Which is why we always return to the golden days of gloriously overdone movies.......when bold (a nice word for 'batshit crazy') producers would spend millions re-creating long gone eras from scratch. Real structures, real costumed armies, real explosions......long, luxurious camera crane shots of all this excess laid out for a couple of hours of entertainment in a darkened theater....
In the era of high rolling blockbuster producers, none dreamed bigger or loonier than Samuel Bronston, who briefly but spectacularly reigned as the premier impresario of historical epics. Bronston's financial house of cards, shakily rigged with Dupont family money, enabled him launch his epics in Spain (where he received big breaks from Generalissimo Franco)
Bronston, flush with Dupont cash, built his epic worlds in Spain from the ground up and rolled out "El Cid", "55 Days At Peking", "The Fall of The Roman Empire" and "Circus World".
But the Roman Empire film, a turgid, unwatchable pageant, tanked worldwide, taking Bronston and his own mighty movie kingdom down the drain into bankruptcy. And sadly, that was the beginning of the end of this kind of spend-money-like-water filmmaking for period epics. (The Liz Taylor "Cleopatra" may have been the final nail in the coffin.)
We duly admire the formal pomposity of "El Cid" and its lush Miklos Rosza score, but Bronston's next stupendous stupifyin' jumbo-tron, "55 Days In Peking" has always been our favorite. Brimming with an all star cast, astounding battle sequences and the ever-popular lunacy of having distinguished Brits play Orientals, this movie defines the long lost art of the 1960's big budget jaw-droppers....
Bronston, obviously sparing not a penny, reconstructed 1900 Peking in Spain, populating it with so many authentic extras, he cleaned out the staffs of every Chinese restaurant in the country. Playing the Boxer Rebellion hordes who lay siege to the embattled foreign legations, they do marathon runs around Bronston's theme park Peking, screaming and swinging a variety of sharp implements. And every time we watch the camera sweep across these seemingly endless, expansive sets, we savor the sight, knowing that no one will ever see the likes of this again....
The movie itself? The BQ may be alone in this opinion, but we're constantly amazed at how well the film hangs together considering the well documented, near catastrophic chaos of its production......continuous script re-writes, the clash of actor egos, director Nicholas Ray exiting the film (or fired, depending on which story you read) halfway through, leaving the rest of it to Guy Green and second unit director Andrew Marton. For a movie afflicted with such non-stop crisis, it moves along with sure-footed authority, aided by Dimitri Tiomkin's always insistent, heart-on-its-sleeve music....
Stuff we can't get enough of: Charlton Heston's template son-of-a-bitch Marine, David Niven's ever so British diplomat, the Three Gilbert & Sullivan Chinese Stooges - Dame Flora Robson as the Empress, Robert Helpmann as her evil advisor (no doubt warming up for his role as the Childcatcher in "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang") and Leo Genn as the relatively benevolent Imperial Army general, (Genn's character supposedly has an affair with penniless Russian countess Ava Gardner.....we can't picture it,...it would take them three hours to shed their ornate costumes) And we especially adore little 11 year old Lyn Sue Moon as the orphaned daughter of one of Heston's Marines, scampering around the movie while the pyrotechnics guys blow up the sets all around her......if that isn't enough, the movie unveils for Western audiences their first look at a demonstration of martial arts swordplay....(including the familiar face of hulking bald baddy Milton Reid, later an occasional minion in Bond films...)
We could go on with the joy of seeing all the international actors gathered together to fight off the waves of waiters and busboys from Spanish Chinese restaurants coming at them.....our personal fave was Harry Andrews as the priest who functions as the go-to guy for improvising cannons to blow the Boxers to smithereens......our most memorably unintentionally funny moment: the film's opening sequence, a European battle of the bands as each country's military orchestras blare out their national anthems. A witty enough idea......but in case you didn't realize who the villains of the film are, the sequence ends at the Empress's Imperial Palace, where her theme song sounds like the arrival of Darth Vader.....
Call it silly, overblown.....and with its British 'Chinese', wildly incorrect and out of another time....but Bronston's Spanish excursion into turn-of-the-century China somehow entertains us every time, a true cinematic oddity we sneak out of the time capsule to peek at every so often.....(we still have memories of the movie's stereophonic soundtrack bouncing off our neighborhood theater's walls....in the days before theaters knew enough to install sound baffling) 4 stars (****).......and we deeply feel for all the Spanish citizens who couldn't get an eggroll or a quart of Wonton during the making of the movie.......
No comments:
Post a Comment