Zeppelin (1971) Really, really wanted to love this one, because there's nothing BQ adores more than a good, solid, muscular war adventure.....preferably with a high body count of Nazi soldiers and officers.
(Just check out the reviews of some of my favorites like "Where Eagles Dare" (on 5/29/17) and more recently, "Operation Crossbow" (on 10/11/22)......)
Usually, the best directors for rip-roarin' war movies are those typical, no-nonsense British 'Field Marshall' directors, like Guy Hamilton, J. Lee Thompson, Richard Attenborough, John Guillerman,
Lewis Gilbert and similar helmers.....
And that's what 'Zeppelin' so desperately needed. The potential to make a real corker of a suspense-action crowd-pleaser was waiting..... with a World War I setting that pits Great Britain against Germany's new state-of-the-art airship capable to dropping bombs on London from heights beyond the range of the era's single propeller fighter planes.
Certainly composer Roy Budd knew what kind of movie it was supposed to be, starting it off with a rousing military theme against the vision of an picturesque sky.
But for some incomprehensible reason (budget, I'm guessing), this movie fell into the hands of a Etienne Perier, a journeyman French director with a prolific but unimpressive filmography.
The movie does contain everything you'd expect it to......undercover spying, decently rendered special effects shots of the Zeppelin, furious firefights, explosions and aerial battle duels between British fighter planes and the Zeppelin crew.
Sadly, Perier seems to show minimal interest or connection to the story he's telling, directing the entire film with a detached, remote slackness. The movie just lumbers along with the deliberate pacing of a made-for-TV film........and the climactic battles display the usual amount of noise, but a total lack of excitement or urgency.
It doesn't help that the script makes its hero kind of a helpless pawn throughout most of the movie. Played by Michael York, he's a Scottish soldier with a German-British family background. A London based Mata Hari type (the alluring Alexandra Stewart) thinks she's prepping him to turn traitor, but York and his superiors are on to her......and let her arrange York's defection to the Fatherland to spy on that new huge Zeppelin.
The Huns, played by the reliably villainous Anton Diffring and Peter Carsten, plan to float the Zepp over Scotland to drop in a commando squad and swipe the Magna Carta no less.....thus striking a demoralizing blow to Merry Olde England. But guess who's on board to stop them.......
What's truly odd for this film.......you get the feeling it doesn't much care what side you root for. Perier's barely there direction takes an even-handed approach to the action, even showing Diffring and Carsten bravely sacrificing themselves to keep the Zepp airborne.
I can't tell if the movie's asking us to take a step back and watch both sides have at it without committing to either one. But I seriously doubt the producers here wanted such a lofty, artistic vision.......more likely, they wanted a World War I version of "Where Eagles Dare".
That's far from that they got, making this film forgettable from the day of its release.
Can't say much else, except it also wastes that dazzler Elke Sommer in a drab throwaway role........when bullets perforate this Zeppelin, its rapid deflation becomes a metaphor for the movie itself.....2 stars (**).
No comments:
Post a Comment