ACCIDENTALLY CHRISTMAS MOVIES....3 FILMS WITH JUST A LITTLE DAB 'O HOLIDAY CHEER!

Holiday movies, by their very nature, revel in the holiday season....in which the days leading up to Christmas provide the fuel for the plot, the characters, basically the reason for the movie's very existence....

.......and then there are the movies in which Christmas seems to make a glancing, cameo appearance...it's not there to do much for the movie....it's just there. And it makes the movie a tad more colorful, what with the blinking lights and the caroling and all.  Here's a few odd selections BQ came across and we continued our eclectic viewing through vintage movie-land....

BELL BOOK AND CANDLE (1958)  I can't help but love the idea of a romantic comedy about modern day witchcraft in New York starting out with "Jingle Bells" on its soundtrack. Yep it's the holiday season, the quaintly replicated Manhattan streets have a light dusting of fluffy movie-studio snow. And once again, 'Vertigo' romantic sparks, this time played for comic effect, strike up between aw-shucks-y, stammering James Stewart and ethereal, otherworldly blonde Kim Novak.  Christmas gets dispensed with early on as Novak applies her something-wiccan-this-way-comes charms on Stewart, and the rest of it is a smooth, bubbly concoction that we don't mind watching again. We cast 3 broomsticks upon it.....

ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE (1969) stands staunchly out by itself in the James Bond catalog for featuring the one-shot Bond George Lazenby paired up with the karate-chopping goddess now addressed as Dame Diana Rigg. And wouldn't you know, it's Christmas Eve when George and Diana end up battling arch-fiend Blofeld (Telly Savalas) at his snowy mountaintop fortress. There's even an extra-gooey sugar-plum Christmas song, "Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Made?" sung by someone billed only as Nina along with a chorus of warbling kiddies. And gift giving too....Blofeld, warming to the holiday spirit, spreads the joy amongst his cadre of deeply hypnotized voluptuous international babes. Each hottie receives a prettily wrapped perfume atomizer to spread crop-killing bacteria around the world. Merry Christmas and to all a good night!  We gift it 4 1/2 stars.....

1941 (1979)  Steven Spielberg's notorious all-star disaster of course hurls Christmas into the mix (along with multiple kitchen sinks) since it deals with one night of supposed comic hysteria in Los Angeles following the Pearl Harbor attack. Along the way Japanese sailors disguise themselves as Christmas trees, holiday shoppers riot at a department store, giant plastic Santas topple as fighter planes dive and swoop amidst the Hollywood Boulevard decorative lights.... and the application of a Christmas wreath sends a house sliding off a cliff, reducing it to splinters. Joy to the world.  Until you endure it, '1941' remains indescribable....it's sort of Spielberg's own misbegotten version of "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad,Mad World" with comedians screaming at each other in the midst of spectacular special effects. As you might imagine, Spielberg's film is a resplendent visual wonder compared to Stanley Kramer's 'Mad World'.....after all, Kramer barely knew which end of the camera to point at his actors. Therefore, for the holiday touches and loony scenes you won't see anywhere else (like a Ferris wheel rolling off a pier, a tank smashing through a paint factory) we'll gift '1941' with 2 & 1/2 gingerbread cookies.......   

THE HURT SHOCKER: WE "EYEWITNESS" A FORGOTTEN ODDBALL THRILLER/DRAMA!

EYEWITNESS (1981), a long forgotten romantic thriller with William Hurt and Sigourney Weaver, commanded BQ's attention mostly due its curious unavailability.....it's one of those rare films that somehow has fallen through all the cracks of the various venues through which you can watch movies. No DVDs on the store racks (apparently you can order a ridiculously rare, overpriced one online), no Blu-Ray, no streaming,  no regular TV appearances.

The only place this strange little concoction of suspense and heartfelt drama surfaces, as far as we can tell, is on a basic cable channel called 'Movies!', which prides itself on not whittling down its offerings in order to jam in umpteen commercials within a 2 hour timeslot. On the contrary, 'Movies' includes the unedited film as well as their umpteen commercials,  with all this content leisurely stretching out their showings to 2 and a half hours or more.(Not quite, 'unedited' though, 'Movies' won't slice a frame of film, but they most assuredly will blank out the F-bombs and pixilate the nudity in their R-rated selections.)

So we finally managed to catch up with "Eyewitness" while it popped its head out of the ground like Phil The Groundhog in Puxatawney, Pa. Written by esteemed playwright/novelist Steve Tesich ("Breaking Away") and directed by Peter Yates ("Bullitt") "Eyewitness" plays out as a weird hybrid stitched together from  Hitchcock films and the kitchen sink dramatics of Paddy Chayevsky's "Marty". William Hurt plays a returned Vietnam war hero biding his time as a New York City office building janitor. It's a lonely, quiet life he leads....he spends his spare time romantically obsessing over a patrician TV newswoman (Sigourney Weaver) whose reportage he tapes every night on his VHS machine. When a shady Chinese businessman, a tenant in the building Hurt cleans, turns up with his throat cut, Hurt spots Weaver doing an on-the-street crime scene report.....and seizes his opportunity to romance her. When Weaver predictably recoils from his advances, Hurt, in a hail-Mary move, maintains her interest by dangling the possibility of his having witnessed the crime. Adding to the complications is Hurt's best friend Waldo (James Woods) a fellow Vietnam vet, Unlike Hurt, Waldo's a snivelling, babbling, cowardly loser (played to twitching perfection, of course, by Woods)  who quickly becomes a prime suspect in the Chinese crook's murder.

Screenwriter Tesich, a stranger to thrillers who primarily excelled in dramatic clashes of characters, labors mightily (and uncomfortably) to bend this material into a suspense nail-biter. Hence the suave, well tailored villain of the piece, (Christoper Plummer) who's courting Weaver while working with her parents to raise money to smuggle oppressed Jews out of Russia....the script vaguely implies he's doing this in the service of the Israeli government, and he comes fully equipped with a formidably silent Israeli hitwoman at his side. Plummer, as you might have guessed, is a means-justifies-the-end guy who has no problem with murder and though Tesich makes a few half hearted attempts to throw red herrings in your direction, you don't have any trouble figuring out who's doing what to whom.

The pleasures of "Eyewitness" come from Tesich regularly ditching the thriller elements of the film for the pure quirky joy of watching his well drawn characters interact. To Hurt's everlasting credit, he makes his moonstruck, adolescent crush on Weaver seem endearingly innocent, instead of a case of unhinged psychotic stalking(which it would be taken for today.....Tesich skims and skirts over Hurt's objectifying and unreal idealization of Weaver's uppercrust Grace Kelly-type character.....Hurt really knows nothing about her and she's properly bewildered at first. But eventually, as we the audience fully expected,  Tesich has her melt for Hurt. In that regard, her character's not much different from the rich teen queens who fall for the nerdy shlubs in John Hughes movies)  The script also throws in Hurt's unhappy relationship with his embittered, crippled father (the late,great Kenneth McMillan)....who's given a small unforgettable scene with Hurt that could have easily served as separate, gut-wrenching drama all by itself. The movie even takes a time out for some angst-ridden byplay between the two cops chasing after Woods (Steven Hill and Morgan Freeman).

Director Peter Yates, however, fulfills his appointed task of adding propulsive thrills to Tesich's overt dramatizing. You know Yates knows his stuff (Exhibit A:the "Bullitt" car chase up and down the San Francisco hills)....and he orchestrates some memorable set pieces, including a motorcycle/car duel and an unnerving method of attempted murder which we won't spoil if you haven't seen the movie.

Sure, "Eyewitness" remains a lumpy mixture of Hitchcockian chills, unlikely romance and squeezed in family drama......but for us, that's part of its unique charm, a strange convergence of an action movie director and a celebrated theater dramatist that we doubt will ever happen again. But BQ lives in hope.....we say 4 stars.

VIVA "THE PROFESSIONALS" ON ITS 50TH ANNIVERSARY!

THE PROFESSIONALS (1966) came stampeding into movie theaters about 50 years ago.....and half a century later it's as robust,muscularly red blooded and legendary as ever, a timeless showcase for the kind of primal no nonsense filmmaking that simply doesn't exist anymore....as well the iconic actors who populated these films. Compared to the chopped up rubbish that passes for action movies today, "The Professionals" looks and sounds practically mythic....like watching the Greek gods party up on Mount Olympus.

Directed by Richard Brooks ("Lord Jim", "In Cold Blood", "Looking For Mr.Goodbar") the film is a men-on-a-mission adventure set on the Mexico border around 1915. A ruthless land baron (Ralph Bellamy) collects a team of four battle-hardened mercenaries (Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan and Woody Strode) to rescue his young Mexican wife (Claudia Cardinal). She's been kidnapped and spirited across the border by revolutionary turned bandit Jesus Raza (Jack Palance). Marvin and Lancaster are tough crusty cynical compadres, having come away disillusioned from their days of fighting along side Pancho Villa. Ryan is the horsemaster for the team, way too compassionate and gentle-hearted for his own good while Strode serves as the mostly silent tracker and scout, deadly with a bow and arrow.

Into Mexico they go, surviving bloody skirmishes with Palance's men until finally reaching the bandit's hacienda headquarters....and his captive, Cardinale. From this point, director-screenwriter Brooks throws in an astonishing twist while keeping up the literally explosive action sequences....right up to the film's satisfyingly ironic conclusion. And it's all perfectly capped off with Marvin's final line of dialogue....still one of the best ever in movie history.

Brooks fills his script, taken from a novel by Frank O' Roarke, with pithy, funny world-weary zingers. (Lancaster: "Well, I'll be damned..." Marvin: "Most of us are...") Palance, of all people, is the only cast member afforded long eloquent speeches about  the Revolution and the men who fight it. Lancaster takes full advantage of his prowess as a former circus acrobat, doing almost all his own stunts and Marvin, as the group leader, epitomizes cool grace under fire.

Throw in cinematographer Conrad Hall's vivid Southwest landscapes (filmed mostly in Nevada) and Maurice Jarre's pulsating score, driven by castenets and pounding drums, you have a classic delivering close-to-orgasmic movie pleasure. As Frank Sinatra opined during his section of "That's Entertainment"....'you can wait around and hope, but you'll never see the likes of this again.'

How true. Another FIND OF FINDS...."The Professionals" easily earns 5 stars.

4 DEAD BODIES ON THE NYC MAYOR'S LAWN? THIS LOOKS LIKE A JOB....FOR MALLORY!

BLIND SIGHT by Carol O' Connell continues the BQ's favorite mystery series featuring the stunning....and the stunningly dysfunctional, brilliant young Detective Kathy Mallory. (Never dare to call her Kathy....Mallory only). We've already raved on about these books in a previous post, so we couldn't wait to pounce on and devour this one in a matter of days. (Now, the depressing news...O'Connell takes her time with these novels....it's been three years since the last one, "It Happens In The Dark")

Mallory, a supermodel-like blonde with electric green eyes, functions as an almost unworldly, superhero figure within her Special Crimes Unit detective bureau. A ruthlessly efficient computer hacker with a killer wardrobe, a large caliber handgun and an ice cold, sociopath's thirst for justified vengeance, Mallory confounds, aggravates, and generally stuns everyone who comes in contact with her....suspects, fellow detectives and the murderers she hunts down. The pure joy of O' Connell's books comes from watching the unforgiving force-of-nature Mallory cut a swath through the convoluted, gruesome cases thrown in her path.

The plots that O'Connell challenges Mallory with are staggering in their mixture of heartbreaking tragedy and shocking violence.....and the complex storylines inevitably relate back to Mallory's own tortured childhood, spent roaming the streets of New York as an orphaned, feral street thief until caught and adopted(and only partially civilized)  by kindly New York detective Lou Markowitz. O'Connell always carefully rations out these nuggets of Mallory's horrendous backstory and you'll greedily gobble them up whenever they appear.

As we headlined, Mallory's new case involves four murdered kidnap victims, minus their hearts, dumped on the lawn of Gracie Mansion, currently occupied by Mayor Andrew Polk. Polk's a former Wall Street scumbag swindler and the horrific crime left on his front door may or may not throw suspicion on a group of one-percenters who lost millions in one of his trading scams. Adding to the mayhem....a poignant and harrowing subplot involving a 12 year old blind boy, the nephew of one of the murder victims. Mallory races to solve the case while the boy literally lives on borrowed time...., held captive by the monstrous hit man contracted to kill the random victims and slice out their hearts... for later mailing to the Mayor.

O'Connell's prose cuts as deeply as any writing you'd find in a lauded mainstream novel and ultimately, in her books' final pages, you see Mallory as O'Connell sees her.....as a star-crossed, potentially tragic figure. And Beached Quill counts "Blind Sight" among the very best of this series. Get your hands on this book ASAP.....and dive right into the others, if you haven't already. We give it a FIND OF FINDS....5 stars.

PSYCHO BABYSITTERS AND ELEPHANT VAGINAS....THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT!

It's quarter to three.....there's no one in the place....'cept you and me.....and 300 gloriously atrocious movies running rampant through our cable movie insomnia-ridden nights.....here's two more haunting us in dark-night-of-the-soul wee hours......

EMELIE (2015) The makers of this nasty brief little horror outing must have thought they stumbled on to a unique concept....the deranged, homicidal babysitter. Not quite new, boys. Marilyn Monroe gave this familiar archetype a spin in "Don't Bother To Knock", which dates all the way back to l952.

Here we have Sarah Bolger playing a seemingly mild mannered young woman embarking on an evening of watching over three young kids, two sugar-fueled, ADD tots and one sullen older boy (about 11) who resents being babysat.  Well, pretty soon all three of them resent the sitter as she quickly reveals herself as an unhinged sadist, feeding the little girl's hamster to the little boy's pet snake and settling them all down in front of the TV to binge-watch porn.  Plus she plans to cap off the evening by abducting the youngest boy as a replacement for her own dead child........we bet her hourly rate is even more shocking than the rest of that stuff.

This all descends rapidly into the usual by-the-numbers horror movie tropes, which movies like this adhere to as rigidly as Kabuki theater or haiku, A few curves pop up, such as the loony sitter's mysterious accomplice, who turns out as dopey and unlucky as his cohort. The filmmakers top off their little nothing of a scarefest with a delusion-of-grandeur final shot....setting up a sequel. Nobody should hold their breath waiting for "Emelie 2: The Devil's Daycare" or whatever they planned to call it. BQ can only scare up 1 star.......with or without children, you won't want to bring this sitter home.

THE BROTHERS GRIMSBY (2016) effectively demotes its whip-smart writer-director Sasha Baron Cohen from cutting edge social satirist ("Borat", Bruno") to worn out British imitation Adam Sandler. The plentiful gross out gags are all in place but none of them, a parade of bodily fluids, genitalia and assorted anal abuse, serve to highlight Cohen's withering view of humanity's foibles. Don't look for any ironic subtext here....the gags are just there to make you go "eewwwwwww." Nothing more.

Cohen plays Nobby, a lower (or we should say lowest) class soccer-besotted lunkhead who reconnects with his long lost brother. The brothers,separated when they were young orphans, have certainly become different people.....Nobby's brother Sebastian (Mark Strong) is now an efficiently lethal MI6 superspy, a Bondian/Bourne killing machine. You can easily figure out the rest....Nobby ends up as his brother's unwanted sidekick, while they're pursued by thugs in the service of an international archvillainess (Penelope Cruz). In the course of their misadventures, they inadvertently shoot a wheelchair-bound child and infect Daniel Radcliffe with HIV (don't ask). In the film's centerpiece sequence (we get the feeling Cohen wrote the entire movie around this scene), the brothers hide from their pursuers inside an elephant's vagina....and yes, if you expect Cohen to double down and triple down on this gag, he will not disappoint you.

"Brothers Grimsby"primarily takes aim at an easy, soft target....casting its farcial eye at all the dreary conventions of today's action movies and their depressing similarity to first-person shooter video games. Cohen particularly gets a kick out of amping up the bloody collateral damage done to innocent bystanders to ridiculous levels. ("The Nice Guys" with Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling makes a far funnier attempt at this same idea.)  Although you have admire his ingenuity in devising brutal sight gags involving pain inflicted on his bare ass, Cohen does nothing more than lazily slum around here...... it's an Adam Sandler-type paycheck grab.  While Sandler's content hitting the ceiling of lowlife comedy and staying there, we can only hope Sasha Baron Cohen has more ambitious things on his mind.  We'll shoot down "The Brothers Grimsby" with only 2 stars.

GIVE OUR DISREGARDS TO BROADWAY.....A FAMOUS SCREENWRITER ENDURES "THE SEASON" OF HIS DISCONTENT....

THE SEASON, by William Goldman remains, 46 years after its initial publication, a biting, intoxicatingly funny, bitchy read. Novelist Goldman had just begun to make his reputation as a star-quality screenwriter with his "Butch Cassidy And the Sundance Kid.'  He grew up loving theater and devoted "The Season" to an exhaustive, incisive look at both the art and business of Broadway plays and musicals. And what better way to do this than sit through every Broadway show that hit the footlights in the theater season of l967-1968.

As he enjoyed, endured and sometimes painfully grimaced through all the shows presented, Goldman, possessed of a withering wit and a rabid gossip's love of dirt, examined every aspect(and every personality type)  of what and who it takes to mount a Broadway show, He casts a sharp unforgiving eye on preening actors,struggling playwrights, hapless directors, power mad producers and all the peripheral hangers on (ticket scalpers, theater party bookers) who make up the New York theater food chain. Very few of them get away unscathed in Goldman's overview.

And why does Goldman take such great effort to apply his breezy vitriol to Broadway?  His book makes a devastating point.....while the country and its culture were enduring monumental upheavals during the mid to late 1960's, Broadway and its shows remained stagnantly mired in decades gone by, presenting the same sort of plays and musicals that had graced the Great White Way since the l940's. While 60's cinema was bursting with bright new diversive talent and a dazzling variety of subject matter, Broadway theater still trudged through written-in-stone imitations of Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals and hoary, arthritic comedies afflicted with stale gags and washed up Hollywood actors seeking refuge from their long gone film careers.

Not a pretty picture.....but Goldman, as he later does in his subsequent, equally sardonic books about his screenwriting career, sugar coats his impassioned rants with the chatty sarcasm of a brilliant raconteur. We loved the way he dished out scorn and a theater buff's loving enthusiasm in equal measure, sometimes in the same sentence. . He's not above punching up his observations with gleeful, show-bizzy exaggeration......movie directors often complained his screenplays included impossibly over the top descriptions for them to follow, like,...."when they kiss, it's the greatest kiss ever in all movie history...."  Goldman finds a perfect subject for this kind of hyperbole in describing the embarrassing foibles of the '67/'68 theater offerings, such as the worthy, but ultimately star-crossed musical "Mata Hari". That show, a legendary flop, cemented its notorious status when Marisa Mell, the movie Euro-starlet playing Mata Hari. absent-mindedly wiped her nose after she'd been shot dead by a firing squad. Yikes, you might think....but you'd be surprised at the wise generosity with which Goldman treats the show itself and its creators, another reason we love this book and return to it again and again.

Since Beached Quill can't afford to take out a second mortgage to buy "Hamilton" tickets, we simply take "The Season" off our shelf for a re-read.....and it has everything you'd want in a hit show....laughter, drama, and thoughtful insight. We rate it a FIND OF FINDS...with a full 5 bright footlights.

IS THAT A BROADSWORD IN YOUR HAND OR ARE YOU JUST GLAD TO SEE ME? WE DO BATTLE WITH "THE WAR LORD"

THE WAR LORD (1965) in its own strange little way, stands apart from the usual overblown 1960's clanging-swords-and armor costume epic. These films,featuring Charlton Heston clenching his jaw, along with vast collections of horses, crowds. castles and flaming arrows, usually filmed overseas in Spain or Italy ("Ben Hur", "El Cid", "55 Days In Peking", etc)  "The War Lord", however, didn't stray far from Los Angeles, shooting entirely on the back lot at Universal studios.

This strategic choice makes sense for the film, since it functions more as an overheated romantic drama that also happens to throw in Viking pirates, catapults and arrow-perforated stunt men hurling themselves off rickety battle towers.

Heston, ably doing his template signature character, the battle-hardened but conflicted epic hero, plays a Medieval knight charged by his boss, The Duke of whatever to seize and control some scrawny patch of coastal real estate. Why anyone wants this place is beyond me.....it features a lone prop department castle and a raggedy bunch of villagers who pay little attention to their priest (Maurice Evans) since they've all become orthodox Druids, dressing up as prancing chickens and goats at their official ceremonies, like weddings and such.)

But Heston's gotta do what Heston's gotta do, shlepping along his small army, including his grizzled, gruff mentor (the reliably grizzled and gruff Richard Boone) and his wild card jealous brother (Guy Stockwell, having a ball chewing the scenery.) Not long after parking themselves in the crumbling castle, a newly smitten Heston exercises his knightly privilege to pluck a Druid ingenue (Rosemary Forsyth) for sexual sampling on the eve of her wedding, This, needless to say, doesn't sit well with the Druid-babe's intended, her childhood BFF.(James Farantino) So Jimmy and the villagers round up the rampaging Viking guys, whose leader has a long standing beef with Heston,having slain Chuck's dad way back when....., and further aggravated by Heston and company having inadvertently captured the Barbarian Chief's toddler Prince..during their last clash. Yes, boys and girls....time to fire up the flaming arrows and check the spring action on the catapults.

Director Franklin Schaffner struggles to give this stuff a more literary, intimate sheen....but ultimately, it comes down to how many guys you get to see swan diving off the top of the castle with arrows stuck in their bellies. Without access to thousands of Spanish army recruits like the other competing epics of the time,  Schaffner  makes do with a moderately large company of Hollywood stunt men who put in a lot of Universal studio overtime falling, screaming, clutching their spear-pierced tummies and running around on fire.

The film does come with a nice bonus, though.....a superb score, both beautiful and rousing, by master movie composer Jerome Morross...also the composer  for William Wyler's "The Big Country" arguably one of the best movie scores ever written.

Okay, now that you know bloated costume battle epics are yet another Beached Quill guilty pleasure, we hold our ceremonial sword over this movie and dub it with 3 flaming arrows.