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Posted: |
May 16, 2016 - 8:31 AM
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By: |
RoryR
(Member)
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Okay, well I'm doing some catching up. I have a book titled "Blacklisted: the film lover's guide to the Hollywood blacklist" and here are a few things it has to say about Losey's THE CRIMINAL and FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE. First FIGURES...
"A strictly minor Joseph Losey movie... It all adds up to very little, though a few scenes are memorable. Losey, who agreed to direct the film under duress from Shaw, was disheartened at the result." The book doesn't say much more than that, unfortunately. It has more to say about THE CRIMINAL...
"Losey closed out the 1950s with the last of his English films that were destined to remain obscure. [THE CRIMINAL] was mutilated in the editing room when the distributors insisted that 35 minutes be cut from the original 130 (and then on cutting another 11 minutes for its U.S. release). ...film buffs can only wonder what great moments were lost along with the minor scenes whose excision has led to confusion on a few important plot points. What is left, however, is a story that shows a highly original director trying to wriggle out of the commercial corset that had confined him for a decade (the aptly named Anglo-Amalgamated Productions never aimed higher than the Carry On, Nurse series).
Baker plays a tough but honorable and independent criminal in the manner of Burt Lancaster in I WALK ALONE. After his release from a stretch in prison he finds his old network of thieves taken over by a new class of corporate gangsters, experts at the deal, the set-up and the double-cross. Wanamaker, by then probably the most prominent blacklisted American actor in England, plays the type with particular relish, protesting that it's all just 'business.' When Baker organizes the theft of 40,000 pounds from a racetrack and then stashes it to let it cool off, he is betrayed and sent back to prison, where he becomes the object of an elaborate conspiracy to force him to reveal where he hid the loot. But the focus is never on the caper. This is Losey's FORCE OF EVIL, where the long arm of business reaches out from the boardroom into the social relations of every kind, turning friendship, loyalty and love into small change."
Well, that certainly gives me a frame of reference for the subtext of THE CRIMINAL that makes the movie more interesting. I wish I'd read that before I watched it.
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I took out my boxset of SECRET AGENT / DANGER MAN and played the episode "Judgment Day." A solid episode in monochrome directed by Don Chaffey, but a desert setting in the last twenty minutes doesn't constitute an analogy to THE SANDS OF THE KALAHARI. The two stories have nothing in common. The latter has Susannah York. I'd follow her anywhere.
That's right, Richard-W. Those stories are not connected. It's merely my preference. Given the prospect of watching again Sands of the Kalahari, I'd prefer to watch (many more times again) the DANGER MAN episodes.
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By the way, I have the half-hour DANGER MAN on DVD, but the hour-long sequel series eventually bored me. I rented all of them from Netflix. I found that the hour-long version was really the half-hour show padded out to meet the 52 minutes running time. Yeah, there are some good episodes, but mostly a lot of filler. The half-hour (actually 24 min.) series is much better, and I recall one episode guest starred Robert Shaw.
I have all the DVD sets of DANGER MAN (both hour-long & half hour) and I like them all.
My preference is for the longer programs. Those half-hour shows are resolved to rapidly for me plus there's not enough runtime for significant atmospheric passages.
If a person thinks the hour-long segments are too slow-moving, then what would one think about deliberately-paced cinema by directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky or Theo Angelopoulos?
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