JackFavell wrote:Oh my gosh, if my parents were Arthur Kennedy and Constance Ford, I would have left home at age 5.
Oh, why? Wouldn't you want to watch the fireworks?
RedRiver wrote:Oh, my goodness! I've never heard of this movie or the book. The book probably doesn't come up in many literary discussions. But you know something? Erskine Caldwell wrote the best smut I've ever read! Yes, there's a lot of sex and moonshine; crooked lawyers and manipulative land owners. But the dialogue sparkles. The narrative has rhythm. Underneath the sensational cover, there's something to think about.
This author actually made an effort toward serious prose once in a while. There's a collection of short stories out there that's flat out moving. Ironic, sensitive themes, and of course, dirt poor country people who "don't know no better"!
I'd love to see this movie before it disappears again!
I agree, Red, though I can't resist poking a bit of fun either. Some of the stories that Caldwell wrote about life during The Great Depression in the South (and that are still in print, unlike many of his novels) are comparable to what Steinbeck was describing in his tales of Northern California, but I'm not sure that Caldwell was at his best as a novelist, though I do remember reading a doozie called "A Place Called Estherville" when I was about 15 that was quite the eye-opener. Back in Caldwell's day, if you were a professional writer and didn't try to knock out The Great American Novel on your Underwood, you were often not taken seriously. And, of course, hardly anyone went broke if you could get your book banned in Boston too.
I hope we'll each have a chance to see this movie when it comes around.
CineMaven wrote: Please don't tell me Claude Akins tries to jump her bones. I have to draw the line in the sand somewhere!
Hell-ohh!
Aaaaargh!!
I had the same visceral reaction, though Claude always seemed to come on strong with the ladies in his bad guy roles--you know--before his role as Sheriff Lobo in the "classic" BJ and the Bear changed his threatening image forever. I actually found Akins much more scary as the minister father in Inherit the Wind (1960) than any of his other parts. He was so menacingly sure of his own holinesss in that one, it sorta worried me as a kid to think you might have to get past someone like him at the pearly gates. I know I'd never make the cut.
Aw, c,mon! I like Claudie Akins! We were just talking about how charming he was in Comanche Station, and he's the only voice of reason in that Twilight Zone episode....
JackFavell wrote:Aw, c,mon! I like Claudie Akins! We were just talking about how charming he was in Comanche Station, and he's the only voice of reason in that Twilight Zone episode....
[u]moirafinnie[/u] wrote:Oh, why? Wouldn't you want to watch the fireworks?
[u]JackFavell[/u] wrote:Oh my gosh, if my parents were Arthur Kennedy and Constance Ford, I would have left home at age 5.
Whaddya trying to do Moira...drum up psychiatry business? Nobody wants a traumatized movie buff.
---
[u]JackFavell[/u] wrote:Aw, c,mon! I like Claudie Akins! We were just talking about how charming he was in Comanche Station, and he's the only voice of reason in that Twilight Zone episode....
[u]moirafinnie[/u] wrote:He's all yours, sister.
At least I'm home now and can laugh my dang fool head off at you two. Yes Wendy, he was appealing in "Comanche Station." But from the way Diane McBain looks in the poster...there'd be no holds barred with Claudelle...and I'd hate to see a leering drooly Akins not take "NO" for an answer.
Yeeeesh!
How come they don't make good movies like THIS anymore? << (( SIGH!! )) >>
.
I have to admit I DVR'd Susan Slade today and watched it a little later on. I also admit I love all of those Universal movies starring Troy Donahue in Parrish, A Summer Place and all of those badly acted, but beautifully dressed, scenery, hair styled, homes, horses, and all the other trappings.
.
Anne
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I thought others who enjoyed The Best of Everything (1959) recently might like to see how this infectious movie was seen through the eyes of a design and film historian. This article from Cathy Whitlock of Cinema Style about the high style that the Jean Negulesco movie incorporated into the story of the world Before There Was Mad Men doesn't shrink from the fun while giving her insights into the movie's look and lasting influence. Enjoy!:
Rampage (1963)
A romantic triangle complicates a big-game hunting expedition after a hunter and a trapper are hired to catch a rare hybrid cat in Malaysia.
Dir: Phil Karlson Cast: Robert Mitchum , Elsa Martinelli , Jack Hawkins .
C-98 mins, TV-PG,
LOTS OF SPOILERS BELOW
"Anything can happen on a Shikar [aka safari]. Some things you plan, some things you don’t." - Ah, yes. Truer words were never spoken--and in this movie that quip is intoned twice by both Otto Abbot (Jack Hawkins) and Harry Stanton (Robert Mitchum).
And anything can happen when you watch this movie with an open mind. This adventure flick should have been a bracing cocktail: Above: A famed hunter (Jack Hawkins) takes a dubious game trapper (Robert Mitchum) under his wing.
Take a twist of a "Tarzan"-like Freudian triangle (of the Johnny Weismuller-Maureen O'Sullivan-C. Aubrey Smith variety), a splash of "Murder in the Zoo" (with Jack Hawkins as a smoother, if no less arrogantly jealous a stand-in for Lionel Atwill), a jigger of "The Most Dangerous Game," (with Hawkins channeling Leslie Banks' mad hunter), a beaker of Hemingwayesque schlock (all the testosterone-laced b.s. about hunter vs. trapper in this movie), and just a scosh of "King Kong" (complete with a beast causing panic on the streets of a modern city). Put it all together, give it a beautifully photographed gloss courtesy of cinematographer Harold Lipstein and director Phil Karlson's great eye for composition, a delightfully atmospheric score by Elmer Bernstein with a kickin' theme song with lyrics by Mack David (that I thought at first might have been sung by that lazy hepcat, Robert Mitchum). Shake it up, give it a garnish of cozy exoticism (provided by dear Sabu, in his last role as a Malayan guide just before his premature death at only 39) and at the end of the day you have one of the silliest movies of the talented Phil Karlson's admittedly checkered career.
Based on a novel by the interesting adventurer-actor-writer Alan Caillou, the story was translated to the screen by at least three others, Robert I. Holt, Marguerite Roberts, and Jerome Bixby, who gave us one of the last of the Great White Hunter movies under the direction of Karlson, who made some of the grittiest and memorable noirs of the fifties, among them Scandal Sheet, 99 River Street, Kansas City Confidential, 5 Against the House and The Phenix City Story. As this very guilty pleasure movie proves, times had changed. Instead of hard-hitting stories with a foot in complex reality, this movie stars Jungle Bob Mitchum in a performance that winks at the audience, collecting his pay and getting a family vacation in a tropical island just as his looks started to set sail forever as his eyelids lowered and his ennui grew. The movie is good for laughs, lust, and some beautiful vistas, though storywise, as Mitchum reportedly said, it consists of "a lot of dancing girls, banjo playing, and bull." Maybe the dancing girls and the banjo picking wound up on the cutting room floor, because all I could detect was the bull. Otto Abbot (Jack Hawkins) takes aim at mortality in Rampage (1963).
Jack Hawkins brings some spice and even an occasional nano-second of sympathy to his fading "Call Me Bwana" character, who has been keeping taxidermists busy for decades prior to teaming up with Bob "I'm only a trapper" Mitchum. Otto, who has never met an animal he didn't like better stuffed, spouts his own philosophy, observing presciently that "Every animal has the right to kill to protect what belongs to him." The pair are hired by a German zoo to catch two tigers and a hybrid cat--"The Enchantress"--a breed apart, whose mom and dad were a tiger and a leopard. The creature actually looks like a leopard with a sunburn in this movie, which helps explain her chronic p.o.'ed disposition. (According to that infallible resource,Wikipedia, there are cross breeds of tigers and leopards called "doglas" or "tigards," though they are very rare in the wild. Since this was on Wikipedia, please take that factoid with one big salt crystal). Above: Elsa Martinelli tries to get the attention of Jungle Bob in Rampage (1963).
Okay, if you have read this far, you probably know that the plot of this movie is a load of twaddle, though it has its moments, and in the context of the time, it's sexual tension was considered quite "adult." The movie features Elsa Martinelli as the amanuensis of Hawkins' older man, and her allure--if not her acting talent--is on display in every scene. For the lads in the audience, there are many shots of the long-legged Elsa Martinelli looking just as nifty in courtier clothes and mufti as she does in the buff in one brief swimming scene, with more than a few takes throughout the story focused on her backside for some reason . Elsa appears to be practicing for her best-remembered part in Hatari! made later in the decade, apparently with leftover parts of this script. Above: Anna (Elsa Martinelli) contemplates trapping her own innocently snoozing big game in Rampage (1963).
As Martinelli's character explains to a non-plussed Mitchum, at the tender age of 14, she was found by Otto (Hawkins) weeping and orphaned in a church in Italy. He took her in, raised her, seduced her, and relies on her abiding presence as his mistress to organize his life and prop up his male ego--even though she has been allowed to dally with various past males "without faces." When Elsa tells Otto that the arousing Harry character might be the "one to have a face," his self-satisfaction is perturbed, though he still maintains that he is confident she will always come back to him. The clash between the two bulls is then referenced in every freaking scene between the two, reiterated to such a point that I was yelling at the set during their umpteenth verbal tussle to get the hell on with the story and start behaving like pros instead of schoolboys.
The real fun of this movie begins once it transfers to mysterious Malaya (actually a verdant and lushly beautiful Hawaii), described by Hawkin's Otto as a place "where tropical flowers grow in the topmost branches and cobras in the lower ones. In places the forest is so thick the sun will never touch you, yet you will feel you are breathing steam. The heat, the animals, the reptiles, the insects--all of them can kill you. And all of them will try." As this jaunt begins in earnest, Mitchum proves to be a diplomat as well as a trapper extraordinaire. He placates a miffed native chief (poor Stefan Schnabel in a loincloth) by giving him his props and a wicked big scimitar. Bob also finds a nice way to refuse the repeated proffered use of Sabu's wife Chep (Cely Carillo) for the night, since our improbably chaste hero would rather parry with Martinelli verbally while waiting for her to make a choice between her "god" and her "man." Above: As Talib, Sabu offers his compliant wife Chep (Cely Carillo) repeatedly to his friend and employer for his pleasure as a friend would give you an extra pillow for a sleepover. Mitchum's Harry Stanton, perhaps thinking of Sir Galahad, insists on remaining celibate until his mission (to capture Anna and The Empress) is completed.
Sabu, looking rather wan, plays Mitchum's head man, chief cook and bottle-washer. He is sadly given little to do, other than gaze adoringly at Mitchum. Chep is played with just the right note of simple cheerfulness, though when out for an early morning skinny dip, she does ask Anna "why you no wear Marry Cloth?" to indicate her puzzlement over the white woman's status. This scene brings home how long ago this was and the (even then) backwardness of the script's attitude toward Anna, who is never seen as acting on her own independently--though that would be expecting the vital Anna to have a spirit that hadn't been shaped by only one man.
The capture of the two tigers is well-staged, with the natives beating on drums, driving the beautiful creatures toward the nets, and Hawkins' character sulking because he has so little to do are all interwoven to achieve a level of suspense that is palpable. A subsequent encounter by Hawkins with a charging rhino, and a missed shot unnerve Hawkins to the point of a near breakdown, made worse by the laidback Mitchum's shrugged acknowledgement of this event, and his comment that "anyone can miss" aggravating the hunter's galloping insecurities.
By the time they have staked out "The Enchantress" in a cave, Otto is crackers, though no one seems to notice his mental disarray until he insists on entering the cat's cave armed only with his tattered machismo and a torch. Hawkins survives this foolishness, though Mitchum [or rather, his safari-suited double] then endeavors to go mano a mano with the understandably peeved cat in an oddly amateurishly recreated lair that looks like a cardboard cave sprinkled with pixie dust that reflects light. Since I tend to find zoos rather depressing places, despite the beauty of their inhabitants, I was rooting for The Enchantress to elude the humans, though that would have led to an even briefer movie.
At this point, I began to realize the meaning of the word "padding." After the inevitable triumph of the hero vs. wild, the movie could have and maybe should have ended naturally, since it has run out of story...but no, the filmmakers have decided that two more finales are needed. Above: Hawkins' "god-like" Otto tries to get cozy one last time and entice Anna (Martinelli) to stay with him.
Fade out and then in:
We are now on another form of transportation--on the trip back to Germany on board a ship. Hawkins waxes philosophical with Martinelli while sipping champagne at the rail, regaling her with his pithy observations about how many times they have done this before and will do it again. Elsa tells him that their life together is over, though as usual in this movie, this news is couched in dialogue filled with such philosophical poppycock that he doesn't get it--though the girl retires to the state room of Robert Mitchum to take up where they left off--no words necessary. Then that's the end, right? NO!
The action transfers to a train about to pull into the German city zoo, when Otto, increasingly wacky, confronts Mitchum while he is communing with the captured tigers and "tigard" in the box car. Seeking a way to graphically illustrate his "survival of the fittest" leitmotif, Otto releases "The Empress" and allows the poor thing to burst out into the streets. Disoriented and hungry, the cat and Otto careen around the streets, wreaking havoc as the residents are all told to make as much noise as possible--prompting them to throw pots, pans, garbage lids, used beer cans and other detritus out their windows in a move that is said to frighten the cat and drive her to the highest point of the roofs, (though I suspect they were really trying to wake up the audience). Eventually, Bob, Jack, Elsa and the Enchantress wind up pacing around one another on an apartment roof until it finally ends badly for two of them (guess which two?).
While I enjoyed this movie, especially the outdoor locations, the sexual blather bogged the story down for me, but approached as an enjoyable trifle, I think others may enjoy it too. The film recently appeared on TCM and can be purchased on DVD from the Warner Archive as well.
Below you can see an extended clip from Rampage showing The Empress' capture and part of the trip back to civilization:
[youtube][/youtube]
This clip gives you a chance to hear the catchy jungle-rhythm of the Elmer Bernstein-Mack David theme:
[youtube][/youtube]
kingrat wrote:I have actually seen Claudelle Inglish and I can guarantee that it will live up--or should that be down--to your expectations? This is sho' nuff po' white trash. No doubt there will be some who won't fall off the couch laughing during Constance Ford's big scene--but I will!
Oooh, I can't wait.
kingrat wrote:As for Rampage: Stefan Schnabel in a loincloth? NOOOOOO!!!!!! That never happened when he was on Guiding Light. OK, I gotta see that.
Sad, but true, though mercifully, Herr Schnabel's cloth is longer than the others to preserve his dignity. Stefan also speaks some kind of "eenie-beenie, chili-beanie" movie language in his scenes. You can see him being handed a shiny new phallic symbol from a respectful Jungle Bob below as Sabu looks on and Jack Hawkins wonders when the check for this performance will clear. (Good thing that Artur Schnabel had gone to that big concert hall in the sky to tickle the ivories for a celestial crowd prior to this appearance by his son).
kingrat wrote:Rampage is being repeated this month...
Rampage is on TCM again on April 24th at 9:45am ET. Don't say you haven't been warned.
The title "Rampage" meant nothing to me, but when I read your description of the movie, I realize that I saw this on TV when I was a kid. (Boy, it must have gone to TV fast.) I remember thinking that it was too much talk and too few jungle animals. Maybe this is the reason I've never warmed up to Robert Mitchum.
What a wonderful review!!! Even your blurbs about my sweetie pie made me laugh. I think you were correct about the reason for his making this piece of . . . what???? I don't know how I missed it but I've never seen or heard about Rampage before and I thought I had seen all his films from the war years on. As usual Bob just slides through this movie with little effort yet I think he still managed to make a lot of the audience believe in him as the ultimate jungle hunter. I always thought Elsa was too young for John Wayne but I guess she was older than I thought since Hatari was made later than this one.
.
Anne
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. Elsa appears to be practicing for her best-remembered part in Hatari! made later in the decade, apparently with leftover parts of this script. 
