Sol Madrid

Though the name might not be instantly recognizable, director Brian G. Hutton has been at the helm of two of my favorite movies, both of them WWII flicks, Where Eagles Dare and Kelly's Heroes. He only directed nine movies while also acting in film and television so those directing efforts? Gotta scoop them up when you can. Turner Classic Movies helped me out last week, screening 1968's Sol Madrid.

An undercover Interpol officer with a checkered past, Sol Madrid (David McCallum) has been tasked with possibly his most dangerous mission yet. A longtime right-hand man to a Mafia boss in NYC, Harry Mitchell (Pat Hingle) has gone rogue and stole $500,000 from the boss while running away with said boss' girlfriend. The catch? Mitchell has a computer-like mind and is able to remember everything he's ever done for the Mob. If Interpol or the FBI can bring him in and convince him to testify, the case is almost a sure thing against the Mafia. Madrid follows some leads and finds out that Mitchell has headed south of the border to Mexico and is hiding out with a rival mob boss in Acapulco. How can Madrid get to him and then convince him? Well, it starts with finding the mob boss' girlfriend, Stacey (Stella Stevens), and convincing her to help with the promise of protection. Can it all work out?

Even considering the very cool cast assembled here, I'd never even remotely heard of this one. But courtesy of TCM, here we sit! This is a movie I wanted to love but ended up only liking it. I'll get into the cast more in a bit, but it's NUTS! Filmed in Acapulco, featuring an appropriately quirky score from Lalo Schifrin, and a style and winding story that seems like a 1960s bizarre-o film noir...'Madrid' should have been better. That's it. It just should have been better in plain and simple words. This is a 1960s crime thriller that is missing that one special thing to make it a really solid, memorable flick. As is? It's okay, pretty cool in moments, kinda dumb/weird in others.

That cast though....man, it's worth watching just to see the collection of talent assembled. Let's start with the other Man from U.N.C.L.E., David McCallum himself. He never grew into a huge star -- he's probably most well-known for his Ducky role in NCIS -- but it's always cool to see him in a leading role, especially an anti-hero role like this. We meet Sol Madrid as he's resting in an apartment full of drugged-out heroin users. What an introduction! From there, it's one cold-blooded decision after another, all the while observing what's going on around him and planning steps in advance of everyone around him. Brutal, calculating and looking at the bottom line, Madrid risks it all over and over again. And that name? Sol Madrid?!? Sounds very fake, but damn, I wish I had a badass, ridiculously goofy and cool name like that.

I'm a sucker for ensemble casts though, and what we've got here for 'Madrid' is pretty impressive. Stevens specialized in these type of roles in the late 60s and early 70s as the damaged woman so it's right in her wheelhouse! She certainly has some fiery scenes with McCallum's Madrid. How about some tough guys?!? Hey, everybody, it's Telly Savalas as Emil Dietrich, a drug supplier with a rivalry against the Mafia! Next up, Ricardo Montalban as Jalisco, another undercover officer and Madrid's contact who may be too comfortable in his job. Oh, and there's Rip Torn as Villanova, the mob boss with a vengeful streak right up his back. Not a bad group, huh?

Also look for Paul Lukas as an older, experienced mobster, Michael Ansara as a Mexican police officer, Perry Lopez as Francisco, Dietrich's enforcer, and Michael Conrad as Scarpi, a mafia hitman tasked with killing Madrid and Stacey.

Probably the biggest flaw in this 90-minute flick is the story. It's far from pointed and doesn't seem to know where it's going, where it wants to end up. To get his hands on Mitchell, McCallum's Madrid partners up with Dietrich to bring huge amounts of heroin into the U.S. In a painfully slow scene, we actually see the smuggling effort, bringing an already slow pace down to a snail's speed. Things pick up in the final act with some good twists and finally some action, but as a whole, this isn't a consistent movie. Decent, pretty entertaining but with some serious flaws.

Sol Madrid (1968): ** 1/2 /****

Kelly's Heroes

Growing up, I always associated Memorial Day Weekend with the war movie marathons on TV that dotted TNT, AMC and Turner Classic Movies. I ate them up -- still do -- as I watched as many as I could. They're still some of my favorite movies, everything from The Dirty Dozen to The Devil's Brigade and one of my favorites, 1970's Kelly's Heroes.

It's fall 1944 and Allied forces are fighting their way across France, the German army slowly being beaten back. At the forefront of the Allied advance, a recon platoon, including Sgt. Big Joe (Telly Savalas), are worn down after months of fighting. One member of the platoon, Pvt. Kelly (Clint Eastwood), stumbles across an interesting tidbit of information while interrogating a German colonel. There is 14,000 bars of gold -- worth $16 million -- in a bank just waiting to be plucked. The catch? The bank is 30 miles behind German lines. Joe manages to convince both Big Joe and the platoon to navigate through the lines and get their hands on the gold. With a scrounger/supply sergeant, Crapgame (Don Rickles) and three Sherman tanks commanded by a hippie, Oddball (Donald Sutherland), along for the ride, Kelly and his motley crew of soldiers head out with a chance to net quite the payday.

What an appropriately timed World War II movie. By the late 1960s, the tone of war movies had changed from the big epics to the more cynical/comedic variety, movies like MASH and Catch 22 among others. Enter Kelly's Heroes, directed by Brian G. Hutton (who also directed Where Eagles Dare), one of the most entertaining war movies I've ever seen. Cynical with a dark sense of humor but also some lighter moments -- courtesy of Sutherland's hippie tank commander -- with some great action, memorable score, and one of those perfect tough guy casts. There's a reason it remains a fan favorite 40-plus years later, and much of it because it blends all those things together so effortlessly. Even an odd-sounding theme, Burning Bridges, fits perfectly in an odd way. It is one of my favorite movies and always will be, a classic war flick that I can sit down and watch whenever it pops up on TV.

Can you ask for a better lead quartet than Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles and Donald Sutherland? Yeah, there has been casts with bigger star power, bigger name recognition, but it's more than that here. This is four tough guys having fun, on-screen chemistry that's just hard to describe. They all get their chance in the spotlight. Eastwood is Eastwood, the impeccably cool and man of few words hero. Savalas is a subtle scene-stealer as Big Joe, the unofficial commander of the recon platoon (Hal Buckley playing the clueless real commander Capt. Maitland), just trying to get his men through the fighting unscathed and a somewhat unwilling participant in the gold heist. Rickles is an out of left field choice to join the cast, but it works, his Crapgame a smart-ass New Yorker always with an eye for a profit. And then there's Sutherland as Oddball, the tank commander always talking about positive waves (No Negative Waves, man!), his Zen-like qualities, heading into battle with music blaring and shells filled with paint waiting to be unleashed on the Germans.

As a fan of guy's guys movies, it's simply hard to beat those four stars. They make it look downright easy. Much of that chemistry and success comes from the script written by Troy Kennedy-Martin, a script with too many great one-liners to even mention. We see familiar character archetypes, familiar war movie situations -- stumbling into a minefield, prepping for battle -- but there's a different energy to the whole thing. It's that tone that blends the drama, comedy and action so easily that makes it work. Carroll O'Connor too is excellent in a part that lets him ham it up as General Colt, the fiery division commander who's frustrated with the stagnant front lines, getting a jolt of energy when Kelly's screwball force unintentionally opens things up all along the front. There's something to be said for a movie that is non-stop fun. It never gets heavy-handed or obvious like some more message-oriented war movies.

When the platoon looks back on a field where some of their fallen comrades lay dead in the dirt, there's no words that need to be said. The looks on the surviving men's faces says it all. Showing he's putting on appearances for his men, Big Joe turns and raises his binoculars to check one last time. The dynamic is there from the lead quartet right down to the platoon, a group of recognizable character actors clearly having some fun. The platoon includes Little Joe (Stuart Margolin), Big Joe's radioman, Cowboy (Jeff Morris) and Willard (Harry Dean Stanton), two drawling best buds, Gutowski (Dick Davalos), the sniper, Petuko (Perry Lopez), the smooth, goofy ladies man, Cpl. Job (Tom Troupe), Joe's second-in-command close friend, Fisher (Dick Balduzzi), the platoon genius, and Babra not Barbara (Gene Collins). Also, you can't forget Gavin MacLeod as Moriarty, Oddball's mechanical genius and constant provide of negative waves.

Also look for Seinfeld's Uncle Leo, Len Lesser, as Bellamy, an engineer Oddball ropes into helping the cause and Karl-Otto Alberty as a German tank commander who goes up against Kelly's forces and Oddball's tank trio.

With a 146-minute running time, we've got plenty of chances for guys being guys and plenty of action scenes. We get lots of action -- escaping a minefield, a tank attack on a railway station, the platoon racing through a German crossroad under mortar attack -- but the best is saved for last as the platoon descends on Clermont, the town where the bank and the gold are waiting. It's an extended sequence that runs about 35 minutes that doesn't rush into it. We get almost 10 minutes of the men and the tanks sneaking into town while the German garrison slowly wakes up, composer Lalo Schifrin's score driving the action. The entire movie was filmed in Czechoslovakia, the action finale filmed in the village of Vizinada. It's an extended sequence that is hard to beat.

Just a great movie overall. Great cast, incredibly quotable, lots of action, memorable soundtrack (Quentin Tarantino is a big fan of the score, especially Tiger Tank), and even a nod to Eastwood's spaghetti western background with a three-way showdown with said tank. One of my all-time favorites and hopefully you'll enjoy it just as much as I do.

Kelly's Heroes (1970): ****/****
Rewrite of August 2009 review

Where Eagles Dare

With his novel The Guns of Navarone (and its film version), author Alistair MacLean deserves an all-time spot in the impossible, suicide, men on a mission genre. Not all of his novels are winners, especially some of his later entries, but as far as success goes, 1968 was a year that was hard to beat for the author. Two of his novels were made into highly successful adventure movies, Ice Station Zebra and Where Eagles Dare.

It's the winter of 1944 and an American general's plane with knowledge of the coming Second Front has crashed in the Bavarian Alps. Captured by German forces, General Carnaby (Robert Beatty) is sent to the Schloss Adler, a mountain fortress home to the SS in the district. A commando team headed by Major John Smith (Richard Burton) is being parachuted into the mountains disguised as German soldiers. Their mission is straightforward if extremely difficult; gain access to the heavily guarded, fortified castle and rescue Carnaby before German interrogators can get the information out of him that they need. On Smith's team are five fellow British commandos and one American Ranger, Lt. Schaffer (Clint Eastwood). Almost the second the team lands, things start to go wrong, and Major Smith isn't letting on everything he knows. Is there something else going on with this mission, more than the others could even guess?

The story of this movie comes from MacLean, who on a request from a producer and Burton wrote a novel that could be made into a fast-paced adventure film. MacLean wrote the novel which became a huge success and was quickly put on the fast track, the film getting its release in 1968. As far as war/adventure films go, there are very few that are more fun than this one. Better ones? Yes, but in terms of pure entertainment value, this one is hard to beat. Director Brian G. Hutton (Kelly's Heroes) does a fine job crafting a twisting, turning story that is almost secondary to the war-time shenanigans. Many reviews that you read are from viewers who were genuinely confused watching this flick. I don't blame them. It took me multiple viewings to pick up everything you need to know. 

The beauty of that statement is that this WWII espionage film can be enjoyed on different levels. We find out quickly that there's far more to the mission than we know. I won't reveal any spoilers here, but there's a-plenty of them! From the second the team parachutes into Bavaria, one of the commandos is killed by one of the team. What's going on? MacLean's script does a fine job parceling out hints here and there about the actual intent of their mission, finally revealing itself in a mind-bending, classic scene in a huge, Medieval-looking dining hall near the halfway point. The build-up is a little slow-moving, but it's worth it. Scenes you thought were pointless end up having key importance later in the movie. We see Smith and Schaffer prepping for their getaway days and hours in advance. We see the inner workings of this suicide mission. Not too many men on a mission movies go into such a detail, therefore setting 'Eagles' one step above so many other like-minded flicks.

Some pairings are just too perfect. Case in point, Burton and Eastwood. Burton as Maj. Smith is the highly capable, brutally effective and nearly brilliant secret agent and commando. He did a lot of acting parts in his career so it's great to see him do a movie that's just fun. It shows. It looks like he had a phenomenal time doing the part, his silky smooth voice, his smartass smirk ever-present on his face. And his radio call sign 'Broadsword calling Danny Boy' sounds almost Shakespearean in its delivery. As his American counterpart, Eastwood is given little to do other than look very cool, and he succeeds on all levels. Burton's Smith calls him a 'second rate punk,' an American Ranger and brutally efficient killing machine. Through all the craziness, it works. This is two pros who look to be having a lot of fun. Also in the team is Donald Houston, Peter Barkworth, William Squire, Brook Williams and Neil McCarthy.

Though Burton and Eastwood are in almost every scene, the supporting cast is solid just the same. Mary Ure plays Mary, a longtime fellow agent of Smith's (and some romance too) secretly along for the mission, with Ingrid Pitt as Heidi, an Allied agent working in the town below the fortress. Patrick Wymark and Michael Horden play Col. Turner and Adm. Rolland, two high-ranking officers back in Britain who knew the true intention of the mission. Rounding out the cast is some familiar faces as the evil German counterparts including Anton Diffring, Ferdy Mayne and Derren Nesbitt.  

While all the build-up, background and twists are fun, the movie's most entertaining feature is the finale. The truth of the mission revealed, Smith, Schaffer and Mary (with some friends along for the ride) must basically shoot their way out of the mountaintop fortress, causing as much chaos as they can along the way. Eastwood's Schaffer alone single-handedly dispatches a whole German division on his own. The shootouts in the dark, poorly-lit castle hallways are a highlight, but the coolest sequence has Smith fighting two Germans aboard a cable car hundreds of feet off the ground. Adrenaline-pumping action, it is a doozy. It's ridiculous action throughout, our heroes able to pick off enemy soldiers at will while the hundreds of enemy soldiers can barely manage to nick our intrepid heroes. And how many packs of dynamite can two men manage to carry? Apparently 385 by my count.

This is not meant to be a serious war film. It's meant to be a film you enjoy from beginning to end. The on-location shooting in Austria, including the Hohenwerfen Castle and in and around Werfen, are spot-on choices for accuracy and realism. As a topper, composer Ron Goodwin's score is big and booming and equally perfect, keeping the tension building and driving the action. Listen to the main theme HERE. In the vein of MacLean's The Guns of Navarone, this is a popcorn flick at its best. Sit back and enjoy Burton and Eastwood win WWII with pretty girls, plenty of action, and even more twists and turns in that ridiculously convoluted plot.

Where Eagles Dare (1968): *** 1/2 /****
Updated February 2009 review