Skyjacked

Yeah, yeah, yeah, air travel is supposedly the safest form of travel around. I've heard it all. But I've also seen a lot of movies. And you know what happens in movies? Bad things happen to planes. Crashes, bombs, madmen hell-bent on doing all sorts of evil, engine failure, Gary Oldman, anything and everything. In other words, it's a prime jumping off point for a disaster flick, like 1972's Skyjacked, a solid if unspectacular entry to the genre.

A veteran airline pilot with a military background, Capt. Hank O'Hara (Charlton Heston) boards his flight to Minneapolis on a Boeing 707 like any other flight. Once the plane is airborne though, a passenger discovers a message in the bathroom. Written on the mirror in lipstick is a message telling O'Hara to divert the plane to Anchorage or a bomb will be exploded. Is it serious? Is it a prank? While they're trying to decide for sure, a second threat/message is found, demanding the flight be diverted immediately. O'Hara goes along with it, knowing nothing can be achieved by calling the bomber's bluff. The plane heads to Anchorage but the weather is horrific for hundreds of miles in every direction. Can O'Hara get the plane to its new destination? Can they find out who the bomber is in time?

Rampant during the 1970s before dying out a bit in the early 1980s, the disaster flick genre produced some classics, some duds and a whole lot of flicks right in between. From director John Guillermin, 'Skyjacked' is right in the middle there. It's not really good, and it's not really bad. In the end, it's an entertaining, sometimes very tense disaster flick that has it's moments. For the most part it avoids a lot of the overdramatic pratfalls that can doom any movie. A nutso bomber has a bomb on an airliner packed with passengers. Do we need much else in the drama department? We waste little time before getting on board and letting the fun begin. The story does take a surprising twist near the halfway point, but I thought it worked pretty well. Yeah, it comes out of left field, but considering who the bomber is, I liked it.

It is a disaster flick so who should star? If you answered anyone else other than Charlton Heston, shame on you. In the 1970s, his name seemed synonymous with the genre. Are they all great performances? Nah, not really, but him just being there definitely legitimizes the movie. He commits to the part, and it's always fun to see him do his thing. I liked his Capt. O'Hara, a tough as nails pilot who will do anything he can to ensure that his passengers, crew and plane makes it through okay. His crew includes Mike Henry as his co-pilot and Ken Swofford as his navigator with Yvette Mimieux as Angela, the head stewardess who had a previous "thing" with O'Hara. Wouldn't you know it? Those feelings might be creeping back up again! I know, right, I didn't see that coming either!

Following the disaster movie formula, we get a whole lot of characters rounding out the cast. Will everyone make it? Who goes nuts? No spoilers here as to the identity of the bomber mostly because I had it ruined for me via a Netflix plot description. Let's start with Walter Pidgeon as a U.S. Senator on the way to Washington D.C., his son (Nicholas Hammond) who has an interest in free-spirited Susan Dey. James Brolin plays a U.S. soldier trying to get to his sister's wedding with Roosevelt Grier sharing his row of seats with him as a musician traveling with his rather large instrument. Mariette Hartley is a very pregnant woman traveling by herself while Jeanne Crain and Ross Elliott play a married couple moving to a new job after some past job troubles. Mostly a cameo, Claude Akins plays a radar specialist who helps O'Hara bring the plane down safely. Not exactly the cast of Towering Inferno in terms of star power, but it's a fun cast with some cool supporting parts.

How about the weirder portions of the movie? My favorite has Heston's O'Hara smoking a pipe...in the cockpit. In general, there seems to be a lot of smoking on-board. I know its the 1970s, but talk about a funny time capsule. A close second in the ridiculous department is pregnant Mariette Hartley turning down a water for a....Bloody Mary. Maybe her going into labor is a drink-induced karma, who knows. There's also a couple of dreamy, cloud-like flashbacks that are pretty bad, but those pale in comparison to the bomber's hallucinations. The story isn't great, keeping things on a superficial level with basically all the characters, but I did enjoy it in a stupid, entertaining popcorn flick kind of way. Decent disaster flick.

Skyjacked (1972): ** 1/2 /****

Two-Minute Warning

When I think of movies from the 1970s, one genre rises above the rest...the disaster movie. Put an all-star cast together with a possibly world-ending catastrophe, and you've got a winner on your hands. Well, sort of. Most of these movies are pretty bad, the appeal coming from guessing which huge Hollywood star is going to die gruesomely in some horrific way.  Hint: It's almost always the aging star sacrificing themselves for the lives of a younger person. The disaster movie opened the door for all sorts of movies with all star casts, not necessarily just at the end of the world.

Take 1976's Two-Minute Warning as an example. The caliber of names is certainly impressive, but more on that later. The premise is disaster-like, but it's more of the man-made variety.  In fact, the movie and its premise -- a sniper setting up shop at a sporting event and opening fire -- was so controversial that it has been almost entirely buried over the last 30-plus years.  To air it on TV, an additional 30 minutes were added to make the lone sniper a diversionary tactic for a heist in Los Angeles, supposedly lessening the blow and the impact of what's going on.  The original theatrical version is a mixed bag overall though with a dull first hour, great middle half hour, and a finale and ending that rival the most uncomfortable scenes you'll ever watch.

Hosting a championship football game (supposedly between L.A. and Baltimore?), the L.A. Coliseum has opened its doors to some 90,000 fans who have turned out to see the contest. VIPs including politicians both locally and nationally have come out for the job, making Captain Peter Holly's (Charlton Heston) job that much more difficult maintaining security. Near halftime though, one of the countless cameras around the stadium spot a man with a rifle in the tower over the main entrance, a location that is impossible to get to without being detected. The high-powered automatic rifle will have free reign over the stadium, and no is seemingly safe. A SWAT team headed by Sgt. Button (John Cassavetes) is called in to handle the situation with Holly, but can they get the job done before the lone sniper opens fire on the thousands of targets in front of him?  

This is a difficult movie to review, and I try to only use that complaint every month or so.  It isn't so much a movie as a faux-documentary from director Larry Peerce, giving you the feeling of being a fly on the wall as this high-tension situation continues to escalate. Peerce's movie follows a handful of characters pre-game and as the game develops, giving us just enough info about them to get interested in them (hopefully that is, the attempt is hit or miss). Much of the movie was shot during the NFL season in 1975, also prominently featuring a Pac-10 game between USC and Stanford.  The problem is that much of the story shows a quick scene with the cast then cuts quickly to the football game and then the police and SWAT efforts to handle the sniper. With that filming technique, the first 45-60 minutes have a disjointed feel that makes it difficult to actually get into any rhythm with the movie and keep up with it.

Thankfully the movie finds the right gear at about the hour mark once Cassavetes' SWAT team arrives on the scene, the anxiety and tension building as the game nears its close.  SPOILERS STOP READING SPOILERS Despite the best efforts of the police and SWAT, the sniper does open fire, causing mass chaos as people start dropping dead all over the Coliseum, the deaths portrayed graphically and brutally.  Pieces start to click together as to why the all-star cast is there....as targets and little else.  Seeing movie stars shot aside, the finale as the sniper opens fire is one of the most troubling, uncomfortable extended scenes I've ever watched. Imagine 90,000 freaked out people all scrambling to stay alive, not quite sure what's going on.  People are trampled and thrown, pushed aside like rag dolls as survival takes over above all else. The second hour most definitely makes up for the struggles of the first hour, a truly memorable ending.

Let's talk celebrities here for a bit, typically a trademark of the disaster movie.  The description of the movie didn't do it justice, making it seem like Heston and Cassavetes worked closely together to stop the sniper.  Well, sort of, but not really.  Heston was in quite a few disaster movies so while it isn't a great part for him, he still brings his typical professionalism to the part. The same goes for Cassavetes, always intense and always very watchable.  Who else? Lots more. Martin Balsam plays McKeever, the Coliseum event coordinator, Beau Bridges as a father who brought his wife and two kids to the game, David Janssen and Gena Rowlands as a bickering couple going through a bitter fight, Jack Klugman as a gambler who needs his bet to stand or he'll be murdered by his bookie, Mitch Ryan as the priest sitting alongside him, Brock Peters as a Coliseum employee, and Walter Pidgeon as an aging pickpocket working the crowd.

More than the cast, the uncomfortable premise is the star here. All it takes is one lunatic to decide to do this, not some huge, elaborate plan that takes terrorists years to plan. It is a reasonably easy thing to do, and anyone who has been to a sporting event can appreciate the terror in the situation. The sniper doesn't care who he hits, just that he hits something. There's so much going on here that just wouldn't work now in 2011.  Can you imagine any stadium -- much less the well-known Coliseum -- opening its doors to a movie depicting mass murder?  I'd say N-O.  The movie works at its best in those moments, a feeling of realism, of pure terror and fear racking your body.

The story builds and builds, and thankfully the ending knows how far to push it.  The sniper is never actually shown in close-up (we see glimpses of him, get a vague sense of what he looks like), and maybe most appropriate...his motivations or reasons are never given. He's a nut, going on a suicide mission that will have only one ending; his death.  Cassavetes' SWAT leader delivers a cynical but ultimately honest brief of how the incident will be portrayed, appropriate for a late 1970s movie. The ending doesn't go for the jugular, just focusing on the emotion, Balsam's McKeever sitting in the empty stadium in the aftermath, wondering exactly what happened. The first hour is bad, but the second hour is that good to counter. Stick with this one.

Two-Minute Warning <---trailer (1976): ***/****

Men of the Fighting Lady

Before his death in 1997, author James Michener's name was synonymous with epics in novel form.  Centennial, Texas, Alaska, Hawaii, Chesapeake, The Journey, all huge novels that fans have come to love. But before he turned to those epics, he wrote several smaller books set in the Korean War which haven't received the publicity of his other works but are nonetheless worthwhile. Similar to Michener's Bridges at Toko-Ri (and the film version), 1954's Men of the Fighting Lady is based off his novel The Forgotten Heroes of Korea.

This is an oddity when it comes to war movies for a lot of reasons.  For one, it is based during the Korean War, but other than a few shots taken at the Commies, this movie could as easily have been based in WWII.  Second, there's something missing, or maybe there's too much?  At just 79 minutes, this is one of the shortest war movies I can think of, right up there with the heavily hacked and edited Red Badge of Courage.  Reading about a true incident a key scene is based on, did director Andrew Marton fill out a story around that single incident? Or to the opposite, did he have a longer movie that was cut down to this running time? I'm looking for some sort of answer and can't find a thing. Maybe it's just an oddity among war flicks?

On board the U.S.S. Oriskany, author James Michener (Louis Calhern) comes to visit his old friend, Commander Dowling (Walter Pigeon), the medical officer on board, in hopes of landing a story. Dowling has one for him, a story concerning the fighter pilots in the still-new jets on board being used against the North Koreans and Chinese in the fighting on land. Michener sits back and listens to the story of the fighter squadron and its pilots, what drives them to do what they do, constantly putting themselves in needlessly dangerous situations when the job doesn't always call for it. Why do they do it? Do they get some sick, perverse enjoyment out of it?  Or are they just doing their duty as expected?  Looking for answers from his old friend, Michener is surprised by what he finds.

Now in 2011, a movie about fighter pilots and their newly developed jet planes seems old hat. Who hasn't seen Top Gun? And in a lot of cases, who hasn't seen Top Gun 20 or 30 times? Guilty.  But in 1954, this newly developed plane had to be impressive to audiences.  Even compared to the fighter planes from WWII, these new designs were remarkable.  Much of the story focuses on these pilots and their life aboard ship waiting for their missions.  Marton uses a ton of stock footage (bordering on too much) of these planes on those missions.  At first, it's cool. It's different, original, and the footage is impressive.  You can always have too much of a good thing though because soon enough, the footage of raids and air strikes gets tedious.

Clocking in at well under 90 minutes, the ensemble cast here in 'Fighting Lady' features some solid names, but unfortunately their efforts aren't always as developed as I'd like. There are a handful of really interesting characters but thanks to the limitations on time, some get the short end of the stick.  The squadron includes Frank Lovejoy as Lt. Commander Paul Grayson, the squadron leader who pushes his men to the limit, but he's always at the forefront of the charge, Keenan Wynn as Lt. Commander Ted Dodson, a veteran flier who begins to question Grayson's tactics, Van Johnson as Lt. Howie Thayer, the amiable pilot trapped in the middle of two warring factions in the squadron, and Dewey Martin as Ensign Schechter, the young pilot who begins to side with Dodson. Lovejoy's commander is especially pushed to the background in the last 45 minutes, odd considering how key his character was to the first half of the movie.

Two extended sequences bring this movie up from same old same old to a near-classic.  The first is based on a real-life incident that Michener wrote about. Returning from a patrol, Martin's Schechter and his plane are struck, the shrapnel blinding the pilot in the process.  Trying to guide the wounded pilot back to the carrier hundreds of miles out, Johnson's Thayer leaves formation and flies with Schechter, giving him step-by-step commands so that he can make it back. Van Johnson is one of my favorite actors, but this may be his most impressive part, and Martin is no slouch either.  Johnson's dialogue is natural and nervous, pulling anything from his sleeve that may help.  The tension builds and builds until its almost unbearable. By the time they reach the carrier, I was willing Martin and his crippled plane to land safely. This extended sequence goes on for most of a half hour, but it never lacks for energy, tension or entertainment. You can watch the whole thing HERE and continue into Parts 7 and 8.

The second sequence isn't based as much on playing to that weird adrenaline rush you get from terrifying situations. It's based in that most basic idea of being separated from your loved ones during holidays.  Soldiers, sailors, Marines, pilots, they all experience it.  It's Christmas in this story, and the Navy has arranged for many of the families of the crew to tape quick messages to their husbands, brothers, sons and boyfriends. The timing of course couldn't be worse. A pilot was killed in action just a day before so when his family's message is played for the crew, a silence hangs over the crowd. There's a moment where you realize what you're watching where it all hits home. This family has no idea their Dad and husband is dead. In terms of pure emotion, this scene hit me like a bag of rocks.

There's two ways to fix this movie (in my weird head anyways). I say this having liked it and planning to give it a positive review. It plays in two ways, an extended TV episode or a badly shortened feature length. In a shorter version, I think it could work nicely the same way a longer, more developed movie would.  More character development would be at the top of the list of possible improvements.  But as is, I really liked the movie, as much for the drama as the cast. Flawed but above average.

Men of the Fighting Lady <---trailer (1954): ***/**** 

Advise and Consent

Recently in the news, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was found guilty on one count of 24 levied against him.  A mistrial is in the works, but the news was nothing new.  Controversies and scandals in politics are as old as well, politics itself.  Are we surprised anymore when a politician, whether it be the President or down through the ranks to Senators, Representatives, Governors, and on and on, does something stupid in the news?  Sex, past indiscretions, corruption, all over the above, nothing seems to faze the American public anymore.

Let's go back almost half a century in more innocent times, I guess, the 1960s weren't exactly innocent.  But the times were certainly different without that 24-hour news cycle that keeps viewers up to date on everything going on.  Politicians could have secrets and that's just what they were, secrets.  The master of adult-themed movies, Otto Preminger explored this concept with 1962's Advise and Consent. When you accept a position in the public eye, you lose your privacy to a certain point.  You open yourself up for criticism on many fronts, but if this Preminger movie teaches us anything, we all have secrets. It's only a matter of time before they're found out.

The President of the United States (Franchot Tone) has chosen a nominee for the vacant position of the Secretary of State. The man is Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda) and from the get-go, the nomination divides the Senate who will have to approve or disapprove him. The Senate majority leader (Walter Pidgeon) is all for the choice and knows he can get the necessary number of votes for Leffingwell. Opposing him is a long-time senator from South Carolina (Charles Laughton), who was burned by Leffingwell in the past and still holds a grudge. But before a vote can be counted, the nomination must go through a Senate sub-committee headed by an idealistic young senator (Don Murray) who will decide if Leffingwell is capable of doing the job. But as the committee starts, the dirt comes out and the fight begins.

As he did so often with his movies, Preminger puts together a very impressive ensemble cast to work with.  It's so good from top to bottom that Fonda -- yes, Henry Fonda -- is almost an afterthought as a supporting character.  He doesn't even make an appearance in the last 30 minutes.  Preminger was a perfectionist as a filmmaker, but actors must have liked working with him.  Along with the names mentioned above, there is also Gene Tierney, Peter Lawford, Will Geer, Burgess Meredith, Lew Ayres, and Paul Ford among others. Like any large ensemble, some in the cast get more of a chance to shine than others, but none disappoint however long they're on screen.  Murray, Pidgeon and Laughton are the ones that shine brightest though, including Ayres as a vanilla vice president.

This isn't a movie about camera techniques or in your face effects.  Preminger lets takes and scenes go on uninterrupted without the slightest editing.  Characters hold conversations like they would in real life.  He lets his cast show off their ability, letting the dialogue do all the talking the story needs.  At times, the pace can be infuriatingly slow (it is 140 minutes long) because of that, especially toward the end when the pace should be picking up, but it's all part of the story the movie revels in.  Preminger filmed in countless locations in Washington DC -- shooting in black and white -- giving a real feel for all the backroom deals and shady motives that really go on in the capital.  It doesn't intentionally call attention to itself, but the movie is a treat to watch on a purely visual level.

What was somewhat disappointing as the story develops is that by 2010, nothing really surprised me in terms of government scandals and controversies.  In the last 10 or 20 years, there has been murder, extramarital affairs, corruption, prostitution, kidnappings, and any number of other things I'm probably forgetting.  So when the scandals do pop up, including Fonda's Leffingwell and his past involvement in a different government and Murray's Senator's past coming back to haunt him, they don't have a huge affect on the viewer.  Shocking in 1962, maybe, but not in 2010.  Through no fault of Preminger's then (you can't blame him for making a move when he did), the emotional impact is lessened then just by time and how the world has changed in the almost 50 years since.

As everything does unravel in the end and the twists and secrets come out, the story thankfully picks up some steam.  One twist at the very end was a little too coincidental for me personally, the timing just too perfect, but that's movies for you. It is a movie that is as professionally done as just about any other movie you'll come across, and the cast is hard to top.  If there was a way to watch this in 1962, maybe the impact would have been greater, but in 2010, it's still pretty good.

Advise and Consent <---IMDB trailer (1962): ***/****

Man Hunt

Plots and conspiracies to kill political figures and social activists among others have existed as long as history itself. The flaw (or strength depending on how you look at) with making a movie about those subjects is that much of the time the audience will already know the end of the story. JFK, Lincoln, Ghandi, Archbishop Romero, you know that in the end, they're going to die. The same goes for people who weren't killed, think Day of the Jackal. Charles de Gaulle was not assassinated so it's obvious the Jackal is going to fail.

The enjoyment out of stories based in historical truth is in how the assassin is going to fail. The survivor of many assassination attempts, Adolf Hitler finally took his own life in Berlin in 1945 as the Russian forces closed in all around his underground complex. But for every attempt history has documented, like Valkyrie, how many failed? That's the basic idea of 1941's Man Hunt, an attempt on Hitler's life and the subsequent fallout in the summer of 1939 before Germany invaded Poland.

A tense opening sequence introduces a lone man, Alan Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon) walking through some a densely-wooded forest area. Armed with a precision rifle, Thorndike sets up a shot and is ready to take it. Who's in his scope? Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Third Reich. But before he can shoot, he's stopped by a guard. Under intense interrogation, Thorndike won't admit he was trying to kill Hitler. Instead, he says he just wanted to know what it felt like to have Hitler in his sights, but of course no one believes him. Thorndike refuses to sign a confession and ends up escaping when his captors attempt to kill him, all the while trying to make it seem like an accident.

Running for his life, Thorndike somehow makes it to safety, stowing away on a Danish freighter meant for London. But he isn't as safe as he thinks and soon finds out that two German agents are on his trail, Maj. Quive-Smith (George Sanders) and Mr. Jones (John Carradine). Thorndike gets help from a lower class British woman, Jerry Stokes (Joan Bennett), who has no idea what's she stepped into. Thorndike knows he cannot be captured, but he also can't go to the English government for help. He's completely on his own and must figure out a way to survive.

The premise is very interesting, and the opening sequence is a great introduction to the story. Seeing Hitler in Thorndike's sights is a startling moment because even when he places a bullet in the chamber, it's obvious he won't pull the trigger, not successfully at least. But the movie goes downhill almost immediately after this extended sequence. Thorndike escapes when the Germans plan to make his death look like an accident in a truly ridiculous scene. He's pushed off a cliff -- a high one at that -- but somehow survives without as much as a broken bone. I had trouble believing that Hitler's security force would have waited till hours later to check that the man was dead. On a bigger level, more likely they would have put a bullet in his head and not thought twice about it before even heading up to that cliff.

But it doesn't stop there as Thorndike seeds aid from Bennett's Jerry. This plot device has been used countless times and usually in a much stronger fashion; an unknowing, sometimes unwilling individual gets involved in some dangerous situation and decides to go all in. But watching the character, all I could think of was how she acts like a pouting toddler most of the time. Thorndike does his best to look out for her and keep her out of danger, but she grimaces, scrunches up her face and demands to be taken along. At one point, she even demands he buy her a new pin for her hat because her favorite one fell off when they were being chased. Granted, this pin serves a purpose late in the movie, but that doesn't take away the unnecessarily obnoxious make-up of the character.

All those logistical flaws -- incompetent Nazis, really? -- and annoyances aside, this would be a good movie. Having the Gestapo hunting you down does have its fair share of worry and tension involved. Two chase scenes, one in a busy London subway station, and the other a race through the streets on a foggy night, highlight the movie's better aspects. But too often, Pidgeon acts like the proper English gentleman, shrugging off the situation with a 'tut, tut' and 'cheerio, old chap' but in these scenes it'd be hard to ruin the atmosphere. His confrontations with the German agents are surprisingly graphic, not in what they show but what's actually happening in terms of violence, especially considering it was released in 1941.

Could have been an excellent WWII thriller but the flaws are just too much to ignore. Good villainous turns for Sanders and Carradine as the German agents on the hunt (Carradine barely says 10 words and is terrifying as all hell). The premise alone might make you want to check this one out, and I won't say 'don't do it' but be forewarned about a very flawed and sometimes entertaining movie. The ending is a little much too, even for a movie with a propaganda motive. Sorry, couldn't find a trailer anywhere.

Man Hunt (1941): **/****

Harry in Your Pocket

Well, it's August now so that means Turner Classic Movies is doing its annual Summer Under the Stars festival every day of the month. That can be good and bad depending on the star of the day, and even then they tend to show more mainstream, well-known star vehicles. So with James Coburn Day earlier this week, I'd seen all but one movie on the schedule, 1973's Harry in Your Pocket.

I was skeptical going in because Coburn made some classics, some above average movies, and then there's a gap until you hit rock bottom with a handful of movies I couldn't stand. I'll file this one right under the above average category. As a favor to an old friend, master thief/pickpocket Harry (Coburn) agrees to form a wire mob team, a group of pickpockets working together. Harry and his friend Casey (Walter Pidgeon) must recruit a few other members and decide on Ray (Michael Sarrazin), an inexperienced, low-level thief, and Sandy (Trish Van Devere), a young woman looking for some quick money.

A story about pickpockets might not seem like a huge thrill ride, but everything works smoothly after a somewhat slow start where everyone is introduced. The movie breaks down the techniques, the mannerisms, the planning that goes into a simple and quick theft of a man's wallet. Harry's one rule is simple, 'I don't carry the goods.' It's with his help of the team, Casey picking their mark, Sandy providing the distraction with some short skirts, and Ray taking the handoff, that Harry and Co. start to rack up some serious money.

Of course, that'd be too easy overall, wouldn't it? Harry takes a shine to Sandy who's dating Ray. Ray sees all this developing and doesn't go along easily. On top of that, Ray wants to branch off on his own but is worried he'll lose Sandy to Harry in the process.

Leading the cast, Coburn at his smooth, coolest best. In his better parts, Coburn gave effortless parts where it often seemed he wasn't even trying. As the expert pickpocket, he pulls off that kind of part here. Just by being there, Pidgeon gives 'HiYP' a ton of credibility. Whether you know him or not by name, I can guarantee you've seen him in a movie or two. An underrated actor who is excellent here as Coburn's aging sidekick. Sarrazin and Van Devere are the two youngsters, representing themselves well against two great presences in Coburn and Pidgeon.

Throw in a catchy 70s score from Lalo Schifrin, and you've got a well-rounded, well-told story. The movie doesn't appear to have been released on DVD or VHS so keep your eye out at the TCM website for another showing. Worth it for Coburn fans to see the laconic actor in one of his many silky smooth anti-heroes. You can check out the first 10 minutes here, and then another scene as Harry discusses strategy with his crew.