Death Becomes Her (1992)

We’ve all heard his tall tales about the living dead in Beverly Hills. 1978. Narcissistic fading actress Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep) performs in a Broadway musical. She invites long-time frenemy, mousy aspiring novelist Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn), backstage along with Helen’s fiancé, famed plastic surgeon Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis). Infatuated with Madeline, Ernest breaks off his engagement with Helen to marry Madeline. Seven years later, a lonely, obese, depressed and destitute Helen is committed to a psychiatric hospital where she obsesses over taking revenge against Madeline. Another seven years later, Madeline and Ernest live an opulent life in Beverly Hills but they are miserable: Madeline is depressed about her age and withering beauty and Ernest, now an alcoholic, has been reduced to working as a reconstructive mortician. After receiving an invitation to a party celebrating Helen’s new book, Forever Young, Madeline rushes for spa beauty treatments. When she mentions she will pay any price, the spa owner gives her the business card of Lisle Von Rhuman (Isabella Rossellini) a mysterious, wealthy socialite who specialises in rejuvenation, which Madeline dismisses. Madeline and Ernest attend Helen’s party and discover that Helen is now slim, glamorous and youthful despite being 50. Jealous of Helen’s appearance, Madeline observes as Helen tells Ernest that she blames Madeline for his career decline. Madeline later visits her young lover but discovers he is with a woman of his own age. Despondent, Madeline drives to Lisle’s mansion. The youthful Lisle claims to be 71 and offers Madeline a potion that promises eternal life and youth. Madeline hesitates but then buys and drinks the potion which reverses her age, restoring her beauty before her eyes. Lisle warns Madeline that she must disappear from the public eye after ten years, to avoid suspicion of her immortality and to treat her body well. Meanwhile, Helen seduces Ernest and convinces him to kill Madeline. When Madeline returns home, she belittles Ernest who snaps and pushes her down the stairs, breaking her neck. Believing her to be dead, Ernest phones Helen for advice but drops the phone in shock when he sees Madeline approach him with her head twisted backward. Ernest takes Madeline to the hospital where the doctor’s (Sydney Pollack, uncredited) analysis shows she is clinically dead. Ernest finds Madeline in a body bag and considers her reanimation to be a miracle. He uses his skills to repair her body at home. Helen arrives and, after overhearing her and Ernest discussing their murder plot, Madeline shoots Helen with a shotgun. The blast leaves a large hole in Helen’s torso but she remains alive – she also has taken Lisle’s potion. Helen and Madeline fight before apologising and reconciling. Depressed at the situation, Ernest prepares to leave, but Helen and Madeline convince him to first repair their bodies. Realising they will need regular maintenance, they scheme to have Ernest drink the potion to ensure his permanent availability. The pair knock out Ernest and bring him to Lisle, who offers him the potion in exchange for his surgical skills … You are in violation of every natural law that I know. You’re sitting there, you’re talking to me – but you’re dead! Eternal youth, cosmetology, the living dead, remarriage screwball, Gothic horror and mad science combine fruitfully in this satirical black comedy that takes swipes at everything within range – Hollywood, vanity, fame, narcissism, beauty, immortality and of course actresses, which leads to an interesting casting conundrum with two of the town’s most amazing fortysomethings as the leads. Hawn is a gorgeous and gifted comedienne but here she is the designated ugly duckling who blooms into a fabulous romantic novelist. Streep had actually played just such a character in She-Devil and essayed her BFF Carrie Fisher’s avatar in Postcards From the Edge a role which supposedly made this frosty technical performer more loveable, as the critics of the era might have it. Here she goes full Joan Crawford in a movie which asks the audience to see her as a legendary screen beauty but her singularity mitigates this proposal somewhat. (Un)naturally there has to be a quote from Bride of Frankenstein and Hawn is gifted It’s alive! It is of course Rossellini who astonishes in her semi-nude presentation, a luscious cross between Cleopatra and Louise Brooks. Now she really has a body to die for. This fact alone crystallises the point of the movie – the business’ attitude to its female cohort. That she’s escorted by Fabio places this in its time but luckily both Elvis and James Dean turn up at one of her gatherings which lands the premise about stars living forever. It’s nice to see Ian Ogilvy at hand as the master of ceremonies. With a combination of CGI (including skin texture) produced by Industrial Light and Magic, animatronics and blue screen, this is a triumph of special effects if not entirely of story despite Martin Donovan & David Koepp having a hand in the screenplay. The characters simply aren’t developed adequately and they feel like the object of a long joke that pitches actresses against each other and then forces them to finish out their days with their worst enemy – each other. The often hysterical lively fun occasionally feels like it has a hole in the middle, like Helen. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. You gave other people your youth and wasted your own

Argylle (2024)

You need to stay on target. Introverted spy novelist Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) has almost finished writing her fifth book about Aubrey Argylle (Henry Cavill), the title character of the Argylle spy series. On a train journey with her cat Alfie (Chip) to go and visit her mother Ruth (Catherine O’Hara) home in Chicago, Elly is saved from an ambush by an actual spy, Aidan Wylde (Sam Rockwell) who explains to her that a devious organisation, known as the Division, headed by Ritter (Bryan Cranston) has targeted her because her novels seemingly predict their future. Aidan travels with Elly to England, hoping that her next chapter will reveal how to stop the Division. In London, the duo searches for a Masterkey that would help expose the Division that Elly had also referenced in her novels. Suspecting Aidan wants to kill her too, Elly calls her mother for help and she immediately travels to rescue her daughter. There’s a knock at the door and it’s Elly’s father (Bryan Cranston). Then Aidan arrives and reveals that her parents are both operatives of the Division, forcing him and Elly to fend them off before fleeing. Who’s the only person who hasn’t tried to kill you in the past seventy-two hours? Escaping to France, Aidan and former CIA deputy director Alfie Solomon reveal that Argylle is not entirely fictional: Elly is in fact agent Rachel Kylle (‘Argylle’ having been derived from ‘R. Kylle’), who was captured and brainwashed by the Division five years ago and made to believe that Dr. Margaret Vogeler (Ruth) and Director Ritter (Barry) were her real parents. Elly put her suppressed memories into her novels in modified form … We’re on our own now. Cats. Writers. Spies. A recipe for success! Starwise it’s essentially Bryce versus Bryan – with a lot of Sam and Henry to spice things up. Even John Cena and pop star Dua Lipa show up in the great opening sequence and later Samuel L. Jackson and Ariana DeBose enter the fray. There’s an argument to be made for a director with such clear gifts as Matthew Vaughn that he should be making serious films – that is, narratives with more significant content and in reality it would appear he is painting himself into a corner of ridiculousness if not necessarily one of large scale likeable silliness. But we might mention that here he’s making a film about the inside of a woman’s mind (and even her eyelids) – kudos for that. Spies lie. It’s part of the game. As the perennially youthful Rockwell morphs into the amusingly Action Man-like Cavill we understand how a writer thinks, the rules of the espionage genre and enjoy Vaughn’s permanently witty point of view as Ellie figures out how to do adventure and spying in the real world (again). You’re just a character I made up. As usual in a Vaughn production, everything looks beautiful courtesy of DoP George Richmond and production designers Russell De Rozario and Daniel Taylor, the action is well managed and there are even some meta references (Argylle is definitely suited and booted by Kingsman). There’s an impressive score by Lorne Balfe with an astute use of the Beatles’ final song to lend poignancy. The midpoint reveal is great fun. Thereafter the conventions necessarily come into play. The greater the spy – the bigger the lie. There’s an easy bond (James?!) between our principals: You’re one hell of a spy, Ellie. Not a bad writer, either. And it’s a jolly sight indeed to have Howard spend most of the film carting her cat Alfie around in a posh backpack – and you know what they say about cats in dramatic structure (Save the Cat?!) – if there’s one in the first act, it has to go off in the third! It makes us think Vaughn is precisely the director to reinvigorate that moribund franchise albeit this is the first in a series of its own to perhaps be fused with Kingsman at a later date. Bonkers, nutty and fun, to be honest, this had us at Cat. Just tell us what happens in the next chapter

Angel Heart (1987)

It’s funny, I’ve a feeling I’ve met you before. New York City, 1955. Private investigator Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) is contacted by a man named Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) to track down John Liebling, a pre-war crooner known professionally as ‘Johnny Favorite’ who suffered severe neurological trauma, resulting from injuries received in World War 2. Favorite’s incapacity disrupted some kind of contract with Cyphre regarding collateral for his investment in his career and Cyphre believes a private mental hospital in Poughkeepsie where Favorite was receiving radical psychiatric treatment for shell shock has falsified records. At the hospital, Harry discovers the records showing Favorite’s transfer were falsified by a physician named Albert Fowler (Michael Higgins). After Harry breaks into his home, Fowler admits that years ago he was bribed by a man and woman so that the two could abscond with the disfigured Favorite, his face wrapped in bandages, driving him away from the hospital. Believing that Fowler knows more than he’s saying, Harry locks him in his bedroom, forcing him to suffer withdrawal from a morphine addiction. The next morning, he returns to the house to find that the doctor has apparently shot himself. Harry tries to break his contract with Cyphre but agrees to continue the search when Cyphre offers him $5,000. He discovers that Favorite had a wealthy fiancée named Margaret Krusemark but had also begun a secret affair with a woman named Evangeline Proudfoot. Harry travels to New Orleans and meets with Margaret (Charlotte Rampling), who tells him Favorite is dead, or at least dead to her. Evangeline died years before but is survived by her 17-year-old daughter, Epiphany Proudfoot (Lisa Bonet) who was conceived during her mother’s affair with Favorite and is herself the mother of a toddler. When Epiphany is reluctant to speak, Harry tracks down Toots Sweet (Brownie McGhee) a guitarist and former Favorite bandmate. After Harry uses force to try to extract details of Favorite’s last known whereabouts, Toots refers him back to Margaret. The following morning, police detectives inform Harry that Toots has been murdered. Harry returns to Margaret’s home and finds her murdered, her heart removed with a ceremonial knife. He is later attacked by enforcers of Ethan Krusemark – Margaret’s father, a powerful denizen of Louisiana – who order him to leave town. At his hotel, Harry finds Epiphany. He invites her into his room, where they have sex during which Harry has visions of blood dripping from the ceiling and splashing around the room. He later confronts Krusemark (Stocker Fontelieu) who reveals that he and Margaret were the ones who took Favorite from the hospital. Favorite was actually a powerful occultist who sold his soul in exchange for stardom. He got his stardom but then sought to renege on the bargain. To do so, Favorite kidnapped a young soldier who was of the exact same age as Favorite and strongly resembling him from Times Square and performed a Satanic ritual on the boy, murdering him and eating his still-beating heart in order to steal his soul. Favorite planned to assume the identity of the murdered soldier but was drafted and then injured overseas. Suffering severe facial trauma and amnesia, Favorite was sent to the hospital for treatment. After Krusemark and his daughter took him from the hospital, they left him at Times Square on New Year’s Eve 1943 (the date on the falsified hospital records). While hearing Krusemark’s story, Harry runs into the bathroom, vomits and continually asks the identity of the soldier… Secret love should stay secret. Written and directed by Alan Parker, this atmospheric adaptation of William Hjortsberg’s 1978 novel Falling Angel is overripe with symbols and intimations of evil, the power of association and issues of identity. Of course the major twist is pretty obvious and there is a weakness in Parker’s screenplay (which alters the novel somewhat) with the revelations arising not from any kind of believable detective work but just happening following Harry’s attending at different destinations rather than the nuts and bolts of storytelling which gives the plot away much too early. For a film so evidently committed to shock value it doesn’t indulge in anything deeper about the propensity of people toward evil and seems content to float on the surface of effects which is disappointing given the potential of the setting. De Niro’s main contribution to the unravelling is to have well manicured nails and Johnny Favorite’s alleged stardom remains something of a McGuffin. Beautiful as this looks and sounds, with Rourke at his most appealing, this had censorship issues due to the nature of his sexual interaction with Bonet, the young star of TV’s Cosby Show and the final twist could only surprise Harry himself. I know who I am!

Misbehaviour (2020)

So this is the eye of the revolution – up close it sure is revolting. As the 1970 Miss World competition looms, divorced mother of a little daughter Sally Alexander (Keira Knightley) encounters sexism as she is interviewed for a place as a mature History student at University College London. She encounters Women’s Liberation activist Jo Robinson (Jessie Buckley) painting slogans on a poster and warns her about bobbies patrolling the street. She joins her group which lives as a commune and advises them to engage with the media – they’re so shabby and disorganised and they don’t even have TV but another group in Peckham disagrees with their tactics. Meanwhile Eric Morley (Rhys Ifans) and his wife Julia (Keeley Hawes) are busy trying to secure Bob Hope (Greg Kinnear) as host of Miss World against his wife Dolores’ (Lesley Manville) wishes because when he last did it in 1961 he took the winner home. Pressured by London-based South African apartheid activist Peter Hain (Luke Thompson), Eric Morley decides to parachute in an extra contestant, black Pearl Jansen (Loreece Harrison) who along with Miss Grenada Jennifer Hosten (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is one of the few coloured contestants in the beauty contest. Then a wilder element of Libbers blows up a BBC van on the eve of the competition and the Grosvenor Road commune has to go through with a proper protest under cover of normal clothing during the live show … You think you can have the same freedoms as a man but you can’t. The screenplay by Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe from Frayn’s story is rooted in reality: this is a group biography but done as a comedy drama in the style of a heist story. It’s a conscientious and entertaining if mild intervention into the evolution of women’s rights. A touch more of zany might have helped this become a genre entry which it’s straining to do but respect for the (still living) heroines obviously hampers wilder moments. And perhaps the truth. It’s a political tale of unbelievable misogyny and inequality. The display of the beauty queens’ behinds for rating is truly shocking: how on earth did this outrageous cattle mart go on as long as it did?! However the lovely irony, that the protest (which occurs in the midst of infamous philanderer Hope’s outrageously sexist monologue) engenders a feminist movement is well played and the meeting between arrested Sally and newly-crowned winner Hosten nicely encapsulates the complex theme and issues which today’s feminists would call intersectional. Fun fact: Sally’s daughter Abigail (Maya Kelly) was the daughter from her marriage to legendary actor John Thaw. Directed by Philippa Lowthorpe. Turns out my seat at the table is actually a high chair

The Comfort of Strangers (1990)

My father was a very big man. And he wore a black moustache. When he grew older and it grew grey, he coloured it with a pencil. The kind women use. Mascara. English couple Mary (Natasha Richardson) and Colin (Rupert Everett) are taking a return holiday in Venice in an attempt to repair their relationship. They are befriended by suave Robert (Christopher Walken), a British-Italian bar proprietor, unaware that he has been stalking and photographing them. When he brings them to his palazzo apartment and introduces them to his wife Caroline (Helen Mirren) they become enmeshed in a game of psychological and erotic roleplay and wind up experiencing a terrifying drama of decadence in which nothing and nobody is as they appear … I mean that you’d do absolutely anything for the other person, and you’d let them do absolutely anything to you. Anything. Adapted by Harold Pinter from the 1981 Ian McEwan novella, this picturesque exploration of perverse relationships practically wallows in morbidity. Teetering on the verge of horror and luridness at all times, this never tips into typical genre expectations, always erring on the side of suggestiveness, surprise and eerieness. Until a swift end is brought to proceedings. The irony replete in the story is all in the title and in creepy Walken who declares, They want to destroy everything that’s good between men and women. It’s expertly directed by Paul Schrader with densely beautiful cinematography by Dante Spinotti, permitting the full strangeness of the city to express the moistly malevolent mystery, sinister and lustrous, terrifying and thrilling, all at once, inhabited by just the right performers in wondrous sets by Gianni Quaranta. Some people don’t like the ending. As in life, etc. Although if you’ve read Thomas Mann or seen Don’t Look Now you’ll have a justifiably familiar feeling of foreboding. A sensual nightmare of innocents abroad. I knew that fantasy was passing into reality. Have you ever experienced that? It’s like stepping into a mirror

Portrait of a Lady On Fire (2019)

Aka Portrait de la jenue fille en feu. Will you be able to paint her? Painter Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is instructing a class of art students in Paris. They ask her about the origins of a painting and she reminisces: France, 1770. Marianne is commissioned to do the wedding portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) a young woman who has just left the convent and is at home on a remote island off the coast of Brittany. She is a reluctant bride to be and her mother the countess (Valeria Golino) wants Marianne to paint her portrait in secret for an arranged marriage to a nobleman suitor in Milan whose visual approval is required. The last male artist failed in his mission and Marianne must study Héloïse without her knowing. Marianne accompanies her on her daily walk under the pretence of being her companion but observes her carefully and paints her secretly. Is that how you see me? When she reveals her identity and Héloïse dislikes the portrait Marianne destroys it, to the rage of the countess who goes away for a while as long as Marianne agrees to do another portrait, this time with her subject’s full co-operation. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s. The women fall in love and Héloïse reads Orpheus and Eurydice by firelight to Marianne and Héloïse’s servant, Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) whose pregnancy the women help to end. As Marianne finishes the portrait and the countess is returning they must accept what happens next … Your presence is made up of fleeting moments that may lack truth. French writer/director Céline Sciamma’s historical romance is stately, elegant and well framed:  this is a picture of female solidarity and love, grounded in the most obvious of ideas – the female gaze in a patriarchal world – in a film about looking and perception. We are going to paint. This is about turning around and acknowledging and engaging with what you see – and making a choice. The performers look and watch and are passive aggressive as society dictates they must be with their taboo affair, illuminating each other’s lives in secret. How people see each other has rarely been so truthfully portrayed. A profound, at times magical, meditation on what it means to be a woman, this is beautifully and carefully staged, with nothing excessive or ornamental and driven by stunning performances. The digital cinematography by Claire Mathon is so exquisite there are candlelit scenes you will want to reach out and touch and hang on your wall. This show and tell is far from still life. If you look at me, who do I look at?

Palm Beach (2019)

It’s what they’ve dreamed of for themselves is not what they’ve turned out to be. Frank (Bryan Brown) is flying in his lifelong friends for his big birthday at his beautiful home overlooking the bay at Palm Beach, north of Sydney. Now retired from his tee-shirt business which made him very wealthy, he and his wife Charlotte (Greta Scacchi), feckless son Dan (Charlie Vickers) and medical student daughter Ella (Matilda Brown), are hosting the remaining members of The Pacific Sideburns, the band he managed in the Seventies who made the cover of Rolling Stone back in 1977 when they had their one big hit song. Now Leo (Sam Neill) is a journalist based in New Zealand, married to teacher Bridget (Jacqueline MacKenzie) and stepfather to her teenage daughter Caitlyn (Frances Berry). Billy (Richard E. Grant) is an ad man married to actress Eva (Heather Mitchell) who thinks at 60 she’s too young to be cast as Nicole Kidman’s mother. Holly (Claire van der Boom) is the daughter of their late lead singer Roxy and she arrives with her lover, an older man called Doug (Aaron Jeffery) in tow. Tensions erupt over money, career, cars and homes and then there’s a secret which has been niggling at someone’s conscience … The Pacific Sideburns go down as the voice of adult incontinence. Directed by that lovely actress Rachel Ward (who is of course married to leading man Brown), who co-wrote the screenplay with Joanna Murray-Smith, in her second theatrical outing behind the camera, this is a kind of Big Chill for a different generation and at a different stage of their lives. Fans of Australian cinema will be thrilled with the cast (which also includes blow-ins Grant and Scacchi), with Neill and Brown co-starring for the fifth time. This time out they’re in a production about rites of passage among friends (and frenemies) which isn’t afraid to be tough on its characters, none of whom is without baggage or post-60 year old issues. There are all kinds of relatable tensions over ageing, health and money with the added frisson of questionable DNA. The issue of whether Dan might be fathered by Leo becomes the main plank of the narrative particularly since Frank and Dan are permanently at daggers drawn. But Billy – who has made an ad for adult diapers in France using the band’s big hit – is envious of Frank’s money and taunts him about the chimneys on a neighbouring property blocking the view so often that Frank does something about it, leading to the film’s comic high point:  retirement is not for chickens, as his anti-depressants prove. Bonding over building a pizza oven is no picnic. It’s pretty hard to bond with the Gestapo, growls Sam Neill. The women have their own problems but try to get them out of their system with some therapeutic white wine-assisted yoga by the pool and tough conversations with their terminally self-obsessed men. The father-son relationship between Frank and Dan results in a terrible accident and it finally brings them all to their senses in a well managed conclusion to the comedy drama. This family affair also involves Brown and Ward’s real-life daughter as Frank’s daughter; while the film within a film is Ward’s 2001 short, The Big House. The songs are by the band The Teskey Brothers in a soundtrack peppered with great tunes. An extremely winning production with fantastic performances and smart writing, this is an amazing showcase for New South Wales in a location familiar to viewers of TV’s Home and Away. Very easy watching indeed. I’m on my way ASAP, especially if I can stay in that magnificent beach house. I call it uninvited clarity

 

A Man About the House (1947)

It may be an advantage to have a man about the house. The unmarried British Isit sisters Agnes (Margaret Johnston) and Ellen (Dulcie Gray) unexpectedly inherit their uncle’s Italian villa and have to deal with his sinister major-domo Salvatore (Kieron Moore) who manages the villa and vineyard. Agnes is overwhelmed by him and they marry, so he ends up owning the estate that once belonged to his family, believing Agnes to be the sole inheritor. Ellen’s suspicions are aroused when Agnes’s health begins to deteriorate and she consults Agnes’s former fiancé, visiting English doctor Benjamin Dench (Guy Middleton) …  Spinsters aren’t safe with such a man. A fun Gothic melodrama with an early opportunity to see Gina Lollobrigida in English-language cinema the year she came third in the Miss Italia pageant. Moore had played Salvatore in the theatre production of Francis Brett Young’s 1942 novel (which is adapted here by J.B. Williams) and he relishes his badness here – his speechifying about the differences between dried up Italian women and young unmarried Englishwomen has to be heard to be believed. Watching the sisters’ emotional unfurling as the vines are harvested is well done, their suppressed instincts vividly described against the emotional Italians nicely gauged in montages and changes of hair and costume.  It’s supremely ironic that it’s the stiff upper lipped older sister played by (the frankly weird) Johnston who succumbs to the determinedly sexual lure of the sleazy butler with murder in mind. Directed by Leslie Arliss. It is our duty as Englishwomen to set an example and not succumb to their lax foreign ways

 

 

The End of the Affair (1955)

Trust is a variable quality. London during World War 2. Novelist Maurice Bendrix (Van Johnson) meets Sarah Miles (Deborah Kerr) the wife of civil servant Henry Miles (Peter Cushing) at their sherry party. He is asking Henry for information to help with his next book. Maurice is intrigued by Sarah after he sees her kissing another man. They become lovers that night at his hotel. After his rooms are bombed when they are together there, she ends their relationship and he suffers from the delayed shock from the bombing and from her ending the affair. After their break-up and the end of the war, Bendrix encounters Henry, who invites him for a drink at his home, especially since Sarah is out.  Henry confides that he suspects Sarah is unfaithful and has looked into engaging a private investigator, but then decides against it. Sarah returns home before Bendrix leaves and is curt with him. Bendrix follows through with hiring a private detective agency on his own account. They come across information which suggests that Sarah is being unfaithful, which Bendrix shares with Henry in revenge. Bendrix then obtains Sarah’s diary via the private investigator Albert Parkis (John Mills) which reveals that Sarah is not having an affair and that she promised God to give Bendrix up if he was spared death in the bombing. Then they meet again … I’ve learned that you must pray like you make love – with everything you have. A deeply felt narrative revolving around love, sex and religious belief sounds like a melodramatic quagmire but Lenore Coffee’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s 1951 semi-autobiographical novel is a rich textured work with impressive performances by the entire cast. Kerr and Johnson might be perceived to be something of a mismatch but that’s the point of the story:  he is fated to forever misunderstand her and as he tries to navigate his way through her complex emotions and her deals with God, he responds with just one emotion – jealousy. His unruly misunderstanding in a world of good manners and looking the other way means he flails hopelessly while we are then persuaded of her beliefs via her diary, the contents of which dominate the film’s second half, leading him to regret his desire for revenge. Love doesn’t end just because we don’t see each other. The ensemble is well presented and their individual big moments are sketches of superb characterisation, Mills’ pride in his snooping a particular highlight. It’s extraordinarily well done, very touching and filled with moments of truth which never fail to hit home in a story that is cunningly managed and beautifully tempered with empathy. Kerr is simply great. Directed by Edward Dmytryk. The ‘not done’ things are done every day. I’ve done most of them myself

A View to a Kill (1985)

A typical Reds to riches story. Bond (Roger Moore)returns from his travels in the U.S.S.R. with a computer chip. This chip is capable of withstanding a nuclear electromagnetic pulse that would otherwise destroy a normal chip. The chip was created by Zorin Industries, and Bond heads off to investigate its owner, Max Zorin (Christopher Walken), first encountering him at Ascot where despite the form of competitors his horses win against the odds. Zorin is really planning to set off an earthquake along the Hayward and San Andreas faults, which will wipe out all of Silicon Valley, the heart of the world’s microchip production. As well as Zorin, Bond must also tackle his sidekick, hit woman May Day (Grace Jones) and equally menacing companion of Zorin, while dragging State Geologist Stacy Sutton (Tanya Roberts) along for the ride… Well my dear, I take it you spend quite a lot of time in the saddle. Written by Richard Maibaum and producer Michael G, Wilson, this is the fourteenth Bond and the seventh and final to star Moore and is adapted from Ian Fleming’s story From a View to a Kill. Unusually violent for the series, with Walken machine-gunning large groups of people in a mass slaughter, albeit his origins as the product of a Nazi experiment explains the high body count. It’s more than redeemed by an awesomely staged pre-titles ski chase and another genuinely impressive chase through Paris, commencing on the Eiffel Tower and continuing with Moore following Jones in a parachute but on the ground, in a car gradually broken up (literally) in traffic before he jumps onto a bateau mouche, only to watch Jones escape in a speed boat piloted by Walken: David Bowie and Sting were first offered the role of Zorin who is perhaps a little too light although his sinister laugh paradoxically suggests the requisite insanity. In a Freudian touch the scientist responsible for him is his in-house scientist. It’s nice to see Walter Gotell returning as Soviet General Gogol while Lois Maxwell makes her final appearance as Moneypenny. The weakest acting link is Roberts but you can blame the screenplay for her shortcomings. There’s a great role for Patrick Macnee as 007’s sidekick (for a while!) Sir Godfrey Tibbett and Patrick Bauchau makes an appearance as Zorin’s security chief, Scarpine.  Dolph Lundgren makes a brief appearance, his debut, as Venz, one of Gogol’s KGB agents. There’s a welcome appearance by David Yip as the CIA agent who assists Bond in a return of the action to the US and the climax at the Golden Gate Bridge is well done. All in all it’s a bright and colourful outing for our favourite spy. The stonking title song is performed by Duran Duran who co-wrote it with John Barry. Directed by John Glen, his third time at the series’ helm. What would you be without us? A biological experiment? A physiological freak?