I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen this iconic Steve McQueen movie. If I have, I remember nothing of it. McQueen was a renowned petrol-head, and having done many of his own driving stunts in Bullitt, having him star in a movie about the famous 24-hour race seems like a natural fit. For added realism,…
Dumbo
“I be done seen about everything when I see an elephant fly.” Dumbo is, I think, one of the most charming of the classic Walt Disney animations. The movie was produced on a relatively low budget after the financial failures of the expensive Pinocchio and Fantasia. Its a brisk 64 minute fable of a baby…
The Parallax View
The Parallax View is possibly the most paranoid of a small wave of paranoid thrillers from the 70s. Several of these (including Klute and All The President’s Men) were also directed by Alan J Pakula. Here, Warren Beatty stars as a crusading journalist who comes to realise that all witnesses a political assassination are steadily…
Psycho II
I recall Psycho II being a better movie than it had any right to be. Whilst the idea of making a sequel to arguably Hitchcock’s most famous movie might seem like sacrilege, Psycho II was more than the abject cash-in that might have been expected. I remember the shift from black and white to colour in…
Cool Hand Luke
“What we have here is a failure to communicate….” These are the last words spoken by Paul Newman’s Luke, a fiercely disruptive convict, whom the authorities are determined to crush in 1967’s classic prison drama. Unbroken to the last, he parodies the exact words spoken to him by the warden before being shot. Cool Hand…
The Final Conflict
The Final Conflict was the concluding chapter in The Omen trilogy (well, it was until someone had the bright idea to flog a dead horse with Omen IV…) I always found it a poor fit with the previous two movies, the basic premise being that the Devil’s son Damien is now a grown adult, intent…