Reviews

Would you believe I actually LIKED this movie?! What exactly is all that wrong with it?? It has a major cast of newcomers that ALL went on to great fame and fortune: Newman, Natalie Wood, Lorne Greene, Strother Martin, Virginia Mayo, Jack Palance, Joseph Wiseman, (Dr. No in the movie of the same name,) and Pier Angeli. The film had the look and feel of a filmed play, rather than a typical "sword and sandal" epic, and the acting, with the exception of one scene of Newman, as Basil, working on that ENORMOUS goblet, was actually pretty good! This is especially true of the two playing the villains, Jack Palance and Virginia Mayo. It was one of the few times Mayo even _portrayed_ a villainess! The one scene where Jack Palance, ("Simon" the magician,) proclaims himself God just before he plummets to his death believing he can actually fly unaided, got an audible gasp from the audience of the theater I saw this in the first time. When you have TRULY despicable villains, your story has got to work, and that almost always makes up for whatever shortcomings a film may have. "Ben Hur" too long? Just sit back and stew over what Massalah has done to his childhood friend Judah and wait until he gets his just desserts in the end! "2001" too boring and interminable in parts? Just speculate on how a talking computer can turn into a psycho-pathological killer, (not to mention the light show at the end!) So what if "Chalice" was a little too earnest in parts....it was a first and/or very early movie for just about everybody involved! Be kind!

I saw this movie when it came out, and was immediately struck by how raw and realistic it was. To this day, I have been impressed by every one of Richard Burton's B&W movies. For some reason he shines in them like a beacon, while he slums through the more glamorous, and ultimately less successful color movies he's been in. These movies include: "Look Back In Anger", "Night of the Iguana", "Spy", "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", "My Cousin Rachel" and "The Bramble Bush". "Iguana", "Rachel" and "Bush" weren't as impressive as the others, but for some reason, Burton still commands the camera better in them in monochrome than he would have in color. Go figure.

The man was VASTLY underrated as an actor...well, maybe not underrated, but under-CONGRATULATED, since he never won an Oscar for any of his incredible, intense performances! He and Peter O'Toole were the crown PRINCES of intense! O'Toole, also, never won an Oscar, except for the Life Achievement Award he won just recently.

"Spy" was one of those landmark movies of the sixties that broke with type and showed the movie-going public what life was REALLY like in a certain type of world. "Blow-Up" was another movie like this, showing how strange the world of fashion photographers could be. The psychiatric dramas "David & Lisa" and "Lilith" showed the world of adolescent and adult psychology in a true-to-life fashion, and "Spy" showed how dreary, deadly, grey and angst-ridden espionage could be, going against the glamorous, over-the-top image the Bond and Flint films and all their imitators had projected.

In the film, Burton plays a character named Alec Leames, an upper-middle-aged agent working for British Intelligence in the midst of the Cold War. The film opens with him, in fact, overseeing the defection of an East German at Checkpoint Charlie, perhaps THE major symbol of the Cold War. From there, it follows him in further dealings with East Germany trying to track down a double agent. He falls into a relationship with a pert but naive little communist played by Claire Bloom, gets approached by smarmy types trying to get him to defect to the OTHER side, with him masquerading AS a possible defector for BI, under the auspices of Cyril Cusack, an actor who has played some of the most condescending elitist types in movies. His characters are almost always in powerful middle management positions and always, ALWAYS have pedantic attitudes. His character, though he actually ISN'T the legendary George Smiley, was nonetheless the obvious prototype for Sir Alec Guinness' portrayal of Smiley in the BBC/PBS series based on Le Carre's novels. The Smiley character is actually a minor entity in this film, played by a rather nerdy actor.

Oskar Werner, who, along with Cusack, was very hot in "important" movies at the time, plays an East German investigator, prosecutor and negotiator. Cusack, in fact, starred with him in the Truffaut sci-fi classic "Fahrenheit 451" as well. Burton, Bloom, Cusack, Werner and Michael Holdern (Lillian Helman's long-lost twin brother)....This cast couldn't have gotten any classier if it had tried! The B&W cinematography, the casting, Burton's performance, the relentlessly grey and doleful feel of the film, Martin Ritt's expert direction, (the man was a VERY reliable "good movie" director,) all add the dramatic touches that make this film the absolute BEST film about espionage in my experience! Claire Bloom's character, Nan, offsets and emphasizes the dreary feel of the movie with her own naiveté and altruism.

Why this film didn't sweep the '66 Academy Awards, I'll never know, but rest assured, it was the best dramatic offering in theaters that year. A complex, disturbing, important and incredible film that should, in retrospect, be honored for the work of art it was.

Highly recommended!

This film is perhaps the ONLY film to "document" what life was probably like for the vast majority of young people in working class America in the late seventies and early eighties, when a true sense of bizarreness reigned in big cities all across the country. This was the world that David Bowie, Kiss, disco and cocaine had made for everyone who had to "get out of the house at night". It was also a statement about how rough life was for anybody trying to make their way in the world during that period, where inflation was rampant and jobs were VERY difficult to come by.

This situation leads one of the characters, Koop, played by Keith Carradine, to join forces with a paranoid but educated and shady black guy by the name of Solo in a diner owned by Genevieve Bujold's character, Wanda. Also frequenting the diner, which he also lives over, is ex-cop Hawk, newly released from prison, played by Kris Kristofferson. The two clash, as Koop descends into a life of crime with Solo, trying to feed his wife and baby while Hawk develops an eye for his young wife, played by Lori Singer.

The mood of this movie has many parts: equal parts weird, compassionate, exposition, self-consciously fashionable, and stylish. It captures the zeitgeist of the period between 1975 and 1982 perfectly...the desperation of young people, especially POOR young people, to get a taste of the glitzy good life and to simply survive in a world that it is too easy to realize really IS cold and cruel!

Alan Rudolph's art director should have won an Oscar for his work on this film, as it captures the presumed time it was set in perfectly. Rudolph himself deserves kudos too, for giving the world a chronicle of the weird world of new wave-disco era, big city America. Bujold, Carradine, Morton, Singer and even Kristofferson are good in it as well.

This is the middle one of three great movies Rudolph produced in the mid-to-late eighties that he and his repertoire company, (usually just Bujold and Carradine,) can be justifiably proud. These are "Choose Me", "The Moderns" and this one. "The Moderns" must be seen to be believed. As good as the mood setting is in "TiM", "The Moderns" walks all over it.

Enjoy.