He produced some great movies---Bitter Rice, La Strada, Nights of Cabria---but it was always a little surprising to see his name on those films because he produced a lot of somewhat lower brow movies in the '70s. I'm looking at a list of what he produced then, and he still produced some pretty good movies. Serpico, Three Days of the Condor, Ingmar Bergman's The Serpent's Egg.
There was a spaghetti western Vic Morrow directed in the 1970s called A Man Called Sledge. De Laurentis was producer. Filmed in Spain. They brought in horses from Italy. When they were done filming, the guy from De Laurentis's production company told them to shoot the horses. It would be cheaper than shipping them back to Italy.
Vic Morrow and the Americans on the set were appalled. They shipped the horses back.
Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus
In the '80s, there was a grim shift in internationally produced exploitation films. The Israelis took over.
A lot of the Italian filmmakers were in the Italian Communist Party, directors like Sergio Leone. Spaghetti Westerns were full of Communist symbolism. I mentioned in another entry the end of For a Few Dollars More--bounty hunter Clint Eastwood counts the dead bodies in the back of a wagon by adding up their monetary value. There was the gold buried in the war cemetery in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. In another Spaghetti Western--was is Django?-- we see a rich American rancher murdering Mexican peasants and feeding their bodies to his pet eagle.
But that all vanished. Communist symbolism replaced with Zionist racism.
There was one Israeli Golan-Globus production, Lone Wolf McQuade starring Chuck Norris as a Texas Ranger. Mexicans stand in for Palestinians.
"A Texas Ranger kicked my father's teeth out! Are you going to kick my teeth out, Texas Ranger?"
Chuck Norris mows them down in the desert with an Israeli submachine gun. Then he kicks the man in the mouth.
People compared Lone Wolf McQuade to the spaghetti westerns. It had the same sort of look to it and it had loud music. But the plot revolved around Chuck Norris fighting Communists who were delivering aid to Nicaragua.
In one scene, Chuck Norris gets involved in a fight at a square dance.
"The boys are just having a little fun," says Communist David Carradine.
"Want to join the fun?" says Chuck Norris assuming a karate fighting stance.
"Stop! This is not my idea of fun!" says Barbara Carrera.
Walker, Texas Ranger
I never sat through an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger. According to The Daily Beast's list of the "Fifty Most Loathsome People" of 2007, "Walker, Texas Ranger once let a little girl battle armed gangsters, because she had the power of belief in God."
A guy who watches Walker, Texas Ranger told me that, toward the end, they resorted to a "ceramic leg". We would see elderly Chuck Norris raise his leg as if he was going to kick someone, then they would cut to a close-up of the person he was going to kick and they'd hit him with a fake leg.
It makes me wonder how one should properly use an elderly martial artist in a movie. Even if they could do a spectacular karate fight, is that what the audience wants to see? They should probably show a little dignity. Not kick as high.
Here's a karate fight with an older actor not generally associated with martial arts films:
No comments:
Post a Comment