The Duellists (1977)

Ridley Scott's first movie after a career directing TV commercials. Based on a story by Joseph Conrad which was based on real events. A deranged officer (Harvey Keitel) in Napoleonic France insists on fighting repeated duels with another French Army officer (Kieth Carradine).

Back then, if you were an army officer and you refused to fight a duel when challenged, you'd be forced to resign your commission. I don't know if they'd kick you out of the Army completely. If they did, it'd get you out of the Napoleonic Wars which would be a good thing obviously. At one point, the two guys are with the Army fleeing Russia as winter sets in.

The movie looked great. Filmed entirely in existing locations. 

This movie was playing at the university here when I was in high school. There was a line of people in front of the classroom where it was showing. I asked someone what was playing. He told me and said it was a great movie if you like fencing. I was into kung fu movies at the time and thought maybe this would be a new martial art I would enjoy watching people kill each other with, but I passed on it. I felt guilty for not sharing that poor guy's enthusiasm for fencing, but I don't think I would have liked it at that stage.

It was interesting. They used some of the same stupid-looking but apparently authentic techniques they did in Royal Flash.   

It also had a sword fight where the guys got really tired and were staggering around struggling to lift their swords.

Gore Vidal worked on the script to Ben Hur. In that story, a Roman gets into a thirty second argument with Ben Hur and spends the next twenty years persecuting him and his family. Vidal had to add a gay backstory for it to make any sense. But this movie made that sort of thing seem plausible. Harvey Keitel spends decades trying to kill Kieth Carradine.

They only fight six duels in the movie. In real life, the French guys fought thirty duels in twenty years.

Free on Pluto.

Baywatch

Pluto has a Baywatch channel now. I still haven't sat through a full episode. It wasn't very good.

Long ago, I saw an  episode of a show, maybe Entertainment Tonight, which had a story on one of the producers of Baywatch. The reporter was weirdly impressed that the guy had written the script to an episode. The producer was dismissive. A script is made up of three minute scenes, he said. "I can write a three minute scene."

Now that I've seen it, writing an episode doesn't seem impressive at all. If you can't think of what to do next, just cut to a montage or rescue a swimmer in distress.

It's an even bigger mystery to me why this thing was so popular in Europe.

Prom Night (Canada, 1980)

Slasher movie. Probably not a lot you can say about it. Violently bratty kids play a form of hide & seek in an abandoned school. They gang up on a girl who falls out a window to her death. 

Six years later, it's Prom Night! 

This had a couple of plot twists, I guess. A relatively innocent sex offender was wrongly accused of the crime and hospitalized, but now he's escaped. The former children receive threatening phone calls.

It goes for an hour before the slashing begins. The prom has a disco theme, so there are dance sequences that drag on. Jaimie Lee Curtis was a trained dancer so she's the John Travolta of her high school.

Something about a ruffian taking the prom king crown from the rightful winner. The masked slasher goes around doing what you expect him to do.

Eve Plumb, TV's Jan Brady, was reportedly set to star until Jaimie Lee Curtis cruelly stole the role from her. I would have loved seeing a slasher movie with Eve Plumb.

With Canadian star Leslie Nielson. Some sex. More smoking than you'd probably see now. They reportedly had to beef up the violence to avoid a PG rating. 

I didn't watch slasher movies in the '80's, but the few I've now seen weren't that bad. I'm sure I've said this before. There weren't that many people killed compared to some movies, and because they focused on random or somewhat or seemingly random murders, the non-murder scenes were relaxed laid back. They weren't straining to create an intricate, logical plot. 

Available on The Criterion Channel, but I don't imagine it'll be there very long.

Airport 1975 (1974)

Wasn't up to the standards of the first. There was hardly any adultery, just Charleton Heston and Karen Black. I assume their relationship was adulterous. I wasn't paying close attention. 

I wondered how Myrna Loy felt about Gloria Swanson playing herself with people gushing over how good she looked at 75. Swanson wrote her own lines. Myrna Loy was just five years younger and played an aging alcoholic, perhaps a callback to her role in The Thin Man films.

With Norman Fell, Jerry Stiller, Conrad Janis, Helen Reddy, Erik Estrada, Larry Storch and Sid Ceasar, Large Marge (Alice Nunn) from Peewee's Big Adventure, Sharon Gless from Cagney and Lacey. Linda Blair as a girl being rushed to get a kidney transplant; played much the same sickly sweet character she did in early scenes of The Exorcist. Former Roger Corman regular Beverly Garland just three years after her role as Fred MacMurray's second wife on My Three Sons.

Dana Andrews flying a small plane crashes into a 747. Everybody is sucked out of the cockpit except pilot Efrem Zimbalist, Jr, but he was hit in the face and is blinded so plucky stewardess Karen Black takes charge.

George Kennedy plays the same character he did in the original Airport although he's had a promotion. Susan Clark from Webster and Brain Morrison, the grandson from Maude, play his wife and son on the flight. 

Free on Tubi.

It was huge in its day. If you haven't seen it, it will explain some of the jokes in Airplane! 

I don't think I'm spoiling anything, but these movies have surprisingly low death tolls considering everything.

Airport (1970)

I watched this in a theater when I was seven or eight. The MPAA rating system was very different in those days. The movie was rated G in spite of Dean Martin talking with a stewardess about flying to Sweden for an abortion. And there was the bomb of course. The first in a wave of big disaster movies with all-star casts.

Jean Seberg looking very conservative as the airline's head customer relations agent who is sleeping with married airport manager Burt Lancaster.

The movie is surprisingly pro-divorce. Van Heflin plays a down-on-his-luck demolitions expert and psychiatric outpatient. He's going to kill himself and blow up a plane full of people so his absurdly devoted wife (Maureen Stapleton) can collect on his flight insurance. Before he leaves for the airport, she tells him that she married him for better or worse implying she would never leave him, thinking she was such a good wife when she was actually driving him to an early grave and endangering scores of airline passengers. More explicitly, Burt Lancaster and his wife (Dana Wynter) agree to end their marriage for the sake of the children. Dean Martin's wife (Barbara Hale) knows her husband is a swinger but thinks if she sweats it out long enough, he'll stop doing that and come back to her. She sees him walk right past her in the end heading for the hospital with his injured pregnant stewardess girlfriend. 

Helen Hayes as a cute old lady who sneaks onto planes without a ticket. I always took the old women Robert Hayes sits next to in Airplane! to be a reference to her.

It looked like a movie from 1970, everything nicely lit, realistic but not enough to fool anyone. Do they make big movie soap operas anymore?

Free on Tubi.

The Quick and the Dead (1995)

I've written about this before, but the most violent play I ever watched was one written and performed by the first and second grade classes at my school. A king wants to find a husband for his daughter, so he has all the potential suitors fight to the death. The last one left alive will marry her. Most of the kids played the men fighting to the death, others were given the task of dragging the corpses off stage. I was a little surprised that the kindly old teachers let them do it, but it's not that easy writing a play with roles for forty or fifty children.

It was like this movie. Gunslingers come to a town run by Gene Hackman for a big contest, murdering each other in the street. The winner is supposed to get a vast amount of money, and Hackman arranged the whole thing to kill off his enemies. 

I'd heard of the movie but knew nothing about it and never had any interest in it. It's on the Criterion Channel along with other westerns that focus on women characters. I was surprised it was directed by Sam Raimi. 

There were Samurai movies where Samurai would fight duels and kill each other for no reason, just to show that they could. I hated those.

And I don't like ubermenschen. I just want a movie about regular people with normal human abilities who murder each other for some logical reason. 

But it was better than I'm making it out to be. Stole the ending from Once Upon a Time in the West.

Starring Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Leonardo DiCaprio back when he was cute, Russell Crowe. With Pat Hingle and Woody Strode.

Bankman-Fried convicted

That was fast. The wretch was convicted of all seven charges. Jury deliberated for four and a half hours. There are more charges he'll be tried for in March, apparently. 

Well, good luck to him in prison. Maybe he can teach math. Poor devil.

From an article in The New Yorker from September. The reporter talked with Bankman-Fried's mother, Barbara Fried:

I asked whether she had ever felt compelled to ask her son if he’d done any of the things he’d been charged with. She replied no—she didn’t need to ask. Her son was incapable of dishonesty or stealing, she said. “Sam will never speak an untruth,” she went on. “It’s just not in him.”

I am reminded of the words of comedian Andy Kindler when he was the judge on Kids Court.

"Kids!" he said, "You've got to work on your lying!" 

Sam Bankman-Fried grew up without ever learning that people may not believe him whether he's lying or not. It may explain why he was blathering away in interviews long before the trial. He said in one that his lawyers were pleading with him to shut up.