John Barry's soundtracks - atmosphere for outer space

 

My life in space with the music of John Barry

I've regularly listened to John Barry's soundtracks for many years, but when I'd heard he'd died, on January 30th, I stopped listening to his music. The news was a shock, out of the blue. I didn't want to be reminded that there'd be no more of the music I've grown up with. It's taken a few months for me to start again and I just wanted to talk a little about my very favourite of his tracks.

He scored outer space like no-one else. Previous sci-fi movies set in space famously used classical music (2001: A Space Odyssey) or electronic atmospherics (Forbidden Planet), but John Barry's take was more about awe, mystery and trepidation, retaining the danger of humanity living outside the atmosphere.

As long as I can remember going to the cinema, we're talking mid-1960s, I remembered his music. My Mum took me to see a re-release of You Only Live Twice (1967) in 1968. At the start of the story, a US space rocket is followed by another. The surprise of it opening up, then swallowing the other, never left me. The track 'Capsule In Space' describes danger approaching during a space walk. The score accompanies the action perfectly, but also works as a stand-alone piece. The experience in the cinema was enough to put me off space travel, the same way Jaws put me off swimming in the sea.

I was then old enough to see Bond films in the cinema during their first run. I especially loved the exciting music to the ski chases in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969). So much so that I'd concentrate on carrying the music away with me in my head. I did this for years until I could afford or find the soundtracks.

I was delighted there was another scene set in space in Diamonds Are Forever(1971), during the launch of a killer satellite. After several stage separations, the beautiful weapon deploys, then begins picking off targets around the world. The tempo of the space march '007 and Counting' matches its graceful motion, alternated with the horrendous power it unleashes.

The theme tune to Diamonds Are Forever really imprinted on me. The impact of Barry's James Bond theme songs were combined in the cinema with the most lavish, widescreen 'pop videos'. Tom Jones, Nancy Sinatra and Shirley Bassey singing top ten hits with huge, naked, pop art visuals by Maurice Binder. The music and the images were also associated with the anticipation of two hours of the most exciting films of the time. For many years after their release, Bond movies weren't seen outside of cinemas, being continually re-released until TV eventually paid huge sums to show them, Dr No (1962) wasn't shown on TV in the UK until 1975. I had the chance to see each one several times in the cinema - the music was part of the attraction of seeing them again.

The soundtracks never stayed in circulation on vinyl for very long. If you were lucky, they'd maybe appear when a new format, like music cassettes, were introduced. The search for the albums missing from my paltry collection kept me hunting through record shops looking for secondhand records or cassettes. For many years, this James Bond Collection double-album (above) was the only Bond music to be reissued. A life-saving compilation of cues from the original soundtracks, at a time when there were dozens of weedy soundalike albums. Geoff Love cover versions weren't a sufficient alternative to the real deal.

I'd even record my favourite sections off the TV, when no soundtrack was available. I waited decades for many missing cues to finally appear when the expanded James Bond soundtracks were released in 2003.

But meanwhile, John Barry made more space music. After Star Wars (1977)became a big box office hit, he composed for three more outer space movies, around 1979. But he remained true to his earlier approach of danger and mystery.

Moonraker put James Bond in his very own Space Shuttle. 'Flight Into Space' describes the tension of the launch in the familiar march motif. Again Barry describes the wonder of being in space and the surprises revealed out there.

Another track 'Space Lazer Battle' anticipated some of the aural effects he'd use in The Black Hole. The scene of astronauts fighting in zero gravity is far more convincingly done than the one in The Green Slime. While Moonraker is far from the best Bond movie, I've enjoyed the soundtrack literally hundred of times.

The main title to The Black Hole (1979) makes it sound almost like a sea-going adventure. Again there's a foreboding tone accenting the hazards, particularly from the black hole itself. This time, the whole album accompanies deep space. Barry's music has to carry the entire climax of the film with the track 'Into The Hole', using increasingly mysterioso effects.

Lastly, I'll even mention Starcrash (1978). John Barry sometimes scored movies he later regretted. It may be embarrassingly (though enjoyably) awful, but tracks like 'Launch Adrift' are particularly beautiful. While the album isn't as consistent as the other two, it's still John Barry in his prime.

Among his many soundtracks, I notice a few tracks that seem out of step with the rest of the score - otherworldly moments reminding me of his 'space music'. In Beat Girl (1960) the track '2000 AD', in Midnight Cowboy (1969) there's 'Science Fiction'. In the superb score to King Kong (1976), the haunting 'Full Moon Domain'. And in Dances With Wolves (1990), 'Stands With A Fist remembers'.

Barry's last non-soundtrack albums The Beyondness of Things (1999) and Eternal Echoes (2001) continued with echoes of the lost 'wild' west from Dances With Wolves. In both, there's a sense that he's summing up his life and saying farewell. But I had no idea that it was going to be so soon.

Of course there's much more to his music, and no matter what you think of the movies, here are my favourite John Barry soundtracks to recommend to you:

Some exceptional James Bond soundtracks I haven't mentioned, From Russia with Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965) and The Living Daylights (1987). They set high standards for how to make action even more exciting.

  

The Ipcress File (1965) accompanied the low-key flipside of spying in the Cold War. This soundtrack propelled Barry into the A-list of soundtrack composers.

Deadfall (1968) woke me up to his being superb music, not just a backing track. The fourteen minute 'Romance for Guitar and Orchestra' at the heart of Deadfall is one of Barry's greatest achievements. Working with director Bryan Forbes, the track had to be woven into the film, being performed in front of the camera, as well as scoring the action of the robbery scene that intercuts with the concert hall footage.

Alice's Adventures In Wonderland (1972) is a rare musical from Barry. With songs as beautiful as they are strange.

King Kong (1976) is one of his very best scores, again to be enjoyed many more times than the movie.

My playlists of his music are made up of my very favourite tracks, cherry-picked from his albums. In all, they're still over 14 hours long. Some of it represents forty years of listening... and counting.

THE IPCRESS FILE (1965) - stylish Michael Caine spy thriller

THE IPCRESS FILE

(1965, UK)

My name... is Harry Palmer

A taut thriller that's about stylish visuals as much as plot. This carefully paced Cold War spy story, based on Len Deighton's bestseller, is given an edge by pushing the camerawork into oblique compositions. These aren't the same techniques used by Hitchcock, who precisely placed his camera to optimise the storytelling, infer insight into the character or offer wry comment. Instead this is style over content... that works. The camera simply won't conform to the norm and constantly uses unusual angles, as if it's playing cat and mouse with the subject, peering over objects in deep focus, spying through phone boxes, carefully-composed dutch angles...

Camerawork is currently all about movement, twitchy and handheld, even when the subject is static. The camera in The Ipcress File is mainly static, but the compositions are dynamic. It's visually exciting and finally, finally, finally seeing this in 2.35 widescreen was really rewarding after decades of cramped TV screenings.

The Ipcress File was originally sold as a realistic alternative to the Playboy fantasy action/adventure espionage lifestyle that James Bond represented. It was released earlier in the year to the exceptionally lavish Sean Connery outing, Thunderball, the fourth in the series. In contrast to 007, author Len Deighton's realistic cold warrior, Harry Palmer, is a badly-paid civil servant. He may have a licence to kill and luck with the ladies, but he also has a tiny flat, cooks for himself, keeps a cat and, gulp, wears glasses. No glamorous international jetsetting, he's trapsing around London (all shot on location). His spy work includes days of listening to phone taps, boring stakeouts and scrabbling in filing cabinets for clues. When he finally gets a lead, is the danger worth the money?

Hedging their bets, this very un-Bond spy movie has many of the regular creative talents from the Bond franchise. Producer Harry Salzman, production designer Ken Adam (just as happy visualising shabby bedsits as he was designing gadget cars and villainous volcanoes), editor Peter Hunt (who pioneered the fast-cutting action for the franchise and soon started directing Bonds), and of course composer John Barry.

While he'd also scored From Russia With Love and Goldfinger, this doesn't sound like a Bond score at all. A slow, brittle theme that gets inside your brain with repetition, is similar to the simple theme from the The Third Man (that was played on an echoey zither). This dramatic low-key score established Barry as a movie composer with an impressive range, ensuring a ridiculously busy schedule for decades to come. The soundtrack is as famous as the film.

Sidney J. Furie directed this prestigious project after an eclectic mix of British films. Horrors Doctor Blood's Coffin (reviewed here) and The Snake Woman, and two successful Cliff Richard musicals wouldn't have made him an obvious choice. But courtroom drama The Boys and widescreen 'kitchen sink' biker tale The Leather Boys must have helped.

While I've enthused about the aesthetics, the script and the cast are just as impressive. This was Michael Caine first starring role and he concreted his star power with another success in Alfie the following year. He's passed from department to department by his superiors, playing a deadly game of chess with their staff. The twists and turns of a simple case explore the confusion and endless subterfuges of the many players in post World War 2 European espionage. The mystery is to find out what 'Ipcress' is all about. All I'll say is that it sounds like an evil Tardis...

Guy Doleman, who was about to play a minor Bond villain in Thunderball, is superb as Harry's long-suffering chief. Nigel Green is more terse - he often played steely authority figures and police inspectors, and is my favourite incarnation of Inspector Nayland Smith, in The Face of Fu Manchu. He also took on super-spy Dean Martin in The Wrecking Crew, embraced Countess Dracula, and brought the house down in The Ruling Class.

Sue Lloyd provides intelligent glamour - the actress usually got stuck in comedies and TV secret agent action. A memorable departure was the early slasher shocker Corruption in which she played Peter Cushing's disfigured wife. Here she looks like she could have beaten Jill St John to the role of Tiffany Case, though her accent is irresistibly British.

The success of The Ipcress File and its characters quickly lead to two more sequels, Funeral In Berlin (1966) and Billion Dollar Brain (1967), then two further tired ones in the 1990s produced by the late Harry Alan Towers, Bullet To Beijing and Midnight In St Petersburg.

I last tried to watch this on TV when it had been cropped to 16:9 and found it no more watchable than the 1.33 pan-and-scan cropping it used to have - the camera compositions are so carefully balanced you need to see the whole picture. The region 1 anamorphic DVD from Anchor Bay that I watched (above) was its 2.35 widescreen debut, and there's a director's commentary on there as well, but the release is marred by very busy video compression artifacts, especially in low-light scenes.

This problem is worsened by the original negative being grainy - it was shot 'two-perf' 35mm (Techniscope) effectively halving the quality of 35mm. So I'm now going to double-dip for the ITV blu-ray transfer in the UK, which also offers a 5.1 mix (and lousy cover art). A quick look confirmed that the compression artifacts are absent, though the grain is more noticeable. I'm happy that the grain hasn't been digitally lessened - if a negative is grainy, that's how it's always been seen in cinemas.

DVD Beaver compared the UK special edition (with a bonus disc of extras) to the UK blu-ray, with a generous selection of spoilery screengrabs.

My review of another Harry Palmer movie starring Michael Caine - Billion Dollar Brain, directed by Ken Russell.

OSS 117: LOST IN RIO (2009) - a very welcome sequel

OSS 117: LOST IN RIO
(2009, France, OSS 117: Rio Ne Repond Plus...)

France's most oblivious secret agent in the summer of love...

This is last year's sequel to the highly enjoyable OSS 117: Cairo - Nest of Spies (2006). OSS 117 was originally a serious character in books and films, a French secret agent who first appeared in 1949. These new films spoof the old OSS 117, James Bond films and, this time, even Hitchcock.


The year is 1968. Once again, France's best secret agent, (the best at vanity and pig-headedness) is on the case. Besides an important mission to Rio to deal with Nazi blackmailers, he's also being targeted by Chinese assassins. Going undercover to team up with the American and Israeli secret services, tracking the blackmailer leads him around some of Brazil's most spectacular tourist spots.


The fun begins from the very first second, with a spoof of the late 1960s use of complicated split screen images (think Grand Prix or The Thomas Crown Affair), filling the widescreen frame with a brilliantly co-ordinated overuse of parallel action. If you think you know split-screen from Brian De Palma films, when the image is neatly divided down the middle, prepare to be dazzled.

While I thought there wasn't quite enough action in the first film, there's no shortage of gun battles here. While the hail of bullets manage to miss our hero, he never, ever empties his clip.


OSS 117's ignorance of world politics and history missed the point of the entire Muslim nation while he was in Cairo. Now working with Israeli agents, it's similarly excruciating as he, gulp, only seems to remember the Nazis because of Hitler, rather than their treatment of Jewish people. Added to this are his complete insensitivity to the equality of women, the hippy revolution or innocent bystanders. There are very few back references to the first film and thankfully few repeated gags from the first film.

With advanced digital compositing, it's hard to say how much of Lost In Rio was actually shot there. But I recognised a few nods to the Bond film Moonraker (1979) which used some of the same Brazilian locations. Jean-Paul Belmondo's That Man From Rio (1964) may have been a reference too, which also visited Brasilia, while the city was still being built.

Thankfully OSS 117 gets to dance again. Once more, actor/comedian Jean DuJardin is effortlessly funny, and I'd like to see more of his films, comedy or otherwise, but none seem to be subtitled anywhere else in the world.

I also really liked the soundtrack, a very catchy mix of contemporary crooners and modern lounge pastiche, incorporating nods to John Barry, Henry Mancini and Bernard Herrmann. I can't find it on CD anywhere, but can be downloaded from iTunes and Amazon.

While a third film is supposed to be in production at the moment, OSS 117: Lost In Rio is out now on DVD in the UK from ICA Films, and coming soon to the US. The region 2 DVD only has English subtitles, with no dubbed audio track.


Here's the movie trailer on YouTube...

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (1971) - James Bond in Las Vegas

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER
(1971, UK)

Sean Connery bows out of the Bond series

In the first ten years, the James Bond film series was unlike any other - more action-packed, more stylish, more violent, more sexy. They set the trend in the 1960s - countless other movies and TV shows tried to copy the format and the style. (Conversely, in the 1970s, the Bonds seemed to follow trends - blaxploitation, kung-fu, Star Wars...).

When I started movie-going at the end of the 1960s, it was a confusing time to start following Bond. The first three movies that I saw on first release had three different actors playing 007: the only George Lazenby (On Her Majesty's Secret Service), the 'last' Sean Connery (Diamonds Are Forever), and then the first Roger Moore (Live and Let Die). At the same time, it took me years to catch all the previous Connery Bonds on re-release.

Years before TV could afford to show them, all the Bond films kept being re-released, sometimes in double-bills - one ticket for two two-hour movies! They commanded multiple viewings years before home video arrived. But like the Planet of the Apes films, I couldn't possibly see them in the correct order, only as and when they appeared in local cinemas. I saw Diamonds are Forever in early 1972, at the impressionable age of ten, when I still took the stories at face value. When 007 is being cremated alive, I could see no way out. I thought he'd die for sure. The horrifying scene was later echoed in Scrooged.

The series had just taken a knock. On Her Majesty's Secret Service had been an unusual Bond movie - it stuck to the novel, avoided using gadgets, and had a uniquely dramatic story of Bond falling in love! It had been perceived as a failure, mainly due to the lack of Sean Connery. Diamonds Are Forever marked Connery's triumphant return and threw gadgets back in to the mix. Playing it safe, the script threw away most of Ian Fleming's novel and resorted to a retread of Thunderball.


Bond is called in to follow a series of murders connected to an international 'pipeline' of diamond smuggling. The trail leads him to Tiffany Case (Jill St John) in Amsterdam and together they fly to Las Vegas where the crimes change from grand larceny into global blackmail.

Another angle to keep audiences extra-happy is to inject an unusual amount of humour, paving the way for Roger Moore's style of Bond. Besides most of the main characters playing for laughs, there's even a comedy sheriff - a dry run for the Sheriff Culpepper in Live and Let Die. The script is certainly witty, carefully ensuring that even the scene changes are ironic.


The highlights of the film include the most complex car chase in the series so far, as Bond steers a red Ford Mustang in rings around (and over) the police along the old Vegas strip (in Fremont Street). There's a sillier chase, that I loved as a kid, that was obviously designed to make me buy a diecast copy of the unwieldy Moon Buggy (a must-have boy-toy bestseller that year). Both chases show up American cars as being overly heavy and unable to take corners without skidding or crashing.


There are some punishing and realistic fight scenes for Connery. One is filmed entirely in a small elevator, echoing the inventiveness and brutality of his showdown in a cramped train carriage in From Russia With Love. A later scene, where he tackles two female gymnasts, is cited as a main influence on Ridley Scott's filming of Pris' attack on Deckard in Blade Runner.


But by the end, the faked exploding helicopters and useless machine-guns start to look lazy. The use of an actual oil rig as a location sounds like a good idea but turns out to be low on exciting possibilities. It felt like an anticlimax compared to Blofeld's hollow volcano in You Only Live Twice. An oil rig doesn't look like a Ken Adam design classic either. My instinct is that the second-unit action was below the usual standard.


The use of endless locations make the film. Las Vegas and the Nevada desert looked like another planet. Never ever thought I'd get to see it first hand. When I finally visited Vegas, I made a point of seeking out some 'Diamonds' locations. The casinos visible in the car chase scene. The alleyway off Fremont Street where Bond tips his car onto two wheels. Circus Circus casino where trapeze artists used to swing high above the slot machines and, happily, where a water balloon stall still stood, where Tiffany Case once squirted. We also visited the Hilton, used as Willard Whyte's 'home' (the extra tower was painted in on top, the glass exterior lifts were actually those outside the Landmark Hotel). Haven't yet found Whyte's spectacular country lodge, which looked like a Ken Adam set, but was in fact a real location nearby! Adam designed a most outrageous Vegas hotel suite, complete with a totally impractical glass bed, lined with a goldfish tank.


Starring opposite Connery is my favourite incarnation of his arch-enemy Blofeld. Played by Charles Gray, he's perfect as an evil supercriminal who actually could win. Gray and his superb voice gained another kind of immortality as the stony-faced Narrator in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and he'd previously personified satanic evil as Mocata in Hammer's superb The Devil Rides Out.


While Diana Rigg had been a formidable partner for Bond, the producers threw subtlety to the wind and shamelessly amped up the jiggle factor here. Jill St John is good at comedy, but gets to sport a parade of ultra-jiggly costumes. In a fight, she's one of the most useless Bond girls - I mean, who throws a trifle? Natalie's younger sister Lana Wood also seems to have been cast for her formidable assets.


Blofeld gets two killer sidekicks this time around, Mr Wynt and Mr Kidd, who are lovers like their characters in the novel. Crispin's dad, Bruce Glover, does well not to make his gay hitman too swishy, unlike much TV comedy of the time. It's not often you get to see gay men holding hands in a mainstream movie either.


Despite mostly being shot in the US, there's only one black actor who gets a speaking part - a fact not compensated for until the next film, Live and Let Die. Adding insult to injury, there's also a scene where a young black woman transforms into a gorilla. What were they thinking?

There's a belting theme tune from Shirley Bassey and the John Barry soundtrack confirms this an authentic Bond film from start to finish, helping soothe over the cracks in the story. A wonderful remastered and expanded CD soundtrack was recently released.


Diamonds Are Forever is available as a two-disc DVD special edition, with plenty o'extras, including some rare deleted scenes that explain some of the plot holes and continuity errors, and reveals Sammy Davis Jr's cameo. Presumably, once it's given the frame-by-frame restoration treatment, it will presumably get the Blu-Ray treatment too.


An original theatrical trailer is here on YouTube, with moderate spoilers...

A few of the movie locations for Diamonds Are Forever.

SATELLITE IN THE SKY (1956) - early British spaceshot sci-fi!

SATELLITE IN THE SKY
(1956, UK)

Miss Moneypenny beats Bond into space!

I recently assumed that The Day of the Triffids (1963) was Britain's first colour sci-fi film. A correction immediately came back - this widescreen spaceshot drama made in 1956! With a handsome budget, extensive FX work and some familiar faces, it proved to be both fascinating and enjoyable. I love fifties sci-fi and would have chased this up sooner if I'd known it existed.

In the fifties, I'd always thought that George Pal had cornered the market in realistic visions of space pioneering. He imagined America's first space voyages with Destination Moon (1950) and Conquest of Space (1955). Satellite in the Sky is similar in approach, but has with more engaging characters and a pacier, more controversial plot. The film was also made at a time when Britain was actually in the space race - when the method of propelling man into space was still 'out to tender' around the world...


It's the story of mankind's first trip into space, launched from England, of course, (note that even the first unmanned satellite didn't make it into space until 1957 - the Russian Sputnik). After the initial tests are successful, the mission gets a green light. But what the crew don't realise is that the government have plans for a secret payload to be installed in the huge rocket ship.

The early scenes of the homelives of the various astronauts have few payoffs in the story, but thankfully zip by and we're soon in space halfway into the story. But the mission doesn't run nearly as smoothly as the ship's artificial gravity...

Of course, many of the story's 'prophecies' haven't come true - it took decades to get a Brit into space, courtesy of the Space Shuttle. The long launch ramp is presumably based on the same rumoured Russian plans that were also depicted in When Worlds Collide. Gerry Anderson's Fireball XL5 used a similar launching method in 1962, probably because it looked more exciting than a vertical take-off. But the rocket of Satellite in the Sky uses less runway, and has a similar tilting launch platform and exhaust vents that Thunderbird 2 would later use.


The extensive modelwork and matte paintings, Cinemascope and colour make this a definite 'A' picture, unlike much of 1950's sci-fi. The visual effects are fairly obvious today, but I was impressed with their scale and design and how favourably they compared to George Pal's films. The viewing ports that emerge from the sides of the ship looked a little flimsy, but predate Dark Star's bubble and Ash's observation window in Alien.


It's marvellous to see Lois Maxwell in a leading role, playing a nosy reporter who's against the expensive project (a concern that hounds space exploration to this day) but is intrigued by the captain. Six years later she lucked into the bit part for which she's famous, Miss Moneypenny, flirting with James Bond in all the Sean Connery's and Roger Moore's. Few other members of the cast manage a mid-Atlantic accent as good as hers. Her Canadian accent also lead her into voicing Atlanta Shore for Gerry Anderson's Stingray (1964), a TV series also aimed at US sales.

Black Hole favourite, Kieron Moore (The Day of the Triffids, Dr Blood's Coffin) is the rocket captain, delivering a typically entertaining uncharismatic performance. He's very 'take charge' and pro-active in an emergency, but his characters are always so abrubt that he's not much of a prize for the love interest. (More about Moore at Brian's Drive-In Theater).

Lurking in the wings is grand thespian Donald Wolfit (Blood of the Vampire, Svengali) posing a threat by daring to scene-steal from Kieron Moore's screentime.

Another crewmen is a very young Bryan Forbes, cheeky stalwart of classic British war movies (The Wooden Horse, The Colditz Story), he was also in the movie of Quatermass II (Enemy from Space). You probably know him as a director - notably The Stepford Wives (1975), Deadfall (1968) and Whistle Down The Wind (1961).

Once again there's a chance to see Donald Gray (Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons) in action. I caught him in another movie last week, Timeslip (1955).


Satellite in the Sky should really have a far higher profile in British sci-fi history, or even as a classic British movie. Perhaps if it had a better title? As it stands, I've never seen this on TV, and the DVD release is of course from the US, in a double-bill with World Without End (also from 1956). Both films are presented in anamorphic 2.35 widescreen (from Warner Home Video).

OSS 117: CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES (2006) - uncanny recreation of sixties' spy movies

OSS 117: CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES
(2006, France)

A retro spy spoof with modern targets
At first glance this looked like a revival release of a lost French spy film that I'd never heard of. It turned out to be a recent spoof that looks back affectionately at the 1960's spy scene. Sort of like Austin Powers, but with some humour lost in translation, so don't expect the same amount of comedy, broad or otherwise. It's still laugh-out-loud funny in places, but I'd liked to have understood more of the verbal gags and the ironic jokes about France's history.
The character of OSS 117 is actually from a long series of spy novels that started before Ian Fleming typed the number 007. They've been adapted (seriously) as movies in the fifties and sixties, with actors like John Gavin (Psycho) and Kerwin Matthews (Seventh Voyage of Sinbad) in the title role.

What makes this new incarnation definitely worth seeing are the standout performance of Jean Dujardin, and the meticulous recreation of the look of 1960s celluloid. While Austin Powers gave lip service to sixties pop culture, it mostly joked about the fashions and the technology, but never looking at all authentic. OSS 117 at times made me think I was looking at a lost Sean Connery Bond film.
Though rubber-faced, Dujardin even resembles Connery at times, helped by wearing copies of many of his early Bond outfits. I was also reminded that James Bond's 'eyebrow acting' began long before Roger Moore took the role. Dujardin is astonishingly good at portraying the swaggering, self-centred bighead who thinks he's irresistible to women. Connery's clothes, hair, and also 'catlike' movement are meticulously copied and spoofed.

The spy's occasional detective work is offset by his obsession with his appearance and... his chickens. My favourite moment is when his glamorous accomplice has to drag him off the dancefloor to do some work because he's enjoying himself too much.

The story is crucially set in Cairo in 1955. Agent OSS 117 has been sent to solve the murder of his best friend (whose very name sends him into flashbacks to happier times), as well as sort out the problems of the Middle East (just as the 'Suez crisis' threatened to ignite another World War). He easily gets sidetracked by everything unimportant, even taking more time over his cover, the chicken-breeding business, than the job in hand. In the style of incompetent detectives, he still accidentally impresses his superiors.

His complete ignorance of life outside France makes him completely unsuitable as an international secret agent. His mission needs him to be knowledgeable about local customs and blend in with the mostly Muslim population. This of course highlights how little has changed with attitudes and indeed foreign policies.

The absolutely authentic look of course includes fashion and music, but with an obsessive amount of paddleball, depicted as a fad of the same popularity as skateboarding!

I'd liked to have seen more action, more fighting and maybe a car chase - all par for the genre. But the pleasant surprise that I didn't expect was a skeleton graveyard - a beautifully creepy scene that seemed to reference the 1968 Japanese horror The Living Skeleton! Am I reaching?

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, was popular enough to spawn a sequel, OSS 117: Lost In Rio (2009), with yet another in the works. The bare-bones UK DVD (from ICA) is nicely presented in 2.35 anamorphic widescreen but the English subtitles are rather large for the job. But they're the only translation - there's no dubbed Enlgish audio track.

English release trailer on YouTube...

This next trailer, for a 1964 OSS 117 movie (starring Kerwin Matthews), appears to be a direct influence on Jean-Paul Belmondo's superb spy spoof Le Magnifique (1973).

(Jean DuJardin returned in an OSS 177 sequel in 2009 - review here!)

GOLD (1974) - gritty action with Roger Moore

GOLD
(1974, UK)

Roger Moore's best non-Bond action movie

For some reason I missed this in the cinemas, and never ever fully caught it on TV. Maybe the publicity stills of Moore sitting in a bath with Susannah York put me off, making me think it was slushy. Anyhow, just seen Gold in 2.35 widescreen for the first time (on a recent region 2 UK DVD) and it's still very enjoyable, thrilling and surprising, with extensive location filming in Johannesburg, back when South Africa was split by apartheid. Watching it with a couple of friends who lived there recently helped add some additional insight.

While I've been looking through a few seventies thrillers, I bought Gold after remembering a scene with a killer Rolls Royce. Like many people, I'm wary of Roger Moore's James Bonds because of the lightweight family films they became, filled with far too much silliness. But his earlier Bonds, especially Live and Let Die are closer to Connery's toughness. Gold was filmed the same year as The Man With The Golden Gun but released slightly earlier.

It's based on 'Gold Mine' by Wilbur Smith, a very popular author at the time, who specialised in thrillers set in Africa. With the sort of detail used for the diamond trade in Ian Fleming's Diamonds Are Forever, Gold depicts the trade from start to finish, from the rockface through to the financiers in the stock market. The opening titles show the process of mining and refining the ore. The leftover rock being relegated to huge slag heaps on the surface. These level, man-made mountains later form a stage for the film's climax. I'm told that the refining process has now been modernised and the slag is being re-processed to extract even more minerals. There's gold in them there slags!

But to dig all the ore out, miners have to go deeper underground than ever, a risky business. A cave-in kicks off the story, with troubleshooter Rod Slater (Roger Moore) risking his life to get everyone out. The mystery is why the trapped miners were so far off course with their digging. If they'd gone any further, they might have ruptured a huge undersea lake that could have flooded the mine forever. While visiting Jo'burg, I went down the last remaining liftshaft into a gold mine. You haven't seen darkess till someone turns off the lights down there. The escape shaft was also particularly terrifying, a small slanted tunnel to the surface - not for the claustrophobic.

Like a true airport page-turner, the characters are closely linked by blood and bed. The daughter (Susannah York) of the owner of the mine (Ray Milland) is married to his deputy (Bradford Dillman), but she fancies playing the field. Meanwhile Bradford and his gay sidekick (Tony Beckley) are in league with the head (John Gielgud) of an international cartel. While Roger and Susannah hook up and go gallivanting, a murderous and explosive plot is being hatched...

Frankly, the sliminess of baddies doesn't get much better than Bradford Dillman and Tony Beckley. Gielgud isn't slimy, but is excellent at greedy ruthlessness, especially round a table with the big-hitters. It's not far removed from his aloof butler in Arthur, but without the humour, he's suitably dangerous. Dillman never fully escaped TV roles, but I've always liked his distinctive voice and sneaky eyes - he dabbled in horror films with Chosen Survivors, William Castle's Bug (1975) and of course Joe Dante's original Piranha (1978). Tony Beckley played several borderline gay roles, such as the disdainful Camp Freddy in The Italian Job (1969), but could also be a realistic serial killer, in the unconventional When A Stranger Calls (1980), his last film. Here he has a pad tastefully painted lilac and covered in pictures of male nudes, greek statues of course. Nothing to do with the story, just a little local colour, as subtle as a mallet.

Ray Milland is always a welcome face, here his career has somehow recovered from the truly awful The Thing With Two Heads (where the head of a white racist is grafted onto a black guy's body) and he's in his best shouty, confrontational form. I think his best horrors were The Man With X Ray Eyes (1963) and The Premature Burial (1962). His daughter is played by Susannah York, the only female character in the whole shebang. While she looks like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, the actress has appeared in many cult movies, including the gruelling They Shoot Horses Don't They? (1969), and getting the first lesbian screen kiss in The Killing of Sister George (1968). She's most famous as Superman's mother in the first two Christopher Reeve movies. Ms York is happily still working, mainly on British TV.

The interiors were filmed at London's Pinewood Studios, with some really convincing mining sets. But there's extensive location work shot in Johannesburg, in a country where apartheid was a political reality enforced by the white dictators of the time. While the story shows black and white miners working together in harmony, note that the mine bosses are all white and, even at social gatherings, the crowds are segregated into black and white. The miner's homes next to the mine look spotlessly clean and modern, but this wasn't the reality for the majority of black people in South Africa, and still isn't, years after the fall of the apartheid regime.

With larger-than-life characters and plenty of plot twists and surprises, one involving a six-year old Patsy Kensit (Lethal Weapon 2), this is still highly enjoyable and gritty action, particularly the climax.

The UK DVD is a pleasant surprise, accurately presenting this 2.35 widescreen anamorphically. Though the cover artwork is far from inspiring, especially compared to the Polish DVD or the original poster. The film is also available in Germany.

Here's the opening titles on YouTube...

PUPPET ON A CHAIN (1971) - rare Alistair Maclean action thrills

PUPPET ON A CHAIN
(1971, UK)

UPDATED March, 2012 - new US DVD release 

What if Daniel Craig was James Bond in the 1970s?

A brutal blond-haired tough guy using any means necessary to bring down heroin smugglers in Amsterdam. With a pistol, and brute force, he's actually an undercover agent working for the good guys, despite his destructive murderous methods. This is a personal favourite of mine for the spectacular, verging-on-reckless, speedboat chase through the canals of Amsterdam that pre-dates many of the stunts used as the centrepiece of James Bond classic Live And Let Die (1973). I was shocked to see how little attention this action thriller had on IMDB.

Movies based on Alistair Maclean novels were sure-fire hits back in the 1970s, fuelled by the popularity of his earlier schoolboy-pleasing WW2 adventures, The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare, he then spawned a string of modern-day tough-guy action thrillers, like this one.

After a triple-murder in Los Angeles, a heroin-smuggling pipeline is traced back to Amsterdam and the police's top unorthodox undercover operative is brought in to track down the murderers. Diving headfirst into the seedy world of prostitutes, junkies, pimps and pushers, he murders his way through the bad guys to get closer to the truth. OK, maybe it was self-defence. There's some creepy doll moments too, adding to the weird twilight portrayal of drug-addiction.

Besides the boat chase similarity with Live And Let Die, the hero's persona is much the same as Daniel Craig's present James Bond, but with less charisma. He's not totally heartless, falling for his fellow operative on the case, but he's practically a stone killer.

It's a good opportunity to enjoy a 70s Bond-type thriller without Roger Moore's increasing lightening of the role with awful jokes. A very similar Maclean character is the downright misogynistic anti-hero played by Anthony Hopkins in When Eight Bells Toll.

Puppet on a Chain was usually cut for TV, but in the early 1970s even family audiences could see a little bloody mayhem and even the occasional topless waitress in the cinema. Go-go boys, body stockings and psychedelic nightclubs were borderline classifications, but still allowed for all ages. (The nudity is missing from the 2012 Scorpion USA DVD, though the footage is included as a 4:3 DVD extra). 

The star is Sven-Bertil Taube, who I failed to remember from The Eagle Has Landed (1976). He's excellent, but maybe too humourless for a career in action movies. Barbara Parkins usually played a suburban good girl in Valley of the Dolls and Peyton Place and seems ill at ease here, but was also dipping into horror at the time, in The Mephisto Waltz and Asylum. Best of all is Vladek Sheybal whose Polish accent and cheeky acting enlivens every screen appearance (UFO, From Russia With Love, Deadfall, The Boyfriend). He and Sven also brave out much of the onscreen stunt driving.

The big chase scene makes the most of the location, with spectacular helicopter shots of the speedboats charging through the canals of Amsterdam city centre. The stuntwork, particularly the collisions, seems to exceed the bounds of safety of even Jackie Chan's Hong Kong films. The chase scene was shot, second-unit, by cult director Don Sharp (Psychomania, Curse of the Fly, Kiss of the Vampire, The Face of Fu Manchu).

The 2012 Puppet on a Chain DVD from Scorpion Releasing (pictured above) is 16:9 anamorphic, though reportedly offers less picture image than the older 4:3 releases. The film source used looks in slightly rougher shape as well, but it adds to the 'authentically seventies' look, and now neatly fits widescreen TVs. Here's another review - DVD Talk on the the new widescreen transfer...

The other best Alistair Maclean thrillers on DVD:

These include some of the most action-packed thrillers of the 1970s, paralleling the early Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood tough guy films where the hero is an anti-hero, prone to destructive, stunt-heavy action. More love wanted for the Maclean!

THE GUNS OF NAVARONE (1961) UK and US DVDs

THE SATAN BUG (1965) Available widescreen from Warner Archive

WHERE EAGLES DARE (1968) UK and US DVDs

WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL (1971) UK DVD - uncut

FEAR IS THE KEY (1972) UK widescreen

FORCE 10 FROM NAVARONE (1978) US and UK DVDs

Other films based on Maclean novels include Caravan To Vaccares, Breakheart Pass (Charles Bronson), Golden Rendezvous (Richard Harris) and Bear Island (Donald Sutherland) all of which I haven't seen recently enough to pass comment. But his body of thrillers obviously influenced action cinema for nearly two decades. Many of these rarer films are out in Scandinavia, but only as fuzzy-looking, non-digital, full-frame transfers.