Sunday, 23 January 2011

2002 Solace in Films after sporting disappointment

My intentions for Friday morning changed as soon as I remembered that it was the second one day cricket International between Australia and England at one of the most picturesque, if not the most picturesque grounds in the world at Hobart.

England won the toss and put Australia into bat , a decision which was quickly proven a great one as the home test were at risk of humiliation when the score became 33 for 4. Then Marsh and White put 100 runs and game appeared to change, but a flurry of wickets took the total only to 142 for 8 with 15 overs remaining. Bollinger stick with Marsh until he was out at 230 when the innings closed after Marsh was out last wicket for 110 priceless runs. England decided that playing the reserve wicket keeper opening batsman Davies was a mistake and gave the spot to Pryor who had such a good Ashes series. Strauss for 19 36 for 2 LBW and England were finding batting early on as great a struggle as the Auzzi’s My words rang true as Pieterson was out first ball 36 for 3. Further disaster followed and what should have been an easy win was lost by some 50 runs. I retreated to the cinema, a la TV.

I begin with the film of a book by Richard Crichton, I enjoyed reading as much as the theatrical experience, The Secret of Santa Vittoria. The story is a simple one. A small Italian hillside community with over 1000 souls makes it income from wine growing for the Cinzano company. Anthony Quinn plays an always drunk wine salesman Italo Bombolini who is estranged from his salt mouthed wife played by Anna Magnani. They have a teenage daughter who is enamoured with a local young man a couple of years older than she. He brings the news that Mussolini has surrendered and the Fascists are out of power. Bombolini is known to have supported Mussolini because of the reforms promised and climbs a water tower afraid of the reaction of the population who assembly below him. He is eventually brought down to great cheers for although a supporter oft he regime he was not an activist and regarded a harmless buffoon. The local Fascist community managers in fear of their lives decide that they will surrender to Bombolini as the new popular Mayor. His first act is to arrest and imprison them. Realising his lack of suitability Bombolini attempts to pass on the role but is advised to adopt the approach of Machiavelli and form fo civic administration combining local talent and respected figures. He sees this as the opportunity to prove to his wife that he is not the fool he normally appears to be.

The challenge comes when he is informed that later in the month the Germans are to come with the purpose of taking the store of wine which amounts to over 1 million bottles. He decides a plan to hide the majority of the wine in the tunnels adjacent to a Roman built cave. The first effort to get the wine form the hillside store down to the cave are disastrous as everyone gets in each other’s way, there are fights and broken bottle. The second plan is to create several human chains in which all the able bodied adults participate day and night. The former fascists are kept hidden so they do not know what is happening

A small contingent of German soldiers arrive led by Hardy Kruger. Bombolini plays the fool but successfully negotiates for the town to retain 25% of the wine that has been left in vaults although the suspicion of the officer and his second in command is aroused when the villagers cooperate in good humour with the task of bringing wine to the lorries for transporting. He is also attracted to a local woman of sophistication and education who returns to the family home after a loveless marriage which tool her to Rome and the International social circuit of Italian high society. Back home she has remet a former childhood “sweetheart” of a different social standing who has returned home injured and who looks after and they share a bed as a man and woman of maturity and experience but with no commitment.

Then the Gestapo arrive with officials who say that from the records the great quantity of the wine is missing and which to use torture to establish the truth having hit the Mayor hard as a preliminary. Kruger intervenes and is given less than two days to locate the wine but fails to do so. That he discovers is that the his love interest has a lover. The Gestapo and hostages and the Mayor suggests that they take the first men who enter the square. They persuade the fascist prisoners that they are to be released to the Germans, nominating the most senior two to leave at a short interval. Both men realise only too late that they have been set up and are taken away for torturing, with their screams heard all over the village. The Gestapo conclude that there is no wine and leaves, with shortly afterwards Kruger is given his orders to also depart.

He on the other hand is convinced that there is wine and that the whole community knows and is laughing at him. He takes the lover of the socialite prisoner and says that if he is not told where the wine is the man will be shot in the morning. The socialite sends the night with Kruger to save the life of the hostage. Kruger is still not satisfied and as the community assembles to watch them depart he threatens to shoot the Mayor unless someone tells him where the wine was hidden. Defeated he sets off but not before Bombolini presents him with the last of the hidden bottle which was tied with a ribbon and he tells the officer that they can afford to be generous as here is another million available. When the German unit leaves the town goes into fiesta.

Earlier in the film his daughters and the young man have got together and the wife demands her husband takes action. He says he will do something the young man will not forget. The couple are married. When the Italian soldier realises what the socialite has done for him he forces her to admit she loves him and that they are committed to each other. Bombolini’s wife has softened towards him when he is beaten in the face and now she joins her husband in the fiesta dancing signalling that their relationship will be better in the future. The tortured fascists re forgiven their sins. It is my understanding that the novel is based on an actual event although this may be a false memory

The second film, Taken, featured an orgy of violence. Liam Neeson plays an experienced and skilled but retired CIA James Bond whose private life joy is his 17 year old daughter who lives with his former wife and husband. She wants permissions to go Paris with a female friend to look at Art and Museums, although in truth it is to see a rock band live(U2), Neeson is apprehensive but yields to pressure from the daughter and her mother. However within a short time of both girls are kidnapped from their separate hotel rooms.

There is a ring of unreality almost from the onset of the film which begins with Neeson as the security officers for a rock singer who he saves from a knife attack and who in gratitude offer to help his daughter with her singing ambitions. Neeson has the most sophisticated of recording equipment on hand and records their contact until she and the phone is silence. Neeson warns the abductors that unless they immediately release his daughter he will find and kill them. Using former colleagues and friends he has the recording analysed especially the only comment from one of the gang in response his warning, “good luck”

From this it is deduced the girls have been deducted by an Albanian gang of white slavers. Neesom gains access to the hotel and the room of the girls and finds the photo card from a camera which reveals a reflection of the person taking a photograph of the two girls at the airport. From this he deduces the gang is using young men to pick up the girls at the airport/ rail station and find out where they are staying (the technique is to offer to share a taxi) and then the members of the gang take the girls. Unfortunately in the chase of the young man in the photo he jumps off a bridge onto a passing van to get away and is then killed by a vehicle as he drops of the van to the roadway.

Neeson then approach a former colleague from French intelligence who is now working behind a desk an is unenthusiastic about helping despite being given the information that unless the girl can be found within fours they are unlikely to rescue her.

Knowing the gang turn some of the girls into drug addicts and street prostitutes he pretends to take an interest in a girl in such a way that a gang member intervenes and Neeson plants a bug on him and having organised an interpreter, is able to work find out that the gang are also using a construction site using girls in a makeshift brothel, Neeson finds a drugged girl with his daughter’s jacket and in the effort to get her away there is a fierce gun fight in which he kills several men and here is also a vehicle chase where several others of gang are killed. From the girl, after he has got her out of the drug stupor, he is able to locate the house where she was held with the daughter. There is a further shooting in which at least a dozen of the gang are killed and the friend of his daughter dead from a drug overdose. He captures the man who had issued the challenge on the phone and tortures him until he reveals that because his daughter is a virgin she is treated as a top acquisition and has been sold to a trader.

Neeson leaves the man to a slow and painful death and then goes to the home of the . From his enquiries he has also learnt that there is a high place source in intelligence who is helping to enable the gang to operate and he visits the home of his French colleague where he has remet his wife and family and demands to know the location of the trader, correctly suspecting that his colleague has been accepting hush money part of a corrupt chain similar to that that existed within the Metropolitan Police in 1950’s and 60’s and other police forces throughout the world. He has to woundingly shoot the man’s wife to get the information. He is able to visit the trader as an auction is taking place with his daughter the last subjects because of her age, ability to speak languages, education and purity will command most money, hundreds of thousands of Euro’s. He ensures that a buyer he has kidnapped wins the auction but before he can claim his daughter he is found out, disabled and left by the Trader to be executed. He escapes, naturally killing the remaining members of the gang, locates the trader and extracts the whereabouts of his daughter before executing the man. I lost track of the body count long before this moment.

He finds the girl is being taken aboard the luxury yacht of an Arab Sheik where after killing the guard he has to shoot that Sheikh in the head as he threatens to cut the throat of his daughter with a knife. The daughter is reunited with her mother and step father and back in the United States Neeson arranges for the girl to have a meeting with the popstar he saved at the beginning of the film. The film is useful for warning young women and their parents of the dangers now that most European Cities are plagued by Russian and Mid European gangsters involved with drugs and sex. This is moral message of the entertainment.

The Americano is an 1955 Western style film set in cattle ranching Brazil with Glen Ford as the hero and Cesar Romero as a bandit who is really goodie. Ford takes 3 prime bulls on behalf of himself and his brother from Texas to Brazil where they have been bought by a larger rancher to improve his heard. Arriving at the nearest town with a station he finds that the purchaser has been murdered and befriended by the bandit who offers to take him to the ranch to meet the foreman. The bandit borrows a vehicle to transport the bulls part of the way and then as they take the animals into the ranch they cross the land of a neighbour who takes exception and turns out to be an attractive girl in ranch hand clothing. She is at odds with the former owner of the ranch where the bulls are due to be sold. On arrival instead on finding the foreman, Ford finds an apparent civilised man to claims to have been the partner and therefore full owner of the estate with a vision of controlling the whole valley which involves buying out or driving out the neighbour and new entrants to the open range who want to fence and farm. He offers a partnership to Ford who just wants to return home and start a small enterprise with his brother. On his way home he is mugged and the money stolen. There is then a series of twist and turns before the local law is convinced that the villain is the foreman who killed the owner and ordered his men to rob Ford in an effort to get him to stay and use his expertise, burns out the new comers and kills the foreman of the neighbouring property. Cesar Romero plays a key role helping Ford come good for the locals.

As previously mentioned I watched the French Connection 2 once more in two parts reminding of those days when cinemas played continuous performances and if you wished you could enter when the theatre opened and stay until God Save the Queen and lights out at night.

While the second film is free standing it is a good sequel which benefits from remembering if not experiencing the original. The movie won several Academy awards including best film and Best Actor for Gene Hackman who plays a real life detective. Two narcotics detectives commence with the arrest and rough treatment of a small time suspect which leads them to focus on a couple who appear to have connections with local gangsters involved with drug trafficking from Mexico bank rolled by a lawyer. The trail leads to Paul Charnier, played by Fernando Rey and he French port of Marseilles. A features of both films is the unconventional approach of Hackman and that he becomes at loggerheads with colleagues and superiors. In this instance having dedicated that the drugs are a car beings sent to New York by a film star, without knowledge of what is secreted in its body, it is allowed to make the journey with the intention of locating the connections in the USA. Charnier escapes, various people are killed, including police and of those arrested we learn that only one of the organisers gets away without serving prison time, another a reduced sentence and another four years. Hackman and the colleagues who works closely with him are transferred out of the narcotics division. The film brought to public attention the nature of international drug trafficking and its funding, the risks faced by the law enforcers and the difficulties they face while working within the system. The films marked the start of the prolonged car chase

French Connection 2 was distributed in 1975 four years after the original and sees Hackman sent to Marseilles unknowingly as bait to capture Charnier much against the instincts of the local police who provide him with a desk and one on a stairway outside the toilets. The rough and always ready for anything cop struggles with the language and culture and being under scrutiny of the local force and day. He gives his minders slip and seeing Charnier gets captured by his gang made into a drug addict before being dumped back in the police yard. Knowing that if he matter is reported it will lead to Charnier beings sent home and discharged the wreck he has become Charnier arranged for him to overcome the condition in secret. However no sooner does he recover than he goes off again and finding where he was held burns the bar/brothel down with a view to smoke out the residents until he finds someone to torture and lead him the boss.

On one hand officially he is then hep under tight supervision before being sent home the local Inspector teams up and their efforts leads to finding drugs being hidden in the lower part of a ship in dry dock. The dock is flooded by the gang in their successful effort to escape and Hackman saves the life of the Inspector who now owes him and agrees to a stake out on the ship as they believe the captain is yet to be paid and will break cover before the ship is due to sail. Their patience pays off and the Captain makes a call and then takes a tourist ferry from the port into the centre of town where before leaving he exchanges and shoulder bad with another passenger.

While the surveillance team keep contact with the man who delivered the money, it is assume the captain is arrested and his Dutch registered ship impounded. The man takes his time returning to the base where we have already seen the drugs being into can of the soup with a hidden compartment in a very professional way before being shipped to the USA. The team arrives before wok is complete and there is a great shoot out in which all the villains are captured with the exceptions of Charnier who evades Hackman in a long sequence involving street cars and then as Charnier takes to his yacht Hackman follows him exhausted and likely to have a heart attack as he climbs and clambers along the port back to get ahead of the vessel. Thinking that he has escape Charnier comes to the surface from he cabin where he has hidden only to be shot and killed as he passes Hackman. While there is an inevitability about the ending the film is effective in carrying forward the engaging intensity of the original.

No comments:

Post a Comment