Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

The Monty Python team have such iconic status nowadays that it's almost sacrilege to point out that some of their material fell flatter than a very flat thing. This one-off TV special features half the Pythons plus one-third of the Goodies (remember them?) performing sketches written by themselves, so what could go wrong?

Well, a couple of things. Firstly, since every single sketch is in some way about irritation, for over an hour we get a parade of characters who sometimes cross the line between being funny and genuinely irritating the viewer. Secondly, many of the sketches are embryonic versions of Monty Python routines - some of them are literally first drafts of sketches that became famous later on - written before the Pythons had realized that it was OK to go completely nuts, so they're watered-down attempts at Python humor without the trademark anything-goes irrationality.

Michael Palin's dodgy salesman who refuses to admit there's anything wrong with the clearly faulty product an irate customer is complaining about is a direct ancestor of a certain man in a certain pet shop, but Tim Brooke-Taylor trying unsuccessfully to get him to admit that a car with pieces falling off it is defective is no substitute for John Cleese banging a very dead parrot on the counter while the salesman insists that it's "pining for the fjords". And Palin in blackface as an overly obsequious Indian waiter is both embarrassing and nowhere near as funny as he would be later in a version of the same sketch turned up to 11 and retitled "The Dirty Fork".

Along with the TV series "Do Not Adjust Your Set" and "At Last The 1948 Show", this is a missing link between the traditional sketch-based comedy the Pythons started out doing, and the full-on lunacy they invented (with a little help from Spike Milligan) and became famous for. But it's very much Python Lite, and, like so many "lost classics", it got lost because it's not really all that good.

As with so much of the output of legendary producer Dino Di Laurentiis (whose movie industry nickname was "Dino Di Horrendous"), this is outrageous, overblown seventies tosh. Apparently it was supposed to be a Western version of "Jaws", and a rampaging buffalo was the largest and deadliest creature cowboys might plausibly encounter. And of course, it had to be not just any buffalo, but a great white one like the shark.

Naturally, the elephant in the room is the white buffalo, which had to be realized using whatever methods existed before CGI. Stephen Spielberg famously had no end of trouble getting his animatronic shark to look lifelike, and he had it easy. Sharks are fish, with no legs, no fur, and totally immobile faces, and they spend most of their time conveniently hidden underwater with just that distinctive dorsal fin showing. A buffalo is a much more complex beast to animate, and the example we repeatedly get a very good look at in this film is hilariously unconvincing, not least because when it charges, its lolloping gait suggests one of those mechanical animal rides shopping malls provide to amuse very young children. In fact, one surprisingly lengthy shot clearly shows that its hindquarters are a cart running on extremely visible rails.

Up against this ridiculous and seemingly supernatural beast, the nature and purpose of which are never explained, are Wild Bill Hickock and Crazy Horse, two real people in a completely unreal situation, which isn't helped by the incredibly strange dialogue. Everybody who isn't a Native American talks in what can only be described as "cowboy Shakespearean", meaning that they constantly come out with utterly weird lines that are sometimes downright incomprehensible. All this while hunting an absurdly fake robot buffalo which is apparently both a Native American evil spirit and a Christian demon, and amongst its superpowers, can cause avalanches by roaring, something it does frequently even though it never has the slightest bearing on the plot.

I've made this film sound a lot more fun than it is, but between the gunfights, of which there aren't that many, there are long dull stretches punctuated by the most stilted dialogue you've ever heard, and several subplots which promise more action than we actually get because they're left unresolved. And it doesn't help that, as with so many seventies films that nobody cares about any more, the surviving copies all seem to be horribly lo-res video to DVD transfers cropped to fit a TV screen. Possibly of interest to connoisseurs of special effects so bad they're kinda funny, or people who want to see Charles Bronson doing his best to look scared of something that wouldn't be out of place next to a bouncy castle. Otherwise, don't bother.

There have been quite a few movies, most of them very silly indeed, in which robots fell in love with humans for reasons that didn't really bear thinking about, especially if the robot looked like a pretty girl, and the handsome young man didn't know she was a robot - "Blade Runner" springs to mind, though that love story has the unusual twist that the girl initially doesn't know she's a robot either. Though sometimes it's the other way round - for example, "Demon Seed", in which Julie Christie is raped by a computer for reasons that would turn the film into an unintentional comedy if it wasn't about rape.

In this film, nobody is under any illusions about Ava's true nature, what with her spending much of the movie walking around minus not just her clothes but most of her skin. What's interesting is the way the film explores the circumstances under which a machine might have emotions which would seem to be not only useless but wildly inappropriate for an artificial intelligence with absolutely no biological imperative to reproduce, let alone any motive to pointlessly attempt to do so with an organic being. The reasons for this, when we finally discover the whole truth, are both more complex than we probably expected, and more logical than they've ever been before in a film of this kind. This is intelligent sci-fi that takes a genuinely thought-provoking look at what might happen if machines developed emotions.

My only real reservation is that at times it's a little too minimalist. Since there are for practical purposes only three characters, it's arguably a bad judgement call to make one of them so unlikeable that every second he's on screen, you wish he wasn't. It's not the actor's fault, since Oscar Isaac is clearly following the director's instructions by playing a person who's meant to be horrible extremely convincingly, but it probably wouldn't have hurt to have enlarged on the redeeming features it's occasionally hinted that he might possess, or to have implied more strongly that he's genuinely unaware that what he's doing is wrong.

I was also somewhat doubtful that any man could fall in love quite that quickly with what is literally a pretty face attached to something that obviously isn't human at all, or even alive in the conventional sense, but these are minor quibbles. This a movie which genuinely tries to get to grips with the idea of humans interacting with creatures at least as smart as they are, and just as emotional, but not necessarily in the same way. I hope the people responsible for the forthcoming "Blade Runner" sequel/reboot saw this film, and took plenty of notes.

Henry James' 1898 novella "The Turn Of The Screw" is regarded as a masterpiece of supernatural literature, and the 1961 movie based on it, "The Innocents", has gained equally high praise as an understated psychological chiller. The plot is that a governess is horrified to discover that the two young children in her care have not only been exposed to adult sexuality thanks to a scandalously uninhibited affair between two servants, both of whom are now dead, causing the youngsters to behave in ways which, in the late Victorian era, are almost unthinkable. Furthermore, she believes that the ghosts of the dead servants are gradually possessing the children in an attempt to continue their torrid liaison beyond the grave. However, this aspect of things is deliberately left ambiguous, and critics have been arguing for over a century whether the ghosts literally exist, or they're merely a symptom of the main character's own neurotic sexual repression.

So naturally, when a ham-fisted blunderer like Michael Winner decided to revisit the story in 1971, he reckoned the world needed a prequel in which we could see exactly what the two servants got up to that was so shocking it ended up with two children being possessed by sex-crazed spooks (or maybe not). The answer turns out to be that Marlon Brando, 10 years past his glory days, well on the way to becoming the bloated, mumbling self-parody of his final years, and sporting a ludicrous Irish accent, indulged in artfully-shot soft-core sex and some rather comical bondage with Stephanie Beacham, and along the way taught two of the oldest and most naïve young children in the world such sinful mysteries as kinky bedroom antics (accidentally), how to make frogs explode, and atheism, with ironically tragic consequences for himself (the atheism, not the frogs).

This is a jaw-droppingly daft and ill-advised film! The modern equivalent would be a remake of "Batman Begins" in which it turns out that Bruce Wayne's parents died as an indirect result of that time Bruce walked in on them having weird sex dressed as a bat and a playing-card, and they're played by Stephen Segal and Paris Hilton. Possibly worth viewing if you're a connoisseur of ridiculous cinema, but otherwise, give it a miss.

This (very) loose remake of "Brigadoon" is the second part of Herschell Gordon Lewis' legendary "Blood Trilogy", generally regarded as the first ever splatter movies. Unfortunately, the "legendary" aspect of these films is about 90% connected with the first one, "Blood Feast", which, with its ground-breaking copious, explicit, and of course hopelessly unconvincing gore, combined with woeful acting and non-existent production values, truly is a sight to behold!

"2000 Maniacs", which, by the way, never manages to give the impression that there are more than about 100 maniacs at the very most present in a few of the crowd scenes, features the same lead "actress" as "Blood Feast", Connie Mason, Playboy's June 1963 Playmate Of The Month, whose subsequent acting career peaked with uncredited walk-ons in "Diamonds Are Forever" and "The Godfather Part II", but is otherwise fairly competently made for most of its length (apart from the sound, which in some scenes is so bad it's hard to make out the dialogue), and thus not as funny, even though, unlike "Blood Feast", it's intentionally pitched as a black comedy. The problem is that the sole joke - an entire town full of yee-hah good ol' boys gleefully murder complete strangers in horrendous ways for an utterly bizarre reason - gets a bit tired long before the film has run its course.

The other problem is that, having gotten away with outrageous if unrealistic gore in "Blood Feast", HGL couldn't take the censors by surprise again, so the actual gore he's famous for is in extremely short supply, though there is at least somewhat more of it than in the tedious final third of the trilogy, "Color Me Blood Red". The basic idea is promising, but the comedy mostly doesn't work, there's zero suspense (no prizes for guessing almost immediately who will survive and who won't), and as horror films go, it hasn't really got very much horror. "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" has a surprisingly similar plot, the same number of on-screen murders, even less explicit gore, and, taking account of inflation, a lower budget, but it's a thousand times more effective. Still, it's hard not to sort of like a film as unabashedly cheesy as this, even if no-one in their right mind would claim it's actually any good.

Fun fact: the Florida location where it was shot ended up as part of Disney World.

It's sometimes said of the original Sherlock Holmes that, although he didn't die at the Reichenbach Falls, he wasn't quite the same man afterwards. Something similar appears to be going on here. Just as the new "Doctor Who", in a desperate attempt to appeal to absolutely everybody and therefore be universally marketable, is sometimes so busy being a slightly gay soap opera that it almost forgets to include any of those evil scary space monsters it was supposed to be all about in the first place, "Sherlock" (which, oddly enough, is written by some of the people responsible for the new "Doctor Who") has to be sort of like Bourne and Bond and Batman (though thankfully Series 3 has less of that last) because, as kids and kidults would say, that's awesome. But at the same time, it has to be all about love and heartbreak and difficult friendships so girls will watch it too. And plenty of comedy to stop the kiddies getting bored. Oh yeah, and PS, maybe Sherlock should solve a crime or two when he has a moment to spare from all that other stuff?

Series 3 opens with a straight lift from "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" because these days Sherlock doesn't get out of bed for anything less than a vast international conspiracy to nuke London, apart from those wacky cases involving sad, stupid people that seem to be comedy interludes until, by an amazing coincidence, they turn out to be somehow connected with whatever billion-buck mega-heist the Hooded Claw is planning this week. How did he survive his obviously unsurvivable death leap at the end of Series 2? There's no good answer to that, so we get a few deliberately bad ones, and the supposedly "real" explanation is lampshaded by the unimportant comedy character to whom it's given pointing out how absurdly overcomplicated it is, but his perfectly valid objections aren't answered, so that might have been a lie too.

And then we're off on some ridiculous romp involving nods to "V For Vendetta", and an international terrorist who appears to have no motive at all because blaming anybody the slightest bit plausible might affect sales in some territories. And we get lots and lots of annoyingly gimmicky camerawork to make it look like a generic modern action thriller, while hopefully disguising the fact that not a lot is actually happening. About two-thirds of this entire series is about Watson's wedding, and the ludicrously implausible complications that arise therefrom (promising that future series will be even more gimmicky and Bournesque). Only in the last episode do we get the expected amount of proper Sherlock Holmes action, and it's all muddled up with silly spy stuff heavily referencing yet another popular movie. Everybody else seems to love the rebooted Holmes 2.0, but I'm rapidly losing interest.

By the way, the fate of a certain supervillain who makes Jar Jar Binks almost seem bearable remains unclear, but even if he really is dead, it looks as though we won't ever be allowed to forget him...

It seems I didn't enjoy this film as much as most other people did. My main problem with it is that it was based on a short story, and boy, does it show! There simply isn't enough plot to sustain a 100-minute film. A 50-minute episode of that old TV show "Roald Dahl's Tales Of The Unexpected" maybe, but a movie twice that length? Events do not exactly move at breakneck speed, and we spend a great deal of time taking a long, leisurely look at the scenery. It's very nice scenery, and beautifully photographed, but it's still scenery, not action. Also, if you didn't see that ending coming almost from the beginning, all I can say is that you must have failed to notice the title of the film!

The other problem is that the logic behind the events is somewhere between muddled and non-existent. When a clear explanation is required for some plot twist, it's nearly always the simplest and most predictable explanation a lazy scriptwriter could rattle off on autopilot. If, on the other hand, it suddenly occurs to somebody that a particular visual effect would look nice, our hero apparently gains supernatural powers that enable him to do tricks which are flat out impossible, and for which no satisfactory explanation is ever given. Maybe this is meant to make him seem enigmatic, but coupled with Edward Norton's forgettable performance, it just seems as though the writers couldn't even be bothered to make up their minds whether it was meant to be a fantasy or not.

Talking of acting, Paul Giamatti is supposed to be second-billed, but he steals it hands down as a rather stupid policeman who could have been a nonentity, and bad guy Rufus Sewell, with all the character depth of Dick Dastardly and none of the redeeming features, gleefully chews the scenery, but I can see why this movie didn't result in Edward Norton landing the rôle of Doctor Strange. And Jessica Biel's in it too, mainly as decoration. So overall, beautiful photography, slow pacing, predictable plot, better acting from the supporting cast than the people we're supposed to care about, very lazy scriptwriting indeed, and peculiar confusion about which genre it's supposed to be in.

Catching up on this franchise all at once because I missed it first time round, I'm noticing a peculiar and unfortunate progression. The first series would have been five-star if its middle third hadn't been so silly. This time, I'm slightly reluctant to go as high as four stars. Benedict Cumberbatch is perfectly cast as a modern Holmes - in fact, he's so good that he almost redeems the growing number of flaws all by himself. And Martin Freeman does quite well as Watson, considering that his character is steadily turning into a put-upon schmuck who, in a relentlessly overdone running gag, constantly fails to persuade anybody that he and Holmes aren't a gay couple. But the whole thing seems to be drifting in the direction of self-parody. Instead of cleverly adapting the original stories with new twists, almost every reference to Conan Doyle's work takes the form of an excruciatingly bad pun.

And it appears that they must have asked one of those people who use the word "awesome" far too often what would make Sherlock Holmes awesome, because he's clearly trying to be more like Batman. Turning Moriarty into a gibbering loony with literally no purpose in life other than to annoy Holmes in needlessly complex ways was a hideous mistake, but understandable if the scriptwriters felt that Holmes had to be up against the Joker, or anyway, somebody as much like the Joker as possible - in this case, Graham Norton's Evil Twin. But that sort of thing doesn't really come off unless your hero lives in the kind of fantasy world where it's normal for good guys to dress as bats and fight baddies made up to resemble playing-cards.

So now we have Irene Adler as a lesbian dominatrix (Catwoman's background in the graphic novel "Batman: Year One"), the Joker - sorry, I mean Moriarty - trying to be the Riddler as well, and another villain who was clearly taking notes during "Batman Begins". As for the crimes our hero solves, the kind of cases he's traditionally good at - crimes the police are baffled by, or puzzles brought to him by members of the public that they couldn't take to the police because it isn't clear that a crime has been committed - are sidelined to such an extent that even Watson comments on it. Instead, we get vast international conspiracies in which the British government is up to all kinds of shady stuff, and the Americans are automatically downright evil. It's all very well for the writers to display their fashionably anti-establishment political views, but do they have to be shoehorned into a show like this where they positively get in the way? And was that the worst CG Hound Of The Baskervilles ever or what?

Ah well, at least Moriarty won't be back for the third series. Well, I hope not. But given the fact that Sherlock Holmes very definitely died at the end of Series 2, but nevertheless returned for Series 3, I wouldn't put it past The World's Worst Actor to escape from the morgue and torment us some more...

I really wanted to give this five stars, because the first episode is an absolute cracker! Benedict Cumberbatch is perfect as a modern Sherlock Holmes who embodies just about every character trait the original had, including the negative ones that tend to get left out of most adaptations, infinitely better than Robert Downey Jr. ever did in Guy Ritchie's ludicrous films. You really believe that this man is smarter than everybody else in the room, and possibly the world; but you also believe him without question when, in reply to an accusation that he's a psychopath, he points out that he's actually a high-functioning sociopath, which isn't the same thing at all. This is a brilliant, brittle, dangerous Holmes who genuinely needs somebody like Watson to stop him going so far that he destroys everyone around him, including himself.

And Martin Freeman, firmly established as the go-to actor if you want a thoroughly decent, brave everyman trying to pull his weight in extraordinary company, is just fine as a 21st. century update of Dr. John Watson, a character too often played as an idiot because he tends to look like one on account of constantly being in the company of the world's smartest man. Also, the story is excellent. The numerous references to Conan Doyle's source material keep the real fanboys happy, but don't play out in the same way at all, so knowing how the original story ended isn't a spoiler. Plus there's a truly chilling baddie, who almost deserves it when Holmes pulls a shockingly brutal move I last saw employed by Dirty Harry.

Unfortunately, the other two episodes can't keep up the standard. The middle one in particular has what Roger Ebert dubbed an "idiot plot" - almost everybody except Holmes has to behave like a complete moron in order to justify what happens, especially the ridiculous Oriental villains, who do everything in the most inefficient, convoluted, and self-defeating manner imaginable, and seem to have escaped from a Fu Manchu story set at least a century ago, or possibly a Roger Moore era Bond movie. Also, Holmes does surprisingly little brainwork, and far too much poorly-choreographed martial arts mayhem involving people of various ethnicities who all look as though they've strayed into the wrong TV series.

And alas, the final episode - since there are only three, you'd think they could have kept the tone consistent - only partially returns to the standard of the first. Holmes is at least thinking again rather than wrestling fancy dress ninjas (though a seven-foot-tall Batman villain does pop up for no discernible reason), but the plot bears a far too obvious resemblance to a certain Bruce Willis movie. And the climax, which introduces a tremendously important character whose arrival we've been looking forward to all along, is utterly ruined by possibly the very worst piece of horrendous overacting I've ever seen in my life! So overall, this would have been perfect if only it hadn't kept going off the rails. But even so, it's well worth watching for the bits where it really does work. Remember to pick your jaw up off the floor at the end of Part 3.

This is the extraordinary story of an extraordinary man who, depending on which historian you ask, prevented WWII from lasting until at least 1947 and possibly 1949, thus saving countless millions of lives, and may even have been personally responsible for the defeat of Hitler. Which he did by designing and building the very first electronic "universal machine", a gadget we nowadays call a "computer". And by the way, the software of the device you're reading this on uses algorithms created by Alan Turing, so it's still got some machine DNA from its first progenitor, the huge steampunk contraption shown in this movie. So, not too shabby for one lifetime!

On the downside, Alan Turing was a shy, awkward man who nowadays would be diagnosed with a disorder somewhere on the autistic spectrum. His wartime work was so secret that he was denied any kind of recognition during his lifetime. And that lifetime was tragically short. As a gay man in a country where being actively gay was legally termed "gross indecency" and punishable by drastic prison sentences, he ended up being punished so barbarically by the authorities that he took his own life at the age of 41. So a bit of long overdue appreciation for a genius who greatly changed the world for the better but was treated with abominable cruelty and almost written out of history is the least we can do.

On the plus side, not only is this true story both astonishing and tremendously important, but Benedict Cumberbatch is clearly very committed indeed to the role and gives it everything he's got.

On the downside, this movie oversimplifies certain aspects of the story a bit too much. Obviously they had to if they didn't want the movie to be 8 hours long. But they go a little too far. Obviously Alan Turing didn't build the first computer all by himself with minimal help from a handful of others, and the whole Bletchley Park operation didn't revolve entirely around six people, only one of whom truly mattered. There were a great many others involved at all levels, including my grandfather. But where it really goes off the rails is in trying to put absolutely everything on the shoulders of the hero. It's true that horribly difficult moral choices had to be made, but it's absurd to suggest that somebody with Alan Turing's job would somehow end up having to make all those command-level decisions himself. And the manner in which he makes a particularly difficult and tragic decision involves a coincidence so gigantic that what ought to be a pivotal scene becomes utterly unbelievable.

The other problem is that every emotional conflict is turned up to 11. A movie entirely about some people trying to make a clunky prototype computer work properly would be very dull indeed, but compensating for that by having everybody hate everybody else so much that they frequently yell at each other, have fist-fights, or even physically attack the computer which Turing has to desperately shield with his body, until they (mostly) end up as buddies after all, seems excessive.

So overall, a worthy but slightly dumbed-down and excessively melodramatic attempt to tell a story that genuinely needed to be told. It tries too hard, but its heart's in the right place. And it's a must for Benedict Cumberbatch fans who want him see pull all the stops out.

Like many classic noir films from this era, the best of which is probably "Rififi", this is the story of a robbery in three acts. One, the meticulous plan comes together. Two, it is carried out with machine-like precision. Three, it all falls apart because the robbers are not machines, but human beings who sometimes make mistakes. In this film, the "oops, bad move!" moment comes about five minutes in, so even as the robbery is planned and executed, you can see the robbers' downfall becoming more and more inevitable.

So it's not about whether they'll get away with it - in a movie made this long ago, there's exactly zero chance that they will. It's about who they are, why they do it, how they do it, and why it goes wrong. Although we get to know some of them far better than others because there are so many characters (perhaps a few too many), they're an interesting bunch. Their motives cover all shades of good, bad and indifferent, and none of the core members of the gang are truly evil. In fact, as in "Rififi", some of the supporting cast are much nastier than the actual criminals. And I particularly liked the little touch of making the hulking brute whose role is to provide a distraction with a bit of mindless violence by far the most intelligent character in the film.

It's not perfect. Kubrick is still learning his craft, and the robbery itself is a little confusing. There are also a few very clunky shots where the camera lingers for so long on something trivial or irrelevant that there might as well be a subtitle reading: "this will be important later". And the voiceover narration is actually worse than the one in "Blade Runner"! All the same, this is one of the very best of the numerous fifties noir crime thrillers.

When I saw the name "Michael Winner" I thought this might be bad, but it's got a pretty impressive cast, and plot sounded promising. Unfortunately it's downright dreary. Burt Lancaster, the titular lawman, is supposed to be Judge Dredd in a stetson, and a director like Sergio Corbucci (or absolutely any other Italian making westerns in 1971) could have turned this concept into a relentlessly gripping tale of excessive revenge, culminating in a spectacular gunfight between absolutely everybody who wasn't dead yet, probably involving dynamite, while managing to make precisely the same point - taking justice too far is sometimes worse than doing nothing at all, even if you're technically right. Michael Winner, not so much. If this is "action-packed" then so is "On Golden Pond"! "Angst-packed" more like. The very occasional gunplay is listless, the overall pace is leaden, and the inevitable final showdown is both nihilistic and dull.

Everybody looks miserable nearly all the time, except Robert Duvall, who looks roguishly cheerful because he usually does, unless told not to by a director who isn't asleep. Burt Lancaster, who always benefited from good direction, simply looks constipated. Character motivation is often opaque. The lawman seems to have no reason to mercilessly hunt down a group of men, all but one of whom are innocent, when everybody else is willing to compromise, beyond the fact that he's a stubborn badass. This is discussed endlessly by everybody, but all they succeed in doing is making each other even more angst-ridden. It's got a cast who pull it up to two stars, but some of them are wasted. Robert Ryan appears to have been told to play exactly the same character he did in "The Wild Bunch" in order to persuade the viewers they're watching something similar. Unsurprisingly, he does not succeed in doing this. Don't bother.

This is one of Peter Sellers' oddest films, and it's very patchy indeed. It's partly an Italian rip-off of "The Pink Panther" (complete with almost identical animated opening credits), only with Sellers as the wily master criminal instead of the cop. Though actually that's not quite true. The Fox appears to be a petty thief who repeatedly gets caught, and has absolutely no resources other than a gang consisting of three painfully untalented and desperately unfunny character actors who resemble the Three Stooges on elephant tranquilizers, so it's a bit puzzling why Interpol think he's the greatest criminal mastermind in Europe. And the theft of four tons of gold which occurs in the opening scenes and provides the basis of the entire plot is the work of some other guy we don't care about in the slightest, and everybody knows it. I suppose the ability to occasionally display flashes of semi-competence makes our hero a force to be reckoned with in a world where every cop has the IQ of mud.

The first half is simply a bog-standard farce in which everybody is exaggeratedly Italian, and the police can't catch a fugitive whose address they already know because they can't search a house properly or recognize him from more than three feet away if he's changed his clothes. Many jokes are prolonged well past their natural lifetime, and the prominence of those three guys who should never have made it onto celluloid as lobotomized foils for Sellers really, really doesn't help.

In the second half, it properly gets going. We meet the real star of this film, Victor Mature, parodying himself as a Hollywood beefcake legend desperately trying to act half the age he very obviously is. He's an absolute delight in every scene he's in, and this would have been a far better movie if we'd spent the first half seeing this insecure egomaniac's story unfold in parallel with that of the Fox, whose worthless trio of sub-moronic hangers-on who can't act mostly fade into the background once Sellers has Mature's character as a foil worthy of his talents. We also get a shift up in gear from Sellers, whose cunning plan to smuggle the gold into Italy is to pretend to be a director making a movie about that very thing. This is an excuse to mercilessly parody the pretentious excesses of certain Italian art-house film directors of the sixties, by implying very bluntly that a complete fake who had to desperately bluff his way through directing a movie would be indistinguishable from them. I suspect that making a movie with two target audiences, many members of both of which would have been bored and/or baffled by half of it, contributed to its commercial and critical failure.

Badly flawed - and there's something a bit odd about Britt Ekland being cast as Seller's sister who's supposed to be 16, seeing as she was his wife - though kind of interesting. And Victor Mature totally steals it. Incidentally, the director of the Old Testament epic we briefly glimpse is the actual director of this movie.

This was Python's final series, and it was less than half the length of the others because they were running out of ideas. John Cleese, frustrated by the staleness he felt to be creeping in even by Series 3, had already quit the team, leaving a tall, thin, cantankerous Cleese-shaped hole throughout Series 4. Still, it was one last chance to enjoy some classic Python.

Or was it? Although he wasn't physically involved, John Cleese contributed to the writing due to quite a lot of the material being recycled from early drafts of the script for "Monty Python And The Holy Grail", which was originally going to take place mostly in the present day. And there's even a little bit by Douglas Adams (watch out for his name in the closing credits of episode 6), who wrote the sketch about savage tribesmen playing cricket as a strange kind of warfare, a concept he liked so much he later recycled it twice. But despite some splendidly silly moments, there are too many patches where it all feels a bit tired.

You can sense the team already moving on to other things (except Eric Idle, who just wanted to keep on doing Monty Python until he and the jokes died of old age, and apparently still does). Most episodes partially drop the sketch format in favor of a proper 30-minute narrative, probably because Terry Jones and Michael Palin were drifting in the direction of "Ripping Yarns". This sometimes works, as in the story of Mr Neutron, the most dangerous man in the Universe, who of course consistently fails to be the slightest bit dangerous. But on the other hand, we get an entire episode without the usual theme-tune and almost devoid of Terry Gilliam animations devoted to the repetitive (and in places, by today's standards, extremely racist) adventures of an incredibly boring man on a bicycle called Mr Pither.

This was obviously the result of Jones & Palin trying out a narrative format they hadn't quite got the hang of yet - Mr Pither would later evolve into the "Ripping Yarns" character Eric Olthwaite, a man so dull that his own father pretends to be French in order to avoid talking to him, who stumbles into thrilling adventures and accidentally becomes tremendously interesting. But here it feels more like a second-rate attempt to be Pythonesque by less talented imitators. John Cleese quit after venting his feelings in a lengthy rant during which he went through every sketch in Series 3, pointing out which sketch in Series 1 or 2 had already been there and done that, until he was only left with sketches that were entirely new - a grand total of 3. Unfortunately he was right. This is Monty Python ripping itself off, and it was time to stop.

Nevertheless, there are flashes of the old brilliance that are up there with the best of Python, and if you liked the earlier series, you will laugh. Just not quite as often as before.

George Smiley, incomparably played by Alec Guinness, is temporarily called out of retirement more or less by accident, when another old cold warrior whose time everyone thinks has passed claims to have vital information, and won't pass it on to anyone but Smiley. Unfortunately before he can do so he is murdered in a particularly nasty way. Realizing that he has one last chance to cross swords with the mysterious Karla, the Russian spymaster responsible for the events of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", Smiley, assisted by loyal though mostly geriatric comrades from his glory days, conducts an unofficial and sometimes illegal personal investigation.

Unlike the ensemble acting we saw in "Tinker, Tailor", this is to a much greater extent a one-man show for Alec Guinness as Smiley, and he has to carry a great deal of the story, though the supporting cast are almost all excellent. In addition to displaying logical and observational skills worthy of Sherlock Holmes, Smiley is even more obviously than before a soft-spoken man with a core of solid granite, who begins by unflinchingly studying a crime-scene that makes one of the attending policemen throw up, and never wavers from his position of calm, polite, and absolute authority until, near the end, he has to make a choice that forces him to question everything he stands for.

Even more than "Tinker, Tailor", "Smiley's People" is all about moral compromise. George Smiley is a good man because he always tries to do the right thing, but sometimes he has to do it in extremely dubious ways that involve putting his innate decency temporarily on one side. His fanatical adversary Karla is so hard to defeat because he's almost literally inhuman. Smiley's terrible dilemma is that he knows he can only defeat him by using his own utterly ruthless and morally reprehensible tactics against him; but for that to happen, Smiley must, in a sense, become Karla. Can he do it, and is it worth the price?

Lacking the tight plotting and intense cameraderie of "Tinker, Tailor", this is a somewhat inferior story, partly because it relies to a much greater extent on Smiley sorting things out all by himself, and good though Alec Guinness is, he's better when he has somebody to interact with. Also, the central mystery is resolved quite early on, so the question driving the story isn't "who is the mole?" but "can George Smiley force himself to be cold-blooded enough to beat Karla at his own game?", which is nowhere near as much fun. And it has to be said that a few of the supporting cast cross the line into caricature.

However, as TV mini-series go, it's still far better than most, and crucially has sufficiently good writing and acting that, apart from the characters reprising their "Tinker, Tailor" rôles, we can't instantly decide who these people are and what motivates them; we have to get to know them, and maybe the "good" guy will reveal himself as a cynical hypocrite, or the lowlife scumbag will turn out to have a strange kind of nobility. And if you want to see a master-class in understated acting, the facial expressions of George Smiley in the strip-club are a wonder to behold! Highly recommended.