Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

One of several highly accomplished westerns directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott, this taut little B-movie uses its modest resources - most of the action involves five people, three of whom are constantly on the verge of killing the other two, uneasily occupying the same tiny shack and small patch of desert - and short running-time to maximum effect.

The plot is riddled with clichés you'll see in many other westerns from this era. The hero and a woman he doesn't know but soon gets to like a great deal, plus the spineless wretch she's initially hooked up with against her better judgement, are accidentally captured by outlaws who don't know what to do with them, but are just barely prevented from killing them out of hand because their leader takes a strange liking to our hero. Of course, nothing's going to save that poor bloke whose main narrative purpose is to die so we know the baddies mean business...

What sets it apart is the way these unoriginal elements are used. Maureen O'Sullivan, who a quarter of a century earlier created a bit of a scandal by playing Tarzan's significant other wearing as little as she could possibly get away with, makes absolutely no attempt to hide the fact that she's 46, and almost every character other than the gallant hero, who's no spring chicken himself, comments on her age and unattractiveness, though even with no make-up and bad hair, being Maureen O'Sullivan gives her an advantage over most middle-aged women. She's also a much better actress than most of the pretty starlets who normally play the love interest in these films, and gets a satisfying amount of character development.

Randolph Scott is his usual self, but he's very good at what he does, which, by the way, includes saying "there are some things a man can't ride around" without making it sound silly. And the opening section is very clever indeed. The jaunty music, the good-natured stupidity of the hero, and the lovably wacky characters he meets, including a truly abysmal child actor, make you fear the worst. But all this frivolity is just a set-up for the abrupt change of tone a quarter of the way through, which, given what we've seen so far, is even more shockingly dark than it would have been anyway. As for the villains, they're so vile, one of them in particular, that their leader's illogical decision to delay killing the hero simply because he wants someone to talk to who isn't subhuman actually makes sense.

It's not a major film and it never tries to be, but it's a very good minor film indeed. And there can't be many westerns that portray shooting people less glamorously than this one does. If you like westerns, don't miss it.

Anthony Mann was, along with Budd Boetticher, one of the grittiest and most interesting directors of westerns in the fifties. Unfortunately, despite having all the right ingredients in the pot, he comes a little unstuck here. The setup is extremely formulaic, and you'll see it in lots of westerns from this period. The hero, a woman he doesn't know who will become his love interest, and the cowardly, annoying man she's initially with (who might as well have "DOOMED" tattooed on his forehead) are captured by a gang of utter degenerates, the leader of which for some reason decides not to immediately kill the hero when he knows he ought to, and you can guess how it plays out from there. The trick on the director's part is to make a predictable situation tense and interesting.

The basic idea of Gary Cooper being a good man with a dark past which suddenly pops up again, although it's another genre cliché, isn't a bad one, and the wrinkle that the nastiest outlaw in the territory is his adoptive father, who therefore has a very strong motive not to kill him when he obviously should, ought to work just fine. The elephant in the room is Lee J. Cobb as the oddly-named Dock Tobin (they actually spell it out so we know he isn't called "Doc" - I haven't the faintest idea why). His performance brings to mind both Robert Newton's archetypal Long John Silver and Billy Bob Thornton's Bad Santa, neither of whom has any business being in a western. It's true that he's playing a psychopath in the early stages of Alzheimer's, but even so there are times you wish he'd tone it down a bit. And given that most of his gang would nowadays qualify for some kind of incapacity benefit and even he repeatedly admits they're useless (a fact they demonstrate very early on), it's hard to see why they haven't been rounded up and hanged yet.

The script reunites our hero with these worthless excuses for human beings in ways that rely on outrageous coincidence, and sometimes make no sense at all. The woman is there to be maltreated to a degree that becomes gratuitously nasty. The hero is there to do what a man's gotta do. And everybody else who isn't an extra is there to be shot. It has its moments, and Gary Cooper really is rather good, but I didn't believe in the characters or the the set-up, and there's something pointlessly nasty about it all. And Lee J. Cobb is definitely in the wrong movie.

This is one of the classics of silent cinema. It's enormously imaginative, it looks like nothing made before and very little made since, and its influence was incredibly long-lasting; "Eraserhead" in particular owes a huge debt to it. Nobody denies that it's a cinematic milestone. But is it a truly great movie?

The answer has to be "not quite". The scenery, along with many of the props and costumes, is outrageously weird throughout, and for once the ludicrous overacting doesn't matter because nothing is even halfway realistic to begin with. The trouble is, once you get over how Surreal the whole movie looks, there's hardly any plot. The obviously bonkers Dr. Caligari arrives in town to exhibit a catatonic mental patient as a fairground freak who can allegedly foresee the future. Murders immediately start happening, one of which is predicted hours in advance to a horrified crowd by Cesare the Somnambulist. Gee, I wonder if Caligari and his pet loony (who looks uncannily like Marc Almond from Soft Cell - remember him?) might possibly have something to do with the mysterious deaths...?

Fortunately the police are as thick as two very thick things nailed together, otherwise this film would be about a tenth as long as it is, so it's down to the hero to solve the mystery by running around overacting while stuff just sort of happens, and the villains give themselves away in even more absurdly obvious ways than they already have, or conveniently self-destruct without anyone having to do anything. And then, thanks to a framing story that wasn't in the shooting script but the production company insisted on adding it at the last minute because they thought the film was just too damn weird, it turns out that none of this bizarreness really happened after all.

It's impossible to dislike a movie in which everyone lives in houses obviously designed by architects who let small children draw the blueprints with crayons for a joke, but in the end it partly falls into the trap of being weird for the sake of being weird, and not quite enough actually happens. By the way, when renting movies this ancient, you may get a pristine digital restoration, or you may get something so cheap and shoddy it's unwatchable; it just depends which copy was on the shelf. The version of this movie I got was somewhere in the middle: allegedly "restored" in an unspecified way by a very obscure company, but judging by the number of serious and sometimes annoying flaws the "restoration" failed to fix, my guess is they just wiped it with a damp cloth. Maybe you'll be luckier.

From its very first seconds, as the opening bars of Frankie Laine's gloriously sincere but rather silly theme-song ring out over the title, this movie is trying to be the ultimate epic western. It comes fairly close to succeeding, but there are two massive obstacles in its way. The first is the problem of constructing a two-hour narrative leading up to a 30-second shootout between four lawmen and five baddies, two of whom ran away. As climaxes go, that one isn't very epic, so of course the famous gunfight has to be spun out, and the not exactly overwhelming odds against the heroes increased by including people who weren't really there, but it's still a bit anticlimactic.

Interestingly, not only did director John Sturges learn a lesson from this when he made "The Magnificent Seven" in 1960, in which the gunfight everything leads up to is absolutely massive, but when he revisited the legend of Wyatt Earp in 1967's underrated "Hour Of The Gun", he made precisely the opposite of this film, starting with a historically accurate and therefore not terribly impressive depiction of the famous gunfight, and spending the rest of the movie exploring the increasingly bloody long-term consequences, and the transformation of Wyatt Earp from righteous marshall into merciless vigilante.

Which leads us to the other problem with this film. Wyatt Earp is the hero, so of course he has to be so squeaky-clean that other characters repeatedly comment on it, and he only becomes ruthless enough to go head-to-head with his foes after the cowardly murder of his brother James (who in reality had nothing to do with the famous gunfight and died of natural causes 44 years later). Burt Lancaster was a fine actor, but his good looks and square jaw got him typecast as boringly perfect heroes when he was far better at playing people who were extremely flawed or downright horrible - see "The Sweet Smell Of Success" for the ultimate example! Therefore the hero of this movie is a cardboard stereotype so holier-than-thou it's impossible to care about him, let alone like him. Even worse, it means there are way too many slow bits before he finally does what a man's gotta do.

Fortunately Kirk Douglas is around to steal every scene he's in as Doc Holliday, which he does, to an extent that makes you wish the film had been almost entirely about him with Wyatt Earp as a supporting character. In the sixties, when Lee Van Cleef was finally a star instead of getting bit-parts as villainous cannon-fodder in westerns (including this one), Doc would have been the hero, and Wyatt's hopelessly naïve attempts to uphold the law without a gun would have gotten him killed inside ten minutes. And frankly it would have been a better movie. By the way, before he was a Starfleet medic, DeForest Kelley always played tough guys in westerns. One time he even got killed by John Wayne. Here he has the small rôle of Morgan Earp, making him the only actor to have fought on both sides of The Gunfight At The OK Corral. And, thanks to some kind of Trekkie miracle, he won both times.

As soon as I started watching this film, I felt I was seeing a masterpiece unfold. What kind of courage do you need to carry on fighting an utterly evil and merciless enemy who for all practical purposes has already won? If this movie is telling the truth, you have to become as ruthless as the people you're up against, yet without losing sight of what you're fighting for.

Melville portrays this dilemma expertly. The resistance fighters sometimes do things which under normal circumstances would be inexcusable, but they're always shown to be forcing themselves to act this way because it has to be done, and fully aware of the horror of what they're doing. The Nazis have no such scruples, at one point turning the routine execution of prisoners into a sadistic game for no discernible reason, presumably because simply shooting them got boring after a while.

And in a masterly sequence, the central character, during a visit to London, takes cover in the nearest house during an air-raid, and witnesses soldiers and military auxiliaries of both sexes young enough to be his children defiantly jitterbugging to the latest hot jazz sounds while bombs shake the building because when you're that age, death isn't invited to the party. Although he simply watches for a while before leaving without saying a word, we clearly understand that this joyous affirmation of life even at a time when death could come at any moment sums up everything he's fighting for, though he's seen and done far too much to ever personally know such innocent optimism again.

These are not Hollywood resistance fighters, and this isn't "The Heroes Of Telemark", in which a tiny band of hopelessly outgunned Norwegians take on a Nazi army and win the war by denying Hitler the A-bomb. These are very reluctant heroes indeed, many of them middle-aged and none of them glamorous, and what they do doesn't really achieve all that much, and sometimes fails disastrously. The point of this film isn't that people such as these can sometimes miraculously defeat impossible odds, because that simply isn't true unless you're a blatantly unrealistic fictional character who will automatically win because you're the good guy and Hitler isn't. The point is that even though they can't do much, they do it anyway, despite the fact that at best they'll probably die, and at worst they'll suffer a literal fate worse than death, eventually followed by death. And they do it because faced with absolute evil, they have to at least try to do something, and they couldn't live with themselves if they didn't. That's not Hollywood heroism. That's true heroism, and this is honest and unflinching a portrayal of it as you'll find anywhere.

The background to this semi-fictionalized but more or less historically accurate film is both fascinating and almost unbelievably bizarre. The House Unamerican Activities Committee's "witch-hunts" ruined thousands of lives and careers and drove some people to suicide, despite being not only a blatant mockery of America's proud tradition of free speech, but so paranoid that at one point the HUAC famously claimed the New York Times had more Commies on its staff than the total number of people it actually employed! All of which arose not only from America's reluctant pact with Stalin to defeat Hitler, but pre-war tensions arising from the terrible conditions the working classes endured during the Great Depression (see "The Grapes Of Wrath" starring Henry Fonda for further details), which caused many of them to become so left-wing that there were genuine fears of a Soviet-style revolution in the USA.

Unfortunately, this movie covers one of the least interesting aspects of the whole sorry mess, which has received more publicity than the rest of it because many of the people involved were extremely famous. A small group of Hollywood screenwriters with minimal connections to international Communism who were no threat to anyone were treated unfairly, some of them went to jail for not all that long, their lifestyles became middle-class instead of rich, and they had to write scripts under pseudonyms until it all blew over. Dalton Trumbo is, as heroes go, rather an unlikely one. His "heroism" seems to be at least partly the result of being unable to back down because of his massive ego, he goes to jail by mistake because his bluff fails through sheer bad luck, and churning out pseudonymous scripts for crappy B-movies (some of which - "Gun Crazy" for example - were actually very good) because his family has to eat is no more "heroic" than Bela Lugosi starring in Ed Wood films when no-one else would employ him.

As he's portrayed here, Trumbo is a difficult person to like, though some of that may be down to Bryan Cranston's odd performance. I assumed the over-the-top way he talked and acted must have been forced on him because that's how Trumbo really was, until an archive clip of the real Trumbo during the closing credits revealed that he sounded nothing like that. So why play him in such an artificial way? And John Goodman as a slightly grittier version of the character he played in "Matinee" is trying to provide comic relief in a totally inappropriate context.

It really tries to make an important point, and it's very good on all technical levels, but it feels like a TV movie that's trying too hard to please everybody, and is therefore scared to talk about politics in case some viewers are bored, so instead we see rather too much of Trumbo's clichéd and unrealistically easily fixed domestic troubles. By far the best treatment of McCarthyism is still Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible". It's ostensibly about hunting actual witches in 17th century Salem, but everybody knew what it was about really.

One of several surprisingly gritty fifties westerns from director Budd Boetticher, this is a fine example of the genre before the Italians turned it up to eleven a few years later. Randolph Scott is excellent as the ex-sheriff relentlessly tracking down the seven men responsible for the robbery in which a stray bullet killed his wife, something which motivates him so strongly that as far as he's concerned, the fact that they got away with a huge sum of money as well is just a footnote. But Lee Marvin is even better as the utterly amoral gunslinger on nobody's side but his own, to whom that box full of gold is all that matters.

Cleverly, the script makes Marvin's character somebody who wasn't involved in the robbery that killed Scott's wife, merely an opportunist hoping to grab the gold by being the last man standing, therefore Scott understands that, scoundrel though he may be, Marvin isn't going to shoot him in the back, and may even help him, so long as this will whittle down the number of people between him and the gold. But of course, when it gets down to just the two of them, as we know it must... Watching him here, you can see why Sergio Leone wanted Marvin to play Angel-Eyes in "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly" (Lee Van Cleef ended up in the rôle only because Marvin had already signed up for "The Dirty Dozen"). He's magnificently nasty, yet oddly insecure, constantly practicing gimmicky fast draws and rearranging his guns like a little boy playing at being a cowboy. Except that the guns are real, and the man holding them has no problem at all with using them.

The inevitable romantic subplot, and the equally inevitable man the girl is initially with who doesn't deserve her because he's a dishonest coward who might as well be wearing a Star Trek red shirt, get in the way of the action a bit too much as they so often did, but the character who threatens to become the dreaded sidekick we're meant to find funny appears in one scene and is never mentioned again, for which I'm sure everyone who has ever watched this movie is profoundly grateful. Overall it does its job very well, with two top-notch performances in the rôles that really matter. It's just a pity that it sags in the middle, when the men Scott's supposed to be hunting, most of whom are still alive, are almost forgotten about while he struggles with his attraction to a married woman. But characters complex enough to sometimes get sidetracked in ways that aren't as exciting as they might be are better than characters whose sole purpose is to live or die as dictated by the stereotype indicated by the color of their hat.

Well of course it's old-fashioned; it was made two-thirds of a century ago. Move back in time twice as far and you wouldn't need a movie because the actual Wild West was still happening. But as an example of a western from the pre-spaghetti era, before such films got both more realistic in terms of bloody violence and moral cynicism, and less realistic in every other way, it's just about perfect.

One crucial test of a good western is to ask the question about the hero that's traditionally asked about each new Bond: do you believe this man would kill you? For viewers more familiar with the overly sentimental Forrest Gump-ish rôles James Stewart played in Frank Capra movies, it may come as a surprise that the answer is "yes". Stewart plays it just right as a good and basically nice man who, if you genuinely deserve to die, won't hesitate for a second before blowing your head off. And the supporting cast includes some memorably nasty villains for him to unleash his dark side on. Stephen McNally as the primary antagonist is a generic and rather inept baddie, who never shaves properly and wears striped trousers, which in this type of film always, for some unexplained reason, proves you're no good. But Dan Duryea is superb as a slightly bonkers outlaw so slippery that if he was left alone for too long he'd probably shoot himself in the back from force of habit. John McIntire makes the most of a small part as the last guy in the world you'd want to play cards with. And you'd never have recognized a pre-fame Rock Hudson as Apache war-chief Young Bull if you hadn't been told.

Shelley Winters, still young enough to be the love-interest, is surprisingly hard-boiled for 1950, and stands up for herself very well when James Stewart isn't around to do it for her. That over-familiar cliché, the coward the hero's girl is initially hooked up with, gets far more character development than usual, and becomes a believable person instead of Expendable Doomed Guy. And best of all, apart from some very minor exceptions right at the beginning, absolutely nobody is meant to be funny. Also, the inclusion of a perfect "one in a thousand" gun as a McGuffin everybody wants, although it doesn't really have anything to do with anything, is a cunning way of compelling the supporting cast to get into arguments usually ending in death even if the hero is a hundred miles away, thus making sure there's plenty happening all the time. I'm not saying this is some kind of ultimate cinematic masterpiece with a profound message. But for what it is, it's about as good as it gets.

Not so long ago, I rented "Electric Boogaloo", a documentary about the almost unbelievably trashy Cannon Film Studio. I found it very useful, because it alerted me to the existence of many gleefully absurd B-movies I'd heard of vaguely or not at all, some of which turned out to be a lot of fun to watch all the way through. This documentary might serve a similar purpose if you're not terribly sure why Alfred Hitchcock is famous because you've never seen any of his films. Though if that's the case, you probably don't know who François Truffaut was either, so you won't rent a movie about the two of them talking to each other, will you?

Assuming you do know a bit about Hitchcock's work, I'm not sure you'll learn an awful lot more here. The problem is that it's a tribute rather than a critique, therefore Hitchcock can do no wrong. One especially absurd segment discusses the strange, dreamlike quality Hitchcock evokes by using back-projection that isn't perfectly realistic. If you're familiar with movies from that era, you'll know that back-projection never, ever looked totally convincing because technically it wasn't possible at the time. Hitch was simply doing the best he could with the available resources. This is particularly apparent with some of the over-ambitious blue-screen shots in "The Birds". Turning an unavoidable technical flaw into a signifier of genius because you're convinced Hitch could walk on water isn't a very helpful approach, to put it mildly! Then again, that DVD box cover up there plugs the film as "The Greatest Story Hitchcock Ever Told", which is the title of a biopic of Jesus Christ with the word "Hitchcock" added...

A great deal of the information we're given is pointless because it's self-evident from watching the films. "Vertigo" is mostly about a man obsessed with persuading a woman to pretend to be another woman who unfortunately happens to be dead - do we really need to have it spelled out to us that necrophilia is a major theme in this movie? On the other hand, anything which might reflect badly on Alfred The Great simply isn't mentioned. For example, his inferiority complex about being a fat ugly man, which caused him to treat beautiful women abominably. Once you know that, it helps you understand certain very peculiar scenes in his films ("Marnie" for example) a lot better than the statement that he had a thing about people falling from high places, accompanied by a montage of clips of people suffering or nearly suffering that fate, which is roughly as useful as pointing out that Zack Snyder likes it when men in tights punch robots. And do we really need to be told yet again why "Psycho" was a game-changer when it came out in 1960?

This documentary is like one of those articles, now thankfully extinct, in which somebody tries to explain why "Sergeant Pepper" is the greatest album ever made, and therefore flawless. If you already know Hitchcock's work, you don't need to watch this. If you don't, rent a few of his movies and judge for yourself whether they're any good. If you think not, 80 minutes of the man himself and some of his most famous fanboys explaining why you're wrong is unlikely to change your mind.

After the rave reviews it got elsewhere, I was expecting much more from this rather average movie. Maybe the fact that it was made in 1971 but has only just emerged from obscurity is no coincidence. It takes over two hours to answer a very simple question: if you are devoutly religious, and you are under such pressure to perform a simple act by which you will symbolically renounce your faith that not only will you be tortured and eventually killed if you don't, but others who have no choice in the matter will suffer the same fate, at what point does it become not only excusable to do this thing, but inexcusable not to?

This isn't even a particularly profound theological problem. A considerably larger one is the undeniably awkward fact that, no matter how much you pray, God never seems to intervene to save suffering innocents, but this is casually brought up as if it's something people who have spent their lives training to be Jesuit missionaries will never have thought about until they actually come face to face with it, not a problem theologians have been debating since the birth of Christianity (and most other religions too). "The Mission" deals with similar issues in a much more interesting and intelligent way, as well as the connection between European missionary activity and political and economic interests, something which this film mentions to explain why the Japanese government has banned Christianity, and then forgets about.

Visually, it's nowhere near as interesting as I've come to expect from Japanese cinema. The scenery is beautiful, but any fool can point a camera at pretty bits of Japan. Unfortunately, the sets and costumes are mostly so drab that when a scarlet-robed man in a gold mask popped up out of nowhere and performed a strange ritual dance for no apparent reason, it reminded me what the rest of the film lacked. The numerous scenes shot in terrible day-for-night the color of mud don't exactly help. It tries ever so hard to be profound, but I'm afraid this movie is nowhere near as deep as it thinks it is (the hero's trials and tribulations are blatantly meant to echo those of Christ - he even looks quite like him), and it only really comes to life when people are undergoing terrible hardship or torture, perhaps because that's something we can all understand without two blokes explaining it to us by means of a lengthy and rather stilted debate. In the end, this film is an interesting failure which raises many important points it does nothing with, because it's too tightly focused on boiling the whole thing down to whether or not a priest can be persuaded to tread on a picture of Jesus.

If it was fiction, this movie would be camp grotesquery along the lines of "Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?" or "Sunset Boulevard", and perhaps very good indeed. But since it's a documentary, it's a "cult classic", meaning that most viewers won't enjoy it much, unless they're the sort of kidult who deliberately watches bad films ironically.

This glimpse into the extremely limited lives of two half-mad recluses who happen to be the aunt and cousin of one of the richest and most famous women in the world, yet deliberately live in disgusting squalor in a fast-disintegrating 28-room beachfront mansion, exerts a kind of horrible fascination, and might be of great interest to psychiatrists, but in the end, what's the point? The most dramatic event in the story - the health department forcibly cleaning the ground floor with fire-hoses - happened a year before the camera crew arrived, and everything else of real interest occurred even longer ago, so what we get is two extremely self-centered poor little old rich girls locked into a very unhealthy relationship talking, shouting and singing at each other almost constantly, mostly at the same time.

By the way, the squalor really is disgusting. Their eight scrawny flea-ridden cats are neither allowed out of the house nor provided with litter trays, but that's OK because Edith Senior likes the smell. Little Edie doesn't, and repeatedly says she wants to get out of this place, where she's apparently been trapped for a decade. But come on lady, you were already middle-aged when you let your loopy miser of a mother persuade you to live with her as a social outcast in the world's biggest cat lavatory! How did these women who once partied with the world's élite, and have relatives who still do, get this way? And why have the rest of their mega-rich family given up on them so completely for so long? A story like this needs lots of background, but we get none at all except what the two women provide, and they almost always contradict each other, usually while the other is still talking.

I suppose you could view this as the bittersweet tale of a symbiotic relationship between an aging control-freak and the only person she can still control, her spoilt daughter who at the age of 56 behaves like an adolescent because she never learned how to take responsibility for anything including herself. But for that to really work, you'd need dialogue by somebody like Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter, instead of letting these not particularly bright and very loud crazy cat-ladies improvise for an hour and a half. Well before the end I felt they'd made their own bed and thoroughly deserved to lie in it, feline by-products and all.

This major landmark in cinematic realism asks what society should do with children who, through no fault of their own, are too disturbed to adapt to normal family life, and then answers the question realistically by not answering it at all, because this isn't the kind of film in which the initially misunderstood kid from the orphanage eventually becomes a hero and is adopted by a billionaire.

What makes it work is mainly the superb performance of Michel Terrazon as the problematic François. Casting child actors always requires a fair bit of luck, but they certainly got lucky with this boy, who plays François as if he's a semi-domesticated feral cat who has sort of come to trust the nice lady who feeds him, but will never be entirely happy around humans. Abandoned by a mother who, judging by what little we hear about her, couldn't even look after herself, and passed around by social workers from one temporary foster home to another, François desperately wants to belong somewhere, but past experience tells him to expect betrayal and rejection, which of course becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Terrazon manages to convey François' complex character perfectly, from the scenes with his new grandmother, the only person who accepts him unconditionally, around whom he's a charming little boy any couple would be delighted to adopt, to the way he acts when his need for acceptance throws him in with the wrong crowd. And since this movie pulls no punches at all when it comes to portraying the thoughtless amorality children are capable of, especially when they run in packs, some of the things he gets up to are genuinely disturbing and completely inexcusable. But they're as believable as his guilty attempts to make amends by doing too little, too late.

It's not a flawless film. Many of the cast aren't professional actors, and you can often see a distinct transition between them improvising as themselves, and then going a bit wooden when they have to do a scripted scene. And the slice-of-life format, with no real beginning or end, though plenty of middle, won't please everyone. But it's a very powerful and sincere piece of work with the courage to ask more questions than it answers. And it's utterly devoid of that sickening Hollywood cynicism which resolves every problem in some wildly improbably way so that the audience can go home feeling smug about the perfect society they live in.

If Jean-Paul Sartre had written hard-boiled pulp fiction, the result would probably have been very similar to this incredibly strange Gallic heist thriller. Taking both its title and the essence of its plot from a Buddhist parable quoted in the prologue, it follows the attempts of several factions to accomplish various things that all play out with the precision of a chess game, and which all intersect, sometimes for outrageously unlikely reasons. The sole wild card in this clockwork universe is Alain Delon's anti-hero, the only character who ever does something important for no reason except that he felt like it. Of course, his "freedom" is an illusion, and just binds him ever tighter in the web of fate that ruthlessly ensnares all the characters.

The weird blend of gritty film noir realism and downright Surrealism is strangely fascinating. The jewel heist at the heart of the story involves state-of-the-art (for 1970) security so impregnable it's almost parodic, yet has a mysteriously overlooked hole in it so huge they might as well have left the back door open. Delon's enemies are able to find him without explanation anywhere in France if the plot says they can. Almost everyone lives in slightly Surreal houses, especially Yves Montand's alcoholic sharpshooter, whose bedroom wallpaper alone is enough to drive anyone to drink! No wonder his closet's full of giant imaginary spiders. And pay close attention to the two scenes in which the detective returns home to feed his cats; they're different edits of the same piece of film.

On the face of it, the movie is about tough guys pulling off an ingenious robbery, the wily cop they're up against, and a few other typical hard-boiled complications. But really it's a symbolic drama about the futility of struggling for freedom when destiny always gets you in the end, and your attempts to avoid it are what makes it happen. This aspect of the movie is perhaps overdone. Everyone seems to have oddly limited lives and personalities, and their whole world is so intent on forcing them to get mixed up with each other that if virtual reality had been a thing in 1970, this film might have been set in it. But it's very well-made, not like anything else you've ever seen, and so downright peculiar that it holds your attention. Fans of spaghetti westerns may be interested to see what Gian Maria Volonté, the villain in the two Clint Eastwood "Dollars" movies, is like when for once he's not overacting. Actually he's rather good.

By far the best thing about this film is Mickey Rourke's truly magnificent performance, which as cinematic portrayals of washed-up pugilists go is up there with Robert DeNiro's in "Raging Bull". I'm not sure which is better, but it has to be said that Randy the Ram is a much nicer guy than Jake LaMotta, and if he's no better at relationships, it's for entirely different reasons. This battered old wreck who can't grow up and lives in a dismal caravan surrounded by tacky souvenirs of his long-past glory days may be irresponsible, not too bright, and still sporting terrible eighties hair in his fifties, but he's oddly lovable, and he deserves a break.

Of course, this being a Darren Aronofsky film, what are the chances he's going to get one? He's an obsolete poverty-stricken has-been, both the women in his life are even more emotionally damaged than he is (in the case of his daughter, it may be his fault, but we're given so little backstory that she comes across as a bit crazy), and on top of all that, he finds out early in the film that his heart's in such bad shape that to carry on wrestling would be literally suicidal. Is there any possibility whatsoever of a happy ending?

The script is rather lazy, with too many plot-points that are predictable clichés. Will our hero last long in a job which seems specifically designed to humiliate him beyond endurance? Go on, guess! The Ram's fellow wrestlers have tremendous camaraderie and warmth that almost amounts to love, even while they're beating each other up in ways that have to be seen to be believed - seriously, staple-guns?! - whereas the women he desperately tries to connect with are traumatized wrecks who seem barely able to relate to anyone. The 20th anniversary of the fight which marked the pinnacle of his career is approaching, and he has to decide whether or not to relive that triumph one more time. Will he listen to the advice of his doctor?

This is one of those movies where the ending is so inevitable it might as well have been the beginning, with the rest of the film showing us how the hero ended up there, and I was coldly impressed without actually enjoying it. It's just as well Aronofsky wasn't allowed to make that Batman movie he nearly directed. It would have made "Dawn Of Justice" look like "Lego Batman".

Believe it or not, before this film was made, even the geekiest kidult didn't know what a ninja was unless he lived in Japan. Of course, like virtually all Cannon movies, it's both terrible and weirdly flawed at the most basic level, but it would be downright mean not to like it. Although it's 18-certificate ultra-violent, it's so goofy that none of the bloody mayhem is the least bit disturbing, since it obviously has no connection whatsoever with reality, and most of the acting is so dreadful that you don't for an instant consider these characters real enough to feel sympathy for them when they suffer and die.

Franco Nero, the original Django, is ludicrously miscast as the white man who is of course far better at ninjutsu than the Japanese people who invented it, and even when he isn't dressed in his ninja suit, he often wears a hat in an unsuccessful attempt to make it less obvious that all his really athletic moves are being done by a stunt double. And the scenes in which he removes his shirt make it very obvious indeed that his 40-year-old body may not exactly be flabby, but it's in no condition to perform the athletic feats he's supposed to be capable of. Shô Kosugi is rather more convincing as the bad guy, since he really can do his stuff while looking straight into the camera without a mask. I imagine that's why he had a much more prominent rôle in the sequels. And Susan George, a limited actress who took off most of her clothes and usually died horribly in numerous trashy movies from a slightly earlier era, is starting to develop a double chin, and conspicuously fails to strip off like she did in just about every previous movie she was in, so that we can't see how middle age is starting to creep up on her.

This is also the film which started the short-lived trend for good-guy ninjas to dress in white, even though that's clearly an incredibly stupid idea unless you're trying to be inconspicuous in a place like Antarctica (this movie is set almost entirely in the Philippines). But it's these absurdities that make it fun. "So bad it's good" is a much-abused concept, but it certainly applies here. Our hero, in a scene which "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" clearly took note of, pointlessly twirls bladed weapons just because he can, while two men with guns aimed straight at him simply stand and watch until he kills them. And that's not the silliest thing in the film. I'm not suggesting that this is high art, but hey, it's crazy, stupid fun! And sometimes that's all you want from a movie.