[profh0011]

THE ASSASSINATION BUREAU (1969)

Outragious comedy-adventure about an organization intended to commit murder-for-money, but only if there's a moral reason involved, which has gotten corrupted by the pursuit of PROFIT, and which one of its members wishes to steer in a more decidedly POLITICAL direction. 

Oliver Reed, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas & Curt Jurgens head one of the most astonishing "all star" casts of English actors I've ever laid eyes on in my life, most of whom only have tiny cameos (I'm reminded of YOU MUST BE JOKING).  One of the most charismatic actors in the whole film, Roger Delgado, only has ONE line of dialogue! Eugene Deckers (the 1954 SHERLOCK HOLMES tv series) has a much-bigger part early-on. 

I haven't seen this in at least 20 years (I've no idea where my tape of it vanished to), but imagine my delight when I found out a BRAND-NEW scan, restoration & Blu-Ray was put out by Arrow Films only this past MAY!!!  Surprisingly, it's a Region-A disc.  I wonder, did they also put out a Region-B? An Australian outfit, Imprint, has also put out a Region-Free disc.  Hmm. 

The story takes place around 1908, and is a highly-fictionalized account of events leading toward the first World War.

[The Australian Panther]

Two things about 'The Assassination Bureau'.
It was based on a book by Jack London. Which was not a comedy.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/156834.The_Assassination_Bureau_Ltd
Prof, you may know already, but didn't mention it, but Roger Delgado was the first [and best] actor to play the Doctor's villainous time-lord nemesis, the Master.

   

[profh0011]

All thru the film, I kept yelling at my TV when I'd recognize another actor I knew from TV or movies. And some, when I couldn't remember their names.

It annoyed me I couldn't remember Eugene Deckers' name. He's to the 1954 HOLMES what Monty Landis was to THE MONKEES-- he's in 7 different episodes, each time playing a different and always stand-out character. After I finished, I looked the film up at the IMDB, and there were quite a few actors listed I had not even seen in the film!

Roger Delgado's the one who gets me, as he's one of the board members, so he's in the film right from the beginning. But he never gets a single line until all the chaos erupts on the zepellin. It's like he was crowded out by so many other people. And usually, he steals anything he's in!

I haven't listened to the audio commentary yet, but I did watch the Matthew Sweet interview. He mentions the guy who played the gondolier as if he was someone famous... but I have NO IDEA who the hell the guy is. I could look him up, but...

Somehow, Wolf Mankiewicz (who he mentioned) does not appear to be listed at the IMDB page at all. Hmm. He apparently also worked on CASINO ROYALE, but where that is a chaotic, shambling atrocity on every possible level, this film's far more refined and controlled in its lunacy. It's like this is the kind of film CR wanted to be.

A film I've seen only recently that has a very similar vibe is THE BEST HOUSE IN LONDON. It has a few things in common: an outspoken lady suffragette, a high-class brothel, a zeppelin, and Warren Mitchell! You could easily watch them as a double-bill.

[profh0011]

Strangely enough, according to Matthew Sweet, the novel (which was unfinished for about 55 years) takes place entirely in the USA. The movie, however, takes place all over Europe.

Jack London seemed to sense Europe was STUPIDLY building up for war (which they were). But of course, the film looks back with hindsight.

I believe Sweet mentioned that the the evils pointed out in this film has STILL NOT YET been acknowledged by most of the world! Oliver Reed's character insists they never will be.

[The Australian Panther]

Jack London seemed to sense Europe was STUPIDLY building up for war (which they were). 

London went to London to report the coronation of King Edward VII from the perspective of the London poorest inhabitants. and never forgot what he saw.
Jack London’s Autobiographical Account of the East End Slums:The People of the Abyss
https://www.victorianweb.org/genre/slumfiction/jacklondon.html

A must-read book which should be much better known.   

[profh0011]

"Slum dwellers, who on average received low wages, had to pay disproportionately high rents to landlords."

This is going on ALL OVER America right now, and getting steadily worse.  A general strike and/or uprising of some sort is coming. I can't wait to see it.

[profh0011]

So tonight I'm watching MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949), Ray Harryhausen's 1st feature film, where he worked with Willis O'Brien. If GODZILLA owed its life to THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS, then MOTHRA was inspired by MJY.  Both stories involve cute girls and show business, and the monster is the hero of the picture.

Among the many actors who I recognized tonight (some for the first time as my knowledge of Hollywood keeps growing), Robert Armstrong as "Max O'Hara" really stands out.  WHY?  His OUT-OF-CONTROL ego-maniacal promoter character must have been a big favorite of either Steve Ditko, or S*** L**, or both.  Watching this just now, I had the strongest feeling that S*** L** based his ENTIRE fake personality on this lunatic!

Unlike Marvel's "editor", Max O'Hara turns out to not be such a bad guy by the last act of the film.  His antics FOILING the blood-thirsty COPS who've gotten a court order to shoot the "dangerous" gorilla add a lot of humor to an otherwise thrilling-as-hell climax.

[profh0011]

THE MYSTERIOUS CASTLE IN THE CARPATHIANS (1981)

Oldrich Lipsky's BAT-S*** crazy comedy based on Jules Verne's "The Carpathian Castle". I just found out they're doing a brand-new restoration of it, and issuing it on BLU-RAY!!  My comments posted at the Blu-Ray-com site:

"Wonderful, yet maddening.  Only last year, I got the 2016 Bohemia Motion  Pictures Region 2 PAL DVD from the Czech Republic.  LOVE the film...  but on my Region-Free DVD player, I had to have the TV set to "normal"  instead of "zoom" in order to avoid having the English subtitles at the  bottom CUT OFF, so there's black bars on all 4 sides.  Also, As it's  PAL, in America, it's running at the wrong speed.  I have since gotten  both "LEMONADE JOE" and "ADELE'S DINNER" on Region-Free Blu-Ray, and  began to wonder if this later film had ever been released on Blu-Ray as  well.  As I keep telling people, Blu-Rays are encoded by an  entirely-different system than either NTSC or PAL, and so, play at the  correct speed in EVERY country!  So despite my buying this thing quite  recently, I would love to get this kind of an upgrade.  Lipsky's films  are bat-s*** crazy fun!"

Here's the article they posted:
https://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=33489&page=

[profh0011]

ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL  (1979)

Currently my #1 favorite comedy film!

I think customer feedback is important, don't you?  JUST sent to Shout Factory:

Just got your 40th Anniversary ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL Blu-Ray.  FABULOUS job all-round!

A few comments:

The info sheet on the back, which is not printed on the back of the box, CANNOT fit into the slot inside the box.  HOW did you screw up something so common to so many similar packages?

The SPINDLE holding the disc is one of the WORST I've seen.  It was so difficult to get the disc loose without CRACKING it... once I got the disc out, I actually went in with a pair of pliers and TORE OUT one of the 6 pieces sticking up.  Whatta ya know?  The disc pops in AND OUT much easier now!  (I have NEVER felt compelled to do this before.)

Please look into this.  I've been buying a minimum of one DVD or Blu-Ray (or box set) every week for the last 5 years, I've seen a wide variety of spindle designs.  Trust me, there are WAY-better spindle designs than this.  Example: I have 2 discs from "CLASSIC FLIX".  Both of them, you push down on a central button, and the disc POPS out on its own!

Finally, this "disc authoring error" problem remains annoying.  That's when, if you hit "STOP", it instantly goes back before the menu and you have to start all over, preventing you from just shutting the film off in the middle to take a break, and pick up where you left off hours later.  Shout Factory, Universal, and Disney all have this, MOST companies don't, so it's clear it's just a matter of CUTTING COSTS instead of really caring about quality.

You do great products.  But you can still DO BETTER.  Take care!

[profh0011]

Today's movie may quality as the MOST "British" British comedy I've ever seen...

CARLTON-BROWNE OF THE F.O. (1959)

Terry-Thomas stars as a minor bureaucrat who's suddenly assigned to deal with a tiny island nation which has a treaty with England that everyone in England has forgotten, due to a pair of English geologists digging there for some unknown minerals.  This has stirred up interest from the US and USSR, and as the British Minister puts it, "If anything's there, WE'RE getting it!"

What they don't count on is not just how corrupt and incompetent the government there is (as well as their own representatives), but a new, YOUNG king who's smarter than any of them, and wants to figure out what's REALLY going on before he re-affirms his country's treaty with England.

Apart from Ian Bannen, Peter Sellers (who goes thru the whole movie looking and sounding like a Mexican bandit), Lucianna Paluzzi (who in my opinion NEVER looked as beautiful as she does in this film) and John Le Mesurier, it also features 2 actors who were in Hammer's DRACULA the year before:  Miles Malleson (the ambassador who hasn't heard from his home office in 59 years), and John Van Eyssen (who has a MUCH-bigger and better part in here than when he played "Jonathan Harker").

Other actors I recognize were Thorley Walters, Ronald Adam, Nicholas Parsons, Irene Handl, Basil Dignam, Sam Kydd, Margaret Lacey, Anthony Chinn, Kenneth Griffith, Marne Maitland, and Austin Trevor.

Absurdly released in the US under the STUPID title of "MAN IN A COCKED HAT", I can't imagine this made any money at all over here.

This trailer really doesn't begin to capture the thing...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n-O7HjCBLA

[profh0011]

THE LONG SWIFT SWORD OF SIEGFRIED  (1971)
ALL the girls love SIEGFRIED   (5 of 10)

The famous warrior (and lover) travels to the Rhineland in search of a wife. To win the hand of Kriemhild, he strikes a bargain to help her king brother Gunther win the hand of Brunhild, the man-hating queen of Iceland. And it turns out, the only way to do this is to impersonate the impotent wimp while INVISIBLE.  Later, when the truth comes out, the rightly-offended queen strikes a bargain with Hagen, the one-eyed henchman who's been wanting to kill Siegfried since the beginning of the picture.

From the above description, I think you can tell, this already has FAR more plot than your average PORNO flick. Filmed in Germany, dubbed into English, there are apparently several different cuts out there, some with more sex, some with less nudity. Thanks to a friend at work, I happen to have the 92-minute version run on Prism back in the 80s.  It's a fun and sometimes funny movie, all the women are gorgeous (though I must confess, Heidy Bohlen as "Queen Brunhild" was my LEAST-favorite among them-- probably due mostly to the character's nasty personality).

I suppose, as with many classic legends, there's so many wrong things going on here.  Siegfried aggressively beds every woman who crosses his path (about 20 minutes in, he does a foursome with three women at once). King Gunther is a spineless worm who can't get it up.  He wins and marries Queen Brunhild under FALSE pretenses (I daresay EVEN the Roman Catholic Church would almost certainly ANNUL that farce of a marriage).  On top of that, Katharina Herberg as Kriemhild’s Maid is in love with Kriemhild and left sadly aside when she marries Siegfried.  And, moreso, Céline Bernier  as Loreley / Pageboy, is even more saddened because from the first, she fell in love with Siegfried.  This one hurts, because SHE was my favorite woman in the film.

The structure is a bit odd, as the big wedding scene takes place at about the one hour mark, so there's another half-hour after that feels like added-on padding.  But I suppose many "classic legends" were like that.  According to Wikipedia, in the Siegfried legends, he met his death at the hands of the "Nibelung" family, who are represented in this film.  They balk at doing that, then have Loreley narrate an epilogue to the audience promising more adventures that never came.  Oh well!

For fans of SYBIL DANNING:  "NO MISS!"

[profh0011]

THE GANG THAT COULDN’T SHOOT STRAIGHT  (1971)
The Movie That Couldn’t Shoot Straight   (4 of 10)

In Brooklyn, an Mob underling is given "one more chance" to do right, by organizing an international bike race. He does so BADLY, his boss tells him from now on, he's going to become his chauffeur, if he wants to go on living! Instead, he decides to KILL his boss, so he can take over.  But like clockwork, everything he and his gang of idiots plan goes terribly, incompetently wrong.

Meanwhile, a hopeless schmuck who was invited over from Italy for the bike race (that wound up not happening) decides to stay, and becomes romantically involved with the sister of the guy who's trying to kill the boss.

In 1969, newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote a hilarious novel based on a real-life New York gangster.  2 years later, Robert Chartoff & Irwin Winkler (POINT BLANK, THE MECHANIC, ROCKY and all its sequels) produced a film version.  Waldo Salt (MIDNIGHT COWBOY, SERPICO, THE DAY OF THE LOCUST, COMING HOME) did the screenplay, and James Goldstone (a ton of TV shows, including 2 of the earliest episodes of STAR TREK) directed.

What the HELL went wrong?

This film has a pile of known, very-talented actors, yet the story-telling is almost incoherent, and for a comedy, a full 44 minutes went by before I laughed the first time.

In the late 70s, my best friend loaned me the book to read.  It was FUNNY!  But when I later taped the film off Cinemax, I remember having the impression I was seeing a bad "Reader's Digest" version of the book.  As other have said, the jokes fell flat, most of the plot details were missing, and re-watching it again more than 40 years later, it really seems to me, somebody decided to focus on the really lame love story between the biker and the gangster's sister to the almost-total exclusion of the rest of the book. It's almost like they made a 3-hour movie... and then CUT 90 minutes out in the editing room.  (Hey-- maybe they did!)

The BEST line in the novel, where the viscious "Mama" tells her boys, "NO MISS!" when they go to work each morning, is nowhere to be found.  And although it's been about 45 years since I read the book, I'm pretty sure they changed part of the key scene in the story where they try to bump off the boss in the Italian restaurant.  My memory may be playing tricks on me, but I don't think so.  I distinctly recall someone running from the restaurant after the hit goes wrong, only to be hit by a moving car by accident.  The fact that a similar hit also takes place in THE GODFATHER (also published in 1969, and turned into a movie in 1972), suggests either both novels took inspiration from the same real-life event, or one of the authors swiped from the other.  It was MUCH-funnier in the 1998 spoof MAFIA!, written and directed by Jim Abrahams (AIRPLANE!).

Among the cast are Jerry Orbach (20 years before LAW AND ORDER), Leigh Taylor-Young (I LOVE YOU, ALICE B. TOKLAS), Jo Van Fleet (GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL), Lionel Stander (1941), Robert De Niro (I must be the only movie-goer in the whole world who is SICK TO DEATH of this guy, so, of course, the bulk of the film focuses on HIS irritating, unfunny character), Herve Villechaize (THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN), dubbed by Paul Frees (THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD), Joe Stantos (THE ROCKFORD FILES), Frank Campanella (countless TV shows), Harry Basch (3 GET SMARTs and a STAR TREK), Burt Young (ROCKY), Jackie Vernon (most famous as a nightclub comic), and Philip Bruns (250 episodes of MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN and an Ellen Foley episode of NIGHT COURT).  With all this talent in front of the camera, you'd think a film that would be a HELL of a lot better, more cohesive, and a LOT FUNNIER, should have resulted.

Heck, even the so-memorable scene where they decide to drop a dead body off the center of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge barely registers when it happens. And I was describing that in detail over the phone to a close friend just before re-watching the film. I'm pretty sure my description of it was funnier than its actual depiction in the movie.

It's hard to connect that the guy who directed "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" on STAR TREK was involved in this thing. I think I'm gonna get myself a copy of MAFIA! sometime soon.  That one I remember being actually funny.

[SuperScrounge]

Robert De Niro (I must be the only movie-goer in the whole world who is SICK TO DEATH of this guy

I think Donald Trump also doesn't like the guy. 

[paw broon]

Never seen the film and thanks to prof I never will.   
I don't know a lot about many of those actors and I don't fancy most more modern films,preferring old b&w British comedies and thrillers. It's some classic American filme that do it for me. Bad Day at Black Rock,
The Big Sleep ( Bogart/Bacall), Lawman, High Noon as examples.