There are two movies (three if you count a 1952 short) supposedly based on the Ernest Hemingway short story "The Killers." Neither the 1946 nor this one, the 1964 version with Angie Dickinson, Lee Marvin and Ronald Reagan, have much more in common with the story than the title. Don Siegel directed the three, along with John Cassavetes, in what would be Reagan's final acting role (although a lot of Democrats would say he only acted like he was President) in a version that was supposed to be a made-for-TV movie. Too violent for television in 1964, The Killers wound up being released in theaters but defnitely retains a kind of small-screen atmosphere.
Two hitmen, the experienced Charlie (Lee Marvin) and youngster Lee (Clu Gulager), find a target and dispatch him, but Charlie is curious as to why the man didn't run or fight back when he had the chance. They backtrack Johnny North (John Cassavetes) to see if they can understand his apathy towards his own death. Eventually they learn of his involvement in a large robbery, along with Sheila Farr (Dickenson) and a gangster named Browning (Reagan). Charlie wants to track down the money from the robbery and use it to finance his planned retirement.
The Killers probably would have worked a lot better in black and white than color; it has a noirish atmosphere that demands shadows instead of the bright colors of the early 1960s. It also would have worked better without the two long extended flashback sequences that help us see Johnny's story; they give the narrative a lurching quality that keeps it skidding for awhile until it can regain traction.
The cast acquits themselves more than adequately; Marvin and Gulager may be the protagonists but an early scene in which they bully a blind woman makes it clear they are anything but heroes. The movie was Reagan's only portrayal of a villain (Walter Mondale would probably disagree) and he does well, although his friend Kirk Douglas said in a book that some of the scenes that have him belittling, threatening or striking Dickinson made him wish he hadn't taken it.
Had Quentin Tarantino been directing in 1964, he probably would have paid for the chance to helm The Killers; its Ray-Ban-and-skinny-tie brutality shows up all over his Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. But if 1964 found the Don Siegel version too rough for TV, then I'm afraid QT wouldn't have had a chance of getting his version in front of a camera.
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Although Shaolin is set in the early 20th century, the presence of warlords and strongmen vying for power could have come from just about any period in China's history. Even when strong emperors held sway, they were overwhelmed by the nation's sheer size -- some parts of China are just too far away to be controlled if you don't have access to modern communications and transportation.The time is soon after the last emperor abdicates and a variety of strongmen rule China. Different lesser leaders, such as Hou Jie (Andy Lau) and Song Hu (She Xiaohong) compete to control cities and regions, now allied with one another and now working against former allies. Song proposes a marriage between his son and Hou's daughter to cement their alliance and control of a strategic region and its largest city. Convinced that Song seeks to betray him, Hou plots with his second in command, Cao Man (Nicholas Tse) to ambush the other warlord. But Cao has learned from his leader and turns on both men. Alone, isolated and having lost everything that matters to him, Hou seeks refuge at a Shaolin monastery whose peace and neutrality he himself earlier violated and insulted.
Slowly convinced by the monastery cook (Jackie Chan) that the Shaolin monks offer a better way of life, Hou begins meditating and training with them, gradually coming to see that his previous reliance on force and hatred was the cause of his misery and destruction. But will that be enough to confront Cao Man and protect the villagers and monks when the new warlord seeks the completion of his revenge?
Most of the cast does a fairly adequate job in their roles -- Xing Yu, Wu Jing and Yu Shaoqun offer some comedy and depth to their fairly standard parts as honorable holy men. Tse is mostly sullen and brooding as the traitorous Cao Man; it would have been nice to see some dimension given to the villain. As Hou's wife Yan Xi, Fan Bingbing punches above her weight in another underwritten role. Jackie Chan gets the chance to act as someone other than Jackie Chan, although he does have a goofy fight scene that should please Chaniacs.
Most of the movie rests on Lau, who must move from murderous warlord to a man who loses everything to one whose newfound serenity and harmony found in Shaolin will be tested to the utmost. He does a stellar job; the latter Hou Jie is almost unrecognizable compared to the earlier man. Lau's work is a top-level performance in a slightly above-average movie; his work and a rare mostly serious turn by Chan make the movie worth watching.
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Operation Crossbow apparently faltered at the box office in its initial 1965 release, and so it went back out later as The Great Spy Mission, studio execs thinking that people who saw the title expected a medieval adventure movie -- something that was not doing well at the time. They'd have been better off writing a story and using some of the top-level cast they assembled for the Carlo Ponti-produced, Michael Anderson-directed big-budget war movie. In Germany in 1944, rocketry research has given the Nazis the potential for causing significant damage at a long distance. Their explosive rockets are much faster than any propeller-driven aircraft, and London is under attack from several of the V-1 "buzz bomb" unmanned rocket-fired explosives.
The development of the V-2 is also suspected, and Winston Churchill directs his forces to find what they need in order to confirm German rocket development and possibly destroy or delay it. German-speaking soldiers with engineering backgrounds are recruited to infilstrate the base. Among them are the American John Curtis (George Peppard) and the English soldiers Phil Bradley (Jeremy Kemp) and Robert Henshaw (Tom Courtenay). Problems with their cover identities hamper their ability to get their mission going, meaning they may or may not be able to achieve their objectives.
You may have noticed that although Ponti's wife Sophia Loren has top billing in the movie, I haven't mentioned her character. That's because she has the next best thing to no screen time and is essentially wasted in what reviewers charitably called a cameo role. Trevor Howard has much the same fate, playing a cranky old professor who refuses to believe that the Germans developed real rockets or that the rockets are dangerous even if they do exist. Cast members with real screen time don't fare much better; director Anderson spends more time on shots of model V-1 rockets than he does developing the character or stories of any of his spies, and he wastes the first of his movie building up characters who never return and have little to do with the espionage action.
Operation Crossbow was a fictionalized version of the actual missions that destroyed and delayed the German rocket program, which means it had already strayed from history and probably could have done so a little more in order to strengthen its story. Rather than renaming the move, a rewrite -- one that put more emphasis on the operatives in the operation -- would have done a lot more to help it hit the target of audience satisfaction.
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