From the Rental Vault: Movie, Movie

Moviemakers who want to adapt H. Rider Haggard's classic King Solomon's Mines face a problem: There are no ladies present, and most of your dashing adventurous leading men types aren't nearly so dashing when they don't have a female person to admire them for their manly adventurous ways and occasionally to rescue. Producers have usually gone for the easiest solution, which is to rewrite the story so that it in fact has a leading lady. Thus, Deborah Kerr has a role in the 1950 version of King Solomon's Mines, playing Elizabeth Curtis. She wants to hire Stewart Granger's Allan Quatermain to find her long-lost husband, deep in the interior of the Africa continent.

Quatermain is at first reluctant -- he doesn't have a high view of women to start with, and women on safari impress him even less. Elizabeth and her brother John Goode (Richard Carlson) have a sketchy map supposedly showing them the way to  mines from which King Solomon was supposed to have obtained his gold, but Quatermain knows it better as a route to probably disaster and possible death. The money convinces him, though, and he agrees to guide the group -- and (gasp!) finds himself lookng much more favorably upon Elizabeth Curtis. The three find themselves in the midst of a power struggle between two factions of a native tribe and have to hope that the side which favors them comes out on top.

Granger landed the role when Errol Flynn turned it down and it made him an international star. He expresses Quatermain's cynicism and distaste for the whole venture quite well, but falters a little when the script really doesn't give him a lot to work with on why he warms to Elizabeth later. He and Kerr have great chemistry onscreen (they would work together again in The Prisoner of Zenda and Young Bess) -- they sell initial dislike and they sell the romantic couple, but the in-between not so much.

For 1950 audiences the major draw of Mines is the African scenery. The movie was filmed in several African locales and showcased areas pretty much unseen by American movie audiences used to Southern California hills standing in for sub-Saharan mountains. Even today, the incredible locations and many wildlife shots do the most to make Mines worth watching. Granger and Kerr are tops, but the thin script that doesn't give them much to do leaves them in second place to their backdrops.

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The 1920s are often seen as a kind of "golden age" for American gangsters; the swaggering bosses like Al Capone came to prominence running alcohol during Prohibition, as well as less welcome crimes like loan-sharking, murder and prostitution.

China in the 1920s had some similar characteristics, as the decade is sometimes known as the "Warring '20s" in contrast with the U.S.'s "Roaring '20s" In the Sichuan province, a man named Ma Bangde (Ge You) has used his money to buy a position as a governor, which he hopes will make him rich through graft and other extra-legal means. But waylaid on the trip by bandit "Pock Mark" Zhang Mazi (Jiang Wen), he finds himself forced to work with the bandit gang as Zhang pretends to be the governor and confronts local crimelord Master Huang (Chow Yun-Fat) in a power struggle. The struggle is aimed at a confrontation that will definitely live up to the movie's title, Let the Bullets Fly.

Zhang and Huang play a violent game of chess as they try suborn each other's supporters and gain enough of an advantage to make an attack succeed. Each man is as witty and intelligent as he is ruthless, which leads to some verbal sparring that will test your subtitle-reading ability. The matchup succeeds because of how well Jiang Wen and Chow Yun-Fat play off of and against each other; they are two of the more charismatic actors you'll see in a long time and sharpen each other's work considerably (think of the way Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro worked in Heat)

Jiang Wen also directed Bullets and wrote the screenplay, which is sometimes hard to follow for a non-Mandarin and non-Sichuanese speaker because of the quickness of the wordplay. Fortunately, DVD's can be rewound or slowed down to catch what everyone's saying.