Franklin J. Schaffner

  • The Double Man (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) The Cold War years were rife with thrillers in which vigilant Anglosphere spies had to defeat the perfidious Soviets, and many of those films have sunk into near-obscurity by now. This only makes them more interesting to rediscover, even if their quality if far from being uniformly good. You can’t really make a case for The Double Man, for instance, as being a top-notch thriller. It’s both ludicrous and boring at once, wasting several promising elements and not doing much with the assets in its custody. But here’s the thing: Yul Brynner. Yes, that proto-bald-chic icon is at play here, and he automatically makes the film better. While most casual fans will focus on the guy’s missing hair, he did have the intensity to complete the package. His protagonist here is nicely hard-edged as he plays a top-level American secret agent going to Europe to investigate the ski-related death of his son, where he finds a complex plot to replace him with an exact double. He brings much of what The Double Man needed simply to stay afloat in a sea of ludicrous plot points. After all—if you’re going to double an actor, might as well double an actor worth doubling! So, there’s definitely an interest in seeing Brynner fight Brynner, and the film does keep that going until the very end. Alas, that’s probably the one single thing it does well, because the rest of The Double Man (excepting maybe Britt Ekland) isn’t nearly as exciting. While directed by veteran Franklin J. Schaffner (whose career would really take off with his next few films) and taking place in the picturesque wintertime Alps, much of the film feels bland and unremarkable. This is further reinforced by a script that can’t seem to take its one striking central idea and execute it in a way that remains compelling: it’s all routine bits of spying business stuck together, leaving Brynner to do most of the work in making us care. There are, to be fair, far duller Cold War spying thrillers. But there’s also a sense that The Double Man is wasting more opportunities than its contemporaries.

  • Nicholas and Alexandra (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2022) At slightly more than three hours of Russian historical melodrama, Nicholas and Alexandra is a lot to take in, and it’s a fair question as to whether the trouble is worth it. Chronicling the last years of Russian Tsar Nicholas II’s life and leading into the bloody Russian Revolution of 1917, the film was clearly designed to ape the long-form prestige epics of the 1950s and 1960s: sweeping historical scope, real-life figures, lavish production values, a cast of dozens and a pacing that clearly doesn’t know the value of restraint. But unlike many other long-form epics, Nicholas and Alexandra doesn’t quite spark until it’s too late. The recreation of the last Russian court lacks a point for too long, and it’s telling that the film only becomes more urgent (to use the term loosely) once the tsar has been deposed, and the family fears for their lives. Any casual student of Russian history knows that this isn’t headed for a happy finale, and indeed the film eventually gets there… after the sumptuous sets are replaced by smaller and dingier environments. But director Franklin J. Schaffner doesn’t do much with what he’s given—even Tom Baker’s deeply weird performance as Rasputin is muted. No one in their right minds will call Nicholas and Alexandra a bad movie—if nothing else, the film will forever boast of its six Academy Awards nominations (including Best Picture) and its two wins in technical categories. But you can rightly suspect that the Academy was honouring the film’s ambitions more than its results, because as a whole it’s a limp and dull film, seldom involving despite the tragic nature of the dramatic events it covers. Alas, it takes three hours to get to that conclusion.