Robert Shaw

  • Black Sunday (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2021) I don’t normally like the grittiness of 1970s filmmaking, but sometimes it’s just the right thing for the film, and so Black Sunday is a pretty good example of form following function. A type of thriller that has been gradually abandoned by Hollywood, it adapts the Thomas Harris novel (yes, that Thomas Harris) into an efficient thriller. Thick in mid-1970s politics, it features Palestinian terrorist groups allying themselves with a troubled Vietnam veteran to hatch a dastardly plot to kill as many people as possible at the Super Bowl. Unusually enough, the production features a copious amount of footage shot at the 1976 Super Bowl itself, with main characters looking at the crowds from the sidelines of the game, inspecting the stadium for signs of danger, or even running behind the end field to react to a sudden discovery. This helps a lot in ensuring the credibility of the thrills—as do the lavish aerial sequences. At a time when action filmmaking usually had to satisfy themselves with approximations, Black Sunday almost gets it right throughout—the exception being the crash of the Goodyear blimp into the stadium (not a spoiler, given that it’s the image used for the cover of the book and the movie poster), which suddenly degenerates into a blurry frantic mix of close-up shots and panicking crowds. (The production history of the film makes for interesting reading.) As much as I like Black Sunday when it works, I do wish it was shorter—there’s a lot of pointless throat-clearing in its first hour, and the action climax is easily a few minutes too long for its own good. Robert Shaw and Bruce Dern are fine as (respectively) the Mossad agent and the American terrorist battling it out, but Marthe Keller is not my picture of the beautiful operative that the film keeps identifying as the near-magical influence on the American renegade. Director John Frankenheimer was, at that point in his career, a veteran of big-ticket thrillers and that experience shows in the film at its best. It clearly fits within the disaster film trend of the 1970s, and still works remarkably well today. I’m not saying that Black Sunday should be remade with modern pacing and CGI spectacle… but I’ve seen worse ideas.

  • Avalanche Express (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) It’s fun to go back to Cold War thrillers and experience the paranoia of the time. The era is rife with movies in which the heroes are clearly Americans and the villains are clearly Soviets, with no less than a credible nuclear war hanging in the balance. Seldom have the spy-versus-spy tropes been so complex and variations so elaborate. In Avalanche Express, a familiar starting point veers into a somewhat original premise, as an important defector is put on a transcontinental train going to western Europe, and the Soviet empire targets the train to eliminate the defector by all means necessary, all the way to causing an avalanche. The existence of such a train is nonsense, and so is much of the plot — but it’s the thrills that count. Accordingly, there are a few good elements at play here: The premise has juice, the cast is led by Lee Marvin’s exemplary tough-guy persona, and you can see here the elements that could have been used for a strong film. Unfortunately, the execution doesn’t quite match the early expectations. Once past the necessary bits of plotting required to get everyone aboard the train or in pursuit of it, the joy very quickly goes out of Avalanche Express. Some of the incoherence comes from production issues: both director Mark Robson and star Robert Shaw died during the making of the film, and we can only imagine what impact that must have had on the production. Other issues, though, are more fundamental to the screenplay: There’s a useless romance, for instance, that gums up the pacing of the film. The various incidents across the train trip are not very well structured, and for all of the good-for-their-time special effects used for the avalanche sequence (which is, surprisingly, not the climax of the film), the sequence itself isn’t particularly exciting. Of course, we’re looking at this from the perspective of audiences used to decades of technical refinements — a modern version of Avalanche Express (not a bad idea!) would use digital effects and time-tested structure. But even contemporary films did better with similar elements — I’m specifically thinking of Von Ryan’s Express, from the same director fifteen years earlier, which crammed a lot more characterization and action out of a train-bound journey. Even the final shootout seems curiously anticlimactic, visually flat and dramatically inert. Too bad — I think that there’s a better movie trying to get out of Avalanche Express. It’s just a shame that we couldn’t get it.

  • Battle of the Bulge (1965)

    Battle of the Bulge (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2019) I wonder if there’s an arc to the amount of historical accuracy we expect from real-life events depending on the proximity to those events. Anything made in the ten years following the event must be reasonably exact given that most of the principals (and audiences) are still there to compare notes. (Although this close to the action, things can be slanted toward a specific ideological purpose, or limited by rights issues and/or classified information.) Then there’s a lengthy period in which accuracy is not deemed as important, as memories fade and the era becomes an increasingly loose storytelling playground. Then there’s the longer-term “reverence” period when following the historical record is deemed respectful, especially given the work of professional historians with some detachment. In this progression, Battle of the Bulge would squarely belong to the second, less accurate era. While it does tackle real-life events such as the Ardennes offensive and the logistical challenges of that stage of the war (as opposed to more fanciful WW2 adventures à la Where Eagles Dare or Kelly’s Heroes), the film does so by outrageously compressing events in an unrealistic time period and being shot in a place that looks nothing like the Ardennes. The Wikipedia entry about the film’s historical inaccuracies is a mile long, but you only need a cursory knowledge of the Ardennes counteroffensive (where the forest environment and the cold and sudden snow all played a role, hence the famous anecdotes about Allied forces using white bedsheets as impromptu camouflage) to be taken out of the film’s ambitious but flawed depiction of the events as being in a wide-open plain. This being said, historical accuracy isn’t the ultimate determinant of a film’s worth, and The Battle of the Bulge does fare better when considered as a reality-adjacent WW2 adventure. The Nazis are deliciously devious, the allied are fine folks and the battle (one of the few rare post-Normandy successes for the Axis side) does offer some opportunity for tension and tank engagements. Actors such as Henry Fonda and Robert Shaw add to the appeal, and director Ken Annakin keeps things moving. It’s not a classic war movie but it is a decent one, and should appeal to WW2 buffs even—perhaps especially—given the historical inaccuracies.