CARAVANS (US/Iran - 1978) Directed by James Fargo. Written by Nancy Voyles Crawford, Thomas A. McMahon and Lorraine Williams. Cast: Anthony Quinn, Jennifer O'Neill, Michael Sarrazin, Behrooz Vosoughi, Joseph Cotten, Christopher Lee, Barry Sullivan, Mohammad Ali Keshavarz, Mohammad Taghi Kahnamooi, Jeremy Kemp, Duncan Quinn, Behrooz Gueramian, Parviz Gharib-Afshar, Parviz Jafari, Fahimeh Amouzandeh. (PG, 125 mins)
A costly flop for Universal in the fall of 1978, CARAVANS was based on a 1963 novel by James A. Michener and had been in development at various studios for well over a decade. Henri Verneuil, Richard Fleischer, and Herbert Ross were all attached to direct at different times, but the job ended up going to Clint Eastwood protege James Fargo, who had been part of the Malpaso inner circle for several years, serving as an assistant director on HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER, BREEZY, THE EIGER SANCTION, and THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES. Eastwood eventually promoted Fargo to director on 1976's THE ENFORCER and 1978's EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE, and in between Eastwood gigs, Fargo also logged time as an assistant director and production manager for Steven Spielberg on DUEL, THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS, and JAWS. In short, two successful filmmakers could vouch for Fargo, which was probably the key to landing him the CARAVANS gig. But the film died instantly at the box office and Michener, whose novels were made into well-received films like THE BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI, SAYONARA, SOUTH PACIFIC, HAWAII, and the epic 1978 NBC miniseries CENTENNIAL, didn't hold back in expressing his dissatisfaction with the finished product.
Just out on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber (because physical media is dead), the almost completely obscure CARAVANS (there isn't even a trailer on YouTube) is beautifully shot by the great Douglas Slocombe (THE LION IN WINTER, THE ITALIAN JOB, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK), and as badly as it tanked, it still managed to nab one Oscar nomination for Best Costume Design, losing to DEATH ON THE NILE. A US/Iranian co-production, it was shot on location in Iran during the waning days of the country being a friendly place for a movie shoot, just before the overthrow of the Shah and the takeover by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. In 1948 in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Zadestan, the US ambassador (Joseph Cotten) and a CIA official (Barry Sullivan) assign diplomat Mark Miller (Michael Sarrazin) to track down the whereabouts of Ellen Jasper (Jennifer O'Neill), the daughter of a powerful US senator. A free spirit, Ellen left her family and fled America, becoming one of the wives of feared Zadestan military figure Col. Nazrullah (famed Iranian star Behrooz Vosoughi), the nephew of the country's ruler Sardar Khan (Christopher Lee). Miller is granted permission by Khan to visit Nazrullah in his stronghold in the city of Bandahar, where the uncooperative colonel insists that Ellen is fine and that Miller will just have to take his word for it since she renounced her rights as an American and as her husband, he speaks for her. It turns out Ellen ran away from Nazrullah ten months earlier and he's been trying to find her as well. Following a lead on her possible location, Miller ends up crashing his Jeep in the middle of nowhere in the desert, where he's rescued by the Kochi, a nomadic tribe of gunrunners led by Zulffiqar (Anthony Quinn). Ellen has been hiding with the Kochi, who have welcomed her as one of their own and she has no intention of returning to either Nazrullah or her family in America. But Nazrullah, after learning Miller is traveling with the Kochi, correctly assumes Ellen is with them as well and leads his forces in hunting them down.
A tedious slog that feels twice as long as it is, CARAVANS ambles along with no momentum or sense of pacing whatsoever. An uncharacteristically blank Sarrazin is an unbelievably dull hero, and he's required to carry much of the film since Quinn and O'Neill don't even appear until 45 minutes in. Elsewhere, the other big names and familiar faces--Lee, Cotten, Sullivan, Jeremy Kemp--are relegated to cameos, but at least Lee gets to stroll around the visually stunning Shah Abbas Hotel, which was such a memorable location in the 1974 version of TEN LITTLE INDIANS and functions here as Sardar Khan's palace (this would also be the first of three big-budget international duds for Quinn and Lee in a short period of time, the pair also appearing together in 1979's THE PASSAGE and 1981's THE SALAMANDER). A loving father eager to help his kids, Quinn also scored a prominent supporting role for his son Duncan Quinn as Zulfiqqar's ambitious son, though Duncan didn't inherit his dad's talent or onscreen charisma and his acting career stalled after small roles in just four films. It doesn't get any better when Fargo tries to shoehorn in some comic relief in the form of an oafish Kochi tribesman fighting with a stubborn camel, complete with wacky music and a punchline shot of the camel eating the tribesman's pants. And that's before the film deploys a feel-good montage set to the overwrought CARAVANS theme song "Caravan Song" performed by Scottish singer Barbara Dickson, which became a hit single in the UK. CARAVANS made a hasty retreat from theaters and was enough of a bomb that Fargo's Dipshit David Lean aspirations only resulted in the stalling of his directing career. EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE was already in the can and about to be released, but Eastwood effectively played the "James Fargo? Never heard of him!" card after that and never utilized his services again, and amidst TV gigs (including episodes of SCARECROW AND MRS. KING, THE A-TEAM, HUNTER, and BEVERLY HILLS 90210), forgettable B-movies (his last credit to date is the 2011 Casper Van Dien DTV biker movie BORN TO RIDE), and uncredited reshoots on the 1981 hit PRIVATE LESSONS, the only noteworthy film Fargo subsequently directed was the 1982 Chuck Norris actioner FORCED VENGEANCE.
Anthony Quinn, Behrooz Vosoughi, and Michael Sarrazin
can barely contain their enthusiasm on the set of CARAVANS.
SCREAMERS aka SOMETHING WAITS IN THE DARK (Italy/US - 1981) Directed by Sergio Martino and Miller Drake. Written by Sergio Donati, Cesare Frugoni, Sergio Martino, and Miller Drake. Cast: Barbara Bach, Claudio Cassinelli, Richard Johnson, Beryl Cunningham, Joseph Cotten, Mel Ferrer, Cameron Mitchell, Franco Javarone, Roberto Posse, Giuseppe Castellano, Francesco Mazzieri, Eunice Bolt, Tom J. Delaney, James Alquist, Bobby Rhodes. (R, 90 mins)
The story of how the 1979 Italian fantasy adventure ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN became the 1981 Roger Corman drive-in splatter movie SCREAMERS is one of the more entertaining examples of hucksterism in the annals of exploitation cinema. Just out on Blu-ray and DVD in its SCREAMERS incarnation courtesy of Scorpion Releasing, the circumstances surrounding the metamorphosis of ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN into SCREAMERS are covered in great detail in the set's bonus features. Contrary to popular belief, Roger Corman didn't have anything to do with the changes despite SCREAMERS being released by his New World Pictures. It came to him with the changes already in place. Richard Kay and Harry Rybnick were two veteran B-movie producers of such titles as 1956's CURUCU, BEAST OF THE AMAZON, and both had a hand in bringing Ishiro Honda's GOJIRA (1954) to the US and its restructuring into GODZILLA in 1956. By 1980, Kay and Rybnick were still eking out a living on the fringes of Hollywood, with their company United Producers picking up foreign exploitation fare and frequently retitling them for their second and third runs through American drive-ins and grindhouses (for instance, Pete Walker's 1974 imprisoned-fashion-models thriller HOUSE OF WHIPCORD was twice relaunched via United Producers, first as PHOTOGRAPHER'S MODELS and then as the even more lurid STAG MODEL SLAUGHTER). Kay and Rybnick acquired Sergio Martino's ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN, a bizarre aquatic Italian ripoff of THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU that blended elements of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft, and approached PIRANHA director Joe Dante about beefing it up with some American actors and gory killings. Dante was busy with THE HOWLING at the time and sent the guys to his buddy Miller Drake, a trailer editor at New World who had been wanting to branch out into directing. Drake took the job, recruited cinematographer Gary Graver, a longtime exploitation fixture whose main claim to fame among his friends was working on Orson Welles' shelved and never-released THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND in 1972, and assembled a crew comprised mainly of moonlighting New World staffers looking for some quick cash and some additional experience (future TERMINATOR producer and eventual James Cameron ex-wife Gale Anne Hurd is credited on SCREAMERS as "Maui location manager," even though no scenes were shot on Maui). Drake wrote and directed a prologue to be added to the beginning of FISHMEN with Mel Ferrer and Cameron Mitchell, aging warhorses who had been in the business long enough to remember the glory days of Hollywood but were now taking any job that came along if it paid enough, being stalked and killed by slimy creatures that didn't really look like the ones in FISHMEN. Drake was supplied with a $50,000 budget for the prologue and the additional footage was shot in four nights at the caves at Bronson Canyon in Los Angeles' Griffith Park, a favorite location of Corman's going back to the 1950s.
Though Dante, who paid his dues at New World and clearly had bigger fish to fry by this time as he was about to break into the big leagues after THE HOWLING, declined the offer to shoot the new footage and wanted to keep his involvement under the radar, he did help Drake out by editing the footage and overseeing the overhaul of FISHMEN into SCREAMERS. Using the pseudonym "Giuseppe Dantini," Dante worked with Drake to streamline the 99-minute FISHMEN down to its basics, cutting it down to about 75 minutes to work in approximately 12-13 minutes of Drake's footage and a couple of other changes sprinkled throughout, like the addition of one character (James Alquist) who appears briefly only to get killed by one of the fishmen, and a later shot in a laboratory where Drake and soon-to-be-revered makeup effects maestro Chris Walas (THE FLY) replaced a shot of one of Martino's fishmen in a tank with their own, more CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON-ish monster--shot in a makeshift tank in Dante's garage--and the seams barely show until they're pointed out to you by Drake in his interview segment. The film, now running 90 minutes (75 minutes from FISHMEN, 13 minutes of Drake's material, plus new credits) was retitled SOMETHING WAITS IN THE DARK, given a new English dub (star Claudio Cassinelli dubs himself in FISHMEN, Italian accent intact, but has been revoiced by someone else for SCREAMERS) and even though it wasn't a slasher film, that's how Kay and Rybnick wanted it marketed, and they began shopping it around to distributors. Because of their knowing Dante and Drake having used a number of off-the-clock New World guys, Corman was happy to take it off their hands. And that's where things got really interesting.
Original 1979 Italian ISLAND OF
THE FISHMEN poster art.
Using United Producers' artwork and assorted promo material, Corman sent SOMETHING WAITS IN THE DARK out to ten drive-ins in Virginia for a test run and it bombed. Refusing to lose money on an investment, he pulled the film from distribution for a marketing overhaul that was assigned to New World advertising honcho and future filmmaker Jim Wynorski. With SCANNERS being an early 1981 hit, Wynorski proposed the title SCREAMERS and it stuck. He devised an ad campaign that made it look completely American, with Cassinelli renamed "Charles Cass," FISHMEN producer Luciano Martino changed to "Lawrence Martin," and a non-existent "Dan T. Miller" credited as director (the original Italian names remained intact in the film itself). Most importantly, the new one-sheet boasted "Be warned: You will actually see a man turned inside out!" and on a Sunday afternoon, Wynorski quickly shot a TV spot that featured just one quick opening shot of actress Eunice Bolt screaming from the new SOMETHING WAITS IN THE DARK scenes and no footage whatsoever from ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN. Instead, it featured Wynorski's then-girlfriend running around the still-standing sets from the same year's GALAXY OF TERROR and a quick shot of a monster thrown together by his pal Rob Bottin (soon to make his mark with his makeup work on THE HOWLING and John Carpenter's THE THING) for free as a favor to Wynorski. A few weeks later, Corman picked Georgia for the new test run, and blitzed Atlanta and the surrounding areas with Wynorski's TV spot and sent out ten prints of the newly-christened SCREAMERS and its second test run was a smash hit. But there was a problem: exhibitors and customers were furious that there was no scene of a man being turned inside out. Word got back to Corman, who told Wynorski that the scene needed to be there. The prints were recalled, and the shot of the Bottin monster from the TV spot and a couple of additional test footage shots were spliced into the fourth reel when Cassinelli is peeking in some various doors in a hallway. More prints were struck, and SCREAMERS became a decent drive-in and grindhouse hit in the summer of 1981. Unless you saw SCREAMERS on the big screen in 1981, you've never seen the complete "man turned inside out" footage. When Corman had the Bottin monster from the TV spot spliced into the existing prints, no one bothered splicing it into the negative. The prints are long gone. The footage isn't in the negative, and it was the negative that was used for the Embassy Home Entertainment VHS release in the '80s and the subsequent interpositive utilized for the new Scorpion release (Dante, in his interview segment, is under the mistaken impression that the footage has been restored).
"Look, do you understand that I was
in CITIZEN KANE?"
SCREAMERS is definitely an improvement over the lethargic ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN. Opening in 1891 with the prologue as broke fortune hunter Radcliffe (Ferrer) charters a boat to a Caribbean island captained by wily old sea salt Decker (Mitchell) only to have the entire party offed by rampaging fishmen in an orgy of throat-slashing, disemboweling, and decapitations, the action quickly shifts to Martino's original film, also set in the Caribbean in 1891, after the sinking of a prison ship, with a small band of survivors led by the doc in charge, Lt. Claude de Ross (Cassinelli). They end up on the titular island of the fishmen, which is home to the fortress-like compound of the dastardly Edmund Rackham (a hammy Richard Johnson). Rackham believes the island lies over the ruins of Atlantis, and tells de Ross that the Fishmen are the amphibious descendants of the original inhabitants of Atlantis. Of course, he's lying. The fishmen are actually mutants created from the remains of dead men by doddering, senile mad scientist Professor Marvin (Joseph Cotten), who believes he's doing altruistic work in abetting humanity's adaptation to the world's future (perhaps the insane doc was an early proponent of climate change?). In reality, Marvin and his daughter Amanda (Barbara Bach) are being held prisoner as Marvin's gill-man creations are being used to raid Atlantis--depicted in miniatures that would make Antonio Margheriti turn away in shame--for the endless buried treasures desired by the despicable Rackham.
This is the original fishman-in-progress creature discovered
in a tank in Prof. Martin's laboratory in ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN, but
Richard Kay and Harry Rybnick didn't like the design, so
it was replaced with...
...this creature, designed by Chris Walas, for an insert shot
done by Miller Drake in a makeshift tank in Joe Dante's garage
In its original form, ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN was a harmlessly goofy adventure with a little violence but minimal gore. It would've easily gotten a PG rating in America, but Kay and Rybnick told Drake they wanted R-rated gore and splatter but, being the old-schoolers that they were, weren't interested in nudity (Drake says he could've easily gotten Bolt, as Radcliffe's female companion, to go topless, but the old-timers shot it down). The SCREAMERS prologue delivers splatter and then some, with Mitchell getting his gut sliced open, Ferrer's throat being ripped out, and another guy getting his head torn off in graphic detail. The biggest cuts Dante and Drake made to FISHMEN in their streamlining it into SCREAMERS was cutting out a good chunk of Beryl Cunningham's screen time as Shakira, a priestess who spends most of FISHMEN blathering on about voodoo and accomplishing little more than slowing the movie down until Martino and co-writers Sergio Donati and Cesare Frugoni finally find a use for her in the climax.
Bach may have been a minor factor in whatever success was enjoyed by SCREAMERS. It's surprising New World didn't play up her involvement a little more, considering that in the summer after John Lennon's murder, anything involving the Beatles was big news, and right around the time of SCREAMERS' release, Bach was a ubiquitous media presence thanks to her marriage to Ringo Starr after the two became an item while shooting the surprise hit comedy CAVEMAN, which hit theaters a couple months before SCREAMERS. Bach's potential breakout role as a Bond girl in 1977's THE SPY WHO LOVED ME got her the global notoriety that came with being a Bond girl, but like many of her predecessors, it evaporated quickly, and by 1979, she was back doing the same European B-movies she was prior to her time with 007, starting with back-to-back aquatic horrors with Martino, first FISHMEN and then THE BIG ALLIGATOR RIVER, which debuted in America on CBS in 1982 as THE GREAT ALLIGATOR. At the ripe old age of 37, Bach retired from acting after she and Starr appeared in Paul McCartney's 1984 vanity project GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROAD STREET. In the early 1990s, she enrolled in UCLA to get a Master's in Psychology, and in the years since, the now 66-year-old Bach has been involved in humanitarian work for numerous charities, generally staying out of the public eye but almost always seen accompanying Starr at red carpet events. Most of FISHMEN's main cast returned in ALLIGATOR, including Bach, Cassinelli (whose tragic 1985 death on the set of another Martino film is discussed here), Johnson, and Bobby Rhodes, who appeared in FISHMEN as a servant and would later go on to cult movie glory for his roles in Lamberto Bava's DEMONS and DEMONS 2. ALLIGATOR also featured Mel Ferrer, who had no idea he'd inadvertently be part of the FISHMEN reunion in a roundabout way thanks to the SCREAMERS additions. Johnson and Cotten were both busy hamming it up in Eurotrash at the time, with Johnson also starring in Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE the same year as the Martino films. Cotten, who appears to have been granted the privilege of live-on-set sound, really dives into his mad scientist role with the utmost enthusiasm--he only has two or three scenes, but judging from his work here, you'd think he was as invested in this as he was CITIZEN KANE, SHADOW OF A DOUBT, and THE THIRD MAN decades earlier. That's a pro.
Mel Ferrer collecting an easy
$10,000 for his work on SCREAMERS
ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN was never officially seen in its original form in the US until Eurocult outfit Mya Communication released it on DVD in 2009. The Mya transfer is acceptable for the most part, with some very murky bits and various rough spots. Scorpion's SCREAMERS presentation essentially makes the FISHMEN DVD obsolete--not only is the quality better (except for one exterior scene with Bach offering some blue potion to the fishmen that's still quite murky, which must just be the way it was shot), but SCREAMERS, even with its patched-together nature, is the far more entertaining and fast-paced film. The Blu-ray also offers reversible artwork if you prefer the SOMETHING WAITS IN THE DARK poster design (both one-sheets can be spotted adorning the walls of the Civic TV offices in David Cronenberg's VIDEODROME). Corman knew how to make a movie play, and he obviously taught guys like Dante and Drake well, not to mention Wynorski, whose carnival barker act of an ad campaign upped the hyperbole factor past a point where even Corman was left bewildered. In the bonus features, Wynorski talks of getting the call from Corman on Saturday morning after he received word of the Friday night debacle of drive-in owners and audiences furiously voicing their outrage at not seeing a man turned inside out. "Jim, is there a man turned inside out in the picture?" the always soft-spoken Corman asked. "No, Roger. There isn't," Wynorski sheepishly replied, expecting to hear the words "You're fired." Instead, Corman told him to get down to the office so they could figure out what they were going to do to fix it. "You mean I'm not fired?" Wynorski asked. "No, Jim. You put people in seats. I'll never fire anyone for putting people in seats. But we need the inside out man." Roger Corman: a man who always knows what his audience wants.
Directed by Robert Aldrich. Written by Ronald M. Cohen and Edward Huebsch. Cast: Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Charles Durning, Roscoe Lee Browne, Joseph Cotten, Melvyn Douglas, Richard Jaeckel, William Marshall, Gerald S. O'Loughlin, Paul Winfield, Burt Young, Charles McGraw, Leif Erickson, William Smith, Morgan Paull, Charles Aidman, Shane Rimmer, Simon Scott, William Hootkins, John Ratzenberger. (R, 144 mins).
SPOILERS discussed throughout
Robert Aldrich's intense post-Vietnam/Cold War/conspiracy nail-biter TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING was a box office flop in 1977 and was quickly shuffled off to a couple of heavily-edited prime-time airings on CBS then ventured into the netherworld of night-owl airings in syndication and a token VHS release in the '80s before largely disappearing altogether. But it's amassed a sizable cult following over the last 35 years and has just been released by Olive Films on Blu-ray and DVD in a new restoration supervised by Bavaria Film Studio, the film's German co-producer. Aldrich (1918-1983), the legendary director of KISS ME DEADLY (1955), WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962), HUSH...HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (1964), THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967), and THE LONGEST YARD (1974) among many others, succeeds not just in making an edge-of-your-seat thriller, but also, amidst some occasionally blustery histrionics of a few cast members, one of the angriest and most cynical films of a decade full of angry and cynical films. And, it's worth mentioning, the strangely fascinating experience of witnessing a few Hollywood old-timers dropping F-bombs.
Set in "the future" of 1981 and filmed completely in Munich, the film opens to the tune of Billy Preston's 1971 version of "My Country Tis of Thee" and has disgraced General Lawrence Dell (Burt Lancaster) escaping from a Montana military prison with three convicts, Willis (Paul Winfield), Augie (Burt Young), and Hoxey (William Smith), and gaining control of Silo 3 at an ICBM facility. Despite Dell's orders to keep it under control, Hoxey starts shooting the few military personnel on duty and is promptly shot by Dell for his trouble. Dell, who helped design the installation and the launch systems and knows them inside and out, contacts General Mackenzie (Richard Widmark) and demands to speak to recently-elected President David Stevens (Charles Durning). Dell gives Stevens his demands: he's going to launch nine nuclear missiles unless he and his associates get $10 million, Air Force One transport to a country of their choosing, and the President going on national television and reading a classified memo that details the true reasons the US got involved in the Vietnam War. The patriotic, socially-conscious Dell is disgusted that so many on both sides died for a war that he insists never had to be fought and was completely fabricated by the US government just to make a point to the Soviet Union that, as one person puts it, "we were capable of inhuman acts" in the name of stopping communism. Dell repeatedly tried to make his views public, but was considered too much of a loose cannon by high-ranking military officials who tried to buy his silence with promotions. When a drunken Dell got involved in a bar fight with a guy who had a weak heart, Mackenzie and others, including Stevens' chief advisor General O'Rourke (Gerald S. O'Loughlin) trumped up a bogus first-degree murder charge and railroaded Dell into a 30-year prison sentence. As Dell explains to Mackenzie, "You sent my memos to the shredder, and when I wouldn't trade what I believed in for a star, you sent me to the shredder."
Aldrich at work on TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING
Aldrich lets the film unfold at a deliberate, methodical pace, rarely rushing or glossing over details. It takes nearly the first hour just to get Silo 3 under the control of Dell and his cohorts and to get the President involved in the matter. Most of the second hour focuses on the President hashing out the situation with his cabinet members and other national security officials. It's here where the film gets interesting. Stevens is an honest, decent man who is revealed to be clearly in over his head as President. Many of his cabinet members--effectively embodied by a number of geriatric actors--represent the old guard politicians of which Stevens is too naive to understand. Durning is guilty of some shameless scenery-chewing on several occasions throughout this film, but he's at his best when he's just glaring in disgust at some of the things he's hearing from smug Secretary of State Renfrew (Joseph Cotten) or the glad-handing CIA chief (Leif Erickson), who shrugs his shoulders and callously explains that "it's a game," and "This is just how it's been since 1945, Mr. President." President Stevens is determined to read this memo on television in order to "open up" to the American people in attempt to heal the still-open wounds of the Vietnam War. But these old men at the table--protectors of "the way it's always been"--can't allow this to happen. They can't allow the American people to know that the Vietnam War was for nothing. Stevens is too earnest, idealistic, trusting, and frankly, not quite ready for prime time to realize what's really going on when it's suggested by the smirking Renfrew--and quickly agreed upon by everyone at the table--that the public cannot be made aware of what's happening at Silo 3 and that he--the President--must go there and talk face-to-face with Dell. Secretary of Defense Guthrie (Melvyn Douglas), the one man at the table who doesn't come off like a callous, out-of-touch asshole, half-heartedly offers to go in the President's place, but instead, Stevens entrusts him to read the memo on television in two weeks if anything happens to him in Montana. Also advising the President is General Crane (Charles McGraw), who first gives Mackenzie the go-ahead to send in a four-man team (which includes John Ratzenberger!) to stop Dell by detonating a small atomic device inside Silo 3, and after that fails, Mackenzie positions snipers outside the base to take out Dell and the escaped cons when they exit with the President.
The film is played completely serious, but some of these old men advising Stevens come off a lot like the inhabitants of DR. STRANGELOVE's War Room 20 or so years later. Both Stevens and Dell are too blinded by ideals and morals to see how the world they're in really operates. Stevens doesn't even recognize the corruption around him. Dell is at least aware of it, but thinks Stevens can help him defeat it. Even after he's been buried by the country he spent his life serving, Dell still thinks a visit from Stevens legitimizes his actions and means the world will finally hear his message. And Stevens is so outraged by a political pissing match taking priority over people that he actually comes to admire Dell's convictions. Willis sees through the plan to send Stevens ("They ain't givin' up that gig! And the President is expendable!") and takes no sides, having only gotten involved for the $10 million ("Grow up, General. Nobody honors nothin', but that's no reason to blow up the whole world"). The rage is hammered home by a closing credits reprise of the Preston tune that takes on an entirely new significance after the President learns too late that a man's word of honor doesn't mean much anymore. Aldrich really cranks the tension by letting large sections of the film play out in anywhere from two to four split screens, watching all of the involved parties for extended periods of time. Aldrich would make a few more movies before his death in 1983, but as his daughter Adell explains in the accompanying 70-minute documentary ALDRICH OVER MUNICH, this was the last of his films that he considered personal and important, the last of his films that made a statement. And what a statement it is. Like many films of the 1970s, TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING probably couldn't be made today, at least not without an incredible amount of controversy. Can you imagine a current film where members of a whistleblowing President's cabinet essentially send him to his own execution? Maybe 1977 audiences weren't ready for it either, although its commercial failure is probably due more to lackluster handling by a soon-to-be-defunct Allied Artists. But in a time of great turmoil from the years of American involvement in Vietnam, films like TAXI DRIVER, COMING HOME, and THE DEER HUNTER addressed that pain and trauma in ways that have made them classics that stand the test of time. TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING raged just as loudly as those other films, and what set it apart was its unique cast of actors more suited for a WWII drama.
Durning's performance probably could've been a little more controlled (he's much better in the President's more reflective moments), though there's certainly an argument to be made that his outbursts and tantrums are indicative of the character's inability to handle what's happening. But almost everyone is top-notch here. Lancaster is great, and the film gives the venerable Cotten, by that time largely reduced to cameos in disreputable Euroschlock, his best late-career role. Widmark delivers some vintage grumpy Widmark, making his entrance in the back of a limo where the driver is listening to the news on the radio and asks "Do you care about the news, General?" to which Widmark's Mackenzie grumbles "Never between wars." A couple of minor gripes: a shot of the President shaving by a bathroom window doesn't really ring true from a security standpoint. And several exterior shots of the installation housing Silo 3 are obvious miniatures that would barely pass in a GODZILLA movie.
Olive's Blu-ray presents the film in a spiffy new HD transfer in its 1.85:1 aspect ratio that looks very nice. The lone extra is the 70-minute retrospective ALDRICH OVER MUNICH, which features interviews with numerous behind the scenes personnel (with much input by German assistant director Wolfgang Glattes), and Aldrich's daughter Adell. O'Loughlin, now 84, is the only cast member present. There's plenty of anecdotes and vintage on-set photos and it's a must-see for any fan of the film. TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING is one of those films that's remembered vividly by everyone who's seen it, with its primary obstacle being that nobody's seen it. This new Blu-ray/DVD release should go far in rescuing this unsung classic of 1970s cinema from years of obscurity.
