I’m really sorry but I’ve been extremely relaxed on the number of posts recently. My life has been crazily busy recently with work and a few personal family things going on.
I’ve got a bunch of articles half-written in the drafts section that I’m hoping to finish over the coming weeks. I expect in the future my output will be more structured but less frequent.
The good news is that I have still been finding time to keep up with visits to the cinema. I also got chance to go to the simply breathtaking Blade Runner Secret Cinema in London in late March. If you get chance, just do it.
I’ve been keeping track of what I’ve been seeing on Letterboxd, a site designed for people to share their experiences of film with friends. My profile can be found here and it would be great if you could all add me on there so I can make more of a connection.
Lesley Selander was a veteran in directing western films by the time War Paint was released in 1953. From 1936 onwards he had directed at least three features a year, eventually reaching a grand total of 107 by the time he retired with Arizona Bushwackers in 1968.
War Paint is one of his later efforts, and Selander walks the line between showing himself to be a veteran of the genre and showing he has exhausted every foible available to make a film interesting.
It stars Robert Slack as Lt. Billings, who is put in charge of delivering a peace treaty to a powerful Native American chief. He sets off with a party of men, only to be tracked by Taslik (Keith Larsen) and Wanima (Joan Taylor), both Native Americans strongly against the treaty. Taslik joins the party, but leads them in a large circle whilst promising them he will lead them to water. Dehydrated and beginning to hallucinate, the party’s morale unravels as tensions rise.
It is a flawed film for several reasons. One of the more interesting characters is Wanima, portrayed by Joan Taylor. She is a dead-shot with the rifle, successfully killing American soldiers with her accurate aim. She is silent as she tracks the party for miles without being discovered. However, when she is eventually found she loses all of her character and becomes more of a damsel in distress, undoing about an hour of hard work from the script writers and from Taylor.
The stock footage used for the circling vultures appears several times and is clearly from a different reel, with nothing done to hide the cracks in the footage. It is a source of humour, but I suppose was quicker than replicating the shot from scratch.
It was filmed on location in Death Valley National Park, the first motion picture to have done so. It is clearly a wonderful and largely untouched location, and was (and is) home to many Native American tribes, adding an air of authenticity to the picture.
The war paint of the title refers primarily to the paint adorning the face of Taslik, which signifies his achievements in murdering settler soldiers. Unfortunately, the overall impression left by the film is more “War-Paint-by-numbers” than anything more sinister.
A decent film with an exciting climax, but nothing that makes it worth seeking out over anything else in the Western genre you might stumble upon.
The Wikipedia page for sci-fi action film Cross boasts that it was the 41st most popular film on the Internet Movie Database when it was released. This tells me one of two things. Either there were only 41 motion pictures in existence upon its release, or director Patrick Durham wrote the Wikipedia page.
It is truly an atrocious film, with the acting sinking to hitherto never-before-seen depths of dreadfulness. A miriad of accents are on display, but there’s no real reason for it; the actors are clearly struggling and embarrassed about attempting Scottish, Irish and English accents and wildly missing the mark.
The characters all have cool names like Backfire and Riot. Nobody portraying the characters has any kind of presence to make their scenes feel like they’re intimidating members of gangs, thus the only conclusion is that they assigned themselves their own names to help elevate their status amongst their fellow goons.
It’s clear that the shortcomings in acting is a fault of director Durham. Eventually the more renowned actors show up – an early scene between Michael Clarke Duncan and Vinnie Jones offers hope that things might pick up – but even that is undermined by shoddy camerawork, framing and lighting. It’s like a 101 in how not to shoot a movie on the cheap.
Indeed, cheap is the word that remained at the forefront of my mind throughout the film. The soundtrack is poor, with a bunch of soulless non-descript ska-punk-rock anthems filling in as background noise about ten years after the genre was last fashionable.
When the sex scenes arrived, with the lights and underwear very much left on, I just felt awkward for the actors. I think we all wanted it to be over.
The worst performance was from Robert Carradine as Dr Zyal. Totally over-the-top and mismatched to the rest of the film, but in a way that absolutely doesn’t work. Imagine the horror when I realised he turns out to be one of the key antagonists of the film.
It’s a poor action film that tries to cover its downfalls up with stylised comic book visuals and a few wacky deliveries. Unfortunately, the graphics are as cheap as the rest of it and the overall effect is a poor imitation of so many much better films.
