THE DARK KNIGHT RISES: so do my hackles

The first critic to post unflattering comments about director Christopher Nolan's magnum opus received death threats so I recognise I'm taking my life into my hands by stating that I did not enjoy this film and don't rate it.
A regular reader of my blog should not be too surprised by that. It's reasonably devoid of reviews of superhero blockbusters, and the reason for that is that I don't like them. They do nothing for me. I don't care about the characters, their epic battles or the endless philosophising/moralising about good, bad and the nature of man.

I found the second part of Nolan's Batman trilogy, 'The Dark Knight' to be an interminable bore which insisted on ramming its message down the throats of its audience over and over again. This third and (thankfully) final installment eases up a little on the preaching but is no less unrewarding.
It's all noise, darkness and characters speaking in ridiculously deep voices. It's like a world peopled by voice-over artists with sore throats.
But it's the nature of this world that I have the biggest issue with.
I appreciate that the viewer is required and expected to suspend their disbelief to enter the world that Nolan has created - this is after all a fantasy world not a National Geographic channel documentary - but I found it impossible to overlook the glaring omissions and inconsistencies.
The world of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is one of broad strokes - broad and constantly in motion in the hope that we won't notice that it doesn't all hang together. There's no attention to detail. Let me give you just one example.
At one point the chief villain, Bane (Tom Hardy), traps the city's entire police force in underground tunnels by dynamiting all of the entrances, leaving him free to run amok above ground. There the police all remain until Batman (Christian Bale) turns up some considerable time later (possibly months) to free them. The film asks us to accept that in the interim the thousands of officers just wait in their concrete tomb, not attempting to escape through any of the thousands of manhole covers, or dying of hunger or even growing a beard.
Sure, fantasy worlds don't have to operate by the same laws that govern the real world but when the story's set in what approximates a modern day New York City peopled by recognisable human beings there has to be something plausible to hold it all together.
The plot's studded with holes big enough to fly Batman's helicopter through and that, for me, more than canceled out any excitement the action might have generated.  If Nolan's intention was to bamboozle my brain by overloading my eyes and ears he failed.

SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN: an unexpected catch

SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN is one of those films that does exactly what it says on the tin.

There's absolutely no spoiler alert required before I reveal that this story concerns the efforts of a wealthy Yemeni sheikh (Amr Waked) to bring his favourite sport to his desert-like nation. To assist him in his fantastical vision he enlists the help of initially reluctant British fisheries expert Dr Alfred Jones.
As played by a surprisingly youthful looking Ewan McGregor, Jones is a strait-laced, socially awkward and emotionally repressed British government scientist, trapped in an unfulfilling marriage. He's extremely dismissive of the sheikh's ambitious plans to stock an artificially created lake and river with thousands of British salmon, believing there's no way the fish will survive in such foreign waters.
But he's under orders from the highest levels of the British government to make the scheme work and with some gentle encouragement from the sheikh's pr representative, Harriett (Emily Blunt) he slowly finds himself being won over to the project and the sheikh's vision of what it could do for his country.
I admit that selling a big screen film centred around fishing is an uphill proposition, and the producers certainly haven't helped themselves with the less than alluring title. It's going to act as an instant turn-off to 90% of the potential audience.
But, given the right frame of mind SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN is actually a very charming, pleasant and - dare I say it - enjoyable experience.

The story moves at the pace of the highland rivers the sheikh is so fond of fishing in. It unfolds in a leisurely manner with very little in the way of overt drama. The pleasure here is derived primarily from entering into the lives of Alfred and Harriett and getting to know them as real people rather than simply characters played by two well known actors. I've never been a huge fan of McGregor but he's definitely been on a roll recently with Alfred just the latest in a string of fine performances that have included 'Perfect Sense', 'Beginners' and 'The Ghost Writer'  in the past few years. Blunt's Harriett is immensely likeable, vulnerable and endearing and while it's inevitable that the two will become romantically entwined at some point director Lasse Hallstrom avoids the rom-com cliches in getting them to that point.
There are a couple of other pieces of business that are handled with considerably less subtlety and damage the overall tone of the film. Both involve politics and politicians, British and Yemeni, with Kristin Scott Thomas as a female Alistair Campbell supposedly adding humour to the UK end of the proceeding, and the Yemeni end offering a very half-hearted and perfunctory nod in the direction of the factionalism and violence which plagues that country.
Not to be mistaken for British cinema's take on 'A River Runs Through It' SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN is considerably less rose-tinted and sentimental yet succeeds in remaining soft at heart - but in a good and delightful way.

HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE: the only victim here is the viewer

In his prime few could best Bob Hope in the delivery of a joke. His timing was impeccable even if the material was often corny. By 1969, when HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE was released, he'd slowed to the speed of an arthritic snail on sedatives and the gags were even worse.
They're as creaky as the knee and hip joints of Hope and his co-star Jane Wyman.
This film really had no business being made.

It's an embarrassment to everyone involved and it's difficult to discern just who the intended audience was.
It's clearly not the nation's groovy swinging youth who are relentlessly mocked and demeaned as gullible, simple-minded and vacuous, and it hardly paints a positive picture of the older generation either, the parents who were apparently so disapproving of the lifestyle of their teenage offspring.
Hope and Wyman are an old married couple who run out of patience for each other's annoying habits and decide to divorce. But their plans are interrupted by the unexpected arrival home of their angelic daughter Nancy (JoAnna Cameron) with fiance David (a very young Tim Matheson) in tow.  She wants to get married right away and live a life as full of love as her parents. Not wanting to shatter her illusions they conceal their divorce from her, but she finds out at the altar and decides to live 'in sin' with David instead.
I know this is going on a bit but I'm trying to keep it as short as possible so please stick with me.
They join a band, The Comfortable Chairs, managed by David's huckster father Oliver (Jackie Gleason), and when Nancy becomes pregnant they decide to give the baby up for adoption. Her appalled - and divorced - parents reunite under a fake name to adopt the baby and raise it until their daughter comes to her senses.
Hilarity ensues.
Actually it doesn't.

Hope has abandoned the earlier egotistical coward persona which had proved so successful in the 1930s and 40s and replaced it with a bland, self satisfied, corporate-America complacency which offers nothing to laugh at or engage with. He's just another wealthy Beverly Hills suit who's traded in his 'old' wife for a blonde, busty younger model, and is now going through the motions of life at a severely reduced speed.

Gleason substitutes bluster and noise for actual humour, while Wyman displays a shocking lack of talent for comedy but an impressive ability to look even older than Hope despite being 14 years younger. The only real laughs come from a trained chimpanzee inserted into the story for no good reason other than director Norman Panama needed to pad out the running time by an extra 15 minutes.
Dated even when it was made, HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE is tired, tiresome and pointless. It drags on like an over-long, unnecessarily elaborate and spectacularly unfunny sitcom and effectively ended the big screen careers of both Hope and Wyman. On the evidence of this film they must have wished they'd firmed up their cinematic retirement plans a little earlier.

THE GONG SHOW MOVIE: America's most definitely not got talent

If this film were a contestant on the titular tv show it would be gonged off long before it got to the end of its act.
I'm not sure what I was expecting from this film but it certainly wasn't what I got.
I'll let you into a guilty secret. I love The Gong Show.

I got addicted in the late 1980s when it was finally screened on British tv as a late afternoon filler. Chuck Barris was a new kind of game show host - somewhere between bizarre (with his crazy outfits  and cornucopia of hats pulled low across his brow) and intensely annoying (that constant hand clapping/slapping when he was talking) - and the show itself was like nothing I'd seen before; a mix of chaos, truly atrocious amateur talent, and third tier celebrity judges (Jamie Farr, Rex Reed, Jaye P. Morgan, Rip Taylor et al) who gamely inserted themselves into the nonsense.
And then there was Gene Gene the Dancing Machine. He was my absolute favorite. A large African-American guy who wasn't a contestant but popped up regularly to stop the show with thirty seconds  of pretty bad disco dancing.
Every show worked to this same formula and it was immense fun to watch. I think it was the stupidity of it all that really appealed to me.
I'd heard that Barris had made a film version of the show in 1980 but had no luck in tracking down a copy until just recently. When I finally got my hands on it all I could think was "fantastic! a feature film length version of The Gong Show!! Let me at it!!!"
I didn't really think about the challenge of translating a 25 minute tv game show punctuated by commercials into an uninterrupted 90 minute feature. I didn't consider how the extra length would dilute the intensity of the original.
However Chuck Barris did, but his solution was less than ideal.

His film (he wrote, directed, starred in it and composed most of the songs) takes us behind the scenes of the tv show to give us a week in the life of Mr Barris. And what an eventful week it is!
Chuck is burning out on the pressure of auditioning dozens of acts every day, and fulfilling the network's demand for new shows each week, while getting constant harassment from people wanting to get on the show, and from network executives who insist the show is getting out of hand - too wild and too dirty.
It's affecting his sleep, his lovelife and his will to continue. He hates his life and the all-consuming monster that the hit show has become.
THE GONG SHOW MOVIE aspires to a surreal semi-documentary style but it's punctuated by too many flabby moments of nothing interesting happening to really engage. Barris is likeable enough but there's too much of him off-set interacting with dull characters and not enough about the show itself.
Most of my favourite moments from the tv show are included (including Gene Gene the Dancing Machine) but they're very brief and served only to remind me how much like the tv show this film isn't.
It was unrealistic to expect the film would simply be an extended version of the tv show, and perhaps Barris's approach is the right one. It's an interesting curio and one that I'm glad I invested the time in watching, but it's left me desperate for a Gong Show tv marathon and I can't find a channel to satisfy my craving!

THE MAN WITH TWO FACES: both of them red with embarrassment

It's oh-so tempting to describe this 1934 drama as creaky but that would be oh-so wrong.
Why?
Because creaky suggests noise caused by movement, such as a foot stepping on an old floorboard, and THE MAN WITH TWO FACES is so stiff there's absolutely no discernible movement for the majority of it's (mercifully) short running time.
And no movement equals no creaking noise.

I didn't need the opening credits to tell me this is a film based on a stage play. That is obvious from the story's first moments when we are introduced to the characters all artfully arranged on an oversize country mansion set, and enunciating dialogue at one another with the sole purpose of being heard by those sitting in the back row.
It's not just the volume of the dialogue which shrieks stage play, it's the quality too. From the pacing to the word choice it's completely unreal. The only people in the world who speak this way are actors in a play.
But maybe I'm missing something here. Maybe director Archie Mayo is making an incredibly clever, magnificently subtle point by having his cast perform as if on a Broadway stage instead of the confines of a film studio with it's camera close-ups and ease of access to microphones.

Because THE MAN WITH TWO FACES is a story about a pair of Broadway actors (Mary Astor and Edward G Robinson) and their thwarted efforts to bring a surefire hit play to the Great White Way. And the off-stage action is - if anything - more melodramatic than the fictional play, so perhaps Mayo's making the point that art is simply imitating life.
But this is Great Depression-era Warner Brothers; the home of James Cagney, Edward G Robinson, Joan Blondell, gangster movies, and uplifting tales of ordinary folk struggling to survive and, heck, no one spoke like they were on stage in all those Busby Berkeley backstage musicals so chances are I've not missed anything here, and the reality is that THE MAN WITH TWO FACES is just a dud.
It's not just the dialogue and its delivery that's bad - the stars are miscast too.
Edward G Robinson is one of the finest actors ever to grace the cinema screen but he is not convincing playing a slightly foppish actor so in love with his craft that he doesn't know when to stop acting. As the brother of Mary Astor, playing a super-talented but emotionally fragile actress whose long awaited comeback is threatened by the re-appearance of her good-for-nothing and presumed dead husband Louis Calhern, he puts his acting abilities to deadly use to ensure Calhern can't ruin her career a second time.
Which is where the titular man comes into play. What's weird about this is that it's obvious from the get-go that both faces, despite the disguise, belong to Robinson. Maybe in the theatre, where the audience were further from the stage, the deception might have worked, but there's no hiding from the eye of the camera.
So that's the story's big surprise blown immediately.
Which just leaves us with a far more ho-hum storyline that takes forever to get moving and then resorts to a patently ridiculous and convoluted finale to ensure compliance with the newly introduced Hays Code.

As an amoral cad with an impressive Svengali-like power of control over his wife, Calhern is no more convincing than Robinson, but he is considerably more hammy. Meanwhile Astor must have been so grateful she was playing her part in the era before actors looked for motivation in creating their characters, because it's impossible to ascribe any plausible explanation for her wild mood swings.
Mae Clark, as Robinson's borderline trampy girlfriend, and Emily Fitzroy as a sharp-tongued housekeeper are really the only two cast members to emerge unscathed.
Warner Brothers were turning out movies at such a rapid pace in the early 1930s that they couldn't expect to strike gold every time and THE MAN WITH TWO FACES is a particularly fine example of what hitting tin instead looks and sounds like.

HOUSE OF HORRORS: if art critics ruled the world

The highpoint of this 1946 B-movie arrives about two thirds of the way through when a newspaper spins into focus, it's headline screaming ART CRITICS ASK POLICE PROTECTION!
Not the kind of phrase one reads everyday, or even once in a lifetime but it just about sums up the style and tone of HOUSE OF HORRORS.

New York's art critics are filling their lace embroidered panties with a warm smelly brown manifestation of uncontrollable fear on account of a serial killer known as The Creeper (Rondo Hatton). This hideously ugly monster of a man (who doesn't actually creep anywhere) is targeting these effete pen pushers at the behest of a mentally unbalanced sculptor named Marcel de Lange.
de Lange, played with hammy relish by Martin Kosleck, wants revenge on those who've savaged his work and talent in the columns of the city's newspapers, but he's too skinny and weak to do it himself. So he persuades The Creeper to do his dirty work for him by offering him friendship and a roof over his head.
There's several fascinating aspects to this storyline, chief among them the incredible and implausible importance that it places on the role of the art critic in society. In the New York of HOUSE OF HORRORS these foppish, self-professed charlatans write the most influential and widely-read columns in their respective newspapers, and wield their immense power to make and break young artists with nary a single consideration for ethics, honesty or journalistic integrity.
All that is, except one, who's neither foppish nor effete but female and incredibly annoying. The way Virginia Grey plays Joan Medford, she deserves to be The Creeper's first victim. She's a socialite with a line in fancy hats playing at being an art critic. She complains incessantly about not having a story for her Sunday column, and is endlessly bothering artists for stories she can write up but she never once produces a notepad and pen, not even when she insists de Lange recount his entire life story so she can fill that Sunday column.
Of course this being 1946 it's still a man's world (despite the millions of women who'd recently taken over men's jobs to aid the war effort) so Joan is not to be mistaken for a serious journalist. She's just playing at it, to get that tiny bit of ambition out of her system, before she succumbs to the inevitable marriage proposal from her artist boyfriend (which comes after she's helped clear him when he's falsely accused of The Creeper's murders) and retreats to the kitchen to prepare his meals and have his babies.
She's such an amateur she doesn't even realise she's found The Creeper when she finds him, and she's so not really an independent woman that she runs plumb out of ideas on how to escape The Creeper's grasp when she finds the door locked. It's clear after turning the handle twice that it's not going to open, but instead of searching for another exit she simply stands there rattling the knob over and over again as The Creeper advances on her, and it takes the deus ex machina appearance of genial Police Lieutenant Larry Brooks and his cheesy grin to save her.

Ironically it's Rondo Hatton who evokes the most sympathy despite The Creeper's penchant for snapping spines. Hatton reprises the role he'd first played 18 months earlier in the Sherlock Holmes thriller 'The Pearl of Death' and with the obvious exploitation of his deformed features (he suffered from acromegaly) for shock value it's difficult not to feel for him (although it's not known how Hatton felt about the kind of parts he was getting, so it's possible he didn't feel exploited in the slightest). The Creeper is so ugly just the sight of him paralyses his victims making it all the more easy for him to break their back, and the film encourages us to stare at his ugliness until we feel physically repulsed, and then stare some more.
Although billed as a horror movie there's precious few genuine chills and way too much chat to be had in HOUSE OF HORRORS. There isn't even a house that fits the titular bill unless it's referring to the studio adorned with de Lange's hideous sculptures. But the film only runs 65 minutes and on that basis I recommend it as a worthwhile investment of your time.

THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL: guests who won't leave but will check out

'Slumdog Millionaire' it ain't.
Although both films share the same star, Dev Patel, THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL offers a very different view of India.
It's a view which barely even scratches the surface of this multi-faceted country. This surprisingly old-fashioned 2012 drama ignores the many complexities and contrasts in wealth and poverty, tradition and modernity, in favour of a superficial tourist guide take which touches on all the appropriate stereotypes without exploring any of them in any depth.
And it does it all with such charm and good humour that I almost feel bad for criticising it.
TBEMH is a delightful viewing experience peopled by some of British cinema's finest actors and offering up a cast of characters that are so endearingly old school British they could almost have wandered in from the set of a Merchant-Ivory production.

Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Maggie Smith and Ronald Pickup are so damned good at what they do that you just want to ignore the one dimensional and stereotypical representation of their adopted homeland.
The chaos and the colour that is India - check.
The delights of spicy food - check.
Copious references to numerous crumbling temples and palaces - check.
Kids playing cricket on a patch of wasteland, using makeshift bat and wickets - check.
At least one Indian who adds humour with his use of flowery, old fashioned English - check.
True love versus arranged marriage - check.
The brief acknowledgment of a vast underclass of 'untouchables' who live in unimaginable poverty - check.
Humanise that underclass to give the impression they're ok with their lot in life - check.
and so it goes on.
It's difficult to avoid the impression that all India really needs to sort out the chaos is a bunch of elderly white westerners because no matter what the Indians have managed to achieve on their own there's nothing that can't be improved upon by the knowledge, experience and worldview of Maggie Smith or Judi Dench, or at least the characters they play.

TBEMH is not a film about India but about the country and its culture as filtered through the differing experiences of a group of elderly white British citizens who've been lured east by the alluring website for the titular residential hotel. It promises them the opportunity to see out their years in the comparatively low cost splendour of a luxury hotel catering to their every whim. The reality is rather different and it's the adjustments in expectations forced upon the guests that the story focuses on, plus their own relationships, or the lack of them. Some are lonely and looking for love, one couple struggle with the growing realisation that their 40 year marriage has reached the end of the road, while a retired high court judge returns to city of his childhood in search of a lost love.
To the extent that India has a culture which is different from the one they are used to back home in Blighty, it does have an impact on how their stories play out but it could just as easily have been Italy, Spain, Kenya or Thailand. The fact that everything happens in India is incidental to the main thrust of the narrative.
It's the top-notch cast that lifts this story to heights it doesn't really deserve to scale and make it possible to overlook the many shortcomings. They're a class act combo and give the lie to the oft-asserted claim that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

THE GHOST IN THE INVISIBLE BIKINI: a ghoulish delight

You may not believe me but it wasn't the titillating title that drew my attention to this 1966 Beach Party B-movie.
My prime interest lay not in the hordes of scantily clad young ladies cavorting around a supposedly haunted mansion, but in the opportunity to watch two great stars eeking out the very tail-end of their careers.

74 year old Basil Rathbone had been working in the movies since 1921 and was for many (including me) the definitive Sherlock Holmes, after playing the great detective in 14 films during the 1940s. 20 years after the last of those thrillers he still looked much like the suave Basil Rathbone I remembered but that beautiful voice, with its crisp authoritative diction, was no more. Each time he opened his mouth to speak it sounded like he had a handkerchief stuffed in it. His speech was muffled, verging on slurred on times and he was no longer able to use his voice to command the scene as he had done in the Holmes movies, and countless historical adventures.
It would be very interesting to know how he felt about this particular project which was so obviously way beneath his talents and stature as an actor. It's not just the inane script and nonsensical plot (both of which resemble a Scooby Doo storyline), but also the indignity of playing support to a bunch of top-billed vacuous non-entities (Tommy Kirk, Deborah Walley and Aron Kincaid, anybody?) who between them struggle to muster the screen presence of a wet paper bag.
The film's other great star of Hollywood's Golden Age had appeared with Rathbone in several movies in the late 1930s, including 'Son of Frankenstein', and 'Tower of London' but sadly shared no scenes with him here. Boris Karloff's character spends the entire movie entombed in a crypt and commenting on the action which he observes via a crystal ball with televisual capabilities. He appeared in so many low budget flicks in the final decade of his life that it's less of a shock to see him sharing the screen with a bunch of overage professional teenagers acting out Hollywood's idea of 60s youth culture.

But more than that, Karloff never allowed inferior material to drag him down. No matter how schlocky the script or feeble the acting abilities of his co-stars, he always managed to rise above them and maintain his dignity. He's classy here in a way that Rathbone isn't, although in the latter's defence, Karloff is not required to fist fight a 22 year old or do a comedy concussion routine after running head first into a wall.
Sad though it is to see these two great actors reduced to such juvenile nonsense they do at least provide a reason for watching the film. Without them there is nothing to hold the attention. The titular invisible bikini is not at all titillating and neither are the numerous other bikinis sported by Nancy Sinatra and her youthful chums. Their swimwear succeeds in both revealing an impressive amount of bare skin and also rendering it completely sexless. The only youth revolution on show here is one in favour of a regression to pre-pubescent childishness and an uncontrollable passion for dancing round the swimming pool. Crazy man,,,,, crazy!

ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK: one two three o'clock schlock

If rock and roll had had to rely on Bill Haley and his Comets rather than Elvis Presley to become a cultural phenomenon we'd all be going crazy over Michael Buble today.

Despite pioneer DJ Alan Freed's enthusiastic introduction of Haley as "one of the most phenomenal acts in the history of showbusiness!" his music was actually simplistic, repetitive and, after two or three songs, pretty unlistenable, while Haley himself had the looks and build of a truck driver and the personality of a turnip. He really was a most unlikely character to usher in a revolutionary style of music.
All of which is made painfully obvious in ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK, a low values, B-movie production hastily thrown together in January 1956 to cash in on a shocking new musical sound that was threatening to end civilisation as square old middle America knew it.
Steve Hollis is Johnny Johnston, a big band manager who sees the writing on the wall and sets out to find the next big thing in popular music. He finds it in the shape of Bill Haley and his Comets, blowing the roof off the joint at a small town Saturday night dance. Johnston's traveling companion reckons they sound like they're "slaughtering cattle" but the kids just can't get enough of the crazy beat which causes them to dance like they've lost their mind.
Johnston signs them up on the spot, along with the brother and sister dance team of Lisa and Jimmy Johns (who demonstrate the correct way to dance to rock and roll music) and sets about trying to promote them to a wider audience. To do that he needs access to clubs and concert halls but that is controlled by Corinne Talbot's talent agency and she's determined to stifle Johnston's new discovery unless he agrees to marry her.
Will Corinne block the rock to bag her bloke or will she join the majority of America's impressionable youth in succumbing to the infectious beat of 'Razzle Dazzle', 'See You Later Alligator' and 'Rudy's Rock', not forgetting the title track?
The plot's little more than an excuse to showcase Haley, the even less inspiring Freddie Bell and the Bell Boys, and the completely misplaced mambo act of Tony Martinez and his Orchestra, in a series of unimaginatively staged and shot musical numbers. The only respite comes from The Platters who sound sublime but hadn't yet mastered the hang of moving while performing live.

The history books tell us this was subversive stuff, but at a remove of half century it all comes across as quaint and tamer than a toothless old tiger posing for photos with visitors to a small-town zoo. The rebellious teenagers with their 'far out' lingo and all consuming passion for rock and roll dress like insurance agents, and all of the musical acts perform in suits and ties. Everyone is unerringly polite to one another and would no doubt have been appalled to learn that their elders feared they were undermining the very basis of American society.
Producer Sam Katzman probably thought he was riding a cultural wave with ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK but the reality was that his film and the musical acts featured in it were all about to be washed away by a one man tsunami.  By the time the film was released in March 1956 Elvis Presley was on the brink of national stardom and a career which would eclipse that of all of his musical contemporaries. If you want to see a star - the man who scored rock and roll's first hit - about to become a footnote in musical history, this is the film to watch.

HOT RODS TO HELL: if, by hell, you mean watching this film

HOT RODS TO HELL is an absolute camp classic!
From the atrocious dialogue to the even more atrocious acting the film is a total treat from start to finish.
My particular favorites are the abysmal performances by the film's two veteran stars, both well past their prime and experienced enough to have known better than to associate themselves with this embarrassing B movie project.

Dana Andrews had made a name for himself in the 1940s as a stolid leading man in classics such as 'Laura', 'A Walk in the Sun' and 'The Best Years of Our Lives.' But by 1967 his best years were decades behind him and he was reduced to accepting parts like Tom Phillips, the emasculated father of a family terrorised by a gang of hot rod driving teenage yobs in the Californian desert. An earlier car accident has left Tom a frightened man, lacking both the courage and the resources to defend his wife Peg (Jeanne Crain), young son and teenage daughter from these young hooligans. In fact his manhood's so shrivelled there's not even fly in his pants!
The part's not much of a stretch for Andrews. Never one of Hollywood's most dynamic or expressive of actors, here he looks washed out and washed up. Even the very visible over-abundance of make-up can't hide his deathly pallor and bad dye job. But his appearance is nothing compared to his diction. For the most part he sounds like a man trying to speak while also attempting to keep hold of a pair of insecurely glued dentures. Some lines are so slurred as to be practically incomprehensible. Andrews had a well publicised battle with alcoholism and I wouldn't be surprised to learn he was in the midst of that war while shooting this film.
Co-star Crain makes a game attempt to match him with a delivery style normally only heard on particularly cheesy late night infomercials for weight loss products. Each line oozes an exaggerated fake sincerity topped only by her even more exaggerated reactions to the various dilemmas she finds herself in. Her acting is just so plain awful it's difficult to believe she was a seasoned professional gainfully employed in Hollywood since 1943. Her performance here would embarrass an amateur pantomime production.

Honorable mentions go to Laurie Mock who plays the part of the Phillips teenage daughter like a clueless actress responding to the director's off-camera coaching calls ("look frightened - more frightened, now look infatuated - more infatuated, ok, now look frightened again" etc etc), and Paul Bertoya as Duke, the least menacing menacing teenage hoodlum in cinema history. Quite what either of them saw in the other is beyond me.
Perhaps what's most shocking is that HOT RODS TO HELL was released by MGM - the king of the Hollywood studios! the home of Gable, Garbo, Gardner, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland and more stars than there are in heaven! That the studio put its name to this piece of exploitation trash says more about the state of American society in the 60s than the story it tells ever could.