Everything about this disaster reminds us of the battle that raged in those days between TeeVee and movies, meaning movies exhibited in a theater. The battle was hot and heavy with a major industry severely threatened. Now of course it is both TeeVee and theaters that are running scared.
Movies had scope, bigness, grand music, stars and budgets that TeeVee didn't have, so studios made movies that spoke to those values. In this case we have 70mm wide screen, the actual demolition of an impressive canyon as if it had been created for this one event. We have nudity (!), and there's a parade of big names from both TeeVee and Hollywood. The original scope was 2 1/2 hours with an intermission after the townspeople get massacred.
But everything about this is wrong. Everything. In part it was because they started with components and shoved them together without any coherent tone: a hee-haw narrator, a comically toned score, what looks like the goals of three or four scriptwriters and in the end some radical chopping of scenes.
But there are other problems too. Peck is supposed to be an ordinary character, modeled after "Maverick," the character in the runaway Warner TeeVee western. A man with a rogue past, many women, drinking, gambling, who has turned "good" and cleaned up the town, perhaps heavy-handedly.
He encounters one of his lovers, here a sexy Indian maiden who he has not only thrown over, but disfigured. He is played by Gregory Peck, but because the director is so weak, Peck reverts to his Mockingbird lawyer. It screws the whole thing around. Lucas and Harrison Ford were one of the bad things to happen to the world, but you have to admit they got this center right. Egyptian Sharif as a Mexican bandito is similarly bungled.
Everything else is sullied in the same way: We have some actors that have been adequate elsewhere, but here we see Lurch, Cat-woman, Kojac, the wife of the studio boss and a bunch of cameos from movie-land. Here, movie-land is shoveled in as "The Town." All the Hollywood actors are townspeople (who are killed by the audience/cavalry) contrasted to the TeeVee folks passing through.
The explosions that bring the walls of the canyon down are compromised by some of the cheapest, junkiest effects you'll see. The wonderful location shots are interspersed by artless backprojection. The nudity is by Julie Newmar or her double and consists of a very strangely assembled nude swim during which she tries to seduce Peck, is rebuffed, so she tries to drown the apparent new girlfriend in underwater shots made murky in postproduction.
Its a curious piece of history. In lots of other places we have movies poorly assembled from prefabricated parts, some which spend a lot of money. Its the overt role that TeeVee plays that makes this interesting, plus the obvious self-reference of goldseekers that come away empty-handed and in the process destroy something beautiful.
So much of life is dealing with old battlefields.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
Movies had scope, bigness, grand music, stars and budgets that TeeVee didn't have, so studios made movies that spoke to those values. In this case we have 70mm wide screen, the actual demolition of an impressive canyon as if it had been created for this one event. We have nudity (!), and there's a parade of big names from both TeeVee and Hollywood. The original scope was 2 1/2 hours with an intermission after the townspeople get massacred.
But everything about this is wrong. Everything. In part it was because they started with components and shoved them together without any coherent tone: a hee-haw narrator, a comically toned score, what looks like the goals of three or four scriptwriters and in the end some radical chopping of scenes.
But there are other problems too. Peck is supposed to be an ordinary character, modeled after "Maverick," the character in the runaway Warner TeeVee western. A man with a rogue past, many women, drinking, gambling, who has turned "good" and cleaned up the town, perhaps heavy-handedly.
He encounters one of his lovers, here a sexy Indian maiden who he has not only thrown over, but disfigured. He is played by Gregory Peck, but because the director is so weak, Peck reverts to his Mockingbird lawyer. It screws the whole thing around. Lucas and Harrison Ford were one of the bad things to happen to the world, but you have to admit they got this center right. Egyptian Sharif as a Mexican bandito is similarly bungled.
Everything else is sullied in the same way: We have some actors that have been adequate elsewhere, but here we see Lurch, Cat-woman, Kojac, the wife of the studio boss and a bunch of cameos from movie-land. Here, movie-land is shoveled in as "The Town." All the Hollywood actors are townspeople (who are killed by the audience/cavalry) contrasted to the TeeVee folks passing through.
The explosions that bring the walls of the canyon down are compromised by some of the cheapest, junkiest effects you'll see. The wonderful location shots are interspersed by artless backprojection. The nudity is by Julie Newmar or her double and consists of a very strangely assembled nude swim during which she tries to seduce Peck, is rebuffed, so she tries to drown the apparent new girlfriend in underwater shots made murky in postproduction.
Its a curious piece of history. In lots of other places we have movies poorly assembled from prefabricated parts, some which spend a lot of money. Its the overt role that TeeVee plays that makes this interesting, plus the obvious self-reference of goldseekers that come away empty-handed and in the process destroy something beautiful.
So much of life is dealing with old battlefields.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.