If you look at the noggins of most of the old actor dudes at the conference table in the Oval Orifice, you'll notice that the ratio between fake and real is pretty one-sided.
If you look at Robert Aldrich's Twilight's Last Gleaming as anything other than a noisy, over-acted, bit of historical/hysterical/nuclear/psychobabble nonsense, then you need to go back to What Makes a Movie Good school.
I saw this chunk of concrete way back when Showtime was cheap and, if you jimmied the dial on the cable box, you could see stuff on the Playboy Channel. I thought I'd give this movie, which I enjoyed a whole long time ago, a chance to please me again.
It didn't. The dialogue was ripe with "Charlie One Foxtrot Belvedere, you have the soccer ball!" and "You've got the power, you big, fat, toupeed, M-Fer!" Burt Lancaster plays, well, Burt Lancaster, Charles Durning looks as if even he doesn't believe he's The President, and there's this black guy who plays Durning's butler, who has played butlers forever, and gets to well-up with tears when Durning, all 400 lbs of him, takes one for the team.
Never once did I buy into this drivel, a story of an imprisoned USAF general who escapes, takes over a ICBM site in Sheep's Gonads, Montana, and attempts to extort the US Government into releasing the minutes of a meeting in the early 60s, where it was decided to, as a national policy, destroy South Vietnam in order to save it so that the Russians will know we sure mean business!
The only thing longer and more tedious than that last sentence was the movie, 145 minutes of old actors strutting about in air force duds and business suits with really wide lapels.
Maybe the most upsetting thing about this blob of congealed sweat is that it's from the director who gave us The Dirty Dozen and The Longest Yard. Right around the time TLG was released, Robert Aldrich directed the movie of the Joseph Wambaugh book The Choirboys. The book was searing, heart-breaking, and hilarious--Wambaugh's style--and the movie was just stupid, an ersatz comedy without the broken heart.
So, enough said. Except, the moment when I knew I was in trouble re-watching Twilight's Last Gleaming after 40+ years. Lancaster and his merry band of saboteurs show up at the gate of the missile site, and they fake having the ubiquitous blue Dodge pickup with USAF on the side break down. Someone calls out to help push the beast through the gate, and you can hear somebody saying that the truck isn't going to move itself, put yer backs into it!
Nobody is pushing. The truck is still. The only thing moving is the actor's mouth as his voice is looped in.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Lee Marvin wouldn't have let the bad guys slack off when that D200 needed a shove!
If you look at Robert Aldrich's Twilight's Last Gleaming as anything other than a noisy, over-acted, bit of historical/hysterical/nuclear/psychobabble nonsense, then you need to go back to What Makes a Movie Good school.
I saw this chunk of concrete way back when Showtime was cheap and, if you jimmied the dial on the cable box, you could see stuff on the Playboy Channel. I thought I'd give this movie, which I enjoyed a whole long time ago, a chance to please me again.
It didn't. The dialogue was ripe with "Charlie One Foxtrot Belvedere, you have the soccer ball!" and "You've got the power, you big, fat, toupeed, M-Fer!" Burt Lancaster plays, well, Burt Lancaster, Charles Durning looks as if even he doesn't believe he's The President, and there's this black guy who plays Durning's butler, who has played butlers forever, and gets to well-up with tears when Durning, all 400 lbs of him, takes one for the team.
Never once did I buy into this drivel, a story of an imprisoned USAF general who escapes, takes over a ICBM site in Sheep's Gonads, Montana, and attempts to extort the US Government into releasing the minutes of a meeting in the early 60s, where it was decided to, as a national policy, destroy South Vietnam in order to save it so that the Russians will know we sure mean business!
The only thing longer and more tedious than that last sentence was the movie, 145 minutes of old actors strutting about in air force duds and business suits with really wide lapels.
Maybe the most upsetting thing about this blob of congealed sweat is that it's from the director who gave us The Dirty Dozen and The Longest Yard. Right around the time TLG was released, Robert Aldrich directed the movie of the Joseph Wambaugh book The Choirboys. The book was searing, heart-breaking, and hilarious--Wambaugh's style--and the movie was just stupid, an ersatz comedy without the broken heart.
So, enough said. Except, the moment when I knew I was in trouble re-watching Twilight's Last Gleaming after 40+ years. Lancaster and his merry band of saboteurs show up at the gate of the missile site, and they fake having the ubiquitous blue Dodge pickup with USAF on the side break down. Someone calls out to help push the beast through the gate, and you can hear somebody saying that the truck isn't going to move itself, put yer backs into it!
Nobody is pushing. The truck is still. The only thing moving is the actor's mouth as his voice is looped in.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Lee Marvin wouldn't have let the bad guys slack off when that D200 needed a shove!