Hercules, Samson & Ulysses (1963)

1958 saw the beginning of the short-lived but spectacular Italian peplum boom. Scores of imitators followed, and then after five or six years it was all over. The Italian film industry abandoned the peplum and embraced the spaghetti western. Which is a pity since on the whole the peplums were a lot more fun. Pietro Francisci directed the movie that started the craze, Hercules. And In 1963 he directed one of the last notable entries in the cycle, Hercules, Samson & Ulysses.

Francisci had in fact been making historical epics since the beginning of the 1950s. And in 1973, long after the peplum craze had run its course, he made yet another movie of this type, Sinbad and the Caliph of Baghdad. Clearly Francisci had a taste for this sort of thing.

Hercules, Samson & Ulysses opens with Hercules and his young friend Ulysses battling a sea monster that has been menacing Greek fishermen. Before the monster can be dealt with a storm intervenes and the heroes are shipwrecked. Hercules and Ulysses and four companions survive but the storm has taken them a very long way - all the way to a Danite village in Judea.

The people of Judea don’t seem too pleased about the arrival of these shipwrecked Greeks. Actually they’re mostly worried that the Greeks might be in league with the hated Philistines. The villagers are also worried that these visitors might betray their hero Samson who is hiding out amongst them.

Hercules and his friends set off for Gaza (where they hope to find a ship to take them home to Greece) accompanied by a Philistine merchant. When Hercules kills a lion with his bare hands the merchant is convinced that he must really be the famous Danite hero Samson. And there’s a very large reward for anyone who helps the Philistine king to capture Samson.

Hercules will meet the real Samson and in order to save his friends he will have to betray Samson to the Philistines. Unless of course he can find some honourable alternative - and Hercules can surely be relied upon to do the honourable thing?

Pietro Francisci knew his stuff when it came to directing this type of movie. The pacing is taut and there are some inspired moments. The action scenes (of which there’s no shortage) are well executed. The highlight is the epic fight between Hercules and Samson with the two heroes hurling gigantic stone blocks at each other, knocking over stone walls and generally demolishing every structure in sight. It’s truly one of the best peplum fight scenes ever. There are more superb and inventive action sequences in the latter part of the film.

The sets are very impressive. For a low budget movie this production manages to look very expensive.

Francisci wrote the screenplay as well as directing and he came up with a fairly decent story. It takes some of its inspiration from the Biblical story of Samson but brings Hercules into the story in at least a vaguely plausible way.

The acting reaches no great heights but it’s fine for this style of movie. Kirk Morris (who despite his screen name was an Italian actor and bodybuilder) is a convincing and quite acceptable hero and his performance is actually quite lively. Samson is played, and played pretty well, by Iranian actor Iloosh Khoshabe (under the suitable American-sounding name Richard Lloyd) while Ulysses is played in rather amiable and not overly heroic style by Enzo Cerusico. To be honest Ulysses is a minor character in this story. The original Italian title Ercole sfida Sansone would have been more accurately and more appropriately translated as Hercules Challenges Samson.

Diletta D'Andrea provides some amusement as Leria, the wife of Hercules. She’s a devoted wife but she’s getting a bit fed up with having her husband constantly away from home doing hero stuff.

Aldo Giuffrè is suitably cruel and villainous as the Philistine King. A really classic peplum should have a beautiful but evil queen and in this film it’s the notorious Philistine queen Delilah, played with considerable panache by Liana Orfei. Hers is the standout performance in the movie. I especially love her costume in the climactic battle scene - she looks like a sexy comic-book super-villainess.

The Warner Archive made-on-demand DVD provides a pretty good anamorphic transfer. There is some very minor print damage but not enough to worry about and the colours are pleasingly vivid. If you’re a hardcore peplum fan you’ll know how hard it is to find these movies on DVD in an acceptable condition and in the correct aspect ratios - and peplums were always made in a widescreen format and even more than most movies they absolutely have to be seen in the proper aspect ratio. This release is most definitely a welcome one. One word of warning - don’t watch the trailer before watching the movie. It gives away far too much!

All peplums have a certain amount of camp appeal but Hercules, Samson & Ulysses stands up as a very decent action adventure movie indeed. This is definitely not to be dismissed as a so-bad-it’s-good movie. It’s superbly made, fairly well acted, it looks terrific and it’s packed with genuine spectacle and imaginative action scenes. It may have come along towards the tail end of the peplum boom but it’s one of the best movies of the genre. Very highly recommended.

The Day of the Jackal (1973)

The Day of the Jackal is a very different kind of 1970s action movie. This big-budget Anglo-French co-production might be unconventional but it’s also a very fine movie.

The end of the Algerian War and the granting of independence to Algeria by France’s President de Gaulle angered a lot of people within the French military. It angered them enough that they refused to accept this outcome. Disgruntled and embittered officers and ex-officers formed the Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS) which carried out terrorist attacks and tried to assassinate de Gaulle. The movie opens with an extended action set-piece based on an actual OAS assassination attempt in 1962. 

The failure of this attempt was a major setback to the OAS. At this point fiction takes over. With their organisation riddled with police informers the surviving leadership of the OAS decides that their only hope is to employ an outsider, a professional hitman, to kill the President. This new attempt will be absolutely secret. Only the four top members of the organisation will know anything about it. The hitman they select is an Englishman, known by the code-name Jackal.

The Jackal (played by Edward Fox) is a very cool customer. He explains that after a job this big he will never be able to work again and therefore his fee will be extremely fee. Colonel Rodin (Eric Porter), the head of the OAS, agrees. The Jackal will work alone and will carry out the assassination at a time of his own choosing.

Much of the movie is concerned with the Jackal’s elaborate preparations - the procuring of false passports, the ordering of a very special gun, the careful planning that leaves nothing to chance. Running in parallel to this is the story of the efforts of the French security agencies (with assistance from Scotland Yard’s Special Branch) to track down the assassin.

The problem for the French is that de Gaulle refuses to take any special precautions or to cancel any public engagements and insists that the investigation be carried out in absolute secrecy. Inspector Lebel (Michael Lonsdale) is in charge of the case. Lebel has the reputation of being a brilliant detective who is also possessed of infinite patience. Slowly and painstakingly he begins the process of hunting the Jackal.

There are several things which make this movie an oddity in the genre. Apart from the opening sequence referred to earlier there is practically no actual action. The emphasis is on suspense. There is however a difficulty here - we know who the assassin is, we know what the crime will be, and we know the attempt will fail. We know that de Gaulle was not assassinated. Therefore the suspense must come from those things we don’t know - we don’t know how the assassination will fail and we don’t know how Lebel will catch the Jackal. In fact even though we know that de Gaulle will not be killed we can’t be sure the Jackal will be caught. We also don’t know exactly who the Jackal is - we know only his code-name.

In some ways this movie is an inverted mystery, where the interest comes from the manner in which the criminal is hunted down. It is also in some respects a police procedural with the focus on following the investigation in meticulous detail.

Kenneth Ross’s screenplay is quite faithful to the approach that Frederick Forsyth took in his excellent best-selling novel (which I warmly recommend). The wealth of detail could become tedious but in fact it’s fascinating.

Fred Zinnemann was a much-praised but somewhat overrated director but he does a splendid job here. This is a long film but while the pacing is unhurried the suspense is built very effectively.

Zinnemann chose Edward Fox to play the Jackal because he wanted an actor who seemed a different as possible from the stereotype of a hitman. It was an inspired choice. Fox plays the Jackal as an educated and cultured (and very polite) upper-class Englishman but he also succeeds in making him chillingly cold-blooded.

The support cast is exceptionally strong. Michael Lonsdale as Lebel provides a superb contrast to Fox’s Jackal - Lebel might be a superb detective but he is temperamentally a very ordinary policeman, and compared to the rather aristocratic Jackal he is something of a plebian. Lebel and the Jackal are worlds apart but both are in their very different ways thorough professionals who know their jobs very very well.

The movie is wonderfully evocative of the world of the early 1960s, a world that was already a vanished world when the movie was made in 1973.

The Region 2 DVD is widescreen but not 16x09 enhanced and has very little in the way of extras. On the other hand it can be picked up very inexpensively.

The Day of the Jackal might not please action movie fans who expect car chases and spectacular stunts. This is a more cerebral kind of thriller and a rather old-fashioned one. It is however a well-crafted piece of work and if you are prepared to accept it on its own terms it’s a tense and engrossing suspense film with a great lead performance by the under-appreciated Edward Fox. Highly recommended.

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

John Carpenter has had a very up-and-down career as a director, or at least it has been very up-and-down in commercial terms. Big Trouble in Little China, an over-the-top action adventure romp, was certainly a commercial low point. Like so many of his commercial failures it has attracted a loyal cult following.

Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) is a truck driver. He finds himself propelled into a world of black magic and mayhem when the fiancée of his friend Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) is snatched at San Francisco Airport by a Chinese gang.

Jack has the kind of experience that Alice had after going down that rabbit hole. Suddenly he’s in a bizarre world beneath San Francisco’s Chinatown, a world of monsters, magic and sorcery. This world is dominated by David Lo Pan (James Hong), an evil sorcerer who as a result of a curse has been trapped in a strange undead incorporeal state for more than two thousand years. To escape the curse he needs to marry a girl with green eyes. Wang Chi’s girlfriend happens to have green eyes. But there is another girl with green eyes, Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall), who also has green eyes and she’s mixed up in this situation as well.

Jack doesn’t understand any of this but he’s the kind of guy who never runs away from a fight.

Things get stranger and stranger. There is a whole world beneath Chinatown, a world in which an epic battle between good and evil must be played out. Warring Chinese gangs fighting it out in the streets with machine-guns are one thing but beneath Chinatown black magic is by far the bigger threat.

What follows is a great deal of very entertaining mayhem. The movie opens at a brisk pace and that pacing never falters for a moment. The action is continuous and it’s executed with a great deal of flair and imagination.

The big twist is that Jack Burton thinks he is the hero but he isn’t. He’s the sidekick. Wang Chi is the hero. Wang Chi knows what’s going on; Jack doesn’t have a clue. It’s not that Jack is stupid. Maybe he’s not a intellectual giant but he’s not a fool. He’s simply completely out of his depth. He tries his best to play the hero but it doesn’t really work. 

Not that Wang Chi isn’t grateful for Jack’s help. Jack might not have much experience battling evil sorcerers but he’s brave and he’s loyal. He’s the ideal sidekick in fact. Of course Jack still thinks he’s the actual hero.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about this movie is that every member of the cast understands the type of movie this is. They all understand what Carpenter is trying to do. And they all produce exactly the right kinds of performances. The performances are slightly tongue-in-cheek, but not in a sneering or condescending way.

Kurt Russell is quite superb. He has the square-jawed action hero persona which contrasts delightfully with Jack’s total unawareness of his own inadequacies. He’s funny but he never allows his performance to descend into outright parody. We might be amused by Jack but we never despise him. Wang Chi never despises him either - he appreciates the fact that Jack is risking his life in order to fight beside him against Lo Pan.

Dennis Dun is terrific also. Wang Chi is very capable but he’s no superman and he would never be foolish enough to do anything this brave except that he has to save his fiancée and he intends to save her.

Kim Cattrall is delightful. She’s no shrinking violet, she’s quite feisty but she’s not a clichéd kickass action heroine. She’s pretty terrified but she’s determined not to give up. Cattrall is funny too and she combines superbly with Kurt Russell. James Hong is an absolutely splendid villain. He’s thoroughly evil but perhaps just a tiny bit tragic. Victor Wong is wonderfully amusing as the tour bus driver Egg Shen who knows a bit more about fighting black magic than you might expect from a tour bus drive.

The action set-pieces are crazy and spectacular. Carpenter was clearly pretty familiar with Hong Kong action movies and captures the feel of that genre perfectly whilst still giving the movie his own distinctive signature.

The Region B Blu-Ray includes an audio commentary by Carpenter and Kurt Russell which is almost as much fun as the movie. They’re obviously great friends and they obviously had a blast making the movie and their enthusiasm for it is infectious. They get very chatty but there’s plenty of fascinating background on the movie as well. The Blu-Ray looks magnificent. 

John Carpenter is a director who has never really achieved either the commercial success or the recognition he deserves. That’s possibly because rather than playing safe he chose to do idiosyncratic movies like this one. It’s easy to see why Big Trouble in Little China bombed at the box office. In 1986 studio executives would have had no idea how to market such a movie and mainstream critics would have been bamboozled by it. It appears that the studio solved the problem by not promoting the movie at all.

In spite of this Big Trouble in Little China is enormous fun. Highly recommended.

The Mechanic (1972)

The Mechanic is one of the most interesting of the movies Charles Bronson did for English director Michael Winner in the 70s. Winner is much reviled and often misunderstood as a director and while The Mechanic is a fine action thriller there’s a lot more going on here.

Arthur Bishop (Bronson) is a hitman. He is a very efficient hitman because he takes infinite pains. His hits are almost works of art. The movie opens with a spell-binding extended sequence in which Bishop stalks and kills one of his targets. Apart from being both tense and fascinating it also tells us a good deal about Arthur Bishop. He is a man of extraordinary patience who plans his work with an attention to detail that is almost pathological.

His work has made him a very rich man. On the surface he is cool and controlled and he enjoys the good things of life - fine wines, good food and art. We soon realise however that he is not a happy man. He suffers from paralysing anxiety attacks. He is lonely and despite his wealth his life is empty.

Then he meets Steve McKenna (Jan-Michael Vincent), the son of gangster Harry McKenna (Keenan Wynn). Harry is now deceased. In fact it was Arthur Bishop who killed him. Bishop liked Harry but a job is a job. Steve reacts to his father’s death with indifference. Shortly afterwards Steve’s girlfriend announces that she is going to kill herself. She slahes her wrists. Steve calmly watches as she starts slowly bleeding to death. He knows she won’t go through with it, that she’ll back down at the last minute. Or maybe she won’t. Steve doesn’t care either way.

Bishop realises that Steve has that quality of detachment that he has always strived for, a detachment that makes a man an ideal assassin. He begins to train as his apprentice.

Given that Steve clearly has the potential to be every bit as efficient a killer as Bishop you might wonder whether it’s such a good idea to train a guy who might well end up being your own replacement. Especially given that there’s no pension plan for hitmen. Bishop is undoubtedly aware of this possibility. He’s no fool. He knows that Steve is as ruthless and pitiless as he is. This is in my view the key to the whole movie. By training Steve Bishop is deliberately courting death, or perhaps defying death. Or perhaps he simply wants to find out what will happen, just as Steve watched his girlfriend’s suicide attempt with dispassionate interest. 

The essential clue can be found in Bishop’s house, in one of his paintings. It’s one of those late medieval dance of death paintings (by Bosch). And that’s what Arthur Bishop is doing - he is dancing with death because his life has no meaning and it’s the only way he can feel something. Maybe he isn’t actually hoping to die. Maybe he thinks he can find some meaning this way. Or maybe he really is hoping to die. Death may be the only thing Arthur Bishop is capable of loving.

As for Steve, he believes he has the detachment to survive this kind of lifestyle. But then Arthur Bishop thought he had that quality as well. Steve may well be taking his first step toward joining the dance of death.

Meanwhile these two men are both very much aware of the game they are playing. It is a game that must end in death, but which of them will die?

To make this idea work requires some pretty good acting. Charles Bronson delivers the goods. Bronson was one of the great action movie stars but he was always a more subtle and complex actor than he was given credit for. He had the ability to convey a great deal about the characters he played while seeming to be doing very little. I rate this is one of his best performances.

Jan-Michael Vincent is also very good, and rather chilling.

There will of course be those who will insist on seeing a homoerotic subtext in the relationship between the two hitmen. This is I think a complete misunderstanding of the film. It’s made very clear that it’s the father-son dynamic that is important here - the relationships between Bishop and his father, between Steve and his father, and the father-son relationship between Bishop and Steve. These relationships are characterised by a complete lack of emotion, this lack of emotion inevitably creating a sense of emptiness and disconnectedness. These peculiar father-son relationships are also all intimately connected with death. Everything in this movie comes back to death.

The one weak point in the film is the motorcycle chase scene which doesn’t quite work. The tone is wrong - it’s a Bond movie-style action scene but this is not a Bond movie. On the other hand the other major action set-pieces are excellent.

Despite including plenty of action scenes this not really an action movie. Winner throws in the action scenes because in 1972 they were a commercial necessity. The movie is really more of a psychological suspense thriller and Winner handles the suspense superbly while Bronson handles the psychological aspects with equal success.

The MGM Region 1 DVD provides a good anamorphic transfer without any extras. There have been a couple of recent Blu-Ray releases but I haven’t seen them so I can’t offer any opinion on them.

The Mechanic is a chance to see Bronson at the top of his game. A fine and rather complex thriller. Highly recommended. 

Knives of the Avenger (1966)

Mario Bava is most famous for his superb gothic horror films but he also made some great action adventure films including a couple of excellent Viking movies. Knives of the Avenger (I coltelli del vendicatore) was the second of these Viking movies, a follow-up to his wonderful Erik the Conqueror (Gli invasori, 1961). Both movies starred American actor Cameron Mitchell (who made a total of three films with Bava).

Karin (Elissa Pichelli) and her son Moki live in a rude hut not far from the sea. One day a stranger rides into town, a man named Helmut (Cameron Mitchell). Helmut saves Karin from a couple of thugs and he stays on for a while. Helmut teaches Miki to shoot a bow and starts to teach him the art of killing with a throwing knife (something at which Helmut is an expert). Karin is not at all happy about this idea - she does not want Helmut teaching her son to be a killer. Apart from this minor problem it’s clear that there is an emotional bond developing between Helmut and Karin although Helmut seems curiously unwilling to push things to their logical conclusion and their relationship remains strictly platonic. We will later learn that both Karin and Helmut have good reasons for exercising such restraint.

Karin is in fact a queen in exile, and in hiding. Her husband King Arald is believed to have been lost at sea. His disappearance followed a series of tragic events. Their wedding was supposed to unite two petty kingdoms but these hopes were dashed by the violent and destructive behaviour of Hagen (Fausto Tozzi). Hagen killed the wife and child of a neighbouring king, Rurik. Rurik reacted (or overreacted) with a campaign of terror. 

These subplots will come together in a surprisingly effective way, as none of these characters succeed in escaping their pasts, or their destinies. 

You might think that the plot sounds vaguely like a western. When you watch the movie that impression will be reinforced considerably. This is in fact a classic revenge western. It also bears a very strong similarity to the classic western Shane. Given the fondness of the Italians for the western this is undoubtedly very deliberate indeed. The screenplay (by Mario Bava, Alberto Liberati and Giorgio Simonelli) actually adds a good deal of extra complexity. Shane is a man who has grown tired of violence but while we have no doubt that in his younger days he went looking for trouble and took some pleasure in his skill as a killer we also have no doubt that he only ever killed men in fair fights and that the men he killed almost certainly deserved killing. The protagonist of Knives of the Avenger is rather different - he is not an evil man but he has certainly done very evil things indeed. He also still derives a disturbing amount of enjoyment from killing for its own sake.

We feel that Shane’s path to redemption will not be easy but his moral standards encourage us to believe that he will achieve it. We cannot be so sanguine about the chances of the protagonist of Knives of the Avenger.

Mario Bava never made a spaghetti western but this movie suggests he might have done something quite interesting had he ever attempted that genre. Visually this movie has nothing in common with the spaghetti western but in tone it’s very close indeed. The fact that the protagonist is a knife-fighter makes the affinity even stronger. When the hero confronts the villain the scene plays out exactly like a western gunfight.

The hero in fact relies mostly on his skill with throwing knives. I very much doubt if Vikings actually bothered with throwing knives but in film terms it has two very great advantages. Firstly it makes the action scenes more interesting, but secondly and more importantly it adds greatly to the western flavour - Helmut uses his knives the way a western hero uses his six-guns.

Knives of the Avenger is not quite as visually stunning as other Bava films but it does have some classic Bava-esque moments, especially the scenes in the grotto.

Cameron Mitchell does a fine job, as he always did for Bava. I wasn’t so impressed by the rest of the cast. Fausto Tozzi as Hagen is a nasty villain but he needed to be a little bit more larger-than-life. Elissa Pichelli as Karin is just a tad on the bland side.

There’s a romantic triangle although it doesn’t exactly set the screen alight. Which is perhaps not such a problem since the revenge and redemption angles are what really matter.

Anchor Bay’s DVD, from their Mario Bava Collection Volume 1 boxed set, offers a fine anamorphic transfer (the movie was shot in the ’scope ratio). The lack of extras is a slight disappointment.

Knives of the Avenger isn’t quite top-rank Bava but it’s an excellent and rather thoughtful action adventure flick. Bava didn’t have the budget for large-scale land and sea battle scenes but he has no difficulty in keeping things interesting. Not as good as Erik the Conqueror but still highly recommended. 

The Last Grenade (1970)

The mercenary action movie was a very small sub-genre that perhaps surprisingly produced two great movies, Dark of the Sun (1968) and The Wild Geese (1978). Sadly The Last Grenade doesn’t even come close to the quality of those films although it did have definite potential.

Major Harry Grigsby (Stanley Baker) and Kip Thompson (Alex Cord) are mercenaries in Africa. Thompson betrays Grigsby and kills most of his men in the process. This betrayal provides the movie’s best moments in the form of the superb action set-piece that opens the movie, with a truly stupendous number of explosions.

Grigsby wants revenge and he gets the chance when the British government hires him to hunt Thompson down and kill him. Thompson has been causing them major problems in Hong Kong. The British want him dead but they don’t want to be seen to be involved. General Charles Whiteley (Richard Attenborough) will give Grigsby as much assistance as possible, on an unofficial basis of course.

Grigsby teams up with his old comrades Sergeant Gordon Mackenzie (Andrew Keir), Andy Royal (Julian Glover) and Terry MItchell (John Thaw). His plans for revenge don’t exactly go smoothly. In fact they go very badly and Grigsby ends up in hospital in Hong Kong.

Grigsby is a very sick man. He has tuberculosis and he knows time is running out for him. While recuperating he and General Whiteley’s wife Katherine (Honor Blackman) fall in love and begin an affair. It’s at this point that the movie loses its way badly. The romantic sub-plot does serve an important purpose in advancing the plot but unfortunately it does so in a very obvious and predictable manner, and the romantic scenes are clumsy, unconvincing and tedious.

Oddly enough, rather than humanising the hero the romance ends up making him both less sympathetic and less convincing - Grigsby doesn’t really seem the type to steal another man’s wife in such an underhanded and sleazy manner. On the other hand while I would hazard a guess that we’re supposed to see Katherine Whiteley as a free spirit trapped in a dull marriage to me she comes across as being exactly the sort of woman who would betray her husband.

The romance also brings the main plot to a standstill, and it never regains its momentum.

On the plus side there’s the strong cast. Stanley Baker has the charisma to carry off the rôle of Grigsby in fine style. Andrew Keir, John Thaw and Julian Glover provide fine support although the latter two are unfortunately rather under-used. Richard Attenborough manages to bring both the necessary pomposity and the necessary dignity to his performance as General Whiteley. Honor Blackman does her best and it’s hardly her fault that her character serves little purpose.

The weak link is Alex Cord’s ham-fisted performance as Kip Thompson. He’s an odd character for such a film - a crazed drug-addled hippie mercenary. Cord’s performance is hopelessly muddled and unconvincing.

The contrast between Grigsby, the old school professional soldier who (despite being a mercenary) has old-fashioned notions of honour and loyalty, and the calculatingly cynical but deranged Thompson could have been interesting. Unfortunately Thompson never becomes more than a cartoon villain.

Director Gordon Flemyng spent most of his career in television. While he shows considerable skill in handling the action sequences the movie suffers from very poor pacing and whenever the focus shifts away from the action it becomes dull and lifeless.

The biggest problem is that while the action scenes are good there aren’t enough of them. In particular the ending falls very flat - we assume it’s all leading up to a spectacular climax but it just doesn’t happen.

Scorpio Releasing have issued some rather interesting 1960s and 1970s cult films on DVD and they’ve done a pretty fair job with The Last Grenade. Picture quality is mostly very good. There are no extras.

In spite of a few good moments The Last Grenade is on the whole a disappointment - it goes off not with a bang but a whimper. Maybe worth a look if you’re a very dedicated Stanley Baker fan.

Fear Is the Key (1972)

Alistair MacLean is now relatively little known but back in the 60s and 70s he was just about the most popular thriller writer in the world (his books actually outsold Ian Fleming’s Bond novels). Most of MacLean’s novels ended up being filmed, with varying degrees of success. The 1972 film version of Fear Is the Key is one of the lesser known MacLean adaptations but it’s actually pretty good.

This movie received lukewarm studio support and failed to set the box office alight, and then more or less disappeared into obscurity.

It certainly hits the ground running. We start with a cargo plane being shot down then we move on to an epic extended car chase. This was not a big-budget feature but the car chase is exciting and well-executed. 

John Talbot (Barry Newman) is on the run and as he explains to Sarah Ruthven (Suzy Kendall) he has absolutely nothing to lose. As we will later find out, he’s not kidding. Sarah is the woman he takes hostage in a daring courtroom escape.

Talbot eventually gets caught, but not by the police. He is offered a deal by a criminal gang and he finds himself caught up in something very big indeed.

The opening car chase is difficult to top but the climax, in a bathyscaphe 1200 feet below the sea, is pretty decent as well.

This was a British production but was filmed on location in Louisiana and it takes full advantage of the setting. The special effects were done by Derek Meddings who had started his career in Gerry Anderson’s 1960s puppet science fiction TV series such as Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet and would later work on most of the Roger Moore Bond movies.

Barry Newman is not the world’s most charismatic actor but he’s well cast as the bitter and obsessed Talbot. Perhaps a more likeable protagonist might have helped the movie commercially but the demands of the story really require Talbot to be a taciturn anti-hero and for my money his performance is fine. Suzy Kendall is a perfectly adequate heroine.

John Vernon makes a suitably chilling smooth but evil bad guy while Ben Kingsley does well as one of his psycho henchmen. Dolph Sweet (great name!) is effective as a crooked ex-cop.

The plot includes some major twists and we discover that things are not quite as they seemed to be. These twists are handled effectively and although we have our suspicions about Talbot’s real motivations we really don’t know just how far his obsessions will push him, and more importantly the other characters don’t know that either.

Director Michael Tuchner made only a couple of feature films before settling into a successful career in television. He handles the action scenes very confidently. The pacing drags just a little in the middle but on the whole the tension is maintained successfully enough.

Studiocanal’s barebones Region 2 DVD offers a superb anamorphic transfer (the movie was shot in the 2.35:1 Cinemascope aspect ratio).

All in all this movie delivers plenty of action and some dark psychological thriller moments. The car chase is excellent and any movie that includes undersea action in a bathyscaphe definitely deserves bonus points. The superb use of the Louisiana locations is another major plus. 

Fear Is the Key is a thoroughly enjoyable action thriller. It’s not quite in the same league as Where Eagles Dare but it compares favourably to other MacLean adaptations such as Puppet on a Chain, The Satan Bug and When Eight Bells Toll (all of which are well worth seeing also).

Highly recommended.