Reeling Backward: "The Agony and the Ectstasy" (1965)

Charlton Heston and Rex Harrison were both booming screen presences with a decided tendency toward hamminess. They knew the taste of the scenery, and enjoyed it.

But I think both actors deliver some of their best work in "The Agony and the Ecstasy" -- a measure of restraint and disappearance into the character, as opposed to bursting out of the box as was their wont. Neither received Oscar nomination, and indeed the film in general was rather ignored during the awards season, receiving five nods from the Academy in only "technical" categories, winning none.

This, in a weaker year for film, with "The Sound of Music" winning Best Picture -- a film I've still not been able to bring myself to watch all the way through -- and the overwrought "Doctor Zhivago" and the overrated "Ship of Fools" forming its main competition.

I would put "The Agony and the Ecstasy" above them all.

It's a very good, borderline great film that takes a historical subject and muses upon the two men who made it happen: Michelangelo and Pope Julius II (played by Heston and Harrison, respectively). It falls into the category of what we now would call "historical fiction," based upon the book by Irving Stone. The story is part history, part mythology and part dramaturgy.

History is full of ironic inconsistencies. Like the Fourth Crusade, which departed to free Jerusalem from the Muslim horde but instead sacked the allied city of Constantinople. Or Joseph Cinqué, one of the slaves who fought for freedom aboard the ship Amistad later (by some accounts) becoming a slave trader himself.

Chief among fate's little jokes is that Michelangelo is probably best known for his painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, when in fact he labored nearly all of his life as a sculptor. The Pope insisted upon the greatest living artist decorating his chapel, despite Michelangelo's objections. This is the story of their clashing, from which emerged one of the enduring works of mankind.

Julius was known as the warrior-pope who fought many battles to keep the papal lands under Rome's control, rather than being gobbled up by the French and others. The movie depicts him literally sword in hand, wearing ornate plate armor and striking down his enemies in bloody splashes of violence. Harrison plays him as a vainglorious man given to fits of anger, but one who truly believes his mission in life is to exalt God and raise up his church.

The movie takes a little while to get really rolling. Michelangelo is working on the pope's tomb -- 40 statues, all told -- and clashing with Bramante (Harry Andrews), the pope's stiff-necked and territorial architect. Julius decides that his chapel needs some saints on the ceiling, and more or less forces the artist to do his bidding, at cut-rate wages.

There's a nice little speech that Raphael (Tomas Milian), another great artist of that age, gives about two-thirds of the way through in which he nicely describes the economics of artistry in the early 1500s. We're whores, he says, dependent on the wealthy and powerful to provide the funding to do what we are compelled to do.

Michelangelo certainly lives out this description on the film, repeatedly defying Julius only to eventually bend the knee and kiss the ring (quite literally).

His first rebellion is to start the portraits of saints, only to scrape them off the wall or ruin them with buckets of paint in a drunken fit after deciding "the wine is sour," meaning he has no creative will to do anything inspiring. After hiding out as a marble quarryman, he's struck by a vision to do a grand collection of frescoes depicting most of the pivotal acts of the Old Testament, centered by God's creation of Adam.

The image of a bearded old man reaching his hand out to Adam's is surely one of the most enduring images in the public consciousness.

Weeks become months, months become years. "When will you make an end?!?" Julius repeatedly shouts up to Michelangelo, high above the floor of the chapel on his scaffolding. "When I am finished!" the artist replies, equally thunderous. Michelangelo quits, is fired, gives up, but always returns to the task.

The film really gains steam in the third act, where first Michelangelo and then Julius are struck down by ill health -- exhaustion for the painter, war wounds for the pope. Each man is forcefully made aware of his mortality, and finds himself reaching out to the other for understanding. The dynamic of begrudged servant and domineering master slowly evolves into a pairing of mutual respect.

Director Carol Reed helmed a lot of "prestige" projects like this; he's probably best known for "The Third Man" and his Oscar-winning direction of "Oliver!". Screenwriter Philip Dunne ("How Green Was My Valley") turns in a fairly conventional but well-done piece in the "Great Man" tradition of moviemaking.

Diane Cilento has a fairly forgettable role as a matron of the Medici family, the powerful clan that controlled his hometown of Florence and first sponsored his artistry. The idea, a predictable one, is that the pair loved each other in their youth, but he chose sculpting as his expression of ardor, and she married another. Indeed, Michelangelo gives a speech in which it's made clear he essentially lives a monastic existence without sex.

Honestly, it's just an example of a very Y-chromosome movie in which the studio decided to inject a little feminine flavor.

Quibbles aside, though, I enjoyed "The Agony and the Ecstasy" a lot more than I thought it would. It's an exploration of how men accomplish great things, usually by sacrificing some large part of their personal happiness to rededicate to a noble endeavor.

Reeling Backward: "633 Squadron" (1964)

Wow, what a piece of crap.

Normally I try to be charitable to the classic films I'm watching for the Reeling Backward column, seeking out movies I think I'll enjoy or find interesting on some level

In the case of "633 Squadron," a 1964 WWII movie starring Cliff Robertson as the leader of a British air squadron, the only thing interesting is how gobsmackingly awful it is.

I lay most of the blame at the feet of director Walter Grauman, a television guy who made a few theatrical films. Although some of the air combat sequences are exciting -- perhaps owing to the fact that Grauman himself flew B-25 bombers during the war -- any time the action is grounded, the movie goes into a deadly  torpor.

The dialogue is incredibly hackneyed, and it's not helped by generally wooden deliveries from most of the cast. Astonishingly, one of the screenwriters is Howard Koch, one of the Oscar-winning writers on "Casablanca."

Topping things off is the musical score by Ron Goodwin, which makes the fatal mistake of intruding upon the movie without enhancing it.


I think in particular of one scene where Roy Grant (Robertson), the American commander of an international RAF squadron, is confronted with bad news by his superior. Goodwin's music goes almost silent while each piece of dialogue is delivered, then creeps in with a little slow arpeggio during the pauses. Comically, the musical notes rise or fall depending on what each man says, so the result is a ridiculous alternating of musical swells going up and down.


But Goodwin's main theme used during the flying scenes is a bray of trilling trumpets that gets the heart moving. It sounds very familiar, too -- I think subsequent films may have borrowed from that lick.


The cinematography by Edward Scaife is often quite dazzling, too, making good use of the full-color Panavision. His shots of planes screaming through the air on an intricate bombing run through a narrow canyon are terrific.


Unfortunately, the film constantly resorts to models to portray explosions, and they're just awful. It looks like a balsa wood toy made by an adolescent that he subsequently blows up with firecrackers. Some archival footage is also ham-handedly worked in ... though not extensively since most of that would've been in black-and-white.

Robertson was a solid actor that Hollywood never quite knew what to do with. (He passed away while I was working on this column.) His character here is mostly a collection of typical "Yank" traits as seen from the British perspective -- cocky yet sullen, resentful of authority and yet committed to military camaraderie.

His commander (Harry Andrews) give him a vital mission: To blow up a rocket factory the Nazis are building in Norway. If those rockets are allowed to go online, the Normandy invasion is doomed to failure.

Because the factory is in a narrow canyon, their only hope is to bomb the overhanging cliff with "earthquake bombs' in order to get it to cause an avalanche and crush the facility. Laughable stuff. Though supposedly George Lucas was inspired by this sequence for the trench run scene in the original "Star Wars."

There's a subplot involving Finn Bergman, the leader of a Norwegian resistance operation. Their job is to provide intelligence on the bombing site, and take out the anti-aircraft guns right before the mission. Bergman clashes and then bonds with Roy, and somehow his sister Hilde (Maria Perschy) materializes just in time to provide a love interest for Roy.

Hilariously, Finn is played by George Chakiris, the dark-haired and -complected actor best known for pleading Bernardo, the leader of the Puerto Rican gang in "West Side  Story" (for which he won an Oscar). Chakiris looks about as Norwegian as an Egyptian pyramid, especially when contrasted with the blonde, fair-skinned Perschy.

(Chakiris was actually Greek, whose Mediterranean good looks allowed him to play a variety of nationalities along the lines of Anthony Quinn, whose lineage was a mix of Mexican, Aztec Indian and Irish.)

At one point Finn is captured by the Germans. In order to prevent the mission from being revealed under Nazi torture, Roy is assigned to bomb the building where Finn is being held, killing his friend in the process.

He succeeds, but apparently he was too late. When the rest of the Norwegian resistance fighters move in to take out the anti-aircraft guns, they are ambushed and wiped out by the waiting Germans. Strangely, it is never explicitly depicted that Funn divulged this information during interrogation; the audience is left to infer this when the Germans get the jump on the Norwegians.

Not that the resistance fighters do much to hide themselves: They're shown blithely walking down open paths and roads on their way to assault the gun positions. The Germans hide from cover and attack with machine guns and grenades. For guerrillas, the Norwegians seem to have the tactical smarts of gorillas.


The only thing I found truly interesting about "633 Squadron" was the planes. They fly De Havilland Mosquitos, versatile aircraft built by the British for a variety of uses. They were exceedingly fast, superficially resembling a B-17, but with only two engines and much, much smaller. They carried a crew of but two, the pilot and navigator/bombardier.

The Mosquitos were tactically very dissimilar from the B-17, B-24 and other large American bombers, which were designed to fly in large groups and fight off more nimble enemies with an array of heavy armaments, and withstand a ton of punishment. The Mosquitos were made of wood and couldn't take much damage. Initially they were intended as fast bombers, lacking any defensive armaments. Later iterations included forward guns, and the Mosquitos were used as night fighters, aerial reconnaissance and even against ships and submarines.

These daring, unique planes also starred in another British war movie from 1969, "Mosquito Squadron." I haven't seen that one, but hopefully the humans in that film made for better counterparts to the amazing machines, unlike in "633 Squadron."

1 star out of four

Reeling Backward: "Play Dirty" (1969)

I thoroughly enjoyed this little war drama/caper from 1969 starring Michael Caine. I admit I'd never heard of it before, but it came up under my Netflix recommendeds, so I jumped. Jolly good show, as they say.

Yes, it is something of a British knockoff of "The Dirty Dozen." A motley bunch of Allied criminals are tasked with an impossible mission during World War II, and even the commanders issuing the orders don't think they'll accomplish their objective. But they're expendable, so it's worth a go.

The X factor is Caine's character, Douglas, a straitlaced if somewhat lazy British officer content to while away the war overseeing the loading of ships at an African port. He's a captain in name only: He worked for British Petroleum before the war, and because he has some tertiary experience with oil, he's assigned to command a task force to blow up Rommel's major oil dump, crippling the German desert war machine that has confounded the Allies.

Except Douglas finds that he's hopelessly in over his head. The professorial colonel running the show (Nigel Green) has lost a string of English officers sent to "lead" his men into the field. The guy really running the show is Capt. Cyril Leech (Nigel Davenport), who was serving 15 years in prison for intentionally sinking his steamer ship for the insurance payoff when he was broken out and conscripted.

It's a fine, memorable performance by Davenport, as a man who's as calculating as he is black-hearted. He works for the Brits, but one senses that if the Germans offered him more money, switching sides would pose no dilemma for him.

The first half of the movie or so consists of Douglas attempting to command the strike force, and Leech undermining his authority and disabusing him of the notion that he's in charge. This culminates with Leech intentionally sabotaging Douglas' efforts to haul their trucks up the side of a cliff using a clever pulley system. One of the trucks comes crashing down, and when the Germans discover the wreck they prepare to annihilate the infiltrators.

Fortunately, the brigadier general in command of special forces didn't trust Douglas' crew, so he sent another, more professional outfit to do the job -- essentially turning the first group into decoys. The Germans stumble upon this second group and prepare an ambush, with Douglas' gang watching from the top of the cliff. Douglas attempts to alert the other British soldiers by firing his pistol, but Leech puts a knife to his throat and forcibly twists the gun out of his hands.

After the Brits are massacred, they come down to loot the dead. Douglas, outraged, picks up a machine gun and threatens to shoot his own men if they don't bury the fallen soldiers. Leech points out that he would only have been able to kill one or two of them before dying himself, and Douglas agrees with his assessment. It's only at this point that Leech begins to develop anything resembling respect for Douglas.

The rest of the outfit isn't terribly memorable. There's a big blond guy who was accused of rape, and a Greek demolitions expert, etc. The only fellows who are remotely interesting are a pair of Arabs who don't speak any English and are pretty conclusively portrayed as being homosexual. They're silly and girly, holding hands and such, but it's notable that none of the other characters seem to have a problem with them being gay. For 1969, that was positively progressive.

At one point they capture a German nurse and force her to care for one of their injured comrades. Several of them corner her and attempt to rape her, but then one of the Arabs shoots the big blond in the ass. I enjoyed the editing here, which slyly cuts to the nurse patching up her attacker's posterior.

Things conclude in a typically nihilistic fashion for that era of war films. The Allies break through the German lines and begin to sweep across the desert, and suddenly the oil dump that needed to be destroyed becomes a crucial objective to be captured. Since headquarters is cut off from the men, they tip off the Germans about the impending attack, which ends successfully but with everybody except the two captains killed.

The ending is a bit abrupt and contrived. Leech and Douglas are hiding out in a village when the British army breaks through. Still wearing the German uniforms they'd use to infiltate enemy lines, Douglas concocts a white flag of surrender and marches out to greet the liberators. Alas, they're shot anyway. Why they wouldn't have just taken off their uniforms is, of course, the unasked question.

"Play Dirty" was directed by André De Toth (his final film) from a script by Melvyn Bragg and Lotte Colin, and was supposedly based on the exploits of some real-life special forces units like Popski's Private Army. Yes, it's a bit deriviative, but well-done and satisfyingly cynical.

3 stars out of four