Now, why should I be interested in missing elephants?

The Avengers

3.17: The White Elephant

The temptation is to say John Lucarotti sold us one, here, so I’ll resist. A real bore, unfortunately, with none of the nascent elements (eccentric characters, unlikely scenarios, curious businesses) amounting to anything interesting, as Steed and Mrs Gale investigate the disappearance of the titular pachyderm.

Most indicatively, Steed watching a daffodil grow (he’s practicing yoga, it seems; “It’s a very good method of improving the concentration”) is much more engaging than the plot proper, in which he once again puts Cathy undercover (as resident zoological director) and in danger at Noah’s Ark zoo, from which elephant Snowy has been vanished.

This leads to one of her not-infrequent railings against the dapper gentleman spy, for callously offering her ivory as a reward (“You’re using my experience to cover your indolence”), yet he turns it around and leaves her smiling (also as per usual) by tickling her self-righteousness, returning her repaired (ivory-handled) derringer “Mrs Gale, you forgot your little gun”.

Steed: How are things on animal farm?

Cathy: Tense.

Godfrey Quigley’s eccentric zoo owner Noah Marshall is only really eccentric for smoking a pipe and having a parrot sit (that’s sit) on his shoulder. That, and his lust for Mrs Gale (“a very impressive woman”; there’s a lot of lust for Cathy at this point in the show). She also finds someone hanging dead (Martin Friend again) in the workplace for the second episode running, although not in the stationery cupboard this time.

The boss isn’t in on it on this occasion, however, since he’s having his coffee drugged, but everyone else seems to be, in a plot that takes in the ivory trade, a missing big game hunter (Edwin Richfield’s Professor Lawrence, in Richfield’s third of six appearances), a gunsmiths (Bannerman & Kemp, where Steed announces he’s after a white elephant; asked if he’s going to India or Burma for the rare beast, he replies, “I thought I might try the home counties”) and Jordan & Moss, a cage builders and restraints outfitters.

Steed: In the overseas market, you can let yourself go a bit.

Madge Jordan: Exactly.

The latter is a case of rather restrained (ahem) kinks, as Steed receives sales talk from enthusiastic dealer in bondage wear Rowena Gregory (Immortal Clay). Everywhere Steed goes he drops hints to those concerned that he’s on their case, but I have no notion quite why the gunsmiths and the shackles shop need to be a part of this, other than it makes for less-than-persuasive quirkiness. Indeed, Steed figures out that they’re a bunch of smugglers while balancing a wine glass on his forehead as Cathy does some headstands.

Cathy ends up incarcerated with a panther, but even that can’t really raise the interest levels. None of the performers (save the aforementioned Gregory) offers much, including Judy Parfitt (of Bullseye) as the inside woman and Lawrence’s missus. Scott Forbes makes Conniston a particularly unconvincing big game hunter (Forbes also delivers a fairly major fluff in his first scene, notable even for this fluff-filled period of the show).

Also appearing are Toke Townley as gun polisher Joseph and Bruno Barnabe (Honey for the Prince, You’ll Catch your Death) as his boss Fitch. The White Elephant is one of those where unwieldy exposition (“Why did I allow myself to get involved with you?”) is firm evidence of the absence of a well-formulated plot.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

She was addicted to Tums for a while.

Marriage Story (2019)
(SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.

You're not only wrong. You're wrong at the top of your voice.

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
I’ve seen comments suggesting that John Sturges’ thriller hasn’t aged well, which I find rather mystifying. Sure, some of the characterisations border on the cardboard, but the director imbues the story with a taut, economical backbone.

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

To defeat the darkness out there, you must defeat the darkness inside yourself.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010)
Easily the best of the Narnia films, which is maybe damning it with faint praise.

Michael Apted does a competent job directing (certainly compared to his Bond film - maybe he talked to his second unit this time), Dante Spinotti's cinematography is stunning and the CGI mostly well-integrated with the action.

Performance-wise, Will Poulter is a stand-out as a tremendously obnoxious little toff, so charismatic you're almost rooting for him. Simon Pegg replaces Eddie Izzard as the voice of Reepicheep and delivers a touching performance.
***

He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982)
(SPOILERS) I don’t love Star Trek, but I do love Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That probably isn’t just me, but a common refrain of many a non-devotee of the series. Although, it used to apply to The Voyage Home (the funny one, with the whales, the Star Trek even the target audience for Three Men and a Baby could enjoy). Unfortunately, its high regard has also become the desperate, self-destructive, song-and-verse, be-all-and-end-all of the overlords of the franchise itself, in whichever iteration, it seems. This is understandable to an extent, as Khan is that rare movie sequel made to transcendent effect on almost every level, and one that stands the test of time every bit as well (better, even) as when it was first unveiled.

Old Boggy walks on Lammas Eve.

Jeeves and Wooster 2.5: Kidnapped (aka The Mysterious Stranger)
Kidnapped continues the saga of Chuffnell Hall. Having said of 2.4 that the best Wodehouse adaptations tend to stick closely to the text, this one is an exception that proves the rule, diverging significantly yet still scoring with its highly preposterous additions.

Jeeves: Tis old boggy. He be abroad tonight. He be heading for the railway station.
Gone are many of the imbroglios involving Stoker and Glossop (the estimable Roger Brierley), including the contesting of the former’s uncle’s will. Also gone, sadly, is the inebriated Brinkley throwing potatoes at Stoker, which surely would have been enormous fun. Instead, we concentrate on Bertie being locked aboard Stoker’s yacht in order to secure his marriage to Pauline (as per the novel), Chuffy tailing Pauline in disguise (so there’s a different/additional reason for Stoker to believe Bertie and she spent the night together, this time at a pub en route to Chufnell Hall) and …

All the way up! We’ll make it cold like winter used to be.

Soylent Green (1973)
(SPOILERS) The final entry in Chuck Heston’s mid-career sci-fi trilogy (I’m not counting his Beneath the Planet of the Apes extended cameo). He hadn’t so much as sniffed at the genre prior to 1967, but over the space of the next half decade or so, he blazed a trail for dystopian futures. Perhaps the bleakest of these came in Soylent Green. And it’s only a couple of years away. 2022 is just around the corner.

So you made contact with the French operative?

Atomic Blonde (2017)
(SPOILERS) Well, I can certainly see why Focus Features opted to change the title from The Coldest City (the name of the graphic novel from which this is adapted). The Coldest City evokes a noirish, dour, subdued tone, a movie of slow-burn intrigue in the vein of John Le Carré. Atomic Blonde, to paraphrase its introductory text, is not that movie. As such, there’s something of a mismatch here, of the kind of Cold War tale it has its roots in and the furious, pop-soaked action spectacle director David Leitch is intent on turning it into. In the main, his choices succeed, but the result isn’t quite the clean getaway of his earlier (co-directed) John Wick.

She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog