Don’t you realise you’re endangering our lives with your incompetence?!

The Holcroft Covenant

(1985)

(SPOILERS) There’s something oddly comforting about 1980s Michael Caine spy thrillers, not because they are any good – most aren’t – but due to his sheer reliability in simply showing up, baring his teeth at some point while grimly enraged, and generally behaving as if he’s still a viable lead in such fare. Caine came on board The Holcroft Covenant late in the day when James Caan fell out, and it might have seemed at first glance to possess a very faintly promising pedigree; an admittedly past-his-prime John Frankenheimer was helming, it was adapted from a Robert Ludlum novel (pre-Bourne and lacking cachet but another of his having provided the source material for Sam Peckinpah’s last, The Ostermann Weekend) by George Axelrod (who hadn’t worked on anything acclaimed in about twenty years, but did have The Manchurian Candidate on his resumé) and Edward Anhalt. The result? Well, see my opening remark about Caine spy thrillers made in the ‘80s, only even less so.

Caine (ostensibly) made the movie to work with Frankenheimer and didn’t much like the end result (quite a common refrain on his part during that period). He also found the screenplay incomprehensible. I don’t know that it’s actually incomprehensible so much as the fiendishly evil plan doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Noel Holcroft (Caine), along with the children of two colleagues of his late Nazi father (as in dead, rather than a former Nazi), is left $4.5bn to use philanthropically to right the wrongs perpetrated by Hitler’s hordes, or so it goes (I kept wondering that such a stash wouldn’t instantly be confiscated, even given it’s in Switzerland, but let it go). Turns out, though, that dad – Herr General Heinrich Clausen (Alexander Kerst) – wasn’t such a repentant schweinhund after all; he was quite content to sacrifice his son as revenge on his missus (Lilli Palmer) for forsaking him, and in so doing laying the paving stones for the emergence of the Fourth Reich.

Tennyson: Can you imagine a hate so strong that it can wait years for revenge?

Accordingly, the concerns of Oberst (Richard Munch) that Noel was planning on using the loot to establish a Fourth Reich weren’t so balmy after all. In fact, the other members of the foundation, Mario Adorf’s Jurgen Maas (really Erich Kessler, son of Michael Wold’s General Kessler) and Anthony Andrews’ Jonathan Tennyson (Johann von Tiebolt), accompanied by his sister Helden (Victoria Tennant), have precisely that goal in mind, albeit somewhat goofily, via “a wonderful idea to consolidate every terrorist group in the world into one cohesive overwhelming force to create international crises”. This will throw the entire globe into anarchy and panic and so create the mood to accept a new leader. One might forward an argument that something not wholly dissimilar has been attempted with ISIS, but it still seems like something of a stretch. Better for a Bond movie, really.

Caine really does not give a toss in this one. He claims he’s always professional and… Well, he’s always watchable, but he seems indifferent to playing a nominal American (German-American) here, and if you didn’t notice his less-than-half-hearted approximation of a twang in various scenes, that wouldn’t be at all surprising. He’s also supposed to be a decade younger than he is, and while some can pull that off, he’s not really achieving it where it counts. Motivation-wise, it isn’t clear why Holcroft, a highly successful architect (“Sorry, I’m an architect, not a financial genius”) should want to get involved in the foundation at all, except to combat some sense of generational guilt (which isn’t remotely telegraphed). Holcroft’s also entirely passive, except, bizarrely, when called on to momentarily engage in an exchange of gunfire (his first time firing a weapon, and he shoots someone in the head, through a windscreen) or with a skilled assassin (turning a gun on him during a grapple).

Leighton: A shootout in Trafalgar Square just isn’t done.

The screenplay is nigh-on terminally exposition heavy, which means it takes the likes of Bernard Hepton (as Oberst’s cohort Leighton: “More often than not, I’m on the right side”) to deliver the goods. Frankenheimer stages a nice little assassination in crowd early on, as “highly respectable banker” Manfredi (Michael Lonsdale) leads an oblivious Holcroft to his car, but he seems most inspired by a sequence at a Berlin carnival, which seems to be there entirely for the director to leer with his camera at T&A.

That aside, Victoria Tennant is pretty but entirely forgettable as love interest-cum-cold-blooded killer Helda, not really pulling off the hooker gear in Berlin. Something was evidently amiss when she announced to Noel, “You’re wonderful. I’ve never met a man like you before”, but you’d be forgiven for assuming it was the flatulent dialogue that had been haunting the picture every step of the way, rather than necessarily her attempting to manipulate her mark (earlier, she berated Noel’s lack of a driving licence – mirroring Caine’s – with “Don’t you realise you’re endangering our lives with your incompetence?!”, so one might just have wondered if she wasn’t a bit loopy). Although, the reveal of an incestuous affair with her brother is a late-stage surprise (“My love, my sister, my spouse”). Talking of whom, Andrews far and away steals the show as a Nazi who works for The Guardian, who sports a silly tache but also gets the single best scene in the movie.

Tennyson: You see, the world must not be run by the frightened and ignorant and weak, and because of my father, and because of Kessler and because of Klausman, it will not be much longer.

Tennyson holds the list that Oberst and Leighton want (the thousand names that will change the world, of terrorist contacts), and late in the game he drops in unannounced on Oberst, who’s entertaining Noel’s mum Althene. Tennyson’s instantly commanding, disarming his host, airily complimenting Althene on the potato salad and sending a plate spinning into a wall above Oberst’s head (“Just keep your nasty, trembling, liver-spotted hands away from those buttons”, referring to Oberst’s wheelchair control panel). There’s a charming ruthlessness to Tennyson that Franhenheimer would have done well to have tapped more, as the director immediately ups his game when he’s got someone putting some welly in.

The Film Yearbook Vol 5 pronounced The Holcroft Covenant one of the Turkeys of the Year, Harlan Kennedy offering a particularly sturdy takedown of Ludlum’s rep (if this was the common view, it may explain why it took another decade and a half to make a success from one of his works, and that one did so by stripping the source novel of all but premise): “another doomed bid to film a book by that master of cinematic prolixity”.

Over-explanatory dialogue aside, The Holcroft Covenant’s pretty clunky and forgettable, alas. It fits loosely into the very minor subgenre of nascent Fourth Reich endeavours that includes The Boys from Brazil, but fails to really draw on the potential of the scenario. In the pantheon of ‘80s Caine thriller fare, I’d take all the other contenders (The Jigsaw Man, The Whistle Blower, The Fourth Protocol) over this one.

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

Comments

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.

You guys sure like watermelon.

The Irishman aka I Heard You Paint Houses (2019)
(SPOILERS) Perhaps, if Martin Scorsese hadn’t been so opposed to the idea of Marvel movies constituting cinema, The Irishman would have been a better film. It’s a decent film, assuredly. A respectable film, definitely. But it’s very far from being classic. And a significant part of that is down to the usually assured director fumbling the execution. Or rather, the realisation. I don’t know what kind of crazy pills the ranks of revered critics have been taking so as to recite as one the mantra that you quickly get used to the de-aging effects so intrinsic to its telling – as Empire magazine put it, “you soon… fuggadaboutit” – but you don’t. There was no point during The Irishman that I was other than entirely, regrettably conscious that a 75-year-old man was playing the title character. Except when he was playing a 75-year-old man.

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.

The guy practically lives in a Clue board.

Knives Out (2019)
(SPOILERS) “If Agatha Christie were writing today, she’d have a character who’s an Internet troll.” There’s a slew of ifs and buts in that assertion, but it tells you a lot about where Rian Johnson is coming from with Knives Out. As in, Christie might – I mean, who can really say? – but it’s fair to suggest she wouldn’t be angling her material the way Johnson does, who for all his pronouncement that “This isn’t a message movie” is very clearly making one. He probably warrants a hesitant pass on that statement, though, to the extent that Knives Out’s commentary doesn’t ultimately overpower the whodunnit side of the plot. On the other hand, when Daniel Craig’s eccentrically accented sleuth Benoit Blanc is asked “You’re not much of a detective, are you?” the only fair response is vigorous agreement.

You're skipping Christmas! Isn't that against the law?

Christmas with the Kranks (2004)
Ex-coke dealer Tim Allen’s underwhelming box office career is, like Vince Vaughn’s, regularly in need of a boost from an indiscriminate public willing to see any old turkey posing as a prize Christmas comedy. He made three Santa Clauses, and here is joined by Jamie Lee Curtis as a couple planning to forgo the usual neighbourhood festivities for a cruise.

Do forgive me for butting in, but I have a bet with my daughter that you are Hercules Porridge, the famous French sleuth.

Death on the Nile (1978)
(SPOILERS) Peak movie Poirot, as the peerless Peter Ustinov takes over duties from Albert Finney, who variously was unavailable for Death on the Nile, didn’t want to repeat himself or didn’t fancy suffering through all that make up in the desert heat. Ustinov, like Rutherford, is never the professional Christie fan’s favourite incarnation, but he’s surely the most approachable and engaging. Because, well, he’s Peter Ustinov. And if some of his later appearances were of the budget-conscious, TV movie variety (or of the Michael Winner variety), here we get to luxuriate in a sumptuously cast, glossy extravaganza.

I am constantly surprised that women’s hats do not provoke more murders.

Witness for the Prosecution (1957)
(SPOILERS) Was Joe Eszterhas a big fan of Witness for the Prosecution? He was surely a big fan of any courtroom drama turning on a “Did the accused actually do it?” only for it to turn out they did, since he repeatedly used it as a template. Interviewed about his Agatha Christie adaptation (of the 1925 play), writer-director Billy Wilder said of the author that “She constructs like an angel, but her language is flat; no dialogue, no people”. It’s not an uncommon charge, one her devotees may take issue with, that her characters are mere pieces to be moved around a chess board, rather than offering any emotional or empathetic interest to the viewer. It’s curious then that, while Wilder is able to remedy the people and dialogue, doing so rather draws attention to a plot that, on this occasion, turns on a rather too daft ruse.

I’m the famous comedian, Arnold Braunschweiger.

Last Action Hero (1993)
(SPOILERS) Make no mistake, Last Action Hero is a mess. But even as a mess, it might be more interesting than any other movie Arnie made during that decade, perhaps even in his entire career. Hellzapoppin’ (after the 1941 picture, itself based on a Broadway revue) has virtually become an adjective to describe films that comment upon their own artifice, break the fourth wall, and generally disrespect the convention of suspending disbelief in the fictions we see parading across the screen. It was fairly audacious, some would say foolish, of Arnie to attempt something of that nature at this point in his career, which was at its peak, rather than playing it safe. That he stumbled profoundly, emphatically so since he went up against the behemoth that is Jurassic Park (slotted in after the fact to open first), should not blind one to the considerable merits of his ultimate, and final, really, attempt to experiment with the limits of his screen persona.

Of course, one m…

So you want me to be half-monk, half-hitman.

Casino Royale (2006)
(SPOILERS) Despite the doubts and trepidation from devotees (too blonde, uncouth etc.) that greeted Daniel Craig’s casting as Bond, and the highly cynical and low-inspiration route taken by Eon in looking to Jason Bourne's example to reboot a series that had reached a nadir with Die Another Day, Casino Royale ends up getting an enormous amount right. If anything, its failure is that it doesn’t push far enough, so successful is it in disarming itself of the overblown set pieces and perfunctory plotting that characterise the series (even at its best), elements that would resurge with unabated gusto in subsequent Craig excursions.

For the majority of its first two hours, Casino Royale is top-flight entertainment, with returning director Martin Campbell managing to exceed his excellent work reformatting Bond for the ‘90s. That the weakest sequence (still good, mind) prior to the finale is a traditional “big” (but not too big) action set piece involving an attempt to…

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…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog