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| Shaken. Not stirred. |
In his sleep ("He was shaken, but he has not stirred." Yes, I went there.), aged 90 years, in the Bahamas. (Where else, for the once and forever James Bond?)
There's little to write about a legend with 50 years in movies that hasn't already been written.
But I think I feel a movie marathon coming on, and not a Bond flick in the lot:
Murder On The Orient Express
The Wind And The Lion
The Man Who Would Be King
A Bridge Too Far
The Great Train Robbery
Outland*
Highlander
The Name Of The Rose
The Untouchables
The Presidio
Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade
The Hunt For Red October
Rising Sun
The Rock
The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen
All very good to great flicks, in no small part due to the star, and all done after he'd passed 40.
Long after he'd hung up the shoulder holster. So much for a "Bond" career curse.
We are poorer for his loss, but were blessed by his talent.
We shall not see his like for a long time.
*(Which elegantly solved the glaringly unforgivable deficiency in High Noon : the Hollyweird-stupid idea that in any Old Western town, the town would crawl off and hide from bad men. As John Wayne noted, "I don't get this picture." With any lesser screen legends than Gary Copper and Grace Kelly, it would have been a notorious mega-flop. Make it a company-town mining outpost in space, however, and it sells perfectly.)
Good write up as always Aesop.
ReplyDeleteFor a non-Bond performance of his earlier days might I suggest The Hill
Without Connery, The Hunt for Red October does not work.
ReplyDeleteAnd skip his last film, “The League...of awful plots”.
ReplyDeleteHad to LOVE him playing against EVERY TYPE he had been saddled with in HIGHLANDER!!!
ReplyDeleteI've watched five of those in the last year, two in the last month (all while blogging).
ReplyDeleteThe man was talented, through and through.
The Russia House
ReplyDelete"C'mon man...!"
@TB,
ReplyDeleteActually, without Connery, The Hunt For Red October doesn't work as well.
A lot of people could have done the part justice. Connery made a great Ramius, but the actual indispensible pieces there was Alec Baldwin, who absolutely nailed the actual literary Jack Ryan to a "T", before Hollywood got their fingers in the pie, and Han Soloed the follow ups to bugger-all (and then Baldwin's ego got ahold of him before he could have done for Jack Ryan exactly what Connery did with James Bond: made him a portmanteau tent-pole franchise character. What a putz.); and the screenwriters who clipped 300 pages out of a 469-page novel, and still left the meat and bones of a great story intact. That was a masterclass on adapting a book to the screen properly, and the only one of the Clancy novels they didn't totally screw to hell.
@MAJack,
LOEG wasn't bad at all, and he made a very good Quartermain. Done better, you had the Avengers before you knew you wanted them.
@Badger,
I only saw The Russia House once, when it came out, and it just didn't impress me. But then, almost all the movies made of le Carre's books have sucked hard, some are outright dreadful, and he made most of a good writing career seem like more than it was wholly on the strength of Richard Burton's stellar performance in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Without that masterwork, there never would have been a second film made, and even reading his stuff is more drudgery than pleasure on a good day.
I regard him and his works in general like a lifelong repetition of H.G. Wells' Island Of Dr. Moreau, a book they repeatedly make into a movie, and everyone of them absolutely sucks @$$. I don't think any other outcome is possible.
If I were the Emperor of Hollywood for but a day, the one infallible test for would-be producers would be to have them evaluate that work and give an opinion on whether or not to greenlight it for production.
Everyone who said "yes" would be taken to the backlot, put up against a wall, and summarily shot to death, for the good of the industry, and for attempting crimes against humanity.
The survivors would be given any of le Carre's novels. Same rules.
That, alone, would markedly improve the quality of films, and the care and thought given to deciding what to make, and what to blackball. (But then, 90% of screenplays are bought to insure they never get made - something most screenwriters still haven't figured out - because they're 1000% better than the crap peddled and penned by the supposed "geniuses" running the biz...into the sewer.
OTOH, some actors, like Connery and a couple of dozen others, could (and virtually have) read toothpaste tubes and cereal boxes and made blockbusters until they died.
@Aesop I agree (mostly) with your assessment of Le Carre's works (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy should've never seen anything but the File-13). However, The Russia House works much better as a film, the cast is stellar, and the dialogue throughout is eminently quotable. The fact that not all movies move at Keanu Reeves' 'Speed' is lamentable by some, treasured by others for the story telling, and that one - on film anyway - was told very well indeed.
ReplyDeleteBut... it's your binge watch, so enjoy. You can keep his bit part in Bridge Too Far (a movie that butchered the notion of translating foreign languages in ETO war films) and I'll keep The Russia House.
And, yeah, Burton made the first book work on film in a way that the book did not.