10 to Midnight

Do you know something that you never hear Charles Bronson referred to as?  If you guessed "Hispanic," then you haven't seen Once Upon a Time in the West.  No, I was thinking of the phrase "actor's actor."  I'm not saying that Bronson didn't make some good (usually ensemble) movies, but his work was never a tour de force of the craft.  You already knew that, but I think it is important to point that out before discussing 10 to Midnight.

This film tells the story of a Los Angeles police detective, Leo Kessler (Charles Bronson) and his hunt for a serial killer.  The killer in question has a very particular MO.  He finds a girl he likes, makes obscene phone calls to her (partially in Spanish), and eventually gets completely naked before stabbing his victim to death.  The police have no leads, but Kessler has a hunch that the wealthy, socially elite Warren Stacy (Gene Davis) is the killer, despite several strong alibis.  Kessler's hunch is correct, but he is never able to get any evidence to back up his claim to others, or even to verify it to himself.  Sounds like a typical detective story so far, right?  Well, that takes up close to an hour of this 100 minute movie.

It then makes a peculiar shift in tone from a detective story to a call to vigilantism; Kessler plants blood evidence from a murder victim on some of Stacy's clothes to get Stacy arrested.  When Kessler's partner (Andrew Stevens) figures that out and refuses to back Kessler's play, Kessler admits to planting the evidence and Stacy is released.  You would think that conflict would take quite a bit of time, but it happened in about the time it takes to read that sentence.  Kessler then starts to do his best Dirty Harry impression and openly stalks Stacy in public.  Stacy gets mad and does the most logical thing a serial killer can do: punish the man that clearly has little to no problem going outside the boundaries of the law to catch you, and murder his daughter.  Serial killers are funny like that sometimes.  The film reaches a climax with Stacy, buck nekkid and armed with a knife, chasing Kessler's daughter (Lisa Eilbacher) through the curiously empty streets of Los Angeles at night.  SPOILER: When Stacy is surrounded by the police, naked and armed in the street, he tells Kessler that he will plead insanity and eventually get out of jail, and then he will kill Kessler's entire family.  Kessler just says "No you won't," shoots him in the head, in front of about thirty policemen, roll credits, the end.  Well, that wraps things up with a nice little bow, doesn't it?

With a story that "good," you can safely assume that the acting is around the same level.  Yes, Charles Bronson is the lead here, so you know that he will perform with all the energy of a mustachioed cactus, but surely the other actors will pick up the slack.  Or not.  Lisa Eilbacher (of Beverly Hills Cop fame) and Andrew Stevens (of Body Chemistry 4: Full Exposure, "fame") managed to spark a fairly unconvincing romance on the screen.  It's one of those movie romances that start out with the characters being all like, "I can't stand him/her" and then, magically (because there is no on-screen time given to the development of their relationship), they admit to a mutual attraction and affection.  Blech.  Gene Davis plays the killer and they decide to spend equal parts of the movie shooting from his point of view (okay, it's kind of a slasher film, that's fine) and from behind while he's attacking people.  That means that his butt gets about as much screen time as his face.  If they had just stuck some googly eyes on his butt, they wouldn't have needed to bother with the face; he's quite the actor, believe me.  There are some noteworthy actors in small roles, though.  A young Kelly Preston plays one of Eilbacher's roommates, who is apparently deathly allergic to knife wounds.  Wilford Brimley plays Bronson's police captain, although I have a hard time judging his work; whenever he speaks, all I hear is him rambling about oatmeal.

Director/co-writer J. Lee Thompson was certainly no stranger to serial killer movies or even vigilante movies at this point in his career, but the man had definitely peaked by 1983.  When a director willingly works with Death Wish sequels-era Bronson, you know they have really given up trying.  Thompson later directed Death Wish 4, too.  I blame Thompson for a lot of this film's problems.  The pacing is very lopsided; the vigilante part is not foreshadowed well, so it feels very abrupt, although nowhere near as abrupt as the ending.  Of course, the acting is just terrible, but some of it could have been fixed by just suggesting that Bronson not read his lines like he didn't understand the words.

The worst aspect of this movie is its lame attempts at being intelligent.  Thompson throws a lot of pseudo-psychology in the script and it just comes off as corny.  Why does Stacy kill all these people?  Because he hates his mother.  Oh.  I'm surprised there aren't more teenage girls out murdering strangers in the night.  Even Bronson gets in on the psychology, saying that "anybody who does something like this, his knife has to be his penis."  So...your best suspect is a bed bug?  Isabella Rossellini would be so mad!  And yet, there is no explanation given for the killer's motives.  Yeah, he seems to hate his mother, but if a movie is going to waste my time with stabs at couch psychology, then it might as well give him a tragic origin.  If he's just supposed to be a jerk monster, then why not cut out those motivational scenes and save us some viewing time?

This is a sloppy movie, too.  Where does a murder victim hide her diary?  In a cheap box labeled "My Diary."  How many stab wounds does it take to kill a person?  Just one, and they're all immediately fatal.  The killer spends a lot of time naked on-screen, so there are an awful lot of crotch-level props shown.  Grown women sharing an apartment share one bedroom with one closet and two double beds?  In what reality is this movie taking place?  Oh, and the title has absolutely nothing to do with the story at all.  What happens at 11:50 PM?  I have no idea.  I'm not saying that fixing these details would fix this movie, but it would help disguise the awfulness of it.

10 to Midnight starts out as a fairly conventional detective story that could have been half-decent.  Coulda, shoulda, woulda, I know.  Dabbling in the slasher and vigilante cop genres just muddled the story in a movie that should have been very straight forward.  The ending is what drops this from "bad movie" to "utter crap," though.  Is there a message in the ending?  Is Kessler to be admired for his actions, or condemned?  I don't really care, because the characters were unappealing, but I honestly don't know what the point of this movie was.

The Guns of Navarone

Imagine you are a casting director, in charge of casting a war movie that will be released in 1961.  Your task is to find a leading actor that can fit the description implied by this line of dialogue: "You speak German like a German."  Who do you choose?  It's not an easy choice.  When I think of available lead actors in the early 60s, I can only think of actors with very unique voices that would sound extremely funny speaking German.  Think about it...John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Cary Grant, James Stewart --- none of them would sound right saying "Ich liebe Deutschland."  Clearly, the best choice was...Gregory Peck?  Really?  Don't get me wrong, Gregory Peck was a man among men, the type of guy that cut razors when he shaved, but...a convincing German?  I have a hard time imagining that.  Of course, this was a time when authenticity in casting often meant British actors putting on dark makeup, so maybe I'm just being picky.

The Guns of Navarone is a Mission: Impossible-type operation, set in World War II and based on Alistair MacLean's novel of the same name. 2000 British soldiers have been marooned on a Greek island in the Aegean Sea, with limited food and weapons.  Intelligence reports indicate that the German forces are planning to make an assault within a week on this island, massacring the mostly defenseless soldiers.  All attempts to save these men have failed because the nearby island of Navarone has two enormous anti-aircraft-style guns covering the stranded troops and their island.  Since attacks by air and sea have failed, a more subtle approach is needed; a motley crew is assembled to sail to the island, sneak into the military complex and blow up the guns.  It's a simple plan.  All they have to do is sail to the island without attracting attention, climb a nearly climb-proof cliff, cross the island unnoticed, infiltrate the military base, sneak into the complex that contains the guns, and blow it to hell.  Viewers learn all this within the first ten minutes of the film.  Does it work?  It's a WWII movie, made in 1961.  What do you think?  Actually, history buffs will recognize this fictional plot as mirroring the Dodecanese Campaign, where British forces tried to capture the Greek and Italian islands to use as airbases against the Germans; it was a costly failure for the British.  I guess the ending isn't so obvious, after all.

This is one of those movies where a bunch of hardy strangers are brought together to kill some Germans.  They do just that.  Gregory Peck is the supposedly fluent German-speaker that is only on the mission because of his rock climbing abilities.  His partner (who openly vowed to kill Peck after the war) is Anthony Quinn, an officer in the defeated Greek army.  They are assigned help, consisting of an extremely British explosives expert (David Niven), a hand-to-hand combat expert with a specialty with knives (Stanley Baker), the leader (Anthony Quayle), and a hot-headed shooter (James Darren).  The group has nothing but bad luck the entire time; their ship sinks on the way to Navarone, their leader breaks his leg on the initial climb, and Germans dog them throughout the film...almost as if they knew where the group would be.  It gets a little predictable at times: one guy will stand up to the authority figure, another will lose his taste for battle, others will form bonds of brotherhood, etc.  The movie throws in some romance and betrayal to spice things up, but this is a pretty standard, mission-oriented, 1960s war movie.

Not that '60s war movies are bad, by any means.  This movie is unique within its genre with both the setting (WWII Greece) and the activities (rock climbing, sabotage), which help keep the movie lively.  It is also pretty brutal for its time.  A few men in the group die unmourned and a woman gets executed, both very atypical of war films in 1961.  The action is fairly commonplace, but director J. Lee Thompson does a pretty good job getting his varied (in talent and experience) cast to react appropriately. 

Movies like this can only get so far on spectacle and plot, though.  It is the cast's performance that determines the longevity of the film.  Here, we have Gregory Peck, who tends to play the same character over and over again; I mean that in a good way, because his stern persona is perfect for war movies.  Anthony Quinn does a decent job of playing Greek, despite the fact that he is Mexican.  The stormy relationship between Peck and Quinn is supposed to form the core of the film, but David Niven's performance opposite Peck is more memorable.  Niven's character is the least military-like in the group and he spends much of the first half of the movie attempting to be sarcastic (I say "attempting" only because the script isn't great).  However, when things get tough, he is the one that stands up for his fellow soldiers and acts as the group's conscience against the tactical mind of Peck.  The dynamic between these two men sums up the film quite nicely.  They address the issues of the value of life on impossible missions, the tactics of torture, honor among officers, and more.  The movie feels dated when you watch it, but it has the decency to function as a movie about soldiers and not as a propaganda piece.