FILM REVIEW OF ''DRUMS IN THE DEEP SOUTH" (1951)

Although the South lost the war, the Confederates win the battle in “Drums in the Deep South!”  Oscar-winning art designer William Cameron Menzies helmed this Civil War yarn based on a screenplay by “Whistle Stop” scribe Philip Yordan and Sidney Harmon from a story by Hollister Noble.  Later, Yordan collaborated with “Talk of the Town” writer Harmon on "Battle of the Bulge," but Harmon was now a producer.  One of the best B-movie directors in the business, B. Reeves Eason of “The Phantom Empire” handled the second-unit action.  Menzies treats us to a glimpse or two of slaves in the fields and those who worked in the houses.  As many commentators have written, movies about the Civil War are few in number and the good ones even fewer.  Guy Wilkerson has a bit part as a Confederate sentry, while Denver Pyle is cast as an obnoxious Union guard.

The explosive action unfolds in Georgia in 1861.  The first scene occurs at an antebellum mansion.  Colonel Braxton Summers (Craig Stevens of “Peter Gunn”) has returned from Atlanta.  According to Summers, the South has been planting too much cotton.  Uncle Albert cannot believe Braxton’s news.  “Cotton is king.  The whole south is built on it.  And the world is knocking down our doors for more.”  Braxton tells his beautiful wife, Kathy (Barbara Payton), Atlanta is a powder keg.  Furthermore, the militia has been called up.  He adds all West Pointers are being called back for duty.  Like Uncle Albert, Kathy believes the storm over succession will abate. Brax lacks her confidence.  Meantime, he shows Kathy a black scarf he purchased for her.  She isn’t overjoyed when he tells her about encountering two of his former roommates from West Point.  The soap opera component of “Drums” rears its amorous head.  Kathy refuses to see Clay Clayburn (James Craig of “Flying G-Men”) who has never stopped loving her.  She assures Brax anything she felt for Clay has passed.  Brax tells Kathy that Clay has changed.  As it turns out, Clay and Will Deming (Guy Madison of "Seven Winchesters for a Massacre"), lie about their thriving shipping business.  They ship cotton from New Orleans to Liverpool and then take wool to Boston.  At dinner, Brax reveals he is experimenting with a new cotton seed for export.  After Brax and Will excuse themselves to discuss his experiment, Clay confronts Kathy.  He admits he is not a ship captain but a common seaman.  Moreover, he has neither repaid his father’s debts nor bought back the family plantation.  Outside the mansion roars a storm that possesses all the fury of Armageddon.  Later, Albert forsakes his chair and proclaims amid thunder and lightning that the South has bombarded Fort Sumter.  

Menzies stages a timeline as the years march past to an artillery barrage.  By 1864, the Union Army has compelled the Confederacy to retreat.  General Sherman's Army is threatening Atlanta.  General Joseph Johnston (Lewis Martin of “Operation Pacific”) selects Major Clayburn for the mission.  Johnston orders Clayburn to sneak twenty men with four cannon through occupied lines and position them atop Devil's Mountain to blunt the Federal advance.  Johnston’s closest officers have doubts about Clayburn’s qualifications.  “Clayburn is reckless beyond all risk.  He exposes himself to enemy fire on all occasions.  How he has come through this war and still be alive . . ., one officer cannot understand Clayburn’s incredible luck.  Another officer observes, “The man seems to be seeking death.”  “A good soldier,” Johnston points out, “dies only once.  And death is someone he knows.” 

When Clayburn enters the headquarters tent, Johnston informs him he has “a difficult job for him.”  Johnston explains, “Sherman’s whole army poured out of Chattanooga three weeks ago.  They are moving straight along this single railroad and heading for Atlanta.  If he takes Atlanta, we’re doomed.  Our only chance is to draw him deep in Georgia, cut off his supply lines, and destroy his army bit by bit.  The bulk of his supplies are pouring through this same railroad and as fast as we destroy it, his men rebuild it.  What we’ve got to do is find a weak link in this railroad so we can keep destroying it faster than Sherman’s men can repair it.”

Clayburn is familiar with the terrain since he grew up there.  Johnston indicates Devil’s Mountain dominates the railway where it swings through Snake Gap.  The General believes this constitutes “the weak link in Sherman’s supply line.”  Johnston wants Clayburn to blast the railroad until the Confederate Army can regroup and counter-attack.  “General, Devil’s Mountain is a sheer cliff,” Clayburn warns. “I might be able to get twenty men up there, but four cannon that’s another question.”  Johnston relieves him when he tells him about a scout who can guide them from inside the cave to the top.  “General, if I can get the cannon on top of Devil’s Mountain, I could fight there until doomsday,” Clayburn vows with a gleam in his eyes.  “You may have to, Major,” they warn him.  No sooner have they embarked on their mission than things turn sour.  When our protagonists rendezvous with their guide, they find him swinging from a noose.  

Menzies never shows the Confederates whistling Dixie as they trundle their cannons across rugged terrain through enemy country to Devils’ Mountain.  Once they get inside the mountain, it’s quite a chore getting the artillery up to the top.  Menzies does a competent job of driving the action along without sacrificing g momentum.  It takes him approximately 26 minutes to get the Southerners to their objective.  Devils Mountain resembles the “Close Encounters of a Third Kind” mountain.  This is a rare Civil War epic with an interesting premise that anticipates the blockbuster 1961 World War II mission movie "The Guns of Navarone."  The music is excellent! Composer Dimitri Tiomkin provides an atmospheric orchestral soundtrack.  “Drums in the Deep South” is an entertaining epic.

FILM REVIEW OF ''THE HOBBIT: THE UNEXPECTED JOURNEY" (2012)

Long before he took the helm of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, New Zealand born Peter Jackson had acquired both a name and a reputation for himself as an independent splatter-gore horror movie maestro. If you haven't seen "Bad Taste" (1987), "Meet the Feebles" (1989), and ultimately "Dead Alive," you've missed three memorable epics. Repellent in some respects but brilliant in others with the brilliant winning out over the repellent summarizes these films. The squeamish should shun them. "Bad Taste" lives up to its title, while "Meet the Feebles" teeters on the brink of puppet porn with scenes that anticipated the 2004 gross-out fest "Team America: World Police." Jackson courted mainstream audiences with "Heavenly Creatures" (1984) starring Kate Winslet of "Titanic" fame.  Later, in 1996, he put "Back to the Future" lead Michael J. Fox through the paces in his supernatural chiller "The Frighteners." These two are both worth renting if you've never seen them.  Ultimately, Jackson ascended into the pantheon of movie directors with the "Rings" trilogy.  Sadly, his creative star plummeted with his dreadful "King Kong" remake and the lackluster but sympathetic crime thriller "The Lonely Bones."  Now, Jackson sets out to relive his glory days with "The Hobbit." Essentially, Jackson's Golden Age consists of his J.R.R. Tolkien adaptations of "The Lord of the Rings" with "The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001), followed by "The Two Towers" (2002) and finally the Oscar-winning "The Return of the King" (2003). 
 

Unfortunately, "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" emerges as a pale imitation of Jackson's earlier Middle-earth triumphs.  No end of money has been lavished on this sprawling spectacle that serves as the first act of the planned "Hobbit" trilogy.  Virtually everybody from the earlier trilogy reprises the roles they created in the "Rings" extravaganzas.  Christopher Lee, Ian Holm, Cate Blanchet, Hugo Weaving, and Elijah Wood drop in for a scene or two.  Ian McKellen doesn't wander through every scene, but he clocks in more time than anybody else.  By now, you're probably shaking your head about the decision Warner Brothers and New Line Cinema made to make more than one film out of "The Hobbit or There and Back Again."  Wasn't it bad enough when Hollywood divided the last "Harry Potter" novel into two movies?  Or that they perpetrated the same strategy with the final "Twilight" novel "Breaking Dawn?" Audaciously, Warner and New Line have gone one film further by stretching "The Hobbit" into three, not just two films! 

  
Ostensibly, "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" (**1/2 out of ****) qualifies as an above-average but predictable first installment in Jackson's newest, larger-than-life, mythological, sword and sorcery trilogy.  Martin Freeman, who co-stars as Dr. Watson in the BBC series "Sherlock," was born to play furry-footed Bilbo Baggins.  Freeman displays a knack for comedy. He is an unobtrusive comic.  He doesn't attract attention to himself, and he savors subtlety the same way the great silent era comic Buster Keaton did.  This minimalist approach makes Freeman appear far more hilarious.  One can only hope either or both of the remaining "Hobbit" movies do Freeman justice.  Freeman imparts both a sparkle and sense of spontaneity to these formulaic antics that nobody but lanky McKellen can rival.  On the other hand, as sympathetic a character as Bilbo is, he is one of the few who has nothing to worry about regarding his own survival. Similarly, Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen of "X-Men") is immune from death, too.  Meantime, it is reassuring to see his peaked hat as he looms above Bilbo and the dwarves.  Everything in "The Hobbit," you must understand, is spelled out in flashback by Ian Holm's elderly Bilbo at the genesis of the action.  For the record, the action in “The Hobbit” occurs 60 years prior to the “Lord of the Rings” adventures.

The grungy villains are a step down in quality from the "Rings" trilogy.  The problem is they aren't very menacing, even for a PG-13 film.  Jackson keeps the violence fairly immaculate, too.  "The Hobbit" suffers because it lacks a centerpiece villain.  The gauntlet of computer-generated adversaries that our heroes encounter isn’t especially impressive.  The "Twilight" wolves looked far more ferocious than these wolves Worst, the movie ends eleven minutes shy of three hours.  Comparatively, the theatrical "Rings" movies ran about the same length.  Nevertheless, Jackson subjects us to lengthy expository-laden scenes throughout and this loquacity slows down "The Hobbit" until our heroes wade into warfare with trolls, orcs, wolves and other mountainous monsters. 
 

The first 40 minutes of "The Hobbit" channels "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Various dwarfs assemble at Bilbo's home in the Shire for an impromptu party.  Jackson plays this scene largely for laughs, but nothing about this scene is outrageously side-splitting.  Naturally, these fellows with their droopy snouts gobble down everything in sight, while Gandalf entreats the Halfling to join them. . Mind you, Bilbo is content in his easy chair with a library and a larder within arm's reach.  Gandalf persuades Bilbo to join them and experience life first hand.  Actually, Bilbo differs very little from contemporary couch potatoes.  An evil dragon named Smaug, it seems, has evicted the sword-wielding dwarfs of Erebor.  "The Hobbit" depicts the quest of Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) and thirteen dwarves to reoccupy their kingdom known as the Lonely Mountain.  Not until fadeout do these pugnacious dwarfs accept Bilbo as one of their own.  The "Transformer" mountain warriors are imaginative and reminded me of the asteroid in "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back" where a desolate rock changed into a creature when Han Solo took refuge in it.  The best scene in "The Hobbit" takes place when Bilbo stumbles onto Gollum, and they challenge each other with riddles for possession of the ring.  Andy Serkis is superb once more as the creepy Gollum.  The best part of "The Hobbit" occurs in its final hour when our heroes take a ride in the skies and scramble through a set reminiscent of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." Sadly, what was once magical has lost its luster, and "The Hobbit" is only half as good as the "Lord of the Rings" masterpieces.

FILM REVIEW OF ''KILLING THEM SOFTLY" (2012)

Connoisseurs of hard-boiled criminal melodramas should line-up for writer and director Andrew Dominik’s latest outing “Killing Them Softly,” (**** OUT OF ****) starring Brad Pitt, Ray Liotta, James Gandolfini, Sam Shepard, and Richard Jenkins.  Mind you, this isn’t a high-octane heist caper with edge-of-the-seat suspense, careening car chases, and scantily clad beauty queens.  If anything, “Killing Them Softly” qualifies as just the opposite.  Had I not read the page-turner Dominik adapted for this third feature film, I would have thought he was imitating Quentin Tarantino without the torture scenes.  Indeed, the first time I saw this atmospheric, but strictly small potatoes ‘disorganized crime’ thriller with its loquacious low-lifers, dismal urban locales, and ultra-violent, artsy-smartsy, shoot’em ups, I walked away with a low opinion of it.  Dominik adapted “Killing Them Softly” from the 216-page novel “Cogan’s Trade,” published back in 1974, long before Tarantino arrived in Hollywood.  Anybody who remembers the vintage Robert Mitchum movie “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (1973), will savor this 97-minute epic.  The characters are unsavory hoodlums with foul mouths and itchy trigger fingers who love to talk about their individual peccadilloes.  A liquor-swilling James Gandolfini appears for three scenes and vanishes, while Pitt looks like a pirate, smokes like chimney, and sports a genuinely cynical attitude.  Unfortunately, this Brad Pitt movie doesn’t look like it was designed for mainstream, PG-13 audiences, any more than Dominik’s last picture, the obscure western “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”  Nevertheless, although it looks like a hundred other forgettable, straight-to-video crime movies, “Killing Them Softly” is one of the coolest, all-male, crime movies you will enjoy.

“Killing Them Softly” draws its title from the protagonist’s method of killing people.  Chiefly, he doesn’t want to kill anybody who he knows.  The victim’s outburst of emotion and their pleas for mercy horrify him.  Basically, rather than killing somebody you know, you only rub out those you don’t know.  Ostensibly, this riveting crime thriller amounts to a series of long-winded conversations between hoodlums punctuated with gunplay.  While the novel took place in the 1970s, Dominik has updated it to 2008 during the Obama Vs. McCain presidential election.  Wall Street has just plunged America into the depths of a recession, and nobody is happy.  The economy is stalling out.  An unlucky ex-con Johnny Amato (Vincent Curatola of HBO’s “The Sopranos”) owns a dry-cleaning business.  He hatches a scheme with an accomplice, Frankie (Scoot McNairy of “Argo”), that involves knocking over a mob-protected poker game.  Everybody knowsif you try to steal from the mob, you can expect to die a hideous death.  Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta of “Goodfellas”) masterminded such a heist; he robbed his own game and then convinced the mob enforcers sent to sweat a confession out of him that he didn’t do it.  After Dillon (Sam Shepard of “Safe House”) and Kenny Gill (Slaine of “The Town”) rough Markie up, Markie goes back to business as usual.  One evening, with a different group of poker players, Markie lets it drop that he robbed his own poker game.  Nobody retaliates, but Johnny Amato decides if he doesn’t rob Markie’s new set-up that somebody will beat him to it.  Frankie isn’t so sure about the wisdom of Amato’s strategy.  Amato assures Frankie that everybody will remember Markie’s early treachery and the real hoodlums will get away scot-free with about $50-thousand.  Frankie and his wisecracking, heroin-shooting, Australian pal, Russell (Ben Mendelsohn of “Knowing”), burst in on Markie’s poker game and rob not only Markie but also his players.  Frankie wields an incredible, double-barreled, sawed off shotgun with the barrels cut so far back that you can see the shells with their green crimping sticking out.  No sooner than they hold up the game and escape, the mob in the anonymous city where the action unfolds imports a thug, Cogan (Brad Pitt of “Fight Club”), to straighten the situation out.  It seems that this second robbery has hurt the mob.  Nobody wants to gamble for fear they will be held up.  Cogan and a mob attorney, Driver (Richard Jenkins of “The Cabin in the Woods”), arrange the details and the pay-offs.  Of course, nothing goes according to plan for Cogan.  He hires an out-of-town torpedo, Mickey (James Gandolfini of “True Romance”), to whack Johnny Amato because Amato knows Cogan.  Again, Cogan has neither the patience nor the desire to watch Amato plead for his life before he blows his head to smithereens.

The late George V. Higgins captured the grimy underbelly of the criminal world in his 26 or so novels.  He shocked critics with his use of profanity.  Like Tarantino, Higgins possessed a droll sense of humor.  Higgins’ characters uttered the F-word as often as Al Pacino’s Cuban gangster did in “Scarface.”  Dominik has transferred “Cogan’s Trade” to the big-screen with enviable fidelity to the source material.  “Killing Them Softly” is one of the rare exceptions to the rule where the movie isn’t as good as the novel.  Sure, some things must have bit the editing room floor, but the film never wears out its welcome. When he isn’t faithfully duplicating Higgins’ irreverent dialogue, Dominik proves that he is a genuinely gifted director.  He shows what it is like for a heroin addict to carry on a conversation.  Furthermore, the little touches distinguish “Killing Them Softly;” you’ve never see a car door shut the way that Dominik depicts it.  Using television news clips from politicians during the 2008 Wall Street debacle, Dominik compares the criminal tendencies of Wall Street with hoodlums.  Nothing about “Killing Them Softly” is delicate, but its sense of irony will have you rolling in the aisles.