Screen Screed: Thoughts on Movies From a Lifelong Eater of Cinema

      Theater of Smoke      The Wikipedia article about the Lebanese Civil War, which lasted from 1975 until 1990, killing approximately 120,000 people and repelling nearly a million from the country, features a table listing the belligerents.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that the United States and Israel were involved.  Others included France, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Syria, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, Libya, South Yemen, Hezbollah, the PLO, Iran, and several Lebanese military and paramilitary organizations, with Christian and Muslim tensions added.      It was a clusterfuck in a complex ancient country about 7/10s the size of Connecticut.      The World War Two American battleship U.S.S. New Jersey  in 1983 and 1984 fired its sixteen inch guns at Lebanon, causing me even then to recall Marlowe's amazement in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness when he remarks that the ship he's on, firin...

      A Snowy Story With Arms Trafficking      When I was a kid one of my favorite movies was Where Eagles Dare , starring Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood.  It deals with a secret British mission to infiltrate a German fortress built on a high mount in the Bavarian Alps.  The Germans have captured a British general who has knowledge of the upcoming Normandy invasion.  Burton and Eastwood are to rescue him, but they run into many obstacles, with Eastwood's U.S. Army Ranger character left in the dark by Burton as the story gets increasingly complex.      The film was based on a novel by Alistair MacLean, who also wrote Breakheart Pass , a movie set mostly on board a train in the American West in the late nineteenth century.  This film, from 1975, is also very complicated, with the protagonist (Charles Bronson) not who he seems to be, guarding his secrets just as Burton's character does in Where Eagles Dare .  On o...

      Something From an Alien Garden      In 1956, in the middle era of 1950s science fiction films, a genre composed of great, good, mediocre, and bad movies, Roger Corman (who went on to become the most successful B movie producer and director) directed his second science fiction effort, It Conquered the World .      I've seen this film at least three times.  It doesn't make much sense.  The writing is too off-kilter at times for the film to be taken seriously as drama.  The depiction of military men is played for comedy, with two of Corman's later lead actors from legendary films, Jonathan Haze ( The   Little Shop of Horrors ) and Dick Miller ( A Bucket of Blood ) portraying a silly fool/straight man combination having nothing to do with the plot.      Even so, the film fascinates me because of Lee Van Cleef's performance as a scientist somehow in radio contact with an alien from Venus.  The Venu...