Like the parson’s egg, parts of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull are very good.

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s fourth entry in the feature film series (Indy also has a life in mass market paperback books and a short-lived television series) has a strong opening sequence, a good third-quarter chase sequence, and an overly familiar end (though I wasn’t entirely clear on what happened to Cate Blanchett’s Irina Spalko, who seemed to be suffering a similar fate as Paul Freeman in the first film). In fact, I felt as if I had seen the film already, last December in National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Both films have a too-large crew of treasure seekers made up mostly of one family, with the addition of an underdeveloped character of questionable morals (Ray Winstone as Mac), and both films end up in a temple of gold that gets filled with water. The final “action” sequence is like one of those endless anime climaxes where things just keep exploding and crumbling endlessly, with the patented Spielberg addition of things glowing before they fall apart whilst people look on in frozen awe.

On the Raider’s scale, the film is not quite as good as the first one, but better than the third, and way better than the second. Its artistic success is probably attributable to the fact that Spielberg and Co. (the script is credited to David Koepp, Jeff Nathanson, and Lucas) worked essentially off of a template of the first film, which it mimics closely, except for the added family member element borrowed from the third film (here a potential “son,” in Last Crusade a dad).

At first it’s disconcerting to see all those old faces: Ford, Karen Allen, Jim Broadbent (in some cases, faces such as John Hurt’s, made even older via make up). At times the movie itself seems old and sluggish, like an ancient baseball player on Old Timer’s Night throwing out the first ball. But soon you get used to it, because the plot elements are so familiar and go by so fast that you don’t really “see” anyone anyway, and you can slip into the roller coaster ride, though here it does feel more like a warm bath.

Given the “secret” of the film’s plot-generating premise (i.e, what the treasure hunters are looking for), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is rendered less a fourth Indy film than the third in a Spielberg aliens trilogy, after CE3K and E.T.. Except that the alien element of the film is probably less Spielberg’s idea than Lucas’s. Indeed, the fogey-ish quality the film emits can also be attributed to its going over old ground that The X-Files did back in the 1990s.

Like the third film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has a female villain to liven up the action, and Blanchett’s character is slightly more developed than most of the others. She is a Stalinist, though at the tail end of the reign of Nikolai Bulganin, but whose dedication to her cause hides hubris. Like Freeman’s character in the first film, ultimately she selfishly wants power and knowledge, seemingly on general principles. With her Rocky and Bullwinkle accent and ruthless athleticism, Blanchett’s Spalko considerably livens up the film: this is one “Natasha” who doesn’t bore us.

This is the second of a series of essays commemorating films that will be included in this summer’s D. K. Holm Film Festival. Dark of the Sun will be screened for free at 8:45 PM (or whenever it gets dark) on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 1804 SE 38th Avenue, Portland, OR, 97214. For more information about showtimes and venues, contact Lance Kramer at kramer.lance@gmail.com or 503-231-3561.

If you’re going to do a journey action film, you’ve got to have a drunk doctor.

That’s one of the many rules for the perfect action film to be found in Dark of the Sun, the now-obscure merc film released in 1968, and starring Rod Taylor and Jim Brown. The film is kicking off the 10-movie D. K. Holm Film Festival on Thursday night, May 29th.

It is also narratively imperative that the alcoholic doctor deliver a baby. And that there be a blonde woman for various protag- and antagonists to fight over. And, when the savages who are the main threat to the journeying party finally close in, a noble man must press a gun to his wife’s head to save her from the brutal ravishment in store.

All of these elements go back at least to John Ford’s Stagecoach, which was written by Dudley Nichols and an uncredited Ben Hecht, from the story, “Stage to Lordsburg” by Ernest Haycox. Elegant gambler John Carradine does not pull the trigger, as his equivalent in Dark does, but the gesture is enduring. Dark of the Sun is based on a 1965 novel by Wilbur Smith, the popular Rhodesian writer, and given these familiar elements, the film is thus not “original” in the conventional sense. But in pop products, you don’t need to be original. It’s all how the elements are presented.

Also known as The Mercenaries, the film is directed by Jack Cardiff, the great cinematographer of many Michael Powell movies, and director in his own right of about 12 features. His approach is a solid enthusiasm, a methodical attention to the plot line. This solidity is what makes Dark of the Sun a textbook action film, a resource for anyway seeking to write or direct a Saturday afternoon action film. You’d think that it would be a favorite film of Steven Spielberg, but no, it is Quentin Tarantino who has championed the film in the past, no doubt because of Jim Brown’s fine, understated performance.

Cardiff mentions Dark of the Sun in passing towards the end of his autobiography, Magic Hour, but only to say that developed a great friendship with Taylor and that the film, though set in the then Belgian Congo, was shot in Jamaica, which is the only place the production could find the right steam engine train. Cardiff also noted that, though the film was criticized for its violence at the time, his research into conditions in the Congo at the time unearthed images more sanguinary than what he put in the film.

Dark of the Sun concerns the three-day mission of mercenary Captain Bruce Curry (Taylor) to travel 300 miles north through rebel territory on a train laden with 40 troops, to rescue the residents of a still-unattacked white outpost called Port Reprieve. His assignment comes from new Congolese president Ubi (Calvin Lockhart) who is in league with European diamond brokers. It just so happens that there are $50 million dollars worth of uncut diamonds in the town’s time-locked safe. Curry’s most trusted aide is Ruffo (Brown), who fights for political rather than mercenary reasons, and they have a great friendship. If Brown’s performance is rather underrated, so is Taylor’s, in this and several other movies. The Australian-born actor blends a Grantish charm with circus athleticism, making him a sort of poor man’s Burt Lancaster. The two work well together. There is a great conversation between Curry and Ruffo, well-acted and well-written (by credited screenwriters Quentin Werty and Adrian Spies) about 35 minutes into the film, a great revelatory and testimonial chat that most modern action films probably wouldn’t pause for.

The film is produced by George Englund, once married to Cloris Leachman and later an associate, as it were, of Marlon Brando, and though liberal in spirit the film hews to the racial notions of the time, which is what has probably minimized its legacy. Africans are either bug-eyed rapine savages, tools of the Europeans, or Man Fridays. Yet in what other film would the dignity of a minor character such as Kataki (Bloke Modisane) be honored? In any case, there are numerous great moments in the film: Curry’s put down of a fat journalist; the assembly of the train by night (anticipating the reconstruction of the trucks in Sorcerer), the air attack on the train which eventually hides in a tunnel, an unnecessary fight between Curry and the film’s villain, ex-Nazi Henlein (Peter Carsten; voiced, I suspect by Paul Frees, the noted announcer and character actor [seen as a scientist in The Thing]), the suspense of waiting for the bank’s time lock to open as the rebels, called Simbas, are getting closer, and the mercenary team’s clandestine re-entering of the town during a Simbanese riot.

Best of all, though, is the great catchy score by Jacques Loussier, which is up there with the great scores by Herrmann and Morricone, and so unlike the tuneless sawing of modern film composers such as Howard Shore. Loussier is still alive as of this writing, but has only composed scores intermittently through the 1990s, after doing Melville’s Le Doulos and the Bond film You Only Live Twice.

If as a viewer I have a “problem” with Dark of the Sun, as an action film and as a work of art, it is the pro forma and unnecessary death of an important character and the forced morality of the final sequence. But one sort of expects lousy endings from films made before the ‘70s. In any case, up until those moments, Dark of the Sun is the perfect action film.

This is the first of a series of essays commemorating films that will be included in this summer’s D. K. Holm Film Festival. For more information about showtimes and venues, contact Lance Kramer at kramer.lance@gmail.com.

Every once in a while your adult self manages to catch up with a film you saw once, fleetingly, as a kid, a film about which you remember neither the title, the cast, nor who made it. All that remains is a few vivid scenes or shots, and a basic premise. Periodically, for the next several decades, you spend untold hours of mental exercises or physical research trying to track down that film’s title.

Such things are easier these days. Back in the early days of VHS, you could ask one of those rarely enthusiastic video store clerks, or write Joe Bob Briggs, where there was a chance, if he printed your query, that one of his readers might recognize it. There wasn’t much I could tell them. This black and white British science fiction film starts out with a man running across a wet bridge at night, and ends with someone falling to their death on the street from a building, and with a circle of women looking down on the corpse. In between, the viewer learns that aliens have invaded the earth in the form of the female sex, marrying all the available scientists. One egghead gets suspicious when he accidentally catches his wife taking a casserole out of the stove without using a oven mitt.

I saw this film sometime in the early 1960s, probably 1965, with my mom on one of our weekly trips to the drive-in. In this case, it was the old Amphitheater, used during the day for car races. The walk from your car to the concession stand, hidden under the bleachers, could take up a reel of film. Just on the other side of the screen, I-5 roared, and the “throw” from the projection booth to the mammoth screen was so long that the film usually had a washed out look. I enjoyed these outings with my mom, because she was game to see anything, from The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming!, to some minor Hershel Gordon Lewis bloodfest (which was, as I recall, the second title on this particular evening’s triple bill).

Today, access is easier. In my case, I simply sent a query to Mobius Home Video Forum and got the title to the film that had been vexing me within minutes.

Thus it turns out that that film that had haunted me all those years was a film callled Unearthly Stranger. Its pedigree turned out to be interesting, however. Directed by John Krish for the small company Independent Artists, the script is credited to Rex Carlton, from a story by Jeffrey Stone. This obscures the truth that the film is an unofficial adaptation of William Sloane’s novel To Walk the Night The only information I could find out about him was on an Amazon page. Sloane wrote only two novels, but they are both highly regarded by science fiction specialists, To Walk the Night originally coming out in 1938, back in the days when science fiction was interested in ideas rather than thinly disguised war stories.

Unearthly Stranger became available recently, and the film version,despite its obscurity, and for being quite different from the source book beyond a basic premise, proved to be yet another creepy, slow-paced, black and white, British sci-fi-horror-noirish film from the era, like The Day the Earth Caught Fire or The Earth Dies Screaming. These are talky films that always seemed to have been shot in abandoned back lots on perennially overcast days. In this one, space travel scientist Mark Davidson (John Neville), part of a special team, is caught up in a series of mysterious deaths while growing increasingly worried about his mysterious new Swiss bride Julie (Gabriella Licudi).

Instead of being a pile of crap like most dimly remembered films seen finally decades later, Unearthly Stranger works, in a Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents sort of way, with limited sets and lots of dialogue to make up for the lack of special effects. Anglophile viewers will be pleased to see familiar faces pop up. Besides Neville, who later appeared in The X-Files, there is Patrick Newell, who played Mother in late episodes of Avengers, and Philip Stone, who played Alex’s ineffectual dad in Clockwork Orange. Jean Marsh is also on hand as an initially benign general secretary.

Unearthly Stranger is an “invasion” tale pitched at a much lower key than, say, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Like Double Indemnity the film begins with a guy racing back to his office, in order to tell his tale into a tape recorder. The rest of the film is a huge flashback, the story he recounts into the machine. The story is insidious. It’s as if the boys from The Big Bang sitcom all found themselves in the unlikely position of having beautiful wives, only to learn that each of their mates was an alien creature, tasked with thwarting their research.

The final images of Unearthly Stranger are quite chilling, as they prey on the male (or at least adolescent or nerd male) fear of women and their power. The film does well with that most difficult of things, following a bunch of characters as they gradually and believably come to realize that something fantastical is happening around them. It also touches on, in a pop psychology way, common fears about the unknowability of one’s mate. Who is this person we’re fucking? What are they really? Will we ever truly know them? And when will they betray us? Even more, the film preys on the fear that what we fear (terrorists, communists, women) are everywhere. One of the film’s most chilling lines is, “You mean, there are others?” And only in science fiction, or perhaps British science fiction, is love not allowed to triumph. The film ends on a wonderfully chilling note.

David Denby makes an interesting point in his review of Iron Man (here, for however long it is posted) and it’s been bothering me ever since. He seems to have struck at the heart of what’s wrong with most comic book adaptations, and perhaps only an art-mongering intellectual type who probably never read comics as a kid could have noticed it. He notes that Robert Downey, Jr., as Tony Stark, is great only when unarmored. When he dons steel, we can no longer see his face, and the film loses its main attraction. Worse, when he faces off at the end against villain Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), “they disappear into their armor and battle like two oversized beetles.”

I realize now that this anonymity of battling bruisers that makes up the last 40 minutes of most big budget comic book adaptations has been what’s bored me about them. Yet these sequences are probably the most faithful elements adapted from the comics, at least in spirit. As a kid, I found the Marvel battle sequences dynamic and cinematic; cinematically, though, I find them a bore, with nothing really at stake as two masked, mostly CGI figures swing at each other to standstills.

And I had high hopes for the adaptation of Iron Man, because from the trailer the film appeared to be one of the closest, more accurate adaptations of the original comic, unlike with most of the other Marvel men who have come to the screen. And the first half of Iron Man is accurate, as proven by a refresher course in the series provided by Iron Man: Beneath the Armor, (Del Rey, 224 pages, $19.95, ISBN 978-0345506153), a tie-in book about the character by Portland, Oregon, movie reviewer, novelist, and comic book writer Andy Mangels. Stark’s sartorial splendor is much better read about in the comic than seen on the screen, where it and its wearer are reduced to animated cartoon characters thanks to the CGI.

Mangels’s book is an excellent survey of the Iron Man mythos, from the character’s introduction in Tales of Suspense issue No. 39 in December of 1962, through the numerous transformations in artists, villains, and the uniforms (they get sleeker), and even including Stark’s bout with alcoholism, a characteristic “tragic flaw” with which Marvel’s masters liked to humanize their superheroes. Mangels’s book benefits from frank interview snippets with Stan Lee and his brother Larry Lieber, who established the character in the first story, though not with input from the late Don Heck and Jack Kirby, who drew the comics (along with Steve Ditko for a phase), and whose own writing skills were crucial to the creation of this and other Marvel figures, as Mangels shows (for example, Lieber says he would give Heck a script with a beginning and end and Heck would fill in the middle).

Another nice thing about Mangels’s book is that it is a movie tie-in that doesn’t tie into the movie, which goes barely mentioned and wholly unillustrated. The book is not an excuse to praise the artistry of the film. Though Mangels does some sociological scene-setting, one wishes that he had gone in for more in the way of sociological or thematic analysis (what does Iron Man’s prophylactic encasement mean?), but the author’s depth of knowledge of comic books makes up for this absence in its vastness. He seems to know everything about the 70-year history of the format and is able to trace antecedents to Iron Man in earlier publications. I wouldn’t say skip the movie and read the book, for after all, the first half of Iron Man is fairly good for what it is, but Mangels’s book offers a salutary compendium that shows just how little of the comic books ever really make it into the movies.

Not to get all sociological on you, but I’ve noticed a few trends in movie content of late. The least significant, and most boring, is the college-set comedy-drama, a sub-set that includes the “ironically” titled Smart People, with Juno star Ellen Page, and The Visitor , the sluggish, airless new drama from the director of The Station Agent and Starting Out in the Evening .

But a more interesting new trend is the “quarantine” movie. This is a film that posits the arrival of some aggressive and murderous agent or a grave disease that necessitates the isolation of a building, town, or country. The recent, derivative action film Doomsday kicked off the trend, with its premise that Scotland is the sealed-off land of disease-spreaders, within whose walls no one knows what goes on. And there is even a comedy variation, in Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay , the sequel to the popular (on DVD, anyway) pot comedy, although the humor is more cloacal than cannabis oriented, and the boys only spend about five minutes of screen time actually in Guantanamo Bay.

A forthcoming thriller is even called Quarantine and concerns an apartment building in Los Angeles sealed off by the CDC with firemen and a news crew trapped inside (this film comes out in October). Finally, there is the A&E channel remake of Michael Crichton’s tale, The Andromeda Strain, produced by Ridley and Tony Scott, starring Benjamin Bratt and Christa Miller, and to be aired in late May. The four-hour miniseries updates the Crichton novel (filmed once before) with some X-Files governmental paranoia, but is sluggish and talky, though the production values are high for a TV show. It lacks the suspense of the similar Outbreak. Blindness, meanwhile, has a high pedigree: from a novel by Jose Saramago , and directed by Fernando Meirelles, it stars indie standbys Julianne Moore, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Mark Ruffalo as residents of a location afflicted by an epidemic of blindness that leads to a vast quarantine (it comes out in September).

Why the sudden interest in enforced confinement? The subject is easy to trace as a cinematic trope, at least back to recent zombie movies such as 28 Weeks Later and Land of the Dead and more obscure recent movies such as Right At Your Door. On the higher ideological level, perhaps the theme is born of post 9/11 anxieties, in which Americans suddenly feel isolated, no longer jet-setters but lepers and pariahs on the global stage. Or maybe the theme speaks to a fear of being reduced to Medieval living, as the economy tanks and a feral society seems just around the corner.

Perhaps the theme is born of guilt. The American imperial juggernaut is out of control, and the people are either indifferent to it or helpless to stop it. A guilt-induced wish to simply withdraw into a shell may be reflected in these films, with the uneasiness of such isolation reflected in the fact that such tales are rooted in the horror and sci-fi genres.