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The Odessa File ***½
UK/West Germany: Ronald Neame, 1974
Frederick Forsythe is probably best known, as a novelist, for The Day of the Jackal, which somehow manages to combine a painstaking level of attention to detail with an extremely gripping plot, resulting in the book being compulsive page-turner despite is extremely clinical style. The Odessa File, written a year later, retains The Day of the Jackal's attention to detail, but for the most part of a more conventionally structured suspense thriller, focusing on an intrepid hero rather than a ruthless killer, and unfortunately suffering from a series of plot contrivances that The Day of the Jackal was able to avoid. Both books were, within the space of a few years, turned into films produced by John Woolf and written by Kenneth Ross, although this is where the crew similarities end.
In 1963, Hamburg journalist Peter Miller (Jon Voight) inherits the diary of a suicide victim who was formerly a prisoner at Riga concentration camp during the Second World War. The diary implicates the camp's ruthless Commandant, Eduard Roschmann (Maximilian Schell), in a series of barbaric war crimes, and Miller decides to set about tracking the man down himself and bringing him to justice. Unfortunately, he finds himself up against something of a brick wall, given the German public's apathy towards digging up this shameful past, as well as the high level of infiltration into the civil services by former Nazis, who naturally have a vested interest in preventing their old identities from being uncovered.
The film is largely a faithful adaptation of its source material, but it deviates in a few respects, some of which actually end up weakening it. The part of Miller's stripper girlfriend Sigi (Mary Tamm), for example, is beefed up, but this only really amounts to more screen time for her rather than her actually affecting the narrative in any way. Likewise, a few plot elements are compressed to save time, while the subplot of a planned Egyptian offensive against Israel, involving the unleashing chemicals over its major cities, is relegated to a brief mention at the beginning and end. In effect, they might as well not have bothered including it at all - surprising, given that it was what gave the novel so much of its urgency. More damagingly, though, the film makes it clear almost from the get-go why Miller is so driven to track down Roschmann. In the novel, his motive is concealed among Forsythe's trademark screeds of painstakingly detailed descriptions, and as such doesn't draw attention to itself, but, in the film, this issue is lingered on to the extent that the audience will surely put two and two together immediately. The film's depiction of the atrocities committed by the Nazis is also greatly toned down from the material in the novel, which probably explains the rather tame PG certificate.
Highlight below to reveal spoiler text: Furthermore, the climax is altered to make Miller more of a traditional action hero, succeeding in shooting Roschmann dead, whereas in the book Miller suffered a bump on the noggin, while Roschmann fled to South America (which was in fact what became of the real Eduard Roschmann).
As with The Day of the Jackal, the film adaptation constitutes a step down from its source. Unfortunately, the film, while engaging enough, is also not of the same standard as Fred Zinnemann's The Day of the Jackal, which succeeded in adapting the novel's clinical, detached narrative style to the screen. Ronald Neame's The Odessa File is, like the book on which it is based, a more conventional affair and thus fails to distinguish itself from the crowd of war and post-war movie thrillers made at around the same time.
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Brotherhood of the Wolf ***
Original title: Le Pacte des Loups
France/Canada: Christophe Gans, 2001
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(*) Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl ***
USA: Gore Verbinski, 2003
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Black Book ****½
Original title: Zwartboek
Netherlands/Belgium/UK/Germany: Paul Verhoeven, 2006
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Pan's Labyrinth ****½
Original title: El Laberinto del Fauno
Mexico/Spain/USA: Guillermo del Toro, 2006
I finally sat down and watched Pan's Labyrinth, and I'm exceedingly glad I did, as it's probably the best new horror movie I've seen since The Descent... although perhaps "horror" isn't the best way to describe it as, contrary to what the marketing campaign would have you believe, only small portions of it take place in the world of make-believe. The rest of it is all unsettlingly real, taking place in Spain in 1944, with the country under the grip of General Franco's fascists, and the military stopping at nothing to root out and destroy the resistance forces. The film is absolutely beautiful to behold, and the designs and effects work on the various creatures that the protagonist meets are astounding. In some ways, it reminded me of a twisted live action Spirited Away: a dark fairytale for adults.
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Problem Child 3 (TV) **
USA: Greg Beeman, 1995
Me and Lyris steeled ourselves and popped in Problem Child 3, as prepared as was humanly possible for the horrors that this made for TV sequel, with the key roles recast, could inflict on us. And it was... surprisingly bearable. Don't get me wrong, it's a load of crap (not that the first two Problem Child films were ever going to win anything, of course - not even a Razzie), but it made us laugh, and the shift in tone wasn't as dramatic as in, say, a Disney cheapquel. It's a hell of a lot more surreal, even going so far as to include a couple of physical gags that wouldn't seem out of place in a Tex Avery cartoon, and the guy playing Ben Healy (William Katt) is about as poor a match for John Ritter as you could ever hope to find, but the scenes with the three returning cast members - Jack Warden, Gilbert Gottfried and Eric Edwards - provide much merriment. There is also some rather sly humour, some of it surprisingly twisted by network TV standards. Am I suggesting that everybody rushes out to see it? No - like I said, the film (if you can even call it that) is garbage by anyone's standards, but it was a painless enough way to kill an hour and a half.
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Movies
Welcome to the movie checklist!
This section is an archive listing every movie I've seen from January 1 2005 onwards. Films I have already seen are included and will be marked with a (*), but probably won't be reviewed except under special circumstances. I will be including a rating for each film (in stars, out of 5), and hope to be able to include a brief 1-2 paragraph review of each film, although due to time constraints that won't always be possible.
Archives
Films Viewed This Month
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