Deadfall (1968)

Glasses: No

Doing an Accent?: No

Accent for whole film?: No

Hair: No

Does he point at someone?: Yes


Best Line: "He doesn't have to like it, he's a philosopher"

Deadfall........a long remembered film for us at Caineology, mainly due to strong memory of having it recorded on a video many years ago and the tape running out about an hour in, post heist. Yes, kids, this used to happen all of the time.  You had to work for your film viewings back then - especially if the film was due to be shown after the late night golf and ended up being cancelled due to the golf overrunning. I mean, what is more important - seeing the finale to the golf being played out or my being able to watch Horror Hospital at 11.55 on a Saturday night on BBC2?  Purest white heat outrage when they did that, I tell you. I think my splenetic ravings awoke Mrs Caineology in the next room. But I digress.


Now, in our minds, Deadfall was a great heist film full of sunny med vibes, a languid atmosphere and cool 68 threads. And it is, lets not get that wrong, but then we watched the other hour of the film........


Our Man plays a brilliant cat burglar, currently working on a big job by getting himself into a boozers drying out clinic and becoming friendly with a member of the local super rich. Whilst there, an approach is made from a seductive wife of another, older, jewel thief proposing a partnership/proxy job.


After some deliberation between parties, they agree to work together and pull a warm up job before the main act, played out in a rather fantastic 20 mins of live concert (John Barry conducting! I think he still had the same suit on when I saw him conduct at the South Bank around ten years ago) intercut with the robbery being carried out, scored by the music shown on screen. Superb cinema and certainly our strongest memory of the film that carried across the years. Lets leave aside the slightly absurd method of getting on that windowsill, the "Deadfall" itself, which would either:


1 - Tear your arms from your sockets, or.........
2 - Leave you in a broken legged sobbing mess waiting for the security to arrive, or.......
3 - both of the above.


Great - and then onto the second hour, which manages to highlight why having a strong sequence like this in the middle of a heist film isn't always the best idea as the film runs flat almost straight afterwards and turns into a domestic drama/sordid secrets/mind games film, but a really bloody tedious one.


By god it needed something in the second half. Something. I can take slow film, I can take vibin' over action, I'm really quite happy to let lush scenery and fashion wash over me........but this one was really testing my patience - and we rarely, if ever, switch a film off halfway through. We've never sit through half this crap on our boys CV if we did.


So - watch the first hour, pretend the film finishes there. Maybe prior to the old boy turning up at the beach house. Thats about 75 mins worth of decent film right there.




Minutae


1 - Whats with all the seagulls? Solarised ones, cuts to them at random moments, shots of them screeching about the place. Maybe they mean something? Symbolism, man, symbolism.


2 - This film was apparently a £1,000,000 job but ended up looking about as costly as an episode of The Persuaders. Actually, I could see our Roger doing this one.


3 - Michael Caine dressed as a matador attempting to seduce a woman whilst holding a sausage on a stick.

4 - Strikingly, this film seems to share a lot with Caines other 1968 entry "The Magus" which I actually prefer of the two. And going by the rep that one has, that should tell you something. It seems as though they were done under contract to 20th Century Fox - but the boy had no memory of signing the contract and nor did his agent. The swinging sixties to blame there, I think. Perhaps that explains his general somnambulistic approach to the proceedings in both?


5 - Its night. Its dark. You are about to scale and burgle an enormous house next to a main road and a seemingly busy river. What do you choose to wear for this?

 Beige turtleneck, beige slacks, beige shoes.

Blending with the sandstone building, I suppose? Theres a reason ninjas wear black, mate, theres a reason. But then the classic burglar top is breton stripes, so who knows?

Speaking of which

5 - you've taken the time to sneak into the place, drug the dogs and carefully plan it for when the owners are out and the security is eating their dinner. At night. In silence.

So what do you do when the safe proves awkward?

 

Get a hammer and chisel.

Beat the utter shit out of the wall.

 

Remove safe and lug it across the courtyard.


How much noise did that make?


I mean, 10/10 for effort, Mike, but 1/10 for the victims not realising they've been turned over and allowing clear getaway, fencing the goods and erasing suspicion time.




Outfit of the film: Plenty of sharp suits in great colours and cuts. So much to choose from, so lets go for this casual light lunch ensemble

Blue Ice (1992)

Glasses: No.

Doing an Accent?: No

Accent for whole film?: N/A

Hair: Yes

Does he point at someone?: Yes.

Best Line: "The person who owns that car will be upset? The person who owns this car is BLOODY FURIOUS!" 

Blue Ice, yet ANOTHER spy related film in Caines oeuvre. He must just really like spy novels or something, as on this one he appears to have put up some of his own money (earning a Producer credit) instead of doing the normal and, you know, just turning up for a fat pay cheque and funding a new pond or something.

London based, seemingly filmed all around Borough and London Bridge areas (nice location for this sort of thing), in extremely 90s dry ice heavy fashion, with an appalling Michael Kamen score and lots of moody lighting. A lot of Edward Hopper like mise-en-scene in this one, which is no bad thing really.

Caine plays Harry Palmer Anders, a retired spy who now runs a jazz club and spends his days involved in The Jazz and all that comes with it. One day, his tasty Jag Mk2 is rear ended by a mysterious seductive woman who carries a secret and which leads him back down the rabbit hole of ye olde spy business. You know - the normal state of affairs for this kind of film. 

This ends up with the American embassy, a group of assassins who appear to drive around in a post office van (??), Caines old firm and the police all wanting a piece of him. When, really, all he wants is a fling with Sean Young, to do his ironing in his tasteful apartment above his club and to spend his evenings immersed in The Jazz. 

And who could blame him?

This film carries heavy Harry Palmer associations, from the London setting, to Caine really pulling out the Harry tricks, to an utterly utterly mental drug induced interrogation scene (ala Ipcress File). This is before they went the whole hog and brought back Harry P for those pair of 90s films.

Not bad, but not hugely great either. A solid 6/10 effort. Not as entertaining as I remember it being back in the 90s when I first saw it (around the same time as Shock To The System) 

Still, if you want to kick back late night with a J&B (as I did) and enjoy a passable little thriller, than this is just the job.

Noticeable Things.

1. We have to start with Harrys tasteful club "Harrys" (imaginative!), which looks like  a perfect Valhalla to me.

 Humble from the outside.....

  ......Where the music flows.......

  ....Charlie Watts is the house drummer.....

 ........and you can get pints of bitter served to the table.

 (you cannot see the sheer ecstatic joy on Sean Youngs face here)

 2. There is an exact point in this film where, if you look, the seed of doubt is planted:

This is supposed to be the residence of the American ambassador. But look:

A circa '91 standard issue BT landline phone in hearing aid beige? In the ambassadors? 

Thats a giveaway about a wrong un, if ever I saw it.


3. Midway through the film, I thought there'd been a mistake as suddenly, it goes from a moody spy thriller into a full bore action gangster film? I honestly thought that another film had been spliced in by mistake:

We get men hurrying out from a building

Bob Hoskins, doing the full Bob Hoskins

Classic balaclava terrorists

High speed car chases

Drive-by M18 firefights

Big explosions

And Bob laying waste to all and sundry

None of which really seems to have anything to do with the main plot of the film, other than being a very elaborate way of Maurice getting a gun and taking part in that classic "prowl the warehouse, shooting wooden cut outs of criminals that pop out at random" scene.

4. This security van turns up. Now, if you grew up in Britain in the 90s, then shite security guards driving around in these style vans were de rigueur.

5. A frankly bizarre ending, which sees the main bad guy hoist into the air 'pon a hook, wildly firing a machine gun and screaming madly whilst gunfighting with Caine. Really.

6. Now, I know what you are thinking. "This is all very well, but where are the points?" Well, never let it be said that we don't give the two people that read this blog what they want:

We get pointing at a car

Pointing during the middle of a fight

Pointing at a fish, interrupting Young mid line to throw this point.

Pointing over breakfast. (breakfast not in shot)

Outfit of the film: It has to be the basic, casual, white shirt he wears for cooking in his rather cool flat. I'd live there. Its crumpled, rolled up at the sleeves, but the boy wears it well.

You smooth bastard.

And it ends with a champagne toast. Cheers!