Seven Thieves

Seven Thieves (Henry Hathaway, 1960) One of the posters for Seven Thieves screams out the cast of characters in this Cinemascope black and white film and manages to have its own little obfuscation in there: The Dancer! (Joan Collins) The Professor! (Edward G. Robinson) The Baron! (Eli Wallach) The Gambler! (Rod Steiger) The Beatnik! (Eli Wallach) The Muscle Boy! (Berry Kroeger) The Safe Cracker! (Michael Dante). Well, kinda, the characters are a bit more nuanced than that, and "The Beatnik" is a stretch for a jazz saxophone player, but, it was the parlance of the time...and Wallach, in the film, fills the bill of two of those mentioned. Hey! It's a Heist film, and one should expect some fudging of the truth here and there, even in...and maybe especially in...the advertising.

 

Seven Thieves may be long forgotten—I'd never heard of it until Todd Liebenow of "The Forgotten Film-cast" podcast gave me a choice of four films to consider discussing in an up-coming episode.* Seven Thieves was a tempting subject—directed by Henry Hathaway—with a cast that included Wallach, Edward G. Robinson, Rod Steiger, Alexander Scourby, Sebastian Cabot, and Joan Collins. The cast alone makes it worth seeing, even if it only amounts to another variation on the One Last Big Score Caper Movie.

Professor Theo Wilkins (Robinson) is a discredited ex-patriate living in Monte Carlo. He spends his time at the beach explaining to little children how to collect shells, but, in the back of his mind is a plan. All he needs is one last "element" to bring it all together and keep it all together in order to pull it off. That "element" shows up one day in the form of gambler and thief Paul Mason (Steiger), who has affection for the old man, but is reluctant to get involved in another of the old man's quixotic ventures.

The plan, Wilkins explains, is to steal ₣4,000,000 from the vault of the casino at Monte Carlo, which will require some special equipment and specialized personnel, all of which he has, but he needs Mason, his trusted mentor, to join the group in order to keep his motley crew of conspirators in line.

The key to the whole enterprise is the casino employee (Scourby) who is so besotted with "exotic dancer" Melanie (Collins) that he will do anything for her, even rob his employer. But, he merely provides information (and invitations) to make the job go smoother...and faster. Time, you see, is the critical element here, with an elaborate distraction on the night of a special celebration at the casino. Security is tight, but it just might be too tight to take advantage of. 

47 minutes in (after much bickering and negotiating), the caper starts, involving a trick wheel-chair, a cyanide pill, a conveniently open window, some safe-cracking tools, some steady nerves and balance, and the casino manager's reluctance to have "a scene" disrupt the joint's big night. It just about comes off without a hitch...but, after all, there needs to be some element of suspense to make the movie enjoyable. 

Now, this was made in 1960, so movie-morals hadn't loosened up so much that producers might let the thieves actually get away with their ill-gotten gains. But, here, they do...but manage to have it both ways so that Boston Blue Noses and the Catholic Legion of Decency won't condemn the film for celebrating "the wages of sin." It's a rather thin ledge the film has to negotiate to do it...and far-thinner than the one that had to accommodate Rod Steiger. But, it still manages to be a semi-enjoyable film, with quite a few things to admire.

 

* The movie we decided on was The Blue Max and the episode discussing it is here.

Black Patch

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day. The music's good, though...

Black Patch (Allan H. Miner, 1956) Low budget western best known in film-music afficianado circles for being the first feature scored by Jerry (nee Jerrald ) Goldsmith.* Shot at Gene Autry's ranch town, the film benefited from being filmed in a television hiatus, its screenplay—penned by Black Patch bad guy Leo Gordon—started out as an idea for a "Gunsmoke" episode and utilizing crew from the recently wrapped "Dragnet" season (that show's crews were the fastest in Hollywood). Not quite as "B"-western as a lot of the early Republic Studios product, Black Patch tries to explore the psychological aspects of Westerns—motivations beyond "he wears a black hat"—that was finding its decade with the collaborations of Anthony Mann and James Stewart in the genre.

Black Patch can't hold a...er...patch to them.

George Montgomery plays Marshall Clay Morgan, but he's disparagingly called "Black-Patch" by the folks in Santa Rita, New Mexico for the eye-patch he sports over his right eye, a result from an old Civil War injury. Being one-eyed makes it tough to be a sharp-shooter with no depth perception. And one could say that it's affected him personally as he has a myopically steadfast approach to his job. It's cost him, and the town under his singular watch treat him with a suspicious respect.

So, things get a little squirrelly when Morgan's friend from The War, Hank Danner (screenwriter Leo Gordon) pays a visit to town with his wife Helen (Diane Brewster, who would play the late wife of Dr. Richard Kimble on TV). In a Casablanca-like set-up, Helen and Morgan were once lovers, and so the Marshall is both pleased and conflicted to see them. He starts to question how his actions towards Danner, a known bank robber, are lit by his sense of duty or the torch he's carrying for the man's wife.

It's a small town, so word gets around of the trio's pasts, but it starts to flame up when word comes that a bank on the way had been robbed and Morgan slams Danner in jail for the crime. But, there are "vultures, vultures everywhere," the most prominent being saloon owner "Frenchy" De'vere (Sebastian Cabot, who clearly relishes playing villainous roles) who conspires to spring Danner from jail with an idea to split the ill-gotten gains as a reward. It all further complicates Morgan's life, and threatens it, as things shake out, eventually seeing him put on trial for murder.

It's a good set-up, and the execution is fairly straight-forward—the film was shot in 14 days—but, there are some plot elements that stray into the area of contrivance, that one could only excuse by objecting that Santa Rita must be a pretty small town (with Contrivance being a nearby suburb). The motivations of one character seem extremely opportune, but only if it takes place in a town with very few women. And how quickly can you learn to be a fast-draw? At least to best someone who's been a gun-slinger for years?

It's not all that bad, just not something you want to write home and send pony-express** about. And, for a first score, Goldsmith did a great job...but, then, he'd been doing live-TV for awhile, making changes to his scores on the fly, even as it was being played. He certainly could have handled the technical intricacies of film scoring.

* It's also one of the Goldsmith "lost" scores—nobody can find acetates or tapes in "the vaults" (or somebody's hiding them) and there's never been a release. Although, a Kickstarter campaign was started to re-record the score for this and for The Man, an obscure political film from 1972. They were released by Intrada records.

 

** "When it absolutely, positively has to be there before two weeks..." 

The Time Machine (1960)

The Time Machine (George Pal, 1960) We are all time-travelers, really, moving forward into the future one second at a time, for that is the natural order of things. The trouble comes when we want a little more speed...or go back, which is unnatural and out of order. Perhaps there is a core-wisdom to not want to live in the past or skip ahead to our future. But, folks have been writing time-travel stories since the Mahabharata (if we're to believe Wikipedia) because wouldn't it be nice to go back in time to meet this person, or to right a wrong, or because just now you thought of the perfect come-back you wish you had then.

It is speculated that time slows down, relatively, the closer you get to the speed of light (299,792,458 meters per second—it's just not a good idea; it's the law) or, more recently conceived, to a massive gravity source—say, a black hole. And there is speculation that by going faster than the speed of light, one could out-race time and catch up with it (as if it was a single-stream device, like a TIVO). Anyway, it worked (or will work) on "Star Trek."* 

Either way, back, or forth, it seems it takes a lot of effort and energy for so little time.

It's all theory, though. Tick-tick-tick is the speed of things. At least for now.

And...now.

In George Pal's version of the H.G. Wells novel, the time is January 5th, 1900. H. George Wells (Rod Taylor) stumbles (just in time) into the pre-arranged meeting with his friends and acquaintances, David Filby (Alan Young), Dr. Philip Hillyer (Sebastian Cabot), Anthony Bridewell (Tom Helmore), and Walter Kemp (the ubiquitous Whit Bissell), and he looks bruised and bedraggled. He has a story to tell them about how he got that way—over his last few hours—and it has a lot to do with their meeting the week before—one that ended with much scoffing and condescension about George's crazy ideas. 

At that meeting (as he reminds them), he posited the invention of a machine to cross "the fourth dimension"—time. He showed them a model, which—at the press of a switch—disappeared, and explaining to his gob-smacked and uncomprehending friends who wondered where it went that it was not a question of "where" it went but "when." The little model is still there, in that room, it's just in another time—where they are not. Philosophically, George is concerned that, with the Boer War going on and strife everywhere, that the answers to man's struggles must be in the future and he intends to see.

To a man, they are practical...and skeptical. His ideas and skills would be better put to helping the war effort, but George cannot be dissuaded. Fearing for his mind, Filby encourages George to see in the New Year with his family, but Wells refuses but assures his friend that he won't walk beyond his door that night. And, indeed, he won't. George decides to do that thing that all visionaries should be wary of—experimenting on oneself—and tests his full-size version of his time machine to travel, tentatively, into the future. He stops in 1917 and things have changed a bit—he monitors changes in fashion from a mannequin in a shop window across the street. Taking a tentative look outside, he runs into a person he thinks is Filby—but it's actually his son. Filby is dead and buried, and his son has just returned from The Great War. That doesn't auger well for Wells' dream of a better world, so he presses on.

A second trial takes him past WWII, where his time machine feels the effects of the blitz and he sees his rural town become surrounded by skyscrapers. Stopping in 1966, he's just "in time" to witness a nuclear bombardment that he only manages to escape with his machine. Volcanic activity leaves him sealed in a cave and he punches forward through time until erosion has taken its time and he can see daylight again. He stops at  October 12, 802701. And the world has changed considerably.

Oh, there's oxygen, conveniently—the nuclear winter and volcanic activity seems to have subsided and formed a livable atmosphere after 802,000 years. The Earth that he encounters is verdant, lush, and judging from the life-forms  appears to be in Malibu by way of Logan's Run.** Everybody is in their early 20's, are model-proportioned, and have sun-bleached blond hair (they're also extremely passive preferring to hang out by the river, and if someone falls in and is in danger of drowning, nobody helps—perhaps they're federal employees!)

But, these aren't the only bipeds roaming about in the 803rd century, merely the ones who see the light of day. Life has bifurcated to include another life-form that lives underground in a subterranean power-plant of tunnels and caves. These are the Morlocks, who prey—and feast—upon the youngsters (who should be called "Veal," but are, instead, called the "Eloi," who are beckoned to the underground chambers by a summons from a pyramid-like structure resembling a temple.

George is aghast at this, and by the Eloi's compliance; when a herd of Eloi is beckoned (including a comely Eloi he has become besotted with (played by Yvette Mimieux), he invades the Morlock Masonic and goes all "Spartacus" on them, inspiring a revolt against the Morlocks and saving the Eloi to return to a life of..."whatever" (that's exactly what they seem to be returning to...a life of "what-everrr") Despite his feelings for "Weena"—as he calls her—he decides to power up his time-machine and return to his present time...for a time, anyway.

It's a good little adaptation of the Wells book, full of fine antiquated period detail and adolescent thrills—if you're not thinking about it too much—which is a mark of the films of George Pal, ever-concerned with the whiz-bang image (effects are usually done in brisk stop-motion sequences) and, if there's a message, best to leave it immersed in sub-text or the basic DNA of the source. And Rod Taylor fit the bill for the type of just-charismatic-enough-for-the-budget star. Taylor hailed from Australia—adept enough that you'd never know it from the expert lack of accent (you could swear he was Canadian!), filtered down by years of stage, film and television work (this was his first starring role)—and makes a fine adventurer to identify with.

The film was remade in 2002 with Guy Pearce, and Nicholas Meyer made an excellent "cousin" film, Time After Time, in 1979. We'll be looking at the latter...some time.

Now, a final note about time-travel: don't dress lightly. 

The trouble with the depictions that we've seen is that they're a bit myopic—at least according to professional physics buzz-kill Dr. Neil Degrass Tyson. All time machines we've seen have been neatly rooted to the ground (at least, The Time Machine acknowledged that the very surroundings that it existed on would change over time). But, even as we're moving through time, so is the Earth. So is the Universe. 

But let's simplify it. In the same way that a plane has to aim for the spot its destination will be at the time of arrival, you also have to do on a more cosmic scale. The Earth travels in its orbit around the sun at 29.78 km/s. So, that means if we wanted to travel, let's say, a day in the future, we should take a rocket to the point where the Earth would be in 24 hours, which would be 1,598,784 miles down the ecliptic. Say we did travel 24 hours in time; without compensating for the constant movement of the Universe, we would end our time-journey with the Earth "'way over there", and we'd be gasping for air before our lungs would explode...because we'd be in space.

Always wear a space-suit when time travelling, kids (and take PLENTY of oxygen) because you may know WHEN you'll show up, but you might not know WHERE.

"Missed it by that much..."

* Michael Crichton's "Timeline" proposed a simpler, more catastrophic solution to time-travel; it can't exist. "Time" doesn't flow as is the conception of pre-quantum time-travel stories—"Time doesn't pass; we pass" says a tech in it—and that what has been more romantically termed "time travel" is actually space-travel to another dimension in the multi-verse that has branched off. One could "travel" to those alternative branches by atomizing the human body and, upon reaching that dimension, reconstructing the physical form from its genetic map. Sounds really, really complicated, but, again, it worked "so well" on "Star Trek." 

Transporter accident as imagined by the late, great Mort Drucker

* I didn't know this until I was doing some research on Pal, but he was trying to get a "Logan's Run" adaptation as early as 1968.