Detective John Wayne!
I’ve re-ordered the latest reviews a little, saving the Richard Attenborough-Judy Geeson-John Hurt true crime drama 10 Rillington Place (1971) for Saturday, but here are the two detective films in which John Wayne starred before switching back to his beloved western.
As the poster indicates, Wayne’s still got a gun, but he’s now wearing a suit and is fully urban, dealing with crooks and schnooks with a little frontier justice (or at least that’s what’s implied by the mere casting of Wayne).
By the early seventies, it seemed logical for Wayne to swap genres. Westerns weren’t as popular, war films were becoming more cynical (making Wayne’s directorial / war statement The Green Berets an anachronistic disaster), and I kind of doubt the actor gave any thought to sci-fi or horror; the results would’ve been fascinating, but because he was so identified with westerns, any scriptwriter would’ve had one tough task making an genre icon fit into a cosmic void or dark and scary house.
Twilight Time’s release of Columbia’s Brannigan (1975) is a treat, but not just for Wayne fans. The lovely Judy Geeson is in proper HD, Richard Attenborough manages to give his clichéd frustrated chief of police some proper gravitas, and there’s an enormous talent pool of proper British actors, veteran American stars, and Canadian John Vernon, with that stentorian voice and hard attitude.
Perhaps most important to myself is it’s a Blu-ray edition of a Douglas Hickox film – one of my favourite Brit directors who should’ve enjoyed a prolific career but never really ‘broke’ into Hollywood nor big international productions. He received critical acclaim for Zulu Dawn (1979), but afterwards drifted into TV, arguably languishing and wasting his skills on banal TV fooder; for a man who crafted striking montages in 2.35:1, he couldn’t have liked being trapped with flat 1.33:1 and TV’s limited budgets.
Also covered is Wayne’s other cop film, the goofily titled McQ (1974), directed by John Sturges. As I touch upon in the review, while solidly made, there’s a marked contrast in visual and editorial styles from a Hollywood studio veteran like Sturges vs. former second ace Hickox who had no fear strapping a ‘scope camera to several parts of a car to craft a kinetic montage. McQ deserves a Blu-ray release, but that’s up to Warner Bros.
Coming next is 10 Rillington Place, Richard Fleischer’s superbly directed version of serial killer John Christie, plus some thoughts on Richard Attenborough, who passed away this week at the age of 90.
Cheers,
Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com
Category: EDITOR'S BLOG
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