{"id":12831,"date":"2015-12-18T15:28:37","date_gmt":"2015-12-18T20:28:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=12831"},"modified":"2015-12-18T15:28:37","modified_gmt":"2015-12-18T20:28:37","slug":"br-innocent-bystanders-1972","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=12831","title":{"rendered":"BR: Innocent Bystanders (1972)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\"InnocentBystanders\"<\/a>Film<\/strong>: Very Good<\/p>\n

Transfer<\/strong>: \u00a0Excellent<\/p>\n

Extras<\/strong>: n\/a<\/p>\n

Label:\u00a0<\/strong> Olive Films<\/p>\n

Region:<\/strong>\u00a01 (NTSC)<\/p>\n

Released:<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0February 19, 2013<\/p>\n

Genre:<\/strong>\u00a0 Espionage<\/p>\n

Synopsis:<\/strong>\u00a0An aging spy attempts to save his life and revoke a burn notice by tracking down a wanted Russian spy in Turkey.<\/p>\n

Special Features:<\/strong>\u00a0 (none)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

Review:<\/strong><\/p>\n

After directing the international and cult hit The Italian Job<\/strong> (1969), Peter Collinson seemed poised to break into the big time, landing high profile productions that would benefit from his glossy commercial style, but after the Gene Corman-produced You Can\u2019t Win \u2018Em All<\/strong> (1970), he seemed to become a bit of a journeyman, especially when the British film industry was slowly crashing from a lack of American financing.<\/p>\n

Collinson moved on to what seemed to be the only realm of employment for directors \u2013 horror \u2013 and gave those modest productions a finesse that in one case, Fright<\/strong> (1971), was undeserving; and in another, Straight on Till Morning<\/a><\/strong> (1972), harkened back to the filmed play that launched his career, The Penthouse<\/strong> (1967).<\/p>\n

His next production was both a return to the studio of his feature film debut, Paramount Pictures (perhaps they had some remaining production funds in the U.K. that was idling), and while cosmetically an international production, it\u2019s a very British film, packed with top talent and globe-trotting locations.<\/p>\n

The plot of Innocent Bystanders<\/strong> is very straightforward \u2013 an old dog secret agent is given one last job to prove he\u2019s better than being a desk-bound relic, but soon discovers he\u2019s merely a decoy, set up to fail as a couple of agile underlings are tasked with tracking down an escaped agronomist wanted after escaping from a Soviet gulag \u2013 but it\u2019s also representative of a rather bleak worldview that seems to permeate Collinson\u2019s oeuvre, including characters with tortured pasts who undergo extreme brutality at the hands of cold-blooded monsters.<\/p>\n

Penthouse<\/strong> focused on a home invasion, while Fright<\/strong> dealt with a tormented and raped babysitter, and Straight On<\/strong> featured a mousy girl (Doctor Zhivago<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s Rita Tushingham) who travels to the big city in search of a stud to father a child and fulfill her life, only to have the father be a slick serial killer.<\/p>\n

James Mitchell\u2019s script is pretty threadbare with a few dry witticisms and clich\u00e9d phrases, and its rapid acceleration runs into a wall when dogged agent John Craig (virile Stanley Baker) travels to Turkey with his hostage, Miriam Loman (Doctor Zhivago<\/strong>\u2019s Geraldine Chaplin), in the hope of finding her wanted uncle, Aaron Kaplan (Vladek Sheybal). The final shootout in a villa is the reward for some ridiculous back & forth negotiating between Craig and rival American and British spy chiefs that unfolds dully, but what saves the film is its strange combination of artiness (Collinson seems obsessed with filming staid conversations with extreme wide angle lenses and bottles and glasses in the foreground), and the character of Craig, a man just getting over an inferred torture session that\u2019s left him almost<\/em> impotent.<\/p>\n

A nasty torture scene really hammers home the tragedy of a broken man, while his surprisingly successful poke at romance (which should\u2019ve been a total failure) sort of negates the film\u2019s grim first half, putting Craig back into form as an aged but suave super spy. Chaplin is beautiful and is dragged across Europe and central Turkey, whereas Craig\u2019s sadistic teammates Joanna Benson (Sue Lloyd) and Andrew Royce (Derren Nesbitt) are more genre caricatures, being mean yet witty, especially when things get ugly. Just like Craig, Miriam is tortured below-the-belt in a scene where cruelty is implied rather than detailed, but Chaplin\u2019s lengthy reaction shots are part of that stark bleakness inherent to Collinson\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

In spite of a clunky final section and an easy wrap-up, Innocent Bystanders<\/strong> is part of a spate of lurid alternative spy films where certain conveniences may push one\u2019s suspension of disbelief to the limit, but the world of secret agents are deglamorized as a refutation of the more cartoon superman sheen of the James Bond franchise.<\/p>\n

Cars don\u2019t snap in half and keep driving down roads like a Buster Keaton montage; they roll over and maim \/ kill the occupants. Villains don\u2019t use antiseptic devices to get truth from hesitant agents after a lengthy this-is-why-you\u2019re-going-to-die preamble; their nefarious enforcers twist and electrocute genetalia. And unlike Bond, the heroes are burned out, clearly suffering from any social lives, rotten marriages, ongoing paranoia that isn\u2019t exhilarating, and at the very end they have no job, home, family, cache of millions, or fabulous babe to shag; their lives are basically shit.<\/p>\n

Donald Pleasance (who portrayed Bond\u2019s arch nemesis Bloefeld in You Only Live Twice<\/strong>) has fun playing Craig\u2019s cold superior, and Sheybal (known for playing No. 2 in From Russia with Love<\/strong>, and popping up in the prior anti-spy film Scorpio<\/strong>) is great as the weasel agronomist, a living Hitchcockian MacGuffin whose importance is irrelevant beyond being the thing everyone\u2019s willing to kill for.<\/p>\n

Smaller roles are filled by memorable character actors, including Lloyd (who appeared in the Bondian alternative The Ipcress File<\/strong>, and the Hammeresque sleazefest Corruption<\/a><\/strong>), Nesbitt (playing a more genial character in The Blue Max<\/a><\/strong>), and Dana Andrews (Swamp Water<\/a><\/strong>, Boomerang<\/strong>, The Satan Bug<\/a><\/strong>) as the slimy CIA chief whose intention to use the Brits to do the grunt work backfires badly.<\/p>\n

Johnny Keating\u2019s score (still sadly unreleased) is a weird, splashy jazz hybrid that blends funky bass with Bondian brass (often paying indiscrete homage to John Barry\u2019s Goldfinger<\/strong> score) in spite of a ridiculous vocal title track, and offers more thematic variation than his classic caper score Robbery<\/strong> (1967).<\/p>\n

Brian Probyn\u2019s cinematography varies from lush to slight documentary, and Collinson\u2019s use of extreme wide angles adds to the film\u2019s slightly baroque visual style. Editor Alan Pattillo (Walkabout<\/strong>) also makes use of some effective flash cuts: whenever Craig metes out his rage on a person or object early in the film, there\u2019s a flash frame of his superior, whose contempt for Craig remains a stressor to the very end.<\/p>\n

Collinson continued to work steadily in the following years \u2013 he\u2019s perhaps best known for the remakes of And Then There Were None<\/strong> (1974) and The Spiral Staircase<\/strong> (1975) \u2013 whereas Baker\u2019s once potent career (which included genre classics The Criminal<\/a><\/strong>, Hell is a City<\/a><\/strong>, Zulu<\/strong>, Accident<\/strong>, and Robbery<\/strong>) turned into a trickle of TV work and the rare \/ smaller film appearances before he died at the ridiculously young age of 48.<\/p>\n

Other memorable cynical spy entries include John Huston\u2019s nihilistic The MacKintosh Man<\/a><\/strong> (1973) and Michael Winner\u2019s more overt Cold War thriller Scorpio<\/strong> (1973).<\/p>\n

The grit of the script and its mean characters seem part of James Mitchell\u2019s work, having written many TV scripts over his long career. His few film scripts include Callan<\/strong> (1974), based on the eponymous series he created starring Edward Woodward between 1967-1972.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a9 2015 Mark R. Hasan<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

External References:<\/strong>
\nEditor’s Blog<\/a> — IMDB \u00a0<\/a>\u00a0— Composer Filmography<\/a>
\n\u00a0<\/span>
\nVendor Search Links:<\/strong>
\nAmazon.ca<\/a>\"\" \"\" —\u00a0<\/span> Amazon.com<\/a>\"\" \"\" —\u00a0<\/span> Amazon.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After directing the international and cult hit The Italian Job (1969), Peter Collinson seemed poised to break into the big time, landing high profile productions that would benefit from his glossy commercial style…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[1915,4138,1911,2476],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-3kX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12831"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12831"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12841,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12831\/revisions\/12841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}