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WWII dramas have never gone out of style, but to make a solid drama you need to have a meticulous attention to detail, and have a production augmented by a fine team of creative technicians.<\/p>\nWWII dramas have never gone out of style, but to make a solid drama you need to have a meticulous attention to detail, and have a production augmented by a fine team of creative technicians.<\/p>\n
Great actors might be able to sell their characters, but succinct dialogue and subtext is important, and it certainly doesn’t help if the drama is based on real-life events, or interpolates a few true life nuggets before indulging in reality-inspired fantasy.<\/p>\n
Like film historian Julie Kirgo declares in the excellent commentary that supports Twilight Time’s fine Blu-ray edition of Eye of the Needle<\/a><\/strong> (1981), I also wanted to see Richard Marquand’s film version of Ken Follett’s novel because of the score.<\/p>\n It’s a peculiar reason to some degree, but having heard the music on LP prior to ever seeing the film (a common circumstance among soundtrack collectors taking a gamble on a name or title or enticingly designed LP), the curiosity in seeing how Miklos Rozsa’s scoring style fitted a period film was the big draw.<\/p>\n Your\u00a0initial thought might\u00a0be ‘Of course it fits,’ but it goes beyond that: can a composer writing in a style evocative of 1940s dramas support, or actually date a film whose interpretation of drama is through contemporary eyes, and irony that comes from hindsight?<\/p>\n The violence and sexual details in Needle<\/strong>\u00a0are modern and frank, so it is an idiosyncratic query to ask; perhaps absurd, but not unwarranted, given up until the early 1980s – especially with the emergence of Vangelis in Chariots of Fire<\/strong> (1981) and The Bounty<\/a><\/strong> (1984) – period films were rarely scored with electronics, jazz-fusion, or rock.<\/p>\n Needle\u00a0<\/strong>also features three figures of interest: director Marquand, who died not long into a successful career (Star Wars: Return of the Jedi<\/strong> and\u00a0Jagged Edge<\/strong> were his biggies), and Canadian actors Donald Sutherland and Kate Nelligan.<\/p>\n Nelligan’s Brit accent is stronger than her co-star, but Sutherland’s visage (cheekily dubbed ‘frog-like’ by Kirgo) lends itself to a character who can be suave, vicious; elegant, rustic; genial, cold-blooded. It’s a fine understated performance by the voice of Volvo.<\/p>\n Paired with\u00a0Needle<\/strong> is\u00a0Athropoid<\/a><\/strong> (2016), an oddly-titled drama chronicling the Czech resistance fighters who ultimately managed to assassinate Nazi bigwig Reinhard Heydrich. It’s also Sean Ellis’ strongest film as a director – the story is linear, logical, and the conclusion immutable – and features an incredibly tense siege that’s a top-notch example of direction, editing, sound design, and score – a largely minimalist electronic score by Robin Foster.<\/p>\n Ellis’ strengths have tended to be visual and atmospheric, so I’ve ported over two of his prior feature films from the KQEK.com archives: Cashback<\/a><\/strong> (2006), expanded from his Oscar-winning, same-titled short, and The Broken<\/a><\/strong> (2008), a moody, chilling, but ultimately fuzzy riff on Invasion of the Body Snatchers.<\/p>\n Coming Soon:<\/em>\u00a0Jean Negulesco’s\u00a0Boy on a Dolphin<\/strong> (1957) from KINO plus related ‘sea treasure’ films from the archives.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Mark R. Hasan<\/strong>, Editor Reviews of two underrated WWII dramas, Sean Ellis’ docu-drama Anthropoid (2016) from Universal + Richard Marquand’s vivid film version of Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle (1981) from Twilight Time, and from the archives, Ellis’ Cashback (2006) + The Broken (2008)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14667,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[4772,4756,4764,2562,2563,4765,4757,4773,4220],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/EyeOfTheNeedle_featured.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-3Or","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14659"}],"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=14659"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14696,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14659\/revisions\/14696"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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