{"id":9596,"date":"2014-09-05T15:21:21","date_gmt":"2014-09-05T19:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=9596"},"modified":"2014-09-07T14:49:51","modified_gmt":"2014-09-07T18:49:51","slug":"detective-john-wayne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=9596","title":{"rendered":"Detective John Wayne!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Brannigan_German_poster\"<\/a>

‘John Wayne hits again to the grace of your God!’ in Brannigan, ‘a man made of steel!’<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019ve re-ordered the latest reviews a little, saving the Richard Attenborough-Judy Geeson-John Hurt true crime drama 10 Rillington Place<\/b> (1971) for Saturday, but here are the two detective films in which John Wayne starred before switching back to his beloved western.<\/p>\n

As the poster indicates, Wayne\u2019s still got a gun, but he\u2019s now wearing a suit and is fully urban, dealing with crooks and schnooks with a little frontier justice (or at least that\u2019s what\u2019s implied by the mere casting of Wayne).<\/p>\n

By the early seventies, it seemed logical for Wayne to swap genres. Westerns weren\u2019t as popular, war films were becoming more cynical (making Wayne\u2019s directorial \/ war statement The Green Berets<\/strong> an anachronistic disaster), and I kind of doubt the actor gave any thought to sci-fi or horror; the results would\u2019ve been fascinating, but because he was so identified with westerns, any scriptwriter would\u2019ve had one tough task making an genre icon fit into a cosmic void or dark and scary house.<\/p>\n

Twilight Time\u2019s release of Columbia\u2019s Brannigan<\/b><\/a> (1975) is a treat, but not just for Wayne fans. The lovely Judy Geeson is in proper HD, Richard Attenborough manages to give his clich\u00e9d frustrated chief of police some proper gravitas, and there\u2019s an enormous talent pool of proper British actors, veteran American stars, and Canadian John Vernon, with that stentorian voice and hard attitude.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most important to myself is it\u2019s a Blu-ray edition of a Douglas Hickox film \u2013 one of my favourite Brit directors who should\u2019ve enjoyed a prolific career but never really \u2018broke\u2019 into Hollywood nor big international productions. He received critical acclaim for Zulu Dawn <\/b>(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\u2019t have liked being trapped with flat 1.33:1 and TV\u2019s limited budgets.<\/p>\n

Also covered is Wayne\u2019s other cop film, the goofily titled McQ<\/b><\/a> (1974), directed by John Sturges. As I touch upon in the review, while solidly made, there\u2019s 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 \u2018scope camera to several parts <\/i>of a car to craft a kinetic montage. McQ<\/b> deserves a Blu-ray release, but that\u2019s up to Warner Bros.<\/p>\n

Coming next is 10 Rillington Place<\/b><\/a>, Richard Fleischer\u2019s superbly directed version of serial killer John Christie, plus some thoughts on Richard Attenborough, who passed away this week at the age of 90.<\/p>\n

Cheers,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mark R. Hasan<\/strong>, Editor
\nKQEK.com<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviews of John Wayne’s pair of detective thrillers – Brannigan (1975), new on Blu from Twilight Time, and McQ (1974) from Warner Bros.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9604,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[3003,3004,2562,2563,3008,2907,3007],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/Brannigan_featured.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-2uM","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9596"}],"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=9596"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9646,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9596\/revisions\/9646"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}