At the end of 1974, as American forces withdraw from Saigon, only a few CIA advisors remain. In this strange end of the war era, one of those advisors named Bob Chesneau (Frederic Forrest, who was in another better known Vietnam movie, Apocalypse Now) is having an affair with a bank analyst, Barbara Dean (Dame Judi Dench).
Written by David Hare (The Hours) and directed by Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity), this Thames Television film also has a strong cast with E.G. Marshall (Creepshow), Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride), British comedian Chic Murray, Manning Redwood (The Shining, Shock Treatment) and Josef Sommer (Witness).
It’s pretty amazing the places that Hare and Frears went after this movie, which doesn’t show much of the promise that they would later display. But here it is, one of the many British made for TV movies that are all over this giant brick of a Mill Creek collection.
The joy of enjoying Robert Conrad as an actor is a case of you had to be there: if you weren’t, you missed out. Back in the day: we went gold, red and black because Conrad told us so. And we can remember those days thanks to Mill Creek rescuing this lost and forgotten TV Movie adrift in the public domain.
If you’re a younger surfer amid the digital pages of B&S About Movies, Conrad is just that old guy from The Wild Wild West (1965 – 1969) adapted into that utterly awful Will Smith movie Wild Wild West (1999) where Smith portrayed Conrad’s Jim West: no, there was never any giant, Civil War-era mechanical spiders in the series. If you’re a wee-bit older and go back to the pre-cable days of local UHF-TV, you remember coming home from school and watching Conrad as Tom Lopaka on the early ’60s series 77 Sunset Strip, a character which grew into its own four-years series, Hawaiian Eye. And the not-so-old and the not-so-young remember Conrad as Pappy Boyington on Black Sheep Squadron in the ’80s.
Before there was a Tom Selleck, there was Robert Conrad: he was the “he man” of the ’70s, rife with the “sex” for the women and the “brawn” for the men. From Murph the Surf (1975), Sudden Death (1977), and The Lady in Red (1979), he packed the duplexes and the Drive-Ins. From Smash-Up on Interstate 5 (1976), Coach of the Year (1980), and Two Father’s Justice (1994), we turned his TV movies into ratings winners. If Conrad was still active and relevant as an actor in the 21st Century, Sylvester Stallone would have cast him in The Expendables, because, for his fans (moi): Action equals Conrad and vise versa.
However, Conrad, even when playing off his tough guy image, isn’t comedy. And that led to his decision, which he later regretted, in turning down the role of Cmndt. Lassard in the first Police Academy film. Conrad tried to correct that career misstep with a role in Neal Isreal and Pat Profts’s next film, Moving Violations (1985) and this military comedy. With his two comedic bids failing at the box office, he went back to the action genre with the TV movies The Fifth Missile (1986) and Assassin (1986; which we reviewed as part of our last Mill Creek blowout with their Sci-Fi Invasion set).
Image courtesy of terriers4u/eBay.
In a story idea conjured by Conrad, and in an obvious bid to correct the wrong of turning down Police Academy, he’s Joe Knox: a hard-nosed, retired Air Force Colonel who takes over the leadership of a co-ed military academy from his mentor, General Garfield (Bill Erwin; Across 240-plus credits: Plains, Trains & Automobiles, Home Alone . . . and too many TV series to mention, yes, Samuel, even Seinfeld: “My Teeth, My Teeth, you moron!”). Helping Col. Knox whip the Porky’s-cum-Animal House bumbling cadets (including Alan Ruck of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off fame) into shape is Thomas “Top” Tuttle (ex-Elvis body guard Red West of Road House).
Since this is an ’80s TV movie, the shenanigans are innocuous and not as racy as the Police Academy films it apes, and it’s not as funny as No Time for Sergeants (the military comedy gold standard, so what film is), but it doesn’t fail as badly as Mad Magazine‘s (really awful) military school romp Up the Academy (1980). Also keep your eyes open for Reb Brown (TV’s original Captain America, Space Mutiny) and Dennis Farina (in an early role; on his way to TV’s Law & Order as Det. Fontana).
Sam? Notice how I got a plug for both Law & Order and Seinfeld into one review? Sweet!
Check out the trailer-clip then get your own copy of Hard Knox as part of Mill Creek’s Excellent Eighties box set and watch it on You Tube.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Here’s another Mill Creeker that Sam, the boss at B&S, and myself never heard of and would have passed on — if not for it being on a Mill Creek box set. And you probably never heard of it either, as it is a British TV movie, part of the 165-episode run of BBC-TV’s 1985 – 2002 series Screen Two. According to the digital content managers at the IMDb, the Screen Two project was the brainchild of producer Kenith Trodd, who headed a team to create a programming block for the BBC to compete with Channel Four’s efforts in making movies for television and theatrical release. The series plan was to break the BBC away from their studio-made stage play format (know your old PBS-TV rebroadcasts of Doctor Who) to create “live,” non-stage programming. Known as The Fourth Man during its TV run, it carried the title of Blunt for its VHS and overseas theatrical releases.
Of course, it helps that we have Sir Anthony Hopkins heading the cast to inspire us to sit down and review the title for our Mill Creek blowout of their 50-film Excellent Eighties box set.
So, what’s it all about?
VHS image courtesy of ijcm3/eBay.
The story concerns Blunt, Anthony Blunt (a bad Bond joke on my part), a British art historian and professor who became the infamous “fourth man” in the Cambridge Five, a notorious group of spies comprised of rogue MI5 agents (Britain’s CIA equivalent) working for the Soviet Union from the 1930s up through the early 1950s. Once a Sir of the Royal Victorian Knighthood, Blunt was stripped of the honor in 1979 when his activities came to public light.
While the production values exceed the TV stage play-style they were attempting to update, this is — even with Hopkins to hold our interest — still pretty dry and pretty boring and the production values really haven’t improved much: this isn’t an action drama, but (still) a stagey, psychological drama that attempts to get inside the heads of the men and asks “why” Blunt did it. While Blunt and the Cambridge Five’s exploits are certainly intriguing and appealing to spy aficionados, the way this story is told, it just isn’t as engaging as the exploits of Ashaf Marwan, an Egyptian billionaire who worked for Mossad, the State of Israel’s intelligence agency to became the world’s first true “super spy” during the 1973 Yom Kippur War/Arab-Israeli War. His exploits are chronicled in the much better spy film The Angel (2018) and its accompanying documentary, The Spy Who Fell to Earth (2018).
You can watch Blunt: The Fourth Man on Tubi as a free-with-ads stream.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Yes, along with The Lady and the Highwayman, this Mill Creek has not one but two John Hough made for TV movies. Hough is an interesting director who made perhaps my favorite late model Hammer movie (Twins of Evil), one of the best car movies of all time (Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry), several fun Disney movies (the Witch Mountain films, The Watcher In the Woods), some out there slashers (American Gothic and Incubus), a few sequels (The Triumphs of a Man Called Horse and Howling IV: The Original Nightmare) and even executive produced a really insightful wrestling documentary (TheBackyard).
This bodice ripper, based on the book by Barbara Cartland, starts with Sir Giles Staverley (Christopher Plummer) being tricked into gambling away not only his home but his daughter to Lord Harry Wrotham (Edward Fox, M in Never Say Never Again). He becomes so distraught over what he has done to his daughter Serena (Helena Bonham Carter in one of her first big movies) he kills himself.
However, Lord Justin Vulcan (Marcus Gilbery, who is also in Hough’s Biggles) wins everything from Wrotham yet has no idea what to do with the house and the girl. His mother, Lady Harriet Vulcan (Diana Rigg!) wants her far away from her son and their ancestral home of Mandrake, so all manner of upper crust intrigue follows.
Originally airing on December 27, 1987 on CBS, there are also roles here for Stewart Granger (The Wild Geese), Fiona Fullerton (A View to a Kill), Neil Dickson (who was also in Biggles, an HBO afternoon movie that I really need to get to), Anna Massey (Peeping Tom), Eileen Atkins (Sister Albana fromI Don’t Want to Be Born), Gareth Hunt (who is in Hough’s Lady and the Highwayman) and Robert Addie (Mordred in Excalibur).
Eurospy fans will be pleased that two Bond girls (Fullerton and Rigg) show up here, while noting that both Rigg and Hunt played roles on The Avengers (she was, of course, Emma Peel while he played Mike Gambit on The New Avengers).
Seeing as how many TV movies are on this set, I was thinking that this would be the 1986 Cannon Pictures made for TV movie Choices, starring George C. Scott, Jacqueline Bisset and Melissa Gilbert, which was directed by David Lowell Rich. Nope.
Instead, this is a 1981 TV movie directed by Silvio Narizzano, who made Georgy Girl and the Dennis Hopper and Carrol Baker-starring Bloodbath, in which Hopper plays Chicken, a junkie living in a small Spanish village where magic and child sacrifice is a fact of life. You better believe I’m hunting that movie down right now.
You know, by comparison, this tale of a partially deaf teenager dealing with his handicap while winning over his football team and a new girlfriend while staying out of trouble seems really boring.
That new girlfriend is played by Demi Moore. It was her first role, but when she became a star, her image became the art on the VHS re-release. The major trivia I can impart to you on this movie is that star Paul Carafotes told Daily Mail that the night before Demi married her first husband Freddy Moore, she snuck out of her own bachelorette party to spend the night with him. She did mention this in her biography Inside Out, but never mentioned him by name.
If you’re a fan of made for TV movies, the Mill Creek The Excellent Eighties is a must buy, as it has plenty of telefilms for one low price. One example is this 1985 David Lowell Rich directed effort.
Rich directed 113 titles in his IMDB resume. The majority of his career was spent in television, working on shows such as Naked City, Route 66, The Twilight Zone, Mannix and Cannon, as well as theatrical films such as Eye of the Cat and The Concorde… Airport ’79. But he’s more known for his TV movies, which include Horror At 37,000 Feet, SST: Death Flight, Satan’s School for Girls, The Defiant Ones (he worked with Robert Urich often), Telethon, The Sex Symbol and Runaway!
First airing on ABC on January 21, 1985, Rich has a great cast here, led by Burt Lancaster as the publisher of the titular scandal sheet, which is obviously the National Enquirer. His role as Harold Fallen is complex, as he’s kind to many of his employees, but driven by selling paper. When he senses a story, such as causing recovering alcoholic actor Ben Rowan (Urich) to get back on the sauce, he does everything he can to destroy that person.
One scheme is by hiring Helen Grant (Pamela Reed, who was great on Parks and Recreation) as one of his writers. She’s a real journalist who sees herself above his supermarket tabloid, but he promises her a way out of her financial struggle and an opportunity for people to actually read her work. However, he’s hiring her because her best friend Meg North (Lauren Hutton) is married to Rowan, which Fallen rightly assumes will give him inside access to the man he wants to fall down into the gutter again.
Look for appearances by Peter Jurasik (Sid the Snitch from Hill Street Blues), Bobby Di Ciccio (I Wanna Hold Your Hand), character actor Trey Wilson, Douglas Rowe (Critters 2), Rance Howard (father of Ron and Clint), Jeff Goldblum’s ex-wife Patricia Gaul (who shows up in several John Hughes movies), ALF star Max Wright, another fun character actor in Frederick Coffin, Hanna Landy (Grace Cardiff from Rosemary’s Baby), Robert Jayne (who you may know better as his other stage name, Bobby Jacoby) and a small role for a young Frances McDormand.
While you can see where this film is going — it has nothing to do with the 1952 movie Scandal Sheet — it’s surprisingly dark and ends on a total down note, with destroyed friendship, death and face spitting at a funeral. Therefore, this is exactly the kind of movie I love, one that decries sleaze while absolutely swimming in it.
Barbara Cartland’s romance novel Cupid Rides Pillion was filmed as this British TV movie, one of the first appearances by Hugh Grant, who appears alongside a pretty solid cast that includes Oliver Reed (once a werewolf, once a diver out of a mansion window in Burnt Offerings), Claire Bloom (Clash of the Titans), Michael York (who I associate with this type of movie most often, as he was in The Three Muskateers), Emma Samms (Dynasty), Sir John Mills (Quatermass in the 1979 TV movie) and Liz Fraser (who was in many of the Carry On movies) among others.
Emma Samms’ character of Lady Castlemaine is based on the life of Barbara Palmer, First Duchess of Cleveland, one of King Charles II’s mistresses and the mother of several of his children, in case you’re into British scandals.
This is the story of Lord Lucius Vyne (Grant), who is loyal to King Charles II and helping help to return to rule after Cromwell. He takes on a secret identity as the Silver Blade, kind of like a musketeer of sorts. He’s too late to save Lady Panthea Vyne’s (Lysette Anthony, Krull) King Charles Spaniel from being stomped to death, so fair warning if you like small dogs.
Even when the king comes back, he has enemies, so the Silver Blade remains in his service, even when it nearly costs him and his lady love’s life.
You can watch this on Tubi and trust me, the print is just as horrible on the Mill Creek release. I think with a British TV movie from the late 80’s, this is as good as we’re going to get.
If you ever associated Ted Danson and Richard Masur with child abuse, thanks to Danson being in Something About Amelia and Masur in Fallen Angel, this film will redeem both of them, as they are chasing an entire cabal of abusers.
Based on the Jonathan Kellerman novel of the same name, this tells the story of Alex Delaware (Danson, who also executive produced). A Los Angeles-based psychiatrist, Delaware is testifying against an accused child murder who soon dies in a suspicious manner. However, when detective Milo Sturgis (Masur) takes the case, he soon learns that things are much deeper than that.
Rachel Ticotin (Arnold’s love interest in Total Recall), James Noble (the governor on Benson), David Huddleston (Santa from Santa Claus: The Movie and The Big Lewbowski himself), Merritt Butrick (Death Spa), Charles Lane (Arsenic and Old Lace), Scott Paulin (Cat People) and Deborah Harmon (Used Cars) all show up in this.
For a mid-80’s show, it’s pretty great that Masur’s character is gay and not mincing or a stereotype. The ending is pretty intense as well and probably one of the few times you’ll see Ted Danson in an MMA-style situation.
Thanks Mill Creek The Excellent Eighties set for having so many made for TV movies! You can also watch this on YouTube.
Based on a true story of Szilveszter Matuska, who said “I wrecked trains because I like to see people die. I like to hear them scream.” Yes, the man literally orgasmed when he wrecked trains, including his most brutal crime, when he killed twenty-two people and injured a hundred and twenty when he derailed the Vienna Express with dynamite, sending the engine and nine of the eleven coaches to plunge down a hill.
Matuska reportedly escaped from jail in 1945. He may have served as an explosives expert during the latter stages of World War II. No one is sure, as he was never recaptured. Some believe that he served on the Communist side in the Korean War.
Michael Sarrazin plays him in this Hungarian/German made for TV movie directed by Sándor Simó. Somehow, Sarrazin has been in two movies I’ve watched this week.
While history claims — as stated above — that Matsuka only really achieved bliss thanks to train destruction, he sure gets a lot of action in this movie. I think what happened after — even if the film only guessed at what happened — would have made for a better movie.
The band Lard recorded a song about Matsuka in which they sang:
Remember this:
No matter how many books you ban
No matter how many records you burn
The seeds of fertile fetishes
Are planted at an early age
And somewhere out there
Someone amongst you
May at this very moment lust
For derailing trains
EDITOR’S NOTE: Welcome to Mill Creek Month! As you know, we love our Mill Creek box sets, so we’re doing an entire month of these films. The first set we got into was their B-Movie Blast 50-Film pack, then their Gorehouse Greats 12-Pack. And as with those sets — as is par for the course with these bricks of films, with their mashups of movie mayhem —their Excellent Eighties 50-Movie set is no different, with its crazy mix of drive-in ditties and lost network TV movies across all genres. So, to start our unpacking of this set . . . here’s our first review!
Oh, boy, Sam . . . when this was first assigned to me as “Second Sight” — without romantic the suffix — I thought I’d have to fly off the top ropes of the Civic Arena and whoop-ass Shirley Doe (my boss’s wrestling altar ego) for stickin’ it to me with that friggin’ John Larroquette monstrosity from 1989, you know, from back in the day when Bronson Pinchot was a “thing,” poised as the next Robin Williams . . . Bess Armstrong’s heart-weeping cuteness (Jaws 3-D) in the film, be damned. . . .
Sorry, Sam.
As it turns out, this debut entry on this Mill Creek set is an ’80s CBS-TV movie based on the best-selling romance novel Emma and I by Sheila Hocken. The “Emma” in this case, is a dog.
What? Why are you snickering? What gives with the eye rolls?
I’m not a totally heartless B-Movie slob. I can be romantic! Just not Hallmark Channel-romantic . . . only old “Big Three Network” romantic. And I’ll take a romantic dog-chick flick over a psychic-infused Balki Bartokomous flick any day of the week — and twice on Sundays.
How obscure and lost is this film: it’s easier to find a clean image of the book than the TV adverts or DVDs.
TV movie powerhouse Elizabeth Montgomery shines (as always) as Alexandra McKay, a woman who has been blind for nearly 20 years. Fearful that people will take advantage of her condition, she’s staunchly independent, living a sheltered, private life — a world where she only trusts her best friend: her always dependable guide dog, Emma. She allows love to enter her life when she meets Richard Chapman, an art dealer. And it’s great to see Barry Newman — of Vanishing Point fame — as said art dealer, allowed to stretch his thespian wings in a dramatic-cum-romantic role.
Now, we know . . . ugh, romance . . . chick flicks . . . argh! So, we’ll play the John Korty card to get you to watch.
John’s career dates back to directing numerous episodes of PBS-TV’s Sesame Street, while his theatrical and TV movie efforts date to the early ’60s. If you grew up in the ’70s, you know John put his previous skills as a documentarian to good use in the TV rating juggernaut Who Are the DeBolts? and Where Did They Get Nineteen Kids? that was hosted by Henry “The Fonz” Winkler (The Lords of Flatbush). Korty also wrote and directed Oliver’s Story (1978), the not-as-successful-and-critically-lambasted sequel to the early ’70s standard for maudlin-romance flicks: Love Story (1970). Another one of Korty’s biggies was the civil rights-drama The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974).
But wait, hey you! Star Wars fan: John Korty directed the Lucasian knockoff, The Ewok Adventure (1984).
All in all, this is great stuff. This is why we have Mill Creek sets: to preserve well-made, forgotten films . . . and not just Crown International, B-Movie schlock. Bravo, Mill Creek!
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