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“Red Sun” (1971)
With the emergence of the Spaghetti Western, the appearance of ethnically incongruent casts became more commonplace, especially in light of the Italian film industry’s
habit of shooting films MOS. The capability of producers for international casts assembled to expand the range of a popular genre production’s global range of marketability (and in doing so, built on the blueprint initiated by the already emergent Italian horror and peplum films) was advanced by the ease with which any linguistical incongruity of a performance soundtrack was immediately correctable with the substitution of a port-dubbing track of any national origin. (That the films, generally situated in the American West, were nonetheless populated by extras seemingly comprised of colorfully grizzled natives from the hills surrounding Almeria, Spain is one of the irreverent idiosyncrasies of the genre when their every utterance emerges with a distinctively flat Midwestern accent.) However, the extension of multinational castings often resulted in odd pairings for which there seemed to be little rational explanation save for the extension of international box-office magnetism. The great Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai featured formidably as the primary antagonist in 1968’s “Oggi a me… domani a te!” though his presence was clearly meant for its enhancement of regional box-office potential than in any meaningful cultural representation in the context of the film.
In Terence Young’s “Red Sun” East again meets the old West with the able participation of a goodly representation of half of the NATO nations and the usual compliment of Almerian local color. Though unlike many multinational European
westerns, in this film there has been some level of effort, labored as it may be, to naturally integrate the international seasoning of the casting.
A gang of thieves, led by the dubiously monikered Link Stuart (Charles Bronson) and Gotch Kink (Alain Delon), robs a train which happens to be carrying an ambassadorial entourage from Japan. In the process of looting the targeted payroll as well as the passengers, it is discovered that the emissaries are carrying an invaluable sword intended as a gift to the American President; a sword which is swiftly purloined by the robbers, with one of its two guards killed. Before escaping the crime scene, Link is waylaid and left for dead by Gotch. The surviving guard, a samurai named Kuroda Jubei and played by the formidable Toshirô Mifune, is charged by the ambassador to be accompanied (in a very unlikely forced association based solely on the needs of the plot) by the betrayed Link who wishes to pursue Gotch for both retaliatory motives as well as the recuperation of his own stolen stolen loot. The ambassador grants Kuroda
Jubei a mere week to recover the sword in order to avoid the necessity of committing ritual suicide as an acknowledgement of dishonor.
While the plot is, within the confines of the dynamic between Link and Gotch, yet another variation of the well-worn standard Western revenge scenario, in “Red Sun” the additional variable of a cultural duality of motivation in the search for exacting retribution opens the possibility for a profound introspection of the possible vagaries of behavior which may occur when incongruous ethos intersect. While the film goes to great lengths to construct a scenario where the conflicting values of each individual’s code of honor are in competitive interplay, it then proceeds to squander the more interesting thematic possibilities for broadly played western pseudo-mockery. Interestingly, it only the protagonist whose owns no direct culpability in the robbery who is suffers the threat of direct moral and mortal consequences; a circumstance which drives the rest of the film, yet whose thematic gravity is trivialized by the light-hearted caper mentality to which the rest of the film happily concedes. With few substantive exchanges between characters, a late act epiphany resulting in a sudden conscientious conversion is entirely unconvincing and a final gesture of respect tinged with a continuance of the film’s jokey cynicism rather than being touched by the imprint of the elegiac. One can only imagine how Sam Peckinpah, whose characters
roamed the West haunted by faded frontier honor grown obsolete by time and progress, might have reconstructed such material.
Given the dreadfully thin material, the formidable leading performers have little opportunity to do anything but assume their most familiar public personae. Charles Bronson is given little to do but spout lightly whimsical monologues punctuated with so much self-amusement it’s as if his character were a fugitive from the writer’s room of the Alan Brady Show. Mifune dutifully strides through the film unchallenged and possibly reminiscing about better days with Kurosawa. Delon is all steely-eyed gazes and cold-blooded smirks. Ursula Andress, as Gotch’s ultimately useless-to-the-plot girlfriend of Gotch is possessed of a stoicism that makes for stunning film stills but less inspiring when functioning as a live performer. Director Young’s work on the film emphasizes how valuable the contributions of Ted Moore and Peter R. Hunt were to his earlier espionage successes.
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“something big” (1971)
Joe Baker (Dean Martin) is an outlaw with a desire to do “something big” before returning to a Pennsylvania life of domesticity with his Scottish fiancé Dove McBride (the
always welcome Carol White). In the course of realizing this wish, he and his gang will rob several stagecoaches, kidnap the wife of Army Colonel Morgan (Brian Keith), indulge in a bit of white slavery in order to steal a Gatling gun, hijack a shipment of whiskey which they then unlawfully deliver to an Indian tribe and slaughter an entire village filled with Mexican bandits. The film is presented as a comedy.
There are many problems with Andrew V. McLaglen’s “something big”, not the least of which is the film’s violent mood swings which appear to be by design, as if the screenwriter James Lee Barrett and the director (both also acting as producers, so the usual backstage alibi of executive interference seems unlikely) were unsure as the direction they wished their opus to follow and instead decided to unwisely incorporate influences from a variety of forms within the genre. Both Barrett and McLaglen cut their creative teeth steeped in the traditional western form, and their desire to move beyond such a long standing comfort zone is admirable, though the resulting cut and paste quilt of styles seems an ill-conceived effort to appease genre
enthusiasts of every stripe, yet producing a work almost guaranteed to please none.
The film does begin promisingly with a grizzled Denver Pyle in high-spirited argumentation with Colonel Morgan that is both sharply paced and genuinely funny; an opening salvo promising a humorously exaggerated version of cavalry and cowboys; material that was second nature to both the filmmakers and the cast of familiar veteran character actors: Pyle, Ben Johnson, Albert Salmi, Robert Donner, Ed Faulkner, Bob Steele, Harry Carey Jr. and Paul Fix. Had the film lived up to this early scene in poking at the familiar frontier types as portrayed by these performers over the years (especially those in the John Wayne repertory company of players, to whom both Barrett and McLaglen are inextricably 
linked), it might have made for a fitfully amusing night at the cinema. Instead, the film meanders without any sense of immediacy, but clumsily touches upon irrelevant plot points that seem included only as familiar milestones with which the filmmakers seems to grant themselves a peculiar justification for self-congratulation. (For what? Seeing older films?) Thus, there is an extended sequence intended to recall the Fordian sentimentality between Capt. Brittles and Sgt. Quincannon in “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon”, down to comical drunken brawl that, in John Ford’s film, was intended to signify the roughhouse camaraderie of the troopers (as well as to amuse), but in McLaglen’s version the fisticuffs are awkwardly imposed without cause, simply to enliven his inert staging of the material. (That the lumpish non-actor Merlin Olsen is hardly a substitute for Victor McLaglen seems to be obvious to everyone but his progeny.) Similarly, the Gatling gun reinforced climax of the film recalls the apocalyptic battle concluding Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” in an act of arrogant homage that manages to 
accomplish little except to expose how truly dreadful is the film’s direction. One might not expect the painstaking technical mastery which Peckinpah brought to the table, but in “something big”, the attention to detail in the action scenes is particularly shoddy: with the Gatling gun spraying bullets to the right while the extras are falling on the left. The entirety of the film is a trip down a Memory Lane of better films, with references to everything from spaghetti westerns to McLaglen’s own flawed but superior “Bandolero!”.
However, nowhere does the film expose its inconsistency of intention more than in it’s treatment of women. Surprisingly, in a film where a good portion of the cast are treated as either subliterate jackanapes or craven scoundrels, the two prominent female roles- that of Honor Blackman’s Mary Anna Morgan and Carol White’s Dove -are conceived
and played with an eye and ear for the quiet strength and dignity of the female’s gentler nature. In a scene that’s part confessional and part life lesson in practical romantic sensibility , Mary Anna explains to Baker the reasons for her extended absences from her husband with an insight that is poetic in its wisdom and understanding of the perils of the human heart. The scene is a truly lovely moment for the actress- who is far more relaxed here in the Western milieu than in “Shalako” -an oasis from the bluster of the rest of the film which is almost crassly destroyed by being bookended by the film’s crudest invention: a pair of sex crazed sisters whose appetites for the carnal pleasures of men is rendered in such broadly exaggerated vulgar strokes, it only results in embarrassment for all concerned.
Dean Martin has often been criticized for walking through this role, though ease in the saddle is often mistaken for lazy performance temperament. (To observe an example of true professional somnambulism by Martin one needs look no further than any of his Matt Helm films.) Of special note is the performance of Ben Johnson who plays his role of an Army scout with a practiced low-key charm (he accounted for himself similarly in McLaglen’s earlier “Chisum”, making entertaining mountains out of the crumbs from which his character was written) which easily manages to invoke charm while retaining his dignity; often at risk but never surrendered to the precarious chasm of buffoonery with which the script intermittently imperils the actors. The
usually reliable Brian Keith is not as fortunate, with his performance becoming more stiff with defensive affectation with each new humiliation encountered.
Finally, there is the matter of the aural assault of Marvin Hamlisch’s anachronistic scoring which seems to mistake the Wild West for an airport cocktail lounge; though this continuous musical offense finds close competition for negative achievement with the perpetration (one can hardly call their work a “contribution”) of Burt Bacharach and Hal David in what must be the most heinously inappropriate song heard in any film since the disastrous Riz Ortolani–Doc Pomus ballad which disgraced the main title sequence of “Anzio”. 
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“The April Fools” (1969)
“The April Fools” asks the audience to believe in an instantaneous romantic attraction intense enough to make a two people discard everything in their lives, all the while mocking the ruinous relationship choices people make. The contradictions prominent in
Hal Dresner’s screenplay are not lost on director Stuart Rosenberg who seems rather desperate at times to send his penchant for visual gimmickry into overdrive in an attempt to masquerade the surprising shallowness of both the central romance and the loveless circumstances which make such agreeable case of dual infidelity so attractive.
Married investment executive Howard Brubaker (Jack Lemmon) celebrates his new promotion by attending a party at the apartment of his boss, Ted Gunther (Peter Lawford), who despite being married to the lovely Catherine (Catherine Deneuve) openly acts the lascivious playboy with his female guests. At Ted’s prodding, Howard inadvertently invites one of the guests to a drink, an invitation she unhesitatingly accepts, with Howard unaware that the young woman is actually Ted’s wife Catherine. They quietly leave the party and in the process of getting to know each other discover that they have much in common, including a mutual dissatisfaction with their respective marriages. In the process of the evening, what begins as a friendly attraction blossoms into love.
The film relies heavily on the audience’s willingness to root for the couple through their path to infidelity against their respective spouses, both of whom are portrayed as such irredeemably obnoxious characters, it has the opposite of the intended effect (to 
make the lovers’ unfaithfulness understandable and acceptable), by making the audience question their judgment in picking such outrageously mismatched partners in the first place. If a film is attempting to convince that intense emotional instincts of an extremely abbreviated courtship may result in a reliable long-term relationship, it hampers that faith if prior judgment is demonstrated to be so irretrievably wrongheaded.
Where “The April Fools” becomes problematic is that its meteoric love affair fails to convince. The film spends a generous amount of time illustrating the dysfunctional lack of emotional symbiosis in Howard and Catherine’s marriages, yet in illustrating the fusion of two romantic discontents seeking a sympathetic harmony, the screenplay never fleshes out the character beyond a surface attraction. Instead what we are treated
to are several repetitious scenes of revelry- making the film, for lengthy periods, feel like an extended Blake Edwards party sequence (the type where the women’s loose moral characters are … by …. -that are used for little more than for Lemmon to run through his repertoire of exasperated incredulity, while Deneuve mainly responds with toothy amusement, though little of consequence transpires emotionally between the two. For much of “The April Fools”, the pair stupidly placed in chaotic environs resistant to simple conversation; certainly not an incubator in
which to hatch emotional intimacy. Often the film seems to operate on the perverse notion that love is the prize at the end of a metropolitan tourist endurance test in libertinism. However, an even more bizarre encounter awaits in the company of a senior couple who inaugurate Howard and Catherine in the secrets of committed love with the use of tarot cards and a boisterous round of slapstick fencing. That the seniors are played by venerable Golden Age stars Myrna Loy and Charles Boyer, whose very presence lends a welcome amount of respectability to roles that even under casual inspection make no sense.
The final third of the film shifts gears to introduce unrelated characters (including a drunken commuter with a penchant for foreign ladies, played with an appealing manic energy by Harvey Korman), resulting in an extended slapstick car race to the airport, but with the abundance of needless distractions, the romantic dynamic is depleted to the point where the finale seems flatly anticlimactic. Both Lemmon and Deneuve perform admirably but have no chemistry in this occasionally amusing but strangely passionless film.
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