“Topaz”

What do you get when you make a spy thriller that's about actual spies?

This is the question which Alfred Hitchcock set out to answer in 1969, with the world's craziest schedule and a novel by Leon Uris as his sole weapons. Long story short, Topaz is the tale of a French spy who discovers that the Russians are keeping some suspiciously missile-shaped objects in Cuba, and then uncovers Russian spies within his own government. 

Although I am, perhaps, giving the film too much credit to say that it is "the tale" of anything. By the dual virtue of striving to for once follow real spying events rather than the ravings of Ian Fleming, and of having been written on the cuff of the actors' shirts a few minutes past the studio deadline, Topaz isn't so much one film as three ones of approximately 50 minutes each, which each get a set-up and a conclusion before we move on to the next one. Disney's Atlantis II: Milo's Return is the last movie you'd expect to be reminded of when watching a 1960's Hitchcock film, but it was the only thing I could think of. 

First, you have the story of Philippe Dubois getting a document from the Cuban embassy in New York; then, you have the story of André Devereaux's adventures in Cuba proper and his doomed love with Juanita; then, you have the story of Devereaux unmasking the mole(s) in the French secret service. 

Due, I am given to understand, to Leon Uris taking the events too seriously to let Hitchcock add any of his macabre humor to the proceedings, none of the three stories are among Hitch's best; if we're talking anti-U.S.S.R. flicks from the 60's, give me Torn Curtain anyday. And the character arc of André's wife Nicole is a mess — first she's the enamored wife who wants André to retire from his dangerous work so he can be with her, then she's… having an affair with… the villain? But then by the end of the film she and André are together again with no fanre? Huh? …But they're fine. If nothing else, they succeed at giving a somewhat realistic Hollywood look at Cold War-era spywork, which is a welcome change from your standard James Bond fare. 

The actors are a mixed bag. Frederick Stafford as our hero André has a knack for "constant poker-face" that would make a great spy, but makes for a poor actor, especially where the romantic subplots are concerned. It's easy to see how he got the part (the man looks like a hybrid of Timothy Dalton ands Roger Moore: of course you want him as your spy and yes I am aware neither of those had yet been cast as 007, but I'm just saying). But he is just. So. Wooden.

John Vernon delivers a fine performance as Rico-Parra-Totally-Not-Che-Guevara, a Cuban envoy to New York whose part of the film ends on a surprisingly tragic note — but in truth, what works here doesn't take much skill — look equal parts stoic and intimidating, and you've got it. Karin Dor opposite him as Juanita de Cordoba plays her character quite well, but her character, as it happens, is even more patently a tragic figure, who feels like she belongs in another movie entirely, and that kind of bothered me throughout her part of the film. 

Philippe Noiret (as the aforementioned Russian spy Henri Jarré) and the improbably-named Per-Axel Arosenius (as K.G.B. defector Boris Kusenov) are both highlights whenever they appear, but have too little a part in this wooly-mammoth of a picture to save it all on thier own. John Forsythe plays the American agent Michael Nordstrom very by-the-book (entirely fine for what he is, but nothing to remember him by). 

A surprisingly enjoyable side-character was Shakespearean actor Roscoe Lee Browne as Philippe Dubois, one of André's agents in New York, who handles the obtention of the secret documents from the Cuban embassy in the first of the three films-in-the-film. You wouldn't think so to look at the man when he's first introduced, a florist in a preposterous yellow jacket, but his brief stint as the movie's protagonist proves he is everything you want from the hero in a spy film, much moreso than Stafford's André. I'd seriously have watched the heck out of a Persuaders-style TV series about The Florist, played by Browne, with a recast André as his very own “M” or “Judge Fulton”.

Claude Jade as André's daughter is sure to disappoint any fans of hers who watched the movie for her sake, not because she does anything wrong, but because she doesn't really do anything. She's in and out of the film almost as quickly as Alfred Hitchcock himself, whose cameo is easy-to-miss but probably the only real joke in the movie (and it's a good one, too). 

As for Michel Piccoli as Jacques Granville/Colombine, his exterior fame and how high he is in the credits make me feel like I ought to have something to say about him, but I really don't. He's just sort of there. The movie throws out as the last second, when we already know he's the traitor, that, oh, André's wife is having an affair with him, and, oh, he was old friends with André in the Résistance, and goddammit why didn't you tell us that earlier?! 

What's more, I am told by Wikipedia that he was robbed of his last chance to redeem his character, a final duel between him and André in a soccer stadium. (Why a soccer stadium? I don't know! Why do you ask me these things?!) It would have been somewhat out-of-place considering how late his significance was introduced, but it would have given Piccoli a chance to do something.

Mind, I don't disagree with the motives for cutting the aforementioned duel, namely, that the film was way too long. At 125 minutes it is already way longer than it can afford from people's attention-spans, and I can't imagine what sort of disaster the 147-minute-long original cut would have been. 

So… mixed-to-negative, is my final impression. One of Hitchcock's few earnest misfires. It's not a bad film, really, if you forget whose name is attached to it, but even without Hitchcock's other masterpieces to take into account, it would be very, very hard to argue that this is a good film. 

Post-Scriptum

Someone tell me, what is wrong with Uribe's glasses? I was waiting and waiting for someone to address it, but, no. The chap just… wears his glasses sideways. Whuh?

“The Most Dangerous Game Night”

(Note how skillfully I deny this title its aggravating faux-clever punctuation. I may like it overall, but DuckTales 2017 has many flaws, and the usually-terrible titles are one of them. There's been very few decent ones so far.)

So being a Duck fan, I have dutifully followed Disney's attempt at doing to the Disney Comics Unvierse what all the big boys with their superhero comics are doing to theirs — e.g., make a reboot that brings in the fans of the original but liberally changes characters and tone to draw in a fresh audience. 

DT17 is strange and occasionally-irritating, but it's very well-made, often funny, sometimes moving, and it's clear from Francisco Angones's blog that the people involve care. Unlike brave, unfortunate GeoX over at Duck Cartoons Revue, I don't have to force myself to watch new episodes. 

Case in point, the Season 2 opened that dropped in yesterday, The Most Dangerous Game Night.

This was… a weird episode to begin a new season with. For one thing, it's your standard 25-minutes fare, whereas the Season 1 pilot, the abysmally-titled Woo-oo!, was double-length. This is unfortunate, as the DuckTales 2017 writers tend to do much better with double-length episodes than regular ones — Woo-oo! and The Shadow War, to me, were probably among the best (if not the best) of Season 1, simply because the plots didn't feel quite as rushed as they usually do. 

Moreover, it hardly sets up anything at all. It has some character development for Louie, true, but that comes to a natural (and well-enacted) conclusion by the episode's close. Aside from the ill-defined monsters-of-the-week that are the Gyropuddlians, a tribe of microscopic cavemen living in McDuck Manor, the episode features only the established cast. Complete, it must be said, with Donald Duck, which bodes well for this season (as Donald was much too often absentee in the previous one). 

Speaking of the whole cast, refreshingly, the episode remembered to include Duckworth. This show's version of Duckworth, as you may recall, is a ghost, and in this episode they're drawing more on the consequences of the "ghost butler" idea than they are doing anything with Duckworth's general character… but to be fair, his brief, ghost-gags-based appearance was funny. As is his relationship with Mrs Beakley, continued from their brief interaction in his first episode. 

As for Gyro, it is necessary, if you want to get anything out of him at all, to accept that he is not Gyro in this show, but rather his evil twin-brother from another dimension. Seriously, dye his hair pink and you'd pretty much get a slightly-more-subdued Mad Ducktor.

Mad Ducktor being Gyro's very own, delightfully-insane Mr Hyde

from a series of Italian Duck Avenger adventures. Look him up. And let's hope

the (sigh) Fresh And Modern folks, somewhere in the inscrutable

recesses of their heretic skulls, find the inspiration to bring him 

to American shores while doing him justice. 

In this episode, his determination to become the God-King of the Gyropuddlians using his Micro-Phone/shrinkray is a particularly stark contrast to Gyro's attitude, never anything but kindly, towards the Microducks when he crossed their path in the DuckTales Classic episode where they appeared. But as far as this "megalomaniac mad-scientist barely held in check" character goes, the writers and actor wring a lot of humor out of him, here and elsewhere. 

Modulo the villainous tendencies, this episode even dispenses with Gyro's cool, 'snooty' Season 1 and brings back some of the joyful exuberance of his comic self. This iteration of DT17 Gyro may not be the Gyro we usually know, but it's not hard to imagine him starring in Think-Box Bollix or Hobblin' Goblins. 

…Oh, I figure I should probably say something about that opening scene. 

The Indiana Jones ripoff as Scrooge & Co. retrieve the Idol of Cibola is obviously a nod to the fact that the similar sequence in Barks's Seven Cities of Cibola inspired the opening scene of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. So this adaption of the Cibola tale (albeit brief) that redesigns things to look more like their Indiana Jones counterparts is bringing things amusingly full-circle. 

Thing is, the novelty of this was largely lost on me, as it was, I think, on most other Disney comic fans. That Barks's treasure-hunt stories directly inspired Spielberg & Lucas for Indiana Jones is, I suppose, kind of cool to those who first hear it, but it is "entry-level trivia" for Disney comics afficionados, of about the same level as "Barks kept drawing scripts for Disney comics even after he retired" or "the Phantom Blot's face is meant to look like Walt Disney's……… probably?". 

Still, I suppose it will have looked clever and witty to new viewers brought to Duckdom by DuckTales 2017 and who are only now starting to catch up on their classics and the associated lore. This is a joke for which I just wasn't the intended audience.

As for the "woah — wait-what? — aaaaah!" joke that goes with it, it is, in itself, well-executed, and it furthers Louie's character arc in the episode, but… people, showing amusing self-awareness about the medium like this would work better if every single adventure story you've done so far wasn't already full of that sort of ironic self-awareness. For God's sake, on his very first adventure in Episode 1 of Season 1, Dewey was already acting casual about a "basic death-trap". 

…and that's a wrap on my review of The Most Dangerous Game Night. I'll be back soon with more. 

“The Abominable Doctor Phibes”

From his first great film role in Dragonwyck, it was clear that Vincent Price was destined to do great things. And he personally did — no doubt about that — but the things he starred in themselves… now, there wear mixed bags. A lot of those mixed bags are nonetheless enjoyable watches, and a high number of them find their way online in copyright-shady-but-undeniably-convenient circumstances. 

Thus, when I stumbled upon (didn't take long for me to use that word again) The Abominable Doctor Phibes among the YouTube Algorithm's suggested videos, I decided to give it a watch, assuming I'd get, at best, another classic in the vein of The Raven and The Comedy of Terror, and, at worst, an hour's offbeat entertainment enjoying Price's performance unironically, and the rest of it ironically. 

Boy, did this take me by surprise. I don't even know whether I actually like it or not in the end — I'm happier for having seen it, I suppose, but I can't tell if that's in a "pharaoh-sized train-crash of weirdness" way or a "this is actually a good movie" way. 

The Abominable Doctor Phibes is a unique movie. Put the early 1970's, the 1920's, The Phantom of the Opera, Edgar Allan Poe and the Biblical Plagues in a blender, and something might come out that possibly has some vague resemblances to Doctor Phibes, but even that doesn't fully describe it. 

The story, such as it is, is that a series of surgeons are being bumped off in grotesque-but-amusing ways, which mirror the Ten Plagues of Egypt (which the film obstinately refers to as the Ten "Curses" of Egypt, for reasons that escape me). Inspector Trout of Scotland Yard investigates, and it surfaces that the ten surgeons all participated in a failed operation on a Mrs Victoria Phibes decades earlier. The inventive murderer is demented organist and theologian Anton Phibes, believed dead, but who in truth survived with horrific injuries. Hell-bent on avenging his wife, Phibes goes through nine Plagues, though his last victim manages to escape in the nick of time, then enacts his last crazy booby-trap on himself, entombing and embalming himself with his beloved in a final sequence worthy of Terry Gilliam. 

Now, the main feature of this picture is obviously the character and mythos of Doctor Phibes himself, as played by Vincent Price. He's definitely a very memorable bit of character-writing ; a striking picture of desperate, Poe-like madness and genius. His hatred of medical doctors is well-developped and comes together with the plot in the climax, and there's something very Mask of the Red Death-y about his exquisitely-designed lair and his clockwork creations (of whom the inexplicably-named Vulnavia is the most advanced example). 

Where Phibes’s character fails somewhat is in the attempt that was made to make him a "ghoul" as well as a "character". The way he talks and drinks through his neck is, I suppose, unique, but to me it just felt bizarre. The film in general is very hit-or-miss in its "silly-gruesome" elements. Deciding that the face Phibes wears throughout the film would be a false face, a mask to disguise his skull-like ruin of a visage, is a creative twist on both the Phantom of the Opera and the Invisible Man — but it also deprives Price of much of a chance to work his usual magic. His body language is on-point, and the slight variations he puts in Phibes’s face manage to be extremely funny at times (such as the disapproving look he shoots to one of his victims when the decor in his house makes it clear he was rather a bon viveur)… but for most of the film, Phibes is a stiff, lumbering figure. 

Hope you like Vincent's ‘miserable’ face, it's basically all you

get for most of the film. 

The same goes for Phibes's voice, made distorted and monotone through its artificial nature. Its stilted, Dalek-y rhythm makes perfect sense for the story, and it is in itself well-done, but if you won't allow Price to act Price-y, please let him speak Price-y… no? No? Really? 

All of this serves the character well — Phibes is terribly injured, both mentally and physically, and putting on a pretense of life for as long as he takes till his wife is avenged in his eye; he should look miserable and in pain and barely alive — but it greatly lessens how much Price can carry the feature on the back of his acting chops, as I initially assumed he would. 

(By the by, I'm not entirely sure what's up with the way Price doesn't even try to look like he's actually playing the organ, and the Clockwork Musicians’ repetitive motions do not in any way match the supposed music. Intentional kitsch? Actual production goofs? Or is the idea that he's just playing records with the pretense that he and his musicians are the source of the tune? Honestly couldn't tell.)

The rest of the cast, fortunately, is pretty wonderful as well. Peter Jeffrey delivers an extremely likable hero in the person of Inspector Trout, and of course, you have Joseph Cotten as Doctor Vesalius, the final doctor on Phibes's list, forced to operate on his son under stress to save both their lives. Out of all the Doctors, counselors on Trout's investigation, and assorted supporting cast, I don't think there's one clearly bad performance. Virginia North as Vulnavia also does the trick of looking silent, beautiful, and eerie, while also bringing a bit of character to the role in the scenes where she sulks about her boss and creator's lair, giving strange looks to Phibes's other, less advanced puppets. 

Also inherent to the movie's identity is the oddball medley of songs played by the Clockwork Musicians in Phibes's lair, and the rest of the soundtrack. (Sealing how entertaining this movie's music manages to be is the ever-wonderful Paul Frees's brief cameo, bringing on the same cartoony-crooner voice he used in Symposium on Popular Songs.)

In conclusion, one leaves The Abominable Doctor Phibes questioning one's sanity — with the clear sense of having watched a well-crafted bit of entertainment, but at a loss as to how the various bizarre elements of it ever fit together in a coherent picture. (One also leaves it with nagging curiosity as to the Tenth Plague and what is up with the symbols on Phibes's coffins — a sequel-hook that would be all but dropped when the actual sequel was released. Boy, was the sequel weird… but we'll get to that later.)

Oh, and —

A post-scriptum:

What is up with the oft-reproduced poster for this? 

• Why use Phibes's skull-appearance? It's not a bad ideain theory but the make-up is… it's what it is… and besides, the real face of the Abominable Doctor is a twist, saved for the very last confrontation between him and Dr. Vesalius. No sense in wasting it here. 

• If the woman is Victoria Phibes, well, she's surprisingly lively-looking for a woman who died decades before the film started, and Caroline Munro has no business sharing the poster with Price when she only ever appears as photographs and a corpse. If she is instead Vulaniava, then why the heck is Phibes kissing Vulnavia? 

• The tagline is just as puzzling. Phibes isn't trying to be with Victoria in his deformed state at all — indeed, he only became this way shortly after she died. No "monster romance" going on here. One gets the feeling that whoever did the poster was trying to get Phantom of the Opera enthusiasts on-board. 

• By Jove, aren't those colors the most 1970's thing ever devised. Booh. That font, also. 

• Hugh Griffith might have been the bigger name, but he's a rather minor character in the film — an exposition-dumping Rabbi who drops in and out as demanded by the plot. It boggles the mind that he and Terry-Thomas are credited, yet the film's actual protagonist, Peter Jeffrey (Trout), is left out.  

“The Case of the Sinister Robot”

And our mystery Disney comic is The Case of the Sinister Robot!

Told ya you wouldn't guess.

Also known as W MM 113-02 to the alien tome of eldritch lore that is the INDUCKS database, The Case of the Sinister Robot is a 1967 story from Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse #113, reprinted in #202 of the same. History has forgotten the name of its writer, as it often does when that writer wasn't someone people care about (like Carl Barks) or someone too blinkin' weird to ever be confused with anyone else (like Vic Lockman). 

The story is extremely obscure, as are most 1960's Mickey Mouse stories, especially those not drawn by Paul Murry, which is extremely unfair; nothing against Murry, individually, but Strobl here does just as good in his own style. I stumbled upon it (get used to that phrase, I “stumbled upon” most of the stuff I'm going to be reviewing here) quite recently and found it quite delightful. It's very 1960's, very goofy, but also a compelling sci-fi story in its own right. 

The best way I can describe it is, its plot is a house of cards standing on a table of clichés, but heck, are the cards pretty. 

The introduction sets up a nice and looney mystery as Mouseton is wracked by all mechanical devices going nuts. 

This culminates in gravity itself failing, and Mickey, Goofy and Chief O'Hara wading to the Mayor's office like astronauts in space. (Most puzzling is the Chief's line that he thought Mickey might know what's going on — Mickey solves the crazy occurrences, but he's rarely behind them…) 

The Mayor himself is not characterized very strongly — but then, he never is — the most you can say about the Mayor of Mouseton as a character is that he was a pink elephant for some reason in a couple of 1980's stories. Duckburg's Pig-Mayor, he is not. But while the Mayor himself is just a random mustached dognose, we do get a very amusing picture of the scientists and authorities he has gathered to solve the problem, where both the unknown writer's dialogue, and Strobl's art, really shine. 

Who would dare to look at that panel and call Strobl a "mediocre cartoonist" (which seems to be everyone's unspoken opinion of him, if they have one at all)? Props, also, to the coloring department. Not always the most competent lot at the time, and they do inexplicably dye Chief O'Hara's hair brown here, but the choice of colors for the costumes of the scientist flows very well, and the reddish-brown mustache for Mustache Guy in the middle is perfect. 

I mentioned Unknown Writer earlier, and again, what a shame it is that we don't know who that guy was. This story's premise is amusing enough, but it's the execution that makes it shine: "machines going backwards" could be played by-the-book with no particular punch, but the fast pacing allows it to really hit its mark. I did not expect to laugh out loud at an American, 1960's Mickey Mouse comic book, but Unknown Writer proved me wrong. 

And at the same time, he develops a good mystery. It begins with not-Doctor-Syclocks here, mysteriously unaffected by the anti-gravity ray, who manages to shake off Mickey and the police…

…features the input of Shamrock Bones (a character who was funnier in theory than in practice, I often find, but here he doesn't overstay his welcome)…

(I dig the orange-and-green colors cheme for his checkered suit. Much more memorable than the usual Sherlock-Holme-brown. Also, notice: "peformed" instead of "performed". It's a credit to Disney comics that this is the only time I ever saw a blatant typo in a Disney speech balloon.)

…and leads our heroes to the Mouseton City Dump, where the sci-fi portion of the story begins in earnest as a mysterious energy being absorbs surrounding junk and builds itself a robot body out of it. 

(…) 

The glowing-ball-of-energy form is cool, and never really explained; as for Kettlehead the Robot itself, it looks very distinctive, as do all the other robots in the story. 

After another rather cool bit where the entrance to the villain's typically 1960's, stainless-steel underground lair is inside a wrecked old car, Mickey and Goofy begin to look for the mad scientist behind the whole scheme, and finds that there isn't one. Instead, our antagonist is a robot himself, bearing the delightfully nonsensical name of “X - Y + 2”. Wounded in his honor after he was retired due to his computational system being faulty, X-Minus has turned his genius to the task of repurposing all human technology, driving all of mankind to madness. He then plans to take over. 

X-Minus is not actually the most interestingly-designed robot in the lair — it's telling that the cover for the story features his minion “0 = 4X”, and not himself — but he's very well-characterised. He's both clearly an insane robot, and a character rather than a mere bogeyman. 

(You have to admire how 0 = 4X is entirely about to disintegrate them, then Mickey says "you can't! that's murder!", and the robots just… opine and desist from any murderous intent. It's funny for how unexpected it is, and on top of that, it actually makes sense if you stop and ponder it. After all, we all know the Three Laws of Robotics ought to prevent our antagonistic androids from actually planning to destroy anyone — and we know that X-Minus is broken — so I propose that it seemed like a right plan to him because it genuinely did not register for him that disintegrating people was murder until Mickey pointed it out; at which point he remembered his programming and thought of something else.) 

I won't spoil it here, but the reveal of the Mysterious Not-Doctor-Syclocks from earlier is also very clever and creative, and something I don't think I've ever seen done with another fictional robot, so points for that. The final fate of X-Minus is also not bad, though the denouement in general feels a bit rushed. 

Oh, one also has to love X-Minus's "last words" before he's powered down:

(Said every ‘Doctor Who’ villain ever. Or they should)

And there you have it. 

The Case of the Sinister Robot seriously has all the qualities of the classic Gottfredson, Scarpa or Casty formula for a Mickey story: wacky goings-on - compelling mystery - interesting sci-fi concept behind it - snappy humor. Seriously, find a used copy or something, and give the thing a read. 

I don't care what preconceptions you may have about a 1967, Tony Strobl-drawn Mickey Mouse story. Read it. I promise you won't regret it. 

Hello There!

Or, as good old Ludwig would put it:

Or, as the good old Ghost Host would put it: 

Or, as… wait, I'm just quoting from Paul Frees characters over and over again, aren't I. 

…Alright then. 

I am a friendly multilingual Internet-dweller with more names than Argus McSwine, one of which is Aristide Twain, another being Achille Talon (though this one I borrowed from one of my favorite characters, for whose introduction I will point you towards my good friend the great Joe Torcivia's blog post on the matter. 

I am a relentless discusser-of-things, amateur writer and filmmaker, and with an interest in all sorts of entertainment, popular and not, kid-friendly and not. A common thread is that I like having fun (I'm fine with dark themes in a movie, but a little bit of humor to go with it is much preferred), another that I'm a continuity-maniac and certified Hunter of Plotholes. 

Since all the interesting people these days have blogs where they post about things they like, I thought I might jump in on the fun. However, my interests are too eclectic to tie myself down to just the one area of review, as I had done in my previous, more amateurish attempt at a blog of my own with Disney Comics Reviews. 

Thus, I've borrowed a page from Aforementioned Joe's own blog: 

the scope of ‘Random Reviews’ will include, and not be limited to, the Undending Universe of Unsorted Things that Interest Me. 

(U.U.U.T.I.M. for short.)

Now those of you that know me from my Disney-related activities: fear not. A healthy dose of that will remain. Indeed, one of the first posts I have planned is a Disney comic review (and I don't think you'll ever, in a million years, guess which, short of taking every story on INDUCKS in order and asking if that's it). 

However, many other reviews may stray from that mold; some of them may not clearly resemble anything you have known me to be a fan of. Not only because I contain multitudes and am a fan of things you never even imagined (though… that too), but also because the ‘U.U.U.T.I.M.’ doesn't just mean stuff I like. The point of reviewing is not only to showcase the good, but also to point out the bad. 

Besides which, I'm a curious soul, and I occasionally make experiments into areas of entertainment I'm not particularly interested in. I've always done this, but now I'll have this blog to record the experience, in what I hope will be an entertaining fashion. 

Cheers!