Hello and welcome to another edition of Five Cool Things, the bi-weekly article where I talk about all the fun, interesting, and cool things I’ve discovered since the last time. This week we’re talking about an old Kurt Wallander novel, an American thriller where Alain Delon plays an Italian, another one where Roy Scheider is hunting down a French assassin, and yet another thriller where Lee Marvin is a badass, and we end with a clever twist on the zombie genre. Let’s get to it.
The White Lioness by Henning Mankell
I’ve become something of a fan of what they sometimes call Nordic Noir. That’s a certain type of crime thriller made in Scandinavia. Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series popularized the genre in the States, but the genre has been popular in its homeland since the early 1990s. It consists of books, movies, and television series.
Buy The White LionessThe Kurt Wallander books by Henning Mankell are the godfathers of the genre. Mankell wrote a dozen books featuring the detective, and they’ve been adapted numerous times, including a popular Swedish television series and a British series featuring Kenneth Branagh. I think I’ve seen the first episode of both of those and enjoyed them. But not enough to keep me watching it. Which has more to do with me getting constantly distracted than the quality of the series.
While browsing the aisles of Gadner’s, my favorite Tulsa bookshop, I came across a few of the Wallander books. I couldn’t find the first in the series, so I more or less grabbed this one at random. I think I liked the book image of an X-ray of a gun on the cover.
I quite liked this book, but didn’t love it.
Kurt Wallander is your typical fictional detective. He’s good at his job and smart, but doesn’t have the magical instincts of Poirot of Sherlock Holmes. He has trouble with his personal life because he is laser-focused on the job. He tends to do what he wants, disobeying orders and the law to solve the case.
This story begins with a missing-persons case. While searching for a remote house, which is the last place the missing woman was supposed to have been, a different house explodes. There, next to the rubble, they find the severed finger of a black man. There isn’t a large African population in Sweden, so this is strange. Stranger still is the fact that the finger was cut off with a blade and is not part of the explosion.
That has the makings of a pretty good mystery. The book then changes perspectives and basically gives us the solution in the next few chapters. We leave Wallander behind and follow some characters in South Africa. Published in 1996, The White Lioness takes place not long after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and South Africa was facing massive political change. Our story follows some white supremacists who wage a conspiracy to assassinate a prominent political figure, which will throw the country into chaos. The potential assassin is sent to Sweden to be trained by a former Russian KGB officer. We quickly learn who that finger belonged to and why the house was blown up.
The book then goes back and forth between following Wallander as he tries to figure out what the book has just solved for us, and chapters with the South Africans. I liked all the stuff with Wallander, but didn’t really care for the book when it left his point of view. Part of this is because I’m new to this series. I don’t know Wallander very well, and I wanted to stay with him to get to understand him. But really, the South African stuff just wasn’t that interesting.
But overall this was very enjoyable, and I’ll definitely be reading more from Henning Mankell.
Once a Thief (1965)
Alain Delon plays an Italian (!) who spends most of the film speaking English (!!). He’s Eddie Pedak, a former thief who turned straight after doing two years in prison. He’s now got a decent job, a loving wife (Ann Margret), and a cute little daughter. It would be a good life if it weren’t for Detective Mike Vido (Van Heflin). He got shot in the gut several years prior, and he’s always been sure it was Eddie who did it. But since the shooter was wearing a mask and Mike only saw his eyes, he was never able to convict. Ever since, Mike has been tailing Eddie, trying to pin every crime he can on him.
Buy Once a ThiefWhen a store robbery goes bad and the shopkeeper is killed, Mike thinks he’s got Eddie dead to rights. A witness described the shooter as looking like Eddie, and he was wearing the same kind of coat that Eddie wears and drove away in the same kind of car. Mike pulls him from his job and arrests him, but when the witness can’t ID Eddie as the killer, Mike is forced to let him go.
But due to the arrest, Eddie loses his job. This is not the first time this has happened. Eddie has trouble landing another job. His wife is forced to take a job as a cocktail waitress. This drives him crazy. He’s a man; he shouldn’t be washing dishes and cleaning up while his wife earns the bread.
Then his brother Walter (Jack Palance) shows up. He’s remained a crook, and he’s got a job for Eddie. He can earn a cool $50,000 for one night’s work. At first, Eddie says no; he’s not in that line anymore. But when he realizes his wife takes off her wedding ring for work and has to wear a skimpy outfit, he says okay. You can probably guess where it goes from there.
The story is your basic “bad guy tries to go good but gets pulled back in” scenario, but the cast and some fine direction by Ralph Nelson make it well worth the watch. It is fun to watch Delon play against type (and speak English). I’m so used to him as the cool, calculating stoic he played in so many French films that it’s fascinating to see him play a more emotional character. He blows up at his brother (and his brother’s creepy friend – a skin-crawlingly good John Davis Chandler) with bouts of violence, but is also tender and caring toward his family.
Really, everybody is great, and it’s all around a terrific film.
The Outside Man
A French hitman, Lucien Bellon (Jean-Louis Trintignant), is hired to kill a California gangster. He does the job, and then, while trying to get home, he is attacked by Lenny (Roy Scheider), a hitman hired to kill him. Also, his hotel was robbed and his passport stolen. He’ll spend the rest of the film trying to figure out who hired Lenny while also trying to not get killed by him.
Buy The Outside ManIt is a terrific, taut little thriller. Ann Margret shows up at one point as a stripper who helps Belton out. Angie Dickinson plays one of the mobster’s wives. Schreider is as cool as ice, and the action goes hard.
One Cut of the Dead
You have to make it through the first half hour of this film to really get it. One Cut of the Dead is like a horror version of Noises Off! That first half hour is a very low-budget zombie movie. Shot in one take, it follows a film crew making a very low-budget zombie movie who are attacked by actual zombies. It isn’t very good. The acting is bad. The cinematography looks like a home video. The one-take concept simply doesn’t work. There are numerous moments where it feels like something went wrong behind the scenes, but because it’s all done in one take, they just tried to roll with it. While watching this section of the film, I couldn’t understand why this film was so highly praised.
Buy One Cut of the DeadThen the credits roll, and I was all sorts of confused. I looked at the timing, and it had been almost exactly thirty minutes since the film began. I know it is longer than that, so what’s the deal? Then the cinematography clears up. We move back in time a few weeks. The film we just saw was a film within a film (within a film). The director of the zombie movie we just watched (about a director making a zombie movie) is a real director who has been hired to make a zombie movie about a director making a zombie movie that gets attacked by real zombies. We spend the next half hour watching him, his crew, and cast work on making that movie. Then the last half hour of the film finds us watching the movie we watched in the first section of the real film, but from behind the scenes. We see this cast and crew trying to make the film we just watched.
Things go wrong in all sorts of ways. One cast member is completely inebriated. Another one gets sick. The real director has to fill in for the actor playing the director in the film within the film. Because it is all supposed to be done in one cut (and is being broadcast live), they have to make do with what they can. Suddenly, all the mistakes we noted from the film we initially watched make sense. We see why they happened.
It is all cleverly done and quite funny. But you do have to push through those first thirty minutes. Those scenes are intentionally done poorly, and once you see the final act of the film, it makes total sense, but it still doesn’t make it fun to watch. Totally worth it, though.
Point Blank (1967)
A guy named Walker (Lee Marvin) and his buddy Mal Reese (John Vernon) rob a crime syndicate known as the Organization. Reese double-crosses Walker, shoots him, leaves him for dead on Alcatraz Island, and runs off with Walker’s wife. He should have made sure he was dead, for Walker wakes up, gets better, and seeks both revenge and the money he’s owed.
Buy Point Blank (Criterion Collection)Lee Marvin was born for this role. Walker is tough and ruthless; effortlessly cool. He takes no shit from anyone. He’ll stop at nothing to get what he wants. He finds a car dealer who might know where Reese is staying, so he pretends to be interested in buying a car. He takes the car and the guy out for a spin, then runs it straight into a wall over and over, smashing the car to pieces until the guy talks. He takes the address the guy gives him, busts straight in, knocks Reese’s girl down, knocks down the bedroom door, and shoots half a dozen bullets straight into the bed. Reese isn’t there, but the girl (played by Angie Dickinson) says she hates the guy and is willing to help Walker find him.
Walker, and the film is relentless. It is non-stop brutal action. He has to climb the Organization’s ladder, going step by step to the top in order to get his money and find Reese. Director John Boorman gives it enough weirdness with fuzzy flashbacks and odd cinematography to make this fairly straightforward revenge flick into something more.
Godzilla Minus Zero
I’m a pretty big Godzilla fan, but even I have to admit the franchise has gotten pretty silly over the years. Godzilla Minus One brought things back to basics. The Godzilla in that film is terrifying. The story moved things back to postwar Japan, like the original movie. The effects were great, and it’s a really good action film. The trailer just dropped for the sequel, and it looks amazing.
