as we may blog

Maggie was at the opera rubbing elbows with the city’s giltterati last night which gave me a rare night to myself. After relieving the refrigerator of the last of the hard boiled eggs and chicken sausages, I took to the couch to check out a couple movies that I knew Maggie had no interest in seeing. As luck would have it, both movies featured the capable thespianism of one Donald Pleasance!

Pleasance may be best known as supervillian Ernst Stavro Blofeld in You Only Live Twice. His portrayal of the one-eyed, cat petting supervillian is now iconic.

THX 1138 (1971, 88 minutes)

I had high hopes for George Lucas’s futurist dystopia, but I found the movie kind of flat. Robert Duvall’s performance as a medication-shirking escapee wasn’t strong enough to balance the stark, clinical whiteness of the entire film. Instead, the environment dominated the movie in a heavier way than I think Lucas intended, leaving me thinking “OK, I get it” at several points.

I did enjoy two aspects of the film quite a bit: the cinematography was excellent, many shots were framed in really striking and unusual ways; the frequent references to cost-benefit analyses of chasing an escaped inmate made me smile.

Pleasance played SEN 5241 and shaved his head for the role, like everyone else in the movie.

Escape from New York (1981, 99 minutes)

There are so many good reasons to see this movie. Manhattan as prison. The hair. Kurt Russell’s hair. Kurt Russell’s hair while wearing an eyepatch. Kurt Russell’s hair while wearing an eyepatch and riding in Ernest Borgnine’s cab.

I think this movie rises above the level of purely ironic or camp enjoyment, too. The movie takes the crime ridden urban decay of the late 70s/early 80s to its logical conclusion (or at least the logical conclusion as it seemed at the time). There is real suspense as Russell battles his way through a violent, abandoned Manhattan full of desperate criminals. The film was an obvious influence on modern fright/horror favorites, too. 28 Days Later owes a huge debt to the scene in Escape where cannibalistic criminals rise out of the sewers and chase Kurt Russell.

Pleasence plays the portly US President whose plane crashes inside Manhattan mere hours before an important global summit with the leaders of the Soviet Union and China. He spends the majority of the movie handcuffed to a briefcase, looking scared. His final scene with Isaac Hayes is notable both for its extreme violence and its extreme comedy.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.