THE ROCKETEER: When They Begin the Beguine

The Rocketeer (1991) – Directed by Joe Johnston – Starring Billy Campbell, Jennifer Connelly, Alan Arkin, Timothy Dalton, Paul Sorvino, Terry O’Quinn, Joe Polito, Tiny Ron Taylor, Ed Lauter, Clint Howard, Margo Martindale, Eddie Jones, and William Sanderson.

Oh, the tricks time can play on one’s mind, at times.

When I pulled the DVD sleeve out of the Netflix envelope, I thought they had made a mistake by listing THE ROCKETEER’s year of release as 1991. 1991? 1991 was the year of Ten, Nevermind, and The Enemy Strikes Black. THE ROCKETEER was before that. Way before that. I would have sworn it was released pre-1990 rather than post-1990 because I remember ROCKETEER with the hazy edges of distant recollection that typically comes from watching a movie when you’re young. The idea that it was released two months before Ten just does not seem right.

And yet, Netflix was right and my head was wrong, so score one for the Red Envelope.

THE ROCKETEER is a wonderful film. It’s safe, soft, simple, relatively all-ages friendly, and just plain fun. Joe Johnston creates a 1930s America that’s pure Americana mythology: hard-working, low-earning Californians struggling to get their dreams off the ground not because of lack of talent, ambition, or effort, but because of a lack of cash and some very bad luck. They get embroiled in a plot involving Howard Hughes, the FBI, the mob, and, because it’s 1938, Nazis. What’s great about ROCKETEER is that it manages to feel both time-worn and fresh all at once, and the overall effect is that it feels like an old, unread comic book from an era you love.

Howard Hughes (Terry O’Quinn) has developed a single-use rocket pack that gets stolen by some mobsters. During a chase with the FBI, the last-surviving thief stashes the pack in an airfield hangar, where it’s eventually found by pilot Cliff Secord (Billy Campbell) and mechanical engineer Peevy (Alan Arkin). The FBI mistakenly takes the wrong piece of equipment back to Hughes, and head mobster Eddie Valentine (Paul Sorvino) tells Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton) that while they weren’t able to acquire the rocket pack, it’s not lost, as the FBI thinks.

Billy’s having his own problems with sweetheart Jenny Blake (Jennifer Connelly). We know that Cliff loves her because he keeps a picture of her in his airplanes when he flies, and even risks his life to save Jenny’s picture from a crash, but his relationship with the real Jenny (as opposed to photographic Jenny) is more problematic. She has her dreams, too. Jenny wants to be an actress, but Cliff, instead of being supportive, keeps making comments about how she’s just a background player in these films. Cliff never comes across as a huge jerk (just a small one), because his comments come across as Cliff being frustrated with his own financial situation, and the general financial unease of everyone’s situation around them. Cliff is also a homebody and Jenny isn’t; when they eat dinner at the small diner by the airfield, Jenny talks about her desire to go someplace else, someplace new and expensive, and Cliff

Peevy does some tinkering with the rocket pack and builds a helmet to go with it to control steering, but the device doesn’t get a proper test until Cliff’s late arrival at an airshow causes an older pilot to take his place. Something goes wrong and Cliff decides using the rocket pack is the only way to help. So he does, and we get a decent action sequence that sees the public enthralled with this new addition to the airshow.

All of the action sequences in ROCKETEER are executed well without ever becoming spectacular. Johnston does well to create the action in memorable locales (during an airshow, at a swanky club, on a Nazi zeppelin), which helps to elevate the effectiveness of the scenes. Take the airshow where the Rocketeer (not named so until afterwards by someone else) makes his debut. He goes zipping around the skies and hanging off the bi-plane that Malcolm is flying (while dressed as a clown), but nothing here is overly complicated (by action movie standards; I’m sure it took plenty of skill to actually do). Some of the best parts of the scene are when the Rocketeer falls off the plane and then re-ignites his rocket during the fall. Or on the zeppelin, when Johnston wisely uses the coolness (and close quarters) of the ship to make the scene work. We get establishing shots of the zeppelin in flight, but most of the action takes place either inside the small cabin area where broken windows and ricocheting bullets take on a greater importance.

And that swanky night club – I never get tired of seeing scenes take place in 1930s nightclubs. I love the costumes, the sets, the big bands … when the band lays into the Cole Porter-penned classic, “Begin the Beguine,” I feel transported to this era.

ROCKETEER sets up a “three army” conflict between Cliff and Peevy, Hughes and the FBI, and Sinclair and the mob. That’s a lot of moving parts but they have very simple actions, so the plot never gets complicated. The big “twist” ends up being the reveal that Sinclair is a Nazy spy.

Dalton is really the best part of the film. He’s the perfect actor to play a villain in a film like this because he’s charismatic and willing to poke some fun at himself. Sinclair is a thinly-veiled parody of Errol Flynn (who was accused of being a Nazi spy), and Dalton easily handles all that the film requires him to do – which is a lot. He’s the only character in the film that has any kind of real complexity, and whether he’s being charming with Jenny, demanding with Valentine, or ruthless with Cliff, Dalton makes it all work.

Everything comes to a head on that zeppelin. We get a big action shoot ‘em up between the FBI, Nazis, and the mob (with the mob siding with the FBI because, as Valentine says, he might be a crook, but he’s 100% American), but then it’s the Rocketeer on the zeppelin. He takes care of Lothar (Tiny Ron Taylor) on top of the zeppelin, then he and Jenny team up inside the zeppelin against Sinclair. Cliff tricks Sinclair into taking a damaged rocket pack and he tries to get Jenny to come with him one last time, but she’s not having it, calling him a liar. “It wasn’t lying, Jenny,” he tells her smarmily. “It was acting.” Then he flies off and blows himself up, crashing into the “HOLLYWOODLAND” sign and destroying those last four letters.

And now you know how that happened.

Even beyond Dalton, ROCKETEER is impeccably cast. Campbell, Connelly, Arkin, Sorvino, and O’Quinn all effortlessly fill their roles. As I said, the film doesn’t ask them to do a whole lot, but what it asks them to do is right in everyone’s wheelhouse.

With the Nazis defeated and the rocket pack destroyed, life goes back to normal, except Johnston allows them to have the Americana happy ending: Cliff realizes Jenny is more important than flying, and Hughes shows up to give Cliff and Peevy a Gee Bee plane for the national airshow. “What was it like,” Hughes asks Cliff of his time as the Rocketeer, “strapping that thing to your back and flying like a bat out of hell?” Cliff says it’s as close to Heaven as he’s ever going to get, but then sees Jenny in the background and says, “Or maybe not.” Good call, Cliff. Jenny has even managed to find the plans for the rocket pack and Peevy starts getting all technical, but as he’s talking to Cliff, Cliff is making out with Jenny.

The story in THE ROCKETEER is serviceable, but it’s the overall look and feel of the film that makes this film work. I love the Art Deco style of the Rocketeer’s costume, and the overall Americana adventure tone of the film makes this a fun film to watch and re-watch. THE ROCKETEER is quietly great, and even now, makes me feel like I did when I was a kid and read my Spider-Man, Captain America, and Green Lantern comics – I look at the Rocketeer and think, yeah, I want to be that guy.

FLASH GORDON: Quarterback, New York Jets

Flash Gordon (1980) – Directed by Mike Hodges – Starring Sam J. Jones, Melody Anderson, Chaim Topol, Brian Blessed, Timothy Dalton, Ornella Muti, and Max Von Sydow.

After a long, absurd day there are few options better to toss into your Blu-ray player than Mike Hodges’ FLASH GORDON.

I say this because after having not watched this movie since I was a kid, I watched it the other night after a completely absurd first day on the new job and loved every moment of it. GORDON is exactly what people mean when they say things like, “live action cartoon.” It’s a bright, exaggerated, campy romp, full of outrageous characters and fantastic sets. Yes, many of the characters and the actors who play them are not close to being “good,” but it somehow all works together well enough to create a completely satisfying movie.

There are few positives that can be said for Flash Gordon (Sam J. Jones) and Dale Arden (Melody Anderson), two flat, ridiculous characters who are nonetheless so open and honest with one another, and have been placed in such an absurd situation, that they manage to not only not sink the picture, but in a strange way enhance it by being so obvious.

They meet on a small plane somewhere in the Green Mountains as they’re both headed back to New York to get back to their crazy lives. Flash is the quarterback for the New York Jets, which tells us that a. he’s not awesome, and b. he never wins anything important. (I imagine that what we’re really watching here is evidence that someone in production still has a man-crush on Joe Namath – who only had 3 winning seasons his entire career – or that they really wanted to call this movie, RICHARD TODD: DEFENDER OF THE UNIVERSE but then realized that sending Movie Richard Todd to another universe wouldn’t prevent Real Richard Todd from ever playing for the Jets again.) Flash is the kind of guy that seems very humble and “aw, shucks, you sure are a pretty lady, miss,” but yet wears a t-shirt that says FLASH on it just to make sure everyone knows who he is.

I mean, he goes to the Green Mountains to get away from the hustle-and-bustle of his life in NYC, yet still wears a t-shirt with his name on it. The pilots of the plane know who he is, because they act like two schoolgirls at a Justin Beiber concert when he’s around, so he’s clearly famous (I’m guessing the Joe Namath conception of the character is more likely than the Richard Todd conception) and yet he still wants to make sure everyone knows who he is. On the plane, he chats up Dale by telling her that he asked at the hotel who she was, but that he didn’t come talk to her, which tells us that he wants everyone to know who he is, but he’s not going to use it to pick up a lady.

In what seems a very anachronistic conception of the love interest, Dale is all googly eyes at Flash, too, even though she’s really nervous about being on a plane in the middle of a storm. What she clearly isn’t is Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane, but she does prove capable of taking care of herself over the course of the film despite a silly start.

I can’t say I honestly ever like Flash or Dale, though. Well-meaning as they may be, and as perfect for each other as they clearly are, they’re also the least interesting characters in the movie.

While Flash and Dale are in the plane, Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow) is causing havoc on Earth, forcing the plane to crash into Doctor Hans Zarkov’s (Chaim Topol) lab. Zarkov is the only scientist in the world who’s been preparing for an attack like this, and even though the rest of the world thinks he’s nuts, Zarkov is more than willing to prove them wrong by forcing Dale at gunpoint into helping him fly his experimental rocket to go to space and stop the invasion. It seems like a rather poor design for a rocket to need a second person to, literally, keep their foot on the pedal, and it seems even sillier that Zarkov wants Dale instead of Flash because she weighs less (the 100 pounds apparently making a huge difference, despite the fact that Zarkov’s intended co-pilot, his chubby assistant, is clearly closer to Flash’s weight than Dale’s).

Anyways, they go to space and get captured by Mongo’s forces and are brought before Ming the Merciless. Von Sydow hits the perfect notes for a villain here – he’s a ruthless, megalomaniacal bad-ass who’s willing to have his daughter Aura (Ornella Muti) tortured to get to the truth. Flash isn’t having any of this evil overlord destroying the Earth business, so he fights everyone with a new fighting technique called, “Football.” The fight scene at the palace is a good example of what GORDON is attempting to do: it gives you a serious plot (the fate of Earth hangs in the balance), well-meaning humans (Flash, Dale, Zarkov), flashy natives (Barin, Vultan, Klytus, the whole host of palace attendees), and a campy fight to solve the problem. What makes the scene work isn’t Flash’s fighting skills as much as it is the sheer energy and ridiculousness of it all, with a big helping hand from Vultan (Brian Blessed), who continually helps Flash when he thinks he can get away with it.

Flash ultimately gets captured and put to death (and I love how his tombstone has the Flash Gordon logo on it – Ming knows marketing), although he survives thanks to efforts of Aura, who wants Flash for her new sexual plaything. Flash is kinda lukewarm on the idea, more concerned about Dale’s whereabouts than running off for some hot sex with an alien princess (okay, maybe he’s not Joe Namath), but he’s still willing to make out a little with Aura while he’s putting on a strange helmet to telepathically communicate with Dale, who’s now a member of Ming’s harem.

Aura takes Flash to meet her main lover, Prince Barin of Arboria (Timothy Dalton). In honor of being from Arboria, everyone agrees to dress like Robin Hood. Barin is jealous and has Flash locked up, where Flash encourages a Hawkman to not drown, but is then tricked into escaping by Barin’s associate Fico (Richard O’Brien). Barin and Flash then play “stick your hand in this massive tree stump and try not to get stung by a poisonous scorpion thing.” Flash pretends to get bitten and then attacks Barin, proving Earth people are awesome at lying and being sneaky. Flash runs off, Barin chases him, and then they get captured by the Hawkmen and brought back to Sky City, where the Hawkmen make great sport out of Barin and Flash fighting each other to the death.

It’s a really big dick move, of course, but we get to see Brian Blessed teach the world how to overact and still be perfectly in character. Ming’s forces arrive and the Hawkmen flee after Flash and Barin kill General Klytus. Barin, Dale, and Zarkov are taken prisoner but Flash is left to die/conveniently escape on Sky City. Flash makes contact with Vultan through his sky cycle and Vultan is ashamed at his actions and agrees to team up with Flash to take down Ming.

Lots of fighting ensues but none of it is as memorable as hearing Vultan yell things like, “Squadron 40, DIIIIIIIIIIIVVVVVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!” I think he shouts, “Dive!” 18 times and each of them are completely awesome. Again, there’s a real talent to using one’s desire to overact to infuse the character with a real personality and no one does that better than Brian “Diiiiiivvvvvvveeeeeee!” Blessed.

We get a happy ending – Ming is defeated, Barin and Aura are lovey dovey, Barin is named the new ruler of Mongo, Vultan is named General of the army, Flash and Dale are lovey dovey, and Zarkov is content in the knowledge that he was the only person on Earth who was right. Everything is left in place for a sequel, but we never get to see it.

Beyond Flash and Dale, the film is as perfectly cast as you could hope for, and the total commitment of the film to this vision, and of Topol, Dalton, Blessed, and von Sydow to their roles, makes you believe in this world, even if it’s a completely absurdist one.

I think what makes GORDON work more than anything else is the ability of the filmmakers to perfectly balance their film: Vultan is completely over the top, but is balanced by the seriousness of Barin. Flash’s do-gooder-ness is balanced by Ming’s mercilessness. Dale’s motivated by the long-term commitment of love and Aura by the short-term thrill of lust. Even the seriousness of the plot (the destruction of Earth) is balanced by the bright campiness of Mongo. Underscoring all of this is the music of Queen, the perfect band for this film given its powerful combination of bluster and cheekiness.

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Mark Bousquet is the author of several novels, including Gunfighter Gothic, Stuffed Animals for Hire, Dreamer’s Syndrome, Harpsichord and the Wormhole Witches, and Adventures of the Five. He has also published a review collection entitle Marvel Comics on Film, which covers every cinematic and TV movie based on a superhero from the House of Ideas. A complete listing of all his work can be found at his Amazon author page.

LICENSE TO KILL: I’m James Bond! I’m Angry! A Shark Ate My Friend!

License to Kill (1989) – The 16th James Bond Film; The 2nd (of 2) Timothy Dalton Films – Directed by John Glen – Starring Timothy Dalton, Carey Lowell, Robert Davi, Talisa Soto, Anthony Zerbe, Benicio Del Torro, Wayne Newton, Robert Brown, and Desmond Llewelyn.

LICENSE TO KILL is one of the more confounding Bond movies – on the one hand, it’s basically a generic revenge flick absent of nearly anything resembling a sense of humor, but on the other it is a pretty good revenge flick, at least in the context of what it is – a 1980s action movie. The confusion doesn’t stop there in my fragile little mind, because once you get past Timothy Dalton and Robert Davi (and Desmond Llewelyn and Wayne Newton, to be fair) the acting is across-the-board atrocious, but there’s such an energetic force to Dalton’s performance that he single-handedly pushes this film forward, largely overcoming Carey Lowell’s inability to act, Talisa Soto’s inability to act, Sharky’s inability to act, anyone in the DEA’s ability to act, Benicio del Toro’s inability to act in this role, Felix Leiter’s inability to come off as a convincing spy, Felix Leiter’s wife practically sucking face with Bond right after her wedding ceremony, and locations that would fail to make the Florida Tourism Board’s brochure.

It’s not the typical Bond movie, but we’ve got 20-something typical Bond movies, so a change of pace isn’t such a bad thing now and then. LICENSE is the opposite of THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS in a lot of ways – where DAYLIGHTS started strong and petered out to a generic blandness, LICENSE starts out rather awful and then turns engaging, and it does so almost solely because of Dalton.

Dalton’s Bond in LICENSE does not display much of the thinking, adaptable Bond that I so enjoyed in the first half of DAYLIGHTS, trading in the think-on-your feet, instinctual approach for a single-minded determinedness that sees him operating as a rogue agent in order to enact his own personal justice for the murder of Felix Leiter’s wife and the feeding-to-the-sharks of Felix himself. Where Dalton’s Bond rings false this time around is in his softer moments; given that Bond is so driven for revenge that he goes AWOL from MI6 (who, admittedly, look about as hard for Bond as I’m looking for someone to come punch me in the face), the moments where he’s smiling like a school boy at a pretty girl feel off.

There’s a lot of silliness here that keeps LICENSE from being a truly great Bond movie but there was surprisingly more to like than I’d remembered. This is a good movie. It’s not the first Bond movie you’d want to give to a novice, but then “Blink” isn’t the first episode of Doctor Who you’d want to give someone, either. (Not that LICENSE is equal to “Blink.” Far from it.) The inescapable reality that always confronts you is how bad the acting is, and I’m truly not playing to hyperbole when I say it is awful. While Bond films are rarely dotted with acting giants, the acting in LICENSE would look bad if it had come in an episode of Knight Rider. Hell, it would even look bad if it had come in Knight Rider: The Really Crappy New Version, too.

Carey Lowell (who went on to be a perfectly fine actress on Law & Order) and Talisa Soto (who went on the be a perfectly acceptable actress in Mortal Kombat) are certainly in the lower levels of Bond women. When we meet Lowell, Pam Bouvier is an allegedly bad-ass contact of Leiter’s, feeding him info on Sanchez’s (Davi’s) operation. We know she’s a bad-ass because she’s sitting in a dive bar, she’s wearing kevlar, and she’s holding a shotgun in her lap, but we never buy her bad-ass-ness. It’s not because she’s gorgeous because plenty of gorgeous women have played bad-asses, but because there’s a softness to Lowell’s features and her actions that make you think she’s playing dress-up instead of inhabiting her everyday world. Even her tomboyish haircut doesn’t work, seeming to enhance rather than hide her supermodel appearance and unconvincing actions.

After Bouvier convinces Bond to allow her to tag along, Bond starts referring to her as his executive assistant, and then dumps some money on her to go buy some clothes so she can look the part. When she reappears she’s cut her hair and traded in her pilot clothes for sharp business suits and tight evening gowns. When Bond does a double-take at seeing the new look, you believe it. Unfortunately, the change in appearance doesn’t come with a similar change in attitude. Other than being ridiculously pleasing arm candy, I rarely buy Lowell in LICENSE TO KILL. She does have one great scene where she plays dumb to get Wayne Newton’s keys but for the most part if she’s not nearly tumbling out of her dress or being comforted by Q, she doesn’t bring anything to the movie.

Soto is even worse. She’s Sanchez’s girlfriend Lupe, one in a long line of beauties that have filled this role, and she sends conflicting signals at the viewer. When we meet her she’s in the arms of another man (who literally gets his heart cut out by Sanchez for this act) but it’s not like she’s actively trying to escape Sanchez’s life. She seems to enjoy the luxuries that come with being a kept woman, she’s just not necessarily super-happy about being this guy’s kept woman. I started to feel some sympathy for her when she gets whipped for her insolence and again when she helps Bond, but when she pronounces her love for him it just comes across as something a pretty girl would say to get an older man to do things for her. There’s no feeling behind it.

Even worse, Lupe’s “love” for James sends Bouvier into fits of jealous poutiness and it actually becomes hard to imagine that Bond would want anything to do with either one of them once the mission is over. Even with all their beauty you’d think Bond wouldn’t want to put up with the lovesick little girl-ness of either of them.

Robert Davi plays the villain Sanchez and he’s pretty good considering this Bond movie wants a villain that looks and acts like he just wandered off the set of Miami Vice. When he feeds Felix Leiter’s leg to his pet shark, it comes across as ruthless and disgusting; this isn’t a guy who puts frickin’ laser beams on the heads of sharks for fun.

Perhaps knowing the film was a bit too grim in the opening half, Q gets an expanded role this go-round, providing some much needed levity and, more importantly, warmth. It’s great to see him in action, posing as Bond’s chauffeur (similar to Patrick Macnee’s role in A VIEW TO A KILL), but Q’s real contribution to the movie is the way he comforts Bouvier – usually with a look of knowing exasperation that says, “I want to tell you that you’re just number 832 but that would be mean, so here’s my shoulder to cry on and some carefully worded advice.”

LICENSE TO KILL isn’t a fantastic movie, and its certainly riddled with horrible acting, but the back-half of the movie really rescues the film. If I could take the opening half of THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS and combine it with the back-half of LICENSE TO KILL, I think we’d have a heck of a movie.

Oh, the title song is pretty mediocre. I love me some Gladys Knight, and she tries her damndest, but this is mid-80s pop ballad schlockfest makes me think of mom jeans.