Thoughts after a church fire in France

By Steve Evans

Yes, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) was filmed entirely on the RKO Studios backlot. Yes, they actually built the front of the cathedral to scale for the film, which is the essential cinematic version of Victor Hugo's immortal classic -- the novel that is directly responsible for saving the Notre Dame Cathedral in the early 1800s during but one of the many threats to its existence over eight centuries. Hugo's book shamed the French government into restoring the cathedral in the 1830s when it was already almost 500 years old.

Nearly a century later, Lon Chaney gave the title role an admirable whirl as Quasimodo the bell ringer in a 1925 silent film. So did Anthony Quinn in '56 and Anthony Hopkins in '82. But the '39 film is the one that unfailingly transports me to medieval times when life, as Tommy Hobbes liked to say, was nasty, brutish and short.

So I'll revisit this one tonight. Charles Laughton delivers one of the greatest performances in film history. A cast of thousands. The finest production values available at the time. This movie puts the hook in me from the opening credits and orchestral score; I will watch it without interruption until the fade to black. First saw this picture on television as a teenager and wept with joy, such was its impact. Wore out a VHS copy from my late 20s to early 30s. Still have a DVD. Bought a restored print on Blu-ray mere months ago. Lest the point be lost, I love this film. Essential viewing.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2019 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

Cold War Boredom: Ice Station Zzzebra

By Steve Evans

Curiosity finally got the better of me so I just watched what turned out to be one of the worst, more boring films I've seen -- Ice Station Zebra (1968). A Cold War espionage thriller, characters fight each other at the climax on a laughably obvious soundstage dressed to resemble the Arctic. The special effects are bad. Paratroopers look like green plastic GI Joe men dropped from string-and-vinyl parachutes onto a tabletop diorama. The submarine might be a bathtub toy. Rock Hudson's acting range can be measured in centimeters. Ernest Borgnine does a ludicrous Russian accent. And Patrick McGoohan is just as strange in this film as he was on the cult TV show, The Prisoner, which is perhaps the ne plus ultra of 1960s weirdness on television, although Green Acres gives it some competition. Ice Station Zebra isn't so much weird, as inept. It appears expensive, but in the way shiny things look when created by people with lots of money but no talent or taste. Worth a look to see spies running around the North Pole without proper coats, gloves or even steam coming off their breath from the frigid air. Filmed in the wide-screen process known as Cinerama, which will be lost on television or a laptop.

The film was based on a novel by Alistair MacLean, whose Guns of the Navarone had been made into a thrilling WWII adventure with Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthomy Quinn in 1961. Whereas that film followed the road to greatness, Ice Station Zebra takes the opposite path. Disappointing as hell, as this was directed by John Sturges, who helmed The Great Escape and the original Magnificent Seven.

I finally. finally watched this old bore only because it was sitting there on the library's DVD shelves this week, and I felt a sense of obligation. Decades ago the picture got a publicity boost when it was reported to be Howard Hughes' favorite film. He apparently watched it more than 150 times in the final years of his life, haunting his penthouse in the Las Vegas Desert Inn. So I was curious, Now, while the verdict's still out on me, Hughes was clearly out of his damned mind. Watching Ice Station Zebra over and over may have been the poor billionaire's tipping point.

On a related note, another famous lunatic, Charlie Manson, has been chillin' in the hospital this week with critical intestinal problems according to news reports and may not come out alive, which is long overdue. Then again, Manson isn't boring. I don't know his favorite film, but if I did, I suppose I'd watch that one, too. Couldn't be duller than this.