The Shadow (1994).

Review #2575: The Shadow (1994).

Cast: 

Alec Baldwin (Lamont Cranston / The Shadow), John Lone (Shiwan Kahn), Penelope Ann Miller (Margo Lane), Ian McKellen (Dr. Reinhardt Lane), Peter Boyle (Moses "Moe" Shrevnitz), Jonathan Winters (Commissioner Wainwright Barth), Tim Curry (Farley Claymore), Joseph Maher (Isaac Newboldt), John Kapelos (Duke Rollins), Max Wright (Berger), Sab Shimono (Dr. Roy Tam), with Brady Tsurutani (the Tulku), Andre Gregory (Burbank), James Hong (Li Peng), Arsenio "Sonny" Trinidad (Wu), and Ethan Phillips (Nelson) Directed by Russell Mulcahy.

Review: 

There were quite a few folks who really, really, really wanted to make their own type of franchise based on some old books lying around in the latter stages of the 20th century. For every Superman (1978) or Batman (1989) or even Dick Tracy (1990), you would get movies such as Flash Gordon (1980) or Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985) or The Phantom (1996) that just didn't pan out... or this. The Shadow actually arose first as a marketing tool, specifically as a storyteller with a distinct voice to narrate the Detective Story Hour for radio. The voice seemed more interesting than the show, so Walter B. Gibson was commissioned to begin writing stories of the character (with a pen name of Maxwell Grant, as one does) that ran on and off for 20 years. You've got a man clad in black (hat, cloak) as a vigilante (while spending his days as a rich playboy, most of the time) that fought crime starting in 1931. The radio drama apparently was the one that made him invisible when in operation. There were two low-budget films done in the late 1930s (The Shadow Strikes [1937], International Crime [1938]) with Rod La Rocque as the title character while Victor Jory starred in a 15-chapter serial for Columbia Pictures in 1940 and Kane Richjmond starred in a trio of B-movie quickies in 1946. The character did in fact prove an inspiration for both Batman and V for Vendetta* (Batman co-creator Bill Finger stated that his first story for the character was a takeoff of a Shadow story). Martin Bregman bought the rights to the character in the 1980s and had Robert Zemeckis in mind to direct, but this did not come to pass (incidentally, Sam Raimi had pitched an idea but was ignored, but he ended up doing Darkman [1990] anyway). Eventually, it worked out for Universal Pictures to have Australian-born Russell Mulcahy (responsible for the first two Highlander films) as director and David Koepp (who had co-adapted Jurassic Park [1993] as writer. Filmed with a mix of traditional practical and optical effects alongside CGI for a budget of $40 million that was released on July 1, 1994 (right between the releases of The Lion King and Forrest Gump), the movie made just $48 million with audiences.

If you like movies set in the 1930s that just rolls along with any offbeat situation possible for what you might call an aloof type of superhero movie, you might have fun with this film. How many movies do you know where one of the key aspects to the plan of the movie is to hypnotize an entire city to not see a whole building? It's a movie all about atonement and adventure in the most offbeat of ways that I can't help but appreciate for its execution and its style that plays fast and loose for 108 minutes. Koepp had actually listened to the radio shows when he was a kid and he utilized the pulp novels as inspiration for his script and it shows in the charm that comes through and through in pulpy oddness, at least for those who get into it (thin? well, your milage may vary). Baldwin proves to be fairly game as the lead that dazzles in serving as a pulp avenger that occasionally terrorizes folks with a booming voice (as one does when having the mental fortitude to only be detected by one's shadow) or has a ball trying to adjust to the charms of Miller; it's all suave and all spry with these folks, it's hard to not have fun. Lone (playing a Genghis Khan descendant, as one does) makes for a delightfully hammy villain, coasting along with clinical precision for a role that could've easily been cardboard. Plans of world domination and folks fighting crime in the middle of the night work when there is some style to it, and I liked what I saw in splattering of Art Deco that keeps its outlandish stuff right for when it needs its most (a naturally elaborate network of tubes to communicate stuff, bombs that roll around like a ball, a climax involving mirrors, for example). There is a bit of relief with McKellen, Boyle, Winters, and Curry* to provide further bits of charm and curiosity to make this oddball world of shadowy networking and henchmen stuff work without too many hitches. With the way the climax goes, I do wonder how the hell they were going to do more of these, but I love ridiculous endings to see where they can write their way out of it (which, well, you know how that worked out). As a whole, The Shadow is an underrated little gem that has enough charm and look to generally rise with its pulp trappings and offbeat plot to make for a curious recommendation for those who can see past shadows and fog.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Song of the day!

*As devised by noted artist and also noted grumpy person Alan Moore. 

*As with Dolly Parton, we'll remember Tim Curry in this life and the next.

*Incidentally, it was nice to have a small role of Ethan Phillips, who played Neelix on Star Trek: Voyager. Why? Because I hate Neelix and Phillips' character in this film gets what Neelix deserved: bipped by the bad guy.

Well, it was a good run for Acknowledged in August Again.

There were many candidates that couldn't quite make the cut due to time or other reasons. These included: 1941, The Plague Dogs, Innocent Blood, Quintet, Sucker Punch, True Colors, Human Highway, Dream Lover, Over the Top, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, Bad Timing, Timebomb, Leviathan, Brain Donors, Rent-a-Cop, The Missing, 3000 Miles to Graceland, Cutters' Way, Swing Swift, Captain Ron, Circle of Iron, Keys to Tulsa, The New Age, Speaking of Sex, Powwow Highway, Monkeybone, The Frisco Kid, Twister (1989), Shoot 'em Up, The Phantom, Very Bad Things, Terminator: Dark Fate, The Taking of Beverly Hills, Moment by Moment, Big Wednesday, Let's Get Harry, The 13th Warrior, [Redux of Escape from L.A./Small Soldiers], Striptease

Barring an unforeseen emergency, August 2027 will see Around the World Again in August

All That Jazz.

Review #2330: All That Jazz.

Cast: 

Roy Scheider (Joe Gideon; Keith Gordon as young Joe Gideon), Jessica Lange (Angelique, the Angel of Death), Ann Reinking (Katie Jagger), Leland Palmer (Audrey Paris), Cliff Gorman (Davis Newman), Ben Vereen (O'Connor Flood), Erzsebet Foldi (Michelle Gideon), Michael Tolan (Dr. Ballinger), Max Wright (Joshua Penn), William LeMassena (Jonesy Hecht), Chris Chase (Leslie Perry), Deborah Geffner (Victoria Porter), Anthony Holland (Paul Dann), David Margulies (Larry Goldie), John Lithgow (Lucas Sergeant), with Sandahl Bergman, Eileen Casey, Bruce Davis, Gary Flannery, Jennifer Nairn-Smith, Danny Ruvolo, Leland Schwantes, John Sowinski, Candace Tovar, and Rima Vetter (principal dancers) Directed by Bob Fosse (#904 - Cabaret)

Review: 

“It is off‐beat. Some people are locked into certain channels of thinking. They're rigid. They think you shouldn't show an operation in a musical. I know the film is strong, but the intention was to be strong. I accomplished what I set out to do, to move people out of the ordinary movie experience. So it's a compliment to all involved that the film is being talked about.”

If one remembers, Bob Fosse was quite the busy man in his age. The Chicago native was the son of a travelling salesman that was so big on being in dance that he was already performing professionally at the age of 13 before moving on to doing shows at burlesque clubs. In adulthood, he went from acting in musical productions in the late 1940s to directing and choreographing his own musical works such as the 1955 show Damn Yankees. He became a feature director with Sweet Charity (1969) that would see him rise in his peaks, which included the smash adaptation of Cabaret (1972) and his work on adapting the play Lenny to a film and also directing and choreographing the Chicago musical. The result of working on both led to him suffering a massive heart attack. He became interested in the subject of life and death as a result and when recovering from open-heart surgery, he came across the Hilma Wolitzer novel Ending. He tapped himself to work with Robert Alan Aurthur on a screenplay of the novel but found that he did not in fact want to "live with that kind of pain for a year and a half." The result of shifting course resulted in a script that would happen to share elements of Fosse's life, such as habits with certain substances (one perhaps may be struck by Fosse once being quoted as saying, "I don't have time for that kind of pain" when it came to the nature of needing to work and being afraid to stop). Various actors came in consideration for the lead role, ranging from Richard Dreyfuss (who dropped out, citing exhaustion) to Paul Newman (who declined an offer due to his issue with the character and regretted his decision), but Fosse would get his way in wanting Scheider. Fosse wrote the screenplay with Aurthur, who died of lung cancer in 1978. Fosse would direct one further film with Star 80 (a decidedly-different type of movie released in 1983) to go along with staging the production Big Deal. He died in 1987 at the age of 60 while in the process of staging a revival show of Sweet Charity. Incidentally, Reinking (who was Fosse's partner for a number of years, and, well, a star featured here) would later be involved in the direction of the 1999 musical revue of Fosse, which utilized a handful of songs from All that Jazz.

Admittedly, the comparison to Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963) came pretty early in the film's lifetime, but there is some entertainment to be found here with a fairly game cast and some useful dancing that generally will prove worthy in the end. It is an expression of ego in all the facets imaginable for a man having himself in on a joke, if you think about it enough when it comes to its energy for the climax. It stylizes the pursuit of work at the expense of everything is a way that seems so raw and yet so real at the same time, since one might as well have a ball when going down in a blaze of glory. Scheider carries the movie with an intensity that is one for the ages in more ways than one, since, yes, he really can do a bit of song and dance to go with being among the noted names of lead presences for his era. The drive and passion of all-consuming work is all compulsive and obsessive in ways that Scheider apparently related to quite well when it came to being a regular worker. The mirage of his character is that he is hard to love but perhaps harder to hate (or perhaps in a different view, its the other way). Consider the scene where he is wrapped in the space looking back at a memory with Lange (playing the angel of death) that shows him with Reinking and all the quibbles that come with how one puts up with the other for so long ("staying in", as they say"). If the film really was just a self-indulgent muddle, it would not lend time for worthwhile moments with Lange and her knowing sense of timing (as one does when listening to recollections of a man on the cusp of reckless abandon) or with Reinking being game to playing out fact and fiction with a lover. It also can be damn funny, as wonderfully captured with "Take Off With Us", in which you get to see a rehearsal of dancers with flashlights and minimal clothing to a murmuring group of producers. In short, one can get taken everywhere by razzle dazzle but never really get anywhere. It all comes to a head for the final stage of the film in "Bye Bye Life" in such poignant nature in both the choreography and the music that has such a crisp tempo for one hell of a subject matter (you've got a crowd viewing some dancers dressed up in veiny get-ups) that even shows Scheider shaking hands down on the stage. On the whole, the movie is Fosse in its distilled form with a exhilarating showman who knew what to deliver in choreographed brilliance that knows death is inevitable and yet decides to move right ahead anyway because what else is there? As the film closes out, there really is no business like show business.

Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.