Animal Men

Point Blank: adapted from the Donald Westlake novel The Hunter by Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse, and Kate Newhouse; directed by John Boorman; starring Lee Marvin (Walker), Angie Dickinson (Chris), Keenan Wynn (Yost), Carroll O'Connor (Brewster), Lloyd Bochner (Carter) and John Vernon (Mal) (1967): God knows John Boorman has his flaws as a director, but lack of ambition isn't one of them. Here, he takes a straightforward novel of revenge by Donald Westlake and makes it burningly trippy and subjective without losing the narrative momentum or bleakness of the original work. Lee Marvin is great as the lead, a master thief and burglar betrayed and left for dead by his partners. The rest of the cast is strong. Many read the movie as being borderline supernatural -- is Marvin's character really alive or is he a vengeful spirit? -- and the film supports both the supernatural and natural interpretations of events. Remade as Mel Gibson's Payback. An essential 1960's thriller. Highly recommended.

The Fly: written by George Langelaan and adapted by James Clavell; directed by Kurt Neumann; starring David Hedison (Andre Delambre), Patricia Owens (Helene Delambre), Vincent Price (Francois Delambre), and Herbert Marshall (Inspector Charas) (1958): I'll be damned if I know why this is set in Montreal. I guess the original short story was. Only one of the leads attempts a French-Canadian accent, and the maid's attempt at a French-Canadian accent occasionally slips into a Hollywood Irish brogue. One of the big-budget horror hits of the 1950's, The Fly now seems unthrilling and painfully slow. The spider-web sequence is great, though, and the Fly prosthetics still possess the ability to startle. Lightly recommended for historical reasons.

Ant-Man: based on the character created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby; written by Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish, Adam McKay, and Paul Rudd; directed by Peyton Reed; starring Paul Rudd (Scott Lang), Michael Douglas (Hank Pym), Evangeline Lilly (Hope van Dyne), Corey Stoll (Darren Cross), Bobby Cannavale (Paxton), Anthony Mackie (The Falcon), and Michael Pena (Luis) (2015): Jolly heist film masquerading as a superhero origin story. This would make a terrific pilot for a TV show -- indeed, it's a much more suitable TV project than Marvel's Agents of SHIELD. The large cast is affable, some of the writing is cleverly non-stereotypical, and the 'shrunken' sequences are nicely imagined. A brief scene showing the 'original' Ant-Man and Wasp in action against a nuclear missile is actually the most spectacular and interesting effects sequence in the movie. More of that! Recommended.

The Day of the Jackal: adapted by Kenneth Ross from the book by Frederick Forsyth; directed by Fred Zinnemann; starring Edward Fox (The Jackal) and Michael Lonsdale (Lebel) (1973): Tense, documentary structure and tone make this fictional account of a 1963 assassination attempt on then-French President Charles De Gaulle seem like a docudrama, to the extent that its events have often been confused with reality. This is one of the great thrillers of the 1960's, on par with The Manchurian Candidate. Edward Fox makes a suave cipher as the paid assassin who goes by the moniker 'The Jackal,' and French actor Michael Lonsdale is excellent as the police detective who leads the efforts to stop him. Old-school Hollywood director Fred Zinnemann (High Noon, From Here To Eternity, Oklahoma!) was never better. Highly recommended.

The In-Laws: written by Andrew Bergman; directed by Arthur Hiller; starring Peter Falk (Vince Ricardo), Alan Arkin (Sheldon Kornpett), Richard Libertini (General Garcia), and Ed Begley, Jr. (Barry Lutz) (1979): Hilarious comedy from a co-writer of Blazing Saddles sends Alan Arkin and Peter Falk on a spy odyssey around New York and New Jersey and ultimately to a (fictional) Central American banana republic whose dictator collects Black Velvet paintings and practices ventriloquism with his 'talking' hand. Falk's character is a CIA agent who is also the soon-to-be father-in-law of Arkin's daughter. Arkin plays a high-strung dentist who gradually comes unstrung as the plot unfolds. The film juggles verbal comedy and slapstick with great elan, and the actors all succeed marvelously. A young David Paymer shows up as a helpful NY cabdriver, while Ed Begley, Jr. plays a CIA wonk. Dreadfully remade in 2003 with Michael Douglas and Albert Brooks in the Falk and Arkin roles. Highly recommended.

Super Powers!

Simon and Kirby: Superheroes: written and illustrated by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby with additional illustration by Mort Meskin, Gil Kane, and others; Introduction by Neil Gaiman; text pieces by Jim Simon (Original comic-book material 1940-1966; this edition 2010): Before and after there were Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, there were Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Unlike Lee, Simon could draw, and the two writer-artists also ran a studio for some time in the 1950's. Britain's Titan Books have been doing a fine job of reprinting the work that Simon and Kirby still hold the copyright on, which is to say most of their work for comic-book companies other than Timely/Atlas/Marvel and NPP/DC.

This over-sized, lengthy collection brings together Simon and Kirby's superhero output from the 1940's and 1950's, along with some pages from a brief revival of Fighting American in the mid-1960's. It's both historically compelling and terrifically entertaining.

After a brief stop with a character (the Black Owl) Simon and Kirby didn't create, the volume takes us on a tour of the superhero genre during the time of its great decline. Without the debilitating censorship of the Comics Code Authority in the mid-1950's, it's entirely possible that American superhero comics would have been reduced to a tiny niche of a much larger marketplace with a much broader and more adult-focused comic book audience. Superheroes were already dying off before World War Two ended, and the post-war years only accelerated that decline.

With 1940's and 1950's characters that include Stunt-man and Fighting American, one can see Simon and Kirby striving to move the superhero genre into a different mode of comedy and satire. As Simon notes in his introduction, Fighting American didn't last long, but it did last longer than the proto-Marvel-company's attempt to revive Captain America in the 1950's (the Captain being one of Simon and Kirby's most popular creations).

Both Stunt-man and Fighting American play for the most part as comic takes on superheroes. Fighting American did begin as a serious comic in which the eponymous star-spangled hero fought assorted Communist menaces, but that approach rapidly went from straigghtforward to seriously loopy to intentionally ridiculous. By the time Fighting American and his sidekick Speedboy (!) battle a Communist villain whose superpowers derive from his body odour, we've pretty much left conventional superheroes behind for something a lot more like Mad magazine.

Simon and Kirby's art throughout is a lot of fun. Single- and double-page spreads abound, and there's a pleasing looseness and dynamism to the composition, which generally involved Kirby pencilling and Simon inking. Some of the later Fighting American material is clearly drawn by artists other than Simon and Kirby, but for the most part this is the Real Right Thing.

With the Silver Age underway at DC in the late 1950's, competing companies turned to more straightforward superhero comics again. The Shield and The Fly, both short-lived efforts for the Archie Comics superhero wing, remain satire-free while nonetheless continuing with an out-sized loopiness that's pure Silver Age.

The Shield, yet another star-spangled hero, has powers more like Superman's than Captain America's. The Fly's origin is completely nuts. Benevolent aliens who look like flies (and indeed sometimes are flies) invest the title character with the power of the Fly in order to fight evil. None of this involves eating crap, much less possessing a penis several times longer than his own body. Well, there was a Comics Code.

Other stories include the use of 3-D glasses (in Captain 3-D, natch) and an experiment with an anomalous three-person crime-fighting team. Uncompleted stories, unused covers, and some solid historical essays from Jim Simon round out the volume. It's an outstanding piece of entertainment and scholarship, with remastered art that often looks much better than what the big boys at Marvel and DC have managed with their reprints. Highly recommended.