Revolving around life in the notorious Hoa Le Prison in 1960s Vietnam, Lionel Chetwynd‘s The Hanoi Hilton (1987) launches a strong assault on Communists and the New Left’s anti-anti-Communism of yesteryear. It pays homage to American POWs, tortured until they “broke,” in the prison.

The film’s characters are not fully convincing and sometimes they are viewed sentimentally, but there is never a dull moment and THH can be moving. It is slightly puzzling when Lt. Cmdr. Williamson (Michael Moriarty) asserts to the prison major (Aki Aleong) that the POWs not only survived the prison, admirably, but also “won” against their captors. Weren’t the POWs forced to provide the North Vietnamese with useful information every time they broke under torture? Is this really winning? In any case, I like Chetwynd’s film. Though flawed, it is inspired and conservative.

Walkabout (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Nicolas Roeg‘s Walkabout (1971), an English teenage girl (Jenny Agutter) and her younger brother (Lucien John) must make their way out of the Australian outback, and are helped by a virile, humane Aboriginal boy (David Gumpilil).  Here, civilization and primitive culture have so much in common they are nearly one and the same, except, as it happens, primitive culture has a moral nobility that civilization will simply never manifest.  Screenwriter Edward Bond does the film no favors by arguing such a theme and by making the theme damnably obvious.  In other words, there’s no subtlety.

Although the film is remarkable-looking—and not always pleasant-looking—Roeg is a would-be artist ignorant of how to avoid pretentiousness.  Hence we see everything from pointless freeze frames to white tree branches which resemble sexy human legs, and we hear ill-fitting choral music.  Walkabout, not surprisingly, is sometimes uncomfortably weird.

Jenny Agutter’s acting is fairly successful, but rather too cold.  Gumpilil, on the other hand, is lively.  Kids are the major characters in Walkabout but, believe me, it’s an  adults-only picture—except, well, I can’t imagine anyone but a callow adolescent REALLY enjoying it.  Roeg has seen the enemy and it is us Civilizers.

Yew Kwang Han of Singapore is, to me, one heck of a writer—and director—of farce, farce being what the film 18 Grams of Love (2007) is. Herein: “Two men [Ah Hui and Zihua] write anonymous love letters to test if their wives are faithful. When their wives actually respond, the two men are left in a fix of what to do” (imdb.com). The marriages are hardly satisfying. The wives, Michelle and Xiao Tong, are insensitive and tired. The men, even so, are not the same as they were during the couples’ courtships, and Zihua, in fact, is a hothead. The attempt at self-justification naturally comes about, but so does soul-searching. “When we have problems,” says Zihua, “why don’t we think back to when we fell in love?”

Problems there are, explored with playful, eccentric direction by Yew, whose plot never gets inert or too thin. And there is good farceur acting from everyone: Adam Chen (Ah Hui), for example—spot-on as a handsome but ordinary and confused hubby. Magdalene See, as Xiao Tong, performs as though she’s been doing farce for two decades. For good measure, the pic features the longest scene of literal finger pointing I will probably ever see.

(Available on Tubi)

In 1978, we should have had American movies, art works or not, that were powerful and ambitious and intelligent, not un-chaste and often unconvincing thrillers like Magic. Even a failure such as ’78’s The Deer Hunter is a limited example of what I’m venerating. Magic is the one about a mentally unbalanced ventriloquist (Anthony Hopkins) whom we do not quite believe in, and his vulgar dummy. It’s a rather adolescent nonentity, put together by some talented technicians but much, much weaker than Hitchcock’s Psycho. By ’78, movies were pathetically weak.

In The Big Caper, a 1957 picture I saw on Tubi, a conning couple pose as husband and wife while aiming to participate with their associates in a bank heist. The make-believe family, however, grows dysfunctional. For one thing, posing as an uncle, Zimmer, a bomb expert, is the thirstiest alcoholic on the planet.

James Gregory is an intelligent actor here in the role of a mob boss. With a cool head he means business. Directed by Robert Stevens, Caper is never less than interesting and involving. All the same, as an actor Rory Calhoun (the phony husband, Frank) keeps threatening to do a disappearing act.