Papillon (1973)

Director: Franklin J. Schaffner
Writers:  Dalton Trumbo, Lorenzo Semple Jr. , Henri Charriere
Cast:       Steve McQueen, Dustin Hoffman, Victor Jory

A man befriends a fellow criminal as the two of them begin serving their sentence on a dreadful prison island, which inspires the man to plot his escape. Steve McQueen plays the role of Papillon, who is hell-bent on escaping, and Dustin Hoffman plays the role of Dega, a counterfeiter, who can underwrite their escape.

Film hinges on extremely physical performances from its two leads who got equal billing even though one of them plays the titular character but McQueen did insist on getting his name first in the same row. Steve McQueen, style-icon from the 60s, must have been in the waning period of his career but this film came immediately after his role in 'The Getaway'. It is indeed considered as his final great role and for him, the role of Papillon is very much against type. Dustin Hoffman as Dega is very funny in his typical dry manner. The first half of the film depicts the hell like life in prison which makes their plan to escape nothing but a logical next step. We don't get much insight into the backstory of the characters and I never felt that it was necessary. Hoffman's character is all about survival while Papillon wants freedom to live in the 'Civilized' world. After the escape to Honduras, he lives among tribal people with a wife and all that but he again flees from there to reach the mainland but gets himself caught again. We don't get many films that deals with colonial horror from Hollywood and this one is  one such even though it is seen through the eyes of a white convict. They are supposed to serve their time in the prison after which they are expected to serve equal amount of time as a Colonist in a remote island. 

Overall it is a very good watch with excellent performances from its leads. It is close to 150 minutes long and that length is necessary to make us really feel and relate to their ordeal. It does go a bit surreal during the sequence in Honduras making us wonder where it is going, but you have to admire the bureaucratic capabilities of Colonial empires as Papillon ends up back in the same prison after his capture in Honduras. The manner of cruelty by the prison authority is done in an impersonal matter of fact way which is preferable to some silly vendetta like portrayal.  The title for the film comes from the French word for butterfly.

Rating: 3.5/5

                                                                            

Patton (1970)

Director: Franklin J. Schaffner
Writers:  Francis Ford Coppola, Edmund H. North, Ladislas Farago, Omar Bradley
Cast:       George C. Scott, Karl Malden, Stephen Young

The film charts the career of controversial American General, George S. Patton. It begins with his operations in North Africa and then proceeds to his landings in Italy and subsequent march to Palermo and Messina where he is shown to be in a egotistical race with British General Montgomery to be the first to reach Messina. He gets chided for his actions and loose tongue there and gets sidelined for sometime. He later has his career high moment after Normandy Landings when he marches his 3rd Army through tough winter weather to hold Bastogne.  After the war he is again sidelined due to his lack of diplomatic skills.

Film is basically a character study on its titular character Patton. He is portrayed as someone who loves war and thinks he is destined to achieve great things during it. He is highly knowledgeable about history and claims that he had been involved in historic battles like Carthaginians war and Neapolitan wars. We can see his colleagues listening uncomfortably to these proclamations. He sees battle fatigue as cowardice which doesn't sit well now but was a common thing for Generals to do back then. Film actually did good for Patton's reputation but I came out of it with ambivalence. Sure, you need bastards like that to win these kind of wars, but in the large scheme of things whatever that happened in Western Front during second world war was child's play compared to what happened in Eastern Front. The whole European landings and the race to Berlin by US and UK was more of an exercise to get as much leverage during their negotiations with Russians and this part of war also featured a huge number of causalities because of this race aspect. Behavior by Patton and Montgomery seems very childish and was as dignified as someone who is trying to beat someone on who gets more during a riot loot. Bastogne was my favorite Band of Brothers episode and so that part of the film was very interesting.

Overall the film is a great watch and is done in an ambiguous way so that you can judge Patton favorably or unfavorably depending on your own biases. I had just about finished Dan Carlin's 24 hours long podcast series on first world war (Blueprint for Armageddon) and I guess I was predisposed to think of Patton as a dickwad. Performance by Geroge C. Scott, whose most memorable other role is the one he did in Dr. Strangelove, is excellent and the production quality of the film is very high. It is close to three hours long but you don't feel the length. It is not a traditional war film with a set-piece battle at the end and doesn't bother to make you understand how World War played out at a macro level in an elaborate fashion. That is fine because when Hollywood does that they invariably tend to portray as if US won the war.

Rating: 4/5

                                                                         

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Director: Franklin J. Schaffner
Writers:  Michael Wilson, Rod Sterling, Pierre Boulle
Cast:      Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter

An astronaut crew crash lands on a planet in the distant future where intelligent talking apes are the dominant species, and humans are the oppressed and enslaved. The crew is supposed to have traveled at near light speed and due to time dilation they aged by only eighteen months whereas in Earth it is around 4000 AD. 

If you want to know about time dilation, general relativity and stuff like that, Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time' is highly recommended. I got a vague handle about the concepts when I read it some time back but would like to read it again. The fact that Earth has aged by 2000 years is significant to the story because the big twist in it is that it is in-fact their planet Earth only where they landed, which Taylor (Charlton Heston) realizes only when he encounters the fallen piece of Statue of Liberty at the end. The stress on time dilation in itself is a big clue but you don't really need that to figure out where it is going because just a basic understanding of evolution itself is enough, which the protagonist Taylor doesn't seem to possess. They encounter humans first and then the master of the planet-English talking apes. If they were indeed on an earth-like but different planet, then it is very unlikely that the species evolved over there would be exactly like the ones on Earth. Lets just for a minute suspend our disbelief and suppose that it also followed the same evolutionary path, but then why the fuck should they evolve into speaking the same fucking language. So what I am saying is that if the viewer understands evolution and assumes that people behind the film also do, then from the get go itself you would realize that it is indeed planet Earth. Then the whole thing of that being a twist doesn't really work and only thing you have apart from that in the film is the mildly humorous take on Ape Bureaucracy and scientific thinking which is similar to the one Europe had during the Dark ages. That and Charlton Heston's Humphrey Bogartesque performance as the protagonist-Taylor.  

I had seen parts of the 2001 film with the same name and going by its wiki page the plot is much different to this one. It doesn't seem to rely on this big stupid twist but I don't know whether the protagonist realize it much after Ape starts talking in English. For the original Planet of Apes to work, it needs an audience that doesn't understand evolution like its protagonist Taylor. It might have got such an audience in the late 60s but still that is no excuse. Overall the film didn't work for me not just because of the twist (which I was aware of) but the satire part of it was not good enough to make it interesting.

Film was a big hit and drew praise for the prosthetic used for the apes. Coming as it was during America's Civil Rights Movement, some people also interpreted it as a metaphor for Blacks ruling over whites. 

Rating: 2/5