The Silent Partner (Daryl Duke, 1978)

Christopher Plummer and Elliott Gould in The Silent Partner

Cast: Elliott Gould, Christopher Plummer, Susannah York, Céline Lomez, Michael Kirby, Sean Sullivan, Ken Pogue, John Candy. Screenplay: Curtis Hanson, based on a novel by Anders Bodelsen. Cinematography: Billy Williams. Production design: Trevor Williams. Film editing: George Appleby. Music: Oscar Peterson. 

Solid, entertaining thriller with a good turn by Christopher Plummer as the heavy. Your enjoyment of it may depend on how much you can accept Elliott Gould's transformation from nerdy bank teller to romantic lead. I'm still struggling with it. Director Daryl Duke's conflicts with the producers led to screenwriter Curtis Hanson being called in to finish the film, which he had wanted to direct all along.

Dracula 2000 (Patrick Lussier, 2000)

 

Cast: Gerard Butler, Christopher Plummer, Jonny Lee Miller, Justine Waddell, Vitamin C, Jennifer Esposito, Omar Epps, Sean Patrick Thomas, Jeri Ryan, Danny Masterson, Lochlyn Munro, Tig Fong, Tony Munch, Shane West, Nathan Fillion. Screenplay:  Joel Soisson, Patrick Lussier. Cinematography: Peter Pau. Production design: Carol Spier. Film editing: Peter Devaney Flanagan, Patrick Lussier. Music: Marco Beltrami. 

The cross as vampire repellent has become so much a part of the Dracula legend that Roman Polanski saw fit to spoof it in The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). Threatened with a crucifix, a vampire reveals himself as Jewish: “Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire.” But Patrick Lussier doubles down on the Christian mythology in Dracula 2000: His vampire isn’t threatened by the cross so much as he hates it. It turns out that Dracula is really the biblical Judas Iscariot, who when the rope broke as he tried to commit suicide after betraying Christ, was condemned to walk the Earth for eternity as one of the undead. Nobody else knows this except Abraham Van Helsing, who is still alive 103 years after Bram Stoker fictionalized his exploits. (In the film, Van Helsing dismisses Stoker as just a drunken Irish writer.) In 2000 he is posing as Van Helsing’s grandson, the owner of Carfax Antiquities in London. It seems he kept himself alive after capturing Dracula and imprisoning him in a silver casket filled with leeches that feast on Judas/Dracula’s blood. Somehow Van Helsing harvests the occasional leech from the casket and injects himself with that blood to keep himself alive. Unfortunately, this twist in the Dracula legend – borrowed from the legend of the Wandering Jew – is about all Dracula 2000 has going for it. Gerard Butler is not a particularly compelling Dracula, and Christopher Plummer doesn’t invest much of his considerable talent in playing Van Helsing. Jonny Lee Miller, as Van Helsing’s assistant, seems more confused than dashing in the romantic lead, and strikes no sparks with Justine Waddell, who turns out to be Van Helsing’s estranged daughter. It was a critical and commercial flop, though there are those who regard it as underrated, so it may some day re-emerge, like Dracula himself, as a cult film.

Inside Daisy Clover (Robert Mulligan, 1965)

Natalie Wood and Robert Redford in Inside Daisy Clover

Cast: Natalie Wood, Christopher Plummer, Robert Redford, Ruth Gordon, Roddy McDowall, Katharine Bard, Peter Helm, Betty Harford, John Hale, Harold Gould, Ottola Nesmith, Edna Holland. Screenplay: Gavin Lambert, based on his novel. Cinematography: Charles Lang. Production design: Robert Clatworthy. Film editing: Aaron Stell. Music: André Previn.

As a satire on Hollywood and the star system, Inside Daisy Clover occasionally feels slack and uncertain. That may be because it was adapted by Gavin Lambert from his own novel, and authors are sometimes not the best judges of which parts of their books to transfer to film. There seem to be characters in the movie who haven't been given as much to do as their prominence suggests, such as Daisy's sister Gloria (Betty Harford), or Baines (Roddy McDowall), the assistant to the studio head, a role more generously cast than the function of the character in the story deserves. But I think a major problem stems from when the movie was made: in the mid-1960s, when the Production Code was on its last legs, and before films like Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) and Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969) showed filmmakers what they could get away with. So although Inside Daisy Clover shook free of the Code's strictures against homosexuality and let Robert Redford's character, Wade Lewis, be revealed as gay (or, in a departure from the book, bisexual), you can still feel that people in the film aren't using the kind of verboten language that they would have in real life. Once, for example, Daisy (Natalie Wood) says "damn" and is reproved by her mother (Ruth Gordon) for using "those four letter words." When Daisy scrawls in anger on a wall, you expect stronger language than her graffiti contains. Lambert and director Robert Mulligan are chafing at the restrictions but haven't been given the go-ahead to take the film as far as it wants to go, so there's a kind of tonal dithering -- lunges in the direction of black comedy, as in Daisy's suicide attempt, that fall short of the mark.

The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston, 1975)

Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer, and Sean Connery in The Man Who Would Be King

Daniel Dravot: Sean Connery
Peachy Carnehan: Michael Caine
Rudyard Kipling: Christopher Plummer
Billy Fish: Saeed Jaffrey
Ootah: Larbi Doghmi
District Commissioner: Jack May
Kafu Selim: Karroom Ben Bouhi
Roxanne: Shakira Caine

Director: John Huston
Screenplay: John Huston, Gladys Hill
Cinematography: Oswald Morris
Production design: Alexandre Trauner
Film editing: Russell Lloyd
Music: Maurice Jarre

John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King is not quite the unalloyed delight I remember it being, but in large part that's because I last saw it well before we became so inextricably embroiled in conflicts in the region where the film's action takes place. We've had our consciousness raised so high about the Middle East and Central Asia that larky adventures, even ones like Rudyard Kipling's story that don't end well for the adventurers, no longer seem so amusing when they take place there. And comic natives like Ootah, religious fanatics like Kafu Selim, or even collaborators with the West like Billy Fish, feel like distasteful stereotypes. As I've said about another film drawn from a Kipling source, George Stevens's Gunga Din (1939), "I have to swallow a lot that I object to when I admit that I still like" The Man Who Would Be King. Objections swallowed, is there another film team more beautiful than that of Sean Connery and Michael Caine, who bring their previous movie personae -- including James Bond and Alfie Elkins -- so effectively into the roles of Danny and Peachy? The story goes that Huston originally saw it as a vehicle for two other vivid stars with trailing personae, Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart, who never made a film together but should have. It would have been a very different film, of course, probably shot in black and white in the Sierra Nevada (like Gunga Din), but an entertaining one. As the years passed, the roles were handed down, at least in theory, to Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole, and then to Paul Newman and Robert Redford, until Newman supposedly knocked some sense into the producers' heads and suggested Connery and Caine. As for the film, is there more to it than just larky adventure in colorful locations? Is it, perhaps, a warning about getting involved in politics and cultures that we don't fully understand? We are still getting our heads handed to us, and they don't usually wear crowns from Alexander's treasury.