Post by Eddie Love on Dec 27, 2010 16:46:02 GMT -5
After the disaster movie boom of the early and mid-70s, there were the odd one-offs that cropped up during the rest of that decade. Charlton Heston was the go-to lead for these pictures and he rode these comet-tail titles to the bitter end of the genre. When seen today, they’re a mixed bag – but in some ways more respectable offerings than the bloated disaster “classics” of their day.
TWO-MINUTE WARNING is a curious little hybrid of the disaster movie and the taut urban thriller. The picture mashes up a kind of GRAND HOTEL-at-the-Super-Bowl structure with a tense sniper story-line. It’s surprisingly good and holds up much better than I would have expected.
The cast of characters gathered in L.A. for the national football Championship (don’t call it a Super Bowl!) between L.A. and Baltimore include a bickering unmarried couple (David Jansen and Gena Rowlands), a desperate gambler (Jack Klugman), a harried family man (Beau Bridges) and a young couple meeting cute (don’t worry, they’re not stars). Soon the boys in the control booth spot a lone figure with a high-powered rifle nested above the scoreboard and they call in Heston and the LAPD, who in turn brings in John Cassevetes and his SWAT team.
The film opens with long subjective shots from the killer’s point-of-view with creepy musical scoring that’s not unlike what we’d soon see in the slasher-movie craze. Throughout, the sniper is kept at an eerie remove; he’s a mysterious figure for most of the movie. We see him captured from the blimp’s cameras and this footage has a very realistic, news coverage look and feel. It calls to mind the grainy images of the terrorists at the Munich Olympics and it’s suitably chilling.
For all the soap opera playing out in the stands, the police scenes have a snappy, procedural feel. Watching this I thought a few times – “They can’t have gotten there that fast!” as, for a minute, I imagined we were in 24-style, real-time mode. Unfortunately, the tension is released a bit as there isn’t much urgency to scenes of Heston and Cassevetes walking back and forth in the stadium parking lot when we’d assume that be more effectively engaged elsewhere. Cassevetes is especially cool, though, as the SWAT leader, and it’s amusing to hear Heston bemoan the fact that this nut job was able to get a high-powered weapon and listen to him take the SWAT guys to task for their heavily armed response tactics.
When I popped this DVD in, I was well aware of its solid two-hour running time, but this flew by and I wasn’t watching the clock at all. This is pretty remarkable when you consider that very little actually happens in the first hour as they lay the groundwork and introduce all the characters. The film is very well-edited and keeps all the various storylines in the hopper. I didn’t realize how involved in the picture I was until each time there were shots of the sniper caught in a SWAT member’s crosshairs and I found myself shouting aloud “Take the shot! Do it!”
Interestingly, I recall seeing this movie on TV when it first aired – which is to say I never saw it at all. Back in those days when a feature was shown on network TV they would preface it by saying “Edited For Television” across the bottom of the screen. Sometimes it would also say “Edited AND Supplemented for Television”, which didn’t always mean that scenes edited from the original movie were restored to pad out the running time. They would actually shoot new scenes and insert them into the story of the original film! I know this was done with EARTHQUAKE, but the most egregious example of this has to be TWO-MINUTE WARNING. I don’t know if the issue was that the story-line for the movie was too intense or disturbing (that’s what Heston credits with the film’s box office failure) or if they just wanted to stretch the movie’s running time. Anyway, they added this giant section – you can’t really call it a sub-plot as it revises the entire main storyline – whereby the sniper was just a devise to create a diversion for a museum robbery! And Heston himself appears in a couple for these scenes to help sell it. So weird.
Seen in its proper state I was surprised by how good TWO-MINUTE WARNING is. It’s still shallow and cheesy, but it’s very well done. The cops handling of the sniper is realistically rendered and they do a masterful job of inter-cutting all the various threads. And even if the histrionic going-ons of the cast of characters may be silly and cliché, they’re well played. And the football game is authentically shot and played as well. The only thing I really didn’t like was the over-done “disaster” scenes at the end involving stampeding football fans.
Two years later Chuck had his last proper go at this genre in the navel-disaster variation GRAY LADY DOWN, a competent, but square rescue adventure.
The action begins when the idiotic Norwegian crew of a freighter heading through the fog without the use of their radar, plow straight into a U.S. nuclear sub that’s topside. The boat crashes 1,400 feet to the ocean’s floor and subsequent rockslides cover the ship further while the navy scrambles to rescue the men trapped below. Heston stars as the outgoing skipper of the sub. Stacy Keach is in charge of the rescue effort for the navy and he calls in David Carradine as the eccentric inventor of a submersible vessel that may be the men’s only hope.
GRAY LADY DOWN is interesting in a methodical, Discovery Channel kind of way, but it’s not all that rewarding from a dramatic standpoint. It’s respectable, but perfunctory. We get one scene of Chuck’s worried wife on shore, and then nothing. The sense that Ronny Cox as another officer on the ship might seriously bitch out and come into greater conflict with Chuck is quickly abandoned.
Though there’s plenty of detail in the movie, there’s also lots of fakey stuff as well. Understandably, there’s quite a lot of unconvincing miniature work, but its not rendered especially well. And the scenes of the sailors clutching the set as they’re thrown back-and-forth ala the Enterprise’s bridge are wildly over-done and over-played. And only some of the cast conveys the proper navel bearing, though the leads are all good, as is a young Christopher Reeve in his film debut. But all told, nothing here merits this film’s inclusion among the ranks of the great submarine pictures.
TWO-MINUTE WARNING is a curious little hybrid of the disaster movie and the taut urban thriller. The picture mashes up a kind of GRAND HOTEL-at-the-Super-Bowl structure with a tense sniper story-line. It’s surprisingly good and holds up much better than I would have expected.
The cast of characters gathered in L.A. for the national football Championship (don’t call it a Super Bowl!) between L.A. and Baltimore include a bickering unmarried couple (David Jansen and Gena Rowlands), a desperate gambler (Jack Klugman), a harried family man (Beau Bridges) and a young couple meeting cute (don’t worry, they’re not stars). Soon the boys in the control booth spot a lone figure with a high-powered rifle nested above the scoreboard and they call in Heston and the LAPD, who in turn brings in John Cassevetes and his SWAT team.
The film opens with long subjective shots from the killer’s point-of-view with creepy musical scoring that’s not unlike what we’d soon see in the slasher-movie craze. Throughout, the sniper is kept at an eerie remove; he’s a mysterious figure for most of the movie. We see him captured from the blimp’s cameras and this footage has a very realistic, news coverage look and feel. It calls to mind the grainy images of the terrorists at the Munich Olympics and it’s suitably chilling.
For all the soap opera playing out in the stands, the police scenes have a snappy, procedural feel. Watching this I thought a few times – “They can’t have gotten there that fast!” as, for a minute, I imagined we were in 24-style, real-time mode. Unfortunately, the tension is released a bit as there isn’t much urgency to scenes of Heston and Cassevetes walking back and forth in the stadium parking lot when we’d assume that be more effectively engaged elsewhere. Cassevetes is especially cool, though, as the SWAT leader, and it’s amusing to hear Heston bemoan the fact that this nut job was able to get a high-powered weapon and listen to him take the SWAT guys to task for their heavily armed response tactics.
When I popped this DVD in, I was well aware of its solid two-hour running time, but this flew by and I wasn’t watching the clock at all. This is pretty remarkable when you consider that very little actually happens in the first hour as they lay the groundwork and introduce all the characters. The film is very well-edited and keeps all the various storylines in the hopper. I didn’t realize how involved in the picture I was until each time there were shots of the sniper caught in a SWAT member’s crosshairs and I found myself shouting aloud “Take the shot! Do it!”
Interestingly, I recall seeing this movie on TV when it first aired – which is to say I never saw it at all. Back in those days when a feature was shown on network TV they would preface it by saying “Edited For Television” across the bottom of the screen. Sometimes it would also say “Edited AND Supplemented for Television”, which didn’t always mean that scenes edited from the original movie were restored to pad out the running time. They would actually shoot new scenes and insert them into the story of the original film! I know this was done with EARTHQUAKE, but the most egregious example of this has to be TWO-MINUTE WARNING. I don’t know if the issue was that the story-line for the movie was too intense or disturbing (that’s what Heston credits with the film’s box office failure) or if they just wanted to stretch the movie’s running time. Anyway, they added this giant section – you can’t really call it a sub-plot as it revises the entire main storyline – whereby the sniper was just a devise to create a diversion for a museum robbery! And Heston himself appears in a couple for these scenes to help sell it. So weird.
Seen in its proper state I was surprised by how good TWO-MINUTE WARNING is. It’s still shallow and cheesy, but it’s very well done. The cops handling of the sniper is realistically rendered and they do a masterful job of inter-cutting all the various threads. And even if the histrionic going-ons of the cast of characters may be silly and cliché, they’re well played. And the football game is authentically shot and played as well. The only thing I really didn’t like was the over-done “disaster” scenes at the end involving stampeding football fans.
Two years later Chuck had his last proper go at this genre in the navel-disaster variation GRAY LADY DOWN, a competent, but square rescue adventure.
The action begins when the idiotic Norwegian crew of a freighter heading through the fog without the use of their radar, plow straight into a U.S. nuclear sub that’s topside. The boat crashes 1,400 feet to the ocean’s floor and subsequent rockslides cover the ship further while the navy scrambles to rescue the men trapped below. Heston stars as the outgoing skipper of the sub. Stacy Keach is in charge of the rescue effort for the navy and he calls in David Carradine as the eccentric inventor of a submersible vessel that may be the men’s only hope.
GRAY LADY DOWN is interesting in a methodical, Discovery Channel kind of way, but it’s not all that rewarding from a dramatic standpoint. It’s respectable, but perfunctory. We get one scene of Chuck’s worried wife on shore, and then nothing. The sense that Ronny Cox as another officer on the ship might seriously bitch out and come into greater conflict with Chuck is quickly abandoned.
Though there’s plenty of detail in the movie, there’s also lots of fakey stuff as well. Understandably, there’s quite a lot of unconvincing miniature work, but its not rendered especially well. And the scenes of the sailors clutching the set as they’re thrown back-and-forth ala the Enterprise’s bridge are wildly over-done and over-played. And only some of the cast conveys the proper navel bearing, though the leads are all good, as is a young Christopher Reeve in his film debut. But all told, nothing here merits this film’s inclusion among the ranks of the great submarine pictures.