A few reviews

[TM2YC]

Rollerball (1975)
Seeing this soon after re-watching 'A Clockwork Orange' (filmed 4-years earlier) brought the influences into relief, the classical music montages, the 70s-future blood-orange set designs and a few slow moving symmetrical tracking shots, not to mention it's set in a dystopian 2018. However 'Rollerball' is a much more mainstream Roman-Gladiator-meets-Sports-Movie. Once considered violent, it looks pretty tame now, even by the standards of some other 70s films. The corporate-run world is sketchily described and the parts that are explored look nonsensical, or naive. James Caan's lead performance is fairly drab and John Houseman lacks the requisite menace (not helped by the script never giving him anything menacing to do). Despite the problems, there was more than enough stunt-laden action and weird quasi-futuristic shenanigans to keep me entertained for 2-hours.



Spione (1928)
Fritz Lang does a super-stylish Silent interwar spy caper, once again starring Rudolf Klein-Rogge as a Machiavellian figure. The plot was excessively convoluted in my opinion, with enough British, Russian and Japanese agents and double-agents to fill three movies. I enjoyed all the invisible-ink type spy stuff and a scene involving a Japanese agent being seduced by beautiful Dutch actress Lien Deyers in nought but a Kimono untied at the front is pretty steamy!



I noticed Lang cheekily put two posters from his recent flop 'Metropolis' into one scene:





Somebody could totally rework this into a James Bond silent-era adventure. Change all the intertitles. Add John Barry. Rename the hero agent 326 (pictured in a tuxedo above), to 007. Rename his boss from Jason, to 'M'. Change the evil mastermind Haghi, to Blofeld. Change the Japanese agent to Tiger Tanaka etc etc. It wouldn't take much changing really.