(The Black Windmill)
Universal - 106 m - GB 1973 - |
ANALYSE
|
Universal - 106 m - GB 1973 - |
ANALYSE
 Der junge Sohn des Spions
John Tarrant wird entführt. Die Entführer sind Tarrants Kollegen
Burrows und McKee. Sie wollen sich Tarrants Hilfe für einen
Diamantenschmugglerring sichern und gehen dabei über Leichen. Tarrants
Frau, die sich von ihm abgewandt hat, sieht sich gezwungen, sich für
die Suche nach dem Sohn mit ihm zusammenzutun. |
| Michael Caine
Donald Pleasence Delphine Seyrig Clive Revill John Vernon Joss Ackland George A. Cooper Brenda Cowling David Daker Edward Hardwicke John Harvey Frank Henson Paul Humpoletz Preston Lockwood Derek Lord Russell Napier Derek Newark Joseph O'Conor Hermione Baddeley Maureen Pryor Denis Quilley Murray Brown John Rhys-Davies Catherine Schell Michael Segal Hilary Sesta Patrick Barr Janet Suzman Molly Urquhart Joyce Carey |
- Maj. John Tarrant
- Cedric Harper - Ceil Burrows - Alf Chestermann - McKee - Superintendent Wray - Pincus - Nette Sekretärin - Dicker M.I. 5 Mann - Mike McCarthy - Heppenstal - S.P. Fahrer - Tomkins - Ilkeston - Sollars - Adm. Ballentyne - Polizist auf Wache - Sir Edward Julyan - Hetty - Jane Harper - Bateson - Arzt - Spezialpolizist - Lady Julyan - Postman - Ilkeston's Secretary - Gen. St. John - Alex Tarrant - Margaret - Harpers Sekretärin |
Don Siegel
Leigh Vance Ousama Rawi Antony Gibbs Peter Murton David Brown Richard D. Zanuck Anthony Mendleson Kip Gowans John W. Mitchell
|
- Regie/Produzent
- Drehbuch - Kamera - Musik/Komponist - Schnitt - Art Director - Executive Producer - Executive Producer - Kostüme - Asst. Director - Sound/Sound Designer |
| "The film is fatally flawed by the inability to handle a
complicated plot (again dealing with the 'manipulation of reality'). The
direction of the film works against the script, forcing the narrative forward
in a seeming effort to overcome by rapid movement the complications of the
plot."
Alan Lovell: Don Siegel. American Cinema. London 1975 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Was dem Film schwer schadet, ist die Unfähigkeit, mit dem komplizierten Plot umzugehen (der wiederum mit der 'Manipulation der Realität' zu tun hat). Die Regie arbeitet gegen das Drehbuch, sie zwingt die Erzählung voran, offensichtlich versuchend, die Plot-Komplikationen durch Rasanz zu überwinden. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
 "The Black Windmill (...) specializes in double-crosses that may be quadruple. Michael Caine, the dubious and super-cool hero of the story, is working for what overlord? He is separated from his wife (Janet Suzman, the fine Royal Shakespeare Company actress who was the mother in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg). Separated by his job, perhaps. He stands for male stoicism and getting on with it. She stands for domesticity and hysterical maternalism, and that is fair enough, maybe, in a story about prototypes. Their child has been kidnapped. There are hints of gunrunning to Ireland by the villains. Conferences of amazing poshness are held in the house of Sir Edward Julyan (Joseph O'Conor), who apologizes to the members of General Purposes Intelligence for "dragging you out all this way." He adds, "It's the damned flu," as he looks round his palace of a house with sniffly and quiteunfair resentment, considering its comfort and luxe. One of the Intelligence people is Donald Pleasence as Cedric Harper, a disgusted-looking man suffering from a less lofty perpetual cold---or maybe from a germ he suspects life itself to be secreting---who folds up pieces of Kleenex as if they were expensive dinner napkins, and then shreds the evidence with an automatic reflex to destroy all relics of himself. There are moments when the film seems to be out-Bonding 007 in gadgetry. For instance, much use is made of an attache case with an enormous detonating power; it could well make one nervous about possible triggers in the handles of doctors' bags. There is even a mischievous reference to Sean Connery ("Sean Kelly, I mean"). The film is full of set pieces that are nearly up to 007 at his groomed best, except that Michael Caine---an actor with the face of an Indian brave, who could play a Buster Keatonish Senecan comedian if he wanted to---is no mere gamesman at showing off. He makes peril seem real. There is a terrific scene in France when he nearly drowns in a gush from exploded barrels of raw red wine. The unthinkable pursued by the undrinkable. The Mr. Harper of Donald Pleasence, absorbed by sneezing and by folding his paper tissues, begins to assume the crushing obsequiousness of a headwaiter who doesn't approve of your order. Like all the other members of General Purposes Intelligence, he actually works for the Department of Subversive Warfare. His familiars are the paraphernalia of hijacking, telephone-tapping, the bugging of committee rooms. "Let's talk in the garden," says Sir Edward Julyan socially to the Pleasence character, as if what he wanted to talk about were the qualities of his rhododendrons. The unloved and unlovable Cedric Harper's most personal dreams must be not of rhododendrons but of explosive briefcases, hidden tape recorders, and the dreaded burglary of a locked drawer in his office, which is above an auction room. He shrinks from Sir Edward's outdoor stroll and obviously thinks enviously of his own indoor plants, which he sprays in the presence of smokers, because, he says reprovingly, like a New York cabdriver, they have an allergy to tobacco. Of intimacy with anything but killing, running noses, plant spraying, and the intricacies of subterfuge, he knows nothing. He is a chilling creation, acted with potent brilliance. Soul and trust have been drained from him. The residue is controlled panic, a will to small-scale power, and paltry sources of impatience. His handmaiden is a vicarage-spirited, downtrodden middle-aged secretary (Joyce Carey), who looks as if she had been given a Getty fortune when he lets her have an extra hour for lunch. The sound effects of the film are very good---the burble of well-bred auctioneering going on below Pleasence's tetchy hellhole of an office, for instance---and so is the use of locations and of the general unhectic kindliness of English men and women doing dusty jobs. The high-up officials are goons. The parvenu Michael Caine character---hellbent on hunting killers who use a Polaroid, and a planted seducer (Delphine Seyrig), and a recorded scream of a kidnapped boy---is himself hunted by Scotland Yard, Paris police, and members of M.I.5 fed up with doing "M.I.6's dirty work." As it should in this sort of carefully made nullity of a film, even the benevolence of ordinary bystanders begins to look like a cover, and the most innocent people going about their jobs start to have the aura of gunrunners or of people in the employ of some unidentified and sinister Other. Penelope Gilliatt in THE NEW YORKER, 3.6.1974 |
How welcome a spy who stumbles,
worries or even pauses to reflect would be if he or she were appearing on
a double bill with The Black Windmill, in which Michael Caine's
exasperating cool robs this very well-made movie of some of its potential
excitement. The Don Siegel picture opened Thursday at Radio City Music Hall.
Mr. Caine, an agent whose small son has been kidnapped by an international
arms syndicate, is also suspected by his British colleagues of having arranged
the snatch---partly
 because
of his uncrackable composure. The actor makes an unlikely father (also husband).
Much of the time, he appears as a tin man, with tiny wheels whirring punctually
inside him. Although he manages to smoke one cigarette with a certain intensity
and to achieve a little hard (if shallow) breathing when his son's life is
at stake, he seems to lack a central nervous system, and that deficiency
deprives the audience of sympathetic thrills. Still, the flatness of the
Caine persona is balanced by Donald Pleasence in his best form, as the phobic
but stony head of the Department of Subversive Warfare---a type who even
shreds his own Kleenex. With his lower lip sucked in, fingers twisting bits
of his mustache, alternating a gutteral with a nasal voice, revulsion hardening
in his boiled gooseberry eyes, he projects the kind of character who could
burst with frustration if he ever allowed himself to unbutton at all. And
surely few actors can deliver such a line as "Kindly have the goodness not
to smoke in here" with such sensitive hostility. However, Delphine Seyrig,
as one of the kidnappers, makes not one uncalculated gesture; "performing"
with every tendon, she does the silken stunt that we've often seen from her
before. I feel some pangs about this picture: It's an admirably professional
job, and distinctly entertaining. But the plot scatters into a flurry of
devices for chases and escapes, and there are no lunges of astonishment,
despite all the athletics. (Remember the shock of suddenly seeing a red London
bus in The Ipcress File---when the Michael Caine character didn't know he
was in England. That's the kind of invention that's missing here.) Really,
The Black Windmill is an action movie, rather than a suspense thriller. And,
in the age of Watergate, we need nimbler or more fantastic material to engage
us---to grab our attention from wondering what may be on the news tonight.
Nora Sayre in : THE NEW YORK TIMES, 18.5.1974 |
| "The initial idea for the music
for this film was the creation of a musical identity, called the Drabble
sound, which plays a haunting repetitive motif heard every time the kidnappers
phoned. It was a bit like a musical version of Pavlovs Dogs theory but for
thrillers chilling on demand. It was this basic musical idea that convinced
the director to commission Roy to write the music for the film."
Paul Fishman im Begleittext zur CD. Der Soundtrack von Roy Budd ist seit 1999 bei Cinephile/Castle erhältlich. |
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