Regularly updated blog charting the most important films of the last 104 years.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
156. Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
Directed By Michael Curtiz
Synopsis
The life of George Michael (snigger) Cohan, patriotic songwriter...
Review
Few directors are as hit and miss as Michael Curtiz, on the one hand you have the near perfect Angels With Dirty Faces and Casablanca, on the other the quite shitty Adventures Of Robin Hood and Yankee Doodle Dandy.
Yes, I understand that the US had just joined the war, that this kinds of films were bound to be done, but that doesn't mean I have to like them. This particular film ends up being no more than boring flag-waving.
The musical numbers which are supposed to showcase the great talents of Cohan are particularly boring, the best thing in the film is Cagney's acting and during the numbers that is lost and there is really nothing to keep you interested.
Of course to compound the problem with this film we have a very modern decorum about the flag-waving which makes you kind of cringe through some of the more patriotic bits. If this was the only problem of the film, however, it would be fine, hey Triumph Of The Will was much more cringe-worthy and it was still a great film. Unfortunately the direction is uninspired, and the songs tough instantly recognisable are dull, so there. Final Grade
5/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
A popular myth about this movie, or at least a stretching of the truth, was that it was written in response to accusations that James Cagney was a communist. The story is as follows: Cagney learns that he is in danger of being blacklisted for having communist sympathies. Therefore, he decides to make the most jingoistic movie he possibly can, and thus clears his name. This myth, as stated, has its chronology a bit askew, as the McCarthy Era did not begin until the early 1950s. Also the Second Red Scare did not begin until the late 1940s, well after the film was made. In other versions of this legend either Robert Buckner or Edmund Joseph were the accused.
The DVD specials discuss this story in some detail. There was a Congressman named Martin Dies who was investigating possible communist influence in Hollywood in 1940, and he in fact had a cordial meeting with Cagney. The actor reassured him that, although he was a liberal and supported Roosevelt's New Deal, he was also a patriot who had nothing to do with communism. That was the end of it, except that James' producer-brother William did see the Cohan story as a good opportunity to dispel any possible concerns about Cagney's loyalty. It was not written in response to the Dies investigation, as Cohan himself had been shopping his own story around for awhile before Jack L. Warner bought the rights, and Cohan retained final approval on all aspects of the film.
As the DVD also points out, production on the film was just a few days old when the Attack on Pearl Harbor occurred. The film's cast and crew resolved to make an uplifting, patriotic film. It was timed to open around Memorial Day in 1942, and was regarded as having achieved its goal in grand fashion.
* Eddie Foy, Jr. played his own father Eddie Foy.
* President Roosevelt was played by "Capt. Joe Young" and not by FDR himself.
* During Cohan's return to Broadway at the end of the film, he is shown portraying President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tap dancing across the stage and on a table--ironic because President Roosevelt was wheelchair bound after a paralytic illness in 1921.
* Cagney reprised the role of George M. Cohan in the movie The Seven Little Foys, but agreed only on the condition that he would receive no money. Instead, he performed in the movie as a tribute to Eddie Foy.
* The Medal given to Cohan at the end of the movie is not the Congressional Medal of Honor as is said by Cagney in the movie (that decoration is solely awarded for valorous acts in battle), but is really the Congressional Gold Medal (the civilian equivalent). Confusion has existed for years as to the differences between the medals, as both are awarded by Congress and are the highest honors the United States can bestow.
George is a pillock. His mother loves Morgan and he is just a prick about it. Eventually it all goes tits up and George gets his comeuppance.
Review
This could have been a truly great film if it were not for the clearly rushed and tacked on ending. For the first about 70 minutes the film works perfectly, Welles is a master director and the originality of the camera placements together with the sparse use of lighting and the great use of shadows give the film an unique look. But then this will always be an incomplete work because of its ending.
The film was supposedly 40 minutes longer than it ended up being, and that must have been for good reason, it just feels rushed with the ending that the studio tacked on to it. Not only rushed but incongruous with the rest of the story, it ends in an up note that was clearly never supposed to be in the film.
The film is a story of inexorable destruction of an old way of life, the fact that the last couple of minutes give a little hint of hope and happiness are completely wrong. It was supposed to end in a dreary way with everything fucked, it's like ending a funeral march with a little polka.
The film had such potential... and it is really worth watching for everything except for the last 10 minutes of it. So do watch it, strongly recommended.
Final Grade
8/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The original rough cut of the film was approximately 135 minutes in length. Welles felt that the film needed to be shortened and after receiving a mixed response from a preview audience, Robert Wise, the film's editor, removed several minutes from it. The film was previewed again, but the audience's response did not improve. This resulted in RKO deleting over 40 additional minutes and re-shooting the ending sequence, replacing Welles' original ending with a happier one, one that more closely resembled Tarkington's. Welles did not approve of the cuts, but because he was simultaneously working in Brazil on another project for RKO, his attempts to protect his version ultimately failed. Details of Welles' conflict over the editing are included in the 1993 documentary It's All True.
Serbian girl is haunted by tales of cat people from her native village and fear she might be one of them. She is! Poor Psychiatrist.
Review
Sometimes it it from the mouth of B-Movies that we get the truth. In this case truth is beauty and beauty truth. The film is beautifully shot, it regains some of the visual wonder present in cinema before the advent of sound. When sound came around the fascination with the image seemed to have lost itself simply to big epic shots loosing the love of subtlety that was so present when all you had was the image to concentrate on.
Then Jacques Tourneur comes in and the subtlety is back, you cast your mind back to German Expressionism to find comparisons to Murnau and Lang. And this guy is making quite a crappy B Movie about sexy ladies that transform into cats. But it doesn't really matter. The lighting is masterful, from bottom lighting of table lamps to the walls light up by pool lights with just the water reflecting off them while menacing shadows are cast on them.
The main character Irene is even kind of portrayed like a Maria form Metropolis when sitting on the Psychiatrist chair with a single halo of white light in her face. The dream sequence incoorporates animation into the film the whole thing is full of innovation. The story and the acting are completely secondary to the brilliance of the director and that is something I have frankly been missing. The villain/heroine of the film is also one of the most sympathetic monsters since the one from Frankenstein. Watch it.
Final Grade
9/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The film is notable for frightening audiences through the suggestion of unseen horrors with cast shadows and ambiguous sound effects, specifically in the celebrated swimming pool sequence. The panther remains unseen until the final scenes of the film, although Simone Simon displays increasingly catlike behavior and the viewer is bombarded by images of cats in paintings and statues. The final, extremely brief view of a black panther attacking Judd was included over the objections of the director, who wanted to keep the entire concept as mysterious as possible.
Although Cat People is usually categorized as a horror movie, many film critics also consider it a film noir, as Irena assumes many of the traits of both femme fatale and the typical noir hero alienated from conventional society, psychologically wounded and morally ambiguous.
A troupe of Polish actors has to perform as Nazis in order to help the underground and save their own skins. They do.
Review
Humour with Nazism is always good and this is, I would say a good early one. Now I should mention that it is not he earliest one or even the best early film making fun of Nazis. The Great Dictator first came out in 1940 to great commercial success, for some reason that totally escapes me it is not on the list while this film is.
This isn't by any means a bad film, it is quite funny and quite well acted and the script is pretty smart, but it simply seems to be replacing the Great Dictator while it doesn't deserve it. Why the hell are there some 3 or 4 Chaplin films on the list and not his best one?
Well but this is supposed to be a review and not a rant on my grievances with the list. So it is a good film, you will laugh out loud a couple of times, It is also a quite symbolic films having one of the actors do the famous Shylock speech (If you prick us so forth) in front of a Nazi soldier, but it isn't particularly gutsy as by this time the Americans were already in the war.
Final Grade
7/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The movie was adapted by Ernst Lubitsch (uncredited) and Edwin Justus Mayer from the story by Melchior Lengyel. It was directed by Lubitsch.
It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture. The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
The movie was released 2 months after actress Carole Lombard was killed in an airplane crash.
Everyone wants to get to Lisbon because it's a fucking great city.
Review
Casablanca is one of those films that I was always meant to watch, that I knew the plot of and the names of all the characters, I knew about half the dialogue in it and recognised all the scenes, but that I had never actually sat down and watched. The same will surely happen with Sound Of Music.
So I have finally filled this huge gap in my cinema knowledge, yay me. And I loved it, it is a great film, it isn't as technically accomplished as Citizen Kane for example, but it is a great story with a great setting. This setting is both the city of Casablanca itself but also the historical turmoil where it is set.
This is a film full of uncertainties, who will win the war? Will Ilse and Rick ever meet again? What happens after they get to Lisbon? But this is also a reflection on e what was actually going on in 1942. The war wasn't going particularly well and there were 3 more years of it to come. The film is also an amazingly affecting piece of propaganda and the scene where Victor Laszlo sings the Marseillaise actually brings a tear to your eyes.
The acting is superb, but even more that Bogey and Berman's performance, the ones which stand out for me are those by Peter Lorre and Claude Rains who steal the show each time they show up on screen. An essential piece of film history, watch it.
Final Grade
10/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
One of the lines most closely associated with the film—"Play it again, Sam"—is a misquotation. When Ilsa first enters the Café Americain, she spots Sam and asks him to "Play it once, Sam, for old times' sake." When he feigns ignorance, she responds, "Play it, Sam. Play 'As Time Goes By.' " Later that night, alone with Sam, Rick says, "You played it for her and you can play it for me." and "If she can stand it, I can! Play it!"
The line "Here's looking at you, kid.", spoken by Rick to Ilsa, is not in the draft screenplays, and has been attributed to the poker lessons Bogart was giving Bergman between takes. It was voted in a 2005 poll by the American Film Institute as the fifth most memorable line in cinema history.[Six lines from Casablanca appeared in the top 100, by far the most of any film (Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz were next, with three apiece). The others were: "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."(20th), "Play it, Sam. Play 'As Time Goes By.'" (28th), "Round up the usual suspects." (32nd), "We'll always have Paris." (43rd), and "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." (67th).
Ugly Duckling turns into Swan. Falls in love with married man and helps turn his daughter into a little swan as well.
Review
I don't know what wrong with me, if I didn't like boobs so much I'd probably be gay. I love this kind of melodramatic soap opera stories. And that is what this film is, a soap melodrama with Rachmaninov soundtrack and everything. When the strings of the second piano concerto start, probably the tackiest piece of classical music ever, you know you are in for a treat.
There are many good features about this film, Betty Davies is fabulous and there is a very good amount of character development here, from Bettie's transformation both physical and psychological to the kind of text book psychology used in the film to explain reasons and motivations for actions it is a tour de force.
So it is well written, very well acted, with a great avuncular Claude Rains as a psychiatrist and the hateful character of Bettie's mother also played to perfection, you really want her dead. So if you love melodrama and good ones get this. Final Grade
9/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The title comes from the Walt Whitman poem "The Untold Want", which reads in its entirety: The untold want by life and land ne'er granted, / Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.
Although not an original idea, the movie's most famous "bit" is having Paul Henreid put two cigarettes in his mouth, light both of them and hand one to Bette Davis.
Woman thinks she doesn't love her husband anymore, but she kind of does. Leaves him in order to help him make money after she divorces him, gets involved with rich guy, realizes she still loves her husband, gets back together with him. THE END.
Review
Prston Sturges' films are coming along like locusts. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I don't really see his immense genius which reviewers are so nice to point out every single time they talk about him. Yes, he does make some quite entertaining films and such, but there have been better comedies and deeper comedies by less revered directors.
So this is another fun film in the tradition of the screwball comedies of the late 30's early 40's, there is a divorce, in this case looming instead of happening, and a reunion of the lovers at the end. Still there are the Sturges marks in this film, the fine line he treads with the Production Code is one of them and probably the most fun thing about his films.
So in the end this is perfectly enjoyable but nothing to write home about, there are some very fun scenes, some not quite so funny and a preposterous twist at the end which I can only imagine was for intentional comedy. So watch it it is a good Sunday afternoon film.
Final Grade
7/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
This was Sturges' second collaboration with McCrea, following Sullivan's Travels from the previous year, and they would work together again on The Great Moment in 1946. Typical of a Sturges movie, the pacing and dialogue are very fast. Also notable are the zany side characters, mostly played by members of Sturges' informal repertory company, particularly the elderly sausage magnate known as The Wienie King (Robert Dudley) and "The Ale and Quail Club," a group of drunken wealthy sportsmen (including character actors Jack Norton, Jimmy Conlin, and William Demarest, amongst others). Victor Young contributes a lively musical score (including a fastpaced variation of The William Tell Overture for the strange opening scenes).
John Ford is known primarily for his westerns, but there have been two Ford films on the list which are quite competent non-westerns. Of course Grapes was by far more competent than this film. Still, How Green Was My Valley is a good film, albeit not great. There are loads of things wrong with it. Firstly I have been to Wales. It doesn't look like that. There is nowhere near enough mud.
The big problem here is the "imagination" of what Wales must be like, there's a close harmony male choir for every occasion. There's an "I've just cut my toenails" song and a "I feel a bit under the weather" song. It comes across as silly. It also comes across as a melodrama and we are a bit past that by now.
Ford does continue to make his socialist points here with the defence of unionisation, for a guy who was so right wing Ford does come across a bit reddish. I think the problem is that Communism was so demonised that if you were a decent and humane person you would still have socialist ideas even if you would never call them socialist. Final Grade
7/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
Director John Ford wanted to shoot the movie in its natural setting, Wales, but events in Europe, World War II made his goal impossible.
Instead, Ford built a replica of the mining town at the close-to 3,000 acre Fox Ranch in Malibu Canyon, where My Friend Flicka and M*A*S*H were also shot.
The beginning of the film, sorry for the Spanish subtitles:
Film director decides to bum it when he is researching his future project named O Brother Where Art Thou. In the process he meets Veronica Lake, a down on her luck actress and together they bum it. Eventually Sullivan goes to jail for a cirme he did commit, but when they find out he is rich he goes free! Yay!
Review
This is a film that has its ideological good and bad points. On the good side it is one of the few positive portrayals of the black community of the time, as compassionate people, it also explores the suffering of the "tramps" on freight trains. On the not so positive side it seems to be an attempt to justify low-brow comedy as the way to better help those down on their luck instead of making politically charged films. This just seems quite stupid.
As a film irrespective of meaning, it is quite a good one, not only it is quite funny but it also manages to defy the Production Code. There are a lot of double entendres and the director seems to get away with a lot of stuff that he really shouldn't have been able to. This is a good thing. There is also a couple of occasions when the fourth wall is soundly broken here, this is not a very common thing in early 40's films and therefore it is interesting to see it here.
In the end Sullivan's Travels is an interesting but ideologically dubious picture which seems like a pretty well made cop out on the gagging of directors when it comes to political statements.
Final Grade
7/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
"Oh Brother, Where Art Thou"'
The title of Sullivan's unrealized dream project has resurfaced in several other works.
A 1991 episode of The Simpsons is entitled "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", and features Homer's half-brother Herb, who goes from being CEO of a major car manufacturer to a hobo.
In the 1993 film Amos & Andrew, Samuel L. Jackson's character has won the Pulitzer Prize for writing a play called O Brother, Where Art Thou?
The Coen brothers' 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? borrows the title and there are many plot similarities to Sullivan's Travels.
References to the film
A 1995 episode of Due South, titled Witness, shows this film being shown in a prison, where Fraser has had himself incarcerated in order to protect both his partner Ray and the husband of a witness in a murder trial, both incarcerated at the prison.
In Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon, Steve Martin's character, a horror movie producer who experiences a revelation and decides to make high quality movies following a mugging, recommends that his friend check out Sullivan's Travels.
A gangster is released from jail and goes on another caper. In the process he meets Velma a young girl with a club foot who he falls in love with and Marie another tough girl that falls in love with him. Caper goes terribly wrong, Velma shuns him and he rushes inexorably towards violent death.
Review
With the Production Code in place directors couldn't show baddies getting away or glorify gangsterism, this film comes close to the second thing, however. The character played by Bogart is actually lovely, tough but fair and really nice to women.
It is also one of the first examples of the film noir and it is a good film. Even tough it goes a little slow in the middle the end definitely pays off. It is one of those endings you see coming a mile away because there are premonitions galore through it, the dog, Pard, is a gun in the mantelpiece, and you know from the moment the stereotypical black guy tells the story of the dog, that things aren't going to end well.
The film also includes the most amazing chase scene to date, followed by a great stand-off in the mountains. So get it.
Final Grade
8/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The film was remade twice:
* Once, as the 1949 western Colorado Territory also directed by Raoul Walsh.
* The story was remade again in 1955 as I Died a Thousand Times starring Jack Palance and Shelley Winters.
Dumbo is born, gets separated from his mother, learns to fly, becomes rich and gets mommy back.
Review
Dumbo is a very short film, almost exactly one hour long and it has a tale that is much more obscure than previous Disney films, it wasn't a well known story and probably because of that animators gave free rein to their imagination.
That is the best thing about this film, how imaginative it really is. Animators know no limits, up to the point of making the Pink Elephants On Parade section, one of the trippiest pieces of animation before the advent of LSD.
Another interesting thing in the film are its racial politics, Dumbo is ostracised by the other elephants by being born with larger ears (maybe he is an African elephant), he is seen as not a member of the "proud race" of Waspish elephant ladies. Eventually Dumbo is helped by a mouse representing the thing that elephants fear most and by the black crows, who are typical stereotypes of black people but who accept Dumbo and teach him how to fly by himself.
So all in all a very interesting film, not only because of the inventiveness of the animation but because of its quite subtle mentions of racism and prejudice.
Final Grade
9/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
* At only 64 minutes, Dumbo is the shortest single segmented Disney animated feature.
* Credited as Timothy, the mouse is never mentioned by name in the actual film. However, his signature can be read on the contract in a newspaper photograph at the finale.
* There are no actual villains.
* Many of the artists who worked on the "Pink Elephants" segment were the younger artists at the studio who joined the picket line in May 1941 and eventually would become the nucleus of United Productions of America, the most influential animation studio of the 1950s.
* The "Pink Elephants On Parade" sequence depicts Dumbo and Timothy's drunken hallucinations. The sequence was the first venture into surrealism for a narrative Disney film, taking its cue from the experimental Fantasia. The sequence essentially breaks all of the "rules" that the Disney animators had lived by for creating realistic animation over the previous decade: pink, polka-dot, and plaid elephants dance, sing, and morph into a number of various objects. The design of the sequence is highly stylized. This sequence also heavily influenced the "Heffalumps and Woozles" sequence in The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, which bears many similar traits.
* The "Pink Elephants on Parade" sequence appeared in the Californian version of Disneyland's night-time show Fantasmic!.
* While trying to comfort Dumbo, Timothy says, "Lots of people with big ears are famous!" That's a joke of Walt Disney himself, who did in fact have big ears. Also, according to animation historian John Canemaker on the commentary track for the 2001 DVD release, audiences of 1941 recognized it as a humorous reference to actor Clark Gable.
* The name of the circus (seen on a sign as the train leaves the winter headquarters) is WDP Circus (Walt Disney Productions).
* When the movie was released, there was a concern that exposure to bright colors for prolonged periods of time might make the audience ill. The film was set in the world of a circus, and bright colors were essential to capturing the mood of the circus. To remedy this, Disney alternated sequences of bright colors with those of a darker tone, to give the audience a chance to recover.[citation needed]
* The sequence called Bathtime for Dumbo was one of the most memorable in the film. To create this scene and Dumbo's behavior, Bill Tytla got inspiration from his own 2-year-old daughter, Susan. He didn't base it on elephants as he claimed, "I don't know a damn thing about elephants".[citation needed]
* Dumbo has no spoken dialogue, much like Dopey in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Foulfellow's sidekick Gideon in Pinocchio.
* Dumbo's mother, Mrs. Jumbo, speaks only once when she says Dumbo's original name, "Jumbo, Jr."
* The human characters in the film are simplified most of the time to lend greater credibility to the animal characters. Circus workmen are kept in shadow, and the clowns are seen in silhouette when not in the circus ring. The sparse story and concise characters inspired a style in Dumbo that is predominantly visual.
* A large portion of Steven Spielberg's film 1941 involves some of the main characters (including General Stilwell) watching Dumbo in a theater. According to Spielberg, this event actually occurred in real life.
* With roughly a year and a half from script to screen, including the extensive strike during the making of the movie, this is the fastest production ever done from Walt Disney Feature Animation (WDFA).[citation needed]
* Dumbo makes an appearance in the popular Playstation 2 game Kingdom Hearts, in the form of a summon that the player can call upon in battle for aid.
* In season 4/5 of Family Guy in the episode "The Courtship of Stewie's Father" Peter and Stewie Griffin go to Disney World and Peter loses Stewie in the gift store. So Peter asks the crows from Dumbo where Stewie's gone. The crows reply "I've seen about everything, but I sure ain't seen your boy". Then Peter replies "Ahh, that's good old fashioned family racism".
* Dumbo II might have been put on hold.
* The scene where Dumbo blows square bubbles of alcohol-tinted water might have inspired the Carl Barks story Lost in the Andes where Huey, Dewey, and Louie blow square bubbles of chewing gum.
Man from small town Tennessee discovers Jebus and goes to war to shoot a number of Fritzes. Comes back a hero and decides to go back to Redneck's Ville.
Review
Oh well another unamazing film on the list. Gary Cooper is great as always except for the fact that he is actually playing Mr. Deeds again. Maybe he is being typecast as the innocent American hero, but the part is too close to Deeds for comfort. But then Deeds is a much better film.
World War I is a fertile ground for good cinema stories, and this is a good story, but it is also too sappy and religious to be able to take seriously. I am sure it is a lot of people's cup of tea, but its sheer populism and simplistic theologies don't agree with my stomach. We never realise and neither does York what exactly he is fighting for (does anyone know what WWI was all about anyway?), it is never mentioned that it was a pointlessly stupid war and waste of life and as a propaganda film for the joining of the US to the Second WW it fails, because there is not much of a similarity between the two wars. There were actual points to fighting WWII, which are touched on in passing here, when York's superior talks about freedoms.
In the end if you want to watch a film about WWI you would do better with La Grande Illusion or All Quiet On The Western Front instead of with this piece of well acted and well directed well-meaning rubbish. Final Grade
6/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The actual firearm used by York to dispose of a line of seven Germans was not a Luger as depicted in the film, but rather a 1911 .45 ACP automatic. The Luger was preferred for the filmmaking, however, purely on the basis that they couldn't get the .45 to fire blanks.
Alvin C. York allowed the making of a movie based on his life only under the condition that Gary Cooper should play him.
Ronald Reagan was considered for the role of Alvin York, but York insisted that Cooper should play him.
The movie utilizes a Springfield 1903 rifle whereas York actually used an M1917 Enfield rifle to capture the Germans.
The American Film Institute ranked Alvin York #35 in their list of the top 50 heroes in American cinema.
The American Film Institute ranked Sergeant York #57 in their list of the top 100 inspirational movies in American cinema.
Wow, doing a synopsis of this film is quite a hard task. Uhh... Bogart is hired tries to find a bird, bird is fake everyone but him goes in the slammer.
Review
I quite liked this, but I was watching it with two girls, my wife and our friend Sarah and they both quite disliked it. I don't know, maybe it is more of a boy thing - it's a bit of a Dick Tracy, detective adventure thing with relics and such.
This is one of those rare cases of films where you kind of wish it was longer, because the plot feels a bit crammed. There are so many twists and things happening here that although you are actually quite able to follow them you do feel that a little breather here and there would have made it a much more enjoyable thing.
This fast-pace is at the same time its great quality and its downfall. The acting is generally good; Humphrey Bogart is probably the worse actor in it, sometimes hamming it terribly. Peter Lorre is great however, because he hams it in such a cartoony way that it is no surprise that Mr. Cairo has become quite famous.
This isn't a great film, but it is an enjoyable one, at least for me. Oh, and from today there are going to be no more Amazon links because no one clicks them anyway and they are a shit-load of work for me.
So there.
Final Grade
7/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The opening crawl begins: "In 1539, the Knight Templars [sic] of Malta, paid tribute to Charles V of Spain, by sending him a Golden Falcon..." This confuses two different religious orders of knights, both founded in Jerusalem.
The Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, known as the Order of St. John, have existed since 1048; they were in fact based in Malta from 1530 to 1798 and hence were also called the Knights of Malta. On the other hand, the Knights of the Temple of Solomon, also called the Knights Templar or just Templars, were founded in 1119 and became the sworn enemies of the first order. The Templars were actually disbanded by 1312, after King Philip IV of France had declared them heretics so that he could confiscate their wealth.
