Friday, March 28, 2008

Miraculous (Part 2)

Our second film for AndressFest ’08 was to be 1973’s ‘Stateline Motel’, but the copy I have wouldn’t play in my DVD player. It serves me right for buying 99c movies off eBay, I guess. As it turned out this was probably for the best, because when I watched part of it later on my computer, it turned out to be… well, less than suitable for a mixed audience. The soundtrack didn’t actually have any wocka chicka wocka music, but it may as well have. The Italians who made it obviously liked to spice up their dramas with a little nudita gratuito.


But since ‘Stateline Motel’ wouldn’t play, we turned instead to 1970’s ‘Red Sun’. If the words “spaghetti western”, “Charles Bronson”, “some samurai dude” and “Ursula playing a prostitute” don’t make you slaver like Pavlov’s dog trapped in a carillion, then frankly I wonder why you’re even bothering to read about AndressFest.




An American, a Frenchman, a Japanese and a Hot Blonde Swiss Bikini Babe. It's just like the UN... only better!


It's the late 1880s, and a band of outlaws led by Gauche (Alain Delon) and Link (Charles Bronson) stages an audacious train robbery. Along with the payroll and the valuables of the passengers, they also steal an antique samurai sword from the Japanese ambassador to the United States, who intended it to be a gift to the American President.


Before they can all get away, however, Gauche double-crosses Link and tosses a stick of dynamite into the train carriage he's looting. Link survives, and finds himself in the none-too-gentle hands of Kuroda Jubie (Toshiro Mifune), the Ambassador's only surviving samurai guard. Kuroda wants the sword, Link wants the gold, and both of them want revenge. So off they head in search of Gauche and his men.


There follows several scenes of amusing pratfalls and japery as Link tries to get away from Kuroda, whom he considers a liability rather than an asset. Frankly, it starts to look like one of those movies with narration on the trailer that goes something like: “When a taciturn Japanese warrior teams up with a cowboy with a face like a mummified apple core, you just know they’re on a collision course with wackiness!”


Saints preserve us all.


Fortunately, the film is saved from falling into ‘Shanghai Noon’ territory by the appearance of our Ursula as Cristina, who is, quel surprise, a feisty prostitute. She’s also the sometime girlfriend of Gauche, and Link figures that if he kidnaps her, he can trade her to Gauche for the gold.


One wonders what sort of unsuccessful career Gauche is having if the love of his life has to stay on the game to support herself. But this is the Wild West, and if one takes Westerns at face value a woman’s only career options at that time were prostitute and grim-faced widow. Given that choice, it’s small wonder that Ursula’s character preferred the path of the cat house floozy. Also if she’d been a widow woman, there would have been fewer excuses to see her boobies, and where would we be then?


Unfortunately it’s soon after this that the plot gets exhausted by all the stretching and flexing it’s having to do to find excuses to show Ursula’s boobies, and it slinks off into the sunset, never to be seen again. A bunch of bloodthirsty Commanches are thrown into the mix, along with Gauche’s apparently never-ending supply of henchmen, so there’s always someone attacking someone else on screen, but it’s impossible to care.




The Greater Breasted Ursula lurks in the long grass, choosing exactly the right moment to pounce on an unsuspecting mate.


The film ends as films always ended in the 70s – everyone who wasn’t dead probably wished they were. Link lost his gold, Cristina lost her man, Kuroda lost his life and the Commanches lost whatever shreds of dignity their tribal name still held. The only positive seemed to be for the President, as the ambassador eventually got his sword back, which presumably meant that it was given to the President as originally intended.


So I guess the moral of the movie is: if you want good things to happen to you, become the President. There’s a lesson in that for all of us. At least for all of us who aren’t being distracted by Ursula’s boobies.

2 Comments:

Blogger FletcherDodge said...

That's my favorite kind of nudita!

10:02 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The true stars of Red Sun, being Ursula's boobs, were wondering what size cup they fit into??

12:20 AM  

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