Gregster-5

It was 1982; Britain had Thatcher, America had Reagan. The Falkland war had just past and there was a strong vein of nationalism within the UK. With that backdrop, we have "Who Dares, Wins" (AKA Final Option). It's too easy to dismiss this movie as a piece of right wing propaganda, but I think that's too simplistic. It was a film scripted in Los Angeles with the usual oversimplification that only the British film industry could carry off, and so was somewhat detached from UK reality, with cardboard cutout terrorists and macho army guys.

Lewis Colins, a then well-known UK actor from the TV series the professionals, which had ended production by that time, was cast as the hero. He's more than up to the task, but what a waste of other cast members (Judy Davis, Widmark, etc.).

A contemporary TimeOut review described it as "something to offend everyone" - that sums it up.

Really quite a peculiar bio pic. In fairness, I didn't catch the first 15 minutes of this when it was shown on TV, but I can't imagine it being substantially different from the rest of the movie. Some observations:

• it's difficult to believe that a screenplay like this got through development. - The movie seems to have a somewhat sanitized view of shirly's relationship with her parents, the scenes where she interacts with them are strangely muted - Nothing (that I could see) is mentioned about race and shirly's relationship with Bill Bojangles (uncle billy) - surely this would have been interesting to learn about - we see how the studio boos sees shirly, and makes some offhand comments privately, but in terms of the screenplay, it leads nowhere - the young lady who plays Temple is fine, but doesn't resemble her in any way physically or in the way she speaks or mannerisms. - the movie seems to end mid-scene

I remember once seeing John Captenter on British television in 1979 on a program about cult sci-fi movies (he did "Dark Star" as a college project). When asked about "Close Encounters of the third kind" he told the interviewer that he thought the director (Spelberg) had lost control of the movie part way through, and I agree with him 100% on that. Interestingly, during the interview, he was sitting outside of the old house in "Haddonfield"(sp?) since he was midway filming "Halloween".

The problem for me is that with the exceptions of his first few movies ("Halloween", "Assault on Precinct 13", "Escape from New York" and "The Fog"), his movies give me the appearance of lost control, from someone who started out with close to perfect filmic vision and directorial control. What went wrong? I watched "Escape from LA" the first night it came out in Mid-town Manhattan, and there were boos from the audience, not at the villains, but at the movie. Parts of the movie are very good - the action scenes (I'm assuming not a second unit production) are really well directed, but rehashing the plot of Escape from LA" was a bad mistake. But it was good to see people lining up around the block waiting to get into see a Carpenter movie, even if briefly.