The Swiss Conspiracy (1975, Jack Arnold)

The Swiss Conspiracy opens with a lengthy title card and voice-over explaining—broadly—the Swiss banking system. Then, the movie’s opening titles, an absurdist, almost silly montage of Swiss postcards, set to composer Klaus Doldinger’s least funky music in the film. Doldinger’s score is always fun and cool (and often quite good), even when it doesn’t precisely match the onscreen action. Swiss is a budget-conscious, European location thriller. There are picturesque car chases, there’s even choreographed fisticuffs (with able stuntmen), but there aren’t pyrotechnics.

After the titles, we get a scene with a guy in a restaurant getting murdered. The film doesn’t spend any time contextualizing it, and when it turns out to be important later (well, qualified important), they still don’t know how to tie it in. The victim is a blackmail victim. There are five more. They’re all customers at Ray Milland’s Swiss bank. Milland and his uneasy vice president Anton Diffring bring in David Janssen to investigate.

Janssen’s a disgraced Justice Department official who had a run-in with the Chicago mob and somehow ended up living it up in Switzerland, consulting when it suits him, otherwise content to zoom around in his Ferrari with his shirt unbuttoned past his navel. Upon arriving at the bank, Janssen gets into a parking space squabble with Senta Berger. She’ll turn out to be not just one of the blackmail victims but also Janssen’s love interest. Berger’s thirty-four. Janssen’s forty-four. He looks early sixties (except, oddly, in their canoodling scenes). So it’s not inappropriate or even weird—other than Berger being interested in brusk, condescending Janssen—but the optics are constantly askew.

Janssen also immediately meets Chicago mobster John Saxon, who’s in town to report his own blackmailing to Diffring. And someone followed Saxon from the airport. Saxon and Janssen know each other—Janssen’s got a great line explaining it’s not a “social” relationship—and there’s immediate conflict. We meet almost the entire supporting cast before Milland gets around to explaining the blackmail scheme to Janssen. It’s an incredibly stagey approach, contrasting how director Arnold shoots it and the film in general. Swiss makes a big deal out of its locations, whether where the mountaintops are alive with the sound of music or the scenic architecture. So when it suddenly slows down to be a corporate office drama… it’s weird.

Because Swiss is a weird movie. Janssen investigates, romances Berger, squabbles with Saxon, meets other blackmail victims John Ireland and Curt Lowens, trades barbs with local cop Inigo Gallo (never seeing the police department is a big tell on the budget’s limits), and runs from hitmen Arthur Brauss and David Hess. Oh, and then occasionally just shoots the shit with Milland. The movie got Ray Milland; they’re going to use Ray Milland.

Then the only running subplot without Janssen is about Diffring and his too-hot-for-him-so-something-must-be-up girlfriend Elke Sommer.

Excellent location shooting, game cast—while Berger easily gives the best performance, no one’s actually bad except Ireland. Saxon’s iffy a lot of the time, but then he’ll have this or that good moment. Ireland doesn’t have any good moments.

Janssen plays his part like he’s in the ensemble, even if Arnold (though more the script) tries to focus in on him. Janssen’s sturdy more than capable, but he’s enthusiastic. Enthusiasm helps.

Right up until the third act, when the film starts deflating all the tires, one lackluster reveal after another. It’s a bummer of a finish, but then there’s a quick, welcome partial save.

For a less than ninety-minute thriller on a budget (in more ways than one), Swiss Conspiracy’s far from bad.

And that Doldinger score is dynamite.

Beau Geste (1939, William A. Wellman)

Beau Geste is a colonial adventure, European soldiers under siege in the Arabian desert. There’s some imagination to the telling, but not at all enough. The strangest thing about the film is the title–Gary Cooper plays Beau Geste, who in some ways is the least of the film’s characters. I think Cooper must get the littlest screen time of the main actors and the film often feels absent of his presence.

The problem stems from the structure. Geste opens with the discovery of a mystery–a desert fort, all the soldiers dead, but a peculiar confession in one of the men’s hands and two shots fired by a ghost. It’s all very Arthur Conan Doyle, except the viewer has to wait almost two hours to discover the solution (well, not really… just the entire solution… from the first flashback, the general answer is clear). After the first scene, the action goes back fifteen years to that revealing flashback. Then there’s a second mystery–this one of great importance–hinted at. It’s not a real mystery because the viewer is deceived into thinking he or she has seen all the relevant action. But it’s of great importance in the end and to a character’s entire motivation. Without it, the film makes little sense–and at the end, there’s a big finger snapping, “of course” moment. It’s a lousy moment, of course, and ruins the film’s already bad denouement.

When the film does get back to the present day and starts toward unraveling the mystery of the first scene, it starts kind of well. The scenes with Cooper, Robert Preston and Ray Milland as wealthy brothers in English luxury are fine. Cooper and Preston have a decent moment together and Milland’s appealing enough romancing Susan Hayward. Both Hayward and G.P. Huntley are useless in any narrative sense, but whatever, the film’s at least trying to be interesting in these scenes.

It lasts only a few minutes, unfortunately. Then there’s another big mystery (tying in to the first scene’s mystery) and it’s off to the Foreign Legion. I always thought Beau Geste was a big adventure story, but the film’s mostly just the three brothers (until Preston goes off to a different fort) and their vicious sergeant, poorly played by Brian Donlevy. It isn’t really Donlevy’s fault–his character has absolutely no depth. He’s a standard movie bad guy, absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever (not even after Cooper observes one about him). The film plays him as pure nefariousness and most of the film’s running time suffers from it. Beau Geste is a mutiny thriller.

William A. Wellman does a mediocre job directing the film, which really hurts it. He has some grandiose scale at the beginning, but losses it immediately in the flashback and never gets it back. The film’s beautifully photographed by Theodor Sparkuhl and Archie Stout, but Thomas Scott’s editing is the pits. Every time Wellman’s action scenes start to look good, there’s a distracting jump-cut. Cooper shoots at the left of the screen and his target gets hit from a bullet moving left to right. The sets are nice too.

Preston has some good moments (Milland gets stuck with a lot of weak moments) and Cooper’s fine when he’s around; the film doesn’t really have any standout performances. J. Carrol Naish is bad as Donlevy’s stooge–probably giving the film’s worst performance–and the less said about the cowboy legionnaires the better. Harold Huber does have a nice small role, however.

Another big problem with Beau Geste is how familiar it all seems… like the source novel was nothing but a creative plagiarism of The Four Feathers. But not having read the novel, it’s impossible to say what went wrong–the adaptation or the story itself. Beau Geste is a monotonous chore to get through, especially as the ending rolls downhill for the last seven or ten minutes.

It Happens Every Spring (1949, Lloyd Bacon)

I know nothing about baseball, but I’m pretty sure it’s against the rules to doctor the ball to guarantee no one can hit it….

The discussion of that dishonesty never comes up in It Happens Every Spring. Otherwise, it’s a nice little late 1940s Fox feature with the cast to match–Paul Douglas, Jean Peters, and Ray Collins. Douglas and Peters are particularly good, with Peters in the thankless girlfriend role that I don’t think she played often or at least, I’ve never seen her in it before. She and Douglas only have a scene together, but it makes you wish they’d done a movie together. Douglas is, of course, great.

It’s Ray Milland, as the forty-seven-year old “kid,” who comes off worst. He’s not particularly charming and the film’s incredibly dull when he’s moving the story along. It’s not even his obvious maturity that makes him so boring, it’s his distance from the whole thing. Spring doesn’t have much of a story (it fails to be either an American baseball film or a character piece), but it’s got a cast. Milland seems to have no interest in it. He’s not putting anything into the picture.

The writing is all right in spots–I particularly love how Douglas can get any piece of dialogue out and make it sound good–and it’s by Valentine Davies, who worked on The Bridges at Toko-Ri, which is great. Still, he couldn’t make this film move. It’s less than ninety minutes and it drags.

It occurs to me that I’ve only ever seen two other Milland pictures: Dial M for Murder and The Big Clock, both years ago. I don’t remember him ever impressing me. Spring does nothing to contribute. He’s just so ineffective, kind of like they wanted Cary Grant and couldn’t get him.

But Paul Douglas is great.