wpeake

I borrowed this movie because I assumed from the cover blurbs and photographs that it was based on the book 'The Coral Island', by RM Ballantyne. It transpires it is not and in fact owes more to 'Swiss Family Robinson' in particular, and 'Robinson Crusoe'.

It is a good, honest representative of the South Sea Island castaway genre that is probably a vanishing category in these postcolonialist, postmodernist days. A film in which there are palm trees swaying is always worth watching. It contains toothless pirates, 'savages', and a cabin boy who is almost impossibly pretty.

This is probably the most recent movie (1990) to have had the cheek to resort to one of the old favourites - a guy in a gorilla suit - into the plot. Of course, there are no free-range gorillas in the Fiji Islands, or anywhere outside of Africa, but who cares. What is more puzzling is that after the boy befriends the gorilla, it disappears from the film. I expected it reappear in the denouement, perhaps beating up pirates, but it doesn't. In terms of the plot, what was the point?

My kids though the film was okay.

Its so easy to get a cool job in Neighbours that no one bothers with the qualifications that run-of-the-mill schmos require. Jason Donovan walked into a job as a hot-shot journalist. Guy Pierce became a school teacher within a few weeks of finishing high school himself. On an recent viewing of Neighbours (after a thankful hiatus), I found the lamentable Toadfish, not content with defying his obvious nerdinity to score a gig as a DJ, inexplicably lobbing up at court in the role of hip barrister. Not only that but Toady, who no one will ever mistake for Cary Grant, has scored himself the current female heart-throb for his squeeze. He seems to have been promoted from 'Comedy Relief', or the 'not so good looking guy with the heart of gold,' to male lead, as a reward for having hung around on the show several years longer than of the other acting novices who have started their careers on this egregious program, and remarkably, have used it as a launching pad to fame and fortune.

Another feature of this program is the shamelessness of the writers in recycling plotlines. Sure everyone does but the Neighbours gang favour the most purile devices. One that keeps turning up like Banquo's ghost is where one of the 'adult' characters challenges a protagonist to a sporting context at which the other cast hangers-on either join in or turn up as spectators in sun hats. Thus over the last 15 years or so we have had the Great Ramsay St Cricket, Australian Rules (several times), bicycle, Basketball, bowling, athletics, soccer Challenge (and others I have tried to forget).

By the way, in case anyone thinks I seem to know a darn lot about Neighbours for someone who professes to dislike it, I say I have never once watched this show voluntarily. Television program selection is rarely decided by the male of the house.

If a you are stooges purist and only watch the films featuring Curly, make an exception in this case. ranks with "a plumbing we will go' as quintessential stooges. Larry, Moe and Shemp are the wonderful pip boys, tailors. Includes classic scenes where breakfast (pancakes) is cooked on an ironing press and a crooks head is pressed in the same device.

This is the most over-rated movie. Ever. John Belushi mugging a few blues standards and Dan Ackroyd, in a pair of trousers too short in the legs, jumping around like an uncoordinated jerk. Sparkless dialogue. A few "smokey and the bandit" car crashes.Thats it? This makes a great movie? Not for this little black duck. (and what's with the hats and sunglasses and dark suits? I don't get it.)

I think people have been brainwashed about this movie. Someone started a rumour it was good. What you might call the 'emperors new clothes' effect. Like, 'what, you didn't like Blues Brothers? something wrong with you, boy?' Or like Elaine in Seinfeld being the only one prepared to say that 'The English Patient' is crap. Well, Blues Brothers is crap too.

I can only recall seeing Jeffrey Hunter in one other movie, a western in which he played a bad guy. I could not come to terms with Christ without a beard, wearing a black hat and doing a good impersonation of Liberty Valence. So I am not surprised that playing this role more or less ended his career.

At the same time I cannot understand criticism of him in this role. Some may have found him a bit too pretty and decidedly western looking with his auburn hair and blazing blue eyes but this is pretty much in keeping with western Christian iconography and what the audience would have expected. There probably would have been a riot in the cinema if Christ had been portrayed as the Neanderthal-like creature that 'scientists' have recreated in recent times (it also reminds me a lot of Rod Marsh, the former Aussie cricketer).

I think that Hunter is really very good as Jesus. Physically attractive, certainly, but also charismatic and nicely understated. I guess that it must be in praise of him that I could say that I can believe that this was what Christ was like or (if it is not sacrilegious)what I might hope he was like.

I also liked the performance of Ron Randall as Lucius and Frank Thring jnr as Herod-both Aussies by the way. I wonder if Herod's second name is the source of 'antipasto'? (only joking).

I like the movie, and like 'its a wonderful Life' and 'the Robe' and 'song of Bernadette', it has an evangelical effect that makes me swear off adult web sites, at least for a while. Unfortunately the effect does not endure, at least to date. But I've just watched 'King of Kings' again today (Good Friday)on channel seven Sydney and maybe this time its permanent.

I do agree with other user comments that the story from the last supper onwards to the end is rather rushed, given the length of some of the other scenes.

I love this movie like no other. Another time I will try to explain its virtues to the uninitiated, but for the moment let me quote a few of pieces the remarkable dialogue, which, please remember, is all tongue in cheek. Aussies and Poms will understand, everyone else-well?

(title song lyric)"he can sink a beer, he can pick a queer, in his latest double-breasted Bondi gear."

(another song lyric) "All pommies are bastards, bastards, or worse, and England is the a**e-hole of the universe."

(during a television interview on an "arty program"): Mr Mackenzie what artists have impressed you most since you've been in England? (Barry's response)Flamin' bull-artists!

(while chatting up a naive young pom girl): Mr Mackenzie, I suppose you have hordes of Aboriginal servants back in Australia? (Barry's response) Abos? I've never seen an Abo in me life. Mum does most of the solid yacca (ie hard work) round our place.

This is just a taste of the hilarious farce of this bonser Aussie flick. If you can get a copy of it, watch and enjoy.

As the other reviewers have suggested, one of the greatest movies ever made. As it does not need any further endorsement, I thought I might provide a few interesting sidelines.

The book on which the movie is based, by the Australian author Paul Brickhill, is equally good. Brickhill is a writer who specialised in world war 2 true stories; he also wrote 'Reach for the Sky'(the story of Douglas Bader) and 'the Dambusters', both of which were also made into stirring films. Brickhill is a master story teller whose books rush on breathlessly and really do defy the reader to put them down.

In the book, as was actually the case, American characters hardly figure at all; obviously the introduction of characters such as Steve McQueen's Hilts was intended to make the movie more palatable for US audiences. For once this tampering with the source does not at all prove a negative. This is obvious when you consider that easily the most memorable sequence in the film, McQueen's attempt to leap the barbed wire border on his motorbike, is the fruit of this invention.

I think that the inclusion of James Coburns' character, Sedgewick, was made in acknowledgement of the author's nationality. Brickhill was an inmate himself at the prison camp where the great escape took place. Sedgewick is evidently an Australian, though you would never know from Coburn's egregious attempt at an Australian accent.

Richard Attenborough's character, Bartlett, the big X or escape coordinator, is based on the Roger Bushell of the book. Why change the name from Bushell to Bartlett? Just a case of someone justifying their paycheck, perhaps.

Additional dialogue for the movie was written by James Clavell, author of King Rat, Shogun etc. This is pure surmise, but I'm almost certain which scenes are his contributions: those where Bronson and Coburn attempt to escape with the Russian slave-labourers; when Wing Commander Day, asked by the commandant why he, an English gemtleman, is growing vegetables, not flowers ('you can't eat flowers'); and the one where the Americans distill some bootleg grog to celebrate American independence day.

Finally an opinion on the music of Elmer Bernstein. It seems to me that it, like Mozart's, can be immediately atrributed to the composer, even on a first hearing, obviously without a suggestion that they are in any way repetitive. Consider the music for this movie, the Comancheros and the Magnificent Seven.

Although filmed 60 years ago I cannot think of a more thrilling realisation on film of a massed cavalry assault. The scene, which is sustained for several minutes, recreats the WWI charge of the Australian light horse on the Turkish-held town of Beersheeba, Palestine, in 1917. This is generally accepted as the last successful cavalry charge in military history (typically some eggheads - probably Brits - quibble on whether it was a true cavalry charge because the Australians were armed with bayonets rather than sabres; not that the distinction meant much to the unfortunates who ended up skewered on the end of them.)

Also noteworthy for the presence of Chips Rafferty, in a typical role as a gangling Aussie bushmen, and who, in the days before Paul Hogan, represented the Australian male as he liked to imagine himself.