Three 1960s films I didn’t care for

Joy Harmon is a ONE WAY WAHINI (1965), a mainland girl who saves enough for a one-way ticket to Hawaii, then finds a job and works in the islands until she has enough money to return home (though Harmon’s character doesn’t quite fit that template). After way too much time admiring the beaches and Harmon’s body (though she certainly has one heck of a body) we get to the plot: two mainland embezzlers are hiding in a beach bungalow and a couple of locals recruit Harmon to help rip off the money from the crooks. Unfortunately the long stretch before things start happening killed my interest, and Harmon isn’t as strong on-screen as Annette Funicello in beach roles. Plus the scheme, which involves Harmon and a friend vamping the crooks, turns into a protracted attempted rape scene I could have done without. So not a win. “There was a time when I could get you an argument on that point in half the bars in San Francisco.”

I paid more attention to the British DEVILS IN DARKNESS (1965) but it didn’t offer any better returns on time invested. A British tourist’s (William Sylvester) visit to France turn nightmarish when he loses his travel companions to freak accidents that are really the work of the vampire heading a local Satanic cult. As the vampire lost his sacred symbol of leadership and Sylvester picked it up, the nightmare continues when the protagonist returns to London; the vampire will get his precious back, one way or another. This has all the right elements but they never catch fire, and the ending is dreadfully deus ex machina (a lightning bolt breaks up the human sacrifice of the female lead, then panics the vampire into running out into daylight). “Do you see the police being interested in ‘black death’ and ‘evil eye’ talk?”

Jean-Luc Goddard’s LA CHINOISE (1967)is the worst of the three. Teenage Parisians form a revolutionary cadre which leads to them reading portions of Mao’s Little Red Book, debating Russian vs. Chinese Marxism (“One kind of communism is dangerous.”) and eventually putting thought into action however ineffectively (“I read the numbers upside down.”). To paraphrase Monty Python’s Flying Circus, this is a film for Clever People Talking Loudly in Restaurants, both pretentious and boring. “They started yelling ‘the Chinaman’s a fake’ — they didn’t realize it was theater.”

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