This is a great family film. It’s also romantic enough to be a great “date” movie if you’re spending the evening in.
Rating: 5 / 5

But as the duels were forbidden in Paris by Cardinal Richelieu, Chief Minister to King Louis XIII, D’Artagnan had to challenge, first, Jussac, captain of the Guard (Saul Gorss).

The duel, under Tchaikowsky themes, was hilarious and explosive, with great acrobatic skills, good for lots of laugh, specially when D’Artagnan didn’t kill the nobleman but he sent him to Richelieu well humiliated “trousers dropping.” This amusing scene opens the door of an eternal friendship between D’Artagnan and the three famous Musketeers…

Cardinal Richelieu (Vincent Price) was unpopular, but extremely powerful… He was an ambitious man who wanted war against England and the complete destruction of the King’s powers…

King Louis XIII (Frank Morgan) opposed Richelieu’s plan for war with England… But the Cardinal, who well knows everything that transpires or has transpired in France, discovers that George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham (John Sutton) – in love with the Queen – was in possession of a set of diamonds studs, twelve studs to be exact, that were delivered to him only last night by the elegant Queen Anne (Angela Lansbury) in love with the Duke…

Richelieu asks his mistress, lady De Winter (Lana Turner), to travel to England and to steal two of them… His plan is to demonstrate Buckingham’s relation with the Queen, in order to make the poor King “lessen,” and “lesser.”

The mission of the Musketeers is to return the Jewels to Paris in nine days time, as the Queen has to wear them at the banquet…

Lana Turner gives her finest performance as the cool Lady De Winter, the most notorious woman of France, that Duke of Buckingham even couldn’t resist… This lethal lady is rather a peripheral character but so forbidding a creature is she as she lies, steals and murders her way from France to England, from palace to boudoir, that she makes Lucrecia Borgia look like Mary Poppins… Turner’s character remained Evil Incarnate from the beginning to the end and the decision to sustain her satanic nature throughout was a great asset to the film and true to the spirit of the original Dumas delineation…

Kelly’s D’Artagnan was just as Dumas portrayed him-a 17th-century country bumpkin who combines cockiness with courage, ingenuity and a fine gift of swordsmanship… His first meeting with the three musketeers; their consternation at finding that each is to fight a duel with the newcomer at almost the same hour; their sudden enduring friendship with the country lad; D’Artagnan’s romance with Constance (June Allyson), the Queen’s lady-in-waiting-all this leads into a rapid succession of adventures on land and sea, in tavern, court and boudoir, as they slash their way through a dozen ambushes to save the Queen’s honor and to foil the scheming Prime minister and his evil accomplice in their plot to dethrone the King…

Van Heflin is powerful enough in his colorful role as Athos, a man in love with a woman who was evil, selfish, death, poison, a lady whom he don’t dare to forgive…

Vincent Price is exciting as the strong Cardinal… I remember him whispering to the weak King quietly at the end of the film: ‘I am the State your Majesty. I am France!’

Loaded with spectacular Swordsplay, and with excellent action scenes, and under George Sidney’s good direction, this colorful swashbuckling adventure romance is visually great entertainment…

Rating: 5 / 5

It is Kelly who pulls the picture together, however. He seems to be everywhere at once, so full of energy and life. Although he is a bumpkin from Gascony he is more than a match with a sword for any man in Paris be he one of the King’s Musketeer or one of the Cardinal’s guards. He does quite a lot with his eyes and his facial expressions, a bit overacted occasionally but still quite enjoyable. Lana Turner has top billing and she is deliciously beautiful with a seemingly endless wardrobe of wonderful costumes From the first scene, however, this movie is all Kelly’s – it seems a bit odd that he is so good in what is primarily an action film – but have no doubt he is completely convincing as the most athletic and acrobatic D’Artagnan ever seen on the screen – he is a bit like Burt Lancaster in “The Crimson Pirate” but without the trampoline. Van Heflin has the most serious role as the nobleman-turned-drunken musketeer – lamenting the loss of his treacherous wife and then trying to warn D’Artagnan of the danger of Milady, who loves him not and is far more dangerous than any of his swordman adversaries.

This is a version of this often-told story where the film makers “got it right” – there is plenty of action, comedy, romance, intrigue, villainy, heartbreak all going on seemingly at once. The characters are portrayed closely to the way they were written by Dumas and this is precisely how they should be played.
Rating: 5 / 5

Of course, anyone who read the novel would know that though it includes sword play it is the charaters and plot that move the story along, so in that respect this movie does a much better job than most Musketeer adaptations. It stays fairly close to the original plot and though there is little time spent developing their personalities the Three are more consistant with their literary counterparts than in, well really, any of the other adaptations.

Over all one of the most fun adventure movies I’ve seen.
Rating: 5 / 5

Early in the film we see a young Jim running away from school because he doesn’t want to go the white man’s school. The fact that he runs many miles to go back home, after his father had taken him to school in a horse-drawn wagon. His father then explains why school is important, particularly if Jim is ever to rise above a very lowly and disadvantaged life on the reservation in Oklahoma. Jim’s father hopes that Jim will do more than he accomplished. Not only does Jim return to school, he eventually goes on to the famed Carlisle Indian School, a virtual college which achieved a very fine reputation both in academics and athletics. The famed “Pop” Warner, portrayed in the film by Charles Bickford, is shown producing some very fine teams and challenging the more reputable, established colleges and universities of his time.

“Pop” Warner becomes Jim’s lifelong mentor. The film actually begins with the coach’s tribute to Jim at a latter day banquet in honor of the amazing athlete. Director Michael Curtiz intercuts actual footage of the banquet, much as he later uses footage of the real Jim Thorpe (seen from a distance) at the 1912 Olympics and in various games. Eventually we see footage of the opening of the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, including the speech by the Vice President of the United States, whom Coach Warner acknowledges is, like Jim, a Native American, except he uses the word “Indian.” Curtiz combines the hisoric footage with shots of Burt Lancaster and Charles Bickford sitting in the Coliseum, which was later used in the 1984 Olympics.

The film is a virtual “rise and fall.” Jim achieved so much in sports, eventually winning both the Pentathlon and the Decathlon at the 1912 Olympics. Then it was discovered he had played on a professional team one summer to earn a little money. For many years professional athletes were banned from competing in the Olympics; the International Olympic Committee was as vigilant in barring professional athletes as it has become in detecting performance-enhancing drugs, such as steroids. Jim had natural ability, of course, and he had great endurance. Yet he was stripped of his medals and it was many, many years before his medals were finally returned to his family, long after Jim’s death, prompting Burt Lancaster’s bitter complaints (cited above). Jim struggled for years, as we see in the film, and, although he apparently never was financially successful, he at least lived long enough to receive some recognition for his athletic achievemtns.

The film was shot in black and white at a time when more and more films were being filmed in color; presumably, the use of monochrome film was because of the inclusion of the vintage, historic footage. Yet it remains an engrossing story and is enhanced by Michael Curtiz’s expertise (as he neared the end of his long tenure at Warner Brothers) and a very fine musical score by another veteran, Austrian-born composer Max Steiner (best known for the music for “King Kong,” “Gone With The Wind,” and “Casablanca”).

Hopefully, Warner Brothers will soon release the film to DVD. It has already been shown on Turner Classic Movies and is clearly yet another top-notch production from the Burbank studio.
Rating: 4 / 5

Jim Thorpe – All American is a fascinating look at a period of American history (the early 20th century) that doesn’t get enough coverage. Thorpe was born just before the death of the Old West (1887 or 88), was an All American college football player at the Carlisle Indian School, won gold medals in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, played Major League Baseball before WWI, was a founding presence as an all-star halfback in the early National Football League (and its first commissioner), and went on to a long career as a bit player in such Hollywood films as King Kong and White Heat. On the darker side, over half of his brothers and sisters died in childhood, he was an orphan before 18, his first son (Jim Junior) died at age 2 from pneumonia, he had poor financial habits, wasn’t much of a team player, moved around incessantly, had problems with alcohol and tobacco, two wives left him, and he died in poverty.

Director Michael (Casablanca) Curtiz does a wonderful job of keeping the campy 50s to a minimum while moving Thorpe’s whirlwind life forward on screen. The real strengths of the film (beyond the historical subject matter) are the wonderful nascent images of early sporting events: the college lettermen’s sweaters, old track shoes, baseball uniforms, leather football helmets, etc. Lancaster was quite fit and looks the part of a young athlete very well. He is perhaps best when portraying Thorpe’s dark decline; these scenes foreshadow De Niro in Scorsese’s Raging Bull. And finally, the scenes from the opening ceremonies of the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles look so real I am sure that Curtiz must have cut actual footage into the film, including an aerial flyover and a speech by then vice-president Charles Curtis (these would have been the first Olympics after the widespread proliferation of sound video recording, in the vibrant young city which created it).

All in all Jim Thorpe – All American is a fine cinematic achievement; this is what movie-making is all about.
Rating: 5 / 5

First of all I must say, that once again, I am completely amazed by this movie. In my opinion, it is one of the greatest earthquake movies I have ever seen. The earthquake scenes are so realistic and are very well carried out. Let’s just say that I would love to see this movie re-released in movie theaters with awsome surround sound!! That would be awsome!

HOWEVER…

There is a huge chunk of the movie’s plot that has been cut out. This version is basically about Dr. Clare Winslow and the Big One she predict. When it originally aired in 1990, we saw the story of Dr. Winslow’s family – her parents, sister and cop-boyfriend and his cop-friend, her family friends, even the house keeper and her son and brother where in the movie, as well as a visiting South African prime minister’s assassination attempt – all those side stories and plots have unfortunatley been cut out. That is why I have to say that I am a little disappointed.

Know that the major editing in this film doesn’t take away from the film at all, for first time viewers, but for people like me who where/are looking for the original movie in its entirety will be a tad disappointed.

All in all, its still an awesome movie to watch!!
Rating: 4 / 5

Some scenes and subplots cut from the VHS version and the version farmed out for syndication on local stations have been restored, most notably the assassination subplot (featuring Clarence Gilyard, Jr. and the late Brock Peters) and the original ending (featuring Dan Lauria).

The Big One is a better, more realistic disaster thriller than the later 10.5 and 10.5 Apocalypse that NBC most recently broadcast, and has better effects than CBS’s more recent earthquake offering, Aftershock: Earthquake in New York, although that movie is pretty good. For the money, getting three hours worth of movie is a treat. Buy this movie!
Rating: 5 / 5