The Silencers

Censorship And Bad Cropping Give Helm Hell!
I've waited many years to see this fearsome foursome of cheese find a decent release in DVD. Sadly, thanks to bad cropping and seemingly random censorship, it still hasn't happened yet.

The four films are, of course, The Silencers, Murderers' Row, The Ambushers, and The Wrecking Crew. (A fifth intallment was storeyboarded but never shot.)

Letting the studio off the hook by saying things like "widescreen areas always crop full frame versions," is being much too gracious in the face of these money-grabbing studio weasels who also CUT entire parts of the film and never even gave you an original trailer.

And I should know about the widescreen concept, since I am, after all, the chairman of the WWS - the Widescreen Watchers Society. (Yes, my organization has a movie site online, but an Amazon review is not the place to plug it by posting links to it.)

Rather I just wanted to point out that it is instead within the "full frame" or "standard...

A word about the cropping
I won't review the film as this has been done by others. However, I would like to add some thoughts about the "cropping" issue--

To many fans of DVD, a key selling point is seeing a film the way it was orginally presented in the theatre.

Most people are aware today that widescreen films shown on a full frame standard TV's are cropped-- that is, they are panned and scanned and you lose information (images). Pan & Scan changes the composition of the film.

With this in mind, people expect to see ALL of the composition when a film comes out on DVD and is viewed on a widescreen televison-- not less. However, there are exceptions:

In some circumstances, the director of a film will compose a shot with more information than is meant to be conveyed to the audience.

The "extra" information is never meant to be seen. When the film is "matted" for release, the additional info is covered up and you are left with the director's original...

Dean Martin's First "James Bond" Spoof as Matt Helm
Following four highly successful serious spy films starring Sean Connery as that world-famous fictional British spy James Bond, American film companies began playing with the idea of producing their own spy films with equally world-famous, but more humorous, spies in their own James Bond spoofs. On January 16, 1966, the first James Bond-inspired spoof hit the big screen starring James Coburn (1928-2002) as Derek Flint in Twentieth Century Fox's film "our Man Flint". Only one month later, on February 18, 1966, a second James Bond-inspired spoof hit the big screen starring the well-known comedic actor/lounge singer Dean Martin (1917-1995) as the semi-retired spy Matt Helm in "The Silencers", which was produced by Claude Productions and Meadway, and distributed by Columbia Pictures.

Similar to Derek Flint, Matt Helm loves to be surrounded by beautiful women; but unlike the super-serious & high-tech Flint, Helm is far more laid back. Helm's bedroom is equipped with a...

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The China Syndrome

"There WAS A Vibration!!"
Review of "The China Syndrome: Special Edition" DVD .............................

"The China Syndrome" first appeared in theaters around the USA on March 16, 1979. In an almost unbelievable coincidence, just twelve days later, on March 28th, the worst nuclear accident in United States history occurred at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The real-life incident at Three Mile Island was, in many ways, identical to the plot of the movie. An incorrect reading of equipment at Three Mile Island made the plant's operators THINK, in error, that there was more water covering the core of the power plant than there actually was -- just exactly what we see unfold on the screen in "The China Syndrome".

Another extremely eerie "coincidence" between the real event and the motion picture is a line of dialogue that was written for the film, and is one of the most chilling lines in the picture, where a nuclear expert is explaining that, if an explosion had occurred...

Dated, but the fear remains.
The idea of a potential nuclear meltdown is and always will be absolutely terrifying. That is the main reason this film has lost little of its impact. I first saw this film when I was a young teenager, and back then I took no notice of the depth of the acting or the political nuances strewn throughout the film. The acting is excellent all around, but the best performance comes once again from Jack Lemmon. It is truly mesmerizing to see him at the beginning of the film as a steadfast employee making excuses for the 'accident' that even he pretends to believe; and then his gradual decline through doubt, suspicion, fearful revelation, and absolute panic. His performance here is one of the best of the 1970s. However, the story and direction take on a "Liberal Hippies against The Man" feel frequently, the bad guys being heartless bureaucrats without families or moral character. In this story they are painted as scoundrels who care about nothing else other than the proverbial 'bottom...

The Real Star
This is one of my favorite movies. I have the 1999 DVD. (I'm not sure why another is needed; maybe more subtitles.) Mine has 1.85 anamorphic, letterbox, and 1.33 too. The transfer is good. The sound is mono; that on the one just out is a matter of dispute -- either mono or stereo, depending on what you read. (Amazon says mono.)

Yes, this movie has Lemmon, Fonda, et alii -- especially Wilford Brimley, whose performance impressed me a lot. But, maybe because I'm an engineer, I've always thought the real star was the nuclear power plant itself. The movie is, after all, about the safety of nuclear electrical power. The "Ventana" plant stands as a monolithic menace, dominating the movie. (The control room was based on the Trojan plant in Eugene, Oregon; I can't find out where the bowels-of-the-plant sets came from, or the external views.) That it is both loving and vengeful God is always apparent, true at the time of release and moreso today after Three-mile Island,...

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