We wanted to cover a Universal product from the late ’60s, and this one has stars we like — Rod Taylor, Claudia Cardinale, Harry Guardino and a lot of angles to discuss — the TV-movie production values, the Techniscope format short cut. Kino’s disc comes with a good commentary from Steve Mitchell & Steven Jay Rubin. The story is about smugglers in Europe, but everything we see looks Los Angeles- local. On the other hand, any excuse to see Claudia Cardinale is a good excuse.

The Hell with Heroes
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1968 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 102 min. / Street Date January 9, 2024 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Rod Taylor, Claudia Cardinale, Harry Guardino, Kevin McCarthy, Pete Duel, William Marshall, Don Knight, Robert Yuro, Tanya Lemani, Mae Mercer, Jacqueline Bertrand, Sid Haig.
Cinematography: Bud Thackery
Art Directors: Alexander Golitzen, John J. Lloyd
Costumes: Jean Louis
Film Editor: Howard Epstein
Music by: Quincy Jones
Screenplay by Halsted Welles and Harold Livingston, story by Livingston
Produced by Stanley Chase
Directed by Joseph Sargent

CineSavant takes a break from masterpiece filmmaking, the kind of pictures everybody praises and lots of people have seen, to dig up a studio picture that nobody loves, but one that stars favorite actors. Universal’s The Hell with Heroes has Rod Taylor, Claudia Cardinale and Harry Guardino, all seemingly caught in the studio grind. It’s a generic ‘foreign intrigue’ action thriller about combat veterans trying crime on for size instead of returning to civilian life. In terms of scripting it’s routine all the way, with weak ‘thematic significance’ and an attempt at trendy psychological flashbacks.

For a movie that takes place in France, North Africa and supposedly Iran, The Hell with Heroes is 90% filmed in and around Universal City, with the same production values granted Uni’s TV shows and movies. Did the money go into the good cast, or was that expense taken up with ‘movies owed’ on contract deals?

 

The macho action show wants to combine  Casablanca with the comics’ Terry and the Pirates. As the first anniversary of V-E Day approaches, rugged ex- 8th army bomber fliers Brynie McKay and Mike Brewer (Rod Taylor and Pete Duel) are bumming around a Tunisian beach between cargo flights with their C-47. Brynie plays scoutmaster to some local orphans, while Mike lusts after the local belly dancer, Jamila (Tanya Lemani). They get roped into a Paris run by the slick operator Lee Harris (Harry Guardino), who gives them a shipment of contraband cigarettes and then blackmails Brynie into an exclusive contract by framing him for smuggling drugs. Their ‘business agreement’ ends with a deal — Lee will use his illicit contacts to get Brynie’s plane returned and keep the law away, and the boys will do all kinds of smuggling runs. Brynie will pay off his plane, and Lee will be able to buy more mansions and fancy paintings, and continue the upkeep on his high-priced mistress, former ‘displaced person’ Elena (Claudia Cardinale).

Nightclub owner Al Poland (William Marshall of  Blacula) tries to help Brynie, as the agents of U.S. Army Intelligence officer Colonel Wilson (Kevin McCarthy) shadow Lee Harris’s operation. They can’t arrest anybody because of Lee’s multi-level corruption deals. Elena is part of the network carrying messages to the fliers, an arrangement that soon makes her an item with Brynie. But Lee’s cozy racket is falling apart, due to betrayals in the ranks, Col. Wilson’s efforts and Lee’s own jealousy over Elena. Young Mike learns that Lee intends to kill them both, but Brynie won’t listen — he thinks he can pay off the loan on his airplane and ‘retire’ from Lee’s criminal enterprise.

The Hell with Heroes hasn’t an original idea from one end to the other, not in the story and not in the production. It holds together as passable 1968 entertainment because of its star casting and decent direction by the interesting Joseph Sargent, later of  Colossus: The Forbin Project and  The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Favorite man’s man actor Rod Taylor was kept busy working on films by  John Ford,  Frank Tashlin,  Jack Cardiff and even  Michelangelo Antonioni, but few pictures allowed him to equal his achievement in George Pal’s  The Time Machine and Alfred Hitchcock’s  The Birds.

 

As an action film, The Hell with Heroes is limited to a few fistfights and a couple of shoot-outs. Rod Taylor instead ogles and/or chats up beautiful women, and lazes on a beach. Taylor’s flier Brynie McKay is a ‘sensitive’ type who makes speeches about the meaninglessness of life, motivated by his experience as a bomber pilot. He treats his sidekick Mike like a kid, but takes Elena’s existential displacement situation seriously — she survived the war as the teenaged mistress of more than one enemy officer. It’s the kind of movie where characters stop every scene or two to explain themselves, as if they were reading character blurbs on the book’s dust cover.

The acting is just fine — Sargent and his capable leads do their best with what’s essentially a pretty terrible script. Rather than let us understand these people by their actions and let us guess the details, any talk about the war kicks off a montage of tinted B&W stock shots and flashbacks: Mike and Brynie flying B-17s, and Elena surviving war-torn Europe by bedding down with a succession of generals. The dialogue drips with ten-cent ruminations about life and love. The actors weather this screenplay abuse quite well. Ms. Cardinale is just fine, even when the writing has her Czech survivor (now wearing furs and fab jewelry) ask rough-tough Bryine what ‘shacking up’ means.

Harry Guardino puts a decent spin on the film’s villain. Lee Harris is a well-dressed hustler, whose crime ring runs cigarettes and penicillin (shades of  Harry Lime). He orders the execution of an informant in his ranks. Guardino, Sargent and Cardinale try to energize the script by making the ultimate User Lee express sincere feelings for Elena. At one point everybody seems able to evade the cops and go their own way — but Lee needs to take his revenge. Like everything else in the story, there is no surprise involved in any of this. Guardino was very busy Universal at this time, in TV and features. The really memorable movie he he made there, in the same year, is Don Siegel’s cop saga  Madigan.

 

Fifth-billed is Pete Duel, a name we associate only with his last show, the Butch Cassidy / Sundance Kid ripoff Alias Smith and Jones. We never saw anything with him before … he has an okay personality and looks like Stuart Whitman crossed with Dwayne Hickman. Duel seems to have worked almost exclusively on Universal shows, mostly TV, and is unfortunately best known now as a suicide at age 31. He’s decent enough as Mike Brewer, even if the screenplay makes his situation as Taylor’s sidekick far too predictable.

Why does The Hell with Heroes look like a TV movie masquerading as a high-flown action epic?  It has everything to do with Universal’s production plan, from the mid- ’60s to about 1972. As if not even trying to compete in the cinematic world, Universal made only a couple of expensive pictures a year, distributed some promising independent productions, and turned out a larger number of economy shows, with production values just a tad higher than TV movies. Shows like The Pink Jungle with James Garner look as if they were made to keep the soundstages and back lot busy, so as to give tram riders on the new Studio Tour SOME activity to gawk at. Every tour guest has seen Universal’s mini-lake with a wharf set; it shows up in old westerns as far back as  Bend of the River. I remember going on the Studio Tour in 1965 and seeing it transformed into a PT boat base for McHale’s Navy. This movie re-dresses it to be a Tunisian waterfront town.

I’ll bet the interior set for Lee Harris’ mansion had been seen in scores of pictures. Burbank Airport appears to stand in for facilities in North Africa and France, with maybe one or two signs posted in French. A second-unit trip to the desert yields a few shots of cars racing down a dirt road. The movie’s ‘extra’ expense are some okay aerial shots and a helicopter viewpoint for a chase… but the landscape below is sunny California, not the French countryside.

 

Universal Art Direction: One size fits all.
But Universal’s house style guarantees that The Hell with Heroes just looks dull. Scenes are too bright and unimaginatively art-directed, even the smoky strip clubs. Many night scenes are filmed Day For Night, and look fake as well. The filmmakers arrange to get a gunfight and a belly dancer into the first reel, as if afraid the customers will walk out.

The costumes also have no sense of period flavor. Everybody goes around in 1968 clothes, when its supposed to be 1946. Men have hair suitable for surfing at Malibu, and the women’s hairstyles are equally bogus. The Tunisian belly dancer wears a chic 1968 bikini at the beach. It looks nothing like the bikini first introduced in July of 1946 in France, that waited 15 years to see widely adopted.

 

For a big studio, Techniscope was a False Economy format.
The Hell with Heroes is also one of Universal’s  Techniscope productions, using the half-frame camera system that used flat lenses. Enlarged and squeezed, it yield a ‘scope image. Technicolor Italy invented it ten years earlier to make production cheaper, but it can’t have helped Universal save much money. Many pictures look cheap and grainy using the system. Opticals look particularly bad in Techniscope — they drop very steeply in contrast and sharpness, with a distracting image degradation for dissolves and title-bearing shots. The end titles in The Hell with Heroes simply look out of focus. Director Joseph Sargent earned his stripes at Universal by directing tons of TV, and this appears to be his first feature film. When he proceeded to Colossus: The Forbin Project, he filmed in full-35 anamorphic Panavision.

Summing up, The Hell with Heroes is a generic action / tough guy / international crime / hot romance movie — and one that avoids anything that might bother a censor. Nobody uses swear words, yet the trailer plays up the sex aspect as much as it can. Ms. Cardinale didn’t do nude scenes, so the blocking confects to have her dressing and undressing during several scenes. Taylor and Cardinale’s characters are barely introduced in the trailer, before Rod is stripping off his shirt and Claudia is dropping her bra … carefully.

We enoyed the show partically to ponder the budget short-cuts and one-size-fits-all Universal sets, art direction and costumes. But we also admire the leads’ skill … even with such mediocre material, star quality and good direction make a difference.

 

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The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray of The Hell with Heroes is a good but not sensational video master that likely had to work with a 35mm blow-up element from the half-frame Techniscope original. That’s where the False Economy comes in: Universal has dozens of feature films from those years, that were shot on a sub-par, hard-to-archive format. Every time a dissolve is on the way, the shots on either side drop in contrast and increase in grain. The actual opticals for the artsy flashback sequences may have been composited in full 35mm — they look a little better.

The remastering colorist finds good contrast levels and teases color out of the elements, but the show is still grainy here and there and slightly dull overall. The women all look great — so many revealing desses and swimsuits in Europe of ’46.

Quincy Jones does the music score, which is by the numbers. He also wrote an okay song that we hear in William Marshall’s club. The singer is  Sue Raney and one of the songs is an updated cover of Richard M. Jones, Don Raye and Gene DePaul’s  ‘Your Red Wagon,’  famously sung by Marie Bryant in Nicholas Ray’s  They Live by Night.

The movie inclues an original trailer that sells the picture through its make-out scenes. The audio commentary is by Kino’s go-to war-movie specialists Steve Mitchell & Steven Jay Rubin. The team has recorded so many — they begin by explaining that  The Hell with Heroes is an ‘almost’ war movie. If you ask me, there would be an automatic tendency to confuse it with the Don Siegel- Steve McQueen movie   Hell Is for Heroes, a 100% war movie.

Filmmakers aren’t stupid — they knew they were making a commercial foreign intrigue ‘meller,’ not a realistic art picture about postwar horrors like H.G. Clouzot’s  Manon or René Clément’s  Les maudits. It had to be ‘just good enough’ but cost as little as possible.

What the predictable show really sells are images of Taylor and Cardinale with their shirts off. And there’s another reason to think the title The Hell with Heroes is a little screwy. Kevin McCarthy’s military intelligence honcho repeatedly gives Brynie MacKay a break because he’s a war hero; they eventually let him walk away after being neck deep in a murderous international conspiracy. Maybe a better title would be  ‘Special Privilges for Heroes.’

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

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The Hell with Heroes
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good + / –
Video: Good
Sound: Good
Supplements:
Audio commentary with Steve Mitchell & Steven Jay Rubin.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: August 7, 2024
(7173hell)

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