Plot in one sentence: An American chemist cheats his boss in order to sell his secret drug formula to a Liverpool gangster, where he is chauffeured by the gangster's football mad underling.

Extras:

• Cinemax special, "The Making of FORMULA 51"(13:18)
• Trailers for FORMULA 51, BAD BOYS, HALF PAST DEAD, SNATCH, and XXX

Samuel L. Jackson is in "hair" mode again in THE FORMULA. You know what his "hair mode" is, don't you? That's when Jackson decides that unless he has his hair A), just so, and B), unlike any hair he has had in any other movie, then C), he cannot go forward with the project. Usually his preferred mop is some extreme variation on an Afro, but he has also embraced jeri-curls, and even red or blond hair. Sometimes he likes no hair at all (SHAFT). But whatever the subject, setting, place, or action, Jackson looks for the hair ops in his movies. He reads scripts like they’re back issues of Allure.

In FORMULA 51, he is blessed with several hair variations in one film, plus some facial footnotes. He has two Afros, some corn rows, and a sideburn-mustache combo set that looks like a road map of Lewis and Clark's trek across America.

In FORMULA 51 Jackson is chemist Elmo McElroy, who in the '70s was arrested for drug possession on the day he graduated from college. Now, he's on the lam in Liverpool trying to set up the sale of a drug he has invented that is "51 times more powerful than cocaine," as well as containing features of other high-powered drugs. This multi-tasking concoction was created while McElroy endured years of servitude to The Lizard (Meatloaf, in a rather clumsy actorial turn). The Lizard at first wants McElroy dead, and then, thinking better of it, prefers him alive, as the formula is supposedly only in McElroy's head.

The Lizard's agent in this task is hit-woman Dawn (Emily Mortimer, of SCREAM 3 fame, and daughter of Rumpole creator John Mortimer), who owes The Lizard lots of money. Besides looking fetching in a series of tight leather pants of various hues, Dawn's job is to make sure no one else gets to McElroy before The Lizard arrives in England, and to that end she wields some high powered rifles and shoots various villains in the head and buttocks.

In Liverpool, McElroy is chauffeured by one Felix DeSouza (Robert Carlyle, in reckless TRAINSPOTTING demeanor), who works for the gangster McElroy is hooked up with. All DeSouza wants is a ticket to the next day's Liverpool FC-Manchester United football/soccer match, which is his fee for playing sherpa. DeSouza also happens to be the ex-boyfriend to Dawn. Suffice it to say that things get complicated and gangsters and cops at cross-purposes have to form unholy alliances. The whole thing ends up with a face off in an executive suite at the soccer stadium where DeSouza's team is playing. Some final end graphics bring us up to date on what happens to some of the characters after the movie stops, which includes McElroy reclaiming a Scottish castle from the heirs of his Scottish slave owners.

This is the kind of movie that requires its viewers to have a taste for fecal humor (or a belief that the best revenge on a bunch of racist skinheads is a lethal case of the shits). It also helps if the viewer finds car chases through crowded streets fun, and believes that the people on the sidelines are pain in the ass innocent bystanders, bereft of the special glow of privilege that the heroes enjoy. Director Ronnie Yu (BRIDE OF CHUCKY) is basically a competent mastermind of this sort of mayhem, but he doesn't show the lively editing style or visual flair of Guy Ritchie, whose work this film is promoted as resembling. There is gratuitous bathtub sex, and several exploding heads and necks, for which we are all grateful, but it all boils at a rather low temperature. But the film isn't thought through enough, visually or narratively. I got a little confused. For example, McElroy appears to have brought samples of his head-improving drug with him to Liverpool, yet still needs to find an ad hoc lab to make up a new batch. Worse, in the end the film doesn't have the courage of its convicts: FORMULA 51 doesn't really have the gritty street level attitude to drugs it seems to profess. At the last second, it bails out of facing the dark side with a soft "surprise" ending.

This is a perfunctory release. If it weren't for the coincidence that Cinemax broadcast a "making of" short about the film, the disc would have almost no extras. On the technical front it looks fine, and the audio is DD 5.1 which is mostly wasted but for a disco scene and a few open air moments of noise and velocity. It might go over a little better with a dose of the substance that serves as both the film's holy grail and its chimera.

Crime Story

THE CRIMINAL

• First screening: August 28, 1960
  
• Anchor Bay Entertainment
  
• $19.98
  
• 97 minutes
  
• NR
  
• Region 1
  
• Street Date: December 3, 2002

• Single disc
  
• Black and White
  
• Widescreen (1.66:1) transfer enhanced for widescreen televisions
  
• Animated, musical menu with 23-chapter scene selection
  
• Single sided, single layered disc
  
• Dolby Digital mono
  
• One page insert with chapter list
  
• Keep case

• Cast: Stanley Baker, Sam Wanamaker, Patrick Magee, Margit Saad, Jill Bennett
  
• Directed by Joseph Losey
  
• Credited writers: Alun Owen and Jimmy Sangster
• Significant music: mournful jazz by Johnny Dankworth, with songs sung by Cleo Laine

Plot in one sentence: A powerful and charismatic British gangster leaves prison only to stage a heist that lands him back in the clink, only this time he is vulnerable to both the guards and the gang.

Extras:

• Filmographies on Baker (20 screens) and Losey (20 screens)
• Theatrical trailer (2:58)

There are some directors you don't take seriously at the time because they seem pretentious or uncinematic or part of a sterile tradition of quality and middlebrow art house snobbery. Joseph Losey is one of those directors. A lefty who fled America in the '50s, he ended up first in England, where he did a series of films with burgeoning playwright Harold Pinter, then to France where he made some remarkable films in the twilight of his career. According to David Caute's admirable, detailed biography Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life, he was not someone you'd want to know, and the repellant personal characteristics portrayed in the book suggest why he never reached the artistic heights of an Orson Welles, for example. Yet today, when so many movies are so awful, many of his 30-some films are beginning to look better and better.

One of them is THE CRIMINAL. A frank account of criminal and prison life, it's an ur-OZ, alternating between the rigid class system behind bars and the hedonism of a pre-Swinging London. Johnny Bannion (Stanley Baker) is introduced in the slammer, where he rules the roost through charisma and loyal followers jockeying for power within his orbit. He has a number of mumble-mouthed underlings to laugh at his jokes and do his bidding, and he has a strange competitive relationship with the head guard, Barrows (Patrick Magee, later of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE). When he is released, Bannion instantly puts into play a race track heist he has plotted through the three years of his sentence. The job comes off, but a dumped girlfriend betrays him (shades of BREATHLESS). Returned to prison, he has to make a series of compromises and details to get out and get the money, which he has buried. The film ends on a bleak, wintry note.

Based on a screenplay by Jimmy Sangster, a person with an actual criminal past, then massively re-written by television writer Alun Owen, who later went on to write Beatle movies, and also revised under the consultation of British underworld figure Albert Dimes, THE CRIMINAL is tough stuff, much tougher than even American prison films or noirs set in prison, such as BRUTE FORCE. It's a social Darwinist cesspool of rule by strength and power, and woe betide the inept fool who snitches on his mates (the film opens with a sequence of retribution on a snitch).

Though the materials of the plot — prison intrigues, heists — seemed common to reviewers of the time today they appear unusually realistic. A party sequence is almost a precursor of Fellini's descent into hardy partying at the end of LA DOLCE VITA, and the sexual swinging within the criminal milieu is portrayed with uncommon frankness (if not admiration). The heist itself is no intricate Kubrickian wind up toy, but almost an afterthought. We aren't shown any of its details and the mechanics of its workings are mysterious. This isn't RIFIFI. Instead, Losey is more interested in the consequences and intrigues of the heist. John Houseman, who knew Losey back in the '30s when they both worked for the Federal Theater Project, disliked the director, whom he viewed as an opportunist "with an appetite for setting up elaborate feuds." That's a cunning observation. Most of Losey's films, particularly those made from Harold Pinter's screenplays, are tales of intrigues in which feuding antagonists jostle for superiority within a rigid social hierarchy. Like THE SERVANT, made a few years later, a staircase is central to the shifting social classes within the prison. In THE SERVANT, it's the tight spiraling staircase that burrows into the new apartment that the hero has moved into. In THE CRIMINAL, it's the iron staircase that connects the three floors of the prison, the causeway between shifting alliances and uneasy truces between prisoners and guards. Back in the real world, Johnny lives in constant threat of betrayal from girlfriends and associates (the most vile played by Sam Wanamaker).

Anchor Bay does a fine job with THE CRIMINAL. The disc offers a fine black and white transfer remarkably free of artifacts. Supplements are at a minimum. The narrated trailer is in much worse shape than the movie, and the two biographies, for Baker and Losey, are in informative, as is typical of Anchor Bay's textual extras.

Taking ROAD HOUSE Seriously

ROAD HOUSE

• Theatrical release: May 19, 1989
  
• MGM Home Entertainment
  
• $14.95
  
• 114 minutes
  
• R
  
• Region 1
  
• Street Date: February 4, 2002

• Single disc
  
• Color
  
• Widescreen (2.35:1) transfer enhanced for widescreen televisions
  
• Animated, musical menu with 20-chapter scene selection
  
• Dual sided, dual layered disc
  
• Dolby Digital English and French stereo, Spanish mono
  
• English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese subtitles
  
• Closed captioned
  
• Keep case

• Cast: Patrick Swayze, Ben Gazzara, Kelly Lynch, Sam Elliott, Red West
  
• Directed by Rowdy Herrington
  
• Credited writers: David Lee Henry and Hilary Henkin

Plot in one sentence: Professional bouncer is brought in to save a bar under threat from a local gangster.

Extras:

• Theatrical trailer (1:55)

If it's possible to love a film for only one line of its dialogue, ROAD HOUSE is that film.

However, there are other things to love about it. One enjoyable component is an impossibly blonde Kelly Lynch as a foxy ER doctor. Another is venerable sage Sam Elliott as a weathered bar bouncer. And until the film descends into a confusing and messy last sequence, ROAD HOUSE is an enjoyable revenge genre story with a despicable villain or two.

I guess if you were a responsible film reviewer you'd have to say that ROAD HOUSE is a junky movie, but at the very least it's fun junk. Patrick Swayze is the mono-monikered Dalton, a professional bouncer who helps keep nightclubs in order. He is summoned to a town outside Kansas City to help out the owner of the Double Deuce. The DD is one of many victims of town gang lord Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara), who used to date the local doctor (Lynch), who is the niece of the local car parts shop owner (Elvis acolyte Red West). Dalton soon learns that not only does he have to clean up the bar, he has to clean up the whole damn town, and to that end he summons his best friend Wade Garrett (Elliott).

Dalton is "the best damn cooler in the business," and in case you didn't know that bar bouncers, like bike messengers (QUICKSILVER) and arm wrestlers (OVER THE TOP), had a cult around them, this film is here to tell you so. Everyone is in awe of Dalton, whose reputation precedes him. And he is presented as the perfect man. He can stitch his own wounds and change his own tires. Everyone likes him, from the farmer he rents a room from to the patrons of the club he helps "cool." He performs tai chi in the dawn light and reads Jim Harrison in his off hours (Swayze has a wonderful actorial moment when his attention is pulled from the book to the pool orgy raging across the pond from his room. He has to drag his eyes from a page, a gesture one sees in real life all the time, but which I've never seen in a movie before).

ROAD HOUSE is also has remarkably clever dialogue. Dalton explains that "Nobody ever wins a fight," and Garrett works in as a bouncer in a bar whose patrons are so dumb that the bathroom "has a sign hanging over the urinal that says, 'Don't eat the big white mint.'" And this film may be the first instance in the history of American culture in which the phrase "My way or the highway" was uttered.

ROAD HOUSE was made back in the day when films rated R actually had nudity and violence in them. But the film's roots stretch back much further, to redneck noirs such as THUNDER ROAD and Phil Karlson's THE PHENIX CITY STORY, and his later revenge fantasies WALKING TALL and FRAMED, tales of the lone man who must clean up a town (themselves premises that hark back to western clichés) or best a racketeer. In this film, Gazarra has Jackie Treehorn status, lazily controlling the town with an oddball gang of misfits. It's not entirely clear how Wesley manages to hold such sway over the citizens, but one thing is sure: Villains have never before cackled with sadistic pleasure over their misdeeds as they do in ROAD HOUSE.

Patrick Swayze is the embodiment of the fact that in movies dancers make the best movie fighters. Think back on how lovely Elvis looked when he was engaged in a brawl, or how smooth and elegant Brando, who moves like a dancer, appears when he is punching some scum-sucking pig. Think of all he WEST SIDE STORY gang members. That's what's missing from modern action movies, the sense of violence as a ballet rather than the definitive blowing up of snarling villains.

Oh, and that great line of dialogue? I hate to spoil it but it occurs when number one enforcer Jimmy (Marshall Teague) and Dalton are fighting to the death. When Jimmy thinks he has the upper hand, he brags dismissively, "I used to fuck guys like you in prison." This is just before he gets his throat torn out.

The Spy Who Walked Out in the Cold

SMILEY'S PEOPLE

• First television broadcast: 1982
  
• Acorn Media
  
• $69.95
  
• 324 minutes
  
• NR
  
• Region 1
  
• Street Date: January 28, 2003

• Three disc set
  
• Color
  
• Good full frame transfer of the original 16mm image
  
• Both static-musical and silent-animated menus with 5-chapter scene selection per episode
  
• One single-sided dual-layered disc, followed by two single-sided, singled-layered discs
  
• Dolby Digital two channel mono
  
• Close captioned
  
• Four page insert
  
• Bad layer switch at about 10:53 of episode two
  
• Folding digi-pak

• Cast: Alec Guinness, Michael Byrne, Bill Patterson, Siân Phillips, Beryl Reid, Bernard Hepton, Michael Gough, Curd Jürgens, Barry Foster, Patrick Stewart
  
• Directed by Simon Langton
  
• Credited writer: John Hopkins and John Le Carré from Le Carré's novel
• Significant music: elegiac score by Patrick Gowers

Plot in one sentence: George Smiley returns from retirement to finally foil his Soviet counterpart.

Extras:

• "A Conversation with John Le Carré, March 8, 2002"(19:30)
• John Le Carré biography (six screens)
• Production notes (11 screens)
• Filmographies: Alec Guinness (six screens), Cürd Jurgens (one screen), Bernard Hepton (one screen), Beryl Reid (one screen), Anthony Bate (one screen), Eileen Atkins (two screens), Michael [Michel] Lonsdale (one screen), Barry Foster (one screen), Michael Byrne (one screen), Patrick Stewart (two screens), Bill Patterson (two screens)

After the joyous occasion of TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY's release on DVD, following years of samizdat tape trading among its fans, it is perhaps inevitable that the release of the mini-series's sequel, SMILEY'S PEOPLE, should come as something of a disappointment. But the disappointment is not born of a predictable emotional let down. There have been significant changes in the character of George Smiley (Alec Guinness), who is in large part the reason for watching these shows. There was also a change in the team that put the mini-series together, the excellent writer Arthur Hopcraft and the experienced director John Irvin succeeded by writers John Hopkins and John Le Carré himself, and TV-oriented director Simon Langton.

In this tale, retired British intelligence administrator George Smiley learns that one of his old contacts, General Vladimir (Curd Jurgens), has died. The government asks him to investigate and quiet the incident, but Smiley soon learns that Vladimir was on to something—a chink in the armor of Smiley's old Soviet nemesis Karla (Patrick Stewart). Becoming something of a rogue agent, Smiley retraces Vladimir's steps and learns enough to get the service excited about an operation whose result should be Karla's defection.

One of my favorite scenes in the source novel is one in which Smiley revisits the park where Vladimir met his death. There he re-traces Vladimir's steps and tries to figure out what happened. In the book it is a multi-layered psychological event. The reader follows three tracks at once: Smiley's walk, his imagination of Vladimir's walk, and Smiley's thoughts. It's a bravura piece of writing. Here the sequence is shorn of its multi-dimensionality and turned into a straightforward, calm portrayal of Smiley walking around.

In fact Smiley walks around quite a bit in this mini-series. While TINKER felt carefully culled from its complex source novel, SMILEY'S PEOPLE, which comes from a book of about the same length, feels padded. Smiley walks here, he walks there. There are lots of shots of Smiley getting out of a car, closing the door, walking down the street, walking up the steps of a porch, looking around the street, knocking on the door, and waiting. After all this, someone comes to answer, and finally some oblique dialogue starts. The mini-series is very interested in showing Smiley being a spy: he finds drop-offs, develops photos, sews them into his coat, and so on. Yet for all this activity, Guinness's Smiley doesn't feel very active. He doesn't seem very happy, either. SMILEY'S Smiley is much different from TINKER's. Here he is irritable, angry, impatient with waiters and hotel people and his own spy staff (by the way, look for Alan Rickman in a miniscule cameo). SMILEY'S PEOPLE is one of those rare Le Carré stories that actually ends with unambiguous triumph for the forces of good, but no one seems especially happy about that. Smiley is so dyspeptic that Toby Esterhase (Bernard Hepton), one of the suspects and buffoons from TINKER, becomes the hero here, one of the few people to show enthusiasm for anything.

Though 21-years-old, SMILEY'S PEOPLE is technically a little "newer" than TINKER TAILOR, and therefore Acorn Media's three disc transfer looks a little better than its predecessor, for reasons explained last week. As before, the transfer is not a "restoration," but there are fewer distractions on this disc. Also as before, the audio track is more than adequate for the often silent story.

Supplements mirror the contents of TINKER. We get the second part of "A Conversation with John Le Carré, March 8, 2002," which is about 20 minutes of chat from the author, talking to an unseen interlocutor. Here, he goes into much more detail about Smiley, the character's antecedents, and Guinness's impact on his ability to write more Smiley adventures. The rest of the extras are also similar: a bio of John Le Carré, production notes about the making of the series, and filmographies for cast members. A four-page insert offers a cast list and a glossary of terms and characters, but for some reason this selection is much more informative. As with TINKER, interested viewers seeking more information can consult Smiley's Circus, by David Monaghan (St. Martin's, 207 pages, $3.95, ISBN 0 312 90127 5).

NEXT TIME: LIVING IN OBLIVION, SWEPT AWAY, PREACHING TO THE PERVERTED, and more!

E-MAIL THE AUTHOR | ARCHIVES