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As an addition to seemingly basic movie genres such as musicals, westerns, and gangster films, we might need to focus on one more genre of Films where aging, quasi-alcoholic, ex-British classical actors put on khaki pants and shoot machine guns. You are virtually done casting the movie if you decided to go for almost every actor and actress in Hollywood, and that is why the plot is far too predictable and remains a mystery as to why audiences decide to watch the same film over and over again.
Take, for example, The Wild Geese, on a linear level, we can see the following formula: A mercenary gets a contract, surreptitiously jumps into an African country in the middle of a civil war and abducts the leader of the populist movement. Richard Burton is the mercenary. He sets the fee and tries to entice his old buddies Roger Moore and Richard Harris to assist him. Where do they find Moore? Oh, he’s living over a casino, and Harris is cast as the father of the world’s most irritating child actor.
When Burton, Harris and Moore are finally caught in the same scene, it’s quite a sight. Each actor seems to be performing in order to make it clear to us that he holds the screenplay in more contempt than the other two. There is even a point, so assist me, when Burton snaps the door in the direction of the child actor. by which point the little tyke has his mouth fully open in preparation to state another overbearingly courteous “Yes, sir!” What’s worse, Harris is on the screen at the same time, and as the two men turn their attention back to each other, you can literally see them sighing in relief.
Another layer of the plot features Winston Ntshona playing the role of an African liberal leader and Hardy Kruger as a racist Afrikaner who literally runs out of the bush carrying Kruger on his back. If you seek the most unreasonable dialogues of today or any year in the picture, look empirically at the incident when Hardened Afrikaaner is persuaded by Ntshona’s sermon on universal brotherhood that lasted 60 seconds. Of course. As the cherry on the cake, they stretch their fingers towards each other while gasping their last breath.
Andrew V. McLaglen is the director…a passible action director at best who made “Bandolero!” and “The Undefeated” in 1969, has little idea how to direct multiple men on a moving screen, and yet spends the last half hour doing nothing else. For practice maybe. In this scene, soldiers run out of the bush, shoot guns, throw grenades, and get shot or blown up. With relentless intercutting of spectacles, McLaglen pairs each character with the fitting end that matches the character stereotype.
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