This 1976 adaptation of Jack Higgins' best-selling WWII novel was a fitting late-'70s swan song for John Sturges. Michael Caine leads a band of principled, Nazi-hating German commandos off to invade Blighty on the sly. Robert Duvall, Donald Sutherland, Jenny Agutter and Donald Pleasance join the action.
The American newspaper heiress' kidnapping and brainwashing by the self-styled urban revolutionaries of the Symbionese Liberation Army, as retold by Paul Schrader. In the title role, Natasha Richardson goes through the trauma with committed desperation, but, despite being based on Hearst's own memoir, you never feel any closer to her, even if Schrader's film is often as claustrophobic as the cupboard in which she was imprisoned for 50 days.
Beautifully gauged 1989 romantic comedy from the undervalued Steve Kloves, with Jeff and Beau Bridges glorious as two competitive but complementary brothers who constitute a lounge act. When they employ Michelle Pfeiffer's seductive Susie Diamond as chanteuse, Jeff's hard-boiled heart goes whoopee. Oscar-nominated Pfeiffer, cleverly, sings well but not too well. Lovely.
A '70s remake of the Hitchcock classic, with Angela Lansbury as an English nanny kidnapped on a German train on the eve of WWII. Can dizzy US heiress Cybill Shepherd foil this Nazi plot with the aid of rugged news photographer Elliott Gould? It might have worked if they'd played it straight; instead, they go for screwball comedy, and it's a disaster.
David Essex and his cheeky grin may have starred in two of the '70s' great British rock'n'roll fantasy movies, That'll Be The Day and Stardust, but he came a cropper in this 1980 motorbiking mess. Champion racers macho it out—it's clichéd, lazy and sexist. Then again, how many movies star Essex, Beau Bridges and Harry H Corbett?
