A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Pros:  Everything. Cons:  None. Ramsey: Colonel Von Luger, it is the sworn duty of all officers to try to escape. If they cannot escape, then it is their sworn duty to cause the enemy to use an inordinate number of troops to guard them, and their sworn duty to harass the enemy to the best of their ability.  After more than a decade of trying to get a studio to film a movie based on Paul Brickhill's book  The Great Escape,  John Sturges finally got backing from the Mirisch Company to recreate the true-life story of Allied officers escaping from a German POW camp in 1944. While the screenplay by W. Burnett and James ( Shogun ) Clavell fictionalizes the characters and compresses events to fit a feature film's running time, the details of the escape attempt are true-to-life. Even better, the film was actually shot in Germany (even the thickest wooded areas in California don't come close to resembling the Black Fore...

Ice Station Zebra (1968) Directed by John Sturges Screenplay by Douglas Heyes, Harry Julian Fink, and W.R. Burnett, based on the novel by Alistair MacLean Starring: Rock Hudson, Patrick MacGoohan, Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown John Sturges'  Ice Station Zebra , based on Alistair MacLean's novel and written by Douglas Heyes Harry Julian Fink, and W.R. Burnett, is a Cold War-era "restoring the balance of power" film.  It focuses on a mixed bag of Navy and Marine personnel, a Russian defector, and a mysterious British agent on a risky mission to the Arctic Circle to retrieve the contents of a crashed Soviet spy satellite's cameras.  On paper, this 1968 technothriller looks promising, considering it features a U.S. nuclear sub (the USS  Tigerfish ), a noteworthy cast (Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Patrick MacGoohan, and ex-football great Jim Brown), and one of those race-the-Russians-to-the-gizmo plots that would later be the heart of such novels as...

Although the average film-goer may not be aware of this, some of Hollywood’s best films are often inspired by movies made in other countries, such as those directed by Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, whose  Rashomon, The Hidden Fortress  and  Yojimbo  inspired American films such as  The Outrage, Star Wars  and  Last Man Standing.  (Kurosawa’s  Yojimbo,  in particular, was also the somewhat controversial template for Sergio Leone’s  A Fistful of Dollars , but  Last Man Standing  is an officially sanctioned remake.)  Perhaps one of the most popular Americanized remakes of a Kurosawa “Easterner” is 1960’s  The Magnificent Seven,  a Western written by William Roberts and officially acknowledged (in the main title sequence) as being inspired by Toho Films’  Seven Samurai  (1954)   .  That  Seven Samurai  could be adapted fairly easily from a film set in a medieval Japanese setting ...