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| Images courtesy of Paramount Pictures |
Late English Bullitt, The Friends of Eddie Coyle and
Krull director Peter Yates and Lawrence of Arabia screen icon
Peter O’Toole were both hitting their creative strides by the time they united
on the 1971 Eastmancolor Panavision anti-war action adventure/dark comedy Murphy’s
War, a film that proved arduous and ultimately ended the creative working
relationship of Yates and his longtime producer Michael Deeley. Having done several films together, the
future Blade Runner producer described the film as the toughest shoot of
his career with several difficult stunts performed by the film’s main actor including
but not limited to flying a real seaplane with the camera strapped to the
aircraft.
For all of the blood, sweat and tears shed creatively on the
set of Murphy’s War, the film flopped and was panned by critics. Thankfully in recent years through the
efforts of Indicator and now Arrow Video who have put together a deluxe limited
special edition blu-ray of the film, this mostly completely forgotten hard
boiled simmer cooker is a bit like a patently absurd and ultimately nihilistic
thriller spoken of the same breath as The African Queen by way of Das
Boot. A movie that feels somewhat dangerous
to watch with Peter O’Toole on absolute fire with the actors climbing, jumping
and reeling all over the screen, moviegoers now have a chance to assess this
difficult but highly entertaining simmer cooker for themselves.
In the waning days of WWII, merchant ship ‘Mount Kyle’ is
downed by a German U-boat near the Venezuelan coast with the survivors gunned
down, miraculously leaving one lone survivor, Murphy (Peter O’Toole) who drifts
ashore into the hands of Dr. Hayden (O’Toole wife Sian Phillips) who runs a missionary
settlement outside the Orinoco River. Murphy
is lucky to be alive, but his presence on the settlement courts trouble when he
catches wind of the same German U-boat downriver and a longstanding grudge and
thirst for vengeance drives the increasingly manic, single-minded Murphy
towards mounting and launching his own personal war against the Germans. With the help of a boater played by Philippe
Noiret, Murphy creates a makeshift arsenal and hastily flies a seaplane over
the U-boat, sparking threats of wrathful retaliation against the settlement. Then the war officially ends, but not if the
obsessed and destructive Murphy can help it.
Partially a survival wartime thriller, partially an
absurdist lunatic takedown of war in general with the titular Murphy’s War likely
engendering more harm than good in the long run, Peter Yates’ adaptation of Max
Catto’s 1969 novel of the same name written for the screen by Stirling Silliphant
is a beautiful, watery, sweaty and grungy WWII film that feels a bit like a
precursor to Man of La Mancha with lone O’Toole absurdly battling the
windmill. Shot on location in the hot
Venezuelan summer with wide open vistas of the lake and riverside fronts lensed
exquisitely by legendary cinematographer Douglas Slocombe with minimal to no
music save for some subtle renderings by John Barry and Ken Thorne, the
Hemdale/Deeley-Yates coproduction distributed by Paramount Pictures is like a
panoramic widescreen reimagining of John Huston’s aforementioned The African
Queen involving a scruffy, alcoholic miscreant who takes on the Nazis.
Performances from the three leads are solid across the board
with Sian Phillips and Philippe Noiret serving as the voices of reason trying
to bring Murphy back down to Earth. O’Toole
initially channels his sing-song Lawrence of Arabia mumblings to his
antihero but eventually a manic and crazed energy predating the madness he
would unleash in The Ruling Class starts to bubble to the surface. Also strong is Horst Janson as the German
submarine Captain who plays up the role of evil Nazi but soon as the war ends
just wants to pack up and go home to normality like everyone else. That the war officially ends just proves to
be an even more neurotic motivator for Murphy.
Despite all the lush production values, the Venezuelan
location photography and the larger-than-life screen presence of O’Toole who is
like a monkey climbing the walls and ceiling, hanging upside down and crawling
atop the frame, Murphy’s War sadly crashed and burned critically and
commercially. While differing somewhat
from the source material, Deeley and Yates clashed over the film’s antiwar
sentiment and the difficulty of shooting with real U-boats and a very real
OA-12 Duck aircraft flown by Peter O’Toole in the movie proved too much for
Deeley and they parted ways. A shame the
film suffered such a dismal fate of becoming a textbook footnote as it is an
underrated postwar nihilist film spoken of the same breath as Henri-Georges
Clouzot or Wolfgang Petersen with its uncompromising foray into madness and
wartime murder. A solid little gem more
than worthy of reappraisal and rediscovery in today’s boutique label unearthing-of-films
world.
--Andrew Kotwicki
