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Richard Fleischer

The Vikings – Richard Fleischer (1958)

IMDb.com

I am not sure how this film entered my watch-list. It is an ancient Viking film. The story reminds a bit about the contemporary series. The Vikings go to Britain, bring back an Englishman, find a way to navigate (here “through the fog” and with another device than in the series) and ravage Britain.

As you can expect from such an old film, the acting is not great, the music is classical and the stages and effects are poor to our current ‘standards’. In spite of that the film is still somewhat enjoyable.

The Vikings are much more than nowadays portrayed as drunk barbarians who have some weird practices. Some obligatory romance and drama is added.

Not a film to put high on your list, but amusing to watch some time.

Soylent Green * Richard Fleischer * 1973

This film has been on my wishlist for ages (slumberingly). When it was anounced on a TV channel that I do not have, I decided to finally rent this old sci-fi cult classic. “Soylent Green” is nice, especially for the time it was made it. It looks a bit like “The Prisoner”, but more forced sci-fi, but still looking 70’ies. The story plays in 2022 New York where actually just one corporation has control over the people and in which ‘real food’ is no longer for the masses. A police-man investigates a murder and runs into a massive conspiracy. The film has a few nice findings and the title somehow is the main element of the film, but it can be explained in different ways. Entertaining and when you put the story on modern society, thought-provoking as well. A good classic.
-3.5-

The Boston Strangler * Richard Fleischer * 1968

I usually don’t care too much for old films, but for some reason I wanted to see this one. I am glad I did!
Of course the film is about the Boston Strangler, a serial killer from the beginning of the previous century in the USA. The story isn’t told too great, but there is something about this film that does make it interesting. The montage of the film has some very original aspects. Often Fleischer used a picture-in-picture way of showing different scenes. Sometimes the different pictures show different things like the first five murders, but sometimes the pictures show different angles of the same scene, which is really well-done. You see -for example- a close up of the face of someone driving a car, but also the car from the front and from the back. Often a scene starts full-screen, but later zooms in something and then other pictures start to pop up. I don’t believe I have seen something similar in any other film, either old or recent.
The film itself is interesting enough to keep my attention for the whole running, so this is definately one of the best old movies that I know.