The V.I.P.s (1963)

Half a dozen First Class passengers suffer hardships when their trans-Atlantic flight is delayed by London fog.

Elizabeth Taylor headlines this glacial melodrama based loosely on a real-life event that happened to Vivian Liegh when she tried to escape husband Laurence Olivier with a younger actor (here played by Richard Burton and Louis Jordan, respectively). Their flight was delayed, giving Olivier the time to find them and talk her out of it!

Supporting plots come from a desperate businessman Rod Taylor and his unrequited secretary Maggie Smith. Orson Wells is a film director trying to flee Britain to avoid a tax penalty, as his ditzy actress girlfriend makes a play for power. And Margaret Rutherford in an Oscar-winning role as a dotty member of the fading royal class who’d rather get drunk than get on a plane. In a surrealist twist, actor Richard Wattis plays a nearly identical officious airline manager in Come Fly with Me, made the same year.

Boring and impersonal, there’s nothing to do in this film but briefly admire the modern architecture and then wait at the bar until your flight is called.

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Jack the Giant Killer (1962)

It was a spiteful rip-off of Ray Harryhausen’s 7th Voyage of Sinbad. The stop-motion animation wizard was shopping for investors when he was turned down by producer Edward Small before the movie was funded by Columbia. Years later after Sinbad was a hit Small decided he could make his own version without Harryhausen, even going so far as to hire the same hero and villain, and the same director!

Harryhausen sued and won but the film had already bombed in theaters. To avoid a total financial loss on the television rights Small retooled the knight and sorcery fantasy as a musical, dubbing the actors voices and manipulating the film to make the actors mouths match the new lyrics!

This didn’t help the fact that the film already boasted some of the worst special effects ever shot in color: lumakeyed goblins that only shoot cartoon fire, unfinished puppetoons that sag like melting play-doh, and a hilarious cross-eyed sea monster you just wanna hug. Harryhausen it ain’t!

So what a surprise under all this camp to find such lovely photography and vivid costumes! Truly fantastic cat-eyed witches, a plush medieval castle in dense textures and tapestries, and colorful lighting that runs the gamut from storybook pictures to soft paintings.