McCarthy Movie Mayhem!!!

More vintage Frank McCarthy 1960s movie advertising artwork — some real doozies in this batch.

 
The late, great Jack Cardiff’s lean, mean The Mercenaries (1968) was released stateside as Dark of the Sun and it was another of the somewhat anachronistic African-set actioners of the decade. It wasn’t politically ’sensitive’ enough then (as McCarthy’s promo art makes quite clear), and it hasn’t aged well in that regard in our more politically-correct era, especially regarding mercenary activity in the then-Congo. It’s a tough movie to find/see today and is usually censored when and if it does pop up.

As you can see from McCarthy’s one-sheet, it’s also the first feature film to wield a chainsaw as a weapon, anticipating the decidedly nasty turn horror movies took in the 1970s. McCarthy was there before Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper popularized the motif via Last House on the Left and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

In fact, a lot of these masculine epics were becoming increasingly anachronistic in the ’60s. Many suffered from their tiresome weddings of flaccid scripts, bloated casts and even more bloated running times, and turgid melodramatics, not to mention their bone-headed stupidity (Krakatoa, for instance, was actually west of Java; still, it sports some nifty Eugène Lourié miniature effects photography). But Frank McCarthy always delivered on the poster art!

Few 1960s war movies were as painfully stupid as John Wayne’s jingoist pro-Vietnam War opus The Green Berets (1968). Krakatoa was indeed west of Java, but John Wayne ended his polemic with the sun setting on the wrong side of the entire fucking world. That pretty much summed up the whole movie.

I was only 13 when I saw it with my pro-war poppa, but I was already radicalized against the war and that wasn’t a fun night at the movies; it was my turning point with viewing John Wayne movies, too. It was impossible to take him at face value after suffering through that ordeal. It at least sported the unprecedentedly gory onscreen impaling of one of its nominal supporting heroes (via a nasty Vietcong bamboo-spike booby trap) to liven up the climax; that special effect shot stuck with me longer than the rest of the film. 

Also worth mentioning — Krakatoa: East of Java may have been directed by the man who counted Roger and Gene Corman cheapies like Night of the Blood Beast (1958) and Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959) among his early efforts, but Wayne co-directed Green Berets with Ray Kellogg, the Texan special-effects expert who had earlier directed The Killer Shrews, The Giant Gila Monster (both 1959) and My Dog, Buddy (1960)! Hmmmmmm, does that count for or against him?

Again, though, a rousing McCarthy art job on the one-sheet. Sigh.

Then again, I didn’t care in 1969 how dopey an opus like Where Eagles Dare was. It was wall-to-wall WW2 mayhem, with Clint Eastwood mowing down Nazis by the truckload (literally) and high-end actors like Richard Burton and Patrick Wymark lending thespian chops to the loopy Alistair MacLean plot twists; I saw it more than once at local drive-ins in double-and-triple bills.

Again, the McCarthy poster art promised a lot, which in this case at least the movie did deliver in spades. I also loved some of the other action and war films McCarthy’s poster art sold me on before I was in the theater… and some, like The Blue Max (1966), had other surprises. Much to my dad’s chagrin, the film offered my eleven-year-eyes my first peek at Ursula Andress taking a bath. “Don’t you dare tell your mother that was in the movie!” my Dad furtively whispered to me.

On the other hand, most of the ’60s westerns were always fun viewing, and these two (above, below) were essentially western-war movies. As this was McCarthy’s preferred genre to paint, the one-sheets were glorious.

As I grew into my teen years the harder edge of the new breed of ’60s westerns proved especially appealing, and few domestic westerns of its year were as lean and mean as Ralph Nelson’s sleeper Duel at Diablo (1966). It was a great ride; three years later, Nelson helmed the far more brutal Soldier Blue.

FYI, Neal Hefti’s musical score for Duel at Diablo was a major favorite of mine, too, even after Ennio Morricone’s music for the Sergio Leone westerns (which I, like most Americans, wouldn’t see until 1967) had irrevocably changed the landscape. Riz Ortolani’s score for The Glory Guys (1965) was sweet, and it was a pretty cool western in its own right (from a script by Sam Peckinpah), but Ortolani’s score didn’t hold a candle to the Hefti score for Duel! Give it a listen, below.