Director: Don Siegel
Cast: Michael Caine, Donald Pleasence, Delphine Seyrig

- Michael Caine discussing The Black Windmill

There have certainly been a lot of unanswered questions that have faced mankind ever since there has been such thing as mankind on this Earth of ours. Some questions have first popped up more recently in man's timeline, such as why popular music started to fall apart in quality around 1989, and has continued its nosedive ever since. Also, there is the question as to why Canadian writers of books, movies, radio, and television shows have not produced all that many examples of science fiction and fantasy when other countries have been able to do so successfully. But there are also questions a lot older than those two particular questions. One such question is why for thousands of years, all sorts of people have decided to take on an occupation that it would seem for an outside person with a good amount of intelligence to be an extremely bad decision. For instance, when I was kid many years ago, I always wondered why anyone would want to work for Cracked Magazine. Even in my youth, I could tell that anyone working under publisher Robert C. Sproul would instantly have what little genuine humor they had lingering in their minds severely held back or instantly evaporated, and as a result would come up with "comic" material that was way beyond lame. Under those conditions, I could understand why former Cracked contributors like Al Jaffee, Jack Davis, Jack Rikard, and Angelo Torres eventually left the magazine to work completely for Mad Magazine, but I never understood why Mad Magazine's Lou Silverstone and Don Martin (despite Martin's documented bitter feud with publisher William Gaines concerning royalties) eventually left a good thing and went to work for Cracked in its dying years. Indeed, the wacky humor from Silverstone and Martin became severely watered down immediately after they left Mad Magazine.

I've sometimes wished that I could have sat down with any contributor to Cracked Magazine to ask them what they were thinking when they decided to work for a publication with such a bad reputation. Did the contributors think that what they wrote or drew for the magazine was funny? What did they think about working for an outfit with a bad reputation? Were they just desperate for work, and decided to throw away respectability for a steady paycheck? Unanswered questions like those will loom in the back of my mind up to my dying day. Actually, I have many other unanswered questions in my mind about other occupations that to me seem more trouble than they may be worth. One of those occupations is being in the world of espionage. From what I've learned about the art of spying over the years, having some sort of occupation in this field seems to come with all sorts of problems that to me would drain any possible enjoyment to come from the work. Do people that enter espionage somehow get enjoyment from work where most of the time there is absolutely nothing exciting happening? Are people who work in espionage frustrated by the fact that they can't tell their friends or even their family members what true business they are involved in? How would they be able to muster enough enthusiasm or will to put an enemy operative "out of commission" if they were ordered to do so by their superiors? For that matter, how do people in "the business" feel about working in an occupation where even the lowliest employee could potentially have a target on his or her back from the enemy that they are pursuing?

Watching movies about people involved in the espionage business, I have frequently seen additional problems of being a spy. It seems in the great majority of espionage movies I have seen, there is a huge amount of backstabbing going on. You have superiors of the spies disavowing them should the spies get in the least bit of trouble. Also, there are sure a lot of double agents and moles in what seems like every cinematic spy agency. It happens so frequently that frankly, I am quite sick of it. That, and what I earlier brought up about what I have learned about espionage over the years, both the profession and espionage movies sure don't seem all that glamorous to me. It takes a lot nowadays for me to get enough interest to watch an espionage movie. What got me to give the espionage movie The Black Windmill a whirl were two things: It had the always entertaining Michael Caine (Surrender) in the lead role, and it was directed by the legendary Don Siegel, who in his career directed many good and memorable movies I've liked such as Dirty Harry, Charley Varrick, and The Beguiled. In the movie, Caine plays an Englishman named John Tarrant, who has managed to balance being the British secret service and being a married (though currently separated) man with a young child. As the movie starts, Tarrant is deep at work investigating indications that a worldwide criminal syndicate involved in illegal arms trading is planning to soon sell weapons to the IRA. But his work with that is abruptly put on hold when his wife calls him to let him know their son has been kidnapped. Tarrant at first doesn't tell his superiors of this, trying to deal with it on his own. But when a mysterious man known simply as "Drabble" subsequently calls Tarrant and informs him he knows all about Tarrant's top secret work, Tarrant is forced to tell his superior Cedric Harper (Donald Pleasence, Watch Out, We're Mad) about what has recently happened. When "Drabble" informs Tarrant and Harper that he wants a fortune in diamonds Harper recently acquired, both men know there must be a mole in their midst. It doesn't take long, however, for Harper to suspect that Tarrant had something to do with the kidnapping, and Tarrant is eventually on the run. Tarrant quickly realizes it's up to himself, with no help, to save his son's life.

With Siegel as director and Caine in the lead role, I wondered as I sat down to watch The Black Windmill if it would have any new angles on the well-worn subject of spying... or kidnapping plots, for that matter. Unfortunately, there isn't all that much new shown for either one of these plots; just about everything concerning these plots you will have seen many times in other movies. I guess the plans the authorities make once learning of the kidnapping do come across as more realistic than usual, but not all that much more. And while this realistic viewpoint includes showing that trying to solve a kidnapping is long and hard work, eventually all this backfires, with the movie seemingly just stretching this story out. All of what I have said about the kidnapping also applies to the spying parts of the movie - it feels somewhat more realistic than usual, but eventually things go way past the breaking point. But there are deeper problems than just those in this script, namely a lot of things that just aren't explained. How did the kidnappers know where Tarrant's son would be at the time they kidnapped him? Why didn't the authorities intercept the registered letter that was sent to Tarrant after the kidnapping? How was Tarrant able to leave England and get to Paris when the authorities were already looking for him? The further lazy writing gets even worse when towards the end of the movie, Tarrant is practically given on a silver platter the clues he needs to track down where exactly his son is being held. The many script flaws are capped by the last few minutes, by not only making it no surprise as to who "Drabble" is (there aren't exactly a lot of potential suspects in this story, by the way), but also not illustrating the fate of one of the movie's key characters.

With the story elements for The Black Windmill being this inadequate, any director would find it difficult to generate any compensation for the weak script. Actually, with a pro like Don Siegel in the director's chair, some parts of the movie are a bit more punched up than you might think. The most interesting part of Siegel's direction is how he portrays this world. He keeps almost all of the focus on the characters directly involved, and seldom shows anything of what's going on in the outside world. It's an insulated feeling, one that keeps us focused on what's happening with little to no distractions (there's also very little music played.) Siegel also puts in a little punch here and there, from the utter feeling of isolation in the opening sequence, to bursts of action when the story moves to Paris and also later in the climactic sequence. At the same time, there are some quieter moments, such as Tarrant's heist of his superior's office, that do generate interest or even excitement. But even with those nice touches, some of Siegel's other direction seems very misguided. The main problem with the movie is that it generally feels quite slow, with many scenes with potential excitement being completely drained of it just before they were filmed. There are a few times when the narrative briefly gets to be genuinely dull. For example, the movie, while as I said before does not show how Tarrant smuggled himself to France, does show how he subsequently smuggled himself back to England. This sequence, showing his hovercraft trip and then hiding in the back of a bus while customs inspectors are doing their thing just goes on and on until you want to shout at the screen, "Enough already!"

The Black Windmill had a very capable cast, not just with the presence of Caine and Pleasence, but also John Vernon (Savage Streets) as one of the chief adversaries Cain's character has to struggle with. Though as it turns out, all of the actors have to struggle to make something out of their roles, which are often as badly written as the story. Vernon manages to generate some heat by using his familiar stony and rough charisma, and actually makes some extra effort to come across as both coldly menacing and quite smart. But we don't really get to know this person particularly well; though we learn of his connection to the conspiracy, we don't know him all that personally. Pleasence, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be showing he gives a particular darn about this project based on his low-key performance, maybe in part because we also don't learn that much about his character. Then, of course, there is Caine. He's unfortunately forced to work with a character that, due to the script and the direction, comes across as not terribly likable, mostly due to the fact his character never seems all that concerned about his son's kidnapping. It is said at one point that he was trained to not show emotion, but even then his outlook is somewhat hard to swallow. The few times his character does get to emote, it's in a pretty labored and unengaging manner, making his character even more unbelievable and unsympathetic. It's possible that Caine strictly did this movie for the money, like with some other movies in his career, meaning that he didn't bring the enthusiastic spirit in many of his other movies to this particular production. A spirit, if it had been used here, might have livened things up somewhat. I'm sure you see by this point why I wasn't very enthusiastic about The Black Windmill, though I may have portrayed it as being even worse than what my true opinion was. As slow, unenthusiastic, and misguided as it was, I admit that it never got to be truly and excruciatingly boring. But all the same, should you watch it, you'll long before the end wish like me that you chose a much better movie to watch, such as one of Caine's earlier Harry Palmer espionage movies, like The Ipcress File.

(Posted February 3, 2024)