Main Cast: John Carroll, Adele Mara, Roberto Airaldi, Mona Maris, Jorge Villoldo
Release Year: 1950
Country: US
Run Time: 89 minutes
Plot
Filmed in Argentina, Republic's The Avengers stars John Carroll as a handsome adventurer known as Don Careless. Our Hero hopes to save heroine Maria Moreno (Adele Mara) from a forced marriage to a ruthless revolutionary (Roberto Airaldi). Both Carroll and supporting actor Vincente Padula play dual roles, for reasons that the film makes clear (even though the official studio resumé does not). Billed tenth, Fernando Lamas is given "and introducing" billing in the credits, and never mind that he'd been in films since 1942. The Avengers is based on a novel by Rex Beach. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
John H. Auer - Director, Mick Audsley - Editor, Marvin J. Coil - Editor, Nathan Scott - Composer (Music Score), Pablo Tabernero - Cinematographer, John H. Auer - Producer, Lawrence Kimble - Screenwriter, Aeneas MacKenzie - Screenwriter, Rex Beach - Book Author
Representative Albums: "Died for Your Sins," "Avengers," "American in Me"
Representative Songs: "We Are the One," "I Want In," "Teenage Rebel"
Biography
One of the first and finest bands to emerge from San Francisco's punk scene, the Avengers were originally together for only two years, and they didn't release an album during that period. But their passionate music and uncompromising viewpoints proved to be a major inspiration in a scene that would grow and flourish long after they broke up, and the handful of singles they left behind documented a band of uncommon power and force. Just as importantly, lead singer Penelope Houston was one of the pioneering women of American punk, proving there was a place for female artists in the new music.
The Avengers came together in early 1977, not long after Penelope Houston arrived in San Francisco from her hometown of Seattle, WA. Houston was a new student at San Francisco Art Institute when she met Danny Furious, a recent SFAI graduate who was still a common sight on the campus. Houston was a fan of musicians like Lou Reed and Patti Smith, and she soon discovered that Furious had similar tastes. Furious, who played the drums, was interested in starting a rock band, and he talked an old friend, Greg Ingraham, into coming to San Francisco from Orange County to play guitar. Houston showed up at the fledgling group's rehearsal space one day before the musicians had arrived; after singing along with a stereo through the band's PA system, as Houston put it, "I was so enamored with the power of amplification that I said, 'I'm gonna be your new singer.'"
In June, the Avengers played their first show, opening for the Nuns at San Francisco's pioneering punk venue the Mabuhay Gardens. In August, Jimmy Wisley joined the band as bassist (replacing Jonathan Postal, who went on to form the Readymades), and the Avengers' classic lineup was complete. The band soon became one of the most popular bands on California's budding punk rock scene, though at that time this limited the band to a handful of clubs in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 1977, L.A.'s premier punk label Dangerhouse Records released a three-song EP from the group, featuring "We Are the One," "Car Crash," and "I Believe in Me." The record received enthusiastic reviews and relatively strong sales, but no larger labels were interested in signing the group. In early 1978, the group scored what seemed like a golden opportunity: opening for the Sex Pistols at San Francisco's Winterland on the final date of the notorious British punk band's first American tour. By all accounts, the Avengers delivered an impressive set (stronger than the Pistols, according to many eyewitnesses), and the group struck up a friendship with Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, who agreed to produce a record for the group. But the Avengers first brush with the larger music business left them somewhat disillusioned; Danny Furious later told a journalist, "It was obvious at Winterland -- everyone knew how to behave, everyone knew how to spit, how to dress -- everyone knew how to pack the place. But it was just sensationalism, a spectacle." Adding to the sting was the breakup of the Sex Pistols days after the Winterland show, which led much of the music industry to regard punk as a spent force, making it all the more difficult for bands like the Avengers to be heard.
In late 1978, Steve Jones did in fact produce a session for the group, which would yield a four-song EP, but 1979 was not destined to be a good year for the Avengers. Tensions had grown between Greg Ingraham and Penelope Houston, and at the end of 1978, Ingraham quit the group. He was soon replaced by Brad Kent, but the band's foundation began to crumble, and in late June, after a pair of sold-out farewell shows, the Avengers called it a day. The Jones-produced EP came out later that summer. After the band's breakup, Houston went on to a career as an acoustic-oriented singer/songwriter, and Jimmy Wisley became a longtime member of Chris Isaak's backing group.
In 1983, a San Francisco-based indie label, CD Presents, bought the rights to the Avengers' material, and released a superb 16-song compilation (the self-titled Avengers) that collected their vinyl releases to date along with some unreleased studio material. However, when CD Presents went out of business, the group's recorded legacy went into limbo, and for the next ten years Houston found herself often questioned by fans who were eager to obtain Avengers' recordings. As a result, Houston began collecting live recordings of the band being traded by fans, and with the help of Greg Ingraham, she compiled highlights of the group's live shows and uncirculated demos into an album, The Avengers Died for Your Sins. Houston and Ingraham decided to cut new studio recordings of three Avengers songs for which they could find no adequate recordings; Wisley and Furious opted not to participate, so Houston and Ingraham recorded them as the Scavengers with Joel Reader on bass and Danny "Panic" Sullivan on drums. In 1999, following the release of The Avengers Died for Your Sins, the Scavengers played a handful of live dates in San Francisco, though Houston and Ingraham parted ways again shortly afterward. Following the release of The American in Me in 2004, the two bandmates reconvened once again, this time touring the country for several years with the help of bassist Joel Reader and drummer Luis Illades. ~ Mark Deming, All Music Guide
The film opens with John Steed, agent of The Ministry, in a training course, which he finishes successfully. Next, we see Mrs Emma Peel at home, where she receives a phone call telling her to go to a gentlemen's club - no women allowed - where she meets Steed for the first time. The two head off to the Ministry to meet Mother, who informs them that the Prospero project - an attempt to influence the weather - was sabotaged by... Emma Peel. Mrs Peel claims she is innocent, but she is sent to work alongside Steed to find the real culprit. Mother's off-sider, Father, claims Mrs Peel suffers from a mental disease. They go off to visit Sir August De Wynter, an old ally of The Ministry. He takes an instant liking to Mrs Peel, as they both share a love of weather.
Steed and Emma follow a lead to Wonderland Weather - a business that artificially creates heat where there is cold and rain where it is hot with a special machine - where they discover a dead man in a teddy bear suit. The members of a secret organisation—led by De Wynter—all wear teddy bear suits to disguise their identities. One of them, however, is a double of Emma Peel. Steed arrives in time to save Mrs Peel, as the double jumps off a roof, but disappears. Steed and Emma go off to visit De Wynter at his mansion - but are attacked by mechanical bees. They manage to flee, helped out by Alice, a Ministry agent. Emma is captured by De Wynter, and tries to escape, but finds herself perplexed by the mansion's ever-changing floor plan. She smashes her way through a window, and Steed rescues her. Back at Steed's apartment, however, Mrs Peel is arrested by Father, as Steed visits Invisible Jones, a man inside The Ministry, to investigate the meaning of a map Steed found at Wonderland Weather. Steed determines Father is working with De Wynter after viewing some photos of failed genetic experiments. Father and the Mrs Peel double (from here called Evil Peel) capture Mrs Peel, but are confronted by Mother, who is incapacitated. De Wynter - controlling Prospero and the weather - confronts the world's leaders, boasting that 'weather is not in God's hands, but in mine' and they will buy the weather from him, they will pay a lot for it, and they have got until midnight to pay up.
Father and Evil Peel take Emma to a hot air balloon, where Emma escapes during a snowstorm. Father and Evil Peel perish in an explosion. Invisible Jones determines De Wynter is using the Prospero instruments on a secret island. Emma and Steed arrive at the island. Emma defuses the Prospero device just as a hurricane forms over London. Steed duels De Wynter, and impales him. Emma and Steed escape just as the base self-destructs, and share champagne on the roof of a building with Mother.
Warner Bros., the film's distributor, refused to allow any early press-screenings for movie reviewers that most releases use to generate interest; such a decision if often made when a studio and/or distributor knows a film is terrible and pre-release reviews would only be negative.[1][2][3] The film was originally scheduled to open earlier in the summer, June 1998, but was pushed back until August; often referred to as the late-summer "dumping ground" for films that are not felt to be strong or worthy enough to open on the more lucrative holiday weekends in early summer.[1]
Critical response
The film was given almost universally bad reviews. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 15% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 40 reviews.[4]Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 12 out of 100, based on 19 reviews.[5] The purists disliked it for its disrespect to the original series (particularly the introduction of a romance between Steed and Peel; a carefully ambiguous subject in the series), and the newcomers were lost by all of the attempts to capture the mood of the original. Rod Dreher in the New York Post called the film "a big fat gob of maximum crapulosity, the kind of shallow, stupid, big-budget cowpile that smells of Joel Schumacher".
Further adding to the confusion, after test screenings, the 150-minute film was cut to 89 minutes, sacrificing much coherence and continuity in the process. The New York Times's Janet Maslin noted "At a pared-down, barely rational 100 minutes, "The Avengers" is short but not short enough."[2]
From the Radio Times film review section when the film has been shown on terrestrial British television: "The cult 1960s TV series gets royally shafted by Hollywood in this stunningly designed blockbuster that's stunningly awful in every other department. Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman couldn't be more miscast as John Steed and Emma Peel, here trying to stop villainous Sir August De Wynter (Sean Connery playing himself again) holding the world's weather to ransom and freezing London to an Arctic standstill. Ruthlessly edited before release and packed with arch one-liners, bad puns and vulgar double entendres, this is misguided and misbegotten to a simply staggering degree, while Jeremiah Chechik's mannered direction screeches the action to an unexciting halt at every flat turn. Terrible special effects and zero chemistry between Fiennes and Thurman make this notorious disaster a total waste of everyone's time and energy." (RT reviewer Alan Jones.)
