Just watched an atrocious movie the other day, Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline (1979). I only did it for the sake of the centrepiece of the story, Audrey Hepburn, and even she couldn’t liven it up.

By Emad Aysha
Thankfully the movie was a rewarding experience, conceptually. You realised the sheer volumes of hatred in a place like Hollywood directed at the old world, and more specifically at Britain!

What happens in Bloodline is that an American tycoon, of European extraction, dies in the Swiss Alps, falling gruesomely to his death. His only daughter, played delightfully by you-know-who, inherits it all, but she has to share the company with her obnoxious relatives, and the company is knee deep in debt as it is.

PRIME TIME: Audrey Hepburn at her most revealing, photographed by Sergio Strizzi, offscreen during the making of 'Bloodline'.

Audrey Hepburn’s cousins are a motley crew, including the likes of Omar Sharif (playing a two-timing Italian husband), James Mason (an old buzzard married to a young, vivacious American woman) and a French woman (with a German accent) who is quite literally in the driver’s seat. (She’s a race car driver and her husband lives off her goodwill and jewellery).

They want to sell off the company, by going public, to pay off their own debts and make some money on the side. Meanwhile, there is a pointless and vulgar side plot involving a serial killer who murders high-class prostitutes, tying a red sash around their necks and strangling them to death, with a cameraman in the room.

Needless to say, it turns out her father was actually murdered by somebody inside the company trying to sabotage it. In the closing scene, Audrey Hepburn is caught between two choices, two men, in a burning holiday house. The American man she has entrusted to run her company, whom she may also marry, or James Mason, who claims the American man is the conspirator.

Alas, James Mason conveniently has a red sash in his hand. I was so disappointed and befuddled. What would he have to do with those serial murders and snuff movies? Then it hit me. This is a tongue-in-cheek way of denigrating him, making him look like someone who is impotent and needs to watch sex to feel like a man.

You see this with his too-young wife. He’s knee deep in debt himself and she tries to placate the creditors through, as you may have guessed sex. Not that it does her any good, since the classy men her husband owes money to have her knees nailed to the floor. And this in James Mason’s own mansion.

This is under the belt commentary by Americans, making fun of a man who can’t rule his own house or keep his women safe, so to speak. To add to the vulgarity of it all, the creditors try to pressure him (and his wife) to hand over vials of morphine as collateral, hinting at the drug trade.

James Mason protests that he can’t do that, logistically, and yet he is smart and mobile enough to sabotage Audrey Hepburn’s car breaks, the lift in her office building, and her holiday house in the middle of a storm. It’s pish posh.

Worse still is that the man is political, in the Conservative party, and the only humanitarian in it because he’s opposed to the death penalty. All mainstream Tories are anti-capital punishment, and that’s to their credit, but in the land of gunslinging, that’s seen as weakness/unmanliness.

I suppose the American wife is a gibe at the special relationship, with the old world holding back the USA. And, wouldn’t you know it, the company is about to make a revolutionary drug that reverses ageing (which makes the movie SF), but James Mason burns the lab and office building to the ground.

Thank heavens by divine caprice I watched a Chuck Norris movie straight after, Good Guys Wear Black (1978), with the said hero being a former special forces guy from Vietnam who has been targeted for elimination by some shadowy forces in the US government.

AMERICA'S ARISTOCRATS: Rough and tumble Chuck Norris and Lloyd Haynes, up against the smoothey badguy played by James Franciscus, in the penultimate scene of 'Good Guys Wear Black'.

His covert ops unit, the Black Tigers, was sent on a mission during the 1973 Paris peace talks to free American POWs, and it was a trap. Now the official who sent them wants them dead so he can become Secretary of State, or else the Vietnamese will expose him during the congressional hearings.

The martial arts sequences are excellent, what you expect from a guy who played with Bruce Lee, and the writing is even better. You get to know all the victims on the hit list, and you miss every one of them when they get killed, ironically by an Asian assassin who was part of their team.

There are lots of tongue-in-cheek references here, too, namely, to the Kennedy assassination and the deep state in the form of J. Edgar Hoover and Bethesda Naval Hospital. The bad guy justifies his actions through ‘expedience’ and ends-justify-the-means, with things like slavery and imperialism making America great.

Another plus point for the movie is Chuck Norris’s love interest, a lawyer investigator who sought him out, played to perfection by the ever-classy Anne Archer. Audrey Hepburn, while still stunning in her later years, was just too lovely for the sordid world of Bloodline.

Anne Archer fits this milieu like a glove, a socialite who knows when to be as cold as ice and when to have a heart of gold. There’s good chemistry with Chuck Norris, too, and for once, he was acting with a lot of conviction, which means he agreed with what was said in the story.

BEDTIME STORIES: Anne Archer consoling Chuck Norris about the legal lies he was told in the Vietnam War. A forerunner of WMD in Iraq?

His Black Tigers were part of Operation Phoenix, notorious for assassinations. Talk about what goes around comes around. And it’s strongly hinted that it’s the American negotiators who sacrificed the POWs and MIAs.

Both movies, not coincidentally, are set in the 1970s, accurately capturing the ugly transformation taking place in post-Vietnam US. They should have teamed up Chuck Norris with Audrey Hepburn!