jayraskin1

This is an interesting film which is part gangster film, part film noir, and part social drama. For those interested in how deportation was used in the 1950s to get rid of undesirables, it is very educational and seems pretty realistic. I think the biggest problem with the film is the casting of the three leads, Victor Mature, Terry Moore, and William Bendix.

Mature is surprisingly good as a gangster, but he really has a good nature and looks heroic, so it is hard to see him as a thug. Moore was 21 years old at the time of the movie and Mature was 37. This type of age difference is not unusual in Hollywood movies of this time, but unfortunately, Moore looks 18 years and talks like she is 16, and Mature looks in his 40s, so the blossoming love relationship between them seems misplaced. There were probably 50 actresses from 25-45 who would have been great with Mature, but Moore just seems in the wrong picture. Moore is great in other pictures, like "Mighty Joe Young," but at 21, she lacks the gravity to be a counter-balance to Mature's brooding performance. He is also about a foot taller than her. She looks like his daughter when she is next to him.

Worse, William Bendix, one of the great comic actors of this time plays the villain. Anybody who has seen him in his "Life of Riley" television series or other comic roles he has played in can only be disappointed that he plays the villain straight without any comic touches. He is not bad as the villain, but it does seem a waste of his talents.

It does move along fairly well and does generate some suspense in the key scenes. Don't go in with high expectations and you'll enjoy it.

"Leonard, Part VI" was released in 1988, at the height of Bill Cosby's television career and popularity in the fourth season of "The Cosby Show," the #1 rated television comedy series in history. He had played a secret agent on "I Spy" for three years in the 1960s, so a spy spoof seemed a source of great material for him. Watching it today, it is a great mixture of satire and slapstick gags. The formula was essentially repeated ten years later with the three "Austin Powers" films. Both critics and audiences loved them. Why did they reject the similar "Leonard VI?"

The film looks great and is well-paced. It is about a retired secret agent who now runs a fancy restaurant, He is called out of retirement to stop a villain named Medusa (Gloria Foster) who has found a way to control all animals and brainwash them into murdering people. Cosby adds some interesting secondary plots. Leonard is trying to win back his wife who left him when she found him naked with a 19 years year old in a sauna. He also has to handle a daughter who has been seduced by a theater director (Moses Gunn). She wants to appear nude in a play on stage to become a star. This seems to be a direct reference to Cosby's troubles with Lisa Bonnet at the time, She played his daughter on television and appeared nude in a movie (Angel Heart). The fact that Cosby's super-hero spy is a family man adds a wonderful dimension to his character.

Why did the critics embrace "Austin Powers" and hate "Leonard Part VI?" I think there were two reasons. First Dawn Steel had replaced David Putnam as head of Columbia Studios. Putnam had greenlit Cosby's "Leonard." If it made a lot of money people would question why they had fired Putnam and replaced him with Steel. Steel, only the second woman to head a film studio, did not want a film that made her predecessor look good. She couldn't kill the film because of contractual obligations, but she could spread the word that it was a disaster. Unfortunately, Cosby himself seems to have believed this propaganda, as he apologized for the film and went on television and told people not to buy tickets to it in the weeks before it opened.

The second reason Hollywood hated it is that the villain is a vegetarian who wants to liberate all the animals in the world from man's oppression. This is a satire on P.E.T.A., While most people in the United States recognized the extreme silliness and madness of the organization, the wealthy, who run Hollywood, tend to back up and support P.E.T.A. with hugh contributions. They see them and themselves as they see the Metoo movement, strictly as heroes. Russians and Eastern Europeans are good for villains, Chinese are good for villains, blacks are good for villains or at least lower-level villains, but animal activists are the heroes of Hollywood movies and must never be considered as anything but saints protecting the poor animal victims of mankind's insensitivity and thoughtlessness.

The attacks on Cosby for his transgressing the Hollywood hierarchy in the film "Leonard Part VI" was a dress rehearsal for the attacks on Cosby in 2004 when he transgressed the boundaries of Hollywood elite with his speech calling for stronger black families before the NAACP.