Mathilde Irrmann in an episode of Bad Banks (s1e6) in 1080hd

Mai Duong Kieu in Bad Banks (s1e2) in 1080hd

Rikke Leigh in Toast of London (s1e6) in 1080hd

Mena Suvari in American Beauty (1999) in 1080hd

This is an open matte version. The scene looks like this:

Rather than this:

Raye Hollitt in Skin Deep (1989) in 1080hd

Ellen Burstyn in The Ambassador (1984) in 720p

The American ambassador to Israel is an idealist who believes he can bring the Israelis and Palestinians to a peaceful solution by simply getting the students from both sides to begin a dialogue, because, gosh darn it, just look at how those young people got the United States out of Vietnam. His efforts are complicated by the wanderings of his wife, whose adventures in old Jerusalem culminate in an affair with a handsome, elegant antiques dealer.

Her affair leads the film into a bizarre series of plot twists. First, somebody shows him a film of his wife and the antiques dealer in flagrante, which leads to a ransom demand. The security chief of the embassy determines that the key to this mystery must lie in the identity of the man who took the film, but this ultimately leads nowhere, because the film of the wife turns out to have been captured accidentally by a Mossad secret camera performing routine surveillance of the antiques dealer, who is a suspected PLO leader. So is the Mossad blackmailing the Ambassador because he is getting cozy with the PLO through his wife? That would be logical, but it is not true.

Say what?

Sorry, but it's a Golan-Globus film. Did you expect a serious attempt to portray American-Israeli-Palestinian relations? Nah. It turns out that the blackmail plot is a McGuffin that has nothing at all to do with the main theme of the film. The scheme is the work of a couple of low-rent con artists. They have a contact at the film processing lab who calls them when anything turns up with some profit potential. The American security chief busts this racket, whereupon we discover that the serious film may now begin.

The Ambassador forgives his wife and resumes his naive attempts at peace-making. In fact, he realizes that his wife's sophisticated PLO lover is the key to the entire peace process, so he visits the antique store to explore the possibilities. Seeing his lover's influential husband, the antiques dealer expects a beating or to be turned over to the Mossad, but instead gets a handshake and an offer of friendship, whereupon the two men set a course for wprld peace, using the last five minutes of screen time not already used up by the cartoon characters in the blackmail scheme.

I'll spoil this for you, since it is now 2019.

They do not bring peace to the Middle East.

End spoilers.

Sidebar: the film of the lovers was supposedly shot by a stationary surveillance camera planted by the Mossad, but the sex tape includes zooms, close-ups and perspective changes. Ah, the magic of cinema!

You can tell from my description that the film is a trivialization and naive simplification of highly complex issues which have not, to this day, come any closer to resolution than when the film was released in 1984. The film does, however, have some intriguing elements:

Despite what I summarized above, it's essentially a gory action film, with some pretty fair action scenes: bombings, other explosions, mass murders, and fist fights. The best set piece involves a low-altitude helicopter chasing a car through the desert, the chopper churning up a massive amount of sand with the power of its rotors, as automatic gunfire is exchanged between the air and ground, while heavy firepower takes them both on from a nearby terrorist stronghold. (Yeah, I know what you're thinking. It was a nice piece of visual cinema, but it was not clear who was shooting at whom, nor why.)

The film does not shy away from showing that the situation is complex, even if it offers no background to explain the complexity. In one sense it reminded me of a non-comedic version of the politics in The Life of Brian, in which various Middle Eastern splinter groups with nearly identical names and ideologies hate one another based upon a single minor point of dispute. In The Ambassador, all of the moderates on both sides are despised by the radicals, who in turn are despised the extreme radicals. It seems that the extreme radicals hate their compromise-minded allies much more than they hate their enemies. There are moments in the film, as exemplified by the helicopter chase detailed above, where the viewer must pause to think, "Wait, who is group A again? And why is group A trying to kill group B? Aren't they allies?" I suppose that is not an unrealistic portrayal of the Middle East, albeit in a highly lurid form.

The film was lensed on location in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and various dramatic landmarks in the Negev desert, which lends an air of authenticity rare in Golan-Globus productions.

The hopelessness of the situation in Israel is not lost on the filmmakers, despite the unrealistically idealistic portrayals of the Ambassador and the PLO leader. All the efforts of those idealists inevitably result in the deaths of dozens who trust and believe in them.

There is a cast of familiar, competent actors who give the low-budget film a veneer of Old Hollywood sophistication. The part of the ambassador is played by a film icon, Robert Mitchum. The wife is played by Ellen Burstyn, who was nominated for six Oscars in her career, with one win. The security chief was portrayed by Rock Hudson, who looked so fit and dashing at 59 that one could not have predicted his AIDS-related death within the year.