THE WRONG MAN

 Perhaps because it isn't a conventional suspense picture or perhaps because it's just so downbeat Hitchcock's "The Wrong Man" isn't much revived and yet it's one of his greatest films. It's the story of 'Manny' Balestrero, a totally innocent New Yorker identified by several people as an armed robber. If it were fiction we would call it Kafkaesque but this is fact. Balestrero's reactions as to what's  happening to him are as blank and unresponsive as Joseph K's and Henry Fonda is simply magnificent in the role, (it may be his finest performance), and as befits the seriousness of the subject matter Hitchcock films it almost as if it were a documentary, Brilliantly shot in black and white by Robert Burks and with a surprisingly muted Bernard Herrmann score this is an astonishing and deeply moving work. Absolutely essential.

LADY ON A TRAIN

 

As murder-comedies go "Lady on a Train" is certainly one of the best, if also one of the least known. It's a Deanna Durbin vehicle, (yes, she sings and charmingly), and a screwball comedy of the first rank, (the supporting cast includes Edward Everett Horton, Elizabeth Patterson and, although he gets star billing, Ralph Bellamy in a relatively small role, at least for him).

Deanna is the lady on the train who, like Miss Marple, sees a murder from the train window and sets out, like the scatterbrain amateur detective she is, to solve the case aided and abetted by crime novelist David Bruce (excellent). Throw in the likes of Dan Duryea, George Coulouris and Allen Jenkins as suitably shady characters and it's anybody's guess who the killer might be. More than just a guilty pleasure this Charles David directed movie is a little gem that is well worth seeking out.

VICTIM

 During his lifetime Dirk Bogarde never admitted to being gay and before his death he destroyed many of his private papers. Nevertheless, his sexuality has long been an open secret and Bogarde's desire to keep his private life private had to be respected. It was, therefore, an astonishingly brave decision to take on the role of Melville Farr, the closeted gay barrister who is willing to 'come out' in order to break a blackmailing ring in Basil Dearden's pioneering thriller "Victim".

Bogarde says he chose the part because he wanted to break free of the matinée idol roles he had played up to that time but by doing so he risked alienating his fan-base. Of course, by playing Farr and subsequent similar roles in films like "The Servant" and "Death in Venice" it could be argued that he was vicariously acting out on screen what he was feeling in real life.

That "Victim" was made at all is as astonishing as Bogarde's decision to take the lead. This was 1961 and homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. "Victim" broke new ground by making it the central theme and by making the gay characters sympathetic, the victims of the title, and by making the law, (at least in the form of John Barrie's investigating copper), sympathetic to their plight. This was a crusading work and is today largely credited with bringing about the change in the law that decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults in Great Britain.

Viewed today it is, of course, both melodramatic and didactic. At times it seems the characters aren't saying lines but making speeches. As a thriller it's reasonably exciting, (it's got sufficient red-herrings to keep us guessing), and Dearden admitted that without the thriller element the film might never have been made. (He did something similar with racism in the film "Sapphire").

"Victim" also featured a number of other gay actors in the cast, notably Dennis Price, superb as an ageing actor, and the actor/director Hilton Edwards. Whatever his motives for taking on the role, Bogarde is superb and he has at least one great scene when he finally admits his true nature to his wife, beautifully played by Sylvia Syms. There is certainly no doubt the film has dated and yet it remains one of the greatest of all gay movies.

JANET PLANET

 Another Marmite movie in that you will either love it or hate it but if, in the initial scenes, you're a detractor don't rush to judgement because "Janet Planet" is finally hypnotic and in a good way. It's another movie in which 'nothing happens'; there's no plot just an observation of life passing slowly for a young girl, her mother and the people who 'intrude' in their lives one summer in rural Massachusetts. Since it's set in the past, 1991, you might see it as autobiographical and it marks the directorial debut of writer Annie Baker.

Janet is Julianne Nicholson, a forty or fifty something acupuncturist who lives near the woods and who is unhappy. A superb Zoe Ziegler is Lacy, her friendless young daughter, mature beyond her years and the very centre of her own universe. People played by Will Patton, Elias Koteas and a terrific Sophie Okonedo drift in and out of their lives leaving no mark.

It's a slow, you might even say, pretentiously 'arty' picture which makes no concessions to its audience or their expectations. Dialogue is sparse and literate and it's gorgeously photographed by Maria von Hausswolff. I began by being a little bored by the lack of anything resembling 'action' but gradually I became enchanted by the imagery, the music and the performances. Yes, like Marmite it's an acquired taste but if you stick with it you will be amply rewarded.

THE SHAMELESS OLD LADY

 One of the least known films of the French New Wave perhaps because the subject matter is so old-fashioned like something you might have seen in the French cinema of the thirties or forties, (even the setting, Marseille, is the same as in Pagnol's famous trilogy). Berthe, (Sylvie, a lovely performance), has been widowed in her eighties and, for the first time in her life, begins to live much to the consternation of her family.

Not a great deal happens; its dramas are fairly small-scale but it's definitely a charmer and there's not a jot of sentimentality on view. Sylvie underplays beautifully and she's backed by an excellent cast while director Rene Allio films it with a documentary-like attention to detail. OK, it was never going to light up the cinema in the way that the films of Godard or Truffaut did but there is so much here to like and to discover.

MOFFIE

 One of the best films to show the horrors of military training although the setting, (White South Africa during apartheid), is perhaps an extreme example. The raw recruits being turned from 'scabs' into 'men' in "Moffie", (the title is a South African slur for a gay man), are essentially being turned into homophobes and racists if they weren't already. The film's central character is neither homophobic nor racist but a young closeted gay man and he must hide it from those around him.

Directed with documentary-like realism by Oliver Hermanus and very well played by its mostly young cast this is a more subtle and understated LGBTQ+ film than many and a pretty horrifying reminder of what life was like in South Africa at the time and of just how toxic and destructive racism and homophobia can be and of how easily evil can flourish if we treat our fellow human beings this way. Although it ends on a positive note of sorts the horrors depicted here make those in Lumet's "The Hill" seem like a teddy-bear's picnic.

MURDER, MY SWEET.

 Dick Powell may not have had Bogart's insouciance but he was just as good with the one-liners, maybe better, of which there are many in John Paxton's superb adaptation of Raymond Chandler's "Farewell, My Lovely" which, if it's not the best film Edward Dmytryk ever directed, is almost certainly the most enjoyable. It is, of course, classic Film Noir with just enough of a convoluted plot to please the most ardent of mystery fans as Powell's Philip Marlowe is hired by Mike Mazurki's 'Moose' Malloy to find his old girlfriend Velma. Meanwhile, he's also asked to act as bodyguard to Douglas Walton's gigolo in a deal involving stolen jewels, a deal that brings him into the orbit of Claire Trevor, (they were her jewels), and some suitably shady characters. When 'Moose' turns up in the same orbit it isn't hard to put two and two together.

Bogart's  Marlowe was undoubtedly a tough guy, (Bogie's snarl counted for a lot); Powell
is clearly softer and more cynical along the lines of Elliot Gould's later personification and there were times when I was sure Dick was going to burst into song. Mazurki is the surprise here giving what is probably his most finely modulated and memorable performance while Trevor positively sizzles with duplicity. Beautifully shot by Harry J. Wild and with Dmytryk for once displaying the lightest of touches, what's not to love.

TWILIGHT

 Clearly influenced by Bela Tarr and determined to outdo him when it comes to pacing, (funereal at best), and general moroseness Gyorgy Feher's "Twilight" isn't so much like watching paint dry as staring at the grey wall before it's painted. Based on the same Friedrich Durrenmatt novel as "It Happened in Broad Daylight" and "The Pledge" Feher strips it of all suspense yet gives it a sense of dread as it moves with all the slowness of a lackadaisical snail from scene to scene, image to image that is both disquieting and disorientating.

An eight year old girl is found murdered in the woods and the policeman whose last case it is is determined to find the killer even after retiring. We can just about figure this out from the material onscreen but really it helps if you've read the book or seen the other films. This is more like a palimpsest of Durrenmatt's novel, something not quite fully formed, a series of beautifully grim images rather than an actual narrative and not helped any by the monosyllabic performances of its cast.

It is, in other words, the worst kind of art-house movie, one determined to hold onto its 'masterpiece' credentials whatever the cost. Amazingly it's never really boring; you watch it transfixed in the vain hope that something might actually happen and, of course, it never does. As Jean Brodie might say, 'For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like'.

SHIP OF FOOLS

 It has become fashionable to deride Stanley Kramer as nothing more than a maker of turgid polemics and his early standing as a director of intelligent trailblazers passed quickly and, despite its success at the Oscars, by the time he got around to making "Ship of Fools" the critics really had it in for him. It may be no masterpiece and despite its subject, (antisemitism), it's no trailblazer but it's certainly intelligent, superbly acted, (particularly by Oskar Werner and Simone Signoret), and a fairly faithful rendering of Katherine Anne Porter's novel; Abby Mann did the outstanding screenplay working with sometimes highly melodramatic material.

The setting is a liner on its way from Vera Cruz to Germany in 1933 with the kind of sundry group of passengers on board you might find in a mini-series. They are a mixture of Germans, a few Americans, (including Vivien Leigh in her last film as an amalgam of Blanche Du Bois and Mrs. Stone), and for dramatic purposes the obligatory Jews, ostracized and heading unknowingly perhaps to a concentration camp.

Mercifully, these are more than mere stereotypes thanks to a superb cast, (Kramer was always a good actor's director). The problem is we've met them all before and since and more successfully. Nevertheless, whatever its faults Werner, in a career-best performance, and Signoret together raise it to the level of art whenever they are on screen. It's a joy to watch acting this good.

SEPTEMBER 5

Making a movie now about the 1972 Munich Olympic terrorist attacks might be considered something of a political hand-grenade since political opinion is clearly divided between those who side with Israel's continuing attacks on Gaza and those who are sympathetic to Palestine.

In "September 5" the 'villains' are clearly the Palestinian terrorists and the horrors of what is currently happening in the Middle East may put many people off seeing this film but then you could also say that "September 5" isn't so much about the hostage taking as it is about the reporting of the situation by ABC and this is definitely the best film about political journalism since "All the President's Men".

Director Tim Fehlbaum films it like a documentary and his remarkable cast respond beautifully. Every performance is pitch-perfect as is Markus Forderer's cinematography, Hansjorg WeiBbrich's editing and Fehlbaum's screenplay co-written with Moritz Binder and Alex David which doesn't feel like a script at all but a piece of actual news reportage and the thrills come not so much from hostage taking as from the dangers involved in simply recording it. The result is terrific cinema that simply shouldn't be missed.
 

NICKEL BOYS

 Using a subjective camera throughout, RaMell Ross' "Nickel Boys" shows us its world through the eyes of, not one but both , it's principal protagonists, (Elwood and Turner), as they struggle to survive life in the Nickel Academy, a 'reform' school run like a concentration camp and it betrays its director's origins in documentary film-making. On the one hand it's something of a visual marvel but it's also a difficult watch and not always an easy film to like or empathize with which is probably the very antithesis of what Ross intended.

This is a 'clever' film, clearly aimed at an art-house audience and magnificently photographed by Jomo Fray in the Academy ratio but the technique leaves no room for the actors to express themselves, (someone's always talking directly to the camera or, as in a lengthy scene near the end, being observed by the camera in a single take).

This is a pity because the technique detracts from what the film is really about, namely the horrors of the Academy, and because there is still a lot to admire here. I mean, if you are going to adapt a Pulitzer Prize winning book for the screen this is as original a way of doing it as any but it's also likely to alienate many of its audience. Worth seeing, certainly, but far from the masterpiece 'Little White Lies' and other critical publications think it is.