BOUNDARIES

A small gem of a film from Canada. "Boundaries" is about politics or rather it's about how politics impacts on the lives of three women involved in negotiations between delegations from Canada and the small island community of Besco to instigate mining on the island and is said to be based on real events. The women concerned are Besco's political leader, a girl working as a negotiator on the Canadian side and the perky blonde acting as mediator. In the end, the politics fade into the background as the personal lives of the women come to the fore.

What emerges is a wonderful picture of a tiny community trying to cope with the pressures of the outside world and an even finer picture of the lives of its female protagonists. Besco may look like a beautiful place, (it was actually filmed in St John's and Fogo Island standing in for Besco), but it's also a place where nothing much happens, a kind of island paradise where the only blot on the landscape is boredom.


It's beautifully photographed by Jessica Lee Gagne and writer/director Chloe Robichaud makes great use of music throughout while the three women are superbly played by Macha Grenon, Nathalie Doummar and Emily VanCamp. It's a small picture, as small in its way as the island on which the action takes place, but it has a large heart and a real sense of humour while the quality of Robichaud's writing and direction make this 'small' film one of the best I've seen this year.

THE CHASE

As a director Arthur Ripley only made six feature films but nothing in that short career quite prepares you for the gem that was "The Chase", which he made in 1946 and which Philip Yordan adapted from a Cornell Woolrich story. It's certainly bizarre, as down-on-his-luck Robert Cummings, (why Robert Cummings I keep asking myself), finds a wallet belonging to gangster Steve Cochran who, when he returns it, hires him as a chauffeur and that's when his troubles really begin, particularly when Cochran's frightened wife, Michele Morgan, asks him to help her get away from her husband.

Everything about this film is surprising and I just don't mean the plot. Cochran's a thug but he lives in a kitsch mansion filled with marble statues and he likes to listen to classical music while Cumming's a veteran who is also a dab hand on the piano. Perhaps the biggest surprise is just how good both these actors are. Being a gangster Cochran naturally has to have a henchman and as always Peter Lorre is superb in the part. About midway through you might start to get an idea in which direction this very strange movie is going and you may even be right...but on the other hand. Needless to say, "The Chase" has all but disappeared but if any film deserves cult status, this is it. Unmissable.

PRETTY POISON

Noel Black's darkly comic masterpiece "Pretty Poison" may owe quite a debt to"Psycho", (Anthony Perkin's Dennis is cut from the same cloth as Norman Bates), and in turn would influence the likes of Malick's"Badlands". What's even more surprising than the failure of the film to be better known than it actually is, (it's certainly a 'cult' movie), is that Black never went on to anything like a real cinema career though his direction here is exemplary. The plot, about a gormless sap being lead very badly astray by a femme fatale, (in this case, a very young femme fatale), is as old as the cinema itself and has served many a film-noir and gangster movie very well indeed though this is a lot more off-the-wall than most genre pictures.

Perkins is Dennis Pitt, recently released from a correctional institution where he has been incarcerated for arson and Tuesday Weld is the high-school senior who latches onto him. Dennis may be as nutty as a fruitcake but it's Weld's Sue Ann who is the film's pretty poison and it's she who eggs Dennis on and leads down much more dangerous roads than even he might have gone by himself. 

Both players are superb, Weld particularly so and there are brilliant supporting turns from Beverly Garland as Weld's tramp of a mother and John Randolph as Perkins' probation officer. The source material is a novel by Stephen Geller and the brilliant adaptation is by Lorenzo Semple Jr. Cult movie it may be; Noel Black's only real film of note it may be but this is still a small classic.

FULL MOON IN PARIS

Most of Rohmer's heroines are among the most truculent in all cinema. Perhaps only Rohmer himself could love them which might be why their love lives are so disastrous. In "Full Moon in Paris", another of his 'Comedies and Proverbs', Louise lives with Remi but, like Garbo before her, she wants to be alone so she takes a pied-a-terre in Paris. You might say she wants her cake and eat it too and feeling the need for independence she treats the men in her life, (Remi, her 'platonic' friend Octave), like dirt but like many of Rohmer's dim, selfish heroines she doesn't know she's doing it. If anything, it's Louise who thinks she's the victim and as played by Pascale Ogier she's a scintillating little minx, (even if at times you feel that if you were to strangle her no jury would convict you). It's a wonderful performance but then she has wonderful material to work with. Perhaps no other writer/director, with the possible exception of Bergman, wrote better parts for women than Rohmer. And naturally this particular 'comedy and proverb' is very funny. Who else but Rohmer could poke so much fun at his silly heroine yet make her so sympathetic? Of course, it's that full moon in Paris that finally determines just which way our heroine might go; a life of blissful discontentment with Remi, a life of blissful discontentment alone or a life with someone else entirely? Rohmer's little joke is that it takes something as ephemeral as a full moon for Louise to finally make a decision even if that decision finally comes back to bite her. Yes, Rohmer can be very funny but he can be cruel, too. As for the film itself, it's simply a masterpiece.

MY MAN GODFREY

The greatest of all screwball comedies. There isn't a wasted moment in "My Man Godfrey"; it begins as it intends to go on, with some high-society types on a scavenger hunt for a 'forgotten' man, a joke that was probably in rather bad taste in 1936 but when did a little bad taste ever get in the way of a classic comedy. Four members of the cast, (William Powell, Carole Lombard, Mischa Auer and Alice Brady), were nominated for Oscars but every performance, (Eugene Pallette, Gail Patrick, Jean Dixon, Alan Mowbray), is perfect while Gregory La Cava's direction, (this is his masterpiece), and Morrie Ryskind and Eric Hatch's screenplay are just sublime. It was remade in 1957 with David Niven as Godfrey and June Allyson as the scatterbrained society dame but that's not a patch on this original which is still one of the funniest films ever made.

ERASERHEAD

The first time I saw "Eraserhead" was in the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton. My friend Gerry had already seen it in San Francisco and was still in paroxysms of praise for the picture so I went in with high expectations; even so, I still wasn't prepared for what I saw that night. I was meeting Gerry in the bar next door afterwards but when I left the cinema I was still in something of a daze, or perhaps a trance, and started walking in the wrong direction. I knew I had seen some kind of masterpiece but I also knew here was a film I wouldn't want to sit through again, at least not for a very long time. Well, here we are 40 years later and I've just seen "Eraserhead" again.

For anyone still ignorant of the fact, "Eraserhead" was the film that introduced David Lynch to the world and a few minutes into the film was enough to tell us that here was a singular new talent worthy to sit on a pedestal next to the young Welles, not that Welles would ever make a film like "Eraserhead"; indeed who, other than Lynch, would.

There is a plot of sorts but essentially Lynch's film, luminously shot in black and white by Frederick Elmes and Herbert Cardwell, unfolds like a living nightmare, but whose? Lynch's? Henry's, (the central character that established Jack Nance as a cult actor for a new generation), or our own? Certainly there are images here enough to give the strongest of us nightmares, images and sounds, (this film has some of the finest sound designs ever recorded).



It has been described as experimental, as avant-garde and by some just as a plain old horror film. You could say it's also a kind of love story, though a very warped and forbidding one. Lynch, of course, would go on to the likes of "Blue Velvet" and "Twin Peaks" and would never fully abandon the sensibilites first seen in this extraordinary film. I was more prepared for it this time but it still blew me away.

DETROIT

I've said it before and sadly I have a feeling I'll be saying it until the day I die but there are times when I've felt ashamed to be white, ashamed to belong to a race that over the centuries have felt they are not only superior to people of other ethnic backgrounds but have a right to kill them as well. Racists may be in a minority but in the overall scheme of things they represent a large minority and rather than stand up to them, often a blind eye is turned. Silence, tragically, gives consent.

Watching "Detroit" I felt ashamed and at times I felt physically sick. I was upset and I was angry. Kathryn Bigelow's magnificent new film is not specifically about the Detroit riots that occured 50 years ago; the riots form the backdrop to a film about one incident when three racist white police officers shot dead three Afro-Americans in a motel. It's a film that doesn't hide its anger; about as even-handed as Bigelow gets is in showing that, while the riots themselves were the direct result of racism, particularly on the part of the police, both sides were culpable in the outbreak of lawlessness that followed. But then Bigelow gets down to the business of showing just how one-sided the events that occured at the motel were. The police, and one officer in particular, (Will Poulter in Oscar-worthy form), are clearly monsters and the victims wholly innocent. The National Guard are bystanders who don't want to get involved while John Boyega's black security guard is caught helplessly in the middle, (at one point he's described as an Uncle Tom; he doesn't object).


Tragically, "Detroit" is not about events that just happened 50 years ago but which have been happening throughout America on a regular basis ever since, so Bigelow can't be accused of simply opening up old wounds. Still, there will be people who will say she should have left well enough alone and will ask if we really need a movie like "Detroit" at the present time. Unfortunately I believe we do and until such time when this kind of racism is totally eradicated we will always need movies like "Detroit".


Will it draw an audience, both in America and internationally? Will the prize-givers award it with the Oscars it so richly deserves? In a just world, and we know this isn't, Bigelow, scenarist Mark Boal and cameraman Barry Ackroyd would all be honoured. In the end, of course, it hardly matters, (though I would like to see the film get the audience it deserves); that it was made at all speaks volumes and gives credence to mainstream American cinema. "Detroit" isn't just the best film of the year; it's also the most important.

THE GREAT MAN

I've often been chastised for posting obits in which I have been less than flattering about the person who has passed on; not nasty by any means, merely truthful about their shortcomings. In "The Great Man" that is the dilemma facing Jose Ferrer; should he sing the praises of the 'Great Man' of the title, a recently deceased and much loved, at least by the people who only saw his public face, radio and television personality or should he tell the truth and expose him for the monster he was.

Ferrer's film came out around the same time as Elia Kazan's "A Face in the Crowd" and while Kazan's film, which plays out in much the same ballpark, has gone on to become a classic, Ferrer's remains virtually unseen; personally I think it's a great picture, a testament to Ferrer's often undervalued talent. There are no great cinematic flourishes here, as there are in "Citizen Kane", another film that Ferrer's has often been compared to. This is a simple, literary piece, almost a series of talking heads as Ferrer, who also stars, interviews those who knew 'the great man', including his mistress, an excellent Julie London, and best of all, Ed Wynn as the man who first discovered him. Wynn's magnificent here, (he was nominated for both the Golden Globe and a BAFTA), and Ferrer is canny enough to give him his dues. As Wynn describes his feelings Ferrer allows his camera to slowly creep up on him. He only has this one scene but it's one of the great performances by an actor in a supporting role. His son Keenan is also superb as another executive out for what he can get. As I've said, this movie is almost impossible to see, at least here in the UK, but if you get the chance take it; it's one of the best American films of the fifties.

I LIVE IN FEAR

One of Kurosawa's least known films; you can see from the credits why he's considered the most 'western' of Asian directors and the opening scene, set in a family court, could come from an American film noir. It was an extremely topical subject. Made only ten years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki it deals with one man's conviction that atomic or nuclear war could happen at any time and the affect this has, not just on him and his family, but on the court advisor called in to help determine the man's sanity. America was making similar films at the time but coating them in the guise of science fiction or anti-communist propaganda. Kurosawa's film was based on genuine fear and real experience and is all the more disquieting for it. 

Kurosawa regulars Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura are outstanding as, respectively, the man convinced he has to get his family as far away from Japan as possible and the court official who finds the man's fear contagious while the entire supporting cast are superb. Perhaps it's the uncomfortable nature of the film's topic that has lead it to being shunted aside in any consideration of the director's work. Certainly, of all his contemporary films it is perhaps the most powerful and I think it's a film begging for reassessment.

WAKE IN FRIGHT

The Canadian director Ted Kotcheff made "Wake in Fright" in 1970 and it first appeared a year later in the UK under the title "Outback"and it's among the most brutal and uncompromising of all films to deal with the machismo of the Australian character. It's about a young schoolteacher, (Peter O'Toole lookalike, Gary Bond), who finds himself stranded penniless, (after losing all his money gambling), in a hell-hole of an outback town known as 'the Yabba'. It's a culture, if culture is the right word, fuelled almost entirely by alcohol and it culminates in a kangaroo hunt that is simply an orgy of violence. It's the most terrifying sequence in a genuinely disturbing picture and it's a picture that disappeared off the radar for more than 40 years. Now that it's been rediscovered it feels like something of a lost masterpiece and it's certainly the best thing Kotcheff has done. It also features an extraordinary performance from Donald Pleasence as an alcoholic doctor living off his wiles and the 'good nature' of the community.

KEY LARGO

One of John Huston's best films and certainly the best film made from a Maxwell Anderson play, (Huston and Richard Brooks did the adaptation). The material is just as tub-thumbingly preachy as we would expect from Anderson; we're still dealing with the struggle between good, (Bogie, Bacall and Lionel Barrymore), and evil (Edward G, Thomas Gomez and various henchmen), set in an hotel in Key Largo during a literal and metaphorical hurricane. Caught in the middle is Claire Trevor's lush Gaye Dawn. She won the film's only Oscar and gets to sing "Moanin' Low".

The difference between this and other Anderson adaptations is in the handling, in the superb cinematography by the great Karl Freund and in most of the casting. Bogart's character is too much a mouth-piece for decency, Bacall is still insipid and Barrymore is still his usual hammy self but Robinson is magnificent as is Gomez and Trevor is simply iconic. Of course, it's "The Petrified Forest" all over again only this time Bogie is on the side of the angels and it's still a second-rate play but thanks to Huston, a second-rate play has become a first-rate film.

SWEPT AWAY....

A sexually charged, agitprop reimagining of "The Admirable Chricton", Lina Wertmuller's  "Swept Away ..." caused no end of controversy when it first appeared in 1974 as rich bitch Mariangela Melato and her communist-leaning hired hand Giancarlo Giannini are 'ship-wrecked' on an uninhabited island where he takes the upper hand, literally as well as metaphorically, and she succumbs to being slapped around as if the whole thing is nothing more than a game of very rough slap and tickle.
Had the movie been directed by a man it might have been banned but Wertmuller brought her own satirical edge to the proceedings turning it into an often very funny comedy of ill-manners. For most of the time there's no-one else on screen but Melato and Giannini and they are both superb while Ennio Guarnieri's sun-drenched cinematography ensures the film is always good to look at. Take it seriously, of course, and you'll probably find it offensive; so along with the joke and you'll almost certainly find it good, if not very pc, fun. Madonna did a remake that died the death.

UZAK

"Uzak" was Nuri Bilge Ceylan's third film but it was the one that established him internationally and marked him out as a world class director. It's an astonishingly mature and imaginative picture displaying great visual acuity as well as a deep understanding of human nature. It's about two cousins, Mahmut, a photographer whose wife has left him and Yusuf, who has come to stay with him while looking for a job. At first their relationship is cordial and friendly but gradually Yusuf begins to get on Mahmut's nerves. Ceylan tells his tale with great empathy and a good degree of humour, despite the sadness at the centre and draws wonderful performances from Muzaffer Ozdemir as Mahmut and Emin Toprak as Yusuf. Tragically, Toprak was killed in a car accident just after the film was completed and posthumously shared the best actor prize at Cannes with his co-star. Absolutely essential viewing

MARDAN

Batin Ghobadi's "Mardan" is a terrifically good film from Iraq that shows movies allocated to the art-house circuit, both in this country and in the West in general, can take on Hollywood at its own game and really deliver the goods. Here is a movie that is highly intelligent, and sufficiently elliptical, for us to bring our brains into the cinema once again while at the same time delivering something edgy, dark and yes, exciting.

Of course, we are in an environment that is alien to most of us and it's a magnificent environment, beautifully photographed by Saba Mazloum. Mardan himself is a corrupt policeman dealing with demons from his childhood and attempting to redeem himself by helping a young woman find the man Mardan presumes is her missing husband. It's the kind of film I can see a good American director like David Fincher remaking or the kind of film the American cinema might have turned out in the seventies.


While the central plot is (relatively) easy for us to follow it's the accumulation of little incidental details that we need to pay attention to. Here is a film that keeps us on the edge of our seats but not in any conventional way. I really do think it is a masterpiece and certainly the best 'new' film I have seen this year. (It hails from 2014).

MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ

One of John Cassavetes' greatest films is also one of his least known. He made it in 1971 and over the years it has been largely forgotten. I've seen it described as a romantic comedy and even as a screwball comedy but I found it very disturbing. It's not a comedy and I'm not even sure it's a love story. It's characters are all dysfunctional, unhappy people and Minnie and Moskowitz are the most dysfunctional of all.

She works in a museum and he works as a car-parking attendant and the film charts their hit and miss relationships, with each other and with other people. It is also largely improvised which gives it the feeling of life being lived in front of our eyes rather than simply being played out but these are people you definitely wouldn't want to know or maybe they aren't people at all but just extensions of Cassavetes' off-the-wall imagination.

It is magnificently acted by Cassavetes' repertory company of friends and family though at times it feels more like a series of classes at the Actor's Studio. Gena Rowlands is Minnie and Seymour Cassell is Moskowitz and they are superb as you would expect as indeed are everyone else, particularly Val Avery and Timothy Carey as men having meltdowns in restaurants and an uncredited Cassavetes as an unfaithful husband, while the cinematography of the three credited cinematographers, (Alric Edens, Michael Margulies and Arthur J. Ornitz), gives the film the documentary-like look the director obviously intended. This is independent cinema at its purest and most unrefined; scary, moving, rarely romantic. Just don't call it a comedy.

3 WOMEN

The 3 women of the title are Millie, Pinky and Willie. Millie and Pinky work together at a health spa for the elderly and the infirm and share an apartment. Willie is an an artist and she never speaks. Millie speaks all the time but no-one listens to her, no-one that is except Pinky who idolises her and would like to be her. Yes, this is Altman's "Persona" with a third woman thrown in for good measure and it's a darkly comic masterpiece.

Altman says he based his screenplay on a dream he had and the film does have a dream-like hallucinatory quality. As Millie and Pinky, Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek are virtually never off the screen and they are superb. Duvall won the Best Actress award at Cannes and Spacek won the New York Film Critics Best Supporting Actress prize. The terrific and disquieting score is by Gerald Busby.

ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS

A wonderful piece of authentic Americana that has tended to be overlooked in favour of John Ford's "Young Mr Lincoln" and while Cromwell was no Ford, this is almost as good. Raymond Massey received his only Oscar nomination as "Abe Lincoln in Illinois" and it's s superb performance and unlike Ford's movie this covers the whole spectrum of Lincoln's life from the earliest days right up to Washington and the presidency, his courtship of Ann Rutledge, (a charming Mary Howard), and marriage to Mary Todd, (a wonderful Ruth Gordon).

Other standouts in a good cast include Gene Lockhart as Stephen Douglas and Howard Da Silva as the town bully who becomes Abe's best friend. The source material is a Pulitzer Prize winning play by Robert E Sherwood and it was Sherwood himself who brought it to the screen while Lincoln's 'House Divided' speech, magnificently spoken by Massey, could be culled from today's headlines and sadly is just as appropriate today as it was back then.

THE COMMITMENTS

"The Commitments" is one of the greatest of all Irish films, though I suppose technically, it wasn't 'Irish' at all; it was made with 'money from America' as we say in this country and it was directed by an Englishman, Alan Parker, who brought to it an outsider's eye, but it was originally a novel by Dubliner Roddy Doyle, who co-wrote the script with Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais and few Irish films got under the skin of the Dublin psyche in quite the same way.

It's about a young Dub called Jimmy Rabbitte, (Robert Arkins), putting together a soul band called The Commitments and it's a terrific musical mainly because the young cast, all newcomers, do their own singing and play their own instruments; there isn't a false note in this movie at all. The acting may be uneven, but remember most of the cast weren't necessarily trained actors, (their background was in music), and were at the start of their careers. The lead singer is Andrew Strong and he's tremendous; it's almost impossible to believe that Strong was only 16 when he was snatched from obscurity for this film. The girls in the band are Angeline Ball, Maria Doyle and Derry's own Bronagh Gallagher and they are all wonderful, particularly Gallagher. One of the boys in the band is Glen Hansard, a Dublin busker who went on to win the Oscar for the song "Falling Slowly" and a Tony for the musical "Once". It's also very funny and just a little sad; this is a musical that tells it like it is and doesn't pull its punches. It went on to win the BAFTA as the best film of the year.

CRIES & WHISPERS

In a house full of ticking clocks signalling the passing of time and rooms of bright red redolent of blood, three women wait for a fourth to die. Two of the women are the sisters of the dying woman , the other, their maid. Is "Cries and Whispers" Ingmar Bergman's greatest film? Perhaps not and yet it remains one of the towering masterpieces of world cinema which should tell you exactly where Bergman stands.

His extraordinary use of colour, (mostly reds and whites; Sven Nykvist won the Oscar for his cinematography), goes some way in alleviating the almost unwatchable horror of the films central situation of a woman dying in agony while those around her are powerless to help her or lessen her pain. There are flashbacks to fleeting moments of happiness and a lot of grief in the women's pasts but for the most part this rigorous and unrelenting film concentrates on that terrible journey into what? Rarely has the cinema tacked the subject of death with such an intellectual compassion as here.

As always Bergman's repatory company of players are extraordinary, down to the smallest part. The sisters are Harriet Andersson, (the one who is dying), Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Thulin, (the ones who wait), and Kari Sylwan as the maid. The men in their lives, (Erland Josephson, Henning Moritzen and Georg Arlin), also play a very significant role in shaping the lives of these women and yet they remain very much in the background. Of course, you could argue that only in Bergman's world could people behave as they do here. These people inhabit a world almost entirely devoid of joy, their only 'pleasure' stemming directly from some form of pain. This picture is grim enough to qualify as a horror film and it certainly isn't an easy watch. Indeed, if anything, this was the film that finally cemented Bergman's reputation as cinema's premier master of misery. However, once seen it can never be forgotten and it's a film that repays frequent visits. I reiterate, "Cries and Whispers" is one of the greatest films ever made.

IL GRIDO

In the Antonioni canon "Il Grido" is often cited as one of his lesser works, superseded by the trilogy that began with "L'Avventura" and even his later English-language films, "Blow Up" and "The Passenger". Granted this remarkable film doesn't quite hit you between the eyes in the way others do but remarkable it is, a grim tale of working-class misery set in a misty, wet Po Valley and concerned, like much of Antonioni's work, with a loss or lack of love.

Perhaps the critics of the time weren't too happy with Antonioni's decision to cast the American Steve Cochran as the brutish anti-hero Aldo. Cochran had to be dubbed as did a number of his co-stars, including Alida Valli and Betsy Blair. In his own country Cochran was never rated as much of an actor but he is superb here as a man deserted by the woman he had hoped to marry, (Valli), and who then takes to the road with his young daughter.

If anything, the film is proof that Antonioni wasn't just a great chronicler of upper and middle-class angst but someone who could deal with the universal themes of loss and grief. It's certainly downbeat. From the outset it's a film that offers no hope for its characters and is probably the director's most pessimistic work. His use of location is, of course, crucial; its bleakness mirrors its characters lack of hope and Cochran's Aldo is one of cinema's great existentialist working-class heroes while, even dubbed as here, both Valli and Blair are excellent and Gianni Di Venanzo's cinematography is superb. This is a film crying out for rediscovery and simply shouldn't be missed.

FANNY

Joshua Logan's film of "Fanny" began life as Marcel Pagnol's Marseilles Trilogy, (Fanny, Marius and Cesar, the three films that made up that trilogy), later condensed to a Broadway musical which Logan directed. This film version arrived in 1961, keeping the musical's structure but minus the (not particularly memorable) songs and it's a sentimental triumph. It's set in Marseilles and tells the story of Fanny, the 18 year old daughter of a fish-seller, Marius, the boy she loves, Cesar, Marius' father and Panisse, the old sail-maker who marries Fanny to give her illegitimate child by Marius, a name after Marius has gone off to sea, unaware that he is to be a father.

For this version Logan was canny enough to cast Charles Boyer as Cesar, Maurice Chevallier as Panisse and Leslie Caron as Fanny and a largely French supporting cast. The German-born Horst Buchholz is Marius and although he never sounds French, for once he doesn't disgrace himself. However, Caron, Boyer and especially Chevallier are outstanding. Boyer picked up an Oscar nomination for Best Actor though personally I think it should have gone to a hardly ever better Chevallier. Caron, too, was unlucky enough to miss out on a Best Actress nomination although the film was nominated for Best Picture.


I've always felt Logan was among the most underrated of great American directors, (Truffaut was a big fan). He worked largely in musicals and melodramas but never achieved the critical adulation heaped on Minnelli; not that he was ever in Minnelli's class. Still, he produced some sterling work, if no actual masterpieces. "Fanny", long unseen, is definitely one of his best films.

THE LADY VANISHES

It may open with possibly the worst model shots in all of cinema but in every other respect Alfred Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes" isn't just one of his enduring masterpieces but possibly the greatest comedy-thriller ever made. It feels almost superfluous reviewing it now but here goes. For anyone who may have been living on Mars these past eighty years this is the one set, for the most part, on a train and dealing with the sweet old lady who disappears and who isn't all she first appears to be. Hitchcock made it in 1938, the setting was a Europe heading into war and naturally there are villains and spies.


It also comes as close to perfection as movies possibly can with a ridiculously good script by Launder and Gilliat and the kind of cast that only comes along once in a lifetime. Margaret Lockwood was already a star in Britain when the film was made but she was never better than she is here. Michael Redgrave, a star on stage, was making his screen debut and his is a lovely, dashing comic performance while the supporting cast are sublime. Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne are Charters and Caldicott, the cricket-mad Englishmen abroad; they made such an impression they were to reprise their roles in "Night Train to Munich" and "Millions Like Us".

May Whitty, or to give her her full title, Dame May Whitty is Miss Froy, the lady who vanishes while potential villains, spies and adulterers include future Oscar winner Paul Lukas, Mary Clare, Cecil Parker, Linden Travers and the great Catherine Lacey as the nun in high heels. In 1979 it was remade by Anthony Page in full colour but none of the subtlety, suspense or comic timing of the original. That version was watchable but this is absolutely essential.

SHOW BOAT

James Whale made "Show Boat" in 1936. It wasn't the first screen version of what is arguably the greatest of all stage musicals; there had been a mostly silent version in 1929 but that took its source material from Edna Ferber's original novel but Whale's version is unquestionably the finest with at least three of the musical numbers amongst the best ever committed to film, (Helen Morgan's rendition of "Bill"; Morgan, Irene Dunne and Hattie McDaniel letting us know they 'Can't Help Lovin' That Man' and Paul Robeson's definitive version of 'Ol' Man River' which Whale films magnificently). It was also a bold movie for Hollywood to make at the time, dealing as it does with miscegenation; bolder still for a musical.

The leads were Allan Jones, (who sings beautifully but acts poorly), and Irene Dunne, (who both sings and acts beautifully), and they are brilliantly supported by the great Helen Morgan in her last film role, Paul Robeson and Hattie McDaniel, (as fine here as she was in "Gone with the Wind), and by Charles Winninger and Helen Westley as the owners of the Show Boat. There was a glossy remake made in 1951 that was good but which wasn't a patch on Whale's version which, despite a lack of songs in the second half, is still one of the ten best musical films ever made."

LE AMICHE

Viewed today Michaelangelo Antonioni's "Le Amiche" feels like a dry-run for his great trilogy of alienation that began with "LAvventura". This movie isn't in the same class but it is still very fine. It's like Cukor's "The Women" minus the laughs as lonely, pragmatic Clelia, (an excellent Eleonora Rossi Drago), returns to her native Turin and falls in with a group of rich, bored and, in one case, suicidal women and equally bored and cynical men, the one exception being Carlo, (Ettore Manni), with whom she starts some kind of relationship.


If it's not quite as densely plotted as "L'Avventura" and if there are no set-pieces to equal those that were to come later in Antonioni's work it nevertheless displays a very cool intelligence that never panders to the cliches of this kind of female orientated picture; there are no hints of lesbianism and the friendships are fickle at best. Even as early as 1955 Antonioni was hooked on that old ennui. Not one of his masterpieces, perhaps, but an essential part of the Antonioni canon all the same.

CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER

Often cited as one of the greatest documentaries ever made Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's "Chronicles of a Summer" takes a look at the lives of of ordinary Parisians over the course of the summer of 1960. It was filmed in a 'cinema vertie' style, using the people who appear as if they were actors 'acting out' their lives. There is no voice-over; their technique is to use interviews or simply silently film these people going about their business. What distinguishes this extraordinary film from others of its kind is that this is a work both sociological and deeply political, a piece of social history in which Africans are side-lined and homosexuality never mentioned.

Rouch and Morin pick and choose their subjects, mostly workers, students and intellectuals, and back them into a corner where the politics of the proletariat becomes the benchmark. These people talk fearlessly about their treatment by the State and the drugery of their daily routine with white Parisians oblivious to their inherent racism.

The film-makers fundamental question is, 'Are you happy?' Initially two women interview people on the street asking them if they are happy and as the film progresses this becomes its focal point while the level of intimacy Rouch and Morin achieves is extraordinary. Theirs is a technique other film-makers have used many times since, perhaps more skillfully as film-making has become more sophisticated but this masterpiece remains the granddaddy of them all. Unmissable.

THE MAGICIAN

Bergman made this period piece around the same time as those masterpieces "The Seventh Seal" and "Wild Strawberries". This may be a lesser film but it hardly deserved to disappear in the way that it did and it’s negative critical reputation is certainly unjustified. The theme is the battle between reason and superstition or what may be magic or between science and religion and it is a fine, powerful piece of work superbly played by the director’s stock company and luminously photographed by Gunnar Fischer. The tone, too, is lighter than many later Bergman films given the darkness of the material. (Bergman called it a comedy but there are many elements you would find in a horror film). A lesser work then but only by the narrowest of margins and certainly not to be missed.

SLOW WEST

"Slow West" may announce itself as an art-house western and one hailing from New Zealand rather than Hollywood at that, but it is still magnificent and not simply one of the best films I've seen this year but one of the great westerns. It may signal its young writer/director John Maclean, (making his feature debut), as being in thrall of his elders, and some might say at this stage, his betters as well as taking his cues from the likes of "McCabe and Mrs Miller" and "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" but here is a film full of imagination as well as virtuoso technique that merits serious critical attention. There is also a large helping of "True Grit" to its plot with young greenhorn Kodi Smit-McPhee journeying West in the company of bounty hunter and killer Michael Fassbender in search of his true love, encountering other bounty hunters, outlaws and Indians on the way.


Dialogue is sparse and poetical with both Smit-McPhee and Fassbender acting as our narrators, very much in the style of early Malick while the film is as visually gorgeous and as inventive as anything in the Malick oeuvre, (the DoP is Robbie Ryan). There is also a terrific score by Jed Kurzel. The two leads are first-rate and there's a wonderfully laid-back performance from Ben Mendelsohn as one of the films many villains, (indeed, everyone in this film is a killer of one kind or another). If the territory it explores isn't particularly new, (even the surreal asides feel somehow familiar), Maclean's handling of the material is outstanding and scene after scene lodges in the memory. In a year that has also seen Tommy Lee Jones' magnificent "The Homesman", who says the western is dead?