The films reviewed here represent those I have liked or loved over the years. It is not a list of my favourite films but all the films reviewed here are worth seeing and worth seeking out. I know many of you won't agree with me on a lot of these but hopefully you will grant me, and the films that appear here, our place in the sun. Thanks for reading.
Sunday, 31 March 2019
THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS
"The Sugarland Express". Although "Duel"did eventually get a cinema
release it was made for television so this very different kind of
road-movie was really Spielberg's official big-screen debut and it's
brilliant. (It's also very underrated, both in the Spielberg canon and
in that series of road movies that came out of America in the
seventies). It's a fact-based tragi-comedy about a young woman, (Goldie
Hawn, remarkably good), who breaks her husband (William Atherton) out
of prison so they can go get their child
out of foster care. On route to Sugarland (great name), where the
child is being kept, they hi-jack a police-car complete with patrolman,
(Michael Sacks), and in the process become celebrities of a sort. This
period marked something of a golden age for American movies and this is
both a key film in that Renaissance, (it's surely one of the best
American films of that decade), as well as being a very entertaining
one. It confirmed Spielberg as a major new director, Hawn's status as
an actress of real potential and newcomers Atherton and Sacks as actors
of considerable promise. The marvellous script was by Hal Barwood and
Matthew Robbins and it's a great satire.
Saturday, 30 March 2019
THE TIN STAR
Anthony Mann made this superlative western after completing the last
of the Jimmy Stewart westerns, ("The Man from Laramie"), and before he
made the Gary Cooper starring "Man of the West" and somehow it got lost
along the way despite having been nominated for a BAFTA Best Film award.
Instead of either Stewart or Cooper, Mann cast Henry Fonda as the
laconic, decent bounty hunter who take a greenhorn young sheriff, (a
beautifully cast Anthony Perkins), under his wing.
It's a very simple, traditional piece, shot in black and white by Loyal Griggs and dealing very much in black and white issues. It is a movie with straightforward heroes and villains, (Neville Brand is principal among the bad guys), a strong heroine, (Betsy Palmer), and even a sweet, likeable kid, (Michael Ray). If it lacks the psychological undercurrents of other Mann westerns it more than makes up for it in good old-fashioned action and suspense and of all his westerns this may be the most underrated
It's a very simple, traditional piece, shot in black and white by Loyal Griggs and dealing very much in black and white issues. It is a movie with straightforward heroes and villains, (Neville Brand is principal among the bad guys), a strong heroine, (Betsy Palmer), and even a sweet, likeable kid, (Michael Ray). If it lacks the psychological undercurrents of other Mann westerns it more than makes up for it in good old-fashioned action and suspense and of all his westerns this may be the most underrated
Friday, 29 March 2019
ZULU
A kind of British "The Alamo" and one of the great action epics, "Zulu"
was a huge popular success, at least here in the UK but was otherwise
underrated, (it was completely overlooked by both Oscar and BAFTA). It's
about the Battle of Rorke's Drift in which a battalion of 100 British
soldiers held out against a Zulu army of 4,000, suffering great losses
in the process. Cy Endfield directed the picture and co-produced with
Stanley Baker who also stars as the commanding officer though it is
Michael Caine, in his first notable part, as Baker's second-in-command,
who walks off with the picture. Since almost all the black actors are
nothing more than cannon fodder it's unlikely it would be made today but
as a picture of men in war it is very fine indeed.
THE KREMLIN LETTER
Just how seriously John Huston took any of this is hard to say but "The
Kremlin Letter" is still one of his most entertaining pictures. A shaggy
dog story with a plot that is virtually impossible to follow, it's
possibly his daftest picture since "Beat the Devil". An all-star cast
play various spies, both Russian and American, and they would all seem
to be after the letter of the title; that much is clear...or is it!
Huston himself wrote it, together with Gladys Hill, from a novel by Noel
Behn though like "Beat the Devil" you feel as if they're making it up
as they go along, which is all part of the fairly nasty fun. The superb
cast act with the straightest of faces, (there's a great cameo from
Orson Welles while Max Von Sydow and Bibi Andersson as usual walk away
with it). Sold at the time as a serious antidote to the Bond movies the
film wasn't a success but is now seen as a cult classic.
Sunday, 24 March 2019
BALLAD OF A SOLDIER
Grigori Chukhrai's "Ballad of a Soldier" was one of the first post-war
Russian films to enjoy international success, (it won the BAFTA for Best
Film and its screenplay was nominated for the Oscar). Of course, it
isn't hard to see why the film proved so popular in the West. In many
ways it's a typical Hollywood love story, as lyrical as anything Frank
Borzage might have made. These Russians weren't 'the red menace' and
could just as easily have come from the American Midwest.
Its hero is Alyosha, (Vladimir Ivashov; handsome, boyish, nineteen, a
Richard Barthelmess of the Steppes), and the film recounts his last
journey home from the Russian Front during World War 11. Not a great
deal happens; he helps a soldier who las lost a leg get home and he
meets a girl and falls in love. It might even be banal were it not for
the artistry and the poetry which Chukhrai puts into every frame,
(Vladimir Nikolayev and Era Savelyeva's cinematography is superb; there
are scenes, particularly in the closeups, that could have come from the
best of silent cinema). And it is this artistry which elevates the
picture beyond anything Hollywood was making at the time, (compare this
to Dmytryk's really banal "The Young Lions"). Its simplicity may no
longer be fashionable but it's a great film nevertheless.
DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT
Jan Nemec's 1964 masterpiece "Diamonds of the Night" is rightly
considered one of the cornerstones of the Czech New Wave. It's a
relatively short film, (only 66 minutes), but from its astonishing
opening in which two boys race across fields while gunfire rings out
around them, it never lets up. Virtually without dialogue, flashbacks or
just thoughts in the boys' minds tell us they are fleeing from a train
taking them to a concentration camp and that we are probably in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.
So extraordinary is Nemec's handling of this fictional situation, we
could be watching a documentary, (it's shot in black and white and often
with a hand-held camera). The boys themselves were not professional
actors, (one of them, Antonin Kumbera, never made another film), and
their plight as they make their way through forests to their inevitable
capture, is distressingly real and the luminous images have, what best
could be described as a 'terrible beauty'. Once an art-house favourite,
the film is seldom seen now but its recent release on Blu-ray should
hopefully change that.
Saturday, 23 March 2019
STOKER
If Chan-wook Park had directed "Shadow of a Doubt" instead of Hitchcock
or it had been written by Truman Capote during his "Other Voices, Other
Rooms" phase then if might have turned out something like "Stoker", a
deliriously over-the-top eye-popper of a chiller in which Uncle Charley
comes to stay with intentions towards niece India that are probably less
than wholesome. This is Park's English language debut and while not as
initially gruesome as some of the movies that made him famous, there's still plenty here to make you squirm; I, for one, was wriggling in my seat in blissful satisfaction.
Charley is Matthew Goode and very good he is, too. India is Mia
Wasikowska whose dark eyes and vacant stare is enough to convince you
that she may be more than a match for Uncle Charley should his
lascivious charm get out of hand. Mom is Nicole Kidman, a mite too fond
of the booze and her dead husband's younger brother and perhaps not
fond enough of her daughter. (Kidman is fast becoming the character
actress of choice for this kind of sleazy, noirish thriller). The
stunning cinematography is by Chung-hoon Chung; you would need to go
back to Minnelli or Sirk to find a director who uses colour as
imaginatively as Park does here. To say too much about the plot would
be to reveal too many of the film's many pleasures. Just race to see
this one for yourself.
I AM CUBA
"I am Cuba" has some of the greatest tracking shots in all of cinema.
Here is a film that practically reinvents cinema. It was made by the
Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov in the early sixties as a kind of
love-letter to the island and the Revolution. He filmed it like a
documentary but with a scripted narrative and using 'actors' to tell the
story of the Revolution and what lead to it but unaccountably the film
was neither popular with the Cubans or the Russians. Did they
really think it lacked revolutionary fervour? Yet this isn't a film you
watch for the narrative alone but for the technique employed and
visually this is one of the greatest of all films. Almost every shot is
a stunner and like all great visual films the intensity of the images
take on a life of their own turning the somewhat didactic
'story-telling' into real poetry. The script may be propaganda and the
acting wooden but the imagery is so strikingly vivid it forces you to
care about the characters and there are scenes in this film that rank
with the finest in all of world cinema. Indeed, I think this film is up
there with "The Battle of Algiers" and Salvatore Guiliano" as one of the
great revolutionary pictures. 'Lost' for almost 30 years it was finally
re-released through the auspices of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford
Coppola. We owe them a considerable debt of gratitude.
Friday, 22 March 2019
THE INFORMER
When "The Informer" first appeared in 1935 it was hailed as a
masterpiece and for many years was even thought of as one of the
greatest films ever made. It won its director, John Ford, the first of
his record-breaking four Best Director Oscars as well as a Best Actor
nod for its star Victor McLaglen and there's no denying that at times it
does touch greatness. The long, wordless opening is so incredibly good
you wish the whole film were silent, (it's superbly shot by Joseph
August in the style of the German Expressionists).
It's set in Dublin in 1920 at the time of the Black-and-Tans and the Irish 'Troubles' and it tells how Gypo Nolan, (McLaglen in a remarkably raw performance), betrays his friend Frankie McPhillips, ( a very good Wallace Ford), for £20 and is then wracked with guilt, Where it falls down is in the miscasting of Preston Foster as the IRA commandant and Margot Grahame as Gypo's girl. Grahame has the face of a soiled Madonna but neither she nor Foster could really act and the drag the film down. So, too, do the many scenes of Gypo going on a spending spree with the blood money he's earned which allows Ford to indulge in too many stage Oirishisms. But every now and then it lifts its head above the parapet and overall it's a powerful, elemental piece of work, maybe not the masterpiece it was first thought to be but an absolutely essential part of the Ford canon nevertheless and a key American movie of the thirties.
It's set in Dublin in 1920 at the time of the Black-and-Tans and the Irish 'Troubles' and it tells how Gypo Nolan, (McLaglen in a remarkably raw performance), betrays his friend Frankie McPhillips, ( a very good Wallace Ford), for £20 and is then wracked with guilt, Where it falls down is in the miscasting of Preston Foster as the IRA commandant and Margot Grahame as Gypo's girl. Grahame has the face of a soiled Madonna but neither she nor Foster could really act and the drag the film down. So, too, do the many scenes of Gypo going on a spending spree with the blood money he's earned which allows Ford to indulge in too many stage Oirishisms. But every now and then it lifts its head above the parapet and overall it's a powerful, elemental piece of work, maybe not the masterpiece it was first thought to be but an absolutely essential part of the Ford canon nevertheless and a key American movie of the thirties.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
The more I see of Theo Angelopolous' work the more convinced I am that
he was possibly the greatest director in the history of the movies and
yet at almost 3 1/2 hours long "Alexander the Great" is not an easy film
to sit through. You know while watching it that he could have made a
much shorter film if he had wanted to without sacrificing any of the
plot but Angelopolous is a man who likes to hold shots even when nothing
much is happening in them; in other words he gives you time, (and lots
of it), to take in the action or lack of it.
This, like so much of his work, is a film told almost entirely in images rather than words and every shot is composed for the maximum dramatic effect. Working again with cinematographer Ghiorgos Arvanitis there are images here as fine as any in cinema. Even if the film does seem overlong it is always visually stunning. The Alexander of this film isn't the great Greek warrior but a bandit who has kidnapped a party of English aristocrats and holds them to ransom while at the same time taking over the village commune in the mountains where his presence is virtually that of a warlord.
As with other Angelopolous political films this, perhaps unfortunately, tends towards the polemical rather than the dramatic. The aristocrats, for example, are used purely as props and even Alexander himself is more of a figurehead rather than a character in his own right. Angelopolous' habit of shooting mostly in long-shot means we never get close enough to any of the characters to really get to know them. Here we have a film in which there are only groups rather than individuals and narratively this is a difficult film to follow. Time and again I lost track of who was doing what to whom. Perhaps this is why, however great the film looks, it is never the historical epic that say, Visconti's "The Leopard" was. Yet this remains a considerable achievement. Films, particularly epics, this rigorous don't come along very often. This is a film that demands a great deal from its audience but stick with it and you will be amply rewarded. Like all of this great director's work it is a film you will take with you and brood over for a very long time. It may not be his greatest film but even Angelopolous working just below his best is still stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries.
This, like so much of his work, is a film told almost entirely in images rather than words and every shot is composed for the maximum dramatic effect. Working again with cinematographer Ghiorgos Arvanitis there are images here as fine as any in cinema. Even if the film does seem overlong it is always visually stunning. The Alexander of this film isn't the great Greek warrior but a bandit who has kidnapped a party of English aristocrats and holds them to ransom while at the same time taking over the village commune in the mountains where his presence is virtually that of a warlord.
As with other Angelopolous political films this, perhaps unfortunately, tends towards the polemical rather than the dramatic. The aristocrats, for example, are used purely as props and even Alexander himself is more of a figurehead rather than a character in his own right. Angelopolous' habit of shooting mostly in long-shot means we never get close enough to any of the characters to really get to know them. Here we have a film in which there are only groups rather than individuals and narratively this is a difficult film to follow. Time and again I lost track of who was doing what to whom. Perhaps this is why, however great the film looks, it is never the historical epic that say, Visconti's "The Leopard" was. Yet this remains a considerable achievement. Films, particularly epics, this rigorous don't come along very often. This is a film that demands a great deal from its audience but stick with it and you will be amply rewarded. Like all of this great director's work it is a film you will take with you and brood over for a very long time. It may not be his greatest film but even Angelopolous working just below his best is still stands head and shoulders above his contemporaries.
Wednesday, 20 March 2019
FREUD
"Freud" is John Huston's amazingly level-headed, clear-eyed biopic, not so
much of Freud himself, but of psychoanalysis and it grips you like a
good thriller should. The problem is it's so level-headed at times it
feels almost simplistic; it's like a horror story that could just as
easily have been called 'Demons of the Mind', and while it's superbly
shot in widescreen black and white by Douglas Slocombe the images are
almost oppressive. (Jerry Goldsmith's score doesn't help;
it's like a prequel to his work on "The Omen"). However, the script by
Wolfgang Reinhardt and Charles Kaufman is very fine; complex ideas are
presented coolly and intelligently and if the dreams seem to be
interpreted a little too matter-of-factly then that is probably down to
what we already know; we have already assembled the jigsaw puzzle in our
heads. Such 'big' revelations as we blame our parents for our sexual
hang-ups hardly feel new. It is also very well acted. Montgomery Clift
is a superb Freud; this was the last really good thing he did and
there's very good work from Susannah York as one of his patients, the
girl who desired her father and wished her mother dead and who comes out
with the classic Freudian slip of saying 'prostitute' rather than
'Protestant'. So despite its faults it remains something of a key work
in the Huston canon, sitting very comfortably along side such 'literary'
works as "Reflections in a Golden Eye", "Moby Dick", Wise Blood" and "The Dead". At the time of its initial release it was treated very shabbily
by the critical establishment; its recent release on dvd should go some
way to making amends.
WILD AT HEART
TOO LATE BLUES
John Cassavetes produced and directed "Too
Late Blues", as well as co-writing it, in 1961. It was his second film,
after "Shadows", but he never really rated it, feeling the studio
imposed restrictions on his 'style' and that the end result was too
conventional. It wasn't. It may not be quite in the same class as "A
Woman Under the Influence" or "Opening Night" but it is still remarkable
in its free-wheeling, semi-improvisational way.
It's about jazz musicians and in particular Bobby Darin's pianist and Stella Steven's singer and their on-again, off-again romance. They are both terrific, particularly Stevens, (I think it's one of the great overlooked performances by an actress in the movies), and there is an equally brilliant performance by Everett Chambers as Darin's Machiavellian agent. Indeed the entire supporting cast are outstanding confirming, even at this early stage, that Cassavetes was a great director of actors. The superb black and white photography is by Lionel Lindon and naturally there is some great jazz on the soundtrack.
It's about jazz musicians and in particular Bobby Darin's pianist and Stella Steven's singer and their on-again, off-again romance. They are both terrific, particularly Stevens, (I think it's one of the great overlooked performances by an actress in the movies), and there is an equally brilliant performance by Everett Chambers as Darin's Machiavellian agent. Indeed the entire supporting cast are outstanding confirming, even at this early stage, that Cassavetes was a great director of actors. The superb black and white photography is by Lionel Lindon and naturally there is some great jazz on the soundtrack.
Monday, 18 March 2019
LES DAMES DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE
This early masterpiece from Robert Bresson is just as austere as any of
the films that followed it but his use of professional actors gives the
film a kind of distance, an almost Hollywood gloss and you can almost
see in Maria Casares' magnificent performance as the vindictive Helene a
touch of Bette Davis. Bresson did the adaptation from a book by Diderot
but Cocteau supplied the terse, pointed dialogue where every word
counts and where every word could be used as a weapon.
It's a tale of revenge. Jean has fallen out of love with Helene but she decides to trap him by telling him first that it is she who has fallen out of love with him. When he tells her he feels the same way she takes her revenge, a woman scorned and all that, by seeking out a sad little strumpet, Agnes, introducing her as a friend and then organizing it so that Jean falls in love with her. She then plans on telling Jean he has given himself to a whore. It's a chilly, almost savage film that takes a novelettish situation and turns into something approaching tragedy. The director draws superb performances from everyone, not just Casares in what may be her greatest role but also from Paul Bernard as Jean, Elina Labourdette as the unfortunate Agnes and Lucienne Bogaert as her complicit mother. One wonders if Hollywood had remade the film would any studio or any director be so single-minded, so absolute in their portrayal of evil. An astonishing film.
It's a tale of revenge. Jean has fallen out of love with Helene but she decides to trap him by telling him first that it is she who has fallen out of love with him. When he tells her he feels the same way she takes her revenge, a woman scorned and all that, by seeking out a sad little strumpet, Agnes, introducing her as a friend and then organizing it so that Jean falls in love with her. She then plans on telling Jean he has given himself to a whore. It's a chilly, almost savage film that takes a novelettish situation and turns into something approaching tragedy. The director draws superb performances from everyone, not just Casares in what may be her greatest role but also from Paul Bernard as Jean, Elina Labourdette as the unfortunate Agnes and Lucienne Bogaert as her complicit mother. One wonders if Hollywood had remade the film would any studio or any director be so single-minded, so absolute in their portrayal of evil. An astonishing film.
PETULIA
Richard Lester may have had the most chequered career in all of movies. There are some deep troughs, ("The Bed Sitting Room", "The Ritz", "The Return of the Musketeers"), but the peaks were remarkable, ("The Knack", "The Three Musketeers", "The Four Musketeers", "Robin and Marian"), but perhaps "Petulia" was the greatest peak of all. Lester liked to take risks but perhaps never more so than here, taking an already rich and emotionally complex tale and chopping it up every which way so an audience really has to work to take it all in. Superficially it's about the on-again, off-again love affair between a divorced doctor, (George C. Scott), and a somewhat off-the-wall married woman, (Julie Christie). His ex-wife is a luminously beautiful Shirley Knight while she is married to Richard Chamberlin, (superb), who likes to beat her up. It's not told chronologically. There are flashbacks or are they flash-forwards? Others in the superb cast include Arthur Hill and Kathleen Widdoes as another married couple and Joseph Cotten as Chamberlin's father. Adding to the film's texture and to its success is Nicolas Roeg's stunning cinematography and the uses he makes of the San Francisco locations. When I first saw it I chose it as the year's best film from any source, (over Kubrick's 2001). I thought that with the passage of time, (I haven't seen it since), I might find it dated and perhaps a tad pretentious. Not a bit of it; this is a film for the ages and it looks and feels as 'modern' today as it did in 1968. A masterpiece.
Sunday, 17 March 2019
ORDINARY PEOPLE
It was fashionable to knock Robert
Redford's film of "Ordinary People" almost from the moment it won the
Oscar as the year's Best Picture almost as a kind of backlash for the
snubbing of "Raging Bull" and Martin Scorsese and yet this was, and still
is, one of the great movies about psychiatry, the way we handle grief
and, above all, that phenomenon known as the American WASP. Or maybe
people couldn't reconcile that a movie this fine could have been made by
Robert Redford. If that is the case reflect on the fact that as an
actor Redford was at his best playing the WASP hero of "The Way We Were".
It's also a superbly well-acted picture. Timothy Hutton won a richly deserved Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for his performance as the troubled boy whose guilt at the death of his older brother has lead him to attempt suicide. As his parents Redford cast actors who were perfect for their roles rather than actors who might have proved a bigger box-office draw. Cast against type Mary Tyler Moore is extraordinary as the mother with ice water in her veins. It was a very brave piece of acting from someone better known as a much loved television personality and it should have won her the Oscar, (she lost to the infinitely more likeable Sissy Spacek in "Coalminer's Daughter"). As the soft-hearted and caring father Donald Sutherland was never better though he went unrecognized by the Academy. In smaller parts Judd Hirsch, (the psychiatrist), and Elizabeth McGovern and Dinah Manoff, (the two girls in Hutton's life), are all outstanding. Like all great films this has stood the test of time. Maybe it cut too deeply into the American psyche to have proved truly popular, certainly amongst Americans. I thought it was a masterpiece in 1980 and I still do.
It's also a superbly well-acted picture. Timothy Hutton won a richly deserved Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for his performance as the troubled boy whose guilt at the death of his older brother has lead him to attempt suicide. As his parents Redford cast actors who were perfect for their roles rather than actors who might have proved a bigger box-office draw. Cast against type Mary Tyler Moore is extraordinary as the mother with ice water in her veins. It was a very brave piece of acting from someone better known as a much loved television personality and it should have won her the Oscar, (she lost to the infinitely more likeable Sissy Spacek in "Coalminer's Daughter"). As the soft-hearted and caring father Donald Sutherland was never better though he went unrecognized by the Academy. In smaller parts Judd Hirsch, (the psychiatrist), and Elizabeth McGovern and Dinah Manoff, (the two girls in Hutton's life), are all outstanding. Like all great films this has stood the test of time. Maybe it cut too deeply into the American psyche to have proved truly popular, certainly amongst Americans. I thought it was a masterpiece in 1980 and I still do.
Saturday, 16 March 2019
SATAN IN HIGH HEELS
One of the great things about exploitation movies is that being made
'on the hoof', so to speak, using non-professional actors or at least
actors without much talent, and often filmed in real locations and in
black-and-white, there is often an almost documentary-like naturalism to
proceedings. Of course, that doesn't mean they are necessarily any
good; the scripts are often terrible and that lack of acting talent can
be laughable but once in a while, one hits pay-dirt. If it's
"Carnival of Souls" it can build up a critical and cult reputation that
far exceeds its merits while others, like "Satan in High Heels", can
slip through the cracks.
This is no masterpiece and the acting from its mostly Z-Grade cast is no
better than we have any right to expect but hey, what's this, an Oscar
nominee billed second from the top? Yes, this is the same Grayson Hall
who only two years later would be nominated for her role in "Night of
the Iguana". Here she's running the club that our heroine, (Meg Myles),
ends up in and yes, once again Grayson is playing a somewhat butch
lesbian. (Oh, and that really is the same Sabrina who was in "Blue
Murder at St. Trinians" cast as 'herself').
This may be a cheapie but the direction values are surprisingly good and there's even a sprinkling of good lines and a few decent songs on the soundtrack. The director was someone with the unlikely name of Jerald Intrator but I often think movies like this direct themselves. It's not the gem I had hoped it might be but neither is it as big a dog as its lurid title and Poverty Row production values would suggest.
This may be a cheapie but the direction values are surprisingly good and there's even a sprinkling of good lines and a few decent songs on the soundtrack. The director was someone with the unlikely name of Jerald Intrator but I often think movies like this direct themselves. It's not the gem I had hoped it might be but neither is it as big a dog as its lurid title and Poverty Row production values would suggest.
Friday, 15 March 2019
THREE COMRADES
"Three Comrades" was one of the few films on which F. Scott Fitzgerald
got a writing credit. He co-wrote it with Edward E Paramore Jr from a
novel by Erich Maria Remarque who wrote "All Quiet on the Western Front"
and it's a beautiful job of work. It's set in Germany after the First
World War, (you'll have no trouble accepting the American cast as
Germans), and is about three friends, (Robert Taylor, Franchot Tone and
Robert Young), and their relationship with a frivolous, sophisticated
and dying girl. She's played magnificently by Margaret Sullavan, (she
won the New York Film Critic's prize for Best Actress), and she's the
lynchpin of this Frank Borzage classic which is deeply romantic and
highly intelligent at the same time. It's a love story that doesn't shy
away from the political situation pertaining in Germany at the time
without ever being preachy. Indeed, it's one of the great films about
friendship and it's very easy to accept Taylor, Tone and Young as men
who really care for one another, (Tone is superb and even Taylor and
Young don't let the side down), but this is Sullavan's movie. It's a
luminous performance, perhaps her finest. Her disappearance from the
movies and tragically early death was one of the cinema's
greatest losses.
Wednesday, 13 March 2019
THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL
Wes Anderson makes films that aren't like the films of anyone else. That
may or may not be a good thing, depending on whether you 'get' them.
I've always felt his films were like live action versions of the
cartoons in 'The New Yorker'; sometimes they're funny, most of the time
they're clever and always they seem to be designed for the
intelligentsia. Perhaps that's why Wes Anderson's films don't make lots
of money or win Oscars. Even the 'intellectual' New York comedies of
Woody Allen have a wider appeal, not that their films have a great deal
in common except, perhaps, their 'smartness'.
Although "The Grand Budapest Hotel" has secured a multiplex release I doubt if it will wow them in Des Moines which is a pity since this is a film of considerable charm and a good deal of wit. OK, it's hardly laugh-out-loud funny but I had a silly grin on my face from start to finish. Like all his films it's set in what we might call 'Andersonland', a totally fabricated country made up of scraps from his favourite fiction, in this case the writings of Stefan Zweig who gets a special dedication at the end. It's literary in that words matter a great deal and play an important part in the development of the story and it's a film in which stories are crucial, (it's divided, like a novel, into chapters).
Indeed, the story that makes up the body of the film is told as a story within a story begun by elderly author Tom Wilkinson informing us of how he first met the owner of the The Grand Budapest Hotel many years before when we was a young writer, (played by Jude Law), and the owner was an old man, (an excellent F Murray Abraham), who in turn tells the story of when he was a mere lobby boy, (newcomer Tony Revolori), under the tutelage of the hotel's concierge and the films central character, M Gustave, (a superb comic performance from Ralph Fiennes). It's when we get back to this point in time that the dimensions of the screen change from today's customary widescreen to the box-like dimensions of '30's cinema. It's as if Anderson is paying tribute, not just to writers like Zweig, but to film-makers like Ernst Lubitsch as this is a Ruritanian romance set in the kind of Mitteleuropa so beloved of Lubitsch and others of the period. All it lacks are the characters periodically bursting into song.
If the film doesn't quite live up to its predecessors such as "The Royal Tenenbaums" or "The Life Aquatic" I think it's because there's no emotional commitment to the characters, It's too skittish, too self-consciously smart to draw us in. On the other hand it looks amazing. The hotel itself is like a giant cake that the baker in the film, M Mendl, might have made, and then there's always that extraordinary cast to keep us entertained. The film reads like a Who's Who, not just of Anderson regulars, but of moviedom's best character actors. None of them are, of course, remotely 'realistic', not even Fiennes. They remain the stock characters we find in those 'New Yorker' cartoons but they remain good company nevertheless. One thing is guaranteed, of course; you won't find anything else like it, at least not until Anderson makes his next movie.
Although "The Grand Budapest Hotel" has secured a multiplex release I doubt if it will wow them in Des Moines which is a pity since this is a film of considerable charm and a good deal of wit. OK, it's hardly laugh-out-loud funny but I had a silly grin on my face from start to finish. Like all his films it's set in what we might call 'Andersonland', a totally fabricated country made up of scraps from his favourite fiction, in this case the writings of Stefan Zweig who gets a special dedication at the end. It's literary in that words matter a great deal and play an important part in the development of the story and it's a film in which stories are crucial, (it's divided, like a novel, into chapters).
Indeed, the story that makes up the body of the film is told as a story within a story begun by elderly author Tom Wilkinson informing us of how he first met the owner of the The Grand Budapest Hotel many years before when we was a young writer, (played by Jude Law), and the owner was an old man, (an excellent F Murray Abraham), who in turn tells the story of when he was a mere lobby boy, (newcomer Tony Revolori), under the tutelage of the hotel's concierge and the films central character, M Gustave, (a superb comic performance from Ralph Fiennes). It's when we get back to this point in time that the dimensions of the screen change from today's customary widescreen to the box-like dimensions of '30's cinema. It's as if Anderson is paying tribute, not just to writers like Zweig, but to film-makers like Ernst Lubitsch as this is a Ruritanian romance set in the kind of Mitteleuropa so beloved of Lubitsch and others of the period. All it lacks are the characters periodically bursting into song.
If the film doesn't quite live up to its predecessors such as "The Royal Tenenbaums" or "The Life Aquatic" I think it's because there's no emotional commitment to the characters, It's too skittish, too self-consciously smart to draw us in. On the other hand it looks amazing. The hotel itself is like a giant cake that the baker in the film, M Mendl, might have made, and then there's always that extraordinary cast to keep us entertained. The film reads like a Who's Who, not just of Anderson regulars, but of moviedom's best character actors. None of them are, of course, remotely 'realistic', not even Fiennes. They remain the stock characters we find in those 'New Yorker' cartoons but they remain good company nevertheless. One thing is guaranteed, of course; you won't find anything else like it, at least not until Anderson makes his next movie.
A GIRL IN BLACK
Ellie Lambetti's performance in "A Girl in
Black" is one of the greatest performances by an actress in all of
cinema and yet hardly anyone has seen it. Michael Cacoyannis made this
film for virtually nothing on the Greek island of Hydra after achieving
international success with "Stella". It's a beautiful looking film, (the
great Walter Lassally was the photographer), and the simple island
setting suited the simplicity of the style perfectly. Early in the film
one of the character says that everything is exposed by the light, even
men's sins and that is the theme of the film.
When two strangers arrive on the island their presence arouses passions among the locals that were always there but kept simmering just below the surface. Eleni Zafiriou is the widow who bestows her favours a little too freely, (the islanders are a very unforgiving lot), Lambetti is the daughter tainted by her sins, Anestis Vlachos is the son who is shamed by her, the better-known Greek actor Georges Foundas, (he was in "Never on Sunday"), is the fisherman who wants Lambetti and Dimitri Horn, the man from Athens, who gets her. It's a contemporary Greek tragedy on a small, but no less terrible, scale and it's heartbreaking. In America the film won the Golden Globe but it is seldom revived. See it at all costs.
When two strangers arrive on the island their presence arouses passions among the locals that were always there but kept simmering just below the surface. Eleni Zafiriou is the widow who bestows her favours a little too freely, (the islanders are a very unforgiving lot), Lambetti is the daughter tainted by her sins, Anestis Vlachos is the son who is shamed by her, the better-known Greek actor Georges Foundas, (he was in "Never on Sunday"), is the fisherman who wants Lambetti and Dimitri Horn, the man from Athens, who gets her. It's a contemporary Greek tragedy on a small, but no less terrible, scale and it's heartbreaking. In America the film won the Golden Globe but it is seldom revived. See it at all costs.
Monday, 11 March 2019
THE AMERICAN FRIEND
"The American Friend" is Wim Wenders' great existential thriller
about a dying man hired to commit a murder so that his family can be
looked after when he's dead. The source was Patricia Highsmith's novel
"Ripley's Game" though Tom Ripley is something of a secondary character.
The central character of the dying killer is Jonathan Zimmermann,
(beautifully played by the late Bruno Ganz), and the film is less of a
thriller, though the murders, (there is more than one), are brilliantly
handled by Wenders if not by the killers, (there's more than one), than
it is about how doing things contrary to our nature can be a form of
catharsis.
It's also
another love letter to the cinema from its movie-loving director who
casts Dennis Hopper as Ripley and the directors Nicholas Ray and Samuel
Fuller in smaller parts and using locations in Paris, New York but
mostly Hamburg to brilliant effect but unlike other directors who might
find themselves classed as 'fanboys' Wenders never draws attention to
his homages; they are just there, intrinsically worked into the film's
fabric. He also doesn't make a big deal out of killing someone or of
dying of leukemia; his genius has always been for observation and by
making the act of murder something mundane he honors the legacy of
Highsmith. A great film by one of cinema's great masters.
Sunday, 10 March 2019
THE WOUNDED ANGEL
In Kazakhstan life is hard and childhood,
as we know it, is virtually non-existent. Children and adults alike do
what they can to get by. Emir Baigazin's remarkable. virtually plotless
film is divided into a number of chapters, each one examining boys
struggling with the pain of the everyday and a life, if a life it is,
far removed from what we in the West are used to.
I don't know if any of the 'actors' are professionals but the performances Baigazin draws from his mostly young cast are extraordinary. There is no music score and little dialogue, (which is just as well as the subtitles on the print I saw were poor). It is, of course, deeply depressing, as grim a picture of childhood as the cinema has given us yet filmed with a startling purity. This is only Baigazin's second film but, if given the distribution it cries out for, it should establish him as a major player in world cinema.
I don't know if any of the 'actors' are professionals but the performances Baigazin draws from his mostly young cast are extraordinary. There is no music score and little dialogue, (which is just as well as the subtitles on the print I saw were poor). It is, of course, deeply depressing, as grim a picture of childhood as the cinema has given us yet filmed with a startling purity. This is only Baigazin's second film but, if given the distribution it cries out for, it should establish him as a major player in world cinema.
Friday, 8 March 2019
MILLIONS LIKE US
Long before the British 'New Wave' and the 'Kitchen Sink' there were
movies like "Millions Like Us", pieces of wartime realism filmed on
authentic locations and peopled with actors who talked and looked just
like the people sitting in the stalls. The acting may have been a tad
ropy but the characters were believable, the approach taken akin to
that of documentaries. "Millions Like Us" was the work of Frank Launder
and Sidney Gilliat who began their careers as writers, (they wrote
Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes"), before taking over the director's reins
as well. They were always overshadowed by Powell and Pressburger and
yet they made several outstanding films and this is one of them, honest
and, although very moving, totally lacking in sentimentality, unlike
similar products being churned out of Hollywood at the same time.
ON APPROVAL
The most English of all English comedies and something of a
tour-de-force, particularly for Clive Brook who produced, directed and
adapted Frederick Lonsdale's play as well as taking the lead as a
penniless Duke in love with an American heiress. She's Googie Withers
but she doesn't love him back. They end up as chaperones, he to Roland
Culver and she to Beatrice Lillie, on a Scottish island where Lillie has
brought Culver for a month 'on approval' to see if she likes him enough
to marry him. All four are superb but Lillie, in one of her few major
film roles, walks off with the movie as the obnoxious Maria, though in
the acting stakes Brook does give her a run for her money. The film is
seldom revived, however; could it be just too sophisticated for
mass consumption?
Wednesday, 6 March 2019
MY DARLING CLEMENTINE
John Ford is reputed as having once introduced himself with "My name is John Ford; I make westerns". He won a record four Best Director Oscars yet none of them for a western. You might say that testifies to his versatility; I think rather it says more about the Academy's disdain for the western, as if horse-operas were nothing more than fodder for the masses yet several of John Ford's westerns are among the finest films ever made anywhere by anyone. A few years back his movie "The Searchers", largely dismissed by critics at the time of its release, was named in Sight and Sound's ten best films ever made.
In 1946 he made "My Darling Clementine", yet another take on the saga of Wyatt Earp, the Clantons and that gunfight that took place at the OK Corral and it's a masterpiece, a luminous, poetic and deeply moving account of life on the frontier. Ford shot the film in his beloved Monument Valley and while he claims the actual gunfight was historically accurate, little else belonged to historical fact. It's a 'print the legend' kind of movie and the legend here lies in Henry Fonda's magnificent performance as Earp as well as a number of set-pieces as good as anything in American movies; Earp's first meeting with Doc Holliday, Earp stepping out with Clementine at the church meeting, Alan Mowbray as a ham actor reciting Shakespeare in the bar-room. It also boasts probably the only really good performance ever given by Victor Mature as Doc Holliday. I have seen this film many times over the years and like all great movies it only improves with age.
JIMMY'S HALL
At his best Ken Loach makes films that are
as emotionally engaging as any in world cinema and while he has on
occasions disappointed, every Ken Loach film is worth seeking out.
"Jimmy's Hall" sees him return, in some respects, to the territory he
explored in "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" and it is one of his very
best films. Again we are back in Ireland but 10 years after the end of
the Civil War. Old wounds haven't healed, (they still haven't healed
completely to this day), and like "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" the
divisions here are much more political than social and almost
as violent.
It deals with the very specific conflict between those who opposed the Treaty, those who supported it and the dominating Catholic Church when one, Jimmy Gralton, returns from 10 years exile in America and reopens a community hall that was the source of all his trouble in the first place, against the express wishes of 'Holy Mother Church' and those who backed it.
As scripted by Paul Laverty it is, of course, a deeply political film but Loach is the most humanist of political film-makers; consequently it is also a deeply moving (and, at times, very funny) picture. At its centre is a magnificent performance from Barry Ward as Gralton and he is backed beautifully by Jim Norton and Andrew Scott representing the clergy as well as a host of wonderfully naturalistic Irish actors, some professional, some not. Loach may now be in this seventies but this feels as fresh and as relevant as anything he did fifty years ago. I think it's the equal to both "Land and Freedom" and "The Wind that Shakes the Barley".
It deals with the very specific conflict between those who opposed the Treaty, those who supported it and the dominating Catholic Church when one, Jimmy Gralton, returns from 10 years exile in America and reopens a community hall that was the source of all his trouble in the first place, against the express wishes of 'Holy Mother Church' and those who backed it.
As scripted by Paul Laverty it is, of course, a deeply political film but Loach is the most humanist of political film-makers; consequently it is also a deeply moving (and, at times, very funny) picture. At its centre is a magnificent performance from Barry Ward as Gralton and he is backed beautifully by Jim Norton and Andrew Scott representing the clergy as well as a host of wonderfully naturalistic Irish actors, some professional, some not. Loach may now be in this seventies but this feels as fresh and as relevant as anything he did fifty years ago. I think it's the equal to both "Land and Freedom" and "The Wind that Shakes the Barley".
WILDLIFE
Paul Dano is one of the best actors in the world today though not too
many people seem to recognize the fact, or maybe it's just the Academy
since Dano has yet to be Oscar-nominated for any of the extraordinary
performances he has given. Now he's turned his hand to directing and
with "Wildlife" he has made one of the best directorial debuts in
American cinema. I haven't read the Richard Ford novel that he and his
partner Zoe Kazan have adapted for the screen but I honestly believe Dano's film version is as fine as movies can get.
Fundamentally, there are really only four characters. Jerry Brinson,
(Jake Gyllenhaal), his wife Jeanette, (Carey Mulligan), their
14-year-old son Joe, (Ed Oxenbould), and the middle-aged man, (Bill
Camp), the wife meets after Jerry 'deserts' his family to go and fight
wildfires, (the setting is a picturesque but lonely looking Montana).
The period is 1960, beautifully evoked in the settings, the costumes and
even in the language the characters speak, while the film is about a
marriage that is neither happy nor unhappy and with characters who are
just making do, (the 14-year-old son is the most mature character on
screen).
It is a deeply sad and pensive film; there are times I was reminded of Bergman but it certainly doesn't feel like a rip-off or even a homage. Dano handles individual scenes magnificently. There is a lengthy sequence where the mother and son are invited for dinner to the home of the man the mother has met that is a master-class in what, I suppose, you could call the cinema of embarrassment. The mother gets drunk and flirts, the man makes a pass at her and the boy is shocked and then it ends almost as suddenly as it began. It is a scene reminiscent of real-life and not of what we are used to seeing at the movies.
The whole film is beautifully acted. Perhaps it is Dano's brilliance as an actor that enables him to draw performances of this quality from his players. Gyllenhaal may have the smallest part, (he's absent for much of the film's middle section), but he's perfectly cast. Bill Camp has finally got a part worthy of his talent but it is Mulligan and young Oxenbould who carry the film. Oxenbould is astonishingly good as the boy trying to live a normal life in what is really an abnormal situation and Mulligan has probably never been better than as a woman who married too young and is now regretting it. Near the end, it threatens it dip into melodrama but it doesn't. As in life, things don't go quite the way you anticipate and like life, you just get on with it. "Wildlife" is a great film and was totally ignored by the Academy last year; once again I say, shame on them.
It is a deeply sad and pensive film; there are times I was reminded of Bergman but it certainly doesn't feel like a rip-off or even a homage. Dano handles individual scenes magnificently. There is a lengthy sequence where the mother and son are invited for dinner to the home of the man the mother has met that is a master-class in what, I suppose, you could call the cinema of embarrassment. The mother gets drunk and flirts, the man makes a pass at her and the boy is shocked and then it ends almost as suddenly as it began. It is a scene reminiscent of real-life and not of what we are used to seeing at the movies.
The whole film is beautifully acted. Perhaps it is Dano's brilliance as an actor that enables him to draw performances of this quality from his players. Gyllenhaal may have the smallest part, (he's absent for much of the film's middle section), but he's perfectly cast. Bill Camp has finally got a part worthy of his talent but it is Mulligan and young Oxenbould who carry the film. Oxenbould is astonishingly good as the boy trying to live a normal life in what is really an abnormal situation and Mulligan has probably never been better than as a woman who married too young and is now regretting it. Near the end, it threatens it dip into melodrama but it doesn't. As in life, things don't go quite the way you anticipate and like life, you just get on with it. "Wildlife" is a great film and was totally ignored by the Academy last year; once again I say, shame on them.
Tuesday, 5 March 2019
HIGH AND LOW
As the trajectory of Ozu and Mizoguchi
continues to rise so that of Kurosawa continues to fall. Critics have
always preferred the esoteric and Kurosawa has always been seen as the
most Westernized, the most commercial of Japanese directors. He was, of
course, best known for his historical epics and samurai films but he
also made many contemporary movies including a number of first-rate
thrillers of which "High and Low" may be the best.
It takes Ed McBain's novel "King's Ransom" and deposits in a post-war Japan that could just as easily be New York or Chicago or LA but for the fact that this is a country of two halves, a society divided into 'high' and 'low', of those who have made it in the years after the nation's defeat and those who haven't. It's about a kidnapping that has gone askew; the wrong boy has been kidnapped, not the son of the rich industrialist but the chauffeur's son. Does the industrialist pay the ransom and ruin himself, (he has put his entire fortune into a take-over bid), or does he risk the boy's life? The film itself is divided into two halves, both equally exciting; the first dealing with the kidnapping and the second with the hunt for the kidnappers while the plot is further complicated by the industrialist, Gondo's (an excellent Toshiro Mifune), involvement in the take-over.
This is a terrific police procedural picture as detailed as something David Fincher might make today, superbly shot in black and white Cinemascope and it displays the same kind of raw urgency one might associate with Samuel Fuller. In other words, there is nothing artsy, esoteric or precious about this film yet it displays all the skills of a great director working at the top of his game. Perhaps it is time to return Kurosawa to his rightful place at the top of the critical canon.
It takes Ed McBain's novel "King's Ransom" and deposits in a post-war Japan that could just as easily be New York or Chicago or LA but for the fact that this is a country of two halves, a society divided into 'high' and 'low', of those who have made it in the years after the nation's defeat and those who haven't. It's about a kidnapping that has gone askew; the wrong boy has been kidnapped, not the son of the rich industrialist but the chauffeur's son. Does the industrialist pay the ransom and ruin himself, (he has put his entire fortune into a take-over bid), or does he risk the boy's life? The film itself is divided into two halves, both equally exciting; the first dealing with the kidnapping and the second with the hunt for the kidnappers while the plot is further complicated by the industrialist, Gondo's (an excellent Toshiro Mifune), involvement in the take-over.
This is a terrific police procedural picture as detailed as something David Fincher might make today, superbly shot in black and white Cinemascope and it displays the same kind of raw urgency one might associate with Samuel Fuller. In other words, there is nothing artsy, esoteric or precious about this film yet it displays all the skills of a great director working at the top of his game. Perhaps it is time to return Kurosawa to his rightful place at the top of the critical canon.
Friday, 1 March 2019
TRAPEZE
Almost a great circus movie, (if such a
thing could exist), "Trapeze" comes closer than most to capturing the
tawdry excitement of the milieu. While most circus pictures are aimed at
kids this is aimed, if not quite at adults, then at least at older
kids. It's sexy and it makes the whole business of being a trapeze
artist seem like the sexiest, most exciting thing in the world.
It's about the rivalry that can develop, both professionally and romantically, between artists and the director, Carol Reed, gives the film a charge that his more famous and infinitely more civilized films don't have. As the trio of artists who are almost consumed by their passions Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and Gina Lolobrigida have an instinctive rapport. Lancaster and Curtis' performances here seem like a dry run for their work a year later in "Sweet Smell of Success" and Lolobrigida never looked or acted better. Although Lancaster wasn't young when he made this, he's like the biggest kid in the playground and seems to be having a hell of a time while Lolobrigida is a dynamic tease.
It's about the rivalry that can develop, both professionally and romantically, between artists and the director, Carol Reed, gives the film a charge that his more famous and infinitely more civilized films don't have. As the trio of artists who are almost consumed by their passions Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and Gina Lolobrigida have an instinctive rapport. Lancaster and Curtis' performances here seem like a dry run for their work a year later in "Sweet Smell of Success" and Lolobrigida never looked or acted better. Although Lancaster wasn't young when he made this, he's like the biggest kid in the playground and seems to be having a hell of a time while Lolobrigida is a dynamic tease.
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