IN THIS OUR LIFE

John Huston's second film, "In This Our Life" may have been just a job of work for him and nothing more than a trashy melodrama but it's undeniably entertaining with a very classy cast even if it does have one of Bette Davis' worst performances, (she's still the bitch but her acting is pinched as if her heart wasn't in it, as if she knows what a crock she's landed herself in). She's the bad sister who steals her good sister's husband and drives him to suicide. Olivia De Havilland is the good sister who finds her backbone after she's been dumped. It was quite daring for its day, even touching on the subject of incest, (Bette has a randy old uncle who has the hots for her and is played with lip-smacking relish by Charles Coburn). The men in their lives are George Brent, (who else?), and Dennis Morgan and there's a nice supporting turn from the young African-American actor Ernest Anderson, (whatever happened to him?) as the boy Bette tries to incriminate in a hit-and-run. Unfortunately poor Hattie McDaniel, only a couple of years after winning an Oscar, is back to playing Mammy and Billie Burke is wasted as the mother who never seems to get out of bed. Huston's heart may not have been in it any more than Bette's but he keeps it moving along at quite a gallop nevertheless.

VIOLENT SATURDAY

Richard Fleischer may never have made it into the very front rank of the great directors but he did make some terrific films and "Violent Saturday" may be his masterpiece. It's a heist movie, (and it's an excellent heist movie), but one with a difference since fundamentally this is also another 1950's small town melodrama of the 'Peyton Place' variety. We get to know, not only the trio of bank robbers, (Stephen McNally, Lee Marvin and a superb J Carroll Naish), intent on robbing the Bradenville bank, but also a number of the town's inhabitants, (Victor Mature, Richard Egan, Virginia Leith, Sylvia Sidney, Tommy Noonan, Margaret Hayes), all of whom are destined to be caught up in some way in the robbery. It's a brilliantly paced movie, beautifully written by Sydney Boehm and impeccably directed by Fleischer, making superb use of the Cinemascope format. Largely dismissed at the time of its release it is now, deservedly, considered something of a classic.

REMBRANDT

Of all the films made about great painters Alexander Korda's "Rembrandt" is still one of the most visually astonishing. Almost every frame, (designer is Vincent Korda and the DP, the great Georges Perinal), is a work of art in itself and Charles Laughton, in the title role, is like a self-portrait come to life. Unfortunately, it ends there. Korda was a dreadfully pedestrian director and this fairly limps along, not helped by the terrible dialogue and some very wooden acting from the supporting cast, including a very shrill Gertrude Lawrence. Only the great Elsa Lanchester comes close to delivering a real character and her scenes with Laughton give the film a much needed lift. Had this been a silent picture, it might really have been something.

HARD EIGHT

"Hard Eight" is one of the great feature film debuts in all of cinema and it's by possibly the greatest director working in America today yet a lot of people don't really know it. For most people, Paul Thomas Anderson's career didn't begin until "Boogie Nights". The theme of "Hard Eight" isn't gambling, (though it's one of the most addictive films about gambling ever made), but relationships and it's a masterclass in great acting. You might say it also launched what became something of a stock company for Anderson and gave Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly and Gwyneth Paltrow three of the best parts they ever had. The cast also includes a terrific Samuel L. Jackson and a then unknown but equally terrific Philip Seymour Hoffman and is superbly shot by Anderson regular Robert Elswitt. While all these factors add up to making this a great debut, (anyone of them on their own would score a perfect ten), ultimately it's the depth of Anderson's screenplay that carries it. It's a thriller, of course, but not in the way you might imagine. There's more psychological depth in any single frame here than in a dozen more conventional heist movies, (and just so you know, this isn't a heist movie). Totally unmissable.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM

"The Man with the Golden Arm" was a ground-breaking film but it wasn't a very good one; in fact, it's a pretty poor picture. At a time when everyone else wouldn't touch the subject, Otto Preminger made an explicit movie about drug addiction and all its attendant horrors and he's certainly to be commended for it but he also made a movie that was highly melodramatic, even for him, and studio-bound in the worst possible way.

Frank Sinatra is Frankie Machine, the former addict coaxed back by a Machiavellian drug dealer played by Darren McGavin like the snake that tempted Eve. McGavin's quite good in the part but the character is appallingly drawn. Frankie has a shrew of a wife in a wheelchair, (an over-the-top Eleanor Parker), and a beautiful, sweet girl who loves him, (Kim Novak, never lovelier). It's a film full of good intentions and there is some fine camerawork from Sam Leavitt but it's poorly written and you get the impression the whole cast are fighting against the material, though Sinatra is outstanding and not just in the cold turkey scenes. In the end, it's the kind of picutre you might admire but not really like and I don't rate it very highly in the Preminger canon.

HOW THE WEST WAS WON

Cinerama was a neck-craning exercise that began in the mid-fifties and lasted for a decade or so until the fad ran out of steam. Of all the films made in the process, which involved projecting images from three 35mm projectors on to a huge, curved screen "How the West Was Won" was probably the most famous and the most successful. With three directors, including John Ford, and four Directors of Photography this was the most epic of epic westerns though I think its real appeal lay in watching its all-star cast, including a host of Oscar winners, go through the motions as much as in its vistas which seemed to stretch from here to eternity and were very pretty indeed.

Covering a period of about sixty years it traced, somewhat sketchily, the whole history of the American West while Debbie Reynolds provided some sort of link between the various stories ageing, not very convincingly, from young girl settler to old lady pioneer. It was written by James R Webb who rather surprisingly won an Oscar for his endeavours.

MY SON JOHN

Leo McCarey was one of the greatest directors ever to come out of Hollywood but he was also vehemently right-wing in his views and he made two stringently anti-communist pictures, "Satan Never Sleeps", which brought his career to a somewhat ignominious close and "My Son John" which he made in 1952 at the height of Hollywood's anti-communist scare. It centres on a very typical Mid-American family; father Dean Jagger, mother Helen Hayes, (with Jesus wanting both of them for sun-beams), and their beloved son, John, (Robert Walker at his most insidious), who returns from Washington spouting views that could hardly be called American. You may wonder which is worse; the sweetness-and-light family or the ultra-cynical John, both of whom I would happily have taken a baseball bat to. If you can't fault the skill of McCarey's direction, you might throw up at the content. Subtle this movie ain't.

Givien the appalling material they have to work with Hayes, Jagger, Walker and the always reliable Van Heflin as an investigating FBI man all give superb performances as characters you either don't believe in or simply can't stand with Hayes good enough, not only to redeem the picture, but actually make it worth watching. Is it any wonder she was considered the greatest actress of the American theatre? However, because of its unfashionable subject matter the film is not highly thought of and even fans of McCarey tend to dismiss it. It's the kind of film you wish they could completely re-dub with an entirely different plot along the lines of "What's Up, Tiger Lily". As a picture of an American family coming apart it can be commended; just a pity about the message.

TEOREMA

At the beginning of "Teorema", in a wordless, sepia-tinged montage, we are introduced to almost all the main characters in Pasolini's film. It's a clever device, almost Hitchcockian, and it could be the beginning of a thriller, though being a Pasolini film we know this won't be a thriller. The character who doesn't appear in this montage is played by Terence Stamp but suddenly there he is right in the middle of things and his affect on everyone is profound. Who is he and why is he here? It's never made clear, of course. Although a very physical presence his role is allegorical. Is he an angel, (there is a strong religious element in the picture), or a devil or simply a seducer since he does seem to have sex with everyone in the family, male and female, including the maid who ends up levitating and performing miracles. He certainly affords everyone a form of release, turning their lives upside down and with it their bourgeoisie pretentions. If we are going to tear down the bourgeoisie we may as well do it with sex; it's a lot more fun than beating them to death.

Stamp, of course, remains the most beautiful thing on screen though Silvana Mangano as the mother gives him a run for his money. No-one really has to act; all they simply have to do is respond to Pasolini's camera and, with no real narrative structure, that's fairly easy. Sex may be Pasolin's weapon of choice but the film is quite clearly a Marxist 'fantasy' and is also very obviously the work of a gay director. I'm not so sure anymore if it's the masterpiece I thought it was all those years ago bu it stands up remarkably well and remains one of the great Italian films of its decade.

RETURN FROM THE ASHES

J. Lee Thompson may have been only a jobbing director but he was one of the best, graduating from British studio pictures in the fifties to international hits such as "Ice Cold in Alex", "Northwest Frontier" and "The Guns of Navarone". The latter earned him an Oscar nomination and the chance to work almost exclusively in America where he made "Cape Fear", one of the best thrillers of the sixties. In 1965 he made another first-rate thriller, "Return from the Ashes", which used the War and the Holocaust as jumping off points for an almost Hitchcockian tale of murder and greed, set in Paris but filmed in a British studio with an international cast.

If the plot is more than a little convoluted, Thompson's handling of Julius Epstein's fine script and first-rate performances from Maximilian Schell, Ingrid Thulin and Samantha Eggar go a long way in making this one of his most entertaining films. Thulin is the rich Jewish doctor, thought to have died in a concentration camp, Schell the gigolo who marries her for her money and Eggar the duplicitous daughter who's having an affair with Schell and the good thing is it doesn't quite go the way you expect it to. It's also superbly shot in widescreen black and white by Christopher Challis and is certainly worth seeing.

WINTER LIGHT

 A pastor who may be dying and who has lost his faith finds it difficult to comfort those who come to him for help. Even if Woody Allen has successfully parodied this sort of sombre Bergman drama it's impossible not to be moved by this remarkable film, the second in what has come to be known as Bergman's 'faith trilogy', (it's also the best). The opening scene alone, which takes places during a communion service attended by only a handful of people, is extraordinarily intense and everything that follows is relentlessly grim and yet you know you are watching something great. It is, as the pastor says, about 'God's silence', the absence of God; it moves us on a metaphysical level. The performances by Bergman's stock company, (Bjornstrand, Thulin, Lindblom, von Sydow), are magnificent as is Sven Nykvist's stark black and white cinematography. A masterpiece.

THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS

"The Sugarland Express" was Steven Spielberg's first feature film and together with his earlier TV movie "Duel" and, I suppose, the later "Jaws", showed that he was more than capable of making outstanding films aimed at a grown-up audience. Even to this day, this is one of his finest films. It's based on a real incident that took place in Texas in 1969 although I'm sure Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins' superb script embellished events somewhat as Goldie Hawn breaks husband William Atherton out of prison, kidnaps policeman Michael Sacks and heads off to the town of Sugarland to get back their baby son, pursued all the way by the police, (lead by Ben Johnson), and a convoy of interfering onlookers. Of course, it could only happen in America where freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose and where, fifty years later, Donald Trump is the President.

It's also a classic road movie; exciting, funny and ultimately tragic and is beautifully acted by everyone and in particular by Hawn who handles both the comedy and the tragedy perfectly. Of course, it's very much a film of its time; road movies were all the rage in the seventies but none were as smart as this and in place of his usual sentimentality Spielberg imbues it with real feeling and a terrific sense of place and he uses extras the way they should be used, as real people. Indeed this is one of the key films of its decade and is as good as it was on the day it was made.

LOTNA

After making his famous War Trilogy, ("A Generation", "Kanal" and "Ashes and Diamonds"), Andrzej Wajda made a very different kind of war film. You might describe "Lotna" as his 'War Horse' as it's about a great grey mare employed by the Polish Army during the Second World War. It's a visually impressive, (he shot it in a mixture of sepia and colour), near-epic account of men in battle with some scenes heavily influenced by Russian cinema, both from the period and from silent cinema. It may be no masterpiece but for some reason it's virtually been forgotten, a fate it definitely doesn't deserve. Four films in and Wajda was already proving to be a world-class director and there are moments here as fine as anything in his canon. Difficult to see now, it's worth making an effort to find.

THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG

Justin Kurzel's films stand out for two reasons; they are visually superb and they are very violent. They can also be infuriatingly idiosyncratic, taking their literary sources and twisting them every which way. He mucked about with "Macbeth", making it more of a horror movie than any previous version and jettisoning Shakespeare along the way. Now he's gone to work on Peter Carey's Booker-Prize winning novel "The True History of the Kelly Gang", stripping it down to its bare bones. It's an acquired taste and not really the kind of thing to draw the crowds in on a Saturday night but once you get used to the pace and Kurzel's treatment it has a lot of offer.

Principal amongst its virtues are Ari Wegner's stunning cinematography and a very fine cast. Kelly is played, firstly as a child, by the excellent Orlando Schwerdt and later, as an adult, by the equally excellent George MacKay while Russell Crowe, (naturally), is the grizzled old outlaw who teaches young Ned his trade. Essie Davis, (of "The Babadook" fame), is excellent as Ned's mother while law and order are represented by Charlie Hunnam and Nicholas Hoult. The violence is still sickening and it often feels like a visual precis of Carey's novel rather than a proper adaptation but considering the lack of imagination in earlier versions of the story this feels very fresh indeed. Kurzel may well have a great film in him yet.

CHARLIE BUBBLES

A few unwelcome scatological moments of surreal humour not withstanding, Albert Finney's only film as a director, "Charlie Bubbles", remains both a remarkable period piece and one of the most imaginative British films of the sixties, perhaps not the masterpiece I first thought it to be, (it was my best film of the year), but unmissable nevertheless. Finney made it in 1968, from an original screenplay by Shelagh Delaney, a time when the Kitchen Sink was no longer fashionable and a new kind of New Wave, typified by films like Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell's "Performance" and Richard Lester's "Petulia", was coming into play. This is certainly good enough to make you wish Finney had directed again.





He plays a working-class writer who has made it big, (he drives a Rolls and his books have been turned into films), and the film is set over the weekend he drives North and back to his roots with his unofficial secretary in tow, (a very good, if unlikely, Liza Minnelli), to see his nine year old son, (a first-rate Timothy Garland), who lives on a farm with Charlie's ex-wife, (a terrific Billie Whitelaw). Not much happens and at times Delaney's screenplay is a little too Pinteresque for its own good, but it's also a richly observant picture of Britain at a particular moment in time and is greatly enhanced by the superb cinematography of Peter Suschitzky.