I've seen just 11 full-length films since last we met, as I was on my honeymoon for the rest of that time (yes, lovely thank you). Here they are:

FEATURES:



CINEMA: The World’s End (Edgar Wright, 2013) - The high school hero unable to replicate their triumphs in an adult arena is a character that echoes through American popular culture. But whereas across the Atlantic the figure tends to be a former quarterback or lead cheerleader, the concluding part of Edgar Wright's Cornetto trilogy gives us a happily British variant (Simon Pegg): a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, trenchcoat-wearing bad boy whose greatest moment was having sex in a disabled toilet and who has degenerated - or perhaps followed along the same path - into an alcoholic mess.

Finding himself at his lowest ebb, this wonderful tragi-comic creation, Gary King, is inspired to tackle the pub crawl that beat him on that fateful, feted night, in the company of the same four friends, now each responsible adults in the shape of Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman and Eddie Marsan. It's then that an army of replicants appear, threatening not just the future of humanity, but also Gary's drinking binge. Dispensing with the pitifully blunted humour of Pegg and Frost's Paul, with its weakly universal, US-centric references, The World's End uses the same recipe as the first two Cornetto films: fiercely British comedy, dead-eyed potshots at genre cliche, and moments of beautiful poignancy, shorn of the irony that dominates the rest.

The first half is a wonder: affecting, surprising - with a first scene just as clever as Wreck-It Ralph's similar opening salvo - and full of brilliant gags. The second, while very entertaining, can't quite maintain that momentum, with an over-reliance on merely competent action, some heavy but muddled exposition and a final 20 rife with iffy post-modernism and high-reaching, not altogether successful dystopianism. And yet despite being the weakest of the trilogy, it's a fitting wrap-up too: narratively the most inconsistent, with an unconvincing, barely escalating external threat - a legion of blue-blooded aliens - but also the most ambitious, and arguably successful of the three in terms of characterisation, emotional maturity and belly laughs. And also swearing. Its jokes are defiantly parochial (there's one about the Antiques Roadshow) and its soundtrack - drawn from the turn of the nineties - gives it a firm sense of both time and place. The World's End stutters a little in story terms, but like its predecessors it's still a must-see - particularly with an audience. And rarely if ever has British cinema produced films as funny, as loaded with deft, unashamed sentiment, or as skilled in using the C-word. (3.5)

***



CINEMA: Monsters University (Dan Scanlon, 2013) - Pixar has lost much of its ineffable magic in the three years since the Toy Story series concluded. La Luna was wonderful, but the studio's features - while fun - have been worryingly mediocre. This one's weirdly paced, riffs on overly familiar American campus cliches (not to mention The Goblet of Fire) and feels altogether too forced in its sentiment, its story and its strange broadness of humour. For all that, it's a fair watch: reasonably engrossing, with some fun action set pieces and a scattering of massive laughs, most of them coming from Art, the oddest new character to populate this erratic universe. It's a disappointment - an unfit prequel to one of the finest children's films of recent decades - but growing from a creative divot, perhaps it was always destined to be. Pixar have now fluffed a sequel, a prequel and a standalone film. Hopefully their next one will blow us all away. In the meantime, this one's not too bad - just functional, rather than magical. (2.5)

***



Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) - "No. I'm nobody's little weasel." On umpteenth viewing (and my second in a matter of weeks), Amélie is better than ever before: a wise, warm, whimsical piece of perfection, blessed with an unparalleled Parisian atmosphere and centred on a performance of uncommon brilliance. (4)

***



Vivacious Lady (George Stevens, 1938) - An emotionally heady, seriously sexy and often very funny fusion of romantic, screwball and social comedy, with associate professor Jimmy Stewart marrying nightclub singer Ginger Rogers on an impulse, but struggling to break the news to his conservative family. The leads are brilliant, with Stewart showcasing his singular schtick - awwing, umming and bumbling to his heart's content - the supporting cast is one of the finest ever assembled, and Stevens' handling is typically sublime, seamlessly blending slapstick, character comedy and some of the most richly romantic scenes in Hollywood history. The script is a little inconsistent, resulting in some short dry stretches, particularly towards the end, but there are numerous great moments, as well as stand-out supporting turns from Franklin Pangborn, as an officious apartment block clerk, and Beulah Bondi - playing Stewart's gentle, surprisingly mobile mother - whose dance scene with Rogers and the amusing James Ellison is an exuberant comic high-spot. It looks great, sounds great - with a lush score and one knock-out nightclub number - and, well, is great, an oft-overlooked triumph from Hollywood at its height. (3.5)

***



Peter Pan (Herbert Brenon, 1924) - The Boy Who Never Grew Up is played by A Woman Who Has Very Much Grown Up, Betty Bronson, in this sometimes spellbinding silent adaptation of Barrie's play, which highlights both the melancholia at the heart of the piece, and the subject of Wendy's sexual awakening. It kicks off with five minutes of stationery, medicine-based chat, but, once Peter skips in, the film springs to life, conjuring a vivid, purposefully artificial world of patently phony creatures, lion-catching "redskins" and sentimental, airborne urchins. Despite such fantastical elements, the strangest thing about the story remains the fact that an otherwise ordinary middle-class family has a nurse who is a dog. Or in this case a man in a dog costume. The mesmerising, fabulously uplifting flying scene remains the standout sequence, but - despite a fair amount of staginess and the odd intrusion of hammy acting (step forward, Ernest Torrence) or archaic filming - a rich vein of magic runs throughout the film, aided by Brenon's suitably fine use of shadow, very special effects from Roy Pomeroy (later Paramount's notorious transition-to sound honcho), Mary Brian's appealing Wendy, and Bronson's ebullient, balletic Peter: that curious piece of pantomimic casting imbuing the film with an ethereal majesty and intoxicating buoyancy it surely couldn't have got from anywhere - or anyone - else. She's clearly a woman, but somehow she's also inescapably and perfectly Pan. (3.5)

***



The Youngest Profession (Edward Buzzell, 1943) - Enchanting fluff about teenage autograph hunter Virginia Weidler and her bff Jean Porter encountering various MGM stars while trying to keep her parents together (they're not actually splitting up). It missteps a little with a diversion into drama - and away from signature-seeking - but it's a must-see for old movie nerds, with some ace walk-ons from the studio's finest, a fine George Oppenheimer/Charles Lederer/Leonard Spigelgass script that allows for several neat supporting parts, and a classic closing gag featuring the one and only William Powell. (3)

***



Charlie Chan in Paris (Lewis Seiler, 1935) - The best of Fox's many Charlie Chan films were the family affairs, those featuring one or more of the character's kids, and ideally those starring the original Chan, Warner Oland, opposite his "Number One Son" Lee, played by Keye Luke. This, Luke's first appearance in the series, is a fairly standard, rather low-budget B-mystery about bond forgery and murder that's lent remarkable warmth and humanity by the touching, completely credible relationship between the wise Chinese detective and his Americanised son. Their opening scene together, beginning with suspense, moving through the excitement of reunion, and ending with Luke vowing to protect his father from his would-be killer, is an absolute beauty. There's also a fairly strong supporting cast, led by Fred and Ginger alumnus Erik Rhodes, Blessed Event's Mary Brian (earlier Wendy in the silent Peter Pan - see above) and veteran character actor Henry Kolker - whose role is little more than a glorified cameo - along with a spectacular reprise of that rough-and-ready style of Gallic dance I last saw in Parisian Love. Fox had only thrown Luke into the series to snag a younger audience; it worked, but it did something greater, giving the films a human centre that the one-off mystery plots simply couldn't approach. Chan would have greater adventures, but this is the one that established the formula - winning in both senses of the word. (3)

***



Too Many Husbands (Wesley Ruggles, 1940) - Trivial but entertaining comedy about Jean Arthur being appalled - then delighted - to discover that her supposedly deceased husband (Fred MacMurray) is alive and well, is coming back to town, and plans to duke it out with her second spouse, and his best friend (Melvyn Douglas) for her fair hand. The material is spotty, especially in the final third, and MacMurray isn't in peak form, but Douglas is great and Arthur simply enchanting as the pair milk every scenario to the absolute limit. Douglas falls over a chair more funnily than any actor I've ever seen. (2.5)

***



Dreamboat (Claude Binyon, 1952) - A nicely-conceived comedy-drama about uptight educator and former silent screen heartthrob Clifton Webb trying to stop his former partner (Ginger Rogers) - both on screen and off - from presenting their old movies on TV. It's not actually that funny, or thematically coherent (teaching is pointless compared to being in movies?) and the barbs aimed at the small screen are as vituperative and desperate as usual for the period, but the script is intermittently interesting, Webb is brilliant and the spoofs of soundless cinema are great fun: agreeably accurate parodies of The Mark of Zorro, Wings, Beau Geste and The Three Musketeers, with Rogers' usual excessiveness tempered by her co-star's subtle, instinctively respectful type of take-off. Well, apart from that one very silly salute. Anne Francis and Jeffrey Hunter share an appealing but underdeveloped, incongruous romantic subplot designed to pull in the teens, while Elsa Lanchester does nice work as a horny spinster. It isn't a great film, but the promising premise does set up some very nice moments, with the aged, effete Webb shaping up amazingly well as a youthful, sexy swashbuckler. And the scene in which he takes tips from that younger self while embroiled in a bar fight is a little gem. (2.5)

***



Three Hearts for Julia (Richard Thorpe, 1943) - A daft, disjointed but unjustly maligned romantic comedy - Melvyn Douglas' last film as a leading man - that's burdened by a weak subplot about a female orchestra, a supporting character (played by Felix Bressart) who's employed to deal superficially with important issues, and an inability to cash in on promising set-ups, but lifted considerably and constantly by Douglas's distinctive brand of humour, delivered - as ever - in that effortless, effervescent manner. (2.5)

***



Two Guys from Texas (David Butler, 1946) - After directing the best of the Hope and Crosby "Road" movies, David Butler moved to Warner, who wanted to try a similar thing with comic Jack Carson and crooner Dennis Morgan. The results were a trio of variable efforts: Two Guys from Milwaukee, Two Guys from Texas and the Hollywood-on-film movie, It's a Great Feeling, a knockabout, post-modern, star-laden affair that's one of my favourite comedies of the '40s. If there's a weak link in the informal trilogy, it's this one, which recycles elements of the silent comedy Womanhandled in its thin, static story about a faux-Western ranch run for tourists, and features Dorothy Malone as a leading lady. She's nothing special compared to unmatched reactor Joan Leslie, or the multi-talented Doris Day, the pair who lit up the other two entries. There are a handful of good gags from Billy Wilder's future writing partner, I. A. L Diamond, though - including a clever closing twist borrowed and improved for Road to Bali - a slew of Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn songs which while unimaginatively staged are unusually memorable, and best of all, an animated dream sequence featuring Carson as a shepherd, Morgan as a wolf stealing his sheep, and Bugs Bunny as himself. It's that kind of freewheeling, try-anything, tongue-in-cheek approach - building on vivid archetypes - that made Butler's Road to Morocco really work, and which runs through It's a Great Feeling: the third and by far the finest movie starring this underrated pair. Their characters aren't from Texas, incidentally, they're just in Texas. While they sing a song with that name, it still makes this one of the most misleadingly-titled movies ever, along with Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (Venus) and Across the Pacific (part-way across the Atlantic). (2.5)

***

SHORTS:



CINEMA: The Blue Umbrella (Saschka Unseld, 2013) - An uninspired Pixar effort about inanimate objects becoming animated, and an umbrella falling in love, that comes to life at two points: when the grates and ducts combine to save the hero's life, and when a strange red hue suddenly falls over him. Those moments just about make this derivative, lacklustre film worthwhile. (2)

***



One Week (Buster Keaton, 1920) - One of Buster's best shorts - and his first solo effort to be released - with the star and his new wife attempting to construct their first home, only to meet opposition in the shape of a bully, a hurricane and a train. It's inspired, ingenious and has one of the great endings: smart, cynical and sentimental. (4)

See also: There are reviews of some of Buster's other shorts here.

***


This is the bit you can't get on a t-shirt.

A Trip to the Moon (George Melies, 1902) - Its importance to the medium of cinema cannot be overestimated, and the shot of the moon with a rocket in his socket remains one of the screen's enduring images, but Meliès' signature film consists largely and inescapably of old men waving their arms around. (2.5)

***



One A.M. (Charles Chaplin, 1916) - A mildly amusing Chaplin comedy, from his time at Mutual, in which a hammered Charlie tries to go upstairs to bed. It's rather repetitive, and Buster not only did more with a stair carpet and a bed in My Wife's Relations, but surely would have found himself in the wrong house for the punchline. There are some nice gags, though, particularly the sequence with the climbing gear, and that fearsome adversary coming out of nowhere. (2.5)

***



The Non-Stop Kid (Gilbert Pratt, 1918) - An average Harold Lloyd short, with the star trying to seduce campus hottie Bebe Daniels, enlivened by the leading lady's expressiveness and an exuberant rhythmic and comic accompaniment from Fanfare Burlesque d'Intervention at this year's Avignon Festival. (2.5)

***



Get Out and Get Under (Hal Roach, 1920) - AKA the one where Harold Lloyd gives cocaine to his car. Get Out and Get Under is a fast, funny jolt of slapstick that doesn't do enough to endear its nominal hero to the audience, but is so full of energy - and comic invention - that you can't help but be swept along by it. There are a slew of clever, subversive sight gags, as the star's manic new motor smashes through a garage wall, is plonked onto a train and, yes, gets hopped up on coke, though the film is at its best when displaying a gleeful, innocent fondness for thrill comedy. I could watch Lloyd legging it after a runaway car all day long. (3)

I've been busy lately: house-hunting, eating my tea, going on holiday, but I also consumed this stuff:



FILMS:

*SPOILERS*
Lucky Star (Frank Borzage, 1929) - An intoxicating romance from the incomparable Frank Borzage, starring the immortal Janet Gaynor and featuring the inconsistent Charlie Farrell, who gives arguably the best performance of his career. The director and his two leads made three films together between 1927 and '29 - silents made when that soon-to-be defunct genre was flourishing, then peaking, then almost dead.

The first two, 7th Heaven and Street Angel, helped win Gaynor the inaugural best actress Oscar, but this one - widely regarded as the least of the bunch, is in many ways my favourite; it's certainly the first I wanted to rewatch. Its metaphysical story is the simplest and sweetest, its characterisation sharply realised and unbearably poignant, and its presentation in both narrative and pictoral terms pitched between hopeless romanticism and the practicalities of real life, the former naturally winning out, as they had throughout this seminal triptych. The photography is nothing short of breathtaking. It is simply perfection, so crisp, clear and meticulously but warmly composed (check out the shot of the virginal, grubby, grinning Gaynor looking fondly back over her shoulder through the window she's just smashed); I've honestly never seen anything like it, though snow-bound films like Lady on a Train have aimed for a similiar look, as did Stanley Cortez with a couple of sequences in The Magnificent Ambersons - another film that stands head-and-shoulders above any competition it could conceivably have had. Here, the snow provides not only a climactic obstacle for Farrell, but also lends that mesmeric finale a lush, gobsmacking atmosphere, all leading to a heart-melting pay-off.

As these Borzage films invariably will, it does tend towards melodrama at the death, but it's nevertheless superbly put together, full of solid foreshadowing and scenes that build story but are more concerned with character, playing out at leisure but never outstaying their welcome, and evoking the heady, consuming feeling of a romantic dream. An incalculable amount of that is down to Gaynor, who was a strong sound actress but a sensational silent one: perhaps the most talented mute ever to parade before the cinema-going public, with a subtlety and an effortless transmission of complex emotion that gives the lie to every stupid spoof of early screen acting you've ever seen. Everything she does is remarkable on one level or another; it's also entirely true - one of those flawless, enrapturing, once-in-a-lifetime performances that she gave once or twice a year in those late silent days. If the film intoxicates - and it does - then that's because Gaynor does, thriving, blossoming in that unique arena that Borzage fashions solely for her. (4)

***



Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011) - Or 'Hug a Hoodie: The Movie', which angered half the people who saw it by presenting inner-city muggers as human beings making disastrous decisions, rather than tabloid caricatures shorn of social context. I loved it, and my favourite film of 2011 still looks magnificent, any flaws it might have overpowered by the strength of its convictions and of its central storyline, following alien-killing, tower-dwelling hoodie Moses (John Boyega) on an unlikely journey of redemption. Boyega is little short of astonishing, and while a few of the young cast are a touch wooden and the balance between the various subplots and disparate elements isn't always spot-on, Attack the Block remains a heady cocktail of post-modern humour, crackling suspense and humanist social comment, flashily directed by Dr Sexy. Perhaps most significantly of all, this piece of exceptional, unusual entertainment shows a side of Britain usually ignored on film, namely disenfranchised kids betrayed by both their country and themselves. (4)

***



Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009) - Moon rocks. Rockwell moons. (4)

See also: There's a longer/better review here.

***



The French Lieutenant's Woman (Karel Reisz, 1981) - An exquisitely-sideburned scientist (Jeremy Irons) with a dishy but shallow fiancee falls under the spell of a melancholy "whore" (Meryl Streep) - their unclear relationship echoed in a dual narrative by the actors recreating their parts for a movie. Pinter's script is fascinating, the story frequently gripping and the parallels between the two worlds - the running time slanted massively towards the former - are mercifully free of over-egging (it probably wasn't necessary for Streep's modern day partner to be French, mind). Two scenes stand out: in the first Irons delivers some bad news to his fiancee (Lynsey Baxter), her performance exploding into life, her character's traditional reserve abandoned as she moves through self-pity, to desperation, and finally pure rage, her words ringing in the ears - and on the soundtrack - long after Irons has left the room, and we've left the scene. The second, the final sequence in what is technically a film-within-a-film (though I've never cared more about what happens in one), is a powerhouse from Irons, laying waste to the still fashionable idea that he is a commanding voice in search of some acting chops.

Streep's performance is obviously integral to the piece and by far the most showy in the picture, at times protruding like the most painful of thumbs. In simplest terms, she is half-great: far better than usual, and excellent when asked to emote solely with that pliable, hollow face - lending the film a haunting, haunted undercurrent - but still focusing too much of her energy on her accent (pure Thatcher) and her hands, rather than making the audience feel. You'll catch her acting a half-dozen times, while trying to keep yourself immersed in the story, and that's a problem. The scene in which her fallen woman first opens up to her saviour is pure choreography and mannerisms, with nothing behind it. The Oscars love that sort of stuff, and doubtless there's a textbook somewhere citing it as the apogee of thespianism, but it's not acting in any credible sense, because it constantly wrenches you out of the scene and into an objective analysis of what she's doing. Everything else about the film is first-rate, from Karel Reisz's handling to Carl Davis's majestic score, and Streep is more measured, less domineering and more nuanced - in emotion, rather than in superficial gesturing - than in many of her starring vehicles. Indeed, at her best and most restrained, perfectly utilised by a smart director, she lifts the film to a level it might not otherwise reach. And yet at other times she's a liability: with another actress in the part it would be a smoother, more immersive experience, and perhaps a masterpiece, rather than the merely excellent film it is. (3.5)

***



Emil und die Detektive (Gerhard Lamprechet, 1931) - This early talkie take on the classic kids' book, made in Germany from a script by Billy Wilder and Emeric Pressburger, is both remarkably accomplished and true to the spirit of its source. Stylish, airy and with some great location shooting, it's also a kiddie companion to the adolescent People on Sunday, that gobsmacking slice of summer escapism that had come a year earlier. The story sees mischievous, resourceful Emil (Rolf Wenkhaus) being put on the train to Berlin by his mum. In his pocket is the 140 marks he must give to his grandmother: a fortune to their impoverished family. Enter the most suspicious-looking man in the world (creepy Fritz Rasp), who drugs Emil with a poisoned sweet - cue a stunning Expressionist dream sequence - and makes off with the money. When our hero comes to, he chases the criminal across town, before falling in with a gang of young ruffians (the "detectives" of the title) with whom he hatches a plan to take back the dough. There's a wonderful sense of immediacy to the film - the novel was only two years old when it was shot - tied to an understanding of how children actually behave (their dogged determination, instant alliances and unselfconscious eccentricities) and, during parts of the picture, a semi-documentary atmosphere that allows these broadly realistic characters to flourish, while offering a vivid snapshot of pre-Nazi Berlin.

At the same time, and for all the film's intelligence, entertainment value and humour, there's an undeniable eeriness to it. That same poverty which drives the plot forward helped to usher in the Nazis, while blonde-haired, blue-eyed Wenkhaus went on to star in one of the Third Reich's first propaganda shorts - playing a member of the Hitler Youth - before perishing off the coast of Ireland in 1942, when his bomber was shot down. Those notorious events you've read about in history textbooks took place on these streets, down which pad the footsteps of these spirited young performers, who in the coming years will each be affected in their own way by Hitler's accession to power. Ignoring such inevitable intrusions, Emil is an excellent piece of work: often technically dazzling - though not without some stiltedness and a few rough edges - and superbly written, with Wilder inventing a bizarre, brilliant silent prologue centring on the taunting of a local lawman, and filling his script with funny set-pieces (special mention for the "Native American" messenger-boy visiting Emil's grandmother) and at least one unbearably tense set-piece. There's also considerable quote appeal in the shape of Emil's love interest, Pony Hutcheon: barely a minute goes by without someone imploringly or excitedly declaring: "Purny Hurrcheon!" Incidentally, the BFI disc includes a scene-for-scene British remake from 1935. Perhaps that was what Truffaut had in mind when he asked Hitchcock whether the words "British" and "cinema" were incompatible. (3.5)

***



The Big Steal (Don Siegel, 1949) - While His Kind of Woman and Beat the Devil would send up film noir itself, The Big Steal is content to reunite the stars of Out of the Past, slip them into a crime caper template, turn down the lights and inject a dry, healthy, and often uproarious dose of humour. The result is pure escapism, from that wilfully mysterious opening onwards, with the leads clearly having a ball - Greer was enjoying a rare break from blacklisting for refusing to sleep with studio head Howard Hughes, Mitchum embraces his screen image unilaterally - their relationship thawing out as they trade zingers across Mexico, in pursuit of Patric Knowles's utter spiv, while chased by scary, bulldogish Army heavy William Bendix, whose pupils are bigger than most people's heads. A running joke about the police chief learning English is long-winded, and the action ranges from superior to dorky, but it's a neat, cohesive and modest movie made before Hughes's obsessive tinkering caused the studio's films to simply fall apart. Jet Pilot, it's worth remembering, was in post-production for seven years. The Big Steal doesn't strive for the fatalism or bleak romanticism of Out of the Past: rather, it's that film's cheeky, irreverent, warm-hearted little brother - wanting little more than to have fun, and taking you along with it, whatever your mood. (3.5)

***



Slightly Dangerous (Wesley Ruggles, 1943) - A very enjoyable, affecting comedy-drama about soda squirt Lana Turner faking her death, getting a '40s makeover that makes her look 70% less attractive and posing as a lost heiress - much to the delight of her new 'father' (Walter Brennan), and the chagrin of her boss (Robert Young), who sets out to unmask her and so save his unjustly sullied reputation. The film sets itself a considerable challenge - our sympathies are hardly with the heroine at the start of her ruse - but comes out on top, handling the tricky material remarkably well. Turner is exceptional in a deceptively demanding part, the Lederer/Oppenheimer script is way above average and so is the slapstick - with Young playing it sillier than usual - while there's superb support from Dame Mae Whitty, Alan Mowbray and particularly Brennan, offering a deft take on his familiar persona: that irascible, soft-centred old duffer. My only real complaint is that it would have been nice to have had more scenes of Turner and Brennan, giving us a greater sense of their burgeoning relationship, perhaps at the expense of those amusing but relatively uninvolving sequences featuring Turner and Young. I also have a sneaking suspicion that Slightly Dangerous is both the best and the worst name ever for a film. Except perhaps for Half Past Dead. (3.5)

***



Good News (Charles Walters, 1947) - A slight but tuneful, utterly charming campus musical set in 1927 - and based on a 1930 film - in which football star Peter Lawford chucks over librarian June Allyson for a lousy snob, then belatedly realises he loves her. Allyson's as good as ever mixing husky-voiced vocalising with homespun sentiment, and Lawford does his usual suave bit - though he can't sing - but it's a long time since I've seen a supporting actor run off with a movie as completely as Joan McCracken does here, the bouncy, cartoonish and irrepressible Ellen Page-alike singing, hoofing and goofing with such boundless energy that it's like someone's set off a firework in the studio. Sadly she rather disappears in the second half, after tearing up the screen with Pass That Peace Pipe, the only one of scriptwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green's new songs to make the final cut. As college musicals go, it's not quite The Affairs of Dobie Gillis - which had Bobby Van, a be-hatted Bob Fosse and a peak-form Debbie Reynolds on hand - but it's still a little gem, recovering after an uncertain opening reel thanks to the exuberant numbers, gentle period spoofery and evocation of a delightful, self-contained little world that are the unmistakable hallmarks of legendary producer Arthur Freed. (3)

***



Despicable Me (Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, 2010) - Top-heavy supervillain Gru (voiced by a Slavik-sounding Steve Carell) adopts three girls as part of a long-term plan to shrink the Moon, only to find the children a distinctly humanising influence. This lively, sentimental animated comedy isn't as strong on second viewing - despite a few neat gags I'd missed first time around (special mention for the Minion sexy-dancing, and Doctor Nefario barking "Who is this?") - as it sticks too rigidly to formula and pushes a little too hard in its quest for emotional high spots, but it's still a good film, striking a successful balance between comedy, drama and action, and offering a few choice Minion moments, my favourite being Kevin's impression of a water cooler. The sequel is a funnier movie, but less impressive overall, with a comparatively dull, contrived storyline that gives Gru fewer chances to shine. (3)

***



"The door's locked! McGinty, you clever dog!"
Mystery Team (Dan Eckman, 2009) - What happens when child detectives grow up? According to this endearingly stupid movie from the Derrick comedy troupe, they carry on solving kids' crimes, being treated with a mixture of irritation, concern and amusement by the teachers, drug dealers and strip club bouncers whom they encounter. There's the master of disguise (Community's Donald Glover) - who kits his team out in top hats and monocles to visit a gentleman's club, the "boy genius" (D. C. Pierson), who knows exactly 1,001 pieces of redundant trivia, and "the strongest kid in town" (Dominic Dierkes), who insists on tackling minor feats of strength that he can't accomplish. After being patronised for the umpteenth time - and now technically adults - the Mystery Team resolve to tackle their first grown-up case, a double murder, bringing them into contact with a couple of psychos, and the victims' deadpan daughter (Aubrey Plaza, naturally), to whom Glover is oddly drawn. "I think we had sex," he confides to his friends, after standing quite close to her in a closet.

It's a great concept, and the film works best - really rather brilliantly - when riffing on the improbabilities of detective fiction and its heroes' magnificent lack of wordliness, but flops when trying to offer further contrast with the adult world through bad taste (and mostly unfunny) jokes about child porn, cancer, suicide and anal intrusion. For a movie from a sketch troupe, it actually hangs together fairly well as a whole - perhaps due to the very safe formula it employs - and its thriller aspect, while slight, predictable and at times simply illogical, is also oddly suspenseful. Perhaps I'm just a sucker for those cliches. The reason to see it, though, is for the gags. I reckon I laughed 10 times and completely lost it a further three, which is a great strike rate. When it doesn't work, it really doesn't, but when it does, well... “Following your dreams is never stupid! Unless you dream about water and then you pee the bed last Thursday. For example.” (2.5)

***



One Touch of Venus (William A. Seiter, 1948) - This otherwise mediocre fantasy comedy - based on a Broadway smash, and concerning a nervy window-dresser (Robert Walker) who falls in love with a statue of Venus come to life - is given an almighty kick up the arse by Ava Gardner, delivering a performance of luminescent, feline sensuality that bursts out of the screen almost in 3D. Like Clara Bow, she was an actress with "flesh impact", to borrow a colourful phrase from Billy Wilder. Eve Arden also turns up to peddle one-liners in her usual tart fashion, the two actresses compensating for an unimpressive script, lacklustre numbers and Walker's acute discomfort as the male lead. The ending makes as little sense as the rest of it. (2.5)

***



*A FEW MINOR SPOILERS*
The Whales of August (Lindsay Anderson, 1987) - The Whales of Snorefest, more like: a movie that moves at the same pace as its geriatric characters - living out their dotage on a Maine island - with a script that mistakes mundanity and mawkishness for profundity, given soporific, bland treatment from Lindsay Anderson (adjectives it seems bizarre to even consider in his presence) who pads the action with endless shots of nature and soundtracks it all with a trite, overproduced score. "I was afraid you would be bored," says Lillian Gish at one point, and her fears are well-founded, though her final screen performance - at age 93, some 75 years after her first - is the film's great virtue, a fittingly reflective, deceptively steely turn at once simple and deep, lending an inferior play a touch of the sublime, as Fonda and Hepburn had done for On Golden Pond. She also reminds me of my nanna, adding an extra poignancy to proceedings.

There are a handful of moments that are genuinely insightful, moving and special, and they all involve Gish: the years falling off her as she pretties herself in combing out her long, snowy hair, an exchange with Vincent Price about whether she has "lived too long", a conversation with her late husband on their wedding anniversary and the simple business of righting the room she has resolved to retain. These pieces of art, timeless and important, lie adrift - like the blocks of ice she clung to in her 1920 film Way Down East - in a sea of snail-paced, repetitive, often meaningless banality. The rest of the promising cast fails to register: Price and Ann Sothern are boring, Bette Davis weirdly and irritatingly motonotous and Harry Carey, Jr simply cliched. Perhaps revisiting it in my twilight will reveal layers of meaning invisible to me now. I waited 15 years to see this one, which I think is about how long the film lasted. (2.5)

***


This sort of thing is basically no good.

Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain (Tsui Hark, 1983) - The first 10 minutes, in which supposed adversaries Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung team up to fight a smorgasbord of rampaging armies, is an utter joy in the old-school manner. The rest is plotless, deadening, effects-driven rubbish, director Tsui Hark having hired experts from Hollywood in a bid to spruce up that side of Hong Kong cinema. Pity. (1.5)

***



The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Henry King, 1952) - A boring, unconvincing and thematically incoherent version of the Hemingway novel, with a thoroughly dislikeable Gregory Peck bitterly recalling his relationship with Ava Gardner - though never once mentioning her terrible hairstyle. It's all rather ugly to look at, with the sloppy pasting together of location footage and studio shots giving the whole enterprise an insultingly slapdash feel. Bernard Herrmann's beautiful score is the film's only plus point. Just listen to that instead, while doing the washing up or something. (1.5)

***

BOOKS:



Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu by Simon Callow
Orson Welles: Hello Americans by Simon Callow

The first two volumes of Callow's mammoth, as-yet-unfinished trilogy on the life of Orson Welles are required reading for anyone the least bit interested in one of the key cultural figures of the American Century. The Road to Xanadu (1995), climaxing with the release of Kane, does an extraordinary, unprecedented job of stripping away the thick layers of myth around Welles, at long last getting to something like the truth. It's arguably at its best in the early chapters, tracing the development of Welles from tormented, annoying child to tormented, annoying "boy genius" of the Irish stage, lying extravagantly at every stage to boost his public profile. If there's a complaint, it's that while Callow does a stunning job of recreating his subject's subsequent stage triumphs in America (the initial focus of his book), his fastidiousness does sometimes cause him to lose sight of Orson the man, while his observations about Welles' flaws as an actor and director (that he has no emotion, that he offers merely a "fireworks display") are a little repetitious. It's a masterful book all the same, exhaustively researched, superbly-written (an addiction to semi-colons and the actorly phrase "inner life" aside) and remarkably insightful, full of fact and mercifully free of the armchair psychology that seems to dog most writing on Welles. Hello Americans (2006), which begins with the heartbreaking tale of The Magnificent Ambersons - and an accompanying human tragedy in Brazil - and ends with Welles' departure from the US in 1947, shows him in flux: his stock as a filmmaker sharply declining, as his engagement in politics as a broadcaster, commentator and activist takes over his life. It's a brilliant story, remarkably told, with perhaps a few too many lengthy excerpts from the subject's newspaper columns, but an abundance of telling detail packed into a pacy, invigoratingly entertaining narrative. Across the two books, Callow delights in playing devil's advocate, or perhaps just offers a sense of balance - whether talking down flaws of the lost Ambersons, talking up various forgotten radio broadcasts or arguing that The War of the Worlds was essentially a fluke - and as the first looked to show that Welles' meteoric rise did include failings both personal and professional, so he argues that the director's fall from grace wasn't exactly clear-cut either. In tribute to Welles, I think the third volume should be taken out of Callow's hands, every second page removed and the ending changed so he doesn't die. (4)

See also: I've written my own epic treatise on Welles in the shape of a 2,700-word blog post about The Magnificent Ambersons. It should be up later this week. Actually, "should" is the wrong word... perhaps "probably will be".

***

Thanks for reading.

I haven't seen many movies over the past three weeks, but the ones I have seen have almost all been fantastic. I think my good film radar must have been fixed. Ratings are out of four, if you weren't aware of exactly how I rolled.



The Way Way Back (Noah Baumbach, 2013) - This is like a big hug in cinematic form, as awkward, taciturn teen Duncan (Liam James) is taken under the wing of a flamboyant motormouth (Sam Rockwell) whom he happens upon at a rundown waterpark. It's a bit like Adventureland, a lot like every other coming-of-age film you've ever seen - the stifling domestic strife, the pubescent blushing, then the sudden blossoming of one's self-confidence - and there are familiar lines and some unconvincing readings to go with the trite, cliched character of the boozy, easy next-door neighbour. But damn it if this isn't the funniest, loveliest film I've seen in ages, with a perfectly-pitched central relationship, a sure-footed story leading to a hugely satisfying climax, and a staggering performance from Rockwell as the wise, reflective, comically phantasmagoric Owen: a true screen maverick but one with a real and recognisable human frailty. If he doesn't win every award going, this world can do one. (4)

***



Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2013) - What a great film: Baumbach doing his thing, and Gerwig doing hers, this plotless ramble through the life of a 27-year-old dancer - who encounters assorted epiphanies and disappointments - shot like Woody's Manhattan or À bout de souffle, scripted with a nod to Whit Stillman and emanating its writer-director's usual good-natured angst, uncertainty about contemporary life and warm-hearted, off-kilter sentimentality.

It wobbles briefly with the introduction of Adam Driver as the poorly-enunciating would-be lothario Lev ("Ahoy, sexy!") who lacks charisma and mangles his dialogue, but that's a minor quibble in a movie dominated by Gerwig's arresting, appealing, frankly extraordinary performance, and nailing a multitude of experiences and emotions ill-served by cinema. Not just its headily romantic sensibility, epitomised by Gerwig's monologue about what she's looking for in life, but the comfort and painful nostalgia of visiting your childhood home, the premature internal ageing of 20-somethings who feel their boat has passed, and the acute anguish that comes with feeling entirely lonely and alienated in a theoretically idyllic place. It cares about in-jokes, the intensity of true friendship (in the shape of Mickey Sumner, whose chemistry with Gerwig is absolute), and the random, aimless but fulfilling way in which we muddle through this world in a way that's very unusual. It's also a very funny film in that shambling Baumbachian way, jokes tossed this way and that, muttered, thrown away and occasionally properly milked: like the beauty that closes the picture.

In the same way as the director's debut, Kicking and Screaming, it seems at first to be a succession of mild comic sketches, but is really a character study of a conflicted, grown-up child afraid of the world into which she's been unceremoniously dumped. As such, its cumulative impact is considerable, though its tactics are somewhat different to that earlier Baumbach film, setting Gerwig up for a fall that we can see coming a mile off, but she apparently can't - or perhaps won't. Eschewing melodrama but not afraid to confront real life, the film then leaves us with an ending that's pure Woody - in fact, pure Manhattan - but which works perfectly, without feeling like a '70s cast-off in the way that, say, a J. J. Abrams film does.

All that and Gerwig's dancer spinning and striding to the strains of Bowie's Modern Love, jump-cutting through New York, oblivious to everything except the joy of movement.

Like I said: it's a great film. (4)

See also: Gerwig also appeared in Baumbach's Greenberg. She's similarly fantastic there.

***



The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice (Orson Welles, 1952) - In 1948, Orson Welles left Hollywood, the town in which he had arrived with such fanfare eight years earlier. After the success of Kane, he watched - helpless - as his next three projects were taken out of his hands, recut and sometimes even re-shot. His fifth picture, Macbeth, was a travesty that he failed to deliver for two years, apparently disillusioned with movies and burnt out at 33.

What he did next was startling. The former boy genius, who had conquered the worlds of theatre, radio and film by his 26th birthday, simply became a nomad, pitching up in Europe to fashion fiercely independent projects, which he funded by taking on any - and every - acting role that came his way.

Othello, his first film free from the shackles of Hollywood, took a staggering three years to complete, with filming in Venice, Tuscany and Morocco, and even now isn't exactly finished: there are at least five versions in existence, including the one that won the Palme d'Or in 1952 (available solely on French VHS), the enduringly controversial 1992 "restoration" - the only one I'd previously seen - and this edit, an American cut released in 1955, which was issued on a Criterion laserdisc in the '90s, and has been handily uploaded to YouTube.

I haven't seen the restoration since 2005, so I'm afraid I can't be too specific on the differences here (perhaps a blessing), but this version uses different takes or angles of several scenes, overdubs Canadian actress Suzanne Cloutier with the pure, imploring tones of Gudrun Ure - a Scot - and features some very out-of-sync dialogue, due to Welles' endless tinkering in the post-Cannes editing process (a problem remedied somewhat in the restoration).

A restless innovator, egomaniac and improviser who had repeatedly tried to make films with a pre-recorded dialogue track (oh Orson), he never seemed to regard poor syncing as a problem - perhaps figuring we'd be so wowed by everything else that we wouldn't notice - but it's a basic technical flaw that detracts a little from some of these mid-period pictures. This '55 cut also has written rather than spoken credits - at the request of the distributor - and the original recording of the score, which was perhaps unwisely re-done in 1992.

Welles, his hair thickened, his face subtly darkened and his voice booming in the unmistakable manner, is Othello, a world away from the peculiar greenface, cod-Caribbean routine that his Shakespearean rival - Olivier - would follow 13 years later. Emoting not wisely but too well, and overcoming a frankly odd, declamatory reading of the "It gives me wonder" speech, he's in rare form, throbbing with torment as his mind is poisoned by his malevolent aide. Biographer Simon Callow has long suggested that Welles was a great speaker rather than a great actor: a mellifluously-voiced reader of dialogue who rarely engaged with his characters. It’s often true, but here his performance seems deeply felt: perhaps something about a great man laid low by whispering campaigns and his own insecurities chimed with him – or perhaps his great and lifelong love of Shakespeare is to thank. Opposite him, Cloutier is a somewhat overly angelic Desdemona, though Micheál MacLiammóir - Welles' friend and nemesis from his first professional assignment at Dublin's Gate Theatre - is a magnificent foil, making for a scintillatingly cynical Iago.

The film's troubled production makes it a genuinely weird experience - it's a film whose abrupt, disjointed style takes some getting used to, and even then can prove something of a liability. At times its bitty form adds to the sense of a fragmented nightmare unfolding at strange angles, in snippets of prose often spat, strained or strangled, but at other times it's simply flawed filmmaking, the director once again robbed of the tools, the time or the money to meet his vision - but at least left largely to his own devices within those limitations.

Despite that patchwork quality, which includes non-matching reaction shots that flicker for a mere instant, it's still a film of overpowering intensity and rich atmosphere, set entirely around the castle and its puddled environs and lit by rich, chiaroscuro visuals both gothic and baroque. Welles' typically imposing use of sound, is, if not always exactly in sync with the pictures, at least a striking tapestry of haunting music and arresting, often intensely involving oratory.

His fabled script-editing skills, meanwhile, which here involve snipping a four-hour play to 90 minutes and would find a still more pressing challenge with Chimes at Midnight, are much in evidence, with the story stripped down to its central conflict, and beginning and ending with the funerals of Othello and Desdemona, a claustrophobic, fatalistic move that essentially turns Shakespeare into a writer of film noir.

This clever framing and the film's disorientating, shadow-drenched, perma-dripping presentation - alive with misery, malice and a mounting horror - form the perfect environment for Welles and MacLiammóir to wrestle with one another, their genuine mutual obsession and antipathy fuelling a deliciously unhealthy screen relationship in which Shakespeare's greatest baddie tries to destroy his boss's life. "I hate the moo-er," MacLiammóir so memorably draws at the play's opening, and indeed he does. He's sensational, so is Welles – giving arguably the greatest performance of a long career marred by minimal quality control – and so is the film: still its director's most underrated movie, and back in 1952 a telling statement of intent from a true maverick. (3.5)

***



Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012)

Ten observations about Lincoln:

1. I heard tell once of an actor from London who was vastly overpraised for his work in Gangs of New York and There Will Be Blood, after emerging from the studio every day with bits of the scenery stuck in his teeth. Then, one day, this actor got to play Abraham Lincoln and he turned out to be the greatest Lincoln that the big screen had ever seen - and I'll confess that I've made rather a study of them, Henry Fonda in Young Mr Lincoln being the previous high watermark - playing not the myth, but the man, and providing new insights into a character we thought we knew. The moral of the story, gentleman, is that despite being the most appalling luvvie, he's also one hell of an actor. Sometimes.

2. It's an unusually mature film for Spielberg, with the jaw-dropping caveat that only he would show Lincoln's assassination from the point of view of the President's youngest son, which is self-parodical to the point of tears. The most striking screen presentation of the murder remains that at the start of John Ford's The Prisoner of Shark Island.

3. The score is horrible. Every time the film approaches some genuine moment of understated, human truth, John Williams pops us to tip a mixture of cheese and treacle over it.

4. The script has been both lauded and derided, but the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It's intelligently devised and sometimes admirably complex in its morality, but also has concessions to cliche, alternately explains too much and too little of the political developments integral to the plot, and unwisely plays out the voting climax in real time, and with a distinct lack of realism. As a result, the film - despite many fine moments - has no dramatic climax.

5. David Strathairn is one of American cinema's greatest treasures and is never less than thoroughly fantastic. Here, his affectionate uber-pragmatist is a fine counterpoint to the ambitious, single-minded Honest Abe.

6. The rest of the supporting cast is ridiculously good, with Hal Holbrook turning up to gobble scenes like a jowly old lizard, Sally Field proving a fragile, combustible Mary Todd, and Tommy Lee Jones peddling that usual brand of hard-earned wisdom.

7. I like the bit where Jones takes off his wig and you realise he's Lex Luthor.

8. In the opening battle scenes, Spielberg has a delightful time using a trick John Ford once told him about: holding the horizon at either the top or the bottom of the frame. The surrender sequence seems to bear the stain of Sam Fuller's Run of the Arrow too.

9. That hagiographic, drippingly sentimental opening scene, which seeks to "print the legend", before the film sets about getting to the truth, is still extraordinarily awful, and makes The Littlest Rebel look like the height of neorealism.

10. It's sorely missing a scene where Day-Lewis yells: "I emancipate yoooooouuuuur milkslaaaaave!" and beats John Wilkes Booth to death with a bowling pin.

(3)

See also: I did that last joke in this piece about "Lincoln on film" too. It traces depictions of Lincoln on the big screen from The Birth of a Nation to Black Dynamite, and it's got clips and everything.

***



Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941)

"You been in Hollywood long?"
"Long enough."
"Trying to crash the movies or something?"
"Something like that."
"I guess that's pretty hard to do, huh?"
"I guess so. I never got close enough to find out."

Preston Sturges' immortal Hollywood satire stars Joel McCrea as a frustrated director who sets out to craft "a true canvas of the suffering of humanity", but first has to find out what trouble is - and gets more than he ever bargained for. Veronica Lake is the acerbic wannabe actress who buys the phony tramp some ham and eggs.

This was the thousandth film I ever saw (I can't remember whether that was by accident and design, though it was number one on my "to see" list for years, back when Sturges' films were unavailable on any format in the UK). Though I must have seen it seven or eight times now, I'm still discovering new things: a line or an industry in-joke here or there that gets caught in the maelstrom of razor-sharp dialogue, or Sullivan's sneezing fits and itchy clothes calling back to the titles of his early hits: Hey Hey in the Hayloft and Ants in Your Plants of 1939. Robert Greig's magnificent monologue about the foolishness of the director's opus also seems to grow wiser and more insightful with each passing year.

Sturges' most serious-minded work, Sullivan's Travels remains one of the best, most ambitious and most thematically dizzying films ever made, being a message movie that argues that comedy is as important as any message movie, but which turns into a bleak portrait of social degradation at its midway point.

Its first half is just astonishingly funny: full of unforgettable, rapid-fire dialogue that seems to spear a different target each time - pretension, hard-luck stories, privileged upbringings, Hollywood's obsession with sex and suspicion of communism, and that's just in the opening scene - and topped off with the great supporting actor Eric Blore falling into a swimming pool. The second is heavy, emotionally draining and full of haunting, Expressionistic imagery, before the gloom is lifted in that legendary sequence at the gospel church, Mickey Mouse and Pluto - projected onto a cotton sheet - giving ex-cons a moment of transcendence from their brutal everyday lives.

Significantly, while Sturges is more celebrated today for his incredible exchanges than his beloved slapstick ("a pratfall is better than anything," concluded his rules of cinema), the film has no fewer than four extended silent sequences. While the "jackrabbit" set piece isn't really my sort of thing - above-par though it might be - the others are superb: a gutting, wryly comic montage of vagrant life, a thriller sequence shot like a noir, and a madcap, lightning-paced, brilliantly-choreographed "studio tour", complete with a cameo for Sturges, Lake pushing over two "Red Indians" and Franklin Pangborn getting bummed by a door.

Pangborn was one of Sturges' stock company, many of whom turn up here - Jimmy Conlin, William Demarest, Alan Bridges, Porter Hall - and all of whom are in fine form. Perhaps above all his other, more celebrated talents, Sturges was a great director of actors, magnificent at drawing laughs from them, just as good at eliciting a beguiling sincerity that they would never match with anyone else (take a look at Eddie Bracken's two lead performances for him, then watch Bracken elsewhere). "There's always a girl in the picture," McCrea says at one point, and while he's as good as ever, an extraordinary amount of the film's charm and timeless appeal comes from Lake, belying her bruised critical reputation, whose impeccable comic timing, considerable natural gifts (that voice!) and faultless underplaying give the film an immeasurable amount of punch, emotion and charm. I'm a vegetarian, but even I might have to give in to Lake's pouty demand of "buy me some ham and eggs, before I bite you".

Few directors have ever produced a film as unusual, incisive or original, a film whose disparate elements - slapstick, satire, social drama and polemic - congeal into such a staggering, successful whole. The great irony is that while Sturges' message is "It's OK to just make people laugh" - and his films have given me inutterable joy over the years - he had more to say than just about any other American filmmaker of his era. And that while Sullivan never made a serious, "important" film, Sturges did. (4)

***



The Marriage Circle (Ernst Lubitsch, 1924) - Lubitsch's favourite of his own films, musicalised by the director eight years later as One Hour with You, is a perfectly crafted comedy-drama on his favoured topic of adultery. Monte Blue, in the role later immortalised by Maurice Chevalier, is a happily married man who's powerless under the spell of his wife's best friend, the saucy, vampish Mizzi (Marie Prevost). Meanwhile, his spouse is enthusiastically if sexlessly pursued by his own best friend. It's missing the catchy tunes and lush romanticism of the later film, but it's funnier, sexier and more resonant (thanks to its greater realism): masterfully conceived and directed, and with an exceptional turn from Prevost. (4)

***



*SPOILERS*
Ramrod (André de Toth, 1947) - This early "Western noir" - a delicious bastard genre that emerged in '47 and seemed to disappear just two years later - is one of the oddest films ever to come out of mainstream Hollywood, a brooding, perplexing, morally murky film that fills its standard genre template with strange details, peculiarly abrupt plot developments and weird, censor-baiting characters, including a femme fatale who gets turned on by making men die for her. Bizarrely paced and packed with liars and cowards - somewhat at odds with the preferred presentation of the West - it's also notable for reuniting the leads of Preston Sturges' astonishing Sullivan's Travels (see above), giving a lie to Joel McCrea's famous line that "life's too short for two films with Veronica Lake".

Lake, with her iconic "peekaboo" hairstyle wrenched into a sort of glamourless cob loaf, stars as a strong-willed woman who declares war on her sadistic ex-boyfriend (Preston Foster) and gruff rancher father (avuncular, dithering comedian Charlie Ruggles - what the hell?!). Meanwhile her "ramrod" (ranch foreman), reformed alcoholic McCrea, has his own axe to grind, and comes complete with an erratic, hot-blooded second-in-command (Don DeFore).

Starting with a sequence that's more confusing than mysterious, subsequently hitting us with a solid minute of improbably expressed exposition, and displaying almost no conception of when to cut a scene off or let it run, De Toth and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (who loved to start in the middle) seem almost reluctant to give their movie a chance. And yet, despite a litany of narrative problems, it is a fine film, featuring some of the most unusual, unconventional and multi-layered characters of the era. Is Lake cold, calculating and manipulative, or just beaten, lonely and out for what's hers? DeFore thinks nothing of shooting a man in cold blood and provokes a land war through lust alone, but he's also a fiercely loyal friend who'll risk his life for his love rival. And McCrea, for all that nobility that came so easily to the actor, says only of his friend's admission that he committed pre-meditated murder: "I thought you did."

McCrea is always good, but the same can't be said of all his Westerns, which are often more comfort movie than classic. He made almost nothing save oaters from 1946 onwards (when he himself bought a ranch), and if we except the transcendent Stars in My Crown on the grounds that it doesn't really count, then the only one that's truly great is Ride the High Country. This is comfortably in the second tier, though, with offbeat entries like Four Faces West and Colorado Territory. In fact, it's so good that he isn't even the best thing about it. Though he delivers another of those wonderfully understated performances so memorably described here as "Joel McCrea mumblecore" - which she meant as an insult, but I regard as high praise - he's competing for attention with both Lake (the director's then wife) and DeFore.

The 4' 11" Lake, that most '40s of actresses, was far, far more talented than she is ever given credit for, but her strange, mercurial gifts seem almost entirely natural. There's that exquisite voice, which pitches you as surely into the realm of old movie escapism as Jean Arthur's, and that pouty, unmoving, deceptively intense face with which she insistently, beseechingly if hardly expansively emotes. Here, she's terrifyingly steely, imploringly vulnerable and seductively passionate, often all at the same time, and she's matched, perhaps at times exceeded, by DeFore, whom I have never seen do anything comparable to his performance here: deep, complex, moving, and alive with danger, compassion and a smirking grasp of his own mortality. Incidentally, he made one of his first appearances as a soldier in The Human Comedy, with Western noir icon Bob Mitchum as one of his wingmen.

Ramrod is a film of weird longueurs, complete with generic, boring sequences of people riding or climbing. It explodes into life in fits and starts, cramming in plot one minute, going quiet the next. And it ends in somewhat conventional style, despite a strangely erotic final close-up. But it's a mad, wonderful, ferocious little Western: starkly shot, often devastatingly played and full of brilliant moments: perhaps the best and most sensual has the diminutive Lake cradling the sleeping, injured McCrea's head, her expression the very model of inscrutability.

If not quite the sum of its parts, Ramrod is - at least - a film of remarkable parts. (3)

***



"He's got a shooter!"
Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (Declan Lowney, 2013) - When I first read the premise of the Alan Partridge movie, my reaction was: "He... err, what now?" Turning Norwich's finest nasally-whistling, self-preserving, leather-gloved "disc-J" into a hostage negotiator seemed perhaps a step too far, even for someone who's driven to Dundee in his bare feet, threatened his former boss with a wheel of cheese and been de-bagged at a pharmaceuticals conference.

In the event, the movie milks the outlandish and surprisingly apt premise for much of its worth, trading on Alan's resurgent egotism as he becomes the centre of a media storm, and giving Coogan's monstrous creation free rein to posture, fantasise and bore to his heart's content. It seems entirely fitting that Alan would only find swelling fame and a captive audience through something as horrific and transient as an armed siege, and that he would have no qualms about turning it to his advantage.

But while a sitcom character can be almost unredeemably unpleasant across a half-hour, you can't get away with that in a movie. This can be where big screen translations fall down, slipping into slack sentiment or misguided mawkishness. Alpha Papa generally avoids that and, in one extraordinary scene, produces a depth of emotion you would have thought impossible for Alan. In a moment that reminded me of those text exchanges between Chris Huhne and his estranged son that turned up in the papers the other month, he offers a muddled final message to his kids, while being threatened (jokily?) by a loose cannon of a cop - a fellow siege history afficionado, as it so happens. Another beautifully-played scene sees Lynn reacting wth barely-restrained euphoria to being named as Alan's next-of-kin.

But a solid plot - quite imaginatively spun out across 90 minutes - fidelity to its central character, and a welcome, subtle emotional edge would be worth nothing if it wasn't funny.

It is.

Replete with Alan's familiar preoccupations (himself, FM rock), prejudices (gays, gypsies, the Irish) and disappointments (his children), it's full of inspired one-liners and pathetic parable-like reminiscences - I, Partridge having apparently stirred something in the writers. There are also plenty of visual gags, which are mostly good, and a few gross-out jokes, a touch above what you might expect, but not much more than that. Crucially, it retains a resolutely British, parochial sense of humour, refusing to broaden the characters' narrow worldview in search of a global audience. And for those who've worked in local news in recent years, there are some sharp, well-aimed barbs at tieless, downsizing, tech-obsessed management types. It is perhaps better in its first half, which is breathlessly funny, or perhaps you just can't laugh at that frequency, intensity and volume for an entire film. Except The Other Guys.

While Colm Meaney offers a bit of dramatic weight as Alan's psychopathic counterpoint, and there are a couple of nice moments with Tim Key and I'm Alan Partridge's Lynn and Michael, the rest of the supporting cast is rather lacklustre, with Phil Cornwell's recovering alcoholic seeming completely out of place.

So the whole thing has to be powered by Coogan, and it is: a nasally-whistling, self-preserving, leather glove-slapping tour-de-force that makes the weaker stuff bearable, the fair stuff good, and the good stuff great.

If it's possible to compare such disparate media, my favourite Partridge is still the Knowing Me, Knowing You radio show, but they did a far better job with the movie than I could have hoped for. Especially when I read the premise. (3)

***



*SPOILERS*
Wait Until Dark (Terence Young, 1967) is famous for featuring one of the most terrifying screen villains of all time: bespectacled little girl-next-door Gloria, who reacts to being called a "monster" by shouting and throwing saucepans on the floor. It also features Alan Arkin as a homicidal maniac.

Sporting a pudding-basin and some very '60s shades, he's one of a trio of hoods terrorising repeatedly self-proclaimed "bliiiahnd laihdy" Audrey Hepburn in search of a doll stuffed with heroin. Any idea where it might be? I have, but this stagy film still plays some neat tricks on its audience, on Hepburn and on Arkin, even if these might have worked even better in the oppressive, pared-down atmosphere of the theatre.

Aside from excessively informing us that Hepburn is blind - "I go to blind school," she explains, in case anyone hadn't quite grasped what was going on - the script is nicely done: an erudite, high-concept scareathon in the Spiral Staircase mold that begins with an absolutely irresistible scene featuring the three crims and illuminated by Arkin's electrifying presence. After that, he's given surprisingly little to do except wear some disguises, until a disappointingly nasty, conventional climax that sees the tables repeatedly turning in a room littered with broken glass and lit by matches, but bottoms out with a knife-crazed frenzy and an attempted rape, an overlong, poorly-directed sequence notable only for one exceptional scare (you'll know it when you see it).

Instead, the bulk of this cleverly-plotted suspenser is built around an elaborate game of role play, as Mike Talman (Richard Crenna) - hopefully named after William Talman, who gave us one of the screen's great baddies in The Hitch-Hiker - appears to come to the aid of the smart, naïve, deceptively resourceful Hepburn, whose beloved husband is supposedly at the centre of a gathering storm. To help her, though, he needs that doll.

Crenna and Hepburn are both very good, with a very thin Audrey overcoming a little woodenness by amping it up in a way she rarely did, but the film is dominated by Arkin's presence, such is the majesty of that opening sequence. It's only when his malicious megalomaniac gives up his aura of omniscient control that the film fails to satisfy. Despite that underwhelming pay-off, this analogue Panic Room does a good job of playing on our fears, giving us a character to really root for, and then putting her in jeopardy through a deft mixture of gimmickry, stock shocks and invention, effectively rooted in the character's ocular deficiency.

This movie got me thinking about which senses are underrated by the cinema. I have an idea for a film in which Janet Leigh is tormented by androgynous, sex-crazed, drug-fuelled bikers, hampered all the while by having no sense of touch. I call it... Touch of Evil. Sorry. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

I write. A lot. Features, reviews, stories, emails to my brother, even the odd poem (not to my brother). But I've never tried to write sketch comedy before a week last Thursday. Here, for reasons of vainglory and masochism, are the (sadly rejected) efforts I sent to Newsjack, the BBC's rather excellent open source topical comedy show. I've also added some brief explanations of what the hell I was playing at, in case you weren't bored enough. Anyway, I'll keep plugging away, and if I get anything on Newsjack, you'll be the first to know, and probably the second, possibly also the fifth, as I'm unlikely to shut up about it.

WEEK TWO

Sketch 1: Nigel Hitler



INTRO
In that prime time slot just before How Clean Is It Behind Your Fridge? - presented by Godfrey Bloom - Channel 4 News reported that the teenage Nigel Farage was regarded as a "fascist" by some of his teachers, and had sung Hitler Youth songs, a claim he denied. When Hitler was a teenager, of course, he also faced criticism from his teachers.

Knock on the door.

HEADTEACHER
Ah yes, Hitler, I wanted to see you.

TEENAGE HITLER (in a voice a lot like Nigel Farage)
What seems to be the problem, sir?

HEADTEACHER
I've had some complaints from the other teachers about your behaviour, young man. Apparently you've been sitting outside class on a bar stool, smoking and enjoying a leisurely pint, surrounded by photographers. You insist on coming to school dressed in tweed, Frau Schlemmer tells me you interrupted her lesson yesterday to make an impromptu speech against inheritance tax, and now you're demanding that your little army of followers refer to you as "Nigel". You've even shaved off your moustache. I don't think this behaviour is really befitting of a prefect.

HITLER
Listen here, headteacher. Germany's been sold down the river by the despised EU pig-dogs: joyless bureaucrats who don't have anything in common with the likes of us. They think ordinary folks like you and I shouldn't be allowed to smoke in pubs, have a beer at work or annex the Sudetenland.

HEADTEACHER
Annex the-?

HITLER (interrupting)
Exactly. If we want to have a laugh with our mates, watch the footy on the box or deport anyone whose first name isn't Franz, I suppose it's inevitable that some jumped up little... little... Mussolini is going to take offence. Cigarette?

HEADTEACHER
Thanks, I don't mind if I- Damn it, Hitler, you've done it again. You're just so persuasive.

HITLER
Thanks chief. Was that all?

HEADTEACHER
Yes Nigel. Now please send in Goebbels, he keeps pretending to be Lembit Opek.

Notes: This sketch uses the old Private Eye gimmick of reversing the roles in a news story, so rather than having Nigel Farage supposedly aping Hitler, it has a teenage Hitler adopting the mannerisms of the UKIP leader. I'm not equating the two parties, that would be stupid; the point of the sketch is the fraudulence of couching hideous ideas in avuncular language and misleading palliness. It's not a particularly original concept, but I was quite pleased with how it came off. The last line is a bit too broad and has no political bite, but at least possesses the element of surprise.

***

Sketch 2: I Have a Bloom



INTRO
UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom went rogue - actually, stayed rogue - this week, carpet-bombing his own party's conference with his unique brand of 18th century sexism and pamphlet-based violence. Godders has form, of course, as this delve into the Newsjack Archives shows.

NEWSREEL-STYLE VOICEOVER
What looked like a potentially historic speech from Dr Martin Luther King, an address which could have given new momentum to the civil rights movement, was today spoiled by a dick in a UKIP tie.

Martin Luther King is giving his I Have a Dream speech.

KING
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

A voice cries out in dissent. It is Godfrey Bloom.

BLOOM
What a racist comment is that? How dare you! That's an appalling thing to say. You're picking people out for the colour of their skin. You disgust me.

KING
I think you may have misunderstood the point I was trying to-

BLOOM
You, sir, are a racist. I, for example, hadn't noticed that you were black, if indeed you are.

KING (trying to continue)
I have a dream today!

BLOOM (seizing the microphone)
Me too: I have a dream today, and it has three parts to it. Firstly, it's crucial that the space behind every fridge is perfectly and unaccountably clean - for some reason this seems to be of the utmost importance. Secondly, more gender-based profanity in the workplace, especially if the word you want to use had a different and very specific meaning some 300 years ago. And, thirdly, the severing of all trade links with Bongo Bongo Land, which for some reason I don't seem quite able to place in my British Empire atlas of 1848.

KING (trying to shout into the microphone)
I have a dream!

BLOOM
No, I have a dream, an exquisitely bonkers dream - and I've just thought of some more bits of it. Maternity leave should include a six-month jail sentence, mad bald men should be allowed to shoot journalists on sight, and anyone who changes pounds into Euros should be stoned to death.

KING
I have a dream!

BLOOM
As do I - Nigel Farage masks for all women!

KING (trying to get to the microphone again)
Free at last!

BLOOM
Yes! At last! Free healthcare for anyone earning over £100,000 a week, free housing for anyone with a second home in Corfu and free Wi-fi for life if you vote UKIP in 2015.

VOICEOVER
And so it was that Dr King surrendered his landmark address to beat Mr Bloom about the head with the text of his speech, to cheers from the crowd.

BLOOM
Ow! Get off. I have a dream - I have a dream! A dream you're all sluts!

Notes: This one isn't as good (clearly). I was really pleased with the basic premise: that Godfrey Bloom's disingenuousness (and hilarious quotes) when dealing with Michael Crick would also apply to Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, but I wasn't quite sure how to follow up on this, as you can see. Having Bloom take the microphone meant I could spoof his litany of ludicrous beliefs, but doesn't necessarily make any sense. The pay-off is a bit cheap, but that could have worked, I think.

***

One-liners:



BBC presenter Simon McCoy baffled viewers by reading out the news whilst holding a packet of photocopier paper, which he'd mistaken for an iPad. His attempts to account for the mistake failed, as he tried to send a tweet on a calculator, conducted a phone interview down a banana and posted a letter of explanation into a man with high blood pressure who happened to have stopped on the street.

The iPhone 5 hit stores this week. With even the budget model priced at more than £450, it looks like this Mark Duggan inquest has come along at just the right time.

***



WEEK ONE

Sketch: Voyager 1

INTRO
This week, Voyager 1 was confirmed as the first ever to leave this lovely solar system of ours. Launched in 1977, the probe contains photos and music from Earth.

The sound of an explosion, followed by a man running and panting, then a knock on the door.

COMMANDER (MALE VOICE)
Enter.

The door opens.

COMMANDER
What is it, Blerk?

BLERK (FEMALE VOICE)
This just fell out of the sky, sir. I think it's important.

COMMANDER
It doesn't look important, it looks like a birthday present strapped to a satellite dish on a tripod. Bring it over here.

Sound of paper being torn off the parcel.

COMMANDER
Good heavens, what's this? It appears to be a message from some sort of... primitive race. And they've printed out all the pictures onto glossy paper, like my nanna does. Look at their gargantuan sideburns, they look like they've got doormats glued to their heads. I don't think we'll be bothering to converse with them. And oh... oh, that's just revolting. This gentleman has put a safety pin right through his nose.

BLERK
There's something else in the envelope, sir.

COMMANDER
So there is. Oh... oh this is priceless - look at this, they're still using phonograph records. Do they think it's 1977? We should write back to them: "Dear puny Earthlings, we're coming to take your planet, please don't poke us with your bayonets. I'm worried that if we get on the wrong side of your president he'll batter us to death with his Betamax player."

BLERK
You never know, sir, it may be that this parcel has taken 36 years to arrive.

COMMANDER
I doubt that very much, Blerk - I don't think Earth will have privatised its postal system.

Notes: This was the first sketch I'd ever written, which is probably painfully obvious. It's pretty bland, though I was pleased with a few of the details (the joke about his nanna and the one about the president), and although the last line is a bit wordy and laboured, I did manage to give the sketch a point by tying together two topical stories.

***

One-liners: You're not seeing the one-liners, they were shit.

I wrote the first draft of this piece on spec for the Guardian's fantastic Why I Love... series, but they're not accepting freelance contributions, so I decided to go into a bit more depth and tack it up here.



It's arguably the most heightened and heartbreaking evocation of the Great Depression ever filmed: an unforgettable portrait of a people betrayed by their country, gripped by a crisis not of their making, disillusioned, dehumanised and dismissed. Rife with righteous fury, dripping with anguish, and populated by marching masses almost zombified by hopelessness, it's a piece of socialist art pitched somewhere between poetry and propaganda. And it's a number in an otherwise innocuous Hollywood musical from 1933.

For most of its running time, Gold Diggers of 1933 is a standard crowd-pleaser. Though its first half has numerous wry references to poverty, one chilling line from Aline MacMahon about the lengths to which out-of-work chorus girls might be forced to go, and interrupts the new song We're in the Money – sung partly in Pig Latin and introduced by Ginger Rogers, dressed as some coins – because the creditors are closing down rehearsals, this is still a film in which struggling actress Polly (Ruby Keeler), seeking funding for a show, catches the eye of a secret millionaire (Dick Powell), who's young and dashing and lives next door and also happens to be a songwriter. In fact, once Doberman-faced Pre-Code lothario Warren William and ruddy lecher Guy Kibbee turn up, and the movie starts to revolve around that '30s staple of a wealthy family trying to buy off a troublesome showgirl, it seems to forget about reality altogether.

In terms of the score, there are two more numbers staged by visionary choreographer Busby Berkeley: the peculiar, sexualised Pettin' in the Park – featuring eight-year-old dwarf actor Billy Barty, cast as a pervy baby – and the Shadow Waltz, replete with neon violins, in addition to the peppy Powell's solo spots. Some 11 years before his reinvention as a film noir tough guy, he's all chubby cheeks and cheese, crooning soppy songs through open windows. It's all amazing fun, but still just snappy, superior escapist fodder, with a tantalising early reference to stage producer Ned Sparks' vision for a "Big Parade of tears" the only hint that something important might be on the way. Nothing, though, can quite prepare you for what it is.

With the daft plot neatly tied up, Berkeley suddenly drops the big one: a climactic number that runs for almost seven minutes and seems to encapsulate an entire generation's experiences in an endless parade of marching, shuffling feet. Men on a downward spiral that begins at the front and ends at the soup kitchen; an army of heroes deserted by America. Prefaced by Berkeley himself as the crew member yelling: "Everybody on stage for the 'Forgotten Man' number!", and smartly moved to the end of the picture by studio head Jack Warner and the brilliant, staunchly Republican producer Darryl F. Zanuck – resulting in some rather obvious continuity errors – it's a rousing, moving and frankly jaw-dropping spectacle, and an uncompromising piece of political cinema.

In 1933, Hollywood movies were preoccupied with the Depression, as well they might have been. Heroes for Sale encompassed all manner of social problems in tracing the troubled life of Richard Barthelmess's war hero. Hallelujah, I'm a Bum rather daringly – some would say naively – equated joblessness with freedom, while finding a role for ex-silent comic Harry Langdon as a communist binman called Egghead. The exceptional time-travel drama Turn Back the Clock allowed Lee Tracy's tobacconist to relive 20 years of his life, and to confront the major social issues of the day, and the entirely bonkers Gabriel Over the White House, bankrolled by William Randolph Hearst, suggested that dictatorship – in the shape of Walter-Huston-with-superpowers – was the only answer to the nation's ills.

For all their virtues, though, none of these films possess the poetry, the passion or the sheer relentlessness of Remember My Forgotten Man, let alone its concision and erudition. It grips right from the start: the strings plunge, the curtains open and a street scene is revealed. From there on in, there are no cutaways to the audience, no concessions to the wider, engagingly daft story: the focus is entirely on this Depression opus, shot in stunning, Expressionistic fashion by studio cinematographer Sol Polito, the gifted Sicilian who gave Sergeant York its unique, painterly feel.



A homeless man (Frank Mills) stands under a streetlamp. A passing white-collar worker drops a cigarette butt on the floor, and he swoops for it. The bum stands and catches the eye of a prostitute (Joan Blondell), who takes a light, then locks eyes with him. He smiles, lowers his gaze and walks away. She looks after him, her coquettish manner evaporating as her face washes over with gloom. “I don’t know if he deserves a bit of sympathy,” she says. “Forget your sympathy, that’s alright with me. I was satisfied to drift along from day to day, till they came and took my man away.”

Though the story naturally attributes the song to Powell's dimpled moneybags, it's actually by Al Dubin and Harry Warren, the pair who'd written the score to Warner's 42nd Street the previous year ("Cancel my contract with Warren and Dubin!" shouts Sparks' character when he hears Powell's tunes for the first time). As a lonely sax starts up a call and response, Blondell slips into the rhythm of the number, and hits us with lyricist Al Dubin's staggering refrain, presumably inspired by Yip Harburg's Brother Can You Spare a Dime?: “Remember my forgotten man? You put a rifle in his hand. You sent him far away, you shouted ‘Hip hooray!’, but look at him today.” As we snap to a close up, we see the tears springing in her eyes. “Remember my forgotten man? You had him cultivate the land. He walked behind a plough, the sweat fell from his brow, but look at him right now…”


The forgotten women.

Then she frames the Depression as a tragedy for women too: "And once, he used to love me, I was happy then. He used to take care of me – won't you bring him back again? 'Cause ever since the world began, a woman's got to have a man. Forgetting him, you see, means you're forgetting me – like my forgotten man." Then, without warning, the massive, magnificent voice of African-American vocalist Etta Moten blasts into the film. The implication from Berkeley is clear: this crisis transcends then-significant racial boundaries; each case, regardless of colour, is as tragic as the last (not that Warner gave Moten a screen credit, appallingly). Hanging out of a tenement, she drenches the sequence in blues, restating Blondell’s words as we move past other windows: a starving mother cradling a child (an image so like a couple of Dorothea Lange photos that it's astonishing to note it predates both of them), a pensioner in a rocking chair staring into the middle-distance. Then it’s Sledgehammer Blow 1: a truncheon-wielding cop tries to move on another bum (Billy West), who's lying listlessly in a doorway. As he pulls him to his feet via his lapel, the man's jacket falls open and we see the war medal still pinned there. Blondell closes it, cold fury in her eyes, and pushes him solemnly out of the frame. (There is an added undercurrent here relating to Blondell's own brutalisation by the law; as a young woman she survived an attempted rape by a police officer.)




Sledgehammer Blows 1 and 2.

A fade, and we’re at an army parade in 1917, ticker tape flying, crowds cheering and flags waving, the pitch-black background giving it all the atmosphere of a dream. Another fade and the men are walking more wearily, their faces grim, the rain bucketing down. Sledgehammer Blow 2: more soldiers appear, staggering in the opposite direction, returning from the front bloodied, blinded and crippled. One of them, his face set in grim determination as he strides towards the camera, has a half-naked casualty slung over his back. Fade again and we’re at a soup kitchen, Berkeley’s camera – so often used to idolise chorus girls’ legs in these Warner production numbers – tracking past hungry, lost souls, some with their lips pursed in determination, bowed but not yet broken, shivering against the winter cold.



Then Sledgehammer Blow 3, Berkeley pulling out all the stops in a way that comprehensively shifts the focus from the personal (emphasised by the lyrics) to the communal. As silhouetted soldiers march endlessly across a huge, three-tiered dome, a chorus of the unemployed starts up. “We are the real forgotten men,” they sing, these swelling masses marching towards the camera, then turning to Blondell, who helps them blast out one last chorus, their hands rising as if enraptured, glorifying the plaintive cry of the prostitute.



It isn’t that much like a Fred and Ginger film.

The number was conceived by Berkeley, whose remarkable, regimented routines (frequently leading to kaleidoscopic imagery, shot from above) were informed by the Army drills he experienced during his time as an artillery lieutenant. Though it can be viewed as a general indictment of the Hoover Administration’s failure to address the nation’s problems, the direct inspiration for the routine, with its unique and wrenching power, was the May 1932 war veterans' march, in which 17,000 soldiers who had fought in the Great War went to Washington in search of enough money to get by. Two of them were shot by the police, the rest were charged by the Army under the command of General Patton. Alongside The Grapes of Wrath, a stunning translation of the Steinbeck novel made by then "socialist democrat" director John Ford and Zanuck, Berkeley's response is probably the most radical work to come out of a mainstream studio during Hollywood's Golden Age.

Closing your film with an incongruous, unprecedented musical routine is ballsy, but it isn't courageous. What is courageous, even prior to the communist witchhunts of subsequent decades, is climaxing with a number that accuses the Government of betraying its people, and calls on the country's lawmakers to recognise the sacrifices made during World War One (and in forming the economic backbone of the country), and to come to the aid of the working classes. Turn off the sound and chop a couple of zeroes off the budget, and the sight of these impoverished masses striding towards the camera, facing down their oppressors and calling for the state to intervene, could easily have been culled from a Soviet propaganda film.

In every way, this stunningly scored mini-epic still astounds: in its matchless atmosphere, its feeling of communality, its extensive use of unglamorous extras, its perfect marriage of sound and image – unobstructed by dialogue or the necessities of plot – its technical complexity but thematic simplicity, and its sense of human compassion permeating every frame. That all this is housed in an otherwise inoffensive Hollywood entertainment, following some glow-in-the-dark violins and plenty of comic relief from a tipsy, horny Guy Kibbee, is almost inconceivable.

***

I previously wrote about Remember My Forgotten Man in this post, "Nine things I like about movies". You can watch the number itself on YouTube.

Nowadays I mostly just watch films on a little computer on the train. Like a boss, as I believe they say. That's how I saw most of these - as the director intended.



Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941) - If Ball of Fire is Howard Hawks' best film - his most enchanting, entrancing and affecting - then Sergeant York has a claim to being his greatest: an astonishingly ambitious piece of storytelling, with sweep and style and a tremendous universality, that's also rooted in the personal. Though the DVD cover features Cooper in full-on battle mode - tin hat on, revolver out, face fixed in stoicism, a hero for the Father's Day market - Sergeant York is much more than a mere war movie.

Its first half is a pastoral masterpiece (pastorpiece?) in the vein of Tol'able David, staggeringly shot in charcoal tones by Sol Polito, and chronicling hellraiser Alvin York's conversion to Christianity, within an isolated mountain community. The second follows Alvin (Gary Cooper) as he wrestles with his conscience upon being drafted during WWI, and winds up a war hero, via one of the greatest battle sequences ever filmed.

If you can stomach the film's patriotism and justification of war as a means to peace, and an unselfconscious sentimentality in much of its dialogue (some written by John Huston), then the film is nigh-on perfect, with even the "in the Army now" sequences possessing the absolute minimum of incongruous character comedy. The immortal Cooper does perhaps his best dramatic work in the lead - it was his favourite of his films - Walter Brennan's performance as the local pastor is another masterclass (pastorclass?) from one of the great supporting actors, and the 16-year-old Joan Leslie - probably the prettiest actress in '40s cinema - is extraordinarily effective as Alvin's fiancée, Miss Gracie, her naturalism and remarkable gift for reaction creating the usual alchemy with her leading man.

Beautifully conceived and rendered, from the stunning sets - at once stylised and realistic - to Max Steiner's astonishing score, the film is a triumph as Americana, as a character study, as a portrait of religious conviction to rank alongside Becket, as a romance, as an entertainment (it was the highest grosser of 1941) and as a - perhaps unwitting - piece of propaganda, its respect for pacifism and conflicted relationship with conflict barely registering with the thousands who saw it just after Pearl Harbor and headed straight for the recruiting office.

To modern eyes, the film may seem fanciful, hackneyed or hokey, but I found it spellbinding: an immersive experience that conjures up a whole lost world. A work of art. (4)

***



Whisky Galore! (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949) - Harrowing drama about Scottish people's reliance on alcohol. (3.5)

***



Green Card (Peter Weir, 1990) - An old-fashioned romantic comedy with a certain intangible, unaccountable magic. Andie MacDowell wants a greenhouse, Gerard Depardieu wants a green card, and so these strangers marry, then bid farewell forever, little knowing they'll be flung back together by suspicious immigration officials. Written, directed and produced by Peter Weir - an enduringly class act - the film isn't particularly funny, but it is a cut above usual romantic fare, partly because it's rooted in the real world and in credible characterisation, partly due to the chemistry of the leads, and partly because of Weir's skilful direction, which fails only in two regards: if MacDowell gives you a handful of wooden line readings, you ask her to re-take, and if you've got a flipping recurring musical motif inspired by a burgeoning love affair, you flipping play it over the flipping climax. While Bebe Neuwirth from Cheers is fun in support, casting off that unsmiling sternness in an infectiously vivacious performance, this is a movie that zones in on its leads. MacDowell comes in for a lot of stick, but she's often very good here, when not relying on that stock smile or fluffing the odd infuriated riposte. Depardieu's first English-language performance seems nothing special in itself - while those sorts of barbs aimed at vegetarianism and clean-living may have been old-hat when they were used in the 1916 movie, His Picture in the Papers - and yet the film is ultimately entirely winning, and its central romance unusually and comprehensively affecting. (3)

***



Man on the Moon (Milos Forman, 1999) - There are three basic ideas about stand-up comedy: 1) That it's about making people laugh, 2) That it's about hauling down the powerful, 3) That it's both an art and a science, a medium in which the element of performance is integral and the self-aware, post-modern deconstruction of comedy is funny in itself. The last one of those doesn't sound at all funny, but it can be in the hands of the right comic, as the numerous critical bouquets flung in the direction of Stewart Lee will attest.

Andy Kaufman thought a little of the first idea and a lot of the last. He thought that dying on stage was hilarious, that making his audience unsettled or outraged was at least as worthwhile as getting them to giggle, and that the only way to respond to requests for his TV catchphrases was to read the entirety of The Great Gatsby aloud on stage. He prefigured the "ironic" un-PC humour of Ricky Gervais by a couple of decades during a peculiar venture as a sexist wrestling bad guy, figured that if he found something funny that was more than enough, and took very much to heart the Wildeism, "I put all my genius into my life", a Withnailian get-out for those who lack the discipline to create anything of genuine worth. I'm rather fond of it myself.

This superior biopic, another portrait of a genuinely odd iconoclast from the People Vs Larry Flynt team, is, if not quite the film that Kaufman would have made of his own life (that doubtless would have been out-of-focus for the second half, which came at the start of the film), at least alive with the perverse glee of his comedy and the sincerity of his erratic artistic vision. Played by Jim Carrey with a level of complexity and dramatic intelligence that proved The Truman Show was no fluke, the film follows Kaufman from his discovery by super agent Danny De Vito, through Saturday Night Live and sitcom fame, onto a relationship with a one-time wrestling adversary (Courtney Love) and then down through professional disaster and failing health.

This standard narrative, shot through with about the right amount of Kaufman's own penchant for rug-pulling and getting somewhere close to an understanding of quite a strange man, is also cleverly bookended, kicking off with a frankly amazing mock-ending and climaxing in about the only way it can. My main criticism is that the film loses a little of its vitality and fondness for invention as it progresses - certainly there's too much wrestling and too much Tony Clifton (a one-joke character whose one joke is funny once) - and may have benefited from a more adventurous, non-linear screenplay: perhaps of the type that Andy's namesake Charlie might have provided. Despite the quality of the acting, despite Forman's gift for montage and comic timing, despite the erudition of the dialogue and the quality of the R.E.M. score, it all comes a little close to storytelling-by-numbers in the second half.

But while playing it safe wasn't exactly his style, a biopic that's often funny, sometimes infuriating and ultimately kind of brilliant does seem about right for Andy Kaufman. (3)

***



20,000 Years in Sing Sing (Michael Curtiz, 1932) - Golden Age legends Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis made their only appearance together in this powerful but deeply flawed prison movie from Warner Bros, based on the memoirs of Sing Sing warden Lewis E. Lawes. Tracy is an underworld big shot who gets sent down for 5 to 30 (they had vague prison sentences back then) after an armed robbery, leaving big-eyed Davis on her lonesome. Naturally she spends her newly freed-up calendar trying to spin nefarious fixer Louis Calhern around her finger, so Tracy can be sprung, but it doesn't quite pan out like that. The star - who had already been sent to prison in his debut film, Up the River - is superb when the part calls for him to play sincere, noble or troubled, but struggles with the malevolent material, seeming somewhat miscast in a role originally intended for Jimmy Cagney. The film's essential toughness is also diluted by weak comedy and studio gloss, while Warner's reputation as a progressive studio doesn't extend beyond a slightly cautious supposition that not all prisoners are evil; "You've got to be useful to live," says the warden at one point, which is the sort of thing Hitler might have said.

The film does get a kick from the stars, though, and includes a nice bit part for future Plan 9 alumnus Lyle Talbot as a complete psychopath, while the fast-moving story is diverting enough - despite a rather daft gimmick concerning Tracy's loathing of Saturdays - and there's one absolute knockout prison break sequence shot in vivid Expressionist style by Curtiz and journeyman Barney McGill: pure film noir, some eight years before the fact. 20,000 Years in Sing Sing can't compete with the bleak, grown-up I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, released by Warner Bros the same year, nor The Big House - one of the first great talkies and still the daddy of all prison films - nor even Cagney's own penitentiary pic Each Dawn I Die, but for a brief, low-budget programmer, it's pretty punchy, and all builds to a gutting pay-off. I still love that title too. (2.5)

***



The Flame and the Arrow (Jacques Tourneur, 1950) - A handsome Technicolor swashbuckler in the familiar Warner Bros style, with Burt Lancaster taking over from Errol Flynn, who was getting too old/debauched for this shit. Lancaster is a free spirit in 12th century Italy - with frankly resplendent teeth - who starts fighting for the little guy after his son is taken prisoner by the ruthless German tyrant who's married his ex. Virginia Mayo is Lancaster's sassy feminine foil (who spends a fair bit of the film with a chain around her neck, like a kind of sexy dog), Frank Allenby is the hissable aristocratic villain and Robert Douglas has a potentially interesting role as a duplicitous swordsman that he doesn't do a great deal with. The star's regular sidekick and former big top buddy, Nick Cravat, also gets a showy part, effective as the star's mute, fiercely loyal right-hand man.

The film is a bit too talky and the action is variable - half awesome circus moves, half bog-standard scrapping - but it's intelligently cast, frequently entertaining and builds to a very satisfying conclusion. At its best, such as in those exuberant opening scenes, it fairly throbs with energy and vigour - much like its leading man. It's also attractive to look at: while Tourneur was no auteur - and cinema is after all a collaborative medium - his films peg him as a fine visual stylist, especially when working with a talented cinematographer like film noir pioneer Nicholas Musuraca (Out of the Past, Cat People), Charles Schoenbaum (Stars in My Crown) or Ernest Haller (this one), who went on to shoot Rebel without a Cause. (3)

***



Tall Man Riding (Lesley Selander, 1955) - A formulaic but fun Randolph Scott Western, one of a pile of identikit offerings the oft-wooden star made from the late-'40s to the mid-'50s, before Budd Boetticher and Burt Kennedy made a cult figure out of him. The best of these is probably A Lawless Street, directed by B-movie wizard Joseph H. Lewis, while the interminable Coroner Creek must be the worst. This one's placed midway between the two, beginning in a confusing, slightly tedious vein, gradually improving, then getting hijacked by a silly twist that feeds into an unexpectedly strong triple-ending.

As usual, Scott is a quiet, stoic gunman, bent on revenge, who's suspected of various nefarious doings (including shooting his ex-lover's husband in cold blood) while finding that his thirst for vengeance abates as more important considerations intrude. That story is rather over-familiar and Scott is at his most oak-like, but the supporting cast has its compensations to atone for the mediocre males - the still-brunette Dorothy Malone is very forceful if clichéd as Scott's ex, and Peggie Castle (the femme fatale in the Mickey Spillane adaptation, I, the Jury) gives a decent performance as a saloon singer and gangster's moll who finds her essential goodness sparking up again - and it's a fast-moving, quite well-directed movie that's wrapped up in an appealing way. For all its shortcomings, Western buffs should find it an enjoyable enough ride. (2.5)

***



Walk, Don’t Run (Charles Walters, 1966) - A fittingly pedestrian remake of George Stevens'The More the Merrier - that classic comedy about an ageing romantic bringing together two young people during a housing crisis - updated to the sexually franker '60s and the hustle and bustle of Tokyo during the Olympics, and notable only as Cary Grant's swansong.

While Samantha Eggar and Jim Hutton are no Arthur and McCrea, hers is actually the stand-out performance, beginning in an uptight, officious manner, then blossoming charmingly. The mahogany, lazily suave Grant - once the most gifted light comedian in screen history - is fairly good but largely coasting, as he so often did later in his career. He hadn't lost his timing (that "... then I'll stay" sequence is beautifully played) and he has fun belting out the theme songs of a couple of his most famous films before waving us goodbye at the end, but he's unable to summon the enthusiasm or the resources to breathe much life into the more trivial, sitcomish material, which mistakes endless repetition for humour (especially in the interminable "timetable" set pieces), thinks the volume of a TV being turned up is in itself hilarious and has characters constantly behaving in incredible ways: like climbing up the side of a building rather than waiting to be let back into an apartment.

There are a few laughs and a few nice romantic moments, while the curious homoerotic undercurrent in the early scenes between Grant and Hutton is sort of fascinating (Grant was long rumoured to be gay, a reputation he'd cheerily spoofed in Bringing Up Baby), but unless you're a Grant completist, distrust black and white films or resent having a good time, you'd be better off just watching the original. (2)

***



Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock, 1950) - Silly, arbitrarily-plotted Hitch film, set in London, his first British movie after leaving for Hollywood a decade earlier. Jane Wyman is a stage-struck kid who risks it all for the man she loves (Richard Todd) after he's framed for murder by his lover (Marlene Dietrich), getting entangled with the investigating officer (Michael Wilding) and going deep undercover as a maid, with the help of an extraordinarily bad Cockney accent. The story is so scatty that it seems as if they came up with the set pieces first and then just tried to tie them together - the director and his writers did sometimes work that way, successfully on North by Northwest - the balance of comedy and tension is never quite right, and rarely has Hitchcock's stairs fetish been so boringly employed as in the sequences of Wyman running up or down steps, trying not to let people see her face. It's a passable entertainment, though, thanks to a few directorial flourishes and a very special home-grown supporting cast, including Kay Walsh as a chain-smoking blackmailer, Wilding giving a masterclass in smitten but hard-edged suavity, and Joyce Grenfell playing her (incongruous) stock character of a toothy incompetent, this time in charge of a shooting gallery. Best of all is Alastair Sim as Wyman's rascally father, a man always in control despite his bumbling manner and disordered appearance: a sort of Boris Johnson for the suspense set. (2)

***



The Saint Meets the Tiger (Paul L. Stein, 1943) - This late, British entry in the Saint series starts and ends quite well, but has an incredibly boring, extended middle, full of secret passages, dull characters and awkward pauses. Hugh Sinclair is an underrated, enjoyable Templar - debonair and amusingly offhand - but no match for Louis Hayward's definitive characterisation. The supporting cast is mostly weak, though Jean Gillie isn't bad as the love interest, and Charles Victor has a fair scene in which he tries to frame the Saint for murder. All in all, though, this cheap, poorly-scripted comedy-mystery is a bit of a chore. (1.5)

***



*SOME SPOILERS*
Ruby Sparks (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2012) - Oh fuck off. There's the germ of an interesting idea in Zoe Kazan's screenplay, concerning the collision between the adolescent ideal of a lover and the reality of sharing your life with someone, flaws and all. Unfortunately it's swamped by buckets and buckets of utter bullshit, a heap of ideas nicked from Stranger Than Fiction and The Purple Rose of Cairo and a veritable avalanche of manic pixie dream girl posturing.

Paul Dano plays a frustrated "boy genius" - a once-renowned writer who expresses the usual fondness for Fitzgerald and Salinger (a familiarly shallow way to imbue your screenplay with faux-intellectual credibility) while being hampered by block as he tackles that Difficult Second Novel. After a dream about an annoying ginger (Zoe Kazan) - sorry, a beautiful dreamer (Zoe Kazan) - who couldn't fit the MPDG stereotype more perfectly if she was wearing a Smiths t-shirt (I have several, but that's not the point) and scrawling Rimbaud verse on her arm with a sparkly pen, he begins to write about her, only to find that she has come to life, and is in his house.

The first 15 minutes is genuinely the worst opening to a film I've seen since Mamma Mia!, full of dreadful dialogue and risible acting. The opening exchanges left me slack-jawed in amazement. Does this kind of pointless writing, combining lazy juxtaposition (dreamy girl says mundane thing) with clumsy attempts to subvert non-existent expectations, honestly merit being filmed? Then suddenly the film seems to get a grip of itself - and so its audience - as Dano's brother (Chris Messina) delivers a neat little speech about the difference between a dream girl and a real woman. Ah, so Kazan's character is supposed to be shallow and ridiculous? Finally we're getting somewhere. Actually, no, the film's not sure. Let it just consider that for a moment, then completely change the subject.

After that, I'm not sure what happens. I mean, I watched it, but it passed in a cacophony of white noise, as deep as a trailer, the sort of wildly inconsistent nonsense that's very difficult to judge, as I've no idea what it's supposed to be, and Kazan has no idea what she's trying to say. Or else hasn't the skills to say it. The film embraces the one plot development you're urging it to, as Dano is overwhelmed by the desire to "perfect" his creation (again, a mature analogy for relationships in general), only for the results to be instantly sunk by gimmickry and bad acting, the "comic" scenes in which Kazan is consumed by joy being the more embarrassingly overacted since Ginger Rogers became a little girl in Monkey Business.

It's never clear whether the Ruby who appears is supposed to represent a real woman or merely a literary creation - surely the crux of the piece - or whether she grows apart from Dano because she has become more human or simply because he is unable to adapt to her inexplicable arrival. There's also a gaping great hole in the way that he is unable to correct her increasingly unrealistic flaws. I don't think it's a critique of perfectionism (if it was, surely he'd answer her request to start over in the final scene with, "It doesn't have to be perfect") and nor does it seem to be dealing with any lack of realism in literature. It's just a flaw.

Somewhere along the way there's also a fucking road trip, of course, with meaningless bit parts for Annette Bening and Antonio Banderas. Bening's character, the Incredibly Irritating Earth Mother familiar from just about every disappointing indie film of the last 20 years (Broken Flowers, Away We Go), handily represents nothing, serving only to inform us that people who excessively embrace a New Age lifestyle are probably quite annoying, which I think we already know. Steve Coogan pops up every so often too, as Dano's overbearing mentor, affecting an accent perhaps best described as "Americunian". There are a couple of laughs in there, Messina is good and the film occasionally alights on something more universal than "man fancies Zoe Kazan" - whether by accident or design, I'm not sure - the idea of a writer paralysed by his own success remains interesting, and certainly the climax to the "human puppet" sequence has a wonderfully manic energy to it, but it's not enough, not nearly.

The film's argument seems to be that we shouldn't try to change people, but that if we don't, they'll leave us. How life-affirming. And also that Zoe Kazan is Zoe Kazan's idea of the perfect woman, in all her cooky capriciousness. It's like (500) Days of Summer, but without the self-awareness or charm, and with all the flaws turned up to 11. Or like Weird Science for pretentious, posing tossers. (No offence intended if you liked it, though you are wrong.) Like I said: fuck off. (1.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

SOME REVIEWS! Also featuring: MGM showing off, Alan Ladd being cool, and Anton Walbrook being mean. Very mean. Evil, even.



Test Pilot (Victor Fleming, 1938) is the epitome, if not the apogee, of Old Hollywood excellence, a slick but weighty entertainment with several remarkable facets, and the full weight of the MGM dream factory behind it.

First, consider its pedigree: its scriptwriters included Howard Hawks and former aviator Frank "Spig" Wead, the personable stars - Clark Gable and Myrna Loy - had just been voted the King and Queen of Hollywood in the biggest poll of its kind ever conducted, there was a meaty role for dramatic heavyweight Spencer Tracy, about to land his second consecutive Oscar, and the direction came from skilled filmmaker and unequivocal "man's man" Victor Fleming - who specialised in rough, tough pictures, but would shoot most of The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind the following year. Seventy-five years on, it still looks like what it was: a proper prestige production, shot on location as well as in the studio, and full of impressive flight footage (which I'll acknowledge isn't always perfectly integrated with the close-up work).

Gable is the test pilot of the title, pushing new planes to the limit at risk of his life. Tracy is his fatalistic, constantly chewing mechanic, Loy the university-educated farm girl on whose parents' land he downs, setting up a romance that moves from blissful exploration to bitter desperation, as drunkenness and death intervene.

This was among Loy's favourites of all her films, and, she said, the last movie in which her seven-time co-star Gable dared to emote, before the need to protect his macho image rendered him dramatically immobile. He was a formidable star, if not much of an actor, and Test Pilot finds him at the top of his game. Loy herself is out of this world: she was never more affecting or amusing - eliciting bona fide lolz and heartbreak in equal measure with a rich, multi-layered characterisation brimming with confidence. Usually happy to merely complement her co-star, here she just acts him off the screen. Tracy is also at the peak of his gargantuan powers, exhibiting a wondrous naturalism that's sustained throughout every moment he's on screen, whether centre-stage or not.

There are a few extraneous scenes, a couple of lurches in mood and perhaps an overly folsky wrap-up utilising Lionel Barrymore's popular persona, but it's largely a proper movie with proper characters, and little of the superficiality or convolution that marred many of Gable's MGM vehicles. It's also a film of great moments: Loy's first meeting with Gable, her breathtaking heart-to-heart with Tracy, a noted precursor to the classic "Who's Joe?" scene from Hawks' own Only Angels Have Wings, and that gutting instant that consists of nothing more than the mechanic tossing some chewing gum on the ground. (Unless my ears deceive me, it's additionally one of the only Breen-era movies to contain blasphemy, in the scene where Gable goes to visit Gloria Holden.)

In her book, Loy says the film "really stands as an example of what big-studio filmmaking could be", and who am I disagree? (3.5)

See also: Tracy and Gable's next, and final collaboration, Boom Town, is reviewed below.

***



The Glass Key (Stuart Heisler, 1942) - For all its flaws, this is one of my favourite noirs, and a movie I return to time and again. There isn't much plot, and what there is doesn't always make sense, but it's pure joy from start to finish, with Ladd and Lake's usual fireworks, Brian Donlevy and William Bendix in career-best form, and a spectacular script crackling with menace, innuendo and pitch black humour. Putting the malnourished story aside, it's everything film noir should be: violent, sexy and funny. And homoerotic. It's very homoerotic. (3.5)

See also: I reviewed Sullivan's Travels, also starring Veronica Lake, here.

***



The Silent Partner (Daryl Duke, 1978) - A very good thriller in a very '70s style, with a languid style of storytelling punctuated by scintillating genre set pieces, a shambling, handsome-ugly hero, and lots of women without any clothes on.

Elliott Gould is a Toronto bank clerk, in love with co-worker Susannah York, who realises he's about to be stuck up by a department store Santa (Christopher Plummer) and decides to turn the situation to his advantage. Unfortunately his adversary turns out to be an absolute psychopath – shades of Charley Varrick – but Gould's dalliance with illegality seems to have woken him from his stupor, and sharpened his wits.

In plot terms it's reminiscent of Wait Until Dark and the later Hopscotch, it's thematically and stylistically akin to Michael Cimino's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and the atmosphere of growing dread and danger within a sanitised, bloodless corporate environment makes it an interesting companion piece to the same year's Dawn of the Dead, but this Curtis Hanson-scripted movie also treads its own path, thanks to consistently surprising plotting, delicious performances from Gould and Plummer, and an incredible score by jazz legend Oscar Peterson, his only one for a feature film, which fills those bank vault sequences with an irresistible, pounding tension.

It's Gould's sporadically assured anti-hero, though - nervous one minute, nerveless the next - who gives the film its apparently contradictory gamut of virtues: it's cool and gripping, fatalistic but unpredictable, escapist but sometimes plain old terrifying. In fact, my only complaint with this offbeat, frequently magnificent movie is the misogynistic nastiness that sometimes intrudes, revelling in Plummer's sexualised deviancy as it pretends to condemn it. (3.5)

Trivia note: The film is set at Toronto's Eaton Centre. I went there once. It wasn't as tense as this.

***



When Ladies Meet (Harry Beaumont and Robert Z. Leonard, 1933) - AKA "The one where Myrna Loy is hot for The Wizard of Oz". This is one of the most grown-up films to come out of Hollywood in the '30s (in stark contrast to the opening of my review): a fiercely intelligent and sexually candid drama about a "good woman" (Myrna Loy) who falls in love with a married man (err, Frank Morgan, in a departure from his popular persona), then winds up spending an unwitting evening with his wife (Ann Harding) thanks to the machinations of the sarcastic, good-hearted journalist (Robert Montgomery) who's stuck on Loy.

It's talky in the extreme, and the character comedy from Alice Brady, Luis Alberni and Sterling Holloway is abysmal, but it's also equipped with a fascinating, astonishingly incisive take on gender politics, with none of the stifling conformity enforced by the Hays Office in future years (or by MGM normally). Though it starts slowly, it builds superbly, and the climactic conversation between the two women is a powerhouse. Harding, who specialised in smart, adult dramas during the Pre-Code era - also appearing in Double Harness with William Powell - is extremely good, particularly in the later scenes, and Montgomery handles a tricky part with some style, but it's Loy's show all the way. She's nothing short of sensational as the modern woman who just might be heading for a fall. With The Rains Came, it's the best dramatic performance she ever gave. (3.5)

***



Truly Madly Deeply (Anthony Minghella the Merciless, 1990) - Juliet Stevenson's performance in this fantasy romance is comfortably in my top 10 of all time, her grieving widow contorting with anger, confusion and unhappiness at the untimely death of her husband (Alan Rickman). Her pleasant, measured and good-humoured demeanour crumples and cracks, revealing a raging sea of anguish, tears and snot, but after the return of Rickman - in ghost form - there's joy there too (Walker Brothers!), and wonder, and then more confusion. When I interviewed Terence Davies a few years back (yes, still harping on about that), he insisted on referring to this film as "Truly Madly Boringly". Far be it from me to contradict the best British filmmaker of his generation, but a) That's not a pun, and b) The film's not boring. It is often quite annoying, though, not to mention thematically muddled, tonally baffling, frequently unfunny, saddled with a weak supporting cast, and equipped with a love interest sporting legitimately the worst hairstyle of all time. How do you rate a film like that? Generously, I think, for Stevenson's intense, jaw-dropping, utterly real performance, and for Minghella's work in securing it, whatever the film's other innumerable shortcomings. (3)

***



"Don't call me 'shorty'."
Boom Town (Jack Conway, 1940) - MGM wasn't in bad shape in 1940. This familiar but ludicrously entertaining mix of comedy, drama and romance – set in the world of wildcat oil drilling – was made on a vast canvas, has the usual polished production values and features no fewer than four massive stars: Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Claudette Colbert and Hedi Lamarr, whose names scroll across the screen in gargantuan capitals. It was the last (and probably least) of three collaborations between screen titans Gable and Tracy, whose mutual jealousy added to their on-screen sparring. As Myrna Loy notes in her book, Tracy was envious of Gable's sexual magnetism and his popularity with the public, while Gable yearned to be taken seriously by the critics and his fellow actors in the way that Tracy was.

The story sees Big John (Gable) and Straight Jon (Tracy) variously making and losing vast fortunes in the oil game, while fighting over Tracy's childhood sweetheart (Colbert), Gable's interest in a single-minded glamour puss (Lamarr), and the fact that the taller guy keeps calling the smaller one "shorty". The first 30 and last 30 minutes are both very well done; the rest is bitty, fast-moving fun, full of abrupt plot developments and excitable montages portraying the passing of time. Tracy and Colbert are superb, Gable – who had worked in the fields with his oil-driller dad – is very charismatic, and there are some wonderful flourishes, both artistic and dramatic: the smoke from a steam train buffeting a banner, a drunk Tracy's parting line to showgirl Marion Martin, and his heart-to-heart with a bedridden Colbert, which moves from faux-poetic predictability to tearjerking brilliance in the blink of an eye.

John Lee Mahin's script is unquestionably erratic, with an unfortunate, jarring propensity to threaten women with violence, but there are lots of enjoyable scenes in it, and it's never boring (just horribly sexist). There's also a first-rate supporting cast, led by Lamarr (whose billing is a little confusing), legendary weirdo Lionel Atwill and Frank Morgan, his riotous performance interrupted by a single moment of overwhelming sincerity. Boom Town isn't as deep or thrilling as George Stevens' later oil-fuelled epic, Giant, but for fans of Golden Age movies, it's a must. (3)

***


We've all been through this.

36 Hours (George Seaton, 1965) - As you'd expect, this is only three-quarters as good as 48 Hrs. It's a disappointing spy story, set on the brink of the Normandy landings, in which the Nazis devise an elaborate way to get American diplomat James Garner to spill the beans about the D-Day plans. An ingenious first half gives way to a conventional, convenient second that mixes reheated cliches with artificial attempts to deal with big issues, and a litany of far-fetched developments, several concerning a particularly improbable "good German" in the shape of doctor Rod Taylor. Garner's hero must also be about the most stupid in movies, and among the least pro-active: a square-jawed moron buffeted around by chance, German office politics, and his own confusion as to which day it is. It's a shame that after a disorientating, deftly-devised first hour that promises plenty, all the film can deliver is a daft, dull and formulaic final 50 preoccupied with German incompetence, and augmented by a little suspenseless pursuit. (2.5)

***

And here's a review of a recent DVD release that I wrote for MovieMail:



Gaslight (Thorold Dickinson, 1940) - There can surely be no higher compliment than the world's most famous movie studio trying to destroy the negative of your film because it's a bit too good. That's the fate that befell Thorold Dickinson's Gaslight in 1944, as it dawned on MGM that their remake of the British film - released four years earlier - didn't really measure up.

Dickinson's original is a scintillating, richly atmospheric and sickeningly tense suspenser set in Edwardian London, in which sadistic maniac Anton Walbrook returns to the house where his aunt was once strangled, and methodically and insidiously drives his blameless wife (Diana Wynyard) to the brink of madness.

The director fairly revels in Walbrook's dapper deviance, and proves himself every bit as meticulous as his villain, stuffing his gas-lit movie with vivid montages, ingenious juxtapositions and nerve-shredding set pieces. The sequence in which Walbrook stage-manages his wife's breakdown at a charity concert is one of the most harrowing in movie history, Dickinson masterfully dragging his heels as we move towards the inevitable, and Wynyard sits blissfully unaware, listening to the tinkling of ivories. Later, he cuts restlessly between a crucial conversation and a rambunctious music hall show, briefly stemming the undercurrent of mounting dread via a sea of can-can dancers, only to unleash it in a veritable torrent.

Although the vicious, grey-templed Walbrook steals the picture in familiar fashion, as he would in Dickinson's cult classic The Queen of Spades nine years later, Gaslight wouldn't work without the basic human goodness at its centre. It's a film that finds time to properly humanise its heroine, whose intense fragility is instantly recognisable and whose true character only truly emerges in the presence of some boisterous street urchins, and equips her with a pair of selfless allies: a rotund retired detective (Frank Pettingell) who smells a Walbrook-shaped rat, and her affable cousin Vincent, played by a young Robert Newton.

Stark, suspenseful and sexually frank, essentially good-hearted and yet dripping with the menace and malevolence of its errant villain, Gaslight remains a must for fans of classic British cinema. Just be sure to lock your copy in your desk, Walbrook-style, in case MGM come calling. (3)

Fifty questions, each more tricky than the last (except for question seven, that's a doddle if you get number six right). No prizes except for pride, but there's plenty of that available. There are 52 points up for grabs - I reckon a decent score would be anything above 15.

Email richardburin@hotmail.com with your answers (subject line: "Movie quiz"), and I'll add you to the leaderboard at the bottom. The quiz is open until the end of the month.

Moderate
1. Which three films have won all five major Oscars (picture, director, screenplay, best actor, best actress)? (One point for each)
2. Which actress was immortalised in the biopic Mommie Dearest?
3. Which movie had the tagline: "Garbo talks!"
4. What was Jean-Pierre Melville's favourite film?
5. Warner couldn't scrap As Time Goes By from Casablanca because Ingrid Bergman had cut her hair, making re-shoots impossible. Which picture necessitated the snip?
6. Which editor re-cut Orson Welles' Magnificent Ambersons...
7. ... and which 1965 musical did he direct?
8. Who played Annie Hall's brother?
9. Max Fischer's line in Rushmore, "Can you get me off the hook? You know, for old times' sake?" was borrowed from which '70s movie?
10. Who portrayed Deep Throat in All the President's Men?

Tricky
11. Which film couldn't be reviewed by critics because Sinatra's female fans were screaming too loudly?
12. Who voices a character in every Pixar film?
13. Which 1961 movie helped change the British law prohibiting homosexuality?
14. What was Alan Smithee's directorial debut?
15. The Hulk and Gollum dance together in which movie?
16. How much was Preston Sturges paid for his Great McGinty script?
17. Christopher Reeve's Hollywood star was paid for by fans of which movie?
18. Which Bunuel film gets a namecheck in the Pixies' Debaser?
19. In which film did Ginger Rogers try to shoot Fred Astaire?
20. Clint is chased by a toy car in which '80s movie?

Difficult
21. Which movie did Dillinger break cover to watch at the Biograph Theater, the night he was killed?
22. Who played Charlie Chan's Number Two Son?
23. John Barrymore performed Hamlet's soliloquy in which movie?
24. Fred Astaire said which 1943 dance number was the greatest he'd ever seen?
25. Who described Jean Arthur's appearance as "half-angel, half-horse"?
26. Marion Davies does a Lillian Gish impression in which film?
27. A novelisation of this film won the 2004 Carnegie Award.
28. The Smiths song Reel Around the Fountain contains two lines from which kitchen sink drama: "You're the bees' knees, but so am I" and "I dreamt about you last night - I fell out of bed twice".
29. Billie Holiday played a maid in which movie?
30. Which film did Noah Baumbach direct under a pseudonym?

Fiendish
31. Sam Peckinpah got final cut on only one his movies. Which one?
32. Which 1972 movie was based on a comic strip in the satirical magazine Private Eye?
33. Who is the only person to have ever won an Oscar without being nominated?
34. John Ford wound up Peter Bogdanovich by telling him that Arrowsmith was his favourite of his films, and at other times claimed it was the critical and commercial flop, The Fugitive. Neither was true. What was?
35. Who tripped up Leo McCarey as he went to pick up his Oscar for Going My Way?
36. Ronald Reagan's autobiography was named after a line in which film?
37. Peter Boyle renounced movies glamourising violence after the release of which film?
38. What links Apocalypse Now and Giuseppe Tornatore's Baaria?
39. Which comic actor said the Russian version of his name looked like it said: "Exapno Mapcase"?
40. In which '80s film does Colin Firth climb out of a lake in a dripping wet white shirt?

Evil
41. Who is the only actress to have, erm, unwittingly "excited" Melvyn Douglas (i.e. Little Melvyn) during a love scene?
42. What do Joanne Woodward, Owen Wilson and Neil Hamilton have in common?
43. This actor died the day before the New Yorker printed the correction he had demanded, saying that he was still alive. That was in 1959.
44. Which actress had the most requested profile of the 1930s, in terms of plastic surgery?
45. The famous line: "My name's John Ford, I make Westerns" is actually a misquote from which director's memoirs?
46. Who was Robert Mitchum's first choice for the part of his brother in his pet project, Thunder Road?
47. What was Hitler's favourite film?
48. In 1989, which actress appeared as the mother of a character she won an Oscar for?
49. John Mills compared his daughter Hayley to which vegetable on the set of Pollyanna?
50. Which movie is the picture at the top from?

WALL OF FAME (LAST UPDATED, 28/10/13)
Kirbyapplegate - 49 points
Louise Penn - 40 points
Pamela Fallon Thornley - 34 points
Elab - 33.5 points
Gustav - 22 points
Jules Ark - 15.5 points
Christopher Hyatt - 14 points
Owen Hughes - 5 points (wins the prize for the funniest made-up answers)
Billy Ray - 4 points
Rocco Tenaglia - 3.5 points
Thanks also to those who've tweeted me their scores, though you don't go on the list unless you email me your answers, as I'm no fun.

Plus: '30s America, Katharine Hepburn and acute disappointment, in the latest batch of reviews of stuff I've just watched.


Boring stupidness.

CINEMA: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (Cody Cameron and Kris Pearn, 2013) - If the original Cloudy was like one of those Heston Blumenthal dishes that's both outrageously odd and utterly brilliant - I don't know, perhaps fried egg with jam and Rice Krispies - then this misguided, saccharine sequel is a pointless pudding, an overly sweet dessert that makes you sick up a bit of the main course.

Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) lands a job with a shady corporation run by his childhood hero - funny how he wasn't mentioned in the first film - who decides to send Flint back to his home island for the post-first-film clean-up, whilst playing him off against his friends. The island itself is now inhabited by living beings made of food, including a spider comprising Big Mac and fries, a taco-dile that spits vegetables everywhere, and a cute little strawberry with the voice of Eric Cartman. Are you sure this script is ready? The problem, no doubt, is that Phil Lord and Chris Miller were only on hand to provide the story and exec-produce, with former South Park staffer Erica Rivinoja botching the writing job, and Cody Cameron (Shrek, Madagascar) and Cloudy contributor Kris Pearn taking care of the rest.

There are a few good jokes - the fishing trip, the translation, Steve the monkey generally - but it's largely overbearing sentiment, food creatures with punny names (essentially a Twitter hashtag that got out of hand), and Steve Jobs-based villainy, a sort of Robots/Wreck-It Ralph/Jurassic Park III hybrid, with a minimum of heart, wit and invention. I wanted something as anarchic and genuinely original as the first movie. Instead, I got a film that's not only aimed at kids, but doggedly conventional and insultingly predictable, both in its re-treading of old ground and its telegraphing of old jokes. It's the most disappointing movie I've seen for a couple of years at least. (1.5)

***



Union Depot (Alfred E. Green, 1932) - Wow. This is a fantastic movie, a rich tapestry of early '30s America, masquerading as a melodrama. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. is a dirty-faced vagrant who pitches up at the titular train station, looking for a break. He gets a new suit of clothes courtesy of a drunk who's obsessed with the Navy (Frank McHugh), then finds a case stuffed with cash belonging to a calculating counterfeiter (Alan Hale), upon whom the police are closing in. Not that Fairbanks senses the danger, opting to play "Santee Claus" to a down-on-her-luck dancer (Joan Blondell) he mistakes for a good-time girl. What sounds on paper like a frothy entertainment - and may have been in the hands of MGM - is exactly the opposite: a hard-edged, cynical, brutish movie full of violence, bitter barbs and truly adult themes, several personified by the limping, porn-obsessed sexual maniac who won't leave Blondell alone (George Rosener), a truly terrifying creation.

Luchino Visconti later did a similar thing with Stazione Termini: a central romance set almost entirely around a station, and supplemented by tangential, even unrelated moments of human drama concerning those round about, but this is even better. Fairbanks slapping Blondell across the face is likely to cause a sharp intake of breath, but everything else about their relationship is perfectly judged, leading to one of the most moving endings I've seen in a long while. Fairbanks, still a bit toothy and goofy, before the studio make-up men properly got their hands on him, was a very underrated actor, and he's dynamic here, laying the blueprint for his spectacular turn in Ben Hecht's Angels Over Broadway - the performance I tend to think of as his definitive one. There's one particularly brilliant scene where he lays into a slapper who's trying to touch him for a meal (in more ways than one), in which he exhibits a vitriol pretty much unmatched in '30s cinema. The big-eyed, curvy Blondell pretty much owned the Pre-Code era, and she's every bit Fairbanks' match here: her pep and sardonism is toned down, the forlorn, vulnerable and melancholy aspects of her persona are dialled up, and the result is startlingly effective.



Around this unusual, desperate pair are many of Warner's best stock players: McHugh hilarious, the erratic Guy Kibbee as funny and agreeable as I've ever seen him, and David Landau brusquely imposing as a straight-talking cop. The film doesn't tackle the Depression head-on like Gold Diggers of 1933, or go for the novelistic approach to a period like, say, 1981's Ragtime (set a little earlier), but it does evoke the essence of the era more strongly than just about any film I've seen: a time of poverty and want, the people of America looking back confusedly at the Great War, and uncertainly towards the future. For many, it was a period of cynicism and individualism, people grabbing what they could, doing it to the other guy before he did it to them. Cultures were colliding in a way they hadn't before, and the depot is awash with faces from different races, some Americanised, others anything but. The supporting snippets aren't all of the same standard, some a little too broad or clichéd, but in totality it emerges as a remarkably real film, with an almost semi-documentary feel.

I've always regarded director Alfred E. Green as a bit of a hack: he made some very impressive films like Baby Face and Four Faces West, but also a lot of lifeless, stylistically-barren dreck. Here, working with the Sicilian wizard Sol Polito, he manages to create a stunning, self-contained world, opening with a simply mesmerising POV tracking shot, and keeping the action fast and credible, as the film juggles drama, horror, comedy, romance, suspense sequences, social comment and even some awesome stuntwork. A couple of the plot points may be a little forced, but it's still an absolute knockout: an entire era boiled down to 66 minutes, with a timeless, off-kilter love story at its heart. (4)

Many thanks to Owen for sending this one to me.

***



The Devil and Daniel Webster (William Dieterle, 1941) - A flavourful Faustian folk tale, vividly directed by William Dieterle, evocatively scored by Bernard Herrmann, and featuring fine work from a notably unglamorous lead duo: weighty, crusading lawyer Edward Arnold, and devilish, exceedingly hammy Walter Huston, who seems to be having the time of his life. They're fighting over the soul of farmer James Craig (just about the most unpopular actor in '40s Hollywood), who's traded his spirit for wealth and fortune, and traded doting wife Anne Shirley for puggy sexpot Simone Simon. It's a familiar story, obvious even, but given a timeless presentation, and particularly arresting when Dieterle's visual imagination goes into overdrive, or the commanding Arnold moves centre-stage. Unfortunately, the film's climax has little to say about man's nature or the bonding together of the oppressed - a key theme earlier in the film - instead peddling the same trite "Land of the Free" platitudes as countless other movies of the period, at odds with much of what we've seen. After all, isn't it the servitude of poverty that drives the callow Craig into the arms of Huston's "Mr Scratch"? That shortcoming leaves you feeling unsatisfied, despite the film's clever, irreverent final image - fully in keeping with Dieterle's Gothic but homespun, jocular tone - though the botching of the big finish doesn't diminish the brilliance of much of what precedes it. The scene in which Arnold himself is tempted by the Devil is a minor classic. (3)

***

A Katharine Hepburn double-bill:



Undercurrent (Vincent Minnelli, 1946) doesn't have a reputation to speak of. Hardly anyone's seen it, and those that have tend to think it's a bit rubbish. I enjoyed it, though for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's essentially entertaining: you can see where the story's going ahead of time, and it's certainly strung out a bit, but it's enjoyably devised, well-handled by Minnelli, and well played by a couple of screen legends. Because, secondly and most importantly, it's one of those "wouldn't it be great..." films. In this case: "wouldn't it be great if Bob Mitchum and Kate Hepburn made a film together?" Two actors that it's hard to believe ever inhabited the same world, let alone the same film. There were so many movies made in the '30s and '40s that a fair few of these perfect pairings did become a reality, for which we have the studio system to thank. So, you've got Mitch and Kate signed up for your fantasy film - when would you like it to be made? How about '46, when he was still young, lean and hungry, and looked killer in a trenchcoat, and she was graduating from desirable young women to vulnerable spinsters, proving equally adept at the new mode. You know how it'd play out: you'd think her acting was as good as it gets, until Mitchum turned up, all effortless authority and insouciant cool, underplaying to the hilt, and then you'd realise he's probably the best actor the American screen ever threw up, even in these early days, between his only Oscar nom and Out of the Past.

They wouldn't have to have long together: just a couple of scenes, he only one other in the whole film, but it would be a joy to behold: their first meeting like the coffee shop scene in Heat, but for nerds, and not terrible. Even if the second one was hackneyed as hell, over-lit and embarrassing, it wouldn't matter too much, not for the chance to see this coupling come to life. The story, since you ask, has Hepburn as the sheltered daughter of an academic, who marries millionaire and all-round legendary figure of industry, Robert Taylor, but becomes besotted by his notorious, ne'er-do-well brother, a man she's never met. Mitchum is the caretaker she happens upon at the mystery man's old place. Aside from the horsey finale and the pat pay-off, which we can safely file under "stupid endings", it's a really fun film: an MGM melodrama tinged with noir and thriller elements, the heavyhandedness in much of the scripting compensated for by slick direction, an agreeably exciteable score and a couple of fine performances. Taylor, forever pushed by the studio as the new Gable, is better than usual in a role that subverts his carefully-developed image, but it's the chance to see two titans of the cinema sharing the screen that makes this something a bit special. (3)



Without Love (Harold S. Bucquet, 1945) - Katharine Hepburn starred in three movies based on Philip Barry plays and adapted by Donald Ogden Stewart: the immortal Holiday, the incomparable Philadelphia Story, and this one: a witty, involving but disjointed affair that's somewhat over-reliant on contrivance and coincidence. It was written for the actress and, after playing it for four months on Broadway, she took it to Hollywood. The story sees her hardened, 28-year-old widow (Hepburn was 38) swearing off love and life after the untimely death of her husband, only to be reawakened by a straight-talking scientist on a Government mission (Spencer Tracy). They marry for the sake of companionship and convenience, their union being one Without Love, but naturally it doesn't end there.

I've now seen seven of Tracy and Hepburn's nine films together, and while none are genuine classics, all are interesting and entertaining to some degree: Woman of the Year is the best, despite an overwrought subplot and a weak ending, and State of the Union and Adam's Rib have much to commend them, the former lit by a raw emotional power, the latter sparked by Judy Holliday's supporting pyrotechnics. This one's a touch below, but well worth seeking out for Hepburn. She's alternately harsh, fragile, funny, clever and naïve, displaying that rare gift for rapidly-quickening delivery and shaky-voiced honest sentiment that was her calling card. Playing a very well-written character within a not always coherent drama, she gives one of her finest ever performances - and that's saying something. Tracy is also in very good form, if not quite his greatest, while Lucille Ball works wonders with a colourful if minor supporting role, playing a self-proclaimed "bad girl" who seems oddly smitten with the bespectacled, tippling Keenan Wynn.

Hepburn's the main draw, though, her familiar mannerisms employed to serve a memorable character, even if beyond all Barry and Stewart's astute philosophical ruminations my favourite moment is just Kate laying down one of her magnificent, self-mocking "haha"s. (3)

***



Full Of Life (Richard Quine, 1956) - When you insist on seeing every film starring a favourite actor, you usually end up watching a dud or two. Aside from some early bit parts, Judy Holliday made just nine movies, but this is hers: a static, unfunny comedy-drama, drenched in self-pity, that's perhaps commendably unusual in trying to deal with the misery and awkwardness of pregnancy, but isn't at all fun to watch. It's also rather upsetting to see Holliday puffing away, not because her character is pregnant, but because this uniquely brilliant performer died so tragically young from cancer.

The story, if you can call it that, was adapted by John Fante from his novel, and sees Holliday's husband Richard Conte warring with his larger-than-life Italian father (Salvatore Baccaloni), amidst various other uninteresting misadventures. Even Judy isn't up to much in this boring, genuinely painful film, rife with poor writing, lifeless direction and dislikeable, deeply irritating characters. As her co-star, Conte proves that his strong suit was playing reptilian gangsters, not curiously sour family men, and throughout it all there's that same inane musical theme, played over and over and over again.

Then, bizarrely, with 10 minutes left, something in Judy and her character stirs - a baby, and a previously untapped joie de vivre - and we get a fairly pleasing finish alive with her distinctive warmth. All a bit late though, really, isn't it?

See also: Conte was rather more at ease in the quite brilliant Cry of the City.

***

Thanks for reading. Comments are welcome below or on Twitter.

I got to watch a lot of films this week. These ones:



Pennies from Heaven (Herbert Ross, 1981) - A conceptually dazzling musical, adapted by Dennis Potter from his BBC series, which juxtaposes the grim reality of Depression-era life with the fantasy of popular song.

Steve Martin is a pipe-dreamer and travelling sheet music salesman who thinks about sex once every one second, leaving his frigid wife (Jessica Harper) in the lurch and a timid spinster (Bernadette Peters) up the duff. Potter doesn't give Peters the soapy sob story, though. In fact, what he does with this tiny-mouthed schoolteacher is remarkable to the point of revolution, and her candid, conflicted, sensual performance is astonishingly good, one of two real reasons to see the film.

The other is the songs: an endless succession of show-stoppers, mostly framed as fantasy sequences, and almost all lip-synched to the crooniest available versions of old standards, while faithful to some distinct visual style of the 1930s. Many borrow directly from Busby Berkeley - Yes! Yes! even has kaleidoscopic overheads - but there's also a nod to nautical numbers, an enduring obsession in American popular culture for reasons unknown, while the film reaches the height of its ambition with a Fred-and-Ginger take-off staged on a replica of the Let's Face the Music and Dance set, but with choreography inspired by Top Hat, White Tie and Tails.

Just about every number is impressive or thrilling in some way, from Peters' exuberant Love Is Good for Anything That Ails You (mimed to a Phyllis Robins record and featuring schoolchildren as backing dancers), to a gold-tinted, stunningly-staged version of the title tune danced by Vernel Bagneris, and excellent guest spots for '50s hoofer Tommy Rall and Christopher Walken, the latter magnificently objectionable as a face-cutting pimp with a sideline in tap-dancing, whose incredible version of Let's Misbehave is probably the gateway drug that Tarantino fans need to get into Cole Porter.

Between these musical high points, though, which reveal the central characters' hidden urges or wildest desires, the dramatic passages don't quite cut it. I haven't seen Potter's original, but his script here - which underwent 12 revisions while boiling down six hours of drama to less than two - operates mostly at a surface level, and seems to mistake repetition and mundanity for profundity. Few of the characters seem truly affected by anything that happens to them, that strange, cold aloofness preventing you from engaging with much of what's going on amidst the impeccable period design. The writing isn't bad - there are moments of truth amidst Potter's laid-back perviness - but it isn't up to the standard of its interludes, which border on the sublime.

There's also the problem of Martin's performance. His attempts at emotion seem to have a unique, mawkish insincerity about them, while his zany treatment of some of his musical spots, mugging when he should be following Peters' restrained lead, often puncture the pastiche, leaving only a cartoon in its place. He makes a good fist of the dancing, but with someone down-to-earth and dramatically dynamic in the central role, perhaps Potter's spoken passages would have come closer to the robustness and realism needed to make the central contrast really work. Though its numbers aren't as impressive, that's why Ken Russell's version of The Boy Friend works so well: you believe in the seedy seaside world it creates, and so the songs give you something to escape from.

I wish this were great. It should be. It almost is. But it doesn't quite make it. A little like the pipe dreamer at its centre. (3)

***



*PRETTY MUCH SOLID SPOILERS*
The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (Ernst Lubitsch, 1927) - When I'm writing about this one, I tend to run out of superlatives halfway through. It's the greatest film from one of Hollywood's greatest directors; a silent translation of a popular operetta, and as much fun, romance and heartache as most people can generally stand across an hour and three quarters.

Ramon Novarro is the titular prince, the nephew of the king of Karlsburg, whose restrictive upbringing - one of "duty, obligation and loyalty" - goes out the window, however briefly, in a fug of love, friendship and beer, swirling (swilling?) across the old city of Heidelberg.

The love - and the beer, for that matter - comes from an ethereal but down-to-earth, slightly cross-eyed barmaid (Norma Shearer): the guileless, glugging Kathi forever the high point of her screen achievements. Novarro himself wasn't blessed with the greatest range, but then you don't want J. Carrol Naish as your callow, conflicted young romantic, you want a sweet, sensitive, big-eyed kid with a seductive streak - and who more suitable than Novarro, a Latino sex symbol whose tenderness and vulnerability were all too real.

You want your kindly professor, his sense of fun overriding his sense of decorum, played by someone with the chops and twinkle-in-the-eye of Jean Hersholt. And, of course, you want Lubitsch, the inimitable, irreplaceable Lubitsch, behind the camera, every scene handled with that "Lubitsch touch", every moment seeming to offer something new and extraordinary to bring a smile to your lips or a tear to your eye: Shearer checking out Novarro with absolutely no subtlety when they first meet, a garden-full of beer glasses raised with military precision, the look on the lead's face as his love interest downs an entire pint, the pair's spirited night-time excursion to the finest field in movies, and that heartbreaking return to Heidelberg, as heartfelt a paean to lost innocence and the youth that is never to return as the movies have ever served up.

You can analyse the film a dozen different ways and it comes up faultless - from its abundance of visual metaphor, shifting perspectives used to illustrate the prince's changing moods, to the director's sparing use of intertitles, and the groundbreaking shot in summation that predates The Long Good Friday by 53 years - but it all adds up to the same thing: a film for the ages, an emotionally overwhelming portrait of self-sacrifice, paradise lost and position found, of young lovers meeting like passing trains, together for a fleeting, shining moment, then torn away by "duty, obligation and loyalty". And it's all scored to perfection in the old Thames Silents version by the peerless Carl Davis.

"It must be wonderful to be a prince," muses one of the town kids, studying a portrait of Novarro. On this evidence, not so much, but then isn't life just about enjoying those perfect moments when they come? This film has more than almost any other. (4)

***



Broadway Danny Rose (Woody Allen, 1984)

Danny Rose: What'd you do, you divorced him, or got a separation, or what?
Tina Vitale: Nah, some guy shot him in the eyes.
Danny Rose: Really? He's blind?
Tina Vitale: Dead.
Danny Rose: Dead. Of course, 'cause the bullets go right through.

I don't think this is Woody's greatest film, but it's the one I return to most often: a sweet, funny, utterly charming tall tale - with hidden emotional heft - about a loveable Broadway talent agent (Woody Allen) trying to escort his best client's mistress (Mia Farrow) to a crucial show, and unwittingly incurring the wrath of the mafia.

What seems at first glance a slight, minor movie holds untold pleasures, from Allen's script - stuffed with gems - to Gordon Willis's mesmerising monochrome cinematography, and an unforgettable, uncharacteristic performance from an unrecognisable Farrow, as the forceful, temperamental Tina Vitale, her late husband a juice man for the mob. "He made juice for the mob?" asks a baffled Allen. (4)

***



Bad Company (Robert Benton, 1972) - A God-fearing young man (Barry Brown), fleeing conscription during the American Civil War, falls in with a barely competent group of robbers about his age, also hoping to escape the draft. Along the trail, and amidst farce, thievery and tragedy, he bonds with their arrogant, charismatic leader (Jeff Bridges), as the group begins to bicker and break up.

This extraordinary, determinedly unpredictable movie - in close up, a model of stark simplicity; in overview deep and fascinating - could only have been made in one decade, shot through as it is with both timely parallels to the conflict in Vietnam and a total lack of respect for Western cliché. It also forms an interesting comparison piece with Ben Wheatley's A Field in England, beginning in the same vein, before events go similarly but differently awry.

The performances are mostly solid but unremarkable: Brown is well-cast but not a particularly good actor, Bridges - between his star-making parts in The Last Picture Show and the experience of shooting The Iceman Cometh that fundamentally changed his outlook as an actor - has great presence but little complexity (too many of his early performances just consist of him whining and looking like a dinosaur), and The Deer Hunter's John Savage is variable as one of his more abrasive underlings. It's the supporting cast that provides the real quality: Jim Davis playing a fierce, single-minded marshal, and David Huddleston, later to be found tormenting Bridges as The Big Lebowski, who's absolutely superb as the laid-back, outwardly avuncular "Big Joe", a courteous, hulking stick-up man leading a gang of imbeciles.

The bulk of the brilliance, though, comes from elsewhere: from the spare script, oscillating purposefully between the silly and the serious, and incorporating numerous inspired developments from lynchings to shoot-outs, the poetic imagery by Godfather photographer Gordon Willis - often at odds with the harshness of the material - and that impossibly fine piano score by Harvey Schmidt.

Writer-director Benton's career has been an odd thing: he kickstarted the New Hollywood era with his Bonnie and Clyde script, wrote Richard Donner's Superman, and got a Best Director Oscar for Kramer vs. Kramer, before turning to gentler fare, and in light of his box-office smashes, this directorial debut often gets overlooked. It shouldn't, it's amazing: unsentimental, realistic and yet, in its brutish and complete rejection of Western norms, somehow mythic - a portrait of lost souls in a hellish America, the whole piece heading inexorably towards a perfect ending.

***



Hold Back the Dawn (Mitchell Leisen, 1941) - A romantic slow-burner, set in a Mexican border town, with Romanian gigolo Charles Boyer seducing American schoolteacher Olivia De Havilland to get in to the States, then starting to struggle with his conscience. Written in Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett's distinctive style, and directed by Mitchell Leisen - the master of the romantic drama, now almost forgotten - it's a simply beautiful movie: one which completely sneaks up on you, with an original set-up, an unusual atmosphere, and superb performances by the leads.

There's also cracking support from Paulette Goddard - as a sparkly-eyed conwoman with no illusions - and a sardonic Walter Abel, while an extremely meta framing device gives a glimpse of Paramount Pictures, with Leisen playing a director, and Veronica Lake and Brian Donlevy playing themselves. It isn't always an easy watch, because you know De Havilland's innocent dreamer is about to get put through the wringer, but it's a truly wonderful movie from a director who made some of the best. (4)

***



Titanic (Jean Negulesco, 1953) - Marital troubles and alcoholism upon the doomed ocean liner! Hurray! It's actually a lot more involving - and enjoyable - than it sounds, thanks largely to a pair of excellent performances from Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck. Webb is particularly memorable as a superficial, spiteful father shaken to his true self by a rip in the boat.

The film doesn't manage to evoke the magnitude of the Titanic, takes place around somewhat artificial sets, and, most damagingly, is erratically plotted, spending just half an hour on the sinking, but finding time for an insipid teen romance that necessitates two utterly incongruous songs, including the anthem of Cornell University (I have no idea). There's also the usual risible "ethnic dancing" set-piece below stairs, while the great Thelma Ritter is given nothing - like nothing - to do.

On the other hand, a handful of nice details effectively evoke life on the boat - everyday things like telegrams, postal deliveries and the rituals surrounding the on-board meals - the central storyline is pretty interesting, and the climax, despite its weird lack of spectacle, is extremely moving, with numerous emotional high spots and an exceptional use of sound. This 1953 effort can't compete with James Cameron's magnificent movie, but it's a valuable film in its own right, a strange paucity of ambition in its staging overridden by the sheer quality and conviction of the human drama. (3)

***



The Nut (Theodore Reed, 1921) - Douglas Fairbanks' last modern-day silent comedy was essentially shot as insurance in case fans didn't go for his reinvention as a swashbuckling action hero in The Mark of Zorro. They did, making this his farewell to contemporary fare - but also little more than a footnote. That's a shame, as it's in many ways the summation of his early work: a very enjoyable movie full of imaginative gags and cheerily bizarre touches, such as the phone operator alternating between Satan and Cupid (both in their usual environs), depending on whether the caller's intentions are nefarious or nice. There's also some neat camera-trickery, done using double-exposure, employed throughout the action climax.

Doug is cast in his usual role as a misfortune-prone go-getter duelling with an utter bastard for the hand/sexy-time of a sweet-hearted maiden, leading to various mix-ups that require him to wear a cardboard cut-out of a suit, walk down stairs as a man carrying a stretcher apparently containing himself, and nick a load of wax dummies that he can pass off as local dignitaries. I don't think any of the eight early comedies spotlighted in Flicker Alley's superlative DVD set are quite masterpieces - it took Fairbanks going back in time to take his films to that higher level, but this is up there with the best of them, and it's perhaps the most consistent of the bunch. Lovely end title too. (3)

***



Ladies They Talk About (Howard Bretherton and William Keighley, 1933) - A salty, stylish Pre-Code meller with a typical Barbara Stanwyck powerhouse as a deacon's daughter turned moll who tangles with a dishy young reformer (Preston Foster) and winds up in the slammer. It's good fun, if a little insubstantial, peopled by archetypes soon to be outlawed by the censors (an unrepentant madam, a cigar-chomping lesbian, a sexually-frustrated fanatic). You also have to wonder if Preston Sturges had the opening reels in mind when he wrote The Best Film Ever (TM), Remember the Night.

Trivia-wise, Lyle Talbot has a bit as a gangster, his storyline very similar to the one in the previous year's 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, and for '30s music nerds, there are two special treats. The first is the chance to see amazing torch singer Lillian Roth, playing Stanwyck's affable new mate and singing a song about how she wants to have sex with Joe E. Brown, which seems a surprising thing to want. Second is an uncredited, unmistakable Etta Moten (who vocalised my favourite production number, Remember My Forgotten Man, the same year) wailing the St Louis Blues off-camera, as Stanwyck writes a clandestine letter to a friend on the outside. (3)

***



I Was an Adventuress (Gregory Ratoff, 1940) - Nothing more or less than sheer escapism, with Vera Zorina as a conwoman who resumes her career as a ballerina after marrying (alleged) Frenchman Richard Greene, only to be aggressively re-acquainted with her really quite gay former partners in crime: innocent Peter Lorre and domineering, creepy Erich von Stroheim, who it's frankly bizarre to find in a film like this. It's faux-Lubitsch fun all the way: minor and a little disjointed, perhaps, but also light, amusing and full of pleasant innuendo, while Zorina's obligatory ballet sequence is strikingly staged. Lorre completely steals the show, as always. (3)

***



Forbidden (Frank Capra, 1932) - A far-fetched, fast-moving soap opera, unbelievable in the more negative sense of the word, with Barbara Stanwyck as a potential old maid who falls hard for a dapper married man (Adolphe Menjou) whilst on an impromptu cruise, and quickly gets pregs. After that, events get rather out of hand.

It's very Art Deco-y in that early Capra way, equipped with bright lighting and stylish montages to go with some jazzy, swooping close-ups, there's an initially appealing supporting part for Ralph Bellamy playing a cool-as-flip newspaper editor - this was before he found that unwanted career niche: never getting the girl - and Stanwyck is going great guns as a potent cocktail of meekness, mousiness and white hot fury. The moment where she essentially strangles herself at the re-appearance of her lover is a gobsmacking piece of acting. And when she throbs with intense, detached, blank-eyed anguish by the fireplace as the police hammer at the door: just incredible.

The plotting's generally pretty laughable, though, despite the solid entertainment value, and none of the cast age very convincingly: the overall effect is as if the filmmakers forget to buy any make-up and could only find a bag of flour. For that matter, the world they inhabit doesn't change at all across more than 25 years, just the amount of flour they're wearing. Spooky. (2.5)

***



The Mind Reader (Roy Del Ruth, 1932) - Warren William is in his element here, playing a phony mystic and all-round scruple-vacuum in love with the most naive woman in the world. It's a snappy if slight, slightly gloomy Roy Del Ruth movie boasting the breathless treatment of risque gags, adult drama and redemptive romance the director made his own in the Pre-Code era. Allen Jenkins is quite good value as William's slow-witted sidekick. (2.5)

***



Miracles For Sale (Tod Browning, 1939) - Horror maestro Tod Browning's final film is a light murder mystery set around the world of the occult, with (mostly) rational conjuror Robert Young helping the police work out who killed a creepy old dude obsessed with demons. The culprit is perhaps overly obvious, but there's a strong ensemble including the likes of Florence Rice, Henry Hull and William Demarest, and the movie pulls a fair few tricks out of its sleeve along the way. (2.5)

***



Noah’s Ark (Michael Curtiz, 1928) - Ooh, somebody likes fire. A sledgehammer-subtle, hokey-as-hell but sometimes impressive epic, written by super-producer Darryl F. Zanuck and inspired by the Oscar-winning epic Wings and Cecil B. DeMille's biblical excursions, that draws one big parallel between the Great War and the Great Flood, and utilises the most 1929 cast imaginable (Dolores Costello, George O'Brien, Guinn "Big Boy" Williams and Myrna Loy) in dual roles. It's a film of scale rather than nuance, its attitude towards war makes little sense and there are countless weak scenes and stupid exchanges, but the film does offer a few good Hollywood moments, like a touching reunion between O'Brien and Williams, as well as a magnificent montage comparing the decadence of the '20s (I think - chronology isn't the film's strong point) to the ancient world that God swept away. Most significant, though, is the climactic flood sequence, which remains a wonder to behold: in artistic terms a staggering, enduring achievement that justifies the film's existence, though in moral terms an unforgivably costly one, claiming three lives and injuring countless others after Warners allegedly failed to heed warnings about extras' safety from original cinematographer Hal Mohr.

The film is largely silent, accompanied only by laughably poor sound effects, though there are a couple of awful talkie sequences added after the initial release. Loy, a favourite of mine who famously struggled with the nascent medium, is billed seventh but only has one short scene (and perhaps a bit in the finale - I couldn't spot her). The ethereal Costello, shot through a Vaseline-lensed haze, would probably seem extremely attractive if I hadn't read her boring, racist honeymoon diary in a biography of her husband, John Barrymore. It's also a bit rich for the film to preach about lust after showing a slippery Costello in her underwear for 20 minutes, though DeMille would have admired such rank hypocrisy. And that prediction about war at the end was a bit premature, wasn't it? Lol Zanuck you n00b. Perhaps it's best to distract yourself from such things with the Best Putdown of Noah Ever: "Shave the corners of thy beard, old man, to make nets to catch fish on the mountainside." Zing. They forgot to add "#sickburn". Also: "I'm going to die in a big flood." Incidentally, as regards the extremely limited Williams, I've always found it quite funny that an actor nicknamed "Big Boy", who engaged in dewy-eyed bromances like this one, was such a homophobe off the screen, once cutting off Orson Welles' tie at a bar because he'd heard that the inveterate skirt-chaser was gay. Not a great film, then, but a film with one hell of a morally-indefensible set piece. (2.5)

***



The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927) - On this evidence, I'm not sure talking pictures are a very good idea. (1.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

#50

Thanks to all those who entered the inaugural Advice to the Lovelorn movie quiz, and congratulations to kirbyapplegate for top-scoring with a staggering 49 out of 52 points. The full leaderboard is here, as are the questions if you would like to torment your friends with them. Here are the answers:

MODERATE
1. Which three films have won all five major Oscars (picture, director, screenplay, best actor, best actress)? (One point for each) It Happened One Night, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Silence of the Lambs
2. Which actress was immortalised in the biopic Mommie Dearest? Joan Crawford
3. Which movie had the tagline: "Garbo talks!"Anna Christie
4. What was Jean-Pierre Melville's favourite film? Odds Against Tomorrow (1/2 for The Asphalt Jungle)
5. Warner couldn't scrap As Time Goes By from Casablanca because Ingrid Bergman had cut her hair, making re-shoots impossible. Which picture necessitated the snip? For Whom the Bell Tolls
6. Which editor re-cut Orson Welles' Magnificent Ambersons... Robert Wise
7. ... and which 1965 musical did he direct? The Sound of Music
8. Who played Annie Hall's brother? Christopher Walken
9. Max Fischer's line in Rushmore, "Can you get me off the hook? You know, for old times' sake?" was borrowed from which '70s movie? The Godfather
10. Who portrayed Deep Throat in All the President's Men? Hal Holbrook


#20

TRICKY
11. Which film couldn't be reviewed by critics because Sinatra's female fans were screaming too loudly? Higher and Higher
12. Who voices a character in every Pixar film? John Ratzenberger
13. Which 1961 movie helped change the British law prohibiting homosexuality? Victim
14. What was Alan Smithee's directorial debut? Death of a Gunfighter
15. The Hulk and Gollum dance together in which movie? 13 Going on 30
16. How much was Preston Sturges paid for his Great McGinty script? $1 (some sources say $10)
17. Christopher Reeve's Hollywood star was paid for by fans of which movie? Somewhere in Time
18. Which Bunuel film gets a namecheck in the Pixies' Debaser? Un chien andalou
19. In which film did Ginger Rogers try to shoot Fred Astaire? Carefree
20. Clint is chased by a toy car in which '80s movie? The Dead Pool


#21

DIFFICULT
21. Which movie did Dillinger break cover to watch at the Biograph Theater, the night he was killed? Manhattan Melodrama
22. Who played Charlie Chan's Number Two Son? (Victor) Sen Yung
23. John Barrymore performed Hamlet's soliloquy in which movie? Playmates
24. Fred Astaire said which 1943 dance number was the greatest he'd ever seen? Jumpin' Jive by the Nicholas Bros (from Stormy Weather)
25. Who described Jean Arthur's appearance as "half-angel, half-horse"? Columbia president Harry Cohn26. Marion Davies does a Lillian Gish impression in which film? The Patsy
27. A novelisation of this film won the 2004 Carnegie Award. Millions
28. The Smiths song Reel Around the Fountain contains two lines from which kitchen sink drama: "You're the bee's knees, but so am I" and "I dreamt about you last night - I fell out of bed twice". A Taste of Honey
29. Billie Holiday played a maid in which movie? New Orleans
30. Which film did Noah Baumbach direct under a pseudonym? Highball


#31

FIENDISH

31. Sam Peckinpah got final cut on only one his movies. Which one? Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
32. Which 1972 movie was based on a comic strip in the satirical magazine Private Eye? The Adventures of Barry McKenzie
33. Who is the only person to have ever won an Oscar without being nominated? Hal Mohr
34. John Ford wound up Peter Bogdanovich by telling him that Arrowsmith was his favourite of his films, and at other times claimed it was the critical and commercial flop, The Fugitive. Neither was true. What was? The Sun Shines Bright (1/2 for Wagon Master or My Darling Clementine)
35. Who tripped up Leo McCarey as he went to pick up his Oscar for Going My Way? Billy Wilder
36. Ronald Reagan's autobiography was named after a line in which film? Kings Row
37. Peter Boyle renounced movies glamourising violence after the release of which film? Joe38. What links Apocalypse Now and Giuseppe Tornatore's Baaria? Both showed the actual slaying of a an animal: a water buffalo/cow respectively.
39. Which comic actor said the Russian version of his name looked like it said: "Exapno Mapcase"? Harpo Marx
40. In which '80s film does Colin Firth climb out of a lake in a dripping wet white shirt? Valmont



#49. Of course.

EVIL
41. Who is the only actress to have, erm, unwittingly "excited" Melvyn Douglas (i.e. Little Melvyn) during a love scene? Maureen O'Hara
42. What do Joanne Woodward, Owen Wilson and Neil Hamilton have in common? They all appear as characters, but only in photographic/painting form: Sleuth, Rushmore and Since You Went Away respectively.
43. This actor died the day before the New Yorker printed the correction he had demanded, saying that he was still alive. That was in 1959. Eric Blore
44. Which actress had the most requested profile of the 1930s, in terms of plastic surgery? Myrna Loy
45. The famous line: "My name's John Ford, I make Westerns" is actually a misquote from which director's memoirs? Robert Parrish
46. Who was Robert Mitchum's first choice for the part of his brother in his pet project, Thunder Road? Elvis
47. What was Hitler's favourite film? The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
48. In 1989, which actress appeared as the mother of a character she won an Oscar for? Glenda Jackson (The Rainbow/Women in Love)
49. John Mills compared his daughter Hayley to which vegetable on the set of Pollyanna? "Do you know what you are like? You are like a great big white cabbage! Yes, really boring. Go on, pull your finger out."
50. Which movie is the picture at the top from? The High Sign (1/2 a mark for mentioning Buster Keaton)

I've been busy trying to finish the first draft of my kids' book (around 7,000 words to go, thanks for asking) and even pitched it to a grown-up (that's me in the tie), so movies have taken a long overdue backseat (there are 13 here, but that's in the last month). I still love them, of course, but every once in a while you have to try to achieve something with your life. This book is my thing. Also, several of the films I've seen lately have been absolutely appalling. They're in this round-up, along with the good ones. I've been doing some freelancing about films too - I'll tell you more about that some other time.



Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995) - I saw this at the cinema when I was 11, when I found the whole thing slightly too grown-up and confusing, and then later when I was perhaps 15, at which time it seemed like a slightly superficial teen comedy. In fact, it's kind of the opposite: a satire, based on Jane Austen's Emma, about a spoilt, self-centred teen (Alicia Silverstone) who reinvents the new girl at school (an unrecognisable Brittany Murphy), but has to make over her own personality in order to get the man she wants (Paul Rudd).

I'm 29 now, and I can see where my confusion set in, as the film does rather want to retain its cake while scoffing it whole, taking place around vast mansions and revelling in Silverstone's eye-catching outfits, while telling us that really such things don't matter at all. It takes a lot of side-swipes at her Cher ("I've divided them into aperitifs and mains," she says, after collecting food for a charity appeal), but her transformation is a little unconvincing and hardly complete.

The reason I revisited the film is because it's heralded as something of a classic nowadays, and recently topped The Guardian's list of the 10 best teen movies of all time: a list that couldn't find space for Ghost World, Brick, Knock on Any Door - hardly a great film, but unquestionably a crucial one, popularising the "live fast, die young" catchphrase - Some Kind of Wonderful or Rebel without a Cause.

So, 17 years on, should it be troubling a list like that? As if! It's essentially a stick-thin comedy in eye-watering colours that has just about enough good gags, fun semantic inventions and wordy, erudite one-liners to secure a decent report card, but is a long way off that coveted A-grade, even given Cher's gift for wrangling. Rudd, then looking like he might turn into a slightly bland leading man rather than an offbeat improv king, is good value, and his sparring with Silverstone provides the film with its best moments, but even then he appears extraordinarily uncomfortable when forced to negotiate the soppy, clichéd wrap-up.

Compared to writer-director Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High (see below), penned by Cameron Crowe, Clueless is simply too light, inconsequential and lacking in heart, its characters caricatures rather than real people. It's entertaining and distinctive, sure, but hardly one of the best teen films ever made. (2.5)

See also: My review of Knock on Any Door is on the MovieMail website here.

***



Of Mice and Men (Lewis Milestone, 1939) - Two drifting ranch hands blow across California during the Depression. Lenny (Lon Chaney, Jr.) is huge, hulking and slow-witted, with a childlike innocence; George (Burgess Meredith) is his protector: a smart, selfless man who's happy to keep telling that same old story: one day they'll own their own place, and Lenny can pet the rabbits. Having fled the town of Weed (it isn't a marijuana metaphor, but imagine if it was), the pair pitch up at a ranch fairly teeming with trouble, most of it coming from the owner's son Curley, and his sexually frustrated wife (Betty Field).

Lewis Milestone's translation of the Steinbeck novella is an immersive, extraordinary powerful experience, exceptionally well-acted, particularly by Chaney and Meredith, and shot in painterly tones by Norbert Brodine, even if his and Milestone's visual sense sometimes seems to have more to do with aesthetics - the re-sizing of the frame by shooting between trees or with machinery in the foreground - than alighting on details actually integral to an understanding of a scene.

That's not much of a problem, though, and it's not always the case: the two key scenes here - the first concerning the potential shooting of a dog, the second the potential shooting of a man - are dealt with perfectly, eliciting a nauseating dread and bitter anguish quite unlike anything I've felt watching a movie before. Those sequences, and indeed the whole film, are also extremely well-scored by the modern musical visionary Aaron Copland, who would write the soundtrack for Milestone's next (and far inferior) Steinbeck adaptation, The Red Pony, a decade letter.

Somehow Hollywood managed to make an even better Steinbeck film the year after this one, as John Ford and Darryl F. Zanuck brought The Grapes of Wrath to the screen with a vivid scope, political punch and sense of photographic realism that this one just can't match. It isn't bad for starters, though: another incredible triumph from Hollywood's greatest year, with an emotional impact that's all too rare. (4)

***



Lawn Dogs (John Duigan, 1997) - In simplest terms, it's like Sundays & Cybele relocated to the Scissorhands universe, but Lawn Dogs is very much its own film, its familiarly fatalistic story full of strange details, the characterisation fresh and original, and the perfectly-judged introduction of fantasy elements paving the way for Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Mischa Barton is Devon, a weird, precocious 10-year-old girl who's just moved to a bright, idyllic gated community with her parents, but quickly becomes obsessed with a terse, tortured piece of trailer trash (Sam Rockwell, exceptional in his breakout part) who tends the lawns of this rarefied estate.

As with all films of its type, from Cybele to Sling Blade to Half Nelson, you know it's unlikely to end well, but the story is doggedly unsentimental, the idiosyncratic, generation-spanning friendship is truly affecting and Duigan has an eye for curious, subversive imagery - an American flag dropped on the gravel or used to mop up after a crime, a hysterically funny "war" scene, a tree dressed in ribbons - that drags his film to some glorious hinterland where folk story, fantasy and class-conscious America somehow sit side by side. (4)

***


Indisputably the best bathtub on film.

"Wherever there's smoke, there must be... somebody smoking."Easy Living (Mitchell Leisen, 1937) - My favourite movie of all time is Remember the Night. This is writer Preston Sturges and director Mitchell Leisen's other collaboration. It's also amazing. Light on plot, long on Leisen getting a bit distracted by nice clothes and the coolest bathtub in the history of the world, but amazing nonetheless.

The one and only Jean Arthur, possessor of the best voice in movies - an instrument of purest husky-hinted squeak - is Mary Smith, an ordinary working stiff who's mistaken for the mistress of New York's third biggest banker (Edward Arnold) and finds that now everybody wants to give her things for free: a hotel room, a new wardrobe, a supper for two... She's in love with an ordinary Joe, though (Ray Milland), little realising that the apparently homeless ex-automat employee is Arnold's son.

This effortless mix of satire, slapstick and romantic comedy lacks the combination of light and shade that makes Remember the Night such a staggering film, and which you'll find in all of Sturges' best films as director, but it is extraordinarily clever, hysterically funny and irresistibly charming, with Arthur at her unapproachable best, Milland a fairly fun love interest, and a trio of classic supporting turns from Arnold, butler Robert Greig, and Luis Alberni - as an incompetent, scheming hotelier called Louis Louis. (4)

***


This bears very little resemblance to anything that happens in the film.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982) - I was watching this on the train, but I had to stop, as people were staring at the boobs. Whether they were gazing in slack-jawed disgust at the appalling pervert or whether they just like boobs, I'm not sure, but it was making me uncomfortable, so I finished it at home.

It's a trendsetting, hugely enjoyable teen movie, scripted by Cameron Crowe from his book, that gave a break to a half-dozen future stars, and influenced everything from John Hughes' run of school-set comedy-dramas to Bill & Ted, and Dazed and Confused.

It's an ensemble piece, but the focus is weighted towards Jennifer Jason Leigh's virginal 15-year-old Stacy, making her first ventures into the world of romance and boffing. Mike Backer is a sweet classmate who's stuck on her, Robert Romanus the smooth-talking ticket-scalper helping him out, Judge Reinhold her hard-working, perpetually unlucky brother, and Phoebe Cates her worldly-wise best friend - the latter two combining to great effect in the obligatory wanking scene.

Almost everyone in the cast went on to fame and fortune to some degree: Sean Penn plays a bolshy stoner named Spicoli - battling memorably with authoritarian history teacher Ray Walston - Forest Whitaker is imposing as a combustible football star, Nicolas Cage's big, stupid face looms into view a few times, and there are small parts for Eric Stoltz, James Russo, Anthony Edwards, Crowe's wife Nancy Wilson and future Beverly Hills Cop director Martin Brest.

I realise that so far I've mostly just listed some people's names and talked about boobs, so how about a review? Fast Times is a real breath of fresh air, like a bonus Hughes film made before the fact, peopled by welcome faces, soundtracked by catchy tunes and touched with that Crowe earnestness that can send everyone running for the hills - but here suits the subject matter, and these characters, just fine.

It's an episodic film, with a bit of '80s gimmickry - check out that football scene - and I was often surprised at the way it curtailed scenes, sometimes after an abrupt punchline, but it's heartfelt, true-to-life, largely unsentimental and extremely entertaining: full of memorable encounters, likeable characters and funny sight gags.

The performances vary in quality: Backer is OK, and Cates, Reinhold and Romanos all manage to be slightly wooden and yet very convincing, but Leigh and Penn steal the show: she very affecting as a sweet-natured, uncertain, resourceful but deceptively strong young woman, he the last word in massive stoners, with the undulating intonation, delayed laugh and wavy hair used by just about every screen weed-smoker since.

The last third perhaps takes a bit of a dip. Though it does resort to some of the teen film staples I was impressed it had avoided, it deals with them in an unusually unmelodramatic, matter-of-fact way. A more significant problem is its inability to satisfactorily tie up some of its many story threads, though, if I'm being charitable, I suppose teenage life is a bit like that. Despite a few shortcomings, it is both tremendous fun and one of the key films in its genre: if Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful are better still, I doubt they'd exist without this one. (3.5)

***



The Man Who Came to Dinner (William Keighley, 1942) - Caustic columnist Sheridan Whiteside (Monty Woolley) fractures his hip whilst on a lecture tour, leaving him holed up in the home of a ball bearings manufacturer and his shrill wife, where his brand of self-centred posturing, empty sentimentality and slightly tiresome insults changes the lives of those around him - for better or worse.

This celebrated comedy, from the Kaufman-Hart play based on the character of theatre critic Alexander Woollcott, starts off in an alarmingly one-note vein, but gets better and better as it goes along, culminating in a memorable tussle between Whiteside's long-suffering secretary Bette Davis and his superficial protegee Ann Sheridan for the heart of country newspaper editor Richard Travis, incorporating hilarious supporting parts for Reginald Gardner and Jimmy Durante - the latter playing a fun-loving movie star called Banjo, patterned after Woollcott's best friend, Harpo Marx.

There are rather too many of those archive one-liners rendered meaningless by changing comedy tastes and Woolley's massive performance falls the wrong side of greatness for me, but it's an entertaining film that builds to a typically funny, frantic climax, and Davis is absolutely excellent as an acerbic, lovelorn woman with little faith in her ability to keep her man. (3)

***


Old Small Chin doing her big-eyed bit.

Young Bess (George Sidney, 1953) - Perhaps Jean Simmons never fulfilled the potential she showed as a young actress, from that film-stealing bit in Give Us the Moon as a chain-smoking teenager, through Great Expectations, Black Narcissus and Olivier's Hamlet, where she was a mesmerising Ophelia.

There are great performances dotted about her career, including in Elmer Gantry and The Grass Is Greener (both 1960, the year she also made Spartacus), but at times she struggled for work and struggled to make an impact when she found it, seeming to possess a fragile confidence to go with her delicate, distinctive appearance: sweeping black eyebrows over huge violet eyes, a long, slender nose, and a full, wide mouth above an extraordinarily tiny chin.

There were certainly two serious factors contributing to the erratic nature of her career: her mental health problems - including serious bouts of depression and accompanying alcoholism - and the unwanted attentions of megalomaniac RKO owner Howard Hughes, who blacklisted her at the peak of her powers, after she repeatedly rebuffed his advances. The situation was so extreme that Simmons and her husband, Stewart Granger, fantasised about murdering Hughes. In the event, they chose a less extreme method of redress, with Simmons winning her freedom from the mogul in 1952.

Young Bess was made by prestigious MGM the following year and, while it isn't a great film, it is a fabulous showcase for her abilities. Simmons is very, very good as the lonely, impetuous, improbably attractive future Elizabeth I, triumphing over a rather flimsy romantic narrative - with a hint of intrigue - through sheer force of personality.

There's a steeliness to her performance, removed from the bitterness of Great Expectations or the shallow histrionics she exhibited in the overrated Angel Face that I found really eye-opening, particularly when she purposefully recalls the mannerisms and proclamations of her father (Charles Laughton, recreating his Oscar-winning role), chest out and hands on hips, or spouting off, dreamy-eyed about the greatness of Britain.

Despite a cast that also includes Granger and Narcissus alumni Deborah Kerr and Kathleen Byron, the film feels very much like an old-fashioned star vehicle, attuned to Simmons' gifts, and simply allowing her to express and articulate a great breadth of emotion - as well as to prove a remarkably dishy redhead - rather than providing a terribly noteworthy or cohesive narrative.

Having said that, there are other notes of minor interest: a little mileage to be got out of villain Guy Rolfe's Fassbender-like fizzog, and a performance by over-enunciating child star Rex Thompson that's either the best or worst thing I've ever seen. He had me in hysterics repeatedly - I think by accident. It's also quite a handsome production, and there's one particularly brilliant shot near the close, in which Simmons' shadow grows and grows until she's as tall as the castle wall. It's an absolute beauty.

Young Bess isn't good history and lacks the ambition in its storytelling to provide much beyond solid entertainment, with a narrative that's rather too slight, low-key and initially bitty, but it is a diverting watch, as well as an effective showcase for one of Britain's most interesting and attractive actresses. Having said all that, Miranda Richardson remains the definitive Elizabeth I. "It's up to you: either you can shut up, or you can have your head cut off."(3)

***



Thieves' Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949) - An apple-flavoured film noir, with war vet Richard Conte hauling crates of Golden Delicious over to San Francisco, where he wants a few words with the greengrocer (Lee J. Cobb) who left his dad in a wheelchair.

Its mechanics are sometimes a little obvious - like the shallow fiancee or the self-righteous cop punching us in the face with a moral - it gets slightly bogged down when we first arrive in San Fran, a symptom of pacing issues, and there's some of that violence towards women that always makes you wince, but it's an interesting, unusual movie with a great many virtues.

As well as the genuinely original setting - an agreeably banal backdrop for the story of an avenging son - there's a nice supporting performance from the oft-ridiculed Valentina Cortese, playing a jaded prostitute with bad hair, some deliriously perilous trucking scenes that may have influenced The Wages of Fear, and fine turns from both Cobb and the forceful, intense Conte, their scenes together crackling with menace. There are also a handful of nice visual flourishes from Dassin and photographer Norbert Brodine, including a perhaps unrealistic but nevertheless striking bit of staging that sees Cobb back-pedalling through a bar-room, dispensing scrunched-up bank notes as he goes.

This isn't in the top tier of Fox films noir, with Fallen Angel and Where the Sidewalk Ends, nor can it quite compete with Cry of the City - which Conte made the same year - but it's pulpy, sweet and sour in equal measure: not ideal for an apple, but about right for the genre. (3)

***



Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (Benjamin Christensen, 1922) is a silent Swedish drama-doc in seven parts: an outrageous, confusing, sometimes quite scary movie about witchcraft, demons and the Devil - part reconstruction, part dramatisation, part vintage PowerPoint presentation.

Three years in the making and overflowing with ambition and naked bottoms, it focuses chiefly on a witchcraft scare in 15th century Germany, but also seeks to provide a wider context, regaling us with officiously sourced tales from the dark ages, drawing parallels between 20th century "hysteria" (mental illness) and symptoms of possession, and throwing in another short story for good measure, in which a horny maiden tries to seduce a fat monk using some cat poo and a dead sparrow.

The film is illuminating on a subject of which I knew little, has a richly toxic atmosphere thanks to some very impressive imagery - most showily the animated money set-piece and a fantastic flying sequence that predates Murnau's Faust by four years - and includes a scene in which a gaggle of witches queue to literally kiss the Devil's bum (I was heartened to find that the monks conducting the inquisition found this just as funny as me). But it's also quite hard to follow, can be tedious and poorly-acted, and suffers from both a muddled viewpoint and a short attention span: I'm not sure any of the stories ever actually got finished.

All this is probably compounded by the fact that I don't have much stomach for the subject matter or for horror movies in general. Certainly I found it more impressive than enjoyable, and struggled to get or stay engaged with the narrative. It did bolster my self-esteem, though. The sky is made of steel? Ancient Egyptians were idiots. (2.5)

***



Madame X (David Lowell Rich, 1966) - Top tip: if you've faked your own death, don't forget to buy a newspaper with your photo on the front, and stand in the middle of the street shaking your head at it.

Madame X is a preposterous, sometimes persuasive Sirk-like soaper, based on a hoary old melodrama and featuring Lana Turner's biggest performance, though hardly her best. It's camp beyond belief, coincidence-driven beyond credibility and has a pay-off that's only about half as good as it has to be in order to justify the sacrifices made to get there. It's also pretty watchable, with a few nice moments towards the end.

Turner is a shopgirl who has married into a wealthy, powerful family. While her husband (John Forsythe) is away in North Africa, she enjoys an ill-advised dalliance with a notorious playboy (Ricardo Montalban), which naturally ends with him dead and Turner staging her own demise, helped by the mother-in-law (Constance Bennett) who despises her. Years later, and having become a massive fan of absinthe, Turner again has a few legal difficulties, bringing her back into the lives of her husband and her son, who's now all grown up (and is Keir Dullea).

The presentation is Sirk-ish, with the same fondness for filtered lighting and big emotions, but there's little of the artistry and none of the nuance, the quiveringly intense cast - all subscribers to the "more is more" mode of acting - operating remorselessly at fever pitch, so there's nowhere for them to go, and no way for you to become invested or immersed in their incredibly unrealistic plight.

Burgess Meredith probably fares best, as an absolute twat, but both Dullea and Turner do pretty well with a script that drifts into the realm of the very silly at regular junctures. The moment where she realises his true identity in the penultimate scene is as effective as it should be - if only the film had properly followed through on the promise of that moment. As soapy anti-climaxes go, this one gives Frank Capra's Forbidden a run for its money.

Incidentally, Turner dyed her hair blonde near the start of Slightly Dangerous (actually her best performance, at least of those I've seen), having just faked her own death, so as to live the high life. Here she dyes it brown to slide down the social ladder. Typically disgraceful anti-brunette/redhead bias. (2)

***



*A FEW SPOILERS*
Big Jake (George Sherman, 1971) - This late-period John Wayne vehicle is absolutely terrible - even in the context of his early '70s movies like Chisum and Cahill U.S. Marshal - a film for casually right-wing middle-aged men whose children need to show them some respect.

Wayne phones it in spectacularly as Big Jake, a man so tough, unsentimental and generally John Wayne-like that he's named his dog "Dog". When the grandson he's never seen is swiped by a gang of baddies who for some reason require a very long and boring introductory voiceover, he sets off in pursuit, accompanied by his idiot offspring, who aren't as cool or clever or as good at punching people in the face as he is. One is played by Wayne's own son Pat, Freud fans, while the other is Bob Mitchum's son Christopher, a sweet-natured man who couldn't act for love nor toffee. There's also a lone Native American amongst the hunting party, of course, with the usual negligible life expectancy.

It's real by-the-numbers stuff: Wayne is proved right about something, Wayne is proved right about something again, one of his Moron Children fires a gun badly and Wayne has to jump in some water, Wayne gets into a fight with a big man and the music goes all silly, the Native American gets killed. Where there is novelty, it's misjudged to the point of comedy, like Mitchum taking advantage of the 1909 setting by piddling around the hills on a motorbike during a gunfight, and not actually getting at all involved, but just doing some jumps. It's very hard to believe the script came from the husband-and-wife duo who wrote Dirty Harry the same year. The only real plus points are leathery old Richard Boone as the villain, acting everyone off the screen even though he doesn't look very interested, and a rousing, tuneful theme by Elmer Bernstein.

The film does pick up a little towards the end, when some Actual Things Happen, but it never shakes that hideous tone of youth-hating, reactionary self-congratulation, which has far more to do with 1971 and John Wayne than anything that ever happened in the Wild West. (1.5)

***



Track of the Cat (William Wellman, 1954) - The things a Mitchum completist has to sit through... William Wellman's attempt to make a black and white colour film - about a panther stalking snowy ground - is pictorially striking but otherwise a total write-off: talky, static, laughably melodramatic and painfully boring, somehow managing to waste a cast that includes Mitch, Beulah Bondi, former child star Diana Lynn, who had transformed from a wry, sarky kid into a throaty, elfin ingénue, and Alfalfa from Our Gang playing a 100-year-old Native American. It's a contender for Mitchum's worst film, right up there with White Witch Doctor, though I haven't seen the one about a boxing kangaroo yet. (1)

***



Penguin Pool Murder (George Archainbaud, 1932) - I'd heard great things about this one - the first film in the Hildegarde Withers comedy-mystery series - but it's absolute drivel. I didn't laugh once. The infernally annoying Edna May Oliver is a schoolteacher who witnesses the aftermath of a murder, and muscles her way into the investigation, helping out a detective (James Gleason) who keeps leaping to the wrong conclusions. Oliver's line-readings are all exactly the same - a sort of posh, strangulated, sphincter-tightening wail - Gleason had yet to learn how to tone it down a bit, and the culprit becomes painfully obvious from about a third of the way through.

Its only virtues are that you get to see some penguins and the final half a minute is mildly pleasant. I may get around to the sequels, but only when I've watched all the other films in the world. Twice. (1)

***

Thanks for reading.

Lulu in Hollywood by Louise Brooks (1982)



I find Louise Brooks a little over-hyped as an actress. Yes, she was a distinctive, even iconic performer, with her helmet of black hair and that aggressive, feline sensuality. Yes, she attained a naturalism rare in silent cinema, even if she only starred in a handful of pictures. But was she really that much better than Bow, Gish and Gaynor? No. No, she wasn't. Like Johnny Guitar and The Girl Can't Help It, she was taken up by the Cahiers du Cinema crowd in the '50s and elevated beyond all others of her age in a blaze of hysterical hyperbole. In a way, that's gratifying: after all, she had been unfairly dismissed - then unjustly forgotten - after Pandora's Box died on its arse at the box office. But in another way, it's extremely silly. "There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks," French film archivist Henri Langlois once said, which translates into English as, "I have an erection."

As a writer on film history, though, I think Brooks may have no equal. This intuitive, incisive and staggeringly insightful collection of essays, written in her inimitable, jaggedly beautiful prose style, turns everything you thought you knew about movies and the movie business on its head. W. C. Fields was a sad loner with eczema whose stage humour was killed stone dead by the realism of his film persona. Bogart was a gorgeous, well-bred, perpetually-exhausted thespian transformed by the sexual anguish of his third marriage. MGM purposefully ruined Lillian Gish's career through a programme of purposefully lousy vehicles and fan magazine smears. Marion Davies wasn't the carefree socialite of legend, but constantly consumed by the green-eyed monster. And Louise Brooks - that cloche-haired monument to flapperish, pure-centred bodily liberation - will never write her memoirs, because she "cannot unbuckle the Bible Belt" and reveal the sexual obsessions that defined her life as, she argues, they do everybody's. (She is a bit preoccupied with sex. After all, she had rather a lot.)

Brooks is brilliant on everything from acting to the studio system, her own career, the singular directorial technique of G. W. Pabst, the hypocrisy of Hollywood and even - most trickily - the downfall of her friend Pepi Lederer, brought low by societal pressures, selfish companions and substance abuse. She offers a vivid picture of location filming, rips apart the widespread predilection to mythologise two familiar types of star, and crafts perhaps the most alarming synopsis of a film's ending that I have ever read. She's also intimidatingly knowledgeable about literature - pegging herself as "the best-read idiot on the planet" - and augments her prose with apposite insights from many of the world's finest writers.

She can be pedantic, and bitchy, even vindictive, but she's also forthright and honest, with a devastating turn of phrase and real things to say: perfectly-formed theories full of wisdom, augmented by first-person knowledge and set aflame by righteous anger.

The book also contains Kenneth Tynan's classic history-lesson-cum-interview-cum-love-letter, The Girl in the Black Helmet, and a brief, hagiographic epilogue by one of Brooks' friends, the German film critic Lotte Eisner. If you have any interest in '20s and '30s cinema, Lulu in Hollywood is one book that you have to read. And, suitably for such a trendsetting screen siren, its many insights are housed within a wonderfully striking front/back cover combo.

HERE ARE SIX OF THE MOST MEMORABLE PASSAGES:

Brooks on her character's fate in Pandora's Box (*SPOILERS AHOY*):"It is Christmas Eve, and she is about to receive the gift that has been her dream since childhood. Death by a sexual maniac." (I find this possibly the most troubling couplet in the book, because of the sexualisation of youth and the fact that Brooks herself was abused as a child.)

Brooks on Lillian Gish:"Marked first for destruction [by Hollywood bankers] was Lillian Gish. She was the obvious choice. Of all the detestable stars who stood between the movie moguls and the full realisation of their greed and self-aggrandisement, it was Lillian Gish who most painfully imposed her picture knowledge and business acumen upon the producers. She was a timely martyr as well, being Hollywood's radiant symbol of purity standing in the light of the new sex star."

Brooks on Hollywood folklore:"In 1922, when I first arrived in New York, I heard all sorts of gags, jokes and anecdotes, and over the past twenty years of reading I have been brought to a condition of nausea as I have found them 'assigned successively' to various film celebrities. There are two categories of celebrities - fitted with appropriate anecdotes - that writers and readers appear to dote on with foolish, untiring enthusiasm. They are the tramp-type woman star delineated by her outrageous conduct and the drunken actor whose cruel antics are considered hilarious."

Brooks on Bogart:"Humphrey Bogart spent the last twenty-one years of his life laboriously converting the established character of a middle-aged man from that of a conventional, well-bred theatre actor named Humphrey to one that complemented his film roles - a rebellious tough known as Bogey."

Brooks on Marion Davies:"To be a true Marionite, one had to hold the belief that mr Hearst had been to bed with no other woman since he met her. Obviously, I did not believe this."

Brooks on understanding her past:"[Film historian Richard Griffith] identified me as 'Louise Brooks, whom Pabst brought to Germany from Hollywood to play in Pandora's Box, whose life and career were altered thereby.' When I read that, thirty years after I refused to go back to Hollywood to do those retakes on The Canary Murder Case, I finally understood why."

Thursday, November 28, 2013



Every Dylan gig seems to bring something new: a reggae version of A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall (Manchester, 2005), a bit where Bob does a little dance to Highway 61 Revisited (Sheffield, 2009), or an engaging spot of mugging to his band as he sings about pants (Hop Farm, 2010). This time he's back at the Albert Hall - a relief to those of us who've turned up, as his legendary, much-bootlegged "Royal Albert Hall" gig of 1966 was actually recorded at Manchester's Free Trade Hall, and I had visions of him pitching up there to find it's now a hotel - and he has three innovations to share with us.

A mesmerising reimagining of Tangled Up in Blue, both jaunty and poignant, complete with new words, a new sound and a melody that he may well be making up as he goes along. A bit where he touches - like, actually goes towards and then touches - the hands of people in front row, as if he likes them. And a wild white Jewfro. There's also an interval, so Bob can go and have a cigarette, a nap and a cup of Horlicks, because he's 72.

The setlist will be familiar to anyone who keeps tabs on such things, as (give or take a song or two) it's the same one he's been playing throughout this European tour: 19 songs, including six from before Time Out of Mind and six off his slightly underwhelming latest, Tempest. Resplendent in a slightly crap black and white waistcoat - and spats! - he kicks off promisingly with a clipped, forceful version of Things Have Changed and a spirited She Belongs to Me, moves through a functional Beyond Here Lies Nothin' - playing a grand piano tonight rather than his usual keyboards - then breaks out that plaintive piece of self-examination, What Good Am I?, from 1989's Oh Mercy, here given the tender treatment.

I was hearing a few of these songs for the first time live, and the sprightly Duquesne Whistle - armed with one of those simplistic riffs to which Dylan has become latterly addicted - was a bit of a treat; lyrically unambitious but eminently danceable. After the sweet if minor Waiting for You (a conventional love song from, err, the soundtrack of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood), we get four tracks of solid greatness, the kind of mid-concert run that is becoming a leitmotif of the modern Dylan gig-going experience. And, as usual, High Water is involved.

He begins it with Pay in Blood, the closest Dylan is ever going to get to writing a gangsta rap song (you imagine). Or Wise Guy by Joe Pesci. I wasn't that wowed by the album version, but live it's transformed into a beast: a nasty, violent and unrepentant bad guy's boast-athon, with Dylan spitting the words from centre stage. Tangled Up in Blue, nowadays generally sung in the third person (as it was on the first, "acetate" attempt at Blood on the Tracks) is showered with a heap of new lyrics - including a neat verse about the importance of trust - and a committed vocal. Not bad considering that it's his 1,358th crack at doing the song live (I feel for the person charged with uploading that information).

I think something is lost from Love Sick when Dylan isn't being surrounded by women in their underwear like in that ad (I don't, I think that was one of the stupidest things Dylan ever did - and he used to duet with Joan Baez), but he atones with a pounding, jarring reading of this anti-love anthem, the first song on arguably his greatest record. And that was the first half over, Dylan leaning in to the mic to announce a 15 or 20 minute interval. My wife translated. What I heard was: "Aye-hay, aheehuhhurrhurr inaboutafifteeeenortwennymuhhurr." (I hope this was some salve to that large section of the audience who invariably complain that Dylan doesn't chat much, has gone a bit growly since 1963 and won't project his grizzled fizzog onto a succession of big screens.)

After disappearing for more than a half-hour (I presume it was a big cup of Horlicks, or he'd got trapped under his blanket), Dylan leads off the second half - and caps that unmissable four-song run - with High Water, the key track off his 2001 album, Love and Theft, which lacks the breathless urgency and wry humour with which Dylan invested it at Hop Farm, but still sounds utterly fantastic. Then he's into a lovely take on Simple Twist of Fate - after Tangled Up in Blue, the second of the night's songs from his seminal 1974 break-up album, Blood on the Tracks - before for some reason playing Early Roman Kings, which is one of the worst things he's written in years and fills the "interminable blues" slot previously populated by Summer Days, which he finally retired last year. I'm all with a band jamming, especially one as good as Dylan's, and the places they go with many of these songs are remarkable. But Early Roman Kings is just one thing repeated, apparently forever, and it was the only point during the gig when I thought: "OK, enough of that one, do something else."

Thankfully that something else was Forgetful Heart, a beautiful ballad from Together Through Life, and comfortably the second best song on that record (after I Feel a Change Comin' On), featuring that perfect couple: "The door has closed forevermore/If indeed there ever was a door", which destroys me every time. With a quiet, violin-led accompaniment, Dylan can sing without straining to compete with the volume (why not just turn him up in the mix?), proving beyond doubt that the low spots of Tempest were a blip, rather than the sound of his voice finally giving out. On a few of tonight's songs, it can be a struggle to make out what he's actually singing about, unless it is indeed "Ahurrhurr, a hurrheehurr".

Dylan has played Spirit on the Water, a delightful number stuffed with great lines, every time I've seen him since 2007, but - to paraphrase that Albert Hall bootleg, "it used to go like that, and now it goes like this..." - less gentle, less delicate, but still just as transfixing, and with the same scope for audience interaction ("You think I'm over the hill?""Noooooooooo!"). Then he ends the main set with a trio of songs from Tempest, all given the same lolloping, reflective treatment: Scarlet Town, the rather good Soon After Midnight, and Long and Wasted Years, which draws a prolonged standing ovation.

The hollers of the crowd bring the usual response: a two-song encore comprising an explosive All Along the Watchtower - one of the best I've heard him do, with a quiet-loud-very quiet-boom template that the Pixies would have been proud of - and a solid Blowin' in the Wind: not the magnificent rock-out we've had in more recent years, but a heartfelt if somewhat overly throaty reading. And then he's gone, back to his Horlicks before the houselights are switched on. "Must Be Santa!" we cry, ignoring the fact that he's not coming back and he has a pre-determined setlist anyway. "Judas!" we shout, as the realisation dawns. But it's been another great night: my seventh Dylan gig and the best since 2009, those magical nights studded through my life, each happily coinciding with some special, personal reason to remember, along with the sheer glory of the music. And the wonder of Dylan's thin, wild mercury hair.

***

Setlist:

1. Things Have Changed
2. She Belongs To Me
3. Beyond Here Lies Nothin'
4. What Good Am I?
5. Duquesne Whistle
6. Waiting For You
7. Pay In Blood
8. Tangled Up In Blue
9. Love Sick
(Interval)
10. High Water (For Charley Patton)
11. Simple Twist Of Fate
12. Early Roman Kings
13. Forgetful Heart
14. Spirit On The Water
15. Scarlet Town
16. Soon After Midnight
17. Long And Wasted Years
(Encore)
18. All Along The Watchtower
19. Blowin' In The Wind

Saturday, November 30, 2013



Yesterday saw a rare screening of Kevin Brownlow's near-mythic five-and-a-half-hour reconstruction of Abel Gance's silent film Napoleon, a labour of love that has dominated more than 50 years of the historian's life, but has never been available on home video, and maybe never will be, due to ongoing and thorny contract wrangles with Francis Ford Coppola, who has his own version, which is incomplete, runs at the wrong speed and has a score written by his dad.

Brownlow's version, by contrast, is scored by arguably the greatest of all silent film composers, Carl Davis, his collaborator on the legendary Thames Silents project in the 1980s, and the man responsible for two of the all-time great soundtracks: The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg and The Kid Brother. And yesterday, at the Royal Festival Hall, that accompaniment came live, with Davis conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in front of a packed house, to stunning effect.

Seen in this, its true form, Napoleon is a staggering achievement, a consistently dazzling mixture of innovation, spectacle and history writ-large, where insight into character and dramatic metaphor often come courtesy of a seemingly endless box of tricks, including octuple-exposure, montages stuffed with brain-scrambling cross-cutting, and a camera that's going to go wherever Gance wants it to, with no thought as to whether such things have ever been done on screen before.

The film kicks off with two of the most extraordinary sequences I've ever seen on celluloid. The first is a marriage of visual poetry and foreshadowing, saturated in its character's singular iconography, as the 10-year-old Napoleon wages war in the snowy environs of his school, Brienne, where such games are seen as a judge of character. Napoleon, an intense, unsmiling boy who lives in "wild isolation", is already a military mastermind, whose use of decoy, reflective vision and attack-as-defence wins him a victory against almost impossible odds. This passage climaxes with a barrage of unforgettable imagery, arresting pictures laid one on top of the other at frenetic speed, as our hero stands motionless in his battlefield, barking instructions until the glory is his. At one point, Gance even breaks out a handheld camera, at another shoots from a child's eyeline, capturing the weird dynamic of this deadly serious duel.

The next set-piece, which surely influenced Jean Vigo's surrealistic masterwork Zero de conduite, released in France just six years later, has Napoleon reacting to the setting free of his (highly symbolic) pet eagle by punching everybody in his dorm room, culminating in a pillow fight that covers every frame in feathers. The pay-off, with Napoleon alone, resting on a cannon, feathers in his hair and tears dripping down his face, only for the eagle to return and a rare smile to bless his angry little face, is an image I don't think I'll ever forget.

I didn't find the next two big sequences as successful, though there are superb things in both of them. The first is only tangentially related to Napoleon: a reconstruction of the first public performance of Le Marseillaise which has a few rousing moments, but only really comes to life with its introduction of the central figure (now played by Albert Dieudonné), leaning against a pillar, looking as cool as Belmondo in A bout de souffle, before turning to the camera in profile. Then the chap who wrote the anthem asks him his name - there's quite a lot of people asking other people what their names are in this film, so it can introduce both character and actor in a handy title-card. More consistent is an ingenious passage in which we see the growing dominance of mob rule, crystallised in one bloody night, as Napoleon saw it: snatches of cries, shadows and incomplete images, viewed through the grates of a run-down second floor apartment.

Despite its impressive credentials, including shooting on the genuine Corsican locales where the events transpired, the next major passage lacks dramatic engagement - with too much footage of people merely sitting around - until the film announces that Napoleon is about to embark on an "incredible adventure" and then all hell breaks loose: there's a stunning sequence in a bar, with Napoleon rising to counter his naysayers, then an escape on horseback, and then a simply staggering sequence in which he steals a French flag from the government headquarters and uses it as a sail to evade his pursuers as he heads off into a brewing sirocco, his battle against the elements juxtaposed with a gathering storm in parliament, shot by Gance - in one of those left-centre moves that suggests you're in the presence of genuine greatness - as if it were also being rocked by the tempestuous waves. There's just time for a neat, funny cameo for Horatio Nelson, then the intermission sign flashes up. End of part one.

Part two is much shorter and rather less revolutionary in both subject and style, dealing largely with the Siege of Toulon, in which Napoleon - now an artillery captain - stakes his reputation on a risky offensive against a far greater force (shadows of Brienne). There's stunning imagery to spare - rain-swept battlefields, a fleet on fire, Napoleon standing amidst the wreckage (a jawdropping image that forms the centre-piece of the event programme) - but it isn't as coherent or emotionally engaging as what precedes or what follows.

The third quarter is the most tonally outrageous, in a film that doesn't give a single damn about convention, as Napoleon and Josephine - still relative strangers - are each targeted by "the Terror", personified by Gance's ruthless, outwardly measured Saint-Just, before engaging in a hilariously awkward courtship that can genuinely be filed under "romantic comedy". In between, we get a vignette about a bureaucrat who saves lives by eating execution orders, and watch Napoleon zip to national prominence by quelling an uprising with devastating defensive tactics, then we're into the "Victims' Ball", a decadent, shimmeringly-photographed affair, in which our grim-faced hero, chin jutting out in that formidable fashion, proves he is the sort of man who would play chess at an orgy. And win.

But while the middle passages of the film are often touched with a rare brilliance, it's the first and fourth that I think give Napoleon its claims to greatness. The last is simply a tour-de-force, with two astonishing high points. As Napoleon heads to Italy to revive a tiring army, he stops at the deserted National Assembly hall. There, in the dead of night, the ghosts of the Revolution come to him, rising from the ether and next from their seats, calling on him to be the strong leader that his country needs, the dictator of an all-conquering France, then a united Europe. Allying the best of Eisenstein to the wizardry of Man with a Movie Camera and the seductive fascism of something like Gabriel Over the White House - in which liberal ends are achieved through totalitarian means - it's a piece of propaganda quite unlike anything else I've ever seen, either in form or content.

The other showstopper, as you may have heard, is that ending, in which the curtain pulls away to reveal... three screens, a vast panorama, a massive canvas on which Gance can paint, as Napoleon rouses his army, rides to victory, then reflects on it all from a mountain top: images from his life rushing breathlessly across the triptych: his successes, his calculations - scribbled across endless sheets - his beloved Josephine and his nose twin, that eagle who represents his power, his utter relentlessness and his fortitude.

It's the longest film I've ever seen and among the strangest, most restlessly innovative and technically astounding. There are shortcomings: the characters are generally very black and white - and sometimes too sketchily drawn or aloof to engage with - the film has a propensity for melodrama, and there are sequences that either confuse or drag. And while the acting is largely convincing, it's also - with the exception of Gance and the stony-faced Dieudonné (whose performance as the Christ-like central figure I found perhaps a little too underplayed) - done with rather broad strokes. But such things pale into gripy insignificance when put aside what it does achieve. There's a scope here, not just in terms of its epic logistics, but its destruction of cinematic barriers, that is unmatched not only in the context of silent film, but arguably within film as a whole. Gance attempts to explain Napoleon: his achievements, his character, his mind, not through dialogue, not even through performance, but via an arsenal of innovations that bring to life the man, the way he saw himself, his consuming obsessions.

When Napoleon encounters Josephine at the Victims' Ball, even before he shuns the boobs to go and play chess round the corner, Gance does something so perfect that I'm amazed no-one had ever tried it before - but so inspired that it's probably no surprise at all - he cuts together, in rapid-fire motion, every meaningful, fleeting moment they've shared, like a head rush of romance, every bit as affecting as Borzage's more reflective, more obviously effusive ruminations on the same subject. It's an act of narrative simplicity but technical genius that sums up this most staggering of motion pictures. It's as if Gance had never seen a film before, and no-one had told him that this simply isn't how it's done. (4 - out of 4, for newcomers)

Plus: Ben Hecht, Maggie Smith and a damp squib of a kung fu film.



Romeo and Juliet (George Cukor, 1936) - This is an astonishingly good translation of the Shakespeare play, devised and demanded by the brilliant, doomed producer Irving Thalberg, but only greenlit in the wake of Warner Bros' massively successful Midsummer Night's Dream, staged by Max Reinhardt. Thalberg was a prodigious, literary-minded man with an ailing body but a will of steel, who had escaped into books during a teenage year committed to his bed, and in the final years before his death at 37 brought to the screen such ambitious projects as The Good Earth and Marie Antoinette. His fingerprints are all over the best moments of this extravagantly mounted movie and, as much as I like elements of Luhrmann's version, this is one of the few film adaptations of Shakespeare that renders his work accessible to a modern audience without resorting to gimmickry or novelty.

Its masterstroke - and bizarrely its most derided element - lies in the casting of the titular lovers. At 36, Norma Shearer was twice as old as Juliet (who's supposed to be 14), while the 43-year-old Leslie Howard is at least 20 years older than the typical present-day Romeo. In the grand scheme of things, though, it doesn't really matter. Not only can they each pass for a decade younger - sprightly and sensitively lit as they are - but in order for the play to work, the flowering of first love needs only to convince, not to be between teenagers. It does that effortlessly, partly because both the leads are absolutely sensational.

As a rule, I'm far more a fan of Howard's humorous work than his dramatic parts. In films like Pygmalion and It's Love I'm After he's a comic whirlwind, a force to be reckoned with, spewing epithets and brilliant bile, seizing the material and contorting it to devastating ends. In his dramatic parts, he tends to be a bit of a wet blanket. But whereas his speechifying introspection in The Petrified Forest - that risible philosophical gangster movie - comes across as unbearably smug and irritating, put him in tights, in love and in the right setting, and such characterisation can work wonders. Added to which, he's simply a lot better here, his heartbreaking portrayal of the tragic lover equipped with a quicksilver air and a latent dynamism to go with that impossibly romantic posturing.

Shearer was married to Thalberg, and the likes of Joan Crawford spend a good deal of their time downplaying her talent, saying she was cross-eyed (she was, but it's very charming) and that she only got ahead because she was "sleeping with the boss". Considering that Crawford was not only about a tenth of the actress that Shearer was, but was actually sleeping with most of her bosses, that seems a bit rich. At her best, Shearer was an absolutely exceptional performer: a great actress, a muse, a centrepiece of truly great romances like The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, Lubitsch's immortal silent. Certainly she achieved less after Thalberg's death - her final film, We Were Dancing, really is a bit of a clunker - and clearly he tailored films to her talents, but what talents they were. She's a magnificent Juliet: ethereal, impulsive and matchlessly tender, grasped by one emotion and then the next, navigating a complex part with a skill, intelligence and emotional sensitivity that takes the breath away. Yes she's 36, but - without wanting to sound too much like a pompous idiot (it is hard for me) - is that honestly the level at which we're going to judge art? "She's a bit old"?

It's that stunning central coupling, perfect together or alone, their masterful handling of the dialogue rendering it utterly modern and entirely unforgettable, that gives the film its grip, its hold, its haunting power, and makes up for the things the movie does wrong, several of which are slightly baffling. Edna May Oliver, perhaps the least talented person in '30s America, is typically one-note as Juliet's nurse, while future John Ford stock company alumnus Andy Devine provides atrocious comic relief in a beefed-up role as her assistant. And, then, of course, there are Shakespeare's own shortcomings. He was one hell of a writer - of course he was - but that doesn't mean you can't quibble with plotting that includes a potion replicating the symptoms of death, a father figure who can't really be arsed to ensure Romeo's safety, and an extremely sudden, remarkably convenient outbreak of pestilence.

There's also bloody Mercutio, of course, arguably the most annoying character in theatre, here brought to life by the 54-year-old John Barrymore (OK, Thalberg, now you really are taking the piss), the legendary thespian who transformed the art of Shakespeare with his stage versions of Richard III and Hamlet, but here is a mere bloated, pointing shadow of his former self, his energy and genius traded for a raised eyebrow, a finger raised to the sky and, at most, two fleeting moments of resonance. In support, it's only Basil Rathbone as a stuck-up Tybalt and Reginald Denny's Benvolio who impress.

It's a film with dips, then: troughs filled with broad comedy and lazy hamming. But boy are those peaks mighty: Cukor and William H. Daniels' often masterful compositions - Romeo lit silver as he plays to the balcony, Juliet "dead" beneath a transparent veil - and Shakespeare's glorious words and intensely moving scenarios performed to perfection by two extraordinary actors. (3.5)

***



It’s a Wonderful World (W. S. Van Dyke II, 1939) - "I swear by my eyes." Claudette Colbert's Hechtian vow is right up there with "I close the iron door on you" (Twentieth Century), "I thought you thought so" (Libeled Lady) and "Oh Dook" (I Love You Again) as one of those Golden Age phrases that instantly transports me to a happier place. And every time she says it, it gets slightly funnier. This daft, fast-paced screwball thriller isn't terribly deep and isn't terribly polished, hopping from one comic scenario to the next with no thought other than where the next laugh might be coming from, but it's a film I happily return to every couple of years, always to discover that, yes, it still rocks. Hard. And - due to my current commuting - that I am sitting on a train, laughing out loud at my laptop like a weirdo.

Jimmy Stewart is a cynical, woman-hating private detective (in the film) who goes on the lam to try to save his playboy employer from the electric chair, and so scoop 100 Gs. Claudette Colbert is poetess and potentially incriminating witness Edwina Corday, who first finds herself his prisoner, then decides to never leave him alone, since she totally fancies him. It's one of the few variations on It Happened One Night that doesn't make me want to sue the writers out of sheer annoyance. At one point Stewart punches Colbert in the face, at another he does a blackface routine, but somehow it's all kind of fine, because the film is so light, charming and hysterically funny, thanks to Hecht's dialogue, the transcendent performances of the leads, and supporting masterclasses from Guy Kibbee and Nat Pendleton - the latter forming one of cinema's great "dumb cop" double acts with Edgar Kennedy.

Most of Hecht's favourite things are in here - tough-but-secretly-sentimental heroes, cynical reporters, smart one-liners ("You couldn't find that guy if he was riding in a float"), absurd catchphrases, dizzy dames and murder - and they're mostly my favourite things too (the only one I'm not as keen on is murder), so that's cool. It's a Wonderful World isn't quite top-tier screwball, but it's close enough: endlessly quotable escapism, and another '30s comedy to be filed under "instant joy". (3.5)

***



Young Cassidy (John Ford, 1965) - I was surprised by how strong Young Cassidy was: a good movie that does a few things wrong, rather than a bad one that does a few things right. It's oddly billed, as "a John Ford film... directed by Jack Cardiff", as the great American director was on his penultimate legs and had to bail after two weeks of shooting, and that's about right: its themes and its characters are Fordian, its stylistics are for the most part pure Cardiff, the whole thing shot in the same way as Sons and Lovers, merely in colour. The exceptions, perhaps rather are obviously, are the pub brawl (recalling She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and most of Ford's others) and a crucial death scene, both of which were filmed by Ford.

It's all based on a memoir by the great Irish playwright Seán O'Casey, climaxing with the first night of his breakthrough work - The Plough and the Stars - which was filmed by Ford in 1936. Australian actor Rod Taylor is O'Casey, Johnny Cassidy by birth, a drunken, brawling working man with an artist's sensitivity, or "the most John Ford character ever", in shorthand. There's no narrative drive until the last 15 minutes, but what there is is a succession of vignettes, many of them interesting and powerful, as we move from a beautiful credits sequence, through O'Casey's encounters with poverty, free-spirited women and Irish rebels, to the flowering of his art and the meeting of the love of his life, a meek, virginal librarian played with a beguiling sincerity by Maggie Smith.

The film is far more effective from an emotional perspective than a historical one. O'Casey cheerily laments at one point that the Abbey Theatre feels he can never strike the right balance between plot and character. Neither can the film. Its feelings are real, but its storytelling is sometimes ham-fisted, particularly in the first half. The Easter Rising is effectively evoked, but the street battle that precedes it is poorly staged, and the grinding poverty of O'Casey's family is marked only by death, which intrudes guttingly but too suddenly. There's also the age-old problem with films about writers: how do you squeeze the literature into your story? At least here the whole thing is an O'Casey work, but there's still too little of his language, his themes, the specifics of his worldview: the things we're told about but rarely made privy to.

From a human angle, though, it works. I've seen Taylor in eight previous films (and have always wanted to see The Picture Show Man), without him ever making much of an impression beyond being a man with a broad hairy chest. I suppose he did a fair job with a weak part in 36 Hours, but his performance here is on a whole other level. There are three crucial parts to his characterisation: his macho energy, his massive screen presence - completely dominating the frame - and his total immersion in the character. It's superb stuff, bringing to vivid and convincing life a complex, contradictory and crucial figure.

Smith is even better. I always enjoy her work, but up until the late '80s it seemed like she still had something to prove, taking on complex, varied roles and doing flatly incredible things with them. On paper, her character may seem like a younger version of her Judith Hearne, but on celluloid she makes these shy, nervous and religious women utterly singular creations. The scenes between Taylor and Smith could have tipped over variously into comedy, farce or melodrama, but instead they feel entirely genuine, attaining a complex, multi-layered truth central - and perhaps largely responsible - for the film's claims to some sort of greatness.

By contrast, the supporting cast is studded with familiar names, but suffers from '60s-itis, stellar players piled into the picture to lend some glamour, then given little to do: Michael Redgrave, Dame Edith Evans, Flora Robson... At least Julie Christie's chapter is worth it: she's magnetic as a kept woman, and her sexually-charged meetings with O'Casey form an effective counterpoint to his relationship with Smith. Speaking of '60s-itis, veteran Carol Reed collaborator Ted Scaife also throws in a few of those crappy zoom-ins and zoom-outs that can provoke no possible response aside from: "Oh yes, now I remember, this is a film and it was made in the 1960s." With Cardiff shooting rather than directing, I wonder if we might have got something a little more artful and imaginative, something closer to what Freddie Young did on Ryan's Daughter.

As a Ford fan(cier), I also can't help but imagine what he would have done with this material. And, to be honest, it isn't hard to imagine. He was a masterful editor of scripts and would surely have zoned in more closely on the points of conflict. He was a great director of action and would have made the most of the two big set-pieces. He was a lover of Ireland who would have made the country a central character, as it was in The Quiet Man. He was a shameless sentimentalist who would have beefed up and milked the film's tragic elements. And he was an unapologetic whitewasher and lover of strong women, who would perhaps have taken the edge off Taylor's performance, and the fragility out of Smith's, giving us a less resonant and significant central pairing.

As it is, Young Cassidy is "a John Ford film... directed by Jack Cardiff", a good but not great movie without the urgency of its hero or the mark of the master, but with an abundance of vim, vigour and actorly poetry. (3)

***



*A FEW SPOILERS*
The Unsuspected (Michael Curtiz, 1947) - This sort of nasty, noirish melodrama was all the rage in the mid-'40s, and The Unsuspected owes more than a small debt to the likes of The Spiral Staircase, Laura and Undercurrent.

The mellifluously-voiced Claude Rains is Victor Grandison, an outwardly affable broadcaster whose interest in murder goes well beyond a ghoulish weekly radio show examining notorious cases. After his saintly, virginal and absolutely loaded ward (Joan Caulfield) dies in an explosion, and his secretary is murdered - the police call it suicide - his house is invaded by a smug, angry guy called Steve (Ted "Michael" North), who wants some answers, and claims to be Caulfield's husband. Further complicating matters are Grandison's malevolent, sexually voracious niece (Audrey Totter), her callow, gloomy and drunken husband (Hurd Hatfield, MGM's Dorian Gray), and Caulfield, whose bland, nervy Matilda isn't very dead after all.

It isn't particularly tense or at all mysterious, and there are more than a few loose ends, but it is an extraordinarily good-looking and stylish film, courtesy of Curtiz - who's simply oozing confidence - and the magnificent cinematographer Woody Bredell. There are touches here that will linger long after the rather erratic story has faded from memory: a murderer's face reflected upside down on a glass table, North pumping Totter for information (no smirking) - observed through net curtains and in full-length - and a Murder My Sweet-ish shot from the PoV of the addled, ODing Caulfield.

There are some good performances too. Caulfield, North and Hatfield are uninteresting, and William H. O'Brien is distractingly awful as the house butler, but, as you'd expect, Rains effectively inhabits the skin of the amoral, greedy Grandison - obsessed with playing God - Constance Bennett is ace in a small part as his Eve Arden-esque secretary, and character comic Fred Clark finds the sweet spot that he sometimes passed by through overplaying.

None of them can hold a candle to Totter, though, who strides off with the film as a bitter, cynical and extremely horny socialite too selfish to report a murder, and too distracted by North to stay faithful to her husband. Totter wasn't as integral to The Genre That Didn't Know Its Own Name as Gloria Grahame - who basically was film noir (sorry, Scorsese) - but in her own way she was also crucially important (and just as talented), appearing in everything from The Postman Always Rings Twice to the PoV noir, Lady in the Lake, High Wall and The Set-Up. She's sensational here, giving a well-directed but somewhat ponderous, flawed movie a proper shot in the arm. (3)

***



The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda, 1933) - This is regarded as the grandaddy of British period dramas, but it's a bawdy, annoying sort of grandad who has no concept of how to pace a movie, and keeps pulling silly faces.

Rex Harrison memorably opined of Charles Laughton: "Everyone said he was a genius, I just thought he was a bit of a show-off." I think Laughton would have trounced Harrison in a talent-off, but this early performance is probably the sort of thing he had in mind, a mannered, slightly ridiculous turn full of stagy quirks that keeps the audience at arm's length, never letting you forget that you're watching someone acting. And acting rather badly at that.

I like the set piece about "The King's Guard!" and Laughton's yelling during the climactic council meeting - indeed, there are flashes of quality in both his performance and the film as a whole - but it's by and large a frustratingly empty, unfunny, superficial affair, in which triviality and tedium triumph, and supporting characters are reduced to a single characteristic, wasting a potentially astonishing ensemble that includes Robert Donat, Merle Oberon, Elsa Lanchester, Wendy Barrie, Binnie Barnes, Lady Tree, John Loder, Miles Mander and Claude Allister. (2)

***



Tai-Chi Master (Yuen Woo-Ping, 1993) - A bloody, ultimately pretty tiresome wire-fu wuxia film from Yuen Woo-Ping, nowhere near as good as Iron Monkey or Wing Chun– the two films he made either side – and notable only as the sole teaming of martial arts icons Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh... at least until The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (I haven’t seen it, is it any good?).

Leaning on a story as old as the hills (or at least 1934’s Manhattan Melodrama), the film follows childhood friends who ends up on opposite sides of the law, though in this instance it’s Chin Sui Ho’s amoral soldier who’s in the wrong – propping up a despicable regime – while the fugitive Li demands our sympathy, getting involved with a group of rebels defending some put-upon townsfolk, and boasting among their number the high-kicking Yeoh (have I mentioned my crush on Michelle Yeoh? Yes I have).

The comedy is wretched, even making the usual allowances for cross-cultural differences, incorporating an extended set-piece in which we’re encouraged to laugh at a man having a nervous breakdown (the film came out in 1993, but its understanding of mental illness is from 1893), the plotting is clichéd and largely uninvolving, and the acting is mediocre at best, though there are at least a few decent fight scenes.

I say “a few”, as though the film is action-heavy, its basic weakness calls to mind Fred Astaire’s objection to Busby Berkeley-style films: “either the camera dances or I do”. Not only does Woo-Ping frequently wander into the realm of the cartoonishly incredible, but his flights of fancy here bear so little relation to reality that he can only achieve them by throwing together mere fragments of film – a flying foot here, a barrel there, a disappearing victim way over there – all meant to represent some outlandish feat, an approach that has an altogether alienating effect, while failing dismally to showcase the gobsmacking gifts of Li and Yeoh.

It’s hard to nullify them entirely, though, and the stars do shine in fits and starts: when they fight side by side – if not quite in the buddy movie style you might like – it just about makes it worth sitting through the rest. (2)

***

... and I reviewed this one for MovieMail:



To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942) - It starts, of course, with Hitler. August 1939, and he is alone in Warsaw, bringing the streets to a standstill as he peruses the window of a delicatessen. Except it's not him. This is a film full of imposters and this Führer is our first: a stage actor (Tom Dugan) merely trying to prove a point.

That memorable, rug-tugging gag merely commences a legendary black comedy, the darkest, most ambitious movie to which Ernst Lubitsch ever turned his touch. It has a catchphrase about concentration camps, a palpable sense of fear and foreboding, and such gallows one-liners as Nazi colonel Sig Ruman's observation that what stage star Joseph Tura did to Shakespeare, 'we are now doing to Poland'. And yet it never strays into bad taste, thanks to the deftness of Lubitsch's handling, the strength of his righteous fury, and a simply pitch-perfect ensemble.

Jack Benny is Tura, an actor in Warsaw who comes complete with a massive ego and an unfaithful wife (Carole Lombard), also a renowned star. Their quarrelling, concerning a handsome young flyer (Robert Stack), is rudely interrupted by the Nazis, and the arrival in Warsaw of a double-agent who plans to smash the resistance. Cue the actors putting their skills to good use in the real world, with Benny posing as the colonel and the spy, Dugan reprising his Hitler, and Felix Bressart's spear-carrier finally getting to play Shylock.

Lubitsch was a magnificent director of actors and here he draws career-best performances from just about everyone involved: radio comic Benny, whose double-takes are a thing of sheer beauty, screwball titan Lombard - who tragically died prior to the film's release - and a supporting ensemble that includes such familiar faces as Bressart, Dugan, Charles Halton and Sig Ruman, who steals the show as the garrulous, idiotic 'Concentration Camp Ehrhardt'.

The film's stakes are high, and yet it can frequently break off into absurdity, poke gentle fun at actorly pretension, or knock you sideways with a deadpan gag. Like Benny wandering into a nest of Nazis who have left him to stew with a corpse. "I tried to open up a conversation with your friend in there," he says calmly, "but he seems to be dead."(4)

See also: This is one of my three reviews for MovieMail this month. The others are David Copperfield and Wings.

***

Thanks for reading.

Plus: Wes Anderson flailing, and noir icons directing pirate capers, in the latest reviews update. Feel free to argue or agree with me below or on Twitter.



CINEMA: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Francis Lawrence, 2013) - There were two reasons why I wanted to see this film, and to pay 10 quid for the privilege.

The first was Jennifer Lawrence's startling expressiveness, that deftness of delivery and effortless evocation of complex emotion that makes my critical faculties exalt, and which has so far turned fair scripts into good films, and stronger ones into masterpieces. She lit up Winter's Bone and Silver Linings Playbook - two of this decade's best five, for me - and transformed the original Hunger Games from a potentially daft, trivial film built on formulaic lines and obscured by ephemeral trappings into something sporadically vital, exciting and real.

The other reason was that I'd forgotten I wasn't a 12-year-old girl.

Of course, in the event that I'd made a big, G.O.B. Bluth-like mistake, I wasn't going to suffer alone, so I dragged my mate Owen along too, violently kicking and deafeningly screaming, and a very good time was had by all (except Owen).

This sequel picks up a short while on, with Katniss (Lawrence) haunted by memories of that legendary killing contest, and caught between the man she loves (Liam Hemsworth) and the one she claims she doesn't (Josh Hutcherson, whose unlikely status as a sex symbol gives hope to those of us with jutting chins everywhere). Unfortunately, the president (evil Donald Sutherland, whose facial hair is distractingly asymmetrical) has his own reasons for wanting a hot Lawrence-Hutcherson love match, so they're forced to carry on the charade, whilst trying not to start a revolution on their national "victors' tour".

The film - and presumably the book - makes a good case for the eponymous event being "just games", but the fight against oppression being real... then decides to have some more games anyway (they're fun, aren't they?), prompting a partial retread of the first film, though with a few arbitrary threats that are in the vein of Cube (electrocution, poisonous fumes) and one that isn't (baboons).

It's paced like a drunk guy in a pub trying to walk to the toilets, the script by Full Monty creator Simon Beaufoy and Little Miss Sunshine writer Michael Arndt doesn't go anywhere terribly revelatory, and I don't think Hutcherson (phwoarr) can really act. But there's just something about it I liked - and I think again it's to be found at the feet of Lawrence. I'm not sure she's as good as we've seen her here, but it's all relative. She's still magnetically watchable, completely persuasive no matter what dubious dialogue she's being forced to recite, and able to signify more with a single look than most actresses could with a Robert Towne monologue. There really may as well be no-one else in the film.

As it happens, the cast has a couple of strong additions from last time around: Jena Malone as an axe-wielding rival whose vote-winning horniness evaporates remarkably quickly, and Philip Seymour Hoffman playing the mysterious new "games master", who may quite conceivably be a massive bastard. Of the returnees, Woody Harrelson and Stanley Tucci are both good if slightly narrowly-defined, while I found Elizabeth Banks' returning Effie extraordinarily irritating to begin with, only for this to prove one of those rare occasions (Tommy Steele in Finian's Rainbow was another) where I was won round by an avowedly eccentric turn, as it opened up to reveal something a little more human. Those lively characterisations compensate for a less compelling narrative than first time around, and the film's enduring preoccupation with fashion as a means to fight oppression, which is probably something 12-year-old girls think, but isn't anything I've seen any evidence to support.

Directorially, Francis Lawrence proves less interesting and distinctive than Gary Ross, though his Ben-Hur homage is good fun, the set-piece with the archery training is nicely edited and there's one lovely scene near the end featuring a shaft of daylight and an almost motionless (Jennifer) Lawrence. That passage made me wonder why the rest of the film often felt so functional, rather than trying to grab us by the throat.

It's no Empire Strikes Back, no Godfather: Part II, no Aliens, but it's no Cloudy 2 either. Beyond the "ooh, I know, how about this?" plotting, the "I'm not sure this bit's aimed at me" window-dressing, and the fact that we don't end up much further along than when we went in, I liked it. Most of that's down to Lawrence. I doubt there's a filmgoer out there not in thrall to her ability but, if there is, the final few frames of the film should win them around: leading to one of those abrupt endings that makes you go: "Hey wait, that can't be the... actually, yeah, OK."

I am a 29-year-old man. (2.5)

***



The Big Street (Irving Reis, 1942) - An often exceptional Damon Runyon story, in his familiar style and filled with his usual affable crooks, about two inhabitants of New York’s Losers’ Street: a selfish showgirl (Lucille Ball) consigned to a wheelchair by her violent ex-boyfriend, and the meek busboy (Henry Fonda) who appoints himself her protector, idolising her beyond all reason and continuing to stick by her even when everyone else gives up.

The production and direction is disappointingly bland – too cheap and yet not cheap enough – but the dialogue and characterisation is utterly remarkable, with Ball and Fonda both in spellbinding form, each proving amusing, heartbreaking and unfailingly convincing, cast boldly against type in doggedly unconventional parts.

Fonda played dupes and mugs in plenty of films during this period – The Lady Eve, Rings on Her Fingers, The Magnificent Dope– but never a character as innocent, stoical nor blindly loyal as Little Pinks, allying the naivete of Sturges’ “Hoppsy” to something like the high-minded view of humanity espoused by Tom Joad. It’s a really beautiful performance.

On a more trivial note, fans of his singular diction will also enjoy hearing Hank say “huh-wheeels” and “ve-heercle” in a single sentence, and Ball gets a cracking new love song to sing, Who Knows. There’s fun support too from Eugene Pallette (as a competitive eater), Sam Levene and Citizen Kane alumni Agnes Moorehead and Ray Collins.

The film isn’t perfect – it sags a little at the beginning of the final third, taking Ball off screen for too long, and I’m in two minds about the ending – but, at its best, its blending of the seedy, the funny and the warmly humane reminds me of my favourite movie, Remember the Night, and I can’t think of any higher praise than that. (3.5)

***



The Front Page (Billy Wilder, 1974) - An unnecessary but enjoyable third screen version of former journalists Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's immortal 1929 play, The Front Page, filmed in '31 under that name, and by Howard Hawks nine years later as His Girl Friday, one of the fastest, funniest comedies ever made, with an added sexual charge due to its ingenious gender swap.

This version of the tale, which as in the source sees unscrupulous Chicago editor Walter Burns (Walter Matthau) trying to persuade ace reporter Hildy Johnson (Jack Lemmon) to drop his fiancee (Susan Sarandon), and cover a hot murder case, is as much a homage to the play and the era than it is a film in its own right. There are references to All Quiet on the Western Front (a year early), Jimmy Cagney (at least two years early), Lindbergh and the rest, and the film looks at least as '30s as the first version - aside from a curious softness in the cinematography, the light fairly streaming off Lemmon's white boater. That jaunty ragtime theme tune is one hell of an earworm too.

Wilder's main innovations are the typical ones when adapting material from a more censorious era: swear words and bad taste gags, this time about paedophilia, prostitution and diabetes. He's also on curiously juvenile form, with a running gag about a cub reporter wetting himself, and a bafflingly unfunny, sped-up sequence concerning a runaway hospital bed that seems to suggest an oft-overlooked influence on his work from Benny Hill.

Wilder and co-writer I. A. L. Diamond put Walter and Hildy behind bars near the close, which isn't in the original work and rather slows thr momentum, while letting the mayor get away with his nefarious doings: a perhaps unsatisfying but nevertheless smartly cynical touch rather typical of the director. The only entirely new sequence I found amusing and worthwhile was Burns posing as a parole officer to tell Peggy that Hildy was a convicted flasher, though it strays from the blackly comic to the unpleasant towards the end. Wilder's only other additions of note are a nice gag about the operetta The Student Prince (adapted into a film by his hero, Ernst Lubitsch, in 1927) and having the central murderer taking rather too literally the suggestion that he pose in a manner befitting a "caged animal".

The film's basic material remains amazing, though - its cynical reporters and crooked politicos enduringly fascinating, as much for Hecht's murky morality as his blistering dialogue - and the acting's good. When Lemmon does his "yadda yadda" scatting, I still want to punch him in the face, but he's very charismatic and adept at nailing Hildy's curious blend of the hard-bitten and the compassionate, as his character shoulders the burden of the story in the way he doesn't in the other versions. Matthau isn't anywhere near as good as he was elsewhere in the decade (this was shortly after that glorious one-two of Charley Varrick and Pelham One Two Three), but he's decent enough, there are interesting spins on murderer Earl Williams and his "girlfriend" Molly Malloy from Austin Pendleton and Carol Burnett, while Vincent Gardenia provides funny if sometimes a little overripe as "Honest" Pete, the sheriff. Veterans of '40s comedy also crop up, with David Wayne as Bensinger - now unmistakably a homosexual - and the great Allen Jenkins as the wizened telegrapher in the final scene.

There's no real reason for the film to exist, and Wilder's abilities were clearly flagging - he seemed somewhat uncertain how to adapt to a permissive industry where he could say whatever he wanted as a writer - but it's good fun and, in an odd way, an interesting, perhaps unwitting experiment in the Far from Heaven vein: taking a near-legendary template and performing it in a largely faithful style while using the new moral code to try to inject it with a greater realism. Well, apart from the bit with the hospital bed. It's ultimately the least of the three versions, but worth it regardless. (3)

See also: My favourite actor, Lee Tracy, originated the role of Hildy on stage. I wrote this piece about him for EatSleepLiveFilm.

***



*A FEW MINOR SPOILERS*
The Crimson Pirate (Robert Siodmak, 1952) - Or 'The Crimson Pirate in an Adventure with a Scientist', this film's peculiar third act presumably the inspiration for the Gideon Defoe novel brought so wonderfully to the screen by Aardman. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Really this fondly remembered flick is a mix of Doug Fairbanks' 1924 cutlass-clasping classic, The Black Pirate, and the 1950 actioner The Flame and the Arrow, marrying the story of a Seven-Seas-scourge who turns noble for the sake of a woman, to the kind of colourful, stunt-heavy, circus-flavoured fun in which Burt Lancaster was briefly typecast. But unlike the sumptuous, seductive Fairbanks film, this one is aimed squarely at a Saturday morning kids' audience. (By a quirk of studio workings, both this and The Flame and the Arrow were directed by men more commonly associated with film noir: Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past) and Robert Siodmak (The Killers).)

The film is basically and solidly entertaining without often exploding into life the way it might. The one thing you really need in a pirate movie is ingenuity: think of Depp hopping onto the second ship or Fairbanks riding down the main sail on his sword. There are brief flashes here, but only really in the final reel, as Lancaster slices a rope to fly skywards and his sidekick Nick Cravat takes out a bunch of soldiers with a swinging mast. The rest of the film is consistently enjoyable, but not perhaps escapist or imaginative in the way it should be. It feels somewhat tied down: by its obvious, overly serious plotting, by Lancaster's irritatingly simplistic acting, and by a strange insistence on subverting its trumpeted credentials by wandering ashore or just getting a bit distracted.

Don't get me wrong: it's a solid, eventful watch and it throws just about everything into the mix - from a mutiny to a submarine, cross-dressing to nitroglycerine - while there's happiness to be found in the stars' stuntwork: the massive, energetic, hilariously twinkle-toed Lancaster and beardy, well-built little Cravat leaping, rolling and tumbling (not a sex thing). I'm just not sure it's quite the unassailable genre highpoint it might seem when viewed through a haze of nostalgia. In fact, I'm pretty sure it isn't. (Sorry for being such a misery.) (3)

***



*SPOILERS*
SHORT: Castello Cavalcanti (Wes Anderson, 2013) - I'll defend Wes Anderson pretty much to the death. Aside from the baffling misfire that was smugness's Fantastic Mr Fox, I love every single one of his magnificent, micro-consistent movies. The features, that is. I'm not sure he's very good at shorts. The Moonrise Kingdom animations were transcendent, but quite how much of a hand he had in those, I'm not sure. Hotel Chevalier, the brief precursor to The Darjeeling Limited, was faintly affecting, but pretty pretentious and seriously slight. Castello Cavalcanti, bankrolled by Prada, is so minor it's barely even there.

The tranquility of an Italian square (pan shot, pan shot, yes, it all looks rather pretty) is rudely interrupted by rally driver Jason Schwartzman, who writes off his car against a wall. He chats briefly - in the most painfully mannered way - to some folks who turn out to be his ancestors, has a fun phone call with his mechanic, then talks to a girl. The end. In the right role, I like Schwartzman a great deal: in Rushmore, in Huckabees, in much of Bored to Death. Outside of those limitations (Slackers, Shopgirl, Bored to Death Season 3, here), he can often appear to have forgotten what acting is. He probably isn't helped by a film that has nothing to say except "shop at Prada". (1.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

A mammoth round-up of recent cinema releases, things I watched on a tiny laptop on a train, and a few we had on in the run-up to Christmas.



CINEMA: Nebraska (Alexander Payne, 2013) - I saw this in a triple - yes, triple! - bill with Gravity and Don Jon, and I think it was my favourite of the three, a(nother) road movie about old age and family: an unsentimental, monochrome variation on the likes of Don't Come Knocking and The Straight Story, a bit overburdened with non-sequitur comedy, but nonetheless bearing the unmistakable handprint of the mighty Alexander Payne, whose films Election and Sideways are about as impressive as writer-director calling cards come.

Bruce Dern - the cult performer who once greeted Jack Nicholson's belated rise to prominence with the contemptuous remark: "Jack Nicholson's a star now? That B-movie actor?" - is an aged alcoholic trying to wander off to Lincoln, Nebraska at every opportunity, convinced he's won a million dollars in a patently phony mailing scam. In a bid to shake him to his senses, and perhaps enjoy some quality time with his old man, his gentle son Will Forte agrees to drive him there, the trip taking in family members, old watering holes and Dern's childhood home.

SNL regular Forte is best known for his comedy work, and he has that slightly simplistic way of rendering dramatic emotion onscreen common with crossover performers, but for this material that actually works very well, his sad-eyed puppy-dog routine an effective counterpoint to Dern's complex performance as an unrepentant, unyielding old man with none of Alvin Straight's hard-won gravitas, but rather the full gamut of human virtues and flaws: a proud, ailing, bitter individualist who did more for his friends than his kids and is now trying to atone for those failings - perhaps - while not willing to admit a single one of them.

June Squibb's comic relief as his wife, while sometimes very funny, detracts from the film's realism and quality when pushed too far, and there's one very misjudged joke that turns Forte's cousins from affable wallies into something else entirely, but Nebraska is mostly very good indeed, doing a few new things with one of the oldest of indie chestnuts, aided by fine acting, crisp photography of an alternately lovely and ugly America, and a typically incisive, amusing Payne script. The line "one and a half days" made me lose control of my face entirely, and the ending does absolutely everything right. (3.5)

***



CINEMA: Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen, 2013) - Woody Allen’s erratic latter-day renaissance continues with this throbbingly neurotic update of A Streetcar Named Desire in which a deluded, substance-abusing depressive (Cate Blanchett) moves in with her relatively unrefined sister (Sally Hawkins), only to clash with her host’s boorish working-class boyfriend.

But whereas Tennessee Williams’ landmark play – which made a star out of Marlon Brando, as an overly hunky incarnation of legendary slob Stanley Kowalski – gave equal focus to the interloper and her rival, this one focuses almost unwaveringly on the sisters. For someone periodically dismissed as a bit of a sexist, Allen has always been a great director of women, and a great writer of female characters. Here, with Blanchett, he has potentially found another Mia Farrow: a muse for his mercurial gifts.

Her Jasmine (born plain Jeanette) is a dynamically nervy, pill-chomping conduit for Allen’s fevered examinations of a crumbling psyche, a fully-realised character, rather than a plaything of fate, as so many of his more recent creations have been. Flitting between time frames, she’s variously a red-eyed freak incapable of holding it together, or an airy, graceful hostess with just about the perfect existence. That perfection, though, is a fantasy, as surely as the films that Farrow sought solace in in Purple Rose, or the transparently false rewritten history that allowed Blanche Dubois to just about function in Streetcar. While the other key theme of Williams’ play: the death of purity in a masculine world (“You didn’t know Blanche as a girl – nobody but nobody was as tender and as trusting as she was, until people like you abused her and forced her to change”), is nowhere to be seen, the central, Allen-ish toss-up between self-delusion and brutal reality is beautifully handled, a performance every bit as good as Dianne Wiest’s in September or Gena Rowlands’ in Another Woman: two of the high points of the director’s dramatic oeuvre.

Because, despite a few broader moments and some concessions to black comedy, this is Allen on firmly dramatic ground. With Midnight in Paris he showed he could still pull off the kind of deceptively deep whimsy that came so naturally to him in the ‘70s; with Blue Jasmine, his other outstanding film of the past decade, he proves that he still has what it takes to be something like the dramatic writer-director he always imagined himself – even if it never felt quite so effortless as when he could lace the narrative with jokes.

The other notable performance is from Sally Hawkins, Allen making up for giving her a dog of a part in his worst movie, Cassandra’s Dream, by providing her with a meaty role as Blanchett’s working class counterpoint, a loyal, conflicted woman easily led astray, whose one chance of climbing out of her rut was pissed up a wall by Blanchett’s conman of a husband (Alec Baldwin). The rest of the cast is solid rather than remarkable. Baldwin is good if hardly stretching it as a slimeball, Peter Sarsgaard gets a taste of his own medicine following An Education, and Louis C. K. essentially reprises his part from Parks and Rec as a clumsily earnest bachelor – at least at first.

For anyone who’s familiar with the blow-up over Allen and his relationship with his long-term partner’s 17-year-old adopted daughter (the pair are now married), there’s a fascinating subtext to some of the later revelations. If Baldwin is Allen and Blanchett is Farrow, then, well… I don’t want to offer any spoilers, but the allegory isn’t very thinly-veiled.

There is some of the clunkiness and clumsiness that has marred Woody’s later work: the staging of a pivotal party is so unconvincing as to be faintly embarrassing, the scene outside the jewellery store is a very mechanical, convenient piece of writing, and everybody talks like Woody – fine for Blanchett, not so suitable for the macho, blue-collar types surrounding her – but there’s a confidence and a general realism in the story and the characterisation that makes an invigorating change. Back from Europe, he proves at home in San Fran, with a central character he understands, and who feels completely human, thanks to a writer on form and an actress on fire. (3.5)

See also: Woody's previous film, To Rome with Love, isn't quite the turkey it's been described as.

***



CINEMA: Gravity (Alfonso Cuaron, 2013) - This film turned me into the aliens from Toy Story. 3D tears in zero gravity? "Oooooooooooooh."

It's a solid but standard Hollywood script - disaster, fleeting romance, somebody running from their past - taken to a whole new level by Cuaron and Emmanuel Lubezki, whose gobsmackingly beautiful photography creates a litany of unforgettable images, and features by far the best use of 3D that cinema has thus far found. It sounds incredible too, an ominous score and some adventurous editing foreshadowing and soundtracking several of the most exciting and nerve-wracking sequences you'll experience on the big screen this year.

As you may have heard (I came to this one rather late), Sandra Bullock is an engineer, haunted by personal tragedy, who becomes stranded in space with astronaut George Clooney after their mission goes tits-up. She's got to stop spinning and somehow get home, via ruined space stations and blasted craft, facing fires, her personal demons and a terrifying barrage of flying debris. The film takes a while to find its rhythm, and it does sometimes turn too Hollywood-y, but Bullock is good, it's frequently thrilling, and it has a visual beauty that's often simply staggering to behold. The ending is perfectly judged too. (3.5)

***



CINEMA: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Peter Jackson, 2013) - There's nothing here to match Riddles in the Dark, and the whole thing is a little shapeless - lacking a clear focus or a real climax - but there are some effective emotional moments, most resulting from Ken Stott's nicely judged performance, and Jackson's talent for directing action is much in evidence, especially during the wonderful "barrel riding" set piece. Stray observations: the Leicester Square Odeon is very swanky - I hadn't been before - Gandalf's staff is a giant asparagus spear; I hope Sherlock and Watson make it up before New Year's Day. (2.5)

***



Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982) - I watched this as a Christmas treat. It's one of the great films. I wrote a proper review earlier this year, so this is just a happy recap: Hoffman is sublime, Lange is the last word in love interests, there's superb comic support from Bill Murray and George Gaynes, and the film refuses to treat any of its characters as a joke (not Durning and not Garr), dealing deftly but properly with every serious issue it raises. It's a rare film that employs drag to interrogate gender stereotypes, not to sit lazily with them, smirking away. It's streaked with greasepaint, charmingly scored, richly romantic, hysterically funny and remarkably poignant. And the last 40 minutes is just utterly sensational. (4)

***



Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) - My two favourite films of the decade so far are movies of water, poor folk and poetry, centred on a young female character of undefeatable tenacity. One is Beasts of the Southern Wild. The other is this bleak, humanist masterpiece, mixing character study, thriller and a portrait of social degradation and moral courage. It's beyond brilliant. (4)

***



*MINOR SPOILERS*
The Descendants (Alexander Payne, 2011) - Payne's greatest, and one of the finest of the decade so far, a stunning, beautiful and utterly unpredictable comedy-drama that's about nothing if not life itself.

Clooney is a self-absorbed lawyer - a descendant of genuine Hawaiian royalty - who's forced to take charge of the situation after his wife has a boating accident, and lapses into a coma. Whilst reconnecting with his opinionated daughters, he's also considering a land deal central to the future of the island... then he discovers that his wife was having an affair.

Whilst rarely original in conception, where Payne's films are truly distinctive is in their execution: that off-kilter humour, heart-melting sentiment and ability to immerse you in the lives - and the world - of his characters. Here he's adapting with the help of Way, Way Back creators Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, to unfailingly spectacular effect.

I'm not a huge Clooney fan, but, as with his idol Cary Grant in his later career, when his smug facade is scratched, cracked or punctured, he becomes an entirely different proposition. He was very good in Up in the Air, and he's absolutely exceptional here, asked to play between the lines, and to nail just about every emotion known to man. The results are extraordinarily affecting.

Nebraska has been bafflingly hailed in some quarters as Payne's "return to form". Following what? A perfectly-pitched rumination on existence, in all its chaotic, tragi-comic complexity? The Descendants is a unique and brilliant movie: intelligent, incisive and poignant, its nuanced plotting, distinctive dialogue and glorious central performance accompanied by one of the most exquisite scores of recent decades, a Cooder-ish guitar accompaniment rich in authentic Hawaiian flavour. (4)

***



The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (Peter Lord and Jeff Newitt, 2012) - Aardman's best feature to date, packed to the gills with gags that exhibit a sharp, silly and deliriously post-modern sense of humour. The "sea monster" line is a thing of genius. (3)

***



The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973) - Something like the Spanish Whistle Down the Wind: a story of childhood innocence and imagination in which a girl becomes convinced that the murderer in a nearby barn is a cherished figure: there Jesus, here the spirit of Frankenstein's Monster. Set in Franco's Spain, saddled with some deeply uninteresting adults and at times both slow-moving to the point of tedium and narratively confusing to the point of impenetrability, it also contains utterly wonderful performances by the two nippers at its centre, and a few of the most visually and emotionally beautiful passages I've ever seen on film, blessed by a rare and special understanding of childhood in all its intense, sentimental, nonsensical glory. (3)

***



The Oyster Princess (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919) - Ernst Lubitsch was a master of endings, even in these early days, and the final reel of this live-action cartoon is just brilliant. The rest of it, dealing with oyster heiress Ossi Oswalda's attempts to wed a prince - but accidentally marrying his imbecilic, chrome-domed butler - is a bit too self-consciously quirky, riddled with amusing but shallow non-sequiturs like female boxing matches, split-screen foxtrotting and drunken wanderings choreographed in meticulous fashion. With his amazing catchphrase of "I am not at all impressed", oyster king Victor Janson would steal most pictures, but this one - as ever - belongs to Lubitsch's unconventional, unpredictable and hugely likeable leading lady, who's completely lacking in vanity, falsity and synthetic celluloid glamour. She's fast becoming one of my favourite movie stars. (3)


See also:Two earlier films that Ossi made with Lubitsch.

***



Nativity! (Debbie Isitt, 2009) - It's formulaic to a fault, and the nativity sequences go on for far too long - and with far too much cheap sentiment - but Freeman is superb, it's very, very funny during the first hour, and its heart is unquestionably in the right place. It also makes me feel proper Christmassy. Typical BBC, though, eh, funding a movie about a multicultural state school whupping a bunch of privileged white-os. (3)

***



Father of the Bride (Vincente Minnelli, 1950) - This is one of those films so ingrained in cinematic folklore that it’s a little difficult to really get a handle on it: so fondly half-remembered that its mere mention turns a certain sort of audience dewy-eyed and gooey-hearted, and so much a part of Hollywood history that it was one of the three films shown on the big screen during The Last Picture Show.

Removed from all that, and seen as merely another movie, it’s essentially another addition in the “stressful family comedies” sub-genre (Mr Blandings et al), which has a fair amount to say about family and ‘50s America, missteps every now and then, but gets by on the strength of its convictions, and its performances.

Spencer Tracy is the patriarch and lawyer forced to foot the bill for daughter Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding, while speculating blackly about his new in-laws, the unsuitability of wife Joan Bennett’s plans, and the spectre of bankruptcy – which he imagines is just around the corner.

A lot of it is just Tracy grumbling about money or being frustrated in his attempts to join in, and some of the sitcom-ish cuts and fades are rather smug and annoying, but it is a fundamentally decent, good-hearted and often incisive film about family, aspiration and the necessities of adult life, with a few amusing moments thrown in. I did find it a little galling to see what 1950s Hollywood imagined a “small house” and an average lifestyle to be, but then I am perpetually broke.

Tracy was a far better dramatic actor than he ever was a comedic one, lacking a lightness of touch and often coming across as sullen and awkward rather than sardonic or witty, but he’s good here, dealing with the funny moments pretty well – the sequence in which he tries to squeeze into an old, excruciatingly tight suit sees him display an unexpected flair for visual comedy – and the emotional ones just as superbly as you’d expect.

The film’s real ace, though, is the young Elizabeth Taylor, who displays a heartbreaking sincerity, an intense sensitivity – everything so keenly and purely felt – that would soon be eroded by who knows what (Hollywood? Her lifestyle? Her lack of discipline?). She had played a similar role in Julia Misbehaves two years previously, and done it very well, but here she’s simply exceptional: wracked with unhappiness, shaking with anxiety, bursting with love.

Just look at the scene she has with Tracy near the close, navigating material that saddles her with nerves about the service, when something deeper and more profound, rendering her more fragile, might have worked so much better. Despite that, she handles it superbly, eliciting a strong, believable and memorable connection with Tracy, who’s just experienced a vivid Expressionist nightmare of his own. And then there’s her acting in the pay-off, which, is just, y’know... *bursts into tears*

Her performance is something very real at the centre of a film that has a few too many cop-outs and weak gags to justify its lofty position in the cinematic canon, but also some great and enduring strengths that periodically lift it way out of the ordinary.

And the church looks just like the one where I got married. Cool. (3)

***



The Mask of Dimitrios (Jean Negulesco, 1944) - An intriguing, boldly non-linear biography of pure evil (Zachary Scott), as writer Peter Lorre delves Citizen Kane-style into the past of a man washed up dead, bumping into a hulking mystery man (Sydney Greenstreet) on the same trail. It's not quite as successful as The Verdict, as its raison d'être is less clear and its destination less impressive, but there are many enjoyable performances and scenes within its less than perfect story. (3)

***



"I beg your... complete pardon."
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (Woody Allen, 2001) - Woody's much-maligned version of a battle-of-the-sexes screwball comedy, set in 1940, is overlong and rather repetitive, but full of nice period flavour and good music, and sometimes simply hilarious. The scene in which his investigator searches rival Helen Hunt's office is one of the funniest things he's ever done. The film as a whole is minor, a little one-note, and has too many gags that fall flat, but it's still a fun watch, and certainly undeserving of its sullied reputation. (2.5)

***



The Conspirators (Jean Negulesco, 1944) - I realised halfway through this film that I'd seen it before, which says a little about me and quite a lot about the movie.

It's a solid but unremarkable Casablanca knock-off made by the same studio, Warner Bros, and featuring Paul Henreid as another freedom fighter engaged in a relationship with a brooding, accented mystery woman (Hedi Lamarr going all Ingrid Bergman on us). Whereas in Casablanca he was striving to get to Lisbon, here he's trying to leave it, but gets drawn into the local espionage scene, encountering such superb character actors as Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, in another of their fine teamings.

The incomparable Lorre is actually a little underused, but Greenstreet is superb, Joseph Calleia has a nice bit as an understanding detective, and both Henreid and Lamarr give it their best, despite the rather formulaic and overly propagandist material. Lamarr is frequently derided nowadays, but I think she could be a decent actress when not asked to merely be a clothes horse. In King Vidor's H. M. Pulham, Esq. and her nudey breakout role, Extase, (I've already seen everything), she was absolutely excellent.

Director Negulesco also creates a handful of memorable suspense sequences, as well as a few tedious ones. While the action finale is completely uninvolving, Henreid's attempted prison break is a knockout in the Mesrine vein, and the climactic, Hitchcockian roulette sequence is cleverly handled, despite the obviousness of the culprit, which seemed like a muddle-headed cop-out even on first watch. I'm sure I'll enjoy another first viewing one day. (2.5)

***



Fancy Pants (Charles Walters, 1950) - A very loose, slightly racist remake of Leo McCarey's Ruggles of Red Gap, re-imagined as a Bob Hope vehicle. He's an American actor who poses as an English butler, then an earl, while tangling with various Western sorts, getting to meet Teddy Roosevelt, and taking the mickey out of how Chinese people speak.

It's slight and very inconsistent, but overall not bad. Lucille Ball is excellent as the combustible love interest gradually falling for our hero (while cultivating her new screen persona), and the best moments see her giving Hope a peck on the cheek - one of those small, sweet touches that can make a film - and the amazing punchline to his story of imperial derring-do, which is as good (and subversive) a gag as he ever delivered.

There's also a fun appearance early on from the great character comic Eric Blore, playing a sort of embryonic version of the Fast Show's Rowley Birkin QC - perhaps based on a character from the 1937 comedy Personal Property - a largely unintelligible aristo with strange moments of clarity. (2.5)

***



*SPOILERS FOR THIS AND WHEN LADIES MEET*
Susan and God (George Cukor, 1940) - On paper this sounds pretty good: a comedy-drama based on the most celebrated work of grown-up playwright Rachel Crothers - whose play When Ladies Meet was made into one of the most intelligent American films of the '30s - adapted by one of the best screenwriters of all time, Anita Loos, and featuring a promising cast that includes the likes of Fredric March, Ruth Hussey and Rita Hayworth. Unfortunately it rarely catches fire, due to weak writing and a disastrous choice of leading lady.

Was there ever a more dislikeable actress than Joan Crawford? That's a rhetorical question. No there wasn't. Kudos to Crawford for taking a part turned down by Norma Shearer because she wouldn't portray a character with a teenage daughter, but that's where the praise ends. With her maniacal stare, grating sanctimoniousness, shiny head, massive shoulder pads, innate lack of warmth and critical lack of talent, Crawford managed to torpedo many a movie from the mid-'30s onwards. She is a disgrace to people like me everywhere with slightly large jaws. I actually quite like some of her earlier work: Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, Grand Hotel, Rain, Love on the Run and The Women (cast most convincingly against type as a bitchy adulteress), when she was a proper performer rather than a riotously vain star upon which to pin entire films. After that, she was usually a bloody nightmare (Mildred Pierce is an exception of sorts) - and that's before we even consider her noted aversion to wire hangers.

So why do I persist with her films? Because there's often so much good stuff filling up the rest of those vehicles: like everyone else in The Last of Mrs Cheyney and Sudden Fear, Melvyn Douglas's engaging antics in They All Kissed the Bride, John Garfield's pyrotechnics in Humoresque, and as much quality in every area, in just about every film, as America's biggest studios could conceivably sling at a picture. Incidentally, the secret to Crawford's longevity was partly contained in The Greatest Put-Down of All Time - "She was the original good time that was had by all" ((c) Bette Davis) - and while the unusual, indomitable and outrageously talented Davis seemed to sum up Warner Bros, the earthy, socially-conscious studio where she made her name, so Crawford epitomised the magnificent, ugly and terrifying monolith that was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Here she's cast as a deluded, maniacally-staring socialite with a shiny head who returns from a jaunt to England full of fervour and constantly mouthing off about God. Her alcoholic husband (Fredric March) wants to reconnect - and have them spend some time with daughter Rita Quigley - but she's more concerned about self-righteously condemning the behaviour of all her friends, including a pair of dating divorcees (Bruce Cabot and Rose Hobart), a former actress (Rita Hayworth), who's thinking of cheating on her husband (Nigel Bruce!), and the stoical spinster in love with March (Ruth Hussey).

While it's tagged as a comedy-drama, I'm not sure I spotted a single joke. Rather, Susan and God is a wearying, single-note film, obvious in the extreme, about a selfish person being very annoying for two hours, and then quite nice for five minutes. And while Hussey is very good and March is absolutely exceptional, it's hard to stay on good terms with a movie that sees Crawford's ultimately repentant egomaniac as better marriage material than the caring, compassionate, empathetic, witty, intelligent and good-looking Hussey. (What is it with pretty brunettes with sticky-out ears getting their hearts broken in Crothers adaptations? It's a conspiracy.) But maybe I'm projecting again. Still, a word on Crawford's hilarious outfits. There's one featuring a miniscule satchel that makes her look like a giant postman, a second that seems to feature several lassos, and another that's like a beekeeper's outfit, but topped off with a Dick Whittington-style bundle on a stick.

Certainly the film as a whole is nothing better than a low-rent, unconvincing American spin on Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara - an immaculate work that deals with faith, femininity and moral want in spectacular fashion - which squanders a good cast on a muddled script with a simply dire characterisation at its centre. Incidentally, that's Joan Leslie in a non-speaking part as one of Quigley's friends. Within a year she would be one of the biggest stars in the world at just 16. And within a year Crawford would take the Myrna Loy role in a remake of When Ladies Meet. *Punches own face*

***



The Impatient Years (Irving Cummings, 1944) - War bride Jean Arthur and her husband Lee Bowman, with whom she's only spent four days, are reunited after 18 months. He's grown a moustache, she's now a dedicated mother with a fixed daily routine, and frankly they don't like each other much. But instead of being granted a divorce, they're forced into a court-ordered courtship - thanks in part to her father Charles Coburn, whose character oscillates between very wise and completely stupid - retracing those four days in San Francisco, where they begin to reconnect.

I reckon I could have written a better script than this: most of the gags concern Arthur and Bowman inexplicably half-explaining their plight to character actors like Grant Mitchell, Charley Grapewin and Charles Arnt, then - having being met with complete confusion - saying something vague and petulant before leaving the room. The only scene where the gimmick works is a nightclub sequence featuring amorous sergeant Frank Jenks, because at least here Arthur has a proper reason for misleading him.

The other good scene has the couple meeting justice of the peace Harry Davenport and his wife Jane Darwell. It's very sentimental, but it shifts the viewpoint of the film from a shallow celebration of the first flowering of romance (which I believe may have been done becore) to the less escapist but more timely subject of building a marriage in the face of adversity, which, given the characters it's dealing with, feels completely right.

And, while the film isn't very funny or romantic or particularly credible, it does at least have the almighty Arthur, one of the great Hollywood actresses, who can make anything look - and particularly sound - a whole lot better, squeaking her way through every contrived situation with the absolute maximum of charm. Aside from perhaps Garbo in Ninotchka, who has ever pronounced the word "silly" in such a marvellous manner?

Sadly, the other central players are disappointing. Bowman is simply weak: he was a passable second lead who should never have become a star (and didn't stay as one for long), while Coburn is completely coasting, and few of the many familiar faces who turn up in support are given anything memorable to do, with several of them being actively annoying.

I don't really ever say "meh", but "meh". (2)

***


Great poster. Weak film.

The Family Man (Brett Ratner, 2000) - Nic Cage is high on my list of least favourite actors, a little below Joan Crawford. He just can't do anything that isn't massive, which is a Bad Thing. He's asked to carry this Christmas fantasy (which riffs on It's a Wonderful Life) and does a predictably hamfisted job. The second half's a lot better than the incredibly flat, pointless first - with an agreeably nuanced approach to its premise - and Tea Leoni is pretty good as the one who got away, but it never quite comes together, and the ending doesn't really work. (2)

This year's review comes in two parts. The first is my top 10 of 2013, taking in everything from indie comedies to animation - and a couple of neat returns to form. The second contains my 20 favourite "discoveries" of the year, from silent film to a documentary from last year, along with the usual round-up of the year's highs and lows. Previous annual reviews are available here:

2010
2011
2012

Top 10 of 2013

1. Frances Ha



Director: Noah Baumbach
Starring: Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Adam Driver and Michael Zegen
What we said:"What a great film: Baumbach doing his thing, and Gerwig doing hers, this plotless ramble emanating its writer-director's usual good-natured angst, uncertainty about contemporary life and warm-hearted, off-kilter sentimentality. It cares about in-jokes, the intensity of true friendship (in the shape of Mickey Sumner, whose chemistry with Gerwig is absolute), and the random, aimless but fulfilling way in which we muddle through this world, in a way that's very unusual. It's also a very funny film in that shambling Baumbachian way, jokes tossed this way and that, muttered, thrown away and occasionally properly milked: like the beauty that closes the picture. What seems at first to be a succession of mild comic sketches is really a character study of a conflicted, grown-up child afraid of the world into which she's been unceremoniously dumped. Its cumulative impact is enormous."Full review.

2. The Way, Way Back



Directors: Nat Faxon and Jim Rash
Starring: Liam James, Sam Rockwell, Steve Carell and AnnaSophia Robb
What we said:"This is like a big hug in cinematic form, as awkward, taciturn teen Duncan (Liam James) is taken under the wing of a flamboyant motormouth (Sam Rockwell) whom he happens upon at a rundown waterpark. It's a bit like Adventureland, a lot like every other coming-of-age film you've ever seen - the stifling domestic strife, the pubescent blushing, then the sudden blossoming of one's self-confidence - and there are familiar lines and some unconvincing readings to go with the trite, cliched character of the boozy, easy next-door neighbour. But damn it if this isn't the funniest, loveliest film I've seen in ages, with a perfectly-pitched central relationship, a sure-footed story leading to a hugely satisfying climax, and a staggering performance from Rockwell as the wise, reflective, comically phantasmagoric Owen: a true screen maverick but one with a real and recognisable human frailty."

3. Paperman



Director: John Kahrs
What we said:"An intoxicating short: a silent, black-and-white masterwork that pays oblique - and then overt - homage to The Red Balloon, as a paper plane with a mind of its own (and a fair few friends) tries to unite two lonely souls. It's extraordinary."

4. Wreck-It Ralph



Director: Rich Moore
Starring (voice only): John C. Reilly, Jack McBrayer, Jane Lynch and Sarah Silverman
What we said:"We've seen a friendship between a hulking monster with a heart of gold and a sweet, brown-haired little girl before - in exec producer John Lasseter's Monsters, Inc. - and yet this feels so fresh and funny and original. We've been pitched into a 3D video game world packed with peril and racing cars, in the execrable Spy Kids 3: Game Over, but that was a film that did almost everything wrong, just as this one does almost everything right. There's a sense of ambition and imagination here that's been missing from most Disney animations since its brief renaissance in the '90s - I haven't seen them do anything this good since The Lion King."Full review.

5. Django Unchained



Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kerry Washington
What we said:"Tarantino’s direction has seemed to falter in recent years, being geared towards people with the world’s shortest attention span (Kill Bill: Vol 2), those with limitless patience who really like fire and blood (UpROARious P0th3ads), or sado-masochists (Death Proof). Here he’s absolutely on top form, delivering the requisite thrills through a fusion of pyrotechnics and restraint that he hasn’t had in check since Pulp Fiction. And this is, unquestionably, his best film since Pulp Fiction: a masterful, genre-bending movie that’s full of superb exchanges and exceptional individual scenes, but also works as a compelling and consummately confident whole."Full review.

6. Nebraska



Director: Alexander Payne
Starring: Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb and Bob Odenkirk
What we said:"A(nother) road movie about old age and family: an unsentimental, monochrome variation on the likes of Don't Come Knocking and The Straight Story, bearing the unmistakable handprint of the mighty Alexander Payne."Full review.

7. Blue Jasmine



Director: Woody Allen
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Alec Baldwin, Peter Sarsgaard and Sally Hawkins
What we said:"Woody Allen’s erratic latter-day renaissance continues with this throbbingly neurotic update of A Streetcar Named Desire. Back from Europe, he proves at home in San Fran, with a central character he understands, and who feels completely human, thanks to a writer on form and an actress on fire."Full review.

8. Gravity



Director: Alfonso Cuaron
Starring: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, Ed Harris and Orto Ignatiussen
What we said:"This film turned me into the aliens from Toy Story. 3D tears in zero gravity? 'Oooooooooooooh.'"Full review.

9. The World's End



Director: Edgar Wright
Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Martin Freeman and Rosamund Pike
What we said:"The first half is a wonder: affecting, surprising - with a first scene just as clever as Wreck-It Ralph's similar opening salvo - and full of brilliant gags. Despite being the weakest of Wright's "Cornetto trilogy", it's a fitting wrap-up too: narratively the most inconsistent, with an unconvincing, barely escalating external threat - a legion of blue-blooded aliens - but also the most ambitious, and arguably successful of the three in terms of characterisation, emotional maturity and belly laughs."Full review.

10. The Place Beyond the Pines



Director: Derek Cianfrance
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes and Anthony Pizza
What we said:"People Magazine's two sexiest men of 2011, together at last. It begins as Drive, turns into Prince of the City and then becomes a film all its own, and all the better for it: an epic tale of fathers and sons, heading inexorably for that place beyond the pines. I admire the film's sense of grandeur, its scope and scale, the energy of the action interludes, the artistry of much of the storytelling, and the intensity of the performances."Full review.

Here's the second part of my review of the year, dealing not with new movies, but with the best old ones I came across this year. For the other half, my top 10 of 2013, click here.

In brief:


The man and woman of the year. At least for me. (Only for me.)

Crazes: Clara Bow, Clint Eastwood, Michelle Yeoh
Continuing preoccupations: Documentaries, silent film, Myrna Loy
Stuff I caught up on: Martial arts movies, things I taped on video nearly 10 years ago and never watched and then decided I had to because I was having a clear-out.
Revelations: MGM's 1936 Romeo and Juliet being one of the best Shakespeare adaptations ever put on film - and Leslie Howard proving that he could be as good at drama as he was at comedy (for once).
A few performances that stuck with me: Clint in Unforgiven, Lake and McCrea in Sullivan's Travels, and, in terms of new ones, the boy (Thomas Doret) in Kid with a Bike.
Happiest surprises:Tootsie being nothing like any other drag film I'd ever seen (more below), Clara Bow offering a vivid, sexually-charged silent counterpoint to the virginal stylings of last year's breakout success, Janet Gaynor. My most(/only) extravagant purchase of the year was an iPhone cover from the BFI shop, showing Gaynor and Charlie Farrell in Street Angel.
Biggest disappointment:Cloudy 2 was so lazy and uninspired that it hurt my feelings.
Oddest films: Abel Gance's Napoleon was immense, avant garde and frequently baffling. And made in 1927. I'd forgotten how incredibly gruelling Dumbo is, especially for a kids' film.
Worst films: In just about any other year, Peggy Sue Got Married would walk it. I think Nicolas Cage's performance might be the worst I have ever seen in a movie. But this was the year I saw What's Your Number? I didn't know films that bad could actually exist.


Napoleon. Never knowingly not massive and arty.

Tell us about some great movies you saw that no-one's really heard of: Clara Bow's last film, Hoop-La, isn't available on DVD, but it should be. It's a staggering last hurrah: not her best movie, but quite possibly her best performance. Union Depot is a terrific Pre-Code cocktail that takes a dozen genres, shakes them and just goes with it. The Silent Partner isn't as well known as some of its '70s crime film cronies, but it's a cut above - if sometimes a little too nasty.
Some favourite moments: The scene between Dustin Hoffman and Charles Durning at the bar in Tootsie handled almost impossible material in the most staggeringly confident, virtuosic manner. The Intouchables made me smile no end, and Myrna got me choked up, as ever, in When Ladies Meet. And some least favourite moments: All of What's Your Number?, Ginger Rogers spoiling otherwise spot-on silent movie pastiches by mugging in Dreamboat, and any scenes featuring '30s annoyance Edna May Oliver, Joan Crawford or Nicolas Cage.
The funniest jokes: Most of Sam Rockwell's patter in The Way, Way Back was ludicrously funny. The "dirty great sea monster" gag in The Pirates! is sublime. Mr Poppy running out of the other door in Nativity! made me lose control of my face.
2013 was... The year I got married and finished the first draft of a book. Woop woop.
Best fight scene: I have a soft spot for the amazing market brawl at the start of Ip Man 2. Shame about the rest of the film.
Best film I saw at the cinema:Frances Ha or Napoleon. I've wanted to see the latter in all of its true glory for nine years, and it didn't disappoint.
I was bored by: A few too many, but Track of the Cat took things to a whole new level. I am reviewing my Mitchum completism as a result, as well as my slavish devotion to Philip French.
I wrote this pretty good review of _______________, you should read it if you have a minute:Remember My Forgotten Man, my favourite production number of all time.
Total number of films I've seen (new watches in brackets): 271 (230)

***

Top 20 "Discoveries" of 2013
These weren't new releases, just things I caught for the first time in the past 12 months.


1. Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012) is remarkable in every way: stunning to look at, full of jaw-droppingly lyrical dialogue and blessed with a triumphant, eminently hummable Cajun soundtrack. Lit by a multitude of brilliant sequences that seem to come out of nowhere, but don't, and dominated by Wallis's heroics (including some excellent screaming), it packs an emotional punch like nothing else I've seen in years. Full review.


2. Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982) is one of the great films, a rare movie that employs drag to interrogate gender stereotypes, not to sit lazily with them, smirking away. It's streaked with greasepaint, charmingly scored, richly romantic, hysterically funny and remarkably poignant. And the last 40 minutes is just utterly sensational. Full review.


3. Mantrap (Victor Fleming, 1926) - Clara Bow is at her absolute best as a combustible bundle of sex who heads to the country, and proceeds to drive all the men completely wild. Mantrap was her favourite of her films, and you can see why. It's lovely to look at, zips by in a flash and has at its centre one of the funniest, sensual and most startlingly charismatic performances I've ever seen. Full review.


4. Intouchables (Oliver Nakache and Eric Toledano, 2011) aka The Intouchables - Ladies and gentleman, I think we have a new comfort movie. And what a beautiful film it is: one of the funniest I've ever seen, and among the sweetest too. Omar Sy is an uneducated Senegalese immigrant from the Projects who applies to become a full-time carer to unhappy, wealthy quadriplegic Francois Cluzet, so he can complete his benefit form. Instead, he gets the job. Cluzet doesn't care about his background, he wants a man without pity, and he gets one - Sy's contempt for modern art, hilarity at high culture, and exuberant dancing to Earth, Wind & Fire are a bonus. Full review.


5. The Descendants (Alexander Payne, 2011) - One of the finest of the decade so far, a stunning, beautiful and utterly unpredictable comedy-drama, a perfectly-pitched rumination on existence, in all its chaotic, tragi-comic complexity. It's intelligent, incisive and poignant, its nuanced plotting, distinctive dialogue and glorious central performance accompanied by one of the most exquisite scores of recent decades, a Cooder-ish guitar accompaniment rich in authentic Hawaiian flavour. Full review.


6. Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941) - If Ball of Fire is Howard Hawks' best film - his most enchanting, entrancing and affecting - then Sergeant York has a claim to being his greatest: an astonishingly ambitious piece of storytelling, with sweep and style and a tremendous universality, that's also rooted in the personal. Its first half is a pastoral masterpiece (pastorpiece?) in the vein of Tol'able David, staggeringly shot in charcoal tones by Sol Polito, and chronicling hellraiser Alvin York's conversion to Christianity, within an isolated mountain community. The second follows Alvin (Gary Cooper) as he wrestles with his conscience upon being drafted during WWI, and winds up a war hero, via one of the greatest battle sequences ever filmed. Full review.


7. Le gamin au vélo (Dardenne brothers, 2011) aka The Kid with a Bike has elements of fatalism without being pessimistic, tells a simple story that never looks for an easy way out, and eschews sentimentality while radiating a bold and uncompromising sense of humanity. It moved me very deeply. Full review.


8. Wings (William Wellman, 1927) - A landmark of action cinema that perfectly blends jaw-dropping spectacle, intense bromance and compelling human drama. And features a lovely little teddy bear. Full review.


9. Yip Man aka Ip Man (Wilson Yip, 2008) - A back-to-basics kung fu classic with a realistic setting, a powerful story and a series of superbly-choreographed fight scenes that place an accent on technical skill, and possess a heartening reverence for visual clarity. It's also rooted in a stunning evocation of time and place, complete with poignant, beautiful bleached-out cinematography that calls to mind old sepia photos. Full review.


10. Of Mice and Men (Lewis Milestone, 1939) - Lewis Milestone's translation of the Steinbeck novella is an immersive, extraordinary powerful experience, exceptionally well-acted, particularly by Chaney and Meredith, and shot in painterly tones by Norbert Brodine. The two key scenes here - the first concerning the potential shooting of a dog, the second the potential shooting of a man - are dealt with perfectly, eliciting a nauseating dread and bitter anguish quite unlike anything I've felt watching a movie before. Full review.


11. Somewhere in Time (Jeannot Szwarc, 1980) - This time-travelling love story was panned on release, but has since attracted an obsessive following, and with good reason. It's wonderfully imaginative, extremely sure-footed, and has a heightened romantic sensibility reminiscent of both Brief Encounter and The Ghost and Mrs Muir, with a strong sense of conviction and an engaging unpretentiousness across both the performances and direction. Full review.


12. The Hired Hand (Peter Fonda, 1971) is a New Hollywood masterpiece from Peter Fonda, a reflective Western in which redemption comes not through revenge, but romance, in all its selfish, selfless glory. Full review.


13. Un long dimanche de fiançailles (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004) aka A Very Long Engagement - Jeunet’s follow-up to the incomparable Amélie is a transcendent romance, a complex mystery (with no shortage of whimsy) and a chilling evocation of the horror and futility of war, as Mathilde (Audrey Tautou) searches for her fiancé, one of five soldiers sentenced to death for desertion at Bingo Crépuscule three years earlier. It’s an extraordinarily successful melding of apparently incompatible moods and genres. Full review.


14. The Marriage Circle (Ernst Lubitsch, 1924) - Lubitsch's favourite of his own films, musicalised by the director eight years later as One Hour with You, is a perfectly crafted comedy-drama on his favoured topic of adultery. It's missing the catchy tunes and lush romanticism of the later film, but it's funnier, sexier and more resonant (thanks to its greater realism): masterfully conceived and directed, and with an exceptional turn from Prevost. Full review.


15. Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1927) - I was lucky enough to see the five-and-a-half-hour reconstruction of this silent epic at the Royal Festival Hall in November. The enduring impression is as if Gance had never seen a film before, and no-one had told him that this simply isn't how it's done. Full review.


16. The Imposter (Bart Layton, 2012) - Like Man on Wire, The Imposter features a charismatic Frenchman explaining - direct-to-camera - how he pulled off the impossible. But unlike Philippe Petit - the visionary (and admittedly adulterer) - who walked above cities to bring a sense of wonderment to people's everyday lives, this guy is a sociopath. An incredible story, and a brilliant, compelling and ultimately unforgettable film. Full review.


17. In the Line of Fire (Wolfgang Petersen, 1993) goes to show what can be done when you take an unimpeachable idea, build on it cleverly, cast it perfectly and then hand over the reins to someone like Das Boot director Wolfgang Petersen, a filmmaker who knows when to be patient, when to inject a breathless urgency into the narrative and when to linger on a close-up of an old man nodding appreciatively at Rene Russo's bum. An Ennio Morricone score always helps too, of course. Full review.


18. Hold Back the Dawn (Mitchell Leisen, 1941) - A romantic slow-burner, set in a Mexican border town, with Romanian gigolo Charles Boyer seducing American schoolteacher Olivia De Havilland to get in to the States, then starting to struggle with his conscience. Written in Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett's distinctive style, and directed by Mitchell Leisen - the master of the romantic drama, now almost forgotten - it's a simply beautiful movie: one which completely sneaks up on you, with an original set-up, an unusual atmosphere, and superb performances by the leads. Full review.


19. Laugh, Clown, Laugh (Herbert Brenon, 1928) - A gutting, wonderful film and an important one too: in telling the story of a gifted mime who wins every heart except the one he wants, it must surely have influenced the ultimately incomparable Les enfants du paradis. Full review.


20. The Beguiled (Don Siegel, 1971) - A highlight of ClintFest '13. Siegel's film may not paint on the broadest canvas, but it has as good a feel for the Civil War as any film I've seen, from the sepia-toned credits to the vivid snippets of battle, and, most tellingly here, the realities of living with but not within the conflict: tying a ribbon to your gate as a code for passing soldiers, consuming rumour and counter-rumour of the latest shifts in dominance - a war shadowed in the schoolhouse - and trying to balance one's humanity, or selfish needs, with one's duty. This vividly-recreated world is a backdrop for mind games and power games heated by a bubbling cauldron of awakening sexuality, and heading who-knows-where. Full review.

I've done something about my top "discoveries" for years, but I used to call them "premieres". The new term is more evocative. I borrowed it from this chap.

***

Old favourites: my top 10 rewatches of the year:


1. The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (Ernst Lubitsch, 1927) (My favourite film of 2013, all told)
2. Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) aka Amélie (Twice)
3. Wo hu can long (Ang Lee, 2000) aka Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
4. Lucky Star (Frank Borzage, 1929)
5. Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)
6. Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941)
7. Ride Lonesome (Budd Boetticher, 1959)
8. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Peter Yates, 1973)
9. Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933)
10. Winter's Bone (Debra Granik, 2010)