The Forbidden Hollywood series is a very interesting project curated by Turner Classic Movies, which spotlights mainstream American movies made prior to the big censorship clampdown of 1934. Before the Hays Office cleaned up Hollywood's act/spoiled everyone's fun (delete as applicable), there was a chance for criminals to triumph on screen, for men and women to climb in to bed together willy-nilly (pun intended), and for filmmakers to properly discuss social problems like poverty and political corruption. There were also a lot of bad, tawdry, cynical movies that substituted footage of women in their underwear for things like proper stories, so let's not overly romanticise the Pre-Code era.

This third volume is slightly more concerned with social issues than the first two, which mostly dealt with sex, spotlighting six films made by the fairly talented Hollywood director William Wellman, who made the first Best Picture winner, Wings, as well as one of the best and most politically-charged movies of the '40s, the anti-lynching drama The Ox-Bow Incident, a rare film that took a big subject during this censorious era, and didn't fudge the issue. Handily, the discs in this collection are split into double-bills: the two films on Disc 1 are rubbish, the coupling on Disc 2 are good, and the pair on Disc 3 are great. All the films look fantastic, even the ones that don't really deserve the sparkling restoration job, and there are also the usual strong extras in the shape of bonus shorts and a pair of documentaries about Wellman.

All in all it's a fascinating set, and well worth it if you're interested in old movies, film history, or indeed 20th century American history in general.

The films:



Other Men’s Women (1931) - A well-photographed but very tedious adultery melodrama, with Grant Withers turning from an annoying idiot into a nobly self-destructive grump after falling for the wife (Mary Astor) of his best mate (Regis Toomey), who wants him to spade her backyard.

The male leads are so bland they almost blend into the scenery, and the writers seem to be making it up as they go along, though the perma-horny Astor is quite good (she gave her best performance in Smart Woman the same year) - compensating for her early-talkie delivery with a subtle facial expressiveness - and there's a cool bit where Jimmy Cagney does a dance, he and Joan Blondell adding a bit of colour in support.

If I ever own a café, I will also erect a huge sign outside saying: "EATS". (1.5)

***



The Purchase Price (1932) - Barbara Stanwyck could act the pants off just about everyone in Hollywood, but she sure as hell couldn't sing. She kicks off this Pre-Code Wellman outing by murdering Take Me Away in cold blood, displaying a vocal range of about three notes.

Otherwise, her typically committed performance is the best thing about this mix of witless comedy and nonsensical drama, in which her nightclub singer hides out with an unsuspecting patsy; shades of the immortal Ball of Fire, only she's hiding from her boyfriend (Lyle Talbot), her host is a wheat farmer (George Brent), it's nothing like it, and it's rubbish. It's also very '30s - at one point Talbot says: "You daffy little tomato, I'm bugs about you", which is also very Looney Tunes.

There are a few nice shots right at the end, but it's a largely unenjoyable watch, and Brent's brutish, judgemental character most be about the most dislikeable goody this side of Birth of a Nation. Just watch Murnau's City Girl instead. (1.5)

***



*SPOILERS*
Frisco Jenny (1933) - After a couple of dreadful films, this is more like it: a Madame X variation starring Ruth Chatterton as a brothel madam whose son becomes a crusading DA.

It's disjointed and the ending doesn't quite do it for me, but Chatterton's good, there's a strong supporting cast - including the tragic James Murray, whose poignant piano solo is the highlight - and the story manages to encompass an earthquake, a doomed romance, two shootings, a birth, an adoption, an election campaign, a Prohibition-era police bust, a murder trial and a final shot that may have influenced Citizen Kane.

Not bad in 71 minutes. (3)

***



*A FEW SPOILERS*
Midnight Mary (1933) - Fierce, big-eyed Loretta Young is brutalised, falls in with gangsters and wears a hat like a Cornish pasty in this very watchable, strikingly-edited Pre-Coder.

There isn't a great deal of substance to the movie and its comic relief is awful, but it makes a solid point about poverty turning people to crime, has an appealingly straightforward approach to sex, and trusts its (stunning) visuals far more than most films.

Shot by journeyman James Van Trees, it's positively stuffed to the gills with unusual and original imagery, from fantasy neon signs proclaiming unemployment, to a corpse animatedly juddering against a forced door. And in terms of nailing both a character and a prevailing mood, the first shot of Young is about as good as they come - even if it doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense in retrospect.

Young herself, who soon developed a dislikeable sanctimoniousness in both her on-screen and off-screen personas, is really excellent here. Many have gone gooey about her gargantuan peepers and singular cheekbones, and she is extravagantly lit and kitted out, but it's more her believability and charisma that sells it. She's asked to carry the whole film, and she does it superbly. Well, at least until the ending, which is pure MGM. (3)

***



*SPOILERS*
Wild Boys of the Road (1933) - As I hinted above, before the censorship clampdown of 1934, spearheaded by Nazi sympathiser Joseph Breen, Hollywood made its fair share of problem pictures: hard-hitting social dramas dealing with the big issues of the day.

This angry, bristling and uncompromising portrait of teenagers brutaised by the Depression, hopping freight trains only to find yet more privation and suffering, is one of the greatest.

There's some small town sentiment, a little incongruous character comedy from Sterling Holloway and a soft-hearted ending, but much else you won't have seen from Golden Age Hollywood before, as a marauding army of youths bands together to beg, beat up railroad cops and murder a rapist - all with the film on their side.

This one has timeless imagery to spare: Wellman bloody loved trains, and the footage of the kids pouring out of the carriages or climbing atop them to hurl debris at their oppressors is exhilarating, matched by a pitched battle against cops with water cannons, and a brilliantly conceived climax at a movie theatre. It also has supporting actor Grant Mitchell, usually as interesting as the furniture, giving a rather lovely little performance as a jobless father. And if you think the director shoots freckled Dorothy Coonan in a hazily romantic way, well, he married her the following year.

Taken scene by scene, there are things that don't quite work - wooden line readings, a little hokiness intruding now and then - but the overall effect is unforgettable, with Frankie Darro exhibiting a raw star power in the lead, and the film tackling its subject head on, anticipating The Grapes of Wrath in its story of desperate people forced to wander aimlessly away from their homes and happiness in search of a living. (4)

***



*SOME SPOILERS*

Heroes for Sale (William Wellman, 1933) - Thirteen months later and this film would have had no teeth at all, but in June 1933 Warner Bros was taking few prisoners: Heroes for Sale is all bravado and socialism, ticking off the references to marauding social ills as if they were quarrels in a rom-com or ditties in a musical.

Former silent star Richard Barthelmess, his face still somewhat immobile after a botched face lift, is Tom Morris, the most unlucky man in the world - and an emblem of the Lost Generation - who misses out on war hero status, gets hooked on prescription morphine, loses his job to his own invention, is jailed for trying to stop a riot, and then gets tagged as a Red and run out of town.

Though the film is tonally confused, and has one disastrously ill-conceived comic communist, it's also bracingly modern and fiercely politicised, with an opening 20 and a closing 15 that are extraordinarily and enduringly powerful. Hollywood wouldn't deal with drug addiction in this way again until 1955, while the scenes of broken-down tramps squatting on parkland, eating anything they can lay their hands, are as valuable and resonant as those in Gold Diggers of 1933 and The Grapes of Wrath.

There are great moments in between - landlady Aline MacMahon's heart quietly breaking, the feeling of "Oh dear" that comes with Edwin Maxwell and Douglas Dumbrille taling over your business, and a riot staged in Wellman's distinctive, tear-gas streaked style - but it's those bold and brilliant bookends that make it one of the key films of its era, before Hollywood found that its function was now to distract from the status quo, not to drag the nation's ills beneath its searing lens. (3.5)

***

Other things I've been watching lately:



Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman, 1955) - Bergman does sex comedy - and the result is a deep, delicate, just about perfect movie, like the best of Lubitsch and Ophüls mixed with Partie de campagne. And while it's influenced everyone from New York-based Jewish songwriter Stephen Sondheim to New York-based Jewish filmmaker Woody Allen, the original remains by far the best.

A lawyer, his young wife, his mistress, her lover, her lover's wife, the mistress's mother, the lawyer's son and a couple of horny servants flirt, argue and try to cop off with each other (except the mum), the whole group ultimately coming together for a sunlit weekend in the country.

Beautifully written, acted and photographed, it's equal parts sentiment, melancholia, absurdism, witty badinage, and timeless, mind-expanding philosophy on the nature of love, lust and language, full of surprises, clever bon mots and rich characterisation. There's even a bit where someone falls in a puddle.

I do wish Paul Giamatti was in it, though, so he could shout: "I am not drinking any wine containing stallion semen!"(4)

***



Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942) - Boy meets girl, boy marries girl, girl accidentally turns into a bloodthirsty panther. (3.5)My full review of the film for MovieMail is here.

***



*A FEW SPOILERS*
Flamingo Road (Michael Curtiz, 1949) - A superior, noir-tinged soap, with carnival dancer Joan Crawford pitching her tent in the town of Boldon, falling in love with weak-willed deputy sheriff Zachary Scott, and tangling endlessly with his boss, a crooked, ferocious, sweat-drenched politico played by Sydney Greenstreet.

You'd never mistake it for great literature, nor real life, but it's beautifully directed by Curtiz, the dialogue is often very rich, and the performances are a treat, with Crawford far better than usual, Scott making a fine transition from noble to feeble, Fred Clark proving a suitably hard-boiled newspaperman, and Greenstreet positively seizing the film from them as the pungent, hulking, drawling villain. It's a bit mean how people always says his characters are fat, though. Leave him alone, poor chap. (3)

***



*A FEW SPOILERS*
Saratoga (Jack Conway, 1937) - I'm always a bit reticent about these sorts of films. Jean Harlow died after collapsing on the set of Saratoga, with the film subsequently completed using the help of her double, Mary Dees, a pair of binoculars, a floppy hat and some rather cumbersome re-writing. But unlike, say, the final films of River Phoenix, this isn't for the most part an eerie or upsetting experience - more a chance to say a fond farewell to one of the most appealing actresses of her generation.

Despite her ailing health, Harlow at least appears to be in fine fettle - in fact, her spirited performance is the best thing about the movie - and the doubling, with its tragic connotations, is limited to a handful of obvious but minor scenes towards the end. Admittedly the way her character is rather bumped out of the plot for the final third is somewhat telling, but the only moments that properly got me were the "fever" sequence (the last footage Harlow ever shot) and the short scene with Pidgeon and Dees in an ante-room at a party: knowing there'd been another version of this scene, with a heartbreaking denouement, shook me a little. I'm so glad that, after a Harlow-light final 30, we get her back for the closing shot.

Were it not for her dreadfully sad demise, the film would be barely remembered today, since it's just a standard example of MGM production line hokum. The story is less interesting and focused than usual, as bookmaker Clark Gable targets the millionaire fiancé (Walter Pidgeon) of the woman he loves (Harlow), but the pace is fast, Gable's solid and Harlow's lovely, showing again what a good actress she had become, after an uncertain beginning in Hollywood as essentially just some blonde hair with boobs attached. The scene in which she has to puff on a cigar to cover up for the Gable under her sofa displays her considerable comic flair. The supporting cast is also quite impressive, with Una Merkel upstaging veterans Frank Morgan and Lionel Barrymore, playing Gable's fun-loving, horse-loving ex, faithful to her husband, no matter what he might think.

In the pantheon of Harlow films, it's no Libeled Lady, while her role doesn't stretch her like Riffraff, but it's a fair send-off for an eternally underrated performer, and I'm glad MGM put it out, Dees, hats and all. (2.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Sorry I went AWOL for a while - I've been busy. Now without additional ado, please let me welcome you to Westival, in which I rewatch all of Wes Anderson's feature films in order. Except Fantastic Mr Fox, because it's rubbish. I'll probably get around to the shorts too at some stage.



Bottle Rocket (1996) is Wes Anderson’s first film and arguably his funniest: an extraordinarily assured debut that established his sense of the absurd and his off-kilter sentimentality, if few of the stylistic concerns that have gone on to dominate his work.

So we get a brilliant passage in which Anthony (Luke Wilson) and his loose cannon of a best mate Dignan (Owen Wilson) have a walk-and-talk that turns into a burglary that turns out to be of Anthony’s parents’ house that turns into a row about Dignan’s stepfather… but throughout the sequence Anderson’s meticulous (some would say alarmingly anal) sense of symmetrical composition is notably absent – a bit of slo-mo the movie’s only real sign that the director was about to establish himself as one of the most visually distinctive directors of his generation.

And I’m OK with that. I’m a fan of Anderson’s work, but I’m not someone who gets overly excited about framing and shot duration – I prefer jokes and bits that make me go slightly weepy. If the film has a problem, and it has a little one, it isn’t that it’s relatively pedestrian in the way some of it looks, it’s that the story sags a touch in places, at about the point it introduces a love story that’s very sweet-natured – and positively Jarmuschian in its hurdling of the language barrier – but more conventional and less amusing than much of what leads up to it. And then again in the coda.

It is an extremely good film, though. There’s the beautifully delicate handling of mental illness, which is a real strong suit of Anderson’s: “You’re so complicated,” a woman tells former psychiatric hospital patient Anthony as they lounge by a pool. “I try not to be,” he replies. There’s Owen Wilson’s spectacular, star-making performance (before Shanghai Noon booted him into the stratosphere) as the wonky-nosed, crew-cutted, deeply sensitive Dignan. And there’s a succession of simply brilliant jokes, including two of the best that I think have ever been put on film. The first is Dignan’s response to his friend Bob going AWOL. And the other is everything that hapless safecracker Kumar (Kumar Pallana) does during the spectacularly good heist sequence that concludes the picture proper.

That Anderson is happy to break off from such comic brilliance for a succession of heartbreaking asides is testament to the confidence clearly coursing through the man, even at this early stage. His co-writer, Owen Wilson, was less sure of himself, pleading with Anderson not to release the film as he was convinced it would mark the end of both their careers.

Anderson would make greater films – a whole succession of them that we're currently rewatching for what Mrs Rick dubs “Westival” – but this one shouldn’t get overlooked in light of Tenenbaums and the rest. It’s a little beauty, its unpredictable sense of humour allied to a truly beguiling tenderness. (3.5)



Rushmore (1998) - Meet someone who has a problem with Rushmore, and they’ll tell you they don’t like Max Fisher (Jason Schwartzman), the insufferable teenage twerp on whom the movie centres, spreading himself thinly across a dozen school clubs and engaging in an obsessive courtship of school teacher Olivia Williams (who's simply superb). That, though, is the point: you’re not supposed to like Max, up until the model aeroplane scene, where he first exhibits empathy, turning him from a fitfully impressive pseudo prodigy into a proper person.

Anderson’s second film is one of his greatest: a meticulously constructed, almost uncategorisably personal work about love, death, pretension, catharsis and growing up, full of brilliant one-liners (“She was my Rushmore” “Were you in the shit?”) and self-contained sequences of rare originality that combine to form a magnificent whole.

This time it was Murray coming out of the elevator that destroyed me. “I’m a little lonely these days..."(4)



The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) - Three times in the last 10 minutes of The Royal Tenenbaums, someone utters a sentimental line that begins with the words, "I know...", and three times it takes the breath away, Anderson repeatedly hitting the release valve after a sad, reflective movie otherwise dominated by duplicity, longing and quiet desperation.

Tenenbaums is funny at times, even quirky, but it's more often heartbreaking, as Luke Wilson and Gwyneth Paltrow somehow dominate a movie featuring Gene Hackman and Anjelica Huston: a sprawling story of useless promise and potential gone to waste for want of human warmth. When the film uncovers that latent emotion, the results are revolutionary. (4)



The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004) - Wes Anderson's fourth movie, and his first to get a bit of a kicking, is stylistically stunning - evoking a meticulously detailed, self-contained world - and has many fine quiet moments between marine documentarian Zissou (Bill Murray) and his possible son (Owen Wilson).

Better yet, it boasts a remarkable USP in the shape of the petty, bruised but fiercely loyal Klaus (Willem Dafoe), whose accidental mutiny, after Murray's "Do you all... not like me any more?" line is a typically virtuosic melding of pathos and comedy in the Anderson tradition.

The film as a whole, though, is slightly disjointed, with a strange number of fragmented scenes and continuity errors - as characters make cryptic references to sequences cut from the finished article - and a few characters who are either erratically drawn (Cate Blanchett's English reporter) or plain old uninteresting (Michael Gambon).

There are unquestionably some beautiful moments, not least Zissou's tears in the observation pod, but it is ultimately a movie of great moments, rather than a truly great movie. (3)



The Darjeeling Limited (2007) - Of all Wes Anderson's films, this is the one that seems most resistant to formula. But whether that's because it's original and narratively daring, or baggy and slightly incoherent, I'm never entirely sure. And we're on, ooh, viewing number five now, I think.

It begins as a straightforward story about three warring brothers - each scarred, one visibly, two not - who resolve to go on a trans-India journey aboard the titular train. The first half of the film is funny and light and well-scored, without really adding up to very much. Then the trio get turfed off the train, and the movie goes in news and fascinating directions, with Jason Schwartzman's send-off to Sweet Lime, that gutting scene in the river, and the look on Anjelica Huston's face as her monastic mother communicates with her children, entirely without words.

The Darjeeling Limited does feel episodic and oddly paced, as if some crucial scenes are missing and superfluous ones tacked onto the end, while as much as I admired the flashback sequence when I first saw it, nowadays it doesn't seem to add much besides a few extra minutes on the running time. But it is also a very touching, emotionally tender piece, with several outstanding comic moments, a couple of very good performances and perhaps the best one that Owen Wilson has ever given. (3.5)



Moonrise Kingdom (2012) - Watching all of Wes Anderson's features back-to-back (except Fantastic Mr Fox, obviously) has been an instructive, some would say unforgivably nerdy pursuit, revealing the ways in which has talent has both unfurled and declined.

Because Moonrise Kingdom has one of his most poignant and arresting central stories - a sort of Tenenbaums Babies, if you will - illustrating just how refined his sense of the absurd and the absurdly, deadpan-ly sentimental has become. But it also strolls deleteriously into the realm of caricature and overloads its simple, affecting narrative with cartoonish characters given too little time or attention to truly flourish.

Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman are just about perfect, in that scarcely emotive, none-more-Anderson manner, as a pair of 12-year-old runaways joined by love and mutual emotional damage, and hunted by a lonely, lovelorn cop (Bruce Willis), a guileless scoutmaster (Edward Norton), and Social Services (Tilda Swinton, again proving that she is the indie Meryl Streep, her popularity with notably fine directors rather out of proportion to the size of her talent).

That gloriously uncynical romance, full of droll one-liners ("I love you, but you don't know what you're talking about") gives the film a lolloping but intense emotional thrust, which sustains it through character overload (Harvey Keitel - yawn), instances of detached smugness and a curiously uninteresting, pretentious subplot about Hayward's sad-eyed parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDoormat) that feels like a parody of the director's best work.

There's an hour-long film inside this one that's among the finest and most touching things Anderson has ever done, and both Willis and Norton score in their sympathetic supporting parts, but the movie as a whole doesn't ultimately soar like Mordecai, becoming slightly compromised and self-satisfied, before turning in on itself at the end. (3)

***

OTHER MOVIES:



CINEMA: Calvary (John Michael McDonagh, 2014) is being sold as a "black comedy", but that's a misleading tag. It's actually a dark, state-of-the-nation drama that just happens to be full of absurdist humour: a succession of foul-mouthed, philosophical conversations between a rural priest (Brendan Gleeson) and a succession of archetypes reflecting the vices and virtues of modern Ireland, one of whom wants to murder him.

The film is erratic - more successful dealing with questions of faith and the issue of church-sponsored paedophilia than tackling, say, the banking crisis - McDonagh has a rather ugly way of shooting interiors, and Gleeson makes the eclectic supporting cast look almost amateurish.

But his imposing, multi-layered characterisation is another to add to a rapidly swelling list, the director's acerbic, loquacious style of writing is enjoyable when not reverting to self-reference, and the passages dealing with that collision between belief and the horrors of the real world are often very powerful indeed. (3)

***



CINEMA: We Are the Best! (Lukas Moodysson, 2013) - An appealing, rough-edged portrait of two boyish teenage girls who start their own punk band, enlisting the help of a shy, bullied Christian called Hedvig, who's entirely capable of rocking out.

Lukas Moodyson's latest, which harks back to his special early films like Fucking Amal, is an enjoyable film based on a novel by his wife, and paying out considerably in the currency of awkwardness, effectively nailing the physical and emotional discomfort of adolescence. Ultimately, though, it begins to drift disappointingly into formula, with a completely uninteresting romantic subplot cursed by surely the very antithesis of the punk spirit: conventionality.

Perhaps the movie merely suffers from "Young Adam syndrome" (others may know it as "that weird thing with Man of Steel"), in that I'm still waiting to see the masterpiece I glimpsed in the trailer, which seemed an extraordinarily smart, funny and charming work. It's very nicely acted, though, by Mira Barkhammer − as the bespectacled Bobo − and the dynamic, mohawk-sporting Mira Grosin, who's surely destined for enormous things, while the ending should leave you with a grin plastered from one excessively pierced ear to the other. (3)

***



CINEMA: Muppets Most Wanted (James Bobin, 2014) - After the unadulterated triumph that was 2011's The Muppets, a touching, nostalgic treat with superb songs, where were the gang supposed to go next? That's the question posed by the opening scene of this sequel and in truth it's never properly answered, except prosaically by Ricky Gervais: "on a world tour".

The film starts off brilliantly, with a succession of great gags, a surprisingly funny turn from Gervais and the inspired introduction of an evil Russian frog called Constantine, who inveigles his way into the Muppets, posing as Kermit and promising the others whatever they want. But as the movie progresses, and the celeb cameos rack up, it gets broader and broader, until the real Kermit's gulag inmates are enthusiastically staging a ballet, which is apparently funny because they're tough, burly men (clue: it's not funny).

It's all harmless enough, and not the disaster some of the more exciteably negative critics have claimed, it's just a bit long and lazy and increasingly heavy-handed in both its comic and sentimental scenes. Constantine is very funny, though, and the running gag about his incredibly poor attempts to replicate the behaviour of his lookalike never stops being funny. (2.5)

***



A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Elia Kazan, 1945) - There's a time to bring a certain scholarly objectivity to a review, to place a film in its historical context, to discuss its relative merits and to ruminate emphatically if dispassionately upon its place in the cinematic canon. And then there's a time to shout from the rooftops: 'Hurray! One of my favourite 10 films of all time is finally − but, finally − out on DVD!'

Because Elia Kazan's debut isn't just one of the key artistic works of the studio era, but the sort of beguiling experience that reminds you why you fell in love with movies in the first place.

Adapted from Betty Smith's autobiographical memoir, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a coming-of-age drama of unmatched potency and poignancy, told through the eyes of an idealistic adolescent, Francie Nolan (Peggy Ann Garner). Growing up in a Brooklyn tenement, she enjoys an uncertain relationship with her loving but steely mother (Dorothy McGuire), while idealising her alcoholic, periodically loquacious pipe dreamer of a father (James Dunn) beyond anything else in the world.

Essentially one heartbreaking sequence after another, with occasional recourse to hard-won catharsis, it's an intensely moving, dramatically stunning movie, perhaps lacking the documentary-style realism that the director would bring to subsequent films like On the Waterfront, but attaining a simple emotional truth that underscores every moment. Kazan was fresh from the theatre, and his gift for coaxing revelatory, even revolutionary performances from his actors was never more in evidence. For A Tree Grows in Brooklyn contains not one, not two, but three of the greatest performances ever committed to celluloid.

There's McGuire, delivering the finest turn of a miraculous year in which she also made The Spiral Staircase and The Enchanted Cottage, as the fiercely protective mother who fears growing hard and cold in the face of poverty. Then Garner, playing every moment to perfection as the sweet-natured teen with the world on her shoulders. And finally Dunn, towering above all as the twinkly-eyed Irish charmer beset by guilt and self-loathing: the definitive cinematic pipe dreamer. It's a film for the ages, finally − but, finally − out on DVD. (4)

***



Blackfish (Gabriela Cowperthwaite, 2013) - What looks at first glance like an investigation into a single tragedy - the death of a SeaWorld trainer at the theme park in 2010 - turns out to be an indictment of the whole rotten business, and indeed of our relationship with the natural world.

From the neurologist who explains that "killer whales" possess a more advanced sense of empathy than humans, to the hunter still wracked with guilt at capturing baby orcas almost 40 years ago, via testimony from a litany of SeaWorld trainers, each offering a chilling insight into the disconnect between the business's image and the stark reality, it's one of the most horrifying, intensely upsetting documentaries I've ever seen. It's also extremely well put together, featuring some bold - and largely successful - editorial choices, and a fittingly eerie score.

If anyone tells you they're off to SeaWorld, give them a copy to watch on the way. (3.5)

***



My Summer of Love (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2004) - This is another film about the intense friendship between two teenage girls, rather closer to the frenzied Heavenly Creatures than something like Me without You.

Natalie Press is a dour, freckled young woman from Yorkshire who retreats into solitude after her psychotic brother (Paddy Considine) becomes a born-again Christian. Then one day she meets the bored, upper-class, sexually-confident Tamsin (Emily Blunt), and they start talking to one another in that slightly stilted, low-budget British fashion. Also kissing.

The film has a certain something, with an unusual visual sense that reminded me a little of Terence Davies's The Neon Bible, an extremely good performance from Considine, and an important early credit for Blunt. But it's also over-familiar and poorly scripted, with no real point to it and an eleventh-hour twist that's entertaining and unexpected, but undercuts and negates much of what precedes it. (2)

***



A Civil Action (Steven Zaillian, 1998) - A big-budget '90s courtroom drama, based on a true story, with superficial prosecutor John Travolta investigating the death of eight kids living close to a toxic waste site. As he discovers his long lost sense of humanity, he meets a formidable adversary in the shape of psychopathic, slightly silly defence attorney Robert Duvall.

It isn't exactly a bad film, just quite annoyingly directed and scored, somewhat over-familiar - playing like a much less successful version of Coppola's The Rainmaker - and so slick, glossy and calculating that it's impossible to penetrate its surface to actually feel anything - except perhaps in the closing scenes. (2)

***

Cary Grant double-bill:



Thirty Day Princess (Marion Gering, 1934) - One of Preston Sturges' first credited scripts, with just enough evidence of that singular genius's disarming pathos and unique comic brain to make it work.

Sylvia Sidney - the mistress of Paramount chief B. P. Schulberg, vintage gossip fans! - stars in a dual role as a European princess and the down-on-her-luck actress who's hired to impersonate her on a state visit to New York, only to fall in love with a cynical newspaper editor (Cary Grant).

While Sturges and co-writer Frank Partos were channelling The Prisoner of Zenda, the effortless gender swap surely prepared Hollywood for the idea of doing the story straight, first with the patchy Princess O'Rourke and then in that beguiling slice of Romanic, romantic near-perfection, Roman Holiday, while Sturges' own 1941 smash, The Lady Eve, traded on a similarly duplicitous dame: Barbara Stanwyck's working class con woman malevolently masquerading as an heiress.

Judged on its merits rather than its influence, Thirty-Day Princess is somewhat less impressive: essentially entertaining, but with a few dead ends, a smattering of longueurs, and a hopeless running gag about a suitor with a lisp. There's also the awkward sight of Grant turning in one of those pre-Awful Truth appearances where he doesn't seem quite sure who he is or what he's for - though he does thump somebody in the face, resulting in the most delightfully '30s version of mussed up hair.

Every so often, though, there's some heartfelt exchange or ingeniously inverted line that's pure Sturges, signalling that the future titan of screwball comedy is limbering up, ready to unleash that string of classics largely unequalled in the annals of American cinema. (2.5)



Big Brown Eyes (Raoul Walsh, 1936) - A strange comic melodrama full of stars-to-be, as cop Cary Grant and his reporter girlfriend Joan Bennett do battle with a slimy crimelord (Walter Pidgeon) and his florally-minded heavy (Lloyd Nolan). The script is confusing and full of overwritten dialogue, but the movie is worth seeing for some genuinely striking direction from Walsh - especially in a courtroom sequence shot entirely at rough angles - and that quartet of future headliners, each wrestling with their burgeoning persona whilst looking impossibly young and fresh-faced. (2)

***



They Won't Believe Me (Irving Pichel, 1947) - Maybe that's because your story is so silly.

This is a watchable but intensely daft melonoirma (this is my new word), with Robert Young as a weak-willed philanderer on trial for the murder of his wife, and regaling the jurors with the story of his life - and his dalliances with a variety of unstable women, including Susan Hayward and Jane Greer.

Told in woozy flashback with the help of an excessive first-person voiceover, it's no great shakes in terms of direction or dialogue, though the far-fetched story is consistently interesting for the first hour, the characterisation deals in a few shades of grey, and pouty Hayward - talking out of the side of her face - is very lively in a key early credit.

Even given the incredible material, it would doubtless have worked better with someone more imposing or lyrical than Young in the lead (though he does look amusingly like George Washington with a flannel on his head), and the poetry of fellow RKO noirs like Out of the Past and Murder, My Sweet is nowhere to be found, but it does boast a few surprises, including a famous ending that's no more or less improbable than the rest of it. (2)

***

BOOK:



A Spy Among Friends by Ben MacIntyre (2014) - Another first-rate book in MacIntyre's accessible, novelistic style, full of straightforward sentiment, wry remarks and the three funniest details he can find about every historical figure who enters the story.

The extraordinary tale of Kim Philby, the Cambridge-educated MI6 spy-hunter who was himself a Soviet mole for the best part of 25 years, has been told a great many times, but here McIntyre alights on a new angle, framing it as a story of friendship among the "friends", Philby's betrayal enabled and abetted by the trust of two great allies: his ribald, gentlemanly colleague, Nicholas Elliott, and CIA heavy-hitter Jim Angleton.

There are some inevitable gaps in the story, due to the nature of the secret services, but MacIntyre keeps it moving at a cracking pace, addressing the human cost of Philby's actions, incorporating several cameos from the hilariously debauched Guy Burgess, and climaxing with that remarkable meeting between Elliott and Philby in Beirut. "I once looked up to you, Kim," says Elliott. "My God, how I despise you now. I hope you've enough decency left to understand why" - dialogue so poetic, poignant and utterly perfect, it's astonishing to discover that it really did play out that way. (3.5)

***

THEATRE:



*A FEW SPOILERS*
Birdland at the Royal Court Theatre (Carrie Cracknell, 2014)

"Am I being a cock again?" Yes, Paul, you are.

Andrew Scott's empathy vacuum, a global superstar in an electric blue jacket, is the centre of this entertaining, smartly staged and somewhat compromised play, which flits between the universal and the personal, the comic and the heartfelt with such capricious uncertainty that I'm not entirely sure its writer knows what it's about.

Paul travels from Moscow to Paris to London in a whirl of debauchery, demanding home-grown fruit, advocating anal sex (no strings attached) and seducing his best friend Johnny's rather over-eager girlfriend, who promptly kills herself. After that, he's both haunted by her spectre and bafflingly abuses her parents - a comic scene that works well in itself but makes no sense in the wider context - before coming clean to Johnny, an act of compassion that would have given us something to cling on to had it happened an hour before.

The opening scene aside, with its irritatingly mannered inflections, Simon Stephens' dialogue is solid: neither naturalistic nor heightened, certainly rich in repetition, but selling its points about wealth and fame with some élan. And while you can quibble with staging that laboriously denotes a dream sequence by lowering glass bubbles from the ceiling, the gradual flooding of the performance space to mirror Paul's descent into amoral self-revulsion is the kind of plashy visual metaphor I like.

The performances are good too: Scott, best known as the shrill, psychotic Moriarty in the BBC's Sherlock, is excellent as the play's superficial superstar and Alex Price makes for an agreeably haunted but matter-of-fact foil, while the rest of the cast each play a variety of roles, scoring one minute, struggling the next, before Stephens opts for a third act revelation that's, well, not really the point, is it?

Birdland is never less than entertaining, but it's also less than the sum of its parts, its sporadic insights into the modern world housed in a narrative that seems too purposefully unrealistic to engage with, while undercutting its leading man's heroics by spending its duration examining the environment and the psyche of a cock. (2.5)

In this, your my latest reviews update: great films, bad films, and a book about whether some people are now or have ever been members of the Communist Party.



The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992)

The twist.

That twist.

This mercurial masterpiece of ‘90s cinema has now been reduced to just one thing. Not that its twist isn’t magnificent, but it’s certainly not the film’s raison d’etre, or its reason to be celebrated. It doesn’t explain why the film continues to enrapture, enthral and grow in emotional resonance as the years pass and the viewings rack up. And, unlike most twists, it doesn’t come at the end, but at the halfway point, meaning that if you’ve avoided seeing the film because you think you know how it ends – you really don’t.

The Crying Game is essentially a redrafting of director Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa, but transferred to the world of the Troubles, as an IRA volunteer (Stephen Rea) helps take a British soldier (Forest Whitaker) hostage, then promises to look up his quarry’s girlfriend (Jaye Davidson), should they have to put a bullet through his brain. Nothing pans out as you’d expect, but Rea does end up seeking out the troubled, brutalised and lovelorn Davidson in a vividly-realised East London, and appointing himself her protector.

The film has an Achilles’ heel that’s larger and weaker than almost any other film deserving of classic status, and that is Forest Whitaker. His performance is so hysterically awful that all you can do is gaze in slack-jawed disbelief as you try to come up with credible theories as to how he a) didn’t get sacked, and b) didn’t get banned from Equity. Asked to portray a Jamaican-born Londoner, he opts for an accent that sounds like Dick Van Dyke’s character in Mary Poppins pretending to be Nelson Mandela.

Everything else about the film, though, is perfect. Rea is in the form of his life, delivering one of the performances of the decade as the kind, gentle foot-soldier moved by love and loyalty, particularly in the terrific scene where, asked to provide solace to a condemned man, he leans on Corinthians 13:11 (“When I was a child, I thought as a child…”), only to find it’s no solace at all. “Not a lot of use, are you Fergus?” mangles Whitaker. “Me?”, whispers Rea, his eyes holding an almost unbearable sadness. “No. I’m not good for much.” Davidson proves his equal as an erotically-charged, good-humoured and endlessly appealing creature who works as a hairdresser and moonlights as a torch singer, hinting at a basic duality and the pain searing through her soul. It’s a film about game-playing, identity, mutual reliance and the healing of scars; in her debut, Davidson is asked to carry an astonishing amount of that, and doesn’t put a foot wrong. Adrian Dunbar, Jim Broadbent, Ralph Brown and a bobbed, flawlessly-accented and terrifyingly psychotic Miranda Richardson round out a phenomenally impressive cast.

It’s also a brilliantly plotted film, one of the few movies of recent years that’s both consistently unpredictable and overwhelmingly satisfying, as it shifts location, genre and mood, beginning as a moral thriller, lighting a sensual slow-burn that casts the early London scenes in a woozy, gorgeous glow, then fashioning a love story of uncommon brilliance and breathtaking originality.

It's a cast-iron masterpiece.

And yet all anyone talks about is that bloody twist. (4)

***



"Now, you know I've got the legal right to go in there hunting the man any place I want?"
"I know you'd be wasting your time and pissing me off."
CINEMA: Winter's Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) - I went to see this at the cinema on Saturday, and I'm going to keep doing it until someone makes a better movie.

Debra Granik's feminist masterwork is the key film of the decade so far: an unorthodox, spine-tingling thriller, a humanist fable, and a staggering study of a good person under almost intolerable pressure. In her breakout role, Jennifer Lawrence is Ree Dolly, a strong, selfless, smart-mouthed 17-year-old living with her vacant mother and two young siblings in Missouri's Ozark Mountains. Once it ran with bootleg moonshine, now this here's Meth Country, and if her crystal-cooking father doesn't turn up for his court hearing, they're going to lose the house, the woods and the whole family unit. So Ree sets out in search of him, facing threats, silence and regular beatings from pinch-faced people who share a lot of the same blood that runs in her veins, and down her face.

There's brutality and violence to spare, but it's the humanity you remember: Lawrence's pleading chat with her mother in the woods, her silent screaming, that beautiful final scene: Ree's essential goodness flawlessly intact despite the intrusions of a cold and often heartless world. There's lyrical imagery - a little girl hopping her hobby horse around on a trampoline, oblivious to the mounting horrors swarming around her sister - Christian bluegrass music that roots you as firmly in this world as a red pin on a Google Map, and a script whose singular, sparse vernacular feels almost intrusively authentic.

Granik finds no nobility in poverty, but she finds plenty in the poor; her vision of a rural community still clinging to some semblance of life as it's ravaged by substance abuse shocking but compassionate. Even the stylistic trappings of Ree's family - grubby clothes, toys outside and tyres in the yard - are synonymous in American film with problem neighbours deserving our fear and contempt; here they're the everyday belongings of ordinary people living their lives the best they can. The director's boundless sense of empathy even extends to Ree's coke-snorting, wife-beating uncle, Teardrop (John Hawkes), a sort of satanic update of the good-bad sidekicks Dan Duryea used to play in '50s Westerns.

Simply everything about Winter's Bone operates on some profound and lofty level, from Lawrence's mesmerising central turn - still by far the finest thing she's done - to its evocation of an insular and restrictive world, deadly to outsiders and even those who belong, and its high-handed attitude to thriller conventions: "Yeah, we can use that; no, we'll sling that; for this bit we're just going to set fire to the rulebook". Movies don't get any better. (4)

***



A Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith, 1929) - A late, great British silent: a dizzying tale of romantic and sexual obsession, its slight story dazzlingly directed by Anthony Asquith.

Uno Henning drops from the sky onto Dartmoor and his silhouetted figure sprints full-pelt across the plains towards his destiny. His destiny? That cottage. The door opens, he advances on a terrified brunette (Norah Baring), she shouts: "Joe!" and suddenly we're flung into their back story. He was a shy, taciturn hairdresser, she a flirtatious manicurist, but were they friends or lovers or is something altogether darker going on?

You could sketch the scenario on a postage stamp and still have room to praise the direction, but what direction it is: surely an influence on Asquith's contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock, and analogous to Murnau's Sunrise in its swaggering confidence and desire to exploit the dying form in every conceivable manner, from a PoV camera vibrating as it receives a head-massage, to a frankly terrifying cacophony of cross-cut paranoia, as Baring goes to the cinema with her new fella, and Henning has a few dark thoughts, all - rather gloriously - whilst watching a Harold Lloyd film.

It's a little masterpiece, and it'll keep you guessing right up to the finish, while exalting you through its refusal to recognise the limits of late silent cinema. (4)

***



I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) - This bruising, brutal slab of social realism was made during that brief period when Hollywood had the opportunity, and the inclination, to take aim at the nation’s ills. In 1932-3, films like Heroes for Sale, Wild Boys of the Road, The Mayor of Hell and Gold Diggers of 1933 (ostensibly a throwaway musical) held a mirror up to Depression-era America, in all its cruelty, drudgery and despair. Packed with righteous rage, these explosive movies went off like dynamite, helping to set the national agenda and changing laws and lives. Then the Hays Code came in, and the mainstream simply wouldn’t touch progressive pictures (with the very rare exception, like Ford and Zanuck’s The Grapes of Wrath in 1940).

Paul Muni is James Allen, a returning soldier who wants something more than a dead-end factory job, but in his quest to become somebody finds only poverty, hunger and wrongful arrest. Sentenced to 10 years on a chain gang, he is brutalised and beaten down, but never beaten. Then, one day, he makes a run for it. The opening 10 is somewhat corny and clunky, and tonally at odds with what follows, but in this context it kind of works: in the eyes of the writers, Muni’s perma-winking mummy’s boy has to be that way for us to root for him; that’s no longer true – if it ever was – but it does make his dehumanisation even more bracing.

The chain gang footage is simply like nothing before or since: figures in striped suits toiling in the boiling sun, treated as less than human by sadistic authority figures. The anti-establishment message, showing the system as corrupt, vindictive and peopled by sociopaths, dispenses with the usual benevolent prison wardens or governors familiar from The Big House and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. Here, the only people with an ounce of decency are the crooks: jug-eared Allen Jenkins – who leaves the bunk house for the last time striking a match on a coffin – Everett Brown as a hulking black sledgehammer-swinger who whacks Muni’s shackles and his ankles, and Edward Ellis (who played The Thin Man), exceptional as an ageing con who shows Muni the ropes.

Though the film seems to ask us to swallow a lot, its more incredible plot points are actually torn from real life, the whole thing based upon Robert E. Burns’ best-selling memoir, I Am a Fugitive From a Georgia Chain Gang. And though it has a handful of obvious flaws, including a smidgen of the obligatory comic relief (thankfully kept to a minimum) and Helen Vinson’s weak, wooden turn as the love of Allen’s life, it remains one of the key movies of its era, with a stunning performance from the stocky, punchy Muni – a proto-John Garfield fresh from Yiddish theatre, via Scarface– virtuosic photography from LeRoy and Sol Polito that perfectly evokes the milieu, and among the all-time great, unresolved endings.

Plus Glenda Farrell as a blackmailing nymphomaniac. Yowzer. (4)

***



Magic in the Moonlight (Woody Allen, 2014) - For the first hour, Woody Allen's latest is a frothy nothing: a light, tone-deaf excursion, with pleasant period trappings but precious few laughs, that sees an exceedingly rational conjuror and professional debunker of mystics (Colin Firth) pitting his wits against a supposed psychic (Emma Stone), who may be preying on a wealthy ex-pat family.

It suffers from all the flaws we came to associate with Allen in the noughties: a tin ear for dialogue, supporting actors playing in the wrong key (Simon McBurney, who's dreadful), and an inability to mine a premise for what it's worth, instead getting caught up in repetition, inanity or gags that would have been chucked out at the redraft stage a couple of decades before.

Then, miraculously, the film arrives at its true purpose, and everything changes. The final third is, simply, magic: genuinely funny, intensely romantic, and with a real point and purpose every bit as poignant and clever as the morals Woody was dishing out in his '80s heyday. It takes a while to get there, but boy is it worth it.

Firth, to his credit, is very good throughout, though especially in that dazzling last half-hour. (2.5)

***



The Dog (Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren, 2013) - This potentially fascinating documentary about the gay bank robber portrayed by Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon doesn't really work, partly because the filmmakers don't seem able to discriminate between the insightful and the irrelevant, and partly because their garrulous hero is an annoying, dislikeable, overbearing idiot - a fact they fail to utilise in their favour.

John Wojtowicz is a self-declared "pervert", a fact we derive less from his confession that he's pre-occupied with sex, than the way he keeps trying to kiss strangers on the face, apparently oblivious to their raging discomfort. The film charts his idiosyncratic existence: how he had his first gay experience whilst in the army, how Vietnam turned him from a Goldwater Republican into a peacenik, and how, in 1972, he took seven hostages at a Chase Manhattan bank in Brooklyn, in an attempt to fund a sex-change operation for his 'wife', Ernie.

What the film doesn't do is ask him how he'd tried to get the money beforehand, how he alighted on the idea of robbing a bank, how he planned the heist, how he recruited his accomplices (beyond meeting them in a bar) or, really, most of the things you'd genuinely be quite interested in finding out about. What it does do is hang around with his mother - once a liberal-minded matriarch, now a wizened, terrifyingly embittered old crow - chat to a couple of his ex-wives (one male, one female), and offer scattershot reminiscences from various gay rights activists and eyewitnesses.

The film took around seven years to finish (Wojtowicz died in 2006, the movie didn't emerge until 2013) which perhaps hints at the unsatisfying and incomplete nature of the footage they'd acquired. Sometimes it will alight on an interesting idea - like the suggestion that its subject's life was dominated for the final 30 years by Dog Day Afternoon - but more often than not, it stumbles around in the dark. In the closing minutes, it seems to be suggesting that Wojtowicz was really a fabulist, but the most incredible thing he ever talks about clearly happened. It was on the news. They made a film about it, with Al Pacino. It's the point of this documentary.

I was looking forward to this one a great deal, and it just didn't really deliver. In some ways that's personal taste - nobody in it seems very honourable or nice or clever or fun to spend time with, and its world is one of pointless debauchery and sickening, senseless violence. But on a more universal level, it's just poor journalism, with key questions left unanswered, meaningless diversions, and a fatal lack of focus. (2)

***



The Marrying Kind (George Cukor, 1952) - Aside from some early walk-ons, Judy Holliday made just eight films, but her name still endures today due to the second of them, a rom-com par excellence by the name of Born Yesterday, for which she won the 1950 Best Actress Oscar.

Half of the eight were scripted by Garson Kanin, an erratic but talented screenwriter and director who often worked in partnership with his wife, part-time character actor Ruth Gordon. Holliday had torn up the screen as a nervy, murderous wife in Adam's Rib, starred in Kanin's Born Yesterday on stage and screen, and would go on to appear in It Should Happen to You, a superlative satire that triples up as an affecting romance and knockout comedy.

The Marrying Kind is sadly the weak link in their collaboration: a dreary, stressful film - co-written with Gordon - about a marriage on the rocks, which has a clever gimmick juxtaposing past reality and self-justifying voiceover, one immensely powerful melodramatic scene, and a memorable monologue from a butcher with his own take on the American Dream, but is largely just footage of Holliday and screen husband Aldo Ray arguing. About everything.

Ray is introduced here as an exciting new screen personality, and - bizarrely - receives a solo credit at the end, telling us to watch out for his next picture. It's wishful thinking: he has a couple of passable moments, but simply can't hold his own against an actress of Holliday's quality, and strangles line readings with a voice like a drunk, chain-smoking Moose Malloy.

Not that this one would have worked anyway: it poses as a realistic examination of a marriage, then throws ludicrous, unrealistic and cartoonish obstacles into the mix, with no apparent comedic or dramatic gain. Then we seem to get to the crux of the matter, only for the film to almost forget the dark ground it's traversed. It's not as bad as Full of Life, the 1957 domestic drama that marks the definite low-point of Holliday's screen career, but it's pretty weak, and there's little of her fire, sparkle or sentimental side on show here, nor director George Cukor's famed sophistication. (2)

See also: I wrote a little bit about Kanin's memoirs in my review of 2014. They came out in 1974, it sometimes takes me a while to catch up. ***



Power of the Press (Lew Landers, 1943) - A hopeless, excruciating collision of small-town patriotic wisdom and WWII propaganda flick, as folksy newspaper editor Guy Kibbee takes over a New York paper infested with fascist fifth columnists, including Hearst-like businessman Otto Kruger, who's in preposterous form.

It's legitimately one of the worst films of the '40s, with a patronising script of relentlessly insulting stupidity, actors repeatedly falling over their dialogue, and an approach to visual composition from minor B-movie legend Lew Landers (name-checked in Gremlins!) that mostly consists of just standing people in a line; some of it isn't even in focus!

Having said that, the film is sort of fascinating from a historical perspective for its snapshot of contemporary politics (including pro-Soviet sentiment), an early Sam Fuller story, and the fact that the blacklisted radical framed for murder is played by an unbilled Larry Parks - the Communist actor who eight years later was fitted up by the HUAC and became one of its most craven informers.

I only watched it because I want to see every movie starring my favourite actor, Lee Tracy (who plays a snappy but spineless, circulation-chasing editor). Unless you're doing the same, which would surprise me, I'd steer clear.

If you want a good old movie about newspapers and ethics, watch Deadline - U.S.A., or Fuller's own Park Row; for the small-town-paper stuff, see It Happens Every Thursday; or to catch Tracy as a newspaper-world whirlwind, try the comic masterpiece Blessed Event or his trivial but entirely entertaining B-movie, The Payoff.

Basically just don't watch this.

***

BOOK



Naming Names by Victor S. Navasky (1980/2003)– “It was a question of choosing to be a ‘hero’, or a shit,” said Ring Lardner, Jr. In 1947, he and 10 other Hollywood screenwriters and directors were jailed and blacklisted for refusing to name and denounce the fellow left-wing radicals with whom they’d consorted during the previous decades. Four years later, when their legal hearings finally ended, the second tranche of subpoenaed witnesses – including actor Larry Parks – were found to be made of somewhat bendier stuff, and so the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) got its names, and Tinseltown proceeded to tear itself to pieces in a seven-year orgy of betrayal and despair. Navasky’s book could perhaps do more to place you in those chilling public testimonies – as cinematic as they were – but is in all other ways the best telling of this story that one could imagine: a forensic, scrupulously even-handed examination of the climate, people and organisations that enabled this to pass: part history, part journalism, part theory (both psychological and sociological), and part devastating moral audit: an angry, righteous polemic about a mass dereliction of duty that destroyed countless lives. Periodic light relief is provided by the pen of Dalton Trumbo, the hilarious blacklisted writer whose witheringly sarcastic letters to his agent and to co-conspirator Albert Mantz occasionally interrupt Navasky’s more methodical prose. (4)

***

Thanks for reading.

Sandy at my office, 1975.

The greatest singer I’ve ever heard is back in the arts pages due to a new biography by Mick Houghton. Though billed as the definitive work on the life of Sandy Denny – it’s the first to be authorised by her estate – it isn't really. It’s sweet and more even-handed than Clinton Heylin’s mean-spirited, typo-ridden book, No More Sad Refrains, and insightful about the folk-rock world that Denny inhabited during the 1960s and ‘70s, but it's noticably weaker on Sandy herself and has problems with properly articulating her tragic demise at 31: while Heylin’s ghoulish account was gruelling to read, this one almost skips over it.

What it may yet do, though, is catapult Sandy back into the public consciousness, a feat not even achieved when a song that she wrote but never recorded ended up soundtracking the BBC's 2012 Olympics coverage. Or, for that matter, when she guested on a record that sold 37 million units.

For the uninitiated, Alexandra Elene MacLean "Sandy" Denny was a pioneering vocalist who battered down the divisions between British folk music and electric rock, firstly by joining Fairport Convention and turning them from a homegrown Jefferson Airplane into the most dynamic traditional band in the world, then with her short-lived Fotheringay ensemble – who threw some age-old American and Australian influences into the mix – and finally with four solo records (and a brief return to Fairport) that scaled unfathomable heights and then plumbed a few depths, as hard living took its toll on her mind, her sense of artistic assurance and her voice, previously an instrument of unique clarity, emotion and power.

Before that fall from health, relevance and grace, though, Sandy was simply untouchable, particularly in the period from 1968 to ’71, when she was completely in control of her mesmeric gift, having built its power, harnessed its mesmeric tone almost free of vibrato, and learned to sing from the depths of a sadly tortured soul.

I still remember the first time I heard her. I must have been about 10, and I thought I'd never heard anything more beautiful. I still think that.

Here, then, are 14 Sandy vocals to enrich your existence (13 of them are on this Spotify playlist):


Buy this record, look how much effort we've gone to with the sleeve.

14. White Dress – Fairport Convention (1974)– By the time Sandy rejoined Fairport in 1974 - by all accounts largely because her womanising husband was now in the band, and she wanted to keep an eye on him, though she also enjoyed the camaraderie - her flawless voice had begun to betray her. This one's a gem, though, as she plaintively pleads with her lover to kiss her and take her dancing. His reward? She might, might, put on a white dress. She's not promising anything. Like Billie Holiday before her, Sandy could at least compensate for her ailing vocal powers with breathtaking emotion and matchless technique. And unlike Billie Holiday, she didn't sound like a frog dying of laryngitis, even when the fags and booze began to bite.
(YouTube / Available on: The Rising of the Moon by Fairport Convention, 1974)

13. Lord Bateman (1971)– The Great Lost Sandy Song is now The Great Found Sandy Song, discovered on the end of an unlabelled reel nearly 40 years after its recording. It's one of the few completely unaccompanied recordings in her canon, with a hypnotic quality similar to the title track of Dylan's Tempest or Anne Briggs' traditional Young Tambling (recorded by Sandy's Fairport as Tam Lin in 1969). Stir yourself from the trance long enough, and you might notice just how long she could go without breathing, and how powerful and on-pitch she stays while doing it.
(YouTube / Available on: The Notes and the Words: A Collection of Demos and Rarities, 2012)

12. It Suits Me Well (1972)– For her second record, Sandy tried writing in a more straightforward style, and the result was many of her best songs. The penultimate track is not about a fabulist, as I'd hoped, but written from the PoV of three different itchy-footed wanderers - a gypsy, a sailor and a circus-hand - for whom "the living it is hard, oh but it suits me well". She apparently dreamed of that existence, with its obvious freedoms, but lacked the temperament (and the mental balance) to ever approach it. Her laidback delivery makes it a delight, and it's ultimately one of her most upbeat numbers, despite the usual tug of melancholia.
(YouTube / Available on: Sandy, 1972)



11. John the Gun (1971)– One of three anti-war songs that Sandy wrote, and the best of the lot, as she takes on the persona of all-time arsehole John the Gun, an amoral if poetic braggart who declares that "ideals of peace are gold which fools have found upon the plains of war", perhaps the finest single line of her songwriting career. There are numerous live versions and alternate studio takes doing the rounds, but none are better than the one which ended up on Sandy's debut solo album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. The first three songs from that record are unassailably great.
(YouTube / Available on: The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, 1971)

10. Who Knows Where the Time Goes – Fairport Convention (1969)– Sandy's signature song ("It was one of my first songs, and I just wish people would listen to some of the other ones," she complained in 1973) has taken on an almost unbearable poignancy following her early death. She had demoed it in 1965, recorded it during a brief stint in The Strawbs in 1967, and watched as Judy Collins' version hit the American charts the next year, but the definitive recording is on Fairport's Unhalfbricking. People keep covering it, but I've no idea why, for how could they possibly improve upon it.
(YouTube / Available on: Unhalfbricking by Fairport Convention, 1968)

9. A Sailor's Life (first version, 1969) – Fairport Convention– Sandy used to sing this song in the dressing room as a warm-up. On 26 February 1969, backstage at Southampton's Adam and Eve Club, the rest of Fairport joined in, and that night they played it for the first time. The recorded version on that year's Unhalfbricking is celebrated for its guitar and violin 'duel' - the kind of thing that folk-rock aficionados find irresistible and everyone else finds unbearable - which takes over after just a couple of verses of Sandy. In the early '90s, this alternate version finally came to light. Free of Dave Swarbrick's exuberant bow-work, it is instead a vocal wonder, with our heroine permitted to belt or breathe out every last lamenting word. Then there's an awful lot of guitar. Such is the all-consuming nature of the redone version that no-one interviewed for Mick Houghton's new book could even remember recording this one.
(YouTube / Available on: The Notes and the Words: A Collection of Demos and Rarities, 2012)

8. The Quiet Land of Erin (BBC session, 1968)– A rare excursion into Irish Gaelic, at least in the choruses, Sandy's version of this beautiful Celtic staple is nothing revolutionary, but bypasses my critical faculties entirely, hitting me in the heart. Having joined Fairport a month earlier, she would soon drag them into the folk realm, and they'd turn her acoustic world electric.
(YouTube / Available on: Sandy Denny: Live at the BBC, 2007)



7. Fotheringay – Fairport Convention (1969)– I can't imagine anyone not being transfixed by the opener from What We Did on Our Holidays - Sandy's first album with Fairport - a picturesque, wintry song about Mary, Queen of Scots' imprisonment, with perhaps Sandy's most accessibly lovely vocal.
(YouTube / Available on: What We Did on Our Holidays by Fairport Convention, 1968)

6. Tam Lin – Fairport Convention (1969)– Seven solid minutes of narrative magnificence, and one of the most exciting things I've ever heard, as mysterious sexyman Tam Lin spars with bolshy young Janet, and Fairport surge endlessly forward, powered by Sandy's perfectly-paced, delicately rampaging vocal. Something like the high point of electric folk.
(YouTube / Available on: Liege & Lief by Fairport Convention, 1969)

5. The Music Weaver (no strings, 1972)– The closer to Sandy's best solo record, 1972's Sandy, is perhaps autobiographical, perhaps about Richard Thompson, but either way a stunning artistic statement couched in her usual elliptical, pastoral language. This version is shorn of the trite, slushy strings that mar many of her greatest later songs, and accompanied only by her piano and Swarb's haunting violin.
(YouTube / Available on: Sandy, 1972)



4. Farewell, Farewell – Fairport Convention (1969)– The highpoint of the immortal Liege & Lief is this Richard Thompson ballad, set to the tune of the traditional song Willie O’ Winsbury, and dealing abstrusely with a van crash the previous year that took the lives of both his girlfriend and Fairport’s drummer, Martin Lamble. Clocking in at just over two-and-a-half minutes, and operating at a consistent intensity of backwards-looking chilliness, it doesn’t demand every ounce of Denny’s staggering, multi-faceted talent, but what she does with the song is just about perfect.
(YouTube / Available on: Liege & Lief by Fairport Convention, 1969)

3. Percy’s Song – Fairport Convention (BBC session, 1969)– In the hands of Sandy-era Fairport, Bob Dylan’s unreleased, anecdotal polemic about a careless driver getting banged up for 99 years becomes an unremitting wail of anguish, Denny’s mega-lunged performance driving it onwards with a repeated cry of “Turn, turn again”, to which she adds grace notes, massive notes and bluesy flourishes, the result a song that’s chilling in content and euphoric in execution.
(YouTube / Available on: Fairport Convention: Live at the BBC, 2007)

2. Bruton Town (Live at the Paris Theatre, 1972)– Here's what regular collaborator Dave Swarbrick had to say about Sandy's singing:

Listen to Bruton Town and try to disagree.
(YouTube / Available on: Sandy Denny: Live at the BBC, 2007)

... and the #1 is...



1. The Banks of the Nile – Fotheringay (1970)– Not just Sandy’s greatest, but a performance largely unmatched in the annals of British popular song, a vocal of crystalline purity that grows in majesty, magnificence and heart-rending desperation as it progresses. This epic traditional ballad is a tale of colonial wars, love and the possibility that it might be OK to disguise yourself as a man, join the army and go to Egypt, in order to be with your boyfriend. The conclusion: it would not be OK, or as Sandy acknowledges: “But your waist it is too slender, and your fingers they are too small/In the sultry suns of Egypt your rosy cheeks would spoil”. It’s Martin Carthy’s favourite Sandy performance, and Linda Thompson’s too, her voice at its unapproachable best, and every line a breathtaking, unwavering wonder packing a devastating emotional punch.
(YouTube / Available on: Fotheringay – Fotheringay, 1970)

***

Thanks for reading, now go and make her a national treasure. Then I can complain and say that I liked her first.

And let me know your own. You started here.

My continuing adventures in popular culture, both high (movies) and low (EVERYTHING ELSE):

FILMS:

Humphrey Jennings revisited:



Spare Time (1939) - "Spare Time is a time when we do what we like." Yes it is.

Humphrey Jennings' first great film shows a documentarian in transition. The opening two passages, set in Sheffield and Manchester, are altogether mesmerising, but show a somewhat aloof fascination with the working classes - a species previously alien to the Cambridge graduate - which had grown during his time working on the Mass Observation project. He seems sympathetic, but not empathetic, observing their rules and rituals without truly engaging with his subjects. That's especially true, I think, of the still contentious 'kazoo band' sequence, which hints at Jennings' past as a surrealist and manages to be utterly unforgettable, aggressively bizarre and also a little cold.

It's the final chapter, 'Coal', where Spare Time comes into its own, as Jennings alights in a Welsh mining village and something in his soul is stoked: the result a warm, tender portrait of soot-choked generations finding release through music in church halls and romance in sweetshop doorways, the whole piece scored by a beautiful amateur rendition of Handel's Largo. I've seen it on the big screen, the small screen, and in my mind's eye a thousand times, and it still takes the breath away.

The film also contains a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance for my all-time favourite newspaper headline: "Her scent was bats' delight". (4)



A Diary for Timothy (1945) - A masterpiece from Britain's most poetic propagandist, Humphrey Jennings, with an E. M. Forster script read by Michael Redgrave and directed at a newborn baby, who hears a chronicle of his first six months on Earth: of the sacrifices of WWII and the challenges ahead. It's more literal and staged than most of Jennings' others, but full of his sublime visual juxtapositions and the understated, heart-melting vignettes that became an increasing part of his wartime work. It also contains the only existing footage of John Gielgud's Hamlet (ooh sir), perhaps the most celebrated of the century. (4)



The Dim Little Island (1949) - Humphrey Jennings' reputation as "the only true poet that the British screen has yet produced" (Lindsay Anderson, 1954, that quote being the one that's always wheeled out) is based largely on his wartime work.

After an outrageously colourful career as a poet, surrealist and Mass Observationist, Jennings joined the General Post Office as a documentarian, which upon the outbreak of war was renamed the Crown Film Unit and started making propaganda films, including Jennings' calling cards: Listen to Britain and A Diary for Timothy, the latter a mainstay in my all-time top 10 since I first saw it in 2005.

The Dim Little Island, his penultimate film, was made four years after the end of the war and is preoccupied with what happens next, as the country is at once patronised and accused of going to the dogs. In turn, a comic artist (Osbert Lancaster), an industrialist (John Ormston), a naturalist (James Fisher) and the legendary composer Ralph Vaughan Williams give their thoughts on their chosen subject - and therefore on Britain itself - before Jennings starts cross-cutting, drawing some unexpected parallels between their ruminations.

The film lacks the seamlessness and effortless poetry of Jennings' best, not least because of the mannered, awkward voiceovers from Ormston and Fisher, clunky in both content and delivery. But the vivid footage and discussion of Britain at a turning point in its history, busily shedding its influence and relevance, makes it a fascinating historical piece, while the marriage of Vaughan Williams' beautiful music and erudite thoughts to Jennings' incisive, instinctive feel for imagery leads to some truly wonderful moments towards the end of this short, sometimes very special film.

It also shows my lovely office, which made me very proud. (3.5)

***



CINEMA: Vera Drake (Mike Leigh, 2004) - Vera Drake has the feel of one of those campaigning films of the 1950s and ‘60s – such as Victim, which lobbied for the legalisation of homosexuality – but made some 40 years after the law was changed. In that sense, perhaps it has no real reason to exist, but as a character piece and a historical document, it’s sort of fascinating. It’s also exceptionally well-acted.

The title character (Imelda Staunton) is a housewife and domestic cleaner who also works as a freelance, free-of-charge abortionist, helping out girls who get into trouble by pumping them full of soapy water, thus helping them to miscarry. But one day things go wrong, and her poor but idyllic working class existence implodes.

It’s really an ensemble piece, and though some performances do tend towards caricature (the shallow sister-in-law, the rapacious middle-woman, the stupid Irishman), they’re mostly extremely good, as the film effortlessly evokes the atmosphere of a working class community very similar to the one in which my dad grew up. Phil Davis is absolutely superb as Vera’s husband, Adrian Scarborough creates a multi-faceted, multi-layered character as his aspirational brother, and Eddie Marsan is the last word in anxious suitors as the adorable bundle of nerves courting the Drakes’ daughter. If Daniel Mays is caught acting a few times, he still makes a good fist of his conflicted character, wrestling with what he sees as his mother’s betrayal of her family, and of basic decency. As the middle class counterpoint to Drake's working class charges ("you had to have that, it was in no way extraneous," says Leigh a little defensively in the Q&A accompanying this screening), a compelling, breathless Sally Hawkins does at least enjoy a more pampered termination, having suffered through hell to get there.

Best of all, though, is Staunton, who has spent rather too much of her screen career playing wittering gossips. As the saintly Vera, who spends the first half of the film basically acting like your nanna and the second half choking back tears as her world crumbles to dust, she is little short of revelatory, Leigh’s intensive preparations – including an 11-hour in-character improvisation of the film’s turning point – provoking a wealth of complex emotion, impeccably captured by a series of immaculate, uncompromising close-ups.

In some ways, the film is almost nostalgic for the Britain that was, before pop culture hammered a rivet between the generations and Thatcher sounded the death knell for society, but there are untold horrors lurking beneath that cosy, perkily poverty-stricken surface, and Leigh isn’t afraid to show them all, ably assisted by an oft-overlooked actress at the peak of her powers. I don’t think it’s necessarily a great movie – I’m not sure quite what its point is, except that the law should have been changed in 1967, which it was – but it’s gripping and gruelling, while casting light on an under-reported chapter of British history.

(PS: I saw this as part of the Tricycle Theatre's British Screen Classics series, and at the end I got to meet Leigh, Staunton and Davis, which was just awesome. Thanks to my excellent wife for bringing a pen with her for autograph purposes.) (3.5)

***

BOOKS:

As well as the two Sandy books, this one:



Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (2011) - Wow. Just exquisite. Hilary Mantel's follow up to Wolf Hall is a fast, sleek, linear sequel without a wasted page. Bloody and brilliant. (4)

***

TV:



Wolf Hall (Peter Kosminsky, 2015 - It's a little hard to tell how good this edited highlights package is; without the bits between the bits that we know from Mantel's Booker Prize-winning books, perhaps it wouldn't work so well. It's also fair to say there's a little too much of people just walking around, while Bernard Hill and Jonathan Pryce are both largely going through the motions. Those shortcomings are largely blown away, though, by Mark Rylance's astonishing performance as brooding courtier Thomas Cromwell, his acting the most mesmeric I've seen since Rebecca Benson tore up the Apollo Theatre in last year's Let the Right One In, and reminiscent of Jason Robards at his early '60s peak. His voice is also utterly seductive, it may well be love. Kosminsky's unusual visual sense also grew on me, as did the sparing, simple traditional score, and the female characters were perfectly cast across the board. (3.5). I think.

***

THEATRE:


Sometimes starring Beverley Knight.

Memphis (Shaftesbury Theatre) - An explosive first half, full of stunning stagecraft, gives way to a somewhat muted second that's set too much around a sterile, uninteresting TV show. The story - about an interracial couple in '50s Memphis - is also rather slight, but the numbers are strong without being sensational, and the cast is first-rate, especially alternate female lead, Rachel John. (3)



Antigone (Barbican) - A frequently dazzling introduction to Greek tragedy, with Juliette Binoche a beautifully compromised heroine, and seamlessly modern staging. A few lulls, though also - surprisingly - a few lols. (3.5)



"There is no present or future - only the past, happening over and over again, now."A Moon for the Misbegotten (film, 1975) - In 1956, Jason Robards exploded onto Broadway in a then-neglected play by Eugene O’Neill by the name of The Iceman Cometh. As Hickey, the play’s bruised, brooding, evangelical salesman, flogging temperance to a bar-load of barflies, he gave a performance of bristling intensity that’s among the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen, thankfully captured in a 1960 live TV broadcast that’s essential for anyone who cares about theatre or drama or really life in general. That revival, directed by José Quintero, led to the comprehensive rehabilitation of a play that up until then had been regarded as one of O’Neill’s weaker efforts.

Thirteen years later, Robards and Quintero returned to O’Neill in A Moon for the Misbegotten (Robards had also appeared in a film of Long Day's Journey Into Night, playing a younger version of his character here), and once again it was filmed for broadcast, with one set, a minimum of credible make-up and a pair of Irish accents so improbable that you could sue the actors for lying. Regardless of how you feel about those things – and I’m pleased with the first, apathetic about the second and got over the distraction of the third after 20-odd minutes – it’s a stunning achievement, a remarkably grown-up, literate and moving film with the writer’s usual damaged souls marinated in alcohol, spewing out their skeletons as the liquor tips them into despair.

Colleen Dewhurst is Josie Hogan, a rough, big-breasted farmhouse girl with a reputation as a slut, who attracts the attention of a charming Broadway actor (Jason Robards), plagued by dark moods and a bleak past. Her father – played by Ed Flanders, 10 years her junior – is a drunk who may be a tyrant or a bastard or a great dad – it’s a play of shifting perceptions – and whose unconvincing ageing make-up has gone a bit crusty. Dewhurst and Flanders both struggle to come up with anything approaching a credible Irish accent – her attempt is particularly baffling – and yet both performances are nothing short of astounding, blessed with a vast depth of emotion that comes out in subtle inflections and fleeting gestures. Rather that way round than the other (hello, Meryl Streep, I am looking at you – when did you last make me feel anything).

And Robards, that eternally underrated actor, who played few lead roles in films because he was considered a bit ugly (how could anyone that talented be ugly? I suppose he did have an enormous head), is simply amazing, inhabiting O’Neill’s avuncular, semi-autobiographical boozehound, ravaged by self-loathing, while surely drawing heavily on his own fertile experiences as a substance-abusing manic-depressive. Swinging from uncertainty to euphoria to tenderness to bitterness, self-recrimination and finally self-awareness, he’s desperately moving and unwaveringly, compulsively watchable.

I’m not sure it’s for all tastes: the camera generally goes to the right places, but there’s little in the way of staging or action, just lots and lots of talking, some of it cyclical, some of it funny, most of it profound in O’Neill’s familiarly sad, elegiac and battered humanist style, lent an unbearable, unforgettable weight by two actors in exceptional form, and another who has probably never been surpassed. (4)



Maxine Peake in Hamlet (film, 2014) - Maxine Peake is a Hamlet of relentless game-playing, caustic sardonism and frequent spit-flecked fury in this engrossing, arresting Royal Exchange adaptation of Shakespeare’s finest. The story, as you may know, is that “a ghost and a prince meat, and everyone ends in mincemeat”. While the script is recycled from a West End production in 2009, and the supporting cast is a little bland, causing attention to wander when its hero(ine) is off-screen, that scenario is lit by staging of minimalist invention – including an ingenious ‘apparition’ scene featuring oversized yellow lightbulbs lowered to the stage floor – some perturbing grace notes (the Prince of Denmark mock-wanking), and the hottest Hamlet since John Barrymore. (3)

and sort of theatre, in a way:



Stephen Merchant: Hello Ladies... Live! (2011) - I'm generally a fan of Stephen Merchant, but I found this document of his first - and so far only - stand-alone stand-up show strangely slight, hackneyed and lacking in ambition. It includes newspaper clippings from 10 years earlier, which are funny but suggest a certain paucity of invention, and laboured gags about his height, his stinginess and Ricky Gervais. At times you can see the working, as he moves laboriously or unconvincingly from one topic to another. There are a few good jokes, though, and he has excellent comic timing to make up for a comic persona that's rather less appealing than the real-life Merchant appears to be. (2.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Hello dear reader. I am on my summer hols, so I finally have time to tack up all these reviews that have been hanging around on my computer for aeons. Lucky you. This is the first of three - yes, three - upcoming updates.



CINEMA: 22 Jump Street (Phil Lord and Chris Miller, 2014) - This sequel to one of the most cheering surprises of the past decade goes the Gremlins 2 route, sacrificing a bit of heart and any minor semblance of reality for a lot of jokes – the overwhelming majority of them extraordinarily good.

Picking up with a brief recap of the first film (with the addition of an Annie Hall reference that later pays off in considerable style), 22 Jump Street sends undercover cops Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill to college, and pitches them into a hyper-intelligent, deliriously stupid, homoerotically-mannered meta-textual subversion of/homage to the original movie, every bit as clever, idiotic, intensely gay and pop culturally astounding as that sounds.

The gags are simply legion and many surely soon to become legendary, from Hill’s beautiful contention that “it’s so refreshing to have a black victim” to the references to his advancing years, an insanely brilliant trip scene, Tatum losing it entirely outside Ice Cube’s new office (which is like “a big cube of ice”) and a post-credits sequence that’s frankly the last word in post-credits sequences.

It’s nothing new in plot terms, but it also keeps telling you it’s nothing new in plot terms, which is something new. And if the slightly repetitive, bleak and overzealous mirroring of marital breakup that forms its centrepoint is no substitute for the real human emotion at the core of the first film, the prison stuff is basically just revolting, and it has a fair few lulls to accompany its immense sense of invention, it is at least brilliantly, bracingly and blissfully funny.

“Are you going to strangle me with your liver-spotted hands?” (3)

... and I'd rewatched this to prepare myself:



"What kind of bullshit do they say about cov... coviolent bonds in this school?"
21 Jump Street (Phil Lord and Chris Miller, 2012) - One of the nicest surprises - and the funniest films - of the past few years, with the creators of Cloudy, and screenwriter Michael Bacall, sending cops and best buds Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum back to school to bust a drugs ring.

The results are imaginative, intensely funny and just the right side of laddish, mixing sentiment, comedy and action with a smart subversive streak that extends to both meta parodies of the action-comedy genre and a brilliant, incisive examination of changing youth culture.

The stars are sublime, that YouTube video incapacitates me, and while the first half is better than the second, which gets a little bogged down in peril, plot and cameo, the pay-off - starting with Hill having to front up and take the killer shot - is just extraordinarily good.

So obviously I'm excited about next week and 22 Jump Street, whilst praying that Lord, Miller and Bacall keep away from the fratboy bobbins with which they briefly flirt here. Praying to Korean Jesus, naturally. (3.5)

***



Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian, 1932) - Mamoulian's musical masterpiece was at least a decade ahead of its time in terms of imagination and innovation, and still looks sensational today. Poking fun at Lubitsch's films in which millionaires masquerade as paupers, Mamoulian casts Maurice Chevalier as a penniless tailor mistaken for a baron by princess Jeanette MacDonald.

From the ingenious opening number - which seems to have influenced everything from Once Upon a Time in the West to Dancer in the Dark - it's an unstinting barrage of joy and invention, full of dazzling shots, hummable tunes and classic Lorenz Hart lyrics, with a gorgeous Myrna Loy just about stealing the show in her breakout role as a witty, sex-hungry countess. (4)

***



Delicacy (David and Stéphane Foenkinos, 2011) - A few sitcomish elements sometimes intrude - not least the improbable event that commences the central relationship - but this romantic comedy still doubles as a deep and resonant study of grief, with several unforgettable scenes, some very well-drawn characters and a magnificent performance from Audrey Tautou.

It's a film in which the female lead's best friend cries in happiness at her emotional rebirth, then makes the boyfriend feel like dirt when he isn't the vicariously enjoyable heartthrob she'd envisaged, a film where people hold a loyalty to people and events long past - despite how it's tearing them to pieces - and a film in which being polite about some soup is a one-way ticket to Sexytown.

A very good film, in other words. (3.5)

See also: I wrote a longer review the first time I saw Delicacy. It's here.

***



Everyone Says I Love You (Woody Allen, 1996) - I finally got Woody's musical on DVD (my ancient pan-and-scan VHS was looking a bit peaky), so it seemed ripe for a rewatch not long after my last one. It was also a first viewing in widescreen, meaning that the choreography and visual composition of the dance scenes made a little more sense.

This time around, Allen's romance with Julia Roberts fell the wrong side of creepy and a few of the characters and numbers got on my nerves, but the film remains fine entertainment - and parts of it are just pure cinematic magic, particularly that climactic song and dance on the banks of the Seine. (3)

***



Gentleman Jim (Raoul Walsh, 1942) - Mark Kermode quite often reviews a movie with the rather vague phrase: "It's not a great film, but it has great things in it." Well, that's Gentleman Jim.

The great things, almost exclusively, are the intoxicating, invigorating fight sequences, strikingly conceived and stunningly executed, as the art of boxing graduates from two meatheads smacking each other on wasteground, to relative respectability, thanks in no small way to Gentleman Jim Corbett (Errol Flynn), a fleet-footed, working class bank clerk sponsored by an aristocratic club.

The pièce de resistance is an intense, brutal slugfest on a riverside platform, but every single scene in the ring is marked by stylish photography, credible choreography and no small amount of panache, whether in the extended set pieces or the flashes of freeze-framed, overlayed action in the various montages, which still look startlingly modern.

Taken as a whole, the film isn't quite a contender, let alone a champ. Flynn is fun but rather one note in his favourite role, the story has little dramatic tension outside the ring, and the film is full of extremely grating comic relief - which even intrudes on the fight scenes at times.

It all looks great, though, thanks to Walsh and cinematographer Sid Hickox's eye for detail, while Ward Bond gives surely his finest - and possibly his biggest - performance as legendary prizefighter John L. Sullivan. If his boxing style is perhaps a little cartoonish, he atones in the beautifully tender presentation sequence near the close, which is followed by Flynn and Alexis Smith's touching heart-to-heart as the film finally serves up two scenes away from the ring that can compare to those inside it. (3)

***



*MINOR SPOILERS*
Invisible Stripes (Lloyd Bacon, 1939) - This is a surprisingly effective mix of social drama and crime film, not because it's from Warner Bros - who specialised in both - but because it starts off so unpromisingly, and stars George Raft.

Raft, a genuine hood spotted by a talent scout while the future star was scouting land for the mob, has always been among my least favourite classic actors, along with Joan Crawford and Charlton Heston. He's good in Scarface and cleverly used in Some Like It Hot, but elsewhere he's simply a plank of wood with an almost immobile face and an inability to generate any emotion beyond intense dislike.

I may have to make one of my periodic about-faces, though, as Raft is very persuasive here, playing a parolee who struggles to get a job once he's out of the big house, then becomes re-acquainted with his old mobster mate (Humphrey Bogart) as he strives to keep his callow brother (William Holden) on the right path, and out of the pen.

After a promising opening scene, the film becomes waylaid by some syrupy, over-written domestic drama, featuring another of Holden's characteristically terrible early performances. Was there ever an actor who improved so much - or so suddenly - as Holden, who some time in the late '40s got some cynicism, some stubble and some meaty roles, and became one of the key American screen actors of the 20th century.

But as Raft gets brutalised, patronised and ostracised by a succession of employers and co-workers, the film starts to grab a hold of you, and doesn't let up or let go, even when he starts robbing banks, and all realism goes out the window. Though the ending is essentially dictated by censorship restrictions of the period, in which all wrong-doing must be punished, its fatalistic air works largely in its favour, even going so far as to anticipate film noir.

In support, Flora Robson has some fine moments in a rather clichéd part as Raft and Holden's saintly mother ("When they were little I could always help them. I could pick them up when they fell down...", sob), and Bogart enjoys perhaps his best role of the '30s: an agreeably nuanced part bridging the gap between his straight out villains and the anti-heroes he would play from High Sierra onwards.

Invisible Stripes is predictable and preachy, with a rather hackneyed backdrop and some weak sequences, but it's also compelling for much of its length, with fine work from Bogart and Raft, and a few enduring things to say about how society breeds and treats its criminals. (3)

***



Kid Galahad (Michael Curtiz, 1937) - It's in the standard studio fodder, rather than the prestige pictures tailored to her talents, that you can truly see what a special performer Bette Davis was.

In Kid Galahad, a boxing film made about a decade before Hollywood learnt how to do them properly - exploring the fighter's psyche in classics like Body and Soul, The Set-Up, and Champion - she injects middling, even hokey material with both a wit and an enrapturing sincerity, as a conflicted, selfless moll knocked out by the hand of fate.

While everyone else is in a slightly superior gangster movie; Davis's film is timeless, an arresting, heart-wrenching tale of mutual reliance cast to the wind, crippling self-sacrifice and unrequited passion. The scene in which she packs her bags and attempts to leave Robinson contains some of the finest acting I've ever seen: remarkably modern and naturalistic. As in The Man Who Came to Dinner, another film where she played a supporting part, there are no histrionics and there's no grandstanding, she's just real - and really brilliant.

Director Michael Curtiz (or more likely his studio paymasters) must have known Davis was on the cusp of greatness - and of superstardom - as she's afforded the final shot here, despite playing essentially a supporting character who doubles as a plot catalyst.

Robinson is a fight promoter who builds and manipulates the career of a naive farm boy (Wayne Morris) with a good right hook. Fresh-faced Jane Bryan is Robinson's sister, for whom he has somewhat Scarface-ish protective tendencies, and Humphrey Bogart plays Robinson's gangland rival, the actor still stuck in villainous parts that largely required him to wince and bare his teeth. Rounding out the cast is Harry Carey, John Ford's first leading man, playing the now familiar role of the weather-beaten old trainer.

The plot is both predictable and rather corny, but the film as a whole is slick and entertaining, with good performances and a memorably nauseating pugilistic climax, fuelled by what I think we can safely call homoerotic sadism, with Robinson at his absolute best, shifting between panting malice and chubby-faced encouragement.

Kid Galahad is more a gangster picture with a ringside seat than a real boxing film, while its fight scenes, though commendable, pale alongside its '40s rivals (let alone Raging Bull). It's also rife with contrivances, right down the line. But if you're an old movie nerd looking for solid studio product, with a top-notch presentation and a cracking cast - including Bette Davis at her best - then you'll find yourself very much in luck. (3)

***



Seven Ways from Sundown (Harry Keller, 1960) - Audie Murphy's character in this film is called Seven. I wish I was called Seven. And Seven Days from Sundown is just a great name for a film, if not for a man.

The movie as a whole is one of a slew of interesting Audie Murphy Westerns made in the '50s and '60s, forming a loose, cool gang with those offbeat, complex and mature Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott starring vehicles shot around the same time. Seven Ways from Sundown starts poorly, but just gets better and better.

The baby-faced Murphy - in real life the most decorated American soldier of World War Two - plays a dogged, baby-faced Texas Ranger who tracks and then babysits a charming, loquacious killer (Barry Sullivan), little imagining that the toothy, reptilian bastard just murdered his brother. (Incidentally, what the film does with that information creates a stunningly astute counterpoint to the overtly, often overly personalised approach taken by so-called "revenge Westerns".)

The studio-shot footage here is seriously garish and ugly, and the acting has regular recourse to woodenness (Murphy's love interest is simply terrible), but Sullivan delivers a fine spin on a familiar character, and the sensational game of psychological cat-and-mouse between hunter and quarry - as mutual antipathy turns to homoerotic admiration - keeps it afloat during some spells of dodgy dialogue, aided by a few punchy, cleverly-conceived action interludes.

There's also one early, almost iconic shot of the star: his foot resting on the stone grave he's just made, his titular figure framed against the mountains and the grey-blue sky. It's actually just a set-up for some uninspiring gunplay, but in hindsight a sign that the film is about to burst into rather glorious life. (3)

***



Son of Rambow (Garth Jennings, 2007) - Two lonely, fatherless kids - one a troublemaker, the other a God-fearing mummy's boy - bond over a shared love of First Blood, and decide to remake it, but with the addition of an evil scarecrow.

Garth Jennings' hymn to friendship, film and the 1980s is best when rooted in the real - and articulating the upbeat - less effective when opting for (amusing but incongruous) comedy interludes concerning a cool French kid, or serving up a good half-hour of authentic but excessive human misery.

It is original, though, within the constraints of its formulaic structure, while exhibiting an invention, a humanism and a heightened sense of humour that reminded me of Danny Boyle's Millions, right down to the third act wobble.

From the sporadic flights of visual fantasy to Jessica Stevenson's heartfelt performance as a protective, conflicted mother, it's a movie studded with admirable attributes, if not ultimately an entirely successful film.

It's basically like Super 8 but English and good and with a flying plastic dog that attacks Adam Buxton instead of aliens. (3)

***



Catfish (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, 2010) - A shy, improbably handsome photographer in his 20s befriends an eight-year-old painter and then begins a passionate online affair with her beautiful, artistic older sister - a relationship that seems too good to be true. And is.

This documentary is unquestionably seminal - having added the term "catfished" to the lexicon - and is by turns entertaining, disingenuous, tacky, poignant, sensationalist, exploitative, intrusive, funny and weird (that chat on the cable car - shudder).

Because while it has something to say about the way we create online personas (after all, I'm really an eight-year-old girl), it's really a story of extremes: extreme naïvete, extreme self-delusion and ultimately extremely dubious investigative journalism that's fuelled by a search for answers but completely fails to engage with the rather serious questions it raises about mental illness.

It's sustained as far as it is by the novelty value of its story and the way that tale was tracked every step of the way, rather than being a particularly proficient piece of filmmaking, though it's ultimately worth seeing, if only to engage with the enduring debate about its themes, its potential fakery and its undeniable rubbernecking. (2.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

A quartet of documentaries in this belated round-up of stuff I watched in the small portion of free time not allocated to watching the World Cup.



CINEMA: Mistaken for Strangers (Tom Berninger, 2013) - This documentary about delightful indie mumblers The National is so meta that it almost swallows itself whole, but also sweet and tender and funny, tracing the relationship between their serious, sharp-suited frontman and the slacker brother he invites to be their roadie, but who spends all his time trying to make a film... this film. The gulf between the rockumentary he imagines himself to be making and the one he ends up with is bafflingly and brilliantly big.

There isn't a great deal of music, but you can get that on CD. It's more a shambling, insightful piece about brotherly bonds, with some (possibly staged) comic interludes that scale the heights of absurdity. (3)

***



The Spirit of '45 (Ken Loach, 2013) - Ken Loach's powerful, poignant polemic - about communal goals dreamt of, fought for, won and lost in the postwar period - is at once uplifting and soul-destroying, as the astonishing programme of reforms achieved by Attlee's administration are eroded, picked apart or junked by grasping free-marketeers.

The film also brought home to me how completely socialist ideas are kept out of the mainstream media: it felt bizarre to see people on my TV advocating the renationalisation of key public services - and yet YouGov says that a majority view in this country.

Occasionally Loach loses the thread of his argument (and the RMT spokesman he chooses is poor), but the diverse selection of left-leaning contributors effectively mix the personal and the political - the best, and the one with the saddest story, is an 87-year-old Scouser supping beer in a pub - while the archive footage is simply stunning. There's some sizzling footage of NHS architect Nye Bevan railing against injustice, which nestles nicely beside interviews with my personal hero, the late Tony Benn.

The overall effect is of watching Terence Davies'Of Time and the City but injected with urgency and righteous, white-hot fury. Call it confirmation bias, but I wish everyone in the country was forced to watch this beautiful socialist propaganda. (3.5)

***



The Armstrong Lie (Alex Gibney, 2013) - Thank goodness Alex Gibney has found a use for all that footage he shot of Lance Armstrong in 2009 and then wasn't able to use.

I jest! (Slightly.)

This slightly messy, repetitive but nonetheless riveting documentary asks the question no-one else has: why did Armstrong return in 2009, and risk jeopardising his legacy. At first it appears that Gibney is only asking it so he has an excuse to roll out the wealth of access-most-areas film he shot whilst improbably constructing an Anderson hagiography five years back, but thankfully that's not the case. It turns out to be a very worthwhile question, and a worthwhile exercise.

For the uninitiated: Lance Armstrong was a young national cycling champion when he was struck down by cancer in 1996. After fighting his way back to health, he did the inconceivable, winning the sport's most gruelling worldwide competition - the epic Tour de France - a full seven times in succession, whilst becoming an inspiration to millions and amassing a personal fortune of $150m.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the sport's reputation and his improbable success, throughout he was dogged by accusations of doping, which he withstood thanks to the brassiest of brass necks and a policy of bullying, smearing and suing anyone who aired those allegations. Last year, he finally came clean to Oprah Winfrey, after the doping organisation USADA handed his arse to him on a plate, via an extraordinarily thorough and damning report.

His story, then, was The Armstrong Lie - and he tells it again and again here, in press conferences where he humiliates bolshy British journalists, in direct-to-camera addresses where he spins that impeccably-conceived tale of triumph over adversity and, in a new and modified version given to Gilbey five months after Oprah, where he admits that, yes, he doped, but it wasn't cheating, the facts once more moulded to fit a narrative of his making.

Armstrong is a fascinating subject - extraordinarily charismatic, with a will of iron and a habit of looking you dead in the eye and lying his face off - and though Gibney was taken in like so many others: willing to embrace the myth rather than question the man, the intervention of fate (or more specifically USADA) has led to a valuable film, if almost by accident.

You can see why Armstrong's defenders wanted to believe, and not just because of the story. The superbly-edited footage of him trouncing his rivals is genuinely exhilarating, at least until you hear him calling one detractor a "whore" on television, publicly belittling an opponent who dared speak out about Anderson's drug-pushing associate, and purposefully and repeatedly humiliating another accuser four years after an enforced legal wrangle.

That collision between the idyllic fantasy and the cold, heartless reality makes for chilling, compulsive viewing, as does the juxtaposition of heartwarming comeback footage with post fall-from-grace humility. While Gibney may not always be in control of his structure or his story, the compensations are vast. (3)

***



"Wanna meet Lars."
Mission to Lars (William Spicer and James Moore, 2012) - A Telegraph journalist takes her brother Tom - who suffers from Fragile X or "autism with bells on" - on a road trip through America. Her mission? To get him in a room with Lars Ulrich, the Metallica drummer with whom he has an almost unaccountable obsession.

I say "almost" because, as a Fragile X-pert informs us, Tom has few inhibiters halting his thought processes, leading to obsessive behavioural patterns. That only explains why he would have an obsession, though, not why he would have an obsession with Lars Ulrich.

This documentary is formulaic in the extreme, feels padded even at 76 minutes and forces you to spend quite a lot of company with a woman I frankly found quite annoying (Tom is the only person in the film who doesn't seem acutely aware of the cameras).

But as a film it has two major things going for it. Firstly, it's a valuable character study, offering insight not just into Fragile X, but into a single, singular sufferer, with his many individualistic idiosyncracies. And, secondly, the final 10 minutes left me with a huge grin plastered all over my stupid face. If it doesn't do the same to you then you're a horrible person and I hate you. (2.5)

***



Somebody Up There Likes Me (Robert Wise, 1956) - A young, Brando-ish Paul Newman is the inarticulate, brutalised inner-city middleweight Rocky Graziano - definitely - in this bruising boxing biopic.

While the star doesn't unfailingly convince as a thick, Italian-American New Yorker, he does bring a compulsive dynamism to the part, while anticipating a trio of his most indelible creations: Fast Eddie Felson, Hud and Cool Hand Luke.

The rest of the film is interesting too, its clichés and the disjointed coupling of its various elements offset by frequent Hitchcock screenwriter Ernest Lehman's smart decision to frame this as a story of poor immigrant communities trying (hopelessly?) to make something of themselves - without being stitched up by the establishment.

It lacks the myth-making cohesion of Body and Soul, the highlight of the '40s boxing movie cycle, but it's a solid film, with a good cast, some authentic location shooting and a few flourishes from Wise, including commentary of Graziano's title fight drifting out into a deserted street: everyone in his former community glued to their radio sets as he punches - and takes the punishment - for his pride and theirs. (3)

***



Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (Ernst Lubitsch, 1938) - A quick rewatch, as I was reviewing for MovieMail. The sanatorium coda is horribly dated, but overall it's an underrated Lubitsch outing, with a typically witty Wilder/Brackett script and good performances across the board. Cooper sometimes looks a little hesitant in one of his first comic roles, but he had a flair for humour, and that shows - especially during an irresistibly goofy song. David Niven remains the stand-out, though, as Colbert's hapless, idiotic suitor. (3)

***



*SPOILERS*
Johnny Eager (Mervyn LeRoy, 1941) - Robert Taylor's cynical crimelord takes quite a while to reform for love in this crime melodrama, that flimsy central story augmented by a litany of incidental pleasures.

It's big-eyed, guileless Lana Turner who does it - her rather fortunate re-appearance in Taylor's life just one of a string of ridiculous if not unwelcome coincidences populating the film - loving him not wisely but too well, then going insane after he uses her to get his greyhound track approved (well, I said it was flimsy).

The film rather hobbles from one sporadic highlight to the next, the majority provided by a stellar supporting cast, from Van Heflin's poetically acerbic Oscar-winning rants, to Paul Stewart's brooding bits as a fickle gunman and - best of all - the mighty Glenda Farrell turning up to steal the film as Taylor's proud, desperate ex. Turner's good too, in a daft part, that excellent voice and instinctive emoting put to good use, though Taylor remains in fifth gear, which was his top gear.

While the plotting is slight, over-familiar and bears the hallmarks of being made up on the spot, those stand-out turns are supported by some fine dialogue - particularly for Heflin; shades of Thomas Mitchell in Angels Over Broadway - a decent shoot-out in an almost Western style, and a very LeRoy fondness for shots of people walking urgently through busy, exciting rooms, almost to the point of self-parody. I also like the way its hysterical early speechifying is completely (though subtly) subverted by what immediately follows, exhibiting a disregard for the spirit of the Hays Code that was very unusual in 1941.

Made as gangster pictures were giving way to that genre we later called "film noir", it's an uncertain picture but also a worthwhile one, if more for what comes with it than what it intended to be. (2.5)

***



The Girl on the Bridge (Patrice Leconte, 1999) - A stylised, monochrome French drama from the late '90s, with the look, feel and depth of a perfume ad. Vanessa Paradis is a suicidal young woman, forever waiting for something to happen, who's saved from a watery grave by knife-thrower Daniel Auteuil, and becomes a part of his act. The part he chucks knives at.

After a rather neat opening scene, this smug, sloppy film quickly unravels, hopping from a makeover scene to casino wins to infidelities, its thoughts on love and luck only half-developed, and a gaping chasm where its heart should be. In mitigation, I did kind of like the narrative device near the close, and the final exchange is quite good, though it's hardly earned by what precedes it. (1.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Assorted ruminations on recent film viewings. I'll try to update you on books read and plays seen when the sun isn't quite so shiny.



CINEMA: How to Train Your Dragon 2 3D (Dean DeBlois, 2014) - So, a sequel to an animated kids' film? Bigger? Check. Darker? Check. Roger Deakins hired as aesthetic consultant? Pardon.

That's just a little hint as to how high this one aims, upping the ante from the original with a story about a fascistic warlord who transfixes gentle but malleable creatures and turns them into a rampaging army (see 1930s Spain, Germany, Italy...), the film going blacker and more intensely sad than you could ever imagine, but also filling its vast frame with wonder and beauty and magic, including some of the most intoxicating flight footage ever created.

In a key part, Cate Blanchett's accent globetrots to a distracting degree - while the challenge of getting her character to make narrative sense requires some not entirely convincing plot developments - but for the most part it's a startlingly effective film, with excellent voicework by Jay Baruchel as our heroic Hiccup, a new faux-folk ballad penned by Shane MacGowan, and a beating heart as big as that weird alpha male ice dragon thing.

Does the film ever quite make up for the daringly dark, perilously tragic turn it takes in its second act? It's debatable, but I think just about: Hiccup's pleading, sincere, desperate face emerging from the fuzzy gloom as that magnificent score gets ready to soar.

Bizarrely, the lamentable Madagascar tried a similar thing and predictably died on its arse. This one has the clarity of vision and the sheer congregation of talent to sustain it through all manner of improbable challenges, the familiar fusion of action, comedy and family drama lent real weight by the sheer scale of its ambition - never more in evidence than when Hiccup sees a flamboyant dragon-rider dressed like The Statue of Liberty bearing down on him, apparently thirsty for blood... (3.5)

***



*SPOILERS*
if.... (Lindsay Anderson, 1968) - Lindsay Anderson's bewildering, bewitching Marxist revenge fantasy is what '60s cinema should have been but so very rarely was: satirical, socially conscious and genuinely surreal, happily lacking in gimmickry and low comedy, with a variety of competing concerns but a sure focus on just who - and what - it wants to dispense with in a hail of bullets.

When I saw the film as a blazered teenager at a British public school, it seemed straightforward to me - after all, which right-thinking adolescent doesn't want to collage his walls, attract a pouty raven-haired girlfriend and then shoot everyone he doesn't like? My #1 film aged 16 looks no less radical to the 30-year-old me, but odder and wilder, throwing off the constraints of filmic form and function, just as its characters blast away the shackles of establishment oppression.

The story is slight but bracing: a trio of dissenters, led by the inestimable Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) - who's afforded one of the great screen entrances, dressed like a highwayman for reasons actually too uncool to recall - drink, scoff at authority and abscond from their increasingly bizarre public school, before a heartbreaking act of vindictive subjugation tips them over the edge into armed revolution.

Some have sensed a respect for tradition in Anderson's treatment of the David Sherwin script: I see little but a twitching contempt, the hymns, habits and institutions of the establishment merely monoliths and their entrenched but superficial trappings to be incinerated by the fire that burns within Travis and co.

There's none of Godard's stultifying posturing here, though: the drama is rooted in human feeling not philosophical semantics, and every sequence seems to serve some grander purpose, even if it's often left to us to determine what that might be. So the fencing fun sets up the triumvirate as musketeers defending some ancient right - and shifting from false to genuine blood-letting - the "tiger dance" presumably denotes a return to man's animal state, and the subsequent motorcycle jaunt is redolent with the smell of freedom: the antithesis of British public school life.

It's possible that the basement clear-out is just Anderson being confrontationally obscure (like Antonioni including the tennis-playing mimes in Blowup"for the critics"), but some tentative theorising can find symbolic value in everything they discover: the crocodile corpse is a relic of imperialism, tossed onto the fire, the gas mask represents Our Finest Hour, the foetus in the jar is an undeveloped human trapped under glass - much like Travis and his cohorts - and the weapons, well, they're the only answer to that.

Perhaps the only element of tradition that Anderson and Sherwin have any time for is the vernacular of public school, of "shag spots", "whips" and "scums", and that's weird enough to fit: a singular language for a singular film that flits between colour and black-and-white (initially through financial necessity, then later artistic choice), possesses a notably and joyfully unglamorous cast and chucks a grenade at the rule book.

For if there's one shot that sums up everything glorious about if...., it's that swooping, exhilarating close-up of Travis on the roof, about to take a shot of his own. (4)

***



*SOME SPOILERS*
O Lucky Man! 1973 (Lindsay Anderson, 1973) - This unremittingly bleak, cynical meander through 1970s Britain is alternately visionary, flabby, bizarre, offensive, stupid, brilliant, scattershot, prescient and beautiful. It's also magnificently unpredictable.

Malcolm McDowell allegedly 'returns' as Mick Travis, the hero of Lindsay Anderson's if...., but if it's the same bloke, then he's certainly changed. Where once he was a Marxist insurgent, now he's an amoral coffee-salesmen-cum-arms-deal-facilitator who makes not a single reference to his glorious past (unless that abstract interrogation counts). But perhaps that's the point writer David Sherwin is making, inserting a deliciously sly line about moneyed warmongerers who once worshipped Karl Marx and Keynes within the walls of Oxford's left-leaning Balliol College.

The film as a whole is almost impossible to pin down, following Travis as it dumps him, and us, into a tragic guest house, a medical testing centre, a hippy hang-out, some smoke-filled rooms of unspeakable moral depravity, a rose-tinted jail that deliciously satirises prison's status as a place of reform, and the environs of a soup truck for the disenfranchised, the film ultimately revealing itself as the evil twin of George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara, with not a crumb of comfort for its audience, aside from the solace of celebrity.

Laced with wicked black comedy, brilliantly soundtracked by Alan Price and his band - who often appear on-screen - and brought to life by a startlingly eclectic cast often playing several different roles (at one point Captain Mainwaring from Dad's Army turns up in blackface as an African president, and makes Rachel Roberts stroke his penis), it's an exhausting, astonishing work, as a patchy - even tedious - first half gives way to a frequently dazzling second.

In terms of coherence and visceral impact, it can't match its stunning predecessor, but it's a fascinating, remarkable film that's both a time capsule and a sign of things to come. Anderson, Sherwin and McDowell reunited nine years later for the conclusion of the trilogy, Britannia Hospital, but let's pretend they didn't. (3)

***



28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2004) - *swoon* Cillian Murphy.

Danny Boyle's zombie nightmare isn't as murky or bleak or intense as it really should be.

Sure, it has memorable ideas - newly awakened hospital outpatient Murphy walking the deserted London streets, shouting "Hellooooo" without much reply - but they're rarely executed as stridently as they might be, and the moments that do hit home are ultimately outweighed by a plethora of shortcomings: ugly digital cinematography, an excessive song score, some weak performances and a mawkish, often formless narrative. The admittedly bold third act diversion isn't an inspired left turn, it's the sight of the script wandering off into the wilderness.

Like all Boyle films, the movie does start well and it's not exactly unwatchable after that - with a pleasant philosophical undertow about what exactly there is to live for in this dystopia - but it's also not nearly the bristling homegrown Romero reboot that most critics would have you believe.

Take Naomi Harris's character as a case in point. She's a punchy, nihilistic one-woman pharmacy, warming up as the body count escalates - but she's just not that convincing, or interesting, or painted in bold enough colours. And neither's the film. (2)

***



Another Country (Marek Kanievska, 1984) - A sad, scintillating film - adapted by Julian Mitchell from his play - about the (semi-fictionalised) school days of the notorious dissolute Guy Burgess (Rupert Everett), who traded upper class respectability for a rollicking infamy born of alcohol, illicit sex and a double life as a Soviet spy.

Here we find him as a tortured young soul, his flamboyant queerness nothing but a mask to face down the stifling, pointless conformity of boarding school life, his dangerous sexuality as intrinsic to his being as the obsessive communism of his best friend (Colin Firth).

It's a strange, lolloping film - the missing link between the counter-culture public school rebellion of if.... and the repressed, restrained gay romance of Merchant Ivory's Maurice - unnaturally obsessed with the rules of its elite establishment not in themselves but as the strictures and structures of the establishment, in all its quivering hypocrisy.

Scored by an eerie synthesiser track, it wanders in and out of its various stories with the swaggering arrogance of Burgess himself, yet interrogates the characters - or archetypes - therein with the intellectual relish, sadness and wit also intrinsic to his being (at least as seen here).

Those myriad complexities - within us all, but within Burgess tenfold, if the film is to be believed - are brought to life with a dizzying virtuosity by Everett, before he apparently jacked in artistic ambition in favour of celebrity and playing various versions of himself in lousy American romcoms.

The scene in which he, lovestruck and drunk, hushedly croons Rodgers and Hart's 'Who?', laid out on a wooden library floor, is the kind of stunningly vulnerable, unselfconscious acting that people only seem to do when they're young and brilliant and seizing the world by its collar. Watch it next to him leading a chorus of 'I Say a Little Prayer for You' in My Best Friend's Wedding, and say a little prayer for the death of youth and its boundless creative endeavour.

Firth, too, is excellent, and their final scenes together are touched by a rare brilliance, the film's themes dovetailing perfectly into an incisive, razor-sharp examination of class, equality and Britishness. Their schoolmates naturally suffer in comparison (as Burgess's heartthrob, Harcourt, Cary Elwes has the cheekbones but not the requisite etherealism), though Michael Jenn is extremely good as a sympathetic house 'god' cracking under pressure - despite looking about 45, rather than 18.

Another Country works best with some prior knowledge of Burgess (or 'Bennett' as he is here), and isn't for all tastes - elliptical, self-contained and closeted as it is - but if you're interested in British history, class or sexual politics, it's completely fascinating, invigoratingly entertaining and extremely moving, with a hypnotically powerful, well-conceived pay-off. I loved it. (4)

***



Forbidden Games (René Clément, 1952) - Seeking perfection in art is a curse. "Why?" I hear you demand in suitably suppliant fashion. Because 'flaws' are often an irrelevance, and one that distracts viewers, reviewers and critics from embracing something truly special.

Take Forbidden Games, an Oscar-winner from 1952, which has more than its fair share of narrative and stylistic shortcomings. The subplots required to power its plot - including a rivalry between neighbours and an illicit romance between their offspring - are heavy-handed and a little dull, while the interiors shot around the lower level of a farmhouse are neither cinematic nor terribly credible.

Which makes it a flawed film, right? But it's also one of the greatest films ever made: an incredible, indelible movie about love, friendship and the destruction of innocence that builds to not one but two extraordinary gut-punches.

The movie details the intense and moving relationship between a little girl (Brigitte Fossey) orphaned in a bombing raid, and the older boy, Michel (Georges Poujouly), who appoints himself her protector. Together they try to confront the horror of war through a forbidden game: swiping ornamental crosses to decorate the cemetery they have created for fallen creatures.

While the action going on around them is middling, the children are both sensational, and the scenes concerning their obsessive friendship, their darkly comic quest and their wrestling with the biggest and most troubling questions in life are singularly and enduringly resonant, leading to a final scene that's as moving and powerful as cinema is ever going to get.

Its high points are so high, its view of childhood so arresting and deftly realised, that poorly-framed interiors and a handful of duff scenes seem a little beside the point. (4)

***

/a>

"P. S. Have you ever been teased? Can you help me?"
Mary and Max (Adam Elliot, 2009) - An animated Australian wonder about the idiosyncratic friendship between a lonely eight-year-old Antipodean girl and the obese, anxiety attack-prone middle-aged American man - magnificently voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman - whom she selects for a penpal.

Told largely through their absurd, heartbreaking letters - which reach a definite peak of hilarity as Max recounts his employment history - and accompanied by distinctive visuals stuffed with brilliant, imaginative sight gags, it's a true original armed with an abundance of emotion, much of it deep and dark and sad.

The film arguably oversteps into poking fun at its characters a couple of times, and its plotting is best when not wandering off into diversions about manslaughter trials and lottery wins, but writer/director/designer Adam Elliot eschews easy sentimentality with admirable vigour, lending the mesmeric Que, Sera Sera sequence a haunting power, before a climactic scene that may even make Max weep big and salty tears. (3.5)

***



The Mayor of Hell (Archie Mayo, 1933) - Or Badass Boys Town: simply one of the best social dramas of the '30s, a crackling slice of humanist filmmaking, with Jimmy Cagney in electrifying form as a slum kid turned political boss who finds his conscience while running a reform school.

It's naïve in places and dramatically simplistic in others - with gangster-flavoured, comedic and romantic subplots we don't need - but it's also startlingly committed, intensely moving and often punchily exhilarating, with Cagney and juvenile delinquent extraordinaire, Frankie Darro, forming an irressistible team.

Darro would star in Warner Bros' revolutionary teen movie, Wild Boys of the Road, the same year. This one is almost as incendiary and provocative (in Wild Boys, Darro and his freight-jumping pals beat a rapist to death - and get away with it): a persuasive and progressive piece of entertainment, with a message about brutalised, demonised and abandoned youth that still rings utterly true, some beautiful direction and a Cagney performance that's up there with his very best. (3.5)

***



Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, 2012) - "I never thought of murdering an innocent person like that before." A rewatch not long after my first one, as my wife hadn't seen it. It's very funny, very British in an acute, specific way, and has some skull-crunching violence to set your teeth on edge. The lead performances could scarcely be better. I like it a lot. (3.5)

***



Goon (Michael Dowse, 2011) is like Dodgeball but with brains and heart, as former security guard Doug (Seann William Scott) is drafted into a struggling Canadian hockey team to protect its mercurial star from marauding opposition heavies, and becomes a cult hero.

Despite having its roots in truth, the plotting is rather by-the-numbers, but the script by Jay Baruchel and Evan Goldberg is funny, offbeat and sweet-natured, while providing Scott with a great part as the dim, guileless and fiercely loyal ice-borne thug with a little of Parks and Rec's Andy Dwyer about him.

Alison Pill is also extremely good as a most unusual love interest: a conflicted, horny young woman not too dissimilar to Jennifer Lawrence's celebrated character in Silver Linings Playbook, but a good couple of years before the fact.

The film occupies a strange hinterland between reality and absurdism, when leaning towards one or the other might have made it more emotionally resonant or outlandishly funny, but it is a fun place to hang out for a fast-moving hour and a half. (3)

***



Year One (Harold Ramis, 2009) - One of the more notorious flops of recent years: a comedy about cavemen Jack Black and Michael Cera, who get involved with Cain and Abel, Sodom and Gomorrah, and June Diane Raphael and Juno Temple.

It starts quite well, the leads are fun in small doses and every so often there's a really good, deceptively sharp gag, but, considering it was written by a couple of American Office staffers, it's mostly a big disappointment, with a stupid and unsatisfying story, a tendency to go for the insultingly lowbrow - and the alarmingly sexist - and a horrible performance by Oliver Platt as a high priest that sets back the gay rights debate to Year Zero. (2)

***


I didn't get to this bit. Thank fuck.

The Boat That Rocked (Richard Curtis, 2009) - Or Operation Yewtree: The Movie. This story of pirate DJs in the '60s is just complete garbage: awfully conceived, beset with mawkishness, and rife with Curtis's cringeworthy sex gags, including an astonishingly ill-judged 'comedy' attempted rape. You'll be rooting for Kenneth Branagh's ludicrous baddie to close down their stupid, boring, sex pest-y boat. Or just bailing early, as I did. (1)

***


The film is exactly this funny.

"Doctor, can you give the court your impression of Mr Striker?"
"I'm sorry, I don't do impressions, my training is in psychiatry."

Airplane II: The Sequel (Ken Finkleman, 1982) - There's no story here beyond Ted Striker (Robert Hays) trying to stop a lunar passenger flight from blowing up, simply an endless stream of jokes. Sorry, 'jokes'. The original film is pretty good if bafflingly overpraised; this repetitive sequel has precisely one-and-a-half laughs (the one is above, the half is that line about pre-flight nerves). The rest is just broad, nasty and sexist. Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit doing whatever would make it in some way bearable. (1)

***

Thanks for reading.

All it took were these words, and I was bombarded with nominations for neglected pop classics, some familiar (Tiny Dancer, What Is Love, Would I Lie to You?), and some not (Together Forever, Fortress Around Your Heart, Thinking of You by Sister Sledge).

So I bunged them all on a Spotify playlist for you, to make those commutes all the bouncier.

*BIG SPOILERS THROUGHOUT *

It was my birthday, so I watched the original cut of Star Wars again.

It is, of course, an endlessly brilliant mash-up of sci-fi movie, serial, WWII flyer flick and western that will never, ever get old. I’m always amazed that it’s as popular as it is: objectively, Hamill is wooden, the script is as full of jargon and corniness as it is wit and credible emotion, and it ends with a battle won but the war only just beginning – but who wants to be objective? It’s bloody amazing. Here are 10 assorted things I love about the greatest B-movie ever made:


1. Luke looking out into the galaxy, as two suns loom above him.

2. The burning of the homestead, cribbed from The Searchers and every bit as powerful and terrible and wondrous.

3. The unbelievably shit, moth-eaten wolf alien thing in the Cantina, which looks like it’s come from a jumble sale.


4. “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”

5. C-3PO saying: “Hello, sir” when he meets Han for the first time.

6. Vader standing up for old-fashioned values: “Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed”. The Force is, like, way better.

7. The damsel in distress being a sarcastic, ass-kicking action hero.

Han: “Look, Your Worshipfulness, let's get one thing straight. I take orders from just one person: me.”
Leia: “It's a wonder you're still alive.”


8. The stripes of stars as the Falcon goes into lightspeed.

9. The noise a TIE fighter makes.

10. Han coming back, and the look on his face when he does.

Han shot first too. As he should do: Greedo was threatening him with a fucking gun.

*LOADS OF SPOILERS, BUT HAVE YOU NOT SEEN THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK?*

Continuing my rewatches of the original cuts of the original (let's pretend the only) Star Wars trilogy, here are 10 things I love about The Empire Strikes Back, the best of the series, without any shadow of a hint of a suggestion of a doubt:


1. The Ice Planet of Hoth. Where do you want to start the film? How about in a freezing, almost uninhabitable wasteland where the Rebel Alliance ride about on funny, hoppy little white camels (Tauntauns), until dock-off robots with gargantuan legs (AT-AT Walkers) suddenly hove into view, shooting the shit out of everything that moves, and many things that don't.

2. The hero spending most of the film sitting in a swamp complaining, accompanied by a philosopher and great warrior who abhors war, delights in wasting people's time and thinks that pretending not to be the person they're looking for is just the best joke ever.



3. The way it looks. Just about every image in Empire is stunning and iconic, thanks to stylised costumes, staggering sets (that catwalk in Cloud City!), and a sense of visual composition that makes everything seem crucial and seismic without being portentous or melodramatic. That eye for a killer image belonged to Peter Suschitzky, who started off working for Peter Watkins at the BBC and now hangs around with David Cronenberg.

4. Vader. No amount of parodying or familiarity will change the fact that he's the most terrifying screen villain of all time, and he has two entrances here that are just dynamite.

5. Ineffectual Englishmen. Most of the Imperial fleet is manned by mediocre journeymen actors from Britain, lending a certain weird charm to the sequences in which Vader keeps murdering them for being useless.

6. "I love you", "I know."
Harrison Ford once said that he belonged to the "make-believe" school of acting. He also belonged to the "instant genius" school of screenwriting. What are the two most memorable moments of his career? This and shooting the whirling dervish in Raiders, right? And he ad-libbed them both. The Han-Leia relationship throbs with sexual tension throughout.


7. Male bonding. 3PO and R2, Chewie and Han, Vader and Luke. There are some great moments of bromance in this movie, hardly surprising when you consider that co-writer Leigh Brackett was the man behind Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (and the director's various semi-remakes). Nobody did understated, unsentimental bonding like Brackett, and those little moments add up to an awful lot: there's an undercurrent of emotion here that gives a lump in the throat, and is missing from every other film in the series.

8. Lando. The good-bad character is a staple in the westerns that Lucas was drawing inspiration from. Dan Duryea's versions didn't tend to come with killer cheekbones and a blue cape, though.

9. Hamill's acting for the final 20 minutes. Where the hell did that come from? As Luke Skywalker, he spends the first 220 minutes of the trilogy giving line readings that might sound a trifle unconvincing in a primary school nativity. Then he gets a nasty surprise from his dad, and suddenly he's Laurence Fucking Olivier, all wailing anguish and a tortured soul. It's like a dagger to the chest and a euphoric catharsis all at once.


10. The whole film possessing the quality of a nightmare. Almost every heroic character is maimed or dismantled or betrayed, Vader is untouchable, and nothing is resolved, its only victories Dunkirk-like retreats. So why can't I stop watching it?

Guess what's up next? No, not Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation, Return of the Jedi.

You can read the first in the series here, it's all about Star Wars.

I had a week off work, which I spent writing, reading, watching movies and occasionally leaving the house to watch plays or buy food or ask a hospital to look at my foot (long-standing injury, no cause for concern). Yes, it was lovely thanks. Here's everything I did that didn't involve my kids' book (third draft, 79 pages through, lookin' alright).

FILMS:



Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh, 1996) - A middle-class black woman (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) goes in search of her birth mother and finds a coarse, tearful, loving, unhappy, chain-smoking working-class white woman (Blenda Blethyn), whose family is a powder keg just waiting for a match.

Mike Leigh's lengthy treatise on family, love and life has more to say on all three subjects than just about any other movie, fitting snugly into that exalted bracket alongside the likes of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Les enfants du paradis. His work can sometimes lapse into caricature, whether intentionally or otherwise, but this one is perfectly modulated and full of devastating long takes, including a two-shot in a café between Baptiste and Blethyn that's as good as any scene in '90s cinema - and probably better.

Blethyn doesn't really do small, but here she's simply sensational - and utterly real - as a character who hits very close to home, with Baptiste wonderfully measured and sanguine as her counterpoint. Perhaps the best performance of all, though, comes from Timothy Spall, as Blethyn's kind-hearted, protective and troubled younger brother, whose marriage to a haughty amateur decorator - who hates his sister's guts - is flecked with misery.

There aren’t many films that change the way you see the world. Or many pieces of art, for that matter. Secrets & Lies does just that. It's brilliantly conceived, bracingly authentic and emotionally overpowering, opting at its climax not for soap or sentiment, but something truly remarkable: the truth. It's simply a masterpiece. (4)

***



Paddington (Paul King, 2014) - I would like every UKIP voter to watch Paddington. Because of its inclusive message, not because I think they deserve a treat. (3.5)

My review from the cinema release is here.

***



The London Nobody Knows (Norman Cohen, 1967) - This messy, unfocused documentary, from the director of Confessions of a Driving Instructor, is an entrancing jumble of elegy, history tour, meretricious Swinging '60s crap, lies and James Mason being brilliant. The 'Boy I Love' sequence is one of the best, most moving things ever put on film. (3.5)

Someone seems to have uploaded it here. My favourite bit begins at 00:01:24.

***



It Always Rains on Sunday (Robert Hamer, 1948) - This near-legendary meller, telling interlocking stories around London's East End, is full of cuppas, crime and grimy poetry. Googie Withers - as a sexually frustrated housewife harbouring a fugitive - John Slater and Indiana Jones cinematographer Douglas Slocombe are all in peak form, and the climactic action sequence is absolutely pulsating. Jack Warner's acerbic cop could hardly be more different from Dixon of Dock Green, the detective he played on TV for 21 years. (3.5)

***



CINEMA: The Dark Horse (James Napier Robertson, 2014) - A mentally ill former chess champ takes over a club full of disadvantaged kids, and prepares them for the national junior championships. Sounds like a typical Hollywood fantasy, doesn't it? Now imagine it being made by the Dardennes, with a bit of Sling Blade thrown in, and lots of people being punched in the face. That's better, isn't it? This multi-garlanded Kiwi film, based on a true story, has occasional moments of wish-fulfilment or woodenness, but it pays for them a hundred times over, and Cliff Curtis's central performance as the bipolar Maori genius is an absolute gem.

The director used to play Red DinoThunder Ranger on Power Rangers. (3)

***


All my strangely tall, Swedish-looking sons.

All My Sons (Irving Reis, 1948) - A solid version of a classic early Arthur Miller play concerning a plant owner (Edward G. Robinson) who may have shipped dodgy parts to the army during World War Two. That potential scandal casts a pall over the romance between his son (somewhat improbably Burt Lancaster, as many have observed) and the daughter (Arlene Francis) of his former partner, jailed for the crime.

It's a little Hollywoodised: neither quite faithful nor cinematic enough to hit as hard as it should, wasting some of its energy on that tedious romantic subplot and underscoring each emotion with overbearing music, but the material remains superb and Robinson is absolutely excellent, flexing his acting muscles as another of Miller's flawed fathers, for whom the American Dream is ultimately just that. (3)

***

Inspector Hornleigh double-bill:



Inspector Hornleigh (Eugene Forde, 1939) - A threadbare British comedy-mystery, with too much plot, a weak supporting cast, and the great Alastair Sim completely overdoing it in a poorly-written role as a bumbling sergeant. Gordon Harker's quite good as Hornleigh, though - when not asked to merely denigrate the Scots - there are a handful of funny lines, and the culprit is genuinely surprising. I also liked the final gag. There are some things that a production budget of £2.50 can't spoil. (2)

Inspector Hornleigh Takes a Holiday (Walter Forde, 1939) - A slightly superior sequel, written by the great (if erratic) Launder-Gilliat team, that sees Hornleigh (Gordon Harker) and his sidekick Bingham (Alastair Sim) getting embroiled in a murder mystery while on holiday in Brighton. It has moments of real invention and quality, and then long passages where the plot drags and the humour feels incredibly forced. At least Sim gets a slightly better role this time, and there's a decent supporting bit for familiar character actor Edward Chapman. (2.5)

***

I also watched a couple from this Sam Fuller box-set, a mixture of movies he wrote, directed or for which he provided the story or source novel. It's an interesting but ragtag, slightly unsatisfactory collection with no classics except for The Crimson Kimono.



Scandal Sheet (Phil Karlson, 1952) - A passable noir about broken-nosed newspaper editor Broderick Crawford accidentally murdering his ex-wife, then sweating a lot as his protégé (John Derek) gets close to unmasking the killer. Based on a novel by former tabloid reporter (and future director) Sam Fuller, it knows its milieu and has some tense moments, but loses its momentum as the plotting begins to stretch credibility. Crawford is typically good while never going beyond type, Donna Reed is typically pretty and uncharismatic, and Derek looks like an 11-year-old Jef Costello. It's probably Henry Neill who leaves the greatest impression, though I think that's more because I'm a sucker for that kind of Fuller character - a beaten-down 'rumbum' who once won a Pulitzer - than because his performance is that great. (2.5)



Adventure in Sahara (D. Ross Lederman, 1938) - I don't even know why this film exists. It's the story of a flyer (Paul Kelly) who joins the French Foreign Legion to avenge his brother's death, and plots the murder of sadistic general C. Henry Gordon. Then his girlfriend crashlands her plane in the desert nearby. It manages to be both predictable and ridiculous. And boring. Not bad for 56 minutes. And yet bad in every way. Including the title. Based on a story by Sam Fuller, but that's no guarantee. Directed by Sam Fuller, that's a guarantee. (1)

See also: I've reviewed some of the other films in the set too: It Happened in Hollywood, >Power of the Press and Underworld U.S.A..

***



CINEMA: A Little Chaos (Alan Rickman, 2014) - A doggedly conventional period film that’s fairly likeable within those limitations, as working-class gardener Charlie Dimmock (Kate Winslet) gets a job with the King of France, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen (director Alan Rickman), and attracts the attention of hunky slice of Euroblandness, Matthias Schoenaerts. It's a bit like when Ground Force did up Mandela's place.

Winslet is excellent (isn’t she always?) and there are three really good scenes in the middle of the picture, where she spars with Rickman – who’s in predictable but amusing form – and bonds with his female courtiers, but beyond that it doesn’t amount to an awful lot, just solid, by-the-numbers romantic fare, with the usual pinch of tragedy, rainy action sequence and sex scene where the female lead covers her boobs with a sheet. (2.5)

***



CINEMA: While We're Young (Noah Baumbach, 2014) - The great thing about Frances Ha was that it gave you enough, but not too much. It created a fully-realised monochrome universe and the sort of late-20-something character rarely articulated on screen, but radiated with the exhilarating feeling that you could explore this world for yourself. There was no spoonfeeding, just credible events and experiences from which you took what you wanted - without that nasty hunch that you were doing all the work, extracting worth from what might all be meaningless bollocks (hello Jean-Luc Godard). Baumbach's follow-up isn't like that. It spoonfeeds you from the off, while leaning heavily on characters and situations we've seen before.

Documentarians Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts are a stale married couple aroused from their stupor by up-and-coming, trilby-wearing hipster annoyance Adam Driver and his ice cream-making wife, Amanda Seyfried. Stiller is entranced by Driver's sense of freedom and open-mindedness, at odds with his older friends' newfound obsession with their newly-minted children, and via various unorthodox new-age experiences, they drift towards collaboration - and crisis.

There's some really good stuff here, and at times the tone is just right. Take the scene in which Watts ends up at a hip hop dance class. In most films she would be a) secretly amazing, or b) laughably terrible. But here there's no revelation of a hidden talent, nor humour at her character's expense: instead she unleashes a latent, white-hot sensuality that covers for her obvious lack of expertise. That scene is then reprised to cast light on her relationship with her husband, which is shifting - perhaps for the better, perhaps not - in the light of their renewed zeal for life and all it can offer.

Some of the jokes are brilliant too, with a special mention for the sequence where Stiller meets a hedge fund manager who may want to invest in his second film, 10 years in gestation. "What proportion of African-American males are currently in jail?" asks Stiller. "I don't know," says the man. "Sixty per cent?"

There's also quite a lot that doesn't work, including a lengthy scene in which most of the characters are vomiting, Driver's leaden performance - I've yet to see him do anything to suggest he's not just a deeper, less engaging Justin Long - and a sense that we've seen a lot of this before, whether in Crimes and Misdemeanours, All About Eve or Catfish.

At his best, Baumbach is funny, eye-openingly original and capable of making you look at the world in a different way. At his worst, he's derivative, long-winded and middle-class in a slightly embarrassing way. He's also prohibitively prescriptive. But he's rarely less than entertaining, and While We're Young - I still can't get over what a nothing title that is - does entertain, while offering insights into growing old that are never quite as multitudinous or profound as he seems to imagine. (2.5)

***



"White folks didn't give the Indians much of a break."
Massacre (Alan Crosland, 1934) - This story of a conceited Native American stunt rider (Richard Barthelmess) who gets in touch with his proud heritage and ends up fighting pervy white racists, isn't particularly well made, but is fascinating for its progressive politics and interracial romance, both of which would soon be rendered omerta by the strict enforcement of the Production Code.

Its message, that powerful capitalist interests have made "diseased beggars" out of America's indigenous people, remains extraordinarily resonant, and shockingly confrontational for a mainstream Hollywood film from a supposedly less enlightened time. And as if to confirm that it really was a less enlightened time, its trailer is by contrast incredibly racist and unbelievably stupid.

Barthelmess, the great silent actor of the 1920s, is quite good, though his best moments are wordless and created as much by intelligent visual composition as thespian skill. His disastrous facelift in the late '20s rendered his face virtually immobile, though he did give decent performances in Four Hours to Kill! and particularly Only Angels Have Wings. Pre-Code firecracker Ann Dvorak - who acted even Paul Muni off the screen in Scarface - is largely wasted as his new girlfriend, another Native American who's been to college. (2)

***



The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946) - A psychotic deer tries to starve a family of settlers to death after they murder his mum.

This handsome adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel dealing with 19th century frontier life is partly a coming-of-age story about a boy and his pet, and partly a Tree Grows in Brooklyn-style domestic drama concerning an idealistic kid (Claude Jarman, Jr) caught between an affable father (Gregory Peck) and a hardened ma (Jane Wyman), but despite a couple of moving moments and some stunning Technicolor photography, it doesn't quite come off.

The main problem is that it's all too mawkish, substituting Brooklyn's often brutal unsentimentality for mile-high corn, its weepier tendencies hammered home by an oppressively naive string-and-choir score. And while I like Peck's performance - he didn't really convince as an actor until Yellow Sky and The Gunfighter, and even then was more of a star, but his sensibility suits the role down to the ground - and Wyman is very good, Jarman simply can't act, the extensive coaching he's clearly being given for each scene also robbing his character of any unity or coherence of purpose.

Considering he's the focus for vast swathes of the film, that's a major shortcoming. And while it seems cruel to lay into a kid, it's more director Clarence Brown and MGM I'm questioning (they supposedly auditioned 19,500 potential Jodys), as well as the Oscar voters, who gave Jarman an inexplicable award. Perhaps his two big scenes near the end stuck in their mind, they're certainly the only ones where you don't catch him acting.

I'm also waiting for some of the plot threads to be tied up - it's been 69 years, but I'll keep you posted.

There are a handful of lovely sequences here, including a joyous, sun-dappled dash through the woods, Wyman being moved to tears by her husband's profligate kindness, and Peck ruminating wisely about life and death, but as a whole it's rather unconvincing and trite, despite looking like a million dollars. (2)

***



The Illusionist (Neil Burger, 2006) - A mediocre period piece in broad strokes, with high-pitched conjuror Ed Norton invoking the ire of Austrian crown prince Rufus Sewell by getting off with his girlfriend (Jessica Biel).

Paul Giamatti is the best thing about it, as an ambitious, compromised, morally complex butcher's son angling for the chief of police gig. He doesn't attempt a Viennese accent, but neither did Jimmy Stewart in A Shop Around the Corner, and he was excellent too.

By contrast, Sewell is shouty as one of recent cinema's most one-dimensional villains, Aaron Johnson is wooden as the young Norton, and the illusions are almost all tedious CGI. Writer-director Neil Burger seems to think the whole venture is redeemed by its ending, but it really isn't.

Just watch The Prestige instead. Or A Royal Affair. (2)

***



Mission to Moscow (Michael Curtiz, 1943) - "Mr Stalin, I believe history will record you as a great builder for the benefit of mankind."

Surely the most notorious movie ever to come out of a Hollywood studio: a pro-Soviet propaganda film made by Warner Bros under the express instruction of President Roosevelt.

Walter Huston is Joseph E. Davies, the US ambassador to Russia, who was infamously duped by Stalin's show trials, in which countless senior politicians confessed under duress to false, often farcical crimes (I did my undergraduate thesis on them). Here, of course, his word is taken as gospel.

It's a chilling, entirely fascinating film, and full of hilarious, unintentional black comedy in its portrayal of peace-loving Stalin, whose nation - in ironic foreshadowing of the Cold War - apparently represents "the iron wall of human freedom". Since Churchill is depicted in the movie, and was a proper film buff, I do wonder if that phrase stuck in his mind.

Mission to Moscow has to be seen to be believed and is a must for history nerds, even if it's not, in any objective sense, a good movie. Still better than Police Academy 7, though. (2)

***



CINEMA: Lost River (Ryan Gosling, 2014) - Ryan Gosling's directorial debut, set in a ravaged, partially flooded Detroit, resembles a disaster area in more ways than one.

The imagery is stunning and the sound is superb, but the story is so vague, pretentious and boring it makes Stalker look like Casablanca.

It was massively exciting to see Gosling do an in-person Q&A after the preview, as I'm a huge fan of his in general, but I have no idea what most of this is supposed to mean, and I'm not sure he has either.

Just call it BS of the Midwestern Wild. (1)

***

BOOKS:



The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926) - "It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing." Hemingway's first novel has great moments, particularly when he turns to introspection or descriptive passages about bullfighting, and the divisive, distinctively terse style was fully-formed even then, but his story of rootless, boozing ex-pats is self-indulgent to the point of comatose tedium, with almost every page flooded by witless pseudo-badinage between dislikeable, indistinguishable characters. Or the narrator telling us that he got either dressed or undressed. (2)



Tinseltown by William J. Mann (2014) - In 1922, clean-cut movie director William Desmond Taylor was killed by a single bullet fired in his living room by an unknown assailant. In Tinseltown, film historian William J. Mann finally works out whodunit. Perhaps. This novelistic saga is extraordinarily well-researched, occasionally presumptive, frequently a little tacky, but never less than utterly gripping, as it tells the stories of Taylor, the three women in his life, his employees, his megalomaniacal boss (Adolph Zukor) and the battle for the heart and soul of Hollywood. It's essential for anyone possessing the slightest interest in this period of cinema and a fairly strong stomach. (3.5)



Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut (1969) - In 1945, Kurt Vonnegut witnessed the bombing of Dresden as a PoW. This freewheeling book, 24 years in gestation, is a comically dizzying, intensely moving, utterly singular treatment of his experiences, which takes in raffish, well-fed English prisoners, alien abduction, time travel, and a Nazi collaborator who certainly has America's shortcomings down pat. I haven't read a book since Catch-22 that made me laugh so hard, reel in amazement so regularly or grasp so strongly that whatever you do as a writer, you just have to be yourself. (4)



In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck (1936) - A muddy, hungry, violent chronicle of a strike, as two reds stir travelling labourers to action, and Steinbeck wonders what the point of it all it is, alighting on a couple of possibilities by the end. The first of three Steinbeck novels looking at organised labour in California (the others were Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath), he wrote it on three levels: as reportage, as a study of the 'phalanx' - whereby men working as a whole acquire different though not necessarily better traits, and as a metaphysical examination of the failings of man. It works best on the first and most immediate, which is still fresh and fascinating: ultimately a study of conviction and the need to live for something. Steinbeck wasn't a communist, and claimed to have little time for those who were, but he makes a great case for his reds, Mac and Jim, who will use everything at their disposal to better the lot of the working classes as a whole, even if it means that individuals are starved and beaten and killed. It's bracing, poetic - if perhaps containing a touch too much about how the sun made the trees look - and utterly, utterly compelling, a neglected classic simply too abrasive, gloomy and superficially cynical to ever find much of an audience. Or to be made into a movie, though self-aggrandising talent vacuum James Franco is apparently on the case. (4)

***

TV:



Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe (2015) - Perhaps the funniest series so far from a presenter who as a satirist, social commentator and smartarse fixated on 'your mum' jokes currently has no equal. Guest spots featuring a phony vlogger and a fake Russell Brand (both Morgana Robinson) are merely mild extensions of something quite annoying, neither of which probably need spearing and both of which result in something largely unwatchable, but those are rare duff spots in a hugely enjoyable series that made me feel like I'm not a lone voice banging my fucking head against the wilderness. And breakout star Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan), a woman of endless wonder but no brain, remains a constant and enduring delight. (3.5)

THEATRE:



A View from the Bridge (Wyndham's Theatre) - Arthur Miller followed up The Crucible with another play dealing allegorically with the communist witchhunts: A View from the Bridge, a story of Freud and informing in which longshoreman Eddie Carbone (Mark Strong) is tempted to turn in an illegal immigrant for daring to romance the niece he idolises (Phoebe Fox).

It's probably no coincidence that this all takes place 'on the waterfront', as had the Oscar-winning apologia for informing made by Budd Schulberg and Miller's former friend and collaborator Elia Kazan the previous year, both of whom had named names for the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Ivo von Hove's production opts for minimal staging but maximum power, with a small, square, boxed-off set, scenes bleeding one into the next through intelligently-paced entrances, and a finale in which no-one is left untainted.

There are a couple of strange decisions, including a seriously protracted five-way conversation that fails to generate the requisite tension despite percussive interludes, and a narrator reading the stage directions during one pivotal, usually fast-moving sequence - but these are minor quibbles with one of the most thrilling, gripping and invigorating evenings I've ever spent in a theatre.

The shaven-headed Strong, facial muscles twitching, disappears into his character entirely, inhabiting this tortured, conflicted Sicilian, polemicising endlessly, though whether to convince himself or others isn't clear. As the nymph whose sexual blossoming has set tragedy in motion, Phoebe Fox is also exceptional, with impeccable delivery and a sensuality that's careless, studied and insecure.

Miller's first draft of the play was a bitter indictment of Kazan, with no room for maneouvre or misunderstanding. His final is much more reconciliatory, with a heartfelt pay-off more concerned with the human condition, more preoccupied with a man's soul. Here, informing isn't seen as the right thing to do, but it isn't seen as the easy thing to do either, and ultimately the play is less about what happened in a Washington committee hearing than a timeless meditation on the emotional forces that may blow a man away from his principles. That's why a Freudian motive, redolent of Greek Tragedy, might at first glance seem incongruous, but actually makes perfect sense.

This gobsmacking production, powered by two performances of exquisite clarity, nails both its specifics and its wider resonances, leaving you feeling exhausted, destroyed and yet curiously euphoric. (4)

See also: For anyone interested in the Communist witchhunt in Hollywood, Victor S. Navasky's Naming Names is definitive.



Letters Live (Freemasons' Hall) - Have you ever had a dream about a show and wished it could really have happened? Well that's essentially what I experienced on Saturday night: extraordinary letters by writers, statesmen, soldiers and poets, performed by a mystery line-up that ultimately included several of the most exciting actors on the planet. Benedict Cumberbatch read Basil Rathbone's heartbreaking, angry ruminations on his brother's death, Toby Jones was Ted Hughes - making me see the world another way as he talked to his son of the child within - Lisa Dwan delivered Beckett's elliptical words of condolence, which spoke of the "gales of grief", Tom Hiddleston played Marlon Brando, and Ferdinand Kingsley said the C-word. There was a wartime romance articulated by Cumberbatch and Louise Brealey, Kylie as Nick Cave, and Matt Berry as a hilariously reactionary Elvis, who was applying to be a federal agent and had got Richard Nixon a present. And there was music too, including Tom Odell playing songs about letters by Cave and Fats Waller. Three hours, it lasted, and I never wanted it to end. Next time it comes, beg, steal or borrow the money to get a ticket. It's magnificent. (4)

Then for my birthday, my work friends got me the book, because they are brilliant.



Clarence Darrow (Old Vic) - I was lucky enough to see Kevin Spacey's final performance on the Old Vic stage, after 12 years as the theatre's artistic director. He inhabits Darrow, the crusading defence barrister, almost completely, and this one-man show is entertaining, compelling, even inspiring, as he harnesses an invisible cast, aided by lighting and staging that's evocative but never intrusive or gimmicky. For all that, the play never quite hits the heights you'd hope: when it asks Spacey to turn impassioned and emotional ("We... w-o-n," he recalls a few times), the sentiment of it slips him up and comes off as phony, and there's nothing sharp or edgy about the play - facing off against old American wrongs like racism and fundamentalist religion is about as safe as it gets when playing to a modern, cosmopolitan audience. I liked it, and feel privileged to have witnessed the occasion, but it was ultimately glossy entertainment rather than the confrontational polemic that Darrow himself might have preferred. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

Assorted ruminations on recent film viewings. I'll try to update you on books read and plays seen when the sun isn't quite so shiny.



CINEMA: How to Train Your Dragon 2 3D (Dean DeBlois, 2014) - So, a sequel to an animated kids' film? Bigger? Check. Darker? Check. Roger Deakins hired as aesthetic consultant? Pardon.

That's just a little hint as to how high this one aims, upping the ante from the original with a story about a fascistic warlord who transfixes gentle but malleable creatures and turns them into a rampaging army (see 1930s Spain, Germany, Italy...), the film going blacker and more intensely sad than you could ever imagine, but also filling its vast frame with wonder and beauty and magic, including some of the most intoxicating flight footage ever created.

In a key part, Cate Blanchett's accent globetrots to a distracting degree - while the challenge of getting her character to make narrative sense requires some not entirely convincing plot developments - but for the most part it's a startlingly effective film, with excellent voicework by Jay Baruchel as our heroic Hiccup, a new faux-folk ballad penned by Shane MacGowan, and a beating heart as big as that weird alpha male ice dragon thing.

Does the film ever quite make up for the daringly dark, perilously tragic turn it takes in its second act? It's debatable, but I think just about: Hiccup's pleading, sincere, desperate face emerging from the fuzzy gloom as that magnificent score gets ready to soar.

Bizarrely, the lamentable Madagascar tried a similar thing and predictably died on its arse. This one has the clarity of vision and the sheer congregation of talent to sustain it through all manner of improbable challenges, the familiar fusion of action, comedy and family drama lent real weight by the sheer scale of its ambition - never more in evidence than when Hiccup sees a flamboyant dragon-rider dressed like The Statue of Liberty bearing down on him, apparently thirsty for blood... (3.5)

***



*SPOILERS*
if.... (Lindsay Anderson, 1968) - Lindsay Anderson's bewildering, bewitching Marxist revenge fantasy is what '60s cinema should have been but so very rarely was: satirical, socially conscious and genuinely surreal, happily lacking in gimmickry and low comedy, with a variety of competing concerns but a sure focus on just who - and what - it wants to dispense with in a hail of bullets.

When I saw the film as a blazered teenager at a British public school, it seemed straightforward to me - after all, which right-thinking adolescent doesn't want to collage his walls, attract a pouty raven-haired girlfriend and then shoot everyone he doesn't like? My #1 film aged 16 looks no less radical to the 30-year-old me, but odder and wilder, throwing off the constraints of filmic form and function, just as its characters blast away the shackles of establishment oppression.

The story is slight but bracing: a trio of dissenters, led by the inestimable Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) - who's afforded one of the great screen entrances, dressed like a highwayman for reasons actually too uncool to recall - drink, scoff at authority and abscond from their increasingly bizarre public school, before a heartbreaking act of vindictive subjugation tips them over the edge into armed revolution.

Some have sensed a respect for tradition in Anderson's treatment of the David Sherwin script: I see little but a twitching contempt, the hymns, habits and institutions of the establishment merely monoliths and their entrenched but superficial trappings to be incinerated by the fire that burns within Travis and co.

There's none of Godard's stultifying posturing here, though: the drama is rooted in human feeling not philosophical semantics, and every sequence seems to serve some grander purpose, even if it's often left to us to determine what that might be. So the fencing fun sets up the triumvirate as musketeers defending some ancient right - and shifting from false to genuine blood-letting - the "tiger dance" presumably denotes a return to man's animal state, and the subsequent motorcycle jaunt is redolent with the smell of freedom: the antithesis of British public school life.

It's possible that the basement clear-out is just Anderson being confrontationally obscure (like Antonioni including the tennis-playing mimes in Blowup"for the critics"), but some tentative theorising can find symbolic value in everything they discover: the crocodile corpse is a relic of imperialism, tossed onto the fire, the gas mask represents Our Finest Hour, the foetus in the jar is an undeveloped human trapped under glass - much like Travis and his cohorts - and the weapons, well, they're the only answer to that.

Perhaps the only element of tradition that Anderson and Sherwin have any time for is the vernacular of public school, of "shag spots", "whips" and "scums", and that's weird enough to fit: a singular language for a singular film that flits between colour and black-and-white (initially through financial necessity, then later artistic choice), possesses a notably and joyfully unglamorous cast and chucks a grenade at the rule book.

For if there's one shot that sums up everything glorious about if...., it's that swooping, exhilarating close-up of Travis on the roof, about to take a shot of his own. (4)

***



*SOME SPOILERS*
O Lucky Man! 1973 (Lindsay Anderson, 1973) - This unremittingly bleak, cynical meander through 1970s Britain is alternately visionary, flabby, bizarre, offensive, stupid, brilliant, scattershot, prescient and beautiful. It's also magnificently unpredictable.

Malcolm McDowell allegedly 'returns' as Mick Travis, the hero of Lindsay Anderson's if...., but if it's the same bloke, then he's certainly changed. Where once he was a Marxist insurgent, now he's an amoral coffee-salesmen-cum-arms-deal-facilitator who makes not a single reference to his glorious past (unless that abstract interrogation counts). But perhaps that's the point writer David Sherwin is making, inserting a deliciously sly line about moneyed warmongerers who once worshipped Karl Marx and Keynes within the walls of Oxford's left-leaning Balliol College.

The film as a whole is almost impossible to pin down, following Travis as it dumps him, and us, into a tragic guest house, a medical testing centre, a hippy hang-out, some smoke-filled rooms of unspeakable moral depravity, a rose-tinted jail that deliciously satirises prison's status as a place of reform, and the environs of a soup truck for the disenfranchised, the film ultimately revealing itself as the evil twin of George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara, with not a crumb of comfort for its audience, aside from the solace of celebrity.

Laced with wicked black comedy, brilliantly soundtracked by Alan Price and his band - who often appear on-screen - and brought to life by a startlingly eclectic cast often playing several different roles (at one point Captain Mainwaring from Dad's Army turns up in blackface as an African president, and makes Rachel Roberts stroke his penis), it's an exhausting, astonishing work, as a patchy - even tedious - first half gives way to a frequently dazzling second.

In terms of coherence and visceral impact, it can't match its stunning predecessor, but it's a fascinating, remarkable film that's both a time capsule and a sign of things to come. Anderson, Sherwin and McDowell reunited nine years later for the conclusion of the trilogy, Britannia Hospital, but let's pretend they didn't. (3)

***



28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2004) - *swoon* Cillian Murphy.

Danny Boyle's zombie nightmare isn't as murky or bleak or intense as it really should be.

Sure, it has memorable ideas - newly awakened hospital outpatient Murphy walking the deserted London streets, shouting "Hellooooo" without much reply - but they're rarely executed as stridently as they might be, and the moments that do hit home are ultimately outweighed by a plethora of shortcomings: ugly digital cinematography, an excessive song score, some weak performances and a mawkish, often formless narrative. The admittedly bold third act diversion isn't an inspired left turn, it's the sight of the script wandering off into the wilderness.

Like all Boyle films, the movie does start well and it's not exactly unwatchable after that - with a pleasant philosophical undertow about what exactly there is to live for in this dystopia - but it's also not nearly the bristling homegrown Romero reboot that most critics would have you believe.

Take Naomi Harris's character as a case in point. She's a punchy, nihilistic one-woman pharmacy, warming up as the body count escalates - but she's just not that convincing, or interesting, or painted in bold enough colours. And neither's the film. (2)

***



Another Country (Marek Kanievska, 1984) - A sad, scintillating film - adapted by Julian Mitchell from his play - about the (semi-fictionalised) school days of the notorious dissolute Guy Burgess (Rupert Everett), who traded upper class respectability for a rollicking infamy born of alcohol, illicit sex and a double life as a Soviet spy.

Here we find him as a tortured young soul, his flamboyant queerness nothing but a mask to face down the stifling, pointless conformity of boarding school life, his dangerous sexuality as intrinsic to his being as the obsessive communism of his best friend (Colin Firth).

It's a strange, lolloping film - the missing link between the counter-culture public school rebellion of if.... and the repressed, restrained gay romance of Merchant Ivory's Maurice - unnaturally obsessed with the rules of its elite establishment not in themselves but as the strictures and structures of the establishment, in all its quivering hypocrisy.

Scored by an eerie synthesiser track, it wanders in and out of its various stories with the swaggering arrogance of Burgess himself, yet interrogates the characters - or archetypes - therein with the intellectual relish, sadness and wit also intrinsic to his being (at least as seen here).

Those myriad complexities - within us all, but within Burgess tenfold, if the film is to be believed - are brought to life with a dizzying virtuosity by Everett, before he apparently jacked in artistic ambition in favour of celebrity and playing various versions of himself in lousy American romcoms.

The scene in which he, lovestruck and drunk, hushedly croons Rodgers and Hart's 'Who?', laid out on a wooden library floor, is the kind of stunningly vulnerable, unselfconscious acting that people only seem to do when they're young and brilliant and seizing the world by its collar. Watch it next to him leading a chorus of 'I Say a Little Prayer for You' in My Best Friend's Wedding, and say a little prayer for the death of youth and its boundless creative endeavour.

Firth, too, is excellent, and their final scenes together are touched by a rare brilliance, the film's themes dovetailing perfectly into an incisive, razor-sharp examination of class, equality and Britishness. Their schoolmates naturally suffer in comparison (as Burgess's heartthrob, Harcourt, Cary Elwes has the cheekbones but not the requisite etherealism), though Michael Jenn is extremely good as a sympathetic house 'god' cracking under pressure - despite looking about 45, rather than 18.

Another Country works best with some prior knowledge of Burgess (or 'Bennett' as he is here), and isn't for all tastes - elliptical, self-contained and closeted as it is - but if you're interested in British history, class or sexual politics, it's completely fascinating, invigoratingly entertaining and extremely moving, with a hypnotically powerful, well-conceived pay-off. I loved it. (4)

***



Forbidden Games (René Clément, 1952) - Seeking perfection in art is a curse. "Why?" I hear you demand in suitably suppliant fashion. Because 'flaws' are often an irrelevance, and one that distracts viewers, reviewers and critics from embracing something truly special.

Take Forbidden Games, an Oscar-winner from 1952, which has more than its fair share of narrative and stylistic shortcomings. The subplots required to power its plot - including a rivalry between neighbours and an illicit romance between their offspring - are heavy-handed and a little dull, while the interiors shot around the lower level of a farmhouse are neither cinematic nor terribly credible.

Which makes it a flawed film, right? But it's also one of the greatest films ever made: an incredible, indelible movie about love, friendship and the destruction of innocence that builds to not one but two extraordinary gut-punches.

The movie details the intense and moving relationship between a little girl (Brigitte Fossey) orphaned in a bombing raid, and the older boy, Michel (Georges Poujouly), who appoints himself her protector. Together they try to confront the horror of war through a forbidden game: swiping ornamental crosses to decorate the cemetery they have created for fallen creatures.

While the action going on around them is middling, the children are both sensational, and the scenes concerning their obsessive friendship, their darkly comic quest and their wrestling with the biggest and most troubling questions in life are singularly and enduringly resonant, leading to a final scene that's as moving and powerful as cinema is ever going to get.

Its high points are so high, its view of childhood so arresting and deftly realised, that poorly-framed interiors and a handful of duff scenes seem a little beside the point. (4)

***

/a>

"P. S. Have you ever been teased? Can you help me?"
Mary and Max (Adam Elliot, 2009) - An animated Australian wonder about the idiosyncratic friendship between a lonely eight-year-old Antipodean girl and the obese, anxiety attack-prone middle-aged American man - magnificently voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman - whom she selects for a penpal.

Told largely through their absurd, heartbreaking letters - which reach a definite peak of hilarity as Max recounts his employment history - and accompanied by distinctive visuals stuffed with brilliant, imaginative sight gags, it's a true original armed with an abundance of emotion, much of it deep and dark and sad.

The film arguably oversteps into poking fun at its characters a couple of times, and its plotting is best when not wandering off into diversions about manslaughter trials and lottery wins, but writer/director/designer Adam Elliot eschews easy sentimentality with admirable vigour, lending the mesmeric Que, Sera Sera sequence a haunting power, before a climactic scene that may even make Max weep big and salty tears. (3.5)

***



The Mayor of Hell (Archie Mayo, 1933) - Or Badass Boys Town: simply one of the best social dramas of the '30s, a crackling slice of humanist filmmaking, with Jimmy Cagney in electrifying form as a slum kid turned political boss who finds his conscience while running a reform school.

It's naïve in places and dramatically simplistic in others - with gangster-flavoured, comedic and romantic subplots we don't need - but it's also startlingly committed, intensely moving and often punchily exhilarating, with Cagney and juvenile delinquent extraordinaire, Frankie Darro, forming an irressistible team.

Darro would star in Warner Bros' revolutionary teen movie, Wild Boys of the Road, the same year. This one is almost as incendiary and provocative (in Wild Boys, Darro and his freight-jumping pals beat a rapist to death - and get away with it): a persuasive and progressive piece of entertainment, with a message about brutalised, demonised and abandoned youth that still rings utterly true, some beautiful direction and a Cagney performance that's up there with his very best. (3.5)

***



Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, 2012) - "I never thought of murdering an innocent person like that before." A rewatch not long after my first one, as my wife hadn't seen it. It's very funny, very British in an acute, specific way, and has some skull-crunching violence to set your teeth on edge. The lead performances could scarcely be better. I like it a lot. (3.5)

***



Goon (Michael Dowse, 2011) is like Dodgeball but with brains and heart, as former security guard Doug (Seann William Scott) is drafted into a struggling Canadian hockey team to protect its mercurial star from marauding opposition heavies, and becomes a cult hero.

Despite having its roots in truth, the plotting is rather by-the-numbers, but the script by Jay Baruchel and Evan Goldberg is funny, offbeat and sweet-natured, while providing Scott with a great part as the dim, guileless and fiercely loyal ice-borne thug with a little of Parks and Rec's Andy Dwyer about him.

Alison Pill is also extremely good as a most unusual love interest: a conflicted, horny young woman not too dissimilar to Jennifer Lawrence's celebrated character in Silver Linings Playbook, but a good couple of years before the fact.

The film occupies a strange hinterland between reality and absurdism, when leaning towards one or the other might have made it more emotionally resonant or outlandishly funny, but it is a fun place to hang out for a fast-moving hour and a half. (3)

***



Year One (Harold Ramis, 2009) - One of the more notorious flops of recent years: a comedy about cavemen Jack Black and Michael Cera, who get involved with Cain and Abel, Sodom and Gomorrah, and June Diane Raphael and Juno Temple.

It starts quite well, the leads are fun in small doses and every so often there's a really good, deceptively sharp gag, but, considering it was written by a couple of American Office staffers, it's mostly a big disappointment, with a stupid and unsatisfying story, a tendency to go for the insultingly lowbrow - and the alarmingly sexist - and a horrible performance by Oliver Platt as a high priest that sets back the gay rights debate to Year Zero. (2)

***


I didn't get to this bit. Thank fuck.

The Boat That Rocked (Richard Curtis, 2009) - Or Operation Yewtree: The Movie. This story of pirate DJs in the '60s is just complete garbage: awfully conceived, beset with mawkishness, and rife with Curtis's cringeworthy sex gags, including an astonishingly ill-judged 'comedy' attempted rape. You'll be rooting for Kenneth Branagh's ludicrous baddie to close down their stupid, boring, sex pest-y boat. Or just bailing early, as I did. (1)

***


The film is exactly this funny.

"Doctor, can you give the court your impression of Mr Striker?"
"I'm sorry, I don't do impressions, my training is in psychiatry."

Airplane II: The Sequel (Ken Finkleman, 1982) - There's no story here beyond Ted Striker (Robert Hays) trying to stop a lunar passenger flight from blowing up, simply an endless stream of jokes. Sorry, 'jokes'. The original film is pretty good if bafflingly overpraised; this repetitive sequel has precisely one-and-a-half laughs (the one is above, the half is that line about pre-flight nerves). The rest is just broad, nasty and sexist. Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit doing whatever would make it in some way bearable. (1)

***

Thanks for reading.

Hello again. I haven't updated the blog since my summer holiday (the day job is heartily satisfying but all-consuming), so this'll be the first of a full four review anthologies unwantedly coming your way...



CINEMA: Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014) - Richard Linklater's staggeringly ambitious film about growing up is sprawling, shambling, and stunning in just about every way, beginning as a series of episodic, often comedic scenes, then mirroring its hero's increasing complexity and uncertainty, searching for itself across a dozen time-frames as this 11-year production morphs into an existential examination of not just one boy but all of humankind, in all its fuzzy, confusing, conflicted glory. Well, I said it was ambitious.

Ellar Coltrane plays Mason, a Texan kid whom we follow from age five to 18 - and across almost three hours - the film attaining some essential kind of truth as it alights upon real life (albeit with occasional recourse to cliché), through its measured, incisive, often improvised depiction of human relationships familial, platonic and romantic, and the way its unique production allows it to document the unfurling of a person and a personality, like a time-lapse camera showing a plant budding and blossoming, while getting rained on a lot.

It has few conventional dramatic peaks and little actual story to speak of, and yet I wasn't bored for an instant, pulled into the story, never able to second-guess where it was going, and sitting there slack-jawed in amazement when it was all over, knocked sideways by the cumulative impact of it all. And by the Hollywood Dean Gaffney (sorry, Ethan Hawke), who has never been this good on screen before. Not even when he flew around in Explorers.

There are individual scenes we've certainly seen before, and it has its moments of verbal pretension - a problem I'm always going to have with the director's Before Sunrise - but it's one of the most arresting and exciting films of the decade so far, and its USP is far more than a gimmick; rather, it's what enables Boyhood to create such an indelible impact: visually, viscerally and deep down in your soul. (4)

***



CINEMA: Two Days, One Night (Dardenne brothers, 2014) - The Dardennes hit a peak with their stunning Kid with a Bike in 2011, a soaring, polarising story about juvenile delinquency, thwarted promise and the loss of innocence.

This one doesn't hit quite so hard, doesn't break then mend you so completely, but it's reliably superb, up there with films like Rosetta and The Son, and boasting the writer-director's usual calling cards. That means the sort of damaged, nuanced characters you've met in real life yet who never grace the big screen, a brief, inspired and polemical premise that allows them to tackle a headline issue in subversive, socialist but universal style, and a confrontational bleakness giving way to marginal catharsis. If I wrote a book about the Dardennes' films, I think I would call it 'Marginal Catharsis'.

Marion Cotillard, sans make-up and vanity, is a factory worker who's laid off, just as she's well enough to return after months away with depression. It had gone to a vote amongst her colleagues: either they got a bonus or she got her job back. With the help of a bolshy friend, she lobbies the boss, who agrees to a compromise: a secret ballot in two days' time. And so, encouraged by her loving, patient husband, she begins to do the rounds, trying to talk them round, like a sad, shy, insecure Juror No. 8 fairly drowning in self-loathing.

It's repetitious at times - we get Cotillard's explanatory spiel numerous times - but while that's not necessarily the most invigorating thing to watch, it is part of the point, the desperation and casual dehumanisation of her character both reminiscent of Joan Bennett getting her soul kicked in during The Reckless Moment, and an allegory about the perils of the free market, which pits workers against one another and ends like this: with someone begging mundanely for clemency.

It's also one of the best and least sentimental, sensational depictions of depression I've seen on screen, right up there with Kirsten Dunst's mopey, ugly, real, stupefied lollop of a performance in Melancholia. Cotillard is a good person who can't even muster the energy to see the good in her that others do.

The film is perhaps minimally inventive in narrative terms, but it is forceful and original and even profound: beautifully played, and concluded in the sole way it really could be - though that's apparent only when it fades to black. (3)

***



The Pajama Game (Stanley Donen and George Abbott, 1957) - It's very nearly great, this adaptation of a smash-hit Broadway show, most recently brought to the Shaftesbury Theatre in London for a spectacular production, which met with rapturous reviews and too many empty seats.

It has the mellifluously-voiced Doris Day - before her weird, evil husband ruined her career - some devilishly good Bob Fosse choreography (the play had been his big break), and a slew of unforgettable songs, written by Jerry Ross and Richard Adler.

But it's not great. Not quite. The comedy seems too forced, male lead John Raitt doesn't have the charisma to put his part across (despite initiating the role on stage), and though some of the dancing is frankly stupendous, there just isn't enough of it.

That frustration is never felt more keenly than during Steam Heat, a showcase for the tragic, incomparable Carol Haney, who had done as much as anyone to reinvent screen dance - working as Gene Kelly's assistant choreographer, then ripping up the rulebook in tandem with Bob Fosse, through those 48 seconds of finger-clickin' goodness in Kiss Me Kate.

Steam Heat is so startling, so innovative, so gobsmackingly, jaw-droppingly perfect in all its scruffy, stylised, androgynous splendour, that it shows up the rest of the film for what it is: a merely competent translation of a hit play, conspicuously lacking in gold dust.

The Pajama Game is likeable, entertaining and unquestionably melodic, but it should have been better. It should have been great. (3.5)

Psst: you can watch Steam Heat here. That squashed, semi-panned-and-scanned version is genuinely the best I can find online. It's still worth it, a hundred times over. Watch it a hundred times. Now.

***



This Gun for Hire (Frank Tuttle, 1942) - Robert Preston and Ronnie Lake are top billed, but it's Alan Ladd - in his first real role - who dominates this stunningly nasty noir, as a new kind of screen anti-hero: a tortured loner of an assassin who punches a woman in his first scene, kills one in his second and pretty much goes on from there. Drawn from a Graham Greene novel, his DNA is in every character from Richard Widmark's giggling psycho in Kiss of Death and sweaty hood in Pickup on South Street to Alain Delon's Jef Costello.

The film isn't as polished or consistent as Ladd and Lake's follow-up, The Glass Key, and lacks that film's seductive verbal poetry, but the performances are mostly great - Laird Cregar as a man of hulking frame and feeble character, Lake putting that astonishing voice to good use - and much of the imagery is unforgettable, including fine LA location work and the mighty, admittedly tiny Ladd strolling into a rendezvous wearing a gas mask. (3)

***



Wedding Present (Richard Wallace, 1936) - A very nice little screwball comedy that starts uncertainly but ultimately delivers in terms of both laughs and heart, as a pair of mishievous, tight-knit newshounds (Cary Grant and Joan Bennett) begin to grow apart after he makes city editor and she makes him mad... only surely it can't end like that.

This is the first time Grant's dynamic fast-talking persona really made an appearance and there are some brilliant gags - including an extended practical joke worthy of Jim Halpert - to go with William Demarest's surprisingly effective bit as a friendly mobster, and the film's secret weapon: a moving, heartfelt depiction of two perfectly-matched lovers kept apart by nothing but pride.

Incidentally, the wedding present of the title manages to be both incredibly tasteless, dated and offensive, and also really quite funny. Well, apart from the pay-off. (3)

***



Two Weeks with Love (Roy Rowland, 1950) - Jane Powell undergoes some slightly tiresome growing pains in this overly glib comedy musical, which just about gets by thanks to her exceptional sincerity and an ebullient performance by the 18-year-old Debbie Reynolds. (I once met Debbie Reynolds, look!)

Powell plays a young woman who's still treated like a kid by her parents (teenagers hadn't been invented yet). The family goes off to the Catskills for a holiday, where she is overwhelmed by the desire to inspect-a-Montalban-o (boom!), but how is she ever going to get off with him if she isn't allowed to wear a corset?

The film's main problem is that the script keeps too much distance between itself and its protagonist, patronising Powell's character by depicting her problems as trivial (like I just did), and putting her through too many slapstick trials, before getting sidetracked by several deadly dull comic vignettes - including her screen father Walter Catlett trying vainly to have a sleep, a sequence which does at least climax with some delightfully primitive special effects.

Thankfully, Powell has a great voice and a winning presence, and the scene in which she breaks down in tears after a calamitous experience at a party is beautifully played, giving the film the heart that it needs and yet so often lacks.

The other real selling point is Reynolds' typically energetic turn, which hits a peak early on with the uproarious Aba Daba Honeymoon number - a paean to simian romance full of stupid dancing and glorious gibbering. The best of Powell's tunes is probably My Hero, a singularly incongruous dream sequence in which her teenager dances around in her underwear being ogled by fully clothed men, as she sings about getting married. (2)

***



Gold Diggers in Paris (Ray Enright, 1938) - Mediocre final entry in Warner's series of Gold Diggers musicals, with peerlessly annoying comic relief from the Schnickelfritz Band - discovered by star Rudy Vallee and now fondly remembered by nobody. There are a few flashes of choreographer Busby Berkeley's genius in the musical numbers, but it's not enough in a film saddled with a weak story, an often irritating cast (including a dislikeable Vallee and an unbearable Melville Cooper) and a dearth of quality songs. The first scene's quite funny, though. (1.5)

***

Old Perry Mason movies:



The Case of the Curious Bride (Michael Curtiz, 1935) - The second entry in Warner's Perry Mason series is a whole lot better than the boring, static opener, with a fair story, the brief American screen debut of Errol Flynn, and some seriously stylish direction from Michael Curtiz, who shoots the opening scene like a time-traveller from the mid-'40s, then slightly overdoes the fades between scenes, like a man who's just discovered what that button does. Admittedly the comic subplot about Mason (Warren William) becoming a gourmand is pretty pointless - indeed, for a comedy-mystery there aren't really any good gags - but there's still enough here to get your teeth into, and the relationship between the sleuth and his assistant Della Street (Claire Dodd) makes for a pleasant if undernourished diversion. (2.5)



The Case of the Lucky Legs (Archie Mayo, 1935) - Slightly irritating third outing at Warner for lawyer-turned-investigator Perry Mason (Warren William), with a rather obvious culprit and a lot of self-satisfied comedy. The main plus point is Genevieve Tobin's sparky, saucy Della Street; best remembered as the über-horny Mitzi in Lubitsch's One Hour with You, there's something of the Joan Blondell about her performance here - and compliments don't come much greater. I also like the scene where a distressed woman shouts "Lucky legs! Lucky legs!", which was the funniest bit of the film, albeit unwittingly. (2)



The Case of the Velvet Claws (William Clemens, 1936) - A short, strange and slightly stupid Perry Mason film - Warren William's last of the series: a series that never really got going; he would fare much better with the Lone Wolf films. The Perry-Della relationship is pushed to breaking point and the story is a rushed, compacted mess. Still, a couple of scenes play out quite well - like Mason slyly obliterating his nemesis' alibi - and it's accidentally very funny that everyone keeps saying "Spicy Bits" in an extremely serious voice. (1.5)

***

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More tales of sitting in a darkened room, with your host, R iCk bURi

N please. proofread this someone thank$



A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011) - An Iranian couple, refused a divorce by the local magistrate, instead begin a separation, setting in chain a series of tragic events that leaves no-one in their vicinity uninjured and untainted.

This bristling, brilliant drama is bleak as hell but simply one of the best movies of recent years, offering rich characterisation, a vivid portrait of Iran's religious, male-dominated society, and a gripping, revealing and constantly surprising narrative that throbs with anger and anguish as bitter recrimination consumes its protagonists, colouring them in the eyes of their children, fast shedding their innocence.

There's not a false line or gesture here, in a searing examination of contemporary morality that offers no easy answers and passes no shallow judgements on its damaged characters, instead giving us something akin to real life, albeit in a world that often seems so very far removed from our own. (4)

***



Kes (Ken Loach, 1969) - Ken Loach's second - and still best - feature is this stunning translation of the Barry Hines novel, with David Bradley perfect as malnourished Barnsley school leaver Billy Casper, who escapes the drudgery of pit village life through his friendship with a savage, graceful hawk.

The hawk represents hope, freedom, aspiration and poetry - none of which are allowed to survive in a Britain that kicks the shit out of its working classes, breeding only vicious alpha males peddling mundane brutality and sadistic teachers blinkeredly hurling their young charges onto the scrapheap.

Though it's lit by frequent flashes of wry humour, glorious music and cinematography, and moments of transcendent escape redolent with rare beauty, it's ultimately a chilling depiction of utter hopelessness; one that packs a devastating emotional wallop, tha knows. (4)

***

"You do swim?"
"Oh yes, almost as well as I dance."
"Then you'll drown."



Libeled Lady (Jack Conway, 1936) - This is my ultimate comfort movie: I must have seen it 50 times.

Aside from one broad slapstick set-piece, a dated Chinese valet and Tracy's competent but uninspired performance, everything works. Loy and Powell simply sparkle together - she at her most arch, warm and beautiful, he turning every line into a mellifluous wonder - while Harlow is in unmissable screwball overdrive, displaying what a truly superb comedian she'd become by this time.

Snappily, imaginatively directed by Jack Conway, it's highly quotable, richly romantic and intensely, intensely funny. In fact, it's just about as good as movies get. (4)

***

Bing Crosby triple-bill



Rhythm on the River (Victor Schertzinger, 1940) - It's lovely to find a gem like this, as sometimes I start to wonder if I've exhausted the '30s and '40s' supply of quality musicals.

Bing Crosby plays a composer who ghost-writes tunes for superficially charming songwriter Basil Rathbone. Due to some fun contrivances, he happens upon Rathbone's secret lyricist - Mary Martin - and the two fall in love. A clever premise, and when you learn that it came from Billy Wilder, that makes perfect sense.

The production is handsome - full of gleaming white sets - there are some fun cameos and in-jokes (like a lovably grouchy Oscar Levant slagging off his own book, and bits for Crosby cohorts John Scott Trotter and Ken Carpenter), while the story is pleasant and quite nicely developed, if cluing in its characters surprisingly early, but where this one really excels is in the music.

The songs by Johnny Burke and James V. Monaco are just brilliant, particularly the moving, timeless Only Forever - sung by Crosby at the piano - and the star clearly knows it, approaching each one with the emotional and artistic commitment it deserves, and investing it with a deep and enduring inner beauty, or a palpable excitement.

Though Bing's jazzy posturing and mannered jive-talk ("Oh make me realise it, Wingston!") during the title track is easy to mock - which is why I've just done it - his vocal and rhythmic, pre-synced drumming is first-rate; Dixieland jazz was the star's overriding musical passion, and it shows.

Martin, who was the lifelong partner of one of my most cherished actresses - Janet Gaynor, vintage gossip fans - also contributes one show-stopping number, a sensational version of Ain't It a Shame About Mame that's flirtatious, funny and quite outrageously enjoyable. (3.5)



Birth of the Blues (Victor Schertzinger, 1941) - Or Cultural Appropriation: The Movie, as Bing Crosby and Brian Donlevy - who's frankly incompetent at miming the playing of a cornet - get the Dixieland jazz bug from the African-American community, and proceed to take it to the (white) masses.

But whereas the ghastly New Orleans - which cast Billie Holiday as a maid - had a certain inherent nastiness about it, and could hardly wait to get to a posh hall where white folks could play jazz to other white folks, here the treatment is more respectful, if still hamstrung by Hollywood cliché and racist censorship, paying tribute to real-life musicians of both colours at its close, which is a nice touch. (For his part, it's worth mentioning that Crosby himself saw racial divisions as ridiculous, performing with black musicians as readily as white: for him it was just never an issue.)

The (fictional) story is unfortunately an unmitigated shambles, taking in a tedious love triangle (hello Mary Martin), incorporating an allegedly cute kid, and having the band terrorised by a gangster, played by the chameleonic J. Carrol Naish.

Where it scores, though, is in that score. The music here is just great, from hot jazz numbers to ballads, including an irresistible version of Melancholy Baby which an overly literal Bing sings to a sleepy child. There's also the immortal St James Infirmary, The Waiter and the Porter and the Upstairs Maid - a tuneful, jaunty effort about poor people having the most fun, featuring the mellifluous tones of Jack Teagarden - and Ruby Elzy's glorious St Louis Blues (provoked by one of the most arbitrary plot developments of all time), the camera rudely wandering away from the African-American vocalist, before deciding that, yes, that's actually amazing and we should go and listen to it.

As a historical piece about the birth of the blues, it's blinkered and racist and basically just a big fib, and as entertainment it's patchy, but it'd make one hell of a CD, and here you get to see Donlevy actively wishing that he'd been paying attention when they told him how to hold a cornet. (2.5)



Rhythm on the Range (Norman Taurog, 1936) - This is another of the '30s' endless It Happened One Night rehashes, with society girl Frances Farmer (of Nirvana namecheck notoriety) falling in love with rodeo bum Bing Crosby while riding a boxcar to the West.

It's a solid if familiar story then, there's one stunningly lit shot of a cigarette-shrouded Farmer pulling on a very '30s hat, and Crosby makes the utmost of a thin song score, but the dialogue and characterisation is trite and the frequent comedy interludes are desperately unfunny, making a promising supporting cast look positively idiotic.

At one point, Samuel Hinds says Martha Raye is the most annoying person he's ever met, which seems fair.

As for Farmer, she's a little better than most of these identikit blondes who made 15 or 20 appearances as leading ladies, but undeserving of the cult attention that has attached itself to her as a result of a troubled life, a fraudulent biopic and a superb Cobain lyric. (2)

***



"Why does he make us feel the questions if he's not gonna give us any answers?"
A Serious Man (Joel Coen, 2009) - The Coens' film about a good man looking for answers as his life falls apart has a superb prologue, two terrific early comic scenes featuring an angry Korean student, and sporadic insights (or non-insights) concerning the meaning of existence. It's also nicely shot by the great Roger Deakins, and accompanied by some nice Jefferson Airplane songs.

But the writer-directors' treatment of the material, for all the originality of its setting - an orthodox Jewish community in the late 1960s - suffers from the age-old Coen problems. Any semblance of sentiment is always just the set up to more nastiness and nihilism, which in this context is frankly baffling, and ultimately both wearing and eye-widening - the cynicism of the ending every bit as unnecessary as the heartless pay-off to their take on True Grit. On one level, I'm intrigued by that approach, but it makes the film dreadfully hard to like. The overall effect is as if Wes Anderson had left the last 10 minutes off The Royal Tenenbaums, and then announced that Royal's illness was real.

On a more prosaic level, it's also quite bitty, but my real problem with A Serious Man is that coldness, that aloofness, the sense that it's laughing at its protagonist, as his world is tipped unceremoniously and brutally upon its head. It's a sad, cynical film, one allergic to genuine catharsis.

***



The West Point Story (Roy Del Ruth, 1950) - Jimmy Cagney reunites with his old comrade-in-arms Roy Del Ruth for this puttin'-on-a-show musical, but sadly the old magic just isn't there.

Cagney's a wisecracking former Broadway big-shot - working his way to the bottom of the ladder, betting on horses all the way - who gets a shot at redemption, in the shape of a revue at the army's West Point College. His covert mission, should he be blackmailed into accepting it, is also to put stars in the eyes of silver-tonsiled soldier Gordon MacRae.

It's a clumsy melange of star vehicle, cartoonish '50s comedy, sentimental drama and puff piece for the military, which reaches a particular nadir with a fascistic salute to the titular college - and the nation's armed forces - that would have made Leni Riefenstahl blush.

Doris Day and hoofer Gene Nelson both have their moments - the former bouncing around like a Duracell Bunny on benzedrine, the latter doing a neat routine with canes and hats - and it's fun to see Cagney sparring with his White Heat and Love Me or Leave Me leading ladies: Virginia Mayo and Day.

But the star seems all at sea with the spotty material, going too big too often, and as a film in itself, it's not nearly as great as it should have been, or as it promises to be in that opening reel.

See also:Lady Killer works in spots, while Del Ruth's Blessed Event - with Lee Tracy in the role originally intended for Cagney - might just be my favourite comedy film of all time.

***



The Saint’s Vacation (Leslie Fenton, 1941) - The bland but affable Hugh Sinclair takes over from George Sanders for this mediocre, visually threadbare series entry, co-written by creator Leslie Charteris.

It starts promisingly, and there are some ingenious touches and nice lines alongside a fair portion of convolution and silliness, but it all begins to drag a long while before its hour is up, with the (alleged) comic support from Arthur Macrae proving particularly irritating.

The first of the series remains by far the best: The Saint in New York, with a white-suited Louis Hayward playing Templar as a seductive vigilante killer. (2)

***



Against All Odds (Taylor Hackford, 1984) - The greatest film noir ever made becomes surely the worst neo-noir, in this staggeringly awful reworking of Out of the Past, with Jeff Bridges in the Mitchum role - reimagined as a beardy, leaden-witted American Football player.

The cast includes James Woods, Richard Widmark and Jane Greer - who played the femme fatale in the exalted original - but almost none of it works, due to the hideous '80s stylistics and one of the most abysmal scripts ever brought to the American screen.

In mild mitigation, Woods does his best, there's one neat (though completely incongruous) car chase and the theme song by Phil Collins is actually quite good, though I prefer the Mariah Carey version. Shut up. (1)

***

Thanks for

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PLUS: The Sex Pistols, Lubitsch falling off his mantle and me (sort of) hanging out with Michael Caine.



Flesh and the Devil (Clarence Brown, 1926) - This is a staggering silent melodrama, with a luminescent Garbo bewitching two formerly inseparable soldiers (John Gilbert and Lars Hanson) amidst the lamplight, mist and falling snow.

The story is short, slight and so fatalistic that it's largely predictable, but that's rather beside the point. The point? That this may well be the lyrical apogee of silent cinema, with a look, a feel and an arsenal of visual innovations that set it apart from - if not above - those other wordless hymns to jawdropping imagery that dominate the landscape of the late silent era: films like 7th Heaven, Sunrise and The Docks of New York.

In any other movie, the silhouetted duel - like one of Lotte Reiniger's animated shorts - or Garbo's sacreligious communion would be the sequence you couldn't wrench from your mind for a week afterwards, but Flesh and the Devil goes one better, with that heart-stopping moment when our hero spies his fatale across a ballroom floor: twice there, twice obscured, then back in sight, then in rapturous, seductive close-up. It's one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen on screen, and call me a hipster idiot, but I made a Vine of it: vine.co/v/OA5KpeM6XEY

As you might have guessed, it's a film that's at once entranced by and terrified of sexuality, a duplicitous relationship that rather works in its favour, as the story throbs with self-righteous fury, then gets periodically sidetracked (like Gilbert) by Garbo's ravishing sensuality.

She overplays a couple of moments near the end, mixing welcome realism and maniacal gesticulation, but is largely excellent, working with her favourite Hollywood director, Clarence Brown, and exhibiting most of the subtlety and all of the star quality that made her a legend within her lifetime. The much-maligned Gilbert is also pretty good in the top-billed part of a happy-go-lucky kid driven to distraction by love lost and lust, with Hanson faring the weaker of the two as his comrade-in-homoeroticism. Barbara Kent - who only departed this realm last year - rounds out the central foursome as Hanson's sister, who adores but doesn't idealise grumpy Gilbert, but can't keep pace with her more illustrious love rival.

It's narratively simplistic, then, erotically confused and perhaps a little erratically played, but it's a visual feast like little before or since, and a fitting showcase for one of cinema's most beguiling, singular performers. (4)

See also: I wrote a bit about Garbo's maligned swansong here.

***



Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932) - I love it that this was made in 1932 and it's still a 15.

It's an undisputed, bullet-riddled classic of the crime genre, and certainly the most violent, unsentimental and realistic of the '30s gangster cycle - which also produced films like Little Caesar, The Public Enemy and The Roaring Twenties. It's also a hell of a lot better than De Palma's laughable '80s retread: an exercise in excess, especially in regard to how excessively long and boring it is.

The story has Italian immigrant Tony Camonte taking the Chicago underworld by force, whilst chatting up fickle peroxided floozie Karen Morley, but mostly just fancying his own sister (Ann Dvorak), who has her own eyes set on his right-hand hitman, coin-flipping heavy, Guino (George Raft).

Scarface was principally the brainchild of three men, and each brings something punchy and powerful to the table. Producer Howard Hughes was a rebel, an anti-authoritary figure who sided with the outsider, and had yet to permit his life-wrecking OCD to commandeer his films (his later works were damagingly in production for up to eight years).

Having apparently buried the hatchet after suing and counter-suing one another the previous decade, his director was Howard Hawks, the aristocratic filmmaker who made tough movies about tough men and women, with a style and economy that had made him one of the hottest properties in Hollywood. And writer Ben Hecht, an ex-crime reporter, contributed not only his street smarts, but an understanding of how gangsters spoke, behaved and ran their business.

Despite some heavy-handed moralising and a pussy-footed ending enforced by the censorship code, Scarface is a film that revels in wrongdoing, delivering a visceral excitement in those scenes where Camonte kicks the living shit out of the city. That excitement also comes from Hawks' consummate style and effortless ease: he kicks off with a mesmeric tracking shot, kills most of his victims off-camera in various imaginative ways, and - with cinematographer Lee Garmes - makes use of light and shadow in a way that would have impressed future noir pioneers Nicolas Musuraca and John Alton, particularly in the St Valentine's Day Massacre sequence, which is every bit as good as the one in Some Like It Hot - high praise indeed. There's also that first shot of Muni, his scarred face emerging from under a hot towel, and the amazing PoV in the First Ward Social Club, where you first see what Camonte is up against, then later how he intends to deal with that.

Finally, Hecht's dialogue is salty, earthy and entirely potent - there's little of the flowery, sardonic noir poetry here. Camonte is a thug who never got an education; he's not thick, he's smart in his own way, but he doesn't talk like a Hollywood screenwriter, he talks like he was raised on the streets, and intends to stay there - just in luxury.

This was former Yiddish theatre actor Muni's greatest year on screen - he would make the definitive social drama, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang right off the back of Scarface - and he's simply sensational, a brutish, bruising monument to obsession who flits from charm to malice in a flicker. Speaking with an accent every bit as contrived as Brando's in The Godfather, he nevertheless seems utterly real, immersed in the character from first frame to last.

Raft is more well-used than he is acting well, and Boris Karloff is oddly cast as a rival ganglord, but the two female leads both score big. Morley is suitably flighty, flirtatious and scurrilous as an actress turned on by power and bloodsheed, though it's only Dvorak who can really keep pace with Muni - and arguably surpass him. Her character, Tony's horny, repressed 18-year-old sister, could have come across as forced or spoilt or annoying, but Dvorak is absolutely dynamic: hitting every note flawlessly, whether playing frustrated or sexy or vengeful. Even, in fact, when doing an impossibly dated tap routine outside a nightclub at an uncomfortable George Raft.

Scarface is undeniably imperfect: it doubtless lost something (and gained some unwanted things) during its extended battle with the censorious Hays Office, and has a few more easily avoidable problems, including a saggy mid-section dragged down by Vince Barnett's pointless comic relief, an inclusion as incongruous as if Michael Corleone banged his balls on the door handle after the restaurant scene in The Godfather, and turned to the camera, going: "Ooooooof."

It's also, though, a landmark of the gangster genre, with an energy, a ferocity and a commitment to both reality and grown-up subject matter, as opposed to Hollywood convention, that's still exciting to behold today. If you are 15 or over. (3.5)

***



The Filth and the Fury (Julien Temple, 2000) - In 1979, Julien Temple made The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle: a fictionalised retelling of the story of the Sex Pistols - the most important British rock band of the 1970s - which spouted the party line of manager and all-time bullshitter Malcolm McLaren, suggesting that he alone was responsible for conceiving of, sculpting and defining the group.

Twenty-one years later, the director kindly followed it up with this definitive documentary, which is funny, ferocious and ultimately extremely poignant, whilst telling the truth about where the band came from, what they stood for and why they fell apart. "Never mind the bollocks," you could almost say, "here's the Sex Pistols."

They weren't just about spit, vomit and saying "fuck", any more than the Beatles were about mop-top hair, Scouse accents and saying "oooooh" - that is to say, they did do those things, but they did a whole lot more besides. Paul Cook was a generic drummer, Steve Jones a horny kleptomaniac, Glen Matlock a competent if boring bassist and melody-writer, and Sid Vicious a posturing, talentless replacement who got hooked on smack and promptly fell to pieces.

But Johnny Rotten? He was something special.

A lot of rubbish is spoken about Rotten (aka John Lydon) today - that either he reneged on his punk principles or was never that great to begin with. Nonsense. He was a poet, a menace, a social pariah, an amateur working class historian and a rough-edged polemicist, who almost single-handedly invented the iconography of punk, whilst waging war on the entire British establishment. In two-and-a-half years. He is that important to British cultural history. But how do you follow that? And how is someone like that supposed to grow old - especially when left bankrupt, blacklisted and bereaved by their own 'success'.

He talks a bit of shit in the film - he always did - but who else would you want to guide you through the story - his story? Cook and Jones are good comic value (I love Cook's one-liner about his first encounter with Nancy Spungen), and the archive footage of Vicious is sort of fascinating, but it's Lydon who leaves the indelible impression - wise, legitimately bitter and ultimately broken-hearted, as he recalls Vicious's sad demise, and you realise that, in the shadows, he's crying. Amongst the wealth of archive footage, there's also a brilliant sequence in which the band hold a benefit for the children of striking firefighters in Huddersfield, doling out cake to the kids, most of which they throw at a delighted Rotten.

As a film it has a few flaws - its political contextualising is shaky, the editing is annoying, and, most damagingly, there's no live music to go with the live footage - but it's a movie with a great deal of personal significance to me, one I've watched a lot over the past 15 years, and as good a film as we'll ever get about the Pistols. (3)

***

Initial experiments with the Hollywood's Legends of Horror box-set:



Mark of the Vampire (Tod Browning, 1935) - This highly-rated ensemble horror from Freaks director Tod Browning is occasionally sublime but more often silly, and hamstrung by some very obvious pre-release butchery.

When a prominent aristo is found dead and drained of blood, sceptical cop Lionel Atwill, vampire expert Lionel Barrymore and several people not called Lionel try to get to the bottom of the matter. Cue Bela Lugosi and the unearthly Carroll Borland stalking the environs, accompanied by mist, eerie soundscapes and a multitude of amusingly unrealistic bats. But cue also all manner of plot contrivances, draggy dialogue scenes and acting as wooden as a stake through the heart (excepting, of course, the kindly, twinkly-eyed and always excellent Jean Hersholt).

Perhaps the problem is that there’s no reason why this film should only run an hour, aside from commercial concerns, making the narrative seem quite absurdly choppy, as we scoot forward in time, fade out during significant moments, and get less Lugosi than anyone could possibly want.

There’s oodles of atmosphere, a handful of memorable images courtesy of James Wong Howe, and Elizabeth Allan's lovely English voice, but with a story this daft and unconvincing – and nominal star Barrymore barely bothering to vary his line readings before returning to his trailer – it just doesn’t really work. Regardless, Browning was a very talented filmmaker, and his movies still cast a long shadow – this one’s DNA is unmistakably present in the work of ‘40s horror pioneer Val Lewton, which really is as good as its reputation suggests. (2)



Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935) - A top-notch little horror, with Peter Lorre in scintillating form as a bald, brilliant surgeon driven mad by his love for actress Frances Drake, who just doesn't see him as boyfriend material.

It doesn't always have time to explore its various competing story threads, and might have worked even better without the dated comic relief from May Beatty and Ted Healy, but it's imaginatively plotted - with a nod or two to Frankenstein, as that film's dodgy doctor (Colin Clive) is taken over by a criminal body part - nicely co-filmed by a young Gregg Toland, and quite exquisitely acted by the star, who's enjoyable when playing it big, and quietly devastating when turning those huge, uneven and expressive eyes on his inner tragedy.

He's helped by some unusually incisive writing for what is just a low-budget B-movie, as well as the inventive, intelligent handling of genre specialist Karl Freund, who shot films for Fritz Lang and Murnau, made Dracula with Tod Browning, and directed The Mummy. This was his last film as a director, with MGM instead putting him to work as a specialist cameraman on prestige productions, but it's one hell of a sign-off.

Mad Love has one of my favourite trailers ever too, with a lounging, charming and fully-haired Lorre cooing into his phone as a 'fan' waxes lyrical about the actor's recent starring part for Hitchcock.

I can never see Clive without thinking of Mae Clarke's comment that he was "the handsomest man I ever saw - and also the saddest". (3.5)



The Devil-Doll (Tod Browning, 1936) - This is the sort of film you might see as a kid and subsequently wonder if you'd imagined, with Lionel Barrymore as a vengeful banker (and prison escapee) who dresses as an old woman, shrinks dogs for fun, then enlists a pair of microscopic, voodoo minions to paralyse his old adversaries.

It's a baffling collision of Tod Browning horror and sentimental melodrama (Barrymore has a daughter who's disowned him, played by Maureen O'Sullivan, best known as Tarzan's Jane) that never gels, but is as difficult to forget as it is to fully embrace.

My favourite thing about it - and there are several good things, none of which are Barrymore's 'old woman voice' - is the enormous set that Lachna (Grace Ford) clambours over on her way to multitudinous wrongdoing - an ingenious bit of filmmaking far more special than the other effects on display.

The Devil-Doll is no classic, but it rarely bores, and is - for all its daft interludes and concessions to eye-rolling hamminess - quite unlike anything I've ever seen before. Very interesting ending too. (2.5)



Doctor X (Michael Curtiz, 1932) - If you love film history, don't miss it. If you don't, don't watch it.

The story - about an unhinged medical professor stalking a Gothic house - is ludicrous, and the acting from a cast that includes Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray and the incredible Lee Tracy is surprisingly dodgy, dogged by creakiness and plenty of fluffed lines, presumably because the two-strip Technicolor they were shooting on was so expensive.

But the eye-popping sets, the casting, the Max Factor make-up and that experimental black-and-white-and-red-and-green-and-sort-of-yellow palette still amaze. The film is notable too for its populist flourishes, like having the reigning Scream Queen, Wray, enter the film screaming for absolutely no reason. (2.5)

***


It's all downhill from here. Which is a pity.

Billion Dollar Brain (Ken Russell, 1967) - I sat in on a Newsnight interview with Michael Caine the other day, as he was doing a show at the concert venue where I work.

One of the fascinating things he talked about - which didn't make the edit - was this ludicrous idea that he just plays himself on screen. Rather, he said, he's a bit like Fred Astaire: "You see Gene Kelly running up the walls and you say, 'I couldn't do that', but then you watch Fred Astaire, and he makes it look so easy - and you think, 'I could do that'. Trust me, you couldn't. And that's the same with my acting. 'I could do that.' Trust me, you couldn't."

That's true of his effortless, offhand performance in Billion Dollar Brain - the third instalment in the Harry Palmer series, which began with The Ipcress File (partly filmed outside the Hall!) in 1965 - lending a wit and subtlety to a film that starts with an utterly sublime scene nodding to classic noir, before declaring open war on our good will.

Part of the problem is the script, which features some fine speeches and delightfully sardonic Palmer zingers, but frequently introduces characters by having Caine simply say their name, too often plays for laughs, and has absolutely no substance: just a shrill, endless merry-go-round of double, triple and possibly even quadruple-crosses.

The cacophonous, bombastic music score doesn't help, either, especially when contrasted with John Barry's magnificent work on Ipcress, and Ed Begley's massive performance as a psychotic religious zealot can be safely filed under 'shit'.

It's sort of interesting, though, for director Ken Russell's familiarly frenzied, sexualised and operatic visual sense, some astute verbiage, and Caine's agreeable underplaying. You couldn't do that. (2)

***



Nancy Goes to Rio (Robert Z. Leonard, 1950) - In this film, Jane Powell uses the word "jinkies" to express surprise.

It's a grindingly dull, often quite irritating retread of the Deanna Durbin film, It's a Date (Powell's mentor was producer Joe Pasternak, who had also discovered Durbin), with a poor screenplay, a weak performance from Barry Sullivan as the love interest, and some awful comedy from Louis Calhern, who I much prefer as a Pre-Code baddie.

Powell's songs are pleasant, though - if never the match of Durbin's - and the dress rehearsal scene, in which we discover just how talented her stagestruck kid really is, works very well. There's also fine support from Ann Sothern as her mother - who doubles as her professional and romantic rival - and Carmen Miranda turns up to sing a song, which is exactly the same as all her other ones, and thus boring.

That's doomed former child star Scotty Beckett as Powell's goofy suitor. (1.5)

***



Madame DuBarry (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919) - Stodgy, sub-par Lubitsch: a plush but joyless, disappointingly straightforward melodrama about DuBarry (Pola Negri) and Louis XV (future Oscar winner and head of the Nazi film unit, Emil Jannings), with little of the director's famous "touch", and all of that confined to the first 20 minutes.

Negri does look quite cool masquerading as a soldier, as Lubitsch briefly explores his famous fondness for roleplay, but the master of the rom-com has little flair for action scenes, and surprisingly little chance to inject his sly sexual politics into this rigid, overblown film. (1.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Tuesday 28 April, 2015


Picture (c) Paul Sanders

I love Titanic.

Love it.

I never get tired of watching it, and last night I was lucky enough to see it at my office (the Royal Albert Hall), with an on-stage Q&A from James Horner and producer Jon Landau, a cameo from James Cameron, and the whole film accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra with Sissel Kyrkjebø. It was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, and they even put my name in the credits at the end. I still haven’t come down from this, as you might be able to tell.

Because I love Titanic.

I’ve seen it a lot over the years. More times, in fact, than James Cameron’s wife (and Old Rose’s granddaughter) Suzy Amis, who’s only watched it three times all the way through (trivia bomb). As with my recent Star Wars reviews, here are 10 things I love about Titanic:


1. The pre-amble. What a strange, fascinating way to pitch us into an old-fashioned story: chiming with the cynicism of a modern audience, then chucking all of that out and asking us to join it, as an 101-year-old woman (Gloria Stuart) bewitches a bunch of mercenaries with her tale of forbidden love, and we fade into...


2. The dockside. On the surface, Jack’s card game and dash to the boat are pure Hollywood, but they’re underscored by the film’s fatalistic themes, giving that blast of euphoria a melancholy undertow.


3. Billy Zane. The finest performance by an eyebrow since Roger Moore was replaced as Bond. Yes it all goes a bit silly when he runs around with a gun and steals a child, but I enjoy his slimy malevolence far more than anyone else seems to, particularly the elitist nastiness he enjoys snidely dispensing in the film’s first half.


4. That chemistry. Perhaps the only time Kate Winslet’s love interest has been prettier than her. She and DiCaprio are just perfect: so sincere, each completing the shortcomings of the other, sparks flying through every spitting contest, soppy utterance or action sequence.


5. The music. Last night made it even more obvious - if such a thing is possible - just what a wonderful score this movie has, augmented by Sissel’s ethereal, wordless vocalising.


6. The dinner party. Jack is so dishy. *sigh*


7. Atmosphere. A $200m budget probably helps, but so does Cameron’s obsessively hands-on approach to every part of the production. The boat’s scale and its appointments seem scrupulously faithful and its evocation of life on the ship – while leaning a little on caricature – is entirely persuasive, bringing to life both vivid archetypes and genuine historical figures who boarded the 'berg-hitting vessel.


8. “I’m the king of the world”, “So, you wanna go to a real party?”, “Never let go”, and other one-liners. I used to find some of the dialogue a bit trite, I don’t anymore: the film is so sincere, so sure in its convictions that it just sweeps you away, like a big flood in an ocean liner.


9. Nearer My God to Thee. One of my favourite set-pieces in ‘90s cinema, and by far the most moving sequence in the movie, with spellbinding imagery and sound, and a devastating emotional wallop: this was real, and this was its human cost. Just sublime.

10. The final scene. Fuck yes.


Captain Birds Eye.

I also liked the way that it predated Avengers Assemble by including all my favourite superheroes, like Captain Birds Eye (Bernard Hill) and heroic Ed Miliband (Ioan Gruffudd).

Did I mention that I love Titanic.

Over the bank holiday weekend, I saw Paul McCartney, David Ford (above) and Al Pacino. Here is all the other stuff I've done lately.

FILMS



A Thousand Clowns (Fred Coe, 1965) - 85% of this film resulted in outright, prolonged laughter. 60% visibly moved me. 100% of Robards' performance is beyond brilliant. (4)

***



Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993) - Mike Leigh's vicious, virtuosic masterpiece still looks sensational more than 20 years on: an episodic, incendiary portrait of the breakdown of British society.

David Thewlis uses up all the genius he ever had as motormouthed Mancunian misogynist Johnny, a man with a rapier wit and a rapey personality, who staggers through a series of vitriolic, vituperative encounters with lonely, damaged people in a dying London, using his intellect and his sexuality as the deadliest, direst of weapons.

His interactions with a sweary Scottish homeless guy (Ewan Bremner) and a sexually frustrated security guard are simply the stuff of legend.

I'll never get over how much I love Katrin Cartlidge's voice, either, and for Potterheads there's the sight of the young, highly unwashed Lupin pretending to be a werewolf.

Are you wiv meh? (4)

***



Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) - The wife and the mistress of the world’s most unpleasant man plot his death in this stunning genre-hopper from Wages of Fear director Clouzot. It’s cynical and gripping, with flashes of humour and humanity, and Simone Signoret exuding malignant cool as a peroxide, jump-suited murderess with killer shades. There's twist after twist after twist - and the final two are just dynamite. (4)

***



The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006) - This is probably the most widely-praised film I'd never seen (except Fury Road, but that only came out about eight minutes ago), so I thought I better finally get around to it.

It’s a brilliant story, brilliantly told, in which a security service operative (Ulrich Mühe) in mid-'80s East Germany is asked to spy on a renowned playwright (Sebastian Koch) - apparently loyal to the communist state - and finds his blind loyalty to his paymasters severely tested. While it could look a little more dynamic, possessing a glossy TV-movie appearance at odds with the chilly subject matter, and has a little flabbiness around the middle, there's little else to quibble with in this Tinker-Tailor-with-a-Stasi-spin, which is emotionally complex, increasingly gripping and builds to a wonderful, satisfying finale.

A film so preoccupied with the plight of artists could conceivably have alienated a broader audience, but this one invests so much in its taciturn, conflicted anti-hero that its resonance is enormous, and probably universal. Mühe, who tragically died just months after release, is simply excellent as the man scrubbing himself quietly clean after taking a long bath in the moral morass. (3.5)

***



Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (Abraham Polonsky, 1969) - Abraham Polonsky’s allegorical Western isn’t quite as great as you’d like it to be, but it is important and fascinating, with some exceptionally good dialogue.

Polonsky was one of the best screenwriters of the late-1940s and had just graduated to directing, with the superlative crime parable Force of Evil, when the hammer fell. As Hollywood was gripped by anti-communist fervour, the lifelong Marxist was denounced as “a very dangerous citizen” in the HUAC hearings and found himself blacklisted.

It wasn’t until 1968 that Polonsky’s name appeared on screen again, when he wrote the script for a police procedural, Madigan. A year later, he directed his first film for 21 years, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. To put that in some sort of relatable context: when Force of Evil came out, George Harrison was five; 1969 was the year of Abbey Road.

The film deals with a real-life event from 1901 that must have been hugely attractive to someone who had been through what he had, being the story of a proud Native American (Robert Blake) who kills in self-defence and then flees on foot, pursued by dozens of lawmen, vigilantes and federal officers. Here, the manhunt is led by a conflicted sheriff (Robert Redford) living in the shadow of his dead father.

It’s a movie lit by Polonsky’s characteristically brusque, brilliant dialogue – “You’re not mayor yet,” Redford tells a politician while they’re on the hunt, “you’re just runnin’ – like Willie Boy” – and some glorious imagery: dust-drenched vistas boiling in the sun. The action, when it occasionally intrudes, is also superbly handled, and the film is awash with ideas: about community, justice, persecution and personal identity.

Where it falls down, though, is in the muddled story – littered with muddy, poorly-defined characters engaged in confused relationships - and the performances, which are uniformly mediocre (though Blake is the best thing on show). Whenever the film starts to work up some momentum, Katharine Ross turns up in brownface, or Redford starts yelling at his doctor girlfriend, and it all falls away again.

I’m a big admirer of Polonsky, as both a writer and a man, and I wish this was another classic in the Force of Evil vein. Though it's not, we can at least revel in his language – both audible and visual – and the cherished, confrontational ideals he looked to wallop across in his work. (3)

***



The Mortal Storm (Frank Borzage, 1940) - From 1933 onwards, the head of Hollywood’s censorship office, fascist sympathiser and notorious anti-Semite Joseph Breen, prevented the studios from making films which were critical of Nazi Germany. He did this using point 2.2 of the Motion Picture Production Code:

“That special care be exercised in the manner in which the following subjects are treated, to the end that vulgarity and suggestiveness may be eliminated and that good taste may be emphasized:

International relations (avoiding picturizing in an unfavorable light another country's religion, history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry).”

On those rare occasions when Hollywood made films set in Germany, it tended to sidestep the issue completely. In Charlie Chan at the Olympics, which features footage of the 1936 Games in Berlin, the teutonic police force were not virulent racists, merely officious types who looked like the Kaiser in a WWI helmet. Anti-Nazi films were frequently planned but never delivered, and The Life of Emile Zola included not a mention of Joseph Dreyfus’s Jewishness, or the anti-Semitism so crucial to the case that Zola so celebratedly took on. Studios, afraid of losing the lucrative German market even though they were all run by Jewish businessmen, were fairly happy to oblige, and MGM put pressure on the great and unspoken Myrna Loy to apologise, after she criticised Hitler and her movies were banned. She refused, because she was a badass.

In 1939, 12 months after Breen had followed the Pope's lead in denouncing Nazism, Warner were able to make Confessions of a Nazi Spy, which dealt with German espionage within the States. The following year, MGM finally summoned the courage to make an anti-Nazi film of its own, The Mortal Storm, though it doesn’t say the word “Nazi” at any point, and nor does it say the word “Jew” (the Roth family, central to the story, are referred to only as “non-Aryans”, which seems almost more inflammatory). It was the first American movie to deal with domestic life in the Third Reich. Upon seeing it, Hitler, with his customary good grace, immediately banned all MGM films, past, present and future.

Frank Morgan plays a respected biologist and professor whose family is split by the rise of the Nazis (though we’re quite late to the story, as it begins the night they come to power), his adopted sons joining the party, but his daughter (Margaret Sullavan) falling in love with a dissident (James Stewart) who stands by his rebellious former mentor, a Jew.

The film seems Hollywoodised, artificial and – seen after the revelations of the death camps – absurdly rose-tinted, with the Roths persecuted, but more so because of what they believe than because of their race. They’re also shot at whilst fleeing the country or made to work in forced labour, not shipped into camps and gassed to death. And The Mortal Storm is the only serious anti-fascist polemic that includes a ski chase.

But the film is very well-cast and acted, with Robert Young’s inherent dislikeability for once put to fairly good use, an interesting part for the very Aryan-looking Robert Stack, and absolutely exceptional performances from Morgan and Sullavan. Morgan, who played the Wizard of Oz and was the only MGM performer on a lifetime contract, was usually utilised as a comedian but was also one of the most underrated dramatic actors of the period, and his turn here is every bit as good as in The Nuisance, The Human Comedy and The Vanishing Virginian (also with director Frank Borzage). Sullavan quit the screen for seven years from 1943, but in her early years made four films with Jimmy Stewart that are still celebrated today, including Lubitsch’s immortal Shop Around the Corner. Few people ever cried as magnificently, or combined the earthy and the ethereal so well, even if she does run funnily.

There are also plenty of Borzage’s flourishes here, though until the last scene nothing to rival his magnificent late silents (like Lucky Star, which also employs snow for a memorable finale). Then the camera starts to tell the story, moving around the rooms like Hitchcock’s did in Rebecca the same year, and putting across the film’s rather botched message as well as is really possible. MGM chooses to ally morality with religion and paint its story as one of free speech and intrusive police, love thwarted and God denied. Not a bad start from them, and more credible perhaps than the embarrassingly one-dimensional propaganda pieces that followed, but not as thoughtful, complex or extensive as a film like this really should be.

It was hilariously marketed as basically "another MGM adaptation of a book", adapted as it was from a novel by English author Phyllis Bottome.

Forget it Rick, it’s Hollywood – at least they managed it in the end. (3)

***



CINEMA: The Falling (Carol Morley, 2014)– This much-lauded indie isn’t even faintly successful (‘faintly’, like the people in it keep fainting), a hodgepodge of other, better movies, with almost nothing of value aside from a few pretty images, a nice Tracey Thorn soundtrack and a charismatic performance from Maisie Williams – well, aside from her curious inability to laugh convincingly – playing an influential, troubled teen whose fondness for fainting sets off an epidemic in her cloistered all girls’ school. Call it We Need to Talk About Faintin’, Sub-par-marine or Picnic at Hanging Cock, but it’s more like The Emperor’s New Clothes. (1.5)

***

BOOKS



Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut (1961)– Dangerous and dangerously funny, with Vonnegut mining race hate for all the black comedy he can find; and he's poignant with it. A slim, blistering masterpiece from one of the great novelists. (4)

***



Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood’s First Openly Gay Star by William J. Mann (1999)– An OK Billy Haines biog, best when it’s dealing with the actor’s battle with MGM – which wanted him to acquiesce to a sham marriage – and documenting the evolution of the gay community in Hollywood. Unfortunately there’s also an abundance of speculation, a tendency to claim that every famous actor of the 20th century was a homosexual (an unfortunate predilection of many gay historians) and a wealth of material about interior decoration, Haines’s chosen profession once he’d been booted out of the film industry. It’s unlikely that anyone is going to be fully satisfied by such disparate parts, or by a book that frames itself as a love story but is unable to provide almost any information about its central relationship. Also there’s only so many times you can describe some bits of furniture without it getting boring – I’d say two, Mann pegs it closer to 1,700. (2.5)

***

THEATRE



Man and Superman (National Theatre) - A bit long, a bit talky, a bit dated in its gender politics, but dizzyingly Shavian: funny, well-acted and full of fascinating ideas about love, politics and personal philosophies. Fiennes rages camply. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

Thoughts on:
Annie Laurie (John S. Roberton, 1927) - Tue, 28 April
La Bohème (King Vidor, 1926) - Sun, 17 May



The Lillian Gish reappraisal starts here – who’s with me?

You wouldn’t have thought that Lillian Gish needed re-appraising. After all, she did virtually invent modern screen acting, in collaboration with noted bigot and revolutionary filmmaker D. W. Griffith, starring in his notorious Birth of a Nation, and the follow-up, Intolerance (contrary to popular rumour, that film wasn’t a mea culpa for the racist sentiment of his earlier film, but a response to people he thought were being intolerant of his worldview. Lol).

She does, though.

The mighty Gish wasn’t name-checked at all in Paul Merton’s most recent series on the history of silent film, appearing just once as he made a facile point about over-acting. In the book I’m reading at the moment, William J. Mann’s Wisecracker, the author gleefully notes that Gish had been excluded from a contemporary list of people with a commodity known as ‘It’ (broadly sex appeal), writing that she “was widely presumed to have no sex drive at all”. Even in the introduction to Annie Laurie at London’s Barbican Centre on Sunday, the marketing person from the Hippodrome Festival who presented the film had just three things to say about Gish: that she had made Annie Laurie to try to change her screen image to something sexier, that she was one of the hardest working actresses in silent cinema, and that when she emoted, people outside the studio walls often came running to see if she was OK, as she was so loud they thought she was in genuine distress. Aside from the fact I’m calling bullshit on that, since post-1920 soundstages were almost all indoors, and encased in massive studio lots, there’s a more important point at stake here – the reputation of arguably the greatest actress who ever lived.

Louise Brooks, who was no-one in terms of popularity in the heyday of silent film but is now an iconic figure across the Western world, wrote a superb essay on Gish in the 1970s, where she cast the actress as a proto-feminist who bought and adapted her own stories, chose her directors, starred in them and even handled the publicity. She argued, very persuasively, that Gish’s career as a leading actress was wrecked not by changing tastes but by sexist studio heads who resented her power and her pay packet. (Incidentally, it’s worth noting that the ass-kicking, non-conformist Gish was also a staunch Republican who was vehemently opposed to child labour laws, having gone on the stage as a kid to support her family!)

Beyond the trendsetting, though, there’s something just as important: the sheer acting talent of the woman. There are only a handful of artists in the field of acting whose mastery of the medium is so complete that they seem to be doing something utterly new: Jason Robards, Emily Watson, Wendy Hiller– it doesn’t happen very often. Gish is one of those. You can see it in Annie Laurie. Everything that works here does so because of her.

The plotting is perfunctory – some fictionialised, Hollywoodised rubbish based broadly around the Glencoe Massacre, as Gish’s aristocrat falls in love with the world’s burliest man (Norman Kerry) and finds herself caught between warring Scottish clans – and the first half is frankly quite boring, but the second has some magical moments, including tremendous use of the titular song, and two action scenes in which Gish loses her shit. The idea that she was melodramatic simply isn’t true: hysteria was just a card she could play, and play beautifully. Here she does it for, what, 15 seconds, then 20, across two hours? It’s in keeping with the plot, and artfully done, creating two of the best sequences in the movie.

The second is one of the few times that director John S. Robertson actually does anything half decent: a thrilling, high-octane chase, with a wide-eyed Gish legging it up a mountainside, pursued by a dude with a gun, the camera scurrying ahead of her, framed on her face and frame. An interesting footnote, though: Robertson was later the local, Stetson-wearing eccentric in the small Los Angeles town where Byrds songwriter Chris Hillman grew up, and the band’s song Old John Robertson (from their classic Notorious Byrd Brothers record) is about how he was ridiculed by the local kids, who knew nothing of his past as a Hollywood director. Here, the music accompanying his film came from Shona Mooney’s folk trio, playing their specially commissioned score for just the second time, which was both inventive and familiar, in all the right places.

And throughout, Gish – while plagued by personal problems that meant she saw this one as simply a job of work – is transcendent. Take the moment where the plot promotes that pernicious myth that, whatever they say, women do want you to kiss them. A load of dangerous, sexist bollocks, but her character’s conflicted emotions: fear of him, fear of herself, anger, confusion, arousal and joy, are beautifully conveyed in just a few flickers of a moment. It’s not sexless, she’s not over-acting, and there’s no-one rushing from outside a studio wall to check she’s OK. It’s art, pure and simple.

And no-one rocks a Tam o'Shanter like Lillian Gish.

***



The main ethical problem with La Bohème - based on the same stories as Puccini's opera - is that it's a romance in which the hero (John Gilbert) is a violent, suspicious and abusive bully who spends the first hour gaslighting his girlfriend.

Its main technical problems are that the script is alternately melodramatic or lacking in incident, that the sets are largely dull, and that most of the cast is mediocre.

Lillian Gish, though, is absolutely mesmerising, as another of her gentle, selfless heroines tortured by an unkind world, exhibiting a range of complex emotion, rendered both subtly and explosively, that's pretty much off-the-scale in terms of artistic genius.

And King Vidor, while never approaching the lyrical, ironic brilliance he displays in something like The Crowd, does stud this sometimes clunky-looking film with a handful of gorgeous shots, most utilising windows, railings or Gish's beautiful, matchlessly expressive visage.

Gilbert's performance, by contrast, is pretty big and unfulfilling: like a parody of silent movie acting by someone who's only seen two of them.

But in the end the film's myriad flaws won't be what stay in the mind. It won't even be Edward Everett Horton looking terrifyingly young as one of Gilbert's bohemian cohorts. Instead it'll be Gish telling her lover that he's foolish to be jealous, a look of fond, intense compassion on her funny little 1920s face.

Annie Laurie: (2.5)
La Bohème: (3)

***

Thanks for reading. #GishFest15 continues with A Romance of Happy Valley and True Heart Susie (both screening as part of BFI Southbank's D. W. Griffith season) over the next couple of weeks.

That last minute "oh yeah but actually isn't revenge supposed to be bad?" name-change in full.

This is the final part of my '10 things I love' series about each of the original Star Wars trilogy, following:
Star Wars
The Empire Strikes Back

*SPOILERS THROUGHOUT*

Yes, it's a bit of a step down from the first two: half a brilliant movie, half a mediocre one aimed at a fictional audience of Ewok super-fans, but it's still exceptionally fun, with a slew of truly great moments. Here are 10 things I love about Jedi:



1. The Jedi knight. Hamill is no longer the callow youth dreaming of glory, but the height of zen, strolling into the heart of the enemy and casting aside the puny-minded minions with a quiet word and a wave of the hand.


2. Incomprehensible aliens. There's only one Star Wars film without a load of stupid aliens in it, and that's Empire. That's also the only one George Lucas didn't write. There are loads in Jedi. On one level they're completely unnecessary, distracting from the main story and slowing the film's momentum. On another, I'm completely in love with the fact that so much nerdy care has gone into creating characters who serve almost no function: they all have names, and back stories, and elaborate production design. There's Salacious Crumb, a maniacally giggling rat that inexplicably eats C-3PO's eye, Admiral Ackbar, memorably described by one Twitterer as "a prawn that is an admiral", and Nien Nunb, the Falcon co-pilot whose sole contribution to popular culture is a hilarious chortle. And there's an albino with a neck that's a snake, and balls on his forehead (Bib Fortuna). Best of all, though, is Max Rebo, the cute, freelance disco-jazz elephant, who brings his ensemble to Jabba's Palace for a gig (the very definition of getting in with the wrong crowd) and then unaccountably hangs around till the next morning to watch them murder some prisoners, getting blown up for his trouble.


3. Fun with the Sarlacc. One of the defining action set-pieces of the series. In the original, the Sarlacc just has a lot of teeth and a couple of tentacles, which I rather prefer. The sequence is full of serial-like thrills, including Luke's own novel take on walking the plank, Boba Fett's nifty gadgetry, and Luke and Leia swinging across the toothy canyon.


4. Bikini Leia. On one level there's a credible argument that Leia is unnecessarily and gratuitously sexualised in a way that she wasn't in either previous film, a process that none of the male characters are forced to undergo. This culminates in a battle to the death with Jabba the Hutt that's the epitome of undisguised kink, as she breathlessly chokes a slug until goo comes out of the end. It's an iconic outfit, though (famously referenced in F.R.I.E.N.D.S). And also she's hot.


5. Speeder bikes. They're fast, they hover, and they only seem to be used on the singularly unsuitable forest planet of Endor. I like it when they crash into trees and explode. The version of the chase sequence in the original cut is one of the few things slightly improved in the Special Edition, as they cleaned up a little dodgy back-projection, one of my bête noirs.


6. Luke and Leia. With Lucas and Kasdan struggling to write Han, who's turned from a sexy intergalactic badass into a slightly envious intergalactic bystander, the focus is on the series' most sexually compatible siblings. Their talk on the rope-walk (lifted almost verbatim for last week's Star Wars VII teaser) is just glorious: proper tingle-down-the-spine stuff. "The Force is strong in my family," intones Hamill, with more credibility than usual.


7. "It's a trap." So the Empire left four Stormtroopers to guard the control room for their deflector shield? That's just bad writing. Unless… oh shit.


8. The showdown. Luke vs Vader. Green lightsaber vs red, with Emperor Palpatine a voyeuristic, heavily partial observer. A little repetitive, perhaps, but utterly chilling (winning is actually losing? Ah, nuts), with a cracking pay-off.


9. Sentimental talking egg.


10. The funeral pyre: beautifully conceived, shot and acted.

I'm glad they never made those prequels they were talking about. No they didn't, shut up.

***

Thanks for reading, now please tell me yours. And no you can't just choose all of Max Rebo's tubular fingers.