*A FEW SPOILERS*
The Big Sleep: the pre-release version (Howard Hawks, 1945)



The Big Sleep is one of the most purely entertaining films of the 1940s, a zingy, slangy, sexy slice of film noir that takes full advantage of a classic Raymond Chandler story, a script by three of the best writers in Hollywood (including Leigh Brackett, who co-wrote Rio Bravo and The Empire Strikes Back), and Bogie and Bacall's sizzling chemistry.

Shabby detective Philip Marlowe (Bogart) is hired by the ailing General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) to foil a blackmailing racket, and finds himself up to his neck in corpses and amorous dames, including the general's smoking-hot daughter, Mrs Rutledge (Lauren Bacall).

So far, so legendary.

The movie has a peculiar history, though. Originally wrapping in January 1945, just as Bacall's debut - To Have and Have Not - hit cinema screens and made her an instant sensation, The Big Sleep was ready for release by March of that year. But with World War Two nearing a close, Warner shelved the film as they rushed to release any and all propagandist flicks that would soon be rendered redundant. By the time The Big Sleep was reinstated for release in November, Bacall's second film - Confidential Agent - had come out, receiving savage reviews that suggested her career might be over as soon as it had started.



At that point, Bacall's agent, Charles K. Feldman, wrote to the head of the studio, Jack Warner, and urged him to take action: to add more scenes of Bacall, to scrap a scene in which she wore a veil (apparently because he didn't think she looked attractive in it, the mad bastard) and to chop various exposition in order to make way for the new material. Warner wrote back to him almost at once, saying that he'd been thinking exactly the same thing (Warner always said that), and Bogie and Bacall agreed to shoot the additional material if Howard Hawks would return to direct it.

The pre-release version (the one from March 1945, which actually played to US soldiers overseas) is available on the flipside of the Region 1 DVD, and is one of the most fascinating cinematic artefacts currently in popular circulation, the sort of bonus feature you dream about, if you're a massive nerd like me. It runs three minutes longer than the finished cut and has over 18 minutes of alternate material, including:

Reel 3



More footage of Marlowe searching Geiger's house. (This is a bit long-winded and was rightly cut for pacing reasons.) Alternate scenes with Marlowe and Carmen in the car, and a different conversation between the detective and his employer's butler. This was ultimately replaced with a superb, daring new scene in Bacall's bedroom that exploits the actress's feline sensuality and her leading man's sardonism (above), and gives the film a welcome injection of eroticism ("You go too far, Marlowe", "Harsh words to throw at a man - especially when he's walking out of your bedroom"). Some dialogue was overdubbed in Reel 4 to cover for the plot changes.

Reel 7



There's a full nine minutes of exposition, explanation and macho sparring in the 1945 version that was ultimately chucked out, with Thomas E. Jackson as a compromised D.A. and James Flavin playing a vaguely incompetent, Marlowe-hating police captain. In this cut sequence, Regis Toomey really comes through for Bogie, as Chief Inspector Bernie Ohls, getting him off the hook when it matters most. Toomey is excellent in the finished film too, but their bromance has much less to it without this chunk of story. Also, if you're someone who finds the finished film hard to follow (i.e. a member of the human race), then this passage should clear things up a bit. Having said that, you can see why it was snipped: whilst it's entertaining (and completely fascinating from a historical perspective), it's also a little slow and turns the movie into more of a procedural than you might expect. This sequence is followed by the notorious 'veil' scene, a piece of exposition in Marlowe's office that simply isn't very interesting, especially when compared to the scorching 'racehorses' passage that replaced it, taking place in the bar at Eddie Mars' casino and graduating from plot-point ticking to an awful lot of innuendo.

Reel 8

The scene where Mrs Rutledge is threatened by one of Eddie Mars' henchman was later redubbed to make her and Marlowe seem more familiar with one another, fitting with the more laid-back, sensual quality of the finished film.

Reel 9



The sequence in which Carmen is waiting in Marlowe's room was added for the theatrical release (she's sitting in his chair, fully-clothed (above), rather than naked in his bed, as she was in Chandler's novel and would be in the '78 version). There's also more information in the final film than in the '45 one regarding Mrs Rutledge getting the DA to drop the case. Here it's just a few lines. In the final film, Marlowe's feelings for her are given greater context, and he ultimately seems like a nicer guy. The '45 version does include a cool bit where Marlowe flicks his guns out of the hidden compartment on the dashboard, though.

Reel 11



Pat Clark, a bottle blonde with intimidating eyebrows and a rather artificial manner, plays Mrs Eddie Mars in the '45 version. She was unavailable for retakes and replaced by Peggy Knudsen, who's more sparky, energetic and believable (and attractive). Bacall gets fewer close-ups in the original, and they're shot from a less adulatory angle.

So there you have it. The 1945 version has a clearer plot, a couple of interesting additional characters, an alternate Mrs Eddie Mars and a stronger through-line for Bogie and Regis Toomey. For once, though, a messy production history and the interference of a powerful, nosey agent made a movie an awful lot better. The original cut is a very good film, but the final product is a classic, and a seamless-seeming one at that, flowing far more freely, easily and quickly than its earlier incarnation, and possessing an irresistible erotic charge that comes largely from those three extra scenes: two spotlighting Bogie and Bacall's badinage, and one casting further light on Carmen's character.

Still, many of the film's familiar virtues are already in place - like Max Steiner's stunning symphonic score (the way he underlines Elisha Cook's closing moments!) and that perfect closing shot, and it remains an extremely illuminating and valuable piece of film history: essential viewing for anyone with an interest in the Hollywood studio era.



See also: I did a similar piece on My Darling Clementine a few years back now.

***

Thanks for reading.

Wednesday 27 May



The Elephant Man (Theatre Royal Haymarket) - This adaptation of Bernard Pomerance's play (also the basis for the exceptional 1980 film) is fantastic as far as it goes, but it doesn't go quite far enough.

The production feels too short by a good 20 minutes and has no real dramatic climax, though it's illuminated by a superlative, all-American cast, particularly screen star Bradley Cooper, who made it big in that abhorrent, detestable slice of Fratwank, The Hangover, before revealing he could actually act the pants of most people in Hollywood, and makes for a simply sublime John Merrick. Eschewing prosthetics, he instead walks on stage as the pin-up he is, before responding to a doctor's coldly clinical analysis of his character's physique by contorting his award-winning body (People Magazine's Sexiest Man of 2011) into the curious curves of the Elephant Man, just as his voice then leans on gasps and gulps, and his personality bends to draw out Merrick's good humour, irony and inherent tortured melancholia.

In what is more of an ensemble piece than you may expect, veteran indie darling Patricia Clarkson goes for some big American moments, angling for the loudest kind of quiet pathos imaginable, as she wields the silence between words like a sledgehammer, but she's certainly commanding playing a world-weary diva shaken to sentiment by her encounter with true goodness. The other really notable performance here, though - indeed, the only person on the Theatre Royal stage who can live with Cooper in this kind of form, in this kind of scene-nabbing role - is Alessandro Nivola, absolutely excellent as doctor Frederick Treves, a character whose descent from arrogant, ambitious physician to largely broken man wielding a few choice observations about the human race is chilling, if not dramatically complete.

The acting is complemented by inventive though not groundbreaking stagecraft, into which so much thought has clearly gone that at times the production slightly undermines itself (the odd if arresting scene in which Cooper contrasts the standard human form with Merrick's distorted body requires that he act from behind a curtain prior to that). It's a hot ticket, though, and it deserves to be, not just for the big names from the big screen - which have brought a crackling excitement to Haymarket - but for the quality of the acting, Pomerance's familiar, erratic but sometimes beautifully modulated observations, and a basic story that retains its ability to appal, amuse, confound and move.

If it has a problem, it's that it never quite comes to the boil. The problem, perhaps is that Pomerance's thesis - that Merrick was as damaged by his embedment in high society as by his experiences as a ritually abused freakshow attraction - doesn't really seem to ring true, at least not in this version of the story.

There's a huge amount to be drawn from it, though, and even a bit of gratuitous nudity for us all to enjoy. No, not Patricia Clarkson's waps (though those are also on show), I'm talking about that glimpse we get of the real John Merrick's penis, which is perfectly in proportion. Cool. (3.5)

A micro-update for your delectation, featuring all of the above, and not much more. Also, I went to see The Lion King, which was great fun. Here I am at it.

Incidentally, we crawled raced past 250,000 all-time hits this week, so thank you kindly for your continued support.



The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (Ray Müller, 1993) - If you find yourself saying things like: “The reason I sent that telegram to Hitler was…” or “… Hitler hated it, ask anyone who was there”, it may be time to take a long, hard look at your life.

But since Leni Riefenstahl isn’t happy to do that, this absolutely extraordinary film does it for her.

The idea was actually Riefenstahl’s.

The greatest female film director of all time – and the only one to have filmed a Nuremberg Rally – had been shopping the project around for a while, and finding that more than 200 respected documentarians wouldn’t touch her with a barge pole, because of The Triumph of the Will, the fetishistically fascist Olympia, and that one where she borrowed extras from a concentration camp for the crowd scenes of gypsies. Plus all the telegrams to Hitler. And her close personal friendship with Josef Goebbels, whom she unconvincingly describes here as “my worst enemy”.

Enter Ray Müller (“the umlaut is a noble symbol and not to be mocked” – Herman Göring), who somehow manages to walk the trickiest, most perilous of tightropes: making a credible, even-handed and deeply insightful film about Leni Riefenstahl in which she is the only interviewee. His remarkable movie – which it’s still kind of difficult to believes genuinely exists – traces Riefenstahl’s journey from dancer to (gorgeously lit) actress to mountaineer to feature film director and finally documentary-maker of choice for the Third Reich. He wisely allows the 90-year-old Riefenstahl to tell her story, using the most perfectly chosen footage and allowing her to offer insights into her creative process, which – whatever you think of her as a person (and in my opinion, she was basically an utter, irredeemable shit) – usually resulted in the most staggering footage.

He also lets her mount the case for the defence, while occasionally and invigoratingly taking her to task for evasion, deceit and instances of appalling moral turpitude. The sequence in which she denies having anything to do with the creation of the 1934 rally itself, only for Müller to throw in a lantern-lit parade with undeniable echoes of the first scene Riefenstahl ever shot, is just one of the sublime, unaccented juxtapositions that pepper this unique film. There’s also the continuous disappearance of her gentle, perma-smiling façade when her carefully-navigated narrative of denial is questioned – or when she thinks the camera is off – and a prologue mixing footage of Nazis and tranquil, beguiling underwater footage that’s simply the best imaginable way of kicking us into this troubling story.

While the film does ultimately lose a little momentum when it follows Riefenstahl to Africa and to the bottom of the ocean, its decision to portray Riefenstahl’s whole life is almost certainly the right one, and the last couple of minutes are astounding, as Müller tries to pin Riefenstahl down once and for all, and her response is everything at once: full of regret, remorse, anger, confusion, self-delusion, and ultimately an attempt to manipulate the world again.

But I suppose this is simply what happens when you let a woman direct films.

Leni Riefenstahl really was a Feminazi. (4)

***



District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009) - This modern sci-fi marvel is about racism, corporate greed, media complicity in state-sponsored terrorism, aliens who look like prawns and a big robot that makes things go “pooosh” and explode when it shoots them. The story, set in Johannesburg and with clear echoes of Apartheid-era South Africa, unfolds initially as a documentary, telling the 20-year story of an alien craft that halts over the city and is prised open to reveal scared, malnourished creatures who end up being detained in a slum. After rioting, the government brings in a private contractor to shift the 1.5m “prawns” – the reductionist racist epithet of choice – transforming the life of the company owner’s sweet, callow, over-promoted son-in-law (Sharlto Copley).

Perhaps in its ultimate shift from a sci-fi movie with lashings of body horror to a sometimes sentimental action film it loses a touch of its novelty and clout – Alien to Aliens, if you will – but it is a fearsomely clever movie with a sense of swaggering self-confidence, a firm grasp of the unexpected and a tremendous amount to say about the world in which we live. It’s also brilliantly and often outrageously funny, whether saddling Copley with a hilarious media smear or giving full flight to scenes of metal-suited mayhem that make Iron Man look crap by comparison (it is crap, anyway). From its inspired evocation of the ‘other’ – a ghettoised, stomach-churning enemy, painted as sub-human – to the unexpectedly moving, poetic final image, it’s mostly very special indeed. (3.5)

***

I started rewatching 'all the Mad Max films, climaxing with Fury Road', but since I didn't like the first two, I'm revising that plan.



Mad Max (George Miller, 1979) - It's flashily directed in its trashy, B-movie-ish way, but this Australian actioner is so formulaic, derivative and simplistic that it's kind of boring. (2)



Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (George Miller, 1981) - Grumpy Max (Adolf Hitler) is back in this one-note sequel, scowling as things go boom. I genuinely don't understand why this is supposed to be good. The prologue is nattily done and the ending is a knockout, but what's in between is almost unremittingly crap, with awful characters, risible comedy and a whooping, moronic sensibility that's quite uniquely offputting. Miller certainly knows his way around a crane shot and a flash of kinetic action; if only he could do anything else. (2)

***

Thanks for reading.

I'm planning something separate about my overriding preoccupations - D. W. Griffith and Lillian Gish - but here's everything else I've been enjoying/not really enjoying of late...

FILMS



Bitter Lake (Adam Curtis, 2015) - The latest film from Power of Nightmares director Adam Curtis, available solely on iPlayer, is an astounding piece of work.

His thesis is that we are unable to truly engage with or understand contemporary affairs because of the simplistic stories to which we have become addicted. To make this point, he considers the case of Afghanistan, creating a sprawling mosaic that alternates utterly fascinating, eye-opening polemicising with thousands of feet of extraordinary, raw, unbroadcast footage − poetic, surreal, chilling, heartbreaking and enraging − shot by BBC News crews over the past 15 years.

Oddly, Curtis doesn't actually succeed in constructing a convincing case around what turns out to be a rather nebulous, ironically simplistic theory, while the idea that most of us stand for nothing, compared to the Mujahedeen, is frankly madness. But the story he weaves, of the seeds for our economic and ultimately ideological destruction being unwittingly sown by Roosevelt (hands down my favourite president) when he met Saudi Arabia's Kind Saud on Seattle's Bitter Lake in February 1945, is quite, quite brilliant. And while at first many of the clips seem to be going on a bit, Curtis's unique approach ultimately gives the movie a haunting, cumulative power that lingers on long after the credits have rolled.

It's an imperfect but essential film. (3.5)

***



An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006) - Despite being a slightly annoying, militant eco type (I didn't fly between 2005 and 2013, I don’t drive for the same reason), I'd never gotten around to Al Gore's Morally Righteous PowerPoint Presentation, as this film should obviously be called.

His sincere, twinkly-eyed hectoring, which includes wiping his mouth whenever he makes a joke, is mostly extremely effective and informative, ticking all the boxes from the Confident Presenter course I once went on with work, and making a passionate, inspiring case for saving the planet. Though admittedly, putting axes on several of these graphs might be helpful if we're going to finally see off all the selfish, blinkered wankers, sorry, 'climate change sceptics'.

The problem with An Inconvenient Truth, and there really is a true, inconvenient problem, is that it breaks off regularly for folksy, glossily-shot segments about Al Gore's life, which are occasionally illuminating (his college professor was the first person to measure the amount of CO2 in the air, for instance) but mostly self-aggrandising and completely irrelevant. There is also a quite staggering amount of PowerPointPorn, as Al smoulders in close-up, dragging pictures from one window to another, as if the other main crisis threatening to engulf us is shoddily assembled slideshows.

The rest of it's good, though, and I was glad to see in the credits that it's a carbon neutral production, as Al seemed to be flying around the world telling people to stop flying around the world. Next I expected him to start stoking a bonfire while shouting: "This is really irresponsible!"(3)

***



Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006) - An above-average dystopian flick set in an apocalyptic England, the last outpost on an Earth battered by untold calamity, including an infertility epidemic. Clive Owen is the bereaved activist who’s dragged into radical politics again by his ex-wife (Julianne Moore) and ends up as the protector of a mysterious young woman on the run (Claire-Hope Ashitey).

The frequently redrafted script has too many annoying tics and speeches of weak, mannered dialogue – the sort of thing you’d write if you had writer’s block – but the one-take action scenes are dizzying and dazzling, and the story is hearteningly unpredictable, incorporating not only unexpected deaths and shifting sympathies, but Biblical allegory, Pam Ferris with dreads and a man being shot for farting.

The cast is alright too: though Owen isn’t much of an actor, he’s a decent star, and the supporting ensemble is unpolished but interesting, featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Peter Mullan and a weed-smoking Michael Caine, playing a kind of slightly damaged Bob Harris. Ashitey is also quite good as the key central figure, her unorthodox performance – sincere, twinkling yet fearful – adding another layer to this flawed but impressive vision of the future. (3)

***



Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007) - I don't know what to think about this one, exactly, which is probably a good thing.

Danny Boyle’s visceral film about sticking an atom bomb in the sun throbs with the director’s typical restlessness: has he ever ended a film in the same genre that he began it? It starts as a men-(and-women-)on-a-mission movie, full of suspicion and setbacks, then becomes a psychological thriller and ultimately an explosive, screeching fusion of horror and action.

There’s some Alien in there, a bit of 2001, Silent Running and Cube, but plenty that’s new too, particularly in its theme of sun worship, which hangs over the story and overpowers its visual sense, resulting in scenes of increasingly exhilarating screen saturation.

The dialogue can be perfunctory and the story extremely difficult to follow, but the ensemble cast is interesting – including future stars Chris Evans and Rose Byrne (who I finally fancy, now she’s an intense tomboy rather than a vacuous neurotic) – there’s fascination to spare, and the imagery is immense. (3)

***



SECRET CINEMA: Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980) - I reviewed this movie very recently, so no need for a big write-up.

What I did notice this time were a couple of things half-inched from Tarzan movies, which provided serial-like thrills of their own in the 1930s. Firstly and most obviously, Luke swinging on the vines at Degobah, but then also the Mynocks attacking the Falcon - this far, far away galaxy's answer to the "vampire bats" so cruelly cut from Tarzan Escapes.

I was watching the movie again due to Secret Cinema. Though I found everything surrounding it rather underwhelming and amateurish, the film itself did manage to transport me, in a way that it always does, and in a way the rest of the experience didn't. (4 for the film, 2 for the overall experience)

***

THEATRE



Gypsy (Savoy Theatre)– This is a fun, funny, intensely sad translation of Sondheim’s 1959 musical about the creation of striptease sensation Gypsy Rose Lee (Lara Pulver), focusing on her manager, Rose (Imelda Staunton), the ultimate stage mother. A work of real emotional heft, it starts off light and sweet and frothy, then takes us deep into the souls and psyches of its characters, peddling a little of Sondheim’s broad sordidness (which isn’t really my sort of thing but works alright), before flooring us with a succession of gut punches. Completely compelling even at two-and-a-half-hours, it’s a show shot through with wit, ugliness, angst, desperation, panache and pizzazz, from the stylised, skewed-perspective sets to a slew of stellar songs and Staunton’s sensational central performance, the best I've ever seen her give. (4)

See also: I reviewed another favourite Staunton performance here.

You know D. W. Griffith - he made the most racist film of all time, The Birth of a Nation, which rather inconveniently also created cinema as we know it. You may notice that a Klansman appears to be the hero.

I've been watching a lot of Griffith's films lately, partly because the BFI in London has had a special season on, and partly because I'm enduringly and indelibly obsessed with the actress who starred in so many of his films, the immortal (not actually immortal, she died in 1993) Lillian Gish.

Depending on your mood, and his, Griffith's films can be either unbearably corny or rather moving in their sincerity, but while he was unquestionably a shamelessly sentimental bigot with a yen for preposterous third-act melodrama, he was also the most important and influential filmmaker of his generation. Here's a whizz through all the Gish-led Griffith I've got my mucky little mitts on lately:



An Unseen Enemy (D. W. Griffith, 1912) - Panic Room, 1912-style. It's all a bit silly, but worth it for the debuts of the Gish sisters, with Lillian compulsively watchable throughout.

Title cards include:



Oh, D. W., you are giving silent films a silly name. (2.5)

***



The Musketeers of Pig Alley (D. W. Griffith, 1912) - The 'first gangster movie' still looks decent a century on, with a hokey but atmospheric opening, a slightly static middle where people mostly walk in and out of a saloon, and then an absolutely spectacular denouement, featuring one eye-popping close-up, a tense shootout in an alleyway and an irreverent ending that makes the most of star Elmer Booth's dazzling charisma.

Lillian Gish is 'The Little Lady', whose patronising nickname masks the fact that she's an asskicking feminist who clobbers an amorous assailant, chooses whichever man she likes, and unwittingly starts a gang war by being hot at a party. Walter Miller plays her boyfriend, a musician who may as well just have 'mug me' tattooed on his face, while Booth is The Snapper Kid, a swaggering gunman who's like a sexy, funny, easy-going Al Capone, though the film came out when Al Capone was 13.

Underworld, Little Caesar and The Godfather all redrafted the genre rules across subsequent decades, but this is the film that wrote them, in 16 brisk, bruising minutes, with Booth something like the cinema's first anti-hero: a likeable guy swaggering around the wrong side of the law, far removed from the tedious, moustache-twirling villainy that blighted many films of the period. Tragically, he died just three years later, on the cusp of superstardom, in a car accident caused by future Dracula director Tod Browning. He had been about to start filming Griffith's epic, Intolerance. (3.5)

***



CINEMA: A Romance of Happy Valley (D. W. Griffith, 1919) - The hero in this film is a lot like me, a young man who sits at his desk, in his flat, in the unforgiving city, thinking about Lillian Gish.

A Romance of Happy Valley was made by D. W. Griffith during his white-hot streak between the enduringly controversial Birth of a Nation (1915) and his epic of the French Revolution, Orphans of the Storm(1921) , a period that also took in Intolerance (1916), Broken Blossoms (1919) and Way Down East (1920), and essentially laid the template for cinema as we know it.

Set in the Kentucky where he grew up, it's notably less ambitious than almost all of those films (Broken Blossoms is the only one on a similar scale): a gentle, pastoral comedy-drama about a farm labourer (Robert Harron) who goes off to seek his fortune in New York, leaving behind the lovestruck, pure-hearted and relentlessly stoic Jennie (Lillian Gish), his childhood sweetheart.

It's corny in places, predictably racist in a couple of others (uh-oh, a white guy in blackface who's greedy and feckless), and saddled with an overlong, melodramatic and improbable climax, but it's also extremely involving and often very moving, with an unexpectedly wry, even occasionally subversive sense of humour.

Harron provides plenty of those virtues in a committed, appealing performance, while Gish is as transcendent as ever, whether bidding him an awkward, adoring goodbye, seeing off 'a descendant of Judas Iscariot' who fancies getting off with her, or romancing a scarecrow that's dressed as her lover, a touching, understated sequence that influenced 7th Heaven and then The Artist.

Her singular artistry and Griffith's trendsetting direction - rich in close-ups, including an unforgettable flourish featuring the lovers' hands, and still yet to be emulated let alone overhauled by his European rivals - make this a little gem, despite a bit of his signature silliness. (3.5)

This screened at the BFI along with Griffith's 1909 short, The Cricket on the Hearth (D. W. Griffith, 1909). My only comment on that one is that I had absolutely no idea what was going on. (1.5)

***



True Heart Susie (D. W. Griffith, 1919) - Maybe my favourite ever Lillian Gish performance, with everyone's favourite tiny-mouthed acting titan playing the "simple, plain" Susie, an angelic, motherless farmer who sells her cow to fund sweetheart Robert Harron's college career, then watches, powerless as he falls for a tight-skirted, powder-faced party animal (Clarine Seymour).

Yes, that is the best premise for a movie ever, thank you for asking.

True Heart Susie is old-fashioned, rose-tinted and heavy-handed in its depiction of the afflictions besetting America (adultery, dancing, lipstick), with a lurch towards melodrama in the final quarter that's more convenient than credible, but it's also utterly beguiling: beautifully directed by a filmmaker who could do Americana with the best of them, when he wasn't doing racism with the worst of them. At one point he uses a hedgerow to split the screen into two: ecstasy on the left, despair on the right.

And yet it's only when Gish is on screen that it hits those heights. Without her, it's a standard, slightly overripe drama with a touch of visual poetry. But when she steps in front of the camera - her heroine too pained to watch as her love is snatched away, hiding her tears behind a fan, or collapsing in agony as soon as the ill-suited pair depart from sight - it becomes something else entirely. You sense that Griffith knows it too: in those scenes his lense is softer but his eye is sharper, and every detail his camera catches seems profound and vivid and alive, every muscle of Gish's genius twitching and sparking.

It's not a flawless film, but as a snapshot of two pioneers pockmarked with greatness, it can scarcely be beat. (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

I went to Mallorca, read two books and swam in the sea. And that's not all. When I got back, I went to the cinema to see a movie you all saw ages ago.

FILMS:



CINEMA: Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015) - An exhilarating feminist actioner that unleashes torrents of water on the risible '80s Mad Max films from an improbably great height.

First off, Ratty Rockatansky has had an upgrade (from Mel Gibson to Tom Hardy); secondly, he's in league with a bunch of gun-toting, patriarchy-defying harem escapees, one of whom (Charlize Theron) can shoot a hell of a lot better than him - and knows it.

Introducing such additional, agreeable novelties as grenade-lobbing pole vaulters, a guitar that's also a flamethrower, and a steady, beating heart where once there was none, it's a crunching, breathless, vital piece of genre joy that rewrites most of the rules and resets the action clock to Year Zero.

There are moments near the film's beginning where you worry that Miller has again pitched us into a world it's frankly no fun to visit, but as soon as it gets moving - in both senses of the word - it really gets moving. Kudos too for a blockbuster that sees human nature as truly complex and transmutable, epitomised by Nicholas Hoult's pale, Valhalla-bound cult flunkey.

Favourite moment? Hardy's little backwards-looking thumbs up, as the first crack appears in his nominal hero's selfish, hard-bitten persona. (3.5)

Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary (André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer, 2002)



Yes, that’s right. ‘Uncle Hitler’.

This film is just 87 minutes of a single talking head. Thankfully that talking head is Traudl Junge, an 82-year-old German woman who worked as Hitler’s personal secretary from 1942 until he shot himself. Her reminiscences of the “kindly old gentleman” she worked for – contrasted with the “monster” she regards him as in retrospect – make for utterly gripping viewing, as she talks in circles about her guilt, sorrow and confusion. Her memories are moving, maddening, sometimes baffling, and the film is quite brilliantly structured, with a stunning final sequence. (4)

***

BOOKS:



Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut (1973) is a pungent, pustulous lancing of the boil that is America, by the incomparable Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut. Written in an even more extreme post-modern, scrupulously self-referential style than his seminal Slaughterhouse-Five, it’s sort of the stories of a psychotic millionaire and a failed sci-fi writer, but really it’s a freewheeling treatise on the ills of the world – world – from racism and cultural imperialism to the inherent, in-built dangers of questioning norms of thought. Though. Perhaps it loses some momentum in the middle, but it’s ferocious and ferociously funny, with a devastatingly sad undercurrent (to which I could truly relate) and a knockout ending. Ending. And the scene in which the waitress is trying to flirt with Dwayne but he has echolalia is my new favourite thing. Thing. (3.5)



The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)– A mammoth, all-consuming and all-conquering book, alternating between the story of the Joad family – a bunch of Dustbowl Oklahomans heading west in search of work – and the world they inhabit, from marauding tractors who don’t feel the earth beneath their tracks, to sentimental waitresses and one very sleepy tortoise. It’s not as punchy and abrasive as Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, but it’s stunningly ambitious and utterly immersive: a sad, grubby, noble crawl towards partial but jawdropping catharsis, full of unforgettable characters struggling to survive in a country gone to Hell. John Ford’s film adaptation was probably the most radical film ever to come out of the studio system, and it’s unquestionably a masterpiece, but there’s a different feel to it. Steinbeck’s novel is a heavy, difficult, waterlogged epic, reeking of grease and pain – a book so challenging and exhausting that he never wrote another quite like it. It’s a tough read too, overloaded with description and despair, but a stunning achievement on any terms. (4)

***

GIG:



Fleetwood Mac at the O2 (Mon 22 Jun). Their voices may be two octaves lower, their faces may be a little melted, but this was an uplifting, even raucous show: cathartic for them, it seemed, and for us: joyous. (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

She was not just the first great screen actor, but arguably the greatest screen actor of all, with a devastating emotional sensitivity and a thousand ways of differentiating between and delving beneath the layers of often superficially similar characters. Her name was Lillian Gish and her genius lives on in silent movies like The Wind, True Heart Susie and the enduringly controversial Ku Klux Klanfic, The Birth of a Nation (or just ‘The Birth’, as she called it), which invented the grammar of modern cinema whilst giving the formerly ailing KKK a second wind, inspiring thousands to join the white supremacist organisation, with chilling consequences.

Miss Gish, as she insisted on being called, returned to the stage in the early ‘30s after the advent of sound cinema – perhaps because she had little time for the new medium, perhaps because Hollywood no longer wanted a woman as assured of her worth and her myriad gifts as she was – playing Ophelia opposite Gielgud amongst other triumphs, but began to appear on screen again from 1942, and featured in irregular character parts until 1987, delivering memorable performances in the sex-Western, Duel in the Sun, Charles Laughton’s hypnotic Night of the Hunter, and – finally – Lindsay Anderson’s Whales of August, a suitable swansong despite its many deficiencies.



Her autobiography, The Movies, Mr Griffith and Me, is insightful in ways both intentional – as she discusses her art and the way in which she crafted characters – and not, since her lack of a personal life, any external interests or a good sense of humour mean that when she isn’t talking about film, the results are usually extraordinarily dull. She’s great on “Mr Griffith”, though: that’s Birth of a Nation director D. W. Griffith, for whom she was a muse, sounding board, actor, writer, story buyer, location scout, editor and even publicity brain. She met Griffith 1912, working with him for a decade, and the passages about their short films at Biograph and the subsequent war epics and rural poems on which they collaborated are utterly fascinating, if emanating the definite sense of someone meticulously curating their own legacy. (Amongst other stories, she claims to have discovered Ronald Colman and Rudolph Valentino, predicted to a disbelieving King Vidor that The Big Parade would be a massive success, and launched Garbo on the path to success.)

Giving her the benefit of the doubt, here are 10 things I learned…


1. The only actress she was jealous of was fellow Griffith regular, Mae Marsh.“She had a quality of pathos in her acting that has never been equalled… Not only did she play the parts I thought I could play, but she was better in them than I could have been. And that hurt.”

2. She didn’t regard The Birth of a Nation as racist. She cites author Thomas Dixon’s (very racist) defence of the film as proof, as well as Griffith’s own argument: “Of whatever excesses or outrages the blacks may be guilty, these they commit as blind and misguided, if violent, pawns of their satanic new white masters from the North.” She adds: “Mr Griffith was incapable of prejudice against any group.”

3. She and Griffith subsequently planned ‘a film of affirmation about the Negro’. They talked about this shortly before Griffith’s death in 1948. “He believed that the Negro had made great strides since the end of slavery… that no other race in the history of mankind had advanced so far so quickly.”

4. The Birth of a Nation was shot on a relative shoestring. It cost just $61,000 to make, and grossed $3.75m in 1915 in New York alone. Though Griffith claimed to have employed up to 18,000 extras at a time, he actually never used more than 500, instead relying on his considerable ingenuity to achieve the film’s stunning sense of scope.


5. Intolerance was not. His subsequent film, Intolerance, required no such penny-pinching, and came in at $1.9m due in no small measure to its sets, which were up to 200ft high and more than a mile long. The film flopped upon release. Griffith’s initial cut was eight hours long and to be shown across two nights; it was later snipped to 210 minutes. Though her scenes in the film took just an hour to film, Gish felt “that there was more of me in this picture than in any other I had ever played in”. She talked over scenes with Griffith before he shot them, viewed all the rushes and suggested ways to improve them, and picked the best takes, before helping Jimmy Smith with the cutting. Though you get the sense that Griffith recognised Gish’s singular genius, this kind of partnership was only possible because of the egalitarian nature of moviemaking at the time.

6. Hearts of the World was filmed on location in a warzone. For this WWI propaganda piece, funded by the British and French governments, Gish, her sister Dorothy and Griffith filmed at the front. Their first location was a village that had been destroyed when the Germans were advancing on Paris. Later they were hit by a creeping barrage: two of their guides were killed, before the soldiers they had been hoping to film were obliterated by shellfire.

7. Lillian was ceaselessly melancholy; her sister wasn’t. In 1919, Gish and her younger sister Dorothy – also a major star – penned profiles of one another for Stage magazine. The pieces remain fascinating, not least for what they say about the writer. Lillian writes: “She is a criticism of all the things I am not. When I look at her, I always miss in myself the qualities that I was born without and that, I daresay, I should have been much happier with. She is laughter… nothing bothers her or saddens her or concerns her lastingly… I am not unhappy. I simply am not gay. It must have rained on the evening I was born, and it seems arbitrarily to have kept on raining in my heart ever since.” Dorothy says Lillian has a steeliness quite at odds with her popular image, like “a hat [that] lies upon the sidewalk; some person kicks it enthusiastically and finds to his astonishment and pain that there is hidden inside it a brick of flatiron”. She adds that “nothing really matters to her except her work and her career. She has little patience for anything or anybody unrelated to her work.”


8. She REALLY prepared – and did all her own stunts. Griffith would usually do just one take of a scene, but would rehearse his entire films from start to finish several times, his cast acting out the scenes on prop-free sets. He asked them to augment their characterisations through endless research. Gish took this to heart more than anyone, and continued her painstaking preparations even after her break from him. For The White Sister, she obsessively studied nuns whilst scouting 30 cloistered orders, watched taking-of-the-veil ceremonies before dawn and fostered a ‘spiritual’ atmosphere on set. Her devotion to her movies went further, though. The finale of Way Down East required her to lie on a slab of ice twenty times a day for three weeks. Her inspired idea that she should drag one hand ethereally in the freezing water permanently damaged her nerve endings. For The Wind, sand was blown at her by eight aeroplane propellers, while sulphur pots were used to simulate a sandstorm, burning her hair and almost blinding her.

9. Her first argument with Griffith was during the filming of Way Down East. After that legendary ‘ice floes’ climax, he told her to get ready. “I’m ready,” she said. “Yes, but the climax is over,” he told her. “The audience will want to see you look beautiful again. Go put on fresh make-up, and comb your hair.” Gish says it was the first time in her memory that Griffith had “settled for less than the truth… I obeyed. But in the scene it is evident to those who know me that I was awfully mad at someone.” In his defence, he was massively in debt, and in dire need of a hit. He got one.

10. She was great friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. The author of The Great Gatsby gave her a copy of his novel, Tender Is the Night, inscribed: “For Lillian Gish, My Favourite Actress. On the occasion of her 1st visit to New York of which this book is a practical guide. From Her Chattel, F. Scott Fitzgerald.”



***

Thanks for reading.

My recent reviews of Griffith and Gish films - some of them screened at London's BFI Southbank - are right here.

You can read Louise Brooks' thoughts on Lillian Gish here.

The first of three updates, as I haven't done any for a while. This one has a great new film, a great old-ish film with good George Lucas dialogue and a few books, one of them compulsively horrible.

FILMS



CINEMA: Amy (Asif Kapadia, 2015) - A haunting, heartbreaking and stunningly brilliant film from Senna director Asif Kapadia, which takes us into the confidence of Amy Winehouse, as the bolshy, big-voiced, jazzy Jewish girl from North London becomes a megastar, while her personal demons, her relationship with a drug addict, and a ravenous, amoral press proceed to rip her to shreds.

Thanks to an abundance of revelatory home video footage, soundtracked by incisive interviews, we see her not only as the beehived, cat-eyed chanteuse or the alarmingly ribbed tabloid quarry, tumbling out of a club at 3am, but as a shy, spotty teen with a seductive offhand confidence in her vocal gift.

I’m not an enormous fan of Winehouse’s music, I think because her deeply personal writing and distinctive, expressive voice tended to be masked by such contrived, Americanised pastiche – trading first on ‘30s jazz and then ‘60s girl groups – but the portrait that emerges here is uncompromising, thrilling and frequently devastating: of an unhappy girl equipped with a massive talent, but none of the stability or serenity to deal with the perpetual media storm that her success brought upon her.

We see stand-ups and TV presenters laughing at her bulimia and drug abuse, her management pushing her out of rehab and onto foreign stages, and – in the second half – a rapacious, vulturous paparazzi incessantly stalking her, an essential decency chillingly absent. If that was my job, I think I would struggle to watch this film and think: “Yes, what I am doing with my life is essentially fine.”

By contrast, Kapadia’s film is quite beautifully lacking in sensationalism. Though it essentially doubles as an indictment of a society almost entirely lacking in basic compassion and empathy, it’s a work that possesses both virtues in apparently limitless amounts, surely compressing and simplifying an impossibly complex narrative, but attaining something that seems awfully like the truth – and apparently is, according to her closest friends.

Amy is a tough watch, but it feels essential, not just for its vivid picture of a fascinating, deeply troubled young woman, but also for its wider significance: as a plea for people to stop being so horribly selfish, to stop seeing excess and illness as ‘rock and roll’ and drug abuse as a joke, and for the media to realise that if it wants to paint itself as a crusading Fifth Estate, then some basic humanity wouldn’t go amiss. (4)

PS: the director thanked me for this review, which I found very exciting.

***



The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940) - This translation of John Steinbeck's immense novel about a Dust Bowl family searching for work and dignity in California is a major work of art in its own right: bristling, poetic and throbbing with anger at the injustice visited upon working people, and filled with stunning imagery and some wonderful acting.

Though centrist screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, (then) left-wing director John Ford and union-bashing producer Darryl F. Zanuck juggled the narrative to remove its more salacious, censor-baiting elements and to end the story on a relative high, it remains by far the most radical film ever to come out of the studio system.

Given the strictures of the period, it's incredible that Steinbeck's view of humanity and of his country remains largely intact, culminating in one of the most breathtaking sequences of that or any other era, a monologue by Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) which is both an affirmation if Steinbeck's "phalanx" theory (that we are all part of one soul) and a call-to-arms echoing out across the nation.

It's Fonda's performance that dominates, for me, even if Jane Darwell is an effective though overly folksy Ma Joad, and John Qualen fantastic in a small part as the haunted, 'touched' Muley Graves. The film's other great and timeless virtue is Gregg Toland's spellbinding cinematography, inspired by the work of Dorothea Lange, whose photos had accompanied one of Steinbeck's first non-fiction treatments of this subject matter.

Toland had collaborated with Ford earlier in the year for the expressionist O'Neill adaptation, The Long Voyage Home, and the director's understanding of music and emotional cues, as well as his keen eye for distinctive visual composition, made them ideal collaborators. The shot of Darwell watching Fonda cross the deserted dancefloor as Red River Valley quietly plays is pure gold, and pure Ford.

His film may lack the scope and depth of the source novel - its climactic catharsis is less Biblical, less revolutionary - but it's still one of the great American movies, its confrontational portrait of dirty, desperate and despairing souls finding solace in socialism being something altogether new from the sun-drenched Republican stronghold that was Hollywood in 1940. (4)

***



American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) - Magical, lightning-in-a-bottle stuff: a flavourful, nostalgic and sentimental movie - somehow made by George Lucas - with a cast of future stars as high school kids whose stories interweave on the last night before college in 1962.

They dance, drive, make out, drink, race, spar, bicker and try to get laid, to a constant soundtrack of impeccably selected singles from the era.

There's sexy James Dean-alike, Paul LeMat, a boy racer who spends most of the film with a cross, underage girl (Mackenzie Phillips) - my favourite of the tales. Sensitive chauvinist Ron Howard, meanwhile, is busy breaking his long term girlfriend's heart, while thoughtful, insecure Richard Dreyfuss has struck up an unlikely friendship with some teddy boy gangsters, and Charles Martin Smith is serving as a blueprint for foolishly bragging needs everywhere - particularly Martin Starr's Bill in Freaks and Geeks.

Utilising the talents of New Hollywood heroes like Coppola, sound wizard Walter Murch and cinematographer Haskell Wexler, it's a deft, amusing and completely charming film, with improbably credible Lucas dialogue, a fantastic period atmosphere and an undercurrent of poignant wistfulness: a desire to return not only to innocent youth, but to pre-Vietnam idealism.

Its influence can be seen on countless films since, from Fast Times at Ridgemont High to Diner, Dazed and Confused and even Tin Men, but this cusp-of-college story is better than any of them.

And it has Harrison Ford as a grumpy drag racer in a cowboy hat.

It really is a shame that Lucas has devoted the last 30 years to making his Star Wars universe slightly worse, rather than creating something as warm and wondrous as American Graffiti. (4)

***



CINEMA: Back to the Future Live in Concert (Robert Zemeckis, 1985) - We held the English premiere of Back to the Future Live in Concert at the Royal Albert Hall earlier in the month: two screenings of the movie for around 4,500 people at a time, with Alan Silvestri's score (plus 15 minutes of new music) played on stage by a concert orchestra.

It was a great experience and as well as providing one moment of absolute, jaw-dropping wonder - as the orchestra struck up for the end of Earth Angel, and everybody in the audience promptly burst into tears - also revealed to me the exciting news that everybody else loves George McFly's laugh too.

The film is a textbook, if formulaic, example of cinema as entertainment, which expertly juggles genres, delivers a slew of euphoric set pieces, and features some of the most memorable performances of its decade. There's Christopher Lloyd's archetypal mad scientist Doc Brown, time-travelling, none-more-American teen skateboard whizz Marty McFly, and his mother, the coquettish Lorraine (Lea Thompson), whom he meets after unfortunately travelling back to 1955, and who really fancies him. Best of all is Marty's hideously awkward dad, George, brought to the screen with a glorious gawkiness by the incomparable Crispin Glover.

It's funny, highly romantic and sometimes very moving, with moments of broad wish-fulfilment that are going to make most people between the ages of 12 and 102 punch the air with delight, from Marty lamping arch villain Biff Tannen and escaping on an improvised skateboard to his Johnny B. Goode guitar heroics and Doc riding a zip wire to destiny. Marty's arrival in 1955 Hill Valley is wonderfully handled, the Oedipal subplot is amusing - and refreshingly odd - and the cast breathes all possible life into a script that doesn't look half as good on paper.

The only thing I'm not quite sure about are its oddly macho sexual politics and its worldview, which is most obvious in the coda and couldn't be more typical of '80s America if Reagan was narrating it whilst doing the Thriller dance. Not only does the film hinge on thumping an attempted rapist in the face, not only is Marty's principal quest to save himself - a suitable shorthand for the 'me' decade - but in order to do so he has to avoid some nameless Libyan terrorists, and his ultimate rewards are parents affluent enough to play tennis, a brother who wears a suit and works in an office, and a 4x4. Harrowingly, though the film doesn't seem to realise it, at its close, Marty has also erased his entire existence up to this point, as he understands it.

But it is really cool when they play The Power of Love and he hitches a ride on his skateboard from a passing car and then waves to that aerobics class. As I mentioned, this film is from the 1980s. (3.5 for the film, 4 for the experience)

***



The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924) - Put a shirt on, man.

Doug Fairbanks' fourth period film is sensual, opulent and often thrilling, with staggering sets, luscious cinematography and some stunning action, but it's also too slow, and lacking the narrative seamlessness that marks the star's best work, while his charismatic, balletic performance tends towards over-acting.

Based on a story from the Arabian Nights, The Thief of Bagdad is a spirited, ambitious, frequently eye-popping fantasy adventure complete with Fairbanks' usual lengthy lead-up, and definitely worth seeing - sort of Intolerance meets Robin Hood meets a fair number of uninteresting supporting characters - just not quite the classic I was anticipating.

Perhaps it's because one of the most fun things about Fairbanks' historical pieces was the sense that all this could really have happened, and effects-driven wizardry is just much less exciting than seeing him swing from things. Perhaps it's because the whole things feels slightly aloof: more an exercise in spectacle than a story that one can invest in or relate to.

Also Ahmed is such an idiot for using his magic chest to get some bread and a silver lamé suit, rather than doing something for that nice, Obi-Wanish hermit who's been helping him. (3)

***



CINEMA: Jurassic World (Colin Trevorrow, 2015) - Jurassic Park IV (or Blackfish II: The Revenge) - another 24 awkward hours in a theme park gone awry, as a genetically modified dinosaur goes AWOL and apeshit, complicating the lives of an ex-Naval recruit (Chris Pratt), park employee Bryce Dallas Howard and her two nephews, who need to Grow and Learn, whilst dealing with Family Problems.

The plot and characterisation are purely functional - even patronising - and it goes on rather too long, but Pratt is a likeable hero, there are a few big laughs, and the film's understanding of action and iconography is impressive, with some smart innovations (that much parodied 'taming'), several imaginative fight-or-flight sequences and a rightful reverence for Spielberg's 1993 classic that happily feels more like homage than thievery, especially when the kids happen on some archive merchandise...

I only went because a friend fancied seeing it, but it was quite a bit better than I expected. (2.5)

***



Arizona (Wesley Ruggles, 1940) - Racism, gun worship and a finale where all feminist credentials go to the wind - it's all par for the course in this overlong, artificial but fairly watchable Western. Jean Arthur is a rifle-toting, ranch-ogling businesswoman who meets her romantic match in grubby, bearded drifter William Holden (in an unusually robust early role), while tangling with duplicitous crimelord Warren William and his slimy front: nervy saloon-keeper Porter Hall. It's poorly-paced and rather one-dimensional, but Arthur's incredible charm and irresistible voice manage to sustain it most of the way, and there are three particularly good scenes: her shakedown of two thieves, Holden's moonlit serenade and an exciting stampede set-piece in lieu of the tedious gun battle I was expecting. (2)

***



Tower Heist (Brett Ratner, 2011) - Fat jokes, seizure jokes, suicide jokes, prison rape jokes, police brutality jokes, product placement, people constantly saying "bitch" - this stuff's now so ingrained in American popular culture that I don't think they even realise they're doing it.

Apart from those unsavoury aspects, Tower Heist is actually alright: a slightly self-congratulatory, sort-of-socially-conscious heist movie set in a big glitzy tower, directed by Brett Ratner, and starring Ben Stiller and a lot of people who popular in 1999. Curiously, it's also shot by the much-lauded Michael Mann cinematographer Dante Spinotti, whose talent is obvious, but whose results are often superficial and cursed with the same slightly nauseating colour palette.

Stiller is the general manager of the New York tower, which boasts the most expensive real estate in North America. When the owner - slippery, smarmy Alan Alda - robs the employees' pension fund, Stiller and his acolytes try to get the money back, and perhaps a little extra, enlisting the help of the only thief they know, who's obviously black (Eddie Murphy).

For all its flaws - like a lack of jokes and suspense, thin characterisation and a twist basically nicked from David Mamet's Heist - the film seems sincere rather than opportunistic in its topicality, which gives it a novel twist. The performances are also committed, transcending some smug, clichéd writing, with decent work from hissable villain Alda, bankrupt financier Matthew Broderick, Téa Leoni - as an FBI agent - and the leads.

It's hardly Topkapi, and while it's sometimes stupid, it's rarely boring. All in all, definitely worth the 80p I paid for it. (2)

***

BOOKS



God Bless You, Mr Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut (1965) - Perhaps Vonnegut's best and most polemically dazzling book: an absurdist, turbo-charged spin on Mr Deeds, concerning the eccentric life of multi-millionaire Eliot Rosewater, an alcoholic volunteer fireman of limitless patience and generosity. A prescient, withering critique of capitalism, inherited wealth and American society, it contains some of the satirist's most memorable characters, inspired and incendiary jokes, and - particularly in the 'babies' speech (above) - a simple profundity that takes the breath away. (4)

***



Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (1963) - "Science is magic that works." That oft-quoted line, out of context, misses the point by, ooooh, about a million miles. Vonnegut's Atomic Age comedy isn't a book about the wonder of science and the futility of religion, but often quite the opposite: the solace of lies and the horror of the truth and the bomb. But nice try, atheists-who-just-found-a-quote. This one has a great first half, with some stinging satire and the introduction of some of his finest ideas ('granfalloons': "seeming teams that are meaningless in terms of God's way of getting things done", like the Communist Party and people from Indiana), then begins to stutter a little, though the remainder has many fine passages and ideas, and it's interesting to note how the author's experiences during the bombing of Dresden saturated his writing so completely even before he dealt with them directly in his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five. He also closes on a wonder of a paragraph. (3.5)

***



Emma by Jane Austen (1995) - If Jane Austen were writing today, I'm sure she'd doubtless be pilloried for regurgitating the same plots, if not quite the same characters - largely drawn, of course, from her narrow experience - while society's changing mores mean that to modern she may seem to decry snobbery on one page, then exhibit it on the next. She's bloody fantastic, though, I love her to bits, and in some ways Emma is perhaps her most rounded book. Dealing with the affairs and imaginings of a self-possessed 20-year-old romantic, it's not her most philosophical (Persuasion), funny (Sense and Sensibility) or romantic (Pride and Prejudice), but it's perhaps the one that balances those virtues most expertly and effectively, offering the same familiar but delayed wish-fulfilment, while effortlessly juggling its disparate and engaging story strands. Sometimes her characterisation here can be too reductionist, with supporting players relegated to a single attribute, then given too much time, but it's a minor quibble with an excellent book. Emma, said Austen, "is a heroine only I could love". Oh I don't know about that. (3.5)

***



The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992) - A horrible, compulsively readable book, about a bunch of young scholars, schooled in Classics, who transgress every moral boundary, ending in murder. It's sort of 'Leopold and Loeb Go to Brideshead' or 'Whit Stillman's Crime and Punishment', not without repetition in the writing and gaps in the characterisation, but meticulously plotted and perfectly paced, chilling you to the bone, like the Vermont winters it so bitterly, viciously evokes. (3.5)

***



Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre (2010) - It lacks the strong, single human story that illuminates Macintyre's best - he's an author man in perpetual search of a moving bromance - but this novelistic, impeccably researched, often very funny chronicle of the greatest deception of World War Two, in which British intelligence officers dressed a corpse in military uniform, gave him some misleading documents about the upcoming invasion of Sicily, and then floated him towards the enemy, is for the most part quite monstrously entertaining. Macintyre is also the only person I know who goes on about how great his own place of work (The Times) is more than me. (3.5)

***



The Human Stain by Philip Roth (2000) - This professor looks to be gloomily wrestling with an existential crisis, I wonder if by any chance he could be a character in a Philip Roth book. It's yet more dazzling brilliance from Roth: another book about sex, death and the unknowability of everyone, masterfully plotted and infuriatingly intelligent, with its every notion and idea and character interrogated, stripped to pieces and then barely put together again. A masterpiece. (4)

***

Thanks for reading.

Assorted pickings from the past month or so, minus the Lillian Gish and Barbara Stanwyck movies, which will get an entry all their own...

FILMS:



CINEMA: The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949) - This titanic achievement occupies an odd, lone position within cinema: an English film with American leads that stands head and shoulders above other home-grown stabs at noir, with its stunning Graham Greene script - full of poetic sardonism, cynicism and sadness - Reed's vivid direction, laden with atmosphere and populated by dizzying, off-kilter camera angles, and a flawless cast at the peak of its powers.

Joseph Cotten is Holly Martins, "a hack writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls". Flat broke, he arrives in the postwar vice-world of Vienna to accept a job from his pal Harry Lime, who he hasn't seen in nine years. When he gets to Lime's place, Harry's just been taken out in a coffin, and Cotton wants to get to the bottom of it, collaring his pals, falling in love with his girl (Alida Valli) and sparring endlessly with a sharp-minded officer British officer (Trevor Howard) and his sweet, lumpy sidekick (Bernard Lee) - who's a big fans of Holly's work.

Orson Welles once said that Cotten was a star, but he'd never make an actor. Welles, though, talked a lot of nonsense, and Cotten is thoroughly excellent as the bull-headed everyman several leagues out of his depth. His scenes with Valli form the emotional centre and substance of the film, soured with the unmistakably sad flavour of unrequited love. "I wouldn't stand a chance, would I?" he asks, drunk and lost in her apartment, the pair living forever in Lime's hefty shadow.

Then Welles himself enters as the villain - smirking in a doorway, lit from an open window - and the film enters the realm of the spectacular.

I'm not overly fascinated by new prints and the like, but the 4K restoration (I don't know what that is, I'll google it later) of The Third Man means that it's happily on the big screen once more, and looking very handsome. The main thing I got from the clean-up job - or perhaps just the size of the screen - were the scars on Howard's face and the visual beauty of that chilly closing scene.

I've seen the film probably 10 times before, but not for a few years, and was completely bowled over by it once more. I love Cotten's taxi ride from hell, Welles' panicked scarper away from the café, and the unprecedented mythmaking that prefigures his arrival in the film. I love his menace rising as the Ferris wheel that he and Cotton are riding reaches its zenith, then slipping back into easy, chubby-cheeked charm as they return to the ground. I love the big shadows on the run, the film's tone - poised between idealism, world-weariness and bristling anger - Howard's beautifully modulated performance, and that highly imitable zither tune. I love the way the spiral staircase looks from below, and the joke about the parrot. I love the faces of the villains, the best rogues' gallery since Casablanca, the kind of supporting players that you imagine the midwife looked at and said: "Congratulations, it's a character actor."

Most of all, I love its depiction of Lime: another Charles Foster Kane in his way, seen by those who knew him in a dozen different ways, with deadly charm, an irresistible boyishness and a way of trampling over everyone who loves him without thinking twice.

It's a fascinating, brilliant movie: original, gripping, entertaining, lyrical, devilishly funny, visually expressionistic and with one of the most extraordinary endings ever devised, which takes Hollywood wish-fulfilment and kicks it down the stairs, as the autumn leaves fall gently on a cemetery path, and Cotten leans on a truck, waiting for the girl he loves. (4)

***



All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979) - A singular insight into the mind - and genius - of Bob Fosse, the choreographer, director and performer who revolutionised dance on both stage and screen.

It's all here: the bowler hats, cigarettes, clicking fingers, angular knees and leading shoulders that typified his routines. His obsession with sex. His fear of death. The drug habit, the insecurity, the arrogance and the obsessive drive to succeed and create and endure.

Roy Scheider gives the performance of his career, inhabiting the skin of Fosse's alter-ego, Joe Gideon, who's mounting a show and cutting a film (similar to Fosse's Lenny) whilst on his way to a massive coronary.

Full of self-justification, self-loathing, self-obsession, dream sequences, pathos, personal philosophy, rapid-fire cutting, and dazzling dance sequences - with Fosse using avant garde angles and, particularly, creative editing to help convey the sheer ecstasy of movement - it's one of the most personal and compelling personal statements ever put on film.

Whether you regard it as one of the all-time great musicals or a pretentious piece of unbearable onanism, though, is likely to depend on how much time you have for Fosse. I adore his work and admire his honesty and chutzpah, so for me it's right up there with the best that the genre has ever had to offer.

That's not only because of its unusually incisive, adult storyline, but also the jolts of joy that come from its numbers. From On Broadway - the groundbreaking montage that opens the film proper - through the rwo-part experimentation of Take Off With Us and the simple, charming emotionalism of Everything Old Is New Again, to the four back-to-back hallucination sequences near the close, it has moments as thrilling as those in any musical, even if its tendencies are darker than almost any other. (4)

***



Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn, 2014) - I'm finding it hard to keep up with the Marvel films, largely because I can't really be arsed, but I've caught around a third half of them. The only ones I've really loved before now have been X2 and Spider-Man 2, fair contenders for the crown of Best Superhero Movie Ever Made, the latter possessing two of the most intensely brilliant, heartbreaking action sequences I've seen: that astonishing train set-piece, and the rescue from the burning building. But apparently those film aren't canon, or something.

Of the recent batch, Thor was a stand-out, but I found Iron Man particularly wearying and Avengers by far the most disappointing, as I'd heard so many great things about it. Gloriously, Guardians of the Galaxy blasts the shit out of those laboriously tagged 'Marvel Cinematic Universe' films, and feels like everything Avengers should have been but wasn't. It's irreverent where Avengers was smug, deft where that film was portentous, and unpredictable where its rival was ponderous and pompous.

The story is practically the same: a bunch of disparate, essentially noble badasses try to get their mitts on a power source, while stalked by various nefarious parties, including a slightly camp psychopath. But whereas Avengers seemed overwhelmed by its formulaic story, James Gunn's film delights in diverting from it, and its sense of humour is genuinely intelligent and subversive, punched across by vividly-drawn characters, from Chris Pratt's motherless, rather guileless mercenary, to a bazooka toting raccoon ("What's a raccoon?") voiced by Bradley Cooper, and a perpetually furious vigilante (Dave Bautista's Drax) who's bent on wreaking vengeance against that fey megalomaniac I mentioned (Lee Pace).

Occasionally the humourless villainy intrudes, and it's weird to see a supporting Peter Serafinowicz playing such a conventional, unfunny part, but for the most part it's magic, the tone set perfectly by Pratt's little dance sequence at the start, and the film striking a fine balance between action, humour and human emotion. (3.5)

PS: Feel free to correct my understanding of what constitutes a Marvel movie, I don't know much about it. (3.5)

***



The Last Waltz (Martin Scorsese, 1978) - The sound. That sound. Made largely by Canadians masquerading as authentic Southerners it may be, but I could happily drown in it.

The Band were Ronnie Hawkins' backing group and then Bob Dylan's band during his first electric tours, before becoming a force - a tour-de-force - on their own terms, fashioning an audial aesthetic that was basically 'the Cool, Slightly Troubled, Quasi-Biblical Rock Band of the Confederacy', their consummate individual musicianship somehow creating a whole where there were no joins, just a perfectly balanced, immersive, swampy, swinging, dingy, timeless, nostalgic, new and overwhelming sound.

The Last Waltz, much lauded, much parodied - not least by Spinal Tap - is theoretically, and according to most anyone you ask, a concert film about their final gig. But it's not really. The gig went on for four-and-a-half hours, while this film comes in at under two, including interviews conducted in the weeks before and after, and a few numbers shot separately, while the bits that are from the show are broadcast in a completely different order, aside from the opening and closing songs. Added to that, that staple of the concert film, audience reaction, is conspicuously absent: there are - at most - five crowd shots in the entire thing. The focus is on the band, and that focus is tight.

Because what The Last Waltz is, is a loving portrait of the group, with some sensational if slightly uprooted performances, and an intimacy that I found very attractive and completely unexpected. The group's camaraderie, its quicksilver chemistry, its union of perfect, complementary personalities is captured - apparently effortlessly, though almost certainly not - by Scorsese's intuitive camera set-ups, his incisive, intelligent editors, and a love of performance, of music, and particularly of his subject that's utterly beguiling, without getting dragged down by hagiography or hyperbole.

I'm lucky enough to work at probably the most famous rock venue in Britain, and I see a lot of gigs all over, but there's very little that can match the potency of The Band here, when they're really cooking. The performances of Up on Cripple Creek, The Shape I'm In and Ophelia are absolutely outstanding, and there are strong versions of their instant standards, The Weight, featuring Mavis Staples - though that one was shot later in the studio - and that immortal Civil War song, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

Staples isn't the only guest star here, it's worth pointing out. Clapton turns up for a scintillating guitar duel with the coolest man on earth, The Band's Robbie Robertson; Muddy Waters sings Mannish Boy; Van Morrison leaps all over Caravan, complete with high-kicks; Joni Mitchell delivers a tender, coyly sexy Coyote; Neil Young is absolutely coked off his tits and had to have a big blob of the stuff removed from his nose in post-production; while an out-of-tune Dylan sings two of his own, before an all-star version of I Shall Be Released. There's also Emmylou Harris crooning the heartbreaking Evangeline from an MGM soundstage.

Not bad, really. I wouldn’t mind mates like those. Apart from the drugs.

At the same time, the film does have a few shortcomings. There are a handful of duff numbers, with Dr John and Neil Diamond a little out of their league, and a couple of the Band's own songs falling relatively flat. In addition, while they do share colourful stories and moments of honest boorish braggadocio and musical insight in the interview snippets, Scorsese's earnestness and poor questioning technique can be both embarrassing and lacking in results.

It also disrupts the flow of the film. There are some clever cuts between performance and back-story, but the choppy structure tends to halt the movie's momentum and prevent us from feeling as if we're really at The Last Waltz for any longer than a song or two at a time. Because when we are, and when The Band are on form, I can't think of anywhere I'd rather be. (3.5)

***



Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman, 2011) - I saw this when it opened the Bradford Film Festival in 2012 and was rather overwhelmed: not by the film itself, necessarily, but by the return of one of my all-time favourite filmmakers, ending a 14-year hiatus from the screen. The word had been that Whit Stillman, the writer-director behind Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco would never make another movie, and yet here it was. I said then that I loved Damsels, but with reservations, and that only repeat viewings would reveal the precise depths of its myriad charms. Well here's repeat viewing #1.

It starts off pretty poorly, introducing us - via naïve new pupil Analeigh Tipton - to a clique of three girls, led by the self-assured, opinionated Violet (Greta Gerwig), who run a suicide prevention centre at a college largely dominated by masculine frattery. Wobbling and hobbling through its early stages, it seems to be firing off ideas almost at random, leaving little clue as to where we're supposed to stand with any of these characters, some of whom are barely sketched in at all. Then cracks appear in the edifice and it starts to click, and for the final hour just gets better and better, proceeding to completely charm the pants off anyone who'll let it (or indeed stick with it for that long).

I do think it's Stillman's weakest film by quite some distance: though the fratboy characters can be funny, they're so unrealistically stupid that they undermine the film; the misogynistic Xavier is hateful to watch, but not in any important way; and while it makes many small points, each reached through Stillman's singular, ceaselessly questioning mind, I'm not sure it has an overarching one.

It is, though, illuminated by the incomparable Gerwig, speaking in that unmistakably Stillmanish way and every bit as good as she was in Greenberg and would be in Frances Ha. It's also full of memorable theories, off-kilter ideas and thoroughly unexpected delights, including a final reel that comes out of nowhere and offers some of the most immersive escapism of recent years.

I can understand why people would hate it, especially if they mistake the quirks of the characters for the quirks of the writer - Stillman is sympathetic to his leads, though not blinded to their faults - but I kind of love it, aware as I am of its many failings. (3)

***



Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990) - It took me a while to see this one. As you'll know, it's an engrossing, exciting sci-fi actioner, based on the usual cumbersomely-titled Philip K. Dick's story, with Arnie as an amnesiac mystery man whose past is tied up with a colony on Mars. There's director Verhoeven's usual superb action editing, heavy-handed but effective social commentary - this time about imperialism and the plight of the poor - and strong if overly sexualised female characters, along with a narrative that's genuinely original and really keeps you guessing. The film is slightly of its time, a little excessive, and not particularly pretty to look at, while Arnie's as wooden as a front door, of course, though he is good at pretending to kick people. (3)

***



Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972) - I hated this film when I was first saw it as a teenager, perhaps because of my discomfort with its sleazy milieu, perhaps because you need to have known more of love and life to appreciate it. Since then, though, I've developed something of an obsession with Bob Fosse, from his personal pyrotechnics in The Affairs of Dobie Gillis and Kiss Me Kate, to his dazzling choreography in The Pajama Game et al, and that slice of unforgettable autobiography, All That Jazz (see above), so I thought I better revisit it, and I'm glad I did.

Cabaret tells the story of an upright, dinosaur-faced plank of wood (Michael York) who comes to Berlin in 1931 to teach English, and finds himself drawn into the world of the cabaret, largely by his saucy next-door neighbour, the flighty, capricious Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli). But on the streets, the power of the Nazis is rising...

It's a baffling mixture of the sublime and the drab. Minnelli is simply magnificent, the numbers are absolutely superb - especially her two solo spots and the stunningly choreographed Mein Herr - with Fosse's genius filtered through the strictures and style of 1930s cabaret, and the director's distinctive, virtuosic editing (in conjunction with David Bretherton) masterfully snaps, shoves and manhandles us into this vividly realised world, where Joel Grey's playful, androgynous master of ceremonies takes glorious centre stage.

And yet the rest of it often barely works at all. The political sequences are erratic - Tomorrow Belongs to Us is superb, but the film's employment of patronising hindsight is not - while the domestic sequences are shot in an artificial, lifeless, soft-focus manner, and dragged down by York's complete lack of credibility, which consistently thwarts the dramatic momentum that Minnelli is managing to swing from rather substandard material.

While life may be a cabaret, old chum, it's only in the cabaret where this film actually comes to life. (3)

***



The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (Francis Lawrence, 2014) - Not much happens, Julianne Moore phones it in insultingly, and the script's anti-authoritarianism engages on only the most juvenile, superficial level, but Jennifer Lawrence's pretty nose, sincere, throaty singing and immense, shimmering talent make so much of it work.

Throw in a couple of unexpectedly touching moments with Hensworth, a seductive Lord Haw-Haw-style subplot and one big shock, and it all proves very watchable: a touch better, I think, than the reheated Catching Fire, if less bracing and compelling than the initial film.

Mockingjay: Part I isn't as deep, important or weighty as it often appears to imagine, but when Lawrence is on screen, it seems oddly and unexpectedly real, and - with it - unusually affecting.

The score's lovely too. (2.5)

***



Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997) - Have you got half an hour, because Ethan Hawke wants to read a voiceover to you. This sci-fi movie, which would almost certainly work better as a book, is intriguing and on the cusp of being gripping, as it imagines a world in which life expectancy is all, but its frequent lapses in internal logic and plausibility tug at your attention. Still, it's hard to be too harsh on a movie that features Tony Shalhoub, Alan Arkin, Ernest Borgnine and Gore Vidal. (2.5)

***



Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992) - A noisy, nasty, cartoonish and confusing sequel to Burton's largely unbearable Batman (1989), with the Ineffectual, Slow-Punching Crusader (Michael Keaton) facing two new villains: an amphibious crimelord called The Penguin (Danny DeVito) - who has serious issues about childhood abandonment - and a dazed, high-kicking PVC sex kitten, Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer), who is sort of sexy but sort of just looks like Felix the Cat. Christopher Walken's also hanging around for no good, as per usual.

While Burton and screenwriter Daniel Waters play almost every scene for laughs, grotesquery or innuendo, the moments of character insight are genuinely touching - especially those between Bats and Cats - there are a handful of good lines, and Pfeiffer's transformation is handled with the neat grasp of iconography that occasionally illuminated the first film. And if it's a film that's rarely anything special, it's also rarely dull, at least until a witless and overlong climax (Burton has no aptitude for directing action), somehow redeemed by a sentimental coda.

The acting is also pretty good, if you like broad, heightened comic book shenanigans, with DeVito effectively disgusting as the lascivious, insane warlord, and Pfeiffer close to dynamic, neatly offset by Keaton's underplaying, the star making for a compellingly understated Wayne if a completely uninteresting Batman.

For all that, though, I like the incisive, exalting montage of footage - cut to the score - in the touring Danny Elfman show far more than I can stomach either of Burton's Batman pictures in full. (2.5)

***



CINEMA: Minions (Kyle Balda and Pierre Coffin, 2015) - On the one hand, this should really be the best movie ever, because… well, because it’s Minions. The Minions material in Despicable Me 2 was quite hysterically funny, the stand-alone shorts they feature in are a joy, and now they’ve got a whole film to themselves. On the other hand, it could have all gone disastrously wrong, since devoting an entire film to characters that are essentially comic relief is a gamble in artistic if not commercial terms (the marketing behemoth that is the Minions continues to conquer all), especially when they can’t actually speak, at least not in any recognisable terms.

As it is, Minions is a mild disappointment but by no means a catastrophe: a functional film with a promising premise, a decent prologue and some very funny moments, which gets bogged down with hideously bland supporting characters, an insistence on presenting the same tiresome idea of Britain perpetuated by innumerable, interminable American films, and setting the bulk of movie in 1968 for no other reason than its final scene. Wouldn’t it be funny if the Queen could do karate, though? No, that wouldn’t be funny at all, that would be crap.

The story sees Minion favourites Kevin, Stuart and the enthusiastic, child-like Bob going in search of a new supervillain to serve, after accidentally killing a dinosaur, a vampire and hundreds of Egyptians. Enlisted by pouty, posing darling of the criminal underworld Scarlet Overkill (voiced by Sandra Bullock), they travel to England to steal the Queen’s crown, but not everything goes to plan...

Sometimes there’s the sharp, offbeat sense of humour that lit up the Despicable Me films – that amazing joke on the news report about the new king is worthy of Lord and Miller – and there are also a couple of really sweet moments near the close, but more often than not it’s safe and rather blunt, with jokes that are amusing but ephemeral, and the feeling of a missed opportunity, especially when they came up with such a neat little set-up.

If you do see it, stay around for the credits, and not just the first bit - there's a rather lovely curtain call at the close. (2.5)

***



Shockproof (Douglas Sirk, 1949) - This maligned mixture of 'women's picture' and noir is actually an interesting story of nice guy parole officer Cornel Wilde falling in love with one of his charges (Patricia Knight), a murderess besotted with a slimy criminal (John Baragrey).

There are touches of Remember the Night and Cry of the City, but this Douglas Sirk movie - with a script by Sam Fuller, who didn't like what was done with it - is generally fresh, involving and humane, until a formulaic final third capped with a stupid ending. (2.5)

***



Ladies In Love (Edward H. Griffith, 1936) - A fair film about the romantic escapades of three young women - Loretta Young, Constance Bennett and the great Janet Gaynor - sharing an apartment in Budapest.

It veers between facile comedy and gloomy drama, but I enjoyed its ultimate unpredictability and lack of naïveté, and the cast is interesting, including up-and-coming stars Don Ameche and Tyrone Power, as well as moon-faced Simone Simon playing a smitten schoolgirl.

I watched it chiefly due to my Gaynorfandom. It's not one of her best roles, but she has decent chemistry with Ameche, especially when they're bickering, and was always an appealing screen presence even when she had little to work with. (2)

***



Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (Brett Morgen, 2015) - Kurt Cobain: Montage of Crap.

I can't believe they even put this out, it's so poorly done. A pretentious, unilluminating and tedious treatment of a fascinating subject, filmed in a witless, muddled montage style full of found footage, disingenuous editing, dated MTV-style cuts, and animated, decontextualised journal entries, these elements together apparently intended to approximate the mind of the manic depressive, heroin-addicted voice of a generation.

Plus Courtney Fucking Love.

There are occasional highlights - a few live flourishes, Cobain singing And I Love Her, Dave Grohl telling Love she has a round face - but seriously, no, watch Amy and then go back and try again. And if anyone watching wants a real insight into Cobain's mind, just listen to In Utero.

I didn't think you could make a boring film about him, but I've been proved wrong at least twice now. (1)

***

BOOKS:



Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut (1959)– My dad’s favourite Vonnegut book sadly isn’t mine. The author’s second novel is about the relationship between omniscient, perhaps omnipotent philanthropist Winston Niles Rumfoord – who appears on Earth for an hour every 59 days – and his embattled plaything, a feckless, fortunate billionaire by the name of Malachi Constant, who across the course of his life will travel from Earth to Mars to Mercury to Titan (a moon of Saturn) and then back to Earth, being variously venerated and eviscerated by the strange cult that Rumfoord seems to be manufacturing. Operating within a sci-fi universe that Vonnegut would ultimately shape into something more human and relatable, it’s superbly put together, but its bleak, fatalistic, meticulously-constructed narrative makes the whole experience feel slightly stunted and static, its incisive, extensive existential ruminations and withering social comment offset by a sense of nastiness and detachment, and most damagingly the absence of that freewheeling joie de vivre that marks his better, later books. (3)

***



The Furies by Niven Busch (1948)– An enjoyable wallow in Busch’s world of Freudian Western weirdness, as the author of Duel in the Sun and the movie Pursued introduces us to the unforgettable Vance Jeffries, a strong-willed, erratic young woman yanked around by her alarmingly intense relationship with her father: the overbearing, ever-guffawing megalomaniac known to all as 'T. C.'. The book is frequently overlooked nowadays in favour of Anthony Mann’s risible cinematic adaptation, a favourite of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd (more of which in my next post), but it’s far more worthwhile: narratively uneven, but atmospheric and full of great characters and bravura moments, written in the punchy, hard-boiled prose style you’d expect from one of the most sought-after screenwriters of his era. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

Assorted bits and pieces from the careers of two of my favourite actresses, Lillian Gish and Barbara Stanwyck. You can click on those links for a bit of background.

GISH:



*MINOR SPOILERS*
Broken Blossoms (D. W. Griffith, 1919) - This slow, bleak D. W. Griffith melodrama has achieved classic status, but I find it so completely over the top, in both its material and Donald Crisp's ludicrous villainy, that it's hard to get into.

Richard Barthelmess is a Chinese pacifist who travels to London to share the Buddha's teachings, but winds up a lonely opium addict instead. When he falls in love with a 15-year-old girl (Lillian Gish) who's terrorised by her father (Crisp) - a malevolent, embittered boxer living in squalor on the waterfront - you get the idea that it probably won't end well.

Crisp is farcical - constantly facing the camera and frequently mugging - and it all feels very aloof and detached compared to Griffith's usual work. Having said that, Barthelmess does a good job of inhabiting his part - if tending to display very little emotion or rather too much, and walking with a stoop that I hope he doesn't think is characteristically Chinese - while Gish is absolutely excellent, playing young yet world weary, abused yet enduringly innocent in some essential way, and masterfully articulating everything from the flowering of self-worth to a cacophony of head-spinning terror. The 'finger smile' she does here - improvised on the set - quickly became iconic, and it's a flash of genius.

Broken Blossoms is also quite a progressive movie for its time, especially considering it was made by Griffith, is subtitled 'The Yellow Man and the Girl', and stars a white man as a Chinese guy. (2.5)



*MINOR SPOILERS*
Way Down East (D. W. Griffith, 1920) - When I was a newspaper reporter, there was a local woman in her 90s who used to sometimes ring me up on newsdesk on a Friday (I think she was lonely), and it turned out that her earliest memory was chasing Maltesers down the aisle of Harrogate's Royal Hall as a toddler, while this film played in the background.

She seemed slightly confused when I told her it was one of my favourite movies, perhaps not realising that, at heart, I'm 103. "You can't mean the same film," she said. "It's very old."

It is.

It's also something of a miracle: a hoary Victorian stage melodrama transformed into enrapturing screen art by the skill of the father of film, D. W. Griffith, and the genius of his leading lady, the incomparable Lillian Gish.

The movie is a lengthier variation on Griffith's pastoral poems of the previous year - A Romance of Happy Valley and True Heart Susie - and a fitting vehicle for Gish, in her definitive role as the embodiment of womanhood, a virginal waif who's tricked into sleeping with caddish Lowell Sherman, and can't start anew with boy-next-door Richard Barthelmess (ideally cast), due to the secret forever hanging over her.

Griffith's title cards are hysterically preachy and the supporting slapstick is moronic, but the rhapsodic, beautifully photographed central story remains utterly mesmerising, with Gish evoking every emotion under the sun, before drifting away on the ice floes, her hair and hand trailing in the freezing water as she heads for a waterfall.

That dazzling climactic set-piece, which has transcended the film to become one of the passages most associated with silent cinema, was filmed essentially for real across three weeks in Arctic temperatures, and left Gish with permanent nerve damage. A tour-de-force of iconic imagery, bravura editing, and stunning stuntwork by the leads themselves, it's the capper to a quite wondrous movie.

The only thing I can think of that's more enjoyable would be chasing Maltesers through a theatre. (4)



The White Sister (Henry King, 1923) was silent screen phenomenon Gish's first film away from the auspices of D. W. Griffith, the pioneering director who had cast her initially in The Unseen Enemy (1912) - a daft short that's a little bit like Panic Room - elicited her first truly great performance in The Mothering Heart (1913), and then collaborated with her on epic smashes like The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), before finding vehicles tailored particularly to Gish's incomparable talents in movies such as True Heart Susie (1919), Way Down East (1920) and finally Orphans of the Storm (1921).

Breaking away with his blessing, Gish then signed with the independent company, Inspiration Pictures, excited by the chance to work with the director (Henry King) and producers of the stunning pastoral drama, Tol'able David (1921), which had been one of the biggest box-office hits of its year, and starred Gish's Way Down East and Broken Blossoms co-lead, Richard Barthelmess. And so she, King, a relative newcomer by the name of Ronald Colman and the rest of the company decamped to Italy to shoot their new film on location, discovering when they got there that there were only two klieg lights in the entire country, though they did at least have both of them.

The story Gish had chosen for her mission statement was The White Sister, dealing with a young woman who believes her soldier lover has been killed, and renounces the outside world to become a nun - only for him to reappear. In typical proto-feminist fashion, the star fought with distribution companies who pooh-poohed the project, scouted all the locations for the film and attended innumerable religious ceremonies by way of research, while fostering an unfailingly, appropriately "spiritual" atmosphere.

"How is it on the set between scenes?" Gish asked Helen Hayes a decade later, when her friend was shooting a talkie remake. "Oh, you know, the usual stories and jokes," Hayes replied. "Then you're not going to get it," Gish told her. "You cannot set up a camera and take a picture of faith."

It's that commitment to the project, and her instinctive genius, that makes the film work, when it does work. There are moments of visual and actorly poetry here as good as anything that the cinema has ever produced: the moment where Gish, hearing of her lover's death, shudders in the breeze of an open window; her heartbreaking encounter with his portrait in a hospital ward; her transfiguration when he later calls on her to recant her vows. It's a performance of extraordinary power and nuance: in the early reels boasting a sensuality very rare in her characterisations - which have been derided for their sexlessness - and in the later ones, so shot through with pious eloquence that you seem to be staring into the face of God through the eyes of Gish.

The rest of the film, somewhat unfortunately, is a bit of a hodgepodge, never quite gelling. There are scenes that go on too long or are cut oddly short, other bits of 'business' (as silent directors termed character colour) that have no real right to be here - so a boy tied a girl's hair to her chair, is that really relevant right now? - passages that are awfully talky for a silent, and an action climax that seems to exist only because of faddish convention and narrative convenience, dragging its feet as it serves up, at best, a feeling of mild peril. And though Colman is fairly effective in a tricky part, we also have to endure a highly silly villainess (sillainess) and a convenient subplot about an ailing scientist notable only for the fact that when a volcano eruption is on the way, he has some thermometers that light up the word "TIIIIIT" on his wall. Sorry, this is a film about nuns, I do apologise.

As a movie, then, it isn't altogether the seamless, ceaselessly credible experience that one truly desires, but as a piece of art about faith and love, it can be both wrenchingly powerful and truly profound, thanks almost entirely to the talents and exertions of Lillian Gish, perhaps the best screen actress we've ever seen. (3)



The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928) - A spectacularly uncommercial silent melodrama, with Lillian Gish driven mad by chauvinism and the desert wind. There's some incongruous comedy and a divisive re-shot ending, but the rest is gobsmacking, with peerless atmospherics and Gish's biggest, arguably best performance. (4)



One Romantic Night (Paul L. Stein, 1930) - This stilted, very talky early talkie is notable only as Gish's first excursion into the nascent medium, cast somewhat against type as a snappily dressed princess caught between two very different men, Rod La Rocque (an actor memorably name-checked in Singin' in the Rain) and Conrad Nagel.

Adapted from a Ferenc Molnár play called The Swan, it possesses dated mores that are difficult to follow today, and creaks like hell, everybody speaking with that weird just-learning-to-use-these-crap-new-microphones intonation, though some of Gish's facial acting is characteristically excellent, and that first kiss is a good moment.

The star made just one more movie in the next 12 years - the no-budget New York-shot film, His Double Life (1933) - tired of and dismissed by Hollywood, before her triumphant return as a character actress in the 1940s. (1.5)



Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle, 1948) - An ethereal, inspiring fantasy-romance in the vein of The Ghost and Mrs Muir, Somewhere in Time and The Time Traveller's Wife, with listless artist Joseph Cotten finding a muse in the shape of a mysterious girl named Jennie (Jennifer Jones), who seems to belong to another era, and is growing up too fast.

Its feel is transcendent, with seductive visuals, a relentless, lushly magical Dimitri Tiomkin score (with a debt to Debussy), and persuasive performances from one of the casts of the decade, including memorable supporting roles for Lillian Gish, David Wayne and especially Ethel Barrymore.

The only parts that didn't work for me on first viewing were the confusingly conceived 'taking of the veil' sequence, and the waterlogged ending, which is impressively staged but thematically unsatisfying. It's still an extremely evocative and affecting film, and one I'll doubtless return to, time and again. Maybe next time those elements will strike me differently.

Incidentally, that's Nancy Reagan making her screen debut in the final scene - she's the teenage girl on the left, viewing the eponymous artwork. (3.5)



*SOME SPOILERS*
Follow Me, Boys! (Norman Tokar, 1966) - Erratic but engaging small-town Americana starring three of my favourite actors, Fred MacMurray, Vera Miles and silent screen legend Lillian Gish, about a touring musician (MacMurray) who jacks it in to put down roots, becoming a beloved scoutmaster.

After that delightful opening, the first half follows the Boys Town template - or The Parable of the Lost Sheep, if we're going further back - with the stern but loving MacMurray becoming father figure to a bunch of boys, only to end up spending more time on one problem case (the young, freckled Snake Plissken) than the rest of them put together.

The remainder of the film is rather odd: shapeless and episodic, with an extended war games set-piece set in 1944, some courtroom drama, and a finale that could never be accused of subtlety, as it hammers home the idea that only a sense of civic duty can lead to true happiness, and that you get a parade and everything.

One can rail against the film's Disneyfied, Republican view of the world - where a white community solves its problems through temperance and Christian values - mock its tending of mile-high corn, and quibble with the stealing wholesale of a memorable moment from Goodbye, Mr Chips, but I think the film caught me in the right mood, as I rather enjoyed it.

I watched it chiefly because I'm continuing to explore the career of Lillian Gish. For the most part, her performance as a wealthy, benevolent widow is suitable but unexceptional, until one very good scene near the end, where she opens up about her past. The rest of the movie is sincere and competently done, without ever pulling up trees, and MacMurray and Miles work really nicely together. (Though the beginning of their courtship reminds me a *little* of Travis and Betsy at the start of Taxi Driver.)

Also, for fans of unimportant facts about movies - 'trivia', if you will - Up wasn't, as is often claimed, the first Disney film to feature a character who can't have children, as that's the case with Vera Miles here.

Follow Me, Boys! is likely to be Hell on Earth for any unremitting cynics out there, but for everyone else, it's all pretty pleasant. If you were only going to ever watch one Disney drama from the 1960s, though, go for Pollyanna, as that's an exceptional piece of work which throws this film's more everyday shortcomings into sharp relief. (2.5)

***

STANWYCK:



This is My Affair (William A. Seiter, 1937) - President McKinley sends naval officer Robert Taylor deep undercover to foil a bunch of bank robbers and expose their inside source, in this handsome but lumpy thriller. It’s a great premise, but Allen Rivkin and Lamar Trotti – the latter the writer of Ford’s seminal Young Mr Lincoln soon afterwards – skimps on the psychology, jumping straight into Taylor’s quest, without the need for him to shed his attachments or sink from the service, a dynamic of public disgracement that worked so well in Batman Begins. Instead, he drops us straight into a suspense-free period crime drama – intended to cash in on the success of San Francisco and In Old Chicago, the second of these written by Trotti – as Taylor spars with criminals Brian Donlevy and Victor McLaglen, each of whom has a claim on songstress Barbara Stanwyck.

There are passages of pure Americana, allied to some lush love scenes (Stanwyck and Taylor simply can’t stop kissing, and married in 1939, though their courtship here begins with some charmless rom-com stalking), and a succession of painstakingly-recreated dance hall numbers from 1901 – several unfortunately enunciated by the leading lady. Stanwyck’s speaking voice – at least before she smoked her one millionth cigarette – was an instrument of rare beauty. Remember the Night and Ball of Fire are all about her voice, but even lesser films like My Reputation (below) and this one hinge upon it. The way she'd drop it out, crack it or throw in a kind of blue note. It’s exalting to listen to. Her singing was dreadful, though, no matter how much training she had, nor how sensitive the arrangement, and that’s never going to stop being true.

There’s a more central problem here, though, and it’s in the writing, which is too often cartoonish, flat and simplistic: words one would hardly associate with Trotti’s work on Judge Priest and that polemical classic, The Ox-Bow Incident. There’s a risible bit of ‘business’ about McLaglen being an inveterate practical joker, which is poorly conceived and idiotically executed, a comfortable shorthand for the film’s narrative failings.

Then, about an hour in, Taylor tries something outlandish in a bid to catch the traitor supplying safe codes to the robbers, and the film turns into something else entirely: a shadowy thriller complete with psychological torture, a nifty twist and some race-against-the-clock shenanigans: again enjoyable enough to watch, but not especially novel, nor evoking the requisite emotional response – partly because Taylor is so wooden, always operating at the same simplistic level, which broadly translates as “wait one sec, I’m just going to do an act”.

A few more weeks spent on the script, and this movie could have been something special. As it is, it’s a good-looking mash-up of various disparate genres that never quite gels or hits the heights it might, but consistently entertains, providing moments of beauty amidst its peddling of affable mediocrity. (2.5)



My Reputation (Curtis Bernhardt, 1946) - Decent, handsome 'woman's picture' about widow Barbara Stanwyck falling in love with patronising know-it-all George Brent, their romance upsetting her mother (Lucile Watson, so purposefully annoying she's unwatchable) and setting local tongues wagging.

It works better as a mature drama than when trying to be a rom-com, but it's really about Stanwyck's excellent performance, James Wong Howe's photography and Max Steiner's score, the three combining to particularly powerful effect in the early scene where she reads a letter from her late husband, and during that moving climactic monologue. The ending proper is sadly a double cop-out representing unreconstructed Hollywood at its worst, but those last 15 seconds are stylised perfection. (Incidentally, if Stanwyck looks unexpectedly young, and you're flummoxed by the unnecessary wartime setting, that's because this one was shot in 1943 then caught up in the Mass WWII Backlog.) (2.5)



The Bride Wore Boots (Irving Pichel, 1946) - Mean-spirited, astonishly unfunny comedy about horse-mad Barbara Stanwyck and historian Robert Cummings having marital troubles, probably because they're both so utterly unbearable. There's one touching scene near the start, but it's mostly shrill, hateful rubbish, and in the end I just gave up. You know a movie's in trouble when even a horny Diana Lynn isn't helping. (1)



*MINOR SPOILERS*
The Lady Gambles (Michael Gordon, 1949) - A gruelling, laudable film about married photographer Barbara Stanwyck becoming addicted to gambling, turning from an affable careerwoman to a two-bit criminal lying bruised on a hospital bed.

The makers were allowed to shoot on location in Vegas, so there's no indictment of organised gambling, with the hoteliers and pawnbrokers proving absolutely delightful, but for the period this is an unusually heartfelt and perceptive examination of mental illness, with Stanwyck playing her problem as if it were a drug addiction, which it absolutely is. You get the sense that she cared more about this role than most of those she got in the late '40s: there's a fragility, a hopelessness, a perpetual vulnerability that she didn't often go for, and it inspires pity, uncertainty and unhappiness in the viewer - not the ingredients for a cracking night in with a DVD, but fitting for this type of film.

Frank Skinner's score is rather patronising. the flashback structure has Robert Preston's character recalling details he wouldn't really know about and the story moves somewhat in judders, with an unnecessary subplot about horse-racing and a weak ending utilising Stanwyck's incredibly neurotic older sister (Gothic horror regular, Edith Barrett), but it's a largely solid 'problem picture' with a fatalistic, ever-present atmosphere of gnawing dread, and a strong central performance that sees Stanwyck doing something a little different from her norm.

Incidentally, I do genuinely wonder if there was something in her contract saying that at least once a film someone had to comment on how ravishing she was. Either that or the studios were just trying to brainwash us. (2.5)



East Side, West Side (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949) - Glossy, unbelievably entertaining Hollywood meller set in New York, with Stanwyck as a wronged wife, Charisse the girl-next-door, Heflin's effortlessly modern performance, Gardner's feline sensuality, Mason's voice, colourful bits for William Conrad, Beverly Michaels and Gale Sondergaard - her last film before being blacklisted. For what it is, close to perfect. (4)



The Furies (Anthony Mann, 1950) - A disappointing adaptation of Niven Busch's novel (which comes in the Criterion set): not as clever, atmospheric or claustrophobically, Freudianly bonkers, and missing the book's most deliriously dark character, the mute, merciless, yellow-eyed blood-lusting 70-year-old psychopath gunman, Quintinella, who should clearly be played by J. Carrol Naish.

43-year-old Barbara Stanwyck is Vance Jeffries - at the start of the book, 19 years of age - who takes after but lives in the shadow of her tycoon father, T. C. (Walter Huston), owner of the titular ranch. Their intense relationship is fractured but not destroyed by two romances: the first her affair with a gaunt gambler (Wendell Corey), the second his visit from gold-digger Judith Anderson, and soon they're trading in increasingly bitter revenge.

That famous scene with the shears is great and there are some strikingly composed shots, but neither those nor the talents of Stanwyck and director Mann can compensate for Charles Schnee's pale, toneless, often brainless script. A couple of his changes are for censorship or commercial reasons, but most of the others are just stupid: Anderson's character is now a villain rather than a charming victim of circumstance, Quintinella is replaced by a generic fat Mexican guy called El Tigre (Thomas Gomez), IOUs are legal tender known as 'TCs', and The Furies is the endlessly-repeated name of the ranch, not a clutch of demons gathering poetically in the sky.

What remains of Busch's story is sufficiently original to explain some of the film's reputation, Stanwyck is good in one of her late-period 'strong woman' roles and Beulah Bondi - her co-star from my favourite movie, Remember the Night - turns up briefly to predictably excellent effect, but it is an extremely flawed movie, equipped not only with narrative shortcomings, but four principal males who are either overrated if commanding (Huston), off-form (Gomez) or just rubbish (Corey and the ever execrable Gilbert Roland).

Mann made a few of my favourite Westerns, particularly Man of the West and The Naked Spur.

This isn't in the same league, though perhaps when the book has faded from my mind I can take it on its own terms and enjoy it more, luxuriating in that chiaroscuro photography. I'm not sure, though. Gilbert Bloody Roland, ffs. (2)



To Please a Lady (Clarence Brown, 1950) - This hilariously-titled movie is the motor-racing film that Gizmo likes watching in Gremlins: a stale star vehicle about speedway, with as much badly back-projected footage of Clark Gable in goggles and a little hat as you'd expect.

The story's the usual sexist Gable rubbish, rather late in the day, with a jumped-up dame (Barbara Stanwyck) causing him trouble until he slaps and kisses her, after which she immediately falls in love with him.

The stars' hearts clearly aren't in it, there's a disconcerting scene where they have phone sex with him watching her in the mirror and then he pretends she's his aunt, and though the film's harnessing of sporting clichés -incorporating some unexpectedly involving race sequences - keeps it moving for a while, it all runs out of gas a long way before the finish.

That speedway episode of Malcolm in the Middle is much better, especially the sight gag with the lap numbers. (1.5)



Jeopardy (John Sturges, 1953) - Nasty little thriller about an all-American family on holiday in Mexico: Barry Sullivan gets trapped under a pier, wife Barbara Stanwyck goes for help, only to get waylaid by complete psycho Ralph Meeker. Starts slowly, picks up when Meeker appears and Sullivan gives his son a moving pep talk about coffee, then ends rather strangely.

The best thing about the film is that Sullivan smells his wife's perfume and then says "Mmm, sexish", which I shall be doing from now on. (2)



All I Desire (Douglas Sirk, 1953) - An affecting drama in Douglas Sirk's familiar style, with Barbara Stanwyck given one of her best later roles - and so giving one of her best later performances.

As in the pair's other film together, 1956's There's Always Tomorrow (below), she's a woman returning to a town she left years before, complicating the lives of the married man she once loved (Richard Carlson), his son and his two daughters. This time, though, the kids are hers and the man was once her husband.

It's not quite as effective, unusual or stylistically striking as that later film, which made vivid use of the wide screen then de rigueur, with compositions rich in symbolism (hello Rex, the Walkie Talkie Robot Man), but it largely succeeds, Sirk again leaning on archetypes - the cowardly cuckold, the surrogate mother, the stage-struck kid and the sexually voracious single man - but usually finding real emotions between the lines.

At times the film tips over into unconvincing melodrama and overbearing sentiment, the supporting comedy is as laboured as ever and the score gets very ominous and silly whenever ex-lover Lyle Bettger turns up, but the film's very Sirkian themes - that good people tossed around by their emotions can do bad things, that gossips should shut up and go away - are very persuasive, and articulated by Stanwyck with a conviction and nuance she rarely managed later on.

During the early '40s, she was absolutely on fire: in 1941 alone, she got three parts showcasing both her beguiling emotional sensitivity (cased in cynicism) and her sexual smarts, and aced them all. Then movies changed, she got old, she got an awful new haircut, all that smoking wrecked her voice, and nothing worked so much any more. Some superficiality on my part perhaps, but that spark, that energy seemed to have sapped away, the star so removed in her Hollywood bubble from her tough upbringing in Brooklyn that it was like she no longer knew how to play ordinary people. All I Desire isn't in the same league as those earlier films, and neither is her performance, but there are moments of genuine clarity and beauty - the start of the conversation with her confused, distraught son; the "I'd love you to come with me" that she utters to herself after purposefully wrecking her daughter's image of her; bits of the Browning poem she reads - and that's far more than we usually get.

And as it's set in the past, even her hair is OK. The slang of the period is better than OK: "He's a regular Lemon, from Lemontown," a student warns a girl he likes. "Ah, 23 skidoo," replies his rival.

All I Desire isn't an unassailable classic, but as a vehicle for a truly great actress it works better than most, helped by a solid script, Carl E. Guthrie's thoughtful lighting and an unusually convincing supporting cast - these aren't exceptional performers, but for the most part they fit their roles well and so never distract from a woman who is.

I find it enduringly fascinating, however, that Sirk and his writers so consistently fetishised the importance of small town family life to an almost hysterical degree, whilst wallowing in the unhappiness of its stifling nature and eyeing the attractions of the alternatives. It's a dichotomy deserving of a book that would perhaps contain no definitive conclusions.



Witness to Murder (Roy Rowland, 1954) - A minor annoyance (Barbara Stanwyck) looks out of her window, sees a homicidal ex-Nazi (George Sanders) commit a murder, and helpfully informs the police. They don’t believe her, but he does. This unpleasant sleeper has a good premise, well-matched stars – with Sanders hamming it up enjoyably if lazily – and some handsome shots by pioneering noir cinematographer John Alton, but it gets more and more illogical as it progresses, leading to an absolutely farcical climax. It also has a sensationalist approach to mental illness that leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

The Window - that 1949 classic about a boy who cried murder - did this sort of thing a whole lot better. As did Rear Window, actually, rather unfortunately released the same year as Witness to Murder.

On a minor note, this is another later Stanwyck film in which someone says completely incongruously how hot she is. It’s now my life’s ambition to find out if this was actually written into her contracts, as it’s getting a little ridiculous. (2.5)



There’s Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk, 1956) - Douglas Sirk tries to dissuade us from having children, #37.

An incisive, if not exactly subtle study of conformity and the American Dream - the director's pet theme - with successful, married father-of-three Fred MacMurray growing tired of his stifling life, and seeking escape with old flame Barbara Stanwyck.

It's brilliantly directed and sensitively played: the ultimate showdown between MacMurray's eldest kids and his mistress providing both dramatic fireworks and rhetorical resonance. His other child, Frankie, is basically the worst person in the world.

This may be the last and least of the three Stanwyck-MacMurray collaborations that I've seen (they made four films together), but since the others are my all-time favourite film (Remember the Night) and Billy Wilder's sublime film noir, Double Indemnity, I think we can let it off. (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

I've been to an exhibition, to the theatre and to my bed, where I reclined whilst watching the following movies...

BETTE DAVIS TRIPLE-BILL



I'm starting to acquaint myself better with the movies of Bette Davis. The big-name highlights - All About Eve; Now, Voyager; Jezebel - I know, and I'm au fait with a lot of her earlier work at Warner's... but her less high-profile star vehicles have thus far eluded me, and seem a suitable subject for my next obsessive venture in the world of classic film. I revisited All About Eve - because why wouldn't you? - and then made in-roads on this rather attractive box-set.



*I'VE TRIED TO AVOID SPOILERS, BUT TAKE CARE JUST IN CASE*
All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

“How about calling it a night?”
“And you pose as a playwright? A situation pregnant with possibilities and all you can think of is ‘everybody go to sleep’.”

The greatest film ever made about the theatre (or the best I’ve seen, anyway): a movie I love still more every time I watch it, whilst wrestling with my continuing astonishment that anyone could write anything this good. That anyone was Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the verbose writer-director responsible for such enchanting, weighty and ominous fare as A Letter to Three Wives and People Will Talk, before he rather forgot what his strong suit was and started adapting other people’s work.

In arguably her definitive role, Bette Davis is seasoned Broadway star Margo Channing, whose mentoring of mousy, stage-struck kid Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) inflames her demons whilst causing small explosions in the lives of her boyfriend Bill (Gary Merrill), a playwright and his wife (Hugh Marlowe and Celeste Holm) and an acidic, vicious but extraordinarily charming columnist by the name of Addison DeWitt (George Sanders).

The script is as good as any ever written. It’s steeped in the theatre, in a hypocrisy and misery and masochism offset by the electrification of applause. It’s wise yet devilishly witty, giving as many unbeatable lines to its villains as its heroes. It’s about love and ambition and mistakes and chance and the cleansing power of celebrity. Its story – of effortlessly shifting fortunes and sympathies, of breakneck turns – is timeless, full of surprises and grips like nothing else: the fate of its villainess as chilling as a man being bricked up alive in a Val Lewton horror.

The cast, too, could scarcely be better, with career-best turns from everyone involved, aside from perhaps Thelma Ritter, who’s characteristically superb, but had rather more to do in The Mating Season and Pickup on South Street. In a characterisation stripped of glamour, playing a bitter, bitterly funny heroine, caked in make-up remover, drenched in self-pity and marinated in booze, Davis is the last word in fading stage stars. As her potential replacement, the bright-eyed Baxter gives a performance that came from nowhere and which she never approached again, nailing a succession of chilling, unforgettable scenes to which the word ‘ruthless’ really doesn’t do justice. Marlowe was always a little bland, but Merrill shows an unexpected force and conviction as Davis’s patient – but not limitlessly patient – beau, tiring of her complexes, Marilyn Monroe has a hysterical bit as a savvy starlet, while Holm is simply the archetypal Mankiewicz character: sad-eyed, good-hearted and ultimately omniscient, but entirely shorn of the power to act.

From the astute, literate voiceover and classic freeze-frame that launches the story, via stinging one-liners, sublime reaction faces and a litany of unimprovable set-pieces, to one of the most memorable, satisfying (and scary) endings in the history of movies, All About Eve is a landmark of Hollywood’s Golden Age: an unassailable classic with the kind of dialogue that a moviegoer dreams about. (4)



The Old Maid (Edmund Goulding) - A somewhat far-fetched but moving story of warring Southern cousins Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, and the four weddings and a funeral that define their lives. Adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, it's extremely episodic but very entertaining and sometimes artistically valuable, lit by Davis's star turn, as she ages from a bright-eyed belle to a harsh, scolding shrew alienated from her beloved daughter, aided by atypically convincing make-up, characteristic charisma and that ability to immerse herself within the particular, peculiar minutiae of a role, without forgetting to emotionally connect. She has one line near the end that is liable to absolutely floor you.

The supporting cast is variable: George Brent is better than usual, but only as good as George Brent can be, which is not very; his principal mannerism being sighing and looking down (like Mark Kermode says that Richard Gere does), while Jane Bryan is too vague and broad as Davis's grown-up daughter, though there are decent performances from former silent star Louise Fazenda, and veteran Scottish character actor Donald Crisp.

Really, though, it's about Davis and to a lesser extent Hopkins, their convincing characterisations housed in a good-looking, sensitive and sometimes bitterly explosive movie that throws the stereotype of the 'old maid' askew, whilst delivering some universal truths about love, happiness and self-sacrificial devotion. The stars reteamed for Old Acquaintance, which was altogether lacking in nuance, with Hopkins cast as one of the most annoying characters in the history of anything.



In This Our Life (John Huston, 1942) - Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland play sisters named Stanley and Roy (what is going on?) in this excitable melodrama, which sacrifices truth for dramatic dynamism.

Bette's an amoral, husband-stealing whirlwind who takes after her ruthless capitalist uncle (Charles Coburn), Olivia's more like her softly-spoken, kind-hearted father (Frank Craven), at least at first, though both women are entirely free spirits, a pleasant antidote to the conformity peddled so frequently during Hollywood's Golden Age.

As is Ernest Anderson's character, a young black trainee lawyer who gets a stirring but understated speech about the lack of promotion or recognition typically offered to African-Americans. Meanwhile, Dennis Morgan - as an unhappy puppet of lust - and the ever-wooden George Brent, playing a lawyer made of wood, are your male leads this evening.

The plotting becomes increasingly unrealistic in the second half, but a strong cast helps (including an uncredited cameo from Walter Huston, the director's father), as well as Ernest Haller's atmospheric photography. Just try to take your eyes off Bette. (2.5)

(Incidentally, movie folklore has it that John Huston - directing this, his second film - included most of the cast of his debut, The Maltese Falcon, in walk-ons: Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet. Sadly it's not the case.)

***



The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925) - King Vidor's emotionally overpowering WWI film - of layabout aristo John Gilbert going off to fight in a fug of patriotism, falling in love with French farmgirl Renée Adorée, then finding that war is hell - was a critical and box-office sensation in 1925, and remains unsurpassed in the genre.

With a lighthearted first half followed by a brutal second, it's a seamless whole formed of countless unforgettable vignettes, its knockabout comedy and beguiling romance giving way to taut, then horrific action sequences emphasising the brutal lottery of battle.

Adorée learning to chew gum; Gilbert arsing about with a barrel on his head, then later sharing a shellhole with the dying German he's just shot; that astonishing ending - its classic scenes are legion, each blessed by an astounding visual poetry.

Best of all is the lovers' devastating farewell, one of my favourite scenes in movies, in which a departing Gilbert - finally prised from Adorée's grip - flings his treasured possessions at her from the back of a truck. Finding that he has nothing else of value to throw, he takes off a boot, and chucks that instead. She cradles it in her arms, before collapsing on the road, alone.

She's great, as the sexy, pure-hearted, then bereft love interest. And Gilbert's excellent too: this is Exhibit A for the case that his damaged reputation is ill-deserved. The Big Parade made a star out of him, and made the career of Vidor, who would create another contender for 'finest film of the silent era' - The Crowd - and then the first great American talkie (and singie), Hallelujah!(4)

(Thanks to DirectorsCut for suggesting that I pick up the recent Region 1 Blu-ray of The Big Parade, which is surely a high watermark in terms of print, music and presentation.)

***



CINEMA: Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015) - This is a major return to form for Pixar: an extremely creative, wilfully different movie that draws on inspirations as diverse as The Beano’s Numskulls, Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth and Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph, but has an existential imagination and emotional sensibility more akin to an arthouse movie.

The film takes place largely in the brain of 11-year-old Riley, who moves from an idyllic existence in Minnesota to a cripplingly different one in San Francisco, where her ties to friends and family start to sever. And that’s about it.

Within her brain, the emotions of Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger try to restore equilibrium (or merely fight for supremacy), abetted or distracted by a litany of imaginative - even imaginary - supporting characters, as they carry core memories, brave the subconscious or ride the Train of Thought.

A few of the jokes and broad or bad – didn’t Toy Story 2 teach Pixar that incongruous movie spoofs are far beneath the standard that the studio prizes and so often meets? – and it seems odd that the script feels it needs to explain gags about broccoli but not about neurological functions.

On the whole, though, it’s a triumph: extremely funny and intensely moving (oh Bing Bong!), with superb animation, apposite voicework from the likes of Amy Poehler and Phyllis Smith, and a melancholy disposition that punctures and subverts the appealing but naïve character of Joy, who regards putting a brave face on a situation as a universal panacea.

(Stay around for the credits too, the cat joke is amazing.) (3.5)

***



*MINOR SPOILERS*
CINEMA: Mistress America (Noah Baumbach, 2015) - After a little while apart so he could make the patronising misstep, While We’re Young, Noah Baumbach is reunited with Greta Gerwig, the stunningly gifted comedian who is to screen humour what Michelle Williams and Jennifer Lawrence are to drama – i.e. better at playing it than anyone else on the planet. And for Mistress America, the director has reinvented himself as Howard Hawks for a fast-talking, ultimately old-fashioned screwball comedy of absurdism and interruption in which Gerwig is essentially his Ros Russell.

Lola Kirke is college starter Tracy, for whom campus life is not really that much fun. Enter her new big step-sister Brooke (Gerwig), a shimmering beacon of compulsive likeability, spurious theorising and increasingly apparent neuroses, who envelopes and enraptures the strait-laced, closeted Kirke, her influence unlocking a side of ‘baby Tracy’ that didn’t necessarily need to be seen. The first half is fairly Baumbachian in structure – with his usual slight self-satisfaction and spirited subversion of genre cliches – before he kicks off his shoes, rolls up his sleeves and essentially slips in a disc of ‘30s screwball mayhem, Hawksian in pace and volume, but inhabiting the ‘wacky family’ world of something like Merrily We Live.

The film isn’t in the same league as Frances Ha, the monochrome masterpiece that established Gerwig as an actress of almost unparalleled if strictly parametered ability, but it is full of great ideas and one-liners - from “’Adultery’? Since when do you have such grown-up ideas about morality. You’re 18, you should just be touching each other all the time” to "I like compressed MP3s", a perfect, contrarian rebuke to the tiresome fetishisation of vinyl in indie cinema - as well as rug-pulling twists that consistently brook convention. It manages to be extremely touching whilst refusing to fall back on almost any of the stock scenarios that even independent movies lean upon to generate emotion.

Particularly welcome is Tracy’s pathological lack of remorse when she does what’s widely agreed upon to be A Very Bad Thing. Like Whiplash’s Neimann, she just doesn’t really care, an approach borrowed from a sublime exchange earlier in the movie where Brooke encounters a girl she bullied at school, refuses to apologise and still come out on top.

It’s that kind of moral and narrative daring that sets the film apart and sustains it even when the frantic, frenzied exchanges risk degenerating into shrillness or pastiche. That, a vivid NY atmosphere and a pair of exceptional performances: Kirke’s pretty, pretty lost freshman holding her own against Brooke, another superb entry in Gerwig’s gallery of appealing, aimless young women, drifting attractively towards oblivion. (3.5)

***

WENDY HILLER DOUBLE BILL

... in which I investigate some more obscure entries in the sporadic, highly odd career of screen legend Wendy Hiller, whom I adore.


Sorry about the watermark, but you try to find a picture of Hiller in this film.

Something of Value (Richard Brooks, 1957) - A sincere but muddled movie about the Mau Mau uprising in colonial Kenya, with Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier as childhood friends caught on opposite sides of the conflict. It's a gruelling watch and its narrative flaws are legion, but there are some very powerful moments, Poitier is superb and Wendy Hiller steals the film (doesn't she always?) being variously sexy and transcendent and covered in blood and shooting a gun. Phwoarr. (2)


Same deal with this pic.

Toys in the Attic (George Roy Hill) - Toys in the attic and skeletons in the closet: a very entertaining slice of Southern Gothic from commie playwright Lillian Hellman: a little ripe, a little familiar, but extremely well done.

Geraldine Page and Wendy Hiller are spinster sisters in New Orleans whose sheltered life is shaken by the return of ne'er-do-well brother, Dean Martin, suddenly flush with cash but somewhat reticent to say why. In his company is his neurotic young wife (Yvette Mimieux), whose harsh, strident mother (Gene Tierney) may have made the match.

It's largely shot on one set, but future New Hollywood hero George Roy Hill directs it all extremely nicely, and much of the acting is an absolute treat, with Page and Hiller dominating in two mesmerising characterisations.

Both play women who are blind and deluded, though in quite different ways, Page hitting a peak of quivering self-loathing, Hiller shuffling the moods as she did so superbly in these mid-career characterisations that she loved to (infrequently) take on: not the shimmering archetypes she had embodied in Bernard Shaw plays, but starkly real characters made beautiful by their flaws and contradictions. Though billed fourth, it's actually a rare instance during her postwar career that she was front and centre, and the results are simply sublime. (3.5)

***



The Bad Sleep Well (Akira Kurosawa, 1960) ... whereas Toshiro Mifune's mysterious, whistling avenger is up till all hours.

Kurosawa's homage to '40s Warner gangster movies is long and mostly enthralling, doubling as a furious indictment of corporate corruption, as Mifune goes undercover in a crooked administration, then finds himself tormented by love, his own growing cruelty and the stone cold psychopaths he's dealing with.

The plotting wobbles a bit here, especially in the second half, but it's tough, intriguing and - as usual with AK - provides an insightful look at the structures and strictures of Japanese society.

It's also quite brilliantly directed, distinctively shot in widescreen Tohoscope and showing both another side and the very definite fingerprints of a master filmmaker.

The first half hour, as Scorsese observes on the DVD case, is an absolute knockout. (3)

***


Well, yeah.

The Two Mrs Carrolls (Peter Godfrey, 1947) - Silly, joyless thriller about psychotic painter Humphrey Bogart offing his first wife and trying to do the same to his second (Barbara Stanwyck). It's derivative, particularly of Gaslight, and frequently makes no narrative sense, though there are lolz to be had from a terrifying villain being called Geoffrey, and Alexis Smith is really rather hot as Bogie's mistress. She transmitted complete horniness better than anybody in classic Hollywood, except for perhaps Mary Astor. You can kind of see why Bogart's poisoning his wife for her, especially as Stanwyck is being so very shrill. (1.5)

See also: To read about Bogart being rather more in his element, here's my piece on the original cut of The Big Sleep, complete with graphic I made on MS Paint.

***

Thanks for reading.

Last month, I read the autobiography of famed silent star Lillian Gish, and suggested that it smelt a little like someone curating their own legacy. Charles Affron's 2001 biography, Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life, essentially attempts to unpick the meticulous framework of untruths that Gish constructed around her existence, whilst giving the actress the due that was very much hers. At first, Affron's exertions are frankly annoying − the early parts of the book are needlessly pernickety and sometimes weirdly nasty − but the further we get into it, the more he draws on varied extracts from her personal papers and the more he examines Gish's peerless art, the dizzying highs, declining fortunes and minor later triumphs, presenting a fine portrait of her as a performer, if a rather incomplete one of her as a woman. The major problem with the book, compared to the best of its type, is that Affron hasn't bothered to interview anyone, which given that Gish was still alive, well, fully compos mentis and happy to talk to everyone who asked until 1993, is something of an incredibly large oversight. It is, however, the best book yet written on her work, and taught me exactly 16 fascinating new things about the greatest screen actress who ever lived:


1. When Gish's mentor, D. W. Griffith, was making Hearts of the World, a WWI propaganda film bankrolled by the British government, Prime Minister David Lloyd George tried to get him to use scenes written by Winston Churchill. The credited scriptwriters, their names designed to endow the film with credibility, were Gaston de Tolignac and Captain Victor Marier. Neither man existed, both being pseudonyms for Griffith. Tolignac was revived for the director's 1921 film, Orphans of the Storm, which dealt with the French Revolution.

2. Broken Blossoms was Gish's favourite of her films. The anecdote about passers-by outside the studio thinking she was being attacked (which I speculated might be nonsense) stems from that shoot, and is apparently from Kevin Brownlow's book, The Parade's Gone By, so is almost certainly true.


3. A pioneering proto-feminist, Gish was heavily involved in every aspect of Griffith's filmmaking. After she left him, she and director Henry King wrote, cast and assembled her 1923 vehicle, The White Sister, together. The final cut was edited single-handedly by Gish. She was also a director, filming Remodeling Her Husband (starring her sister Dorothy) in 1920. Despite such progressive virtuosity, she wasn't as forthright about gender roles as she might have been, saying: "I doubt if any woman is strong enough [to direct films]", though adding as a caveat, "what is more, there are very few men that have the vigour and imagination to be directors."

4. A workaholic, she said that when being absorbed in shooting one of Griffith's pictures "I underwent a period of creative fervour that to me was intense happiness. At the time, I hadn't enough insight to know that I was using hard work as a smoke screen to cover my almost complete retreat from my life."

5. After breaking with Gish and replacing her with the unloved Carol Dempster, director Griffith lamented to reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns that he had "chucked her out for that mediocre girl... She was my luck, she was my light − I never had either after I lost her. Oh God − man can be his own worst enemy, can he not?"


6. She became an "honorary member of the Fascisti" in 1923, joining the repugnant ranks of Mussolini's blackshirts while shooting The White Sister near Rome. I'm more of a fan of Gish's acting than her politics.

7. When Gish signed with Nicholas Schenck at MGM in 1925, it wasn't her first dealing with his family: Nick and his brother Joe (chairman of United Artists) had, like many other movie moguls, come up from the amusement park game, running Fort George in Upper Manhattan, where Gish's mother Mary had managed a candy stand and Lillian had learned to ride a horse.

8. Gish's first choice project upon joining MGM, Romeo and Juliet, was vetoed by theatre owners, more than half of whom said they'd refuse to buy a Shakespeare adaptation. Her second, Joan of Arc, was kiboshed due to expense. Other suggestions included Jane Eyre, Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara (which would have been wondrous to behold), and works by Goethe, Euripides, Thomas Hardy and Gabriele D'Annunzio.


9. Lillian claimed that her mother's ill-health had been caused by shellshock sustained during a trip to London in WWI. Actually, a careless gynaecologist had accidentally forgotten to retrieve his sponge.

10. The only MGM film that lost more money during the 1927-8 season than Gish's Annie Laurie (an attempt to sex up her image) was Lubitsch's silent masterwork, The Student Prince of Old Heidelberg.


11. This is the big one: there was no alternate ending to Gish's greatest film, the incomparable silent Western, The Wind. According to the star in her oft-screened introduction to the film, preview audiences were shocked by a tragic finale in which Gish's Letty wandered off into the desert to die, and studio bean-counters decided that she'd met her maker too often on screen lately, and ought to survive. (I fell for this myself: look.) In fact, the ending that we see was in the fourth draft of the script − completed two months before shooting began − with the exception that the original climax included some additional business for the abysmal comic character, 'Sourdough'! Her mythmaking was designed to cast her in the role of a crusading artist sold out by greedy studio heads: a convenient fiction to explain her unhappy departure from MGM. Bad Gish.

12. The hostility towards Gish from Photoplay Magazine, which launched an almost unstinting vendetta against the star from 1924 onwards, appears to have resulted from her polite refusal to be included on a set of collectible movie star spoons that the publication launched shortly beforehand.

13. After the failure of The Wind, Gish spent months working on an unrealised project called The Miracle Woman, with German theatrical maestro, Max Reinhardt, for much of that time even living in his house, the Schloss Leopoldskron. After reading the story, Joe Schenck gave Gish his hilariously blunt assessment of what would happen if they made the film: "I will lose my money and you will lose your last chance to become popular again." Her next role would have been Nina in Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude, but United Artists pulled out after the playwright was sued for plagiarism (a claim later dismissed at trial).


14. Gish would have played the role of Birdie in William Wyler's breathtaking version of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (review of that film in my next post), had she not been held to her contract for the play, Life with Father, another of the major 'what if's in her career. The answer to all of them: it would have been amazing. In later years, she was pitched to John Ford for his swansong, Seven Women, and to Hitchcock for Family Plot, while John Gielgud − to whose Hamlet she had been Ophelia in 1936 − was originally cast in the Vincent Price role in Gish's last film, The Whales of August.

15. Among the famous stage roles written for Gish, but never played by her, were Lavinia in O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Elektra and the young prostitute in William Saroyan's Time of Your Life. She did finally get to play another part penned with her in mind, the rough draft of Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams' Portrait of a Madonna (the play that became A Streetcar Named Desire), at a one-off event in Berlin in 1957.

16. In 1991, she turned down the chance to play her first nude scene, aged 98.

... and here's the last word from Affron on Gish's consummate artistry, discussing Orphans of the Storm (spoilers):

It's been quite a couple of weeks. A slipped disc in my back (again), the completion of my kids' book (only took the best part of three years) and further forays into the career of Bette Davis, a performer so talented that my admiration has even withstood seeing an interview in which she claimed to fancy Terry Wogan. Here's the latest stuff I've seen and read:



FILMS:

Starting with a slew of movies featuring the astonishing Bette Davis: a skilled technician (like the modern actress to whom she's so often compared, Meryl Streep), who could really make you feel (unlike the modern actress to whom she's so often compared, Meryl Streep).



Of Human Bondage (John Cromwell, 1934) - Magnificent, unique Pre-Code drama, from the Somerset Maugham novel, about clubfooted medical student Leslie Howard and his romantic and sexual obsession with a callous, uncouth waitress (Bette Davis in her starmaking role).

This stunning study of unrequited love and self-destruction boasts snappy direction in the early-'30s style, one of Howard's best and most affecting dramatic performances - though a comedic wizard, he could be unbearably smug in a straight role - and a dazzling, dynamic turn from Davis, particularly when her character has her emotions in check.

This fast-paced film dips a little towards the end, as it explodes into melodrama, but it is a remarkably grown-up and accomplished movie - especially for second-tier studio RKO - with space for an affecting bit from Kay Johnson, and an appearance from the quite astonishingly attractive 25-year-old Frances Dee.

Of Human Bondage is a short, sharp shock that still reverberates down the decades. (4)



Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939) - An oddly-paced but otherwise exceptional Warner weepie, powered by Bette Davis’s star turn as a shallow socialite diagnosed with a terminal illness. Like Ikiru’s Mr Watanabe, her immediate reaction is to drown herself in hedonism, before she makes some important realisations about what’s really important in life. Everything about Davis here is stunning, but I especially love her walk: she could define the distinctions between her deceptively disparate characters through her stride or the use of her hands alone, then slay you with those subtly expressive close-ups. In support, both George Brent and Geraldine Fitzgerald do some of their best work (I’m not a huge fan of either), but no-one can handle Davis, or ever could, really. This is the film in which Humphrey Bogart pretends to be Irish, with limited success. Sumptuously shot by Ernie Haller, though, it's another minor classic from Hollywood’s legendary year. (3.5)



*SOME SPOILERS*
The Little Foxes (William Wyler, 1941) - We need to go beyond the canon. The established canon. The regimented canon. The Empire canon of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Back to the Future, Alien, Aliens, peak era Spielberg, Blade Runner, The Shawshank Redemption and a handful of headline old movies: Singin’ in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz and Metropolis. The Sight and Sound canon that centres on Vertigo, Ikiru and – for some reason that I can’t quite fathom – suddenly Man with a Movie Camera. The Cahiers canon, lauding Godard and Truffaut’s pet films, from underwhelming sex Westerns like Rancho Notorious and Johnny Guitar, to selected Hawks films and the lesser work of Frank Tashlin.

Between the monoliths and the re-evaluated misfires lie films every bit as good: forgotten, neglected, still classic. In terms of American films of the 1940s, Casablanca, Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon are great films, but they’re not the only films. It’s in the cracks beneath these landmarks that you’ll find many of the most interesting – ironically, the most memorable – movies of the period. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Nightmare Alley. Remember the Night. Ball of Fire. Hail the Conquering Hero. Broadway Melody of 1940. Films that encapsulate an era, hum with its sense of invention and imagination, spotlight actors like Joan Blondell, Barbara Stanwyck and the unheralded Eddie Bracken, showcase the dialogue of Preston Sturges, the direction of Mitchell Leisen.

The Little Foxes is another masterpiece deserving of rediscovery. I’ve seen very few films better than this over the last five years, and I consider myself an Old Hollywood nerd; yet until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t even heard of it. As far as I can see, it’s never had a UK DVD release. But look at its credentials: produced by Sam Goldwyn, directed by William Wyler (whose career is bizarrely overlooked nowadays, aside from the abysmal Ben-Hur remake, probably the worst film he made), based on a play by Southern Gothic commie playwright extraordinaire Lillian Hellman, shot by the incomparable Gregg Toland, and featuring one of the finest ensemble casts ever assembled, with juicy roles for shimmering stars and weighty character players alike.

It’s a caustic, troubling, profound examination of a Southern family brought low – or high and to prominence, depending on how you view it – by a sea of moral dissolution. Charles Dingle and Carl Benton Reid play brothers who want to invest in a new mill, paying low wages to dirt poor labourers. To do it, they need the support of their brother-in-law, bank president Herbert Marshall, and so enlist the help of his wife (Bette Davis) to swing the deal. Meanwhile, radical journalist Richard Carlson battles Davis for the soul of her daughter (Teresa Wright), a kind but naïve, weak-spirited young woman, Reid’s neurotic wife (Patricia Collinge) drinks herself into oblivion and their son Leo (Dan Duryea) becomes a willing pawn in the scheme to land the mill.

There’s only one film I’ve ever seen that has the same atmosphere of rotting wealth and moral corruption, the same richly-textured cinematography – an endless supply of apposite, entrancing, artistic, thoughtful and beguiling shots – and that’s Orson Welles’ butchered masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons. I don’t really subscribe to that “one perfect shot” phenomenon, since cinema is movement, but there are Toland images here that I could happily freeze and hang up above the fire, especially that stunning shot of Duryea reflected in the sign outside his uncle’s bank. Somehow, the acting is every bit as accomplished, with Dingle given a rare chance to command a scene, and taking it (despite a certain repetitiousness in his line readings), Collinge extremely moving in a potentially cliched part, Marshall a touch uncertain with his accent but unquestionably magnificent – attaining that dramatic potency he only ever reached with this director – and Davis playing a tricky part with consummate ease, balancing restraint, malevolence and burgeoning triumphalism with unapproachable skill.

Movies are a collaborative medium, but the disparate parts, the collision of massive, swaggering talents with egos to match, rarely creates anything as seamless, as measured, as potent as The Little Foxes. Nor did ‘40s Hollywood – despite being my favourite area of film – tend to produce films this grown-up, intelligent and uncompromising. It is not an easy film, a happy film, an escapist film, but it is utterly dazzling: a seductive assault on the senses, a vicious assault on its meeker characters, and ultimately an indictment of an entire nation. Hellman’s politics run through it like words through a stick of rock: you can see why she ended up getting blacklisted at the end of the decade.

You could argue that the film’s delineation between good and evil is rather simplistic for a work aspiring to high art, but it’s that heightened sensibility that gives it much of its haunting power, particularly as the vultures gather and you realise that Hellman’s vision of America – imagined by Toland, enlivened by a killer ensemble, given order by the gifted Wyler – is far darker than anyone could have expected, the blanched Davis poisoned by greed, leaving goodness, humanity and virtue all gasping for breath. (4)

- The only disappointment? That Collinge's part was supposed to have been played by the incomparable Lillian Gish. The things she could have done with it...

- Incidentally, this piece sparked a really interesting discussion of the concept of the cinematic canon, here.



*VERY MINOR SPOILERS*
The Star (Stuart Heisler, 1952) - A gloomy, sometimes histrionic low-budget drama that starts off extremely unpromisingly, but ultimately attains some essential truth. Here’s what you can expect:

- Bette Davis as a broke, deluded disaster area who used to be a movie star (patterned after her arch nemesis, Joan Crawford).
- A terribly conceived sequence in which she goes drink-driving with an Oscar statuette, and we’re supposed to feel sorry for her.
- A killer POV shot as Davis lays into her ex-lover’s wife.
- A lush Victor Young score.
- Sterling Hayden being all strapping and second-gen Scandinavian and wearing a tweed suit as per usual.
- A heap of movie in-jokes, with references to Ralph Bellamy, ‘Clark Spencer’ (an amalgam of MGM’s biggest male stars of the late-‘30s) and cinematographer ‘Ernie’ Laszlo, and a character patterned after Cecil B. DeMille - The most unrealistically kindly movie moguls and agents this side of A Star Is Born (1937).
- A mawkish subplot about Davis’s daughter (Natalie Wood) that has been done to death.
- An eerie scene in which Davis and Hayden discuss whether Wood is in danger of falling off a boat (she did in 1981, and tragically died).
- Dated sexual politics in which ‘being a woman’ is apparently incompatible with having a career.
- Two of the best Hollywood-on-film sequences I’ve ever seen: an excruciating screen test sequence, and a follow-up in which Davis watches the test whilst falling to pieces: effectively playing opposite herself.

Not one of the star's best films, but – by the end – a valuable and fascinating experience. (2.5)

***



Gypsy (Mervyn LeRoy, 1962) - This faithful translation of the classic Sondheim musical is nearly great, with diverse, irresistible songs, some wonderful acting and an engrossing, surprising storyline, but is a bit too drab in appearance, a little too light on quality dancing and ultimately lacking the emotion wallop that a film of this type really needs.

Screwball veteran and occasional scenery-chewer Rosalind Russell is Rose, the ultimate stage mother, her performance big but nicely modulated, without the excesses that you worry about. Karl Malden makes for an appealing Herbie, her faithful doormat, business partner and romantic partner, while Natalie Wood is the future Gypsy Rose Lee: initially a dour, boyish (but actually gorgeous) talent vacuum named Louise. I saw the West End version of the play back in June and it fairly knocked my socks off, dominated by Imelda Staunton’s surely definitive – and even career-defining turn – as Rose.

Usually comparisons between theatrical and cinematic productions are somewhat pointless, but this is one where it works, since Mervyn LeRoy’s film is so doggedly, and apparently intentionally, rooted in its stage origins. With that in mind, it’s worth noting that the stylised, skewed-perspective sets and dazzling costumes at the Savoy Theatre were far more vibrant and arresting than in this Warner film, but that Natalie Wood navigates Gypsy’s changing modes, moods and priorities with an effortless, enchanting grace and understated human resonance that Lara Pulver’s competent turn was rather lacking. Russell plays it differently to Staunton: more obviously sentimental and sympathetic – which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t – with bluster and screwball mannerisms in place of theatrical grandstanding, and with an effective but tar-damaged voice less obviously appealing than Staunton’s, but with no smaller emotional range (though much of that singing actually comes from sound-alike substitute Lisa Kirk, who was rather easier on the ears than Ros). The single biggest improvement in the recent stage adaptation, though, was surely Baby June's weird squeaking when she did the splits, which slayed me every single time.

I find the material both impressive and admirably nuanced – Rose is misguided but not a monster, blinkered but essentially decent – but it does have dips and wobbles and dry spots, particularly during the earlier sequences in the burlesque house, which are kitsch and campy in the worst sense of those words, with irritating, broad and clichéd supporting characters. The songs, both on stage and on film, are simply superb: some of the best that Sondheim ever wrote: pining, lushly romantic, cynical and silly in turn - from Small World and You’ll Never Get Away from Me to If Momma Was Married – a scene that comes complete with transcendently beautiful facial acting from Wood – the whole thing climaxing with the show-stopping Rose’s Turn, which wraps it up perfectly, nailing the character in five minutes of sheer leather-lunged majesty. I wish the film was always as moving, as narratively coherent, and as aware of its visual sense as during that sequence, but it is an extremely good movie musical, if not quite a great one. (3.5)

***



*SOME SPOILERS*
The Unforgiven (John Huston, 1960) - This is a strong but flawed race relations Western with a cracking cast, in which whites and Native Americans alike react badly to the news that the pale-faced scion (Audrey Hepburn) of a wealthy family of cattle ranchers may be a 'redskin'.

The performances take in everything from realism to Gothic melodrama, and the denouement may trouble liberals who'd been rather enjoying themselves up till then, but it's a heady brew, with committed handling from John Huston − who could be bothered to properly direct around half of his films − some extremely distinctive photography, and a fascinating ensemble. The pick of the bunch is silent screen legend Lillian Gish (though I would say that) in one of the few talkie roles requiring even an ounce of her awesome talent: indeed, it's the sound-era part she received that most suited a performer whose genius lay in the economic transmission of complex emotion through face and body alone. There are little, exalting nods to her greatest film, The Wind, while the ferocious hanging scene and the subsequent revelations in her parlour are two of the finest things Gish did after the movies learned to speak.

Meanwhile, Audie Murphy is cast against type as a bigot with a horrible moustache, Hepburn's cut-glass pan-European voice may carry disconcertingly over the plains, but she has some fine moments, Burt Lancaster is as virile, commanding and cheesily clichéd as ever (while looking curiously like sports journalist Martin Kelner), while Charles Bickford is the only one who comes close to matching Gish, as an essentially decent man struggling with a few very difficult truths. Joseph Wiseman and June Walker, by contrast, play it BIG − he as essentially a corpse on horseback, she a mad, screaming racist − and John Saxon off of Enter the Dragon appears every so often, as a Native American horse-tamer with very white teeth.

There's not quite enough story and I'm not sure it ultimately hangs together as a message movie, but there are some good action sequences, some startling visual compositions and a few memorable cues from genre favourite Dimitri Tiomkin, as well as the kind of cast that you would frankly have to be very odd to not want to see. (3)

See also: There's no link beyond the genre and the title, but I reviewed Clint Eastwood's greatest film - Unforgiven - right here.

***



The Hard Way (Vincent Sherman, 1943) - I've wanted to see this for ages, but it didn't quite live up to expectations. It's an uneven but sometimes dazzling backstage melodrama from Warner, with ruthless Ida Lupino scheming behind the scenes to drag her cartwheeling kid sister (Joan Leslie) to the top of the Broadway fame game.

I'm a big fan of Leslie, a rosy-cheeked triple-threat who was the best-looking girl-next-door in Hollywood and created a dizzyingly alchemy with some of the best and most charismatic male leads in movies (Bogart, Gary Cooper, Fred Astaire), all before her 20th birthday. But here she seems miscast: her routines are oddly mediocre and her inhabitation of a potentially interesting part − an apparently sweet-natured young woman happy to acquiesce to her sister's marauding brutality − seems piecemeal, especially up against Lupino's pyrotechnics.

Lupino, who was also the only prominent female director of the Golden Age, was a London-born actress who moved to Hollywood in 1939, shortly after completing filming on The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and became one of the most dynamic and compulsively watchable actresses on the American screen, typically offered Bette Davis's cast-offs, but able to inject them with a mixture of big-eyed charm and boggle-eyed neuroticism. I love her in the unapproachably brilliant B-movie, Lone Wolf Spy Hunt− a mixture of screwball comedy and crime thriller − but it's her bonkers scene-stealing in movies like High Sierra, Woman in Hiding and They Drive by Night that tend to have attracted a committed cult following.

She's great here, often more restrained than you might usually find her, and offering a few moments of genuine pathos: like the scenes showing the grinding poverty she's come from, or the sequence in which she's effortlessly seduced by Dennis Morgan − who's just trying to humiliate her. I say 'a few moments', as her character here is increasingly cruel, pitiless and selfish: a hardening that's credible and compelling if housed in a story that doesn't always convince. It simply isn't believable that Leslie would turn the Broadway world on her ear, that Lupino could mould and manipulate people so simply, that Morgan (in one of his better performances) would switch from a cynical ladykiller to his usual bland romantic in a matter of montaged moments. But as the pouty, soot-haired operator, powered by pride, poverty and − at least at first − sisterly devotion, Lupino utterly convinces.

There are other virtues too, within the rather unlikely narrative. James Wong Howe's shimmering cinematography. A pair of stunning montages: the first a gloriously rhythmic evocation of life in the mining town of Greenhill that recalls the short films of Humphrey Jennings, the second a glitzy, '30s-style montage of Leslie's '30s successes, segueing into despair. Three fine supporting performances: Jack Carson's role as Leslie's good-hearted, naïve husband, Gladys George's barnstorming performance as an alcoholic star on the skids, and Leona Maricle's Eve Arden-ish bit as a witty writer, who seems to get much better dialogue than everyone else. For those virtues, Lupino's fire and a great last line, it's worth catching, it's just not the classic I was hoping for. (2.5)

***


Silly.

Golden Boy (Rouben Mamoulian, 1939) - A glossy, largely unbearable high-concept boxing movie, from Clifford Odets' play, about curly-headed second-generation immigrant William Holden, a callow, sanctimonious boor who's caught between a love of the violin and the lucrative lure of the fight game. Adolphe Menjou is the promoter who takes a chance on him, Barbara Stanwyck the hard-bitten, Jean Arthur-ish girl who comes between them, and Lee J. Cobb his father, in a preposterous, movie-sinking characterisation − bits of carpet apparently glued onto his face, and each line emoted in a strangulated, cod-Italian wail.

Every good thing that happens in the film comes from either Karl Freund and Nicholas Musuraca's sumptuous cinematography − between them they shot Lang's Metropolis, Out of the Past, The Good Earth and Cat People, among some 360 other films − or an absolutely superb performance from a young, hot Stanwyck, who almost reduced me to tears in her opening scene, and went on from there.

There's the shot of her face, held in a heart shape between Holden's body and violin, as she starts to fall in love with conflicted artist. That moment with Cobb in the doorway, the tears finally springing in her eyes. Her scene opposite Holden where she says that she doesn't want love, only peace and quiet. The way she barks: "I love Tom, tell him what>?" at his replacement, the bitter toughness of her Pre-Code characterisations colliding with the self-sacrifice of her later ones. The way she slinks towards him, virile, threatening and uncompromising, after he orders her to look at him when she speaks. And, a rare moment that works without her emotional immediacy, thanks to that phenomenal photography: as moral-swamp-of-a-gangster Joseph Calleia throws a fag at Holden, and the sparks fly off the fighter's jacket, an effect I've never seen before in a chiaroscuro film.

The rest of the movie is just crap. Holden was a star off the back of this, but didn't become an actor until much later, and his titular 'hero' is absolutely insufferable: vain, arrogant, selfish, self-obsessed, blinkered, cruel, stupid, ungrateful and nauseatingly self-righteous, with his dilemma coming off as both extremely far-fetched and incredibly boring. Add to that a shapeless, episodic story, poor dialogue, weak comedy, a schmaltzy score, a miscegenation joke, a black fighter called 'Chocolate Drop' and Cobb devouring much of the scenery in one of the most ludicrous performances of his or any other era, and the overall effect is one of those movies that you hope people don't see when they're first giving classic Hollywood a go, as they're likely to just give up. (2)

***

BOOKS:



True Story by Michael Finkel (2006)– I saw the trailer for a new movie called True Story, starring Jonah Hill and the perma-dreadful James Franco. The film looked iffy, but the story looked fascinating, so I sought out the book it’s based on, and while it has rather more of a ‘true crime’ flavour than I was anticipating (with all the unease, unhappiness and guilt that engenders for me), it was a cracking read. Finkel was a New York Times journalist chucked off the paper for making up a character in a feature about slave labour in Africa. On the day that the paper announced his sacking, he got a call from a local newspaper reporter in Oregon, who was ringing for an altogether different reason: a man accused of slaughtering his entire family had just been arrested, and had been telling everyone he was Finkel.

What follows is really rather like In Cold Blood – though with the author very much a character, in a way that Capote wasn’t within his ‘non-fiction novel’ – a haunting, unsettling portrait of a murderer with an artistic bent and a flair for wordplay: in this case the charming, handsome Chris Longo. Written in the style of an epic magazine feature, though with a cliffhanger at the end of almost every chapter, it’s not only the story of Longo, but a chronicle of his conflicted, almost incomprehensible relationship with Finkel, a treatise on the nature of truth and pride, and a dizzying thriller told in precise language, with real pace and panache.

It’s undeniably ghoulish and calculating, and provides only a few of the answers to the many horrifying questions it raises, but it had a big effect on me – not all of it positive – and it proved extremely difficult to put down. (3.5)

***



Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (1958)– Capote’s pained, wistful, often beguiling novella could scarcely be more different from the trite, racist and simplistic Blake Edwards translation, a movie that provided Audrey Hepburn with her emblematic role, while adding a Hollywood ending and one hell of a Mancini score, but misplaced the book’s heady sensibility – which trades in romance, realism and idealism – opting instead for a stale, static and curiously literal approach. Opening in a gobsmacking nostalgic reverie, Capote’s book then takes us back to 1948, as his nameless narrator falls in love with his neighbour, an ethereal, playful, boyishly-haired all-time tease by the name of Holiday “Holly” Golightly.

There are elements that jar and grate, as Capote enthusiastically evokes the artificiality of Holly’s world – the party set-piece, her Gatsby-ish airs, supporting characters barely fleshed out enough to bother remembering – but his elegant prose, measured unsentimentality and eye for detail make it all seem somehow fresh and invigorating, despite its dated milieu and its thematic familiarity (was Holly a cliché even then, or is it merely her influence on Manic Pixie Dream Heartbreakers from Le mépris to (500) Days of Summer that makes it seem that way?). Does Capote’s book stumble and stutter? A little, yes. But does it also sing and endure, nearly 60 years on? Emphatically so: its story and its heroine as infuriating, fascinating and ultimately touching as ever it was. (3.5)

The three short stories accompanying Tiffany's are a little less persuasive. House of Flowers (2) is an unconvincing, rather tedious story set in Haiti, about a prostitute finding love. A Diamond Guitar (3) is far better: an affecting, understated gay love story about a literate, upright lag who develops a non-contact affair with a bewitching young Cuban named Tico Feo, who oddly anticipates Perry Smith - the murderer with whom Capote apparently fell in love some nine years later. A Christmas Memory (3) has become something of a standard in the US, though it's so personal, so specific and so idiosyncratic, that's a little hard to believe. I don't love it - it didn't enrapture me in the way I thought it might, and hoped it would - but it was touching and charmingly offbeat, touched with truth and wrapped up with one of Capote's favourite closing techniques: not the offhand, almost throwaway prefiguring of the future, but the poetic, symbolic leap into the metaphysical.

See also: I've got a piece on the way about Capote's In Cold Blood and its various cinematic adaptations. Do not peel your eyes, as that would be disgusting, or watch this space, as that would be a waste of time, maybe just check back in a week or two, as soon as I've watched the final distressing movie in the cycle, In Cold Blood itself.

***

Thanks for reading.

I've been busy writing and with work, but here are a few things I've watched or read lately. I also saw (and met!) Dave Gilmour, which was amazing. I'm listening to Dark Side of the Moon as I write this.



*SOME SPOILERS*
The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955) is one of the great films, a beguiling, bewitching, sometimes bewildering collision of Gothic horror and fairytale, a haunting, hypnotic vision of pure evil, of goodness, of redemption, of innocence lost and perhaps regained, of greed and guilt, loss, delusion, sexual obsession and puritanical perversion. It has some weak acting, wild lurches in tone and even a little Schufftan silliness, and yet also many of the most striking, magical sequences of its era, climaxing with a half-hour confrontation between good and evil that is amongst the most indelibly artistic and impossibly moving passages of pure cinema ever put onto celluloid.

Robert Mitchum is a psychotic, phony preacher on the hunt for a $10,000 stash hidden away somewhere by a recently hanged bank robber (Peter Graves). Inveigling his way into the lives of Graves’s widow (Shelley Winters) and two children – John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Anne Bruce) – he seduces her, charms their friends at the local ice-cream parlour and a picnic in the park, and terrorises the young ‘uns, convinced that they know where the money’s hidden. Which they do. It’s in Pearl’s dolly.

Laughton, a famed stage and screen actor directing his first and only film, drew on the then-derided medium of silent film for his visual inspiration, basing his visuals primarily on the work of German Expressionist director F. W. Murnau: the early sections draw transparently on Nosferatu and Faust, the later ones on Sunrise and particularly City Girl. He’s helped, immeasurably, by Stanley Cortez, who had shot arguably the most ambitious and attractive film of the previous decade, Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, before it was unfortunately slashed to shreds by a bunch of dicks. Almost literally.

Mitchum was one of the best actors of his generation, and a favourite of David Lean, but he got most of his power from underplaying, in movies like Out of the Past, The Lusty Men and The Friends of Eddie Coyle. In a role of this kind, that approach simply wouldn’t work, and so he plays it big: at first brilliantly – the ‘story of left hand, right hand’ is a dazzling set-piece – but then increasingly as a sort of satanic panto villain, hamming it up outrageously, and even growling in a way best filed under ‘extremely silly’. Laughton and Cortez use him superbly, as does the story, but I don’t see his performance as one of his best; in fact, not even close.

There are also weaknesses in the children’s performances: Bruce’s line readings are mostly exactly the same as one another, while Chapin alternates between articulating resourcefulness and stoic belligerence and just acting quite poorly: as in that moment where he blurts out something ill-advised and then belatedly gasps and clutches a hand to his mouth. At other times he’s spot-on, but essentially playing the Bobby Driscoll part from The Window, you can see the gulf in class between the two.

And yet despite those shortcomings, it’s never less than utterly astonishing, creating a seductive, artistically enriching world so rich with symbolism, so blessed by love, craftsmanship and even - dare I say it - genius that you can’t help but be enraptured. There’s the stunning, eerie use of wholesome American song. The shot of Mitchum framed as if in a chapel, as he clutches skywards, channelling his God. Winters in the water: one of the most astounding, unforgettable images in all of American film. The entrancingly beautiful boat ride, entirely fresh, yet utterly timeless.

And then, just when you think it can’t get any better, silent screen icon Lillian Gish turns up, armed with the only truly worthy role of her sound career: an aged version of the heart-rending heroines she played in Griffith’s rural tone poems, Way Down East and True Heart Susie, with so much love to give and so much empathy for the meek, the weak and those children who “abide and they endure”. It is as good a performance as I have ever seen in a movie, for once conceived and shot with as much intelligence and reverence for an actor of Gish’s mercurial, majestic gifts as she deserved; and every time she opens her mouth, I want to cry. The only other performance that has ever had that effect on me is Wendy Hiller’s Major Barbara: both performances are true and both characters are gentle and selfless, but have a rod of sheerest steel at their centre.

I must have seen the film 30 times and there are still new things to enjoy, to marvel at, to be astounded by: like the little tell-tale paper figures blowing unseen past Mitchum’s feet. But it’s the old things I love the best, particularly that incomparable scene in which Mitchum once again commandeers that wondrous hymn, Leaning on the Everlasting Arms, to creep the hell out of Chaplin and Bruce. But this time Gish, in silhouette and cradling a rifle as she sits in a rocking chair, joins in, her voice rising and harmonising, in perfect tandem over his haunting, horrifying vocals. He’s not on top any more – in the story or in the film – because Lillian Gish is here. (4)

***

Joel McCrea Westerns, because why the hell not?



Border River (George Sherman, 1954) - Everyone has comfort movies. Mine are mostly old rom-coms, and '50s B-Westerns starring Audie Murphy, Randolph Scott or particularly Joel McCrea - the only one of the three who could actually, like, act.

This McCrea oater is better and better-funded than most, with a nice balance of intrigue, action and romance, as his Confederate bank robber turns up in a Mexican town, attracting the attention of merciless mercenaries, a slick crime kingpin with his own private army, and the kingpin's girlfriend (Yvonne de Carlo), who likes money, but likes McCrea more.

There are some pleasant if sparing location shots, several unexpectedly fantastic lines - as well as a couple of sillier exchanges, including one about a pig - and plenty of plot twists, even if a few could be seen as mildly convenient. And though it wobbles a tad in the final third under the weight of a frankly ambitious number of subplots, the climactic set-piece delivers, with one fantastic stunt, and a fascinating piece of off-kilter imagery.

I doubt the film would work half as well without the effortless charisma, lovely voice and leathery tanned skin of McCrea, one of the most likeable and - within his limitations - underrated actors ever to grace the American screen, but with him in the saddle it's fine if admittedly flawed fun. (3)



Wichita (Jacques Tourneur, 1955) - A po-faced, pastel-shaded and action-packed Western about the cleaning up of Wichita, featuring a Wyatt Earp who's a little too good to be true. It's great fun, though, despite its artificiality, with plenty of incident, a fine cast led by Joel McCrea, and a theme song that works as a lovely motif, once shorn of its extremely silly words. There are also some cracking visual compositions, right from the get-go, and weightier observations than you might expect about gun control and law and order, the film rather more progressive on the former than the latter. (3)



Stranger on Horseback (Jacques Tourneur, 1955) - A sensational little Western about the coming of law and order, with gun-toting circuit judge Joel McCrea trying to bring the son of a powerful pioneer to justice.

Made by McCrea and director Jacques Tourneur the same year as Wichita, it's a vastly superior outing in every way: a tight, slim oater that does wonders with a tiny budget, boasting a riveting story, a crackling script that includes a superb monologue for villain John McIntire and a stunning climax making full use of whip-cracking desert dominatrix Miroslava. There's also a colourful supporting part for long-faced John Ford favourite, John Carradine.

McCrea's Westerns are one of my enduring cinematic pleasures, but they're rarely as good as this intelligent offering, one of the few as impressive as his central characterisation: which here is assured, multi-faceted and effortlessly imposing. The only real downsides are a couple of duff effects and the fact that no colour negative for this film still exists, so the existing print looks a little odd and oversaturated.

In creating a chamber Western that's credible, invigorating and constantly keeps you guessing, Tourneur and his writers effectively anticipated the 'Ranown' cycle: the Budd Boetticher movies starring McCrea's contemporary and rival, Randolph Scott, which kicked off the following year with the astounding Seven Men from Now. The two stars were eventually united in Sam Peckinpah's second and greatest film, Ride the High Country. (3.5)

***



Séance on a Wet Afternoon (Bryan Forbes, 1964) - A dark, atmospheric thriller about false-nosed asthmatic Dickie Attenborough being forced to kidnap a child by his wife, a terrifying, chameleonic psychic played by Kim Stanley.

It's extremely well-acted, with superb use of sound - augmented by John Barry's syncopated score - and one notably fine sequence making the most of London's Underground.

For all that, it's not exactly enjoyable, and while the shifting dynamics and periodic revelations keep you guessing, the forced withholding of information, Gothic-lite back story and excessive use of interiors prevent it from scaling the heights it otherwise might.

As ironic pay-offs go, though, that last line is very deftly done. (3)

***



Bitter Sweet (W. S. Van Dyke II, 1940) - Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald's seventh of eight films together is no match for their early classics - Naughty Marietta, Rose Marie and Maytime - with a poorly-paced story, unmemorable songs and an interminable gypsy opera finale.

It's set largely in Vienna, with exactly the supporting cast you'd expect (Felix Bressart, Sig Ruman and Herman Bing), as well as George Sanders proving comprehensively that amongst his considerable arsenal was not the ability to do accents.

The film starts quite well and thereafter occasionally sparks into life, courtesy of the Singing Sweethearts' singularly evocative harmonising or a funny scene with Bing that riffs cleverly on the absurdity of their image, but mostly it's distressingly mediocre, with barely any story at all - and then much too much. It's also somewhat garish and flatly directed by Woody 'One Take' Van Dyke, despite rather hilariously - in the wake of The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind - being billed as "Technicolor's greatest spectacle".

Noel Coward was reportedly so outraged by the changes made to his play that he never let Hollywopd touch another one; the result is a reheated reimagining of Maytime with little of the sweetness and none of the peril or intense romantic feeling.

Eddy and MacDonald's movies are often (and unfairly) dismissed nowadays as kitsch or camp, but at their best they do as good a job as any of crystallising the extraordinary escapism that MGM was capable of crafting: the Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life sequence in Naughty Marietta remains perhaps my favourite scene of the studio era. (2)

***

BOOK:



A Book for Her by Bridget Christie (2015) - A shocking, impassioned, insightful, incisive, passionate and hysterical* book about where comedy and feminism intersect**, from the most blistering, blissfully funny talent on the current stand-up scene. It notably overuses one joke format, is occasionally unfocused and has more than its fair share of typos, but I loved it to pieces. Give it to the feminist in your life. Or to the unreconstructed sexist prick. Either works. (3.5)

*as in 'funny'. I'm not saying Bridget is hysterical, or that all women are. Though they are. **this is a pun about intersectional feminism. Hear me roar.

***

THEATRE:



Hangmen (The Royal Court Theatre) - In Bruges writer-director Martin McDonagh returns to the London stage with a killer new play about the country's second best hangmen (David Morrissey) - on the day that hanging is abolished. It's both perilously dark and astonishingly funny, McDonagh weaving together his comic and thriller-ish strands with utter majesty, as a mysterious blonde stranger appears in Morrissey's Oldham pub, setting in motion a truly grisly chain of events. After the partial misfire that was his Hollywood debut, Seven Psychopaths, this is a stunning, seamless return to form from one of the sharpest, wittiest and most interesting writers working today, a work so incredibly entertaining that it's only when the dust settles that you realise there was real meat on these bones. Perhaps its ending is telegraphed a little too clearly considering the near-constant surprises served up beforehand, but it's a must-see for anyone who loves the stage, with a superb ensemble, a couple of dazzling coups de théâtre and the best new material you'll hear this year. (4) (Also in the interval I met Kate Tempest and she recommended me an early McDonagh play. I love Kate Tempest. I'll let you know when I've read it.)



The Play That Goes Wrong (Duchess Theatre) - A neat idea that doesn't quite work in practice, as we watch an am-dram production fall to pieces in a litany of minor ways. It's too slapsticky, its farcical elements don't make sense and too many of the running performances and running gags are unforgivably broad* (a sound engineer who loves Duran Duran? I mean, really?), though there are a few jokes that really land - including a killer one about improv - and the way that James Marlowe's incompetent thespian repeatedly breaks the fourth wall with his bashful grin is rather delightful. (2.5)

*unforgivably in a transitory theatrical context, I have forgiven them all now

***

Thanks for reading.

Friday, 2 October 2015
at the Barbican Centre



Hamlet was fairly good, but no better than that: a curious, tonally awkward production that accentuated the absurdism of the character's descent into madness, drawing attention to the play’s odd lurches in mood, which doesn’t always play well to a modern mind.

Benedict Cumberbatch, of course, is the sweet prince who becomes markedly less sweet upon learning of his father’s murder: as the king was poisoned, now his son’s mind is poisoned: flitting from revenge fantasies to abusive rants to (in this adaptation) playing in a toy castle. The show begins with him listening to Nat ‘King’ Cole’s Nature Boy on a gramophone, before the curtain rises to reveal a stunning set depicting a castle hall and centring on a banqueting table set at an angle, guests descending a stately, statuesque staircase along one wall. It’s a magnificent moment, but it soon becomes clear that the film has traded a basic, thrilling intimacy for these fleeting instances of theatrical splendour, as everyone is just rather far away. And for some reason that one could probably imaginatively justify at a stretch, but which I’m not going to, the table is littered with the antlers of recently deceased deer. In another curious bit of staging, the set also goes way, way back. It’s a design pregnant with possibilities, but it’s not generally used as imaginatively or intelligently as it might be: mostly for chase sequences or to suggest the size of the building. Indeed, the only moment when it really comes into its own is during Ophelia’s touching departure from this planet.

That’s also the only part of the play in which Ophelia works as a character, since Sian Brooke has apparently never encountered a mentally ill person before, or, indeed, a person. Her wretched, inane twitching is like every stylised approximation of madness you’ve ever seen, but somehow worse. The rest of the supporting cast struggles too (though not quite so much), aside from Ciarán Hinds’ dangerous, repentant, rather bluff Claudius, Karl Johnson – an effective ghost, particularly when appearing within the players’ stage – and Matthew Steer, an amusingly apprehensive, confused Rosencrantz. I don’t know why Kobna Holdbrook-Smith was cast as Laertes: there does seem to be a tendency in London theatre to incongruously bestow black actors with traditionally non-black roles to which they’re not very well-suited; and unless I’m missing something, it’s not done for purely artistic reasons.

At times, though, this adaptation really does work. “What a piece of work is a man” remains one of the most remarkable speeches ever written, with a vast scope and an overpowering emotional pull, and Cumberbatch draws out much of its haunting power. He’s good, throughout, actually: less drenched in spit-flecked venom than Maxine Peake’s recent genderblind characterisation and lacking her manic, vituperative if one-note comic energy, but committed to the legendary role, finding flashes of anger and shards of sorrow that illuminate the stage, and drawing the eye even when the action is elsewhere on that rather cavernous stage. Having said that, I’m not sure that what he offers us is Hamlet: it’s more a fusion of the character and his stock persona, which can be a little too knowing and in control to suggest true pain, true passion and true madness.

He’s also undermined by an oddly silly, adolescent touch in which people act in slow motion while he delivers his solliloquys, an approach that distracts from several of the play’s most important moments. That kind of am-dram silliness is one reason that this production is unlikely to satisfy Shakespeare buffs, but then neither is what I’m about to say, which is that a lot of Hamlet is quite silly. I wouldn’t actually mind some judicious cutting of the text and not just for reasons of length: keep the killer dialogue, but dump the signet ring, the poisoned blade and the comic longeuers in which Hamlet turns into a kind of wankerish clown. Doubtless some pseud will tell me that Shakespeare is subverting the very nature of plotting (just like he’s a feminist and not an anti-Semite), but I really think that if someone made a TV drama that hinged on these self-same elements, everyone would say it was shit.

The play probably will appeal to Cumberbatch fans, though, as it’s as close to a star vehicle as a Shakespeare play is ever going to be, and because he gives them what they want: charm, charisma, effort and Sherlock-ish comedy, dressed informally or in mocking, post-modern military garb, striding around a stage on which no expense has been spared – would that similar effort had been spent finding a cast – and interspersed with a handful of knockout moments. The most notable of all is a magnificent pièce de théâtre at the end of the second act, which informs the impractical but intriguing staging of the rest of the play. It’s an effect that I won’t spoil for those likely to see it: a very exciting, engaging bit of theatre in a schizophrenic, ultimately disappointing production. (2.5)

Can we just ignore this and enjoy the rest of the film, please.

Call me Old Man McBorefest, but I’m retreating into the past as far as my movie-watching is going. 17 of the best 19 films I’ve seen this year have been things I’ve seen before, and the only movie I got out of bed for during this year’s London Film Festival was made in 1953*. In 3D, I should add, which is why I just couldn’t miss it, attracted – as the film’s marketeers intended back in 1953 – by the chance to experience something that a TV screen just can’t deliver.

That film was Kiss Me Kate, which I think is ultimately my favourite of MGM’s many, many Golden Age musicals, because of its ingenuity, imagination and electrifying energy, typified not by its leads – the charming, tuneful Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson – but by its author and its supporting artists. I love Broadway Melody of 1940 for its tap battle and Preston Sturges gags; I love that near-mythic semi-musical, A Star Is Born, for giving Judy Garland her greatest role, and breaking my heart; and I love Singin’ in the Rain, because I am a person.

This, though, elates and excites me in a way that no other offering from the Dream Factory quite manages. It has an odd dry-spot an hour in, there’s a slight disconnect between its central story and its subplots, and the costumes are frankly inexplicable (while Singin' in the Rain’s remain the apogee of cool), but it’s a simply monumental achievement, and the LFF screening was one of the defining cinematic experiences of my life so far. Now stop calling me Old Man McBorefest.

Here are the things I love about Kiss Me Kate:

1. The 3D

Like the now ubiquitous widescreen, 3D was a gimmick intended to drag audiences away from their accursed TV sets and back into cinemas. It worked a little, but not a lot. On this evidence, you wonder what else Hollywood could really have done: it's delightfully executed (well, except for in the final scene, where it totally breaks down) and augments a bright, showy musical in a fun, showy way. Fuck art, look how many things they’re flinging at us.

2. Too Darn Hot

Ann Miller’s Bianca auditions for a part in Cole Porter’s new show by arriving in what is essentially her underwear, tapping her toes on anything that’ll move and chucking any and all superfluous clothes directly at the camera. I’d never fully embraced this number, but experienced with an audience, on the big screen and in 3D, it’s simply one of the most extraordinary sequences I’ve ever seen, an exhilarating, intoxicating, uproarious and hilarious showstopper that ticks every box going, draws a few more, and then ticks those too.

3. Porterian rhymes

This is the film in which Cole Porter rhymes “Padua” with “cad you are”. At another point, it’s “ruins” and “scandalous doin’s”. Later, “Gable boat” and “sable coat”. Man, I love Cole Porter.

4. Porterian smut
The stuff Porter managed to sneak past the censor here is genuinely astonishing. When he was asked to remove a line about puberty, he changed the next one so it was about fingering. There’s also Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore threatening to kick someone “right in the Coriolanus” and Ann Miller just shouting: “I’ll take a Dick” over and over and over again.

5. Porterian post-modernism
Backstage drama, on-stage drama: a stage drama that’s Shakespeare but with songs by Cole Porter – the same Cole Porter who appears in the opening scene, but played by someone else – where actors’ backstage dramas intrude on the drama unfolding, and the (hideously dated) spanking scene is provoked by those backstage dramas, but is also a part of the text of the drama they’re playing. Try to spot the joins: I bet you can’t.

6. Miller bringing it

The exuberant, delightfully wordy Tom, Dick and Harry number has other glories too, perhaps the greatest of which is Miller’s first: “any Tom, Harry or Dick”, the drum starting to bang as the beat quickens and she begins to stomp, injecting a raw sexuality into what until then has just been three men describing themselves in oddly verbose terms.

7. Tommy Rall

He's just superb. His acting’s as broad as Gene Kelly’s, but his athleticism and dynamism are comparable too, and it’s a wonder watching this that he wasn’t a bigger star. If you do like seeing him spar with Bob Fosse here, then check out MGM’s 1955 musical remake of My Sister Eileen, which sees them engage in a stunning challenge dance.

8. From This Moment On
This number wasn’t in the original play, but a discarded piece from a 1951 offering added at the 11th hour. It’s a heady concoction that captures Porter’s mix of cynicism, sentiment and wit, while providing a dazzling showcase for Miller and her three suitors: Rall, Fosse and Bobby Van, whose contrasting styles are exhibited to stunning effect. From that glorious opening melody, every frame of the number hums with invention, imagination and sheer, unbridled energy, with one segment so startling that I’ve given it a section all its own...

9. Bob Fosse reinventing dance in just over a minute

Legendary dancer, choreographer and director Bob Fosse had only just pitched up in Hollywood when he was cast in Kiss Me Kate. After a dazzling but conventional supporting part in a charming, neglected B-musical, The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, he properly announced his arrival here, with 64 seconds of finger-clickin’ goodness. Accompanied by regular co-conspirator Carol Haney, his angular, overtly sexualised routine turned everything on his head, winning him the chance to choreograph new Broadway show The Pajama Show, and launching the Fosse legend. I was joking when I said “fuck art”, as this is one of the greatest pieces of art I’ve ever seen. I often just watch this scene on YouTube if I’ve got a minute.

10. Keenan Wynn (right)

I’m not a big fan of this journeyman comic, but as a well-mannered gangster with a love of the theatre, he transcends his usual limitations – and perhaps even the material itself. No doubt this was what Woody Allen had in the back of his mind when he wrote the Chazz Palimenteri part in Bullets on Broadway.

Do you like Kiss Me Kate? TELL ME YOUR OPINIONS.

*I would also have been to see Terence Davies’s Sunset Song, but I was double-booked

***

Thanks for reading.

I also saw Bob Dylan twice.

FILMS:



CINEMA: The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928) - One of the high watermarks of silent cinema: a stunningly atmospheric drama ignited by a tour-de-force performance from the incomparable Lillian Gish, who plays a tormented, tortured waif driven to madness as she’s buffeted by a desert wind and by unfettered male sexual aggression (I don't think the film is intended as an allegory, but it certainly works as one).

I saw this old favourite at St John’s Church in Notting Hill, London, accompanied by a live organ score, and it was a magical experience. Former Leicester Square Odeon accompanist Donald MacKenzie’s improvised score drew memorably on old Western songs, while effectively resolving one of the film’s main two problems: the comic relief character, Sourdough (William Orlamond).

Rather than accentuating his bumbling idiocy, as the great Carl Davis did during a rare misstep in his Thames Silents series, MacKenzie underlined the pathos inherent in this perpetually unlucky character, changing his interludes from incongruous interruptions to almost complementary asides.

The other potential problem, as you may have heard, is the rather fanciful ending, which was not added by a nervous studio after test screenings, as Gish always claimed later, but which is rather abrupt, no matter how glorious her evocation of her character's new-found emotions.

Everything else about the film is close to perfect, from Sjöström's imaginative use of montage and symbolism (compensating for a somewhat static camera in the era of Murnau) to superb supporting performances from Lars Hanson and Dorothy Cumming, and Gish's near-mythic central turn.

Scalded, burned and almost blinded on the set by wind machines and sulphur pots, she reaches a sustained but subtly modulated melodramatic pitch unlike anything in her career after the legendary (though deeply flawed) Broken Blossoms, fashioning a character in the familiar Gish tradition - poor, pure, persecuted - and yet utterly new; unforgettably heightened but unremittingly real.

This troubling, difficult film was dumped on an unimpressed public by an uncaring MGM more than a year after it wrapped, and proved to be Gish's silent swansong. Bad decisions, bad timing and bad luck meant that she never became the sound-era actress that she might have. The Wind shows what the movies missed out on when it lost both her and its vow of silence, retaining its ability to shock, disgust and enthrall some 87 years later. (4)

***



The Girl of the Golden West (Robert Z. Leonard, 1938) - A charming, textbook Singing Sweethearts musical, this time set in the Old West, with tuneful saloon keeper Jeanette MacDonald unwittingly falling in love with faux-Mexican bandit Nelson Eddy.

It's not as powerful or as fresh as Naughty Marietta, but there are great musical moments, and the film hits all the right notes in terms of emotion, with some suitably moving revelations buried beneath the surface, ready to detonate and do damage to your tear ducts.

There are also pleasant supporting bits for Buddy Ebsen, Leo Carillo and the reliably excellent H. B. Warner, as well as an attempt to replicate the success of Fred and Ginger's 'announce a dance craze' shenanigans, in the shape of a lavishly mounted Mariache number.

Really it's all about the leads, though; it always was. MacDonald is in strong dramatic form - photographing far better than in the pair's garish Technicolor outings - while her chemistry with her mellifluous co-star is absolute.

There are few couples in movie history as simpatico as these two, and when their voices are intertwined, as on the standout Who Are We to Say, it's a simply extraordinary thing to behold. (3.5)

***



The Violent Men (Rudolph Maté, 1955) - An unusually thoughtful, well-scripted Western about nation-building, moral duty and, yes, violence, as Yankee veteran Glenn Ford tries to avoid being drawn into a range war with a crippled pioneer (Edward G. Robinson) and his avaricious wife (Barbara Stanwyck).

Written by Harry Kleiner, who scripted Sam Fuller’s classic House of Bamboo, the incoherent ‘60s cop drama Bullitt and the Arnie vehicle Red Heat (!), it has an offbeat approach to its subject matter that reminds me a little of Four Faces West– that ‘40s sleeper in which not a single shot is fired– dealing not in platitudes and cliches but in real characters, original ideas and unusual action set-pieces. While it leans initially on a stock genre trope, the peace-loving man who must pick up a gun in the name of right, it then has this supposed hero mastermind a cold-blooded ambush, while allowing Robinson to paint himself not unconvincingly as a defensible man of destiny, whose blood is in the very soil he treads.

That’s about the only stand-out moment Eddie G has: though he and fellow studio-era heavyweight Stanwyck may appear the more obvious draws, Ford is by far the best thing on offer here, with a charisma, complexity and dynamism that arrests your attention at every turn, his conflicted ex-soldier losing a little of his humanity while never trading in the vicious deconstructionism later realised in Anthony Mann’s Man of the West and Clint’s Unforgiven.

The film is also very nicely, expansively shot: despite an ugly, artificial interior scene early on, it exists mostly in the open: the mountains and valleys of Lone Pine vividly photographed in Cinemascope for Columbia’s debut foray into the new widescreen format (oddly, though, the camera does sometimes create a weird ‘boxing’ effect that I haven’t seen before: flattening part of the image during pan shots). The overall effect is a cynical spin on George Stevens’ Shane that even a rose-tinted coda can’t take the edge off. (3.5)

***



Rosalie (W. S. Van Dyke II, 1937) - A jaw-droppingly opulent MGM musical - from the Dream Factory at the peak of its powers - boasting Nelson Eddy's vocals, Eleanor Powell's dancing and a clutch of new Cole Porter songs.

And for three-quarters of an hour, it's utterly charming - as soldier and football hero Eddy romances incognito princess Powell - then it falls off a cliff, consisting of little but gloomy back-biting and bloody awful comedy from Ray Bolger and the usually reliable Frank Morgan. It tanked at the box office and helped put pay to Powell's hopes of being a leading lady - a shame when you see how well she handles the battle-of-the-sexes stuff early on.

It's worth seeing the film once, though, for that spirited opening, and worth persisting with for two absolutely dazzling tap routines in the second half that shine like beacons amidst the fug of disappointment. The first, in which Powell hoofs atop a series of massive drums before ripping holes in cellophane circles as she spins like a dervish, is an absolute gem.

Not that the music accompanying her is terribly inspired. It sounds like Porter either had writer's block or wrote most of these songs in his lunch break. (2.5)

***



The Card (Ronald Neame, 1952) - What on paper promises to be a rather charming offering turns out to be simply a bad film, with no point, no purpose and no proper characterisation, just a handful of straining ciphers stumbling through a series of generally mirthless episodes.

The great, chameleonic Alec Guinness is ‘Denry’ Machin, a lazy, perma-smirking ideas-man who works his way up through the ranks of Edwardian society, whilst enjoying barely credible, barely coherent relationships with three very different women: a countess (Valerie Hobson), a lying, husky-voiced flirt (Glynis Johns, playing like a toneless, Welsh Jean Arthur) and a wet blanket who hasn’t been written properly (Petula Clark).

The first 15 minutes aren’t bad, the football section plays to my own particular interests and there’s a fun surprise cameo at the end, but I found the movie irritating in the extreme, with a good cast wasted on a weak, smug script. Incidentally, if you were wondering how it can be written by Cruel Sea author Eric Ambler and yet not be set on a boat, I can reassure you: there is a bit set on a boat.

Happily, Guinness and director Neame would re-team to glorious effect eight years later, on the bleak, fascinating movie, Tunes of Glory. (1.5)

***

BOOKS:



A Man without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut (2003)– Vonnegut’s final work is sad, familiar and essential for fans, a loose memoir dealing with his life, his work and the world in which he finds himself as an 82-year-old: George Bush’s America. Some passages are fascinating – did you know Marx’s line, “religion is the opium of the masses”, was alluding to painkillers, not addiction – others aren’t quite so convincing (surely not all Bush’s advisers are simply psychopaths) and several have appeared elsewhere in similar or identical forms, but this short, spare work is a vivid portrait of the author as an old man. Tragically, he claims to have lost not only his country but his famed sense of humour, beaten down by too many disappointments, too many deaths, but every so often that light shines through, and his blending of satire, sentiment, righteous rage and historical detail is invigorating and moving to read. (3.5)



Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut (1990)– Vonnegut’s last will and testament, at least until he decided he had a little more to say with 1997’s Timequake, is a state-of-the-nation polemic about education, law and order, and the flogging of America’s national assets, as a prisoner looks back on his life – a la 1969’s Mother Night– and tries to figure out how and why it all went wrong. It isn’t as good as Mother Night, that rollicking shot of pitch-black entertainment on the subject or mortality. Nor does it endure like his best two books, which dealt with war (Slaughterhouse-Five) and capitalism (God Bless You, Mr Rosewater), and seem more coherent, perhaps because they’re simply better-written or perhaps because they’re more universal and their lofty subjects remain unchanged, whereas this one has been somewhat left behind by history; I don’t doubt that it read superbly in 1990. It’s more akin then to Cat’s Cradle and Breakfast of Champions, two much-lauded works from what's broadly regarded as Vonnegut's peak period; it too has a pungent, powerful and hilarious first half, wobbles in the second with excessive repetition and some thematically muddled diversions, then lands superbly. It’s a great time capsule, with several enduring arguments and inspired ideas – calling WWII “the Finale Rack” is a hint of the sporadic wonders within – even if its genius isn’t ultimately sustained. (3)



The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)– Tony Benn’s favourite book, and one of the key socialist pop cultural touchstones, is a frustrating, stodgy, nasty, repetitious, anti-everything diatribe that plays like a tedious, English Grapes of Wrath (some 25 years before the fact), and never really reaches a dramatic peak of any sort. Where it does excel, is in painting such a complete picture of working class life, as it chronicles a year in the life of a group of builders beaten down by poverty, fear and a complete absence of self-worth. It also acts as the primer on socialism that Tressell intended, as a pinko within the group, Frank Owen, tries to educate his colleagues as to the realities of life – and the joys of left-wing politics – only for his ideas to be met with contempt, mockery and rage. Sadly its realism and value are both undermined by a hysterical approach that, while fired by fully justifiable anger, is a drain to read, hammering away endlessly at the same points, and resulting in caricatured, one-note villains who are simply beyond parody (like a boss who spends every scene crawling around houses, trying to catch people not working, so he can sack). Its arguments for socialism, too, are generally so tied to the industrial era that they’re hard to relate to the modern world, though the first part of the book – dealing with the way that immigrants and the poor are blamed for economic problems – remains timely, and the manner in which the media and the right ultimately seek to silence socialist argument is still startlingly and depressingly relevant. (2.5)



So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson (2015)– A short, funny, clever, wise, far-reaching and deceptively important book that prizes incision over depth, as Ronson makes the case against public shaming on social media, by meeting the publicly shamed, the shameless, a group advocating complete honesty and a company that repairs damaged reputations online. A joy to read, but terrifying with it – and making a powerful polemical point. I loved it. (3.5)

***

THEATRE/COMEDY:



Farinelli and the King (Duke of York’s Theatre) is a sort of music therapy origins story which borrows heavily from The Madness of King George, as Madrid-based monarch Mark Rylance is awoken from his madness by a mellifluous castrato, and goes to live with him in a forest. Rylance is good, and the final scenes are genuinely moving, but they’re also rather without foundation, the play never laying the requisite groundwork, as we’re asked to be nostalgic about events that weren’t that good at the time. There’s also a problem that seems to arise with a lot of new work at the moment: the play gets most of its laughs by injecting modern, sweary colloquialisms into the dialogue, but these are cheap laughs, and their basic incongruity undermines the whole. It’s also staged in a curiously flat, inauspicious manner: the actors just stood in a line (recalling Joseph McBride’s vivid complaints about how Mervyn LeRoy directed Mister Roberts), the low-hanging chandeliers blocking their faces from the Upper Circle. I was a latecomer to the Rylance love-in – his performance in this year’s TV adaptation of Wolf Hall is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen – and while the material doesn’t fully exploit his mercurial gifts, his effete prowling and quicksilver mood shifts lend it a certain quality that isn’t there on the page. (2)



John Finnemore’s Souvenir Cabin (Shaw Theatre)– A shambling, good-humoured live show from one of the best comic writers in Britain, displaying a little of Finnemore’s signature genius – in a Famous Five sketch, a new Cabin Pressure monologue about bears, some delightfully absurd ad-libs and the deliriously odd Thank You, Captain Dinosaur closer – as well as the distinct impression that he was very nervous and his co-star Margaret Caborn-Smith hadn’t really done any rehearsal. (3)



Guardian Live: Steve Coogan and Armando Iannucci in Conversation (Central Hall, Westminster)– It took a while to get going, but this spotty chat between two famed collaborators – a razor-sharp comic mastermind (Iannucci) and a more thoughtful, introspective character actor (Coogan) – was full of charm and insight, as well as a few stories Coogan has told at least once before. I found the Q&A session at the end genuinely mortifying (I usually do), an experience alternately compounded and alleviated by Iannucci’s delight in tormenting his interrogators. And obviously at the end some twat asked a question that was basically about themselves and gave Coogan a script. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

Yes thank you I will have my Pulitzer now

I went to the Spectre premiere last week, as it was at my office. It was amazing. The whole place was transformed, the red carpet was thick and plushy under my feet, I saw the stars of the film and then, after a speech from Sam Mendes, I saw the film.

My premiere experience:

I found out I had been successful in the staff ballot a couple of weeks before the event. There weren't too many to go round, so I was very excited. The ticket arrived in a fancy wallet with gold writing (not pictured).

In the morning, I saw a big mask arriving at Stage Door. It looked like this:



I got changed into my suit jacket from TK Maxx and my bow-tie that I got for £1.50 on eBay and went to join the red carpet. The red carpet looked like this. These are my feet.



I was joined by my friend-and-colleague Martin and my friend-and-boss Jessica. Here I am with Martin.



Here I am with Jess.



In both cases, I am the one with the bumfluff beard. I was pretty delighted about the whole thing. The premiere and the beard.



This is how the Hall looked as we approached:



Of all the people it was possible to see, I was most excited about seeing Ben Whishaw, as he's a wonderful actor. Here he is being wonderful:



He subsequently registered my excitement and gave me a smile that I like to think was sincere rather than frightened. I also saw Andrew Scott, and took this photo for my wife, who is a big fan. She said I can share it with you too, so that's cool:



After that, I went and stood in the middle of the carpet. Despite this, I have not become a social media sensation (I would suggest #HotBondPremiereGuy if you need a hashtag).



Security guards I'd never seen before kept telling me to hurry up, or else gave me very detailed instructions on how to get into the building where I work, but I managed to enjoy my moment by ignoring them. Eventually they got me to move. On the way past, I saw a car and David Walliams. Martin thought it was Sean Connery on the stage, but it wasn't.



Along the side of the stage, I tried to take an arty shot, but it looked a bit rubbish:



I had some water (shaken, not stirred! - I really hate myself) and met some 'friends' (work colleagues), then I went into the world's bestest auditorium, which was filling up:



They showed the rest of the red carpet stuff on the big screen:



Then Sam Mendes came on with the cast. We had a pretty good view:



But their heads are quite fuzzy irl.



Then the lights went down and the film began.

FILM:



Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015) - Since when did Bond movies get good? Since Casino Royale really (with one boring, Quantum-shaped wobble), when they discovered emotional depth, quiet pathos and the joys of a knowing reference that isn’t just smugly parodic, and encouraged Bond to embrace his world-weariness, the grubbiness of his profession and a brutal, down-and-dirty fighting style, which is now all rabbit-punches and elbows to the face. I appreciate that this isn’t what everyone wants from Bond, but it is what I want.

Spectre isn’t as great as Skyfall, but that is such a high-watermark: a remarkably tricky act to follow. It is, however, a worthy successor. The scene with the rat is probably my favourite moment in a Bond film – giving him, perhaps for the first time, a sense of humour that’s warm and whimsical and self-mocking – there are wonderful supporting bits for Ralph Fiennes and Ben Whishaw, two of the best British actors working today, and the action sequences repeatedly deliver. My favourite is the opener, which is just a virtuosic piece of movie-making: a five-minute Wellesian tracking shot (a nod to Touch of Evil, perhaps, as we’re in Mexico), which follows two figures dressed as skeletons through the streets on the Day of the Dead, then launches us into a short, sharp assassination attempt ending with a fall to earth.

It’s a stunning start to an extremely entertaining, very likeable film that sometimes leans too heavily on flashy motors and callbacks to previous films at the expense of building a gripping story of its own – the plot is frankly a little scant for a film that runs 2hrs 30 – but delivers in just about every other way, with well-drawn supporting characters, good gags and, like, proper acting. While a craggy Craig doesn’t have as many moments to display dramatic range as he did in either Skyfall or Casino Royale, he’s asked to bear this film on his broad back, and he does it with ease. A mention, too, for Sherlock’s Moriarty, Andrew Scott, who does a lot with a slightly imprecise part, and chief villain Christoph Waltz, whose greying locks and hushed, faux-reasoned erudition calls to mind no-one so clearly as Jose Mourinho – though obviously Jose Mourinho is a lot more evil. By contrast, the Bond women (Lea Seydoux and Monica Bellucci) are fine, just... not that interesting, with the script and cinematography doing most of the heavy lifting. And even then, there's a moment where Seydoux orders Bond to leave her building "in the next 10 minutes" or she'll get security to eject him. That's rather a long time, and conspicuously slack screenwriting.

Spectre isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty damn great: riotously enjoyable, genuinely affecting and with a handling of Bond mythology that’s fresh yet respectful, the film pervaded by a swaggering self-confidence (and featuring additional dialogue by West End superstar Jez Butterworth!). If it is Mendes and Craig’s final Bond, it’s a good one to bow out with, but I really hope it’s not, since its balance of artistry, intelligence and blockbuster smarts lifts it way, way out of the ordinary. Not only did Bond films get good, but they’ve stayed good. (3)

***

Sorry if this was boring.

Here are all the books and films I've consumed lately. And here's a piece I wrote about actor-director combos to flog tickets in my day job.



Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973) - I love François Truffaut beyond almost anyone else who has worked in the medium of film. There’s that quote – “I always loved the reflection of life more than life itself” – which seems to crystallise an essential truth about those of us who live through film, or have at one time or another. His movies radiate a love of cinema, its possibilities and its pleasures, its ability to transport us, bewitch us, change us. He also seems to have been invented to cater for my specific tastes: sentimental about love, art and childhood, whilst understanding and articulating the limitations of all three.

This film is the only one he made that’s explicitly about the movies, or as he put it: “The subject of Day for Night was, quite simply, my reason for living.” It’s a deceptively deep ensemble comedy-drama about the making of a melodrama, starring Truffaut himself as the director, his regular cinematic alter-ego Jean-Pierre Leaud as his callow leading man, and Jacqueline Bisset, Valentina Cortese and Jean-Pierre Aumont as the other principal cast members, each with their own insecurity, their own past.

Examining and celebrating the artifice, the potential for perfection and yet the compromise of cinema (a collaborative medium in which logistical improvisation is king), the film starts with a scene that needs to be retaken and goes on from there, tipping us a wink as it wheels out a gentle set-piece about a misbehaving cat or a hairy stuntman doubling for Bisset, tightening the knot in your stomach as a cast or crew member begins to go to pieces, and then slowly but surely revealing its subtle depths: an ability to move, enchant and beguile, as all truly great movies do.

It’s light and playful – impeccably constructed, as Truffaut’s roaming camera drops us into one conversation, one story, then another – but it’s also substantial, with myriad delights that encompass administrator Nathalie Baye’s abrupt, laidback seduction technique, montages of moviemaking that draw you in to a walled-off world, and a breathtaking speech by Truffaut to Leaud about the disparity between fantasy and reality that is one of the most affecting (and clearly autobiographical) things that the director ever did. As, in fact, is the dream sequence so tantalisingly previewed early on, and then revealed in its full majesty near the close.

Not every scene has the same emotional charge or conviction of performance as Truffaut’s urgent pep talk, but for fans of the director – or of cinema in general – it’s still a rare sort of treat: stuffed with in-jokes and fun nods to cinematic icons like Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Jean Vigo, but more importantly underscored by an implicit understanding of the responsibility of the filmmaker, the collision between art and life, and the joy of the film set itself: what Orson Welles once called “the biggest electric train set a boy ever had”. No-one else could have made this film. (3.5)

***


English, motherfucker. Do you speak it?

Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) - This film is just so, so good. More than 20 years on, the freshness and effortlessness of it all is still astounding. Its vernacular. Its spiky, absurdist humour. Its moments of heart. Those long, wordless takes. The diner. The toaster. The watch up Walken’s ass. The legion of stylised lines that never feel mannered or forced. Actors like Samuel L. Jackson, Travolta and Uma Thurman producing performances from nowhere that continue to reward and astound. QT hasn’t done anything comparable since. Nowadays I will him to succeed – and with Django he did – but there was a brief time when all you could do was watch in slack-jawed amazement as he created dizzying, dazzling films that re-wrote the rules of genre cinema. (4)

***



Philomena (Stephen Frears, 2013) - A simply wonderful movie about journo Steve Coogan trying to trace the adopted son of Irish pensioner Judi Dench, a victim of the notorious Magdalene laundries. It’s often desperately bleak, but also unstintingly warm-hearted, full of the most brilliant jokes, and as emotionally and intellectually rewarding as anything I’ve seen this year. It’s also a little formulaic in structure, looks pretty much like every other British drama made in the last 10 years and has some final-reel villainy that’s a little too on-the-nose (not to mention hysterical), but the story is utterly fascinating, the acting and script exceptional, and its ultimate question of how best to move on is one answered with nuance, dignity and grace. (3.5)
***




Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015) - Computer programmer Domhnall Gleason wins a company competition to hang out with Google-but-not-Google CEO Oscar Isaac in his remote headquarters, where he's introduced to an AI called Ava (Alicia Vikander), and encouraged to submit her to the Turing Test. But seriously, America, it's pronounced "Tyouring", not "Too-ring", show some fucking respect.

There are plot holes in Alex Garland's zeitgeisty thriller, along with a few obvious 'surprises' to go with the more novel ones, but it's an entertaining, immersive, quite thought-provoking film that maintains the courage of its convictions right up to a superb twisty-turny ending. And then carries on for another five minutes for absolutely no reason. (3)

***



The Leopard Man (Jacques Tourneur, 1943) - I watched The Leopard Man for @ValLeween, the Val Lewton-based live-tweetathon that happens every Halloween (this reviews update has been a while in coming), and the whole thing was a lot of fun.

The film isn’t one of my favourites from the pioneering producer – this tale of a black cat terrifying a Mexican village is a little disjointed, with some iffy acting – but Lewton does a good job of creating a world through scripting, scoring and a handful of sets, and his horror high points are exhilarating, the moments of sustained terror as poetic, beautiful and self-contained as Astaire and Rogers dance numbers.

The blood under the door? Wow. (3)

***



The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999) - Soderbergh’s malevolently playful editing illuminates this brooding thriller, helping to turn it from a potentially straightforward Get Carter transplant into something rather more interesting, aided by an imposing central turn, intelligent use of footage of the star as a younger man – taken from Ken Loach’s debut film, Poor Cow– and a surprising, surprisingly affecting pay-off.

Terence Stamp is a seriously violent ex-con who comes to LA straight from the slammer, plotting revenge on the criminals what caused his daughter’s death, a group apparently led by counter-culture beancounter Terry Valentine (a perfectly cast Peter Fonda). Sometimes the script flounders, especially when resorting to cliché or having Stamp repeatedly use and then explain Cockney rhyming slang – he is a British character written for American audiences – but at other times it’s extremely strong, especially when Fonda is explaining the ‘60s (a speech that passes from the sort of platitudes you can basically mouth along to, to something poignant and surprising) or Stamp is lamenting his mistakes.

Where it really works, though, is in the presentation: fragments of action that drop us forwards or back in time, flashes of pathos at unexpected moments, action scenes that take place off camera or in the back of the frame, Soderbergh drawing thematic parallels like a young Terence Davies, or flicking between scenes in a way that recalls nothing as much as... Easy Rider: the film that launched Fonda and defined a generation, at least in cinematic terms. Stamp’s good too: some of his line readings seem wooden, but he catches the eye and holds it, and that scene in the warehouse still has the ability to shock and appal and rather worryingly excite. All together now: “Tell him I’m coming!” (3)

***



The Chocolate Soldier (Roy Del Ruth, 1941) - This wasn't the gay porn I thought I'd ordered.

Worse than that, it's not even a bona fide operetta. Though its songs come from the 1909 work, The Chocolate Soldier, the writer of the source story, George Bernard Shaw, objected to its being adapted, so they were grafted onto a play by the oft-adapted Ferenc Molnar, The Guardsman, occasionally intelligently, but more often completely incoherently.

Still, at least Nelson Eddy's here, right? A lot of people are sniffy about Nelson Eddy nowadays, in the unlikely event that they've heard of him at all, but I'm quite a fan. He was an underrated actor (catch his performance in Ben Hecht's liberal drama, Let Freedom Ring, for evidence of that) and a magnificent singer, especially vital and appealing when paired with regular leading lady Jeanette MacDonald.

What he wasn't, was a comedian. He proves that beyond any doubt here, playing a jealous husband who - in typical early '40s comedy style - tests his wife's fidelity by posing as an amorous Russian. That stock device of masquerade occasionally worked, but needed subtle writing and intelligent playing, neither of which it gets here. Eddy is so broad and flat it hurts, Metropolitan Opera diva Rise Stevens simply transmits none of the spark required for such battle-of-the-sexes comedy, and Nigel Bruce is really beginning to annoy me now.

The result is a pathologically unfunny film: bitter, laughless, joyless and sexless, with only a handful of reasonable musical numbers relieving the oppressive tedium. And no gay sex. (1)

***



Gunsight Ridge (Francis D. Lyon, 1957) - This atrocious oater plays rather like a parody of B-Westerns by someone who's hardly seen any, as Wells Fargo agent Joel McCrea tries to root out a highwayman in a small town and finds a frustrated pianist prone to fits of hysterical anger (Mark Stevens). Ernest Laszlo's photography is unusually handsome for a movie from a no-name studio, but the ageing stars can do nothing with the abysmal script from MGM veteran Talbot Jennings and his wife Elisabeth, which manages to be both clichéd and completely ludicrous, hopping from one silly scenario to the next with barely a credible line of dialogue to be heard. The great McCrea comes off merely as trivial and smug, but Stevens manages to set fire to the huge pile of goodwill left over from the bristling noir The Dark Corner, crossing over into ridiculousness early on, and never returning. The scene in which he is out-acted by a confused horse is a particular low. (1)

***

BOOKS

Fiction:



The Railway Children by E. Nesbit (1905) - This beloved children's story has a mother who's good to be true, some understandably stuffy contentions about the way the world works and a rather clunky writing style to which it takes some adjusting, but it's also full of vivid characters, fine sentimental moments and thrilling scenes of escapism and middle-class adventure: virtues that ultimately win out over its shortcomings. (3)



Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (1975) - I liked this kaleidoscopic portrait of early-20th century New York, drawn to its world, its scope, and its moments of terrible clarity (particularly concerning lovelorn depression and the everyday poetry of squalid urban life), but found its quasi-Hemingway, quotation-free style rather one-note, contrived and detached. (3)

Non-fiction:



Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford (1960) - This memoir from The Communist Mitford is good and sometimes brilliant, trespassing into the latter territory when it deals with family dynamics and human emotion, or when the author punctures pomposity with some lancet-like line. I admire Decca's perfectly pitched irony and sense of poignancy, borne of a complete lack of sentimentality. And I like her names for her siblings, such as Boud (Unity), Debo(rah) and the delightful Tudemmy (Tom). Her journey around America is ultimately a lot less interesting than what predates it, though, with many of the tales notably lacking a sufficiently strong punchline. But I'll now be reading absolutely everything about the Mitfords anyway, beginning with Decca's second volume of autobiography. (3)



Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson (2005) - More a collection of pre-9/11 features than a coherent work, but an immensely readable, blackly comic journey through the world of political and religious extremism that sees Ronson rubbing shoulders with Muslim fundamentalists, KKK members and David Icke, and finding that - hey guys, maybe you're not all so different after all. Which I suppose is heartening. In a way. (3)



The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson (2011) - Ronson's study of psychology, psychiatry and psychopathy is fast-moving, consistently hilarious, and completely and utterly fascinating. It's also a little unfocused: a scattershot treatment of the subject in which his angle seems determined by the eccentric people he can find to interview, before he attempts to drag together some conclusions at the death. I did bloody love reading it, though, and I learned a lot: the revelation about the official classification of mental illnesses is absolutely astonishing. (3.5)

TV:



Parks and Recreation: Season 7 (2014-15) - I'm sad to see my favourite sitcom go, but it's probably about time, as towards the end this started to feel very familiar: at times fuzzily, more often in a rather worn way. These final 13 episodes kicked the story into 2017, a scenario occasionally exploited for poor non-sequitur gags about fictitious world events, but more often used to up the emotional ante, as in a genuinely affecting storyline about the estrangement between central character Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) and her former boss, Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman). Its flaws are evident, almost all the sign of an enterprise that's gone on for too long - the Johnny Karate novelty episode doesn't really work, Craig (Billy Eichner) remains a horrendously unfunny, one-note character, and the walk-ons by real politicians give the distinct impression that the programme is now on the inside (rarely the best place for a show with a satiric bent) - but it's still hard to say goodbye to a show that's given me so much joy, and which still makes me laugh out loud and tear up with some regularity, even in its seventh and final season. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

Oh, the usual.

FILMS:



*A FEW SPOILERS*
Hulk (Ang Lee, 2003)

"So, Ang, the film's due tomorrow. Obviously we know your reputation as the director of The Ice Storm and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, so we've been happy to just leave you to it. How's it all looking?"
"It’s looking great... Let me just say, I think you're going to be very pleased."
"Fantastic – just what I wanted to hear! Is there lots of action?"
"Yes, there's lots of action."
"Great."
"At one point a psychotic old man sets three rabid dogs on the love interest and they try to rip off her head."
“Err… OK. That’s not exactly... but, yes, as long as there’s lot of action. That’s not the only bit, is it?”
“No, of course not. Do you like bouncing?”
“In what way?”
“You know, people bouncing a lot?”
“No, why?”
“No reason.”
“Erm, right. Now you mentioned a love interest. That’s great, we need that.”
"Yes, lots of love in there."
"Well, so long as the hero’s girlfriend doesn't betray him to the military for no reason!"
"[nervous laughter]"
"So, lots of action, lots of romance, sounds like a lot of fun."
"Yes, it's very fun, it's just a fun summer popcorn movie about a man trying to come to terms with watching his dad stab his mum to death as a child."
"Wait, what?"
"Yes.”
"Why've you done that?"
"What?"
"Made our big, green movie a horrifically gruelling Freudian drama about domestic abuse."
"Action figures?"
“It's frankly a long shot, Ang. Have you seen the Nil by Mouth merchandising numbers? I have, and... oh no, I've just thought of something."
"Go on."
"Eric Bana. We gave you Eric Bana. There's no way he'd be able to pull off a role of this complexity. Is there?!"
"No. He couldn't do it."
"Oh, well that’s a relief, I suppose. But I didn't hear anything about re-casting. Who did you get instead?"
"No-one. We just have Eric Bana not being able to do it. Jennifer Connelly can't do it either. And Nick Nolte does what he can, but his character makes no sense - he'll reach some point of pathos or resonance and then just start screaming abuse or electrocuting himself. To be honest, the premise was kind of spoiled by all of the dialogue and also the cast.”
“I thought you said it was great.”
“No, I said it’s looking great. I’ve got this really cool gimmick where the movie frames look like comic book panels.” “Is that all?”
“No, Danny Elfman’s written me a nice score. Sam Elliott isn’t bad, I suppose, and Jennifer is gorgeous.”
“And I bet Hulk himself looks great, given that Terminator 2 came out 22 years ago, and even since that landmark in visual effects we’ve had massive advancements in technology.”
“No, he looks like a fat cartoon Jeffrey Hunter.”
“You know I’m going to lose my job, don’t you?”
“I know.”
“Bye.”

(2)

***



The Cat and the Fiddle (William K. Howard, 1934) - A delightful, marvellously inventive if not quite classic musical-comedy about operetta writer Ramon Novarro and Tin Pan Alley-style tunesmith Jeanette MacDonald meeting cute in Brussels, falling in love through their overlooking windows, then breaking up when he decides he needs to make it by himself before they can be happy.

That stock ‘30s rom-com device is the only thing formulaic or over-familiar about this charming concoction, which weaves in its tunes in the same naturalistic but knowing style as Mamoulian’s classic Love Me Tonight (also starring MacDonald), reunites Novarro and Jean Hersholt in a similar master-pupil relationship to the one they enjoyed in Lubitsch’s immortal Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, and casts a certain dizzy Pre-Code spell, by turns romantic, moving and quite preposterously sexy. The moment where Novarro throws his career to the wind, then takes MacDonald back to her room is close to perfection.

Like The Merry Widow– made by Lubitsch and MacDonald the same year, such was the incestuousness of such films – it spends too long being too gloomy after a bewitching beginning, but like that film it’s full of bright music, amusing supporting performances (special mention for the hilarious Charles Butterworth, another Love Me Tonight alumnus) and ineffable old fashioned movie magic, not least when it bursts into colour for the final reel! The leads are simply irresistible. (3.5)

***



Orion: The Man Who Would Be King (Jeanie Finlay, 2015) - A fantastic story, told almost as well as it could be, about a masked Elvis soundalike who was marketed to a public that didn’t want to believe the King was dead. That man was Jimmy Ellis, an unhappy, womanising, frustrated, ultimately tragic artist who made a Faustian pact for fame, and unsurprisingly struggled to live with the consequences. Working with a limited amount of archive film, director Jeanie Finlay weaves this stranger-than-fiction tale with the use of talking heads, intelligent reconstructions, melancholic bucolic footage and audio interviews, and while a few interesting eyewitnesses are absent – including Ellis’s various wives – and it doesn't always delve as deeply as it might, the result is a compelling, fascinating film with a couple of devastating late twists. (3)

***



Samurai and Idiots: The Olympus Affair (Hyoe Yamamoto, 2014) - This insightful documentary is flawed filmmaking but offers a rare, fascinating glimpse of how Japan sees its companies, its visitors and itself, with echoes of Kurosawa’s classic indictment of corporate power, The Bad Sleep Well.

It’s superficially the story of Michael Woodford, a Scouse businessman who rose to the top of the Japanese camera company Olympus before being unceremoniously tipped out of his seat after asking a few awkward questions about dodgy accounting practices. I’d argue that he has surprisingly little news sense, though. He keeps saying he'll go public with "governance concerns" rather than $1.7BN FRAUD.

In some ways the film is a little disappointing – our apparently hero’s rather terrifying feudal adversaries are only given a voice in fascinating archive footage, and the movie could do a better job of both explaining the wrongdoing and remembering that it is not a PowerPoint presentation – and yet it’s ultimately so surprising and enlightening in its portrait of the Japanese national character that it’s almost great. (3)

***



Marked Woman (Lloyd Bacon, 1937) - A distinctive if not exceptional crime film, based on Lucky Luciano’s 1936 trial, about prostitute Bette Davis and her working girl pals helping to bring down a mobster (Eduardo Ciannelli), with the help of crusading assistant D.A., Humphrey Bogart.

This “ripped from the headlines” tale isn’t one of Warner’s gangster classics, being too pedestrian for the most part – cursed with a weak comedy interlude featuring Allen Jenkins and a lousy subplot about Davis’s kid sister (Jane Bryan) – but Body and Soul writer-director Robert Rossen and Abem Finkel contributes some superior lines, Bogart gives probably his best pre-High Sierra performance, and Davis is simply scintillating, finally given something proper to do after years of being taken for granted.

Even without those virtues, the premise would be sufficiently unusual to give this one a look, while director Lloyd Bacon also brings a verve and imagination to Marked Women that’s missing from most of his work (the mark of an uncredited Michael Curtiz, perhaps), including a blast of sickening off-screen violence and a brilliant downbeat ending far removed from Hollywood cliché. (3)

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BOOK:



Josiah the Great by Ben Macintyre (2004)– This one didn’t quite do it for me. The story of Josiah Harlan, the 19th century American adventurer who became an Afghan prince (sort of) and provided the pattern for Kipling’s Man Who Would Be King, it’s written in a slightly less formulaic fashion than Macintyre’s later books (I’m not knocking him, he’s a compulsively readable writer, but he has certain stock devices he’s liable to lean on) but based primarily on Harlan’s unpublished memoir, which even in this edited form is long-winded, unfocused and often just about the fruits and flowers he’s seen. It’s also oddly paced and has no real dramatic peaks, with little of the suspense, dry humour or rich emotion that fill Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat and A Spy Among Friends, the author’s books on 20th century history. There’s none of the bromance, either, the primary currency of any Macintyre work. It’s a reasonably interesting tale, with some very valuable parallels to the present day situation in Afghanistan, but I wasn’t itching to pick it back up again and ultimately felt rather underwhelmed. (2.5)

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Thanks for reading.