Movietone Cameos

Bullets or Ballots (1936) **

2012-02-09T04:25:00.001-08:00

Director: William Keighley
Screenplay: Seton I. Miller
Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Joan Blondell, Barton MacLane, Humphrey Bogart, Joe King, Frank McHugh, George E. Stone, Louise Beavers

This slick, pacy, complicated Warners programmer begins with perhaps the studio’s most impudent comment ever on the relationship between screen and real violence, as crime baron Barton MacLane and henchman Humphrey Bogart go to see a “crime picture” together, actually a short in a fictional series called ‘Syndicate of Crime’, partially modelled on MGM’s Crime Does Not Pay films (1935-47), with Bogart commenting “Wait till you see the actor that takes you off.”
It’s a terrific opening to a film largely concerned with the uneasy relationship between the media, the police and organised crime.
The narrator of the film, a crusading publisher, is soon killed by Bogart’s character because his utilisation of the film medium is proving too effective at mobilising public opposition to racketeering (one-nil to Warners) and it’s not long before we hear the police complaining that the newly-rendered transparency of their operations, thanks to print media, is hampering their ability to deal with the criminals. (Accordingly, the plot is constantly advanced by newspaper headlines, either referred to by the characters or flying straight at the screen to the accompaniment of wailing sirens and a background montage of cops racing to work.)

Since Cagney had appeared to such memorable and popular effect in the previous year’s G-Men (the obvious model for this film, also directed by Keighley and written by Miller) the latest Warner rouse was to recast their gangster icons as tough, no nonsense good guys - that way they could maintain all the old attitudes, punchiness and cocky dialogue (leaving the actual criminality to the plainly irredeemable Bogart), and the censors couldn’t complain.
This one comes up with the even happier variation of casting Robinson as an undercover cop pretending to be a gangster (a deception the film does not even reveal until the halfway mark) so for whole sections it really is business as usual, perhaps the ultimate example of the studio both having its cake and eating it.

Warners were no doubt hoping for another G-Men-sized hit, but lightning didn’t quite strike twice this time. Still, this is an engrossing and hugely enjoyable yarn that rattles along at the best Warner Brothers tempo – all meat, no fat – with the help of a crackerjack studio supporting cast headed by Bogart in his first role after the same year’s Petrified Forest, the great Joan Blondell, Frank McHugh, Louise Beavers and the wonderfully greasy George E. Stone.

The Ghoul (1975) ****

2012-02-09T03:30:00.000-08:00

Director: Freddie Francis
Screenplay: John Elder
Cast: Peter Cushing, Veronica Carlson, Alexandra Bastedo, John Hurt, Gwen Watford, Ian McCulloch, Stewart Bevan, Don Henderson, John D. Collins

Lush compendium of second generation horror cliches; in effect the ultimate Hammer film, made by assorted old boys (and girls) for a rival studio intent on reversing the direction it had taken, to its peril, in the 1970s.

While others bemoaned Hammer's traditionalism and timidity, and counselled radical innovation, Tyburn's take was refreshingly reactionary, urging a return to the generic blueprint of the original Bray Studios films. The result is what a 'pure' Bray film would have looked like in the seventies.
It's basically a revision of Elder's script for The Reptile, with an unusual and irresistibly stylish 1920s setting and a less wacky, more grisly monster.

Cushing, in one his most nuanced and effective performances, plays Dr Lawrence, a tormented ex-clergyman in a permanently fog-shrouded (and marsh-encircled) Cornish mansion, who keeps the diseased cannibal son he cannot bring himself to destroy locked in his attic.
While he and Carlson (along with Elder's script, Francis's direction and Harry Robinson's splendid score) all play as reassuringly traditional, other aspects of the film seem positively anticipatory, not least the cannibalism, and a rotting, green-skinned monster that would be more at home in a later Fulci film than at Hammer.
Coincidentally, Ian McCulloch, later the star of Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters is the male lead here; nice also to see Bevan, a familiar face to Pete Walker fans. Odd, too, to note the similarities with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which emerged the same year and is usually cited as exactly the kind of horror film that was making the Hammer sort obsolete.
(Both films begin with four young travellers getting lost in the middle of nowhere; some look for assistance in a nearby house and end up slaughtered and eaten by one of the inhabitants. Meanwhile John Hurt, as Cushing's weird gardener, leaps about maniacally in the road in a manner uncannily reminiscent of Edwin Neal's hitch-hiker. And while Cushing's well-appointed house and civilised tastes seem leagues away from the home life of the deranged chainsaw family, Hurt's shed, with its caged animals, general chaos and relics of earlier victims, in this case the purloined underwear of the Ghoul's shapely victims, is not at all dissimilar to their abattoir-like dwelling.)

Since my first nervous encounter with it as a young boy, The Ghoul, despite a very low critical standing generally, has always seemed to me the quintessential horror film: richly coloured, flesh-creepy, with spooky music, blood, thick fog, quicksand, something unspeakable locked upstairs, and pretty girls running and screaming.Especially well-judged is the decision to delay a full sighting of the Ghoul until the end, forcing us in the meantime to build our own picture based solely upon repeated shots of his feet, green skin, weeping sores and sandals.
Francis, a director not always comfortable with the subjects he was handed, was never so confident and in control, his prowling camera seeking out every dark corner of the imposing house and fog-blanketed moors.

The Ghoul (1933) *

2012-02-06T10:34:00.001-08:00

Director: T. Hayes Hunter
Screenplay: Rupert Downing, from the novel by Frank King
Cast: Boris Karloff, Cedric Hardwicke, Ernest Thesiger, Dorothy Hyson, Anthony Bushell, Kathleen Harrison, Ralph Richardson

Long thought lost, this genuinely unusual British horror film boasts a casually assembled all-star cast and a peculiar atmosphere entirely its own.
The idea was to provide Karloff with a British role worthy of his new found Hollywood stardom, but the result, clearly influenced by The Mummy, moves with an entirely different rhythm to Hollywood horror, while a few surprisingly gruesome moments show up the differences in British and US censorship.
Not a complete success on its own terms, it is nonetheless unendingly interesting.
The novel by Frank King on which it is based later inspired the delightful spoof What A Carve-Up! (1962).

Ieri, Oggi, Domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) (1963) ***

2012-02-06T09:42:00.000-08:00

Director: Vittorio De Sica
Screenplay: Silvia Monelli, Eduardo De Filippo, Isabella Quarantotti, Cesare Zavattini, Bella Billa, Lorenza Zanuso
Cast: Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Aldo Giuffre, Agostino Salvietti, Lino Mattera, Armando Trovajoli, Tina Pica, Giovanni Ridolfi, Gennaro Di Gregorio

Robert Benchley wrote that you can divide the world into two groups of people: those who divide the world into two groups of people and those who do not. Nonetheless, I think it is useful to divide cineastes into those who think the coolest movies of the 1960s were made in Italy, and those who prefer those made in France.
The latter have Godard and Karina and Truffaut and Belmondo and the New Wave. The former have Loren and Mastroianni, Fellini and Antonioni and Monica Vitti.

I suppose it will come as no surprise to anyone who has been here before that I am in the Italian camp, and this is one of our sacred texts.
It's not weighty like L'Avventura, or magical like La Strada. It's purely cool; fluff, but perfect fluff.

To those who never forgave De Sica for abandoning the purity and seriousness of Neo-realism it was merely confirmation that he had fully embraced commercialist froth. But for everyone else it's a wonderful concoction, three short stories, each starring Marcello and Sophia, that riff on various aspects of sexual duplicity and gamesplaying, and in which everything is stunning and uncomplicated: the cast, the locations, the photography, the music, the atmosphere.
Wrong to imply that it is entirely without substance - far from it - each vignette will give you plenty to think about and discuss with whoever watches it with you. They are like psychological pencil sketches, that allow the viewer to fill in the detail and the colour. But the overall effect is leagues away from the bleakness and introspection of Antonioni: it's light; effervescent, effortlessly Italian.
If you're on it's wavelength it's like going home.
That's why De Sica, for me, is second only to Fellini, and only my iron disciplined objectivity withholds the fourth star.

Our Daily Bread (1934) ****

2012-02-02T23:48:00.000-08:00

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, King Vidor, Elizabeth Hill
Cast: Karen Morley, Tom Keene, Barbara Pepper, Addison Richards, John Qualen, Lloyd Ingraham, Sidney Bracey, Henry Hall

Vidor's best films reflect his preoccupation with depicting the experiences of ordinary people in extraordinary situations, such as The Big Parade (1925), his incredibly eloquent recreation of one man's experience of the First World War, and The Crowd (1928), the equally powerful dramatisation of a few days in the life of a downtrodden city office worker and his wife.
As social documents, part of what makes them so effective is that Vidor has no interest in the fetishising of despair; an easy option for many who affect to prize 'realism' as an alternative to catharsis. He employs a documentary-like matter-of-factness but never abuses the audience's emotional investment in the characters and their plight; so films that sound relentlessly bleak in synopsis play as movingly affirmative, without ever lapsing into contrived sentimentality. The ending of The Crowd in particular, chosen from several that were considered (the camera pulls away from the couple whose fortunes it has been following and slowly loses them in the all-consuming crowd), is ambiguous without denying the possibility of hope.

No question that Vidor was one of the greats: his career was as long and successful as DeMille’s, he was as pioneering as Griffith, as innovative as Mamoulian, and like all three he had a sure sense of what went over big at the box office.
But time and again he was advised that the public wanted escapism, not reminders of reality. MGM wanted no part of Our Daily Bread, yet so committed was Vidor to the project that he pressed on anyway with private backing, most of it his own: he pawned everything he owned to see the project through. (When I think of him pitching it, I see Joel McCrea trying to pitch Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? in Sullivan's Travels.)
He conceived it as a follow-up to The Crowd - although the two main characters, Depression-hit husband and wife city dwellers who stake everything they have to manage an abandoned farm, are played by different actors they do have the same names - Mary and John Sims - as their counterparts in the earlier film.
Still, no specific plot points are cross-referenced, so it's just as easy to think of the two films as unrelated, and it is, I think, better to. The extraordinary ending of The Crowd would be weakened by the existence of a chapter two, and the everyman status of the couple in Our Daily Bread would seem compromised by so specific a back story. So think of them as two facets of the same type, and the films as linked only by their concerns.

The Sims' get the farm working by running it as a workers' co-operative, inviting any out of work artisans to help out and share the profits. Despite this, the film advances no clear political position, and takes care to include a lively scene in which the merits of various political systems are argued over by the characters, all of them ending up soundly savaged, including democracy: "That's what got us here in the first place!" says one.
The commune see themselves rather as founding fathers of a whole new ethos, and the film is one of the very few to reflect the temper of a brief moment between the crash and the New Deal when popular disenchantment with and mistrust in central government was leading to open calls for anarchism and self-rule. The workers in the film embody the spirit of this moment, and the film could only have been made as an independent production - Hollywood had officially rallied around FDR by the time it was released.
Though surely not for this reason, it is a film that never did find its place.
At the time, it was thought depressing, too close to the bone to audiences looking to the movies as a way to forget their troubles. In the years thereafter it became a relic, and when Vidor was reassessed in the sixties it was dismissed as dated, and compromised by its honey-coated ending.

None of these criticisms seem to me to hold water: the film is Vidor's crowning achievement.
As a technical exercise it is breathtaking, beginning with studio interiors for the city sequences it moves to beautifully photographed rural landscapes, and we really get the feeling that these characters actually live in their makeshift shacks and work hard all day. In On Film Making, written in the 1970s, Vidor writes: "when I run my film Our Daily Bread for new audiences I am always asked if the performers were real down-and-out people, or if they were cast through an actor's agency in Hollywood."
The performances of the leads, however, are usually criticised, I think unfairly. I've always warmed to Tom Keene as the husband (even before I realised he was Colonel Tom Edwards in Plan 9 From Outer Space), who plays with utter sincerity and conviction. And for Karen Morley as his wife the film marks the end of a long apprenticeship as ingénues (Dinner at Eight), molls (Scarface) and damsels in distress (The Mask of Fu Manchu); her performance is the emotional centre of the film, and one of the best things in it.
All of the players are fine, but one in particular stands out, in the community itself as much as in the cast. Bringing with her all of the vanished superficiality and high-spirits of pre-Depression days, city girl Sally, played by Barbara Pepper doing a first class imitation of Jean Harlow, pulls up in her dead sugar-daddy's car halfway through and comes within an inch of destroying the entire community with her twin weapons of sexual availability and gramophone records. (As thoroughly entertaining as it is unexpected, Pepper's appearance was, delightfully, a condition of one of the backers.) Her function is to provide the temptation for John to abandon the farm when all looks lost, and he is actually in the act of running away with her when he realises how the farm can be saved.
He returns to instigate the film's magnificent final act, which, unlike The Crowd, is unambiguous and powerfully uplifting.
In this amazing sequence of choreographed toil the workers divert a stream through a hastily constructed ditch to irrigate the crops. Through superb editing, scoring and composition Vidor turns the stuff of documentary realism into compulsive, magnificent, poetic cinema. As he writes in On Film Making:

"One of my favourite sequences of all time is the ditch-digging sequence from Our Daily Bread. Although this sequence has been thrilling audiences since 1934, if I had based it on the advice of a professional ditch digger, its impact would be as dull as its name suggests. Its basis is music. There is nothing factual about it besides the fact that the men use picks and shovels. They move many times faster than men would if they were actually digging a ditch to contain the stream of water shown in the film. But it is the crescendo of rhythm and music carrying the viewer along with it that invariably brings forth applause at its conclusion."

Yes, it owes much to Eisenstein. But so what? It is magnificent, and it brings to a crescendo one of the most compulsively authentic documents of an era that historical circumstances have permitted, and one no less powerful and serious for being so essentially warm-hearted.

Three On a Match (1932) ***

2012-02-02T06:20:00.000-08:00

Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Screenplay: Lucien Hubbard
Cast: Ann Dvorak, Joan Blondell, Bette Davis, Warren William, Lyle Talbot, Humphrey Bogart, Allen Jenkins, Edward Arnold, Virginia Davis, Anne Shirley, Betty Carse, Jack La Rue, Glenda Farrell

I don't know if you're familiar with Apocalypse Now, but it's basically about some prat going up a river, and meeting up with an even bigger prat, and it takes him about three hours to get there and then there's another half hour of yap when he does.

If there's one big negative distinction to be drawn between Hollywood films made under the studio system and those made afterwards, it's that the later ones tend to be more self-indulgent, because there is no objective overall control, and they often make a fetish of overlength. They are not all as megalomaniacally tedious as Apocalypse Now, of course, but the ability to keep a film whip-tight, with not an ounce of superfluous fat, was probably the hardest to achieve of all the skills that golden age cinema made look so easy.

Case in point: Three On a Match.

In roughly the time Martin Sheen spends moping about in his hotel room before we even find out what he's going to spend the rest of the film ostensibly doing, Three On a Match takes us through some twenty odd years of American social history, interspersed with the stories of three women whose lives we follow from school-age to adulthood.
In scenes that play as vivid thumbnail sketches we learn everything we need to know about the three girls, so that when the contemporary drama itself begins (ie: about ten minutes in) we already feel we know them and are interested in how their lives unfold.
One of them (Blondell) is sent to reform school and ends up a Broadway chorine, the most popular (Dvorak) marries money and enjoys every imaginable luxury, while the most grounded (Davis) is a hard-working stenographer.
Catching up on old times after the three re-encounter each other accidentally, Dvorak reveals that she is deeply unsatisfied by her seemingly perfect existence, and leaps at the opportunity Blondell's Broadway friends provide to run away with her young child in tow.

The left turn the film then takes remains shocking today.
Dvorak wallows in dissipation and eventually becomes a drug addict, allowing her child to live in neglect and squalor; Blondell helps her husband regain the child, then marries him after he is divorced from Dvorak; Dvorak's feckless boyfriend becomes heavily indebted to a gang boss and hits on the scheme of kidnapping the child and holding it to ransom, but the scheme, overseen by an especially sleazy Bogart, goes awry and it is decided the child has to be killed.
Whereupon Dvorak, physically wasted and with nothing left to live for but her son, writes the location where he is being held on her body with lipstick, and leaps to her death from the window.

That's still enough to silence almost any audience: an incredible example of what Hollywood movies were like before the Hays Code.
For years it was forgotten that they ever made movies like this; now that the pre-Code era is again popular among critics and film enthusiasts, Three On a Match is again being recognised as one of the quintessential products of this uniquely free, imaginative but above all creative era of American film-making.
In particular, it has helped in the re-evaluation of Dvorak, an actress who seemed lost in the Code era, as if made to articulate the narratives that only pre-Code allowed. In this film she gives one of the most intense and vivid performances to be found anywhere in a Hollywood movie.

Of course, it's fairly obvious that what we really have here is a rather longer film, pared down to its absolute essentials in post-production.
Blondell seems to be the main character in the prologue, but the seemingly lesser character played by Dvorak takes over in the narrative proper, while in both sections Davis's character is sketched only vaguely. And while it would be interesting to take a little longer over certain scenes and see a little more of some of the characters - because it's all so very, very good - ultimately I wouldn't change a thing. It's as an example of the extraordinary narrative concision of which Hollywood film-makers were once capable that the film is perhaps most striking.
It's almost impossible to believe just how much it crams into a running time that is, though you may find it hard to believe, 64 minutes.

Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces) (2009) *

2012-02-02T03:25:00.000-08:00

Director/Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar
Cast: Penélope Cruz, Lluís Homar, Blanca Portillo, José Luis Gómez, Ángela Molina

I must say at the outset that I am not an Almodóvar devotee.
I've never felt the need to see any of his films more than once, but at the same time, I do usually venture out whenever there's a new one. So my view of his work is by no means jaundiced but it is certainly dispassionate.
And personally, I prefer his work now that he has settled comfortably into the role of auteurist elder statesman, the last - temporarily at least - in the line of flamboyant international showmen that stretches back through Fellini, Buñuel and similar stylists. It's as if he doesn't feel he has anything much to prove, and so has less need to grab us by the lapels; the work is more relaxed and considered. Whereas the films with which he made his name and reputation in the 1980s and 1990s look already to me like ossified period pieces.
But I am aware that many of his keener followers - more entitled than I to authority on the matter - feel the opposite.

So, with no real axe to grind either way, I found this typical: never less than enjoyable, never likely to find its way on to my video shelves. Pretty interesting, pretty engrossing, pretty pretty. Parts of it are striking, a lot of it is colourful, it's long, it moves at a uniform pace and it just sort of wanders by - like the circus leaving town.

The Big Sleep (1978) **

2012-02-01T01:52:00.000-08:00

Director/Screenplay: Michael Winner, from the novel by Raymond Chandler
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Sarah Miles, Richard Boone, Candy Clark, Joan Collins, Edward Fox, John Mills, James Stewart, Oliver Reed, Harry Andrews, Colin Blakely, Richard Todd, Diana Quick, James Donald

Updating the story to seventies London, this audacious production was asking for trouble, though as director Winner pointed out, the fact that Henry Irving did a pretty good Hamlet was not seen as grounds for denying anyone else a crack at it.
Of course it isn't really a remake at all, just another adaptation of the novel, and one that actually plays somewhat fairer by its source, notwithstanding the changes to location and era. Nonetheless, because it 'dares' to retell the story rendered so perfectly in 1946 it is critically impermissible to do anything but dismiss it as an abject failure. In truth, however, it is nothing of the sort.

It's a totally different take on the material from the 1946 version, and Mitchum, who had debuted his older, wearier Marlowe in 1975's Farewell, My Lovely, is a totally different Marlowe to Bogart. He's outstandingly good, and the supporting cast, likewise, is uniformly excellent. The result is a rather splendid film: at least as clever a rejigging of source material as Altman's Long Goodbye (and my money's on cleverer) and a first class crime thriller in its own right.
Its only sin is that it is not the 1946 version of The Big Sleep. But then, not many films are.

The Big Sleep (1946) ****

2012-02-01T00:25:00.000-08:00

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, from the novel by Raymond Chandler
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers, John Ridgley, Dorothy Malone, Elisha Cook Jr, Charles Waldron, Peggy Knudsen, Regis Toomey, Louis Jean Heydst, Sonia Darrin, Theodore von Eltz, Joy Barlow.

A treasure trove of great lines, iconic performances, gloriously moody photography and some of the most labyrinthine plot developments ever foisted upon a Hollywood movie, The Big Sleep has as strong a claim as any to the title of greatest crime film ever made.

Just the title instantly conjures a hundred images and memories.
You think first, obviously, of Bogart as Philip Marlowe, sardonic, disillusioned, resourceful, cynical yet possessed of a kind of battered nobility. You think of Lauren Bacall, in the second and most effective of their big-screen teamings, and of their dialogue, impeccably delivered and bristling with sexual innuendo.
Then you recall that whole Warner noir universe, of shadows and rain and fog, high collars and felt hats, small-time crooks and girls on the make, where nobody can be trusted and everybody lies all the time.
But this is one of those films where virtually every line is quotable, just as every scene is a separate delight, and every character gets their own chance to shine. Think of Dorothy Malone’s cameo as the book store salesgirl who passes a boozy afternoon with Marlowe, of Elisha Cook Jr as Jonesy, the patsy whose efforts to get in on the action leave him dead, or of Martha Vickers as Carmen, Bacall’s thumb-sucking, nymphomaniac younger sister.
Then reflect on how Charles Waldron’s General Sternwood, forced to live in an orchid house after a lifetime’s dissipation and debauchery, is able to leave such an indelible impression despite appearing in only one scene, or that Sonia Darrin’s touching Agnes, the girl on the make who never gets the breaks, is not even listed in the credits.
(In fact, two of the other players I've listed above don't rate a name-check, but they both leave a memory: von Eltz is the sleazy Arthur Gwynn Geiger; Joy Barlow the bubbly, forthcoming taxi driver.)

Though the story of Chandler confessing that even he didn’t know who killed the chauffeur is surely apocryphal (it’s not that hard to work out!) this is a dense and intricate plot for sure, made more so by the dictates of censorship. (You have to guess for yourself, for instance, that Carmen is both a drug addict and is embroiled in a pornography racket, a vitally relevant fact that the film merely implies opaquely.)
Still, even if you don’t follow every twist it is unlikely you’ll be feeling short-changed come the breathtakingly tense final scene, notable for one of the most shockingly effective moments of implied violence in Hollywood history.
The whole film is a lesson in how to achieve and sustain mood, style and excitement without once violating the dictates of the Production Code or setting foot outside a studio sound stage.

Incidentally, though Bacall is superb as the duplicitous older sister, it's Martha Vickers for me.

Red Dragon (2002)

2012-01-31T23:15:00.001-08:00

Director: Bret Ratner
Screenplay: Ted Tally, from the novel by Thomas Harris
Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Harvey Keitel, Emily Watson, Mary-Louise Parker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anthony Heald

A vast improvement on its predecessor, but still a plainly superfluous third serving of cannibal stew, which turns the clock back to Harris's first Hannibal novel and re-recruits Lambs screenwriter Tally, so at least there's a plot and a bit of narrative drive again.
Though set before the events of Silence of the Lambs, Hopkins is visibly ten years older and tireder - like the whole moth-eaten concept, really. Worst performance is a close three man race, but perhaps surprisingly it's Norton who takes the trophy, as a supposedly battle-scarred veteran cop who looks like he's just graduated from high school: never has an actor seemed so uncomfortable in a leather jacket and Bruce Willis he-man vest.

This was actually the second time Harris's novel had been filmed: way back in 1986, before the original novel of Lambs had even been published, Michael Mann directed it as Manhunter. Smart alecks hailing it as superior to the legitimate series abound, but, though very different, it's still just awful, with an all-swamping synthesiser score and the look of an overslick tv cop show. Brian Cox played Lecter.

Hannibal (2001)

2012-01-31T01:23:00.000-08:00

Director: Ridley Scott
Screenplay: David Mamet, Steven Zailian, from the novel by Thomas Harris
Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore, Gary Oldman, Ray Liotta, Giancarlo Giannini

All that The Silence of the Lambs had going for it, besides novelty, was well-directed suspense and nail-biting narrative momentum. This sequel makes the brave decision to do without both, offering not a single twist or thrill in its entire, numbingly overlong 131 minutes.

Julianne Moore takes over from Jodie Foster, and is poured into a black cocktail dress for the grand finale, but chances are you'll miss it, having long since given up on this almost literally plotless and unendurably boring film.
If you do rouse yourself towards the end, you'll be further rewarded by the sight of Ray Liotta eating his own brain and Moore losing one of her hands - but not, the film would have us accept, her intellectual and emotional regard for the ever more preposterous title character.
If this is high concept grand guignol for the twenty-first century, Herschell Gordon Lewis has never looked so good.

Some beautifully photographed Florentine locations.

The Silence of the Lambs (1992) *

2012-01-31T00:29:00.001-08:00

Director: Jonathan Demme
Screenplay: Ted Tally, from the novel by Thomas Harris
Cast: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine, Brooke Smith, Anthony Heald, Kasi Lemmons

Unquestionably, this is an important film, perhaps more important even than its continued high standing would suggest.
I'd place it as one of those watershed films that totally changed the direction of the thriller and horror genres, every bit as decisively and permanently as the Lugosi Dracula, Psycho, Night of the Living Dead or Halloween. Indeed, of all the above, I'd say only Psycho rivals it for lasting influence and impact.
By influence, I don't mean those awful rip-offs that appeared in its wake and still occasionally show up today; I mean the way it has influenced the whole shape and substance of what a horror-thriller should be and could do.
Psycho had made it okay to be fun-scared by savage murder in a modern setting, and this took the terrible reality of sadistic 'serial' murder and made it de rigeur to a) centre a film on the clinical detailing of the killer's methods and activities, b) make those killers enigmatic, charming, fascinating, witty, and gamesplayers who set challenges for the cops to solve. The only way to catch such killers was to hope for a sympathetic, maverick cop capable of treating them with the dignity they deserve and, most of all, able to 'get inside their heads'.

At the time, the film was shocking and stunning, and breathtakingly new. There was much concern that it was going too far and too non-judgementally into the world-view of the sadistic and depraved. But it had - don't they always, first time round? - both a patent sincerity and obvious merit as a thriller, that enabled it to deflect such criticism. It romped home with the Oscars and Hopkins's wisecracking cannibal fiend became a cultural hero.
And now, we have Saw, and Hostel, and even worse films, existing solely to show killers torturing and mutilating victims in vivid detail, the victims whimpering and pleading in terror, and all with no excuse needed, just for fun - and Silence of the Lambs is unquestionably the reason why.

It is still a well-made film that may still provide an exciting evening of thrills for those who don't like to think too much about what they're watching. There's a very clever bit towards the end, now copied so much as to have lost its original power, where cross-cut editing is used to thoroughly mislead the audience and provide a very effective narrative surprise. The climax is still fairly nail-biting.
But nearly twenty years on, it is able to look at it more clearly and see how thoroughly duped we were by its pretence of seriousness and sobriety. The dialogue and performances are more or less roundly ludicrous, the psychologising is many rungs below even Hitchcock's Spellbound. The central character of Hannibal Lecter, the supposed sophisticate and genius who also enjoys grabbing people and ripping off pieces of them with his teeth, is one of the stupidest ever to be absorbed into the cultural fabric.

But the real giveaway, to me, is the title.
Just stop and think about it. Think first about the phrase itself, the formulation of it; how silly it is. Now consider the supposed relevance of it to the film in question; that embarrassing scene in which Hopkins psychoanalyses Foster and scores bullseye after idiotic, risibly quasi-Freudian bullseye, and reduces her to tears, and we are supposed to nod our heads and conclude we understand her so much better now, and have stumbled upon the perfect defining motif for the entire film...
What laughable nonsense! It's terrible, terrible writing, built on terrible, terrible Hollywood psychoanalytic cliche, and then to twist it into such a pretentiously ungrammatical phrase, and make that the title, as if it in any way summed up (or disguised, more to the point) the ghoulish swamp of pure sensationalism hiding behind its self-regard...
Well, I fell for it same as you back in 1992, so don't get angry with me just for pointing it out now.

Roger Corman and George A. Romero appear in cameos.

Blame It On The Bellboy (1992) **

2012-01-30T23:54:00.000-08:00

Director/Screenplay: Mark Herman
Cast: Dudley Moore, Richard Griffiths, Patsy Kensit, Bryan Brown, Penelope Wilton, Alison Steadman, Bronson Pinchot, Andreas Katsulas, Jim Carter, John Grillo, Ronnie Stevens

Good, fun, totally unpretentious and old-fashioned farce, involving the standard tropes of mistaken identity, mounting confusion, and people hiding and running away from each other.
An assured cast, beautiful Venetian locations and, best of all, a 78 minute running time (that leaves no room for the kind of padding and energy slippage that so often do for enterprises of this sort) ensure it never flags. Though neither the plot nor the jokes are outstanding in themselves, Moore in particular is in excellent form, reminding us of what a fine comic actor he really was, and the whole ensemble join in with mutually commendable enthusiasm.

I remember my mother and I going to see this at the cinema when it came out to generally terrible reviews, and enjoying it thoroughly, and a recent, cautious rewatch has happily confirmed my original opinion. How anyone could prefer A Fish Called Wanda to this is beyond me. Or, indeed, Brassed Off, writer-director Herman's nasty and infinitely less nimble follow-up, which nonetheless briefly got him the attention of which this film could only dream, mainly because it had nice brass band music.
Bar an uncredited walk-on and a bit of voice work, this was Moore's last screen appearance.

The Most Dangerous Game (1932) ***

2012-01-29T23:37:00.000-08:00

Directors: Irving Pichel, Ernest B. Schoedsack
Screenplay: James Ashmore Creelson, from the story by Richard Connell
Cast: Leslie Banks, Joel McCrea, Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Noble Johnson

Tired of hunting tigers and rhinos, Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks) lives only to stalk and kill "the most dangerous game". On a deserted island on which he has built a sumptuous home, he waits in immaculate evening dress for the survivors of the shipwrecks he deliberately engineers to struggle ashore, restores them to full health with fine wine and gourmet food, then sends them out into the jungle for him to hunt and kill.
Today, his quarry are international big game hunter Joel McCrea - a worthy adversary indeed - and Fay Wray, of whom (and which) more later.

Made on what would soon become immortalised as the sets for King Kong, partly to test their effectiveness and partly to get more value for money out of them, this breathless adaptation of Richard Connell's short story is as fine, and important, a piece of work in its own right.
It's probably the defining pre-Code horror movie, the clearest example of what a horror film could be like, but for a variety of interesting reasons rarely was, during those four extraordinary years of sound film production before the Code was enforced.
The assumption that the differences between this and a golden age (Code era) horror film would be more or less the same as between the latter and a modern horror film - ie: more violence and onscreen blood - is soon disabused, though there is a surprisingly gory shark attack, and the 'trophy room' scene, where our heroes stumble upon Zaroff's display of mounted and pickled human heads, is certainly a shock to audiences who are not expecting to see such things in a 1930s movie. (This scene was originally much longer, with even more shocking footage of heads and fully mounted corpses.)
It is a tense and genuinely frightening film; the final scenes of pursuit through the jungle fully the equal of Kong in dramatic effect. But it is the aura of decadence and dark eroticism that truly marks it as pre-Code horror; the fact - of which Wray's tattered and clinging dress would have kept original audiences more than fully reminded - that the cost of their failing to outwit Zaroff is death for McCrea but the proverbial fate worse than death for Wray.
As he states outright, with frankness enough to give Hays nightmares of his own, Zaroff has sex only after the kill, and he intends to make a very different trophy of Fay than a head on the wall.

And it is, I am certain, this darkly sexualised quality to Wray's horror heroines that make her still such an icon of the genre, considering how small a proportion of her output her horror films represent.
It would be interesting to know when her reputation as the genre's most celebrated screamer was first cemented, as I have a feeling it was from the first a kind of metaphorical tribute: the point is not the frequency or volume of her screaming (neither, surely, remarkable in themselves) but the seeming cause and, dare I say, effect of it: even in Kong, the true frisson is that her peril is maidenly peril.
Clara had it, and Fay screams. She is the quintessential embodiment of the genre's pre-Code desires, so carefully sublimated after the Code came in as to be frequently invisible.
Note how often her characters are put in some kind of restraint, or end up with their clothes in disarray; they are not merely put in physical danger from the films' protagonists but a source of obvious lust for them too. Had she played horror roles in the Code era she may well not have stood out from the crowd; it is her complicity in their sado-erotic elements that distinguishes her appearances in this, Kong, Doctor X and Mystery of the Wax Museum (which ends with her strapped naked to a pasting table on the verge of receiving immortalisation via a deluge of hot pink wax).
And it wouldn't have worked so well if her everyday persona was an overtly sexual one: a Jean Harlow, say, would be an interesting but far less effective choice. I think it is in the actual contrast between, on the one hand, her elegance, prettiness, cut-glass accent and mannered style, and on the other, the uninhibited abandon with which she gives herself up to the demands of pre-Code sexuality in her earliest talkies, that her continued and palpable appeal can be located. (Watch these films with an audience and you'll see that whatever she had, it has not become quaint or diluted over time: she's still got it.)
If all she did was scream when the fiend strikes that would be one thing. But as I have written elsewhere, she pants loudly, whimpers, her chest heaves, and she throws herself back in complete submission, her arms flailing. Such sudden moments of eroticised abandon hint at strange depths to her personality. When threatened by lusting maniacs it is not her famous screams themselves that make the deep impression so much as the instant capitulation, tinged with what really does seem like unconscious arousal, that comes swiftly in their wake.

The vividness with which she conveys sexual threat, at its most potent here, is the motor powering these horror films; the secret ingredient that made them seem so very terrifying at the time and still puts them among the most unusual and compelling thirties movies you'll ever see.
I said at the start that the pre-Code era did not produce the quantity of horror films we might have liked or expected, and that's due mainly to the relative newness of the genre itself, but in terms of quality, what was produced was frequently striking. And Most Dangerous Game is one of the very best.
It is perfectly structured, with the first half's slow-mounting suspense, as we discover hint by hint exactly what Zaroff is up to, giving way with the suddenness of Zaroff sounding his hunting horn to a brilliantly directed, relentlessly paced pursuit through the jungle. Set design, music and camerawork all impress, and visiting Britisher Banks is wonderfully loathsome as the mad Russian Zaroff, constantly fingering his scars and waxing rhapsodic on the joys of killing.
Noble Johnson, appearing in whiteface as Zaroff's Cossack servant, makes quite an impression too, as does the pack of terrifying hunting dogs, in reality lovable pooches borrowed for the film from Harold Lloyd.

The Bowery (1933) **

2012-01-29T10:40:00.000-08:00

Director: Raoul Walsh
Screenplay: Howard Estabrook, James Gleason
Cast: Wallace Beery, George Raft, Fay Wray, Jackie Cooper, Pert Kelton, Herman Bing, Oscar Apfel

Raucous and generally convincing portrait of life in New York's gay nineties, a sprawling tapestry of booze, broads and brawls, focusing on the rivalry between gambling king Raft and saloon supremo Beery, and especially their mutual attraction to good girl Fay.

The narrative moves swiftly if not necessarily in any recognisable direction: whenever the audience's attention looks set to wander, a new thread is developed, played out and substituted in turn. The film stops rather than ends, and there is a lot of hurried loose end-tieing that does not, perhaps, play entirely fair by the characterisation.
But as a recreation of an iconic era it is a success comparable to the later San Francisco, and the cast are lively.

Wedding Daze (2006) *

2012-01-29T02:53:00.000-08:00

Director/Screenplay: Michael Ian Black
Cast: Jason Biggs, Isla Fisher, Michael Weston, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Joe Pantoliano, Heather Goldenhersh, Joanna Gleason, Edward Herrmann, Margo Martindale, Matt Malloy.

Biggs, still getting over the sudden death of his girlfriend, inexplicably proposes marriage to a winsome waitress; when she even more inexplicably accepts, the frolics begin.

You know you're in modern romantic comedy territory when you use the word 'inexplicably' twice in a one-sentence synopsis, but accept that as a convention rather than a fault and you should have fun enough with this basically jolly contribution to the family. It handles its contrived premise with confidence, and carefully balances its appeals to female and male audiences.

The central story is cute enough, and the two leads well cast; where it slips up a little, as so often with this sort of film, is in the arbitrary and frequently silly characterisation of the supporting characters, and the subplots devised for them. (Edward Herrmann is especially ill-used.) And what's with that naff title?

Fisher is fully as appealing as she was in Confessions of a Shopaholic.

The Affairs of Cellini (1934) **

2012-01-29T00:54:00.000-08:00

Director: Gregory La Cava
Screenplay: Bess Meredyth, from a play by Edwin Justus Mayer
Cast: Fredric March, Constance Bennett, Frank Morgan, Fay Wray, Vince Barnett, Jessie Ralph, Louis Calhern, Jay Eaton, Irene Ware

Delightfully irreverent period comedy, with a freewheeling spirit that is as much a signifier of its pre-Code origins as the frivolity with which it plays murder, seduction, torture and adultery for light farce.
A true one-off, it is hard to imagine a film less likely to pass the enforced code regulations that were already in place by the time of its release, with all of its characters left unpunished for their scandalous machinations, not least Cellini himself, a cheerfully self-confessed murderer as well as adulterer, given to attacking members of the Florentine court and forcing them to eat live flies.

Though the film is set ostensibly in Renaissance Florence, and concerns real historical figures and events, La Cava deliberately has his cast play the dialogue in the modern idiom, with Morgan, doing his usual schtick as the henpecked and sexually ineffectual Duke of Florence, emerging a particular delight.
This all works in effective contrast to the stylised but lavish costumes and set dressings, like a kind of sophisticated adult pantomime. My wife likened the effect to a Morecambe and Wise play: very true.

March, in the lead, probably gets least to do, acting more or less as the pivot around which the action revolves, and serving basically as deadpan stooge to Morgan. And also to Fay Wray, who is splendidly funny as the infuriatingly dense and unresponsive model for whom both men are consumed with lust, much more interested in her bobbin work than in sharing Cellini's bed, and expecting him to feel likewise. When he whisks her to his picturesque mountain retreat for a night of passion, she observes only the overpowering smell of sheep and the absence of creature comforts: "You take me away from the nice palace with soft cushions, and you bring me to a place like this with no cushions at all!"
Bennett is elegant and amusing as the seductive Duchess, the true power in court, and my fellow devotees of the luminous Irene Ware will relish her very funny one-scene appearance at the beginning. It's really just a tiny role cast appropriately, but we can imagine it's a guest star cameo in which she typically shines; as a Venetian noblewoman, scandalously seduced by Cellini, who nonetheless refuses to co-operate with his indictment. ("You forced me to come here. I've told my story so boo! It's my own affair. He can come over my garden wall any time he wants to!")

The happy ending sees the Duke and Duchess, who have spent the entire film sneaking around the palace so the other should not catch them in the act of extra-marital diversion, happy at last as she prepares for a mutually acknowledged night of bliss with March, and he does likewise with Wray.
Enjoy it while you can, 1934!

It Pays To Advertise (1931) **

2012-01-26T23:51:00.000-08:00

Director: Frank Tuttle
Screenplay: Ethel Doherty, Arthur Kober, from the play by Walter C. Hackett and Roi Cooper Megrue
Cast: Norman Foster, Carole Lombard, Richard 'Skeets' Gallagher, Eugene Pallette, Louise Brooks, Lucien Littlefield, Judith Wood, Morgan Wallace, Tom Kennedy, Marcia Manners

Clocking in at just over an hour, this is one of those everything-but-the-kitchen-sink trifles that manages to cram just about every pop-cultural obsession of the pre-Code era into its wafer-thin plot. In just the first few minutes, in fact, following one of the most delightful main title themes you'll ever hear, we have a chase in fast cars, a spoiled rich layabout, a showgirl, gossip-hungry newsmen, a crash in a private plane, the wastrel's businessman father bewailing his offspring's hedonism and looking gloomily at the stockmarket figures, the even more hedonistic best friend, his life given over entirely to pranks and high-living (could be Charlie Ruggles, could be Roland Young, actually it's Skeets Gallagher), and the resourceful secretary the son will fall for (either Claudette or Carole; in this case Carole: not laughing, golden, long-haired Lombard of late-thirties screwball vintage, but the other one, the pre-Code one, with the translucently white skin and short, slicked-back white-blonde hair.)

As the title suggests, the film is about big business and advertising, and points out the interesting paradox that so much of what is wrong with modern culture has its roots in the twenties, a time rightly idolised as the most glamorous and charming period of modern history. Yes, the cancer that is modern advertising was invented in those sensation-hungry, business-obsessed years, but the intent behind it was so child-like and its manifestations so energetic and good-hearted it would be inane to hold a grudge.
Some of the most delightful scenes, in fact, are those in which Skeets tries to convey the importance of advertising to the hero (played, I forgot to say, by actor and director Norman Foster), who considers it a mere passing fad:

- That's been overdone! Nobody reads ads anymore. I don't.
- Oh you don't, don't ya? I guess you don't know what I mean when I say four out of five have it? It satisfies? Good to the last drop?

Particularly amusing are the references to Listerine and its slogan "even your best friends won't tell you." Listerine, of course, was one of the defining success stories of twenties advertising, produced since the nineteenth century (as Lucy Moore notes in her book Anything Goes) as "a surgical antiseptic, a cure for venereal disease and a floor-cleaner, (it) was transformed by advertising into a magical product which would free its user from the dreadful, life-ruining scourge of halitosis - a faux-medical term for bad breath invented by the marketing men. "Once rebranded as a mouthwash, "Listerine's profits soared from 4115,000 to $8000,000 in just seven years."

Directed at a fine pitch of frenzy by Frank Tuttle, one of my favourite unsung movie masters, It Pays To Advertise is now chiefly remembered for a delightful if all-too brief appearance by Louise Brooks as showgirl Thelma Temple, star of the show Girlies Don't Tell. "Oh boys, get a look at them gams!", as one reporter puts it.

Love Happy (1949) *

2012-01-24T23:53:00.000-08:00

Director: David Miller
Screenplay: Mac Benoff, Trank Tashlin
Cast: Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Groucho Marx, Ilona Massey, Vera-Ellen, Marion Hutton, Raymond Burr, Paul Valentine, Leon Belasco, Eric Blore, Marilyn Monroe

What a supporting cast!
Though several of them were on the cusp of stardom rather than in its jaws, there's still something vaguely ironic about the fact that the smallest and least consequential of all Marx Brothers films should have a starrier line up than Night at the Opera and Day at the Races combined.
And the surprise names show up behind the camera too: as well as Tashlin, Ben Hecht contributed to the screenplay without credit, and Mary Pickford co-produced.

Sadly, however, this is one of those films that was built to disappoint all but those coming to it knowing exactly what they are in for, and preferably for at least the second time.
Supposedly the last Marx Brothers film, in reality it is something else: a Harpo film, based on his own story and conceived as an entirely solo experiment ("Harpo had an idea he wanted to be Chaplin," is how Groucho recalled the film's genesis), with a supporting role written in for Chico, and a guest spot for Groucho grafted in at the last minute (so as to deliberately bring about the false assumptions and resultant disappointments the film has laboured under the weight of ever since.)
True, all three are playing their usual roles, more or less, (though this is a less anarchic and more sentimental Harpo than usual, and Groucho has a real moustache and eyebrows), but their relationship to each other and the plot is altogether different, so that ultimately the film looks ahead to their joint involvement in The Story of Mankind as much as it does back to A Night in Casablanca. Nowhere here do they feel like a team.

Having said all that, the film is by no means difficult to sit through for audiences who know what they're getting. Programmed in rep seasons of Marx movies it always brings in a good sized crowd, a few indulgent laughs, and much discernible chatter on exiting about how they enjoyed it a lot more than they were expecting.
It's zippy and friendly, with some amusing business here and there for Harpo, a couple of good lines for Groucho, Leon Belasco joining Chico for a splendid performance of the piano and violin routine from his nightclub act, and a jolly chase at the end. And in between, musical numbers from Vera-Ellen and Marion Hutton that, while not to everyone's taste, are more solid than anything contributed by the supporting players of their last three MGM films.
Come expecting a grand finale for The Marx Brothers and disenchantment is guaranteed, approach it as the curiosity it is, however, and you should be contentedly diverted.

A Countess From Hong Kong (1967) **

2012-01-23T23:08:00.001-08:00

Director/Screenplay: Charles Chaplin
Cast: Sophia Loren, Marlon Brando, Sydney Chaplin, Tippi Hedren, Patrick Cargill, Michael Medwin, Angela Scoular, Margaret Rutherford, Dilys Laye

Chaplin's last film, after a gap of fourteen years, was dismissed as hopelessly outdated at the time of its release, but has weathered the years with more dignity than many of its more celebrated peers, just as he predicted it would.

The film's error (at the time) was to strive to be timeless rather than fashionable, and light rather than weighty. Light it certainly is - as light as a helium balloon, overbalanced only by the weight of expectation it was forced to carry, and by Brando's clodhopping performance. (Loren, on the other hand, gets the mood exactly right and is delightful throughout, as are the generally excellent support cast, including Chaplin himself in a cute cameo as a seasick steward.)

Many were expecting Chaplin to take on the mood and trends of the late sixties as his previous film, A King In New York, had done for the early fifties, and were somehow affronted to instead find themselves served with a fluffy romantic farce based on a script he had written for Paulette Goddard in the 1930s. Much of what was deemed so alienating about the film in 1967 is clearly attributable to its roots in the thirties screwball tradition: the action gets underway too quickly for a sixties film, and as a result audiences have been known to misread the initial farce episodes on the boat as merely an extended prologue rather than the first act, leading to accusations of anticlimax, formlessness and triviality.
The other problem is that material such as this is inevitably swamped in colour and wide screen – but whether this is a fault with the material or the medium is a matter for the individual viewer.

There is no question that its greatest sin was to have been launched in one of those maddening cultural epochs we are forced to live through from time to time, that are in love with themselves and demand uniform worship from their product, and dared instead to ignore the consensus more or less entirely. Critics pounced, but as co-star Margaret Rutherford reflected at the time, "critics can be very tiresome gentlemen."
It surely has aged better than many of the original critical judgements, such as that of Ernest Betts in the People, who found the film "as dated as one of those silent movies we see now and then."

Rocky (1976) ***

2012-01-23T11:17:00.000-08:00

Director: John G. Avildsen
Screenplay: Sylvester Stallone
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Burt Young, Carl Weathers, Burgess Meredith, Thayer David, Joe Spinell, Jimmy Gambina

Believe it or not, this film did not win the best picture Oscar by mistake. It's an exceptionally good and admirable piece of work.
Even if I pay you the compliment of assuming you loathe boxing and would rather watch an upturned tortoise than two idiots pummelling the crap out of each other, this is still an irresistibly uplifting and effective salute to human potential, with simultaneously vivid and warm-hearted backgrounds.

Try, if you can, to think of it as a film in its own right rather than the begetter of a six film sub-industry, and you will hopefully find that it works as well as it ever did. Like a collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Frank Capra.
One day, Stallone will be recognised as one of the last true artists of American cinema.

Rocky II (1979) *

2012-01-23T10:59:00.000-08:00

Director/Screenplay: Sylvester Stallone
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Burt Young, Carl Weathers, Burgess Meredith, Tony Burton, Joe Spinell

Thoroughly indulgent sequel, reversing the 'loser take all' sentiment of the original film and replacing it with whimsical wish-fulfilment: a rematch, that ends with Rocky actually claiming the world title. (Stallone would go on to do exactly the same thing to his other great loser-hero Rambo, in a series of superman sequels.)

This is perhaps the only film in history that would actually be improved by an ending in which the main character wakes and realises the whole thing has been a dream. Damn it if it doesn't carry the viewer along, however.

Rocky III (1982)

2012-01-23T10:36:00.000-08:00

Director/Screnplay: Sylvester Stallone
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Burt Young, Carl Weathers, Burgess Meredith, Tony Burton, Mr T, Hulk Hogan

The one with Mr T, and a redefinition of the term formulaic - but what a formula!
Clearly Stallone had hit on the modern equivalent of the philosopher's stone: the license to print money.
In that sense, this is probably the most perfect of the series; content-wise there is nothing here at all. But it works.
Stallone is not an ingenue: he's a master showman, a 1980s DeMille, and he leaves nothing to chance.

Rocky IV (1985)

2012-01-23T10:09:00.001-08:00

Director/Screenplay: Sylvester Stallone
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Burt Young, Carl Weathers, Brigitte Nielsen, Michael Pataki, Dolph Lundgren

Shot from a recipe rather than a script, and all over in ninety minutes, this is by any measure an uninventive and unnecessary sequel, yet just as unquestionably one of the key films of the nineteen-eighties.
Hard to guess what audiences of the future will make of it, but historians will never tire of analysing its Reagan-era quintessentiality. It doesn't even attempt subtlety: the battle between Rocky, in his stars and stripes shorts, and doped-up robotic Russian Lundgren, who killed Apollo Creed in the ring, is unashamedly played as a Cold War grudge match. Those who insist on pretending the Soviet Union wasn't a threat to the safety of the entire world can look forward to a feast of cynicism; the rest of us may find ourselves strangely comforted by its old-fashioned certainties.

This was the first Rocky film I ever saw, at the cinema, for my twelfth birthday. Objectivity is out of the question, and I still put it on every five years or so to remind myself how old I'm getting.
It's a terrible film, unimaginably crude and formulaic, but I love everything about it - including its enviable naivety.

Rocky V (1990) *

2012-01-23T09:42:00.000-08:00

Director: John G. Avildsen
Screenplay: Sylvester Stallone
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Burt Young, Sage Stallone, Burgess Meredith, Tommy Morrison

His fortune lost, Rocky is retired, a hesitant father and back in New York, when the opportunity to train and manage a young protege brings him back to the old game.

The return of John G. Avildsen as director signifies that this is an admirable attempt to restore some realism to the saga, but many viewers may feel that too much water has flown in the interim to take easily to the sight of their hero on his uppers again.
A brave try, but it would have been better if fourteen empty years had separated it from the original Rocky, rather than three empty sequels. (I say that, because I have to. I don't mean it.)

One Sunday Afternoon (1933) ***

2012-01-23T07:37:00.000-08:00

Director: Stephen Roberts
Screenplay: Grover Jones, William Slavens McNutt, from the play by James Hagan
Cast: Gary Cooper, Fay Wray, Frances Fuller, Roscoe Karns, Neil Hamilton, Clara Blandick

This disarming bucolic comedy drama begins with frustrated dentist Cooper preparing to kill the former friend he holds responsible for a lifetime of romantic disappointment when he comes to his surgery years later to have a tooth removed. (I want gas." "You'll get gas.")
From this splendid black comic opening the film flashes back twenty years, when both were young men in love with the same woman (Fay, of course).
Cooper is a delight in both segments, as are Wray and Fuller as the women over whom their rivalry is founded, and Karns as Cooper's ne'er-do-well pal. The film is also charming in its evocation of the period.

Remade pleasantly but with less distinction in 1941 as The Strawberry Blonde, with James Cagney and Rita Hayworth, and then again under its original title in 1948, this remains the definitive version, with a much darker undertone, and Wray enjoying the liberties of pre-Code to show her character's transformation over the years from prim young woman to blowsy tramp.

Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009) *

2012-01-22T11:00:00.000-08:00

Director: P. J. Hogan
Screenplay: Tim Firth, Tracey Jackson, Kayla Alpert, from the books by Sophie Kinsella
Cast: Isla Fisher, Hugh Dancey, Krysten Ritter, Joan Cusack, John Goodman, John Lithgow, Kristin Scott Thomas. Fred Armisen, Leslie Bibb, Lynn Redgrave, Julie Hagerty

I have written here before that I am no fit judge of what are termed 'romcoms' (when they are entirely light and fluffy) or 'chick flicks' (when they also have a serious bit where the characters resolve something, cry and then hug each other).

This is not, I rush to clarify, for any reason so crass as 'because I'm a man'. The so-called 'women's pictures' - the 1930s and 40s genre from which these films are, I suppose, descended - are by and large a source of endless satisfaction to me, and on that territory I do feel myself able to wander at will without native guide to show me the safest route.
But the problem with these things is not that I do not always enjoy them, but that I have no mechanism whatever for sorting them out, and spotting which ones will and won't impress most people relative to the others.
For instance, according to Leonard Maltin and the IMDB, The Notebook and P.S. I Love You are good examples of the form, with across-the-board appeal, whereas to me they were like watching a bullfight.
But this, on the other hand, is by all accounts an inferior sample of the breed, that deserved and apparently received a rough ride at the world's box offices.

That's why I'm not a Hollywood executive.
It is, of course, totally and unreservedly inconsequential. But it is also, I thought at least, pretty funny, very likeable, sweet and entirely painless. Nobody swears in it.
Isla Fisher is extremely good, predictably easy on the old oculars but also winning extra points here for a surprising capacity (and willingness) for undignified physical comedy as well as snappy dialogue. Generous laughs in our house when she tried to hide in a clothes rail, and attempted to intercept a phone call by propelling herself across a boardroom table in the middle of a meeting. She's adorable, to be honest.

I've no idea how to go any deeper than that into it: I suppose I need to read the film reviews in Marie Claire more often. It probably has some kind of message to impart about consumerism, and it probably does so insincerely. This may or may not be of concern to some, as may the merits or otherwise of the male lead. To me, male leads in romantic comedies are a bit like children in restaurants: you don't really notice them unless they're annoying you. A few hours after watching this chap doing the usual sorts of things male leads in romantic comedies do, I wouldn't stake big money on being able to pick him out of a line-up. But he certainly didn't annoy me, so more points there.
In all, I would have said this film was no great shakes in the wider scheme of things, but a pleasant night in, and virtually impossible to actually dislike.
Still, what do I know?

Kiki (1931) **

2012-01-20T01:11:00.001-08:00

Director/Screenplay: Sam Taylor, from the play by David Belasco
Cast: Mary Pickford, Reginald Denny, Joseph Cawthorn, Margaret Livingston, Phil Tead, Fred Walton, Edwin Maxwell, Betty Grable (uncredited)

Perhaps the most startling attempt ever by a major star to radically change their image.

Mary Pickford is an oddity in film history, in that she occupies as sure a place in the pantheon of silent screen icons as Charlie Chaplin or Rudolph Valentino but almost entirely by virtue of her physical image (of radiant, blonde-ringletted purity), her nickname (‘America’s Sweetheart’) and her reputation as both high-ranking Hollywood royalty and shrewd businesswoman.
Her films seem almost incidental, rarely revived and not widely available to the home collector. Not that she would have minded overmuch: she once expressed the bizarre wish that they all be destroyed at her death.

This may be due to the fact that her career ended rather unspectacularly in the early years of sound. She had tired of it, and of the peculiar restrictions her screen image imposed upon her, choosing to retire quietly in 1933.
Though it is far from true to claim that she never took adult roles in her heyday, by far her greatest successes were those in which she played children: Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), or Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1918) or Daddy Long Legs (1919). She played twelve year-old Little Annie Rooney (1925) at the age of thirty-two. The same year she invited the readers of a film magazine to suggest new parts they would like to see her play, only to receive suggestions like Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland.

She made four talkies, all of them provocative departures from formula; she seemed intent upon forcing a new, more modern screen image on her public against their will. The first, Coquette (1929), was a women’s picture ending in tragedy, with Pickford not only speaking for the first time but also sporting a modern short hairstyle. The film was praised critically – Pickford won the best actress Oscar – but audiences didn’t want Mary without her curls.
And they certainly didn't want Kiki.

Kiki is supposedly a feisty, sexy French chorus girl causing romantic strife in this zippy pre-Code comedy romance, with Busby Berkeley-designed dance routines. It is a shrill, boisterous, exhausting performance, boundlessly energetic but wrongly pitched either for farce or romantic comedy, at times bordering almost on the grotesque.
There's a scene where she falls off the stage into a drum in the orchestra pit (as Chaplin would later do in Limelight) and, it's hard to say why, but there's just something a bit unpleasant about the way she plays it. She's sort of saying, "Aren't I hilarious and adorable and sexy all in one dynamic five-foot package?'
She falls on her behind a few times, in fact, and does quite a bit of provocative undressing; and the plot would have us accept that Reginald Denny (fresh from the peerless Madam Satan) is at first infuriated, but finally enchanted by her. She wears him down, and she wears us down.
Yet you can't ever quite look away. Pickford and the camera just seem to have an understanding with each other; even in a performance this preposterous, Pickford the artist is totally in control of her effects.
And while I can perfectly understand audiences, women especially, getting nothing at all out of this exasperating performance, I must confess that by the end I was coming round to seeing Denny's point of view, accepting in theory at least how a man could fall for this absurd creature.
This is star quality of a rare intensity; it's impossible to ignore it, even when you are in danger of being bludgeoned to death by it.

Dirigible (1931) ***

2012-01-20T00:38:00.000-08:00

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Jo Swerling
Cast: Jack Holt, Ralph Graves, Fay Wray, Hobart Bosworth

It's easy to forget the films Capra made before his style-defining breakthrough masterpiece It Happened One Night.

History has rightly made monuments of the later blockbuster paeans to the American spirit (though pygmies frequently take pot-shots at them, they're standing firm at present) but it could be argued that there is more variety, more cinematic dexterity, certainly more surprises, in earlier masterpieces such as American Madness, Forbidden, The Bitter Tea of General Yen or any of the three he made in 1931.
Of these, Platinum Blonde and Miracle Woman are widely known and celebrated, but Dirigible, though less acclaimed, is a big, technically demanding picture in no way meriting its relative obscurity, and hugely entertaining. I suppose auteurism is to blame: of all thirties Capra, this is the one where the revelation of his presence as director would come as the biggest surprise to anyone watching it unaware. ("The story was all strong, male-chauvinist adventure stuff," Fay Wray recalled in her autobiography, with "none of the delicate comedy sense that Robert Riskin was to help him find and establish as a trademark.")

It's part love triangle and part disaster spectacular, with some amazingly convincing effects work and dramatic scenes of aerial and polar peril. (According to Capra, actor Hobart Bosworth was hospitalised and lost some teeth and part of his jaw when one of the small cages of dry ice the actors used in some shots to simulate visible breath broke in his mouth.)
The actual plot has Fay married to a daredevil aviator and would-be Lindy called Frisky Pierce but secretly in love with his superior, though the real attraction (apart from Fay, of course) is the disaster movie stuff, which is still gripping.

Historically, it is an interesting snapshot of the time when the US navy bought a bunch of German airships and went into production on their own, a scheme soon abandoned when all of the massive, cumbersome and uneconomical things crashed. The use of real documentary footage adds an extra layer to this already fascinating venture.

The Hammer Dracula series

2012-01-19T07:07:00.001-08:00

Dracula (1958) ****
Director: Terence Fisher
Screenplay: Jimmy Sangster, from the novel by Bram Stoker
Cast: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling, Carol Marsh, Valerie Gaunt, George Woodbridge, Charles Lloyd Pack, Miles Malleson

The inevitable response to the worldwide success of Curse of Frankenstein, this would prove the most confident and efficient of all the Hammer horrors, a certain masterpiece of its kind, and one of those films where every moment of every scene is essential to the whole. Still exciting, and breathlessly paced (strangely, Hammer would almost instantly lose the talent for pacing they displayed with such casual mastery in these first two films), the film is also notable for the richness of its colour photography and the defining performances of its two leads. Every penny of a clearly low budget is brilliantly spent.

Brides of Dracula (1960) *
Director: Terence Fisher
Screenplay: Peter Bryan, Edwin Percy, Jimmy Sangster
Cast: Peter Cushing, David Peel, Yvonne Monlaur, Martita Hunt, Freda Jackson, Miles Malleson, Andree Melly, Marie Devereux, Michael Ripper

With Christopher Lee either reluctant or unable to reappear (depending on whose account you trust), and with Peter Cushing still viewed as the studio's principal star, Hammer went confidently ahead with the series, wisely opting to pit Cushing's Van Helsing against another vampire rather than recast the Count himself.
The result is almost as highly rated as the original in some quarters, although it's certainly more sedately paced, and a little of Freda Jackson and Martita Hunt goes a very long way. Blonde David Peel makes an interesting antagonist, and after a rambling first half, the film builds to a very exciting climax.

Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1965) *
Director: Terence Fisher
Screenplay: John Samson (Jimmy Sangster)
Cast: Christopher Lee, Andrew Keir, Barbara Shelley, Francis Matthews, Suzan Farmer, Charles Tingwell, Thorley Walters, Philip Latham, George Woodbridge

Lee's official return to the role is a strictly by the numbers affair, with the film half over before his first appearance and not much for him to do even after that. Barbara Shelley is impressive as the prim English traveller who becomes a snarlingly uninhibited vampiress, and Andrew Keir's vampire-hunting monk Father Sandor is as good a stand-in for Cushing as could be reasonably expected, but the real surprises are Thorley Walters's Ludwig - basically Renfield, written out of the first film and belatedly inserted here - and Philip Latham's Klove, Dracula's dusty family retainer. But the pace is relentlessly dogged, and Dracula's demise is uncertainly designed.

Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968) **
Director: Freddie Francis
Screenplay: John Elder (Anthony Hinds)
Cast: Christopher Lee, Rupert Davies, Veronica Carlson, Barbara Ewing, Barry Andrews, Ewan Hooper, Marion Mathie, Michael Ripper

Stylishly directed continuation of the original, with some interesting new ideas and lively set pieces; a distinct improvement on its predecessor. Some fascinating theological angst involving a stuffy cleric and a cocky young atheist (borrowed, along with a couple of giveaway visual ideas, from the recent film of Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons), heavy use of amber-edged filters, and a grand finale involving Dracula falling off a cliff and getting impaled on a giant crucifix.

Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969) **
Director: Peter Sasdy
Screenplay: John Elder
Cast: Christopher Lee, Linda Hayden, Ralph Bates, Geoffrey Keen, Gwen Watford, Peter Sallis, Anthony Corlan, Isla Blair, John Carson, Martin Jarvis, Roy Kinnear, Michael Ripper, Russell Hunter, Madeline Smith

Conceived as a Dracula film in name only, with Ralph Bates as a young devil worshipper who takes on the Count's mantle in Victorian London, the film was hastily rejigged when the American backers insisted on Lee's involvement. Apart from the somewhat messy results of that last minute change, however, this is one of the series' highlights, with Dracula finally arriving in Victorian London, and seducing the children of the three society wastrels who killed his servant. Very stylish, and full of fascinating ideas, but the series has still not resolved the problem of finding things for its central character to do.

Scars of Dracula (1970) *
Director: Roy Ward Baker
Screenplay: John Elder
Cast: Christopher Lee, Jenny Hanley, Patrick Troughton, Dennis Waterman, Michael Gwynn, Anouska Hempel, Christopher Matthews, Michael Ripper, Wendy Hamilton, Bob Todd

A very different film from its predecessors, this was conceived yet again as a Dracula film without Lee, but more ambitious this time: this was to begin the series afresh with a new star, much as Horror of Frankenstein attempted to do. As before, however, Lee was grafted on at the last minute, and the film turned half-heartedly into a sequel by means of a revivification scene that makes no sense in the light of the subsequent film, makes no sense in the light of the previous film, and is ludicrous to boot. From then on it's business as usual with a more or less equal ratio of good things - much more screen time, dialogue and involvement for Lee, a much livelier pace than was customary by this time - and bad things - a much cheaper, studio-bound look, some bizarre special effects. It's much gorier and more sadistic than the others too.

Dracula AD 1972 (1972) **
Director: Alan Gibson
Screenplay: Don Houghton
Cast: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Stephanie Beachman, Christopher Neame, Michael Coles, Marsha Hunt, Caroline Munro. Janet Key, Michael Kitchen

A radical reinvention indeed, reviving the Count in nineteen-seventies Chelsea, and also bringing back Peter Cushing to play Van Helsing's grandson. To keep the recalcitrant Lee on his toes, there's set another potential replacement snapping at his heels: Christopher Neame, in the role of vampire disciple Johnny Alucard (an alias Van Helsing has to work out letter by letter with a pad and pencil). Critics tend to decry the film's flirtation with mod London and dismiss the film as a camp absurdity, but the fact is that nobody ever watches this film without thoroughly enjoying it. At one time it was illegal to say a good word for it at all; presently we are at that nervous, tentative, cowardly "it's rubbish, but I can't help liking it" phase. Ultimately the truth will out. It's a great movie. It's fast paced, it's exciting, it has a great score, it's creepy and it's inventive. Nothing wrong with it at all.

The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) **
Director: Alan Gibson
Screenplay: Don Houghton
Cast: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Joanna Lumley, Michael Coles, Freddie Jones, William Franklyn, Valerie van Ost, Richard Vernon, Barbara Yu Ling, Patrick Barr

A direct sequel to the above, and a massively entertaining, densely plotted horror -thriller, with a distinctly Brian Clemens flavour to it and style to burn. The only problem is how to fit Dracula into it all: apart from one brief appearance halfway through he is saved for the climax, where Lee does at least get to make up somewhat for lost time with some great dialogue (more, ironically, than in any other film in the series, despite the fewest scenes) and a flashy, splattery death in a hawthorn bush.

The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974) *
Director: Roy Ward Baker
Screenplay: Don Houghton
Cast: Peter Cushing, John Forbes-Robertson (as Dracula), Julie Ege, David Chiang, Robin Stewart, Szu Shih

The series bid a truly eccentric adieu with this collaboration between Hammer and the Shaw Brothers that came off looking like a collaboration between Hammer and the Ritz Brothers, and with Dracula for the first and only time not played by Lee. Cushing, however, is back as another Van Helsing (though if we're pernickety about chronology it can't be either of the Van Helsings he's played so far).
Another in the 'impossible to dislike category', this 'first kung fu horror spectacular' boasts some impressive slo-mo demon-vampire-zombies and a wonderfully lurid vampire's lair, where topless girls are strapped to boards around a bubbling cauldron of blood, as just two of its many attractions. In order to allow for the requisite number of martial arts sequences, Cushing's vampire-hunting team opt to wait until nightfall for the vampires to rise and then fight them, rather than, as you or I might do, kill them in the daytime while they are still asleep. It's all undeniably good fun, and it's a real pity Lee couldn't have been tempted back to see the series to a close.

Freddy Got Fingered (2001) *

2012-01-19T00:55:00.000-08:00

Director: Tom Green
Screenplay: Tom Green, Derek Harvie
Cast: Tom Green, Marisa Coughlan, Rip Torn, Julie Hagerty, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Harland Williams, Anthony Michael Hall, Drew Barrymore

It's official: Freddy Got Fingered is now a decade old, and getting older.
If there's one thing it was never intended to be, it's ten years old. This is a film that runs on sheer nowness. Films like this do not age like wine, they embalm themselves. It will never truly find a fresh audience: only those who were there, and innocent bystanders.
And yet, this most dismisssed and disastrous of comedies still remains on the cultural radar where so many of its more warmly embraced brethren have faded; devoted cultists still celebrate it; there is even talk of a director's cut (though it's hard to believe the studio compromised Green's artistic freedom in any way whatsoever - if any film ever screamed "I am the director's cut!" it was Freddy).
And actually, it is still provocative and fascinating, and the same must be said of Green, who had something that can't actually be called comic invention but was, for all that, very definitely something, and something that his peers and progeny lack to a man. In a funny sort of way it was charm, a palpable idiot charm, and that combustible mix of self-deprecation and extreme confidence that you see in someone who is riding a wave of adoration in a job the nature of which (unlike that of pop star, say) prohibits the explicit acknowledgment of it.
The comedian needs to be laughed at, and so coolness is fatal. Peter Sellers never recovered from a taste of it, and that's why he was never able to revive his career after it was withdrawn. Girls screamed for Green around this time, even as he maintained his chosen persona of post-adolescent dropout goofball. Then he got to marry Drew Barrymore, which I bet he still finds hard to believe: a case of Mr Smith not only going to Washington but becoming president too. And then Twentieth Century Fox came to him and said: "Would you like to star in your own movie? Tell you what - why not write and direct it as well!"

Nobody thought it would do badly; indeed, among the many fascinating extra features on the DVD is a live soundtrack of the audience at the film's premiere, cheering, whooping with delight and screaming with laughter. But, as we all know, the film was released just as that coolness bubble burst, and it got near-universally bad reviews and became the film that defined Hollywood comic excess. Overnight, Green turned from a superstar to a pariah.
Like everything else in his career to that point, the moment was somewhat overplayed. Not every review was a pan: it actually got a rave from the New York Times, and an imdb contributor made the following valuable observations:

This movie, although not solid in plot, is that of comical genius. People are too easily offended by the actions of Tom Green, not able to see the comical genius this movie has. Breaking barriers is comedy, and that is exactly what Tom Green does in this film. The things he does, from jerking off a horse, to pretending to be a deep sea diver are all great ways to get the point across, this movie is something different. People who have any sense of moral value or a tendency to vomit should stay away, but who has moral values anymore? In the end this movie is nothing more then an inspired way of making me laugh. The movie is funny enough as it is sober, I however would suggest you see it stoned or drunk off your ass.

The extreme confidence Green must have felt at the time he made the film is plainly visible on screen. It's an astonishingly hubristic film, that contains not a drop of wit but pulses with manic energy, and is so unusual that at times it feels more like an art house movie than a big studio star vehicle.
Imagine watching it with no idea of who Green is - think of it purely as a narrative about a young man who wants to be a cartoonist - and you'll see what I mean. It's a uniquely strange piece of work, for all its nods to the American gross-out tradition, and to Green's own work on tv. It also has real momentum, and each scene is different from the last, revolving around some new, separate idea.
The best scene for me, where all the threads come together in joyous concert, is the bit where he takes Marisa Coughlan to the fancy restaurant -a bravura sequence from first to last, buzzing with incompatible comic ideas and ending in an orgy of slapstick so unjustified by the narrative as to play closer to Bunuel than American Pie.
I'm not saying any of this is intended, or even that any of it is done with great style.
But even if you hated it more than any film you ever saw, of all the insults you could fling, you know that 'boring' is the least likely one to stick. Most bad comedy films just run out of energy and lie there. Freddy never runs out of energy. It has too much. It's overlong, and there's way too much in it, but it's never dull, from the exhilarating opening titles, with Green skateboarding through a shopping mall to the accompaniment of the Sex Pistols' 'Problems' to the finale, as he and his father return from their Pakistan hostage ordeal and, among the placards greeting them at the airport, is one that reads WHEN THE FUCK IS THIS MOVIE GOING TO END?

Mr Smith Goes To Washington (1939) ***

2012-01-19T00:43:00.000-08:00

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Sidney Buchman
Cast: James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Claude Rains, Edward Arnold, Guy Kibbee, Thomas Mitchell, Eugene Pallette, Beulah Bondi, H. B. Warner, Harry Carey, Grant Mitchell, Porter Hall, Charles Lane

Only Capra could pull this sort of thing off, and great as Cooper is as Mr Deeds and John Doe, it’s questionable if even Capra could have put this one over without Stewart’s immense likeability in the central role.
It also benefits from the director's skills (both symbolically handed down to Preston Sturges) in confidently juggling extreme changes in mood from broad comedy to poignancy, and assembling a supporting cast in which every face holds the viewer's eye, and every tiny role leaves an echo behind. With Stewart, Arthur and Rains are likewise on top form, but they are supported all the way down by rock solid support.

Actually, as with a lot of Capra’s later work, the first half is a touch too leisurely, the last ten minutes too rushed. But this is quibbling compared to the stunning effect of the final scenes in which Jimmy, hoarse, exhausted but unbroken, continues to make his stand for what he calls “a little looking out for the other fella”.
Stewart's honest everyman persona was never put to a sterner test, but the outcome remains inevitable.

Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) ****

2012-01-18T10:55:00.001-08:00

Director: Michael Curtiz
Screenplay: John Wexley, Warren Duff, from a story by Rowland Brown
Cast: James Cagney, Pat O’Brien, Ann Sheridan, Humphrey Bogart, George Bancroft, The Dead End Kids

Here we have the Warner Brothers crime movie formula in perfect working order.
It’s the one with Pat O’Brien and Cagney as former boyhood friends and small-time partners-in-crime Jerry Connolly and Rocky Sullivan, whose lives take very different paths when Rocky is sent to reform school. Rocky learns the tricks of the criminal trade while Jerry goes straight and becomes a priest.

Aware that their films were frequently condemned for glamorising criminality in the eyes of youthful audiences, Warners here make this problem the central component of the narrative itself, as the friendship still retained by the two former pals is tested when Rocky’s celebrity gangster becomes a hero to the gang of boys Jerry is trying to keep on the right side of the law. (Cast as the latter contingent are the Dead End Kids in perhaps their most famous appearance outside of the original Dead End, noticeably less reprehensible after their debut appearance was itself widely criticised for providing bad role models.)
Much of the fun of these films was always to be found in their attempts to provide authentic gangster thrills (provided in part here by Bogart in one of his best pre-Casablanca sneering hood roles) while at the same time maintaining an explicitly condemnatory attitude towards them to appease the censors, often taking the form of introductory scrolling captions claiming public service status.

But the trick was rarely mastered as brilliantly as in this film, not least in its still almost unbearably powerful and moving final scenes where, sentenced to death, Rocky aggressively refuses Jerry’s pleas that he should pretend to be cowardly at the point of death so the boys do not idolise and imitate him.
With commendable ambiguity, we never discover for sure if Rocky really does turn yellow at the last minute or if his attitude of cocky bravado beforehand is all part of a performance to lend verisimilitude to his subsequent collapse. Most viewers, I suspect, lean towards the latter, more heroic option, but either way it is a shattering, audience-silencing climax to a film that never puts a foot wrong.

Touch of Evil (1958) ***

2012-01-17T23:32:00.000-08:00

Director/Screenplay: Orson Welles, from the novel 'Badge of Evil' by Whit Masterson
Cast: Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Orson Welles, Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff, Marlene Dietrich, Ray Collins, Joanna Moore, Mort Mills, Dennis Weaver, Valentin de Vargas, Mercedes McCambridge, Joseph Cotten, Zsa Zsa Gabor

Re-watching this film at the cinema last night, it occurred to me that there are directors like George Cukor, for whom technique is the art of the unobtrusive, defined purely as the most effective means by which the story can be told. Then there are the directors like Hitchcock for whom technique is the point, and storytelling is the art of finding excuses to display it. But few directors enjoyed Hitchcock's luxury of being able to select and tailor material specifically for the technical opportunities it would allow him. Most took what they could get and did what they could with it.
Orson Welles was an extreme example of the latter, a man who - despite his protestations to the contrary - loved dazzling the audience with audacious and innovative technique, but rarely got the opportunity to do so organically after Citizen Kane.
The inevitable result is a film like Touch of Evil, a cop thriller for which Welles was hired as an actor but upgraded to (re)writer/director at the instigation of Charlton Heston, where we see two enterprises running simultaneously - a narrative, about a Mexican detective investigating a crime in a border town who discovers that a respected American police captain is planting evidence to frame suspects - and a presentation, in which Welles crams in as much style, showmanship and experimentation as the routine structure will hold.
It's not seamless, the way that technique and content are seamless in the best Hitchcock or Cukor movies. Parts of it are messy, and the match is imperfect. The half-dozen or so most celebrated displays of directorial bravura sit adjacent to the film itself, rather than rise with it in the same dish.

Add to this the customary myth-making: Welles went off chasing his next project after assembling a rough cut, then was horrified to discover that in his absence Universal had re-edited the footage into a vague approximation of the film they hired him to make in the first place. But there was no conspiracy against Welles at the studio, as legend would have us believe. The only reason why he wasn't closely consulted in the post-production process is because nobody knew where to find him.
As a result, there are now three versions available: Universal's release cut, a longer one incorporating cut material but also retaining the extra scenes re-shot without Welles's involvement, and a restoration made in accordance with the changes requested by Welles in a letter he wrote to Universal after seeing their version, which is as close as possible to being a director's cut without the director actually being involved.
The latter is the most commonly available today, and while it is a better film than the Universal cut in a number of subtle ways, there's really not all that much in it. All available versions are good, share the same faults and - crucially - include all the showstopping Welles moments that have guaranteed the film's critical longevity.
The only really distinguishing feature of the Universal cut, apart from a very few unnecessary extra scenes designed to smooth out the plot, is their decision to run titles and theme music over the opening continuous take tracking shot. (Though even here, there might be a case for arguing that this helps integrate this technical display a little more organically into the subject. And I personally find the new edit - which begins without any kind of opening title at all - distractingly incomplete.)

So there should really be two reviews here, for two films.
As a chance for Welles, ten years after Lady From Shanghai, to show that he still has what it takes to turn a basic Hollywood thriller into a dazzlingly personal display of artful composition and presentational innovation: a certain masterpiece, fascinating from start to finish.
Four stars.
As a Hollywood thriller: a good, seedy, downbeat tale of corruption, with unusual and impressive location photography, excellent acting cameos and mordant dialogue. (That Welles is a superb director of actors is often forgotten, but both Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh have rarely been as relaxed and confident, and it really does feel like they're married to each other.) But the film is too long, key narrative points are needlessly obscured, and - in all available versions - the scenes with Dennis Weaver as the eccentric motel night man go on far too long. (In particular, his last appearance, with Heston at the now abandoned motel, is magnificently shot and lit, but seriously disrupts the tension of the film's final act.) Plus the title doesn't mean anything.
Two stars.

How much does it matter that these two films never quite coalesce? Up to you.

Suspiria (1977) **

2012-01-17T07:29:00.000-08:00

Director: Dario Argento
Screenplay: Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi
Cast: Jessica Herper, Alida Valli, Joan Bennett, Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci, Udo Keir

A young American at a German ballet school discovers that the teachers are all witches.

Perhaps realising that Profondo Rosso had taken him about as far as he could go with the Giallo subgenre, temporarily at least, Dario Argento pole vaulted several stages further into unreality and made his first supernatural horror film, in the form of this truly one of a kind fusion of fairy-tale and ultra-violence.
The narrative is knowingly ambiguous and ill-defined, and the set pieces conform to a dreamlike anti-logic entirely of the film’s own devising, creating as true a cinematic recreation of nightmare as has ever been realised or attempted.

Boasting a unique visual style, and some of the most beautiful colour photography ever seen, the film is full of expertly conceived, painterly imagery, distinguished or marred (depending upon your taste) by the director’s now customary penchant for intensely detailed physical violence.
Harper makes for an extremely likeable heroine, and it's just wonderful to see Valli and Bennett again, seemingly enjoying themselves enormously as the witches.

Quattro Mosche Di Velluto Grigio (Four Flies On Grey Velvet) (1971) *

2012-01-17T07:13:00.000-08:00

Director/Screenplay: Dario Argento
Cast: Michael Brandon, Mimsy Farmer, Bud Spencer, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Aldo Bufi Landi

Argento’s third trip to the Giallo well shows definite signs of diminishing returns. Nothing is done badly but the surprises are becoming harder to muster; there’s little here we we haven't seen before, either in the storytelling or the tricks.
It's still essential viewing for Argentophiles, but the casual observer will miss little if they jump this and go straight to the extraordinary Profondo Rosso.

L'Uccello Dalle Piume di Cristallo (The Bird With the Crystal Plumage) (1970) ***

2012-01-17T06:49:00.000-08:00

Director/Screenplay: Dario Argento, from the novel 'The Screaming Mimi' by Fredric Brown
Cast: Tony Musante, Suzy Kendall, Eva Renzi, Enrico Maria Salerno, Umberto Raho

An American in Italy watches what he thinks is a man murderously attacking a woman while trapped helplessly through two sets of glass doors. Later he becomes convinced that what he saw was not as it seemed, and as the only eyewitness finds that the killer is now after him.

Dario Argento's first film as a director reinvents the Hitchcockian suspense film as something altogether darker, more enigmatic and quintessentially Italian, thus setting in stone almost all of the rules and conventions of the Giallo movie.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is that it still works so well as a thriller: the plot is involving and clever and Argento's set pieces retain all their bravura. Ennio Morricone's score adds to the off-kilter mood; the violence, though by no means minimal, is not yet as self-justifying as it would later become in Argento's career. Not the director's flashiest film, but probably his most perfectly conceived.

Phenomena (1985) *

2012-01-17T06:15:00.000-08:00

Director: Dario Argento
Screenplay: Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini
Cast: Jennifer Connelly, Donald Pleasence, Daria Nicolodi, Fiore Argento, Dalila Di Lazzaro, Patrick Bachau, Michele Soavi

A schoolgirl who can communicate psychically with insects helps track down a killer in an Alpine village.

Ripe Argento madness, with enough plot threads for six ordinary horror films and excellent Swiss locations. Exceptionally bizarre even by the man's own standards, but for the most part irresistibly entertaining (under the usual terms and conditions).
The incredible opening sequence sets the tone and the film never really lets up from then on, though it loses touch with reality very early on. The rock score is more than usually intrusive, but will still be all part of the fun for many.

Profondo Rosso (Deep Red) (1975) ****

2012-01-17T00:17:00.001-08:00

Director: Dario Argento
Screenplay: Dario Argento, Bernardino Zapponi
Cast: David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia, Macha Meril, Eros Pagni, Giuliana Calandra, Clara Calamai

Despite 35-plus years of subsequent variation and deviation in films good, bad, terrible and amazing, this remains Dario Argento's calling card: the perfection of the pure giallo of Bird With the Crystal Plumage, Cat O'Nine Tails and Four Flies On Grey Velvet, and its first fusion with the baroque explosions of pure style that would become the central element of his next phase, beginning with Suspiria.
All of the above are worthy of investigation, but it is the unique combination of rationally involving narrative and wildly imaginative flourishes that continues to make Rosso so vividly exhilarating a film.

It's a murder mystery, that signposts its indebtedness to Antonioni's Blow Up by casting David Hemmings as the young musician who sees a murder and then, in its aftermath, becomes fixated upon the sensation that he saw something significant but cannot quite remember what it was.
This plot device - common to several of Argento's films - then plunges him into an increasingly nightmarish investigation, punctuated by murder scenes staged like rock operas.

Viewers without any taste for the excesses of the horror genre will find the whole thing too undisciplined and savage, and there's no question that Argento's relish in the process of violent death is problematic. But treat it like a kind of nth-degree Hitchcock movie, where style is all and content at most a facilitator, and this film should prove a stylistic text-book, wherein the defining effects and preoccupations of the Italian Giallo cinema are displayed in a state of eccentric perfection: black-gloved killers, fetish objects, strange juxtapositions of image and music, disorienting cuts to extreme close-up, ambiguous angles and perspectives, non-ambient lighting, the transformation of superbly chosen Italian locations into dream landscapes, shock moments somehow more effective for being announced rather than sudden.

Watch for Ossessione's Clara Calamai in a small but scene-stealing role.

Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) **

2012-01-16T00:08:00.000-08:00

Director: Alan Rudolph
Screenplay: Alan Rudolph, Randy Sue Coburn
Cast: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Campbell Scott, Matthew Broderick, Peter Gallagher, Jennifer Beals, Andrew McCarthy, Wallace Shawn, Martha Plimpton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Lili Taylor, Nick Cassavetes, James LeGros, Sam Robards, Heather Graham, Stephen Baldwin, Stanley Tucci, Keith Carradine, Peter Benchley

There are two types of successful biopic: the kind that is good enough or interesting enough to divert the attention even of viewers with no prior knowledge of or interest in the subject, and the kind that rewards those who seek it out because of a prior interest.
This, I think, falls very much into the latter category, though if you do have the least regard for the greats of the Algonquin Round Table you should find more than enough diversion, from the simple fun of spotting the famous people being impersonated as they pass by, to enjoying the visual recreation of the lunches themselves, to a number of excellent interpretations by a generally well-chosen cast.

The only problems, if we must stop to consider those lost souls who come to it not already addicted to Parker, Benchley, Woolcott and their peers, is that it moves at a very leisurely pace, there is little dramatic progression and, ultimately I suppose, there isn't really all that much of a story to tell about Parker.
The film's emphasis on her personal problems also gives us a far better sense of how draining she was on her off-days than of what sparkling company she could be the rest of the time. Neither is sympathy easily mustered, her problems seeming somewhat inevitable for one who spends most of their time in superficial pursuits on a diet of prohibition home brew.

Reviews at the time noted the extraordinary oddness of Jennifer Jason Leigh's speaking voice, which was defended as a scrupulous reconstruction of Parker's own; that it may be but it still sounds bizarre. And what price such authenticity when Benchley is presented as a suave sophisticate, played by dishy Campbell Scott, presumably on the grounds that we would not otherwise accept Dorothy's romantic attachment to him?
But it brings the times alive with thoroughness and enjoyment, covers most of the important stops (I particularly liked the recreation of the Round Tablers' stage show Yes, Sirree), and manages to give an enormous cast of characters at least a moment each in the spotlight.
And yes, that is Benchley's grandson, Jaws-author Peter Benchley, as their former editor Frank Crowninshield.

P. S. I Love You (2007)

2012-01-15T10:47:00.000-08:00

Director: Richard LaGravenese
Screenplay: Richard LaGravenese, Steven Rogers, from the novel by Cecelia Ahern
Cast: Hilary Swank, Gerard Butler, Lisa Kudrow, Gina Gershon, Harry Connick Jr, Kathy Bates, Jeffrey Dean Morgan

Her young husband dies; he has left a series of messages for her as she reclaims her life; she has to choose between two new men; her gal pals are there for her, but there are plenty of emotional ups and downs.

Over to you, really: a romcomdram that is so carefully tailored to its target audience that I am incapable of judging it on just about any level at all. My wife observed that it is "very Ally McBeal", and it is; it's up to you whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
A few hazarded pointers: it's probably a mite too long for what it is; there's the usual snappy, buzzwordy dialogue and performances; the characters are put through the wringer a little more than is generally the case for films with this sort of poster art. Hilary Swank is her customary likeable self; business as usual from Lisa Kudrow; nice to see Gina Gershon again; whatever appeal Gerard Butler holds is lost on me entirely.
You already know if you'll probably like it or not.

Burke and Hare (2010) *

2012-01-15T01:09:00.000-08:00

Director: John Landis
Screenplay: Piers Ashworth, Nick Moorcroft
Cast: Simon Pegg, Andy Serkis, Isla Fisher, Tom Wilkinson, Jessica Hynes, Ronnie Corbett, Tim Curry

The famous true story of the Irish immigrants who murdered 16 people and sold their bodies to anatomists in early 19th century Edinburgh is here replayed as ghoulish farce by the perfect director for the task, back after a 12 year sojourn in television.
The true events lend themselves naturally to black comic treatment, and the film also has a few good ideas of its own, such as Burke, bewitched by a comely would-be actress (Isla Fisher), using his half of the profits to finance an all-female version of Macbeth.

As always with Landis there is a surfeit of cameos (including Michael Winner, Christopher Lee and Jenny Agutter, the latter reunited with American Werewolf co-stars John Woodvine and David Schofield) and equal evidence of quirkiness in the main casting, notably a lovely turn from Ronnie Corbett as the head of the Edinburgh militia.
With excellent use of real Edinburgh locations, and a short and sprightly running time that keeps boredom at bay, it's nothing world-shaking, but all very good fun.

Dead End (1937) ****

2012-01-14T06:51:00.000-08:00

Director: William Wyler
Screenplay: Lillian Hellman, from the play by Sidney Kingsley
Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Joel McCrea, Humphrey Bogart, Wendy Barrie, Claire Trevor, Allen Jenkins, The Dead End Kids

Audiences coming to this film expecting another typical Bogart gangster movie may be disappointed to discover that it is in fact a social drama that just happens to have a Bogart gangster as one of the characters, and a secondary one at that.
But they shouldn’t, because it’s an always engrossing, sometimes moving and unusually serious piece of work, with an overt social conscience rare for a Hollywood movie of its time.

Adapted from a hugely successful play by Sidney Kingsley, Dead End is striking in its effort to convey, more vividly than any film made since the introduction of the Hays censorship code, a realistic portrayal of New York slum life, a world of poverty, causal violence, prostitution and squalor, cleverly staged on stylised but brilliantly designed and photographed sets.
It also addresses class tensions in an unusually frank manner, with Sylvia Sidney’s Drina striking for better working conditions, and Joel McCrea’s Dave, the former slum boy who trained as an architect and wants to build a new future away from the ghetto, torn between his feelings for Drina and his infatuation with Kay (Wendy Barrie) one of New York’s upper set, whose town house overlooks the tenements. (Ironically, in real life it was Barrie who thought it cute to hang out with thugs.)
Into this carefully delineated world comes Bogart’s ‘Baby Face’ Martin, a notorious gangster on the run, returning home to flaunt his new affluence and catch up with his mother and old girlfriend Francey.
These scenes are among the most powerful in the film, and feature some of Bogart’s best ever acting work, as he is first tearfully rejected by his mother (Marjorie Main), now old, dejected and repulsed by the man he has become, and then horrified to discover that Francey (a stunning cameo from Claire Trevor) has become a tired and wasted prostitute.

The film is also important for introducing the Dead End Kids, an ensemble of naturalistic teenage actors who would go on to take supporting roles in several Warner Brothers crime films (notably Angels With Dirty Faces) and ultimately, in variously renamed and arranged conglomerations, in a series of increasingly comic second-feature vehicles of their own. Here, as the street gang exactly like the one in which both Dave and Baby Face started out, they represent the perpetuation of the crime and violence that the slums breed, a visual symbol of hopelessness and despair, for all their amusing banter and seeming lust for life.

Seven (1995) *

2012-01-14T01:21:00.000-08:00

Director: David Fincher
Screenplay: Andrew Kevin Walker
Cast: Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Kevin Spacey, Gwyneth Paltrow

Most sources refer to this film as Se7en purely because that's the way that the film's title happens to be presented in the opening titles: an impossible standard to apply across the board, and therefore indicative only of selective juvenile veneration, exactly akin to referring to Peking as 'Beijing'.
We don't call Germany 'Deutschland' and we don't call Boeing Boeing 'Boeing (747) Boeing (747)', to cite at random one of countless films whose actual onscreen title isn't really what they're called. 'Se7en' may make a vaguely attractive visual formulation of the title (though in my view it doesn't because the figure 7 in no way resembles a 'v', this being the reasoning behind such substitutions in the past), but the idea that it actually is the film's title is ridiculous.
It doesn't mean anything, and it would also have to be pronounced 'Sesevenen', something I've never heard anybody say.

Anyway, on to the film, which I'm happy to report is basically worthless drivel combining sleazy scares with naff psychologising straight from the David O. Selnick-Sigmund Freud forties synthesis.
It's the story of two cops - one young and idealistic (Brad Pitt), the other wearied by experience and nearing retirement (Morgan Freeman)- attempting to stop a murderer (Kevin Spacey) from completing a series of slayings based on the seven deadly sins. It is extremely well made, involving and, if one is receptive to such things, frightening.
It is also extremely hypocritical, pretending to endorse the Freeman character's disgust with a world that is capable of producing such horrors and yet still happy to trade in them for easy sensation, as if a culture for which movies wallowing in sadism and despair are a reliable source of entertainment to millions is somehow unconnected with the corruption of its subject.
A film sincerely committed to the points to which this one pays plainly insincere lip service would be a masterpiece. As it stands, this is a superbly made, thoroughly gripping, and utterly disgusting, pointless spectacle.

Paltrow is lovely in an early supporting role; she ends up as a severed head in a box.

L.A. Confidential (1997) **

2012-01-14T01:00:00.000-08:00

Director: Curtis Hanson
Screenplay: Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland, from the novel by James Elroy
Cast: Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Kim Basinger, James Cromwell, Danny DeVito

Vivid backgrounds, good performances from Kevin Spacey and James Cromwell and a labyrinthine but entirely engrossing plot keep this Tinseltown crime thriller streets ahead of its peers all the way to the only slightly unsatisfactory ending. It's long and episodic but also tight: a difficult trick to pull off, as The Black Dahlia and countless others have proved.

The chief drawbacks are the two central characters played by Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe, whose fates you may find it extremely difficult to care about, and, as usual, some ridiculously anachronistic dialogue and character motivation.
Veronica Lake fans may also be peeved by the film's repeated insistence that Kim Basinger's character is a dead ringer for her. In its dreams perhaps.

Chinatown (1974) *

2012-01-13T11:21:00.000-08:00

Director: Roman Polanski
Screenplay: Robert Towne
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, John Hillerman

Reasonably effective thirties-set private eye pastiche that enjoys a somewhat baffling reputation as one of the most important films of the nineteen-seventies.

Short on both humanity and thrills, and boasting a plot that is simultaneously unsurprising and incredibly convoluted, it is unquestionably the work of cynics: their pride in its lousy unhappy ending is obvious.
Nicholson is all over the place as usual, but the supporting cast work well, and Huston is in scene-stealing form. Some good lines and performances; a basic but effective sense of period.

The Woman I Stole (1933) *

2012-01-13T10:51:00.000-08:00

Director: Irving Cummings
Screenplay: Jo Swerling
Cast: Jack Holt, Fay Wray, Donald Cook, Noah Beery, Raquel Torres

Fay Wray, sandwiched confidently between King Kong and Ann Carver's Profession, lets rip as never before or subsequently as an utterly irredeemable, selfish, mercenary, scheming, heartless sexy bitch, with not a single redeeming characteristic barring the obvious.
She's most of the fun, and obviously enjoying herself, as if all too well aware of how rare an opportunity she has been handed.
As a showcase it's a little ragged, and Jack Holt was always a stolid leading man, while the actual plot is a Boys Own affair replete with pesky Arab bandits and a pith-helmeted hero. There's also an incredibly exuberant turn from Raquel Torres, best known today for her performance with the Marxes in Duck Soup.
It's not high art, but Wray is sensational, and the film is irresistible if you're in the mood.

The Finger Points (1931) **

2012-01-13T10:26:00.000-08:00

Director: John Francis Dillon
Screenplay: John Monk Saunders, W. R. Burnett
Cast: Richard Barthelmess, Fay Wray, Regis Toomey, Robert Elliott, Clark Gable

Effectively doomy pre-Code crime meller, with Fay Wray cast intriguingly against type as "Marcia Collins, queen of the sob sisters and the best-looking gal in the newspaper business".

Other attractions, should you need any: Clark Gable, moonlighting at Warners in his nasty gangster phase, the same year he socked Barbara Stanwyck in Night Nurse; Richard Barthelmess, silent star who drifted away in the talkies; Regis Toomey chewing gum, and a typical torn-from-the-headlines Warners scenario by the great W.R. Burnett, with dialogue by Lost Generationer (and Mr Fay Wray) John Monk Saunders.
The plot is the Road to Ruin, with gangsters and Front Page hacks in their usual fatal embrace; Barthelmess plays his customary wet sap who becomes a reporter, exposes a bunch of gangsters, gets beaten senseless, takes a pay-off and gets sucked into a world of corruption. Gable wears a bowler hat and spats. Fay looks concerned and occasionally pretends to use a typewriter.

The Artist (2011) ***

2012-01-12T23:20:00.000-08:00

Screenplay/Director: Michel Hazanavicius
Cast: Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, Uggie, John Goodman, James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller, Missi Pyle, Ed Lauter, Malcolm McDowell

It's not going to start any trends or set any precedents - this is strictly a one-shot return to greatness. But what a shot! A simple story (lifted more or less neat from A Star is Born, but with the bonus of a gloriously affirmative ending) charting the relationship between a silent movie star and the ingenue he discovers; her rise to success as he fades to failure with the coming of talkies and is then wiped out in the Depression, and his eventual rebirth after she puts her career on the line to help him out.

So yes, it's a silent movie about silent movies, and if that rings any postmodern warning bells, don't worry. There are occasional sequences that play intertextually with the forms, constraints and conventions of silent film-making, but they do so brilliantly. In particular, in one of the film's two equally effective uses of recorded sound, there is a nightmare sequence in which the main character, tormented by the advent of talkies, dreams himself in a world where real sound is all around him but in which he still cannot talk. As he runs from a Hollywood bungalow suddenly alive with terrifying ambient noise, the film briefly plunges him into a forbidding open space of Antonioniesque alienation, as a gaggle of grotesque, Felliniesque flappers go loudly by, and a falling feather reverberates monstrously as it hits the ground. (The threat of sound and speech is constantly evoked: the first line of dialogue we read, spoken by the actor in character, in a film in which he is being tortured by dastardly villains, is "I won't talk!"; later, his career over, his wife begins a conversation about their dire circumstances by saying "we must talk".)
There are a few other 'clever' moments like this, such as when, at the premiere of the star's latest action film, we cut from him trapped in a cell to him having already escaped via the audience's reaction - first shock then overwhelming delight - at a plot twist we never actually get to see.
But actually, such moments are not 'clever' - they really are clever, and they do not in any way disrupt the tone of, or push too far into knowing pastiche, a film that for the remaining 90% of the time is not remotely self-reflective but an entirely authentic utilisation of silent storytelling techniques and ravishingly stylish black and white photography, all offered up in the sacred Academy ratio which, as Hazanvicius reminds us, walking heroically into the wind, is "perfect for actors" because it gives them "a presence, a power, a strength. They occupy all the space of the screen."
There's nothing postmodern about the effect whereby the actor, now down and out, pauses to look longingly at a tuxedo in a shop window, his image on in the glass directly in line so that his reflection appears to be wearing it. That could have come straight from a Chaplin movie, and if Chaplin had done it we'd still be talking about it today.

Of course, with even the best intentions, where a silent pastiche stands and falls is in the quality of its visuals and of its performances. In both cases The Artist triumphs.
It looks amazing, not just in a period look that is incredibly detailed and accurate as well as sumptuous, but also in the lighting, styling, make-up, irises, fonts and - to save listing space - truly, in every other conceivable area I could come up with if I thought you needed convincing.
Expecting over-emotive, parody acting? Think again. The cast is magnificent, both entirely authentic and form-vindicatingly effective. Dujardin and Bejo in the leads are perfect: both beautifully talented, both incredibly convincing in their milieu, and both, for anglophone audiences at least, benefiting from the additional element of relative unfamiliarity. But even the better-known faces seem almost eerily right: John Goodman, James Cromwell and Penelope Ann Miller will make you forget they were ever anything but silent movie stars. (It's especially nice to see Cromwell here, given that he is the son of the great Kay Johnson.) You may feel, however, that the real star of the piece is Uggie, a spectacularly talented dog.

Okay. Let us try to maintain critical restraint as much as possible.
Try to remember, perhaps, that this film seems amazing to us now, but in the context of film history it's a good silent film, not the greatest by the actual standards it evokes. Of course it outclasses The Hangover Part II, but how does it stack up against City Lights or The Crowd?
Well, the story is slight, and self-referential, and we don't really come to know either of the two main characters. They behave only as we would expect them to, in a context in which their lives are historical, not contemporary. They are the stock archetypes of the old silent star killed by talkies, and the ingenue that overtakes him. We never actually get to know them, and they never surprise us. The artistry is imitative, whereas Chaplin and Griffith and Vidor were innovators. The use of snatches of real old film scores I also found a little distancing, and at key moments too, albeit far from the act of rape that batty old Kim Novak seems to feel they constitute.
But enough. I'm boring myself, even as I type this.
None of that matters a damn. The film is a life-affirming joy, that chance you thought you'd never have to watch a brand new silent movie with a contemporary audience who are loving it as much as you are. The warm glow it leaves you with will still be there next morning.
The only real negative note is struck nowhere in the film itself but in the very juxtaposition it represents, and forces you to confront, and in the accordingly gauche, 'gee shucks, who'd have thought it!' tone of even the most appreciative reviews. How amazing! The film that's so charming it made us happy to sit through a silent, black and white film and still, you know, really enjoy it like it was a proper movie! It's got title cards you have to read instead of dialogue, and yet it's so cute, and we're so cute, we loved it!
Actually there are hundreds of films you'd love just as much if you'd only let them into your life. They're called silent films, and they're all like this.

The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) *

2012-01-11T23:42:00.000-08:00

Director: Harold Young
Screenplay: Robert E. Sherwood, Sam Berman, Arthur Wimperis, Lajos Biro, based on books by Baroness Orczy
Cast: Leslie Howard, Merle Oberon, Raymond Massey, Nigel Bruce, Anthony Bushell

Producer Alexander Korda’s customary lavish production values, a witty screenplay that amusingly interpolates genuine historical figures such as Romney, Sheridan and Daniel Mendoza, and the perfect casting of Leslie Howard are the chief virtues of this successful version of the Baroness Orczy’s famous anglophile romance.

The film was an attempt by Korda to find another international smash along the lines of The Private Life of Henry the Eighth (1933), after the blatantly imitative Private Life of Don Juan (Korda, 1934) had noisily failed to do just that.
From both films it borrowed the exquisite Merle Oberon, and it was especially canny in its casting of Howard – a quintessentially English actor with one huge Hollywood success behind him and many more to come.
The role of the Englishman who daringly rescues condemned aristocrats in France while maintaining a façade of foppish imbecility in London played to all his strengths, and he tellingly revised it during the war years in Pimpernel Smith (1941).
Perhaps indicative of the heavy burden of responsibility it carried, the film had a troubled production. Three (credited) scrfeenwriters and three directors (including Korda) worked on it, though only Young takes credit in the finished print. The first, Rowland Brown, was allegedly removed for making the film too violent, though as Jeffrey Richards observes in his book The Age of the Dream Palace, it might have benefited from less genteel handling.
He notes that there is “too little of the Pimpernel and too much of Sir Percy”, and certainly the story’s obvious potential for scenes of swashbuckling and derring-do is under-exploited. This is especially true when the rescue of Armand and the Count de Tournay - to which the narrative has been excitedly building for some time - is achieved through nothing more suspenseful than bribery, and not even shown but merely reported by subsidiary characters.
Though the scenes of Sir Percy annoying buffoonish English aristocrats and humiliating the Prince of Wales’s tailor are highly amusing, a few more daring rescues and escapes would have helped strike a better balance. In this respect, the 1980s tv movie with Anthony Andrews and Jane Seymour is much the better version.

Korda produced a sequel, Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1937), but it has not endured: Howard’s Hollywood commitments resulted in stage actor Barry K. Barnes standing in as Sir Percy, and of the original players Anthony Bushell alone returned. The best variation of all, perhaps, remains Howard's brilliant updating of the story in Pimpernel Smith.

The Ghost Train (1941) ***

2012-01-10T23:31:00.000-08:00

Director: Walter Forde
Screenplay: Marriott Edgar, Val Guest, J. O. C. Orton, from the play by Arnold Ridley
Cast: Arthur Askey, Richard Murdoch, Carole Lynne, Peter Murray-Hill, Linden Travers, Betty Jardine, Stuart Latham, Raymond Huntley, Kathleen Harrison, Herbert Lomas

Arnold Ridley's theatrical comedy thriller is here reconstructed as a vehicle for Band Waggon's Arthur Askey and (as he is actually billed here) Richard 'Stinker' Murdoch, resulting in an unpretentious masterpiece of British comedy.

It's not, perhaps, the most representative example of Askey's style on film (for that go straight to the eccentric screen version of Band Waggon itself) but probably the most successful attempt to insert him into a conventional narrative, with the original's plot and dialogue well preserved and Askey's own material carefully integrated. Ridley's play had already been filmed several times and was sufficiently familiar to have been ripped off twice without offence by Will Hay and the same writing team (in Oh! Mr Porter and Ask a Policeman). But this potentially superfluous return ticket proved the best overall version, as well as the spookiest of all the baddies-pretending-to-be-ghosts comedies, thanks to great sets and real atmosphere. The moment when the ghost train rushes through the deserted station rivals anything in The Cat and the Canary, aided by the intense performance of that great British actress Linden Travers.

Also notable among the generally excellent supporting ensemble are Herbert Lomas as the lugubrious station master ("if it be a natural thing... where do it come from? Where do it go?"), and the charming Betty Jardine, who only made a few more film appearances (including in Powell's Canterbury Tale) before her tragic early death in childbirth in 1945.
But Askey and Murdoch are the main attraction of course, and this is as good an introduction to Askey's gifts as you'll need, with the eeriness of the setting perfectly complementing his relentless bonhomie.
Some of the best of all British comedy has relied on the surefire formula of one irritating comic stuck in a confined space with an assortment of irritable people: think Hancock in The Railway Journey or its unacknowledged remake The Lift, or Norman Wisdom on the train in One Good Turn. But both are amateurs alongside Askey here: he mercilessly pummels his victims with crass observations, end-of-the-pier gags and groundless good cheer. The joke is partly that Askey’s faith in his likeability never falters now matter how often his efforts are repulsed, but mainly the fun of the attack itself: Askey’s barrage of quips, impersonations and inane suggestions for passing the time versus the undentable contempt of his fellow travellers, at least one of whom teeters constantly on the brink of doing him serious physical harm. The one song in the film, Askey’s delightful performance of “The Seaside Band” ends halfway through when the gramophone he is using for accompaniment is thrown on to the line.
It is one of the supreme comic performances of British films, and the film is a fine example of the professionalism in all departments that distinguished British production around this time.

Pointed Heels (1929) ***

2012-01-09T23:37:00.001-08:00

Director: A. Edward Sutherland
Screenplay: Florence Ryerson, James V. A. Weaver
Cast: William Powell, Fay Wray, Helen Kane, Richard "Skeets" Gallagher, Phillips Holmes, Eugene Pallette, Adrienne Dore.

First, an exercise in the maintaining of critical restraint.
Wish me luck...

Pointed Heels is a romantic light backstage drama with musical numbers, revolving around a chorus girl and her troubled marriage to a disinherited millionaire composer, her irritating brother and his wife, performing together as a lowbrow vaudeville duo, and the Broadway producer who is staging a show for the latter purely so as to tempt the former away from her husband.

Now, with all the cold objectivity I can muster, I shall begin by observing that this film is:
a) Fascinating, as an artifact of early talking cinema, with all of its frustrations and opportunities,
b) Delightful as a record of late twenties fashions, slang, mores and tastes, and
c) A charming romantic comedy, studded with evocative song numbers.
To anyone that has an affection for or interest in the style, flavour or mechanics of early Hollywood cinema, this should be enough to justify two stars' worth of value.

Of course, if none of the above is of especial interest, this will perhaps seem a primitive and unrewarding experience, tolerable if at all only by virtue of its short running time.

There, that's the middle ground and the lunatic fringe taken care of, now I shall preach to my real congregation, and we can start by scrubbing out those three stars. On a one-to-four star scale, this is a twelve-star movie at the very least.

Pointed Heels is a film to be found near the top of my all time top ten (to get a sense of which of my prejudices are most likely to conflict with my reason, there's a handy list here) and each repeated viewing increases my love for it. It's a gourmet feast of theatrical style, cloche hats and beautifully tentative early-talkie film technique (some of the dialogue, particularly in early scenes, is only just caught by the recording equipment).
The trappings, settings and preoccupations are like fizzy champagne, and the cast is a dream.
As well as William Powell as the suave producer putting on the show and Skeets Gallagher as his male lead, the film preserves a once in a lifetime pairing of Helen Kane and Fay Wray. They play sisters-in law; their bantering relationship is a treat throughout, and they even get a scene in bed together. (When Fay says that her husband is leaving for Europe, Helen replies: "Europe? That's in England isn't it?")
Kane is as wonderful as ever, in a screenplay that gives her the chance to do a bit of everything - singing, dancing, comedy and character acting. She gets to sing two of her best numbers, Aintcha and I Have To Have You, the latter of which she sings in a hilarious 'highbrow' manner when her character, suddenly struck pretentious, decides to cultivate a new sophisticated image, then again in knockabout fashion after Powell deliberately gets her drunk to cure her of her affectations. This latter performance is perhaps her most physically uninhibited in any film; at the end she falls on her behind with such force she visibly bounces.
And Fay, her hair flapper-styled and almost black, her deep-red lipstick coming out matching in the beautiful monochrome photography, has simply never been more gorgeous. (Director Sutherland, the man who took home the cheque for the arduous task of filming her here, in and out of costume, had just come out of a two year marriage to Louise Brooks: a reminder that we are not all created equal.)
To Fay is given the film's main dramatic portion, such as it is, and there are a few genuinely affecting and poignant moments in the domestic scenes with her frustrated husband.

It all ends happily but a little anti-climactically, since the print we have today is tragically missing a Technicolor sequence of the climactic show, presumably of the costume number we see Fay dressed for. Whether this lost scene therefore featured the film's only glimpse of supposed chorine Fay actually kicking her pointed heels on stage is therefore too heartbreaking to consider for more than a second or two.
I also remember my disappointment, after seeing that Fay's and Helen's characters have the same surname, on discovering that they were playing sisters in law and not, as they should have been, sisters. This would have made the inter-relationships even more interesting, as well as obviously a delightful notion in and of itself.
But that's the most I can come up with by way of negative criticism, I'm afraid. That aside, Pointed Heels is perfection.

City Streets (1931) **

2012-01-08T08:22:00.000-08:00

Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Screenplay: Max Marcin, Oliver H.P. Garrett, from a story by
Dashiell Hammett
Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Gary Cooper, Paul Lukas, Guy Kibbee,
William Boyd

City Streets was the second Hollywood project of Rouben Mamoulian, the maverick genius of talking cinema who would go on to direct such innovative masterpieces as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931), Love Me Tonight (1932) and Becky Sharp (1935).

Like his first film, the musical Applause (1929), City Streets sets its narrative against vibrantly used real locations, making use of unconventional angles and strikingly unusual, at times poetic, imagery, showing again that the supposed technological limitations of early sound cinema needed only imagination and skill to be overcome.
The film is also famous for inventing the cinematic convention of the voice-over, used by Mamoulian against the objections of the studio, who feared audiences would be confused by the sound of disembodied voices.

The only story Maltese Falcon author Dashiell Hammett conceived expressly for the screen, the film stars an excellent Sylvia Sidney (replacing Clara Bow after her much publicised nervous breakdown) and a young Gary Cooper as lovers whose relationship is cut short when she is caught carrying the gun used by her stepfather to kill a rival bootlegger.
In prison she comes to reject the values of the criminal lifestyle she had previously urged Cooper to take up, and on release is horrified to discover that he has become henchman to ‘the big fella’, the lecherous head of the bootlegging organisation.

Though ultimately respectful of conventional morality, the film features a number of instances of crimes going unpunished (impossible after the enforcement of the Production Code in 1934) and is among the most cynical of the early gangster films in its total disenchantment with city living, which it portrays as almost inevitably corrupting. None of the gangsters are especially unpleasant as people, and some, such as Guy Kibbee’s jovial Pop, are downright likeable. It is not the basically ordinary individuals drawn to this world but only their trade, presented by Mamoulian as a fact of urban life to be avoided rather than resisted, that is repugnant.
With all of its killings kept off-screen (conveyed through symbolic devices such as a shot of the victim’s hat floating along the river), City Streets is easily
the most restrained of the first gangster talkies, but whether because or in spite of this more poetic approach, it was apparently considered the best of them by no less an authority than Al Capone himself.

The Clairvoyant (1935) *

2012-01-08T07:49:00.000-08:00

Director: Maurice Elvey
Screenplay: Charles Bennett, from the novel by Ernst Lothar
Cast: Claude Rains, Fay Wray, Jane Baxter, Mary Clare, Ben Field, Athole Stewart, Felix Aylmer, Graham Moffatt

Interesting and unusual thriller from what would be seen as a golden age of British genre cinema were it not for the disproportionate influence of Hitchcock's thirties masterpieces.

Mixing straight drama, thriller and a twist of the supernatural, it never quite wanders into horror film territory but is often most effectively eerie, with a fascinatingly cocky performance from Rains, back from Hollywood to remind the little people how it's done, and a more delicate turn from Wray, as a phoney stage mesmerism act whose lives are destructively transformed in various ways when he discovers he can genuinely predict the future. Romantic strife is added to their troubles when he realises his powersonly work in the presence of a strange woman who seems to be falling in love with him (Baxter).

The final section, in which he is accused of causing a mining disaster that he had in fact been attempting to avert has a genuinely doomy atmosphere that clearly displays the talents of its unjustly underregarded director and screenwriter.
Meanwhile Fay, on a British sabbatical (that resulted in three films of which this was the best, but which sadly had a decisively negative effect on her Hollywood career), is at her most charming, and especially beautiful in her stage costume.

Ann Carver's Profession (1933) **

2012-01-08T06:03:00.000-08:00

Director: Edward Buzzell
Screenplay: Robert Riskin
Cast: Fay Wray, Gene Raymond, Claire Dodd, Frank Albertson

Wray, hot from King Kong, is beautifully styled, dressed and photographed in one of her biggest and showiest leads: too bad there weren't more like this to propel her to real stardom.

She's a hotshot lawyer whose demanding job and high media profile eventually wear down her initially adoring husband, former college football star and now so-so architect Raymond. They split up after he becomes a nightclub crooner, but she must defend him when he is accused of murdering a floozy who has, in fact, strangled herself accidentally while drunk!
As fascinating a round-up of pre-Code elements as that synopsis suggests, the film is an extraordinary time-capsule: almost every scene brings some new demonstration of the social and attitudinal gulf between its age and our own. Riskin - whom Wray would later marry - contributes a typically busy screenplay, in which social themes alternate with domestic melodrama.
Fay is, perhaps, not quite at home in the courtroom scenes, and her self-loathing address to the jury at the climax must have seemed gratuitous even at the time, but the domestic sequences with Raymond play as delightfully as ever, and Frank Albertson is his usual good value in support.

The Notebook (2004)

2012-01-08T05:44:00.001-08:00

Directed by Nick Cassavetes
Screenplay by Jeremy Leven and Jan Sardi, from the novel by Nicholas Sparks
Cast: Rachel McAdams, Ryan Gosling, James Garner, Gena Rowlands

A fine performance from James Garner is not enough to redeem this ickily artifical tearjerker, which uses senile dementia as a vehicle for cheap sentiment.

In an old people's home, a man is trying to remind his uncomprehending wife of the life they have shared by retelling the story of their courtship, which we see in flashback.
And without that wraparound story, the main body of the film - a forties set across-the-tracks romance - would seem even less substantial and original than it does in context. (It's all very Titanic, and even less effective.)
As usual, no attempt is made to create a sense of period beyond a fussy perfectionism of set dressing and backgrounds, and the young cast prove entirely incapable of conveying the effect their characters' life trajectories would have on them as they (supposedly) age.

It is only fair to add that this film enjoys a large following and is generally felt to be both moving and emotionally satisfying: a disappointing reflection on how easy it now is to press people's buttons.

The Carry On films

2011-08-06T09:20:00.000-07:00

Few today remember the ‘Somewhere’ films, beginning with Somewhere In England (1940, the title of course a reference to wartime security measures) and continuing on through Somewhere in Camp, On Leave, In Civvies and In Politics.
They were essentially vehicles for the unique British comic Frank Randle, with strong support, were often unbelievably ramshackle, crude and lowbrow and in the words of Leslie Halliwell, a fan, were “weird entertainments at best”.
But many must have recalled them when an unpretentious barrack-room trifle called Carry On Sergeant first aired in 1958, still more so when the phrase ‘Carry On’ became appended, as meaninglessly as ‘Somewhere’ to a series of subsequent wheezes, in various institutional, fictional and historical settings, with little connection to each other beyond their casts and the downward drive of their humour.
Nobody needs telling that what was eventually unleashed after a careful start and a few wrong turnings was a pop cultural phenomenon, now routinely spoken of in all seriousness as one of the key defining icons of the British twentieth century.

Beginning as mild, end-of-the-pier alternatives to the Boulting Brothers’s examinations of British society and institutions, taking in the army, hospitals, schools, police force and the like, they then passed through a phase in which they parodied historical and genre movies, before settling into a final golden age as mild sex comedies, in which the characters’ relentless obsession with sex generally and breasts specifically was counterpointed by the scripts’ insistence that all such desires must remain frustrated.
As such, they relied incessantly upon double-entendre, and it is this element of the films, usually likened to the seaside postcards of Donald McGill, that is usually cited as their defining characteristic. It is also of course what makes them seem so naïve and charming today, and what left them unable to compete with the less inhibited style of British sex comedy that appeared in the wake of Confessions of a Window Cleaner. But while the latter films retain only minority cult appeal, the Carry Ons survived their own destruction to become endlessly revived and celebrated British comic artefacts.

Since nostalgia is so important a part of their contemporary appeal, it is worth stopping to ponder why they were so incredibly successful at the time. Certainly it would be a mistake to unleash a little of that deadly paternalism with which we are conditioned to view the popular culture of generations past, and conclude that original audiences didn’t find the jokes as corny or old-fashioned as we do. They did, and perhaps they were already responding to a nostalgic quality in the films, not the nostalgia we now feel for the series itself, but an inbuilt reactionary regard for the dying traditions of music hall and seaside postcard humour, what was deemed ‘honest vulgarity’ and which seemed on the way out in a new age of would-be erudite humour, arriving in the form of Beyond the Fringe, TW3, Monty Python and their even crapper derivatives. Ironically, the Carry Ons might have died out a decade earlier than they did but for the historical accident of coinciding with a vogue for old-fashioned Britishness that was part of the late-sixties zeitgeist.
Disliked by at least as many as liked, they are hailed by none as great productions or great comedy. Instead they exist on a plateau of their own carving, where the cornier the gag, the more telegraphed the punchline and contrived the double-meaning, the more excessive the performance and bludgeoning the concluding musical riff the better. Sympathetic audiences see the lines coming and welcome them like old friends.

And welcomed very literally as old friends are the sterling cast of irreplaceable – certainly never even nearly replaced – greats of British comic acting.
Numerous guest stars and peripheral sub-regulars turned up throughout the main series’ twenty-year run, but those most indelibly linked to the brand are Sidney James (lecherous cockney spiv on the make, beloved by his public like few British stars before or since, with famous walnut face and dirty laugh), Kenneth Williams (in the early films: a young, priggish intellectual, from the mid-sixties: a near-indescribable whinnying, nostril flaring neurotic), Kenneth Connor (a charming young romantic bumbler who turned almost overnight into bumptious mayors and other middle-aged authority figures), Charles Hawtrey (weird, stick-thin and epicene with round spectacles and unnaturally black hair, an uncontainable eccentric on screen and off), Barbara Windsor (bubbly blonde with unexceptional but much fixated-upon breasts and an ingratiating giggle, can make as well as take a joke), Angela Douglas, Liz Fraser, Shirley Eaton (less exuberant sexy blondes from the days before Barbara), Jim Dale (the handsome young man the script occasionally called for, very likeable, and good at stunts), Hattie Jacques (indelibly the hospital matron, sometimes fearsome, alternately reticent or oversexed), Bernard Bresslaw (balding and huge, either Sid’s gormless mate or else heavily disguised in specialty turns), Peter Butterworth (devious and shabby middle-aged opportunist, more interested in making small sums of money than pursuing the other), Jack Douglas (infantile man in spectacles and cloth cap plagued by violent involuntary movements and accompanying exclamations), Terry Scott (sometimes henpecked, usually leering, a podgy, younger, middle-class Sid), Patsy Rowlands (downtrodden wife or secretary seething with repressed passions), Leslie Phillips (suave, lady-killing playboy), plus strong support from June Whitfield, Jacki Piper, Richard O’Callaghan, Bernard Cribbins, Bill Maynard, Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Cope, Windsor Davies, Marianne Stone, Carol Hawkins, Sally Geeson, Margaret Nolan, Valerie Leon, Dilys Laye, Julians Holloway and Orchard, and many more.

All the series were directed by Gerald Thomas, and all but the last produced by Peter Rogers (he was still on hand as an exec, but handed over the actual job of production to John Goldstone.) The first six were written by Norman Hudis, whereupon Talbot Rothwell took over, penning all the remainder but the last four. (Behind and Columbus were written by Dave Freeman, England by Jack Seddon and David Pursall, and Emmannuelle by Lance Peters.) Adding immeasurably to the fun in almost all was the crudely reinforcing music by Eric Rogers.

None are great films, but a world without them is unthinkable.

Carry On Sergeant (1958) *

2011-08-06T08:45:00.000-07:00

Cast: Hawtrey, Connor, Williams, Jacques, Eaton and Scott, with William Hartnell, Bob Monkhouse, Eric Barker, Dora Bryan, Bill Owen

“Carry on, Sergeant!” is of course a well-known military instruction: in selecting it as a title, this film was in no way expecting or announcing itself to be part of a series to be known as a ‘Carry On film’. The use of the phrase as collective nomenclature is therefore purest accident. The film could have been called That’s My Sergeant, or Up The Army, or Settle Down, Men, and we’d all be talking about the That’s My films, or the Up The series, or describing some other film as trading in Settle Down humour.
That this film, of all films, should have had such monumental cultural repercussions, therefore, is probably the thought that will most preoccupy audiences coming to it with its pedigree already established, for it is certainly an innocuous thing, at least as inconsequential as it is likeable. Rarely have oaks grown from littler acorns. A happy, jolly ring-binder of assorted army wheezes, still bearing the fingerprints and tobacco stains of Frank Randle and George Formby and Ronnie Shiner, and all the others who have used them before, what really stands out is the team work: Connor, Hawtrey and Williams (the latter especially charmingly in early, diffident mode) work beautifully, and they work beautifully together: if there is the germ of a series here, it’s strictly in the playing.

Carry On Nurse (1959) *

2011-08-06T08:42:00.000-07:00

Cast: Connor, Hawtrey, Jacques, Phillips, Sims, Eaton and Williams, with June Whitfield, Bill Owen, Wilfred Hyde-White

Nice to see the pick of Sergeant’s cast back and looking like a team, but the star of the show is really Eaton, here looking set to stay, but in fact treating us to the second and best of her but-three appearances as the series’ lead female non-grotesque. Her replacement would prove elusive to the series’ producers in the films to come, with first Liz Fraser and then Angela Douglas briefly emerging as the most satisfactory candidates, until the lucky day that they found in Barbara Windsor a sex object who is also one of the boys, and only a notch, if that, below Williams in cartoon gargoyle performance level. We also get Leslie Phillips, an honorary rather than fully paid-up team member (more fully associated with the similar, concurrent Doctor series) making the first of his appearances as young male non-grotesque. Permanently filling these shoes was a comparable problem: Jim Dale is their most familiar occupant, but he left the party early and unresolved struggle dominated ever after, with Richard O’Callaghan making the bravest fist, and Kenneth Cope the most versatile one.
This still isn’t really looking a series yet, even the reuse of the name feels like an opportunistic announcement of the same cast and production team than the bolder assertion that ‘this is the second film in what we hope will be a long-running film series that will in time be seen as one of the defining elements of British cinema’ would be. The most anticipatory aspects are Hattie Jacques getting her first chance to play Matron, and the joke that made the film a hit the world over: querulous patient Wilfred Hyde-White having a daffodil stuck up his bum in place of a thermometer.

Carry On Teacher (1959) **

2011-08-06T08:30:00.000-07:00

Cast: Connor, Phillips, Hawtrey, Williams, Sims and Jacques, with Ted Ray, Rosalind Knight, Richard O’Sullivan and Carol White

My favourite of the black and white Carry Ons, a very sweet and historically fascinating entry, boasting nice work from guest star Ted Ray as the headmaster, an early appearance from Richard O’Sullivan (as the chief schoolboy agitator, called Robin of course) and a genuinely telling snapshot of the moment when the progressivists were seizing control of the education system in Britain. The Carry On position, of course, is face firmly backwards, but there is a measure of complacency in the mockery that seems ironic in the light of how things really turned out.

Carry On Constable (1960) *

2011-08-06T08:29:00.000-07:00

Cast: James, Connor, Hawtrey, Williams, Phillips, Sims, Eaton and Jacques, with Eric Barker, Cyril Chamberlain.

Amiable romp in which we say hello to Sid and goodbye to Shirley Eaton (at least until she reteams with James and Connor in the sub-Carry On What a Carve Up the following year). Leslie Phillips also bows out now, until Carry On Columbus (when he stepped in to fill the role accepted by Frankie Howerd shortly before his death). James’s instant head boy confidence is the most striking thing here: what we think of as typical Carry On humour is still far from typical, though. For that you really have to wait for Rothwell to take over from Hudis as screenwriter, and even he’ll need to settle in a bit first.

Carry On Regardless (1960) *

2011-08-06T08:26:00.000-07:00

Cast: James, Connor, Hawtrey, Sims, Williams, Fraser and Jacques, with Bill Owen, Esma Cannon, Fenella Fielding

If nothing else, this is a fully up and running series now, as evidenced by this episodic, sketch-format screenplay that exists purely to make use of the familiar players.
The pacing feels more authentic too, freed as we are (though only temporarily, it must be admitted) from the implicit demand that we should be interested in the narrative thread, when all we really want, of course, is to see Sid and Kenny and the gang. This is a kind of halfway house, twice as interesting as the other early entries; maybe one and a half times as funny.

Carry On Cruising (1962)

2011-08-06T08:23:00.000-07:00

Cast: James, Williams, Fraser and Connor, with Dilys Laye, Esma Cannon and Lance Percival.

The last for Hudis, the first in colour, and one of the very few I’ve only ever been able to sit through once. Percival apparently earned his role at the expense of Hawtrey who, his head swollen by a newspaper review that said a Carry On without him would be impossible, promptly demanded star billing and a star on his dressing room door, and was instead booted off the film entirely.
On its own merits this may or may not be a pleasant enough mild shipboard comedy. As a Carry On film: forget it.

Carry On Cabby (1963) *

2011-08-06T08:20:00.000-07:00

Cast: James, Jacques, Connor, Hawtrey, Fraser and Dale, with Esma Cannon, Bill Owen, Amanda Barrie

With Hudis off to Hollywood, the producers co-opted an unrelated script called Call Me A Cab and welcomed Talbot Rothwell to the fold.
Rothwell is probably the single most important factor in creating what we now think of as the Carry On style, which is why this script, not written for the series, plays far more typically than most of those that preceded it. Jim Dale looks in for the first time, and Fraser for the last until her reappearance, batting for the shrews, in 1975’s Carry On Behind. First of very, very few entries in the series not to feature Kenneth Williams.

Carry On Jack (1964)

2011-08-06T08:14:00.000-07:00

Cast: Williams, Hawtrey and Dale, with Juliet Mills, Bernard Cribbins, Donald Houston

Blaze away all you want about the tackiness of the final films in the series, but even Carry On Emmannuelle isn’t quite as boring as this. It is important, because it consolidates Rothwell’s position as the new regular writer of the series, and because it’s the first to show the series can embrace historical settings without losing its overriding comic identity (only just though, and the absence of most of the regular team members doesn’t help). We’re back in colour again, Cribbins fits in well, and Juliet Mills is a pleasant novelty, but the laughs can be counted on the fingers of one stump.

Carry On Spying (1964) *

2011-08-06T08:11:00.000-07:00

Cast: Williams, Hawtrey, Windsor and Dale, with Bernard Cribbins, Dilys Laye, Eric Barker

Cribbins, now seemingly set sure for team member status, instead drops out until Columbus, and Dale continues his slow ascent through the ranks, but the big news is the arrival of Barbara Windsor, playing a genuinely sweet and attractive ingénue for the only time in her Carry On career. There are tit jokes, but she is restrained, demure, even embarrassed in the face of them. (It’s her next, Carry On Doctor, that introduces the facial contortions, waddle, giggle, and delighted “Saucy!” in response to crass innuendo.)
Dilys Laye, another semi-regular, has atypical fun as a slinky double-agent, and says "Stop messin' about" to Kenneth Williams, who is doing his famous radio 'Snide' characterisation for the only time on film. The rest affects to parody Bond by parodying The Third Man. This is more sustained genre pastiche than we are used to from the films, not quite as exacting as the deadly Carry On Cowboy, but far less removed from its material than is usually the case.
The last of the series to be made in black and white; it’ll do fine, while we’re waiting for Camping.

Carry On Cleo (1964) **

2011-08-06T08:09:00.000-07:00

Cast: Williams, James, Connor, Hawtrey, Sims and Dale, with Amanda Barrie, Jon Pertwee

Now we’re getting there: more movie parody, but one in which the actors are free to essentially be themselves. So the joke is not Kenneth Williams playing Julius Caesar, but rather Julius Caesar being reinvented as a Kenneth Williams character. The difference is less subtle than it sounds, and it’s why this film is so much more satisfying than Carry On Cowboy.
Plus, the innuendoes are starting to appear, and Amanda Barrie is wonderful as a Sloaney Cleopatra. “I have a poisonous asp,” she tells Sid’s Mark Anthony. “I wouldn’t say that,” he hurries to reassure her.

Carry On Cowboy (1965)

2011-08-06T08:08:00.000-07:00

Cast: James, Williams, Sims, Dale, Bresslaw, Hawtrey and Butterworth, with Angela Douglas, Jon Pertwee, Margaret Nolan

Useful for its yoking of three of my favourite regulars-to-be to the ever expanding casting cart: Bresslaw, Butterworth and Nolan, that paradigm of dim glamour. But the western parody is played boringly real, with the cast all doing American accents and never once welcoming the audience into the joke. Williams provides some fun doing an impersonation of Hal Roach. Otherwise: mildly amusing if you enjoy westerns really a hell of a lot.

Carry On Screaming (1966) *

2011-08-06T08:05:00.000-07:00

Cast: Williams, Dale, Hawtrey, Sims, Bresslaw and Butterworth, with Harry H. Corbett, Fenella Fielding, Angela Douglas, Jon Pertwee

Only marginally better than Cowboy but more fondly recalled and much tougher to dislike, this supposed parody of Hammer Horror films, the series' contemporary and rival British lowbrow cultural institution, is really not much like the object of its satire at all, playing far more on the conventions of earlier American horror films. But it looks good, and Fielding is magnificent as perhaps the best of all those Morticia Addams type characters in which horror comedies habitually abound.
Bringing in Harry H Corbett from Steptoe and Son is only a partial success; but they would try the guest star lead strategy again to even more distracting effect in Follow That Camel.
If you don’t like horror films but do like westerns, you can probably reverse the reviews and star ratings for this and Cowboy.

Don't Lose Your Head (1966) *

2011-08-06T08:03:00.000-07:00

Cast: James, Williams, Dale, Hawtrey, Sims and Butterworth, with Dany Robin, Marianne Stone.

A switch of distributors from Anglo-Amalgamated to Rank meant the temporary abandonment of the ‘Carry On’ brand, though it is always added now anyway, in defiance of what actually appears on the screen.
This is good enough fun – a Scarlet Pimpernel romp – though for me the dressing up is starting to stale, and the series needs to get back into modern dress, and stop relying on gestures of genre parody and historical revisionism, to really earn its place in British cultural history.

Follow That Camel (1966)

2011-08-06T08:01:00.000-07:00

Cast: Williams, Dale, Butterworth, Hawtrey, Sims and Bresslaw, with Phil Silvers, Anita Harris, Angela Douglas, John Bluthal, Julian Holloway.

Or ‘Carry On Follow That Camel’ according to everyone and everything except the titles.
Phil Silvers gets the guest lead, but the results are patchy. Frankly, we have our team now and we like them as they are; guest stars are fine, but don’t try to give them the whole show. (In truth, Silvers is not on form even if the script he is given would allow him to be; Williams in his diaries bemoans his unprofessionalism and bad breath, constantly referring to him as ‘she’. “There seems to be no respite from this kind of man,” he writes. “You mention the county of Kent and he says ‘O! You Kent do that!’ and you’re supposed to fall about.”)
Now it really is time to put away the costume box.

Carry On Doctor (1968) *

2011-08-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

Cast: Williams, Jacques, James, Bresslaw, Dale, Sims, Hawtrey, Windsor and Butterworth, with Frankie Howerd, Anita Harris, Dilys Laye, Dandy Nichols, Julian Holloway.

A return to the bedpans with the regulars all seen to advantage: Williams as the supercilious surgeon, Sid as the wily patient smoking under the bedclothes, Bernie embarking on a charming romance with Dilys Laye in the adjoining ward, Hattie Jacques back, after a seven film absence, to play Matron again and Babs eating a lovely-looking pear. There’s even a joke about Carry On Nurse.
Frankie Howerd – the only guest lead who doesn’t feel like an uncomfortable graft, and not coincidentally the only one invited to do it again – fits seamlessly into the ensemble, to become almost an honorary team member. (When he died all the obituaries prominently mentioned his connection to the series, one even called him ‘King of the Carry Ons’.) The scripts will get funnier than this, but we’re starting to roll now: just one more aberration to go.

Carry On Up The Khyber (1968) *

2011-08-06T07:53:00.000-07:00

Cast: James, Williams, Hawtrey, Sims, Bresslaw, Butterworth and Scott, with Roy Castle, Angela Douglas, Julian Holloway.

A temporary step backwards that for a number of reasons, none to be found on screen, is generally considered not just the best, but far and away the best of the series.
Because it’s opted to spoof Kiplingesque Boys’ Own colonial adventures, we are all supposed to pretend that it is not simply ransacking another page of history as randomly and superficially as it did the Roman Empire, and that the team are not playing spivs and incompetents because that’s what they always do, but instead that this is genuine, biting satire in the David Frost tradition, with British imperial attitudes coming in for a genuine thump, not even by happy accident but genuinely by design.
Of course, if this were the case it would make it among the least interesting, but don’t worry: it isn’t. It’s an utterly typical, utterly innocuous costume caper, with a good but not outstanding set of jokes and performances, and Williams and Bresslaw blacked-up as Indians with funny names and voices.
The best news is that Terry Scott’s back for the first time since Sergeant to take his place as a bona fide team member. The last for Angela Douglas, and a pleasant one-off for Castle, in the Jim Dale role.

Carry On Again Doctor (1969) *

2011-08-06T07:48:00.000-07:00

Cast: Williams, Dale, James, Sims, Hawtrey, Windsor, Jacques, Butterworth and Rowlands, with Valerie Leon, Patricia Hayes, Wilfrid Brambell

Hattie's the matron again, and the title alone is enough to tell you that it’s filler, but there’s a bizarrer touch to this than the other trips to the hospital, and a South Sea island subplot.
Babs has her famous examination; Hawtrey is amusing on the last occasion any attempt would be made to integrate his increasingly bizarre presence fully into the principal narrative thread (from hereon he would always be an outsider and king of his own, ever-shrinking subplot); Dale is charming indeed, with a nice aptitude for stunt slapstick, and showing no signs of being about to bow out. (In fact, his ambitions now took him to America and resulted in his part, already written, in Carry On Camping being considerably downsized and given to Julian Holloway: only the fact that he’s still called Jim gives the game away. Apparently he caused real resentment by upping sticks, though it had abided in time for him to take the lead in Carry On Columbus.)
Only James seems restrained by the considerable eccentricities of the script, which has a wildly fantastic flavour to it rarely seen in the series before or since. Hello to Patsy Rowlands.

Carry On Camping (1969) **

2011-08-06T07:22:00.000-07:00

Cast: James, Bresslaw, Williams, Jacques, Windsor, Butterworth, Sims, Hawtrey and Scott, with Dilys Laye, Julian Holloway, Betty Marsden, Valerie Leon.

Sid Boggle and Bernie Lugg are desperate to have their way with Joan and Dilys Laye, so they take them to a nudist documentary film (just the first of many loud dongs on the socio-historical value-o-meter). Despite the girls' patent disgust, they decide the ideal plan will be to take them to a nudist camp on holiday. At a camping shop where Valerie Leon is showing Charles Hawtrey how to stick the pole up they get directions to what they think is the camp in the film, but what they find is a shabby and distinctly non-nudist camp site run by Peter Butterworth ("my usual fee is a pound"), and where a stripy-blazered headmaster Kenneth Williams is also staying with a coachload of burgeoningly post-pubescent schoolgirls, led by Barbara Windsor, whose subsequent outdoor aerobic mishap is now the stuff of British comedy legend. They all try and fail to gain intimate knowledge of each other, until the idyll is shattered by an unwelcome intrusion of modernity: a party of grubby flower-children staging a noisy rave in an adjoining field. Sid, Bernie and Julian Holloway, dressed magnificently as hippies, save the day by tying the real hippies to each other with string and having them towed away, still grooving, by a cart.
Take that 1969! In the future, 1969 will belong to us! And of course they were right.

Forget about Up The Khyber, assuming you need to be told to - this is the masterpiece, the one to show your kids or your girlfriend, the one where the series really settles down to looking like the feature-film spin-offs of nonexistent ITV sitcoms, which is to say: where it achieves perfection. It’s just an endless joy, full of good jokes and performances and iconic moments, and it looks so beautiful, and Eric Rogers’s score is so beautiful, and watching it is like being able to take a childhood holiday all over again.

Carry On Up The Jungle (1970) *

2011-08-06T07:20:00.000-07:00

Cast: James, Sims, Scott, Connor, Hawtrey and Bresslaw, with Frankie Howerd, Jacki Piper, Valerie Leon

The one with Terry Scott as Tarzan: an odd, perplexing sight more than doing justice to the odd, perplexing concept. (Dale, incredibly, had first been offered it before, less incredibly, turning it down, blotting his copybook still further with the outfit.)
Also awol this time is Kenneth Williams, for the first time since Cabby, though Hawtrey is very funny in what is presumably the unacceptably small, late-arriving role Williams turned down. But, welcome back, for the first time since Cleo, to Kenneth Connor, whose young idealistic gumps were so delightful a feature of the early films, but he’s aged a lot in the interim, and will now be cast mainly as middle-aged sexual frustrates, and even bona fide old men. And a very warm welcome to Jacki Piper, who turns up in three seventies Carry Ons, and is very cute and funny. These assets, plus an equally successful return visit from Frankie Howerd all go some way towards making up for the fact that this is probably the silliest of the series, heavily padded, in transparent creative desperation, with very broad slapstick.

Carry On Loving (1970) **

2011-08-06T07:12:00.000-07:00

Cast: James, Jacques, Williams, Sims, Scott, Hawtrey, Bresslaw, Rowlands and Butterworth, with Jacki Piper, Richard O’Callaghan, Imogen Hassall, Julian Holloway, Bill Maynard, Bill Pertwee.

Sid and Hattie are Mr and Mrs Bliss, owners of the Wedded Bliss Marital Agency, their façade of harmony sorely tested by Sid’s obsession with ‘vetting’ their female clients, not least the woman who works in the tobacconists. (“I only keep going in there for me shag!”)
In a series of thus-linked episodes we follow the progress of some of their clients, among them a whimsical young man whose greatest passion is making aeroplanes out of milk bottle tops, inadvertently matched with a sexy model (Piper and O’Callaghan, a nice new junior team, paired off again in At Your Convenience in recognition), and Williams as a marriage guidance counsellor reluctantly intent on taking the plunge for purely professional reasons, finding himself sandwiched between the affections of Rowlands and Mrs Bliss. Meanwhile Sid’s attempts to grab a piece of Joan (in one of her last unambiguous lust-object roles before she starts playing the passion-killers – oh, the heartless march of time!) are frustrated by Bernie as her boyfriend, a professional wrestler called Gripper Burke.
If Up The Khyber is the most over-rated of the series, this is surely the most under-rated. No wild plot shifts, costumes or parodies of other films, just relentless comic single-mindedness, more great jokes than virtually any other half-dozen randomly chosen others in the series combined, Imogen Hassall as a stuffer (you know, putting it in), all the socio-historic precision you can shake Terry Scott’s bowl haircut at, and a big pie fight at the end.

Carry On Henry (1971) **

2011-08-06T07:10:00.000-07:00

Cast: James, Williams, Scott, Sims, Windsor, Hawtrey, Connor, Rowlands and Butterworth, with Julian Holloway, Margaret Nolan, Bill Maynard, John Bluthal

The only perfect marriage of historical parody trappings and authentic seventies vintage Carry On humour, this is an unqualified success in a way that none of the previous costume films really were. Cleo came closest, the one remaining, Dick, is a curate’s egg, but this is a riot.
Why is it so much better than Cowboy and Up The Khyber? Because it’s the Carry On team pretending to be historical figures, not historical figures being played by the Carry On team. The jokes are all modern, and either don’t fit the time and that’s the joke in itself, or else just don’t fit the time and nobody gives a toss.

Carry On At Your Convenience (1971)*

2011-08-06T07:03:00.000-07:00

Cast: James, Williams, Jacques, Sims, Bresslaw, Hawtrey and Rowlands, with Kenneth Cope, Jacki Piper, Richard O’Callaghan, Bill Maynard, Renee Houston, Marianne Stone and Margaret Nolan.

A toilet factory is the perfect place for a seventies Carry On, but this is just a little light on jokes and atmosphere. It’s hard to quite put my finger on what it's missing, since it lacks nothing entirely, only in degree, and there are many memorable moments: the subplot of Sid and Hattie’s race-winner-picking budgie is among the highlights of the whole series. But it just doesn’t quite move as carelessly as it should, and it proved a rare dip in terms of box-office for the series. (Verging on charmingly, some modern critics attribute this to its robustly conservative take on working relations, which they are certain must have alienated the proletariat they so love looking at from a safe distance before rushing back to Hampstead and having a shower.)
What is becoming increasingly obvious, however, is just how difficult they’re finding it to fit Hawtrey, a specialised turn if ever there was one, into these modern scenarios. The showdown already brewing, ostensibly over his alcoholic unreliability, that would soon lead to his dismissal from the series seems almost inevitable.

Carry On Matron (1972) *

2011-08-06T06:58:00.000-07:00

Cast: James, Williams, Scott, Bresslaw, Jacques, Windsor, Connor, Hawtrey, Sims, Rowlands and Douglas, with Kenneth Cope, Jacki Piper, Bill Maynard, Valerie Leon, Margaret Nolan, Wendy Richard, Madeline Smith.

Last and least-justifed of the medical Carry Ons, and also my favourite. Like Loving, it’s pure sitcom and doesn’t waste much time on plot development, though there’s loads going on: Sid in disguise as a crook trying to steal birth control pills (his gang are Kenneth Cope as his son, a wildly unsympathetic figure in At Your Convenience here made Dale-level loveable in drag, Bernard Bresslaw in a long wig and Bill Maynard: that’s a whole film’s fun just there), Williams as perhaps his most grotesque neurotic of all, obsessively hypochondriacal and at one point convinced by a chance comment that he might be changing sex, Scott as randy Dr Prodd trying to poke all the student nurses, and that resentment-charged waiting room for expectant fathers, where Kenneth Connor’s frustrated British Rail employee arrives every day for news of the baby that never arrives and Jack Douglas shuffles in for his one-joke walk-on series debut. Jacki Piper, alas, bids us adieu.

Carry On Abroad (1972) **

2011-08-06T06:43:00.000-07:00

Cast: James, Williams, Hawtrey, Sims, Bresslaw, Windsor, Connor, Butterworth, Jacques, Douglas and Rowlands, with June Whitfield, Sally Geeson, Carol Hawkins, Jimmy Logan, Ray Brooks, Bill Maynard

Even if it’s not your personal favourite as it is mine, this has no place outside of any Carry On top five.
Like Camping, it's just a lucky accident, where nothing much new is added to the formula, but it all comes out of the bottle just right, and endless harmony of perfectly judged jokes and performances, placed in exactly the right setting.
Directing the unsatirical blancmange-filled kid-glove at weekend package holidays, with Butterworth giving his best performance as the harrassed manager of a still-incomplete Spanish hotel, the film offers us the definitive incarnations of Williams, as obsequious courier Stuart Farquhar ("Stupid what?" asks Butterworth), James, as Vic Flange, hoping to get away with Babs but stuck instead with Sims ("This is the wife - don't laugh"), Connor as the randy husband of sexless Whitfield, Bernie as a monk with little grasp of asceticism and a roving eye for Carol Hawkins, Babs as Babs ("I just adore old prints. I've got a couple of beauties"), Hawtrey as an alcoholic weirdo well versed in the sex habits of hamsters, and Douglas flinging his pints of beer about.
But if the main reason why it is so especially satisfying is simply that Rothwell and the gang both happen to be on top form, another is that the characters really seem to get to know each other, and Rothwell has provided a last act in which their problems are actually resolved and they find contentment, which isn't the sort of thing you expect to get from this kind of rubbish at all. The last scene, a reuinion back in England, should bring a tear to the eye of anyone who laughed their way through Love Story. And another reason is Sally Geeson.

Carry On Girls (1973) *

2011-08-06T06:34:00.000-07:00

Cast: James, Sims, Connor, Windsor, Bresslaw, Butterworth, Douglas and Rowlands, with June Whitfield, Valerie Leon, Margaret Nolan, Sally Geeson, Wendy Richard, Robin Askwith, Jimmy Logan, David Lodge, Bill Pertwee, Marianne Stone, Arnold Ridley.

In retrospect, this is when it all started to end. Both a bitingly cynical portrait of a down-at-heel English seaside resort and a nostalgic, Donald McGillish farce about an end of the pier beauty contest, it also acknowledges those forces that would rob the series of its essential defining innocence and bring about its end, in the form of June Whitfield’s humourless band of mannish women’s libbers, and self-confessed window cleaner Robin Askwith as a gormless photographer taking hardcore glamour shots of Margaret Nolan on the beach.
It tries to laugh off the libbers and give ground to the liberators with some slightly more risque material than usual, but between the disapproval of the one and the other making them look hopelessly old-fashioned, there was nowhere for the Carry Ons to go. As a last gesture from the sinking ship, however, this is a beautifully blown raspberry, with Williamsless but otherwise all-cylinders teamwork, and pleasingly greater prominence for unsung stalwarts Leon and Nolan.

Carry On Dick (1974) *

2011-08-06T06:29:00.000-07:00

Cast: James, Jacques, Williams, Windsor, Bresslaw, Sims, Connor, Butterworth, Douglas and Rowlands, with Bill Maynard, Margaret Nolan, David Lodge, Marianne Stone.

Indecision is writ large on every frame of this superfluous historical, the final fling for Sid, Hattie and screenwriter Talbot Rothwell.
It’s never less than fun, but never more than disposable, and it attempts to avoid the winds of change by ignoring rather than confronting them, retreating back into fancy dress in the hope that it will make Confessions of a Window Cleaner go away. It's basically Dick Turpin, though the plot is lifted from Dr Syn, and the confidence of Henry is just not there, though Windsor still gamely bursts out of her top while bell-ringing, and Williams says "I wouldn't fancy a poke with that!" when Joan Sims goes by carrying a sword.

Carry On Behind (1975) **

2011-08-06T06:27:00.001-07:00

Cast: Williams, Bresslaw, Connor, Douglas, Sims, Rowlands, Fraser and Butterworth, with Windsor Davies, Elke Sommer, Ian Lavender, Adrienne Posta, Carol Hawkins, Sherrie Hewson, David Lodge, Marianne Stone, George Layton, Larry Dann.

Back to the campsite, thought this time with caravans rather than tents, and a bit of shifting around in personae to accommodate the absence of Sid James: Bresslaw is now the Terry Scott-ish husband, Rowlands upgrades to his wife, Sims ages-up to become the annoying mother-in-law, and Jack Douglas broadens out to play the middle aged frustrate, with just one token twitch halfway through the film (somehow far weirder in effect than when he does it non-stop).
Only Connor as the randy Major who owns the camp and Butterworth as his shabby assistant play to type, while the resulting blanks are filled by a really well-considered infusion from elsewhere – Windsor Davies, Ian Lavender, Adrienne Posta, and Sherrie Hewson joining Carol Hawkins as the dolly contingent and both of them dying for it, by which they of course mean a cup of tea.
Last and most eccentric of the series’ occasional guest leads is Elke Sommer: a bold shot, especially under the circumstances, but weird enough to be wonderful, and delightfully paired with Williams as archaeologists.
With Dave Freeman taking over as screenwriter this plays more like a tv sitcom than ever, and though the absence of Sid is felt, Windsor Davies is excellent in his stead, clearly the great Carry On regular that might have been. Often dismissed but always enjoyed, this is actually the last Carry On classic, with a (presumably) illusory feeling of effortlessness about it all.

Carry On England (1976)

2011-08-06T06:22:00.000-07:00

Cast: Connor, Douglas, Sims and Butterworth, with Windsor Davies, Patrick Mower, Judy Geeson, Melvyn Hayes, Peter Jones, David Lodge, Julian Holloway, Larry Dann

An almost entirely fresh cast grapple with a script that in every respect beyond its greater-than-ever sexual frankness seems to want to hark back to the earliest black and white entries.
It was, in fact, expanded from an unused episode of the Carry On Laughing tv series. (Not to be confused with the later, joyous clip-compilation shows of the same name, this was a series of sitcom-style playlets transmitted around this time on ITV, with some, but notably not all, of the regular team appearing, often in roles that allowed much greater range than their film personas - Jack Douglas, especially - but which as often as not missed the mark script-wise.)
This is watchable, but mainly for Connor, and Judy Geeson, obviously. Davies comes off as a bit of a disappointment after his fabulous debut for the team in Behind, because he’s just doing his familiar Sergeant-Major routine from TV.

Carry On Emmannuelle (1978)

2011-08-06T06:19:00.000-07:00

Cast: Williams, Connor, Douglas, Sims and Butterworth, with Suzanne Danielle, Beryl Reid, Larry Dann

This time, they get the proper cast assembled and instead go haywire on the script. God alone knows if this is meant to be a parody of sex movies, or just a suicidally mild example of one, but every cast member is misused, sometimes grievously so, and the resulting disaster finished the series.
For men of my generation, an appearance by Suzanne Danielle is always worth a look-in, but this is no Boys In Blue. It might perhaps have been better if Williams wasn’t made to do that accent all through it, if Windsor had appeared as intended as all the women in the strange sex fantasy sequences, or even – if that were the route they were intent on travelling – if it had found something of the irreverent style, and dipped into the supporting female casting book, of the Confessions movies… but it’s beyond saving really. It just comes from nowhere, resembling nothing else before or since, and a Carry On film least of all, and it just squats there, like a hundredweight of lead piping.

That's Carry On! (1979)

2011-08-06T06:15:00.000-07:00

Cast: Windsor and Williams

Technically the last of the proper Carry Ons, but usually overlooked until it recently got the deluxe DVD commentary box-set treatment, is this oddball compilation of clips, chosen seemingly at random, with new linking material featuring Babs and Kenny in a screening room, and the title inanely attempting to recall MGM’s megahit That’s Entertainment.
The later tv compilation programmes take their cue from this venture, which seems to want to be a pick and mix sampling of the films, rather than a best of compilation. The running joke in the linking sequences is that Kenny is desperate for a piss. At the end, Babs locks him in and the film freeze-frames on a close-up of his face as he registers first horror, then resignation, then a curious kind of sub-erotic contentment as he wets himself. In his diaries Williams noted that his light blue suit looks rather good on film. I agree.

Carry On Columbus (1992) *

2011-08-06T06:04:00.000-07:00

Cast: Dale, Phillips and Douglas, with June Whitfield, Bernard Cribbins, Jon Pertwee, Sara Crowe, Richard Wilson, Maureen Lipman, Rik Mayall, Larry Miller, Charles Fleischer, Holly Aird, Rebecca Lacey, Don Henderson, and a bunch of losers from the swamp of post-seventies British comedy.

Clearly not a great film, but one I am slightly defensive of for three reasons. First, trivially, because it is the only Carry On film I saw new at the cinema, interestingly enough on the night before I left home for university. Second, because there is nothing whatever wrong with the script, and the relentless sniping about bad jokes and feeble dialogue not only ignores the fairly obvious fact that all good Carry On films have bad jokes and feeble dialogue – the worse the jokes and the feebler the dialogue the better, in fact – but also disgracefully belittle the talents of screenwriter Dave Freeman.
Freeman is not nobody. Neither is he some strutting newcomer, brought in like the majority of the cast. This film could so easily have been written by Ben Elton. But Freeman is one of the great British sitcom writers, who penned most of the better Carry On TV shows and, of course, Carry On Behind, easily the best and most authentic post-Rothwell piece of work in the Carry On canon. And his script here is for the most part excellent. Thirdly, a word about the casting, the main reason given for dismissing the movie. Now, I bow to no man in my hatred of modern British comedy and contempt for its sneeringly artless practitioners. But clearly, the problem here is not that new comic actors were drafted in per se, but simply that the wrong ones were.
Carefully cast newcomers would have been fine, as they were throughout the lifetime of the original series: so many of those we now consider the quintessential faces of the series didn’t show up until well into the run. Windsor Davies was fabulous. And here, Sara Crowe fits in fine, as does Richard Wilson and Maureen Lipman.
Rik Mayall’s scene, which opens the film on a real high, is a triumph: he fits effortlessly into the old style, and for two minutes Kenneth Williams is spectacularly honoured. But then, that’s it for him, and even more bizarrely, the script has no greater use for the proper old-timers, with Leslie Phillips, June Whitfield, Jon Pertwee and Jack Douglas all getting what amount to cameos; Pertwee’s a walk-on so small he’s virtually an extra, and Douglas spat on with a proper role that gives him, insultingly, almost literally nothing to do. Only Cribbins and Dale get a shot from the real performers.
But then, look at some of the shit given major roles! Alexei Sayle! And Keith Allen! Julian Clary for Christ’s sake.
And defying all reason, the second male lead role is entrusted to Peter Richardson, unquestionably the laziest actor in comic history, sullen and mumbling, and lacking in anything resembling energy or even interest in what he’s doing, as always. It’s a tragic error that leaves a massive hole in the film, but that, and that alone, sinks the ship. Some of the performances, the script, and, I think, the raison d’etre are all just fine.

Gasbags (1940) **

2011-07-31T01:43:00.000-07:00

Directed by Marcel Varnel
Screenplay by Val Guest and Marriott Edgar
Cast: The Crazy Gang (Bud Flanagan & Chesney Allen, Jimmy Nervo & Teddy Knox, Charlie Naughton and Jimmy Gold), Moore Marriott, Wally Patch

Virtually all of Britain’s screen comics were pressed into service during the war years, but on few of them did the uniforms seem as ill fitting as the Crazy Gang, the British Marx Brothers, here seen in fine if not quite peak form.

Never courting the audience’s affection like George Formby, and lacking Will Hay’s ability to sustain a coherent comic narrative, their breathless, iconoclastic style offered little scope for simple flag-waving. Even when placed nominally in real settings, they never truly integrate but are simply let loose, their job to pull rugs, blow raspberries, deflate authority and generally clog the wheels of genteel society.
As airmen, who supplement their pay by running an illegal fish and chips stall attached to a barrage balloon and end up in a concentration camp full of professional Adolf Hitler look-alikes, they make a predictably irreverent contribution to the war effort, typified by Bud’s pronouncement that they will “strike a blow for the Empire, Hippodrome and Palladium!” Later Knox tells the camp guards not to speak in German on our behalf: “They don’t understand that stuff, do you?” he asks us, and a thunderous “No!” is heard off-screen.
The ridiculous plot allows no attempt at a serious evocation of the enemy threat, despite the reminders of the camps (where the Gang are told they will remain for the duration of the war “unless they have another purge”), anti-Semitism (Bud wishes the commandant ‘mazel tov’ on leaving the camp) and the presence of Hitler himself.
These Nazis are as buffoonish and easily outwitted as any of the Gang’s usual foils: “More English lies!” cries one after their stricken chip shop balloon inadvertently carpets Germany with leaflets proclaiming ‘Fried Fish Is Good For You’.

As always, there is considerably more vulgarity than American censorship would pass: while disguised as trees, Charlie proclaims himself a “son of a beech” and a dog relieves itself against Bud; Charlie is swollen with helium and his flatulence used to ignite a gas fire, and later, told that the ‘mechanical mole’ burrows under enemy lines and comes up in their rear, he exclaims “What a horrible death!”
Amidst the corn and some surprisingly grim gallows humour, the melancholy of Flanagan & Allen’s song ‘Yesterday’s Dreams’ seems especially poignant, reflecting as it does a weariness and resignation that stops short of defeatism – but comes closer to it than most wartime numbers.

The team, who always play well with other performers of stature - witness Alistair Sim in Alf's Button Afloat - strike nicely against Moore Marriott in Harbottle mode, and as this is a British film from the first half of the twentieth century, the lovely Wally Patch is present and correct too.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) ***

2011-07-28T11:33:00.000-07:00

Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Robert Bolt, Michael Wilson
Cast: Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Arthur Kennedy, Jack Hawkins, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Donald Wolfit, Anthony Quayle, Jose Ferrer, Claude Rains

“I’ve always been fascinated by these English nuts,” director David Lean once explained to account for the extraordinary feat of endurance and devotion that resulted in this truly one of a kind film, unquestionably the best and most intelligent of his post-war blockbusters.
While his abandonment of the intimate cinema of manners that he had perfected in the thirties and forties may broadly be regretted, Lawrence of Arabia fully lives up to its reputation as the war epic that even those who hate war epics admire, distinguished especially by its near-mystic visual sense, and by its lush and romantic score by Maurice Jarre.

The subject of the film is T. E. Lawrence, the English aesthete and academic, and nut, who despite shortness of stature, an eccentric nature and no military experience managed to lead an Arab regiment to significant victories against the Turkish army. While in no way skimping on the grandeur, vast canvases and vividly staged action sequences characteristic of Lean’s other epic movies (such as Bridge on the River Kwai and Doctor Zhivago), the film is unusual in placing equal weight on psychological drama.
As played by Peter O’Toole in his first major starring role (after scores of other, vastly less suitable stars had been considered and either rejected or refused), Lawrence is alternately unassuming and forceful, retiring and pretentious, given to fits of indecision and self-loathing and yet capable of rousing himself to acts of incredible stamina and shocking (not least to himself) ferocity. The screenplay (by Robert Bolt, author of A Man For All Seasons, and an originally uncredited, blacklisted Michael Wilson) is as much concerned with penetrating the mind of its central character as in depicting his achievements; the result is a film as divided and (in a sense) contradictory as Lawrence himself, and thus the perfect marriage of content and form.

The cast mixes scene-stealing newcomers like O’Toole and Omar Sharif with a fine supporting roster of British reliables, but the real star is the desert itself. Photographed with an almost hallucinatory intensity by Freddie Young, the landscape of the film is its essential defining feature. Logistical problems were considerable: shooting miles from the nearest facilities in intense heat, the cast and crew came under frequent barrage from sandstorms and insects, and production was slowed by the need for teams of men to smooth over the vast expanses of sand after each take. The results, however, entirely justified the efforts of all concerned. Still, one can't help thinking that the only thing Lawrence himself would have liked about the film is the fact that, in nearly four hours of running time, not a single woman ever appears.

Logan's Run (1976)

2011-07-19T22:13:00.001-07:00

Director: Michael Anderson
Screenplay: David Zelag Goodman, from the book by William F. Nolan
Cast: Michael York, Jenny Agutter, Richard Jordan, Peter Ustinov, Roscoe Lee Browne, Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Michael Anderson Jr

“Life clocks are a lie! Carousel is a lie! There is no renewal!!!”

The makers of 1970’s sci-fi were really only agreed upon one thing about the future: the outlook is bleak.
Here, in the 23rd century, humans live in the mall-like serenity and sterility of a great domed city. When their ‘life clock’ reaches its end at the age of thirty, they are selected to appear on ‘Carousel’, a kind of gameshow, where the excited audience cheer for their favourites to be ‘renewed’, while those who choose instead to run for their lives are hunted down and ‘terminated’ by ‘sandmen’ like Logan (Michael York) who never questions his job (the word ‘kill’ offends him) until he finds his own time running out.

Viewed today, Logan’s Run is purest kitsch, its futurist iconography dominated as usual by elaborate glass and silver architecture, model vehicles and togas. But on the level of ideas, the film seems to have gained something with the passage of thirty years: where once it seemed somewhat random in its satirical predictions, it can now be seen to have hit a number of bullseyes.
The society in which all is geared to the pursuit of ephemeral sensation seems strikingly prescient, and the film takes effective aim at the emerging horrors of reality television, mall culture, vanity (as represented by the shop where citizens choose new faces to replace their boring old ones) and the commodification of sexual desire. (Iconic in the latter capacity is Jenny Agutter as Jessica, conjured up by remote control unit for the perfect night in.)
The first carousel sequence, shown before we are exactly certain what is going on – is excellently staged, as is the subsequent Blade Runner-like pursuit of the ‘runners’. The architecture of the older, disused parts of the city, gleaming chrome giving way to low-tech wheels and cogs, is also effective.
The main problem with the film – and a common enough one it is – is that the first half is much more interesting than the second. The ‘run’ itself is a reasonably exciting affair of pursuing assassins, floods and homicidal robots but little is as interesting as the early sequences in the city. The section with Peter Ustinov as an old man who knew his parents is anti-climactic, and the ending itself is hokey.

Two things, incidentally, which seem to have not altered at all since the nineteen-seventies: the design of escalators, and Farrah Fawcett’s hairdo.

Street of Women (1932) **

2011-07-18T08:36:00.001-07:00

Director: Archie Mayo
Screenwriter: Mary McCall Jr, from the novel by Polan Banks
Cast: Kay Francis, Alan Dinehart, Roland Young, Gloria Stuart

A typical if not exceptional example of what passed for a formula movie in the days before the Code, this is a predictably off-kilter romantic melodrama cum morality play, concerning the romantic tribulations of a married property developer, whose mistress is a slinky frock designer, who is also loved by her lover's best friend, who is also the employer of her brother, who is in love with the daughter of her lover. Which would be fine, if only the wife would give him a divorce. Needless to say it all comes out right in the end, thanks to that habitual harbinger of a pre-Code happy ending: the near-fatal car crash.

Pre-Code connoisseurs should find plenty to make them feel welcome here, not least a racy-seeming title that doesn't mean what it seems to, and has to be pointedly explained in specially-inserted dialogue. Then, too, there is much of that quintessential oddball casting, so evocative of those years when the golden age stars were starting to make movies but hadn't yet settled into their familiar personae. So here's a ripe example from Roland Young's straight actor period (or straightish, at least), obliging him to play hangdog as Francis's failed suitor, forever turning up at her flat and failing to get her to come out with him for the evening. The only time he makes her laugh is when he draws her a picture of a pessimistic rabbit.
Then, in the romantic leads, we have Alan Dinehart (as the tycoon), who moved on quickly to semi-comic proletarian support before dying in 1944, and Allen Vincent (as the brother) who hung around in bits before throwing in the towel in 1939. You might know him as the doltish hero in Mystery of the Wax Museum but not much else I'll wager.

As usual in a pre-Coder, though, it's the female casting that will make you want to stick around. As the mistress: Kay Francis, chic as ever in an early Warners role, when she still had that sullen, sultry Paramount air about her and plenty of gel in her hair (you won't find it easy to keep your eyes off her hairdo, in fact). And as the daughter: Gloria Stuart, in her movie debut. There's always something a bit suggestive about Stuart's characters, even when they are as simpering as here: as in Secret of the Blue Room she gives her father a big smacking kiss on the lips in one scene. (At least her dad's not Lionel Atwill this time, though, which in that picture hit the perversity meter so hard the bell broke.) At times it seems like Kay and her brother can barely keep their hands off each other too, and their estrangement when he discovers her affair with Dinehart plays much more like a lover's tiff than brotherly resentment. The world of pre-Code!

And other familiar sights and sounds are tossed into the mix, including one of those ladies fashion house salons where models come out wearing the gowns people are thinking of buying. For the chaps: some excellent real footage of thirties skyscraper construction.