Peter Lorre, Sunset Song and an enrapturing trip to 1900s Brazil – Reviews #258

More erratic adventures in culture, including – but not limited to – Terence Davies's worst film, Peter Lorre on the big screen, and one of the most beautiful books I've read in years. I've just signed up for Goodreads too, I'm over here if you're interested, but the reviews will all end up on here eventually.

FILMS



Sunset Song (Terence Davies, 2015) – I was lucky enough to interview Terence Davies in 2006, and even then – sidelined by the film industry and at a notably low ebb – he was talking about turning Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song into a movie. It took him nine years to realise that ambition, but I’m not sure why he bothered, or indeed what the point of this film is. I will always dearly love his early movies, and talking to Davies was one of the true highlights of my career as a journo (before I got tired of the stress and moved into creative writing and a job in the arts), but this film is not a highlight of anything, not even my weekend.

Agyness Deyn is Chris Guthrie, a rural Scottish lass who feels at one with the land, but not at one with her tyrannical father (Peter Mullan) – shades of Davies’s own childhood, so heartbreakingly rendered in his first film proper, Distant Voices, Still Lives. As everyday tragedy visits her family, she falls for sweet-natured neighbour, Ewan (Kevin Guthrie), but this is 1914 and damn it if the drums of war aren’t pounding in the background.

The film begins promisingly, but becomes increasingly boring as it progresses, with virtually no dramatic impetus. It’s no coincidence that the good scenes here – a sumptuous opening shot, soundtracked by the wind swooshing over a field of grain, the beautiful musical sequence that ends with a congregation walking into a church – are, like the great scenes in Davies’s earlier work, wordless.

Think of the ‘Tammy’ set-piece in The Long Day Closes (the greatest three minutes in ‘90s British film), the death scene in The Neon Bible, the sequence set to Peggy Lee’s ‘The Folks Who Live on the Hill’ in Of Time and the City, or the funerals in both Distant Voices (cut to Jessye Norman’s ‘There’s a Man Goin’ Round’) and his Trilogy (to Doris Day’s ‘It All Depends on You), and they are all just stately, beautifully composed shots set to music. Davies is a genuinely great and utterly distinctive director, but as he’s moved to more conventional narratives, his work has lost not only its brilliance, but also its coherence. He has little talent for filming drama and none for shooting sex scenes: the first half of Sunset Song builds to a night of passion which, as I’d been warned, begins with a close-up of a man’s hairy arse.

There are moments when the film gets to you. The compositions by Davies and Winter’s Bone cinematographer Michael McDonough are at times breathtaking (the horses in the thunderstorm!), and you’d have to be extremely hard-hearted to find none of the plot developments affecting, but even when Guthrie is changed shockingly by the war, there’s a suddenness and silliness that prevents you from fully investing in the story. Likewise, though Deyn is mostly in fine form, she’s wearing more – and more artful – make-up than is surely realistic, and has at least one moment of farcical overacting that wrenches you out of the story. And though Mullan is pretty commanding as the cruel patriarch, and the scenes in which his rage is only enhanced by becoming a tubby, floppy invalid are genuinely scary, he’s… y’know… a bit much.

I haven’t seen A Quiet Passion yet or, indeed, Davies’ Terence Rattigan adaptation, The Deep Blue Sea. But of his others, this is the weakest, and I say that as no fan of The House of Mirth. It’s a beautiful-looking piece of nothing, depressing without being insightful, eventful without being dramatic, and slow without being a slow-burner. (2)

***



Quatermass and the Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967) – Each of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass TV serials was made into a movie: The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass 2 had been monochrome outings starring fading Hollywood star, Brian Donlevy, each following two years after the small-screen outing. This one took four times as long to bring to movie audiences, and though that was down to money troubles, by 1967 Hammer could afford colour film, while the financial necessity of incorporating an American star had apparently evaporated, leaving the producers to make a purely artistic choice in Andrew Keir. (Fans remain divided on Donlevy – he has so much of my goodwill from movies like The Glass Key that my judgement may be clouded, but I enjoyed his stolid doom-mongering.)

The film begins at (the fictional) Hobbs’ Lane tube station, where TFL engineers unwittingly uncover a human skull, then another, and then a huge, unexplained… thing. The discovery brings together rocket scientist Prof Bernard Quatermass, the tiresomely officious and closed-minded Col Breen (Julian Glover) and a palaeontologist (James Donald) and his assistant (Barbara Shelley), the group remaining divided as to whether the untorchable, untouchable object is a V-1 bomb, a black propaganda exercise or the key to all human existence.

It's somewhat garishly shot and Kneale himself described the special effects as “diabolical”, but with 50 years’ hindsight, I found the technical primitiveness rather charming, while the film is unquestionably full of fascinating ideas about extra-terrestrial life, the occult and the evolution of man. Despite its general tendency to be somewhat static and talky, it also has several knockout set-pieces, the odd jump scare nicely complementing the eerie atmosphere generated by Tristram Cary’s score, and the mix of folklore, mysticism and science in Kneale’s politely whacked-out, cerebral script.

It’s not quite a great film, I don’t think, but it’s unusually innovative and intelligent, with one of my all-time favourite titles: you can read it a dozen ways by the end, and they’re all valuable insights into the film. (3)

***



CINEMA: The Chase (Arthur Ripley, 1946) – Chuck Scott (Robert Cummings) is a war hero turned bedraggled bum who gets a gig driving around absolute psycho Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran). When Roman's wife (Michèle Morgan) tries to take a powder with the help of her chauffeur, we relocate to Havana, as Cummings flees for his life, with pop-eyed henchman Gino (Peter Lorre) on his tail.

This proto-Lynchian headfuck, based on a Cornell Woolrich story, starts promisingly, begins to flounder, explodes into life through a dazzling twist and then fails to adequately deliver on its vast promise and possibilities. It also has a little too much silliness to keep you truly immersed (special mention for the additional accelerator in the back of Cochran's car).

The Chase is an interesting and largely entertaining noir, though, with artful direction, some very effective flourishes in the script, and a decent cast – Lorre is absolutely sensational, yet again. His timing, his counter-intuition (funny when he could be frightening, moving as he chills the blood, menacing simply at will) and his ability to steal a scene using only a cigarette are the stuff of legend. (3)

***

BOOKS



Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries by Jon Ronson (published 2013) – A collection of many of Ronson's finest features for the likes of the Guardian and GQ, from a deeply upsetting, unsettling investigation into sub-prime loans – published two years before the financial crash, and inspired by the suicide of a family man deep in debt – to the aftermath of a planned school shooting in a Christmas-themed town. Other pieces are more light-hearted, like his adventures with real-life superheroes and Deal or No Deal contestants, but none are trivial, each revealing something about humanity or the world we inhabit, whether looking at bravery, open-mindedness or the rationalisations we make for being callous.

Ronson's writing is as it always is: perhaps a little formulaic in structure, but crisp and economical, righteously angry and hysterically funny, with rich veins of humanity and self-deprecation running parallel through each story. It's his wit, honesty, basic decency and genuine curiosity that makes these stories work, preventing them from reading like exploitation or sensationalism, even though he exists to document the extremes of human behaviour. At least four of these articles have been included in previous compilations, but there are a total of 26 in the second edition of Lost at Sea, and it's worth every penny.

In recent years, Ronson has had major success with full-length books (The Men Who Stare at Goats, The Psychopath Test and So You've Been Publicly Shamed), but he does still write stand-alone stories, and his gift for getting to the heart of a story, and a person, over just a few pages remains utterly remarkable. (4)

***



Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson (2001) – A beguilingly beautiful children’s novel about orphan Maia, who travels to Brazil in the early 1900s to stay with distant relatives. There, she’s tormented by her new-found family, but finds solace in her friendships with governess Miss Minton, a child actor named Clovis King, and a mysterious boy named Finn, while discovering escape in her exploration of the seductive, enrapturing world of the Brazilian jungle.

Ibbotson’s plotting is meticulous but effortless, her prose clean and economical, and her worldview exaltingly humane, without ever being cloying or naïve. She wrote the book when she was 76, but got the idea years before, entranced by the idea of the Manaus opera house, a home for the arts in the most chaotic and supposedly uncivilised of natural environments (the building was also the inspiration for Werner Herzog’s astonishing 1982 film, Fitzcarraldo.

I got hold of Journey to the River Sea to help me pitch my own kids’ book, and began reading with a sense of duty, but it knocked me absolutely sideways, and by the end I was choked to let it go. It’s timeless but modern, character-led but immaculately constructed, and paints a vivid and unforgettable portrait of early 20th century Brazil, while drawing much of its humour and conflict from the virtues and vices of Englishness. It’s unquestionably a great book, but perhaps more importantly it’s a good book: rich in human decency, and as deeply and desperately moving as anything I’ve read in years. A masterpiece. (4)

***

Now reading: The Authentic Death of Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, by Paul Seydor.

***

Thanks for reading.

Truffaut, Pulp Fiction and how to spot a psychopath - Reviews #218

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



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

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

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

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

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

***


English, motherfucker. Do you speak it?

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

***



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




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

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

***



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

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

The blood under the door? Wow. (3)

***



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

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

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

***



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

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

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

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

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

***



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

***

BOOKS

Fiction:



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



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

Non-fiction:



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



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



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

TV:



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

***

Thanks for reading.

The Wind, Kurt Vonnegut and public shaming - Reviews #217

I also saw Bob Dylan twice.

FILMS:



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***



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

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

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

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

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

***



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

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

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

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

***



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

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

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

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

***



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

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

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

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

***

BOOKS:



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



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



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



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

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THEATRE/COMEDY:



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



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



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

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Thanks for reading.