Forbidden Hollywood: Vol. 3, and Bergman getting sexy - Reviews #189

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

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

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

The films:



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

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

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

***



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

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

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

***



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

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

Not bad in 71 minutes. (3)

***



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

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

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

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

***



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

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

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

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

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

***



*SOME SPOILERS*

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

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

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

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

***

Other things I've been watching lately:



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

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

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

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

***



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

***



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

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

***



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

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

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

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

***

Thanks for reading.

A Star Is Born revisited, Jennifer Lawrence and how to start an argument - Reviews #148

Hello, and welcome to a special Oscars-themed update, as the Oscars happened yesterday and it would be negligent of me not to piggy-back pointlessly on that kind of publicity. To celebrate, I've reviewed a film starring Jennifer Lawrence, who won Best Actress last night, and another starring the first winner of that award and featuring an Oscars ceremony of its own. That this was all just a coincidence shouldn't stop you reading on. JOIN ME.



A Star Is Born (William A. Wellman, 1937) - The initial incarnation of this Tinseltown tragedy is right up there with Judy's, and holds up superbly on second viewing, revealing - most rewardingly - additional layers to the stunning central characterisations. We first meet Norman Maine (Fredric March) as he's toppling off his mantle - and his chair - and it's largely downhill from there, via a sanitarium, a night court and three of the saddest and most uncomfortable scenes I've ever had the good fortune to dread coming round again. Esther Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) is introduced as a feisty fighter of a farm girl - not unlike Gaynor's character in Lucky Star - if one with a sensitive soul, but once she gets to Hollywood, with stars in her eyes, we see her as the naive, innocent dreamer she really is. What the film does next is magnificent, but so seamlessly, subtly done, that it's only when the credits roll that you appreciate the shifting, sliding, dynamic: Esther growing in confidence, authority and compassion - growing up, if you will - and Norman sinking, faster than you keep up, his chilling forecast that he has lived too much to have anything left being proved tragically true.

Evelyn Waugh said of Brideshead Revisited that he wanted to write a book about people brought low by nothing more than love and drink. Add a bit of masculine pride into the mix and you have A Star Is Born. The film is perhaps a test of empathy (as I feel something like The Kid with a Bike may be), as its success - or otherwise - is based on how much compassion you feel for a good-looking millionaire whose greatest problem, at least that he will acknowledge, is that his star is slipping. Really, though, he's a man being consumed - from the inside - by demons and disease, slipping into dissolution even as he appears to have it all, as would his contemporary John Barrymore, and their spiritual successor, Errol Flynn. March makes Maine - and his problems - seem utterly, desperately real, in a gutting characterisation that may well be the best thing he ever did. It's only in the final third that the human cost really becomes apparent, though, and up until then it's a lighter proposition, a revealing snapshot - in early Technicolor - of Hollywood in the '30s, and just as fun as that sounds (I'm aware that some people may not think that sounds very fun). I still think Adolphe Menjou's benevolent producer is too good to be true, and Edgar Kennedy's comic sequences seem incongruous, but Lionel Stander brings just the right mix of amusing irascibility and sadistic insensitivity as a kind of hybrid press agent/fixer, perhaps patterned after MGM's Howard Strickling and Eddie Mannix, and Andy Devine is just lovely as Gaynor's first friend in Hollywood. It's a superlative film, wonderfully conceived and scripted - with some of the best barbs coming unmistakably from Dorothy Parker's poisonous pen - and with an emotional clout like little else in '30s cinema. (4)

***



Laugh, Clown, Laugh (Herbert Brenon, 1928) - A gifted clown (Lon Chaney) finds a little girl in the rushes, makes her laugh with his cockerel-based shadow puppetry and takes her under his wing (pun intended), naming her Simonella. When she grows to adulthood, and reveals a bit of shoulder, he realises he loves her in a different way - but then so does the count and reformed cad with whom he shares a psychiatrist. This intensely moving melodrama sticks to the familiar Chaney formula, strikes a few questionable notes (having the count's deep unhappiness manifest itself in bursts of manic laughter seems an unnecessarily gothic touch), could do with a scene showing the children's connection to the comic that would give its final line even greater resonance, and fails to explain its characters' motivations at some key junctures. But who cares? Chaney is sensational, the 15-year-old Atilla the Nun, Loretta Young, is at her ethereal best as Simonella, and the film is stuffed to bursting with unforgettable images of love, longing and desolate desperation, many focusing on Chaney's matchlessly expressive face - painted or otherwise - and all showcasing legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe's unique eye for contrast and composition.

Some viewers may feel queasy about Chaney's sad clown trying to "do a Woody Allen" and cop off with his adopted daughter (legal disclaimer: in Woody's case, it was his long-term partner's adopted, of-age daughter), but these were different times, Young isn't playing a 15-year-old. and the film is so persuasively acted that you can't help but feel for the sad-eyed Chaney, and wish for him some modicum of happiness. It's a gutting, wonderful film and an important one too: in telling the story of a gifted mime who wins every heart except the one he wants, it must surely have influenced the ultimately incomparable Les enfants du paradis. It was Chaney's favourite of his pictures, and with good reason. The TCM release features a wonderful addition in H. Scott Salinan's beautiful new score, which recalls Howard Shore's classic work on The Lord of the Rings. (4)

See also: The other two films in TCM's Lon Chaney Collection are reviewed here.

***



Hard to Handle (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933) - An anarchic Cagney comedy, with Jimmy cast (once again) as an inveterate go-getter for whom the Depression is little more than a mild inconvenience. Having lost the takings from an epic dance marathon to an unscrupulous partner, his versatile promoter spents the rest of this fast-paced, sex-fuelled jolt of Pre-Code hilarity putting his quick wits and absent morals to good use by hoodwinking the ordinary folks of America into taking part in a phony treasure hunt, smearing meritricious gloop over their wobbly bodies or buying up acres of grapefruit groves (a nod to that notorious scene in The Public Enemy). Like Groundhog Day's Phil Connors, he subscribes to the somewhat damning notion that people are morons.

There's little of Warner Bros' famed social conscience at work here, but it's delightfully unpredictable and extremely funny with it - its laughs, unusually for the studio, coming more from the performances and the situations than the repartee - while providing a fascinating glimpse of how my favourite comedy of all-time might have panned out, reuniting sassy Mary Brian and sardonic Ruth Donnelly from the previous year's Blessed Event, originally set to star Cagney. His chemistry with Bryan is both appealing and electric, Donnelly proves a perfect(ly unscrupulous) foil and sometime ally. and Cagney is, of course, magnificent: a whirlwind of energy, playing every comic scenario to the absolute hilt. (3.5)

***



The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, 2012) - It's Winter's Bone meets Battle Royale meets The X-Factor in this tense futuristic thriller, as Jennifer Lawrence takes the place of her terrified little sister in a televised fight-to-the-death against 23 other kids and teens. The only other contestant from her district is dishy, slightly wood-prone Josh Hutcherson, whose character has so many contrasting facets that I stopped thinking he might be realistically complex and decided he wasn't particularly well-drawn. The plotting, which inserts breathless action sequences at regimented intervals, seems a bit too clinical, the lead-in goes on too long (check out The Wages of Fear for how to properly execute an hour-long prologue to your suspenser), and the gaudy world fashioned around the game is tacky and heavy-handed. But the film has a wild card like few others, allowing you to spend two hours in the exultant company of Jennifer Lawrence. The whole thing hinges on her performance, and she's simply mesmerising. I've seen her in four movies so far (including Winter's Bone - the best of the decade so far - and Silver Linings Playbook, my favourite film released last year), and she hasn't struck a false note in any of them. Here, the story takes the toughest decisions away from her character, Catnip Evergreen, but she's wondrous nonetheless, creating an affecting, kind-hearted, ass-kicking protagonist with an innate emotional intensity who keeps the film grounded and real, even when being interviewed by a man with a blue ponytail in front of the crowd from Take Me Out.

It isn't exactly original - it riffs on the superior Battle Royale, there are shards of Logan's Run in there, and it occupies a similar world to the hugely silly Equilibrium - but it is very entertaining, and has one particularly fine, powerful scene, rather dubiously utilising Holocaust imagery, in which Lawrence volunteers for those there Hunger Games. It's also a well-directed film, in a showy sort of way, employing warped images and aggressive jump cuts while Lawrence is tripping on wasp bites, and fantastic use of sound throughout. It's clearly aimed at a teenage audience rather than an adult one, and perhaps a film like this should do more with its subtext of anti-establishment rebellion and social degradation, but when it tries to it feels forced and shallow, and Ross doesn't really know how to handle crowd scenes (he seems to be taking pointers from tea-time dramas on ITV), so it may be for the best. For all its imperfections, I enjoyed it a great deal, and Lawrence's performance confirms her status as one of the three most exciting actresses around, along with Carey Mulligan and the mighty Michelle Williams (Emily Watson doubtless remains the finest, but can't seem to land too many strong roles nowadays). This has really whetted my appetite for a sequel. Though apparently the "book" is better, whatever "books" are. (3)

***



Undefeated (Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin, 2011) is like Hoop Dreams remade by Disney. It's an Oscar-winning doc about a volunteer high school football coach (Martin Clunes) who whips his troubled African-American charges into a formidable team, as they cope with injury, anger issues and everything else that comes with growing up in black, inner city ghettos (see The Interrupters and The House I Live In for yet more chilling detail). Compared with the benchmark for all documentaries of its type, Steve James' unforgettable Hoop Dreams, it's too much a surface look at the issues it raises - and a calculating, sometimes staged one at that - to be a real contender, but it is slickly done, emotionally stirring when not opting for easy sentiment (Chavis's speech is a wonderful moment), and in entertainment value alone deserves its place in the play-offs. Also, "Why you gotta sit by me for bro? You gay" is my favourite ever way to start an argument. I've spotted a goof, though, they're not undefeated - they lost their first match. What's that you say? A metaphor? (3)

Thanks for reading.

More stars than there are in the heavens - Reviews #50

Here's a review of the star-spotters' dream that is The Stolen Jools, plus where the genre went next and some stuff about my computer habits which I've decided to bore you with.



SHORT: The Stolen Jools (William C. McGann, 1931) is a slapdash early talkie short, but for any fan of the period it's a must, with arguably the finest collection of stars ever assembled for a film. Or at least for a film bankrolled by a cigarette company to fund a TB clinic. Sure, the plot is woeful and the writing is sloppy, even inane, with stars repeatedly introduced by someone saying "Aren't you..." and then their name, while the best bits are over way too soon. But you do get Buster Keaton being knocked over, Wheeler & Woolsey taking the law onto their own hands, Jack Oakie telling a cop that Fay Wray is Jack Oakie, a fun in-joke about Winnie Lightner's signature tune Singing in the Bathtub, and Joe E. Brown yelling. The cast also includes stars Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck (and then-husband Frank Fay), Bebe Daniels (and spouse Ben Lyon), Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, Laurel & Hardy, Edward G. Robinson, Norma Shearer (it's her "jools" that get pinched), Victor McLaglen, Edmund Lowe, Warner Baxter, Richard Dix, Maurice Chevalier, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Loretta Young, Richard Barthelmess, character actors Eugene Pallette, Charles Butterworth, George E. Stone, J. Farrell MacDonald, Gabby Hayes and the entire Our Gang gang. It wasn't the first all-star movie, Warner's The Show of Shows (featuring Lightner's hit song) and Paramount on Parade were earlier full-length features that did a similar thing, but those films were restricted to showcasing a studio's roster of famous faces. The charitable nature of The Stolen Jools meant the biggest stars from MGM, Warner, Paramount and RKO could all appear - pretty exciting for inherently trivial star-spotters like myself.

The all-star model would reach its artistic and commercial zenith during World War Two, albeit within the constraints of the studio system, in the shape of Warner's Thank Your Lucky Stars - perhaps the most purely entertaining film I've ever seen - and Paramount's Star-Spangled Rhythm, along with lesser entries like Hollywood Canteen (Warner), Stage Door Canteen (RKO) and Follow the Boys (Universal). These big-budget extravaganzas weren't made solely for philanthropic purposes, but performers do seem to have been lent from one studio to the next with more grace than usual. The all-star film enjoyed a colourful renaissance in the '60s with How the West Was Won, The Longest Day and It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, though there were no cast-iron classics to speak of.

I watched tons of Daffy and Bugs cartoons on YouTube last year and was enjoying some classic Lee & Herring on the comp just the other day, but Stolen Jools is the first film I've caught on the internet this year. It seems revealing - or perhaps merely an indictment of users' attention-spans - that at the time of writing 45,000 people have watched the first section of the movie, and only 4,000 bothered to catch the final part. Perhaps they just tuned in to see Wallace Beery. You can watch the film here. The print quality is poor, but we're lucky to have this curio at all, since it was considered lost for many years - even if in all honesty it merits a (2).

Kick-Ass, X2 and an unheralded screwball masterpiece - Reviews #32

CINEMA: Kick-Ass (Matthew Vaughn, 2010) is an original, entertaining fusion of teen comedy and superhero movie that stops firing on all cylinders when its guns start blazing. Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is an ordinary American teenager who decides to become a superhero. He has no powers, aside from “being invisible to girls”, but he does have a natty green costume, ordered online. After a spot of posing and some light training, the self-proclaimed Kick-Ass goes into action. Seeing two hoods trying to break into a car, he tackles them - and departs in an ambulance. Eventually, though, through a combination of resilience and dumb luck, our hero does attain local celebrity, along with the unwanted attentions of gangland kingpin Mark Strong, who thinks him responsible for a series of vigilante killings carried out by wronged ex-cop Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and his foul-mouthed daughter Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz, who is terrific). Meanwhile, Strong's neglected son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) decides he wants to get involved, and reinvents himself as the bequiffed Red Mist.

The film starts in an appealingly whimsical vein, its superbly-observed passages about teen life punctuated with blasts of graphic, realistic violence: one minute Lizewski is wrestling with love interest’s Lyndsy Fonseca mistaken belief that he’s gay, the next he’s wrestling three armed men in the gutter. There’s a superb moment in which Kick-Ass decides to leap between tall buildings, then thinks better of it, such subversion of comic book lore jostling for space with simpler pleasures, like two geeky teen superheroes dancing goofily to Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy as they cruise the New York streets. But these more engaging elements are ultimately overtaken by cartoonish mayhem in a less imaginative, more gratuitous second half that - while fine in itself - largely abandons the excellent premise in favour of stylised gore. It’s still a very worthwhile film, with well-drawn characters, a glorious sense of the unexpected and a dozen huge laughs. (3)

***



*SPOILERS FOR THIS FILM AND CONFESSIONS OF BOSTON BLACKIE*
X2 (Bryan Singer, 2003) is a stunning sequel to X-Men that ups the ante in terms of action, mystery and character drama. The premise is perfectly formed, as the heroes from the first film are forced to enter an uneasy alliance with former adversary Ian McKellen and his amorphous henchwoman (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos). The danger this time is despotic military man Brian Cox, who’s harbouring at least two dark secrets as he plots the demise of the mutant race. All the key cast members return, while Alan Cumming is an excellent addition to the cast as Kurt Wagner, improbably channelling Nosferatu to create a lovely, sympathetic character. Utilising biblical reference and the actor’s effective underplaying, the film cleverly flips our initial impression of Wagner, introduced as a knife-wielding, teleporting psychopath in a bravura opening sequence.

This is an extremely well-plotted, satisfying action film that (presumably inadvertently) ends up borrowing the clever double-ending of Confessions of Boston Blackie (see #89), which also saw its heroes defeat the bad guys, only to face near-certain suffocation. Singer seamlessly balances the disparate story elements, which again mix story threads about friendship, love and loyalty with broad satire and disarmingly funny, well-integrated comic asides. Racism gets another battering here, while mutancy is also equated with homosexuality in a spoof of ‘coming out’ clichés that’s played solely for laughs. “Have you tried not being a mutant?” asks Ice Man’s mother, before adding: “This is all my fault.” Happily, Pyro is on hand to reassure her: “Actually, they discovered that males are the ones who carry the mutant gene and pass it on, so-” he points at Ice Man’s dad, “it’s his fault.” The film's heart is illustrated by the genuinely touching chat between Wolverine and Ice Man, which sees the latter use his powers to cool his friend's drink. X2 is littered with such likeable, knowing touches.

There are shortcomings, with a slight nastiness permeating several scenes and coming to a head in a sequence invoking a gruesome lobotomy. It’s also unnecessary for Singer to hit us over the head with flashbacks concerning Wolverine’s past, when that shot of the three scratch marks etched into a column in a grim cellar lab made the point so subtly and so well, while a lack of clarity about the dam site in the final set piece makes the ending a touch confusing. But this is a mightily impressive, immensely enjoyable blockbuster, with strong action sequences, a firm grasp of its source novels’ mythology and strong performances across the board. (4)

***



It's Love I'm After (Archie Mayo, 1937) is just a delight, an incredibly well-written screwball comedy that keeps the expertly-crafted witticisms flying thick and fast. Given the wrong material or the wrong direction, Leslie Howard could appear unbearably smug, but here he gets the role of a lifetime - and makes the most of it. He's a conceited ham, with two eyes for the ladies, who spends most of his time off-stage (and some of it on) warring with thespian girlfriend Bette Davis. Resolving one day to turn over not just a new leaf, but a whole book of them, he's forced to play the last word in unthinking bounders to disillusion the fiancee (Olivia de Havilland) of an old friend's son. It's a great set up: a reformed character having to appear even more reprehensible than before in order to do the decent thing, and it's developed in consistently surprising, imaginative ways.

And then there's the cast. Howard is flawless as the conceited, confused, compromised, increasingly desperate cad - who has more than a little of John Barrymore about him - with Davis giving her best comedic performance as his long-suffering lover, who packs an explosive temper. De Havilland is perfectly cast, both cloying and appealing as the starstruck girl who'll excuse anything her rambunctious idol does, while Eric Blore excels as Howard's valet and co-conspirator. Blore, one of the great supporting comics, is great in everything, but I've never seen him as funny as here. Displaying his customary lack of vanity and willingness to do anything for a laugh, he spends most of one scene making ridiculous bird noises and another displacing his silly toupee. Blore also gets the best line of the film, responding to Bonnie Granville's cry of "I know something you don't know" with one of the funniest, most petulant one-liners I've ever heard.

Drawing on Shakespeare to gets both its pathos and its laughs, in the vein of To Be or Not to Be and Withnail & I, It's Love I'm After is streets ahead of most other golden era comedies: intelligent, romantic and uproariously funny, eliciting the particular buzz that comes with watching something that's clearly very special. (4)

Note: This film is now available on Region 1 DVD, on demand from the Warner Bros Archive.

***



*MAJOR SPOILERS*
Daredevil (Mark Steven Johnson, 2003) - Speaking of Shakespeare, there’s something of Hamlet about Daredevil, the hero of Mark Steven Johnson’s grim, adult comic book tragedy on the subject of revenge. Ben Affleck is Matt Murdock, a lawyer by day, but a catsuited crimefighter by night. In between, he recharges his batteries by gobbling down prescription pills and sleeping in a coffin full of water at the back of a Catholic church. Whilst supposedly a protector of the public, Daredevil battles a burning desire for vengeance that threatens to consume him, as shadowy forces rob him of the only two people he loves.

The context is particularly interesting: in terms of the character’s background, his complexity and his moral ambiguity. Murdock, the son of a prizefighter, is blinded during a tough childhood in Hell’s Kitchen, but finds that his other senses acquire a superhuman sharpness. Exacting his own brand of justice, he comes into conflict with his priest and guardian (a character reminiscent of Pat O’Brien in Angels with Dirty Faces), who tells him: "A man without fear is a man without hope." But as the desperate Murdock tells a cowering child: “I’m not the bad guy.”

The bad guy is The Kingpin (Michael Clarke Duncan), ably assisted by flicky hitman (“flickman”, if you will) Bullseye (Colin Farrell), who’s like a satanic, Irish Oddjob. Hilariously, Farrell is introduced with a hip hop song boasting the central refrain: "Top o' the mornin' to ya/Top o' the mornin' to ya". Indeed, one of the film’s main failings is an overbearing song score stuffed with unmemorable tunes that are either unsuitable for the action or else offer blunt narration. Farrell’s superb, though, in his colourful characterisation, and there’s a cracking joke about the way he deals with security guards.

Johnson’s direction is quite good, repeatedly drawing on a neat “radar” gimmick, later half-inched by wise old Morgan Freeman in The Dark Knight, as Murdock constructs a picture of his surroundings via his supersensitive hearing. The scenes in which the hero “sees” via the rain are poorly realised, there’s too much CGI in the Affleck/Farrell showdown and the non-linear structure is quite confused, but there’s a great shot of Murdock on the rooftop before the final fight that recalls the classic image of coward Chester Morris keeping an eye out for the cops above his safehouse in the pictorially striking Alibi. The final fight itself, in the pouring rain, is also very good - recalling the main set piece in Jet Li’s passable Born to Defend – and the payoff is admirable and brave.

Affleck is fairly good in a well-written role, supported by Jon Favreau - offering strong comic relief and emotional backbone as Murdock’s law firm partner – and Jennifer Garner, who’s a nice romantic lead. Her courtship dance with Affleck, a kung fu battle in a park, is daft but novel. I was surprised to learn that Daredevil is widely regarded as one of the weaker comic book adaptations of recent years, as it’s vastly superior to Spider-Man and more coherent and nuanced than the messy, if sporadically extraordinary Dark Knight. There’s also a funny bit in the funeral scene where it starts to rain and Affleck’s impeccably gelled hair begins to look like an umbrella. (3)

***

The following review contains one instance of fully-justified swearing.



Le mépris (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) sounds intriguing, but staggers under the weight of its own pretensions. The plot, according to almost anyone you ask, is this: screenwriter Michel Piccoli is torn between an artistic director (Fritz Lang, good fun playing himself) and a commercially-minded producer (Jack Palance), his artistic problems coinciding with home life troubles. Really, though, this is a 90-minute lovers' quarrel, with a soupcon about art and compromise occasionally nudged into the narrative. If that sounds fun, then go ahead. The film is at its best in the first hour, with fine use of the central musical theme (later borrowed by Scorsese for Casino), some spectacular Cinemascope photography and snippets of fairly involving characterisation, but the final third is almost unbearably tedious, dominated by marital squabbling that becomes hopelessly mannered and repetitive. It's interesting to see Bardot as the director's muse, but while she's really rather good, she's scuppered by the infuriatingly shallow scripting. In the disc's accompanying documentary, Bardot et Godard, the narrator says: "All Godard's films are portraits of the modern woman: illogical, disarming, capricious, exasperating, regal ... mysterious." Try: "All Godard's films are artificial, unilluminating portraits of the two women he seems to have met: illogical, capricious, naked and really fucking annoying."

Likewise, though Lang has some interesting - if rigidly Godardian - things to say about man's relationship with God and with film, the movie too often lapses into self-indulgent rubbish. Godard is clearly delighted at the points he's making, but they tend to be either obvious or confused. The dearth of insight is typified by including the character of an interpreter, who takes up about a fifth of the running time saying something someone else has just said, making a pretty crude point about the incompatibility of the archetypes in a very long-winded, tiresome manner. While the key cinematic homage in Godard's first film, À bout de souffle, was stylised and clever ("Ah, Bogie!"), here the namechecking of Rio Bravo and Bigger Than Life comes across as pointless and laboured. Lang's contention that Cinemascope is "good for snakes and coffins" rather than people is a nice moment, while the unsurprising revelation that he prefers his 1931 film M to the bloody dreadful Rancho Notorious has a clear implication: one is a clear; artistic statement, the other Hollywood studio product. But I'd still rather watch Lang's Fury, or The Big Heat, than Le mépris, which is self-satisfied, overly familiar and ultimately dull. (2)

***



It Happens Every Thursday (Joseph Pevney, 1953) – Loretta Young, the toothy, huge-eyed leading lady, was known in Hollywood as “Attila the Nun”, due to her evangelical Catholic faith (which extended to introducing a swear jar on set, something I’ll have to implement at work) and iron will. She may have been voted the Hollywood Women’s Press Club’s most cooperative actress of 1950 (Bob Mitchum scooped their least cooperative actor gong), but then she always was a sassy self-publicist. Still, despite all that, and the bad press she’s had in recent years for the whole Judy Lewis affair, she remains an attractive performer: ethereal and appealing in those early years, then a fitting screen mother as her fascinating looks ebbed away.

It Happens Every Thursday was her final film and it’s a charming piece of Americana: something like the gentle cousin of Fuller’s Park Row, with a showy role for Young as the archetypal supportive wife – stoic, resourceful and loyal. John Forsythe is a New York newspaperman who buys his own small-town ‘paper – the Eden Chronicle – and finds it’s going to need a bit of work. The relationship between Forsythe and screen wife Young is smartly written and delightfully played, and the difficulties they face are nicely realised. The familiar baddie in such movies, a hateful, sniping little gossip gleefully ruining lives, is usually a harridan, but here you get a fey wannabe adulterer, played by Willard Wateman. The rest of the supporting cast is pretty much terrific, featuring the greatest character comic of them all, Frank McHugh, alongside Preston Sturges regular Jimmy Conlin and round-faced Edgar Buchanan, who’s excellent in a surprisingly deep role. Best of all is the magnificent Gladys George (also appearing on the big screen for the final time), the most sympathetic brothel owner in ‘50s cinema. This blend of Johnny Come Lately and Mr Blandings could have seemed stale, but thanks to good scripting, pleasant plotting and lovely acting, it turns out just great. (3.5)