Kate Hepburn, 11/22/63 and Elia Kazan's America – Reviews #255

I've been busy writing, reading and working, but I found time to watch a few films too.

BOOK



*A FEW SPOILERS*
11/22/63 by Stephen King (2011) – This is the first Stephen King book I’ve read (though I’ve seen plenty of films based on his writing), I was drawn in as a fan of American history and a sucker for time-travel stories. Jake Epping is an English teacher in 2011 who’s shown a portal into 1958, located at the back of short order cook Al Templeton’s storage cupboard. He steps through and emerges in a world of tailfins, Lindy Hopping and harrowing domestic violence. His aim: to stop JFK’s assassination by monitoring and disposing of psychotic, communist mummy’s boy, Lee Harvey Oswald – if he can survive the interventions of an obdurate past that will sling all manner of abrupt, improbable obstacles into his path. First, though, he’s got some errands to run and a librarian to boff.

11/22/63 is overwritten and overlong, with clunky prose, a silly climactic dystopia and a lot of superfluous, blunt humour, but it’s also blessed with a gripping, meticulously plotted story and an unexpected moral grace. Its treatment of time travel is interesting too, as well as creating rules of the game that give melodrama a free pass and make coincidence almost profound, building to a climax of thrilling alternate history, before proceeding to go on for another 90 pages. Along the way, there are sly winks to cinematic history (Epping’s alias, George Amberson, is surely a reference to the character in Orson Welles’ vandalised masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons, the first cultural object I’d save, given a time portal) and historical novels dealing with the period (Dwight Holly from James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand makes a cameo), before a bittersweet ending that has more than a hint of Somewhere in Time - a much-maligned time-travelling romance with a devoted following. The book could be more economical and precise, and less hackneyed in its phrasing, sentiments and imagery, but King creates a compelling story set in an often vividly-realised world, and with an undeniably atmospheric, race-against-time crescendo best filed under ‘D. W. Griffith Does Dallas’. (3)

Next up is The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I'm 300 pages in and it is ridiculously readable, ideologically terrifying and a little preposterous.

***
FILMS



CINEMA: Holiday (George Cukor, 1938) – A truly beautiful, thoughtful and romantic film that deals with politics and philosophy through the prism of a wealthy family, while doubling as an utterly captivating rom-com. Cary Grant is Johnny Case, a working class boy made good, who meets privileged Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) during the first holiday of his life, forcing him to choose between a life of capitalist conformity and the idealism represented by Julia’s free-spirited sister, Linda (Katharine Hepburn).

Based on a 1928 Philip Barry play, and adapted by the great liberal screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, it’s a remarkably deep, wise and incisive work that transcends its simple three-act structure, its running time and even its own story, seeming to live way beyond its boundaries in all directions. We encounter entire decades of these characters’ lives, to either side of the few weeks seen on the screen.

Though almost the entire cast are astonishingly good, the film is dominated by Hepburn’s magnificent characterisation, arguably the greatest thing she ever did on film. Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go) introduced the film at the BFI as part of the Screen Epiphanies strand, and eulogised her acting style during this period: innumerable emotions clashing beneath the surface. Later, he said, she either lost that virtue or abandoned it, shifting to a style of “one shot, one emotion”.

Linda is a woman shackled and patronised by her family, who finds solace only in the fourth-floor playroom created by her late mother, and escape in Johnny’s infectious zest for living. She idolises and idealises the shallow, grasping Julia, while her desperate fragility breaks more than once into quivering tears. But she’s also a ferocious fighter, fiercely individualistic, with a righteous anger and a devastating wit. “I beg your pardon,” says her father as Grant obligingly engages in a discussion about his suitability as Julia’s suitor. “I should think you would,” counters Hepburn, in just about the finest tone of sardonic disgust I’ve ever heard. Occasionally she traverses into a private school manner that I find a little much (“I do, reaaaally”), but Linda’s pretty much my ideal woman – intelligent, open-minded, loyal, funny and equipped to do a forward roll or an impression of a giraffe when duty demands it – without ever seeming like a caricature or mere wish-fulfilment.

Lew Ayres is almost as good, playing her despondent, booze-marinated brother, Ned. Prohibited from following his ambitions by his father, and with his lustre drained by alcoholism, his waning energies are channelled into sad reflection and bitter observation that’s both heartbreaking and hilarious. It would be easy to be turned off or alienated by a materially privileged character stewing in listless self-pity, but as a New York Sebastian Flyte, Ayres is so specific, so assured, so intensely, insanely likeable that his scenes aren’t just tolerable, they’re tear-jerking and timeless. “He’s in a spot, isn’t he?”, he asks Linda at one point, bleakly surveying Johnny’s chances of emerging with his principles intact. Later, as she flees the nest, the catharsis tempered by his inability to break free, she tells him: “I’ll be back for you.” “I’ll be here,” he murmurs into his glass.

Grant’s Johnny is a similarly vibrant, vital creation. Before the actor became waylaid by a tedious mahogany suavity, he was the best light comedian in Hollywood, and a dramatic actor of unheralded brilliance, and he makes Johnny’s plight remarkably real. This isn’t the fast-talking, exaggerated Grant of His Girl Friday, the stylised nebbish of Bringing Up Baby or the charmingly omniscient rom-com lead premiered in The Philadelphia Story, it’s the most human and appealing character he ever played, with more to say about his world and his times than any other role he was ever given.

Holiday is a snapshot of inter-war America, and yet it endures more than probably any other American film of its period. It’s an assault on conformity, rapacious materialism and – more subtly – fascism, as the odious Seton Cram (sometime Moriarty, Henry Daniell) memorably opines that he could make a lot more money “if only the right government was in place”. It’s also a film about the purpose of living, and especially the purpose of living in a capitalist world that values acquisition beyond accomplishment. Seton Cram’s antithesis is liberal professor Nick Potter, realised by regular Fred-and-Ginger foil, Edward Everett Horton, giving the straightest (in both senses of the word) and deepest performance of a spectacular career. He’s the only actor remaining from the 1930 version of the film, and knows the material inside out. He is warm, loyal, whipsmart but deceptively shambling, his intelligence and charm put to proper use, rather than commandeered in the service of business. His partnership with Jean Dixon – as screen wife, Susan – is immensely rewarding, their relationship like a sort of unglamorous, red-brick Nick-and-Nora, blessed with immaculate chemistry and impeccable timing. There’s one small shortcoming in this film, and that’s Julia’s character. She’s instantly dislikeable, where a superficial or eroding charm would have worked far better, and you wonder whether Mary Astor might have made more of the role in the 1930 film, her ethereal beauty and undeniable sensuality hoodwinking Johnny and the viewer more convincingly than Nolan’s shrewish reading of the character.

Ishiguro was keen to explain that ‘screwball comedy’ doesn’t mean ‘screwy comedy’, it’s a spin ball (from the baseball terminology) in which events have unexpected consequences, in which entertainment meets serious ideas, in which female characters are strong and intelligent and funny, and taken seriously. He listed Holiday as one of his three favourite, alongside It Happened One Night and His Girl Friday, and reserved a special level of ire for The Philadelphia Story – which reunited the same playwright, screenwriter, director and stars, and revived Hepburn’s flagging career, two years later – a work he sees as the reassertion of capitalist and chauvinist values after the Depression (I’d argue that it’s more complicated than that, but his extreme stance is a fun starting place for a discussion).

Holiday is very funny when it wants to be, and exceptionally romantic when it needs to be (that New Year’s kiss…), but it’s the film’s intelligence, erudition, humanity and philosophical daring that sets it apart. It’s obviously derived from a play, but it’s not overly talky and Cukor’s presentation is as cinematic as it needs to be, with some fine use of close-ups. He was Hepburn’s favourite director, having introduced her in 1932’s A Bill of Divorcement, and knew how to get the best out of her: how to capture that vulnerability, that ephemeral, quicksilver quality, and that intellectual alertness that characterised both her characters and herself. There are dozens of Hepburn performances that I admire, and a half-dozen I truly love, but for me she reached a peak in 1937 and ’38 – ironically the most difficult part of her professional career – with this and Gregory La Cava’s astounding comedy-drama Stage Door.

It is a remarkable, one-of-a-kind, lightning-in-a-bottle film, catching four Hollywood acting legends – Hepburn, Grant, Ayres and Horton – at the zenith of their artistry, given room to live and breathe by Cukor, and fed almost the last word in articulate, humane and liberal mind-fodder by two writers of uncommon quality. (4)

***



The Catered Affair (Richard Brooks, 1956) – A sort of Mother of the Bride, translated to a working-class Bronx household, with Bette Davis as a harsh but loving mother who decides to pull out all the stops for daughter Debbie Reynolds’ wedding. She wants Debbie to have something she’ll remember all her life, but the process of planning it begins to alienate her friends and family: her older brother (Barry Fitzgerald), the matron of honour (Joan Camden) and Davis’s own husband (Ernest Borgnine) – a cab driver whose life savings, meant for his own cab, are about to be splurged on one meal.

This impressively low-key drama, originally filmed for TV with Thelma Ritter, made the transition to the big screen after the success of Marty – also written by Paddy Chayefsky. He characterised The Catered Affair as “an unfocused piece, in which the first act was farce, and the second was comedy-drama and the third was abruptly drama”. There’s some truth in that, but I think the celluloid version – adapted by Gore Vidal – is more coherent and cohesive than he’s suggesting (aside from a cheering but tonedeaf ending). Its problems are more an overabundance of similar viewpoints, Debbie Reynolds’ character – who seems to have wandered in from a frothy rom-com – and the fact that it just isn’t very funny; Fitzgerald’s scheming and scowling is good value, but the rest of it is either too vague or too stressful to make you laugh.

It is, however, an unusually thoughtful, honest and poignant film, set largely in an admirably scuzzy little apartment and with fine work from Fitzgerald, Borgnine, Camden (in an arresting bit part) and Davis. Her identikit line-readings struck me at first as a shortcoming, but that’s not typically a problem she has an actress, and I came to think of it as the key to her character. That rasping, dropping voice is a positive choice Davis has made to hammer home Agnes’s weariness and emotional repression. With her usual – and indeed increasing – lack of vanity, she looks dowdy, even haggard as she crafts a character who’s neither a selfless saint nor a mommie dearest, but a real person blessed with few illusions and beset by the chronic, thankless monotony of life. When she responds to a private character evisceration by wordlessly plaiting her frazzled hair, it is a moment of rare profundity: I’ve found that tragedy is usually and perversely accompanied by such shell-shocked mundanity. (3)

See also: Ritter and Davis starred together in All About Eve, the best movie ever made about the theatre.

***

I was supposed to be seeing this at the BFI, but TFL cancelled all the trains, so I streamed it on Amazon instead. £3.49 in HD if you want to do the same:



America, America (Elia Kazan, 1963) – Kazan’s epic, based on his uncle’s journey from Anatolia to America, is uneven but unforgettable, with many fine moments and astonishing Haskell Wexler cinematography. The director’s style seems so effortlessly virtuosic, juggling moods from absurdist comedy to frenetic violence, rhapsodic joy and despair, or else conjuring them from thin air through immaculately composed monochrome imagery and remarkable but unshowy editing.

The film suffers a little from formal artificiality – everyone speaks English, the accents are a shambles and the juxtaposition of location photography and synthetic studio sets in the early stages is frustrating – but the cast looks just right (no Hollywood glamour here), and from Fordian or Seventh Seal-ish silhouettes on a hillside to that quietly overwhelming kiss of the turf, the film shows a man whose command of his medium is absolute – the climactic coughing montage on the boat a simply extraordinary bit of filmmaking.

As you might expect from the late Kazan, though, he remains transparently tortured by the shame and guilt of his appearance before HUAC, in which he ‘named names’ of fellow communists. When the hero (Stathis Giallelis) says he keeps his honour ‘safe inside him’, he is echoing not only the character’s collaborationist father, but also the writer, director and producer, who oscillated endlessly between seeing his own actions as cowardly or heroic.

It is, ultimately, a film about the opportunities that America affords immigrants, and the hardships it is worth enduring to get there, which is both an enduring message and one likely to ring bitterly hollow for the foreseeable future. There’s also a bit where someone's told that they'll have to change his name from ‘Kardashian’ if they want to make it in America. (3)

***



*ONE SPOILER IN THE FINAL PARAGRAPH*
Drive a Crooked Road (Richard Quine, 1954) – A very worthwhile and unexpectedly moving little noir, with Mickey Rooney typically excellent as a badly-scarred, self-loathing and possibly autistic mechanic, who's recruited as a getaway driver by ruthless playboy criminal Kevin McCarthy and his hard-boiled moll (Barbara Foster).

At times its low-budget is a hindrance – with an endlessly repeated musical motif and a pathetic opening set-piece dominated by lousy back-projection – while Jack Kelly's part as McCarthy's wisecracking heavy is basically just annoying, but Blake Edwards' story is genuinely affecting, there's some quietly iconic imagery and breathless action (the climactic drive is heart-in-mouth stuff, despite its overall vagueness and process shots), and Rooney is enormously touching as the lonely, unloved dupe whose great love is just a sham.

At his best, Rooney was arguably the finest screen actor in America (Young Tom Edison, The Human Comedy, National Velvet), but he typically needed both good material and a director who could rein him in. Here he seems to have both, and compared to his other best-known noir, Quicksand, in which he's supposed to be sympathetic but is written rather like a psychopath, this one comes off very nicely. It's rare to find such a gentle, sweet-natured, and quietly and consistently moral crime film; one that's about love, dreams and goodness, rather than lust, money and man's dark heart. Warner arguably did something similar with probably the oddest film in its '30s/'40s gangster cycle: Brother Orchid.

It'd be nice if Columbia and director Quine had put a bit more care into the finished product – even the impressive finale has one incompetent bit of staging that should have been re-done, as a man 10 yards away is shot by a bullet that goes directly upwards – but the film is sufficiently distinctive and original enough to succeed anyway, while leaning on all those noir tropes that I love so dearly.

***



"I never thought I'd make a killing on some guy's 'integrity'."
Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957) – A spectacularly cynical late noir, with Tony Curtis's best dramatic performance, as gorgeous, amoral press agent, Sidney Falco, who slimes his way around a vividly-realised, nocturnal NY, trying to save his own skin. He'll do whatever it takes to break up the romance between an idealistic jazz guitarist and a fragile young woman (Susan Harrison), in order to win the favour of her brother: all-powerful, creepily possessive Broadway columnist, J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), one of the movies' most frightening villains.

Director Alexander Mackendrick called satire "the snarl behind the smile", and here that snarl is barely concealed, as he mercilessly drags tabloid muckraking, capitalist compromise and phony patrotism under the lens. It's the feel of the thing too, though: a sweaty, desperate, and seductive trawl through the seething, rancid underbelly of urban America. It's in the striking performances and the avant garde angles (some of which are positively Wellesian). It's in the textures and timbres of Elmer Bernstein's classic jazz score. It comes from the peerless NY flavour, with stunning use of street locations by the great James Wong Howe; the bruising, blistering dialogue from regular Hitchcock collaborator Ernest Lehman (who wrote the original novella) and legendary playwright Clifford Odets.

It's also an enormously entertaining film, once you become attuned to its eye-watering misanthropy (or at least that of its characters), until it begins to stop and stutter with 20 minutes to go. Characters had to be punished in this era, and the tricks that the script has to play in order to do it are worse than fraudulent, they're laboured. There are flashes of inspiration and irony in those last two reels, but the intrusion of bathos into this nightmare vision has never worked for me. This is one movie where comeuppance should be outlawed; where sweetness doesn't spell success. (3.5)

***

TV



Sherlock: Season 4 – A disappointing fourth series of what used to be the best show on TV, with flashes of brilliance but an awful lot of self-satisfied nonsense and bum-squeaking tedium.
The Six Thatchers – Mary’s got a secret and apparently we care. This opener was difficult to follow and had far too many platitudes in its script (a major problem with Gatiss’ writing), though it was terrifically acted and the music was fantastic.
The Lying Detective – An hour of light-hearted escapism about Jimmy Savile (terrifyingly rendered by Toby Jones), followed by an insanely good closing 30 that made this whole series worthwhile. The reveal was astonishing.
The Final Problem – Silly, disengagingly overblown, self-parodic silliness, with our heroes forced to play The Crystal Maze with Ayn Rand. The closing montage is a reminder that Sherlock was most fun when he, y’know, solved crimes. (2)

***

Thanks for reading.

Totoro, Les 400 Coups and in the desert with Donald Cammell - Reviews #222

I've had the chance to watch quite a few movies and some TV. I've written you some reviews. Back to the books now: there'll be some of those in the next round-up. Thanks, as ever, for reading.

FILMS



Les quatre cents coups (Francois Truffaut, 1959) - When I was 14, I knackered my knees by doing too much road running (what has this got to do with Truffaut? Don't worry, I'm coming to that), meaning I could no longer spend all my time playing sport. Looking for a new hobby, and energised by the re-release of Star Wars the previous year, I was knocked to the floor by two old movies that I caught in quick succession: On the Waterfront, dominated by Marlon Brando's totemic performance as conflicted informant Terry Malloy, and then Les quatre cents coups, which we watched in a French lesson. I quickly became completely obsessed with the latter, getting the VHS for Christmas in 1999, and spending Millennium Eve watching it, whilst eating some cheese. Back then, it was the film's unease, its portrait of the loss of innocence, its non-conformist central character that bewitched me. Seen as a 31-year-old - again on New Year's Eve (I know how to party) - its 14-year-old protagonist is at times more obviously comic, which only makes the film's sense of heartbreak more acute.

Jean-Pierre Leaud is Antoine Doinel, director Francois Truffaut's 14-year-old alter-ego, caught between a disinterested mother and a weak father, bored by school, too unlucky or preoccupied to make anything of himself, and descending into a life of petty crime. This irresistible but intensely moving portrait of his life utilises Nouvelle Vague tics like jump-cuts and improvisation, but only to subtly enhance the narrative not, as Truffaut's contemporary Jean-Luc Godard would over the next few years, to replace it. Shooting vividly on Parisian locations, Truffaut intersperses Doinel's downward spiral with passages of charming, poetic whimsy: Antoine in a fairground spinning wheel, a Punch-and-Judy show where his growing cynicism is contrasted with the simple pleasure of younger children, and a school P. E. lesson in which the pupils peel away to leave the teacher jogging through town accompanied only by two students.

It's a film that's almost casually iconic: its unforgettable imagery - Antoine peering through the bars of a police van, rolling his polo neck over his mouth, or caught in that astonishing final freeze-frame - all grown from this completely credible character, Leaud (but for a few phony chuckles) inhabiting his role absolutely. Every decision Truffaut makes, like the journey from the active to the passive that Antoine makes upon crashing the adult world, is just perfect, as he punctuates the story with humour (I particularly like the fate of the Michelin Guide, and Doinel's friend Remy talking back to their teacher), further prevents it from passing into Bressonian territory with moments of catharsis, and deals in the kind of confusion, introspection and sense of injustice that dominates the world of the 14-year-old.

Godard seemed to love politics, post-modern gimmickry and himself; Truffaut loved cinema and children, and sentimentalised both without naivety; it's little wonder I prefer the latter. Les quatre cents coups is his first, best and purest: a masterpiece on any terms, and my gateway film to the joys of world cinema, and indeed to cinema as a whole. (4)

***


One of our villains, who is basically a walking (though currently seated) Michael Rooker character.

Harlan County, U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1977) - Documentary maker Barbara Kopple lived with coal miners’ families for a year in order to make this startling, far-reaching film, which uses a desperate localised strike – called by workers seeking union recognition – to examine the way America treats its poor. Alongside vivid footage of a conflict spiralling out of control, she examines corruption and compromise within the union, the duplicity and heartlessness of the coal companies, and the impossible odds stacked against the workers, in the shape of a police force, legislature and judiciary all conspiring to keep them under foot.

Impassioned, committed but also willing to acknowledge the complexities of the situation and the personal shortcomings of some campaigners, it’s ultimately a valuable, inspiring and upsetting film, a hymn to the virtues of authentic unionisation, when America still had such a thing. For an outside observer, it also highlights just how damaging US firearms laws are in a situation like this, making the escalation from placid to dangerous all the steeper – and infinitely more destructive. And Kooper soundtracks the whole thing with a succession of beguiling, soot-choked renditions of bluegrass songs about mining, some done professionally, others sung with an overpowering intensity by minor players in the film. (4)

***



My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988) - A wonderful, uncategorisable Miyazaki film about young sisters Satsuki and Mei, who move to the country while their mother is in hospital, and deal with growing pains, fear and disappointment - while finding solace in pastoral beauty, one another's friendship and a smiling, furry, 20ft grey-blue troll called Totoro.

The opening is perhaps a little shrill (at least in the Japanese-language version I saw), but it's a sumptuously-animated, emotionally overpowering movie full of charm, magic and humanity, without the superficial need for an antagonist, and with no formula in sight. I'll be seeing it again, and more than once.

Totoro still clutching the umbrella while he leaps over the growing plants. <3 (3.5)

***



*A FEW VERY MINOR SPOILERS*
CINEMA: Brooklyn (John Crowley, 2015) - This is a really sweet, affecting and mature film that sneaks up on you, with a central performance, a subtly subversive sensibility and a latent, growing power that catch you off guard, compensating for a look and storytelling technique that often stops you forgetting that you’re watching a movie, not observing real life.

Saoirse Ronan is absolutely exceptional as Eilis, who leaves her Irish hometown for a job and a new life in New York, where she begins a romance with Italian-American Tony (Emory Cohen in a sort of Brando-lite performance), an experience that changes her from a callow, homesick stray to a composed, confident young woman, nattily attired in a succession of pastel-shaded dresses. Then tragedy intervenes, trapping her in a conflict between two irreconcilable worlds.

Aside from two sumptuous shots – snow falling on a slow-motion Ronan, dust motes flailing in a sunbeam – the film has the same artificial look as many contemporary British and Irish movies (a problem shared with the largely magnificent Philomena), and some of its comic set pieces and supporting characters are too broad and inauthentic to truly engage. Yet there’s something in the script that is special, richly rewarding, that lifts it out of the ordinary: a realistic romanticism, a desire to engage with the scope of human emotion, and an agreeable allergy to fashioning superficial antagonists. When the film does make one concession on that ground, tossing a blackmailing villainess into the mix, the pay-off is so unexpected, arresting and unusual – yet so rooted in the real – it makes you want to whoop with joy.

The great virtue, though, is Ronan, who always goes for the subtle gesture over the grand one and, playing a character more remarkable for what happens to her than anything she does herself – carved more by events than her own will – keeps us in rapt attention: her evolution a series of small, meaningful moments, epitomised by that stunning moment early on in which she beams with broad but overstated pleasure at her friend’s blossoming love affair, before the look freezes on her face, declines and ebbs away, replaced only by uncertainty. Even when the events around her seem to be happening on a soundstage, in front of a camera, she is utterly genuine: eliciting sympathy, empathy, humour – the centre of everything here that works. It’s an extraordinary performance: the beating heart of a film that isn’t always great, and yet leaves more of a mark than many that are. (3.5)

***



The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015) - Colin Farrell checks into a hotel populated by character actors. If he can find a mate within 45 days, he gets a yacht; if not, he gets turned into an animal (an animal of his choosing, though).

It’s an interesting, sometimes intelligent allegory about love, relationships and the attendant social constructs and personal compromise, which is somewhat undermined by its self-consciously post-modern, deadpan presentation: one of those films that trumpets itself as a true original, and yet travels a stylistic path so well trammelled that it’s almost bare. Even Farrell’s appearance appears modelled after Joaquin Phoenix’s similarly alienated hero in Her.

It’s worth it for the flashes of incisive social comment, the welcome narrative surprises and a few brilliant jokes, but the mass critical circle jerk seems a little much. (3)

***



The Face Behind the Mask (Robert Florey, 1941) - This threadbare effort from Columbia has quite a cult following; I'm not sure why - probably just because of Peter Lorre. He plays a wide-eyed Hungarian immigrant whose face is destroyed in a flophouse fire. Unable to find work, due to his hideously scarred visage, he enters the criminal underworld, only for a succession of clichés and coincidences to prove his undoing.

The incomparable Lorre is very good (if not close to peak form) and there's one unexpected plot development that took a reasonable amount of balls, but otherwise it's a rather dull and drab affair that doesn't bother depicting any of the gang's exciting-sounding crimes (it seems they took that Hays Code edict a little too far) and saddles its cast with an abundance of lousy dialogue. *shrugs* (2)

***



Lucky Night (Norman Taurog, 1939) - I’d only heard negative things about this movie, and yet I’d wanted to see it for years. Why? Completism. It’s the only film starring Myrna Loy that I hadn’t seen (well, aside from Night Flight, if that counts). The arch, wry, stunningly attractive Loy had the most requested profile of the 1930s (source: plastic surgeons), was the favourite movie star of Bonnie and Clyde’s C. W. Moss, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Dillinger – who broke cover to see her in Manhattan Melodrama, being unfortunately shot for his troubles – and was crowned Queen of Hollywood in 1938, following the biggest poll of its kind ever conducted. She isn’t especially well known today, but from her breakthrough comic role in 1932’s Love Me Tonight, she occupied a unique place in the Hollywood firmament: sexy, playful, a master at manufacturing chemistry with leading men from Gable to Spencer Tracy to her beloved William Powell – and better at flirtatious, knowing badinage, flecked with sentiment, than anyone else in movies.

I was pretty obsessed with her for a while, and her best movies are still knocking around my all-time top 100: the first two Thin Man films, the screwball comedies I Love You Again and Libeled Lady, the underrated disaster epic, The Rains Came, that immense postwar drama, The Best Years of Our Lives, and arguably the apogee of studio excellence: Test Pilot. Though she made a fair amount of dreck (The Squall and the hideous rape apologia, The Barbarian, are the worst offenders), the vast majority of her films are a joy, and almost of them are improved immeasurably by her classy presence. Between The Prizefighter and the Lady in 1933 and Belles on Her Toes in 1952, she made 38 movies – until now, Lucky Night was the only one I hadn’t seen.

Myrna plays an affable but frustrated, unhappy young woman who flees her privileged upbringing in a search for the excitement of romantic love, which she has never felt. In a faintly risible ‘meet cute’, she happens upon fellow broke job-hunter, Robert Taylor, on a park bench. Proving to be his good luck charm, they spend the night winning big at a casino, get a reward for foiling a robbery, and then get hammered, waking up married – at which point they decide to make a go of it, only for their differing viewpoints to tug at the delicate thread of their union. It’s often rather inane, and it really drags towards the end, but for the most part this notorious flop isn’t actually too bad, with a few nice observations about love and life that remain intact 77 years on (I particularly like the way she mutters, "You're very attractive" during a deep discussion, and the way their dynamic shifts between the cerebral and the physical), a handful of reasonable gags and a very nice performance from Loy, looking largely great and sparkling whenever she can, especially during that scene in her father’s office, which she literally steals from behind Robert Taylor’s back, working with almost nothing. (2)

See also: The Impatient Years brought this story (uncredited) into a wartime, home front setting. It isn't very good.

***


A committee designed by a Cammell.

Wild Side: Director's Cut (Donald Cammell, 1995/2000) - When Donald Cammell shot himself in 1996, his final film - Wild Side - was seen as merely a footnote, a direct-to-video erotic thriller that barely anyone had bothered to watch, and which the critics who had regarded as a travesty. Cammell, too, had regarded it as such, as it has been taken out of his hands before he had had the chance to put his usual woozy, kinky, non-linear stamp on it, and tossed onto the home video market (pun intended). Four years later, after a painstaking restoration project led by producer and editor Frank Mazzola, this director's cut finally made its bow, doing the festival circuit before a major cinema release in the UK. It's only ever once appeared on DVD: in a Tartan release in the UK that same year. I managed to find a copy of that long out-of-print disc for a fiver, so I gave it a go.

It's basically not very good. In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw gave it five stars. Kim Newman in Empire gave it four. I don't share their taste for excess. I find huge performances tiresome and pointless, because anyone can hoot and yell and twitch and shout as Christopher Walken does here. The plot (and I am being kind in suggesting that the film has a plot) concerns a part-time hooker and full-time bank loan manager (Anne Heche) who catches the eye of her latest client (billionaire Walken, looking and acting a lot like Tommy Wiseau), as well as his estranged wife (Joan Chen) and his repulsive chauffeur (Steven Bauer). Across almost two hours, they bicker, flirt, discuss high finance and rape one another, in an almost endlessly repulsive parade of pretentious nastiness.

But amidst that oppressive unpleasantness, and its undisputable ridiculousness, it does have saving graces: Cammell and Mazzola's brilliant editing, Ryuichi Sakamoto's sleazy, neon-lit score, Heche's impressive performance, and the richly sensual love story between her and Chen which, while incomplete and slightly muddled, is also very affecting. Despite those artistic compensations, I won't be watching it again - ever - because a wallow like this simply isn't for me. Cammell's Performance (1970), on the other hand... (1.5)



SHORT: The Argument (Donald Cammell, 1999) - The script and acting are absolutely abysmal, but this unfinished short from Donald Cammell (shot in 1971 but released in 1999) is worth watching for the jawdropping desert cinematography and bravura editing, which create a succession of staggering juxtapositions that essentially define the phrase "acid Western". Editor Frank Mazzola and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond used some of the effects again - with frankly dizzying results - when he worked on Peter Fonda's majestic, eternally underrated mid-'70s oater, The Hired Hand. (3)

***

TV



Making a Murderer (2015) - What else is there to say? Gripping, immersive, bleak, gruesome, important, harrowing, compulsively watchable and perhaps a little disingenuous, with an astonishing cast of characters. Something like Serial + True Detective + Winter's Bone. If only it weren't all true. (4)



Charlie Brooker's 2015 Wipe (2015) - I'm a big fan, but the last few episodes have felt cobbled-together and uninspired. It had its moments, but the feeling of being variously educated, righteously enraged and weary with laughter by the end seems to have long departed. Please don't stop doing it, just do it better. (2.5)



Sherlock: The Abominable Bride (2016) - I'm still undecided about this one. It was variously delightful, hilarious, self-indulgent, pretentious, confused, fascinating, embarrassing, irritating and exhilarating, and managed to be all of those things at once in the stunningly staged waterfall sequence, which ended with a moment of fitting, knowing and utterly exalting television. Mrs Rick, the world's biggest Sherlock fan, said it "felt like a teaser trailer for the next series", which sounds about right. (2.5)



Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh, 2013) - The Private Life of Liberace, with Michael Douglas in imperious form as the flamboyantly, secretly gay entertainer, and Matt Damon as his live-in... assistant. Soderbergh's biopic, made for HBO but screened in cinemas over here, is stylistically spot-on and very well-acted by the leads, but doesn't necessarily amount to all that much, largely because it seems to have almost no wider significance. (3)

Greta Garbo, Sherlock, and down-and-out like Flynn - Reviews #180

Here's some stuff I watched and read over the past couple of weeks. Let me know if I'm overselling it.

FILMS



One, Two, Three (Billy Wilder, 1961) - Wilder's second-to-last masterpiece - and Jimmy Cagney's penultimate picture - is a rapid-fire Cold War comedy that ranks as one of the funniest films ever made.

Caggers is a veteran Coca Cola executive, marooned in West Berlin, who's forced to call on every ounce of his resources - and every trick in the book - after he lets the boss's daughter (Pamela Tiffin) marry a card-carrying communist (Horst Buchholz).

After a slow but steady 15-minute set-up, a little light on laughs, it's just non-stop entertainment: clever jokes, silly jokes, Nazi jokes, Stalin sight gags, cross-dressing, satire, in-jokes and innuendo, with Cagney a whirlwind of chicanery, juggling crooked commissars, suspicious journos and a bum-wiggling secretary with an "ümlaut".

Back in his element after a decade of mostly misfires, the star effortlessly recaptures the Cagney of old, of Blonde Crazy, Jimmy the Gent and Torrid Zone. It's a performance so full of manic energy that he then had to lie down for 20 years, only re-emerging for 1981's Ragtime. He's supported by a fun and perpetually shouting Buchholz, and a little-known but faultless ensemble, from his matchlessly acerbic wife (Arlene Francis) - whose every utterance is a gem - to the effusive, impressionable none-more-Southern Tiffin, and a sidekick who claims he was too far underground to know what Hitler was up to (Hanns Lothar).

Lots of later filmmakers have tried to recapture the zany spirit of '30s and early '40s comedies, but few have succeeded. Since Wilder wrote most of the best - from Midnight to Ball of Fire - he's not paying homage, merely remembering, and this one's the true spiritual successor to the immortal Ninotchka, co-written by him and directed by his hero Ernst Lubitsch, with the same culture-clash comedy, and the same well-lubricated, well horny Russian emissaries.

Incidentally, while Wilder gave both capitalism and communism what for in Ninotchka (and in 1933 Cagney described Stalin as "the greatest man in the world"), here he sides quite clearly with the West, while loading the script with acidic references to Germany's recent past - a beautiful, almost saintly way to deal with the events that had so impacted upon his own life, his nuclear family having largely perished at Auschwitz.

Many actors and directors never retained or reclaimed the carefree sensibility of the '30s after the horrors of the war. Bomber pilot Jimmy Stewart swore off mere entertainments, immersing himself in murky Westerns. Comedy specialist George Stevens never made another after filming the liberation of the death camps. But after getting some of his angst and anger out with his moody 1948 film, A Foreign Affair, shot on the ravaged streets of Berlin, Wilder merely dug in and kept pitching, the political gags still flying, a film still a place where anything went and everything was good for a laugh.

His last masterpiece came nine years after this one: a butchered but remarkable riff on the Sherlock Holmes legend that was up there with the Brett adaptations as my favourite treatment of Conan Doyle's legendary detective... until Moffat and Gatiss went to work. (4)

Trivia note: The movie in-jokes here alone are worth the price of admission, with Cagney doing his grapefruit bit from The Public Enemy, Cagney doing Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar (more of which below) and, best of all, a guy doing a Cagney impression at Cagney...!

***



The Man in the Iron Mask (James Whale, 1939) - A glossy, successful version of Dumas' timeless tale, very different in focus and feel to Doug Fairbanks' take on the story, The Iron Mask, but with the same Cardinal Richelieu (Nigel de Brulier appearing briefly his fourth time out) and that same classic closing shot.

Away from the realm of the star vehicle, the emphasis here is not on the ageing D'Artagnan - putting his life on the line for perhaps the last time - but on the title character, with Louis Hayward excelling in a dual role as the effete, pampered and murderous king, and his brave, empathetic, hounded brother - a finer man than he will ever be.

Hayward was one of the most talented and underrated leading men of his era, memorably playing The Saint as a smirking, hard-edged vigilante in the greatest ever incarnation of Leslie Charteris' hero, and he creates two diverse, contrasting and perfectly rounded characters here. Almost as soon as the film begins, you simply forget this is the same man, aided by the clarity of the writing, perhaps, but largely due to Hayward ability to craft two so distinctive and memorable personas. He really is terrific.

Dog-faced Pre-Code lothario Warren William is strangely cast as D'Artagnan, struggling to embody the character's great virtues (a challenge which Fairbanks met effortlessly), and the action climax is a bit of a letdown - aside from one impressive fall under some horses - but it's a slick, handsome and fast-moving movie, with a very good performance at its centre and some lovely, lushly-scored romantic scenes between Hayward and Joan Bennett. There are also a few striking images courtesy of Frankenstein director Whale, almost all of them within the confines of that jail cell, spotlighting that brutal, hideous mask. And, alas, there is one concession to Code-era "morality", as one character is punished for promiscuity by being quite inexplicably shot.

I still prefer The Iron Mask, a flawed but frequently fantastic rendering of the story which served as Fairbanks' emotional farewell to the silent screen, but this entertaining film - from Hollywood at its height - does a lot right, and shouldn't disappoint anyone, except perhaps those seeking some exciting action to go with their impressively rendered period drama. Indeed, its changes to Dumas's original proved so popular and effective that later adaptations often based themselves on this version of the story, rather than the celebrated novel. (3)

***



Garbo (Kevin Brownlow, 2005) - An insightful, respectful Brownlow documentary on one of the greats, perhaps overly concerned with her reclusiveness, but also well-researched, with a few interesting talking heads (plus Snore Vidal) and a wealth of exceptional footage: not only from her films, but also from her private life, her fabled 1949 screentest for a comeback that never transpired, and, most extraordinarily, two adverts she shot as a chunky, generously-eyebrowed teenager. The typically beautiful original score from frequent Brownlow collaborator Carl Davis is a massive bonus, and the montage of kisses - presumably inspired by Cinema Paradiso - is a jolt of sensual old movie joy. (3)

***



It's All True (Richard Wilson, Myron Meisel and Bill Krohn, 1993) - In 1942, Orson Welles was asked by the American government to make a film in Brazil as part of its "Good Neighbour" policy, which was designed to warm up relations with South America and so prevent the countries there from siding with the Axis. For reasons of office politics and global politics - not to mention Welles' unpredictability, obsessiveness, perfectionism, erratic work ethic, quest for authenticity and desire to fill his magnum opus with socialism - It's All True was never finished.

Fifty-one years later, his assistant director Dick Wilson put together this crucial, often magical and sometimes quite frustrating documentary, bearing the same name and containing some of the recently rediscovered footage. It begins with a hagiographic history of the project - ironing out Welles' various shortcomings and mistakes - and catches up with many of the impoverished Brazilians who became the stars of It's All True, or would have done, had it ever been completed.

For some reason, and this is the biggest frustration, the documentary contains mere snippets of My Friend Bonito - the Mexican pastoral piece directed by Norman Foster under Welles' specific instruction - but, most significantly, it climaxes with a lengthy reconstruction of Orson's pet project, Four Men on a Raft, telling the story of four penniless "jangaderos" who sailed the unimaginable journey from Fortaleza to Rio to demand the same civil rights as those in the cities.

This piece of silent poetry, shot in Welles' distinctive style but also bearing the influence of Robert Flaherty, couldn't be presented as the director intended - he was long dead, and the footage emerged from the vaults simply as dailies - and comes with an unsuitable, overbearing and overly modern musical score, but it is a priceless piece of film history nonetheless, containing its share of longueurs and non-professional woodenness, but also much breathtaking imagery. The sequence in which a sobbing child tackles an obstacle course of daily life, as she runs to report the body she's just found, is simply magical filmmaking, especially when one considers the clunky cameras Welles was having to use by the time his team pitched up in Fortaleza. And there's plenty more where that came from: boats silhouetted against a tempestuous sea, working-class Brazilians preparing meticulously for the daily catch, or marching endlessly by as they bury their dead, an emotional charge beneath the sheer beauty of the pictures.

As a chronicle of Welles' doomed South American project, the film only really works in conjunction with Simon Callow's biography - which properly contextualises and explains the myriad problems surrounding the shoot - but it does fill in a major blank in one of the most important and fascinating of all cinematic careers, sharing the almost mythic footage collected during surely the boldest and most ridiculously managed venture ever attempted by a Hollywood director. (3)

***



Brother Orchid (Lloyd Bacon, 1940) - Edward G. Robinson seemed to spend more time riffing playfully on his gangster image than actually defining it, but I suppose the immortal Little Caesar was all it really took.

This 1940 "crime comedy", though, isn't really what you'd expect, especially when you hear that Eddie G will be playing an underworld kingpin who hides out in a monastery. Perhaps the comic possibilities of the premise couldn't be fully exploited because Code-era movies were banned from anything that might be seen to lampoon religion, or perhaps the writers were just looking to do something different from a culture clash comedy - because this is certainly different.

Robinson's uncouth mobster returns from five years abroad - searching in vain for "real class", as he had in The Little Giant - to discover that he's yesterday's news, and his malevolent, duplicitous old partner, Humphrey Bogart, is now running the show. Our hero's ditsy dame (Ann Sothern) tries to smooth things out, but instead sets him up for a gangland slaying, which he only just manages to avoid, collapsing fortuitously in front of a monastery run by wise, gentle Donald Crisp.

The first half is a mixed bag, with Lloyd Bacon showing his usual lack of panache behind the camera, but there are a few good jokes, including Robinson's line about a postcard from a psychiatric hospital and Frank Orth's bit with the phone, while the scene in which our hero thinks he's been betrayed by his girl is unexpectedly moving. There's also a first-rate cast: not just the commanding star, Bogart, Sothern and Crisp, but also the likes of Ralph Belllamy, Allen Jenkins and Richard Lane.

But nothing really prepares you for what follows: a strange, heartfelt and earnest diversion - perhaps not entirely different from the ones that followed in On Dangerous Ground and Looper - featuring a couple of sly, funny gangster-out-of-water gags concerning "chumps" and "rewards", but rather more concerned with showing Robinson the error of his ways. While it's not entirely successful, providing neither the crime that we were promised, nor the comedy, it is agreeably unusual, perhaps due to the input of maverick associate producer Mark Hellinger. In fact, it's so good that even Bacon perks up, his obviousness offset by the rather lovely presentation of the scenes at the monastery.

Sometimes studio films of this era turn into something else entirely, merely because the writers were under such time pressure that they wrapped things up any way they could think of. With this one, based on a Collier's Magazine story, you get the impression that the redemptive tale into which it develops is the whole point, the cliched crime and comedy trappings are mere dressing for what the talented, often left-leaning screenwriters Earl Baldwin (Wild Boys of the Road) and Richard Connell (Meet John Doe) were trying to say. As such, it doesn't really compare with Robinson vehicles like Larceny, Inc. and A Slight Case of Murder, precisely because it isn't supposed to. It's so shot through with flaws that they may as well have been coming out of a Tommy Gun, but this gentle movie is also more satisfying than many others of its era, because it has a proper message underlying its immediate story.

Bellamy's final scene should also astound anyone familiar with his '30s and '40s work... (3)

***



Forever Female (Irving Rapper, 1953) - A backstage comedy-drama, with a pinch of Dodsworth, centring on a vain, ageing actress still playing 29 (Ginger Rogers), her producer and ex-husband (Paul Douglas), the headstrong young man who wrote her latest play (William Holden) - and who makes her feel young - and the ambitious, pretentious newcomer (Pat Crowley) trying to nab her role, and her man.

The script by Casablanca scribes Julius and Philip Epstein is predictable and rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but also enjoyable and pretty witty, with a fair Broadway flavour and an approach to attraction, relationships and middle-age that's perhaps erratic but also unusually mature.

The three big-name leads are in good if not tip-top form. Rogers never delivered on the comic or dramatic potential of her performance in Stage Door, but she's more modulated than normal, and her closing scenes are good. Holden, ironically, is simply too old for his part, and has little chance to trade on either his seductive cynicism (Sunset Blvd., Stalag 17) or dynamic muscularity (Picnic), but he's solid enough, while Douglas - a heavy, jowly stage success - does his usual bit, as reliable as he is unexciting.

The long-forgotten Crowley gets a huge credit at the start and another siamese stand-alone one at the end, billing her as a "future Paramount star", going to prove William Goldman's acerbic adage that no-one in Hollywood knows anything. She holds her own in the prestigious company, offering a decent variation on Anne Baxter's All About Eve heroics, and won the Golden Globe for Best Newcomer, but her energetic, charismatic performance is less nuanced than it should be, her sudden and not entirely convincing graduation from peppy youngster to wise young woman reminiscent of - and directly analogous to - Phoebe Nicholls' pleasant but mannered turn in the TV version of Brideshead Revisited. (3)

***



Black Legion (Archie Mayo and Michael Curtiz, 1937) - This bristling social drama is still shocking - and relevant - today, as an American everyman (Humphrey Bogart) loses a promotion to a second-generation immigrant, and joins the Klan. Or rather a Klan-like group called the Black Legion, though that rebranding appears to have had more to do with legal caution than moral cowardice, as the KKK is explicitly namechecked in the film.

It's a B-movie, really, with some convenient plotting, a lot of thick characters and a bit more romantic padding than is really welcome - as sweet as it is - but the central story retains a haunting power, much of it from the chilling imagery: masked figures swathed in black laying waste to farms and drug stores, whipping half-stripped immigrants, or conducting initiation ceremonies in the dead of night, at gunpoint, in which new recruits sign away their souls.

Scorsese must have had Bogart's revolver-based posing in mind, too, when Travis Bickle enquired as to whether anybody was talking to him. And there's something sublime about the movie calling into action bland, benign character players like Charles Halton and Harry Hayden (you'll probably know the faces, if not the names) to play its more banal, inconspicuous fascists. A shame, then, that the film's transparent contention that its higher-ranking Legionnaires are motivated more by money than proper racism does seem to be rather missing the point.

Warner Bros was more socially conscious, and spent more time and effort speaking to immigrant audiences, than any other studio, and this film goes where MGM and the rest would never have dreamt. It has its fair share of wooden acting, trite scripting and even silliness, while its attack is more on vigilantism than intolerance, but the boldness of the concept endures - along with a few unforgettable moments. (2.5)

***



Two-Faced Woman (George Cukor, 1941) - Three words: Garbo career apocalypse.

The ethereal Swedish sufferer works absolute wonders in this most unlikely of settings - a screwball comedy containing barely a trace of her established image - but the film around her is utterly dire, with a brainless, bad-tempered script, a supporting cast simply going through the motions, and the laziest direction Cukor ever gave. Stung by the (understandably) vitriolic critical reception, the great Garbo would never make another picture.

For what it's worth (and that really is very little), Garbo plays a Swedish ski instructor whose new husband (Melvyn Douglas) either wants to return to New York so that he can work incredibly hard editing his magazine, or just doss around chatting up women - the film is incredibly confused on this point. So she creates a twin sister for herself, who is apparently going to be such a handful that Douglas will return to the arms of his wife. Only he falls for her. But also finds out almost immediately that it's a ruse. So it's a battle-of-the-sexes comedy in which the male is entirely in charge the whole time, which also makes absolutely no sense, and which is bookended by some of the unfunniest slapstick ever misguidedly committed to film.

Douglas is so half-arsed it's little wonder that he soon took his considerable talents to the stage and the political arena - the scene in which he conceitedly smirks whilst hoodwinking her on the phone seems to sum up what he thought of the role - and the likes of Ruth Gordon, Roland Young and Constance Bennett look similarly embarrassed to be associated with something so abysmally conceived.

Somehow, despite all that, Garbo gives one of her most charming and delightful performances, following up her comic debut in Ninotchka with an altogether different characterisation: vivacious yet tormented, full of life, fun and flirtation, but with a heartbreakingly melancholy undercurrent. It would be the last time audiences would ever see her: Sweden's greatest cinematic export vanishing from sight for all time; well, except for to clomp around the streets of Manhattan in a huge hat and sunglasses for 50 years, the "hermit about town". (2)

***


These probably weren't that much use in the end.

*A FEW SPOILERS*
Tarzan Escapes (Richard Thorpe and John Farrow, 1936) - A film that's better known for what it doesn't contain than what it does, its notorious "vampire bats" sequence being excised after previews as it was deemed too frightening for audiences - and later lost (though some fans report seeing it in the '60s). As such, the characters climactically travel into a cave and emerge bloodied and beaten for no discernable reason, which I think we can file under "continuity error". Ironically, the whole film had already been completely repatterned by MGM after the 1935 cut, Tarzan Returns, was said to lack a central menace. Make your mind up, fellas.

As it exists today, Tarzan Escapes contains the usual mix of staggering racism, breathtaking colonial arrogance, incoherent philosophising and haplessly incorporated location footage, partially rescued - as ever - by some lively mythmaking and the megawatt charisma of Johnny Weissmuller (Tarzan) and Maureen O'Sullivan (Jane).

Plummy Benita Hume idiotically provokes a lioness, who is then shot dead - nice work, moron - with the travelling party doing nothing to atone, while black characters plummet to their death only for their civilised overlords to remark: "That was a close one." Indeed, the tribal inhabitants of Tarzan's perilous paradise exist only to be slaughtered, so that we, the viewer, are aware some white guy might be in a spot of danger - which, of course, they never are.

The film cleverly keeps Tarz off screen - aside from a couple of aaaheehaaaeeeaaaahs - for a good 20 minutes, then introduces him unexpectedly with a pip of a reveal, the camera swooping backwards to show his imposing frame in the upper reaches of a jungle tree. There's also a killer PoV shot of Tarzan kissing a very horny Jane, cutting to a flower floating in an inky lake that's very artily done, but the film in its entirety is an almost plotless inconsequence, its small snippets of story merely rehashed from its two predecessors, and coming out as dull domestic drama.

Jane's jungle house is impossible to take seriously in light of the excoriating Me Cheeta, James Lever's "autobiography" of the simian performer, while, perhaps most damagingly, Herbert Mundin provides some of the unfunniest, most overbearing comic relief I've ever seen - aside from his final scene - even if surprisingly effective when asked to play it straight. Had the whole production hadn't been so appallingly tortuous - going through three directors, including O'Sullivan's husband, John Farrow - you could almost accuse the film of being very, very lazy. As it is, it's perhaps just notably lacking in inspiration.

Then with 15 minutes left, it finally finds a bit of rhythm: Tarzan's escape is good fun, the swampy, foggy cave into which he leads his gang is overloaded with proto-noirish atmosphere - as man-eating lizards skulk around, gobbling black people - and the punchline to the sequence is superbly conceived. What it's really crying out for, though, is a topper: something to erase the tedium of the preceding 70 minutes and make it all worthwhile. You know, like vampire bats. (2)

***

BOOKS



Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre (2007) - You may remember this as the book that everyone was buying for everyone else (and particularly their dads) six Christmases ago. I gave it to my brother, but only just got around to borrowing it. It's the superb, ridiculous true story of Eddie Chapman, the North Eastern safecracker, womaniser and all-round Jack-the-lad who managed to get out of a Jersey prison by offering to spy on Britain for the Nazi occupiers... then turned double-agent under the guidance of spymasters supreme Tar Robertson, John Masterson, and his handler, Ronnie Reed. Barely a paragraph passes without some remarkable or hilarious detail, from fervent Nazi Walter Praetorius's obsession with Morris dancing, to the German agent who blew his cover in Britain by paying £10 and six shillings for a train ticket costing "10 and six". Chapman emerges as a fascinating character, his life the stuff of fiction, whose motives were often murky but who was transformed by that most appalling of creations - war - into a man of conscience. Meticulously assembled and written with the lightest of touches, it's one of the most enjoyable factual books I've read in an age. Highly recommended. (4)

***



My Wicked, Wicked Ways by Errol Flynn and Earl Conrad (1959) - Flynn's epic, notorious (and ghost-written) final statement is a patchwork of lies, fantasy and perhaps even a few things that actually happened, underscored by an obsession with sex that borders on the hysterical. It's the heartbreaking climactic third, though, that shifts it from a rollicking good read to something timeless, shot through as it is with sadness and loneliness, the spectre of addiction dominating. In addition to countless tall tales about his death-defying escapades, a false murder confession and some troubling sexual politics - Flynn and his aide lurching from one topic to the next with little interest in structure but a killer turn of phrase - there's an extraordinary amount in the book about the meaning and purpose of existence, somewhat at odds with the image of its (purported) author as a brainless carouser. But, as he so forcefully argues, he is as contradictory as any man, or indeed, as all of them. (3.5)

***



See You at the Movies by Melvyn Douglas and Tom Arthur (1986) - A wise, intimate autobiography with a rather misleading title, since the suave leading man turned heavyweight character player is so much more enamoured of his stage work than the featherweight Hollywood efforts that made his name. There are a few extremely insightful pen portraits of stars like Joan Crawford and Cary Grant, but Douglas spends more time - and energy - on the art of acting, the politics of the period, and his relationship with his beloved wife, Helen Gahagan Douglas. He's self-critical, frequently self-effacing - undercutting seriousness with sarcasm in the most unexpected places - and occasionally self-satisfied. He's also a charming companion in this, his twilight, with an irredeemable fondness for stories in which he behaves arrogantly and then trips over: pride coming before a quite literal fall. (3.5)

***

TV



Sherlock (Season 3, 2013) - Still the best thing on TV, perfectly balancing humour, sentiment and suspense, and provoking one of the most tedious, unconvincing backlashes in living memory. There's nothing here to touch the Season 2 finale, but then there's little else I've ever seen to touch the Season 2 finale. The first episode perhaps missteps by reuniting John and Sherlock in a comic, rather than a heartfelt manner, a few of the one-off supporting characters (the train nerd, the women on the online forum) have a case of the woodens, and there isn't always that much detecting going on, but those are infinitesimal quibbles with a truly remarkable programme - one of those works of dramatic art that exalts you, then leaves you bereft as the credits roll. The season finale, His Last Vow, is simply gobsmacking. Face-licking too, at one point. (4)

***



Veep (Season 1, 2012) - Armando Iannucci and Simon Blackwell's attempt to transfer their profound, profanity-laced brand of political satire to the US is a complete and staggering success, the unmistakable feel of their work remaining gloriously untouched, albeit with a touch of Parks and Rec sweetness smuggled in. Cracking ensemble too. I loved it. (4)

Sherlock: Series 1 Revisited

I dug out the DVD and wrote short-and-therefore-essentially-pointless recaps of the opening three episodes, and the one the BBC threw in the bin. Since I'd done that, I thought I may as well put them up here. To be honest, I'm not adding much to the world with this one, though there are *SPOILERS* throughout. If you're in the mood for other insultingly brief pieces about the programme, my original four-sentence review was here, the first episode of the second series got a brief mention here and there was a slightly lengthier and more worthwhile summary of the whole season here.

THE SERIES PROPER:



A Study in Pink (3.5) - I still don't think the encounter with the culprit quite works, but everything else about this open is utterly extraordinary. It's astonishingly sure-footed, with virtuosic performances from Cumberbatch and Freeman, scintillating dialogue and the kind of slick direction that's at once modern and timeless. The Blind Banker (2.5) is the weakest episode of the six so far (though Steve Thompson also penned the best of the bunch), with a convoluted, shapeless story about Chinese treasures, and uninteresting supporting characters. The interactions between Holmes and Watson are at least familiarly fine, and the Watson-is-Holmes bit is funny. The Great Game (3.5) is an excellent climax to the first series, with Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbum) delighting in being tormented by an unseen psychopath. I'd forgotten how dark, awkward and tricksy this Mark Gatiss-scripted episode was - even if its excursions into horror are a touch tiresome - with an eerie gimmick that sees Moriarty's goading words panted by sobbing civilians, and a deliciously amoral Holmes. It makes the moment where he finally mellows ("Thank you for what you did then, that was... good") all the more satisfying. But the best bit is still Andrew Scott's eyes flashing as he spits: "I will burn you... I will burn the heart out of you." Cripes. He nearly did, as well.

THE PILOT:


I chose this picture because it looked a bit red. That's about all it has going for it.

This embryonic, one-hour version of A Study in Pink cost a reported £800,000, but was ditched by the BBC upon completion - and thank goodness for that. Its pacing is probably slicker (presumably that's what happens when you're forced to throw in an extra half hour of material) and the most jarring element of the finished film is missing - how does Sherlock miss the fact that it's the taxi driver first time around? - but the direction, performances and sections of the script stepped up another level before the series reached our screens. Moffat added creepy footage of the shaking, bawling victims, an excellent subplot featuring Mycroft, that superlative gimmick of on-screen writing and the odd great one-liner ("Look, I've got a blanket"), while the music got a welcome upgrade and the reddish, scrappy visuals of this first effort were replaced by a shimmering, icy blue palette that underlined its hero's otherworldliness. Sherlock's reasons for getting into the car with the culprit also changed, from a hypo in the arm to a desperate need to understand how toothy serial killer Phil Davis got his passengers to poison themselves. And his flat looked nicer. Also, Sergeant Donovan was replaced by a better actor. Kudos to the head honchos at the BBC for demanding a re-tooling of the project - I bet it took balls, I know it drew flak from the right-wing tabloids, but it also gave us the greatest argument for retaining the licence fee that I've come across in years*. (3)

*To be honest, I would happily pay the licence fee just for the advert-free football commentary on the radio, I just put this bit in as a pithy sign-off.

Sorry, I have got a bit obsessed with Sherlock.

Silent film. And Buster Keaton singing - Reviews #100

For our 100th reviews round-up, we present The Artist, The Circus and Buster Keaton's spoof of '30s musicals. To mark the centenary, I also seem to have taken up swearing, for which I can only blinking apologise.



CINEMA: The Artist (Michel Hanavicius, 2011) - George Valentin has a problem. The swashbuckling, perma-twinkling charmer is a matinee idol, but he is a silent one, and it is 1927. Within two years, his kind will be obsolete, as the movies learn to talk. On the front-line of this revolution is Peppy Miller, a fresh-faced ingénue whose star is about to go stratospheric. They meet and fall in love, but seem destined to be forever apart. The Artist is really a simple melding of A Star Is Born, Singin’ in the Rain and Sunset Blvd. (all movies of the 1950s), but the stroke of genius was to shoot it as a silent film – the finest since Chaplin hung up his Little Tramp costume in 1936. Often, when you see a spoof of early cinema, the overriding feeling is that the people who made it have never seen a silent film. With The Artist, the impression is that the writer, director and stars are immersed in the mythos of the medium, and that of studio system movies as a whole. But while this homage is a spot-on pastiche, it is also a whole lot more than that. The Artist reclaims the mantle of silent film as popular art, while adding a new classic to the canon. There are nods to stars Greta Garbo and Douglas Fairbanks, directors F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, and exuberant, Hollywood-on-film efforts of the ‘20s, like Show People.

It mixes sweet set-pieces – particularly the “tuxedo cuddle”, which wouldn’t be out of place in one of Harold Lloyd’s silent masterpieces – with stylised montages, experimental, expressionistic fantasy sequences and segments of black drama. Jean Dujardin’s heightened performance as the boozy star on the skids is wonderful, while Bérénice Bejo is suitably taken and toothy as the peppy Peppy, and the film features what is comfortably one of cinema’s best five dogs. If there is a flaw, it’s that the pacing of the less visually inventive scenes is sometimes a little off, as if writer-director Michel Hazanavicius hasn’t quite got to grips with handling talky moments in a silent film. Perhaps that’s why The Artist isn’t ultimately as heartwrenchingly powerful as wordless wonders like The Crowd, The Wind or City Lights. But for all that, it’s still the best silent film for 75 years. (3.5)

***



*SPOILERS*
The Circus (Charles Chaplin, 1928) – Lovely Chaplin comedy – placing him in an eminently suitable setting – in which the Little Tramp accidentally becomes a star of the Big Top, while having his heart broken by a sweet, abused stunt-rider (Merna Kennedy). Not everything here gels, but it’s full of clever set pieces and hilarious running jokes, and there’s a beautiful love story at its centre. (3.5)

***



*SOME SPOILERS*
SHORT: Grand Slam Opera (Buster Keaton and Charles Lamont, 1936) - After being sacked by MGM in 1933, Buster Keaton pitched up at Educational Pictures, a Poverty Row studio that had switched from shooting films for schools to making comedy two-reelers, billing itself as "the spice of the program". He regarded the 16 films he made there, across three years, as a creative low point, but remained proud of two of them: the baseball-themed One Run Elmer, and Grand Slam Opera, universally regarded as the pick of the bunch. It is a delightful shot of musical-comedy silliness in which Buster sings, dances and destroys a bed. The film begins with him on the back of a train - a leitmotif in his work - crooning along to So Long, Elmer (a spoof of the George M. Cohan song, So Long, Mary), as he leaves Arizona to try for stardom in New York. Once there, he attempts to land a break via a radio talent show, and romances pancake chef Diana Lewis by repeatedly asking her, "How about dinner and a show?". The low budget means that a couple of scenes are slightly stilted, while Lewis (later the wife of the great William Powell) is extremely wooden, and the star no longer draws on his famed gracefulness and athleticism. But, and this is one of the biggest buts I've ever had to write, Grand Slam Opera is an exceptionally good film. There's a lovely bit of business in which Buster dances to an ever-changing medley of international dances, a slapstick duel (borrowed from his vaudeville days) where he and a conductor exchange wallops in time to an orchestra, and a fine collection of incidental gags: the object of his affections disappearing on a passing bus, his attempts to hitch a ride on a parked car and the climactic pratfall. The pièce de résistance is a superlative spoof of Fred Astaire's No Strings number from Top Hat. Fred kept Ginger awake with a spectacular tap routine utilising his whole hotel room, before lulling her to sleep via a delicate sand dance. By contrast, Buster clumps around excitably, clambers messily over the furniture - obliterating his bed - and then, while trying to make amends, does quite the opposite. It is one of the great set-pieces of his career, the high point of one of his most improbable triumphs. (3.5)

NB: I watched Grand Slam Opera on the excellent Kino DVD pictured above, but it is available on YouTube, beginning here.

See also: Several of Buster's finest early solo shorts are reviewed here.

***



Bolt (Byron Howard and Chris Williams, 2008) – Impressive Disney animation about a superhero dog whose life isn’t all it seems. It opens with a bang and fills in the character drama later, with a Pixar-ish sensibility and a welcome lack of cloying sentiment. The hamster’s funny too. (3)

***



*SOME SPOILERS*
The Public Menace (Erle C. Kenton, 1935) - Zippy, entertaining Columbia crime comedy about cocky journo George Murphy enjoying an on-off relationship with screwballish manicurist Jean Arthur while trying to get the scoop on crime kingpin Douglass Dumbrille. It's no His Girl Friday, but Arthur is as lovely as ever, Murphy's rival reporters are funny and I like the fact that our hero's plays for the big time are essentially quite rubbish. Especially the one about delivering a heavily-armed gangster to your boss. (3)

***



Apa (István Szabó, 1966) aka Father – A young boy who lost his father in the Second World War concocts fantasies that the old man was a resistance leader – and an action hero. A potentially brilliant idea is somewhat mangled in the translation. There are poetic stretches – not least the ‘three memories’ – but the film is a little hard to follow and has no real emotional pull, despite its semi-autobiographical material. (2.5)

***



The Client (Joel Schumacher, 1994) – I have a soft spot for Grisham adaptations, but Schumacher’s tend to be a bit trashy. This one is also saddled with a slightly confusing story, in that the viewer isn’t quite sure what they’re supposed to want to happen. It’s fast-moving and fairly entertaining, with a strong cast, but somewhat lacking in thrills. (2.5)

See also: Schumacher's A Time to Kill, also from a Grisham novel, is reviewed here.

***



Ocean’s Twelve (Steven Soderberg, 2004) is like a big, long in-joke to which you’re not party. At one point, Julia Roberts’s character has to pretend to be Julia Roberts – oh, the complete opposite of hilarity! It’s rare to come across a film that’s so utterly inept and yet so extraordinarily pleased with itself, with its atrocious plotting, babbling, inane overlapping dialogue and expensive swooping shots of each big name actor’s preening fizzog. Having said that, it is quite a lot less objectionable than A Touch of Class (see below), the 'laser dance' is nifty and I do rather like Matt Damon. (1.5)

***



The Three Caballeros (Norman Ferguson, 1944) – Bafflingly bad Disney feature in which inveterate pussy hound Donald Duck becomes acquainted with some of the most tedious aspects of Latin American culture. The title number is a wow and there’s some clever integration of live-action and animated footage, but long stretches of the film are just interminably boring. (1.5)

***



Mr. Woodcock (Craig Gillespie, 2007) – Unfunny, unpleasant ‘comedy’ about self-help guru Seann William Scott having a breakdown when his vindictive old gym teacher (Billy Bob Thornton) starts slamming/porking/boning his mum (Susan Sarandon) - and that varied repetition is the only laugh in the film. This premise was dealt with superbly in Freaks and Geeks; Mr. Woodcock is just a catastrophe. Amy Poehler’s character is an alcoholic, lol. (1)

***


Glenda Jackson, putting her considerable talents to dubious use.

A Touch of Class (Melvin Frank, 1973) – Can detestably smug adulterer George Segal keep saucy divorcee Glenda Jackson as a mere side dish? Who gives a shit? Appalling romantic comedy-drama in which love blossoms after she says she wishes he’d raped her. (1)

***

TV



Sherlock: Series 2 (2012) - Ridiculously, almost obscenely good, at least in the first and last episodes, which boasted a couple of the best scripts you're ever likely to find. The middle chapter was the weak link again, with a silly plot and Russell Tovey overacting in a key supporting part. Regardless, this second series is a remarkable achievement, with exceptional direction, performances - particularly by Freeman, Cumberbatch and Andrew Scott - and music. Final episode, The Reichenbach Fall, just raised the bar in terms of British TV drama. (4)

***



Community (Season 1, 2009-10) – Exceptional post-modern comedy about a self-styled “loveable gang of misfits” who band together at community college after each hitting a crisis in their lives. It begins in a Bilko vein, focusing on selfish, grandstanding former lawyer Joel McHale, but opens up impressively to spotlight a gallery of brilliantly-etched subversive archetypes, including pop culture-obsessed Asperger’s sufferer Danny Pudi, “decent person” Alison Brie, and vacant jock and secret modern dancer Donald Glover. There are a handful of episodes that don’t quite work in this initial batch of 25, but at its best it is as funny as anything I’ve seen on American TV. The most surprising thing of all? Its secret weapon is Chevy Chase, as the racist, gay-obsessed Pierce, who has probably the best two lines of the series in the final episode. (4)

***



30 Rock: Season 1 (2007-8) - In spots, dangerously funny, though it's not very consistent and has a tendency towards caricature. The cast is excellent, particularly Tracy Morgan, Judah Friedlander and Scott Adsit. (3)

***



Charlie Brooker's 2011 Wipe (2010) - A bit erratic. Doug Stanhope was atrocious, but the sequence about Freddie Flintoff's Christmas advert made me cry with laughter. (3)

***



TVM: Hawking (2004) - A portrait of the scientist as a young man, as Steve-O (Benedict Cumberbum) tries to find his place in the world, while dealing with romantic distractions and the onset of his illness. The framing device is absolutely atrocious - another transparent attempt to sell our dramas to the States - the story is unfocused and some of the dialogue sucks so much it creates a black hole... but it's worth it for Cumberbum's excellent central performance, and that stunning scene at the train station. Lisa Dillon, who doesn't get out much, is decent, if somewhat underused, as his beau. (2.5)