Review of 2015: Part 1 - Movies

I may have curbed the obsessive movie-watching a little this year and last, but I still managed to catch 167 movies, 134 of them for the first time, and 31 of them at the cinema. In this, part one of my review of the year (live performances and books are coming up later in separate instalments), I'll talk you through the best of them, imagining myself to be some sort of gold/flax filter, rather than just a 31-year-old man who sits in the dark watching telly. First up are my top 10 movies of the year, then the 15 best new discoveries, followed by a brief round-up and a few old favourites.

Top 10 of 2015:

10. Orion: The Man Who Would Be King



Director: Jeanie Finlay
What we said: "A fantastic story, told almost as well as it could be, about a masked Elvis soundalike who was marketed to a public that didn’t want to believe the King was dead. Working with a limited amount of archive film, director Jeanie Finlay weaves this stranger-than-fiction tale with the use of talking heads, intelligent reconstructions, melancholic bucolic footage and audio interviews, and while a few interesting eyewitnesses are absent – including Ellis’s various wives – and it doesn't always delve as deeply as it might, the result is a compelling, fascinating film with a couple of devastating late twists."

9. Spectre



Director: Sam Mendes
Cast: Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Léa Seydoux, Monica Bellucci, Ben Whishaw, Andrew Scott and Ralph Fiennes
I, erm, went to the premiere of this movie, as it was at my office. What we said: "Since when did Bond movies get good? Spectre isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty damn great: riotously enjoyable, genuinely affecting and with a handling of Bond mythology that’s fresh yet respectful, the film pervaded by a swaggering self-confidence (and featuring additional dialogue by West End superstar Jez Butterworth!). If it is Mendes and Craig’s final Bond, it’s a good one to bow out with, but I really hope it’s not, since its balance of artistry, intelligence and blockbuster smarts lifts it way, way out of the ordinary. Not only did Bond films get good, but they’ve stayed good."

8. Mistress America



Director: Noah Baumbach
Cast: Greta Gerwig, Lola Kirke, Seth Barrish and Juliet Brett
What we said: "Noah Baumbach is reunited with Greta Gerwig, the stunningly gifted comedian who is to screen humour what Michelle Williams and Jennifer Lawrence are to drama – i.e. better at playing it than anyone else on the planet. And for Mistress America, the director has reinvented himself as Howard Hawks for a fast-talking, ultimately old-fashioned screwball comedy of absurdism and interruption in which Gerwig is essentially his Ros Russell. It’s a film of moral and narrative daring. That, a vivid NY atmosphere and a pair of exceptional performances: Kirke’s pretty, pretty lost freshman holding her own against Brooke, another superb entry in Gerwig’s gallery of appealing, aimless young women, drifting attractively towards oblivion."

7. Star Wars: The Force Awakens



Director: J. J. Abrams
Cast: Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Adam Driver and Harrison Ford
What we said: "Well, J. J. Abrams certainly seems to understand what Star Wars fans want more than George Lucas does, because The Force Awakens is fun - and there's not a discussion of international trade tariffs in sight. For great portions of the movie, I just had a big grin plastered across my face. It gets Star Wars, it really does. It knows how much we love the original trilogy, and it loves it too. That affection, evidenced by a million tiny touches, doesn't always blend seamlessly with the new narrative, but it does underpin and underscore everything that happens."

6. Birdman



Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Cast: Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Emma Stone and Naomi Watts
What we said: Like last year's best film, Boyhood, this gave me the feeling of euphoria that comes from seeing something utterly new and startlingly ambitious. Whereas Linklater's movie was wise, universal and steeped in contemporary Americana, this one is pin-sharp, blackly comic and streaked with greasepaint, with at least two scenes of fantastical wonder, one of underpants-based humiliation, and a dozen comprising stylised human drama between vivid, unforgettable characters.

5. Inside Out



Director: Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen
Cast: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Mindy Kaling, Bill Hader, Lewis Black and Kaitlyn Dias
What we said: This is a major return to form for Pixar: an extremely creative, wilfully different movie that draws on inspirations as diverse as The Beano’s Numskulls, Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth and Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph, but has an existential imagination and emotional sensibility more akin to an arthouse movie.

4. Whiplash



Director: Damien Chazelle
Cast: Miles Teller, J. K. Simmons and Melissa Benoit
What we said: For once, the hype barely goes far enough. Whiplash knows what its strong suit is: the dynamic between the combustible conductor and his potential protégé, whose development from a taciturn up-and-comer to a bleeding-handed, budding Buddy Rich not afraid to stand his ground, is invigorating to watch. As an antidote to innumerable 'inspirational teacher' of insurmountable treacliness, it's undeniably welcome. But more than that: it's not just great... it's one of the greats.

3. Mad Max: Fury Road



Director: George Miller
Cast: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult
What we said: "An exhilarating feminist actioner that unleashes torrents of water on the risible '80s Mad Max films from an improbably great height." Its hold on me has only grown throughout the year, while the initial impact of Birdman and Whiplash has lessened a little.

2. Carol



Director: Todd Haynes
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara and Kyle Chandler
What we said: A small miracle of a film, about a quiet, emotionally straightforward shopgirl (Rooney Mara) - on the cusp of self-revelation - who falls in love with a middle-aged housewife (Cate Blanchett), herself careening towards divorce; a blissfully textured, stunningly authentic and seductively realistic portrait of love busting up through the floorboards of stifling conformity.

1. Amy



Director: Asif Kapadia
What we said: "A haunting, heartbreaking and stunningly brilliant film from Senna director Asif Kapadia, which takes us into the confidence of Amy Winehouse, as the bolshy, big-voiced, jazzy Jewish girl from North London becomes a megastar, while her personal demons, her relationship with a drug addict, and a ravenous, amoral press proceed to rip her to shreds. It's a tough watch, but it feels essential, not just for its vivid picture of a fascinating, deeply troubled young woman, but also for its wider significance: as a plea for people to stop being so horribly selfish, to stop seeing excess and illness as ‘rock and roll’ and drug abuse as a joke, and for the media to realise that if it wants to paint itself as a crusading Fifth Estate, then some basic humanity wouldn’t go amiss."

***

Top 15 discoveries of 2015:



... being the older movies that I happened upon for the first time this year.

15. Stranger on Horseback (Jacques Tourneur, 1955) - A sensational little Western about the coming of law and order, with gun-toting circuit judge Joel McCrea trying to bring the son of a powerful pioneer to justice. Made by McCrea and director Jacques Tourneur the same year as Wichita, it's a vastly superior outing in every way: a tight, slim oater that does wonders with a tiny budget, boasting a riveting story, a crackling script that includes a superb monologue for villain John McIntire and a stunning climax making full use of whip-cracking desert dominatrix Miroslava.



14. Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn, 2014) - Gloriously, this blasts the shit out of those laboriously tagged 'Marvel Cinematic Universe' films, and feels like everything Avengers should have been but wasn't. It's irreverent where Avengers was smug, deft where that film was portentous, and unpredictable where its rival was ponderous and pompous.

13. Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973) - Examining and celebrating the artifice, the potential for perfection and yet the compromise of cinema (a collaborative medium in which logistical improvisation is king), the film starts with a scene that needs to be retaken and goes on from there, tipping us a wink as it wheels out a gentle set-piece about a misbehaving cat or a hairy stuntman doubling for Bisset, tightening the knot in your stomach as a cast or crew member begins to go to pieces, and then slowly but surely revealing its subtle depths: an ability to move, enchant and beguile, as all truly great movies do.



12. Philomena (Stephen Frears, 2013) - A simply wonderful movie about journo Steve Coogan trying to trace the adopted son of Irish pensioner Judi Dench, a victim of the notorious Magdalene laundries. It’s often desperately bleak, but also unstintingly warm-hearted, full of the most brilliant jokes, and as emotionally and intellectually rewarding as anything I’ve seen this year.

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



10. Toys in the Attic (George Roy Hill, 1963) - Toys in the attic and skeletons in the closet: a very entertaining slice of Southern Gothic from commie playwright Lillian Hellman: a little ripe, a little familiar, but extremely well done. It's largely shot on one set, but future New Hollywood hero George Roy Hill directs it all extremely nicely, and much of the acting is an absolute treat, with Geraldine Page and Wendy Hiller dominating in two mesmerising characterisations. Both play women who are blind and deluded, though in quite different ways, Page hitting a peak of quivering self-loathing, Hiller shuffling the moods as she did so superbly in these mid-career characterisations that she loved to (infrequently) take on: not the shimmering archetypes she had embodied in Bernard Shaw plays, but starkly real characters made beautiful by their flaws and contradictions.



9. Of Human Bondage (John Cromwell, 1934) - A short, sharp shock that still reverberates down the decades.

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


7. Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary (André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer, 2002) - Err, yes, a second documentary about Hitler on this year's list, meaning that over 13% of favourite discoveries this year are about him. This film is just 87 minutes of a single talking head. Thankfully that talking head is Traudl Junge, an 82-year-old German woman who worked as Hitler’s personal secretary from 1942 until he shot himself. Her reminiscences of the “kindly old gentleman” she worked for – contrasted with the “monster” she regards him as in retrospect – make for utterly gripping viewing, as she talks in circles about her guilt, sorrow and confusion. Her memories are moving, maddening, sometimes baffling, and the film is quite brilliantly structured, with a stunning final sequence.



6. A Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith, 1929) - A late, great British silent: a dizzying tale of romantic and sexual obsession, its slight story dazzlingly directed by Anthony Asquith. It's a little masterpiece, and it'll keep you guessing right up to the finish, while exalting you through its refusal to recognise the limits of late silent cinema.

5. The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (Ray Müller, 1993) - If you find yourself saying things like: “The reason I sent that telegram to Hitler was...” or “... Hitler hated it, ask anyone who was there”, it may be time to take a long, hard look at your life. The greatest female film director of all time – and the only one to have filmed a Nuremberg Rally – had been shopping this project around for a while, and finding that more than 200 respected documentarians wouldn’t touch her with a barge pole. Enter Ray Müller, who somehow manages to walk the trickiest, most perilous of tightropes: making a credible, even-handed and deeply insightful film about Leni Riefenstahl in which she is the only interviewee.



4. Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) - The wife and the mistress of the world’s most unpleasant man plot his death in this stunning genre-hopper from Wages of Fear director Clouzot. It’s cynical and gripping, with flashes of humour and humanity, and Simone Signoret exuding malignant cool as a peroxide, jump-suited murderess with killer shades. There's twist after twist after twist - and the final two are just dynamite.



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

2. The Little Foxes (William Wyler, 1941) - A caustic, troubling, profound examination of a Southern family brought low – or high and to prominence, depending on how you view it – by a sea of moral dissolution. You could argue that the film’s delineation between good and evil is rather simplistic for a work aspiring to high art, but it’s that heightened sensibility that gives it much of its haunting power, particularly as the vultures gather and you realise that Hellman’s vision of America – imagined by Toland, enlivened by a killer ensemble, given order by the gifted Wyler – is far darker than anyone could have expected, the blanched Davis poisoned by greed, leaving goodness, humanity and virtue all gasping for breath.



1. Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh, 1996) - A middle-class black woman (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) goes in search of her birth mother and finds a coarse, tearful, loving, unhappy, chain-smoking working-class white woman (Blenda Blethyn), whose family is a powder keg just waiting for a match. There aren’t many films that change the way you see the world. Or many pieces of art, for that matter. Secrets & Lies does just that. It's brilliantly conceived, bracingly authentic and emotionally overpowering, opting at its climax not for soap or sentiment, but something truly remarkable: the truth. It's simply a masterpiece.

***


Miss Gish. Now and always.

Crazes: Bette Davis
Continuing preoccupations: Lillian Gish, Star Wars, Joel McCrea Westerns
Stuff I caught up on: Books, to be honest.
Revelations: Oft-derided silent star John Gilbert. He was weak in La Boheme, but superb in The Big Parade and his early talkie triumph, Downstairs. One to watch.
Happiest surprises: The barely-known, never-before-released Stranger on Horseback being a killer little movie, rather than a generic B Western. The 1949 version of Little Women still casting its strange and enduring spell, after a slightly rocky beginning.
Biggest disappointment: Quite a few. Cobain: Montage of Heck fucked it up badly: it was incoherent, embarrassing and portentous. The original Mad Max films were nothing. The Yearling wasn't awful, but I was expecting more poetry and also more realism from a movie often classed among the greats.
Oddest film: Batman Returns seems to misjudge its audience at every turn. Séance on a Wet Afternoon amorality might give you nightmares.
Worst films: Ryan Gosling's directorial debut, Lost River, was absolutely woeful. That I managed to see several worse films - a couple of B Westerns, the Stanwyck rom-com The Bride Wore Boots, the execrable Adventure in Sahara and particularly the WWII propaganda film, The Power of the Press - was in some ways an accomplishment. In some ways.
Some favourite moments: The dance at the start of Guardians of the Galaxy, the meeting in the cafe in Secrets & Lies, All That Jazz's living room number, which boots Meet Me in St Louis's cakewalk into the modern era and fuses sex, sentiment and sheer, unadulterated genius.
2015 was... A good year at work, a fair one at the cinema.
Best film I saw at the cinema: Winter's Bone at the Barbican
I was bored by: Too many films. Sometimes I fear I'm running out of good ones, especially in my beloved '20s-'40s Hollywood bracket.
I wrote this pretty good review of _______________, you should read it if you have a minute: My series on the original Star Wars movies wasn't bad.

***

15 I revisited in 2015:

The top 10 are actually the best 10 films I've seen all year.

15. The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980) (Cinema)
14. A Diary for Timothy (Humphrey Jennings, 1945) (and Spare Time, for that matter, on the same link)
13. Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993)
12. A Thousand Clowns (Fred Coe, 1965)
11. Way Down East (D. W. Griffith, 1920)
10. Kiss Me Kate 3D (George Sidney, 1953) (Cinema)
9. Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) (Cinema, film with live orchestra)
8. The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940)
7. All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)
6. The Wind (Victor Sjӧstrӧm, 1928) (Cinema)
5. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
4. The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925)
3. Winter's Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) (Cinema)
2. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
1. The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992)

***

Thanks for reading. Why not come back for the other instalments, if you can be bothered?

Whiplash, Laird Cregar and body doubles of the 1930s - Reviews #202

Further adventures in popular culture.

FILMS



CINEMA: Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, 2014) - For once, the hype barely goes far enough.

Whiplash is a tense, taut thriller - with periodic explosions - that has four things sorely missing from most movies:

1. A purpose: in this case a worldview that's tough, confrontational, unforgiving and punched across without equivocation.

2. A lead who'll play the part without needing to be liked: who'll act sweaty, ugly, arrogant, selfish and sweaty again.

3. The ability and the desire to consistently surprise, within the boundaries of its familiar up, down, big up, big down… formula, but without ever betraying either its characters or its raison d'être.

4. At least a solid hour of J. K. Simmons shouting.

Miles Teller is Andrew Neimann, a talented, driven drummer who wants to be "not just great… but one of the greats". His passport to success? An obsessive, abrasive, black-suited, bald-headed and apparently psychotic professor (J. K. Simmons), who takes him under his wing, only so he can slap him repeatedly in the face.

Crucially, the film knows what its strong suit is: the dynamic between the combustible conductor and his potential protégé, whose development from a taciturn up-and-comer to a bleeding-handed, budding Buddy Rich not afraid to stand his ground, is invigorating to watch.

When the discredited intrusion that is a romantic subplot rears its head, you wonder if writer-director Chazelle knows what he's doing. He does. And just when you begin to think that he may have mislaid the plot with a change of direction in the final third: BOOM.

Chazelle's handling is unobtrusive but exceptional throughout, drawing you into the action through frequent close-ups, sensational music and a succession of jump cuts that help keep up the film's breathless pace. His direction is… well, I suppose… tight as a drum. He also elicits two of the best performances I've seen in age.

Andrew is closer to his mentor than he might imagine, his egomania, cruelty and self-obsession pouring out increasingly as he nears his goals. That we side with him is not only testament to the vicarious power of cinema, but also to the broad-nosed, scar-faced Teller, who communicates the film's essential idea: that sacrifices have to be made for art, not just in terms of time and talent, but perhaps also in basic humanity.

And, as Fletcher, Simmons is simply sensational, dominating every scene, keeping the knot in your stomach nice and tight as it becomes increasingly clear that he can flip out at absolutely any time. Blessed with an easy superficial charm and something intangible beneath the surface - which comes out in one memorable speech to his Studio Band - he's otherwise a monument to malevolence, darkly hilarious when spewing a torrent of Malcolm Tucker-ish invective at anyone who deems to play out of time or tempo, still more terrifying when stoking a silence.

I said it'd take something special to top Birdman this year, but Whiplash has done it already. As an antidote to innumerable 'inspirational teacher' of insurmountable treacliness, it's undeniably welcome. But more than that: it's not just great… it's one of the greats. (4)

***



I Wake Up Screaming (H. Bruce Humberstone, 1941) - Let’s just dwell for a moment on that title. Brilliant, isn’t it? One of my favourites. It doesn’t have a tremendous amount to do with the plot, but it strikes a pleasing note of terror and despair, which I think we can all get behind.

I Wake Up Screaming.

Lovely.

The film itself is a little less wonderful than its name, but only a little. It’s also extremely important, especially in the evolution of one of classic cinema’s most modern diversions: the swerve into the abyss that was film noir.

Noir, memorably described by Lee Server as “the genre that didn’t know its own name”, was a hybrid of German expressionism, French poetic realism and post-isolation American malaise, peopled by poetic PIs and deadly dames. It fully congealed, and reached its popular zenith, in 1944, with Double Indemnity, Laura and Murder, My Sweet, but its inception was probably – and admittedly arguably – a full four years earlier, as the release of Stranger on the Third Floor introduced photographer Nicholas Musuraca’s pioneering visual approach to slack-jawed audiences. The following year saw a slew of crime films that traded either on the staple storylines of noir (The Maltese Falcon, High Sierra) or else the stylistic traits (Out of the Fog, this one), but rarely both.

I Wake Up Screaming, directed by Charlie Chan veteran H. Bruce Humberstone, is an extremely engrossing mystery about the death of a model (Carole Landis, herself sadly subject to an early demise), with the mystery being whodunit, and why. The chief suspect is promoter Frankie Christopher (never trust a man with two first names), a sweaty, understandably angsty man embodied by Victor Mature, the big-browed, man-boobed Italian-American leading man who remains celluloid proof that stars who couldn’t really act are nothing new.

Also in for questioning are the victim’s sister, Betty Grable – a Fox musical star making a foray into crime films, as Alice Faye would do in the exceptional Fallen Angel – and a former Shakespearean ham (Alan Mowbray), as our suspicions also alight on an urbane columnist (Allyn Joslyn) and a massive cop (Laird Cregar) with an intense interest in proving that Mature dunit.

Tragically, Cregar’s screen career lasted barely five years. After brilliant supporting parts in Rings on Her Fingers, This Gun for Hire and Heaven Can Wait, the 21-stone actor lost 100 pounds for his first marginally romantic role – in Hangover Square – and his body simply couldn’t take the strain. Here, as the laconically witty, mellifluous, hulking, terrifying detective, he simply destroys the competition, negligible though it is.

Still, while Cregar is the only truly great actor in these ranks, Joslyn has an excellent bit as a George Sanders type spitting sardonic one-liners, William Gargan is fine as the archetypal 'good cop', and both Mature and Grable give credible if rather limited performances. A deleted scene, in which Grable sings ‘Daddy’ while working as a music sheet saleswoman – rather than a stenographer – is so incongruous that it may have succeeded in killing film noir had it not been consigned to the cutting room filing cabinet. The finished film does, however, contain the frequent - and baffling - use of Over the Rainbow, which was hardly a little-known song even before the invention of VHS, since The Wizard of Oz had only come out two years earlier.

Despite that, I Wake Up Screaming remains a richly atmospheric movie that forms an essential part of the noir canon, replete with impressive, shadow-drenched imagery and poetic, hard-boiled dialogue touched with black humour. If the plot stretches credibility a couple of times, and the absence of a Mitchum, Dick Powell or Richard Conte is keenly felt, it’s still a cracking little movie, which paved the way for others to follow. (3.5)

***



The Beast of the City (Charles Brabin, 1932) - This is a film as sanctimonious and heavy-handed as its hero: a crusading police chief (Walter Huston) who vows to destroy the city's criminal element. His starting point? An oily kingpin played somewhat improbably by Jean Hersholt, who made for one hell of a twinkly-eyed mentor, but was hardly Edward G. Robinson.

Beginning with a blurb from President Herbert Hoover, and intended as a response to sensationally popular gangster movies like Little Caesar, The Public Enemy and especially Scarface, The Beast of the City is a fitfully exciting film sadly undone by its overburdening sense of self-righteousness and a litany of fairly basic problems. Roger Ebert has argued that a thriller is only as good as its villain. If that's the case (and it's a debate worthy of a book rather than one review), then The Beast of the City is in trouble, as Hersholt is barely on screen and deathly tedious when he is. The movie is also bedeviled with a by-the-numbers plot littered with improbabilities and lapses in logic, like a car chase in which the bank robbers presumably have a five-minute head-start but can be caught within seconds thanks to some keen-eyed grocers pointing out the way they've gone.

I'm also not overly enamoured with Huston, who seems to attract a reverence far greater than most of his contemporaries for reasons that remain a little unclear. Perhaps it's his status as the head of an acting dynasty, perhaps his stage past, or perhaps it's just The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but he's not especially effective for the bulk of this one.

The film has a few aces up its sleeve, though. The first is an excellent opening montage which graduates from some slightly sexist, allegedly-comic control centre banter to a portrait of police across the city, the whole thing underscored by the familiar intonation of Ed Brophy (usually found on the other side of the law), flatly bellowing car numbers and crimes. It's strange that this triumph of sound editing, as well as some stunning, rather fascistic fetishing of the police ranks later on, sits alongside the kind of extremely boring visual compositions that genuinely wouldn't have looked out-of-place in 1915.

The second of its calling cards is Jean Harlow, who's quite good as the braless gangster's moll who seduces and corrupts Huston's detective brother (Wallace Ford). Though not quite fully into her stride, she does exhibit considerable charisma and presence, and performs an impromptu dance that manages to be both oddly sensual and hilariously, ridiculously of-its-time.

Finally, there is the climactic scene, which I won't spoil here, but which is worth waiting for, however much contrivance, cliché and moralising you have to sit through on the way. Let's just say that it seems unlikely that Sam Peckinpah had never seen The Beast of the City.

I'm sorry to disappoint Herbert Hoover, but Scarface is way better than this. (2)

***




A collection of fakes.

It Happened in Hollywood (Harry Lachman, 1937) - In the late '30s, you could hardly move in Hollywood for movies about movies, like Stand-In, Crashing Hollywood, A Star Is Born and this one: a harmless comedy-drama co-written by future B-movie legend Sam Fuller. Richard Dix - best-remembered nowadays (if at all) for Val Lewton's The Ghost Ship and the Whistler series - plays Tim Bart, a hero of silent Westerns who gets the boot when the talkies come in, then has to make good to impress an orphan with a poorly leg.

The first half, detailing his triumphs, his fall, and the subsequent rise of his frequent co-star and lifelong love (Fay Wray, who's in good form), is quite nicely done. It's not as funny as it might have been, wasting the sort of set-piece about talkie techniques that Singin' in the Rain famously slamdunked, but as a sort of embryonic version of The Artist, it's not at all bad, and also throws in some interesting if broad ideas about an artist's responsibility to his public, as Dix chucks away the chance to reinvent himself as a screen gangster.

Then the kid (Bill Burrud) turns up in Dix's life and it all gets too horribly literal, director Harry Lachman spooning syrup over everything, before Fuller and his cohorts serve up an absolutely atrocious ending. Surely, surely the ending that this one needs is a scene in which Dix either performs or thwarts a bank robbery in the vein of the scene he earlier refused, then the director yells cut and we pull away to Wray and the kid watching him on the set, hand-in-hand. Instead we get… well, 'idiotic' barely covers it.

Ironically, though, the film's main selling point is a sequence in its second half: about the only thing the movie does right from the midway point. In order to impress Burrud, Dix holds a party at a ranch, peopling it with lookalikes. The twist? The pseudo-stars are played by Garbo, Dietrich, W. C. Fields and Chaplin's real-life doubles - along with a dozen more. It's extremely surreal and, despite not really being mined in any inventive way, fascinating enough in itself to satisfy any classic film nerd. (2)

***


A lot of it is precisely this unbearable.

God Help the Girl (Stuart Murdoch, 2014) - Stuart Murdoch has spent a small part of the past six years working on his side project, God Help the Girl, in which a rotating roster of female vocalists sing the kind of irresistible pop tunes indelibly associated with the Belle and Sebastian founder. Now Murdoch has created a spin-off movie inspired by the idea, which proves beyond doubt that he is both an extraordinary songwriter and a very bad writer-director. Just as Bob Dylan’s wretched, nonsensical novel, Tarantula, proved that sublime compositional skills aren’t necessarily a transferable skill, so Murdoch’s debut venture into moviemaking shows that a sensibility that’s essentially appealing within the somewhat intangible, uncodified arena of pop music can become stale as soon as it becomes solid, and that a superb ear for lyrics can become a tin one for dialogue.

Emily Browning is the anorexic Eve, a young woman with an apparent gift for songwriting, who – after checking herself out of hospital via an open window – forms a band with misanthropic guitarist James (Olly Alexander) and an extremely poorly-defined character named Cassie (Hannah Murray), leading to a film not unlike We Are the Best, but with music which springs from the air, as per the tradition of the screen musical, and also nowhere near as good. The endlessly pouting Browning is quite persuasive as the damaged protagonist, but Murray is bland as anything – with what must be one of the worst singing voices I’ve ever heard – while Alexander is a frankly dreadful actor playing an utterly unbearable hipster who speaks in hollow clichés. It’s also a failing of Murdoch as a screenwriter that we don’t see Eve as a great composer, Alexander as someone for whom comfort is paramount, or Cassie as a potential mate for. We're simply told things and reflect: "Oh, I had no idea that was what was happening." That old “show, don’t tell” adage has rarely seemed more relevant. And essentially none of it makes any sense.

Occasionally there’s a moment that rings true or undercuts our expectations, like Browning’s line to Alexander when it looks like they may finally be about to get together, but otherwise the only real joy is to be found in Murdoch’s frequently excellent songs - which shine even when filtered through this cast - and flashes of invention in the choreography, though again it's limited by the people he’s found to articulate it. (Whether that’s why there are so many fast-cuts in the numbers, I’m not sure.)

Indeed, one of the oddest things about the film is Murdoch’s boring visual sensibility. While falling into the amateurish trap of shooting every scene in a different style, he also fashions an aesthetic that’s simply nowhere near as distinctive as the one frequently glimpsed in his lyrics. That richly-textured world of middle-distance runners, lazy line painters and girls who “smell of milk” , fashioned in a 1980s Glaswegian adolescence, is infinitely more interesting than the sort of yuppie-ish, Stylist Magazine dress code enforced throughout God Help the Girl, as well as derivative passages that lean on 'Swinging '60s' excursions like Smashing Time and Les Bicyclettes de Belsize.

If it’s worth seeing at all, it’s really for Browning’s relatively interesting characterisation and for the songs, including Pretty Eve in the Tub, which starts and ends in astonishingly witless fashion, but has a breathtaking middle. It’s enduring proof that Murdoch remains a virtuoso in one medium, if not really any good at making films. (2)

***

COMEDY



Josie Long – Cara Josephine (Soho Theatre) – This new show from my favourite stand-up isn’t her strongest, but largely works – thanks chiefly to the Kent-born storyteller’s enormous personal appeal. Even at her finest, she doesn’t make me laugh as much as Richard Herring, or kick in the boundaries of comedy like Simon Munnery, but I’d rather spend 90 minutes in Long’s company than anyone else on the current circuit. She's a performer who makes an intense personal connection, locking personalities and drawing you into her singular world. She’s also warm, clever and self-effacing, all the qualities I prize in a comedian and/or human.

Largely dispensing with the political material that has dominated her recent shows, save for a hysterical fantasy about feeding Nigel Farage to death with marshmallows, Long instead talks freely and unusually frankly about the personal crisis that enveloped her during 2013, clouding her easygoing persona and destroying her insatiable appetite for intellectual and cultural engagement. It’s a show that takes in despair, philosophy, and at one point a torrent of menstrual blood, the gag-stuffed narrative - as ever - interspersed with post-modern observations about how the show is going, and self-mocking asides that reveal a performer completely in control of her audience and her talent, if not her apparent sense of self-doubt.

I was mostly chuckling rather than creased up with laughter – as in Be Honourable – and wasn’t knocked sideways by the freshness of Long’s current worldview – like in The Future Is Another Place – but this sweet, sincere and mature show is still well worth seeing, and contains one of my favourite lines of recent years: “If you are mainly interested in making money, I’m going to assume there is something sexually wrong with you.” (3.5)

Incidentally, I felt compelled to address Josie's contention that her favourite impression is of "a 1930s film noir detective".

***

BOOK



The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (2003) – Henry meets Clare for the first time when he is 28 and she is 20. She has known him since she was six, and he was 38. The reason: a neurological condition that sends him spinning through time, arriving naked and often vomiting. One of the more rapturously received novels of recent years, this sci-fi romance has a superb premise, an original and meticulously-executed approach to time travel and some passages of real emotional potency, but also possesses an abundance of superfluous material about what everyone was wearing or eating, uniformly weak dialogue and a fatal inability to make us fall in love with either of its protagonists; Clare is essentially a cipher whose only characteristics of note are a capacity for great love and understanding, and a lot of festishisable red-blonde hair. I have never met a man who thinks or acts like Henry. It’s one of those books destined to stay with you, for its novelty, its narrative cleverness and its sporadic ability to bring a lump to the throat, but you wish Niffenegger had the same way with language, character and humour that she has with complex plotting. The pay-off, with shades of both Forever Young and The Whales of August, gambles on Hallmark-style sentiment and somehow comes out well on top. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.