BFI introduction: Captain Blood (1935)

Here's the transcript of my introduction to Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz, 1935), in the Art of Action season, which took place at the BFI Southbank in London on Wednesday 6 November:

"Hi,

I’m going to tell you a bit about the background to Captain Blood, its enduring significance and a few things to look out for while watching it.

There’s a line that the judge in the film speaks early on – “In heaven’s name, be brief, man” – and I’ve taken that to heart. I’ll talk for about nine minutes, and then I’ll let you watch the movie.

Can I just have a show of hands as to who’s seen Captain Blood before…?

It's about a third of you. Well, all of you are going to have a great time, but only about a third of you realise it yet.

Captain Blood is the film that made stars out of Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, and, with its release in 1935, launched a swashbuckler craze that lasted for five years, before exploding again in the early ‘50s.

Swashbucklers had been a key part of silent cinema: Douglas Fairbanks turned himself from a rom-com lead to an action hero with The Mark of Zorro in 1920 – and there’s a screening of that movie, with its astonishing final reel, at the BFI on Saturday 23rd. Fairbanks then made a string of huge hits in the same mould, including his 1922 Robin Hood, and The Black Pirate. But when he retired from swordfighting with the elegiac The Iron Mask in 1929, the genre went with him.

Swashbucklers were reborn in the sound era with The Count of Monte Cristo, an independent film made in 1934, and Warner Bros – wanting to get in on the action – hired the star of that movie, Robert Donat, to play Captain Blood, in its remake of an old silent.

At that time, Warner were still best known for fast-talking urban pictures aimed at an immigrant audience:

• gangster movies
• backstage musicals
• films about social justice

But America’s tastes were changing, and Hal Wallis, the studio’s new head of production, was particularly drawn to historical epics. Captain Blood’s script was by Casey Robinson, who became the studio’s expert at adapting novels. He kept the basis of the Rafael Sabatini book – about a physician who becomes a slave and later a pirate – but looked to “humanise” the story, in his words, getting inside the central character, and introducing a theme of man’s injustice to man. And in case that wouldn’t bring in the crowds, he also built up the love story, and introduced a couple of quack doctors for comic relief.

The studio put aside a million dollars for the film – the most they had spent on a picture since the debacle of Noah’s Ark in 1928, a movie that had lost Warner $2m, as well as drowning three extras. Incredibly, they hired the same director, Michael Curtiz, who after that disaster had been relegated to making programmers. While waiting for production to begin, he directed an entry in Warner’s mediocre Perry Mason series, called The Case of the Curious Bride. And, in that film, playing the part of a corpse, later seen in flashback being murdered, while speaking no lines of dialogue, was a 25-year-old Australian bit-part actor called Errol Flynn, making his Hollywood debut. Remember his name, because he’s coming back in a minute.

In the meantime, Warner were having serious problems casting Captain Blood. Robert Donat had dropped out, and the studio’s attempts to replace him with box-office names like Leslie Howard, Fredric March or Clark Gable all failed.

Head producer Hal Wallis had taken to screen-testing everyone in sight. An acerbic memo from studio chief Jack Warner to Wallis on the 16th of April 1935 read: “I noticed that there are 24 reels of tests for Captain Blood accumulated up here in the projection room. I would suggest that instead of you going to Palm Springs for the next weekend that you stay here and run [them].”

Eight weeks later, though, they were still testing. On the 11th of June, Wallis ordered tests of the abysmal George Brent and – fatefully – one Errol Flynn, who had previously read for the part of one of Blood’s crew. Jack Warner compared Flynn’s new test to seeing “a meteor stab the sky, or a bomb explode, or a fire sweep across a dry hillside”. Wallis said Flynn “leapt from the screen into the projection room with the impact of a bullet.”

Flynn got the gig. But being thrown into a starring role in Warner’s most expensive sound-era movie wasn’t, if you’ll excuse the pun, plain sailing. We have Wallis’s memos from during production, which make this clear. On 9 September, a month into filming, he wrote to Curtiz about Flynn: “The fellow looks like he is scared to death every time he goes into a scene. I don’t know what the hell is the matter.” The good news, though: once he was into a scene, “he plays it charmingly”.

“I worked as hard as I knew how,” Flynn remembered, though he was called onto the carpet once, after becoming drunk, waving his sword about “like a Cossack”, shouting lines that weren’t in the script, and proceeding to almost fall off the boat. For once, though, he may have been blameless. The star claimed that the crew had fed him brandy after he collapsed due to a recurrence of malaria – and, astonishingly, historians believe that he may have been telling the truth.

Flynn was acting opposite the 19-year-old Olivia de Havilland, who had also signed with Warner the previous year, abandoning her original dream of becoming a schoolteacher. She first met Flynn at their costume test. Her reaction: “Oh my! Oh my! Struck dumb. I knew it was what the French call a coup de foudre.”

Love at first sight. A lightning bolt.

“He is the handsomest, most charming, most magnetic, most virile young man in the entire world,” she elaborated.

But as well as being the most virile young man in the entire world, Flynn was also married, to French actor Lili Damita. While his professional partnership with de Havilland would endure for eight movies across six years, and although they had fallen in love, their relationship would never be consummated.

Production on Captain Blood took around 11 weeks. Wallis later called Curtiz, “my favourite director, then and always”, but, during filming, his barrage of complaints, in memo form, was incessant:

• there were too many candlesticks and bowls of fruit in the foreground of shots
• there were too few people in the hold of the slave ship
• the movement of the camera to simulate a rocking boat made him dizzy
• Curtiz kept filming shirtless older pirates with hairy potbellies

The film’s composer was secured at the 11th hour: Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who had done A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the film in which de Havilland had made her debut. He wrote his extraordinary score for Captain Blood in three weeks, despite only being able to work on it at night. You’ll notice in the credits that his reads, “Musical arrangements by”, even though 98 per cent of the score is original. He’d insisted on that wording, after lifting a short extract from a piece by Liszt for the duel between Flynn and Basil Rathbone – the film’s action highlight.

Keep an eye out too, in the credits, for the name of co-cinematographer Hal Mohr: he’s a good pub-quiz answer, as the only person to ever win an Oscar without being nominated, having received a deluge of write-in votes for his work on, again, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Captain Blood came out in Christmas week, 1935, grossing almost $3m and being nominated for five Oscars, including Picture and Score. It made stars of Flynn and de Havilland, and created a new template for swashbucklers, inspiring

• Selznick’s The Prisoner of Zenda
• countless imitations at Fox, including The Mark of Zorro
• and Warner’s own 1940 film, The Sea Hawk

After Captain Blood, Flynn and de Havilland were regularly reteamed. Reflecting decades later, she said: “Errol was a strange mixture. A great athlete of immense charm and evident physical beauty, he stood, legs apart, arms folded defiantly and crowing lustily atop the Hollywood dung heap, but he treated women like toys to be discarded without warning … He was not a kind man, but in those careless days he was fun to be with.”

Though his marriage had been one obstacle to their getting together, there were others: Flynn tended to express his affection through the medium of distressing pranks – putting a dead snake in de Havilland’s underpants during the filming of The Charge of the Light Brigade – and, certainly, the two looked at the world in different ways.

During rehearsals for Captain Blood, they had found themselves alone on a soundstage. De Havilland recalled: “He sat down and he said to me, ‘What do you want out of life?’ And so I said, ‘Well I want respect for difficult work well done.’ And then I said to him, ‘What do you want out of life?’ And he said, ‘I want success.’ And by that he meant fame and riches, and I thought, ‘That’s not enough.’”

Flynn’s fixation on material treasures is echoed in a key scene in the film, and the real-life dissipation that would prove his downfall is foreshadowed by de Havilland’s line in Captain Blood that the hero has “destroyed himself”. While she would go on to become one of the most respected and powerful actors in Hollywood, he would be dead at 50, something between a legend, a self-parody and a cautionary tale. Flynn called Captain Blood the film that “started me on that road which has so often made the public acquainted with my wicked ways”.

Viewed today – starting in about one minute’s time, in fact – Captain Blood remains rousing entertainment. Flynn is so dashing and commanding in the lead, and Curtiz’s direction is consistently striking, with that roaming camera, his vivid use of shadow, and the artful compositions that drove Wallis up the wall.

And while the film’s excessive sadism panicked supervisor Robert Lord, who worried that women and children would be warned to stay away, the movie also has three unequivocally beautiful scenes, all of which I hope have made the cut in this re-edit:

• the “sail on, little ship” sequence, which even Wallis admired
• the would-be mutiny
• and a glorious moment of romantic revelation, invented by screenwriter Casey Robinson

It has, in addition, more derring-do than you can shake a cutlass at.

So sit back and enjoy the star-making turns of Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland in… Captain Blood."

Review of 2018: Part 3 – Movies

Sometimes I wonder if I may have seen all the good films. I know they keep on making new ones but they're either Marvel or Zama and Roma, and I mean, come on. I wonder too about the value of a movie list with the same 'best film of the year' as the Oscars, and Pan's Labyrinthh in its Deep Cuts folder, and yet here we are. Hopefully you'll learn something, but it may only be one thing.

I spent January and February watching and re-watching Orson Welles films (and then trailers and then TV episodes; I went far down the Welles Hole). If that's of interest, you can catch up here.

The previous two Review of 2018 blogs are about books and live stuff. And here are the previous film round-ups (the ones that are any good, anyway): 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017.

Top 10 of 2018

It wasn't the most thrilling year (I'm really scrabbling around for a #10 tbh), but we got there. Five classics, four imperfect knock-out blows and one relic of last year's film festival that for all its flaws had a certain something.



10. BPM (Director: Robin Campillo) – At its best, this confrontational, unsentimental but humanistic film has unexpected echoes of Melville's Army in the Shadows, which looked at action, division and necessity within the French Resistance, and I understand why it included so many sequences of illness and fucking, but those elements don't seem as interesting as the story it started to tell. When it returns to it in those final moments, loaded with the suffering and sadness of what's gone before, the results are admittedly astounding. Full review.



9. On Chesil Beach (Dominic Cooke) – For almost its entire length, this adaptation of Ian McEwan's 2007 novella is close to perfect: the beautifully-modulated, restrained story of a strait-laced couple in the still strait-laced early '60s who look back on their often idyllic courtship from the claustrophobic environs of their honeymoon suite. If only they'd ended it there. Full review.



8. I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie) – A dynamic, polemical retelling of a story that’s always fascinated me. The film’s great gamble is the blackly comic tone, and it works superbly, while never blunting the story’s harrowing edge. It’s only in the caper-ish, somewhat longwinded treatment leading up to the pivotal ‘incident’ that the movie errs, before kicking in hard again at the end. Who knew that Steven Rogers, the writer of weak, mawkish rom-coms, had this in his locker?! As everyone has said, Robbie is terrific, while the sequences on the ice are genuinely dazzling.



7. You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay) – Well what did you think a Lynne Ramsay noir with Joaquin Phoenix as a hitman would be like? Ramsay can write great dialogue, but with a Hitchcockian desire to tell stories using just pictures, that visual imagination – CCTV action sequence ftw! – and her matchless ear for apposite pop music, she rarely needs it. Full review.



6. Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda) – An almighty assault on the emotions in the tradition of Bicycle Thieves and Forbidden Games, though its inevitability is cloaked in surprises – and charm. Beautifully observed and filmed in the most extraordinarily tactile manner, with fine performances all round; Lily Franky is astonishingly good.



5. A Star Is Born (Bradley Cooper) – The best version of this story for 64 years. There’s the odd wrong note in the script – you could write books on its sexual politics and rock v pop posturing, not all of them positive – but it’s still something special, thrumming with emotional charge, crackling with chemistry. More here.



4. Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig) – Greta Gerwig: Origins. An unsentimental, painful, deceptively lyrical debut.


"Our revels now are ended..."

3. The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles) – The first new Orson Welles film for 40 years, which was something I could look forward to for 10 months of 2018. And when it arrived, in a blur of bad Twitter takes about authorship and misogny, it truly delivered: as a maddening, daring, relentless, repetitive, often dazzling examination of creativity, cinematic artifice and Welles himself. Not just the director's self-destructiveness, myth-making and Falstaffian relationship with protégé Peter Bogdanovich (playing a barely fictionalised version of himself), but also the conflicts raging within him: his outsider posturing but need to belong, a buried tendency towards homoeroticism, the battle between art and commerce (at a time when art was becoming commerce, and vice versa) that had sunk him back in 1942. All of that filmed across six years, much of it in a Hollywood mansion peopled by the wizened faces of his old stock company and the directors that had usurped the old order. The passages that Welles edited himself – including the best sex scene ever put on celluloid – are utterly dazzling; despite the remarkable work done in completing the film, pure genius has a way of standing out.



2. A Fantastic Woman (Sebastián Lelio) – Vega has the most fascinating face and the camera makes the most of it, not least in a dazzling nightclub sequence that moves from pain to sensuality to a fantasy dance number, but there's such depth to her characterisation too, and the film's refusal to give her easy, sassy victories is uniquely satisfying, grappling profoundly and humanely with issues that are both specific and universal. Full review.



1. The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro) – A sci-fi, a horror, a monster movie, a romance, a Cold War thriller, and a history lesson about Alice Faye: this genre-bender is many things, but above all it's an emotional experience, a clear-sighted, glowing-hearted picture with some of the most beautiful imagery and a performance I'm going to be rhapsodising about for weeks, months, years. Full review.

***

14 'discoveries' of 2018

... being the best old things I hadn't seen before this year.



The Dawn Patrol (Edmund Goulding, 1938) – My pick of the year, an unexpectedly terrific anti-war film (though its polemicising isn’t perfect), about WWI flyers facing impossible odds – and for what? Niven, Rathbone and Crisp are all excellent in this understated, intensely moving movie, though it’s Flynn who leaves the greatest impression, as a carousing but stiff-upper-lipped flyboy suddenly shackled by responsibility, and flirting with despair. He was never better. Only complaint: almost all the action and even several scenes of dialogue are lifted from Howard Hawks’ 1930 original. Perhaps only Capra’s Riding High ever recycled footage so flagrantly/stingily.

The films of Alan Rudolph: Choose Me (1984), The Moderns (1988), Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) – Yes, reader, I found a new director to investigate, with thrilling results. Short reviews via those links. Here's how I started the one of Choose Me: "Sex and madness, Alan Rudolph style, as a group of unhappy souls in a pink-skied, neon-lit netherworld engage in fleeting erotic encounters..."



The Song of Bernadette (Henry King, 1943) – A beautiful film about Bernadette of Lourdes – from back when Fox doing religion meant faith, gentleness and visual poetry, not private healthcare, intolerance and assault rifles. Full review.

Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) – Magical Del Toro film, in the tradition of Spirit of the Beehive and El Sur, about a young Spanish girl (Ivana Baqueiro) negotiating the horrors of war by passing into a fantasy world. Lyrical, moving and humanistic – but also shockingly and viscerally violent, existing almost entirely in the chilling real world, with mere doses of escapism. The director revisited many of its themes and touch points in The Shape of Water (see above), another haunting, beautiful movie about the collision between innocence and brutality.



Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989) – So cinematic. A white-hot Lee polemic, masquerading (at first) as a slice-of-life drama. It nods to Night of the Hunter and Welles’ The Trial, but it’s conspicuously in communion with its times, and the unwanted touchstones of the contemporary African-American experience, Tawana Brawley to Howard Beach. Full of humanity, anger and pizza. My subsequent adventures in Lee have been mixed: I loved She's Gotta Have It, in all its scuzzy imperfection, until its hero sexually assaulted his ex-girlfriend and we were supposed to cheer along.

Best of Enemies (Robert Morgan and Gordon Neville, 2015) – A superb doc about the 1968 TV debates between influential Conservative commentator William F. Buckley and his arch nemesis (at least at this time), flamboyantly gay, left-leaning novelist Gore Vidal. It's brilliantly put together, though what makes it most thrilling is simply the raw footage of two intellectual behemoths going at it hammer and tongs. For all you want Vidal to triumph, Buckley is often on top, though watching Vidal needle someone until they explode is my new favourite spectator sport... and the pay-off is unforgettable. I've since read two books about Buckley and none about Vidal, so who's the real winner?



All Night Long (Basil Dearden, 1962) – ‘60s London jazz Othello? Yes please. McGoohan’s the standout as Iago, drummer ‘Johnny Cousin’. Only the climax disappoints.

The Power and the Glory (William K. Howard, 1933) – Terrific Preston Sturges script about a working class industrialist (Spencer Tracy) whose controversial personal and professional lives are revealed in flashback. This one’s often cited as a key inspiration on Citizen Kane, but in truth, the similarities are fairly superficial. It’s a superb movie on its own terms, though, with a maturity, complexity and lack of moral judgement that’s really refreshing, and a panache in the storytelling that’s way ahead of its time, its human secrets gradually revealed, and the individual scenes imaginatively devised. Tracy is excellent. Slightly longer review.



What We Do in the Shadows (Taika Waititi, 2014) – Disarmingly funny and original. This mockumentary about vampires (and werewolves) is full of well-sketched characters, and opens up its story in intelligent ways, but beyond all that it just made me laugh a lot.

Piccadilly (E. A. Dupont, 1929) – Pictorially striking silent, set in the clubs, dives and slums of London, with an electrifying performance from Anna May Wong as a sultry Chinese dancer whose moves make men knife each other. Director Dupont seems more interested in character and atmosphere than the thin, ultimately melodramatic story, and I’m with him, though the elements touching on race are quite interesting. Try to see Piccadilly with Neil Brand’s infectious jazz score if you can, music that matches the film’s energy, cynicism and modernity.



20th Century Women (Mike Mills, 2016) – They’re saying ‘menstruation’ wrong. But this film about women, written by a man, directed by a man, starring a boy, is insightful and interesting and only occasionally very irritating. As usual, Greta Gerwig is much better than everybody else, even when dealing with some of Mills' heaviest indie affectations.

Lola Montès (Max Ophüls, 1955) (Cinema) – Everything Ophüls does to tell this story works, even if the story itself doesn’t. If you get the chance to see it on the big screen: leap. Otherwise, perhaps leave it, as without its grandiose visual sumptuousness there's not an enormous amount to embrace.


Jack Nicholson during those halcyon days (1969-74) when he did some acting.

Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971) – A fascinating, distinctive New Hollywood film about sex, self and the death of love, which is steeped in macho despair, as well as a horror at what it reaps. Everyone in the film is great, though having Jack Nicholson (34) and Art Garfunkel (30) play the 18-year-old versions of their characters, nervous about touching a boob, does take a little getting used to. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, Jules Feiffer, it’s probably not for everyone – talky, weirdly-paced, and as much about its characters as their times – but I found it really interesting: one of those movies that you fear might add up to nothing, then find yourself chewing over for days.

The Holly and the Ivy (George More O'Ferrall, 1952) – A literate British ensemble drama with a great cast; a little stagy and cheap-looking, but exhibiting considerable compensations. It’s the story of a family regathering in a Norfolk village at Christmas. They are Irish parson Ralph Richardson, his children – a damaged fashion journalist (Margaret Leighton), an aimless soldier (Denholm Elliott) and the live-in daughter who wants to spread her wings (Celia Johnson) – a couple of grandparents and a godfather. Over Christmas they’ll quietly tear one another apart and be born anew, so it’s hardly festive fluff, but it’s all the better for that. Full review.

***

I kept it short and sweet this year. Like I say, the books blog is generally the best one, but hopefully you found something halfway decent that you can watch in 2019. Thanks for reading.

Pride and Prejudice, Gene Clark, and John Ford returning to Ireland - Reviews #197

Hello, how are you? Great, me too! Reviews:



Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947) - A stunning, staggeringly cynical melo-noir-ma about an amoral carnival huckster (Tyrone Power) using everyone he meets as he cuts a rapid path to the top. Gripping from first frame to last, it's simply one of the best of its decade: richly atmospheric, incisively intelligent and both fatalistic and unpredictable in the best tradition of the genre.

From the quasi-religious Jules Furthman script to Lee Garmes' gloriously textured cinematography, everything here works, and the performances are an absolute treat, with pin-up Power exhibiting his dazzling charisma, Helen Walker matching him as a shrewd psychologist with a fiercely jutting chin, and Joan Blondell threatening to steal the show in arguably her greatest performance, playing a horny, big-hearted mind-reader with a lush for a lover. (4)

***



Adventures of Don Juan (Vincent Sherman, 1948) - Errol Flynn’s first swashbuckler for eight years, and the last one he ever made, has him as an older, wiser version of his familiar, sword-wielding lothario, reforming in the face of love. Well, reforming a bit.

He plays Don Juan – in the immortal words of Shaggy, “a Mr Lover Lover” – who marauds around Europe, leaving a trail of breathless women, furious husbands and severe diplomatic incidents in his wake. In the film’s classic opening scene, he scales a balcony in the old John Barrymore manner, seduces an old flame, humiliates her groom-to-be using a sword and a chicken, and then rides away. Delightful.

Then he returns to Spain, to find there are serious social wrongs that need to be righted, putting him at odds with the Duke de Lorca (Robert Douglas), but winning him the favour of Queen Margaret (Viveca Lindfors), a big-hearted, big-eyed monarch somewhat troubled by his dignified, offhand smouldering.

In a way, I’d have liked for the film to crack or puncture Flynn’s irresistible persona, but it’s still a magnificent movie, and strikes a good balance, playing along with Don Juan’s incorrigibility, while asking him to truly care and feel. In his (preposterous) autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Flynn seems proud only of his breakthrough film, Captain Blood, and a couple of late ‘50s efforts. I’d argue, though, that this is probably the best performance he ever gave – funny and athletic, yes, but also tender, conflicted and sincere – even if it is housed in the most roistering entertainment.

He’s helped, no doubt, by having words put in his mouth by two of the finest writers ever to hit Hollywood: George Oppenheimer – the creator of high-concept nonsense like A Yank at Oxford and A Yank at Eton, as well as gems such as Libeled Lady and the magnificently-titled Slightly Dangerous – and Harry Kurnitz, who wrote the 1938-9 ‘Fast’ trilogy, a Thin Man cash-in that nevertheless included one absolute gem, Fast Company.

The pair were chief writers on just two films together: I Love You Again, a spectacular comedy film that’s comfortably among the four or five funniest I’ve ever seen, and this one. Right from the off, their quality is apparent. There’s a little clunky exposition here and there, and the character of a dwarfish courtier is frankly unnecessary, but Flynn has an almost constant supply of devastatingly witty, still modern one-liners, and his scenes with Lindfors are subtle, heartfelt and credible, deftly dealing with that old love-in-a-hopeless-place scenario that is the commoner-and-Queen romance. There’s also at least one completely unacceptable ‘swordsman’ gag that got past the censors. I presume that was these two – additional material was by B-movie director and committed orientalist Robert Florey, and William Faulkner!

I also enjoyed Vincent Sherman’s handling of the often boisterous action sequences, Max Steiner’s Korngold-ish score, and the photography by the incomparable Woody Bredell: there’s one particularly brilliant shot during the fencing demonstration, the camera passing through the flashing blades as it zones in on the proud, trim Flynn, bedecked in blue and gold. On one level, it’s just nice that there are films out there that are this funny and charming and romantic, with such a dash of quality in their action choreography. It’s more than that, though – and it isn’t all in the subtle writing or the heartfelt playing. There’s something slightly sad about the ageing, once-beautiful Flynn: a little dissipated, a little melancholic, a little greying beneath the dye, that gives this added pathos for anyone invested in his life and career. Is that something you can praise the film for? Perhaps not, but it elevates it further for me: a film about an ageing lothario trying to reform, starring an ageing lothario who never did, and shuffled off this mortal coil aged 59, alienated from his family and friends, pretty much alone.

Fun film though. (3.5)

***



*MINOR SPOILERS*
Make Me a Star (William Beaudine, 1932) - An extraordinarily sweet-natured film in the popular '30s vein, serving as both a hymn to and a satire on the movie industry, as an earnest hayseed (Stuart Erwin) turns up in Hollywood with stars in his eyes, has the stuffing knocked out of him, then makes good - but perhaps not in the way he expected.

In plot terms, it's reminiscent of King Vidor's Show People, and almost identical to the Harold Lloyd film, Movie Crazy - released a few months earlier - but it's far more touching than that work, considerably lighter on the slapstick and delivers for the fan magazine crowd (i. e. me), with some fun cameos from a couple of massive stars, and an entertaining look at Paramount Studios in 1932.

At times, Erwin seems a little too one-note as the slow, simple and folsky hero - who haunts the casting office, sleeps rough on the lot, then gets the lead in a film he doesn't know is a comedy - but there is something extremely attractive about his guileless character, and the actor is astonishingly good in the film's final and most important scenes, particularly the closer, which is an absolute classic.

As his leading lady, the immortal Joan Blondell is simply as brilliant as ever, playing a wise, protective and not unattractive old hand showing the rural dope the ropes - shades of Jean Arthur in Capra's seminal Mr Smith.

Based on a play by George S. Kaufman - still one of the finest writers ever to pick up a pen - this gentle, enjoyable and very moving comedy-drama is one of the best Hollywood-on-film pictures of its era, an era when more were made than at any other time, its sporadic uncertainty about tone and theme giving way to several sequences of breathtaking sincerity.

The short scene in which Erwin confounds the cast and crew who are busy stitching him up, by delivering a teary, tender talk to his horse, is a little beaut. And that ending? Wow. (3.5)

***



Stop at Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Story (Alex Holmes, 2014) - A straightforward but extremely accomplished telling of the Armstrong story, with few revelations for those already acquainted with it, but a fine selection of interviewees, an excellent score and a veritable treasure trove of archive footage, edited with rare confidence and skill.

Unlike Alex Gibney's film, The Armstrong Lie, the subject granted no access to the director, so he has little chance to retroactively justify his actions - or to endear himself to the filmmaker.

As a result, everyone's favourite cycling sociopath comes out of it far worse, thanks to an abundance of damning detail about his political power and various nefarious bully-boy tactics.

I personally prefer it to the Gibney film, as though it's somewhat simpler, it's also more coherent, complete and compelling - if somewhat rushing its conclusion. For such a nasty, dream-crushing tale, this one's a very entertaining ride. (3.5)

***



Love Is a Racket (William Wellman, 1932) - Blessed Event, Advice to the Lovelorn (!), Okay America!... In 1932 and '33, the American screen was saturated with films in which sarky, hard-boiled newspaper columnists - invariably patterned after gossip peddler Walter Winchell - locked horns with slimy Pre-Code gangsters. I'm not complaining, that is literally the best premise for a movie ever. And here's another.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. is our hero, a debonair, slightly effete man-about-town, dining at Sardi's, nursing hangovers and writing up Broadway rumours for a New York paper. His comrades-in-arms are my favourite actor of all time, Lee Tracy - who was very soon to make the part of an unrepentant smear-factory his and his alone - and Ann Dvorak, the sparky secretary who's pining after Doug Jr. Sadly he's got his eyes on someone else, a spoilt, superficial actress (Frances Dee), who's naturally caught the eyes of a Brylcreemed hoodlum (Lyle Talbot).

As so many of these films do - it seems only Blessed Event was exempt - it begins in a comedic vein, with Doug Jr cracking wise and Tracy doing the ice-bucket challenge, before shifting into less persuasive melodrama. But it's sharp and funny most of the way, with a rich early-'30s flavour, a magnificent supporting performance by the outrageously talented, uniquely expressive Tracy (check the way he uses his hands to articulate Fairbanks' probable fate!), and a quite brilliant ending redolent with those twin joys of Pre-Code film: smirking immorality and unabashed sex. (3)

***



*MINOR SPOILERS*
The Rising of the Moon (John Ford, 1957) - John Ford, the greatest American director of them all, often unwound after intense, ambitious and draining moviemaking experiences by creating something gentle, easy and laidback. Following his landmark Cavalry Trilogy, it was the beautiful, semi-musical oater, Wagon Master: still his most underrated and overlooked film. And after The Searchers, that monumental exploration of racism, redemption and Western mythos, he did The Wings of Eagles (perhaps his purest, most self-indulgent work) and then this - a lighthearted, patronising but extraordinarily heartfelt paean to his parents' home country of Ireland so rose-tinted that it makes The Quiet Man look like Calvary.

Made by the director "for fun", as well as to promote filmmaking in the Emerald Isle, it was shot quickly and cheaply - at odds with the director's initial plans for a Technicolor opus filled with star names - on Irish locations and using a homegrown cast, telling three comic stories: each introduced by Tyrone Power, Ford's old Irish-American buddy (and possibly lover, depending on who you ask), who that year made his last notable contribution to the US screen in Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution. The script came from his regular collaborator Frank S. Nugent, who wrote many of the director's best - though of course Ford would re-write, re-tool and at times just literally throw away pages of dialogue.

All three films are intensely 'Fordian', 'Fordian' meaning a great many things - starting with sentimental, timeless, moving and, at times, full of iffy, overbearing comedy - and this one stuffed to the gills with his singular concerns.

After a heartstoppingly poignant credits sequence soundtracked by the revolutionary song of the title, we begin with the best of the three tales, The Majesty of the Law, an amusing, beautifully rendered version of a story by popular Irish author Frank O'Connor. Telling the tale of a police inspector (Cyril Cusack), a warrant hanging heavy in his breast pocket as he visits an old acquaintance (Noel Purcell), it starts in stunningly poetic fashion, unwraps its story through delicate touches slipped into old-fashioned (perhaps overly talky, static) Blarney, then produces three external scenes of rare quality and emotional resonance, finishing as only a Ford film can. It's a deeply personal work, dealing with a pet Ford theme of personal honour, and manages to be both extremely understated and remarkably powerful, the director exhibiting an effortless lyricism.

The second story, A Minute's Wait, is the weakest of the three, a rather obvious, overbearing segment about a provincial railroad, with a train pulling up at Dunfaill station, and various 'characters' pouring into or out of it for a good half hour, to the sound of people yelling, "One minute's wait!" There are some good jokes amidst the caricaturing, but it's Ford at his broadest, and we know how broad that is. The director's strong suit was never comedy, no matter how he might have fancied that it was (even his bleakest and most complex works feature people being hit in the face and/or arse), and there's precious little heart here, just a lot of noise - some of it from a typically stupid, snobby and spoilt English couple, who get their comeuppance for having the temerity to attend a wedding.

Our final chapter falls somewhere between the first two (though chronologically after them, hence it being the final chapter): a film of shifting tone, ostentatious camerawork (with avant garde angles courtesy of Third Man photographer Robert Krasker) and contentious Republican sympathies, which probably works best if you're familiar with Ford's other treatments of the Troubles, particularly The Informer, the movie which won him his first Oscar, and which is cheerily subverted here. Updating Lady Gregory's one-act play, The Rising of the Moon (itself named after an old rebel song), to the Irish War of Independence - and renaming the piece 1921 - Ford casts largely from the rep company at Dublin's famous Abbey Theatre, and tells the story of a revolutionary (the very Irishly named Donal Donnelly) awaiting execution by the British occupying forces.

But what's this? A nun-related escape plot? A plan to evade the police by walking around town singing folk songs and leading a donkey? And a sentimental old duffer of a policeman (Denis O'Dea) conveniently positioned at a prized place along the waterfront? Stylistically it's full of pointless and pretentious touches (more Four Sons than The Fugitive), thematically and narratively it's like The Informer's cheeky little brother, if you can imagine such a thing, but if not a complete triumph, it is very Ford-y, and so is the whole of Rising of the Moon. If you're not a fan, it will drive you up the wall - particularly if you're an Irish person who finds the stereotyping of your national character somewhat annoying. If you are a fan, it's simply a must: distinctive, at times powerful, at others trivial, but always overflowing with a genuine and rhapsodic love of Ireland; its language, its mores and its peculiarities of character. An Ireland that may never have existed but forever will on film. (3)

***

I'm starting a bit of a Barbara Stanwyck season, on account of SHE'S AMAZING:



*MINOR SPOILERS for this film and You Belong to Me (1941)*
The Bride Walks Out (Leigh Jason, 1936) - This is an underrated romantic comedy with a rather daft, dated overarching story - about model Barbara Stanwyck resenting having to jack in her job when she weds hard-up engineer Gene Raymond - but some wonderfully tender moments, and a few delightful details.

There's Stanwyck silently crying to Auld Lang Syne, the room lit by lanterns; Helen Broderick breaking down in tears as she realises she truly loves taciturn beau Ned Sparks; and Robert Young's fascinating, very unusual supporting character: a drunken millionaire who adores the married Stanwyck and acts as her secret, silent benefactor. I'm not really a fan of Young, beyond his excellent performances in King Vidor's memorably mature, intelligent drama, H. M. Pulham, Esq., and the seminal noir Crossfire, but it's a very well-conceived part and he does a decent job.

Amidst much bickering and broad comedy, there are also some flashes of quality in the humour, with two cleverly inserted one-scene wonders: one a kid who keeps saying that his brother could beat up Raymond, and another a chauffeur who has never started a fight before (Irving Bacon); plus Stanwyck excitedly assisting a cop in the execution of his notepad-based duties. And then there are the little touches that lift pedestrian passages out of the ordinary: a gift-laden street-side waltz and a watch-and-learn dance diversion shot through with joie de vivre.

The film is liable to offend anyone with a feminist bent, due to at least three wife-beating gags and an ultimate belief that a woman's place is in the home, but it does have moments of real heart and humour, and at least gives Stanwyck a chance to put her case, even if in the end we know she's never going to win (and wouldn't win five years later, facing a similar problem in You Belong to Me).

I rather disliked Stanwyck when I first got into old movies, but Meet John Doe showed me some of what she could do, before Remember the Night and Ball of Fire revealed a certain something that no other actress has ever really had: a beguiling sincerity that can take the breath away. I'm not saying she couldn't be annoying - in something like Lady of Burlesque she's harsh and grating - but when she was allowed to unlock that softer side, the results were unfailingly remarkable. Here she's working with erratic material but that unique sensibility shines through - perhaps especially when her character recalls a youth of poverty and want: the actress herself was orphaned at four and grew up destitute in innumerable foster homes. She always played those scenes with a desperate, heartbreaking vulnerability. (3)



*MINOR SPOILERS*
Annie Oakley (George Stevens, 1935) - This 1935 biopic of the backwoods sharpshooter is barely mentioned today, existing as it does in the shadow of its musical update - Annie Get Your Gun - but it's great entertainment, if not really a great film.

The incomparable Barbara Stanwyck is the titular heroine, who shoots to fame after facing off against celebrity marksman Toby Walker (Preston Foster) and ends up as the star attraction of Buffalo Bill Cody's travelling Wild West show.

For an hour it's just a solid crowd-pleaser: useless as history, but full of homespun charm, touches of Americana and old-fashioned romance. Then the writers realise that they've forgotten to include any real dramatic tension, and so contrive some, which wasn't a very good idea.

Lucky then, that Stanwyck is in that rare form which for her wasn't so rare, her mesmerising sensitivity in full effect as she waxes poetic about Walker in a room full of his enemies.

Then director George Stevens completely loses the plot - almost literally - with an idiotically conceived comic subplot featuring Chief Sitting Bull (Chief Thunderbird - yes, that is his name), before finally wrestling it back through a rather delightful little closing scene.

Annie Oakley isn't in the same league as Stanwyck's best - or Stevens', for that matter - but for all its flaws, it's an enjoyable watch, with another of the star's apparently endless supply of indelible characterisations. (3)



The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra, 1933) - Interesting, erotically-charged drama about the strange, intense relationship between a Chinese warlord (err, Nils Asther) and the American missionary he's sort of kidnapped (Barbara Stanwyck).

It's oddly paced, light on actual incident and might have worked better with someone more innocent and refined in the Stanwyck part, but the leads are both very good (she has one great speech about God), Capra's soft-focus, epic rendering of China is effectively done, and the subject matter is often fascinating, with a sensitive approach to inter-racial attraction that would soon be prescribed as verboten by the censorship clampdown of 1934.

That wordless scene in the train carriage is basically a threesome in which only the eyes make contact.

This one would also make a fascinating companion piece to Lewis Milestone's magnificent 1936 film, The General Died at Dawn, a sumptuously-photographed story that exists in a similar realm, but takes fewer chances with its central story. (3)

***



Molière (Laurent Tirard, 2007) - Ou "Shakespeare in Love à la Français", as Romain Duris - kitted out like Russell Brand - offers a somewhat cartoonish approximation of the legendary Gallic playwright, who learns to live thanks to the love of a married woman (Laura Maurante), then channels his new-found feelings into his work.

For the most part it serves up a pleasant but unremarkable mix of broad farce, self-reflexion and heartfelt yet not entirely on-the-level romantic expression that recollects both 1999's Best Picture winner and the fitfully fine '30s film, The Great Garrick. Indeed, it isn't until the final five minutes that Duris' dramatic talents are properly called upon - and while he's adept at the wordplay elsewhere, the broader, slapsticky parts of the material leave him wanting.

For the rest of the time, it's Fabrice Luchini who dominates - playing Molière's idiotic, self-serving "employer", who secures the writer's services under duress as he seeks to woo a young widow - with Edouard Baer offering consistently funny support as his raffish, incorrigible and entirely unscrupulous fellow philanderer.

It's fairly good fun, there are a few big laughs ("Your eyes make me die of love"), and Molière scholars will probably get more from it than I did, due to the wealth of in-jokes apparently peppered throughout, but it's ultimately too broad, predictable and insubstantial to fully score - an affliction that's alarmingly obvious from the first 10 minutes. (2.5)

***



Err, yes.

The Return of Doctor X (Vincent Sherman, 1939) - This much-maligned non-sequel to that Pre-Code curio, Doctor X, is actually quite good fun, with smart-alec reporter Wayne Morris and surgeon Dennis Morgan investigating a string of murders in which the culprit drains his victims of blood.

It's all highly silly, but there are some fun twists and turns, and it all moves at a fair clip. The real selling point, though, is its achilles heel: a notoriously and hilariously miscast Humphrey Bogart as an evil, anemic and transparently embarrassed henchman (with a very funny secret), who comes complete with a vivid blonde stripe through his jet black hair, some unforgivable wire-framed glasses and a pet rabbit. His entrance and his final line deserve an entire cult around them - let's see if we can start one.

See also: This is the final film in the Hollywood's Legends of Horror box-set I wrote about here.

***



The Byrd Who Flew Alone: The Triumphs and Tragedy of Gene Clark (Jack Kendall and Paul Kendall, 2013) - A disappointing doc about the mercurial Byrd, who never attained the success his unique talents deserved - largely because he refused to play the publicity game, and kept on pushing the self-destruct button.

There's great music to spare (much of it played distractingly under the interviews), but the film is shallow and poorly-paced, racing past triumphs like Clark's 70s triumphs White Light and No Other, then dwelling on the McGuinn, Clark and Hillman era - illustrating a point about his abilities as a live performer by showing footage of him miming listlessly on a TV show - and crawling through his prolonged decline.

The interviews are also a mixed bag: Clark's wife, two of his 12 siblings and several noted collaborators turn up, but few have anything insightful to say. Fellow Byrd and noted Gram Parsons cohort Chris Hillman is the best of the bunch: extremely thoughtful and eloquent, while David Crosby should be shown to schoolchildren as an example of what drugs to your brain.

It's nice to see one of the most important and consistently overlooked musicians of the rock era afforded the documentary treatment - I think I'm the only one of his 10 fans who isn't interviewed - and there are a few nice moments, including a beautiful passage about Clark's divine creative process, but the film ultimately becomes a little boring, the one thing you could never say about his glorious, glorious music. (2)

***


"At this moment it's difficult to believe we are being asked to read this dialogue."

Pride and Prejudice (Robert Z. Leonard, 1940) - A lot of dismissive words have been written about the 'Hollywoodisation' of classic plays and novels, when in reality the studio system often made a decent job of adapting them, especially when producers like MGM's Irving Thalberg and Fox's Darryl F. Zanuck were in charge.

The 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice, though, seems to bear out every criticism ever levelled at the Californian trivialisation of great art, with none of the wit or nuance of Jane Austen's peerless romantic comedy, and only about half the story. It's OK to make changes if they serve the contrasting demands of the medium, but here every decision MGM made seems to be wrong, from the dubious, artificial sets and costumes, to the safe, dull and wrong-headed characterisation.

Greer Garson is completely miscast - but considering that, quite good - as Elizabeth Bennet, the sparky, funny heroine of the 1812 novel, with Laurence Olivier, a year on from Heathcliff, recruited to play another dark, brooding heartthrob, albeit one of finer lineage. You'd think he'd be perfect, but his character is rendered almost unintelligible by the artless compression of the story. The whole point of Darcy is contrast: how his principles are transformed by love. Here he's shown to be noble and incongruously charming far too early in the story, and directly in Elizabeth's sight, so the tension between them either doesn't exist or else doesn't ring true.

Mr Bennet also gets a raw deal, his reaction to Lydia's husband changed by the Hays Code (which presumably thought audiences had gotten more sensitive in the previous 122 years) from absurd delight to stern disapproval, Miss Catherine De Bourgh becomes a sponsor of the central romance - which makes no sense, further undermines Darcy's character and takes us off into the realms of fantasy - while Melville Cooper plays Mr Collins far too aggressively, accompanied by an idiotic theme tune. Worst of all is Mary Boland's infernal, grating Mrs Bennet, giving way to every scenery-chewing impulse the actress ever had.

The only characters that really work are Maureen O'Sullivan's Jane (a nonsensical early dissing of Darcy aside) and Bruce Lester's avuncular Bingley - both pleasantly restrained and in keeping with what Austen intended.

It's strange to learn that the book was adapted, via a stage play, by Aldous Huxley (!) and the co-writer of The Women, Jane Murfin. It's perhaps not the easiest work to transfer to the screen: set in a world of now defunct rules, often dealing in thoughts and feelings, and with several key passages of the book presented in vague reported speech - a challenge to any writer, if a welcome one - but the version they delivered was just far too simplistic, to the extent that we even get the following abysmal exchange between Lizzy and Darcy:

“At this moment it's difficult to believe you are so proud.”
"At this moment it's difficult to believe you are so prejudiced."

I mean, really?

Ironically, the film seems vastly more dated than the novel it's based upon, a loud, cloying, annoying and superficial rendering of a masterpiece, its only saving graces a handful of Austen's timeless lines and a couple of passable performances. (1.5)

***



Als ich tot war (Ernst Lubitsch, 1916) aka When I Was Dead - The earliest surviving film by the master of the romantic comedy is, well, a bit crap really. Director Ernst Lubitsch (looking a lot like The Count from Sesame Street) plays a chess-loving husband whose all-night matches are mistaken for infidelities. After being stitched up by his mother-in-law and turfed out of the house, he returns one Paul Weller wig better off, masquerading as a valet. Lubitsch would indulge his fascination with disguise and masquerade across three more decades, with often dizzying results. This one's just silly - if inoffensive - has no real story or ending, and doesn't seem to contain any jokes. But who cares? He made Ninotchka. (1)

***

Thanks for reading.

Maurice Chevalier, 22 Jump Street and old boxing movies - Reviews #191

Hello dear reader. I am on my summer hols, so I finally have time to tack up all these reviews that have been hanging around on my computer for aeons. Lucky you. This is the first of three - yes, three - upcoming updates.



CINEMA: 22 Jump Street (Phil Lord and Chris Miller, 2014) - This sequel to one of the most cheering surprises of the past decade goes the Gremlins 2 route, sacrificing a bit of heart and any minor semblance of reality for a lot of jokes – the overwhelming majority of them extraordinarily good.

Picking up with a brief recap of the first film (with the addition of an Annie Hall reference that later pays off in considerable style), 22 Jump Street sends undercover cops Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill to college, and pitches them into a hyper-intelligent, deliriously stupid, homoerotically-mannered meta-textual subversion of/homage to the original movie, every bit as clever, idiotic, intensely gay and pop culturally astounding as that sounds.

The gags are simply legion and many surely soon to become legendary, from Hill’s beautiful contention that “it’s so refreshing to have a black victim” to the references to his advancing years, an insanely brilliant trip scene, Tatum losing it entirely outside Ice Cube’s new office (which is like “a big cube of ice”) and a post-credits sequence that’s frankly the last word in post-credits sequences.

It’s nothing new in plot terms, but it also keeps telling you it’s nothing new in plot terms, which is something new. And if the slightly repetitive, bleak and overzealous mirroring of marital breakup that forms its centrepoint is no substitute for the real human emotion at the core of the first film, the prison stuff is basically just revolting, and it has a fair few lulls to accompany its immense sense of invention, it is at least brilliantly, bracingly and blissfully funny.

“Are you going to strangle me with your liver-spotted hands?” (3)

... and I'd rewatched this to prepare myself:



"What kind of bullshit do they say about cov... coviolent bonds in this school?"
21 Jump Street (Phil Lord and Chris Miller, 2012) - One of the nicest surprises - and the funniest films - of the past few years, with the creators of Cloudy, and screenwriter Michael Bacall, sending cops and best buds Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum back to school to bust a drugs ring.

The results are imaginative, intensely funny and just the right side of laddish, mixing sentiment, comedy and action with a smart subversive streak that extends to both meta parodies of the action-comedy genre and a brilliant, incisive examination of changing youth culture.

The stars are sublime, that YouTube video incapacitates me, and while the first half is better than the second, which gets a little bogged down in peril, plot and cameo, the pay-off - starting with Hill having to front up and take the killer shot - is just extraordinarily good.

So obviously I'm excited about next week and 22 Jump Street, whilst praying that Lord, Miller and Bacall keep away from the fratboy bobbins with which they briefly flirt here. Praying to Korean Jesus, naturally. (3.5)

***



Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian, 1932) - Mamoulian's musical masterpiece was at least a decade ahead of its time in terms of imagination and innovation, and still looks sensational today. Poking fun at Lubitsch's films in which millionaires masquerade as paupers, Mamoulian casts Maurice Chevalier as a penniless tailor mistaken for a baron by princess Jeanette MacDonald.

From the ingenious opening number - which seems to have influenced everything from Once Upon a Time in the West to Dancer in the Dark - it's an unstinting barrage of joy and invention, full of dazzling shots, hummable tunes and classic Lorenz Hart lyrics, with a gorgeous Myrna Loy just about stealing the show in her breakout role as a witty, sex-hungry countess. (4)

***



Delicacy (David and Stéphane Foenkinos, 2011) - A few sitcomish elements sometimes intrude - not least the improbable event that commences the central relationship - but this romantic comedy still doubles as a deep and resonant study of grief, with several unforgettable scenes, some very well-drawn characters and a magnificent performance from Audrey Tautou.

It's a film in which the female lead's best friend cries in happiness at her emotional rebirth, then makes the boyfriend feel like dirt when he isn't the vicariously enjoyable heartthrob she'd envisaged, a film where people hold a loyalty to people and events long past - despite how it's tearing them to pieces - and a film in which being polite about some soup is a one-way ticket to Sexytown.

A very good film, in other words. (3.5)

See also: I wrote a longer review the first time I saw Delicacy. It's here.

***



Everyone Says I Love You (Woody Allen, 1996) - I finally got Woody's musical on DVD (my ancient pan-and-scan VHS was looking a bit peaky), so it seemed ripe for a rewatch not long after my last one. It was also a first viewing in widescreen, meaning that the choreography and visual composition of the dance scenes made a little more sense.

This time around, Allen's romance with Julia Roberts fell the wrong side of creepy and a few of the characters and numbers got on my nerves, but the film remains fine entertainment - and parts of it are just pure cinematic magic, particularly that climactic song and dance on the banks of the Seine. (3)

***



Gentleman Jim (Raoul Walsh, 1942) - Mark Kermode quite often reviews a movie with the rather vague phrase: "It's not a great film, but it has great things in it." Well, that's Gentleman Jim.

The great things, almost exclusively, are the intoxicating, invigorating fight sequences, strikingly conceived and stunningly executed, as the art of boxing graduates from two meatheads smacking each other on wasteground, to relative respectability, thanks in no small way to Gentleman Jim Corbett (Errol Flynn), a fleet-footed, working class bank clerk sponsored by an aristocratic club.

The pièce de resistance is an intense, brutal slugfest on a riverside platform, but every single scene in the ring is marked by stylish photography, credible choreography and no small amount of panache, whether in the extended set pieces or the flashes of freeze-framed, overlayed action in the various montages, which still look startlingly modern.

Taken as a whole, the film isn't quite a contender, let alone a champ. Flynn is fun but rather one note in his favourite role, the story has little dramatic tension outside the ring, and the film is full of extremely grating comic relief - which even intrudes on the fight scenes at times.

It all looks great, though, thanks to Walsh and cinematographer Sid Hickox's eye for detail, while Ward Bond gives surely his finest - and possibly his biggest - performance as legendary prizefighter John L. Sullivan. If his boxing style is perhaps a little cartoonish, he atones in the beautifully tender presentation sequence near the close, which is followed by Flynn and Alexis Smith's touching heart-to-heart as the film finally serves up two scenes away from the ring that can compare to those inside it. (3)

***



*MINOR SPOILERS*
Invisible Stripes (Lloyd Bacon, 1939) - This is a surprisingly effective mix of social drama and crime film, not because it's from Warner Bros - who specialised in both - but because it starts off so unpromisingly, and stars George Raft.

Raft, a genuine hood spotted by a talent scout while the future star was scouting land for the mob, has always been among my least favourite classic actors, along with Joan Crawford and Charlton Heston. He's good in Scarface and cleverly used in Some Like It Hot, but elsewhere he's simply a plank of wood with an almost immobile face and an inability to generate any emotion beyond intense dislike.

I may have to make one of my periodic about-faces, though, as Raft is very persuasive here, playing a parolee who struggles to get a job once he's out of the big house, then becomes re-acquainted with his old mobster mate (Humphrey Bogart) as he strives to keep his callow brother (William Holden) on the right path, and out of the pen.

After a promising opening scene, the film becomes waylaid by some syrupy, over-written domestic drama, featuring another of Holden's characteristically terrible early performances. Was there ever an actor who improved so much - or so suddenly - as Holden, who some time in the late '40s got some cynicism, some stubble and some meaty roles, and became one of the key American screen actors of the 20th century.

But as Raft gets brutalised, patronised and ostracised by a succession of employers and co-workers, the film starts to grab a hold of you, and doesn't let up or let go, even when he starts robbing banks, and all realism goes out the window. Though the ending is essentially dictated by censorship restrictions of the period, in which all wrong-doing must be punished, its fatalistic air works largely in its favour, even going so far as to anticipate film noir.

In support, Flora Robson has some fine moments in a rather clichéd part as Raft and Holden's saintly mother ("When they were little I could always help them. I could pick them up when they fell down...", sob), and Bogart enjoys perhaps his best role of the '30s: an agreeably nuanced part bridging the gap between his straight out villains and the anti-heroes he would play from High Sierra onwards.

Invisible Stripes is predictable and preachy, with a rather hackneyed backdrop and some weak sequences, but it's also compelling for much of its length, with fine work from Bogart and Raft, and a few enduring things to say about how society breeds and treats its criminals. (3)

***



Kid Galahad (Michael Curtiz, 1937) - It's in the standard studio fodder, rather than the prestige pictures tailored to her talents, that you can truly see what a special performer Bette Davis was.

In Kid Galahad, a boxing film made about a decade before Hollywood learnt how to do them properly - exploring the fighter's psyche in classics like Body and Soul, The Set-Up, and Champion - she injects middling, even hokey material with both a wit and an enrapturing sincerity, as a conflicted, selfless moll knocked out by the hand of fate.

While everyone else is in a slightly superior gangster movie; Davis's film is timeless, an arresting, heart-wrenching tale of mutual reliance cast to the wind, crippling self-sacrifice and unrequited passion. The scene in which she packs her bags and attempts to leave Robinson contains some of the finest acting I've ever seen: remarkably modern and naturalistic. As in The Man Who Came to Dinner, another film where she played a supporting part, there are no histrionics and there's no grandstanding, she's just real - and really brilliant.

Director Michael Curtiz (or more likely his studio paymasters) must have known Davis was on the cusp of greatness - and of superstardom - as she's afforded the final shot here, despite playing essentially a supporting character who doubles as a plot catalyst.

Robinson is a fight promoter who builds and manipulates the career of a naive farm boy (Wayne Morris) with a good right hook. Fresh-faced Jane Bryan is Robinson's sister, for whom he has somewhat Scarface-ish protective tendencies, and Humphrey Bogart plays Robinson's gangland rival, the actor still stuck in villainous parts that largely required him to wince and bare his teeth. Rounding out the cast is Harry Carey, John Ford's first leading man, playing the now familiar role of the weather-beaten old trainer.

The plot is both predictable and rather corny, but the film as a whole is slick and entertaining, with good performances and a memorably nauseating pugilistic climax, fuelled by what I think we can safely call homoerotic sadism, with Robinson at his absolute best, shifting between panting malice and chubby-faced encouragement.

Kid Galahad is more a gangster picture with a ringside seat than a real boxing film, while its fight scenes, though commendable, pale alongside its '40s rivals (let alone Raging Bull). It's also rife with contrivances, right down the line. But if you're an old movie nerd looking for solid studio product, with a top-notch presentation and a cracking cast - including Bette Davis at her best - then you'll find yourself very much in luck. (3)

***



Seven Ways from Sundown (Harry Keller, 1960) - Audie Murphy's character in this film is called Seven. I wish I was called Seven. And Seven Days from Sundown is just a great name for a film, if not for a man.

The movie as a whole is one of a slew of interesting Audie Murphy Westerns made in the '50s and '60s, forming a loose, cool gang with those offbeat, complex and mature Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott starring vehicles shot around the same time. Seven Ways from Sundown starts poorly, but just gets better and better.

The baby-faced Murphy - in real life the most decorated American soldier of World War Two - plays a dogged, baby-faced Texas Ranger who tracks and then babysits a charming, loquacious killer (Barry Sullivan), little imagining that the toothy, reptilian bastard just murdered his brother. (Incidentally, what the film does with that information creates a stunningly astute counterpoint to the overtly, often overly personalised approach taken by so-called "revenge Westerns".)

The studio-shot footage here is seriously garish and ugly, and the acting has regular recourse to woodenness (Murphy's love interest is simply terrible), but Sullivan delivers a fine spin on a familiar character, and the sensational game of psychological cat-and-mouse between hunter and quarry - as mutual antipathy turns to homoerotic admiration - keeps it afloat during some spells of dodgy dialogue, aided by a few punchy, cleverly-conceived action interludes.

There's also one early, almost iconic shot of the star: his foot resting on the stone grave he's just made, his titular figure framed against the mountains and the grey-blue sky. It's actually just a set-up for some uninspiring gunplay, but in hindsight a sign that the film is about to burst into rather glorious life. (3)

***



Son of Rambow (Garth Jennings, 2007) - Two lonely, fatherless kids - one a troublemaker, the other a God-fearing mummy's boy - bond over a shared love of First Blood, and decide to remake it, but with the addition of an evil scarecrow.

Garth Jennings' hymn to friendship, film and the 1980s is best when rooted in the real - and articulating the upbeat - less effective when opting for (amusing but incongruous) comedy interludes concerning a cool French kid, or serving up a good half-hour of authentic but excessive human misery.

It is original, though, within the constraints of its formulaic structure, while exhibiting an invention, a humanism and a heightened sense of humour that reminded me of Danny Boyle's Millions, right down to the third act wobble.

From the sporadic flights of visual fantasy to Jessica Stevenson's heartfelt performance as a protective, conflicted mother, it's a movie studded with admirable attributes, if not ultimately an entirely successful film.

It's basically like Super 8 but English and good and with a flying plastic dog that attacks Adam Buxton instead of aliens. (3)

***



Catfish (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, 2010) - A shy, improbably handsome photographer in his 20s befriends an eight-year-old painter and then begins a passionate online affair with her beautiful, artistic older sister - a relationship that seems too good to be true. And is.

This documentary is unquestionably seminal - having added the term "catfished" to the lexicon - and is by turns entertaining, disingenuous, tacky, poignant, sensationalist, exploitative, intrusive, funny and weird (that chat on the cable car - shudder).

Because while it has something to say about the way we create online personas (after all, I'm really an eight-year-old girl), it's really a story of extremes: extreme naïvete, extreme self-delusion and ultimately extremely dubious investigative journalism that's fuelled by a search for answers but completely fails to engage with the rather serious questions it raises about mental illness.

It's sustained as far as it is by the novelty value of its story and the way that tale was tracked every step of the way, rather than being a particularly proficient piece of filmmaking, though it's ultimately worth seeing, if only to engage with the enduring debate about its themes, its potential fakery and its undeniable rubbernecking. (2.5)

***

Thanks for reading.