Review of 2020: Part 2 – Films

This is the most excited I’ve felt about cinema in a long while. Not in terms of new releases – though I fell wildly in love with the films of Céline Sciamma – but just my new areas of exploration. I mentioned last year that sometimes it can feel like you’ve seen all the good films. But in 2020 I stayed up late watching Indian melodrama, discovered that war films aren’t all cardboard jingoism, and became briefly preoccupied with ‘70s schlock, as well as excavating new nooks and crannies in my true home – Golden Age Hollywood.

At heart, I am just a shameful sentimentalist, and wherever they originate, my favourite films are always those that make me feel. You’ll find the list of best ‘discoveries’ (movies I saw for the first time this year) slanted severely in that direction. I’m going to pick out 20 of those, chat about a handful of cinematic obsessions that dominated 2020 for me, and then share a few snippets of the best film writing I’ve done this year.

DISCOVERIES

1. Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987)

I’ll just be thinking about Holly Hunter’s performance for the foreseeable. It’s the best I’ve seen in years. Words hit her with physical force, and she reminds me of nothing so much as ‘50s Brando, in that every choice she makes is unexpected and inspired, and every scene she plays is underscored by something odd and intriguing. With Brando, that often meant plastering tough-guy theatrics over a soft, wounded femininity; Hunter is sweetness slapped on top of rage and sadness. In her performance are at least 20 of those small moments that, each on their own, would be worth seeing a film for. Full review.

2. Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015)
One of the loveliest films I’ve ever seen, an intensely moving and yet spare, understated movie on Kore-eda’s favourite theme of surrogate families (or perhaps, in this case, just families. It's a movie about many things: family, heritage, unexpected human connections, what we bequeath to our children, what we leave behind for our future selves and for others – plum wine or emotional wreckage – and our capacity to appreciate beauty. The blocking in the final scene is a tender ballet that traces these characters’ personas, their relationships and their unbreakable solidarity. Full review.

3. Céline Sciamma films (2011-19)

Sciamma has alighted on an essential truth in her work, which is that we should stop putting men in films. Her five features (if we include My Life as a Courgette, which she wrote), form the Sciamma Cinematic Universe – a place of cruelty, longing and occasional catharsis, of gender fluidity, of blessed tactility. Each of the films is marked by her vast capacity for compassionate non-judgement, and shot in a way that mirrors her material. My favourite, Tomboy, is almost scrappy at times; Girlhood oscillates between stylisation and social realism; Portrait of a Lady on Fire is touched with an elegant grace headily infused with flaming eroticism. I find her films both profoundly painful and utterly beguiling. Reviews.

4. Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019)
This has passages about as good as anything I’ve ever seen on screen, with Ronan a mesmerising, indelible and definitive Jo. It isn't a perfect film, but – beneath Desplat's overly conventional score, away from those performances that dwell in the shadow of past triumphs, those early lines uttered unnaturally to oneself – there are passages of extraordinary intelligence, sincerity and sensitivity that happily confirm Gerwig-Ronan as the most exciting actor-director partnership in aeons. I just kept crying. Full review (which also discusses the 1933, ’49 and ’94 versions).

5. After Life (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1998)

Kore-eda’s answer to A Matter of Life and Death: the Technicolor fantasy of life (or at least reminiscence), the drab bureaucracy of death, as the newly deceased spend a week at a residential centre, deciding which memory to take with them for the rest of time. Their counsellors, meanwhile, have secrets and torments of their own. This contemporary masterpiece has more to say – quietly, painfully, sometimes obliquely – about life’s compromises, disappointments and beauties than almost any other film I’ve seen. I haven’t been this broken by a man sitting on a bench since Ikiru.

6. Blue Collar (Paul Schrader, 1978)
A breathtaking film about class and race, so entertaining that you scarcely realise what it’s up to. Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto are blue collar workers in a Detroit car factory who decide to steal from their corrupt union. In other hands, that could mean a conventional heist film or a reactionary polemic, but for Schrader it’s some wild fusion of laugh-out-loud comedy, counter-intuitive politics and rich character drama, like The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists filtered through the ‘70s malaise. Full review.

7. Only Yesterday (Isao Takahata, 1991)

An exquisitely beautiful Ghibli film about memory, which both understands that you can be impossibly nostalgic for your childhood whilst in your 20s, and that what we remember isn’t what is obviously significant – but it is significant. It's full of the most beguiling small moments. Like a little league baseball player standing on a quiet street in the sunset, a moment that threatens not to end. Full review.

8. A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood (Marielle Heller, 2019)
Matthew Rhys is a hardbitten feature writer, fucking up his life one malicious long read at a time. Then he’s sent to profile beloved children’s TV personality, Mr Rogers (Tom Hanks). The cover plug for the eventual feature is “Mr Rogers – Especially Now”, and that’s how I feel about this film. It’s so deftly done, toying meta-ly with the iconography of the milieu in a way that reminded me of Life on Mars, expertly using Rhys as a surrogate for its audience’s own cynicism, and drawing from Hanks a performance of multi-layered complexity that somehow plays out entirely on the surface. Full review.

9. A Girl in Every Port (Howard Hawks, 1928)

A wonderful Hawks comedy about sailors (and shaggers) Victor McLaglen and Robert Armstrong who have, well, a girl in every port. The opening scene promises so little, but then the film catches light: it’s so charming and disarmingly funny, balanced by moments of romance and rich emotion. That sequence in the apartment block – where McLaglen and Armstrong go in search of dates, then discover their latent compassion – may be the most tender and lovely thing in the whole Hawks canon. Then just when you think the film can’t get any better, Louise Brooks turns up and takes over. Full review here, and there’s more about both Hawks and Brooks in the Obsessions section below.

10. Deadline at Dawn (Harold Clurman, 1946)
There’s a purposefully offbeat scene in this brilliant humanist noir from the typewriter of Clifford Odets, in which a sailor trying to solve a murder sees a nervy man dash from a building next to the crime scene. He tails the man… right to the door of a vet’s, where the suspect breaks down in tears. It’s closed, and he was too late anyway. His cat is dead. There are other stories, you see. And this film intersects with those. In the irritating vernacular of 2020, it is “noir adjacent”. The cat vignette seems the sort of thing that would happen during the night, in the New York of noir, but usually it happens just around the corner. And this film is just around the corner from noir. Full review.

11. The Secret of Convict Lake (Michael Gordon, 1951)

Most films that have a secret have just that – one secret – and so we sit around amiably waiting for it to be revealed. But almost everyone in The Secret of Convict Lake is covering something up: at least four of the characters are powder kegs just waiting to go off, and you have no idea where the explosion is coming from. Full review.

12. The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, 2016)
An intoxicating, strange, erotic Korean lesbian period-drama heist-romance, though it cares as much about genre as I care about horror films. I’ve tried to distil its essence – The Favourite if it was sincere, shot through with genius and spliced with The Sting; a warmer, feminist Rashômon shot like A Very Long Engagement, Lubitsch’s early role-play films with the songs and Maurice Chevalier replaced by sapphic love, East Asian geopolitics and graphic prose about vaginas – but it’s not really like those films, or indeed like any other films at all. It’s sad eyes and wet mouths, love that feels like betrayal, betrayal that feels like love. It’s imperialism’s dominance glimpsed through misogny’s dominance. It’s bodies so entwined they lose all parameters, all meaning. It’s twists that accentuate emotion, that find new depths to the characters, that renew, rather than erase.

13. The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg, 2019)

A riveting autobiographical drama about a film school student and her relationship with a darkly fascinating older man. The first half is tight and intriguing, the second open and exhausting, and though the odd line falls flat, for the most part it’s acted, written and filmed with a striking nuance, originality and truth. It feels like a spiritual cousin of Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels, sharing that movie’s freshness of vision, its bleak acceptance of destructive relationships, and female characters who are complex and real, but also readable and specific. Not everything is revealed – neither here, nor there – but by the end you have a complete picture of these people, and of the chilly world they inhabit. Full review.

14. The Past (Asghar Farhadi, 2013)
A bleak moral thriller, in Farhadi’s distinctive style, about an Iranian man, Ahmad (Tahar Ramin), returning to France to divorce his wife (Bérénice Bejo), and being drawn into the lives of her boyfriend, his wife, and Bejo’s troubled daughter. It’s long but never feels it, dealing in complex characterisation, purposefully spacing out its revelations – even the premise itself is kept from us for 10 minutes – and wallowing in ambiguity, with shades of Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret. To the end, it all remains brilliantly unresolved – Ahmad doesn’t even get the climactic speech he asks for, because people want to move on; there is no ‘closure’ beyond the desire to close the book now. Full review.

15. The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, 1953)

This remarkably compassionate and sensitive film belies its opening, its periodic speechifying, and a credit that screams, “… and Edmond O’Brien as The Bigamist”. It has a patsy, a heavy, a good girl and a fatale, but the good girl unwittingly lures the anti-hero into adultery, the fatale is the wife who drags him back from the life he wants, and the heavy is just trying to make up for the time he let something happen to an adopted child. And Robert Towne thought he was being clever with Chinatown. (To be fair, he was.) Full review.

16. Housekeeping (Bill Forsyth, 1987)
A melancholy gem from Bill Forsyth, about two young sisters in an icy, isolated ‘50s town, and their relationship with their non-conformist aunt, who isn’t the free and liberating spirit of cliché, but a loving woman whose eccentricities (and mental illness) become an embarrassment. It’s an astonishingly uncommercial film: sad, quiet and almost devoid of incident, but incredibly well-observed, and even profound. Full review.

17. Battleground (William A. Wellman, 1949)

This film from producer Dore Schary and director William Wellman is miles away from the cardboard stereotypes and plastic heroics of most ‘40s war movies. It had the advantage, of course, of being made four years after the conflict, without the strictures that come with shooting propaganda. But while flagwaving, speeches and gung-ho clichés may have been hard to avoid during World War Two, there was never a reason why those earlier filmmakers had to people their pictures with one-dimensional characters, skimp on atmosphere, or attempt to squeeze the genre into the established mould of a Western. Full review.

18. Dragon Inn (King Hu, 1967)
This was just SO MUCH FUN, a Taiwanese martial arts Rio Bravo with what I can only describe as brilliantly deadpan cartoon ultra-violence. You also get a nice minimalist score, a raft of cool performances, and a neat mix of studio claustrophobia and lovely exterior shots (from sumptuous vistas to the titular inn pockmarked with flaming arrows). It takes 15 minutes to get going (and, in my case, to be able to work out what’s going on), but after that it’s a whole carnival of leaping, slicing people in the belly, and laughing at a man for having no balls – when honestly there are other things you could have a go at him for; the psychopathy, for a start.

19. Quiz Show (Robert Redford, 1994)

This dramatisation of the ‘50s quiz show scandals is conspicuously great on America, anti-semitism, TV, and the pass that comes with privilege. I particularly love the gay cat-and-mouse chemistry between Fiennes – doing a sort of cinematic-shorthand performance – and Rob Morrow, bringing method energy to Dick Goodwin. Full review. The film was based on Dick Goodwin's memoir, Remembering America, reviewed here.

20. Why Be Good? (William A. Seiter, 1929)
A captivating silent rom-com, with Colleen Moore irresistible as a Charleston-ing flapper in love with millionaire’s son, Neil Hamilton. She’s a good girl – but his dad won’t believe it. It’s fun as a snapshot of the time – with slangy dialogue and deceptively interesting mores – and it’s also neatly filmed, but this material could well have felt slight. It has to be carried by Moore’s talent and charm, and both are absolutely off the charts. Her comic timing is perfect, and she’s so appealing when playing it smitten, but it’s those moments of pain that stay with you, played with such subtlety and purity.

***

OBSESSIONS

1. Brian De Palma

De Palma was the first ‘great’ filmmaker I ever identified as someone whose work I couldn’t stand, but with age I have come to appreciate that the inherent stupidity and wildly erratic direction of his work is part of its appeal. It is, in fact, the main part. Sisters (pictured) was my way in: it’s trivial and trashy, even by his standards, but it is very directed, in the best sense of that word. After that, it was crane shots and voyeurism all the way, as I gorged on such debatable fare as Dressed to Kill, Femme Fatale and Passion, as well as the derivative but dazzling Blow Out, in which his warped oeuvre reaches some kind of apogee.

2. Louise Brooks

It took me a while to embrace the cult of Brooks, who wasn't a big star during the silent era and whose reputation rests on just a handful of irregularly-sized roles. It seemed unfair that being absolutely smoking hot, in a conspicuously modern way, made her recognisable to modern audiences in a way that, say, Clara Bow wasn't. But having finally 'got' it, thanks in large part to the evangelising of historian Pamela Hutchinson, a chance encounter with Diary of a Lost Girl and a Damascene conversion at seeing Pandora's Box on the big screen, I've since made up for lost time. This year I watched six, a real mixed bag, from the glory of Hawks’ A Girl in Every Port (see Discoveries, above) to the hopelessly compromised fragmentation of The Canary Murder Case – Brooks was dubbed, and her performance sliced and diced, after refusing to return for retakes – and the abject humiliation of Windy Riles Goes Hollywood. At her best, she has a cold, quicksilver magnetism entirely unique in cinema. And great hair.

3. Howard Hawks

Tough and soppy, the archetypal Hawks film is recognisable from a mile away: a hangout movie in which people are put to the test. I revisited Rio Bravo, Red River (a hangout movie on the move!) and – best of all – the staggering Only Angels Have Wings in 2020, as well as exposing myself to his puzzling ‘60s Nascar variation, Red Line 7000, which is faintly embarrassing but with those effective moments of Hawksian sentiment that always make his work worthwhile. And then there’s Ball of Fire, by far the best of his screwball comedies, with the incomparable Barbara Stanwyck at her absolute zenith.

4. Glenda Farrell

I just really like Glenda Farrell. No-one ever spat rat-a-tat dialogue like she did, and she was a constant companion during Lockdown 1.

5. Zachary Scott

Scott (pictured, right) – a sort of faintly upmarket Lee van Cleef, with the same widow’s peak, overbite and aquiline nose – was a Warner contract player who never quite made it, though endures in the pages of various Hollywood memoirs as the noted antagonist of the studio’s ‘Irish Mafia’ (Cagney, Pat O’Brien, Frank McHugh). Somehow he became the hero of this year’s Socially-Distanced Film Club, in which my friend Andrew and I watch a film together every Saturday night. Our first exposure was via Guilty Bystander, we enjoyed him in The Secret of Convict Lake, then actively sought him out, via The Southerner, Ruthless and The Young One. I’m not sure if he’s actually that good, but like Toby Wing or Donald Meek, it’s always nice to see him.

***

BEST WRITING

For your consideration, a pile of stuff I wrote on film.

1. On Mank, and how Old Hollywood learned to hate itself, for the Independent. Featuring Billy Wilder, Dorothy Parker, Clifford Odets and many more.

2. Malevolence and mansplaining in The Little Foxes, for the Guardian.

3. Bigging up the blistering Pre-Code masterpiece, Blessed Event, in Sight & Sound:

4. Extended thoughts on Elia Kazan’s troubling and inspired Wild River.

5. The Pre-Code era and sex, in They Call It Sin.

6. Showgirls

7. Googie Withers in Pink String and Sealing Wax

8. Ten Cents a Dance (part of Socially-Distanced Film Club; the full list of mini-essays is here)

9. Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil

10. It’s a Wonderful Life and other Christmas behemoths, for the Guardian

***

Thanks for reading.

The Big Sleep as you've never seen it

*A FEW SPOILERS*
The Big Sleep: the pre-release version (Howard Hawks, 1945)



The Big Sleep is one of the most purely entertaining films of the 1940s, a zingy, slangy, sexy slice of film noir that takes full advantage of a classic Raymond Chandler story, a script by three of the best writers in Hollywood (including Leigh Brackett, who co-wrote Rio Bravo and The Empire Strikes Back), and Bogie and Bacall's sizzling chemistry.

Shabby detective Philip Marlowe (Bogart) is hired by the ailing General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) to foil a blackmailing racket, and finds himself up to his neck in corpses and amorous dames, including the general's smoking-hot daughter, Mrs Rutledge (Lauren Bacall).

So far, so legendary.

The movie has a peculiar history, though. Originally wrapping in January 1945, just as Bacall's debut - To Have and Have Not - hit cinema screens and made her an instant sensation, The Big Sleep was ready for release by March of that year. But with World War Two nearing a close, Warner shelved the film as they rushed to release any and all propagandist flicks that would soon be rendered redundant. By the time The Big Sleep was reinstated for release in November, Bacall's second film - Confidential Agent - had come out, receiving savage reviews that suggested her career might be over as soon as it had started.



At that point, Bacall's agent, Charles K. Feldman, wrote to the head of the studio, Jack Warner, and urged him to take action: to add more scenes of Bacall, to scrap a scene in which she wore a veil (apparently because he didn't think she looked attractive in it, the mad bastard) and to chop various exposition in order to make way for the new material. Warner wrote back to him almost at once, saying that he'd been thinking exactly the same thing (Warner always said that), and Bogie and Bacall agreed to shoot the additional material if Howard Hawks would return to direct it.

The pre-release version (the one from March 1945, which actually played to US soldiers overseas) is available on the flipside of the Region 1 DVD, and is one of the most fascinating cinematic artefacts currently in popular circulation, the sort of bonus feature you dream about, if you're a massive nerd like me. It runs three minutes longer than the finished cut and has over 18 minutes of alternate material, including:

Reel 3



More footage of Marlowe searching Geiger's house. (This is a bit long-winded and was rightly cut for pacing reasons.) Alternate scenes with Marlowe and Carmen in the car, and a different conversation between the detective and his employer's butler. This was ultimately replaced with a superb, daring new scene in Bacall's bedroom that exploits the actress's feline sensuality and her leading man's sardonism (above), and gives the film a welcome injection of eroticism ("You go too far, Marlowe", "Harsh words to throw at a man - especially when he's walking out of your bedroom"). Some dialogue was overdubbed in Reel 4 to cover for the plot changes.

Reel 7



There's a full nine minutes of exposition, explanation and macho sparring in the 1945 version that was ultimately chucked out, with Thomas E. Jackson as a compromised D.A. and James Flavin playing a vaguely incompetent, Marlowe-hating police captain. In this cut sequence, Regis Toomey really comes through for Bogie, as Chief Inspector Bernie Ohls, getting him off the hook when it matters most. Toomey is excellent in the finished film too, but their bromance has much less to it without this chunk of story. Also, if you're someone who finds the finished film hard to follow (i.e. a member of the human race), then this passage should clear things up a bit. Having said that, you can see why it was snipped: whilst it's entertaining (and completely fascinating from a historical perspective), it's also a little slow and turns the movie into more of a procedural than you might expect. This sequence is followed by the notorious 'veil' scene, a piece of exposition in Marlowe's office that simply isn't very interesting, especially when compared to the scorching 'racehorses' passage that replaced it, taking place in the bar at Eddie Mars' casino and graduating from plot-point ticking to an awful lot of innuendo.

Reel 8

The scene where Mrs Rutledge is threatened by one of Eddie Mars' henchman was later redubbed to make her and Marlowe seem more familiar with one another, fitting with the more laid-back, sensual quality of the finished film.

Reel 9



The sequence in which Carmen is waiting in Marlowe's room was added for the theatrical release (she's sitting in his chair, fully-clothed (above), rather than naked in his bed, as she was in Chandler's novel and would be in the '78 version). There's also more information in the final film than in the '45 one regarding Mrs Rutledge getting the DA to drop the case. Here it's just a few lines. In the final film, Marlowe's feelings for her are given greater context, and he ultimately seems like a nicer guy. The '45 version does include a cool bit where Marlowe flicks his guns out of the hidden compartment on the dashboard, though.

Reel 11



Pat Clark, a bottle blonde with intimidating eyebrows and a rather artificial manner, plays Mrs Eddie Mars in the '45 version. She was unavailable for retakes and replaced by Peggy Knudsen, who's more sparky, energetic and believable (and attractive). Bacall gets fewer close-ups in the original, and they're shot from a less adulatory angle.

So there you have it. The 1945 version has a clearer plot, a couple of interesting additional characters, an alternate Mrs Eddie Mars and a stronger through-line for Bogie and Regis Toomey. For once, though, a messy production history and the interference of a powerful, nosey agent made a movie an awful lot better. The original cut is a very good film, but the final product is a classic, and a seamless-seeming one at that, flowing far more freely, easily and quickly than its earlier incarnation, and possessing an irresistible erotic charge that comes largely from those three extra scenes: two spotlighting Bogie and Bacall's badinage, and one casting further light on Carmen's character.

Still, many of the film's familiar virtues are already in place - like Max Steiner's stunning symphonic score (the way he underlines Elisha Cook's closing moments!) and that perfect closing shot, and it remains an extremely illuminating and valuable piece of film history: essential viewing for anyone with an interest in the Hollywood studio era.



See also: I did a similar piece on My Darling Clementine a few years back now.

***

Thanks for reading.

Wes Anderson, Easy A and the problem with J.J. Abrams - Reviews #119

... also featuring Shakespeare, a drunk judge and another plundering of It Happened One Night.



CINEMA: Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, 2012) is a very Wes Anderson lovers-on-the-lam movie, as two emotionally disturbed 12-year-olds head for the hills, with a scout troop, a cop, social services (Tilda Swinton) and a couple of parents on their tail. After the baffling miscue that was Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson resumes his run of deadpan, dead-on films about damaged souls with this poignant portrait of loneliness and love. The first half is absolutely wonderful, full of lovely jokes and the director's usual off-kilter sentimentality, and if the second half can't match it - becoming too bitty, as well as curiously claustrophobic and small-scale at its supposed climax - it's still a very entertaining, amusing and affecting film. The familiar fonts, distinctive musical selections (Benjamin Britten and Hank Williams) and sad-faced protagonists are all present and correct, so if you like Anderson's (non-animated) films, you'll like it. If you don't, you won't. If you like some of them and not others, then you're weird and I don't understand you. (3.5)

***



Easy A (Will Gluck, 2010) - Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) unwittingly starts a rumour that she's done a sex, and the next thing you know her whole school is up in arms. If Stone, a bright redhead who's extraordinarily adept at both comedy and drama, is a more talented Lindsay Lohan, then this is a superior - not to mention less stressful - spin on Mean Girls, full of brilliant one-liners and equipped with some razor-sharp satire. The nods to other teen movies seem unnecessary and forced, but the characters are very nicely drawn (while possessing a shared aptitude for densely eloquent phrasing), the unexpected gags come thick and fast (Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson have some great lines as the heroine's parents), and Stone is just absolutely superb. This is one of the best and most enjoyable comedies of the last few years. (3.5)

See also: Stone also lit up the excellent Crazy, Stupid, Love.

***



The Great Garrick (James Whale, 1937) is an unusual, sometimes brilliant comedy presenting a fictional chapter from the life of the great English actor David Garrick (Brian Aherne). During a breathtaking opening, the mercurial, caddish thespian manages to both entrance London and offend the French, who've just invited him to star at the Comédie-Française - so they hatch a plan to humiliate him, staging an elaborate ruse during his stay at a rural hotel. When Garrick is tipped off by an old acquaintance (Etienne Girardot) to expect a set-up, he becomes wrongly convinced that the virginal runaway countess falling into his arms (Olivia de Havilland) is somehow involved. Aherne is absolutely sensational, the climactic reveal is stunningly powerful and there's a superb supporting performance from Girardot (the absent, balding comedian who somehow matched John Barrymore in Twentieth Century), but the tricks within the central scheme aren't very funny and the lushly romantic love scenes are somewhat undercut by the fact that Aherne is having de Havilland on. There's still much to enjoy and admire in both the original material and Whale and producer Mervyn LeRoy's masterful evocation of the period, but this tale of a Shakespeare-quothing ham enjoying the affections of de Havilland pales in comparison to 1937's other - the irresistible It's Love I'm After. (3)

***



The Bride Wore Black (Francois Truffaut, 1968) - In 1968, Jeanne Moreau will... KILL FERGUS. Possibly. Truffaut's Hitchcock homage, which in turn led to Kill Bill, pays tribute more in style than in theme, as Moreau's widowed bride tracks down the five men responsible for her husband's death (I say "responsible", four of them get a pretty bum rap), amidst numerous clever directorial touches (like the camera snaking around the bushes in front a potential victim's house) and to the strains of Bernard Herrmann's superb score. It isn't deep, particularly credible or very well plotted, it's shot in the peculiar "pastel shade" fashion of so many European films of the '60s - that extends even to the actors' skin; it's difficult to distinguish between the many drawings of Moreau and the real thing - and there's a very silly death scene effect that is almost certainly not a joke, but for the most part it's fast-moving and fun, particularly if you like seeing lecherous Frenchmen being killed. (2.5)

***



Barbary Coast (Howard Hawks, 1935) - A mediocre Hawks entertainment, on his usual theme of tough, displaced men and women falling in love, with a very strong cast but a rather trite and badly-paced storyline. Miriam Hopkins is the self-consciously tough broad who pitches up in Gold Rush-era San Francisco, and allies herself to casino owner Edward G. Robinson – who has a really funny, ever-present curl trespassing onto the right hand side of his face – only to fall for soppy poet Joel McCrea. To get an idea of just how sanitised the movie is, it's worth noting that Joseph Breen, the head of the Hays Office, thought the original script was the filthiest thing he'd ever read, but regarded the film as absolutely charming. There's some wonderfully poetic Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur dialogue in the opening exchanges ("However soiled his hands, the journalist goes staggering through life with a beacon raised" – just beautiful), but it dries up alarmingly quickly, while the story degenerates into tiresome bickering, before reinventing itself as a gruesome love letter to vigilantism. Breen seemed to espouse a strict pro-death-penalty, anti-double-bed viewpoint that’s difficult to get on board with nowadays. (I'm also not sure what the form is on everybody celebrating the arrival of a "white woman" - seems a bit racist.)

There are a few atmospheric shots in fog-shrouded San Francisco – though conveying the sweep of the burgeoning town is never even attempted – but the real selling point is the performances. Hopkins gives one of those faintly wooden, sub-Stanwyck, but nonetheless intriguing performances combining genuine, even enrapturing emotional attractiveness with the ability to be a bit irritating, while both Walter Brennan and Robinson make the most of familiar roles: Brennan a hoarse crook with an eyepatch and a quietly-emerging conscience, Robinson a menacingly-mewling tough guy who doesn’t really understand how love works. McCrea is cast in one of those parts that can come off as unbearably smug (I’m thinking of Leslie Howard’s horrendous role in The Petrified Forest), while the script asks him to swallow some rather questionable plot developments, but he’s not bad, playing more fey and sensitive than was usually required. There’s also a very funny bit part for J.M Kerrigan, who shines as a drunk judge in an incongruous, inappropriate but riotous comic interlude. Barbary Coast never really manages to clamber over its main obstacle – a disjointed, at times slightly tedious story – but some very nice acting and the odd good line or arty shot make it worth a look, especially for fans of the director. (2.5)

***



*MINOR SPOILERS*
Super 8 (J.J. Abrams, 2011) is a fraud. A group of kids shooting a homemade horror film see something they shouldn't (clue: it's a big alien), in Abrams' love letter to his teenage self (OK, and the films he saw back then, borrowing liberally from the likes of The Goonies, Gremlins and Stand by Me). On one level, it's a fairly fun ride - I've certainly rarely seen so many bikes in one film - but take a peek under the surface and there's nothing there. To be honest, I have a real problem with Abrams' script. He's clearly read some screenwriting books, but his treatment of bereavement and broken families is horribly mechanical: he can regurgitate manipulative cliches at will, but seems to have nothing to say and no understanding of either genuine human emotion or the patterns of speech. There's no insight or warmth and his characters don't talk like real people, they just talk like people in other films he's watched. On the plus side, Ella Fanning is quite good as the teenage love interest: I like the way she fancies the hero because he paints model trains - that is just like what happens in real life and not at all wish-fulfilment. Her acting debut at the train station is one of the two best scenes in the film; the other is the bit where the friends are all bickering in a diner. Essentially Abrams has just crammed most of Stand by Me into 90 seconds, but for a few seconds you forget you're watching a movie and start to believe in the characters. The rest of it feels terribly hollow and fraudulent. There's actually a film called E.T. from the 1980s that has quite a similar story to this, but is much better. (2)

***



Leap Year (Anand Tucker, 2010) - While the prospect of a romantic comedy featuring the talents of Amy Adams and Adam Scott would usually make my heart, well, leap, the reviews of this one were for once enough to put me off. But then Mrs Rick decided she wanted to see it*, so we gave it a go. It's offensively unoriginal, just a tired reheating of the old It Happened One Night stock plot - with chunks of The MatchMaker stirred in - but after a terrible first half hour it picks up a little and by the end it had at least stopped getting on my nerves. Adams' character is too dislikeable for too long, Scott has little to do beyond a bland retread of his smug Step Brothers persona, and both the general plot and the individual jokes are appallingly predictable, but Matthew Goode is quite good as a love interest with odd patches missing from his scruffy beard, and there's nothing mean-spirited about it, aside from the fact that some studio accountant decided to make this unambitious, derivative film instead of any number of interesting scripts that will never see the light of day. Mrs Rick thought it was OK. (1.5)

*My superior half actually has impeccable taste - her favourite films are Colonel Blimp and Ninotchka - but she shares my romantic comedy weakness... only more so.

See also: The best retread of It Happened One Night is surely The Sure Thing, though I have a soft spot for Love on the Run too.