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.

Beggars of Life - Reviews #229

CINEMA: Beggars of Live (William A. Wellman, 1928)
with live accompaniment from the Dodge Brothers; Elgar Room, Royal Albert Hall



A grim but intoxicating silent wonder from William Wellman, with a rough-and-ready storyline, Louise Brooks' best American performance and a first 45 minutes of almost perpetual motion, as our heroine kills an attempted rapist, dresses as a bloke and then hops freights with hobo Richard Arlen, trying to shake the "dicks" on their tail (stop sniggering).

Wellman made most of the best movies about trains and though Wild Boys of the Road remains one of the finest - and most violent - Pre-Code movies around, he never bettered the stunning, rolling, juddering, smoking, dangerous, desperate, hypnotic and free, wonderfully free evocation of the rails that he achieves here.

It's the backdrop to a timeless story of love and another of redemption, as sleazy, hulking, kind-of-cool hobo Oklahoma Red (Wallace Beery, giving the performance of his life) sees the lengths that the fugitives will go to for one another, and decides that maybe he should stop being a bastard. As 'the girl', Louise Brooks is modern, touching, beguiling, sexy, sweet, unaffected and quite outrageously steely.

There are grace notes aplenty, good gags, smooth but breathless tracking shots that take you to the heart of action, love scenes of refreshing originality - including a beaut in a haystack - and the bloodiest meet cute of all time, followed immediately by a frankly staggering murder montage that recalls (or anticipates) Abel Gance at his best.

I saw it, at long last, at my office, with astonishing, apposite accompaniment from Neil Brand and the Dodge Brothers that added immeasurably to every scene: a rollicking, raucous, nuanced soundtrack bursting with energy and emotion. If you ever get the chance to experience that: leap. Leap like a hobo going for the last freight to freedom. (4)

See also: I wrote about Louise Brooks' wonderful essays here: the book includes a superb, upsetting rumination on her experiences filming Beggars of Life. Richard Arlen also starred in Wellman's Wings, which I discussed here.

***

Thanks for reading.

Crime, Clara and Cagney running wild - Reviews #181

Plus: Peter Lorre, Chuck Palahniuk and Kate Hepburn's first Oscar win, in this latest reviews update. Ratings are out of four, because that's how I and also old men rate things.



Classe tous risques (Claude Sautet, 1960)

The short version: "A masterpiece of crime cinema: bleak, brilliant and grubbily realistic, influencing everything from Melville to Godard to Eddie Coyle. Will almost certainly take up smoking on account of Belmondo."

The long version: "Which movie character would you turn to in a crisis? As tempting as it might be to go for, say, Dumbledore, or Batman, I'm inclined to pick Jean-Paul Belmondo's Eric Stark in this Gallic crime classic: a noble, personable and resourceful small timer willing to stick his neck out, right out, for a total stranger.

That stranger is career criminal Abel Davos (Lino Ventura), a big-shot-turned-petty-thief who's left down, out and injured – with his two young kids on his hands – after a fateful encounter with some heavily-armed custom officials. Stark's job is to get him back to Paris and then out of sight, though Davos wants a few words with his former partners, who owed him a debt of honour, and didn't really deliver.

Director Sautet, branching out after years as an assistant director, called his style of filmmaking 'pure cinema': light on dialogue, strong on faces and physicality, this time vividly employing Ventura's past experience as a wrestler. "A big plus for Classe tous risques was his instinct for abrupt violence," recalled Sautet decades later. "It was great!" The film was also integral in defining one of the most important screen personas of the 1960s: the ugly-handsome Belmondo's image as a dapper, unflappable modern man with a singular code of ethics and a socially irresponsible way of making smoking look like a really good idea.

For all his stylishness, though, this understated, wintry masterpiece of gangster cinema, about a man in decline in a dirty, deadly business, is bleak, full of regret and stunningly filmed at authentically drab locations. Written, suitably enough, by ex-con José Giovanni, it remains both a massive achievement on its own terms and a model for a new breed of film, its DNA present in everything from Melville's mesmerising Le Doulos to Peter Yates' The Friends of Eddie Coyle. In an overt nod to Sautet's movie, Jean-Luc Godard even went so far as to name a whole film after one of its unseen characters, an underworld figure called Pierrot le Fou.

Often ignored amidst its showier contemporaries, Classe tous risques looks better – and greater – with every passing year."

(4)

***

Then I revisited a couple of old Woody Allen films: one almost perfect, the other merely pretty damn great:



"Who is Pearl Harbor?"
Radio Days (Woody Allen, 1987) - Woody's most personal and nostalgic film: a rough collection of tall tales and reminiscences, dealing with his childhood - he's played by a young Seth Green - and his beloved radio shows of the 1940s.

Lovingly narrated by the director, it's a time machine made of celluloid, beautifully devised and executed, with sumptuous period music and design, and the usual stunning work from his great '80s collaborators, Dianne Wiest and Mia Farrow - the latter showing her range once more in a sweet, funny, Judy Holliday-ish part.

Sentimental and deceptively deep, it's a simply wondrous movie - back from when it all seemed so effortless for Woody - casting its spell like a rosy, American Distant Voices. (4)



Bullets Over Broadway (Woody Allen, 1994) - An often joyous Woody confection - all surface, but what surface!

John Cusack is a pretentious, highly-strung playwright in early '30s Broadway who sells out, while being forced to deal with a monstrous luvvie (Dianne Wiest), a mobster backer (Joe Viterelli) and his moll (Jennifer Tilly), her abrasive bodyguard (Chazz Palminteri) and a leading man who can't stop eating (Jim Broadbent).

It lacks the depth and resonance of the director's greatest, and doesn't always quite tie together, but it looks utterly stunning, the cast is superb, and there are plenty of great characters, funny lines and inspired ideas - particularly the development of Palminteri's heavy.

For fans of the period, there are also fun references to the likes of Philip Barry, Eugene O'Neill, Jerome Kern and Clara Bow, as well as a soundtrack full of lovely old standards, including that cracking Irving Aaronson version of Cole Porter's Let's Misbehave. Such compensations should help you to stomach a little of Woody's usual smirking at non-intellectuals (imagine someone not knowing who Hamlet is!). (3)

***



Three Strangers (Jean Negulesco, 1944) - Good old Warner: you couldn't imagine MGM ever greenlighting a succession of films with leading men who looked like Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. Their lack of conventional glamour, of course, was offset by a staggering amount of talent - particularly in the case of the strangulated, bug-eyed Lorre, beautiful in his own way and one of the greatest actors in the history of film.

This is one of the pair's best: an ironic, unpredictable and sometimes shockingly violent drama about three strangers - they're joined by Geraldine Fitzgerald - who wish upon a Chinese deity for wealth, with a couple of them having a particular reason for needing a mountain of cash, and fast.

I wouldn't think of spoiling even the smallest of plot points in this original, moodily-photographed and deeply affecting movie: a mesmerising mix of mystery, thriller and character study, superbly acted by all three leads (though especially Lorre), as well as Joan Lorring in a crucial supporting role, and unusually well-directed by Negulesco.

Allergic to formula, yet richly and enduringly fatalistic in the familiar manner of co-writer John Huston, it's one film you won't forget in a hurry, right down to that classic final scene. (4)

See also: Lorre and Greenstreet made eight films together, starring in three of them. The others were The Verdict and The Mask of Dimitrios.

***



*SOME SPOILERS*
Picture Snatcher (Lloyd Bacon, 1933) - This Cagney film is like many of the ones he made in the early '30s, going great guns at first, before getting a bit bogged down in censor-soothing melodrama, as he falls in love and seeks to atone for his sins. Here he's an ex-con who becomes a star reporter at a yellow tabloid, the story based - very, very loosely - on the photographer who snapped the notorious 1929 photo of murderess Ruth Snyder in the electric chair. (Trivia fans: that chap's grandson is Norm from Cheers, and his greatgrandson is Jason Sudeikis.)

There's a rich vein of sex jokes being mined throughout, and Cagney is as he usually was during this period: dynamic, fun, sometimes a bit annoying. The best scene in the picture comes early on, as he announces that he's going legit to a roomful of his former associates, facing them down with hard-won wisdom, righteous anger and a touch of old-fashioned toughness. The momentum slows after the first 15, though, as the melodrama and the message intrude, leaving us with another good film, rather than a great one.

In support, Ralph Bellamy is a standout as Cagney's alcoholic editor, playing a part not unlike his one in Capra's Forbidden, and Alice White - who once starred in a film called The Naughty Flirt - does that Pre-Code thing she generally does. While I'm not a fan of director Lloyd Bacon, and the film's most memorable shot - an electrician setting up for the big one - seems as much through necessity as design, he does handle the bullet-heavy machine gun shoot-out quite excitingly. (3)

See also: Other early Cagney comedies include Taxi!, Hard to Handle, and the rather wonderful Jimmy the Gent. As well as this one:



Lady Killer (Roy Del Ruth, 1933) - A crackling early Cagney vehicle, directed at Del Ruth's usual breakneck speed, and featuring jokes about drugs and sex, and a bit where Jimmy kisses Mae Clarke's boob (that'll make up for the time he used her face as a grapefruit squeezer).

The plot is complete nonsense - with two-fisted conman Cagney storming the picture business - though the film knows it some of the time, and there are as many salty, nifty one-liners as dated ones. There's also a scene where some monkeys invade a birthday party, and another where Cagney plays a Native American with a sore bottom. Incidentally, I think his tyrannical Teutonic action director is patterned after Warner's own Michael Curtiz.

The star is clearly having a whale of a time, spending most of the film laughing at his own jokes and slapping people around, and Clarke is also extremely good as his flirty moll, whom he can't trust as far as he can throw - though it turns out he can throw her quite far. (More of that unsavoury woman-beating that Warner, and Cagney in particular, seemed to go in for).

Lady Killer is basically all over the shop, but good fun with it. (3)

***



Good Ol' Freda: The Beatles' Secretary (Ryan White, 2013) - A sweet, affectionate and even moving documentary about Freda Kelly, the tough, vivacious Liverpudlian teenager who met the Beatles in 1961, became their secretary in '62, and contined to reply to fans five years after the band had split up, such was their astonishing popularity - and her part in retaining it.

At one point she was responding to over 3,000 letters a day: colluding with John to make sure photos were properly signed, scooping up George's hair to post back to fans and nipping over to Ringo's so he could sleep on a pillowcase sent by one excitable girl.

Freda never cashed in on the connection, though, and has spent the last 40 years as, well, still a secretary, but this time a legal secretary. This portrait of her life then and now has no major revelations (she even refuses to discuss which of the band she stepped out with), but many minor ones, as well as a few insights into working class Liverpool life in the 1960s. And while it's fairly standard in presentation, with a little too much reliance on period, non-Beatles music, it makes good use of archive film and photos (albeit with a couple of conspicuous errors - that's the Queen Mum, not the Queen), and some thoughtful, intelligent location shooting.

Freda herself is unassuming and good-natured: an ordinary person telling a sometimes extraordinary story in a good-humoured, down-to-earth way, her transparent fondness for her fellow fans enduring to this day.

I was an absolute Beatles nut as a kid, and spent my 12th birthday at the Beatles Story museum and on the Magical Mystery Tour bus (along with John Lennon's uncle, who used to hop on it to pick up his pension). That part of me was happy to wallow in nostalgia one more time, and for serious fans of the band it's definitely worth checking out. McCartney even licensed the rare use of four Beatles recordings due to his eternal bond with the subject, while Ringo pitches up at the end to deliver a personal message, and do that peace sign he always does. (3)

***



Morning Glory (Lowell Sherman, 1933) - Kate Hepburn won her first Oscar for this backstage drama, playing an insecure, self-obsessed and stagestruck young woman who pitches up in New York, flitting around the theatrical circle of producer Adolphe Menjou, writer Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and a peroxided Mary Duncan, as she looks for a break.

It's stagy and rather mannered, but also believable and entertaining for the most part, and while Hepburn isn't as good as she had been in A Bill of Divorcement or would be in countless other films, she's still quite persuasive, and her playing of Romeo and Juliet's balcony scene at a party is beautiful. Fairbanks, cast in an unusually sensitive role, is in fine form as the playwright secretly in love with her - especially when revealing his crush to Menjou - matched by C. Aubrey Smith as the mentor Hepburn forcibly adopts.

Unfortunately the film ends in rather anti-climactic fashion, serving up a cliched wish-fulfilment ending right out of 42nd Street, then failing to show us even a line from the play-within-a-film, an almost wilfully perverse decision that would have rendered the finale just about meaningless, had the closing monologue not proceeded to do that job itself.

It's worth seeing, especially for Hepburn buffs, but her 1937 classic, Stage Door, also made by RKO and featuring Menjou, tackled a very similar story in a vastly superior manner. (2.5)

***



Choke (Clark Gregg, 2008) - For the most part, an almost indiscriminate jumble of sex, offbeat sweetness, sex, boobs, sex, satire, sex, and black comedy about addiction and psychological and sexual abuse, based on the Chuck Palahniuk novel and anchored by a physically, mentally scruffy Sam Rockwell, who's frankly had better hair.

He's a sex addict (that's where all that sex I mentioned, erm, comes in) and history re-enactor who supplements his income by feigning choking fits in restaurants, donating all the money towards expensive hospice care for his mother (Anjelica Huston, in unusually mediocre form) - once a paranoid psychopath tormenting his various pretty young foster parents, now a passive-aggressive dementia sufferer lamenting her impending demise.

Whilst chasing every woman with a pulse and without a bus pass, sparring with Agent Coulson (who also directs) - as his officious, scrupulously colonial boss - and trying to stop his friend from masturbating in public, Rockwell finds himself thoroughly unable to get it up with his mum's doctor (Kelly Macdonald). But is that because he loves her, or just because they're having sex in a chapel? And then there's the small matter of his true parentage...

For a long time the film seems to be going nowhere, albeit fairly divertingly, before rather dropping off as its mean-spiritedness becomes overbearing. Then, with about 15 minutes to go, it somehow pulls its many disparate strands together in a way that makes much - though certainly not all - of what precedes a whole lot better in retrospect. Rockwell has a couple of nice moments then - he's pretty good in a somewhat muddled part - but it's Macdonald who completely steals the show, and really with only one meaty scene in which to shine; what an exceptional actress she is. (2.5)

See also: For more news on Macdonald saving films somewhat beneath her talents, see this review of The Decoy Bride. And the film, if you insist.

***



*MINOR SPOILERS*
Dancing Mothers (Herbert Brenon, 1926) - The intuitive essayist and former silent film icon Louise Brooks was an unstinting champion of her phenomenally popular then long-neglected contemporary, Clara Bow, with whom she shared a natural sensuality, though Brooks herself was a long, sultry seductress and Bow a flirtatious bundle of fun.

There were two Bow performances for which Brooks reserved special praise: one was unsurprisingly Mantrap, Bow's favourite of her movies (and mine, for what it's worth), but the other wasn't the legendary It or the first Best Picture winner, Wings: it was this one.

For while Dancing Mothers didn't give Clara a starring role, nor create her "flapper" image - key elements of which had turned up in the previous year's The Plastic Age - it certainly cemented the recognisable Bow image, adding a degree of unrepentant hedonism to her persona, and providing her with a character called "Kittens", which always helps.

The film begins in a fug of moral dissolution, with Bow neatly cast as a spoilt, sex-crazed young woman who goes on the pull with her dad to Napoleon-themed brothels, while her suitor (Donald Keith) impotently broods and her blameless mum (Alice Joyce) sits on her lonesome, poring over old newspaper cuttings about when she was famous. (For those who know about Bow's intense and fractious relationship with her own alcoholic, brothel-frequenting father, who abused her as a teenager and contributed to her terrible mental health problems, watching her act out a similar scenario on screen is rather upsetting.) Naturally Joyce eventually comes to her senses, turning into a massive MILF - at least in the eyes of the movie - as she tries to take sexy womaniser Conway Tearle away from her daughter, partly by pretending to be French, only for the pair to develop, like, "feelings" for one another.

The material is spotty, though leading up to a decent reveal and a progressive pay-off, while the whole cast is rather dull with the exception of Bow. For much of the film she offers only an energetic but posturing cartoon (she was after all the partial inspiration for Betty Boop), curiously playing direct-to-camera at various junctures. In the final third, though, she has two key scenes, and plays them both well: first moving from anger to surprise, mirth and finally dejection as the object of her affections spurns her; then, in the finale, acting gentle, vulnerable and quite appallingly selfish, her playing displaying many of the virtues for which she would soon become renowned, being vibrant, natural and entirely lacking in technical affectation. I can't quite see what Brooks was getting at when she hailed it as a performance for the ages, but there is at least a fair bit to admire and enjoy. In truth, Bow isn't helped by the lacklustre handling from future Laugh, Clown, Laugh director Brenon, who rarely holds her in close-up. Perhaps he simply didn't realise what he had.

It's nothing special, then: not as gloomy and laughably melodramatic as Bow and Keith's Parisian Love from the previous year, but rather drab and lacklustre, rarely making the most of its possibilities. It's worth a look for Bow, though, as well as three little things that made me smile: 1) The bit where Joyce's best friend tells her that they have long lives ahead of them, and they both light up; 2) One of the characters being credited as Butter and Egg Man; and 3) Joyce's accidentally hilarious confession: "I've lied to you - I'm not a French woman." (2)

***



*A FEW MINOR SPOILERS*
Change of Heart (John G. Blystone, 1934) - Janet Gaynor and Charlie Farrell were one of the most popular romantic teams in pictures, back when such things existed. He was limited if personable, but she was arguably the best actress of her or any other era, possessing a beguiling sincerity, and from the silent period - when they kicked off with three incredible Frank Borzage films: 7th Heaven, Street Angel and Lucky Star - through to early musicals like Sunnyside Up and Delicious, they were a reliable box-office banker with a solid screen chemistry.

Tastes changed, though, and this 1934 effort, blandly directed by former Buster Keaton collaborator Blystone, proved to be the last of their 12 (12!) teamings, across just seven years. The pair play a prospective lawyer (Farrell) and a writer (Gaynor) who arrive in New York hoping to make a mark, forming a love quadrangle with their college buddies: a superficial actress (Ginger Rogers) and a guy who keeps making rubbish jokes (James Dunn), followed by self-congratulatory remarks like: "Oh, that was a subtle one", after which he whips out a comb and does his hair. In 1945, the alcoholic Dunn confounded expectations by producing one of the greatest and most astonishingly raw of all screen performances, as a dissipated pipe dreamer in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but that was a way off. Here he's merely competent in a daft role.

The film isn't really very good. Its script, co-written by playwright and character actor James Gleason - a familiar face in many of the period's best comedies - is anaemic, abrupt, luducrously melodramatic and full of excessive exposition, if occasionally effectively evoking the atmosphere of mid-'30s New York from the point of view of outsiders.

Dunn we've dealt with, Rogers is a pain - playing the "bad girl" part that was briefly her stock-in-trade - and Farrell's a mopey annoyance turned potential adulterer, leaving only Gaynor's attractive naturalism to cling onto, along with a bit of future-star-spotting in the shape of Shirley Temple - just prior to her breakthrough in Little Miss Marker - Mischa Auer and a debuting Dick Foran, billed as "Nick".

There is one absolutely brilliant scene, though, completely at odds with the silliness surrounding it, in which Gaynor shaves the recovering Farrell's face as they discuss their future. Recalling Lucky Star, one of my all-time favourites, it's a completely genuine, tender and affecting passage, full of Gaynor's warmth and understated sense of humanity, and augmented by her fond, delightful and realistic facial quirks. After that, the film brightens a little, while never approaching such lofty heights again.

This was one of two DVDs I bought with my Christmas money. (The other was Dancing Mothers.) For that one special scene, and really that scene alone, it was worth it. (2)

***

TV



The Spy Who Went Into the Cold - Kim Philby: Russian Super Spy (George Carey, 2013) - This cumbersomely-titled Storyville doc deals with the most senior member of the "Cambridge Five", a communist penetration agent who rose to the upper echelons of MI6, while feeding secrets to the Russkies and getting blind drunk. The film is as erratic as they come, with a few vague psychological insights into its subject, an interesting theory that fellow spy Anthony Blunt tipped Philby off about his cover being blown, and an almost endless parade of footage in which Carey shows us the sites where some of the things happened, which is sometimes eerily interesting but more often not. To be honest, he really should have got some more source material before handing this one in to BBC4, as close-ups of Google searches of people's names don't really cut it as far as documentary imagery is concerned. There are some interesting talking heads, not least the subjects's daughter Josephine, and a few good clips - including interesting analysis of Philby's supposed British boss speaking later on a TV chat show - but overall it's a scrappily unsatisfying addition to the wealth of Philby films. (2.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Some thoughts on Lulu in Hollywood

Lulu in Hollywood by Louise Brooks (1982)



I find Louise Brooks a little over-hyped as an actress. Yes, she was a distinctive, even iconic performer, with her helmet of black hair and that aggressive, feline sensuality. Yes, she attained a naturalism rare in silent cinema, even if she only starred in a handful of pictures. But was she really that much better than Bow, Gish and Gaynor? No. No, she wasn't. Like Johnny Guitar and The Girl Can't Help It, she was taken up by the Cahiers du Cinema crowd in the '50s and elevated beyond all others of her age in a blaze of hysterical hyperbole. In a way, that's gratifying: after all, she had been unfairly dismissed - then unjustly forgotten - after Pandora's Box died on its arse at the box office. But in another way, it's extremely silly. "There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks," French film archivist Henri Langlois once said, which translates into English as, "I have an erection."

As a writer on film history, though, I think Brooks may have no equal. This intuitive, incisive and staggeringly insightful collection of essays, written in her inimitable, jaggedly beautiful prose style, turns everything you thought you knew about movies and the movie business on its head. W. C. Fields was a sad loner with eczema whose stage humour was killed stone dead by the realism of his film persona. Bogart was a gorgeous, well-bred, perpetually-exhausted thespian transformed by the sexual anguish of his third marriage. MGM purposefully ruined Lillian Gish's career through a programme of purposefully lousy vehicles and fan magazine smears. Marion Davies wasn't the carefree socialite of legend, but constantly consumed by the green-eyed monster. And Louise Brooks - that cloche-haired monument to flapperish, pure-centred bodily liberation - will never write her memoirs, because she "cannot unbuckle the Bible Belt" and reveal the sexual obsessions that defined her life as, she argues, they do everybody's. (She is a bit preoccupied with sex. After all, she had rather a lot.)

Brooks is brilliant on everything from acting to the studio system, her own career, the singular directorial technique of G. W. Pabst, the hypocrisy of Hollywood and even - most trickily - the downfall of her friend Pepi Lederer, brought low by societal pressures, selfish companions and substance abuse. She offers a vivid picture of location filming, rips apart the widespread predilection to mythologise two familiar types of star, and crafts perhaps the most alarming synopsis of a film's ending that I have ever read. She's also intimidatingly knowledgeable about literature - pegging herself as "the best-read idiot on the planet" - and augments her prose with apposite insights from many of the world's finest writers.

She can be pedantic, and bitchy, even vindictive, but she's also forthright and honest, with a devastating turn of phrase and real things to say: perfectly-formed theories full of wisdom, augmented by first-person knowledge and set aflame by righteous anger.

The book also contains Kenneth Tynan's classic history-lesson-cum-interview-cum-love-letter, The Girl in the Black Helmet, and a brief, hagiographic epilogue by one of Brooks' friends, the German film critic Lotte Eisner. If you have any interest in '20s and '30s cinema, Lulu in Hollywood is one book that you have to read. And, suitably for such a trendsetting screen siren, its many insights are housed within a wonderfully striking front/back cover combo.

HERE ARE SIX OF THE MOST MEMORABLE PASSAGES:

Brooks on her character's fate in Pandora's Box (*SPOILERS AHOY*): "It is Christmas Eve, and she is about to receive the gift that has been her dream since childhood. Death by a sexual maniac." (I find this possibly the most troubling couplet in the book, because of the sexualisation of youth and the fact that Brooks herself was abused as a child.)

Brooks on Lillian Gish: "Marked first for destruction [by Hollywood bankers] was Lillian Gish. She was the obvious choice. Of all the detestable stars who stood between the movie moguls and the full realisation of their greed and self-aggrandisement, it was Lillian Gish who most painfully imposed her picture knowledge and business acumen upon the producers. She was a timely martyr as well, being Hollywood's radiant symbol of purity standing in the light of the new sex star."

Brooks on Hollywood folklore: "In 1922, when I first arrived in New York, I heard all sorts of gags, jokes and anecdotes, and over the past twenty years of reading I have been brought to a condition of nausea as I have found them 'assigned successively' to various film celebrities. There are two categories of celebrities - fitted with appropriate anecdotes - that writers and readers appear to dote on with foolish, untiring enthusiasm. They are the tramp-type woman star delineated by her outrageous conduct and the drunken actor whose cruel antics are considered hilarious."

Brooks on Bogart: "Humphrey Bogart spent the last twenty-one years of his life laboriously converting the established character of a middle-aged man from that of a conventional, well-bred theatre actor named Humphrey to one that complemented his film roles - a rebellious tough known as Bogey."

Brooks on Marion Davies: "To be a true Marionite, one had to hold the belief that mr Hearst had been to bed with no other woman since he met her. Obviously, I did not believe this."

Brooks on understanding her past: "[Film historian Richard Griffith] identified me as 'Louise Brooks, whom Pabst brought to Germany from Hollywood to play in Pandora's Box, whose life and career were altered thereby.' When I read that, thirty years after I refused to go back to Hollywood to do those retakes on The Canary Murder Case, I finally understood why."

Sunrise, Louise Brooks, and stars in disguise - Reviews #118

*BIG SPOILERS*
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927) – Perhaps the most famous silent film of all, and one of the best, equipped with an emotional tractor beam too often absent from Murnau’s eye-wideningly inventive works. George O’Brien is a farmer driven to the point of murder by a devilish flapper (Margaret Livingston). He takes his wife (Janet Gaynor) on a boat ride with the intention of killing her, but relents in the face of her terror – and, during a day in the city, falls in love with her anew. The film begins in matchlessly oppressive, moody fashion, morphs into a romantic comedy and then takes a hard left with the introduction of a great big storm. If you can accept a romantic drama with such wild shifts in tone, and in which boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy attempts to strangle girl and then boy relents and decides he really, truly and everlastingly loves girl – and I really can, such is the majesty of Murnau’s masterpiece – then Sunrise is just about as good as movies get.

To be honest, it’s almost impossible to conceive how talkies ever got off the ground, novelty aside, when you compare something like Sunrise with almost any sound picture made before 1930. Silent cinema had reached a startling apex of visual creativity, particularly in these Fox films where visionary artists were given completely free rein, with restlessly mobile cameras, jawdropping trickery and as much atmosphere as one can conceivably cram into several cans of film. Early talkies consisted of someone nailing a camera to the door like some Ozu-obsessed DIY fanatic and then not being able to move it because it was too heavy. The central performances in Sunrise are unspeakably wonderful. Gaynor won the most well-deserved Oscar you could ever possibly imagine for her work here, and in Borzage’s 7th Heaven and Street Angel, giving a more stylised performance than usual, while still exhibiting much of the breathtaking naturalism that was her forte. O’Brien, who had starred in John Ford’s The Iron Horse and went on to be one of his famous stock company, had clearly been directed to give a more expressionistic turn, at least in the earlier scenes, moving like a prototype Frankenstein's Monster – all high shoulders and odd, jerky movements, as if manipulated by some heinous flapper puppeteer – before freeing himself from the chains of destructive, avaricious lust, and consequently loosening up a bit. He's bafflingly attractive in the middle third of the film – considering what his character has just been up to – and appealingly repentant and lost in the frantic climax. By way of contrast with such wordless majesty, you can watch someone start to say a word in an early talkie, go downstairs, make some toast, put the kettle on, have a cup of tea, nip out to the shops because you’re out of milk, catch a bus to the park as it’s a nice sunny day, come back home again, wash up, go back upstairs, and find that the person is still saying the same word. There are vowels in The Black Watch that last longer than a typical working day.

Sorry, I forget where I was. Sunrise! Of course, Sunrise. It’s the best film Murnau ever made, from its swampy opening, through the moral quagmire of premeditation, to the rediscovery of love and life, and the affirmation of everything dear in the world. There’s also a bit with a runaway piglet. It really is very good. (4)

***

Skeletons (Nick Whitfield, 2010) - Bickering best friends Davies (Ed Gaughan) and Beckett (Andrew Buckley) make a living from psychically uncovering the skeletons in people's closets. Metaphorical skeletons, but real closets. As the intense Davies nears a nostalgic meltdown, his amiable, lumbering companion yearns for a normal existence, and their boss (a gruff, northern Jason Isaacs, in a flat cap) eyes them for promotion, they're pitched into the trickiest case of their career. The film starts off in a precise, literate comic manner, with hilarious scenes of obscure bureaucracy and awkward revelations, then gets stranger and stranger as it progresses. Though the whydunit isn't terribly mysterious, the film's frequent dips into the world of weird - dizzying diversions that drop the characters into one another's dreams and reminiscences - are satisfyingly original, the largely unknown cast is excellent and the film never forgets to be funny. "Going Bulgarian" must be my favourite comic invention of the decade so far. A high (3.5).

***

*ABSOLUTELY GARGANTUAN SPOILERS*
Diary of a Lost Girl (G.W. Pabst, 1929) – Pabst and star Louise Brooks’ follow-up to the legendary (and rather unpleasant) Pandora’s Box is a bizarre mix of tawdry melodrama and social comment that manages to keep an entire cake in its cupboard, while scoffing it before your very eyes. Brooks plays a nubile, bob-haired innocent who undergoes a litany of horrendous experiences, including being raped twice, losing her child and being widowed (even von Trier never put his heroines through so much), before becoming a kick-ass social stateswoman. Elsewhere, Pabst incorporates voyeurism, sadism and quiveringly lascivious lesbianism – a drooling, butch authority figure smacks a big gong and licks her lips as a group of abused young women bounce up and down in front of her – as well as a bald workhouse enforcer being bopped repeatedly on the head, and a baddie wearing a bobble hat on the beach. Pabst is clearly infatuated with his lead actress, and as she slips from backless evening gown to backless bathing suit and back again, a paragon of flapper fashion, it does sometimes appear that he made a list of costumes that he might quite like to see her wear, and then built the story around those. But his handling is stylish and sometimes striking, and Brooks is magnificent – sweet, steely, alluring and iconic, guiding the film through some uncertain, morally confused territory on the way to a stunning last half hour. (3)

***

Get Low (Aaron Schneider, 2009) – Gun-toting hermit Robert Duvall, who has neglected company since a mysterious incident 40 years earlier, decides to hold a party prior to his imminent death, and enlists the help of local funeral director Bill Murray – who doesn’t suit the ‘30s setting – and assistant Lucas Black (the boy from Sling Blade). This mixture of mystery and character study, with some concessions to wry humour, is reminiscent of The Straight Story, but never quite hits the heights, despite an interesting set-up and Duvall’s best performance in ages. Perhaps it’s the pace, which seems too leisurely by half, or a succession of half-hearted subplots that distract from rather than enhance the central story. It’s still worth a look, though, largely for the commanding central turn, and it’s always nice to see Sissy Spacek, who has a couple of good scenes as Duvall’s old flame. (3)

***

"White folks sound so stupid when they get mad. They be like, "Hey... I'm going to kick your B-hind'."
Wet Hot American Summer (David Wain, 2001) – It’s the last day of summer camp, and as director Janeane Garofalo begins a nervy relationship with astrophysicist David Hyde Pierce, and awkward Michael Showalter falls unwisely in love, most of the key American comic actors of the newly-minted decade pop up to engage in messy kissing (Paul Rudd and Elizabeth Banks), gay marriage (Bradley Cooper and Michael Ian Black), amateur dramatics (Amy Poehler) or last-gasp child rescue (Ken Marino and Joe Lo Truglio). It’s part teen movie spoof, part summer camp reminiscence and part complete nonsense, and though sometimes it doesn’t work, and it never amounts to anything more than a series of sketches, it's often very funny. Many of the cast had worked on the MTV sketch show The State, and re-teamed four years later for a brilliant little romantic comedy called The Baxter, starring Showalter and Michelle Williams. This comedy, which is now a cult phenomenon in the States (there’s a full episode of the underwhelming podcast The Nerdist devoted to it), isn’t in the same league, but it’s diverting and amusing, with a discombobulating habit of subverting the very thing it’s partway through emulating. (3)

***

Three legends: Frank McHugh, the greatest character comic of his generation, with Cagney and Kazan.

City for Conquest (Anatole Litvak, 1940) is an over-ambitious Warner film that tries to create a symphony of New York via three inter-linking stories, but lacks the eloquence to match its size and sense of self-importance. The main narrative sees truck-driver-turned-boxer Jimmy Cagney losing childhood sweetheart Ann Sheridan to her relentless, nagging ambition, while his little brother (Arthur Kennedy) composes an ode to the city and their neighbourhood pal Elia Kazan becomes a slick gangster. The portentous tone is set by Frank Craven’s garbled monologue, which kicks off the picture, uses the phrase “seven million teeming masses” and concludes with him bafflingly proclaiming: “I know this town, brother, because I got clothes on my back”, which turns out to be his catchphrase. Still, it’s a very handsome production, well-shot by Sol Polito and James Wong Howe, with a solid performance from Cagney and a fantastic one from legendary (and indeed notorious) director Kazan, in a rare acting role. (2.5)

***

*SOME SPOILERS, I SUPPOSE*
New Orleans (Arthur Lubin, 1947) – Patronising, racist fiction about the birth of jazz - years in gestation - that features one of the most embarrassing stories you will ever see, and truly execrable performances, but scintillating music from Louis Armstrong, his band and the incredible Billie Holiday, insultingly cast as a maid in her only feature. Annoying, white opera starlet Dorothy Patrick falls in love with both smug white gambler Arturo de Cordova and the ragtime played in the back of his casino, and together they popularise jazz. Well, with a little help from Woody Herman (who on earth is Woody Herman?), who’s also white, not that good and – like Satchmo – playing himself in a film set in 1916. Frankly, I have no idea. The whole thing is pretty hideous, but as a rare chance to see Billie on screen, it’s unmissable. She sings three songs, including Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?, which is comfortably one of the best musical numbers ever put on film. Predictably, it’s reprised for the climax by a bunch of white guys playing in front of a white audience at Symphony Hall. Yuck. (2.5)

SHORT: A Rhapsody in Black and Blue (Aubrey Scotto, 1932) - A jazz-loving layabout gets thwacked over his head by his nagging wife and dreams that he's the King of Jazzmania, receiving a command performance - at a foam party - from a leopard-skin clad Louis Armstrong. This was Armstrong's second appearance on screen, and I've never seen him play with this level of intensity. There's a sense of fun about his performance, but also a sense of fire - he's not twinkling and goofing around, he's tooting, scatting and singing as if his life depended on it, shaking through blistering renditions of I'll Be Glad When You're Dead and Shine. The framing device is mildly amusing (I liked the last gag), but this is all about the exhilarating middle, and the chance to see a bona fide legend when he was keen, raw and almost impossibly magnetic. (3.5)

SHORT: Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life (Fred Waller, 1935) - These musical shorts usually require a little gimmick that leads into the main business of jazz musicians cutting loose. This one strikes upon the incredibly lazy idea of showing Duke Ellington writing some music at his piano, which segues into his band playing the pieces on stage, with some cuts to occasionally thrilling imagery. The footage of black labourers shovelling coal in time to the music at the beginning works superbly, but this idea of marrying the music to culturally significant visuals isn't really sustained. Still, Ellington's rhapsody is engaging and, while the film's various elements don't quite click, this 10-minute short does include Billie Holiday's mesmerising reading of I've Got Those Lost My Man Blues. (3)

***

The List of Adrian Messenger (John Huston, 1963) – Gimmicky thriller that puts a gaggle of stars – including Mitchum, Sinatra and Tony Curtis – under elaborate make-up, as George C. Scott wanders around Britain trying to work out why Kirk Douglas keeps killing people from a lengthy list. It starts off intriguingly, promising plenty, and Scott is very good indeed, but the film goes completely off the rails in the second half, with a coincidence-heavy plot and lots of boring footage of fox hunting. Added to that, the film’s USP sounds fun, but doesn’t really work at all. According to Lee Server, of those disguised, only Mitchum and Douglas actually filmed their parts in full, with Sinatra and Curtis just turning up for the reveal. The supporting cast includes two stiff Englishman of the Golden Age – the excellent Herbert Marshall and the often less excellent Clive Brook (though get a load of his performance in the silent gangster classic Underworld – wowsers) – along with Dana Wynter. (2)