Review of 2018: Part 3 – Movies

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

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

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

Top 10 of 2018

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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


"Our revels now are ended..."

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



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



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

***

14 'discoveries' of 2018

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



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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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


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

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

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

***

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

Review of 2017: Part 3 – Movies

I’ve cut back a bit on film-watching in recent years, aiming for a slightly more balanced and healthy existence, but movies are still a huge part of my life. Here’s my top 10 of 2017, plus a few personal recollections of the year, and 13 older films I ‘discovered’ in 2017, and which you might like too.

Parts 1 (books) and 2 (gigs, shows and exhibitions) of the year in review are up on those links.

My 10 favourite films of 2017



It's been a great year at the cinema: I rarely see a new film as good as this year's #3, let alone two even better, and there are so many up-and-coming directors doing interesting work. This list is based on films which received a general release in the UK this year, so it includes some films from last year's London Film Festival. To read about some of the best movies coming up next year, including Guillermo del Toro's masterwork, The Shape of Water, you can go here.

Bubbling under (but still marvellous): Christine, The Beguiled, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), Tower, Call Me By Your Name.

***

10. Paddington 2



Director: Paul King
Cast: Ben Whishaw (voice), Hugh Grant, Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville, Brendan Glesson
They did right by Paddington again. The prison sequences are all kinds of lovely. Full(ish) review.

***

9. Battle of the Sexes



Director: Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
Cast: Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Andrea Riseborough, Sarah Silverman, Bill Pullman
A hugely uplifting, entertaining movie, with a typically dynamic central performance from Emma Stone, who inhabits the character of Billie Jean King almost entirely, as the tennis legend breaks away from the sexist tennis establishment, confronts the fact she's a lesbian, and gears up for the eponymous match, opposite self-styled 'male chauvinist pig', the shy and retiring Bobby Riggs. Full review.

***

8. The Salesman



Director:Asghar Farhadi
Cast:Shahab Hosseini, Taraneh Alidoosti, Babak Karimi, Farid Sajadhosseini, Mina Sadati
An utterly compelling moral thriller from the writer-director of A Separation, Asghar Farhadi, about a couple (Shahab Hosseini and Taranah Alidoosti) whose marriage is thrown into turmoil by the hand of fate, as they prepare to appear together in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. It contains a late shock so well-executed that it made the person next to me in the cinema do a little fart. Now that's movie-making. Full review.

***

7. Tickling Giants



Director: Sara Taksler
A wonderful documentary about 'the Egyptian Jon Stewart', Bassem Youssef, a heart surgeon who becomes a TV satirist and national hero following the Arab Spring. As the political climate festers and the military intervene, his potshots at authority start to divide the revolutionaries, leading to protests, boycotts and threats, but he and his staff remain unyielding – at least at first. After one of the writers says she doesn’t care about the outcry, a colleague asks if she’d care to provide a more diplomatic answer. “Yes,” she replies. “I don’t give a shit.” I expected Tickling Giants to be insightful and powerful, but not such fantastic fun as it is, and if you’re worried that Egyptian humour won’t translate across language and cultural barriers, you couldn’t be more wrong. Full review.

***

6. Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi



Director: Rian Johnson
Cast: Daisy Ridley, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Kelly Marie Tran The first sequel that feels like a film on its own terms. It's also a tremendous antidote to gung-ho macho heroics, plays deliriously and drolly with our expectation of good-bad guys, and features the coolest new series vehicles since Return of the Jedi's speeders. I wrote this piece just after emerging, dazed and happy, from the cinema.

***

5. I Am Not Your Negro



Director:Raoul Peck
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson (narrator)
A profoundly powerful polemic that forces you to view the African-American experience through the piercing gaze of writer, thinker and activist James Baldwin, who speaks with authority, insightfulness and a broiling anger about the way his people have been exploited, abandoned and killed by their own country. It's a superb film in itself, and it also turned me onto Baldwin's writing, which has been one of this year's greatest joys, and changed the way I look at myself and the world. Full review.

***

4. Fences



Director: Denzel Washington
Cast: Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen Henderson, Jovan Adepo, Russell Hornsby, Mykelti Williamson
An astonishing drama, based on August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which tells an archetypally American story in the manner of Eugene O'Neill or Arthur Miller, but does so to elucidate the African-American experience, which as 13th so eloquently expressed, is the result of decisions that have never been in their hands. It's both extraordinarily original and utterly timeless, with a polemical power that comes along rarely, and two of the finest performances in years. Full review.

***

3. La La Land



Director: Damien Chazelle
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend, Rosemarie DeWitt, Finn Wittrock, Jessica Rothe
The problem with contemporary musicals is the undercurrent that says: “Isn’t this wacky, we’re doing a musical!” It was musicals’ everyday nature, their centrality to the national psyche that made them so magical. Somehow Chazelle has made that live again. Full review.

***

2. Certain Women



Director:Kelly Reichardt
Cast: Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone, James LeGros, Jared Harris
A film of unwavering, unflinching honesty and quiet poetry – from Williams’ piercing, scarcely likeable performance to that shot of a rogue truck tumbling off the road – a gift from a filmmaker at the very peak of her powers. Full review.

***

1. Moonlight



Director: Barry Jenkins
Cast: Trevante Rhodes, Ashton Sanders, Alex Hibbert, André Holland, Jharrel Jerome, Jaden Piner, Naomie Harris, Janelle Monáe, Mahershala Ali
An enveloping, once-in-a-lifetime film about the constancy, malleability and complexity of human nature, the pain and ecstasy of love, and the world's vicious but not quite unrelenting assault on the weak. Full review.

***

Five obsessions that defined my year in movies



Orson Welles
My intense infatuation with Awesome Orson flares up every three or four years. This time it was a first big screen viewing of The Magnificent Ambersons that set it off, sending me on a fast-paced journey through established classics (Kane, Touch of Evil, The Trial) and oddities both remarkable (The Immortal Story) and not (Journey Into Fear, Too Much Johnson). Though Ambersons will never be seen again in its proper state – having been cut by a third against Welles’ wishes before release, with the culled footage dumped in the sea – it also cast its spell on me more thoroughly and enduringly than ever before. I’m still thinking about it now, three weeks later, and I haven’t been able to look at any other film in the same way since. It’s the greatest thing he ever did and, even in its butchered form, one of the key works of screen art, with a look, a feel and an atmosphere – playfulness giving way to an exhausted, defeated malaise – that is like nothing else in cinema.



The big screen
More than half the films I saw this year were at the cinema, thanks to both the BFI’s magnificent programming and a newly rekindled love of the big screen experience. There’s still nothing quite like it, and it’s got me off my arse and out of the house and then back on my arse to catch films I love, that I have on DVD, but that I’ve never quite seen before. After experiencing countless movies ruined by dodgy prints or the Odeon’s laissez-faire attitude to keeping a projector in focus, I’d begun to see digital as a simple solution, especially after the great 4K job done on films like The Third Man. One of my favourite film writers, Ian Mantgani, took me to task a while ago for such naïvete, and he was right. Seeing Minnelli’s The Cobweb on film – the widescreen image tactile, its brash colour scheme turned a touch gaudy – or Ambersons with grain and flicker and the odd scratch, the soundtrack a little screechy now and then, but as it was shot and should be seen, is the ideal filmgoing experience, and one which perfectly polished pixels are never going to be quite able to match. Having said that, if the print is a hissy, fuzzy mess, don't take the piss by putting it on.



Titanic films
As I mentioned in passing in my books review, my friend Jess and I are watching all the films we can find about the Titanic. Our grand experiment is in its infancy, but we have managed Titanic (good), Titanic (great), A Night to Remember (excellent) and Raise the Titanic (absolute shit), and we’ve secured further titles for 2018 already. Next up: S.O.S. Titanic.



Lillian Gish
There haven't been quite the opportunities to further my Gish fandom that previous years have offered, but I've done my best. I tracked down three more of her films: The Greatest Question (a derivative but persuasive star vehicle), The Cobweb (a big, bold Minnelli soap with Gish in an unusually large supporting role), and The Battle of Elderbush Gulch (more a historical curio than A Good Film), and saw a watchable version of her 1928 classic, The Wind, for the first time. Anyway, we're very much in love, even though she died in 1993.



François Truffaut
I finished my voyage through the lesser-known works of François Truffaut, drawing the inescapable conclusion that this is one of those rare times the popular canon has it right: some of them were crap. Here's the full list of his 22 features, with plenty of reviews to go with it.

It's also important to mention at this point that IN OCTOBER I MET DANNY DEVITO.

***

13 'discoveries' of 2017

Perhaps because many of them were on at the BFI, this year's discoveries are perhaps a little less obscure than in previous years (a notable dearth of 1930s B-movies, sorry), especially if you're interested in seeing the established 'classics' of world cinema, but hopefully there'll be a couple that are new to you.



Chloe in the Afternoon (Éric Rohmer, 1972) – The last – and greatest – of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, with businessman Frédéric (Bernard Verley) torn between his marriage to quiet, repressed academic Hélène (Françoise Verley) and the sensual, erratic Chloe (Zouzou), who returns to Paris six years after driving his best friend to the point of despair. Shot in 1.37:1, reinterpreting Murnau’s Sunrise for the sixth time, and equipped with an unreliable, self-justifying narrator who’s obsessed with women, it feels like the summation of the series, and also its cleanest, clearest and most narratively inventive example: full of profound insights and observations wrapped in a light, sexy, playful exterior that simply doesn’t prepare you for what’s coming. Full review.

Cria cuervos (Carlos Saura, 1975) – A miraculous film, quite unlike anything else I’ve seen, that plays out on the face of its young heroine (Ana Torrent from Spirit of the Beehive) and exists in that strange place between memory, reality and fantasy, as scenes bleed one into the next, and Torrent recalls her authoritarian, adulterous father, conjures the gentle spirit of her neurotic mother (Geraldine Chaplin) and cautiously negotiates a new, lonelier life in the bosom of her strict aunt’s family. Full review.



Le Trou (Jacques Becker, 1960) – Jacques Becker's final film is a tough, meticulously detailed and incredibly suspenseful prison break movie, as four men awaiting trial acquire an apparently callow, privileged new cellmate (Mark Michel), while preparing their painstaking, painfully slow escape from the Big House. Cast mostly with non-professional actors (as opposed to unprofessional actors, like Marilyn Monroe) and based on an autobiographical novel by José Giovanni, it works as both a gripping thriller and a socialist allegory about class, co-operation and bourgeois hypocrisy. Full review. I saw Bertrand Tavernier talk about Becker, his great hero, at the BFI in September.

The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) – A pulsating, gripping, brilliantly-directed docu-drama about the Algerian revolution, which works as a history lesson, a thriller and a study of a handful of memorable characters on both sides of the battle, all augmented by Ennio Morricone's exceptional score. Full review.



Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989) – For all its rough edges (or perhaps because of them), Soderbergh’s debut still looks astounding. Full review.

Claire's Knee (Éric Rohmer, 1970) – The Rohmerest Rohmer film ever (hot French people talking unreliably about love and sex amid beauteous locales), with great acting, stunning Nestor Almendros photography and some of the finest examples of Rohmer defining his characters, their dynamics and his audience's perceptions through understated and apparently effortless composition. Laura > Claire, tho.



Babette's Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987) – A film full of painterly imagery, complex truths and quiet wisdom that echoes long after the curtain has fallen, and the virtuosic storytelling − hopping between time-frames, mood and media − takes the breath away. Full review.

Prick Up Your Ears (Stephen Frears, 1987) – Near-perfect biopic of gay '60s playwright Joe Orton (Gary Oldman), focusing on his volatile relationship with live-in lover, Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina), powered by a superb Alan Bennett script, and Oldman's best performance. 'Synthesisers by Hans Zimmer'! Full review.



Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001) – We meet Chihiro just minutes after an emotional farewell to her old friends: she’s sitting in the backseat of her parents’ car, as they trail a moving van to their new home. The family stop to investigate what seems to be an abandoned theme park, and soon the parents have been turned into pigs, Chihiro’s life has been saved by a boy who it turns out is a dragon and also a god, and she’s been forced to find employment in a fully-functioning bathhouse populated by ghosts, assisted by a multi-armed man who lives by a furnace with his friends – sentient bits of soot – and under the cosh of giant-headed Thatcher-a-like Yubaba, whose beloved germaphobe baby is bigger than she is. That’s the first 20 minutes. Full review.

Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969) – So much for the tolerant left.



Le deuxième souffle (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969) – A violent, grimply poetic underworld epic from Jean-Pierre Melville, with Lino Ventura as a brutal train-robber – obsessed with his own personal conception of honour – who escapes from prison only to be drawn inexorably towards a heist plot. Relatively unknown within the Melville canon, it takes a little while to find its rhythm, but once it does it's stunning, with mesmerising set pieces and several superb supporting characters, including ironic, omniscient police inspector Paul Meurisse, and Denis Manuel as a short-tempered gypsy gunman.

All This, and Heaven Too (Anatole Litvak, 1940) – An exceptionally classy melodrama, with Bette Davis giving one of her most extraordinary performances as a silhouette of a woman who enters the Duc de Praslin's tempestuous household in Paris of 1848 to act as the governess, falling in love with her master and becoming beloved of his children, before incurring the formidable wrath of his jealous, unstable wife. It's a beautifully balanced and restrained performance, with the star often saying one thing and playing three more, her heroine having to keep her emotions in check, know her place in society and her household, and juggle the conflicting responsibilities to her employers, her charges and herself. She's a character rarely permitted to speak honestly, but yet at every instant we know what she's thinking. Full review.



The Mouthpiece (Elliot Nugent and James Flood, 1932) – Few pre-Code films were ever as sweet and affecting as this one, in which William’s noble prosecutor reacts to tragedy by reinventing himself as an amoral shyster for the underworld (with a moustache, naturally), only to be changed back by the guileless southern office waif (Sidney Fox) he’s been trying to shag. It’s a little clumsy in places, and mistakes audacity for humour, but it’s saved by the performances. Full review.

***

Thanks for reading.

Lillian Gish, Henry V, and Woody Allen in 2015 - Reviews #223

A few reviews. Next time: a journey through the back catalogue of Francois Truffaut.

FILMS



*MINOR SPOILERS*
Irrational Man (Woody Allen, 2015) - In 1989, Woody Allen created one of his greatest movies, Crimes and Misdemeanours: a bleak, gently blistering drama in which Martin Landau kills his mistress then tries to deal with the guilt of it all. Since then, Allen has made three serious crime movies and, to a greater or lesser degree, they are all terrible. This latest one is perhaps the least terrible of the three (the others are the tone-deaf Match Point and the brain dead Cassandra’s Dream), but it still falls down an elevator shaft after 50 minutes.

Joaquin Phoenix is a brooding cliché of a philosophy professor – dark, sexy, dangerous – who attracts the attention of both an unhappily married lecturer (Parker Posey) and a guileless student (Emma Stone) while toying with the idea of murder. At first you can forgive the film its flaws: lazy exposition, laughable lines and erratic performances (often helpless in the face of the dialogue), because the story is surprisingly involving and watchable, but after a while even that starts to go wrong, and there’s nothing left to cling to.

The movie’s conformity is a problem for me: it purports to wrestle with serious philosophical quandaries (albeit like a low-rent Rope), then goes for the easiest possible way out. And it conforms in its characterisation too. Phoenix’s professor disastrously calls to mind Half Nelson, a film against which almost everything looks unoriginal and somewhat pathetic. In that movie, Gosling’s crack-addicted teacher tries to impress his sister-in-law with his magnetic brand of nihilism and she literally laughs in his face. Here, no-one laughs in Phoenix’s face, they just want to boff him.

In the one interesting choice Allen makes, he has Joaquin’s penis misfiring early on, but when he gets the chance to build on this later, he falls short of pushing the character as far as it will go – they both do – and the results are just unbelievably frustrating. Watch the end of Peter Medak’s The Ruling Class for an example of how you kick your film into another gear, with a seductive, beguiling paragon of evil.

As I have said at least once before, I prefer the ever-underrated In My Father’s Den to the widely-praised You Can Count on Me because the muscular, avenging angel of an anti-hero gets kicked down some stairs and called a prick when he tries to do the right thing, rather than winning out in some pyrrhic but vital way. I prefer Half Nelson to Irrational Man for about 800 reasons, but it starts with Phoenix’s drab if extremely charismatic caricature, and the hypnotic effect his character has on everyone, with his hilariously stupid malt-swigging.

He is also the only actor I’ve ever scene who has scenes stolen from him by his own tummy, Phoenix’s funny little pot belly arriving in the room shortly before him, with a kind of scene-stealing grace that Peter Lorre might have admired. Stone, meanwhile, does her best, and has a handful of truly, unexpectedly impressive moments (considering she’s in a film that simply doesn’t work), but more often than not she is – well – powerless to act, her line readings sounding like something from a 1930s B-movie actress. Or a porn star.

Another problem with the film (and there are many) is Allen’s superficial understanding of philosophy, which both undermines the serious message he is attempting to impart and, more prosaically, means that his brilliant professor is often just spouting rubbish, or paraphrased platitudes. Allen has read the chapter headings in his textbook, it seems, but gone no further epitomised by the frankly embarrassing scene in which Phoenix says the class will consider “Sartre’s classic line, ‘Hell is other people’”, which is as much Sartre as we get. Woody also has no idea how to build a crime narrative, as evidenced by the sequence in which Stone explains that everyone a murder victim knew “couldn’t have done it” – an equivocal shorthand that is frankly insultingly stupid.

I suppose he is 80 now.

At this stage in his career, Allen is desperately in need of a script editor who can tell him: a) You don’t know how teenage girls speak; b) You can’t write working class characters in a contemporary setting; c) You’ve forgotten how to subtly interweave exposition; d) Your plotting is built on contrivance and coincidence, not anything that resembles real life.

In the excellent 2012 documentary detailing his life and work, Allen fascinatingly reveals how he decides which film to do next, emptying a drawer onto his bed and then searching through scraps of paper on which are written one-line summaries of possible projects. He used to dress and augment these frameworks, until the incidental joys were as great as the story they adorned. Now – with the exception of Midnight in Paris and perhaps Blue Jasmine – that isn’t really true: from photography to performance to dialogue to sound, it all feels perfunctory: we simply travel from A to B, his hand revealed well in advance, the minor pleasures few and far between, if they are there at all.

As far as bad dialogue goes; well, it simply doesn’t get any worse than this:
Phoenix: “I’m just… too far gone.”
Stone: “I’m going to be late for my piano lesson.”

And then there are the Allenisms that pepper his work: stock phrases that emerge from the mouth of so many of his characters, no matter how different they are supposed to be. Will he ever again make a film in which someone doesn't say, "This is cra-zy."

The film isn’t funny, either. Not in the way that the first hour of Magic in the Moonlight isn’t funny: this one isn’t even supposed to be. In Crimes and Misdemeanours, among his greatest masterstrokes was to run a hysterically funny narrative in parallel to the main affair, with Allen’s self-righteous documentary maker outfoxed by his insufferable rival (Alan Alda), his character receiving a devastating final sting that threw him and Landau together, and cast the central story into a different light. Here, everything is in the same tone – visual, verbal and philosophical – with no wit or nuance to leaven the po-faced, self-serious quasi-moralising.

These problems are epitomised by a potentially interesting scene near the close, which somehow manages to be taut and tense but also completely embarrassing, with apparently improvised dialogue that has to be heard to be believed, and an action pay-off that’s like a Byker Grove outtake. It’s a fitting climax to an unredeeming, tacky and obvious third act that just about explains itself but is as uninteresting as Allen has ever been. Except for Cassandra’s Dream<, which is the caveat that keeps on giving, and the worst film that Allen will ever make.

In Allen’s hands, it seems that fatalism – predicated on chance – has none of the danger, cynical humour or dark poetry of noir, it’s merely predictable coincidence, playing out in bright colours and dull words. (2)

***



The Scarlet Letter (Victor Sjöström, 1926) - A year before their towering masterwork, The Wind, director Victor Sjöström, writer Frances Marion, and stars Lillian Gish and Lars Hanson made another film – The Scarlet Letter – a flavourful, somewhat fanciful adaptation of the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel. Miss Gish is ideally cast (though perhaps wearing a bit too much make-up, historical accuracy fans) as Hester Prynne, whose illegitimate child outrages Puritan, 18th century New England, visiting tragedy upon her restrictive community. Hanson is her troubled lover, the outwardly respectable Rev Arthur Dimmesdale.

MGM’s films from this period never quite seem to match – say – Fox’s in terms of their scale or authentic set design, and the plotting sometimes comes off as forced or convenient, but Sjostrom's imaginative staging leads to a succession of visually striking passages (he was a great director of shadows and of feet) and the acting grabs your attention and holds it, with Gish’s inventive, intuitive gesturing creating a Hester who’s flirtatious, resolute and also feels intensely, every thought transmitted by the actress’s peerless evocation of the inner life.

Her innocent seduction of Hanson is the sort of scene she so rarely got to play - not that you'd know it from her effortless, uncompromised sensuality - while the sequence in which she reveals the scarlet letter, if plumb in the centre of her comfort zone, is a masterpiece of subtle expression and heart-wracking poignancy. (3.5)

A thousand thanks to Owen for getting hold of this one for me. I’ve been after it for years.

***



Henry V (Laurence Olivier, 1944) - Olivier’s near-mythic adaptation of Henry V is a film of dazzling, bravura moments, but not altogether a great film. Beginning with a brilliant gimmick – a framing device that presents the action before an audience at The Globe in 1600 – it then abandons the conceit at exactly the right time, with a staggering fade that takes us from London to the sky above the ocean, where a swelling British fleet is moving stealthily, hazily towards France. Once they get there, though, we face a world that lurches weirdly from fantastical castles to earthily realistic battlefields, as the narrative mixes Henry’s rousing speeches and introspective ruminations with some of the broadest, most unbearable comedy imaginable (at one point a Welshman wears a leek on his head while ending every sentence with the words, “Look you”), culminating in a wooing scene that seems to go on for ever.

Despite those shortcomings, there are scenes as rich in beauty and emotion as just about anything British cinema produced in the ‘40s, thanks in no small part to the sumptuous Technicolor photography and Olivier’s astounding performance, which – despite the occasional recourse to simply yelling – is full of tenderness, steel and imperious regality, while exhibiting his unique gift for Shakespearean delivery: his understanding so rich, his interpretation so clear, that the dialogue could just as well be in modern slang, were it not for its power, its consequence and its ability to stir anyone with a pulse, an English birth certificate and, ideally, a sword. He also has one hell of a way with a battle sequence: the long take of advancing French cavalry moving from a trot to a murderous gallop is just an astonishingly exciting piece of action cinema.

Olivier adapted two further Shakespeare plays as director and star – Hamlet and Richard III – and while both are better than this celebrated first effort, Henry V still has moments that simply take the breath away. (3)

***



All Through the Night (Vincent Sherman, 1941) - This is the other film in which insular isolationist Humphrey Bogart has a change of heart to battle despicable Nazi Conrad Veidt. But unlike in Casablanca, he’s a gangster who gets in over his head while searching for the killers of his favourite cheesecake supplier.
This weirdly pitched yarn is a curious mixture of heavy-handed propaganda, mannered dialogue and variable suspense: a melange of Hitchcock, Damon Runyon and what we now recognise as ‘WWII Warners’, as the studio warms to the cinematic possibilities of the conflict. It starts oddly and ends badly, but what’s in between is often good fun, with a frankly astonishing cast doing what it can with a peculiar script that promises much but delivers relatively little.

Though he’s given rather too many visual gags for a performer whose talents lay elsewhere, Frank McHugh’s line deliveries are – of course – an utter joy, while Peter Lorre is perfect as the mirthfully malevolent gunman, Pepi, the diminutive, sleepy-eyed legend having turned this type of playful, cigarette-led scene-stealing into nothing short of an artform. (2.5)

***

BOOKS



The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1965) – This story of a Scottish schoolteacher engaging her charges in twisted adult games is slim, spare and economical, warped, waspish and filled with malevolent, brilliant throwaway jokes, its nastiness masking a poignancy and perception that linger, along with the bitter taste of betrayal. When Spark’s Sandy talks about the virtue of economy, as a way to live and to create art, she may as well be commenting on the book in which she finds herself. (4)



Orson Welles: One Man Band by Simon Callow (2015) – The third volume of Callow’s biography is another stunning achievement: fast-paced, fascinating and immensely readable, the author expertly juggling disparate sources to not only document and explains Welles’s triumphs and disasters, but also to discern the truth behind his endless self-mythologising, coming as close as anyone has to explaining who Welles was, and why he was like that.

Dealing with Welles's life between his estrangement from Hollywood in 1947 and the release of his intensely personal Chimes at Midnight in 1964, it’s often sad, occasionally punch-the-air inspiring and - for the most part - wonderfully written, with Callow a fond but wise and moral adjudicator with a rare insight into the art of acting. And for that, we can forgive him some excessive use of Latin, an occasional recycling of his pet theories and the suggestion that classic ensemble dramas include “Casablanca and Four Weddings and a Funeral".

Sometimes I did wish we could linger longer on the majesties of those things that work - Othello, Touch of Evil, et al - before moving onto the next backstage debacle, but by any standards it's an exceptional work, and for fans it's pretty much essential.

I'm not sure I will ever get over not seeing Welles's stage play of Moby Dick. (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

The magnificence of the Ambersons

*SOME SPOILERS*


The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)

"Something had happened. A thing which years ago had been the eagerest hope of many, many good citizens of the town. And now it came at last: George Amberson Minafer had got his comeuppance. He got it three times filled and running over. But those who had so longed for it were not there to see it, they never knew it. Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him."

But when George Orson Welles, the infuriating, profligate wunderkind of American cinema got his comeuppance - three times full and running over - the whole world was watching. Still basking in the remarkable acclaim afforded his debut feature, Citizen Kane, he returned home from a government mission to Rio to find his Mercury unit disbanded by the studio, RKO, and his second masterpiece mutilated almost beyond recognition: cut from 131 minutes to 88 after a preview at Pomona where his employers purposefully showed his sombre epic to an audience of teenagers, directly after a Betty Hutton musical. They hated it, most of them - one derided Welles as "camera happy", which is like calling Leonardo Da Vinci "paint happy" - and so the destruction began.

Stories about Welles encountering, in his later years, the dismembered remnants of what might have been invariably end with him in tears - and from the unapproachable brilliance that remains, you can understand his sorrow, self-obsessed as it may have been. While some historians have sought to suggest that the boy genius abandoned his film to chase showgirls in Brazil, it was more his fervour for the never-to-be-completed South American opus, It's All True, that was occupying the rest of his time in 1942. I say "the rest", as those historians fail to acknowledge that he was fighting tooth and claw to save his vision of Ambersons from studio heavyweight Charles Koerner and his cabal of artless bean counters, and spending a staggering $1,000 a week on cables and phone calls regarding the re-shaping of his remarkable film.


Winter visits the Ambersons.

Welles made miscalculations, certainly, thinking his legendary charm could bluff him out of any tight corner and failing fatally to acknowledge the gravity of his situation, but it was more a mixture of bad luck - along with its more ruinous effects, Pearl Harbor made the film instantly out of step with the times, then sent Welles overseas - and genuine malevolence on the part of Koerner and his sycophantic acolytes that robbed the world of The Magnificent Ambersons.

What we have left are mere fragments: shreds of the weighty, playful, dizzyingly inventive two-hours-plus film that Welles intended - indeed shot - interspersed with awful inserts filmed by anyone who happened to be around (editor Robert Wise, Welles's business manager Jack Moss) and both dramatically and thematically completely out of place. Wise argued in his final interview that the finished film merely reinstated author Booth Tarkington's original ending, and that Welles' conception of the climax was so off-the-cuff that it had never even been storyboarded. True, but Tarkington's ending is regarded almost universally as a travesty, while Welles was forever guided by the lightning of inspiration, crackling through him and straight onto celluloid. Just as Pomona smirked, giggled and "kidded" the picture, high on hormones and Hutton, so we're obliged to wet ourselves with tears and bitter laughter at the embarrassing, mawkish junk that replaces the director's fabled "boarding house finale". Astonishingly, this incompetent hospital climax, so cheap that it writes the central character out of the finish and has someone else recap what he's just said, was scripted and directed by Moss - the same Moss who failed to get Welles the critical final cut on the film, who was then inexplicably left in charge by the director to fight his corner, who consequently threw Welles's daily memos about the editing process into the bin without reading them, and who spread the convenient rumour that Welles had given up on the film to shag carnival dancers. The same Moss, in fact, who had never written a page of dialogue before, or shot a frame of film.

It's been written of Rossellini's films that they possess a certain something no other filmmaker's have ever had. It's true. I think it of Barbara Stanwyck's greatest performances too, and of The Magnificent Ambersons. Texturally, it's like nothing else you've ever seen, Welles and the painstaking Stanley Cortez's evocation of a lost era of America - specifically the aristocratic Mid-West of the 1870s, a community rarely glimpsed in film - seems variously to have been shot on oak, on silk, on burlap, as a sewing pattern and as an old picture postcard - a vivid picture of a vanishing past, vanishing fast. Its visual sumptuousness is very much the point, in and of itself, but like Kane it's a film in which the technical wizardry succeeds in always serving the story, whether spanning decades in the blink of an eye, keeping us breathless at the centre of the action or turning exposition into the richest screen magic. Welles found it notoriously difficult to engender material himself, but he could shape and hone other people's words with a confidence and bravura virtuosity that was unmatched in the realms of radio, theatre and film.

The opening montage finds him at his zenith, placing the Ambersons - the "magnificent" Ambersons, the adjective relating to their wealth, power and refined extravagance rather than any admirable personal traits - in context, via round-cornered reminiscences set to his own unapproachable voiceover, and using Joe Cotten as a clothes dummy and comic fall guy before revealing, quite magnificently, that the pratfall we've just enjoyed precipitates the tragedy upon which the whole piece will hang. Well, that and the advent of the automobile - sorry, "horseless carriage" - which for Welles represents the loss of Eden, that simpler place that he himself had found in Grand Detour, Illinois, in rural Ireland and - as Ambersons previewed in Pomona - in impoverished Fortaleza, Brazil.


The pratfall: Cotten's face touched with worry.

Via the intonations of the wise, omniscient Welles, a harridan in a grocery store and a gossiping chorus (shot theatrically against a blank background), we learn of the film's central character, a spoiled, arrogant youth by the name of George Amberson Minafer ("TIM HOLT!") - ruined by too much motherly love - whom the town dearly wishes would receive his "comeuppance". In that irrepressible, jovial mood that Welles would forever struggle to recapture, the director's even happy to explain the word to us via the on- screen action.

Welles' beloved set-piece, a single, meticulously choreographed shot that took the audience through each room of the house during the crucial ball, and so into the lives of these people - a life that would soon cease to exist, this being "the last of the great balls" - is cut to ribbons, causing the stomach to tighten, the spirit to sag and the heart to sink each time Wise and his studio paymasters opt for an ugly, arbitrary dissolve. And yet still the ball retains a singular magic, dancing with life, exuding a sense of effortless fun, fleshing out George and introducing the adult Gene Morgan (Cotten) and his spirited daughter, the roving camera drawing us into the heart of this rarefied community, as Cotten's jovial interjections recall nothing as much as the song-and-dance number from Citizen Kane. The Leopard may match the ball for romanticism and opulent grandeur, but in terms of evoking the perfect atmosphere and provoking sheer exhilaration at what the filmmaker is doing: setting fire to the rulebook before your very eyes, there's still nothing to touch it. While Ambersons is an old man's film - quiet and sad, full of regret - it is also a young man's film, positively bursting with invention.


The beloved ball.

The ball sequence is followed by a spellbinding snowbound scene in which the car and the horse-drawn vie for supremacy, the latter zipping around the track to Bernard Herrmann's delightful jangling score - leading to a fall and a kiss - the former ailing, sputtering and dispersing thick plumes of smoke into George's fizzog, then juddering into ugly, ramshackle life as the family breaks into song, his vain, tuneless commandeering of the melody entirely in keeping with his character. And while the first 40 minutes suffers from RKO's idiotic tampering, compared to what follows it emerges relatively unscathed: the masterfully nauseating scene in which George stuffs his face with cake while considering his family's affairs had been earmarked for the chop, but somehow made it to theatres intact. There are sequences, and single shots, of such extraordinary emotional depth and clarity that it destroys at a stroke the idea that Welles was a cold filmmaker. My favourite composition sees Dolores Costello silhouetted between two departing lovers - one of them her son, George - bidding goodnight to her own childhood sweetheart, the one she didn't marry, the one who just re-entered her life. It's such a poignant, perfect juxtaposition, a visual, character-centric effect that no other director could have achieved so subtly or strikingly.


The nauseating, brilliant "cakes" set-piece.

As the film progresses, it becomes more and more disjointed, Welles' confidently episodic handling replaced by something that looks awfully like random, merciless cutting, as almost 50 per cent of the second half is removed, later to be dumped in the sea to Koerner's sadistic delight (if you think I'm exaggeratedly scapegoating, check out the memos - he hated Welles). Triumphant self-contained scenes follow one after another, at one point Welles pans up three storeys inside the Ambersons' vast mansion to an appreciate "ooooh" from me, but there's no through-line, no dramatic escalation, just pieces of meaningless brilliance, wrenched out of context, sitting miles apart, the narrative lurching forwards in time like a drunk Doctor Who. At one point Welles shoots a long, brilliant close-up of Major Amberson's (Richard Bennett) face, other voices intruding on the soundtrack: first Welles, then Collins, then Holt. As Bennett himself begins a monologue about the sun, his voice dips out, and you realise that RKO is now cutting scenes off in the middle. A pivotal death scene - interestingly shot by Russell Metty rather than Cortez (who Welles regarded as too slow) lasts little more than 10 seconds in the final cut, but in that time alone achieves a bracing impact, George's aunt (Agnes Moorehead) suddenly appearing before the camera, flinging her arms around her nephew and pressing him close, expecting no resistance and finding none.


The three-storey pan.

Many aspects of the film are hard to judge in this compromised state. Thematically, it's a difficult movie to comprehend. In the theatre, Welles was a conceptual director, creator of the "voodoo" Macbeth and the fascist Julius Caesar, but those concepts - while invigorating, lacked political coherence. As Simon Callow noted in The Road to Xanadu, the moral of his Caesar would appear to be: "don't kill Mussolini", probably not the message that he was trying to transmit, even prior to his left-wing awakening in the early '40s. Here, he's lamenting the passing of an epoch (and an extraordinarily brief one at that) by focusing on the product of that civilisation: the intensely dislikeable, selfish George Amberson Minafer. His counterpoint, the charming, personable Gene, cheerily oblivious to the past, may be bringing about the ruination of this world with his new-fangled motor-driven contraption, but you're clearly intended to side with him.

At a stretch, you could say that Gene is also a product of this lost world - one who acknowledges the danger of "progress" - as is his lost love (George's mother), while it's the flawed character of this callow, conceited youth and his contemporaries that allows their existence to slip into oblivion, but it's more likely that Welles is merely doing credit to a literary work he loves, and creating and revelling in the world it conjures, without drawing an ideological or moral bead on the material contained therein. Perhaps in its complete form, Ambersons dealt with these apparent contradictions more clearly.


Stanley Cortez's chiaroscuro lighting, Welles's singular sense of composition.

The performances are also hard to consider in any definitive sense. I really admire Cotten's work in this film, his Wellesian intonation suggesting that he was either coached very closely by the director or took on his inflections in admiration. It's a performance of outer tranquility, a wealth of emotions raging beneath the surface, and pouring out in that brilliant sequence where he tersely, defiantly brushes George aside, heading for the boy's ailing mother. As George's aunt - tormented by her unrequited love for Gene - Moorehead's performance is so intense, so unlike anything else in the picture or in the cinema at that time - at one with the gloomy lighting, the shadows streaming down her angular face - that it takes a little adjusting to, but really it's the key one, throbbing with conviction, unhappiness and self-loathing. After seeing the rushes, George Schaefer, Welles' main sponsor at the studio - and still then the head of RKO - described her performance as "one of the finest pieces of work I have ever seen on the screen", but after he took unprecedented "punishment" at Pomona, the kids howling with laughter at her supposed over-acting, it was slashed to pieces, like everything else. Like the corporative executive in Sturges' Christmas in July, Schaefer knew something was good only if other people told him so. Bizarrely - and hilariously - Moorehead seems to have borrowed from her part here for the following year's Youngest Profession, a daft MGM comedy about teenage autograph hunters, though with the hysteria very much dialled down. Bennett is, well, magnificent - when granted rare consent to shine by Wise's scissors - but Costello is unexceptional in a role that's either underwritten or just uninterestingly played, while - a little damagingly - neither Holt nor his love interest (a young Anne Baxter) have as much dramatic weight as would be ideal to power a story of this magnitude.


Moorehead giving it some welly.

Ray Collins' performance as the paternalistic, twinkling Uncle Jack demonstrates just what actors would do for Welles. Elsewhere, he gave some of the most half-hearted performances I've ever seen. Here, filling the screen, given a real, breathing character at the heart of the action, he excels. His farewell scene, with the background hubbub, a tolling bell and a poetic, nostalgic speech about a girl he once knew, sees Welles putting his experience to work: setting the background with a handful of radio tricks, then showing what he learnt from Herman Mankiewicz. "Quicksilver in a nest of cracks" is pure Welles - lyrical but not meaningful - but it's the wise, witty and straightforward language surrounding it, with a wealth of affection and a touch of hyperbole, that gives the scene a rare power. It's perhaps the second best scene in the picture. The best regards George Amberson Minafer receiving his comeuppance: Welles's voiceover, Wise's editing and Holt kneeling by a bed, delivering in a way that makes up for most of his shortcomings as a petulant, sullen George. It's set, of course, to the music of the incomparable Herrmann, whose justly celebrated score quite gloriously still exists in full.

It's also worth noting that Welles had been unable to do any post-production work on Ambersons, due to the tight deadlines of his government-appointed role, compared to several unbroken months on Kane, a period that had produced many of the film's most lauded innovations, including the double-exposure that placed the eponymous anti-hero in the background - but in deep focus - as Leland snoozed drunk at his desk, and that stunning, swooping shot of the Thatcher Memorial Library and its statue, all done via model work. The quality of what remains - discounting the occasionally voiced idea that Wise "saved" the film (an amusingly provocative stance, but clearly complete nonsense) - is testament to how astonishingly well Welles was firing in those heady days, before he became just too hot to handle - either in reality or just in reputation.

He would rise again, of course, first with Othello, then Touch of Evil, then The Trial and finally Chimes at Midnight, but he never did get over the debacle that was The Magnificent Ambersons. Welles lost his mother at nine and his father at 15, but it was the destruction of his 1942 film that he regarded as "the worst thing that ever happened to me". That bold, brilliant, maddening genius got his comeuppance alright - from the studio sadists, the hand of fate and his own bloody recklessness - while the whole world watched. (4)


The RKO press pack. This, I believe, is known as "gobsmacking gall".