And introducing... #2. Wendy Hiller

Following on from the surprisingly successful John Ford feature (650 hits, thank you very much), here's part two.

#2. Wendy Hiller



One of the most extraordinary things to happen to me in recent times was the discovery – quite by chance, aside from the fact that I’m generally talking about Wendy Hiller – that my dad’s new girlfriend’s mum grew up next door to Wendy Hiller, the only actress who truly vies for my affections alongside Miss Lillian Gish. This discovery has culminated with my cool new grandma giving me the signed photograph that Hiller gave her upon returning to her childhood home upon making it, a quite exquisite act of kindness and generosity. So for the second instalment of the ‘And introducing…’ series, we’re talking all things Wendy Hiller.

Who?
One of the most distinctive actresses of the 20th century, with her inimitable, tremulous voice, arrestingly unusual features and irresistible presence, guaranteed to wrench your attention away from everything else on screen.



She sounds good. Why haven’t I heard of her?
The Cheshire-born actress was primarily a stage star, but she lent her talents to 18 films across 50 years, as well as doing a bit of TV. Fans of British filmmaking legends Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger will know her as the social climber scuppered by love in their Hebridean romantic drama, ‘I Know Where I’m Going!’ (above). She was also George Bernard Shaw’s favourite actress and appeared in definitive film versions of two of his finest plays: Pygmalion – later musicalised as My Fair Lady – and Major Barbara, giving perhaps my favourite performance of all time (here's the opening scene, it's an absolute wonder). Her later film work included lower billing in everything from an exhaustingly compromised colonial drama (Something of Value) to Southern Gothic (Toys in the Attic), soaring, searing religious drama (A Man for All Seasons), and David Lynch’s The Elephant Man.



That was some big talk about Major Barbara. Tell me more.
Hiller gives a beautiful, enrapturing performance as the title figure (above), whose faith in the noble work of her Salvation Army is shattered when her bosses accept a donation from her father, a supercilious, ominously-twinkling arms dealer (Robert Morley) who looks and acts like a mix of Shaw and Satan. She’s the perfect, compassionate, warm and beating heart of a satirical, often cynical Bernard Shaw gabfest that cocks a snook at temperance, the Sally Army and those who see nobility in poverty.

Go on.
It’s an extraordinary showcase for a rare and remarkable talent, Hiller’s greatest creation a living, breathing, wonderful woman of Shavian rhetorical powers, uplifting faith and arresting, all-consuming empathy. "Oh, did you think my courage would never come back?" she asks screen beau Rex Harrison in a transcendent closing monologue. "Did you believe that I was a deserter? That I, who have stood in the streets, and taken my people to my heart, and talked of the holiest and greatest things with them, could ever turn back and chatter foolishly to fashionable people about nothing in a drawing-room?" It absolutely floors me.

Whit-whoo. You love her.
Please. This is ridiculous.

You do.
I do a bit.



She’s your wife. So what else did your wife make that’s worth watching?
Pygmalion (above) is high-grade, surprisingly glamorous entertainment – featuring Leslie Howard’s white-hot comic smarts and Hiller’s definitive Eliza – and has a good deal to say about life, love and how to pretend you’re not a Cockney. There’s a committed group of cinephiles who hold ‘I Know Where I’m Going!’ as their favourite film ever, and you can well understand why. Hiller’s performance is a masterclass in thawing-out, her stuffy bride-to-be throwing caution to the wind – and a future of security in the bin – as she falls for penniless Scottish charmer Roger Livesey. Hiller is the best thing about both the batshit colonial melodrama Outcast of the Islands and the conventional war drama, Sailor of the King, though she disappears from the latter after the prologue.

Written out after the prologue? Sounds like she was in decline.
How dare you. Five years later she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar – despite having most of her best scenes snipped – playing a stoically lovelorn hotelier in Separate Tables, opposite Burt Lancaster, Rita Hayworth, David Niven and her Major Barbara co-star Deborah Kerr. She delivered another of her sporadic, effortlessly devastating performances four years later in Sons and Lovers. It may be difficult to watch much of the film without thinking of Monty Python’s deft spoof, but Hiller is spectacular as a mother who retains her essential goodness despite the oppressive brutality of life. Her performance incorporates a couple of little breakdowns that make you whimper. Which other actress has ever made you feel – actually feel – something of the loss of a child, or the ruination of another? She went on to play Thomas More’s wife Alice in A Man for All Seasons, an exceptional characterisation that transcends its relative brevity, and formed part of an impeccable supporting cast assembled around The Elephant Man. Her final big screen role was opposite a rampaging, marauding, self-loathing Maggie Smith in the erratic 1987 film, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne – in which Hiller is afforded just one truly stirring scene, but what magic she weaves from it.


Hiller in Separate Tables.

Be honest, though, how did a Bramhall-born favourite of the British stage translate to a slice of Southern Gothic?
Incredibly well. I was surprised too. Toys in the Attic, written by Lillian Hellman, is a little ripe, a little familiar, but extremely well done. Geraldine Page and Hiller are cast as spinster sisters in New Orleans whose sheltered life is shaken by the return of ne'er-do-well brother, Dean Martin, suddenly flush with cash but somewhat reticent to say why. In his company is his neurotic young wife (Yvette Mimieux), whose harsh, strident mother (Gene Tierney) may have made the match. It's largely shot on one set, but future New Hollywood hero George Roy Hill directs it all extremely nicely, and much of the acting is an absolute treat, with Page and Hiller dominating in two mesmerising characterisations. Both play women who are blind and deluded, though in quite different ways, Page hitting a peak of quivering self-loathing, Hiller shuffling the moods as she did so superbly in these mid-career characterisations that she loved to (infrequently) take on: not the shimmering archetypes she had embodied in Bernard Shaw plays, but starkly real characters made beautiful by their flaws and contradictions. Though billed fourth, it's actually a rare instance during her postwar career that she was front and centre, and the results are simply sublime.



Surely she must have done something rubbish?
Well, she was in the all-star Murder on the Orient Express (above), one of the most tedious, overrated and silly films of the ‘70s, playing the pale, aloof Princess Dragomiroff – not her best work, but still the most watchable thing on show, opposite Albert Finney and his little moustache-hammock. The 1978 version of that hoary old horror, The Cat and the Canary, is also a bit of a stinker, though Hiller is both droll and appealing as the executor.

I might give those a miss. Was she in anything as weird as John Ford’s sex hygiene film?
Arguably. Outcast of the Islands is a kind of batshit colonial Third Man, with raffish thief Trevor Howard winding up at a trading outpost, where he falls for a female warrior (Kerima) and proceeds to betray his best friend (Ralph Richardson). It’s a strange, intense drama – complete with broad comic interludes – that lacks a consistency of tone, oscillates between profundity and pomposity and is too low-budget to realise its ambitions, leading to continuity problems and some iffy back-projection. But it has a whole deck of wild cards that make it a must-see for fans of classic British film. Where else would you get to watch Robert Morley trussed up in a cocoon-like hammock, swinging, whooping above a bonfire? Or Richardson – in full Captain Birdseye make-up – trudging up a mountain, unsure whether to shoot or lecture his protégé? Indeed, much of the acting has to be seen to be believed, with a masterclass in madness from Howard, a poignant part from Richardson, Morley’s bilious turn as a barking, greedy trader, and Hiller impossibly touching, in what could have been a hackneyed part, as the unhappily-married woman looking to trade in one bastard for another. It’s a film of rough edges and odd diversions, but it’s very interesting, and at its best, it’s just great. Something of Value is the film’s boring cousin: a sincere but muddled movie about the Mau Mau uprising in colonial Kenya, with Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier as childhood friends caught on opposite sides of the conflict. It's a gruelling watch and its narrative flaws are legion, but Poitier is superb and Hiller steals the film (doesn't she always?) being variously sexy and transcendent and covered in blood and shooting a gun. Phwoarr.



I am glad you fancy your wife. Where does her TV work come on the Brideshead-to-Stranger-Things spectrum?
Do you mean, ‘Is it white flannelled English period drama or populist, internet-backed American sci-fi?’

No, I mean, ‘Is it amazing or terrible?’
Oh. Well I haven’t seen all of it, but there are dazzling highlights. Like All Passion Spent, a three-part adaptation of Vita Sackville-West's most popular novel, with Hiller as an 85-year-old widow – previously wedded to the establishment – who finally gets to show her innate non-conformity. It takes ages to get going (the first half of the mini-series is basically just her purchasing and redecorating a house), but the music's nice, the script is unusually classy and meditative, and the scenes between Hiller and her eccentric longtime admirer (Harry Andrews) are extraordinarily moving. This portrait of a stoical, accepting and non-judgemental woman, blessed with a gentle power that comes from deep within, is among the great achievements of her incomparable career. What surrounds it isn't generally in the same league, but it's worth seeing for the central performance alone.



I’m not going to watch 90 minutes of someone redecorating a house. What else?
How about her 1983 reunion with Rex Harrison, The Kingfisher (above)? This marvellously escapist drama, ab sees a lonely bachelor (Harrison), living with his gay old butler (Cyril Cusack), make a move for the one that that got away a half-century ago (Hiller), following the death of her husband. The material is good if imperfect – there's a touch of pointless slapstick and an ill-advised diversion about Harrison's fatal conquests that seems in rather bad taste given the actor's involvement in Carole Landis's suicide – while the direction is fairly standard and unimaginative, but the performances are an absolute joy, with Harrison and Hiller sparking as they had in Major Barbara 42 years earlier, and Cusack providing memorable though not exactly hilarious support. Sexy Rexy plays the unrepentant but genuine, wistful old cove you'd expect, dialogue still like honey on his lips, while Hiller creates another of those impeccable, distinct characterisations she could turn out at will: a twinkly-eyed, joshing, witty, knowing and self-aware woman who's happy to get sloshed but blessed with tremendous emotional intelligence (a pensioned-off, very English version of Myrna Loy's character in Libeled Lady, perhaps).

Warmer. Next!
OK, best of all is The Best of Friends, a remarkably thoughtful and mature TV movie based on the correspondence between legendary playwright George Bernard Shaw (Patrick McGoohan), esteemed museum curator Sydney Cockerell (John Gielgud) and Dame Laurentia McLachlan (Hiller), a Benedectine nun who was one of the world's leading authorities on church music. Quite how a play in which the characters simply wander in and out of one another's rooms and gardens, reciting their letters, can be this entertaining, immersive and affecting is rather beyond me, but Hugh Whitmore's script is remarkably incisive, insightful and inspiring − even curiously, enduringly comforting − in its ruminations on friendship, religion and death. That's especially true in the hands of these performers, with McGoohan a barnstorming but immensely likeable Shaw, and two of the finest actors of all time delivering late masterclasses: Gielgud's Cockerell understated, self-deprecating and self-aware, Hiller's Dame Laurentia radiating compassion, humanity and understanding: a fitting companion piece, in Hiller's penultimate appearance, to the greatest performance she ever gave, in Shaw's own Major Barbara.



Please can you summarise this blog for people in a hurry?
The filmed legacy of this renowned stage actress is a strange and spotty thing: she made just 18 movies, along with 40-odd TV appearances, during a career that spanned from 1937 to 1992, but what remains is of inestimable value for anyone who admires the artistry of acting. Through the nuanced control of her incomparable face, a stage-honed understanding of gesture that she adapted for the all-seeing camera, and that deep, modulated and inimitable voice, she thought out loud, and what she thought was usually extraordinarily beautiful. I really do think she's the greatest sound actress of all time. The world’s finest playwrights wrote roles for her, the world’s finest directors sought her out, and the world’s greatest performers were acted off the screen by her.

So where do I start?
With Pygmalion if you want something light but substantial, with Major Barbara if you want to have your very foundations shook.

Anything else to report?
If you ever come across a copy of her 1937 debut, Lancashire Luck, please alert me with extreme prejudice.

I bet she never expected to become a weird cult figure, if only in the head of an obsessive 33-year-old Press Executive.
On the contrary. Asked by the BBC how she would like to be remembered, if at all, the replied: “Oh, I think a little posterity must always be nice. After I'm dead I'll probably be a cult and they'll have entire seasons of me at the National Film Theatre. Thank God I won't have to watch them all." I've tweeted the NFT (now BFI Southbank), though, and they're ignoring me.

What to say: “Taking the bus to the video store to find out more about Wendy Hiller? Not bloody likely – I’m going in a taxi.”

What not to say: “I feel that she did her best work in the mid-to-late ‘70s.”

***

Thanks for reading. I didn't make any of the gifs, as I don't know how. You can find credits here.

James Baldwin, Absolute Beginners, and Kerouac falling apart – Reviews #'264

Since you've been very good, I've written some reviews for you, taking a look at I Am Not Your Negro, Julien Temple's bizarre, fascinating 1986 musical, a Fassbinder film (he's the subject of a BFI season at the moment, so there are more on the way), and Jack Kerouac's phenomenal follow-up to On the Road, 1962's Big Sur.



CINEMA: I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2016) – 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.

The script is taken entirely from his unfinished book, Remember This House, which was to explore the history of black America through the murders of community leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Those passages, perfectly performed by Samuel L. Jackson, are mixed with footage of Baldwin in interview or debate (I love his voice), and a wealth of material showing everything from reviled character actors Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best – who epitomised the slurring, slow-witted black American in ‘30s comedies – to public information films, contemporary news reports of police shootings, and clips of Doris Day and Gary Cooper, the paragons of toxic white innocence whom Baldwin draws into his crosshairs.

At times that footage matches, showing the prescience – or more often the enduring relevance – of Baldwin’s words, but director Raoul Peck seems more interested in creating a collage of cumulative effect. In some ways, I do find it difficult that the film goes after RFK – who’s derided for his commitment to pragmatic realpolitik – and John Ford, one of the most thoughtful mainstream directors when it came to race, but that’s kind of Baldwin’s point: black people shouldn’t have to be grateful to the benevolent white man who nobly recognises their worth, they have as much right to their country as the white people who nicked it from the Native Americans.

As filmmaking, it may have rough edges or clumsy segues, but it’s wrenchingly powerful: an extraordinarily rich, humane and unsettling work, dominated by Baldwin’s unique moral and intellectual voice, which it brings to the masses. His polemicising is startlingly clear-sighted and incisive in a way that yanked the scales from my own eyes, and while it’s also wide-ranging and complex – bringing in such relevant but apparently disconnected concerns as the gulf between Americans’ private and public personas – perhaps its purest essence is contained in the speech that closes the film.

There, Baldwin rightly argues that since the grotesque caricature of black men (or of Jews in Nazi Germany or Muslims in Britain and the US today) bears such little relation to reality, it must have another purpose. “What white people have to do,” he says, “is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a n***** in the first place, because I'm not a n*****, I'm a man, but if you think I'm a n*****, it means you need it.” (3.5)

***



Absolute Beginners (Julien Temple, 1986) – Julien Temple's notorious musical is one of the oddest and most perversely interesting British films of its era: a sort of West Side Story for '50s Soho, shot in the fantastical neon style of One From the Heart (or the 'Girl Hunt' ballet in The Band Wagon) and featuring arguably the most peculiar cast of all time. Ever wanted to see David Bowie and Patsy Kensit share the screen? Dying to find a movie where Lionel Blair, Profumo affair luminary Mandy Rice-Davies, and Sade all feature? Searched all your life for a film graced by the talents of Irene Handl, Sylvia Syms, Ray Davies, Edward Tudor Pole, Alan 'Fluff' Freeman, James Fox, and Steven Berkoff as an Oswald Mosley-like fascist hate preacher? Well step right up and enjoy the weirdness.

Kensit is Crepe Suzette, an annoyingly-voiced model and fashion designer whose romance with clean-cut dirty-picture-photographer Colin (Eddie O'Connell) is sacrificed on the altar of career advancement, as London gets ready to erupt into race riots in the boiling summer of 1958. No-one can act and the script is infuriating pretentious rubbish stuffed with shallow sub-and-pseudo beatnik proclamations, but the music's mostly excellent, the energy of the film is thrilling, and it's startlingly directed from start to finish, kicking off with a roaming five-minute tracking shot introducing us to a vividly-realised '50s Soho.

Self-contained scenes like Bowie's 'That's Motivation' and Ray Davies's 'The Quiet Life' aren't just like music videos, they are music videos, a stipulation made by the Americans financiers (who stepped in part-way through and insisted on adding famous names to the cast list). That might have corrupted Temple's original vision, but those set-pieces are a lot better than much of the narrative that surrounds them: while the film's themes of gentrification, racism, and art vs commerce (centring on the idea of 'selling out', an idea that obsessed my adolescent, music-loving mind) are more timely now than at any time since the film was made, the screenplay is enormously irritating, and the leads are risible, especially the squeaky, blank-faced Kensit. For her big number on the catwalk, Temple uses most of the Busby-Berkeley-meets-Baz-Luhrmann tricks in the book to keep it moving, and make it dynamic and convincing, but he can't quite mask her absolutely bloody awful dancing.

The screening at Regent Street Cinema included a Q&A with jazz club owner Chris Sullivan. He appears briefly in the film and supplied most of the extras, who largely wore their own clothes, the late-'50s look being fortuitously in vogue in the London of 1986. He remains keen for Temple to create a director's cut reinstating all the footage that was shot but then junked after the film was taken out of the director's hands following his original editor's death. It's only then, I suppose, that we can see whether Temple's vision was intended to be as divergent from the source novel, and if it would have made a more convincing film overall, with stronger characterisation and a greater consistency of tone than this compromised final cut.

Sullivan also shared some stories about production: the entire cast being off their face on beer, speed or coke, the climactic pitched battles exploding into genuine violence (since none of the non-professional actors were used to faking fight scenes), and a woman having 12 stitches in her bum because − while almost everyone was shagging behind the sets − she was the only one who decided to do it on top of an antique pinball machine with a flimsy glass top.

He didn't have too much to say about the film itself, which is − to pervert the Manics lyrics − "all surface and no feeling", a sumptuous stylistic delight with nothing to it, Temple's 'Carry on Punking' approach to everything rendering its characters and attempts at sincerity visceral, shallow and grotesque. It is a wonder of sound and vision, though, capped by Bowie's theme tune and 'That's Motivation', Sade's 'Killer Blow', the jazz club numbers and Davies's 'The Quiet Life', complete with a Finders Keepers-style cutaway house and unbearable cartoonish shenanigans, while unexpected explosions of movement and music pepper the half-finished, artistically bankrupt script. (2.5)

***



Mood Indigo (Michel Gondry, 2013) – When I heard that Michel Gondry was making a phantasmagorical romance starring perhaps my favourite three French stars of recent decades, I was excited, but bad reviews and an inability to find the full-length cut that played to home audiences sapped my appetite, so it took a while.

The film – adapted from a book by singular, surrealistic author Boris Vian – tells the story of rich layabout Colin (Romain Duris), who spends his time in a spectacular, stop-motion apartment, being cooked for by his perma-grinning lawyer, Nicolas (Omar Sy). When Nicolas and his other best friend begin romantic relationships, he realises just what is missing from his life, and begins to court Chloe (Audrey Tautou), a playful, post-modernly joshing young woman he seeks out at a party. On their wedding night, a water-lily begins to grow in her lung, puncturing their perfect existence and sending Colin out into a merciless, absurd and unforgiving world, as his cloistered home descends into rot and ruin.

It begins (at least in this 95-minute version) like a music video stretched well beyond breaking point, coming off as twee and shallow – if fitfully amusing – when its quirks should be shorn of some of their self-consciousness, and rooted in a world both transcendent and idealised. But then, as it slips into prolonged, joyless, existential anguish, its style becomes substance, which is a good job as there's precious little else to cling on to here.

It is Gondryan excess in the service of Vian, with mere silvers of story, and its stars left out in the cold, or deluged by an avalanche of whimsy. Here, Duris has neither the fascinating looks nor the commanding intensity that power his most compelling vehicles, Tautou is thoroughly underused – while the mountain diversion never gives you the epic money-shot of flowers wilting all around her – and Sy comes across as a mere comic adornment, with the script and effects doing all his heavy lifting.

It does draw you in, and by the second half you’re immersed and engaged in its characters’ plight, so arrestingly articulated by the restlessly innovative visuals, leading to a final scene that makes use of one of its calling cards – a mouse realised through in-camera effects and played by a man in a mouse suit – before breaking into a simple and simply beautiful animation.

It lacks the novelty of Eternal Sunshine, which first brought Gondry’s delirious DIY aesthetic to audiences, or the sublime comedy and off-balance emotional centre of The Science of Sleep – easily my favourite of his films – but it’s just about worth seeing if you’re receptive to his preoccupations, and the way he serves them through ostentatious stylistics. (2.5)

See also: Here's one film each that spotlights Gondry (The Science of Sleep), Sy (Chocolat), Tautou (Amélie) and Duris (The Beat That My Heart Skipped), and which I'd really recommend.

***



*SOME SPOILERS*
CINEMA: Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975) – This resonant Fassbinder allegory tells the story of a virile, happy-go-lucky prole (the director) who wins the lottery, then loses his dignity, identity and all his money after falling for a calculating middle-class snob (Peter Chatel).

Its presentation of gay society can feel a little forced and it has moments of woodenness, but the film's combination of fatalistic poise and rough-and-ready spontaneity is pure Fassbinder, while his script blends excoriating satire with human drama and mordant humour.

Fox and His Friends also expands the director's familiar world to incorporate society drawing rooms, Marrakech and the kind of factory office you'd see in a Dardennes film, but doesn't skimp on the trappings you rightly expect from a Fassbinder film: moustaches, dingy bars, brown clothes, trashy '20s cabaret glamour, and squalid flats that stink of fags, booze and stifling urban desperation.

It's also interesting to Karlheinz Böhm, the star of Michael Powell's immortally creepy horror, Peeping Tom, in his more natural habitat. He's initially inscrutable – but unexpectedly suave and well-balanced in an Anthony Andrews vein – as an upper middle class antiques dealer who picks up Fassbender in a public toilet.

From the absurd, witty carnival intro to the pitiful dance of tragic greed that closes the picture, it's a hard-bitten but humane movie which suggests that the world is a terrible, cynical, rapacious place, but there are good people in it. What happens to those people, though, doesn't bear thinking about it, especially if they're from the proletariat and get ideas above their station. (3)

***



"No, I'm not gay!"
"Okay, alright, calm down. Look, this gay panic situation you're having right now, it's coming off a little homophobic."
"What, I'm homophobic because I don't want a penis in my mouth?"
"Exactly. That's exactly what homophobic means."

We're the Millers (Rawson Marshall Thurber, 2013) – An above-par comedy, with scuzzy weed dealer Jason Sudeikis moving into smuggling after losing loads of drugs, and recruiting a fake family (stripper neighbour Jennifer Aniston, homeless punk Emma Roberts, all-time dork Will Poulter) to help put the authorities off the scent. It's sensitive more often than sentimental, undercuts some occasional misogyny with clever pay-offs and Aniston's strong female character, and − while at times it's guilty of obviousness or signposting jokes or virulent misanthropy − when it's funny it is very funny. For that, you can forgive its lurches in tone, the clumsy recuts and post-synced dialogue synonymous with a film they thought was in trouble, and Ed Helms offering precisely nothing as Sudeikis's amoral boss. 'Very funny' covers a lot of sins (and how can you dislike a film in which the two main characters love Tom Waits? Shame he doesn't feature on the soundtrack). (2.5)

***

BOOKS



Big Sur by Jack Kerouac (1962) – Kerouac's follow-up to On the Road finds him retreating from the pressures and moral privations of fame to a lonely cabin in foggy, violent, howling, rocky Big Sur. Between there and the city, alone or with gentle, conspiratorial Cody, ailing George Baso − his slowness and Zen-ness corrupted by illness − with his eternal future bride Evelyn, with Ben Fagan, Monsanto, Dave Wain and the tortured, destructively depressed Billie, he finds only mounting madness, which comes at first in fleeting signs that interrupt his tranquil but restless, probingly creative diversion, then grows in the fertile ground of a wine-soaked mind, until chapters of exhausting, harrowing, unrelenting terror that evoke mental malaise as well as anything I've ever read.

It is a breathtaking work, written in Kerouac's roving, unstinting style, basking in naturalistic, colloquial language, in the juxtapositions of ideas and words, in the unvarnished, unprettified honesty of a man at the end of his tether, who despairs at his lack of 'human beingness' and yet in Big Sur shows the compassion, innate, clear-sighted judgement of character and ruthless, pitiless self-awareness that is being human. It is a book of wisdom, hope and relentless artistic accomplishment, a journal of illness and uncertain, incomplete redemption, haunted by the spectre of insanity and total self-destruction but blessed with the gentleness, empathy, childlike playfulness and richly-textured world of this unique poet: wine bottles, fireplace, old green t-shirt, singing bluejays, rolling mist, sacred burro and all. (4)

***

I also greatly enjoyed Dr Seuss's immortal Oh, the Places You'll Go, which has everything you need to know for a life on earth. See also: Vonnegut's Timequake.

***

Thanks for reading.

Basia Bulat, The Entertainer and a voice you could write a book about − Reviews #241

LIVE



The Entertainer (Garrick Theatre) − It makes sense that Kenneth Branagh would close his first season at the Garrick with this: a play synonymous with his hero, Laurence Olivier. Branagh is Archie Rice, the unhappy, dissolute and past-it music-hall star Archie Rice, whose fey, innuendo-laced stylings are playing to dwindling audiences in '50s Yorkshire.

John Osbourne's play is very much of its time, but director Rob Ashford does well to mine it for its modern relevancies: patriotism, racism and the pathos of an artform on its last legs, and plays Archie as a slight, sad figure, his bags of charisma obscuring a complete lack of moral character, or really any substance at all. He's fast, erudite and fills a room (if not a concert hall) with his bravado, and his rants are more lost than vitriolic. It's a reading of the character that convinces but doesn't always lend itself to emotional dynamism, and that's problematic in a play that has some serious longueurs. On a more prosaic note, I remember reading years ago that Branagh doesn't work himself up into a teary state, but aims for the same effect through simple acting shorthand, and that synthetic approach leaves me feeling rather detached and cheated.

After a stunningly modern opening that sees a silhouetted Branagh slowly tapdancing with his back to the audience, as he's joined by four young chorus girls, we're largely trapped in a room with his family. The first dialogue scene, with Branagh's daughter (Downton Abbey's Sophie McShera) and his father (Gawn Grainger) goes on forever and has little to offer but vast swathes of unpopulated space and an oppressive mundanity. As Greta Scacchi enters as Archie's wife, Phoebe, and the star breaks off for music hall routines pitched perfectly between the dated and the devilishly good, it does begin to work up some momentum, but the first half never really hits its stride until the final seconds.

Once that happens, it doesn't lose it: suddenly it seems to have a purpose and a theme, the characters crumbling like the edifices of the music halls, their viewpoints complex but apparent, and their relationships shifting like cogs in a rotting machine. I don't rate McShera as an actor, and she speaks increasingly throughout the play with that unbearably false intonation that convinces people they don't like theatre. The other principals are fine though: Grainger's comic timing, sentimentality and irascible detachment are a joy in themselves and lend the climax a real emotional heft, Scacchi is largely terrific as a woman drunk on her own hard-luck stories, and Jonah Hauer-King is tuneful and gently nuanced as Archie's lanky son, Frank.

It doesn't ever quite hit the heights I was anticipating − and one can only imagine what John Hurt might have made of Grainger's character if he hadn't been forced to drop out − but at its best it's a valuable, fascinating portrait of the Britain that was and perhaps still is, with a commanding, committed and often brilliant performance at its centre. (3)

***






Photos by me, can you tell?

Basia Bulat (Oslo Hackney) − Barnstorming power-pop princess Basia Bulat lit up London again last week, surely confirming her status as just about the best live act around. A knockout In the Name Of, a three-song autoharp solo spot comprising Heart of My Own, Gold Rush and In the Night, a heart-stopping, brokenhearted cover of Damaged by Primal Scream, and a dizzying version of her 2013 song The Wire that concluded with her screaming into a voice distorter, it often took the breath away. She never stands still; every time, every song sounds new, thanks to her restless imagination, a Sandy Denny-like gift for reworking melodies, and that notable fondness for odd gadgets. If you get the chance to see her, leap at it. (3.5)

See also: I've reviewed other Basia gigs, at the Slaughtered Lamb (my favourite show of 2015), Rough Trade East and − best of all − Hoxton Square Kitchen. ***

FILM



CINEMA: Born Yesterday (George Cukor, 1940) − I had a rough day on Thursday, then I went to the BFI to watch this, and my worries just floated away. It's a film I return to time and again, and it always has the same effect on me.

The movie is dominated by Judy Holliday's tour-de-force as ill-educated, complacent former chorine Billie Dawn, whose gangster fiancé (Broderick Crawford) decides that she needs her edges smoothing off, but doesn't bargain for what happens next. You could write a book about Holliday's voice alone: the working class accent, the seductive impediment, the cartoonishness that accentuates the comedy but is never broad or alienating as Billie transforms from an abused adornment to a self-possessed modern woman.

Garson Kanin's script pulls a punch or two to circumvent the censors (the rogue congressman who Crawford bribes is the exception, not a rule) and William Holden's columnist − the catalyst for Billie's change − comes off as a tad smug, but it's rare to find a mainstream movie that elides so succinctly with my own views: that anti-intellectualism is dangerous, that intellectual posturing is tiresome, and that a woman improving herself for her own sake is more beautiful than if she reforms for love.

Cukor's direction is curiously drab, but almost everything else about the film works, with Howard St. John superb as Crawford's refined, self-hating lawyer, two dozen big laughs, and some eloquent polemicising that's arguably more relevant in 2016 than it was in 1950, dealing as it does with crooked lobbyists, spineless legislators and rampant misogyny.

Its greatest strength, though, remains Holliday's astonishing characterisation: so hilarious, vital, heart-warming, nuanced and specific. She would give other truly great performances, but none as great as this. People who say women can't be funny should have their eyes stapled open and be made to this film. It'll improve their Thursday. (4)

See also: This movie is in my all-time top 100, which you can read about here.

***

Thanks for reading.

Pre-Code mania, The World Moves On, and radicals reunited - Reviews #199

I'm a huge fan of Pre-Code cinema, those films made between the advent of sound cinema and the censorship restrictions imposed from mid-1934 onwards, and of the Forbidden Hollywood DVD series, which has done a fine job of documenting it. I've written about this a few times before, and reviewed the third Forbidden Hollywood set earlier this year. I'd never seen the second, though, so I did. And then I watched Vol. 7 as well.

Forbidden Hollywood, Vol. 2:



The Divorcee (Robert Z. Leonard, 1930) - Married woman Norma Shearer responds to husband Chester Morris’s infidelity by engaging in one of her own, which doesn’t go very well.

Shearer won the 1930 Best Actress Oscar for this museum piece, which does a remarkably good job of examining the double standards inherent in sexual politics, but just isn’t very enjoyable to watch.

She had given great performances already (The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg) and would go on to provide many more (A Free Soul - see below - Romeo & Juliet, The Women), but here she’s hamstrung by mundane dialogue, slow, uninvolving plotting and erratic sound recording – the scene in which she properly loses it with Morris just a lot of high-pitched whining.

She does, however, rock an extremely cool bandana. (2)



A Free Soul (Clarence Brown, 1931) - A provocative Pre-Code drama about a free-spirited young woman (Norma Shearer), the slave-trading, opium-dealing gambler she loves (Clark Gable), and her alcoholic lawyer father (Lionel Barrymore), who just got the utter, utter bastard off a murder charge.

The film was celebrated at the time for Barrymore’s performance – which climaxes with a 12-minute, one-take courtroom speech best filed under ‘narratively preposterous’ – but by far the most interesting thing about it today is Shearer’s modern, naturalistic characterisation, which hurdles some sentimental obstacles to provide a vivid portrait of a passionate, straight-shooting and sexually open young woman, an impression never entirely banished by the moral lessons doled out at the finish. There’s a little of her standing around in gowns like she’s in a George Hurrell photo, or acting in profile as was the early ‘30s fashion, but there’s also fire in her belly and in her loins, an arresting proposition even now.

It’s also an extremely good-looking film, with MGM staffer William Daniels drenching Shearer in light and causing her to positively glow, then striking up interesting but not ostentatious angles wherever he finds himself – the courtroom, the forest or an apartment above a speak-easy.

For those things, James Gleason’s affecting supporting characterisation and the chance to see Gable in his ‘moral flotsam’ era (as the magnificently-named Ace Wilfong), it’s well worth it. Just don’t expect the story to hold up to the finish or Barrymore’s performance to blow you away. He did great things in movies, but not great like his brother Jack, and not often. He’s too crusty, too mawkish, and ultimately too much. (3)



"I thought engineering was a profession, not an affliction."
Female (Michael Curtiz, 1933) - Ruth Chatterton has everything she could want: a dock-off car factory, a ready wit and a succession of young men to boff as her resident organist plays Shanghai Lil. Everything, in fact, except a real man. It's when she meets one of those (George Brent), that her saucy, ordered existence starts to go haywire.

This frank, funny comedy-drama about love, business and embryonic feminism doesn't perhaps retain the courage of its convictions (or else has different convictions to the ones you might like), but it also has a unique premise and vantage point, some stylish direction by Michael Curtiz, and a knockout performance from Chatterton as a blistering business mind (comment reserved on how admirable I find this trait) with a beating heart and a habit of draping herself over cushions on the library floor. (3)



*SOME SPOILERS*
Three on a Match (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) - What a cast: not only Ann Dvorak, Bette Davis and Joan Blondell as the titular three, but also Bogart, Edward Arnold, Warren William, Lyle Talbot, the young Anne Shirley (as Dawn O'Day) and - unbilled - Frankie Darro and Glenda Farrell.

Can the film live up to such an assembly and to its reputation as a landmark of Pre-Code cinema? Well, yes and no. Mostly no.

There's certainly adult material to spare, as Dvorak's heroine turns from a teen girl who reads porn in bed to her classmates, to a well-respected member of society dogged by sexual repression and emotional malaise, to a sallow drug addict tied by romantic obsession to a pathetic coward.

But while her role is interesting and she makes what she can of it, it's nothing like the showcase she got in Scarface. At 64 minutes, this should be a short, sharp shock of a film, utilising her power, naturalism and lack of vanity, while contrasting her character's lot with that of her two old school acquaintances (Joan Blondell and Bette Davis). Instead, there's a cherubic, tousle-haired kid, a host of montages filling us in on various boxing results from 1919 to the early '30s, and so much plot that you start to wonder if it's just a trailer for a mini-series.

As a result, Blondell and William get just one great scene each (she in a reform school, he slapping down a blackmailer) and Davis doesn't get any, perhaps kept on retainer to look after the kid, as that's all her character seems to do, and not very well at that.

It's often bracingly adult, and there are excellent moments, including Dvorak's sad heart-to-heart with William, and that shocking ending, but its thrills are often more of the 'I can't believe they got away with that' variety, than the 'Jeeves, clear a space in my all-time top 10' kind. Like having a whacked-out Dvorak not even bothering to fight for the kid she's left in the next room, and opting instead to taunt Blondell. Or Edward Arnold pulling out his nose hairs.

Interestingly (well, I thought so), Dvorak's trouble - an uncontainable restlessness despite an outwardly perfect life - is one that also informed a lot of film noir, including the 1948 movie Pitfall, in which Dick Powell jacks in the American Dream for who knows what.

I wish Three on a Match was in the same league, but despite Dvorak, the subject matter and a few choice moments, it's ultimately too choppy and unfocused to really come off.

Incidentally, this was early in Bogart's career, when he was only able to intimidate women and five-year-olds. (2.5)



Night Nurse (William Wellman, 1931) - This notorious Pre-Code melodrama from William Wellman mixes mystery, horror, sentiment, social drama, romance, thriller elements and gratuitous scenes of women in their underwear to memorable effect.

Barbara Stanwyck is in dynamic form as a kind-hearted nurse who starts kicking arse when she realises that two kids in her care are in danger, setting her at loggerheads with their drug-addled, dipsomaniac mother, a creepy doctor with a twitch, and Clark Gable - notably cast as a psychotic, woman-beating chauffeur.

It doesn't exactly gel and it's often too unpleasant to truly enjoy, but it is a fast-moving, fascinating snapshot of where Hollywood was heading prior to the censorship clampdown, with good supporting parts for Joan Blondell and a curiously cast Ben Lyon, as well as a notable showcase for Stanwyck, who was at that time the most real, explosive actress in Hollywood. There are moments of uncertainty and awkwardness in what was one of her first performances, but she plays the big moments with rare and unquestionable élan. In simplest terms: was there ever an actress who was better at shouting?

Her star power and street smarts keep this one powering on, even when its disparate elements somewhat jar, and Wellman resorts to no fewer than three scenes of Stanwyck and Blondell in their bras and pants. Not that they don't look nice. (3)

Summary: There are no cast-iron classics in this second volume, but it's a fascinating snapshot of where gender politics were at in the early 1930s, and how Hollywood held a shaky, sometimes nervous mirror up to the modern, sexually-voracious young woman.

Forbidden Hollywood, Vol. 7:



The Hatchet Man (William Wellman, 1932) - One of the most bizarre and - in its way - brilliant films of the early '30s, with Edward G. Robinson as a Chinese hitman with an ancient code of ethics.

The prologue is absolute dynamite, with Eddie walking the mean streets of Chinatown in 1910s San Francisco - director Wellman evoking it with tracking shots and cacophonous gongs - on his way to murder his best friend over an unforgivable transgression. Yes, these are white dudes made up to look 'yellow', in the words of the opening text, but their encounter - stately, unsentimental and yet desperately moving - bleeds with a love and respect for the peculiarities of the Chinese character and culture, and ends with a sickening thud.

After that, we skip forward to the present day (1932), where Robinson has had a haircut, put on a suit and buried his hatchet. He has a solid job not murdering people, a similarly Chinese fiancée (a disastrously miscast Loretta Young) and an extremely untrustworthy new bodyguard (Leslie Fenton from Wellman's The Public Enemy, which is referenced with another trussed-up corpse). But with trouble brewing, we know it won't be long before he has to put an axe up his sleeve again.

The contemporary material is weirdly paced, lacks the effortless grace and beauty of the opening, and suffers as a result of Young's female lead, who's poorly written and played. But for every moment that seems clichéd, racially dubious or extravagantly silly, there's another that's culturally sensitive or utterly new, while Robinson is truly sensational as the eponymous hero, what seems at first mention to be a laughable piece of casting rendered a masterstroke simply through the force of his monumental talent. It may be my favourite of his many great performances: stoical, powerful and redolent with a righteous menace backed up by one of those strict moral codes essential to any self-respecting hitman.

The ending is bloody brilliant too. (3)



"Business is business."
Skyscraper Souls (Edgar Selwyn, 1932) - An exceptional melodrama telling interlocking stories within a 100-storey art deco skyscraper, as owner (and incorrigible lothario) Warren William strives to own the building outright, virginal secretary Maureen O'Sullivan turns heads and falls in love, a lonely jeweller (Jean Hersholt) pines after a model with a past, and a half-dozen other stories come to fruition.

It's unpredictable, novelistic and groundbreaking - paving the way for everything from Grand Hotel to Four Hours to Kill! to Pulp Fiction - with a barnstorming performance from William, and a beautifully tender one from the miraculously talented Hersholt. The only drawback for me is a final five minutes that wanders into the realm of the ridiculous, though that may be a matter of taste. (4)



Employees' Entrance (Roy Del Ruth, 1933) - Hollywood was never shy about trying to repeat its successes. Take Blessed Event, for example, the 1932 Lee Tracy vehicle. That was a massive success, so the next year they took an existing property – the play, Miss Lonelyhearts – changed just about everything about it, and – hey presto – another Tracy film about a scurrilous hack romancing a girl, ruining another’s life and tangling with a gangster, called Advice to the Lovelorn (the film after which I named this blog).

Another of 1932’s big successes was Skyscraper Souls. The next year? Well, swap a 100-storey building for a department store and away we go: once more, Warren William is a workaholic heel manipulating the lives of those in his building, his amorous desires almost spelling the end for a young couple who work there, and his heartlessness leading to at least one conspicuous tragedy. The difference between this and Advice to the Lovelorn? This one’s just as good as the original.

The first thing to say is that William is magnificent. Just magnificent. His career soon slipped into bit parts and B-movies, precisely because the thing he was good at – peddling smut and general malevolence with a raised voice or a raised eyebrow – was outlawed by the imposition of the 1934 Production Code. Here, he’s in his absolute element. There’s barely a nice thing that one can say about his arrogant, selfish, self-made megalomaniac, but only barely: shreds of justification and humanity occasionally flash before your eyes, before he’s back to gloating over his misdeeds, cursing the weak, disrespecting the dead – holding forth with the style of John Barrymore. The film judges his anti-hero as much as it needs to, but no more, an approach that works wonders. (Note to Scorsese: you didn’t do this in The Wolf of Wall Street. Keep up.)

I’m not a big fan of Loretta Young, but she’s fairly good in a role lacking the sanctimony of her later work, and the rest of the cast is spot on, from the never-knowingly-not-one-note Alice White as a frankly disgraceful flapper (she actually starred in a film the previous year called The Naughty Flirt!), Wallace Ford as William’s new right-hand man, and Frank Reicher in a deliciously cynical recurring role as a supplier put out of business by the central sociopath.

The material is also unfailingly great: pithy, exciting, often blackly amusing, with a rich evocation of Depression-era New York, and Pre-Code supremo Roy Del Ruth – who helmed most of Cagney’s fastest, funniest films at Warner, as well as Blessed Event – gives it both barrels throughout, leading to an incredibly satisfying pay-off. Chalk one up for Hollywood unoriginality. Why did they stop there? (4)



Ex-Lady (Robert Florey, 1933) - A chic remake of Illicit - made just two years earlier - with Bette Davis taking over the Stanwyck role of an independent woman who acquiesces to marriage, then watches as it impinges on her happiness through jealousy and conformity.

Whereas Illicit was drab, talky and stiflingly serious, this one is plush, slim and occasionally amusing, with the heroine now a fashion artist for the likes of Cosmopolitan, and the completely rewritten script finding space for Frank McHugh as a culture vulture secretly obsessed with his own wife.

Ironically, this lighter, shorter treatment makes the film's themes of compromise and emotional maturity slightly more coherent, but the film does still suffer from the same problems: the material remains muddled, reaches few conclusions that aren't staggeringly obvious, and just isn't that fun to watch, especially when it turns nasty and moralistic towards the end.

Davis, looking unusually glamorous, is quite good in the lead but still learning her craft, and unable to transcend the script. Her characterisation ultimately lacks the depth of Stanwyck's, though also the early-talkie stiltedness.

One of the oddest things about the movie is the appearance of a big bluebottle during two of the love scenes. At 47:26, a fly crawls around on Davis's arm while she's necking with Raymond; then at 59:34, there's another one. Very odd; who was on no-flies-during-the-romantic-bits duty on this one? (2)

Summary: Though the packaging is merely functional - whereas once it was exquisite - and the discs are of the oft-maligned DVD-R variety, this is perhaps the best Forbidden Hollywood set yet, featuring two titanic achievements of the Pre-Code era, one extraordinarily odd minor gem, and just the single piece of dispensable pap.

I'm going to get the sixth set next. I've put Vol. 2 on Amazon Marketplace already.

***

Joan Blondell double-bill:



I've Got Your Number (Ray Enright, 1934) - A ludicrously entertaining Pre-Code comedy-thriller, with Pat O'Brien as an alarmingly cocksure, slightly sexist telephone repairman who spends both his work time and his free time getting his end away, until he falls in love with a switchboard operator (Joan Blondell) and finds himself neck-deep in intrigue.

It's lightning-paced fun: extremely well put-together, with fine performances from the leads, a delightful bit from Glenda Farrell as a phony, horny mystic, and a deft balance between tension, humour and pathos − the latter largely provided by Eugene Pallette as a gravel-throated foreman whose bark is worse than this bite.

If you like it, you'll be pleased (if surprised) to learn that it isn't the only film of its kind: William Wellman made a romantic crime-comedy about trouble-shooting phone engineers the next month, called Looking for Trouble. This one's sexier, but that one climaxes with a recreation of the 1933 Long Beach earthquake so realistic that it still turns up in documentaries, so take your pick. (3.5)



Havana Widows (Ray Enright, 1933) - A very funny Pre-Coder, with Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell as struggling showgirls who head for Havana, hoping to fit a frisky millionaire (like Guy Kibbee) with a breach of promise suit. Instead, Blondell falls for the Guy's dishy son (Lyle Talbot), while her rightly suspicious boyfriend (Allen Jenkins) turns up in town.

Some of these Blondell and Farrell pictures are dull and contrived, others are an absolute treat, and it's impossible to guess which will fall where. This one's firmly in the latter camp, with a steady stream of top-quality jokes - including some great sight gags - and a hilarious supporting performance from peerless character comic Frank McHugh, whose incompetent lawyer is drunk for the entire film. (3.5)

***

... another Stanwyck. Only the second in this update. I'm slipping.


She doesn't look like this at any point during the film. Nice, though, isn't it?

*MINOR SPOILERS*
Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937) - This lush soaper features perhaps Barbara Stanwyck's most widely-praised performance, but the whole film is done in such broad strokes that there's no room for those little details that always lit up her greatest performances.

Stanwyck is the brash, peroxided working-class mother who marries into wealth, then tries to do right by her daughter (Anne Shirley) after the marriage heads south. It's one of those films where characters act with such a cartoonish lack of self-awareness that it's difficult to suspend your disbelief − Stanwyck has spent years in high society but would still apparently turn up to a country club looking like a drag queen on the game − though its (often calculated) big moments are likely to do a job on you, even as you realise you're being manipulated. The best of the bunch is that scene between mother and daughter on the sleeper train, a heart-melting evocation of enduring love that's difficult to wrench from your mind afterwards.

The concept of the 'star vehicle' is largely a redundant one now, but that's what Stella Dallas is. Ironic, then, that it's more a portrait of what Hollywood execs in 1937 thought Stanwyck was best at − sentimental, one-note matriarchal fare − than what she actually was: namely beguiling sincerity and deft, self-mocking humour, spiked with a desperate vulnerability.

She's still good, though − of course she is − as is Shirley, whose approach to line-readings is to try to make each more frenziedly impassioned than the last, a tactic that works surprisingly well in these surroundings. Her speech about the bonds we form in adversity being the ones that tend to really matter also seems to contain some essential truth, in a film that's often more artifice than reality. (2.5)

***

... and another John Ford movie. One of his most interesting, in some respects, though certainly not one of his best.



The World Moves On (John Ford, 1934) - John Ford’s Downton Abbey is wildly erratic but, amidst much contrivance and the clunk of bad dialogue, contains some of the most heightened, potent romantic sequences in the history of American film. For that, some visual flourishes and perhaps the odd historical quirk, it’s simply a must for anyone who loves this period of cinema.

Kicking off with a prologue set in 1825, decamping to World War One for most of its duration, then closing with a coda that takes in the Roaring ‘20s and beyond, it’s a family saga of the type popular in the early ‘30s, that follows a family of cotton magnates, its disparate, wealthy sons and daughters spanning the globe from New Orleans to Britain to France and Germany, and, in the case of Franchot Tone and Madeleine Carroll, falling madly and hopelessly in love.

Their romantic sequences are utterly astonishing: almost parodical in their perfection, as extraordinarily potent, moving and yet realistic as any I’ve ever seen. The first is a garden sequence, during that prologue, in which the pair obliquely, tentatively and then explicitly discuss how their love can never be. The second, in 1914, has their descendants haunted by that lost love: feeling they’ve seen each other before, the viewer’s spine-tingling as an 89-year-old melody comes to them from somewhere deep within. And the next one, with Tone dropping in on Carroll unexpectedly, convalescing after a bomb blast, is only a mite less wondrous.

There are other moments that work too, including a dizzying wedding flashback that briefly reinvents the grammar of cinema, shifting from a line of dialogue on an ocean liner to a still photo, which turns out to be on a submarine door, to footage of the nuptials themselves, to a watery action sequence that’s at first invigoratingly voyeuristic, and then – when you realise exactly what’s happening – a battle between vivid direction and extremely daft plotting.

And that’s where Downton Abbey comes into this, for where else will you find such coincidences: the family conveniently representing competing sides in the war, then facing off on the field of battle and, you think for a moment, about to meet in an interrogation room, in a major subplot that is set up and then must surely have been chopped prior to release! Nobody has any self-awareness, things are worth exactly $100m, someone can become “the richest woman in the world” – it’s like it was written by me, aged seven. And there’s bad dialogue to spare. Often Ford and his talented leads can triumph over it, but then there are passages of stilted discomfort or excessive exposition – like Tone’s 1925 speech, in which he tells each member of the family what they have been doing for the past few years.

And then you have Stepin Fetchit, providing his inimitably racist, unfunny comic relief, as an African-American who accidentally joins the French Foreign Legion. Debate still rages over whether Fetchit was an important standard-bearer for black entertainers – giving minority audiences someone to cheer and blazing a trail for other, less embarrassing, performers to follow – or if his persona of a black man so stupid that he could barely speak was not only hideously offensive, but also enduringly damaging in that it confirmed society’s prejudices in the minds of audiences. Whichever of those is true – and I actually think that both are the case, I have never laughed at anything he has ever done. What Ford does do is ultimately place him on a narrative – if not a societal – level with his white counterparts, and puts him in a context where his inarticulacy is shown as a character trait, rather than a racial one – a crucial distinction in keeping with the director’s progressive politics (two years later he would confound contemporary expectations by devoting the final shot of The Prisoner of Shark Island to the reunion of a black family, which is basically unheard of in ‘30s Hollywood films). If only he cared as much about giving Manchester its due. Audiences in northern England will doubtless be deeply troubled by Irish actor Lumsden Hare doing the worst Mancunian accent in the history of the world. For any foreigners/Londoners reading, “tha knows” is a pointless appendage to sentences added by Yorkshiremen, not people from Manchester.

In terms of Ford’s visual style here, there are some very showy and clever decisions, like the artfully directed sequence in which Reginald Denny's German soldier returns home, Ford’s camera focusing on the doorway, Tone then exiting through it, as the family unit is complete once more. The sequence is set up with a shot of their anxious anticipation that is quite exquisitely, recognisably Fordian in composition.

It’s also an interesting movie in Ford’s movie for his visceral war footage – including some very tasty shakycam – which is very convincing, even if there is far too much of it, and an abundance of tracking shots. Ford used these sparingly once his style was cemented, but in the years after training under legendary German filmmaker (and fellow Fox contractee) F. W. Murnau in 1927-8, he employed them a lot: in silent films like Four Sons and the recently rediscovered Upstream and, once sound equipment became more mobile, throughout The World Moves On.

Even though it is far more impressive in the way it’s directed than written, its viewpoint, haunted by the Great War and the Wall Street Crash, opposed to arming and nationalism, advocating faith and family, is a fascinating snapshot of morality as it existed in 1934 – and of its director’s preoccupations at that time, especially for those familiar with his exuberant flagwaving (and career as a propagandist) throughout the coming conflict. Ford was one of the few filmmakers of the period whose complex, constantly evolving politics can be seen through his work. Though he lied a lot in interviews, there seems to be some truth in what he told Peter Bogdanovich in the 1960s: that his main reason for making movies was to articulate the way he saw the world. He described himself the next year as “a socialist democrat – always left”, and this is not only a heartfelt advocation of pacifist politics, but also one of the first Hollywood films to depict the Nazis as warmongers, a practice soon clamped down upon by the fascist sympathiser in charge of the censorship office, Joseph Breen.

There’s plenty to get your teeth into, then, and a few scenes to truly and unreservedly treasure, in this big, silly, sometimes magnificent Fordian film. (2.5)

***



Return of the Secaucus Seven (John Sayles, 1979) - This early indie from writer-director John Sayles is an exploration of early-30s malaise, as a group of friends talk about their frustrations – and minor victories – in life and love.

The direction is primitive and the acting can be wooden, with only Mark Arnott and regular Sayles collaborator David Strathairn staying free of splinters, but Sayles is perhaps the best, most naturalistic writer of dialogue in movies, and his script is full of insights into the sacrifices and difficulties of adulthood, as we chase fulfilment through romance, artistic expression and worthy work.

The director himself appears briefly as Howie, a hotel delivery man with three young kids, who’s perhaps the most interesting character in this thoughtful, intelligent and ultimately unresolved film. (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

The Way Way Back, Greta Gerwig and hating the moo-er - Reviews #171

I haven't seen many movies over the past three weeks, but the ones I have seen have almost all been fantastic. I think my good film radar must have been fixed. Ratings are out of four, if you weren't aware of exactly how I rolled.



The Way Way Back (Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, 2013) - This is like a big hug in cinematic form, as awkward, taciturn teen Duncan (Liam James) is taken under the wing of a flamboyant motormouth (Sam Rockwell) whom he happens upon at a rundown waterpark. It's a bit like Adventureland, a lot like every other coming-of-age film you've ever seen - the stifling domestic strife, the pubescent blushing, then the sudden blossoming of one's self-confidence - and there are familiar lines and some unconvincing readings to go with the trite, cliched character of the boozy, easy next-door neighbour. But damn it if this isn't the funniest, loveliest film I've seen in ages, with a perfectly-pitched central relationship, a sure-footed story leading to a hugely satisfying climax, and a staggering performance from Rockwell as the wise, reflective, comically phantasmagoric Owen: a true screen maverick but one with a real and recognisable human frailty. If he doesn't win every award going, this world can do one. (4)

***



Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2013) - What a great film: Baumbach doing his thing, and Gerwig doing hers, this plotless ramble through the life of a 27-year-old dancer - who encounters assorted epiphanies and disappointments - shot like Woody's Manhattan or À bout de souffle, scripted with a nod to Whit Stillman and emanating its writer-director's usual good-natured angst, uncertainty about contemporary life and warm-hearted, off-kilter sentimentality.

It wobbles briefly with the introduction of Adam Driver as the poorly-enunciating would-be lothario Lev ("Ahoy, sexy!") who lacks charisma and mangles his dialogue, but that's a minor quibble in a movie dominated by Gerwig's arresting, appealing, frankly extraordinary performance, and nailing a multitude of experiences and emotions ill-served by cinema. Not just its headily romantic sensibility, epitomised by Gerwig's monologue about what she's looking for in life, but the comfort and painful nostalgia of visiting your childhood home, the premature internal ageing of 20-somethings who feel their boat has passed, and the acute anguish that comes with feeling entirely lonely and alienated in a theoretically idyllic place. It cares about in-jokes, the intensity of true friendship (in the shape of Mickey Sumner, whose chemistry with Gerwig is absolute), and the random, aimless but fulfilling way in which we muddle through this world in a way that's very unusual. It's also a very funny film in that shambling Baumbachian way, jokes tossed this way and that, muttered, thrown away and occasionally properly milked: like the beauty that closes the picture.

In the same way as the director's debut, Kicking and Screaming, it seems at first to be a succession of mild comic sketches, but is really a character study of a conflicted, grown-up child afraid of the world into which she's been unceremoniously dumped. As such, its cumulative impact is considerable, though its tactics are somewhat different to that earlier Baumbach film, setting Gerwig up for a fall that we can see coming a mile off, but she apparently can't - or perhaps won't. Eschewing melodrama but not afraid to confront real life, the film then leaves us with an ending that's pure Woody - in fact, pure Manhattan - but which works perfectly, without feeling like a '70s cast-off in the way that, say, a J. J. Abrams film does.

All that and Gerwig's dancer spinning and striding to the strains of Bowie's Modern Love, jump-cutting through New York, oblivious to everything except the joy of movement.

Like I said: it's a great film. (4)

See also: Gerwig also appeared in Baumbach's Greenberg. She's similarly fantastic there.

***



The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice (Orson Welles, 1952) - In 1948, Orson Welles left Hollywood, the town in which he had arrived with such fanfare eight years earlier. After the success of Kane, he watched - helpless - as his next three projects were taken out of his hands, recut and sometimes even re-shot. His fifth picture, Macbeth, was a travesty that he failed to deliver for two years, apparently disillusioned with movies and burnt out at 33.

What he did next was startling. The former boy genius, who had conquered the worlds of theatre, radio and film by his 26th birthday, simply became a nomad, pitching up in Europe to fashion fiercely independent projects, which he funded by taking on any - and every - acting role that came his way.

Othello, his first film free from the shackles of Hollywood, took a staggering three years to complete, with filming in Venice, Tuscany and Morocco, and even now isn't exactly finished: there are at least five versions in existence, including the one that won the Palme d'Or in 1952 (available solely on French VHS), the enduringly controversial 1992 "restoration" - the only one I'd previously seen - and this edit, an American cut released in 1955, which was issued on a Criterion laserdisc in the '90s, and has been handily uploaded to YouTube.

I haven't seen the restoration since 2005, so I'm afraid I can't be too specific on the differences here (perhaps a blessing), but this version uses different takes or angles of several scenes, overdubs Canadian actress Suzanne Cloutier with the pure, imploring tones of Gudrun Ure - a Scot - and features some very out-of-sync dialogue, due to Welles' endless tinkering in the post-Cannes editing process (a problem remedied somewhat in the restoration).

A restless innovator, egomaniac and improviser who had repeatedly tried to make films with a pre-recorded dialogue track (oh Orson), he never seemed to regard poor syncing as a problem - perhaps figuring we'd be so wowed by everything else that we wouldn't notice - but it's a basic technical flaw that detracts a little from some of these mid-period pictures. This '55 cut also has written rather than spoken credits - at the request of the distributor - and the original recording of the score, which was perhaps unwisely re-done in 1992.

Welles, his hair thickened, his face subtly darkened and his voice booming in the unmistakable manner, is Othello, a world away from the peculiar greenface, cod-Caribbean routine that his Shakespearean rival - Olivier - would follow 13 years later. Emoting not wisely but too well, and overcoming a frankly odd, declamatory reading of the "It gives me wonder" speech, he's in rare form, throbbing with torment as his mind is poisoned by his malevolent aide. Biographer Simon Callow has long suggested that Welles was a great speaker rather than a great actor: a mellifluously-voiced reader of dialogue who rarely engaged with his characters. It’s often true, but here his performance seems deeply felt: perhaps something about a great man laid low by whispering campaigns and his own insecurities chimed with him – or perhaps his great and lifelong love of Shakespeare is to thank. Opposite him, Cloutier is a somewhat overly angelic Desdemona, though Micheál MacLiammóir - Welles' friend and nemesis from his first professional assignment at Dublin's Gate Theatre - is a magnificent foil, making for a scintillatingly cynical Iago.

The film's troubled production makes it a genuinely weird experience - it's a film whose abrupt, disjointed style takes some getting used to, and even then can prove something of a liability. At times its bitty form adds to the sense of a fragmented nightmare unfolding at strange angles, in snippets of prose often spat, strained or strangled, but at other times it's simply flawed filmmaking, the director once again robbed of the tools, the time or the money to meet his vision - but at least left largely to his own devices within those limitations.

Despite that patchwork quality, which includes non-matching reaction shots that flicker for a mere instant, it's still a film of overpowering intensity and rich atmosphere, set entirely around the castle and its puddled environs and lit by rich, chiaroscuro visuals both gothic and baroque. Welles' typically imposing use of sound, is, if not always exactly in sync with the pictures, at least a striking tapestry of haunting music and arresting, often intensely involving oratory.

His fabled script-editing skills, meanwhile, which here involve snipping a four-hour play to 90 minutes and would find a still more testing challenge with Chimes at Midnight, are much in evidence, with the story stripped down to its central conflict, and beginning and ending with the funerals of Othello and Desdemona, a claustrophobic, fatalistic move that essentially turns Shakespeare into a writer of film noir.

This clever framing and the film's disorientating, shadow-drenched, perma-dripping presentation - alive with misery, malice and a mounting horror - form the perfect environment for Welles and MacLiammóir to wrestle with one another, their genuine mutual obsession and antipathy fuelling a deliciously unhealthy screen relationship in which Shakespeare's greatest baddie tries to destroy his boss's life. "I hate the moo-er," MacLiammóir so memorably draws at the play's opening, and indeed he does. He's sensational, so is Welles – giving arguably the greatest performance of a long career marred by minimal quality control – and so is the film: still its director's most underrated movie, and back in 1952 a telling statement of intent from a true maverick. (3.5)

***



Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012)

Ten observations about Lincoln:

1. I heard tell once of an actor from London who was vastly overpraised for his work in Gangs of New York and There Will Be Blood, after emerging from the studio every day with bits of the scenery stuck in his teeth. Then, one day, this actor got to play Abraham Lincoln and he turned out to be the greatest Lincoln that the big screen had ever seen - and I'll confess that I've made rather a study of them, Henry Fonda in Young Mr Lincoln being the previous high watermark - playing not the myth, but the man, and providing new insights into a character we thought we knew. The moral of the story, gentleman, is that despite being the most appalling luvvie, he's also one hell of an actor. Sometimes.

2. It's an unusually mature film for Spielberg, with the jaw-dropping caveat that only he would show Lincoln's assassination from the point of view of the President's youngest son, which is self-parodical to the point of tears. The most striking screen presentation of the murder remains that at the start of John Ford's The Prisoner of Shark Island.

3. The score is horrible. Every time the film approaches some genuine moment of understated, human truth, John Williams pops us to tip a mixture of cheese and treacle over it.

4. The script has been both lauded and derided, but the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It's intelligently devised and sometimes admirably complex in its morality, but also has concessions to cliche, alternately explains too much and too little of the political developments integral to the plot, and unwisely plays out the voting climax in real time, and with a distinct lack of realism. As a result, the film - despite many fine moments - has no dramatic climax.

5. David Strathairn is one of American cinema's greatest treasures and is never less than thoroughly fantastic. Here, his affectionate uber-pragmatist is a fine counterpoint to the ambitious, single-minded Honest Abe.

6. The rest of the supporting cast is ridiculously good, with Hal Holbrook turning up to gobble scenes like a jowly old lizard, Sally Field proving a fragile, combustible Mary Todd, and Tommy Lee Jones peddling that usual brand of hard-earned wisdom.

7. I like the bit where Jones takes off his wig and you realise he's Lex Luthor.

8. In the opening battle scenes, Spielberg has a delightful time using a trick John Ford once told him about: holding the horizon at either the top or the bottom of the frame. The surrender sequence seems to bear the stain of Sam Fuller's Run of the Arrow too.

9. That hagiographic, drippingly sentimental opening scene, which seeks to "print the legend", before the film sets about getting to the truth, is still extraordinarily awful, and makes The Littlest Rebel look like the height of neorealism.

10. It's sorely missing a scene where Day-Lewis yells: "I emancipate yoooooouuuuur milkslaaaaave!" and beats John Wilkes Booth to death with a bowling pin.

(3)

See also: I did that last joke in this piece about "Lincoln on film" too. It traces depictions of Lincoln on the big screen from The Birth of a Nation to Black Dynamite, and it's got clips and everything.

***



Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941)

"You been in Hollywood long?"
"Long enough."
"Trying to crash the movies or something?"
"Something like that."
"I guess that's pretty hard to do, huh?"
"I guess so. I never got close enough to find out."

Preston Sturges' immortal Hollywood satire stars Joel McCrea as a frustrated director who sets out to craft "a true canvas of the suffering of humanity", but first has to find out what trouble is - and gets more than he ever bargained for. Veronica Lake is the acerbic wannabe actress who buys the phony tramp some ham and eggs.

This was the thousandth film I ever saw (I can't remember whether that was by accident and design, though it was number one on my "to see" list for years, back when Sturges' films were unavailable on any format in the UK). Though I must have seen it seven or eight times now, I'm still discovering new things: a line or an industry in-joke here or there that gets caught in the maelstrom of razor-sharp dialogue, or Sullivan's sneezing fits and itchy clothes calling back to the titles of his early hits: Hey Hey in the Hayloft and Ants in Your Plants of 1939. Robert Greig's magnificent monologue about the foolishness of the director's opus also seems to grow wiser and more insightful with each passing year.

Sturges' most serious-minded work, Sullivan's Travels remains one of the best, most ambitious and most thematically dizzying films ever made, being a message movie that argues that comedy is as important as any message movie, but which turns into a bleak portrait of social degradation at its midway point.

Its first half is just astonishingly funny: full of unforgettable, rapid-fire dialogue that seems to spear a different target each time - pretension, hard-luck stories, privileged upbringings, Hollywood's obsession with sex and suspicion of communism, and that's just in the opening scene - and topped off with the great supporting actor Eric Blore falling into a swimming pool. The second is heavy, emotionally draining and full of haunting, Expressionistic imagery, before the gloom is lifted in that legendary sequence at the gospel church, Mickey Mouse and Pluto - projected onto a cotton sheet - giving ex-cons a moment of transcendence from their brutal everyday lives.

Significantly, while Sturges is more celebrated today for his incredible exchanges than his beloved slapstick ("a pratfall is better than anything," concluded his rules of cinema), the film has no fewer than four extended silent sequences. While the "jackrabbit" set piece isn't really my sort of thing - above-par though it might be - the others are superb: a gutting, wryly comic montage of vagrant life, a thriller sequence shot like a noir, and a madcap, lightning-paced, brilliantly-choreographed "studio tour", complete with a cameo for Sturges, Lake pushing over two "Red Indians" and Franklin Pangborn getting bummed by a door.

Pangborn was one of Sturges' stock company, many of whom turn up here - Jimmy Conlin, William Demarest, Alan Bridges, Porter Hall - and all of whom are in fine form. Perhaps above all his other, more celebrated talents, Sturges was a great director of actors, magnificent at drawing laughs from them, just as good at eliciting a beguiling sincerity that they would never match with anyone else (take a look at Eddie Bracken's two lead performances for him, then watch Bracken elsewhere). "There's always a girl in the picture," McCrea says at one point, and while he's as good as ever, an extraordinary amount of the film's charm and timeless appeal comes from Lake, belying her bruised critical reputation, whose impeccable comic timing, considerable natural gifts (that voice!) and faultless underplaying give the film an immeasurable amount of punch, emotion and charm. I'm a vegetarian, but even I might have to give in to Lake's pouty demand of "buy me some ham and eggs, before I bite you".

Few directors have ever produced a film as unusual, incisive or original, a film whose disparate elements - slapstick, satire, social drama and polemic - congeal into such a staggering, successful whole. The great irony is that while Sturges' message is "It's OK to just make people laugh" - and his films have given me inutterable joy over the years - he had more to say than just about any other American filmmaker of his era. And that while Sullivan never made a serious, "important" film, Sturges did. (4)

***



The Marriage Circle (Ernst Lubitsch, 1924) - Lubitsch's favourite of his own films, musicalised by the director eight years later as One Hour with You, is a perfectly crafted comedy-drama on his favoured topic of adultery. Monte Blue, in the role later immortalised by Maurice Chevalier, is a happily married man who's powerless under the spell of his wife's best friend, the saucy, vampish Mizzi (Marie Prevost). Meanwhile, his spouse is enthusiastically if sexlessly pursued by his own best friend. It's missing the catchy tunes and lush romanticism of the later film, but it's funnier, sexier and more resonant (thanks to its greater realism): masterfully conceived and directed, and with an exceptional turn from Prevost. (4)

***



*SPOILERS*
Ramrod (André de Toth, 1947) - This early "Western noir" - a delicious bastard genre that emerged in '47 and seemed to disappear just two years later - is one of the oddest films ever to come out of mainstream Hollywood, a brooding, perplexing, morally murky film that fills its standard genre template with strange details, peculiarly abrupt plot developments and weird, censor-baiting characters, including a femme fatale who gets turned on by making men die for her. Bizarrely paced and packed with liars and cowards - somewhat at odds with the preferred presentation of the West - it's also notable for reuniting the leads of Preston Sturges' astonishing Sullivan's Travels (see above), giving a lie to Joel McCrea's famous line that "life's too short for two films with Veronica Lake".

Lake, with her iconic "peekaboo" hairstyle wrenched into a sort of glamourless cob loaf, stars as a strong-willed woman who declares war on her sadistic ex-boyfriend (Preston Foster) and gruff rancher father (avuncular, dithering comedian Charlie Ruggles - what the hell?!). Meanwhile her "ramrod" (ranch foreman), reformed alcoholic McCrea, has his own axe to grind, and comes complete with an erratic, hot-blooded second-in-command (Don DeFore).

Starting with a sequence that's more confusing than mysterious, subsequently hitting us with a solid minute of improbably expressed exposition, and displaying almost no conception of when to cut a scene off or let it run, De Toth and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (who loved to start in the middle) seem almost reluctant to give their movie a chance. And yet, despite a litany of narrative problems, it is a fine film, featuring some of the most unusual, unconventional and multi-layered characters of the era. Is Lake cold, calculating and manipulative, or just beaten, lonely and out for what's hers? DeFore thinks nothing of shooting a man in cold blood and provokes a land war through lust alone, but he's also a fiercely loyal friend who'll risk his life for his love rival. And McCrea, for all that nobility that came so easily to the actor, says only of his friend's admission that he committed pre-meditated murder: "I thought you did."

McCrea is always good, but the same can't be said of all his Westerns, which are often more comfort movie than classic. He made almost nothing save oaters from 1946 onwards (when he himself bought a ranch), and if we except the transcendent Stars in My Crown on the grounds that it doesn't really count, then the only one that's truly great is Ride the High Country. This is comfortably in the second tier, though, with offbeat entries like Four Faces West and Colorado Territory. In fact, it's so good that he isn't even the best thing about it. Though he delivers another of those wonderfully understated performances so memorably described here as "Joel McCrea mumblecore" - which she meant as an insult, but I regard as high praise - he's competing for attention with both Lake (the director's then wife) and DeFore.

The 4' 11" Lake, that most '40s of actresses, was far, far more talented than she is ever given credit for, but her strange, mercurial gifts seem almost entirely natural. There's that exquisite voice, which pitches you as surely into the realm of old movie escapism as Jean Arthur's, and that pouty, unmoving, deceptively intense face with which she insistently, beseechingly if hardly expansively emotes. Here, she's terrifyingly steely, imploringly vulnerable and seductively passionate, often all at the same time, and she's matched, perhaps at times exceeded, by DeFore, whom I have never seen do anything comparable to his performance here: deep, complex, moving, and alive with danger, compassion and a smirking grasp of his own mortality. Incidentally, he made one of his first appearances as a soldier in The Human Comedy, with Western noir icon Bob Mitchum as one of his wingmen.

Ramrod is a film of weird longueurs, complete with generic, boring sequences of people riding or climbing. It explodes into life in fits and starts, cramming in plot one minute, going quiet the next. And it ends in somewhat conventional style, despite a strangely erotic final close-up. But it's a mad, wonderful, ferocious little Western: starkly shot, often devastatingly played and full of brilliant moments: perhaps the best and most sensual has the diminutive Lake cradling the sleeping, injured McCrea's head, her expression the very model of inscrutability.

If not quite the sum of its parts, Ramrod is - at least - a film of remarkable parts. (3)

***



"He's got a shooter!"
Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (Declan Lowney, 2013) - When I first read the premise of the Alan Partridge movie, my reaction was: "He... err, what now?" Turning Norwich's finest nasally-whistling, self-preserving, leather-gloved "disc-J" into a hostage negotiator seemed perhaps a step too far, even for someone who's driven to Dundee in his bare feet, threatened his former boss with a wheel of cheese and been de-bagged at a pharmaceuticals conference.

In the event, the movie milks the outlandish and surprisingly apt premise for much of its worth, trading on Alan's resurgent egotism as he becomes the centre of a media storm, and giving Coogan's monstrous creation free rein to posture, fantasise and bore to his heart's content. It seems entirely fitting that Alan would only find swelling fame and a captive audience through something as horrific and transient as an armed siege, and that he would have no qualms about turning it to his advantage.

But while a sitcom character can be almost unredeemably unpleasant across a half-hour, you can't get away with that in a movie. This can be where big screen translations fall down, slipping into slack sentiment or misguided mawkishness. Alpha Papa generally avoids that and, in one extraordinary scene, produces a depth of emotion you would have thought impossible for Alan. In a moment that reminded me of those text exchanges between Chris Huhne and his estranged son that turned up in the papers the other month, he offers a muddled final message to his kids, while being threatened (jokily?) by a loose cannon of a cop - a fellow siege history afficionado, as it so happens. Another beautifully-played scene sees Lynn reacting wth barely-restrained euphoria to being named as Alan's next-of-kin.

But a solid plot - quite imaginatively spun out across 90 minutes - fidelity to its central character, and a welcome, subtle emotional edge would be worth nothing if it wasn't funny.

It is.

Replete with Alan's familiar preoccupations (himself, FM rock), prejudices (gays, gypsies, the Irish) and disappointments (his children), it's full of inspired one-liners and pathetic parable-like reminiscences - I, Partridge having apparently stirred something in the writers. There are also plenty of visual gags, which are mostly good, and a few gross-out jokes, a touch above what you might expect, but not much more than that. Crucially, it retains a resolutely British, parochial sense of humour, refusing to broaden the characters' narrow worldview in search of a global audience. And for those who've worked in local news in recent years, there are some sharp, well-aimed barbs at tieless, downsizing, tech-obsessed management types. It is perhaps better in its first half, which is breathlessly funny, or perhaps you just can't laugh at that frequency, intensity and volume for an entire film. Except The Other Guys.

While Colm Meaney offers a bit of dramatic weight as Alan's psychopathic counterpoint, and there are a couple of nice moments with Tim Key and I'm Alan Partridge's Lynn and Michael, the rest of the supporting cast is rather lacklustre, with Phil Cornwell's recovering alcoholic seeming completely out of place.

So the whole thing has to be powered by Coogan, and it is: a nasally-whistling, self-preserving, leather glove-slapping tour-de-force that makes the weaker stuff bearable, the fair stuff good, and the good stuff great.

If it's possible to compare such disparate media, my favourite Partridge is still the Knowing Me, Knowing You radio show, but they did a far better job with the movie than I could have hoped for. Especially when I read the premise. (3)

***



*SPOILERS*
Wait Until Dark (Terence Young, 1967) is famous for featuring one of the most terrifying screen villains of all time: bespectacled little girl-next-door Gloria, who reacts to being called a "monster" by shouting and throwing saucepans on the floor. It also features Alan Arkin as a homicidal maniac.

Sporting a pudding-basin and some very '60s shades, he's one of a trio of hoods terrorising repeatedly self-proclaimed "bliiiahnd laihdy" Audrey Hepburn in search of a doll stuffed with heroin. Any idea where it might be? I have, but this stagy film still plays some neat tricks on its audience, on Hepburn and on Arkin, even if these might have worked even better in the oppressive, pared-down atmosphere of the theatre.

Aside from excessively informing us that Hepburn is blind - "I go to blind school," she explains, in case anyone hadn't quite grasped what was going on - the script is nicely done: an erudite, high-concept scareathon in the Spiral Staircase mold that begins with an absolutely irresistible scene featuring the three crims and illuminated by Arkin's electrifying presence. After that, he's given surprisingly little to do except wear some disguises, until a disappointingly nasty, conventional climax that sees the tables repeatedly turning in a room littered with broken glass and lit by matches, but bottoms out with a knife-crazed frenzy and an attempted rape, an overlong, poorly-directed sequence notable only for one exceptional scare (you'll know it when you see it).

Instead, the bulk of this cleverly-plotted suspenser is built around an elaborate game of role play, as Mike Talman (Richard Crenna) - hopefully named after William Talman, who gave us one of the screen's great baddies in The Hitch-Hiker - appears to come to the aid of the smart, naïve, deceptively resourceful Hepburn, whose beloved husband is supposedly at the centre of a gathering storm. To help her, though, he needs that doll.

Crenna and Hepburn are both very good, with a very thin Audrey overcoming a little woodenness by amping it up in a way she rarely did, but the film is dominated by Arkin's presence, such is the majesty of that opening sequence. It's only when his malicious megalomaniac gives up his aura of omniscient control that the film fails to satisfy. Despite that underwhelming pay-off, this analogue Panic Room does a good job of playing on our fears, giving us a character to really root for, and then putting her in jeopardy through a deft mixture of gimmickry, stock shocks and invention, effectively rooted in the character's ocular deficiency.

This movie got me thinking about which senses are underrated by the cinema. I have an idea for a film in which Janet Leigh is tormented by androgynous, sex-crazed, drug-fuelled bikers, hampered all the while by having no sense of touch. I call it... Touch of Evil. Sorry. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.