Clint, more Clint and back to the Southern Wild - Reviews #151

Dearest reader,

I haven't got around to that other Dardenne brothers film just yet, but I have watched a documentary about a chimp, a horror-mystery starring Joan Blondell and a lot of movies featuring Clint Eastwood. I hope that this in some way compensates.

Respectfully yours,

Rick



Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012)

"For the animals that didn’t have a daddy to put them on the boat, the end of the world already happened. They’re down below, trying to breathe through water."

What a stunning, dreamlike film this is, and what a beautiful, credible and unique performance lies at its centre, courtesy of the then six-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, whose Hushpuppy is one of the great characters of recent decades. On second viewing, Beasts' many wondrous strengths seem greater, its few shortcomings slighter and its plotting more cohesive ("I wanna be cohesive") than at first glance.

The story sees Wallis's tiny titan facing down flooding, fire and famishment – while dealing with the busted remnants of her family – as the beasts of the title course towards her slum area, trampling all in their wake. These fearsome creatures, unleashed when Hushpuppy knocks her seriously ill father to the ground, almost certainly exist only in her mind, and – depending on your point of view – represent either rampaging global warming, the enormity of death or, to my mind, the need to "fix what was broken": her relationship with her impulsive, troubled but loving father (the excellent Dwight Henry) – and perhaps her 'gator-eating mother too.

Beasts is remarkable in every way: stunning to look at, full of jaw-droppingly lyrical dialogue and blessed with a triumphant, eminently hummable Cajun soundtrack. Lit by a multitude of brilliant sequences that seem to come out of nowhere, but don't, and dominated by Wallis's heroics (including some excellent screaming), it packs an emotional punch like nothing else I've seen in years. (4)

See also: My original review of the film is here.

***



Project Nim (James Marsh, 2011) - Project Nim is like Au hasard Balthazar, as an innocent creature is tossed around by the whims of humans, only it's all real and its hero isn't a doleful donkey but a chimp who smokes weed. Nim is wrenched from his mother at birth and adopted by an annoying hippy, who breastfeeds him for two years. It's all part of a plan, put in place by a Columbia professor, to see whether a chimp - raised as a human - can be taught to construct sentences in sign language. But personal conflicts and simmering jealousies throw the (questionable) venture into disarray, and Nim is variously abused, disorientated and admonished for his animalistic behaviour, as he passes through the hands of various handlers - many of them well-meaning and most still moved to tears by his plight - only for events to take a truly chilling turn.

It's an absolutely fascinating, remarkable story that's fairly well told. Marsh mixes reams of excellent archive footage with forthright, often insightful interviews, while introducing a great gimmick, central to our understanding of the film, in which the signing between Nim and his handlers is presented in subtitles. I do feel, though, that the film is hampered by focusing so tightly on Nim's life. It's a bold decision by the filmmaker, presumably informed by the idea that Nim's problems were caused by treating him in a human way, not a humane way, and failing to acknowledge how events were affecting him, a mistake the film is keen to avoid.

While we hear a lot about how Nim must have been feeling, complete with close-ups of his face - which is expressive, but perhaps not enough to sustain this approach - we don't get enough of an insight into the back-stories of the professor, Nim's adopted mother or the various students, doctors and philanthropists who come in and out of the chimp's life, whether they're providing moments of comfort and escape, encouraging him to try cannabis, or dragging him to the depths of despair. It means that we're asked to view the many shocking and alarming things that happen without proper context. You could argue that context is irrelevant when you're dealing with a project this misguided, or something as horrific as the Lemsip centre, but I think the wider picture is essential to our understanding of the story.

There's also a certain vagueness in some of the sequences near the beginning, coupled with imprecise pacing, though this is offset by later set-pieces that are variously affecting (aww, Nim's hugging a cat), amusing (no Nim, don't hump the cat) and utterly chilling, including one of the most upsetting 10-minute chunks I've ever encountered. And I've seen Blues Brothers 2000. So while it's an imperfect film, it's also a very interesting, compelling one, with a sometimes overpowering emotional charge. Project Nim, not Blues Brothers 2000, which is a terrible sequel in which Dan Aykroyd turns into a zombie.

Of course we don't hear from Nim himself, aside from various whoops and clapping noises, but if he could speak, I know that he would say, "Nim, hug, banana, play, banana." (3)

***



You'll Never Get Rich (William A. Seiter, 1941) - "Exciting loveliness and rhythm in a star-spangled army musical!", promises the tagline. Astaire's first film with his favourite movie dance partner, Rita Hayworth, is an ever-underrated trifle blessed with some astonishing hoofing. She said later that her two movies with Fred were the only "jewels" in her career, proper prestige productions that cleaned up at the box-office. He plays a dance director who gets entangled in philandering boss Robert Benchley's web of lies, jettisoning Hayworth's affections due to a misunderstanding over a diamond bracelet, but finds a way out of the frying pan thanks to the draft board, resulting in various in-the-Army-now shenanigans.

The story is silly and disjointed, and the humour is variable - one-joke comic relief Cliff Nazarro briefly becomes the star of the film to entirely tiresome ends - but there's a pleasingly irreverent tone, the leads are in peak form, and much of the dancing has to be seen to be believed. The two best routines are genuinely unusual, with Fred tapping explosively in a guard house to jazz and blues numbers played by an African-American group called the Four Tones. There's also a brief but brilliant rehearsal dance representing the stars' first collaboration on screen, a handful of lively propagandist numbers and a Latino-tinged routine set to Cole Porter's devastating So Near and Yet So Far. Hayworth is also one good-looking lady, but so might you be if you'd undergone a beautifying process that included having your hairline altered (I often wonder if that intensive programme of electrolysis led to her early-onset Alzheimer's).

In the back catalogue of cinema's greatest ever dancer, this isn't a classic to rank alongside Top Hat, Broadway Melody of 1940 or The Band Wagon, but it's still a joy to behold, the genuine care that went into it visible right from the clever, inventive credits sequence. "Exciting loveliness" indeed. (3.5)

***



Miss Pinkerton (Lloyd Bacon, 1932) - A static, muddled Old Dark House rehash that crams an awful lot of confusing plot and awkward pauses into its 65 minutes. If you want to see Joan Blondell dressed as a nurse, you won't be disappointed, and her bright, brassy performance does provide a sprinkle of Golden Age gold dust, but it's held captive in a slow and unsatisfying mystery given the usual perfunctory treatment by one of Warner's least creative directors. Bacon throws in a couple of Expressionistic shots he's lifted from Nosferatu, but does nothing to quicken the action or make the story clearer. George Brent's detective seems overly preoccupied with how handsome his number one suspect is. (2)

See also: This is in Vol 5 of the magnificent Forbidden Hollywood series, along with Hard to Handle.

***

And, of course, the rebranded ClintFest '13 (check out that upper-case 'F') has been continuing apace:



The Enforcer (James Fargo, 1976) - The third in the Dirty Barry series lands Clint with a female partner (Tyne Daly), who carries a fucking handbag everywhere and runs about one mile an hour (13.5 in her gym shorts, my arse). It's as deep as a puddle, as credible as a cartoon and as stupid as open day at Idiot World, but it's incredibly entertaining, building to a climax involving Alcatraz and a rocket-launcher. "Marvellous." (3)

***



*SOME SPOILERS*
Sudden Impact (Clint Eastwood, 1983) - This unbelievably nasty fourth outing for Dirty Barry makes the original look like Dixon of Dock Green. San Francisco's growliest man is sent out to a small town after annoying the mob, where he ends up tangling with a rape victim (Sondra Locke) who's murdering her attackers one by one. The first half is like a compilation of 10 Dirty Barry movies, with only the bits where he crosses the line and then gets bawled out left in. The only recourse to excessive unpleasantness is the sickening rape scene, but that's probably as it should be. Clint's earlier vehicles tend to treat the subject (which turns up as a plot device with alarming regularity) far too lightly, even allowing his anti-hero in High Plains Drifter to rape someone and then joke about it. Here, the sequence is virtually unwatchable, which, even if the treatment is gothically sensationalist, seems a step forward. But there's absolutely no justification for flashing back to it a further four times in the film's second half. Presumably it's meant to hammer home to Clint's more neanderthalic fans that this time we're on the side of a murderer/rape victim/woman, but surely even they could remember back to when the film showed it half an hour ago.

Though the film's first hour has no narrative coherence, features the worst line of dialogue of all time ("Call D'Ambrosia in the DA's office - ask him if coffee is psychic") and includes a scene in which Clint drives around with his car on fire, it's indecently fun. What follows is just horrific. Who enjoys watching a woman being raped, punched repeatedly in the face, and then faced with being raped again? There's a stunning shot near the close, when Barry arrives at a closed-down fairground like a gunslinger at high noon, silhouetted in the night by vivid white light, and Lalo Schifrin pipes up with a super, noir-tinged theme every time we head for Locke's house, but such concessions to class offer scant consolation in a quite hideously misjudged second half. For what it's worth, the performances are a mixed bag. I couldn't tell if Audrie Neenan was good, because her character made me feel too ill, and Pat Hingle was absolutely terrible as the small-town chief (he really needs to take bigger breaths before talking), but Clint and Locke always work quite well together and Wendell Wellman offers an interesting portrait of a supposedly reformed character who still gets shot in the head. And also the balls. (2)

***



*MINOR SPOILERS*
Pale Rider (Clint Eastwood, 1985)- A grizzled mystery man (Flint Lockwood) saves a homesteader (Michael Moriarty) from a shellacking at the hands of a gold tycoon's hired goons, and becomes a symbol of hope to the community of brutalised miners, while sending Moriarty's fiancee (Carrie Snodgress) and her 14-year-old daughter wild with lust. If Clint's High Plains Drifter was a delirious subversion of the "outsider hero" seen in such films as Shane, then this is basically just a remake of Shane, right down to the kid yelling "Come back! We love you!" at the close, an act of outlandish thievery that frankly amounts to taking the piss. There's also a slight lack of dramatic tension that comes with having a hero who can teleport. Still, it's a solid, entertaining allegorical Western - Clint's "preacher" being a messenger of death sent from God - that boasts some truly iconic imagery, particularly during its climactic shoot-out, and a pair of very good performances from Clint East-woooooood and his new best mate. A young, svelte Chris Penn turns up as a bad guy, looking eerily like his Argentinean brother Sean. (3)

***



Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (Michael Cimino, 1974) - Michael Cimino's attempt to make a '70s action movie in the New Hollywood style is a memorable, fascinating and beautifully-acted existential buddy flick that gets rather sidetracked by its second-half heist. The opening is as good as any you'll ever see, as a Brylcreemed preacher (Clint Eastwood) is forced to flee for his life across a wheatfield, while across town a grinning tearaway (Jeff Bridges) with a possible wooden leg jacks a car from a dealership. They're about to collide - literally - sparking an unlikely, truly affecting friendship that will get them laid, shot at and beaten, before they join forces with the two hoods on their trail (George Kennedy and the quite brilliant Geoffrey Lewis).

It's then that the film, an astonishing piece of Americana, full of fluttering flags and vast, arid landscapes, and met by an extraordinary theme song from Paul Williams (who wrote the Bugsy Malone score), turns into a Hot Rock-ish heist film: above par for the genre, but nothing like as interesting or unusual as the movie we were watching. Almost fatally, the focus shifts from the smiling, weary Eastwood and the young friend who "came along 10 years too late" and gives too much screen-time to the blustering Kennedy, diluting the film's power by simply forgetting its strong suit. You can shout "What about The Big Lebowski?" all you want, but I've found that Bridges is usually the best thing in a bad film or the worst thing in a great film. Here he's just brilliant, and it isn't his fault that the movie's steering goes awry, or demands that he dress up as a woman. While that's not very entertaining, it's no slight on her to say that he looks a bit like Laura Dern.

Then, when the film seems to have died out in a fit of cross-dressing and a flurry of skidding motorcyclists, it crawls out of the wreckage, towards a magnificent, dreamlike coda that leaves you slack-jawed in amazement. Cimino straddled two worlds, having co-written the second Dirty Harry film and gone on later, of course, to make The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate. This, his debut behind the camera, doesn't sustain its fusion of the mainstream, the modern and the avant garde as successfully as genre-fucks like Charley Varrick, Fat City or Electra Glide in Blue, but at its best it's gobsmacking: Williams on the soundtrack, a car on the endless highway and Eastwood at the wheel, looking dead ahead, a canvas for our own emotions, like a John Ford hero. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

Rita Hayworth, This Means War and tuna - Reviews #130

An indie triumph, Loki in a low-key drama, and three absolutely rubbish movies. Plus: The Office (US), Michael Cera and Carmen Miranda.



Who Loves the Sun (Matt Bissonette, 2006) is an exceptional debut from Matt Bissonette, who went on to make the tremendous two-hander Passenger Side. Lukas Haas is a taciturn, unhappy and mysterious 30-something who returns home after five years away, and reconnects - in less than reconciliatory fashion - with ex-wife Molly Parker and cocky former friend Adam Scott. Growing in confidence and resonance as it progresses, it's an eloquent, moving and funny film, traversing apparently well-worn ground, only to find new avenues of exploration, and new insights. Haas and Parker are both very good, though once again it's Scott who takes top honours. His comic abilities have been front and centre of late, in TV sitcoms like Party Down and Parks and Recreation, but he's a tremendously gifted dramatic actor, and displays a heartbreaking vulnerability beneath his white-suited character's smarmy exterior. It's a fantastic film: effective as a character study; even better as a treatment of universal themes, arguing that most people face disasters of some magnitude, and we can only move forward by making peace with the past. (4)

***



Archipelago (Joanna Hogg, 2010) - An unhappy middle-class family decamps to the Isles of Scilly, where its frailties and internal tensions simmer and leak out across one gloomy week. The mother (Kate Fahy) is falling apart, her daughter is a stuck-up, self-hating bitch (Lydia Leonard) and sensitive younger brother Edward (Tom Hiddleston) is beset by bourgeois guilt that sees him trying to make friends with the hired help, prior to setting off for an 11-month aid mission in Africa. There's a touch of Festen in there, a bit of Bergman, perhaps even some of Woody Allen's Alice, but its concerns - particularly its preoccupation with class - are overridingly British. Hogg's second feature is acutely well-observed, and filmed in a way that suggests a series of overheard conversations, but it's also wilfully undramatic: there are barely any close-ups, narrative peaks are invariably followed by long silences and the stylistic gimmick does sometimes give the impression that someone has accidentally left the camera in the other room. While the slow stretches are integral to the film's purposefully faltering rhythm, they're not that interesting to watch: the film is at its best when bursting into restrained conflict, as in its awful, brilliant centrepiece, in which Leonard decides to send back her guinea fowl. (3)

***



Youth in Revolt (Miguel Arteta, 2009) - Ineffectual teenager Nick Twist (Michael Cera) needs to get kicked out of his mum's house, so he can hook up with the girl of his dreams, idealistic Francophile, Portia Doubleday. Enter his Belmondo-esque alter-ego, Francois Dillinger (also Cera), a moustachoied, smart-shirted sociopath with a ciggie permanently on the go. This adaptation of an early-'90s novel plays like a less successful version of Richard Ayoade's Submarine. It has the same interesting pictoral sense, dry sense of humour and amusing, introverted, sometimes obnoxious hero, but lacks focus and wastes the talents of an exciting supporting cast, giving Steve Buscemi and Justin Long very little to do. Taken as a whole, then, it's frustrating, but it has wonderful moments: its hero gawping, lovestruck in the shower as French music swells, two fine animated sequences and a handful of belly laughs. Those familiar with Cera's work should take to it more than most, and fully appreciate the rather heavy-handed subversion of his persona. (3)

See also: Cera also appeared in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, which got a bit tiresome after a while.

***



The Thief Lord (Richard Claus, 2006) - When protective, tousle-haired Prosper (Aaron Johnson) rescues his little brother, Boniface, from unfeeling relatives, the pair head for Venice, a place special to their late mother. Looking to elude their pursuers, including PI Victor Getz (Jim Carter), they fall in with the The Thief Lord, a masked teenager who gets by on his wits and acts as mentor to a group of orphans camping out in a derelict cinema. This by-the-numbers family film lacks the complexities and nuances of Cornelia Funke's source novel, leaning instead on cartoonish villainy and broad humour, but Johnson is a class act - particularly when asked to emote with face, not voice - and it's always nice to spend time in Venice, even if the locales could have been used more atmospherically. It's certainly nothing like the horrendous failure that was the adaptation of Anthony Horowitz's Stormbreaker, though it would certainly have benefited from more subtle and adventurous handling. The supporting cast includes Vanessa Redgrave and Alexei Sayle. (2.5)

***



That Night in Rio (Irving Cummings, 1941) - Fox's mainstream musicals were never in the same league as MGM's: the budgets weren't as large, the songs weren't as good and, crucially, the talent involved just couldn't compare. The Gang's All Here may have a cult following of Californian acid casualties due to its trippily garish visuals, but it's really no better than the rest: films like Down Argentine Way and Sun Valley Serenade, which only truly come to life when the incredible Nicholas Brothers make their typically brief appearances. (Ironically, Stormy Weather, an African-American musical which the studio didn't even deem worthy of Technicolor stock, is by far its most enduring and exciting outing.) This colourful but pedestrian remake of Folies Bergère de Paris - a near-classic Maurice Chevalier vehicle - has a typically charismatic Don Ameche taking on a dual role, as his American cabaret entertainer comes to the aid of his Brazilian baron, while almost nabbing the baroness (Alice Faye). Yes, you're right, quite a lot like The Prisoner of Zenda. It's actually a better farce than a musical (I swear Carmen Miranda does the same two songs in every film), though Faye's rendering of They Met in Rio is lovely - with some awesome blue notes. (2.5)

***



*SPOILERS*
Down to Earth (Alexander Hall, 1947) – Silly semi-sequel to Columbia’s dazzling 1941 fantasy Here Comes Mr Jordan, which sees the goddess of song and dance, Terpsichore (Rita Hayworth), coming down from above to destroy a Broadway show that paints her as a horny everywoman. Larry Parks, fresh from his success in The Jolson Story, is the show’s producer, who falls head over heels for the scheming, hoofing psycho. Hayworth is good, and the film looks amazing, with vast, vivid sets and sumptuous, sensitive early Technicolor. But after a fun beginning featuring Jordan alumni James Gleason and Edward Everett Horton, the story slows to a crawl, and just sort of sits there as Parks flounders and a game cast tries to enliven a set of tunes ranging from the forgettable to the downright poor, and keep afloat a plot with a ridiculous third-act twist. It’s worth a look for old movie nerds, but it isn’t a fitting follow-up to one of the most unusual and memorable Hollywood movies of the decade. (2)

Trivia notes: Here Comes Mr Jordan was based on a play called Heaven Can Wait, and was remade under that name in the 1970s. There is an unrelated ‘40s film called Heaven Can Wait, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Don Ameche. A third version of Here Comes Mr Jordan arrived in 2001, featuring Chris Rock in the Robert Montgomery role. That film was called... Down to Earth.

***



This Means War (McG, 2011) - This dire attempt at a date movie is a creepy, bombastic romantic-action-comedy, full of teeth-achingly awful dialogue, about CIA agents Chris Pine and Tom Hardy using their security clearance to stalk mutual girlfriend Reese Witherspoon. Speaking of agents, hers must be about the worst in the world. The script includes a joke about bipolar disorder, Hardy calling someone a "spaz" and an incredibly irritating supporting part for Chelsea Handler. Occasionally the film becomes halfway entertaining in a kind of pathetic, witless way, but most of the time it's just grating, offensive nonsense. The best bit is in the final scene, when Hardy has to shout above the noise of a plane, and briefly turns into Bane. Watch the unjustly maligned I-Spy instead. (1)

***



Mustang Country (John C. Champion, 1976) - Extraordinarily bad Western about milky-haired ex-rodeo champ Joel McCrea (in his last film) trying to catch a wild horse, avoid a bear, and bond with one of the worst child actors I have ever seen: Nika Rita, whose Native American foil redefines the concept of the wooden Indian. The film is shot in some pleasant locales, and McCrea does his best with what he's given, offering one nice moment of quiet grief, but the script, story and editing are atrocious. Hardly a fitting swansong for an icon of the genre, and of the American screen. (1)

***



*SPOILERS, BUT YOU'LL THANK ME. I ALSO SEEM TO HAVE STARTED SWEARING, BUT IN THE CIRCUMSTANCES THIS SEEMS ENTIRELY REASONABLE*
Weird Science (John Hughes, 1985) - This might be the most '80s thing that has ever happened. And one of the worst. If you found the scene in Sixteen Candles where Dong gets stuck up a tree hilarious but a little highbrow, then you'll love this steaming pile of hairsprayed, incomprehensible shit, in which Bill Paxton does literally and incomprehensibly turn into a steaming pile of shit. The premise - which sees two horny teenage geeks conjure up a hot 23-year-old with their computer - is great, but what John Hughes does with it is the exact opposite of great. It's sexist, racist, homophobic, and has a completely different message to the one it claims to espouse. I'm a big fan of Hughes, but this one's impossible to defend. And Anthony Michael Hall's drunk scenes are the most annoying on film. (1)

***



SHORT: The Campus Vamp (Harry Edwards, 1928) – Embarrassingly awful Mack Sennett two-reeler about a college boy ignoring his frigid girlfriend to consort with an annoying flapper (a young, brunette Carole Lombard wearing a cloche hat, who gets groped by a lobster). The plot makes no sense, the jokes are rubbish (with the sole exception of a man looking for his wife in a chest of drawers) and the characters are really annoying, though film nerds might enjoy a couple of the sequences being in two-strip Technicolor: love those reds and greens. If you want to see it, my copy is now at a charity shop and also contains three Our Gang shorts and the racist Harold Lloyd film, Haunted Spooks. (1)

***

TV:

This is what I have been mostly doing lately:



The Office (US): Season 2 (2006-7) – The series at its zenith, with Michael becoming more human (and slightly less annoying), the Jim-Pam relationship developing in beautiful and poignant ways, and just one great episode after another. My favourite bit has to be either Jim flicking on his messages after a lousy day at work, or the scene in the road at the end of the final episode. (4)

The Office (US): Season 3 (2007-8) – The third season is less realistic and more sitcomish, causing the dramatic scenes to lose a little of their resonance, while Jim and Pam seem to be kept apart more through dramatic necessity than credible plot development, and there’s an inability to fully capitalise on some of the more promising premises, like the convention visit. For all that, it’s still top entertainment, with as many fine comic moments as Season 2 (my personal favourite is Dwight’s impression of Jim) and an absolutely irresistible pay-off. (3.5)

The Office (US): Season 4 (2008-9) – Only one of the opening four, double-length episodes really works (Launch Party), but after that it really kicks into gear. Kevin saying “toona toona toona” may be the funniest moment in the show’s history. Bizarrely, Carell’s inconsistent, irritating central character remains the weak link in what is a riotously enjoyable series. (3.5)

The Office (US): Season 5 (2009-10) – A step up from Season 4. At its centre is the most successful episode ever, and one of the best, Stress Relief, which compensates for a deeply unfunny film-within-a-show with two very involving narratives and one of the most amazing cold opens I have ever seen. The season as a whole serves up the usual mixture of escapism, invention and affecting sentiment, and just when you think the basic format may be getting tired, Schur and co shake it up again. John Krasinki's spectacular comic timing remains something to behold. (3.5)

Rita, Cyd and The Godfather Part III - Reviews #23

Well you try to find a decent colour still from this Technicolor movie...

Silk Stockings (Rouben Mamoulian, 1957) is a neat musical update of Ninotchka, perhaps the best romantic comedy of them all. Brilliant ballerina Cyd Charisse is in the Garbo role, playing a Russian envoy who's sent to Paris to bring home the nation's greatest composer, but is seduced by the city - and the American movie producer she meets there (Fred Astaire). Most of the plot and many of the best lines remain intact, while Charisse's communist commissar affects a Garbo accent, rather than a Russian one. While that does highlight the obvious superiority of the original film, there's still a great deal to enjoy here. Taken on its own terms, Silk Stockings is sleek and breezy entertainment.

Astaire, about to make his second of four retirements, is in good form and his numbers with Charisse are very attractive - if lacking the spark and sizzle of those in The Band Wagon. All of You is the obvious stand-out, both in its original incarnation and a glorious warehouse reprisal, though Cole Porter's score is positively littered with fun tunes. Charisse does some sensational work to the lyrically slight Red Blues, brassy Janis Paige sings the smutty stomp Josephine, and she and Astaire poke fun at cinema's passion for frightened innovation in Stereophonic Sound. The climactic Ritz Roll and Rock is both impressive and quite silly, as it suggests that fleet-footed Astaire and his high society pals from the stage-show-within-a-film can rock out far more comprehensively than Elvis. I don't really buy it.

As a special treat for Golden Era buffs, Silk Stockings also features a most peculiar and welcome sight: Peter Lorre dancing. The star of M, a recurring Hitchcock heavy and all-round mercurial wizard of the screen - by this time displaying a latter-day wideness rarely seen outside of James Cagney's films - Lorre great fun as a fibbing, carousing rogue of a Russian diplomat. Arriving in a distressed state in the early hours, he rubbishes suggestions from his colleagues that he's been out on the town by claiming he's been having a manicure. "At two o'clock in the morning?" a comrade enquires. "I cannot sleep with long fingernails," he replies. Lorre also does one of the silliest dance routines I've ever seen, hoisting himself up between two chairs and swinging his legs back and forth in time to Porter's Too Bad.

Silk Stockings isn't a classic to rival Ninotchka, but as these musical remakes go, it's good value - with attractive leads and a handful of great numbers. Charisse, who passed away in 2008, is really something to behold when she's in full flow. Usually it's impossible to wrench one's eyes away from Astaire, but she's a most inspiring diversion. (3)

***



Cover Girl (Charles Vidor, 1944) is worth it for the dancing - much of it choreographed by co-star Gene Kelly, in just his fourth musical. Rita Hayworth is a stage-star who spies a path to the big-time via a magazine beauty competition. Though she gets the gig, thanks to the sentimentality of a big shot who once dated her grandmother, it puts a strain on her relationship with boyfriend and former boss Kelly. That hackneyed but involving plot, which borrows from the Jessie Matthews musical Evergreen, is a springboard for some very interesting routines. The lovely Make Way for Tomorrow sees Hayworth, Kelly and comic foil Phil Silvers dashing around a vast set, arm-in-arm, while the ebullient Put Me to the Test is an energetic stage-set number teaming Gene with a succession of partners. The absolute highlight is Kelly's Alter-Ego Dance, in which he hoofs opposite a transparent version of himself. Until you've seen the screen's second greatest dancer leap over his own head, you haven't really lived. Elsewhere, the staging is just peculiar. During the title number, Hayworth descends the biggest staircase this side of The Great Ziegfeld. When she gets to the bottom, she just sort of waves her arms around a bit. I take it Kelly didn't devise that dance. Poor John, dubbed by Martha Mears, as were all Hayworth's numbers, features the oddest (Cockney?!) accent I've ever heard. The choreography and costumes are almost as weird.

Cover Girl is too spotty and muddled to be ranked with the best musicals of the period, but it's a valuable snapshot of one of cinema's greatest creative forces at an important stage in his career. In the film's key numbers, Kelly's sense of ambition is already much in evidence - though it was only once he was given bigger budgets and more significant talents to work with that he really came into his own. Even so, he reportedly cited the Alter-Ego Dance as the most difficult routine he'd ever crafted, and it is a phenomenal achievement*. Hayworth, who Fred Astaire regarded as the best of his own partners, is good value in the lead, and displays a depth of emotion that transcends the slightly stale script, while Phil Silvers and especially Eve Arden provide exemplary comic support. Silvers - later TV's Sgt Ernie Bilko, of course - even does a couple of song-and-dance bits. (3)

*Trivia note: Fred Astaire would offer his own variation on the routine two years later - Puttin' on the Ritz - backed by no fewer than nine Astaires. The way Kelly and Astaire pushed one another to ever greater heights during this period is exhilarating.

***



"I would burn in hell to keep you safe."
*SOME SPOILERS*
The Godfather Part III (Francis Ford Coppola, 1990) is an unnecessary follow-up to the devastating gangster epics that defined the '70s. Al Pacino, who in the intervening 14 years had begun shouting a very lot, returns as Michael Corleone, the mafia don who's going legit - with a little help from the Catholic Church. Also along for the ride is his brother Sonny's non-legit offspring, Andy Garcia, whose unquestioning loyalty just about makes up for his appalling temper - and the fact he's got the hots for his cousin, Michael's daughter (Sofia Coppola). The film begins with a set of sumptuous tracking shots around various unpopulated ruins that suggest this is going to be "Terence Davies' The Godfather". Alas, no. Instead, we're pitched into an overambitious story concerning high finance, Papal assassination and moral absolution that dwarfs the curiously uninvolving Garcia-Coppola romance.

Screenwriters Coppola and Mario Puzo strain to make each line a killer - when they're not penning exposition - meaning that the script is clunky and often lacking insight. Take the scene between Corleone and estranged wife Kay (Diane Keaton). "I don't hate you, Michael" she says. "I dread you." So far, so agreeably unexpected, but they won't shut up - and the resulting exchanges are first overdramatic and then superfluous. "I did what I could, Kay, to protect all of you from the horrors of this world," he says. Her reply? "But you became my horror. The children still love you, though. Especially Mary." Err, great. Mary, for her part, has come in for a bit of flak - some of it deserved. Though the director's daughter has an interesting face and excels during one heartbroken exchange (the "I'll always love you" bit), her delivery is often distressingly wooden in a way you rarely see on screen. And while her beau Garcia is unquestionably charismatic, he's also cliched and dull: if he's his generation's answer to James Caan, perhaps we should rephrase the question. Robert DeNiro was turned down for that part, while Robert Duvall's character was killed off after he asked for $5m and Coppola threatened to write Pacino out of the series unless he settled for $2m less than he wanted. That wrangling - and the director's threat therein - betrays the poverty of vision here, with use of footage from the earlier films suggesting desperation rather than an epic sweep, as well as showing exactly how far Coppola had fallen.

The film isn't a complete write-off, though, boasting a hit-by-helicopter that's utterly unexpected and thus entirely great, some fine individual scenes - like Pacino's confession at the Vatican and his son's performance of the series' famous love song - and that certain brown wood-panelled glossy look unique to these films. It's also rarely dull, moving at a fair clip and balancing plot, action and character drama in the traditional manner. But it's rarely special - and within the context of this trilogy, that's pretty damning. (2.5)

***



I'm All Right Jack (John Boulting, 1959) is a celebrated British comedy about industrial relations that's sunk by the biliousness of its "anti-everything" attitude. It's also not that funny. Ian Carmichael is a toff who enters his uncle's business at the low end and finds he's fatally distrusted by his working class colleagues - including shop steward Peter Sellers (who's as good as ever). There are some impressive moments, but its sporadic joviality can't mask an appallingly low opinion of its subjects - and of British industrial workers in particular - that's extremely hard to swallow. (2.5)

***



Tomorrow at Seven (Ray Enright, 1933) is like a Monogram Chan before the fact: a creaky, archaic mystery with a none-too-surprising culprit - but fun just the same. Chester Morris (later Boston Blackie in Columbia's exceptional B movie series) is a novelist investigating the inspiration for his latest book, a killer known as The Black Ace. He travels to see wealthy Henry Stephenson, who's also researching said homicidal maniac, and before you can say "when you finish that jigsaw, it's going to contain a threat from the killer", Stephenson's secretary finishes a jigsaw, and finds it contains a threat from the killer. This is a slow-moving production that recalls movies made in the early days of sound cinema, but the name cast keeps the questionable narrative afloat and it's a delight to see legendary character actors Frank McHugh and Allen Jenkins as a pair of thick cops. "Anyone touch the body?" a creepy coroner enquires of them. "Nobody," replies McHugh confidently. "Only Dugan and me and Drake and that guy Henderson and Broderick." (2.5)

***



Guest Wife (Sam Wood, 1945) reunites the stars of the brilliant romantic comedy Midnight, as happily married Claudette Colbert ends up spending an inordinate amount of time posing as the wife of her husband's best friend (Don Ameche) in a bid to save the guy's job. It's OK, but the comic situations are often more stressful than funny, and the usually reliable Ameche is both cartoonish and flat. Still, Colbert does her best with the material, while character comedians Charles Dingle and Grant Mitchell work wonders in their supporting parts. Dozens of familiar faces crop up in small roles, including Irving Bacon, Harry Hayden and Chester Clute, playing a town gossip accused of voyeurism. The climactic sight gag is the best joke in the film. (2.5)