And introducing... #1. John Ford

About five years ago, I used to write a regular series for the now defunct Eat Sleep Live Film, and since I want to run more features here alongside the usual reviews, I thought I'd revive it. It's called 'And introducing...', it shamelessly apes the Guardian's Pass Notes, and it's a beginner's guide to some of my favourite people in the movies.

#1. John Ford



Who?
The great American director. Asked which filmmaker had most influenced him, Orson Welles once replied: “The old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, John Ford.” Ford’s career – which sprawled across more than 50 years – produced more cast-iron masterpieces than any other, and covered almost every genre conceivable, though he remains best-known for his Westerns. As a person, he was a ludicrous caricature of the tough-guy-with-a-heart-of-gold, prone to acts of remarkable humanity – like filling a funeral with his own friends after the death of a lonely acquaintance, in order to comfort the widow – but in everyday terms was prickly, awkward and really liked to tell lies.

Lies? What like?
He claimed to have been born Sean Aloysius O’Fearna, in Ireland. Actually he was a second-generation immigrant, whose birth name was John Martin Feeney. Such myth-making was intrinsic to Ford’s persona and to his nostalgic films, which – if not the way things really were – were perhaps the way they should have been. Except for the bits where all the white guys shot all the Native Americans.



How can I spot a Ford film?
His movies are characterised by devastatingly effective sentiment, folksy humour, distinctive visual motifs – including extreme long shots, and photography that focuses on the eyes (but not in a stupid way, like Sergio Leone) – and an obsession with both the family unit and the outsider hero. There are motifs and rituals he returns to countless times from communal meals to poignant farewells, but the greatest is that of his protagonist talking to a lost loved one, while gazing at a painting or kneeling by a grave. The most exalted example is in Young Mr Lincoln, as a camera focused on the water segues from summer romance to brutal winter, and Henry Fonda’s Honest Abe is left alone on a frozen riverbank (above). It’s worth adding that if you’re watching a movie where everyone suddenly starts singing Shall We Gather at the River, then Ford almost certainly made it, and his films are also chock-full of boozing, brawling and bawling (like I said, his parents were Irish).

Talk us through Ford’s career, Troy McClure-style.
A pleasure. You may remember him from such Westerns as Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine and his masterpiece, The Searchers, a staggering odyssey of revenge and redemption that marked the high-point of his many collaborations with John Wayne.

Mates with John Wayne, eh? Was he also a right wing tub-thumper and massive racist?
No. Towards the end Ford veered rather to the right, becoming friends with Richard Nixon, but in the ‘30s he described himself as a “socialist democrat... always left”, and he made the most radical movie ever to come out of Old Hollywood, The Grapes of Wrath, ably assisted by the brilliant, union-bashing producer Daryll F. Zanuck. One of Ford’s last – and worst – films, Cheyenne Autumn, was ironically a noble but boring attempt to right the wrongs of his “manifest destiny” Westerns, by sympathetically depicting the Native American experience, while The Searchers and Sergeant Rutledge – though each complex and contradictory – argue that the people of the West can only be free when they let go of their racism. Even The Prisoner of Shark Island, which houses perhaps the most troubling views of any Ford film (anti-slavery campaigners are the bigots, apparently), focuses on the growing respect between hero Warner Baxter and his former slave (Ernest Whitman). After the pair return home, following years away, Ford saves the last shot of the picture for the reunion of the African-American family: a gesture you’re unlikely to find in many American films of the 1930s.



“Not a racist.” I’m nearly convinced. Anything else?
Biographer Joseph McBride argues that Ford purposefully cast friend, red-hunter and all-round objectionable bigot Ward Bond in aggressively progressive roles, as a punishment for his more unpleasant behaviour.

That should do it. Sorry, I seemed to touch a nerve there.
Well, Ford being a right-winger is a common misconception, and one still perpetuated by superb film director and absolutely terrible historian, Quentin Tarantino. I’ll admit that Ford did play, erm, one of the ‘heroic’ Klansmen in the most racist film ever made, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, a movie that almost single-handedly revived the KKK (he's on the right of frame, below). But which of us can honestly say we haven’t done that?



I have rarely, if ever, appeared in a racist D. W. Griffith film, but let’s move on. Aside from Wayne and Bond, who else did Ford hang out with?
The John Ford Stock Company comprised more than a dozen performers, who turned up time and again in his films, from Ben Johnson and Harry Carey, Jr to Jack Pennick, Mae Marsh and Ford’s brother Francis. In terms of leading men, Ford first worked with Harry Carey, Sr, then Will Rogers, and later enjoyed a remarkable, oft-overlooked collaboration with Henry Fonda, before his shifting priorities saw him forge a remarkable working relationship with Wayne. Ford himself claimed that it took seeing Wayne in Howard Hawks’ Red River to realise that the “big son-of-a-bitch” could actually act.

Some would disagree.
And they would be wrong. Watch She Wore a Yellow Ribbon if you’d like your eyes comprehensively opened. Ford was fascinated by the idea of toying around with Wayne’s screen image, casting him variously as a Swedish sailor, a tormented divorcee, and a tormented, lovelorn ex-soldier corrupted by racism. Compare that with regular Wayne screenwriter James Edward Grant’s memorable formula for creating the actor’s vehicles: “All you gotta have in a John Wayne picture is a hoity-toity dame with big tits that Duke can throw over his knee and spank, and a collection of jerks he can smash in the face every five minutes. In between, you fill with gags, flags, and chases. That’s all you need. His fans eat it up!” Grant was only allowed to write one John Ford film, Donovan’s Reef, and that was comprehensively re-written by the director, who preferred to work with either Frank Nugent – the brilliant, left-leaning former journalist – or the notorious but talented James Warner Bellah, a man described by his own son as “a fascist, a racist and a world-class bigot”.



I place unnecessary weight on gold statuettes. I don’t suppose John Ford ever won any of those?
Yes. Four Best Director Oscars for starters. And none of them for Westerns.

Any of them for sentimental dramas about Welsh coal miners, released the same year as Citizen Kane?
Well, it’s funny you should mention it… People make a big fuss about How Green Was Valley landing Best Director and Best Picture the year that Citizen Kane was up for both, but it’s a matchlessly poetic movie, albeit one that doesn’t seem to know much about Wales. Still, without Ford, Kane wouldn’t exist. Welles recruited the same cinematographer as Ford’s The Long Voyage Home and The Grapes of Wrath (Gregg Toland), while his preparation for making The Greatest Film Ever Made™ had been to watch Ford’s earthshaking anti-isolationist masterpiece, Stagecoach. Fifty times. Stagecoach notably popularised deep focus photography, and ceilinged sets, which gave filmmakers carte blanche to devise avant garde camera angles that would augment a scene’s atmosphere, like so:



I see. So he devised putting a ceiling on some walls. He doesn’t sound as good as my favourite director of Westerns, Sergio Leone.
Compared to John Ford, Sergio Leone was a derivative, adolescent hack, and I’m not entirely sure that he wasn’t one even when not compared to John Ford, who effectively invented the epic Western with The Iron Horse, retooled the entire genre with Stagecoach and then endlessly interrogated its priorities, preoccupations and prejudices across 25 years. His Cavalry trilogy (1948-50) remains one of the outstanding, unsung achievements in American film, and from gentle, lyrical screen poems (Wagon Master) to race relations Westerns (Sergeant Rutledge and Cheyenne Autumn) and the richly nostalgic but clear-sighted genre deconstruction that was 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, he turned the oater into an artform. Whereas Leone turned it into a badly-dubbed parade of clichés lit by occasional moments of visceral excitement and lent an air of artistry by Ennio Morricone’s sumptuous scores.

I think you were telling me about Oscars, weren’t you? Before you got distracted. What were his other gongs for?
Arty IRA flick The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, and that supreme slice of blarney, The Quiet Man. He also landed a further two documentary Oscars – and a Purple Heart – for his World War Two escapades.

What did he do?
Ford headed up a photography unit making propaganda films, and was wounded whilst pointing his camera at the Battle of Midway.



What are his best movies?
How long have you got? Ford’s pre-war filmography alone takes in silent epics 3 Bad Men and The Iron Horse, exalting, legal-minded Americana like Judge Priest and Young Mr Lincoln, Stagecoach (above), three groundbreaking collaborations with the legendary Gregg Toland (The Informer, The Grapes of Wrarth and The Long Voyage Home), and neglected gems like The Prisoner of Shark Island and Steamboat Round the Bend, the latter a rich slice of southern fried escapism. He made one of the great WWII movies, They Were Expendable, then focused mainly on the Western for the final 20 years of his career, with the spectacular results I mentioned before. He also popped off to Ireland in the middle of all that to shoot The Quiet Man, which it would be fair to say continues to polarise audiences.

Why? Not Irish enough?
Actually, the opposite appears to be true.



That big list of films sounds tiring – where do I start?
Not as tiring as this list. But start with Stagecoach: a subversive skewering of American hypocrisy, dressed up as a slam-bang Western, and featuring some of the coolest stuntwork you’ll ever see. Then try Liberty Valance, The Grapes of Wrath and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. The best of the best is The Searchers, which for some reason I wrote 4,000 words about here. It's not the best place to begin, but it is among the most beguilingly beautiful films ever made, its sumptuous Winton C. Hoch cinematography and latent humanism offset by moments of chilling brutality.

Was that his personal favourite?
Probably, but he was such a committed contrarian that he told Peter Bogdanovich that the most cherished of his films was the forgotten medical drama Arrowsmith, and once claimed that the only movie which turned out how he wanted it to was the botched Graham Greene adaptation, The Fugitive (based on The Power and the Glory), a film notable only for its breathtaking chiaroscuro photography. Ford’s fondness for The Sun Shines Bright, a remake of Judge Priest for the cheapo studio Republic, was genuine, and gave him the chance to realise passages excised from the earlier film by the censors, including a beautiful sequence set around a prostitute’s funeral (below).



Any weird ones in his back catalogue?
A few. In 1928, he tried to emulate then mentor F.W. Murnau by stuffing his sentimental WWI film, Four Sons, full of technical innovations, and keeping his camera in almost perpetual flight. It isn’t very good. Then in 1937, he made two films: a South Seas disaster movie called The Hurricane, and an adaptation of Wee Willie Winkie, starring Shirley Temple. Neither are what you’d expect from him, but both bear his unmistakable stamp, and both are fantastic. The Edna Ferber-like family saga, The World Moves On is another curio – stuffed with contrivance, bad dialogue and several of the most potent, heightened romantic scenes in cinematic history – while Tobacco Road, from 1941, is half transcendent Americana and half baffling, misanthropic filth, but it’s kind of fascinating. McBride calls it The Grapes of Wrath’s “evil twin”. Ford also shot an Army information film entitled Sex Hygiene. I haven’t seen that one.

Which ones should I avoid like gonnorhea?
The Black Watch, an early talkie released in 1929, which is notable for some of the most uncomfortable, unwatchable sound sequences in cinema history (many featuring future romantic comedy icon Myrna Loy), though it picks up every now and again. Mary of Scotland is essentially just a series of lingering close-ups of star Katharine Hepburn, who was Ford’s girlfriend at the time. The Long Gray Line and Cheyennne Autumn just aren’t very interesting.

Tell me one other brilliant factoid with which I can impress all of my mates down the pub. Certainly. The only on-screen pairing of future legends Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart was in Ford's 1930 film, Up the River, Tracy's first film and Bogart's second.

That’s all very well, but what does the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles, think about John Ford?
By a remarkable coincidence, he loves him. Pickles chose Ford on Radio 4’s Great Lives back in 2012. To his credit, he showed an impressive knowledge of the director’s oeuvre. To his discredit, he’s still Eric Pickles.



What to say: “John Ford invented the modern Western.”

What not to say: “Wasn’t he a racist?”

***

Thanks for reading. Subjects of future beginner's guides are up for grabs, so tweet me any you'd like to see, or comment below. I'm not doing Mel Brooks.

The greatest movies of all time - my Sight and Sound ballot

Despite this special effect, Vertigo has been named the greatest film of all time.

This week, British film mag Sight and Sound published its list of the 50 greatest movies ever made, as voted for by critics. Having topped the list since 1962, Citizen Kane came second this time, with Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo replacing it at number one. The changing of the guard has made headlines worldwide, with journalists confusedly declaring that Kane is "no longer the greatest film of all time".

For me, Kane remains as good a bet as any, its timeless screenplay and arresting performances allied to a matchless sense of innovation that changed the face of movie-making. Taking his lead from a pair of John Ford films, Stagecoach and The Long Voyage Home, Welles proceeded to comprehensively re-write the rules of cinema, employing jaw-dropping deep focus photography (developed with the legendary Gregg Toland), ceilinged sets that opened up the possibility of outlandish camera angles and an arsenal of frankly astounding visual tricks, all to serve a riveting, moving, aggressively non-linear narrative in which a man gains a fortune but loses his soul.

I like Vertigo - it's an interesting, masterfully-directed movie with a fine central performance from Jimmy Stewart, and a cut above much of Hitchcock's later work - but like rather too many films on the list, it engages the brain rather than the heart. And if I was sitting down to watch a Hitchcock film tonight, for entertainment rather than to write a thesis about it, I can think of a dozen I'd rather see. As Pauline Kael said about The Searchers (more of which later): "You can read a lot into it, but it isn't very enjoyable." In fact, that's how I feel about too many films on the list.

Jean-Luc Godard - everyone's favourite annoying, self-satisfied cinematic philosopher - has four entries on the list, including the disappointing Le Mépris, while Jacques Tati's interminable Play Time also makes an inexplicable appearance. The Bergman entry is the intriguing Persona, rather than the affecting Wild Strawberries, the Fellini movies are 8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita - rather than La Strada and Nights of Cabiria - both of which prize dazzling direction over human emotion, while the Renoir isn't La Grande illusion, but La Règle du jeu. Kubrick wasn't renowned for his weepies, but Paths of Glory can destroy a man; can the same be said of 2001? And between them, Man with a Movie Camera, Battleship Potemkin and Stalker don't offer a character you can engage with on any level, even if for fans of montage, double-exposure or having a three-hour nap (Stalker), there's lots to enjoy.

There are, of course, moving movies amongst the selection. Chaplin's exquisite City Lights is there, Truffaut's Les Quatre cents coups, and Dreyer's startling Passion of Joan of Arc, one of the most intense experiences that cinema has to offer. Sunrise is a perfect marriage of style, poignancy and entertainment; Bicycle Thieves makes me weep buckets. But it seems a list of slightly skewed priorities: over-familiar and celebrating the cerebral over the emotional.

***

My list

For reasons too obvious to document, I wasn't invited to vote in the poll (as you can see, I'm not bitter), so I thought I'd tack up my own top 10 here. All of which have made me cry, because I am a girl.



Remember the Night (Mitchell Leisen, 1940) - Written by comedy legend Preston Sturges and uniting the stars of Double Indemnity four years ahead of the fact, this holiday movie begins as a screwball comedy but morphs into a matchlessly moving romance, as prosecutor Fred MacMurray plays a dirty trick on shoplifter Barbara Stanwyck, then winds up spending Christmas and New Year with her. Spotlighting Leisen's startling visual sense and led by pitch-perfect performances - supporting players Beulah Bondi, Elizabeth Patterson and Sterling Holloway each given one scene in which to sparkle - it's a mesmerising, magical movie.



The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943) - What does it mean to be British? Powell and Pressburger have a few ideas, serving up a mixture of character study, history lesson and state-of-the-nation address, as they chart the life of colonial-soldier-turned-Home-Guard instructor Clive Wynn-Candy (Roger Livesey, giving the performance of a lifetime). Churchill hated it, but what the hell did he know?



Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994) – You won't forget this documentary in a hurry: four years (and three hours) in the company of two teenage basketball players from inner-city Illinois who dream of the big-time, seeing the NBA as their ticket out of poverty. Shocking, exhilarating and heartbreaking, with astonishing twists of fate, it's a virtuosic, unforgettable film that has more to say about life itself than any other movie I've ever seen.



Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001) - A melancholy, bitingly hilarious crystallisation of teen ennui, which sees school leaver Thora Birch gravitate towards loner-with-lumbar-support Steve Buscemi. Beautifully written, superbly played and endlessly quotable. "It's America, dude, learn the rules."



Les enfants du paradis (Marcel Carne, 1945) - The towering achievement of French cinema: a portrait of a vanished world, a hymn to the art of acting and an allegory about Free France, boasting three of the finest performances ever committed to celluloid. Carné's handling is breathtaking, Prevert's script is clever, witty and worldly-wise and the timeless story seems to grow in strength and resonance with each passing year. Full review here.



The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) - Ford's dazzling odyssey of revenge and redemption has the greatest opening and closing sequences in all of cinema, and what's in between isn't bad either, dominated by John Wayne's towering characterisation. There are 4,000 words on it here.



Major Barbara (Gabriel Pascal, 1941) - There are some performances that bypass your critical faculties altogether, connecting not with your brain but with your soul. They are desperately few, those characterisations of such heightened sensitivity, such emotional resonance that the effect is both exalting and suffocating. I don't know why, or how, but every time Wendy Hiller utters a line or holds the frame in Major Barbara, I am on the verge of tears. It's just such a beautiful, enrapturing performance, 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. Full review here.



Cinema Paradiso: Director's Cut (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988/2002) - In any form, Cinema Paradiso is a richly evocative movie that radiates a love of film and scales some unforgettable heights - the exam set-piece, the outdoor screening, the montage of kisses. This remarkable cut turns much of what you think you know on its head, twisting the film back from a crowd-pleaser to an upsetting, uncompromising artistic statement. And when Jacques Perrin's aged filmmaker puts his hands behind his head, it's hard to hold back the tears. Full review here.



Diary for Timothy (Humphrey Jennings, 1945) A summation of propagandist Jennings' wartime films: a portrait of Britain at war, made for a newborn child. Scripted by E.M. Forster and narrated by Michael Redgrave, it shows the country as you've never seen it: suffering and hardening, bogged down in a seemingly endless war of attrition as its people struggle to maintain business as usual for a fifth, ravaged year. As he would in his 1949 classic, The Dim Little Island, Jennings focuses on four diverse Britons: in this case a miner, a farmer, a train driver and a wounded pilot undergoing rehabilitation. Theoretically, anyway. In typical fashion, his scope encompasses not just conventional morale-boosting fodder, but also culture (Shakespeare, Beethoven), homelife and the contrast between the industrial heartlands and the tranquil countryside a stone's throw away. It's at once realistic and poetic. The fellow who edited the chaptering on the film's first DVD release said it was impossible to do it satisfactorily, because its themes are so interlocked. But while you could study it for weeks and still draw more from its immaculate construction, Diary for Timothy really works because it speaks not to the head but to the heart, and the part of all of us that will remain forever England.



A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Elia Kazan, 1945) - Kazan's debut is impossible to fault, an utterly draining movie about teenager Peggy Ann Garner's coming-of-age in early-20th century New York, flawlessly-directed, with immense performances in which every detail, every gesture rings true. Dorothy McGuire excels as Garner's mother - hardened by poverty - Joan Blondell is superb in a rare dramatic role as the girl's oft-married aunt, and James Dunn delivers an indelible characterisation as Garner's dad, an alcoholic pipe dreamer oscillating between euphoria and desperation. His reading of the folk song Annie Laurie soundtracks one of the most wondrous sequences I've ever seen on film.

Why the Oscars are worthless

"And the award for the most stultifying, simplistic, unchallenging guff of the year goes to..."

What have Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Mitchum, Cary Grant and Judy Garland got in common? Here's another clue: it's the same thing that unites The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Double Indemnity, It's a Wonderful Life, The Searchers and Hoop Dreams. They've all played a crucial role in the evolution of movie-making. They've all brought joy and heartache to countless millions. And not one of them has grabbed a single competitive Oscar.

The Academy Awards is the annual ode to gaudity and mediocrity that chose Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction, that decided Marty was a more important film than Rebel Without a Cause, that gave Bogart his Oscar for The African Queen and Scorsese a gong for The Departed.

As the gold dust settles on this year's ceremony, the results are being met with the usual cries of surprise and dismay. Why? The Oscars has been getting it so completely wrong since its inception, the only mystifying thing is that anyone takes it seriously at all.

But even aside from the subjective argument that the Oscars consistently fails to reward "great movies", their more troubling flaw is a refusal to recognise important, era-defining ones - an issue that goes to the very heart of its purpose. Its continual embracing of the bland is not by coincidence, it's by design.

Set up in 1928 with the express purpose of mollifying censors and right-wing critics who saw Hollywood as debauched and amoral, the Oscars has always returned to that offensively unchallenging remit. The Academy had been established the previous year by MGM head Louis B Mayer as an anti-union move. As early as the first ceremony, its awards overlooked King Vidor's progressive liberal drama The Crowd in favour of the dazzling but apolitical romance Sunrise. It's barely deviated since. If in doubt: play safe.

Social polemics, state-of-the-nation dramas and movies that with one fell swoop have created entire genres have been - and are - consistently ignored, in favour of unchallenging, box-ticking, hateful, award-ogling guff. That underwhelming, simplistic fare can be so easily dismissed as "awards fodder" is a damning indictment of what these events represent. This is the awards ceremony that heralded Rocky over both Taxi Driver and Network, that decided Kramer vs Kramer was not only better than Coppola's Vietnam opus Apocalypse Now, but also knocked the Tin Drum into a cocked hat. That has just overlooked In the Loop. That seems to think Gandhi isn't shit. (The film, not the man).

The awards are reactionary, even regressive, with pet fixations that members think compensate for their general blinkeredness. Disabled people are sort of alright, and gays can get up to what they want - so long as we don't have to really see it - but keep the dissidents and the self-possessed blacks away at all costs. The Oscars have always prized the worthy and the preachy above the challenging or the new, consistently celebrated the cautious, the mawkish and the dull. The awards are pointless and redundant, irrelevant and obscene. And did you see what Sandra Bullock was wearing?

Poseidon, Frank James and Doc Hollywood Mk 2 - Reviews #5

"Revival meeting at Clinton tomorrow night. Be there, brother - it's me and the devil and no holds barred."
The Return of Frank James (Fritz Lang, 1940) - German-born Fritz Lang (Metropolis, M, Fury) was a great director, but his three Hollywood Westerns are a fairly weak triumvirate. There's the flashy but thin Western Union, the utterly risible Rancho Notorious, and this sequel to 1939's Jesse James, with Henry Fonda hunting down the cowards who laid his brother low. Like that overpraised crowd-pleaser, which really doesn't hold up well today, this one has a great first five minutes and spectacular Technicolor cinematography to recommend it, but is too flat, too clean-cut and sorely lacks momentum. It also has an inappropriate, cartoonish sense of humour that jars with the often serious subject matter. That's not to say it's a write-off. John Carradine is superbly utilised; his Bob Ford so insidious that he quivers with cowardice and repressed homosexuality every time he points his gun at someone. He plays a key part in the film's best set piece, battling actors portraying the James brothers on a theatre-stage, then looking up to see Fonda towering on the balcony. There's also the chance to see porcelain Gene Tierney in her first screen role, aged 19. She's cast as a budding journalist who falls for Fonda. Tierney was a better actress than she's usually given credit for, but aside from being pretty and pleasant, she has little to do here. One curious aspect of the movie, borrowed from John Ford's masterpieces Judge Priest and Young Mr Lincoln, is its contention that the way to triumph in the courtroom is to make the public gallery laugh. I've never seen that work in real life. Fonda, who's making most of the quips, was a brilliant actor, but rarely in this film does he get to show it, at least until the last 10 minutes. Still, for the colour, the historical value and a great final shot, the film is worth checking out. You can tick off your favourite Golden Age supporting actors too: Frank Sully (the idiotic Sgt Matthews in several Boston Blackie entries), Irving Bacon (you'll know his face), Henry Hull, Donald Meek, J. Edward Bromberg and Jackie Cooper (the kid in the original version of The Champ) all play a part here. (2.5)

***


At no time during the film does this happen.

The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame, 1972) has been on my "to see" list for years. Well, I finally got around to it, and I liked it a lot. After an ocean liner overturns, 10 passengers fight their way upwards to the bottom of the ship, in a bid to escape the exploding, flooding wreckage. Among the skilfully-etched archetypes are an all-action priest (Gene Hackman), a cop (Ernest Borgnine) and his ex-hooker wife (Stella Stevens), a friendly, chubby woman (Shelley Winters), two kids, a fitness freak (Red Buttons) and a hippy. The script is incisive, while helmer Ronald Neame exhibits his usual skill, keeping excitement at a maximum through deft, fast-paced direction that draws you into the centre of the action. Where the film really scores, though, is in its realism, with the gallery of A-listers performing the bulk of their own stunts. There's also a bit that seems to nod to The Searchers (yes, The Searchers again), as Hackman interrupts the grieving process with a bark of "We've got to keep moving!" Great stuff. (3.5)

***



Le fils de l'épicier/The Grocer's Son (Eric Guirado, 2007) traverses well-worn ground in an appealing way. Nicolas Cazalé is agreeably gruff as the titular character, the Prodigal Son returning to the family he left behind (You Can Count on Me, In My Father's Den), whose pastoral existence is in stark contrast with the hubbub of the metropolis (I Know Where I'm Going!, Local Hero, Doc Hollywood). Arriving with his almost-girlfriend, he takes on his ailing dad's rounds, finding both solace and frustration in the work. It's a bit erratic, with a couple of stretches that just consist of Cazale handing out food and an ending that's slightly rushed, but there are enough offbeat laughs and telling episodes to make it worthwhile. It's also a bit darker than you might expect, or at least more fraught. (3)