Thandie Newton, Russian Revolution, and an evening with Elmer Bernstein – Reviews #268

Revel in my balanced lifestyle, as I review a film, a TV series, a novel, an exhibition and a gig.

FILM



The Mouthpiece (Elliott Nugent and James Flood, 1932) – I have such a soft spot for pre-Code movies, and especially the pungent, abrasive, censor-baiting comedies starring the likes of Lee Tracy (Blessed Event, The Nuisance, Call All Wires!), William Powell (Jewel Robbery, High Pressure) and Warren William (Beauty and the Boss). Though not uniformly, these had a tendency to be extremely funny and cynical, before discovering a latent tenderness that at its best was knitted into the fabric of the film, and at its worst saw the piece unravel into soapy melodramatics. Few, though, were ever as sweet and affecting as this one, in which William’s noble prosecutor reacts to tragedy by reinventing himself as an amoral shyster for the underworld (with a moustache, naturally), only to be changed back by the guileless southern office waif (Sidney Fox) he’s been trying to shag. It’s a little clumsy in places, and mistakes audacity for humour, but it’s saved by the performances.

Fox, a short-lived punchline remembered if at all for her sexual affairs with Universal execs, is hesitant and naïve in a way that might not all be intentional, but works its magic upon you, her innate ethereality, uncompromising morality and unexpected sexual potency convincing us unfailingly that a rich, powerful, overbearing and unapologetically unyielding lawyer would be desperate to sleep with, protect and be forgiven by her. As the lawyer, William dominates as he has to: he’s witty, assured and prepossessing, while allowing self-debasement and self-disgust to bleed into his performance, and he’s supported by the great Aline MacMahon, characteristically brilliant as she turns the somewhat familiar role of the lovelorn, patient secretary into something indelible. In these studio films, MacMahon often gave the impression of having just wandered in from real life: she could have the lightest touch with comedy, and spit out Warner Bros’ snappy zingers, but she was at her best when playing something heavy and truthful and whacked out.

Warren William didn’t star in as many – or as good – tailor-made comic vehicles as Tracy and Powell: his greatest roles were topping the bill in ensemble, state-of-the-nation films like Employees’ Entrance, which bristled with energy, anger and social comment, even if his megalomaniac sex pests powered these movies, and are what you remember of them (indeed, he returned to unrepentantly terrorising virgins in Skyscraper Souls later in 1932). The Mouthpiece is a leaner, slighter and simpler film, which zeroes in on the star, shows him through the eyes of two good women, and allows him an emotional sensitivity that was usually off limits for the pre-Code William. It’s not perfect, but it holds a special place in this cycle of films, and it has several beautiful moments, infused with a sweetness that’s tantalisingly bereft of saccharine or soap.

See also: I read the only existing Warren William biography a couple of years back. He really didn't have a terribly interesting life. For what's it's worth, Powell made a similar film to The Mouthpiece the same year, 1932, the stolid Lawyer Man, which gets a shot in the arm from Joan Blondell's sensitive, erotic performance, but is hampered by for some reason omitting any scenes that take place in a courtroom.

***

TV



"I'm interested in one thing, and only thing only: bent coppers."
Line of Duty: Series 4 (2017) – I wonder if this is the series to which we’ll look back and see that Line of Duty was beginning to go awry*, when a show that traded on an insider feel jettisoned any genuine concessions to realism, and became too daft and melodramatic and big and yet somewhat unconvincingly inter-connected. That’s its overall impact, but this season is packed with memorable characters, so stuffed with incident that it’s jawdropping in the moment, and yet still quietly dominated by Thandie Newton’s performance.

Newton is Roz Huntley, an arrogant, assertive DCI still scrambling to catch up after taking years off to start a family. When she gets the chance to close a serial killing case, she takes it, arresting Michael Farmer (Scott Reid), a learning-disabled loner incapable of riding out the interrogation (as Series 3 dealt with both Operation Yewtree and the Mark Kennedy affair, so this plot-thread appears inspired by another topical case, that of Making a Murderer’s damaged, eager-to-please, patently innocent Brendan Dassey). Enter AC-12, who have a few concerns about the strength of the evidence.

Line of Duty’s central triumvirate – Steve (Martin Compston), Kate (Vicky McClure) and Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) – are fantastic characters, but here they mostly just plod along. Earlier seasons perhaps saddled them with overly soapy subplots, but this time there’s very little character development, beyond the manufacturing of some unconvincing competition between the two junior officers. Things happen to them, but they don’t change.

Despite that, both Compson and Dunbar are excellent, with Hastings’ broiling sense of rectitude cleverly cast into doubt, and Steve’s somewhat squat stoicism – coupled to an impressively realised impetuosity – once more the defining flavour of the series. A mention too for Paul Higgins, memorable as the vituperatively violent Jamie in The Thick of It, whose patronising faux-earnestness pours out in overbearing, over-familiar line readings that might just be brilliant. Certainly his voice becomes a central part of the programme’s atmosphere, its feel and its identity.

Newton is given an exceptionally tricky role, so much of it internalised, so much of her character’s appearance being for the benefit of others, the actress variously asked to mask, contort, unshackle or abruptly unveil her feelings. Sometimes she’s barely allowed to give a performance at all, being asked to keep the audience in a permanent limbo, dropping clues or red herrings instead of inhabiting a role. And yet when it matters, as in that climactic interrogation, in which she suddenly becomes recognisably ‘feminine’ for the first time, she shows why she was an indie darling, Hollywood star and a stellar coup for Jeb Mercurio and co. That level of acting is rare, even in a show as lauded as Line of Duty (and especially compared to fellow guest star Jason Watkins, who has won a BAFTA and an Olivier, but is desperately unpersuasive here).

Series 4 feels like a bit of a dip after three compelling seasons: there are too many scrawny or barely-tied plot threads, its perhaps noble attempts to look at race and sexism come off more like window-dressing – a concession to ‘serious’ television, rather than state-of-the-nation polemicising – and its culprits are obvious in a way that they haven’t been before. But while its total impact is muted by these shortcomings and its sojourn into the incredible, it’s still cracking, addictive TV. Fella. (3)

*like Sherlock's third series, which was great in itself, but had sown within it the seeds of its own destruction

See also: I talked about the first three series here. My statistical survey on BAME characters in Line of Duty being mostly cowards, informers or bent coppers will have to wait, as I've realised that also describes the majority of the white characters.

***

BOOK



Often when the Spectator says something is brilliant, like the free market or Toby Young's new column, they're wrong. They're not wrong here.

A Long Way from Verona from Jane Gardam (1971) – This is such a special book: like Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel (one of my discoveries of this year), its heroine is a brutally honest teenage writer in a vanished England: and an outsider because she isn’t like anyone else. Like Angel, too, it has an innate, fierce unpredictability and a rapturously distinctive voice (ideally utilised in a first person narrative) which, by definition, make it nothing like Angel. Its wartime Yorkshire setting is intrinsic – the story set against the mercilessness and the brutal lottery of war, even on the Home Front – and it crashes into the narrative, but it isn’t a book about war. It’s a book about Jessica Vye and the world she inhabits, ridicules, abhors and attempts to negotiate, with uncertainty and arrogance and perseverance, and a conviction that never shakes, but does latch onto passing whims, and falls prey to her explosive temper. It is fascinating and funny and spectacularly unsentimental, as well as uncategorisable in the best possible way. (4)

***

EXHIBITION


Lenin's lovely manners

Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths (British Library) – I studied Russian history at GCSE, A-level and university (my undergraduate dissertation was on Stalin’s show trials), so I was very excited about the British Library’s exhibition, 100 years on from the revolution. They didn't let me down.

It’s vividly staged – in the space where I saw the Gothicism exhibition in 2014 – with digital screens and photographic lightboxes, all framed in vivid scarlet, enticing you in and guiding you through the story, beginning in a Tsarist Russia of unbelievable inequality, charting the mounting division and discontent, and then exploding into revolution, and the five years of bloodletting that were the Civil War (an oft-overlooked part of the story, dealt with in due detail here). Crucially, Russian Revolution does a formidable job of being a paper-led British Library exhibition without just showing you a lot of books.


The Whites' propaganda was largely rubs. Here's an exception.

There are books, papers and some irresistibly arresting posters, but also dozens of other artefacts – a Red Army cap; a peasant’s cheap, woven shoes; a wooden gun so alarmingly primitive it induces panic; a free gift given away at the Khodynka Field tragedy, the cheap tankard juxtaposed with one of Tsar Nicholas’s own immaculate regal glasses – listening posts, a giant digital map showing the marauding Red Army’s progress during the Civil War, and a climactic screening room, with Shostakovich on the PA and classic propaganda films by Eisenstein (October) and the Vasilievs (Chapaev, Stalin’s favourite on the big screen).


The greatest excuse of all time.

Now and then the exhibition text is a little drab or clunky, or begins discussing events or institutions before defining what they are, but the wealth of material is astonishing, and I got a particular visceral thrill from seeing the handwritten notes by Trotsky and Lenin – the latter applying under a pseudonym, extremely politely, to be a BL reader in 1902 – as well as those propaganda posters in the constructivist style, much homaged or parodied, but still bracingly and instinctively powerful. Like this one:



That constructivism I bum off so much

My main take-aways:

a) my uncontroversial view that the ‘communist’ experiment in Russia was essentially just a disaster (and one which continues to plague socialist causes) doesn’t look like being challenged any time soon

b) the reviled Tsar Nicholas II, later executed for his crimes against the workers, visited the wounded a day after a tragedy... *whistles*

(4)

***

LIVE



The Best of Elmer Bernstein (aka The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and more!)
at the Royal Albert Hall, Sun 18 Jun, 2017

This was such a fantastic show, and it’s been a pleasure to work on too, allowing me the chance to luxuriate in the movie music of the incomparable Elmer Bernstein, who has been a favourite since my teens (I often work to his music, particularly The Man with the Golden Arm, a hypnotic, unrelenting jazz offering that simply changed the way movies were scored), and to chat to the great comedy director, John Landis, who worked with Bernstein on 12 films, and was one of the co-hosts of this concert. The other was Peter Bernstein, Elmer’s son and John’s schoolmate, who shared funny, moving stories about his bold, brilliant, blacklisted father, as well as conducting the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra. With Peter on the podium, Landis shamblingly shuffling papers and regaling us with big, well-trodden showbiz tales, and a setlist showcasing Elmer’s pioneering work in everything from epics to comedies, Westerns to romances, and nature documentaries to sweaty, cynical, claustrophobic fag-end noirs, it was cosy, conversational and emotionally overwhelming in turn.

Some of the music was merely pretty and well-played, the show kicking off with a trio of pieces that have no real resonance to me – the theme from the Nat Geo TV show, a suite from The Ten Commandments, and the main title music from the bloated disaster movie, Hawaii, but everything that happened after that was wonderful in one way or another. Bernstein’s rhapsodic homage to/pastiche of classic Hollywood music – evoking the very history of Hollywood and composed for a ‘60s TV show called Hollywood and the Stars – was a revelation, captivating me with its sweeping, Steiner-esque beauty, and was followed by three cast-iron classics. The Man with the Golden Arm rapped and stuttered, its snares and cymbals mirroring the stabbing pain and breathless desperation of addiction (the film’s theme). To Kill a Mockingbird showed Elmer’s innate understanding of cinema, the composer isolating that the story’s raison d’etre is to deal with adult themes from a child’s perspective: the suite, then, for all its tension and frantic menace, is dominated by the music-box cues and elegiac simplicity of his main theme. And The Magnificent Seven, which closed the first half, was an explosion of exuberance: the piece seeming fresh and new all these years, as if heard for the first time. In this setting, one could appreciate not only Bernstein’s instinctive genius, but also his intelligence and craft: the violins leaping up for the final go-round, as the seven ride to the rescue.


I took this picture of the orchestra. It's not very good, is it?

The second half, once more peppered with Peter and Landis’s reminiscences, observations and easy badinage, was a similarly eclectic mixture of unassailable classics and genuine curios. The sleazy but rousing jazz of Walk on the Wild Side was followed by From the Terrace – intended to showcase the ‘romantic’ Bernstein, but a little dull (I know of the film only as an unapologetic Myrna Loy completest) – before a spirited take on the End Title music from ¡Three Amigos!, Landis’s favourite Bernstein score written for him, being that very post-modern thing: a gentle spoof of Elmer Bernstein’s Western scores. After that, we got the director’s favourite Bernstein score of all, a glorious new arrangement of Bernstein’s music for Scorsese’s period drama, The Age of Innocence, followed by a previously unheard – and unused – piece of music written for the transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London (“I used Sam Cooke instead – it took a couple of years, but Elmer forgave me,” as Landis remembered), its pained, violent and discordant death-throes wrapped up in the eerie soundscapes we already know and love. And then it finishes as it must, with an exuberant Great Escape suite, rich in delayed gratification, as we hang on and on for that famous "Dah dah, dah dah dah-la-dah" only to find it fully reclaimed from the dire dirge of an England defeat, and reborn as the triumphant, playful, rousing anthem it once was.

That gets the biggest reception of the night, and so Peter steps back on stage to conduct one more: the scintillatingly sordid Sweet Smell of Success, Bernstein's other great jazz score of the '50s. It's a fitting climax to this celebration of a great artist, which gives us everything we could want, aside from Far From Heaven (my absolute favourite Bernstein score), and salutes his creativity without sugar-coating his personality. Elmer is painted as a man who fought endlessly against pigeon-holing, evaded easy categorisation, and was only able to forge the path he did by taking chances, erecting a wall around himself, and coating his brilliance in an impermeable level of arrogant authority. Bernstein wasn't needlessly abrasive like his predecessor and admirer, Bernard Herrmann (Peter recalls his dad once ringing Herrmann to say thank you for recommending him for a commission, to which the older composer said something along the lines of: "If I didn't think you could do it, I wouldn't have said you could. Now go away"), but from Landis's stories he emerges as a necessarily tough cookie, insulated from creative interference by his crusty self-confidence. I sat there thinking that I'm glad he was, because the cinematic landscape would be a much blander, duller place without him.

Then Landis came back on stage to shout "Go home", so we did. (3.5)

See also: I wrote about my favourite Bernstein piece for the Royal Albert Hall blog here.

***

Thanks for reading.

Ten things I learned about Warren William

Sort of. It turns out that while William excelled playing a series of rogues throughout the Pre-Code era, away from the screen he was self-effacing to a fault, while devoting his time and energies to inventing and sailing. Sounds like a nice guy, but not perhaps the best subject for a biography, especially as most of the people who could fill in the rest have long since passed on. That makes Warren William: Magnificent Scoundrel of Pre-Code Hollywood (John Stangeland, 2010) an admirable attempt to plug a key gap in film history, but a less than gripping tome. It also means that I had to look beyond his life for 10 things truly worthy of your attention. If you do still want to take the plunge, you’ll find some rare candid shots, a few insights from William’s nieces and a biographer with a fair writing style and a decent grasp of cinema’s past.


Big floaty Warren William head.

1. Satan Met a Lady was named by an office boy. Despairing execs offered $25 to whoever could come up with a decent title for the 1935 screwball remake of The Maltese Falcon. The devilish moniker presumably came from author Dashiel Hammett’s description of his hero, Sam Spade, as “a blonde satan”.

2. William’s wife Helen was 17 years his senior. She claimed just seven. It’s unknown whether he ever found out.

3. Bette Davis may have been sacked from The Case of the Howling Dog – the first ever Perry Mason film – because of her boobs. “Be sure that Davis has her bulbs wrapped up. If she doesn’t do it we are either going to retake or put her out of the picture,” said a memo from studio head Jack Warner. She was replaced by Mary Astor shortly afterwards.

4. Davis, that big-eyed, multi-faceted walking argument, claimed that William repeatedly tried to seduce her. He doesn’t seem to have bothered with anyone else, aside from his wife.

5. In Smarty – an abysmal, appallingly sexist 1934 movie that majorly contributed to William’s slide out of the big time – the star was forced to hit co-star Joan Blondell. He described filming the sequence as “the most embarrassing moment of my life”.

6. The film was promoted by a pressbook in which exhibitors were encouraged to sponsor a local newspaper contest gathering stories about domestic abuse – “but make ‘em funny!”

7. In 1935, after William was passed over for the lead in Captain Blood (in favour of the guy who played a corpse opposite him earlier that year, Errol Flynn), the star wrote a furious missive to the studio lawyer, Roy Obringer, demanding to be released from his contract. He left the next year.

8. "They gave me a script; I told them it stank.” So said director Andre de Toth about Counter Espionage, the Lone Wolf series entry he had been assigned to direct. He asked for two weeks to shoot the movie – twice what had been approved – and was berated by Columbia chief Harry Cohn. If they removed the clause in his contract requiring him to produce films “to the best of his ability”, de Toth suggested, he’d be happy to go faster.

9. In 1942, Fox planned to mount an all-star mystery called The Four Star Murder Case, featuring Philo Vance (William), Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler), Mike Shayne (Lloyd Nolan) and Mr Moto (Peter Lorre), with the latter helping out from within an internment camp. I have a new favourite movie and it has never been made.

10. William’s tragic early death was due to multiple melanoma, probably caused by his relentless woodworking in confined spaces.

... and so as not to end on such a gloomy note, I loved Alexander Woollcott's magnificent dismissal of the 1926 Broadway show, Fanny: "written by Willard Mack and Mr Belasco and they both ought to be ashamed of themselves and each other."

Boyhood, Carol Haney, and Kissimee in the Catskills - Reviews #194

Hello again. I haven't updated the blog since my summer holiday (the day job is heartily satisfying but all-consuming), so this'll be the first of a full four review anthologies unwantedly coming your way...



CINEMA: Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014) - Richard Linklater's staggeringly ambitious film about growing up is sprawling, shambling, and stunning in just about every way, beginning as a series of episodic, often comedic scenes, then mirroring its hero's increasing complexity and uncertainty, searching for itself across a dozen time-frames as this 11-year production morphs into an existential examination of not just one boy but all of humankind, in all its fuzzy, confusing, conflicted glory. Well, I said it was ambitious.

Ellar Coltrane plays Mason, a Texan kid whom we follow from age five to 18 - and across almost three hours - the film attaining some essential kind of truth as it alights upon real life (albeit with occasional recourse to cliché), through its measured, incisive, often improvised depiction of human relationships familial, platonic and romantic, and the way its unique production allows it to document the unfurling of a person and a personality, like a time-lapse camera showing a plant budding and blossoming, while getting rained on a lot.

It has few conventional dramatic peaks and little actual story to speak of, and yet I wasn't bored for an instant, pulled into the story, never able to second-guess where it was going, and sitting there slack-jawed in amazement when it was all over, knocked sideways by the cumulative impact of it all. And by the Hollywood Dean Gaffney (sorry, Ethan Hawke), who has never been this good on screen before. Not even when he flew around in Explorers.

There are individual scenes we've certainly seen before, and it has its moments of verbal pretension - a problem I'm always going to have with the director's Before Sunrise - but it's one of the most arresting and exciting films of the decade so far, and its USP is far more than a gimmick; rather, it's what enables Boyhood to create such an indelible impact: visually, viscerally and deep down in your soul. (4)

***



CINEMA: Two Days, One Night (Dardenne brothers, 2014) - The Dardennes hit a peak with their stunning Kid with a Bike in 2011, a soaring, polarising story about juvenile delinquency, thwarted promise and the loss of innocence.

This one doesn't hit quite so hard, doesn't break then mend you so completely, but it's reliably superb, up there with films like Rosetta and The Son, and boasting the writer-director's usual calling cards. That means the sort of damaged, nuanced characters you've met in real life yet who never grace the big screen, a brief, inspired and polemical premise that allows them to tackle a headline issue in subversive, socialist but universal style, and a confrontational bleakness giving way to marginal catharsis. If I wrote a book about the Dardennes' films, I think I would call it 'Marginal Catharsis'.

Marion Cotillard, sans make-up and vanity, is a factory worker who's laid off, just as she's well enough to return after months away with depression. It had gone to a vote amongst her colleagues: either they got a bonus or she got her job back. With the help of a bolshy friend, she lobbies the boss, who agrees to a compromise: a secret ballot in two days' time. And so, encouraged by her loving, patient husband, she begins to do the rounds, trying to talk them round, like a sad, shy, insecure Juror No. 8 fairly drowning in self-loathing.

It's repetitious at times - we get Cotillard's explanatory spiel numerous times - but while that's not necessarily the most invigorating thing to watch, it is part of the point, the desperation and casual dehumanisation of her character both reminiscent of Joan Bennett getting her soul kicked in during The Reckless Moment, and an allegory about the perils of the free market, which pits workers against one another and ends like this: with someone begging mundanely for clemency.

It's also one of the best and least sentimental, sensational depictions of depression I've seen on screen, right up there with Kirsten Dunst's mopey, ugly, real, stupefied lollop of a performance in Melancholia. Cotillard is a good person who can't even muster the energy to see the good in her that others do.

The film is perhaps minimally inventive in narrative terms, but it is forceful and original and even profound: beautifully played, and concluded in the sole way it really could be - though that's apparent only when it fades to black. (3)

***



The Pajama Game (Stanley Donen and George Abbott, 1957) - It's very nearly great, this adaptation of a smash-hit Broadway show, most recently brought to the Shaftesbury Theatre in London for a spectacular production, which met with rapturous reviews and too many empty seats.

It has the mellifluously-voiced Doris Day - before her weird, evil husband ruined her career - some devilishly good Bob Fosse choreography (the play had been his big break), and a slew of unforgettable songs, written by Jerry Ross and Richard Adler.

But it's not great. Not quite. The comedy seems too forced, male lead John Raitt doesn't have the charisma to put his part across (despite initiating the role on stage), and though some of the dancing is frankly stupendous, there just isn't enough of it.

That frustration is never felt more keenly than during Steam Heat, a showcase for the tragic, incomparable Carol Haney, who had done as much as anyone to reinvent screen dance - working as Gene Kelly's assistant choreographer, then ripping up the rulebook in tandem with Bob Fosse, through those 48 seconds of finger-clickin' goodness in Kiss Me Kate.

Steam Heat is so startling, so innovative, so gobsmackingly, jaw-droppingly perfect in all its scruffy, stylised, androgynous splendour, that it shows up the rest of the film for what it is: a merely competent translation of a hit play, conspicuously lacking in gold dust.

The Pajama Game is likeable, entertaining and unquestionably melodic, but it should have been better. It should have been great. (3.5)

Psst: you can watch Steam Heat here. That squashed, semi-panned-and-scanned version is genuinely the best I can find online. It's still worth it, a hundred times over. Watch it a hundred times. Now.

***



This Gun for Hire (Frank Tuttle, 1942) - Robert Preston and Ronnie Lake are top billed, but it's Alan Ladd - in his first real role - who dominates this stunningly nasty noir, as a new kind of screen anti-hero: a tortured loner of an assassin who punches a woman in his first scene, kills one in his second and pretty much goes on from there. Drawn from a Graham Greene novel, his DNA is in every character from Richard Widmark's giggling psycho in Kiss of Death and sweaty hood in Pickup on South Street to Alain Delon's Jef Costello.

The film isn't as polished or consistent as Ladd and Lake's follow-up, The Glass Key, and lacks that film's seductive verbal poetry, but the performances are mostly great - Laird Cregar as a man of hulking frame and feeble character, Lake putting that astonishing voice to good use - and much of the imagery is unforgettable, including fine LA location work and the mighty, admittedly tiny Ladd strolling into a rendezvous wearing a gas mask. (3)

***



Wedding Present (Richard Wallace, 1936) - A very nice little screwball comedy that starts uncertainly but ultimately delivers in terms of both laughs and heart, as a pair of mishievous, tight-knit newshounds (Cary Grant and Joan Bennett) begin to grow apart after he makes city editor and she makes him mad... only surely it can't end like that.

This is the first time Grant's dynamic fast-talking persona really made an appearance and there are some brilliant gags - including an extended practical joke worthy of Jim Halpert - to go with William Demarest's surprisingly effective bit as a friendly mobster, and the film's secret weapon: a moving, heartfelt depiction of two perfectly-matched lovers kept apart by nothing but pride.

Incidentally, the wedding present of the title manages to be both incredibly tasteless, dated and offensive, and also really quite funny. Well, apart from the pay-off. (3)

***



Two Weeks with Love (Roy Rowland, 1950) - Jane Powell undergoes some slightly tiresome growing pains in this overly glib comedy musical, which just about gets by thanks to her exceptional sincerity and an ebullient performance by the 18-year-old Debbie Reynolds. (I once met Debbie Reynolds, look!)

Powell plays a young woman who's still treated like a kid by her parents (teenagers hadn't been invented yet). The family goes off to the Catskills for a holiday, where she is overwhelmed by the desire to inspect-a-Montalban-o (boom!), but how is she ever going to get off with him if she isn't allowed to wear a corset?

The film's main problem is that the script keeps too much distance between itself and its protagonist, patronising Powell's character by depicting her problems as trivial (like I just did), and putting her through too many slapstick trials, before getting sidetracked by several deadly dull comic vignettes - including her screen father Walter Catlett trying vainly to have a sleep, a sequence which does at least climax with some delightfully primitive special effects.

Thankfully, Powell has a great voice and a winning presence, and the scene in which she breaks down in tears after a calamitous experience at a party is beautifully played, giving the film the heart that it needs and yet so often lacks.

The other real selling point is Reynolds' typically energetic turn, which hits a peak early on with the uproarious Aba Daba Honeymoon number - a paean to simian romance full of stupid dancing and glorious gibbering. The best of Powell's tunes is probably My Hero, a singularly incongruous dream sequence in which her teenager dances around in her underwear being ogled by fully clothed men, as she sings about getting married. (2)

***



Gold Diggers in Paris (Ray Enright, 1938) - Mediocre final entry in Warner's series of Gold Diggers musicals, with peerlessly annoying comic relief from the Schnickelfritz Band - discovered by star Rudy Vallee and now fondly remembered by nobody. There are a few flashes of choreographer Busby Berkeley's genius in the musical numbers, but it's not enough in a film saddled with a weak story, an often irritating cast (including a dislikeable Vallee and an unbearable Melville Cooper) and a dearth of quality songs. The first scene's quite funny, though. (1.5)

***

Old Perry Mason movies:



The Case of the Curious Bride (Michael Curtiz, 1935) - The second entry in Warner's Perry Mason series is a whole lot better than the boring, static opener, with a fair story, the brief American screen debut of Errol Flynn, and some seriously stylish direction from Michael Curtiz, who shoots the opening scene like a time-traveller from the mid-'40s, then slightly overdoes the fades between scenes, like a man who's just discovered what that button does. Admittedly the comic subplot about Mason (Warren William) becoming a gourmand is pretty pointless - indeed, for a comedy-mystery there aren't really any good gags - but there's still enough here to get your teeth into, and the relationship between the sleuth and his assistant Della Street (Claire Dodd) makes for a pleasant if undernourished diversion. (2.5)



The Case of the Lucky Legs (Archie Mayo, 1935) - Slightly irritating third outing at Warner for lawyer-turned-investigator Perry Mason (Warren William), with a rather obvious culprit and a lot of self-satisfied comedy. The main plus point is Genevieve Tobin's sparky, saucy Della Street; best remembered as the über-horny Mitzi in Lubitsch's One Hour with You, there's something of the Joan Blondell about her performance here - and compliments don't come much greater. I also like the scene where a distressed woman shouts "Lucky legs! Lucky legs!", which was the funniest bit of the film, albeit unwittingly. (2)



The Case of the Velvet Claws (William Clemens, 1936) - A short, strange and slightly stupid Perry Mason film - Warren William's last of the series: a series that never really got going; he would fare much better with the Lone Wolf films. The Perry-Della relationship is pushed to breaking point and the story is a rushed, compacted mess. Still, a couple of scenes play out quite well - like Mason slyly obliterating his nemesis' alibi - and it's accidentally very funny that everyone keeps saying "Spicy Bits" in an extremely serious voice. (1.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

June Allyson, The Lone Wolf and Cinema Paradiso uncut - Reviews #45

*MASSIVE SPOILERS*
Cinema Paradiso: Director's Cut (Giusseppe Tornatore, 1988/2002) is longer, bleaker and more troubling than the uplifting 'international version', which scooped countless awards (including the Oscar for Best Foreign Film) and won the hearts of the world. The set-up is the same, with silver-haired moviemaker Salvatore (the excellent Jacques Perrin) looking back on his childhood and adolescence - most of it spent at the local picture palace - following the death of his mentor Alfredo (Philippe Noiret). Sadly, life has afforded no Hollywood ending to the deadened director, who remains haunted by the spectre of lost love, a doomed romance with the middle-class Elena (Agnese Nano). And through it all, Ennio Morricone's sensational score dips and soars.

Rather than a self-indulgent splurge or a cash-in job, as many extended cuts are, this one is the real deal, an expanded take on the original version of the film that toured Italy in 1988. As well as restoring the 31 minutes that were lost in the re-edit, deemed necessary after disastrous box-office receipts, this definitive cut includes an extra 15 minutes of material. So what's new - or rather old? Well, Toto, for one thing. He's old for much longer. In the shortest cut, we get just a handful of scenes showing Perrin as the grown-up Salvatore, still lamenting his betrayal by the only girl he ever loved. Here, there's a full-blown reunion between the former lovers (sadly the older Elena is played by Brigitte Fossey, who's quite poor), along with a stunning, thriller-ish sequence (composed of masterful jump cuts) that reveals the identity of her husband.

Crucially, this release also reveals why the love of Toto's life apparently left without saying goodbye, substantially changing the character of Alfredo from an avuncular, grizzly old duffer to a possibly misguided puppet-master. These are the extra sequences which were bafflingly shown in confusing and meaningless silent snippets over the end credits of the international version! As with that more familiar cut, the best scenes remain those featuring Noiret and the young Toto (Salvatore Cascio), both of whom are just magical, but here they're lent yet greater resonance by the devastating pay-off. 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. See it. (4)

***



Passport to Suez (Andre de Toth, 1943) - Warren William's final appearance as jewel-thief-turned-crimebuster The Lone Wolf is light on comedy and has almost no mystery. Surprising, then, that it's still a pretty snappy thriller, with our hero (I trust he's your hero too - why wouldn't he be?) getting mixed up with Nazi spies trying to steal secret plans. The Lone Wolf series was a staple of '30s and '40s Hollywood and after a superb, glossy outing with Melvyn Douglas (The Lone Wolf Returns) and a surprisingly sprightly one featuring Francis Lederer (The Lone Wolf in Paris), Pre-Code favourite Warren William took over as solo operator Michael Lanyard. His first appearance was in The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt, a matchlessly enjoyable fusion of thriller and screwball romance, before the series settled into an agreeable if unexceptional groove with movies like The Lone Wolf Meets a Lady and The Lone Wolf Keeps a Date. Those earlier sequels are certainly the best, full of nice interplay between William and his doting valet Eric Blore. By the time studio Columbia began shoving Lanyard into WWII propaganda flicks like Counter-Espionage (so steeped in patriotic fervour it feels slightly bossy) and One Dangerous Night, the entries were looking a touch thin. Which brings us to Passport to Suez. It's unusual to see William's character so out of his depth as he appears for the most part here, trying - and largely failing - to stay one step ahead of the Axis agents. Eric Blore is good value as ever, playing valet Jamieson, though the introduction of his screen son is a little wrong-headed. The support cast is somewhat enlivened by Ann Savage, the femme fatale from the classic PRC no-budget noir Detour, who has an intriguingly strange face/head, if not a great deal to do. (2.5)

For a review of the previous film in the series, One Dangerous Night, please go here.

***


The worst drawing of Joel McCrea the West has ever known.

*SPOILERS*
Four Faces West (Alfred E. Green, 1948) is a genuinely offbeat Western, in that no bullets are fired at any stage, though the gunpowder inside is used to cure two sick border children of diptheria. The film begins as a manhunt, with 'bankrobber' Joel McCrea (he leaves an IOU, but does point a gun at the manager) tracked by sheriff Pat Garrett (Charles Bickford). Then it adds some romance and a touch of history, before taking an inspired left-turn. McCrea's Westerns are a mixed bunch. He was a marvellous actor and from 1946 made nothing but oaters. Odd, then, how few were worthy of his talent. Of the 15 or so I've seen, only Stars in My Crown (is that a Western?), Ride the High Country and Colorado Territory really made the grade. This is definitely above-average, improving as it goes along, with a moving, reflective final 30 that comes out of nowhere. The supporting cast includes McCrea's wife Frances Dee as the love interest, and Maltese actor Joseph Calleia, playing against type as a kind-hearted gambler. This moodily-photographed outing isn't a masterpiece, but it does something different, and that's a welcome change in a genre heavily populated by formula films. (3)

***


These women look a funny shape. Can't they get some better artists in Hollywood?

The Opposite Sex (David Miller, 1956) is a disappointing remake of The Women that adds colour, songs and men, but somehow loses the essence of the original. Perhaps the plentiful cuts to plot and dialogue were to blame, though the lacklustre direction and unimaginative incorporation of the numbers doesn't help. June Allyson plays Kay, a former chanteuse who finds that her husband (Leslie Nielsen) has strayed with chorus girl Joan Collins. She's cut up about it and heads for Reno, but the chance of reconciliation is always there. Amidst the disappointment, there are some positives. Allyson was an underrated, distinctive actress and she's very good here, well-supported by Sandy Descher (as her daughter), Ann Sheridan - delivering the best performance of the bunch - and the legendary Joan Blondell, whose part is sadly far too small. June also contributes a couple of musical highlights: Young Man With a Horn, complete with trumpet solo by Harry James, and Now Baby Now, with its explosion-in-a-pastel-factory colour scheme. The latter is an exuberant performance, with staging that clearly informed Elvis' Jailhouse Rock (made at MGM the next year), though it inescapably features Allyson in a light blue jumpsuit, somewhat failing to transmit the desired sex appeal. The film's a bit of a damp squib, all told, though worth sticking with if you do start it. The last third is the best. (2)

Neo-noir, the Nicholas Brothers and frog kissers - Reviews #16

One Dangerous Night (Michael Gordon, 1943) was the second-to-last of Warren William's nine appearances as The Lone Wolf, a reformed jewel thief who tackled crooks and enjoyed oddly platonic relationships with damsels in distress. After the absolutely sensational Lone Wolf Spy Hunt, arguably the greatest B movie of all time, the series found a slightly lower groove in a series of undemanding mystery-comedies with premises of varying ingenuity. The generically-titled One Dangerous Night (giving a clue to the content for patrons who might have missed the trailer; the next year's Boston Blackie was called One Mysterious Night) is fairly standard jewel robbery stuff and notable only really for the timeframe, with the crime solved over Independence Night. There's too much exposition at the start, particularly for a film that only runs 77 minutes, though as soon as The Lone Wolf tells his oxymoronic companion, valet Jamison (Eric Blore), that the pair should "go off to crash a party together", it picks up. The cast is stuffed to bursting with familiar B-movie faces, including Frank Sully (who played Sgt Matthews in several of the Blackie films), noir legend Ann Savage (Detour) and Louis Jean Heydt, along with returning Lone Wolf alumni Thurston Hall and Fred Kelsey. Williams, meanwhile, is his usual delightfully irreverent self. The scene where the star suddenly whips open a door displays his trademark sense of danger - that commodity someone silly once said was required of every great actor (ah yes, like Lillian Gish, or Gary Cooper) - and he bounces off Blore as well as ever. Despite its formulaic nature and the slow opening, the film remains good-natured fun. A weaker series outing, perhaps, but if you've come this far with The Lone Wolf, you'll want to check it out. If you haven't, you probably won't. (2.5)

***



Widely held as Pixar's weakest, Cars (John Lasseter and John Ranft, 2006) is unexceptional but easy-to-take, with a well-worn plot given bright treatment. As has been said before, it's Doc-Hollywood-but-with-cars, as a speedy, superficial young buck - race car Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) - gets stranded in a small hick town where the residents' goodheartedness and easy-going nature start to work their magic. As in the Michael J. Fox-starrer, our conceited hero is asked to repair the damage he caused during his noisy arrival, and ends up dating a female lawyer who wound up in the area after an unhappy stint in the big city. (Having said that, Doc Hollywood itself is a hybrid of Local Hero, The Secret of My Success, a Dr Kildare, and a complete mess, so it's hardly the essence of originality.) Cars is well-short of the studio's best: Up, WALL-E, Ratatouille and Monsters, Inc., but the usual spark is periodically apparent, particularly in the treatment of tractors and a hysterical epilogue in which Toy Story, Monsters, Inc. and A Bug's Life are given a new spin (pun intended). Elsewhere, colourful characters and cut-to-the-chase races compensate for the sometimes slack narrative and muddled motor-y message. Nice James Taylor song, too. (2.5)

***



Pixar typically include a spin-off, direct-to-video short on each feature film DVD. The one for Cars is DTV SHORT: Mater and the Ghostlight (John Lasseter and Dan Scanlon, 2006), in which the principal comic relief character from the movie is apparently pursued by an unearthly blue glow. I'm not sure quite what the point is, but it's an OK watch, and the final gag is fairly chucklesome. (2)

***



Being a made-for-theatres outing, SHORT: One Man Band (Mark Andrews and Andrew Jimenez, 2005) is understandably better. Set in a lushly-realised Italian piazza, it sees rival musicians face off in a fight for a peasant girl's penny. The battle is as imaginative as you'd hope, and the whole thing has a great sense of place, but it takes an ill-conceived, unexplained turn near the close that's, like, well random, and trips the whole thing up. Shame. (3)

***



- "Did you guys come over here to arrest me?"
- "It kind of looks that way, Wayne."
Red Rock West (John Dahl, 1993) was made by the director a year before he wowed most everyone alive with The Last Seduction, a dazzling, resolutely nasty neo-noir that would presumably have taken home a bevvy of Oscars had it not been screened on TV first. Whoops. The earlier film is an effective, smirkingly fatalistic thriller about a drifter (Nicolas Cage) who's mistaken by lowlife Wayne (J.T. Walsh) for the hitman (Dennis Hopper) he's just hired to take care of his wife (Lara Flynn Boyle). Dahl is a gifted director and for the first hour it's pretty triumphant: atmospheric, exciting and riotously enjoyable, with an interesting treatment of creeping moral corruption and little clue given as to where it's heading next. But then the tightly-wound plot starts to unravel, with improbable (and therefore uninteresting) twists creating the enduring mental image of Dahl at his writing desk, scowling and scratching his head with the end of his pencil as he wonders how we got from that to this. It's still fine viewing, with a brooding, ever-present score and Hopper's excellent performance as Lyle from Dallas, a Johnny Cash look-alike of a hitman with an inferiority complex and a sentimental attitude to the Marines. It picks up for the last five, too. (3)

***



Bridge to Terabithia (Gabor Csupo, 2007) is perhaps the loveliest film I'll see this year - at least until I dig Remember the Night out for New Year's Eve. Josh Hutcherson is a fifth-grader (he's about 10) who finds solace from schoolyard bullying and home troubles with new classmate AnnaSophia Robb. The pair close their eyes and open their minds, conjuring a mythic land in a nearby forest that helps them confront their real-world problems - but tragedy is just around the corner. Former animator Gabor Csupo's understated handling, subtly incorporating fantastical elements, is perfect for the material, and he's aided by a trio of fine juvenile performances: from Hutcherson, Robb and Bailee Madison - playing Hutcherson's younger sister. T2 villain Robert Patrick is also very good, playing a gruff dad presumably not fashioned from liquid metal. There are very minor weaknesses, like a slight overreliance on musical montage and Zooey Deschanel's underwritten part as a teacher, but this is an extremely assured, intelligent, sensitive film with a believable and immensely touching friendship at its core. (3.5)

***


Harold and Fayard Nicholas dance for the Sheik of Araby.

Tin Pan Alley (Walter Lang, 1940) is a superior example of those composer biopics that were all the rage in golden era Hollywood - but with fictional songsmiths! It also appears to be employing the WWI-as-WW2 dynamic somewhat ahead of time. John Paine and Jack Oakie are musical publishers in 1915 New York. John's romancing tuneful Alice Faye, while Jack's got his sights - somewhat unrealistically - on leggy dancer Betty Grable. They all hit the big time, but it takes America's entry into WWI (late as usual) to iron out their differences. Attractive performances, top-drawer songs and an appearance by spectacular hoofers Fayard and Harold Nicholas, doing yet another eye-popping routine, make this well worth catching. (3)

***



CINEMA: The Princess and the Frog (Ron Clements and John Musker, 2009) - A lazy prince and a workaholic waitress fall in love after being turned into frogs by a voodoo spiv. That’s the premise of Disney’s return to hand-drawn animation, an enjoyable ride set in Jazz Age Louisiana that smells suspiciously like progress - that and swamp water. Waitress Tiana (voiced by Anika Noni Rose), the studio’s first black heroine, dreams of opening her own restaurant, while her best friend Charlotte fantasises about marrying a prince. The arrival of a ukulele-playing royal (Bruno Campos) promises to help them both achieve their ambitions - if only a rakish occultist hadn’t just turned him into a frog. It’s an enjoyable ride, with a rich New Orleans flavour that extends to an agreeable jazziness in the film’s many new tunes, while the forays into art deco animation are nicely handled. And if too many supporting characters seem to be based on those from previous Disney hits, at least there’s Cajun firefly Ray, a funny and touching comic foil. But the film’s side-stepping of the real difficulties facing black Americans in the 1920s seems hamfisted in the extreme, undoing much of the good done by its bold setting. Also, fireflies can’t talk, but we’ll let that slide. (3)

Lady for a Day - Reviews #13

Please note: despite appearances, Warren William is not evil in this film.

Lady for a Day (Frank Capra, 1933) was, as his son proudly points out in his DVD intro, the first Capra film to be nominated for an Oscar. It was up for four gongs, though ultimately won none. Don't feel too sorry for the beetle-browed sentimentalist, though, his follow-up - It Happened One Night - became the first film to take home all five major Academy Awards: picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay.

As a film based on a Damon Runyon story, Madame La Gimp, directed by Capra and scripted by his regular collaborator Robert Riskin, Lady for a Day is pretty much what you'd expect. It takes place in a world of likeable hoods, good-hearted ordinary folk and overly suspicious cops. It's frequently very funny - and it's deeply sentimental. May Robson is Apple Annie, a downtrodden old woman who lives in a barely-lit flop house, drinks too much and sells fruit out of a basket to survive. The only thing on this good earth she cares about is her daughter (Jean Parker), who was sent to a convent school years before and is now living in Spain. To shield the girl from her plight (she says a couple of times that the shock would kill her, though the shame - you imagine - would mostly be on Annie's part), she steals stationery from a swanky hotel and pens letters boasting of her exploits in high society. When the girl writes to say she's returning to America with a fiancee and a prospective father-in-law (Walter Connolly, unusually restrained as a Spanish count with a generic foreign accent), it's left to good-hearted gangster Warren William and his ragtag band of affable goons to turn her into a lady.

The plotting is extremely deft and well-paced and Riskin's script provides plenty of memorable dialogue. He could overwrite and reject brevity for speechifying, but at his best he was among the finest screenwriters in Hollywood. Here he's at his best. There's a lovely moment when Annie appears at the dockside, looking every inch the society lady, and one of her friends says: "I remember when she looked like that all the time." It's such a simple line, but so stunningly effective. Later on, there's a wonderful exchange between William and his moll, Glenda Farrell. "I love you for what you're doing," she tells him. "Oh shut up", says William. Near the close, as plot threads are being tied up, we cut from one car to the next. For a second you think Riskin's completely lost it, with a series of brief, nondescript exchanges in which the authorities resolve not to prosecute William and the governor and the mayor make up. Then comes the sting. "I'm sorry I've been so harsh on your guys, I know you're doing your best," the irascible police chief tells his men, as they grin sheepishly. Riskin's scripting is so skilful that potential pitfalls - a dearth of daytime scenes between Annie and her daughter, little screentime for either of its romantic couples - are effortlessly avoided.

There's a lot to enjoy in the acting. William, perhaps best known today for his role in the delightful mystery-comedy series The Lone Wolf, makes the most of what is essentially a supporting role. Farrell, fast becoming one of my favourite performers, is also a joy, sparking brilliantly with the eternally deadpan Ned Sparks (who resembles an old Buster Keaton). And Robson, nominated as Best Actress, is simply superb. She's utterly believable as the tragic alcoholic venturing, terrified, into high society. The first 15 minutes, in which we see her peddling, lying by letter, then growing increasingly desperate as her daughter's latest message goes missing, are an acting masterclass. Capra fills the cast with familiar faces, each given a couple of scenes to absolutely nail their character. As well as the sardonic Sparks, there's Guy Kibbee playing a billiards shark with the gift of the gab, Nat Pendleton as a very supportive henchman and Halliwell Hobbes, doing a Blore-ish bit as Robson's adopted butler.

Capra's handling is typically assured: perfectly balancing the different story elements and drawing the viewer in via some expressive direction. The backwards tracking shot following Robson as she goes off to ruin her life in the living room is really effective, and the lush romanticism of his soft-focus close-ups on the lovey-dovey couple recall Mitchell Leisen's soppier moments. I'm a big fan of Capra, and Lady for a Day is one of his best - a marvellously-acted tearjerker that allows plenty of room for character comedy. It was remade by Capra himself as A Pocketful of Miracles, incidentally, then later by Jackie Chan, as Miracles. (4)