Movietone News

Sickert in Bath and Bathampton

2012-02-05T16:59:00.033Z

This weekend we decided to explore the links between Bath and one of my favourite painters, Walter Sickert.

Sickert lived until 1942, but is indelibly associated with images of late-Victorian London. (He's probably most widely known today, alas, as perhaps the most stupid of all suggested Jack the Ripper suspects, a demonstrably false suggestion, started in the 1970's by a fantasist called Joseph Gormley who claimed to be Sickert's son and the great-grandson of Queen Victoria, and repeated more recently by the absurd novelist Patricia Cornwell).

I especially love his paintings of the popular entertainments of his day, which are given an additional dash of socio-historic interest by the fact that his work spans the transition between Edwardian and Jazz Age popular culture: he painted some endlessly atmospheric scenes of London's Victorian music halls in rich, gloomy, glowing colours, but one of my favourites of all his paintings is one strangely (presumably randomly) titled Jack and Jill, which is in fact based on a newspaper photograph Of Edward G. Robinson and Joan Blondell in Bullets or Ballots.
Lit from below, Robinson looks like a squat, malevolent Punch, his protruding cigar seemingly made of the same material as his face. It's just wonderful.

But despite his close association with London, Sickert loved Bath.
He first came for the first of several prolonged visits in 1917, and wrote to the painter and patron Ethel Sands:
"Bath is it. There never was such a place for rest and comfort and leisurely work. Such country, and such town. And the mellifluous amiability of the west-country gaffers and maidens, all speaking the dialect which became the American we know and love."

During these initial working visits to the city, Sickert roomed at The Lodge, a small but impressively stylish house, tucked away on Entry Hill, a not inconsiderable uphill walk from the city itself.

He worked at studios located at number 10 Bladud Buildings, in the heart of town (and just opposite the street where we live!)

Four years before he died, however, he decided to move to the area permanently.
With his third wife Thérèse he settled on the lovely village of Bathampton, just outside the city. The first flurries of snow were just beginning to settle as we set off on Saturday morning to pay him a call.

They bought a spacious, rambling property, St George's Hill House - difficult to photograph, unfortunately, because it's at the end of a long and tree-shrouded driveway. This is the best we could do:

Sickert settled happily into his new surroundings, and enjoyed being a local celebrity. He would invite villagers and children in for tea and to talk about paintings, and agreed to judge a local fancy dress competition, and paint a portrait of the winner.
He also joined the local art society - as an ordinary member, turning down the offer of a vice-presidency - and lectured once a week to the students at the city's art college. (His keen eye for the beauty of the everyday had not deserted him: on observing the tenants of a dowdy nearby apartment block drying their washing on the iron balconies, he said to the students: "Look how these people with their few poor things are writing poetry for us.")

Here's Walter, with his superb beard, and his wife Thérèse in the garden of Hill House:

And here, some time before the beard had reached the above stage of enviable perfection, he is lecturing at Bath's Victoria Art Gallery:

Oddly, despite the profusion of plaques all over Bath celebrating its many famous residents and visitors, neither The Lodge, the studios at Bladud Buildings nor Hill House bear any visible indication of their connection with the great man.

Sickert died in Bathampton in 1942, and is buried in the local churchyard:

The reason that such a notable resident received so dowdy a headstone is that he died during World War II, and so was given a wartime utility gravestone.
This one, in fact, is a 1980s replica: the original had fallen to pieces.

Two other local celebrities also rest here: Arthur Phillip, first Governor of Australia and founder of the settlement that is now Sydney...

... and William Harbutt, the inventor of plasticine!

Apropos of nothing much, here's a stone pig we saw under a Bathampton tree:

And here's Snowy, Bath's famous Art Deco listed polar bear, who we passed on the way to Sickert's lodgings on Entry Hill:

Lastly, here are a few of Sickert's paintings of scenes in and around Bath, matched up with their real locations as they were this weekend. Damn those cars!

Mid-Atlantic with a blush of Russian: Your one-stop Keira news round-up

2012-02-03T15:38:00.017Z

With Cronenberg's Dangerous Method almost upon us - and I must say it's starting to look rather better than I feared from early accounts, which probably only means it's got that much further to fall - Keira's been all over the news this month, in a variety of odd mini-stories, topped off by a first class photo session for Gentleman's Quarterly, as I still like to fool myself into calling it.

And since this is Movietone News, after all, I thought I'd bring together in one post the pick of all the great new Keira stuff out there, on the assumption that you'll welcome having it all at your fingertips, rather than have to go trawling through upwards of a dozen print and online outlets, or - option 3 - saying: "to be honest, I don't know what all the fuss is about" and leaving it at that.
I've also included some of the GQ pictures, so you don't forget who it is we're talking about.

Actually, there was a time when I wouldn't have dared waste your time with mountains of Keira trivia, but since my American friend James Nicholas declared her 'the patron saint of Movietone News' I feel it's my duty, somehow.
So pour yourself a gin fizz and we'll all go on a Keira-in-the-news tour.

First up comes the news that she doesn't own a television.

Keira Knightley: Why I Don't Own A Television is courtesy of the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper with a certain highbrow reputation, hence this 'top-end' Keira story.
Turns out that the reason why she doesn't have a TV is the same reason why I don't: because all the programmes are rubbish. So she earns ten points for that, but unfortunately has three taken away again for saying that she watches football in the pub. She almost certainly doesn't really - at least, I've never seen her in a pub. But that's not the point. She should have learned by now that no amount of making out she's Joe Schmo is going to change their minds in Plasma Land, hence the caddish comments beneath the article.

Which leads neatly into this revelation:
Keira: I get less criticism in the US.
This snippet of the GQ interview seems to have got all the attention, with Keira explaining that while American audiences are generally supportive, the British can be nasty, and actually make her cry.
This splenetic riposte - Americans are stupid enough to like Keira Knightley, from what purports to be 'Cosmopolitan's best celebrity blog, 2011' - amply proves her point, calling the US "just about the only country gullible enough to buy her schtick of being a not-ugly posh English girl of no-fixed-talent".
Call it predictable chivalry on my part if you must, but this site really does read like the work of a drunk twelve year old.

We leave the top-end Telegraph 'no TV' type of story some distance behind us now, and pass down the rutted track to Weirdsville, where a story that seems to have originated with your super soaraway Sun has been doing the rounds in no small measure:
Keira Knightley practiced 'sex face' in mirror for Dangerous Method role
"I asked psychoanalysts about it and they said, 'sex and anything like that is trying to release pent-up emotion'. So I worked with that and sat in my bathroom and pulled faces at myself for two days."
The result, apparently, was a 'sex face' authentic enough to convey its merits to David Cronenberg via Skype.

Praise indeed from the director of Shivers, I'd say. And also a fine example of people without televisions making up their own amusements.

The best thing about Dangerous Method looks set to be Keira doing a Russian accent. I've seen clips of it and it does sound pretty terrific.
Here she is talking about doing a fake Russian accent while talking in a fake cockney accent. Sorry about the nasty lead-in music.

Not entirely sure what that bit about the tics are on the face and they're not funny means either, but pretty good for all that, I'm sure you'll agree.
Well all good things must come to an end, and I even I can't go on trawling the internet for Keira stories forever. There are, after all, fires to be lit and buffalo to be caught.

But I'll leave you with Keira singing 'Maybe It's Because', the only good bit in the film The Edge of Love.

On the Titfield trail

2012-01-28T17:59:00.023Z

Today we walked from Bath to the lovely little village of Monkton Combe, better known to fans of Ealing comedies as Titfield, in The Titfield Thunderbolt.

Monkton Combe Station was the stand-in for Titfield Station in the film, and we decided to find out where it was - past tense intended, because sadly the station itself no longer exists.
Nonetheless, its exact site can still be located, thanks to one fortuitous landmark and the bizarre survival of just one original feature.

The village itself is charming in the extreme, and almost eerily quiet and still.

Gentlemen, be upstanding...

And is there...

Yes, there is!

In the local churchyard, we found the grave of the famous First World War veteran Harry Patch, who was 111 years old when he died in 2009.

The local inn was fabulous, with a blazing log fire beneath a splendid oil painting of a slumbering dog.
And the mustard came in a dish, not in one of those naff little sachets.

Best of all, they had photographs of the production of The Titfield Thunderbolt on the wall.

This is the landmark that enabled us to pinpoint the relevant road: an original eighteenth century lock-up, unusual in that it contains two adjoining cells:

Surrounded by houses, it's easily missed, but it leads directly to Mill Lane, clearly identifiable in the film:

And here, at the end of the lane, is the site of Titfield Station.
All that remains are those two iron gate posts, on either side of the garage, almost spooky in their isolation...

Next week, we find Shangri La and Oz.

Britons confused by artistry; compensation offered...

2012-01-20T08:19:00.007Z

“Odeon Liverpool One can confirm it has issued a small number of refunds to guests who were unaware that The Artist was a silent film. The cinema is happy to offer guests a refund on their film choice if they raise concern with a member of staff within 10 minutes of the film starting.”

Good grief... (read on)

Please Consider Uggie... plus Cameo seasons and competition winners

2012-01-13T15:50:00.007Z

All you regglars'll know I was seriously nervous about going to see The Artist, from the fear that it could not possibly live up to the promise of its trailer. My friend Damian swayed me in the end; he got in touch to say that it really was as good as it looks, to the point that even the fonts were authentic. And this is a man who knows a thing or two about movie fonts.
So yesterday we crossed our fingers and went to see it and by heck it really is sensationally good. I've reviewed it at Movietone Cameos.

The film is full of great performances, but the undoubted star is Uggie the dog, who delivers a multi-layered performance of exceptional subtlety and skill. So much so that I am delighted to see there is a movement afoot to overturn the speciesist shortsightedness that has rendered him ineligible for the Oscar he so richly deserves.
There's more on the campaign here, including a link to the 'Consider Uggie' Facebook page.

By the way, and speaking of Movietone Cameos, after months of at best sporadic activity interspersed with wide slabs of stasis, the site(hereafter referred to as the aforementioned) is undergoing something of a relaunch this year.
You could all be forgiven for forgetting there ever was such a blog. The original idea was, because I don't tend to do short reviews of individual films here, to create a place where I could index all the reviews I've done over the years for other people's magazines and books, and also websites like the BFI's ScreenOnline, and especially the reviews I did for those awful Movies You Must See Before You Die books that got edited and partially rewritten, to the brink of illiteracy and bravely beyond, without my permission.
But what I also wanted to do, and spectacularly failed at, so heroic is my laziness, was make the site into a kind of evolving film journal in which I would record every film I see.
And it is in that capacity that I have vowed to bring it back from the grave. My aim is to post something new every morning, and I've managed it this week at least, so if you feel like dropping by it would be lovely to see you there.
Something else we're doing, the wife and I that is, that I'm linking-in with the relaunched Cameos is watching films in self-curated seasons.
Every month we take it in turns to pick a subject for a season and choose the films we want to see for it, and I'll put reviews up on Cameos as we go.
There are ground rules: modern American romcoms are okay now and then but not permitted in a whole month-long season; Angela in turn has prohibited me from suggesting "any of your 'house of blood' type films".
I get to go first because I just do and that's all there is to it, and so this month it's Fay Wray. (I sense little by way of surprise.)
You can find out what the current season is by going to 'This Month at Cameos' at the top of the page, and then by clicking the link you can isolate all of the films under that heading.
Your comments on the way will, as always, jolly us both along no end.

Now on to our competition winners.
We had two copies of the new Steve McQueen biography and two of Piper Laurie's autobiography up for grabs, and the lucky Steves were
Heather Terry and The Lady Eve,
while the fortune-dusted Pipers were
Russell Peterson and Sherry Smith.
Thanks to everyone who took part, and congratulations to the lucky four. Your books will be mailed next week.

There's more Movietone Books up next, with features on the Marx Brothers, Leslie Halliwell and the next of my Movie Books I Couldn't Live Without.
So meet you back here soon, and in the meantime, don't forget to consider Uggie...

My All-Time Favourite Movie Books: “Louise Brooks – Portrait of an Anti-Star”

2011-12-22T08:33:00.014Z

This is one of those books that takes me back instantly to the early nineteen-eighties, when I was just embarking on my love affair with old movies.

I had of course never heard of her until she died in 1985, and the BBC showed an old documentary, Diary of a Lost Girl, Pandora's Box and, charmingly, Overland Stage Raiders (still one of my all-time favourite Brooks movies; still one of the very few westerns I watch for fun.)
I'd just turned twelve, and hitherto my old movie crush had been Marlene Dietrich, who had transfixed me in a BBC Saturday matinee double-bill of Destry Rides Again and Seven Sinners. But Brooks was something quite different, and my memory, rendered hyperbolic by time, insists that within a few minutes of watching her in Pandora's Box my voice had broken.

The book is a kind of scrapbook of various essays, articles and bits of ephemera. There are loads of photographs, not glossy or glamorously reproduced but, it seemed to me at the time, almost a portal into a world of slightly dark, slightly decadent allure.
I didn't know there were old movies like this, or old movie stars.

How I came upon it is a story inextricably interwoven with the geography of the city of Plymouth.
Plymouth’s city centre has been massively restructured in recent years. It was never the most charming of shopping centres: thanks to our proximity to the Royal Naval Dockyard at Devonport it had been more or less razed by the Nazis during the war, then rebuilt in the Attlee years as a series of distended grey concrete blocks which, viewed from above, had a distinct and ironic touch of the Albert Speers to their fearful symmetry, but from the ground must have seemed unbelievably austere and lifeless compared to what had been there before.
Nonetheless, it was a design that still revealed the touch of a human hand. Not the work of a creative imagination, clearly, but you could still see the brushmarks for all that. What has now replaced it, with no war as excuse for further tampering, is incomparably worse, a drunken computer's nightmare, dominated by an enormous video screen hovering like a War of the Worlds tripod where once the eye was led gracefully through a straight avenue leading to the famous Plymouth Hoe, where Drake famously played snooker while waiting for the Vikings.

And Drake, our city's most famous son (with the possible exception of Wayne Sleep) gave his name to the site of my first encounter with this book: the Drake Circus shopping complex.
This was, depending on who you asked, either an ugly concrete rabbit's warren or a fascinatingly eccentric radiating splurge of subways leading in several directions to and from a central open air tapestry of mainly small, friendly shops. But I always thought that entering it was a bit like entering a secret cave, or passing through one world into another.
As a child, my mother and I would come here every Friday on the bus, get off at the library just on the outskirts, and pass down into the first tunnel which, like them all, offered a mysterious choice of directions (mysterious in that we always took the same route, and it was some little while before I was old enough to be there on my own, and find out where the adjacent passages actually took you).
Always there was a cheery busker, and with tiled walls depicting scenes from Plymouth’s past, these longish, dark and echoing tunnels were not remotely frightening. Week in and out we passed through them, never for a second entertaining the thought that they contained even the latent potential of threat, as indeed they did not at that time.
The first tunnel took you to a kind of central courtyard, where we would stop and feed bread to the pigeons. (This was the highlight of my week, partly because a goodly percentage of the bread ended up in me rather than the pigeons.) We then took the left path, into the Drake Circus complex itself.

The first thing you saw was the back entrance of C&A. The front was right at the other end of the complex, a fact I found incredibly impressive. Sometimes we would use C&A as a kind of unofficial subway into the town proper, but they eventually caught on to this and stopped people using the back entrance, so we had to pass through Drake Circus itself.
First on the left was a cheery, dimly-lit café, where tables would be routinely shared by strangers, and we would sometimes stop for a bowl of 'soup of the day', also known as minestrone. On the right, a wool shop.
Then on the left, the first Tesco supermarket I had ever seen. The exact layout of its two floors remains so vivid in my mind that you could give me a shopping list and I would know exactly where to find each item, something I still can’t do in my local Sainsbury’s after six months of regular usage.
But we will ignore Tesco’s today and march onward still, because we have another destination in mind.We will not even turn right, where at the top of one of the only outside escalators I have ever seen stood my favourite childhood shop: an Aladdin’s cave called Arcadia: two massive open-plan floors with, on the ground, paperbacks, magazines, annuals, sweets and records, and on the top, a wonderland of toys.
No, we are heading straight ahead, to a small but enchanting bookshop called Chapter and Verse.

Here is where my earliest memories of solo book buying are located, where I turned so many vague potential interests into lifelong passions, with careful purchases of judiciously chosen stock. Here is where I bought my first book on ancient Egypt (Romer's Egypt by John Romer) and my first book on Hitchcock, and my first Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion.
It seems to me there are no such bookshops now: they either sell nothing or everything, neither option really conducive to the kind of chance discoveries from which true devotion to a subject is built. Just as multi-channel television has killed the potential for stumbling upon and sticking with a film or programme you would not have chosen to watch but might just change your life, so too has the book superstore. If you know what you’re looking for, great, but stumbled-upon epiphanies are rare.
Chapter and Verse was shaped by human imagination. Space was at a premium, so stock was carefully chosen and the books were all good. And there, staring at me one Friday, was that amazing face I had just seen on television, the provocative, shiny haired, black-red lipped, hypnotic eyed, impossibly beckoning visage of Louise. The films had impressed me, but it was this book that made me her slave. For a few weeks I would simply go into the shop and browse through it, but soon enough I succumbed, as all men did around Louise, it would seem.

Of course all the iconic glamour shots were there, but the one that held my eye the longest was this one, a candid of her on a set, surrounded by books and eating a sandwich:

In later years, there would be other, technically better books about Louise to add to my shelves, but none were ever quite as exciting as this first one: I bought her own memoirs, collected as Lulu In Hollywood soon after, then a few years later Barry Paris's biography came along; just recently Peter Cowie's coffee-table tome became the ultimate photographic record of this most photogenic of all stars. Now, comes the mouthwatering news that her private journals are being prepared for publication.
My own view of Brooks has changed over the years too: my complete initial capitulation to her erotic hypnosis was eventually tainted by cynicism when I realised how well she stage-managed her decline, and how so many of the bad breaks that killed her career were brought about by her own stubbornness and vanity. But the delight I take in flicking through this book has never weakened for a second, and thus it belongs at the very top of my list of film books I cannot imagine life without. I only have to look at the cover to be transported back to that time when the cerebral passions of cinemania were first mixed with the more instinctive fixations that mark the transition from short to long trousers.

As for Chapter and Verse: well, we had many more pleasant encounters to come, but it disappeared eventually, as all things too good for this world must sooner or later do. And eventually, the entire Drake Circus complex was demolished and rebuilt, seemingly freehand, with whatever materials happened to be lying around at the time.
The original was by no means a pretty thing: it was grey, it was shadowy, and cold even in Summer. What it has been replaced by, however, is something only a computer could love, and I'm proud to say it was the 2006 inaugural winner of the Carbuncle Cup, the prestigious award given by architectural magazine Prospect to honour the most egregious eyesores in Britain.

(Movietone Books continues next year)

Adventures in Cinemagoing, December 2011

2011-12-19T17:04:00.009Z

The late, lamented Gerald Stewart once wrote: "Rather than his directorial efforts, I prefer Martin Scorsese’s work as film enthusiast, preservationist, historian, and keeper of the flame."

I agree totally, having just enjoyed his amazing three hour love letter to cinema Italiana, My Voyage To Italy.
It's as good, as detailed and as deep as a book, and the man's insights into the films, both analytical and autobiographical, are fascinating.
I'm constantly amazed by the breadth and depth of his knowledge and appreciation of cinema, from Michael Powell to Antonioni to Hammer horror, and none of it guesswork.
Quite why so little of that leaks back out when he gets behind a camera is a mystery indeed.
I can see that Taxi Driver is a great film, and Mean Streets probably is, but neither are films I feel any need to see again: surely one standard of great cinema. The only Scorsese film that ever calls me back is The King of Comedy. And how a man who knows and loves as much as he does about classical Hollywood could possibly have made something as crass as Cape Fear is simply inexplicable to me.
This enigma was uppermost in my mind at the cinema last night as I got my first sightings of the trailers for two movies that have had my discerning fellow classic film bloggers reaching for the superlatives like they're coming into fashion: The Artist and Scorsese’s Hugo.
Of course, one should never judge a film by its trailer (they’re usually much better than the movie) but I confess I saw precious little to attract me about Hugo. It looks like a Spielberg film, with that new-fashioned fantasy look that somehow manages to dribble out of the boring CGI effects and spatter the actors too, so the whole thing takes on that strange, sharp, grey, metallic quality of computer-aided joyless magic. I can't care. And I didn’t much like the book either.
The Artist, on the other hand, looks so amazingly good I scarcely dare to dream that it might live up to its promise – could it, even? This really could be what I’ve longed for for years: not a pastiche, just a new old movie.

Old movies are the safest bet at Christmas, but we didn’t manage It’s a Wonderful Life this year. Our local cinema advised us to get our tickets early because “they sell out faster than Comet”. I have not the smallest idea what that means, but we did as advised, and settled down for a delightful evening, beginning with mulled wine and mince pies, and then a carol concert. So far, so lovely. Then, when the film started, the speakers farted and died and the film became virtually inaudible. We left after ten minutes, on the promise of a second showing with the same tickets.
In the event we couldn’t make it, so we swapped our tickets for Les émotifs anonymes. Utterly delightful. I like a romantic comedy as much as the next husband, but they rarely if ever actually make me laugh out loud. Parts of this, however, are really, really funny, and all of it is adorable. Incredibly warm performances from Isabelle Carré and Benoît Poelvoorde. The latter, a lifetime ago when I was a first year undergraduate, was a student-wall poster perennial on account of a wretched film called Man Bites Dog, but he has latterly aged and thickened into one of the most charming actors on the planet. What a face! Made for movies. And he made the entire audience laugh by saying "Hugde".
I cannot recommend this one enough; a delight from first frame to last.

I got my favourite ever reader’s comment last month.
It’s from the prolific Anonymous, who often drops in with something oblique to say, sometimes to offer me all sorts of interesting products and services, sometimes to tell me that my post helped him with an exam.
This time he looked in on my post on Patricia Roc and had this to say about it:

There is no doubt that Patricia Roc was a formidable movie star. However I would like to say that she had also very beatifull and elegant figure and the best woman legs up today.

He could be right. Or do you disagree? Who do you think has the best woman legs up today?
Suggestions in the comments please…

Movietone Books: Four Steve McQueen and Piper Laurie biographies must be won!

2011-12-05T20:14:00.010Z

The remainder of my posts for this year are going to be on the subject of movie books.

I'll be highlighting my favourite movie books of all time, chatting to some favourite authors, posting a couple of book reviews and paying tribute to the man who was, in my opinion, the greatest film writer of all time.

But that's all to come.
First, we're going to get things started with a giveaway competion!

Thanks to the generosity of Christina Foxley at Crown Archetype, we have two copies of Marc Eliot's Steve McQueen: A Biography, and two copies of Piper Laurie's autobiography Learning To Live Out Loud: A Memoir to give away to lucky readers.
All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning a copy is to send me an email at matthewconiam@aol.com, stating whether you would like the Piper Laurie or Steve McQueen book.
You can, of course, enter the draw for both books if you wish, but please do so in two separate emails.
At the end of the year, I will draw four lucky winners at random from the entries received and notify them by email. There's no need to give me a postal address unless and until you receive notification that you are a winner.

Please note that this competition is open to followers only, but if you're not already following and want to win a book, I'm happy to look away while you follow first and enter second.... You can always stop following afterwards, and who knows, perhaps someone will.

Good luck!

We see them all the time, and we never notice them

2011-11-28T16:34:00.008Z

I can't remember the last time the death of a film-maker felt as epoch-defining to me as that of Ken Russell, who has left us at the age of 84.

And I suspect future generations will look back at how little room we gave him to manoeuvre in the last decades of his professional life with some considerable bafflement. His was an infuriatingly erratic talent, impossible to contain or divert, and his work, even in his peak creative years, is an uncommonly extreme combination of peaks and troughs. But however deep the troughs, some of the heights were giddy indeed. That he ended his life making eccentric vanity productions with amateur casts, shot in his house on home video, unable to find any kind of financing in other ways, will seem an epic indictment of us.

You could never be sure what he would come up with - it could be a masterpiece or a dud or, most likely, some previously undiscovered simultaneous amalgam of the two - but it would always be interesting - more interesting than, and certainly quite, quite unlike - the work of any other British director.
Looking at his career chronologically it is, unquestionably a tragedy.
First, apprentice works of enormous sophistication and beauty on television, most notably his sublime portraits of classical composers for the BBC arts series Monitor. The increasingly cinematic ambition (not to say iconoclastic provocativeness) of these productions segued naturally into a feature film career of profuse energy and commitment. Incredibly, there was a time where big studios were willing to give him big budgets and big stars to make wild, kaleidoscopic, intensely personal films on commercially suicidal subjects. Thanks to the surprise critical and box-office success of Women In Love in 1969 (definitely not one of his best films, actually: he himself considered it his worst) he got to make The Music Lovers, The Boyfriend and The Devils: a redefinition of eclecticism, but all of it rooted centrally in the same set of basic artistic concerns.
Perhaps inevitably it was not a ride he was going to be allowed to play on forever. A trip to Hollywood led neither to work of value (Altered States and Crimes of Passion both have followers, but to me they just do not give the impression of being shaped by a free hand) nor to useful opportunities thereafter, and after one final burst of frivolous eccentricity back in Britain (Gothic, The Lair of the White Worm, Salome's Last Dance) he was reduced first to hack work, and then, when even that dried up, to tail-chasing video experimentalism.

The great thing about Russell was that there was nothing predictable about his iconoclasm. He had no social or ideological agenda. He cared nothing for social realism (once beautifully suggesting that the Free Cinema movement got its name because the directors associated with it "received free handouts from the British Film Institute"). He cared only for art. As he wrote in his autobiography A British Picture he was "somebody who doesn't, on the face of it, seem too political, too committed or press his working class background. I can't be fitted into any of those pigeonholes."
No artist spent so much of their own creativity examining the artistic processes of others. His key mode was biographical, but always filtered through his own imagination, and with a commitment to underlying meaning over objective, historical truth.
As he put it in his book Fire Over England: "My intention was never to produce a factual, day by day account of the composer's life - that's the stuff of newsreels, explaining nothing of the man's inner life. What I've always been after is the spirit of the composer as manifest in his music."
This leads to varying effects, from the sublime simplicity of Elgar (1962, which I have described elsewhere on this site as "in a sense... his most truly rebellious film: in its pastoralism, its sobriety and its unabashed admiration for a key icon of unfashionable Empire Britain, it went against the emerging anti-establishment and London-centric mood of sixties Britain") all the way - via every intermediate gradation - to the self-engulfing excess of Lisztomania (1975), with Roger Daltrey as Liszt, reimagined as a pop star. "The fact that the treatment of the subject matter was symbolically and intellectually above the heads of the Daltrey fans was unfortunate, for the film was pure magic," is how he later summed-up the film's disastrous reception in his book Directing Film.
("How I wince when I see the words 'Based on a True Story' flash on the screen, because you can bet your bottom dollar it's going to be harrowing, horrible and banal," he wrote in the same book. "And so you are blackmailed into enduring the most awful claptrap on the grounds that the subject matter is worthy. Frequently they're about saints, disabled people or repentant rapists.")

Russell always had trouble with critics, and in fairness he went out of his way to court it. He certainly enjoyed playing the enfant terrible. "I sometimes think I would fare better in the hands of British critics if I was called Russelini," he once wrote, and he had a point. His flamboyance and theatricality would have passed unremarked from one whose background had not been in the British documentary tradition.
At his worst, there is a banality to his excesses that negates their potential even as a shock tactic. As I wrote in an earlier post: "The trouble I have with Russell when he goes crazy is that the wildness of his imagination is not matched by any comparable liberation in technique. Everything is shot in the same unimaginative and prosaic manner, so the end result is bathos; it just looks silly... There are two Russells (at least): one who loves being outrageous - and really naff erotica - and one whose experimentalism and occasional sensationalism are underpinned by a deep and sensitive commitment to high culture. Mahler (1974) in particular shows these two Russells at war: much of the film is straightforward and fine, then Russell the iconoclast bursts forth, and the effect is lost in the service of non-shocking shocks, non-frenzied frenzy, down to earth insanity."

But enough - let the retrospectives begin.
Pick any three Russell films at random, especially from among those made before Altered States, and there will surely be enough surprises, enough energy, enough beauty and enough wild invention to justify his status as one of the most important film-makers Britain has ever produced.
My own personal retrospective would begin with Elgar, certainly, then progress through Song of Summer, his pioneering study of Delius, for the first time incorporating scripted episodes with actors rather than mere documentary reconstruction; then leap to the temporary apotheosis of Dance of the Seven Veils, his scabrous life of Richard Strauss that proved so outrageous it was disowned by the BBC after protests from the composer's estate. Viewed today, it seems a clear bridge between the television and cinematic work: elements of it recur not just in the composer movies but also in The Devils, and like The Devils, its (often surprising) excesses are plainly defensible in a way that is not always possible in Russell's work.
Of the cinema films, I would have to start with The Devils, for its awesome power and passion, though it is, to say the least, not an easy film to watch at times. But the points it makes are valid, and much of it is quite brilliant.
I would like to include The Boyfriend, its immediate follow-up, mainly because I love the fact that he opted to follow The Devils with a twenties musical. But as my friend and fellow Russellmaniac Anthony Blampied warned me, it is sadly a film that defiantly refuses to be as good as it looks: there's just too much in it, without variation, to hold the spectator's enthusiasm, and what seems effervescent at first has tired by at least the halfway point. Still, it is a thing of wonderful parts, and is perhaps best watched as a serial, one twenty minute chunk at a time.
My other certain choice would be one of his least-known films, but in my opinion his greatest of all. Savage Messiah (1973) is his fascinating and moving study of the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, and outshines even Song of Summer as his most perfect mixture of drama, documentary and analysis. Further, the final few minutes are unbelievably moving.
In Directing Film, Russell recalls that he double-mortgaged his London mansion to finance it, only to then see it close after five days in the West End. "I'm now living in a small cottage in the provinces," he writes. "The fact that the film is a masterpiece is ample compensation."
The last film in my retrospective would be A British Picture, an autobiographical film made for British television to tie-in with the book of the same name. Bursting with vindicating insight and observation, it is the ultimate statement of Russell's artistic credo, and a fascinating summation of his career. The tragedy is that it seemed valedictory even then.

I was fortunate enough to meet Ken a few years ago when he gave a talk at a literary festival in Cornwall.
He was in fine and frequently ribald form, at one point attempting to lead the audience in a singalong of 'The Good Ship Venus. But the thing he said that really stuck in my mind was in response to the inevitable question; what is your next film going to be?
He said it was going to be about trees - just film of trees, with beautiful music in the background.
"We see them all the time," he explained, "and we never notice them."

Friday night is Falcon night

2011-11-23T17:37:00.012Z

One of the great things about not having access to any television channels is that you get to programme your own viewing like it's your own channel, which in my case invariably means a kind of mix and match approximation of the television I used to enjoy as a boy.

So while classic series detectives may be good fun at any time, they're just sublime on Fridays round about teatime, just as they were in the early 1980s, when BBC-2 introduced me carefully and sequentially to the adventures of Rathbone's Holmes, Charlie Chan and The Saint.
Friday night was going to be Charlie Chan night, in fact, but I was dismayed to pull out my old copy of The Black Camel two weeks ago and discover that the sound was almost completely inaudible. So a last-minute substitution was needed, and my eyes fell upon The Falcon, which I had never really payed much attention to before, and certainly didn't know inside out and upside down, as I do the Rathbones and many of the Chans.
I'd loved George Sanders as The Saint, and had always been intrigued by the idea of The Falcon's Brother, in which the Falcon hands over his investigations to his brother, played by his soundalike real-life brother Tom Conway, who then carried on for the rest of the series. So on it went.
The first, The Gay Falcon, was a treat, and so I pressed on the following week, and A Date With the Falcon was a treat too. So now Friday night is Falcon night for the foreseeable future.
Sanders is most of the show, of course, but they are distinctive, playful little films; I love the character's bon mots, his outrageously roving eye, and the interplay with Allen Jenkins as his ex-con Watson. It's sort of reminded me of something I was in danger of forgetting: that Sanders is actually one of my favourite actors of the forties.

Truth is, the movies didn’t really know what to do with him. He didn’t seem to fit any available type. With his chiseled good looks and supremely melodious voice he should have been a gift to Hollywood in leading man roles, but he projected a more complex and ambiguous persona than, say, Ronald Colman or Leslie Howard. Nor did he have the easy charm of a Cary Grant. He was never quite comfortable playing the straightforward hero. But neither was he suited to villainous roles: they tried that, too. He was too obviously good-natured to play the bad guy, yet too indolent for the hero, and casting him soon became almost impossible.
So the bulk of his movies, certainly the performances we remember best, are supporting roles: slimy Jack Favell in Rebecca, epigram-tossing Lord Henry Wooton in The Picture of Dorian Gray and the accidentally heroic ffolkes in Foreign Correspondent (opposite Joel McCrea, the kind of uncomplicated heroic lead Sanders could never be).
Had he been American, he might have been a natural fit for the kind of world-weary private eye roles in which Bogart came to specialise, but his deeply cultured voice counted against him there. The Saint and The Falcon were as close as he got (though his last full Falcon adventure was based rather impudently on Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely): sleuths at large in a forties noir world, but with a distinctly 1930s urbanity.
It was his air of cynicism, detachment and a kind of amused boredom that most defined his screen presence, a dark twinkle in his eyes, the slight but ever present hint of a sneer around his mouth and a slightly mocking note in his voice. Sanders’s characters can be heroic if absolutely necessary, but they certainly don’t go looking for maidens to rescue and dragons to slay.

He had never longed to be an actor: that his good looks and even handsomer voice might be well-suited to the stage was suggested to him by the company secretary of an advertising agency where he was working, and on her recommendation he gave it a whirl, as he did most things, more or less in the spirit of a lark, never dreaming that it might actually come to something. (She didn’t do too badly for herself either: she was Greer Garson.)
“Acting is like roller-skating,” he later explained. “Once you know how to do it, it is neither stimulating nor exciting.” But if you’re one of the lucky ones, it does offer a relatively undemanding means of paying the bills, which was exactly what he was looking for. In his autobiography he wrote: “I am not one of those people who would rather act than eat. Quite the reverse. My own desire as a boy was to retire. That ambition has never changed.”
Hollywood was especially useful because it kept him out of the war; according to David Niven he made no secret of his refusal to contribute to the war effort, which certainly took bravery of a sort. He also told him cheerfully that he would take his own life in his sixties, when it had ceased to interest him.
Witty and well-dressed cads seemed his stock in trade through the forties (“beastly but never coarse” as he put it, “a high class sort of heel”), though as he grew older he was able to diversify somewhat. He played a lot of costume roles in biblical and historical epics in the fifties, beginning with Cecil B DeMille’s Samson and Delilah in 1949, and continuing through Ivanhoe, King Richard and the Crusaders and Solomon and Sheba.
But amidst all the corn he managed to turn in some of his very finest work: in All About Eve, ideally cast as wasp-stinged theatre critic Addison DeWitt and, even better in my opinion, as Ingrid Bergman's bored and cynical husband in Roberto Rosselini’s Voyage To Italy, a character one suspects to be very close to the Sanders of real life.
Voyage is one of those movies I have to strictly ration: I could watch it over and over. His interplay with Bergman, herself never more magnificent than when working for Rossellini (I love her Hollywood films, but this is simply a different actress), is excoriatingly real and vivid, and the film has an unmistakable power that makes its initial rejection, by critics as well as audiences, seem simply inexplicable.

With grey hair, stockier build and a new found gravitas he also made an ideal foil for comedians. I love him as the art dealer who takes on Tony Hancock’s pretentious painter in The Rebel, unaware that the Hancock masterpieces that send him into such raptures were painted by his former roommate: Hancock's own work (he considers himself father of the Shapist movement: all the colours are different shapes), though the rage of the dilettantes, is a mess of childish scribbling. (Galton & Simpson, Hancock's writers, recalled Sanders telling them that he had reached an age where sex was infinitely less preferable to a really successful bowel movement.) And he's hilariously deadpan as the millionaire under suspicion of murder in A Shot in the Dark who plays a memorable game of billiards with Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau. He also revealed a new talent as a singer and songwriter, recording the delightfully titled album The George Sanders Touch: Songs for the Lovely Lady, a collection of classic and self-penned romantic ballads, in 1958.

Off the screen his life was often unpredictable, and increasingly unsatisfying to him. His first marriage had come to an end in 1949, and he immediately married Zsa Zsa Gabor. Though this ended in divorce in 1954, the two remained friendly for this rest of his life. (His fourth marriage, in 1970 and lasting only six weeks, was to her older sister Magda.)
His happiest marriage, and the only one not to be ended by divorce, had been his third, to actress Benita Hume, the widow of Ronald Colman, in 1959. He was devastated when she died of bone cancer in 1967, and it was at this point that his habitual cynicism tipped into outright pessimism. He made a few more films, but he was drinking heavily, and was so distraught when a small stroke resulted in his inability to play his grand piano he smashed it to pieces with an axe.
Unable to stomach the thought of being helpless and cared for by others, he began to prepare the end by his own hand that, according to Niven, he had been planning since his youth. His prediction came to pass in a hotel room in Barcelona in 1972. He left three notes: one for his sister, a kind and thoughtful request that she not grieve unduly, one to the manager of the hotel, explaining that he had left the cost of his room in his jacket pocket, and one beginning ‘Dear World’.
In the latter he wrote, “I am leaving because I am bored”, and signed off “Good luck.”

Despite his once summing up his career by saying “I never really thought I'd make the grade, and let's face it, I haven't”, Sanders now seems one of the real standout actors of his day. You certainly don't mistake him for anyone else (not even Tom Conway).
Offscreen it seems he was a man who never really found his place in the world, or quite knew what he wanted to do with the life he had been given. But he left more behind to remember him by than he realised.
When I've finished with the Falcon, I'm going to reintroduce myself to The Saint.

“I’ll never look like Rita Tushingham”

2011-11-18T07:56:00.014Z

To a young boy growing up in Britain in the late nineteen-seventies, Diana Dors seemed to be on television virtually every night of the week.
I wasn’t sure exactly what she did, but she was always there: large, loud, in big pink tent-dresses from which gold high-heeled shoes peeked at the bottom, and white blonde hair exploded at the top. She was always rosy-cheeked and smiling and laughing, but the knowing eyes and gravelly laugh seemed charged with the cynicism of experience, and some kind of unspoken common history seemed shared by her and her interviewers, and we the audience, that only I was not privy to. She seemed jolly, and straightforward, like an eccentric aunt, but was there something hidden there, too?

I didn’t know until much later that in the fifties she had been Britain’s biggest, brassiest movie star - but then, to someone born in 1973, 1953 might as well have been the Middle Ages.
Now I’m of an age to see how truly short a period of time twenty years really is, I have a fuller sense of just how fast her career was, and just how much experience and living was packed into it.
When she died in 1984, I thought she was in her late sixties at least. In fact, she was just 52, and she had been a star for over 35 years.

The future Miss Dors was born Diana Fluck, in Swindon in 1931. Her mother Mary lived with two men, and Diana never knew which was her father, but it was Bert Fluck, sub-head of the Great Western Railway’s accounts department, that brought her up. (Dors was the surname of her maternal grandmother; she would explain that she changed it in case it was ever painted in lights on Broadway, and the 'L' malfunctioned. Is it true, or apocryphal, that she was once mistakenly asked in a tv interview the no-U turn-possible question: 'Was it embarrassing growing up as a child with the surname Clunt?')
Diana's dreams of stardom were not pursued in the face of parental indifference or resistance: Mary deliberately took her to see glamorous Hollywood movies, and encouraged both her ambitions and her air of precocious sexual knowingness.
By the age of fifteen she was earning a guinea an hour modelling, and was the youngest ever student at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, where she won several medals for elocution and dramatic excellence. Her very genuine talent led almost instantly to a contract with the Rank organisation and an endless series of variations on the same few roles: blowsy good time girls, dance hall queens and barmaids.
She had something new: a relaxed, natural quality on screen and an obvious authenticity in working class roles, and both assets paradoxically but magnetically combined with the kind of natural glamour audiences expected to find in Hollywood movies but was rarely to be found in Swindon. (And though invariably compared to Marilyn Monroe, it is important to remember that Diana was no carbon copy: she actually achieved stardom first.)
Rarely did a film come along to challenge her or offer anything new or surprising to the public, and while the production-line fodder of the early fifties looks just wonderful to us today, British audiences of the time generally found such product an entirely drab alternative to Hollywood, at the time at its most tv-obsessed crowds-of-thousandsish. The key to Diana's initial appeal, perhaps, was that she seemed like an authentic piece of Hollywood glamour in the mundane context of British B-feature comedies and crime thrillers. Titles like Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? and My Wife’s Lodger (currently available on a charming, highly recommended double bill DVD from the BFI) did little to enhance her critical reputation, but audiences weren’t complaining. They liked her on screen and most of all they liked her in the newspapers and magazines, where she was happy to pose in eye catching outfits and swimwear, and proved a witty and attractively self-deprecating interviewee.
At 20 she was the country’s youngest registered owner of a Rolls Royce motor car.

Diana herself was becoming restless with the treadmill, however, and interviews increasingly became dominated by two aspirations: to crack Hollywood, and to get serious, meatier roles to play. (Her hopeless desire to play a nun was a frequent refrain at this time.) She also spoke of her ‘five year plan’: “to make enough money while I’m young and enjoy it; five years and then a family and real living.”
She never quite achieved any of these goals, and the main reason – in all three cases - was Dennis Hamilton, the first of her three husbands. She never picked her men well, indeed she seemed to perversely and knowingly pick them badly, but Hamilton was the worst: a ghastly, violent sponger who comfortably settled into the role of her manager and promoter, encouraging her to turn down work if the money was not lavish enough, and to present a more arrogant, aloof public image that he felt was better suited to a screen goddess. Sometimes he turned down work on her behalf without even informing her of the offer, especially if Burt Lancaster was pencilled in as co-star.

She never did play that nun, but dramatic roles in The Weak and the Wicked and, especially, in Yield to the Night (a drama about capital punishment inspired by the Ruth Ellis case, in which she dared to appear without make-up), showed a little of the very real talent the studios left so deliberately untapped at all other times.
And Hollywood did come calling: RKO put her under contract and launched her on a wave of publicity, but her Hollywood experience never really survived its disastrous beginning.
Her marriage to Hamilton was by this time seriously on the rocks, his increasingly violent and bizarre behaviour exacerbated by her unwillingness to make a permanent base in America, take up citizenship and devote her attention solely to a Hollywood career. ("Diana will do what I tell her to do," he told an interviewer around this time; "When you quote me you're quoting Diana, and never mind what she says.") At a swanky party designed to introduce her to the Hollywood elite, a drunken Hamilton, jealous of the limelight rightly angled at Diana alone, picked a fight with a press photographer and savagely attacked him. Her reputation stateside never really recovered. Though she would continue to work sporadically in America over the next few years – the leads had dried up but she did some decent supporting work and television – the Hollywood dream was basically over before it had ever begun.

Back in Britain, she found the climate changing. Like jealous lovers, fans and newspapers who had once supported her now condemned her for abandoning them for tinseltown, and columnists wrote disparagingly of her lavish, lawless lifestyle. When her first autobiography was serialised in the News of the World in 1960, some of her scandalous revelations of life with Hamilton, replete with wild parties, blue movies and two-way mirrors, caused outrage. The Mayor of Swindon denounced her for “bringing shame on the town” and the Archbishop of Canterbury called her “a wayward hussy”. The announcement that she would be appearing in that year’s Royal Variety Show was met with a storm of protest, and even though she did appear as planned, she wasn’t presented to the Queen.
And the movies were also changing. The naivety and artificiality of the films Diana had known was giving way to kitchen sinks and angry young men, in worlds where Diana’s brand of impossible glamour had little place. Overnight, standards of female beauty changed, and she seemed instantly anachronistic alongside the likes of Julie Christie and Twiggy. “No matter how hard I try,” she told one interviewer resignedly, “I’ll never look like Rita Tushingham.” And so British roles, too, began to dry up, just as the American ones had.
Her first solution was to take to cabaret, where she was promoted by the man who became her second husband, Richard Dawson. After divorcing him she married her final husband, the actor Alan Lake, in 1968. Though not as disastrous as any of her previous relationships, it was still an ill-advised match. Lake was neurotic and fiery, an alcoholic given, like Hamilton, to the occasional public brawl, and Diana, cast increasingly in a maternal role, found him draining and unpredictable. (Five months to the day after her death, an inconsolable Lake returned to their former home, now up for sale, and committed suicide. He was 43.)
Diana quickly put on weight, and segued instantly from sexpot roles to playing frustrated landladies and matronly, faded women. Michael Winner's brilliant first film West 11 introduced this new Diana in 1963, and though she remained elegant and dazzling off screen, despite her ballooning size, on screen she seemed to positively revel in looking as dowdy and washed-up as she could, perhaps thinking that this would at last give her the chance to be recognised for her dramatic capabilities. Even so, there was something self-demeaning in the way she seemed so frequently to play characters whose unattractiveness was of their essence, and even commented upon, like the slatternly wife of Peter Sellers's doorman in There's a Girl In My Soup. (Describing the latest girlfriend of Sellers's randy tv chef as having "legs all the way up to her arse", he adds that when Diana stands up "her arse comes all the way down to her knees.") You can imagine the impression she might once have made on the young Harold Steptoe in the one-and-nines, but by the time they meet in one of the spin-off film Steptoe and Son Ride Again she is a nymphomaniac who invites him into her flat while her late husband is still lying in state, her sturdy legs packed into white knee-high boots, and from whose attentions Harold cannot escape fast enough.
Such work was now typical; she had become a professional guest star, taking a scene here and a scene there in bawdy comedies and horror films. Of the latter, the most interesting was probably Herman Cohen's well-named big-top blood-spiller Berserk! (1967), in which she got to co-star with a similarly down in the world Joan Crawford. By all accounts the two got on like a house on fire.

Television became her real home, and this is where I came in, waiting for Robin's Nest to start and wondering just who these people were with names like Kenny Lynch and Bernie Winters and indeed Diana Dors, whose presence seemed instantly to represent something they were never obliged to demonstrate. Like Kenneth Williams she had become a professional celebrity, and her real career was in chat shows, panel games, cabaret clubs and kiss and tell autobiographies (she wrote no fewer than five), helping to keep her profile high with memorable appearances in The Two Ronnies (packed into leather as the dominatrix head of all the all-women secret police in the serial The Worm That Turned) and a regular diet spot on new-fangled breakfast television.
In the early 1980s she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and though early early treatment was deemed successful, the condition recurred. She died in May 1984.
It had been a troubled and difficult life, for all its glamour, but today, she is more highly regarded than at any time during her career. Her very real comic and dramatic talent is widely acknowledged, and several sympathetic biographies have told the true and often tragic story behind the glitzy façade. And as far as British movies are concerned there really has never been anyone else quite like her. Had she lived, she would have been eighty last month.

Lots of buzzing moths

2011-11-14T07:35:00.019Z

For anyone that enjoyed Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold now brings you a revisionist Wuthering Heights, with lots of buzzing moths and a black Heathcliff. Those who have seen it tell me it also features anachronistic swearing and genuinely traumatised dogs, in what context I can only guess. But I can confirm that it has the most pretentious trailer in film history.
So, sadly, the Bath Film Festival is an almost total waste of time. I left London mainly to get away from Ken Loach; now the loony old bastard shows up here. And the films on offer are, in the main, all too deserving of his patronage.
Apart from a few meagre reissues - increasingly the sole purpose of film festivals for me - I only left the house for The Awakening, a ghost story with a twenties setting and Rebecca Hall from Vicky Christina Barcelona. It's that one again: the one that starts with the uncompromisingly rationalist ghostbuster disrupting a fake seance, then shows them going to a spooky old pile on their next case in the same confrontational frame of mind, only to have their certainties overturned after a few encounters with the other world, before a poignant resolution reveals a) their own personal involvement in the hauntings, and b) the fact that some of the people they had been interacting with throughout were in fact ghosts from the start.
It probably wasn't all that original when James Herbert wrote it up as Haunted 25-odd years ago, and a lot of M. Night Shyamalan has flowed under the bridge since then. (The film they made of Haunted with Kate Beckinsale was even more similar, being set, unlike the novel, in the twenties too.) This one's by Stephen Volk, still plugging away; the usual meticulously maintained period atmosphere and settings knowingly undermined by proudly deliberate anachronisms of characterisation and dialogue, a few good scares, and a made for television look to it. Still I suppose we'll have to get used to stark, camcorder visuals and sound recording now that they're not making movie cameras anymore. Another miracle advance of the digital age we're all so proud of.

The new Cronenberg film, A Dangerous Method, is a dramatisation of the 'Anna O' case, that made a superstar of Freud and condemned the twentieth century to understanding the mind via a totally fraudulent and irredeemable set of schema and assumptions. That's Keira at the London premiere in the photo. Good to see she's still doing herself up to the nines and coming out for these premieres, even in winter, when she must know the films she gets cast in are always headed for nowhere. Cronenberg hasn't made a really good film since The Brood in 1979, and if this film presents the story in terms even vaguely flattering to Freud, as certainly appears to be the case from the trailer, then I fear this is yet another back door-bound Keira epic I'll nonetheless trot along to regardless: no other actress in history has so consistently rewarded unconditional support with such relentlessly duff movies.
They rarely make any money either, but somehow the next one always comes along: Keira, like Garbo before her, is clearly understood to be one of those commodities for whom actual box office take is largely irrelevant. It's like their films were/are seen as future investments, that will pay off when the appeal is retrospective.

Does the same apply to Jennifer Aniston? Has she ever made a hit movie? I ask only for information, implying no blanket dismissal of her cinematic output. For reasons I explained here, I’ve actually seen an ungodly number of her movies, and some of them are quite good, some of them not so good, a couple are very pleasant indeed, and The Good Girl registers the full Clockwork Orange on the universal crapometer. But none of them, so far as I can see, went over wowsville at the big B-O. And yet she seems to be one of those subsidised stars who always gets a second chance, whereas others can be killed by just one flop, and still more are never given the big chance in the first place.
When you look at the golden age, you sometimes ache to see more of a particular star, but you can’t, because they were at a studio that only had room for them in B’s or support, while the kings and queens got all the plums. Odd thing is that even without a studio system, much the same thing happens today.
At any given time, a vast list of well known names toil in quickies or pop up only now and again, while a select pantheon take home all the cherries, even those to which they are far less suited than many another contender. I mean, I like Anne Hathaway a lot, but does she have to be in everything?
And because all the stars do the publicity rounds, keeping their faces as fresh as possible in chat shows and premieres and fashion shoots; because therefore at the moment you're just as likely to open a magazine and see Anna Faris as Anne Hathaway, you tend to forget how long it's been since you saw Anna Faris in an actual movie, and you get the illusory feeling that there's work enough for them all, and they're all busy beavering away out there under the plastic rainbow. It takes a generation to get a really true sense of what the pecking order was.
This is more obvious the further back you go, and is just coming into focus now for the film stars of the 1990s, my first fully adult filmgoing decade. To anyone who went to the movies regularly then, it is interesting to see that more recent generations of moviegoers know exactly who Sharon Stone is, for example, but may be a little hazier on Madeleine Stowe or Virginia Madsen, regardless of how many films they've seen with each of them in. We thought of them as equal contenders, but of course they weren't really. Longevity, like stardom itself, is a surprisingly hard thing to predict, and the mood of the moment is no help, as anyone who picks up one of those F. Maurice Speed Film Review annuals from years past, and looks at either the 'Top Ten Box-Office Stars' or 'Ten Most Promising Faces' section, will realise in a sobering moment.

So will our children know much about Jennifer Aniston? Not sure.
Here she is in a film I only watched last night, but try as I might, I just can't remember the title of.
I had to go to the shelf to remind myself in order to Google for this photo, and I'm now going to have to go to the shelf again - and we're talking less than ten minutes later - to remind myself again in order to write the title here.
Ah, yes. It's called Just Go With It. Ask me to remind you at the end of this post and I'll doubtless have to go and check a third time. A suicidally unmemorable title, I'd say.
Originally sat to Jen's right in the picture is Adam Sandler, a light comic actor whose true level of popularity I've never quite been certain of, but who also keeps working away, in films that seem to do consistently well-ish but rarely smash (or bomb). I've only seen him in The Wedding Singer and Fifty First Dates. He gatecrashes when we invite Drew around. (Even Winona couldn't hold my attention too long into Mr Deeds.) He's showing his age in this one; getting a bit stocky, and it looks like he's dyeing his hair now. Comes to us all, I suppose. Quite a nice little actor, albeit not one I would have picked from the chorus line personally.
A few good laughs here. Not too bad. It's not really a pure pink film but a kind of couples movie that strives to appeal to both sexes equally, and full of references to contemporary popular culture, of which I understood just enough to realise how much of the rest of it went careening over my head. And even when they're not punchlining about tv shows and pop groups I've never heard of, they're talking very quickly, often at the same time, and with a lot of ambient noise. And I know this is supposed to be a golden age of sound recording, but to me at least a lot of the dialogue reached my ears like this:

Adam: Dgfgf rhrhhr jjytuwpq shdh?
Jennifer: Kf Lotrgfcd ghtyr!
Adam (unimpressed): Thf hghr jkupzcmght agde.
The blonde cutie Adam's trying to pull: Wqryr hghfde slpu.
Adam's dorky brother: Aw, come on! Retss fgfhr hjyt!
Jennifer (in comic triumph): Ghjfkjtye puytrew!!!

Two surprises: first, when Nicole Kidman shows up half way through in a funny but basically nothingish guest star supporting role (the best bit, actually, is the hula contest where she and Jennifer try to upstage each other) and then at the end, when I found out it was a remake of Cactus Flower (which I've never seen). This latter surprised me, at least, because the plot seems so entirely typical of contemporary comedy: an utterly and desperately absurd premise that must be swallowed whole and uncritically if the ensuing shenanigans are to have any comedic value. Loose remake is my guess. Presumably the original didn't have Ingrid Bergman indulging in bikini rivalry with Goldie Hawn.

Finding new plots for these romantic complication movies is a problem, of course. There are only so many ways boy can meet girl, lose girl over some comic misunderstanding or girl can realise that boy she took for granted is really boy of her dreams. Perfectly understandable if the desperation shows.
If (re-check and insert title here before publishing post) has a plot that seems to lean on the absurd side, Failure To Launch is just plain ludicrous. Possibly the silliest idea for a romantic comedy I have ever encountered, and not helped for me by the lead presence of Matthew McConnaughey, by no means a man without any rightful place in our cinematic wonderland, but surely one whose stock company villain's wolverine face positively screams 'Don't cast me as the lead in a romantic comedy'.
But the plot's the real snag: it would defeat any chemistry. Never mind Matthew McWhatsisname and her off Sex and the City, Cary and Audrey would lose a gallon of sweat each trying to keep it greased. It really is crazy. From the big central premise to the most peripheral subplot (Zooey Whatshername trying to get rid of a noisy nightingale) via just about every scene and set piece, all of it plays like someone telling you about the weird dream they had last night. And when you think of the number of screenplays being written that never see the light of day, and how many frustrated writers there are out there, the fact that this one got greenlighted and then went all the way to the screen, that a major studio had and never lost faith in it from draft to premiere... well, that's why I'm not a studio executive, I expect.

Our other pinkie this month was Morning Glory, seemingly a star vehicle for Rachel McAdam, of whom I had not even heard whispers, until we saw her, being very good, in Woody Allen's new one. I was also attracted by the elder supporting pairing of Diane Keaton, always good in anything, and Harrison Ford, an annoyingly underused actor who could have been a kind of modern Gary Cooper and second lieutenant to Clint (who in this movie he resembles quite a lot, especially vocally) if only he hadn’t got so rich so early, chasing robots down white corridors and Nazis through underground tombs. A handsome and likeable actor on the rare occasions he set his sights on appealing to adults – excellent in Polanski’s Frantic – he has proved wilfully elusive for most of his career. He’s nice in light comic roles, and here, though underused (as is Keaton), he's very funny indeed.
It's from the writer of Devil Wears Prada and has the same weird narrative arc: in the first a bright and talented girl takes a job on a fashion magazine she rightfully considers beneath her but comes, somehow, to love and share the superficiality of its worldview; now here a respected news journalist is forced to take a job on morning television, initially holds out against its banalities but comes, somehow, to learn respect for it, happily taking part in cookery demonstrations and forced banter with the co-host. Despite this cockeyed take on the subject the film, like its predecessor, is good fun.

This post is already too long, so here's just a brief rundown of what we've seen lately on Italian Night (see here for explanation):

Bread and Tulips: Delightful romantic comedy with the kind of wonderful actors with wonderful faces that only Italy seems to find, not like film stars at all, just fascinating-looking people: witness Licia Maglietta in the lead and Giuseppe Battiston as a hapless private detective. Audaciously happy: always a plus.
Marriage, Italian Style: Lovely, glossy De Sica trifle from his triumphant post-neorealist betrayal period; Marcello and Sophia halting the decline of the European film industry.
Malena: Monica attempts to revive the European film industry by walking down the street and having all the young men follow her, just like in those old Sophia movies. I just wish she only made Italian films, instead of naff European and Hollywood things like Shoot 'em Up and Irreversible. Always interesting to see an Italian perspective on World War 2; this is from the Cinema Paradiso fellow.
Summertime: David Lean unleashes his magic camera on a fifties Technicolor Venice: the smile takes a few hours to fade, though the scenario would have needed big print to fill the back of an envelope. Technique, and mood, are all.
Lights of Variety: Critical restraint dies when you love Fellini, so let's just call this a sink-your-teeth-in feast of magnificence. Actually, once colour and reputation got the better of his imagination, he became a unpredictable speculation, but he rarely lets you down when he's in black and white. Second case in point:
I Vitelloni: We set aside an afternoon on our honeymoon in Florence to watch this in our hotel. Granted, a film would have to be pretty bad to fail with that kind of build-up (Argento's Giallo managed it, though), but coming to this now, for a second time and just over a year later, it seemed if anything even more impressive: that 'can't quite catch it in your fingers' atmosphere, a concoction of photography, music, location, performance (all the cast are magnificent) and that extra spell Fellini waves over it all somehow.

Now I'll leave you with a couple more pictures of Keira looking fandabidozi at the Cronenberg premiere. As premiere outfits go, I'll give this one ***.
It's the only fair way to judge her movies.

What are Woody Allen's most under-rated films?

2011-10-18T07:23:00.009+01:00

We both enjoyed Midnight In Paris, nervously hailed (yet again) as Woody Allen's 'return to form', a claim treated with justified suspicion after a few writers jumped the gun after preview screenings and said the same of Melinda and Melinda and Match Point.
Vicky Christina Barcelona had also picked up good reviews and even earned a dollar or two, albeit only at the demeaning cost of literally hiding the fact of Allen's involvement from all advertising. (This includes the DVD packaging, which does not mention his name once, except - literally unreadably - in the tiny credits bar at the bottom.)
That was all very nice, but very laid-back and unsurprising: this one has a bit more get up and go.

Owen Wilson plays Woody Allen playing a frustrated Hollywood screenwriter and would-be novelist, obsessed with the ambiance of twenties Paris, who finds that he is able to travel back in time and hang out with Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, and the film recreates more than one era of Paris's past with a degree of sumptuousness that suggests someone's put a bit more money into this than usual. (It's distributed by Warners: his first major release in I don't know how long.)
For me and probably you this premise is obviously irresistible, and developed as invitingly as it sounds, even if Allen - equally true to form - does come close to souring it by giving Wilson a moment of climactic realisation that seems to endorse the anti-nostalgia sentiments of the character played by Michael Sheen, an obnoxious intellectual with no time for golden ages. (He's also unable to resist two chances to get easy laughs with arrested adolescent party politics - perhaps as insurance against potential attacks on the film for its reactionary premise, perhaps not, but either way reminding me just how weird it feels on those rare occasions this so stubbornly idiosyncratic a man feels the need to play to the gallery.)

There's some simple but undeniable fun with the cast of real-life figures Wilson encounters (including that ridiculous actor Adrien Brody as an appropriately ridiculous Dali) - I was amused despite myself by the moment in which Wilson, tipped-off by the future, attempts to pass on the plot of Exterminating Angel to a baffled and disinterested Bunuel - and the supporting cast has its usual quota of nice surprises (including a pleasantly unaffected Carla Bruni as a museum guide, and Priceless's Gad Elmaleh in a very funny, wordless cameo as a private detective).
It's good fun, not hilarious, for the most part entirely disarming, and I enjoyed it especially because I had just got back from a trip to France (and, among other things, had visited a farm to see how the apple brandy Calvados is produced, and which I was therefore most amused to see Wilson and Marion Cotillard quaffing in the film.)
Way back, when I, like Wilson, was visiting Paris with my then-fiancee, I too went on a tour of its twenties literary past, visiting the various Hemingway haunts, the (new) Shakespeare and Company booksellers, and Gertrude Stein's house. The difference is that my fiancee was happy to go with me, and I'm pleased to say is now my wife. Also, of course, Gertrude wasn't in.
And it's good to see Woody's name on the posters again.

I've never seen a Woody Allen film I've regretted surrendering the time to, though some are clearly failures: I suppose the one I've seen that fell widest of its potential is Match Point, which had the makings of a masterpiece. A very few seem to me slightly overrated: Sleeper (an amusing attempt to prioritise visual over verbal humour, but verbal humour is surely what we want from the man), Annie Hall (still riding on its initial reception, when it seemed breathtakingy new and advanced, but now, surely, an obviously transitional effort, instantly eclipsed by Manhattan), and Hannah and Her Sisters (good stuff, but there's lots better, and the major post-production restructuring does show).
The only one I didn't really enjoy at all, and have never felt the need to see a second time, was Husbands and Wives, the film that became synonymous with the Mia Farrow scandal, and was praised for its dramatic and aesthetic rawness, but which seemed to me irredeemably ugly in both capacities, with exactly the right visual style to match its utterly horrid cast of characters. (Lysette Anthony's character, a sweetly naive New Age idiot loathed by the author as much as his characters, is the only one I wouldn't have happily watched driving off a cliff. Deconstructing Harry, which was attacked far more for its mean-spiritedness, I found much more appealing, perhaps because the nastiness was addressed by the film itself, and the character of Harry was more overtly at odds with Allen's own persona. The film's narrative structure is somewhat gauche, as Allen can often be, but the film makes me laugh more than a lot of other Allen films of its vintage.
The other side of Husbands and Wives was Manhattan Murder Mystery, a retreat into whimsy and an exercise in ingratiation in the wake of the scandals, that Allen preferred to describe as an indulgence (a dessert, he called it, between weightier courses), the triviality of which, he claimed, made him guilty. Some critics felt the same, but on the whole it was hailed as a refreshingly light and charming - if not especially witty - return to a less preoccupied style. In more recent interviews, I've noticed, he seems to have warmed to it, and singles it out for especial praise, which, as you'll know if you've ever read an interview in which Allen discusses his own work, makes it a lucky film indeed.
The return of Diane Keaton - in a role written for Farrow and which she insanely thought she would still undertake after falsely accusing him of child molestation - is a happy event (why didn't she hang around for a few more?), and her (and Allen's) interplay with Alan Alda is especially relaxing. Nice, too, to see Alda play an unequivocally likeable role, after his charm was so effectively used against type as the horrendous Lester in Crimes and Misdemeanours; Anjelica Huston is rewarded too for her all too convincing intensity in that film with an excellent supporting role as a funny, maneating novelist. You may find yourself surprised at the relative lack of memorable lines, but how anyone can come out of this without a big grin on their face is beyond me. At university I saw it three times in one week, the last time at the now closed Camden Plaza, where I saw it as a last-minute substitute for The Vampire Lovers (playing at a rep cinema I couldn't find until after the film had started), and sat next to Simon Callow.

Of the films he has made subsequently, I think judgement in many cases still needs another layer of dust before it can reach certainty. I loved Mighty Aphrodite on release, but my friends hate it, and with their criticisms still ringing in my ears I've never quite liked it as much again. Everyone Says I Love You is an obviously happy film, with some beautiful sequences - and Drew in a Woody movie! - but there's no question that while an Allen musical is so delightfully odd an idea the film cannot fail to please, nonetheless Allen does not direct the musical sequences well, and the lack of old-time talent is not a myth.

Then, speaking of old-time talent, there are the Scarlett Johansson collaborations. I've already mentioned Match Point and Vicky Christina Barcelona, but I did think that Scoop, though unquestionably Allen at his silliest, was unjustly maligned.
The only of his collaborations with Scarlett in which they also co-star, I really enjoyed the onscreen rapport between his crap magician and her student journalist. He doesn't play bumbling idiots often but he always does it well, and a geeky Scarlett (or as geeky a Scarlett as is possible, given her natural inheritance) is a nice change too. I also like the way well-known faces from British comedy turn up in both her English movies in tiny straight roles (look out for John Standing and Paula Wilcox in Scoop). I'd love to see more of Woody and Scarlett, especially co-starring, partly because the combination seems on paper such an unlikely one yet in Scoop turns out so very nicely, also because Allen rarely seems to warm up to his stars (as a director I mean), but in Scarlett's case he is clearly a besotted fan as much as (or more than) a shrewd judge of performance.

The big bone of contention comes when he tries straight drama. Generally, I like them, especially the 'vintage' ones: Interiors, Another Woman and September, and would certainly include them among the more under-rated titles in his filmography.
The common complaint that the scripts are mannered and full of over-composed observations and over-formal sentence structure would not bother me in the least ordinarily: naturalism is just one technique among many, not the gold standard to which all drama should aspire. That said, critics of these movies do have a point in so far as Allen always picks very naturalistic actors, and encourages them to give naturalistic performances, and so his scripts often make a bad fit with the acting. It is this disjunction, rather than the dialogue's artificiality per se, that can cause audiences to laugh at the heightened moments. But the patent sincerity and seriousness of intent in these movies does earn points with me, and all three seem to me sufficiently laden with cherries as to outweigh the occasional stalks.

I suppose the most underrated Allen films must inevitably be found among those that either flopped most significantly (in the days when the difference between an appreciated and an unappreciated Allen film could still be measured in box-office take) or else received the worst write-ups in the years thereafter, yet still seem not just better than critics or public allowed but actually in the top half of his work.
A film like Shadows and Fog, for instance, seems to me plainly better than its reputation, but not so much better as to justify making any big case for it. And I have not seen Hollywood Ending or Curse of the Jade Scorpion (the latter sometimes nominated by Woody himself as his worst), so as to whether they are hugely or only slightly underrated I can make no comment (beyond registering my strong inclination to believe that they do lie somewhere on that spectrum).

So, omitting the serious dramas, objection to which comes down as much to one's personal view of the very idea of them as to their specific merits on their own terms (which makes them a special case, a separate question, to be reserved for another day), these are my nominations for Allen's four most unjustly maligned efforts.

1. Stardust Memories (1980)
Memories does have a following, and a reputation, now, but at the time it was a major disaster for Allen: his first real failure not with audiences, whom he was happy to malign, but more crucially with critics, on whose support he had plainly been counting. Partly it was on account of the obvious indebtedness to other film-makers that continues to be an occasional problem for him (Fellini this time, rather than Bergman) but mainly it was the perceived sourness, and the sense that Allen was biting the hand that fed him, attacking public and critics alike for their failure to get behind Interiors. And so, the hand was abruptly and decisively withdrawn.
Rather than face up to this breakdown in communication, Allen prefers to this day to write off the film's initial reception as a mistake - audiences were too silly to see that the film was a fantasy, with no autobiographical relevance at all. This is obviously disingenuous from frame one, but as someone who feels artists are entitled to their frustrations I've never had a problem with it, and dramatically it seems to me the obvious masterpiece among his overtly experimental films.
As for wanting to be Fellini: nothing wrong with that, either. Much of this is funny, and all of it is gripping.

2. A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982)
Not so much hated as ignored by critics, this was, according to Allen, his most commercially unsuccessful film of all. Made back to back with Zelig, with Allen literally shooting scenes for one movie, then the other, then back again, it was conceived as a conscious change of style - period not modern, bucolic not urban, romantic not cynical. It is also beautifully photographed and styled, and I have never shown it to anyone that didn't find it utterly charming, or that didn't come away with the overwhelming desire to live in the house in which it is set. (The house was in fact built for the film on unused land but was left standing and is now occupied.)
This was the first Allen film I ever saw, but that it is a true masterpiece, and not merely a nostalgic indulgence, I have no doubt whatever.

3. Anything Else (2003)
Maltin calls this Allen's "all-time worst movie", a position I simply cannot make any sense of. To me it is both fascinating as an experiment and entirely successful as a comedy. In essence it's a remake of Annie Hall for a new generation, with Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci as 21st century Alvy and Annies (he's a comedy writer in analysis with an ex-wife, she's a frustrated singer lacking in confidence) and Allen as an older Tony Roberts: in the same trade, and keen for the hero to join him writing comedy in California. At one point, the pair discuss whether or not an overheard remark was anti-Semitic, or if Woody is merely being paranoid.
But because Woody cannot be at all Woodyish, since Biggs is playing Woody, he instead has a ball making his character as unlike the traditional Woody persona as possible: a gun-nut and survivalist, a car driver, and prone to episodes of irrational violent behaviour.
As well as really interesting on this level, I also found it the funniest Allen film for some time, with Danny DeVito outstanding in an especially good supporting cast. Maltin must have seen a different film.

4. Celebrity (1998)
Not a disaster, the critics seemed agreed, but very much Allen coasting along, a little film, with nothing much new or distinctive to offer. I thought it was among his best, not least because it had one of the great Allen endings - of which Crimes and Misdemeanours is the masterpiece example, as it is of everything else worthwhile about Allen's movies - where it all comes round in a circle so neatly and cinematically that you, or I at any rate, just want to stand and cheer. (Incidentally, have you noticed how people increasingly tend to applaud at the end of movies now? Pretty weird. They can't hear you.)
The first time Allen faced up to the need either to change his main characters or to cast other actors as himself (Kenneth Branagh is very funny indeed as his spiritual twin and physical opposite), the film is full of good one-liners, smart observations, well-cast cameos and acidic comment on the modern media which posterity, at least, will side with, even if contemporary film critics, understandably perhaps, did not. Plus Winona Ryder as she was meant to be seen - in glowing black and white.

Which of Woody's films do you consider land widest of their reputations?

Much snow here recently

2011-09-10T08:25:00.028+01:00

Dear Matthew,
Congratulations on your coming marriage.
Enola and I were married in the month of October in the same year that Frances McDormand was born. A particular favorite but more for Blood Simple and Short Cuts than for Fargo.
Much snow here recently.
Best,
Gerald

Short or long, it was always good to get an email from Gerald Stewart.

I loved the way he talked in movies ("my frame of reference is film," he once told me). I loved the way he was so deeply knowledgeable on so many subjects, and could tie them all together, and relate them all back to the single overarching subject of cinema, so cleverly.
I'm assuming that the photograph above, which he appended to the email quoted from at the head of this post, is of his own house, in the beautifully named Pocono Pines, PA. If it isn't his house, I don't want to know. Ever since he sent it, I always pictured him in it.
I can't imagine him living anywhere else.

You may know Gerald better under the name Gordon Pasha, the alias (derived from his lifelong study of General Gordon) under which he wrote the blog Laszlo's on Lex. (Read this to understand the blog's title - and because it's superb.)
His other interests, according to his blogger profile, included modern jazz, New York City, John Buchan, South Asian cuisine and baseball - and that was only scratching the surface. He also knew England well, and London encyclopaedically, and would travel here for a month or two with Enola every year to revisit favourite old haunts.
Typically, he revealed the extent of his knowledge of London to me while in the act of downplaying it:
"It would be arrogant to say I know London. But I am comfortable there and have a map of it in my head. Enola and I have probably spent a total of two years out of the last eleven, living and working there. We wander endlessly, and ride tubes or buses from Tottenham to Brixton, from Barking to Southall. We play “bus roulette”, which can take us anywhere (have you ever been in the Willesden Garage?) We always go to Hammersmith on Sundays. My barber is in Holborn. And I feel at home in Highbury."

So when I noticed that Laszlo's had been on an uncharacteristically long hiatus recently, I imagined him strolling around Hammersmith, assuming he was again on his travels (always travels of the mind as much as the body), immersed in the land of Gordon and Sherlock Holmes (another of his extraordinarily knowledgeable passions).
I dropped him a line anyway, just to double-check that all was well.
A little while later, I received a reply from Enola, to say that Gerald passed away on August 5th.

Gerald rarely spoke to me of matters as private, or should I say as uncinematic, as health. The closest he came to acknowledging those few sides of life that cannot be converted back into controllable illusion was this laconic aside:
"The years encroach and I spend much time going from one medical site to another as parts wear out. But my recent round is settling and I hope that I might spend February watching films, posting an idea or two, and catching up with your past posts and those of others whom you recommend."
I think I was most amused by the impatience here - there is a trace of melancholy, but a trace only. Mainly he's annoyed that getting old and sick cuts back on the number of films he's able to see.

Laszlo's was a film blog with a difference: the author's reflections on forties movies were informed not by memories of a television childhood, rediscovering the black and white world in the postmodern living room, as is the case with myself and most classic movie bloggers I know. He had been there, really been there, in New York as a kid, watching them when they were new and part of the cultural pulse of modern life. (See here, for example.)
This perspective gave his writing a unique extra dimension, and he had a rare gift for evoking the mood and moment of times past. His memories, scattered through his posts not systematically but elliptically, in hints and fragments, gave his pieces unmistakable authenticity.
He was, by any standards, a first class writer. Yet there was about him not a trace of pomposity or, it seemed to me at times, even of awareness of how good he was at what he did. He saw himself as an amateur, experimenting in a field entirely new to him.

I can no longer remember how I came across Laszlo's, but I'm proud to say that mine is the first icon on its followers' board.
I wrote to Gerald first simply to tell him how impressive I thought it was, and in particular how the pieces seemed to have so much of his own personality invested in them.
He replied, "Everything I have posted I really care about. I do it for myself (and my wife) only. I think no one has viewed these entries but the two of you."
I made it my quest, then, to change that, mentioned the site whenever I could, gave it an award (which he accepted with his customary thoroughness) and was delighted to see a small number of like minded bloggers making the same discovery I had.
"I would certainly appreciate your mentioning Laszlo’s to others, as such linkage brings together people of like interests from which synergies develop," he wrote to me afterwards, adding "I can share and learn and I can handle adverse comments".
I don't think he ever received any.

Gerald saw me as a kind of blogging mentor (oblivious to my own relative inexperience) but from this beginning, I'm pleased to say, a friendship grew.
We spoke about movies we both loved but felt were under-regarded by cineastes generally: Portrait of Jennie, The Magnificent Ambersons, Wilder's Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. We wrote of our shared obsession with Edward Hopper.
He loved Woody Allen's Radio Days because it represented an almost entirely accurate picture of the world and the culture in which he was raised. He was genetically programmed to respond to James M. Cain, hardboiled noir, thrillers with a strong New York background (Naked City was another obvious favourite: a film that could have been made with him in mind), but he also enjoyed Ealing comedies, Top Hat, Preston Sturges, Duck Soup. And Michael Powell: he was strongly attracted to films and film-makers with a sense of the mystical.
I was able to send him a copy of Jazzboat, an obscure British musical comedy in which he thought he might appear in a crowd scene, having been there during the filming. (Sadly, however, he didn't.)
When Gerald left a comment on one of my posts, or a reply to one I had written on his, it was his habit to email it to me as well, in case I hadn't seen it. Sometimes a whole new conversation would be initiated this way. (I especially cherish his thoughts on the death of Sherlock Holmes scholar Richard Lancelyn Green, the circumstances of which he enigmatically likened to the film Dead Of Night in a post comment, then elaborated upon in private correspondence in case, he explained, the comments box wasn't the proper place for it.)

He had so many stories still to tell.
When I wrote to tell him how much I enjoyed his post Walled City, but how much potential I thought there was for taking it further, he replied thus:

"I have thought about extending the idea of Walled City first by enhancing the experiences of the 1940s – and then carrying it through to what I saw into my dating days in the mid fifties. Then into films I saw as a soldier in Germany in 1958 and 1959. I came home to the rediscovery of film as an art movement, which took full flower with the Sarris/ Kael wars - I was and am a Sarriste.
With a family, viewing diminished and took us out of dark halls. There was television but the fare was sparse. After a time came VCRs, DVDs and the reemergence of television with cable and TCM and Fox. For the past ten years we have been shipmates to the aging movie stars shuffling around QE2 and QM2. (Patricia Neal in robe and slippers was no longer looking the part. Then there was the obnoxious Carrie Fisher, and the sweet and charming Jane Russell. And as Kurt Vonnegut told us … )
Comments on books and materials, remarks made about images, remembrances of events, and the choice of material alone – might all provide additional insight. There is a built in conflict between the world of research (e.g., bibliography) where everything has to be right and those film blogs that deal primarily with remembrance. It seems if too much research is done, it takes away from the immediacy, the nostalgia and the mood of recreating yesterdays. Editing the thoughts of yesterday with the new found knowledge of today can lead to choppy waters. Writing, like good films, is always full of conflict."

So many avenues opened up in just a few paragraphs!
This was Gerald's habitual method when writing letters and blog posts both. I eventually learned more of his Jane Russell encounter; the Carrie Fisher story, however, was always put off until another day that now will never come.

It's tough to accept that I will never again rise from my bed, switch on the computer, and find that while I slept, Gerald has been reading my old posts an impossibly long way away, and leaving kind, perceptive, erudite comments.
Or that there will never again be an email from him waiting for me in my morning in-box, containing some obscure literary allusion that sends me scuttling to the reference books, or some knowledgeable aside about bit part actors long forgotten by the overwhelming mass of the public for whose approval they had worked.

I had just mentioned him in a piece I had published a few posts back, about how one of the joys of the blogosphere was of getting to know such wonderful people. Now I have to get used to his not being there anymore.
Indeed, he had already left us when I wrote that. I just didn't know it yet.

But Laszlo's will still be there, and just as Gerald described it:

A portal, perhaps, attempting to bring the distant near. A reminiscence of films and players seen during 70 years. First seen in dark buildings surrounded by strangers and now watched again and again on diminished screens. Herewith some random thoughts on that flickering past. Remember when the lights went on and we had to leave the theatre? From Rick’s Café Americain to Lexington Avenue? Laszlo's on Lex...

Others have left far less to mark their presence, that's for sure, and in time, perhaps, it may seem more than sufficient.
But at the moment: much snow here recently.

Better ways forward, and back

2011-09-09T07:03:00.022+01:00

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a film featuring a subjective close-up of tears falling on a crumpled love letter, and, despite my at best nodding acquaintance with modern cinema, I’ll bet it’s been a while for all of us.

But that’s one of the good things about pan-European popular cinema: it’s still doing what it’s always done, more or less, following a template in which only the incidentals have changed, never the story-telling mechanics, in some fifty-odd years of reverse progress.
While British cinema continues to wildly oscillate between a crazed hubris that expects the world to assume it’s the coolest, cutest place on earth and an equally hysteric self-loathing that sees itself somewhere beneath Iran on the social justice scale (at the moment it’s in one of the latter troughs, so it’s all movies about heroin addicts on council estates again, almost but not quite a relief after the faux-sophisticate horrors of the Richard Curtis years), and while Hollywood digs itself deeper and deeper into a self-made pit of festering cow manure, it's nice to remember that the rest of the west has never basically given up on the confident, unpretentious notion that it can tell us stories we’ll enjoy using the basic tools of George Cukor.

This confidence is especially marked when it has a truly exportable star to centre the action around, as France has in Audrey Tautou, to an extent not really seen since Bardot.
True, France has always taken the lead in the almost casual discovery of iconic actresses, but they are for the most part darlings of the art house, even simmering glamourpusses like Beart don't actually make the kind of films that get shown nationwide.
But thanks to Amelie, however many years ago that was now, an Audrey Tautou movie is still a small event, which is why she is able to work so much more infrequently than her peers, and is so rarely required to stretch herself. Indeed, within its somewhat eccentric, or at least cultural-specific, self-set parameters, cinema doesn’t want her to stray too far from the reassuring - which is why in The Da Vinci Code, notwithstanding the laugh riot that was the film itself, her presence made even less sense than usual when Hollywood tries to make French screen goddesses walk two paces behind cultural midgets like Mel Gibson or Tom Cruise.

Of course, she is not required to actually be Amelie every time – though I imagine a return visit to that character would bring out the queues – and provided she is playing against rather than merely ignoring that character’s heritage she can, in fact, get away with quite a lot (even insanity, in the excellent A la Folie Pas Du Tout). But a certain pixieish cuteness is always demanded, and even when not foregrounded, is still being acknowledged and celebrated, even in the gesture of its being withheld.
Indeed, in her two films for director Pierre Salvadori (2006's Priceless, and now in Beautiful Lies), between them her most comfortably successful star vehicles, she is actually brattish and unlikeable for most of the time, but never in such a way that we might actually believe it, only in a manner that makes us look forward to the transition, back into cute lovable Audrey, that the films never let us doubt is a foregone conclusion. The fun is in waiting for it (for us) and making us wait for it (for them).
This tacit acknowledgement and reassurance of the audience’s expectations is the mark of true star presence; what boring actors mistake for typecasting and fear like manual labour, but which the old stars knew was the holy grail of stardom. (And it's fickle: Nathalie Baye, in second lead as Audrey’s mother, might well have watched the cameras circling around the star and remembered wryly how times had changed since Venus Beauty Institute, in which Baye was the star and Tautou the newcomer, just as Judith Chemla, in an equivalent role as as nervous hairdresser Paulette, might have been doing likewise, readying herself to steal all her scenes just as Audrey had snatched hers in Venus.)

Beautiful Lies is a romantic comedy of confusion, of the sort built around anticipation of the moment when the characters reveal their true feelings for each other. It’s also one of those films that delays the lead characters’ discovery of each other’s true motives: when will a know the truth about b’s feelings for a, and when will b realise that a has done so… As a big tease and reveal tactic this rarely fails, and might be termed the Baxter-Kubelik resolution, after its most perfect cinematic demonstration. I thought 'when will a realise the truth about b' was handled rather better than 'when will b realise that a has realised' this time around, the latter moment being somewhat thrown away in a rush of last-minute plotting.
It's a little long, and on the whole I preferred Priceless, but this is not the kind of film one is supposed to judge on the grounds by which we all tend to judge movies in the home entertainment age, ie: how will it stand up on the 275th viewing?
This is a film like a fifties Bardot comedy, to be watched and enjoyed, perhaps just once, and then forgotten about even, but with no hard feelings on either side. Just a movie. Bring on the next. The only difference is that they don’t bring on the next anything like as swiftly and easily as they used to, which is why each new trifle has to be sold as if it were a main course, and on those grounds alone Beautiful Lies might disappoint. But it shouldn’t, and the more people go to see things like this – instead of Batman and instead of Ken Loach – the more of it they’ll make for you. I can think of no higher praise for the film than to say that I enjoyed it thoroughly, and have already forgotten most of it.
My wife was unsure of the merits of Audrey’s audaciously short hairdo, however, which is a far more important reservation to have about a film of this sort than any trifling concerns about narrative structure or film technique. I was happy enough with the barnet but we both agreed that she was far too thin.
She spends the whole film in trousers until a very short scene at the end, and her legs are like breadsticks.

From France to Italy. My excitement at the prospect of Salt of Life was so great that to wiser heads disappointment might have seemed as inevitable as it was unthinkable to mine.
In the end, I won the bet: it’s not the film that Mid-August Lunch was (what is?) but it was still the best time I’ve had at the movies since Ghost World.
A semi-sequel to Lunch, the film could easily be enjoyed by anyone who had never seen or heard of the first film, indeed many, I’ll wager, would enjoy it even more on those grounds, mistaking the film’s assumption of audience familiarity for the elliptical meandering of Sofia Coppola or Jim Jarmusch, with which it shares a non-architectural structure and loosely connected, minimalist episodes. The resemblance is superficial, though, because the brush strokes are deeper and surer: Di Gregorio is a John Singer Sargent of cinema, not a Picasso.

The film lacks the tightness of structure that was part of what made Mid August so impressive, and it plays more plainly for laughs, but that’s perfectly fine in context, since the film's focus is on a more obviously comic subject: Gianni's flailing attempts to rationalise the prospect of no longer being considered a romantic prospect by the women he meets in the course of his day. The structure mirrors his metal state, not least in a wonderful sequence, simultaneously moving and hilarious, in which he wanders Rome all night with his neighbour’s enormous pet dog after accidentally ingesting an hallucinogenic at a party, playing like a child in the city fountains while the dog looks on unimpressed. Later, when he and the dog are sat in the street, there is a moment where he tries to get the dog’s attention by tapping it on its shoulder, the implication being that he either wants to tell it something or point something out to it, and when the dog ignores him he gives up with a look of bemused resignation. I fear it is impossible to convey why this is so hilarious, but it's one of the funniest, truest bit of comic-improvisational playing I’ve ever seen in a movie. And the ending is so perfect I wanted to stand and cheer.

It’s very different in tone from Mid-August, which also had a perfect ending but one which was perfect in a very different way, and is best viewed, I think, as a kind of reward for those of us who came out for the the first film, and cherished it, and told our friends, and made it the modest but future-bankable international hit that it was.
There is an element of crowd-pleasing contrivance here – Valeria De Franciscis is back as Gianni’s mother, and at times the film sweats to keep her relevant to the story, her appearances often seeming like guest turns. But that's fine. She's just as good as she was last time, and the narrative set-up of the climactic, aborted family meal, in which the two halves of his life come together, is superb.

In Italy, apparently, they’re calling Di Gregorio he Italian Woody Allen, a nice indicator of worthiness, though while Allen is seen by many as an increasingly spent force, Di Greogorio, a relative whippersnapper at 61, seems hardly in need of the comparison. Neither does he share Allen’s tics and inconsistencies and blind spots. His refreshing acknowledgement that his stories and performance are drawn 99% from his real life stands in marked contrast to Allen’s habitual, often petulant reluctance to cede autobiographical relevance to even his most blatantly self-inspired works.
In Gianni De Gregorio the Italian cinema has found its finest, most idiosyncratic, lovable, charming and cherishable creative voice since you know who.

James Mason: a thoroughly insecure investment?

2011-09-05T15:04:00.013+01:00

The first time I saw James Mason was in the early nineteen-eighties.
He was near the end of his life by this time, grey-haired and moustached. I was about nine or ten, and he scared the crap out of me.
This was when the BBC showed the mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1979), and those pasty, floaty vampires that leaped out of dark corners and scratched on your window panes at night were scary, but Mason’s icy, refined creepiness was even more lingering when the time came to turn the lights out.
When I saw him again a year or so later, I couldn’t believe the transformation.
Now he was Dr Watson to Christopher Plummer’s Sherlock Holmes in Murder By Decree (1979); he looked the same, but instead of evil he was warm, charming and eminently trustworthy - the very model of an English Victorian gentleman.
I was still scared, this time by what remains the most darkly terrifying recreation of Jack the Ripper's London on film, but Mason's steadfast, decent and reliable Watson was one of the film's few beacons of light.
I was even more impressed.
Then, finally, a little later again, I saw The Wicked Lady (1945).
Now he was young, dashing, passionate, with thick black hair and a magnetic vitality: every inch the man film historian David Thomson described as “the most stylish leading man in British films.”

Which is a roundabout way of saying that James Mason was among the most versatile and talented of all British leading men.
Do people still love him? He doesn't get mentioned a lot these days, but he's always been one of my favourites, and it's a very interesting career. Few British stars had his range, or his magnetism, his dynamism or his sensitivity.
He was born in Yorkshire in 1909, and even in his later Hollywood years a trace of Yorkshire accent can always be discerned in that oh so melodious speaking voice.
If the voice is the actor's basic instrument, no actor was so fortunate as Mason. I don't know if he worked on it, and played it up in professional circumstances, or if it was how he really talked all the time, but if the latter it's pretty amusing to imagine him ordering a pizza.
It's simply the greatest actor voice of all time, simultaneously soothing and disquieting, like honey-coated gravel.
For proof, turn to the 1953 animated short The Tell-Tale Heart, with Mason narrating Poe's first-person confession of a madman trying to convince the reader of his sanity, and just wallow in it. The combination of the mesmerising, stylised imagery and Mason's voice makes for probably the most creepily effective Edgar Allan Poe movie ever made. Sorry, Vincent.

The essence of Mason for me is in the Gainsborough melodramas that first brought him true stardom: rollicking bodice-rippers that exploited the relaxed censorship of British wartime to wallow in sadism and villainy, decadence and duplicity, rape, murder, bondage and flagellation. And all in wonderful approximations of period dress and settings, and peopled with a gorgeous rep company of British stars: Margaret Lockwood, Patricia Roc, Phyllis Calvert. For ladies who liked their men upright, dashing and unthreatening, there was Stewart Granger, for everyone else there was Mason. In The Wicked Lady and The Man in Grey and Fanny By Gaslight he was mad, bad and dangerous to know, but devilish handsome for all that, and providing, as writer Jeffrey Richards put it, “the same powerful sexual charge as those dark, cruel, fascinating outsiders of nineteenth-century Romantic fiction, Rochester and Heathcliff.”
Women adored him regardless of, and a little bit because of, the depths of misogynistic villainy his characters plumbed, bringing his cane down upon Ann Todd's poor defenceless fingers as she played the piano in The Seventh Veil, horse-whipping Margaret Lockwood to death in The Man in Grey or, as highwayman Captain Jerry Jackson in The Wicked Lady, surviving a public hanging before returning broken-necked to Lockwood's boudoir to give her one from beyond the grave.
Rather like the later Hammer Horror films, these barnstorming historical dramas were savaged by the critics but audiences (particularly Britain’s newly emancipated home army of women) flocked to them.

A pacifist, Mason was a conscientious objector during the war, a stance which estranged him from many in his own family (and cost him a part in Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve) but did not, surprisingly perhaps, alienate the film-going public, who consistently voted him among the top male stars at the British box-office throughout the period. And while Granger laboured under his matinee idol image for the rest of his career, finding worthwhile roles harder and harder to come by, Mason continued to flourish as a hugely talented character actor.
Immediately after the war, he appeared in Carol Reed’s brooding masterpiece Odd Man Out (1947) as Johnny McQueen, a mortally wounded IRA operative on the run in wintry Belfast. Considered by many to be his best ever performance, his work in the film was aided by a magnificently doom-laden score by William Alwyn and some exceptionally poetic images.

At this point, Mason decided to try his luck in Hollywood. In later life he was wont to characterise this period as a failure, and it is true that he never became a Hollywood star in the strictly limited sense of one whose name alone is enough to sell a picture. But he was in regular demand, and he gave many noteworthy performances in several of the fifties’ most memorable and important films.
He was Oscar-nominated for A Star is Born with Judy Garland and a splendid Captain Nemo in Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (both in 1954), a sensitive and convincing Rommel in two films, most importantly The Desert Fox (1951), Brutus to Brando’s Mohk Annunny in Julius Caesar (1953) and one of his best smooth villains in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest (1959).
“The public never knows what it's getting by way of a Mason performance from one film to the next,” he said around this time. “I therefore represent a thoroughly insecure investment.”
Physically, he seemed to get older very quickly, and to welcome the chance, in the early sixties, to slip into offbeat middle-aged roles in unusual, sometimes controversial projects such as Lolita (1962) and the Swinging London drama Georgie Girl (1966) with Lynn Redgrave, in both of which he played older men making predatory advances to younger girls. The latter is on the whole rather a charming relic of the era and one of its more worthy, if entirely typical, prospects for reappraisal; the former is a Kubrick adaptation of a Nabokov novel, so it's really up to you.

Despite this, along with the equally unlikely Cary Grant, he was one of the many actors initially considered for the role of James Bond in Dr No. The casting seems unimaginable now, but it prompts the reflection that he would have made a first class Bond villain, at least one of which (Drax in 1979’s Moonraker) he was offered but declined.
But he seemed refreshingly happy to do work that was cheerfully beneath him. Many a Briton of a certain age will remember him warmly in an eccentric documentary, The London Nobody Knows, in which he lugubriously tours the capital's dying markets, rotting and condemned music halls, and Jack the Ripper murder sites, captured for posterity in grainy Eastmancolor mere seconds before the re-developers obliterated them forever. Americans might remember him doing 'The Wonderful World of Beards' on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
And here he is revealing that he likes the unusual flavour of Thunderbird wine. I'm not surprised it tastes unusual if you drink it out of a tumbler stuffed with ice and sliced fruit.

And here he is on What's My Line?:

Never entirely comfortable during his years of stardom in the forties, he found far greater fulfilment playing supporting roles in the second half of his career.
He published his autobiography Before I Forget in 1981. It begins: “My purpose in writing this book is to get things out of the way.” Revealingly, he once said that he would like to be remembered “just as a fairly desirable sort of character actor”.
His final film, The Shooting Party, was released after his death from a heart attack in 1984.

I demand a recount!

2011-09-04T15:53:00.018+01:00

Jennifer Love Hewitt can do no wrong.

This is a simple fact, easily proved with graph paper and a lead ball on a string.
After all, who else could turn a project like The Tuxedo - inept chauffeur gets mistaken for a superspy and saves the world with the aid of a futuristic jacket that enables him to defy gravity and fight off all attackers - into a surefire Saturday night favourite, simply by having her character wear a pair of sexy specs? ("Hewitt is incredibly obnoxious..." - Leonard Maltin)
Who else would not only cheerfully accept the offer to play Audrey Hepburn but would come out swinging with so fabulous an imitation of her voice that it's now difficult to watch any Hepburn movie and not imagine what it would be like with Jennifer doing it instead?
Who else wields the cinematic chutzpah to make you seriously contemplate giving over 0.0000032594 of your expected lifetime to a live-action version of Garfield?
Remind me again what it was that made you want to see Heartbreakers?
Never missed an episode of Ghost Whisperer? That'll be because of the plots, I expect.

Like almost all of you, I'm sure, I own a copy of her book The Day I Shot Cupid, a kind of self-help dating guide cum autobiographical scrapbook, written in aphorisms that remind the reader irresistibly of Nietszche. "I really do think that both sexes are completely nuts and beautiful," she tells us fairly early on.

I read it straight through, twice. I even read the bit that's for female readers only ("the section where we truly bond") in which she speaks frankly about her varicose veins.
It's a self-excoriating nightmare trip through every failed relationship Jen has ever had, and no detail is too revealing. She even confesses to the time she "spent three hours making his and her toiletry kits" and "never heard from him again."
And I'm assuming you all know about vagazzaling and don't need me to bring you up to speed there.
Because of this book, which my wife got me for my birthday - it happened to me and it can happen to you too! - I now know that Jennifer collects miniature books, loves monkeys, gets turned on by office supplies and wears a tiara in the bath.
Now, for some reason, the book is not available in Britain and has to be ordered via Amazon, but this is not exactly difficult, and certainly not an excuse for not doing so. If you live in America it's even easier: simply stroll into your nearest Wal-Mart, or K-Mart, or whatever it is you call corner shops over there, and pick up a copy fresh from the shelf. You won't regret it.
Which is all simply to make the point: I take Jennifer Love Hewitt very seriously.

And yet, despite all this, despite Heartbreakers ("wonderful performance by Hewitt's breasts" - Leonard Maltin), despite the romantic and clever If Only (filmed in London, like Sliding Doors only better), despite Shortcut to Happiness (a remake of The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which she plays the part Walter Huston essayed in the original, finding in it a level of compelling physical wondrousness the old boy simply hadn't been able to muster, greatest screen actor ever or no greatest screen actor), despite even the fact that she was recently photographed on holiday playing tennis in a bikini and platform shoes, there are people in this world who enjoy nothing better than taking a pop at her.
And I've just learned - gamely enough via her own website - that Jennifer Love Hewitt is, statistically-speaking, the world's worst-reviewed actress since 1985 (this according to someone's idea of a website called 'Rotten Tomatoes'):

Hewitt has the rare distinction of never having made a single "fresh" (above 60 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) film. Her average score of 18.9 owes to such duds as Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (7 percent), I Know What You Did Last Summer (35 percent), I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (7 percent), and both Garfield movies (15 percent and 11 percent, respectively).

Because it measures reviews, this is all pretty misleading of course.
After all, by the same statistical method, the best actor and actress for the same period are those screen giants Daniel Auteuil and Arsinée Khanjian. The best American actor is John Ratzenberger, who is a terrific actor actually, but obviously makes it to the top of his tree because he had the sound financial sense to get his voice in every Pixar movie, not because he was magnificent as Cliff in Cheers.
Mike Leigh, meanwhile, probably isn't even his own mother's idea of the world's best director, but critics love to pretend they enjoy his silly films, so there he is too.

And since when did critics know anything anyway?
I thought that nobody could ever rival Fay Wray as a horror film heroine - until I saw I Know What You Did Last Summer and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, the sequel in which she gives, if anything, an even more impressive performance. Remember the bit where she almost dies in a self-tanning machine? Suddenly it was 1932 again, and Fay was still in the wax museum, and the rest of the twentieth century was just a madman's dream. And what about her English accent in The Truth About Love? Didn't it just make you want to buy her a puppy with a ribbon tied round it? And the film was shot in Bristol for goodness sakes!
Was Bullitt shot in Bristol? Was Midnight Cowboy shot in Bristol? Was Return of the Jedi shot in Bristol?
I think you'll find the answer is in every case no, and I hope you'll remember that the next time you contemplate watching them rather than a Jennifer Love Hewitt film.

Call your daughter Googie

2011-09-02T08:37:00.011+01:00

The last standing great British star of the forties, the wonderfully named Googie Withers, left us all in July, at the age of ninety-four.

A stylish, elegant but also very quirky actress, with lustrous dark hair and slightly quizzical, slightly imperious features, she ably personified the well-spoken, well-mannered high society dramas and comedies that were the backbone of British cinema in the forties.
But her popularity, I think, attests to the fact that she made sure audiences could see there was more going on underneath all that. Her speciality was playing outwardly refined women finding reserves of resilience in moments of crisis, or revealing hidden depths of desire or duplicity beneath the placid exterior. There was a furtiveness to her screen persona, a haughtiness; male audiences seemed to sense that the posh and proper surface was paper thin, and a tigress growled beneath.
She had a long career, with notable successes before and especially after her forties heyday, and if she never quite became a superstar, she enjoyed a longevity as an actress that others, more briefly cherished, may well have envied.

When she started out, audiences might have been forgiven in seeing little to distinguish her from many another hopeful British starlet. If thirties viewers noted her at all, it was probably in dolly bird bit roles, frequently in a maid’s costume, and usually with her hair dyed blonde.

Did you remember she was in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, for instance?
Surely that was Margaret Lockwood, I hear you cry.
Yes, it was Lockwood in the lead, but Googie’s there if you look for her, with a line of dialogue or two, as one of her pals in the opening sequences. She often appeared in support of star comedians – a thankless job if ever there was one – giving her all alongside the likes of Arthur Askey and George Formby, and rewarded for her pains in the latter case by sharing a dunking with him in an enormous vat of beer, in his 1939 beauty Trouble Brewing.
But with determination, her hair restored to its original rich chestnut, and a natural talent that was, eventually, permitted to flower, she became a regular and reliable presence in several notable movies.
I think I first saw her in the ‘Haunted Mirror’ episode of Dead of Night (1945), an anthology of creepy tales untypically produced at Ealing Studios, that still retains the ability to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. She’s charming, too, and very funny, as the long-suffering wife in Miranda (1948), whose husband brings a real live mermaid – in the fetching form of Glynis Johns – back to their London penthouse after a Cornish fishing holiday. ("She never wears panties?")
And what about her glorious villainess, cold-bloodedly poisoning her husband, in Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945), an Ealing melodrama that gave the Gainsborough team more than a run for their money?

Born Georgette Lizette Withers in Karachi in 1917, she was the daughter of Edgar Withers, a Captain in the Royal Navy, and his Dutch wife, from whom she inherited her exotic second name. The name under which she became famous, however, was not a corruption of Georgette but a nickname given her by her Indian nurse – it means ‘little pigeon’ in Hindi.
It was often said that she would have escaped ingenue and cheesecake roles and progressed more quickly to serious drama if she had not decided to retain Googie as her professional name, but she fought against all advice to change it. “I have won a certain reputation with it,” she reasoned, “and I don't feel like beginning over again with a fresh name. Besides, my real name sounds even crazier. I was christened Georgette Lizette!”
As it transpired, the golden key that unlocked her mature career was again in the hands of director Michael Powell. Cast as an extra in his 1935 film The Girl in the Crowd (1935) she reported for work to be told by Powell that the second lead actress had been dismissed, and would she like to take her place? The girl in the crowd had arrived, and he used her twice more in the thirties, always in light supporting roles. But had made a point of telling her that he would provide her with the more serious work he felt she deserved as soon as he could, came good on his promise, and basically started her serious career for her by casting her as a member of the Dutch resistance helping stranded British airmen to flee the Nazis in One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942). Critics seemed amazed that this familiar figure from so many undistinguished movies had turned, seemingly overnight, into a poised, talented and confident leading lady, holding her own opposite Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney in Night and the City (1950), and standing out as the married woman attempting to shelter her former lover, now an escaped convict, in It Always Rains On Sunday (1947).
She made six films at Ealing Studios, but from her own perspective the most important of them was probably The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947). Not only is she at her gutsiest in it - as a sheep farmer - but it was also on the set of that movie that she met and fell in love with John McCallum, her Australian co-star. They were married the following year and went on to make ten films and three kids together. They eventually returned to Australia in 1959, where Googie went on to become the first ever non-Australian to be given the highly prestigious Order of Australia. (She was also honoured with a CBE back home.) A marriage widely considered among the most successful in showbusiness, it was ended only by McCallum’s own death, last year, at the age of 91.

If she were around in movies now, I suspect her name would have caught on among the general public, but wartime Britons were made of less frivolous stuff. It's a shame she didn't inspire a generation of little Googies, but it's never too late.
Go on. Call your daughter Googie.

Le Notti di Italia

2011-09-01T08:01:00.009+01:00

Fellini, of course.
Hard at work as usual.

Another ritual my wife and I are really getting into is Italian Night.
We both love Italy and just about everything that goes with it, and Angela is learning the language, so we like to watch Italian movies, and have recently hit on the idea of making one night a week into a bonafide celebration of all things Italiano.
So we start with Italian music: Puccini if we're feeling grandiose, Mina if we're in retro mood, traditional songs from Tuscany at other times.
In the background while cooking we get the laptop out and watch the free Italian channels you can access online (the only TV we ever watch is Italian TV); our favourite is one called Yes Italia, which has interesting documentaries on different regions and cultural topics with English subtitles.
Angela prefers this to the kind of entertainment typically to be found on the Berlusconi channels, which tends to adhere to the golden formula of Italian live tv: men in weird foam rubber costumes and women in bikinis dancing in front of an audience clapping in time. I on the other hand can watch quite a lot of this without getting bored, but we both agree as to the excellence of the game show L' Eredità (so much more riveting when you don't have a clue what they're saying) and its startlingly orange presenter Carlo Conti.
Food-wise, we try to vary the menu, but we're creatures of habit, and have lately fallen in love with a deceptively simple concoction of spaghetti, garlic, olive oil, red peppers and flaked parmigiano-reggiano (which according to its own website is both the king of cheese and 'gives energy for sports' - only the Italians would promote cheese as an aid to athletic prowess).
I spent years avoiding spaghetti, and favouring every other imaginable pasta, because I had always associated it with its British incarnation, sold in tins of slimy tomato sauce and with a consistency so soft it only just held its shape before instant obliteration followed its first encounter with the human mouth. Nasty stuff. But proper spaghetti, I now realise, she is magnifico, and the perfect accompaniment to Federico and Giulietta.

We don't only watch Fellini, by any means, though he remains a kind of touchstone. Odd that he has been so unfashionable in recent times, but then, as a teenager, I too affected to prefer the colder pleasures of Antonioni; now I unashamedly prefer human warmth and the clink of glasses to slow immersion in ice water.
I have to say that Bicycle Thieves disappointed me this time round too, and I really wasn't expecting it to.
Realism is all very well, but pessimism is lazy, I've come to believe. Nobody needs a filmmaker to educate them in what real life is like, and it is patronising of them to suppose otherwise. Neorealism was a good idea, but the fact that it lasted such a short time tells you how much of it audiences needed. Escapism has become a dirty word, but surely that's what cinema is for, or 'transportation', perhaps, a term I prefer because it doesn't come trailing connotations of idle Spielbergian fantasy.
Of course one can argue that it is too easy to reach for the lazy absolution of a glib, unearned happy ending, and you'd be right. But it's easier still not to bother at all, and let the narrative lead its creator down the most predictable of cul-de-sacs until his nose is against the wall, as if it had a life of its own and there is no controlling intelligence shaping it at all.
The clever thing, surely, is to bring the narrative to a non-glib, well-earned point of transcendence, one that does play fair by the narrative but displays the effort its creator has put into getting it there (and the underlying worldview that compelled the attempt). Or, in the case of the best of Fellini, those combinations of tragedy and hope that leave the viewer truly lifted to another plane.
I don't mean to attack Bicycle Thieves, which is a great film in so many ways, but I was struck, as I never had before, that the ending I once thought so powerful now seemed merely inconclusive, and self-satisfied in a way that went against the spirit of empathy informing the gesture.

And really, what great principle would been violated if he had found his bicycle at the end? Would we have been less moved; less inclined to take seriously the plight of the people we have encountered?
Surely De Sica's point is that these are people buffeted randomly by fate, not actually cursed by it? If he can lose his bicycle, he can find it: it's all a lottery and the fates of us all hang on threads of circumstance and coincidence. After all, we knew how many other unemployed men were passed over so he could get the job. Presumably one of them will now get it? Or are they less important? In life, no; but in the film, inescapably yes, because the film has chosen to tell one man's story at the expense of the others. That in itself is a cinematic choice, an artifical choice, an anti-realist choice; it comes from conventional narrative structure, not realism which must surely aspire to documentarian non-involvement. If we are to invest prioritised interest in one man over another then it's folly to allow some the concomitant rules of fictive structure to be obeyed and not others.
And I think De Sica thought so too, which is one of the reasons why I still like him a lot. I think he got fed up with neorealism even before audiences did. There's a revealing quote in an interview shortly after Bicycle Thieves came out, where he says that his next film will be an exercise in "irrealism", aiming to make "the unreal seem real, the improbable seem probable, and the impossible seem possible", but all, he stresses, "without camera tricks". The Sight & Sound interviewer is frankly baffled ("this could mean plain fantasy," he ponders, "or, preferably, an experimental attempt to go beyond literal vision in the way Jean Vigo did").
What it sounds like is Fellini - what it is, of course, is Miracle in Milan (1951), which makes all necessary neorealist points, but boldly defies its governing ethic by daring to offer a last act that, as Halliwell puts it, "sends one out of the cinema in a warm glow".
Some critics never forgave De Sica for abandoning the streets and returning to the glossy cosmopolitanism with which, as an actor, he had begun his film career. But I love the fact that the director who made so vivid a success of casting amateurs and unknowns came home as a compositor framing Sophia, and Shirley Maclaine, and even Peter Sellers. (In a charming comedy called After The Fox, Sellers plays a master thief who disguises himself as an Italian film director and stages a gold robbery as if it were a movie. He steals his film equipment from De Sica, playing himself, and in a true gesture of exorcism, De Sica has Victor Mature, likewise brilliantly self-parodying as an ageing actor refusing to admit his pin-up days are behind him, ask "what's neorealism?" "No money," comes the reply.)

To take the raw indredients of sadness and tear them apart until you find the grains of hope they conceal, and then amplify them, is the noblest service drama can perform to the disaffected. It's what Capra did, and it's still such a controversial way of looking at things that many people still affect to passionately hate Capra, for this very reason. And it's certainly what Gianni Di Gregorio does in his brilliant Mid-August Lunch.
This was Italian night's biggest hit so far: our third time of watching, and it just gets better and better. Every time you notice something new, and every time it leaves you more moved and uplifted. Some critics called it a welcome return to neorealism, but if so its an altogether better, neo-neorealism.
And now there's a semi-follow-up, Salt of Life, which I had no idea was on the way at all. I can't remember the last time I was so excited about a new film that I could hardly wait. (Well actually I can: it was Rocky IV.)
Tonight, 6.25, the Little Theatre Cinema, Bath. Perhaps I'll see you there.

Go Mina!

Marienbad, Marilyn, and the art of the pink film

2011-08-31T07:51:00.007+01:00

The only thing I thought I would miss about London when we came to Bath was the Phoenix Cinema. But hurrah, we have The Little Theatre Cinema, which has a more or less identical programme and is an even nicer place. (The Phoenix may have been Britain's oldest continually operating cinema, but that didn't stop it looking like a workman's hut inside.)
Since we've been here we've had The Last Picture Show, there's Audrey Tautou's new one next week, and we're halfway through a Marilyn season to coincide with the exhibition of her frocks up at the American Museum.
Enjoyed How To Marry A Millionaire very much indeed. I never really paid much attention to it before, but on the big screen - like White Christmas - it came magnificently alive, even if they did just project a DVD. Very naughty, that.
I love the supporting cast - Fred Clark, always the funniest man in the room; David Wayne, as great and as unpredictable as usual; Cameron Mitchell (look out, Lauren! It's Vance from The Toolbox Murders!) and William Powell, still showing them how it's done despite a fuller profile and greying head.
We all enjoyed the bit where the three girls are having romantic dreams, and Grable's is just a static shot of a hot dog.

They're perfectly right: I did see it without glasses

They also showed Last Year at Marienbad, a film I had never caught up with, and probably would never watch if it wasn't at a cinema. So, that eventuality having presented itself, I declared that the time had come, and that it was inexcusable that I still hadn't seen what is, if nothing else, an important film.
In the event I forgot to go and so I still haven't seen it. But then I got to thinking: is it true to say I haven't seen it? Isn't not going just as legitimate a form of engagement with so speculative and intuitive an artifact as going? Couldn't it be argued that a man who forgets to see it is, in a sense, more connected with its aims and intentions than the one who remembers? That the man who, as it were, 'does something else' while it is being projected in the same town is as much if not more a receiver of its ambiance as any who happen, trivially, to be within the same four walls as its projected shadow? Have I, in fact, 'seen it' in a far deeper and more meaningful sense than the poor sap who trudged along and merely 'saw' it in the superficial sense of being sat in front of it while it unspooled?
If so, I have to say I enjoyed it immensely and I look forward to enjoying the complete works of Jean Luc Godard in the same way.
(Werner Herzog on Godard: “Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung-fu film.” )

Now that I live a married life I see more modern films than I used to. Not across the board – thankfully my wife has no more interest than me in 99% of modern culture, but she does have a soft spot, particularly after a long day, for the kind of movies that are commonly called romcoms but which we call 'pink films', on account of the fact that they are usually packaged in pink DVD cases, designed to catch the eye of people like my wife, a tactic as brazen as it is entirely successful.
So while I’ve still never seen Last Year In Marienbad (or have I? or did they? or was it?) I am pretty well versed in the cinematic trajectories of Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Aniston and Anne Hathaway.
You probably know the rules of pink films, but if you don't, basically he loves her but she doesn't love him because she has a distracting career/unsuitable boyfriend/he's unreliable/he lives too far away for it to work/he's older/he's younger/he's Hugh Grant. Either that or they're married and he's not paying her as much attention as he used to and she starts to notice that other guy, the one she never thought much of at first, but you know he is sorta cute and very attentive. Or else she's got the perfect life until suddenly she gets a baby, or a long lost sister with whom she'd never really bonded comes to stay, or her mother gets ill and she has to reluctantly leave the city life where she's this big hot shot in a trouser suit and heels, and go stay with her in Florida where there's this dweeby mother's boy who works at the local hospital radio station who actually now I come to notice it does have a rather firm jawline and with a bit of bringing out could just be Mr Right, and who'd have thought, if I hadn't come here I'd never have met him.
Along the way there's a good deal of comic bitchiness, lots of product placement, sequences in which long periods of eventful time and/or shopping expeditions pass by in montage to the accompaniment of a nineties pop standard, and loads of hugging and crying. Usually there will be a scene with the main character and three of her her chums sat around a table in a bar drinking and laughing very loudly. She lives in a busy city, and at times she's so busy she has to run across a busy street without the time to find a pedestrian crossing, usually carrying a polystyrene cup of coffee, cutely dodging the cars that occasionally honk a token horn at her, but probably not so much because they're annoyed as because they think she looks nice in her bobble hat and matching scarf, which would look dorky on anyone else, but on her seems kooky and attractive.
Surprisingly, perhaps, in these hardbitten, fleabitten times, pink films almost always end with somebody getting married. If you're lucky, the writers will remember that an awful lot of men are stuck watching them too, and will toss us the occasional bone: a bit of physical humour, or a few seconds of Anne or Jen or Drew in their underwear not salacious enough to alienate the primary constituency, but just enough to tip us off that we're not being taken for granted either.
Bride Wars was a particular favourite that took several spins in the months leading up to our own big day. I've seen The Devil Wears Prada twice too. So as a result of that, and also because she was a good if unlikely Jane Austen, I do have a soft spot for Anne Hathaway. She has one of those massive mouths I always find appealing, and nice hair, and the same rare but casually-displayed talent for both drama and comedy last seen in Sandra Bullock.
But holy cow, I don’t know quite what to make of her rapping. Is it cute or is it embarrassing, or is cute because it’s embarrassing, or what?
I’ve really no idea, and I’ve only been able to watch it twice, the first time peeping horror-struck through the gaps in my fingers after the first couple of seconds, the second time sat on my hands, having taken what I discovered was a pretty foolhardy vow not to do the same thing again.
See what you think. (I expect that the fact that everybody laughs when she says it's "in the style of Lil Wayne" means that they all know who "Lil Wayne" is and that therefore you probably do too, but if, like me, you didn't, he's a silly-looking man with scribbles all over his face and body who presumably makes a noise a bit like the noise Anne makes here.)

What do you think? Creepy and embarrassing or sort of geeky-cute?
Did you come away liking her more than you used to or less? Or perhaps you couldn't give a rat's either way, as I probably shouldn't at my age.
Damn those pink films.

Around the blogosphere without a paddle

2011-08-30T17:59:00.018+01:00

Great stuff happens when you write a blog.
People you've never met from all over the world just appear in your in-box with all sorts of strange things to say, and questions to ask.

Here's a for instance, and one what's more that I could do with your help on.
In keeping with our status as your official smoking is cool blog (go on: look at Scarlett and dare deny it), a reader has been in touch demanding to know what film or films featured two cigarettes being lit at the same time before Paul sparked up for himself and Bette simultaneously in Now Voyager. (Don't ask for the moon, we have a full pack of Rothman's king-size.)

The thing driving me mad is that I know I've seen it happen - I remember remarking on it - in some thirties movie or other, but I can't remember which. And when you own hundreds and hundreds of movies, there's just no way of checking. So please - your assistance would be much appreciated...
This reminds me of that bit in Bette's This Is Your Life, when Henried comes on and, like a performing spaniel, cautiously repeats the routine. He's all thumbs, and Bette is sat there looking all extraordinary and 1970s, still unmistakably one of the great stars, and he just looks like a very smart old man. It's massively poignant somehow, and when he finally does it he gets a round of applause. Compulsive television, but just imagine such a thing being allowed on the idiot box today.

Ah well. Now to business.
Blogs and blogging. As I said, it's a nice little virtual world, this film blogging thing. And thanks a thousand times to the excellent Paul at the excellent I Thank You for giving Movietone a Stylish Blogger Award.
It's always a treat to get an award - I admit it - and especially so when the donor site is as fascinating as Paul's. In fact, I would give it right back to I Thank You if that weren't a silly thing to do; instead I merely urge you to sample its eclectic and informed contents.

Receiving the award entitles me to pass it on to seven other blogs. From a shortlist that was anything but short, I've tried to give the attention to blogs that are new, or at least new to me, but in the event a couple of revamps and the odd long-established national treasure made their way into the final round-up too.
I had arranged for the awards to be handed out by Sean Penn, but unfortunately he's busy tonight judging the annual We Hate America Society Stalin lookalike competition. So instead, to announce the winners, we are proud to welcome Sylvester Stallone and a pig from The Muppet Show.
And the winners are...

1. Laura at Who Can Turn The World Off With Her Smile? Best new blog I've found in ages.

2. whistlinggypsy at Distant Voices and Flickering Shadows and The Lady Eve at The Lady Eve's Reel Life. Both part of the furniture now.

3. Meredith at her recently re-named Movie Montage. Better than ever, quite frankly.

4. Joseph at Famous Pipe Smokers. What a brilliant idea for a blog.

5. Maya at Nuts To Will Hays! A new pre-Code blog always brings out the Monroe Owsley in me.

6. Jinx at Totally Jinxed. I don't think I've ever actually given her an award before. It's about time. Have an award, Jinx.

7. Jenny at the Vincentennial Cookblog. We all love Silver Screen Suppers, but what could be better than a new Jenny blog devoted solely to the stuff Vincent Price liked to cook?

That's it, then. Thank you, Sylvester. Thank you, Muppet pig.

Of course, there are so many other great blogs equally worthy of attention, new and old. It's great when new film blogs appear, but I can't bear it when old favourites fall away.
Strange to think of myself as one of the older generation now. When I started a few years back, the standard bearers I first encountered were the likes of Silents and Talkies, Oh By Jingo, Lolita's Classics and Noir Girl.
All still exist, but are rarely updated (though Noir Girl seems to have kick-started itself again lately), as their authors in most cases have moved on to other things, be it other sites or other priorities. Elizabeth now presides over a sort of online scrapbook, which is always an enjoyable and eclectic mix, but she's a fine writer, and I miss her ruminations on Stan and Ollie and Cliff Edwards and King Vidor.
College seems to be another all-conquering blog-slayer, reducing Lolita's once-incessant output to the occasional eccentric nugget, while Juliette's just waits there, dangling the hope that she will one day return like the proverbial carrot before the proverbial donkey. It's worth waiting for, because as a prose stylist Juliette is a genuine American original, as is Ginger at Asleep in New York, which revives itself in intoxicating spurts before hibernating again. The fun is that you never know when it will come back to life, or for how long. In fact, uniquely in her case, the sporadic and sudden appearance of new posts is actually part of the fun.

I'm one of those people who hates change, and to see the blogging landscape changing while mine does not is never comfortable for me. Worst of all is when whole blogs just disappear: you click on your link, and get that nasty message from Google saying THIS BLOG DOESN'T EXIST, as if it had never been there, and you only dreamed it. Are you calling me a liar? I was going to pass one of the Stylish Bloggers on to CK's Neo-Edwardian Hipster only to find that it, too, had mysteriously gone the way of all flesh.
So thank heaven for the stayers that have never gone away, for Laura's Miscellaneous Musings (whose 'Around the Blogosphere This Week' feature has been kind enough to point in this direction on several occasions), for Ivan's Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, for A Noodle In a Haystack and Another Old Movie Blog and Time Machine To The Twenties, and for Classic Forever, which I guess is everybody's favourite, because it has such a unique tone of voice, and is so hilariously enthusiastic about so many unlikely things. And above all for Radiation Cinema!, which we thought lost for some time, but is now back and thankfully better than ever.
It's wonderful to discover new ones, of course, and I especially like it when I am able to play some small part in spreading the word, and thus get to know the authors. Stumbling upon Laszlo's on Lex, and getting to know Gerald, its author, who has a treasure chest of memories of moviegoing in forties New York, was an especial pleasure. Over at Carfax Abbey I've found a contemporaneous soulmate in Jinx at Totally Jinxed, who never has to have any of my British childhood references explained to her. Jenny at Silver Screen Suppers always cheers me up, and came to my wedding.
And I wish everybody enjoyed Jorge's videos, over at The March Studios, as much as I do. Or at least they should do - though if I'm honest I quite like it being under the wire.
And while we're at it, did you know Peter Bogdanovich had a blog? No? Well you should. It's called - what else? - Blogdanovich.

Okay, that's all till tomorrow. Don't take any wooden nickels, and I'll leave you with a picture of Rose McGowan dressed as Clara Bow.
Waiter, I'm ready to order now.

A Short Post About Juliette Binoche

2011-07-28T19:08:00.001+01:00

The blank female face, staring from the screen just above or below or to one side of us, has come to be the defining motif of European art cinema.
And nobody stares as meaningfully as Binoche. Foremost among contemporary French actresses, Binoche is equally at home in France, Britain or America, in art films or commercial prestige pictures, in roles that call for stark minimalism, naturalism or old-fashioned star quality.

Remember her enigmatically gazing out from the posters for Kieslowski’s Bleu: the abstract ideals of the Jacobin death-cry may have been the unifying concept behind the Trois Couleurs, but what united the films aesthetically was their reverent but uncomprehending genuflection before the female face.
Binoche's, like Delpy's in Blanc and Jacob's in Rouge says nothing and everything; its strength is in its obliquity as much as, perhaps more than, its beauty. Emotions are to be hinted at and meanings fragmented; these days we lack Bergman’s faith in narrative as journey and we are wary of catharsis.
(Do look out for those blankly staring faces, by the way: they have been the instant markers of a movie that wants to be taken seriously since the late sixties. When American cinema has lofty ambitions, from The Graduate to Lost in Translation, characters stare meaningfully to the accompaniment of pensive pop music, in European art cinema they just stare meaningfully.)

Her performance as the young widow in Kieslowski’s Bleu, first and finest third of his basically sound (if over-rated to Hades and back at the time, and now, tellingly, more or less forgotten) trilogy, is one of the great, defining performances of arthouse cinema. And it is one of the great modern screen performances, with reams of psychological and emotional information conveyed in the tiniest gestures and nuances of speech. Even doing nothing at all, as Kieslowski’s camera simply stares at her face, she rivets attention, and all without a trace of mannerism or forced feeling. It will last as long as anything by Masima, or Karina, or Vitti.
Nowadays, she seems content to settle into elder stateswoman roles, leaving the lighter stuff to Tautou, her cinematic lovechild.

She was first noticed in Rendez-vous (1985) in a sexually provocative performance that now seems untypically self-effacing. Mauvais Sang (1986) remade her as the muse of director Leos Carax, and English-language success in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) proved her bankable internationally. Emerging personally unscathed from Carax’s hugely expensive white elephant Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) she was a surprise Cathy in Wuthering Heights and an enigmatic femme fatale in Louis Malle’s Damage (both 1992).
"She was no different from anybody else", reflects Jeremy Irons at the end of the latter film, catching sight of her again at an airport, after her desirability has destroyed his marriage and career, and inadvertently brought about the death of his son. To somehow play the vamp straight and get away with it, and yet still retain enough normality to make that final observation play too is more than most actresses of the day could have taken on. The result was true international popularity of a kind enjoyed only occasionally by European stars, and more box-office success in The English Patient (1996) and Chocolat (2002).
The trouble with her English language films is that there simply are no anglophone male actors capable of keeping up with her, or not seeming grotesque in her company, so the viewer has a stark choice: miss a Binoche performance, or sit through two hours of Johnny Depp or Daniel Day Lewis.
Fascinatingly, for this most meaningful of faces, when she consented to pose nude for Playboy magazine, her face was covered in every shot.

(Written for the book 501 Movie Stars)

I believe it was W.C. Fields who never said...

2011-07-25T18:28:00.013+01:00

Few men have been so frequently misquoted as W.C. Fields, though it has to be said that in many cases, perhaps the majority of cases, it was the man's own fault.
For someone with such a gift for language and such a perfect and idiosyncratic turn of phrase, he was quite bizarrely happy to let studio publicists do his talking for him.
Despite a reputation for extreme difficulty in just about every other department, he was a publicity man's dream: he simply didn't care what supposed quotes they invented for him, or what image of his character they crafted for public consumption.
The popular image of his comic persona, that owes so very little to what is actually to be seen in his wonderful, amazingly subtle and inspired films, was almost entirely studio flim flam, and so were most of the quotes that go with it. The dog-hating, child-hating, woman-hating, whisky-obsessed curmudgeon was the studio Fields. List the most famous Fields quotes you can think of from memory, and chances are most if not all of them will be the work of others.

In the last few years, though, to the legion of phony quotes have been added a few bizarre misattributions.
'Never work with children or animals' is an old, old showbiz maxim that most of us, I had assumed, have been familiar with all our lives. The first time I came across it being attributed to Fields (presumably mistaken for the itself spurious "anyone who hates small dogs and children can't be all bad") was in, of all places, Syd Little's autobiography, and I thought it was just Syd getting himself in a muddle and thought no more of it. But since then I've seen it claimed by three more, increasingly authoritative sources. Now I find it's all over the internet like a rash, including in the imdb.

Quotes written by others in his name are one thing; a well known expression that is vaguely similar to something he was once supposed to have said being inexplicably attributed to him is, I suppose, one thing as well. But this is quite another kind of a thing:

This sign appears outside a pub in Bath.
I have never come across this quote before being attributed to anyone, much less Fields. I have done an internet search, and the only place I have found it in conjunction with Fields's name is on the website of the brewery that owns this pub.
What we would appear to have here, then, is a totally fake quote that somebody has made up, and cynically attributed to Fields on the (erroneous) grounds that it's the sort of thing he might have said, and the assumption that nobody's going to know any better, or care.
Or am I wrong?
Have any readers ever come across this quote attributed to Fields before?

I'm with George

2011-07-23T11:47:00.001+01:00

Even I know what Warner Archive is

2011-07-19T17:54:00.016+01:00

Half the time I haven't got a clue what my fellow movie bloggers are talking about.
I nod along, and pretend I do, because I don't want to look like a Big Silly, still less a Big British Silly, but the truth is I'm just bluffing, and hoping none of them asks me a point blank question that gives the game away.
They say confession is good for the soul, but are we all too far down the pike now for me to admit I don't know what Netflix is?
When someone says that they're going to put a film I've mentioned 'in their Netflix queue', does that really mean something? I thought it was just jazzy new slang, meaning they're going to look out for it, or they like the sound of it. I say, old chap, that Monica Bellucci certainly is the cat's pyjamas. Wouldn't mind putting her in my netflix queue. That sort of thing.
What on earth could a Netflix queue actually be? If pressed, I would have guessed Netflix was something a bit like a thing we have over here among the hobbits called LoveFilm, where you rent films online and they come in the post in a little white envelope. But why would there be a queue?
Then there's this fellow Robert Osborne. All film bloggers worthy of the name love him with that special love they reserve for their firstborn.
I wouldn't be able to pick him out of a line-up of one.
If he came up to me and said, "Hi, I'm Robert Osborne", I'd probably believe him, but only because I wouldn't be able to think of any reason why he'd be lying. People rarely lie when they're telling you their names.
If someone said to me after he'd moved on, "Hey! That wasn't Robert Osborne was it?", I'd confidently say, "Yes, I believe it was." But I'd wonder why they were asking.
But in Blogland, someone coming up to you and saying "Hi, I'm Robert Osborne" would be like Jennifer Love Hewitt coming up to me and saying "Hi, I'm free this Friday."
For a while I thought he was an obscure golden age actor, probably from the fifties, a slightly vague decade for me, when everyone was either Richard Egan or else might as well be. But too obscure even for me to know the name? I didn't like that one little bit. I am, after all, the man who won a bet by identifying Nick Cravat in My Friend Irma. (No packet of Skittles ever tasted as good as the one that earned me.)
And then imagine my confusion when the truth emerged. He was in fact something to do with 'TCM'. I do know what TCM is, though I won't dare tell you how recently I found out.

Thing is, I'm British. It's just the way it is: I've seen all the best doctors in the east, and while none of them seem able to agree on a fee, they all agree there's no cure. Of course, I'm not the only film blogger who isn't American, but I am in that cute little slice of the massive pie. Not only are all my blogging pals American, the stats tell me that all my readers are too.
Why are old movies so little supported over here and so generously over there? (That's almost certainly 'over where you are', if you're reading this.) Dunno. Is it just because it's so much bigger there and there's room for pretty much every enthusiasm to get its day in the sun? (Here, for example, is an online poll that invites you to cast your vote as to whether you'd rather give up shampoo or toothpaste, in the unlikely eventuality that so stark a choice will become a practical necessity.) Or is there something specifically philistine about Britain? It's one or the other and my guess is both but I'm not sure which.

But I do know what Warner Archive is. It's this spiffing thing Warners do, where they'll produce an on-demand DVD of a film that you might once have thought there'd be more chance of finding in an owl's pellet than in the catalogues of a company that seriously wants to make some money. Of course the trick is that they charge way over the odds, even for a film like Reducing, a Marie Dressler comedy set largely in a Turkish bath that they'd be lucky to shift one of in a month if they stood on a street corner trying to flog them off a barrow. But pay we do, because they're clever, these Warner johnnies, and they know how much we need Marie Dressler comedies set in Turkish baths once some wiseacre dangles them in front of our snouts.
Actually, I tend to think of Warner Archive as a specifically pre-Code movie service, because that's what I tend to buy from them. But actually they do films from all eras, linked only by their occult appeal to people who would never in a million years have bemoaned their absence from catalogues before, and would never have gone looking for them as bootlegs, but will somehow realise their life depends on obtaining them when Warners puts them in a decent-looking box and charges twenty of the best and fastest. Do you think they have prize competitions among the staff: who can make the silliest suggestion for a Warner Archive release that actually leads to a sale? If so, I've created a few happy smiles round the office I'm sure.
Oooh, look! Lady In Cement! I didn't even know they made a sequel to Tony Rome! That must be because it's great! And Raquel Welch is in it! When did she ever make a bad movie? Ker-ching!
And Get To Know Your Rabbit! How many collaborations between Brian De Palma, Orson Welles and Tommy Smothers can you name? You just can't let this one go!
Sweet November!!
Return To Salem's Lot!!!
It's like I've died and gone to the Betamax cupboard of Video Express, Laira. (Yes, having just established that only Americans read this blog, I thought I'd slip in a joke about an old video shop that depends for its effect on knowing the city of Plymouth really, really well.)

And another thing. Warner Archive DVDs are technically DVD-Rs, which are like DVDs except they have a shelf-life of as-long-as-the-film-takes-to-watch-if-you're-lucky. This may seem at first to be a bad thing, since it means you have to pay too much more than once for something you should never have bought at any price in the first place. But look at it from the inside of the big building marked Warner Brothers and you can begin to see the cleverness of the idea.
If you have a friend who loves old movies and has got all the obvious stuff, get 'em a Warner Archive. You can rarely go wrong. This birthday my wife got me Street of Women (1932), a typical pre-Code moral tract concerning the romantic tribulations of a married property developer whose mistress is a slinky frock designer who is also loved by her lover's best friend who is also the employer of her brother who is in love with the daughter of her lover. I know what you're thinking, but his wife won't give him a divorce. Needless to say it all comes out right in the end, thanks to that habitual harbinger of a pre-Code happy ending: a near-fatal car crash.
This has got everything you want from a pre-Code film, including one of those swanky dress shops where girls come out modelling the clothes customers are going to buy, and some excellent real footage of thirties skyscraper construction.
Then there's the racy-sounding title that doesn't mean what it seems to, and has to be pointedly explained in specially-inserted dialogue, and that quintessential oddball casting, so evocative of those years when the golden age stars were starting to make movies but hadn't yet settled into their familiar personae. So here's a ripe example from Roland Young's straight actor period (or straightish, at least), obliging him to play hangdog as Francis's failed suitor, forever turning up at her flat and failing to get her to come out with him for the evening. The only time he makes her laugh is when he draws her a picture of a pessimistic rabbit. In the romantic leads, we have Alan Dinehart (as the tycoon), who moved on quickly to semi-comic proletarian support before dying in 1944, and Allen Vincent (as the brother) who hung around in bits before throwing in the towel in 1939. You might know him as the doltish hero in Mystery of the Wax Museum but not much else I'll wager.
As usual in a pre-Coder, though, it's the female casting that will really make you want to stick around. As the mistress: Kay Francis, chic as ever in an early Warners role, when she still had that sullen, sultry Paramount air about her and plenty of gel in her hair (you won't find it easy to keep your eyes off her hairdo, in fact). And as the daughter: Gloria Stuart, in her movie debut. There's always something a bit suggestive about Stuart's characters, even when they are as simpering as here: as in Secret of the Blue Room she gives her father a big smacking kiss on the lips in one scene. (At least her dad's not Lionel Atwill this time, though, which in that picture hit the perversity meter so hard the bell broke.)
I can't recommend it enough if you've got more money than sense; failing that you can always put it in your Netflix queue.

Direct from the smallest room: shameless trivia filler post

2011-07-11T17:46:00.008+01:00

As my contribution to haemorrhoid surgery prevention month, I've stopped keeping Russian novels in the bathroom.
Film trivia books are another matter, though.

In a rummage through the old family homestead a couple of weeks ago, I recently rediscovered a magnificent tome called Movie Clips. It was compiled by Patrick Robertson, chairman of the Ephemera Society according to the author blurb, and published by Guinness, recorders of world records and manufacturers of a dank, death-black liquid that tastes of liquid dust. And I don't mind telling you it went straight in the gap between the cistern and the toilet roll holder and hasn't seen daylight since.

The book is a handy condensation of a bigger tome called The Guinness Book of Movie Facts and Feats, which I used to have, but sold when I was going through a barbarian phase in my early teens.

Here are my 20 favourite facts, as gleaned from its deathless pages. As is often the way with this sort of thing, they may not all be true. But I'd like to think they are.

1. Roscoe Arbuckle was a plumber's mate who got his big break when he turned up to unblock Mack Sennett's pipes.

2. Adolphe Menjou was American, Yves Montand was Italian, and Simone Signoret was German.

3. Joan Crawford turned down the Deborah Kerr role in From Here To Eternity because she hated the costumes.

4. WARNING: OF INTEREST TO BRITISH READERS ONLY: Annette "Muffin the Mule" Mills was the sister of John Mills!

5. Two years before he made an all-time champion ass of himself by hiring a fake Red Indian to turn down his Oscar for The Godfather, Marlon Brando applied to the Academy for a replacement of the one he'd mistakenly won for On The Waterfront, which had been stolen by a film lover who knew the value of scrap metal.

6. James Cagney refused a fee for appearing in The Seven Little Foys as a gesture of respect to Eddie Foy, who had befriended him in his youth.

7. Bebe Daniels was the first female civilian to land in Normandy after D-Day.

8. As well as playing Flash Gordon and being an Olympic gold medalist, Buster Crabbe was the author of The Arthritis Exercise Book.

9. 6ft 3ins Laird Cregar was the shortest of six brothers.

10. Andy Devine was not born with his trademark rasping voice: he acquired it by having a metal curtain rod pushed through the roof of his mouth as a child.

11. Katherine Hepburn used to sniff people's hair to check it was clean.

12. In a period of just 27 months between 1930 and 1933, Joan Blondell appeared in a record 32 films.

13. John Wayne has appeared in more leading roles than any other star, headlining 142 of 153 movies between 1927 and 1976. My favourite is Brannigan (1975), the one with the exploding lavatory.

14. Rudy Vallee described as "a bunch of disgruntled pukes" the neighbours who clubbed together to preventing him renaming the street on which they all lived Rue de Vallee.

15. The set of the ballroom of the Palace of Versailles built for Norma Shearer by MGM was considerably larger than the actual ballroom of the Palace of Versailles.

16. Francis X Bushman kept 300 Great Danes on his California estate.

17. Tim Holt was the only western hero to smoke a pipe.

18. Larry Parks's legs were different lengths.

19. Mary Pickford wrote a book called Why Not Try God?

20. D.W. Griffith invented false eyelashes.

If by any chance anyone is still here reading this, why not leave a comment with your own favourite bit of movie triv?

The next best thing, if you're a Marilyn fan who doesn’t have $4600000 to spare

2011-06-21T08:33:00.019+01:00

That's how much her iconic Seven Year Itch dress went for at Debbie Reynolds's garage sale, according to this report (which, be warned before you click, comes from The Guardian, so it claims Chaplin's bowler and cane were used in a film called The Little Tramp, calls Reynolds an 'actor' throughout, and is followed by scores of comments from its champagne socialist readers indignant at the thought of rich people spending their own money).

But assuming that you, dear reader, are not the lucky buyer - and are not trying to remould its stubborn stitching to the contours of your non-goddess form even as I write, a hairdryer pointing upwards held beneath your feet for full subway-grating effect- here is a much cheaper way to share some of that indefinable presence that great personalities shed like ectoplasm on everything with which they come into contact.

The (excellent) American Museum at Bath has a fantastic Marilyn exhibition, running until October, containing not just one measly little dress but a whole heap of 'em, including the see-through Some Like It Hot one, the sparkly red one with the plunging neckline and massive side-slit from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the string bikini from The Misfits, and the infamous 'wiggle dress' and black negligee with red rose motif from Niagara. (Here is the official museum page for the show, with some nice pics of the exhibits.)

They are surprising things in the flesh, as it were. In the cloth, rather. They're surprising individually - the see-through one isn't really see through, the wiggle dress is a lot less pink than it looks in fifties Technicolor, the exposed frontage of the sparkly red one is really flesh-coloured fabric - and surprising collectively: they're all a lot smaller than I was expecting. I tend to think of her as semi-Amazonian, packed and poured into her outfits, and one stitch away from exploding out of them. But she must have been quite dainty. The magic of the movies.
If you are into fashion, doubtless they do have considerable appeal as dresses, but if it is Marilyn's ghost that beckons you here they are more like illusions, not so much things in their own right as the shadow of the woman who once wore them, like the impression she left in a mattress, or the lingering smell of her perfume after she has left the room, their intrinsic merit surely secondary to the fact that they mark out the boundaries of spaces she once occupied.
And when you're done gazing at them, and imagining yourself in them (which is not to say that I was doing that, of course) there's also a load of other fascinating memorabilia and personal items to divert you here, many of them all the more poignant for being entirely without value, and oddly pathetic, in that she carried them around with her all her life. A brass figurine of a dancing girl had stood as "a symbol of the star she hoped to become" in her orphanage days, and remained in her possession even after that dream was realised and found lacking. An old print of an eighteenth century German street scene, she decided, "looked sad", so she carefully cut out all of the windows and stuck a sheet of orange card on the reverse, making the buildings seem ablaze with cheerful light.

Personally, I couldn't stop staring at her Twentieth Century Fox dressing room key, her name engraved on it: chunky and heavy and dripping star status attainment.
And there are lots of giant original posters, too, my favourite being one of the all-time masterpieces of the poster-designer's art: the one for Niagara in which her dress is seemingly made of the water that is cascading over the falls beneath. How anyone could have seen that and resisted the temptation to immediately rush to the cinema and see the movie is beyond me.

A lovely illustrated brochure is yours for a fiver, with lots of nice pictures and the interesting story of how the exhibits were collected by a devoted fan, David Gainsborough Roberts.

I liked the Weimar Republic much more the second time

2011-05-29T09:43:00.015+01:00

I suppose I can understand why some people find Ute Lemper a bit much.
There's an element of deliberate artifice in her showmanship than can be read as insincerity, and her affectations - the facial contortions, the gurgling tongue-rolls, the ear-splitting yelps, the slightly mocking exuberance - presume rather than request our adoration.
But then, idiosyncrasies always divide opinion. When I talk to people who love Barbra Streisand, it's no use listing the things about her performing style I find so repellent - the grotesque sentimentality, the self-veneration, the pretence of profound emotion - since these are not denied by them but read as something else, indeed as the very tricks with which she enchants. And even I love these things when it's Anthony Newley doing them. Where I look at Streisand and see only a pampered, pompous medusa, they see a shaman, and quite right too.

Anyway, we both loved Ute's Last Tango In Berlin show, her customary musical tour (through Brecht and Weill, and Brel, and Dietrich) performed with her customary energy, intensity and sinewy grace.
Not easy, I should think, to hold a large room with just two musicians and yourself (though she did add to the instrumentation with a pretty convincing imitation of a trumpet solo, which she prolonged, as she does most things, to the point where amusement is spent and only admiration - for her accomplishment as much as her gall - remained).
A mistake to think of her as an exclusively shouty kind of performer, as she also reminded us. Fully fifty percent of the show was conducted at the level of such a still intensity you could sense the audience leaning forward as one to meet it; the magical transformation of a large theatre space into the closer and more revealing environs of a cabaret room, achieved purely through theatrical presence.
She drifts into rambling soliloquies, with a cultivated but no less convincing spontaneity, occasionally into stream of consciousness comic monologue, blending in and out of fragments of song, carried on the breeze like memories. She's at her most affecting when at her quietest, and it makes the subsequent explosions all the more effective for it. A one-woman variety bill, blown back from Berlin, 1929.

To think I would have travelled far for this - twice in the past I have nearly been to see her in London but couldn't make it - now I find the wait rewarded by being able to stroll to the venue ten minutes before the curtain rises, and be back home ten minutes after it falls again. (Eventually I will stop going on about how amazing it is to live in Bath, but it's still new at the moment, so your tolerance is kindly requested.)

Her mad talent convinces me more than her commitment to the wonder of Weimar, though. It's an era better recalled than endured, I would have thought.
Decadence, in recollection, has obvious aesthetic appeal, but freedom is a nebulous concept, applied to the absence of government and to wise government both: the first a recipe for tyranny, the second the only freedom really worth having.
Any cultural moment that romanticises prostitution, pornography, corruption or dissipation of various kinds is clearly one of little use, until it's over at least: this is the kind of freedom that tramples on people who can't keep up with it.
It seems to me that if we are entitled to give the vindictive terms of the Versailles agreement a measure of responsibility for the rise of Hitler - a very different thing from offering excuses for it - then the provocative and confrontational nihilism of Weimar culture must stand accused also. It made it far too easy for Hitler to recruit political reactionaries to his cause, without whose support his otherwise uncompromisingly progressivist stew of socialist-revolutionary citadel-storming would have been far harder to get off the ground. Consensus may insist that the Cabaret was the last stand against Nazism; little imagination is required to see it, instead, as a vital facilitator.
That the music was good is never enough until afterwards - but it is good, and as long as we're in the business of looking backwards then fine. Theme park Weimar cabaret-land, with Ute as your guide, is terrific: actually being stuck there at the time, I should think, would have been hell.

Seeing the old girls off in style

2011-05-28T17:05:00.036+01:00

Well, here we are in Bath.

Normally I defer to Dr Johnson at all times, but it has to be remembered that when he opined that the man who is tired of London is tired of life, he was speaking before the invention of car stereos.
Were this not the case, he too would have moved here.
I'm not sure why every Londoner doesn't, though I'm glad they don't, obviously.
In London, even the good bits, unless you live in one of its inner circles of Hell, are a soul-eroding underground journey away from you, so it feels like living somewhere else, and by the time you arrive you only go through with the thing you actually intended to do because you can't bear to repeat the trek back home just yet.
So you traipse dutifully round Tate Modern looking at their latest exhibition of metal filings in glasses of urine suspended on strings, but what you really want is your sofa, a glass of wine and another episode of Man About the House.

Here, though, there's everything London has, and more, and much more attractively housed, and all a ten minute walk from my door. A gorgeous theatre, a little art cinema, bookshops, Italian restaurants, museums, entertainment... and no transport necessary, ever. We're going to see Ute Lemper tonight; Acker Bilk next weekend (ask your dad). I have landed, at last.
It's hard to credit that I was still in London just over a month ago. The last thing I wrote here, the last London Movietone entry, was to mark the passing of Jane Russell, and in the interim I've said goodbye to both old gals in tandem. My memory will always record them receding together: London, the wheezing old candidate for euthanasia, unmourned; Jane, the eternal, gone to never be forgotten, off to join her image on the other side of the silver curtain.
Most of my last London days, spent in my almost totally empty flat (our things went to Bath first) were given over to watching Jane's triumphs on my laptop.
Cineastes with their heads in the nineteen-seventies can obsess all they want over Robert de Niro staring at his reflection in the mirror and demanding, "You talkin' to me?", but until they've experienced Jane's "Lookin' for me?" in The Paleface, staring down the bad guys from behind a six-shooter, in her smalls, in a bath house, before blazing away... well, they might as well have never watched a movie in their lives, I say.
This time round I tried to steer clear of my usual favourites - the grittier ones I wish she'd made more of: Macao, His Kind of Woman, Las Vegas Story - and concentrated more on those I'd seen only once, or not for years, or had told myself I didn't think so much of.
Oh, and The French Line, of course. It's impossible to embark on a course of Jane studies without including The French Line. Nobody can love her and not it. The man who is tired of The French Line is tired of life.
Plus it's TOTALLY CONDEMNED, so you get the added bonus of feeling sinful when you watch it.

It doesn't leave you in the dark as to which commandments you're breaking, either. Thou shalt not covet they neighbour's wife, obviously. Then of course there's Thou shalt not worship any Gods - or Goddesses - but me. And when she starts dancing in that 'Looking For Trouble' outfit, try to remember Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain, too. "I'm gonna melt all the snow in Alaska till it steams like the tropical Amazon..." and who would bet against it? Basically the whole film is an excuse to get to this number; it's all overture, and though never less than fun to watch nothing else is truly memorable: not a scene, not an idea, not any other character, not any other number. The plot is sheer flim-flam, concocted in equal parts of the old one about the rich gal who swaps places with her best friend so she can be sure her man loves her for herself rather than her millions, and a generous chunk of the previous year's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. And when I say the whole of the film is an excuse to get to 'Looking For Trouble' I don't mean to provide narrative justification for it, far from it in fact. The song is a performance given by Russell's character on stage rather than an integrated number, and if anything the narrative works against it: the situation she is in at the moment she launches into it is one so fraught with reouble that it's unlikely she would want to be bothered, certainly she would be too distracted to perform it with such carefree exuberance. And who cares about any of that? Nobody, that's who. Nobody making it gave a damn, and nobody watching it does. Though Jane did, a bit, according to her autobiography, but she's in a minority of one. What a stretch of film! Your mouth will still be hanging open for days after.

Novelist Peter Ackroyd once opined, in a review of Michael Winner's remake of The Wicked Lady, that cinema devoid of all purpose can be a wonderful thing (sort of 'how I learned to stop worrying and love a bomb'). Remember that when next you find yourself watching Underwater.

What we have here, superficially, is a mildly compelling yarn about deep sea treasure seekers. What we in fact have is the consummate fifties entertainment package, as delivered by Howard Hughes (by this time so far lost in his own obsessions as to be by no means the man best qualified to supply such a thing), marshaling the following hundred lures to fifties sensibilities:
1: Superscope wide screen, and colour so thick you need to watch it through misted glass.
2: A hit tune in the catchy trumpet serenade Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White, taken to the charts in sundry versions, with and without lyrics, by Eddie Calvert (the man with the golden horn) and many others.
3: Beefcake, if your tastes run to such things, from Richard Egan: he's fine, easily mistaken for a dozen or more other fifties hunks; agreeable, colourless, and with a jaw you can even strike dead matches on.
4: Underwater photography in profusion, as beautiful and hypnotic as only that most alien of earthly kingdoms can be.
5-100: Jane. Jane dry, and Jane wet. Jane on a boat, in a boat and under a boat. Jane in a red swimsuit swimming from one side of the engorged screen to the other, and then - wait for this - back again. Jane running and Jane climbing. Jane doing her pout, her sneer and her sassy backchat.
Of course the plot is the thing that the word 'nominal' was hanging about in dictionaries waiting for, as how could it not be in the face of such provocation? Dostoyevsky couldn't keep the human drama central against this kind of opposition.
The days when this was all it took to thrill, to arouse and to engross are long gone. Minds tuned only to the wavelengths of our more cynical age will find only bunkum, perhaps tedious bunkum at that. If the film is ever enjoyed, it is with that precocious condescension with which a culturally bankrupt generation instinctively reviews the achievements of its betters, as if our parents were children with nursery-level tastes, and should be pitied for their naivety, while we in our wisdom sit once removed and take purely sarcastic delight in the dialogue, the fashions and the simplistic thrills. (Then get back to rhapsodising Batman, which is where even I start getting confused.)
But recognise instead that the loss is truly ours, and pleasure can be reclaimed from so irresistibly innocent a concept of spectacle. The loss remains: ultimately, we can only imagine - or, if we are lucky, dimly recall - what it truly meant to be swept away by such things. But for those brave enough to acknowledge the shape of decline, a more than merry Saturday afternoon's fun can be dredged from this particular sunken wreck.
The Revolt of Mamie Stover, on the other hand, needs no special pleading. It's a little lost gem.

I think this was the fourth time Angela and I have watched this and the third in English (the other occasion being a dubbed showing on Italian TV that we enjoyed in a hotel in Florence) and we admire it more each time. Basically it's Sadie Thomson again, with a nice balance of certainties and surprises (Jane the redhead!), showing the aged Hays Code's ability to tame wayward scenarios at its most heroic, mixing fiction and historical fact cleverly, and allowing for a number of standout scenes and cameo performances. It's also one of the small number of movies where you see just what a good actress she was.
Its faults are obvious and easily dealt with. First, it's no small task sanitising an original novel which included not only prostitution and lesbianism but also a scathing attack on Hollywood vice, and clarity is obviously going to be the first casualty of the effort.
The result is a successful job of sleight of hand but once in a while desperation shows: the Agnes Moorehead character's lesbianism is subtly and cleverly suggested, but a scene or two later explicitly disavowed; the euphemism of the 'champagne rooms' to which the taxi dancers take their higher paying clients is rendered senseless by the frequent assertions that sex is not on offer. (Why pay more for less physical contact?)
Then there is that more general flabbiness of fifties cinema, the abundant evidence that the technique, flare, style and uniformity of purpose that thirties Hollywood had perfected is now in a state of dissolution, indeed just a few years away from irreparable destruction. The old-style majesty of Jane, too, reminds us just how much star power had faded. Richard Egan's back - I can only repeat there's nothing wrong with him - he's handsome and pleasant - but the film was half over before I realised it was the same guy from Underwater.
But all that is outweighed by the film's strengths, as compelling drama, as star vehicle. It benefits from the obscurity into which it has mysteriously fallen. Hopefully, our losing Russell may prompt a serious reevaluation of all her films - not just the Bob Hopes, Blondes and The Outlaw. If so, this is the one ripest for rediscovery. It is, I would suggest, Russell's best all-around vehicle, and perhaps her best dramatic screen performance.
But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes was the big treat: a surprise present from the missus before she went on to Bath ahead of me, and a film I had thought was impossible to track down, let alone in a bootleg print of such high quality. I watched it over and over. I love it.

Part of the reason it gets such a bad rap, I suspect, is because it's just not the film people expect it to be, let alone the film they want it to be. Unlike the Anita Loos novel from which it blithely and opportunistically takes its title, it's not a sequel to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Jane does not play the same character, or even a similar one: in actual fact she's far more like Lorelei than Dorothy - she's the shallower, ditzier one - and Jeanne Crain is the level-headed half of the team.
This is a whole new story about a sister act attempting to make it in Paris, where their aunts - also played by Jane and Jeanne - had been stars in the twenties. It's a hoot. The main reason usually given for its lowly status is that the song numbers are subpar, but are they? I loved them all. And the costumes. There's lots of good jokes, Rudy Vallee plays himself, Jane comes on in old age make-up at the end (it's the sort of corny finale you expect of a Road movie) and the male lead is Wilbur from Mr Ed. Now, I don't know what you want from the movies if not this, but frankly...

All who are familiar with my ramblings on this site will know how appropriate it is that the last film I watched in company in London was my beloved Madam Satan, and at the most delightful of venues - The Palace of Solitude, aka Silver Screen Suppers Towers, aka Jenny's flat.
Jenny has quite possibly the most stylish living quarters in the western hemisphere, an amazing deco flat that looks like Poirot just moved out the week before, decorated in bewildering profusion with ephemera you'd give your right arm for and - now - boasting a seriously enviable DVD projector that enables her to turn her siting room into a cinema at a moment's notice.
Amazingly, she'd never seen Satan before, so I was delighted to be able to introduce it to her, as my last good deed before departing the Smoke. Luckily she loved its insane, rug-pulling changes of style and direction, and reacted just as I'd hoped to the Zeppelin finale, and Trixie's soft landing in the men's sauna. At the end, she pronounced it the maddest film she'd ever seen, which was both no small achievement and, I think, a compliment.

Where I've been and where I'm going

2011-04-13T07:50:00.007+01:00

Apologies for so much deafening silence these past weeks, and for all the posts uncommented upon, the comments unresponded to, even the award unacknowledged (until now: thanks, Lolita!)

The reason is that the Movietone empire is in the process - the final stages, in fact - of upping sticks and moving from London to Bath.

For international readers, that basically means moving from this:

to this:

Internet time is limited and sporadic, so I won't be able to do much of anything around here until Movietone makes its official return in May.

Till then, all the best, don't forget us, and Movietone (and Carfax, the Council, Cameos, Dennis and Eccentrica - listed in order of the interest they evoke) will be back, live from beautiful Bath, in a few weeks time.

See you soon!

Goodbye, Jane

2011-03-01T07:05:00.020Z

"A slouching Amazon, her clothes appear to stay put just as long as she agrees not to burst out of them; essentially a good sort, she has an ever-annihilating sneer for the false, the pretentious and the fresh."

- Monthly Film Bulletin

It was much more fun saying happy birthday to her...

Jane could have been a better star, though scarcely a bigger one. She could sing and dance and be athletic, but was also natural and watchable in a two-shot. She did dialogue well: by no means a universal talent. But too many of the films she was given were too standard in their construction to really make use of her.

Nobody before or since has so effortlessly combined desirability and independence. Too knowing to be the passive sex symbol, yet epically sexy, her smile hypnotises but she can freeze it in an instant, and that can kill. She keeps a store of put-downs, and uses them as often as she has to, which is all the time.

Her hair is raven black, her lips blood red, her figure an escapee from Gil Elvgren's drawing board.

Clearly, as I have said before, she belonged down Warner's mean streets, but, sadly, freedom from her Hughes contract came too late. Instead we have a few good black and white thrillers (Macao, Las Vegas Story, His Kind of Woman) and a gallon of froth. But say what you like about The French Line or Underwater, they are star vehicles of the most adoring sort, and she is enough to carry them.

Her sexuality seemed almost comically overt in the forties, and was taken to stand for a new loosening of propriety; by the fifties she she had won everybody over and seemed an oasis of sophistication in a Sahara of dumb blondes. Women liked her because she was funny and didn't take herself too seriously, and because it was obvious she knew what she was doing.

Yet physically, she can startle you. In Cinemascope and 3-D, her natural formats, she was photographed with undisguised fervour, and even today certain shots and angles and costumes can still leap from the screen and announce their daring. But Jane is never a passive object - encountering the body is always to encounter the person, and if that's enough to keep Robert Mitchum or Victor Mature guessing, think what it did to the guys in Peoria and Albuquerque.

Jane Russell, 1921 - 2011

“Percy”: not quite what you might have expected the world's first penis transplant comedy to be like

2011-02-26T15:53:00.001Z

Percy (1971) makes for a strange and perpexing ninety minutes of entertainment.

In the first instance, it's habitually described as a British sex comedy, but it doesn't play that way at all, Robin Askwithy I mean. There are a few good laughs in the first half hour or so, but from then on it goes a bit Play For Today.
And it's no cheap Wardour Street exploitation item, either, but a major release bankrolled by EMI some time before the proper studios entered the sex comedy arena.

The central gimmick, from the novel by Raymond Hitchcock, is comic simplicity itself. Edwin Anthony (Hywel Bennett) is walking down the street holding a chandelier when a naked man falls on him from a tenth story window. While only Bennett survives the encounter, both men are castrated by the shards of broken chandelier. The penis of the dead man is transplanted, as Bennett's own is irreparably mangled as well as severed. From here on the laughs just keep coming.
The operation is successfully performed by pioneering transplant surgeon Dr Emmanuel Whitbread (Denholm Elliott) who just prior to Bennett's accident, is seen on tv explaining how keen he is to perform a penis transplant (but frustrated by the fact that the word 'penis' is bleeped every time he uses it. What do you expect me to call the fucking thing?" he asks. "Well, nanny always called it Percy," the interviewer replies.)
The rest of the film then articulates Anthony's two post-operative compulsions: to road-test the new addition, and to discover all he can about the man Percy once was, by introducing him to his conquests and associates.
In the course of his investigations he learns that Percy had been quite a ladies man, and ends up falling in love with his wife (that is, with the wife of the man from whom Percy came - please pay attention). At the same time he must dodge the advance of a tabloid press intent on discovering the identity of 'the transplant man'. (The Sun's headline is: WOW! THE SWINGINGEST TRANSPLANT EVER - BRITISH KNOW-HOW SHOWS THE WAY.)

Most of the jokes about whether it will stand up in the light of day and 'can I take it back and change it?' and suchlike are used up in the first scenes, along with all pretence of the film being any kind of farcical comedy.
As soon as he goes out to learn the truth about Percy the film turns wistful and even a little dull. Partly it's because Hywel Bennett is such a sulky chap always, so it's hard to work up any sympathy for him, and partly because the central idea is so grotesque. (When we see him putting Percy to the test with a nurse before he's even been discharged, can I really be the only male viewer compelled to cross his legs and plead for caution?)

As well as quite slow anyway, the film keeps stopping for Kinks songs. The main theme is a nice but irrelevant one called God's Children, and there's one called The Way Love Used to Be that's really rather lovely. But none are tailored to the film, and often in fact the film seems tailored to them, as when Bennett goes to the zoo seemingly for no reason other than to facilitate Animals in the Zoo.

Raymond Hitchcock's novel, which still turns up now and then amongst the Alistair Macleans at car boots, ends somewhat bleakly with Percy being rejected by his new body. The film has Bennet being tricked on to a This Is Your Life-style tv exposé from which he flees after starting a fight.

You might reasonably have expected Percy's Progress (1974), the sequel, to pick things up roughly from this point. Au contraire, as they say. Instead of a wistful lament by The Kinks we open with Tony Macauley bellowing God Knows I Love You. The central character - and this simply defies explanation - is now called not Edwin Anthony but Percy Edwin Anthony. (To make things even more curious, he was called James Anthony Hislop in Hitchcock's novel.) He is now played by Leigh Lawson. Oblique reference is made to his wife, but she has a different name to either of his wives in the first film. Adrienne Posta and Elke Sommer return from the first film, but as different characters. Denholm Elliot also returns as Dr Whitbread, but only briefly, and sporting a half grown beard that suggests a relatively last minute commitment to the project.

Most tellingly, the script has been entrusted to tv gagman Sid Colin, and the cast is studded with well-known faces from sitcom and light ent: Harry H. Corbett as the Prime Minister, Barry Humphries as both a rabbit-obsessed zoologist and, bizarrely, Dame Edna Everage (billed as 'Australian housewife' in the credits), and crumpet galore: Judy Geeson, Madeline Smith, Penny Irving, Carol Hawkins, Jenny Hanley and Julie Ege. (Ege is seen in an unrelated photograph below with one of her many conquests, the celebrated Lord Charles.)

Some real heavyweight thesps are also around, often as not squandered in undignified guest spots. Vincent Price, in a role he could only have accepted for the money, plays the world's richest man; Bernard Lee looks in long enough to deliver the line "Give me your camera or I'll puke all over your nice clean bar again."

To escape his troubles, Percy (as we must now so name him) has spent a year on a yacht drinking only champagne. During his exile, every man on the planet has been rendered impotent by a toxic substance leaked into the seas and rivers. As the only working male left, he is soon under orders to ensure the survival of the species by copulating with a representative of every culture and race.
The competition to find each representative is amusingly staged like an end of the pier beauty contest, with the contestants having to answer advanced questions on science and philosophy while parading around in swimsuits. As Miss Bristol City, Madeline Smith lists the laws of thermodynamics and then, when asked what she wants from life, replies "what I really want is a good fuck."

By now, a curious fact is probably beginning to dawn on you: the fact that Percy has a second-hand whanger is completely irrelevant to the plot. Nobody even stops to note the irony that the only working member on the planet is a transplanted one. The whole issue is simply forgotten.
At the end he dresses up as a woman and runs away, then the effect of the toxic substance wears off and everybody gets their erections back. Mysteriously, the main theme runs out half way through the end credits, which finish rolling to eerie silence.

I'll leave you with a picture that has nothing to do with with either film, but which popped up in a Google search for 'Percy 1971' and which is so charming I've decided to share it with you anyway.

Errol Flynn: A colourful fragment in a drab world

2011-02-16T07:40:00.008Z

Errol Flynn’s autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, begins as follows:

I particularly detest books that begin something like “Ah, there was joy and happiness in the quaint Tasmanian home of Professor Flynn when the first bellowings of lusty little Errol were heard…” So if you are interested, let’s get down to the meat of the matter.

Many have questioned the accuracy of what follows, but few Hollywood memoirs have been so frank, surprising and compelling. In the next few chapters, he visits brothels (“about the only institutions I never have been ejected from” ) and opium dens, is slashed in the stomach so severely he has to hold his intestines in, steals a lover's jewels while she sleeps, and accidentally blows the bottom out of a boat while trying to kill a shark with dynamite - and he hasn’t even arrived in Hollywood yet.
What happened there was the usual mix of extraordinary opportunity, incredible good fortune and rapid disinterest when the gilt fades – but Flynn’s heyday lasted longer than many, and at his peak his stardom ascended to heights rarely conquered.
David Niven’s autobiographies provide a vivid picture of Flynn at the height of his glory years; “The great thing about Errol,” he wrote, “was you always knew precisely where you stood with him because he always let you down.”

There had been great swashbucklers before him (not least Douglas Fairbanks) and others would just as surely follow. But Flynn remains the supreme exponent of the art, the greatest adventurer that ever thrust a rapier, climbed a rigging or swung from a chandelier. To Ann Sheridan he was “the most beautiful man ever created”. For Olivia de Havilland he was a “shining knight”. Ida Lupino insisted that “if you had Errol Flynn for a friend, you were doing fine.” Others were much less generous.

For Flynn himself, such prowess was a burden as well as a gift. It must have occurred to him very early on in his career that the niche he had elected to fill in Hollywood was one with tremendous rewards in terms of fame, riches and sexual opportunity, but also one that was rarely taken seriously, never won awards, allowed little room to extend his range and lasted only so long as his youth and agility, and the fickleness of public fancy, would allow.
“In those pre-war days, Errol was a strange mixture,” Niven recalled, “a great athlete of immense charm and evident physical beauty, he stood, legs apart, arms folded defiantly and crowing lustily atop the Hollywood dung heap, but he suffered, I think, from a deep inferiority complex: he also bit his nails.”
He himself explained:

It is a habit for me to discount myself before somebody else does it for me… That one stank. This one was no good. I didn’t care for the others. I don’t even like to discuss them. Yet there is a certain hypocrisy in this. Because I know I have done a few things I can take a bow for.

A renowned companion, he was guarded and elusive with the press, rarely gave interviews and was not above litigation if a particularly scurrilous story was false. (But, he stresses in his autobiography, he did not object to ugly rumours if they were true, as they often were.) A talented writer himself, he had worked as a journalist and, in addition to his autobiography, published a novel and an account of a voyage he took around the coast of Australia. He said that writing relieved him of the sense of futility his film career gave him, and claimed he would rather have written three good books than made all of his movies, but as usual was constitutionally incapable of making the effort.

Of Hollywood, he once said: “It’s comfortable, it’s warm, it’s sunny, but it’s filled with the most unutterable bastards.” He dismissed his talents as a film star, perhaps because he genuinely thought them commonplace, so easily did they come to him.
It can only be conjectured what effect a more varied and interesting film career would have had on Flynn – would he have been up to the task? Would the audience have allowed it? And might it have quelled some of that restlessness and dissatisfaction that made his Hollywood experiences so bittersweet?
The likely answers to those questions are perhaps, to the first and second, and probably not, to the third. That his range was greater than his opportunities few can doubt, and there are a few films in his final burst of activity at the end of the fifties that at least give him the chance to play insecure and disreputable. (More the Flynn of the gossip columns than the Flynn of the screen.)
But this is merely to fall into the trap Flynn set himself: that of devaluing the illusions he offered, underrating their significance and overlooking the skill, ingenuity and talent that went into creating and sustaining them. To be the world’s greatest swashbuckler is not to be nothing; to remain a byword for dash, bravery and athleticism nearly fifty years after your death is achievement of another magnitude again.
Vincent Sherman, who directed him in The Adventures of Don Juan, was in no doubt as to his qualities:

Personally, he was the most charming guy you could possibly meet. And I tell you he was very good. Very few people could wear a costume like he could; even though he was no great fencer, when he took that thing out, you thought that he was the greatest. Even if it was just one or two passes or something, but he did it with such style and such grace.

The almost insolent ease with which he sustained this absurd charade over a dozen years of stardom was the key to his appeal. (It was also the first thing to desert him when his run at the top finally ended.)

Viewed today, his screen persona seems more ambiguous than it once did, certainly more so than, say, John Wayne’s or Clark Gable’s. Beautiful rather than handsome, he appears athletic and virile but not necessarily all that tough. (Screenplays often call upon him to prove himself physically early on, as frequently, it seems, did life.) The little playboy’s moustache warned of frivolousness and unreliability, and he often seems mildly foppish, careful in his manners and dress and vain about his looks (which Flynn in fact was not).
He did not deal in cynical heroes, but, watching him, we suspect a cynical man behind the lustiness and derring do, despite the total absence of irony in the portrayal itself. His characters seem to wink at us, but at us alone, as if keen to reveal to us facets of themselves they never show other characters.
His rebelliousness often seemed to cross over into his characterisations, too; hence our delight in Custer’s initial sloppiness and aversion to discipline in They Died With Their Boots On or the sight of Robin Hood barging into the king’s dining hall with one of the royal deer (penalty for poaching: death) draped over his shoulders. In these moments, too, audiences sensed something of the real Flynn, the one who bought a house high above that of Jack Warner’s in the Hollywood hills so he would be able to throw rocks down at his nemesis and employer.

Warner’s publicity machine went overboard on Flynn, claiming their star discovery a member of the Dublin Players, recently arrived from the heart of Ireland. In truth, he was born in Tasmania to two Australians in June of 1909. His early adventures call for a depraved Mark Twain to do them full justice. Incapable of committing himself to any form of study or of moderating his boisterousness at school, he had himself expelled from prestigious seats of learning almost as fast as his father’s influence could secure them, before launching himself upon the world with neither assets nor ambition. Drifting through a number of dissimilar jobs, including running a charter boat for a while, he decided to try his hand at gold mining and staked a claim in New Guinea. While there he involved himself in the ‘recruitment’ of native labour, attended a group hanging, witnessed cannibalism and the massacre of an entire village, bought a young girl for two pigs and, he claims dubiously, killed a man.

Professor Flynn, MBE, a marine biologist and a distinguished international figure, remained to the end as bemused as ever by the enigmatic child he outlived by two decades. Flynn’s scientific work often kept him away from the centre of family life, and Errol was raised primarily by his mother. Where affectionate incomprehension defined Flynn’s dealings with his father, his relationship with his mother was more volatile.
She was still alive when his autobiography was published; it describes their relationship as “one long unending scrap”. The dislike was mutual, he assures us, without ever explaining why or, seemingly, anticipating any curiosity. It was a fact, like everything else in life, to be noted and responded to appropriately, but nothing to waste a second of life pondering:

As she tells it today – she is living, with my father, in England – I was a devil in boy’s clothing. I can only sympathise with her. I can readily understand she had a good case in finding me unmanageable. I wish I could say that time had changed the situation between us. It has not. We have fallen out all our lives.

Inevitably, biographers have seen in this tempestuous and uncomprehending relationship the essential template for all of Flynn’s future dealings with women. Olivia de Havilland thought that being ridiculed by her was at the heart of much of his later behaviour; director Vincent Sherman was one of many who felt his flippancy owed more to fear and mistrust than disrespect:

He liked to debase a woman – I could tell in the way he talked about his mother – he’s the first man I ever heard talk about his mother in a scurrilous manner. Loved his father, detested his mother.

Sooner or later with Flynn, the conversation must turn to women. His reputation as a prodigious sexual Olympian would come to disgust him, but it was not unearned. (“I hate the legend of myself as a phallic representation, yet I work at it to keep it alive,” he would write in My Wicked, Wicked Ways. ) Incapable of monogamy, he indulged his sexual urge without restraint, discretion or, he claims, much choice in the matter:

I only know if I touch the arm of a girl or woman who fires me, I have got to go as far as I can or as far as she will let me. The emotion rises. What are you supposed to do? Just say good night, or have a Coca-Cola or something, and go home aching from the scrotum up? Nonsense.

All of his three marriages ended in divorce. He met his first wife, the charming pre-Code actress Lili Damita, on the boat to America to begin his film career. She gave him his only son, Sean, and she knew it was over, she said later, the moment the box-office receipts for Captain Blood were in.
Never remarrying during his lifetime, he claimed that her demands for alimony bled him dry for the rest of his life. “I had to ride a lot of horses and wave a lot of swords to take care of her expensive tastes,” he wrote in his autobiography, claiming that over the years “she had siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars out of my hide.” “He lies for the fun of it,” she once said of him. Gossip columnist Sheila Graham considered him “even meaner with his money than Chaplin.”
Damita and Flynn divorced in 1942, the same year that he went on trial for statutory rape (unlawful intimacy with a girl below the legal age of consent, which was eighteen in California at the time). In fact, two girls, Peggy Satterlee and Betty Hanson, both under eighteen, claimed that Flynn had seduced them.
It is often suggested, and was certainly thought by Flynn, that the trial was a trumped-up witch-hunt designed to bring Hollywood back into line after a number of scandals. Niven noted how the girls, though technically underage, were neither inexperienced nor unwilling, and that though they normally dressed as sophisticated young women, the prosecution had “ordered them to take off their make-up, do their hair in pig-tails, wear Bobby socks and carry school books.”
Though there is little doubt Flynn’s sexual appetite was rapacious and rarely dormant, it seems equally certain that he was often as much the seduced as the seducer: coercion would have been neither appealing nor necessary. (According to Ida Lupino: “Errol never raped any girl; they all raped him.” )
Flynn was an innocent suddenly loosed in an unreal world of fantasy and fabulous reward, one where morality was largely a matter of choice. There is no doubt he liked his girls young. Niven remembers being invited to join him in seeing “the best looking girls in LA”. Expecting a visit to a chorus show, Niven was surprised when Flynn’s car pulled up outside a local girls’ school just as the pupils were leaving. “What a waste,” Flynn observed ruefully, before being moved on by the police.

If the ungentlemanly and sexually insatiable Flynn revealed by the hearings harmed his popularity, as in some quarters it must have, it is equally certain that to others such revelations only added to his roguish allure. (It was at this time that the phrase ‘in like Flynn’ became common parlance.) William F. Buckley Jr, at prep school at the time, founded ABCDEF – The American Boys’ Club for the Defence of Errol Flynn.
The jury smelled a rat too, and quickly acquitted him. But even as the corks at Warners were popping, the District Attorney amazed all by claiming the rarely evoked right to proceed with a prosecution anyway, invalidating the original jury’s decision. Warners hired grandstanding showbiz attorney Jerry Geisler, and the result was another acquittal.

There were a million things he might have been doing when destiny finally cornered him; as it happens he was managing a tobacco plantation when low budget producer-director Charles Chauvel, recognising a certain magnetic quality in him, cast him as Fletcher Christian in a cheap production called In the Wake of the Bounty (1933). Flynn claims he shot the film on location in Tahiti, in truth it was shot in a small studio in Sydney. Chauvel was correct in his hunch, however: this young man with no experience was a definite presence on screen.
At last finding his vocation, but perceiving himself already somewhat larger than the Australian film industry, he made up some fake titles for non-existent films in which he claimed to have appeared and set off for England. Work was not forthcoming and he ended up doing eighteen months in provincial rep, realising in the process that acting was not just fun and easy but could also be satisfying. (He loved the Good Companions atmosphere and recalled this period as one of the happiest of his life.) It also gave him the skills and confidence to relaunch himself upon the movie studios. The result was a lead in Murder at Monte Carlo (1934), and a summons to Hollywood.

It is easy to imagine him arriving at Hollywood much as George Custer does at cadet training camp in They Died With Their Boots On: with “more gold braid on him than a French admiral”, trailing servants, dogs and aristocratic self-confidence. Such is his bearing and certainty of success he is mistaken for a visiting general, just as Flynn the ingénue was so quickly mistaken for a star by Warners, and by an adoring public shortly after.
The swashbuckler film had fallen from popularity since Fairbanks’s heyday; it was expensive, and Warners were taking something of a risk with Captain Blood (1935) even before its star – the temperamental (and asthmatic) British matinee idol Robert Donat – pulled out over a contractual disagreement. In the rush to find a replacement, it was director Michael Curtiz who suggested the cocky young nobody he had directed (as a corpse) in the B-thriller The Case of the Curious Bride.
Flynn was called, tested and cast, and almost immediately began playing the star, oblivious to the many simmering resentments he caused. (Niven notes that “the extras, among whom I had many old friends, disliked him intensely.” )
It was during the shooting of this film – and not before production of the second, when the box-office reaction may at least have justified it somewhat – that he began his famous habit of withdrawing labour until his salary was increased. (According to Sheila Graham, “with every film, he would not show up for wardrobe fittings or meetings until his contract was renegotiated. It was not long before he had brought his salary to $150,000 a picture.” ) For a more or less unknown actor, being given the opportunity of a lifetime in a major studio lead, this really is breathtaking self-assertion; few others would have dared to enrage Jack Warner from such an unguarded position.
And yet, though similar confrontations and mutual recrimination would ever characterise their relationship, there was affection there, at least on Warner’s part. He indulged Flynn as one would an ungrateful favourite son, equally impossible to handle and to dislike. “I was at Errol’s funeral when there was a far smaller crowd than was anticipated,” recalled director Vincent Sherman. “A lot of Flynn’s so-called friends stayed away. But Warner was there.”

Captain Blood still holds up as an entertainment, but the electric effect it had upon original audiences is harder to recapture. We know exactly what we’re getting from an Errol Flynn movie; they did not. We may even, now, be slightly disappointed by the picture’s occasional signs of indecision as the formula receives its first tentative work through. To contemporary viewers, Flynn was all that mattered, and their verdict was unequivocal: more, please, and don’t change a thing.

As requested, Flynn and co-star Olivia de Havilland were reteamed on a further seven occasions. Director Raoul Walsh approved the teaming: “I considered those two the most beautiful I ever photographed. She was a beauty, and he was a handsome devil, before he took to rumming it up.”
The stars became close friends; though de Havilland was ambivalent about the roles she was given in these productions, and resisted all romantic overtures from her married co-star (despite what she termed “a very deep crush on him” ). As always, his ardour, once frustrated, was channelled into infantile practical jokes: during shooting of The Charge of the Light Brigade he put a dead snake in de Havilland’s underwear. She thought it was living, and waded waist-deep into a pond to drown it. (“She was terrified and she wept… It slowly penetrated my obtuse mind that such juvenile pranks weren’t the way to any girl’s heart,” was Flynn’s much later summing-up of the situation. )

The next few years were a blur of dashing action roles on the screen, and sexual athleticism, pranks, carousing and monumental feats of consumption off it. In all these fields he was a recognised master, with seemingly little effort exerted in his casual mastery of any of them.
He lived for some time with Niven in a pseudo-bachelor home rented from Rosalind Russell; it became “a hotbed of fun and bad behaviour, the booze flowed freely, the girls formed an ever changing pattern and after Flynn came back from a trip to North Africa, we went through a long period when we smoked or chewed kif.”
For the most part a happy drunk, he did get into brawls, though rarely started any. Niven noted that he lacked any of the techniques by which actors such as Bogart or Gable were able to diffuse the inevitable and frequent occasions when a barfly would challenge them to prove how tough they really were. Flynn would simply wade in, and as often as not finish it.
John Huston’s autobiography includes a lively account of a fistfight he instituted with Flynn at a party after the latter made a disparaging remark about a woman of his acquaintance. The original slight was soon forgotten as they launched into a scrap that, according to Huston, lasted an hour, put both men in hospital and “was conducted strictly according to Queensbury, for which I take my hat off to Errol Flynn.” They both enjoyed themselves thoroughly.

Somewhere amidst the horseplay, time was found for a movie career, but Flynn was becoming increasingly tired of the routines:

I just wanted to act, to have a chance to play a character, to say good-by to the swashbuckler roles, to get swords and horses the hell out of my life. I itched to turn in a prize-winning job – but they held to making money: box office! box office! The ruin of creative personalities.

Actually, there were numerous attempts to widen his image and put him in a suit: in 1937 alone he was a doctor in The Green Light (for Frank Borzage), in a love triangle with Kay Francis in Another Dawn (for William Dieterle), and trying sophisticated comedy with Joan Blondell and Edward Everett Horton in The Perfect Specimen. None of these films were bad, but all were seen as indulgences. What audiences really wanted was The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and they got it, though Flynn may well have cursed them for it.

Even today, Robin Hood tends to get overlooked when the great works of Hollywood are recalled. Why should this be so? It is a masterpiece of sustained mood, with Olde Englande evoked as never before or again beneath the Californian sun, Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone oozing villainy, De Havilland the ultimate heroine, and all painted in exceptionally beautiful Technicolor. (It may be the best-looking Technicolor film of the thirties.) It still stirs the blood, and it still works with an audience of children (always a revealing test).
It is the best, but this is the rub: it is the best of the most trivial of genres. Horror was once the genre taken least seriously by critics, now the opposite is the case. But the historical swashbuckler still loiters with the Saturday morning serial, mocked for the superficiality of its boo and hiss morality and its cavalier disregard for the historical record.
But it is important to remember that Flynn is very much in the business not of historical recreation but of myth making, a kind of secular canonisation by popular culture. George MacDonald Fraser, in his book The Hollywood History of the World, defends Hollywood against charges of philistinism and license with history. Robin Hood he calls “a near-perfect motion picture, quite the best evocation of a folk legend ever put on the screen.” As for authenticity, who cares?

For this simply is Robin Hood of the ballads and childhood lore and the world’s imagination. For once, history does not matter. Whether, as seems probable, he was in reality a hedge-robber in Barnsdale, or a yeoman in the royal service, or a mixture of Robin Goodfellow and that Cloudsley of Cumberland who supposedly shot an apple from his son’s head in the presence of Edward III (a common feat in Northern folklore), or a wandering Scottish fugitive – none of this is important. The legend is what counts, and it was the legend that Warner Brothers brought to life.

And what goes for that one film speaks just as clearly for Flynn’s entire filmography, and the ethos underpinning it. The point is not dramatic realism but the elevation of individuals to symbolic and mythic status, and the celebration of courage, resourcefulness and chivalry. The films themselves were lavish, showcasing the latest developments in miniatures, process photography and dramatic editing, with stirring scores by the likes of Erich Korngold and Max Steiner, all effectively marshalled by director Michael Curtiz, Warner’s resident master of spectacle and confrontation.

But however fruitful the Curtiz-Flynn association may have been artistically and commercially, theirs was a far from smooth and amicable working relationship. Curtiz’s attitude to Flynn was not unlike that of Josef von Sternberg to Dietrich: proprietorial, and reluctant to concede that Flynn was more than an especially receptive empty vessel. Both men seemed to think they had not merely discovered but somehow invented their stars.
Flynn, Curtiz said, was his “beautiful puppet”. For an actor whose doubts as to the value of his art verged at times on self-disgust, Curtiz was the worst possible collaborator. The only place their union made any sense was afterwards, on the screen.

The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) was a second pairing of Flynn with Bette Davis, following The Sisters the year before. For Warners it must have seemed a safe compromise: double star power, and the reassurance of costumes and courtly derring-do. Flynn did not disgrace himself, but he didn’t try all that hard either, and it is possible that a more sensitive director than Curtiz would have got more from him. As usual, he put far more effort into practical jokes, trying to bed Davis (who was flattered and tempted but ultimately unresponsive) and heckling over title billing, than in playing the character. (The film had begun life as Elizabeth the Queen; Flynn got that changed to either The Knight and the Lady or Essex and Elizabeth, and Davis settled matters by switching the latter around and insisting on the clumsy title the film now possesses.)
Predictably, the two did not bond, largely because she considered him an inadequate talent and freely said so. She later called him “one of the great male beauties of his time, but a terrible actor – not because he didn’t have the basic talent, but because he was lazy, self-indulgent, refused to take his work seriously, and tended to throw away his lines and scenes.” As an actor, wrote Frank Nugent in the New York Times, Flynn had as much chance of dominating the proceedings “as a bean-shooter against a tank”. According to Flynn, Davis pointedly looked away whenever they met again for the rest of his life.
As so often when such an experiment is deemed to have failed, it was back to basics for the follow-up, but The Sea Hawk (1940) lacked the enthusiasm of its predecessors, to say nothing of de Havilland in the female lead. (She was now campaigning for more dramatic leads and fewer swooning damsels, though she later came to see that she, too, had been guilty of underrating the films: “Seeing Robin Hood [again, years later] made me realise how good all our adventure films were, and I wrote Errol that I was glad I had been in every scene of them.” )
What was new, this time, however, was an explicit vein of contemporary propaganda, attacking American isolationism and asserting the necessity of confronting militarist aggression. The Second World War seemed the ideal stage for Flynn’s heroics, and on screen it was: he made six war pictures between 1941 and 1945.

In reality, he did not contribute to the war effort, a fact for which he received a great deal of mockery and condemnation, victim yet again of his public image. It was in his and Warners’ best interests to maintain the illusion that he was the most perfect physical specimen ever hatched on a sound stage; the truth is that every military examining board he went to turned him down.
The real Flynn was vigorous, brave, even foolhardy, but he was not healthy: he was tubercular, had a heart murmur, was prone to recurrent malaria and the veteran of a double mastoid operation that put him in danger of losing his hearing (or even, it is said, his life) if he received a severe blow. (Bette Davis had to be told to pull back on her slaps on the set of Elizabeth and Essex for this reason; she naturally thought it was a lot of fuss about nothing.)

The relationship with Curtiz was severed at Flynn’s request. His replacement was Raoul Walsh, a director capable of greater dramatic depth, and with comparable gifts as a stager of spectacle. The alliance produced results – Desperate Journey, Gentleman Jim and Objective, Burma among them – but it, too, ended in acrimony and incompatibility. (“He was a good actor if he liked the part,” Walsh recalled. “Otherwise he’d walk through it.” )
What followed were mainly disappointments. Vincent Sherman was recruited to handle the last authentic Warner swashbuckler, The Adventures of Don Juan, in 1949. That Forsyte Woman (1949) paired him with Greer Garson at MGM; for once he rose to the challenge offered by the material but the public found it dull. There were a couple of quickies for Warners, two of them westerns. (Flynn made many westerns, but disliked them all and considered himself unsuitable for the genre.) Then there was Kim (1950), another disappointment at MGM, two trips to London to co-star with Anna Neagle that drew the curious in Britain but bombed everywhere else, and a few low-grade pastiches of his old style for much smaller studios. (One of them, the ridiculous Adventures of Captain Fabian [1951], he wrote himself.)
But the biggest failure of all, in fact probably the decisive failure of his career, was William Tell, begun in 1953 again from his own screenplay, and abandoned shortly thereafter in a blizzard of accusations, suits and countersuits. Flynn had sunk his entire savings into the film and was left with virtually nothing. (Impatient to unreel the catalogue of disasters, Flynn abandons chronology to devote the opening pages of his autobiography to an account of this project.)
It was at this point that the United States government opted to bill him for some eight hundred and forty thousand dollars in back taxes. “When flat, put on the old front – you know,” he writes in My Wicked, Wicked Ways: “I went to ‘21’ that day for lunch. It is a habit of mine, when you are down and out, to go to the best spots.”

Flynn’s nemesis was temptation; there was virtually no kind to which he was resistant. It appears to have been somewhere during his second marriage that his prodigious appetite for booze and drugs turned the corner into compulsions he could not control. Typically, eighteen-year-old Nora Eddington had caught his eye working at a cigar stand in the Los Angeles Hall of Justice during his rape trial. They divorced after six years and two daughters, and with no films forthcoming Flynn became a drifter, travelling the world in his private yacht; like Bogart, the sea calmed and commanded him.

“A couple of years before he died,” wrote Olivia de Havilland, “I had an unhappy experience in Hollywood. A tall man kissed me on the back of the neck at a party and I whirled around in anger and said, ‘Do I know you?’ Then I realised it was Errol. He had changed so. His eyes were so sad. I had stared in them in enough movies to know his spirit was gone.”
It was this Flynn, the one with whom time had caught up, that wrote the cynical autobiography, dwelled upon his faults and derided his virtues. He had married again in 1950, to twenty-four year-old Patricia Wymore. (On the day of the wedding he was again charged with statutory rape; again, the charge was thrown out of court.) Wymore gave him another daughter, but like Lili Damita before her, found herself edged out of his life when his career, quite unexpectedly, regained momentum.

A call had come out of the blue from Darryl Zanuck, for whom he had never worked, to play one of Hemingway’s malcontents in an adaptation of The Sun Also Rises (1957). It was a successful comeback, but he must have sensed the irony that his new license to play more complex characters came about only once he had swapped one popular image for another. It was typecasting, same as always, only now he was typed not as heroes but disillusioned drunks. He was too old but otherwise ideal in The Sun Also Rises, back at Warners playing John Barrymore in Too Much Too Soon (1958), in Africa with John Huston for The Roots of Heaven (1958), as a deserter. Now he was Flynn the sozzled, world-weary cynic, older and beyond heroics. Mercifully, the public found this casting not merely apposite but also welcome.
Perhaps it was his willingness to lay bare the extent of his dissipation that re-endeared him to audiences; perhaps they found it comforting to be reminded that men are not gods after all. Arthur Hiller, who directed Flynn in a teleplay that proved his very last acting appearance, was shocked on the first day of shooting to discover the once great athlete “barely able to climb out of a wagon”. John Huston was also saddened by the change he saw in Flynn when they began filming The Roots of Heaven:

Errol Flynn was truly ill, but it had nothing to do with Africa. He had a vastly enlarged liver. He continued to drink, however, and he was also on drugs. He knew he was in bad shape, but he put on a great show of good spirits. He’d brought along some fine French wines, potted grouse and various delicacies from Paris – and plenty of vodka. I remember seeing Errol sitting alone night after night in the middle of the compound with a book, reading by the light of a Coleman lantern. There was always a bottle of vodka on the camp table beside him. When I went to sleep he was there, and when I’d wake up in the middle of the night I’d see him still sitting there – the book open, but Errol not reading any longer, just looking into his future, I think, of which there wasn’t very much left.

The performances were good. The groundwork had been laid for a second career as an older, respected character actor, one that he could easily have sustained for the next two decades. Instead there was almost nothing more, save a characteristically chaotic episode in which, besotted with Castro, he decided to make a semi-documentary film that finally emerged as Cuban Rebel Girls, his last and least film, in 1959.
His co-star was his final girlfriend, the seventeen year-old Beverly Aadland. They had been together for two years. A fresh charge of statutory rape awaited his return to America.
Yet despite the chaos of his own love life, he was sufficiently troubled by his son’s non-inheritance of his own prodigious appetites to write him a cautionary note shortly before his death. In it, he counselled him to live a little more, and enclosed a generous sum of money “for condoms and/or flowers.”

My Wicked, Wicked Ways was published posthumously. It became an immediate bestseller. Based on Flynn’s reminiscences, transcribed by ghostwriter Earl Conrad, it has a superbly direct, conversational style; the outlook and the aphorisms are unmistakeably the real man:

The conventions of Mid-England could not easily hold for a vigorous young man surrounded by feminine and attractive Melanesian girls.

I think I can truthfully say that my behaviour in whorehouses has been exemplary.

I have a genius for living, but I turn many things into crap.

I allow myself to be understood abroad as a colourful fragment in a drab world.

Flynn was fifty when he died in 1959, and it would surely have amused him that the coroner who performed his autopsy expressed amazement that he had lived as long as he had. He would have been pleasantly amazed, too, to learn that in the lottery of longevity his has become one of the select few names never to pass into half-memory, that prelude to oblivion from which few escape. Like Monroe, Bogart, Garbo, his name, image and reputations endure. Perhaps what he did wasn’t so easy after all.
Most importantly, he lived how he had wanted to live. Though Jack Warner summed him up as “one of the most charming and tragic men I have ever met”, to modern eyes there is a wilfulness in his decline, and a relish almost, that is both endearing and defiant of pathos. He confesses to self-pity in his autobiography, but never indulged it in public. He was under no illusions about himself:

My dream of happiness: A quiet spot by the Jamaica seashore, looking out at the activity of the ocean, hearing the wind sob with the beauty and the tragedy of everything. Looking out over nine miles of ocean, hearing some happy laughter nearby; sitting under an almond tree, with the leaf spread over me like an umbrella, that is my dream of happiness.
Unfortunately, an hour later, I might not be happy with that.

He had always pledged to cram two lifetimes into half the span of one and even at the end, he did not regret having made that choice. A failure, he said, was the man who died with more than ten thousand dollars in his pocket. For that reason also, Errol Flynn died a success.

Hey, Russell - remake this!

2011-02-12T13:03:00.014Z

I don't know about you, but I've never been able to set foot in a shower since I saw Psycho.
It's crazy, I know. But every time I see a shower curtain I immediately think of that immortal sequence, in which, one minute, Anne Heche is innocently washing in her motel bathroom, the next she is suddenly stabbed to death by Vince Vaughn disguised as his own mother. It's one of those sequences that will live forever in screen history, like that of King Kong rampaging through New York city with Naomi Watts clutched iconically in his paw.

The broad consensus among classic film bloggers is that remakes are bad. Whereas people who think that Gene Wilder was all very well but the ideal choice for Willy Wonka is an actor who looks like a waxwork of Charles Manson's eldest daughter are, to say the least, thin on the ground.
The tendency to unlock the rifle cabinet whenever a cherished classic is slated for crass remake is an obviously understandable one.

But does it really matter? It's not like the old days, when studios would actually suppress or even try to destroy earlier versions of movies before their remake came out, as MGM did with the vastly superior thirties versions of Gaslight and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Originals don't stop being good whenever a bad remake hits town; surely if anything it leaves them looking even better. If we're honest, what we fear most is not that the new version will be bad but rather that it will be good, if only by the standards of its own day, so that generations will rise not even knowing that An Affair To Remember, say, is a massively inferior rejig of Love Affair.
I feel a lot less personally threatened by flop remakes than by the ones that everyone loves.
The Nastassja Kinski version of Cat People is awful, but it is fascinating, and I'd much rather it existed than it didn't. A heart of flint is needed not to warm to such obviously charming follies, but if your answer to the question "who is the star of the movie Scarface?" is "Al Pacino" I will hunt you down no matter where you try to hide.
This week, the AOL homepage has been offering us its team's list of 25 remakes that outclass the original. Scarface is there, of course (Bridget Jones's Dairy to the original's Pride and Prejudice), along with such other abominations as Heaven Can Wait (1978), The Fly (1986) and Cape Fear (1991).
And you don't need to hate The Magnificent Seven, A Fistful of Dollars, the '54 Star Is Born or the '56 Man Who Knew Too Much to see that to express a preference for them over their originals is simply to fetishise lack of discernment.

The real problem for many of us, I think, is that the gesture of remaking a great film seems disrespectful, and also arrogant to a degree that would be not be tolerated in literature, for example. To the classic film historian a movie is as sacred as a novel - imagine a novelist proudly announcing that his next work will be a remake of Anna Karenina, as if the original book is merely a plot, and one, what's more, that has been waiting for him to tell it properly.
But to those who view cinema merely as a consumer's market, films are like pop songs, just recipes merely, always benefiting from revision with new technologies and styles. The friction lies in the distinction between these two different attitudes to cinema: the idea of remakes reinforces a conception of cinema as a lesser medium that angers those who insist it is a true artform. If, as I am certain, we are living in the last days of cinema as we understand the term, it will be interesting to see what perspective history takes, and which of its many faces will be the one or ones it chooses to preserve.

Viewed from a purely practical perspective, of course, remaking is almost always a mug's game.
For a start, it means that the film has something to prove before it's even begun. I adore the Mel Brooks version of To Be Or Not To Be: it seems to me to be almost perfectly constructed as a crowd pleaser and I've never known it to fail with audiences unfamiliar with the Lubitsch. But of course it was savaged on release, and those who cherish Lubitsch refuse to even consider its merits. The same fate befell Michael Winner's The Big Sleep (1978), which technically speaking isn't even a remake of the 1946 movie anyway: it's a different version of the same novel, which isn't the same thing at all. But it's very good in its own right: obviously inferior as a piece of fim-making to the Bogart version; just as obviously superior as an adaptation of the novel. But it, like the Brooks film, never stood a chance, simply because it was perceived as sacrilege.
The best kind of remakes would remake not great films but average ones, films that had the potential to be great but, for whatever reason, just missed their mark. But no studio would risk bankrolling a story that had already flopped once, so they go on restaging the masterpieces, hoping that lightning will strike twice. But the end result needs a lot of luck and goodwill even when it is good, and few would argue that most of the time they are not. From a commercial point of view, the compulsive urge to remake is mysterious indeed, no matter how short in supply originality may be.

Anyway, I say all this because I have just seen the trailer for the new version of Arthur, and it is so transcendentally, rhapsodically appalling that I couldn't not share it with you.
Now, it may be that you didn't much care for the Dudley Moore original. It very much hinges on whether you like Dudley Moore for one thing, and many do not, indeed, even the millions that thought they did when Ten and Arthur came out changed their minds almost immediately afterwards, ensuring that he never had another box office success in his life. It so happens that I do like him, and I do like Arthur very much, which has been a favourite of my family's for as long as I can remember. It's not perfect by any means, but it does recreate the ambiance of thirties screwball romantic comedy about as successfully as was possible in the eighties, and there are long stretches where it really does take flight, and you could almost imagine it's Peter Bogdanovich in the chair.
But, I stress, you don't have to like it one little bit in order to watch this trailer and want to die. When even the highlights selected for a trailer are less funny than the worst bits of any comedy ever made, you know you're in the presence of something very rare and very special. And this idiot Brand, entertainment's answer to entertainment, looking somehow even more sinister clean-shaven, is not a sight you'll forget in a hurry either: has there ever been anyone - man or woman, young or old, in the entire history of mankind - more utterly and extravagantly repulsive?
Here's the link: I did try to embed it straight into the post but Blogger kept rebelling and shutting down. It seems even computers know total and complete rubbish when they see it. And If you do like the original film, prepare to experience a sensation akin to watching your house burn down while the fire brigade just stand there laughing.

Is a real Keira better than a projected Keira? (Excuse me while I clean my pistol)

2011-02-09T07:04:00.006Z

Theatre is a bit like the circus: a stubborn anachronism surviving because we cannot bear to see it disappear - not because to do so would truly deprive us of anything quantifiable, but because it would force us to face up to the essential, anti-spiritual destructiveness of technological progress.
It is the idea of theatre that we cannot bear to see die, so rather than accept that it has been supplanted and superseded by cinema we go on pretending that they are two entirely separate things, when in reality of course the only difference is that cinema is permanent, perfectible, universal in its reach and vastly more resourceful in its ability to convey mood, location and multiple location, the control of pace, detail, subtle emotion, various forms of activity and suchlike matters.

I am being deliberately provocative, of course.
The unholy union of special effects technology and the cult of realism that has all but destroyed cinema as an art form has no means of corrupting the stage, and so theatre has remained pure, and been largely saved from the wrecking ball of cultural decline. Theatre cannot avoid artifice and suggestion, and the requirement that the audience use its own imagination to complete the effect, so it makes a virtue of these things, and is thus rendered an unquestionably higher (if not necessarily more efficient, if that's your bag) medium for creative expression than cinema. (Just as black and white movies are by the same definition better than colour ones, and silent movies better than talkies, potentially at least.)

Still, there's something about live theatre that I always find ever so slightly ludicrous, partly I suppose because actors are for the most part such silly people, and being essentially parasitic on society is fine only so long as you live up to your half of that reciprocal bargain, struck centuries ago with the rest of society, to maintain the humility commensurate with the dispensation from having to work for a living. The old stars did know this, and their chief mode of engagement with their fans was gratitude, whether sincere or not does not matter. This is too often forgotten by modern celebrities, and the spectacle of them capering about right there in front of you, rather than via the unreality of celluloid, tends to bring that home more forcefully.
And yet, there is one unquestionable advantage a good theatrical revival has over a rep screening of an old movie: it can transport you in ways even the most amenable cinematic surroundings cannot quite, back through time and into the skin of the original audience. Certainly that's been my experience: even in an authentic period cinema (and I am lucky enough to have Britain's oldest continually operating cinema as my local) I'm never quite sucked out of the contemporary audience and placed down into the original audience; I'm always me, watching an old film with an old soul, but never forgetful of the real world around me.
But when watching Rosamund Pike on stage in Gaslight I could somehow truly believe that she and I were Victorian, or that Jennifer Ehle in The Philadelphia Story was in some (mid-forties, perhaps) touring revival of the play, perhaps in a small American town. Those were my two best moments of transportation until now, with Keira Knightley in The Children's Hour in a fine old London theatre, and even though the real London in all its dismal modernity still stalks and swaggers outside, I am for a fleeting moment truly able to let the play drag me back to its proper situation: thirties Broadway. Off to thirties Broadway with Keira: you don't get an invitation like that too often.

The great American theatre of the late twenties and thirties is a jigsaw piece I've never quite been able to fit into the overall picture of the popular culture of its day.
So much of it drips with such glib and insincere pessimism, and so undergraduatish an emphasis on superficial formal innovation: yet this is the theatrical world in which such peerless puncturers of humbug as Benchley and Parker and Kaufman and Woollcott all spent their leisure hours and found their inspiration, and from which they made at least a part of their living and their reputation. And when you watch a piece like Hellman's The Children's Hour today, I can't help wondering how they stood for it.
America's was an essentially optimistic culture, one that enshrined the necessity of Wilde's injunction to look to the stars, even if from the position of the gutter. Surely once the Marx Brothers had destroyed the po-faced absurdity of O'Neill's Strange Interlude, mercilessly parodied by Kaufman and Groucho in Animal Crackers, there was no way back for this ersatz-European gloom-mongering and technique-as-content?
Does Mourning Becomes Electra get revived much these days? If so, does Orin's line "I'm just going in the study to clean my pistol" ever pass without an explosion of hearty laughter? Hard to imagine it could, but I suppose it must.

There were certainly a few laughs in odd places in this new production of The Children's Hour, though its own last act trip to the study to clean the pistol just managed to get past the audience in dignified silence, thanks largely to the commendable intensity of Elisabeth Moss (who is apparently in Mad Men, a programme you lot all love that I've never seen, but who I knew only from Did You Hear About the Morgans?, one of my wife's fast food comedies). I suspect its the cast that keeps the whole thing above water here: Carol Kane (better even than Miriam as the dotty aunt), Ellen Burstyn (an obvious presence, with complete and quiet command of every soul in the room, as the vindictive grandmother) and of course Keira.
Obviously, I went to see this for Keira, not from any eagerness to see two nice women have an appallingly bad time in thirties New England. I make no secret of my helplessness in the lure of this strange actress with the fascinating, spooky face.

Without Keira as inducement I doubt I would have even considered attending a revival of The Children's Hour, but it is often when our expectations are at their lowest that we derive the most from artifice, I guess. The play is a real downer, for sure, just the way they liked it in sophisticated New York circles at the time. It doesn't use its theme to make any points or point any morals - other than that it's wicked to tell lies, which the Brothers Grimm more or less had sewn up some time before Hellman opted to throw her two cents in.
Certainly it isn't about the injustice of contemporary attitudes towards lesbianism, as a stray line or inference frequently reminds modern audiences who would like it to be otherwise. It is the spreading of falsehood, not the reaction to the supposed iniquity itself, that we are obliged to be appalled at, and even that has no moral force: it is the means, not the end, and the idea is just to set up a situation in which bad stuff happens to nice people, and we all go home shaking our heads at how cruel life can be. (And that's even if we don't work in a coal mine all week and maybe look to entertainment as a source of diversion from our lot rather than reinforcement of its wretchedness.)
We are used to this sort of thing from the Russians, from self-indulgent existentialists, and especially from silly English imaginations like Thomas Hardy's. But Americans tend to be made or sterner stuff, and to rightly turn their noses up at the wallowing in ill-fortune Europeans still mistake for the definition of high art.

I'll confess with shame that I've never seen These Three, the thirties screen version of the play that substituted menage a trois for the love that dare not, and in Hollywood may not, speak its name. But I have seen the sixties remake with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley Maclaine, both excellent, panting as they carry the weight of the show up the steep banks of its narrative, before collapsing exhausted as Shirley hangs herself and Audrey is left wondering with the audience what she has gained from the experience. The film has an airless, suffocating morbidity, and a pronounced sense of its own worth rarely found in a film not made by Stanley Kramer.

Interestingly, however, I didn't get the same sense of irritation from the play, and in reflecting on that, and trying to account for it, I began to get a sense that maybe Hellman (and O'Neill and the rest - but not Arthur Miller; I will never, ever warm to Arthur Miller) were on to something after all. There are some plays that are essentially plays, and when you film them, however sympathetically, something vital is lost. They demand for their effect a form of connection that is proscribed by prerecording and the mere illusion of human presence, they need real people and real engagement, tangible and live. The charge of cynical pessimism must still stand, but on stage it seems less self-indulgent somehow, more cathartic, more useful as emotional experience. Certainly I didn't come away, as I do from the Hepburn movie, wondering what I was supposed to do with the last two hours other than get over it as soon as I could.
Even at its most meandering - and it is wordy, as you'd expect - I was content to give myself to it, avoiding trauma by imagining Benchley crumpled in the third row, perhaps making paper chains out of his programme, or Woollcott snorting derisively at the bar in the interval. And of course there was Keira; no point pretending there wasn't. A strange fusion of my two worlds - the past in which I wallow and what little of comfort I can claw from the present - and both of them dressed for Sunday. I was content.

Human, all too human... When my mother dipped me in the waters of the Styx, she held me by my inability to resist going to see anything that Keira is in simply because she's is in it. Please consider it an endearing flaw, or something.

Oh, the things I've sat through for this girl! I mean: Atonement for God's sake! Domino! Greater tolerance hath no man.

And it's not like she even gives much back: she remains, in each fresh hat and background, the same forbidding ice sculpture, so completely mysterious that we know not even what is being concealed: it could be emptiness as much as eternity that she hides from the camera. Her chill perfection seems to feed on cultivated disdain for we who clamour at her plinth. I know many, many people who find her more annoying than anyone this side of Vanessa Redgrave and I have no argument at hand with which to convert them. To paraphrase Ben Hecht's immortal disclaimer from The Song of Bernadette: To those helpless in her thrall, no explanation is necessary; to those immune, none is possible.

To the latter, I must here bid an envious adieu. Speaking conspiratorially now to the former, and the former alone, let me stress that you should not pass up the chance to see this: her effect is not diminished on stage, as I heretically dared to think it might be (oh how foolish am I!) It burns to the back of the stalls as mesmerically as her most perfectly composed cinematic close-up. There were no surprises (she's not bigger, smaller, quieter, louder, more or less beautiful than she seems in movies) and no revelations (she still keeps her face perfectly still in performance, and reveals its range only candidly, showing in curtain calls as in red carpet photographs that the reason she doesn't smile is because she cannot smile, though she tries, and becomes somebody else for the duration). All I know is that I once met Charlize Theron, and even with full warpaint and ostentatious bodyguards I didn't realise who it was until somebody told me afterwards. But this is Keira; from the second she walks on the stage, it is only ever Keira. Any amount of tragedy, ill-fortune and pistol-cleaning is worth enduring for this very occasional kind of presence.

(The Children's Hour is now playing at the Comedy Theatre, Panton Street, London.)

Fewer stars than there are in Hendon: All-star World War 2 morale movies

2011-01-03T10:28:00.021Z

Let the Andrews Sisters sing us in:

The coffee pot is always hot
And are the doughnuts keen!
The welcome mat says 'check your hat'
At the Hollywood Canteen!

Then apologies, next, for the title of this post, a pun that will mean nothing to anyone reading this outside of England, but which does make the most important point about the all-star morale-boosting specials, of which most studios produced at least one example during the war years: though each one utilises the slimmest of plots as an excuse to assemble guest spots featuring their studio's roster of star players, they tend to come up fairly light on stars. The Andrews Sisters, not officially affiliated with any one studio, topline two of them, Hollywood Canteen (1944) for Warners, and Follow the Boys (1944) for Universal (the studio with whom they were most identified), but the rest of the bills are strictly home teams only.
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It would have been nice if the Warners and the Mayers and the Cohns couldn't have got together, pooled their resources and done something really surprising as a joint contribution to the war effort, with interesting combinations of stars from all studios... but no. The Hollywood Canteen was one thing: Hollywood Canteen the movie is a strictly Warners affair. (Incidentally, I don't know how Warners got the rights to use the Canteen - which really was an all-studio collaborative effort - for their own exclusive movie; perhaps it was because they had Bette Davis and John Garfield on their books, and a Hollywood Canteen movie without either would have been absurd.)

Actually, though, the idea of all the studios clubbing together is central to the plot of Follow the Boys: star hoofer Tony West (George Raft) hits on the idea of producing a battalion of Hollywood stars who will tour every possible conflict zone bringing entertainment to the troops. Nothing so petty as studio rivalry can be allowed to stand in the way of this noble endeavour, and sure enough all the studio heads bend over backwards to show their support. Surprisingly, we are treated to shots of the other studio buildings, and at the operations centre where the various combinations of stars are matched to the appropriate locations, we hear frequent updates on what their stars are doing for the cause. A phoney headline announces the participation of Columbia, MGM, Paramount, Republic, RKO, Fox, Universal and Warners in a "Huge Mass Meeting" (what no Monogram?)... but a shot of the audience shows a suspiciously Universal-heavy crew: Andy Devine, Gloria Jean, Turhan Bay and Lon Chaney Jr are all prominent among the front rows. (As is Nigel Bruce, looking disdainfully amused as if he had been dragged without warning to the set, seemingly still chewing the bubble gum Dr Watson sampled in Sherlock Holmes in Washington.)
You have to hope that none of these studios charged for the right to use their logos and mention their players: if so it's not just Universal that ended up short-changed. It must have been highly frustrating for the viewer to keep hearing characters wandering into shot and saying things like "RKO just okayed Cary Grant; we'll hear from Paramount later today on Colbert and Dick Powell!" only to find that this incessant name-dropping is the closest they're actually going to get to any of them.
But even allowing for the studios' jealous reluctance to cross-pollinate their talent, there does seem to be an odd stinginess even with their own personnel.
“Humphrey Bogart waits on tables, Hedy Lamarr makes sandwiches, and Errol Flynn has his own speciality – he sweeps out the place,” explains Joe E. Brown to a visitor to Warners' Hollywood Canteen, but we get to see none of them. We get Greenstreet and Lorre and Henreid, but no Bogie – why? Similarly unfathomable is the absence of both Deanna Durbin and Abbott & Costello from Follow The Boys. Paramount seems to have been the most generous with their headliners: Bing, Bob, Betty, Dottie, Ronnie and even Alan Ladd are all present and correct in Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), the latter gently mocked in a comic sketch. (Also displaying an unexpected gift for self-deprecation is Cecil B DeMille, and Sturges pops up as himself too.)
Of course it helps that Paramount's roster included a generous assortment of names whose talents lent themselves to variety spots. Other studios often struggled to incorporate stars with no particular aptitude for revue. Hollywood Canteen has it easiest: the set-up of the stars all helping out allows the audience to simply (in many cases literally) bump into them, as actors playing servicemen cluelessly say stuff like, "Has anyone ever told you you look like Joan Crawford?" (Note incidentally, that Canteen, made after Joanie's move to Warners but before she had actually made any movies for them, marks the first occasion she shares a bill - if not, alas, any actual screen time - with Davis, nearly twenty years before Baby Jane.)

My favourite of the Canteen walk-ons are Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, who deliver this deliciously deadpan rebuke to a marine getting a little too frisky with Patty Andrews (I love Lorre's line, "Sydney, doesn't that constitute mayhem?"):

Star Spangled Rhythm comes up with the smartest solution: it casts otherwise useless dramatic players against type in comedy sketches (and gets George Kaufman to write them). As well as the aforementioned Alan Ladd quickie (as result of the munitions shortage he is seen attempting a stick-up with bow and arrow) there is a very funny sketch called If men played cards as women do, actually a remake of a 1929 Paramount short of the same name, with Fred MacMurray, Ray Milland and Franchot Tone commenting on each other's hats and passing bitchy remarks about their host's decor.

Here's the glorious highlight of Star Spangled Rhythm: the novelty number A Sweater, a Sarong and a Peek-a-boo Bang, performed by Dottie, Ronnie and Paulette (was Paulette really best-known for appearing in campus-set sweater roles, and if so which ones?), with grotesque assistance from Walter Catlett, Arthur Treacher and Sterling Holloway:

With many top stars unsuited to the format except in novelty walk-ons, and more still actually in uniform themselves, an often inspired desperation informs the items on the bill. Follow the Boys brings back Sophie Tucker ("Just in case any of you fellas don't know me, I'm a little something left over from the last war"), enlists Charles Butterworth as emcee of a weird dog act (recalling the indignities of MGM's Dogville shorts of the early thirties), and plunders the radio waves for Dinah Shore. W.C. Fields ambles through an abbreviated version of his pool routine, but he is clearly past his prime, and the make-up artists were either not bothered or not able to disguise the livid alcoholic blotches all over his face.
But the shining oddity is this magic routine featuring a cigar-puffing Orson Welles (and the 'Mercury Wonder Show') performing that celebrated trick 'sawing Marlene Dietrich in half'. Marlene is especially endearing; I love her nervous sotto voce asides to Welles ("Orson! We haven't rehearsed this!"):

"It tickles!"

I haven't much mentioned the nominal plots of these movies, because everyone knows the plots are the least interesting parts. Furthermore, because the stars in guest spots are the chief attraction, the plotty sections don't tend to have big players in them. (Why pay star wages when you can fill the film with stars on a day's pay and leave a contractee to do the actual acting? It's just like today, when those big, crappy films that exist solely to show off their special effects tend to ‘star’ people like Jeff Goldblum and Matthew Broderick.)
This also offers a sneaky opportunity for the studios to give green talent a high profile, low risk try out. So the actual 'star' of Hollywood Canteen is not Bette or Babs or Crawford but Joan Leslie, supposedly - and most conveniently - the favourite star of the film’s fictitious one millionth serviceman to visit the canteen. (“Imagine me standing right here and talking to Barbara Stanwyck!” he swoons when the Lady Eve herself leans forward and offers him a turkey sandwich. Yeah – but talking about how you prefer Joan Leslie, you big sap!)
Follow the Boys gives its central role to George Raft, (not so much on the up as difficult to place these days) but gives by far the film’s showiest dramatic part – his screen siren wife Gloria Vance - to dancer Vena Zorina, who had already appeared in a specialty number in Star Spangled Rhythm. You may not even recognise Una Merkel, playing straight and attractively dressed and made-up, as Raft's sister.
The addition of plot to an already crowded bag of items leaves almost all of these films feeling overlong: Hollywood Canteen, which stops even bothering with guest stars for much of its final third, instead losing its way amidst the complications arising from Joan Leslie's adventures with her dopey starstruck admirer, feels at least half an hour longer than necessary.
A surprisingly maudlin air hangs over these final scenes too, which may seem odd in a morale booster, but it's nothing compared to the finale of Follow the Boys, which lurches without warning into such complete and unexpected tragedy that you suspect Thomas Hardy had a hand in the screenplay. One minute Raft and an audience of submariners are enjoying the Andrews Sisters deliver a spirited underwater rendition of Shoo Shoo Baby, the next a Japanese torpedo scores a direct hit and Raft is engulfed in a torrent of water. ('Tony West Missing, All Others Rescued', stresses the newspaper headline, presumably to reassure audiences who would otherwise be fearing for the safety of the Andrews Sisters.)
Not only is West killed, he dies without ever knowing that his estranged wife was waiting to be reconciled with him, and has just given birth to the child he didn't even know she was carrying. The film ends with Gloria tearfully enlisting to join his star platoon, keeping up the good work.
I guess wartime audiences were less shocked by such tragedies than we are now: they were, of course, a daily occurrence, and the inclusion of such an ending to what was ostensibly a spirit-lifting movie makes for a salutary reminder that these were years in which death was a constant companion in everybody's lives.
Even for movie stars he came. At Tony's headquarters are large boards, in which the platoons of stars are listed next to their locations and engagements. Briefly glimpsed alongside is an 'Honor Roll', comprising the names Carole Lombard, Leslie Howard, Roy Rognan, Tamara, Charles King and Bob Ripa.
If you don't know who any but the first two are, as I did not, look them up.

I recommend spending Christmas with the Ambersons

2010-12-21T19:35:00.006Z

Of all the films that seem to me most quintessentially Christmas movies, The Magnificent Ambersons is the least obviously relevant to the festive season.

True, it does feature charming, and beautifully realised, studio-shot sequences of jingle bells and dashing through the snow, but it is not set at Christmastime, nor does it abound in the yuletide cheer that radiates from On Moonlight Bay, Holiday Affair or Bell, Book and Candle. It is as moving as It's a Wonderful Life, but less effusive, and perhaps a little less certain that every story can end happily if we only wish it so.

And yet, at that more thoughtful hour, at the end of the day, with the presents long opened, the wine all drunk, the fire only faintly glowing, and not a creature stirring all through the house, when our thoughts drift to Christmases past, absent friends and, perhaps, dreams unfulfilled... then there can be no better cinematic accompaniment to our ruminations than this, the most humane and moving film Orson Welles ever made.

It is not, let me rush to stress, a morose film. There are powerfully moving passages, for sure, but much of it is light; it's very funny in parts, and full of charming social detail. But at the same time, in its very simplicity and reticence it finds its way to a very deep place, and says more about the bonds of family, of the loves we strive for and define ourselves by, and of the passing of the years, than any other film I know.

It is a story about things ending, and of the need to make our peace with time, the enemy we cannot possibly outwit. And it speaks, consolingly but not sentimentally, of our need, like the effigy atop Larkin's Arundel Tomb, "to prove our almost-instinct almost-true: what will survive of us is love."

At one time it was the last film in the world to need trumpeting. It was almost Citizen Kane, not as precocious perhaps, but, except for the effects of studio interference, every bit as good.

But it rarely troubles the 100-best lists these days, due in part to the inevitable, lazily iconoclastic backlash against Kane itself, now routinely punished for the crime of being so long hailed the best film ever, and in retaliation against its appropriation as shorthand by critics who refuse to look beyond the milestones of cinema history. (A couple of years ago British film critic Chris Tookey wrote of an already forgotten film called There Will Be Blood that it “even surpasses the greatness of Citizen Kane”! In what department?) And as Kane's stock fell, so did Touch of Evil's rise, because it’s genre and there’s stranglings and shootings and corruption and you don’t have to think much about it.

While all this was happening, Ambersons seemed to just fall away, like melting snow, or memories of a childhood Christmas.

Personally, I like Kane and Evil very much (and also The Stranger, still underrated) - but my favourite Welles by a wide margin remains Ambersons. Kane is an obvious tour de force, a technical marvel and a work of great brio, but in its striving for profundity it is clearly a young man's film. Ambersons is a quieter work in its mechanics, but as drama it's streets ahead.

The film is based on a book by Booth Tarkington, whom I have never read, but who seems to specialise in nostalgia Americana: he also wrote the Penrod stories, on which were based those two delightful Doris Day movies On Moonlight Bay and By the Light of the Silvery Moon.

As befits the subject, Welles’s work as director is never ostentatious or distractingly showy; it is a far more integrated job of work than Kane, that at all times allows the drama to lead the presentation. (Though when the moment does call for the grand effect, Welles pulls off some of his most impressive: witness the reverse tracking shot through several doorways.)

Welles wrote, directed and narrates the film but does not appear, allowing the other members of his Mercury players their chance to shine, which they certainly do.

Agnes Moorehead was never better. I hate to think what this woman could have done in movies and never got to show us. She's like an exposed electric wire one minute, cracked china the next; just amazing. This is my favourite Joseph Cotten performance too (with the possible exception of his work in that other great non-Christmas Christmas movie Portrait of Jennie: oh what a double-bill they make!): praise indeed for that most reliable of actors.

And there are striking contributions too from a very young Anne Baxter and from Tim Holt, a likeable actor who, in a long and busy career, never gave a performance this good again.

True, the film was grievously compromised by a frankly vengeful RKO who, fed up that their much ballyhooed boy wonder had turned into a white elephant almost overnight, hacked at the concluding reels, took out half an hour and re-shot a new, hurried finale. But the amazing thing is that it still works as well as it does. The new bits are obvious if you look for them, but not really obtrusive if you don’t (they were supervised by Robert Wise, the film’s editor and himself a stylish and intelligent director). At most one is aware of an unwise acceleration to the final scenes, but the first hour is sublime.

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No other film has achieved (or perhaps sought) its texture. It starts like a documentary and slowly segues into drama, in which an entire time and place, its rise and fall, is mirrored in the rise and fall of one family, whose members we are carefully introduced to and whose paths we follow in tandem.

By the time it has established all of its major themes and characters it has settled into a unique rhythm that is warm, elegiac, delicate in the extreme, but also poignant, cinematically very effective, and quite stunning in its careful but never unnecessary attention to historical detail.
It may be possible, but mistaken, to dismiss the film as an insufficiency of drama in a surfeit of detail. This is because Welles adopts the very opposite approach to most dramatists, who pride themselves on creating human situations that ring true in any surroundings and convey themselves to us with the minimum of effort and adjustment. But the personal dramas here are indivisible from their location and their moment (and so carefully and beautifully are the latter evoked, the film seems often almost eerily like a vanished age come to life). Somehow it uses its specificity of setting and circumstance to reveal its essential truths all the more potently; it reminds us that the universe cares nothing for the complexity and intensity of our lived moments: all we are is the connections we make, and eventually we, and everything we know and see and experience, will be forgotten utterly.

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Welles achieves this, paradoxically it might seem, by deliberately concentrating on the tiny details rather than the large. His opening monologue pinpoints both theme and era exactly by the seemingly irrelevant distraction of listing various changes in men’s fashion against a montage of Joseph Cotten trying on the different items in front of a mirror.

The whole film is built around the same understanding: that a change as seemingly mundane as the transition from horses to automobiles is in fact one that transforms everything and everyone it touches, that instantly ends one age and starts another, and cuts off the former from all possibility of recall. It is by concentrating on the small details that the larger themes come into focus.

Thus neither narrative nor backdrop are appendage to or metaphor for the other, rather they are two perfectly integrated halves of the same story.

There is a sad wisdom here, never stated outright but potently conveyed all the same. The story of the Ambersons themselves seems inevitable, somehow, in the context of the wider setting Welles evokes for them to reside in.
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I usually try to find time around Christmas for this wise, generous-hearted, rueful little film, and every year, as I get older, it seems to have more to tell me. Great drama, as Hemingway told us, is a matter of truth. The Magnificent Ambersons, never harsh or bitter or neglectful of drama's obligation to enchant, is nonetheless one of the truest films I have ever seen.

(A much shorter version of this was originally posted in a different form in March 2008)

Christmas quiz: We have a winner!

2010-12-13T08:41:00.031Z

Thanks to everyone who had a go at my Christmas photo quiz.
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Our contestants were:
Audrey at Fedoras and High Heels
Gerald at Laszlo's On Lex
Jorgé at The March Studios and It Certainly Was
KC at Classic Movies
Millie at Classic Forever and The Stupendously Amazingly Cool World of Old TV
Whistlinggypsy at Distant Voices and Flickering Shadows
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Jorgé initially recognised only one of the twenty films, later upgraded to two, but took the time to invent her own brilliant alternative titles "based entirely off of what the photos bring to mind".
Here are the answers:
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#1 was one of my very favourite Bette Davis films, Ex-Lady.
Apart from Jorgé, whose suggested title was Mattress Shop Mayhem, virtually everybody got this, which surprised me a little, as I thought it was one of her more obscure titles.
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#2 was De Mille's The Crusades.
Only KC got this right, with two contestants opting for Kismet, and Jorgé suggesting The Staring Contest.
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To Italy for #3, and my favourite Fellini movie Nights of Cabiria.
We had a few abstentions here, but everyone who hazarded a guess got it right. Jorgé went with Waving in the Wrong Direction.
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Who could fail to recognise Veronica Lake in I Married a Witch at #4?
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I wish Jorgé was right and this really was a scene from The Half-eaten Fruit Puppet Show. But in reality, as everyone seemed to know, #5 was Una and Ginger in 42nd Street.
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#6 was Plan Nine From Outer Space, as even Jorgé realised.
Gerald was stumped, suggesting that it was perhaps a film for which I had written the screenplay; Whistlinggypsy and KC, lacking his impeccable taste, knew exactly what it was.
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It took a while for some of the contestants to cotton on that #7 was Chaplin's Limelight.
Only Gerald got there straight away; Chaplin fanatic Jorgé nobly volunteered "to climb into the pit of shame" for not recognising it immediately.
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Probably my favourite Loretta Young performance is as newshound Gallagher in film #8: Capra's Platinum Blonde.
Is it just me or is this an odd still? To my eyes the man on the left looks nothing whatever like Robert Williams, the more or less unknown actor who gives so memorable a performance in the lead, to the extent that I might even believe it's a stand-in, like those famous Some Like It Hot stills where they dragged some broad in from the car park and dressed her up like Marilyn. But everyone who ventured a guess got it, so maybe I'm wrong.

At #9 we have the odd little sixties trifle What a Way To Go!
It's a star vehicle for Shirley Maclaine, and if you love her, as I do, you'll love it. Otherwise it'll annoy the hell out of you, or - if you're Millie - give you nightmares. ("So completely creepy... And it has Gene Kelly who always smiles creepily.")
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One of the easiest at #10: Lana Turner displaying the body that's worth killing dear Cecil Kellaway for in The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Unsurprisingly, James M Cain devotee Gerald got it, and so did, for the first time, every other participator. (Jorgé wondered if it might not be Professor Pain and Nurse Venom Travel To Planet Earth and Steal Plutonium.)
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Miriam Hopkins keeping two men happy - and she was just the gal to do it - at #11, in Lubitsch's slightly underrated Design For Living.
I thought this one was much harder, but for the second time in a row, everybody got it...
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... whereas #12, which I thought among the easiest, prompted a far from unanimous response. It's Marlene explaining how many men it took for her to get the name Shanghai Lily in Shanghai Express to starchy Clive Brook who, quite frankly, doesn't deserve her.
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At #13 we have The Lady Vanishes, perhaps the greatest achievement of all from what I insist were Hitchcock's greatest films: his British productions of the thirties. But I love Jorgé's suggestion: The Magical Lamp.
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Not Attack of the Fluffy Snake, Jorgé, though you were close. #14 is in fact Topper Returns, with the great Patsy Kelly indulging in some of the most shameless scene-stealing it's ever been my delight to witness behind Billie Burke's back.
A great movie, and I'm pleased to see Millie shares my conviction that it's superior to the original. But as a second sequel, with the main stars not present in the still, I thought this might fox you somewhat more than it did...
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... Neither did #15 give you too much trouble: Bing, Bob and - thanks to the wonders of process technology - a really weird-looking superimposed camel, in Road To Morocco.
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#16 is The Magnificent Ambersons, and I wish everyone agreed with me that it's Orson Welles's greatest achievement in cinema by a mile.
Millie confessed to not having seen it - do so NOW if you please - while Jorgé mistook it for How Mildred Got Away With Murder.
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Jorgé was close with The Man Who Drooled Napkins, but #17 was actually Wife vs Secretary, MGM's useful reminder to their male audience that you can have Jean Harlow or Myrna Loy, but not both.
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Obviously Eddie G. at #18, but how obvious is it that it's Double Indemnity?
Sufficiently so to make it the third to receive correct answers all round, though Jorgé identified it by its lesser-known European title The Man Who Sold Pocket Protectors.
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Millie correctly identified "the awesome Gale being cool evilness" at #19, but not that the film itself was The Letter.
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Finally, then, to #20. Gerald made a good guess with Stromboli; Whistlinggypsy suggested a film I'd never heard of before hurriedly changing her mind; Millie didn't know and cursed her failure at 'Ingy adoration', and Jorgé suggested Too Much Wind. But as only KC knew instantly, this was the greatest symbolic fantasy sequence ever, from the '41 version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It's the bit where Hyde imagines himself whipping a pair of coach horses, and then fantasises that they turn into a pair of naked, bridled, galloping Lana and Ingrids. Suddenly, for two delirious seconds, this basically disappointing remake of the Mamoulian version takes on the original and wins!
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So, without further ado...
THE RESULTS:
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In fifth place, with seven guesses and six-and-a-half correct answers ("one of the 'Road' movies" for #15) is AUDREY.
In fourth place, with twelve guesses and eleven-and-a-half correct answers ("Topper or maybe Topper Returns" for #14) is MILLIE.
In third, with 19 guesses and 14 correct answers is GERALD.
First runner-up, with 17 guesses and all of them correct, is KC.
Which means that the winner, who answered all 20 and got 19 correct, is WHISTLINGGYPSY.
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The prize, if you can call it a prize, and if you choose to accept it, is to decide what my next blog post will be about.
See the 'Name That Vet' competition two posts below for terms and conditions, and if you would like me to write about a subject of your choice just let me know either by email or by leaving a comment.
Whatever you choose will appear shortly after I write about either heist movies or movies with Benny Hill in them, as requested by the most excellent Tom, master of ceremonies at Motion Picture Gems and winner of Name That Vet.
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Well done again to Whistlinggypsy, and thanks again to everyone who looked in, commented or took part.
Merry Christmas!
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The just for fun, slightly harder “Name That Film” Christmas competition!

2010-12-05T09:10:00.031Z

Well, there was me thinking that my Name That Vet competition (see below) would be foxing folks for ages.
Instead, the excellent Tom from Motion Picture Gems guessed it before the ink was even dry. Seriously, the post had been up for about a minute.
But yes, the vet with the first class 'tache was wee Peter Ostrum, Charlie Bucket to you, from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
.If you'd like to know more about what Ostrum's been doing lately with cows and stuff, look here.
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So I thought I'd better bounce right back with a competition that might stay unsolved a little longer - perhaps fifteen minutes or so.
All very simple: just name the 20 films from which the following stills are taken. Some are harder than others, but they should all be well enough known to habitual perusers of blogs like this.
Same terms, conditions and prize as Name That Vet, below. Winner is the first person to get them all right, and there may be clues to follow if any prove to baffle all comers. But I doubt it somehow.
Anyway, have a go...
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1.
2.
3.
4. 5.
6.
7.8.9.
10.11.
12.13.14.15.
16.17.18.19.20.

The just for fun, slightly seasonal “Name That Vet” competition!

2010-12-05T07:52:00.010Z

See the chap on the left and below?

All I'm going to tell you about him - beyond the obvious fact that he has the kind of moustache all men covet but most wives forbid (and yes, I do speak from bitter experience) - is that he is a veterinarian who specialises in dairy cattle and is currently in practice in the USA.

However, once upon a time he was something else entirely. And it's connected to a film that's not actually anything to do with Christmas but is still sorta Christmassy.
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But what?

Do you know who this vet is and what his link to kinda Christmassy movies might be?

Leave your answers in the comments if you think you do, or even if you don't, but just like leaving comments. (Wish there were more out there like you.)

There's no big prize or anything, I'm afraid. I just thought it would be nice to print a coupla pictures of this obviously great guy and his superb moustache.

Tell you what: the winner can choose a subject for me to write my next Movietone post on, to the best of my ability and - most important, this - the limits of my knowledge. That's to say, if you choose the Lord of the Rings trilogy I'm not going to do any special research - like watch any of them - or anything like that. So it may be a bit shorter than my usual. Alternatively, if you have no desire to see me taint your favourite movie or star with my opinionated rambling, you can choose something you don't want me to write about, and I'll keep away from it and write about something else.

Frankly, the sky's the limit here. Do you know, I'm suddenly feeling a lot more excited about this now.

When I started, and all I had were two pictures of a cow vet with a cool moustache and a link to some old movie, I was concerned this post might look a bit desperate.

Now I'm wondering if it isn't even too fabulous for the internet to cope with (especially in all this cold weather we've been having round here lately.)

My only clue is that milk is not unconnected to either of his two claims to fame...

So come on, kids: name that vet!

Leslie Nielsen: Them's the breaks

2010-11-30T07:16:00.012Z

Sad to hear of the death of Leslie Nielsen, an actor I always enjoy watching, whether it's in Forbidden Planet or The Poseidon Adventure or Prom Night or The Naked Gun or Columbo.

His career tells an interesting story about Hollywood, and what actors call 'the breaks', and a nice story at that.

We only tend to notice the breaks when they go against someone: the star that never made it, the poor mug who made it once and never clawed their way back, the silent legend killed by the microphone, or what seems to us the patent absurdity that such charismatic legends as Lugosi, or Buster Keaton, or Louise Brooks never got their second chance.

Them's the breaks, kid, them's the breaks.

But then you look at Nielsen.

Imagine going up to Nielsen in the mid-seventies, when he was guesting in every tv show under the sun, just making a living but hardly a face too many people would be able to instantly put a name to.

Imagine telling that guy that his obituary will be headline news all over the world, that thousands of movie fans will feel the loss, that tributes will spring up listing favourite moments from his films, or even, indeed, the simple fact that still to come in his career will be several huge box-office hits in which he will be lead star and principal attraction. And strangest of all, almost all of those obituaries will call him a comedian.

How did this happen? Just the breaks.

Look again at Airplane.

Nielsen is cast as the doctor in Airplane for the same reason that Lloyd Bridges and Robert Stack and Peter Graves are there: because of their reputation for slightly stolid seriousness in melodrama and disaster movies.

Nielsen's first appearance in the film is interesting in this regard. The crew are looking for a doctor among the passengers, and we cut to Nielsen for the first time, who says he is a doctor. The sudden cut to his character is not really meant to announce the arrival of a well-known actor; that it's Nielsen is at best a sort of in-joke for film buffs. The main purpose is to deliver a joke: he has a stethoscope around his neck.

But to audiences today the abruptness of the cut seems to say here comes Leslie Nielsen, with precisely that buzz of excitement that accompanies our first glimpse of Orson Welles in The Third Man. The film cranks up a gear - great, says the audience, here comes Leslie Nielsen.

His presence announces comedy, where it was intended to announce, if anything, authenticity. The stethoscope, and the fact that it is joke, tends not to be noticed at all. All we see is that absurdly handsome face, and what now seems like its obvious promise of masterfully delivered laughs.

And masterfully deliver laughs is precisely what he goes on to do. He cemented this new reputation with the various incarnations of Frank Drebin and never looked back. Now he's a comedian, and that very deadpan quality that characterised his straight work becomes his trademark in comedy. He gets to play a live action Mr Magoo; he gets to play Dracula for Mel Brooks. No matter how bad the film is, he's always value, and he's lovable; one of those actors we think of as pals rather than idols. He gets to spend the last twenty years of his professional life as a beloved star, as a face everyone can instantly put a name to.

And he gets to be a loss that thousands of film fans feel.

Them's the breaks.

Leslie Nielsen, 1926 - 2010