All Slights Deserved

This is probably going to be brief because I'm exhausted and in danger of building up a backlog of unwritten reviews... So you're a middle-aged producer at a major Hollywood studio and you've noticed that all across America the kids are digging this new 'rock 'n' roll' craze. Sure, it's just a fad and won't last, but why not use it as the basis for a musical comedy? You could have all the big acts playing those rocking beats the kids love, then work the story around it. How about using it to launch that Mansfield broad? You know, the one who looks like a parody of Monroe? The fellas will go crazy for her! Yeah, she could be an aspiring singer. Only let's make it so all she really wants is to stay at home and be a housewife and mother, conforming to a nice safe, chauvinist stereotype. But we'll give her a mobster boyfriend who wants to make her a star. He can be a real putz! Okay, what about the leading man? He needs to be an older guy, ...

By his own admission Terence Davies is a director whose films polarise opinion. For some they are unremittingly bleak, making "Ingmar Bergman look like Jerry Lewis", to quote the director himself. But for others - and I'd include myself amongst them - through their exploration of pain and grief, memory and loss, they achieve a deep and powerful catharsis. There can be few film-makers with such single-minded conviction that through the healing power of art we can find atonement. Davies began his directorial career with the Trilogy , three monochrome autobiographical shorts shot over a seven year period. Depicting the life of the director's alter-ego, Robert Tucker, at various junctures, they also chart Davies' evolution as a film-maker towards the distinctive style of later work such as Distant Voices, Still Lives . The first, Children , tackles Tucker's difficult school days, the death of his thuggish father from cancer and nascent awareness of his homo...

However you may feel about it Linda Lovelace and the film that catapulted her to stardom, Deep Throat , were a huge phenomena. When it opened in 1972 thousands flocked to see the film in Times Square and for a brief time it looked like hardcore porn was about to go mainstream. After the film was distributed across America the ticket receipts were estimated at up to $600 million, which would have made it one of the highest grossing films of all time. This for a film that was shot for just $25,000. So much has been written and said about Lovelace and Deep Throat that there's really no point in repeating it. Her own later accounts of the violence and humiliation she was subjected to transformed her into a feminist icon, although the veracity of some of those claims is disputed. At the very least it's reasonable to say she was an impressionable woman who was drawn into the company of some very unsavory people. Before that, in the years immediately after Deep Throat 's re...

When we watch a film we enter into an unwritten contract that we're willing to be manipulated. Be it sympathy, happiness, sadness, anger, fear, lust or any combination of these; if the film-maker is skillful they'll succeed in delivering at least some of us to that emotional state. We accept that their intentions are more or less benign and go along for the ride. That manipulation doesn't always sit quite so comfortably afterwards, when reason resumes control. Traditionally the works which are singled out for criticism or censorship are those more extreme films which, according to our moral guardians, have the tendency to 'deprave and corrupt'. But there's another kind of film that can be equally ruthless; those which seek to speak to our inner child and the unresolved issues we never quite put aside. Where is this coming from? Well, because at the end of Niki Caro's Whale Rider I cried, which - being a jaded cynic - isn't a common occurrence. ...

No country holds the cinema in higher regard as an art form than the French. During a trip to Paris when I was fourteen I recall flicking through the tv channels one morning and stumbling upon a studio-based discussion programme in which intellectuals were vigorously arguing about the films of James Dean. I've no idea whether this was a regular occurrence but needless to say I can't imagine Alan Titchmarsh or Paul o'Grady (c-list daytime celebrities, for the benefit of non-British readers) ever chairing a debate about the work of Montgomery Clift. In fact finding any kind of serious discussion of the arts is a rarity on British television, which is decidedly not the case across the Channel. There's a drawback to such earnestness though; sometimes you can't see the wood for the trees. The French have produced some great films, but there are plenty of others that are stultifyingly dull. A particular object of my enmity are their historical dramas and biopics. Thes...

Early one crisp Saturday morning last spring I found myself standing in front of a supermarket in Candem, the former site of the once-renowned Bedford Music Hall. I was spending the day revisiting locations featured in The London Nobody Knows , an obscure 1968 documentary in which James Mason travelled around pointing out obscure Victorian landmarks in the capital. Sadly, while Candem has held on to some of its old charm better than many parts of London, there was nothing to see. The Bedford, by then semi-derelict, was torn down a couple of years after it was filmed. Its fate was typical of many of the old music halls and the working class variety shows which had all but completed their slow and lingering death by the onset of the sixties. The London Nobody Knows wasn't the only film to sentimentalise this vanishing culture. In the same year came A Little of What You Fancy , a kind of potted history of the music hall complete with re-enactments and renditions of many of the po...

Hooray for Harold Lloyd! Dodo-do-do-do-do-do-do-doo-do Harold Lloyd! Dodo-do-do-do-do-do-do-doo-do Black or white, he's that guy, A pair of glasses and a smile It's impossible for me to think of Harold Lloyd without recalling the theme tune to Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy , a tv series of excerpts from his films that seemed to be a fixture of school holidays and early evening slots during the eighties. Even now I can't help but raise a smile when I hear it; like the character Lloyd played in his best known work it was simple, unaffected and infectiously likeable. Ironically that series, produced by Time-Life Films, is much derided by purists as a clumsy cut-and-paste job that played the clips at the wrong speed. Yet it was probably my introduction to silent comedy; consequently I think I knew of Lloyd before Charlie Chaplin and certainly before Buster Keaton. Critically speaking Lloyd is probably destined to remain in the shadows of Chaplin and Keaton, alth...

At the time of writing, director Otakar Vávra is a month short of celebrating his 100th birthday. Yet even in 1969, when he shot this adaptation of Václav Kaplický's novel of the same name about the Northern Moravia witch trials, he was considered one of Czech cinema's old guard. Witchhammer (or Witches' Hammer , as it's sometimes known) doesn't fit entirely comfortably in the Czech New Wave canon, although Vavra himself was instrumental in the movement. As a lecturer at the state film school FAMU (Film Faculty of the Academy of Dramatic Arts) his open-minded philosophy encouraged the likes of Vera Chytilova ( Daisies )and Jaromil Jireš ( Valerie and Her Week of Wonders ) to innovate and push the boundaries. His own films, taking this as indication, tend towards a more grounded approach, although by no means as reserved as some of his contemporaries. Starkly shot in black and white, Witchhammer tells the story of Boblig von Edelstadt, a ruthless inquisitor ...

The closest I usually get to the ballet is passing a statue of Margot Fonteyn in Reigate on my way to work every morning, so my understanding of it derives almost exclusively from the cinema. Generally the ballet world is depicted as a hotbed of seething emotions and bitter rivalries where egomaniacal artistic directors place their charges under nigh-unbearable pressure to perform. Strangely enough it seems to be a lot like the movie business. Darren Aronofsky's latest film doesn't have any interest in altering that perception; in fact it milks the cliche to glorious effect. As with Powell and Pressberger's 1948 film The Red Shoes the offstage drama becomes an extended metaphor for the ballet's story, in this case Swan Lake. Like its predecessor Black Swan is an overblown melodrama that blurs fantasy and reality, but its portrait of madness is altogether more immersive. Natalie Portman is an actress I've never been enamoured with. It's partially due to hav...

In director Lindsay Anderson's final film, the quasi-documentary Is That All There Is? he's asked by the critic Tom Sutcliffe whether it's true Peeping Tom ended director Michael Powell's career. "Complete rubbish" retorts Anderson, adding that Powell "didn't have a marketable talent". It tells us more about Anderson's penchant for pithy aphorisms, but there's probably some truth that had Powell been commercially savvier he might have found it easier to reclaim some standing in the British film industry. The glory years of his collaborations with Emeric Pressberger had long passed by the time of Peeping Tom 's release in 1960 and a host of younger directors, including Anderson himself, were about to set forth with a fresher outlook. As it was Powell would have to travel overseas to seek out directing jobs. After filming an adaptation of the opera Bluebeard's Castle in Germany he headed down under for two films shot in Aust...

Now in its 45th season, the Gothique Film Society is a peculiar but quaint anachronism. The Society meets on Friday nights roughly monthly over the winter to screen obscure old horror, crime and suspense films. Many of these films, most regulars would admit, are not very good. I've been attending the Gothique, on and off, for over five years now but am still one of the youngest there. A large number of the membership are pensioners and a few could be politely described as 'eccentric'. Like the dodgy projector (liable to break down at the most inopportune moments) and uncomfortable seats it's all part of the 'Gofeek' experience. As usual tonight's event was a double bill. First up came Dead Men are Dangerous , an above average 'b' movie starring Robert Newton as a struggling and debt-ridden writer who fakes his death by switching his identity with that of a suicide victim. After the police investigation reveals the man's suicide was actuall...

Latin American cinema is almost a complete mystery to me. To the best of my knowledge the sum total of my viewing consists of Amores Perros , City of God and Santo vs. The She-Wolves . I was hoping I could also include El Perro , a rather odd seventies picture in which The Exorcist 's Jason Miller plays a fugitive chased across Venezuela by a relentless dog; but it turns out to have been a Spanish production.  Either way, you can see it's not exactly an impressive return. Yet the consensus amongst film critics and scholars is that the region has made huge strides in the past decade, even if the general English-speaking public aren't paying much attention. That Mexico, Brazil and Argentina now have prospering national cinemas is perhaps not so surprising, but Chile and Uruguay are also getting in on the act. Of course it's all relative and Hollywood still dominates at the box office. It would be remiss if at least a handful of the intended (but don't count on ...

Were I asked to name one figure above all others who has shaped my love of cinema then it would be Lindsay Anderson. Watching a rented video tape of his 1968 film if.... in the autumn of 1993 changed my perception of the medium forever. The surrealistic tale of a revolution at a public school, it was so jaw-droppingly audacious, so different to anything I'd experienced before, that no sooner had I watched it than I rewound the cassette and did so all over again.   if.... was the first of three collaborations with the writer David Sherwin and actor Malcolm McDowell;  a loose trilogy of films that featuring McDowell's alter-ego Mick Travis. The three are vastly different in style and in truth Travis is the same character in name only. For the second, O Lucky Man! (1973) Mick was transformed into a modern-day equivalent of Voltaire's Candide in a picaresque journey through seventies Britain. It was Anderson's most ambitious film and almost matches if.... for quality....

I'll be the first to admit that when it comes to my film viewing habits I'm a bit of a snob. In the early years I was inclined to seek out the critically acclaimed rather than populist cinema, and although my tastes expanded to include more idiosyncratic material as a rule it's tended to be haute cuisine over meat and potatoes. The drawback of this philosophy is one grows so accustomed to the good stuff it's not always possible to appreciate the value of what you're watching relative to the bigger picture. I suspect this may be why the work of French writer/director Henri-Georges Clouzot has failed to capture me. Clouzot is best remembered for the high-tension truck adventure Wages of Fear and seminal psychological thriller Les Diaboliques ; neither of which which lived up to their reputation. Strangely enough I prefer some of the Hammer studio's shameless rip-offs of Les Diaboliques , such as Scream of Fear , to the original. Seen retrospectively Clouzot...

Everything I despise about the modern cinemagoing experience is embodied within the walls of the Epsom Odeon. It's a cinema for people who have no affection for the art; a soulless monolith to banality where undiscerning patrons indifferently consume the latest overhyped effluence. A workforce of acne-ridden part-timers serve you through forced smiles with nonchalant disaffection... "Where would you like to sit?" "Maybe one of those dozen empty rows clearly displayed on your monitor?" "I know, I'll sit you right next to the only other people in the auditorium." Popcorn's available with a complimentary dressing of puss but I don't usually partake. The philosophy of the Epsom Odeon is that films with subtitles, or for that matter anything not produced or distributed by a major studio, are for lefty freaks and weirdos. Homogeny rules and middle England doesn't care to rub shoulders with beatnik metrosexuals whilst escorting their k...

The difficulty of writing about a subject close to your heart is how to adequately express the wealth of memories and emotions it invokes without parylysing the critical faculty. It's one reason that I'll probably avoid re-viewing any of my favourite films for this blog. For the main part they're bound to a particular place and time, a point in my life; indirectly they become a means of revisiting that period even though the film itself might have been made many years earlier. And for me much the same applies to comics, although it's a nebulous subject. The affair started when I was five or six years old when my mum picked up a copy of the Incredible Hulk Pocket Book - a black and white British reprint of the character's origin - at a school jumble sale. It probably wasn't the first comic I'd seen but certainly the first to grab my attention; the bold Jack Kirby visuals conjuring up a dark, strange world inhabited by a sinister brute more fearsome than ...

In 1983, at the height of the video nasties panic in the UK, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) published a list of 72 films that were deemed liable to deprave and corrupt and banned under the Obscene Publications Act. In many cases the charge was laughable and they were acquitted within a couple of years, while the vast majority are now readily available, albeit occasionally (e.g. Cannibal Holocaust) with cuts. One of the handful that remains banned is Robert Endelson's 1977 home invasion thriller Fight For Your Life . Although unquestionably a violent film it's perhaps unique amongst the blacklisted titles as having been of more concern for the prolific use of inflammatory language, namely racial slurs. The BBFC rejected it outright when it was submitted in 1981 and nobody's tried since. When I became aware of the film recently it immediately intrigued me. I've been on the receiving end of racist pejoratives myself over the years, but could the language re...

During a short interview that's included as an extra on the dvd of Pistol Opera , director Seijun Suzuki is asked what the film means to him as a director. "Such a stupid question," he retorts. "What does making this interview mean to you?" It was the influential French film journal Cahiers du Cinema that first popularised the notion a film's director should be credited as its primary creative influence in the mid fifties. Although applicable to all cinema, some of the most enthusiastic writing on the auteur theory concerned directors who had worked within an integrated studio system, in particular that of classical Hollywood. While Francois Truffaut and his Cahiers cohorts were extolling the virtues of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, at the Nikkatsu Company in Japan a young director was just beginning his career. Within a decade Seijun Suzuki had taken the helm of more than thirty B-movies for the studio, demonstrating a particular aptitude for ga...

Those of you who are British and of a certain vintage may recall a Saturday morning kids tv show that ran in the eighties called No.73 . It was a rather odd affair; a magazine programme with guests and features that took place in a house (really a studio set ) and was fronted by presenters who played its residents. I could never quite fathom what the domestic arrangement was supposed to be in the house. Comedienne Sandi Toksvig (in those days still in proud possession of a neck)  played Ethel, the homeowner and apparent matriarch, but were the other presenters supposed to be family members? It seemed a rather bohemian household and to my young mind there was something slightly unhealthy about it all. Anyway, along with Toksvig another stalwart of the show was Andrea Arnold, who played a perpetually roller-skating redhead named Dawn. After No.73 ended she turned up as a presenter on one or two other things and then dropped out of sight. In the intervening years I may have wonde...

So Day 12 and probably not for the last time I'm struggling to know exactly what to say about a film. Are these the first signs of ennui? Is my resolve beginning to crack after less than a fortnight? Stay tuned to find out. After all today's choice Arsenic and Old Lace is an an undisputed classic, isn't it? Many years ago I picked up a book by Christopher Tookey called The Critics Guide to Film . I must have spent hours perusing it, but perhaps the most notable feature a chart of the 200 highest rated movies according to film writers. The top honours in fact went to another Cary Grant vehicle, His Girl Friday , but this one was well placed. Like His Girl Friday , Arsenic and Old Lace is sometimes labelled as a screwball comedy, but although it shares the high tempo pacing, the romance element is far less significant. Grant plays a newlywed who visits the family home with his bride only to discover his elderly aunts have developed a penchant for murdering old men as a...

A few days back in reviewing Seven Green Bottles you may recall I mentioned that the school I attended in Epsom some twenty-odd years ago was mainly populated with straight, middle-class kids largely incapable of any malice or criminality. That was the way it seemed; yet watching today's film I recalled an incident that made the national headlines years after I'd left. One of my old P.E. teachers found himself on the receiving end of a series of abusive telephone calls, including death threats, from two of the boys at the school. The teacher was forced into early retirement from the stress whilst, bizarrely, the boys were for a time allowed to return. It took the intervention of the Education Secretary before their parents agreed to move them to different schools. Such stories aren't unusual these days of course and there have been far more extreme cases. A schoolteacher's life can be a grim and unrewarding one, faced with pupils who can scarcely conceal their co...

The 1970's was a strange period for Czechoslovak cinema, the one-time darling of critics and festival goers. Although the Soviet invasion of Prague in August 1968 marked the beginning of the end for the cycle of films known as the Czech New Wave, the wealth of talent creative talent nurtured during this period didn't simply disappear into the ether now that the authorities started keeping a closer eye on their activities. A few, most famously Milos Forman, defected to the West but for most it was a case of adapting to the new status quo. Perhaps unsurprisingly comedy and fantasy, always a vibrant component of the Czechoslovak film scene, assumed renewed significance as a creative outlet. Works such as bizarre time travel comedy Zítra vstanu a opařím se čajemor ('Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea') or Juraj Herz's Beauty and the Beast adaptation Panna a netvor may not have had the same subversive intent of their predecessors but still show a natio...

Okay, today's turned out to be a bit of a disaster. Originally I'd intended review the 1973 horror Ganga and Hess but after watching it this afternoon didn't feel able to reach any firm conclusions about it. It might be a masterpiece, alternatively it might be obtuse, meandering and (in some quarters) rather overrated. I need to see it again, hopefully within the next couple of weeks. So, in what's probably not going to be the last time, and because there have been calls in some quarters to do something football related, here's an undemanding little thirties murder mystery I watched by way of making amends. Or at least try. The Arsenal Stadium Mystery has acquired something of a cult reputation as one of the first football themed films and for the novelty of featuring the hugely successful 1930's Arsenal team. I must admit to having low expectations of this one; after all it's principally based around a gimmick. It's by no means a bad film, just n...