All Slights Deserved

I didn't hold particularly high hopes for today's film, The Admirable Crichton (known in the US as Paradise Lagoon , lest the poster cause any confusion). It was an arbitrary late choice and seemed likely to be a stilted fifties comedy that hadn't aged well. It certainly belongs to a different era but proved surprisingly enjoyable. An adaptation of J.M. Barrie's 1902 play, Kenneth More stars as Crichton, the resourceful butler with a impeccable sense of duty and his place in the social hierarchy. Whilst serving his master the Earl of Loam on board the Earl's luxury yacht in the Pacific, they are forced to abandon boat and become marooned on a desert island. It's swiftly evident that the Earl and his family haven't a clue how to cope for themselves and it's up to Crichton to take charge. We jump forward two years and the social order has been completely reversed. Crichton is now the top dog and incontestable alpha male, what's more the Earl and ...

It's a reflection of just how vibrant a time the late sixties were, both in the cinema and the world at large, that a film like Wild in the Streets is largely forgotten today. In fact, this tale of a rock star who becomes President actually earned an Oscar nomination for its modish editing. This represented a rare distinction for a film by AIP , a company best remembered today for Roger Corman's Poe adaptations but whose teen-centric productions had grown increasingly more stylish and 'turned on' to the counterculture as the decade continued, with work such as The Wild Angels and The Trip . Although the idea of the euphoria surrounding pop star being exploited for political ends had been explored by Peter Watkins in Privilege the previous year, that film had centred on the notion of the celebrity as a Warholian facade ripe for manipulation. Wild in the Streets offers a premise that's superficially more progressive but ultimately far more reactionary. Max ...

Like many people I like nothing more on a Friday night than to relax with a work of Russian Constructivist cinema. There's just something about rousing Soviet agit-prop that says "the weekend starts here". If you disagree well that's obviously because you're a bourgeois individualist, an anachronism destined to be swept away by the inexorable tide of communism. Strike was Sergei Eisenstein's feature debut, at the disarmingly young age of 26 he found himself spearheading the new Soviet film drive with what was meant to be the first of seven (some sources say eight) films intended to chronicle the path towards the proletariat dictatorship. The remainder of the series were never completed but the director demonstrated enough talent to be commissioned to produce the even more celebrated Battleship Potemkin later that year. Strike centres around an uprising of workers at an unspecified factory in Russia in 1903 (i.e. some years prior to the Revolution). The...

In Hollywood the truth is always inconvenient. Facts become mutable, actual persons are delineated into caricatures and around it all is erected the scaffolding of a narrative arc, implying subtexts and relationships which never existed. Take Anastasia ; inspired by the case of Anna Anderson , the mentally ill Polish woman who claimed to be Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas II that allegedly escaped death when Bolsheviks murdered the rest of the Russian royal family in 1918. Although the veracity of Anderson's story couldn't be completely dismissed until 2008, when Anastasia's remains were finally discovered, even in 1957 it had unravelled to the point of becoming laughable. But not according to the account given here, in which the amnesiac Anderson (Ingrid Bergman) is discovered by General Bounine (Yul Brynner), a former white Russian officer who has been seeking out a suitable Anastasia in order to get a slice of the £10m deposited by the Romanovs in ...

I've never been a driver but from what I understand for the majority of motorists the greatest challenges they are likely to face are negotiating traffic jams, speed cameras and adverse weather conditions. There are accidents of course and even the occasional road rage incident, but providing you have some basic common sense they seem to be few and far between. In the cinema, on the other hand, the unsuspecting traveller is never more than one wrong turning away from Hell's Highway. As with many fairy tales and folklore, mysterious strangers and the dread hand of fate are always waiting to strike and hurl characters into circumstances the like of which they never believed possible. Being a cheap and convenient setting it's long been a staple of 'B' movies; perhaps the archetypal example being the cult noir Detour (1945), in which Tom Neal's hapless piano player finds himself plunged into a surreal confluence of misfortune while hitchhiking his way to Califo...

Jean Cocteau once said of the Czech animator Jiří Trnka that "the very name conjures up childhood & poetry". Sadly to most people the Trnka's name is only likely to draw a blank expression, but in animation circles his standards of excellence once drew comparisons with Disney. The son of a plumber, Trnka first achiewed renown as a painter and childrens' illustrator and didn't begin animating until the age of 33. His earliest shorts were cell-based, but it was with stop motion, or puppet animation, that he emerged as an original voice, adapting the distinctive style of his illustrated work to the three dimensional medium. With Czechoslovakia now under Communist rule in those post-war years, animation enjoyed state patronage and a degree of creative freedom not allowed to feature films with their wider audiences. Unlike the industrialised production methods of Disney et al, Trnka worked in a small studio, personally supervising the entire process. His work i...

Another Friday night at the Gothique Society and this time a double bill of American films. Given the growing backlog of unwritten or unfinished reviews on this blog I'll have to keep it brief. First up was Curse of the Undead ; an example of a rarely spotted sub genre: the vampire western. Australian actor Michael Pate stars as Drake Robey, a mysterious gunslinger whose arrival in a small town in the Old West coincides with a spate of mysterious killings. After some misgivings he wins the support of pretty maiden Dolores Carter (Kathleen Crowley), who's inherited the family farmstead after the death of her father and recruits the stranger as a ranch hand. Robey isn't quite so well received by Dolores's beau Dan (Eric Fleming), the local preacher, who conveniently uncovers a diary that may hold the secret to the gunslinger's true nature. Given how certain facets of vampire lore had become a staple of film horror, it's notable that Curse of the Undead ret...

It's slightly unnerving when, at the start of Italian for Beginners , you see it was produced under the guidelines of Dogme 95 , the quasi avant-garde manifesto for film-making devised by renowned director Lars von Trier. Fortunately, while it presumably adheres to Dogme principles, that doesn't prevent director Lone Scherfig from telling a charming romantic comedy about misfits finding love in a small Danish town. Although the film is shot in a handheld verite style there's none of the detachment this approach can create. The story revolves around six lonely individuals, three men and three women, who all enroll to take Italian lessons at the local community centre. When their teacher rather inconveniently dies one of the group takes over his duties and they carry on. Gradually they pair off, two of the women discover they are actually long-lost sisters, and the story ends with a group trip to Venice. Although Scherfig didn't admit so at the time she'd actu...

Ever since Jack Kerouac and his cohorts first coined the term, 'Beat' has held an ambivalent status. It was derived from the slang talk of hustlers and addicts, an epithet for their abjection; but for Kerouac it also stood for 'beatitude'; a certain state of grace. As it was appropriated and commodified by the mainstream, that spiritual aspect became subordinate to the pursuit of pleasure and as mitigation for pretentious excess. The 'beatnik' was born; a subculture for the kids who dug the Bohemian coolness of jazz culture. They fancied themselves as more sophisticated than 'square' society and made sure everybody knew it. The beatnik cliche: goatee beards, shades, turtle-neck sweaters, the coffee shops where cool cats would recite jazz poetry, was ripe for parody and exploitation by the movies. In Funny Face (1957), Audrey Hepburn discovers pseudo-intellectual pretensions are no match for Fred Astaire's old school charm. A couple of years late...

When Italian neorealist director Vittorio De Sica agreed to work with David O. Selznick it was probably a disaster waiting to happen. Although the legendary producer had enjoyed great success with work such as Gone With the Wind , Selznick was also an infamous control freak, often clashing with his directors (including frequent collaborator Alfred Hitchcock) over control of the final edit. For De Sica, whose Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D. had brought world renown, one suspects the motive was mainly financial. Why else agree to shoot a film in English when you can scarcely speak a word of the language? Add to that Selznick's requirement his wife Jennifer Jones lend her attractive but insipid presence in the lead role and the term 'Faustian pact' springs to mind. Yes, Indiscretion of an American Wife is an inconsistent and disappointing slice of fifties cinema. The plot could almost be sumarised as the final station scene of Brief Encounter stretched out to (barely...

As a rule most films stick to a particular pitch or tone when telling a story. The pacing may rise or drop, there may be quirks or twists, but you can usually be fairly confident what kind of film you're watching after the first five or ten minutes. Even when the script takes a detour into the strange its usually given some kind of foreshadowing. But when the style suddenly shifts dramatically our fondest held notions of classical aesthetics are rather rudely challenged. Imagine you were watching a stirring account of the brutality of trench warfare in 1917 when an hour into the film without explanation a talking panda suddenly turns up in a time machine. You'd feel perplexed, perhaps even a little angry. Granted, if you'd heard or read about what to expect beforehand it might not be such a surprise, but that was almost how I felt when watching Yoshitaro Nomura's Castle of Sand . It's a film that moves the goal posts a couple of times during its 142 minutes and...

Those of you of a certain age may recall The Singing Ringing Tree , a bizarre childrens' fairy tale that was serialised by the BBC and shown several times during the sixties and seventies and sometimes cited as one of the scariest things ever shown on television. I was born a little to late to catch these screenings and only became aware of it several years ago, my interest piqued by the many vivid recollections people had. It's certainly a very strange production and probably best avoided if you've a penchant for hallucinogenics. Before it had been split up into episodes for broadcast purposes, The Singing Ringing Tree had actually been a feature film produced in 1957 by the mighty East German state studio DEFA. Notwithstanding the folkloric traditions of central Europe, fairy tales were the ideal means for priming kids with wholesome communist values and DEFA churned them out at a fairly prodigious rate. The year after they followed The Singing Ringing Tree with an ...

So what's the only comics adaptation ever to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture? Perhaps The Dark Knight ? Or how about the The Road to Perdition ? Both picked up nominations - even gongs - in other categories but not the big one. In fact you have to go all the way back to 1931 and a film called Skippy , based on Percy Crosby's comic strip and starring Jackie Cooper, who (at nine years-old) also became the youngest ever Best Actor nominee. No, I'd never heard of it either, but you know I'm now going to have to try and track it down. Wish me luck because it seems to be incredibly obscure. The reason I bring this up is that given the number of nominations for Best Picture was increased to ten last year, it seems mean-spirited that comedy Scott Pilgrim vs. the World didn't receive this recognition. Here's a film that's original, creatively daring and far more relevant to the world we live in today than The King's Speech . Apparently misplaced...

Although it's hard to imagine the director of such arthouse classics as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire as a Hollywood player it isn't as unlikely as you might think. Immediately after shooting his second and final collaboration with Salvador Dali, L'Age d'Or , Luis Buñuel spent six months learning about American film-making processes at MGM's studios as well as meeting the likes of Chaplin and Von Sternberg. Buñuel returned to the US again after the Spanish Civil War forced him into exile, helping produce Spanish versions of films for the international market. However it wasn't until he relocated to Mexico in 1946 that he resumed his directing career. Most of his work there over the next twenty years was in his native tongue, but he did produce his only two English films, of which Bunuel notes in his biography My Last Sigh that he was very fond. The first of these was an adaptation of Robinson Crusoe , the second wa...

It's sometimes inexplicable how certain films become completely forgotten. Unless you're a devotee of old British horror/supernatural films there's a good chance you've never heard of The Halfway House , yet this Ealing drama prefigures their more celebrated Dead of Night and one suspects its musing on our final destinies could even have influenced Powell and Pressberger's A Matter of Life and Death . Ten people of varying backgrounds are drawn to spend the weekend at a remote guest house in rural Wales. They're a cross section of British wartime society: a famous conductor who has just months to live, a feuding middle-class couple and their adolescent daughter, a retired seaman and his wife still grieving over the death of their son in conflict, a neutral Irishman and his fiancee, a deserter recently released from prison and a racketeer who's made a fortune from the war. Their hosts are the Halfway House's enigmatic innkeeper Rhys (Mervyn Johns) a...

Back in the late eighties Jonathan Ross presented a series on Channel 4 that's pretty much the only worthwhile thing he's ever done. The Incredibly Strange Film Show ran for just twelve episodes and served as an introduction to all manner of weird and wonderful cult movies; everybody from Ray Dennis Steckler to George Romero. In those pre-internet days it was all but impossible to get hold of such films and the series gave a tantalising glimpse into a forbidden world. One episode in particular which lodged in my memory featured the work of Doris Wishman; most famous of which are the two films she made starring exotic dancer Chesty Morgan. Even as a pubescent 14 year-old I remember being more appalled than turned on by Chesty's 73FF-32-36 figure. I mean, all straight men will tell you that breasts are great but for most of us there are acceptable limits. Chesty - real name Lillian Wilczkowsky - was quite simply a freak and apparently happy to let herself be defined by t...

Coincidence is a strange thing. I only read about the death of John Paul Getty III this morning and was completely ignorant that he had a small role in today's film, The State of Things , until I saw his name in the closing credits. Getty, who presumably knew director Wim Wenders through his German wife Gisela Zacher, shot the part of a troubled screenwriter not long before the overdose and stroke that left him paralysed. In truth he doesn't seem entirely compos mentis and it could be little acting was required. Fortunately there's rather more to recommend Wenders' film than that, although had I been asked to draw any conclusions after the first hour it wouldn't have been nearly so favourable. It's one of the most schizophrenic films I've ever seen but so skillfully accomplished that at the end I wished I had time to sit through it all over again. Just as Fellini had 8½ and Truffaut Day For Night , The State of Things is Wenders' film about fil...

If you follow the movies then it's familiar story. A young director has a breakthrough success and, heady with his new status, decides to follow it with something completely different. The public aren't impressed and the film bombs. Chastened by this hard lesson the director reluctantly retreats to safer ground, destined to remain working in the genre that first brought success. That was more or less what happened to George Romero when he chose to follow the flesh-eating ghouls of Night of the Living Dead with groovy love story There's Always Vanilla . Like many before and since Romero discovered that he didn't quite possess the Midas touch; and subsequently he's all but disowned the film, describing it as "a total mess". But hold on a second... didn't I mention a very similar response from Alfred Hitchcock to his Number Seventeen just the other day? Could this be another neglected gem hidden away in the depths of a renowned director's filmo...

When I heard there was a fresh adaptation of Brighton Rock my first thought, probably like many others was, "Why?". The Boulting Bothers' original is one of British cinema's sacred texts; a dark, brooding film that dared to explore territory other work from the period baulked and retains its vitality after more than sixty years. But it's ridiculous to be so precious. The original is still there regardless of whether the new rendition fails to match its standards and there's always the possibilty, however remote, it will either improve or at least bring a fresh perspective to some of the themes of Graham Greene's novel.  So, having thrown caution to the wind, I entered the cinema with two questions. First, how would Sam Riley's depiction of the vicious young gangster Pinkie compare with Dickie Attenborough's career-making portrayal? Second, how would this version choose the interpret the most sadistic ending in all of English literature? But...

A few days ago I reviewed Ozu's Late Spring , starring the legendary actress Setsuko Hara. Widely regarded in Japan as one of, if not the finest talent of her generation Hara shocked the nation when she decided to retire from the profession in her mid-forties shortly after Ozu's death, bluntly stating that she had made enough money to support herself and simply didn't care to continue. Since that time Hara has lived as a recluse and gradually a mystique has built up around her, perhaps due to the fact we romanticise the arts and can't fathom how anybody could regard acting as merely a job. But I was intrigued to discover that her life had served as partial inspiration for a feature length anime, Millenium Actress , and naturally had to seek it out. Made by anime director and cartoonist Satoshi Kon, who died last year, it explores precisely that theme of how we project biographical legend upon an artist's body of work, blurring fantasy and reality. Tachibana,...

I didn't realise while watching it that Claire Denis's Beau Travil was a loose adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd , but wasn't terribly surprised. Beneath the oblique veneer lies a nineteenth century morality tale in a military setting vaguely reminiscent of Tolstoy. The story is relocated to the present day and a regiment of French Foreign Legion troops stationed in Djibouti. Galoup (Denis Lavant), a committed but somewhat sullen staff sergeant, develops a festering jealousy towards Sentain, a popular and good looking new recruit. When Sentain is awarded a medal for bravery in the wake of a helicopter accident Galoup's hatred only grows and he begins trying to unsettle his rival. When an opportunity finally presents itself to discipline Sentain, Galoup takes it too far and destroys his own career. For long stretches very little takes place; much of the narration is told through Galoup's voiceover and the dialogue is sparse; a great deal imparted ...

This is a shrew, a small rodent of the order Soricomorpha. Despite being fairly prolific both in Europe and North America (albeit separate sub species) they're quite reclusive and I can't recall ever seeing a live one. My first awareness of these strange little creatures came through a card game called Woodland Happy Famiies, a pack of which could be found sequestered amongst the vast array of junk at my grandmother's house as a kid. I liked the pictures (by the prolific illustrator Racey Helps ) so much that years later I bought a new set for myself. Here are the Shrew Family... Okay, so they're anthropomorphic versions but still recognisably shrews; they have that distinctive snout and beady black eyes. There's really not a lot of mistaking a shrew. These, on the other hand, sure as hell ain't shrews... But they do give a fair idea of what to expect from bargain basement nadir The Killer Shrews . A film that's pretty much ensured a...

The general consensus is that Alfred Hitchcock's earlier films are something of a mixed bag. After The Lodger 's triumph in 1926 came a spell in which Hitch appeared to be finding his feet as a director, trying different genres and approaches without the elan which would later characterise his work. Some, such as boxing melodrama The Ring (1927), have received positive reappraisal in recent years and it leaves you wondering whether they've been the victim of critical prejudice towards the definitively 'Hitchcockian'. Blackmail (1929), British cinema's first sound film, is considered his next watershed but again the view is it was followed by a fallow spell before his breakthrough with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). Sandwiched roughly halfway through this period is a minor suspense called Number Seventeen , that may be the most unloved work of his entire career. Given that Hitchcock, in his conversations with Francois Truffaut, referred to the film a...