I have been blessed recently watching some fantastic movies. here is another, albeit my feelings are somewhat mixed.
GET CARTER (1971)
A 2004 Total Film magazine survey chose Get Carter as the greatest British film of all time. Let’s get something straight, for those who like an esoteric argument: Get Carter is not the greatest British film of all time. I can name at least twenty movies that are better directed and staged, better acted and better written. That isn’t to say Get Carter is a bad film – far from it, Mike Hodges debut directorial tome is excellent, with a sweeping criminal grimness that matches the nip-and-tuck of gangland London and Newcastle with the dirt-and-shovel existence of the British kitchen sink drama. Lead actor Micheal Caine knows all about those: it was Alfie, a London kitchen sink comedy-drama with pazazz, that launched him into the league of world famous actors. Five years on, Get Carter solidifies his image as a working class ‘hero’, a man of hidden emotions, fiery anger and a sense of righteous justice. Caine would continue to play similar roles throughout his career, to the point he was sometimes indefinable from one role to the next. Only his rare turns into deft comedy or serious drama stood out from the chaff.
Jack Carter is a killer. A hard man. A repulsive character. Yet Caine makes us like him. We feel for this man returning to his home town and prowling the streets of Newcastle like an avenging demon, clad in black, even to his leather gloves, barely breaking sweat even when he runs at a gallop through the Bigg Market. He treats friends, foes and lovers with equal contempt. Listen to his responses to his landlady when she’s been assaulted and then listen to his responses to the bar man, Keith, [a young Alun Armstrong], who has been beaten to pulp in the same night: they show exactly the same lack of emotion. Michael Caine’s Jack Carter is clear-headed, single-minded and couldn’t give a brass monkey about anybody else unless it benefits his own ends. He is brutal. Reconnoitring the estate of the local gangland kingpin Kinnear, an austere debut from playwright John Osbourne, Carter smacks an unsuspecting guard with a large tree branch, knocking the man cold. He kicks a car door in another heavy’s face. Stabs paedophile pornographers in the guts. Throws them off car park roofs. Let’s them drown in cars. Administers drug overdoses. His pursuit of the men and women who he considers responsible for his brother’s death – a man he has no love-lost for – is purely motivated by personal pride. “Didn’t he know Frank was my brother?” he asks one sullen victim, astonished somebody could be so stupid as to not care.
If they don’t like him in Newcastle, and they really do not, then they sure as hell don’t like Jack Carter very much in Londen either. He’s warned to stay away from “Up North.” Sid and Gerald Fletcher, his shady bosses down south have an arrangement with Kinnear to distribute his illegal porn; Carter’s cutthroat investigations start to unravel the seedy syndicate and soon he has not only Kinnear’s men on his hooves, but the Fletcher’s also. This gives rise to a scene so memorable it can only be assumed it is moments such as this which allow the film to win things like Total Film’s Best of British: a minute of high comedy as Jack escorts two hoodlums out of his dingy hotel wearing nothing but his birthday suit and a shotgun. “I hope your landlady has understanding neighbours,” quips George Sewell. Earlier, in another great scene, Carter seduces his girlfriend to orgasm over the telephone; all the while his landlady is listening, her rocking chair rocking harder and faster and more urgently, the creaks matching Anna’s off screen pants. Britt Ekland is Anna, a five minute wonder part, probably the best thing she ever did on celluloid. She gets third billing for her naked efforts. Even earlier, Carter pays a visit to shady penny arcade businessman Cliff Brumby and here the enforcer is astonished by Brumby’s incompetent homelife; he’s also surprised Brumby has never heard of Jack Carter. “You’re a big man,” he says with brutal diffidence, “but you’re out of shape. With me it’s a full time job.” Brumby, for his abuse, gets a smack on the chops, not unlike the poor guard at Kinnear’s.
Carter enjoys dishing out the punches. He even smacks his women about. Porn actress and drug fuelled whore Glenda [a brazen Geraldine Moffat] gets the rough end of his fist after an afternoon of love in her grotty flat: she’s inadvertently played Carter the skin flick which features Doreen, his doleful niece, in scenes of lesbian love and daddy rape. This sequence is probably the best in the whole film, displaying Michael Caine’s ability to interpret a character with both sympathy and power: Jack Carter, tough, no-nonsense bully that he is, cries. It is a raw and inspired moment of filmmaking and another possible reason to launch the movie from the rank of violent thriller to a first class drama-thriller. Now, we understand Jack Carter’s grief. Unable to protect his brother, who he has disowned but who knew the sod-life of Newcastle just as he did, Carter realises he can’t even protect the innocent: he has come too late and his niece has already been corrupted by the cess pit of life he also desperately wants to escape. For Carter has fanciful notions of setting up house with Anna in South America – his soon to be former colleagues know better. Jack Carter may be good with his fists, but he isn’t so hot on how his actions affect others. His supreme indifference eventually proves his own downfall and at the moment he symbolically tosses his life of violence aside, all his past misdemeanours catch up with him in a single deadly second.
Get Carter is a great film. It is incisive, violent and also extremely thoughtful in its portrait of a doomed, yet sympathetic villain. The photography is suitably bleak and occasionally dips into that docu-drama feel. Some of the editing has panache and bite, at others it is curiously flat. The jazzy music score from Roy Budd is an ace-up-the-sleeve. What Get Carter lacks, which the very best films possess, is a metaphorical sounding board, moments or a person of tranquillity where we can take stock of the impact the action is having around us. Jack Carter as a character is simply too vicious to achieve this on his own, and he’s surrounded by nothing but villains and ne’er-do-wells, so there’s barely an ounce of friendliness among them and the best get rough treatment [see above].
It will remain popular and it is certainly watchable, but Get Carter isn’t quite as ‘great’ or as nearly exceptional as some might have us believe.
An ineffectual thriller / drama from veteran Anthony Asquith. David Niven and Leslie Caron star as a mismatched couple [and a mismatched couple of stars] who find themselves caught up in a popular revolution in a fictional South American country. Pacifist Tom Jordan [Niven] fortuitously saves the life of the deposed President Rivera [David Opatoshu] and chooses to hide him in his villa. That’s unlikely enough, but Jordan and his wife next embark on a mercy mission race to the border. While travelling across country, avoiding the law, natural disasters and the angry disenchanted poor, the Jordans come to an uneasy personal understanding. Meanwhile the British foreign office, in the sturdy form of James Robertson Justice, are doing a shady deal behind their backs that will endanger them and the ailing ex-president.
Competent, but not great. The film was filmed entirely in England and mostly on studio sets – and it shows despite some decent black and white photography from veteran Robert Krasker. Writer and sometime legal whizz John Mortimer scripted the functional screenplay. He did better with next year’s The Running Man for another veteran director, Carol Reed, which shares similar themes of marital dissatisfaction.
Samuel Bronston’s Spanish epics of the sixties seem to define the Hollywood historical movie: lavish, long, loud, well cast, a broad sheet of history, a huge dose of action and a slice of tortuous romance. Even his circus movie The Magnificent Showman was big and bold, albeit misguided. El Cid ranks as one of the most enjoyable epics of the era, before the genre became subdivided into Roman epic, historical epic, wartime epic, whateveryouwant epic. Stuff like The Alamo, The Longest Day and Exodus began to impinge on and dilute a crowded market. By the time The Fall of the Roman Empire hit the cinema screens, Cleopatra with its doomed love story and gloomy politics had worn the audience’s patience – at four hours in length it was bound to – and any sword and sandal extravaganza, however well-intentioned and executed, was guaranteed to struggle. Suddenly, people wanted a lighter tone and so was ushered in the era of the epic musical. My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music and Fiddler on the Roof among them. There was still time for grandiose movies, but they became more bluster than bold. So, not only does The Fall of the Roman Empire attempt to portray the seeds of decline for the actual Roman Empire, it also enacts the seeds of decline of the Roman epic as a movie genre, revealing in its excesses, deliriousness and production difficulties the same sense of debauchery and infighting that typified Rome of the second century.
Here, Alec Guinness is a philosophical Marcus Aurelius, last of the Four Great Antonine’s, camped out on the bleak German frontier engaged in a war against the barbarian hordes he has no hope of winning. He is co-emperor with his son Commodus, who rules Rome and indulges in gladiatorial games and licentious behaviour. But Marcus prefers Stephen Boyd’s Livius, his adopted son, a soldier and a reluctant statesman who just might save the dynasty. Meanwhile, his courtiers scheme for the succession. Livius has the hots for Marcus’s daughter Lucilla, played with her usual European sensual mystery by Sophia Loren, but she’s been married off to Omar Sharif’s Armenian prince. Chaos ensues when Christopher Plummer’s petulant but powerful Commodus arrives and stakes a claim for the throne.
While history is given a passing glance – much of the truth is there, but it is hidden in the background or presented in non-chronological order – what director Anthony Mann and his writers do is conjure the sense of uncertainty surrounding the times. The failing emperor, as wise as he is, has not delivered a respectable heir. The politics surrounding Commodus’s suitability, his ascension and his eventual fall, are crystallised in a series scenes set in enormous gaudy interiors, built at Rome’s Cinecittà studios as a tax dodge. Here, Plummer’s Commodus reveals himself as both a smart politician and a forbidding despot. His command of the senate is consummate, his ironic worship of the gods beautifully macabre [smirking, he abandons his golden laurel wreath at the marble feet of Jupiter – just who is more powerful now?] his cruelty unfettered, his vanity unrestrained [Rome is renamed City of Commodus and the emperor declared a god; this actually happened]. The film touches on all the same elements of Commodus’s story covered in Ridley Scott’s far more boisterous Gladiator. While that film was about obsessive revenge, this one is about peace, justice and cultural understanding. There may be legions battling each other across snow driven plains, gladiator combats and internecine murders, but the film is really about how the politicians, philosophers and businessmen failed the Roman state, obsessed more with their wealth, position and opportunity than with the preservation of the empire’s borders and the assimilation of all cultures and nations throughout the realm. Livius and Lucilla, characters of fiction and fact, are virtual pawns on everyone else’s chessboards.
The film looks marvellous. Bronston ordered up the biggest outdoor set ever for his recreation of the Roman Forum. The original script never once went to the forum and scenes were hastily rewritten to accommodate the enormous exteriors and justify the million-dollar spend. The Roman fort guarding a wintery Germany is equally spectacular, set on a mountain escarpment overlooking a pine forested valley. Costumes super. Interiors daubed in crimsons and golds and magnificence. Photography better than fine; Robert Krasker comes up trumps again. Dimitri Tiomkin’s score is one of his best non-western efforts, hinting at a choral edge but never giving in to the temptation. It is less ‘trumpet voluntary’ than most of the era. The editing is crisp and efficient. Anthony Mann keeps the direction fluid, although it is never particularly interesting [these kind of films never are, the need for spectacle dwarfs the intimate or innovative]. Even the acting is good, although Boyd and Loren are not convincing lovers. Alec Guinness and Christopher Plummer as two halves of a psychologist’s plum are both superb. Anthony Quayle shines in a small role as a gladiator. Mel Ferrer is good too as the blind advisor Cleandor, based on a real person. It is perhaps the lack of female characters that disappoints; Commodus appears to have a wife or mistress, but she is seen and not heard. Writers Ben Barzman, Basilo Franchina and Philip Yordan never find time for the courtly intrigues of the female of the species and the movie remains one of testosterone and blistering male pugilism.
It is rather good, in its overblown way, and you’re never bored, even during the silly bits Mann manages to stop us from sniggering. The climax is a bacchanalian orgy in the huge forum and a staged fight to the death in front of burning barbarians. Good stuff all round by then and the film has covered the gist of Commodus’s reign in a condensed and brutal fashion, action highlights being more important than thoughtful reflection, although we get that too. As usual, it is all a little simplistic, but the swaying-and-side-changing of the protagonists rings very true and you can forgive anyone for siding with a delectable schemer as beautiful as Sophia Loren.
The Fall of the Roman Empire is one of my favourites and the last of the truly epic epics of a long gone cinematic era.
A short documentary narrated by Dirk Bogarde that attempts to explain the story of Alexander Korda’s failed 1937 production of I, Claudius. Starring Charles Laughton in the title role and Merle Oberon as his wife, the nymphomaniac Messalina, and directed by Hollywood auteur Joseph Von Sternberg, I, Claudius perhaps would have been the greatest British film of its era. Korda challenged his designers to come up with a series of opulent sets and costumes to glorify the decadence of ancient Rome. His scriptwriters bastardised Robert Graves’s novel to fit the standard two-hour runtime. His actors both hated and loved the film; Laughton in particular could not get into character – although you remain fascinated as to why he thought that as the footage reveals a consummate and quite startling performance. Emlyn Williams too is excellent as Caligula. So where did it all go wrong? A car accident damaged Merle Oberon’s face and while the injuries would heal, Korda could not afford to wait for her return. He was not prepared to recast and reshoot either, as Oberon was his ‘banker’ Hollywood star. So what might have been a stupendous Roman epic, simply never was and there are only memories remaining and a few minutes of amazing footage which, despite a tad too much standing around by subsidiary characters, indeed looks vital and compelling.
This BBC documentary was shown theatrically in some countries, including the USA, where its legacy was virtually unknown. The Beeb themselves would venture into Von Sternberg and Korda’s shoes themselves in 1976 with the brilliant ten part adaptation starring Derek Jacobi, John Hurt, Brian Blessed, Christopher Biggins and Sian Philips.
Ex-convict and professional jewel thief Frank yearns for only one thing.
A life away from crime, with a loving wife and child.
After a major diamond heist goes awry, Frank finds himself ensnared by the local mafia.
Crime boss Leo convinces Frank that one big score for his outfit will set him up for life.
Things as always...don't go according to plan.
Directed by Micheal Mann and starring James Caan as the iconic thief, this electrifying crime drama with its brilliant acting, cold realism and expert film-making, is bound to impress.
High production values can’t save a turgid script that veers between three-handed romance, disaster epic, cheery musical and modern western, dealing as it does with professional gamblers, laconic cowhands and dodgy dealings at city hall. Ann Dvorak had been a success in the pre-code Hollywood of the early 30s and big things were expected of her, but she broke contract to elope and get married and had difficulty reigniting her career. By 1945 she was signed to Republic and feted as a star, but her qualities are delicate in performance and her vocal mannerisms are indistinct. While attractive she clearly is not a star; against John Wayne’s robustness she retreats into an obvious wall-flower. Joseph Schildkraut’s nasty businessman, to whom her character professes love only to be spurned, is even more remote, seeming to hold one facial expression and one tone of unerringly settled voice throughout the whole movie. The story, for what it’s worth, concerns Wayne’s Duke Fergus [yes, ‘Duke’ – is that the first time he used his nickname on film? Was it an in-joke?]. He visits San Francisco and loses all his cash to unscrupulous gambler Tito Morell [Schildkraut] but gains pretty musical hall star Flaxen Tarry [Dvorak] who advertises her show as ‘The Flame of the Barbary Coast’. Duke Fergus teams up with a few likeminded locals and opens a rival casino, only to lose all once more in the 1906 earthquake – but can he keep his love? No surprises anywhere. The saloon songs add a semblance of class but get in the way of a story that was floundering from the off. It’s a filler for sure and worth a look, but is one of the lesser of umpteen likeable, aspirational but slip-shoddy movies Wayne made for Republic in the 40s.
A grim seasonal offering from the pen of Emma Thompson, who ought to stick to acting, and a chummy performance of Emilia Clarke. She plays Katerina, a shop assistant at a cheesy Chinese Santa store, who is having a twenty-something-life-crisis and meets charming, but elusive Tom whose good nature helps her reassess her life. The film touches on too many themes to be entirely successful – a Brexit subplot of no consequence should have been written out and only serves to highlight Katerina’s familial origins – as played by Thompson et al you have no sympathy for these appalling Croatians so there is very little point to the subtext. Not even the damaged heroine can raise our festive sympathies. The film is basically a comedy of embarrassment from start to finish and it is, frankly, embarrassing. Oh, and the soundtrack features 14 George Micheal songs, including one previously unreleased track, which was the only reason I watched it.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 27,912Chief of Staff
Conclave.
A throughly enjoyable film from the pen of Robert Harris…starring Ralf Fiennes - really solid performances from Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow & Sergio Castellitto as well…
Fiennes plays Cardinal Lawrence who is tasked with running the selection of a new Pope…far more political than you’d expect, with other Cardinals jockeying for position and trying to find secrets other cardinals are trying to hide…
Well acted, well directed and with a decent soundtrack…recommended 🍸
It's gonna get Oscar noms for Picture, Director, Actor (Fiennes), and Supporting Actress (Rosselini). I would not be surprised if Tucci, Lithgow, or some of the others get a Supporting Actor nom as well. Probably costumes and a few other tech awards.
And, crazy as it seems, I think it has a great chance at Picture and Actor. It's a bit of an 'Oscar bait' film and could be seen as a safe choice, ala THE KING'S SPEECH.
Talking Pictures TV likes to show this Agatha Christie story, though as often as not it will be the other versions which have James Bond links- the one done 20 years later, in black and white still, with Goldfinger's Shirley Eaton as the love interest and relocated to a snowy Alpine castle accessible by cable car, a bit Piz Gloria, and the other one almost 10 years later with Oliver Reed as a charmless lead and Bond stars Gert Frobe, Adolphi Celi and another one I think, relocated to a Middle Eastern desert accessible only by helicopter.
This one is my favourite, it is shot in eerie black and white, almost Hitchockian. It's fun to spot some of the names - Diana Rigg lookalike June Duprez was the romantic lead in The Four Feathers and The Thief of Baghdad, there's the woman who played Mrs Danvers in Hitchcock's Rebecca, C Aubrey Smith - wasn't he in The Four Feathers too? and the Russian actor who popped up in Hellzapoppin. Louis Hayward, an overlooked star, is there too - he was the private eye in Farewell My Lovely, oh I don't know, my brain isn't working, the character Bogart played. And one minor character, the butler's wife, was the voice of the dog Princess in Disney's 101 Dalmations.
I wouldn't say the characters were fleshed out too much and they should have realised perhaps that each time any of them confesses to the crimes outlined in the vinyl record presented and played to them upon their arrival, it is their turn to die - so should have simply not confessed. The two who turn out to be innocent would have done better to make a thing out of that from the start, and their explanations are a bit vague in this one. This is the version I saw the first time round, so it delivered the twist for me - but at any rate this must be in the top 5 of filmed Christie whodunnits along with Witness for the Prosecution, Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, possibly chuck in Evil Under The Sun too.
It just occured to me that there's scene in the movie where Sønsteby and a member of his group are waiting for a target for assassination, and they're playing cards. I wonder if that's a reference to DN and Bond waiting for professor Dent?
A well regarded box office success for Merchant-Ivory Productions with an award winning screenplay from author Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, A Room With A View is starting to show its age a little in its dreary interiors and closeted English surroundings. Even the summers do not appear to shine in this film’s version of Dorking, Surrey. Italy meanwhile looks ravishing and Tony Pierce Roberts’s photography is grandly eloquent of the historical and sensual nature of the Tuscan countryside. Florence and the Arno are indeed hard to make dreary. There is a particularly effective crane shot of the Piazza del Duomo, leaving E.M. Forster’s heroine Lucy Honeychurch to wander through thinning crowds before we close-cut to a vivid brawling street scuffle between two local braggarts, the beginnings of which we see in the earlier shot. Otherwise, the film is rather static, which surprises me as my memory of it – I haven’t seen the film since 1985 – was of broad sweeping views of Italian locations and Home Counties gardens. There is much to-ing and fro-ing on Hanson cabs, bicycles, carriages and trains, but nobody moves a muscle, frozen it seems by the screenplay that plays on words rather than actions in the manner of the book.
Some of Forster’s characters are intensely annoying in this presentation, chief among them being Freddie Honeychurch, Lucy’s boisterous brother, and old Mr Emerson [Denholm Eliot] who looks incompetently untidy and spouts the humanist non-conformist bumph that peppered the novel. Julian Sands is insufferably intense as his lovesick, impulsive son. Thank goodness then for Helena Bonham Carter in a star making role as the delicate and delicately confused Lucy and Daniel Day Lewis as her pompous fiancé Cecil Vyes. Lewis in particular has clearly studied the novel’s descriptions and is an absolute spit for Forster’s priggish literary creation. Two soon-to-be dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench and the reliable Simon Callow show that great stage craft is easily transferrable onto the screen. Their supporting roles add depth where it might have been inconsequentially shallow.
The film has a romantic heart, but it feels contrived, unlike the novel where the resolution is more organic. Good music, fore-fronted by Puccini, and excellent production values. It isn’t as funny or well-observed as the novel because so much of the wit has been erased in favour of story; the class divide isn’t so well presented while the miscommunications seem trival at best. Certainly an enjoyable two hours, whose success probably stemmed from the Chariots of Fire effect as opposed to its own merits, good as they are. James Ivory and Ismael Merchant had made and would make much better films also. One has the feeling the BBC might have done it better.
Comments
I have been blessed recently watching some fantastic movies. here is another, albeit my feelings are somewhat mixed.
GET CARTER (1971)
A 2004 Total Film magazine survey chose Get Carter as the greatest British film of all time. Let’s get something straight, for those who like an esoteric argument: Get Carter is not the greatest British film of all time. I can name at least twenty movies that are better directed and staged, better acted and better written. That isn’t to say Get Carter is a bad film – far from it, Mike Hodges debut directorial tome is excellent, with a sweeping criminal grimness that matches the nip-and-tuck of gangland London and Newcastle with the dirt-and-shovel existence of the British kitchen sink drama. Lead actor Micheal Caine knows all about those: it was Alfie, a London kitchen sink comedy-drama with pazazz, that launched him into the league of world famous actors. Five years on, Get Carter solidifies his image as a working class ‘hero’, a man of hidden emotions, fiery anger and a sense of righteous justice. Caine would continue to play similar roles throughout his career, to the point he was sometimes indefinable from one role to the next. Only his rare turns into deft comedy or serious drama stood out from the chaff.
Jack Carter is a killer. A hard man. A repulsive character. Yet Caine makes us like him. We feel for this man returning to his home town and prowling the streets of Newcastle like an avenging demon, clad in black, even to his leather gloves, barely breaking sweat even when he runs at a gallop through the Bigg Market. He treats friends, foes and lovers with equal contempt. Listen to his responses to his landlady when she’s been assaulted and then listen to his responses to the bar man, Keith, [a young Alun Armstrong], who has been beaten to pulp in the same night: they show exactly the same lack of emotion. Michael Caine’s Jack Carter is clear-headed, single-minded and couldn’t give a brass monkey about anybody else unless it benefits his own ends. He is brutal. Reconnoitring the estate of the local gangland kingpin Kinnear, an austere debut from playwright John Osbourne, Carter smacks an unsuspecting guard with a large tree branch, knocking the man cold. He kicks a car door in another heavy’s face. Stabs paedophile pornographers in the guts. Throws them off car park roofs. Let’s them drown in cars. Administers drug overdoses. His pursuit of the men and women who he considers responsible for his brother’s death – a man he has no love-lost for – is purely motivated by personal pride. “Didn’t he know Frank was my brother?” he asks one sullen victim, astonished somebody could be so stupid as to not care.
If they don’t like him in Newcastle, and they really do not, then they sure as hell don’t like Jack Carter very much in Londen either. He’s warned to stay away from “Up North.” Sid and Gerald Fletcher, his shady bosses down south have an arrangement with Kinnear to distribute his illegal porn; Carter’s cutthroat investigations start to unravel the seedy syndicate and soon he has not only Kinnear’s men on his hooves, but the Fletcher’s also. This gives rise to a scene so memorable it can only be assumed it is moments such as this which allow the film to win things like Total Film’s Best of British: a minute of high comedy as Jack escorts two hoodlums out of his dingy hotel wearing nothing but his birthday suit and a shotgun. “I hope your landlady has understanding neighbours,” quips George Sewell. Earlier, in another great scene, Carter seduces his girlfriend to orgasm over the telephone; all the while his landlady is listening, her rocking chair rocking harder and faster and more urgently, the creaks matching Anna’s off screen pants. Britt Ekland is Anna, a five minute wonder part, probably the best thing she ever did on celluloid. She gets third billing for her naked efforts. Even earlier, Carter pays a visit to shady penny arcade businessman Cliff Brumby and here the enforcer is astonished by Brumby’s incompetent homelife; he’s also surprised Brumby has never heard of Jack Carter. “You’re a big man,” he says with brutal diffidence, “but you’re out of shape. With me it’s a full time job.” Brumby, for his abuse, gets a smack on the chops, not unlike the poor guard at Kinnear’s.
Carter enjoys dishing out the punches. He even smacks his women about. Porn actress and drug fuelled whore Glenda [a brazen Geraldine Moffat] gets the rough end of his fist after an afternoon of love in her grotty flat: she’s inadvertently played Carter the skin flick which features Doreen, his doleful niece, in scenes of lesbian love and daddy rape. This sequence is probably the best in the whole film, displaying Michael Caine’s ability to interpret a character with both sympathy and power: Jack Carter, tough, no-nonsense bully that he is, cries. It is a raw and inspired moment of filmmaking and another possible reason to launch the movie from the rank of violent thriller to a first class drama-thriller. Now, we understand Jack Carter’s grief. Unable to protect his brother, who he has disowned but who knew the sod-life of Newcastle just as he did, Carter realises he can’t even protect the innocent: he has come too late and his niece has already been corrupted by the cess pit of life he also desperately wants to escape. For Carter has fanciful notions of setting up house with Anna in South America – his soon to be former colleagues know better. Jack Carter may be good with his fists, but he isn’t so hot on how his actions affect others. His supreme indifference eventually proves his own downfall and at the moment he symbolically tosses his life of violence aside, all his past misdemeanours catch up with him in a single deadly second.
Get Carter is a great film. It is incisive, violent and also extremely thoughtful in its portrait of a doomed, yet sympathetic villain. The photography is suitably bleak and occasionally dips into that docu-drama feel. Some of the editing has panache and bite, at others it is curiously flat. The jazzy music score from Roy Budd is an ace-up-the-sleeve. What Get Carter lacks, which the very best films possess, is a metaphorical sounding board, moments or a person of tranquillity where we can take stock of the impact the action is having around us. Jack Carter as a character is simply too vicious to achieve this on his own, and he’s surrounded by nothing but villains and ne’er-do-wells, so there’s barely an ounce of friendliness among them and the best get rough treatment [see above].
It will remain popular and it is certainly watchable, but Get Carter isn’t quite as ‘great’ or as nearly exceptional as some might have us believe.
GUNS OF DARKNESS (1962)
An ineffectual thriller / drama from veteran Anthony Asquith. David Niven and Leslie Caron star as a mismatched couple [and a mismatched couple of stars] who find themselves caught up in a popular revolution in a fictional South American country. Pacifist Tom Jordan [Niven] fortuitously saves the life of the deposed President Rivera [David Opatoshu] and chooses to hide him in his villa. That’s unlikely enough, but Jordan and his wife next embark on a mercy mission race to the border. While travelling across country, avoiding the law, natural disasters and the angry disenchanted poor, the Jordans come to an uneasy personal understanding. Meanwhile the British foreign office, in the sturdy form of James Robertson Justice, are doing a shady deal behind their backs that will endanger them and the ailing ex-president.
Competent, but not great. The film was filmed entirely in England and mostly on studio sets – and it shows despite some decent black and white photography from veteran Robert Krasker. Writer and sometime legal whizz John Mortimer scripted the functional screenplay. He did better with next year’s The Running Man for another veteran director, Carol Reed, which shares similar themes of marital dissatisfaction.
THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (1964)
Samuel Bronston’s Spanish epics of the sixties seem to define the Hollywood historical movie: lavish, long, loud, well cast, a broad sheet of history, a huge dose of action and a slice of tortuous romance. Even his circus movie The Magnificent Showman was big and bold, albeit misguided. El Cid ranks as one of the most enjoyable epics of the era, before the genre became subdivided into Roman epic, historical epic, wartime epic, whateveryouwant epic. Stuff like The Alamo, The Longest Day and Exodus began to impinge on and dilute a crowded market. By the time The Fall of the Roman Empire hit the cinema screens, Cleopatra with its doomed love story and gloomy politics had worn the audience’s patience – at four hours in length it was bound to – and any sword and sandal extravaganza, however well-intentioned and executed, was guaranteed to struggle. Suddenly, people wanted a lighter tone and so was ushered in the era of the epic musical. My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music and Fiddler on the Roof among them. There was still time for grandiose movies, but they became more bluster than bold. So, not only does The Fall of the Roman Empire attempt to portray the seeds of decline for the actual Roman Empire, it also enacts the seeds of decline of the Roman epic as a movie genre, revealing in its excesses, deliriousness and production difficulties the same sense of debauchery and infighting that typified Rome of the second century.
Here, Alec Guinness is a philosophical Marcus Aurelius, last of the Four Great Antonine’s, camped out on the bleak German frontier engaged in a war against the barbarian hordes he has no hope of winning. He is co-emperor with his son Commodus, who rules Rome and indulges in gladiatorial games and licentious behaviour. But Marcus prefers Stephen Boyd’s Livius, his adopted son, a soldier and a reluctant statesman who just might save the dynasty. Meanwhile, his courtiers scheme for the succession. Livius has the hots for Marcus’s daughter Lucilla, played with her usual European sensual mystery by Sophia Loren, but she’s been married off to Omar Sharif’s Armenian prince. Chaos ensues when Christopher Plummer’s petulant but powerful Commodus arrives and stakes a claim for the throne.
While history is given a passing glance – much of the truth is there, but it is hidden in the background or presented in non-chronological order – what director Anthony Mann and his writers do is conjure the sense of uncertainty surrounding the times. The failing emperor, as wise as he is, has not delivered a respectable heir. The politics surrounding Commodus’s suitability, his ascension and his eventual fall, are crystallised in a series scenes set in enormous gaudy interiors, built at Rome’s Cinecittà studios as a tax dodge. Here, Plummer’s Commodus reveals himself as both a smart politician and a forbidding despot. His command of the senate is consummate, his ironic worship of the gods beautifully macabre [smirking, he abandons his golden laurel wreath at the marble feet of Jupiter – just who is more powerful now?] his cruelty unfettered, his vanity unrestrained [Rome is renamed City of Commodus and the emperor declared a god; this actually happened]. The film touches on all the same elements of Commodus’s story covered in Ridley Scott’s far more boisterous Gladiator. While that film was about obsessive revenge, this one is about peace, justice and cultural understanding. There may be legions battling each other across snow driven plains, gladiator combats and internecine murders, but the film is really about how the politicians, philosophers and businessmen failed the Roman state, obsessed more with their wealth, position and opportunity than with the preservation of the empire’s borders and the assimilation of all cultures and nations throughout the realm. Livius and Lucilla, characters of fiction and fact, are virtual pawns on everyone else’s chessboards.
The film looks marvellous. Bronston ordered up the biggest outdoor set ever for his recreation of the Roman Forum. The original script never once went to the forum and scenes were hastily rewritten to accommodate the enormous exteriors and justify the million-dollar spend. The Roman fort guarding a wintery Germany is equally spectacular, set on a mountain escarpment overlooking a pine forested valley. Costumes super. Interiors daubed in crimsons and golds and magnificence. Photography better than fine; Robert Krasker comes up trumps again. Dimitri Tiomkin’s score is one of his best non-western efforts, hinting at a choral edge but never giving in to the temptation. It is less ‘trumpet voluntary’ than most of the era. The editing is crisp and efficient. Anthony Mann keeps the direction fluid, although it is never particularly interesting [these kind of films never are, the need for spectacle dwarfs the intimate or innovative]. Even the acting is good, although Boyd and Loren are not convincing lovers. Alec Guinness and Christopher Plummer as two halves of a psychologist’s plum are both superb. Anthony Quayle shines in a small role as a gladiator. Mel Ferrer is good too as the blind advisor Cleandor, based on a real person. It is perhaps the lack of female characters that disappoints; Commodus appears to have a wife or mistress, but she is seen and not heard. Writers Ben Barzman, Basilo Franchina and Philip Yordan never find time for the courtly intrigues of the female of the species and the movie remains one of testosterone and blistering male pugilism.
It is rather good, in its overblown way, and you’re never bored, even during the silly bits Mann manages to stop us from sniggering. The climax is a bacchanalian orgy in the huge forum and a staged fight to the death in front of burning barbarians. Good stuff all round by then and the film has covered the gist of Commodus’s reign in a condensed and brutal fashion, action highlights being more important than thoughtful reflection, although we get that too. As usual, it is all a little simplistic, but the swaying-and-side-changing of the protagonists rings very true and you can forgive anyone for siding with a delectable schemer as beautiful as Sophia Loren.
The Fall of the Roman Empire is one of my favourites and the last of the truly epic epics of a long gone cinematic era.
THE EPIC THAT NEVER WAS (1967)
A short documentary narrated by Dirk Bogarde that attempts to explain the story of Alexander Korda’s failed 1937 production of I, Claudius. Starring Charles Laughton in the title role and Merle Oberon as his wife, the nymphomaniac Messalina, and directed by Hollywood auteur Joseph Von Sternberg, I, Claudius perhaps would have been the greatest British film of its era. Korda challenged his designers to come up with a series of opulent sets and costumes to glorify the decadence of ancient Rome. His scriptwriters bastardised Robert Graves’s novel to fit the standard two-hour runtime. His actors both hated and loved the film; Laughton in particular could not get into character – although you remain fascinated as to why he thought that as the footage reveals a consummate and quite startling performance. Emlyn Williams too is excellent as Caligula. So where did it all go wrong? A car accident damaged Merle Oberon’s face and while the injuries would heal, Korda could not afford to wait for her return. He was not prepared to recast and reshoot either, as Oberon was his ‘banker’ Hollywood star. So what might have been a stupendous Roman epic, simply never was and there are only memories remaining and a few minutes of amazing footage which, despite a tad too much standing around by subsidiary characters, indeed looks vital and compelling.
This BBC documentary was shown theatrically in some countries, including the USA, where its legacy was virtually unknown. The Beeb themselves would venture into Von Sternberg and Korda’s shoes themselves in 1976 with the brilliant ten part adaptation starring Derek Jacobi, John Hurt, Brian Blessed, Christopher Biggins and Sian Philips.
Very interesting.
THIEF (1981)
Ex-convict and professional jewel thief Frank yearns for only one thing.
A life away from crime, with a loving wife and child.
After a major diamond heist goes awry, Frank finds himself ensnared by the local mafia.
Crime boss Leo convinces Frank that one big score for his outfit will set him up for life.
Things as always...don't go according to plan.
Directed by Micheal Mann and starring James Caan as the iconic thief, this electrifying crime drama with its brilliant acting, cold realism and expert film-making, is bound to impress.
A classic.
(123 mins)
I vaguely remember seeing Thief when it came out when I was a lad
what I remember is it has a trippy soundtrack by Tangerine Dream, and Jim Belushi (Johns little brother) is in it
I should see if I can find it and watch it again
FLAME OF THE BARBARY COAST (1945)
High production values can’t save a turgid script that veers between three-handed romance, disaster epic, cheery musical and modern western, dealing as it does with professional gamblers, laconic cowhands and dodgy dealings at city hall. Ann Dvorak had been a success in the pre-code Hollywood of the early 30s and big things were expected of her, but she broke contract to elope and get married and had difficulty reigniting her career. By 1945 she was signed to Republic and feted as a star, but her qualities are delicate in performance and her vocal mannerisms are indistinct. While attractive she clearly is not a star; against John Wayne’s robustness she retreats into an obvious wall-flower. Joseph Schildkraut’s nasty businessman, to whom her character professes love only to be spurned, is even more remote, seeming to hold one facial expression and one tone of unerringly settled voice throughout the whole movie. The story, for what it’s worth, concerns Wayne’s Duke Fergus [yes, ‘Duke’ – is that the first time he used his nickname on film? Was it an in-joke?]. He visits San Francisco and loses all his cash to unscrupulous gambler Tito Morell [Schildkraut] but gains pretty musical hall star Flaxen Tarry [Dvorak] who advertises her show as ‘The Flame of the Barbary Coast’. Duke Fergus teams up with a few likeminded locals and opens a rival casino, only to lose all once more in the 1906 earthquake – but can he keep his love? No surprises anywhere. The saloon songs add a semblance of class but get in the way of a story that was floundering from the off. It’s a filler for sure and worth a look, but is one of the lesser of umpteen likeable, aspirational but slip-shoddy movies Wayne made for Republic in the 40s.
LAST CHRISTMAS (2019)
A grim seasonal offering from the pen of Emma Thompson, who ought to stick to acting, and a chummy performance of Emilia Clarke. She plays Katerina, a shop assistant at a cheesy Chinese Santa store, who is having a twenty-something-life-crisis and meets charming, but elusive Tom whose good nature helps her reassess her life. The film touches on too many themes to be entirely successful – a Brexit subplot of no consequence should have been written out and only serves to highlight Katerina’s familial origins – as played by Thompson et al you have no sympathy for these appalling Croatians so there is very little point to the subtext. Not even the damaged heroine can raise our festive sympathies. The film is basically a comedy of embarrassment from start to finish and it is, frankly, embarrassing. Oh, and the soundtrack features 14 George Micheal songs, including one previously unreleased track, which was the only reason I watched it.
Conclave.
A throughly enjoyable film from the pen of Robert Harris…starring Ralf Fiennes - really solid performances from Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow & Sergio Castellitto as well…
Fiennes plays Cardinal Lawrence who is tasked with running the selection of a new Pope…far more political than you’d expect, with other Cardinals jockeying for position and trying to find secrets other cardinals are trying to hide…
Well acted, well directed and with a decent soundtrack…recommended 🍸
It's gonna get Oscar noms for Picture, Director, Actor (Fiennes), and Supporting Actress (Rosselini). I would not be surprised if Tucci, Lithgow, or some of the others get a Supporting Actor nom as well. Probably costumes and a few other tech awards.
And, crazy as it seems, I think it has a great chance at Picture and Actor. It's a bit of an 'Oscar bait' film and could be seen as a safe choice, ala THE KING'S SPEECH.
And Then There Were None (1945)
Talking Pictures TV likes to show this Agatha Christie story, though as often as not it will be the other versions which have James Bond links- the one done 20 years later, in black and white still, with Goldfinger's Shirley Eaton as the love interest and relocated to a snowy Alpine castle accessible by cable car, a bit Piz Gloria, and the other one almost 10 years later with Oliver Reed as a charmless lead and Bond stars Gert Frobe, Adolphi Celi and another one I think, relocated to a Middle Eastern desert accessible only by helicopter.
This one is my favourite, it is shot in eerie black and white, almost Hitchockian. It's fun to spot some of the names - Diana Rigg lookalike June Duprez was the romantic lead in The Four Feathers and The Thief of Baghdad, there's the woman who played Mrs Danvers in Hitchcock's Rebecca, C Aubrey Smith - wasn't he in The Four Feathers too? and the Russian actor who popped up in Hellzapoppin. Louis Hayward, an overlooked star, is there too - he was the private eye in Farewell My Lovely, oh I don't know, my brain isn't working, the character Bogart played. And one minor character, the butler's wife, was the voice of the dog Princess in Disney's 101 Dalmations.
I wouldn't say the characters were fleshed out too much and they should have realised perhaps that each time any of them confesses to the crimes outlined in the vinyl record presented and played to them upon their arrival, it is their turn to die - so should have simply not confessed. The two who turn out to be innocent would have done better to make a thing out of that from the start, and their explanations are a bit vague in this one. This is the version I saw the first time round, so it delivered the twist for me - but at any rate this must be in the top 5 of filmed Christie whodunnits along with Witness for the Prosecution, Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, possibly chuck in Evil Under The Sun too.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
It just occured to me that there's scene in the movie where Sønsteby and a member of his group are waiting for a target for assassination, and they're playing cards. I wonder if that's a reference to DN and Bond waiting for professor Dent?
Saw I, Robot again. It's still good.
Afterwards, for a change of pace:
A ROOM WITH A VIEW (1985)
A well regarded box office success for Merchant-Ivory Productions with an award winning screenplay from author Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, A Room With A View is starting to show its age a little in its dreary interiors and closeted English surroundings. Even the summers do not appear to shine in this film’s version of Dorking, Surrey. Italy meanwhile looks ravishing and Tony Pierce Roberts’s photography is grandly eloquent of the historical and sensual nature of the Tuscan countryside. Florence and the Arno are indeed hard to make dreary. There is a particularly effective crane shot of the Piazza del Duomo, leaving E.M. Forster’s heroine Lucy Honeychurch to wander through thinning crowds before we close-cut to a vivid brawling street scuffle between two local braggarts, the beginnings of which we see in the earlier shot. Otherwise, the film is rather static, which surprises me as my memory of it – I haven’t seen the film since 1985 – was of broad sweeping views of Italian locations and Home Counties gardens. There is much to-ing and fro-ing on Hanson cabs, bicycles, carriages and trains, but nobody moves a muscle, frozen it seems by the screenplay that plays on words rather than actions in the manner of the book.
Some of Forster’s characters are intensely annoying in this presentation, chief among them being Freddie Honeychurch, Lucy’s boisterous brother, and old Mr Emerson [Denholm Eliot] who looks incompetently untidy and spouts the humanist non-conformist bumph that peppered the novel. Julian Sands is insufferably intense as his lovesick, impulsive son. Thank goodness then for Helena Bonham Carter in a star making role as the delicate and delicately confused Lucy and Daniel Day Lewis as her pompous fiancé Cecil Vyes. Lewis in particular has clearly studied the novel’s descriptions and is an absolute spit for Forster’s priggish literary creation. Two soon-to-be dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench and the reliable Simon Callow show that great stage craft is easily transferrable onto the screen. Their supporting roles add depth where it might have been inconsequentially shallow.
The film has a romantic heart, but it feels contrived, unlike the novel where the resolution is more organic. Good music, fore-fronted by Puccini, and excellent production values. It isn’t as funny or well-observed as the novel because so much of the wit has been erased in favour of story; the class divide isn’t so well presented while the miscommunications seem trival at best. Certainly an enjoyable two hours, whose success probably stemmed from the Chariots of Fire effect as opposed to its own merits, good as they are. James Ivory and Ismael Merchant had made and would make much better films also. One has the feeling the BBC might have done it better.