Your right about Debbie Reynolds. Seems an odd decision given she can sing very well. Same with Audrey Hepburn in MFL, which is an even more peculiar irony. I think Debbie Reynolds was dubbed only when she sang solo. In group numbers it is her voice. But I may be wrong on this.
The flu thing is movie making myth, isn't it?
Regards Don Lockwood being down in the dumps, he is considering his career because of the home-truths Kathy has told him, but he's also seeking her out as he has developed an affection for her. Its not entirely clear from the action, only when Cosmo says something like "Is this about that Kathy girl? Pity she lost her job at the Coconut Grove." Which is why I believe we needed the extra song.
The extra song may have slowed down a movie that was taking its time to get going by your account. Also it sounds like the same kind of thing Kelly does with his actual Singing in the Rain scene, so it might have undermined that impact. Similar to when Jaws got released, the big fright in the film was the dead head popping out of the boat but not one featuring the actual shark. In some early previews, they showed the film without that scene - and the first big sighting of Bruce himself got the biggest shock, but when they showed it with the bobbing head, that scene itself provoked less of a jump.
Don't know if the flu thing was a myth.
I associate SITR with bloated Christmas Day dinners and stress and it also feels like a stressful film somehow so it's not a musical classic I enjoy as much as I feel I ought, mainly for the reasons you have pointed out in your fine review.
I finally had enough free time to go out and see BLACK ADAM. RottenTomatoes couldn't be more divided, with a 40% positive rating from critics, but an 89% rating from fans. I guess I'd lean closer to the fans' reaction. I had a good time, though while watching it I felt like I'd seen a lot of it before (the female lead owes a lot to Lara Croft, the ancient Mideast culture seems "inspired" by Wakanda, etc.). This said, I appreciate DC's efforts to be the "anti-Marvel," centering the film around a superhero who ain't all that nice; and I like that some lesser-known characters in the DC canon got their chance to shine. Which brings up Pierce Brosnan as Dr. Fate--he was just splendid, bringing detached irony to the role and giving the highjinks a bit of gravitas. So. . .a cautious recommendation. There are worse ways to spend your time.
I’d seen it before (no, I wasn’t at the premiere) but that was a shortened version in the 1980s. This one was as full length as we’re going to get, incorporating footage from an almost complete (though damaged) cut found in Argentina in 2008.
I think it’s pretty pointless to go over the plot- everything is allegorical anyway- so I’ll just comment that
(1) The effects are damn good for a movie almost 100 years old
(2) The acting is typical for silent movies, with the male lead being especially… expressive. I forget his name, but the female lead Brigitte Helm is far better. You may not know her name, but you’ve seen her before-
She plays the good Maria (see what I mean about allegory?), the robot above, plus an evil version of Maria which is the robot in disguise and succeeds in making the good and evil Marias distinct from each other.
(3) The film quality obviously varies but once you’re caught up in the story that doesn’t matter much. Sometimes no film was available so a title card explains what we should be seeing though this doesn’t happen very often.
BIG TAMWrexham, North Wales, UK.Posts: 773MI6 Agent
An interesting bit of trivia re. SINGIN' IN THE RAIN: Jean Hagen who plays diva starlet Lina Lamont not only does her own ditzy voice but also dubs Debbie Reynolds as the voice used to replace Lamont's inadequate vocals. Such was Hagen's linguistic versatility!
Sentimental rubbish from Nora Ephron about a widower whose kid sets him up with the long-distance listener of a radio phone-in show. Phenomenally popular, but jammed full of the obvious cliches and expected stereotypes from the opening scene. Tom Hanks proves he’s no one’s idea of a romantic lead. He mumbles most of his lines and does that stupid ‘hang-dog’ face when called upon to be emotionally wrought. He just looks vacant. His son seems to have escaped from a dud version of The Parent Trap. Meg Ryan plays a stalker. If the roles had been reversed, audiences would have cheered for his arrest, but because she’s a woman on the verge of an unsuitable marriage we’re supposed to think her behaviour is cute. The premise is utterly stupid and its overtly sentimental ending deliberately recalls an old Cary Grant film that hardly anyone the age of the protagonists had even heard of in 1993, let alone seen. [It’s An Affair to Remember, if you’re interested, and to this day I don’t know a single person who has admitted to watching it.] There’s a soundtrack full of old-time classic hits from the likes of Nat King Cole. The whole escapade tries desperately to be a reimagining of Ephron’s winningly scripted When Harry Met Sally, but the pulse is all wrong and the heart is misplaced. Just awful.
an old Cary Grant film that hardly anyone the age of the protagonists had even heard of in 1993, let alone seen. [It’s An Affair to Remember, if you’re interested, and to this day I don’t know a single person who has admitted to watching it.]
oy! I've watched An Affair to Remember. Its Cary Grant in romantic tragedy mode rather than his usual comedy mode, apparently he did a few of those.
There are some nice shots of Seattle in the film you just watched. Tom Hanks' houseboat is real and Seattle boat tours point it out while going through the Ship Canal. maybe if thered been less of the actors and more of the geography it could have been a better film?
Humphrey Bogart was badly cast in William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours. The Broadway play had starred Paul Newman, but Newman’s name was not sufficiently box-office for Paramount, in fact he’d barely registered as an actor at all in Hollywood, the misfiring historical epic The Silver Chalice being his sole credit. Bogart re-enacts his star making turn as the psychopath Duke Mantee from 1936’s The Petrified Forest, but he’s too world weary and passive to make us believe he’s as mean as he wants to be. After his raging turn as the bastard villain of High Sierra, Bogart spent a whole decade playing flawed good guys and mischievous baddies who turn good. This role and performance doesn’t sit right with the persona he’d built up. It’s also hard to believe he and Dewey Martin are brothers; they don’t look alike and Martin is much, much younger. The physical threat provided by Martin and Robert Middleton as the half-wit killer Kobish far outweighs Bogart’s presence. He should really have been given the Fredrich March role.
March is Daniel Hilliard, a businessman whose family is held hostage by three escaped convicts. A series of believe-it-if-you-will circumstances occur which put the family in constant danger trying to keep the convicts under wraps. Director William Wyler knows how to build tension and along with photographer Lee Garmes exploits every enclosed space and deep monochrome shadow. The screenplay lacks any moral stance and is very by-the-numbers. It needed a really dynamic actor for the Bogart role and he just isn’t it.
A year earlier, Suddenly, starring Frank Sinatra, was released. It’s a similar film and although Sinatra is good in it, I kept thinking it would have made a good film for Bogart, with the socio-political stance the lead takes. Here, I kept thinking what a good character Griffin would have been for someone like Brando, Clift or James Dean – or yes, Paul Newman – those method actors who could present the character’s psychological make-up through action and reaction. Bogart, for all his gifts, needs a great screenplay to give truly great performances because he works from the outside in, if you get me.
The film’s strong at its climax. One or two moments are quite gut wrenching for 1955. Arthur Kennedy sneers his way through the supporting role as the chasing cop. He might have made a better fist of the Griffin role too. A film of missed opportunities.
One missed opportunity was to have Spencer Tracy as Hilliard. However, neither he nor Bogart was willing to take second billing so the part went to the excellent Fredric March.
If you don't know of Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc is the English version of her name) she was a peasant girl in medieval France who believed she was told by God to save her country from the English occupiers. Ingrid Bergman stars as Jeanne d'Arc in a project she campaigned hard for. Perhaps too many years, since she was i her early thirties and she plays a teenager. Bergman looks young for her age, but she isn't quite convincing as a teenager. Back in 1948 the movie got good reviews and it was nominated for several Oscars, but won none. Unfortunately for the movie there was a huge scandal with the Italian director Rossilini that pushed away many of the religious members of the public that was a target audience for the movie. Both were married to other people when started a public affair while the movie was still in theatres. Not very saintly. One can only wonder what would've happened to this movie if it wasn't for this scandal.
In my opinion this movie has perhaps Bergman's best acting ever, especially in the scenes after she is caught and stands for trial. The obvious comparison for many modern audiences is Luc Besson's movie Messenger staring Milla Jovovovic. The modern movie relies much more on action and has a good deal of humor, while the 1948 movie is very earnest. In my opinion Bergman's movie's strengths are that it focuses on the religious and psychological issues, and much because of the star's performance it often works. It's often in danger of becoming too earnest and many scenes wouldn't work in a modern movie. If that's a good or bad thing is up to the viewers.
The plot stays pretty close to history and it works well with one exception. Why are we not shown Jeanne getting caught by her enemies? Here we're just suddenly shown her being in captivity. The scene were she is caught would've been important for the plot and emotionally. The movie also suffers from being shot in California, a place completely without medieval castles. I would like it to have been shot in Europe with real locations and not just sets and painted backdrops.
Joan was technically sentenced for cross-dressing because she dressed like a man when she was with the French troops. My first reaction when Bergman had short(er) hair and was dressed like a boy was that she was completely unconvincing as a boy, but then I remembered something. She looked very much like a boy I served with during our national service! If they had the same hair style he could've been her stand-in. 😂
It’s 1861 and in glorious technicolour, Randolph Scott’s reformed cattle rustler Vance Shaw accepts a job scouting for the Western Union Telegraph Company as they install the first ever west coast telegraph line. Plenty of action ensues of the kind which made westerns familiar and popular in the 1940s. Dean Jagger plays the sole real life character, the Chief Surveyor Edward Creighton, in a movie that purports to be based on true events. It isn’t. It’s based on Zane Grey’s bestselling western novel which itself embellished the truth.
However, even he was generous enough to portray the native American Indians as peace loving and co-operative; and at this time in history, they were. The movie makers however insist on turning them into drunken figures of fun or renegade murderers. The real villains are Vance Shaw’s old rustler gang, who manipulate the Indians into doing some dirty work while pocketing oodles of Western Union cash. Shaw is caught between loyalty to his gang and love for the Chief Engineer’s sister. She is played with at too much of a modern lick by Virginia Gilmore. Historically, she wouldn’t have been present anyway as Creighton was married at the time and would surely have been accompanied by his wife.
Plenty of meaty performances in the support cast; Slim Sommerville as a cowardly cook and Chill Wills as his minder are good double act. The top billed Robert Young is bland as the Eastern city-dwelling hero. The cattle rustlers are a nasty bunch. Generally, a decent looking and well-made western drama from Fritz Lang which hops along to a rapid beat, entertains and departs with a waved stetson.
This classic black and white portmanteau horror film, which inspired Amicus Films to spawn a series of like-minded films twenty years later, is renowned for its final story of the ventriloquist’s dummy who takes over it’s master. It’s a masterpiece of paranoia directed with superb tension by Calvalanti. The portmanteau, or anthology movie, always has a wraparound story which links the following (usually 5) tales, this time it is an architect with a recurring dream who finds himself in travelling to a cottage where all the people in his dream are assembled. One by one the guests tell of their paranormal experiences - the racing driver who has a foreboding experience which saves him from a crash, a teenager who sees a ghost at a birthday party, a couple who buy a haunted mirror, two golfers who chase the same girl, and finally the aforementioned ventriloquist’s dummy story. The golfing story is played for laughs and stars Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford who are brilliant as the love-crossed middle aged men who play around of golf to decide who will win the hand of the girl they both love. The others are suitably spooky but it’s the final story that remains long in the mind.
An excellent and influential film.
9/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Part of a 'British New Wave' series on the Criterion Channel, this mid-60s film feels rather French New Wave inspired in its style at times, and I found it a pretty entertaining 90 minutes. It was directed by Richard Lester, who released A Hard Day's Night the year before, and Help! in the same year as this. Whereas Help! was brightly coloured, The Knack features stylish black and white cinematography. I particularly enjoyed Rita Tushingham in this film, and it was scattered with touches of humour which I enjoyed, as well as a cracking score by John Barry. It feels very 1965-Barry, with echoes of Thunderball which came out in the same year.
Fascinatingly odd thriller which commences like a caper film but turns out to be nothing of the sort, being more concerned with Nazi war criminals, homosexuals and dark family secrets. Michael Caine is Henry Clark a cat burglar moonlighting as an alcoholic in a Majorcan sanitorium attempting to glean snippets of information from Salinas, a rich count with jewels to be stolen to order. Henry is approached and propositioned by the delectable Fé, who is married to another thief, Moreau, an old school queer [the screenplay’s word, not mine] played with some efficiency by Eric Portman. It was his final film and he shows his acting class with a performance which requires fine breeding.
It’s fairly obvious how this menage-a-trois is going to progress so I won’t spoil the no-surprise. Henry does some digging about his newfound associates, using Leonard Rossiter’s know-it-all, and embarks on an uneasy partnership which doesn’t bear instant fruit. A tense test run robbery goes wrong and only Henry’s blind determination saves the crooks, endearing him to the delightful Fé. Moreau meanwhile is picking up beautiful young men in swanky restaurants.
These early scenes have all the funky, off-kilter glamour we now associate with hip sixties movies. There are those strange camera angles, shots delivered through windows, in extreme close up, soft focus, cross-edited, foregrounded focus, backgrounded detail, a swinging fancy dress party, swiftly edited scenes, snappy erudite and fanciful dialogue. It’s whimsical, amusing and ever-so slightly tawdry, despite the lovely Spanish scenery and gorgeous Julie Harris costumes. You can even accept the ridiculous heist, played out against and intercut with the performance of a superb orchestral suite written by John Barry, who has a cameo as the conductor. Barry’s music score, like most of his contemporary sixties' movies, has the trappings of OO7 about it. Listenable, though. Shirley Bassey sings a decent theme number. Vladek Sheybal puts in a short cameo, so that's four nods to James Bond past and future.
The second half of the movie is much less interesting and seems to want to make more cakes and eat them. The intrigue about Moreau’s Nazi past isn’t nearly as interesting as you’d demand and everyone’s motives begin to make less and less sense. It’s not any fun anymore, but then maybe serial adultery never is. Michael Caine is good – when wasn’t he in the sixties? – and Italian starlet Giovanna Ralli makes a delicious heroine. She was trying to forge an international career, but her film choices did her no favours. The movie’s directed with a good visual eye by Bryan Forbes. He placed his own wife Nanette Newman in a small role as a goodtime girl. This character [‘The Girl’] appears to be of more prominence than suggested and I think – without evidence, I admit – that an editing decision excised some of her screentime. Perhaps Desmond Cory’s original novel revealed all.
A mixed critical reception on release led Deadfall to underperform at the box-office, but it is not a failure. It’s well played, looks good and offers solid, ungainly entertainment; it’s just a little tangled in knots by the end.
Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars is not the first spaghetti western – that was Gringo (1963) from director Ricardo Blasco – nor is it the most violent. It isn’t even particularly original, given the plot is a basic relocating of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) cluttered with many traditional western sequences and characters. What it is though, and what it does, is demonstrate the ability of a filmmaker to twist the mythology of the western genre and create a sub-genre that panders specifically to a captive contemporary market. American westerns of the late fifties and early sixties had begun to believe their own history. The ideas provided by movies like Shane, the white man with his white hat righting wrongs, or The Big Country, where progress can pacify and alter a host of wrongs, are debunked in a swift, violent and fetishistic manner.
A Fistful of Dollars takes place in bandit territory near the Mexican border. Clint Eastwood’ s Joe [not a ‘man with no name’] may be the only white American on display among a cast of Latin actors, but he doesn’t dress like one: black jeans no chaps, spurs, a heavy poncho, a hat – yes, white – a smouldering cheroot, unshaven, squinting. He may be the hero, but he looks as unruly, unkempt and vicious as the men he fights. He even has the temerity to be introduced exactly how Alan Ladd’s Shane came off the prairie, from behind, slowly on horseback walking towards an isolated homestead, seeking water. This hero takes his water for free. Nobody is there to stop him or question him. He witnesses a small boy torn from its mother, the father abused by two bandits and banished into one building while she remains locked in the second. He watches. He squints. He does nothing. The lead bandit, Chico, stares at him. The man stares at the beautiful woman. What’s she doing here? the audience asks. When’s he going to intervene on the family’s behalf? The man does nothing. The only information the audience learns is this man shares his identity, his breeding, his expertise with nobody until it matters to him. There is nothing in the opening scene to concern him.
Later, when he learns who Marisol is and the situation her family is embroiled in, Joe briefly becomes the hero with a white hat. His reasoning isn’t to do with justice, or fairness if you like, or even a Biblical sense of ‘thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife’. Joe’s reasoning is entirely personal. Freeing Marisol and reuniting the family, he urges them to flee: “I knew a family like you once and there was no one to help.” The implication, an excellent cinematic example of show not tell, is he was once a crying child and his mother too was the mistress of an oppressive overseer. Recognising the situation from the first scene, and allowing the audience to recognise it also, allows the moment of clarity – that Joe’s intention was always to help Marisol and not, as we might suspect, to seduce her himself – to reveal the hidden depths of his character. Heroes and villains of the American west don’t inhabit hidden worlds and fractured pasts; if they do, they keep them hidden under a surface veneer of black and white. Sergio Leone’s and Clint Eastwood’s vision is of something much more dirty, grey and forbidding. It’s telling us the west, or perhaps that should be the West, is much like the modern day and needs to lose its sacrosanct attitudes.
To that end, death inhabits almost every frame of the film. It isn’t as relentlessly, ruggedly bleak as Corbucci’s Django, or as maniacally socio-political as Damiani’s A Bullet for A General, but death is there: right from title sequence of the silhouettes being exploded by bullets, right from the tolling bell which welcomes and bids farewell to every visitor, right from the dusty scar ridden deserts of Almeria, right from the cemetery so far from the town it is almost forgotten and all bar one of its inhabitants were murdered, right from the undertaker measuring Joe for a coffin. The notion a town has become so enamoured with killing that all the women are widows and all the men have a price on their heads, offers us no escape from the oncoming slaughter. Joe’s first action is pervert a gunfight with four of the Baxter Clan. Having won the battle, he offers his services to the opposing Rojos Brothers. Over the next few days, Joe plays one band against the other, until in a night of gargantuan bloodlust, the psychopathic Rojos Brothers burn the Baxter residence and murder everyone within it, including the scheming matriarch Consuela. Caught, but refusing to surrender the whereabouts of Marisol and her family, Joe has been beaten to within an inch of his life. When his friend Piripero is tortured, he reappears ready for a final confrontation.
There isn’t anywhere near as much bloodlust as you would expect from the film’s reputation. It’s quite low on incident. What it does do is ensure that the violence stays with you, as all dark violence should, not to thrill us, but to remind us of the butchery and savagery of the West and implicitly, modern society. Leone, or his five writers, don’t seem to like modern mores much, even when they put them centre stage. The domineering Consuela orders her husband and son with a sharp tongue; she rules the Baxter Clan. The Rojos delight in killing what they consider a weak man and a superior, haughty woman. Afterwards, enemies exterminated, the brothers' expressions are blank, devoid of interest and excitement. Their life must find a new purpose. For Ramon [an excellent Gian Maria Volante, here listed as Charles Wells] that is to find Marisol by any means possible.
The showdown is daft in the extreme, which is a pity. This is not Leone’s masterpiece. It would be easy to write pages about the editing, the iconic Ennio Morricone music score, the brutish direction, the laconic performances, the framing of the scenes, but it’d take me too long. The film has errors, especially regarding the passage or not of time, yet it continues to surprise with its intensity and courageousness. A Fistful of Dollars didn’t premiere in America until 1967 and reaction was snooty. Some filmmakers, Sam Peckinpah notably, understood what Leone was attempting to say and made his own revisionist western, The Wild Bunch, which takes traditional western themes and deconstructs them with an even more cynical air.
A Fistful of Dollars is the film to which many westerns right up to the modern era of stuff like The English owe a tremendous debt. By being brave and bold and contemporary, Leone showed the western could outlive its customary cultural stereotypes.
The 60’s was a decade full of bloated comedy movies, this being one of them (It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines were two others), but even though they were overlong this one is a lot of fun with great 😊 performances from Jack Lemmon and Peter Falk as the dastardly duo trying to cheat their way to winning the early 1900’s New York to Paris car race. Tony Curtis plays the The Great Leslie, a clean cut white suited hero with Jack Lemmon as Professor Fate and Peter Falk as his henchman sidekick Max Meen. Seven cars begin the race with lovely Natalie Wood as a journalist driving a sponsored car for a newspaper. As Fate and Meen attempt to sabotage the other cars the other drivers are involved in various subplots including a Prisoner Of Zenda spoof involving a massive pie fight.
I enjoy the slapstick humour in this and the characters of Fate and Meen were morphed into the successful cartoon series Wacky Races as Dick Dastardly and Muttley. It’s certainly not the greatest comedy of all time as the poster proclaimed, but it’s worth staying the distance.
7/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
GLASS ONION A Knives Out Mystery (2022) Dir: Rian Johnson
It's difficult to say much about this without giving anything away! If you liked "Knives Out", chances are you'll like this. Daniel Craig heads a starry cast, puzzles abound, some things are not as they initially seem, there are a few surprise guest stars, and I'm looking forward to the next one (which is already confirmed, apparently). It'll be in cinemas for a week, then later reappear on Netflix.
The 1990s film Haunted on Talking Pictures TV last night gave me actual nightmares though I think the England game contributed to my mood that evening.
It's a good one, bit hokey in a way, almost a bit Ken Russell, you could imagine Hugh Grant as the lead rather than Aidan Quinn who has his blue eyed Daniel Craig look down pat. He plays a sceptical professor of paranormal studies or something who is invited to a supposedly haunted house/stately home to disprove or clarify what is going on. He soon seems out of his depth with the posh young family there. It's set in the mid 20s.
It's directed by our own Lewis Gilbert, one of my fave reviews on imdb has someone writing 'I look forward to seeing what else he's done' - got his work cut out there! Kate Beckinsale gets her kit off to good effect which surprised me, there's John Guildgud ('Sir' John on the poster if you please), Anthony Andrews too, the acting elevates it and some hokey stuff is explained later on, though the final 10 minutes also threw up a few 'Hang on a minute...' thoughts too.
Honestly surprised to see it was based on a James Herbert book - guess that explains the sex but the story had a classy undercurrent that made me think it was based on a vintage tale.
It's an engaging and affecting yarn nicely told - cinema goers might have felt a bit let down though.
BTW, My sister is friends with a German nanny, whose charges are often the extremely rich. She told of a friend who was nanny to Kate Beckinsale when - of course - she was a child. Notwithstanding being an attractive child, she would forever go on about how fat she was, even though she wasn't, in an irritating way. Eventually, tiring of all this, the nanny replied complacently - and you have to imagine this being related in a downbeat German accent - 'Yes, you are rather fat...' She was fired the next day.
Its been a very long time since I’ve seen this celebrated movie. It regularly tops opinion polls as the finest British horror film ever made.
Edward Woodward gives the performance of his career as a devout Christian police sergeant sent to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a schoolgirl. Once there he discovers a community who worship paganism. His investigation is thwarted by the islanders and he is subjected to both temptations of the flesh and hostility as the policeman is led to the horrifying Wicker Man climax.
Christopher Lee and Britt Ekland (pre-TMWTGG), along with Woodward, are simply marvellous in their roles, Lee as the island’s master and Britt as a sexy publican’s daughter who tempts Woodward. Diane Cilento (Sean Connery’s ex-wife) and Hammer beauty Ingrid Pitt co-star.
I think the only downside to the plot is that Woodward’s policeman is so puritanically devout, it’s a little hard to believe in 1973 that someone is not tempted by a naked Britt Ekland!
Im not sure why debut director Robin Hardy didn’t continue making films but the sketchy details I can find only lead to the fact that he went into directing television commercials, such a waste of talent.
So, is it Britain’s finest horror? No, not quite, but it’s terrifyingly good.
8/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I'd agree with that review. It's a 'not quite'. Overrated I feel by its relative obscurity until the last 25 years or so. A sort of 'have you seen The Wicker Man' anticipation being more visceral than the actual finished product. Still a very fine film though.
Collateral disappointed me last time out. It's a tick the box exercise in tension and the metro climax is unnecessary. Last of the Mohicans is excellent though.
Clint Eastwood’s seasoned bank robber teams up with Jeff Bridges’s young chancer and two of Eastwood’s old gang to recreate his infamous bank heist by using a cannon to blow the safe. Thuggish George Kennedy clashes with the youngster while inept robber Geoffrey Lewis provides a lot of laughs. A young Gary Busey gets a role here along with many of Eastwood’s stalwarts that he relied upon throughout his career. Michael Cimino writes and directs in his debut and his assured handling of the movie led to The Deer Hunter four years later.
The cast is excellent and the film mixes hard boiled action with comedy nicely and a surprisingly touching ending makes this a real worthwhile watch. Bridges got an Oscar nomination for supporting actor but Eastwood gives a brilliant performance in this which would be recognised years later in Unforgiven.
This is one of my all-time favourites so henceforth it’s a high…
9/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Jean Jacques Beineix’s drama Betty Blue (1986) is probably more famous for the faintly erotic title and iconic poster which plastered many a student wall than it is for its cinematic content. That’s probably because most audiences at the height of the VHS hire fad were not renting the film for its storytelling but more for the sequences of nudity and sex that regularly accompany the narrative. These may or may not be exploitative moments, but in context they certainly aid the telling of an obsessive love story in a naturalistic and passionate manner.
Zorg, a piano playing failed writer, has sought solace at a beach front shack when into his world walks Betty, an exuberant, unconventional, unpredictable waitress, whose lust for life hides an internal conflict which she and Zorg struggle to control.
At times the film is wistful, at others uplifting; it is equally shocking or funny, disturbing, carefree and frequently emotionally draining. The writer-director is at pains not to explain much; simple dialogue statements suffice. Gabriel Yared’s effortlessly circuslike music provides linking motifs which hint at the couple's dreams, fulfilments and disappointments, the cycle of life repeating, the carousel turning.
While Jean-Hugues Anglade’s Zorg is the audience’s lynch pin, the film belongs to Beatrice Dalle, who as Betty delivers a contradictory and impassioned performance as an obsessive compulsive. Her portrait of the heroine’s descent into madness is heart breaking, intensified by the director’s insistence the audience – like Zorg – become absorbed by her forceful nature. She never welcomes our sympathy, sometimes rejecting it, and Zorg’s. We, as watchers have to earn that right by understanding what she is not telling us. Early on we believe it is merely an exceptional appetite for life which leads to Betty to sudden impetuousness, but as these outbursts begin to metamorphose into unpredictable self-loathing, we sense there is something untold in her life, a hidden past no one, not Zorg, the audience or possibly Betty herself has uncovered – and the possibilities sprawl through low self-esteem, OCD, mental breakdown, depression, abandonment, rape and abuse.
If the film veers erratically to the edge of melodrama or teeters on the verge of a French farce, this is balanced by the strong, committed and believable central performances, which draw out the underlying darkness of the narrative and never escapes our notice, either by the music, the shadows or the pensive expansive silences.
If the poster was absolutely brilliant, the film is even better.
Peter Cushing’s Baron Frankenstein is now working in a lunatic asylum and a new inmate, who is a doctor accused of sorcery, is quickly taken under his wing as they experiment in making a new creature. This was the final entry in the Hammer series of Frankenstein films and also Terence Fisher’s final film as director. In the 17 years that Cushing had played the role he had hardly aged at all and the film limps along retreading old ground without much inspiration. Madeline Smith looks lovely as a mute assistant and future Star Wars actor Dave Prowse plays the monster.
Hammer films were heading towards their final curtain at this stage and the lack of originality and inability to embrace the new horror tropes look glaring in retrospect, but it still has enough old school charm for Hammer fans like myself to make it worth watching.
5/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Comments
😉😁
Your right about Debbie Reynolds. Seems an odd decision given she can sing very well. Same with Audrey Hepburn in MFL, which is an even more peculiar irony. I think Debbie Reynolds was dubbed only when she sang solo. In group numbers it is her voice. But I may be wrong on this.
The flu thing is movie making myth, isn't it?
Regards Don Lockwood being down in the dumps, he is considering his career because of the home-truths Kathy has told him, but he's also seeking her out as he has developed an affection for her. Its not entirely clear from the action, only when Cosmo says something like "Is this about that Kathy girl? Pity she lost her job at the Coconut Grove." Which is why I believe we needed the extra song.
The extra song may have slowed down a movie that was taking its time to get going by your account. Also it sounds like the same kind of thing Kelly does with his actual Singing in the Rain scene, so it might have undermined that impact. Similar to when Jaws got released, the big fright in the film was the dead head popping out of the boat but not one featuring the actual shark. In some early previews, they showed the film without that scene - and the first big sighting of Bruce himself got the biggest shock, but when they showed it with the bobbing head, that scene itself provoked less of a jump.
Don't know if the flu thing was a myth.
I associate SITR with bloated Christmas Day dinners and stress and it also feels like a stressful film somehow so it's not a musical classic I enjoy as much as I feel I ought, mainly for the reasons you have pointed out in your fine review.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I finally had enough free time to go out and see BLACK ADAM. RottenTomatoes couldn't be more divided, with a 40% positive rating from critics, but an 89% rating from fans. I guess I'd lean closer to the fans' reaction. I had a good time, though while watching it I felt like I'd seen a lot of it before (the female lead owes a lot to Lara Croft, the ancient Mideast culture seems "inspired" by Wakanda, etc.). This said, I appreciate DC's efforts to be the "anti-Marvel," centering the film around a superhero who ain't all that nice; and I like that some lesser-known characters in the DC canon got their chance to shine. Which brings up Pierce Brosnan as Dr. Fate--he was just splendid, bringing detached irony to the role and giving the highjinks a bit of gravitas. So. . .a cautious recommendation. There are worse ways to spend your time.
METROPOLIS (1927) Fritz Lang
I’d seen it before (no, I wasn’t at the premiere) but that was a shortened version in the 1980s. This one was as full length as we’re going to get, incorporating footage from an almost complete (though damaged) cut found in Argentina in 2008.
I think it’s pretty pointless to go over the plot- everything is allegorical anyway- so I’ll just comment that
(1) The effects are damn good for a movie almost 100 years old
(2) The acting is typical for silent movies, with the male lead being especially… expressive. I forget his name, but the female lead Brigitte Helm is far better. You may not know her name, but you’ve seen her before-
She plays the good Maria (see what I mean about allegory?), the robot above, plus an evil version of Maria which is the robot in disguise and succeeds in making the good and evil Marias distinct from each other.
(3) The film quality obviously varies but once you’re caught up in the story that doesn’t matter much. Sometimes no film was available so a title card explains what we should be seeing though this doesn’t happen very often.
An interesting bit of trivia re. SINGIN' IN THE RAIN: Jean Hagen who plays diva starlet Lina Lamont not only does her own ditzy voice but also dubs Debbie Reynolds as the voice used to replace Lamont's inadequate vocals. Such was Hagen's linguistic versatility!
SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE (1993)
Sentimental rubbish from Nora Ephron about a widower whose kid sets him up with the long-distance listener of a radio phone-in show. Phenomenally popular, but jammed full of the obvious cliches and expected stereotypes from the opening scene. Tom Hanks proves he’s no one’s idea of a romantic lead. He mumbles most of his lines and does that stupid ‘hang-dog’ face when called upon to be emotionally wrought. He just looks vacant. His son seems to have escaped from a dud version of The Parent Trap. Meg Ryan plays a stalker. If the roles had been reversed, audiences would have cheered for his arrest, but because she’s a woman on the verge of an unsuitable marriage we’re supposed to think her behaviour is cute. The premise is utterly stupid and its overtly sentimental ending deliberately recalls an old Cary Grant film that hardly anyone the age of the protagonists had even heard of in 1993, let alone seen. [It’s An Affair to Remember, if you’re interested, and to this day I don’t know a single person who has admitted to watching it.] There’s a soundtrack full of old-time classic hits from the likes of Nat King Cole. The whole escapade tries desperately to be a reimagining of Ephron’s winningly scripted When Harry Met Sally, but the pulse is all wrong and the heart is misplaced. Just awful.
chrisno1 said:
an old Cary Grant film that hardly anyone the age of the protagonists had even heard of in 1993, let alone seen. [It’s An Affair to Remember, if you’re interested, and to this day I don’t know a single person who has admitted to watching it.]
oy! I've watched An Affair to Remember. Its Cary Grant in romantic tragedy mode rather than his usual comedy mode, apparently he did a few of those.
There are some nice shots of Seattle in the film you just watched. Tom Hanks' houseboat is real and Seattle boat tours point it out while going through the Ship Canal. maybe if thered been less of the actors and more of the geography it could have been a better film?
Well, you're the first @caractacus potts Congrats
THE DESPERATE HOURS (1955)
Humphrey Bogart was badly cast in William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours. The Broadway play had starred Paul Newman, but Newman’s name was not sufficiently box-office for Paramount, in fact he’d barely registered as an actor at all in Hollywood, the misfiring historical epic The Silver Chalice being his sole credit. Bogart re-enacts his star making turn as the psychopath Duke Mantee from 1936’s The Petrified Forest, but he’s too world weary and passive to make us believe he’s as mean as he wants to be. After his raging turn as the bastard villain of High Sierra, Bogart spent a whole decade playing flawed good guys and mischievous baddies who turn good. This role and performance doesn’t sit right with the persona he’d built up. It’s also hard to believe he and Dewey Martin are brothers; they don’t look alike and Martin is much, much younger. The physical threat provided by Martin and Robert Middleton as the half-wit killer Kobish far outweighs Bogart’s presence. He should really have been given the Fredrich March role.
March is Daniel Hilliard, a businessman whose family is held hostage by three escaped convicts. A series of believe-it-if-you-will circumstances occur which put the family in constant danger trying to keep the convicts under wraps. Director William Wyler knows how to build tension and along with photographer Lee Garmes exploits every enclosed space and deep monochrome shadow. The screenplay lacks any moral stance and is very by-the-numbers. It needed a really dynamic actor for the Bogart role and he just isn’t it.
A year earlier, Suddenly, starring Frank Sinatra, was released. It’s a similar film and although Sinatra is good in it, I kept thinking it would have made a good film for Bogart, with the socio-political stance the lead takes. Here, I kept thinking what a good character Griffin would have been for someone like Brando, Clift or James Dean – or yes, Paul Newman – those method actors who could present the character’s psychological make-up through action and reaction. Bogart, for all his gifts, needs a great screenplay to give truly great performances because he works from the outside in, if you get me.
The film’s strong at its climax. One or two moments are quite gut wrenching for 1955. Arthur Kennedy sneers his way through the supporting role as the chasing cop. He might have made a better fist of the Griffin role too. A film of missed opportunities.
One missed opportunity was to have Spencer Tracy as Hilliard. However, neither he nor Bogart was willing to take second billing so the part went to the excellent Fredric March.
Joan of Arc (1948)
If you don't know of Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc is the English version of her name) she was a peasant girl in medieval France who believed she was told by God to save her country from the English occupiers. Ingrid Bergman stars as Jeanne d'Arc in a project she campaigned hard for. Perhaps too many years, since she was i her early thirties and she plays a teenager. Bergman looks young for her age, but she isn't quite convincing as a teenager. Back in 1948 the movie got good reviews and it was nominated for several Oscars, but won none. Unfortunately for the movie there was a huge scandal with the Italian director Rossilini that pushed away many of the religious members of the public that was a target audience for the movie. Both were married to other people when started a public affair while the movie was still in theatres. Not very saintly. One can only wonder what would've happened to this movie if it wasn't for this scandal.
In my opinion this movie has perhaps Bergman's best acting ever, especially in the scenes after she is caught and stands for trial. The obvious comparison for many modern audiences is Luc Besson's movie Messenger staring Milla Jovovovic. The modern movie relies much more on action and has a good deal of humor, while the 1948 movie is very earnest. In my opinion Bergman's movie's strengths are that it focuses on the religious and psychological issues, and much because of the star's performance it often works. It's often in danger of becoming too earnest and many scenes wouldn't work in a modern movie. If that's a good or bad thing is up to the viewers.
The plot stays pretty close to history and it works well with one exception. Why are we not shown Jeanne getting caught by her enemies? Here we're just suddenly shown her being in captivity. The scene were she is caught would've been important for the plot and emotionally. The movie also suffers from being shot in California, a place completely without medieval castles. I would like it to have been shot in Europe with real locations and not just sets and painted backdrops.
Joan was technically sentenced for cross-dressing because she dressed like a man when she was with the French troops. My first reaction when Bergman had short(er) hair and was dressed like a boy was that she was completely unconvincing as a boy, but then I remembered something. She looked very much like a boy I served with during our national service! If they had the same hair style he could've been her stand-in. 😂
WESTERN UNION (1941)
It’s 1861 and in glorious technicolour, Randolph Scott’s reformed cattle rustler Vance Shaw accepts a job scouting for the Western Union Telegraph Company as they install the first ever west coast telegraph line. Plenty of action ensues of the kind which made westerns familiar and popular in the 1940s. Dean Jagger plays the sole real life character, the Chief Surveyor Edward Creighton, in a movie that purports to be based on true events. It isn’t. It’s based on Zane Grey’s bestselling western novel which itself embellished the truth.
However, even he was generous enough to portray the native American Indians as peace loving and co-operative; and at this time in history, they were. The movie makers however insist on turning them into drunken figures of fun or renegade murderers. The real villains are Vance Shaw’s old rustler gang, who manipulate the Indians into doing some dirty work while pocketing oodles of Western Union cash. Shaw is caught between loyalty to his gang and love for the Chief Engineer’s sister. She is played with at too much of a modern lick by Virginia Gilmore. Historically, she wouldn’t have been present anyway as Creighton was married at the time and would surely have been accompanied by his wife.
Plenty of meaty performances in the support cast; Slim Sommerville as a cowardly cook and Chill Wills as his minder are good double act. The top billed Robert Young is bland as the Eastern city-dwelling hero. The cattle rustlers are a nasty bunch. Generally, a decent looking and well-made western drama from Fritz Lang which hops along to a rapid beat, entertains and departs with a waved stetson.
DEAD OF NIGHT (1945)
This classic black and white portmanteau horror film, which inspired Amicus Films to spawn a series of like-minded films twenty years later, is renowned for its final story of the ventriloquist’s dummy who takes over it’s master. It’s a masterpiece of paranoia directed with superb tension by Calvalanti. The portmanteau, or anthology movie, always has a wraparound story which links the following (usually 5) tales, this time it is an architect with a recurring dream who finds himself in travelling to a cottage where all the people in his dream are assembled. One by one the guests tell of their paranormal experiences - the racing driver who has a foreboding experience which saves him from a crash, a teenager who sees a ghost at a birthday party, a couple who buy a haunted mirror, two golfers who chase the same girl, and finally the aforementioned ventriloquist’s dummy story. The golfing story is played for laughs and stars Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford who are brilliant as the love-crossed middle aged men who play around of golf to decide who will win the hand of the girl they both love. The others are suitably spooky but it’s the final story that remains long in the mind.
An excellent and influential film.
9/10
THE KNACK...AND HOW TO GET IT (1965)
Part of a 'British New Wave' series on the Criterion Channel, this mid-60s film feels rather French New Wave inspired in its style at times, and I found it a pretty entertaining 90 minutes. It was directed by Richard Lester, who released A Hard Day's Night the year before, and Help! in the same year as this. Whereas Help! was brightly coloured, The Knack features stylish black and white cinematography. I particularly enjoyed Rita Tushingham in this film, and it was scattered with touches of humour which I enjoyed, as well as a cracking score by John Barry. It feels very 1965-Barry, with echoes of Thunderball which came out in the same year.
DEADFALL (1968)
Fascinatingly odd thriller which commences like a caper film but turns out to be nothing of the sort, being more concerned with Nazi war criminals, homosexuals and dark family secrets. Michael Caine is Henry Clark a cat burglar moonlighting as an alcoholic in a Majorcan sanitorium attempting to glean snippets of information from Salinas, a rich count with jewels to be stolen to order. Henry is approached and propositioned by the delectable Fé, who is married to another thief, Moreau, an old school queer [the screenplay’s word, not mine] played with some efficiency by Eric Portman. It was his final film and he shows his acting class with a performance which requires fine breeding.
It’s fairly obvious how this menage-a-trois is going to progress so I won’t spoil the no-surprise. Henry does some digging about his newfound associates, using Leonard Rossiter’s know-it-all, and embarks on an uneasy partnership which doesn’t bear instant fruit. A tense test run robbery goes wrong and only Henry’s blind determination saves the crooks, endearing him to the delightful Fé. Moreau meanwhile is picking up beautiful young men in swanky restaurants.
These early scenes have all the funky, off-kilter glamour we now associate with hip sixties movies. There are those strange camera angles, shots delivered through windows, in extreme close up, soft focus, cross-edited, foregrounded focus, backgrounded detail, a swinging fancy dress party, swiftly edited scenes, snappy erudite and fanciful dialogue. It’s whimsical, amusing and ever-so slightly tawdry, despite the lovely Spanish scenery and gorgeous Julie Harris costumes. You can even accept the ridiculous heist, played out against and intercut with the performance of a superb orchestral suite written by John Barry, who has a cameo as the conductor. Barry’s music score, like most of his contemporary sixties' movies, has the trappings of OO7 about it. Listenable, though. Shirley Bassey sings a decent theme number. Vladek Sheybal puts in a short cameo, so that's four nods to James Bond past and future.
The second half of the movie is much less interesting and seems to want to make more cakes and eat them. The intrigue about Moreau’s Nazi past isn’t nearly as interesting as you’d demand and everyone’s motives begin to make less and less sense. It’s not any fun anymore, but then maybe serial adultery never is. Michael Caine is good – when wasn’t he in the sixties? – and Italian starlet Giovanna Ralli makes a delicious heroine. She was trying to forge an international career, but her film choices did her no favours. The movie’s directed with a good visual eye by Bryan Forbes. He placed his own wife Nanette Newman in a small role as a goodtime girl. This character [‘The Girl’] appears to be of more prominence than suggested and I think – without evidence, I admit – that an editing decision excised some of her screentime. Perhaps Desmond Cory’s original novel revealed all.
A mixed critical reception on release led Deadfall to underperform at the box-office, but it is not a failure. It’s well played, looks good and offers solid, ungainly entertainment; it’s just a little tangled in knots by the end.
A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964)
Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars is not the first spaghetti western – that was Gringo (1963) from director Ricardo Blasco – nor is it the most violent. It isn’t even particularly original, given the plot is a basic relocating of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) cluttered with many traditional western sequences and characters. What it is though, and what it does, is demonstrate the ability of a filmmaker to twist the mythology of the western genre and create a sub-genre that panders specifically to a captive contemporary market. American westerns of the late fifties and early sixties had begun to believe their own history. The ideas provided by movies like Shane, the white man with his white hat righting wrongs, or The Big Country, where progress can pacify and alter a host of wrongs, are debunked in a swift, violent and fetishistic manner.
A Fistful of Dollars takes place in bandit territory near the Mexican border. Clint Eastwood’ s Joe [not a ‘man with no name’] may be the only white American on display among a cast of Latin actors, but he doesn’t dress like one: black jeans no chaps, spurs, a heavy poncho, a hat – yes, white – a smouldering cheroot, unshaven, squinting. He may be the hero, but he looks as unruly, unkempt and vicious as the men he fights. He even has the temerity to be introduced exactly how Alan Ladd’s Shane came off the prairie, from behind, slowly on horseback walking towards an isolated homestead, seeking water. This hero takes his water for free. Nobody is there to stop him or question him. He witnesses a small boy torn from its mother, the father abused by two bandits and banished into one building while she remains locked in the second. He watches. He squints. He does nothing. The lead bandit, Chico, stares at him. The man stares at the beautiful woman. What’s she doing here? the audience asks. When’s he going to intervene on the family’s behalf? The man does nothing. The only information the audience learns is this man shares his identity, his breeding, his expertise with nobody until it matters to him. There is nothing in the opening scene to concern him.
Later, when he learns who Marisol is and the situation her family is embroiled in, Joe briefly becomes the hero with a white hat. His reasoning isn’t to do with justice, or fairness if you like, or even a Biblical sense of ‘thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife’. Joe’s reasoning is entirely personal. Freeing Marisol and reuniting the family, he urges them to flee: “I knew a family like you once and there was no one to help.” The implication, an excellent cinematic example of show not tell, is he was once a crying child and his mother too was the mistress of an oppressive overseer. Recognising the situation from the first scene, and allowing the audience to recognise it also, allows the moment of clarity – that Joe’s intention was always to help Marisol and not, as we might suspect, to seduce her himself – to reveal the hidden depths of his character. Heroes and villains of the American west don’t inhabit hidden worlds and fractured pasts; if they do, they keep them hidden under a surface veneer of black and white. Sergio Leone’s and Clint Eastwood’s vision is of something much more dirty, grey and forbidding. It’s telling us the west, or perhaps that should be the West, is much like the modern day and needs to lose its sacrosanct attitudes.
To that end, death inhabits almost every frame of the film. It isn’t as relentlessly, ruggedly bleak as Corbucci’s Django, or as maniacally socio-political as Damiani’s A Bullet for A General, but death is there: right from title sequence of the silhouettes being exploded by bullets, right from the tolling bell which welcomes and bids farewell to every visitor, right from the dusty scar ridden deserts of Almeria, right from the cemetery so far from the town it is almost forgotten and all bar one of its inhabitants were murdered, right from the undertaker measuring Joe for a coffin. The notion a town has become so enamoured with killing that all the women are widows and all the men have a price on their heads, offers us no escape from the oncoming slaughter. Joe’s first action is pervert a gunfight with four of the Baxter Clan. Having won the battle, he offers his services to the opposing Rojos Brothers. Over the next few days, Joe plays one band against the other, until in a night of gargantuan bloodlust, the psychopathic Rojos Brothers burn the Baxter residence and murder everyone within it, including the scheming matriarch Consuela. Caught, but refusing to surrender the whereabouts of Marisol and her family, Joe has been beaten to within an inch of his life. When his friend Piripero is tortured, he reappears ready for a final confrontation.
There isn’t anywhere near as much bloodlust as you would expect from the film’s reputation. It’s quite low on incident. What it does do is ensure that the violence stays with you, as all dark violence should, not to thrill us, but to remind us of the butchery and savagery of the West and implicitly, modern society. Leone, or his five writers, don’t seem to like modern mores much, even when they put them centre stage. The domineering Consuela orders her husband and son with a sharp tongue; she rules the Baxter Clan. The Rojos delight in killing what they consider a weak man and a superior, haughty woman. Afterwards, enemies exterminated, the brothers' expressions are blank, devoid of interest and excitement. Their life must find a new purpose. For Ramon [an excellent Gian Maria Volante, here listed as Charles Wells] that is to find Marisol by any means possible.
The showdown is daft in the extreme, which is a pity. This is not Leone’s masterpiece. It would be easy to write pages about the editing, the iconic Ennio Morricone music score, the brutish direction, the laconic performances, the framing of the scenes, but it’d take me too long. The film has errors, especially regarding the passage or not of time, yet it continues to surprise with its intensity and courageousness. A Fistful of Dollars didn’t premiere in America until 1967 and reaction was snooty. Some filmmakers, Sam Peckinpah notably, understood what Leone was attempting to say and made his own revisionist western, The Wild Bunch, which takes traditional western themes and deconstructs them with an even more cynical air.
A Fistful of Dollars is the film to which many westerns right up to the modern era of stuff like The English owe a tremendous debt. By being brave and bold and contemporary, Leone showed the western could outlive its customary cultural stereotypes.
All hail, Leone, I say.
THE GREAT RACE (1965)
The 60’s was a decade full of bloated comedy movies, this being one of them (It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines were two others), but even though they were overlong this one is a lot of fun with great 😊 performances from Jack Lemmon and Peter Falk as the dastardly duo trying to cheat their way to winning the early 1900’s New York to Paris car race. Tony Curtis plays the The Great Leslie, a clean cut white suited hero with Jack Lemmon as Professor Fate and Peter Falk as his henchman sidekick Max Meen. Seven cars begin the race with lovely Natalie Wood as a journalist driving a sponsored car for a newspaper. As Fate and Meen attempt to sabotage the other cars the other drivers are involved in various subplots including a Prisoner Of Zenda spoof involving a massive pie fight.
I enjoy the slapstick humour in this and the characters of Fate and Meen were morphed into the successful cartoon series Wacky Races as Dick Dastardly and Muttley. It’s certainly not the greatest comedy of all time as the poster proclaimed, but it’s worth staying the distance.
7/10
GLASS ONION A Knives Out Mystery (2022) Dir: Rian Johnson
It's difficult to say much about this without giving anything away! If you liked "Knives Out", chances are you'll like this. Daniel Craig heads a starry cast, puzzles abound, some things are not as they initially seem, there are a few surprise guest stars, and I'm looking forward to the next one (which is already confirmed, apparently). It'll be in cinemas for a week, then later reappear on Netflix.
The 1990s film Haunted on Talking Pictures TV last night gave me actual nightmares though I think the England game contributed to my mood that evening.
It's a good one, bit hokey in a way, almost a bit Ken Russell, you could imagine Hugh Grant as the lead rather than Aidan Quinn who has his blue eyed Daniel Craig look down pat. He plays a sceptical professor of paranormal studies or something who is invited to a supposedly haunted house/stately home to disprove or clarify what is going on. He soon seems out of his depth with the posh young family there. It's set in the mid 20s.
It's directed by our own Lewis Gilbert, one of my fave reviews on imdb has someone writing 'I look forward to seeing what else he's done' - got his work cut out there! Kate Beckinsale gets her kit off to good effect which surprised me, there's John Guildgud ('Sir' John on the poster if you please), Anthony Andrews too, the acting elevates it and some hokey stuff is explained later on, though the final 10 minutes also threw up a few 'Hang on a minute...' thoughts too.
Honestly surprised to see it was based on a James Herbert book - guess that explains the sex but the story had a classy undercurrent that made me think it was based on a vintage tale.
It's an engaging and affecting yarn nicely told - cinema goers might have felt a bit let down though.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Sorry to disappoint you, Napoleon, but that's a body double rather than the delightful Ms Beckinsale.
Anthony Andrews had wanted to play the lead but the backers insisted on an American star, so Andrews settled for playing Beckinsale's brother.
Yet one more cruel twist...
BTW, My sister is friends with a German nanny, whose charges are often the extremely rich. She told of a friend who was nanny to Kate Beckinsale when - of course - she was a child. Notwithstanding being an attractive child, she would forever go on about how fat she was, even though she wasn't, in an irritating way. Eventually, tiring of all this, the nanny replied complacently - and you have to imagine this being related in a downbeat German accent - 'Yes, you are rather fat...' She was fired the next day.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
THE WICKER MAN (1973)
Its been a very long time since I’ve seen this celebrated movie. It regularly tops opinion polls as the finest British horror film ever made.
Edward Woodward gives the performance of his career as a devout Christian police sergeant sent to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a schoolgirl. Once there he discovers a community who worship paganism. His investigation is thwarted by the islanders and he is subjected to both temptations of the flesh and hostility as the policeman is led to the horrifying Wicker Man climax.
Christopher Lee and Britt Ekland (pre-TMWTGG), along with Woodward, are simply marvellous in their roles, Lee as the island’s master and Britt as a sexy publican’s daughter who tempts Woodward. Diane Cilento (Sean Connery’s ex-wife) and Hammer beauty Ingrid Pitt co-star.
I think the only downside to the plot is that Woodward’s policeman is so puritanically devout, it’s a little hard to believe in 1973 that someone is not tempted by a naked Britt Ekland!
Im not sure why debut director Robin Hardy didn’t continue making films but the sketchy details I can find only lead to the fact that he went into directing television commercials, such a waste of talent.
So, is it Britain’s finest horror? No, not quite, but it’s terrifyingly good.
8/10
I'd agree with that review. It's a 'not quite'. Overrated I feel by its relative obscurity until the last 25 years or so. A sort of 'have you seen The Wicker Man' anticipation being more visceral than the actual finished product. Still a very fine film though.
Collateral disappointed me last time out. It's a tick the box exercise in tension and the metro climax is unnecessary. Last of the Mohicans is excellent though.
I'd forgotten about this film. Very underrated if I remember correctly.
I remember really enjoying it at the time and I was also a big James Herbert fan.
I may have to look it up again.
THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT (1974)
Clint Eastwood’s seasoned bank robber teams up with Jeff Bridges’s young chancer and two of Eastwood’s old gang to recreate his infamous bank heist by using a cannon to blow the safe. Thuggish George Kennedy clashes with the youngster while inept robber Geoffrey Lewis provides a lot of laughs. A young Gary Busey gets a role here along with many of Eastwood’s stalwarts that he relied upon throughout his career. Michael Cimino writes and directs in his debut and his assured handling of the movie led to The Deer Hunter four years later.
The cast is excellent and the film mixes hard boiled action with comedy nicely and a surprisingly touching ending makes this a real worthwhile watch. Bridges got an Oscar nomination for supporting actor but Eastwood gives a brilliant performance in this which would be recognised years later in Unforgiven.
This is one of my all-time favourites so henceforth it’s a high…
9/10
BETTY BLUE (1986)
(aka 37.2º Le Matin)
Jean Jacques Beineix’s drama Betty Blue (1986) is probably more famous for the faintly erotic title and iconic poster which plastered many a student wall than it is for its cinematic content. That’s probably because most audiences at the height of the VHS hire fad were not renting the film for its storytelling but more for the sequences of nudity and sex that regularly accompany the narrative. These may or may not be exploitative moments, but in context they certainly aid the telling of an obsessive love story in a naturalistic and passionate manner.
Zorg, a piano playing failed writer, has sought solace at a beach front shack when into his world walks Betty, an exuberant, unconventional, unpredictable waitress, whose lust for life hides an internal conflict which she and Zorg struggle to control.
At times the film is wistful, at others uplifting; it is equally shocking or funny, disturbing, carefree and frequently emotionally draining. The writer-director is at pains not to explain much; simple dialogue statements suffice. Gabriel Yared’s effortlessly circuslike music provides linking motifs which hint at the couple's dreams, fulfilments and disappointments, the cycle of life repeating, the carousel turning.
While Jean-Hugues Anglade’s Zorg is the audience’s lynch pin, the film belongs to Beatrice Dalle, who as Betty delivers a contradictory and impassioned performance as an obsessive compulsive. Her portrait of the heroine’s descent into madness is heart breaking, intensified by the director’s insistence the audience – like Zorg – become absorbed by her forceful nature. She never welcomes our sympathy, sometimes rejecting it, and Zorg’s. We, as watchers have to earn that right by understanding what she is not telling us. Early on we believe it is merely an exceptional appetite for life which leads to Betty to sudden impetuousness, but as these outbursts begin to metamorphose into unpredictable self-loathing, we sense there is something untold in her life, a hidden past no one, not Zorg, the audience or possibly Betty herself has uncovered – and the possibilities sprawl through low self-esteem, OCD, mental breakdown, depression, abandonment, rape and abuse.
If the film veers erratically to the edge of melodrama or teeters on the verge of a French farce, this is balanced by the strong, committed and believable central performances, which draw out the underlying darkness of the narrative and never escapes our notice, either by the music, the shadows or the pensive expansive silences.
If the poster was absolutely brilliant, the film is even better.
FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL (1974)
Peter Cushing’s Baron Frankenstein is now working in a lunatic asylum and a new inmate, who is a doctor accused of sorcery, is quickly taken under his wing as they experiment in making a new creature. This was the final entry in the Hammer series of Frankenstein films and also Terence Fisher’s final film as director. In the 17 years that Cushing had played the role he had hardly aged at all and the film limps along retreading old ground without much inspiration. Madeline Smith looks lovely as a mute assistant and future Star Wars actor Dave Prowse plays the monster.
Hammer films were heading towards their final curtain at this stage and the lack of originality and inability to embrace the new horror tropes look glaring in retrospect, but it still has enough old school charm for Hammer fans like myself to make it worth watching.
5/10