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: 27,964Chief 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.
Gina Lollobrigida, Sean Connery, Sir Ralph Richardson
a bit slow and posh for my tastes, but if you like classical musical standards juxtaposed with upper-than-upper class architecture, then the first half of this film delivers. Billed as a romantic crime thriller but without the pacing I would expect.
Richardson is a detestable old gazillionaire, abusive to his servants, dogs, and nephew, and confined to a wheelchair. Connery is his nephew, and has just hired for his uncle a new live in nurse played by Lollobrigida (" a foreigner?!? I might have known! do you wash regularly?" "of course, its part of my job"). Lollobrigida repeatedly tries to quit the job, but through seduction, intimidation, and his own brand of abuse Connery persuades her not only to stay, but to marry his uncle and get him to change his will. Because, as is, when Richardson dies Connery will get next to nothing. In the last half a sequence of plot twists complicates things and it gets more interesting. Richardson acts a storm in the first half til love mellows his character. Lollobrigida does most of the acting throughout, especially in the last half as she learns whats really happening. Connery plays Connery, just in a different context.
but lets talk about Connery. I think he's playing himself as a stock character at this point, very similar to Marnie which was made round the same time (and has some similarities) and to his first two Bonds, while he was still playing it straight. He changed his interpretation of Bond with Goldfinger, and from that point even in later nonBond films always maintained that knowing comedic edge to his persona. So it seems to me theres two stages to his stock character he played throughout his career, a dangerous early version and a comedic later version.
in this film he is a complete and utter bastard, and though he is charming he is always creepy from his very first scene. He slaps Lollobrigida hard about twenty minutes in, and that moment is genuinely shocking. Yet he is similarly violent to women as Bond (just they are bad girls) and his interest in Tippi Hedren in the first half of Marnie always feels creepy (and I think Hitchcock copped out by making him a loving husband in the second half). and of course in real life, Connery gave a notorious interview where he said women needed a slap or two.
so this has got me thinking; is our hero Connery, the original and definitive James Bond, actually inherently creepy? at least til he reinvents himself as a comic actor? he certainly is good in this film at playing it creepy, like the plot is really taking advantage if something that was there all along (and which Hitchcock copped out on). And yet as I say, he's not really acting any different than he did as Bond in his first two films. He's just not exhibiting that actorly range. He's got a seductive yet dangerous persona he does well that reads as a hero in Bond, and reads as despicable here. Not that difficult to change the context and make his Bond persona the villain.
Which makes me think again: is Bond meant to be a role model or not? Fleming said not, Bond is meant to be the character needed to make that sort of story work, and we should not expect that sort of character to be a nice guy. But as a popular fiction character gains more mainstream acceptance, there is conservative public pressure to make that character a role model. Generations of young boys are watching these James Bond films and aspiring to be James Bond when they grow up. We dont want our children slapping women around and ordering people of colour to fetch my shoes. So Bond mellows out after a few films and starts playing it for laughs, and all these decades later we're still giving CraigBond a hard time for occasionally doing things we dont want our children to do. as if the job of saving the world should only be assigned to nice guys.
But I think in those first two BondFilms there was not that expectation that Bond be a role model. It was an assumption that a man trusted with a license to kill was charming at first glance but really a dangerous bastard. an antihero. and Connerys initial actorly persona was perfect for that, just maybe camouflaged by the overtly heroic nature of the stories, giving those first two films a nice subtle edge.
Last night I watched CARRY-ON on Netflix... totally unbelievable, especially in its portrayal of American TSA agents as cool, funny and patient people (anyone who's been to an American airport knows they are very much a minority); but a pretty good and often tense action flick... and Jason Bateman makes for a damn good villain.
Very good review and an interesting longer assessment of the Connery / Bond aura.
I would draw your attention though to On The Fiddle, a 1961 movie Connery made with Alfie Lynch. His character there shares many of the comic traits that the Connery Bond of 1964 - 1967 would recognise, including also some heroics. It isn't a great film but the performance is worth watching. Also too 1960's The Frightened City, where Connery's tough hoodlum has a vicious edge, yet also exhibits a sophisticated air as he develops from new kid on the block to an essential cog in a gangster's wheel. Now, these character traits are partly promised by the screenplay - as are the more negative aspects of Connery's turns in A Woman of Straw and Marnie - yet they are also evidence of the interpretation provided by the actor alongside the directors, who are framing the scenes, his reactions and actions, setting his tone and volume of voice.
What makes the latter Connery Bond's so interesting in terms of performance is that he doesn't seem to be relying on the director for assistance any longer. Perhaps Guy Hamilton's light touch eased him through Goldfinger in the manner Terence Young did not. Thunderball has Connery completely inhabiting the epitome of a gentlemanly, deadly, seductive, witty cad of a spy. He no longer needs directorial advice to play the part. You Only Live Twice lacks a decent script to allow him to shine similarly, although there are flashes; Lewis Gilbert as director may as well not be there. It is a stunt man's film. Ditto Diamonds, although it is funnier and Connery enjoys the humour. However, while the older performance in NSNA certainly follows the reinvention as you describe it, I think by missing assessment of films such as The Offence, The Anderson Tapes, The Hill, Cuba and The Molly Maguires [to name a few] you are doing Connery's vivid and genuine acting abilities a disservice.
His Bond is not creepy. Connery developed the role over five films in a manner he can't do in one film, providing the basis for his successors, which include himself, to take aspects of his portrayal and magnify them. For instance, Moore pitched at the lightweight jocularity, while Craig tends to the bitter, harsh and incisive aspects that we see in DN and FRWL, but also TB. The foundations of those successive performances are all in evidence in those two earliest films. What exactly is the moral difference between him checking his watch when he seduces Sylvia to slyly undressing that French girl in LALD - the implication is the same and I'd judge the second is even more presumptious than the first. Similarly, ConneryBond killing Dent and CraigBond assassinating a traitor - both cold blooded exploits and in the same simple chair sat fashion - demonstrate the character's inate insensitivity. ConneryBond's lack of emotion following Kerim's death is as singularly taut as Moore's following Ferrara's or his own when discovering Paula's corpse.
Mind, however you dress James Bond, even if he's in a tuxedo, he isn't anyone's idea of a twenty-first century role model. While I don't like the hard edges being smoothed from Bond, I don't think he can be portrayed in a contemporary setting acting and talking how he did sixty years, or seventy years, ago. But then, you can say the same for Rhett Butler or Stanley Kowalski or any other great literary and cinematic character whose actions make us twinge and twitch uncomfortably today.
Phenomenally well-observed movie from Aardman Animations packed full of sci-fi references, mostly to do with E.T., but Dr Who, Short Circuit, Close Encounters and 2001 are all noticeable imports. Shaun the Sheep, for those who don’t know, is a children’s television show of much amusement. It is a spin-off from Wallace and Gromit. I have a soft spot for it because, back in the 1990s, I bought my girlfriend a Shaun the Sheep t-shirt to remind her of me whilst she toured Australia. I was cuddly and cute then! As the holiday progressed, I received photo after photo of Shaun in Oz. I digress, The television series had its own successful movie adaptation in 2015, hence a sequel Farmageddon. The mischievous sheep Shaun encounters a cute blue alien who unexpectedly drops into Mossy Bottom. Much fun is had attempting to feed it, disguise it and get it home to a far flung galaxy. Silliness and silly heroics abound and you can’t help but smile and chuckle and even gawuff at the daft goings on – the ‘Bull in a China Shop’ sequence was excellent amongst others - while there is an element of tension provided by absurd hunters the Ministry of Alien Detection, M.A.D. for short. Silent, excepting grunts and groans, the characters are brilliantly brought to life through action and facial reaction.
Aardman make excellent comedy animations and Farmageddon is super addition to their roster. Highly recommended for those with a young heart and a generous sense of humour.
Responding to points made upthread, I think early Connery Bond, the audience was sophisticated enough to be laughing at the character and his outrageousness - but with Goldfinger, which was also for kids, the nuance got lost and we are always laughing with him really. So, in the first two he could be a bit dangerous, a bit Flashman and back then anyone looking for and getting sex had to be portrayed as 'bad' anyway, which includes many of the 'bad' girls.
This postwar movie adaptation of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’s classic Victorian tale of redemption, is horribly dated. A lot of people enjoy it and consider it a definitive version. For a couple of decades Scrooge was regularly repeated on US television, as much a part of festive TV as Bing Crosby and It’s A Wonderful Life. Personally, I find it rather stagey, the performances display the hallmarks of theatre, which perhaps does justice to Dickens himself, who toured the tale around Britain offering recitals to mass audiences. The theatre shows are one of the reasons Dickens’s work has endured in the public as well as the critical sphere as they helped boost his reputation and popularity beyond that of the reading [educated] classes. Alistair Sim is certifiably miserable as the miserly Ebenezar Scrooge and uses his fine comic timing to bring vividity to the sudden revelatory transformation of his heart and soul. However, when Sim attempts sincerity he just looks manic and creepy, which isn’t so much heartwarming as dead-scary. I think I’d be fainting like his wailing, annoying housemaid if I too saw him so altered. George Cole cuts a dash as the younger Scrooge, but mostly the cast stand around cramped into Victorian suits and mumble their lines. Unfortunately, the three mysterious spirits are distinctly underwhelming, the Cratchit family don’t seem anywhere near as destitute as they ought to be and while some less savoury aspects of the story are retained, other strains are created winsomely to no purpose. Richard Addinsell’s music is worth a closer listen, mixing folk tunes with carols. The version I saw was colourised, badly. The sound recording has an appalling echo, which I assume is on the original prints. So, no, not A Classic Christmas Carol then. I am a fan of the gleeful, witty and more sophisticated Muppets, or the ironic deceitfulness of the Blackadder special, but I do see why some people might prefer this grim, more traditional exercise.
Walt Disney’s animated output of the 21st century is a bit hit and miss. It would be fair to suggest there are probably too many animated movies and the quality is subsequently patchy. Who remembers Treasure Planet, for instance? Moana is one of the better efforts, following as it does the mythology of the Polynesian islands, and lending a comic undercurrent and an ecological overcurrent to proceedings. If Auli’i Cravalho’s titular heroine is a trifle overbearing, she’s countered by Dwayne Johnson’s shapeshifting demigod Maui. Strident storytelling that pauses only for brief moments of melancholy, well told and visually impressive. The unnecessary songs are not winners and didn’t win any awards, but the incidental score strikes many atmospheric themes. Overall, a well-crafted slice of entertainment.
Another Jennifer Lopez rom-com where she is teamed with an inappropriate leading man [Owen Wilson, this time] and made to act like Cinderella in a fairy story. This time however, J-Lo already has the riches. Her Kat Valdez is a Latino singing star who baulks at a live on stage marriage proposal from her cheating and manipulative lover and instead, by some insane default of reasoning, hooks up with decent maths teacher Charlie Gilbert. Yeh, I didn’t get it either. Owen Wilson’s Charlie is the real Cinderella figure and J-Lo is the blinkered Prince Charming. Her revelation is one of the heart. His of heart, mind and disco-beat. Yeh, and it’s all a bit soppy by the time the heavily sentimental ending rolls around. We guessed the outcome from the start, so there is no surprise. The film is charming, but inconsequential. I was thinking they made several Fred Astaire / Ginger Rogers movies with the same kind of silly misdemeanours, misunderstandings and deliberate romantic subterfuge, and wondered why J-Lo – who is a half-decent actress – could not be teamed with a dancer-singer-actor [someone like Justin Timberlake] and starred in a proper all dancing all singing musical. For a point of order, the music is rather good and there is a winnable ballad On My Way that hits the romantic soft spot. Yeh, look, after a flabby Christmas, Marry Me was about all I could take. It is light-hearted and pleasant despite being as see-through as air.
Paul McCartney’s grandfather, impersonated by Wilfred Brambell, causes chaos when the Beatles take a trip to London to film a TV special. Music accompanies him the whole way and he is surrounded by dolly birds and teenagers who scream and wail and wet themselves and chase him down the street. Meanwhile Paul, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr spout political theories and social injustices and reminisce about a war they never fought in. In between times, they dance a bit in a nightclub, make life hell for their manager and manage to sing a few songs, most of which appear to be filmed as a template for band videos and stage performances for years to come.
I jest.
Highly influential, with a Scouser script that occasionally makes one laugh, the chief joy of A Hard Day’s Night is to see the four Beatles in their initial elements, cheeky, carefree, witty and vibrant. The songs have a similar vibe too, touching in mostly around the 2½ minute mark, so we don’t get bogged down in extended murmurings of “Love, Love, Love” or “Laaa-la-la, la-la-la”. The action passes as swiftly as the songs and is mostly immaterial, it really is the songs and their presentation that matters. If the opening shots of the Beatles running down a railway station pursued by screaming hordes of girls have an urgency and realism missing from all but the climatic concert footage, the inventiveness of the staging still amazes by both how fresh and dramatic they feel. A card game in a train carriage turns into a rendition of I Should Have Known Better, with close ups of the stars, a stupefied Wilfred Brambell sitting stoic among them and wispy breathing fans stretching out hands and eyes to their heroes. Can’t Buy Me Love explodes on the screen via an escape from the television studio into the parkland beyond where the foursome perform like kids in a playground while Gilbert Taylor’s cameras whirl around them; the rising crane shot is particularly effective. Ringo wistfully strolls the streets of London to an instrumental of This Boy, taking photos and being turned down by women, kids and dogs. I’m Happy Just To Dance With You begins as an instrumental dance number for Lionel Blair before segueing into full on John Lennon. You can pretty much see the workings of every kind of pop promo in this formative version, from concert footage, rehearsal, studio, street life, chummy get togethers, narrative stories; perhaps all they miss is a love story.
I am not a Beatles fan, but I always considered A Hard Day’s Night the band’s most urgent and efficient album, with songs that move on from the boy-girl stuff of 1962-63 to a darker place where black and white becomes grey. As a soundtrack it works exceptionally well, being the right side of pop, yet retaining that threatening cinematic edge. Elvis Presley, who had been making films for eight years by now, hadn’t made anything visually or audibly so exciting and tense since 1958. The Colonel should have taken note.
Culturally important, even if the Alun Owen script dates it and places A Hard Day’s Night firmly as a Merseyside romp, a sort of Boy’s Own Liver Birds before The Liver Birds. Photography, editing and direction are well above par. It was always going to be a hit, but luckily for culture it wasn’t a bad hit, it was a very good smash hit.
Yeah, I saw this was on and decided to settle down for a double bill with annual Christmas fave Death on the Nile but come the day forgot about it and got out the house to do a bit of shopping instead.
AHDN is very good I suppose but Beatle fans might approach with caution - it's sophisticated in its own way but the band was for teenyboppers at this time notwithstanding how well most of the songs hold up for adults, it you're approaching via later stuff like Revolver it seems a bit immature. I recall catching a TV showing at uni with a fellow fan who felt compelled to ask, 20 minutes in, 'What's the point of this movie exactly?' and until you realise it's just a showcase for the Fabs, you might well think that.
Couple of points; the name Beatles is not mentioned in its entire running length and only referenced at the end with the BEA airliner pun and secondly, you get the feeling Macca is even then slightly apart from the band - you don't see him running away from the fans at the opening, he is the one with the disguise waiting for them, and he doesn't get his own scene either (one was filmed with Frankie Howerd and upcoming starlet Wendy Richards but it got cut).
Oh, and third, maybe they should have got Wilfrid Brambell to reappear in Macca's ill-fated Give My Regards to Broad Street in place of Ralph Richardson but I think he might have died by that point.
A Hard Day's Night seems an odd film this Xmas because it doesn't feature the late Dame Maggie Smith - though actually, you could imagine her turning up and doing a short comic turn..
Beatles fan here, who was around at the time. Just a small boy, granted, but the Beatles were everywhere - dominating the radio, headlines in the papers, being joked about by comedians (my dad was a big Morecambe and Wise fan and I loved seeing them there), and regularly in the TV news. Seeing clips from AHDN back then wasn't too different from seeing their media appearances (TV was b&w, of course).
The size of their impact is easily forgotten or at least underestimated today. Think Taylor Swift x10 and that's close, but doesn't quite catch it.
@Napoleon Plural mention of Maggie Smith got me thinking about this which I caught as few days ago...
THE LADY IN THE VAN (2015)
Here Maggie Smith gives another of those cantankerous old lady performances that she became famed for in the latter stages of her career. That’s nothing to complain about and she is well-worth watching in this autobiographical film adapted by Alan Bennett from his own book / play. Alex Jennings stars as Bennett in a dual role, both as the author and his ego, who invites homeless Mary Shepherd to park her dilapidated van on his drive; he had found it a distraction parked outside his house because Mary would embark on arguments with the neighbours. The van, and Mary, stay for 15 years. Patience of a saint, has Alan Bennett. Mary Shepherd would drive most people up the wall and back down again. Smith plays her as annoying, but scrupled, and a sense of the character’s documented mental instabilities begins to eek through the portrait as the story wears exasperatingly on. The result isn’t a laugh a minute exercise, but eventually becomes quite touching. For the first half, it is a quite difficult watch, chiefly because the circumstances are so infuriatingly annoying you lose all sympathy for both Mary Shepherd and Alan Bennett. Towards the end, as the old dear ails, Bennett uncovers the truth of her circumstances and hence discovers something vital about his own self and we learn how that came to affect his writing. The film, like much of Bennett’s work, is slight, rather obvious and fitfully amusing. Veiled attacks are made on the Catholic church and the historical treatment of the mentally ill, but the majority of the film’s ire is directed at Alan Bennett’s timidity. Maggie Smith may be the film’s driving personality, but it isn’t really about her, other than as a long-winded catalyst to the author’s Damascene moment. Nicholas Hytner directs, one of three Alan Bennett adaptations he has made.
@Napoleon Plural also mentioned this movie during a Christmas telly roundup. He missed it, I think, which is a pity...
WHAT’S UP, DOC? (1972)
A sparkling screwball comedy made when they were out of fashion, but starring cinema’s two biggest stars of the era, Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand. It couldn’t fail. Director Peter Bogdanovich is a film scholar and his recreation of all things Cary Grant, Katie Hepburn and Preston Sturges takes some beating for the first hour when the quips roll off everyone’s tongue and the narrative twists and spins in on itself until even if you pay attention you have no idea which plaid suitcase is which. Yes, unusually, the plot revolves around mistaken suitcases, not people; however the principle must remain and Barbra Streisand impersonates Ryan O’Neal’s fiancé in an attempt to woo him and win him a huge study grant.
O’Neal is bespectacled musicologist Howard Bannister – looking and acting like Cary Grant, that mixture of stupefied intelligence and well-bred elegance. Bannister’s real fiancé is the annoyingly whiney Madeline Kahn – a dead ringer for the kind of role Alice Pearce would have revelled in. Streisand is in full on Rosalind Russell mode, snapping her dialogue so fast you wonder how her tongue keeps up. She looks absolutely gorgeous in seventies denims and blouses, her flat tweed baker boy cap delicately perched on her head, chewing celery and winking. She acts the accident prone trouble magnet Judy Maxwell, a student thrown out of a dozen colleges for constantly causing chaos. Poor Bannister doesn’t know what has hit him; and nor does Ryan O’Neal. He is good, but he’s no match for La Streisand who is the consummate star and displays both wit, intelligence and amorousness with verve and a cheeky twinkle.
The film loses its way a little in the latter half when a car chase takes over proceedings, but it gets back on track for the epilogue. The extremely funny screenplay came from future Oscar winners Robert Benton and Buck Henry. Bogdanovich would continue to mine thirties film territory for the excellent follow up Paper Moon and the underrated Nickelodeon. Streisand would never be as much fun or as sexy on screen again.
Some Like It Hot: Billy Wilders classic from 1959 starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe and George Raft. One of The greatest movies of all time!
"I mean, she almost kills bond...with her ass."
-Mr Arlington Beech
As a fan of F. W. Murnau's German Expressionist original (1922) and Werner Herzog's haunting 'Nosferatu The Vampyre' (1979), I came to Robert Eggers' new film a little skeptical about what more it could offer. It's certainly entertaining, tributing and tracking its predecessors while incorporating modern horror tropes and taking time to attempt greater narrative complexity.
What it lacks, crucially, is an outstanding Count Orlok. Bill Skarsgard is smart casting, but the impression Skarsgard makes is limited by a full prosthetics makeover which leaves him unrecognisable as an actor. The aim is to turn him into an undead Transylvanian lord, complete with long moustache. Unfortunately, no amount of cosmetic latex or Disney villain-style vocalising can match the extraordinary, unforgettable look of the legendary Max Schreck or Klaus Kinski. Also, Skarsgard's verbose Orlok seems rather too sophisticated to be so easily tricked - as he is, in time-honoured fashion - by Ellen Hutter's (Lily-Rose Depp) self-sacrificial ploy of detaining him till the cockerel crows. In short, this Orlok is generally more MCU than Schreck, and he lacks the surreal sense of vulnerability which Kinski so brilliantly conveyed.
Eggers' film includes stunning visual imagery, some of it channelling Murnau and Herzog. And yes, there are plague-bearing rats aplenty. Yet Eggers' more conventional story-telling largely saps the film of the ethereal strangeness which Herzog notably achieved. The movie's at its scariest when Ellen is possessed by the curse of nosferatu: she convulses and changes identity as if she's in an 'Exorcist' film, but that's riffing on a different horror sub-genre. And if our post-Covid context invites a new approach to the theme of pestilence, this is barely explored, important though the plague remains to the drama and imagery.
The main advantage of Eggers' greater plot development is a substantial emphasis on the Van Helsing figure, Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), a role which was something of a damp squib in Herzog's version. In some ways the 2024 'Nosferatu' has more in common with Francis Ford Coppola's 'Bram Stoker's Dracula' (1992), a stylised romp which tributes the wider Dracula legacy: Dafoe brings an energy which is similar to that of Anthony Hopkins' Van Helsing in Coppola's movie; he clearly relishes the part of eccentric vampire hunter, galvanising the film alongside Depp.
I have a few other notes on the cast. Nicholas Hoult as Thomas Hutter is a solid, standard issue Jonathan Harker type. Simon McBurney chews the scenery - as well as a live pigeon - as Herr Knock, in the Renfield role. Ralph Ineson plays Dr. Wilhelm Sievers (loosely, the Dr. John Seward character), in a return to the horror genre having been previously cast by Eggers in 'The Witch' (2015) and having provided the voice of the demon in 'The Pope's Exorcist' (2023). To me, Ineson will always be Finchy in Ricky Gervais' 'The Office' (2001), so I can't help but smile when seeing (or hearing) him in straight roles in these horror movies. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays a friend of the Hutters, Friedrich Harding (an Arthur Holmwood type), whose family is tragically destroyed by Orlok. Taylor-Johnson does a great job in his supporting role here but sorry, I just can't see him as a candidate for Bond! Emma Corrin is Harding's doomed wife, Anna - again, a solid supporting performance.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
A low entry in the Carry On dynasty and the least interesting of their medical farces. Talbot Rothwell’s script creaks and groans as much as Kenny Williams’s and Charlie Hawtrey’s surgeons Carver and Stoppage. Jim Dale’s hapless medic is, or course called, Dr Nookey. Barbara Windsor’s famous ‘love-hearts’ scene was abruptly edited for this daytime TV slot, but given the endless double-entendres [they are virtual single-entendres, given the obvious subject matter] you wonder why. Proceedings are all a bit slap dash until Sid James turns up as a South Sea Island white witch doctor proffering a magic slimming potion; naturally he has five wives and is known as Gladstone Screwer. The level being sunk to is fairly low. Manic and maudlin in equal measure, there simply isn’t enough joy in this one. Given all that had recently gone before, the sudden decline in quality from the brilliant Up the Kyber via the mixed Camping is startling.
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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.
Woman of Straw
1964, director: Basil Dearden
Gina Lollobrigida, Sean Connery, Sir Ralph Richardson
a bit slow and posh for my tastes, but if you like classical musical standards juxtaposed with upper-than-upper class architecture, then the first half of this film delivers. Billed as a romantic crime thriller but without the pacing I would expect.
Richardson is a detestable old gazillionaire, abusive to his servants, dogs, and nephew, and confined to a wheelchair. Connery is his nephew, and has just hired for his uncle a new live in nurse played by Lollobrigida (" a foreigner?!? I might have known! do you wash regularly?" "of course, its part of my job"). Lollobrigida repeatedly tries to quit the job, but through seduction, intimidation, and his own brand of abuse Connery persuades her not only to stay, but to marry his uncle and get him to change his will. Because, as is, when Richardson dies Connery will get next to nothing. In the last half a sequence of plot twists complicates things and it gets more interesting. Richardson acts a storm in the first half til love mellows his character. Lollobrigida does most of the acting throughout, especially in the last half as she learns whats really happening. Connery plays Connery, just in a different context.
its up on youtube
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but lets talk about Connery. I think he's playing himself as a stock character at this point, very similar to Marnie which was made round the same time (and has some similarities) and to his first two Bonds, while he was still playing it straight. He changed his interpretation of Bond with Goldfinger, and from that point even in later nonBond films always maintained that knowing comedic edge to his persona. So it seems to me theres two stages to his stock character he played throughout his career, a dangerous early version and a comedic later version.
in this film he is a complete and utter bastard, and though he is charming he is always creepy from his very first scene. He slaps Lollobrigida hard about twenty minutes in, and that moment is genuinely shocking. Yet he is similarly violent to women as Bond (just they are bad girls) and his interest in Tippi Hedren in the first half of Marnie always feels creepy (and I think Hitchcock copped out by making him a loving husband in the second half). and of course in real life, Connery gave a notorious interview where he said women needed a slap or two.
so this has got me thinking; is our hero Connery, the original and definitive James Bond, actually inherently creepy? at least til he reinvents himself as a comic actor? he certainly is good in this film at playing it creepy, like the plot is really taking advantage if something that was there all along (and which Hitchcock copped out on). And yet as I say, he's not really acting any different than he did as Bond in his first two films. He's just not exhibiting that actorly range. He's got a seductive yet dangerous persona he does well that reads as a hero in Bond, and reads as despicable here. Not that difficult to change the context and make his Bond persona the villain.
Which makes me think again: is Bond meant to be a role model or not? Fleming said not, Bond is meant to be the character needed to make that sort of story work, and we should not expect that sort of character to be a nice guy. But as a popular fiction character gains more mainstream acceptance, there is conservative public pressure to make that character a role model. Generations of young boys are watching these James Bond films and aspiring to be James Bond when they grow up. We dont want our children slapping women around and ordering people of colour to fetch my shoes. So Bond mellows out after a few films and starts playing it for laughs, and all these decades later we're still giving CraigBond a hard time for occasionally doing things we dont want our children to do. as if the job of saving the world should only be assigned to nice guys.
But I think in those first two BondFilms there was not that expectation that Bond be a role model. It was an assumption that a man trusted with a license to kill was charming at first glance but really a dangerous bastard. an antihero. and Connerys initial actorly persona was perfect for that, just maybe camouflaged by the overtly heroic nature of the stories, giving those first two films a nice subtle edge.
Last night I watched CARRY-ON on Netflix... totally unbelievable, especially in its portrayal of American TSA agents as cool, funny and patient people (anyone who's been to an American airport knows they are very much a minority); but a pretty good and often tense action flick... and Jason Bateman makes for a damn good villain.
Very good review and an interesting longer assessment of the Connery / Bond aura.
I would draw your attention though to On The Fiddle, a 1961 movie Connery made with Alfie Lynch. His character there shares many of the comic traits that the Connery Bond of 1964 - 1967 would recognise, including also some heroics. It isn't a great film but the performance is worth watching. Also too 1960's The Frightened City, where Connery's tough hoodlum has a vicious edge, yet also exhibits a sophisticated air as he develops from new kid on the block to an essential cog in a gangster's wheel. Now, these character traits are partly promised by the screenplay - as are the more negative aspects of Connery's turns in A Woman of Straw and Marnie - yet they are also evidence of the interpretation provided by the actor alongside the directors, who are framing the scenes, his reactions and actions, setting his tone and volume of voice.
What makes the latter Connery Bond's so interesting in terms of performance is that he doesn't seem to be relying on the director for assistance any longer. Perhaps Guy Hamilton's light touch eased him through Goldfinger in the manner Terence Young did not. Thunderball has Connery completely inhabiting the epitome of a gentlemanly, deadly, seductive, witty cad of a spy. He no longer needs directorial advice to play the part. You Only Live Twice lacks a decent script to allow him to shine similarly, although there are flashes; Lewis Gilbert as director may as well not be there. It is a stunt man's film. Ditto Diamonds, although it is funnier and Connery enjoys the humour. However, while the older performance in NSNA certainly follows the reinvention as you describe it, I think by missing assessment of films such as The Offence, The Anderson Tapes, The Hill, Cuba and The Molly Maguires [to name a few] you are doing Connery's vivid and genuine acting abilities a disservice.
His Bond is not creepy. Connery developed the role over five films in a manner he can't do in one film, providing the basis for his successors, which include himself, to take aspects of his portrayal and magnify them. For instance, Moore pitched at the lightweight jocularity, while Craig tends to the bitter, harsh and incisive aspects that we see in DN and FRWL, but also TB. The foundations of those successive performances are all in evidence in those two earliest films. What exactly is the moral difference between him checking his watch when he seduces Sylvia to slyly undressing that French girl in LALD - the implication is the same and I'd judge the second is even more presumptious than the first. Similarly, ConneryBond killing Dent and CraigBond assassinating a traitor - both cold blooded exploits and in the same simple chair sat fashion - demonstrate the character's inate insensitivity. ConneryBond's lack of emotion following Kerim's death is as singularly taut as Moore's following Ferrara's or his own when discovering Paula's corpse.
Mind, however you dress James Bond, even if he's in a tuxedo, he isn't anyone's idea of a twenty-first century role model. While I don't like the hard edges being smoothed from Bond, I don't think he can be portrayed in a contemporary setting acting and talking how he did sixty years, or seventy years, ago. But then, you can say the same for Rhett Butler or Stanley Kowalski or any other great literary and cinematic character whose actions make us twinge and twitch uncomfortably today.
A SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE: FARMAGEDDON (2019)
Phenomenally well-observed movie from Aardman Animations packed full of sci-fi references, mostly to do with E.T., but Dr Who, Short Circuit, Close Encounters and 2001 are all noticeable imports. Shaun the Sheep, for those who don’t know, is a children’s television show of much amusement. It is a spin-off from Wallace and Gromit. I have a soft spot for it because, back in the 1990s, I bought my girlfriend a Shaun the Sheep t-shirt to remind her of me whilst she toured Australia. I was cuddly and cute then! As the holiday progressed, I received photo after photo of Shaun in Oz. I digress, The television series had its own successful movie adaptation in 2015, hence a sequel Farmageddon. The mischievous sheep Shaun encounters a cute blue alien who unexpectedly drops into Mossy Bottom. Much fun is had attempting to feed it, disguise it and get it home to a far flung galaxy. Silliness and silly heroics abound and you can’t help but smile and chuckle and even gawuff at the daft goings on – the ‘Bull in a China Shop’ sequence was excellent amongst others - while there is an element of tension provided by absurd hunters the Ministry of Alien Detection, M.A.D. for short. Silent, excepting grunts and groans, the characters are brilliantly brought to life through action and facial reaction.
Aardman make excellent comedy animations and Farmageddon is super addition to their roster. Highly recommended for those with a young heart and a generous sense of humour.
I know there's a 'Last Bond Film Seen' thread but, and despite searching, I can't find it, so...
OHMSS. Bond brilliance.
And to think it was once my least favourite film of the whole franchise. It's funny how time changes perspectives.
Author of 'An Ungentlemanly Act' and 'Execution of Duty'. The WW2 espionage series starring Harry Flynn.
Responding to points made upthread, I think early Connery Bond, the audience was sophisticated enough to be laughing at the character and his outrageousness - but with Goldfinger, which was also for kids, the nuance got lost and we are always laughing with him really. So, in the first two he could be a bit dangerous, a bit Flashman and back then anyone looking for and getting sex had to be portrayed as 'bad' anyway, which includes many of the 'bad' girls.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
SCROOGE (1951)
This postwar movie adaptation of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’s classic Victorian tale of redemption, is horribly dated. A lot of people enjoy it and consider it a definitive version. For a couple of decades Scrooge was regularly repeated on US television, as much a part of festive TV as Bing Crosby and It’s A Wonderful Life. Personally, I find it rather stagey, the performances display the hallmarks of theatre, which perhaps does justice to Dickens himself, who toured the tale around Britain offering recitals to mass audiences. The theatre shows are one of the reasons Dickens’s work has endured in the public as well as the critical sphere as they helped boost his reputation and popularity beyond that of the reading [educated] classes. Alistair Sim is certifiably miserable as the miserly Ebenezar Scrooge and uses his fine comic timing to bring vividity to the sudden revelatory transformation of his heart and soul. However, when Sim attempts sincerity he just looks manic and creepy, which isn’t so much heartwarming as dead-scary. I think I’d be fainting like his wailing, annoying housemaid if I too saw him so altered. George Cole cuts a dash as the younger Scrooge, but mostly the cast stand around cramped into Victorian suits and mumble their lines. Unfortunately, the three mysterious spirits are distinctly underwhelming, the Cratchit family don’t seem anywhere near as destitute as they ought to be and while some less savoury aspects of the story are retained, other strains are created winsomely to no purpose. Richard Addinsell’s music is worth a closer listen, mixing folk tunes with carols. The version I saw was colourised, badly. The sound recording has an appalling echo, which I assume is on the original prints. So, no, not A Classic Christmas Carol then. I am a fan of the gleeful, witty and more sophisticated Muppets, or the ironic deceitfulness of the Blackadder special, but I do see why some people might prefer this grim, more traditional exercise.
MOANA (2016)
Walt Disney’s animated output of the 21st century is a bit hit and miss. It would be fair to suggest there are probably too many animated movies and the quality is subsequently patchy. Who remembers Treasure Planet, for instance? Moana is one of the better efforts, following as it does the mythology of the Polynesian islands, and lending a comic undercurrent and an ecological overcurrent to proceedings. If Auli’i Cravalho’s titular heroine is a trifle overbearing, she’s countered by Dwayne Johnson’s shapeshifting demigod Maui. Strident storytelling that pauses only for brief moments of melancholy, well told and visually impressive. The unnecessary songs are not winners and didn’t win any awards, but the incidental score strikes many atmospheric themes. Overall, a well-crafted slice of entertainment.
MARRY ME (2022)
Another Jennifer Lopez rom-com where she is teamed with an inappropriate leading man [Owen Wilson, this time] and made to act like Cinderella in a fairy story. This time however, J-Lo already has the riches. Her Kat Valdez is a Latino singing star who baulks at a live on stage marriage proposal from her cheating and manipulative lover and instead, by some insane default of reasoning, hooks up with decent maths teacher Charlie Gilbert. Yeh, I didn’t get it either. Owen Wilson’s Charlie is the real Cinderella figure and J-Lo is the blinkered Prince Charming. Her revelation is one of the heart. His of heart, mind and disco-beat. Yeh, and it’s all a bit soppy by the time the heavily sentimental ending rolls around. We guessed the outcome from the start, so there is no surprise. The film is charming, but inconsequential. I was thinking they made several Fred Astaire / Ginger Rogers movies with the same kind of silly misdemeanours, misunderstandings and deliberate romantic subterfuge, and wondered why J-Lo – who is a half-decent actress – could not be teamed with a dancer-singer-actor [someone like Justin Timberlake] and starred in a proper all dancing all singing musical. For a point of order, the music is rather good and there is a winnable ballad On My Way that hits the romantic soft spot. Yeh, look, after a flabby Christmas, Marry Me was about all I could take. It is light-hearted and pleasant despite being as see-through as air.
A HARD DAY’S NIGHT (1964)
Paul McCartney’s grandfather, impersonated by Wilfred Brambell, causes chaos when the Beatles take a trip to London to film a TV special. Music accompanies him the whole way and he is surrounded by dolly birds and teenagers who scream and wail and wet themselves and chase him down the street. Meanwhile Paul, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr spout political theories and social injustices and reminisce about a war they never fought in. In between times, they dance a bit in a nightclub, make life hell for their manager and manage to sing a few songs, most of which appear to be filmed as a template for band videos and stage performances for years to come.
I jest.
Highly influential, with a Scouser script that occasionally makes one laugh, the chief joy of A Hard Day’s Night is to see the four Beatles in their initial elements, cheeky, carefree, witty and vibrant. The songs have a similar vibe too, touching in mostly around the 2½ minute mark, so we don’t get bogged down in extended murmurings of “Love, Love, Love” or “Laaa-la-la, la-la-la”. The action passes as swiftly as the songs and is mostly immaterial, it really is the songs and their presentation that matters. If the opening shots of the Beatles running down a railway station pursued by screaming hordes of girls have an urgency and realism missing from all but the climatic concert footage, the inventiveness of the staging still amazes by both how fresh and dramatic they feel. A card game in a train carriage turns into a rendition of I Should Have Known Better, with close ups of the stars, a stupefied Wilfred Brambell sitting stoic among them and wispy breathing fans stretching out hands and eyes to their heroes. Can’t Buy Me Love explodes on the screen via an escape from the television studio into the parkland beyond where the foursome perform like kids in a playground while Gilbert Taylor’s cameras whirl around them; the rising crane shot is particularly effective. Ringo wistfully strolls the streets of London to an instrumental of This Boy, taking photos and being turned down by women, kids and dogs. I’m Happy Just To Dance With You begins as an instrumental dance number for Lionel Blair before segueing into full on John Lennon. You can pretty much see the workings of every kind of pop promo in this formative version, from concert footage, rehearsal, studio, street life, chummy get togethers, narrative stories; perhaps all they miss is a love story.
I am not a Beatles fan, but I always considered A Hard Day’s Night the band’s most urgent and efficient album, with songs that move on from the boy-girl stuff of 1962-63 to a darker place where black and white becomes grey. As a soundtrack it works exceptionally well, being the right side of pop, yet retaining that threatening cinematic edge. Elvis Presley, who had been making films for eight years by now, hadn’t made anything visually or audibly so exciting and tense since 1958. The Colonel should have taken note.
Culturally important, even if the Alun Owen script dates it and places A Hard Day’s Night firmly as a Merseyside romp, a sort of Boy’s Own Liver Birds before The Liver Birds. Photography, editing and direction are well above par. It was always going to be a hit, but luckily for culture it wasn’t a bad hit, it was a very good smash hit.
Yeah, I saw this was on and decided to settle down for a double bill with annual Christmas fave Death on the Nile but come the day forgot about it and got out the house to do a bit of shopping instead.
AHDN is very good I suppose but Beatle fans might approach with caution - it's sophisticated in its own way but the band was for teenyboppers at this time notwithstanding how well most of the songs hold up for adults, it you're approaching via later stuff like Revolver it seems a bit immature. I recall catching a TV showing at uni with a fellow fan who felt compelled to ask, 20 minutes in, 'What's the point of this movie exactly?' and until you realise it's just a showcase for the Fabs, you might well think that.
Couple of points; the name Beatles is not mentioned in its entire running length and only referenced at the end with the BEA airliner pun and secondly, you get the feeling Macca is even then slightly apart from the band - you don't see him running away from the fans at the opening, he is the one with the disguise waiting for them, and he doesn't get his own scene either (one was filmed with Frankie Howerd and upcoming starlet Wendy Richards but it got cut).
Oh, and third, maybe they should have got Wilfrid Brambell to reappear in Macca's ill-fated Give My Regards to Broad Street in place of Ralph Richardson but I think he might have died by that point.
A Hard Day's Night seems an odd film this Xmas because it doesn't feature the late Dame Maggie Smith - though actually, you could imagine her turning up and doing a short comic turn..
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Beatles fan here, who was around at the time. Just a small boy, granted, but the Beatles were everywhere - dominating the radio, headlines in the papers, being joked about by comedians (my dad was a big Morecambe and Wise fan and I loved seeing them there), and regularly in the TV news. Seeing clips from AHDN back then wasn't too different from seeing their media appearances (TV was b&w, of course).
The size of their impact is easily forgotten or at least underestimated today. Think Taylor Swift x10 and that's close, but doesn't quite catch it.
@Napoleon Plural mention of Maggie Smith got me thinking about this which I caught as few days ago...
THE LADY IN THE VAN (2015)
Here Maggie Smith gives another of those cantankerous old lady performances that she became famed for in the latter stages of her career. That’s nothing to complain about and she is well-worth watching in this autobiographical film adapted by Alan Bennett from his own book / play. Alex Jennings stars as Bennett in a dual role, both as the author and his ego, who invites homeless Mary Shepherd to park her dilapidated van on his drive; he had found it a distraction parked outside his house because Mary would embark on arguments with the neighbours. The van, and Mary, stay for 15 years. Patience of a saint, has Alan Bennett. Mary Shepherd would drive most people up the wall and back down again. Smith plays her as annoying, but scrupled, and a sense of the character’s documented mental instabilities begins to eek through the portrait as the story wears exasperatingly on. The result isn’t a laugh a minute exercise, but eventually becomes quite touching. For the first half, it is a quite difficult watch, chiefly because the circumstances are so infuriatingly annoying you lose all sympathy for both Mary Shepherd and Alan Bennett. Towards the end, as the old dear ails, Bennett uncovers the truth of her circumstances and hence discovers something vital about his own self and we learn how that came to affect his writing. The film, like much of Bennett’s work, is slight, rather obvious and fitfully amusing. Veiled attacks are made on the Catholic church and the historical treatment of the mentally ill, but the majority of the film’s ire is directed at Alan Bennett’s timidity. Maggie Smith may be the film’s driving personality, but it isn’t really about her, other than as a long-winded catalyst to the author’s Damascene moment. Nicholas Hytner directs, one of three Alan Bennett adaptations he has made.
@Napoleon Plural also mentioned this movie during a Christmas telly roundup. He missed it, I think, which is a pity...
WHAT’S UP, DOC? (1972)
A sparkling screwball comedy made when they were out of fashion, but starring cinema’s two biggest stars of the era, Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand. It couldn’t fail. Director Peter Bogdanovich is a film scholar and his recreation of all things Cary Grant, Katie Hepburn and Preston Sturges takes some beating for the first hour when the quips roll off everyone’s tongue and the narrative twists and spins in on itself until even if you pay attention you have no idea which plaid suitcase is which. Yes, unusually, the plot revolves around mistaken suitcases, not people; however the principle must remain and Barbra Streisand impersonates Ryan O’Neal’s fiancé in an attempt to woo him and win him a huge study grant.
O’Neal is bespectacled musicologist Howard Bannister – looking and acting like Cary Grant, that mixture of stupefied intelligence and well-bred elegance. Bannister’s real fiancé is the annoyingly whiney Madeline Kahn – a dead ringer for the kind of role Alice Pearce would have revelled in. Streisand is in full on Rosalind Russell mode, snapping her dialogue so fast you wonder how her tongue keeps up. She looks absolutely gorgeous in seventies denims and blouses, her flat tweed baker boy cap delicately perched on her head, chewing celery and winking. She acts the accident prone trouble magnet Judy Maxwell, a student thrown out of a dozen colleges for constantly causing chaos. Poor Bannister doesn’t know what has hit him; and nor does Ryan O’Neal. He is good, but he’s no match for La Streisand who is the consummate star and displays both wit, intelligence and amorousness with verve and a cheeky twinkle.
The film loses its way a little in the latter half when a car chase takes over proceedings, but it gets back on track for the epilogue. The extremely funny screenplay came from future Oscar winners Robert Benton and Buck Henry. Bogdanovich would continue to mine thirties film territory for the excellent follow up Paper Moon and the underrated Nickelodeon. Streisand would never be as much fun or as sexy on screen again.
A brilliant, rarely seen comedy.
Well, I think so anyways...
Some Like It Hot: Billy Wilders classic from 1959 starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe and George Raft. One of The greatest movies of all time!
-Mr Arlington Beech
'Nosferatu' (2024)
As a fan of F. W. Murnau's German Expressionist original (1922) and Werner Herzog's haunting 'Nosferatu The Vampyre' (1979), I came to Robert Eggers' new film a little skeptical about what more it could offer. It's certainly entertaining, tributing and tracking its predecessors while incorporating modern horror tropes and taking time to attempt greater narrative complexity.
What it lacks, crucially, is an outstanding Count Orlok. Bill Skarsgard is smart casting, but the impression Skarsgard makes is limited by a full prosthetics makeover which leaves him unrecognisable as an actor. The aim is to turn him into an undead Transylvanian lord, complete with long moustache. Unfortunately, no amount of cosmetic latex or Disney villain-style vocalising can match the extraordinary, unforgettable look of the legendary Max Schreck or Klaus Kinski. Also, Skarsgard's verbose Orlok seems rather too sophisticated to be so easily tricked - as he is, in time-honoured fashion - by Ellen Hutter's (Lily-Rose Depp) self-sacrificial ploy of detaining him till the cockerel crows. In short, this Orlok is generally more MCU than Schreck, and he lacks the surreal sense of vulnerability which Kinski so brilliantly conveyed.
Eggers' film includes stunning visual imagery, some of it channelling Murnau and Herzog. And yes, there are plague-bearing rats aplenty. Yet Eggers' more conventional story-telling largely saps the film of the ethereal strangeness which Herzog notably achieved. The movie's at its scariest when Ellen is possessed by the curse of nosferatu: she convulses and changes identity as if she's in an 'Exorcist' film, but that's riffing on a different horror sub-genre. And if our post-Covid context invites a new approach to the theme of pestilence, this is barely explored, important though the plague remains to the drama and imagery.
The main advantage of Eggers' greater plot development is a substantial emphasis on the Van Helsing figure, Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), a role which was something of a damp squib in Herzog's version. In some ways the 2024 'Nosferatu' has more in common with Francis Ford Coppola's 'Bram Stoker's Dracula' (1992), a stylised romp which tributes the wider Dracula legacy: Dafoe brings an energy which is similar to that of Anthony Hopkins' Van Helsing in Coppola's movie; he clearly relishes the part of eccentric vampire hunter, galvanising the film alongside Depp.
I have a few other notes on the cast. Nicholas Hoult as Thomas Hutter is a solid, standard issue Jonathan Harker type. Simon McBurney chews the scenery - as well as a live pigeon - as Herr Knock, in the Renfield role. Ralph Ineson plays Dr. Wilhelm Sievers (loosely, the Dr. John Seward character), in a return to the horror genre having been previously cast by Eggers in 'The Witch' (2015) and having provided the voice of the demon in 'The Pope's Exorcist' (2023). To me, Ineson will always be Finchy in Ricky Gervais' 'The Office' (2001), so I can't help but smile when seeing (or hearing) him in straight roles in these horror movies. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays a friend of the Hutters, Friedrich Harding (an Arthur Holmwood type), whose family is tragically destroyed by Orlok. Taylor-Johnson does a great job in his supporting role here but sorry, I just can't see him as a candidate for Bond! Emma Corrin is Harding's doomed wife, Anna - again, a solid supporting performance.
Thanks for that review @Shady Tree
I have less dramatic fare...
CARRY ON AGAIN DOCTOR (1969)
A low entry in the Carry On dynasty and the least interesting of their medical farces. Talbot Rothwell’s script creaks and groans as much as Kenny Williams’s and Charlie Hawtrey’s surgeons Carver and Stoppage. Jim Dale’s hapless medic is, or course called, Dr Nookey. Barbara Windsor’s famous ‘love-hearts’ scene was abruptly edited for this daytime TV slot, but given the endless double-entendres [they are virtual single-entendres, given the obvious subject matter] you wonder why. Proceedings are all a bit slap dash until Sid James turns up as a South Sea Island white witch doctor proffering a magic slimming potion; naturally he has five wives and is known as Gladstone Screwer. The level being sunk to is fairly low. Manic and maudlin in equal measure, there simply isn’t enough joy in this one. Given all that had recently gone before, the sudden decline in quality from the brilliant Up the Kyber via the mixed Camping is startling.