Month: July 2023

The Sound of Fury aka Try and Get Me!

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Howard and Jerry on the lam

A beacon of decent acting in a sea of ham and cardboard, Frank Lovejoy is the main reason to watch The Sound of Fury (aka Try and Get Me!), a dull, sanctimonious drama boosted by an incendiary finish. Fritz Lang had already turned the original true story into a film, Fury, but this is Cy (billed as Cyril) Endfield’s version. The plot: decent, hard-working family man Howard Tyler is the everyday sucker who can’t get a decent break and so takes up with flash Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges), a smalltime criminal. Things go OK for Howard and Jerry for a while, and Howard’s blubby wife (Kathleen Ryan) is particularly happy that Howard is … Read more

The Five Devils

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Vicky observes from a hiding place behind a wall

A close relative of Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman, The Five Devils (Les Cinq Diables in the original French) starts off with a one two three of scenarios which, if you’re coming to this movie cold (as I did) are designed to make you wonder just what you’ve signed on for – a horror movie, something at the luxe James Bond end of film-making, or even something much more ordinary, workaday, as those two opening impressions give way to a third. An aquarobics class, run by Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulos) who, when not exhorting her “girls” (senior citizens) to give it some heft, spends her spare time wild-water swimming in a wintry alpine lake that’s … Read more

The Wrong Man

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Henry Fonda in hat

Atypical and yet very typical, 1956’s The Wrong Man is Alfred Hitchcock’s tilt at those noirish ripped-from-the-headlines crime dramas that were all the rage when people still said “all the rage”, films sold on authenticity and with a dedication to telling it how it was. That’s what’s behind Hitchcock dropping his usual comedy cameo early in this movie and settling instead on a moody, backlit intro in which the man himself informs us that what we are about to see is stranger than all the films he’s made before, and yet… “this is a true story. Every bit of it.” He is pretty much as good as his word. This is the story … Read more

Nothing Personal

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Lotte Verbeek

Working my way in no logical order through the films of the under-rated Urszula Antoniak, I come to her first feature, 2009’s Nothing Personal. And it’s nearly all here – the female focus, the quiet way of working, the absence of unnecessary detail, mood rather than plot being her primary concern, and great performances just to top it all off. What isn’t quite here is Antoniak’s sudden ta-daa moment, the moment in Code Blue (2011) or Magic Mountains (2020) when she suddenly racks all the knobs to the max, to shocking effect. It could be, of course, that those films are atypical. There are another three films, at the time of writing, to … Read more

Degree of Murder

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Anita Pallenberg

“Starring Anita Pallenberg” and “Music by Brian Jones” are the big sells of Degree of Murder (Mord und Totschlag in the original German), a weird trifle from 1967 seemingly designed to showcase the almost unbearable cuteness of Pallenberg and little more. If you’re steeped in the culture of the times, no further details about these people is necessary, but if not, then Pallenberg was at the time rock chic numero uno – though Marianne Faithfull might have challenged her to the title – being the girlfriend of the founder of the Rolling Stones, Jones. Jones is harder to explain in a nutshell, though Nick Broomfield’s excellent documentary, The Stones and Brian Jones, does … Read more

R.M.N.

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Matthias with his son in a boat

The state of the Romanian nation is what Cristian Mungiu’s films tend to be about – Occident, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Tales from the Golden Age, Beyond the Hills and Graduation have all dealt in various ways with the country’s escape (or not) from the Communist-era Ceaușescu regime and its progress towards becoming an more or less integrated part of modern Europe. R.M.N. could be a truncated textspeak-y way of writing “Romania” but in fact it’s an acronym standing for Rezonanță Magnetică Nucleară, Magnetic Resonance Imaging in English, and that, in a sense is what the film is – a 360º scan of the nation, where the same grand game is … Read more

100 Years of… The Phantom Carriage

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The phantom carriage materialises

The Phantom Carriage is something of a phantom movie. Loved by Ingmar Bergman, who rewatched it every year and claimed it inspired him to get into film-making, it was also adored by Charlie Chaplin, who called it the best film ever made. Stanley Kubrick was also a fan, and lifted one of his most iconic sequences – Jack Nicholson axing through a door in The Shining – directly from it. But how many people have actually seen this classic? Bergman, Chaplin, Kubrick, this is clearly a film with “bottom” but it also has plenty going on up top. In short, it’s a Dickensian tale of a man who has lived a life as an … Read more

Code Blue

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Bien de Moor as Marian

Code Blue is the second of six (as of June 2023) features by Poland-born, Netherlands-based film-maker Urszula Antoniak, and the second one I’ve seen. The first one I saw, Magic Mountains, was made in 2020, nine years after Code Blue but both feature single women locked in near-mortal struggles, with intimacy an issue. Does that make this a feature of her work or a coincidence? Three’s a trend, as they say, so I don’t know. Either way, Antoniak is someone to watch. She has a way with space and sound, and on the evidence of the work I’ve seen, makes stylish films bristling with menacing moods and atmospheres of psychological imperilment. There is … Read more

Whirlpool

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Husband and wife William and Ann

A diabolically brilliant plot is the making of Whirlpool, a very noirish whodunit from 1950, which gets off to a flying start with a rich psychiatrist’s wife, played by Gene Tierney at her most fragile, being caught shoplifting in a department store. Within seconds it’s been revealed that Ann Sutton (Tierney) is a kleptomaniac but rather than take her problems to her husband, the city’s go-to guy for mental problems, she’s been keeping her secret dark, which has now laid her open to manipulation by David Korvo (José Ferrer), a hypnotist, astrologer and all-round quack who is soon putting the squeeze on Mrs Sutton – she initially thinks he wants money or sex, … Read more

Translations

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Kate Morgan-Jones as Stef

A guy turns up at a young woman’s house unannounced. He’s a photographer who’s been travelling the world. She’s an agoraphobic shut-in cut off from everything. But they have something in common. Two things, in fact. A dead person who they both once knew, in different ways. And feelings for each other, which Evan (Alan Emrys) and Stef (Kate Morgan-Jones) are going to struggle to get into the open. That difficulty – communicating one person to another, translating emotions into words – is really what Translations is all about. It’s a strange film unafraid to head off in its own direction. A simple two-hander for the most part about two old friends (lovers?) catching … Read more