I Want to Live!

Close up of Susan Hayward looking frantic

I Want to Live! won Susan Hayward a Best Actress Oscar and yet the film, like Hayward herself, is barely remembered today. The story of a woman who is convicted of murder and is then executed in a gas chamber, it is an emotional and fairly gruelling drama which leaves one question entirely open – did she deserve it? – to focus on the unsavoury mechanics of the execution itself. But first a couple of prologues, one by the writer Albert Camus, billed as the Nobel Prize winner, enjoining us not to look away, the other from the Pulitzer-winning journalist Ed Montgomery, who covered the case, and vouches that what you are about … Read more

Meanwhile on Earth aka Pendant ce temps sur Terre

Elsa in the dark with a flashlight

Advancing on greatness by stealth, writer/director Jérémy Clapin’s Meanwhile on Earth (Pendant ce temps sur Terre) isn’t all the way there, and he throws away a lot of goodwill towards the end, but the great stuff really is great, and his movie is bold and unusual too. It also features a star with one of those strikingly watchable face. There’s a savage beauty to the features of Megan Northam, who plays a young woman whose astronaut brother went missing in space three years before, an event that has torn her psychologically to shreds. Gone is the intention to forge a career in the arts, though Elsa still fervently sketches all the time. Instead … Read more

No Way Out

Linda Darnell, Sidney Poitier and Richard Widmark

Issue-driven but dramatic enough and making political points that still resonate, No Way Out is a film about racism and stars Sidney Poitier in his first major role. He’s 22 and his self-assurance is both remarkable and one of the key selling points of director Joseph L Mankiewicz’s film. Poitier plays Dr Luther Brooks, a black doctor in a very white hospital where – as Mankiewicz and co-writers Lesser Samuels and Philip Yordan’s go to great pains to show – Brooks is treated as an absolute equal by his fellow doctors. In particular Dr Dan Wharton (Stephen McNally) and hospital administrator Dr Sam Moreland (Stanley Ridges). Don’t be fooled, black lift operator and … Read more

The People’s Joker

Vera Drew in full Joker garb

The People’s Joker started life as a re-edit of the original Joker movie, then that idea was junked in favour of shooting something that was all new, though leaning heavily on the intellectual property of Batman and his DC adversaries. So much did it lean, in fact, that it got as far as one screening at the Toronto International Film Festival before a shot across its bows from Warner Bros. got it yanked it from the festival. There were no further screenings, and nor were there any clear explanations from either director/star Vera Drew or from Warners whether a full-blown cease-and-desist letter had been sent, or whether something else had gone on in … Read more

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

Close-up of Dr Mabuse

Technically remarkable, fitfully brilliant, not entirely successful, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse) was Fritz Lang’s second time out with a character who fascinated him. His creation is the archetypal Bond villain, a criminal mastermind whose tentacular reach extends right through the city of 1930s Berlin and from the here and now into the afterlife, or so it appears. The story kicks off where 1922’s Dr Mabuse the Gambler ended, with Mabuse in an insane asylum after being apprehended by the police. Whether he is actually or just feigning it is moot, but one man on the case, Inspector Hofmeister, believes Mabuse is still somehow running his rackets. As … Read more

Chicken for Linda!

Linda, yellow all over

Linda wants chicken, that’s the plot and the literal translation of the original French title of Chicken for Linda! (Linda veut du poulet!), a farce of sorts about a young girl and her hassled mum, a dead dad and a search to get together the ingredients to make the dish that reminds Linda of her missing papa. Except. Maman does not cook. She’s a microwave queen whose cooking know-how extends about as far as the difference between shepherd’s pie and lasagne. But cook she must, because having accused Linda of stealing her ring she discovered that the cat had in fact swallowed it. And now that mum Paulette has found it again in … Read more

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte

Bette Davis screaming

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte tries to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle that was What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. And fails. It’s not even a valiant fail, instead director Robert Aldrich and co mount a cynical re-run at the same basic idea – two vintage dames doing battle most foul – but this time around the recipe lacks one essential ingredient. Joan Crawford. Bette Davis is, though, the other half of the duelling duo who’d made Baby Jane‘s Grand Dame Guignol (as these things full of superannuated Hollywood monsters are known) so memorable. Crawford walked off the production of this follow-up claiming to be ill. Eventually the insurers demanded she be let go. Or that’s how … Read more

Deadpool & Wolverine

Publicity shot of Deadpool leaning on Wolverine

The quipping and meta-referencing have started even before the Marvel Studios ident is fully on the screen. Deadpool & Wolverine carries on in this vein, hitting Peak Ryan Reynolds at about the halfway mark, before realising it’s also meant to be a superhero movie, stops waving its hands around airily and finally balls them into fists. It also gets a bit dull at that point too, or less fun. Up till then this is a very funny film, making jokes about cocaine use, pegging, the shocking treatment that Fox meted out to Wolverine, how Disney saved the day, how Deadpool is “Marvel Jesus” and on and on and on it goes. Don’t even … Read more

Werewolf of London

The wolfman in the lab

So here’s the world’s first feature-length werewolf movie, 1935’s Werewolf of London, which wasn’t particularly successful financially or critically but did get into the ether most of the nuts and bolts, the lore, of weremovies to come. It owes a tiny bit to Frankenstein – gentleman scientist interfering with the nature of things in a lab full or arcing electricity – and quite a lot to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which had been a huge hit four years earlier. Whole chunks of Werewolf‘s story appear to have been airlifted from the 1931 movie, in fact, something all the critics noticed and a few were not happy about. While searching for a rare … Read more

Flow

The cat has caught a fish

Latvian animation phenomenon Gints Zilbalodis follows up his extraordinary debut, Away, with more beautifully rendered imagery in Flow, an Apocalypse Now-style quest, but with animals instead of people. They’re in a boat, in other words, sailing up a waterway and having adventures on the way, none of which ever look like they’re going to be fatally dangerous. If you were going to level an accusation at this gorgeous movie, its cuteness might be where you’d start. For those who don’t know Zilbalodis’s story, he’s the guy who couldn’t get a job after finishing college and so decided to write his own ticket, making Away all on his own, in his bedroom, taking on … Read more