Review

The President’s Cake

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Lamia and her cockerel

A lyrical but punchy debut by writer/director Hasan Hadi, The President’s Cake is a near-fairytale story about a poor little girl who is “chosen” by her class teacher to bake a cake to celebrate the birthday of the president, and then has to move heaven and earth to find the ingredients. Because the president is Saddam Hussein and because the little girl is a Marsh Arab – focus of Hussein’s genocidal wrath – the baking of the cake has a special importance. Get it wrong and it’ll be seen as an insult. Who knows where that could lead? And so Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) heads into Baghdad with aged grandma Bibi (Waheed Thabet … Read more

Merrily We Go to Hell

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Jerry with Joan hugging him from behind

Merrily We Go to Hell ran into trouble when it came out in 1932. The use of the word Hell in the title gave some distributors an attack of the vapours. To get round potential objections, in the UK the problem word was simply removed and the film went by Merrily We Go to __, which was also the case in certain states in the US. The film itself is often described as a comedy, but it isn’t really funny. But then that is often the way with the comedy of manners, which this is. This is a big one in the feminist canon, not least because it was directed by Dorothy Arzner, … Read more

Fuze

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Will Tranter aims a rifle

Fuze adds another little gem of a film to under-regarded director David Mackenzie’s list, joining Starred Up, Perfect Sense, Relay, Spread and Hell and High Water as unusual takes on genre, often with a heavily procedural slant. Things click, click, click into place in Mackenzie films, though often the tumblers line up in unexpected ways. Here, what looks like one sort of film quickly becomes another and then another. But things starts off in familiar territory, in the Paddington area of London, where a huge unexploded bomb has been exposed during the preparatory work for a new development. In come the bomb disposal guys, an army team led by the bluff, sweary Major … Read more

Jamaica Inn

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Charles Laughton

Hitchcock’s last movie before he decamped from Britain to the USA is a nearly great adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel Jamaica Inn, set in Cornwall where smuggler gangs lure ships onto the rocks, loot their cargos and kill their crews. The towering presence in it is Charles Laughton as local lord Sir Humphrey Pengallan, a charming psychopath who runs the notorious gang through his trusty lieutenant Joss Merlyn (Leslie Banks), landlord of the Jamaica Inn, from which the gang operates, a place so feared that coaches will not stop there. Arriving one dark and stormy night – poor orphaned Irish colleen Mary Yellan (Maureen O’Hara), looking up her aunt after the death … Read more

Normal

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Sheriff Richardson with a cup of coffee

After John Wick, Nobody and after Nobody, Normal, all films written by Derek Kolstad and all telling essentially the same story – mess with this seemingly placid dude at your peril. Normal is Bob Odenkirk going around the block one more time with Kolstad – Nobody one and two did good business so why not? But this time Kolstad has Coen brothers ambitions in his broadening out of the landscape and deepening of the characterisation. Though for the most part it is another example of Kolstad as the consummate Hollywood writer – everything has its place and everything has its pace, and a detail dropped in now is surely going to pay off later, … Read more

Big Wednesday

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Gary Busey, Jan-Michael Vincent and William Katt head for the waves

Expectations were high for John Milius’s Big Wednesday when it debuted in 1978. Based on Milius and co-writer Dennis Aaberg’s own experiences growing up as California surfers, it tracks three dudes from callow youth to maturity, dropping in periodically as they also surf the waves of life. So high, in fact, that Milius kindly swapped profit points with his old friends, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Which is how he ended up owning a tiny piece of Close Encounters and Star Wars and they ended up with a little bit of Big Wednesday. Which worked out better for Milius than for Lucas and Spielberg. He became rich on his end of the deal … Read more

Enzo

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Enzo takes a phone call

If it’s gay versus queer then gay wins out in Enzo, a coming-of-age/coming-out drama of the old school, where the homosexuality is the subject under discussion, the problem to be solved, rather than window-dressing to something else. Enzo is a 16-year-old French lad who has rejected the life that was in his stars. Currently working as a labourer, he was meant to be following a similar trajectory to his brother – university, some sort of career – but has instead dropped out and is hefting sacks about on a building site where his soft hands are picking up blisters. As we meet him, Enzo is being given a hard time by his boss, the … Read more

The Wrecking Crew

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Dean Martin close-up

1968’s The Wrecking Crew was the last of the Matt Helm movies. A series of chintzy James Bond knock-offs – Faux Faux Seven? Junk Bond? – starring Dean Martin as a spy laidback to the point of requiring resuscitation, it had pretty much exhausted the seam by this fourth outing. Box office wasn’t great either so when Martin’s co-star, Sharon Tate, got murdered it made for a handy smokescreen. In public utterances Martin said that her death had taken the fun out of the films and that’s why he was giving up. In reality… who really knows? As for plot: a bullion heist so huge that it needs to be kept quiet otherwise … Read more

Nuremberg

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Close up of Russell Crowe as Göring

Would you have guessed, when Russell Crowe was appearing in Australian TV soaps like Young Doctors and Neighbours that one day he’d be playing the lead in Nuremberg? And that he’d have gone from being a slim, handsome chap with tousled hair to someone who could effortlessly play Hermann Göring, sour-faced, fat and oozing self-regard. The self-regard maybe – actors, huh – and transformations are what actors are all about, after all. Wibbling to one side, Crowe’s performance as Göring, Hitler’s Supreme Commander of the Air Force and an unrepentant Nazi right to the last moment, is the making of James Vanderbilt’s film. Set at the Nuremberg War trials in the aftermath of the … Read more

St Benny the Dip

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Lionel Stander, Dick Haymes, Roland Young

I didn’t know, going into St Benny the Dip, that a “dip” is a pickpocket. In these circles the dip is the one who goes in for the goods, the “stall” having provided a distraction, while the “mule” is the one to whom the hot item is swiftly transferred, in case the dip is caught in the act. That established, into the film, which doesn’t seem to be about pickpockets at all, though it is about street criminals. When we meet Benny (Dick Haymes) the smooth, Matthew (Roland Young) the plausible and Monk (Lionel Stander) the operator, they are midway through a gambling sting, trying to bilk a high roller, when the police … Read more