Popular Features
100 Years of… A Page of Madness
Madness indeed. A Page of Madness was made in 1926 on next to no budget, by a talented director aided by a group of demented avant-garde writers called the Shinkankakuha, who were determined to break free from the shackles of naturalism. For many years it was considered lost, until its director, Teinosuke Kinugasa, found a copy of the film in a storeroom in 1971. Still with a third of its footage missing, that’s the version you will see today. The other thing that needs saying before locking in is that it’s made with barely any gear. Kinugasa and co had no equipment to speak of, just a 16mm camera and eight lights. Remember … Read more
100 Years of… 3 Bad Men
3 Bad Men was John Ford’s last silent western, though it was obviously never billed as such (who knew, when it opened, that the silent era would end within a couple of years?). The unannounced end of an era was released in 1926 and Ford wouldn’t return to the genre until Stagecoach in 1939. It’s a Ford classic, though you can see all the key elements in this earlier film – admirably straightforward storytelling through powerful characters against stunning backdrops. For those who consider silent movies to be a lesser art form, the unsophisticated predecessor to the real deal, this could be an eye opener. It’s ironic, for a start, and that starts with … Read more
Isn’t It Iconic?
La Dolce Vita might not be the best Italian film ever made. Or the cleverest, steamiest or most gripping. But it is the most iconic. Here’s why… Just a touch over 50 years ago the assembled critics at the Cannes film festival gave Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita a standing ovation. Not at the end of the film, or even at the moment when Anita Ekberg gets into the Trevi fountain, its most remembered scene. No, what got them to their feet was the film’s opening shot. It’s of a huge statue of Jesus Christ being airlifted out of Rome, the Eternal City. It doesn’t look like much now but back then this … Read more
100 Years of… Master of the House
More than just a miserable face, arthouse darling Carl Theodor Dreyer could also churn out the hits. Master of the House is one such, a counter to the suggestion that he was just an austere Dane interested only in the beauty of human suffering – see The Passion of Joan of Arc or, much later, Ordet, for plenty of that. Madly successful at the box office, Master of the House is, as near as you got from Dreyer, a Hollywood entertainment, telling a story with a clear beginning, middle and end, emotional arcs, good guys and bad guys, fairly realistic performances and a moral at the end that you can actually see coming from … Read more
100 Years of… Robin Hood
Accept no substitute. This is the original Robin Hood, or Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood (as the registered title insists), the one that Errol Flynn’s 1938 version modelled itself on, the one that gets all the Merry Men, Maid Marian, good King Richard and bad King John, Sir Guy of Gisbourne and the Sheriff of Nottingham into forms so recognisable that even at 100 years old, it’s instantly obvious who is who. This wasn’t the first screen outing for the mythical character, in fact there had already been five before (if we include 1919’s My Lady Robin Hood), so Robin Hood as a movie character was at least fairly well known, though of … Read more
100 Years of… Coeur Fidèle
The first thing to say about Coeur Fidèle (aka The Faithful Heart) is how brilliantly good the image is on this 100-year-old movie. I watched the Eureka Masters of Cinema version and it’s excellent. It’s important that it’s good because this is a highly visual movie. It certainly won’t win awards for storytelling. Wikipedia says it was written in a day, to which the response is surely “you don’t say”. Marie is an orphan girl who skivvies at the bar of her foster parents. She is in love with Jean, a local docker, but is being courted by Petit Paul, a brutish drunkard. After her adoptive parents give her to Paul, Jean and … Read more
100 Years of… The Plastic Age
There was barely any plastic around in 1925 when The Plastic Age debuted. “Plastic” in this context has its original sense of something easily moulded – “rendering the material more plastic”, my dictionary offers as an example. That “material” in this case is a young man and his “Age” is the reason he’s so biddable, labile, impressionable, easily influenced – see your thesaurus for more synonyms. Donald Keith plays the dude, Hugh, a young man off to college where, his parents hope, he’ll keep the family end up and fulfil himself as a sportsman of track and field (no one at this college seems to do any studying). But instead of knuckling down … Read more
100 Years of… The Gold Rush
Charlie Chaplin’s most famous film, the one he wanted to be remembered by, is The Gold Rush. It was not only sensational then but it’s amazing how well it holds up now. Fashionable though it is to be slightly down on Chaplin these days, The Gold Rush is the one doubters should see – inventive, dramatic and funny, it’s well made enough to convince all but the most prejudiced. I’d urge the Criterion version on you if you’re going to shell out for a physical copy. It contains the 1925 silent original and also the 1942 re-release, which Chaplin re-edited, rescored and overdubbed with a narration (an approximation of newsreel bombast done by … Read more
100 Years of… The Strong Man
Two people do special things in 1926’s The Strong Man. The first is director Frank Capra, inventing film language on the hoof in his feature debut and showing us why he was such a force on the 20th-century film scene. The other is Harry Langdon, demonstrating an ability to animate dead space with his fluid features and expressive body. The story is really a case of the tail wagging the dog and it takes a long time to get to the film’s point – elaborately conceived and expertly executed stunts. First there’s a preamble in the Great War, where Harry’s hapless soldier Paul Bergot is taking potshots at Germans with his catapult in … Read more
Ben Dover: The Sultan of Schwing
Britain’s pornographer-in-chief on the toughest thing about his job, changing attitudes to sex and why all politicians are bastards “M’lud, one of the pornographic tapes in question involved a young lady and a German sausage, a Brat… (leans back) – or was it a Bock…? It was, I believe, a Bockwurst. The lady was in the process, your honour, of committing an unnatural act with a meat appendage.” Ben Dover, real name Simon (though he tells me it’s Lyndsay) Honey, hits the Soho bar we’re meeting in with his motormouth at full throttle and full volume. Now sitting opposite, he’s telling me about his court appearance for supplying porn to some Belgian bloke … Read more
100 Years of… Foolish Wives
When Foolish Wives debuted in 1922, its writer/director/star Erich von Stroheim was at the peak of his popularity, having exploited anti-German sentiment during the First World War by playing a despicable Hun doing despicable things in a series of films. “The man you love to hate,” was his moniker, one gained in 1918 in the film The Heart of Humanity, where he plays a ruthless German officer who throws a baby out of the window so he can better get on with raping a Red Cross nurse. That’ll do it. Foolish Wives works the same seam, though, the war over and the Russian revolution grabbing more headlines, von Stroheim is now playing a … Read more
100 Years of… Our Hospitality
1923 is the year when Buster Keaton’s run of classic feature-length comedies gets out of the blocks with Our Hospitality, which signals its intention to be different even in its opening credits, which linger on the screen far longer than those of most films of the era. Here, they say, is something to be savoured. The story is William Shakespeare via rural 19th-century America via the mind of Buster Keaton, a re-working of Romeo and Juliet crossed with the Hatfield and McCoys feud, with Buster playing Willie McKay, a guy who falls in love with a young woman he meets on the train journey back to his Appalachian homeland where he’s inherited a … Read more
