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Les Tontons Flingueurs aka Crooks in Clover
There’s something about 1963’s Les Tontons Flingueurs as a title that sounds wackier, funnier, just better than the usual English translation – Crooks in Clover. The film also goes by the name Monsieur Gangster but the original French literally translates as Gunslinging Uncles. Tontons Flingueurs is better because it sounds a bit ridiculous, and that’s really what’s going on in this amusing French drama from 1963, often described as a comedy but only properly funny if you speak French. Michel Audiard’s screenplays deal heavily in slang and wordplay and neither of those quite survive the translation into English. The film has a real cachet in France; elsewhere barely any. If like me you’re … Read more
Neon Bull
Iremar (Juliano Cazarré) is a bull handler who travels from one Brazilian rodeo to another. It’s a life lived on the road, with a small gang of fellow nomads. They pitch up, do their job, then move on. Like a little family they eat together, joke, squabble. They have each others’ backs. Iremar is the guy who puts chalk on the bulls’ tails, so the guys on horseback out in the arena can better grab a hold (these rodeos seem to consist of grabbing the tail and flipping the bull onto its back). By day he applies chalk, opens the gate into the arena to let the bulls run, then cleans up afterwards, … Read more
The Bullet Train
Disaster movies summed up in one factoid: Airport (1970) to Airplane! (1980). You’re welcome. The Bullet Train comes slap dang in the middle, 1975, and though it’s often sold as being the inspiration for 1994’s Speed, which it is, it’s just as significant for being a grand summing-up of the entire disaster movie genre. Let’s deal with the Speed stuff first. A bomb has been fitted to one particular Japanese bullet train, or shinkansen (Shinkansen daibakuha is the Japanese title), on the Tokyo to Hakata route. Once the train reaches 80kph the bomb becomes armed. After that, if the speed drops below 80kph, the bomb will detonate. So far, so Sandra Bullock. But … Read more
The Banshees of Inisherin
The films of Martin McDonagh are full of lonely, isolated people and The Banshees of Inisherin is no exception. Like In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri before it, this is the story of missed or missing connections. This time, though, it’s particularly bleak. Billed as a comedy, The Banshees of Inisherin isn’t full of laughs, and they tend to come early on. Things get darker as the film goes on. It reinstates the In Bruges coupling of Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, here as longtime friends who live on an island off the coast of Ireland in 1923. While the civil war has been raging away just over there … Read more
A Special Day
Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni appeared in many films together, but in 1977’s A Special Day they both play against type – she’s the dowdy housewife rather than the glamour bomb, he’s a gay man rather than the straight Italian lover, two characters thrown together after pretty much everyone else in their apartment block has rushed out into the streets hoping to catch sight of the Führer or Il Duce on the day that Hitler visited Mussolini in 1938. They may live in the same block but Antonietta and Gabriele have never met. She’s always too busy looking after her six kids and husband (John Vernon), and he’s always at work. Or always … Read more
Confess, Fletch
A confession about Confess, Fletch. I was quite a chunk in before I realised that the character of Fletch, played here by Jon Hamm, was the same Fletch that Chevy Chase played in 1985’s Fletch and 1989’s Fletch Lives. Prejudices readjusted, I continued, noting that Hamm’s Fletch is now a retired investigative journalist (Chase’s was still on the job), and that Hamm is trying to dignify the character up a bit. A touch of Cary Grant in his portrayal, or maybe even Gregory Peck – especially when Fletch is riding around Rome on an old-school scooter, Roman Holiday style. From the opening credits – that big blue Miramax ident of yore – and the … Read more
Army of Shadows
Jean-Pierre Melville is slightly off his turf in 1969’s Army of Shadows (aka L’Armée des Ombres). No trenchcoat-wearing criminals driving American cars. Instead he gives us a slice through the activities of the French Resistance during the Second World War. Like all his late-era film, from 1966’s Le Deuxième Souffle to 1972’s Un Flic, Army of Shadows is an absolute must-see. Joseph Kessel, who wrote the original book, had been in the Resistance himself and based it on his own experiences. Melville, too, had been a member and is keen to present a nuts-and-bolts, warts-and-all portrait of the men and women who risked everything to help rid their country of the Nazi invader. … Read more
The Hole aka Il Buco
The latest stop on MichelAngelo Frammartino’s quest to redeem the much-abused drama-documentary, The Hole (aka Il Buco) relates in god’s-eye-view fashion how cavers discovered the 700-metre deep Bifurto Abyss in Pollino, South Italy, in 1961. If you’re familiar with Frammartino’s work, in films like Le Quattro Volte, you’ll know to expect a quiet and meditative journey, with reveals coming orgainically, always with Frammartino’s camera appearing as if it was just lucky enough to be there when something happened – when in fact everything has been carefully staged, artfully lit and framed for maximum picturesqueness. The effect is a bit like Slow Cinema, though the hallmark of all those films of fires flickering, or … Read more
100 Years of… Safety Last!
Here’s an image so iconic that it’s recognised by people who have no idea what film it’s from, or who the geezer hanging off the clock is. Wikipedia calls it one of the most famous images from the silent-film era but it’s surely more than that – this is one of the most famous images from any era, in any medium, and ranks alongside the Mona Lisa or the mask of Tutankhamoun, right? Maybe I’m hyperventilating a bit there, but to change tack slightly, the added brilliance of this remarkable image is that it perfectly sums up in one frame what Safety Last!, Harold Lloyd’s 1923 masterpiece, is all about – hanging on for grim … Read more
Italian Studies
The (mis)adventures of a writer who suddenly loses her memory in New York City, Italian Studies boldly tries something original with the old “movie amnesiac” formula and swerves the usual mechanics: loss and recovery. Instead, writer/director Adam Leon sets out to explore what it actually feels like to suddenly have no idea of who or what you are. Vanessa Kirby plays the amnesiac author in search of character, a Brit in New York who wanders into a hardware store to buy something, having first tied her dog up outside. Nothing obvious happens while she’s in there, but on leaving, this pretty blonde walks away from the store, leaving the dog behind. She has … Read more
100 Years of… The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Mention The Hunchback of Notre Dame to someone and the response is often a shuffling crouch, accompanied by a moaning “the bells… the bells”, in vague homage to Charles Laughton. Here’s where Laughton got it all from, 1923’s Hunchback, starring Lon Chaney as Quasimodo, the mostly deaf, half-blind unfortunate who falls for a gypsy dancer called Esmeralda, as does nearly every other man in the film. What’s notable watching this version for the first time is how Esmeralda-centric it is. This is her story, not Quasimodo’s. The title of Victor Hugo’s original novel was Notre-Dame de Paris (Our Lady of Paris), and it’s tempting to imagine the title nods towards Esmeralda – she … Read more
The Apology
The list of dark Christmas movies grows one longer with The Apology, an atmospheric female-centric thriller with interesting psychology revealed when the crunch comes. Distributed by Shudder, The Apology was produced by Company X Productions, the all-female outfit behind films like Bitch (2017), Seven Stages to Achieve Eternal Bliss (2018) and No Man of God (2021), and starts off in the warm domestic setting of a cosy but remote house on a dark and stormy winter’s night. Inside, two old friends are putting the final stages of Christmas prep together. For Darlene (Anna Gunn) it’s the first time she’s hosted the celebration since her daughter disappeared 20 years before. She’s nervous, and in … Read more
