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Diabolik
What sort of a supervillain has his secret lair in his girlfriend’s back garden? Why not his own turf? While we’re about it, why does Diabolik – the title of the film and the name of its antihero – lift so much of its plot from Fantomas, another European masked villain? If those are the sort of questions you’re asking while watching this film then it probably isn’t working for you. A stew, a pastiche, Diabolik is bits of Bond stirred together with a sliver of The Pink Panther and then spritzed with Italian glamour. We are not here for originality, but for cars and girls, mid-century modernism and split screens, hot women … Read more
The Locket
A locket opens once, to reveal what’s within. The 1946 movie The Locket, on the other hand, keeps on opening. Flashback follows flashback, with more information delivered each time the hinge creaks ajar. What’s inside is sort of special, sort of irritating. This is a film whose most difficult bits are quite easy to follow. It’s the rest of it that gets a touch troublesome. That flashback-within-flashback structure is the film’s USP. Otherwise it’s a mid-1940s aberrant-psychology drama focusing on one Nancy Patton (Laraine Day). As the curtain rises Nancy is about to get married to big swell John Willis (Gene Raymond) at a society wedding. But then Dr Blair (Brian Aherne) sits … Read more
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Political hotheads start revolutions but it’s the apolitical masses who win them when they abandon the old regime. The Seed of the Sacred Fig was shot in secret in Iran by Mohammad Rasoulof and it’s set against the backdrop of the Masa Amini protests of 2022. This was the moment when, after the Iranian morality police killed a young woman for not wearing a hijab, nationwide civil unrest broke out and for a moment it looked like the regime was going to topple. It survived to fight another day, which lends Rasoulof’s film an extra piquancy. His film is history as written by the losers not the winners, an examination of something very … Read more
Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay
When the boomers were young, they were youth-obsessed like no other generation. 1971’s Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay (Morgane et ses nymphes) captures the febrile insecurity of a generation whose claim to specialness was its own youth, in a story about bright young women, already feeling the years aged only 20, being offered immortality by an ageless vamp. The opening shot – a young woman naked, surrounded by old women clothed, some sort of black mass or diabolical chastisement going on – sets the tone, though director Bruno Gantillon then pulls way, way back after the opening credits, in a change of tone so startling it’s camp. Suddenly we’re on holiday with … Read more
The History of Sound
Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor in a film together? Sold to that salivating wreck at the back of the room. The History of Sound has pulled off a casting coup, that’s for sure. Two of the hotmost of actors right now in the same movie. If you were to take a guess as to what sort of movie that might be – given their CVs of sexy and queer-adjacent stuff – you might go for something like a Brokeback Mountain remake. And that’s just what this is, dressed up in a different era’s clothes and with the two men committing themselves to the roles as a pair of students who meet at Boston … Read more
Dead Reckoning
Dead Reckoning cashes in on the Humphrey Bogart persona big time – a drawl and a rough and ready way with women but beneath it all a courtly gent with a thirst for truth. It was made in 1946 when peacetime mopping-up was the order of the day. War is over. Men are returning to where they came from. Things are going back to normal. Or that’s what’s meant to be happening, at any rate. As we meet Bogart’s Rip Murdock, he’s covered in blood, scared and on the run. If this is a reset then something has gone wrong. With plenty of voiceover from Bogart, and the useful shimmer of an extended … Read more
Alone in Berlin
During the Second World War, a Berlin couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, waged a two-person war against the Nazi regime. Prompted by the death of their son at the Front, they embarked on a campaign of writing seditious postcards and leaving them all over the city for people to find. The cards urged their fellow countrymen to rise up against Hitler and join the German resistance. Being just little postcards, they weren’t much of a statement, maybe, but they were enough to make the authorities to sit up and take notice. In 1947 writer Hans Fallada published Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone), a novel about the Hampels and their … Read more
Showbiz Kids
I’m reasonably sure Alex Winter is fine about being the one in Bill and Ted who isn’t Keanu Reeves. Showbiz Kids is part of the reason why I think that. The latest in a stream of fascinating documentaries taking in subjects as various as the downloading revolution (2013’s Downloaded), government secrecy (2018’s The Panama Papers) and Frank Zappa (2020’s Zappa), his latest takes in the landscape of the movie brat, the child star, focusing not so much on the obvious benefits as the near-bottomless downside. Like his earlier docs, this is well informed, humane, intelligent and thoughtful. In interviews publicising his films Winter comes across as someone who is fulfilled in his work, … Read more
Night Has a Thousand Eyes
If it’s a really good Edward G Robinson performance you’re looking for, can I suggest Night Has a Thousand Eyes, a knotty little potboiler elevated by Robinson. Out of gangster mode he was a versatile actor who could bring home the goods in all sorts of roles. Here he’s a stage magician who gets spooked when the phoney predictions he offers audiences start coming true. So spooked that he gives it all up and flees, away from the woman he loves – a premonition has told him she’ll die if he stays – and away from the best friend who will become stinking rich by investing in oil, another fulfilment of John Triton’s … Read more
Crown Vic
Crown Vic goes by the title Bulletproof in the UK and Protect and Serve in Australia, because barely anyone in those countries has any idea what a Crown Vic is. Maybe not that many in the USA do either. So I’ll tell you. It’s the Ford Crown Victoria cop car, the black and white one that’s been speeding off after bad guys in movies (and on the streets) for at least 20 years, from the start of its production run in 1992. It was made in Canada, ironically enough for a car so iconic in US culture, and is roomy, well built and has rear-wheel drive – so it’s good around corners. Real-life … Read more
The Amazing Mr. X
The only really normal person in The Amazing Mr. X, Richard Carlson’s Martin Abbott, is presented as a complete dope. It’s that sort of film – exotics, psychotics, psychics, camp conmen and vamps circle each other while boring old Martin sits stupidly at the centre. The two real reasons to watch are Cathy O’Donnell, again effortlessly sexy as she was in They Live by Night. She plays the concerned sister trying to get her widowed sibling Christine (Lynn Bari) to marry again. To… you guessed it… chump and dullard Martin. Christine is understandably hesitant. Martin clearly a mistake. But Christine is also reluctant to let go of the hope that husband Paul (Donald Curtis) … Read more
The Secret Agent
It’s never entirely clear what’s going on in The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto), a 1970s-style conspiracy thriller from Brazil with lots of good hair and tasty roles for old dudes. Director/writer Kleber Mendonça Filho doesn’t even make clear until right near the end that it’s all taking place in flashback, yet another veil between the audience and his protagonist, Wagner Moura’s secret agent – of sorts. There’s a lot of good things to say about this film but the plot is not easy to talk about. There just isn’t that much to it – Moura’s Marcelo/Armando/Fernando (depending on who he’s talking to) returns to his native Recife at carnival time, possibly on … Read more
