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The Long Night
The Long Night is a remake of Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Lève hoping to do for American audiences what Carné’s film had done for the French – wow them. It was a flop, in spite of having a good cast, a fine director and top flight technical team. In case anyone wanted to make a direct comparison, before it came out RKO took the precaution of buying up all the prints of Carné’s film and destroying them. Luckily, not absolutely all of them, so now we can enjoy the Carné original and watch it alongside the remake to work out what went wrong. I’ll just say it here – timidity is the … Read more
Hard Truths
Hard Truths must be Mike Leigh’s most straightforwardly enjoyable movie since Topsy Turvy. Which is probably all kinds of wrong, since it’s about a woman in the grip of a depression so profound and persistent that she’s almost learned how to live with it. Leigh likes these pithy titles – High Hopes, Life Is Sweet, Naked – and Topsy Turvy is an outlier in his work, being a quasi-musical about the partnership of British operetta powerhouses Gilbert and Sullivan. Hard Truths is more the Leigh we expect – working class, a bit dour, a kernel of something tasty in there, fabulous performances. For all the genuinely great acting on display here, it’s Marianne Jean-Baptiste … Read more
Jigsaw
Organised race hate is a grift, the unusually prescient 1949 film Jigsaw points out, and is just another way of separating the poor and gullible from what little money they have. Donations, uniforms, other paraphernalia, it all adds up. Franchot Tone plays an assistant district attorney investigating the death of a printer. Who, it turns out, used to do off-the-books work for a far-right hate gang. The dead man’s wife insists that a journalist is involved in her husband’s death. Though she also insists that her husband killed himself, so who knows. DA Howard Malloy believes that the woman is scared out of her wits and is only telling him what she’s been … Read more
It Was Just an Accident
It Was Just an Accident is the latest in a string of films from a director who officially does not make them. Iranian Jafar Panahi was sentenced to a 20 year ban on making films in his homeland in 2010. Since then he’s made six features, all in Iran. Among them, This Is Not a Film, a pointed “fuck you” to the authorities shot in his apartment under house arrest. And the equally ingenious Taxi Tehran, in which Panahi drove about Tehran in a taxi, filming his interactions with people he picked up. His latest film continues the trend. Shot on the hoof, with a tiny cast and crew, using a van as … Read more
Desperate
Anthony Mann called Desperate his first proper movie, the one where he got to do what he wanted to do. Mann, now so famous for his westerns, had previously proved himself a master of film noir, as Desperate proves. This was the first of seven he’d crank out in 1947 and 1948. It’s a good work rate, but then these were made hot and fast. If it was me I’d have put director George Diskant’s name on the movie as its star. His cinematography is majestic. He was known for deep focus and his mastery of contrast – plenty of both here. But things being how they are it’s Steve Brodie’s name at … Read more
Happyend
Billed as sci-fi, Happyend is actually closer to films like Dazed and Confused or The Last Picture Show. It catches a bunch of Japanese youngsters just as they start the transition away from high school and on to the next thing. If there are the end of times coming down the track, they are not the impending annihilation of the planet after alien invasion but approaching adulthood. There is a sci-fi element, though it seems to be there as a cover rather than as an integral part of the plot. We’re in an authoritarian world where ethno-nationalism has its feet in the zeitgeist’s stirrups. In the high school where our two main guys, … Read more
The Devil Thumbs a Ride
It’s only in B movies that the bad guy gets top billing. That’s the case with The Devil Thumbs a Ride, a showcase for Lawrence Tierney, playing a villain who looks like he’s been lifted out of the 1930s and dropped into this 1947 noir. Cold and deadly, side-of-the-mouth diction. He fits in perfectly with this mix of the ugly and the quaint, the terse and the acidic. The whole thing is a cliché, but a cliché done with a considerable amount of flair. Tierney plays a hood, a murderer who shoots a man in cold blood and then flees the scene of the crime by picking up a lift with a drunk … Read more
Preparation for the Next Life
As a title Preparation for the Next Life sounds a bit sci-fi, spiritual maybe. But in fact it’s set in the very real world of the immigrant experience, as seen through the eyes of a young Uyghur woman who has arrived in New York on the back of a truck and is now trying to make a go of things without papers. As I type Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are rounding up people all over the USA, so this film, shot in late 2024 and early 2025, couldn’t be more timely. Director Bing Liu is best known for his documentaries, All These Sons and the Oscar-nominated Minding the Gap. He seems keen … Read more
The Clock
Stirringly democratic and winningly romantic, The Clock is one of Judy Garland’s best films. She sings not a note, you may be surprised to learn, but brings a tear to the eye with her portrayal of a sweet young miss having a whirlwind romance in surely the most New York New York ever committed to film. Almost all of it was shot in the studio, you may also be surprised to learn. Anyhow, Alice (Garland), a button-bright go-getter meets-cute with Robert Walker’s Joe Allen, a corporal on 48 hours leave, after he causes her to break a heel on an escalator in busy Pennsylvania Station. Though properly contrite, he is taking barely any … Read more
Oh, Canada
Robert DeNiro turned it down and so Richard Gere wound up with another decent role, in Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, a cool look at “heroic” types who have done little more than hitch a ride on a wave. Gere plays a crusading documentarian who, stricken with terminal cancer at the end of his life, is being interviewed by old students – now famous themselves – for a last hurrah. Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill) are here to celebrate the man and his valiant work. That’s the dying Leo’s initial intention, too. But, unsure of himself and realising that this is his last chance to set the record straight, he switches track … Read more
The Woman on the Beach
The Woman on the Beach is a bit of a dog’s breakfast. Designed as a dreamy, psychological tear through the unconscious, where libido is locked in a fight with other bits of the psyche, it wound up looking like it had been in a fight with itself. After a negative preview screening, panicked director Jean Renoir took it away and cut out 30 minutes of it. After reshooting all the scenes between leads Joan Bennett and Robert Ryan, he recast the only other significant woman in it. Out went Virginia Huston and in came Nan Leslie, who plays the significantly named Eve. The result? “I produced a film which was, I think, neither … Read more
Riefenstahl
As you might expect, Riefenstahl is a documentary about Leni Riefenstahl, “Hitler’s favourite film-maker”. The director of Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Riefenstahl’s career was first boosted and then destroyed by her association with the Führer. She insisted to the grim end – she died aged 101 in 2003 – that she was enthusiastic for Hitler at the time because all Germans were, nothing more or less. Director Andres Veiel had access to the Riefenstahl estate and so is able to include material that’s not been seen or heard before – interviews blowing up spectacularly when Riefenstahl loses her rag and telephone conversations with supporters, including Albert Speer. Veiel largely takes the combative … Read more
