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Semmelweis
If you know the name, you’ll know the film. Semmelweis tells the story of the 19th-century doctor who introduced hand-washing to labour wards in Vienna and at a stroke reduced the incidence of puerperal (aka childbed) fever, a killer of new mothers. Opening shot: a pregnant woman going into labour on the Austrian capital’s streets screaming blue murder when the police try to hustle her into the “death factory”, as she calls the maternity hospital. We’ve been plunged straight into the meat of the movie. Why is she so reluctant to go? What is regularly killing new mothers in this venerable institution, and why, we soon learn, does the midwife clinic across the … Read more
Fury
In 1936’s Fury, Fritz Lang revisits one of the key themes of M, his 1931 paranoid classic about a child murderer on the run. The focus on mob rule had seemed prophetic in a country about to install the Nazis as its rulers, but how well would it translate to democratic America? Very well is the answer, and it would stand up even better now, in the world of social media, where a rumour is enough to convict in the court of public opinion and the best option for anyone caught up in a pile-on is to disappear entirely. Joe (Spencer Tracy) and Katherine (Sylvia Sidney) are very much in love and plan … Read more
Oktober November
After sublime revenge thriller Revanche, Austrian writer/director Götz Spielmann falls back to earth with Oktober November, a soap, a melodrama, call it what you will, but whether you like it or not, it’s a film with a chrome-like finish. It hangs off the spectacular cheekbones of its star, Nora Waldstätten, an ice-maiden specialist giving us blasts of wintry chill in her portrayal of Sonja, a successful actor who’s headed back home where her dad is sick and her sister is conducting an illicit affair with the handsome local doctor who tends to the old man. Here, in the bosom of her family, as dad shuffles towards his final days, old tensions re-emerge, secrets … Read more
The Killing
Stanley Kubrick really gets going with 1956’s The Killing, the first of his grand march through the genres. Paths of Glory, Lolita, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut would follow but here Kubrick’s attempt to do genre movies in a distinctively different way focuses on film noir, and in particular the noirish heist. Yes, there had been earlier movies, Killer’s Kiss and Fear and Desire, but Kubrick considered those the training warm-ups of the ambitious amateur rather than considered finished products. Here, thanks to a partnership with producer James Harris, he had enough money and enough technical talent behind and in … Read more
The Vourdalak
Dracula before Dracula, the original of The Vourdalak, Aleksei Tolstoy’s The Family of the Vourdalak, was written in 1839, nearly 60 years before Bram Stoker sat down to write his tale of the Undead. It’s a refreshingly different take on the story we’re all used to, with a focus, unsurprisingly given the title, on how the average everyday vampire might get along with his relations, blood and otherwise. This retelling of the story makes for a very drole movie, in the very French sense of the word. Not exactly comedic but prancing about in that territory somewhere and incarnated in the central character – the Jonathan Harker, if you like – an innocent … Read more
OK Connery
A moving target is harder to hit. That must be why OK Connery goes by so many different titles. The perfectly reasonable Operation Kid Brother is one alternative, the frankly bizarre Divided Evil another. Probably the most informative of all the variants, apart from the original, is Operation Double 007. If I tell you that it stars Sean Connery’s younger brother, Neil, you’ll twig what’s going on here. A mockbuster Bond movie, complete with actors from the franchise. Like Bernard Lee, who played M; Lois Maxwell, of Miss Moneypenny fame; a Bond Girl in the shape of Daniela Bianchi (she was in From Russia with Love); Adolfo Celi (a villain in Thunderball); and … Read more
May December
Todd Haynes loves Douglas Sirk but with May December he takes on a love-across-the-divide tale even Sirk might struggle with. The story is loosely based on the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal, the case of a 34-year-old teacher and her inappropriate sexual relationship with a 12-year-old boy. In this retelling, the teacher was the 36-year-old Gracie and the boy the 13-year-old Joe, a couple who met in a pet store where she helped out and he did odd jobs, and where the two of them were one day discovered in flagrante in the store room. But that was all 20 years in the past. As Haynes picks up the story the scandal is all … Read more
Hangover Square
The film that killed its star, Hangover Square is an adaptation of Patrick Wilson’s most popular novel, a moody noir set in gaslit, foggy London and with a psychoanalytical element that marks it out as a beast lumbering out of the 1940s. There’s a lot to like here but the first thing to grab the attention is the score by Bernard Herrmann, which sets the mood with its jangling tangle of unresolved chords, followed by a giddy, swooping camera swinging us straight into the action – a man being killed done from the killer’s point of view. The killer is George Harvey Bone (Laird Cregar), a classical composer with dissociative identity disorder (multiple … Read more
How to Have Sex
Selling the sizzle rather than the sausage, How to Have Sex is loud and garish on the outside but gooey and emotional on the inside, a story of three teenagers on a post-exam drunken holiday in Crete, having fun like they invented partying and determined to lose their virginity at the first opportunity. This is the feature debut by its writer and director, Molly Manning Walker, and she captures the heroic quantity of good times consumed by 16-year-old Brits Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Sky (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis) in the pursuit of bliss in one of those holiday towns (it’s Malia) the Brits love to colonise. Shrieks of “Babes!”, “This is insane!” … Read more
Killer’s Kiss
“Her soft mouth was the road to sin-smeared violence,” runs the blurb on the poster for Killer’s Kiss. Well, yes and no. The title of Stanley Kubrick’s second feature’s isn’t really that accurate either – which killer? which kiss? – but we get the idea. Film noir. The lone individual dwarfed by circumstance and environment became an abiding concern of Kubrick’s in later films and you can see it here in his story of atomised individuals trying to make a go of it in the big city. On one side Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), a fighter who’s seen better days. On the other Gloria Price (Irene Kane), a taxi dancer wondering how it came … Read more
Caligula: The Ultimate Cut
Have you ever wanted to see Malcolm McDowell’s cock? Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is at least one place to find it, the movie released in 1979 marking the high water mark of the arthouse/porn crossover. The story behind the making of the film threatens to overshadow the plot of the film itself, which can be distilled as “man becomes emperor of Rome, goes mad, pays the price”, and as I’ve written about it at length once already, here’s the link if you don’t know how it goes. Briefly, the film, financed by soft-porn outfit Penthouse, was shot by Tinto Brass but was then drastically altered in post-production, with producer and Penthouse owner Bob … Read more
A Life at Stake
Angela Lansbury Sex Kitten is the offer in A Life at Stake, a short and atmospheric noir from 1955 with a looser attitude to sex than was usual at the time. But before we meet Angela’s minxy Doris (not the sexiest name in the world, but hey), we get an eyeful of our star, Keith Andes, stripped to the waist and showing off the physique that got him movie work in the 1950s. He’s playing Edward Shaw, a down-on-his-luck property developer introduced to rich, married and bored Doris Hillman by a go-between lawyer. In scenes thick with flirtatiousness, all set by a swimming pool where Doris is sunning herself in a skimpy swimsuit, … Read more
