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István Szabó: Mephisto/Colonel Redl/Hanussen
A neat Blu-ray box set of some of Hungarian director István Szabó’s best – probably his best known – movies. Mephisto (1981), Colonel Redl (1985) and Hanussen (1988) all star Klaus Maria Brandauer, all three are co-written with Péter Dobai and they’re all shot by Lajos Koltai. Thematically they all deal with essentially the same issue too – personal integrity, though they come at it from different directions. To précis the plots, Mephisto is a Nazi-era tale of an actor who is “invited” to endorse the new regime in return for career success. Colonel Redl follows a traitor on his path towards sending thousands of countrymen to their deaths in the dog days … Read more
Ebony & Ivory
If you enjoyed The Greasy Strangler and wondered whether writer/director Jim Hosking had anything else in his locker, Ebony & Ivory has your name on it. Imagining Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder meeting on the remote Mull of Kintyre in Scotland sometime in 1981, it’s not aiming for documentary realism – the two musicians met in Montserrat in the Caribbean, for one – and is the sort of whimsy that seems aimed at stoners. And yet there is a kernel of something weird but true going on here. The British Wool Marketing Board feature in the closing credits, that’s how all over the place this film is, leading to theorising (if only on my … Read more
Clash by Night
Marilyn Monroe as a fishwife?! 1952’s Clash by Night has some fun incidentals like Monroe, making much of a small role. But the real action is with Barbara Stanwyck, as a goodtime girl who’s worn out her welcome after ten years in the big city and is now back in the coastal town where she grew up to wreak havoc among the menfolk. It’s another tough-nut role for Stanwyck, who plays a woman who decisively knows what she doesn’t want but isn’t quite sure what she does want. Should Mae, for instance, go with her head and marry dull and dependable Jerry (Paul Douglas)? Or have a fling with bad boy Earl (Robert … Read more
One Battle After Another
If the characters from Dr Strangelove somehow escaped and eventually found themselves in a Tarantino movie, it might look like One Battle After Another. A 1970s-vibing, magpie-thieving, funny and relentlessly entertaining ride, director Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie is basically one gloriously extended chase with added spiritual input from Hitchcock, the Coens and Paul Greengrass (plus QT). It’s funnier than your average Anderson movie – There Will Be Blood wasn’t notably full of jokes – and happier than usual to paddle in genre waters. The story is based on Pynchon’s novel Vineland, with much diluting by Anderson, and follows a gang of direct action radicals, the French 75, whose campaign of bombing banks and migrant … Read more
The Earrings of Madame de…
Light-hearted, ironic, passionate, frivolous, lush, beautifully made and full of little jokes, The Earrings of Madame de… is the sort of self-consciously filmic film that film-makers love but audiences are less enthusiastic about. It was a favourite of Kubrick. Douglas Sirk described it as perfect. When it got its Criterion Collection release Paul Thomas Anderson did the spoken introduction. New York Observer critic Andrew Yarris referred to it as the Greatest Film of All Time. Even if you don’t rate it quite so highly, it’s undeniably exquisitely made. This was director Max Ophüls back in Europe after a sojourn in Hollywood, and he’s definitely off the leash. His final four European films – La … Read more
2073
The year is 2073 and in a post-apocalyptic world a survivor of a climate catastrophe ekes out a meagre existence in New SanFrancisco, a colony of survivors in a world divided into the billionaire class and the rest. Cities are shattered, settlements are flooded. Unlucky non-billionaires like Ghost (Samantha Morton) scurry about in the wreckage, like something out of I Am Legend. Living in the shoe section of an old department store, she makes daily forays into the dangerous outside world to scavenge canned goods while trying to avoid being pounced on by gangs of marauding law enforcement officers. How did we get here? In cracked voiceover, the otherwise mute Ghost explains as … Read more
The Mother and the Whore
If the supposedly highly autobiographical The Mother and the Whore (La maman et la putain) is anything to go by, its writer/director Jean Eustache was a cock, a pseud and the sort of blowhard who could dish it out but not take it. A flattering portrait it is not but what’s usually considered Eustache’s best work (the Cahiers du Cinéma called it the best movie of the 1970s) is at least bracingly honest. Or maybe not – Eustache might have been even more appalling than the smug, self-centred creature he is portrayed as here, in the astonishing performance by Jean-Pierre Léaud, on screen for every minute of three hours 35 minutes of running … Read more
The Naked Gun
Manslaughter mispronounced as “man’s laughter” – by a cop! I laughed, so shoot me with a service pistol. The Naked Gun, back after nearly 30 years and with Liam Neeson now playing Frank Drebin Jr, son of the cop originally played by Leslie Nielsen, is funny. Not, perhaps, as funny as the original, but it made me chortle a few times, groan quite a few more, plus there was a reference to that beaver joke originally cranked out by Nielsen and Priscilla Presley in one of the earlier films. Can any more be necessary? A plot, for instance? No, it’s entirely unnecessary, and the writers – Akiva Schaffer (who directs), Doug Mand and … Read more
The Valley of the Bees
František Vláčil’s The Valley of the Bees (Údolí včel) got a fairly cool reception when it came out in 1968, even though his previous film, Marketa Lazarová, had been a success. Maybe they followed too hard on each other – Bees came only four months after Lazarová. Maybe the same 13th-century setting failed to hit the spot second time around – that itch had already been scratched. Maybe it was just too subtle, and its allegory whooshed over audience’s heads. Zeal is what it’s about, religious zeal in this telling, though the political allegory is clear, in its story about a young man who tries to escape a severe religious order and return … Read more
Evil Does Not Exist
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi originally intended Evil Does Not Exist to be a 30-minute short but realised somewhere along the way that he had the makings of a bigger film on his hands, one that’s part thriller, part meditation on (and manipulation of) audience sympathies. In a variation on the WB Yeats line “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met” – beloved of expat Irish bars – Hamaguchi seems to be saying that in the movies there are no bad guys, just characters we haven’t been introduced to properly. Get close and evil does not exist, just complexity. See also Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy for more on this. First up, in what’s … Read more
Four Nights of a Dreamer
Often pitched as Robert Bresson’s most accessible film, Four Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d’un rêveur) is, for him, a wild ride. Not exactly pulsing with vivid event, perhaps, but by Bressonian standards highly unusual. The people in it, for example, actually act, rather than read out the words with as little emotion as possible. There is music, it’s in colour. There’s nudity… sex… heartbreak. Wind the expectations in a touch for the actual film, which follows two young people over four nights. Jacques is a whimsical poetic type who falls in love with women – women on the street – too easily. As we meet him he’s gazing longingly at one … Read more
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
It’s taken a long time but maybe that’s as it should be. As Spinal Tap II: The End Continues opens, the cultural landscape is awash with ancient rockers back on the road cranking out their greatest hits one last time. In that context the four decade gap since the original movie isn’t all that inappropriate. The reason for the wait is prosaic. A legal wrangle over the rights to the Tap name, which were only concluded favourably (if you’re the band) in 2020, paving the way for the reunion. In the intervening years rock as a vital musical form has died. In fact it was already dead in 1984, which is one of … Read more
