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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
MaXXXine
A collection of great scenes in search of a movie, MaXXXine opens with a quote from Bette Davis – “In this business, until you’re known as a monster you’re not a star” – and ends with the song Bette Davis Eyes. Between those bookends, the story of a porn actress (Mia Goth) trying to go legit in the 1980s United States, where Ronald Reagan is promising “morning in America”, Christians are campaigning against satanism in rock music and filth on the screens, and a serial killer is on a spree butchering young women like Maxine. We first met Maxine in X, this trilogy’s opener, when she was a 1970s burlesque dancer with ambitions … Read more
Captain Pirate
Captain Pirate? Pirate Captain, surely? This swashbuckler from 1952 went by the much more obvious title of Captain Blood, Fugitive in some regions, which makes more sense all round, since this is a sequel to Fortunes of Captain Blood from two years earlier. Fortunes had done pretty good business and so this revisit gets an upgrade, black and white to Technicolor, and keeps its two key cast members, Louis Hayward and Patricia Medina, he the dashing pirate hero, she his hispanic lady love and bounteous fount of virtue. It also keeps the earlier film’s structure, which was essentially a detective plot with a wash of piratical timber-shivering over the top. Here, it opens … Read more
Close Your Eyes
Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los Ojos in the original Spanish) makes it four full films in 50 years for writer/director Victor Erice. Hardly a punishing workrate. But then when your debut was The Spirit of the Beehive – often touted as the best Spanish film ever made – you can pretty much go at your own pace. Close Your Eyes does too, moving at a speed that would be considered glacial if it were almost any other director, but is a delicious, tantalising linger in the hands of Erice. A thriller, believe it or not, though a fairly existential one, about a famous actor who disappears off the face of the earth just … Read more
