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A Private Life
A Private Life is the “Jodie Foster speaks French shock!” movie, and it’s a funny old beast, as if the plot of Jane Austen’s Emma – the fixer who cannot fix her own life – had been re-written by Agatha Christie and then weirded-up with a plot involving past lives. Another way of looking at it is that it’s a 1940s noir, as refracted through Robert Altman’s 1970s update of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. But let’s go to cold hard facts and leave the analysis to work itself out. Foster is Lilian Steiner, a Jewish American psychotherapist based in France who seems to be having trouble keeping hold of patients. Her son … Read more
Went the Day Well?
“Do not underestimate the British” is the message of Went the Day Well?, a tea-and-crumpets piece of wartime propaganda from Ealing Studios. It begins with a unit of Germans – disguised as British Tommies – arriving in the village of Bramley End and ends with the villagers uniting to give Fritz a bloody nose. Actually, much more than a bloody nose. The violence, when it eventually comes, is all the more shocking for being out of the blue. If I tell you that the village where it was shot, Turville in Buckinghamshire, was later used as the location for cosy comedy The Vicar of Dibley and cosy crime series Midsomer Murders that’ll give you … Read more
The Marching Band
Feelgood movies often lunge for the heartstrings. The Marching Band (originally En fanfare) does so too, but there is finesse here as well, and lovely performances, plus a plot that doesn’t always go where expected. And when it does go where expected it does it so unapologetically and majestically that you might feel like applauding, or even shed a little tear. It’s soppy. It’s lovely. And it tells an interesting and faceted story. First of all about Thibaut, an orchestral conductor who collapses on the podium one day, goes to the doctor and discovers he has leukaemia. He needs a bone marrow transplant but his sister cannot oblige because, he learns, she is … Read more
Tension
If you’re buying Tension as a “physical”, it often comes packaged together on DVD or Blu-ray with Where Danger Lives, as if it were a makeweight. Strange, since it’s a cracking film in terms of plot and character. Ostensibly designed as a vehicle for Audrey Totter, it ended up with Richard Basehart’s name first in the billing – studio reasons – though in all honesty it’s Barry Sullivan who’s the standout here, excellent though Totter and Basehart are. She plays the femme fatale who’s somehow wound up married to sappy and dutiful drugstore manager Warren Quimby but who’s carrying on a not-so-secret affair with local tough guy Barney Deager (Lloyd Gough), a believer in … Read more
A Fortunate Man
The title isn’t so much ironic as a question. Is Per (Esben Smed), the hero of A Fortunate Man, actually fortunate? Or a hero, for that matter? Danish director Bille August sweats bullets to condense this adaptation of Nobel-Prizewinner Henrik Pontoppidan’s eight-volume novel Lykke-Per down to movie size. At two hours 40 something minutes, it’s a big, sweeping, historical epic of a thing, a carriage-clock movie at bottom posing a simple question: what is the good life? Pontopiddan’s eight volumes were intended as a compare and contrast to Hans Christian Andersen’s last book, the near-namesake Lykke-Peer, which was a tale of heroic struggle crowned by the ironic death of its lead character at … Read more
Rosa la rose: fille publique
A film about a sex worker who falls dangerously in love with a client, Rose la rose: fille publique has also fallen in love with its subject – life on the streets, where working girls have sex with men and like it, the girls all get along together and pimps are on the whole benign and serve a necessary purpose. Buy it? Me neither, but there is a lot to like in Paul Vecchiali’s 1986 film, which he says is influenced by the sort of films France was making in the 1930s and is dedicated to Danielle Darrieux, Max Ophüls, Dora Doll and Jean Renoir. Opening shot: Rosa (Marianne Basler), a young woman … Read more
Primate
Primate tells us what it’s all about in its opening moments – a chimp mad with rabies bent on killing the people who raised it. And then, having told us how the trick plays out, puts the rabbit back in the hat and invites us to be amazed and awed all over again even though we know what’s coming. It is a testimony to the skill of director Johannes Roberts that he pulls off the feat, relying on a different mechanism to generate tension second time around. We’re on Hawaii, the only state in America that’s rabies-free, we learn as the film goes along. Or was, anyway. And we’re in the house of a … Read more
Donkey Skin
A big thing in France but barely talked about anywhere else, Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin (Peau d’âne), sometimes known as The Magic Donkey, possibly owes its failure to ring cultural bells globally to its plot, which is about a king trying to marry his own daughter – incest, in other words. It’s Catherine Deneuve as the daughter, trying to put the king off with one ruse after another. Jean Marais as the king, Delphine Seyrig as a fairy godmother reinforcing the young woman’s belief that sleeping with daddy is wrong, and Jacques Perrin as the prince of a neighbouring kingdom who falls for the disguised young woman after she goes on the run … Read more
Carolina Caroline
If you’re not familiar with the work of Adam Rehmeier, he made the harrowing The Bunny Game as a feature debut, later following up with Dinner in America, another distinctive, idiosyncratic film. Carolina Caroline is neither of those, in mood or intention. Instead it is a down-the-line crime drama seemingly designed to show Hollywood that Rehmeier can play quirk-free. It’s a Bonnie and Clyde kind of thing, with the emphasis firmly on the female party, a smart, hot young woman in a small nowhere town who one day realises a grift is taking place under her nose – a passing motorist is pulling it on the owner of the gas station where she works. … Read more
The Psychic
Tarantino’s proposed remake starring Bridget Fonda never happened and so we have only Lucio Fulci’s 1977 original of The Psychic (aka The Psychic, Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes aka Sette note in nero) to scare us, though in all honesty it’s not so much scary as an exercise in Italian gothic style and 1970s advertising imagery. Which sounds like a put-down but Fulci turns the sleek, airbrushed looks to his own ends, in a story about a young woman who sees dying people, in particular a woman at some unspecified time in the past being walled up alive in the palazzo belonging to her husband Francesco (Gianni Garko). It … Read more
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert. A marketing award to whichever genius came up with that title for this epic rebrand of old product done with such polish and dash that it casts Elvis Presley anew – all over again. Baz Luhrmann is credited as the director but here he’s more an editor. Having come across tons of never-seen material in the vaults while researching his Elvis biopic a few years back, he decided to take a closer look at what he’d found, the raw footage to the Elvis: That’s the Way It Is and the Elvis on Tour movies. Undoubtedly this was prompted by the realisation that the celluloid itself was in astonishingly good … Read more
Broadway Melody of 1940
If it’s not quite the big deal it maybe ought to be, Broadway Melody of 1940 does do one great service to posterity: it brings together for the only time on screen Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell, whose ferocious tap skills Astaire admired and even feared. The story is the corny Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers one of mistaken identities, with Powell as a successful Broadway star and Astaire as one half of a struggling song and dance act. Seeking to freshen up her act with some new blood, Clare Bennett (Powell) gets her agent to contact talented, committed Johnny Brett (Astaire), but instead winds up with his deadweight song-and-dance partner, King Shaw (George Murphy). … Read more
