Latest Posts
The Last One for the Road
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Don Quixote, Lost in Translation, Waiting for Godot, The Last One for the Road (aka Le città di pianura) contains elements of all, without obviously borrowing from them. A “state of Europe/Italy” comedy of sorts, it follows two drunken has-beens – smalltime criminals who are waiting for their boss Genio to show up and in the meantime are drinking themselves to a standstill. It’s funny, amused, cock-eyed, nostalgic, a little bit 1990s, a touch Tarantino, and rests entirely on the performances of Sergio Romano and Pierpaolo Capovilla as Carlobiancho and Doriano. Strange, old-fashioned names for a pair of fiftysomething archetypes who we meet utterly drunk and … Read more
Berlin Express
First of the so-called “Trümmerfilme”, after the German word for rubble, films shot in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when Germany lay in ruins. Berlin Express was directed by Jacques Tourneur and features a high-tone cast including Merle Oberon and Robert Ryan, with much of the action set on a train sweeping through Germany – Frankfurt a heap of bricks apart from the IG Farben building – and on to the eventual destination of Berlin. No one uses the word Nazi, which sets the tone of the piece, which is all about recovery rather than recrimination. On board the train representatives of the victorious powers – American Robert Lindley (Ryan), Brit … Read more
Midwinter Break
Unfashionable and not particularly worried about it, Midwinter Break is a showcase for the acting talents of Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds, who play a long-married couple taking a city break in Amsterdam. She bought them both the trip for Christmas and if he’s being honest he probably didn’t want to go but is not saying so. Because? That’s your film. A bit of infill. Stella and Gerry are originally from Northern Ireland but relocated years before to Scotland, after she got caught by a bullet during the Troubles. She was pregnant at the time. The child survived, but her ability to have more kids was taken from her. Now, Stella’s daughter is … Read more
Where Danger Lives
The film equivalent of being sent to sit on the naughty step, Where Danger Lives is where Robert Mitchum was put to cool off after a marijuana bust put him in the newspapers for all the wrong reasons. It is low-level, cheese-paring noir well below his pay grade and with not really enough plot to get it to the finish line. But the finish is spectacularly good and Mitchum puts his back into the role of the decent humanitarian doctor who falls for a bad girl and ends up on the run with her after her husband dies. Dr Jeff Cameron (Mitchum) is introduced reading a bedtime story to a girl in an … Read more
Two Prosecutors
What happens when a state goes mad and its leader starts to behave like a king, ruling by whim? Two Prosecutors (aka Zwei Staatsanwälte) is asking that big question right from its opening frame, in which state prosecutor Kornev (Alexander Kuznetsov) arrives at a 1930s Soviet gulag and asks to see a prisoner. Other countries/regimes are also available. As the film goes on we’ll learn something about Kornev but Ukrainian writer/director Sergei Loznitsa, working off Georgi Demidov’s novel, holds back vital information and to an extent leaves us in the dark about him and about what’s going on. Two Prosecutors, the title says. Here’s Kornev, he’s one, but who’s the other one? All … Read more
The Hit
A US remake has long been mooted but has never happened, but would it be any better than the original 1984 The Hit, Stephen Frears’s second non-TV movie? I doubt the casting could be any better – Terence Stamp as Willie Parker, a lag who squealed years before who’s now been tracked down to Spain by guys paid to bring him in for payback. John Hurt as Braddock, the taciturn leader of the abduction op. Tim Roth as Myron, Braddock’s hotheaded young assistant. And Laura del Sol as Maggie, a sexy young woman caught up in the midst of things. First the background – Willie ten years before singing like a bird in court. Then … Read more
Hokum
The success of the TV show Severance seems to have woken up the weird in Adam Scott, who used to make more films like Damian McCarthy’s Hokum back in the day. Which is to say – small-scale, offbeat, the path less trodden, relying on mood and atmosphere to do the storytelling. He plays a writer called Ohm Bauman who goes to Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes in the place where they honeymooned and winds up in a nightmare, possibly of his own making. There’s a bit of Stephen King in here – the blocked writer invaded by his own dark imagination – but also Tarkovsky in the poetics of the film’s assemblage. … Read more
Welcome Mr Marshall!
How should the world respond to the fact of America? Welcome Mr Marshall! (aka Bienvenido Mister Marshall!) is often rated as one of the best Spanish films ever made and retains its relevance – even though it was made in 1953 – because the fundamentals remain unaltered. America is still a mighty power, Spain relatively subordinate. So how should one small village respond when it hears that a delegation is arriving from the USA, to distribute money from the Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild Europe after the destruction of the Second World War? Open arms or more guardedly? Treating them as liberators or invaders? A good thing or a bad thing? Stir into the … Read more
The Stranger aka L’Étranger
Albert Camus always rejected the queer reading of his novel L’Étranger, but director François Ozon insists on it in his adaptation. One of the urtexts of existentialism known for its blank refusal of emotion, the book famously opens with its antihero coolly announcing the death of his mother. Ozon’s Meursault (no cosy first name), for his part, tells us similarly blankly that “I killed an Arab”, again shifting the story slightly. The dead man was a “stranger” – one translation of “L’étranger”. Another is “outsider”, and refers to Meursault himself, a white Frenchman in brown Algeria, a coloniser in someone else’s country. Ozon gets all this done just like that and then proceeds … Read more
Time to Kill
In one hour 1942’s Time to Kill achieves what a lot of much longer films fail to do. It delivers a story while painting a picture of a time, a place and the people in it, and is highly entertaining, amusing and dramatic. The fact that it’s based on a Raymond Chandler story helps – this is the first adaptation of High Window, which would re-emerge on screen as The Brasher Doubloon five years later. But Lloyd Nolan as Michael Shayne – Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe in all but name – really helps too. Shayne is introduced feet first, the camera lingering on the holes in his shoes as he takes a call that … Read more
Skinamarink
My parents used to say “Skinnymalink” rather than “Skinamarink”. As affectionate insults go I suppose it was better than one alternative description, which was “long streak of piss”. The dictionary tells us the word has something to do with an old Scottish children’s song, Skinamalinky Long Legs, which (to vary the spelling yet again) went: “Skinny Malinky long legs / Big banana feet / Went to the pictures but couldnae find a seat / When the picture started / Skinny Malinky farted / Skinny Malinky long legs / Big banana feet.” The name probably came from the dialect word “Manikie” a little man (like mannequin) – so a skinamarink is skinny little man. All of … Read more
Tangos, the Exile of Gardel
You don’t have to know who Carlos Gardel is for El Exilio de Gardel: Tangos (aka Tangos, the Exile of Gardel) to work its magic. Nor do you need to know much about the political situation in Argentina in the 1980s to be affected by the film. You can just watch it for its fabulous tango dancing – to the music of Astor Piazzolla – and come away feeling like you’ve been served up something sumptuous and meditative. There is a sadness to tango music and it suits what’s going on here, an experimental melding of backstage musical with political agitprop, centred on a group of Argentinian exiles – intellectuals, dancers, musicians, academics – putting … Read more
