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Foto Háber aka Haber’s Photo Shop
There’s a lot that’s good about Foto Háber (aka Haber’s Photo Shop), a pithy Hungarian spy thriller from 1963, but it does have one obstacle to surmount. Of which more later. One of the best things is Zoltán Latinovits as the cool, calm spy infiltrating an espionage ring that steals state secrets. Or secrets, let’s just say secrets, of which more, also, later. We meet Gábor Csiky (Latinovits) in a prison where he’s introduced as an ex-priest and theologian – the other inmates refer to him as “Reverend”. When they ask him what he’s in there for, Gábor replies “political stuff”, modestly. One inmate points out that, rationally, all crime, no matter how … Read more
Rotting in the Sun
Sebastián Silva’s films are never boring and Rotting in the Sun is no exception. Alienating, sometimes. In this case it’s the male genitalia on display – big and small, in various hues and states of turgidity – that’s going to put off a lot of people. Difficult to swallow, handle, choose your own innuendo. Cheap shots to one side, the first thing to say about this film is that the weird thing about the cock is that it’s absolutely not necessary. No one needs to see men getting it on together for the film to work. There is a wilful perversity to it. Silva is daring his audience not to be alienated. Because … Read more
Les Demoiselles de Rochefort
As is often the case with sequels, “the same but different” is the big idea in the musical Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort), the 1967 follow-up to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg). Largely it’s the same production team as on the 1964 movie – writer/director Jacques Demy, composer Michel Legrand, producer Mag Bodard, costume designer Jacqueline Moreau and production designer Bernard Evein. They gussie up this film in much the same way as they did the previous one. Bright lights, bold colours, big sets, grand camera movements, and locations tweaked till they squeak with pastel excess. Catherine Deneuve is the only key cast member to survive … Read more
The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra
The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra is about mould, not backbones. So why the weird title? Because, I’m guessing, debut writer/director Park Sye-young thought it had the right effect. This is a film that’s all about effect, mood, and Park conjures like a master right from the opening seconds, where a removal guy is talking on the phone to the woman whose stuff he’s meant to be moving. The woman isn’t there and he’s haranguing her. Meanwhile the guy next to him is talking right over the top of him in a separate conversation. It doesn’t overlap, as traditionally “realistic” dialogue in movies does (see Robert Altman), it attempts to overwhelm. After the removal guy’s … Read more
Ride the Pink Horse
Ride the Pink Horse? Strange title. A gay slur, perhaps? Like “playing the pink oboe”, maybe? But as the title music comes up, all clippity cloppity, this unusual movie from 1947 sends us off in yet another direction. Because this isn’t a cowboy movie either, or even something more esoteric, it’s an unusual slice of dark noir set, atypically, on the Mexican border, where an ex-soldier recently back from the Second World War arrives in town to exact revenge on the guy who caused the death of his old comrade-in-arms. Robert Montgomery plays the ex-soldier, Gagin, and Fred Clark plays the slippery Mr Hugo, from whom revenge will be extracted, that’s if Gagin … Read more
Anatomy of a Fall
Following on from the brilliant Sybil, Justine Triet double-taps it with Anatomy of a Fall, another rangy drama with rare psychological depth. Written expressly for Sandra Hüller by Triet and her partner Arthur Harari – and you only hope that it doesn’t reflect their own relationship – it’s the old “did he fall or was he pushed story” spun out at tantalising length. Did Sandra (Hüller’s character’s name too) push her husband to his death off the balcony of their swish chalet in the French Alps or was she asleep at the time, oblivious to everything with ear plugs in, as she claims? We follow Sandra from the film’s opening moments to the … Read more
The Set-Up
Here’s the set-up to 1949’s The Set-Up. On one side Stoker, an ageing boxer convinced he has one more shot at glory. On the other Tiger, an upcoming young fighter in the pocket of a local gang boss. The boss, via an intermediary, asks/commands Tiny, Stoker’s manager/trainer, to get Stoker to throw the fight. Tiny is convinced Stoker will go down anyway so he doesn’t bother to pass on the message that Stoker is to take a dive in the third. Tiny is not just a coward – he avoids an awkward confrontation with Stoker – this way he also doesn’t have to share any of the sweetener with his boy. The Set-Up is … Read more
A Haunting in Venice
A change of gear for Kenneth Branagh’s third Agatha Christie adaptation. A Haunting in Venice isn’t as starry as Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile, doesn’t start out with a captive roster of possible murderers and murderees and, to an extent, abandons the strict rationality of previous Hercule Poirot adventures for something a bit more supernatural. All three turn out to be changes for the better. This is probably the best of the bunch so far, though, full disclosure, I’m not really a fan of these things. Whether it’s Peter Ustinov, John Malkovich, Albert Finney, Ian Holm, David Suchet, Tony Randall, Alfred Molina or even Austin Trevor (first of … Read more
The Street with No Name
Full of guys with nicknames like Mutt, Shivvy and Whitey, 1948’s The Street with No Name is your tough, streetwise crime drama making many claims to authentiticity. It was one of a run of “semi-documentary” movies made around this time, often by Twentieth Century-Fox, and shot out on the streets, in the bars and at the racetracks where ordinary Americans lived their lives in the boom that followed the Second World War. Don’t get too cosy is the message, delivered via stern voiceover and onscreen teleprinter in the film’s opening moments – gang activity is starting to re-assert itself now the peace has been won, it declares in so many words. If the … Read more
The Man from Rome
A James Bond who takes his orders not from M but from Him? The Man from Rome is an action thriller with an ecclesiastical twist set in photogenic Italy and Spain. Interesting, even if, by the end things have bogged down so badly that there’s the distinct impression of presentee-ism. Things are still happening on screen but it’s as if spiritually everyone involved has pulled the old office trick of leaving their coat on the back of their chair and slipped away for a beer. Richard Armitage plays Quart, James Quart. No, we don’t learn his first name. Father Quart is a special operative working for the Vatican’s Institute of External Affairs, a … Read more
House of Bamboo
In many ways an atypical Sam Fuller film, House of Bamboo does conform to Fuller type in one specific way – strong performances by his two leads. They are Robert Ryan and Robert Stack, as two guys involved in different ways in crime in post-War Japan. Doing almost nothing at all, Ryan acts Stack right off the screen as crime boss Sandy Dawson, an American who has found rich pickings in the debris of post-War Japan. And yet Stack is also pretty effective as a smalltime hoodlum who arrives in the country and immediately starts throwing his weight around and extorting money in the smallest of smalltime ways. What Eddie Spanier (Stack) doesn’t … Read more
Wer
In any fight for the top slot in the “humanoid monsters of the movies” competition, zombies and vampires fight it out to be number one, while werewolves lope along way behind. It could be worse – the mummies in their tatty bandages get barely any attention and even further down the field are invisible men who are hardly ever seen (geddit?). So maybe the werewolf doesn’t have it too bad, all things considered. At first glance 2013’s Wer appears to be in the business of pushing the fanged, hirsute lycanthrope even further down the pecking order. But first a pre-credits sequence in which a nice French family on a camping holiday are subjected … Read more
