Latest Posts
Miroirs No. 3
Because it’s a Christian Petzold film, Miroirs No. 3 is an exercise in watching with the head tilted to one side. How’s he going to do it this time? “It” being either a remake of a familiar film, done with plausible deniability (the classic being Jerichow, an oblique take on The Postman Always Rings Twice). Or a fairy tale/myth reworked in modern dress, Petzold’s other obsession (see Undine or Afire). Is it either here? Or neither? The set-up is downright strange. A piano student is involved in a terrible car accident in which her boyfriend is killed. Instead of heading off to hospital, she moves in with the woman outside whose house the … Read more
The Falcon Takes Over
The Falcon Takes Over could be the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question. First appearance of a Raymond Chandler story on screen? – this is it, a version of his Farewell, My Lovely, which would get a bigger-budget workthrough two years later as Murder, My Sweet, with Dick Powell in the lead. Here, it’s 1942, we’re in B movie territory and it’s George Sanders as the detective on the case of a missing person. Big bruiser Moose Malloy (Ward Bond) would very much like to know where his showgirl girlfriend has disappeared to, and so presses Gay Lawrence aka The Falcon (Sanders) to find her. Chandler’s loads up the plot – a jade necklace, … Read more
Crime 101
Slick operators meet slick movie in Crime 101, a drama about capable people being pushed out of their comfort zones for our entertainment. It’s 21st-century film noir, to a large extent, Michael Mann in its glossiness and sexing-up of the city, utterly familiar in its set-up, less so in its payoff. Bart Layton has made two feature films before, both with a strong documentary flavour. The Imposter was a full-on doc about one guy passing himself off as another, and everyone, including the replaced guy’s mother, somehow being taken in. The other, American Animals, used documentary elements to tell the story of an elaborate real-life heist. Both were remarkable. Layton edges more obviously … Read more
Eran Trece
In Spanish it means “There were thirteen,” Eran Trece, and that’s the best title to use for a film originally called Charlie Chan Carries On. The original US version, in English, has been lost to eternity, it seems. But we still have this Spanish version, shot on the same sets with different actors and crew but working from the same story and using a lot of the same stock footage to set the scene. It’s a very trad whodunit about a gaggle of rich people travelling around the world on a grand tour. The action kicks off in London, where one of the party has wound up dead. There were 13… until old … Read more
Sunlight
You think you’ve seen all the variations on the road movie and then along comes Sunlight, about a suicidal man on a road trip with a woman in a monkey suit. With a giant monkey, in effect. Strange. Funny. It’s written by its two leads, stand-up comedian Shenoah Allen, and Nina Conti, whose comedic ventriloquism act often involves a little monkey sitting on her arm and saying rude things to hapless members of the audience she’s dragged on stage. That’s more or less what we have here, that naughtly little chappie but at Conti size rather than miniature, sitting next to Allen’s Roy and saying frank, awful, rude and disgusting things to him … Read more
Trace of Stones
Socialism good, the socialist party bad is the idea driving Trace of Stones, originally Spur der Steine, a film made in the German Democratic Republic in 1966. It was shown a handful of times and then withdrawn, not to be seen again until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Audience unrest, said the authorities. Don’t criticise the Party! The SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deustschlands aka Socialist Unity Party of Germany) really does get it in the neck in what’s otherwise quite a familiar film, not a long way from the “kitchen sinkers” being made by the likes of Lindsay Anderson in the UK, though director Frank Beyer’s direction is looser, his approach to dialogue … Read more
Dead Man’s Wire
In 1977 Tony Kiritsis walked into a loan company in Indianapolis and took mortgage broker Richard Hall hostage. With a gun to his hostage’s head, and a wire connecting Hall’s neck to the trigger, Kiritsis had the broker where he wanted: any interference and Kiritsis would pull the trigger; should Hall make a sudden movement, then the “dead man’s wire” would activate the trigger. The police, who were soon on the scene, were helpless. Kiritsis had a beef with the company, which he claimed had lent him a lot of money to develop a shopping mall and then engineered things so the project would fail. In the process Kiritsis had gone bust and, … Read more
The Killer That Stalked New York
You don’t need to know that the smallpox vaccine was first developed in 1796 but it adds a layer to The Killer That Stalked New York, a pandemic thriller from 1950 inspired by a real-life outbreak of smallpox in New York in 1947. That it did not become more widespread is thanks to thanks to swift action on the part of the authorities, who rolled out a massive vaccination campaign. Evelyn Keyes plays our Patient Zero, Sheila Bennet, a woman newly in from Cuba, where she picked up smallpox though she doesn’t yet know it. She also picked up something else: a consignment of hot diamonds, intending to smuggle them into the USA … Read more
Ne Zha
Ne Zha, to rhyme with Treasure, is a landmark piece of Chinese animation, the first from that country in IMAX, made by debut feature director Jiaozi in his own studio, using voice talent that no one had ever heard of. There is more back story to Jiaozi – a nickname, real name is Yang Yu – enough for a hundred magazine rags-to-riches feature pieces. Suffice to say he went from living with his widowed mother on her pension to making the highest-grossing film in mainland China in 2019 via a couple of shorts not many people ever saw, then followed up with a sequel, Ne Zha 2, which also broke records. The nickname, … Read more
100 Years of… The Strong Man
Two people do special things in 1926’s The Strong Man. The first is director Frank Capra, inventing film language on the hoof in his feature debut and showing us why he was such a force on the 20th-century film scene. The other is Harry Langdon, demonstrating an ability to animate dead space with his fluid features and expressive body. The story is really a case of the tail wagging the dog and it takes a long time to get to the film’s point – elaborately conceived and expertly executed stunts. First there’s a preamble in the Great War, where Harry’s hapless soldier Paul Bergot is taking potshots at Germans with his catapult in … Read more
Wuthering Heights
It’s “Wuthering Heights”, in scare quotes, rather than just the plain old Wuthering Heights of Emily Brontë’s imagination. Adapter/director Emerald Fennell wants us to know she’s messing about with the text a bit and having fun. Either that or she’s hiding out behind a bit of punctuation. Good luck with that. Actually, the story remains pretty much as Brontë wrote it, though Fennell leaves out the entire “next generation” plotline, as did William Wyler in 1939. Cathy and Heathcliff grow up together on the top of wild and windswept Yorkshire moorland – she the wilful daughter of drunken Mr Earnshaw (an excellent Martin Clunes), he the orphan child Mr E brings home one … Read more
How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying
How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying was a massive hit on Broadway in 1961, winning seven Tony awards, including best musical and book, plus a Pulitzer prize. It was quite the thing – Bob Fosse did the choreography, Frank Loesser did the music, audiences flocked to see it and it ran for nearly four years. Since then it’s done US national tours, transferred to London (twice) and also been been successfully revived on Broadway twice, once with Matthew Broderick in the lead and once with Daniel Radcliffe. And here’s the film version, made six years after that Broadway debut, with most of the stage stars back in the roles they originated, … Read more
