Popular Reviews
I Walk Alone
Big acting is the offer in I Walk Alone, the first of many teamings for Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, and the first directorial effort by Byron Haskin, up till this point an effects guy. Haskin delivers nuanced, psychologically attuned drama while Lancaster and Douglas go at it like fighting dogs. The whole thing is great to watch and it’s easy to see why Scorsese is such a big fan (it marks a transition from one type of film-making to another, he says). The critics of the day were less enthusiastic. “Low grade of melodrama,” said the New York Times. “Dreary,” said the Chicago Tribune. Variety liked it, though. So let’s side with … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 32 – Get-A-Way!
The penultimate Avengers episode actually goes right back to the early days of this series’ production run. There was over a year between the completion of Get-A-Way! in February 1968 and its transmission in May 1969. It’s one of the ones produced (or started, at any rate) by John Bryce, whose short-lived attempt to take The Avengers back to some version of realism never really had enough time to gain traction before the old team of Clemens and Fennell were reinstated. Invisibility (realism?) is what Get-A-Way! is all about. Invisibility at a high-security prison for enemy agents, run as if it were a monastery – the warders wear habits (again, realism?) – where … Read more
He Walked by Night
There were two big “ripped from the headlines” movies in 1948, one from the East Coast of the USA, the other from the West. Both The Naked City and He Walked by Night made big claims to authenticity. The Naked City made much of the fact that a lot of its footage was shot out on the streets of New York. He Walked by Night also makes use of real locations, most notably LA’s underground storm drain system for a finale The Third Man would borrow a year later. But its bigger pitch is that it’s a non-Hollywoodised movie about actual events. And how it asserts that. “This is a TRUE STORY”, the … Read more
Sexy Beast
A simple story from first-time feature director Jonathan Glazer – an advertising hotshot who directed the famous Guinness “surfing horses” advert . It’s all about a retired tealeaf (make sure your dictionary of rhyming slang is beside you) being forced into one last job back in Blighty (as Brits of a certain vintage mock-affectionately call the UK). And right from its opening moments, featuring a glistening Ray Winstone in ludicrous yellow trunks flat out beside a Spanish swimming pool, Sexy Beast feels like a slice of your actual quality. The film is deliciously short but the pacing is so luxuriously slow and self-confident that initial groans – Oh God, not more Brit gangsters … Read more
Import/Export
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 7 February Maastricht Treaty signed, 1992 On this day in 1992, the Treaty on European Union, aka the Maastricht Treaty, was signed by members of the European Community, in Maastricht, Netherlands. Its purpose, as its name suggests, was to create a union of Europe. It proposed and established three pillars of the Treaty –the European Community, a common foreign and security policy and a similar arrangement for justice and home affairs. In effect it formalised arrangements that had already existed, but it also extended them – the European Community was the continuation of the European Economic Community, with the “Economic” being … Read more
The Murderer Lives at Number 21
Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock and (using a time machine) the Knives Out franchise jostle along chummily in The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (L’assassin habite… au 21), the 1942 feature debut by Henri-Georges Clouzot and a confident beginning by a film-maker who knows exactly what he’s about. Winking all the while at the audience, Clouzot gives us a murder right up front – a drunk in a bar who’s just won the lottery – done with a camera that slides between third-person omniscience to killer to victim, Clouzot as good as announcing himself as hugely talented before the film’s even got going, in the same way as the killer announces himself, with a … Read more
Les Diaboliques
If you’re working yourself towards film-buffery, you really need to have seen something by master of suspense Henri-Georges Clouzot – “the French Hitchcock” he is often called, when Jacques Deray or Claude Chabrol aren’t using the sobriquet. You may already have seen the masterful The Wages of Fear, Clouzot’s 1953 tale of gelignite being driven across the South American jungle. It’s well worth adding Les Diaboliques, 1954’s tale of the murder most horrid – drugged, drowned – of a brutish husband by a fragile wife (Vera Clouzot) and his scheming mistress (Simone Signoret, none better). Job done, except the body keeps disappearing. Less a whodunit, more a wheresitgone, Les Diaboliques also strongly prefigures … Read more
To Be or Not to Be
Farcical Nazis. Nearly 30 years before Mel Brooks had a go in The Producers, here’s To Be or Not to Be, in which Ernst Lubitsch lays down the template. The comparisons are not endless, but in one respect 1942’s To Be or Not to Be does mimic The Producers – it’s set in the world of the theatre, itself a good target for comedy, which is where most of the laughs come from for the first chunk of the film. We’re in Poland, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, where a theatrical troupe is putting on nightly shows of Hamlet while rehearsing their next show, an anti-Nazi piece called Gestapo. … Read more
Hell’s Angels
Howard Hughes had almost finished his action-packed, stunt-driven epic Hell’s Angels, at vast expense, in 1928 when silent movies were suddenly made obsolete by the vast success of The Jazz Singer. So he did what any mega-rich tycoon who just happened to own a film studio would do – he remade it. Out went his female star in the process. Greta Nissen was Norwegian and had a heavy accent, and so she became one of the first casualties of the talkies, which destroyed many an established career (which is what the plot of Singin’ in the Rain is all about, after all). In came unknown 18-year-old Jean Harlow to fill the gap, while … Read more
12:08 East of Bucharest
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 25 December Nicholae Ceauşescu executed, 1989 On this day in 1989, Nicolae Ceauşescu, general secretary of the Romanian Communist party since 1965, president of the country since 1967, was tried and convicted by a military tribunal, then taken out and shot by a firing squad, along with his wife Elena. Only the previous month, in November 1989, he had been re-elected for another five years as leader of the Romanian Communist Party. Ceauşescu had taken the opportunity to denounce the spread of anti-Communist rebellion throughout Eastern Europe. On 16 December in the city of Timişoara an impromptu demonstration against the eviction … Read more
Operation Cross Eagles
Operation Cross Eagles is the only film Richard Conte ever directed. Great at playing bad guys and constipated good guys, in Conte’s one and only go calling the shots he never quite works out what he’s meant to do with the camera and the film is a bit of a mess. That said, it is a fine example of a particular type of movie made at a particular time and came out the same year as Where Eagles Dare, 1968, which does the same thing but better. We’re talking not just about the adventure movie but about the adventure movie stacked with ageing thespians, in reality too old for the action hijinks their … Read more
The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 20 – The Danger Makers
The Danger Makers is the 13th episode of The Avengers written by Roger Marshall, the amazingly prolific writer of scripts for everything from 1959’s William Tell to 1992’s London’s Burning by way of Public Eye, The Sweeney and Lovejoy. And it’s a bizarre and fascinating story, of men doing massively foolish things in an attempt to put the fizz back into an existence made flat by the advance of technology. All this Marshall summarises neatly in an opening sequence about a man trying to commit suicide on a motor bike by engineering a crash. We know it’s a suicide attempt – or looks like it – because when he fails the first time, … Read more
