Popular Reviews
I Married a Witch
The 1942 comedy I Married a Witch had all the makings of a flop but it turned out to be OK – it’s a classic if looked at from the right angle. People kept coming and going for a start. Dalton Trumbo was hired to write but then left before he was finished. Preston Sturges was meant to produce it but never actually did. Joel McCrea had been signed up to star but bowed out when he realised he’d be working opposite Veronica Lake. He’d done a stint with her already on Sullivan’s Travels and, according to him, “Life’s too short for two films with Veronica Lake”. Then there was the pre-shooting falling-out … Read more
Offside
Iranian Jafar Panahi’s comedy is about a group of girls who are arrested for dressing up as boys and trying to get in to see the 2006 World Cup Iran/Bahrain qualifier, women not being allowed to watch football in Iran. Accessing another country’s culture through football is a neat way of curving a ball past those who “don’t do arthouse”. The anti-subtitle crowd might also be interested to learn that the film was shot on the hoof, guerrilla style at the actual game in Tehran, using non-professional actors. Painting a picture of a country that seems at first almost barbaric in its medieval world view, Panahi isn’t so western focused that he can’t … Read more
The Trouble with Being Born
The Melbourne International Film Festival wouldn’t screen The Trouble with Being Born when it debuted in 2020. Likely to be “used as a source of arousal for men interested in child abuse material,” said the two forensic psychologists who informed its decision. Director Sandra Wollner’s German-language film ran into trouble at the Berlin Film Festival too, though it also won a special jury prize, just one of many from film festivals. Not that awards and bans are usually much to go on, but in this case the various responses do say something. This is a tough film but a good one. Tough not because of the suggestions of paedophilia but because of its … Read more
Million Dollar Legs
Originally intended as a Marx Brothers movie, Million Dollar Legs is a comedy with humour verging on the surreal and is set in a familiar Marx Brothers world. Even so it’s probably too mad even for them. It’s so familiar, in fact, that you might wonder if they read Joseph Mankiewicz’s original treatment for Million Dollar Legs and rejected it because there wasn’t enough meat in it for all the brothers but liked its basic outline enough to borrow it for Duck Soup, which came out the following year, 1933. Duck Soup is the one where Groucho is the ruler of a bankrupt country called Freedonia, who goes to war to save his … Read more
One Minute of Darkness
At first glance One Minute of Darkness, last of the Dreileben trilogy, seems to be the most straightforward of the lot. A honest-to-goodness cat-and-mouser. On the one hand the escaped murderer Molesch, who has been little more than a bad smell in the first two films. On the other a cop on a mission to bring Molesch in, in spite of the fact that he’s ill and on leave. It’s deceptive, though, and the deception starts with the opening shots, of Molesch in custody being driven to a police station. This, it seems obvious, is a continuation of the previous instalment of the series, Don’t Follow Me Around (Komm Mir Nicht Nach), the … Read more
Spencer
A fairytale princess is trapped inside an ogre’s castle in Spencer, “A fable from a true tragedy” a note announces at the start of director Pablo Larraín’s film following Princess Diana over three Christmas-y days stuck with the Royal Family at Sandringham. But it’s also a story about a woman driven mad by the situation around her, gamely still fighting for independence, trying to assert that she’s also a somebody in her own right, a Spencer, not just a pretty bauble hanging off the tree of the British Royal Family. The story takes place at Sandringham over Christmas where the Firm all assemble annually. It’s the tenth time Diana has done the three-day … Read more
27 May 2013-05-27
Out in the UK This Week The Last Stand (Lionsgate, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Welcome back Arnold Schwarzenegger, just a touch arthritic after all those years running California and now, with seven projects announced on the imdb, clearly cranking them out quick before the ibuprofen wears off. So what do we have here? It’s Arnie as a sheriff in a nowhere town down near the Mexican border being inveigled into an Unforgiven style strapping back on of the guns by a seriously bad escaped gangster (Eduardo Noriega) who’s heading down Arnie’s way in a hilariously fast car. The big idea is a lone-hero High Noon showdown but in essence this an 80s action movie … Read more
Dead Reckoning
Dead Reckoning cashes in on the Humphrey Bogart persona big time – a drawl and a rough and ready way with women but beneath it all a courtly gent with a thirst for truth. It was made in 1946 when peacetime mopping-up was the order of the day. War is over. Men are returning to where they came from. Things are going back to normal. Or that’s what’s meant to be happening, at any rate. As we meet Bogart’s Rip Murdock, he’s covered in blood, scared and on the run. If this is a reset then something has gone wrong. With plenty of voiceover from Bogart, and the useful shimmer of an extended … Read more
Hope Gap
About as unfashionable as they come, Hope Gap has two and a half great actors in it and tells a tender story with great compassion. It’s an adaptation of writer/director William Nicholson’s play The Retreat from Moscow and though Nicholson throws in scenes set on the cliffs and by the sea as often as possible, in an attempt to cinematify things, this is obviously a chamber piece that doesn’t in any case need them. Instead it gets its power from the gulf between what is said and what is unsaid, and the interaction of the two. The two great actors are Annette Bening and Bill Nighy, playing a long married couple called Grace … Read more
Random Harvest
Random Harvest takes the amnesiac plot used and abused by mid-20th-century moviemakers and pushes it into and beyond the realm of the absurd. Audiences at the time loved it, the film was multi-Oscar nominated and even though it ascends into madness fairly early on, it’s a fabulous madness, confected by MGM with all the lush plushness the studio could engineer. Ronald Colman is too old by a stretch but let’s put that to one side as we watch him playing a soldier who is back from the First World War and languishing in an asylum with PTSD and amnesia. In short order he accidentally gets free, meets a showgirl and strikes up a … Read more
Murder, My Sweet
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 14 November Dick Powell born, 1904 On this day in 1904, Dick Powell was born. A remarkably adaptable man, Powell started his career as a singer in the 1920s, then became a movie star in the 1930s. In the 1940s he switched from light comedy and musical films to weightier, tough-guy roles. In the 1950s he was one of the founders of a TV company, Four Star Television, who made The Big Valley and Burke’s Law, among other hits shows, and gave an early leg up to talent such as Steve McQueen, Mary Tyler Moore and Sam Peckinpah. Powell also became … Read more
Spies
Metropolis, now seen as a classic, didn’t do many favours for director Fritz Lang short term. And it nearly bankrupted Ufa, the studio that made it. For Lang’s follow-up, Spies (Spione), Ufa clipped his wings and forced him to shoot on a reduced budget. Hey ho, another classic, and also, just incidentally, the template for almost all of the spy thrillers of the future. In a brilliant, lightning-fast opening montage, Lang lays out his stall – stolen documents, a murder, a public furore stoked by incendiary newspaper headlines (“public officials asleep on the job”), – another murder, followed by a man who might as well be named M calling a spy who might … Read more
