Popular Reviews
Conspiracy
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 20 January The Wannsee Conference, 1942 On this day in 1942 a short meeting was held at 56-58 Am Großen Wannsee, in the suburbs of Berlin. It was called by Reinhard Heydrich, boss of the SS, and gathered together the heads of various government departments to facilitate the removal of Jews from Germany and occupied territories, their deportation to Poland and their extermination. It lasted only about 90 minutes and was arranged to put in place the practical measures to ensure that the process ran smoothly, and to make sure that the various government departments cooperated. A secondary concern was to … Read more
Merrily We Go to Hell
Merrily We Go to Hell ran into trouble when it came out in 1932. The use of the word Hell in the title gave some distributors an attack of the vapours. To get round potential objections, in the UK the problem word was simply removed and the film went by Merrily We Go to __, which was also the case in certain states in the US. The film itself is often described as a comedy, but it isn’t really funny. But then that is often the way with the comedy of manners, which this is. This is a big one in the feminist canon, not least because it was directed by Dorothy Arzner, … Read more
The Human Voice
If you’ve never seen a screen version of Jean Cocteau’s short one-hander The Human Voice before, this one, starring Tilda Swinton and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, is a good place to start. There are plenty of others. Shelby Satterthwaite appeared in a Canadian version in 2019, Rosamund Pike in an adaptation by Patrick Kennedy in 2018. There’s a Spanish language one starring Karina Gidi from 2016, a sung version from 1985 with the soprano Elisabeth Söderström as “the Woman”, even one starring Ingrid Bergman from 1966 directed by Ted Kotcheff (who also gave us Rambo in First Blood, the great Aussie shocker Wake in Fright, and ur-bozo comedy Weekend at Bernie’s). A South … Read more
The Family Friend
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 9 May First recorded appearance of Mr Punch, 1662 On this day in 1662, Navy Board administrator Samuel Pepys went to Covent Garden, London, where he enjoyed “an Italian puppet play that is within the rayles there, which is very pretty, the best that ever I saw…”. The show was by a Pietro Gimonde from Bologna, and Pepys’s mention of it in his famous diary is the first record we have of Mr Punch. Today, Punch is a glove puppet, but back then he was a string marionette called Puncinello or Pulcinella or Pulliciniello, a character derived from the Italian commedia … Read more
Hollow Triumph
Paul Henreid got sick of playing bland heroes like Casablanca‘s Victor Laszlo and in Hollow Triumph set out to prove he could be just as convincingly bad. Having optioned the novel this crime drama was based on, he produced the film himself and, according to legend, directed most of it too, once original director Steve Sekely had been fired by the studio. The result is either a triumph or a hollow triumph, depending on your approach to the movie and your attitude towards implausibility. If you’re taking things very seriously, then problems over likelihood and credibility entirely undermine everything. If not, they’re all part of the fun. But on to the plot, which … Read more
Unclenching the Fists
Unclenching the Fists could so easily be poverty porn but manages not to be, thanks to an ending offering a sliver of salvation, and a look that’s deliberately trying to avoid the charge that this is just another in a very long series of films using poor people to tell the same story over and over again – it’s tough at the bottom. We’re in Ossetia, one of those regions that were all but subsumed by the old USSR but seem to be having a revival in the post-Communist era. Even so, it’s a poor place, and the town where Kira Kovalenko’s film is set sits in a ravine where it’s hemmed in … Read more
Wag the Dog
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 January President Clinton denies “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky, 1998 On this day in 1998, a serving president of the United States responded to allegations that he had had sex with a woman other than his wife. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky” said Bill Clinton at the end of a White House press conference, with his wife standing beside him. Unfortunately for Clinton, there had been what most people would call a sexual relationship, and Lewinsky had a blue dress stained with the president’s semen to prove it. Later in the year, boxed into … Read more
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 19 December Birth of Leonid Brezhnev, 1906 On this day in 1906, the very last old-school leader of the USSR was born. Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was born into Tsarist Russia, the son of workers. Thanks to an education at a technical school he became a metallurgist, joined Komsomol (the Communist youth movement) and started to make his way in the party, becoming a political commissar in a tank factory by the age of 30, and eventually party secretary in Dnipropetrovsk, a Ukrainian city intimately connected to the arms industry. As a result of Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s, Brezhnev advanced … Read more
Frida
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 31 January Leon Trotsky exiled, 1929 On this day in 1929, Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, aka Leon Trotsky, was exiled from the country he had helped create. A member of the victorious Bolsheviks in the revolution of 1917 (having earlier switched allegiance from the Mensheviks), Trotsky rose quickly through the party, proving himself decisively in the civil war against the Mensheviks in 1918. Ideologically he was loosely aligned with Lenin, believed in mass democracy, permanent revolution and internationalism and was opposed to the “socialism in one country” of Stalin. Trotsky found his ideas and those of the Left Opposition increasingly marginalised in … Read more
The Omen
Thirty years on, a pointless remake of the film that put quite a few bums on seats in 1976. Back then Gregory Peck was playing the American diplomat slowly realising he’s bringing up the spawn of Satan, and Lee Remick (an expert in lip-tightening panic) was the wife. This time Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles have the dubious honour. In spite of the disaster movie craze and the example of the late career of Bette Davis, it was still quite unusual in the mid-1970s for a big star like Peck to appear in a horror movie – genre was for wimps. But the studios were realising that the likes of Jaws were changing … Read more
100 Years of… Mud and Sand
Before Laurel and Hardy there was Laurel and Laurel, and in 1922’s Mud and Sand we get to see Stan Laurel’s original silent-movie partnership at work. The film is a longish short (40 mins) spoofing the Rudolph Valentino hit Blood and Sand, the story of a poor Spanish toreador who hits the big time and has his head turned by the wiles of a vampish older widow. Tragedy ensues. Turned out within three months of Valentino’s all-action spectacular – one of the biggest films of the year – Mud and Sand’s target is obvious, with Stan Laurel playing the slick-haired accidental toreador hero and irresistible love icon Rhubarb Vaselino. (The on-screen intertitles call him … Read more
La Silence de la Mer
With 1949’s La Silence de la Mer Jean-Pierre Melville got his shortish career off to the sort of start you might expect from a director who would go on to turn out one classic after another – Bob le Flambeur, Le Samouraï, Army of Shadows and A Cop to name but four. It is a classic in its own right and yet a strangely overlooked film, possibly because it doesn’t quite fit the Melville template. His films are generally centred on men’s men who abide by a strict code of honour and suffer when they break it. But dig not too far in and La Silence de la Mer also seems to be … Read more
