Popular Reviews
The 39 Steps
In a world where the excellent is often the enemy of the good, what about The 39 Steps? Not Hitchcock’s 1935 classic, but the 1959 remake starring Kenneth More? So often compared to the original, so often reviled – especially in its native UK – the 1959 version is actually a pretty good stab at an adaptation of John Buchan’s rattling thriller and a decent film in its own right. But thanks to the Hitchcock version it struggles to get a hearing. To watch it, it’s probably best to mentally lock Hitchcock’s version away, though there is also something to be said for watching it as a compare and contrast. Same plot more … Read more
Happy End
If you’ve never heard of Oldrich Lipský before, here’s your chance to get to know him. Second Run, purveyors of overlooked European movies, are re-releasing Happy End, Lipský’s 1967 comedy. Compared to the titles of other Lipský films – The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians, I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen and Adele Has Not Had Her Supper Yet – Happy End sounds almost commonplace. Do not be taken in. Lipský lived from 1924 to 1986 in Czechoslovakia (now Czechia or the Czech Republic) and made comedies suffused with Dada, surrealism and magical realism, the sort of weird stuff that’s often the refuge of the scoundrel. But like fellow Czech (though ten years younger) Jan Švankmajer, … Read more
Twist
Updating Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, as Twist does, is a bold move. Usually the lure of the dressing-up box and the chance to lay on the foggy London atmospherics prove irresistible. Film-makers tend to stick with its original Victorian setting. Looking through the many, many adaptations, Twisted stands out. It’s a 1996 update set in in New York’s gay subculture. But for the most part Oliver Twist tends to be set in world of street urchins, top hats, horse-drawn carriages and much dropping of aitches. Watching the opening moments of Twist, a question arises: when in the early production process did someone suggest bringing Oliver Twist into the Britpop era? And was this … Read more
Road House
Road House is a bad movie full of good things – yes, that is the sort of line often trotted out by the terminally indecisive or foolishly fixated when they don’t want to just come right out and condemn something. But in this case it’s true. Why it’s bad first: it’s a film suggesting it’s about one certain person when it’s about another. The several good things: the acting by Ida Lupino and Richard Widmark plus the crackling dialogue. And the cinematography is pretty tasty too. And, before going any further, there is no connection to the Patrick Swayze movie of four decades later, though both stories take place at a road house, … Read more
Eiffel
“Librement inspiré de faits réels,” it says at the beginning of Eiffel. Not a mere “inspired by real events”, often used as an apology for serving up historical fact laced with made-up stuff, but “freely inspired”. Turn to Wikipedia if what you want is the actual factual, in other words. That’s what I did, and can tell you that the background to this story is pretty much all true, depending on what you call the background, which Eiffel isn’t entirely sure about either. In opening scenes Gustave Eiffel, engineer extraordinaire, stares out at Paris from the tower he gave his name to – handy if you’ve no idea who he was – before Eiffel cycles … Read more
The Band Wagon
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 3 May Betty Comden born, 1917 On this day in 1917, lyricist, librettist and screenwriter Betty Comden was born, as Basya Cohen, in Brooklyn, New York. After finishing high school she studied drama at New York University, where she formed a small revue troupe with Judy Holliday, Leonard Bernstein and Adolph Green. Green would go on to be her lifelong writing partner. Being performers and writers, both Comden and Green liked to write themselves into their works. Which is what they did with On the Town, their first big Broadway success. After a couple of flop shows, the duo headed to … Read more
Luz
So was Tilman Singer’s first feature, 2018’s Luz, as inventive as Cuckoo, his most recent one (starring Hunter Schafer)? Yes, is the answer, though Luz is inventive in an entirely different way. It plays about with time in ways that are unusual – Singer doesn’t do flashbacks and flashforwards so much as infect the here and now with snatches of what’s happened and what’s about to come. It sounds like it’s hard to follow and at first it is, but by the end Singer has given us enough plot for us to have a grasp of what’s been going on. This seems to be, in as much as we can tell, the story … Read more
Underworld
1927’s Underworld is often described as the first gangster movie, or the first film noir. It’s neither really, but it’s easy to see why the tags stick. It is undeniably the movie that kicked off the gangster craze in the late 1920s and early 1930s and there’s enough moody lighting in it to tick any number of noir boxes. But really it’s a tale of doomed romance, the story of a gangster’s moll caught between not two but three men – her original guy, who she wants to do right by, a psychopathic rival, and the guy she falls for. For a silent movie it has a lot of psychological nuance, though the … Read more
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
The world is at Peak Ben Gazzara and Peak John Cassavetes in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, a neo-noir from 1976 full of techniques – handheld camera, sparse (if any) lighting, crash editing, semi-improv – that seemed weird at the time but have since been absorbed into mainstream film-making. Cassavetes had worked on the early stages of the film with Martin Scorsese (a protégé) and there are parallels with the style and content of Mean Streets – a “hey we’re just guys talking” aspect to the storytelling and a loose shooting style which Cassavetes pushes a lot further than Scorsese. Here, the camera often becomes more obviously subjective and emotional, the image swinging … Read more
The House I Live In
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 5 December Prohibition ends, 1933 On this day in 1933, the USA ended one of its most disastrous experiments. The Volstead Act, or National Prohibition Act, had been passed on 28 October 1919. It banned “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States…” It had required a change in the US Constitution to get the act passed, which the Congress had finally done on 16 January 1919, when it ratified the 18th Amendment. On 17 January 1920, America went dry. Except it didn’t. What happened instead is that … Read more
The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 15 – The White Elephant
For the first episode of 1964, broadcast on 4 January, the day that Auburn University in Alabama accepted Harold A Franklin as its first black student (accompanied by three US marshals and 100 state police to keep the mob at bay), John Steed and Mrs Gale are on the case of a missing albino elephant in an episode unsurprisingly titled The White Elephant. The beast has been stolen from a private zoo which supplies mainstream zoos, run by upper-class English chap Noah Marshall (Godfrey Quigley) – Marshall is modelled on John Aspinall (gambler, zoo-owner, anti-Semite and the man who allegedly facilitated murderer Lord Lucan’s escape from the UK). Why the zoo is of … Read more
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
More of the same, that’s what Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse delivers. The follow-up to Into the Spider-Verse is another blistering, migraine- and epilepsy-inducing collision of animation styles, the sort of thing which, if it had been done in the 20th century, would have taken the entire 20th century to do. And if you like it, there’s still more to come. This is the second instalment of the tripartite series and it ends with an abrupt “to be continued”, comic-book style. Beyond the Spider-Verse will complete the cycle. Quick recap. There are many parallel universes out there. And in many of these there are parallel Spider-Men too. Some look a bit like this, others … Read more
