Reviews

Although usually passed over in discussions of John Ford his final film with John Wayne was obviously a picture he made for pleasure.

In a device frequently used by Ford we're briefly told that in the past the hero suffered a terrible tragedy involving the lost of his wife, thus justifying the indulgence of 57 different varieties of toxic masculinity for the rest of the picture.

Having just made 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance', one of his finest and most thoughtful films shot in deliberately drab black & white, 'Donovan's Reef' - described by one critic as a form of Valhalla - constituted a chance for Ford to let his hair down and indulge in non-stop carousing and fisticuffs.

As Anne Billson observed, David Lean's adaptation of E. M. Forster's final novel - bearing the unusual credit "Directed and Edited by David Lean" - following his return from fifteen years languishing in self-imposed exile makes "the Merchant-Ivory Forster adaptations seem like very small beer".

One of a slew of films that in the early eighties revisited the British Empire in its heyday tempering visual sumptuousness with a prim disapproval of the condescension of the British. It provides the pleasures of a handsome, classically well-made film, complete with a score by Maurice Jarre and culminating in a courtroom climax; although it certainly gets bizarre with the eccentric appearance of Alec Guinness as Professor Godbole in turban and blackface.

The late lamented Maggie Smith made an auspicious screen debut in the unfairly neglected 'Nowhere to Go' (1958), which could have represented a radical new departure for Ealing had they not closed their doors for good after only one more film.

The film was intended to be Smith's first film under a seven-year contract with Ealing, but in the event she was only to make one more film for them before her role in 'The VIPs' marked her conclusive entry into the big league.

Smith's second film was the nearest she made to a classic Ealing comedy in which she looks gorgeous in colour and 'scope and provides an early opportunity to demonstrate just how funny she could be as a refined French lady who slips into cockney when upset.

Lon Chaney once said "there's nothing funny about a clown seen in the moonlight". The presence of Robert DeNiro means its probably no coincidence that Joachim Phoenix in the title role resembles a composite of three of DeNiro's most antisocial malcontents turned urban vigilantes from Travis Bickle to Rupert Pupkin - with long straggly hair as in 'Cape Fear' - playing a party clown who filches one of his best jokes from Bob Monkhouse.

Like most modern comic book films 'The Joker' takes itself far too seriously with a mood reflected in its production design which seems to take its lead from Anton Furst's hellish Gotham City in Tim Burton's first Batman film in its depiction of 1981 San Francisco.

During the first half of the 1960s an eminent director's first film in colour was always a great source of excited anticipation. Unfortunately this novelty could only happen the once and as the decade wore on colour lost that special quality it originally displayed when black & white was the cinema's default setting.

Although Oswald Morris' black & white photography in Jack Clayton's attempt to adapt Antonioni to Hampstead in 'The Pumpkin Eater' is perfectly apt, in the case of 'The Red Desert' the use of colour while diverting seems singularly inappropriate to its depiction of madness encroaching upon a severely depressed woman.

Academics make much of the office building shown in cutaway in 'Tout Va Bien', which they interpret as a Brechtian distantation device, when Godard plainly got the idea from Jerry Lewis' 'The Ladies' Man'.

After Martin & Lewis acrimoniously parted their careers shot in spectacularly different directions. It was Martin, blessed with authentic movie star looks, whose career like many former straight men subsequently wobbled, while it was nerdy Lewis who like Elvis was showcased by Paramount in vehicles blessed with glossy production values.

In the 'The Nutty Professor', louche crooner Buddy Love represents Lewis's most coruscating attack on his former partner; the irony being that Love bears an even greater resemblance to Lewis himself whose offscreen personality was inclined to be baleful and lugubrious when not pulling faces and squealing.

When George Lucas originally announced the third instalment of 'Star Wars' - although nerds now insist it's Episode 6 - it was under the title 'Revenge of the Jedi', but by the time it hit screens it had become 'Return of the Jedi': the reason given that revenge wasn't part of the Jedi philosophy.

The revised title provided only too obvious a sign that the series was by now taking itself far too seriously. Which makes it doubly ironic that the feature of the film to which most fans accord iconic status is Slave Leia in a bikini; as usual prominently displayed on the posters but featured only briefly in the film itself, in which the outfit is so scanty all shots involving movement employ obvious use of a body double.

Rank's ruinously expensive attempt to make a film star out of West End sensation Sid Field immediately acquired legendary status when it crashed and burned with both critics and at the boxoffice taking with it the career of director Wesley Ruggles and setting back that of Kay Kendal for several more years.

Predating British film comedies of the fifties and sixties which showcased British television comedians in Technicolor, like most really bad films the biggest sin 'London Town' commits is the one of simply being very dull, to the extent that for the next fifteen years it was produced as Exhibit 'A' whenever the case was argued that the British simply couldn't make musicals.

The later films of Orson Welles are usually unfairly criticised for failing to live up to the promise shown by his earlier works, but if anybody else had made 'Lady from Shanghai' that would now be the film on which his reputation now rested.

Noirs are not exactly noted for their clarity so when this film was completed and Columbia head Harry Cohn famously made the offer "I'll give $1,000 who can explain the story to me" he was rather missing the point.

It was certainly perverse of Welles to make Rita Hayworth a blonde, but it's an exemplary noir that would be memorable if only for the scene in the hall of mirrors.

The author John Brunner opined that John Boorman "despises science fiction. He comes along and thinks he's created a masterpiece while it's a piece of second-rate hack work, but he expects to be lauded to the skies and told he's done anything better than a regular sf practitioner could have done. This condescending attitude is half the trouble - they say people who like sf are idiots so we'll make an idiot picture".

Despite similarities to 'The Time Machine', when finally revealed the provenience of the title reveals 'Zardoz' more fantasy than sci-fi and with characters given 'symbolic' names like 'The Eternals' and The Brutals' is a prime example of the sort of sci-fi movie made by people who don't read science fiction.

David Munrow's arrangements of Beethoven's Seventh however compares favourably with Kubrick's use of Strauss in '2001', while the floating head of 'Zardoz' is an image as memorable as '2001's obelisk.

When Jean Arthur's contract with Columbia finally expired, after Garbo she became the second choosiest star in Hollywood, still making films, but now only the best was good enough, deigning only to work with directors of the calibre of Wilder and Stevens.

Meanwhile for the first ten years of Alan Ladd's career in leads he was typecast as a cold-blooded killer, but 'Shane' reveals the melancholy that lay behind those big blue eyes bonding with Brandon De Wilde.

The film doesn't stint on villainy however, with Jack Palance at his evil best; while Elisha Cook plays the worm that as usual picks the worst possible time to turn.

Probably the best-known but certainly not the best of Fritz Lang's three westerns. Nine times out of ten when you see a visual representation of this movie it'll almost certainly be a publicity picture of Marlene Dietrich in basque and tights. Naturally this outfit (SLIGHT SPOILER COMING:) appears only fleetingly in the film itself in a flashback to Dietrich's day as a showgirl and for most of the duration she wears a blouse and trousers as the owner of the title ranch.

Lang subsequently spoke of friction on the set but the most remarkable feature has to be the lack of billing for Lloyd Gough who despite playing the pivotal role of 'Kinch' between the film's completion and its release was blacklisted, became an 'unperson' so his name was removed from the credits.

Largely forgotten today, the use of CinemaScope and colour marked 'Satellite in the Sky' as an ambitious undertaking for usually modest production outfit the Danzigers.

That it was meant to be something special is already signalled by the casting of Donald Wolfit (although not generally known for his choosiness regarding film scripts). The rest of the casting is economical but lively with Bryan Forbes looking rather out of place in outer space while Lois Maxwell anticipates her role as Moneypenny as the inevitable lady reporter who (SLIGHT SPOILER COMING:) stows away.

Despite the title most of the preliminaries are talky and earthbound, but the exteriors when the action finally reaches outer space evidently impressed Stanley Kubrick - who was thorough enough to bother to view it - and went on to employ special effects technician Wally Veevers both on 'Strangelove' and '2001'.

Although usually billed as 'Frank R. Capra' (the 'R' stands for 'Russell') his name in reference books rarely includes that middle initial, with the IMDb repeating that omission. Here billed on his directorial debut in lettering almost as big as original author Rudyard Kipling, the middle initial was probably an early way of qualifying among the big boys like D. W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille and Thomas H. Ince.

Already recognisably the work of the preCode Capra who made worldly entertainments like 'Platinum Blonde' and 'Bitter Tea of General Yen' rather than the tiresome fellow later responsible for didactic screeds like 'You Can't Take It With You'; 'Fultah Fisher' also anticipates Longfellow Deeds by a good fifteen years with a hero who responds to opposition with a punch in the face rather rather than simply engaging in negotiation.

Thanks to Stanley Kubrick 'The Animals Went in Two by Two' and 'We'll Meet Again' were never the same once I'd seen 'Dr Strangelove', just as 'Singin in the Rain' was never the same agin after I saw 'A Clockwork Orange'.

Considering what a perfectionist Kubrick was it's ironic that because he sat on this film for such a long time after the tabloid feeding frenzy it initially provoked that for thirty years a whole generation knew the film only from dreadful bootleg copies; while with the passage of time 'Strangelove' just looks better and better, but 'A Clockwork Orange' has rapidly dated. (When Anthony Burgess wrote the original novel in the early sixties he had teddy boys in mind, while the droogs are egregiously seventies in their appearance.) The film also irresponsibly makes Alex fascinatingly evil and infinitely more articulate than the average yobbo. And how many football hooligans relax by listening to Beethoven?

A striking departure for William Wyler, in 'The Collector' Terence Stamp tried to show that he was more than just a pretty face; although in the title role of this adaptation of John Fowles' novel his looks make him rather unlikely casting.

Being one of those directors who held out for black & white until well into the sixties Wyler decided to re-start the film in colour to take advantage of Samantha Eggar's red hair.

The addition of colour made what potentially could have been a squalid psycho-drama into a moving and melancholy film, an impression reinforced by Maurice Jarre's lyrical score.

A critic once said that "Watching Doris Day is my favourite pro-American activity".

Not a lot of people are aware that in her first three films Doris Day was originally cast as a brash Betty Hutton type. It was 'Calamity Jane' that marked her transition from the girl next door to a tomboy that eventually paved the way to her later roles as a career woman;, compete with a theme song sapphists have long enthusiastically embraced.

The film suffers from that usual bizarre misconception that a lassie is only attractive to men wearing a frock, but Howard Keel didn't seem to have a problem with that.

We have Zanuck's enthusiasm for Technicolor to thank for the fact that a number of major talents - including John Ford and Fritz Lang - were given the opportunity to bequeath posterity productions that availed themselves of this technological miracle; although this embellishment was too often squandered as in this case on works by journeymen like Irving Cummings.

Following close of the heels of Fox's wholesome depiction of Jesse James 'Belle Starr' presents us with a sumptuous production complete with Alfred Newman's Ann Rutledge theme on the soundtrack depicting a southern belle who bears as much resemblance to the original as blue-eyed Gene Tierney does to the laughing portrait behind the credits and Doris Day later did to Calamity Jane.

As one whose hobbies include collecting 8 by 10 movie stills, maybe I'm getting cynical in my old age, but whenever I see the leading lady briefly in a state of undress I think to myself, ""ah, that's going to go into the trailer...", which also applies to the publicity stills.

With such a suspiciously short running time, indicating some pretty drastic re-release cutting, you wonder since so much that remained was so dire, why on earth did they cut so much of the footage of Emma wearing her leather gear, which prominently featured in the publicity, provided the film's very raison d'etre and the most interesting feature of the trailer?

Filmmakers are often accused of 'whitewashing' history by unduly concentrating upon the contribution of Europeans. 'Zulu' on the other hand could be accused of 'greenwashing' the Battle of Rorke's Drift by giving the impression - compounded by an opening narration by Richard Burton - that most of the participants were Welsh.

Jack Hawkins' claim in his memoirs that the single worst experience in his entire career as an actor was attending the premiere of 'Zulu' and only then discovering that his character now looked like a complete maniac since all the scenes in which he was quiet and persuasive had been cut, leaving only those in which he was red-faced and ranting. Which is a very good reason that actors prefer acting on the stage to acting in films; although balance is provided by the contribution made by Nigel Green, who made such an impression audiences at the time demanded to know why he wasn't included (SLIGHT SPOILER COMING:) in the final roll call of VC recipients.

Also worth mentioning is John Barry's atypical music which demonstrated that he could provide a stirring score without recourse to guitars.

Since the dawn of the cinema countless directors across the political spectrum from Cecil B. DeMille to Pier Paolo Pasolini have nursed ambitions to film the life of Christ and those who managed to fulfil that goal can only be attributed to Act of God.

George W. Bush ironically once claimed that the philosopher who most inspired him was Jesus Christ, since if he'd ever actually met him he'd have thought him a smelly little troublemaker.

Plainly fond of the sound of his own voice, not for a moment have I ever thought that he was the Son of God, and Christ evidently only ever used that angle as a hook to get people's attention.

But I've always thought the guy talked plenty of sense: particularly liking "Let he that is without sin cast the first stone".

One's opinion of Henry Hathaway tends to ebb and flow according to which particular film of his you just happened to have seen.

Anybody who has just seen 'Niagara' will raise him up a notch or two, while the film itself provides conclusive proof that a film noir can successfully be made in Technicolor.

Marilyn Monroe as a dime-a-dozen Jezebel in glossy lipstick and poured into a tight red dress gives a whole new meaning to the term 'scarlet woman', while Sol Kaplan's eerie score and Joe MacDonald's travelogue photography demonstrates that a tale of passion, lust and murder can be just as effective in brilliant sunshine as in dark alleys.

If I ever get a publisher interested I've got a humdinger of an idea, which I would call 'Big Dumb Movies': movies with A-list stars, first class production values but tiny brains which are soon consigned to the oblivion they deserve, although they remain hidden in plain sight on TV late at night or among the DVDs at car boot sales.

Pride of place surely goes to 'Shining Through' which stars Melanie Griffith as a dizzy blonde who we're expected to believe is sufficiently fluent in French to be smuggled into occupied France and infiltrate grand houses with swastika banners hanging from the front.

Still paying attention? Michael Douglas gets to swan around in a Nazi uniform, while there's the inevitable cameo from John Gielgud.

A bizarre anomaly of colour filmmaking in the British cinema of the fifties & sixties was that the more ambitious the intentions of the makers the cheaper the colour process; which explains why the handful of artistically ambitious productions of the period tended to be made in Eastmancolor while vehicles for TV comedians such as Charlie Drake and Harry H. Corbett so often employed Technicolor & Scope.

This explains the resources lavished upon the likes of 'Petticoat Pirates' - a film so cheap the frog girls don't even wear wetsuits - yet obviously got extensive access to naval facilities; although the film does show occasional flashes of imagination such as the vivid colours that serve as the backdrop for a dream sequence.

'Kismet' marked Marlene Dietrich's final concession to Hollywood frivolity before getting into uniform for the sake of war work in Europe by appearing in Metro's version of the sort of Technicolor nonsense Maria Montez was currently making for Universal; albeit with a much starrier cast.

An Arabian Nights fantasy of the type being made back in Germany when William Dieterle was there directing silents (including a couple featuring Dietrich) with remarkably similar production design. Despite Ronald Colman's usual quiet authority in the lead, its most memorable feature has to be Dietrich performing - in the only one of her four scenes lasting longer than a minute - an exotic 'dance' with - as Elkan Allan once described it - "that fabulous body painted gold", owing more to editing than choreography and anticipating Shirley Eaton in 'Goldfinger' by twenty years.