Eegah (1962)

Director: Nicholas Merriwether
Stars: Arch Hall Jr, Marilyn Manning and Richard Kiel

I'm driving the highway to Cinematic Hell in 2010 for the awesome folks at Cinema Head Cheese to post a review a week of the very worst films of all time. These are so bad that they make Uwe Boll look good.

There are films that live on in legend because whatever else they might be, they're mostly prominent embarrassments in the career of someone eminently recognisable. I'm not talking about the direction John Carradine's career went as it dragged on way down into the depths, but about things like Trog with Joan Crawford, Teenage Caveman with Robert Vaughan and Eegah with Richard Kiel, three films that coincidentally share a theme. Yes, Richard Kiel is a 7'2" apparently ageless prehistoric giant caveman, which might have seemed a step up at the time from being merely a bouncer in a night club, but may well have been a little too prominent for comfort when he put on his steel teeth and started duking it out with James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me fifteen years later.

Not having seen this one before, I was surprised to find it has much more going for it than just the man who would become Jaws. For a start, it's yet another Arch Hall Jr vehicle, conjured up by his father Arch Hall Sr to launch him into superstardom as the new Elvis Presley, something that you won't be too surprised to find didn't happen in the slightest even though he certainly wasn't devoid of talent. Watch The Sadist for a start, a story based on the exploits of Charles Starkweather, which was the fourth of his six films. This was the second, after The Choppers, a juvenile delinquent movie written and produced by Sr and starring Jr as Jack 'Cruiser' Bryan who runs a gang, which means in 1961 that he sang rock 'n' roll songs and stripped cars. It must have promised at least something because a year later Sr put Eegah into production with what appears to be everyone he knew.

How's this for nepotism? The leading man is his son, Arch Hall Jr. The leading lady is his secretary at the time, Marilyn Manning. The title character is 7'2" of nobody that he 'discovered' bouncing at a nightclub. To play the leading lady's father he cast himself, under the name of William Watters, but that's only one pseudonym he used here because as Nicholas Merriwether he also wrote, produced and directed. Just in case you wondered if there was a member of the family who didn't get involved, Addalyn Pollitt turns up towards the end of the film as the wife of a drunkard. Outside the film, she's Sr's wife and Jr's mother. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the rest of the cast turn out to be his mechanic, his wife's best friend and his second cousin's chiropodist who owed him a favour.

There is one name that wasn't directly connected with the Halls, except through history, and he's introduced to their work here. He's Ray Dennis Steckler, now remembered as the legendary director of such Z grade movies as Rat Pfink a Boo Boo, The Thrill Killers and the awesomely titled The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? He was a budding cinematographer at the time, having worked on Timothy Carey's cult hit The World's Greatest Sinner, but after the Halls made him assistant cameraman and had him thrown into a swimming pool in a bit part as an actor, they went on to make him a director too. His debut feature in that capacity was Wild Guitar, Arch Hall Jr film vehicle number three.

There is a story here, though initially you might be a little confused as to what it's going to be, if by some fortunate circumstance you didn't have a clue before starting. The credits are certainly memorable, as desert becomes lush vegetation during a thunderstorm, only for the camera to pan up and find a rock with Eegah painted on it. There's even blood dripping from the last two letters because this film is so painful it even makes rocks bleed. That's enough for rocks though as the rest of the credits are for some reason intriguingly painted on wizened corpses that have been stuck in the ground like scarecrows for the camera to fail to focus on. Rocks would have been cheaper.

By the time it actually starts we find ourselves watching young Roxy Miller doing all the usual everyday stuff teenage girls did in 1962. Roxy walks out of a fashion store. Roxy gets in her sports car. Roxy stops at the gas station. I think we're supposed to feel the magnetism of the leading lady but we don't so gas station attendant Tommy Nelson has to point out to the other customer, 'That's my girl, her father's Robert I Miller.' You know, because the most important thing about your sixteen year old girlfriend is who her father is. We can never manage to work out just where Tommy fits into the social scale, given that he works as a gas station attendant but seems to be able to take the entire film off from work on a whim. If this is a part time job to get him through college, he's doing pretty well at it given that he's saved up enough to buy a pretty cool car and a dune buggy.

Anyway, on her way to the Ocotillo Lodge, Roxy drives her little yellow car into a 7'2" caveman. You weren't expecting subtletly from a movie called Eegah, were you? C'mon, you know better than that. Bob Wehling, who turned Arch Hall Sr's story into a screenplay, obviously hadn't a clue how to build a back story from the material provided, so just decided to have the plot stand there in the middle of the road, complete with loincloth and large club, just waiting for our heroine to drive into it. The giant threatens the vehicle because he thinks it's just some big ass critter but he never really does much more than threaten for the entire film, which is more than a little unfortunate. If only he could have whaled the crap out of something at random every five minutes it would have been much more enjoyable.

He does get to look longingly on the delectable female form who pretends to faint dead away in her car, but he gets interrupted by Tommy. 'Roxy, it's me, Carl,' he says. 'Oh Tommy!' she replies, waking up. Perhaps Carl is the name he adopts when he goes to hang out with Roxy's dad because it's a little more suitable for the Ocotillo Lodge than plain old Tommy, but we never get an explanation. We're too busy getting explanations for 7'2" cavemen on the road. After all, as her dad tells her, 'a prehistoric monster is a rather large order to swallow.' No, hang on, this isn't that sort of film; calm down, there's no John Holmes here. Daddy believes her of course, but only while mentally checking her into rehab next week with her idiot friends Paris and Nicole. She has the explanation ready though. 'There were giants,' she says. 'The Bible says so.'

Perhaps this introduction of Biblical quotation into a giant caveman movie, right down to the chapter and verse, is what prompts everyone to become Production Code stereotypes. Tommy or Carl or Rumpelstiltskin or whatever his real name is wants to head out into the desert with a flashlight because he's a big man and he's happy to take on a prehistoric giant with a club. 'I swear on my Elvis Presley LP,' he says, as if we'd forgotten why Arch Hall Jr is even in the movie to begin with. Meanwhile Roxy goes all mushy and a little doe eyed. She has the funniest feeling he wouldn't hurt her. She thought he was kinda cute. I really hope this was just to rile up Tommy. And so does he. Oh boy, so does he.

After they drive out the next day and find huge footprints, Mr Miller shows that he doesn't just talk the talk, he walks the walk too. He pulls his safari suit out of mothballs and has himself flown up to Shadow Mountain by helicopter. Sorry, Tommy, helicopters trump dune buggies, and you'll have to work a few more weeks at the gas station for one of those. At least Daddy doesn't have a rifle like the moron cop in The Beast of Yucca Flats, but he probably wouldn't be able to use it anyway because he can't even use a camera. The moment he tries to focus his box brownie on the remnants of a fire, Eegah the caveman looms up in front of him, and he proves that the clothes don't make the man by promptly backing up a step, falling over his bag and knocking himself unconscious.

So off go Tommy and Roxy in their dune buggy to save him, riding around the sand dunes for a while having a great time until they remember they're supposed to go to the mouth of Deep Canyon to pick up Daddy because the helicopter blew a gasket or something. In other words Arch Hall Sr couldn't afford a helicopter for two scenes so conjured up a dubious excuse. Can you imagine that one being used in real life? 'I'm sorry we can't send out the lifeboats to save your ass but we blew a gasket. Have a nice day.' At least the call to arms means that we don't have to listen to Jr singing at the poolside any more. He hauled an electric guitar over there with a couple of amps, just to sing 'I love you Vicky,' even though his girlfriend is called Roxy. When his next song in the desert turns out to be all about someone called Valerie, even she calls him on it. I didn't think all that Roxy Music was already copyrighted in 1962.

Mr Miller naturally hasn't made it back to the mouth of Deep Canyon, given that he lasted about ten seconds alone in the bush, so they wait for him into the night. The ever thoughtful Tommy has brought bed rolls and a rifle and probably some of those little blue pills too. What an opportunity, he's obviously thinking, but Roxy won't bite even when he pulls his magic guitar out, the one that sounds like a whole band with whistles and backing vocals to boot. Even Eegah heads on over to listen but he doesn't get to do more than peek at the sleeping Roxy in the dune buggy because Tommy's transistor radio has motion sensors on it that alert him when cavemen look at his girlfriend and promptly scare them off with the noise.

Well, officially it just switches on and off at the slightest touch, but as nobody could be so indescribably stupid as to put such a thing in his pocket when he goes to sleep I'm leaning towards the motion sensor theory. And so, after scaring off Eegah and tossing his club into the desert, they drive into Deep Canyon to find Mr Miller. Because Tommy and Roxy apparently haven't learned the ground rules of grade Z movies, they promptly split up, naturally at precisely the location that Eegah was hanging around. It's a strange location too, one that obviously plays havoc with acoustics as while Tommy doesn't hear his girlfriend scream, he does hear her conveniently brush against the horn while being dragged out of the buggy by the giant caveman, who carries her off to the very same cave in Bronson Canyon that was Ro-Man's headquarters in Robot Monster. How's about that for a Z movie pilgrimage site?

The longer this film runs the more you feel sorry for Richard Kiel because this just can't have been what he signed up for. Arch Hall Sr wrote this story for him because he's a 7'2" giant resonating with power who screams out to be a title character in a movie. Yet somehow he managed to emasculate him in every way possible. The obvious things like the loincloth and boots, the huge flowing beard but rather well trimmed moustache, the mummified relatives he discourses with in one sided caveman gibberish are all forgivable because they're just dumb things in a dumb movie. We expect things like this. The problems stem from the fact that he's a politically correct caveman who carries around a huge club without any apparent willingness to use it. And yeah, if you want to get Freudian, that applies too.

He doesn't kill anyone, he doesn't rape anyone, he doesn't even crap in his cave. OK, he throws Ray Dennis Steckler into a swimming pool, but that's about it. He even stoops so low as to run away from a poodle at one point. Mostly he just goes moonfaced over Roxy to the degree that he brings her flowers and carries her purse for her. No, I'm not kidding, he's some sort of prehistoric lounge lizard. He even sits still while she shaves him though he does slurp up the foam. He doesn't freak when she gives him a mirror to look into. And, get this, he shows her his etchings. He's even a primitive artist, drawing cool things on the wall like a spaceship chasing a buffalo. Ah, no, that's not a spaceship, it's apparently Roxy in her car. She recognises herself instantly because she must be an aficionado of modern art.

He's an embarrassment but to be honest he isn't the only one. Arch Hall Sr tries to emphasise how much of an expert Mr Miller is on everything there is, but gives himself intellectual lines like 'Roxy, Roxy. Roxy? Roxy!' He can recognise the style of Eegah's cave paintings as being the same as 'that cave in France'. He can identify precisely how long mummified remains have been dead. He can conjure up all sorts of theories on the drop of a hat about how to communicate with Eegah, how the sulphur in the cave must be what kept the cavemen alive and healthy so long, even how Roxy can get Eegah's mind out of the gutter. Yep, she starts singing operatic exercises.

Meanwhile Jr, who was over six foot tall but in the company of Richard Kiel looks more like a ten year old schoolboy, is so lyrical that he can come up with conversation like, 'Wow. Wow de wow wow,' because Roxy's skirt seems to get shorter with every scene that passes. He's supposed to be awesome because he sings and plays guitar in a rock 'n' roll band, but they can apparently cope fine without him because they have spare people at the next table to fill in when anyone needs. He just hands over his guitar to someone else and wanders off to dance with his girl and nobody cares. Somehow I don't think that would have worked for Elvis. It works for some other member of the band though, because this act brings the realisation that if Roxy is Tommy's girl then she can't be his. Maybe he's really Carl and Arch Hall Jr just got to play both characters for most of the movie.

Roxy doesn't care about either of them, of course, because she's suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and how can these two little boys compete with 7'2" Richard Kiel? I'm not sure whether the crucial moment was when he was rough enough to rip off her shirt but polite enough to do so without scratching her, or whether it was when he slurped away that shaving foam with a huge tongue, but she was obviously missing her big Eegah even while being driven away from him in Tommy's dune buggy. And that scene, where the camera focuses in on her longing face looking back at the prehistoric giant chasing her, is the one truly emotional shot in the entire film.

In fact everything that follows could be interpreted as being her imagination, her giant romantically tracking her down by the scent on her scarf and standing up for her against all odds, only to die heroically because their love was never really meant to be. In fact to reinterpret the finale as the heroine coming to terms both with her impending womanhood and the fact that her boyfriend is a wiener actually plays a lot better than how it was presumably intended. Actress Marilyn Manning's boss Arch Hall Sr didn't care, of course, because he got to see her without a lot of clothes on in a film starring his son that made him money. How much more can a man get out of life? And in the end, that's what this is really all about.

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

Director: Lewis Milestone
Stars: Louis Wolheim and Lewis Ayres

I'm climbing the stairway to Cinematic Heaven in 2010 to post five reviews a week of films from the IMDb Top 250 List, supposedly the greatest motion pictures of all time. Are they really? Find out here.

A few of the films I've watched as part of my trek through the IMDb Top 250 have been spoiled for me by one major flaw that I couldn't ignore, and here's another one. When I watched Gone with the Wind, I found that I couldn't care about a single character. When I watched North By Northwest, I cared about the lead character but couldn't believe in him. When I watched All Quiet on the Western Front, I cared about most of the characters, who are painfully human in a highly inhuman environment, but none of them are believable in the slightest in the roles they are given for one very simple reason: they're supposed to be Germans but they're all as American as American could be, at least once we leave the Teutonic town for the generic classroom and then on to the generic battlefield.

The story, based on the wildly popular bestseller by Erich Maria Remarque that racked up two and a half million sales in its first eighteen months in print, follows an entire class of young Germans who sign up en masse to fight for the fatherland in the First World War, as prompted by their teacher, Prof Kantorek. However, just as they discover that war is nothing at all like their teacher had led them to believe, we discover that the German army is nothing at all like we had been led to believe. If All Quiet on the Western Front is anything to go by, Germans look like Americans, sound like Americans and act like Americans. By the time the cast had reached the western front, which is far from quiet, I'd entirely forgotten that I was watching the German army at all and it took me some time to realise that I wasn't watching New York fighting New Jersey.

There really is no excuse for this. During the First World War, legendary director Erich von Stroheim found great success as a Hollywood actor playing no end of German officers, and that war ended twelve years before this film was made. He was far from the only German actor in Hollywood in 1930 and in fact director Lewis Milestone cast many actual German veterans as officers, but they aren't the ones who talk. What's more, George Cukor, about to become a director in his own right, was hired as a dialogue coach to lessen the regional accents of the actors so that the characters could be more generic and thus identifiable to more moviegoers. Perhaps this is the only valid reason for such behaviour: to portray these soldiers not as Germans but as Everyman. To my mind, the German equivalent, G W Pabst's film Westfront 1918, made the same year of 1930, is even better because it succeeds at all the same things but doesn't fail at making the Germans be believable Germans.

All Quiet on the Western Front was a pre-code film, released in the early days of sound when the Hays Code on moral conduct was in place but not enforced. America was a highly pacifist nation in 1930, a time when over 70% of the population believed that it had been wrong to enter what became known as World War I, and the film has a pacifist message. The introduction suggests that it aims neither to be an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, simply trying to tell of a lost generation. On its initial release, the review in Variety suggested that 'the League of Nations could make no better investment than to buy up the master-print, reproduce it in every language, to be shown in all the nations until the word 'war' is taken out of the dictionaries.'

Only in the pre-code era could a film like this be made in the States, that dares to treat the enemy with sympathy and understanding, while also slipping in snippets of male nudity and a number of gruesome death scenes. While those elements would be barred after the code became enforced in 1934, there is simply no way that Americans would have stood for a sympathetic portrayal of Nazis after World War II, or the Vietnamese or Koreans or Iraqis after other conflicts that involved their country's troops. Yet in 1930, All Quiet on the Western Front wasn't just tolerated, it was a huge critical and commercial success that went on to receive both the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for that year.

Outside this one major flaw, I was very much surprised by how much I enjoyed All Quiet on the Western Front. Of all the films that added up over time on my DVR for this journey through the IMDb Top 250, this one stayed there the longest before my better half and I finally bit the bullet and decided to watch it. It just didn't seem appealing. Neither of us had seen it before and all we expected was an old black and white film that would depress us about the horrors of war. It was made in 1930, very early days for sound, so it was likely to feature silent stars overacting because they hadn't got used to sound technology yet and we wouldn't be able to hear them too well because of the technical issues that plagued that era. It was so easy to leave it for later and watch something else in the meantime.

Happily most of these expectations proved to be entirely wrong, and even though the actors aren't believable in the slightest as Germans, they are very believable as naïve soldiers. We suffer with them as they go so quickly from the schoolroom to the battlefield and they teach us not just about the horrors of war but the fundamental pointlessness of it as well. What's more, they don't depress us too much in the process because there are light hearted moments too that ease the weight of the film's message. Even as Prof Kantorek exhorts his students to enlist, suggesting to them in Latin that 'sweet and fitting it is to die for the fatherland,' he calls them 'the iron men of Germany' while they sit there chewing pencils and dreaming of girls. Their drill sergeant at training camp is Himmelstoß, their old postman, who delights in making them hit the mud, and they get a suitable revenge on him.

Lew Ayres is the lead, playing a young German named Paul Bäumer, and he has more heart and compassion than most. This was very early in his career, given that he made it as far as Battlestar Galactica and Damien: Omen II and beyond. Unlike most arrivals in Hollywood around this time, he got to appear in a couple of silents, including The Kiss, Greta Garbo's last silent movie, but this was where he made his presence known. Later the same year he'd lead the cast in The Doorway to Hell, only to be outshone by a supporting actor, James Cagney. Ayres was a memorable actor who only grew better with age, finding his real stride at the end of the thirties in films like Holiday and a long string of movies as Dr Kildare.

Here he's a fresh faced youngster who epitomises the point of the story. Bäumer enlists only because his Prof Kantorek has thrust blind nationalism down his and his classmates' throats until they would almost believe that black is white and it's Kantorek who's the real villain of the piece. This seems a little strange, given that most war films I've seen have easily defined enemies. The good guys fight the bad guys and while we may not cheer for the one and hiss at the other, the principle isn't far off. On occasion the enemy is war itself. Yet here the real enemies are the figures of authority who may not have started the war, but continue to feed it: Kantorek the teacher who glorifies war to children, Himmelstoß the postman who trains the recruits to be soldiers but doesn't prepare them for the reality of what they'll face, and the elders back home who Bäumer encounters on leave who have no clue what war is really like and exhort him to go on alone and take Paris by himself.

These scenes when he goes home on leave are the most powerful for me. When he visits his old school, the very same teacher who persuaded him to sign up is busy at it again with even younger children. Prof Kantorek exhorts Bäumer to help him in what seems to him to be an almost holy task, but he simply can't do it. Instead he tells them, 'It's dirty and painful to die for your country. When it comes to dying for your country, it's better not to die at all. There are millions out there dying for their country, and what good is it?' However the children are brainwashed enough already for them to see him as nothing but a coward, and Bäumer heads back to the front early, unable to exist anywhere else now.

Ayres is good but obviously still inexperienced. He gets many of the best scenes, including a notable one where he gets stuck in a foxhole for an entire night, talking to the corpse of a French soldier that he has killed. However Louis Wolheim is better as the canny old veteran Kat Katczinsky who has an uncanny knack for finding food and staying alive. It's Kat who teaches these kids how to survive at the hard edge of battle and he's possibly the only German at the front who could almost be taken for a German, given that his wonderfully battered mug is half Brooklyn prizefighter and half Nazi stormtrooper, with maybe a bit of Jason Statham in there too if you can imagine him in twenty years time after being battered so often that he could never be a male model again.

I didn't know Wolheim before seeing this film in 2004, which is possibly his best known, but I've become a big fan over the years since. He didn't make a lot of sound films, given that he died in early 1931, but his credits date back to 1914 and he's memorable in everything he appeared in, from small roles in early twenties movies like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Orphans of the Storm and Sherlock Holmes to more prominent parts in later silents like Two Arabian Knights, Tempest and The Racket. He doesn't get as much screen time as Ayres here but he owns every scene he's in, a powerful presence to the younger soldiers around him and a powerful presence to us.

Backing them Ayres and Wolheim are so many young actors playing so many young soldiers that it's nigh on impossible to keep track of who's who, but there are memorable scenes for some of them. One is blinded during a trip out into no man's land to lay wire and runs out into a bullet, while another goes stir crazy staying in a bunker under fire. By the time we hit the first extended battle scene, we can't even keep track of which side is which except by following the spikes on some of the helmets, let alone the soldiers taking part. It's a long and powerful sequence with some surprising imagery, one quick shot of some wire just above the German trench having a pair of severed hands attached to it.

Mostly though there are explosions, enough to satisfy a Michael Bay fan if they can deal with actual people instead of just giant robots, and the sounds of warfare feel uncomfortably close. There's an omnipresent rumble of distant explosions with the accompanying whizzing of artillery shells to keep it varied. This is the soundtrack, as Lewis Milestone deliberately avoided the use of a score as it would have detracted from the impact of the story. He shouldn't have worried unduly because there may be even more impact here than was intended. Many times we can't help but wonder if the actors hadn't strayed a little too close to the bombs because it gets dangerously uncomfortable on more than a few occasions.

The cinematography is spectacular, especially in these battle scenes that featured a couple of thousand extras and which saw acres of California ranch land echo with some truly awesome explosions. The script is sharp and intelligent and always engrossing. I admire the subtle way that certain devices were subtly worked in as recurring themes, such as Kemmerich's boots. Kemmerich is one of Bäumer's young comrades who was passed down a pair of quality boots through his family. As he dies he gives them to a colleague, and we soon realise that deaths are piling upon deaths merely by watching these familiar boots being worn by a neverending succession of new soldiers in a stunning montage.

Above all though the biggest star is the message, that plea for pacifism that rang so true in the pre-code era but was soon censored out of existence. When it came to later wars, the media had discarded All Quiet on the Western Front and so became Prof Kantorek instead of Paul Bäumer. Times had changed and so had the feelings that went with those times. In fact when World War II rolled around Lew Ayres became a conscientious objector, in part because of his experience in making this film, and his movies were promptly banned in a number of places in response. Of course the Nazis banned it everywhere for being anti-German, at least once they gained power. Before that they just released rats or stinkbombs into the theatres. Bizarrely the Poles banned it for being pro-German. Fortunately for us the film hasn't changed and its message becomes all the more effective because of what the intervening time has brought. That's an amazing feat for a film that's now eighty years old.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

Director: William Wyler
Stars: Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Theresa Wright, Virginia Mayo and Cathy O'Donnell

I'm climbing the stairway to Cinematic Heaven in 2010 to post five reviews a week of films from the IMDb Top 250 List, supposedly the greatest motion pictures of all time. Are they really? Find out here.

The Best Years of Our Lives was a timely picture for 1946, a gentle reminder that the impact of war didn't just take place overseas on farflung battlefields, it came home with the servicemen too. It was a plea for understanding, not for better treatment or special consideration but just for understanding, and it was the way that plea was made that led to its success. It became the biggest hit at the box office since Gone with the Wind broke all the records seven years earlier. It won seven Oscars out of eight nominations. It's a much beloved film even today, though it's almost three hours long and tweaks the heartstrings rather blatantly on occasion. And all this came through that most elusive of cinematic achievements, the ability to touch the right nerve at the right time and tap into the feeling of a nation.

It had plenty of opportunity to touch the wrong nerve, director William Wyler taking a lot of risks with the material. On top of dealing with the general plight of servicemen returning home and the changes in attitude that the country was going through as war became peace, it also took a good look at both alcoholism and infidelity, hardly popular subjects with the moral arbiters of Hollywood product. There are nods to what was on the horizon in the form of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which a year earlier had become a standing committee and a year later would begin its investigations into communist links in Hollywood. It even cast a double amputee as a lead character, the sort of approach that hadn't been taken since Freaks in 1933, an astounding film but one which effectively mangled the career of director Tod Browning in the process.

Most of all, the Second World War wasn't really what most audiences wanted to see a year after it had ended. Since the US had joined the war effort in 1941, Americans had been been deluged with war movies, often propaganda pictures that talked up the reasons for being in the war and promising a better life for all once it was over. After four years of war and hardship, albeit not to the degree that allies closer to the action like the UK and Russia had dealt with, they were more than ready for something different, especially as the hardship continued even after the war's end. However they had to wait until the backlog of war films was exhausted first. Studios like Warner Brothers were even delaying the release of new movies like The Big Sleep until this was done, fearing that audiences would soon be staying away from war movies in droves. So for Samuel Goldwyn to finance this major production independently in such an environment was seen by many as commercial suicide. I guess he had the last laugh.

Based on a novel by MacKinlay Kantor which had been written in free verse, The Best Years of Our Lives focuses on the return to Boone City, a fictional version of Cincinnati, of three servicemen, one from each arm of the forces, who meet on the flight home. Fredric March is army, an infantry sergeant called Al Stephenson who used to be a banker at the Cornbelt Loan and Trust Company. Dana Andrews, who had been a memorable sergeant a year earlier in Lewis Milestone's A Walk in the Sun, gets to be an officer here, a highly decorated air force officer who dropped bombs out of a B17, though back in Boone he used to be a soda jerk at a drugstore. Both are excellent and March won his second Oscar for his work, even though his name was misspelt on the closing credits. His first was for his memorable double role as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1931.

Even though March and Andrews were highly recognisable stars in 1946, they were tasked with playing alongside someone who had never acted before, Harold Russell. He represents the navy, in the form of a sailor called Homer Parrish who had lost both his hands at war and who had been trained to use a pair of hooks instead. In the story he lost them to fire, having been trapped below decks when his ship went down to be hauled out unconscious. In reality he lost them to explosives when some TNT blew up in his hands while he was training paratroopers in North Carolina. Whichever way we remember it, the end result is startling and Wyler puts Russell to good use, though it did help that he was also able to be the epitome of the small town American boy.

William Wyler was known for his delicate touch, that and his staircases, but he outdid himself here, painting these three characters, and those that support them, with delicacy and depth. These three servicemen share many characteristics even though they come from completely different backgrounds. They all return home with troubles, though they want to overcome them. They all find difficulty adapting back to the lives they once had, though for different reasons. They all have problems dealing with those around them, though they overcome those problems to different degrees. Every major character in this film is given plenty of opportunity to develop, partly through the running time of nigh on three hours but also partly through the careful and thoughtful writing by Robert E Sherwood, who adapted Kantor's novel. Their initial return seems perfect, Boone City shown as a happy travelogue, a voyage of rediscovery, but the darker side soon bleeds through.

Al had been married for twenty years before he shipped out and returns home to a textbook family reunion, one modelled on Wyler's own return from the war to his own wife. Al is the career man with a loving spouse, a grown daughter and a son in college, for whom life is so perfect that he's even given Myrna Loy, who had been consolidating her status as the perfect screen wife since The Thin Man a couple of decades earlier, to play his. While the environment couldn't be better for Al, he's forgotten what life back home was like. He hardly recognises his kids because they've grown up while he was away and he even forgets his wife doesn't smoke. He's more like an amnesiac who's literally lost three years of his life and can't work out how to get them back. Unfortunately he tries to do it by hitting the bottle.

In many ways Fred is the mirror image of Al. Instead of twenty years, he hadn't even been married for twenty days before heading off to war. Instead of a heartfelt reunion with his family, he can't even find his wife, who had moved out of his parents' house to get a job in a nightclub. Instead of the mixture of love and concern that Milly Stephenson exudes, Marie Derry is just hot for the glamorous flyboy, his uniform with its string of ribbons and of course the pay that enabled her to live the highlife while he was off in his bomber. He has nightmares about burning planes but she just tells him to snap out of it, as if that's all it takes. It doesn't take long for him to find far more understanding, respect and love with Al's daughter Peggy than with his own wife.

Homer's problem is about acceptance. On the plane back to Boone City he demonstrates how well he can use his hooks by lighting matches and explains to his new friends that he knows he's better off than many who didn't come back at all. Yet he's deeply worried about what his childhood sweetheart will think when he gets home. She knows but she hasn't seen, and he can't help but panic about her reaction. Wilma Cameron turns out to be a rock who loves him regardless but Homer has trouble dealing with both their families who tiptoe as if on eggshells around him. They make him nervous because, as he describes it, 'they keep staring at these hooks, or else they keep staring away from them.' Yet perhaps because his problem is so easily defined, he has possibly the easiest time of it back home.

Homer also doesn't have to work, with a disability pension of a couple of hundred bucks a month, which makes life simpler for him than the more complex problems Al and Fred go through. Al isn't just hired back at his bank, he's promoted to vice president in charge of small loans. The reasoning seems to be sound, because with many servicemen applying for loans under the GI Bill of Rights he's in a good position to understand both their concerns and those of the bank, but really he's just put there to say no a lot, which he finds he can't do. He gives a speech that sums up the message of the film: 'We're going to have such a line of customers seeking and getting small loans that people will think we're gambling with the depositors' money. And we will be. We will be gambling on the future of this country.'

While he wants to take his time and look around, Fred quickly ends up back at the drugstore, finding it nothing like it used to be. It pays a third of what he earned in in the air force. 'The war is over, Derry,' his new boss says simply, before making him an assistant to Clarence Merkle, a weasel of a man who used to be Fred's assistant before the war. Worst of all, Marie, who enjoyed life while he was away on $500 a month from his air force salary and her job, is offended that she now has to make do on a measly $32.50 a week from the drugstore. Marriages can't survive on that amount or double it, she tells Peggy, who wouldn't care about the money and just wants the man. Their little battle is just one of many subplots that get an opportunity to play out in this film.

I watched The Best Years of Our Lives back in 2004 and remembered being really impressed, but it didn't leap out as a film that I wanted to rewatch. I was just as impressed here but I still feel no urge to come back to it again. For many though it's a favourite, perhaps because the picture really defines a world at a point in time and they're happy to be thrown into it, to work through the troubles with the characters they're watching. Certainly the romance between Peggy and Fred is an engaging one, not least because of the great performances of Dana Andrews and Teresa Wright, whose character really would have been a great catch. She provides great repartee, which is joyously delivered, and it's hardly surprising we see so much of her and so little of her screen brother.

Wright was appearing in her sixth and last film at MGM here, even though five had seen her loaned out to other studios. She had an unparalleled start to her career, still the only actor to be nominated for an Oscar for each of her first three movies. First there was The Little Foxes, which saw her play Bette Davis's daughter; then Mrs Miniver, something of an English companion piece to this film, which is what she won her Oscar for; and finally The Pride of the Yankees, where she played Lou Gehrig's wife. Film four was Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt and film six was this one, but from here it was sadly downhill, as the great roles she found as an engaging teenager didn't translate into adulthood. It's a shame, as she's superb here, somehow young and naive enough to still know everything but also old and knowing beyond her years.

All the supporting cast are solid, including Virginia Mayo as Fred's glamorous but selfish wife Marie. She's the epitome of the pinup girl that the guys overseas dreamed about coming home to. Fred got the opportunity but found that it wasn't worth it. Homer's uncle Butch who runs a bar and plays the piano in it is Hoagy Carmichael who even gets a couple of jokes. 'How about Lazy River?' Homer suggests, 'Remember that?' Well he should, as Hoagy Carmichael wrote it. Cathy O'Donnell, who landed her first credited role as Homer's fiancée Wilma, was well cast as the girl next door, something she'd play often in her short career, emanating innocence and inherent goodness. The short career was partly because she became William Wyler's sister-in-law a couple of years later, something that prompted Samuel Goldwyn to cancel her contract because he was feuding with Wyler at the time.

The other actor who went home with an Oscar though was Harold Russell, who actually won two. Given the timing and his circumstances, he was given a special honorary award before Oscar night arrived, 'for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans through his appearance in The Best Years of Our Lives.' It has been suggested that this award was given because he didn't have much of a chance to win a competitive award but he promptly won that too, leaving him still the only winner of two Oscars for the same role. He was good, far better than could be expected for a non-actor, and indeed it had to have been the natural feel he brought to the role that won him the most acclaim. He could play the part because he was the part and William Wyler played that up to no small degree.

He even found time to wrap the whole thing up in a decent story arc, with all the little stories taken care of in the meantime. When our three heroes fly into Boone City they see that the airport is full of planes lined up to be scrapped. When Fred returns to this scene towards the end of the story, we find the most striking images of the film in what can only be described as an airplane graveyard with its dead planes lined up in endless rows. These planes, some with markings to show how much action they saw, are as much war heroes as the men who served in them and the comparison is more than a little obvious. They're being scrapped, which is precisely what servicemen like Fred felt was happening to them, but we discover with him that they're breaking them up to turn into prefab housing. In other words while their old purpose is gone, they have a new life ahead of them in a new America, just as Fred's dad tells him: 'There's a need here for fellas like yourself that fought and won the war.' And it's that need that makes our movie.

Touch of Evil (1958)

Director: Orson Welles
Stars: Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Orson Welles

I'm climbing the stairway to Cinematic Heaven in 2010 to post five reviews a week of films from the IMDb Top 250 List, supposedly the greatest motion pictures of all time. Are they really? Find out here.

In 1957 Orson Welles presented his first cut of Touch of Evil to Universal but the studio felt it could be improved, a concept that tormented Welles throughout his career. They shot new footage and reedited the film against his will, causing Welles within hours to write what has been described as 'a passionate 58 page memo' requesting editorial changes. That's more than some scripts. The first time I saw Touch of Evil was in the studio's butchered version, which is nonetheless still a classic. The second time round I saw Welles's own preferred version which, amongst other things, preserves the legendary opening shot which is a truly stunning piece of cinema, leaving the credits until the end. The studio version has those credits slapped all over the opening so that I didn't even notice the genius unfolding on screen first time around.

As the film starts we're looking at a bomb, held close to a man's chest, but then we shift perspective to the man himself and watch as he plants it inside the boot of a car. He gets out of the way just as the owners turn up and we pan up and over a building to follow them and the car onto the main road of Los Robles, which straddles the US/Mexican border, falling back a couple of blocks as it waits at traffic lights. Eventually the camera finds Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh, crossing the road. Both the car and these characters work on down through the border station, connecting and disconnecting like dance partners, until eventually we hear about a ticking noise in the car, then focus back in on Heston and Leigh who are on their honeymoon. Only when they kiss does the car explode, off screen, and everything promptly turns to chaos.

And all of this is one single uninterrupted shot, three and a half minutes long. This seemed to me at the time as unmatched in cinema as a masterpiece of choreography and shifting perspectives, but I've since seen a couple of films by Max Ophüls, including 1950's La Ronde, which has an opening shot that puts even this one to shame. Nonetheless it demonstrates yet again both the genius of Orson Welles and the sort of hassle that he had to put up with when attempting to create his films. It's often pointed out that when Welles first came to Hollywood he had complete control over his creation and the result was Citizen Kane, often referenced as the greatest film ever made. However after pissing off someone as important as William Randolph Hearst, who after all ran a few newspapers, that he never got the same level of control again and the results never soared to the same heights.

At least that's what they say. As I began to explore the depths of his career in 2004 I discovered something a little different because many of his films, including The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai and Mr Arkadin, can still easily be described as masterpieces, and this one would seem to be above them all, with the exception only of Citizen Kane. I was stunned by Touch of Evil, even in the butchered version, which really says something, but especially in what would nowadays be described as the director's cut, even though it didn't see the light of day until 1998, thirteen years after his death. It's a film that warrants multiple viewings, not just because of the complexities of the plot but because the casting choices only become more intriguing as the viewer learns more about classic cinema.

Welles took a lot of chances here, but the most obvious ones were with the casting, some of which is especially strange or at least seems so from my viewpoint over fifty years on. Most obviously, to play the central character of Miguel 'Mike' Vargas, some sort of moustachioed Mexican, Welles cast that most American of Americans, Charlton Heston. What's more, the bad guys steal his gun without the courtesy of making his hand a cold dead one in the process. All this could easily have backfired as massively as other ludicrous casting choices like having Katharine Hepburn play a mountain girl, putting Humphrey Bogart into a hillbilly wrestling comedy or casting John Wayne as the centurion who looks up at Jesus on the cross and says, 'Truly, this man was the son of God.' Somehow Heston makes it work, though I'm still not quite sure how he did it. It seems insane to think of him as a Mexican but the idea is growing on me, however much he had trouble keeping our attention in many of his confrontational scenes.

Vargas is some sort of high powered Mexican investigator, involved in a cleanup operation that is never quite made clear, but presumably ties to drugs and organised crime. What is made clear is that he's in the process of putting the leader of the Grandi gang in jail in Mexico City. The Grandi family's reach stretches as far as Los Robles and they're integral parts of much of what follows. The man in the car was a local construction boss called Rudy Linnaker, with his stripper girlfriend, but he's only the MacGuffin of the piece. Everything happens because of him but his only involvement is to die and trigger it all. We don't even know if his death has anything to do with what Vargas is investigating or whether he really is just heading Stateside to honeymoon with his new wife.

His young wife is Susie, who Janet Leigh plays as sassy as they come. She has more cojones than any leading lady of the era and, while she's rather prone to bad decisions, she's certainly a pleasing change from the sort of women that usually found their way onto Hollywood films in 1958. I'd never thought of Orson Welles as a feminist before but he certainly implies it here with the character of Susie. 'What have I got to lose?' she asks in this border town when a stranger asks her to follow him into a strange building to meet other strangers. 'You silly little pig,' she calls Uncle Joe Grandi when she finds herself face to face with him. 'You ridiculous, old-fashioned, jug-eared, lop-sided Little Caesar!'

Leigh is superb, whether playing headstrong or vulnerable. She also has the worst time in a motel room that she could have imagined, at least for the next couple of years until Psycho. She's famously mentioned that after the latter film she was scared to take a shower again, but I'm amazed she ever went back to a motel. Really the convolutions of plot that she's carried through don't matter at all, because like The Big Sleep it's the journey not the destination that counts. We're watching the characters swagger and step and struggle through the story rather than the story itself. Like The Big Sleep, they could be right or wrong and it wouldn't matter because we're watching them and what motivates them.

Most of all we're watching Orson Welles, who may only be third credited in his own film but is by far the most obvious thing about it. Only nine years after playing the sharp and suave Harry Lime in The Third Man, he's almost unrecognisable as Hank Quinlan, a bloated whore of a police chief who we first see struggling to get out of his car. He's so swollen that he doesn't seem to fit properly on the screen and he's often shot from below to make him look even more blatantly obese. He slurs his speech like he's drunk even when he isn't and frequently talks while eating. 'You're a mess, honey,' says Tanya, a former paramour who doesn't even recognise him any more, and she isn't kidding.

What's most fascinating is that he's such a complex character. Apparently driven by the murder of his wife many years before, he's become a legend on the force for the amount of cases he's successfully closed. As he mentions at one point, his wife's murderer was the last killer he never found, but we discover over time that he's as corrupt as they come. The source novel by Whit Masterson was called Badge of Evil, which is a little too polarising for this film, as the title change would suggest, because Quinlan does all the wrong things for all the right reasons. There are fascinating contrasts to his character. When one of his colleagues mentions that he speaks like a lawyer, he disputes that. 'I'm no lawyer,' he says. 'All a lawyer cares about is the law.' As Tanya points out at the end of the film, he's 'a great detective but a lousy cop.' That's a rare and fascinating line to walk.

Welles cast a lot of lesser known names that shine here, although very few are believable as Mexican. Surprisingly one of the better attempts comes from Akim Tamiroff, who was born in Russia. He's Uncle Joe Grandi, the leader of the Grandi family while his brother is in jail, though he's a comedic crook with his pencil moustache and his runaway toupée, at least comedic in a rather sleazy way to fit in with the rather sleazy tone of the movie. Joseph Calleia is Quinlan's sidekick, Sgt Pete Menzies, who is less sleazy and more inept, a crooked cop who doesn't even know he's crooked. He's far older here than I'm used to seeing him, because he's over a quarter of a century into a long screen career with only four films to go. Ray Collins and Mort Mills are suitably faceless as the DA and his assistant.

Elsewhere Zsa Zsa Gabor appears briefly as a stripper and Marlene Dietrich is a joy to behold in a few short scenes as Tanya, a darkly seductive cigar smoking gypsy woman with her incredibly languid eyes that just invite us to dive into them. She shot this film as a favour to Welles, expecting to only be paid union wage, but when the studio added her to the credits they had to pay her more for the privilege. Most notable is Dennis Weaver, who is a wildly paranoid and twitchy motel clerk, like something out of the imagination of David Lynch thirty years before Lynch ever got it onto celluloid himself. I'm not sure if he's supposed to be retarded, withdrawn or strung out on something but he's a hoot. Nobody lets the side down, all the way from the leads down to uncredited turns from Joseph Cotten, Keenan Wynn and Mercedes McCambridge. I think I've blinked at the wrong moment every time I've watched this movie and missed Cotten each time.

And then there's the biggest star that ever featured in any Welles movie: his technique. Citizen Kane isn't just the most highly regarded film of all time, it's the most analysed and dissected film there is, full of technique that just screams to be talked about. There's plenty to analyse here too. There's a startling use of light and shade, especially in the hotel murder scene where we feel almost stifled by the shadows. There are daring and innovative camera angles, no doubt influenced by The Third Man. That legendary opening shot is only one of many examples where the camera soars up into the air like it's a bird flying free. The plot is tightly woven and unfolded at a rapid pace, with sharp dialogue and daring twists; the editing often aids the pace, speeding it up or slowing it down at will.

There's also a masterful composition of images on screen, but it comes across less as a set of well composed photographs and more of a choreographed dance of characters and conversations. It's a very busy screen in Touch of Evil, not least because the supporting characters have so much screen time, and almost every shot has motion. Even the still scenes are moved by wind or pulsing light. There are even a few examples of the sort of rapid fire editing Russ Meyer used frequently, to turn still shots into effective motion. This innovative use of editing with constant changes of view makes the picture sometimes claustrophobic and almost hallucinatory. There are often two things going on at once to segue from scene to scene, often two conversations running simultaneously. Characters frequently begin talking to one camera then turn round to finish at another one. There are a number of scenes where conversations are held around pillars or through windows, the camera dancing to keep up. We feel like we've been whirled into that dance and by the time it's over we're disoriented but pleasantly exhausted.

The more I see Welles's work, the more I'm stunned at what he did on screen. I knew him first outside of direction: from his legendary War of the Worlds radio broadcast, from the portentous voiceovers he did for Manowar on a few of their songs and from his memorable performance as Harry Lime in The Third Man. Then I saw Citizen Kane and realised just what he could do with full control over a movie. Whether it's the greatest film of all time or not, it's an amazing eye opener to anyone who can look beyond the ride at the machinery making it go. The saddest thing about his legacy is that people talk about Citizen Kane like it's the only thing he did or at least the only thing that turned out how he wanted and so remains worthy of mention. Just watch F for Fake and tell me the master didn't have tricks galore up his sleeve even late in his career.

What else he did was stamp his authority on whatever film he made, even those that he didn't write and direct. He was known to take over and direct his scenes in films that he was only supposed to act in or to rewrite his dialogue to whatever he deemed appropriate. In fact here he was only supposed to act, but because Heston believed he was going to direct too, that's what he did. His films were also notoriously played around with by studios and producers who didn't like what he did, this being a prime example. Yet his films stand out today because of his presence and this one, beyond even Citizen Kane, simply reeks of Welles. As a director he layered the depth and sleaziness of the tone to such a degree that it plays out like a hallucination. As an actor he provided us with the most memorably deep and sleazy corrupt cop I've yet seen on film. Even Citizen Kane didn't have that much.

King Kong (1933)

Directors: Merion C Cooper and Ernest B Schoedsack
Stars: Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong and Bruce Cabot

I'm climbing the stairway to Cinematic Heaven in 2010 to post five reviews a week of films from the IMDb Top 250 List, supposedly the greatest motion pictures of all time. Are they really? Find out here.

The most amazing thing about King Kong is that it is still an awe-inspiring sight today, almost eighty years after it first reached the big screen and after we've all learned what happens. One of the most watched films of all time, it's also become such a staple of our culture that even those who haven't seen it know at least something of what it's about, even without the benefit of Peter Jackson's heartfelt 2005 remake to assist. I've seen it many times so know all about how the adventurous showman discovers the giant ape on Skull Island and fetches him back to New York, only for him to break loose and run amok before finally being toppled from the Empire State Building, but it's became obvious to me that every time I rewatch it I find myself stunned all over again as I get caught up in the majestic adventure of the thing. This time through I tried to watch with a more critical eye and a number of things leapt quickly to mind.

Most obviously the film works to a huge scale, and I'm not just talking about Kong himself and the giant adversaries he has to face in the interior of Skull Island. These were miniatures, the Kong on Skull Island being 18" models and the Kong in New York being a 24" model to make him look even bigger in civilisation. Everything is done on a grand prehistoric scale, large even to eyes that have got used to modern day blockbuster effects. The caves and trees and cliffs and ravines and walls and whatever else aren't just big, they're gargantuan. The Empire State Building was the most fitting location for Kong's final scenes, given that it was only two years old in 1933 and the tallest building anywhere in the world, a record it would hold for another 21 years.

This concept of scale has been mostly lost in cinema today because it tends to be reserved for the gimmick, even in films with substance like Gojira, Jaws or The Wicker Man. Nowadays that idea has been taken to an extreme, because there's simply no point watching anything else but the gimmick in films like Aliens vs Predator, Michael Bay's Transformers or even the blue Na'vi in Avatar. Back in Kong's day, the scale was in the sets: huge castles, endless staircases, high vaulted ceilings, massive doors. This is especially apparent in the Universal horror movies being made at the same time as King Kong and in many silent movies and early sound films before it, even lesser films with lower budgets and smaller expectations.

Even today there's a sense of awe merely looking at these sets, which is highly appropriate given the material. Here we're watching the epic size of prehistory on sets that were often recycled from earlier epic Biblical films. The Great Wall on Skull Island was part of the Temple of Jerusalem in The King of Kings, Cecil B DeMille's 1927 version of the story of Jesus. It reappeared in films like The Garden of Allah, which shifted epic to exotic, and was eventually destroyed as part of the burning of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind, perhaps the pivotal moment when scale ceased to be the grandeur of the sets to become instead the budget, the stars and the publicity. Perhaps the truest comparison is between the 'spectacle' of that era and the 'blockbuster' of our day.

There's much more than scale here, of course, this being one of the most primal adventure stories of them all, conjuring up more exotic savagery than Tarzan ever managed. While many people worked on the story and the ideas behind it, not least English thriller writer Edgar Wallace, the credit mostly falls to Merian C Cooper and Ernest B Schoedsack, the uncredited directors of the piece. They were true adventurers in the old pulp sense of the word, who had met in the Polish Air Force fighting the Russians and who wandered the world in search of new and exotic experiences. They had already made two silent ethnographic documentaries for Paramount, in the style of Nanook of the North, that brought them to prominence in Hollywood, the second even being nominated at the first Academy Awards in the category of Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production.

Both these films saw them walk the walk. In 1925's Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life, they accompanied 50,000 members of the Bakhtiari tribe from Turkey to Iran on their arduous seasonal migration to fresh pastures. Then they spent a dangerous year in the jungles of Thailand making Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, a melodramatic piece about a Thai farmer fighting for survival in the jungle against natural enemies, released in 1927. The spark for King Kong apparently came from a dream of Cooper's, but in keeping with technology at the time and his own exotic experiences, he envisaged making it by taking live gorillas from Africa to the Komodo islands to fight the large lizards there and then turning it all into a film with special photographic effects.

Cooper and Schoedsack even feature in their own movie, both in fictional form and in cameo roles. Carl Denham, the film director who takes his cast and crew to the mysterious Skull Island to make a movie, is not a long way removed from Cooper himself. 'If it's there, you bet I'll photograph it!' Denham says at one point and you can imagine Cooper saying the same thing. Jack Driscoll, the second mate on the SS Venture, who falls in love with leading lady Ann Darrow during the voyage, is similarly pretty close to Schoedsack. Given that the final version of the script was written by Schoedsack's wife, Ruth Rose, it's easy to see her as the young actress too. As former wrestlers, Cooper and Schoedsack acted out some of the monster scenes themselves, before handing over to the animators and they appear at the end of the film, as the pilot and machine gunner who topple Kong from the Empire State Building. The reason for the cameo? Cooper said, 'We should kill the sonofabitch ourselves.'

Kong himself, the eighth wonder of the world and the real leading man of the piece, is certainly the main reason to watch the movie. He and all the other stop motion monsters in this film were created by the first great Hollywood special effects master, Willis O'Brien, here credited as chief technician. By sheer coincidence I rewatched King Kong in 2004 just after watching the original 1925 silent version of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. While Wallace Beery was a memorable Professor Challenger, it was O'Brien's stop motion work that stole the show, being nothing short of revolutionary. Cinema audiences of the 1920s must have fainted in the aisles at the sight of living dinosaurs just as they did to the very first stop motion effects invented by the French genius Georges Méliès around the turn of the century.

O'Brien had worked his prehistoric marvels before, in films as early as The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy for Thomas Edison in 1915, and an intriguing 1918 short film called The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, which he also wrote, directed and appeared in. It's creaky today but fascinating nonetheless. That led to The Lost World, which led in turn to RKO's proposed prehistoric fantasy called Creation, which was never completed, partly to make way for King Kong. It was when Cooper saw O'Brien's work on this aborted project that he realised that his film had to be done with stop motion animation instead of photomanipulation. Many of the dinosaur models, articulated metal armatures encased in rubber skin, built for Creation are what we see today in King Kong. Much of the rest comes from The Lost World, not least the finale in which a captured brontosaurus escapes from its bonds and proceeds to stomp parts of London, inspiring not just Kong in New York but Godzilla in Tokyo and most monster movies ever made.

Another great reason to watch is leading lady Fay Wray, who was told she'd be working opposite the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood, though she assumed that meant Cary Grant rather than Kong. When she took quite literally the words, 'Scream, Ann, scream for your life!' she became cinema's original scream queen. Already experienced in Hollywood since her early days in the twenties in slapstick shorts (the earliest I've seen her was in a Charley Chase short from 1925 called What Price Goofy?), this came at a point where she was becoming the leading lady of choice for horror movies. Her first was Doctor X in 1932, an excellent early example of two strip Technicolor, and that led her to The Vampire Bat and Mystery of the Wax Museum. With this pedigree it's hardly difficult not to see her scream queen act here as the template for the enhanced antics of Linnea Quigley and Brinke Stevens and all the other scream queens that dominated the straight-to-video horror genre in the 1980s.

She'd already worked for Cooper in 1929's The Four Feathers and as the leading lady in The Most Dangerous Game, albeit without the striking blonde wig that was added for this film. In fact all the jungle scenes here were shot back to back with that film to defray costs, Cooper filming scenes for King Kong during the night and Schoedsack shooting The Most Dangerous Game during the day. This was the original 'man hunting man' film, released to screens in 1932, and it's a particular favourite of mine even though it pales in direct comparison with King Kong. While I recognise both leading actors and many of the jungle sets used, I didn't notice other cost cutting recycling such as the repetition of some of the sound effects. Apparently the screams of the sailors as the ship sinks at the beginning of The Most Dangerous Game are the same as those of the sailors in King Kong as the giant ape shakes them off a huge log.

Wray has a lot of sympathy for Kong, something that shows in the film but even more so if you read up on her. In her autobiography she talks about Kong as if he was a real person, going so far as to write a prologue in the form of an open letter to the giant ape. She had ideas for a sequel film which sees Kong rise from underneath Fifth Avenue, where he has been resting for so long being toppled from the Empire State Building. Attitudes towards him having changed over the years, he is helped back to his home on Skull Island in something of a reversal of the story here. Maybe that's not such a bad idea, even today, and her name is still one to be reckoned with. So lasting was her memory that two days after her death in 2004 at 96 years of age the lights of the Empire State Building were extinguished for fifteen minutes in tribute.

Wray never appeared in a giant ape movie again, but her co-star Robert Armstrong seemed to turn up in all of them. After his starring role here as showman Carl Denham, he returned the same year for the direct sequel The Son of Kong, and again in 1949 for the original Mighty Joe Young, that time dealing with a gorilla only a mere ten feet high. Discounting The Most Dangerous Game, it took me a long while to actually see him anything that didn't feature a giant ape. What I found is that while he is always worth watching, even in something as dire as 1929's The Racketeer, the films he appeared in often aren't. When he found a great film to appear in, like 1935's 'G' Men, he found himself upstaged yet again, that time not by a giant ape but by James Cagney, a fate that befell many actors back in the thirties.

Kong upstages everyone and everything here, as you might expect, but he does so surprisingly well. Like many classic Hollywood films the rear projection work is sometimes rather apparent, but it's also notable that King Kong pulled off that trick far better than Hollywood tended to manage elsewhere. In particular many of the later Hitchcocks, such as The Birds, To Catch a Thief or Marnie have horrendous rear projection work, even though they were made by a master over thirty years later. Most of the technologies used here, with one notable exception, were already known and had been used in films before, but this was the first time they were all really brought together. Rear projection itself was reasonably new but its junior cousin, miniature rear projection, had never been done before. This was the technique that put a tiny Fay Wray into gargantuan backgrounds for Kong to play with, and it's a huge achievement that such innovative technology could be so well implemented on the first attempt.

What's more, there were other innovations too, something that Cooper did often. Max Steiner wrote a very modern soundtrack at Cooper's request, even though RKO had requested standard stock music pilfering instead, and Murray Spivak's sound effects were deliberately tied in to that soundtrack, a unique approach for the time. Spivak also created Kong's roar in a very clever fashion, by combining a tiger's roar played backwards and a lion's roar played forwards. Cooper went on to pioneer colour (Technicolor) and widescreen (Cinerama), as well as stereophonic sound and a whole host of other technologies. Cinerama wasn't just the pioneer for widescreen but also for IMAX and Omnimax and all those documentaries that immerse us in fabulous surroundings.

So King Kong was an innovator as well as being a really great film that went on to entertain generations. However it also holds another solid spot in cinematic history, by singlehandedly saving a fledgling studio. RKO was the smallest of the five major studios, constantly on the brink of bankruptcy with budgets so low that the sound effects engineer worked out of the former stable of Tom Mix's horse. RKO literally owed its continued existence to The Most Dangerous Game and King Kong, which led to it seeing a profit for the very first time after five years of operation. The Most Dangerous Game was a much cheaper production so made more money but King Kong was the bigger success, reaping an amazing $2m in its initial release, an awesome amount in 1933.

And so to the end, one of the truly magic endings to ever come out of Hollywood. There are many touching endings, but this one is especially so as we really care for the monster, something almost unheard of in monster movies. We may cheer for Godzilla or Mothra or other famous monsters of filmland, but we never really care for them and so only show our support or disdain on the level of professional wrestlers. We know they'll never really die because they have to come back for another sequel, just like we know Hulk Hogan will never really retire, however many times he actually does. Contrary to Wray's sentimentality about the beast and the similar affections that pervaded Peter Jackson's remake, Cooper wanted Kong to be brutal and vicious, a primeval creature, because it would make his eventual demise all the more tragic. Sure enough the best line is left for last. 'It wasn't the airplanes,' says Denham. 'It was beauty killed the beast.'

Some Like It Hot (1959)

Director: Billy Wilder
Stars: Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon

I'm climbing the stairway to Cinematic Heaven in 2010 to post five reviews a week of films from the IMDb Top 250 List, supposedly the greatest motion pictures of all time. Are they really? Find out here.

For a film from the classic era of Hollywood that the AFI selected as the greatest American comedy of all time, Some Like It Hot is an unlikely creature for a number of reasons. This comedy begins with the St Valentine's Day Massacre and has a body count in the double digits. It ends on an overtly bisexual note, with one of the greatest closing lines of all time. In between it's a highly suggestive screwball comedy that unfolds while the two leading men are in drag. There are sly nods to prostitution, oral sex and free love, as well as alcoholism, unemployment and the poor treatment of women. No wonder the Catholic Legion of Decency rated it C for Condemned and it was banned outright in Kansas.

What's more, it's a remake, at least of sorts, being based on a story by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan that had previously been made into a German film called Fanfares of Love in 1951. The only real difference is the gangster stuff at the beginning: the gun battle while the cops chase a bunch of bootleggers, the federal raid on Mozarella's Funeral Parlor and the subsequent massacre as Spats Columbo gets his bloody revenge on Toothpick Charlie. This raid leaves two musicians from the Mozarella's house band, Joe and Jerry, out of a job on the very night they were finally going to be paid, hardly good timing given that they're behind on their rent and they owe money to everyone in their company.

Their timing doesn't get better because they soon find themselves in the very worst place at the very worst time, on the other side of Charlie's Garage on Clark St trying to pick up a car while Spats and his men burst in and open fire. They manage to escape alive and intact, even though they're hindered by their saxophone and double bass, but they've been seen and with the Chicago mob hot on their tail they have to do something drastic. As they don't have the money to do anything at all, they take the first opportunity that comes to hand, filling a couple of vacant spots in an orchestra about to head to Florida for a hotel gig, an orchestra where the bassist has got herself conveniently pregnant and the saxophonist has conveniently run off with a bible salesman.

It's all too good to be true, except for one little problem: Sweet Sue and the Society Syncopators are a girl band. Needs must, so they join anyway, in drag, Joe becoming Josephine and Jerry becoming Daphne because he always hated the name Geraldine, with the plan of getting safely to Florida and then taking off. However that's before they discover that Sugar Kane, the lead singer and ukelele player, is played by Marilyn Monroe in the role with perhaps the most shivery sensuality of her career. She's 'just like jello on springs' says Daphne and no heterosexual male in 1959 was ever going to put something like staying alive ahead of a chance at Marilyn Monroe, even when he's pretending to be a woman at the time. It's more than a little strange to find two of the greatest male film comedians of the era playing women for almost the entire film, but that's what we get.

Once we see Josephine and Daphne walking down the platform towards the train to Florida, that's pretty much it for Joe and Jerry. We don't see Jack Lemmon out of drag until the memorable final line of the film, his improvised change from Geraldine to Daphne being a marker, from which point he doesn't just play Daphne, he becomes her, giggles and gossip and all. On the first night he gets stuck in his bunk trembling all over because Sugar has come to thank him for a favour and proceeds to warm up his feet. Repeating a mantra to himself that he's a girl, he's a girl, he somehow half convinces himself, which leads to a good proportion of the jokes still to come. They're so successful that pauses had to be added to some so that half the dialogue wasn't laughed over and missed.

The only time Tony Curtis steps out of his character of Josephine is when he creates a new persona based on Cary Grant, right down to the voice. It's all to impress Sugar, who has already confessed her weakness for sax players to him, all but describing the persona he can't show her as the one she can never resist. 'All they have to do is play eight bars of Come to Me, My Melancholy Baby and my spine turns to custard,' she tells him and he's hooked. The catch is that she's trying to stop the trend by playing in a girl band with no male saxophonists and going to Florida where all the millionaires are. She wants to land one herself, so he becomes one, pretending to be the heir to the Shell Oil fortune who meets her by chance on the beach. As she later describes to Josephine, 'He's got millions, he's got glasses, he's got a yacht.'

I wonder what Grant thought of the impression of him that Curtis attempts here, which is actually pretty good, especially as somehow he manages not to break up laughing even when speaking lines like, 'With all the unrest in the world, I don't think anybody should have a yacht that sleeps more than twelve.' When Daphne comments that 'Nobody talks like that,' she's technically not criticising him, she's just highlighting that the era of Cary Grant's suave and famously clipped voice hasn't yet arrived. This is 1929, after all and Grant wouldn't appear in a film for another three years, making this a similar joke to one about Hedy Lamarr in Blazing Saddles: 'What the hell are you worried about? This is 1874. You'll be able to sue her!' Apparently after Grant saw this version of himself he echoed Daphne's comment by simply stating, 'I don't talk like that.'

While they're not entirely successful at sounding like women, Curtis being partially dubbed by Paul Frees, he and Lemmon are far less successful at looking like women, though they could be a lot worse. They're certainly no Thai transvestites and there's simply no way that they would have got the attention they got in any other situation but a Hollywood movie. As Josephine, Tony Curtis gets hit on by a fresh bellboy who looks rather like Elisha Cook Jr. As Daphne, Jack Lemmon gets courted by elderly millionaire Osgood Fielding III, the one with seniority in the line of synchronised millionaire leches waiting on deckchairs in front of the Seminole-Ritz Hotel for the all girl band to arrive. In fact the main reason the film was in black and white was because the makeup the leading men had to wear turned out to tinge their faces green when shot in colour.

Given that Marilyn Monroe's contract stipulated that all her films had to be made in colour, Billy Wilder had a lot of persuading to do to convince her otherwise. Frankly, she looks gorgeous in black and white. However gorgeous she looks though, she was not a popular character on set, except perhaps with Tony Curtis who recently revealed that they slept together during the shoot. The chaos she caused during filming has become legendary, so much so that she was not even invited to the wrap party. 'We were in mid-flight,' said director Billy Wilder, explaining why, 'and there was a nut on the plane.' She was routinely two or three hours late to the set, a habit that contributed in no small part to the death of Clark Gable two years later when she did the same thing while shooting The Misfits, and some days she refused entirely to leave her dressing room.

It took her 47 takes to get the three words, 'It's me, Sugar' in the right order, even after Wilder had them written on a blackboard for her. For the scene where she has to say, 'Where's the bourbon?' while rummaging through a chest of drawers, Wilder even taped the line into one of the drawers because she'd flubbed 40 takes, but then she got confused about which drawer the line was in, so he had to tape it to the bottom of every one of them. After 59 takes it's very likely he just gave up and had the line overdubbed. Certainly many of the publicity shots of her are actually her frequent stand-in, Evelyn Moriarty, with her head added later, though another reason for this is that she was apparently pregnant at the time. Wilder had originally planned to cast Mitzi Gaynor as Sugar Kane, but switched to Marilyn when she became available at the right time. However well it turned out, I'm sure he regretted that decision.

I'd seen Some Like It Hot before, but when I was younger I didn't appreciate many of the clever in jokes because I hadn't seen the films that the script was referencing and I didn't recognise the actors who set up the gags. In particular there are a lot of nods to classic Warner Brothers gangster movies here, especially after Spats Columbo walks into the Seminole-Ritz Hotel after being away from the movie for over an hour. He's played by George Raft, third in the pecking order at Warner Brothers in the thirties, ahead of fourth place Humphrey Bogart and behind only James Cagney and Edward G Robinson who were both so definitively top dog that it would be impossible to put one ahead of the other. However they were both definitely ahead of Raft.

Spats is there for the 10th annual convention of the Friends of Italian Opera, which is as transparent a euphemism as it seems. 'Where did you pick up that trick?' he asks a hood who's tossing a coin in precisely the way that Raft did as Guino Rinaldo in the original Scarface. The hood is played by Edward G Robinson Jr, who proves to be a dab hand with a machine gun, under the command of Little Bonaparte, an obvious nod to Little Caesar, whom his dad had played in 1931. The Cagney reference comes when Spats almost slaps half a grapefruit into the face of one of his 'lawyers', just like Cagney did to Mae Clarke in The Public Enemy. There's probably meaning in the sex change there, given what film this is. As the Kinks sang it, 'Girls will be boys and boys will be girls. It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world,' and they could well have been singing about this movie.

As you might imagine for one of the old Warners actors from the thirties, George Raft was getting on a bit here. He was 64 in 1959 and his days as a hotshot were over, having effectively handed Bogart stardom on a plate a couple of decades earlier by turning down a host of great roles that Bogie ended up with. He's excellent here but he only had ten more films left until his final appearance in 1980, in a picture ironically called The Man with Bogart's Face. Originally a dancer before he became an actor, and one good enough for Fred Astaire to comment that he danced 'the fastest Charleston I ever saw,' he taught Jack Lemmon and Joe E Brown how to tango for their memorable scene here.

While I've only seen Raft older by a year in the original Ocean's Eleven, I've never seen Pat O'Brien older and in fact he looks older than Raft here even though he was only 60. He would only make five more films, finishing up with a ninth role opposite James Cagney in 1981's Ragtime, the last film for both of them. O'Brien, so often an Irish cop, is Det Mulligan, the federal agent hot on Columbo's spats, in both Chicago and Florida. He doesn't get much of a part but he has fun with what he has. George E Stone, as Toothpick Charlie, has even less of a part and even less of a career left with only three more pictures to come. It's always good to see him, however little he has to do, even over a decade after he last played the Runt to Chester Morris's Boston Blackie.

I mentioned at the start of this review that Some Like It Hot was the AFI's choice as the greatest American comedy of all time. This list was compiled in 2000, at a point in time when attitudes towards the subjects it touched upon had changed immensely. In fact second on the list was Tootsie, another transvestite comedy but one made in a more understanding 1981. Back in 1959, Some Like It Hot failed its preview screening with many audience members leaving during the film, but succeeded on its second in a different neighbourhood. It went on to win the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Comedy, with further awards for Lemmon and Monroe. It was nominated for seven Oscars, though conspicuously not Best Picture, but it only went home with one, for Orry-Kelly's costume design. I have to admit that Marilyn Monroe's costumes, some of which were sewn on, were rather memorable and often more than a little dangerous, but for the Academy to effectively see them as the best part of this film suggests that it was deliberately snubbed. That's what risqué subject matter got you in classic Hollywood.