Third Finger, Left Hand (1940)

Director: Robert Z Leonard
Stars: Myrna Loy and Melvyn Douglas

In the delightful form of Myrna Loy, Mrs Tony Merrick runs a women's fashion magazine, a rare instance where she's actually the star instead of the co-star. This came in between a string of movies with William Powell, three Thin Man sequels as well as I Love You Again and Love Crazy so perhaps she needed a change during that period. As great as they were as a screen couple, they were both great separately too. Her co-star here is Melvyn Douglas, who she'd never acted opposite before and wouldn't again, at least until a TV movie in 1971. They work very well together and I'm surprised they didn't do so again back in the day.

Mrs Tony Merrick is apparently good at her job and she's popular too, the staff even buying her and her husband an engraved letter opener for their first anniversary. The twist, as is made very clear during a conversation a few minutes in, is that there is no Mr Tony Merrick and she's really just Margot Sherwood. He's a fictional construct to counter the concept that men have egos. In Mrs Merrick's own words, 'they can't believe an unmarried woman has any business in an office except to meet men and raise gleams in their eyes.' A year earlier in Rio when she received the wire that confirmed her promotion to editor, it was signed with regrets, because the colleague that sent it knew how long single women tended to last in the position. So they invent Tony Merrick.

It works pretty well. Most of the wolves who hone in on the single women in business leave her lone, and certainly the publisher's wife doesn't incite the removal of competition from the job, as she'd done more than once before. A year later, she's still there, though the ruse is beginning to complicate things, given that the perennial absence of her husband is raising a few questions. Her lawyer Philip Booth still wants her to dump this absent husband and local drunkard Hughie Wheeler whose divorce has just come in wants her to get one too so she can marry him. However life really hasn't got complicated yet, because Third Finger, Left Hand is a romantic comedy and we can't help but wonder how that's all going to get going if nobody can romance Margot Sherwood.

There's only one way it can happen, a comedy of errors, and sure enough that's what we get. Margot goes to meet an old college friend from the boat, only to find the right cabin but the the wrong person's artwork and unceremoniously kicks out the art dealer who comes to look at it. Jeff Thompson, from Wapakoneta, OH has spent two years trying to get Mr Flandrin to even look and she takes two minutes to shoo him straight out, which is great for the plot but bad for Donald Meek who gets far too little screen time. I miss films with lots of Donald Meek in them, like the Nick Carter movies where he was Bartholomew, the quirky Bee Man.

Of course Margot and Jeff begin a rather strange romance and you can see the opportunities. You just know that if he's going to pursue her and he discovers that her husband doesn't exist that he's going to pretend to be that husband, right? They both have fun exploring these and almost the whole film revolves very closely about how they cause chaos for each other and hilarity for us. This is fun for Melvyn Douglas fans but it's even more fun for Myrna Loy fans because of a truly outrageous scene at Niagara Falls where she does an impression that's half Mae West and half Edward G Robinson. Even after fifty plus movies she still surprises me.

It's not so much fun for fans of the other names involved, as nobody else really gets too much of a lookin. It isn't just Donald Meek, though he only gets a mere few minutes. Margot's father is played by Raymond Walburn, who became a favourite of mine after I saw him steal the show from talented competition in Christmas in July, but he doesn't too much opportunity to do the same here. Her sister Vicky is Bonita Granville, fresh from the Nancy Drew series, in which she was the star, but while she's fine here she gets very little to do except highlight just how short she was, a mere 5' in height.

Felix Bressart, soon after a couple of memorable Ernst Lubitsch movies, Ninotchka in 1939 and The Shop Around the Corner, gets a little more to do, and he's great fun. The best supporting role really has to go to Ernest Whitman though, even though he doesn't show up for most of the movie. He's a black porter on the train back to Wapakoneta, OH who gets to substitute as a lawyer given that he's been taking law via correspondence course to keep his brain busy, a very rare example of Hollywood giving a black actor a character with dignity and substance. Usually these characters were very clearly second class citizens and tended to have names like Snowflake, Sleep 'n' Eat or Stepin Fetchit. Sorry, those are the actors' names. No, I'm not kidding. Whitman is excellent but he still hardly has a substantial role. Perhaps just having Myrna Loy with the most screen time in a movie just has to be enough.

Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932)

Director: Jean Renoir
Star: Michel Simon

One of those intriguing world movie titles that I've seen mentioned often, I was surprised to find that I'd seen a Hollywood remake of this film, namely Down and Out in Beverly Hills, made in 1986 by Paul Mazursky with Nick Nolte being rescued from drowning by Bette Midler and Richard Dreyfuss. This original French version, made half a century earlier by Jean Renoir, features Michel Simon in the role that later went to Nick Nolte, with Marcelle Hainia and Charles Granval as his benefactors, Édouard and Emma Lestingois, who are antiquarian booksellers on the embankment of the Seine in Paris.

Boudu is a tramp with a bushy beard who we first meet apparently checking his dog for fleas in the park. When it runs off he's unable to find it, but nobody is willing to help him search: the passers by ignore him or actively avoid his presence; and even the cop that he finds standing around just tries to run him off too. However when a lady of breeding explains to the very same cop that she's lost her dog too, a pekinese worth ten thousand francs, he's more than happy to help her. In fact one cop promptly becomes three, and passers by in rich vehicles stop to help out too. Such is the power of wealth.

A little later, Édouard Lestingois, who is watching the young ladies out of his window with a telescope, sees Boudu too, climbing over the railing to throw himself into the Seine. Whether he's upset at seeing a man trying to kill himself or because he's never seen such a perfect tramp we really aren't told, but he rushes out and dives in to save him, becoming a hero in the process to the many people watching. Given that Boudu wants to go right back to the river, once he realises he isn't dead, they have to keep him there for a little while and if you've seen the remake you won't be too surprised at the rest of the story. In fact you be mostly surprised at how little attempt is made to change the characters over the course of the story.

You might expect from a story where people of two utterly different classes are thrust together that life changing decisions will be prompted, but that's surprisingly missing here, at least in the more overt sense you might get from Hollywood. Renoir was far more subtle than that, as epitomised by a later film he made called The Rules of the Game, one that is frequently referenced as the greatest film ever made. It's undeniably great but it's also so subtle that many just don't get it at all; while I'm perhaps getting there after a couple of viewings, I still much prefer other Jean Renoir movies. This film is subtle too, as while Boudu undeniably influences the Lestingois household through his presence, the changes he causes are mostly ones that don't happen before the film ends. There are no specific outlook changing moments here, except perhaps an accidental discovery which would have happened anyway.

What we really see here are two things. One is Michel Simon, who is more of a force of nature than an actor as Boudu, apparently utterly unable to be still or to be ignored. Boudu staggers around as if he's drunk, regardless what he's been drinking, his energy running rampant and apparently raging for release when within the confines of a building. Simon was only 5'10" but he feels so much taller here, as if he's the biggest thing around but still not big enough to contain his energy. He knew the role well, having played it on stage. I've seen Simon before, in Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows and as one of the judges in The Passion of Joan of Arc, but he's notched up a few other world classics, including Renoir's La chienne and Jean Vigo's L'atalante, to name but two. Renoir ascribed most of the success of this film to him.

The other is the fact that it's Lestingois who wants to have that energy. While he despises Boudu for his savagery, stooping as low on the heretical scale as to spit in Balzac's Physiology of Marriage, he really admires him for his magnetic power. Lestingois spends as much of his time as he can watching young ladies and is apparently having an affair with his maid Anne-Marie, but we never actually see this, merely hear about him falling asleep first or getting interrupted before anything can happen. What's utterly apparent is the intent and it's Boudu who turns that into action. Charles Granval, from the Comédie Française, is excellent as this grounding for the entire story, and I'm sad that I've only ever seen him once before, in the joyous Pépé le Moko.

Technically I'm in two minds about the film. Renoir was a filmmaker who could astound us with shots of utter beauty and there are a few attempts at that here, but nothing that stands up to my memory of The River, Grand Illusion or The Woman on the Beach. I got the impression that what Renoir tried to do with some shots here was stunning but the equipment he had to work with wasn't always up to what he wanted. It appears I'm not the only one in two minds about the film. Movieline rated highly enough to include it in their list of the 100 Best Foreign Films of all time, but for The Times it didn't even make their list of the Best 100 French Films. It's an excellent film but it feels like the least of the seven Renoirs I've seen thus far.

The Green Goddess (1930)

Director: Alfred Green
Star: George Arliss

Exotic stories about India were commonplace in the pulp era and Hollywood was more than happy to play along, usually with Nigel de Brulier in some local garb. He specialised in such exotic roles, seemingly playing every fakir and witch doctor Hollywood ever needed. He was the Tsering Lama a year earlier in The Wheel of Life and a year later he'd be Rao Rama, the Holy Man in Jacques Feyder's Son of India. In between he was a Russian, a witch doctor and the mysterious Elijah in Moby Dick. Sure enough he's here too, as the Temple Priest of the kingdom of Rukh, a remote kingdom in the Himalayas, though he looks and sounds far more like a Klingon, as do his faithful. Given that the Raja of Rukh is also in trouble with the Ferengis, I can't help but wonder about how often Gene Roddenberry saw this movie.

Released in 1930, it was actually completed in 1929 so as you might expect the sound is problematic, but it's capable and we can keep up with almost everything that's going on without the static being too annoying. In fact the most annoying part is that the sound was originally released on Vitaphone disc, only being added to the film itself at a later date and forcing the picture to be shifted left to accomodate it. That means that the left edge is cropped away throughout, something that's especially noticeable during the opening credits but on occasion also crops away the character who's speaking and prompts us to curse the projectionist.

Sound apart, technically it's variable. The wing mounted camerawork is terrible but the modelwork is surprisingly good, as a plane is forced down into Rukh under harsh circumstances, to crash against a tree but fortunately leave the occupants unharmed. The pilot is Dr Basil Treherne and he's escorting Maj and Mrs Crespin to see their children in some remote corner of India. The Crespins are on dubious terms, because of something the Major has done that we're not told about, but they're still married. That doesn't stop the doctor from looking at her though, and perhaps she at him too. She's the lovely Alice Joyce and he's the manly Ralph Forbes, after all, while she's married to H B Warner, as officious and military as a only pulp Englishman can be.

It's great to see H B Warner again, as he was one of the great underrated actors of the era, but he succumbs more than a little to overacting here. There's a lot of that going on from everyone involved, as if this was all done on a first take or as if everyone deliberately plays up to the unabashed pulp nature of the story. Perhaps all these silent screen regulars were still adapting to the fact that they could talk. Alice Joyce in particular was in her last year of making films after a couple of hundred of them, almost entirely silent, since 1910. She reprised her role here from the 1923 version. Ralph Forbes lasted longer under sound but had a decade of silent films behind him already. Warner himself was a silent star whose portrayal of Jesus in the silent version of The King of Kings is still my favourite thus far.

Like all the characters in this film, surprisingly based on a play by William Archer rather than a story from the pulp magazines, Maj Crespin is something of a pulp stereotype and Warner plays up to that to no small degree. He's the English officer who combines manners, good breeding and self sacrifice with a peculiar colonial arrogance. Whenever he does something that offends the locals, like inadvertently sitting on one of their stone idols, he blithers, 'Well why didn't they say so?' even though they did and he merely doesn't speak their language. 'How was I supposed to know they worship a block of stone?'

Warner is not the star of the film though, that honour going to Mr George Arliss, the 'Mr' included on the title card, and he's a bizarre delight as the Raja of Rukh. He's a very educated Raja, fluent in English, impeccably polite and rather fond of quaint colloquialisms. He appears small and perhaps a little frail but is always utterly in control of his surroundings. We get the feeling that he's something of a mischevious god who could snap his fingers and make the world end, the only question being whether he really wants to or not. The turban makes his face look even more like a caricature, appearing precisely as it would in an exaggerated satirical cartoon, and the prominent lipstick and blush add more than a little effeminate touch. 'Of all the infernal purring devils,' says Maj Crespin, aptly, as there's a lot of infernal purring going on.

Arliss was one of the oldest actors working in early Hollywood, a man of considerable talent who won an Academy Award in 1929 for portraying Benjamin Disraeli, becoming both the first Briton to win an Oscar and the first actor to win for playing a real person. He was also nominated for this film, given that these were the days when people could be nominated more than once in the same category. He even discovered Bette Davis, so we can hardly discount his importance. As you might expect given the timeframe, he was also a highly regarded stage name, one who regarded the cinema as a lesser art, and he certainly appears to be playing to an audience for much of this film. He knew the material well, having played the Raja on stage and in the original silent film version in 1923. There are points where he seems to be reading from cue cards, as there are so many surreptitious eye movements to the camera, but perhaps as he knew the part so well it's really just sly Oriental cunning.

The story is a minor affair, revolving around the fact that three of the Raja's brothers have been condemned to death by the Ferengi in India for the crime of murder, and while he's the epitome of the civilised host he's almost pained to point out that his people are barbarians and that his Klingon temple priest and his followers live by the code of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and a life for a life. Given the circumstances, having three westerners dropped into their laps must have been a sign from their goddess that they should be sacrificed. So everyone plays their part in these pulp games, including a fifth English speaking character called Watkins who's a low class Cockney thug in a bowler hat and dinner suit. He serves as the Raja's prime minister and his entire cabinet, but he's really just a thug who isn't welcome in either England or India.

This really isn't a good film, but it's blistering pulp entertainment, albeit frequently in the wrong way. When the Raja first arrives with much ballyhoo, preceded by wild men throwing scimitars into the air, one of them can't catch and the weapon clobbers him on the head with what must surely have been a fatal blow just before he walks off screen. Watkins is almost the epitome of the fish out of water, utterly ridiculous in his situation which makes him appear far more of a crude gentleman's gentleman, and George Arliss has so much fun with his role that it's impossible not to be engaged by the sheer insanity of it, not least when the apparently gay Raja forcibly seduces Lucilla Crespin or when he's flinging out hilarious asides to the camera after scenes finish.

Best of all are the amazing coincidences, if they truly are such, to hindsight. This film was made in 1930, no less than 36 years before Star Trek came along, but the similarities are palpable. Apparently the Klingons were invented by Star Trek scriptwriter Gene L Coon and I'm not seeing a reference to this film as an influence. There is also no Indian tribe called Ferengi but the word derives from eastern words meaning 'foreigner'. Perhaps the sources were merely the same. The other hilarious coincidence is the use of a piece of music while the Raja is entertaining his guests and explaining to them what an unfortunate fate they are going to reach. The Raja even namechecks it before it's placed onto his record deck, but even those who don't recognise the name of Charles Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette probably recognise it as the theme tune for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, highly appropriate given that Hitch found impish delight in his polite descriptions of the macabre.

By any standards used to rate movies, this is not a good one. The flaws are everywhere and more than obvious, the plot holes wide and the coincidences so unfortunate that we see far more in this film than was ever intended to be there. We see a Klingon Bird of Prey shimmer into reality right behind the English air fleet that come to save the day. We imagine Scotty beaming up the Crespins from the admirably huge sets right before Shatner lays out Nigel de Brunier cold with a punch to the jaw and a double handed club to the back. And we know that George Arliss was channelling Hitch for his final comment to the camera. It's all utterly delightful but mostly for the wrong reasons. And hey, in a black and white film, how do we know which one has the red shirt?

Reefer Madness (1936)

Director: Louis Gasnier
Stars: Dorothy Short and Kenneth Craig

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.

Somehow I've managed to avoid seeing Reefer Madness up until now, even though I probably own half a dozen copies of it in various public domain box sets and I have seen a number of its peers. It's an important film, generally seen as the benchmark of the educational exploitation films of the thirties and forties, the standard by which they're judged. Unfortunately it's somehow neither particularly good or bad and so has attained its lofty and legendary status through a salacious history and a particularly delicious form of irony. Financed as a cautionary tale by a small church group, it is most popular with the very people it warned against, thus it amazingly achieved the precise opposite of what it aimed at and continues to do so over seventy years after its initial release. Beyond that irony, it apparently improves in quality the more stoned you are. To be truly entertained you need to be so high that it becomes topical humour.

Originally titled Tell Your Children in 1936, it was bought by the notorious Dwain Esper, who had already directed fims like Narcotic, Maniac and Marihuana, recut and redistributed it under its newer more salacious title. Other releases saw it retitled Dope Addict, Doped Youth, The Burning Question and bizarrely, Love Madness. Soon, its potential apparently extinguished, it languished forgotten and drifted into the public domain. Then in 1971, Keith Stroup, who had founded NORML, the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws, discovered the film in the archives of the Library of Congress, bought a print of it and began showing it at pro-pot rallies and at college campuses across the country. Its success was immediate, as every college student in the US in the seventies was stoned all the time. I know that because I saw That '70s Show.

Unfortunately because I'm not stoned, and in fact have never smoked anything in my entire life, legal or otherwise, I can only miss out on a large part of the hilarity that Reefer Madness has brought to millions of college students and other lowlife ne'erdowells. It becomes merely another bad movie, but perhaps the message that screams out at me loudest is that I should start smoking this stuff just so I can keep up with this film. Everything happens so quickly that I can hardly keep up with the constant introduction of new characters and maintain my judgement of who I'm actually supposed to be watching, let alone all the sensational headlines spattered at the screen like a hail of machine gun bullets. If only I'd got high on marihuana first, time could have slowed down and this could have morphed into a ten hour David Lean epic, merely one as funny as anything Mel Brooks could have conjured up.

It can hardly come as a surprise that the first words spoken are 'Must be stopped!' We're at a PTA meeting that aims pretty high, to lay the foundation for a nationwide campaign to demand compulsory education, because it's only through enlightment that this scourge can be wiped out. What scourge could that be? Well let's sit back and listen to Dr Alfred Carroll read us a letter from an anonymous member of the Narcotics Bureau who explains that we can ignore all those other soul-destroying drugs like opium, morphine and heroin, because we need to focus on the most vicious, the most deadly drug of them all. No, not crack! We're talking about marihuana, that evil weed that with one single puff can turn innocent all-American children into cackling, twitching, murderous sex fiends. Rape! Murder! Driving over 40 mph! The shame of it!

Carroll is the principal of Lakeside High School, which is a strange place because kids seem to stay there until their mid twenties and they dress in tweed suits with bow ties. It would be a wonderful place, where these children can happily play tennis in peace, but there's a sinister gang working hard to hook them all on marihuana and make them miss the ball by three or four feet. I bring this up because apparently it's important enough to be used as evidence in a murder trial. No, I'm not kidding. The story of this gang and some of the children they entice into their evil clutches is told in an hour long flashback that will truly open your eyes. And yours. And yours.

The gang seems to be comprised of a boss we don't see, a male secretary who lives in a room furnished only by a desk and a network of enticing young ladies and gentlemen who befriend people and invite them to their apartments to party on down with some marihuana cigarettes. One such is the apartment of Mae Coleman and Jack Perry, who are apparently depraved enough to flagrantly live in sin yet obey the edicts of the Hays Office and so sleep in separate beds. Mae is a shameless hussy, a temptress, a woman who dares to dress herself in her own bedroom for us to watch, but she does have a heart, upset that her boyfriend wants to sell drugs to schoolkids instead of just consenting adults. Jack is like the supporting characters Humphrey Bogart got landed with around this time at Warner Brothers before they worked out what he could do, but Carleton Young doesn't have a hint of his charisma. They also have a couple of resident dealers, Ralph Wiley and Blanche, who just isn't worthy enough of a last name, apparently.

Jack is the real fiend of the piece because this is 1936 and under the Hays Code women had to be kept in the kitchen or at least be decently victimised. He manages to entice that nice Bill Harper boy who looks like Tony Slattery up to Mae's apartment so that our real cautionary tale can begin. You see, Bill has a girl, Mary Lane, a girl who's as gosh darn nice as he is, and Jack doesn't realise that they're both giddy enough already without needing to smoke some evil weed and they're already doomed to tragic deaths. We know this because in the token soppy scene at Mary's house, he shows her a copy of Romeo and Juliet and points out that when he studies it he kinda thinks of her. Apparently he's already set on a stormy relationship ended by the suicide of both of them, but hey, whatever rocks your boat. Maybe we should ban that Shakespeare guy too. Won't someone think of the children?

Jack also entices Jimmy, Mary's kid brother, up to Mae's and he can't resist the stuff either. It's so addictive, you see. We can't help but wonder about Jack, because he seems to be so good at finding ways to corrupt the youth of the day but remain so utterly lacking in common sense. When he gets Jimmy to drive him out to pick up more dope, he ensures that nobody could possibly think anything was up by having Jimmy stay in his car in the street, get stoned while he waits on one of Jack's reefers and then race off with the new shipment like he's Steve McQueen. 'Let's go, Jack. I'm red hot!' he cries and promptly scoots away, reaching a scarily excessive 45 mph. You just know there's going to be someone in the road for him to miss by three or four feet, I mean mow down in front of many witnesses. How do these idiot crooks stay in business?

In fact how do they do anything given that they smoke marihuana themselves? We're told in no uncertain terms how dangerous this stuff is from the start. Before we even meet Dr Carroll we get to read a long scrolling text that explains how marihuana is 'a violent narcotic, an unspeakable scourge, the real Public Enemy Number One!' It leads to 'monstrous extravagances', 'emotional disturbances', 'dangerous hallucinations'. It causes the 'total inability to direct thoughts', 'acts of shocking violence' and best fun of all, 'incurable insanity'. The FBI agent that Carroll goes to see reinforces this, telling a story of a sixteen year old marihuana addict who was locked up for taking part in a holdup, even though that seems like a strange charge given that he'd apparently also slaughtered his entire family with an axe.

Yet Jack seems to function just fine. Even Mae's resident pianist Hot Fingers Pirelli seems to function just fine though he even looks wasted when he isn't. When he hides in the closet to smoke a joint he turns into Harpo Marx doing a Jimmy Durante impression, but he can still make those 88 keys jump and jive. It's only the kids that can't take it, high school kids like Jimmy who knock down pedestrians at low speed, college kids like Ralph who tries to rape Mary when she turns up at Mae's looking for her brother, otherwise decent kids like Bill who are in the other room romping with Blanche only to stumble out and see his girlfriend being molested. In his marihuana stupor, Bill fights Ralph to protect Mary, Jack rushes in to knock him out with the butt end of a gun and the ensuing struggle leaves Mary dead, shot in the back. Jack wipes the gun clean and plants it on Bill so he thinks he did it. What a stinker!

You know what this means, of course: more newspaper headlines to detail the inevitable progression of the court case, because we just have to keep things sensational. One of the unintentional joys of this film that I can relish is the way these front pages were composed. One from the Herald-Tribune details 'Harper Verdict Expected Tonight', but I couldn't help but notice the story underneath it, which, I kid you not, reads, 'Dick Tracy, G-Man, in Sensational Raid.' Given that the headline looks like it's been obviously pasted onto a real paper, I wonder where they found the real paper, but this is where non-potheads like me get to find humour in a film like this, that and the utterly unintentional use of what seems like every slang reference for drugs in regular dialogue: joint, dope, crack, powder, you name it. I bet Mary's surname is really Jane not Lane.

A film like Tell Your Children was never going to be about the acting, but it's capable. Most of the cast and crew are real professionals, albeit names who would never be anything but minor. Perhaps the biggest name is Louis Gasnier, the director, who had made the definitive movie serial back in 1914, The Perils of Pauline. Kenneth Craig, who played Bill, never did anything else, but Dorothy Short, his girlfriend here, went on to a generic B movie career. She married Dave O'Brien the year this film was made, the actor who plays her would be rapist, Ralph, the one who looks like the Amazing Criswell. They divorced in 1954 but apparently for the banal reason that he spent too much time sailing not because they'd locked him up in an institution for perpetrating a bad caricature of Dwight Frye's Renfield, I mean for going completely looney tunes on marihuana. Don't forget that he's only one tragedy. The next tragedy may be that of your daughter. Or your son. Or yours. Or yours. Or YOURS!

The Killing (1956)

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Star: Sterling Hayden

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.

If you take a good look at this Top 250, as I grabbed a copy of it in 2004, you'll find nine films by Alfred Hitchcock and eight by Stanley Kubrick. No other director manages more than six, regardless how large their filmographies are. What makes Kubrick's achievement even more notable is that he only directed thirteen feature films over a career of almost fifty years as a director. That's an insanely high proportion of classics, even before you factor in that a ninth, Barry Lyndon, has popped into the Top 250 since and Kubrick bought up all the copies he possibly could of his debut feature, Fear and Desire, so that nobody could see it. He failed, by the way, as it's available on European DVD.

It also says something, though I'm not sure exactly what, that these two legendary directors did not win a single Academy Award between them, at least for Best Director. Admittedly Hitchcock was nominated five times and Kubrick four, but not one of those nominations turned into a win. I should add that Hitch won the Irving G Thalberg Memorial Award in 1968 as a thinly veiled apology for overlooking him across the years and Kubrick won two other Oscars, though only one had his name on it, for the visual effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The other went to Russell Metty for the cinematography in Spartacus, but after complaining to producers that Kubrick was taking over his job, the director told him to sit there and do nothing. Metty did so and won an Academy Award in the process for the work Kubrick did in his name. Irony is alive and well and living in Hollywood.

The Killing came early in Kubrick's career, during a period of lesser known films that he made relatively quickly, which didn't make waves on a commercial basis but which nonetheless prompted much critical acclaim and directly led to Kirk Douglas putting him into the director's chair for his first huge Hollywood picture, Spartacus, in 1960. You know his career from there, I'm sure, full of films that you've heard of and probably seen, but unless you're a film buff you probably haven't seen anything earlier than Spartacus. Yet before this three hour epic, shot in widescreen and Technicolor, budgeted at $12m and packed with star names, Kubrick had made four black and white films in the standard Academy ratio and at the standard length, plus three documentary shorts, all in a mere seven years.

This was the third of those four features, coming after Fear and Desire and Killer's Kiss but before Paths of Glory, which I watched back to back with The Killing both in 2004 and again in 2010. The first time through they were both new to me, along with this whole era of Kubrick's work. Now, I've seen almost all his films, only Fear and Desire and one of the shorts still eluding me, and I've found that while it's nigh on impossible to even pick a favourite from such a diverse selection, let alone to nail one of them with such a vague honorific as 'the greatest', this early period is certainly the most fascinating to me because it's when he was just Stanley Kubrick, regular up and coming filmmaker, rather than Stanley Kubrick, legendary genius in exile.

The Killing has been called his first classic and that's probably true. Based, as always, on a novel rather than an original screenplay, Kubrick wrote and directed one of the tightest crime thrillers ever made, as meticulously executed as the $2 million robbery it details, one that Johnny Clay puts together at the Lansdowne racetrack, but without the inevitable slip that he makes at the end. This was released under the Production Code, after all, so it's no spoiler to say that he can't make a successful getaway with the loot, whatever happens up till then. How it all falls apart is as believable as everything else here and it's amazing to watch, the last thirty seconds of the film in particular carrying a powerful stomach punch. In 2004 it felt like nothing else, but now I can draw strong comparisons to Jean-Pierre Melville's similarly masterful Bob le flambeur, made the same year of 1956. They would work very well as a double bill.

Johnny Clay is played by Sterling Hayden, a deeply cynical man who brought life to some of the screen's most memorable deeply cynical characters. The cynicism is ingrained into his face and that benefits characters like Clay who is not as simple as he initially seems. He's a crook, one that's served five years inside already for his crimes, but he's the only one in the film and he's an honest crook too, one who fully intends to play fair with the crew he's brought together. None of them have ever been involved with anything shady, just regular joes with steady jobs but who all have very specific needs, needs that can be satisfied by a substantial windfall.

It's surprising that only a few are recognisable, given that they seem to epitomise the sort of fifties faces that the characters need. Most recognisable is Elisha Cook, who plays a cashier at the track called George Peatty. Cook, once aptly described as 'Hollywood's Lightest Heavy' and probably the first face most people will associate with the word 'gunsel', made films in what seems like every genre but he'll always be remembered for roles like this where he's the weak link in the chain, a small man acting big, but who nonetheless finds a way to do something tough regardless, whether it works to his advantage or not. He's great here, in a part that's more fleshed out than those he had in The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep and Stranger on the Third Floor, to name but three.

Like all of Clay's crew, he has a reason to be involved, to need that money. In his case it's his wife Sherry, a sarcastic and manipulative bitch who cheats on him with a hoodlum called Val and constantly puts George down, though she hardly even bothers to look his way while she abuses him. She's played by Marie Windsor, who was glamorous in a very film noir sort of way and who was so good at this type of role that people sent her Bibles in the mail, promising hell and damnation if she didn't reform. Kubrick hired her after seeing her work in the film noir Narrow Margin but I remember her from Roger Corman's directorial debut, as the leader of the Swamp Women. While it's easy for us to see through her, it's also easy to see why poor George is so smitten and how she can continually string him along. Perhaps a few hundred thousand dollars will bring back her love and respect, he thinks, if he can be a big enough man to land it for her. Yeah, he's utterly kidding himself, but I know people who go through the same thing every day and they don't see it either.

The rest of the crew have better reasons than George. Mike O'Reilly, the track bartender, has a sick wife at home but not the money to pay for the doctors she needs. Joe Sawyer plays him with plenty of sympathy, unlike many of the cronies and two bit thugs he played in the thirties and forties, usually Irish American like here, even though he was Canadian and of German heritage. Randy Kennan is a cop, a frequent sort of role for Ted de Corsia, though as Clay suggests here, 'he's a funny kind of a cop.' He's broke and owes a growing amount of money to a loan shark. Only Marvin Unger, played by J C Flippen, doesn't seem to have a financial reason to be involved, though perhaps he's doing it just to help out Clay, who he sees as something of a surrogate son. He's a bookkeeper who owns the apartment Clay lives at and finances the job.

There are a couple of other faces that you may recognise too, playing characters that aren't in on the job specifically but who Clay hires to perform specific tasks for a fixed fee in order to ensure its success. $2,500 of Unger's money goes to Maurice Oboukhoff to start a fight in the track bar at a set time. Oboukhoff looks very much like George 'The Animal' Steele, but is really a different wrestler and promoter, Kola Kwariani by ame, who Kubrick knew through his interest in chess. Both men were avid chess players who frequented the very chess club Kwariani's character runs in this story and from which he's recruited by Clay. $5,000 more goes to Nikki Arcane, a suitably bizarre name for a character played by cult actor Timothy Carey, a sniper who Clay hires to assassinate Red Lightning, the favourite in the $100,000 Lansdowne Stakes, during the race, to generate more chaos while he robs the place.

The details are magnificent, thoroughly believable and carefully unfolded, hardly surprising for Kubrick who is so well defined as the epitome of the director who focuses on the tiniest piece of detail that it's consistently surprising to realise that he was also a screenwriter who wrote most of his films. The original story here is by Lionel White, who wrote the source novel, Clean Break, but Kubrick adapted it and because of budget constraints, was forced to exercise his skill as a director to a large degree. Most of the film is shot from very close quarters, often indoors and following tightly scripted conversations. The complex web of flashbacks means that some shots could be used twice or even three times, as we watch scenes we've already seen but from the perspective of other characters, filling in little details as they go. Kubrick didn't like the narration but it seems to compliment the rest of the film pretty well.

The other contributor to the script was pulp crime novelist Jim Thompson, the 'Dimestore Dostoyevsky', who fleshed out the dialogue and according to some reports also wrote much of the script. Now if the dialogue had sucked in this film then the entire movie would have sucked, because there would be little else left to focus on, but instead Thompson's contribution gives the film its life. Like all the best film noir scripts, it could easily have played on radio as it's truly a joy to listen to these people run through their lines, especially when they have voices perfectly suited to the genre. The first time I watched The Killing, I only knew two of the actors: Hayden who has a deep manly voice and Elisha Cook who whispers like a monotone Peter Lorre. Both sound perfect in film noir and Jim Thompson provides them with the lines to do so.

Whoever came up with the way the story would unfold in such a jagged way, bouncing around in time as it fills in characters and plot details, deserves a huge part of the credit for this film. It's not particularly confusing but it's utterly not linear and it has an innovative feel to it. Certainly a lot of other filmmakers seemed to have paid attention and adopted the approach, not least Quentin Tarantino with Reservoir Dogs. It wasn't quite as popular at the time. Notably, Sterling Hayden's agent hated the whole flashback concept, so Kubrick and James B Harris, his producer and long term collaborator, re-edited the entire thing into a straight chronological story. They quickly found that it didn't work that way in the slightest and so put it all back the way they had it to start with. I'm glad of that and maybe over time so was Hayden as he became one of a select group of actors to work with Kubrick twice when he so memorably portrayed General Jack D Ripper in Dr Strangelove eight years later.

In fact 'over time' is the best way to look at Kubrick himself because his thirteen films are all very different creatures indeed. Many directors have shone within their chosen genre, whatever that genre happens to be but tend to flounder whenever they stray away from it. The only two American filmmakers that spring to mind who really flouted that sort of logic from the very beginning were Billy Wilder and Stanley Kubrick, who both simply chose film itself as a genre, making something different every time and building a body of work to keep the critics in books for years. For Kubrick it really began here and the rest is history.

Annie Hall (1977)

Director: Woody Allen
Stars: Woody Allen and Diane Keaton

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.

I should make it very clear at the outset that I don't understand why Diane Keaton won about a zillion awards for Annie Hall including an Oscar and a Golden Globe. The may have given a fine performance as the title character (so obviously based on her that it carries her name: her surname is Hall and her nickname is Annie) and a fashion trend may have been based on her wardrobe in the movie (which was comprised of her own clothes), but she has so little to do and the film apparently has so little to do with her that I wouldn't even call her the leading lady. The character of Annie Hall would appear to be little more than a prop for the real leading lady to work with. And who's that? Erm, Woody Allen. OK, he's a male actor playing a male character, but how would you describe the role he has to play here? The most appropriate description of the part to me seemed to be simply 'woman', as defined in the most sneering manner possible by a male chauvinist pig. It's a caricature, merely one that seems a little bizarrely written and cast.

As Alvy Singer, Woody Allen plays the most neurotic, unstable, demanding, whiny attention whore that I think I've ever seen on film. He's like the sort of hypochondriac who reads the medical dictionary and on discovering a hitherto unheard of condition is immediately convinced that he's been suffering from it for years. He's paranoid (he gets invited to a tennis game but can only imagine that he'll be barred entry for being Jewish), he's insufferable (he broke up with one woman over disagreements about the second shooter theory in the JFK assassination) and he centres his life around his psychiatrist, even though fifteen years of therapy has obviously got precisely nowhere. Admittedly he does all this with such sheer talent that it is impossible not to admire his performance, but the end result is so annoying that it's hard to imagine sitting through an entire film based around it.

That I did sit through it, and thoroughly enjoyed myself to boot, must be the primary reason why Annie Hall can fairly be regarded as a true classic. After all I hadn't much of a background in Woody Allen's work. When I watched this in 2004, I think I had only one of his films under my belt, Zelig, which I'd seen many years before and only remembered in an abstract sense. I certainly couldn't be considered a fan, and it took me a few of his films to get past that initial annoyance factor, but I'm a fan now. And as much as I found myself in two minds, this is a great introduction to Woody Allen and his work. Learn about him here, then work through his career in both directions, back to the parodies and the slapstick and forward through the more subtle comedic dissection of human interaction.

The title notwithstanding, this is all about Alvy Singer, the way in which he spends a year falling in and out of love with Annie Hall, and how this affects the rest of his life. And that's pretty much the entire plot, because the movie isn't really about the plot anyway: it just defines a start and an end and fills in nuances of character in between the two to explain why. It would be easy to translate that to the film being all about Woody Allen, how he thinks, how he sees the world and, not least, how he imagines things. There are ideas all over this film, both intensely focused ideas that we're given the opportunity to think about during conversations and wildly flung ideas that pepper the screenplay like scattershot, there to trigger something in our brain and keep thinking.

There are other people you'd recognise in the film beyond Woody Allen. There's Carol Kane as an early girlfriend, a young Christopher Walken as Annie Hall's brother, Shelley Duvall as a disastrous date. There's Paul Simon as a rich music mogul who is interested in Annie's voice and thus actually switches the location away from New York for a while. Sigourney Weaver makes her film debut in a tiny non-speaking role towards the end of the movie. Blink and you'll miss her. At least Jeff Goldblum gets one line at a party. There's even Truman Capote playing a Truman Capote lookalike. Yet, just like Annie Hall herself, they're really just props for Alvy Singer to use and move on from. What's most amazing is that given that the film could easily be personified by Woody Allen himself he didn't win an Oscar for his acting, though he did win for Best Picture, for Best Director and for Best Screenplay (along with Marshall Brickman) and I'm not going to argue with any of those three.

Surely the biggest achievement is the way Woody Allen deconstructs the manual on how to make movies, by cutting it up into little pieces and then pasting it all back together in a completely different order. He introduces the film with a narrative monologue aimed directly at the camera and within ten minutes he's changed perspective so many times that there's nothing we can do but accept that we have joined the plot as characters in our own right and everyone we see on the screen is someone we know. There's a lot of that here, as you might expect from a filmmaker who began as a stand up comedian. Stand up routines are generally about establishing a rapport with the audience by getting on their wavelength, ensuring that whichever characters they tell stories about are also descriptions of people we know. This film is no different.

Even when the narrative stops leaping about in all sorts of directions and settles down to some semblance of linearity, it's still subversively altered from anything we're used to seeing. In one scene Alvy talks with Annie Hall on the street, but when she leaves he continues his conversation with complete strangers who answer with utmost honesty, and then the whole thing shifts off into narration. The weirdest thing is that the flow is unbroken even though the one scene is really three. Sometimes Alvy completely gives up on reality and veers off into sheer fantasy as a means of illustrating what he's talking about. At one point, when waiting in a line at the movies, he gets so fed up of the pretentious bore behind him talking about Marshall McCluhan that he walks out of the line and starts arguing with us through the screen. We've seen characters break the fourth wall before but Allen takes the concept a couple of steps further: the bore follows him to join in the argument, at which point Alvy introduces the real Marshall McCluhan, who has been hiding behind an advert, to prove his point.

Some of the strangest scenes are when we switch not just in perspective but in time. During a conversation about who Annie used to date, she flashes back to her former boyfriends in full video and then the pair of them walk into the flashback and discuss what they're looking at. Early on Alvy flashes back himself to what he was like in grade school, then switches so that it's his present day character arguing with the past characters of his fellow students, only to shift again to a documentary perspective where these kids start telling us what they do in the future. How many grammatical rules about tenses I've just broken or how many levels we get removed from reality I don't know, but no doubt it's a lot in both cases. More modern filmmakers paid a lot of attention to this sort of thing, as you can see versions of this everywhere nowadays. In fact whole movies have been based on scenes from this film, even deleted scenes.

It doesn't even stop there. I wonder if Woody Allen compiled checklists of all the cinematic rules that could be broken or all the different techniques he could use so he could work through all of them in turn and gradually mark them off as he went along. Ten minutes in, check, check, check. There's a scene early in the Alvy/Annie relationship where we're shown subtitles to show what the characters are really thinking while their dialogue follows a different path entirely. There's a fun little animated section where Alvy argues with the Wicked Queen from Snow White, and a couple of split screen scenes. There are even a couple of musical numbers where Diane Keaton sings in a nightclub.

The thing is that while all this gimmickry really should have turned the film into an incoherent mess, somehow it doesn't. It merely becomes clever but without becoming pretentious, though with Woody Allen's work that's a fine line with many viewers on each side. The screenplay works the same way. It's intensely clever, both in the big picture and in the superb lines that almost entirely go to Woody Allen himself, but somehow it keeps from being pretentious even when deliberately trying to be. Maybe all the other tricks help to hide another trick, namely that everything we should find annoying about the movie gets cunningly translated into Allen's performance, knowing that we'll be annoyed by Alvy Singer while still admiring the skill with which he is portrayed and defined as a character.

It's redundant to say that Woody Allen is an acquired taste or that he's someone either loved or hated but it may be helpful to describe him here as a neurotic version of Groucho Marx. The jokes are as clever, as funny and as fast in coming, but they highlight a real change in culture. As much as their performances have so much in common, Groucho would have been as disastrous in Annie Hall as Woody would have been in Duck Soup. In fact, Woody Allen would have been disastrous in anything made before his time. He arrived only when culture allowed him to, and since then has defined his part of culture to the point of monopoly. He's the Walt Disney of neurosis and Annie Hall is generally regarded as his finest moment. I'm halfway through his filmography now, and while there are a number of other classics in there too, I'm not going to argue with that.

Brazil (1985)

Director: Terry Gilliam
Stars: Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Iam Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan and Kim Greist

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.

Terry Gilliam has made a string of fascinating films and I'm very aware that I haven't seen them all yet, something that I really should remedy. Their quality is variable but they're never anything less than fascinating. When Jabberwocky, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Fisher King are the worst titles in your filmography, then the rest must be pretty notable and, sure enough, at the other end there are films like Time Bandits, Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, all three quirky and delightful classics. I really need to get around to his more recent work, Tideland and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, but in the meantime I keep coming back to this, one of my favourite films of all time and one that never ceases to make me gasp in astonishment at what he managed to get onto the screen.

Never the most prolific film director in the book, Gilliam has been making films since the sixties but hasn't even caught up to Stanley Kubrick's numbers yet. He has only eleven feature length movies to his name and that could so easily have been ten, given the legendary lengths to which he had to go to get Brazil released in the States, initially at all and then in an appropriate form. There are now no less than five versions of the film available, including the Love Conquers All version that Universal chairman Sid Sheinberg eventually sanctioned because he really liked the film, just not all the dystopian nightmare parts of this dystopian nightmare, so mangled it into a meaningless fairy tale. In particular he insisted on a happy ending, which Brazil so memorably doesn't have, and when no consensus could even be approached, let alone reached, the film remained unreleased Stateside.

What was most amazing is that while Universal were handling distribution in the US, Fox owned that role in Europe and they happily released the version provided, to much acclaim. Fearing that his project would end up in a morass of idiotic bureaucracy and legal shenanigans mirrored only by the film's storyline, the director went the personal route. He took out a full page ad in Variety, the industry's trade paper, that read simply, 'Dear Sid Sheinberg, when are you going to release my film Brazil? Terry Gilliam.' On the TV show Good Morning America the host asked him if he was having trouble with his studio. He replied, 'No, I'm having trouble with Sid Sheinberg. Here's an 8x10 photo of him.' How's that for a strange approach to publicity: pissing off the head of your studio.

Well, it worked. The Los Angeles critics picked up on it and even took a vote as to whether they could consider a film for their awards that hadn't yet been released. They decided they could and so awarded it Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay, something of a kick in the teeth for Universal who had premiered Out of Africa, their big title of the year, in LA a mere four days earlier. It had to settle for Best Actress and Best Cinematography, while Brazil, which they refused to release, won the top prizes. I'm sure that wasn't what the Universal VIPs in attendance wanted to hear, but they got their own back at the Academy Awards when Out of Africa won seven Oscars and Brazil lost in both the categories it was nominated for.

It's a hardly a straightforward film and I'd really recommend that you watch it more than once. The first time through is likely to appear reasonably confusing because so much, possibly all, of what it seems to be about is merely a front and it's deliberately structured so that you won't realise that right off the bat, to tap into Mr Helpmann's collection of sporting metaphors. On a second viewing, most of the big picture should be pretty clear so you can appreciate the finer aspects of what the story is really saying. After that, every time you come back to it is likely to treat you to some small new detail or other that you'd missed previously, because there's just so much here to see.

In fact there are scenes in Brazil that are so pervaded by little touches of genius that it's nigh on impossible to appreciate all of them without the benefit of at least a few viewings. Take a single scene for example, an early one where the hero of our story, Sam Lowry, merely wants to talk to his mother about a promotion she's wangled for him even though he doesn't want it. She takes him to dinner at a posh restaurant, fully intending to ignore his protestations and set him up with a friend's daughter instead, but in the mere few minutes in which the scene unfolds we're treated to a truly dazzling array of quirkiness.

We learn about medical gift tokens and that plastic surgery through acid is like a delicate Rembrandt etching. We see digital menus that light up the options and a young lady who has been so traumatised by her mother that all she can do is twitch and ask Sam if he wants any salt, even before the food arrives. We watch the meals arrive in seconds, quintessential fast food but in a gourmet setting, every dish three scooped mounds of something that looks precisely the same as the next order except for its colour. We hear the house band start up Hava Nagila after a terrorist attack and Sam have trouble ordering a steak because he uses words instead of numbers. He's a square peg in a round hole and this scene hammers it home because it's what the film is about.

It's all about the system, the vast mindless and emotionless bureaucratic system. More specifically it's about what it does to the little people, how it tries to cover its tracks and how it diverts attention away from what it really gets up to. It's deliberately set nowhere and nowhen, though many reference points make it obviously a version of England rather than the US, and the opening tells us that it's 8.49, somewhere in the twentieth century. It's impossible to tell any more than that because it's both futuristic and yet utterly rooted in the past, full of film noir imagery and retro tech. It could be a warning from 1985 of what's to come or merely an alternate reality. The best way to look at it is perhaps Gilliam's attempt to tell his version of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four but actually in 1984 rather than looking forward to it.

It begins with some of my favourite scenes from all of cinema. A Central Services spokesman wants to talk to us about ducts in a commercial broadcast to a host of retro TVs in a shop window that promptly explodes while a woman walks past with a pram. Mr Helpmann, the deputy minister of the Ministry of Information is interviewed and asked how he accounts for the fact that this bombing campaign has been going on for thirteen years. 'Beginner's luck,' he replies with a laugh. Government is a game, as highlighted by a stream of sporting metaphors. Then we see a recreation of what caused Grace Hopper's literal computer bug in 1945, as a bureaucrat kills a fly on the ceiling only for it to fall into a printer and create an error whose consequences create our plot. Archibald Tuttle is already on the government watchlist, but now, courtesy of this bug, so is Archibald Buttle.

The Buttles are celebrating Christmas in their apartment in the rundown Shangri La Towers, yet another reminder of unfulfilled promises. 'Father Christmas can't come if we haven't got a chimney,' their little girl says, as the ceiling falls away and they're efficiently invaded by faceless stormtroopers that look like the SAS but are led by a stereotypically emotionless lawyer. Poor Archibald Buttle, the victim of a dead fly, is 'invited to assist the department with their inquiries.' 'That is your receipt for your husband,' says the lawyer, 'and this is my receipt for your receipt.' This is a scene of sheer genius, that leaves us nearly as emotionally stunned as Mrs Buttle, but Gilliam doesn't quit. He follows it with another one, a long tracking shot through the bowels of Bureaucratic Hell that just keeps going, well until the camera reaches Mr Kurtzmann, in the memorable form of Ian Holm, better known to the modern generation as Bilbo Baggins.

He's only one of many actors that pepper Brazil with quirky performances that often bely how much time they have on screen. Holm is a nervous fellow, a manager with an apparently large domain but who utterly relies on one of his employees to get anything done. That employee is our hero, Sam Lowry, played to naïve perfection by Jonathan Pryce, the epitome of the put upon little guy. He has a little more control than Josef K in Kafka's The Trial, but not much more when it comes down to it. While he has highly influential relatives, he's happy being a small fish in a big pond, deliberately staying in his dead end job in Records. 'It's impossible to get noticed,' his friend Jack Lint tells him. 'I know,' says Lowry. 'It's wonderful. Marvellous. Perfect.'

All Sam wants is a chance at love, at the girl he dreams about. He has awesome dreams: giant teleporting samurai in full battle armour, naked women floating in cages clad only in translucent sheets, walls turning into huge stone hands... The symbolism is obvious but it's no less effective for that. We first meet him in his dreams, flying around idyllic skies and truly awesome cloud formations with his mechanised wings, utterly free but dangerously reminiscent of Icarus. The girl in his dreams has no name but she's played by Kim Greist, whose next film would be another of the greatest movies of the eighties, Michael Mann's Manhunter. Lowry soon sees her in real life too, as she's the Buttles' upstairs neighbour who visits the Ministry of Information in a vain attempt to file a false arrest report, discovers that she's Jill Layton, and pursues her with a passion.

He even accepts the promotion his mother arranges for him to Information Retrieval, given that Jill Layton's attempts at justice have flagged her as a terrorist to the Ministry which has classified her records. At Information Retrieval he can read them. He meets the real Archibald Tuttle too, another classified terrorist who is really just a maverick heating engineer who merely doesn't want anything to do with paperwork. In the most bizarre casting of all, he's played by Robert De Niro, who originally wanted to play Jack Lint but found that Gilliam had already promised it to his former Python colleague, Michael Palin, so he became Tuttle instead. Neither are large parts but Palin and De Niro are both highly memorable, in my view far better as the characters they ended up with than if they had been cast the other way around.

These are just the key names, there being plenty more to back them up. Ian Richardson and Peter Vaughan are Lowry's new bosses at Information Retrieval. Bob Hoskins and Derrick O'Connor are a memorable pair of Central Services heating engineers who arrive at Lowry's apartment while Tuttle is fixing it, O'Connor ignoring the dialogue he was given to parrot his colleague's lines instead. Katherine Helmond is Lowry's mother and Barbara Hicks her friend Alma, who shares her passion for plastic surgery. Ida Lowry looks younger every time we see her while Alma Terrain looks more damaged. Even her complications have complications, it seems. Jim Broadbent is Dr Jaffe, Ida's crude but popular plastic surgeon, while Alma shifts to Dr Chapman, played by Jack Purvis, Wally from Time Bandits.

In fact there are so many of these actors, including a whole host more that are very recognisable from English television, that their characters are almost swallowed by the great machine that is the Ministry of Information, something that apparently costs 7% of the gross national product. Gilliam, with his co-writers Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown, threw everything they could in here, into both the story and the design, not just Orwell and Kafka but also the Nazis, the KGB, the Stasi, every secret service and propaganda department you could imagine, all thrown into a blender and turned into something vaguely English.

I first saw Brazil in the eighties in Thatcher's Britain and there were obvious reference points then. There are even more now, given the changes the world has gone through. There are insightful comments about 9/11, Guantanamo Bay, the process of extraordinary rendition, the Echelon project, overreliance on credit and, more than anything, the concept of security theatre. Yet this was made in 1985 before most of those things came to be. A conspiracy theorist would find a lot more, I'm sure, especially as one of the most startling revelations of Brazil is that the entire framework of the story seems to be a lie. It's all about terrorism, except we see no terrorists and nobody claims anything. All we see are government departments trying to cover up mistakes. It's mistakes that are the true anathema, as anything done to pretend they don't exist is apparently perfectly acceptable, however extreme.

This leads to another stunning revelation. In this dystopian nightmare of a story there really aren't any bad guys, there are just people doing their job the best they know how. The greatest example has to be Jack Lint's terminally cheerful secretary Myrtle who spends her time transcribing torture sessions. Jack himself believes in what he does, just like everyone else in the story. The only bad guy is the system itself, or perhaps by extension the people who voted into office the people who created it and now maintain it. This could almost be seen as a monster movie, with the system playing the part of the giant lizard, not inherently bad, just doing what it's designed to do.

As befits such a sprawling behemoth, Terry Gilliam's sense of humour comes into play and turns what could be a suffocating diatribe into a dark comedic dream. It's all patently absurd, but then that's the point. The system is a conglomeration of all the niggling little idiocies of life that drive us nuts because they don't make sense when you look at them from a human perspective, asking 'Why?' Most of the characters in this story are only problems because they don't ask 'Why?' A great example comes when Sam takes the job at Information Retrieval and finds that the desk in his office is shared with the office next door, literally, through the wall. The thing is that it stays equally divided between the two until the moment he gets there at which point his neighbour begins trying to inch it into his office. This is the sort of material cartoonists thrive on. The script could provide the next year's worth of Far Side and Dilbert cartoons all on its own.

There's so much more to say about Brazil but you really should experience it for yourself: the amazing production design, the glorious sound effects, the steampunk look of much of the film, the dark but engaging music by Michael Kamen, the cinematic reference points, the wordplay, the ambitious camera movements, the vehicle design, the Rube Goldberg machinery. All of these things and more are worthy of much discussion but the overriding effect of this film is to make us think. What's most amazing is that in doing so it seems more and more palpable and relevant with every viewing. Deliberately timeless in its setting, it's become a timeless film and I have a feeling it's going to retain its impact and its ability to provoke thought long after other more overt movies fade.

The Thin Man (1934)

Director: W S Van Dyke
Stars: William Powell, Myrna Loy, Maureen O'Sullivan, Nat Pendleton and Minna Gombell

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.

W S Van Dyke II, better known within the industry as 'One-Take Woody' because of the speed at which he worked, was given three weeks by MGM to shoot The Thin Man but he only needed twelve days. After all the studio weren't expecting a lot from the project, merely another picture, nothing special. Hollywood studios churned films out in 1934 and most of them were only expected to break even and maybe make a little profit, before being forgotten in favour of the next week's picture. This one did far more than expected, however, not least at the box office where the $231,000 it cost to make turned into $1.4m in ticket receipts. Originally a B movie, it was nonetheless nominated for four Oscars, including one for Best Picture. It spawned five sequels of surprisingly high quality and even began a trend in dog ownership, it suddenly becoming the height of fashion to own a wire haired fox terrier like Asta, the dog in this film.

In 2004 I didn't know what to expect from The Thin Man, knowing only that it was a detective story, though presumably a good one, given that it's an IMDb Top 250 movie and the script was based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett, the virtual creator of the hardboiled detective genre in literature. A former private dick himself, he turned his experience into such successful novels as The Maltese Falcon, another literary classic that became a cinematic classic, albeit on the third attempt, Hollywood remakes not being a modern phenomenon. However The Thin Man is far from being a hardboiled tale and its hero, retired detective Nick Charles, is just as far from being Sam Spade, the tough hero of The Maltese Falcon.

Charles would feel far more at home shelved next to those amateur detectives from the English upper classes that crop up throughout Victorian literature than with Sam Spade and his ilk. To see the difference between the two types, watch Neil Simon's masterful parody Murder By Death which spoofs both Sam Spade (as Sam Diamond) and Nick and Nora Charles (as Dick and Dora Charleston). Simon has Dick Charleston avoid death by virtue of his incredibly good breeding while Sam Diamond is just brutally honest, working the streets tirelessly for his forty bucks a day plus expenses. It's testament to Hammett's reach that he defined both styles.

I should point out that Nick Charles is not the Thin Man of the title, though that would be an easy mistake to make, especially given that all five sequels to this film also included the Thin Man in their titles too. This is utterly misleading because the real Thin Man only appears in this first entry in the series, and then not for long. He's Clyde Wynant, some sort of scientist who invents smelting processes and such, but he quickly disappears from the story, apparently closing up his shop and leaving for parts unknown. He's an absent-minded sort, but not enough to forget his daughter Dorothy's imminent marriage, so she's more than a little worried about his conspicuous absence.

Wynant is divorced, having embarked on an affair with his secretary, Julia Wolf, but she's been taking him for a ride, one that he discovers at the beginning of this film when he realises that $50,000 of government bonds are missing from his safe, to which only he and Julia knew the combination. To make matters worse, when he goes to confront her about it and demand their return, he finds her with a mobster by the name of Morelli, who she's been carrying on with. And that's the end of him. As Julia is such a bad sort, we wonder if he should have stayed with his wife, Mimi, but she turns out to be worth little more.

She's now Mrs Jorgensen, married to a gigolo called Chris who has no money. He wants his wife to get it, preferably from her ex-husband, but of course he's nowhere to be found, merely wiring for cash every now and again through his secretary. His accountant dutifully sends it but can't help but worry himself. And all these shenanigans eventually progress to murder, as you might expect. The first victim is Julia Wolf, and given that she's left clutching Wynant's distinctive watch chain, he becomes the lead suspect. Fortunately for young Dorothy, who is merely trying to get married while this tangle of murder and intrigue unfolds around her, she recognises Nick Charles in a bar.

And here the story really begins, because while the mystery is a capable one, what really sets this film apart from all others is the amazing pairing of William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, one of the great screen couples of all time, which to my mind trumps others like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, or to more modern audiences, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. The husband and wife banter, apparently based on Hammett's own relationship with playwright Lillian Hellman, is a joy to behold, and the way in which Powell and Loy bring that dialogue to life is the primary reason that this film was so successful.

Powell was a major name already in 1934, having debuted in the silents twelve years earlier and successfully transitioned to sound, becoming in the process a genuine recognisable star for his portrayals of detective Philo Vance. Myrna Loy had followed a similar path, though she arrived three years later than Powell. Memorable for many exotic roles, she found herself typecast in that sort of character and urgently needed something different to progress in the business. She found it in a screen partnership with Powell that spanned fourteen films, most notably this one, their second together after Manhattan Melodrama, which they made earlier the same year with Clark Gable. Two years later she would literally be crowned Queen of Hollywood, with Gable her King.

Far from being just a detective story, The Thin Man is also a comedy, something of a screwball comedy too or perhaps a highball comedy, given just how much drinking is going on. When we meet Nick Charles, he's been retired for four years so as to be able to devote his time to being equal parts husband and drunken sot, and he's more than a little devoted to each. We first find him teaching bartenders how to shake martinis and every time he's introduced to someone in this initial scene, he immediately calls for another glass. Much of his dialogue, at least that doesn't tie specifically to the investigation he doesn't want to get involved with, is related to drink and much of it is hilarious. In fact, as his wife points out to the increasingly disbelieving press, the only case he wants to be involved with is a case of scotch.

More alcohol is consumed during the 91 minute running time of this film than in any W C Fields movie I've seen thus far, perhaps in all of them put together. Nick is so dedicated to the art of drinking that we can't help but wonder how his wife puts up with him, but she soon arrives to show us that she's of the same mind. When she finds out that he's already on his sixth martini, she orders five more to accompany the one he's already called for, just so she can catch up. Prohibition ended in the US in 1933 but we're given the impression that Nick and Nora are still celebrating its demise over a year later and sure enough they'd still be celebrating it thirteen years on in Song of the Thin Man, the last of the series.

It's hard to imagine it now, given that Myrna Loy has become one of my favourite actresses and I'm over fifty films into her career, but this was my first experience of her work. Juliette Lewis, in a segment for Turner Classic Movies, called Loy a chameleon, an actress who instinctively altered her entire style to balance her leading man. I can buy into that with hindsight, given how different she was in her exotic era and how different she became later. She's far more physical when playing opposite William Powell than in many of her later movies, which often saw her act with her face rather than her body. Here, from her initial entrance which sees her sprawled out on the barroom floor, Christmas presents sent akimbo, she gives us a lot of body acting too.

If Loy is superb, Powell is even better. One of those four Oscar nominations was for him and it was justly deserved, though he lost out to Clark Gable for It Happened One Night. His dialogue is sheer genius, not just how it's written but how it's delivered, so much of it not just the words but the subtle pauses too. He could always switch from genre to genre without apparently blinking and here he gets to do that in the very same movie, moving seamlessly from drunken parties to serious investigations. Myrna Loy gets serious moments too but is kept away from the dangerous side of things by her husband as much as is humanly possible. At one point he even locks her in a cab and asks the driver to take her to Grant's tomb, just to keep her out of the way.

There are plenty of names to back here them up, some of whom are far more successful than others, Natalie Moorhead and Minna Gombell hamming it up something rotten as Julia Wolf and Mimi Jorgenson respectively. The biggest supporting name at the time was Maureen O'Sullivan, who plays Dorothy. She was still relatively new in 1934 but had already made quite a stir as Jane in the first two Tarzan movies, the first of which was also directed by Woody Van Dyke. She'd marry director John Farrow two years later and provide him with seven children, including Mia Farrow. Lt John Guild is Nat Pendleton, not the sharpest copper in the book but a couple of leagues above the usual level he got to play at. Harold Huber, Cesar Romero and Edward Brophy are recognisable faces too who, like Pendleton, just keep turning up in seemingly no end of thirties movies. Everyone was more prolific then, it seems, especially when they were supporting actors by trade.

Each of them seems to play someone who ends up on the barbed end of one of Nick's witticisms, which are so rapid fire here that you'll need to watch the film twice just to keep up with them. To be fair Nora gets plenty of gems too, possibly even more than Nick given that she has to ground everything he says. When Nick asks her 'How'd you like Grant's tomb?' she replies, 'It's lovely, I'm having a copy made for you.' 'What's that man doing in my drawers?' she asks him as the police search their hotel room. 'Will you serve the nuts,' she prompts the waiter at the dinner party that provides our finale, only to realise that she needs to clarify, 'I mean, will you serve the guests the nuts.'

This dinner party is the sophisticated way in which Nick gets to unmask the killer. Instead of the traditional English drawing room, in which all the suspects are gathered for the denouement, he has the police summon or haul them all to a civilised dinner to begin unravelling the case over oysters. Powell in particular shines throughout this scene of explanations, keeping everyone on their toes, including us. Just watching this scene, with Powell's mastery of cleverly timed delivery, it's patently obvious that the sequels were going to come. In fact we almost don't care that there's a murder mystery going on and we're watching the killer be cleverly exposed, because we're just caught up in the joy of the dialogue.

Massively impressed with this film in 2004, I returned to it in 2006 and again in 2010, and it still stands up just as well as ever. By the time the dinner scene arrived, let alone by the time it finished, I couldn't help but wish I had the five sequels lined up and ready to go, followed by the other eight movies William Powell and Myrna Loy made together. Every time I see them play opposite each other I feel more than entertained, I feel enriched. They're like old friends, with whom life can only be a joy, and they were never better together than here.

Big Fish (2003)

Director: Tim Burton
Stars: Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Helena Bonham Carter, Alison Lohman, Robert Guillaume and Marion Cotillard

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.

I still don't know how I missed this one in 2003. I grew up being a little different from those around me in the eighties and so I identified to no small degree with the films Tim Burton made that were full of outsider characters: Batman and its sequel, Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, not to mention Ed Wood, a fantasy which benefitted from being mostly true. Perhaps I missed this one because it was more recent, coming next in his filmography after his disappointing remake of Planet of the Apes. Yet I believe it's the best film he's made thus far, a very personal one that rings so true in its complex web of tall tales that it's almost palpable. I hadn't heard of it until I noticed it was a Top 250 movie and watched it in 2004 as a download on my laptop. A fresh viewing on DVD on a big screen TV merely reaffirms its power. The bigger the screen the better with this movie. The big fish of the title deserves to be huge.

We see the fish before we even see the title, but it's really a metaphor or rather a few of them tied together. Most obviously the big fish is Edward Bloom, the central character in the story, but it also refers to the idea that there are some fish that cannot be caught; they exist only as immortal stories because the chase is always better than the catch. Ed Bloom has been talking about one of these fish all his life, the one he calls the Beast that he's been chasing as long as he's been talking about it. He tells his son William that he caught it the day he was born, at least for enough of a moment to get back the wedding ring it swallowed when he used it as bait. He tells everyone else the same story too, over and over, until he finally pisses his son off by telling it at his wedding.

Perhaps it's because Will Bloom is just a footnote in the story, perhaps it's because he's heard it a thousand times or perhaps it's because he's come to the point where he doesn't believe a word his dad says any more. Probably it's all three put together, but whatever the reason, from that point they don't talk for three years until eventually the call comes that they're stopping the chemotherapy. Ed Bloom is dying of cancer, and Will and his wife fly out to be there, to be with him, but also so Will can find out just who his father really is, at a point in time when he's about to become a father himself.

All he knows are his father's tall tales, which are as tall as they come so obviously can't be real. As far as he was concerned the day he was born his dad was really out selling novelty products in Wichita because Will is as prosaic as his father is whimsical, and resents what his father calls facts and stories but which he sees as nothing but lies. He doesn't believe his father has ever told him a true thing, being 'like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny combined: just as charming and just as fake.' He sees them as strangers who know each other very well, a concept that he feels a need to address while he still can.

Obviously this is a huge deal for Will Bloom, just as this story was a huge deal for writer Daniel Wallace who wrote the source novel, Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions, being the first novel that he managed to sell. It was also something personal to Tim Burton at the time, as his father died in 2000 and his mother in 2002, just before he took this job, so it's easy to see catharsis in the production. It's very personal to me too because in many ways this is also my story, however much my father never consorted with giants, werewolves or Siamese twins, at least not that I know of. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2000 while I was travelling the States and I flew home to be with him and our family. He died in 2001 and his funeral was the revelation to me that Ed Bloom's is to his son at the end of Big Fish.

Every detail about Ed Bloom's life is strange, at least the way he tells it, from the moment of his birth when the doctor dropped him and he slid down the corridor like a bowling ball. As a child he was the only one with guts enough to knock on the door of the town witch, the one with a glass eye that has the magical power to show you your own death. He's always the one with the guts, partly because the knowledge of how and when he's going to die doesn't scare him the way it scares the crap out of his friends, it merely tells him that he's going to survive everything else. He always has a different perspective on everything to everyone around him.

This is the primary reason that he's so fascinating, not the fact that he seems to live a charmed life. Sure, he made every winning touchdown, scored every winning basket in the last second of the game, constructed every winning science fair exhibit. He even saved a dog from a burning house before the firemen got there, every cliché in the book, but the key to all those events isn't that he's a star, it's that he made a difference. That's what he's really about. He was the biggest thing there was in Ashton, AL until one day a stranger arrives, a twelve foot giant that eats all the sheep and prompts the expected mob with raised pitchforks, but even then he saves the day by persuading the giant to leave through the intriguing concept of going with him. After all, Ashton, AL was too small for his ambitions too.

We watch Ed Bloom in the form of two actors. The old Ed is Albert Finney, a powerful presence on screen from his first outings in the early sixties in The Entertainer, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Tom Jones, which brought him his first Oscar nomination. Here he manages to somehow be a mischevious imp bursting with life while still being a frail old man in his death bed soon to be hospitalised with a stroke. He even manages to tell us jokes we've heard a number of times before and surprise us with the punchline. That's the art of storytelling. The young Ed is Ewan MacGregor, who manages to redeem himself through this film for the cinematic abortion that was The Phantom Menace. He's the means by which we see the stories that old Ed tells and he's excellent. He even gets the best non-fight scene since Indy pulled the gun on the swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

As you might expect from a Tim Burton movie, the cast is full of memorable supporting actors including a few that were already regulars in his films. Given that the story unfolds as a set of tall tales, there's plenty of room for a large cast and many actors are given plenty of opportunity to shine. Also as you might expect from a Tim Burton movie, the main supporting actors are there to ground the story, so while Billy Crudup and Jessica Lange are fine as Will Bloom and his mother Sandra respectively, our attention mostly goes elsewhere, and I don't mean to Marion Cotillard as Will's wife Josephine or Robert Guillaume as the doctor who's taking care of his dad.

Most obvious is Matthew McGrory, who plays Karl the Giant. McGrory was a real giant, though he was a mere 7'6” when he died in 2005 at the sadly young age of 32 rather than the 12' he seems to be for much of this film. He looks like a huge and misshapen Ben Mankiewicz. Least obvious may be Destiny Cyrus, making her debut on screen here as Ruthie. She's better known today as Miley Cyrus, who every young girl in the world would apparently recognise as Hannah Montana. Which one was Ruthie again? My favourites have to be Ada and Arlene Tai, who are real twins but not the Siamese twins they play here. There's a fantasy or two there, that's for sure, and I'm not talking about rescuing them from Korea.

Danny De Vito, so memorable for Burton as the Penguin in Batman Returns, is Amos Calloway, the owner and ringmaster of Calloway Circus, looking more than a little like Ron Jeremy, especially when he's naked. He's also a werewolf, which perhaps could explain a lot about Mr Jeremy too, come to think about it. It's at Calloway's circus that Ed first sees the love of his life, immediately convinced that he's going to marry her even though he has no idea who she is. Calloway is so manipulative that he hires Ed on the terms that he'll tell him one thing about her for every month he works at the circus for free. His lawyer, Mr Soggybottom, is Deep Roy, who played all the Oompa Loompas in Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Steve Buscemi plays Norther Winslow, the last man before Ed Bloom to leave Ashton. He's a poet who aims for Paris but only gets as far as Spectre, a mysterious hidden town on the other side of the jumping spiders, from which nobody apparently leaves, not least because an eight year girl steals their shoes and throws them onto the phone cable at the edge of town. After Ed Bloom proves that it's possible to leave, Winslow follows suit and reoccurs throughout the movie and is as welcome anywhere in this story as Buscemi is anywhere in a movie. Finally there's Helena Bonham Carter, who seems to find a part in every film Tim Burton makes. She finds two of them here, playing a very memorable witch as well as Jenny, that eight year old girl, at two very different stages of her adult life.

Will Bloom has heard about all these characters all his life. He knows their stories by heart but he never believed any of them were real, taking them as just the necessary characters to flesh out his father's Baron Munchaüsen complex. He finds that they're all real, though perhaps a little exaggerated, just like the stories they inhabit and the lessons they teach. There are real rules to live by here, not least that the more difficult something is, the more rewarding it becomes. I'm also partial to the suggestion that it's rude to talk about religion, as you never know who you're going to offend. It goes without saying that you should never argue about romance with a Frenchwoman.

The biggest discovery Will learns is that his father made a difference to a lot of people, not least to him, and there's so much truth in this that it's impossible to not to find a tear or three as he comes to that realisation. This is especially true for me, given the similarities. Ed Bloom was a travelling salesman who conjured up flamboyant stories, whereas my father was a teacher who mostly kept himself to himself unless perhaps the Scotch was flowing. However the way in which they made a difference is precisely the same. After his funeral, which was not in a small church but one which still ran out of seats, I stood with my mother and sister as people left and they told us stories of how he had made every difference in the world to them. He didn't ask for reward, he didn't publicise what he did and in fact we didn't know many of these people at all until they turned up to pay their respects. I learned an important lesson that day, the same one that Will Bloom learns in this film. My father was a big fish too.

Five Came Back (1939)

Director: John Farrow
Stars: Chester Morris, Lucille Ball, Wendy Barrie, John Carradine, Allen Jenkins, Joseph Calleia, C Aubrey Smith, Kent Taylor, Patric Knowles, Elisabeth Risdon and Casey Johnson

What a bizarre cast list for an RKO adventure yarn! A dozen highly varied characters played by a dozen highly varied actors board the Silver Queen for Panama, even though there are prominent Guatemala signs everywhere. It's a plane, the pride of the Air Coast Lines, but it still flounders off course during a storm and crashes into jungle country that's riddled with headhunters. The airline sends reconnaissance flights to track it down but they're looking in the wrong place, so this bunch are effectively on their own to find a solution. As I'm sure you can extrapolate from the title, after a good deal of drama they manage to get the plane back in the air to return safely home, but because of technical limitations only five of the twelve can be on board.

Wendy Barrie and Patric Knowles are a young couple, Alice Melbourne and Judson Ellis, who are apparently boss and secretary but also obviously much more than that. During the stopover in Mexico, we discover that they're eloping, much to the displeasure of their parents. Lucille Ball, who always looked better in black and white to my eyes, is a dreamy sort of sad here, some sort of disreputable young woman called Peggy Nolan. We're not sure initially why she's there but she's wished 'good luck and thanks a million for what you're doing,' by special delivery right before the flight. C Aubrey Smith and Elisabeth Risdon are Henry and Martha Spengler, a botany professor on vacation with his wife. Prof Spengler delights in explaining to the passengers the techniques the local headhunters use in shrinking the heads of their enemies.

John Carradine is a bounty hunter, Mr Crimp, who's tasked with escorting Joseph Calleia to the proper authorities in Panama City. He's an anarchist called Vasquez and he'll net $5,000 for delivering him to the hangman. As Pete and Tommy, Allen Jenkins and young 'nephew' Casey Johnson turn up to the plane in a Rolls Royce. Tommy's dad will follow later, or so he says. He's a mob boss and the reports of his death by violence are soon reported over the radio on the plane. Chester Morris is top credited (there really isn't a star per se) but we don't see him for quite a while. He's Bill Brooks, the pilot of the plane, assisted by Kent Taylor and Dick Hogan as Joe the co-pilot and Larry the steward, respectively. Hogan can't have been too happy given that this is a story told by twelve actors, eleven of whom get credits and one of whom didn't. Guess which one he was. Then again he's the first to die, not even making it to the jungle, let alone back from it, leaving the plane in a heroic nature during the storm.

As you might expect from such an ensemble cast, the character development is the key here, and fortunately there's a talented set of writers to provide that, not least Dalton Trumbo. It takes more than the material though, it takes the actors to bring it to life and this film fortunately has a decent amount of both. Almost all the characters change given their new and rather unwelcome surroundings, as you might expect they would, and of course we're left to work out how they're going to change, because the big question comes down to which five are going to make it out and which six are going to be left behind. For the longest time it isn't particularly clear, as each revelation changes how we comprise our list, though by the time it gets down to really calling it, a couple of deaths and a change of circumstances make it reasonably obvious.

We're given a lot of opportunity to think before we get that far. Excluding the child who would always be a given, even the most obvious candidate for not wanting to leave might not have a choice about it. While everyone else wants to leave to get back to their lives, Vasquez would be leaving to get back to his death, something he'd hardly want to do. As a prisoner in custody though, he may not have a choice. It's a truism that times of trouble always bring out the real characters within people, and here's a time of trouble for everyone involved. To get out of it alive, they have to team up and work together, something that's easier for some than others. Sure enough some are great assets, and you'd be an idiot to assume that good old reliable C Aubrey Smith isn't one of that number. Others are more of a hindrance and some exhibit true heroism or villainy.

I won't spoil the outcome, of course, but I don't want to spoil the progression either. It's well written and well acted, though there are a number of things holding it back from beyond its control. For a start it had to struggle along with a budget of $225,000, apparently rather low even by the standards of RKO at the time, but it looks more expensive than it was. It had a mere 75 minutes to unfold, though it could easily have been a three hour epic that concentrated even more on the subtleties of character, but everyone involved did what they could with the inherent limitations, and the end result is much better than I ever expected it would be.

Most obviously it was released in 1939 and just look at what it had to compete with at the ticket booth! This was the year where undying classics couldn't even get Oscar nominations because there were too many to cram in there, even though these were the days when there were ten choices for Best Picture. In full cognizance of its inherent limitations, I'd call it a greater success and far more powerful entertainment in my eyes that the film that the Academy awarded the Best Picture of the year. I'd even dare to suggest that it jerked more tears at Chaos Central.

In fact it plays better to me than a number of other major films that members of this cast were involved with, and of course there are many to choose from. Even little Casey Johnson made three films in 1939 and this was his debut. Chester Morris made four and I've only seen Blind Alley, but this is certainly superior. Lucille Ball made five and I haven't seen any of the others, highlighting yet again that however many films I see from Hollywood's greatest year there are always many more to find. This is my first Kent Taylor of 1939, even though he made seven films that year. At least I've seen three of the five Joseph Calleia made, including Juarez and The Gorilla.

John Carradine was always prolific, meaning that this is only one of nine films he made that year, including at least one other classic that throws a bunch of disparate characters together in close proximity for an extended journey, John Ford's Stagecoach. Other notable films he made in 1939 include The Three Musketeers, Drums Along the Mohawk and The Hound of the Baskervilles, the latter of which also featured Wendy Barrie. Barrie made six films that year, including another with Chester Morris, Pacific Liner. Those sorts of connections are rampant if you look for them.

C Aubrey Smith's most prominent film of the year was The Four Feathers but he had eight to choose from, including the third Thin Man movie, which also featured Patric Knowles. Knowles made six films that year, including Torchy Blane in Chinatown. This was the era of movie series, so Allen Jenkins got to appear in a different Torchy Blane movie, Torchy Blane... Playing with Dynamite, along with one of my favourite classic westerns, Destry Rides Again. Most prolific of all was Elisabeth Risdon, who managed to land ten parts in 1939, though this is only my second, after the highly underrated Cagney gangster flick, The Roaring Twenties. Whew.

As fits a film that seems to be a popular memory to many, the simple yet powerful concept behind the story resonating to viewers the way I fully expect it to resonate with me, it was remade twice. The first was a Mexican film in 1948 called Los que volvieron, but that looks to be rather obscure. More obvious was a Hollywood production in 1956 made by the same director as this original, John Farrow, called Back from Eternity, which was apparently pretty good even though it added a chick fight that may not have made a lot of sense. It would be interesting to see it, especially given some of the names involved. I'm rather fond of people like Chester Morris, C Aubrey Smith and Allen Jenkins and I'm hardly likely to prefer their replacements, but having Rod Steiger play the Joseph Calleia role could be fascinating to see.

A Study in Terror (1965)

Director: James Hill
Stars: John Neville, Donald Houston and John Fraser

Given that my last visits with Sherlock Holmes were the John Barrymore silent version from 1922 and the fourteen films with Basil Rathbone in the thirties and forties, a colour version was always going to look a little different, but this is vibrant Eastmancolor. That's clear from moment one as we watch Jack the Ripper follow a prostitute with very red shoes and stab her through the neck, literally. This version came out in 1965 with John Neville in the lead, a long while before I first came across him as Baron Munchausen in the Terry Gilliam version of that story. He's pretty good, all things told, and he's blessed with a Watson who isn't a complete idiot, courtesy of actor Donald Houston.

Given that were dealing with Jack the Ripper, there are more murders to come, of course. Three days later Polly Nichols is stabbed to death in a water trough with copious amounts of red paint to indicate just how dead she is. She's played by Christiane Maybach, a German actress in a rare English language film role, but after her comes a bastion of the British cinema, no less a bubbly blonde than Barbara Windsor. Having her murdered in a Whitechapel street is bad enough, without the wicked laugh of Sid James to accompany the deed, but she'd also just failed to even give her body away for free in return for a bed for the night. The last person to see her alive, the Ripper excepted, was another prostitute in red played by another major British actress, Kay Walsh, who had played Nancy to Alec Guinness's Fagin a couple of decades earlier.

Enter Sherlock Holmes, who is precisely the sort of character we might expect, thank goodness, after my last experience with the character. John Barrymore may have been a great actor but his 1922 version was heresy to the Holmes afficionado. Neville plays him with a heavy nod to Basil Rathbone, full of the classic deductions and memorable lines we might expect. Most of the old Holmes chestnuts are wheeled out in the first five minutes he's on screen, as if to get them out of the way early so the real fun can begin. Hardly surprising for a great British stage actor, Neville also proves adept in the art of disguise, conjuring up a false identity that's good enough to convince everyone in the film, Watson included, but not quite enough to stop us seeing through it.

The trail leads them to a number of characters played by faces I recognise, but of course the underlying question throughout is which one is Jack the Ripper. Given that the obvious suspect is Michael Osborne, eldest son and heir to the Duchy of Shires, who went to study surgery in the Sorbonnes two years earlier only to leave mid-term and promptly disappear, it presumably can't be him. He does appear in the film but not much more than the third name with lofty billing alongside John Neville and Donald Houston. He's John Fraser, playing Michael Osborne's younger brother, Lord Carfax, and he's suspiciously absent for much of the film. It isn't difficult to work out who the real alternative suspect is and why, but I'll let you work that out for yourselves.

The supporting actor we probably see the most of is Anthony Quayle, who as Dr Murray runs a soup kitchen in Whitechapel and protests the poverty that runs rampant through the district. Working for him in his soup kitchen, the Montague Street Hostel, is his niece, Sally Young, in the amazingly young form of Judi Dench. This was only her third film, though she was already an established actress on television and the stage. It would be another thirty years before she'd become M for the first time, a part that is starting to take over her filmography. Insp Lestrade is played by Frank Finlay, who was Oscar nominated for a different 1965 film, having played Iago to Laurence Olivier's Othello. There's even Robert Morley as a surprisingly emotional Mycroft Holmes, rather easily flustered by his younger and supposedly not so smart brother.

The film is an intriguing piece, well played and well progressed, with a dependable script. It's set in the appropriate era, unlike most of the Rathbone films, and the sets and costumes back it up well. Neville is a decent Holmes and Houston a capable Watson. I particularly liked the garish Eastmancolor, which often put me in mind of a Hammer horror, especially with German actor Peter Carsten so prominent in the film as the landlord of the Rose and Crown. I was surprised to find that Carsten never appeared in a Hammer, because I could have sworn I remembered him from films like Twins of Evil, but perhaps my faulty memory just highlights how much he looks like the epitome of one frequently cast sort of Hammer horror actor.

Somehow though it all fails to ignite. All the component parts are there but it doesn't quite know how to put them all together in the right order to stun us. Perhaps some people realised that at the time. John Neville returned to Holmes on Broadway in the seventies, for one. For another, Frank Finlay returned to Lestrade in 1979 in another film that once again merged the Holmes and Jack the Ripper mythos into one story, a film that also saw Anthony Quayle return but in a diferent part. That film is Murder By Decree, and from what I read it's more successful than this one, perhaps benefitting from even greater names than here. Holmes and Watson are Christopher Plummer and James Mason, and backing them up are David Hemmings, John Gielgud, Donald Sutherland and Geneviève Bujold, among others. Now I guess I'll need to track that one down too. It'll be the Arthur Wontner Holmes films first though.

Girls on the Loose (1958)

Director: Paul Henreid
Stars: Mary Corday, Lita Milan and Barbara Bostock

Paul Henreid was a notable actor back in the golden age. Born in Trieste in 1905, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he left for England in 1935 and of course ended up in Hollywood, courtesy of a supporting role in Goodbye, Mr Chips. You've seen him, of course, given that he was Victor Laszlo in Casablanca, but film fans know him well from other memorable performances too in films such as Now, Voyager, Between Two Worlds and The Conspirators. His acting career dried up after being blacklisted during the witch hunts, but somehow he managed to become a director instead, working mostly in television (28 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents alone) but with a handful of B movies to his name too.

Made the same year he made Live Fast, Die Young, this one's a B movie about a bank heist, but as the title suggests, there's a notable exploitation twist. When the Jamestown Laundry truck drops off three men in hats and trenchcoats with the collars pulled up, we can tell that they're not men at all. As we find out when they get inside they're wearing masks too, but it's impossible not to notice the way they walk, the hint of curly blonde hair that we see behind one of those collars and, most obviously of all, an ample bosom. Did I hear high heels too? Yep, I think I did. All these bank robbers have short hair, but they're all still obviously women.

Vera Parkinson is the ringleader and her friends Marie Williams and Joyce Johanneson are in on the job too. They've planned well and they're apparently good at what they do: the heist is over in minutes, they're in and out quickly and efficiently and they leave with a solid haul. No less than $200,000, say the papers. They even demonstrate restraint during the heat of the moment, given that Vera has every opportunity to kill Tom, the bank employee who reaches for the alarm, but she slugs him unconscious instead of shooting him dead. Of course however good a bank robber she is, she sucks royally at digging a hole in the woods to bury the money, not least because of those inappropriate high heels.

The real mistake appears to be Vera's bringing in her younger sister Helen on the deed too, given that while they're sisters the pair are utterly different in character. Initially Helen only believes she's picking her sister up after a 'late night business appointment', but Vera does explain it to her afterwards, at least to the degree that she's earned $40,000 for fifteen minutes work, doing something dubious. She doesn't want to know the rest. The catch is that she soon falls for a homicide detective, Lt Bill Hanley, and having cops hanging around when there's a couple of hundred grand dangling between bickering crooks is never a good thing.

Yes, this is the old story about there being no honour between thieves, and they're an unlikely trio. Vera runs a nightclub, modestly named the Club Vera, and she's a cool as ice criminal mastermind in high heels. In the form of Mara Corday, born Marilyn Watts, she's precisely what this sort of film should be about: tough, capable and intelligent, but always ready for a catfight when it counts. Girls on the Loose was released the year she became a Playboy Playmate of the Month, but it was also the last film she made before retiring from the screen to concentrate on being a wife and mother. She left behind her a string of B movies, many genre related, like Tarantula, The Giant Claw and The Black Scorpion. She returned to film later in life but only to play supporting roles in films featuring her friend, Clint Eastwood.

Her cohorts in crime are utterly unlike her. Joyce is a masseuse, apparently a real one not the usual euphemism, though actress Joyce Barker plays her with a tone of such sleaziness that we could believe anything of her. Surprisingly this was her only film appearance. Marie is a beautician, but she's hardly a pillar of reliability, given that she's also a drunk, a pickpocket and an inveterate shoplifter. She has a vaguely continental air to her, hardly surprising given that she's played by an actress called Lita Milan, but she's really just from Brooklyn. Her real continental flavour came later the same year, when she married the son of a Latin American dictator, who seized power of the Dominican Republic in 1961, yet another inevitably short lived dictatorship whose failure prompted Lita and her husband to flee to Spain.

Marie's a thinker as well as a drinker, and the more she drinks the more she thinks. That would lead her down dangerous paths as it is, even if Vera didn't promptly give her even more to think about by bumping off the other character involved in the heist, Agnes Clark. Agnes is the inside man at the bank, or the inside girl, I guess, as well as the getaway driver. She knew Tom, that bank employee who Vera hit, which act is played up by the radio as a brutal assault that left him in a coma, and she's as shook up by the whole thing as Vera isn't, unable to even go to work the next day. Flouncing around in a tizzy, Vera gives her a sedative only for her to begin spilling all in her sleep. There's just no way they're going to stay free with Agnes on the loose.

So Vera takes care of her, cleverly setting it all up like a suicide, locking the door from the inside and even sending her a $200 money order to arrive late but divert attention nonetheless. While this establishes Vera well as being both intelligent and ruthless, it also removes Abby Dalton from the rest of the movie. Probably best known to the world for her television work in comedy shows of the sixties and Falcon Crest in the eighties, I know her best as an actress for Roger Corman in the fifties. She was Desir, the lead character in the awesomely titled The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent and the leading lady behind Dick Miller in Rock All Night, one of my guilty pleasures.

It's the death of Agnes that brings Lt Hanley to Club Vera and you can pretty much write the rest of the story yourself from there. He falls for Helen's performance on stage, given that she's not just Vera's sister, she's her entertainment too, and pursues her with a passion. Hanley is played by Mark Richman, better known nowadays as Peter Mark Richman, one of those faces that you'll know that carries a name you won't. Helen is the delightful Barbara Bostock, who didn't make enough movies. The immediate comparison that leaps to mind is to Liza Minnelli, but that's mostly because of the short hair and the material she's given. The more we see her the more she seems much more like Maggie Gyllenhaal, especially when she quits the virginal younger sister act and starts dancing on stage. Lt Hanley is hooked and so are we.

This is a routine movie, not a patch on the sort of thing that saw Paul Henreid's name as an actor rather than as a director, but it's a fun diversion nonetheless. Everything about it is surprisingly capable, the material suggesting something a lot worse. There's some bad acting going on, but it's generally not that bad. The worst comes courtesy of Ronald Green, who is credited as a gigolo but is really the new delivery guy who couldn't act to save his life. He made seven movies but this was only one of two that saw him actually credited. How he impresses Vera enough for her to fall into his arms, I really don't know. Compared to his acting, the few prominent plot conveniences are forgiveable. Sure, people can come out of comas just at the right time, just as guns can jam just at the wrong time and knives are always left out in the open just in case.

The best work here is on the dialogue, presumably courtesy of writer Alan Friedman. While some of it is the usual forced B movie tough banter, there are more than a few gems that sparkle out to be noticed, mostly from Vera given that Mara Corday is perfect for them. She could have been a great film noir lead in her day, had she been given the right material. 'Thinking takes brains,' she tells Agnes. 'Just forget you've got them.' Everyone else seems to be on the end of one of her cracks too. After a spat, Joyce gets, 'Have a good nightmare,' after suggesting that, 'I'll see you in my dreams.' Even Lt Hanley receives a great snub in 'This is our business. Why don't you mind yours.' He begins the best one though. 'Don't you ever hate yourself in the morning for what you do to that girl?' he asks Vera, only to receive the dry reply, 'I never get up in the morning.' The dialogue is great, the girls are good and the rest you won't tend to mind too much.

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Director: Edward D Wood Jr
Stars: Tor Johnson, Vampira, Tom Keene and Gregory Walcott

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.

I couldn't resist watching Plan 9 from Outer Space after Manos: The Hands of Fate. It's the film most usually regarded as the worst ever made, but there's really no comparison. Harold P Warren didn't know how to make a movie in the slightest, but Ed Wood did. Sure, he chose to do so in his own very outsider way but he was capable nonetheless, hardly the no talent hack movie history tries to make him out to be. Outsider art is an acquired taste that surely isn't for everyone, and Wood can only be fairly contextualised as an outsider, especially given that his films, which like Tarantino's movies are patchwork quilts of everything he had seen and thought was awesomely cool, are undeniably his. You simply can't mistake an Ed Wood movie for anything else, just as you can't mistake a Russ Meyer movie for anything else.

What made Ed Wood happy isn't what would make most people happy. His taste is so different to that of the mainstream audience that they often couldn't help but laugh at him, but what really matters is that he knew how to make movies and he made some really fun ones, however inept they often are. Along with its legendary wobbly flying saucers, Plan 9 from Outer Space has cardboard sets, redundant dialogue and terrible acting, make no mistake about it, and it plays out like a textbook of things not to do when making a movie. It breaks all the rules and doesn't even attempt to make excuses for doing so. To a film school professor this is Cinematic Hell.

However there's a flip side that really can't be ignored. It also has crisp visuals, synchronised sound and capable tracking shots. There are some decent special effects along with the bad ones, professional make up work and an appropriate soundtrack. It even has opening credits, cool ones with names carved into tombstones to boot, and not one of these things could Warren even dream about. Then again Wood had three times the budget to work with, even a decade earlier and working as cheaply as he possibly could. That meant $60,000 to ensure that he had real film to shoot with, real sound stages to shoot on and real studio lights so that whatever happens in the film, at least we're able to see it. Bill Thompson, the cameraman, even knew how to put them to decent effect.

In many ways, while Manos is an utter failure, successful only at winning a bet, Plan 9 is a true American success story. It's a real film, made like one, released like one and one that found its audience. Manos was rescued from obscurity by Mystery Science Theater 3000, Plan 9 was never obscure in the first place because of the magic of television and a growing cult audience even in those first few years after release. And at the end of the day, it's a film that rightly carries those magic words, 'Made in Hollywood'. It's a success, it merely isn't the success that most people would want. Just so long as you can tune into Wood's wavelength they don't get any more fun than this but, as Manos proved, they get a hell of a lot more inept.

Wood also had a whole smorgasbord of cult actors that would have made this film famous even if there were no other reason. There's Vampira, the original TV horror host with her delightful cleavage and her tiny waist, and Tor Johnson, the wrestler with a thick Swedish accent who became The Beast of Yucca Flats. There's the Amazing Criswell, a phony psychic famed for his stunningly inaccurate predictions, and the flamboyantly gay but rich and influential drag queen Bunny Breckinridge. Most famously of all, Ed Wood cast legendary horror icon Bela Lugosi, even though he was already dead before shooting began. That's certainly some sort of genius, even if he padded out Lugosi's scenes by casting his wife's chiropractor with a cape held over his face to attempt to hide that he looked nothing like him.

The story is laughable but it's a real story at least. There are flying saucers over Hollywood, wobbly flying saucers that the stock footage army can't shoot down. They're here because mankind has developed explosive technology far too quickly for its own good and we're apparently on the verge of destroying the universe. We know this because we watched The Day the Earth Stood Still too, the characters in the film know it because they've secretly managed to build a language computer that can translate every language into American, except perhaps English. What's more the aliens know that we've done it, so broadcast their plea to us in an attempt to get us to pay attention. They actually speak fluent American anyway but we're not supposed to notice that. We're not supposed to notice a lot in this film. As we apparently ignore the aliens' message like every other attempt to communicate with us, presumably the much discussed plans one to eight, they promptly mount plan nine. They're persevering souls, these aliens.

What's plan nine, you ask? Bunny lets us in on the secret: 'Ah, yes. Plan 9 deals with the resurrection of the dead. Long distance electrodes shot into the pineal and pituitary glands of the recently dead.' In other words they want to scare us by having zombies march on the nations' capitals, just like Ozymandias wanted to scare us in Watchmen by materialising aliens into those capitals. And I thought Night of the Living Dead was really about communism! Apparently it was a wake up call from aliens to stop building bombs. How naive I was! At least I'm not naive enough to know that plan nine will succeed where the others failed, because if anything's been drummed into us by these old movies it's that pesky aliens with electrode guns and nifty space age costumes never win out in the end over superior human intellect.

Fortunately they have a good try at it first, shooting their long distance electrodes into the pineal and pituitary glands of our cult cast and turning them into the coolest zombies that cinema ever saw. The first is Vampira, playing an unnamed character who was fortunately buried in a glorious gown, stylishly ripped so as to expose a tantalising amount of cleavage. She's the wife of the old man, the character Bela Lugosi is playing, even though Vampira was 35 and Lugosi over 73 and dead to boot, and even though his few minutes here are really from a movie Ed Wood never finished called Tomb of the Vampire.

I should add that Wood doesn't attempt to explain why these two characters would be married or even why Lugosi is playing a vampire when he's supposed to just be an old man. He does explain the old man's death at least, screening footage of Lugosi walking out of Tor Johnson's house and down his path, apparently tortured by the death of his wife. We can believe it, given that Vampira never looked better than here, even though her character spends the entire film dead. So he walks off screen to be mowed down by a car, one that is courteous enough to leave his shadow untouched. Of course Eros and Tanna, who comprise the entire army that alien ruler Bunny Breckinridge sends to save the universe, resurrect him too. They had taste, you have to give them that, even if they wear bejewelled corsets or tunics with medieval axes on them.

The victim in between the old man and his wife is Tor Johnson, who plays Inspector Daniel Clay with a vitality that doesn't even hint at what terrible shape he would be in five years later for The Beast of Yucca Flats. He joins the film because Vampira rises so quickly from the grave that she can even kill the gravediggers that are throwing earth on her coffin, even though she's magically somewhere else and interacting with them through some bizarre bending of the laws of physics given that they're in daylight and she's surrounded by darkness. Anyway Clay comes to investigate the murders of the gravediggers, only to become another zombie with cool make up, be promptly buried and then rise from the grave in a truly great resurrection scene that could only have been improved if Tor Johnson could stand up without making it seem like he had broken legs.

There are subplots that we're supposed to pay attention to but really don't care about. There's an airline pilot called Jeff Trent who gets hassled by a flying saucer, hanging outside his plane's window on a string, and he conveniently lives right next to the graveyard that it decides to park in and glow at us from. There's a general at the Pentagon, played by Lyle Talbot, who is investigating the aliens and he sends a colonel to California to investigate. There are cops everywhere, almost as many as there are Baptists, who all got bit parts because they financed the movie, but none of them are any use whatsoever. These aren't Keystone Kops but still if they'd stayed around about thirty years until Rodney King's day, given that it's precisely the same neighbourhood, he'd have kicked their collective asses and consequently saved Los Angeles from '53 deaths, 2,383 injuries, more than 7,000 fires, damages to 3,100 businesses, and nearly $1 billion in financial losses.' Let's hear it for idiot Hollywood cops.

What we really do is sit back and watch our favourite zombies lurch around the cardboard graveyard, obviously not the one that the real Bela Lugosi wanders around, and pick out all the best continuity errors. This sort of thing is really why Plan 9 became such a classic cult film and it's one good reason why it's so often regarded as the worst film of all time, being voted as such by the Golden Turkey Awards. Even if you don't pay attention you'll find mistakes because they'll leap out of the screen and slap you silly. Day becomes night and night becomes day, often during the same scene. Tombstones fall over. Flying saucers are described as cigar shaped but are really shaped like saucers. If you do pay attention, you'll have trouble keeping up with them. Flying saucers leave shadows on the space station they visit, just as soldiers leave shadows on backdrops that are supposed to be sky. Pilots have to fly their planes without controls. Zombies walk back and forth through the same graveyard because that's all Wood had built.

Yet this isn't about the ineptness of the filmmaking, it's the fact that Ed Wood just didn't care about such things. Sure, he wrote redundant dialogue, he ignored flagrant continuity errors and he built sets that would only really pass muster in a school play. He cast friends and financiers because it was the only way he could get the movie made, even going so far as to get baptised to secure that funding. It takes some mental gymnastics to really see what Ed Wood saw when he made this, but that's what turns this film into an immersive and interactive experience. That's why Fox Mulder on The X-Files watches it whenever he has to focus because it shuts down the logic centres of his brain and allows him to make the sort of intuitive leaps of logic that he needs. It's why people love it so much. As Wood once said, 'If you want to know me, see Glen or Glenda, that's me, that's my story, no question. But Plan 9 is my pride and joy.' And as Criswell asks us at the end, 'Can you prove that it didn't happen?'

Taxi Driver (1976)

Director: Martin Scorsese
Star: Robert De Niro

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.

It took me a long while to get Martin Scorsese, probably longer than any other director and I'm still not quite there. I think it took me four tries to even get through Mean Streets, the film that broke him as a major name, as well as two of the future stars here, Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. It took another couple of viewings to really understand what Scorsese was doing, and even then I needed to read up to find out about the metaphors he was using. It seemed unfocused and sloppy and pointless. I found that about a lot of his films, though bizarrely I seemed to really enjoy the ones that nobody else raved about, things like After Hours. I've persevered though and I'm starting to get just why he's regarded as one of the most powerful filmmakers working in the industry today. I'm still no fanboy but the more I see, and perhaps more importantly, the more I re-see, the better it all gets.

Taxi Driver opens with music as smoky as the exhaust from the cars that are everywhere in this film. It's soft saxophone music, courtesy of Bernard Herrmann's excellent last score, and it lulls us into a false sense of calm, very unlike anything he did for Alfred Hitchcock. There's a lot of calm here, as the film unfolds quietly and subtly for quite some time, something that feels more than a little surprising given that we know full well that it isn't going to end up that way. This is the movie where Robert De Niro goes full on batshit crazy, right? 'You talking to me? You talking to me? Well I'm the only one here.' We watch his eyes as the credits roll and as he applies for a job as a taxi driver and we wonder how he's going to get to where he's going.

He's Travis Bickle, a former marine with an honourable discharge, only 26 years old. He can't sleep nights, and it looks like it, given that he has a perpetual five o'clock shadow. He has a clean driving record and he'll work any time, anywhere. He wants long hours because he has nothing else to do, nothing at all and he has eight hours a day more than the rest of us to fill because he can't sleep. So he works the night shift, six till six, six days a week, sometimes more. It pays pretty well, especially given that he doesn't seem to ever spend anything except on pie and porn movies. When he's home he lies in bed or writes in his diary. It's this diary that provides the most overt direction, narrated in a poetry of sorts, but not delivered as such. Then again it's all coming from a taxi driver with mere education here and there.

Writer Mark Schrader plays along with the sax and keeps it calm, but it grows slowly but surely. Bickle is a driven man, and whatever is driving him builds as we watch. He needs a place to go, a destiny to fulfil, but he doesn't seem to have a clue what that will be. He just drives around all night until it manifests itself, all the while gradually tightening up like a coiled spring. He has headaches, bad headaches, perhaps associated with the fact tht he sees all the bad things in the city, the whores and the pimps and the muggers and a whole bunch of other subsets of city lowlife that get referred to by names I can't list in this review without having to set an adult rating on the blog. The profanity here is extreme but it's reserved for the right moments and so has all the more impact for not being used throughout.

He thinks he finds his destiny in the angel in white that he sees one day walking into the presidential campaign HQ for Senator Charles Palantine. She's Betsy and she's played by Cybill Shepherd, so she's good looking in a wholesome sort of way, very believable as a city dweller who would stand out among the usual sort of people Bickle meets in his cab. After all, he has to clean the semen off the back seat every night and sometimes the blood too. He tries to chat her up but he doesn't have much luck. He persuades her to go out to eat with him but while he throws out some lines about how great her eyes are, he mostly talks about how sucky her co-worker is, the one he thinks is competition. When he takes her out to a movie, he picks a porno called The Swedish Marriage Manual and that's the end of that.

Then he thinks he finds it in a twelve and a half year old prostitute who gets into his cab, apparently wanting out of her life, only to be hauled right back out by her pimp who throws Bickle twenty bucks to leave. He keeps looking at that twenty dollar bill and it rankles. He's already thinking, because his previous fare was Emperor Palpatine, I mean Senator Palantine, who seems to be interested in what the people have to say. He is standing for President, after all. Maybe he has to be interested. Palantine asks him what concerns him most and he explains that the city needs to be cleaned up because it's like an open sewer. So he can't fail to think about young Iris and that twenty dollar bill.

Perhaps what really does it is the Martin Scorsese cameo. He's another fare, a jealous husband who asks him to pull over to the curb and leave the meter running. He has a stream of consciousness monologue to run through, full of contradictions and obscenities, while he watches his wife's silhouette through some nigger's apartment window. It's all to validate the spiel he runs through about how he's going to kill her. It's an amazing monologue, even Bickle unable to turn it into dialogue. Maybe this is when he starts to think about real violence, and once he's there it escalates quickly and surely and everything begins to click into place.

We're almost ready for 'You talking to me?' and we have plenty of guns ready to back it up. We're also almost ready for the other two major stars of the film, not that they were that in 1976. The twelve and a half year old prostitute is twelve and a half year old Jodie Foster, already four years into her career, in a huge year for her that saw not just this but Bugsy Malone, Freaky Friday and The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane too. She is so much older than her years when she's coming onto De Niro, unzipping his fly and asking him if he wants to make it, yet she's every bit her age when she meets him for breakfast the next afternoon.

There have always been child actors in Hollywood and some were a lot younger than Foster when they started out. Only recently I saw It's a Gift, featuring Baby LeRoy becoming the youngest actor ever to earn a co-starring credit in a Hollywood movie, at age two. Compared to him Jodie Foster was an old woman when she started, at ten years old no less than five times his age. Yet she's always seemed the epitome of what a child actor should be, because she was never there just to be the token kid. She was an actress from moment one, every bit as capable as the more experienced adults she appeared opposite, apparently completely aware of what she was doing and what it meant. In many of these films she was the lead or the title character, including her first picture, Napoleon and Samantha in 1972, when she was the latter.

Her pimp is Harvey Keitel, playing a character best known as Sport. Amazingly he was less experienced on screen than Foster was, even though he was almost three times her age. He'd only made five films before this one, one of which was merely an uncredited role as a soldier. He presumably knew Jodie Foster as he'd beaten up her screen mother two years earlier in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. That was a Martin Scorsese film too, as were most of the films he'd made, really debuting in Scorsese's feature debut, I Call First aka Who's That Knocking at My Door, and then graduating from the Mean Streets that firmly established them both. After this one he was off and running and he hasn't looked back since. He has a penchant for unlikeable roles, but this one is up there with anything he's played, though even this hardly compares to Bad Lieutenant.

Really though it's hard to concentrate on anyone in this film except the two real lead characters: Travis Bickle and New York City. Robert De Niro was Oscar nominated, but he lost out to Peter Finch for Network, whose character's most memorable line, 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more!' could easily have been given to Bickle. We never know precisely what triggers him to act but it may not be anything in particular. It could just be the endless nights of insomniac driving through the worst parts of the Big Apple, witnessing every depravity known to man and trying to find a way to deal with it. He comes very close to the edge indeed and nearly falls off it. De Niro is almost never off screen and he's utterly magnetic, almost but not quite connecting with reality at any point in time. Whether he's making a Secret Service agent very nervous, failing to understand anything his date is talking about or firing empty guns at the TV and empty fingers at the porn movies, you just can't stop watching him.

The violence, when it comes, is a real shocker. It's the antithesis of every Hollywood gun battle you've ever seen, not even remotely slick and with apparently no planning whatsoever. There's no beauty to be found and no glorification either. It isn't pretty, it's just raw, visceral, inept violence, reminding of nothing less than a crime scene photo, not the safe staged sort of stuff you see on CSI but an unholy mess of out of control blood and gore and death. The understated follow up that speaks to his heroic stature is thoughtful. Sure, Bickle takes down some truly sick individuals, but the way in which he does so is nowhere near how we expect a hero to act, especially when we see what he was about to get up to beforehand. If not for circumstance it and he would have been something utterly different. The two parts to this, the noise and devastation followed by the quiet broken narration, combine to provide some of the best shocking and powerful scenes cinema has given us.

It's hard to say what Scorsese was trying to tell us here. Was this merely a character study? Is it really just speaking to loneliness, and Bickle's status as a 'walking contradiction', tormented by the loneliness but embracing it nonetheless. Was Taxi Driver speaking to the inevitability of a violent response when someone is effectively submerged in depravity without any opportunity to escape it, not even though sleep? Perhaps the most telling message is that sometimes there's a fine line between heroes and villains, a very fine line indeed.

I have a feeling that I'm vague about the meaning simply because there isn't one, at least not one in particular. Maybe with Taxi Driver Schrader and Scorsese merely asked questions and we come up with own our answers, just as Bickle answered his questions about the human condition and the legacy of Vietnam by doing what he did. If this is the case it makes the story subtle and intriguing, certainly not a bad thing. I think I'm getting it.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Star: Renee Falconetti

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.

Back in the nineties I was a silent movie novice. I hadn't really seen much silent cinema and I didn't know much at all about it, but even so I was massively shocked to find that an estimated 80% to 85% of silent films are completely lost. They don't exist any more. They're gone. And that's not just a few here and there, it's almost all of them! Any serious journey into silent film is therefore inherently doomed to being something of a scraping of the surface, with the abiding hope that at least the best and most important titles are what's left but the sad underlying surety that that isn't going to be entirely true. Some great stars are almost completely lost to us today except in photographs, to the degree of Theda Bara, who made forty films of which only three still exist.

The Passion of Joan of Arc isn't a lost film, but it was thought to be for many years. It was censored before its release in 1928 and the original negative was destroyed by fire. A second negative was reedited from alternative takes but this was also lost to fire. All seemed lost until 1981, when a complete Danish copy in very good condition was discovered in the closet of a Norwegian mental hospital, of all places. It has been professionally restored to what must be something very close to the original, and made available to the audiences of today along with a new soundtrack, Voices of Light. This composition by Richard Einhorn is a highly appropriate accompaniment, the choral grandeur fitting the religious subject magnificently.

I don't know exactly what I expected from The Passion of Joan of Arc. Knowing that what little experience I had with silent film was with slapstick shorts or Lon Chaney horror movies, this was always going to be a little different from anything I'd ever watched before. It's a French film by a Danish director at the end of the silent era about the trial and execution of Joan of Arc, made a mere eight years after she was canonised. All I knew about it was what I gleaned from watching a long and fascinating documentary on director Carl Theodor Dreyer immediately beforehand, which pointed out that it's based closely on the record of her trial that exists to this day in the Bibliothèque de la Chambre des Députés in Paris, and the script provides both exact transcriptions of the questions given to Joan and her answers. The tantalising glimpses of the film promised something very special indeed and those promises were soon fulfilled.

What Renee Falconetti does in this film could just be the greatest single acting performance I've ever seen, and while I watched it first in 2004 near the beginning of my voyage of discovery into classic film, I'll stick to that statement today, over 3,600 films later. She took the part of Joan of Arc after all the major French actresses of the time refused it, due to Dreyer's insistence that part of the role involved being shaved. She was a stage actress who never appeared again in film, and that choice helped lead to the role being identified with her forever. After seeing her stunning performance, I can understand why. Even restricted into performing without a voice, she is still mesmerising from the first moment we see her.

Her eyes are huge pools that shine brightly and shed frequent tears, though these tears never alter her demeanour. She never weeps. The tears merely trickle and she ignores them as if they are of no consequence. She is also frequently still, her head tilted piously, looking intently at something only she can see, while the judges and elder priests are far more dynamic and obviously unsure of how to proceed. Lips quiver, eyes wander, gestures are hurled and exhortations made, nervous tics and a variety of indignant reactions make themselves apparent, while Joan remains still and kneeling. She has to put up with plenty, both as a character and as an actress, yet she always manages to be something above everyone around her.

She looks holy, pure and simple, and never loses that look regardless what happens to her. Holiness is a characteristic that is nigh on impossible to act, being something that inherently comes from within. I grew up active in the Church of England, meeting and working with many church leaders and authorities who were often good men, but I only ever met one who I could truly call holy: David Hope, at the time the Bishop of Wakefield but later Archbishop of York. Somehow Falconetti taps into that holiness, radiating it as she is bled, with stark realism, to alleviate fever; prodded with a stick; ridiculed; humiliated; forced into a false confession; shaved bald; and, of course, after she recants her confession, eventually burned at the stake as a relapsed heretic.

If there was anything more to want in this film beyond Falconetti's tour de force performance as Joan, there's still much more to experience. Dreyer put together a film that still looks unique today, over eighty years after it was made, and that puts it into a very select company indeed. I added a caveat in 2004 that I didn't then have enough background to suggest that The Passion of Joan of Arc is something apart from everything else cinema has ever given us, and to be frank I still don't. Since that first viewing I have found a number of other reference points, more in some of Sergei Eisenstein's films than much of the rest of Dreyer's filmography which I've been happily working through, but this still seems like something out there on its own and benefitting to no small degree from that fact.

For a start, Dreyer concentrates almost exclusively on close-ups, so we experience the story through individual expressions. It's immediately obvious that Dreyer chose his cast for their looks, something obvious not only because this is a silent film that relies entirely on visuals, but because these characters are so easily distinguishable. We see the faces of so many of those judging her, but never in one mass. They are consistently separate from each other, or only in small groups, as if they were disconnected jigsaw pieces. It's up to our minds to put the puzzle together. The camera pans across these small groups, zooming quickly in and out. We remember prominent warts and long beards that turn faces into triangles. One judge is wizened like Boris Karloff in The Mummy, another has eyes that bug like Peter Lorre's, yet another is bald but for a tuft of hair on either side of his scalp like demonic horns. The wizened judge is superb: while others rage he remains constantly calm and collected, yet calculating like an evil wizard.

These faces occupy sets as distinctive as they are. They were designed by a man called Hermann Warm, who had also made the stunning avant garde sets for one of the great expressionistic silent horror films, 1920's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, which I had seen shortly before this film in 2004. These are highly minimalist and starkly white, so as not to distract from the close-ups of features. They don't resemble anything I've seen elsewhere and really belong in the era, yet another sad reason to lament its passing.

The camerawork is simply incredible and must have been highly innovative in 1928. The cinematographer was Rudolph Maté, who I knew even in 2004 as the director of one of my favourite films noir, the original DOA. What he does is so artful that it's impossible not to find serious depths beyond something that on the surface looks so impeccably cool. I didn't even need to force myself to look for meaning, the camerawork just drew me into it. One notable shot shows us a barred window entirely in silhouette so that it looks like a flag. We watch the spears above a bunch of marching helmets, pan across a bunch of raised hands, follow a stool carried aloft. Are these looks upward telling us where Joan will soon be?

Maté's camera is rarely still and each shot is short and sweet, as minimalist as Warm's sets. The close-ups are occasionally so close up that the camera has to pan down them for us to see faces in their entirety. Even the torture implements are shown in close-up, sometimes so much so that they become abstract puzzles. We see revolving spikes but not what they belong to, pan down links of chain but don't know what they connect to. One man turns a wheeled torture device so fast that we see him only stroboscopically. As you might expect from a film with expressionistic influence, shadow is well used, the shadows of swinging hooks at expressionistic angles and a helmet and pike reflected against a pillar are particularly impressive.

It's incredible to realise that all of this stunning work was done over eighty years ago, including amazing shots where the camera is suspended from an arch and rotated 180 degrees vertically to follow soldiers through an archway from outside to inside. When I grabbed a copy of the IMDb Top 250 in 2004, The Passion of Joan of Arc was the newest of its seven movies from the twenties, made only six years after Nosferatu, the oldest of them all. It's a silent film that came out at the very end of the silent era, a full year after The Jazz Singer had ushered in sound. In fact the next movie Dreyer made, the inferior but highly stylish horror film Vampyr, is about as close as I've ever seen to a silent film with sound.

And while Maté, Warm and especially Falconetti excelled themselves, the whole thing was put together by Carl Theodor Dreyer, one of the most utterly uncompromising directors that cinema has ever seen. He made no panderings to commerciality whatsoever, something of course almost impossible nowadays without becoming an inherently obscure underground filmmaker, but that uncompromising nature led to a masterpiece like this. If Dreyer couldn't make a film his way he wouldn't make the film at all; and that's why his career of over forty years only left us thirteen films, just like that of Stanley Kubrick, in this way his closest equivalent in recent times.

Dreyer also broke many cardinal rules of direction, long before any modern equivalents followed suit. He often deliberately hired actors who were not professionals and he frequently forbade them to use make up. I can't help but wonder what he would do were he to be starting out today, in a world where blockbusters have to advertise themselves on talk shows and cereal boxes and Happy Meals. Would he be able to find financing to make his films? Would the festival circuit keep such a vision as his alive or would it exclude him because he wouldn't play their games?

The Passion of Joan of Arc profoundly affected me as a work of art but it touched me in another way too. If not for that unexpected copy in that Norwegian mental asylum closet, this masterpiece would have been lost from our culture. Now I've seen it, that's a loss I don't want to think about, yet I have to think about it. If it was only saved by chance, which other masterpieces have already been lost to us and which are in danger of being lost? Most importantly, what can we do about the situation? Films are often inspirational, providing us with opportunities to reevaluate our perspectives on life and make conscious decisions on how to change. This one and its close brush with non-existence made me very interested indeed in the fight to keep culture alive.

After I was shocked by the extent of how much of that culture has already been lost, I investigated on a much wider scale and didn't like much of what I found out. The preservation of culture, whether film, book or music, is an expensive and time consuming task and, while there are many individuals and organisations dedicating much effort, there's so much more that needs to be done. What's most upsetting is that it isn't just a case of finding enough people to do a job and enough money to pay them, as the current state of copyright legislation means that there are many legal obstacles thrown into the path of those who already have technological obstacles to cope with.

It's bad enough to know that I won't ever be able to see every Hitchcock, every Chaney, every Chaplin, because some, or sometimes most, of their output are lost films, but it's somehow worse to know that there are many examples of films that exist but are withheld from release for some reason or other. When writing this review in 2004 I singled out films like the Mr Moto and Charlie Chan series as good examples, but fortunately times have changed even since then and these have now been released onto DVD in box sets that I happily snapped up. So there's definitely a lot of good being done, but there are other examples out there that are still suppressed, withheld or banned.

It can't be a good state of affairs when the public is unable to experience its own culture. We live in a technological age where there is no valid reason for this culture to disappear, but political correctness and bad legislation is causing exactly that. Especially through the gnarled mess that is the state of modern copyright, we're losing more films, more music and more literature every day and frankly that sucks, as does the fact that it takes pirates working outside the bounds of law to preserve it, the modern day equivalents of Henri Langlois and his compatriots in France during the Second World War who risked their lives to save films from destruction by the Nazis. The Passion of Joan of Arc was almost lost to us. Let's work to make sure that nothing else is.

The Seven Samurai (1954)

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Stars: Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura

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.

I'd waited for so long to see this movie, possibly more so than any other film in the entire IMDb Top 250 list and I caught up with it in 2004 courtesy of the Independent Film Channel. I'd seen so many clips from Kurosawa films, but only a couple of complete movies, Yojimbo many years earlier and its sequel Sanjuro much more recently. Even those who have only dipped into classic film tend to have at least heard of Kurosawa and realise how important he and his films are. This one tends to stand above all of them in the regard of critics, one of the most influential films ever made, most obviously but not restricted to the American remake, The Magnificent Seven. It's the first place to go to begin to understand why Kurosawa is so important and the taiko drums that back the rakishly angled kanji credits are only the beginning.

We're in the late 16th century, when Japan was torn by almost constant civil war, known as the Warring States Period, and as the introduction tells us, farmers were frequently crushed by cruel bandits. We soon see a pack of the latter about to crush a village of the former, riding up like a whirlwind to charge down on it from the mountains, only to surprisingly leave it alone. They realise that they looted this particular village the year before so decide to wait a few months until the harvest is in before doing so again. That leaves the villagers, who notice their arrival and prompt departure, at least a little while to work out what to do about it. They're a pitiful bunch to say the least, suggesting everything from outright capitulation to mass suicide. Where's God, they ask. Land tax, forced labour, war, drought and now bandits. Where's God, indeed.

Only one man seems to want to fight, the rest merely lamenting that it's the lot of farmers to suffer. To highlight his importance, he's the only one we see in real close-up, amongst an expansive village population. Watching the number of people in frame here is a real eye opener. Kurosawa finding innovative ways to move and position crowds into and within the frame. The choreography here is magnificent and it's impossible to ignore, especially as Kurosawa only had a 4:3 aspect ratio to work with, an epic of this scale screaming for widescreen. Fortunately for this lone villager, the patriarch of the village backs him, decreeing that they'll fight but to do so they'll need help. They'll need to hire samurai, but hungry ones who will work for what they have to offer in payment, nothing but three square meals a day. Gisaku, this grandfather of the village, is old and infirm but he's a savvy soul.

The four men that head out to find these hungry samurai don't have any luck and end up crouching in a building to shelter from the rain. They're out of rice, out of hope and aware of their failure to the point of tears. It's only when they argue about going home empty handed that they luck into being in the right place at the right time, to witness what Roger Ebert has suggested may well be the origin of the sequence now routine in action movies to establish the credentials of the hero through a feat unrelated to the main story at large. This one establishes an aging ronin called Kambei Shimada, who shaves off his topknot, symbolic of the honour of a samurai, and dresses as a priest in an effort to save a boy who is being held hostage by a thief who has taken refuge in a barn.

Of course it works, because he's played by no less a name than Takashi Shimura, already on his eleventh Kurosawa movie, with Stray Dog, Rashomon and an astounding performance in Ikiru behind him, all three films undeniable classics. The same year he made this film, the largest production ever mounted in Japan up until that time, he made no less than eight other films too including another massively influential movie, the original Gojira. Incidentally filming these two movies in the same year nearly bankrupted Toho Studios, but in the end both films made them famous far beyond Japanese borders. Naturally our four villagers promptly beg his favour and he accepts, to lead what will become the seven samurai of the title. The second gets to him before even the villagers do, an idealistic young samurai from an aristocratic family called Katsushiro Okamoto who is so impressed by his act that he begs to be his disciple. Actor Isao Kimura had debuted five years earlier in Kurosawa's Stray Dog and also appeared in Ikiru, but this was perhaps his most prominent and memorable role.

Just as we got the potential origin of the establishing sequence for the hero with Kambei's saving of the child hostage, we also get what may be the origin of the team recruitment sequences so reminiscent of American action movies of the seventies like The Dirty Dozen and The Guns of Navarone, as Kambei recruits another five ronin to meet the quota he feels is required. Okamoto has already been counted, though he doesn't become official until later, and the rest arrive gradually. They're a varied bunch, highly memorable and distinctive. We certainly spend more time with some than others but each of them gets his moment in the spotlight and the opportunity to develop his character within a wider story.

Gorobei Katayama is a careful cherub of a man, looking more like a Buddha than a samurai, who finds Kambei himself even more interesting than the concept of the work. He's seeking in friendship morethan anything else and his loyalty is fierce. A skilled archer, he backs up Kambei in building the team and in planning the defence of the village. He finds the next recruit, Heihachi Hayashida, in a back yard chopping firewood because he's hungry and has no money. Then comes Kyuzo, the unflappable epitome of the samurai spirit, a master swordsman who they witness winning a duel almost like it's a textbook. He's played by Seiji Miyaguchi, who is highly recognisable to anyone with a background in Japanese films, not least because of his highly distinctive face. The sixth samurai is Shimada's former right hand man Shichiroji, found completely by accident.

The last of the group is Kikuchiyo, not really a samurai at all, who arrives drunk as a skunk with false credentials which if they were to be trusted suggest that he's thirteen years old. He's a wonder to behold, a bundle of energy fighting everyone and everything including the instinct to fall asleep and sober up. We've already met him, as he was hanging around during the hostage incident, and so we already know that he's played by Toshiro Mifune in full on wild man mode. He's a monkey, a pirate and a jester all wrapped up in one package and he has a sword taller than my wife in an obvious statement of machismo, possibly because his name translates roughly to One Thousand Generations of Chrysanthemums. I can't quite bring myself to call this okatana a penis extension given that this is Toshiro Mifune we're talking about but that's basically what it is.

He joins them but only in a way, initially rejected as a member of the group but following them anyway, initially apart from the others not just figuratively but literally. He's the wildcard for sure, but he proves his worth on a number of occasions, not least immediately after arriving in the village, as they're welcomed rather akin to the plague, due to the fear of the farmers. It's Kikuchiyo who comes up with an imaginative solution to the problem and breaks the ice in no uncertain terms. He's good at that, certainly the comedic element in the story, and I get the impression that the laughter he tended to elicit, especially from the children of the village, wasn't acting in the slightest. Certainly he was allowed a lot of freedom to improvise.

Like many of Kurosawa's films, The Seven Samurai is at heart a western, only where westerns tend to feature gunslingers in the Wild West, Kurosawa's easterns feature men with swords in feudal Japan. The story comes straight from the western tradition, but it's full of quintessential Japanese history and culture, reevaluating to a wide audience just what being a samurai meant. Many of these ronin exhibit strange behaviour to anyone used to merely the traditional viewpoint of their code but that's very deliberate on Kurosawa's part. The film is also so much more than just a western (or eastern). One of the reasons it's such a powerful success is that it really is many things, all fully formed and explored in the nearly three and a half hour running time. Despite such length and the fact that it's a black and white film in a foreign language, it isn't boring in the slightest, from the initial scenes with the pitiful villagers to the full fledged battle in the rain.

There are so many story arcs involved here that it's impossible to really explore them all in a single viewing. Even twice through I'm sure that there's plenty more depth for me to find in the future. As a friend and Kurosawa fan has suggested, it's a film to grow with. I don't know how many times you've worked through it thus far, Robert, but I know there are more to come. Most obviously it's an action film, a samurai movie, but that's merely scratching at the surface. While there are no armies involved, it has enough military strategy to effectively count as a war film. It's even a romance, between young Katsushiro and a paranoid villager's daughter called Shino, the one whose father cut her hair and disguised her as a boy just so he can keep her safe from the samurai who he fears are about to ravage his village.

Most of all though it's a character study. What seems like every character here learns and grows and evolves, not just the seven samurai of the title. Most obviously Katsuhiro comes of age, as a warrior and a man, experiencing both love and death at around the same time, but he's far from the only one. Gorobei seeks friendship, Kikuchiyo action and Katsuhiro learning. Kyuzo merely seeks a closer perfection of his art. Yet all of them seek something and all of them find something in the time they share in the village, though not always what they expected. They learn a good deal about what farmers are and why they are why they are. Their eyes are opened.

The villagers evolve too, even more palpably than the samurai, both as individuals and as a group. These farmers, who had previously killed fleeing samurai and saved their armour and weapons, find a respect for these seven men who put their lives on the line to save their village. They learn through association as much as through direct training, the whole timbre of the place altering completely as they come to trust their saviours and then themselves. Kikuchiyo is the link between the two, helping each side to gain insight and to come to terms with each other. It's heavily suggested that he's a former farmer's son who escaped the death of his family to become who he is.

The Seven Samurai is undoubtedly the most characterful and well defined jidaigeki or Japanese period movie ever made, not to mention the most influential. While spaghetti westerns most obviously sprung from another Kurosawa film, Yojimbo, this had an influence too. It could be seen as the first Japanese blockbuster but there are too many negative connotations to that word to really allow it. As I've already mentioned, it did a good deal to define the format of action movies generally. Most obviously it's been remade in what seems like every other genre. The Magnificent Seven took it to the west, Battle Beyond the Stars took it into space and Sholay took to to India, apparently the highest grossing Indian film of all time. A fresh American remake is in the planning stages, set in the modern day with paramilitary mercenaries defending a Thai village.

As soon as I saw one Kurosawa I wanted to see another. When I first saw this in 2004 it was the second I could remember and it left me eager to see more. It overwhelmed me to quite some degree but left me in no doubt of its importance and I certainly felt enriched for the privilege of having seen it. Now, watching again, I have much more of a background in jidaigeki and in Kurosawa's films too, with a even dozen under my belt from Sanshiro Sugata in 1943 to Rhapsody in August in 1991. Kurosawa is justly known for his samurai films but he made much more, including notable films noir like Stray Dog and The Bad Sleep Well.

It's hard to argue against this as his masterpiece, but with so many masterpieces to choose from there's room for a few others too. There were four others in the IMDb Top 250 when I grabbed it in late 2004: Ikiru, Yojimbo, Ran and 1950's Rashomon, which might just be as influential a film as this one. Three more have made the list since: Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress and High and Low. I could make a solid claim for a few others too and compared to many other directors, Kurosawa wasn't that prolific, especially late on in his career. He's a director of world cinema who can simply not be ignored. What George Lucas has stolen from him, albeit with much acknowledgement, is only the top of the barrel. Everyone else has copied him too and they're still doing it. That's patently obvious when watching The Seven Samurai.

The Princess Bride (1987)

Director: Rob Reiner
Stars: Cary Elwes and Robin Wright

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.

William Goldman's novel, The Princess Bride, is an astounding piece of modern fantasy, not to mention adventure, comedy, romance and whatever else he managed to cram into the book. It took the old hackneyed fairy tale concept that's been gradually done to death over the last few centuries and reinvented it along precisely the same lines it ran in the first place. I'm still not entirely sure as to why this works. Maybe the process of distilling the entire fairy tale genre down to its essence and brewing it back up again makes it both entirely familiar but somehow still fresh at the same time. Rob Reiner's film version, based on Goldman's own screenplay, does exactly the same thing. There's absolutely nothing new here in the slightest but somehow the nothing new in the slightest still seems awesomely fresh.

We start with a book, being read by Peter Falk to his grandson, Fred Savage, who play such archetypal characters that they don't even have names. They merely serve as the framework for the story and pop back every once in a while to ensure that we're paying attention to the rules of the game. All that's really important is the book, naturally called The Princess Bride, and written by a fictional writer called S Morgenstern, a pseudonym Goldman adopted for at least one other book too, The Silent Gondoliers. It tells of the True Love that arises between Princess Buttercup and her farm boy, Westley and it should be noted that this isn't just everyday run of the mill true love, hence the capitals; it's more, well, the sort of thing that books are written about.

The problem is that Buttercup believes that Westley is dead, slain by the dread pirate Roberts who never leaves captives alive. As it happens he has merely become the dread pirate Roberts, just the latest in a long line of them, and he comes to Buttercup's rescue five years later when she has been kidnapped for ransom. It's the 500th anniversary of the kingdom of Florin and the evil prince of the realm is taking her for his bride, though amazingly enough it isn't the prince who's behind the kidnapping. It's really another villainous character by the name of Vizzini who wants to blame it all on the next country along, called Guilder, and start a war. He's the leader of a fascinating trio, as different in character as they are in height.

Vizzini is the brains of the operation, played by an actor who for years I've recognised and enjoyed in bizarre films like Nice Girls Don't Explode, made the same year as this. However I've only recently broken my long running inability to ever remember his name: he's Wallace Shawn. He's a highly regarded actor known far more for serious films made for French director Louis Malle, such as My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street, or at the other end of the art film scale, for voicing Rex the Dinosaur in Toy Story, but I think it'll always be Nice Girls Don't Explode and The Princess Bride for me. He brings such a sense of arrogance to proceedings that it's difficult to imagine it equalled, let alone bettered by anyone else. 'Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?' he asks. 'Morons.' I don't know anyone who could make that sound more dismissive without overacting and he doesn't overact here in the slightest.

Being a rather diminutive character, he's backed up by two much more physically able fellows: a Spanish swordsman called Inigo Montoya and a giant called Fezzik. The Spaniard is played by Mandy Patinkin, who has long hair and looks stunningly different to anyone who has got used to him on TV shows like Chicago Hope, Dead Like Me or Criminal Minds, this being perhaps his most obvious film role and certainly his favourite. He tries to outdo every romantic swashbuckler in the book, from Douglas Fairbanks Sr onwards, in his twenty year quest to find the man with six fingers on his right hand who killed his father. He even has his speech memorably prepared: 'I am Inigo Montoya,' he'll say. 'You killed my father. Prepare to die.'

Fezzik the giant is played by the huge professional wrestler Andre the Giant, so natural a candidate that he was understandably the one and only choice for director Rob Reiner. However it took so long to get the film off the ground that the character was almost played back in the seventies by a then unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger, who of course had become such a huge star by 1987 that he was way beyond the film's budget. Andre looks perfect as Fezzik and it's easy to believe that the feats of physical strength he performs are real, though as it turns out he was actually one of the least able members of the cast physically at the time.

Andre was a real giant, in the medical sense, as opposed to his closest modern wrestling equivalent, The Big Show, who is merely very big indeed, and by 1987 his back problems were such that he couldn't even walk up the hills unaided, let alone catch princesses leaping out of windows. Even Andre's thick French accent is completely forgiveable, given that the country names point to a Dutch setting, and the Netherlands are only a stone's throw away from France. Then again, the entire film was shot in England and Ireland. Hey, it's the old country. Fairy tales are older than the United States. Get used to it.

That's not the only serious truth here. The young boy at the beginning of the film is bored by the entire concept of having a book read aloud to him before it's even opened. He's obviously part of the ADD generation and in the person of Fred Savage, star of TV's The Wonder Years, he could almost be described as a spokesman for his entire age group. Yet by the time Princess Buttercup is about to get eaten alive by the shrieking eels he's become engrossed despite himself. By the last page he's so caught up in the story that he even admits to be open to listening to the kissing bits, an uncomfortable truth for young boys everywhere, I'm sure. I'm reminded very much of my youngest stepson, who as a young teenager struggling with ADHD was always trying to avoid things that he'd end up thoroughly enjoying.

In fact it's the script that is the most magic thing of all here, hardly surprising really given that Goldman wrote the book in the first place, which like every source novel is inevitably better than the resulting movie. What the book doesn't have, though, is this incredible cast. The bit parts are moments to shine for comedians like Carol Kane, Mel Smith, Peter Cook and especially Billy Crystal, who made Rob Reiner laugh so much he had to keep leaving the set. In fact Mandy Patinkin, who learned fencing with lead star Cary Elwes to lend authenticity to their epic fighting scene which they fought without doubles, later claimed that the only injury he sustained during filming came through stifling his laughter when playing opposite Crystal.

The principal roles have about as much depth as the bit parts but then again, that's entirely the point. The good guys are good and the bad guys are bad and that's how fairy tales work. So Princess Buttercup is unfailing in her belief that her Westley will save her; Westley himself is indestructible, even when dead; and the evil six fingered Count is evil to the core. Actors Robin Wright Penn, Cary Elwes and Christopher Guest are perfectly fine, but for my money, the best roles are the ones in between the leads and the bit parts, people like Vizzini, Inigo Montoya and Fezzik the Giant; and so it's always that guy from Nice Girls Don't Explode, Mandy Patinkin and Andre the Giant that I'll remember.

In short, Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride is a small slice of the magic you'll find within the pages of S Morgenstern's The Princess Bride, which you'll find within William Goldman's The Princess Bride. Reiner has a mere hour and a half of screen time to attempt to transfer that magic over to celluloid, and he naturally fails at the completely impossible task. Maybe if he'd have been filming in this new century, he could have pitched it as a trilogy of three hour movies, but that's idle conjecture. It may be an impossible job under any circumstances, but Reiner does come about as close as anyone could hope to get.

Chinatown (1974)

Director: Roman Polanski
Stars: Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway

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.

Smoky music by Jerry Goldsmith that Mike Hammer would have loved sets the timeframe wonderfully as Chinatown begins, even though we're merely watching a long list of credits that includes John Huston, who provides a notable acting performance here, and ends with director Roman Polanski, the last such credit he would earn in the US. Given that we're looking at an elegant font on a dark and faded sepia background, it's not difficult to realise that we're not in 1974, when Chinatown was made. Sure enough we're a lot further back, so far back that the cars come in any colour we like as long as it's black and Seabiscuit is still on the front page of the Racing Record without the benefit of a biopic to advertise the name.

It's 1937 and it looks precisely like 1937, as well it should, given that notable critics have cited Chinatown as having the best design ever seen in a American film, courtesy of production designer Richard Sylbert and his team. It's hard for me to buy into that accolade, having seen both Blade Runner and Brazil, but it's definitely something to experience in its original anamorphic widescreen glory, full of sumptuous visuals, skilful and deliberate composition and with plenty to look at, whether it's the focus of the frame or not. Do not watch this the way I first saw it, in fullscreen on television, under any circumstances. While it's always going to be a powerful film noir, quite possibly the best such ever made in colour, in fullscreen it's a shadow of its former self, literally half a movie.

We're watching Jake Gittes, who is a Marlowe-esque private eye of the old school, with an abundance of cynical sarcasm, a receding hairline and a stock of whiskey bottles in his office ready for any occasion. He's played to everyday perfection by Jack Nicholson, way before he let the Joker get into his blood and started overacting for a living. He should have been good because writer Robert Towne wrote the part specifically with his way of speaking in mind, but it's more than that: both Nicholson and Towne thankfully resist the temptation to turn it into a star vehicle. Private eyes should be completely inconspicuous because by definition they don't want to be seen, especially when they're the sort of private eyes who look into the personal lives of people having affairs and take pictures of them.

Gittes is hired to look into the personal life of the chief engineer of the Department of Water and Power in Los Angeles, Hollis Mulwray. He's apparently cheating on his wife who wants to know for sure and so almost browbeats the detective into investigating. Of course he quickly discovers that there's a lot more to the story, film noir never being about transparent storytelling. Mulwray is indeed seeing a beautiful young woman on the side, but it turns out that the wife doing the hiring isn't the real wife after all and that real wife sues Gittes. To make it even stranger, she quickly drops the lawsuit but Gittes refuses to accept it. His thinking is that whoever has made a fool out of Mulwray has also made a fool out of him, so he perseveres regardless of circumstances.

He discovers that Mulwray, who is a big fish in a big pond, has stumbled onto something much bigger than he is, something to do with bringing water to the deserts around Los Angeles. There's a drought on and tempers are flaring with the heat. There are city meetings to propose dams, through which farmers drive their herds of sheep in protest and there are threats to blow up the city reservoirs. Strangest of all, while water is still in very short supply, it's also being dumped out of these reservoirs into the ocean each night and people are turning up drowned in dry river beds. It doesn't take long for Mulwray to be included in that company and this story promptly becomes a murder investigation, among many other things. There are webs of corruption, layers of fraud and even seedier revelations to come.

Much of this has a solid basis in history, being what historian Margaret Leslie Davis has called a metaphor for the rape of the Owens Valley, part of the California Water Wars. Mulwray is a thinly disguised version of William Mulholland, a self taught Irish engineer who had arrived in Los Angeles when it only contained 9,000 people and effectively masterminded the construction of its entire water supply up until 1928, when the St Francis Dam collapsed mere hours after he had personally inspected it, an event that is specifically referenced during a city meeting in Chinatown. This was the worst civil engineering disaster in 20th century America, the resulting hundred foot torrent swamping much of Ventura County and burying utterly the town of Santa Paula, leaving 450 people dead, including 42 schoolchildren. The California Water Wars were hardly a minor event, ripe for fictionalisation.

Given the superb cinematography, the admirable production design and the wonderful script, it seems strange to focus on something as basic as Jack Nicholson's nose, but Chinatown, as befits what is really an old black and white film noir that just happens to be a little newer and in colour, doesn't try to make its characters look pretty. The gritty reality of the story really hits home through the device of having Nicholson's nose bandaged or at least notably damaged for at least two thirds of the film, as a reward for, well, being nosy. Nicholson knows well that Gittes is a vaguely decent man making a living in a vaguely indecent way, who becomes notably more damaged as the film goes on, both on a metaphorical and a literal level, and if a star of his stature is happy to put his art before his vanity for the sake of the movie, then it must be something special. He wasn't the major name back then that he is today but he certainly wasn't nobody either.

Towne's script is a peach, one which brought the film its only Academy Award from eleven nominations. The Writers Guild of America West named it the greatest original screenplay of all time, even more notable because it was Towne's first, as he had previously only adapted other work. In fact he was initially hired to adapt The Great Gatsby but as he felt he couldn't improve on it, took less money to write a script of his own. I'm sure he never regretted that decision. He does nothing less than reinvent film noir here, both in the sweep of the thing and in the details, but he reserves the right to leave his own stamp on the genre. It's rare to see noir done both traditionally and well in latter years, LA Confidential being possibly the best other great example of the colour era.

There are genre traditions here, not least that the story is told through the lead character's perception of events. Gittes is in every scene of the film and when at one point he's knocked unconscious the film fades to black until he recovers. The tone is uniformly dark. Anyone truly innocent is little more than a victim, there for the talented and more morally flexible people to exploit. The only really good looking character is Mulwray's wife Evelyn, played by the ever-sensual Faye Dunaway, but of course she's firmly in the role of the femme fatale so good looking comes with the territory. Towne wrote this character with plenty of depth and Dunaway develops it notably over the course of the film, so it's impossible to pigeonhole her. In the end she's possibly the only selfless character there is. Everyone else fits somewhere on the bad scale from two bit thug to evil mastermind, and of course somewhere in there is the director of the film, Roman Polanski.

He was never afraid to turn to the dark side, which of course is a prerequisite for anyone making a film noir, but he takes Towne's script and runs with it, taking it into some truly dubious territory, so much so that the movie certainly couldn't have been made while the Production Code was still in effect and it probably couldn't be made today, at least by a major studio. Polanski, of course, is rather notably associated with the dark side, having already been embroiled in more controversy than most directors or most people will ever be. Polanski was involved in controversy even before he was old enough to know what the word meant, so a modern film noir that touches on taboo subjects seems like a natural choice for him.

He's a good parallel to the title, which at once has nothing to do with the story and everything to do with it. Hardly any of the film takes place in Chinatown, but it's always being referred to, because when you ask questions in Chinatown you find answers to questions that shouldn't be asked. As writer Robert Towne later explained, he based the concept on an experienced vice cop who pointed out that in Chinatown with its maze of different accents, gangs and cultures you never really know what's actually going on: by doing anything at all you could find yourself either stopping a crime or unwittingly assisting in one. The only way to avoid doing the wrong thing is to do nothing at all, thus leading to the memorable line, 'Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.'

Polanski was born in Paris but moved at the age of three with his parents from France to Poland, a really unwise choice of destination for a Jewish family in 1936. It's hardly surprising that his parents were soon moved again, to Nazi concentration camps where his mother was killed, no doubt one of the major influences to his other film in the IMDb Top 250, The Pianist. Some time later in 1969, his pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, was murdered by followers of Charles Manson at their Los Angeles home, an event that surely flavoured his next few films including a violent version of Macbeth as well as this one. Had his life been freer from tragedy, I'm sure Chinatown would have been a very different film with a very different ending. Certainly writer Robert Towne and producer Robert Evans wanted something very different, but I'm happy that Polanski got his way on it. Towne even admitted he'd been wrong when the film was rereleased in 1999.

Towne intended for the story to be the first part in a trilogy, each about the manipulation of a different critical and finite municipal resource and focused around detective Jake Gittes. Jack Nicholson believed so much in Towne's vision that he has conspiciously refused to play a detective again, so that this one remain the only one associated with him. He returned to the role in 1990 for the second part in the trilogy, The Two Jakes, which he also directed, which Towne wrote and which included a number of other returning cast members. It centred on oil and was not a success, never mind the wild success that Chinatown was, so the third and final part, Gittes vs Gittes, about land and the LA freeway system, has never been made.

When I first saw Chinatown, Polanski was living in Europe, unable even to enter the United States for fear of a fresh arrest for the statutory rape and drugging of a thirteen year old girl at Jack Nicholson's house. As I post this review, he's in house arrest in Gstaad, having been taken into custody by Swiss police on an international arrest warrant while travelling to accept a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival. Maybe one day, if Polanski gets out of jail, he'll have enough dark left in him to make a real successor to Chinatown.

Two Seconds (1932)

Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Star: Edward G Robinson

Even in 1932 a mere year after Little Caesar, Edward G Robinson was trying to vary things. He may have played a lot of gangsters, but it's amazing how few of them contained anything that could remotely be regarded as glorification and it's just as amazing how often he didn't play gangsters too. Here he's John Allen on his way to the electric chair, so close to it that we don't even see him leave the cell. We just watch the college boy in the execution chamber explain that Prof Summers has him there so he can report back to his sociology class on the experience and ask how long it'll take the condemned man to die. The doctor explains that a powerful man like Allen won't die immediately. He'll survive for perhaps the two seconds that provides our title, but that will still be long enough for him to relive his whole life.

Sure enough, it provides the rest of our story in flashback. He's a rivetter working twenty five stories up in the air putting skyscrapers together and that's something that gives him a different perspective on life. He looks down at the world, at all the lawyers and fancy women and they look like nothing. He tells his flatmate and coworker Bud Clark that they're a 'crawling bunch of little flies' and he doesn't want anything to do with them. He's done pretty good at that so far too, Clark being the one with a girlfriend, though the pair of them keep trying to double date with him bringing along blind dates that look like the back end of fire trucks. That's Allen talking too, not me, but who am I to argue with Edward G Robinson?

It's ducking out of one of those blind dates that he finally meets a girl of his own. She's Shirley Day and she's a nickel a dance girl at the cheap dance place that he finds himself in. I utterly didn't recognise Vivienne Osborne in the part, even though I saw another of her roles only last week. She looks fine here if suitably cheap, but she's completely different from Vincent Price's glutton of a first wife in Dragonwyck twelve years later in what would be her last role. That difference suggests quite a talent, but she's far better here as she has a notable edge to her that's perfect for the precode era, delivering lines like, 'Since when did you begin to examine a dollar to see who its father was?' with panache, let alone, 'Another cup of tea, and bring the bottle this time!'

John and Shirley hit it off but promptly get kicked out of the place, because she gets stuck with someone else while he's getting more tickets, he gets fresh and so in comes John Allen to deck him. It helps that he's the first character she's ever met who doesn't spin a line on her, in fact he's so honest he's almost rude, social niceties obviously not being his thing. She's a nice girl too, dancing at night so she can earn money to study through the day, and she sets up dates with him at lectures at the public library. In fact she's such a nice girl and he's such a down to earth guy that we can only wonder how he's going to end up in the electric chair at the end of a mere 67 minute running time, especially given that we're almost halfway in already.

Well, needless to say, she has designs and so they don't end up at the library after all. She drags him to a nightclub instead and gets him drunk on bootleg liquor, drunk enough that she can drag him to the nearest justice of the peace to make a rather dishonest woman of her. He's so drunk that he still has a teacup stuck on his finger from the nightclub and she has to pay the JP ten bucks in place of the two words that he can't even fathom he's supposed to say. She has a convenient ring in her pocket ready to go and she's had it waiting for three weeks. Nice girl, my eye. Bud Clark may not be able to resist his bookie, who after all is played by the always engaging Guy Kibbee, and he may spend half his time trying to avoid his girlfriend but he's spot on when it comes to Shirley Day. She's after John's $62.50 per, more than college professors make.

This is a short and obscure precode but like many such creatures it's unjustly overlooked. It's a little melodramatic on occasion but it has a kick to it. Preston Foster is fine as Bud Clark, recreating his role from the original play by Elliott Lester, but while he gets a great cinematic death scene (25 floors up on a six inch girder really isn't a good place to have an argument), he's not a character we spend a lot of time watching. In fact his brightest moment is a James Cagney joke, Cagney being the other great gangster actor working for Warner Brothers at the time. With $38 in his pocket from a rare win on the horses, he chats up a couple of tomatoes in the street and tells one he'd like to sit opposite her and squirt grapefruit in her eye, like they do in the movies, an obvious tip of the hat to The Public Enemy.

Vivienne Osborne is spot on as Shirley Day, suggesting that I really ought to find more of her precodes. She started out as a silent actress in 1920, but took a long break between 1922 and 1931 when she racked up the usual volume of precodes, sixteen in three years. I believe I've only seen one, playing Warren William's ex-wife Maybelle in The Dark Horse, coincidentally another Guy Kibbee picture. Warner Brothers regulars were very regular in the precodes, but Kibbee was the focus of that one. By the way, she gets a Cagney joke too, pointing out to Robinson's character on their first meeting that he's a swell hoofer. Am I stretching to see this or did Cagney and Robinson do the sort of cross referencing jokes in the thirties that Stallone and Schwarzenegger did in the eighties. Maybe I've just been missing that from all the others I've seen.

Best of all is Robinson, hardly a surprise to anyone who's ever seen him act. He's good from moment one, possibly because he didn't know how not to be, but he gets better as the film goes on. I wasn't as impressed by the scenes where he's sick but after those he's magnetic. In particular, the final courtroom scene is simply blistering, as he explains to the judge why he deserves what he's getting but that they're burning him at the wrong time. The rationale for that pours out in a scene that's mostly one shot and it's masterful acting. I try not to wheel out the old chestnut that he unfairly never won an Oscar, but it seems harder to resist with every film, especially when he leaves it on such a high as this.

He made four films for director Mervyn LeRoy, three of them in a quick two year period in 1931 and 1932. Little Caesar, Five Star Final and Two Seconds are very different films but they're all great vehicles for him and he shines in every single one of them. Each could have brought him an Oscar nomination at least, this one being no exception. Fortunately he gets a lot more than two seconds to strut his stuff, though we do end with those real two seconds that matter, quietly and surreptitiously, with us watching the audience not John Allen in the chair. Even the precode era had limits, I guess.

Sherlock Holmes (1922)

Director: Albert Parker
Star: John Barrymore

'Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent,' prompts the introductory title card, but the mind of man has a go here, even giving Sherlock Holmes a love interest of all things. We meet Moriarty before we meet Holmes though. In the twisted form of Gustav von Seyffertitz, he isn't remotely like the elegant Napoleon of Crime that we meet in later films, being far more of a Dickensian villain like Fagin or Scrooge. Perhaps he's a little more reminiscent of John Barrymore's version of Mr Hyde, especially given that we meet him in the underground torture chamber he maintains below his lodgings in a forgotten thoroughfare of Limehouse. Given the limp figure hanging in shadow, he's apparently been doing something sick and twisted to his prisoner with the assistance of the trusted Bassick, his chief lieutenant of crime.

He's also a old man, already hunched and walking with a cane, though Holmes is merely a student at Cambridge University, 'groping for his place in the scheme of things'. He finds it in Moriarty, meeting him in a hidden room behind a Chinese merchant's shop while helping out a fellow student, Prince Alexis of Harlstein. Prince Alexis is presumed guilty of the theft of the university's athletic funds and will be charged, thus casting doubt on his imminent marriage in Switzerland. To save himself he consults Watson, not yet a doctor and in the same year as Holmes at Cambridge, who in turn calls in the future detective to assist. He locates the real thief pretty easily but we're too busy watching who's playing him in wonder.

He's Forman Wells, the first screen role for William Powell. Hardly the sophisticated gentleman he would soon become, Powell looks more like a taller version of Mr Bean with a Buster Keaton haircut and hollow eyes caused by scarily heavy application of makeup. He looks a little better when we skip forward in years and he gets to play a butler, but it's stunning to realise that My Man Godfrey was only 14 years away because there's hardly a comparison. Anyway, Wells is under the thumb of Moriarty because he's the son of a master cracksman who died in Dartmoor, sent to Cambridge under a false name. Holmes saves him too, of course.

Sherlock Holmes himself is played by no less a star than John Barrymore, who much preferred the stage at this point and until the late twenties appeared only rarely on screen. Perhaps that general reluctance to appear in front of the camera is one reason why he's not very good here at all, much better two years earlier as the title characters in Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde and also two years later in his next film as the title character in Beau Brummel. Another reason is that he was forty years old and being called upon to play a college student, at least initially, and at that he isn't credible in the slightest.

He's better after we skip forward through the years to Holmes as the established detective working out of 221 Baker St (they forgot the B), but he's still not great, hardly even attempting to flesh out the character. There's a little preparation for the future in early scenes, philosophising in the countryside, even keeping a list of his strengths and limitations. Apparently his knowledge of sensational literature is immense and he can run really fast, but other more needy talents are more lacking. We get one decent disguise scene, hardly surprising as Barrymore had already proved himself in that regard in Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, but mostly he spends his time merely posed in intense thought or pining for the girlfriend that might have been.

Yes, you read that right. Sherlock Holmes gets a crush on Alice Faulkner during one of those countryside trips to find himself, literally falling for her from a window ledge and never forgetting their brief moment together with him stunned on the ground and her climbing down from her carriage to check to see if he's OK. She's conveniently the sister of Rose Faulkner, who is the pivot around which this story revolves. Rose is the young lady that Prince Alexis was going to marry in Switzerland before being called back to Harlstein to become Crown Prince after the untimely death of his two brothers in a car accident.

That doesn't bode well for Rose. While he could marry her as a third son, such an idea is utterly out of the question now that he's heir to the throne, so disgraced through no fault of her own she commits suicide, leaving her love letters from her prince with Alice for safe keeping and so we can have a second half to our plot. Now Prince Alexis is engaged to someone more suitable for his current status, Princess Olga of Brünwald-Torbay, a rather bizarre location that would appear to be half German and half Welsh, Alice is happy to blackmail the man she sees as responsible for the death of her sister.

Holmes thinks the same way, seeing Prince Alexis as nothing more than a blackguard, but he lets the prince hire him to recover the letters in order to set a trap for Moriarty, who has escaped his every attempt to bring him down. Quite what he plans to do with the letters once acquired we really don't know, because they're as much of a McGuffin as Rose Faulkner herself. This is all about Moriarty, the suggestion being that Holmes really has no purpose other than to catch this self appointed nemesis, who seems to get miraculously younger as the film runs on.

This film was adapted from a play by William Gillette, who was at the time the vision most people had of Sherlock Holmes, given that he had played the detective on stage for a couple of decades. In fact he wrote, directed and starred in a play about the character as far back as 1899, while Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was still actively contributing stories to the official canon. Titled Sherlock Holmes, or The Strange Case of Miss Faulkner, it was a conglomeration of a few Conan Doyle stories that added certain details that would come to be associated with the character such as his deerstalker and meerschaum pipe. Gillette played the role on stage around 1,300 times and even made the transition to the screen for a 1916 film called simply Sherlock Holmes, a movie that has become the only preserved record of Gillette playing the part that made him famous.

While he lived until 1937, he wasn't involved in this version at all and I can't speak to how closely it follows his play. Certainly other versions differ strongly from this. It's an adventurous piece, deeply plotted and certainly worthy of a viewing but it's far more important a film than a decent one. Bizarrely it's not particularly important for John Barrymore, possibly the best actor in the film, being far more important for both William Powell and Roland Young, who also debuted here, playing Dr Watson. Watson is married in this film, something that apparently stops him doing anything else, so we hardly see him. There are hints of who Young would become but the lack of sound doesn't help him.

Only two years into his Hollywood career, Gustav von Seyffertitz is recognisable this early, as is Louis Wolheim, whose broken nose could never be mistaken for anyone else. He turns up towards the end as one of Moriarty's thugs and he's perfect for the part. Unfortunately we don't get to see too much of him. We don't get to see too much of Reginald Denny either, as Prince Alexis, or other recognisable names like Hedda Hopper and Lumsden Hare. The part of Alice Faulkner went to Carol Dempster, a paramour of D W Griffith who retired from the screen in 1926. It isn't difficult to see why.

The biggest problem with the film though is how unlike Sherlock Holmes it gets in places, Gillette's liberties not being minor. I'm going to leave it wondering just why he felt it important to add in a romance for a detective who so notably only ever had anything to do with one woman, not this one. The ending of the film was painful enough for me as a mere fan of the character, but it must be truly cringeworthy for any serious Holmes afficionados. If you're one, stop watching once the natural ending finishes. Don't wait for the Hollywood one afterwards. Interesting? Sure. Important? Certainly. Unforgivable? Without a doubt.

Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

Director: Harold P Warren
Stars: Tom Neyman, John Reynolds, Diane Mahree and Hal Warren

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.

Ask any random moviegoer what the worst film of all time is and they'll generally throw back Plan 9 from Outer Space because they just don't know any better. It has to be the mostly widely seen really bad movie of its era, it features more outré celebrities than any John Waters movie ever made and it got special attention in the high profile Tim Burton/Johnny Depp biopic of its director, Ed Wood, so it's simply the easiest choice. Ask people who actually know about the really bad films, though, people like the writers of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and films that make Plan 9 from Outer Space look like Citizen Kane (well not quite but you get the picture), and they'll come up with a whole bunch of other suggestions. The one that tends to sink through all the dross to the very very bottom is this one, Manos: The Hands of Fate. It's supposed to be a horror movie but Quentin Tarantino, who owns what may be the only 35mm print of the film, calls it his favourite comedy of all time. Now I've finally seen it, I can understand why.

Manos is a man's man movie in every way, right down to owing its very existence to a bet, one conjured up between a fertiliser salesman (or insurance agent, depending on the source) and a Hollywood screenwriter, in El Paso scouting for locations. The fertiliser salesman, Harold P Warren, won the bet because he successfully completed a film, this one, but the screenwriter, Stirling Silliphant, surely had the last laugh given that his name is on films like Village of the Damned, In the Heat of the Night and The Towering Inferno, while Warren's will only ever be on this. He did pitch a second script, Wild Desert Bikers, but after Manos nobody would touch him with a ten foot pole. This was the kiss of death for everyone involved, in at least one case literally.

Warren raised an estimated $19,000, which isn't a heck of a lot to begin with but as he didn't have a single clue about how to make a movie the most stunning thing about it is that it actually exists, that there is a finished product, however bad. The most obvious way he had to cut costs was to become the writer, producer and director and also cast himself in the lead role of Mike. The second was to not pay anyone, promising them instead a share in the film's profits, which naturally never materialised. To be fair, the little girl got a bicycle out of it and the Doberman got a big bag of dog food, but that hardly counts, right? The third was to dispense with any opening credits, so we're thrown right into the action or lack of it, given that it's Mike and his family lost and either unable or unwilling to ask for directions to the Valley Lodge by toughing it out and not asking anyone, even the cops who pull them over for making a bad movie, I mean for having a broken taillight. We watch Mike drive around for a while, as the non-existent credits don't roll, passing the time by singing Row, Row, Row Your Boat until they find a sign for the place and drive straight into the Twilight Zone and cinematic history.

If the existence of the film isn't enough to tell us that Mike, his wife Margaret and their little girl Debbie are heading for trouble, we have a couple of very old teenagers necking in their car to underline it for us. 'I wonder where they're going?' says Girl Teenager in Car. 'Man, like there's nothing up that road,' adds Boy Teenager in Car. Apparently this girl was going to have more of a substantial role but actress Joyce Molleur, who is also uncredited for stunts, broke her leg during filming so ended up stuck in this car throughout. As Bernie Rosenblum, uncredited as the stunt coordinator, promptly got hired to smooch with her throughout, conspiracy theories wouldn't be difficult to conjure up. He was also the key grip on the film so those conspiracy theories could easily be combined with risqué jokes. Stranger things have happened and, well, they mostly happened on this film.

Anyway, Mike, who even tells his family that he's never got them lost before, promptly gets them lost. There's absolutely nothing on this road in the slightest, so after getting to a dead end and turning round they immediately stop at the house that's apparently just appeared out of the ether. Yes, you read that right and Warren knows how dumb that is too because he even wrote a line of dialogue to apparently explain the gaping plot hole. 'Where did this place come from?' Mike asks. 'It wasn't here a few minutes ago.' His wife simply answers, 'I don't care,' and that's all we need to know, apparently. You can turn off your sense of logic now. That would help. Perhaps this isn't a regular holiday, it's really an acid trip to the countryside, thus explaining why they arrive at the headquarters of the local polygamous demon worshipping cult instead of the local Holiday Inn.

Up till now the film has been bad, really bad, but it's about to take a legendary turn for the worse. 'I'm Torgo,' says the freaky guy on the porch, 'I take care of the place while the Master is away.' Torgo is probably the single most amazing character in the history of bad cinema. It isn't the beard or the shredded hat or the iron staff with a hand on it. It's the fact that we can utterly believe the rumours suggesting that actor John Reynolds was strung out on LSD throughout the shoot. He continually repeats himself. He answers questions that haven't been asked. He continually repeats himself. The camera lingers on him while he shivers around like he's fighting the worst case of ADHD in history or using an army of fire ants to irrigate his colon. He can't even walk, instead hobbling around like he's auditioning for a paraplegic performance of Riverdance and the story behind this may just be the saddest one ever written.

Reynolds was a local theatre actor in El Paso who went the whole hog on his debut film role, as far as Lon Chaney ever did. Torgo is apparently a satyr, half man and half goat, and to be believable as such Reynolds built a metal harness for his legs and perhaps even a pair of hooves. The resulting prosthesis was highly painful and led to him being addicted to painkillers until he committed suicide six months later. If that wasn't sad enough, there isn't a single shot in this film that shows anything more than freaky fat legs, the hooves are never visible and nobody ever mentions that Torgo is a satyr, so effectively an actor tortured himself into agony and suicide for precisely nothing.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, quite literally as the film was shot on the ranch of Colbert Coldwell, an apparently slouchy El Paso judge, Harold P Warren is having fun with his Bell & Howell 16mm camera, which had to be manually wound and only allowed 32 second shots. Warren didn't want to waste a second, so many scenes contain perhaps five seconds of story within 32 seconds of footage. A great example is when Mike literally invites himself into the Master's house. He's a pushy character, but he's played by the director so naturally he gets whatever he wants, but before agreeing Torgo has to think about it for 32 seconds, squirming uncomfortably all the while in the blazing sun that constitutes night in Manos. Inside Torgo tries it on with Margaret and we watch his wavering hand get closer and closer to her while she stands there waiting and waiting. For 32 seconds.

Another great example comes inside the ranch where we meet the Master and his dog in pictorial form. We must get 32 seconds to look at this painting, in which the Master looks like Frank Zappa and his dog looks sinister. 'Sinister isn't descriptive enough,' says Margaret, but what's really sinister is that we get another 32 seconds of Mike and Margaret looking at the picture. I'm sure you can imagine how fascinating it is to watch two characters look at a painting, but that's what we get. It's so fascinating that it even sends poor little Debbie to sleep, even though some bizarre animal starts moaning loudly in the desert. Ah no, that's just a continuity error, because she's awake in the next shot. She can't make up her mind. I swear blind that one scene has her surreptitiously run back over to the couch to lie down because she suddenly remembers she's supposed to be asleep. Then she's back awake again. She's like the magic box in The Room.

I really don't want to spoil this film for you, because it goes beyond surreal to unreal, but it's the most magnetic piece of utter garbage I think I've ever seen, possibly because it's the ultimate auteur experience, almost literally the outpouring of Harold Warren's brain onto film. There's so much depth here but never in anything remotely like the right way, so we're stunned into submission by what made this man tick. Remember those scenes in Ed Wood where Wood refused a second take because nobody would notice whatever calamity had just taken place? Warren refused second takes too but rather than pretend that it's all OK, he told his cast and crew that all would be made right in post production through the magic of Hollywood. I honestly think he believed it too. And yet that only explains a fraction of what we see.

I think Mike and Margaret are the reason that the counterculture happened. Mike is the tough all American alpha male, in charge even at someone else's house, always sure of what to do and where to go, coming up with concepts like, 'We'll hide in the desert. Someone will help!' Even when Torgo knocks him silly with his staff and ties him up, he shows how tough he is because he can escape from his bonds by merely standing up! It's his sheer awesomeness that prompts Torgo to leave his gun and flashlight right next to him, switched on no less. When little Debbie vanishes he only has to stand still and call her name for her to reappear, and then he pulls a gun on her! What a man!

Meanwhile Margaret is an utter waste of space, unable even to open the door when her husband comes to rescue her from her room. She falls over every five yards in the desert because she won't take off her high heels and she pleads with her husband to leave her behind and save their daughter instead. She's so decisive that it doesn't take her long to give up even on escape. 'Let's go back. They'll never think of looking for us at the house!' she decides. You can tell that she'd be awesome with a spatula in her hand or an egg whisk or a rolling pin, because a woman's place is in the kitchen not in Manos: The Hands of Fate. And in Warren's kitchen, only the men wield the knives.

If Mike and Margaret are the old way, perhaps the Master and his six wives are supposed to be the new way, living in some sort of occult commune setup where polygamy is fine and the women paralyse themselves when the Master goes to sleep on his stone slab. The Master is played by Tom Neyman, top credited even though he doesn't turn up for half the film, perhaps because he also built the sets, painted the Master's portrait and sculpted the iron hands that appear on the mantelpiece. He provided the sinister Doberman too and is also Debbie's real life father, though she probably hated him for life after putting her into this debacle.

Apparently young Jackey Neyman cried when she heard her dubbed voice for the first time, because Warren's camera didn't record sound and so he dubbed in the voices later. That's pretty standard but for some reason he only used three people for the dubbing, two men and one woman, so characters like Debbie and Girl Teenager in Car sound inhuman and male characters talk to each other in precisely the same voice. When the cop talks to Mike at the beginning, the two sides of the conversation are merged into one stream of consciousness monologue and it takes us a while to work out what's actually happening.

If we'd waited for Tom Neyman to see some real acting, we'd wasted our time. When he finally wakes up and starts spouting gibberish in his expanse of a black gown with huge red hands painted on it, he looks less like Frank Zappa and more like a tribute to the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. He's so powerful a Master that he can browbeat Torgo into submission by merely looking at him for that inevitable 32 second shot, but he can't deal with even one of his wives, let alone all six of them. If Mike and Margaret were the old American way, the Master is the failure of the counterculture to come up with meaningful change. He has six wives, plucked from the local model agency no less, and yet he's nothing but henpecked.

The lead wife is actually the best actress in the film, but she and her fellow wives turn out to be a bickering hen party who wear modern underwear under their flimsy and translucent white gowns and spend most of their awake time wrestling in the sand, randomly changing partners like they're being called in a square dance. 'This foolishness must stop!' the Master shouts at them, but he's presumably talking less about how much Manos will be upset at them and more about how Hal Warren could make a six girl catfight boring. The ripping of diaphonous gowns is what this movie needed, but these wives have flimsy clothing that doesn't even get dirty let alone rip.

I was so stunned by this film that I watched it twice. Then I watched the MST3K version. I still don't understand how Warren could have so much tenacity as to see this thing through and get the picture to a theatre. He even had balls big enough to invite the VIPs of El Paso to the premiere, the mayor and the alderman and the chief of police. The only reference point I have is Joe Queenan's book, The Unkindest Cut: How a Hatchet-Man Critic Made His Own $7,000 Movie and Put It All on His Credit Card, in which he succeeded only to the same degree that Warren did: to actually complete the thing. He failed to meet the budget and he failed to make something worth watching, so much so that he refuses to let his film, Twelve Steps to Death, be seen by anyone else. I get the impression it's something like this.

Manos is legendary for making what seems like every mistake in the book, something also Queenan tried and failed to avoid. Warren shot his night scenes at night, which meant that nobody could see anything, least of all us. There's one amazing scene where two cops begin into the desert after hearing a shot only to promptly turn back after two steps because they can't see enough to put one foot in front of the other. Warren assumed that things that can sound gripping on paper would look gripping on film and this movie is the ultimate proof that he was wrong. People being engrossed by a painting could read well, but watching people look at a painting is utterly boring. The Master dominating Torgo with his eyes sounds cool but it looks like two people looking at each other really hard.

And at the end of the day we have no idea what anything means. In a film that translates from Spanish as The Hands: The Hands of Fate, we have no idea what either hands or fate has to do with anything. Who is Manos? Is he really a deity who requires his followers to commit every cliché in the book. Peals of maniacal laughter? Check. Wild staring eyes? Check. Title card at the end that reads 'The End?' Check. Yes, that's right. Perhaps it isn't the end. Perhaps there's room for a sequel. Perhaps people like David Hayes, Jeff Dolniak and Kevin Moyers have one in their sights. What could be better to follow a sequel to The Beast of Yucca Flats than a sequel to Manos: The Hands of Fate. Can I be Torgo? Please? Just as long as I don't have to wear metal satyr rigging under my trousers. We can afford CGI, right? I don't want to die...

Memento (2000)

Director: Christopher Nolan
Stars: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano

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.

Memento has a lot to live up to. When I grabbed the Top 250 list in 2004 it was ranked as the 19th greatest film ever made and six years later it's only dropped as far as 26th. That puts it ahead of almost every film throughout the history of cinema including the nine entries that I'd watched so far in this project. So is this product of the new millennium really better than Vertigo and Sunset Boulevard and Gone with the Wind? Well my initial reaction after watching in 2004 was that I didn't have a clue. I enjoyed it but it was obviously one of those films that warranted more than one viewing to fully appreciate what it does and what it means. Now that I've watched through it again I'm inclined to agree that it's one of the greats, a film that doesn't just entertain but provokes thought. That's a balancing act that director Christopher Nolan has proven pretty good at over the years. As the icing on the cake, the non-linear approach has proved massively influential, copied in more than a few instances on television and in film.

We begin with a polaroid of a crime scene. There's blood everywhere but no apparent corpse in sight and as we try to work out what the shape in the right hand bottom corner is, we watch it fade. That's a clever device to point out to us that this scene is running backwards, even before the bullet leaps back into the gun and the dead man comes back to life. Yes, that blur was part of a body. So, even if we haven't heard anything about what this film is before watching it, we can't help but realise at this point that we're in for something different and as we watch, we realise just how different it is. While the initial scene is literally reversed film, the film itself is reversed in a different way, scene by scene but in reverse order, making it more than a little confusing but not impenetrable and it's enlightening in a fascinating and innovative way.

The shooter is Leonard Shelby, who is a former insurance investigator from San Francisco, someone with a talent for telling whether people are lying by looking at their eyes as he talks with them. He's been hunting a man called John G who raped and murdered his wife, and as far as he's concerned he's finally found him, because he's the man he kills at the beginning of our film to end his quest. What we need to find out is how he manages to track him down given that he has a serious handicap. When he walked into his bathroom to catch his wife's killer in the act and shoot him dead, an unseen accomplice threw him into a mirror and triggered a condition called anterograde memory loss, possibly the most serious way to impact anyone's ability to investigate anything.

Anterograde memory loss is a form of amnesia that prevents the formation of new memories, but doesn't break anything else in the brain. Therefore Shelby can remember his life before what is consistently referred to as 'the incident', right up to seeing his wife in the bathroom, but nothing further from then on except for the previous few minutes. But hey, he gets there in the end, right? After all, we see it at the beginning of the film. We see Shelby get his revenge by killing John G. Well it's not quite that simple. It's more than a little strange watching an investigation in reverse, scene by scene, because of course it isn't about the usual things an investigation is about.

Normally we follow clues to work out whodunit, but here we follow clues to work out if whodunit got it right, if he killed the right man, and if not why things panned out the way they did. After all, he can't trust his memory in the slightest. That means that he has to rely on some sort of system to compensate for his inability to remember what he's found out. At one point he's given key information in a restaurant but goes to the bathroom and promptly forgets he'd even met anyone. Fortunately the waiter gives him what he'd left on the table. At another point he's being chased by a drug dealer with a gun and he forgets during the chase who's doing the chasing. So he defines a system, beginning with a tattoo on his left hand that reads 'Remember Sammy Jankis'.

Because he knew Jankis before the incident his memory of him isn't lost and he knows precisely what that tattoo is supposed to trigger: the recollection system. Sammy was a man he investigated who had the same condition and wrote things down on notes. As Shelby is dealing with more serious things, he goes a step beyond mere notes to keep polaroids in his pocket that identify people and places and key information like who to trust and what people's motivations are. His own driving purpose he has tattooed onto his chest in mirror writing and whenever he is sure enough of something that it becomes an unarguable fact he has that tattooed onto his body too, along with general reminders like 'notes can be lost' and 'memory is treachery'.

While this sounds like an innovative approach to a story, how can it expect to keep our interest over a 113 minute running time? After all, we know what happens. We've seen the finished jigsaw puzzle, watching backwards just means that we see the pieces taken out, right? Well, no. This story really does run both ways. Part of the power is in the fact that we watch the story the way the lead character, with all the restraints of his condition, sees it, in that we question every new character as they appear because, like him, we're seeing them for the first time, only later finding out the history that went before. However there's also power in the fact that, unlike Shelby, we don't forget what we see, so everything we learn from this reverse chronology fills in that jigsaw puzzle and we discover all the background information and character motivation that he's forgotten. These in turn intrigue us, puzzle us and eventually shock us.

Christopher Nolan is one of those rare creatures, a filmmaker who wants to produce art but to entertain us in the process. There aren't too many people who even attempt this, because the two approaches are not particularly compatible. Art is inherent in a piece, whereas entertainment by necessity involves a process of experiencing it. Art is unchanging, whereas entertainment is relative and constantly in flux, depending on fashion and context and timeframe and even the personal taste of whoever is going through the experience. It's the rare filmmaker who can make something that stands apart as a work of art but still involves and entertains us. Stanley Kubrick is the most obvious name to conjure up and Christopher Nolan has every possibility of succeeding such an important name.

Each film he's made thus far has tried to do something new, even though he's committed supposedly unpardonable cinematic sins like filming a remake or making a superhero movie. Insomnia is a rare American remake of a foreign film that wasn't universally panned on release and Nolan reinvented the superhero genre with Batman Begins, then apparently mastered it with its sequel, The Dark Knight, possibly the most popular and acclaimed such film ever made. I'm more of a fan of Following and The Prestige, very different films with very different budgets that both impressed me no end, and Memento, only the second of six features thus far to carry his name, seems to be holding its own. It sprung out of a cross country road trip, of all things, which prompted both a short story by Nolan's younger brother Jonathan and this screen adaptation of it, though the two apparently have a number of strong differences.

Guy Pearce plays the lead, which helps the story because he's far less recognisable than the initial choice of Brad Pitt. He's come a long way since Neighbours, an Aussie soap opera, finding himself in films from what seems like every genre: film noir (LA Confidential), horror (Ravenous), romantic comedy (Dating the Enemy), western (The Proposition), science fiction (The Time Machine), swashbuckler (The Count of Monte Cristo), drama (Winged Creatures), crime (Animal Kingdom), even the uncategorisable (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert). He currently has a couple of major titles to his name, keeping him at the forefront: Kathryn Bigelow's award winning The Hurt Locker and the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

Pearce carries much of this film, the condition his character has surely making it a difficult part to play, regardless what order they shot the scenes. However he has able support from a couple of actors from The Matrix: Joe Pantoliano as Teddy, the man who dies at the beginning of the film but has quite a bit of screen time after that, and Carrie-Anne Moss as a bartender called Natalie. Both of these characters, along with Shelby himself, help to shape the directions he takes, and while it gradually become clear which are due to who and why, even after the impactful ending I was still a little unsure as to how much each of them knew at any point in time, or whether the beginning of the film constitutes justice or a miscarriage of it. Perhaps it's both. Perhaps we'd really need the scene that happens before the film begins to truly reach that decision.

Amélie (2001)

Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Stars: Audrey Tautou and Mathieu Kassowitz

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.

One thing that surprised me as I worked through this project was just how much French cinema began to slap me between the eyes and say, 'Hey, look at me!' I'd seen Amélie before and fell in love with it on my first viewing, but I'm finding that at least some of the joy that this brings me is present in many French films and many of my favourite films of all time are now French. It shouldn't be surprising. After all, what we know today as movies came to life in France. Sure, there had been fancifully named inventions all over the civilised world such as the zoetrope and the magic lantern and the kinetoscope and such, but each was treated as nothing more than a scientific curiosity, hardly something to display to the masses.

It was the Lumière brothers in Lyons who mixed the science with entertainment by making actual films with the instruments that they had devised. While they made short comedies and so-called realities, filmed enactments of real life situations like a train arriving at a station, their fellow countryman Georges Méliès took things a step further again by using stop motion animation and other innovative tricks to confuse, surprise and shock his audiences. He made films that took us to the moon, turned beautiful women into skeletons or displayed magicians who could remove their heads. And all of this before the turn of the twentieth century. At the other end.

Now when it comes to modern French cinema, you'd be better off talking to my friend Dan who has far more depth than I have, though I've certainly been catching him up over the decade or so since he first showed me this. I knew a few names reasonably well, whether they be actors like Jean Reno or Gerard Depardieu who have made their names known on a wider stage, or filmmakers like Luc Besson or Olivier Assayas who have established their own unique styles. I'd really enjoyed quirky films like Irma Vep, Nikita and Subway, or the Taxi series. It was Dan who introduced me to one of the biggest names in French cinema today, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and for that he has my undying gratitude.

Jeunet is unique. That may sound trite but once you've seen his entire body of work you'll use exactly the same word. From the surrealism of City of Lost Children through the delightful black comedy of Delicatessen to a distinctly Jeunet take on Hollywood action films in Alien Resurrection, he has never failed to do something different. With Amélie he gave us a modern day fairy tale, a glimpse at the magic of childhood that most of us quickly lose. It's an hour and a half that reminds us what pure delight is. I challenge anyone to leave this film with a heavier heart than when it began, but I won't dare you because that never works.

Amélie Poulain is a young lady who is full of life but who has never been able to live it. She sees through the eyes of a child; not that she's backward or naïve, but in that she can still notice things that most adults have forgotten to look at and laugh at them, just like a child. While most people descend into thinking certain ways because that's how they should be thought, Amélie has a blissful delight in thinking about things her own way. It makes her incredibly attractive to us, the viewers, but of course it makes her lonely in life, and as such she doesn't connect with the world very well. When she finally finds someone to care about, she has absolutely no clue how to go about telling him.

We find out her background in a long narrated introduction that is quite unlike the usual sort of thing. For a start it begins with her conception, shot from the sperm's point of view, and then continues throughout her youth, as she finds all sorts of joy in the littlest things, coins and ribbons and strawberries stuck on the ends of her fingers. We find out all sorts of quirky little details like her suicidal goldfish called Blubber and her used Instamatic camera that her neighbour convinces her causes accidents. After a night of panic watching the evening news, she works it out and gets her revenge by messing with his TV antenna while he's watching football, disconnecting him every time someone's about to score.

We're introduced to the characters of the characters through incredibly specific likes and dislikes. Her father Raphaël likes peeling large strips of wallpaper but dislikes wet clingy swimming trunks. Her schoolmistress mother Amandine dislikes having her hands touched by strangers but likes the costumes figure skaters wear on TV. We find out that she spends her life at home, because the only physical contact she gets from her father is when he does a monthly checkup and because this makes her heart race he ends up believing she has a heart condition. Her mother dies at Notre Dame, taking Amélie to pray for a baby brother, but ends up crushed by a tourist from Quebec who commits suicide by leaping off the roof. Her father builds an ornate shrine in the garden for her ashes.

And after being almost submerged inside the lives of the Poulains, we meet the grown up Amélie in the utterly delightful form of Audrey Tautou, who must be at least two thirds pixie. She works as a waitress at the Two Windmills café, which is as full of bizarre characters as anywhere else in this film. It's run by a former bareback artiste called Madame Suzanne, Georgette the tobacconist is a hypochondriac and even the regulars, like Joseph, are obsessives who turn up every day to record notes about the waitress two months after their relationship has ended. And in and amongst this absurdity we're told that while she doesn't know it quite yet, 48 hours later her life will change forever. This sort of strategem pervades this story to its core and each and every example is a delight.

What happens 48 hours later is that Princess Diana dies and our story really begins when, shocked at the news, Amélie drops a glass stopper that bounces into a tile in her bathroom to reveal a tin box, carefully secreted behind it many years before by a previous resident. She takes it upon herself to track him down ​​​and return the box and its knick-knack contents to him. Of course, being Amélie, she does so surreptitiously and so enjoys his rediscovery without ever being seen, suckering him into a phone box that she's left the box inside. The sheer joy in this scene is palpable, right up there with the most joyous moments I've ever seen on film, not just his joy but the joy she finds in his joy from afar, and how she discovers that it changes his life.

So It causes her to embark on a further series of quests designed to anonymously bring happiness to many of those around her, or in one notable exception to mess with the life of someone who deserves it. To recount the fabulous destiny that provides the original French title is to spoil the discovery that awaits you here. I will at least tell you that it covers a whole range of human emotions, as Amélie finds love and purpose and belonging, but overall is a thing of bliss. I laugh more joyfully with this film than any other I have ever seen. Blazing Saddles may have me in stitches every time I see it but Amélie brings different laughter. It's a delight, pure and simple. Watching it will enrich your life and help you to see the world with different eyes, just like those of Amélie. 'Ain't life beautiful?' says Georgette and she could be talking about this film.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet spent over fifteen years collecting the quirky stories that make up this script, retired train ticket punchers who get up at night to punch laurel leaves instead, blind men who play records on the subway or the artist downstairs from Amélie who paints old masters for fun but finds that the characters change their looks while he isn't looking. He's Raymond Dufayel, known as the glass man because his bones are so fragile that he pads things in his apartment to avoid dangerous accidents. Most importantly there's Nino Quincampoix who collects ID photos, even reconstructing those that the subjects have torn to shreds, and keeps them in a scrapbook. Acquiring this scrapbook by accident, Amélie works out that there's one man whose picture keeps appearing, taken twelve times on different dates and at different stations but nonetheless always discarded.

It's these quirky little details that make the film so full of wonder. Watching it years apart I find that while some details do fade, they merely provide a fresh joy of discovery the next time through. They're like old friends who you care about but don't need to talk to on a regular basis. It can be months or years but each reunion is a joy and a pleasure. This film is an old friend to me and I plan to watch it every five years or so for the rest of my life. While a few people don't seem to understand the charm of Amélie, most tend to rank it among their favourite films of all time. I picture these people watching with widened eyes and a knowing smile, an expression that most won't have worn for decades.

Audrey Tautou wears precisely that face for much of the movie. She invites us into her story with a conspiratorial glee and we leap at the chance to hear her secrets. As Amélie, Tautou with her huge twinkling eyes also appears happier than any other actress I've seen on screen, with the only possible exception being her namesake Audrey Hepburn who also had an elfin face that could turn pixie at the slightest notice. Beyond the belief that nobody else could possibly have played Amélie (thank the stars that Hollywood didn't remake it), I'm leaning also towards the belief that the entire film couldn't have been made without her. If Jeunet gave the film its wonder, Tautou gives it its life.

There are things to talk about beyond wonder and life. The use of colour is magnificent, the film being shot in lush greens and yellows, making it appear that the screen has moisture and a life of its own. There's an odd and sparing use of special effects to highlight inner thoughts or the absurdity of situations, and these aid the dreamlike quality of much of the movie. Most especially Amélie contains some of the most ambitious camera movements used in film, but they are so smooth and bewitching that it took me a couple of viewings to even notice them. Far from the great opening shots of films as diverse as Touch of Evil or La Ronde, these seem as inevitable as the laws of gravity only to stun us when we realise just what we're seeing. Talent could be described as the ability to make something incredibly difficult look incredibly easy, and that applies very well indeed to what Jeunet does here.

It isn't just Jeunet either. There are frequent collaborators that pop up throughout his work too. I'm still not sure what Marc Caro does, but whatever it is he's done it in every Jeunet film so far and so presumably it's pretty important. Dominique Pinon is also in every one of Jeunet's movies and he's an incredibly versatile actor who gets better in my eyes every time I see him. Here he's a regular at the Two Windmills who records his thoughts on a dictaphone and who becomes the subject of one of Amélie's happiness strategems. He's great as usual but even better elsewhere, especially as the wheelchair-bound space smuggler in Alien Resurrection.

The net result is that if you're one of those people who wouldn't pick up a French film if it bit you on the behind, pick up this one just because. Make sure it's widescreen and subtitled and get ready to smile. I have no idea which of the little stories will touch you, but I bet one of them will if not a whole host of them. You'll be the beneficiary of Amélie's attempts to bring joy to everyone around her, as much as the blind man she helps across the road, describing at a rapid pace everything she sees, only to vanish up a staircase to leave him somewhat stunned and overwhelmed by emotion. That's what this film does to us. It lost out for the Best Foreign Film Oscar that year to No Man's Land, which is a peach of a movie, no mistake, but this should have won Best Film. Period.

Gone with the Wind (1939)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Stars: Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman

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.

So this is Gone with the Wind? I've heard so much about this film: about how it's the greatest love story of all time, how it's the epic to end all epics, how there is nothing like it in the history of cinema. It's not just well placed here in the IMDb Top 250, the American Film Institute can't stop lavishing it with praise: on their annual lists it was the fourth greatest American movie of all time, the fourth greatest epic and the second greatest love story, it has the second greatest score and the greatest quote of them all. It swept the Oscars in 1939, leaving with no less than ten of them in what has been described as Hollywood's greatest year, a record that stood until Ben-Hur won eleven twenty years later. Adjusting for inflation, it's the highest grossing movie ever made, and never mind those expensive 3D IMAX tickets Avatar is selling like hot cakes, Gone with the Wind still holds the record for the most movie tickets sold. The success wasn't just American either: it was such a hit in London after opening in April 1940 that it ran continuously for four years during the Blitz.

So why is it so highly regarded by all and sundry? Well now that I've finally seen it I can understand why, but there's also a massive and fundamental flaw that I just can't get past, which means that I don't see how I can give it my highest rating and keep a good conscience. I'll get to this flaw shortly. Before I do, I'd like to point out that the picture does excel technically and the scale it works to is massively impressive. Then again, producer David O Selznick spent $3.9m on the film, only Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and Hell's Angels having exceeded that sum previously. Every actor in the film does a superb job, and as can be expected in a four hour movie there are a whole bunch of them: over 50 speaking roles and a couple of thousand extras.

Clark Gable doesn't just act Rhett Butler, he exudes him. Even though he didn't want to take the job to begin with, having been burned by a period role before (Clark Gable was many things but whoever thought he should play Irish politician Charles Stewart Parnell ought to have been sacked with extreme prejudice), he does it so well that it's hard to imagine anyone else in the part, not least Gary Cooper who turned the role down because he thought the film would be the biggest flop in Hollywood history. It's Rhett Butler that Gable will always be remembered for, even though by the time he died in 1960, two days after finishing The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe, he had made 67 sound movies on top of his few silent film appearances, and was known as 'The King of Hollywood', having literally been crowned with that title in the thirties.

Vivien Leigh, the unknown from England who landed the role everyone in Hollywood wanted for their own (and I mean everyone, the list is a Who's Who of Hollywood actresses, even if you restrict it to merely those who completed screen tests for the part), is spot on as Scarlett O'Hara, the central focus for the entire movie. She's believable as a rich bitch and she's believable as the woman who does what she must when she must, though that sounds rather unfortunately like an apology for her actions. The consequent balancing act between weak and strong is not an easy one to manage, especially for an unknown starring opposite some of the greatest names in the industry. Then again she was dating Laurence Olivier at the time.

Leslie Howard has his own balancing act to manage as Ashley Wilkes, juggling between the spineless man and the honourable warrior, and he's just as good as Leigh. His wife Melanie is whiter than white, too much so, but in the able hands of Olivia de Havilland such a saintly portrayal is at least believable. And above all of these superb performances, my personal favourite is Hattie McDaniel's as Mammy, the big black slave who effectively runs the show at Tara, the O'Hara homestead. With over seventy films behind her already, many of which I've now seen and enjoyed, this one brought her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, making her simultaneously the first African American to be nominated and to win, even though Georgia law prevented any of the black actors from attending the premiere in Atlanta.

The background that all of these players act against is nothing short of epic. Margaret Mitchell's source novel isn't about Scarlett, it's about the demise of an entire nation, with Scarlett merely our guide through the War Between the States that caused the South to effectively cease to be. Selznick's film begins in 1861 on the eve of the war which runs through the entire first half and ends around the time of the intermission. He began as he meant to go on, the first scene shot being the epic burning of Atlanta, not the city but the ammunition dumps torched by retreating Confederates. This fire cost $25,000, raging 500 feet high from a 40 acre set and burned many old sets including the Great Wall from King Kong. It was shot by all seven Technicolor cameras then in existence in Hollywood and phone lines in Culver City were jammed because local residents thought MGM was burning.

This was only the first of many awesome set pieces, some of the most awesome seen on film at that time, including the justifiably legendary long pan across the stupendous numbers of Confederate wounded, which is what's stayed with me most from this film over the years since, not to mention all those stunning romantic sunsets and the endless sweeping staircases. All the way down the line the film is beautifully shot, which has a good deal to do with the production design of William Cameron Menzies. In fact Gone with the Wind marks the first time that anyone at all was credited with production design, purely because what Menzies did here went so far beyond the old position of Art Director.

In short, I'm not surprised at those ten Oscars and much of the rest of the legend. And so to the catch: who the hell am I supposed to care about in this picture? Other than Olivia de Havilland's saintly Melanie Wilkes, everyone in the film is either a pathetic wimp or an entirely unlovable waste of space. It doesn't matter how much money or influence each has, it doesn't matter how dashing they are or how beautiful their gowns are, they're all nobodies and I couldn't care what happened to any of them. In fact I'm not alone. Very few members of the principal cast apparently liked the characters they were playing and I can hardly blame them.

Rand Brooks as Scarlett's first husband, Charles Hamilton, objected to playing a wimp. Leslie Howard complained that his costumes made him appear like 'a fairy doorman'. Even Gable, who had fought playing a historical role, almost quit because he had to cry on film, and it's possible that his part, which runs to what Wikipedia calls 'physical brutality and low regard to women' may have been based on author Margaret Mitchell's first husband, who she divorced. Butterfly McQueen, another black actress in an important role as a childlike adult slave, even suggested that her character 'Prissy should have been slapped often, because she was horrid!' Malcolm X later said that 'when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under the rug.' Racial harmony this isn't, but then it was set in the slave owning South.

The character I liked least of all was Scarlett O'Hara who is truly despicable, one of the least likeable lead characters in movie history. I'd almost rather sit down to dinner with Hannibal Lecter. Scarlett starts the film as a rich brat who toys with her suitors, the Tarleton brothers, because she secretly loves her neighbour Ashley Wilkes. When she finally realises that she can't have him, because he's marrying someone else, she promptly hooks the nearest available man and doesn't care a hoot when he dies in the war, not even as a soldier. I'm sure you're wondering where Rhett Butler comes in, especially as the two have had exchanges already but she falls for him hard as a supposedly mourning widow, only to end up stealing her sister's fiancé instead for the money and position (sorry, to save Tara, right?).

Not only is she a blatant gold digger but she's a blatant gold digger at the expense of her family, which if anything is even worse. Are there levels to dishonourable behaviour that can be measured? I'm sure the Japanese could conjure something up. Anyway this second unloved, exploited and thoroughly miserable husband eventually dies too, leaving her free at last to marry Rhett, who she's already told outright to get the hell lost. It'll never happen, she tells him, not as long as she lives, but he's Clark Gable so he's not one to take no for an answer. I'm sure he ended up wishing he had, given that she promptly goes on to make his life a misery in the same way she did her other husbands, even though they manage to stay on speaking terms just long enough to produce a daughter.

How a film entirely devoid of romance can be seen as the greatest romance of all time, I fail to understand. No wonder the world is so screwed up if this is what women aspire to. I presume I'm not supposed to cheer at the death of her daughter and the break-up of her marriage, but I did, just like I cheered at the death of Jack in Titanic. The happiest part of the film for me was when she finally drove Rhett away too, because it was the first real piece of justice in the film. Of course Rhett isn't much of a catch either, being little more than an opportunist who makes money out of the misery of others. He spoils his daughter to the point of her death, but he does at least care about her, which puts him a cut above Scarlett at least.

Admittedly by no stretch of the imagination could I claim to be a romance fan. I know little about the genre and don't pretend to understand it. Hey, I'm a man, so what understanding could I have about how women's minds work? However I have seen some blatant tearjerkers and I've even surprised myself by thoroughly enjoying many of them, including a good degree of the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Passions list, not to mention such unashamed chick flicks as The Bridges of Madison County and others featuring people like, well, Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. There's even one in particular that I enjoyed shortly before Gone with the Wind that could almost be called the precise polar opposite of this film.

Camille was made only two years earlier, in 1937, but it avoided Technicolor, sweeping grandeur and the whole epic scale that Gone with the Wind thrived on. The most important difference is that, while it may not have jerked my tears, it certainly succeeded in catching my emotions and I just plain cared what happened to the petulant heroine Marguerite, who begins the film as a spoiled brat just like Scarlett but eventually finds redemption in love. The why of it is half Greta Garbo's powerhouse performance and half the script that paints her far more vividly in black and white than Scarlett ever managed in colour, but the end result is that it's a joy and Gone with the Wind is almost an endurance test.

I've also travelled through the South, through Savannah and Charleston and Atlanta, and I've had the pleasure of encountering some of the kindest folks that I've ever met right there below the Mason-Dixon Line. I understand what southern hospitality is because I've experienced it first hand and I appreciate what the South did to make these people who they are. However I didn't see a single example of this in Gone with the Wind. So Scarlett screws up her life, even with all the chances she's given, and so does Rhett and so does Ashley and so does Charles and so does every other supposed lady or gentleman in Gone with the Wind. Well, my dear, to steal the legendary line from Clark Gable, frankly I don't give a damn. They just didn't deserve any better! I can't feel sorry for any of them, and if they are really what Margaret Mitchell's South was all about then why the heck didn't the Yankees start the war a couple of hundred years earlier and save everyone the trouble?

To be fair I should point out that I haven't read Mitchell's source novel, the only novel she published during her lifetime, one that took her seven years to write and which apparently included a decent amount of carefully researched historical accuracy. When I watched Gone with the Wind in 2004 I presumed that given the consistent quality otherwise, the flaws may have been inherent to the novel rather than Selznick's film, though of course that still doesn't excuse it. Now, I'm not so sure. I still haven't read the book but I have seen another David O Selznick epic production, one obviously intended to follow up on the grandeur that he so ably conjured up here.

Gone with the Wind is undeniably a great film, merely one that doesn't contain a jot of the romance it aspires to, but Duel in the Sun, made in 1946 with Selznick's girlfriend Jennifer Jones in the lead, is truly awful, one of the most overblown and badly cast films Hollywood ever made. It highlights ably just what Selznick could do to a movie in the very worst ways, so perhaps then Mitchell's novel, with its coverage of material the film ignored, such as the horrors of war and the prominence of the Ku Klux Klan, isn't the biggest problem, it's merely what Selznick did with it.

Notorious (1946)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Stars: Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman

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.

It's hard to know where to stand with Notorious. In his role as the 'master of suspense', Alfred Hitchcock habitually played with his viewers like a magician plays with his audience, sending us off to follow red herrings wherever he could conjure them up. I'm still stunned at how often he kept turning everything around in Vertigo, keeping me hooked while building up and then knocking down what I believed was the direction of the plot; and of course in Psycho he performed no less a devious act than to than kill off Janet Leigh, whom we firmly believed to be the major star, in the first third of the film.

Hitchcock also frequently toyed with the MacGuffin, something that is fundamentally important for the characters in a story and around which the entire plot revolves, yet which carries no direct importance to us in the slightest. Hitch didn't invent the MacGuffin, but he did more than anyone else to make the term famous, and the most classic uses of the concept in cinema are his, especially those MacGuffins in North By Northwest and Notorious. Here the MacGuffin is the uranium ore stored in bottles in the wine cellar of villainous Nazi Claude Rains in Rio de Janeiro. If it weren't for these bottles the film could not exist, yet they could have been almost anything else just as well and my telling you about them at the beginning of this review won't spoil your viewing pleasure in the slightest.

Yet Hitch does a lot more playing with our minds in Notorious than just using a MacGuffin. Like my previous Hitchcock experience, North By Northwest, this is a Cary Grant movie, or so the credits tell us. His is the first name on the screen, alongside that of Ingrid Bergman, yet he has almost nothing whatsoever to do. He's nominally an American secret agent called T R Devlin who acts as the key liaison for Bergman on an undercover mission in Brazil, and it's Bergman who gives the bravado performance here. She plays Alicia Huberman, the daughter of a Nazi on American soil; but as the secret service know from surveillance that she does not follow her father's views, they send her undercover in Rio to infiltrate the household of the other important character in the story. He is Alex Sebastian, the head of a Nazi organisation involved in some sort of nefarious plot; he also knew Alicia's father and he was once in love with her.

Grant seems to play along with this abdication of everything that a star role requires. The film opens as it means to go on with Ingrid Bergman firmly the focus of our attention. Photographers are waiting for Alicia, crying 'Here she comes!' as if she's a celebrity, which of course she is, given that this happens mere moments before she hears her father receive twenty years. Then we see her drunk and partying to drown her sorrows, while the voyeuristic camera follows her wherever she moves, again just like it would follow a celebrity. The scene revolves around her and she is in utter control of proceedings. Yet Cary Grant is also in this party scene, though it takes us a while to realise it. He doesn't say a word and appears as nothing more than part of a back blotting out a little of the screen.

Is this just because he's a secret service agent and as such trained to be socially invisible, or is it because he isn't really the star at all? This sort of thing continues as the film progresses. When they leave the party together and Bergman is pulled over by a policeman for speeding, Grant handles the entire affair from offscreen. The camera stays on the cop or on Bergman, but never on Grant. His role could be interpreted many ways. He could be described as little more than a love interest, her means of introduction to Sebastian, or nothing but a necessary link between Bergman and the world. Maybe Grant's entire character is a MacGuffin. Everybody and everything in the film is involved with him, often deeply, yet we hardly care. We're too busy watching Alicia get deeper and deeper involved with the South American Nazis.

However important Devlin really is, it's Alicia who gets the screen time, the best lines, the most powerful scenes. Bergman is the one who has to carry the twists and turns of the plot and she does so marvellously. When, instead of a romantic dinner, Devlin informs Alicia of her mission, he tells us plenty by doing nothing whatsoever. He simply stands there, while Bergman acts around him. Yet Bergman was not Oscar nominated for her performance: Olivia de Havilland won instead that year for To Each His Own, beating the favoured Rosalind Russell in Sister Kenny, two films that I had never even heard of and still haven't seen.

Claude Rains was nominated, however, as Best Supporting Actor. He plays Alex Sebastian and he does his job so well that we see all the complexities in his life. He is a Nazi, committed to his cause, and happily involved in whatever secret evil scheme that requires all that uranium ore. Yet he truly cares for Alicia and we share his pain when he realises that she has betrayed him. The final scenes are powerful because of his being in them. Then again this is what Claude Rains did, so much so that it's easy to mistake him for being the lead in a whole slew of movies in which he's technically only playing a supporting role, this one being a perfect example. It hardly comes as a surprise to find he was Bette Davis's favourite actor or that he taught some of England's greatest names, people like Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud.

So Rains is superb; what about Grant? Well, he does a superb job in depicting the nearest thing to an invisible man since, well, Claude Rains played the original for Universal. If the aim was for him to fade into the background so as not to be noticed, then he did what was required of him and I can respect him for such a lack of ego. He does that job superbly, but by definition that doesn't make a star turn and to my thinking Rains should have been up for a Best Actor Oscar rather than merely a Supporting one. So it goes. Sometimes it feels that T R Devlin is more of a cameo role, suggesting that Cary Grant is really a secret agent playing himself, more believable here than in North By Northwest, but cameos are supposed to be noticed and Devlin is all about not being noticed.

There are other great performances here notable of mention, all of whom steal scenes from Cary Grant even if they only have a few scenes in which to do so. Most notably, while Sebastian may run many dark and nefarious operations, his mother runs him. She is played capably by Leopoldin Konstantin though the part was previously offered to Ethel Barrymore and I could easily see Maria Ouspenskaya, one of my favourite character actors, in the role instead. Konstantin shines even though all the other Nazi conspirators in the house are memorable too, and Bergman and Rains weave their web around them.

Outside of acting and Hitchcock's taut and deceptively simple direction, the cinematography in Notorious is wonderful, courtesy of a man named Gregg Toland. It's easy to look at cinema and realise that directors like Hitchcock, Kubrick and Welles are major names, but there are others behind the scenes who are just as important and this project helped me begin to notice some of them, especially those who worked at MGM, the largest and most powerful of the Hollywood studios. Every MGM film I saw seemed to carry the names of Douglas Shearer and Cedric Gibbons, and many also include Edith Head, names as important as they were prolific.

Shearer ran the sound department at MGM from the moment they had such a thing and he went on to win 14 Oscars, not just for Best Sound Recording but also for many technical innovations that went on to change the industry. Gibbons started at the Edison Studios in 1915 and worked for Metro and Goldwyn even before they were merged into MGM where he became supervising art director for over 1,500 MGM films. He didn't just win 11 of his own Oscars for art direction, he designed the Academy Award statuette itself. Costume designer Edith Head only won 8 Oscars but was nominated for 35, including an unprecedented 19 year run from 1949 to 1967. I already had great appreciation for others like special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen or cartoon writer Michael Maltese, but it didn't take long to realise that I should add Gregg Toland to that list too.

His work on Citizen Kane introducing Orson Welles to deep focus photography could just be the pinnacle of achievement in his field by anyone, but he continued to prove himself worthy in many other films, including in 1946 both Notorious and the most decorated picture of the year, The Best Years of Our Lives. Toland has tricks to play here too. There's an awesome camera tracking shot down a staircase from a high landing that zooms in all the way to a key in Alicia's hand. We watch part of a horse race as reflected in the lenses of a pair of binoculars. Many shots are taken from Alicia's incapacitated point of view: while hung over in bed, she watches Devlin rotate as he walks towards her, and later after being poisoned her view shimmers, blurs and contorts. Toland's talent was huge and his death only two years after this film was a great loss to Hollywood.

The other major name behind the scenes is Ben Hecht, who wrote the script. He was a notable writer both on and off screen, with many novels, short stories and plays behind him, along with sixty or so screenplays. In Notorious he wrote with such depth that I'm sure I didn't catch all the levels he wrote at, even after doing my homework first. Most obviously though there's an underlying theme of alcoholism. There's drink everywhere in this film and most of the plot developments take place through its use or misuse, including the major turning points which I won't spoil.

So how good is Notorious? Well it's a classic for sure, though maybe behind Rear Window, Psycho and Vertigo in my estimations. I'd certainly rate it higher than North By Northwest, which is so highly rated in the Top 250. Back in 2004 I was still learning about Hitch and what he really meant to the industry. I began this project with only four of his films under my belt but notched up another three in my first six project reviews. One of the great things about Hitch is that his films are so easy to find nowadays, frequently shown on TV and easily available on DVD. Even if you don't have a budget many of his early English releases are in the public domain, so can be picked up cheap in ten or twenty film box sets.

I'm working this project in the internet age where availability of films is the strongest it's ever been. It's hard to think back to the sixties where many films as important as Hitch's just couldn't be seen. Back then you couldn't just wander into a WalMart or logon to Amazon to pick up the one you're missing. In fact there were even Five Lost Hitchcocks, five of his most famous films, that were entirely unavailable in any form because he'd bought the rights back from the studio to leave to his daughter as a legacy. It doesn't bear thinking about and I'm very thankful that in this era I could deluge myself in his work, realising both how vast the man's talent really was and how much I've been missing over the years. The more of his films I see, the more I want to see the rest, and I can't think of a better recommendation than that. I felt that way after seven in 2004 and I still feel that way today after forty one.

North By Northwest (1959)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Stars: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason

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.

When I first watched North By Northwest in 2004, I had problems with it but was careful to add a few disclaimers to my review. Maybe I'd have rated it higher if I had seen it before being blown away by Vertigo instead of shortly afterwards. Maybe I'd have appreciated it better on a big cinema screen rather than just a big screen TV, as it obviously makes superb use of Paramount's widescreen technology known as VistaVision. Maybe if I wasn't watching a couple of Hitchcock classics a day at that particular point in time it would have stood out more effectively from the rest of his work, which contains many undeniable classics. Maybe I'd still up my rating when I watched it again somewhere down the line. After all that was still only a first time viewing of what has been described as 'the ultimate Hitchcock thriller'.

I think I was feeling a little pressured. I'd already seen three out of the four Hitchcocks that are very highly placed in this list and this one completed the set, meaning I only had apparent lesser work to come. In 2004 it was ranked behind only Rear Window in a lofty position ahead of both Psycho and Vertigo. By 2010 it had dropped behind Psycho but is still ahead of Vertigo. Maybe if it wasn't in such select company I'd see more than just something that, to my mind, couldn't compete with those three classics, and a couple of subsequent viewings hasn't changed that viewpoint. It's a great thriller, no doubt, but it holds a strange place in my thoughts for a Hitchcock.

When Hitch does things right, which is pretty much all of the time, he draws in my interest slowly but surely to leave me tense, rivetted and smiling with admiration for his talent; and when he really turns it on, like with Vertigo, he stuns me. On the rare occasion that he fails, such as with Rope, it usually leaves me so mightily underwhelmed that it's easy to treat it as an aberration. Now North By Northwest doesn't fit any of these. It's beautifully shot, suspensefully scripted and cleverly cast. Yet it's like looking at the difference between Marilyn Monroe and Marilyn Monroe's corpse. All those magnificent components are still there but there's no spark. The life is gone.

That isn't the case to begin with because it's set up perfectly. Cary Grant is our reluctant hero, Roger Thornhill, a Manhattan advertising executive who gets mistaken for a secret agent by virtue of a quirk of circumstance. He's merely in a hotel bar when he needs to send a telegram and so hails the nearest employee to ask where he can do so. Unfortunately this very act identifies him to the villains of the piece who are trying to trap a secret agent by the name of George Kaplan. Nobody's ever seen Kaplan, you see, but they know he's registered at this hotel and what better way to identify him than to have him paged.

There are two points of pure genius here. One is the question of how anyone could possibly prove that they're not a secret agent, once someone thinks they are. How would you do it? Every bit of proof you have could have been falsified, set up deliberately as cover. Of course you have a different name, you've probably had plenty. Of course you have a driving license and credit cards and the works, but they could be government class forgeries. Of course you have photos, but they're either photoshopped or, more likely in the fifties, just someone who looks like you. So as Thornhill is walked out of the hotel and into a car at gunpoint, brought to a country estate to be asked questions by a man he's never met, he can't prove anything either and as he can't give them anything, they take that to mean he won't and stage his murder by pouring a bottle of bourbon down him and putting him behind the wheel of a car on a winding mountain road.

The other is that he's stuck with an impossible task, his only apparent salvation being in finding a man who doesn't exist, Kaplan being a fictional decoy set up by the US Intelligence Agency just like the British did during the Second World War in what would become The Man Who Never Was. He manages to escape near death on the road and gets arrested for driving under the influence, but is stupid enough to tell the truth. Naturally nobody believes a word of it, especially given that the villains of the piece have ably covered their tracks, but in the end he pays his fine and heads back to Manhattan to follow odd clues. He gets into Kaplan's room at the hotel, only to find that nobody has ever met him. He goes to see Lester Townsend at the United Nations, the man who apparently kidnapped him the night before, only to find that it's someone else entirely, someone who's never heard of Kaplan.

What's more, Townsend is promptly murdered right in front of him. Now Thornhill isn't just up against a drunk driving charge, he's up against the cold blooded murder of a high ranking Interpol man inside the United Nations building. To hammer the point home, the press are right there when it happens so next morning there's a photo of him holding the knife from Townsend's back on the front page of every paper in town. Now he's being chased by both the bad guys and the good guys, which is a pretty tough situation even for a real secret agent who is trained in the arts of evasion and disguise and going to ground. What chance does a Manhattan advertising executive have?

So while this setup is perfect, already the key problem has manifested itself. Thornhill isn't stupid and he can think on his feet, as is evident by the ease with which he can steal taxis in New York, but he's no secret agent. Once the Glen Cove police let him go, the whole thing becomes less and less believable as time passes. On one side he can't even dial a phone number because he's always had a secretary to do it for him and he pulls the knife out of Townsend's back in front of the most reliable witnesses in the world. On the other he's supposed to be able to keep one step ahead of everyone, even though even the US Intelligence Agency, for whom the non-existent George Kaplan works, doesn't believe that he can stay alive for five minutes. 'Goodbye, Mr Thornhill, wherever you are,' they say.

I just couldn't persuade myself into buying into anything that happened after this masterful 45 minute setup. Hitchcock's talent was to take the unbelievable and make it believable. Here I couldn't suspend my disbelief and by the end I was thinking something along the lines of, 'If only Alfred Hitchcock had directed this...'. My biggest problem was with Cary Grant and how suave and sophisticated he remains. Up until this point he's all indignation and surprise, even shock, and that's how it should be, but from then on he's obviously more professional than his far more real predecessors, all now deceased. As a kidnap victim, he's great; but as a fugitive I'll stick with Harrison Ford. Or even David Janssen.

How bad does it get? Well immediately after becoming the most sought after man in America he heads over to Grand Central Station wearing a disguise comprised entirely of a pair of thick sunglasses. He sneaks onto the Twentieth Century Limited and pursues a lovely blonde by the name of Eve Kendall over trout in the dining car. She's the leading lady, Eva Marie Saint, who has been suspiciously absent up until now. Now I'm not asking for him to turn into a gibbering mass of urine in the darkest alley in town, but there are limits. Perhaps Hitch had the same problem, given that he highlights Thornhill's initials at this point. They're ROT. 'What does the O stand for?' asks Kendall. 'Nothing,' replies Thornhill.

The sad thing is that while the film has lost its credibility, there's still much to see. There are three distinct thirds to the film, each about forty five minutes long. The first is stunning: it's when Thornhill gets kidnapped and flounders around, and it's difficult to find a flaw. The second is the unbelievable one: Thornhill is on the run from everyone and his dog. He knows something is up but not who or what or why, but is both lucky enough and capable enough to keep himself safe until he can find out the important details. The third is when he knows exactly what's up but has to continue on anyway because it's simply the right thing to do. It starts solidly but ends up as just another setpiece, this being something of a prototype blockbuster.

I'm sure I'm sounding really negative here and I don't mean to. Having Thornhill turn into James Bond is a problem big enough for me not to ignore, though I do still appreciate the truly stunning filmmaking. Everything else is top notch stuff. The cinematography in particular is superb and often subtle, and I can't help but admire many of the little decisions that made such a big impact. Hitchcock really knew how to tell us things without words. One of many great examples is having our first view of Prairie Stop be from the air, setting the stage for the famous attack on Thornhill by a cropduster, even though we don't know it yet.

The entire cast is spot on. James Mason is a superb villain of the quietly spoken charmer variety, hardly surprising given that he'd been mentioned as such eleven years earlier in Hitchcock's Rope. Leo G Carroll is a great intelligence officer working his grand schemes to catch him, as always in a small role. He appeared in six Hitchcock movies and every time I wish his character had had a larger part. Eva Marie Saint is the delectable femme fatale of the piece and Martin Landau is an effectively chilling henchman, though the Hays Office were a little dismayed at how effeminate he was. The script is clever too, with little red herrings nested inside the big ones. The tension is often palpable, but after all that's what Hitchcock was best at. He could always play us like violin strings and he delighted in coming up with new tunes.

So it's a great film from a great director and for all my complaints, it's a great thriller too. Above all though, I think it's a technical masterpiece. There's certainly much to be learned here as a student of film. While I may prefer Vertigo and Psycho and Rear Window, not to mention Sabotage, Saboteur and The Lady Vanishes, this is a far better demonstration of masterclass filmmaking. In many ways it really is 'the ultimate Hitchcock thriller' because it has everything in it that made a Hitchcock film, all constructed magnificently, up to and including the finale with its chase across the face of the Mount Rushmore memorial. As a textbook it's perfect and as a ride it's a joy. It's only when you think about it that it shows its flaws. That's surprising for Hitch.