Ed Wood (1994)

Director: Tim Burton
Star: Johnny Depp

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.

Ed Wood was always going to be a favourite of mine. I'm a confirmed Tim Burton fan, however much I wish he'd add an edge of danger to his stylised creations. I'm a Johnny Depp fan and was long before the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise made that fashionable. Most importantly I'm an Ed Wood fan, just as I'm a fan of much outsider art, whether the medium be writing, painting, music or film. He was certainly an artist, in his way, merely one who saw something else on the screen when he was done than most of the rest of us did. When Rob Zombie kicked off the TCM Underground series of cult films on Turner Classic Movies with a double bill of Ed Wood movies, he said that however inept his movies get, they have a sincerity about them that shines above everything else. That sincerity is often the key factor that turns a bad movie into a so bad it's good movie, and it's the key factor that sets Wood above most of his competitors.

There's no getting away from the fact that a film like Plan 9 from Outer Space is utterly inept. It's hard to understand how such a film could be begun, let alone finished, and how nobody seemed to care about the glaring inconsistencies that pervade it. Yet it's still magnetic viewing. I've seen it many times, on TV, DVD and even in a colorised 35mm version on the big screen. I'm sure that I'll see it again and again and I'll enjoy it just as much next time and the time after that. However I can't say the same for anything made by people like Coleman Francis, Larry Buchanan or Jerry Warren. Without sincerity, their films become merely bad movies and it's just not as much fun to sit through them. When I watch Francis's The Beast of Yucca Flats, another science fiction/horror movie released two years after Plan 9 from Outer Space, with Wood regular Tor Johnson in the lead role, I'm not enjoying the cheese, I'm trying to fathom just how inept Coleman Francis was.

Another reason that Ed Wood movies are generally so much fun (and Coleman Francis movies generally aren't) is the cast of characters who populated them. Wood may have hired hasbeens, though that's a terribly unfair and subjectively inaccurate term to use, but Francis usually hired people who had never been anybody to begin with, like his family. Many of the characters that congregated around Wood could accurately be described as outsider artists too and they're often fascinating in themselves: psychics, transvestites, wrestlers, horror hosts, former stars. Their dynamic nature also provides the reason why producing a biopic about Ed Wood makes sense where a biopic about Coleman Francis would be an utter waste of time. Wood's clique of regulars are unmatched in their cult appeal until perhaps the era of John Waters, and indeed some of them have been the recipients of the biopic treatment themselves.

Burton's film concentrates entirely on the period when Wood made three films with Bela Lugosi, even though Wood led a fascinating life both before and after this period. The timeframe makes sense when you consider the similarities between two relationships: the one between Wood and Lugosi that is focused on here and the one between Tim Burton and Vincent Price, who at the time they met was also an elderly screen legend known mostly for his horror features. 'Meeting Vincent had an incredible impact on me,' Burton has said, 'the same impact Ed must have felt meeting and working with his idol.' As this film bombed at the box office and recouped less than a third of its costs, any thought of a prequel or sequel would be insane from the perspective of a major studio, but perhaps one day someone might make them nonetheless, someone working with the same sort of budget and the same sort of infectious zeal Wood had.

The story kicks in at the point Wood gets his big break as a film director, due to a confluence of circumstances: the idea that he could make an entire movie from stock footage, his meeting and befriending Bela Lugosi and a small studio's inability to get the film rights to make the story of Christine Jorgensen. He makes Glen or Glenda instead, a intensely autobiographical story in which he also starred, under the pseudonym of Daniel Davis, alongside his girlfriend at the time, Dolores Fuller, who was unaware of his transvestism. Even though this was a low budget mess of a movie that was subsequently 'enhanced' by the producer with additional softcore porn scenes, Wood was intensely proud of writing, directing and starring in it, just as his idol, Orson Welles, had done with Citizen Kane. Needless to say, Glen or Glenda was hardly the picture Citizen Kane was but it set Wood on the track to future fame at the other end of the scale to his idol.

He proceeds on anyway, because, regardless of the quality of the work he produces, he proves that an infectious energy and a blind optimism are sometimes all that's needed. Jim Morton later suggested that, 'Lesser men, if forced to make movies under the conditions Wood faced, would have thrown up their hands in defeat,' and we watch this in action through the characterisation of Johnny Depp, who is impossible not to watch. He presumably nailed the spirit of the man, given that Wood's wife Kathy visited the set and gave her approval. 'That's my Eddie,' she said. Depp has Wood always smiling through sheer optimism, believing things like Warner Brothers would be interested in his work. He mouths the lines of his actors as they act because he's so into the moment. He cuts everything on the first take because it's all perfect and if it isn't, then nobody would notice anyway, or it all makes sense on some level of reality only he can see.

Depp is well known for his inspirations and this time round he constructed his characterisation out of 'the blind optimism of Ronald Reagan, the enthusiasm of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz and Casey Kasem.' Beyond Reagan's optimism and Kasem's confidence, he also studied the acting of Mickey Rooney to pick up that unbridled energy, and Wood certainly needed it. For Bride of the Atom, he gets stuck with a colourblind cinematographer, a non-actress who gets the female lead role because he believes she's going to finance the picture and a non-actor who's 'a little slow' who gets the male lead because his father actually does. Offscreen, merely living his life is just as traumatic as trying to get his film made, because the drama never ends. Fuller breaks up with him because she can't deal with his fetishes and his friends, and Lugosi, who has a serious addiction to morphine, attempts to enlist him in a double suicide attempt.

Eventually, of course, he makes it through to the legendary Plan 9 from Outer Space, a film with a history so outlandish that the documentary about it is half an hour longer than the film itself. Shot in 1956 as Grave Robbers from Outer Space, but not released for three years because of distribution problems, it stars Bela Lugosi, even though he had died before production began. He appears through a bizarre mix of existing footage shot for a movie that never happened and through the introduction of Dr Tom Mason, Wood's girlfriend's chiropractor, as a double, with a cape conveniently draped over his face to hide the fact that he had very little resemblance to Lugosi. The cast all had to be baptised, because the film was financed by the Baptist Church of Beverly Hills, eager to raise money to make a set of pictures about the twelve apostles. Driven to distraction by the changes they require, Wood shoots some scenes in drag to keep him calm.

Watching all this unfold is surreal, but it's fascinating to watch because it's shot straight rather than with Burton's usual quirky stylisations. Because the film only progresses up to 1959, Burton chose to shoot in black and white, even though Columbia were very wary of such a move and so he switched to Disney, who released what would become Burton's first R rated movie through their Touchstone brand. Depp is magnetic throughout, not just because he's playing the title role and so gets far more screen time than anyone else but largely because he was depressed about the process of filmmaking at the time and saw the part of Ed Wood as a 'chance to stretch out and have some fun.' It turned out to be the right film for him as he later explained that working with Martin Landau 'rejuvenated my love for acting'. Amazingly Landau is one of the less obvious choices for a part here, but he deservedly won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Lugosi.

Most of the actors are obvious casting choices. Jeffrey Jones looks and sounds like Criswell, the television psychic who introduced Ed Wood's movies with so much confidence and redundancy. Professional wrestler George 'The Animal' Steele is really the the only possible choice to play professional wrestler Tor Johnson, even though he isn't quite big enough to fill the big Swede's boots. Bill Murray is the spitting image of Bunny Breckinridge and his campiness is a thing of genius, conjured up with subtle movements and rolls of the eyes. Others are inspired choices. Vincent d'Onofrio, one of the most underrated actors of today, is unforgettable as Orson Welles, to whom of course Ed Wood frequently compared himself, even though he appears in only one single scene to inspire Wood to complete Plan 9 from Outer Space and his voice is dubbed by voice actor Maurice LaMarche, who had based the Brain in Pinky and the Brain on Welles.

Landau shines above all these, even above Depp, though I wouldn't go so far as to suggest he steals the film from him. Bela Lugosi would always be a great opportunity for any actor to play, but the old Bela is a dream part. He kickstarted the horror boom of the thirties with his defining take on Dracula, but then turned down the follow up role of Frankenstein's Monster because it wasn't sexy enough. After all, he'd already got married to his third wife and divorced after three days because he'd been having an affair with Clara Bow. How sexy could you get? After that his career sped into rapid decline because he proved to have the worst business sense of any actor except perhaps George Raft or John Travolta who turned down enough great parts to enable Humphrey Bogart and Richard Gere respectively to build entire careers out of. Lugosi, however, didn't turn down films he should have taken; instead he took the ones he shouldn't.

When he appeared in Glen or Glenda he was over seventy and had been a morphine addict for twenty years, soon becoming the first Hollywood star to be admitted to rehab. It had been eight years since he'd made a decent movie, The Body Snatcher, and even then his rival Boris Karloff had by far the better part. All this makes Bela exactly the sort of role that a good actor could make something of and Martin Landau makes it emphatically his own. He was of course a major actor long before Ed Wood, not least for the Mission: Impossible TV series, but I much prefer the older Landau, whether he's in a regular supporting slot in shows like The Evidence or Without a Trace, or in more recent movies like Lovely, Still. I've seen every performance he was up against in 1995 and, while Chazz Palminteri was notable in Bullets Over Broadway, nobody was real competition. His win was the first time any actor won an Oscar for playing another real life actor.

The only real downpoint to the movie is the fact that the script takes so many liberties with the truth, especially as pertains to Lugosi. He was not as antagonistic towards his frequent co-star Boris Karloff as scriptwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski would have us believe. He didn't swear, own a small dog or sleep in a coffin. He recovered fully from his morphine addiction and left the hospital under his own steam. His fourth wife did leave him in 1953, but he married again in 1955 and remained so until his death. He had a son who is notably absent from the film. His funeral was well attended by family and colleagues, Boris Karloff included. Peter Lorre is said to have looked down at Lugosi in his coffin, clad in one of his Dracula capes, and asked Vincent Price, 'Do you think we should put a stake through his heart, just in case?' Inaccuracies aside, Bela Lugosi Jr became friends with Landau after seeing his portrayal of his father.

Other notable departures from the truth include the well received premiere of Plan 9 from Outer Space and the meeting between Wood and Welles, neither of which ever happened; the mass baptism required by the church financing the film; and Wood's discovery of Tor Johnson, who was a much experienced actor who had appeared in a string of movies over a couple of decades. Often these departures from the truth end up less as slight inaccuracies and more as outright fabrications to unashamedly distort the truth for the sake of a more cinematic script, but Ed Wood is a strange subject to raise this sort of concern over, because he was notorious for doing precisely the same thing. He was always all about the spirit of a piece, never the detail, so his films are full of glaring errors and plot inconsistencies that nobody except Wood can ignore, the biggest reason that Plan 9 from Outer Space became known as the worst film of all time.

After the premiere of Yankee Doodle Dandy, an Oscar-winning biopic about impresario George M Cohan, Cohan himself said, 'Great film. Who's it about?' Like Yankee Doodle Dandy, Ed Wood really isn't a biopic, it's an impressionistic take on a point in time in a man's career. Much of Burton's work (and Depp's, for that matter), looks sympathetically at outsiders and this film may be, even more than Edward Scissorhands, his masterpiece on that front. Almost singlehandedly it led to a far more sympathetic reevaluation of Ed Wood and his work, after the Golden Turkey Awards had in 1980 consigned him with the dubious title of the 'Worst Director of All Time'. Now we can enjoy the irony of Ed Wood finally winning an Oscar and appearing in the IMDb Top 250 and speculate on whether it really is true that the title credits cost more to make than every single one of Wood's films put together.

The 39 Steps (1935)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Stars: Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll

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.

Alfred Hitchcock's name appeared on no less than nine films in this Top 250, as I grabbed it in 2004, making him the most represented director of all, and three more have popped in and out since. When I started this project I'd seen only two of those nine films, Rear Window and Psycho, but two years later this one completed the set. I've also managed to improve my background in Hitch generally from a pitiful total of four films to a far more acceptable forty one, including all the acknowledged classics, a whole bunch more that easily deserve to be regarded in the same breath and some that are merely, well, pretty darn good. I'm happy to report that there really aren't many below that standard and that working through the career of the master of suspense is an education that every avid film fan should really consider taking on. Don't just stop with the big ones from the fifties and sixties, because you'll miss out on things like this.

In fact, while his best films may be the ones caught up in his stunning decade of work that ran from Strangers on a Train in 1951 to Psycho in 1960, my personal favourites tend to appear somewhat earlier in his filmography, namely his later English films such as Sabotage, The Lady Vanishes and this film, perhaps his first true classic. It was based on The Thirty-Nine Steps, a 1915 novel by John Buchan, which introduced the character of Richard Hannay, something of a gentleman cliffhanger, a sort of secret agent of the English school who helped set the stage for a new generation of spies and action thriller heroes. He starred in five novels and appeared in a couple more and has been represented on screen by actors of the calibre of Kenneth More, Robert Powell and, in this film, Robert Donat, an actor so highly regarded that he was able to remain in England throughout his career and let Hollywood come to him when it wanted him.

Here Hannay is Canadian, just one indicator that this isn't a particularly close adaptation of the source novel, but given that the author apparently enjoyed it very much we shouldn't be too upset at that. We meet our hero in a London music hall where he does a pretty good impression of an English gentleman after a couple of gunshots interrupt the performance of Mr Memory, a man with an eidetic memory whose act is to answer trivia questions the audience throw at him. Hannay keeps his calm while all around are losing theirs, but he continues to keep it throughout the evening, which becomes more and more admirable. He rescues a young lady, even though she doesn't particularly seem to need rescuing and even though she claims to be called Smith but patently isn't, given the notable European accent. She's cute but she's sinister, not least because she knows his name and that the phone ringing in his furnished apartment is for her.

He plays along like a gentleman, as she admits both to being a spy without a country, in the game for the money, and to firing those shots herself to create a diversion. There's a secret vital to England's air defence and it's about to be spilled, but the bad guys are on her trail and she's in serious danger, something that now inherently extends to him, her unwitting accomplice in escape. She drops hints at things but doesn't fully explain. She warns him about a man with the tip of his little finger missing. She mentions that her next step is to travel to Scotland to talk to someone. She even asks him if he's heard of the 39 steps but she won't explain why. 'Is that a pub?' he asks. She might tell him tomorrow but she doesn't get the chance because tomorrow never comes for her. She stumbles into his room during the night with a knife in her back, to live long enough only to hand him a map of Scotland with the town of Alt-na-Shellach circled.

And so the race is on, with Hannay something of a precursor to Roger Thornhill in Hitchcock's even more lauded North By Northwest, both men regular joes caught up in a wild ride into spy country. Fortunately my biggest problem with North By Northwest fails to appear here, Robert Donat being far more believable than Cary Grant because Richard Hannay is far more believable than Roger Thornhill. Thornhill was an everyday advertising executive who gets caught up in events way beyond his control and suddenly morphs into James Bond or something close to it. Maybe that's empowering to the viewers as a fantasy, but it hardly makes for a realistic story. We don't really know what Hannay is but he's obviously a nice guy who gets caught up in events way beyond his control but he makes it through without ever turning into James Bond. He falls prey to massively dangerous errors and wins out through a combination of luck and judgement.

There are points where he feels confident and points where he doesn't, but he never has an air of invulnerability floating around him. Initially he's calm and collected, as conspiracy nuts were presumably thin on the ground in 1935, but when Smith is murdered it ceases to be a game and he runs, albeit north to Scotland because, with a dead body in his apartment, he feels that the only way to really clear his name is to uncover the truth. What we see is a bright man out of his depth, who flounders around trying to stay ahead of both the good guys and the bad guys, while trying to work out what he's got himself into. He can certainly think on his feet, but then he has to because he doesn't know who else is involved and so he often cleverly escapes one situation only to blunder right into another one. Much of how he succeeds or fails also rests on the actions of other people who, acting on their own best intentions, unknowingly frustrate everyone's plans.

All this makes the action engrossing, believable and grounded, far more so than in Hitch's later 'technicolor bauble'. I loved the social comment in Hannay's first escape that we believe what we want to believe. He tries but fails to persuade the milkman that the men outside are murderers and he's in mortal danger, only succeeding in eliciting his help by lying about playing around with a married woman. What's really clever is that Hannay is also believing what he wants to believe, assuming he's a target even though he's probably not really in danger from the killers, who only let him live to take the rap for Smith's murder and so he heads north to Scotland to begin his adventure. In a magnificent piece of editing, a charwoman finds the body as the Flying Scotsman sets off but because the news travels faster than the train, he soon finds he has to get more and more imaginative with his escapes to keep that one step ahead of his pursuers.

There are so many pointers here to future Hitchcock films. With the police searching the train he finds himself in the hands of a beautiful young lady travelling alone. In North By Northwest, that turned out to be a glamorous spy played by Eva Marie Saint, prompting Hollywood romance and intrigue. In The 39 Steps, it's merely a passenger played by Madeleine Carroll who promptly turns him in. This forces him to stop the train and jump, only to find himself on the Forth Railway Bridge, perhaps the first of many landmarks that Hitch would find a suspenseful place for in his films. Sometimes I wonder if a landmark is truly a landmark if it wasn't in a Hitchcock movie. He was always ahead of the technological curve too, so when Hannay is chased across the moors of Scotland, one of his pursuers is an early form of the helicopter called an autogyro, previously only seen in two other movies, It Happened One Night and W C Fields's International House.

The film is less than an hour and a half long, and Donat as Hannay is the focal point throughout, the rest of the characters appearing and disappearing as the story requires. Yet there doesn't seem to be a wasted shot, except perhaps the odd last long lingering glimpse at some of the set locations, and every character is admirably fleshed out, even if they don't have a lot of screen time. The two commercial travellers who sit opposite Hannay on the train are there only to aid with the suspense, but great writing means that we learn exactly who they are in a few short scenes of limericks, ladies' underwear and risqué dialogue. We learn all about who an innkeeper and his wife are, entirely through how they choose to treat the pair of newlyweds who arrive late one night. We even learn plenty about Smith, through a combination of what she tells Hannay and what she doesn't. You aren't paranoid if they're really all out to get you.

Best of all are a crofter and his wife, who Hannay stays a night with outside Ard-na-Shelloch, in scenes that take up mere minutes but which in other hands could have been the entire movie. John is a strict religious man, though as tight and traiterous as any stereotypical Scot in the wild eyed form of John Laurie, later to find fame as Private Frazer on Dad's Army. His wife Margaret is well out of her depth, even though she's played by one of England's foremost stage actresses, the future Dame Peggy Ashcroft in only her second film. John is utterly in charge and so Margaret is doomed to an austere existence far from Sauchiehall St and the lights of the big city that she misses so much. Hannay immediately becomes threat to one and lifeline to the other, realising he can trust her but not him, but with Margaret's actions to help her guest only deepening her husband's fears that she's being seduced. John gets to be traitor and saviour all at once.

There's so much depth in these mere few minutes that it's amazing to realise how short they really are. It's masterful cinema, stripped down to its bare essentials by the director, writer and the actors involved. The breadth of the emotions that Peggy Ashcroft embues into the last shot of her character amply demonstrates why she must have been so great on the stage. I didn't recognise her at all here, though that's hardly surprising as this is almost fifty years before she would win an Oscar for A Passage to India and she was never known as a screen actress. I didn't recognise John Laurie either because Dad's Army was over three decades away and I came to his film roles later. I didn't even recognise Robert Donat, though he was so magnificent only four years later to win his own Oscar for Goodbye, Mr Chips. Perhaps that's because he was hardly prolific himself and he spent much of that film in progressively serious aging make up.

Leading lady Madeleine Carroll ought to be the most recognisable member of the cast as she retired from acting early in her career after a burst of prolificity, averaging two films a year over two decades. After her sister was killed in a Nazi bombing raid in London she devoted the rest of the war to working in field hospitals for the Red Cross, which earned her the Legion d'Honneur for valour, and after the war she only made three further films. Yet I didn't recognise her either as I believe I've only seen a couple of her other movies, 1937's The Prisoner of Zenda and Hitchcock's next film, Secret Agent, both of which were dominated by male characters played by amazing sets of actors. She's understated here too but makes herself more obvious through only having to share the screen with one actor, who is more than happy to give her an opportunity to shine. And they really share the screen, as they're handcuffed together for much of the time.

She's Pamela, the young lady Hannay stole a kiss from on the Flying Scotsman in an attempt to avoid capture, but she disappears from the film for a while, just an inconsequential character at that point. When she returns to the story, she turns him in yet again, after he escapes from the police and stumbles into a political meeting, only to fall foul of a case of mistaken identity and be promptly hustled up on stage as a speaker. He impresses the audience with an astoundingly generic speech that says everything and nothing all at once, but he's far too obvious to get away and so gets driven off in handcuffs by the villains of the piece who are posing as policemen. They take Pamela too, ostensibly so she can identify Hannay but really just to keep her quiet, and as suspicion quickly rises about who they are and where they're taking them, she ends up cuffed to him when they're held up on the road by a flock of sheep and flight becomes possible.

This is all more social and personal comment from Charles Bennett, who adapted Buchan's novel for the screen. His association with Hitch dated back to Blackmail in 1929, a film adaptation of Bennett's play, and from there he wrote many of Hitchcock's English films, as well as his second American picture, Foreign Correspondent. It's impossible not to see both humour and comment in Hannay's political speech, but there's another level. Hitchcock had a phobia about policemen, apparently triggered as a child when his father sent him to the local station with a letter. After reading it, the desk sergeant locked up the young Alfred for ten minutes before setting him free with the explanation that, 'This is what happens to people who do bad things.' With typical black humour, he extended his wrong man paranoia to his cast, cuffing Donat and Carroll together on the set one day and pretending for a few hours to have lost the key.

It's these scenes with the leading characters on the run together, literally inseparable because of the handcuffs, that turn out to be the funniest, as Hannay attempts once more to convince her of the reality of the situation and when he fails yet again, turns the tables on her and plays up his imaginary life of crime. 'All right,' he says. 'Then, I'm just a plain common murderer who stabbed an innocent, defenseless woman in the back not four days ago. How do you come out over that? I don't know how innocent you may be, but you're a woman and you're defenseless, and you're alone on a desolate moor in the dark manacled to a murderer who would stop at nothing to get you off his hands. And if that's the situation you prefer, have it, my lovely, and welcome.' Of course, after finding a pub for the night, he proves such an amateur that he tries and fails to saw off the cuffs while she just waits for him to fall asleep and slips her tiny hand out herself.

There are so many reasons why this film works, but this is the most palpable. Richard Hannay is a great wish fulfilment hero, one who we can truly watch and believably picture ourselves in his place. He's daring, imaginative and intelligent, as I'm sure we all would like to believe we are, but he's far from a superhero. He's quintessentially human so makes mistakes, bad choices and decisions and he's rarely in control of any situation for long. In short he's refreshingly grounded. Another reason is that the film never lets up, as wild a ride in black and white as North By Northwest ever was in colour, and it's tighter and more focused. Perhaps the biggest reason though is that all human life is here. Yes, it's a Hitchcock suspense picture, but more than any of his later work it's full of so much else. It's not a romance or a comedy but it's full of both of those things. It's an adventure, a cliffhanger, a set of thrills, but always deliciously old school.

Above all it's a real statement on human nature, from the insights I've already mentioned to the finalé which speaks to routines, behaviour patterns and the fundamental relief that accompanies getting something off our chest. Perhaps my favourite moment in the film is an easily overlooked one. Eventually Pamela learns the truth about Hannay as she tries to escape from him, sneaking out of their room at the inn while he sleeps, only to discover the reality of their situation from other mouths. Forced to quickly reevaluate all his actions and all her own, she sneaks back into the room, tucks him in and turns in herself on the couch at the foot of the bed, then realises that she's cold so promptly steals back the blanket. Like the scenes at the crofter's there's so much depth here in such a short timeframe that it's wondrous to behold and it's this sort of mastery that may may lead to this fighting off The Lady Vanishes to become my favourite Hitchcock.

Spirited Away (2001)

Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Stars: Rumi Hiragi and Miyu Irino

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.

By the time I watched Princess Mononoke for this project back in 2006, I'd seen a sum total of one Hayao Miyazaki movie: a dubbed full screen version of Kiki's Delivery Service. A couple of weeks later when I caught up with this one, I'd seen almost all of them, just short of his earliest (The Castle of Cagliostro) and his latest (Howl's Moving Castle). Now, the only one I still haven't seen is the new latest, Ponyo, which was released in 2008 to the usual acclaim, because once you've seen one Miyazaki you just have to see more. He serves as writer, director and lead artist on his films and is so far from prolific, with only ten films to his credit as director in over thirty years. Fortunately he works for Studio Ghibli, which he co-founded, and so is relatively free to work on whatever he wants, at whatever speed suits him. After Princess Mononoke, he went in to temporary retirement but, luckily for us, he returned to work to make his masterpiece.

Miyazaki is sometimes described as 'the Japanese Walt Disney', but the accolade is misleading because his greatest achievements are very different from Disney's. Walt Disney succeeded in making animation massively popular, with icons like Mickey Mouse, and to make animation at a feature length viable, with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1938, initially dubbed 'Disney's Folly' but soon to become the highest grossing film of the year which won him a special honorary Academy Award: one Oscar with seven miniature companions. An important Oscar is one of the few things that these two filmmakers share, as Spirited Away was the first Japanese anime to win at the Academy Awards, even though anime predates them by a full decade. In 1938, Miyazaki hadn't even been born and so many of the greatest innovations in the industry predate him, with Osamu Tezuka being a better fit for the description of a Japanese Walt Disney.

What Miyazaki achieved is to elevate the art of animation to a whole new level. Working within the most animation friendly country in the world, one whose written language is even comprised of pictures, he brought depth and maturity to the medium that is startling for the deceptive ease by which he achieved it. Inspired by western writers of children's fiction like Rosemary Sutcliffe, Ursula Le Guin and Eleanor Farjeon, he crafts his stories less as movie scripts and more as real works of literature, without descending, as Disney tended to do, to clichéd heroes and villains and hackneyed fairy tale plots. His characters have grand adventures that are exciting to watch, but they also grow through the experiences that unfold, learning about who they are, what flaws they have and how they relate to the world around them. There are distinguishable themes to Miyazaki's work that resonate: feminism, pacifism and environmentalism, but he never preaches.

Because Miyazaki's movies are all about growth and young children at the point of learning about life are perfect as lead characters, the lead character here, as usual, is a young girl, ten years old and far from happy about the fact that she and her family are moving house. As her parents get lost on the way to their new home, young Chihiro just bemoans her fate and whines a lot. There are hints at the magic ahead, in the form of tiny inviting shrines that Chihiro sees out of the car windows, but she's too happy being unhappy to pay much attention. Soon they run out of road and find themselves in front of a tunnel blocked by yet another stone shrine, so they leave the car behind and walk through the tunnel to discover a deserted theme park full of restaurants. It's empty of people but is at least full of food, all hot, steaming and inviting, so her parents tuck in with the intention of paying the proprietors when they appear.

While Chihiro's parents apparently fall under the spell of this theme park and fail to acknowledge anything strange about it, she does and so wanders around on her own to explore. Fortunately she discovers the androgynous young sorcerer, Master Haku, who feeds her a red pill to stop her from disappearing. She's already fading away because as we all know, this place is not what it seems and it's not a place for humans. It's when night falls that the theme park comes truly alive though that is hardly the right word, given the characters we're about to be introduced to. Her parents turn into pigs, the visitors are huge shadowy figures rather than people and the tunnel becomes submerged, turning into a wide river. A paddle steamer brings new guests, leaving the boat as Japanese masks and stepping onto land as varied kami or spirits. You just can't go wrong with kami and if you haven't been introduced to the concept, this is the perfect place to start.

To suggest that this world is fantastic is an understatement but it's vibrant and engaging. Haku may be a young sorcerer with a number of powerful secrets, but he still works at a bathhouse, the central location for most of the film and, as we soon discover, it's a bathhouse where eight million gods can rest their weary bones. This is the safest place for Chihiro though it's still hardly a place for a ten year old girl, especially as humans are close to taboo in this world. Haku gives her directions to the boiler room, asking that she insist that Kamaji put her to work. If she doesn't work, Yubaba, the sorceress in charge of the bathhouse, will turn her into an animal too. And off he goes. You can imagine what a bundle of nerves young Chihiro must be in at this point, her world having been turned into a nightmarish whirlwind where every glance shows her something else weird and wonderful. This is a deluge of imagination and it's only just beginning.

Just as Chihiro has Haku to guide her, at least a little, we put ourselves in the hands of Miyazaki. There are many reasons why his introduction on the Disney-distributed DVD by his friend John Lasseter, chief creative officer at Pixar and now Disney, is so appropriate. While he is obviously uncomfortable in front of a camera, Lasseter puts him there for a brief moment and simply says, 'Hayao Miyazaki, the world. The world, Miyazaki-san.' This resonates with me, not only because he was almost unknown in the west until the release of Princess Mononoke, his genius known only to a select few of the initiated, me excluded. I discovered anime in 1991 with Akira's UK release and I became an instant fan, stunned by the sheer range of material that the medium offered. I put down a standing order for any new titles released and even made odd little pilgrimages to events at the Yaohan Plaza in London and the offices of Anime UK magazine.

Anime was a whole new world, utterly different from the animation I knew, but Miyazaki was its best kept secret, even though to watch anime without knowing Miyazaki is like watching kaiju without knowing Godzilla or watching spaghetti westerns without knowing Sergio Leone. Only when I finally saw one of his films did I realise just what people like Helen McCarthy, editor of Anime UK, were talking about. We all watch cartoons as a kid but there's a point in time where we discover our first Disney movie and everything that went before turns into kids stuff. Spirited Away is so far beyond anything that went before it that it stuns us and we find ourselves laughing and crying at the sheer elation of the experience. We find ourselves lost in the magic and have difficulty remembering to blink or breathe, utterly immersed in the world that has been opened up before us. And yet he is not a household name. The world, Miyazaki-san, indeed.

It's impossible not to see the wonder in every glance. Even the staircase that Chihiro needs to walk down to the boiler room turns into a Herculean task full of terror and relief. Kamaji is a six armed creature with extensible limbs and dark glasses who stokes the furnaces that feed the baths, assisted by balls of soot with arms that carry the coal, one piece at a time. The sheer otherness of the world Chihiro finds herself in is palpable. Suddenly she finds it difficult to put her foot down without treading on someone or something. These sootballs eat little stars, just one reminder that every character is both utterly memorable and utterly different from anything you're likely to have seen before. Yubaba has a huge head with even more huge hair, like a Toby jug, and a collection of huge rings like a gypsy fortune teller. She has three heads that bounce around her room like cushions. She even turns into a bird to fly away during the day.

She's a scary character for a ten year old girl, something that extends from the lead character to the audience watching. She can light a cigarette with her finger. She can pull Chihiro through a set of doors just by waving her hand. She has a huge baby that she dotes upon, and I do mean huge. She can even pull the kanji off the page after Chihiro signs a contract to work for her that constricts her name down to Sen. 'You'd make a lovely piglet,' says the sorceress, 'or a lump of coal,' and you can believe she'd make it happen too. She calls Chihiro 'a lazy, spoiled cry baby,' but the girl persists in asking for work and Yubaba has taken an oath to take on anyone who so requests, so Sen she becomes. Unfortunately, as Haku explains to her afterwards, Yubaba steals people's names and in so doing steals their memories of who they used to be. Haku doesn't remember who he was and even after only a day, Chihiro almost turns entirely into Sen.

As a worker at this bathhouse for the gods, Chihiro experiences all that life has to offer, all its shapes and sizes and flavours. She has an adventure getting down the staircase to the boiler house that first night but walks up it without even thinking the next morning. She's already more than she was, shaped by her experiences. She finds prejudice, oppression and trickery in this bathhouse, but also friendship, belonging and camaraderie. She finds strength, purpose and maturity, all the while remaining a child. She learns how to keep control over her emotions. She even makes an unlikely friend, a tall shadowy creature in a mask. Through his mute help and her own stubborn determination, she turns a disaster into a triumph and the emotions soar, though even he isn't what he might appear. He's No Face, a dangerous monster who generates gold but eats some of the employees. Again she saves the day, through a mix of daring and naïvete.

In things like this Miyazaki keeps us guessing. While it's obvious that Chihiro is the focal point of the story, not least because she's the title character in the original Japanese, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, which translates literally to Sen and Chihiro's Spiriting Away, there's far from just one story woven into this one picture. Initially it's Haku who plans to rescue Chihiro, given that he knows this environment and she doesn't, and so he tries to find a way to return her parents back from swine into people. Yet as Chihiro grows as a person and becomes more comfortable in her surroundings, it falls on her to rescue Haku from a number of fates. Never one to make his characters one dimensional, Miyazaki crafts even Yubaba, initially the villainess of the piece, in ways that make her more and more morally ambiguous, especially when we discover her twin sister, Zeniba, who has infiltrated her domain in the innovative guise of a flock of paper dolls.

It's watching characters like these who have little obvious connection to the viewer that we can't fail but realise the magic involved in the filmmaking. Miyazaki conjures depth out of paper dolls, draws attitude out of the movement of hair and wrings emotion out of a character with no face. How difficult must this be? Even the little soot creatures have more humanity to them than any characters I've seen Disney come up with in the last fifty years. Cutesy singing teapots do not come remotely close. Somehow Miyazaki can embed emotion into anything and everything, a highly appropriate talent given that this film is full of kami, the spirits that exist in every object, a Shinto concept that finds at once its most obvious and its subtlest cinematic interpretations here. It flows out of the backgrounds, not just the architecture of the bathhouse but the myriad creatures that populate it, even the ones who only exist to flesh out the background of a scene.

Miyazaki packed Spirited Away full of far more background detail than any of his previous films. Every shot is hugely detailed with more attention spent on the ephemeral than most animators would spend on the focal points, yet our attention is never diverted away from where it should be. There are little touches throughout this film, so many that you'll still be discovering them on your fourth or fifth time through, from a chair that lowers itself automatically to suit the person sitting in it to a lantern that hops, for its stand is a single leg. Some aren't even seen because corridors offer only shadowy hints at what lies behind their paper thin walls. There's glorious decoration everywhere, from Yubaba's lush suites to the many painted wall screens, always different and always delightful. Almost everyone and everything in this film has character except for Master Haku who for much of the film is deliberately an inscrutable cypher.

Such attention was not unnoticed. Spirited Away made an unimaginable impact in Japan, even more than Miyazaki has previously done throughout his career. It broke the record set by its predecessor, Princess Mononoke, for the number of cinema tickets sold for a domestic film, then went on to do the unthinkable: break the all-time box office record set by Titanic. It also won the equivalent of the Best Picture Oscar in Japan, and I should emphasise that that was Best Picture not Best Animated Picture. In the States, it deservedly won the Best Animated Feature Oscar in 2002, the films that comprised its competition being unworthy of mention in the same breath. The only other anime ever even nominated was Miyazaki's next film, Howl's Moving Castle, not because anime is unworthy or overlooked but because the Academy's rules require theatrical release in Los Angeles. C'mon, Spirited Away or Treasure Planet? Did they even have to discuss?

Spirited Away is also the longest film to ever be nominated over the entire run of the category, something else that speaks to the different attitudes taken in Japan to America when it comes to animation. There's no expectation in Japan that kids just won't sit still for a movie that runs over two hours, and indeed within a year of its release, one out of every six Japanese had seen this film. Personally I can't imagine anyone not becoming utterly engrossed with Spirited Away, not even if they have ADHD and can't sit still for five minutes at a time. It's the closest thing I've seen to magic on a cinema screen, the best possible entry point to a whole new world, though I'd swear to whatever deity you choose that one experience of Studio Ghibli or Hayao Miyazaki and you'll have difficulty going back to lesser material. In my humble opinion this is the greatest animated film ever made and you are depriving yourself by not seeing it.

The African Queen (1951)

Director: John Huston
Stars: Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn

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

The African Queen begins on the water, just like the thirty foot launch that provides its name, as we gaze at the incredibly lush foliage of German East Africa and listen to the diverse soundscape of the jungle while the credits roll. 'Lush' is the word to use because we can almost feel it seep through the screen in vibrant Technicolor, this amazingly being the first colour film of both lead actors, Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, and director John Huston. Happily neither the colour nor the sound let up: they soak into the film stock and make it all the more real. There should always be noise in a jungle, but most Hollywood jungle flicks got made on the MGM lot and so missed out entirely on any level of authenticity. It's only the rare ones that got the full on location treatment to bring in a believable feel and the only other movie I remember offhand from this era that sounded this authentic was Mogambo, with Clark Gable and Ava Gardner.

While most of the film unfolds on water, we briefly switch back to land to find Hepburn singing away with gusto inside the 1st Methodist Church in Kungdu. It's September 1914 and she's a haughty old maid of a Methodist missionary called Rose Sayer, notably red from the blistering African sun even though she's in the shade. While she certainly doesn't look good as she plays the organ, she still looks better than she felt for close off screen, out of our sight, was a bucket for her to vomit in between takes because she was suffering from dysentery. Jack Cardiff, the director of photography, called her 'a real trouper', but this sort of attitude is precisely why she was cast. The other half of her character explains how she got the dysentery to begin with. She stubbornly drank only water in protest at the amount of imported Scotch Bogart and Huston constantly put away. 'Whenever a fly bit Huston or me,' said Bogie, 'it dropped dead.'

Rose is the brother of the Revd Samuel Sayer, played to wonderfully sanctimonious effect by Robert Morley, with much the same expression that he had when being force fed his poodle by Vincent Price in Theatre of Blood. They have a full house but it's an open question how much effect they're having on the half naked congregation who are certainly vocal, if not particularly close to the hymnal, and who happily run out to meet the mailman. This is Charlie Allnut, the grizzled Canadian captain of the African Queen, a part entirely unlike any Bogart had played before, as is soon made abundantly obvious when his first scene with the Sayers has him play second fiddle to his own rumbling stomach. We first see him relaxed in a wicker chair, a cigar in his mouth, a glass of whisky in one hand and the boat's whistle in the other. Charlie Allnut is a happy man, as Bogart would soon be too when the part landed him his only Academy Award.

He drops by with the mail and a few supplies they've been waiting for, but more important than long overdue rose bushes is news that the war is on, though he can't remember much more than that the Germans are on the other side to the English and all those little countries are in it too. As soon as he heads back to his boat though, in come the German troops to march around and torch all the buildings like good German troops do, so that they can force the natives into service without anything for them to run home to. One futile attempt at resistance on the Revd Sayer's part and he goes a little mad. Soon he's dead, perhaps of a delayed concussion to the skull from a German rifle butt. However this is a war story the way Raiders of the Lost Ark is a religious film, the Kaiser's troops providing a source and destination to the plot but otherwise backing out so that we can watch the real story unfold in between their brief but periodic appearances.

The story is really about two people, Charlie Allnut and Rose Sayer, or perhaps three if you count the trusty old African Queen herself. For almost the entire film it's just them, the jungle and the river as they head downstream to almost certain death in an insane attempt to strike a blow for King and Country by sinking the Louisa, a much larger German boat that carries the biggest gun in East Africa. It's a real David and Goliath story, but we safely ignore it because we don't really ever believe that they're going to be able to pull it off anyway. We concentrate instead on the performances of the two leads as their two mismatched characters gradually grow together by putting aside their many differences and finding a common ground through shared experience. This worked so well that Hollywood effectively remade it 24 years later with Hepburn opposite John Wayne, albeit with her character renamed Eula Goodnight and Bogart's Rooster Cogburn.

Without the performances given by the two leads and the solid script by James Agee and director John Huston, this could have been a mess, as could Rooster Cogburn for that matter, and neither would be particularly remembered today. I often wonder how many forgotten TV movies with low budgets and awful casts would have become legendary classics if only they had been made by people like John Huston who didn't tend to go for TV movies with low budgets and awful casts. It only takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch. Luckily for us, the script here is razor sharp, based not just on the source novel of the same name by C S Forester but by Huston's observations of the offscreen chemistry of his stars, and those stars are in blistering form, however much they were suffering through the shoot and sometimes even because of it. The ending is a rare thing indeed, a change from the source novel that is appropriate and perhaps even an improvement.

Humphrey Bogart may never have been better, but then he'd have to be good to have beaten out such heavyweights for that Oscar as Marlon Brando (in A Streetcar Named Desire, no less) and Montgomery Clift (in A Place in the Sun). I've never seen him animated like he is here, even when playing second fiddle gangsters for Warners back in the thirties. Maybe he took a leaf out of frequent co-star James Cagney's book: Cagney's acting style was to never stop moving and Bogart never stops here, even when he's not coated in rubber leeches. He's less the captain of his boat and more an integral part of it. His eyes are always looking somewhere new and his face harbours more expressions than you would ever believe the hardboiled dick of the forties could have come up with. Maybe it's the water that did it, given that Bogie was a notable sailor and he successfully defied stereotype again in The Caine Mutiny, as the captain of a much bigger boat.

Co-star Katharine Hepburn is as stubbornly stiff and politely pestering as only Katharine Hepburn can be, and she manages the highly difficult task of remaining stiff and pestering even when she comes to life hurtling down white water rapids. She always had a stubborn and rebellious streak in her, playing tomboys and misfits and getting up to all sorts of unladylike behaviour, because frankly she didn't care two hoots about what anyone else thought of her. She knew she was right and that's all that mattered, even when she was wrong. Here she finds herself prim and proper and in the enforced sole company of a gin soaked but very capable outdoorsman. Most women would happily fall back on stereotype, especially in 1914, and let the man take care of business, but not our Kate. If Rose gets an idea stuck in her head, woe betide anyone who stands in the way of its fruition, even if it's their boat and their supplies and their life that she's gambling with.

It's hard to imagine anyone else's expression going from acute distate to doe eyed and back so quickly yet so believably, yet Kate wasn't the first choice for the part. Bette Davis was the name most frequently associated with the project, having first been offered to her in 1938. She tried to make it again in 1947 and 1949 but by then Hepburn's name was attached and she didn't get another shot. I'm sure it's an interesting question for film geeks to throw around: would this have been as good with Bette opposite David Niven, James Mason or John Mills? Each has possibility but I can't see any of those combinations outdoing how Bogart and Hepburn stamped authority onto their roles. Then again, the original reason Columbia chose to buy the rights to the novel was as a vehicle for husband and wife Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester. That I'd pay to see! Instead they went for a comedic approach to a similar story with 1938's Vessel of Wrath.

There's comedy here, just as there's a war hovering around to be referenced once in a while, but this is a character driven drama. Allnut, who's Canadian anyway and so not too concerned about a war in Europe, is all ready to keep his boat hidden behind an island until the whole thing blows over. After all, there's plenty of food, crates of cigarettes, even a couple of cases of gin: 'all the comforts of home,' he tells Rose but she's having none of it. If you've ever heard Hepburn speak, you can hear the tone in her voice as she states, 'We simply can't remain here in this backwater until the war is over, Mr Allnut.' The British are sure to come but are also sure to not get there as they'd have to pass the Louisa, a hundred ton steamer with a six pound gun, the biggest in all of central Africa. Rose happily decides that the pair of them can redress the balance, with blasting gelatin from the mine, oxygen cylinders for torpedoes and Charlie's skill as a machinist.

For a while he just plays along to humour the crazy lady and wait for her to back out when the inevitable danger threatens, but of course that just isn't going to happen. Charlie Allnut doesn't know Kate the way the viewers know Kate. Charlie Allnut is dumb enough to miss the seizure she almost has when she realises he's drinking alcohol and doesn't for one moment imagine that she would dare to empty it all overboard while he's passed out drunk. He only gets drunk so he can tell her off. 'Whose boat is it anyway?' he shouts before calling her 'a crazy psalm-singing skinny old maid.' And that's it for the Gordon's. At this point they have nothing in common, no frame of reference except Africa itself. Snippets of history, like him coming to Africa to build the Zambezi Bridge and staying on because he can be his own boss, always end up with Rose saying, 'I beg your pardon?' because she no longer remotely understands what he's talking about.

The connections they find grow out of the danger they face. After they head down their first set of rapids, Miss Prim and Proper finds the experience bracing and wonderful, a feeling that she's only ever felt a couple of times before during her brother's sermons when the spirit calls him. 'I never dreamed that any mere physical experience could be so stimulating!' she cries. They get past the Shona, a German fort, under heavy fire, only to hit heavier rapids and a combination of exhilaration and relief leads to the ice being broken by a kiss. Suddenly it ceases to be 'Miss' and 'Mr Allnut' and begins to be 'Rosie' and 'Dear'. Suddenly, Charlie isn't looking at the crocodiles to pointedly suggest to his unwelcome guest that they're just waiting for their breakfast, instead he's making faces at the hippos and imitating the monkeys on the bank, though all the noises he makes are surprisingly dubbed. I wonder what Bogart really sounded like.

It's only on these technical points that the film creaks, because of an inevitable contrast. At least half of the picture was shot in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, much of it at the junction of the Victoria and Albert branches of the Nile, and it reeks of authenticity, not least because most of the crew went down with fever. They all lived it, even the folks we don't see on screen. When Hepburn wrote a memoir of her experience, she subtitled it, How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind. Even the scenes with the stars in the water look good, though they were shot in studio tanks back in England, but in and amongst are rear projection shots that can't help but stand out against the realism of the rest. It may seem picky to poke holes at bad rear projection in scenes set on river rapids in 1951, but reusing some of the same shots at a number of different points in the film seems a little less forgivable.

Perhaps they'd had enough. By all accounts, the shoot was a memorably difficult one, not that the production was unaware of the likelihood before setting out. Natives were hired to help the crew, but Huston has explained in interviews that many failed to show up, as they believed the filmmakers to be cannibals. Lauren Bacall, who tagged along to cook and camp and be with her husband, even though she wasn't in the film herself, suggests that they weren't always helpful when they did. The African Queen sank twice during filming. 'The natives had been told to watch it and they did,' Bacall said. 'They watched it sink.' Huston also spent time hunting big game, on one occasion unwittingly leading Hepburn into a herd of wild animals, and his exploits, perhaps at the expense of the production, generated a further film, Clint Eastwood's White Hunter, Black Heart, based on the novel by Peter Viertel, who was an uncredited writer on The African Queen.

As a direct contrast to the grim reality of the production's off screen experience, at least except for Robert Morley, who had the foresight to shoot all his scenes in London to be spliced into the film later, the picture itself is a pure joy. It's easy to get swept away into the story and join one of cinema's most memorable pairings down the Ubangi river on the little African Queen to reach a line as memorable as, 'By the authority vested in me by Kaiser Wilhelm II, I pronounce you man and wife. Proceed with the execution.' It's full of relieved tension, poetic justice and Hollywood screen magic, even though the Germans are played by actors as quintessentially English as Peter Bull, later a similarly surprising Russian Ambassador in Dr Strangelove. This project saw my maiden voyage on the African Queen but it's obvious why many people take it again and again. I've already taken a return trip and I'm sure I'll be booking my tickets again soon.

The Terminator (1984)

Director: James Cameron
Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton, Lance Henriksen and Paul Winfield

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

The Terminator opened a lot of eyes in 1984. It came out of nowhere, the second movie directed by a man whose first was Piranha II: Flying Killers, a film so bad that it has a relatively safe spot on the IMDb Bottom 100 Films rather than the Top 250. Yet it made a major star out of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who would go on to become one of the biggest box office draws of the decade, one of the most recognised men on the face of the planet and eventually, of course, Governor of California; it created an iconic villain who is among the most memorable in science fiction film history; and it also redefined what could be done without a major budget, something bizarre to consider given that the director we're taking about is James Cameron. This is the man who spent $200m to make Titanic and $237m to make Avatar, so its easy to see him as the worst example of Hollywood excess ever and the last person imaginable as a pioneer of low budget filmmaking.

Sam Raimi said that a director working with little money must innovate to make something float, for example, but a big budget director just wonders what an anti-gravity disc would cost. Orson Welles was more succinct, pointing out that 'the enemy of art is the absence of limitations.' They could have been talking specifically about Cameron, who had no limitations with Titanic. He built a full size replica of the boat, contracted companies who furnished the original to furnish his sets and flew in genuine Picassos from Paris to hang in them. It wasn't just the most expensive film ever made at that point, it cost more to produce than the original ship itself. When he made The Terminator he had only $6.4m but he put it all on the screen for us to see. Whether the first low budget action film to outdo its big budget competitors was The Terminator or Escape from New York in 1981, this was certainly emphasis that a big movie could be made without a big budget.

Of course, there's much more to The Terminator than just being a pioneer. We've all seen it and we all know the plot because it's entered popular culture to a rather pervasive degree. In 1997 a US defence system called Skynet becomes self aware and decides to wipe out the human race which it sees as a threat to its continued existence, starting with a nuclear holocaust that comes out of nowhere. A man named John Connor rallies the human race and organises the survivors into a resistance that fights back and in 2029 is about to win the day but, before it does, Skynet tries to cheat. It sends a terminator, a cyborg assassin, back in time to the Los Angeles of 1984 to find and kill Sarah Connor, John's mother, before he can be born, thus wiping out his entire existence and by extension the threat to theirs. Before he destroys the time machine, John takes the opportunity to send back a soldier, Kyle Reese, to find and protect her, and the fight is on.

From my current perspective 21 years on, it seems almost impossible to imagine anyone except Arnold Schwarzenegger playing the terminator. Yet there were a number of other choices before him, one of which still sounds intriguing to me: I can really see Jürgen Prochnow playing the part, albeit in a different way that fit Cameron's original vision of having a terminator that could blend into a crowd. Lance Henriksen, who the director had worked with on Piranha II: Flying Killers, was the original choice, even down to the character design sketches being based on him. Kevin Kline and Michael Douglas were considered for the part, Tom Selleck was rumoured and Mel Gibson turned it down. Of all people, O J Simpson was in the running too but was discarded as a choice because the producers ironically felt he was just too nice to be believable as a cold blooded killer. Maybe I should write a script about sending someone back in time to recast him.

Arnie was originally brought in to play Kyle Reese, the terminator's nemesis. Perhaps this was an attempt to bring an element of size and power to a soldier of the future, given that terminators don't need muscles. After Cameron met Arnie though, both decided that he should take the title role and so Henriksen was relegated to a supporting role. Incidentally, he did end up playing a very different cyborg in Aliens, Cameron's next film, which he wrote during the nine month delay to the start of production caused by his star's prior commitment to Conan the Destroyer. Bishop, Henriksen's character in Aliens, is a fascinating study of how human and machine can merge, all subtlety and social commentary, telling us about ourselves through our reactions and those of the characters to what he does. I wonder how much of that character development came out of what Cameron couldn't write into the cyborg in this film.

As you might expect from someone played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, there isn't an ounce of subtlety or social commentary in the terminator. It has only one purpose: to find and kill Sarah Connor. It is literally unconcerned about anything else at all, about pain or secrecy or innocent bystanders. It just aims at his target and doesn't quit. As Reese says to Sarah, 'It absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.' As such, the severe limitations that had plagued Arnie in his previous roles, such as his strong Austrian accent and lack of serious acting ability, turned into assets. He could get away with appearing very wooden and speaking only sixteen lines, because his amazing physique as a multiple winner of the Mr Universe title naturally lent itself to our subconscious definition of something unstoppable. He looks right when he's totally naked at the beginning and he looks right with his black leather jacket and Gargoyle shades.

After forgettable movies like Hercules in New York and Stay Hungry, Arnie was becoming well known in the early eighties as Robert E Howard's musclebound Hyperborean hero, Conan the barbarian. Yet it was his role here as the terminator that truly defined him and it's easy to see its influence in almost every other part he would play for at least the next decade. After one final sword and sorcery role in Red Sonja, he became again and again an unstoppable machine with cool one liners, including the 'I'll be back' catchphrase that was used for the first time here. It didn't matter if he was playing human or not, he was the unstoppable machine template that every action hero had to follow. He was so right for this that he fell naturally into the role, once even forgetting he was in terminator make up while going for lunch in downtown LA during a break in filming. We can imagine the reactions to such a primeval fear apparently come to life.

It really is the primeval nature of this film that makes it so appealing, rather than any meditation on the future of the human race or the paradoxes involved in time travel. It's just a slasher story in science fiction clothing, all about our fear of what's out there beyond the light of the campfire. It isn't surprising that such a story, which speaks to us on a very guttural level, sprang from very personal places. Cameron was stuck in Rome, broke and unable to get home, surrounded by people who couldn't help him because he didn't speak the language, a time that he described as 'the greatest alienation in my life.' So he conjured up an idea of a 'metallic death figure rising Phoenix-like out of fire' as a fantasy of being able to do anything, without fear of consequences. 'It's like the dark side of Superman,' he wrote. 'Everybody has that little demon that wants to be able to do whatever it wants, the bad kid that never gets punished.'

Of course, the terminator is a villain, in cinematic terms, and with such a powerful wish fulfilment villain, the heroes had to be extra heroic. The one thing that Cameron didn't bring to this script was a strong relationship between Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese, which was introduced at the suggestion of the film's backers. Cameron is known for writing stories featuring strong women, but as this film begins Sarah Connor is absolutely not that. She's utter fluff, almost a MacGuffin, because she's the most important thing to everyone in the movie but she doesn't actually do anything of importance, except by accident. It's interesting to note that Cameron married Linda Hamilton, who plays Sarah Connor, but not until 1997, long after she had bulked up to become the tough as nails version for the sequel. After this film, he married its producer and co-writer, Gale Anne Hurd, who had to be tough to succeed as a female producer in Hollywood.

This anomaly in Cameron's leading female characters meant that Linda Hamilton had a tough task on her hands, one that she was able to live up to. It's one thing to play a strong character but it's another thing entirely to play a weak character who could believable become strong at a later point in time, like the sequel made seven years later. In this film she's a victim, just like any other victim in a slasher movie except that she can't be allowed to die. She's an inconsequential waitress with no real sense of self, yet she will apparently give birth to the man who will save the human race, and have the strength of personality to prepare him for his life's work. It's amazing to watch the first two Terminator movies back to back and see the difference in Linda Hamilton, not just her muscles but her attitude. She managed the task of being both the slasher victim in the first movie and the last woman you'd ever want to mess with in the second.

As Kyle Reese, Michael Biehn is a great soldier, crude but effective. Even though he's suddenly thrust into the middle of the big city halfway through the 1980s everything he does is done how he would do it in a combat zone, which of course from his point of view is precisely where he is. A very telling line from a deleted scene, has Sarah telling Reese that 'wherever you go, you bring the war with you.' He's the man who saves Sarah and, by extension, both John Connor and the future of the human race, but he's more out of place in LA than the terminator. His grocery list just contains what he needs to make plastique. He doesn't use headlights because hunter killers can track them. When Sarah asks him about the women in his time, his answer is merely 'good fighters'. Yet there's depth enough that he has come through time for her. Biehn, who originally auditioned for the part of the terminator, is a much better Reese than Arnie would have been.

There are other people in the film beyond the three main characters but the story focuses in so closely on them that nobody else has much of a chance. Paul Winfield and Lance Henriksen are decent detectives, Earl Boen is memorable enough as a police psychiatrist to be asked back for the first two sequels and there's the always welcome Dick Miller as the gun salesman from whom Arnie gets his much quoted Uzi 9mm. Miller is another link to another name worthy of mention because while he wasn't directly involved, this film is possibly the most obvious product of his legacy as a filmmaker. He's Roger Corman, who regularly cast Dick Miller as star or supporting actor and who gave James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd their starts in the business. Cameron started out as art director and miniature builder for Corman's Battle Beyond the Stars and shot second unit on Galaxy of Terror. Hurd was Corman's executive assistant for quite a few years.

There are a number of names offscreen who deserve much praise here. Brad Fiedel's music is still excellent, fortunately an anomaly for the decade it was written in, as most electronic scores for eighties films sound painfully dated today. Fiedel's music is recognisably eighties but also has a timeless quality that made it work just as well seven years later in the sequel and on from there to the rest of the media franchise that this film spawned. Maybe it's the simplicity of it that makes it so effective, reminding of the simplicity of the themes John Carpenter writes for his own movies. I used it for some time as my background music when playing Doom. Then there are the effects which are highly impressive for the budget. Amazingly they weren't nominated for an Academy Award, though only three films were in 1985, and it's notable that every picture Cameron has directed since has been nominated for Best Effects, regardless of the quality.

The success here is mostly due to the presence of Stan Winston in the crew, though he was not yet the legend he later became. He had been a versatile makeup and effects artist for some time but his animatronic terminator skeleton was what made everyone sit up and pay attention. This walking metal endoskeleton, perhaps even more than Arnie's face, helped make the terminator one of the great iconic villains of the cinema. It's hard to imagine a better final battle than the one Winston conjures up here with half a terminator, seemingly just clutching hands and glowing eyes, dragging itself ever onward towards its goal. The facial prosthetics are more dubious, but they're good enough and some would still stand up today, such as when the terminator gets run over by a truck, cleverly mirroring an earlier scene where the exact opposite happens. Today it would be done closer up with CGI and stylish camera angles but it would be no more effective.

It's often said that the biggest problem with Hollywood today is that it has the technology down but it's forgotten that it needs quality stories to go with it. Cameron's latest film, Avatar, is the epitome of this, being possibly the most technologically advanced picture ever shot, gorgeous to look at in every way, but with a story that plays out like a fourteen year old fanboy's attempt to put Pocahontas into space. Back in 1984, Cameron and Hurd had a story to back up their action, a commentary on man's relationship with technology. I've always seen the opening sequence as a microcosm of the film as a whole. An old black guy is happily doing his job but the terminator pops through time and screws up the electrics of his garbage truck. He hasn't a clue what to do and so runs away. The film is an extrapolation: we have a love/hate relationship with our magical technology and, at least in The Terminator, the result is a literal war against the machines.

While Cameron is a science fiction action nut who mostly works in a traditionally male genre, one of his biggest achievements as a filmmaker is to cross that demographic line and make pictures that appeal to a female audience too. Much of that surely has to do with the powerful female characters he writes into most of his stories, especially here where Sarah Connor doesn't start strong but by the end of the film, finds herself well down that road. She's an empowering role model to women. Yet it's more than that. What's possibly most important about The Terminator is that when all is said and done, it has something for all of us. It's a great action piece, a great horror film, a great thriller, a great science fiction flick and even a great romance. Unlike a film that seems ostensibly similar like Robocop, though still a great movie, The Terminator speaks on a primal level to all of us: boys and girls, men and women. That's an enviable achievement.

Grand Illusion (1937)

Director: Jean Renoir
Stars: Jean Gabin, Dita Parlo, Pierre Fresnay and Erich von Stroheim

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 want to work in the visual medium of film, it surely can't hurt to be the son of a master painter and French writer/director Jean Renoir must have reaped the benefits of being the son of renowned impressionist master Pierre-August Renoir, beyond being the subject of many of his paintings and having the luxury of selling some of those he inherited to finance his films. He paid enough attention to write a biography of him, Renoir, My Father. However he also had the good fortune to be the brother of a noted actor of stage and film, Pierre Renoir; and the nephew of a cinematographer, Claude Renoir. Sometimes it seems as if the visual arts were a destiny he simply couldn't avoid but he excelled on his own merits and became a name worthy of mention alongside his father's with films not just made in France but in the US and India too. Talk about a daunting prospect, to be the next in a line that included names like these.

Grand Illusion was not his first great work, as by 1937 he was in his fourteenth year as a director with films like The Bitch and Boudu Saved from Drowning already behind him, but it may be his first masterpiece. Perhaps the greatest anti-war picture of all time, it was successful in his native France but banned in Nazi Germany, both achievements of note in 1937, and it began a spark of genius which lasted until the outbreak of the war and included The Human Beast and Rules of the Game, which is often listed as the greatest foreign language film or simply the greatest film ever made. Having seen all three, I like Rules of the Game least, though audiences of the time went much further to meet it with derision and turn it into his greatest commercial failure. It's certainly a subtle piece and I'm well aware that I may just not see the depths that its vehement supporters do. Of the three it's Grand Illusion that stands out most for me.

It's one of those wonderful films that works on many different levels: it would be enjoyable as a ride, pure and simple, but it's even more enjoyable to delve through its many depths which are never too deep as to be unapproachable. Renoir deserves most credit for this, as both director and co-writer, but nobody lets the side down, not least the three leading stars. Two are French: Jean Gabin, often referred to as the French Bogart, and Pierre Fresnay, who was apparently Alec Guinness's favourite actor, hardly a minor accolade if not an official one. The third is Austrian: Erich von Stroheim, far better known to western eyes through his work in Hollywood as both actor and director, especially in the silent era. In keeping with a multinational cast, it treats all nationalities with equal respect, even though it's set during World War I with characters and actors from the nation who was then and was about to again become France's mortal enemy.

Von Stroheim plays Capt von Rauffenstein, an aristocratic German flying ace, and if you've ever seen him act you already have a picture in your head of just how clipped and aristocratic. When we meet him, he's celebrating the downing of his twelfth French plane in a composed manner that could have been applied to the first duck of the season. He asks his staff, without any hint of irony, that if any survivors are officers they should be promptly invited to lunch. They do indeed turn out to be officers, Fresnay as staff officer Capt de Boeldieu and Gabin as Lt Maréchal, who is a pilot, the pair on a reconnaissance flight to clarify a grey smudge on a prior photograph. Renoir knows precisely what this role called for as he was a French Air Force pilot himself and in fact Gabin even wears Renoir's own uniform. I wonder if he ever had the privilege of being treated as well as Maréchal is treated by his new host who sees them as welcome guests.

Rauffenstein is utterly of the old school. He is serious about his respect, which extends not just to the courtesy of pulling out their chairs and sharing his food but to honest conversation that proves the sides have more than a war in common. Maréchal, whose arm was broken in the crash, shares a profession with the German soldier who cuts his food: they're both engineers. Rauffenstein knows Boeldieu's cousin Edmond, the Count de Boeldieu, who serves as a military attaché in Paris. When wreaths pass through the room, memorials to the French dead from the men who killed them, they all stand as Rauffenstein salutes them: 'May the earth lie lightly on our valiant enemy.' It's at once entirely civilised and utterly surreal, as it's hardly what we expect from a war movie nowadays. It doesn't last though, as both prisoners are promptly transported to the Hallbach prisoner of war camp, where we spend almost half the film.

This is a officers' camp so prisoners are treated well, if not with Rauffenstein's exacting courtesy. They receive mail and food packages, which means that some of these officers eat better in a prisoner of war camp than they did at home, as Lt Rosenthal's parents run a bank and send him quality food from Fouquet's, which he shares with his compatriots in a subtle rejoinder to the Jewish stereotypes the Nazis were propagating across Europe. They even receive clothes to turn into costumes, which leads to this turning briefly into a silent movie when Maisonneuve tries on a woman's outfit and everyone stops and stares. It's little moments like this when we glimpse the reality behind the forced cheer. Of course they try to escape, for varying reasons: some because they see it as their duty, some because they're bored, some because they feel they should be part of the fight. De Boeldieu sees escape as the integral next move in the game.

It's in how these opinions connect people that Grand Illusion shows its real genius, because the connections aren't where you think. There are no good guys or bad guys here, merely soldiers, from a number of armies but especially French and German. Yet the sides aren't important, as if these soldiers didn't particularly recognise them: the Germans are the guards and the French are the prisoners, but that seems more like rules to a game than anything else. They're playing POW camp but it might as well be Monopoly for the amount of fraternisation that goes on. Only rarely does fighting even enter into the picture and then only incidentally like when Maréchal interrupts their stage review to start singing La Marseilleise because the German papers have announced that the French have retaken Douaumont. While this isn't up to the rendition in Casablanca, which it influenced, it's rousing nonetheless and it gets Maréchal put into a cell.

He's still there growing a beard when the Germans retake Douaumont, which promptly becomes a footnote in our story as well as the war. 'Isn't that awful?' one soldier says. 'Can't be much left of it,' says another. In Maréchal's cell, even as he insults his guard, shouting out that he wants to hear a French voice and see the light, the guard brings him a mouth organ and some cigarettes. These scenes let us know that these are all patriotic men, proud of their countries and willing to fight or serve to protect them. It's almost a primal urge, as Maréchal suggests to his compatriots as soldiers process past their window playing fife and drum. 'It's not the music that gets to you,' he points out, 'it's the marching feet.' Yet regardless of the posturing of the powerful, there's precious little difference between these officers, regardless of which army they're in. They have a shared sense of duty and shared experience to bind them together and adapt past the rest.

We soon discover that the differences that are harder to get past aren't those between people of different nationalities but between people of different classes, one discussion even classifying fatal diseases on a class basis. Rules of the Game is supposed to be Renoir's great meditation on class, but this fits that bill too, as it's the key to the whole film. Boeldieu is an aristocrat, while Maréchal is working class, an engineer by trade. Rosenthal is nouveau riche, born in Jerusalem to a Jewish family who acquired wealth and property in France. They bond as French officers, albeit distinguishable ones through opinion and attitude, and in another film that would be the end of it. Here, there are other connections, most obviously the one between Boeldieu and Rauffenstein which is renewed when the French officers are moved on to other camps, eventually reaching Wintersborn, a 12th century mountain fortress of stone and iron which he now commands.

It's here we begin to really understand the depth to which Renoir is going. Rauffenstein is always respectful of the men he must guard, but he reserves his strictest courtesy for Boeldieu, as he did on their initial meeting. These two characters, the one French and the other German, bond in a far deeper way than the French officers have, becoming something close to friends. It isn't just common experience, though they find that they've even pursued the same girl in Paris, it ties to being bred to privilege with the rituals and responsibilities that go along with it. They have an innate understanding of each other that neither has of the lower classes of their own nations, as they share with other in French, German and English, another marker that sets them apart from the other characters who only know their own languages, something that causes minor problems here and there throughout the story. Rauffenstein and Boeldieu also realise what's coming.

The grand illusion of the title is the idea that what was still known in 1937 as the Great War was the war to end all wars, an idea disproved two years later when it was renamed to accommodate another one. Most anti-war movies, including prior classics like All Quiet on the Western Front and Westfront 1918 are full of the horrors of war, the violence and terror and the dehumanising effect on the participants. In Grand Illusion, we don't see a moment of action, the war effort being restricted to incidentals like the same method to hide tunnel earth that was used in The Great Escape. The anti-war sentiment here isn't that war is inherently evil but that it fails to achieve anything positive, even when someone wins. There's no commentary on the reasons why the war began or on the Nazi plague sweeping Europe, beyond tantalisingly fleshing out a lead character as Jewish but without a single stereotype. War itself is the only specific target.

It offers no specific answers either, or perhaps it offers a variety of them depending on class. For the lower classes, the scenes after Maréchal and Rosenthal escape from the Wintersborn fortress explain that going back to the front to help win the war and so help to end it is pointless. Still deep in enemy territory, they find the house of Elsa, a German woman with a young daughter. Her husband was killed at Verdun and her brothers killed in other battles, some of the biggest German successes of the war, but the only result is that her table is now too big. For aristocrats, there really is no answer as they are rapidly becoming anachronisms, through what Rauffenstein describes as 'a charming legacy of the French Revolution.' They are career officers, raised to serve as combatants not bureaucrats, which Rauffenstein is revolted to have become because of his injuries. A fine career is what Boeldieu's cousin had: to lose an arm and marry a rich woman.

'I don't know who will win this war,' he tells his prisoner and friend, 'but whatever the outcome, it will mean the end of the Rauffensteins and the Boeldieus.' He's melancholy about the future and the geranium he keeps in his room is obviously representative of himself and his particular way of life. When Boeldieu sets up the escape of Maréchal and Rosenthal, using himself as diversion, he forces Rauffenstein to shoot him, but before he dies we realise that in dying both of them feel that he has won. 'For a commoner, dying in a war is tragedy,' he points out, 'but for you and me it's a good way out.' Rauffenstein can only admit that, by surviving with horrific injuries instead of going down in flames, he has missed his opportunity and faced with what he promptly calls a futile existence, he snips his geranium. Now there is nothing left of beauty in the fortress, as Von Stroheim superbly echoes by losing all light in his eyes after he shoots down his friend.

Erich von Stroheim is magnificent here, stiffly courteous and formally respectful, but always with utter sincerity. He has the arrogance and the responsibility of an aristocratic officer down pat, having long ago assumed such a back story for himself, though he was really the son of a Jewish hat maker who never served in the military. Yet while he was deservedly known as 'The Man You Love to Hate' for his many villainous war roles, here he has our sympathy from moment one and is the most tragic character in the film, even over those who die. His characterisation is superb, full of nuance, though cleverly written scenes ably assist him. His spine is fractured in two places, leaving him in a bizarre spinal brace, and he has silver plates in his skull and his kneecap, but he's dismissive. 'I owe these riches to the misfortunes of war,' he tells Boeldieu. Instead he knows that life is going badly because he's down to his last two pairs of white gloves.

While Erich von Stroheim was long established before Grand Illusion, his legendary directorial career already over, Jean Renoir's was just taking off and I wonder how much they discussed the film and its aims. Given that he was renowned as a perfectionist who demanded authenticity in his props, I wouldn't be surprised to find the brace he wore was real and he wore it throughout production or that he adjusted his character in many small ways. His legacy is hard to quantify because much of his impact came through the knowledge he passed down to great directors while working for them as an actor. Jean Gabin's legacy is huge and perhaps most notable in how his French films of the thirties influenced Hollywood in the forties. He isn't called the French Bogart for nothing, but it's because the iconic style Bogart thrived in once he left his supporting days at Warner Brothers behind was taken from Gabin rather than the other way around.

Gabin made his name in France with films for Julien Duvivier, beginning with Maria Chapdelaine in 1934 and progressing through four more including the wonderful Pépé le Moko before joining up with Renoir for this film, which made him an international star. His work during this period is amazing, including The Human Beast for Renoir and Port of Shadows and Daybreak for Marcel Carné. Never the prettiest of actors, he's perfect for the role of Maréchal, Renoir casting these actors not just for their talent but also for their faces. Gabin plays the everyman in this film, a French military officer but still very much one of the boys. His earthy portrayal grounds the story to those of us who aren't privy to the subtle rituals of the aristocracy. His scenes in the cell at Wintersborn are superbly played, far more realistic than the cooler equivalent shown by Steve McQueen in The Great Escape and all the more powerful for that.

While Gabin and von Stroheim interact, the actor really tasked with playing off both of them is Pierre Fresnay, far less well known than either of his co-stars but perhaps regarded even higher by those in the know. While Gabin was the favourite actor of Sergio Leone, Fresnay was that of Sir Alec Guinness, which hardly surprises here, given that he plays Capt de Boeldieu precisely as you might expect Guinness to play him. He had been established longer than Gabin, especially through a trilogy of Marcel Pagnol plays brought to the screen by Alexander Korda, Marc Allégret and Pagnol himself: Marius, Fanny and César, in which he played Marius. He's tasked here with finding common ground with both the lower and upper classes and in fact with bridging the gap through his actions. It isn't a small task but he makes it seem easy, peppering his performance with observations like, 'Out there children play like soldiers. In here soldiers play like children.'

All three performances are multi-faceted and gloriously played, as are supporting roles by Dita Parlo as Elsa and many French actors who went by one name. Keeping them all in focus is Jean Renoir, who directed the film and also co-wrote it with Charles Spaak, and he shines brightest here for a number of reasons. There isn't a moment that is wasted, every detail adding more to the depth of it. Not a moment is overplayed, this being a truly subtle message movie, so subtle that while the themes are readily apparent, the variations on them are gently played enough that you'll find new insight with every viewing. Best of all, it works on multiple levels so you can sit back and simply enjoy or delve deeper, depending on your mood. It's films like this and The Seventh Seal that refresh our understanding of what a masterpiece really is and restore our perspectives. I should watch these two films every couple of years just to enforce that.