A River Runs Through It (1992)

In Missoula, MT, back at the turn of the century, the Revd Maclean was a mild mannered but very firm Presbyterian minister who spent as much time fly fishing as teaching the word of God, and he took both equally seriously. To him both are truth and art and serious stuff. He also brings up two sons in the early part of the century, Norman and Paul. Norman tells our story, which is a simply told autobiographical one, and he's played as an adult by Craig Sheffer who is technically the lead. His wild younger brother is a young Brad Pitt, making himself noticed but still not yet famous.

The film looks gorgeous, as it should having won the Oscar for Best Cinematography, and it sounds good too, as it should given that it was nominated for Best Music too. However what really matters is the story and the simplicity with which it's told. It seems to carry an honest authenticity and my impression is that anyone born in a similar place at a similar time will feel a major kinship with it. Of course I wasn't born anywhere near Montana or anywhen near the depression era and so I don't feel any kinship at all. I couldn't find any way to empathise with the characters so I was restricted into merely enjoying watching them.

They play their parts well, not just Sheffer and Pitt but Tom Skerritt as the minister and Brenda Blethyn as his wife. Nobody else really gets a look in except the Big Blackfoot river and the fly fishing lines, until Emily Lloyd shows up and she's fine too. They look good and they're believable, but how much do I care? I'm sure I'd enjoy sitting out on a big river bank and enjoy communing with nature, just as I know I do elsewhere, but I don't grok the concept of fishing, especially as a metaphor for life. Perhaps because of the lack of connection, none of it really means anything so it becomes a means to pass time.

There are similarities to Legends of the Fall: a family out in the gorgeous wild Montana countryside, way back when, with a respectable brother and a wild brother played by Brad Pitt. Yet while there wasn't particularly anything for me to empathise with their either, it engaged me. This one felt dry and passive in comparison. There's probably absolutely nothing wrong with it, but I ended up bored anyway. It's a very subtle autobiographical story, but 'very subtle' could easily equate to less positive adjectives.

There's a great scene late on where Brad Pitt catches a large fish in spectacular manner. It's so obviously a setpiece and it's just as obviously a pinnacle, yet to me it's just a guy catching a fish. Very nicely, I'll grant you, but it's just a guy catching a fish. And to me, so's the film.

The Last Angry Man (1959)

Paul Muni only made 22 films over a 30 year period and this makes half of them for me. It's also his last movie, made eight years after the previous one, Stranger on the Prowl. He still has plenty of power as an older actor though, as evidenced early on when he shows Lando Calrissian how tough he isn't. Billy Dee Williams is 22 years old here, playing an eighteen year old street punk like he was auditioning for West Side Story, but tough 68 year old Jewish doctor Sam Abelman from Brooklyn toughs him out of his knife, beats him at arm wrestling and gets him to shut the hell up and get examined, all in about five minutes.

Unbeknownst to him, TV producer Woodrow Wilson Thrasher is watching on, and he's hooked. He's turned up at the doctor's house to persuade him to be the focus of a show he's pitching, based on a newspaper article by the doctor's nephew. Of course Abelman doesn't want anything to do with it, so it's up to Thrasher and young Myron Malkin to persuade him, with the help of Abelman's friend and fellow doctor Max Vogel, who has his friend to look out for and who is sharper even than the producer himself.

Muni is superb here. He was Oscar nominated for the first time in 22 years and it's as well deserved as last time for The Life of Emile Zola in 1937. Certainly he's far better than his abysmally overblown showing in Black Fury for which he was nominated two years before that. David Wayne is solid as Thrasher the producer, but he's trumped by Luther Adler as Vogel, partly because Adler and Muni were real life friends going back forty years. The script is excellent, especially in the ways in which everyone sets up everyone else, but it veers off into sentimentality too often. The setups are subtle and masterful though, whether they be Thrasher persuading his boss or his boss persuading his boss or even Vogel persuading Abelman to appear on the show. It's a very clever script with some very astute performances.

It's well ahead of its time, given that the focus is really a reality tv show, as portrayed in 1959. We get to see how it's devised, how it's all set up, how it's made and how it's exploited. It also gets to tell a timely story, namely a doctor of the old school who believes in the Hippocratic Oath he took and heads out on a moment's notice to treat people just because they're his patients, even if they can't pay or won't pay or don't even want his treatment. He's absolutely the good guy, and he's a great character in the process.

However all his spiel about crooks in the industry pushing drugs for diseases that don't exist yet goes completely contrary to everything the network wants, as all the executives pushing adverts are obviously the bad guys and they can't possibly say anything that might make the sponsor look bad. That's a really refreshing view to hear in an era where the advertising executive was the American Dream and the hero on every TV sitcom. As Abelman says, 'it's the age of the galoots'. He's right and he's one of Muni's finest portrayals.

The Whole Town's Talking (1935)

While there are certainly exceptions, I'm actually finding myself more partial to the non-westerns that John Ford made throughout the thirties than the westerns he's famed for. Here he gets a head start by having no less a star than Edward G Robinson in not one but two lead roles. He's Arthur Ferguson Jones, a mild mannered clerk at the J G Carpenter Corporation, highly cultured and the one and only employee who's never been late. Of course the one day the boss leaves orders to raise Jones's salary and fire the next person to be late he's the next person. He's also 'Killer' Mannion, a dangerous gangster who has just escaped from prison and is now public enemy number one. It's a true joy to watch mild mannered Eddie G try to imitate the famous snarl of gangster Eddie G, especially with Donald Meek looking on.

Meek sees Mannion's picture in the paper and so calls the cops on Jones, and it takes plenty of work to make them believe that he's not the gangster. However once the real Mannion robs a bank and identifies himself in the process, it becomes obvious that Jones is really Jones. He has a terrible time being harrassed by the police, while Miss Clark, a co-worker who was having lunch with him, has the time of her life. She's the object of his passions, up till now restricted to anonymous poems, but it's this mix-up that really makes her notice his existence. She's also Jean Arthur, making a serious name for herself and she's great fun to watch.

John Ford has fun with this one, as displayed in certain powerful scenes like the early one where Jones gets flustered by photographers' lights, which is delightfully claustrophobic. However it's Robinson who has the most fun. Jones starts out merely annoying, a complete wuss but then he has to be because Eddie G proved from his very first screen appearance that all he had to do to dominate a scene was to walk in front of the camera. He had to seriously work at making Jones invisible and how well he manages it is made obvious when Jones faces Mannion in a scene together. In fact he doesn't just play Jones and Mannion, he plays Jones playing Mannion and he plays Mannion playing Jones.

Robinson is superb and he gets a serious proportion of the screen time. He's the lead throughout and is rarely off the screen, but he's also the co-lead and there are a lot of scenes where he's both characters. Jean Arthur is superb too but she gets far too little time to strut her stuff. She's the sassy newspaper girl type who became a stereotype through the screwball era, with regular examples from people like Carole Lombard, Barbara Stanwyck and Katharine Hepburn. I don't believe this is the first such appearance but it's definitely early and done very well indeed. Other regular supporting actors like Donald Meek, Edward Brophy and Etienne Girardot are fine but they get almost nothing to do and there's very little here that doesn't belong to Robinson.

Lost Horizon (1937)

Every time a film turns up from the Home Theater Forum's Top 100 Films of the 1930s list that I haven't seen, I make sure I record it. I'm further through that list than any other, even genres like horror and science fiction that I've known well for years. This has a few added bonuses, in that it's also something of a sf film in itself, a Frank Capra movie (my fifteenth) and beyond the star Ronald Colman, it also features favourites of mine like Edward Everett Horton, Sam Jaffe, H B Warner and Thomas Mitchell.

It's 1935 and some place in far eastern China called Baskul, is in turmoil. Some new war is sparking off and daring Robert Conway, England's 'man in the east', is evacuating ninety English citizens before they're all massacred. The last plane is sparsely and intriguingly populated, just like Ford's Stagecoach two years later and with one man in common: Thomas Mitchell as Henry Barnard. There's also Conway and his brother George, a paleontologist called Alexander P Lovett and what appears to be a barroom floozy. They're all taken for a ride by a mysterious pilot who holds a gun on them and takes them west instead of east. The mystery builds when they take on fuel somewhere on the border of Tibet, but eventually the propellors freeze up and they crash in a snowbound wasteland in the middle of nowhere.

Robert Conway is of course Ronald Colman, so tailor made for the part that he hardly even had to change his name: he's half thirties style action hero and half dreamy pacifist, with great potential to become the next Foreign Secretary. Thomas Mitchell looks strange in the character building glasses he wears but he sounds just like Thomas Mitchell, and he's a more restrained version of a number of similar characters he'd play in the year to come, including in Stagecoach. Edward Everett Horton plays the paleontologist exactly as you'd expect Edward Everett Horton to play anyone: intelligent, but flustered, dithering and touchy. The two of them work wonderfully against each other, Mitchell's blind optimism and Horton's paranoid pessimism. John Howard is something of a waste of space as George, but Isabel Jewell is fun as Gloria Stone. She's already living on borrowed time. The doctors gave her six months to live a full year ago but she's still going pretty strong, a brief period of hysteria on the plane notwithstanding.

Anyway, they crash in the middle of nowhere and the pilot dies on impact. As they decide what to do about it, they are amazingly rescued by a bunch of locals, the leader of which speaks English. He's Chang, played by the wonderful H B Warner with his subtle facial expressions and dancing eyes, who welcomes them all to Shangri-La, a cultured paradise nestled in the midst of shrieking winds and snowy mountains. The plane crash looks great, especially for 1937, but Shangri-La looks better, sumptuous and utopian. Warner appears very similar to the character he played a year later in The Adventures of Marco Polo, the only decent thing about that film.

The only down side is the lack of a complete print but the AFI did a great job of ensuring that we can see as much of the film as possible. It originally ran 132 minutes long, but was soon chopped down to 118 for general release and even to 95 minutes for television. The acetates that constitute the extra footage, which would restore the film to what we would nowadays call a director's cut, was destroyed, though a full copy of the score survived, so the AFI had to check the rest of the world's archives to find replacement footage. There are now only seven minutes of visuals missing and there are stills to punctuate the gaps.

The film is intelligent but doesn't feel the need to be blatant about it. The whole concept of Shangri-La comes with a lot of questions, that are asked not just by the characters thrown into it, especially Bob Conway, but also by us, the viewers. We consistently wonder about how real any of this is, whether we should take it at face value or whether it's all a dream by the dying Conway or even whether it's some sort of fractured Philip K Dick reality. Everything we learn merely leads us to new questions. It may not be the undying classic I'd been led to expect, but it's certainly an excellent and thought provoking film.

Backdraft (1991)

It's 1971 Chicago and we're watching fireman Kurt Russell rescue babies from a fire at the cost of his own life, just the sort of overblown and sentimental heroics you'd expect to see in a Ron Howard movie, especially as Kurt's young'un Brian is standing down below watching. It gets him the Pulitzer prize winning cover of Life magazine but that's hardly much of a consolation prize. Fast forward twenty years and Brian has grown up to become a firefighter himself, newly graduated, and played by William Baldwin.

He's been away for six years so most people have either written him off or forgotten about him. Life has completely moved on and he missed all of it, but thinks he can just pick it up where he left off. He even tries to bribe the station master to assign him somewhere on the other side of town to his brother Stephen, the serious 'born to be a firefighter' type, but his brother bribes bigger! Stephen is nicknamed Bull and is played by Kurt Russell and is obviously the man who can within the Fighting 17th, and we get plenty of tension with Brian and Bull on the same crew.

The first fire they fight together sets the pace for me. Whoever is manipulating the fire is doing an incredible job because it certainly doesn't look like CGI and it does a lot of very cool things. However the fire choreography isn't matched by the more traditional choreography as I didn't get much of an image of what anything except the fire was doing. There was no tension and more than a couple of painful cliches under supposed pressure. The fire was definitely the star of the show, as Jennifer Jason Leigh pointed out after reading the script. She wished she could play the fire because it had the best part.

The cliches don't let up either. Somehow I knew there was going to be a point where a black woman jumps in front of the camera shouting 'My baby! My baby!' and sure enough, there she was. Kurt Russell gets to be as heroic as he was born to be and Billy Baldwin is as annoying as you'd expect from a Baldwin. Rebecca de Mornay is as drop dead sexy as she was almost ten years earlier in One from the Heart and Risky Business, even when she's not trying to be, though Jennifer Jason Leigh looks pretty awful. For all the fun of the cameraderie on the force, this entire thing is worthless, but for the fire which deserves the Oscar nomination for best visual effects. The effects throughout are awesome, they're just directed with sheer ineptitude.

Fortunately for us there's another plot going on too with a lot more substance to it, though it takes most of an hour to even get going and gets ignored far too often. Robert de Niro, tougher than he was in Mad Dog and Glory but still calm compared to his traditional power roles, is a severely burned arson investigator called Shadow. He's working a case of serial arson that is proving to be a tough one to crack, that provides the title of the film. These backdrafts are set to kill particular people but in such a way to ensure that the fire blows itself out, hardly standard operating procedure for anyone. Shadow is doing his job but being pestered by an ambitious alderman played by a wonderfully sleazy J T Walsh, and to make it even more interesting, we get to meet Donald Sutherland, a diehard and half sane convicted arsonist who was the cause of Shadow's burns in the first place. He's an obvious Hannibal Lecter substitute, the same year as The Silence of the Lambs, but he's Donald Sutherland so he's a damn fine obvious substitute.

I wish I'd have fast forwarded through the rest of the film to the Bobby de Niro scenes. Other than those, the best thing I can say about Backdraft is that the city of Chicago got four restored fire engines out of the production company after shooting had finished. That, right there, achieves far more than the film does. Hell, Ron Howard's so on the ball that with Kurt Russell and Rebecca de Mornay in the cast, he gives us instead a sex scene between Billy Baldwin and scary Jennifer Jason Leigh. Good grief.

Silkwood (1983)

Here's an interesting mix of good and bad, and entirely not in the ways I expected. The good is the acting, especially by Meryl Streep. She plays Karen Silkwood, a menial worker at a nuclear plant, who spends her time blending plutonium and uranium into fuel pellets within protective tanks behind protective gloves and protective suits. She seems to treat it all as a social thing, the way I remember data processing, where most of the people who did it were married women earning second incomes. They turned up to get out of the house and socialise with people, and if it earned a little bit of money then all to the good. It certainly wasn't a vocation for them and it obviously isn't for Karen Silkwood.

Not knowing much about the subject matter, I always thought Silkwood was some heroic activist who paid a huge price for doing the right thing. The longer this film ran on the less I realised that was true. She's a bored and not very nice woman who doesn't seem to have much of a clue about anything. Early on she goes to visit her children, at which point we realise that she's such a great mother that the father has custody. When she gets back to the plant her colleagues tell her about a contamination leak that closed down the plant for the weekend and it's obvious that they all believe that she did it in order to get the weekend off. She raves about colleagues getting cancer yet we hardly see her without a cigarette in her mouth, even while getting changed or eating lunch at work. She can't even quit when going to sleep.

Streep is superb, as always. I've seen her play a very wide range of characters over the years and she's never been less than excellent, regardless what sort of part she has. She's excellent here, even though I really don't care for the character, and she's ably assisted by young looking boyfriend Kurt Russell (though still after Escape from New York and The Thing) and roommate and wannabe girlfriend Cher who really doesn't get much to do here, not even sing as all the vocals are done by Meryl Streep. Cher is fine but I don't get her Oscar nomination at all, or any of the others, such as Mike Nichols for Best Director and the script by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen.

On the bad side, the film is really boring. There's slow and subtle, gradually building into something of serious substance, and there's just plain boring. If all this was shown to help build our sympathies for Karen Silkwood as a character, it didn't work on me. It's pretty obvious that this plant was criminally lax on a number of fronts, but I don't get these people's thinking. Silkwood finally looks everything up in safety documentation that she hadn't previously read and bitches about the bad safety practices, only to bitch even more when they transfer her to another department and she loses out on her overtime. In other words, let me out, but once you've let me out, let me back in again.

She ends up working to keep a union, sleeping around on her boyfriend with a union rep in Washington DC, who's so concerned about the possibility of deliberately defective fuel rods that he suggests they can use the proof to renegotiate contracts. They don't care about anyone or anything any more than the operators of the nuclear plant. And of course, while they rant about how they disagree with government designated safe levels of plutonium exposure, and how it causes cancer, Karen is chain smoking through the whole thing. I'm sorry, but none of this makes sense to me. This film is nothing more than a bunch of highly dubious characters bitching and moaning about another bunch of dubious characters, led by a drug addicted, chain smoking serial philanderer who cares more about her overtime than her safety, all done in a slow and tedious manner. Even Fred Ward and Bruce McGill can't save it and that's sad.

Black Orpheus (1959)

There's music everywhere here, and thankfully it's provided by someone with the talents of Antonio Carlos Jobim. We're in Rio de Janeiro and it's time for Carnaval so everybody is singing or dancing or playing a musical instrument. The whole city is alive, the way I remember it was in New Orleans last time I was there, except more so. There's one point early on where I wondered what director Marcel Camus was showing me until I realised he was showing me how empty the rest of the city is where the carnival isn't.

As you'd expect from the title, the film is a translation of the old myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, but in a different location with a different ethnic group, and dripping with musical flavour, exotic samba rhythms and rich colour. It's a joyous thing, because everyone is so alive. It's hard not to tap your feet and bob your head and smile, if not laugh outright in happiness at the world, especially when kids are telling roosters to hush so that they can hear Orpheus play Manha da Carnaval on his guitar. I've loved that for years but never realised it came from a film, let alone this one.

He's a tram driver, obviously a ladies man of long standing but who's about to get married to Mira who is beautiful yet remarkably full of herself. However Orpheus soon meets Eurydice, a young lady who has run away from home because she believes that a mysterious man is trying to kill her. He invites her to the Carnaval rehearsal, even though he's there with his fiancee who's playing the Queen of Day, but this mysterious man turns up to chase her and Orpheus gets to save her bacon. Next thing we know they're sharing the night and she's taking her cousin's place in the carnival as the veiled Queen of Night.

The actors are primarily new to film and I get the impression that they weren't even professionals, at least at this point in their careers. Yet they feel so natural that any lack of finesse isn't just acceptable but beneficial. Footballer Breno Mello debuts in film as Orpheus and he went on to make only six films over four decades. He's so natural it's almost impossible to imagine him not smiling. It's 47 years since Black Orpheus was released and I'd believe it if he was still dancing today. It's notable that when he stops dancing here is when Orpheus becomes lost.

Dancer Marpessa Dawn, the director's wife, is excellent as Mira. She had appeared in two films before this one but only as things like 'native girl sacrifice'. Better than either are Lourdes de Oliviera, perfect as Mira in the first of only two films she ever made, and Léa Garcia who lights up the screen as Eurydice's cousin Serafina, who alone of these actors seems to have turned her debut here into a career, if a slow one until the new century. Even the young Jorge Dos Santos is excellent and he's only a small boy here.

Really not much happens here. Orpheus falls for Eurydice but Death claims her. Orpheus wants her back. However the plot is nothing but a framework for Camus to build his rich exploration of a fresh ethnic world onto, and there's as much depth as you want to look for. I particularly liked the staircase that doubles for the descent into Hell, but that's just one of many such examples. I'm also sure there are others I didn't catch on first viewing because this feels like one of those films to come back to again and again. Another worthy early winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar!

Poltergeist (1982)

Another of those many eighties movies to quietly rage against suburbia, this is a slice of early eighties pop culture if ever I've seen one and it's possible I haven't seen it since that decade. Within the first third of the start, we've worked through BMX bikes, remote control cars, duelling TV remote controls, white noise, superhero comics, Star Wars bedcovers, bent spoons, you name it. There's even recreational drug taking by suburban married couples, flushing dead birds down the toilet and kids staying on the phone all night. It's also one of those films that looks like it's riddled with cliches but really isn't because it's the one that got there first: trees, clowns, white noise, the rest of it.

The focus of the story is little Carol Ann Freeling, who is a five year old girl who lives with her family in happy suburbia. Her father Steve works for the company who built the estate and so he's a little surprised when his house gets caught up in what seems to be a 6.4 magnitude earthquake. His wife Diane gets surprised a little more when the chairs in kitchen start moving of their own accord. Carol Ann knows exactly what's going on because she can talk to 'the TV people', who appear to her in the white noise that appears on the TV screen when regular programming is over, thus giving this possibly more instances of the Star Spangled Banner than any other movie.

It's a scary little movie, given that it's a family entertainment type thing, originally to be made by Steven Spielberg before he ended up on ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, but still written and produced by him. The general target is that everything going on is as normal as possible but then outrageously bizarre things break into that normality and throw it way out of whack. When the tree outside reaches in to steal young Robbie Freeling and Carol Ann gets sucked inside the TV, it's pretty obvious that it's got really serious. So the Freelings call in paranormal investigators who are stunned by the whole thing.

One of the many magic moments have to do with reactions: ours when the energy explodes from the TV screen, Steve Freeling when the paranormal investigators boast about having filmed a toy car moving across a room so slowly that you can only see it without time lapse photography, and the investigators themselves when he opens the door to the haunted bedroom and shows them what this house has to offer. There are many others too, all of which are joyous. The effects are variable: some are seamless but others obviously constructed from old technology, but the story gets by fine anyway, as the Spielberg touch is definitely all over it.

The cast are solid, entirely fresh to viewers to avoid familiarity breeding disbelief: Craig T Nelson and future TV movie veteran JoBeth Williams are the parents, and they're entirely believable as a suburban couple. Dominique Dunne, the first victim of the so-called Poltergeist Curse, is the eldest child, with Oliver Robins and a thoroughly memorable Heather O'Rourke as the others. O'Rourke would be the second victim of the curse. Beatrice Straight is a fine psychic investigator, shaken almost to pieces to blatant examples of the phenomena that she's tried so much to experience. The peach of the bunch though is Zelda Rubenstein, the plump 4'3" psychic who brings Carol Ann back.

It does stand up today. That surprised me a little but in a pleasant way. While half the other horror movies from the eighties stole plenty from it, there aren't too many bits that don't work through having become cliches. The acting works and the cast are still fresh to me as they're either dead or only working in TV movies on the Lifetime channel. The story makes sense and raises a smile, in enjoyment as much as nostalgia. Definitely a fun movie and better looking back at than something like Friday the 13th.

Zorba the Greek (1964)

Alan Bates plays Basil, who is half English and half Greek and who is heading to the island of Crete to claim his inheritance from his Greek father. The inheritance is land that contains a mine and so Basil ends up hiring Alexis Zorba, a strange man who laughs a lot who he meets while waiting for the rain to stop and his boat to sail. Basil is officially a writer of poetry and essays but who really doesn't do much of anything. He continues to do not much of anything in his newly adopted village on Crete, though he is the catalyst for plenty of events, not just good ones that come from his reopening the mine.

A lot of this plays like a silent movie. One scene in particular where Irene Papas comes looking for her goat doesn't have many words and really doesn't need them. It's dynamic and engaging and tells a number of stories in a completely visual manner. It would have worked just as well with a title card in the middle and there are a whole slew of other scenes to which exactly the same would apply, most but not all of which focus around Papas, who hardly speaks a word in the entire movie. Words often aren't important here, for as much as Zorba keeps distilling unconventional nuggets of wisdom purely in conversation.

Anthony Quinn is a joyous riot in this film. I've seen many different faces of Anthony Quinn, from the early days as a Mexican heel in Carole Lombard comedies or Bulldog Drummond movies, to the power of Fellini's La Strada, and on to the feature length Hercules episodes in the nineties when he played Zeus. Here's a new one though: a wild free spirit, Alexis Zorba, who has strange thoughts because, as he says, his brain is not the right weight. More than anything, he is alive, very alive, and he has advice on that as much as everything else. 'Life is trouble,' he says, 'Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble.'

Co-star Alan Bates is by necessity no competition whatsoever. Basil is as restrained as Zorba is unrestrained, as still and tied to the ground as Zorba is restless and unfettered. However there is a character that can compete with Zorba the Greek on his own terms: the aging diva Madame Hortense, for the portrayal of which Lila Kedrova won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar that year, outdoing in that respect even Anthony Quinn himself. She's a highly emotional woman, four times married, who is an amazing mixture that is half grotesque Baby Jane and half childishly beautiful. She's one of those truly unforgettable characters, so memorable for not really doing much other than be, in her own idiosyncratic way.

Some of what goes on is stunning, literally, because it's part of alien culture that I don't understand in the slightest. I don't want to issue spoilers, because this is so strange, but there are two separate incidents that seem irreconcilaby foreign and both have to do with death. Both also make for amazing pieces of cinema, which this is in entirety. It stands out because it's something other than anything I've previously seen.

Legends of the Fall (1994) Edward Zwick

It's obvious within about ten seconds of this film that the Oscar it won for cinematography was justified. It looks gorgeous, a masterpiece of composition and John Toll should be proud of his achievement. However there's much more here. It's a western that follows the lives of Colonel William Ludlow and his sons. Tristran is the wild one, played by Brad Pitt launching his career into the stratosphere after Johnny Depp turned the part down. Aidan Quinn plays Alfred, the one with, as is mentioned, more breeding, who lives with them in Montana. The third is Samuel, played by Henry Thomas, who arrives from civilisation with his fiancee Susannah who is the catalyst for the entire plot as all three of them fall for her. As she's ably portrayed by Julia Ormond, who is no great beauty but has a serious beauty within her, that's hardly surprising.

Mother, a long way away back in England, is Christina Pickles, and father is no less a talent than Sir Anthony Hopkins, from the period of time when he was in full possession of his considerable powers but didn't deliberately flaunt them unashamedly. These are happily still the days of The Silence of the Lambs, not Hannibal. He is excellent and gets plenty of opportunities to show it.

Brad Pitt is also excellent. He's rough and ready, long haired, happy to fight and not afraid to get himself either dirty or not clean again. His manners are not good and he both knows it and doesn't particularly care. While the others talk of world affairs, he's the one who understands how the world works, or at least his small part of it. He's not uneducated, he's certainly not stupid and in many ways he sees things better than they do: he just has his feet planted firmer on the ground. However as is made very obvious this is the point at which the world is changing, not just back in Europe where the Germans are stirring everything up, but even here in Montana. When they pick up Julia from the train, they head back to the farm in a mixture of cars and horses. They talk of culture while Tristran meets them with a dead deer over his other horse. It's a very changing world.

All three get to see this changing world, when Alfred and Samuel head off to fight in the First World War, and Tristran goes with them, not for any sense of duty like the others, but to keep his brothers safe. He gets the great showstopping scenes as he becomes something that his colleagues and his family don't understand. In many ways he goes native but it takes strange forms as he quests around the world to find his way back. The story is superb and the film continues to look gorgeous throughout, but the sweeping and majestic music by James Horner is astoundingly overdone, to my tastes, and it unfairly diminishes the visuals. If I watch it again, I may just turn the sound off. It was that annoying.

I had other problems with it too. Everyone gets older as the years pass, especially and memorably Anthony Hopkins and young Isabel Two, who grows up from a child to an adult, but Brad Pitt never seems to age. He grows hair on his head and his face but never his chest, wherever he happens to be in the world, and stays as young as he was to start with. Maybe that's a deliberate thing to highlight how much he's a legend, as legends don't grow old. The introduction points out that: 'Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness and they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy, or they become legends.' It's talking about Tristran and we get to make our minds up which he becomes as the film rolls on. That's the chief triumph of many.