Two Seconds (1932)

Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Star: Edward G Robinson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sherlock Holmes (1922)

Director: Albert Parker
Star: John Barrymore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memento (2000)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amélie (2001)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gone with the Wind (1939)

Director: Victor Fleming
Stars: Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland and Leslie Howard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notorious (1946)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Stars: Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

North By Northwest (1959)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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