Rain Man (1988)

Director: Barry Levinson
Stars: Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise

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

I can't quite put my finger on why Rain Man feels a little empty to me but I think it may boil down to Tom Cruise. Made when he could still be credited after someone else, this is another eighties movie where he got to be an annoying pissant with an attitude. He was the poster child for this sort of thing in the eighties, but he had a habit of making us care anyway. At least I cared, just a little, in Risky Business when he was up against the odds, in Top Gun when everyone else had the attitude too, even in The Color of Money when he at least had the talent to back it up. Here, though, he's just annoying. There are points in the film where something shines through, some depth, some character, to take the edge off the yuppie who cares so little about everyone else that the only way we can get a story is to partner him with an autistic character who is unable to comprehend human emotions. I see Rain Man less as a buddy movie and more as just desserts.

Cruise is Charlie Babbitt, a yuppie car salesman of all things, who lives the American dream by selling expensive foreign cars by the seat of his pants and making $75,000 with a few phone calls. He's good, naturally, even though he often still looks like he's only just out of high school, like we're watching Joel Goodsen a year on from Risky Business. Away from business, though, he can't even talk to his token cute foreign girlfriend on the way to Palm Springs and can only come up with 'Aha!' when he gets the call that his father has died. He does show up for the funeral but when he goes back to the house, he doesn't want to look at the family photos that she hones in on, just the 1949 Buick Roadmaster convertible in the garage that he's lusted after for years. It turns out that it was this car that inadvertently caused the rift between Sanford and son that was never healed up until the day that Sanford Babbitt died. Most notably, Charlie never tried.

Thus far I have precisely no sympathy for Charlie Babbitt and it takes me a long while to find the precious little I'll end up with. Up till now I'm siding entirely with the characters who suffer him patiently, especially his girlfriend Susanna who must have a plentiful reservoir of patience just to avoid slapping some sense into him. It isn't surprising when she finally leaves him. 'What do you want from me?' he asks her. 'Out,' she says and she's gone. I'm with his father, who may have had difficulty in showing love but at least tried to teach his son about life. The rift began when Charlie took the Roadmaster out for a drive, against his father's explicit wishes, just because he felt he deserved it after a decent report card. Daddy reported it stolen and left him in jail for two days. I've only known him for ten minutes and I wish he'd left him there for good. He leaves him the Roadmaster in his will, along with his prize winning rose bushes.

Of course, Charlie wants rose bushes about as much as wanted his father, which is to say not at all. What he wants is his estate worth three million dollars which goes into trust instead, and I'm with the lawyer who reads him the will, including some last unwanted advice from his father that explains his reasoning but which Charlie just ignores or misunderstands completely. As we've already discovered from what we see of his business practices, Charlie is successful because he never says die, however much he has to lie and cheat to get there, so it isn't surprising to find him following through on the secret trustees and finding himself at Wallbrook, a care home for behaviourally challenged patients. I'm with Dr Bruner, who runs the place and finds talking to Charlie a trying task. Most of all I'm with Raymond Babbitt, whose carefully ordered life is about to be turned upside down by his younger brother's lust for financial gain.

You see, Raymond is the brother Charlie never even knew he had. He suffers from autism, a neurodevelopmental disorder which manifests itself in many different ways but with certain key commonalities, such as changing the ability of the brain to process information and impairing the abilities of social interaction and communication. That still leaves a wide spectrum for those with the disorder to occupy, contrary to the expectations of many who were first exposed to it through this movie. Raymond Babbitt is a high functioning autistic and an autistic savant, what used to be called an idiot savant, someone who can perform incredible feats at one thing but pparently at the expense of others. Raymond is a speed calculator and has an eidetic memory, but he can't subtract and he doesn't understand the concept of money. He recites Abbott and Costello's Who's on First? routine when he's nervous because he can't understand the riddle.

What keeps Raymond happy, like most autistic people, are rituals and routines which protect his place in the world. He knows precisely how everything in his room is positioned and he finds comfort in knowing which food will be served on which day and when his TV programmes will come on. Even knowing the address of the KMart where his underwear comes from is an anchor for Raymond and Wallbrook serves him well. Yet into his life comes Charlie, pissed at the world and especially his father for not leaving him the estate, who naturally does what he does best: cheat. So he effectively kidnaps his brother, whether that's illegal or not in this instance, and holds him to ransom for half of the three million dollars. As he explains to Susanna before she leaves, he took him because they want him and he'll keep him until he gets half. 'What is my goddamn crime?' he asks her, as if he honestly doesn't understand the moral issues.

Even after a couple of viewings I still can't decide if the next hour of road movie until we reach a revelation is a joy or a curse. It's certainly fascinating to watch Dustin Hoffman on his way to a second Academy Award, though sometimes it's less fun to watch the character and more the actor staying resolutely in character by avoiding eye contact with everybody. As Charlie annoys us continually on their journey to LA to take care of business, we're rewarded by Raymond doing the same to Charlie. He frustrates his every move, without ever intending to. He won't fly for flying is dangerous but he doesn't point that out until he's almost on the plane. He won't drive on the freeway for freeways are dangerous too but he doesn't point that out until he's on one at a stop because there's an accident up ahead. He won't even go outside when it rains. Watching Tom Cruise be tormented is a crazy reason to stick with a movie but it's a satisfactory one.

Perhaps the biggest problem with this half of the film is that we pick up exactly who and what Raymond is in a few minutes of screen time so find ourselves watching Charlie catch up only to get frustrated when he persistently fails to do so. He has no clue what autism is and he really doesn't care, even initially believing that it can be cured. His attitude is most apparent in his habit of turning his back on his brother to make phone calls even though Raymond has a habit of wandering off every time he does this. It's not that Charlie is stupid or that he's unable to learn, it's that he's quintessentially selfish and unable to register the importance of anyone except himself. Sure, he does plenty for Raymond: finding the right sort of food, moving the beds over to the window, even stopping at a house in the middle of nowhere so his brother won't miss The People's Court. Yet really it's all for himself because without Raymond there's no money.

The first time he does something for his brother without thinking of himself happens an hour into the movie, when he helps Raymond off a crosswalk where he's holding up traffic because the sign changed to Don't Walk and he took it literally. Doing the right thing without thought doesn't last long for Charlie but it comes back with a vengeance almost exactly halfway through the film when he comes to a major realisation and so do we. While he knows Raymond is his brother, it hasn't meant anything except half of three million bucks, but in a roadside motel he discovers that Raymond is the Rain Man of the title, in his mind just an imaginary friend he forgot when he grew up. Of course Rain Man is just Raymond, as spoken by a two year old. Quickly he discovers a real connection. Raymond remembers him, in detail, and he was moved to Wallbrook because the family thought he was a danger to him, because of some incident in the bath.

The realisation we come to is that Tom Cruise isn't just playing himself, because suddenly some humanity surfaces in the character and we see a path to redemption for Charlie Babbitt. No, he doesn't stop being a yuppie or magically see the error of his ways and that's a good thing, for changes on that scale are reserved for visions of the divine, but there's a change nonetheless, even as he suddenly realises on the other side of Las Vegas just how much money he can make off a savant who can count a six deck shoe and the old gleam comes back. Rain Man runs for 133 minutes and that's far too long for a one revelation movie, but there had to be something to build up to these few minutes when suddenly the two characters connect. Hoffman has been excellent throughout but it's here that Cruise makes his presence worthwhile, especially as these scenes were shot in a single take. Sometimes humanity must out, even with Scientologists.

Bizarrely Hoffman was originally going to play Charlie until he met a savant called Leslie Lemke, who suffers from cerebral palsy, brain damage and blindness but who can repeat anything he hears on the piano, up to complex classical concertos, by ear. Moved to tears, he chose to switch to Raymond and have the character rewritten from being mentally retarded to being an autistic savant, one of a number of changes he insisted on that led to the departure of original director Martin Brest and the eventual return of Barry Levinson, who had initially turned down the movie when it was offered to him in order to make Good Morning, Vietnam instead. Hoffman had some experience working in a psychiatric care home so drew on that to craft Raymond Babbitt, but he also spent a year with autistic men and their families, including savant Kim Peek who was writer Barry Morrow's initial inspiration for the character and who Morrow gifted with the Oscar he won.

Watching Rain Man unfold, I couldn't help but remember an earlier Hoffman movie that seemed to aim at the same sort of concept. 1969's Midnight Cowboy is centered around the growth and bonding of two characters who find themselves stuck with each other for an extended period of time, who share a deep and abiding non-sexual connection even though they have very different backgrounds and outlooks. Yet the longer this film ran, the more it didn't seem to live up to that expectation. The setup is the same and both films concentrate so closely on the lead characters that it's rare to see them leave the screen, but while both characters in Midnight Cowboy grow, only Charlie needs to change here, to leave selfishness behind and find compassion and family. Raymond Babbitt is what he is and change is the last thing he needs, given that he thrives on routine. That means that we should be watching Cruise but we're really watching Hoffman.

Rain Man succeeded by word of mouth rather than hype, which makes me a little guilty for not liking it more. Beginning so poorly that it debuted behind Twins with a mere $7m in ticket sales, it rose to the top of the box office a couple of weeks later and ended up as the highest grossing film of 1988, even though most of its gross was generated during the following year. It won the Best Picture Oscar, along with further wins for Hoffman's acting, Levinson's direction and the original screenplay by Morrow and Ronald Bass. It's kept its place in the IMDb Top 250, though only just, and critics who initially found flaws have raised it in their esteem to being one of the best pictures of the eighties. For my part, I'm still seeing the flaws and honestly doubt I'll be back for a third viewing. Cruise is too annoying, the movie is too long and the songs have no apparent connection to the story, with both Iko Iko and Dem Bones finding their way in for some reason.

The most telling line comes towards the end when director Barry Levinson steps in as a doctor to evaluate the newfound relationship of the Babbitts. As only a week has passed since Charlie demanded a million and a half bucks for the return of his brother, the doctor is a little skeptical of his motives, even though he's now turning down cheques with no strings attached and he explains his actions as caused by distress over his father's death. 'So last week you were upset,' the doctor sums up, 'and this week you suddenly found some devotion for your brother and you want to take care of him for the rest of your life.' We can't help but wonder too whether Charlie has done enough and I'd vote he hasn't. It all sounds trite in summary, however much Hans Zimmer left strings out of his score to avoid sentimentality. Only because Hoffmann pushed for a very particular ending does Charlie not get what he wants and that's the film's saving grace.

Run Lola Run (1998)

Director: Tom Tykwer
Stars: Franka Potente and Moritz Bleibtreu

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.

Here's about as nineties a film as there could be, an elevation of MTV style attention grabbing to feature length art form, and art it really is. I find myself scrutinising the details of this film just like I'd scrutinise a wall-sized old master in an art gallery, because it isn't just the picture it's the technique. In fact here it's mostly the technique because the picture is very much relegated to playing second fiddle. With Run Lola Run, German writer/director Tom Tykwer manipulated a simple plot by applying video game logic and adding distractions. After a few viewings I'm now wondering if perhaps he subverted it even further into being a parody of ADHD filmmaking by asking what would happen if it isn't just the audience that has ADHD but the scriptwriter too. Those distractions are at once utterly irrelevant to the story at hand and the key to the whole film. Collectively they're akin to a MacGuffin except the characters don't care about them either.

What this ends up being is a film that becomes more and more impressive with each repeated viewing. The first time round, I felt that it was a style over substance affair, quintessentially cool with its nuns in sunglasses, credits rolling in reverse order and Franka Potente's startling shock of red hair, but without much actual substance. Watching afresh I realised just how much of a devil Tykwer had in the details and each time through I've found more and more to see. Perhaps this is inevitable because of the approach Tykwer takes to spring the key on us a third of the way through the film. At this point, we the audience are forced to make a complete reevaluation of everything we've just seen because the whole thing starts all over again. By the time the same thing happens again after another third, we've got the point but we still probably aren't thinking deeply enough about why Tykwer chose to do things this way.

Again this is inevitable. Unless we have eidetic memories this really forces us to go back and watch the film again to see what we missed because we weren't equipped to ask the right questions first time. This is underlined by a blurry dance through a mass of faceless humanity that accompanies the credits. Nobody means anything to us on a first viewing, but a second shows us that the people that the dance slows to focus on are key players in the story to come. For any of us watching who aren't German, there are also cultural references that we miss out on entirely until we read up on the film afterwards. The narrator is Hans Paetsch, who generations of Germans would instantly recognise as a teller of fairy tales, and the opening philosophical quote that the ball is round, the game lasts ninety minutes and everything else is theory comes from legendary German football coach Sepp Herberger. It applies well to a wider stage here.

Our heroine is Lola, whose boyfriend Manni is in serious trouble. He's a small time crook who has got himself caught up in some dubious cross-border criminal enterprise. It's a reasonably safe job as such things go: he merely has to pick up 100,000 DM and transport them to his boss but, racked with nerves, he promptly leaves the money on the train where it's found by a nameless homeless man. Manni has twenty minutes to find the money or he is in serious trouble so he rings his girl from a phone box outside the Spiral Bar. From then on, Lola's running, the spirals are spiralling, the clocks are ticking and we have to watch intently to keep track of all the things we should be watching, especially as Tykwer bombards us with a dazzling array of power zooms, split screens, hand held camerawork, repetition, animation and all the rest of the MTV eye candy effects that serve the ADHD generation so well but critics tend to hate in feature films.

However there's actually a lot of depth here and we have to pay attention to realise just how much, beginning at the point where Lola finds herself breaking the fourth wall and crying, 'Stop!' The previous twenty minutes have been busy. Initially Lola runs to the bank where her father is the manager, hoping that he'll lend her the money. Not only does she fail to persuade him to do this, she also discovers that he isn't her father anyway and that he's about to leave her mother for his mistress. She runs on to find Manni already robbing a supermarket, so helps him collect the money and run on out, only to be accidentally shot in the chest by one of the many police officers who quickly surround them. It's not a good ending for a movie, especially as it's only a third done, so she cries 'Stop!', Dinah Washington sings What a Difference a Day Makes and Lola is off running again to try to get it right on the second try, just like a video game character.

While her quest could now be seen as a game level which she's attempting again after simply losing a life, there's more to it than that. Throughout her initial run, Lola had interacted with a host of characters, all of whom we initially assumed were merely incidental, perhaps obstacles or diversions, but surely nothing of consequence to the wider story. However Tykwer uses these characters to provide a surprising philosophical underlay that ends up being the point of the film. The technique used is a set of rapid fire photo montages that illustrate the future of each character, sparked simply by the presence of Lola in their lives, through a touch or a glance. It's the fact that these futures change with each of Lola's runs that highlights that in starting again she changed everything, not just her own destiny but theirs too and it's surreal and somehow anachronistic to find a modern pop culture movie asking such a serious question on the sly.

Of course the question is the old chestnut that pits free will against determinism, something that goes back at least as far as Aristotle and will no doubt continue on for as long as there are still philosophers to ponder it. Those who believe in free will believe that any one of us can change anything purely because we choose to do so, that choice having no precedent and just springing out of nowhere. On the other hand, determinists believe that everything is cause and effect, from the tiniest human thought to the largest natural disaster. As Philip Merilees famously asked, 'Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?' This film asks precisely the same question, with Lola representing the butterfly's wings and all these characters as their own individual tornadoes. It took Ashton Kutcher an entire movie to explain the butterfly effect, but Tom Tykwer manages it with a set of photographs prompted by a single touch.

It's so strange to focus on the incidental characters that it's hard to actually do. Our eyes keep following Lola as she runs, both because Franka Potente is magnetic to watch and because all that we've learned from the movies tells us to follow the action, especially if it's represented by the lead character whose name is in the title. Tykwer keeps Lola running, even as he throws out these little snapshots of the future to hover in our minds as meaning more than the pounding of Lola's feet. We gradually learn more about these characters too, once again subverting our initial assumption that they aren't important. As we realise that the slightest thing these characters do affects Lola's story just as much as her actions affect theirs, we begin to understand just how complex this matrix becomes and what an insane number of possibilities explode from any single action. Some could take this insight as proof of the existence or the non-existence of God.

Our first hint at this comes right at the beginning of her second run. Lola meets the same punk standing on the staircase inside her apartment block with his dog that she did on her first run, but instead of it growling at her and prompting her to run faster, this time out he trips her and she runs slower because of a limp. The minor car accident she causes in the first run happens in the second too, but now we know that one of the drivers is a colleague of her father's. Because she arrives at the bank a little later, the whole dynamic about her father's infidelity changes and his mistress has the time to explain that she's leaving him because she's pregnant by somebody else. This time out Lola gets the money by robbing the bank, infuriated at her father, but it does no good because instead of her dying after the supermarket robbery, it's Manni who dies at the end of her second run, hit by an ambulance as he crosses the road to meet her.

Yes, it all changes again on the third run. No, I'm not going to tell you how it comes out in the end. You should watch this film yourself to find out. Then you can start puzzling about the how and the why of it all and imagine an infinite amount of monkeys generating an infinite amount of further runs for Lola, because that's what the laws of determinism call for. Infinite divergence means that one run would have you in the car accident, another would have you as the driver of the ambulance and a third would have you as her father's mistress, regardless what sex you are. I love these little glimpses of how easy it must for philosophers to go completely insane and how someone like Douglas Adams, who turned precisely this sort of quirky concept into science fiction humour, might just end up being the most accurate of them all. And it all starts with what appears to be an apparently throwaway gimmick conjured up by Tom Tykwer to distract us.

There are other techniques Tykwer uses here that resonate with me. At one point Lola wonders about who could help her in her hour of need and because she's a human being, this wondering works at the speed of thought. Everyone she knows, or perhaps has ever seen, promptly leaps into her thoughts at rapid fire speed. We see them each for a mere fraction of a second as she conjures them up and then discards them all, but as she gradually focuses certain people reappear more and more until only her father is left. I've never seen a better example of either the brute force approach to computational power and the sheer anarchy of human thought. It's a welcome reminder that, just because a film employs cinematic gimmickry, it doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have substance behind it and a reason to be there. Compare any episode of CSI with one of CSI: Miami and you'll see the depth in the former and the surface in the latter.

Tykwer also explores time in this film in a very powerful way. Every viewing I make brings more little details to the fore that I missed the last time round. Sometimes he's obvious, sometimes obscure, but everything in the movie revolves around the importance of the passage of time. It even begins with a ticking clock that morphs into a techno soundtrack. As Lola sets off running in an attempt to beat the clock, her boyfriend is waiting to die, her father is waiting to change his life and his girlfriend is waiting for him, and so on. I haven't seen so many clocks in a film since High Noon, to the degree that everything else, like fountains viewed from above, begin to look like clocks too. I'm sure that wasn't accidental. Even the editing plays with time, so we get split screens as there isn't enough time to show two sides of something separately, and jump cuts because there isn't enough time to show Lola getting from one end of the road to the other.

I'm perhaps on my fourth viewing now but I still noticed more new things. This time I caught sight of a tortoise walking across Lola's bedroom floor just before she starts running, yet another indicator of speed, which as distance over time is precisely what Lola has in her sights. I also realised that when these characters actually find time, like when Lola has her father at gunpoint to wait for the rest of the 100,000 marks she's stealing from his bank, they can't even talk to each other because they can only function at breakneck speed. I wonder what I'll see for the first time next time around. No wonder TV shows like The Simpsons and Johnny Bravo paid obvious tribute, just as this paid tribute too, most obviously to Hitchcock's Vertigo, referenced not just in the spirals and the segmentation of the story into an original and a rerun, but even down to a painting in a casino that depicts the famous view of Kim Novak's head from behind.

While overtly influenced by Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, not least his films Blind Chance and The Double Life of Véronique, Tykwer introduced modern visual techniques instead of the more traditional play with colour and score that Kieslowski used. That puts this movie alongside a whole slew of films that similarly attempted to reinvent modern cinema through techniques used previously in commercials or rock videos. In the States, it happened most notably in the hands of the Wachowski brothers (The Matrix) and Darren Aronofsky (Pi and Requiem for a Dream). In the UK, it was Danny Boyle (Shallow Grave and Trainspotting) and Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch). In Japan it became apparent through the work of a whole slew of filmmakers such as Shinya Tsukamoto (the Tetsuo films), who had the additional influence of anime to bring to bear.

In Germany it was by the filmmakers of the X Filme Creative Pool. This was a pooling of artistic talent, inspired by the formation of United Artists in 1919. Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D W Griffith wanted more artistic freedom than they were accustomed to getting from the Hollywood studios, so they pooled their talents and their money to form a new studio, United Artists. In 1994, four Germans did the same thing: producer Stefan Arndt and directors Wolfgang Becker, Dani Levy and Tom Tykwer. This pooling of talent has collectively led not only to Lola Rennt, which became the highest grossing German film of the year and, as Run Lola Run, the most successful foreign film in US cinema history at the time, but also to even greater international success with Becker's Good Bye, Lenin! and Tykwer's Heaven, which would have been Kieslowski's next film had he not died in 1996.

It also launched the career of Franka Potente, who makes a magnificent Lola, even though the film was created especially for her by her longtime director boyfriend. It certainly paid off as her work here and a deeper performance in another Tykwer film, The Princess and the Warrior, led her to Hollywood. Five years later she was third billed behind Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz in Blow, one more and she was earning a cool million bucks for The Bourne Supremacy. She looks so right in her bright red hair, even though she couldn't wash it for seven weeks as the colour was highly sensitive to water, that it seems really strange to see her elsewhere but her changing hair colour has become her trademark. Moritz Bleibtreu, who plays Manni, hasn't risen to the same heights but is still a much respected actor in Germany who makes odd appearances in American films like Munich, The Walker and Speed Racer. Perhaps he just needs to shout 'Stop!'

Nosferatu, a Symphony of Terror (1922)

Director: F W Murnau
Stars: Max Schreck and Gustav von Wangenheim

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

I've been disappointed with Nosferatu every time I've seen it, though I should include two major caveats. Firstly, I haven't seen a decent print yet, as the versions I've seen thus far are all low quality public domain prints. I really should get round to picking up a Kino or Image DVD and see what I haven't seen over the years. Secondly, I expected a lot. Nosferatu is almost ninety years old, the oldest film to make the IMDb Top 250, and is a pioneer in so many ways that it's difficult to count them. Among the most important is its look and feel, as it's one of the three key films that brought German expressionism to a wider audience, the other two being The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and The Golem. This shines through even in the rough prints I've seen and surely must be very apparent in a pristine copy. Most obviously though it's a vampire movie, one that helped shape its genre and gifted us with what may still be the most horrific vampire on film.

Nosferatu is a treatment of Bram Stoker's Dracula, marking the first time that the Count found his way into film, beginning a cinematic legacy that has eclipsed that of every fictional character except perhaps Sherlock Holmes. However it was a rather free adaptation which changed the names of the major characters and removed the lesser ones, changed the timeframe and the settings and introduced important concepts not in the novel, some taken directly from European folklore and which have since become inextricably entwined with the Dracula story. Nonetheless Stoker's estate literally sued Prana Film out of existence, and only the verdict's timing prevented the film's annihilation, as a number of prints had already been released worldwide. The writer was Henrik Galeen, who with Paul Wegener had adapted both the 1915 and 1920 versions of The Golem from Yiddish legend. He would go on to write Waxworks and The Student of Prague.

In the Stoker novel, Count Dracula is a nobleman who lives with his minions in his castle in the Carpathian mountains. Jonathan Harker travels there to assist with a real estate transaction, as the Count wishes to buy a house in England and lose himself among the teeming masses, but finds himself confined to the castle and plagued by wanton vampires. The Count travels west on the Demeter, a Russian ship which arrives in Whitby with all crew lost and the captain lashed to the helm. He proceeds to pursue Harker's fiancée, Mina, along with her friend, Lucy, a popular girl who turns down a number of marriage proposals. One is from John Seward, who runs the lunatic asylum that contains Renfield, a man who eats small creatures to absorb their life force and who acts as a proximity sensor for the Count. The Dutch professor Abraham Van Helsing realises what is happening, chases the Count back to Transylvania and stakes him with a knife.

In the Galeen adaptation, Graf Orlok is a ratlike monster who lives alone in his castle in the Carpathian mountains. Thomas Hutter travels there to assist with a real estate transaction, as the Count wishes to buy a house in Wisborg, and is gifted The Book of Vampires by locals who believe that Orlok is one. Hutter finds himself confined to the castle. The Graf travels west on the Demeter, which arrives in Wisborg with all crew lost and the captain lashed to the helm. In the Demeter's wake comes plague. Orlok proceeds to pursue Hutter's wife, Ellen. Knock, Hutter's employer, is driven mad by influence from the Graf and institutionalised, where he eats flies and acts as a proximity sensor. After Hutter returns home, Ellen reads The Book of Vampires and discovers a way to kill Orlok. A woman pure in heart must willingly give her blood to him so that he loses track of time and dies when the sun rises. She succeeds but dies herself in the process.

As you can see, there are unmistakable similarities between these versions but notable changes too, far beyond names and locations, especially once the Count reaches the west. Using Stoker's names as examples, Renfield isn't just a random lunatic, he's the agent who sends Harker to the Count, suggesting that the Count's influence arrived with his initial letter, which is comprised of strange glyphs and magical symbols. There is no Van Helsing in Nosferatu, though a Prof Bulwer is aware of bloodsucking creatures as he demonstrates Venus Flytraps and carnivorous polyps to his students. There is no staking, indeed any trip back to Transylvania, as Nosferatu introduces a new concept, that a vampire can be killed by sunlight and pure intent. The Count is the only one of his kind, as there are no Brides of Dracula in his castle, but he has an affinity to rats and between them they spread plague instead of undeath. Orlok does not make more Orloks.

The most obvious difference is in the demeanour of the Count. Stoker's Dracula is a seductive nobleman, aptly portrayed on screen by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, and whose influence remains massive today in the works of Anne Rice, Charlaine Harris and Laurell K Hamilton, even Stephanie Meyer. Galeen's Orlok is a monster, pure and simple, and the performance by German actor Max Schreck is possibly the greatest portrayal of an inhuman monster that cinema has yet seen, even though he only has a mere nine minutes on screen. Schreck is so memorable that the rumour that director F W Murnau hired a real vampire to play Orlok rather than an actor is believable, an idea aided by the fact that his very surname translates to 'fright'. Shadow of the Vampire is an intriguing take on this. In reality Schreck was a real actor, with four credits prior to Nosferatu and who continued to act until his death in 1936 of a heart attack, not stake.

In fact Schreck is so good as Graf Orlok that the film suffers for his absence and so we're forced to suffer for a while through an overacting Gustav von Wangenheim before we're treated to Max Schreck. To give him some credit, he is hindered by playing the Jonathan Harker role, inherently the boring one in any Dracula movie because he's the regular Joe in a story all about fascinating monsters. However, von Wangenheim manages the dubious achievement of perhaps outdoing Keanu Reeves as my least favourite Harker of all time. It isn't just the way in which he overacts, which is not the usual silent era gesticulation, but the way he animates his character. Ebullient and overconfident, he bounds through life without a care. Rather than being the type whose joy is contagious and energising, he's the type who simply annoys, who slaps you on the back after sleeping with your wife, who never learns even if someone drops a piano on his head.

Unfortunately it's von Wangenheim as Thomas Hutter who we watch through much of the early film, after a brief glimpse of Alexander Granach as Knock, his boss. Granach is entirely allowed, even encouraged, to go wild, because he has the Renfield role, one that has a little more depth here because he's the agent who receives Orlok's cabalistic letter and so gets a brief moment to go insane, not just start there. Renfield has always attracted intriguing character actors, from Dwight Frye's defining take in the Universal Dracula, through Bruno Ganz in Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre, to Tom Waits in Coppola's presumptuously titled Bram Stoker's Dracula. Granach is a worthy beginning to that tradition, a talented actor who would later shine in films as varied as Pabst's Comradeship, Lubitsch's Ninotchka and Lang's Hangmen Also Die!, ironically playing a Gestapo Inspector given that he was a Galician Jew who escaped Hitler for Hollywood.

Granach plays Knock like a demonic clown, the sort of character you might expect Danny de Vito to play in a Spawn movie. This is a silent film but you can just hear him cackling, his wide eyes and grin outrageous and always alive. When he summons Hutter to send to Transylvania he has an edge to him. 'Young as you are, what matter if it costs you some pain,' he tells him, 'or even a little blood?' Perhaps von Wangenheim had to play Hutter as unreasonably ebullient. If not, he wouldn't have accepted the job! Even in the poor quality prints I saw, Granach gleams and acts more like a coiled spring than a human being. He's wonderfully twitchy in the asylum, snatching flies out of the air, crying 'Blood! Blood!' and sidling up to people with malicious intent. After he murders the warden and escapes, he takes to the rooftops and gets hit by stones, seemingly unaware of what the townsfolk are throwing at him. He's joyous to watch.

As great as Granach is, he very much plays second fiddle to Schreck, who dominates the film as Graf Orlok. Circumstance surely helped, as in 1922 he didn't have Bela Lugosi's iconic portrayal of Dracula to influence him. Everyone tasked with playing a vampire after 1931 couldn't help but bear the influence of Lugosi, whether they care to admit it or not. Schreck had free rein to create a creature entirely apart from anything that had gone before him through a combination of body language and silent era make up techniques and he succeeds magnificently. Galeen's choice to write the character without Stoker's dark romanticism but instead with a kinship to the plague carrying rat is the foundation, as Orlok looks notably like a tall thin rat, right down to the incisors being elongated rather than the canines, the stretched ears and the clawlike hands that seem vestigial rather than functional. He only blinks once in the entire movie.

Who built on the foundation to decide on the choices of stance or motion, I have no idea, but they nailed it, conjuring up a vampire from sweatsoaked nightmare rather than wet dream with a quirky posture and gait that make us uneasy every time we see him. He's somehow the wrong shape for a human being, too tall and thin like a midget perched on the shoulders of a regular sized man. It would have been so easy for Schreck to go wild and overact, especially in a silent movie, but if anything he underplays the part and leaves even more of an impression for it. All the best shots are of him: Orlok seen through his coffin lid, Orlok manhandling his coffins onto a cart, Orlok rising from his coffin in the Demeter's hold, Orlok emerging from the ghost ship in Wisborg, Orlok standing at the window willing Ellen to come to him, Orlok's shadow on her wall, Orlok hearing the cock crow and knowing that it's all over, Orlok contorting in the sunlight.

Even shots that would be powerful elsewhere become lessened through comparison here. One shot of a Wisborg street has many people carrying coffins in procession, all sombre and spaced out enough to suggest massive scale. Yet we've just watched Orlok creeping through the town at night, with his coffin under his arm, as if the weight is nothing. Obviously Murnau didn't task his actor with a real wooden coffin full of Transylvanian soil but Schreck still makes us wonder just what it was made of for him to ignore the weight so utterly. On the Demeter, with only captain and mate left of a compliment of fourteen passengers and crew, the first mate takes it upon himself to search the hold, only for Orlok to rise before him and scare him into leaping into the sea. Presumably this was a sprung board but it's so well done that even the hardened horror nut can't help but feel a rush. As an intertitle says, 'Nosferatu! That name alone can chill the blood.'

The only flaw to the scenes with Orlok is one that isn't present in the original movie and has only been propagated through low quality prints over the years. While the concept of sunlight being anathema to vampires began with this film, it's become an established part of vampire lore. In Bram Stoker's original novel, it was merely debilitating and Count Dracula does wander around a little during the day. Here Graf Orlok appears to wander around during sunlight all the time, but this is because the scenes were indeed shot during the day and later tinted blue to represent night, a frequent convention during the silent era because the orthochromatic film stock could only be used in environments with plenty of light. When screened in black and white, of course, this tint is lost and with it, some of the continuity. Intertitles that reset the names to those in Dracula but for some reason change Wisborg to Bremen rather than Whitby don't help either.

I'm fascinated to find out what the real translations of the original German intertitles reveal. Those I read were often clumsy and remained on screen too long, but there were still gems of wordplay. Hutter's journey to Orlok's castle ends unceremoniously when the coachmen drop him at a bridge and refuse to go further. 'And when he had crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him,' reads the following intertitle which is simple but utterly effective, as effective as Orlok's coach that hastens to pick him up with bizarre movements that are more like stop motion animation than sped up film. Like Orlok himself, it doesn't feel real. 'Blood! Your precious blood!' cries the creepy count as he is drawn towards Hutter who has cut his finger. There's one perhaps unintentionally humorous line that may well translate differently in more authentic prints. 'Is this your wife?' Orlok asks Hutter when he sees a photograph of her. 'What a lovely throat!'

While a pristine, properly restored print of Nosferatu may well elevate the film for me by showing it as it was originally intended, for now it feels like a flawed masterpiece. Undeniably creepy and with the greatest screen vampire of them all, there is too much in between Schreck's scenes that feels weak in comparison. Gustav von Wangenheim is annoying as Hutter, Greta Schröder gets too little to do as Ellen, lesser characters like Ruth Harding and Prof Bulwer have little reason to even be in the film. We are forced to have patience through many of these scenes, while waiting for the horror to return. And horror it truly is. There's no metaphor for sex and reproduction here, no seduction or dark romance. Graf Orlok is a creature who evokes purest terror, his vampirism reminiscent only of the plague, a time honoured blight upon the land that cannot be reasoned with, merely extinguished. Even after ninety years Nosferatu still exudes that terror.

The Seventh Seal (1957)

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Stars: Gunnar Björnstrand, Bengt Ekerot, Nils Poppe and Max von Sydow

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

I knew beforehand that this would happen, of course, but from the very moment I started delving into the world of classic cinema, the name of Ingmar Bergman came up and remained highly prominent. His name permeates any serious discussion about world cinema or cinema as art, even in places you may not expect. Writing in exploitation master Roger Corman's book, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, for instance, Martin Scorsese described his days at New York University's Film School before making his first film for Corman. He said, 'There's no such thing as studying film at NYU. At NYU they make you study Wild Strawberries. I studied Wild Angels in movie theatres. Every morning at NYU you had to light a candle to Ingmar Bergman. They had little shrines to Bergman all over the place. I love Bergman pictures but it was Corman's movies we studied in those strange dives all over New York'.

This makes sense to me now as I learn just how differently film is seen across the globe. In the US, people who make films are filmmakers and success is measured at the box office. In many other parts of the world, people who make films are artists and success is measured by the quality of the work and the size of the legacy. Yes, that's an atrocious generalisation. Yes, there's crossover, especially today with the rise of indie cinema and consistently lower production and distribution costs, but there wasn't much in 1957 when Ingmar Bergman made The Seventh Seal which was based on his own play and wouldn't seem to be a commercially viable idea in the slightest. Set in mediæval Sweden with a title taken from the Revelation of St John the Divine and structured as a set of meditations on unquantifiable abstracts like life, death and man's relationship to God, this is hardly something you could imagine Hollywood turning out in 1957.

Background like that may draw the intelligentsia but it limits the audience massively as most people, consciously or subconsciously, avoid such work because it's surely going to be a long slog to depression. I'd often seen clips of this film but had little context to place those clips into, so before I saw it, I had expectations of an hour and a half chess game on a beach between a mediæval knight and Death himself, with deep philosophical discussions to parallel the moves. Happily, this is not the case. The chess game punctuates the film but is never the focus and the philosophy is an accompaniment to the story rather than a substitute for it. What I discovered here, with my first Bergman, is that though he undeniably fashions high art, he can still be accessible to more than just the snobby cultural elite. The Seventh Seal turns out to be a very human story indeed, telling us all about life through its proximity to Death.

We're in the 14th century and down on the beach are Antonius Block and his squire Jöns, who have returned to their native Sweden from a decade away fighting in the Crusades to discover that the country they left is being ravaged by plague. Death is a frequent visitor to this land and he's soon there on the beach in the memorable form of a black cloaked Bengt Ekerot to take Block too. However the knight isn't ready, because after ten years fighting in the name of the Lord, his faith has deserted him and he's tormented by its absence. Now he seeks knowledge, for proof of the existence of God and, while the soldier in him is not afraid of death, his soul fears that it's all that there is. So he challenges Death to a game of chess, ostensibly with his life as the prize but really to just play for time so that he might find the answers he seeks before he has to face the reality of them. In this he mirrors the rest of the population, who ask en masse.

As Block sets out for his castle, perhaps instinctively remembering the safety it offers or perhaps just wishing to die at home with his wife, he and Jöns come upon a wide range of people and with them a wide range of reactions to the very same situation he finds himself in. Everyone has to face Death, whether knight or peasant, and in a plague ravaged country it's on everyone's mind. And if that all sounds impeccably depressing, you should discover that it's a bawdy romp with memorable dialogue and superlative performances. Yes, here you'll meet Death, but here you'll also see a bar fight, a witch burning and a textbook seduction. You'll see a merry band of troubadours acting out their plays and singing their songs and you'll see a dark procession of penitents, whipping themselves and each other into purity. Does that sound like an arthouse discourse on existential angst or a lurid horror movie? Amazingly this is something of both.

Block is played by Max von Sydow, amazingly young to those of us who know him best as Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon or even as Father Merrin in The Exorcist. He looks the part with his shock of white hair, like Rutger Hauer with a stretched head, and he wears the garb of a knight like he was born in it. To a film full of peasantry, he brings a touch of class. We don't believe he's holy, but we believe that he truly aspires to that role, not just a nobleman but a noble man too. Mostly he's composed, speaking with quiet authority on everything except his own questions, but his face contorts magnificently when he looks into the eyes of a supposed witch as she dies, not just for her pain but because of the emptiness he sees there. 'Is it so terribly inconceivable to comprehend God with one's senses?' he asks a confessor. 'Why does he hide in a cloud of half-promises and unseen miracles? I want knowledge! Not faith, not assumptions, but knowledge.'

Another Bergman regular, Gunnar Björnstrand, instils plenty of character into Jöns, his squire. Block restricts his emotions except when he comes alive matching his wits with Death, so his squire provides a great balance, just another way to serve his master. He sings, jokes, makes rude faces behind his master's back. 'Between a strumpet's legs to lie, that's the place for such as I,' he sings, as they set forth into plague country. Outside of Death himself, who dominates proceedings partly through Bengt Ekerot's iconic performance but partly just because he's frickin' Death, Jöns is the star of the show. He seems to be all things to all people, loyal servant and timely saviour, hired muscle and provider of insults, drinking companion and purveyor of philosophical advice. He carries them all off wonderfully, though he calls himself simply, 'a pleasant, talkative young man who thinks only kind thoughts and performs only noble deeds.'

As they travel onward, they interact with the people they meet and learn how they're facing the inevitable. While Block visits a church and gives confession, albeit unwittingly to Death himself, Jöns gabs and drinks gin with a painter of murals, Albertus Pictor, a real life painter whose many murals on churches in which Bergman's clergyman father preached provided the basis for the iconography and imagery used in this film. His fictional counterpart explains to Jöns that 'a skull is more interesting than a naked woman' and that he paints the dance of death to remind the people that they're going to die. Outside they find a woman hanging in the stocks like a statue because she's supposed to be the witch who slept with the Devil and brought about the plague. People spread the blood and entrails of a black dog around her to keep Satan away until she is burned at the stake. Apparently he can't stand the smell, but then neither can anyone else.

Superstitions abound in The Seventh Seal. Many pertain to religion but many hearken back to days before Christianity, as not everyone has the benefit of education. In the town's tavern the opinions are simple: some want to live while they can, others would rather die pure. They aren't too sure of how but the penitents who process through the land spreading doom and gloom seem to know. Their march into town is a startling spectacle, quite literally awesome. Cowled penitents struggle under huge crosses, flagellants whip each other or themselves, all to the accompaniment of ritual chanting and clouds of incense. 'God has sent his punishment down on us,' their leader tells them. The message is simple. They're all going to die of the black plague. They're all doomed. Even those already singing the Dies Irae, carrying skulls or wearing crowns of thorns, pay attention, and then they all move on once more to leave shock in their wake.

One man epitomises the change that the fear of Death can bring. A young woman catches him stealing from a corpse in a stable and he turns on her with intention of rape, only to discover Jöns behind the door, who recognises him as Raval from the seminary in Roskilde, the very man who sent them to the Holy Land ten years before. 'The Lord sought to chasten our smug pride,' spits the squire, 'so he sent you to spew your holy venom and poison my master's mind.' He lets him live but threatens to cut his face up next time he sees him, as would be meted out to a petty thief. He makes good his word too, after Raval picks on a juggler named Jof in the town's tavern. Jof is a visitor, a travelling performer, thus an easy target and nobody stops the thuggish Raval from tormenting him. Perhaps any target is good when Death stalks the land, as long as it isn't them. Only when Jöns makes good on his promise does Raval vanish.

While the story is drenched in philosophy and great dialogue, it doesn't skimp on the visuals and these scenes in the tavern highlight a lost cinematic art: the use of human faces as background. This film is over half a century old but it's the most recent exemplar of this technique that I've found, after earlier gems like Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc and Eisenstein's two films about Ivan the Terrible. The cinematography is by Gunnar Fischer, one of two great visual artists who worked with Bergman over a string of many movies, the other being Sven Nykvist who mostly took over as of The Virgin Spring in 1960. Fischer shot fourteen films for Bergman, including both his masterpieces from 1957, the other being Wild Strawberries, and the 1955 film whose success at Cannes enabled this one to be made, Smiles of a Summer Night. He's a better choice here because he was more expressionistic while Nykvist was more natural with light.

I can wonder what Nykvist would have done with the forest scenes, but I can see what Fischer did, whether looking at the sky or the trees, and so it's easy to understand why people are happy for Block to guide them through the forest to keep them safe from trolls and ghosts and bandits. The company has grown considerably by this time: not just Block and Jöns, Jof and his wife Mia, and the unnamed girl that Jöns saves from Raval, but also a smith named Plog. Plog is distraught over the loss of his buxom wench of a wife who has run off with an actor, Jonas Skat, who was the third in Jof's company. Yet when he rediscovers the pair in the forest, she rejoins him and Jonas stays behind to fake his own death to escape Plog and then find it for real. Death is also with them, as he soon discovers and as Jof soon sees because he's precisely what Block has been searching for, but doesn't realise has been under his nose for a good part of the film.

We learn early on that Jof has some sort of second sight because he experiences a vision of the Virgin Mary only for his wife Mia to discount it. 'The things you imagine,' she says, especially as he'd previously suggested that the Devil had painted the wheels on their caravan red with his tail, though of course he'd painted them himself. It's Jof who sees the dance of death at the end and Jof who sees Block's opponent at chess in the forest, at a rather fortuitous time. Jof and Mia are the only people in the film who are truly full of life, possibly because they have a year old child, and it's very possibly this yearning for the future that ensures their survival when most of their fellow countrymen aren't so lucky. Another take is more personal and suggests that Block, Jöns and Jof are different sides of Bergman, in turn the questioning son of a strict Lutheran minister, the cynical adult who saw World War II and the natural artist, the only one who lives on.

Certainly Block's motives are worn on his sleeve and Jof's carefree attitude while surrounded by death is unmistakable. It's Jöns who evokes most discussion because he's a complex character, as befits the top billing that Gunnar Björnstrand receives, even though he's playing a servant. He gets most of the best lines, whether they be serious or jovial. He gets to fashion both highbrow and lowbrow insults, in Latin to Raval and in vulgarisms when assisting Plog the smith in a battle of wits against Jonas Skat. He's frequently hilarious, which seems a strange thing to say in a film about the meaning of life, but he may be the key to what's really going on. At points he's like a translation tool, like the many devices Woody Allen uses in his movies and especially in Annie Hall where Allen uses subtitles to show us the real meaning of conversation. Bergman uses Jöns.

As perhaps befits the most cynical character, he misses out on a line that could sum up the film, settling instead on many lines that sum up all the different things in it, such as 'Love is the blackest of all plagues. If one could die of it, there would be some pleasure in love, but you don't die of it.' Three lines in particular stand out for mention at the close. Block's is suitably quiet and philosophical. 'To believe is to suffer,' he says summing up his life and what he hopes will end with his death. The longing of the unnamed girl played by Gunnel Lindblom is palpable as she looks into the face of Death. Mute throughout the story, she speaks at the end to say, 'It is finished.' Inevitably the final word must go to Death himself, who is a sure creature here, unlike the incarnations in Death Takes a Holiday or On Borrowed Time. Block questions him continually through the film, asking for his secrets. Eventually he answers. 'I have no secrets,' says Death.

Tentacles (1977)

Director: Oliver Hellman
Stars: John Huston, Shelley Winters and Bo Hopkins

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.

Tentacles, a low budget rip off of Jaws, made two years later with a giant octopus replacing the shark, appears to be about as Hollywood as you can get from moment one. The MGM lion roars, then Samuel Z Arkoff of American International presents John Huston, Shelley Winters and Bo Hopkins with a special appearance by Henry Fonda, all major names in 1977. Sure, we haven't heard of the director, Oliver Hellman, but there are always new directors in Hollywood, right? Well, this isn't Hollywood in the slightest, this is an Italian monster movie. Oliver Hellman is a pseudonym for Ovidio Assonitis, which sounds like a reason to stock up on anti-inflammatory cream but is really a hidden hint that this isn't what it seems, a terrible hint to be sure but the next one's even worse. In an attempt to tell us the secret to the film before we've even seen it we're forced to watch the opening credits unfold over a full sixty second shot of a taxi radio.

You can picture just how rivetting that is, but the sheer genius of it is that it means nothing at all until you've seen the movie and once you've seen the movie you're not going to care. This sort of thing suggests that Assonitis is an artistic soul, merely one whose artistic aspirations are far ahead of his grasp of cinematic language, and that suggestion is backed up continually as the film unfolds. When this taxi stops, for instance, we follow a pair of feet as they get out of the car and walk towards the ocean, only to realise that they have nothing whatsoever to do with the price of fish in Denmark. They're just an example of something that Assonitis saw in a movie, felt was cool and threw into his own, without apparently realising that the technique is supposed to highlight how important a character is while keeping us in suspense as to who he might be. Then again he got this job because he'd successfully ripped off The Exorcist. That's not much to go on.

Another great example comes when we see the sign that explains that we're not in Amity, we're in Solana Beach, California, where they're going to have their annual junior yacht race on 21st August. In Jaws, this sign is a successful plot device, here it's a sign. Oh, and it's a sign that looks like the sign in Jaws. That's it. And if you hadn't realised that this is an inferior knock off by this point, Assonitis replaces the skinnydipping Susan Backlinie with some Italian woman doing her lipstick while trying to talk her baby into behaving. She's Susan Hopkins and she runs over the road to talk to a friend who pulls up. In the background we watch little Billy, wondering where his mother has run off to and promptly disappearing as a bus goes past. 'But where is he?' asks the friend, because dialogue isn't a plus point here either. We know where he is because we've been watching him by octopus cam, not just at sea level but climbing up the cliffs too. Clever octopus.

And so it goes, as we follow the standard setups for a monster movie in very strange ways. The first victim is a baby but we don't play up the shock factor and we don't exploit it at all. Next to go is Bill Sullivan but we're stuck watching his peg leg and his butt and the back of his head as if the cameraman is shy or something. Maybe he's supposed to look like Quint but wouldn't if we could actually see him. There are many bizarre angles that look less like clever artistry and more like pointing the camera at random angles based on the roll of a dice. Sullivan is on a boat but not for long. In the time it takes his friend with the unfortunate flesh coloured shorts to walk off and grab a sandwich, he splashes off into the sea and is entirely gone when his friend runs back. By the time it throws up his corpse in front of the fat kids arguing about who kisses better we're firmly on the side of the monster. It even has the good taste not to eat such obnoxious kids.

Enter journalist Ned Turner, in the form of famed cinematic maverick John Huston, so maverick that he got to star in films like this. 'Jesus H Christ!' he says, in his resonant whisper. 'Stripped to the bone!' Quite why it's stripped to the bone after we saw it surface with not just the man's skin but even his beard intact, I really can't say. 'Got any answers?' he asks the nearest cop, who naturally doesn't have any idea either. 'I don't even know where to start asking questions,' he replies but his deputy nails it from moment one. 'That tunnel they're building in the harbour,' he suggests. 'They're using equipment Buck Rogers couldn't dream up.' Now, the only thing worse than the assumption that anyone using equipment that a cop doesn't recognise must be guilty of something is the fact that he's right. 'My opinion, we're in for a nightmare,' says Huston, but whether he's talking about the giant octopus, the film itself or the next scene is open for debate.

The next scene has Huston wander around his house in a huge white robe that makes him look like an old extra from Life of Brian. He was 71 at the time and looked it but Assonitis obviously hired the first stars that bit at his offer of a free Italian vacation and didn't bother to change the script to accommodate the results. So 71 year old John Huston is supposed to be the brother of 57 year old Shelley Winters, who poses sexily for him, even though she was overweight by this point. 'This isn't candy, this is passion,' she rumbles. 'Aren't you ever going to slow down?' he asks her. 'Never,' she says. Yes, Shelley Winters is playing herself here. She's Tillie Turner, she seduces young Italians, she has Bloody Marys for breakfast and she has a young son called Billy. A really young son. Effectively Ned and Tillie are apparently fortysomethings, as we discover when they talk about a surreptitious conversation they had forty years ago behind the sofa.

Quite what a 31 year old was doing whispering to his 17 year old sister so mom and pop couldn't hear is something that doesn't bear thinking about. We're also not supposed to be wondering what Shelley Winters is wearing and why she thinks it's a good idea, we should be setting up our octopus story before we forget why we're here. 'There must be something monstrous out there, monstrous and infernal,' Turner tells Sheriff Robards, who's checking up on the autopsy reports. The flesh is gone, there's very little cartilage left and all the marrow is gone too. Naturally these characters don't have the benefit of knowing that they're in a film called Tentacles but they do precisely nothing to find out what the cause of such a bizarre set of deaths really is. They just hire an expert to look into it, Will Gleason, an oceanographer with a case of the bends and a wife who's scared of him dipping his toes into the water. He sends a couple of his divers down instead.

Sheriff Robards is played by Claude Akins, another well known seventies face slumming it for a quick buck, but you're probably wondering where Henry Fonda is. Well, he's Mr Whitehead, the president of the rather unfortunately named Trojan Tunnels Inc, which is the bunch that are doing all that Buck Rogers stuff underwater. He has to read about Ned Turner's insinuations in the morning paper and he isn't happy about it. It would seem that he's really not happy about anything, given that he looks to be in notable pain. He seriously looks as if he's been crying, but perhaps he just read the script, remembered what he'd been doing forty years earlier and wondered why he was a film called Tentacles. Then again The Swarm was still to come, along with City on Fire and Meteor, before he'd finally redeem himself somewhat with On Golden Pond. He has about as much screen time here as the radio in that taxi at the beginning of the film.

Mr Whitehead is a strange character for another reason. Trojan Tunnels Inc is so fundamentally set up to be the traditional corporate villain of the piece that nobody ever seems to consider that there could be another cause for these tragic deaths. It's like they're the only possible suspect, so much so that nothing and nobody else is even worth considering. And yet Henry Fonda comes out with only a little blame because it's really his evil henchman who does the dastardly deeds that prompt the pissed off octopus and doesn't even have the common courtesy to keep his boss informed. It's almost as if Fonda agreed to lend his name to the project as long as he wasn't a bad guy and he didn't have to spend more than a day in front of the camera. This also sets a trend. None of these major stars do much, they don't interact very often and only one of them has any interaction with the monster. It may be the greatest waste of a good cast since Duel in the Sun.

What I'd read about this film led me to expect something truly awful, a spaghetti monster movie horribly mangled, but it wasn't, at least not in any traditional way that I'm used to. Films I review for Cinematic Hell tend to have something stunningly wrong with them, or many somethings all the way down to the decision to even make the movie. Yet none of that really applies here. The major names are capable but they struggle with the material. The rest of the cast are Italian so this feels more like a bad dub of an American film than an Italian film with a lot of Americans in it. The score is pretty good as a piece of music but it's overblown and often utterly inappropriate. The technical side is fair, at least when compared to much of the competition. The octopus shots are mostly of a real octopus in what must have been a pretty sizable tank and the killer whale shots are of real killer whales too. No single component screams out as a showstopper.

Yet by the time it was over, I realised that this film deserves a place in Cinematic Hell for many reasons. For a start, it's a boring monster movie and such creatures should simply not exist. It tries to emulate the suspense that Jaws was drenched in but fails dismally. The most exciting scenes inexplicably become still photos. Many scenes aren't actively bad only because they're not actively anything, they're just there and we have to wait for them to finish to get on with the story. Here are a couple of divers swimming around looking at mysterious equipment. Here's a bunch of boats lining up for the regatta. Here's a corridor for no apparent reason. Here's Bo Hopkins's crotch. Here's a shaky overhead shot. It does get a little disconcerting when probably a third of this film is filler that unwittingly distracts us from the rest. Here's water splashing against the camera. Here's a boat being flipped. Oh crap, we should be watching this! Rewind!

Somehow I managed to pay attention long enough to realise how many plot holes there are, so many that this becomes a Swiss cheese of a movie. Will Gleason won't dive deeper than 120 feet and only for three minutes because he had an attack of the bends but that's quickly forgotten in a crisis. Even talking about that sparks an argument with his wife, which gets him so upset he forgets her name. She's Vicky but he calls her Nicky or Micky or something icky, at least. When the characters work out what's going on, we have to triple take because it's so pathetic. 'There's only one thing big enough or powerful enough,' says Gleason. 'Are you thinking about sharks?' he's asked. 'No. I'm thinking giant octopus.' That's it. Just like Trojan Tunnels is the only suspect, a giant octopus is the only explanation. If it was that simple why didn't they work it out from moment one when the corpses started turning up all bleached and without any bone marrow.

Best of all, if you're remembering the sign from the beginning of the movie, there's a regatta coming up, the big summer event that Solana Beach has been planning all year, where the older kids race their yachts in the open sea. It's huge, so huge that Sheriff Robards completely forgets it's even happening. So he closes off the entire coast because of the dangerous giant octopus, but fails to tell the organisers of the regatta. This is about as believable as Chief Brody forgetting the fourth of July is coming up, but Ned Turner is worse yet. He's ahead of the game throughout the story, working out what the monster is, what riled him up and even what triggers him to kill, but somehow manages to forget that his nephew Tommy is taking part in the regatta, despite being half the age of anyone else competing. Most amazing of all is that nobody, precisely nobody, actually watches the race. They all sit back on the shore and watch a clown instead!

I should mention that Tommy is racing with his friend Jamie, who his mother seems to like more than him, so much so that she hugs him constantly and keeps calling her own son Jamie as if wishes come true merely through repetition. She also enrols them in this dangerous open sea attempt to run the octopus gauntlet but otherwise treats them like five year olds. 'Tommy, tell me, why do you think Jamie has to wee wee so much?' she asks him at one point, in public, in a truly surreal conversation that is even more notable for what isn't on screen. The reaction on the face of the child actor playing Billy at this point suggests that Shelley Winters must surely have hurled a string of abuse at the director for putting her in such a situation. A highly talented actor, she finds herself stuck in a huge sombrero asking some kid about wee wee. And she only gets more embarrassing from then on. She's the mother you'd want to run away from. Into the sea.

It's hard to realise why she took this part because it starts embarrassing and just gets worse. She never flinched at roles that made her look bad, like in Poor Pretty Eddie, but at least that was a real role. This one is an insult, even leaving her on the butt end of fat jokes conjured up by a kid. Then again there are lots of fat jokes in this picture. Maybe it's an Italian thing, you know, along the lines of the old chestnut. What's the difference between an Italian grandmother and a whale? About thirty pounds and a black dress. In comparison Huston attempts to play things serious but he vanishes from the story entirely after he commits his unfathomable faux pas. 'My God, the regatta!' he cries and just gives up the ghost for good. Akins plays the biggest non entity of a sheriff I've ever seen. Immediately after the film finished I tried to remember what he did and couldn't come up with anything. Fonda is merely collecting a paycheck and that's about it.

Only Bo Hopkins really gets an opportunity to do anything and I don't mean the inevitable fake shark attack jokes he plays on Don the really fat guy. He has not one but three love interests in the story. One is his wife, Vicky or Nicky or whatever else rhymes right now, but she dies in a quick succession of octopus attacks on boats that conveniently turn up to be attacked, never to be referenced again. This merely gives him the opportunity to be with his real loves. The closest thing we get to a love scene in this film is when Bo Hopkins emotes to the two killer whales that are inside the big yellow Oceanographic Institute tanks that he's floated out into the ocean. This is so tender that it becomes palpably romantic. I watched nervously in case he was going to strip off and climb into the tanks like Spock in Star Trek IV but to meld something other than mind. And it was here that I realised just how this film is utterly worthy of inclusion in Cinematic Hell.

Tentacles isn't even really a single film. There are four credited writers, which makes me wonder if each of them wrote a completely separate script about a giant octopus, so Assonitis could hire four sets of actors and crew members to make four utterly unrelated giant octopus movies, then later patch them all together in the editing room. It's that disjointed. Even the monster changes because mostly it's a real octopus in a tank but in at least one scene it's like the sort of toy you buy your kids to float on in a swimming pool. The only film more jarring than this that I can think of is Ray Dennis Steckler's Rat Pfink a Boo Boo and that's because he literally got so bored with what he was making that he gave up entirely halfway through a serious drama and decided to shoot the second half as a spoof of the Adam West version of Batman. At least that's a film of two halves. This is a film of four quarters, mashed into each other like unholy calamari sushi.

City Lights (1931)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Star: Charlie Chaplin

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

I've become a huge fan of the silent era and the more I explore, the more of a fan I become and the more I learn. In so many ways the silent era was just the beginning of the sound era but in so many ways it's something utterly apart from it, a separate art form that doesn't exist any more and to experience it we have to jump back eighty years. Once it catches you in its spell, there's no going back. Either you'll be hooked or you won't care. I've discovered plenty while exploring the silents, but what surprised me most was that the three great slapstick comedians were not contemporaries. They date back so far that the differences don't seem important nowadays but they really couldn't be bigger. Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd both made their screen debuts in 1917 and didn't do anything particularly meaningful until the twenties had come around. By 1920, Charlie Chaplin had already done everything.

His start in the industry came at Mack Sennett's Keystone studio, where he made no less than 35 films in 1914 alone, including Tillie's Punctured Romance, the first feature length American comedy. A year later he had moved to Essanay where he became the world's highest paid movie star, already one of the most recognisable people in the world courtesy of his Little Tramp persona. By 1916 he had moved again, to Mutual, where he pocketed a million dollars in the process and gained complete control over his films. He didn't just star in them, he also wrote, produced and directed them himself. He started his own production company, he built his own studio and in 1919 he co-founded United Artists with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Sr and D W Griffith so that they would not just have artistic control of the films they made but financial control too. 1914 to 1920 is a short period but Chaplin used it to redefine what comedy was.

It's a fascinating experience to watch through Chaplin's work in order. Watching those early Keystones is a difficult task. We remember slapstick comedy as being about outrageous stunts, frequent pratfalls and incredible timing, but these Keystone films are more about people with outrageous moustaches throwing bricks at one another and literally kicking each other's ass. Worst of all, the debut of Chaplin's famous Little Tramp character came in what must be one of the least funny films I've ever seen. In possibly the slightest plot of any film ever made, all he does in 1914's Kid Auto Races at Venice is to walk in front of a camera that's filming a road race, again and again. It's not funny in the slightest, just impeccably annoying, and it's more than a little embarrassing to find a comic genius like Charlie Chaplin come across notably less funny than someone like Adam Sandler or Ashton Kutcher.

It's hard to imagine why audiences at the time would roll in the aisles, but Chaplin built on it and continued to reinvent film comedy, introducing previously unheard of concepts like plots, drama, tragedy, even feature lengths. To progress from Kid Auto Races at Venice to The Kid in a mere seven years is an incredible achievement and all the credit is due to Charlie Chaplin. However by the time of City Lights, another cinematic change had happened that had precisely nothing to do with him: the arrival of sound. The Jazz Singer signalled the beginning of the end in 1927 and by 1929 the whole of Hollywood was switched over. The silent era was dead and gone, but Chaplin released City Lights in 1931 anyway, against the weight of the entire industry. This didn't just come along at the very end of the silent era, it was the end of the silent era as far as Hollywood went. It has sound effects and synchronised sound but there is no speech. It's the last hurrah.

Partly this is because the film took over three years to make with a massive 190 days of actual shooting. Surely the biggest reason though has to be that Chaplin knew exactly what he was doing with silent film and didn't want to even attempt to translate his Little Tramp, a worldwide silent icon, into the sound era. In fact, when he came back to the tramp one last time in 1936 for Modern Times he was still resisting the switch to sound, resulting in what silent film afficionados call a 'mute sound film'. Sound to Chaplin at this point merely meant that he got to compose the musical score, along with starring, directing, producing, editing, co-writing and being totally in control of every aspect of the movie both in front of and behind the camera. As a result City Lights may be the most accomplished American silent film of them all, the end result of eighteen years of Chaplin experimenting and stretching the very boundaries of the medium.

Chaplin is, as always, the last name on the credits, listed simply as 'a tramp' and he gets a grand entrance into this 'comedy romance in pantomime'. Politicians unveil a statue called 'Peace and Prosperity' only to find the little tramp curled up on its lap. Beyond this scene being a textbook on the comedic use of space and time, it neatly pokes fun at the industry Chaplin was working in too. The generic establishment statue symbolises sound in film and he promptly lampoons it, literally cocking a snook at it by using the statue's hand in place of his own. This is a silent mirror of the way that he uses sound only to parody speech, such as the squeaks we hear in place of the politicians' speechifying. And with that out of the way, we get on with our plot, which concerns itself with the connection between the tramp and two very different characters: a blind girl selling flowers on a street corner and a suicidal millionaire mourning the departure of his wife.

He makes a huge difference to both of them but tragically neither recognises him until the justly famous finalé. The flower girl, of course, is blind so has no idea what he looks like, even though they fall in love anyway. In fact she has an abiding misunderstanding of who he is from the start, one that he chooses not to correct, assuming that he's rich because he steps out of a car in front of her. In reality he's just finding the only way he can across a busy road and he spends his last coin to buy a flower from her, which he treasures. The millionaire only recognises him when he's drunk because that's the state he's in when the little tramp saves him from leaping into a canal with a heavy stone tied round his neck. When the tramp finally convinces him to choose life he is effusively thankful. 'I'm cured,' he pronounces. 'You're my friend for life.' However when he sobers up he gives his butler free reign to unceremoniously kick him out of the house.

Surprisingly we spend more time with the latter than the former, but everything with the latter is there because of the former. The little tramp, of course, is virtually penniless, unable to help anyone financially without a change of circumstances or a stroke of good luck, and the girl needs precisely that sort of help. One day he finds her missing from her corner and discovers that she's ill and in need of medical attention. She's behind on her rent and the final demand has come, one that she can't pay, so she'll be out on the streets with her grandmother. So our hero tries to find a way to help, partly because he loves her and partly because she thinks he's a rich man. The eccentric millionaire is one way he can acquire money to help her out, given that he almost literally throws money around when he's drunk. Another way is to get a job, so he becomes a street sweeper only to be fired for being late back to work from his lunch break after seeing her.

Given that this is a Charlie Chaplin movie, all these little stories conjure up comedy and tragedy, joy and pain, hope and despair. He gets a job to earn money for her but loses it because of time he spends with her. He takes an opportunity to earn quick money as a boxer in a fixed fifty buck prize fight, assured half the take for losing. Unfortunately his opponent has to get out of town at the last minute to avoid the cops, so the little tramp faces a real opponent instead and is bound to lose. When he reads the newspaper to his flower girl, he discovers a miracle cure for blindness that's free for the poor, if only they can get to Vienna. When he asks the millionaire to help out he does so without hesitation. 'Will a thousand dollars be enough?' he asks. Yet the timing is such that he gets arrested for theft when burglars strike and he calls the cops. After being hit on the head, the millionaire naturally sobers up to forget who his friend even is.

At every point the tramp is built up to hope then torn down to fail, but he never gives up. He is after all a symbol of the power of the human spirit to carry on regardless, one reason why three quarters of a century after his last appearance he's still as recognisable an image on the global stage as Mickey Mouse. What Disney would give for such staying power! At every point he finds opportunity for comedy too and the first time you see City Lights that's what you're going to see. Even when there's sadness there's laughter, whether it be the amazing comedic timing on show at the statue or the street elevator, the choreography of the boxing match or the canal suicide attempt, the visual gags of the unravelling undergarments or the confetti eating. Initially though it may seem disjointed, a collection of skits rather than a single story, but with repeat viewings you'll start finding the subtleties that link everything together and explain why it's all there.

And you can be sure that what's there is what Chaplin wanted to be there. He was an inveterate perfectionist and it's well known that the people who worked with him firmly believed that if it could be done he would have played every role in every one of his movies himself. Of course he was forced to hire some actors in the end, but even those he chose to play the parts he couldn't were deliberately picked for their ability to follow his direction. Rather than hiring an established actress to play the flower girl, and there are plenty who would have fit the role, he cast a twenty year old socialite, Virginia Cherrill, who really wasn't an actress at all though she naturally found more work based on her appearance here. They didn't get on in the slightest but she did exactly what he asked her and it worked, even though he fired and rehired her at one point and one scene, when he gives her his last coin for a buttonhole, took 342 takes to get precisely right.

Effectively if not absolutely truly a silent film, as evidenced by the whistle scene which works entirely through sound, this was a huge gamble for Chaplin. It took him a long while to venture fully into the realm of the sound film, even 1940's The Great Dictator containing silent scenes, but he eventually proved that he was just as much a master with sound as he was without, films like Monsieur Verdoux being highly underrated gems. In 1931 though, he was the lone voice, if you can call it that, attempting to keep the silent days alive with this last anachronism. 'Words are cheap,' he said. 'The biggest thing you can say is 'elephant'.' However the gamble paid off and City Lights proved to be a huge hit. He took Albert Einstein and his wife to the premiere in Hollywood and wrote later in his autobiography that watching their reactions was enough for him to know that the film would succeed.

While it made a substantial amount of money, its true success came later through the opinions of some of the most important names in the industry. Orson Welles listed it as his favourite film. Andrei Tarkovsky listed it fifth, stating that 'Chaplin is the only person to have gone down into cinematic history without any shadow of a doubt.' No less than 77 years after its original release, the AFI named it the greatest romantic comedy ever made. In particular the final scene has been singled out, critic James Agee calling it the 'greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid.' It truly is an astounding end to a film because it has every opportunity to cop out and steadfastly refuses to do so. Perhaps what makes it so amazing is that it isn't just the visuals, which are perfect, but the words which are at once everything and nothing. They are merely ten words, over three title cards, but you can read something different into them with every viewing.

What a difference between Kid Auto Races at Venice and City Lights! Rather than having nothing at all, this film has everything. While I personally feel that The Kid was Chaplin's masterpiece, made a decade earlier with Jackie Coogan, possibly the only actor who ever truly shared screen real estate with him rather than act as another prop for the little tramp, this is what most people cite as his greatest work and throughout his life it remained his personal favourite. Perhaps the most obvious reason is that it was the last American silent film and it manages to stand up as the summation of everything that went before it. It's the perfect gateway drug to the silent era, a great introduction to so many of the joys that will come if only you allow yourself to let go of the belief that it can't be a movie if there isn't sound. Watch this and you'll understand why Johnny Depp could famously say that we're stealing from Chaplin today.