Tommy (1975) Ken Russell

What better to drown out the mariachi music blaring out of the cars outside next door than to throw on a rock opera like Tommy? And who better to make a film about a deaf, dumb and blind kid who plays a mean pinball and becomes a religious icon than Ken Russell, doyen of the sacrilegious. It's not The Devils, nor even The Lair of the White Worm, but it does have plenty of controversial moments. It's also told entirely musically, with no speech at all, just like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Tommy's father is an Air Force pilot who's shot down during the last days of the war, or so we think, making what would be a very short role for Robert Powell if he didn't continue to reappear in hallucinatory dream sequences. His mother Nora, played by Ann-Margret, takes a few years but then remarries Oliver Reed, a holiday camp worker called Frank. Unfortunately a traumatic experience involving a vision of his scarred father bursting into his mother's bedroom leaves him psychosomatically unable to see, hear or speak. He thus misses out on plenty going on around him, such as a bizarre Marilyn Monroe healing cult led by Eric Clapton or Acid Queen Tina Turner turning into a hypodermic laden robot hooker. Unfortunately he doesn't miss out on lunatic Keith Moon playing lunatic Uncle Ernie fiddling about with him though he'll have missed the cartoon sound effects.

By this time, of course, he's grown up to look astoundingly like Roger Daltrey, who is only three years younger than mama Ann-Margret. He follows himself to a scrap yard where he discovers an affinity for pinball on a table that's somehow plugged in and perfectly horizontal even though it's balanced on top of a scrap car. Once the police locate his parents, good old Frank makes a celebrity out of him and he gets to play pinball on stage while Elton John sings about him in trademark huge glasses.

Last time I saw this film I was a young lad who dug the Who and who didn't have a clue what it was all about. Now I get it, though it is a particularly wild trip of a rock video rather than a movie proper. Ken Russell does have fun with this trip and how could we help but enjoy Ann-Margret writhing around in foam and baked beans, straddling a phallic pillow and spinning around in a chair stolen from The Prisoner? Jack Nicholson sounds bizarre with an English accent but Ollie Reed looks perfect in a grey top hat and monocle. Priceless.

Fires on the Plain (1959) Kon Ichikawa

There's not a lot left of the Japanese Imperial army in the Phillipines in 1945. Most are dead and the rest are too busy foraging for food to fight. Private Tamura has been sent to the hospital with TB but sent back three days later, prompting his squad leader to tell him that there isn't enough food, he can't carry his weight and that he should therefore return to the hospital and commit suicide if they won't let him back in. Of course the hospital won't let him in this time either, because as far as they're concerned if he can walk he's too well to be there. They're overflowing with seriously injured men as it is. He takes up with a few others too sick to fight but too well to get into the hospital, which is very quickly destroyed by enemy fire anyway. So he finds himself on his own, unable to go back to his unit and unwilling to kill himself.

This has to be one of the most realistic war films I've ever seen, mostly because the only name I know here, director Kon Ichikawa, who made The Burmese Harp, wanted maximum authenticity, so deliberately starved his cast and barred them from attending to matters of simple hygiene. He did keep a number of nurses on set to protect against serious malnutrition or illness, but I'm sure that his actors hated him for it while probably not coming to an appreciation of what he achieved until later. Then again, The Burmese Harp came three years earlier, so maybe they were merely willing to go through the hardships in order to be in a film by the same director.

There are scenes of great power here, that don't require words and preachiness. When the bombs start falling on the hospital, the doctors run quickly out of there, carrying anything of value, while the injured start rolling out of the hut as quickly as they can which is notably not very quickly. It's all quite pathetic but then again it should be in an anti-war film. A troop of half dead soldiers struggles along the road, all drop when a plane flies overhead and strafes them, then half get up and carry on. There are no theatrics here at all, just people doing the only thing they can: move, drop, move. Don't worry about those who can't carry on, just keep going. When a soldier passes a pair of boots in a puddle, he takes them and leaves his own which are in worse condition, but the next few soldiers to come along do precisely the same thing because theirs are even worse still.

Now I really need to see The Burmese Harp, because if it's better than this it's got to be awesome. This one is unforgettable.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) Russ Meyer

I'm a big Russ Meyer fan and I've long looked forward to watching Beyond the Valley of the Dolls again, because it never seemed to fit with the rest of his films. There are the early nudie cuties like The Immoral Mr Teas, which I haven't yet seen; the black and white cult classics from the late sixties like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Mudhoney which feature Meyer's patented large breasted women mostly covered; and the rest of his films, made later and in colour and with far less clothes. And then there's this one. I saw it early on, didn't get it and in hindsight couldn't see how it fit.

Well this time through it makes far more sense and, while it still fits in a category all its own in Meyer's filmography, it doesn't quite stand entirely alone. There's a lot more nudity than I remembered, though it's far from the focus that it would become in later films and the dialogue, particularly John Lazar's, is deliberately outrageously theatrical and often sounds very similar to the narration of later Meyer movies ('And you, the infamous Ashley St Ives, high mistress of carnality, what thinkest thou of our fair minstrels?') There's the wonderful editing that Meyer always excelled at, and early uses of other Meyer fetishes like Martin Bormann, superhero capes and sex amidst the wilds of nature. There are also Meyer regulars like Charles Napier and Haji in small roles and even Pam Grier in a role as a partygoer tiny enough that I couldn't find her.

The film has nothing official in common with Jacqueline Susann's megablockbuster novel and subsequent Oscar-nominated film Valley of the Dolls, but it does feature three young ladies trying to make it in show business. These three are a rock group who head off to Hollywood to make it big as the Carrie Nations. However they are drawn instead into a maelstrom of sex, drugs, violence, homosexuality, rape, abortion , transsexuals, Nazis, wheelchairs and death. That's the sweep of the plot which is far more important than the details.

Delightful red headed band leader Kelly McNamara is the focus for much of it. She starts out the girlfriend with manager Harris Allsworth but once in Hollywood quickly meets Ronnie 'Z-Man' Barzell, the cat who seems to run all the scenes in town, and so gets introduced to golden haired actor, egomaniac and money grabber Lance Rocke who helps her into all sorts of trouble trying to screw her aunt out of half her million dollar inheritance. For his part, Harris gets picked up by porn star Ashley St Ives who wants to screw him everywhere but in the bedroom but ends up attempting suicide on live TV. Neurotic senator's daughter Cynthia Myers who plays rhythm guitar finds the bottle and the pills and a lesbian affair with a fashion designer but still ends up pregnant. Black drummer Pet Danforth falls in love with a decent law student but still ends up in bed with a heavyweight boxing champion who runs over her boyfriend with his car.

Yes, everything happens and that's precisely the point. Meyer and co-writer Roger Ebert (yes, that Roger Ebert) didn't write this as a serious drama but as an antidote to all the overblown dramas that were being churned out at the time. The title is very apt indeed, and the script and editing are simply superb. The acting is variable, because half these people aren't really actors anyway. John Lazar (later in Meyer's Supervixens and excellent in Deathstalker II) is the most obvious actor. He's joyously outrageous and appears as I imagine Freddie Mercury might have played Mick Jagger's part in Performance.

The Carrie Nations are Dolly Read, Cynthia Myers and Marcia McBroom. Dolly and Cynthia were Playboy Playmates and Marcia was a fashion model. They all appeared in other films but never as the focus. Harris Allsworth was David Gurian's only film appearance but he made the most of it. However many of the rest of the cast were already or would become Meyer regulars. Edy Williams, who plays the porn star, was Meyer's wife at the time, and this wasn't her only film credit for him, just like Erica Gavin, Charles Napier, Haji, Henry Rowland and many others. If only Roger Ebert had become one of those regulars too.

The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) Anthony Minghella

I knew The Mysterious Yearning Secretive Sad Lonely Troubled Confused Loving Musical Gifted Intelligent Beautiful Tender Sensitive Haunted Passionate Talented Mr Ripley, to give the film its full title, starred Matt Damon, so I'd successfully avoided it before now. I know he's an Oscar winner but that was for a screenplay, so hardly indicative of his acting ability. He was nominated for that too, for the same film, but then again Marky Mark and the Funy Bunch as nominated too, so I can safely ignore that as well. Yet here he is, surrounded by a whole slew of names I had no clue were associated with the film. Had I known I'd have seen it earlier.

It's directed by Anthony Minghella, who made The English Patient, and he also wrote the script, which is based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, author of such other filmed novels as Strangers on a Train. It might star Matt Damon as Highsmith's regular character Tom Ripley, as compared to someone as truly talented as Alain Delon, who played the role in 1960 in Purple Noon, the first version of this novel, but there are other real actors here. How about Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett and Jack Davenport for starters, and then add Philip Seymour Hoffman as well. Suddenly Matt Damon is a little forgiveable.

The transitions during the title credits are as annoying as Ripley's canary yellow swimming trunks in the first scene that he meets Dickie Greenleaf, but everything else is solid. He's been sent to Italy by Greenleaf's very rich father to bring him home, as all he does is spend his father's money, play jazz and sail his boat. Jude Law is a superb Dickie Greenleaf, half human and half rich playboy brat. He is truly at home in the playboy lifestyle while not having a clue how to be anything else, while Tom Ripley seems acutely uncomfortable in his role.

The thing is that it's all an act, as is everything that Ripley does, because Ripley is a chameleon. He reminds me in many ways of Theresa Russell's title character in Black Widow. Incredibly talented, as the title suggests, his chief talent is becoming other people. He researches every detail, picks up any talent required and takes on their personality. At the beginning of the film he takes the part of a pianist who has broken his arm, just for one appearance, but he obviously has the will to make it work for a much longer period. Needless to say he fails to persuade Dickie to come home, so becomes Dickie instead.

The script is pretty tight and I'm sure the novel is, but I don't buy Matt Damon in the role. Talented or not, I just don't see how Damon's version of Tom Ripley could have kept things going the way he does. I don't see how everyone around didn't see his obvious slew of issues. That lapse of judgement on everyone's behalf aside, Law is superb, Paltrow and Blanchett solid, Hoffman awesome and Davenport not bad at all. That leaves Damon seriously letting the side down. Now I want to see other Ripleys: Alain Delon (Purple Rain), Dennis Hopper (The American Friend) and John Malkovich (Ripley's Game) especially.

Divorce, Italian Style (1961) Pietro Germi

In the Sicilian town of Agromonte, Baron Ferdinando Cefalú's family are faded aristocracy. However he doesn't care anywhere near as much about how his father has squandered the estate as he does about his young cousin Angela. He's been married to Rosalia for twelve years but he lusts after Angela, who is half his age, gazing at her in church, sneaking into the bathroom at night to look out into his cousin's window opposite and see her sleep. Soon he discovers that she dreams about him too, through her father discovering her diary in which she describes the completely chaste encounter almost like sex. He is livid and fetches in the midwife to check that she's still a virgin, but Ferdinando realises the truth at least before she's sent back to the convent.

The film unfolds like an Almodovar movie. Ferdinando sees inspiration in the trial of Mariannina, who gets eight years for the killing of a man who dishonoured her, and starts working out how he could kill his wife and yet still get a lenient sentence. He's been conjuring up all sorts of visions of his wife's death all along and now he starts conjuring up what the oratory of Mariannina's eloquent lawyer would sound like in his theoretical case. Like the most obvious comparison, Kind Hearts and Coronets, it's a deliciously dark comedy that looks at just how far one man is willing to go to achieve his heart's desire.

Marcello Mastroianni is excellent in the lead, just as calculating though not as clever as Dennis Price's character in that other film. Unfortuantely there's no Alec Guinness to dominate the rest of the cast, the remaining actors being decent but not stunning in support. The screenplay won an Oscar and there were two nominations, for Mastroianni as Best Actor and Pietro Germi for Best Director. Those are major categories to be sure, that highlight how well received this Italian film was with the powers that be in Hollywood. In comparison, Kind Hearts and Coronets won a National Board of Review award for Alec Guinness and nothing else. It didn't get a single Oscar nomination, and while this one is certainly a decent film that I thoroughly enjoyed, I couldn't help but compare the two films throughout and this one came off second best in every regard.

Paisan (1946)

Paisan begins like a war documentary, with an American narration over an animated map, and it carries on like an American film with soldiers arriving in an Italian village. Soon though we hear the locals speak in Italian and one of the soldiers translate, and we realise that it's really an Italian film and a notable one at that. The screenplay was Oscar nominated for the six writers, one per sequence, and they include names like Federico Fellini and director Roberto Rossellini, hardly minor names.

What it shows is the other side of war, the story of people rather than grand beliefs, and how we don't really understand each other. The first section is all about misunderstanding. An Italian girl guides a group of American soldiers out of her village, but ends up dead and unfairly unmourned. What must be half of the piece is taken up with a conversation between one soldier and the girl, with the soldier speaking English and the girl speaking Italian. They understand almost nothing of what each other say, but find a bond, and when the GI is shot by the Germans, she revenges him. But when the American's colleagues check out the shooting they believe her to have done it. It's a tragedy wrapped up in a very small parcel but it's probably a decent microcosm of the war as a whole. The Americans, Italians and Germans are just people and none of them really have much of a clue about what the others are on about.

The second deals with a black American military policeman who doesn't want to go home and an Italian kid who steals to survive. The MP berates the kid, who is stealing from the back of a military truck, ad asks him why he has to steal. Of course the kid doesn't understand a word of it. When the MP realises that it's the same kid that stole his shoes while he slept, he tells him to take him to his home to talk to his family, only to discover that his parents are dead and he lives in some sort of overcrowded quarry or mine. His driving away symbolises the advent of understanding.

There's understanding later on in the other four stories, and hope and humanity too, along with tragedy on a personal level and a whole range of other emotions that fit a country so recently at war. There are points where people of different nationalities are able to communicate with each other, but plenty more where that is merely a sad wish. In and amongst the war films where the good guys heroically kill the bad guys, here that's far from the point. The point is that people die, whichever side they happen to be on, and people lose their families and homes and lives. It's a very potent film, deliberately raw and unpolished but all the more real for that.

In Cold Blood (1967)

Based on the book by Truman Capote, this is a legendary true crime story and one of the few that survived the transition to the big screen. In fact it probably stands above all the rest. We're on the road to Kansas City and we're waiting for something to happen, something that we would know was bad even if the legend hadn't preceded the film because of the wonderfully dark and claustrophobic cinematography by Conrad Hall and the awesomely tense and menacing score by the maestro of mojo, Quincy Jones.

Perry Smith is a nervous, hesitant and obviously troubled traveller who has already broken parole by quitting his job but he's about to make it much worse. He meets up with his friend and fellow parolee Richard Hickock who has a plan: to head 400 miles west to Holcomb and blow the safe at the Clutter place where a friend of Hickock has seen $10,000 in cash. Hickock is lively and hopeful but Smith is out there. He goes into a trance when he looks at himself in the mirror and tells his friend all sorts of bizarre stories. The studio wanted Paul Newman and Steve McQueen to play Smith and Hickock but they were busy doing other minor films like Cool Hand Luke, Hombre, The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt, so Columbia ended up with Robert Blake and Scott Wilson instead. I can see the far more famous actors in the roles but these two are great not just through their performances but through being less easily recognisable.

The story is told wonderfully. After the intense buildup, we skip over the crime completely, merely hearing about it via John Forsythe's character, who's running the investigation. He explains the evidence clinically and we quickly discover that all four members of the family were left dead: all tied up and shot in cold blood, though Mr Clutter's throat was also cut. The Clutters had no money, not even a safe, so the whole thing got Smith and Hickock nothing but a radio, a pair of binoculars and forty three bucks. So much for listening to cellmate's stories.

After not seeing the murders, we watch the story in an innovative manner. Smith and Hickock head onwards, not remorseful but gradually dealing with what they had done. The police are on the trail and we alternate between the murderers and those chasing them. We also alternate current events with those from the past, especially Perry's, often merging into the same scenes where the past confronts the present. It explains plenty, never judging but merely demonstrating all sides of the picture. There's joy of sorts in the present and pain in the past, never enough to justify but enough to go some way to explain. I'm sure a lot of that came from Capote's book which I really need to read.

Wilson and especially Blake are simply superb, never showboating but really letting us into the depth behind these characters. The cops are deliberately far more two dimensional, almost Terminator like in their persistence of pursuit, single track minded all the way and without any of the personality you'd expect from cops in a show like, say, CSI that brought Wilson back to Las Vegas where his character here was finally arrested for driving a hot car. He was a rich casino owner with serious mob connections in that show, while for Blake's part, he went on to play on the other side of the law: Detective Tony Baretta on TV and Big John Wintergreen in the awesome Electra Glide in Blue.

When the crime comes, it's completely unlike any similar crime in a movie: it's beautifully and cinematically shot, a masterpiece of direction, yet it's also completely unsensational. It's at once brutal, pathetic, powerful, yet never sensational. It's superb and different, just as the way this story is told is always completely different. We see it differently to how we usually see it. There's little more of the trial here than there is in 12 Angry Men, but we see all we need to see, and it's easy to wish that most of the law shows and films we get nowadays showed us just as little. Their life in prison is again completely different from what we're used to seeing, but again it shows us exactly what we should see. All the way to the inevitable and yet amazingly sudden end, it's a piece of genius in exactly the same way that the original crime of killing the Clutters wasn't.

I Vitelloni (1953)

We're watching five men watch the crowning of a local beauty queen, Miss Mermaid 1953, but it soon gets rained off by a storm. Everyone crowds indoors and Miss Mermaid faints, becoming the centre of attention, so you'd be forgiven for not realising the film is really about the five men: Moraldo, Alberto, Fausto, Leopoldo and Riccardo. Fausto wants to split for Milan because he's got Moraldo's sister Sandra pregnant, but of course he marries her instead. Riccardo, played by director Federico Fellini's brother Riccardo, is a jovial tenor who seems to sing on every occasion, but who quietly watches his gut grow. Leopoldo is the intellectual of the bunch: he's a playwright living with his aunts. Moraldo wanders the streets after everyone else has gone to bed and thinks. Alberto worries about his sister who's seeing a married man.

In short, all five of them are young but certainly old enough: thirty or so. They're at the point in their lives where it's time to work out who and what they want to be, but they're all clinging on to their childhoods a little too strongly. Our film is how they go from one to the other, and it's hard to really sum it up any better than that because it's the sweep of it that works rather than the details: it's the why not the what. Fausto gets a job working for his in-laws' best friend, but tries it on with his boss's wife and gets fired; Riccardo gets drunk and depressed while dressed up as a woman for Carnival; Leopoldo gets to read his play to a great visiting actor. The details don't matter so much as the progression of the characters as people.

When I first started to watch Fellini I really didn't get it. I was all wrapped up in what seemed to be plots that didn't go anywhere, but the more I watch the more I understand how much he just tells us about life, in a uniquely and highly cinematic way. His films change each time I see them and are infused with a sense of what cinema should be about. They're about the grand topics like truth and beauty and they teach us without teaching. It becomes difficult not to watch just for the joy of it, and all the typical reasons to watch movies be hanged.

Arizona (1940)

A single year after John Ford's Stagecoach launched John Wayne into superstardom, it seems strange that someone as experienced in westerns as Wesley Ruggles should choose to direct a western with a female lead. After all, he'd directed one that won an Oscar, the astoundingly average Cimarron in 1931, and in that Irene Dunne was very much a supporting character to manly man Richard Dix. This one has the forty year old but still highly desirable Jean Arthur playing a rough and tough frontier woman called Phoebe Titus who, in the tradition of Jean Arthur characters, has more balls than most of the rough and tough frontier men. Of course, also in the tradition of Jean Arthur characters she's as funny as she is serious. She's more sassy than native.

She runs roughshod over an almost unrecognisably young William Holden who is only 22 years young. He's Peter Muncie, who has travelled into Tucson from St Louis, MO on the way to the fabled California, but after he serenades her overnight, she ropes him into working a new business she sets up shipping freight across country. That's dangerous business in the Arizona of 1860, given that Tucson has no law, no manners and not a lot else and plenty of dangerous Indians, lowlifes and outlaws to deal with.

Ruggles tried very hard indeed to make this look authentic. He didn't want to film on a set, so he built a town from nothing and it's still around today, known as Old Tucson. It was used in films like Rio Bravo, Gunfight at the OK Corral, Death Wish, The Cannonball Run, The Bells of St Mary's and Tombstone, along with a wide range of fifties and sixties TV westerns. Now the town looks awesome but it's pretty hard to believe in the story which is more than a little too sentimental, convenient and nice. The sweep of the story is fine but the details let it down.

Jean Arthur is a joy to watch but she's a good part of what makes the film difficult to believe. She's better in westerns than Jimmy Cagney or Humphrey Bogart but she was made for other material. Far more believable are regular western supporting actors suchas Edgar Buchanan and Paul Harvey. Warren William is as great as ever, arriving out of nowhere and enforcing his way by sheer force of will. I don't think he knows how to give a bad performance and when he's being a sleazy character who can switch between two different faces in the blink of an eye, he's unmatched.

The biggest problem of all is the fact that Wesley Ruggles chose to make a western with a female lead, a rough and tough female lead, and then turned her into a complete wussy girl. It could have been so special but it ended up wasted. Phoebe is a great character for half an hour but gradually gets more and more stereotypically treated until the point that she's nothing. What a waste.

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Robin Williams, even today, is a comedian in my eyes, just like Tom Hanks or Will Smith. However many serious roles they rack up and however many Oscars they win doesn't alter the fact that they're damn fine comedians and I have trouble not laughing when they do their thing. Here he's doing what he does best: make us laugh while being serious. I wish Hanks and Smith would learn that lesson. He's an English teacher, John Keating, at a high class prep school in the fifties, upsetting the apple cart just as well as, though in a very different way to Adrian Cronaeuer in Good Morning Vietnam. He's expected to tow the line but he has his own thoughts and ideas about what constitutes good education, even though he himself graduated from the school he's teaching at, Helton.

When he starts his first lesson by walking through and out of the classroom whistling Tchaikovsky, none of the all male class has the faintest clue what he's doing. Things go on along the same lines. He asks them to call him 'Captain, my Captain', and they smirk. When he asks them to rip out the introduction to Understanding Poetry they look on horrified, but they can't help but pay attention, which is entirely the point. They don't get it and Keating sees it as his mission in life to make them get it. He wants them to seize the day. Carpe diem. When they look him up in his old annual and finds him listed as 'man most likely to do anything', they are intrigued, especially when they ask him about the Dead Poets Society, which he ran. Naturally, they end up creating their own version.

Robert Sean Leonard and Ethan Hawke are the nominal leads, behind Williams of course, who dominates, and it's Leonard who has the biggest part and in many ways he's the focus of the story. He plays Neil Perry, son to Red from That '70s Show, who was always great at being a forceful son of a bitch. Here he has struggled to give his son every opportunity, but in the process has mapped his life out for him, in a direction that he doesn't want to go. He's got him into Welton and he'll get him into Harvard and on to medical school to be a doctor and achieve to a greater degree than he could himself. Of course he doesn't want any of it and, after having his eyes opened to life by Mr Keating, finds the will to try to find his own way and finds his own calling as an actor. It's a great part, underpinned wonderfully by Kurtwood Smith as his father, and he makes the most of it.

Gale Hansen, who is male despite his name, is superb in a smaller part as the first to pick up on Keating's teachings. At the Dead Poets Society meetings he becomes a beatnik character, sneaking in girls, playing the saxophone and preferring to be called Nawanda. Josh Charles shines as Knox Overstreet, possibly the most eager devotee of Keating's carpe diem philosophy, who learns the confidence to be who he wants to be and to be with who he wants to be with. Hawke is good as the shy type who finds his voice.

In fact all the students are excellent, and given that the film is really about who they are and who they become that's a must for the film to work. Because they aren't just good, they're great, they breathe life and something very special indeed into the story and the film becomes a true inspirational classic. It doesn't take anything at all to admit that I had tears at the end at the humanity of it all and as I'd seen it before, I knew exactly what was coming. Why is this not in any of the Top 100 lists I'm working through?