keith-moyes Reviews

Jeeves and Wooster (1990–1993)

More hits than misses

[6/10 · 12 January 2010]

I missed this series in its many TV outings and have only just caught up with it on DVD. Knowing how much Fry and Laurie love Wodehouse, I was hoping for good things. Overall, I am slightly disappointed with it, but it is still enjoyable and I wouldn't want to discourage anybody from giving it a view.

Stephen Fry was born to play Jeeves, but Hugh Laurie's Wooster is too broad for my taste. His mugging and 'silly ass' mannerisms are overdone, particularly in the first two seasons. However, he does tone them down after that and the shows benefit as a result.

Surprisingly, this appears to be only the second attempt to televise what is undoubtedly one of the great literary double-acts of the Twentieth Century. There was a series in the 60s, with Dennis Price and Ian Carmichael, but Wodehouse was scathing about Carmichael's 'middle-aged travesty' of Wooster, so it probably wasn't much good.

There may be a reason for this relative neglect. Good books don't always make good dramas and I think Wodehouse gave the screenwriter (Clive Exton) a couple of problems which he never entirely solved.

Firstly, the material doesn't really fit the fifty-minute format. The short stories are slightly too short and the novels are far too long.

Exton's approach to the short stories is to intertwine two (or more) into a single episode. This is usually done quite adroitly, but often the individual stories lose crucial scenes and fail to build up their full comic momentum. In most cases, I think it would have been better to stretch single stories to the required length rather than to condense them in this way.

With the novels he took three different approaches. Some he pared down to the bare bones, retaining the central story elements but stripping away all the sub-plots. In others, he pulls the different sub-plots apart and reassembles them as two separate, consecutive, stories. Neither approach really works. Wodehouse took great care with his plot construction. Much of the humour in the novels is in the way that incident piles on incident, so that poor old Wooster's life becomes 'one damn thing after another'.

Only once does Exton simply break the novel in half and present it as a two-part story. Even here, he has to simplify too much (there is probably enough material for three episodes).

The second problem is more fundamental and may be insoluble. While the incidents and the characters are funny in themselves, the genius of the books lies in Bertie Wooster's unique narrative voice, with its evocative slang and its elaborate hyperbole. The books are not just about what happens, but how Wooster perceives and relates it. He turns 'making mountains out of molehills' into high art.

It is the same with characters. No actual Aunt Agatha can possibly be the intimidating old dragon of Wooster's imagination. This is even more true of the wonderful Madeleine Basset. She can be depicted accurately and amusingly (Elizabeth Morton has a good stab at it) but no performance can hope to be as droll as Bertie's designation of her: "a droopy, soupy, sentimental article."

Of course, Exton could have given Wooster a voice-over, but there would be a danger of making the shows too wordy. As it is, he obviously felt that some of the stories were a bit short on physical action. To strengthen them visually, he makes radical changes to the plots and adds scenes and bits of physical comedy that have no counterpart in the books. Sometimes these amendments work well and the slapstick elements integrate seamlessly into the general tone of the stories, but on other occasions he is less successful. There are a couple of truly terrible ideas that Fry and Laurie should simply have refused to sanction. In particular, putting Wooster in drag was deplorable enough, but Jeeves in drag was unforgivable: shame on you, Mr Exton.

The great Jeeves and Wooster series has yet to be made. However, if P G Wodehouse is to your taste, then this series has more hits than misses.

Only the most uncompromising Wodehouse purists will fail to get enjoyment out of it.

PS: If any actor wants to know how to play Bertie Wooster he should check out the audio books read by Jonathan Cecil. He is spot on.

Emma (2009)

Neither one thing nor the other

[6/10 · 27 October 2009]

There has been a glut of Austen recently. Since 1995 there have been at least 12 major movie or TV adaptations of her work.

Nonetheless, I was looking forward to this Emma. At four hours, it promised to be the most expansive version of any of her books since the famous 1995 Pride and Prejudice. It started well enough, but over the past four weeks my high hopes slowly ebbed away.

I have still enjoyed it. Romola Garai and Jonny Lee Miller may not be the definitive Emma and Knightley (probably nobody is) but they are both pretty good and there was definitely a chemistry between them. It generally moves forward at the right pace (neither racing nor crawling) and always looks good. But in the end I felt it was a somewhat lacklustre production and didn't compare too well with the other versions widely available on DVD. Still, it is not without its merits.

With so much time at its disposal, it can give a real sense of the pace at which things happened in Austen's world and it can give more screen time to peripheral figures, like the Westons and John Knightley and his family. As a result, we feel Highbury is a fully functioning community, with a life of its own: not just a backdrop to Emma's own particular concerns. I also liked the way the prologue was used to set up the story and avoid long expository dialogue scenes later on.

But it also has its deficiencies.

Austen is probably best-loved for her romances, but in Emma the romance is somewhat peripheral and only really emerges in the closing chapters. This production tries to make it much more prominent, but can only do this by subtly distorting the method of the book. Rather than seeing events largely through Emma's eyes, so we share in her constant misapprehensions about what is really going on, we get a much more objective viewpoint. For example, we know about Knightley's growing attachment to Emma long before she does - but this weakens the impact of the proposal scene.

Emma may not be especially romantic, but it is funny. In switching the focus of the story, humour is the biggest casualty. Whatever other purposes they serve, Mr Woodhouse, Miss Bates, Harriet Smith and Mrs Elton are comic figures and Austen has furnished each of them with devastatingly accurate and revealing dialogue. Perversely, this production edits out most of the lines that actually help define these characters. Not only do we lose some of the humour, but the story itself suffers slightly.

This Mr Woodhouse is not quite Austen's silly, timorous, self-centred old hypochondriac. He has too much substance, seems too intelligent and his fears are too reasonably grounded in his his distress at the death of his wife.

Miss Bates is a good-natured, grateful old spinster, but her most striking characteristic is her constant, nervous prattling. She cannot help giving voice to every stray thought that passes through her head. Austen supplies paragraph after paragraph of her irksome, stream-of-consciousness, babbling (probably too much) but hardly any of it appears here. This means that Emma's impatience with her is no longer justified and her unkind quip at Box Hill loses its point and poignancy.

Harriet Smith is sweet, innocent and easily led, but decidedly dim. Here she is not quite dim enough. The scenes where she is struggling with Mr Elton's puzzle and where she disposes of her little box of 'treasures' are both rather thrown away so she appears fractionally less stupid and childlike than she should. This slightly diminishes our sense of Emma's culpability in her delusions and her bad decisions.

Mrs Elton suffers even more. We see very little of her vulgar pretension, her her continual bragging about Maple Grove, her bossiness, her officious interference in Jane Fairfax's affairs and her determination to be Queen Bee of the neighbourhood.

In every case, I feel the problems are not with the actors (although Michael Gambon was miscast) but in the way the characters are conceived and I suspect that there is an underlying reason for this: the screenwriter and director were both uncomfortable with certain aspects of the book and wanted soften its edges to make it more palatable to a modern audience.

They thought Mr Woodhouse was too much a figure of fun and wanted the audience to understand him, rather than laugh at him. They feared Austen was too merciless in her depiction of Miss Bates's verbal diarrhoea, so toned it down (to vanishing point). They felt she was too patronising to Harriet Smith so made her slightly more spirited and independent. Above all, they were worried that Austen was too much implicated in Emma's own snobbery in the way she depicted the 'parvenu' Mrs Elton so let the character recede into the background.

The result is that the story occasionally loses focus and some of the key scenes dissipate their energy and dribble away. Superficially, this Emma looks like one of the most faithful and complete adaptations of Austen, but for me there is always this canker of unease eating away at it from within.

Perhaps they should have adapted the book more freely (it's only a novel: not a sacred text). Patricia Rozema registered her concern with Mansfield Park by completely re-inventing Fanny Price and re-writing the story. I might prefer the earlier, more faithful, BBC adaptation but Rozema's radically different version is valid in its own right. You can try to faithfully reproduce the spirit of a book or you can comment on it. Both approaches are legitimate.

This Emma is neither one thing nor the other.

Lolita (1997)

Unfilmable?

[4/10 · 21 August 2009]

This is not at all a bad movie and is surprisingly faithful to the book. At times I suspected some scenes had been inserted to appease a contemporary sensibility but, on checking, I found they were all in the book.

I generally prefer this Lolita to Kubrick'e version, but both versions raise an interesting question.

It is a presumption of cinema that any novel can be satisfactorily filmed. Lolita casts doubt on this.

The problems can be illustrated by a small, but crucial, change that both films make to the book. When Humbert first meets Lolita she is 12. In the movies she is 14 and is played by actresses who were 15 and 16 respectively.

Objectively, this change shouldn't matter: under age is under age. In practice it does. When you see a 14 or 15 year-old, you can see the woman she is about to become. When you see a 12 year-old you can only see the child. Raising Lolita's age makes Humbert seem less perverse than Nabokov intended and James Mason and Jeremy Irons both make him too sympathetic.

All Nabokov needed to write Lolita was a typewriter and some paper. To film it, Kubrick and Lyne needed a young actress. Jodie Foster, Nathalie Portman and Lindsay Lohan all show that it would have been possible to find a 12 year-old actress good enough to carry the movie - but should she be asked to? If it was absolutely necessary to have a 12 year-old in order to make this movie, then most people would say: "Don't make it then".

But this is only part of a wider issue.

Nabokov wanted to put readers inside the head of a paedophile without them endorsing his actions: empathy doesn't necessarily imply sympathy. His first attempt was The Enchanter (which gave us the word nymphet). It was written in the third person. Nabokov was unhappy with it and it was only published after his death.

Lolita was written in the first person and that changed everything.

The book is Humbert's own testimony. He wants to present himself as a sensitive aesthete: a romantic lost soul surrounded by dull, uncomprehending Philistines. He charts his seedy obsession in elaborate, over-ripe 'poetic' prose, trying to draw the reader into his self-delusion, but we soon come to doubt the truth of what he is telling us. He can't help letting us see through his self-serving narrative to glimpse the murky reality that lurks beneath. Lolita is in real distress and is being profoundly corrupted by this unhealthy relationship.

Humbert's nymphet fantasy soon starts to crumble before the reality of a troubled, wilful, increasingly manipulative child. Then he finds himself haunted by the ominous shadow of Clare Quilty, who we come to realise is his dark alter ego (Humbert's doubled name is a fairly obvious clue to Nabokov's intentions). Humbert is the doomed romantic he wants to be seen as: Quilty is the evil sexual predator he really is. Inevitably, it is Quilty that wins the battle for Lolita.

Eventually, Humbert emerges from his pubescent fixation and has a relationship with an adult woman, so when he finally meets Lolita again he is able to see (and love) her as a real person. But it is too late. At this point, there is nothing left for him to do but finally kill off his evil doppelganger and then die himself.

The point of Lolita, therefore, is not just in the the events it depicts, but in the particular way it depicts them. It is not only a story: it is a specific literary device. I think this presents an insoluble problem for a film-maker.

I doubt if there is a cinematic equivalent to Nabokov's mendacious first person narrative. Cinema only really works in the third person and is a very literal medium: 'the camera doesn't lie'. When Hitchcock used a misleading flashback in Stage Fright people were outraged and even film critics, who should have known better, complained about the deception.

Kubbrick and Lyne can both show us that the real Lolita is a far cry from Humbert's idealised nymphet but we are always seeing the disturbing reality itself, rather than that reality filtered through the haze of Humbert's prevarications.

Kubrick tried to defuse the problem by playing up the humour. The first hour, in which Shelley Winters's Charlotte vamps the stiff, repressed Humbert to his considerable discomfort, mines the humour of embarrassment. Then Kubrick lets Peter Sellers loose to do a series of virtuoso comic turns. They are great, but overload the picture. Kubrick's Humbert is constantly being harried and badgered and in the end is less a sexual predator than a hapless victim. I don't think the movie works and Kubrick seemed to agree. He often talked about remaking it.

Adrian Lyne uses the voice-over to give us more of Humbert's oily verbosity and he can be much more frank about the true nature of this deplorable relationship. But, again, we are spectators of events as they actually occur, rather than as Humbert wants us to see them, and the greater frankness only compounds the problems. Although his version is better in many respects than Kubrick's, it is even more uncomfortable to watch.

Because of the nature of the medium in which they were working, Kubrick and Lyne both ended up making The Enchanter, not Lolita.

I am not suggesting that it was wrong to make these movies. Film-makers should be free to tackle any subject that intrigues them - and it is not a crime to fail. It is just that the problems inherent in some books are so great it is unlikely there will be any solutions to them. Perhaps there are some challenges that film-makers should just decline.

I suspect Lolita is one of them.

The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

Test of time

[7/10 · 11 August 2009]

I have recently viewed this classic fantasy on DVD in a near-immaculate print. It stands the test of time quite well.

The screenplay (by Miles Malleson) is pleasingly literate. It captures the heightened romantic tone of myth surprisingly well, but does have its drawbacks.

The structure is very awkward. The whole first half of the narrative is a flashback, but the remaining 55 minutes is told in real time. I am not sure why it was written this way. Usually, flashbacks are used to avoid long expository dialogue scenes, or else to tell the whole story retrospectively within a framing device. This is neither one thing nor the other and feels a bit clunky.

I also feel it is short on physical action at times. For example, the movie cuts from the revelation that Abu has stolen the key to the prison cell to a scene of him and Ahmed in a boat, so that the actual escape is not shown. Similarly, Ahmed's fight with Jafar's guards and the final overthrow of his tyranny are both a bit perfunctory. The picture as a whole is inclined to be too talky: there is a tendency for people to gather in groups in wide angle shots and make speeches at each other.

The production design is generally good, with a fairy tale ambiance that seems about right for the story. My only reservation is that many of the interiors look like large stage sets and don't cut that well into the back lot exteriors and the location shots. While this is very noticeable, it is only a quibble and I doubt if it would interfere with anybody's overall enjoyment of the picture.

The special effects were not particularly special, even for 1940. They won an Oscar, but I suspect this was for their sheer number rather than their quality. The genie emerging from the bottle is effective, but the model of the flying genie needed some articulation to give it even a veneer of credibility. The full scale prop of his foot is never convincing, but is good fun anyway. There are highly visible matt lines throughout. The wires supporting the flying carpet are also very conspicuous.

The performances are variable. They range from excellent (Conrad Veidt) to merely serviceable (John Justin and June Duprez). Sabu was clearly no actor, but his performance is energetic and winning. His limitations only really show when he is required to laugh: which he does a lot. Like many non-actors, he has trouble fabricating a convincing laugh and this aspect of his performance does tend to grate on the ear somewhat. Miles Malleson is just Miles Malleson. He gave pretty much the same performance in every film he ever made, but it is usually enjoyable and that is the case here.

Despite all these reservations, in the final analysis, it doesn't matter how you choose to analyse the parts. All that really matters is whether the movie as a whole manages to engage and delight. It does.

Viewed nearly 70 years after it was made, Thief of Bagdad is not just an interesting museum piece. It is a fun way to spend 100 minutes of your time and is well worth the trouble of checking out.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Decline and fall

[3/10 · 17 June 2009]

Eyes Wide Shut has some unusually eloquent and persuasive advocates and some equally eloquent and persuasive detractors.

If I gravitate towards the detractors it is because I see this movie as the culmination of a trend in Kubrick's work that had long troubled me.

Rather than attempt a detailed analysis of its strengths and weaknesses (both of which have been covered in other excellent IMDb reviews) I would merely use it as an illustration of what I see as Kubrick's principal weakness as a film-maker. He was too slow and got progressively slower.

I mean this in three senses.

Firstly, I cannot help noting that it took him just 8 years to make his first 5 features and another 35 years to make his next 5.

These later pictures all spent years in development. I doubt if this long gestation period was a good thing. If you spend too long thinking about a picture it is easy to lose track of why you wanted to make it in the first place (A.I.?) and there is always a danger that you will end up squeezing the life out of it.

Secondly, when Kubrick finally got a project into production he would take months and months to shoot it (14 months for Eyes Wide Shut). Notoriously he shot dozens of takes of every scene, constantly trying out new things. He got away with this because he used a very small crew and was very economical. His pictures may have taken an age to complete but they never went over budget.

But again, I suspect this obsessive concern with the minutiae of every shot was counter-productive. Sometimes, Kubrick couldn't see the wood for the trees. He was so focused on how each individual scene should play that he lost sight of how the picture as a whole would work with an audience. You cannot force a movie to be great just by sheer hard work and painstaking attention to detail.

Thirdly, the movies themselves are often too slow and none more so than Eyes Wide Shut.

For one thing, no movie in recent years has spent so much time just getting characters from one scene to another. When they cross a room we see every step. For example, Tom Cruise is called to the bedside of one of his patients. We see him in a taxi, tortured by thoughts of his wife with another man. Then Kubrick cuts to an empty lobby just as the elevator arrives. The door opens and Cruise walks slowly across the lobby and through another doorway. As he does so, the camera dollies to the left so we can see him pass through that door and across another room. He rings the bell of an apartment. We cut to the interior of the apartment. A maid enters from the right and walks all the way across the hall to open the door and let Cruise in. She takes his coat and they exchange a couple of words before Cruise walks across the hall and over to the bedroom door. He knocks. Next, we cut to an interior of the bedroom. The door is opened and Cruise walks in. Finally the scene begins. And this is from the man who once spanned 5 million years with a single jump cut!

This scene is not an exception. The whole movie is like that.

This is compounded by the highly stylised acting that Kubrick came to love. In this movie, people often talk in slow motion. Nicole Kidman, in particular, is often required to break each sentence down into disconnected fragments, with agonising pauses between them. This is not her normal style and must have been specifically dictated by Kubrick.

Fine - except that much of the dialogue is achingly banal and unconvincing. Tom Cruise's flirtation with the two girls at the party is feeble enough, but those lines sound like Oscar Wilde in comparison to the ones exchanged by Sky Dumont and Nicole Kidman. What was Kubrick thinking of?

This is a valid question, because he probably knew exactly what he was doing. If the dialogue is banal it was because he wanted it that way. If the pacing is funereal it is because it was part of his design for the picture. I suspect that he wanted it to play like a lucid dream. Lucid dreams seem very normal when they are happening: it is only on reflection that you realise how strange they actually were. In Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick was probably aiming at an apparently realistic surface, but with subtly surrealistic undertones.

For me it didn't work. The surface is just too prosaic to hold the interest and the undertones are too studied and too calculated to be unsettling. As a result, the movie is cold and clinical when it needs to be passionate and engaged.

Ultimately, there is too much thought and too little feeling: too much technique and too little instinct.

I would draw a somewhat artificial distinction between movie artists and movie entertainers. It has nothing to do with quality: there are lousy artists and great entertainers. The difference is that artists make the movies they feel they have to make. Entertainers make the movies they feel their audiences want to see.

Unquestionably, Kubrick was an artist. He always followed his own Muse. For a long time I was happy to go along for the ride, but eventually his Muse took him to places where I couldn't follow.

From my perspective, his career after 2001: A Space Odyssey was mostly a story of decline and fall.

Star Trek (2009)

The future begins, possibly

[1/10 · 19 May 2009]

I have never been a particularly avid Star Trek fan, so this was hardly a must-see movie for me. Nonetheless, I was intrigued to see if JJ Abrams could revive the show in the same way that Russell T Davis revived Dr Who a few years ago.

The jury is still out.

The screenplay isn't bad in terms of character establishment and some of the dialogue is noticeably sharp and effective. The plot is pretty dumb, with some gaping holes in its logic, but this isn't crucial because the story is really just a device to introduce the new crew members and set up further movies. I quite liked the new incarnations of Kirk, Spock, Scottie, Uhura and so on. I would be happy to spend more time with them, subject to one proviso: JJ Abrams must never be allowed near Star Trek again.

For me, all enjoyment of this movie was sabotaged by his hyper-active direction. Every scene (almost every shot) is designed for maximum impact, but that means the movie has no light and shade. There is no change of pace, no pauses for reflection, no steady build up of tension and no overall dramatic arc. It starts with a climax and tries to stay there for the next two hours. But a movie that is all climaxes has no climax. The unvarying pace becomes exhausting and, ultimately, tedious.

Every scene is directed in the same way. Half the dialogue is delivered on the move; people run rather than walk; the camera never stops moving; and most of the shots are too tight. The movie constantly runs the same gamut of visual devices: aerial shots, cranes; whip pans; zooms and endless Steadicam tracks through the crowded sets. The frantic visuals are then cranked up even further by the constant quick cutting. The action scenes, in particular, are all cut, cut, cut.

Orson Welles once said that anyone could make a movie with a six inch lens and a pair of scissors but the test of a good director was what happened between cuts. Clearly, Abrams disagrees. At times, the cutting is so hectic that it seemed as if his contract must have specified that he wouldn't get paid if the camera ever stopped moving or he held a shot for more than five seconds.

As a result, the Enterprise seems to be in a state of constant panic, with the camera zapping from character to character and everyone talking over each other, so that crucial explanatory lines are lost in the perpetual babble. The action scenes, where the cutting gets even quicker and the camera gets even tighter, are often reduced to a flurry of near-indecipherable, almost abstract images.

This over-wrought style of shooting is becoming increasingly common, particularly in big action movies, and it is slowly driving me out of the cinema. However, Abrams manages to raise the irritation factor even higher with another visual affectation that I have always hated.

Lens flare!!

For more than 70 years, avoiding lens flare was one of the basic skills of a cinematographer. Then, in the mid-Sixties, it suddenly became fashionable to let it happen. I always disliked it because it just draws attention to the camera, but it was only a minor irritation in most movies - limited to a few exterior shots where (for example) car headlights shone directly into the lens. The first time it seriously bothered me was in Close Encounters, where it greatly compromised the magic of many of the effects sequences.

By the early Eighties it seemed the vogue for lens flare was dying out, but in Star Trek it is back with a vengeance. Almost every shot in this movie is smothered with light streaks, rainbow effects, bleed over, visual echoes and halos that appear around every dust mote on the lens. Sometimes it is so extreme that the whole screen whites out.

This is not only highly distracting in itself, but it undermines Abrams's whole directorial method. I might not like his high-adrenaline style, but I can appreciate what he is trying to do. The tight shots and the restless camera is trying to draw us right into the centre of the action, so we become part of it. However, the ubiquitous lens flare immediately hooks us out again, putting a barrier between us and what is happening on the screen. It feels like we are standing in the street, watching the whole movie through the reflections on a dirty shop window.

Of course, the blame must be shared by the Art Director, who peppered every set with those bright, low-level lights and with the cinematographer who failed to persuade Abrams to let him him filter out the problem.

Although I regard this movie as an unmitigated disaster, there is no reason why the next movie shouldn't be much better. For me, Star Trek was never really about the characters or the endless elaboration of the Star Trek universe. At its heart, Star Trek was just an efficient vehicle for tackling a wide range of SF ideas. That hasn't changed.

A good SF story typically takes the form of a puzzle that has to be solved by a deadline. In SF books we don't care too much about fine writing or subtle characterisation (although they do no harm). All we really want is an intriguing problem with an ingenious solution. There are still plenty of good SF stories waiting to be told.

Having introduced the new characters and re-launched the series, a couple of good stories is all it will take to make me forget this frustrating aberration.

Despite everything, I am not without hope.

PS: On re-reading this, I still stand by what I wrote, but I also have to acknowledge that Abrams has injected a bit of life into what had become a very stodgy show.

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)

Missed opportunity

[4/10 · 15 May 2009]

The Ealing Comedies constitute their own specific sub-genre in the history of film. They were wry, droll reflections on British life in the late Forties and early Fifties. They are always amusing but I feel it is misleading to characterise them as comedies. They are breezy and good-humoured, rather than laugh-out-loud funny. However, the best of them are laced with understated satire and shot through with an occasional dark streak (epecially Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers).

I have an affection for all of them, but The Lavender Hill Mob is probably the one I have most difficulty with. Compared to the others, it seems somewhat perfunctory. To me, it is an outline sketch for a movie, but one that needed to spend a lot more time in development before it was ready to go before the cameras.

Everything about it is a bit undercooked. For example, nobody is given any real context or background. Henry is simply a dutiful drudge, whose secret dreams and hidden ambitions go unrecognised, while Albert is a frustrated artist forced to prostitute his talent by making gift shop trash for a living. This establishes a motive for their crime, but nothing that subsequently happens is a consequence either of their characters or their plan.

Other characters are introduced but play no real part in the story. The elderly resident in Henry's guest house could (with her love of detective stories) have been made an unwitting thorn in his side, but is merely used as background 'colour'. Similarly, the various policemen who pop in and out of the action are simply there to keep the plot ticking along.

As a result, the movie is driven entirely by its contrived plot devices, which I find both frustrating and faintly irritating. The not-very-ingenious robbery is accomplished with minimal problems, despite Albert being prevented from carrying out his part in the plan (by Sidney Tafler's Clayton). The gold is then smuggled to France without mishap. Everything would have gone smoothly if it wasn't for a minor hitch, lamely based on the French pronunciation of the letter 'R', which results in six of the gold Eiffel Towers being accidentally sold to some English schoolgirls.

This leads to a series of frantic chases as Henry and Albert seek to retrieve them. These scenes are well executed, but at each point the conspirators are frustrated in their pursuit of the schoolgirls by a series of wholly factitious accidents. It is as if God is deliberately intervening to give them a hard time. This kind of plotting always has me grinding my teeth.

When they finally track the last Eiffel Tower to a Police Academy exhibition and snatch it from under the nose of John Gregson's Police Inspector (why is he there, anyway?) all shreds of plot logic are abandoned. The final car chases are then simply filling up screen time until we are returned to the framing device with which the picture began.

The movie doesn't even bother to tell us the fate of Albert (Stanley Holloway), Lackery (Sid James) and Shorty (Alfie Bass).

This genial little caper has the professionalism of the Ealing team behind it, so it is far from being a bad movie. I suspect most viewers will find it considerably more enjoyable than I do (and why shouldn't they?), but I cannot help thinking there was a much better movie waiting to be made, if only more time and effort had been expended on fleshing out both the characters and the story.

By the standards established by Ealing, Lavender Hill Mob is a missed opportunity.

PS: One curious footnote is that Audrey Hepburn gets a credit for her single line early on, but Archie Duncan remains anonymous despite his much more substantial contribution. I guess she just had a better agent.

Sherlock Holmes (1954–1955)

Innocent pleasure

[6/10 · 1 May 2009]

This short-lived TV series is a fairly lightweight interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, but is well worth a view. I am glad it has been rescued from oblivion and made available on DVD for a new generation of viewers to enjoy.

Ronald Howard, H Marion Crawford and Archie Duncan are by no means the definitive Holmes, Watson and Lestrade but they make a good team in their own right. Watching them go through their paces, I found it was easy to temporarily forget other, more substantial, interpretations of these characters.

The series was shot on film and the production values are pretty good for a cheaply-made TV series of the mid-Fifties. Each episode is limited to a handful of sets, but the standing set of Baker Street is widely used and there is enough location shooting to prevent the shows becoming too claustrophobic. Shooting in France probably stretched the budget further than would have been possible in America, or even England.

Each episode is only 25 minutes, so don't expect complex plots or baffling mysteries. We do get some good deduction from time to time, but on other occasions Holmes leaps to conclusions by something not far short of clairvoyance. Of course, the stories vary in quality, with a couple veering perilously close to farce (the cowgirl and suffragette stories being the most overtly comic) but most are very enjoyable. I tended to watch two or three episodes at a time and I was never bored.

However, I must sound two warnings.

Firstly, the source prints are very ragged: clearly they have all been through the projector far too often. They are watchable, but would benefit from extensive restoration. Since these shows are far from being classics it is unlikely this will ever happen.

Secondly, while it is understandable that a company releasing budget price DVDs will use whatever prints they can get their hands on (and these might be the only ones that have survived), there can be no excuse for the wretched DVD transfer.

Digital recording is inherently inferior to analogue recording, so DVDs are inherently inferior to videos (until they start to deteriorate - which happens quite quickly). I have found that even major companies producing full price DVDs often use inadequate compression software that cannot handle subtle movement (e.g. close-ups of faces). This becomes particularly obtrusive when recording old films, where worn sprocket holes cause a slight shaking of the image that completely confounds many digital recording systems.

Having said that, the DVD transfer here is not just poor; it is probably the worst I have ever seen. Movement is often very jerky and there is highly distracting flickering and wavering throughout, with whole areas of the screen appearing to move independently of each other.

Some episodes seem worse than others (I have no idea why) but even the best of them are dismal. You can buy bargain-basement DVD recorders that give better results than this.

Nonetheless, if you can ignore the poor prints and atrocious transfer and just watch the shows, there is much innocent pleasure to be had.

L'Atalante (1934)

Learning curve

[5/10 · 7 April 2009]

L'Atalante is frequently cited as one of the greatest movies ever made. This judgement clearly baffles many people. Having just viewed the fully-restored 1991 version on DVD, I confess to being one of them.

The print now looks great, with good detail and only the occasional scratch, so we can finally appreciate the exquisite cinematography. Scenes that were trimmed or deleted by distributors and censors have now been restored, along with the original music track. Apparently, this version is as close to Vigo's original cut as will ever be possible.

This statement needs qualification. Vigo fell ill shortly after shooting and L'Atalante was cut by an editor with only minimal involvement by him. Moreover, it is still only a rough cut. It was originally planned to do some further tightening.

L'Atalante undoubtedly has its merits. Vigo used the trite story as a framework from which to hang a number of notably good scenes which often veer off in unexpected directions. It has a loose, lyrical quality that evokes poetry rather than prose.

Unusually for early Sound movies, much of it was shot on location, but I am not sure how much. The interiors look cramped enough to have been shot on an actual barge and this would account for the tight close-ups, awkward camera angles and strange compositions (in one scene both protagonists go briefly out of shot, leaving an empty screen), but there are also indications that these scenes were shot on studio sets (e.g., the shot from inside Jules's cupboard).

In both subject and treatment, L'Atalante looks and feels quite different to other films of its time and its quirkiness can be a refreshing change from the predictability of most other movies. However, much of that quirkiness is simply incompetence. Vigo had a great visual sense and the movie often looks ravishing, but in most other respects his grasp of movie technique was still somewhat weak.

Cinematically, he was still rooted in the Silent era. Dialogue is little more than background sound and rarely adds much to the visuals. Most of it was improvised by the actors (never a good idea). The soporific pacing that alienates many modern viewers was simply the characteristic pacing of Silent films.

At the micro level, the cutting is often very amateurish. Vigo doesn't know when to enter or leave scenes. Shots are assembled out of sequence, so that visual information is only given after it is needed. Sometimes, it is not given at all: for example, we only know about the near-collision with another barge through the dialogue, not the visuals. Individual shots don't cut together properly (e.g., the sequence of Juliette discovering that the barge has gone). Often, we simply don't know where we are until half-way through a scene. We cut to Juliette in Jules's Aladdin's cave of a cabin without any preparation (she has shown no curiosity about how he lives) and don't even know where we are until he turns up to tell us.

Individually, these examples could be dismissed as mere quibbles but they occur in almost every scene.

At a macro level, the movie has a weak dramatic structure: it alternately gallops and crawls. Marginal scenes run on far too long (the gramophone scene, the checkers game, the bar scene with the peddler, and so on) while essential scenes are truncated or missing altogether.

It doesn't even tell its simple story very effectively. Scenes don't flow naturally from one to another, so story jerks forward in fits and starts. The evolving relationship between Jean and Juliette (and her growing frustration with life on the barge) is actually quite poorly documented. Jean's decision to abandon Juliette in Paris is under-motivated. We see almost nothing of how she survives there. We see Jean's distracted manner after her loss, but not the neglect of duty that alarms the barge owners and puts the crew's livelihood at risk. The recovery of Juliette is simply miraculous. One second, Jules is in Le Havre, the next he wandering aimlessly around Paris. He hears music coming from a record shop and - Hey Presto!

At the end, the characters are nearly as opaque as at the beginning.

For all the excellence of the cinematography and the originality of individual scenes, Vigo's 'let's make it up as we go' approach means that L'Atalante is little more than a glorified home movie. It is so choppy that it feels like he shot a three-hour movie and lost half the reels, so he had to do the best he could with what was left.

In the Thirties, L'Atalante sank without trace, but it was rediscovered after the War by the French directors of the 'New Wave'. They were becoming increasingly frustrated with the stodgy movies of their time and soon found ways to slash through the plodding story-telling conventions of established movie-makers. I can understand why they saw Vigo as a pioneer and came to laud L'Atalante as a precursor of everything they were trying to do.

Nonetheless, you have to master the rules before you can throw away the rule book. In 1933, Vigo was still learning how to make movies. If he had been able to supervise the editing of L'Atalante it might have been a somewhat more accomplished picture: but then again it might not. Zero de Conduite suggests he was still on a steep learning curve.

Vigo had a unique sensibility and was a singular voice in the cinema. If he had lived long enough to make a few more pictures he might well have given us a really good movie. Then, even his most delirious advocates might see L'Atalante for what I believe it to be: not a fully-achieved work in its own right, but a fascinating, still very flawed, practice piece.

Little Dorrit (1987)

There's always one

[6/10 · 23 March 2009]

The recent TV adaptation of Little Dorrit sent me out in search of this movie version, which I hadn't seen since its original release.

This mammoth project was written and directed by Christine Edzard and is the closest that cinema has come to capturing the richness of a Dickens novel. I enjoyed seeing it again on DVD, but I was disappointed to find it was not nearly as good as I had remembered it.

The performances are variable, as you would expect with such a massive cast. However, the leads are generally pretty good.

Derek Jacobi's melancholy is always arresting (and sorely missed in the TV version) but his performance overall lacked some light and shade.

Alec Guinness effortlessly conveys the patrician pretensions of the imprisoned Mr Dorrit (better than Tom Courtney) but we don't get enough of his underlying anxiety when he is released, so his mental breakdown is sprung on us without adequate preparation.

Sarah Pickering is steered through the picture without mishap and is an acceptable Amy, but is clearly not an experienced actor and this appears to be her only screen credit.

In accordance with a long-established tradition a number of the minor characters are played by comics and comic actors. Sometimes this works, sometimes not. This movie is no different.

Patricia Hayes is a good character actor, but for British viewers she carries too much baggage. She is having to fight against her normally forceful personality to play the timorous, oppressed Affery.

Similarly, Bill Frazer is best known for his comedy work, where he typically plays a blustering bully. This comic persona is not quite right for the bogus Casby, but the problem here is not Frazer's performance but the strangely truncated part.

Max Wall was a master of physical comedy who became the darling of 'intellectuals' but he was not an actor and his Fintwinch is not a performance.

Flora was based on a woman Dickens actually knew and his depiction of her was rather cruel. Miriam Margolyes's comic monster may be faithful to Dickens but misses the opportunity to suggest an underlying sadness in Flora.

Of the comics, Pauline Quirke fares best and gives a lovely performance as the mentally-arrested Maggy.

However, my main reservations concern Edzard's screenplay and direction.

She took an unusual approach to this long book. Instead of just breaking it in half, she extracted two parallel story lines and gave us two overlapping first person narratives: Arthur is in every scene in the first movie and Amy is in every scene in the second one. I don't think this experiment really works.

The problem is that Dickens wrote very much in the third person. His complex plots are told through a wide range of characters, spanning the whole social spectrum, and the story moves forward on a broad front. In this book there is too much going on outside the direct experience of Arthur and Amy for a coherent story to be told entirely from their perspectives. Characters pop in and out of the action without us knowing enough about who they are and how they relate to the leads. Things happen without sufficient justification. For example, Pancks denounces Casby as a hypocrite without us seeing any of the hypocrisy. Important plot developments, such as the rise and fall of Mr Merdle, appear out of nowhere.

The first movie, in particular, suffers from this approach. There are noticeable gaps that are only filled in the second movie (if at all) and key narrative strands, such as Arthur's relationship with his mother, are left hanging unresolved. This leaves us intrigued and wanting to know more, which is probably why Edzard did it this way. However, it also means the whole of the first movie becomes a teaser - but it is a three-hour teaser!

I also feel that Ezard is too indulgent with Dickens's dialogue. It is often great, but he wrote for the page, not the screen, and his wordy speeches need severe editing to make them speakable. Edzard sometimes lets them run on too much, leaving scenes over-written and over-long. Overall, I felt she could have used the six hours more effectively.

I also felt that Edzard's relative inexperience as a director was evident on a number of occasions.

In some scenes, the pacing and rhythm is not quite right. In the early stages, in particular, she choreographs Derek Jacobi in slow motion and there are agonising pauses between lines. Elsewhere, her staging is often too theatrical. Characters whirl around the set, going in and out of shot at random, with the camera trailing in their wake. In simple dialogue scenes she hold shots for too long: dwelling on the speaker when when the scene is crying out for a reaction shot. Simple devices, like montages and flashbacks, are curiously unconvincing in ways I immediately sensed but cannot quite describe.

It doesn't help that the sound recording is quite poor (at least on the DVD). I sometimes struggled to pick up individual lines. When Arthur learns of a death abroad, I didn't actually hear who had died and had to wait several minutes to find out. At times, the garrulous Flora could have been speaking Martian for all I knew.

I applaud the ambition of this project, but it is a bit of a mess. It can be a moving, engrossing and thoroughly enjoyable mess. But it is still a mess. It is so manifestly a clunky piece of film-making that I am at a loss to understand the rapturous praise it has received from other IMDb reviewers.

However, I appear to be in a minority of one, so I suppose I must expect to get slaughtered if anyone ever gets round to reading my own comments.

Oliver Twist (2005)

Thin gruel

[3/10 · 10 February 2009]

Dickens is one of the great storytellers in literature, but the natural dramatic medium for his rambling shaggy dog stories is the TV mini-series, not the movies.

Oliver Twist is one of his shorter books, but even so, Ronald Harwood was only able to compress it into two hours by cutting great swathes of the novel. It is reasonably faithful up to the half-way stage, but then loses all the sub-plots concerning the mystery of Oliver's birth, his bitter enemy Monks, his connection with Mr Brownlow, Mrs Maylie, the love affair between Rose Maylie and Dr Losberne, the return of Mr Bumble, the treachery of Noah Claypole and so on.

However, Harwood's compression actually works well on its own terms and if you are not familiar with the book there is no reason why any of these omissions should trouble you. In certain respects, it even improves on its source material, because in the book Oliver becomes less and less involved as the story proceeds: he becomes the object rather than the subject of the narrative. Harwood's screenplay keeps Oliver much more in focus and more central to the action and has the merit of putting him in jeopardy at the movie's climax.

My problems with this movie have nothing to do with its fidelity to the text. It is simply that it is not very memorable in its own right. The performances are all relatively low-key and fail to capture the vividness of Dickens's characters; the production design is not particularly impressive; the pacing is too measured; and the movie continually veers away from Dickens's full-blooded emotionalism. It is never angry enough, bitter enough, sad enough, happy enough, funny enough or frightening enough.

Perhaps I was expecting too much. While I always felt that the world didn't really need another Oliver Twist, I was nonetheless very intrigued to see what Dickens would look like when filtered through Polanski's dark, perverse imagination. I never found out, because it is actually a competent, unfussy, very straightforward movie that could have been made by almost anyone.

In short: not enough Dickens and not enough Polanski.

"Please, Sir, I want some more."

My Little Eye (2002)

Unprofessional

[4/10 · 26 January 2009]

I missed My Little Eye when it first came out but remembered it getting some good reviews, so when I spotted it in the 'remaindered bin' at my local video store I hooked it out to give it a view.

Like many people, I found it hard to get into this picture. However, I stuck with it and by the end it had delivered enough to justify the effort.

The story is quite intriguing. It was a very quick response to the 'Big Brother' phenomenon and gave an original twist to the familiar 'House on Haunted Hill' plot. It is also stylistically interesting, being shot on video using the locked-off CCTV cameras that pepper the house.

Unlike most viewers, I have no strong feelings about it one way or the other. For me, it is neither a minor masterpiece nor an excruciating bore. I wouldn't have bothered to write about it at all, except for one extraordinary statement in the DVD commentary that set me thinking.

We have long lived with the cult of the director, but in Hollywood they will tell you that only two things really matter in a movie: the screenplay and the casting.

In a picture like this, the casting is not that much of an issue. It is appropriate to use relatively unknown actors so long as they can deliver. For me they did. Those reviewers that have castigated the performances are probably just blaming the cast for their frustration with the movie as a whole.

The problems all lie with the screenplay. In a well-constructed screenplay the early scenes, in particular, have to do a lot of work very efficiently. Ideally, every scene (almost every line of dialogue) has to do at least three of four things simultaneously: give vital information; move the story forward; reveal character; and set up things that will pay off later in the story.

The first half of this picture ladles on the atmosphere, but with insufficient context. We never learn enough about the characters or the set up to get really involved with what is happening. How were these people recruited? How did they get to the house? What are their back stories? What happened in the previous six months? What relationships did they form? How does this affect their behaviour at the end? It is the lack of this information that makes the picture so frustrating to watch: which brings me to the staggering revelation in the commentary.

The rough cut was four hours long!

Rough cuts are always too long, because the editor just dumps in all the relevant footage, which is then tightened up, scene by scene. Sometimes you can lose whole scenes because the point has been made elsewhere in the story. But you cannot lose two-and-a-half hours just by trimming a bit of fat.

If the rough cut was four hours then this must be because David Hilton's screenplay was far too long. It probably included most of those things that are so conspicuously missing from the picture, but in a form that was always going to be too unwieldy for a tightly-budgeted little horror movie like this. But surely this this must have been obvious to the producer and director: all they had to do was count the pages.

I find myself asking how this picture could have gone into production when it must have been clear that the screenplay still needed a massive amount of work. If you start out with four hours of footage you cannot expect to make a coherent 90 minute movie just by some nifty work in the editing suite. It is a miracle they manged to extract a releasable movie at all from that mass of footage, but there was no chance that it could ever be really good.

I like to see gifted newcomers getting their chance in the movie industry (and I suspect that Marc Evans is gifted) but the lack of professionalism and discipline shown here can only make that more difficult in the future.

PS:

I understand from the IMDb trivia section that a four hour version was actually previewed. I would be interested to see it, but I doubt that anybody would actually want to spend four hours of their life on this story, or that a cinema would ever want to show it.

Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (2005– )

The love that dared not speak its name

[8/10 · 13 January 2009]

This series is an excellent adaptation of Hamilton's trilogy of novellas and is a beautiful evocation of the seedier side of London in the early Nineteen Thirties.

The three books (The Midnight Bell, The Siege of Pleasure and The Plains of Cement) were published several years apart and centre on three characters who meet in a pub: Bob, an aspiring novelist, Jenny, a prostitute on whom he squanders his meagre savings, and Ella, who is in love with Bob while being pursued by an ageing suitor.

The story is essentially told three times, each from a different perspective, and this production was originally broadcast as three separate plays. However, the DVD offers the alternative of viewing it as a single narrative and this is the option I would recommend.

It is thoroughly engrossing, but there can be no pretence that it makes for easy viewing. It is unremittingly bleak and at the end there is only the faintest hint of hope for any of the characters.

The great merit of the books was their accuracy as reportage and this is fully realised in this production. It is filmed in a washed-out near monochrome and the production design is a marvel of authenticity achieved on a tiny budget. The playing (especially by the leads, Bryan Dick, Zoe Tapper and Sally Hawkins) is uniformly good. Their performances seem completely in keeping with the time and place without mimicking the acting style of the era.

For me, this series doesn't fully capture the flavour of the books, but that is not necessarily a criticism.

The Midnight Bell, in particular, was highly autobiographical, being closely based on Hamilton's own relationship with a prostitute, Lily. This book, and The Siege of Pleasure, have an obsessive, confessional quality that is largely missing here.

In The Midnight Bell we don't get the same sense of just how self-willed Bob's disastrous relationship with Jenny really is. In the book, Jenny is even less calculating than she appears here. She never pretends to have any affection for Bob and makes only the faintest attempt to get her hands on his savings. She is simply bemused when he keeps popping up to shower money on her. Bob understands this but cannot help himself. Ultimately, his behaviour is much more consciously self-destructive than in this production.

Similarly, we get a much weaker sense of the importance of alcohol in the novel. Bob's increased drinking is shown but not emphasised.

With hindsight, we can see that The Midnight Bell is not merely documenting Hamilton's relationship with Lily, but also the origins of his much more lasting relationship with alcohol. Bob is not an alcoholic (Hamilton probably wasn't, at that stage) but the warning signs are there.

The role of alcohol becomes much clearer in the second book, The Siege of Pleasure. Its centrepiece is a lengthy passage depicting with meticulous accuracy and loving detail the process of Jenny getting drunk for the first time - and how much she enjoys it. Here, we see this happening but cannot share the effect it is having on Jenny. As a result we lose the subtext of the book. Objectively, it is showing how Jenny's seduction is the first step on her road to prostitution, but we sense that it is drink that is the real cause of her fall, even if Hamilton is not explicit about it.

In these books, alcohol is the love that dared not speak its name.

From this perspective, Bob and Jenny are not separate characters, with their own personal destinies, so much as aspects of Hamilton. This makes for an uncomfortable read. Rather than being fiction, the books feel like extracts from his private diary, recording his own lacerating self-reproaches, so the reader feels like a voyeur. Moreover, there is something masochistic about Hamilton's wallowing in ruin and degradation. It is only in The Plains of Cement that he rises above this neurotic self-absorption and achieves a degree of objectivity that redeems the whole trilogy.

No adaptation of Hamilton, however faithful it tries to be, can adopt his perspective. Inevitably, it will interpret the stories, rather than reproduce them. But this is no bad thing. We lose some of the immediacy that we get from the sense humiliation and self-loathing that infuse the books (and re-emerges even more strongly in The West Pier and Hangover Square) but in downplaying their more obsessive aspect it objectifies and generalises the issues that he raises.

Cut loose from Hamilton's very personal preoccupations, the characters now have autonomous lives of their own and we can even believe that there might be some hope for them. Their futures may not be not very promising, but they are no longer completely trapped by the fatalism of Hamilton's self-castigating nightmare.

At the same time, stripping away the most obsessive elements of the books gives us an unobstructed view of the world he has so faithfully documented and it proves to be both convincing and compelling. If Art is about finding the universal in the particular then this drama is arguably more successful than the books on which it is based. It certainly feels like a more balanced piece of work.

This version of 20,000 Streets Under the Sky may not have the same power as Hamilton's books, but it is mesmerising in its own right. At times it is hard to watch, but it is still well worth spending three hours of your time on it.

PS: For a more detailed account of the merits of this production read the three reviews above.

The Secret Garden (1993)

Raised from the dead

[9/10 · 14 December 2008]

I recently came across an old video of this movie that I had packed away years ago. I decided to give it a view to see what condition it was in. I am glad I did. Although the video had deteriorated slightly it was still highly watchable, but this is clearly a movie that I need to upgrade to DVD.

The Secret Garden is a little gem. It confirms something that one of my friends has been saying ever since he became a father and started watching movies with his daughter: most of the best pictures being made these days are children's films. Few adult movies are as well crafted as this.

The book seems to have been an obsession with the BBC. I first saw it in 1960, but by then there had already been two earlier versions (1949 and 1952) with further adaptations to follow in 1975 and 1987.

As an eleven-year-old boy, I was embarrassed to be watching such a 'girly' programme and would have been humiliated if anybody had found out how enthralled I was, but by the time this movie came out I could watch it without any reservations.

I immediately fell in love with Kate Maberly's Mary Lennox and my heart bled for the neglect and emotional privation that had created this sullen, imperious little madam. Maberly has had a successful career ever since and would probably be crestfallen to know that there are people like me who will always associate her with a performance she gave when she was still only ten. However, other performances are as good: for example, Laura Crossley's scene-stealing Martha. And when has Maggie Smith ever been less than outstanding?

The direction by Agnieszka Holland is spot on. I have just checked her credits and found that she was responsible for another overlooked movie that made an impression on me when I stumbled across it recently: Copying Beethoven.

It is beautifully shot, with some magical time-lapse photography, and has a great score.

The screen play by Caroline Thompson is masterful. Again, I checked her credits and found she wrote three pictures for Tim Burton, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare before Christmas and The Corpse Bride: 'nuff said.

When I was eleven, the idea of a couple of kids tinkering about in a garden seemed rather soppy and was the principal cause of my unease, but of course I was missing the almost pagan symbolism of the garden, whose regeneration parallels the regeneration of Mary and Colin. Thompson puts this symbolism right at the heart of the story and underlines it with a beautiful scene in which Colin's impromptu fire ceremony summons his father back from the south of France. This is turn-of-the-century magical realism.

Giving Mary a voice-over was also a good decision. It keeps the movie focused and allows Thompson to take us efficiently through the plot without any sense of being hurried along. However, I cannot help noting that the serialisations were often twice as long and this leaves me with a slight feeling of regret.

Although this movie doesn't need to be any longer than its current 97 minutes, I would still have liked it to be a bit more expansive. There are a few areas where some follow through would have helped. For example, Colin's spasm of jealousy when he sees Mary on the swing with Dicken leads to nothing. This (and similar examples) are only minor quibbles that do not really impact on the effectiveness of the movie. The truth is that I simply want to spend more time with these entrancing characters. I wonder if there were any deleted scenes that would allow for an extended cut.

My rediscovery of this timeless little classic will now send me out in search of the other Hodgson Burnett movie that came out shortly after this one: The Little Princess.

IMDb reviews suggest I have another treat in store for me.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941)

By the numbers

[2/10 · 23 September 2008]

First: a warning.

I recently saw this movie on DVD in the Universal 'Hitchcock Collection' series. The source print looks to be in immaculate condition, but the image is a bit soft, suggesting it might be a second generation copy straight from video. The framing is far too tight, so all the compositions are terrible. Even the title of the movie is cropped. I gather from other IMDb reviews that there is a much better version available.

Mr and Mrs Smith is just a footnote to Hitchcock's career.

In his lengthy interviews with Francois Truffaut in the Sixties, Hitchcock gave a comprehensive overview of his whole body of work, but all he could say about this picture is that he did it as a favour to Carole Lombard and that he didn't understand the characters so just photographed Norman Krasna's screenplay.

In truth, there is not much more that needs to be said.

It is a screwball comedy out of the same mould as It Happened One Night, His Girl Friday and Philapdelphia Story. Carole Lombard is a typically feisty wife who learns that her marriage is technically invalid, falls out with with her husband on the flimsiest of pretexts and spends most of the picture being 'adorably' unreasonable.

Robert Montgomery does well enough as the put upon husband, but it is hard not to lose patience with him. Long before the end of the movie the audience is saying: "dump the silly cow, she's not worth it."

Gene Raymond plays the best friend with whom she becomes engaged. He is supposed to be a courtly, 'old family' Southerner, although this is not obvious from his accent and only really becomes apparent in the drunk scene (which he otherwise plays very well). He is an honourable, generous, teetotal gentleman, so of course he is bullied and patronised by Robert Montgomery and made the butt of many of the jokes - although he is not as badly treated as the similar Ralph Bellamy character in His Girl Friday.

This movie feels like it was made by people who only knew of screwball comedies by reputation, but hadn't actually seen one. For example, a good screwball comedy has a strong central idea with a number of on-going comic threads that continually intertwine and overlap. Here, all the comedy elements are just strung out, like beads on a necklace. This is screwball comedy by the numbers.

It is the same with the direction. Typically, these comedies race along at an ever increasing pace that rises to near hysteria by the end. Hitchcock doesn't get this. His direction is somewhat lethargic and the picture becomes a stately succession of scenes that all seem slightly over-written (but under-nourished) and slightly too long. He was never a particularly good director of actors so he just lets the cast get on with it. They do OK.

Hitchcock had a good sense of humour, which he frequently used in his thrillers, but he had no feel for comedy as a genre. His later Trouble with Harry was also a misfire, for similar reasons to this movie, but at least he was involved in that picture. Here he is just going through the motions.

All the people connected with this movie were good solid professionals so it is not especially bad. It just feels a bit derivative, over-familiar, over-long and ultimately rather flat.

Mr and Mrs Smith is one for Carole Lombard fans and Hitchcock completists only.

Our Mutual Friend (1976)

Video and film

[7/10 · 29 August 2008]

The 1998 version of 'Our Mutual Friend' is one of my favourite TV book adaptations, but I am pleased that this 1976 production is finally available again. It is well worth discussing in detail as a stand-alone production in its own right, but I will leave that to other reviewers. What intrigues me is how two comprehensive dramatisations of the same book came to be so different.

This version is the most faithful to Dickens in both story-telling and performances, but that is not always a merit.

Inevitably, both versions have many scenes in common, but there are some slight differences. This version includes scenes (and expanded scenes) that I would have liked to have seen in the 1998 version. For example, the early scene with Charley and Lizzie looking into the embers of the fire helps establish their relationship and her 'fancies'. The scene where Harmon (in disguise) gets Riderhood to retract his accusation against Gaffer Hexham redresses the most questionable aspect of Harmon's behaviour and is sorely missed in the later version. This version also makes it slightly clearer that Charley's selfish objections to Eugene Wrayburn aren't completely unreasonable (he fears the seduction that Wrayburn eventually contemplates) and it is more specific about the burying and unearthing of the various wills.

On the other hand, I regret the loss of the Laemmles, which is symptomatic of the major weakness of this production: we don't see enough of the fashionable world into which the Boffins and Bella are abruptly pitched. This was probably due to budgetary constraints, but it means we only get half the story. One of the triumphs of the later version is the startling visual contrast between the murky world of the poor, with its muted, muddy tones, and the glittering world of the rich - flooded with light and saturated with vibrant yellows and greens.

Overall, I feel the 1998 version tells the story more effectively - partly because it doesn't try to replicate Dickens's own method.

Dickens disperses his complex plots over a wide range of characters. Each chapter just inches the story forward, but is worked up into a richly detailed scene, reflecting Dickens's love of the theatre. However, this means that characters disappear for long stretches so it is easy to lose track of them and their role in the story. Dickens can mitigate this by prefixing each scene with a retrospective narrative bridge.

This 1976 version is structured in a similar way, with a stately procession of lengthy scenes, but without the narrative bridges, so at times it feels a bit disjointed

This is partly dictated by the medium. Videotape is difficult to edit, so directors tend to shoot whole scenes in a single take with multiple cameras, switching from camera to camera while the scene is in progress. This favours fewer, but longer, scenes - as in a stage play. Actors often prefer to work this way, but it does mean they don't have the luxury of fine-tuning their performances, line-by-line, as movie actors can. It also means that the camera is not always in the best position to punch up a line or capture a necessary reaction shot.

The 1998 version was shot on film and is structured more like a movie. It trims individual scenes and sharpens up Dickens's sometimes prolix dialogue. It continually inter-cuts between the various plot strands, keeping everything in better focus and inserts Dickens's narrative bridges in correct chronological sequence so the story flows better. In this version, I was struck by how long it takes to introduce all the main characters. For a while, I feared that Mr Venus had been cut altogether.

The use of cinema technique means that the staging in the 1998 version is much more precise, so the big set pieces are all more powerful and emotionally affecting (compare the two versions of the big revelation scene that exonerates Mr Boffin). Basically, the camera does much more work.

Then there are the performances.

In virtually every case the later ones are vastly superior. In this version, even when we have good actors giving good performances, such as Leo McKern, Warren Clarke, Jane Seymour and Ronald Lacey, they are still overshadowed by Peter Vaughan, David Morrissey, Anna Friel and Timothy Spall. In most other instances, the discrepancy is even greater. The 1998 version is already an unparallelled feast of great acting when, at the very end, up steps Robert Lang's Mr Twemlow to steal the whole show with his only speech (sadly missing here). In Hollywood, they will tell you: "If a performance is good, that is the actor. If all the performances are good, that is the director." Take a bow, Julian Farino.

However, these performances are not necessarily more faithful. For example, while Dickens had enormous sympathy and respect for the poor and dispossessed, he was a man of his times and found it hard not to patronise them. This is evident in his treatment of Silas Wegg and Rogue Riderhood and is accurately reflected in the playing of Alfie Bass and John Collin. But in the 1998 version there is no hint of condescension in the fierce, envious malice of Kenneth Cranham's Wegg and the cool, calculating villainy of David Bradley's Riderhood. Dickens might well have approved of this change of emphasis.

From the Fifties through to the end of the Eighties, the BBC utilised live broadcasting and videotape to bring us consistently excellent dramatisations of classic books. This version of 'Our Mutual Friend' is a good example of what they could achieve and it deserves to find a whole new audience today.

However, in the Nineties these serials were upgraded to film. Actors may regret this, and the extra cost may mean there will be fewer classic book adaptations in the future, but a comparison of the videotape and film versions of 'Our Mutual Friend' shows that there is no going back.

Dombey & Son (1983)

Precis

[5/10 · 14 August 2008]

I now have a nearly complete set of BBC Dickens adaptations on DVD. This Dombey and Son is my latest addition.

Overall, I think it is one of the most disappointing, but I find it hard to pin down exactly why. My ideas are still a bit rambling and unformed, so I probably shouldn't be writing anything yet, but there are no other IMDb reviews to help me clarify my own thoughts and someone has to kick off the debate.

Dickens always gives us a rich gallery of striking characters so I guess I must start with the performances.

None of them could be described as bad, but most of them seem slightly off-target and the fact remains that I didn't warm to any of the characters as much as I wanted to.

Julian Glover has the thankless task of trying to make Mr Dombey work. I say 'thankless' because Dickens depicts Dombey as unremittingly arrogant, proud, unfeeling and perpetually neglectful of his daughter. When they are finally reconciled, we can't help feeling that he gets far more than he deserves.

To redeem Dombey, Glover must somehow suggest that he isn't simply cold and heartless but is himself oppressed by a misplaced sense of duty. He has buried his own identity in Dombey and Son and the honour and reputation of the company has become his whole life. We must sense that he is not without feelings but has deliberately suppressed his love for Florence as a distraction from this sacred trust: ultimately he is as much a victim as she is.

The trouble is that Dicken's hasn't given Glover much to work with and neither he nor the director can flesh out intimations that are not fully realised in the book, so the reconciliation loses most of its poignancy.

He is not helped by an inadequate Florence. Florence is consumed by her desperate need to gain her father's affection, but here she seems too composed, so we never fully feel her conflict of loyalties over the growing antagonism between her beloved (but unloving) father and her affectionate stepmother. At times she seems almost as cold and distant as her father. If she had been ten years older, Lysette Anthony could easily have played Edith.

At first, I felt Paul Darrow's Carker might lift the series, but the part is under-written (the loss of the sub-plot concerning his disgraced elder brother doesn't help) and the development of his relationship with Edith is rushed through. In the book it is perplexing but here it seems utterly inexplicable.

As for Edith - could anyone make this strange character work?

Zelah Clarke's Susan Nipper isn't bad, but her compassion is too near the surface. We needed to see a bit more of the angry scolding and prickly belligerence under which she hides her warm heart.

James Cossins has Major Bagstock down to a 'T' but his role in the story needed better definition.

Shirley Cain fails to convince us that the devotion Miss Tox feels for Dombey is genuine. She might easily be the gold-digger that Mrs Chick accuses her of being.

Steve Fletcher was too old for Biler and he doesn't give us enough of his cringing and whining self-pity. When Carker threatens Biler he seems quite capable of sticking a knife in his employer's back.

Barnaby Buik didn't really capture the fey strangeness of young Paul Dombey. Everybody remarks on it ("an old-fashioned child") but his artless directness often seems like simple bad manners.

I could go on, but I think the real problem is how this production deals with the story. Characters are introduced without context and thrown away as it rushes through the plot.

For example, Mr Toots is given one short scene in Brighton, but we see nothing of Mr Blimber's academy so don't know who he is or why he is so infatuated with Florence. Is he really needed at all? Similarly, Major Bagstock (one of my favourite Dickens characters) just appears out of the blue. His prior relationship with Miss Tox is mentioned but not shown and his motives for attaching himself to Dombey are somewhat obscure.

The central love story dies of malnutrition. The grown-up Walter Gay only appears in two of the ten episodes.

Even at five hours it is difficult to do full justice to the richness of a Dickens novel, so focus is essential. You must know what to keep and what to discard and why. This production doesn't, so it actually feels very sketchy. Marginal characters and sub-plots are given too much prominence (Miss Tox and Mrs Chick?) so that essential story elements are starved of screen time. All the key incidents are included but are so pared down that it feels like a précis of the story rather than the story itself.

I think that Dombey is a difficult novel to dramatise. One of it greatest assets is the hallucinatory passage when Carker is fleeing from the wrathful Dombey, but this cannot be captured in a studio-bound production like this. More importantly, the central characters and their relationships are more ambiguous than is normal with Dickens and he never seems quite in control of the story. This leaves this production with a lot to do if it is to find a degree of coherence that I am not sure is in the book. For me, it doesn't achieve this.

At this point I am worried I might be making this production sound worse than it is. It is a bit disappointing, not disastrous. I look forward to reading some more appreciative reviews to get a better sense of balance. However, at this stage I can only record my initial responses and hope that somewhere in the pipeline there is a better Dombey and Son awaiting us.

In the meantime, when will we ever see a Barnaby Rudge?

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (I) (1920)

A good read

[6/10 · 12 August 2008]

I have long doubted that the silent cinema was ever really a mature dramatic medium in it own right. To me, it has always seemed like a transitional phase that was was inevitably destined to evolve into the 'talkie'. This 1920 movie merely confirms how quickly this started to become apparent.

This version of Jeckyll and Hyde is one of the best adaptations of Stevenson's book. Because it predates the Hays Office it could be much more open and honest about Jeckyll's motives than either the 1931 or 1940 versions (which both have their merits). It is also more effective in documenting Jeckyll's gradual slide into 'addiction'.

Barrymore's Hyde is the most creepily depraved I have yet seen. His first 'in camera' transformation is rightly applauded as a tour de force, despite some histrionics that might raise a few snickers amongst contemporary audiences unfamiliar with the acting conventions of earlier times.

There is much to admire and enjoy in this picture, which has been well documented in other reviews on this site, and I can only regret that it no longer seems to be available in a print that does it justice.

However, I cannot help noting that this movie would have been impossible to follow without the liberal use of title cards. I counted 27 in the first 15 minutes. That means that 30 - 40% of the initial running time is taken up with reading rather than viewing.

Once the basic situation has been set up and explained, the title cards become noticeably less frequent but, even so, all the major evolutions of the plot are announced rather than dramatised. Even when the movie uses some effective spider imagery to depict Hyde's increasing hold over Jeckyll, the symbolism would have been incomprehensible without the preceding title card.

Was this a failure of the movie or a failure of the medium?

To those people who would still try to convince me that silent cinema had developed a fully-fledged visual language of its own I would only say: "show me how this story could have been told effectively without all those title cards?"

To date, there has been no reply.

Vertigo (1958)

Not a masterpiece

[3/10 · 18 June 2008]

Vertigo divides audiences more than any other Hitchcock film.

For one critic it is "one of the four or five most profound and beautiful films the cinema has yet given us." A poll of 150 international critics has three times voted it the second greatest movie ever made (after Citizen Kane). However, many viewers find it a crashing bore.

I have sympathy for both camps.

Vertigo is the film in which Hitchcock comes closest to dealing directly with his own personal demons. The surface story makes no sense by itself and only works if you respond to the powerful undercurrents in its subtext. But Hitchcock still has to get the surface story right. It must fully embody the subtext and engage with its audience. For many people, it doesn't quite do either.

The prologue leaves Scottie hanging over an abyss. By not showing his rescue, Hitchcock effectively leaves him hanging there for the rest of the movie and his vertigo becomes a metaphor for his spiritual condition; he is poised between a longing for life and a longing for death. In rejecting the (real) life-affirming Midge and in his infatuation with the (illusory) death-obsessed Madeleine, he makes his fateful choice.

However, the prologue also supports a literal interpretation of his vertigo and the next scene doesn't really establish that Scottie's problems go deeper than his understandable fear of heights. We learn that he and Midge were once lovers but there is no follow through that explains why he broke off the relationship or why he becomes besotted with what we later learn is just a fantasy women.

The next scene, with Elster, is even more unfortunate and its defects reverberate throughout the movie. Elster could have been depicted as a sort of Mephistopheles, who sees Scottie's weakness and tempts him to his doom. In fact, he is thinly-sketched and is just a device for kicking off the story.

More crucially, he tells Scottie too much about Madeleine's obsession with Carlotta. This virtually forces Scottie into being the level-headed sceptic and makes his subsequent neurotic behaviour even more arbitrary and difficult to believe. It also undermines the ten-minute wordless sequence of Scottie trailing Madeleine around San Francisco.

If Elster has simply asked Scottie to investigate his wife's aimless wandering, we would have started out expecting something mundane (like an affair) only to be drawn into the much more intriguing mystery of her identification with Carlotta and her apparent sleepwalk towards suicide. As it is, the sequence merely confirms what Elster has already told us and often tries the patience of the audience. For many, the picture never recovers.

Moreover, because Scottie's character is under-developed (and Stewart's performance is unable to realise what the story implies) the rest of the movie can be viewed as the tale of an ordinary man who becomes infatuated with an attractive, troubled, woman whose life he has saved. The shadow of Carlotta then becomes an incidental detail and we get only a weak sense that Scottie's love is an unhealthy obsession. His eventual break-down is then under-motivated and seems imposed on the picture rather than being integral to its structure (a feeling reinforced by Hitchcock's decision to present it in an abstract, symbolic way).

I don't view Vertigo in this way, but I can sympathise with those that do.

With Scottie's breakdown, the picture reaches a second turning point. When Midge walks down the hospital corridor and the screen fades to black, it feels as if the movie is over. Of course it isn't and what happens next is crucial. Nothing up to that point makes any sense without it. But a second structural flaw immediately emerges. We are three-quarters of the way through the movie but only half-way through the story. Just when Vertigo needs time to re-engage our interest after the false ending it suddenly accelerates.

We get a montage that establishes Scottie's continuing obsession with Madeleine, then he spots Judy, follows her home and we are immediately plunged into a flashback that 'explains' the plot. This meeting needed much better preparation and the subsequent relationship needed more time to develop.

By revealing the plot twist so early, Hitchcock is inviting us to see how self-defeating Scottie's neurotic behaviour really is: in recreating Madeleine he is inevitably destroying his own illusions. But he rushes through this process. We have no time to get to know the real Judy before we are confronted with Scottie's bizarre plan to transform her. Then, at the very moment the transformation is complete, Scottie immediately spots the deception so the picture gallops to its climax and then slams to a halt.

As a good professional, Hitchcock was wary about letting any of his pictures run over two hours, but if he wanted to impose this discipline on himself, then he should have been more ruthless in pruning the first half of the story. In fact, he should have just accepted that this story couldn't be told effectively in two hours and have let it run on longer.

We rightly admire Hitchcock's movies for their great set pieces, but tend to overlook their fragile story sense and relatively weak dramatic structure. Mostly, that didn't matter, but in an ambitious picture like Vertigo it is a fatal flaw.

There is much more to Vertigo than its detractors acknowledge, but it is far from being the near-perfect masterpiece that its most fervent admirers would have us believe.

Talking Heads (1988)

Good fun

[9/10 · 4 May 2008]

Talking Heads is one of the minor glories of television, so I was surprised that only three IMDb readers have reviewed the series. Actually, these three reviews are all that is needed, because anyone reading them without having seen the series will be in no doubt about the quality of what awaits them. However, it did occur to me that they might not have fully captured how much fun these twelve mini-plays really are.

Each one is a thirty-minute, face-to-camera narration by a single character; usually told in six or seven separate scenes. The overall tone is one of subtle, understated humour. It is so dead-pan that you don't laugh out loud, but the 'slow-burn' humour creeps up on you and it is only when they are over that you realise how funny some of these stories were. However, most of them have an underlying sadness and some of them are absolutely heart-breaking.

Each episode is a master-class in the 'deceptive narrative'. The characters who are relating these stories are trying to conceal what is really happening in their lives and the audience has to piece together the real story from little hints that they inadvertently drop. It is worth the effort, because most of these seemingly mundane little vignettes have unexpectedly strong plots that can often veer off in surprising directions. Trust me: much more happens in these stories than you will initially expect. Buried in these apparently drab character studies you will find madness, perversion, incest, paedophilia and serial murder.

Alan Bennett's special skill is that he gives each of these characters an uncannily accurate voice. Often they are voices from his own childhood, full of the middle-class and lower middle-class idioms of the Nineteen Fifties. This may be a slight problem for some people. You probably have to be English and at least fifty-years-old to fully appreciate the creepy accuracy of the dialect, slang and speech patterns that bring some of these characters to life.

Nonetheless, I am sure that viewers of all ages and from all countries will enjoy the clever structure, surprising twists and unexpected poignancy of these sly tales (not to mention the great performances). Even if you cannot personally verify the precision of the language you will instinctively feel that it is right on the button.

Alan Bennet is undoubtedly a serious playwright and he has some challenging things to say, but he never forgets that his first duty is to entertain.

Give him a chance and I think he will entertain you.

Pathfinders in Space (1960–1961)

Nobody likes a smartass

[4/10 · 25 March 2008]

I have only the vaguest recollection of this children's SF serial, which I saw only once, when it was first shown in 1960. It may well have been broadcast live, so will never be available for viewing again.

I was about twelve when I saw it and remember being quite sniffy about its poor production values and pathetic special effects. I would probably have forgotten all about it long ago except for one memory that still gives me a twinge of embarrassment.

In one episode the 'pathfinders' land on the Moon. One of the kids is surprised that he (or she) cannot leap about like a gazelle in the moon's one-sixth gravity. The adult leader explains that the weight of their spacesuits counteracts the low gravity.

I was outraged by this suggestion and calculated that if the adult weighed about 180lbs, then on the moon he would weigh only 30lbs. That meant that the spacesuit's moon weight would have to be 150lbs, so its Earth weight was 900lbs. I indignantly exclaimed: "What is that spacesuit made of - solid gold!!"

I have no doubt I pointed this out to anybody who would listen.

Aren't you glad you didn't know me when I was twelve?

PS: Since posting this reminiscence, it occurs to me that it probably relates to the earlier Target Luna, rather than to this follow-up serial.

The Common Touch (1941)

Representative

[4/10 · 12 March 2008]

I was just flicking through TV channels when I stumbled on this 1941 movie just as it was about to start. I have always been intrigued by this little-known era of British film, so I decided to watch it for a while to see what it was like.

Notoriously, routine British movies of the Thirties were vastly inferior to routine American movies. The War gave a huge boost to the British film industry and by the late Forties that gap in quality had all but disappeared. Most post-War British movies may have been too parochial in their subject matter for European or American tastes but they looked thoroughly professional and technically equivalent to the Hollywood product. The Common Touch illustrates this catching-up process in action.

Whatever its defects, it looks good. It is noticeably well lit and photographed. The production design is generally effective and the sets are unexpectedly lavish and spacious. Its a quantum leap beyond many of the pokey, cramped-looking 'quota quickies' of just a couple of years before.

The performances are not particularly memorable. Geoffrey Hibbert's Henderson is suitably callow (with hidden steel) and when he has to assume a working class accent he handles it well enough. Joyce Howard and Greta Gynt just say their lines and avoid bumping into the furniture. They are competent, but when you have said that you have said everything. It is no surprise that none of the leads ever became stars.

However, we do get introduced to the plethora of good character actors that were available at the time and it is they that carry the weight of the movie. Of course, the middle class characters are all terribly 'British' with plummy accents that might grate on our ears today and the working class characters are a stage school fantasy of the 'salt of the Earth' deserving poor, but those were the conventions of the time and there is no point in castigating this movie for not having the sensibility of movies made twenty years later.

As with so many British films of the Forties and Fifties, my main reservation concerns the material. British film-makers may have mastered the technology of cinema but were still not much good at storytelling. Barbara Emary's screenplay is only too typical of the era.

The story is just sentimental wish-fulfilment, but its 'we are all in it together' ethos probably struck a chord with audiences during the War. Young Henderson leaves school to take over his father's company and to the chagrin of the general manager, Cartwright, is not prepared to be a mere figurehead. He learns of a plan to demolish a part of Covent Garden that includes 'Charlie's Place' - a refuge for the homeless poor. Suspicious of Cartwright's motives, he decides to investigate by pretending to be a down-and-out and checking himself into Charlie's Place where he becomes involved in the lives of the other residents. Eventually he is able to defeat Cartwright's plans and ensure that Charlie's Place will be retained as part of his company's regeneration of the area.

It is a simple enough story and it is hard to see why it took 104 minutes to tell. More importantly, its various elements are quite poorly integrated.

For example, Henderson is assisted by an old school friend, but his only role in the picture is to give Henderson someone to talk to. This friend is briefly smitten with a nightclub singer, but they hardly interact and she is in love with another character that plays no other part in the story. The friend's sister is introduced early on but disappears for long stretches of the movie and is also marginal to the plot. Henderson falls in love with her, but this development occurs far too late in the movie to affect anything that happens. I guess all movies of the time had to have a love interest, but this one is especially perfunctory.

Another of Henderson's accomplices is a down-at-heel lawyer, known as Lincoln's Inn, but in the end he has no real part in thwarting Cartwright. Indeed, neither does Henderson! Cartwright is essentially defeated by another marginal character in a somewhat contrived plot development that pops up out of nowhere, like a rabbit being pulled out of a hat. In fact, it becomes obvious that the screenwriter has never worked out exactly what Cartwright's plan is and her attempts to hide this become faintly risible.

Similarly, most of the characters that hang around Charlie's Place are just 'colour' and never impinge on the actual story. Several of them seem to have fallen from affluence, including Lincoln's Inn and an ex-concert pianist, but the reasons for their decline are never disclosed. None are alcoholics.

The movie is also punctuated by musical interludes that are never integrated into the drama and further slow down its somewhat leisurely development. I enjoyed Ian Maclaren's virtuoso harmonica playing, but the nightclub numbers seemed rather feeble to me (although they might appeal to aficionados of that musical era). As a dancer, Greta Gynt was no Ginger Rogers.

All in all, it is a rather lame story, poorly structured, full of redundant characters and padded with sub-plots that mostly just dribble into sand. Nonetheless, having intended to watch it for only twenty minutes or so, I stuck with it to the end. It must have had something.

The Common Touch is of undoubted historical interest as a representative artifact of the British film industry during a now-obscure, but important, period of rapid transition.

However, I find it hard to recommend it on any other basis.

Rope (1948)

Misconceived

[4/10 · 23 January 2008]

Rope is generally regarded as one of Hitchcock's failures, but many reviewers on this site have attempted to rescue its reputation. I find their arguments interesting but not convincing. There is too much wrong with this picture. The source material is weak, the screenplay is inadequate, the casting is hopeless and Hitchcock's technical experiment is misconceived.

I have never seen it, but Hamilton's play probably ran about two hours. Hitchcock has trimmed it to a brisk 75 minutes. However, this undermines his decision to 'preserve the unities', because the whole party scene is now unrealistically abbreviated. It also means that information is given in such a rush that very little of the sub-text is actually on screen.

The play is based on a classic 'folie a deux', where two people form a bond against the rest of the world and egg each other on to do something that neither would have done alone. In this case, the killers' antagonism is partly rooted in their sense of rejection and isolation as homosexuals in a censorious society.

It is also about a schoolteacher's moral crisis as he comes to realise that his cynically playful philosophical speculations have been taken seriously, with tragic results.

However, by beginning the story with the murder the actual relationship between Brandon and Phillip is never really explored and the homosexual undertones are so deeply buried as to be effectively non-existent. Instead, the relationship and its consequences have to be explained retrospectively though stolidly expository dialogue. Similarly, Rupert's background, character and former relationship with the killers is hardly touched on and he has barely expounded his cynical views when he is forced to recant them.

The focus of the story, therefore, shifts from the characters and their relationships to Rupert's suspicions about what has happened. Consequently, the suspense is mostly to do with whether the killers can get through the evening without anyone discovering the body in the trunk.

In short: the movie is interested in the inherent suspense of the situation, rather than in how that situation came about, or how it affects the people involved.

This would be OK, except that much of suspense lies in the verbal duels between Rupert and Brandon, but they are not very well written. The dialogue is generally very flat and prosaic. There is a lot of it, but it is strictly functional and there is scarcely a line that really sparkles with wit or menace. As a result we get no sense that Rupert is an aloof armchair philosopher who enjoys outraging convention with his wild free-thinking, or that Brandon is a clever, bitter psychopath. A psychopath, yes: but clever?

This is not helped by the casting.

Jimmy Stewart was a competent actor, but clearly miscast. He is too folksy to play a character like Rupert. We believe his shocked denunciation of Brandon at the end, but not his earlier pseudo-Nietzchean speculations. The part had been turned down by Cary Grant (who would also have been a disaster) and should probably have been offered to someone like Ray Milland, Frederick March, James Mason or George Sanders.

At 30, John Dall seems too old for Brandon. He comes across as arrogant and rather stupid. The screenplay saddles him with an irritating stutter which he uses throughout. He would have fared better if someone had simply told him to use it more sparingly (only when under pressure) but nobody did.

Farley Granger was a limited actor and it shows. He plays Phillip all on the same note and his continual panic is both wearing and implausible. We never believe in his relationship with Brandon because it has effectively broken down by the time the movie begins. How he came to acquiesce in Brandon's murder plan is a profound mystery. We can only speculate how things might have turned out if Montgomery Clift had accepted either of the two main parts.

Nobody else registers.

To make these performances work, despite the miscasting and the inadequacies of the screenplay, Hitchcock needed to spend a lot of time with the actors, but his attention was elsewhere.

This was not the first play he had shot. In the early Thirties, he had filmed Juno and the Paycock in a very conventional way. Here he wanted to do something different: to shoot it in 'real time' with a single camera and no editing. He could have elected to have his camera tracking up and down outside the set, shooting through the 'forth wall' and simply recording the actors, but that is not how he liked to work. At heart, Hitchcock always remained a silent movie maker. He liked to tell a story visually and manipulate the audience's response through his choice of lenses, camera angles, framing and lighting of shots, tracking, panning and editing.

In Rope he wanted to discard editing but retain everything else. This would have been feasible if he had access to a Steadicam, but he didn't. What he had instead was a massive Technicolor camera dollying through the set in eight or nine minute takes. This was a huge logistical challenge that occupied all of Hitchcock's attention and energy. He managed to achieve some striking and revealing set-ups, but the camera has to plod ponderously from one to the other so that the overall pacing is noticeably draggy.

Meanwhile, his actors are left struggling with their inappropriate and underwritten parts, trying to give engrossing performances while stepping over cables and watching an army of stage hands pull the set apart in front of Hitchcock's lumbering Technicolor juggernaut.

Rope usually gets a mention in any overview of Hitchcock's work on the basis that it is an interesting experiment. In fact, it is an uninteresting experiment. There are great Hitchcock pictures, good ones and not-so-good ones, but he only made a handful of boring movies.

Rope is one of them.

Phantom from Space (1953)

Curiouser and curiouser

[5/10 · 14 January 2008]

This is a minor movie, but not without interest.

The idea of having the 'space invader' invisible for most of the time is so manifestly a cost-saving measure that you cannot help smiling at the audacity of the producers. However, the few invisibility effects that there are in the picture are not bad for its budget level. I can view this movie with some fondness, but I have to accept that it is probably very hard going for any but the most avid fans of Fifties' SF.

There is little that I can add to the other reviews on this site, but there is one issue I do want to raise.

I purchased it on a budget DVD in a mediocre print that makes it difficult to properly evaluate. However, there is one aspect of the DVD version for which I am unable to account. When dark objects move across a light background, there is very noticeable bleed-through so that they become transparent. Similarly, when characters are moving quickly, the image becomes very hazy and the movement somewhat jerky. In fact, the image breaks up and parts of the people simply disappear. I checked this by freezing the picture.

These problems are characteristic of early TV technology and the picture looks very much like low resolution CCTV footage, but I have never heard of them in connection with film, however poor the film stock. It set me wondering. Was this movie originally shot on video and transferred to film for the theatrical release? It seemed a plausible explanation, but from what I can determine, there were no viable video systems available that early and the ones that did exist were so expensive and cumbersome that no low-rent movie producer could have afforded to use them. In any case, there are no detectable scan lines.

I can only assume that this artifact is a consequence of some cheap DVD transcription system being used, but it is something I have never seen on any other DVD before or since.

Curious!

PS: I have now discovered an old copy of this movie which I taped off the TV. It is so degraded that it does not really play (the picture jumps all over the place) but as far as I can determine, the artifacts I described above do not appear. The problem is definitely with the DVD transcripion.

Cult of the Cobra (1955)

The sincerest form of flattery

[3/10 · 22 November 2007]

Cult of the Cobra is now available on DVD in a pristine print that does full justice to whatever merits it has as a movie. Unfortunately, that is not saying much.

It has a competent cast of second-rankers that acquit themselves as well as could be expected under the circumstances. It is efficiently directed, entirely on sound stages and standing sets on the studio backlot. It looks OK, but is ponderously over-plotted and at a scant 80 minutes it is still heavily padded.

For example, the double cobra attack on the first of the GIs was surely one attack too many.

The business about Julia choosing to marry Pete rather than Tom never amounts to anything. Tom immediately falls in love with Lisa and she never has any reason to be jealous of Julia (nor is she).

Julia's 'feminine intuition' is introduced as if it is going to lead to an important plot development, but it doesn't. Similarly, Pete's investigation into cobra cults and the suspicion that briefly falls on Tom serve no purpose other than to fill up screen time.

These are just symptoms of the underlying problem. The movie is structured like a mystery but it isn't. As soon as the curse is pronounced we know exactly where the story is heading, so the characters are left painstakingly uncovering what we already know.

The ending is particularly lame. Julia is menaced purely by accident. Lisa has no reason to want to kill her - she just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. When Tom turns up in the nick of time to save her, it is not even clear whether she was threatened at all. He then simply disposes of the cobra in the way any of the previous victims might have done.

It is such an inconsequential little pipsqueak of a story that I found myself wondering how on earth it had been pitched to the studio heads. Then it occurred to me. Someone said: "Those Val Lewton movies were very successful over at RKO, so why don't we make one like that?"

Cult of the Cobra is clearly modelled on Cat People: mysterious, troubled, shape-shifting woman falls in love with the hero, is apparently frigid, kills people, arouses the suspicions of the hero's woman friend and dies at the end. But 'modelled on' doesn't mean 'as good as' - by a wide margin. It copies, but doesn't understand what it is copying.

It is obviously trying for the low-key, suggestive Lewton style, but this approach doesn't follow through into the story. Lisa is no Irene. She is meant to be strange and mysterious but there is no mystery about her. We get a glimpse of her after the first attack in Asia, so immediately recognise her when she turns up in New York. There is never any doubt about her purpose. Neither is there any ambiguity about whether of not she actually turns into a snake.

Then again, during her nocturnal prowling we get, not one, but two attempts at 'buses'. Neither come off, because the director doesn't understand what makes a 'bus' work and, in any case, they happen to the stalker, not the person being stalked.

These faint echoes of Cat People give Cult of the Cobra whatever small distinction it might have, but they only draw attention to the yawning gulf between the original and the imitation.

Plagiarism may be the sincerest form of flattery, but I doubt if Lewton or Tourneur were particularly flattered when this tepid little time-passer came out.