Change Your Image
dan-filson-928-874987
Reviews
The Reckoning (1970)
Bravura performance by Nicol Williamson, and a great Jack Gold ensemble film
I disagree with the first reviewer - this is a bravura performance by Nicol Williamson and much better than 'Get Carter'. As an indication of how much I respected this film, my father was in the film industry in London at the time and I was in Manchester as a student. I saw the film poorly advertised in a small cinema and felt it was wholly spoiled by the poor performance of the film's marketing and distributors. So much so that on leaving the cinema I telephoned my father at once from a call box and told him how highly I rated it. He may have been startled to hear from me as I was the typical uncommunicative student, never writing home.
The film not only has Williamson but also Rachel Roberts giving a good performance, and the ensemble cast does some fine work - there is a brilliant mocking of life in a Virginia Water type of suburbia where all have quality cars in their drives and trite conversation over canapés. It is critical in its style of the mass demolition of the Liverpool slums and is almost elegiac at what is lost thereby, much in the same way as was The Likely Lads TV series. 'Get Carter' is more vulgar, with Michael Caine producing shotguns and leaving bodies about. Williamson is much more earthy - there is a brutal kicking in the film which really makes you wince.
It's also, in its way, a tribute to a kind of Brendan Behan Irishness that was being squeezed out of Britain's cities - the hard-working, hard-living heavy-drinking workers who actually built things with their muscles as opposed to the prissy types who never dirtied their hands. This is why the Williamson character is such an outcast in his smooth London corporate job (in the heart of a City of London that would over the next 15 years also be transformed) but nonetheless effective in his own rough and ready blunt way.
One superb moment is at the end of the film when Williamson driving his Jaguar at breakneck speed has jumped a Stop sign at a roadworks and is racing down a single track sure that oncoming traffic must be starting his way shortly. He just gets away with it, at the expense of a few traffic cones and similar, and one of those in the car says words to the effect "If you can get away with that, you can get away with anything". As he does (I won't spoil the plot by saying more). This is not a sanitized look at Liverpool but a cold stare. Jack Gold made a great film here and it deserved better of its distributors who did not have faith in the product.
Amnesia: The James Brighton Enigma (2005)
There's paint drying, and there's paint drying...
Amnesiac with minimal personal memory shows up in Montreal, with just knowledge of being gay, a name James Brighton and a chit of paper with a town name and a phone number, which doesn't check out. Months pass. At times I felt I was watching paint drying and just yearned, oh how I yearned, for him to hurry up and recover his memory. But the intrigue continued as a new identity for him showed up - where had these folk been all these months, why hadn't they reported him missing, were they themselves for real? It was all a puzzle. Common sense told me the guy had suffered some mental trauma, obviously not a rape to himself as even stupid doctors would pick that up. So what was it? The flashbacks suggested abduction. Exorcism? I watched on. That's the point of this film, it hooks you in and you keep watching.
But in the end the flaw of the film is that the hero is such a blank canvas you ultimately don't really care who he is. Which is a shame, as he is not lacking in some good looks.
La vingt-cinquième heure (1967)
A film that will live in your memory for decades
It says something that other reviewers are recalling this film after 30 or more years. It's like that with me too. Goodness knows how long ago I saw this, but it has haunted me for years.
This film alone marks Anthony Quinn out as a truly great film actor. Never mind Zorba the Greek - all he did in that was be exuberant. Here his face carries complexities of suffering, confusion and other emotions.
In this film he plays the little man buffeted by forces not only beyond his control but beyond his imagination, an eternal victim, one of the flotsam and jetsam of war. Never mind the details, if this film makes you think, it will be about displaced persons, chaos, disruption of lives, and the triumph of the human spirit. I did not realise that Michael Redgrave was even in this film until reading the credits today - never mind who plays other parts, it is Quinn, the screenplay and the direction that win the Oscar for me.