David Peace

The novelist David Peace, who I've never read and until about two months ago had never heard of, is the man of the moment. His book about Brian Clough's 44 days at Leeds United has been turned into a film, The Damned United. The most interesting article I've seen so far is an interview with Michael Sheen in Time Out. What excites me most is to see what the director Tom Hooper has done with it - after John Adams, one of the finest pieces of work I've seen, TV or film, in recent years, The Knowledge expects great things.

Meanwhile his Red Riding books have been adapted by Channel 4 into a trilogy of films which are gaining lots of acclaim. I've just finished catching up with the first one, Nineteen Seventy Four. The acting was very fine, the writing intelligent and its muted colours created a certain atmosphere that captured a particular perception of the 1970s (although I could have done with a few less 'interesting' shots and moody lighting). What I thought mostly though was: 'but surely this is Chinatown?!'. Okay not quite - they're two very distinct works. But there are definite similarities; Andrew Garfield's journalist protagonist as against Jack Nicholson's Jake Gittes; Rebecca Hall's Paula compared to Faye Dunaway's Evelyn Mulray; the theme of the problems of individuals being linked to widespread corruption all seemed very familiar; and Sean Bean's businessman John Dawson could be John Huston's Noah Cross, even down to his penchant for young girls. Meanwhile 'Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown' becomes 'This is the North. We do we want here!'. Having said all this, it wasn't a patch on Chinatown (1974).

Art and Life 2

Another essay that looks at this idea.

Art and Life

I was 21 and living in Cornwall. One night we made the trip from Falmouth to Truro to go to the cinema. We missed the start of the film and I had a miserable cold. It was an inauspicious start to say the least. But the film was The Truman Show (1998) and at the end of it I was convinced as I have ever been that I had just seen a masterpiece.

In the ten plus years since it was released it has, if anything, become deeper and more resonant. This was, remember, a few years before Big Brother. As happens so often The Truman Show was part of a trend of films that came out of Hollywood at the time; The Game (1997) and Edtv (1999) also looked at the theme of an individual being constantly watched and whose actions are being controlled by external forces. The subtext of this is the metaphor of cinema; how a writer and director dictate the movements of protagonists, how editing subtly changes the meaning of events and how lighting and photography can alter mood purely through the way things look.

But only The Truman Show (and considering that Edtv is actually about a man having his life filmed by a video crew, it's strange that it is so light on this) begins to hint at the implications which would become apparent with the rise of the reality television genre. Peter Weir's film suggested how we the audience would turn real life into soap opera and how, like a soap opera, our interest would be fickle and changeable.

In the end the film focussed on those creating the story behind Truman's (Jim Carrey) life and didn't quite realise how he could become like the reality TV contestant Jade Goody who, for non UK readers, has moved from a figure of fun and derision to aspirational status symbol to pariah and now with the news of her terminal cancer, a latterday saint. I feel uncomfortable comparing Goody's real pain to fiction, but as a member of the audience which has watched and followed her journey, I am complicit in creating (and encouraging) the Big Brother industry and media creation of her. The article that most sums up my feelings is by the sports journalist Martin Samuel, who may just be one of the best writers around.

Changing Your Mind

Jonathan Rosenbaum has republished his original review of Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct (1992) to show his surpise at how much he disliked the film when it came out. He's now a fan (indeed in his book Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons he listed it in his 1,000 favourites) and it raises the interesting topic of a critic changing his or her mind.

Pauline Kael famously never did (largely because she - also famously - rarely saw a film more than once), David Thomson believes it's why rewatching films is so worthwhile and often does. Probably one of the most famous examples is Joseph Morgenstern who wrote Newsweek's review of Bonnie and Clyde. In the August 25 1997 edition of the Los Angeles Times he explains what happened next:

'I think I subconsciously sensed that I’d missed something. When we went out on Saturday and my wife asked what movie I wanted to see, I said “Bonnie and Clyde.” The audience just went wild, and the cold sweat started forming on my neck. I knew I’d blown it.

On Monday morning, I went into Newsweek and wrote a six-column review. It began with a description of the previous review, and then I said, “I am sorry to say I consider that review grossly unfair and regrettably inaccurate. I am sorrier to say I wrote it.”

That night I met Pauline Kael at a Chinese restaurant and she said, “I read your review and you really blew it.” And all I could say was, “Wait until you see the one next week.”'

A Douglas Sirk steak with extra mash

Channel 4 has just shown two Douglas Sirk films Magnificent Obsession (1954) and Imitation of Life (1939), both of which were remakes of John M. Stahl films. I'm looking forward to catching up with them. Meanwhile there is a new book out about the making of Imitation of Life.

Watching (and reading) habits

Read this. And then read Andrew Sullivan every day. You probably do anyway. Most of the time it's nothing to do with films - just brilliance. As the P.A. Announcer in MASH would say, 'That is all.'

Some meditations on Cinematic Space

My previous posts lead on to some thoughts about cinematic space. In particular the way films create – for the want of a better phrase – ‘safe space’, in the same way that ‘home’ is a ‘safe space’ or ‘refuge’ is; a place of comfort, a feeling of not wanting to leave, of being happy within certain confines. A psychological trick that we use as human beings is to go to a ‘happy place’ in our heads at times of distress or unhappiness, a memory of a place and time that was particularly special in our lives. In this, the cinema is – as it is so often – like memory:

I am child, four or five, attending nursery, or returning to it after some time out. It is that time of day when the staff seem to abandon hopes of control and surrender to the chaos and mayhem. I and a group of other children find an alcove, a short corridor with a dead end. We build a barricade of sorts out of soft cushions and plastic mattresses which encloses us in. We decide to defend and protect this space from the others. They come and try to tear down our walls. Eventually they succeed. But for a time they don’t and in that time there is a sense of comfort and warmth and at oneness with the world. Yet there is also excitement and fascination and I don’t want this moment to end yet I know it must.

In film there are often sequences we choose to watch over and over again, often as opposed to the films themselves in their entirety. David Thomson claims to regularly view a dance of Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire in Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940), a truly glorious piece of choreography set to Cole Porter’s ‘Begin the Beguine’ on a black marble floor, which partially mirrors the two dancers dressed in white, all set against a backdrop of black and white lights, almost a night sky.






Another sequence that I cannot forget and that Thomson looked at in an essay for the Spring 1980 edition of Sight and Sound is Humphrey Bogart’s visit to the Acme Bookshop in The Big Sleep(1946): ‘We are in paradise, a version of Los Angeles with book stores on either side of the street. Is there any surer trace of William Faulkner’s involvement on The Big Sleep than the dreamy city being so book-ended, or book stores harbouring sharp honeys who can persuade the bookworm that he is on the verge of racy action whenever he browses among dry pages?’





I am the age I am now. It is last year.. I am walking down Portobello Road towards the market on a Saturday afternoon. It starts to rain and put up my very flimsy umbrella which may break at any time. Then I come to the market stalls which are under the Westway, a concrete flyover overhead which is the motorway into Central London. The space under the Westway is packed full of people sheltering from the rain. I make my way through and take a spot at a stall selling discount CDs and DVDs and flick through the boxes. This is partly to kill time while the rain stops, but also to find a bargain. The owner of the stall plays music, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Nina Simone and then Glen Miller. There is almost a party atmosphere as the sound echoes into the space under the flyover; a kind of communal joy as everyone exalts being in the dry. There is a short burst as the rain gets heavier and the mood is heavy with a nostalgic war on the home front like spirit. A girl half dances while walking past

Then there is John Boorman’s Hope and Glory (1987), a semi autobiographical story of a young boy (Sebastian Rice Edwards) growing up in South London during World War II works as a series of these kinds of memories rather than any kind of coherent whole. Boorman’s alter ego, Bill, runs over playgrounds of houses left derelict by the blitz, catches hundreds of fish when a German plane drops a bomb in the river and discovers how to bowl the perfect googly. Meanwhile Bill’s friends and family sit around the piano and talk about how much better life is now that war is on and his teenage sister Dawn (Sammi Davis) dances joyfully around the house (ironically they’re all singing ‘Begin the Beguine’ – maybe it’s something about that song!). In the most wondrous moment of the film a barrage balloon comes lose from its ropes and floats across the rooftops like a huge great friendly lumbering elephant in the sky (Dawn (Sammi Davis): He just got fed up with all the other boring old barrage balloons and decided it was time to have
some fun!) only to be shot down by the Home Guard.

As David Bordwell wrote in his blog a few months ago, the true cinephile would ‘watch damn near anything looking for a moment’s worth of magic’.

Selective Memory

My recent reflections on Devil’s Daughter started a train of thought which inevitably led to the subject of ‘lost films’. This is a game that film buffs play quite often, with Orson Welles playing a starring role; the altered ending of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), the tantalising fragments of Don Quixote and The Merchant of Venice, the endless will they-won’t they saga over the release of The Other Side of the Wind (1972 – for what it’s worth!). Meanwhile there is Erich Von Stroheim’s vision for Greed (1924), originally lasting ten hours, reduced to four and then coming in, at Irving Thalberg’s insistence, at two hours and twenty minutes. Honourable mentions should also be given to Jerry Lewis’s unreleased holocaust drama The Day the Clown Cried (1972) and to Sam Peckinpah, whose work continues to show up in different director’s cuts.

I also thought about the films we remember from childhood but then later can’t identify. For years I had flashbacks about an Abbott and Costello film in which the duo were bus drivers. I could see them driving the bus into the sea and then my selective memory cut to them being carried away in a storm and left marooned on a desert island. A search through the film guides brought nothing up, but the internet (of course!) revealed this to be Pardon My Sarong, in which after the bus crashes into the water the pair end up working for a playboy on his yacht and then get shipwrecked. I think I prefer the earlier version! Meanwhile I’m haunted by a film about a married woman who gets caught up with a mysterious stranger. Black and white, it feels like it came out of the 1950s. The story is told in flashbacks and voice over and with a hypnotic intensity. Was it an early TV film, a B Movie, a major release? Who knows? Any suggestions welcome!

Literary films and B Movie masterpieces

Two articles in the Guardian pick up on a couple of recent posts. Salman Rushdie writes more fully about the art of adapting books into films and, despite his complete lack of a sense of humour, it is a fascinating piece. Meanwhile John Patterson looks at the studios that made the likes of Gun Crazy, although one somehow suspects Rushdie turning his nose up!

A trip through the archives...

I've spent part of the evening playing a game of 'what was on release' on this day x number of years ago and looking through the archives of the New York Times. Exactly sixty years ago to the day the review was of a French film, Devil's Daughter, which had been released in 1945, but only got to the United States a few years later. I can find very little real trace of this movie on the web. The director Maurice Saurel gets an imdb page for being a production manager! It shows the fragility of the medium; not just the actual physical decay of celluloid, although that danger is very real, but how easily hundreds of films fade from our collective memory. In contrast here is the review of a comedy which was released fifty years ago next month and, to slightly contradict its famous final line, may be one of the most 'perfect' ever made.

Scoop 3?...God I hope not!

Woody Allen is to make a third film in London featuring Freida Pinto from Slumdog Millionaire, which strangely seems to bring much of what I've been blogging about recently together. I intend to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona in the next couple of weeks and looking forward to it, but Woody in London only brings about a shudder these days. Have I mentioned how bad Scoop is?! Meanwhile The Guardian is asking whether Inglourious Basterds will be the worst film ever made!

'Danny Boyle dancing like Tigger?'

This is what Salmon Rushdie really meant about Slumdog Millionaire, although the actual comments about the film piling ‘impossibility on impossibility’ and his criticisms of the original book Q&A aren’t that far off. Meanwhile The Daily Show has a wicked response to Hugh Jackman replacing Jon Stewart as the host of the Oscars.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

81st Academy Awards

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Funny Political News
Joke of the Day

Cue Colin Welland...

And sometimes Oscar gets it absolutely right. This is punch-your-fist-in-the-air time - the right film at the right time winning the awards it deserves. No, Slumdog Millionaire isn't the greatest film ever made. It doesn't really stand up even against No Country for Old Men or There will be Blood from last year. But it does, as plenty of the commentators have been saying this morning, sum up the moment in a way that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button just can't. You see what I mean though - how exciting it all is! These contests between films are like sporting bouts, with fascinating duels - Raging Bull v Ordinary People (1980), Forrest Gump v Pulp Fiction (1994), Crash v Brokeback Mountain (2004) - or just complete knockouts like Ben Hur (1959) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). Sometimes you even cheer!

Inevitable, Ubiquitous...Glorious!

I haven't posted much about the Oscars during this period, largely because everybody else is and there didn't seem much to add. I will say this though: I'm excited about them and I'm looking forward to the results.

There is a certain type of critic, you see - a type that, for the most part, The Knowledge loves reading, for their passion, intellect and analysis, but who is either dismissive or gets agitated about 'the Academy' and their awards. The argument goes that the films honoured are the same old Hollywood product, that the variety and depth of world cinema is not recognised and that the entertainment industry is far too obsessed with them. Some or all of this is true.

And completely misses the point. The reality of the matter is that unless you're Paul Schrader and saw no films until a certain point in your life and your first experiences were of Dreyer, Bresson and Ozu, as a cinefile, your love grew out of movie, out of star systems and glamour and hackneyed dialogue and colour and fun. I think to deny this part of it is to lack a sense of humour and to go without many of the pleasures.

For we are many...

Yes, this is sometimes how it feels.

Grail music

One of the theses of Mark Cousins's excellent book The Story of Film is about how filmmakers influence each other. This may seem obvious, but Cousins reveals that this can happen in a very direct way; so, for example, the crane shot which climbs up an office block and entres a window and pans across several desks to get to a particular one in King Vidor's The Crowd (1928) is repeated in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) and Orson Welles's The Trial (1962).

It occurs to me that this takes place in all aspects of the business, from the direction and cinematography to the script writing process and scoring of a movie. This struck me today while watching The Knights of the Round Table (1953). The film starring Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner is almost completely without merit. But the music by Miklós Rózsa has, to my ears, similarities of tone and mood in the more melancholy moments of John Williams's score for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). I suspect that Steven Spielberg suggested Williams think of the sword and sandal epics of the 1950s and 60s when composing it and it is possible that he had this context in mind. Of course both films make use of the Holy Grail legend which could be why my brain has made the link. We know that Williams sometimes plays Rózsa's theme from Ben Hur (1959) at his concerts and I would love to know just how much of an influence the Hungarian has been.

B Movie heroes

BFI Southbank are showing Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy next month. It got me thinking about B Movie and second feature directors who, in their own way, have become heroes. So far the list includes Alfred E. Green, William Clemens, Stuart Heisler, Andre De Toth, Roy William Neill, and of course Mr Detour himself, Edgar J. Ulmer. I'll add more later

Blowin' in the Wind

I don't normally point people in the direction of adverts, but this is a bit special. If you want to know what it takes to get Bob Dylan to let a company use one of his signature tunes, here is the answer.

Movie Location Location

The farmhouse in Cumbria used in Withnail and I (1987) - or Uncle Monty's Cottage - is to be saved for posterity. The new owner is hoping that it'll become a site of pilgramage for fans of the film, which has a number of similar locations in the area. I had a rueful smile at the story because I'm particularly prone to movie tourism. Here are a few of the ones that I've been to (or tried to go to!):

• The square of Campo San Barnaba in Venice is where Katherine Hepburn fell into the canal in David Lean's Summer Madness (1955) and also (and given Spielberg's reverence of Lean hardly surprising) where the library that leads into the catacombs is set in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
  
  
• Sicily is synonymous with The Godfather trilogy, but it's also the sett of Luchino Visconti's The Leopard (1963) - a valiant attempt to get inside Palazzo Valguarnera Gangi where the ballroom scene was filmed failed!
  
  
  
  
• I've never seen The Wackiest Ship in the Army (1960) starring Jack Lemmon, but did randomly come across the boat on which the film is based in Picton in New Zealand. The Echo which was used by the US Army as a supply ship in World War II has until recently been used as a cafe and bar, although when I was there the owners were trying to sell it off.
  
  
• Has one city ever been quite so associated with a film? Vienna is for me, now and forever, Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) and no, not the giant ferris wheel, but number 8 Schreyvogelgasse where Harry Lime (Orson Welles) emerges from the shadows in a doorway.
  
  
• There are too many other places to mention, but above all I suppose is New York which I've mentioned before. Los Angeles notwithstanding, if ever a place was designed for cinema to be made, this is it.
  
  

'No fuss. No excitement. This is the Copa!'

When I was student we once watched a screening of Now Voyager (1942) directed by Irving Rapper and starring Bette Davis, Claude Rains and Paul Henreid. It tells the story of a woman traumatised by living with her mother who, on the advice of a psychiatrist, goes on a cruise and finds love. The woman is Davis and the love interest is Henreid. The line I remember, apart from the obvious ('Jerry, don't ask for the moon. We have the stars!'), is as the boat nears to Rio de Janeiro and Henreid looks over the side and declares: 'Copacabana - there's music in the word!' The audience, familiar with a certain Barry Manilow song, fell apart.

As well as that song (and Manilow's subsequent musical) and a place in Brazil, Copacabana is also a nightclub in New York where Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis used to perform and the title of a 1947 film starring Groucho Marx and Carmen Miranda. Groucho is the agent and sometime romantic partner of Miranda trying to get her a gig at a club called the...yes, you've guessed it! Eventually he comes up with a scheme where she has to pretend to be two performers - herself and Mademoiselle Fifi, a French singer with an Arabian Nights like veil on. It's all a bit half hearted really - Groucho has the lines, but seems lost without his brothers, while Miranda only livens up once that strange jewel encrusted fruit salad hat of hers is on and the music is playing.

What strikes you is that the film is about people desperate to get into show business, with song lyrics that mention Leo McCarey and Claudette Colbert and Groucho's comments on how a boss and his secretary are supposed to fall in love during a picture. It reminds you that self referentiality is as old as movies and certainly didn't begin with Tarantino. It's a pity Copacabana isn't better than it is; there is something about the word that makes you agree with Paul Henreid - music and possibly something of the magic of the cinema too.

William Bendix

How to describe the Hollywood actor William Bendix (1906-1964)? Well, look at his face. He has a pug nose, slightly shifty eyes and a thick build. He had one of the best known ‘Brooklyn’ accents in the business (all the more bizarre since he was apparently from Manhattan) with a wonderful nasal quality to his voice that was perfect for playing tough guys, honest to goodness hard working Joes, or dopes. For Americans he’s probably better known for starring in The Babe Ruth Story (1948) or playing Chester A. Riley in The Life of Riley on television in the 1950s - in 2004 he was named in a list of top fifty TV dads of all time.

The Knowledge prefers to think of him as the soldiers he plays in Wake Island (1942) and A Bell for Adano (1945), his heavies in The Dark Corner and The Blue Dahlia (both 1946) and as Sherrif in Cover Up (1949). There’s also his Gus Smith, an injured sailor amongst the survivors on Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944). To my mind, Bendix always added a touch of class to any film he was in, able to show the complexity behind the no nonsense 'everyman'.

He could move from humour and good-naturedness to menace with complete ease. Take Cover Up where his Sheriff Larry Best appears to be sinister, but might be one of the good guys. Or if you can (and you really should!) look at The Big Steal as his Captain Vincent Blake chases Lieutenant Duke Halliday (Robert Mitchum) into Mexico over the matter of some stolen army money. Watch how Bendix goes from being a physical threat to a slapstick doofus and back to physical threat. It’s masterly.

Mainly though there was that voice – Brooklyn was never the same again!

Reports of the Cinema's death...

…continue to abound. One of the most interesting is in the February 2009 issue of Standpoint, in a dialogue between the magazine’s critic Peter Whittle, editor Daniel Johnson and the one and only Philip French, from the Observer. It’s a fascinating discussion, although I’m not sure Whittle and I have much common ground in terms of movies or politics!

British Films 3: Saloon Bar

Ostensibly this atmospheric little 1940 number from director Walter Forde and starring Gordon Harker and Mervyn Johns is a murder mystery: a group of regulars in a London pub spend the night trying to work out who really killed an elderly woman and prevent the hanging of an innocent mechanic, engaged to one of the barmaids, the next morning. But the plot is neither here nor there, a rather unconvincing stringing together of clues that emerge throughout the evening.

Instead the film is about supping a light ale or seven, the bloke giving you a tip on the 2.30 at Newmarket, putting in for the Christmas club fund, and finding yourself in a lock-in after closing time. In short, it's about class and to be specific the working class in - what is to my eyes - South London. As someone from the area and with family there, the accuracy of detail is almost painful. These are salt of the earth types, who stick by their guns and woe betide anyone who crosses them. This line from Doris, the barmaid of a rival pub, The Shakespeare, is resonant of the spirit throughout the film: 'Ever since I was a kid I've known just how hard the pavement was. I've seen a broken bottle pushed in a man's face and I've laughed!' The upper and middle classes appear as unwelcome figures, unwanted and out of place in this world. A group of them appear in the pub at one point, coming in for a laugh, dressed up in their top hats and tails and silk dresses, and we feel that the sooner they're gone the better. Saloon Bar belongs with the great films about the London working classes: It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), Holiday Camp (1947), Hope and Glory (1987), Nil By Mouth (1997) and Vera Drake (2004

Saloon Bar is also about theatre. The film was adapted from a play and its roots are evident. Most of the action takes place within the pub itself while characters walk in and out, as if entering stage left and exiting stage right. In the first part of his essay 'Theatre and Cinema', the great French critic André Bazin spoke of the dangers of 'filmed theatre', but also admitted the debt that the one had given the other: 'if we insist the dramatic is exclusive to theatre, we must concede its immense influence and also that the cinema is the least likely of the arts to escape its influence'. Bazin argued that film should acknowledge the debt to the stage and harness its dramatic force, but be true to the medium itself and play to its strengths, which in many cases, pushed it beyond the power of theatre. I think the success of Saloon Bar is that uses devices like the tracking shot (there's a wonderful one in the opening scenes where the camera pans through the rain and over the 'Saloon Bar' sign on the window and into the pub itself) and the close up to great effect without feeling the need of some films to 'open' everything out. I've made the point before that I think the director Walter Forde is more comfortable within confines and set limits.

The film is not much more than a second feature, a mere seventy six minutes, barely longer than an episode of Lark Rise To Candleford. But the makers knew the value of not stretching a thing out, that a miniature can be worth as much as a broad canvas. The Knowledge believes it should be better known than it is.

Silly Love Films

There are some who have accused me of being a cynic and asking what's wrong with romantic comedies. To which I would answer, absolutely nothing: the romance of the movies may be what it's all about and should you offer me Bringing Up Baby (1939), The Shop Around The Corner (1940), Before Sunrise (1994) or The Clock (1945), there would not only be no problems, but rather a state of bliss.

What I object to is much of what would once have been called the 'woman's picture'. The genre has developed a soft centre and the likes of Love Actually (2003) and 27 Dresses (2008) is a far more common of what we're likely to see. The (once brilliant) writer and director Richard Curtis has mispresented the debate with this often repeated quote:

'If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it's called searingly realistic, even though it's never happened in the history of mankind. Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you're accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental.'

The critic Anthony Lane - who was absolutely ripped to shreds for daring to criticise Sex In The City and Mama Mia - had it right in his review of the remake of The Women when he made this comment:

'I am aware of the dire paucity of films that appeal to a grownup female audience, as opposed to a mob of ten-year-old Transformers fans, but why should discerning viewers of either gender be fobbed off with indolence? Taken together, Sex and the City, Mamma Mia!, and The Women add up to a spectacular trilogy of the inane, and to point that out is not the prerogative of the misogynist or the killjoy. It’s the view of someone who thinks that women deserve better from the movies, and who sees no joys to kill.'

The way that Hollywood has rediscovered the female audience is fascinating, whether they are serving that audience is another matter.

British Films 2: Three Hats For Lisa

To watch Three Hats For Lisa (1963) is not to discover some hidden masterpiece that somehow passed the critics by. In fact, it’s a true oddball of a film – a British musical in London during the swinging sixties which practically no one (other than those who saw it on Channel 4 in 1998) remembers. An Italian movie star (Sophie Hardy) comes to the city on a publicity tour for her latest film. She meets three young people, an infatuated dock worker (Joe Brown), his would be girl friend (Una Stubbs) and his best friend (Dave Nelson), as well as a crotchety taxi driver (the one and only Sid James) when she arrives at City airport. After escaping from her entourage, she runs away with them for the day. To give her the best possible experience of London, they agree to help her steal three hats for her collection.

Really, off the wall doesn’t begin to describe it. Aside from the insanity of the plot, the acting and songs are fairly average while the choreography is second rate West Side Story. So how do I explain the hold of the film, its sense of play and sheer joyfulness? Perhaps it starts with the films opening titles as the camera swoops above the Thames and the lyrics of the opening number (‘There’s something in the air, I feel it everywhere, the sort of magic that seems to say, that this is no ordinary day’). It’s the idea, already that this is fairy story, not quite real, that there might be a bit of magic in it all, and there is the feel throughout of being told a rather charming and harmless fable.

More than that though, I think, is the irrepressible optimism. Like many of the ‘youth’ films of the period, it has no ‘side’ to it, no cynical edge. It’s worth noting the similarities of say, the scene where Sid drives them around the tourist spots and Joe Brown sings about ‘London Town’ with something like The Young Ones (1961) with Cliff Richard. In both the music is jaunty; the colour is, if not quite Technicolor, then at least bright and cheerful. These are films obsessed with the new look London; the new glass and concrete buildings, which still have that just painted feel about them (although as we now know it wouldn’t take long for that to disappear - Norman Cohen’s wonderful documentary The London Nobody Knows (1967) has a very different take).

To say that Three Hats For Lisa has dated is obvious; it must have looked strange within a couple of years of being made. Obviously it has no critical credibility at all. And yet it is the kind of discovery that makes the act of watching films continually fascinating.

The Oscars 1

David Denby in the New Yorker has the most downbeat view of this year's Oscar contenders I've seen so far. Denby's view is that of the five best picture nominations only Gus Van Sant's Milk belongs there and that Slumdog Millionaire has no business being on the list at all. This isn't the view of The Knowledge, as I've previously stated how much I like the film, but am in agreement that it's not as strong a field as it was last year.

'Where do the noses go?'

A poll has 'revealed' what the British public think are the most memorable kisses in films. This shouldn't matter, except that it does. So much of our ideals about love and romance comes from the movies and on that basis this is a pretty depressing list. I agree with almost none of it, except, unsurprisingly, Gone With The Wind (1939) which has Clark Gable delivering one of the great pieces of film dialogue on the subject: 'You should be kissed and often and by someone who knows how!'

Carey Mulligan

I first noticed Carey Mulligan in the BBC adaptation of Bleak House as Ada Clare in 2005 and promptly fell in love with her. She also appeared as Kitty Bennett in Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, Sally Sparrow in one of the greatest Doctor Who episodes, ‘Blink’, and Elsie Kipling in My Boy Jack. She’s now apparently the toast of Sundance after being in two films at the festival, in An Education and The Greatest. A star is born?

Scoop: a verdict

So, how bad could it be? The answer is pretty bad, almost enough to make a person want to rent out Scary Movie 4. I can see now why it wasn't given theatrical distribution (although the lack of a DVD release still confuses me - surely there's room for more substandard fare out there?). The BBC were showing it on television last night because they helped to finance it, although no one seemed to have much of an imput or even to have looked at the final script for Scoop. The actors seemed to be there, purely so they could say they had been involved in a Woody Allen project.

You almost get the sense that the decision to bury the film was taken for Allen's good as much as anything else ('Jesus Woody, if anyone sees this, you just try to get funding ever again!'). Perhaps now that Vicky Cristina Barcelona has been getting good notices, it was thought it couldn't do any harm to screen it. All of this of course belongs in another, sister, blog called The Speculation.

I'm still just about prepared to give Allen the benefit of the doubt, although I have more sympathy than I did a week ago for this piece by John Patterson. Going back to Scoop, it was just incredible how amateurish, badly thought out, lacking in character development and - most surprisingly - poorly written it all was. Allen has been as important to the one liner as anybody in the last forty years, but the efforts here made you cringe. An embarrasment really - but at least now I've seen it!

Scoop

When Woody Allen made a film set in London a couple of years ago, it was a big deal - for a number of reasons. Woody was leaving his familiar milieu of New York. It was said that he had been invigorated by the challenge of a new setting. He began to work with an actress - Scarlett Johansson - who was to become his muse in his next few films. The result, Match Point, became something of a topic of debate; was it vintage Allen or the latest in a line of not quite up to his earlier standards? As far as The Knowledge is concerned, it's a deeply flawed piece of work - the acting is stilted at times, English aristocrats speak (unconvincingly) the dialogue of uptown New Yorkers, the London on show is tourist town and let us not even get started on the Ewan Bremner and James Nesbitt police officer roles.

And yet despite those, Match Point created a certain mood; Jonathan Rhys Meyer has a definite presence as the protagonist, the plot is successful in that the climax and its dénouement is devastating and shocking, and, for all his faults, Allen is a filmmaker with a unique eye, a distinctive viewpoint which he could bring to bear, that meant this was his London.

The film found an audience, had a respectable, if not brilliant, critical response and Allen enjoyed the city, the people, found the weather clement. He chose to make another film in London, also starring Johansson. What follows is - to me, at least - staggering. The finished version of Scoop was apparently so dreadful that it didn't receive distribution in any cinemas in the United Kingdom. Later it didn't even get a DVD release. This is the work of a major director, admittedly one who has seen better times, who has just had, by his standards, a success. Scoop came out in 2006. Films that came out that year which got distribution and are available on DVD include the remakes of Last Holiday, The Pink Panther, and The Wicker Man, as well as the 'comedies', Date Movie, Scary Movie 4, and Beerfest. Well, Scoop must be a real stinker!

But very few people from the UK have had a chance to make up their own minds about it - until tonight! Because suddenly, Scoop has appeared in the TV schedules, on BBC2 at 10.45. I have no illusions. Indeed I suspect it's awful. Even so, as I say, staggering. I'll let you know my thoughts tomorrow.

Racist Movies

Margaret Thatcher's daughter Carol has found herself in the headlines for saying that a black tennis player looked like a 'golliwog'. Lots of white middle class commentators think this isn't an offensive term, so that's alright then. Some would argue that it represents an unreconstructed view rather than an outright racist one, which is probably true, although I'm not sure this is much of a defence. But should we outlaw this type of language?

Someone asked me during one discussion about the controversy whether I thought older films that have what we would now see as unacceptable portrayals of black and ethnic minorities should be banned. The answer is, on balance, no. But this is not to say I don't find this aspect of those films problematic. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) is the obvious example and there is a fascinating forum discussion involving the likes of Kent Jones and Jonathan Rosenbaum which you can see here.

But this is a fairly extreme case. Somehow worse is the more insiduous racism of the black 'mammys' who appeared in the likes of Gone With The Wind (1939) or Belle Starr (1941). Or the 'Uncle Tom' types with their rolling eyes and 'Yassah, masser' way of speaking. One of the most disturbing films of this type is Santa Fe Trail (1940) which tells the story of West Point officers who track down the abolitionist John Brown just before the Civil War. Errol Flynn plays the protagonist Jeb Stuart who more or less puts the case for why slavery should be kept in certain circumstances - a viewpoint seen as a positive! This couldn't be done now and that's probably no bad thing.

Of course, the extreme cases sometimes make for the most fascinating watching. There's a part of me that would love to see the infamous Jud Süss (1940). You can see extracts in museums in Germany or clips on Youtube (which bizarrely have Hungarian subtitles since the film apparently isn't banned there as it is in other parts of Europe). It's a notorious piece of Nazi progaganda set in the eighteenth century in which a wealthy Jew craftily gains influence, rapes a young woman and tortures her fiance before he is brought to justice. Showings of the film reportedly inspired anti-semitic violence. The subject matter is clearly repellent, but as with The Birth of a Nation and The Triumph of the Will (1935) the fascination is definitely there.

A headline 'bout a breadline

There have been a number of articles about the affect the recession will have on movies and the comparison with the golden age that came out with the Great Depression of the 1930s, but none as fine as in this piece by J. Hoberman in the Village Voice.

The Grass Is Greener

Another film which was always mediocre (and now leaves something of a sour taste), The Grass Is Greener (1960) has a sequence that makes your jaw drop. The back story is that Victor (Cary Grant) and his wife Hillary (Deborah Kerr) are English landed gentry, but pretty impoverished and forced to open up their stately home to American tourists. Charles Delacro (Robert Mitchum), a millionaire tycoon, arrives and promptly falls for Hillary and tries to entice her into an affair. She resists until making a trip to London where she meets him again and they start spending their days together. One night as they walk, Hillary thanks Charles for a lovely time and he says: ‘we’ve been surrounded by people all day long. Let’s try to avoid them from now on.’

2 minutes and 55 seconds into this clip you’ll find the scene that follows: The camera pans along the river Thames through the trees and finds a boat which Kerr and Mitchum aren’t in. Then we see a restaurant with a table for two which they aren’t sat at. By the river again a picnic and hamper have been layed out, but it’s all been abandoned. At the theatre two seats for the performance haven’t been claimed. Neither have the pair gone for some late night dancing. And then finally, as if to ram the point home, back at the hotel, the bedroom door is swiftly shut against us, the audience – for their eyes only, one might say! If we had wanted to feign ignorance and pretend nothing untoward is going on (and we like Cary Grant and we might prefer to think that Kerr and Mitchum aren’t doing the dirty on him), this scene ends our innocence.

It shows how effective films can be when they don’t show us everything; L’Eclisse (1962) reveals the alienation and failure of a relationship by shooting the location of a place at a time where a couple used to meet, but now never will again. Cat People (1942) is more frightening by not showing the monster, but the shadows in which it lurks. And this scene in The Grass Is Greener is actually more erotic than some pornography. Strange how these things work out!

Sherlock Holmes 1:Guy Ritchie...the horror...

Thanks to the Self Styled Siren for pointing to this. I love the character of Sherlock Holmes and his screen portrayls and will write more on this later. For now all one can say is that this is pretty depressing stuff.

Abe

Who knows - as everyone is asking - whether Barack Obama will make a great president? What I love already though, is his sense of history and the way he is a conduit to America’s past, from his use of language, which goes back to the founders, to his youthful vitality and invigoration, which reminds us of John F. Kennedy. Most of all there are the links with Abraham Lincoln; a politician from Illinois, powerful speeches, calm in the face of a crisis, the sense of being the ultimate fulfilment of the Emancipation Proclamation. It would take a hardened cynic not to be moved by the use of the 1861 bible at the inauguration or the repeat of Lincoln’s train journey to the capital to be sworn in.

Lincoln is of course one of the truly cinematic presidents. So many moments of his life have passed into the mythology of America; the brief love affair with Ann Rutledge, the intense rivalry with Stephen Douglas, the Gettysburg address, his assassination at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. Indeed, he was there almost from the beginning of the movies as D. W. Griffith wrote ‘history with lightning’ in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and then later in Abraham Lincoln (1930). Raymond Massey was nominated for an Oscar for playing the role in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940). In fact there are numerous examples of him on film (most recently his death was recreated in National Treasure: Book of Secrets). Historians would be right to feel uncomfortable at the awe with which Hollywood has greeted the man and how it has helped make him an American saint, almost beyond criticism. Henry Fonda, who played him in probably the most successful screen incarnation, Young Mr Lincoln (1939), originally declined the part ‘because I didn’t think I could play Lincoln. Lincoln to me was a god.’ Despite these misgivings, Young Mr Lincoln is a piece of poetry, beautiful and moving and one of the best things that John Ford ever did.

Steven Spielberg is looking to make a film about him with Liam Neeson after Tintin. Yet more anticipation!

Not mentioning the reference

I may be missing something, but no one I've read so far has mentioned the obvious when talking about the new release Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist; i.e., that the title is a reference to the characters played by William Powell and Myrna Loy in the Thin Man series of films in the 1930s, based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett.

Given that by all accounts (and The Knowledge really can't comment on this) it isn't actually any good, maybe critics are trying to avoid sullying the original by making the reference. But it seems to me a key part of what the newer film is trying to; take the easy, casual, (dare I say it) cool nature associated with Hammett's tale and transplant it. The Thin Man (1934) was influential, not so much in showing us a happily married, gently sparring, couple for the first time in movies, but for showing a couple so intellectually, emotionally and sexually on the same level. And the sex is the key thing here; given that this was made around the time of the Hay's code, makes the subtext of Powell's and Loy's attraction even more impressive.

Slumdog Millionaire

The Knowledge has been to see Slumdog Millionaire and believes the film deserves all the plaudits it's getting. It combines the verve and colour of Bollywood with the serious intent of neo-realism, although, as always with Danny Boyle, the more appropriate expression is hyper-realism. Without wishing to get into a habit of hyperbole or glib catchphrases, one of the best ways I can think of describing the effect is Satyajit Ray on acid; it has the same humanity, the same unblinkingness at character and situations, but instead of contemplation and reflection, there is constant movement. In that respect it has the same energy as early Godard.

The main thing about the film is just how much sheer fun it is. This might seem strange considering that the subject matter includes the blinding of children to make them more effective beggars, prostitution and the rise of Indian gangsterism. But more than any film I can think of recently, there are no longeurs and no sense of boredom. It has your attention all the time you are watching it.

John Landis

Director John Landis is reportedly suing Michael Jackson for not receiving his share of profits for the Thriller music video. You couldn't avoid this video during the 1980s; it was truly ubiquitous and so I can well believe it's still making money somewhere.

The surprise is that Landis has always come across in interviews as one of the most laid back men in the world, so he must have been pretty annoyed to take this action. He's also a reasonably underated director these days. Once upon a time The Blues Brothers (1980) would have been named as one of my top three favourite films and although it's nowhere near this status any more, there are still scenes I would happily watch again. An American Werewolf in London (1981) and Trading Places (1983) are two of the best films of the 1980s, while National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) and Three Amigos (1986) are perfectly fine comedies.

The rot set in later on, so that by the time we got to Beverly Hills Cop III (1994) and (even worse) Blues Brothers 2000 (1998) the taste in the mouth had well and truly gone sour.

Anticipation

There are some films you just can't wait to see.

The Rules

Film critic Roger Ebert from the Chicago Sun Times is always worth reading, although I don’t go to the site as often as I might. But his rules for wannabe film critics may prove to be essential.

Last Scenes

This is partially following on from another post which asks for memorable scenes from otherwise poor films. Crocodile Dundee (1986) is actually not bad at all, although it hasn't dated very well. What it does have is one of my favourite movie endings.

What is it about the sequence? Part of it is the score, the effectiveness of the insistent didgeridoo beat which sets the mood and pace of the scene combined with the occasional lift in the melody. I love the way that Linda Kozlowski's character takes off her shoes as she's running towards the subway through New York streets. Then there is the ludicrousness of the way her confession of love for Mick Dundee (Paul Hogan) has to be conveyed through a crowd on the subway by a Jamaican and an Italian builder, which is funny and somehow true at the same time. Finally there is Dundee climbing over the people on the platform and the way they help carry him towards Kozlowski. Yes, it's all very movie, but I can't help liking it for all that.

The Other Forde

The title of the post is wrong on a number of levels. There is just to start with, the extra ‘e’, although part of me enjoys the mischievousness of it. More of a problem is that, as much of a fan as I am of his work, Walter Forde’s career simply doesn’t compare to that of John Ford; his films aren’t as good and as a director he couldn’t be described as an auteur. There are no overriding themes, so sense of him building a picture of the British nation in the same way that John Forde did for America.

So what is there to be said? His 1932 Rome Express is the basis, the blueprint, for many of the films set on trains that followed; it's a fast moving comic thriller that compares well with and influenced Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes six years later (as an aside Sydney Gilliat wrote the scenario for the former and was co-screenwriter on the latter). Meanwhile Rome Express is, in my view, a superior work to Von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express made with Marlene Dietrich in the same year and exploring similar themes. The Ghost Train (1931) set a standard for British comedies, the storyline of a group of people trapped in a remote location and confronted with what at first glance seems to be a problem of the supernatural (Forde himself remade it ten years later). Then there is Saloon Bar, unknown, unheralded, but perhaps one of the finest murder mysteries of the 1940s.

Forde's was an art of the interior; he was at his best showing a group of people inside, in the confines of the train carriage, the station waiting room and the pub. The limitations of such settings stretched his imagination and stimulated his creativity, while a free reign was often disastrous (I hesitate, but try to watch Land Without Music (1936))

The Knowledge will write in more detail on Saloon Bar (1940), which is perhaps Forde's best work, at a later date. But all of it is worth seeing.

Late night TV

Some of the best films that I've seen lately have been ones recorded from late night television; Jules Dassin's Brute Force and The Naked City, John Boorman's Point Blank, Jean Renoir's The Diary of a Chambermaid, Mark Robson's The Seventh Victim and now Ida Lupino's The Bigamist. Which begs the question - why not show them earlier. Having criticised retailers for their bizarre DVD pricing policy, it seems only fair to do the same to TV schedulers. The worst offenders are Film 4, who not only endlessly repeat truly bad films, but when they do have something interesting, put it on at a time when very few are watching. Again, I accept I have certain specialist tastes, but since I'm pretty sure that no one wants to see Tommy O'Haver's Get Over It starring Kirsten Dunst ever again, they could at least try the experiment of giving a decent showing to the Ingmar Bergman films they've been so proudly trailing in recent months. This doesn't seem like rocket science or elitism gone mad.

Posthumous Oscar

One bookmaker has reportedly already paid out on Heath Ledger being awarded the best supporting actor oscar for The Dark Knight. Watching Ned Kelly (2004) last night, I realised again just what a loss of talent it is. The film has lots of flaws, not least that it romanticises the real Kelly and paints him out to be a victim of circumstance, forced into being an outlaw. There may be an element of truth in this, but having been to visit his suit of armour in Melbourne and seen the exhibition, I would suggest that he was a more brutal figure than we see here, who in all probability accepted the necessity of violence and more than likely revelled in it.

The pity is that Ledger was more than capable at hinting at this without taking away from the charismatic and popular nature of the man (which was undoubtedly true), that made him the most interesting of anti heroes. We know this because of The Dark Knight. Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain notwithstanding, his portrayal of the Joker is his outstanding performance and one of the best of the decade. Dangerous, compelling, it takes us inside madness and celebrates the abyss. One can only speculate (and The Knowledge wouldn't recommend it) about how much of a character an actor takes home with him, but did the darkness of the Joker add to Ledger's depression and help set him on a tailspin? We will never know for sure, only that the idea doesn't feel as wrong as it might.

America, Land of the Cinematic

I suppose, on today of all days, that a post should have an American theme. What struck me watching the inauguration and the crowds and the magnitude of it all is not only that it is a country influenced by cinematic moments, it was one that was built for them. From the language of its inception to the physical geography of the place, America just is cinema.

The most obvious location is of course New York, where it sometimes seems you could put a camera anywhere and the shot would be cinematic purely by virtue of where it is. It's a city soaked in the glamour of movies to such an extent that people who visit can pretend they're in one. Go to the top of the Empire State building and you’re in the company of Gene Kelly, Cary Grant and King Kong. Take a walk through Central Park and you could be Joseph Cotton searching for a strange ghostly young woman called Jennie. Drop by FAO Schwartz and play chopsticks on a giant piano like Tom Hanks. Go to Tiffany’s and….well, you get the idea.

Ah America...you have given us our dreams back!

Appaloosa

Sometimes as a filmgoer you’re struck by the synchronicity of things. I’m sure I would have had a different reaction to Appaloosa (2008) had I not also seen Warlock (1959) a couple of weeks ago. As it is, it seems to me that this is, at least at the start, essentially the same movie: a town tired of being plagued by a gang of cowboys employ a Marshall from, who works with a man who has been his friend for many years and who exists by his own set of laws. Later the film changes into something very different and we can see echoes from The Wild Bunch (1969) (a train which stops by a water cooler tower is subject to a raid, a gunfight happens in a Mexican town square). The film directed by and starring Ed Harris and also Vigo Mortensen, Renee Zellweger and Jeremy Irons is well acted and has an interesting theme. But the pace of it is wrong and the plot becomes too wandering and sporadic. A much better modern western is Kevin Costner’s Open Range (2003), which has an excellent performance by Robert Duvall and a surprising amount of tension for such a simple story.

Aesthetic Experience

A rather interesting debate has been taking place on the blog of Bryan Appleyard. This isn’t, strictly speaking, about film, because Appleyard generally has a wider remit (although he has done an interview with Catherine Deneuve in the Sunday Times today). Basically his theory is that the world is divided into those who have had a transcendental aesthetic experience - an intense engagement with art which takes you beyond what you have previously thought or realised - and those who haven’t. If you have, the argument goes; you are more likely to have an open mind about the existence of God, with the ultimate logic that a ‘militant atheist’ can not have one. Have I had such an experience? I realise I’ve quoted a lot from David Thomson recently (and so will give him a rest for awhile), but does this mean the same as his account in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film of first watching Blue Velvet:

‘The occasion stood as the last moment of transcendence I had felt at the movies – until The Piano. What I mean by that is a kind of passionate involvement with both the story and the making of a film, so that I was simultaneously moved by the enactment on screen and by discovering that a new director (David Lynch) had made the medium alive and dangerous again.’

If so, then the answer is yes - many times. The last one was seeing Max Ophul’s Le Plaisir (1952). In the film, a group of prostitutes travel from Paris to a small town in France for their Madam’s niece’s first communion. The villagers welcome them with open arms and generosity and kindness as if they were old friends. In the middle of the ceremony, as the congregation watch the girls go through the ritual and the church is filled with music, the prostitutes start to cry. In doing so, they start a ripple and everyone else sitting in the pews also starts to cry. It is a deeply moving moment; rich in its complexity, for the tears are not for any one thing. The prostitutes are crying out of regret for their choices in life, but also in gratitude for the way they have been treated. The rest cry with love for the young girls taking part, but also a sadness at what seems like the passing of childhood. Ophuls uses his famous camera movement to great effect in evoking the emotion of the scene.

The fact that this sequence takes place in a church is incidental and doesn’t seem to be proof of God one way or another. Indeed it occurs to me that you can feel this ‘transcendence’ and at the same time be pretty sure that he/she/it doesn’t. The reason why the scene is so affecting is that what Ophuls shows us feels like a truth about human beings; that we can be happy, sad, flawed, beautiful all at the same time. You don’t have to be religious or deny the value of science to acknowledge that.

Stromboli

When Ingrid Bergman left Hollywood to make Stromboli in 1949, the experience was a traumatic one in all senses. For Bergman, it meant being taken out of the comfort of the studio and shooting on location, using completely different methods. There was also her developing relationship with the director Roberto Rossellini and the subsequent breakdown of her marriage. RKO by all accounts were unhappy with the finished film, so different from their usual productions. Then there was the storyline of the film itself; a Czech woman who marries to escape the confines of an internment camp and finds herself in a new trap – a marriage to a man who doesn’t understand her and living on an island with a way of life that she hates. Like other neo-realist directors, Rossellini didn’t seek to praise or condemn the age old traditions of Italy, just to show them as they were. He could explore the contradictions of the community, how living by values so attached to the past could be reassuring and invigorating as well as suffocating. Stromboli is about old white stone houses, hidden coves where the water laps over rocks and watching the sun set over the sea, but it is also about the desolation of paths and fields left to grow wild and the constant tension created by a mountain which could explode at any moment (the volcano providing the film’s central metaphor, of course). Bergman as Karin Bjorsen is not easy to love; she complains all the time, flirts and manipulates and looks her nose down at those she perceives as less sophisticated. But it’s hard not to sympathise with her situation. Her husband Antonio (Mario Vitale) can be brutish and he is stubbornly resistant to change. But he also loves and he works harder than the other fisherman to give his wife a lifestyle he thinks she wants.

Outsiders have hardly been able to film Italy without turning it into a paradise: Roman Holiday(1953), Three Coins in a Fountain (1954), Summer Madness(1955), even another film about old traditions clashing with the new world, A Bell for Adano(1945), about an American major trying to run an Italian town during the war turns the villagers into affectionate, wily, characters. But the neo-realist directors could show the beauty and the cruelty, never better exemplified than by the sequence showing the actual Stromboli fishermen out at sea capturing huge tunny fish with the waves crashing around them. Visually compelling, we see these huge majestic creatures speared in a ritual that has gone on for hundreds of years. Rossellini believed in truth as far as it was possible; but I also love neo-realism for the social document elements of it, capturing a way of life which may well have vanished forever.

Leonardo DiCaprio

David Thomson sums up the angst of Leonardo DiCaprio very well in this piece in the Guardian. The only disagreement I have with what is said is that I think The Departed is actually Dicaprio's best role of late, a character who made you feel nervous and gave you sweaty palms just by watching him.

Travellers Tale

It was late, after one o’clock in the morning, in a youth hostel in Berlin. The bar in the lobby was packed full of people and there was a feverish excitement in the air. A bus- load of Australians, New Zealanders and English were on their way later that day for a weekend in Prague and the booze, it is fair, to say was free flowing. I was at a table with a young American film student. We had just been admitting that Titanic had some virtues and then he asked me who my favourite director was. I thought for a moment. On a different day I might have named someone like Howard Hawks or Michael Powell. But instead I said: ‘You know, I was watching The Thirty Nine Steps again the other night and I have to say I think Alfred Hitchcock takes some beating’. He shook me by the hand, offering a compliment on how one of the best of filmmakers was British. By much less have great friendships been born!

Claude Berri

The Knowledge can’t let the death of Claude Berri pass without some comment. The Guardian is asking if he was the most influential postwar French director. This seems a mite strange given the likes of Francois Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, Alan Resnais and, well, countless others. But I take the point. Xan Brooks who wrote the piece means in terms of the way Jean de Florette and Manon des Source (both 1986) helped to define an image of Provence for thousands of Britains. More than, say, Eric Rohmer, Berri, alongside the likes of writer Peter Mayle (most famously A Year in Provence), inspired the dream of France as a lifestyle. His vision of a rural idyll – which lives on in the Stella Artois adverts, even using the theme by Jean-Claude Petit - has not always been looked kindly upon. Gilbert Adair, who edited Penguin’s wonderful anthology, Movies, compared Berri unfavourably with one of his influences, Marcel Pagnol, who made a series of films about the South of France, including Marius and Fanny in the 1930s.

‘What Berri trades in is ‘filmed cinema’ (as one refers to ‘filmed theatre’) and the sickly visuals of his pastiches remind one of nothing so much as the idiom adopted by the sort of spuriously authentic restaurants whose bread is invariably ‘oven-browned’ and whose tomatoes are obligatorily ‘sun dried’. Pagnol’s own wonderful films are just bread, plain loaves of unsliced bread; they are, equally, as juicy and refreshing as ordinary raw tomatoes. Without any smothering of Technicolor Sauce, they taste, like the simplest and best kinds of food, of nothing but themselves.’

Berri also wrote and directed, among others, Germinal (1993), Lucie Aubrac (1997) and Ensemble, c’est tout (2007) and acted in Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (2002).

Mad Men

I've just seen Mad Men and now get what all the fuss is about. Apart from being a terrific revisionist look at the world of advertising in the early 1960s, it's one glorious reference to the movies and television shows of the time; all those Doris Day pictures (Pillow Talk, That Touch of Mink etc), The Apartment, Days of Wine and Roses, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, not to mention Bewitched. The makers even have the cheek to name check them all! And at the centre of it all is Jon Hamm as executive Don Draper, like a brooding Cary Grant from North By Northwest. No wonder they think he's going to be a star. Peyton Reed did something similar with Down with Love (2003), but his pastiche doesn't quite live up to the depths of Mad Men. Great stuff.

A word about Youtube

Youtube can be among the curses of the internet, allowing for a spew of anti social behaviour, yobbery and general disgustingness. But The Knowledge loves it for providing access to a wealth of material, some of which has hardly been seen by an audience at all. So far the best examples I have come across are Thom Anderson’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) and The Blue Bird (1940) starring Shirley Temple, both of which have been subsequently removed. Hopefully they’ll be uploaded again at some point, but there’s no doubt that these are films I would probably not have ever seen if it hadn’t been for Youtube.

Green and Pleasant Land

Something that AA Gill wrote in the Sunday Times today made me smile (Gill is always good value, even when you disagree with him). Here are his thoughts on the way England is portrayed in television documentaries like Nicholas Crane’s Britannia:

‘There is something rather distasteful about the lens’s lyrical licking of our country; the unquestioning, unremitting, unrequited lust for the twee, twinky, touristy bits of Blighty. All those series of elegiac rambles, with their moaning, breathless clichés, groping mountains and valleys, come one after the other like charabancs in the Lake District. There’s a sort of sentimental fascism about them, an overromanticised geological jingoism. While the presenters ramble, the cameras go by helicopter, soaring over National Trust properties, being chased by a sobbing orchestra. Their England doesn’t contain any suburbs or tower blocks; no motorways, airports, no industry, no trading estates, no you and me. It’s inhabited by an occasional dotty rustic, an endangered craftsman and simple lock-keepers. Why do they continue to try to sell us this ridiculous, bogus, thatched lie of a nation? I already live here, I want to shout.’

Just about every British television documentary using the countryside as a subject is guilty in some way of this: Countryfile, Coast, A Picture of Britain with David Dimbleby, Britain’s Favourite View. Of course there is nothing new in any of it; the British Transport Films unit, set up sixty years ago in May, made travelogues showing destinations like Cornwall, Norfolk, and the Highlands as places which people might go to on holiday, preferably by train. Many of them had a ‘lyrical’ quality; there was the use of poetic language, quotations from the likes of Shakespeare and the Romantics and classical music in the style of Benjamin Britten and Edward Elgar.

Ironically the man said to have founded the British documentary movement had very different aims in mind. John Grierson believed that the intentions behind film making should be ‘social and not aesthetic’. The idea of, say, Drifters and the later films of the 1930s by directors and producers like Harry Watts, Edgar Anstey, Basil Wright, Paul Rotha and Robert Flaherty was to have as realistic as possible a portrait of the way life was lived. Even so Grierson was not against the use of non professional actors or of constructing scenes and suggesting they were real. Arguably the blame behind the pictorialisation that lingers in modern British documentaries lies in Night Mail (1936). This famous film shows the post being delivered by a train going from London to Scotland and the workers who did it. But for all its attempt at realism, the part that everyone remembers is the sequence at the end of the journey with WH Auden’s poem narrated over music. The rhythm of the beat and the editing create a sense of excitement and anticipation which is, whatever Grierson wanted, due to the aesthetic of the piece. It is stirring, beautiful; Auden’s poem talks of thousands ‘still asleep, dreaming of monsters’ as the train arrives in Edinburgh and Aberdeen with the sun rising. The effect is unforgettable, both for the audience and, I think, the filmakers who have come after, wanting to create something similar. Sometimes this is beauty, often it is as Gill suggests ‘overromanticised geological jingoism’.

Warlock

I’ve just caught up with Warlock, a 1959 western starring Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn and Richard Widmark (and DeForest Kelley who played Bones in Star Trek in an overtly camp performance – with that and the relationship between Fonda and Quinn, no wonder a Sunday Times critic was moved to reference Brokeback Mountain!). It was directed by Edward Dmytryk, who made some terrific film noirs during the 1940s including Farewell My Lovely, Crossfire and Cornered. Bar a couple of scenes, Warlock isn’t one of his finest moments. What’s interesting about it is the sheer number of western clichés it manages to pack into one film: a one street town, a gang of lawless cowboys, a saloon complete with a long bar, a gunman for hire brought to the town to be marshall, the Grand Canyon, a stage coach robbery and an endless number of fast draw style duels. Best of all, and hilariously, is the scene in which a lynch mob invades a jail where members of the gang are being held and you notice that they are carrying burning torches! Still, it’s worth a watch and The Knowledge will return to Dmytryk who is a constantly surprising director.

Critic Rivalries

Worth looking out for is a piece in the New Yorker looking at the history of the Village Voice. Surprisingly it only has a couple of lines on the critic Andrew Sarris, who was one of the mainstays during the 1960s and 70s. It's an interesting omission given that Sarris had probably the most famous of all film critic rivalries with the New Yorker's own Pauline Kael. He's generally considered to be the man who brought to the US and developed the French theory of authorship; the idea that the director was the main creative impulse in cinema, the 'auteur'. When it came to films, Sarris was a classicist: he loved the old masters - Ford, Hawks, Welles. Kael also believed in the supremacy of the director, but she was a more instinctive critic (famously she declared that she never watched a film more than once - with an odd exception like Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller) and mocked theorists like Sarris. Their rows were played out in print and often very personal. His take on their relationship after she died is fascinating.

There probably isn't a feud amongst today's major critics which is quite the same, although Jonathan Rosenbaum seems determined to have one with David Thomson. Of these two heavyweights, Thomson is a stylist and purely in terms of writing the finest critic around at this moment in time. His view of cinema is a melancholic one; having loved the films of the Hollywood golden age and from the 1970s, Thomson has become disillusioned with the modern era and speculated often about whether the medium is in its death throes. Rosenbaum, on the other hand, may be the most knowledgeable man about films in the world; he absolutely refutes the idea that it is on its last legs, pointing to the variety and breadth of work coming out of places like Iran and China. There's no doubt that he despises what he sees as Thomson's narrow view of films and he also believes him to be a lazy researcher, particularly in the biography of Orson Welles, Rosebud.

What prevents this from being a proper feud is that while Rosenbaum's attacks have been many and widespread, Thomson has never really acknowledged his fellow critic's views. In fact in the comments to a Chicago Reader blog post from a year or so back, one person asks Rosenbaum if Thomson has ever responded to the criticism and it is admitted he never has. The only reference that I can find that Thomson has made about his 'rival' is in The New Biographical Dictionary of Cinema (the last edition published by Little, Brown in 2002 is pretty much an essential text on a film buff's shelf) in an entry on Raúl Ruiz: 'I was criticised a few years ago, very reasonably, by Jonathan Rosenbaum for important maverick and foreign figures left out of this book. But I refuse to include them all, and I am always happiest to find a new way of sizing up a person.'

It may be tit for tat stuff, but for The Knowledge the relationship between those who comment on films is as gripping as anything.

The Archive Collection

Lets get back to one of the key mission statements: 'spreading the wealth'. This collection of archive TV programmes from the BBC makes you remember what they can do.

Off Message

This post probably belongs in a blog entitled 'Faint Exasperation', but I never fail to be amused by so called DVD sales and the arbitrariness with which films are priced. I've just been to the music store HMV (apologies to non UK readers for the parochial reference, although there are probably equivalent examples abroad)where you can buy the latest Rambo film for seven pounds and I'm Not There, Todd Haynes's critically acclaimed look at Bob Dylan for six. Meanwhile you can get Sweeney Todd for five pounds (okay not to everyone's liking) and Forgetting Sarah Marshall for seven (?!) Admittedly my personal taste is involved here and I do appreciate the idea of pricing something higher which you think the public will want more. But I don't think that is happening here; there doesn't seem to be any logic or thought to any of it. Why not just set a price across the board? And oh while we're at it, if you are a store going into administration (yes Zavvi!), a clearout sale in which the products are still more expensive than they are in Fopp, should probably be rethought!

A Lot of Hokum

Has fantasy gone too far? In the 2008 adaptation of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (as opposed to the wondeful 1959 version with James Mason), the main characters fall through a hole when the floor collapses beneath them; all screaming in terror, they suddenly stop in unison to allow star Brendan Fraser to exclaim: ‘hey, we’re still falling!’ Or how about The Lord of the Rings where Orlando Bloom as elf Legolas climbs aboard a moving elephant, fights its passengers and slides down the trunk? Or there’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls in which Harrison Ford escapes the explosion of a nuclear bomb by shutting himself in a refrigerator, which is then exploded into the air during the blast and lands safely away from any chance of being incinerated. This is not to mention the latest additions to the Star Wars franchise and comic book adaptations such as Spider Man and Iron Man. The development of CGI special effects means that literally anything, no matter how fantastical or extreme, is possible. But are filmakers now ignoring the fact that a use of restraint in both plot and what we see on screen might work more effectively? Is it time, perversely in an age of so much technological advancement, to ask filmmakers to take a step back or should we just relax and enjoy the hokum?

Right from the start filmmakers recognised that part of what kept audiences coming to the movie was the promise of showing them something they had never seen before. The history of special effects is practically as old as the history of movies, with Georges Melie’s ‘stop trick’ (an object is filmed, the camera is turned off, the object is removed, the camera turned back on; it seems that the object has disappeared) developed as early as 1896. It is that promise of the combination of thriller, mystery and spectacle, which if got right, can make the adventure genre so irresistible. As Cecil B. DeMille once asked of his writers: ‘what would fascinate Eskimos in their igloos, harness harassed housewives, rivet restless children?’

So anything goes…right? Speaking about the BBC series Bonekickers, about a group of mystery solving crime fighting archaeologists, on Newsnight Review recently, academic and critic John Mullan made this point: ‘Hokum has to have its own logic, don’t you think?’ In other words, like any genre it has its own rules, its own set of narrative conventions. You can play with these rules by all means; subvert them as much as you wish. But if you break them, then realise that you run the risk that the project will fail. Mullan went on to say: ‘I think hokum can be fine, but they (ie, the programme makers) have to take it seriously while they’re doing it.’ I take this to mean that you give the subject - whatever the art form - the respect it deserves. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Harrison Ford jumps from a horse on to a tank, falls of it, and hangs on to the side and is almost driven into a cliff wall, it may be ludicrous, but it is also somehow real. Spielberg and his team manage to make the audience feel the sense of danger inherent in the scene. In Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, Ford’s heir apparent Shia LaBeouf catches up with a jeep chase by swinging through the jungle on vines in a sequence inspired by the Johnny Weismuller Tarzan films. The effect could not have been achieved in the former film, made twenty years before. But for all it’s CGI brilliance, it feels cartoonish; we may enjoy the moment, smile at it, but it’s closer to a parody of the genre and robbed of the tension greater realism might have given it. But, with the financial rewards of CGI so spectacular, if there is a lesson, it doesn't look like anyone will be learning it any time soon.

The Big...

There are an astonishing number of great films which start with the words 'The Big...'. They include The Big Country, The Big Combo, The Big City (also known as Mahanagar, ), The Big Red One, The Big Sky, The Big Steal (the 1949 version with Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and the one and only William Bendix), The Big Heat, and The Big Lebowski. Towering over all of these is Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep, (1946), although of course this towers over most films.

Doctor Who

Having said that it may well be considered one of the masterpieces of the past decade, it seems inevitable to make some comment on the new Doctor Who. The first instinct on seeing the actor Matt Smith was a disappointment in the sense that a black actor playing the role – Patterson Joseph or Chiwetel Ejiofor – seemed an exciting possibility. The second was to speculate on how Smith’s name ended up on Betfair and I don’t think we’ve heard the last of that. But the third instinct is a growing excitement; the new Doctor’s youth (and he may be too young) does open up a whole raft of possible storylines, particularly that he will be misjudged and underestimated in the adventures to come. The theme of a character hundreds of years old in a young body isn’t a new one; Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell), an alien which could host many lives, was a major character in Star Trek: Deep Space and the writers continually played with this idea. The best response I’ve seen so far is from Matthew Sweet (whose excellent Shepperton Babylon, a revisionist look at the history of British cinema, is available from most good bookshops) on the Guardian website:

“Matt Smith has got a fascinating face. It's long and bony, with a commanding jaw. He looks like someone who could have been in Duran Duran. He has a quality of the old man trapped in the young man's body. I suspect he might be a more sensual character than David Tennant, who had no kind of dangerous sexuality about him. There's something Byronic about Matt Smith – he's got the lips for it."

Australia

The Knowledge has just seen Australia and thought it would add its own two pennoth worth. Much of the criticism of the film seems unduly harsh, especially this from Germaine Greer. Yes, its history is, shall we say, a bit dubious (but then it was in Gone With The Wind - and no this is not a comparison!). Yes, the film is overlong and overcooked. No, it isn't the film of a generation, some all defining epochful masterpiece.

Instead it is full of tearful partings, joyous reunions and over wrought death scenes, of near misses and getting there in the nick of time. It is bizarre, entertaining and curiously old fashioned and we are of course in the world of movie (which in this case is half Western, half love torn apart by the horrors of war story). As if to drive home the point there are the continual references to The Wizard of Ox and 'Somewhare Over The Rainbow' - even the homestead owned by Nicole Kidman's character, Faraway Downs, seems to be deliberately modelled after Dorothy's farm in Kansas. For those who know and love classical Hollywood this is all familiar territory.

The problem for the film is the weight of the hype - both in terms of its place as the latest work in Baz Luhurman's ouevre and in the way it is supposed to represent Australia as a country to the world. Whereas someone who has spent any time there will know that the stereotypes it offers - the fighting, drinking, laconic bushmen, the mysterious mystical aborigines, the Outback itself - don't begin to address the complexities of the place: the fragility and doubts beneath that veneer of extreme self confidence, the landscape, as much sea and sky and tropical paradise as desert backwater, and yes, the ambiguities of the relationship between the whites and the blacks.

This is what Greer is getting at. Yet Hollywood - and wherever it was set or made, that is what this is - has always set stories against controversial backdrops, sometimes shamefully distorting the history (Birth of a Nation anyone?). Australia belongs in a long and not quite noble tradition and I suspect Luhrman wouldn't have it any other way.

It Only Takes A Moment

Of all the many lovely things about Pixar’s WALL-E, one of the loveliest is the use of clips from the 1969 film, Hello Dolly. As the robot gathers surviving bits and pieces from an Earth deserted after an environmental disaster, he repeatedly watches two musical numbers: 'Put On Your Sunday Clothes' and 'It Only Takes A Moment'. The songs from the film relieve his deep loneliness and give him hope.

Having just watched a repeat of Hello Dolly on television, I'm struck by how WALL-E has given it added depths. The truth is that for the most part it’s a heavy handed, stuffy old film, overlong and self indulgent; the kind of picture that made Sunday afternoons with relatives even more interminable. But these two songs were the parts of the movie which lightened your heart and made you sit up (especially 'It Only Takes A Moment', which is right in every respect). What’s interesting, and what director Andrew Stanton and the Pixar team recognised, is that it’s because Hello Dolly isn’t up to much that the songs have such resonance. If the clip being watched was instead the Gene Kelly dance from Singing In The Rain, we would smile, nod in agreement and let it wash over us. But instead we raise an eyebrow and are made to think about how special moments and memories can be found in the most banal of places.

It’s a whole fascinating topic - truly outstanding scenes in otherwise dreadful movies! The Knowledge would like to nominate The Holiday (2006), directed by Nancy Meyers, where Iris (Kate Winslet) first meets Miles (Jack Black) and told that when the Santa Ana wind blows ‘all bets are off!’