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!