Challengers (2024)

Dynamic, mature, hilarious and moving relationship drama, an absolute delight

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Cast: Zendaya (Tashi Duncan), Josh O’Connor (Patrick Zweig), Mike Faist (Art Donaldson), Darnell Appling (New Rochelle Final Umpire), AJ Lister (Lily Donaldson), Nada Despotovich (Tashi’s mother), Naheem Garcia (Tashi’s father), Hailey Gates (Helen)

Tennis superstar Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) is on the slide after six majors – he’s lost his click and can’t even struggle past up-and-comers from the lower rungs of the tour. His coach, manager and wife Tashi (Zendaya) has an idea for how to get his groove back: he’ll enter a lowest-rung Challenger tournament, chalk up an easy win and return to confidence. Problem is, Art’s estranged former friend and doubles partner Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) is also in the tournament and the two of them now line up for a grudge match in the final. But there is more going on than meets the eye, as Guadagnino’s film unfolds in a non-linear style to reveal the complex, confused and frequently ambiguous sexual, emotional and sporting tensions that have beset the three over 13 years.

Challengers feels like it might be a ripe piece of teen click-bait fluff – but reveals itself to be a whipper-sharp, funny, involving and cleverly open-ended film stuffed full of excellent dialogue by Justin Kuritzkes that frequently catches you off-guard with its plot developments. Challengers is a thrillingly mature, adult and very truthful exploration of the underlying attractions and tensions between three people, all of whom seem confused about their exact feelings and motivations.

What is clear – as made explicitly clear by an intensely erotic late-night encounter in a hotel room between the three of them thirteen years earlier – is the rich, unspoken attraction they all share. Art and Patrick are strongly attracted to Tashi, she seems equally interested in different aspects of each of them, while Art and Patrick’s homoerotic bond (clued in before this by their affectionate, casual physical intimacy as well as their intense celebrations on winning the Junior US Open) is immediately clear to the savvy Tashi and briefly embraced by the two men.

Sport – particularly mano-a-mano games like tennis – has an undercurrent of sexual energy to it. Adrenalin-filled men pounding away at each other from across the net, bodies glistening with sweat? Teammates grasping each other in victory with an intensity often beyond anything they would show to a romantic partner? Challengers explores how close a dance sport and sex is, the remarkably similar effects both have on our bodies. It’s what Tashi – a former tennis sensation whose career was ended in tragic circumstances – is getting at when she says the best tennis matches aren’t about tennis. They are semi-romantic couplings, the perfect rally being two bodies in perfect harmony.

This all develops thrillingly in the inter-relationships between the three leads, each excellent. Zendaya is superb as a woman forced to live her tennis dreams vicariously through her husband, who values the loyalty of Art while being quietly troubled by his neediness, infuriated by Patrick’s arrogant performative selfishness while being deeply attracted to his don’t-give-a-damn independence. She has a tight knot of tension throughout that is compelling, a constant sense we are watching a woman struggling to find some sort of resolution from a lifetime of competing resentments and desires.

Equally superb – revelatory in fact – is Josh O’Connor, who makes Patrick a cocksure, confident, selfish but immensely charming guy. Patrick scraps a career from natural skill that he never bothered to hone (witness his bizarre crooked-arm serve), embraces his sexual confidence, bounces around with a breezy bro-confidence and does everything he can to hide the lonely, lost boy he really is. This is breathtaking work from O’Connor, from hilariously funny when shamelessly pimping himself on tour for a roof over his head, and tragically vulnerable in bashful confessions with Tashi.

Mike Faist has the least flashy role but is equally wonderful. Art is – if you will – the most closeted of the three, the least confident, most dutiful, who dedicates himself to things and doesn’t stop to think deeply about his true feelings. You suspect the unspoken intense romantic bond between Art and Patrick remains unspoken in their youth because Art himself is uncertain (scared?) about what he feels. Just as he buttons up and represses his own resentments and anger towards Tashi.

Challengers switches and re-aligns these characters beautifully and constantly leaves us guessing. When Tashi (and by extension Art) refuses to see Patrick after her injury, is this because she genuinely blames him for unsettling her before the match or because she just needs something other than random chance to blame? Does she drive Art into becoming a Grand Slam winning machine out of love, a vicarious desire for success or anger (as she shapes into something he isn’t) because she blames him as well? Does Art know or care? Does he realise how much his depression comes from severing connections with his alter-ego Patrick and does Patrick slog it out on the circuit because it’s the only way he can still feel in-any-way close to the only two people he loves (but won’t admit?).

Watching all this unfold, seeing each scene reveal a new piece of information that refocuses what we thought about each character, is compelling – helped a great deal by the vibrant, emotional and intensely sympathetic performances from the three leads. Challengers is also a superbly assembled film, sharply and snappily edited and with an electric, emotionally well-judged score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that skilfully uses refrains to link back to key emotions and sensations. It’s also a film that shoots tennis more electrically than any other. With sweeping crane shots, hand-held camera and every trick in the book, we see matches from the perspective of everything: the players, the ground, even the ball itself. It’s stunningly visually inventive.

It culminates in a truly wonderful, open-ended, emotionally satisfying ending that I actively adored. It’s a film about love, about three people who feud over petty things for years but need each other to be complete, who find there are elements of each other’s personalities that serve to complete themselves. Who are fiercely sexually attracted to each other, but also have a deep, intense emotional bond they need more than they realise. Challengers is an absolutely gorgeous, delightful, superb film – another emotional, mature triumph from Guadagnino, with three brilliant actors working wonders with a sharp script. It’s a film to love and treasure.

The Bells of St Mary’s (1945)

Schmaltzy but also rather charming, a superior sequel to Going My Way

Director: Leo McCarey

Cast: Bing Crosby (Father Chuck O’Malley), Ingrid Bergman (Sister Mary Benedict), Henry Travers (Horace P Bogardus), William Gargan (Joe Gallagher), Ruth Donnelly (Sister Michael), Joan Carroll (Patsy Gallagher), Martha Sleeper (Mary Gallagher), Rhys Williams (Dr McKay), Dickie Tyler (Eddie Breen), Una O’Connor (Mrs Breen)

When Bing Crosby asked America if they were Going My Way in 1944, the answer was a massive yes. It was inevitable we got a sequel –the first sequel to be nominated for Best Picture – The Bells of St Mary’s. In a stunning display of it ain’t broke so don’t fix it, The Bells of St Mary’s drops Father Bing (aka Chuck O’Malley) into another urban-parish-with-problems, this time turning round a rundown convent school, run by straight-laced Sister Ingrid Bergman (aka Mary Benedict). Can Father Bing and Sister Ingrid set aside their incredibly-good-natured rivalry to: (a) convince heartless local businessman Horace Bogardus (Henry Travers) to donate a new school building, (b) save sensitive young Eddie from easy-going bullying and (c) re-build the marriage of easy-going-bad-girl Patsy’s parents? If you have any doubt Father Bing can solve these problems without breaking his easy-going-sweat, you ain’t spent long enough going his way.

The Bells of St Mary’s score over its Oscar-winning forbear by being significantly less gag-inducing in its snowstorm of saccharine schmaltz. This is despite the fact it shares almost all the flaws of the original. It goes on forever, very little really happens, every single problem is solved with a little flash of Father Bing’s gentle insight, and it’s painfully predictable. But The Bells of St Mary’s manages to not outstay its welcome because it’s told with genuine wit and, in Ingrid Bergman, has a consummate performer who is actually charming and lovable rather than someone we are just told is charming and lovable.

It’s also somehow more down-to-earth, the resolution to its problems being a bit more relatable than Going My Way’s MET-opera finale for the tough kids. Father Bing is marginally less saintly smug and has an underhand cunning – having worked out his wise words ain’t melting the heart of Bogardus (how strange it is to see George Bailey’s Clarence as a child-hating arsehole), he quickly switches to a little conspiracy of suggestion to make Bogardus fret about being set on a highway to hell. Despite this of course, O’Malley remains blissfully perfect, a liberal churchman and bathed in perfection.

The Bells of St Mary has complete faith in the fundamental goodness of the church. The only questions are ones of approach: O’Malley favours a manly Christianity where decent men fight bullies, while Mary Benedict’s instinct is to turn the other cheek and take the moral high ground. O’Malley feels the kids will be served best if they relax, Mary Benedict sees virtue in hard work and self-improvement. Naturally, lessons are learned on both sides: O’Malley discovers sending the boys on holiday isn’t a ticket for good behaviour, Mary Benedict teaches bullied Eddie to box and prove himself to his bully.

Sister Ingrid might be a bit more serious because, unlike Father O’Malley, she’s lived a bit in her time. The tomboy-turned-nun can swing a baseball bat with the best of them and when she tells young Patsy you “have to know what you are giving up” when you become a nun, there is more than a hint Sister Mary might have snuck behind a few bike-sheds back in the day. Perhaps this contributes to The Bells of St Mary’s cheekily suggesting a little bit of sexual tension between the eunuch-like O’Malley and Mary Benedict. (Crosby and Bergman played up to this to tease their on-set Catholic advisors, at one point ending a take with an improvised passionate kiss – a gag that’s probably a little funnier than some of those in the film.)

Ingrid Bergman is actually rather marvellous here. It’s a reminder she had fine light comic chops, making Mary charming, warm and rather endearing – for all Sister Mary switches from hard-headed academic realism to a flighty faith that God Will Provide so long as they pray hard enough (very different from O’Malley’s God Helps Those Who Help Themselves angle). Bergman hilariously dances and prances, like Sugar Ray, while teaching Eddie to box but is also touchingly gentle when comforting a distressed Patsy. Bergman is such a good actress she pretty much lifts the entire film another level from its original.

She even lifts the game of Bing Crosby. Though he still largely coasts through on his own charm and persona, but he pushes himself into some more fertile dramatic territory. Even the film’s contrived plot developments like Sister Ingrid’s TB diagnosis – something which for reasons she can’t be told about (don’t ask) – end up carrying a touch of realistic drama. Not that Bing forgets what the people want to see: of course Patsy’s father is a piano player, so of course within seconds of him turning up at her mother’s flat he and Bing dive straight into a musical number.

Despite all the treacle that The Bells of St Mary’s wades through, there is enough genuine charm here (among all its sentimental, signposted silliness) for you to cut the film some slack. Leo McCarey directs mostly with an unfussy professionalism – although he does sprinkle in the odd good bit of comic business, noticeably a cat stuck crawling around under O’Malley’s signature straw hat, on the mantlepiece behind him during his first meeting with the nuns. And it might largely be due to Bergman’s skilful presence, but there is genuinely more substance here than Going My Way. It might still feel like gorging on candy, but at least this time you don’t feel your stomach groaning in pain after you’ve finished.

Kanał (1957)

Wajda’s war-epic is a brilliantly filmed, unsettling critique of the truth behind national myths

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Cast: Teresa Iżewska (Daisy), Tadeusz Janczar (Jacek “Korab”), Wieńczysław Gliński (Lt. Zadra), Tadeusz Gwiazdowski (Sgt. Kula), Stanisław Mikulski (Smukły), Emil Karewicz (Lt. Mądry), Maciej Maciejewski (Gustaw), Vladek Sheybal (Michał, the composer), Teresa Berezowska (Halinka)

By 1957, Wajda was working under a very different Polish government from the one in place for his debut feature A Generation. With the fall of Stalinism came an easing on restrictions and controls. Wajda could address themes he couldn’t touch before, helping make Kanał perhaps even more controversial than A Generation, as it explored Polish sacrifices during the Second World War and, by implication, asked what the point might have been. Focusing on the final days of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising – a revolt against the German occupiers which the Soviets effectively stood by and watched the Wehrmacht crush – Kanał gives a Polish National myth a tragic human face of futile effort.

Not quite what Wajda’s bosses in the Polish Film Industry expected. Perhaps the title should have tipped them off: Kanał translates as Sewer, hardly suggesting a heroic tribute to national sacrifice. Starting on the 54^th day of the Warsaw Uprising, the Home Army forces are beaten, clinging to a few streets. Introducing a unit commanded by Lt Zadra (Wieńczysław Gliński) in a long tracking shot through a devastated city, an unseen narrator bluntly tells us in the opening moments everyone we see is about to die. But not in a last charge against the Germans: instead it will be in the sewers, while attempting to escape, waist deep in shit, lost in the dark and stumbling into dead ends, madness, exhaustion and booby traps.

For many Poles this didn’t fit with the idea of the Warsaw Uprising being a heroic, necessary battle for the nation. It’s rather like in the 1950s, a British film studio had made a film about the Battle of Britain in which the pilots got tanked up on booze then took to the skies to be pointlessly shot down by the Luftwaffe over the channel. At least Wajda this time could present the Home Army – who, following the government line, A Generation had condemned as bourgeoise, fusspot cowards – as heroes. And Kanał is mercifully free of blunt political messaging: no one has time for any of that when they are simply desperate to survive.

What it’s also free of though is any tangible achievements from the Polish Resistance forces. Zadra’s unit holds onto a trashed district, under heavy fire, taking more and more casualties for about a day before being ordered to withdraw through a city pounded by shells through desperate civilians. During the entire course of Kanał the Poles inflict three casualties on the Germans: one tank is hit (but not destroyed), one unmanned motorised mine is stopped and one German soldier who falls into a defensive trench is beaten to death with a stone. Other than that, this is a one-sided curb-stomp where the Germans are hardly even seen and the Poles take huge casualties without even the most basic, morale boosting minor victory.

Kanał’s first half, which covers the war up-top is gritty, immediate and a truly scintillating piece of brutal combat. Wajda’s cinematic confidence is clear from the start with that long Wellesian tracking shot introducing all the characters as they move from one ruined district to another. His combat scenes take place on a wasteland of smashed buildings and have a panicked pointlessness to them – confused and desperate soldiers responding rather than planning anything proactive. The one undeniably heroic act we see – Jacek’s (Tadeusz Janczar, once again Wajda’s complex sacrificial lamb) taking down of the motorized mine – sees him near-fatally wounded, reducing him to a limping, slowly dying passenger for the rest of the film.

The atmosphere behind the lines is already tipping into desperation: number two soldier Mądry (a swaggering Emil Karewicz) is bedding young fighter Halinka (a fragile Teresa Berezowska) openly, while composer Michal (Vladek Sheybal, excellent as a haunted outsider) attempts to call through to his wife and children on the other side of the city, only to listen in on their deaths over a phone line. Any sense of chain of command is crumbling, and the soldiers are already hardened to death and destruction: retreating through the city, none of them can muster even a flicker of interest in a desperate mother begging for news of her lost child.

That’s nothing though compared to the bleakness of the film’s second half as the unit piles into the sewer. Here, time and space start to lose all meaning. The film’s timeline becomes as unclear for us as it does for the characters as they trudge through this Dantean sludge (Wajda makes sure we don’t miss the point, in a slightly clumsy touch, by having Michal quote the poet at length). With limited light, no real idea where they are going, low motivation and toxic gases being stirred up from the excrement they are crushing under their feet, slowly sanity slips, people revert to their worst instincts and selfish, unheroic decisions are made.

There is little to build a national myth on here. An incoherent colonel is left to die in the mire. Mądry and record keeper Sgt. Kula (a comradely Tadeusz Gwiazdowski) decide their own lives are more important than those of the company. Zadra clings to his duty, but lost and confused utterly fails to maintain any duty of care to his men. Michal, teetering already with the loss of his family, disappears into his own world. Their guide Daisy (a brilliantly humane Teresa Iżewska) abandons her duty in what we already know is going to be a futile attempt to keep Jacek alive. There is no dignity or final heroic act of death, with people meeting the end with stunned silence, clumsy tiredness or panic.

And over it all is the statement Wajda implies: since the Uprising achieved nothing but the massacre of its fighters, to a Wehrmacht driven out months later with ease by the Soviet forces, what was the point? That, however much the Communist state chose to praise the bravery of the soldiers, was it brave or foolhardy to single themselves out as targets in a one-sided battle that achieved nothing? Watching the fighters of the Uprising wade through excrement towards a lonely, uncelebrated death with nothing to show for it, makes you consider the complex feelings that lie behind National myths of sacrifice. And it’s a powerful and haunting message for this mesmerising sophomore effort.

Rollerball (1975)

Violent science-fiction dystopia satire ends up making blunt, uncertain points

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: James Caan (Jonathan E.), John Houseman (Mr. Bartholomew), Maud Adams (Ella), John Beck (‘Moonpie’), Moses Gunn (Cletus), Ralph Richardson (The Librarian), Pamela Hensley (Mackie), Barbara Trentham (Daphne), Shane Rimmer (Rusty), Richard LeParmentier (Bartholomew’s Aide)

It’s the future, but it might as well be Ancient Rome. The world is ruled by Corporate Caesars, holding supreme power, controlling information and plucking anyone they want for anything, be it for a job or as a partner in bed. The masses are kept pliant and happy by being fed Bread and Circuses. Namely Rollerball, the world’s most popular sport, a hyper-violent mix of American football and ice hockey played in a velodrome, with teams competing to score by thrusting a metal ball into their opponent’s goal, with rules to prevent only the most egregiously violent acts. It’s a game designed by with a simple message: the individual is powerless, the system is all.

Problem is, like any game, some players are better at it than others. And the best player there has ever been Jonathan E (James Caan) is a living legend for Houston, tougher and more passionate about the game than anyone else alive. He’s a living contradiction of the secret principle of the game: an individual can make a difference. Naturally the Corporation want him gone, offering him a generous package to retire. Problem is Jonathan doesn’t want to retire. What else is there to do, but to remove the few rules Rollerball has, and establish how futile individual effort is by killing Jonathan in the game. But Rollerball’s greatest ever player isn’t that easy to kill.

All of which makes Rollerball sound both cleverer and more exciting than it actually is. Because Rollerball is a deeply sombre, rather self-important film that makes obscure, slightly fumbled points about the war between the system and the individual, within a coldly Kubrickian framework that suggests Jewison and co misunderstood what made 2001 a sensation (it wasn’t just clean surfaces and classical music). It’s actually quite a problem that the only time Rollerball even remotely comes to exciting life for the viewer is during the game sequences: and seeing as the film is criticising our love of gladiatorial blood sports, that can hardly be what it’s aiming for.

Rollerball is shockingly po-faced and lacks even a hint of humour at any point (except perhaps a reliably eccentric cameo from Ralph Richardson as an only half-sane custodian of an all-seeing computer). There is little satirical spice that might provide a bit of lighter insight into the ruthless, business-driven world the film is set in, or that might demonstrate how concepts we are familiar with (sports and television) have been tweaked to manipulate and pander to the masses. Combined with that, every character in the film is sullen, serious and (whisper it) dull and hard to relate to.

This is best captured in Jonathan himself, played with a lack of an uneasy stoic quality by James Caan. Caan later commented he found the character lifeless and lacking depth, and you can see this in his performance. Caan never seems sure what angle to take: is Jonathan a defiant individualist or a guy utterly at sea in the system who can’t understand why he is being told to stop playing the game he loves? Rollerball wants to settle for both: it doesn’t really work. Jonathan spends his time outside the ring, moping and staring into the middle-distance. He holds a candle for the wife taken from him by an executive, but this is never channelled into a motivating grief or ever used as way to make the scales fall from his eyes about the nature of the system he’s working in.

In fact, Jonathan remains pretty much oblivious to the brutality and cruelty of the sport he’s playing – which, by the end of the film, regularly clocks up impressive body counts in every match. He’s still perfectly capable of throwing an opponent under the wheels of a motorbike, thrust a goal home and then bellow “I love this game!”. Never once does he, or the film, question this love. Not even an on-pitch assault on his best friend (which leaves him in a vegetative state) or watching his teammates being crushed, incinerated, battered and smashed seems to register with him intellectually or emotionally.

Rollerball needed a character with enough hinterland to grow into that or could denounce on some level (even privately) the violent spectacle he’s wrapped in, capable of a moral journey or making an imaginative leap. We don’t get either. Instead, Jonathan E feels like a care-free jock who wants to carry on doing his thing, because he has a good-old-fashioned dislike of being told what to do. In the end it fudges the whole film: Jonathan E is neither sympathetic or interesting enough to be a vehicle for the sort of satirical or political points the film wants to make.

Not that these ideas are really that interesting anyway, essentially boiling down to a mix of familiar “Big Business Bad” and “the proles will take any loss of freedom lying down, so long as they get some juicy violent action to watch”. None of this hasn’t been explored with more wit and wisdom elsewhere. Never-the-less Rollerball lets its points practically play trumpets to herald their arrival as they stumble towards the screen. There is nothing here Orwell didn’t cover better in a few paragraphs of 1984.

Norman Jewison does a decent job staging this though, in particular the violence of the Rollerball games, with bodies crushed, maimed and thrown-around. There is a fine performance of heartless corporate chill from John Houseman. But, when the film makes its points, I’m not sure what on earth it’s trying to say. Is it a tribute to the strength of one man’s character? Does it matter if Jonathan E acts out of a stubborn lack of knowledge or understanding? As the crowd watches a deadly match in stunned silence, have they finally had enough? As they praise Jonathan E rapturously is Rollerball suggesting we are just naturally inclined to love strong-men dictators? I’ve no idea what is happening here – and I’m not sure that Rollerball does either.

The Insider (1999)

Mann’s finest film is a chilling breakdown of the insidious strength of corporations

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Al Pacino (Lowell Bergman), Russell Crowe (Dr Jeffrey Wigand), Christopher Plummer (Mike Wallace), Diane Venora (Liane Wigand), Philip Baker Hall (Don Hewitt), Lindsay Crouse (Sharon Tiller), Debi Mazar (Debbie De Luca), Stephen Tobolowsky (Eric Kluster), Colm Feore (Richard Scruggs), Bruce McGill (Ron Motley), Gina Gershon (Helen Caperelli), Michael Gambon (Thomas Sandefur), Rip Torn (John Scanlon), Cliff Curtis (Sheikh Fadlallah)

For decades we persuaded ourselves smoking was problem-free. Then, when we finally decided sucking tar into your lungs several times a day probably didn’t go hand-in-hand with good health, Big Tobacco bent over backwards to argue they didn’t believe for one minute nicotine was actually addictive. This lie – they were improving the hit to increase the customer base – was blown upon by corporate whistle blower, and former B&W employee, Dr Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe).

But the battle over the reporting of the story also exposed the fault-lines in corporate-owned media companies, as Wigand’s 60 Minutes interview was canned by a CBS network terrified of legal action imperilling a corporate sale, much to the fury of crusading producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) who spent months bringing Wigand in only to see him brushed aside. The Insider charts these two stories merging into each other: the deadly campaign of intimidation and smears against Wigand, segueing into the caving of CBS in the face of legal threats with Bergman left furious, betrayed and turning his campaigning fire against his own employers.

This all comes grippingly to life in Michael Mann’s superb slice of All the President’s Men inspired-reportage, turning this 1996 TV-and-business scandal into a sleek, intelligent thriller that takes a chilling look at how corporate America rigs the game in its own favour with impunity. The Insider is as rightfully furious at the dirty-tricks and menace of the tobacco companies, as it is at the subtly insidious way corporate interests pollutes news reporting. It does this while also presenting its two heroes as flawed men with more in common than they might think: competitive alpha males, both prone to taking rash, destructive actions in fits of head-strong self-righteousness, caring about their own moral code over the needs of others.

The Insider splits into two clear acts: the agonising decision of Wigand to blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance, in the face of immense personal and professional pressure and Bergman’s subsequent struggle to deliver on his word and get Wigand’s confession on air. The first half offers the more traditional heroics – and the more overt hero-and-villain structure, but increasingly I find the second half, of news shows being dictated to by their paymasters more-and-more unsettlingly prescient, becoming increasingly relevant the older the film gets.

But that first half makes for a compellingly tense pressure-cooker view. It’s powered by an excellent performance by Russell Crowe (effortlessly convincing as someone twenty years older, and collecting his first Oscar nomination). Crowe makes Wigand principled but prickly, brave but confrontational and at times frustratingly self-righteous. His moral qualms are finally sharpened into action his fury at the blunt-intimidation from B&W’s sinisterly avuncular CEO (a masterful cameo from Michael Gambon – one of the great single-scene performances in movies) and its implication that he cannot trusted to stick to his NDA. Wigand barely involves his wife (a tightly-wound Diane Venora) in his decisions, only mentioning his dismissal in passing and deciding to appear on 60 minutes (a decision that will shatter their lives) unilaterally.

But Wigand also has higher motives. He wants to be able to look his daughters in the eye, having sold-out to burnish the dirty-deeds of B&W with his scientific skills. He’s rightly affronted by the lies Big Tobacco has sold the public and undergoes enormous sacrifices (financial, marital, professional, legal, death threats and a public smear campaign) to see things through. Mann’s cool mix of starkness and shadows, full of drained out colours and greys, is perfect for a world where Wigand is shadowed by strangers at a driving range, receives bullets in his mailbox and searches late at night for who has left footprints in his garden. Crowe superbly conveys a man acting out of an increasing sense of moral imperative, struggling desperately to hold himself together under immense pressure.

This section of the film – especially with its clear antagonist – plays as a superb personal and political thriller, Mann expertly conveying lurking menace. In 1999 the second half of the film, the struggle to actually broadcast Wigand’s interview, was often seen as slightly underwhelming. But actually it shows a different type of danger: less overt and heavy-handed corporate power with its legal injunctions and bullying FBI guys hoping for a cushy retirement job with the corporation, more how these corporate masters assert control in quiet, less direct ways to decide what we hear or see.

Our journalists have no fear when confronting criminals or terrorists – The Insider’s prologue establishes this with Bergman and host Mike Wallace not flinching in the face of gun-toting Hezbollah fighters guarding the Sheikh they have arranged to interview. But they face far greater threats to their integrity when confronted with lawyers and corporate directors (effectively embodied by Gina Gershon and Stephen Tobolowsky as uncaring suits) whose threats are indirect and insidious. Wigand’s interview could imperil the sale of CBS and the bonus of the corporate suits, and in that scenario journalist principles can go hang. Christopher Plummer is, by the way, superb as the charismatic Wallace, who caves to pressure then convinces himself he hasn’t, a super-star of the airwaves who loses part of his wider integrity trying to protect his position.

And doesn’t the idea that corporations can squeeze the life out of journalistic stories feel even more chilling today? After all, virtually every single news outlet out there is owned by a major business, all with their own agendas. Can we really believe they’ve not all made calls on gets reported, based on what their shareholders might think? Mann’s film skilfully – and rather chillingly – shows how quickly they can re-work the agenda. It leaves Lowell Bergman raging (as only Al Pacino can) against the betrayal of trust he’s being forced to make towards Wigand.

Crowe’s pressure-cooker performance stole many of the headlines on release but The Insider also benefits from an excellent Pacino performance. Utterly committed to his principles and – just like Wigand – utterly unwilling to compromise them even an inch, no matter the cost, Bergman will pick up the windmill-tilting banner, and charge with it at his own paymasters. No one can rip through speeches quite like Pacino, but he gives Bergman a real genuineness, grounded in a fundamental decency, whose righteous anger is underpinned with world-weary disbelief that it’s come to this.

It grounds an excellently studied breakdown of a journalistic turf war. The Insider plays like All the President’s Men, if Woodward and Bernstein had been spiked after they nailed the story. Mann demonstrates the influence in The Insider’s crisply immersive photography that employs depth of frame and gyroscopic deep-focus, as well as in the crisp editing and the film’s mesmerising emersion in the complex details of building a story. Combine that with a gripping conspiracy thriller on the machinations of ruthless corporations and The Insider makes for a compelling film.

Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)

Some odd clashes of style but still a distinctive and unique musical, if not a triumph

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: Ted Neeley (Jesus Christ), Carl Anderson (Judas Iscariot), Yvonne Elliman (Mary Magdalene), Barry Dennen (Pontius Pilate), Bob Bingham (Caiaphas), Larry Marshall (Simon Zealotes), Josh Mostel (King Herod), Kurt Yaghjian (Annas), Philip Toubus (Peter)

A bus rolls up in the West Bank and a bunch of excited, hippie actors and singers bundle out. What else are they going to do but replay the final days of Jesus Christ – with songs! Thus begins Norman Jewison’s adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice’s rock opera musical, a hodge-podge of interesting ideas, stylistic nonsense and touches of the bizarre. Some of it works, some of its doesn’t – but at least it’s having a stab at doing something different.

I’ll assume you are familiar with the final days of Jesus Christ (Ted Neeley) as Jesus Christ Superstar ticks off the arrival in Jerusalem, the money lenders in the temple, the last supper, Gethsemane, Pilate washing his hands and the crucifixion (but not, pointedly, the resurrection). Jesus is at the centre of this but, as is so often the case in films, is an enigmatic, unreadable figure. The real lead is Judas (Carl Anderson), worried that the Messiah is running the risk of provoking a brutal smack-down from the Romans and letting the worship of his follower’s rush to his head. Perhaps he should do something about it?

First the good stuff. Douglas Slocombe’s photography, on location in a sun-soaked Middle East (the cast must have been grateful their flowing, hippie robes translated into such light clothing) looks gorgeous (the final shot of the cross at dusk – with a shepherd and sheep just visible in the corona of the sun’s glare, a happy on-the-day accident – is sublime). The locations are bravely selected to stress the sweeping vastness of desert: Pilate’s home is a rocky mountain, the apostles dance among abandoned Roman pillars, Gethsemane is the only splash of green we see. A cave with a circular hole in its roof, casts a striking shard of light over Jesus with his disciples. There is gorgeous stuff here.

It’s mixed in with some successful modern touches. Turning the money lender’s stalls into a trashy marketplace, rife with everything from tourist tat to heavy weaponry works as a striking image of commercial corruption. Jesus’ final vision of Judas takes place in a Roman amphitheatre decked out like a concert carries a nice dream-like quality. The idea of having the priest’s temple being a piece of bare-bones scaffolding is a nice visual image of their ambition. At the centre of the film is a very striking, excellently sung performance by Carl Anderson as Judas. Pretty much dominating the film, he brings the part just the right amount of spark, frustration, anger and self-pity and best manages to invest the songs with character.

Unfortunately, Jesus Christ Superstar mixes this with plenty of modern touches that either land flatly or whose intention becomes almost hard to work out. When Judas is chased through the desert by tanks or buzzed by fighter planes, is this a sign of the conflict that would come, the sense of destiny forcing him into his assigned role, or just an excuse to see the budget put into effect on some military hardware? Moments like this feel they are trying too hard against the more subtle modern touches.

There’s also the rather mixed bag of inexperienced performers Jewison fills the film out with. Ted Neeley can certainly hold a note, but he’s no actor, turning Jesus into a blank void who frequently feels like he’s watching the action around him while waiting for his cue. Yvonne Elliman similarly is an excellent singer but doesn’t really manage to convey the complex feelings of love and worship in Mary Magdalene. The rest of the cast give it an enthusiastic go, ranging from the decent (Barry Dennon) to the over-emphatic (Philip Toubas – who later became a hugely successful porn star, not exactly the expected career path of St Peter).

The mix of hippie-ish costumes also only works in places. While Jesus is of course dressed pretty much as any Hollywood film had ever dressed him (white-flowing robes), others wear a mixture of that, flower-power garbs or the sort of in-between strangeness (I’m looking at you Roman soldiers) that makes it look like they have wandered in from an episode of Star Trek. The brightly coloured costumes do however stand out extremely well in the vast blankness of the desert.

Jesus Christ Superstar’s main problem is its lack of narrative drive. Co-scripting with Melvyn Bragg (surely the easiest paycheque ever for one of the UK’s leading public intellectuals), Jewison doesn’t really provide any dramatic meat or force between the songs. There isn’t really a sense of moral and narrative development, with the film instead feeling rather like the concert album it’s based on, a series of songs staged one after-the-other without really linking together in a full narrative arc.

Saying that, Jewison’s effectiveness with the camera comes across well. “Hosanna” is crammed with a full-blown, very well-shot Busby-Berkely style number where Jewison rather effectively uses freeze-frames to punctuate the beats. “The Temple” sees Jesus disappear under a swarm of lepers like a zombie victim. A shot of the Judas’ purse of thirty pieces of silver dominates the frame at one point like it’s drawing him in. Some of the frantic tracking shots of Judas through the desert have a real elemental force to them.

But there isn’t quite enough of that to bring Jesus Christ Superstar to make it a triumph. Its episodic song structure, it’s odd mix of styles and the wildly varying quality of its performances never quite gel together. However, it’s perfect for turning this into a sort of camp spectacular, a cult oddness that stands out as quite unlike any other musical or film Jewison made.

Awakenings (1990)

Decent performances from the leads can’t save a shamelessly manipulative, saccharine movie

Director: Penny Marshall

Cast: Robert De Niro (Leonard Lowe), Robin Williams (Dr Malcolm Sayer), Julie Kavner (Eleanor Costello), John Heard (Dr Kaufman), Penelope Ann Miller (Paula), Max von Sydow (Dr Peter Ingham), Ruth Nelson (Mrs Lowe), Alice Drummond (Lucy), Judith Malina (Rose), George Martin (Frank), Dexter Gordon (Rolando), Keith Diamond (Anthony), Anna Meare (Miriam), Mary Alice (Margaret)

There can be few things more terrifying than being trapped inside your own body, unable to engage with the world, but to be in a sort of waking coma for years. Imagine how wonderful – and how terrible – it might be if you briefly woke to normality, only to return to your catatonic shell? This actually happened to patients of Dr Oliver Sacks – here re-imagined as Dr Malcolm Sayer (Robin Williams) – in a Bronx hospital in 1969. Looking after catatonic survivors of the encephalitis lethargica epidemic of 1919-30, Sayer discovered they responded to certain stimuli: their name, music, catching balls etc. With an experimental drug he discovers he can restore the patients to ‘life’ – foremost among them Leonard Lowe (Robert De Niro), just a boy when afflicted – only to discover the effects won’t last and they are doomed to return to their coma-like state.

It’s such a terrible thing to think about that it even gives genuine emotional force to Awakenings an otherwise hopelessly manipulative, sentimental film that plays like a TV-Movie weepie. It certainly didn’t need the naked emotional manipulation that washes over the whole thing like a wave, with Randy Newman’s sentimental, tear-jerking score swells with every single heart-string tucking moment. Awakenings is so determined to make you feel every single moment it eventually starts to make the story less affecting than it really is. A simpler, less strenuous film would have been more moving rather than this film almost genetically engineered into ‘life-affirming’.

Everything in Awakenings feels like it is always trying too hard. Every moment is laid on for maximum emotional impact. Adapted from Oliver Sacks’ book chronicling individual cases, it presents a stereotypical Hollywood ‘feelings’ film, with lessons for all. Worse, there is a tedious ‘seize the day’ message that keeps ringing out of the film. The awakening is, of course, not only literal but metaphorical – the patients (and their doctors) ‘awoke’ to appreciate life and living more. It’s hard not to think at times there is something rather patronising about partially using Leonard’s brief experience as a lesson for Dr Sayer to stop being so damn timid and ask a nurse out on a date. As traumatic as it is for Leonard to return to his coma, at least Dr Sayer learned to live a little!

It’s a very fake attempt at a hopeful ending to an otherwise down beat true-story. Dr Sayer is a retro-fitted version of Oliver Sacks, sharing many of his characteristics – but not his sexuality or decades long celibacy – and the film presents him, as Hollywood loves to with geniuses, as a shy, awkward type who no-one of course could expect anything of. He combines this with quiet maverick tendencies, putting the patients first against the ‘numbers-first-risk-free’ obstructionist bureaucrats (represented, of course, by John Heard, though he does thaw a little) who run the hospital and poo-poo his ideas.

Awakenings is full of sickly moments of heavy-handed sentimentality – its opening shot of Leonard as a boy carving his name in a bench under the Brooklyn Bridge tells you immediately one of the first places he’ll go as an adult for a wistful smile – that keep trying to do the work for you. (Of course, all the nurses and cleaning staff offer up cheques to help pay for the patients drugs!) The story doesn’t need it. Just seeing the facts of these vibrant adults emerge for a brief time in the sun is moving enough. Leonard quietly, but with dignity, asking the hospital board for permission to go outside alone is more moving than watching him forcibly dragged from the door by porters or seeing him rant on the mental ward he’s been consigned to as a punishment. We don’t need Sayer to literally tell us some things are too sad for him to film, when we can see it on Williams’ face.

The leads are not always immune to the try hard nature of the film, but they do some decent work. De Niro (Oscar-nominated) brings a touching sweetness to Leonard, essentially a boy who wakes in the body of an adult. There is a genuine wonder in his eyes at the world around him – wonder that transforms into frustration at the continued restrictions placed on his freedom. There is something slightly studied about the physical effects (especially in the film’s final act) but De Niro understands that underplaying and quiet honesty is more moving than when the film pushes him towards grandstanding.

Williams is also very good – if at times a little mannered – as the quiet, awkward Sayer. With the less flashy – but potentially more complex role – he again shows how close humour is to pathos. It’s a performance with several little eccentric comic touches, but wrapped up in a humanitarian shell of earnestness that is quite affecting. It’s a shame that the film constantly undermines his restraint by using every conceivable trick of framing, scoring and composition to wring sentiment from him.

But then that’s Awakenings all over. You can imagine the script covered with annotations along the lines of ‘make them cry here’. And it worked with a great many people, the mechanical nature of the film working overtime to tickle the tear ducts. But the film’s utterly unnatural sense of artifice constantly prevents you from really feeling it. You are always aware of Marshall nudging you to remind you of the unbearable emotion and the tragedy of lives not lived. All easily washed down in a narrative structure as old as the hills – Sayer is an outsider who proves himself, he and Leonard fall out then come back together stronger than ever etc. etc. – that continually reminds you of its functional, manipulative nature.

A Generation (1955)

Wajda’s striking debut is full of politically-enforced lies but is masterful film-making

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Cast: Tadeusz Łomnicki (Stach Mazur), Urszula Modrzyńska (Dorota), Tadeusz Janczar (Jasio Krone), Janusz Paluszkiewicz (Sekuła), Ryszard Kotys (Jacek), Roman Polanski (Mundek)

Few European countries felt the brunt of the Second World War more than Poland. Invaded by the Nazis and the USSR (it’s often forgot Britain and France went to war in 1939 to defend Polish, something even we seem to have forgotten by 1945 when we allowed the country to be smothered in the Soviet embrace), it faced atrocities from both dictatorships which left lasting scars on the nation. It’s events (and legacy) was the subject of the first three films by legendary Polish director Andrzej Wajda, the title A Generation capturing the impact it had on the entire country.

A Generation follows a group of young men drawn into the resistance movement against the German occupying forces. They include the increasingly political Stach (Tadeusz Łomnicki) and the hesitant, anxious Jasio (Tadeusz Janczar), both of whom are inducted into a resistance cell by the impassioned Dorota (Urszula Modrzyńska). As Warsaw burns during the Jewish Ghetto Uprising of 1943, the newly minted fighters take to the streets in solidarity – and at cost.

It’s a simple summary, but that only tells half the story. There are subtleties to A Generation that can be hard to pick-up on for those not born Polish. When Wajda made A Generation, Poland was in the grip of Stalinism. It’s a film not made under artistic freedom, but by an artist pushing against the boundaries of what censorship would allow him to say. Among a great deal of truth in A Generation there are also thumping great lies. Lies that surely must have hurt Wajda, whose father was murdered (along with thousands others) by the Soviets at Katyn (a war crime A Generation, by necessity, pins on the Germans).

Stalinist thinking dictated very clear lines. The resistance heroes in the film are The People’s Guard. This was a pro-Soviet force, that believed only the Soviet Union could save Poland from the Germans. The Home Army (the largest resistance group, loyal to the Polish government-in-exile in Britain) are portrayed as bourgeoisie, reactionary, scared to fight and only marginally better than collaborators. (In real life, Stalin allowed the Home Army to be massacred by the Germans in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 – Soviet tanks effectively sat outside the city and watched – then shipped thousands of survivors to death in the gulags).

Stalinist thinking also permeates the films characterisation and opinions. Many of the characters frequently feel functional and under-developed, quietly placing the movement ahead of themselves – classic Stalinist thinking, where the individual only serves as a cog in a greater machine. Stach’s work-place mentor waxes lyrical about a wise, kind old man with a beard – Karl Marx of course – while outlining how their Home Army supporting factory boss is ruthlessly exploiting the working classes for profit. Comments about the holocaust are kept to a minimum – Stalin hardly being known for his tolerance either – with Wajda going as far as he can by praising the Jews bravery as fighters. Arguably the most developed character in the film – Tadeusz Janczar’s twitchy Jasio – is only allowed to be a more complex hero because, all his doubts, fears, bravado and individual pride, eventually lead him to the ultimate sacrifice (in the film’s most iconic moment).

If A Generation is so politically compromised, why watch it today? Because it is also a superbly striking debut from a master film-maker – and it’s important to remember, that even with its lies and political obfuscations, the Polish authorities were hardly happy with it at the time anyway. Inspired by Italian neo-realism, Wajda gives the film a lived-in, on-the-streets quality that helped revolutionise Polish cinema. Quite simply, no Polish film had ever looked like this before – it was the first to break free from its hermetically sealed studio bubble. From its opening tracking shot through the poverty-stricken streets of Warsaw’s Wola district, to its extensive location shooting in run-down factories and cobble-lined streets, A Generation embraces realism, employing several non-actors.

Mud, rain and ill-lit locations fill out the frame in a grim, sharply realist view of war. Wajda frequently shows bodies hanging from lamp-posts, while gun battles between Germans and partisans have a frighteningly random intensity to them (perhaps helped by the fact that budgetary issues meant it was cheaper to fire real ammunition on set). The film pioneered the use of squibs for gunshots (condoms filled with fake blood, then burst). Warsaw burns in the background of shots that foreground everyday life, such as fun-fares and solidly proletarian workers working happily.

The partisans huddle in sewers, drink in shanty late-night bars and work in dirty, noisy factories. Wajda’s film fully embraces the style de Sica and others introduced (and fascinatingly was doing this in parallel with Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali and Aparajito thousands of miles away). A Generation might keep many of its characters lightly sketched – Stach and Dorota are invested with youthful fire by Tadeusz Łomnicki and Urszula Modrzyńska which goes a long way to round-out their essentially blandly communist personalities, Donata in particular fervent and stoic in her socialism – but it makes the stakes for their struggle with Fascism grippingly real and dangerously immediate.

Wajda also, successfully, gambled that if he made the two leads reasonably acceptable symbols of Stalinist thinking he would be allowed greater scope with the third. Tadeusz Janczar’s performance as Jasio is fabulous – a fighter disgusted by killing, who kills a German with a panicked firing of an entire clip then brags how much he let him have it, whose escape from the Germans during the Uprising could be interpreted either as a noble distraction to allow others to escape or a blind panic that ends fatally. Either way, Jasio is a fascinatingly rich, contradictory character.

Wajda’s film is a powerful mission statement of his dynamism with the camera and his ability to walk a fine-line between political demands and genuine drama (though his later films would be made under a marginally more liberal government). While it must never be forgotten while watching it that it presents a slanted, false version of history, it still captures an essential truth of its haphazard chaos and savage violence. When Stach weeps when seeing teenagers not much younger than him preparing to join the People’s Guard, it hits a deeper truth about the horrors of the twentieth century on Poland that blasts through any political compromise Wajda was forced to make.

Ratatouille (2007)

Delightful and heart-warming cooking comedy with added rats – a Pixar gem

Director: Brad Bird

Cast: Patton Oswalt (Remy), Lou Romano (Alfredo Linguini), Ian Holm (Skinner), Brian Dennehy (Django), Peter Sohn (Émile), Peter O’Toole (Anton Ego), Brad Garrett (Auguste Gusteau), Janeane Garofalo (Colette Tatou), Will Arnett (Horst), Julius Callahan (Lalo), James Remar (Larousse), John Ratzenberger (Mustafa), Teddy Newton (Talon Labarthe)

They say anyone can cook – but surely they don’t mean a rat can cook? But in Ratatouille that’s what we get: the greatest chef in Paris is a rat. Remy (Patton Oswalt) has a sense of taste and smell that’s light years ahead of his fellow rats. While they happily munch on rotten food, Remy longs for food that’s actually good. Separated from his family, Remy finds himself in the Parisian restaurant of legendary late chef Auguste Gusteau (Brad Garrett). There Remy’s natural instincts make him the secret brains behind the growing success of young Alfredo Linguini (Lou Romano), who overnight moves from dish cleaner to chef. His secret? Remy of course. Can they keep their secret in the face of the suspicion of head chef Skinner (Ian Holm), Linguini’s growing romance with fellow chef Colette (Janeane Garofalo), and the threat of a damning review by feared critic Anton Ego (Peter O’Toole)?

All this comes together in Brad Bird’s delightful confection, a superb dish where every flavour is perfectly balanced and all ingredients are seasoned to perfection. (I promise this won’t all be full of cooking puns.) It’s absolutely wonderful good fun and on top of that, it’s a real heart-string tugging treat. Ratatouille takes a fantastical set-up (a cooking rat manipulates a talentless chef’s body through precise hair pulling) and then throws in ounces of carefully judged comedy with real emotional pathos. Ratatouille never fails to make you laugh but then hit you with tear-inducing sincerity. The film is a total delight.

What Ratatouille is really about is truth. Being true to yourself, embracing the things you love, and the struggle to find acceptance for that, be it from family or the world around you. It’s the subtext behind Gusteau’s message that anyone can cook. This is not about anyone being able to crack an egg into a pan: it’s about good food coming from a person loving what they do and wanting to share that love with someone else. Remy – an utterly delightful voice performance by Patton Oswalt – wants to experience good food, but as a rat the home of good food is always the place he’s most likely to find himself skewered by a trap.

Remy loves food in a way that the rest of his rat family – lead by his tough-as-nails father Django (Brian Dennehy) – can’t even begin to understand. They see food as just fuel. Who cares which flavours complement each other or even if its fresh? To them Remy’s extraordinary sense of smell is only useful for his ability to detect poison before it hits their mouths. And they can’t even begin to understand Remy might want more. But the very idea of heading to a kitchen – or interacting with humans who, to the other rats, get their kicks from slaughtering rats in their thousands – they can’t even begin to get their head round. Why can’t Remy be happy snuffling in the gutter?

Linguini (a very sweet, nervy Lou Romano) also has burdens of expectations that he can make a career in the kitchen. Anyone can cook – except for Linguini, who has no interest in (let alone flair for) flavours. The relationship between man and rat is beautifully done– even though neither can speak the other’s language. (In a neat touch, while we hear the rats talk – every human in the film just hears them squeak.) To Linguini, it doesn’t matter that Remy is squeaky vermin, what matters to him is that Remy is a master at what he does. But, Ratatouille gently asks: can hiding your true self make you happy in the long term?

Linguini’s success shows another side of being true: as fame goes to Linguini’s head, he starts to forget he’s the muscle not the brains of the operation. What will eventually alienate his growing relationship with fellow chef Colette (a wonderful Janene Garofalo) is not that he’s working with vermin to make the food, but that he’s lied to her about his skills. Something particularly tough since, like Remy, she has had to fight tooth and nail to live her dream in a male-dominated industry.

Accepting your true self and being happy in your own skin are themes our two villains also juggle with. Head chef Skinner (hilariously voiced with impotent rage by Ian Holm) has lost any love he once had for cooking, marketing his former mentor Gusteau as the face of a brand of cheap ready-meals (“with dignity” he absent-mindedly requests, as Gusteau is drawn as a burrito for the latest packaging) and his interest is only in turning a profit. The face of mass-produced, soulless fare, he’s the perfect antagonist of a film that praises lovingly crafted individualism.

And our other villain? Played with a beautifully plummy relish by Peter O’Toole, Anton Ego – drawn with a grey-faced, sepulchral chill – despairs that any food can meet his standards and seems to have forgotten somewhere along the line that excellence comes from love. Unlike Skinner though, Ego is (at heart) an idealist who may no longer quite remember what he is searching for – but will embrace it when he finds it at last. Ratatouille’s finest moment – always brings a tear to my eye for sure – is Ego’s being reminded at last what made him fall in love with his passion in the first place, perhaps one of the finest moments in Pixar’s long history.

Ratatouille’s emotional content and its themes of truth and acceptance are at the heart of its success, complemented always by the superb score from Michael Giacchini, crammed with Parisian inspiration. There is more life in this animated marvel than in hundreds of live-action films. And the animation is breath-taking: from the kitchen a marvel of pristine, gold and steel surfaces, via the sewers bringing back memories of The Third Man, to the visual imagination of Ego’s coffin-shaped office or the cobbled together rat colony (made from various bits of rubbish). Brad Bird’s flair (and Ratatouille is a wonderfully directed film) also carries across to his electric chase scenes through the streets and rivers of Paris, and the undeniable tension of watching Remy maneuverer his way around a kitchen without being detected.

Bird’s film though really succeeds because it has a warm-hearted love for all its characters and a heartfelt and appealing message for us to be the people we want to be, not what those around expect us to be. And who can’t relate to that? Throw in the sort of unexplained comic magic of watching a naïve young man having his body moved about by a cuddly rat sitting under his chef’s hat and with Ratatouille you onto an absolute winner. Bon appetit!

Champion (1949)

Kirk Douglas is a boxing heel in this noirish melodrama full of excellent moments

Director: Mark Robson

Cast: Kirk Douglas (Midge Kelly), Marilyn Maxwell (Grace), Arthur Kennedy (Connie Kelly), Paul Stewart (Tommy Haley), Ruth Roman (Emma), Lola Albright (Palmer), Luis van Rooten (Harris), Harry Shannon (Lew), John Day (Dunne), Ralph Sanford (Hammond), Esther Howard (Mrs Kelly)

What does it take to get to the top? Skill, luck, ambition, determination – and sometimes just being a ruthless bastard. Midge Kelly (Kirk Douglas) as all five of those skills in spades, flying from bum to champ in just a few short years, burning every single bridge along the way. Champion tells the ruthless story of how Kelly alienated his devoted lame brother Connie (Arthur Kennedy), dropped the trainer (Paul Stewart) who discovered him in a heartbeat and used and tossed aside a host of women: dutiful wife Emma (Ruth Roman), would-be femme fatale Grace (Marilyn Maxwell), artistic, sensitive Palmer (Lola Albright) wife to his new manager. As he enters the ring to defend his title against old rival Johnny Dunne (John Day), will all these chickens come home to roost?

Champion is deliciously shot by Franz Planer with a real film noir beauty, in particular the vast pools of overhead light that fill spots of the backstage areas of the various venues Midge fights in. Its boxing is skilfully (and Oscar-winningly) edited into bouts of frenetic, enthusiastic energy – although you can tell immediately that no one in this would last more than 90 seconds in a real ring – and it manages to throw just enough twists and turns into its familiar morality tale set-up to keep you on your toes and entertained. In fact Champion is a gloriously entertaining fists-and-villainy film, full of well-structured melodrama and decently drawn moral lessons. It’s the sort of high-level B-movie Studio Hollywood excelled at making.

For a large part it works because Douglas commits himself so whole-heartedly to playing such an absolute heel, the kind of guy who knows he’s a selfish rat but just doesn’t give a damn. Douglas was given a choice of a big budget studio pic or playing the lead in this low-budget affair, chose Champion – and his choice was proof he knew where his strengths lay as an actor. Midge Kelly is the first in a parade of charismatic, ruthless exploiters that Douglas would play from Ace in the Hole to The Bad and the Beautiful. Kelly is all grinning good nature until the second things don’t go his own way: and then you immediately see the surly aggression in him.

Its why boxing is a good fit for him. He doesn’t quit a fight – pride won’t let him. It’s the quality that Tommy sees in him, after Midge is literally pulled in off the street to pad up the under-card at a challenger’s fight night. Clueless as he is about boxing technique, he refuses to stay down and picks a fight with the promoter on the way out when cheated out of his fee. Champion shows how, for resentful people like Kelly, pugilism is a great way of getting your own back when you feel life has screwed you in some way. Perhaps that’s why he goes for his opponents with such vicious, relentless energy and why he takes such a cocky delight in beating the hell out of them. In fact, Champion could really be a satire on the ruthless, put-yourself-first nature of much of Hollywood, with both Connie and Tommy commenting that the fists-and-showbiz world is a cutthroat one.

What Champion makes clear though is that Kelly isn’t corrupted by fame. For all Douglas’ charming smile, there is a cold-eyed sociopathy in him from the start. Kelly performs loyalty, but it’s always a one-way street. He’ll assaults those who call his weak-willed, more cynical, crutch-carrying brother Connie ‘a gimp’, but he has no real sense of loyalty. He doesn’t even pause for a second when seducing Emma (daughter of the diner the brothers end up working at on arriving in LA) for a quick fumble despite knowing Connie’s feelings for her. Later, criticised by Connie, he’ll just as angrily lash out at Connie, mocking his disabilities, the second his brother starts to make decisions of his own.

Kelly’s ruthlessness towards women is also clearly something innate. He’ll whine like a mule when forced (virtually at gunpoint) to marry Emma, who he’ll immediately leave behind with no interest of hearing from again (until she finally develops some feelings for Connie of course, at which case he seduces her as a point of pride). His sexual fascination for the manipulative Grace – a purring Marilyn Maxwell – quickly burns out, again not pausing for a second in chucking her aside, all but flinging dollar bills on a table as he goes. Even more heartlessly, after showing some flashes of genuine courtliness in his romantic interest in Palmer (a very sweet Lola Albright), he happily takes a cheque from her husband (right in front of her) to never see her again. None of this comes from fame: it’s the sort of guy Kelly is.

And, as Douglas’ smart, self-absorbed performance makes clear, it’s because deep down Kelly always thinks he is the victim and the world owes him a living. There is a strong streak of self-pity in Douglas’ performance, bubbling just below the surface combined with a narcissistic need to be loved by strangers even while he’s reviled by everyone who knows him. There is an escape from inadequacy for Midge in fighting: something he keeps coming back to time-and-again in complaints about the unjust treatment the world has given him in the past, used to justify any number of lousy actions.

Champion unfolds as an interesting study of a deeply flawed, increasingly unsympathetic character with a huge drive to destroy other people, either by words or fists. An excellent performance by Douglas is counter-poised by a host of other strong turns, especially from Arthur Kennedy, whose Connie effectively trapped in an abusive relationship and Paul Stewart’s unromantically realistic trainer who knows the score long before anyone else. Handsomely shot and directed with a melodramatic flair by Mark Robson, it can enter the ring with any number of other boxing films.