The Man Who Laughs (1928)

Gothic romance, wrongly remembered as a proto-horror, also has a dark sexual undercurrent

Director: Paul Leni

Cast: Conrad Veidt (Gwynplaine), Mary Philbin (Dea), Olga Baclanova (Duchess Josiana), Josephine Cowell (Queen Anne), George Siegmann (Dr Hardquanonne), Brandon Hurst (Barkilphedro), Sam De Grasse (James II), Stuart Holmes (Lord Dirry-Moir), Cesare Gravina (Ursus)

The Man Who Laughs often gets remembered as a horror film, which seems a bit odd when you actually watch this Victor Hugo adaptation. It’s really a sort of melodrama romance with a touch of conspiracy-tinged action. What possibly cements it as a comedy is the Glasgow-smile of its lead character Gwynplaine, played by that legend of silent cinema monsters Conrad Viedt. (It went on to inspire the look of The Joker, further cementing the film as horror in minds). But, far from a monster, Gwynplaine is a sweet-vulnerable figure who has find himself at the centre of an atmospheric drama with lashes of shadow and Gothic German expressionism from its director Paul Leni.

Gwynplaine has his twisted smile after his face was mutilated as a child, a punishment for his executed father, stripped of his lordship by order of James II (Sam De Grasse). Years later, in the reign of Queen Anne (Josephine Cowell), Gwynplaine is the leading figure of a travelling band of players, famous as the Man Who Smiles. He’s in love with the blind Dea (Mary Philbin) but disgusted and ashamed of his own appearance, which prevents him declaring his love. But his ancestry is discovered, as his (unwanted) claim to the title now held by the nymphomaniac Duchess Josiana (Olga Baclanova), and he becomes the centre of a scheme for power by the sinister Barkilphedro (Brandon Hurst).

The Man Who Laughs main focus is the gentle romance between Gwynplaine and Bea, which becomes absorbed into a tragic story of creeping gothic power. Gwynplaine wants nothing more than to be left alone. He hates being the centre of his attention, only really comfortable when disguised under theatrical make-up or with the blind Dea. Even then, Gwynplaine refuses to let her touch his face so terrified is he that she will reject the twisted facial features that she will find below her hands. This is told with a gentle, sympathetic sweetness by Leni, who dials down the misty misery and darkness that casts its shadow over the rest of the film, to allow this romance to spread hope.

It’s far different from the gloomy, gothic foreboding that covers the rest of the film in its frequently shadow and mist filled frame. From its opening in the bedroom of King James – lined with stony carvings that look like they’ve been peeled off the wall of an ancient Minster – it throws us into a grizzly execution for Gwynplaine’s father, locked into a spike-lined Iron Lady with a stoic look on his face. The banishment of Gwynplaine, along with the bizarre cult who deformed him, on a rickity ship passes through a frozen coast-line, where the young boy is cast aside the moment the going gets tough. From there, we see streets filled with hints of violence under the mists. Brandon Hurst’s darkly twisted Barkilphedro is the sort of man who thinks nothing of dispatching a witness to the torture chamber or dragging a victim in the middle of the night to who-knows-where. Hurst is an unsettling stand-out here, playing a man with no sense of loyalty or honour, happy to lie and manipulate as well as slimly ingratiate himself to anyone in power.

The gloomy sense of danger that this world is filled with is captured superbly in Leni’s film, which is stuffed with atmospheric compositions that only stress the unsettling sense of peril lurking around every corner. It’s also a world filled with perverse sexual longing. It’s hard to imagine The Man Who Laughs having a whisper of existing a few years later under the Hays Code, such is the dark sexual current flowing beneath it. Frequently sexual desire rears its head, from the coded glances Queen Anne gives the missing chair of the Duchess, to the base desires that drag Gwynplaine from his bed one night to explore a beguiling offer from the Duchess.

The Duchess is the heart of the sexual darkness in the film, an allusive seductress we are introduced to lazing practically naked on a bed, attempting to seduce Barkilphedro to follow her whims with him perching at the end of her bed and allowed a peek of her (possibly non-existent) underwear. Not until Basic Instinct would another villainous of such rampant, unabashed sexuality hit the screen. The Duchess is as sexually excited by the thought of men fighting over her on the street (and its implied would be more than happy to satisfy any number of winners) as she is hornily fascinated by Gwynplaine’s unusual features. She is able to puppet along Stuart Holmes’ clueless Lord, who can barely tear his eyes from her even while he knows she is treating him like dirt. Her sensuality even runs the risk of seducing our hero, and her unabashed revelling in her sexuality feels light years ahead of its time.

But the lasting impact of The Man Who Laughs comes from its lead character, wonderfully embodied by Conrad Veidt in one of the legendary silent performances. Labouring under the facial disfigurement make-up – which left his face and mouth sore and exhausted – Veidt belays the restrictive nature of his make-up to offer a parade of expressions, variations on the same smile. Devotion, shame, joy, excitement, fear and hope play across his face so clearly that, even with the lower part of his mouth rigidly fixed, it’s always certain exactly what he is feeling. Presented to the House of Lords at the film’s end, Veidt is given a marvellous set-piece of moral force, berating the crowing bewigged courtiers who turn on him and vigorously asserting his right to choose. It’s a crowning moment of a subtle and moving performance.

And it makes Gwynplaine so sympathetic, it’s even more unusual that it’s been remembered as a horror, for all the film ends in a gothic chase and the brutally bloody intervention of a loyal but fierce wolf hound. Because The Man Who Laughs is, in the end, a hopeful and undeniably romantic testimony to how love can in fact conquer all, which for all its gothic gloom, leaves us sailing into a sunset relieved that the future promises all the best for our heroes.

Blossoms in the Dust (1941)

Sentimental and straight-forward biography that tells a simple, unlifting story

Director: Mervyn Le Roy

Cast: Greer Garson (Edna Kahly Gladney), Walter Pidgeon (Sam Gladney), Felix Bressart (Dr Max Breslar), Marsha Hunt (Charlotte Kahly), Fay Holden (Mrs Kahly), Samuel S Hinds (George Kahly), Kathleen Howard (Sarah Keats), George Lessey (Mr Keats), William Henry (Allan Keats), Henry O’Neill (Judge Hartford)

From the 19s0s, Edna Kahly Gladney (Greer Garson) was a Texas-based campaigner for the rights of orphans, pouring what money and time she and her husband Sam (Walter Pidgeon) had into the Texas Children’s Home and Aid Society, that dedicated itself to find homes for orphans. Even the death of her husband doesn’t stop Gladney from campaigning, lobbying to have the word illegitimate struck off birth certificates, since that was condemning children to a lifetime of frowns from Texas society.

The proceeds of Blossoms in the Dust went back into that Children’s Home so something good came from this sentimental, middlebrow biography. Made after an MGM publicist, who had adopted a child from Gladney, pitched the story to the studio, it became a cosy, box-office hit that helped cement Garson as the star-of-choice for the noble, suffering women’s film (the sort of role Norma Shearer would have grabbed five years earlier). It’s a slight, very safe and reassuring film that presents its march to inevitable triumph with an unchallenging hagiography-istic glow.

Of course, the real story of Edna was not quite tragic or satisfyingly neat enough, so the film invents several biographic details to beef up her motives. Now, the young Edna’s best friend (played with decency by Marsha Hunt) kills herself in shame, once her perspective fiancée’s heartless, posh family discovers her illegitimacy and unceremoniously tells her they don’t want her in their family, thank you very much. Secondly, Edna and Sam are given a fictional young son who exists purely to almost immediately die in a tragic sledge accident as a boy.

Of course, she will now care about illegitimacy and orphans – motivations established! Both events are so dramatically neat, it’s not a surprise they didn’t happen. Inserted, it seems, in case we objected that no one could care about the fate of children unless one happened to have lost one. The death of the boy is also so insistently sign-posted – repeated shots of his cuddly horse on its side leave us in no doubt he’s doomed the second he steps out of the door on a winter’s day – it’s impact for the viewer is almost washed away.

These tragic fictional events feel even more functional because, thanks to the film’s tendency towards sudden massive time jumps, by the time the next scene comes around years have flown by and any grief long-since shelved. No where is this more awkward than practically the next shot after the death of Gladley’s son, being Greer Garson laughingly pouring drinks at a society soiree. It continues thus: even the death of her husband Sam (Pidgeon exiting the film surprisingly at the half-way mark) is followed by a flash forward of Edna stoically but smilingly getting on with it. Blossoms in the Dust introduces tragedy throughout as a cheap motivation tool, but never once allows it to carry real, lasting impact.

Despite all these flaws, Greer Garson carries the film relatively well. Edna is the sort of part that requires middle-distance staring, mixed with can-do stiff-upper-lipness and a resolute determination to put the needs of others in front of her own (no matter how tempted she might be, in the case of orphan Tommy, to keep this child to herself rather than send him to a better home). Garson gets several barn-busting speeches at the injustices of the various systems set against the young and disadvantaged, which she delivers with aplomb. A particular fine moment is her railing – ever so politely of course – against the Texas Senate from the viewing gallery, announcing “there are no illegitimate children – there are only illegitimate parents!”. It’s fine, decent work that never stretches Garson, but is perfectly suited to her persona.

The story itself is fairly episodic. The Gladney’s wealth rises and falls, depending on the (dubious) business talent of her husband. There is a sweet moment, as they face bankruptcy, when thankful town residents buy from the auction of their goods a garish vase both Gladney’s were secretly glad to see the back of (“We’ll have to keep it now” a deeply touched Edna tells her husband). Orphans suffers various crises. A shallow single father falls over himself to hand his unwanted child over, and then takes Edna to court when he sniffs he can wrangle money out of the wealthier home the child has been sent to. No events really threaten the long-term, blissful sentimentality of the film and we are left in no doubt that Edna will ever choose herself over her work.

Blossoms in the Dust does have some rather uncomfortable racial politics. Every Black character in it is a faithful servant, deferring to their masters and happy in service. The Gladney’s servant Zeke is, of course, so thrilled to work with them he insists that he carries on doing so unpaid when they go bankrupt. A Black maid is so dim, she doesn’t realise washing a thermometer in hot water will affect its result. The Black characters are treated with the same paternal charity as the babies Edna cares for, which is of its time but still somehow a bit disappointing.

Aside from that though, this is a gentle, extremely sentimental – you might almost say icky – drama, shot with technicolour beauty by Karl Freund and decently directed by Mervyn LeRoy. However, it is also a purely functional, heart-string tugging crowd pleaser of a film, which desires to do nothing more than make us feel good about the fact the human race can still do decent things for other people without reward. Which is fine now and then, but not exactly challenging stuff.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026)

Fan-pleasing sequel that cosily does exactly what it says on the tin

Director: David Frankel

Cast: Meryl Streep (Miranda Priestly), Anne Hathaway (Andy Sachs), Emily Blunt (Emily Charlton), Stanley Tucci (Nigel Kipling), Justin Theroux (Benji Barnes), Kenneth Branagh (Stuart Simmons), Lucy Liu (Sasha Barnes), BJ Novak (Jay Ravitz), Simone Ashley (Amari Mari), Tracie Thoms (Lily), Patrick Brammall (Peter), Helen J Shen (Jin Chao)

Twenty years on and once again The Devil Wears Prada trots down Hollywood’s cat-walk. Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) is now an award-winning journalist, whose entire newsroom has recently been kicked to the curb (via a group WhatsApp!) by their owner. Meaning she’s free to come back to Runway to help the magazine pilot its way through an online storm around a puff piece for a recently exposed sweatshop brand. Subdued dragon Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) might not want her back, but the listless editor is struggling in a world of HR complaints and magazines kow-towing to whip-hand holding advertisers like Dior – their advertising team now managed by former assistant Emily (Emily Blunt). Can Andy, Miranda and loyal number-two Nigel (Stanley Tucci) work together to make Runway successful and relevant again in the age of clickbait?

But of course, they can. There is nothing really surprising about The Devil Wears Prada 2, a perfectly entertaining film that has been skilfully set up to offer a good night out for fans of the first film. It’s packed with knowing little in-jokes and references and is overwhelmingly focused on getting the band back together and giving them a joint mission. Which in this case is those two familiar enemies of modern Hollywood, money-obsessed owners with no interest in talent and the internet and all its phone watching shallowness for legacy media.

As such, the idea of a print fashion magazine editor being a symbol of all powerful, devil incarnate ruthlessness feels incredibly passé. That’s one reason why Miranda feels like such a milder, put-upon, even vulnerable figure here, for all Streep can still rip through a sharp one-liner. The other is, of course, that rather like Hannibal Lecter becoming a sort of bizarre cult anti-hero by the time we got to Hannibal, rather than fearing Miranda, Devil Wears Prada 2 knows most of the audience love her. It’s a trend that was already happening in the first movie, and its doubled down here. Miranda is no more-or-less than the primary focus of sympathy for the film.

From the fact that her old world is falling down around her, to the joyless HR rules that stop her poisonous barbs even passing her lips in public, it’s in every inch of the film that expects the viewer to be openly rooting for her. In fact, the whole film is about getting that poisonous, go-getting killer back purring again – with Andy even being called out by a journalist friend for going through Stockholm Syndrome in her eagerness to help her old boss restore herself to terrifying the masses of the fashion world. Andy’s just feeling what the film is going through.

This is all part of a film that recognises the four leads are really popular with the audiences, so since we love them all they might as well all love each other (however secretly) as well. Stanley Tucci’s avuncular affection as Nigel is the glue that brings this gang back together. Anne Hathaway is still all sprightly, girly enthusiasm (however much we are told she is an ace investigative reporter) still trying to impress her private mentor. Emily Blunt (still ace) carefully lets the vulnerability and desperation to be liked peek through the surface of her brittle namesake, obsessed with style and etiquette. All the performers natural mateyness (heck, Blunt and Tucci are famously in-laws) scream off the screen in a film that’s basically a cosy reunion party.

It’s also a film that demonstrates the power of the original. Ironically, for a film all about cost-cutting at Runway, the budget for the film seems through the roof. Most of the second half takes place in the fashion hotspot of Milan. An armada of fashion figures play themselves at various junkets and black-tie dinners (bizarrely, even Rory McIlroy and his wife appear – Rory’s probably shouldn’t have acting in mind as a back-up career). You know a film has passed through the popularity mirror, when the industry it as effectively parodying (however gently) in the first film, pulls out all the stops to get every single name going into its sequel. To cap it off, Lady Gaga pops up to play an exaggerated version of herself, as holder of a long-running feud with Miranda.

The plot, as such, isn’t particularly important compared to the clothes, the charisma of the actors and the warm comfort the film is sure you are getting from the very fact it exists and is playing in front of your eyes. Meryl Streep is still lots of fun, even if she could still play Miranda while standing on her head. I would guess she asked for a top line actor to be her scene partner for her domestic scenes, hence the slightly bizarre presence of Kenneth Branagh of all people (doing a perfectly serviceable job, and he seems to have also gone to the trouble of learning a few notes on the violin).

How much you enjoy all this, rather depends probably on your level of knowledge and affection for the original. But, if you’ve got any level of that, you’ll probably find something to enjoy in this light, feel-good confection, where problems can be easily solved (twice!) by the waving of mythical billionaire Lucy Liu’s magic wand. There are some very, very mild points made about the downfall of the print industry (not to mention journalism) in the digital age, but that’s a subsidiary point to what we really want to see: a closing shot of our heroes working in perfect harmony, having learned (finally) to love and respect each other. It’s the sequel as very particular fan fiction.

The Pride of the Yankees (1942)

Cooper triumphs in this hagiographic but still endearing film, low on drama but high on sentiment

Director: Sam Wood

Cast: Gary Cooper (Lou Gehrig), Teresa Wright (Eleanor Twitchell Gehrig), Babe Ruth (Himself), Walter Brennan (Sam Blake), Dan Duryea (Hank Hanneman), Elsa Janssen (Mom Gehrig), Ludwig Stössel (Pop Gehrig), Virginia Gilmore (Myra), Bill Dickey (Himself), Ernie Adams (Miller Huggins), Pierre Watkin (Twitchell)

It was a story that touched an entire nation. Record breaking New York Yankees captain Lou Gehrig, hitter of home runs and holder of a consecutive games streak of over 2,000 games, suddenly retired and shortly after passed away after a shock diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, forever after known as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease”. The Pride of the Yankees is an unashamedly sentimental, feel-good and hagiographic staging of the life story of a man who was so decent, modest and honourable that not a single person seemed to have so much as a bad word to say about him.

As such, it’s not a surprise he is played by Gary Cooper, who was more or less the age Gehrig would have been when if he had survived (this does make it slightly harder to not frown a bit as the craggy looking Cooper plays Gehrig as a freshman student). There is no star in Hollywood who combined masculine strength and height, with such compelling vulnerability, tenderness and polite, gentle decency like Cooper. He’s perfect for the bashful, modest Gehrig, who struggles to talk to girls, treats his natural skills at baseball with an aw-shucks modesty, is devoted to his dotting (and slightly over-bearing) mom and head-over-heels with his witty, playful and endlessly supportive wife Eleanor (played with real charm by Teresa Wright).

So perfect is Cooper for the role – and so brilliant at nailing this film’s version of Gehrig’s lump-in-throat inducing goodbye speech to a packed-out Yankee’s stadium – that it barely mattered he had virtually no interest in baseball at all. For year’s stories abounded Cooper was utterly unable to master Gehrig’s distinctive left-handed swing, requiring him to be filmed the wrong way round in a mirror-flipped shirt, so the editor could flip the film. That’s not completely true, but it certainly is true Cooper was frequently replaced by doubles and his baseball skills frequently look rudimentary at best. (It’s interesting watching today, to see how pudgy and unathletic these star baseball players – such as Babe Ruth playing himself – look. They’d be eaten alive by the streamlined athletes of today).

But The Pride of the Yankees knows that truly successful sports films are rarely actually about sports. Most of Gehrig’s career achievements are glossed over in a late montage that ends with a shot of a dresser in the Gehrig home groaning under a collection of medals and trophies. The film has more interest – perhaps rightly – in relatable personal anecdotes rather than the intricacies of the ball game. Our longest sequence of sustained play revolves around an unspoken competition between Ruth and Gehrig to hit the most home runs in honour of a bed-bound kid in hospital (there is, apparently, also a championship at stake). Other than that, baseball is largely background colour in this most beloved of baseball films, Wood and Sam Goldwyn trusting die-hard fans would get their kicks from seeing so many real-life hitters and catchers playing themselves in Yankee kits.

Instead, the film is largely a tribute to the decency of Gehrig, presenting his life in charmingly related chunks, largely devoid of conflict or obstacles. You could in fact marvel about how undramatic Pride of the Yankees frequently is. Gehrig getting into some fisticuffs with a bunch of frat boys after one crack too many about his fumbled attempts to woo a girl is about as conflict heavy it gets. That and a brief power struggle between Eleanor and Momma Gehrig for control of the Gehrig matrimonial home – never has wallpaper caused such discord on film – which is resolved thanks to an off-screen conversation, leaving everyone thereafter bathed in happy smiles.

It sort of doesn’t really matter that conflict is a stranger, and obstacles always fall away from Gehrig, because the film itself is very sweet, well-meaning and charming. Sometimes, it seems to argue, good thanks happen to good people. And Gehrig, in one of the definitive Cooper roles, is a stand-up guy bar none. In his quiet, bashful way he’s dedicated to becoming the engineer his mother dreams of – only taking up the game professionally to pay for her medical care. He sits patiently on the Yankees bench (and is loaned out to every team under the sun) for his chance to shine, without a single complaint. His mantra America incarnate: if you work hard, you can do anything.

Pride of the Yankees coats itself in hard-warming personal stories, filled out by an impressive cast. Elsa Janssen finds keeps a nice pinch of possessiveness in Momma Gehrig’s devotion of her son – Gehrig is very adept at reassuring her of his devotion – while being endearing as a parent who supports her son come what may. Ludwig Stössel is equally sweet as his hen-picked, but quietly wise and observant dad. Walter Brennan, as a fictionalised representation of a host of journalists who supported Gehrig, is perfect casting as an endlessly loyal advocate of Gehrig. Best of all, Teresa Wright’s playfulness – from teasing Gehrig at his first game in Chicago, to a marvellous comic skit she performs to distract him from illness – is very good, warm-hearted, adorable and genuinely moving as she deals with Gehrig’s diagnosis.

It’s a well-constructed, admirably assembled film by Wood, with some photography from Rudolph Maté that mixes documentary reconstruction with real-world footage pretty seamlessly (an Oscar for editing was deserved). The general lack of conflict or struggle can slow the pace – as does Gehrig and Eleanor’s visit to a Chicago cabaret night, which feels like an excuse to reel out a few variety acts on Goldwyn’s books – but when the tone of the film is purely aimed at heart-warming reassurance and tribute to a fallen hero you can let that go.

The film though is Cooper’s. From his awkward youth – Cooper was always adept at using his height to feel more uncomfortable, and he frequently looks worried that he’s sticking out too much – to the modest decency of his glory years, the subtle hints of fear on his face as he feels a loss of the control in his hands, it’s a perfectly judged performance. Above all, Cooper’s final closing speech – capped by a perfect shot that follows Gehrig walking from the centre circle into the darkness of the dressing room – is perfectly judged. Gehrig couldn’t have asked for more.

Playtime (1967)

On a huge set, modern life is gently parodied in this unique, demanding but joyous comedy

Director: Jacques Tati

Cast: Jacques Tati (Monsieur Hulot), Barbara Dennek (Young American), Jacqueline Lecomte (Her friend), Georges Montant (M Giffard), Erika Dentzler (Mme Giffard), John Abbey (M Lacs), Yves Barsacq (Friend), Jack Gauthier (Guide)

Jacques Tati, heir to the great silent comedians, had dreamed of making his own perfect film. It would have the synchronisation of sound and image together, where every detail could be honed and measured to maximum effect. To achieve this, he was willing to sink every franc he had into the experiment. Most of those went on building a gleaming city block, with the interiors built to Tati’s exact requirements, nicknamed Tativille. And in this playground of his making, Tati created (over a couple of years) Playtime, a sprawling, almost incomparable masterpiece that pretty much lost him every single one of those francs when it was released.

There is no plot as such to Playtime. It follows a disparate group of people across a single 24-hour-period in Paris. Not the Paris of postcards mind you: this is the modern Paris of the 1960s, where every building is a shining, glass-covered cathedral of commerce and every street is a perfectly laid-out boulevard with cars moving down it in perfect unison. Over the course of a series of vignettes – set, in turn, in an airport, a labyrinthine office-block, a series of personality-free apartments, the opening night of a restaurant and a regimented supermarket – a group of American tourists, office workers, visitors and Jacques Tati’s famous creation Monsieur Hulot, stumble about never quite letting the monumental modernity around them crush their free spirits.

Perhaps it’s not a surprise Playtime flopped. It’s a long film and, with every single frame choca-block with comedic action which your eye is invited to roam over it, it’s often hard-work to watch, demanding a large amount of focus and attention to get the most out of it. Tati loathed the concept of the close-up, and Playtime almost totally lacks anything not a medium- or long-shot. Without the camera to guide you, it’s left to the viewer and the odd audio nudge from Tati’s use of ambient, carefully modulated sound to point the viewer where to look and what to pay attention too. This can, however, be richly rewarding, allowing you to ‘pick your own adventure’ in the detail-crammed frames, where almost every character has their own story.

Tati pulled together everything in Playtime himself, working Bresson-like with a cast of amateur actors (some of them his neighbours!) who were carefully drilled into hitting their appropriate marks without losing their spontaneity. Watching Playtime is to see almost a metronome bought to life, with every single decision on every single footstep made to the neatest, closest detail – the sort of obsessive level of detail Kubrick would be proud of. And everything is timed to perfection, a few big sight-gags never crowding out a litany of little moments, small glimpses of situational humour, that reward the viewer whose eye happens to stroll to the correct point at the correct time.

It’s only just controlled by Tati’s use of sound. Dialogue is nearly non-existent in Playtime, as a smattering of French, English, German and other languages is overheard, but only really when we are required to be looking in the direction of the speaker. Otherwise, across the massive 70mm image, sound fades up and down on key points, depending on where Tati wants us to look. The sound of feet walking a corridor can suddenly carry real aural impact. But then so can the squeak of a restaurant door, or the squirt of a lemon, the tapping of a finger… the sound nudges and guides us around this complex, shining world to draw our eye to key moments.

Playtime is a triumph of production design, its gleaming, artificial world of glass-fronted buildings and aesthetically clean surfaces part of the robotic modern world – one far different from our brief glimpses of the Eiffel Tower or Montmartre in reflections. There is no character at all to this world of consumerist, futuristic Utopian surfaces, where chairs are perfect identikit leather, offices are perfectly laid out blocks of cubicles and supermarkets enforce rigid one-way systems between its pristine aisles. Part of Tati’s joke is how this new world of gleaming futurism is not only taking over everything – in a travel agent, a series of posters for exotic locations all show the same anonymous office block – but even seems to excite the tourists more than the idea of the ‘real’ Paris.

It’s easy to think Tati was parodying the sort of commercialist thinking of de Gaulle (satirised here as an impossibly short president arriving at the airport, with a luggage flap prominently blowing behind him). After all, even the homes we see (only filmed from the outside) look like shop windows peering in at a stack of furniture identical to the sort we’ve seen in offices, with people at home as tucked into cubicles as they are in their offices. But in fact, Playtime suggests that, even in a world as hideously over constructed as this one, people will find a way to break down barriers and bond. That people don’t naturally become cogs in a machine, but wild, unpredictable elements.

That’s at the heart of the film’s longest vignette, that covers what is really a disastrous opening night at a restaurant – where the walls fall down, the chairs leave terrible marks on the clientele’s backs, the waiters are overwhelmed and the floor becomes an impassable mass of people. But the night isn’t a disaster, despite a parade of comic pratfalls, sight gags and misunderstandings that would make Fawlty Towers look like fine-dining, because people are there to have a good time. And that they do, whether it’s turning the collapsed area into a VIP zone, forming an impromptu band or encouraging a sing-along, what could have been a parade of fury becomes instead something joyful and, yes, playful. You actually don’t watch Playtime at these moments feeling embarrassed for them, but instead wish you were there.

It’s a tone that Playtime ends on, suddenly upbeat, magical and almost like the entire film is about to break into a charming Busby Berkely number, with cars moving together in circular patterns. That’s where you admire the skill of Tati, the superb control and attention to detail that never also forgets that all this stuff is meant to be fun. And yes, as noted, Playtime puts a lot of focus on the viewer to find that fun. But when they do spot it, it’s hard not to be a little bit charmed and entertained by it.

And there are some great jokes. A business switchboard that emits a shriek of sounds when operated by its concierge (who smokes his cigar whenever out of sight of his boss). Hulot bamboozled in an office, where people call each other to be delivered papers in their own desks. A game of charades Hulot is roped into playing in a house. A waiter who swops his pristine clothes for damaged ones from others until he stands in rags. A doorman who continues operating his glass door, even after it’s been smashed to smithereens. You could spot a thousand other gags in the corner of every frame, in a film almost like no other designed for multiple re-watchings. Tati may have lost a fortune, but he also delivered a film like few others.

The Informer (1935)

Ford’s atmospheric film is superbly directed and visually impressive, despite some clumsy moments

Director: John Ford

Cast: Victor McLaglen (“Gypo” Nolan), Heather Angel (Mary McPhillip), Preston Foster (Dan Gallagher), Margot Grahame (Katie Madden), Wallace Ford (Frankie McPhillip), Una O’Connor (Mrs McPhillip), JM Kerrigan (Terry), Joseph Sauers (Bartly Mulholland), Neil Fitzgerald (Tommy Connor), Donald Meek (Peter Mulligan, D’Arcy Corrigan (Blind man)

It’s hard to make ends meet in the fog-filled streets of 1920s Dublin. Especially if you are a non-too bright former boxer with an eager eye for the bottle. That describes “Gypo” Nolan (Victor McLaglen), a tough bruiser totally at sea after being expelled from “The Organisation” (that’s the IRA to you and me). Desperate for a bit of cash, Gypo instinctively rats out old friend Frankie McPhillip (Wallace Ford) to the British in return for £20, cash-in-hand. Guilt will slowly eat away at him over one long, self-destructive evening as his old colleagues from the Organisation ruthlessly hunt down the informer.

Ford’s richly filmed The Informer takes a limited RKO budget and makes it work to spectacular effect, disguising its largely unconvincing Dublin street sets with misty, Murnau-inspired photography from Joseph H August. The Informer is supremely atmospheric, fog coating around the edges of the frame and only interrupted by beaming streetlights or the odd shaft of light – almost all of which actually lead to danger (be it lighting the way to the British headquarters or the dreary basement where the Organisation measure out summary justice). The Informer still feels, in many ways, like a silent film – but in a good way, one where its story and the emotions would be perfectly easy to follow from the striking compositions that flood the frame.

This is Ford at possibly his most stylistic and impressionistic – influenced not just by Murnau but also clearly by Fritz Lang, the closing trial of Gypo feeling like a straight lift from Peter Lorre’s pathetic fate in M. As Gypo stumbles through the streets, he seems haunted by super-imposed images of the Wanted poster that instigated his betrayal – not to mention, his feet buffeted by wind-swept remains of the same poster. This fateful Wanted poster pops up repeatedly, even a version burnt by Gypo in a fire seems to sear through the frame as its edges disappear in flames. It’s a continual reminder to our hero of his weakness, foolishness and lack of character – his betrayal being so selfish that even the British toss the reward money to him with veiled contempt.

Our hero is played by regular Ford mucker Victor McLaglen, plucked from his regular pack to play the lead over the claims of several more prominent stars. Although it won McLaglen an Oscar, Ford selected him because he felt he was the sort of actor (a hard-bitten drinker, whose every fault was well-known to him) that could be manipulated into giving a virtuoso performance. McLaglen’s physicality is perfect for it – a former boxer himself, he’s got the perfect boisterousness and knuckle-ready force the part needs – but Ford also readily identified his vulnerability and nervousness. Deliberately keeping the actor on his toes, changing the shooting order on a day-by-day basis, Ford draws from McLaglen a performance of bubbling, hesitant, unaffected uncertainty. Gypo is forever stumbling over his words, glancing around waiting to be corrected, a sweaty nervous mess when the pressure piles on.

It’s a role that many actors could shine in, so rich is the material, and McLaglen doesn’t disappoint. The Informer follows his collapse in excruciating detail, as guilt leads to drink, leads to further guilt. Ford’s film surprisingly isn’t really awash with sympathy for this deeply flawed, child-like bruiser lost in the world of real men – despite the decency we discover in a man who was expelled from The Organisation because he wouldn’t kill an unarmed man. Chalk it up the director’s old-school ideas of loyalty and his notable Irish sympathies – not going to be easy to hold sympathy for a man who has betrayed both those elements.

Ford gives a striking martyrs death of McPhillip – played by his brother Wallace – who is caught in his home with his sister and mother (Una O’Connor, very good). He takes a few Black and Tans with him, before being machine gunned while climbing out of a rear window, our last view of him his hand disappearing over a ledge, nails scratching loudly on the surface. The members of the Organisation look like raincoat wearing hoods from Chicago, but fitting Ford’s sympathies they don’t leap to decisions (even if they execute anyone they find guilty), setting up a people’s court to trial those they suspect.

Their main suspect is an innocent tailor, excellently played with a mix of affronted innocence and weary defiance by Donald Meek, largely because they initially want to give the benefit of the doubt to Gypo and the string of half-formed, barely credible lies he has pulled together to shake the blame. Doesn’t stop them tailing Gypo during a night on the town, surrounded by ordinary people spending time with him for his new-found money, as he impulsively gives away the cash he has sacrificed his honour for.

The Informer does have a tendency to lay on its moral judgements a little too thickly. There are a few too many slightly sentimental shots of McPhillip’s grieving sister, a little too much of the moral judgement piled on Gypo, for all the passing sympathy for the boxer’s general lack of savviness. The Informer’s final ending, set inevitably in a church, is about as close as a great director like Ford can get to being flat-out bad: on-the-nose, clumsy, hectoring and simplistic and (particularly striking in a film as generally so beautiful as this) badly filmed. Max Steiner’s score similarly forces some of the emotional points a little too strongly, while his use of Irish Folk and Rule Britannia to hammer home points can wear a bit thin.

But there is still a lot to admire in The Informer, not least its extraordinary visual brilliance and the creeping paranoia and claustrophobia of its telescoped plot – you can feel the real influence it must have had on Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out with which it would make a fascinating double-bill. It might make its moral points with a little less subtlety than you would like, but it’s still an expertly executed, richly affecting film.

The Marvels (2023)

Messy sequel, that splits the focus between a host of unfamiliar characters and rushes from set-piece to set-piece

Director: Nia DaCosta

Cast: Brie Larsen (Carol Danvers), Teyonah Parris (Monica Rambeau), Iman Vellani (Kamala Khan), Zawe Ashton (Dar-Benn), Gary Lewis (Emperor Dro’ge), Park Seo-joon (Prince Yan), Zenobia Shroff (Muneeba Khan), Mohan Kapur (Yusof Khan), Saagar Shaikh (Aamir Khan), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury)

The Marvels carries some heavy baggage, being the first flat-out, unarguable mega-flop in the whole Marvel Franchise. It’s a follow-up to Captain Marvel, a film that itself drew a lot of fire from the knuckle-dragging depths of the internet for daring to have a woman in the lead role. The Marvels has no-less than three women in lead roles – although that split focus hardly helps it. After an accident in space, Captain Marvel (Brie Larsen), her honorary niece Monica (Teyonah Parris) – who grew up while an ageless Carol was lost in space – and New Jersey wannabe-hero Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) find themselves teleporting into each other places when they use their powers. Not helpful, when they are fighting to stop a radical leader (Zawe Ashton) of Carol’s old enemy the Kree from destroying a series of planets to restore her own.

That split focus is a big part of the problem with The Marvels, a light-and-breezy fast-paced piece of comic book adventure, so slight that a puff of wind could blow it away. Honestly, it’s hard to imagine there were any discussions about Thor, Captain America or Iron Man having to share the spotlight (and title!) in their first sequels with two other heroes. It’s hard not to feel that Captain Marvel is a supporting player in her own movie (the real POV character is Iman Vellani’s very charming Ms Marvel), struggling to find airtime for her own plot arc, character dilemmas and actions to come into shape.

That split focus is surely partly why The Marvels flopped. With the franchise becoming ever more sprawling, it sometimes feels like you need a PhD to follow the ins and outs of who all these characters are and how they relate to each other. The Marvels never quite knows whether it should be introducing or not Carol’s two co-leads, both floated in from Disney+ TV shows. It says a lot that the final trailers for The Marvels became info-dump recaps of these two shows, and the origins of these heroes, desperately trying to assure people they could enjoy the film without seeing the shows. You can, you just might not really know who or what everyone is.

The Marvels feels like a film cut down to the bone to try and salvage entertainment from its carcass. You can’t help but feel a great deal of plot and context has been trimmed off into the bin while every single inch of the fight scenes (and these are shot with a great deal of dynamism by Nia DaCosta) has been left in. This makes The Marvels feel, almost more than any other film in the franchise, like a relentless rollercoaster to nowhere. Something thrilling or barmy happens every few minutes – from gravity defying fights to worlds exploding, to our heroes visiting a planet where everyone only communicates through song and acts like they are in a Disney Broadway spectacular – but it never quite hangs together. You never quite manage to land on why things are happening or why you should care. And the film hopes that you’ll be so entertained by moments like its lifting of ‘Memory’ from Cats for a key sequence that you won’t particularly mind.

Most unfortunately, the biggest cuts affect Carol and the villain’s plot line. It’s only late on that we discover Carol has effectively caused a catastrophic disaster on the Kree home-world that led to a decades long brutal civil war in the crumbled aftermath. Perhaps because The Marvels is terrified that we might sympathise less with Carol for essentially unilaterally deciding to take revenge on her past tormentors and accidentally triggering a series of catastrophic war crimes, both her guilt for her actions and the justified anger from the Kree (who see her as a sort of Hitlerian figure of mass destruction), it dials down and fudges these facts and tries to keep the material off-screen or buried in busy scenes. This also means Zawe Ashton’s villain is reduced from a woman seeking to re-build her lost homeland to a typical anger-filled baddie with a planet destroying weapon who we unquestioningly can’t sympathise with.

The Marvels tries to find some clumsy room instead for a plot line where Carol feels awkward around her guilt for not seeing Monica in about thirty years. This however get similarly fudged, not least since (good as Teyonah Parris is as a reserved, by-the-book astronaut with superpowers) Monica is a character largely dropped into the film with very little context who it’s easy to forget was even in the first film. Brie Larsen is also, as is the case throughout the film, given barely a second of interesting dialogue or reflective pause to even begin to try and sell these feelings, so determined is the film to fly hell-for-leather towards the next set-piece.

If there is a star, it’s Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan – not least because she gets all the best lines and Vellani’s winning ability to breathe naïve excitement into any single moment (who wouldn’t be thrilled at suddenly flooring bad guys with your heroes?) is incredibly endearing. Since we spend large chunks of this film seeing things entirely from her perspective – and her family get bucketloads of screen time as well – it’s hard not to start to feel the film is about her. Especially since Captain Marvel’s own emotional conflicts, moral failings and attempts to make amends have been so thoroughly de-fanged in editing.

The Marvels isn’t a terrible film. It’s just also not a very memorable one, a well-assembled, well-oiled piece of franchise IP that will entertain you on a Sunday afternoon (which is when I watched it). But it will barely scratch the surface of your memory.

The Defiant Ones (1958)

Kramer’s film is well-balanced mix of drama and message with two strong performances from the leads

Director: Stanley Kramer

Cast: Sidney Poitier (Noah Cullen), Tony Curtis (John “Joker” Jackson), Theodore Bikel (Sheriff Max Muller), Charles McGraw (Captain Frank Gibbons), Lon Chaney Jnr (Big Sam), King Donovan (Solly), Claude Akins (Mack), Lawrence Dobkin (Editor), Whit Bissell (Lou Gans), Carl Switzer (Angus), Kevin Coughlin (Billy), Cara Williams (Billy’s Mother)

The Defiant Ones is a vintage Stanley Kramer message film, one of his best mixings of serious social issues with entertainment. Two convicts escape from a prison transport, making a run for it while chained together at the wrist. They are thief John “Joker” Jackson (Tony Curtis) and Noah Cullen (Sidney Poitier), imprisoned for standing up to a racist thug. Cullen is Black – and that’s a big issue in the racist world of Southern America. Forced to work together to survive, despite their mutual distrust and outright dislike, slowly the two form a curious bond – all while dodging the dangers of recapture and falling foul to vigilante ‘justice’ from ordinary people.

The message of The Defiant Ones is pretty clear to see, but Kramer’s film manages to avoid laying it on too heavily, mostly letting it be seen in everyday casual prejudice. Starting with Jackson’s constant use of the word “boy” – and his complete failure to understand why Cullen finds this grating. Jackson has already used the n-word the very first time he speaks to Cullen, side-by-side in the prison transport. Most of the police and enthusiastic deputies helping them are itching to release fierce dogs on the escapees (it’s clear why). The hostility Cullen immediately encounters when they are briefly caught by turpentine workers, accelerates with terrifying speed into ropes being flung over lampposts for a lynching (Jackson’s protest, that you can’t lynch a white man, is telling in itself). Even when they encounter a scared child, he jumps to Jackson to protect him from Cullen (he even assumes Jackson must be Cullen’s guard).

The constant repetition of the dangers and assumptions behind racism probably gained added force at the time because they a white man shared some of the chance of being suddenly murdered for looking the wrong way. Part of The Defiant Ones aim is to show through adversity that more connects us than not. This also comes out when the two men talk about their lives. When Jackson bitterly describes his life of working-class drudgery in a hotel, scraping and smiling for tips from the rich, Cullen quickly points out it places him only a mild rung above a Black man who wouldn’t even be allowed in the hotel unless he was holding a mop. Both are firmly wedged on the bottom of the social ladder, part of the film’s suggestion that, prejudice aside, they are natural allies.

Allies is what they become, a relationship that develops smoothly thanks to the skilled playing and excellent chemistry between Poitier and Curtis (both Oscar-nominated). They certainly were put through their paces physically – aside for brief doubles (or dummies) work when they traverse some rapids, pretty much all the difficult stunts (all the more so, since they were chained together) were done by the actors themselves. In particular, an awkward escape from a clay pit was remembered by Curtis as possibly the toughest thing he ever did on a film set. Kramer throws the two stars into a parade of dangerous terrain – wading bogs, fast rivers, climbing awkwardly up and down heights – which adds a narrative energy to his issues-based plot.

Poitier at this time had to carry the burden not only of acting, but also representing a significant share of the American population single-handed. Here, he’s sharper, rougher and more resentful than his reputation suggests. Poitier makes Cullen a no-nonsense fist, someone who refuses to take crap from anyone – least of all Jackson. Frequently he uses singing to express his refusal to knuckle down and be silent, and it’s his strength and resourcefulness that does the most to keep the men moving. If Poitier does have a disadvantage, it’s that Kramer’s film gives him less of a personal journey – it’s the world that must accept Cullen, not vice versa, and rightly-or-wrongly the character is little different from his journey (aside a personal loyalty to Jackson) than he was at the start.

This means, Tony Curtis actually many of the more interesting character beats. If Cullen remains largely unchanged, Jackson progresses from holding thoughtless, knee-jerk assumptions into someone who forms his own opinions and loyalties. It’s very well-drawn by Curtis – who relished the chance to play such a complex character – as he slowly reveals Jackson as a vulnerable, regretful and lonely figure under the bluster. So much so, that his late realisation of where his true loyalties lie – an outburst of anger, expertly delivered by Curtis – feels completely earned, as an expression of all the character depth we’ve watched him develop. Its Curtis’ finest performance.

The Defiant Ones does lose some energy in its later stages. It splits, fairly naturally, into three acts: the convicts alone, the convicts at the turpentine camp and the convicts at the secluded home of a lonely woman (an Oscar-nominated Cara Williams) who takes a shine to Jackson. Each of these acts is, if I’m honest, marginally less compelling than the one before, in a film at its strongest when focused on the relationship between its two stars and their conflict with each other, the elements and the wild terrain. There is something more melodramatically familiar about watching Cullen resentfully face down would-be-lynchers, or Curtis’ flirt with a desperate woman who doesn’t even need to know his name to have the hots for him.

There is good work from the rest of the cast. Cara Williams does manage to make a lot of her quietly siren-like character, with surprising depths of selfishness and cruelty – even if her section is the film’s least narratively intriguing. Lon Chaney Jnr is very good as a work boss, appalled by the racist violence his colleagues are capable with. The police crew following our heroes – oddly soundtracked to a constant barrage of music from their portable radios (the only music in the film) – are little more than narrative tools, but Theodore Bikel (Oscar-nominated) finds a fair bit of humanity in his sheriff.

The Defiant Ones though is strongest with the focus on its two excellent leads, with the constant parade of obstacles and dangers it throws them into powering the film strongly without letting it lapse too much into moralising and preaching. It’s a very good balance of high-brow earnestness, and genuine entertainment, one of Kramer’s most successfully films.

Disclosure Day (2026)

Spielberg returns to Close Encounters in a film that explores interesting ideas but doesn’t quite no how to conclude

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Emily Blunt (Margaret Fairchild), Josh O’Connor (Daniel Kellner), Colin Firth (Noah Scanlon), Eve Hewson (Jane Blankenship), Colman Domingo (Hugo Wakefield), Wyatt Russell (Jackson), Henry Lloyd-Hughes (Casper Boyd), Elizabeth Marvel (Sister Maura), Hettienne Park (Serena)

After almost fifty years, Spielberg returns to Close Encounters territory: the wonder and fear from learning we might not be alone. Disclosure Day wraps this up in a very modern conspiracy, a shady organisation keeping secrets, but still carrying the optimism and hope Spielberg’s previous encounters with Little Green Men had. Disclosure Day is a film awash in different ideas and concepts, assembled with the flair and skill you expect from Spielberg, but somehow not quite sensational enough to hold together as well as you hope it’s going to from its punchy opening.

It does start with the sort of guts that you only get after a lifetime of directing mega-hits, throwing us into the middle of the story and avoiding clumsy flashbacks and voiceover and trusting we will catch up as we go. Two very different people find their lives surprisingly changed: Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a mathematics genius, feels compelled to steal (to release to the public) a mountain of evidence of extra-terrestrial visitations (and our mistreatment of them) hidden by shady corporation Wardex, run by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). And TV weather presenter Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) suddenly finds she has the ability to know people’s whole live stories just by looking at them and to speak every language fluently, including a clicky alien dialect that sounds like dolphin chat but is clearly not of this world.

This forms the set-up for a mix of chase movie and earnest plea for patience, understanding and togetherness that feels very in-tune with Spielberg’s greatest hits. Disclosure Day is set in a world where, playing in the background of many scenes, the world teeters on the edge of World War Three – right down to panicked small-town citizens stripping a convenience store to the bones. There is a half-formed argument bubbling here about whether the world is ready for the revelations to come. Will it tip everyone into destructive panic? Eve Hewson’s Jane, a former novitiate, worries it could lead to a brutal shattering of faith – and rightly argues Daniel would have responsibility for the possible negative effects that might come out of whistle-blowing.

It’s avoiding this that is the justification used for by Wardex, our sinister corporation, with its small private army that uses its control of alien tech to call the shots with the government and hunt down whistle-blowers. They are represented by Colin Firth, perfectly cast as an imperiously gruff corporate suit who has just enough humanity bubbling under the surface to make you believe he regrets the things he does. Wardex uses alien mind-control tech, to form a psychic bond with people over great distances, something akin to heightened interrogation and mind-control. These sequences are the film’s stand-outs, Spielberg skilfully using simple effects (both parties pupils switch colour to a sky blue) and effective editing to cross-cut between two people talking while their bodies are miles apart (and he cleverly shows the punishing impact – especially on Firth of the strain of using the device) – as well as the creeping, unsettling horror of mind control pushing people to do and say things they don’t want to do.

It’s a perversion of what Disclosure Day holds up as the alien’s evolutionary advantage: their empathy. That’s the root of Margaret’s powers, which come so naturally to her that when she drops into Russian from nowhere when talking to her slacker boyfriend (a good performance of unreliable decency from Wyatt Russell) or enters into a long fast-paced Korean conversation with a visiting professor in her TV studio (so fast, the official translator can’t even keep up), she doesn’t even notice she’s not talking English. Similarly, her ability to “see” people’s lives – allowing her to offer small titbits of immediate advice that instantly disarm everyone she meets – happens so naturally, it takes her few moments to notice and become scared by her insight.

Her mixed feeling about these skills – which sometimes seem like a blessing and others a terrible curse – are beautifully played by Emily Blunt, who gives a stand-out performance of a driven, successful woman, increasingly terrified but still resolute in the actions she feels compelled to do. Blunt is able to handle the emotion and distress, as well as deliver on the comedy (there is a very funny sequence where, in pelting rain, she grows increasingly frustrated by Jackson’s inability to crush her phone by driving over it with her car). She finds a great deal of sensitivity and gentleness in Margaret, who mixes responsibility, fear, anxiety and exhilaration.

This all comes together very well in the momentum-packed first-half of the film, which sees Margaret and Daniel (a decent performance by Josh O’Connor, that largely fails to really stretch him) travelling together. It’s crammed with inventively shot sequences, such as Daniel and Jane’s escape from a blown countryside safe-house – a brilliant sequence of tracking camera-shots, inventive angles and nerve-tangling tension, helped by O’Connor’s rather sweet nervous fear (“What am I doing?”) throughout. Match that with Margaret’s engrossing pilgrimage across country, and the fascinating use of the alien bond-control device and it makes for a film that sets up a lot of interest.

It’s a shame then that the second half never quite pays this off. As the film proceeds, it feels compelled to start answering the questions that have been bubbling under most of its chase. It’s here the film’s deliberate narrative card-holding starts to work against it. Since our heroes don’t even fully know the questions they should be asking, Colman Domingo’s whistle-blower has to both ask them and then immediately answer them. It leads to a long ‘revelation’ scene, that rather overwhelms us with points about our heroes’ backgrounds stretching back to their childhood that feel both rather heavily delivered and not quite engaging enough.

It also builds towards a sort of modern recap of the ending of Close Encounters, but this time in a TV studio – and it’s interesting to see that Spielberg perhaps still believes that a TV news programme showing footage of aliens would be instantly trusted the world over, without any talk of AI fakery. This long sequence, spooling out the whole backstory of the film’s close encounter phenomena is also similar to Close Encounters in the sense that it’s a simple presentation – but differs in that it lacks the awe-inspiring scale and spectacle of that movie. Without it, it feels somehow slightly drier and more earnest, rather than carrying the sort of magical force the film needs.

It’s part of a sense that Disclosure Day throws a lot of complex stuff at us – our place in the universe, ability to empathise, the potentially dangerous impact revelations can have – but lets these drift away, in favour of a more reassuring and slightly simplistic ending that leaves you feeling its points have been underexplored. This is slightly more disappointing because there has been so much good stuff in Disclosure Day – Blunt is excellent, Hewson and Firth are very good, the direction and film-making on show is first class – but there doesn’t feel like a fully satisfying conclusion is found for everything we have seen.

Jezebel (1938)

A star turn helps to lift this bonkers melodrama into the realm of delicious entertainment

Director: William Wyler

Cast: Bette Davis (Julie Marsden), Henry Fonda (Preston Dillard), George Brent (Buck Cantrell), Donald Crisp (Dr Livingstone), Fay Bainter (Aunt Belle Massey), Margaret Lindsay (Amy Bradford Dillard), Richard Cromwell (Ted Dillard), Henry O’Neil (General Theophilius Bogardus), Spring Byrington (Mrs Kendrick), John Litel (Jean la Cour)

It’s pretty much the first line in any review about Jezebel so let’s start with it: rumour claims it largely exists as a consolation prize for Bette Davis after missing out on Scarlett O’Hara. It makes sense: Julie Marsden is a Southern Belle so similar to Scarlett they could almost be sisters. And Bette Davis is so wonderfully, passionately, brilliant playing her that, if it wasn’t for Vivien Leigh’s landmark performance, Jezebel could make you deeply regret Davis never got that role. But there is more to Jezebel than that, a handsomely filmed adaptation of a hit play by Owen Davis Snr, which predated Margaret Mitchell putting pen to paper. This is delicious, old-school, scandal-tinged Hollywood melodrama, with a star actor in a custom-made star role.

Julie Marsden is a fiery, independent-minded woman in 1850s New Orleans, convinced she can bend the world around her (and the wills of men) to her own whims. She’s engaged to strait-laced Pres Dillard (Henry Fonda), but flirts with playboy Buck Cantrell (George Brent) and won’t play by societies rules. So much so, she plans to attend the high-society Olympus Ball in a dress not of virgin white but Jezebel red. This goes down like a lead balloon; Pres effectively drops her in disgust at her wilful selfishness and a year later returns married to someone else. At which point Julie, a woman spurned, plans revenge even as yellow fever rips through the city.

Jezebel is a great big, melodramatic soap with a celluloid-burning turn by Davis (who won her second Oscar) at its heart. Davis dominates the film, a boundless force of charisma from the moment she sashays (late!) into her own party, whipping her dress up behind with a riding crop to when she departs the film, eyes full of genuine remorse, nursing a fever cart. She plays the role full of sinful flirtatiousness and playful certainty. No one will tell her what to do and where to go – from charging through a bank (captured in a beautiful tracking shot from Wyler) to drag Pres out for the day, to headstrongly ignoring all pleas to not wear her dress of choice, to holding court a year later in her own home planning revenge with burning, destructive glee.

It’s a portrait of bull-headed, feminine, self-destructive foolishness and pride that Davis would make her own, a marvellous star-turn that helps lift this otherwise rather silly melodrama with an inevitable message (this bull-headed floozy will learn the error of her head-strong ways) into something quite magic. That and the superlative richness of Wyler’s direction (and Gregg Toland’s sumptuous camera work), full of dynamic images, as well as a series of top-drawer performances from a strong cast.

Obviously, it’s hard not to spot that Jezebel lacks the scale and colour of Gone with the Wind (has any black-and-white film ever so openly revolved around colour as a source of drama?). But it has a lot of its dramatic energy, despite the fact you can sense its theatrical roots (it splits rather neatly into four acts, each set in a distinct location). Jezebel juggles its balls remarkably well, balancing a focus on Julie’s desire for attention and control with a fine portrait of two different men. George Brent, with a sly, self-satisfied grin as a Don Juan and Henry Fonda, prissy and stuffed-of-shirt (mouthing, at points, an awkward Southern accent) successfully making Pres profoundly wise, surprisingly weak despite his certainty, rigid and unpersuasive.

The pivotal ball-room sequence, and its build-up, works particularly marvellously. Despite Julie’s determination, its clear everyone around her feels it to be a terrible idea. Pres concedes to it with a grudging irritation and, once it becomes clear even to Julie it’s an appalling idea, forces Julie to be swallowed up in her public humiliation. After watching a parade of genteel ladies and gentlemen scurry away from her, as if in fear of catching her loose morals, Pres drags her to the dance floor (despite her pleas). Tracking back, Wyler shows the dance floor clear in moments, leaving just these two dancing alone (Pres even insists the band continues playing), cementing her humiliation. He’s made his point and, even though she slaps him later, even she knows he was right. Not that this will help either of them in the long run.

It’s part of the moral of the story, that sometimes women need a firm hand. (Sometimes literally so, as Donald Crisp’s grouchy Dr Livingston tells Pres). There has to be a punishment for Julie’s willingness to scheme, her constant placing of her own whims above everyone else and her inability to even consider that there might be dangerous consequences to her actions. It doesn’t wear us down though, because Davis is such a dynamic and forceful presence it’s hard not to rather like her. And then, of course, you sort of sympathise with her (even though she is awful and selfish) as a conga-like of damage and guilt leave her reeling before converting her into an ideal self-sacrificing woman.

Of course you watch Jezebel today and can hardly fail to notice that the greatest wickedness all these Southern gents and dames can possibly imagine is turning up at a ball in the wrong dress. Certainly not the slavery all around them. There is a parade of “yasum” slaves in Jezebel, all of them (like old retainer Cato) perfectly content in their lives of servitude. Pres may get a few loose critiques off about the South, but even those are focused on its economic and political short-sightedness: like everyone he’s paternally fond of his naïve property but wouldn’t imagine giving any of them freedom.

It’s another echo perhaps of Gone with the Wind and not a welcome one. Jezebel settles down for another genteel, Birth of a Nation myth of a sublime South doomed for being too noble. Not even the terror of yellow fever – and, at one point, the shooting of an infected man for fleeing his island ghetto – can get in the way of that feeling, that this way of life is not the problem, even if it does allow the odd bad apple like Julie to pop up.

That’s a more awkward political point, but it’s hard to imagine it crossing the mind of many at the time. And it doesn’t stop an enjoyment of Jezebel as a masterfully executed soap. Wyler’s direction is excellent, the filming wonderful and the actors firing on all cylinders. (Fay Bainter also won an Oscar for her fine performance as Julie’s horrified Aunt). Davis of course reigns supreme in the cinematic equivalent of an airport novel, a big, steamy, sex-fuelled melodrama with a handwringing ending of moral enlightenment delivered with such earnest, underplayed sensitivity by Davis and Wyler that it convinces. A big, brash, hugely enjoyable entertainment.