Author: Alistair Nunn

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Deliriously overblown and full of demented imagination even if it never quite feels necessary

Director: George Miller

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy (Furiosa), Chris Hemsworth (Dementus), Tom Burke (Praetorian Jack), Lachy Hulme (Immortan Joe), Alyla Browne (Young Furiosa), George Shevtsov (History Man), John Howard (People Eater), Angus Sampson (The Organic Mechanic), Nathan Jones (Rictus Erectus), Josh Helman (Scotus), Charlee Fraser (Mary Jabassa), Elsa Pataky (Mr Norton)

Is there a more demented mainstream film series than Mad Max? Furiosa follows the balls-to-the-wall excess of Mad Max: Fury Road with more of the same and a mythic atmosphere of Godfather Part II-backstory deepening. What you end up with might feel slightly odd or self-important – over two and a half hours of direct build-up for a pay-off we saw almost ten years ago (perhaps that’s why Furiosa ends with a cut-down play-back of the major events of Fury Road spliced into the credits, so we can all be reassured the villains left alive here got their comeuppance later). Furiosa is frequently overlong, a little too full of its love of expansive world-building and never quite convinces you that we actually need it – but then it’s also so bizarre, Grand Guignal and totally nuts perhaps we should just be happy that, in a world of focus-grouped content, it even exists.

We’re back on the desert wasteland of post-apocalyptic Australia as motorbike riding goons kidnap young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) from the Green Place hoping to use her to persuade crazed war lord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) to lead his forces there. Despite the heroic efforts of her mother (Charlee Fraser), Furiosa remains a captive with only a secret tattoo on her arm (guess what’s going to happen to that…) to guide her home. Dementus provokes a resources war with cult-leader Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), with Furiosa traded, then escaping a hideous fate as one of Joe’s wives, instead growing up secretly-disguised as a boy (becoming Anya Taylor-Joy) as part of Praetorian Jack’s (Tom Burke) War Rig crew. Then the war between Immortan Joe and Dementus explodes again, foiling Furiosa and Jack’s plan to escape and giving Furiosa a change at revenge against Dementus.

That sprawling plot outline hopefully gives an idea of the ambitious bite George Miller is taking out of his world. While Fury Road took place over, at most, a few days, Furiosa stretches well over twenty, so gargantuan in scale and newly invented locations (as well as the mountainous citadel, we get the oil-rig nightmare of Gas Town and the Mordor-like Bullet Town) that it squeezes most of the entire Act Five war between Dementus and Immortan Joe into a brief, tracking-shot, montage. Furiosa is actually rather like a fever-dream Freud might have had after reading an airplane thriller, split into on-screen chapter titles – each with portentous (and sometimes pretentious) names like ‘The Pole of Inaccessibility’ – and a self-important narration dialling up mythic importance. If Fury Road was like someone stabbing an adrenalin-filled syringe straight into your heart, Furiosa is a like being told a detour-crammed story by someone a bit the worse-the-wear after a long night.

Not that Furiosa shirks on the banging madness of Fury Road’s slap-in-the-face action. It features a mid-film War Rig vs motor-bike raiders pitched-driving battle that is so extreme you wonder no one got crushed under wheel while making it, perfectly capturing the addled madness of Fury Road. A Chapter 4 pitched battle at one of Furiosa’s Dystopian-on-speed locations sees destruction, devastation and disaster on an even grander scale than anything else Miller has done before in this series, with an entire mining crater turned into a whirligig of firey destruction. That’s not forgetting three desperate desert chases – the finest of which is the film’s opening sequence, which see Furiosa’s mother track down and ruthlessly dispatch Furiosa’s kidnappers with a velociraptor-like ruthlessness and efficiency. No wonder Miller can put a whole war into a single shot – and why he feels comfortable ending Furiosa with a surprisingly personal and small-scale confrontation.

The main confrontation is between Furiosa and her self-proclaimed warlord – and would-be surrogate Dad – Dementus. Furiosa gives Chris Hemsworth the opportunity he’s been waiting for, allowing to flex his comic muscles, chew hilarious lumps out of the scenery and still show his menace. He makes Dementus an overgrown child, brilliant at stealing but with no idea about how to use them, obsessed with self-improvement (his dialogue is full of verbose, overwritten phrases, like a psychotic thesaurus) and only really happy when he’s smashing something. Introduced framing himself like a zen-like messiah, it doesn’t take long until he’s charging around on a chariot drawn by motorbikes, tasting other people’s tears and giving self-aggrandizing speeches while torturing Furiosa’s nearest-and-dearest. It’s a gift of a part, funny, scary, loathsome but strangely likeable even when he does awful things.

Opposite him, Anya Taylor-Joy actually has less to work with as Furiosa (she only takes over the part almost an hour into the film). Although this is meant to be a Furiosa film, it rarely feels like its telling us much more than we already know, especially since much the skills that ‘makes’ Furiosa what she is in Fury Road takes place in montage and her desire for freedom and to protect others are swiftly established so that any new-comers can unhesitatingly root for her. If Dementus is all talk, Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa is silent and simmering, her humanity either shrinking or quietly growing from moment-to-moment. She has a quiet romance with Tom Burke’s world-weary Praetorian Jack, but this really about converting her into a mythic figure of vengeance rather than making her a personality.

A vengeance we’ve already seen pan-out in Fury Road. I’ll be honest, for all the grand scale of Furiosa, I don’t really feel I learned anything about its central character here I hadn’t already picked up from Theron’s brilliantly expressive performance in the first film. For all the impressiveness of the scale, a lot of Furiosa boils down to physically showing us things that were implied in the first (second?) film – from locations, to the reasons why Furiosa lost her arm to giving us clear reasons for her motivations. But all this is already there – and with brilliant economy – in Fury Road. Telling us all again feels like Miller giving us the footnotes (Furiosa Silmarillon perhaps?) rather than anything truly new and the Homeric backdrop Miller is going for never really clicks into place.

So the most successful swings are not narrative but visual. Furiosa reminds you what an absolutely insane extreme world Mad Max is. Death cults of radiation-deformed albinos? Villains who bottle milk straight from the nipple (not a cow’s), while another obsessively fondles his exposed, pierced ones? A villain who straps a battered old Teddy bear to himself? Action set-pieces that throw in everything – flying bikes, lava lakes and arms stoically lopped off? Even time-jumps are done imaginatively, like a wig, caught in a branch, decaying in front of our eyes. Every single design decision in this – and the gorgeously sun-kissed photography – is dialled up to eleven for George Miller’s very personal vision of pulpy, dystopian chaos.

You can wonder at times – as I did – whether we really needed a two-and-a-half hour film that’s expands the thematic depth of a chase movie which already outlined its characters motivations and personalities with impressive economy. But then, there are moments in Furiosa that just feel like they’ve been pulled out of someone’s crazy dreams. It’s put together with such a good mix of pulp poetry and head-banging craziness by George Miller that after a while you just go with it. And it sticks with you in a way focus-grouped Marvel films never seem to.

Ashes and Diamonds (1958)

Wajda’s masterpiece of subtle but stinging Soviet criticism and one of the great European films

Director: Andrjez Wajda

Cast: Zbigniew Cybulski (Maciek Chełmicki), Ewa Krzyżewska (Krystyna), Wacław Zastrzeżyński (Szczuka), Adam Pawlikowski (Andrzej), Bogumił Kobiela (Drewnowski), Stanisław Milski (Pieniążek). Ignacy Machowski (Waga)

When the dust settles from the chaos of uncertain, terrible times what will we it leave behind: ashes or a diamond? It’s a question Poland is asking on the final day of the war, 8^th May 1945 –what fate will come under Soviet rule? Wajda’s War Trilogy comes to its end and, even considering the quality of the first two films in the series, Ashes and Diamonds is a quantum leap in filmmaking, an extraordinary mix of realism and poetic ambiguity. Wajda captures this turning point in Polish history with a series of encounters between a group of characters in a single location on one night. Ashes and Diamonds can lay claim to being one of the greatest films from Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, a breathtakingly rewarding mix of subtle messaging and tragedy.

Home Army fighters – those paying attention to Wajda’s earlier work will be well aware the Polish government strongly disapproved of these forces loyal to a democratic Polish government – Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) and Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) attempt to assassinate communist leader Szczuka (Wacław Zastrzeżyński). Instead, they accidentally murder two regular workers. They are ordered to take a second attempt on their target after he attends a celebration with a host of Polish and Soviet dignitaries at a local hotel. But triggerman Maciek is torn, trapped in a cycle of war that has killed his friends, uncertain about whether to continue in the crusade that has consumed his youth or explore a life he glances at with barmaid Krystna (Ewa Krzyżewska). Will Maciek complete his mission or accept Poland’s future lies not with the ‘liberating’ Soviets?

Wajda’s restructuring of Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel is the culmination of the entire War Trilogy’s style: a careful criticism of Stalinism, buried behind ambiguous characters and images that provide enough of an interpretative fig-leaf that the Polish authorities could convince themselves his work was politically acceptable. Nearly everything in Ashes and Diamonds is subtly open to interpretation, carefully hiding its message in plain sight: the war is bringing ashes to Poland, not diamonds. Certainly, today, that’s the only interpretation you could take from Wajda’s extraordinary ending: our assassin writhing in painful, fearful death-throws on a rubbish heap while the hotel guests dance slowly and hypnotically into a doorway bathed in light. The beautiful ambiguity though is clear: look, Wajda could say to his political masters, they’re heading into the light while the Home Army soldier literally dies in a pile of rubbish. How more pro-Soviet can you get?

The entire film is a sad poem to a lost Poland with Wajda carefully guiding our sympathy towards Maciek. On paper, there’s plenty to admire in Szczuka, clearly an honest, competent politician – but he’s also uncharismatic and dull, who we may respect but never love. All our sympathies are captured by Zbigniew Cybulski’s extraordinary performance as Maciek. Inspired by James Dean and Marlon Brando (having binged their films while studying in Paris), Cybulski effectively wears his own clothes and gives Maciek the sort of anti-authority cool Dean made his own. Our sympathies lie immediately with this young man turned reluctant warrior, angry and scared.

Cybulski’s performance isn’t just attitude. He makes clear Maciek is deeply traumatised by the things he’s seen and done. Those dark glasses he wears – which make him look both older, cooler and more cocksure (he looks noticeably younger and more vulnerable without them) – are a legacy of damage to his eyesight from the sewers of the Warsaw Uprising. There’s an odd childish vulnerability to him – he’s spooked by ants crawling across his machine gun during their opening botched assassination – along with a surly resentment at the never-ending demands of this war. But he’s also iconoclastic and passionate about the vision he’s been fighting for. All of this is beautifully captured by Cybulski.

Maciek is at the centre of this pained reflection on all that has been lost in the war. Wajda presents this lingering sense with a series of strikingly unforgettable images. Maciek and Andrzej toast their fallen comrades with burning shots of vodka, each lit like a candle as they remember another name. Flames mark death and loss throughout: the innocent man accidentally machine-gunned by Maciek falls with his jacket burning from point-blank gunfire, fireworks fill the sky when Maciek carries out his assassination.

And where is the Church in all this? Ashes and Diamonds come back time and again to the great spiritual guide in Polish lives (before Socialism). The early assassination takes place outside a countryside Church, its locked door failing to save the victims. It’s an ominous sign for a world where God may have fallen silent, or perhaps never spoke at all. In another brilliant touch of Wajda ambiguity, Maciek and Krystyna walk through a bombed-out church, encountering a giant crucifix hanging upside down. This is not only an extraordinary image – the thorns from Jesus’ head either seeming to visually skewer the lovers or pull them in – but also a confirmation or lament for how little God can help Poland. Maciek clearly doesn’t care, since he happily uses altar decorations to fix Krystyna’s shoe. Faith doesn’t matter in this world.

All people have to belief in is what they can muster in themselves. Perhaps that’s why Maciek has filled his life with the longing to keep the good old cause going. He’s lost so much, he can’t actually believe there is anything else he could really do. For all his flirting at the bar, brimming with cocksure cool, does he ever really believe he has any choice but to continue with what he has committed to do? Wajda frames Maciek in his final moments of choice, huddling under stairs, shadows seeming to box and cage him in.

He’s as trapped as the rest of Poland is. Szczuka is a decent man, but he’s also a Socialist fanatic horrified to hear his son fought for the ‘reactionary’ Home Army. Meanwhile, his Soviet paymasters carefully nuzzle themselves into control over the Polish authorities, Wajda presenting them always with a careful political neutrality. Cunningly, all criticism of them is placed in the mouth of a journalist who speaks nothing but the truth about the freedom-crushing Soviets – but he’s made a drunkard sleazeball (more than enough for the censors to dismiss his words).

Ashes and Diamonds is also a beautiful piece of filmmaking, crammed with Wellesian light and shadow. Despite mostly being a film about waiting and decision making, it’s also full of pace, energy and a sense of a world steamrolled out of existence. It has one of the legendary endings, not only the long, lonely death of our hero but also the hypnotic, slow dance of the Polish authorities, disappearing into the sunlight, unknowingly marching into a future that will extinguish them.

Wajda manages to communicate all this in a film which, thanks to its need to slip everything past the censors, is extraordinarily supple and subtle, never over-playing its hand and spreading its humanity. There are no real villains here, only a series of people at a turning point of history, presented with careful even-handedness, but in way that never intrudes on the obvious sympathies of the film. With extraordinary direction and a superb, era-defining performance from Cybulski, it’s a masterpiece of World Cinema.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

Intelligent and engaging entry in a continuously rewarding sci-fi series

Director: Wes Ball

Cast: Owen Teague (Noa), Freya Allan (Nova), Kevin Durand (Proximus Caesar), Peter Macon (Raka), William H Macy (Trevathan), Lydia Peckham (Soona), Travis Jeffery (Anaya), Sara Wiseman (Dar), Neil Sandilands (Koro), Eka Darville (Sylva)

Apes Together Strong! Their battle cry never works out that way does it? Because apes are more like humans than they would like to think – just as humans can be as dangerous as they fear. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes picks up the franchise hundreds of years after the death of ape-leader Caesar. The human’s world is lost under a vast forest and apes live in separate clans, barely able to remember the teachings of their one-time leader.

One clan – living in the forest-covered remains of Los Angeles – live peacefully, rearing and bonding with eagles. All that is shattered when the clan is captured by the soldiers of would-be ape emperor, the self-styled Proximus (Kevin Durand). The only one to escape is young Noa (Owen Teague) who sets out on a pilgrimage to free his people, encountering along the way Raka (Peter Macon), an orangutan who is the last of the Cult of Caesar and mysterious human Nova (Freya Allan) who is being hunted by Proximus’s soldiers. At the heart of Proximus’ kingdom Noa discovers many are willing to go to extreme lengths to gain access to a mysterious structure they believe is the key to dominating the planet.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is sharply directed by Wes Ball and follows the trend of putting the apes front-and-centre of their own story (it’s nearly an hour into the film before we see a human). It almost goes without saying now, but the special effects and motion-capture work is extraordinary: the apes feel utterly real and the human performers behind these evolved simians are flawless in their physicality. All of this is set in a superbly designed post-apocalyptic world, where locations slowly become recognisable as overgrown skyscrapers, observatories, airports and oil tankers.

Ball’s film takes it’s time – perhaps, at times, a little too much – to build our connection with the eagle clan. Peaceful and with a rich, humanitarian (apeitarian?) community, they live in harmony with their surroundings, carefully obeying set rules to avoid over-exploiting their environment. Noa and his friends Soona and Anaya are carefully established as a contrasting group each with their own flaws and strengths. Noa, in particular, displays early quiet leadership skills and an intuitive understanding of machinery: from manipulating the ruins around him as unexpected climbing tools, to working out how to repair damaged equipment.

It makes it even more affecting when this community is torn apart by brutal violence – especially since the main threat of Proximus’s forces is a terrifyingly, psychotic gorilla who murders without a second thought. It’s particularly unsettling as this destruction and violence is constantly done “in the name of Caesar”. How could the hero – the funeral of whom the film opens with – who was so full of respect for others have become the byword for such hate.

It’s because this is a world where the apes’ ability to build communities has outstripped their ability to create records of their history. None of the apes have any knowledge of the past – the eagle clan have never heard of Caesar and has no idea that humans (or echoes as they call them, implying some past knowledge has been lost) used to talk and rule the planet. Even Raka’s Cult of Caesar learning equates to fractionally less than a casual viewer of this franchise would remember and guards a series of books he has no idea how to read. Noa stares in wonder at these symbols on the page, understanding that this ability to record and recall the past can be used to bring power to the future.

It’s certainly understood by Proximus, the only ape who seems to have any understanding of their past, but has used this knowledge to twist himself into the demagogue figurehead of his own cult of personality, building an empire he models after the Romans. Proximus has an extremist ideology, taking the Apes Together Strong as a mantra for forging his own empire, terrified that humans could rise again and take back the world they once owned and also yearning (like a violent King Louis) to learn the secrets of their skills and technology.

And perhaps he’s right. As Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes develops, its narrative takes unexpected twists and turns as Noa and the eagle clan become the peaceful eye of a storm of extremist megalomania. Perhaps Noa suspects this from the start – his instincts on whether to trust or not are shown to be consistently strong – but Ball takes the film into unexpected directions that forces us to ask whose side we are on, especially as the ending tees us up for a sequel where we could potentially find our loyalties fiercely divided. It’s telling that the closing moments of Ball’s film, using the framing and style of a traditional triumphant ending, are invested by him with a great deal of dread and menace.

It’s fitting that an intelligent film like this, mixing action with subtle commentary on human (and ape) nature, draws out some fine performances. Owen Teague makes for highly engaging and relatable lead as Noa, a young buck who becomes a leader. Kevin Durand is wonderfully bombastic as Proximus and Peter Macon warm, charming and witty as Raka. Freya Allan brings a great deal of light, share and ambiguity to a challenging part while William H Macy is a similarly ambiguous delight, as someone both right and wrong, in a great cameo.

Above all, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes suggests there is plenty of life left in this franchise yet, which still sits near the top of the list of intelligent, engaging and exciting sci-fi series. Continuing a rich run of form, this entry in the franchise leaves you fascinated as to where the film will turn next.

The Big Chill (1983)

Heart-warming, engaging and moving ensemble drama, low-key and all the better for it

Director: Lawrence Kasdan

Cast: Tom Berenger (Sam Weber), Glenn Close (Sarah Cooper), Jeff Goldblum (Michael Gould), William Hurt (Nick Carlton), Kevin Kline (Harold Cooper), Mary Kay Place (Meg Jones), Meg Tilly (Chloe), JoBeth Williams (Karen Bowens), Don Galloway (Richard Bowens)

Growing up is hard, isn’t it? The older you get, the harder it is to cling on to the idealism of your younger days. The past can wind up feeling both very familiar and a very different country indeed. It’s something a group of thirtysomething college friends start thinking about when they gather for the funeral of their friend Alex (the famously cut-from-the-film Kevin Costner, seen only via close-ups of his hands and chest while being prepped by an undertaker). Spending a weekend together they reminisce, argue and remind each of why (and if they are still are) friends.

Kasdan’s sharp script, full of sparkling dialogue and rich (if at times familiar) character arcs attracted a smorgasbord of the cream of 80s American film acting, all of whom give fabulously relaxed, extremely genuine performances, largely devoid of grandstanding. The disparate range of career and life-choices the friends have made influenced an armada of ‘college-reunion’ stories, but it’s a trope that works because Kasdan knew it offered such a rich potential for drama.

The Big Chill is the definitive ensemble piece, delightful because it’s structured not around heavy-handed, overtly dramatic clashes, but everyday conversations full of observational humour and low-key emotional truths. There isn’t really a plot as such in The Big Chill: the pleasure comes from Kasdan pulling off the near-impossible trick of making us feel we have been invited to share the fun rather than watching, with our noses pressed up against the window, a film where the actors are having more fun than us. The Big Chill feels truthful, universal and eventually moving because it is so down-to-earth. We’ve all had social groups where we feel absolute loyalty and love for its members, while still being capable of finding them earth-shatteringly infuriating.

Most of them have traded their youthful idealism to change the world for a Reaganite cash-grasping. Sam (Tom Berenger) stars in a hit Magnum PI style TV drama. His former partner in left-wing politics Harold (Kevin Kline) owns a successful running shoes business (named Running Dog in a subtle pop at his own selling out) while his wife Sarah (Glenn Close) is a successful doctor. Michael (Jeff Goldblum) writes shallow celebrity pieces for glossy magazines, Meg (Mary Kay Place) has traded being a public defender for real-estate law. Karen (JoBeth Williams) wanted to be a writer, but instead married an ad executive Richard (Don Galloway).

All of them feel their late friend Alex represents the path they could have taken: a genius scientist who turned down all academic promotions to focus on social work and his old principles. Not that this seems to have made Alex happy. The most like Alex’s seems to be Nick (William Hurt). A former radio-psychiatrist, left impotent after Vietnam, who jacked in his career and is now a drifting drug addict. It’s never quite said, but you can feel the concern of the rest of the group that Nick feels destined to be the next funeral they gathering for.

Much of the tension comes from Nick – largely because he feels more willing to touch nerves the rest are happy to leave unprodded. This is a group that works hard to maintain harmony – after all, Sarah’s affair with Alex hasn’t dented Harold’s genuine grief or his love for his wife, and no one else wants to address it. But there are clear tensions and resentments under the surface: small grudges or irritations many perhaps coming from that uncomfortable feeling of the group seeing their own self-recriminations reflected back at them in their friends faces.

Nick is the only one who raises the scary spectre that decade-old events hold this group together, not their lives today. If they all met for the first time now, would they even be friends? Nick is also willing to take pot-shots at their tendency to self-pitying regret and to provoke the romantic and sexual tensions the others are happy to keep unremarked or compromise on. (Even Jeff Goldblum’s seemingly provocative Michael, avoids trouble by scrupulously taking nothing seriously.)

What makes The Big Chill such a lovable film, despite this, is this doesn’t fracture the group but are islands of tension within a sea of genuine friendship and warmth. Kasdan’s insistence that the company spend a longer time than usual in rehearsal – famously the cast cemented their chemistry via an almost five-hour, Mike Leigh-style, in-character improvisation, involving cooking and eating a dinner together – paid off in spades. They genuinely feel like life-long friends, sharing in-jokes, teasing each other, looking out for each other and making generous offers of help.

There is a lot to laugh at because it feels so universal. We’ve all mucked around with friends while cooking and cleaning. When the group gather to teasingly cheer along with the opening credits of Sam’s cheesy TV show (to his good-natured embarrassment) it makes us laugh because we recognise the affection. The hilarious absurdity of Harold, Nick and Sam chasing a bat out of the attic feels real. Just as the emotions hammer home – Harold’s grief in his eulogy for Alex, Sarah’s tears at a meal, Nick’s tragic middle-distance gloom or Karen’s private ennui among her friends.

It’s all helped by superb performances. JoBeth Williams is excellent in, arguably, the film’s most challenging role, deeply unhappy with where her life has gone, wanting to pretend she can seize the day but not having the conviction to see it through. Goldblum is drily witty but distant as the group’s closest thing to an outsider, Berenger affectingly modest at his sell-out success, Place quietly desperate as a woman whose body clock is ticking down. Kline is very funny and sweet as a man desperate to help those around him, while Close in the flashier (and Oscar-nominated) part as the group’s nominal ‘mother figure’, far more deeply affected by Alex’s death than she is willing to let on.

Perhaps best of all is Hurt, vulnerable, gentle and quietly lost as Nick, his pain manifesting itself in occasional bear-prodding outbursts, but who will quietly apologise the next morning with a gentle, unremarked hug. He also forms a warm and genuine bond with Alex’s younger girlfriend Chloe, played with a sparky energy by Meg Tilly, who (not surprisingly) sees a lot of Alex in him.

Kasdan’s film gently explores the tensions of a group of adults unsure about where their life has taken them, but it does so in a warm and charming structure that makes us really care for the characters all of whom are expertly and humanly drawn. It’s lack of explosive melodrama is a large part of its success, helping ground the film as something relatable that we can feel a real bond with.

Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)

Lusciously filmed melodrama that might also be an exploration of dangerous obsession

Director: Max Ophüls

Cast: Joan Fontaine (Lisa Berndle), Louis Jourdan (Stefan Brand), Mady Christians (Frau Berndle), Marcel Journet (Johann Stauffer), Art Smith (John), Howard Freeman (Herr Kastner), Carol Yorke (Marie), John Good (Lt. Leopold von Kaltnegger)

Faded pianist and lothario Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan) plans to skip town in 1920s Vienna before his duel with a reputed crack-shot. He’s packed up and ready to go, but halts when his butler passes him a letter from a woman unknown to him that opens “By the time you read this letter, I may be dead”. The writer is Lisa Berndle (Joan Fontaine), a young woman who has loved Stefan since first seeing him when she was an impressionable 15-year-old living in his apartment block in 1900. All her life she has shadowed Stefan and twice they have met – once ten years before, spending a few romantic days together and then again recently under another name – but Stefan has no idea who she is.

Adapted from a Stefan Zweig short story, Letter From an Unknown Woman becomes a richly elaborate display of film-making from Max Ophüls, a show-case for his gorgeous camera work and luscious sense of visual theatre. This is classic melodrama, the characters thrown together after years apart by chance and contrivance, heightened emotions guiding every scene, with the suspense hook at all times of wondering who will see clearly first: will Stefan recognise this woman who has loved him from afar all his life, or will Lisa acknowledge that what she wants from Stefan, a full recognition and genuine return of her feelings, he is unable to give?

It makes for perfect material for Ophüls almost-unmatched visual sense. Letter From an Unknown Woman is packed with the sort of elaborate, carefully planned tracking shots and fluidic camera movements Ophüls made his own. From the start, the camera roves upwards, following the young Lisa as she excitedly runs up a spiral staircase to creep into the apartment of Stefan. There is a superbly handled tracking shot through the street of Venice, as a mid-twenties Lisa walks with a soldier would-be-suitor whose proposal she will immediately reject. And, most triumphantly of all, a tracking shot through a grand society theatre, that roams past crowds of hoi-polloi with Lisa, before focusing on her reaction as she glances Stefan from a distance across the hall.

It’s a visual richness Ophüls triumphs at and he uses it to give an intensity to several scenes, in particular the lost opportunity weekend Lisa spends with Stefan. This is marked by a beautifully framed late-night café dance, before a walk full of romantic lingering in a nearly-abandoned fairground. What’s superb about what Ophüls does with these sequences is to make them look romantic while also suggesting a sort of broken decadence to them (the locations, like the slightly faded café with its bored band, are always slightly past their best). There is a faded grandeur in Letter From an Unknown Woman, with everyone clinging to something they’ve lost or never had, hopes of love or artistic success that are never quite going to happen.

It’s easy to see Letter from an Unknown Woman as a traditional romance of the loyal loving woman, who sticks with her love for a man for better-or-worse. But, particularly today, it’s also clear that the film walks a fine line where its possible to see its lead character as both richly romantic and a delusional, obsessive border-line stalker, fixated on a heartless seducer. Is love a force to be praised at all times, or a destructive force that prevents someone from maturing? For all the richness of the photography and music, it’s hard not to think it’s the latter. And I think Ophüls lets this play on the edges, the camera lingering at points on Fontaine’s face full of obsessive self-sacrifice monomania.

It make for a richly complex role for Joan Fontaine, playing the young Lisa from age 15 to 35, taking her from doe-eyed, love-struck teenager to a woman seasoned by years of regrets, obsessively clinging to has last chance of finding a love she has spent her whole life pining for. Fontaine is giddy, excited but that glimmer of obsession is always there. Ophüls presents her at one point standing, stalker-like, outside Stefan’s apartment, her eyes craning up for just a glance of the object of her affection. In his presence, she’s breathless and excited but also with a touch of pain and desperation, longing for him to give her some sort of validation after years of dutiful, unremarked-on love. Fontaine manages to keep Lisa vulnerable and sympathetic, even as she goes about her life with an obsessive self-destruction, discarding other suitors, spending years working a menial role in a dress shop on the off-chance it might lead to an encounter with Stefan.

Self-destruction is what this ‘relationship’ brings to Lisa, a woman who stubbornly refuses to move on in her life from the decisions and emotions she first experiences as a teenager and will discard attentive lovers, husbands and even children all to the chance of finding a few moments of bliss with the object of her affection. She does this with a real sense of fragility, a longing that keeps her vulnerable, but also something that keeps her from really living her life. Particularly since Stefan – and the film uses Louis Jourdan’s cool, detached arrogance to great effect – emerges as a heartless roué, who thinks only of the immediate and destroys his own promise in a hedonistic clinging to the moment rather than really building something.

For all its luscious romance, Letter from an Unknown Woman carries this air of self-destructive futility about it. Is cradling a teenage obsession healthy for Lisa? Especially as its object is scarcely worthy of the effort? After all, Stefan meets and seduces (as he sees it) the same woman twice several years apart without ever joining the dots up in his head- repeating the same smooth pick-up lines both time. It doesn’t stop Lisa, until the very end, lighting up with a sort of youthful joy you imagine she’s not felt at any other time But Ophüls is using it to build towards a moment where Stefan may perhaps finally remember Lisa – and even more strikingly may realise the shallow emptiness of his whole life and the lost opportunity of being genuinely loved by someone.

That feeling exists, even if you feel (as I do) that Stefan is the unworthy figure of an emotionally-immature woman’s unhealthy obsession. Perhaps Lisa’s life would have been better and happier if she had moved on, as we all do, from our first crushes. But Letter from an Unknown Woman also celebrates a sort of strength in this, by contrasting the morally pure and consistent Lisa with the shallow and mercenary Stefan. His flaws are obvious but, in a way, they also serve to cement Lisa’s own innocence and vulnerability – and add to the impact as Stefan realises the path not taken.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021)

Low-key, beautifully made short-story anthology, crammed with wonderfully little touches

Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Cast: Kotone Furukawa (Meiko), Ayumu Nakajima (Kazuaki Kubota), Hyunri (Tsugumi Konno), Kiyohiko Shibukawa (Segawa), Katsuki Mori (Nao), Shouma Kai (Sasaki), Fusako Urabe (Moka Natsuko), Aoba Kawai (Nana Aya)

Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy feels deceptively simple. But it’s the Japanese auteur combining an Ozu-inspired sensibility with the narrative flair of Chekhov. In its three acts, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy presents three short stories, each chamber pieces, each revolving around intimate, intense and life-changing conversations between two people. Hamaguchi demonstrates how lives can rotate on their axis in split seconds, with conversations shifting for one or both participants with no warning, generating unexpected, emotionally surprising results.

‘Magic’, the first story, revolves around model Meiko (Kotone Furukawa) and best friend Tsugami (Hyunri). During a long cab journey, Tsugami tells Meiko all about her new romance – only for Meiko to realise, part way through, she is talking about Meiko’s ex-boyfriend Kazuaki (Ayumu Nakajima) with whom Meiko may still love. ‘Door Wide Open’ sees distinguished professor and author Segawa (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) become the unsuspecting target of a honey trap by Nao (Katsuki Mori), after her friend-with-benefit’s Sasaki (Shouma Kai) had his media career-plans derailed by Segawa failing him. Nao and Segawa however find unexpectantly common ground. Finally, ‘Once Again’ has Natsuko (Fusako Urabe) excitedly bumping into her former high school girlfriend Aya (Aoba Kawai) at a train station – only to find, when they return to Aya’s home, both have mistaken the other for someone else. These two strangers however find it easier to talk and bond.

All three of these stories are deceptively simple. Only ‘Once Again’ features any unusual set-up (a computer virus has rendered all computers unusable, a sci-fi insertion that only exists to remove any chance of the mix-up being avoided). Hamaguchi shoots each story with an unaffected simplicity, frequently employing long-takes and staging the bulk of each story (each is about 40 minutes) in single, every-day locations – from taxis to offices to homes.

But Hamaguchi’s approach allows the performances to grow with a subtle, skilful naturalness, capturing intense (but often hidden) changes of mood in the slightest micro-expressions. Each of the three key conversations underpinning the stories develops in utterly unexpected ways and part of the magic of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is immediately wanting to play each of back and try and spot the moments where they changed their participants lives.

Hamaguchi carefully builds our empathy with these characters, using Ozu-inspired stationary set-ups complemented with unfussy two-shot set-ups, but culminating in moments of complete immersion where POV shots place us behind the eyes of each character, looking directly at the person they are talking with. It’s a superb way of quietly building our connection with the characters and the events they are experiencing and works brilliantly to immerse us in these moments that we know will shape their emotional development over months and years to come.

This gives these small scale – and they are defiantly small-scale – stories real impact. Hamaguchi’s film is about real people facing real problems: lost loves, frustrated ambitions, childhood regrets. The very human feelings in play here help make the stories affecting. It’s helped again by the subtle performances Hamguchi draws from the cast. When Meiko – a marvellous ambiguous Kotone Furukawa – fumes against her ex-boyfriend for moving on, is she angry at him or at herself for letting him go? Does Segawa (a perfectly dour, almost unreadable Kiyohiko Shibukawa) feel fear at his reputation being damaged or because of stirrings of sexual longing he has clearly repressed? Does Natsuko (a gorgeously fragile Fusako Urabe) relish the freedom of speaking her mind to a complete stranger even more than she would talking to the actual person she is recalling?

Hamaguchi mixes this with intriguing moments of fantasy. A deliberately clumsy camera zoom at one point indicates to us a no-holds-barred conversation in a café has just been in the imagination of one of its participants. Sasaki fantasises about himself reporting on the television about his former mentor. Hamaguchi also brings a wonderful sense of magic to everyday locations (not to mention the fairy tale like set-up of the final stories lack of computers, which feels like the aftereffects of a witch’s curse). The escalator Natsuko and Aya meet on takes on a mystic beauty as it moves them past each other on careful tracking shots. Meiko walks through city streets and stares back at a skyline that feels filled with meaning. Hamaguchi isn’t afraid to slow the film down at key moments to soak up atmosphere and observe the everyday beauty in objects around us.

It lends even more power to the sudden changes these characters experience. Each story carefully builds on the emotional impact of the one before, taking us through ambiguity to complex mixed feelings to a final cathartic moment at a train station that carries real emotional force. Every story ends in a very different place from what we expected at the start – or arguably even the middle – without Hamaguchi ever overplaying his Dahlish Tales of the Unexpected card.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a small-scale expression of Hamaguchi’s directorial mastery, a perfect expression of his ability to infuse small-scale stories with great emotional force and psychological depth. It’s a highly skilled piece of short-film-making, pulled together into an effective collection. A clear indicator that this – combined with Drive My Car – marks Hamaguchi out as a future great.

Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)

Epic retelling that sticks with the same melodrama and nearly destroyed Brando’s career

Director: Lewis Milestone (Carol Reed)

Cast: Marlon Brando (Lt. Fletcher Christian), Trevor Howard (Captain William Bligh), Richard Harris (John Mills), Hugh Griffith (Alexander Smith), Richard Haydn (William Brown), Tarita Teriipaia (Princess Maimiti), Matahiarii Tama (Chief Hitihiti), Percy Herbert (Matthew Quintal), Duncan Lamont (John Williams), Gordon Jackson (Edward Birkett), Chips Rafferty (Michael Byrne), Noel Purcell (William McCoy), Tim Seely (Midshipman Ned Young), Henry Daniell (Admiral)

After the success of Ben-Hur, MGM thought it had cracked the mystery of making those cash-registers go ring-a-ding: massive historical pictures, with scale and run-time dialled up to “epic”. Mutiny on the Bounty was one of the most famous stories of all time and they’d had signed up Marlon Brando, universally seen as the greatest actor alive. It couldn’t go wrong, could it? Months of shooting and a disastrous box-office release later (despite a MGM campaign that landed this a Best Picture nomination), and Mutiny on the Bounty effectively destroyed Brando’s career for the next ten years and became a by-word for star excess.

Brando played mutineer Fletcher Christian – but in a manner completely different from Clark Gable (who, Brando disparagingly stated, only played himself minus the moustache). Brando’s Christian would be British and then-some: posh, foppish, a gentleman torn between the rules of society and those of fair play. Bligh – played with a constant sneer by Trevor Howard – would follow in the footsteps of Laughton, but Brando wanted to make something more serious, more historical. Less of a blood-and-thunder naval drama and more a character study that would give a fair crack of the whip (so to speak) to the Tahitian natives the mutineers lived among.

The film we ended up with though is no more historically accurate than the 1935 Best Picture winner. Part of the film’s disastrous reception might well be that this epic tells more-or-less exactly the same salacious story of a devilish sadist scowling as he whips men to death (far from the truth of the real Bligh, a poor leader but not a monster) until his noble number two steps up (the real Christian was a spoilt weakling) but in what feels like twice the time with half the fun. If you want to watch this version of the Bounty story, why would you want to choose this one? (We’d have to wait until the 1984 version for a more fair-handed telling.)

Not that Mutiny on the Bounty is as terrible as its reputation suggests. It touches – particularly in its thoughtful post-mutiny coda on Pitcairn island – on an interesting character study of the mixed motivations of Christian, filled with regrets and self-pitying sulking. It wants to explore where the balance lies between what is right by the letter of the law and by its spirit. Nothing Bligh does in the film is wrong as such, but his relish and zeal in doing it are. Christian isn’t a conventional hero, but a smirking, foppish character prone to snide remarks and affecting an air of disconnected duty for large chunks of the film. If the film had allowed Bligh more sympathy, rather than the two-dimensional monster he’s portrayed as here, it might have made for an interesting character clash.

Instead, it tends to be slow, self-important and pompous, not helped by Brando’s indulgent performance which sacrifices drama for portentousness. For all the film offers a cartoonish villain, it’s resolutely unfun and deathly serious. Shot with a professional, disengaged widescreen flatness by Milestone (called in from decades of retirement as a “safe-pair of hands”, after the sacking of Carol Reed), it’s uninspired and mistakes size for visual interest. The ship, in particular, is shot with a wide-angled spaciousness which feels completely wrong for a location supposed to be ripe with claustrophobic tension.

The drama attempts to make up for this with its parade of lashings, keel-haulings and bodies (or obvious dummies) tumbling to their death from the rigging. Trevor Howard delivers exactly what’s asked fork here, sneering and constantly in the wrong. It’s one of the film’s failings that it leans into psychological complexity in some places, while most of its events and its second lead are presented with cartoonish silliness. Its location shooting in Tahiti looks great (although the all-too-obvious intercutting of this with scenes on sound stages, sometimes from one cut to another, jars) but a widescreen image of glistening sea would look gorgeous in even the most workmanlike hands.

Perhaps the film is, at times, a chore because it all too clearly was for many involved. Reports of Mutiny on the Bounty have regularly focused on its disastrous making, with directors fired, location shoots awash with dysentery, shooting months over schedule. Above all, Brando rewriting the film on the fly, muscling a disinterested Milestone aside to direct certain scenes. Not a surprise that the studio decided all the blame would be dropped on him not them (they were also stung by the contract they gave him, at $5k a day overtime, Brando’s perfectionism becoming one of the main factors of the film going months over schedule), leaving him virtually unemployable for a decade.

But is that fair? Brando arguably become the awkward, unlikeable, misunderstood Bligh with the cast and crew as the mutineers, all of them intent on a voyage of mutual self-destruction. Put simply, this was a clash between Brando’s immersive, deep-dive acting style and Old Hollywood. To Brando “professional” meant something very different to the “hit-your-marks-say-your-words” attitude of Milestone and the crew: it meant searching over time for the heart of a character. The sort of psychological depth Brando was aiming for was just anathema to many of those he was working with, coming across as the unprofessional self-indulgence of a spoilt star. Combine that with Brando’s stand-offish shyness and professional selfishness and you had a recipe for disaster.

Severed from any director he respected (he made it all too clear he considered Milestone a hack studio Yes-Man) and with no-one having either the power or inclination to restrain him, Brando threw every idea he had at the screen, no matter how awful. So we got Christian with a ludicrous, giggle-inducing accent, a performance stuffed with foppish eccentric touches (and awful costume choices) that aims at thoughtful re-invention but comes across as a camp, bizarre mess. The tragic thing is Brando is clearly passionate about the project, putting more thought and commitment into this performance than he ever offered in barely-bothered turns in films like Sayonara.

Brando was also working with a group of Reed-recruited actors with no sympathy for him. This group of macho British and Irish heavy-drinkers (Hugh Griffith, in a crucial role, frequently disappears for no reason as his alcoholism eventually became such a burden he was fired mid-shoot) had no sympathy for the fey Brando or his acting style. Richard Harris’ loathing of his co-star – who responded to their open dislike with petty on-set power-plays, only making the whole problem grow – in particular is all too-clear. Brando looks most comfortable working with the Tahitian actors (he had long been a passionate anti-racist campaigner) and later married Tarita Teriipaia. It’s one of the few times where he makes Christian feel fully human rather than a mixed bag of conflicting actorly tricks.

Mutiny on the Bounty has its moments: unfortunately it’s all the wrong ones. For a film that wanted to be a more serious, historical exploration of the mutiny, its best parts revolve around Howard’s lip-smacking villainy, combined with flashes of its on-location shooting. Problem is, that’s not dissimilar from what we got in the 1935 original – and really you’d just be better off watching that.

Civil War (2024)

An eye-catching concept disguises a film more about journalistic ethics than politics

Director: Alex Garland

Cast: Kirsten Dunst (Lee Smith), Wagner Moura (Joel), Cailee Spaeny (Jessie Cullen), Stephen McKinley Henderson (Sammy), Nick Offerman (President of the United States), Sonoya Mizuno (Anya), Jefferson White (Dave), Nelson Lee (Tony), Evan Lai (Bohai), Jesse Plemons (Militant)

A third-term President (Nick Offerman) speaks to an America torn apart by Civil War. It’s an attention-grabbing opening but actually, in many ways, politics is not the primary focus of Civil War. Rather than a state-of-the-nation piece, Garland’s punchy work is a study of journalism ethics. Should journalists have any moral restraint around the news they report? Civil War covers the final days of its fictional civil war, as four journalists – celebrated photo-journalist Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and her reporter colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), veteran correspondent Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and would-be war photography who idealises Lee, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) – travel to Washington in the hopes of capturing the photo (and interview) with the President before his defeat.

Perhaps worried about accusations of political bias, Civil War keeps the causes of its war – and, often, even which sides we are interacting with at any given moment – deliberately vague. There is a throwaway reference to Lee having gained fame for a photo of “the Antifa massacre”, phrasing which doesn’t tell us if Antifa were victims or perpetrators. California and Texas – unlikely bedfellows to say the least – have allied to form the Western Federation. We learn nothing about the President, other than casual name-checks comparing him to Gaddafi (he does vaguely resemble vocally, in his brief appearances, Trump). But so universal are the politics of Civil War it could, without changing a thing (other than wifi access) be as easily set in the time of Clinton or Reagan as Trump and Biden.

Instead, Garland’s point seems to be more if there was a civil war in the Land of the Free, the chaos we could expect to see would be no different than the chaos that has occurred in any number of other locations. On their journey, the journalists encounter UN-run refugee camps, lynch mobs, summary executions, street-by-street fighting, mass graves of civilians and a collapse of anything resembling normal life. We’ve seen the same sort of images countless times on TV, and it matters not a jot that the backdrop now are the streets of DC rather than, say, Mogadishu.

Instead, Civil War becomes the sort of ethical discussion you could imagine in a journalism school seminar. Lee is plagued with troubling memories of conflicts passed, where we see her photographing at intimate range, war crimes, atrocities and shootings without a flicker of emotion. It doesn’t take long for the viewer to find this passive observation of death uncomfortable. It’s something I already felt, watching Lee in the film’s opening photograph a riot over a water truck, camera clicking mere centimetres from civilians laid low by truncheons. When an explosion occurs, her first instinct (after pushing Jessie down to avoid the blast) is to reach for her camera, not to help.

Although showing journalists as brave – putting themselves in harm’s way to bring the readers and viewers at home the truth – Civil War subtly questions the profession of war reporter, people often excitedly pounding the streets alongside killers. Lee’s mentoring of Jessie seems focused less on camera skills, and more on drilling into her the need to disconnect with the world around her. To see herself an observer, whose duty is to record events not to intercede. This boils down to a central idea that Civil War will repeat: if I was killed, Jessie asks, would Lee take the photo? This question becomes the dark heart of Civil War.

We increasingly realise many of the journalists are adrenalin junkies, hooked on the buzz from following in soldier immediate footsteps. “What a rush!” screams Joel after they drive away from a battle that ended with a series of summary executions. Many of the journalists don’t consider they hold any moral connection at all for what happens in front of them. It never occurs to them to attempt to prevent an act of violence or argue against something they see. You start to get the chilling feeling that some of them would as unprotestingly followed the Wehrmacht through the Eastern Front and recorded mass executions with the same emotional disconnection.

The journalists also have a cast-iron belief in their own inviolability, believing the simple waving of their press badge will be guarantee them safety. This delusion is seriously shaken by an encounter with a terrifying, mass-grave filling soldier played by a dead-eyed chill by Jesse Plemons. Even in the tragic aftermath of this, Joel’s grief at the loss of friends and colleagues is also tinged with regret that their potential missing of a crucial story means it was also all for nothing.

Only Lee – an excellently subtle performance by Kirsten Dunst, with the flowering of doubt and regret behind her eyes growing in every scene – shows any growing sense of the ghastly moral compromises (and even collaboration with the grisly things they witness) the journalists have made. It makes an excellent contrast with the increasingly gung-ho and risk-taking Jessie (an equally fine Cailee Spaeny), who becomes as hooked on the adrenalin rush of combat as Joel is.

Garland explores all this rather well under his flashy eye-catching concept. The film is shot with a grimy, visceral intensity – punctuated frequently with black-and-white freeze frames showing Lee and Jessie’s photos, which reaches a heart-wrenching climax for one pivotal scene. Interestingly it’s the dialogue and plotting that sometimes lets Civil War down: its character arcs verge on the predictable and the characters have a tendency to fill themselves in on events with on-the-nose journalism speak.

Civil War culminates in a well-staged gun battle towards the White House in Washington that, like much of Civil War’s America-based concept is about the shock of seeing these things “happening here” rather than in a land far away “of which we know nothing”. But this teasing of a political comment disguises the film’s real intent, a careful study of the moral complexities of reporting horrors rather than stopping them, of becoming so deadened to violence a friend’s death becomes a photo op. Civil War might be one of the most subtle questioning of journalistic ethics ever made, presenting it not as an unquestionably noble profession but one of moral compromise and dark excitement-by-proxy at death and slaughter.

Written on the Wind (1956)

Sirk’s melodrama packs in plenty of tight psychological observation among soap suds

Director: Douglas Sirk

Cast: Rock Hudson (Mitch Wayne), Lauren Bacall (Lucy Moore Hadley), Robert Stack (Kyle Hadley), Dorothy Malone (Marylee Hadley), Robert Keith (Jasper Hadley), Grant Williams (Biff Miley), Robert J. Wilke (Dan Willis), Edward Platt (Dr. Paul Cochrane), Harry Shannon (Hoak Wayne)

Money can’t buy you love. The oil-rich Hadleys live the high-life off the oil-empire built by patriarch Jasper Hadley (Robert Keith). Unfortunately, his children are both deeply unhappy and emotionally stunted. Kyle (Robert Stack) is an alcoholic playboy, Marylee (Dorothy Malone) a lonely woman who plays with other people’s lives to make herself feel better. Both are, in different ways, in love with sub-consciously resentful Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), the poor-boy childhood friend turned geologist who their father sees as the son he wishes he had. Mitch is in love with Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall), an ambitious secretary at Hadley Oil – but Kyle also falls for her, marrying her. Marylee is in love with Mitch, who doesn’t feel the same. We already know from the film’s prologue all this is going to end with a bullet.

It makes for gorgeous entertainment in Douglas Sirk’s lusciously filmed melodrama, that helped lay out the template for the sort of soapy Dynasty-type TV monoliths that would follow years after. Sirk’s gift with this sort of material was to imbue it with just enough Tennessee Williams’ style psychological drama. Written on the Wind is awash with the glamour and beauty of wealth but, at the same time, demonstrates the immense psychological emptiness at the heart of the American Dream. What’s the point of all this luxury when those who have it are as deeply fucked up as the Hadleys are?

Their family is so wealthy the Texas town they live in is named after them and the run it like a private fiefdom, with the police running around like their errand boys. It’s not made them a jot happy. Both Maryann and Kyle are deeply aware of their own emptiness, rooted in the lack of attention (and love) from their father, a work-obsessed man who seems to have written his children off at an early age and invested far more time in training up Mitch like some sort of cuckoo-in-the-nest. Perhaps to try and win back their father’s love as much as to try and find meaning in their own, both of them want to possess Mitch: Maryann is destructively desperate to marry him, Kyle seems to want to become him and if one-way of doing that is by stealing the girl Mitch loves, all the better.

Wonderfully played by Robert Stack, overflowing with false confidence, jocularity and an utter, all-engulfing emptiness, Kyle talks endlessly about how Mitch is like a brother to him all while repeating as often as he can gently disparaging references to his poor-upbringing and dependence on the Hadley’s patronage. It’s coupled with his homoerotic (unspoken of course – it’s the fifties – but you can’t miss it!) obsession with Mitch. All of these confused, contradictory feelings wrap up in Stack’s (Oscar-nominated) performance, with the weak Kyle all too-readily believing Mitch might just be bedding his wife.

It’s an idea planted by Maryann, played with a scene-stealing bravado by Oscar-winner Dorothy Malone. Despite her vivacious energy and languidly casual confidence in establishing her pre-eminence over the newcomer Lucy, Maryann is a miserable, disappointed, deeply damaged soul, painfully bereft of any love and seeking meaning in casual couplings with a parade of gas attendants and hotel bellboys. Obsessively in love with Mitch, she dwells like Kyle on their childhood and the lost dreams of what might have been, but never was. This bubbles out over the course of Written on the Wind to an ever-more destructive Iago-like manipulation of the haplessly drunk Kyle, out of a mix of wanting everyone to be as miserable as she is and a desire to either own or destroy Mitch.

Malone and Stack triumph in these show-case roles, successfully building both frustration and sympathy in the audience. Opposite them, Hudson and Bacall (the stars!) play the more sensible, less interesting parts. Bacall’s strength and firmness balance rather nicely the contradictions in Lucy. A clear-eyed realist on meeting Kyle, attracted to the display of wealth while repulsed by his shallow, well-oiled, lothario routine, she never-the-less marries him, at least partly out of a desire to mother this fragile figure (she is genuinely moved by Kyle’s cockpit confessions of inadequacy and self-loathing while he flies her from New York to Miami for a date). From this Lucy confronts the psychological mess of the Hadley family with a stoic determination to make the best of things.

When does she start to develop feelings for Mitch? Mitch is clearly smitten on first sight, glancing fascinated at her legs while she stands behind a display board. But Sirk uses Rock Hudson’s similar stoic quality to great effect, turning Mitch into the epitome of duty, loyal enough to the Hadley family to bend over backwards to support the Kyle-Lucy marriage, all while clearly carrying an immense candle for Lucy. Saying that, part of the fun in Written on the Wind is wondering how much the patient Mitch is a conscious cuckoo, displaying all the intelligence, dedication and aptitude that Jasper so publicly lambasts his children for lacking (and whose fault is that?)

All these psychological soapy suds bubble superbly inside Sirk’s intricately constructed world. Every shot in Written on the Wind is perfectly constructed, splashes of primary colours dominating a world of pristine 50s class. Sirk frames the picture gorgeously, notably using mirrors effectively to place the characters in triangular patterns (Mitch at one point strikingly appearing in a mirror standing between Kyle and Lucy) or to suggest psychological truths (one shot angled to show Lucy brushing her hair in a mirror where we see a reflection of the reclining Maryann and don’t forget that marvellous closing shot of Dorothy subconsciously mirroring her father’s pose in the painting behind her while caressing a phallic model of an oil drill).

Sirk keeps events just the right side of melodramatic excess. A brilliantly staged sequence sees Maryann – dragged home from an assignation by the police – dance with a wild abandon in her bedroom while Jasper, horrified at realising how his disregard has warped Maryann, collapses to a heart-attack on the stairs. It’s a sequence that could be absurd but has just the right amount of reality to it, grounded as it is in Maryann’s self-loathing. Just as Kyle’s belief that impotence is going to consign him to being as much a failure in continuing the Hadley line as he is in everything else. Particularly since he’s constantly reminded of his inadequacy opposite the taller, smarter, better-at-everything Mitch who everyone else in the film openly seems to prefers to him.

It’s an extraordinary balance Sirk keeps, treating the characters with utter respect and affection while placing them in an over-the-top structure full of elaborate sets and overblown, melodramatic events and heightened feelings. Perhaps because Sirk never laughs at the concepts and content he’s created, we invest in both its truth and ridiculous entertainment quality. He does this while avoiding any touch of self-importance, never forgetting this is an old-fashioned melodrama. It makes Written on the Wind a hugely enjoyable, and surprisingly rich, character study mixed with plot-boiler.

Die Nibelungen (1924)

Wagnerian epic is crammed with gorgeous, dramatic imagery and relentless pace

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Paul Richter (King Siegfried of Xanten), Margarete Schön (Kriemhild of Burgund), Hans Adalbert Schlettow (Hagen of Tronje), Theodor Loos (King Gunther of Burgund), Hanna Ralph (Queen Brunhild of Isenland), Rudolf Klein-Rogge (King Attila), Bernhard Goetzke (Volker of Alzey), Rudolf Rittner (Margrave Rüdiger of Bechlarn), Georg John (Mime the Goldsmith/Alberich the Dwarf/Blaodel)

Fritz Lang wanted to create a film that would help a shell-shocked Weimar Germany start to feel proud of its heritage and culture. He would do this with a film of the legend of Siegfried. It’s not really Lang’s fault that this Aryan feel-good stuff, coupled with Lang’s flawless visual compositions dripping with power and authority, would turn into the wet dreams of the Nazi party Lang fled Germany to escape. Die Nibelungen has unfortunate associations, but it stands as a towering pinnacle of Lang’s visual artistry. An adaptation of the legend, not the Wagner operas, Lang created something both mystic but also subtly questioning the idealistic figures it celebrates.

He would do all this in two (epic of course) films, totalling almost five hours. In the first Siegfried, the hero (Paul Richter) overcomes dragons and murderous dwarves to gain powers of almost (that almost is key) total invulnerability, strength and invisibility. Powers he puts to the test to win the weak King Gunther of Burgundy (Theodor Loos) the hand of Brunhild (Hanna Ralph) by invisibly aiding Gunther best this Valkyrie at a series of challenges. He even takes on Gunther’s form to help lead Brunhild to the bridal bed. Brunhild however discovers the truth from the loose lips of Siegfried’s wife (and Gunther’s sister) Kriemhild (Margarete Schön). Brunhild’s tricks Gunther and his loyal heavy Hagen (Hans Adalbert Schlettow) to murder Siegfried via a spear in his one weak spot. In Kriemheld’s Rache, Kriemheld plots the destruction of everyone who conspired in the death of her husband, via a marriage with the warlord Attlia the Hun (Rudolf Klein-Rogge).

The first thing that strikes you about Die Nibelungen – aside from its surprisingly electric pace – is the powerful, undeniable beauty of nearly every single frame. Lang composed each image as if it was a painting, from Siegfried introduced in steaming smoke at the forge, to the formalist imperialism of the castle of Burgandy and the rigid order and symmetry of its soldiers. Locations, from grand castles to mystic forests, underground caverns full of scheming, wicked creatures are superbly bought to life. There is a martial power Lang’s composition of so many of these images, their perfect angles and symmetrical blocking: parts of Die Nibelungen are some of the greatest pageantry displays in movies.

There is a wonderful sense of overblown, geometric, artificiality in all this – Lang deliberately creates a world larger than life and full of the unworldly and impossible. Buildings tower over crowds, courts that hold thousands to view events of grand importance, sieges of burning halls that fill the frame, staircases up impossibly high buildings. The sort of world of medieval excess where Gunther and Kriemheld disembark from a boat by walking across a bridge of shields created by half-submerged knights. Power and magnificence come from every frame.

It’s matched with an impressive creation of the bizarre and magical. Of course Siegfried kills a giant, animatronic dragon (strangely it’s obvious – even then surely – fakeness works in a film where everything is a heightened, from the emotions to the buildings to the costumes). Siegfried trains in something not far off from Vulcan’s forge and the forest feels like a sort of fairy-tale wonderland. Lang pioneered cross-fades and double exposures to make extraordinary effects, as Siegfried disappears under a veil of invisibility and jumps impossible distances. There is an extraordinary shot where Brunhild, still in the midst of her Valkyrie-like super-powers, seems to jump straight into the camera lens at full force. A beautiful edit sees a tree seem to reform itself into a skill in front of the eyes of the grieving Krimhild.

But Die Nibelungen places its world of power and magical forces in an increasingly costly human world of realpolitik and conspiracy, where its mystical but naïve and simple hero is out of step. Even before then, Siegfried’s status as a hero is subtly questioned. The dragon he kills seems a peaceful, inoffensive creature for all is scale, sitting placidly when Siegfried attacks and stabs it in the eye. Lang introduces a lovely touch where it’s dying tail flick will send the leaf that shields a crucial spot of Siegfried’s back from the torrent of invulnerability-granting dragon’s blood he bathes in. Siegfried is easily manipulated by the dwarf Albereich (a Gollum-like, uncomfortably antisemitic in appearance) before a large dose of luck allows him to defeat his opponent and gain the treasure of Nibelungen.

At the court of Burgundy, for all his courage and blunt honesty, Siegfried is at sea among the subtle power dynamics. The kingdom is ruled by chronically indecisive weakling Gunther (a snivelling Theodor Loos), easily manipulated by Wagnerian-costumed Hagen (an imposingly arrogant and faintly psychotic Hans Adalbert Schlettow). Siegfried’s main acts are to trick and then break the resistance of Brunhild (a dynamic Hanna Ralph) while impersonating the weakling – hardly acts to brag about, which doesn’t stop Siegfried doing exactly that to his wife who then blurts it out to Brunhild in a fit of pique. This isn’t a hero covering himself with glory, just as even the formally idealistic Brunhild (much to her later self-disgust) is reduced to scheming and plotting revenge, a far cry from the noble actionee she prided herself on being.

It’s not a surprise to find Part 2 heads into a Götterdämmerung as Kriemhild’s obsessive, destructive desire for revenge against Hagen (her husband’s murderer) meets with Gunther’s own stubborn-short-sighted protection of his controlling vassal. Nearly half of Part 2 is dedicated to the prolonged siege of the King and his followers by the massed armies of Kriemheld’s new husband Attila the Hun, her manipulations of him helped a great deal by Hagen’s arrogant, impulsive violence against Attila’s people. This extended battle sequence is astounding in its scale, violence and excitement – you can see the influence it had on The Two Tower’s Helm’s Deep – and is shot with the same visual mastery as the more stately first half, even as it seeks into bloody desperation.

It must be stated that Die Nibelungen does feature more than its share of clumsily presented racism. As mentioned, the hook-nosed, gold-obsessed, murderous dwarf Albereich is a painful antisemitic stereotype. Rudulf Klein-Rogge is caked under layers of make-up as the ugly, Slavic Attila while his Hun army resemble crouching Orc like figures, frequently ripe for the sword edge of the relentless German soldiers. It’s the uncomfortable flip side of the Aryanism idealism and romantic framing given to Siegfried, that these un-German figures are painted so monstrously.

But Die Nibelungen’s subtle criticism of the flaws in its German leads – it would go some to call them heroes – balances this out. From the flawed, empty-headed, foolishness of Siegfried to the increasingly sadistic, unrelenting cruelty of Kriemheld (Margarete Schön’s performance is excellent, going from sweetly retiring to unblinking fanaticism over the course of the film) the Germanic characters are compromised, weak and cruel: Hagen and Gunther are no one’s ideas of admirable figures. Compared to them, for all his clumsy racist appearance, Atilla feels like a reasonable figure, loving his family, caring for his people and refreshingly free of vindictiveness and cruelty.

It makes for an intriguing complex undercurrent in a film which, of course, the Nazis interpretated entirely on surface-appearance as a celebration of Aryan super-might. Or at least they did for Part 1 – even they couldn’t kid themselves that Part 2 didn’t quite fit that bill. Today Die Nibelungen provokes the same interesting thoughts. But above all it’s a visual marvel from a gifted film director, a truly painterly masterpiece that, for all its great length, never flags and offers a new marvel, camera trick or miraculous composition with every frame. This is silent cinema at its best.