Author: Alistair Nunn

The Gospel According to Matthew (1964)

Pasolini’s neo-realist Biblical epic is quite unlike any other retelling ever made

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Cast: Enrique Irazoqui (Jesus Christ), Margherita Caruso (Mary), Susanna Pasolini (Older Mary), Marcello Morante (Joseph), Mario Socrate (John the Baptist), Settimio Di Porto (Peter), Alfonso Gatto (Andrew), Luigi Barbini (James), Giacomo Morante (John), Rosario Migale (Thomas), Ferruccio Nuzzo (Matthew), Otello Sestili (Judas), Rodolfo Wilcock (Caiaphas), Rossana Di Rocco (Angel)

Pasoloni seems a strange choice for a film about Jesus. A Marxist-atheist intellectual? Pasolini had even been jailed briefly for blasphemy after featuring Jesus in his short film La ricotta. But he was fascinated by questions of faith and was a passionate admirer of the classics, from the Greeks to Boccaccio via the New Testament. Pope John XXIII made it one of his missions to reach out to non-Catholic artists (the film is dedicated to him) and Pasolini’s interaction with the Church made him interested in bringing the life of Jesus to the screen.

But on his own terms. Pasolini didn’t want a reverential epic, but something real and human amonf the divine. After scouting the Holy Land and concluding it no longer matched the ideal look required, he would set the film in South Italy. In this he followed in the footsteps of the classic artists, who had frequently transposed events from the Bible to the homelands of their patrons. (And, after all, as Pasolini surely reasoned, not all of the great Renaissance artists could have been passionate believers themselves).

Pasolini also chose his source carefully. Unlike other Bible stories, he would not use all the gospels. Instead he would exclusively dramatise St Matthew’s. Going even further, he would remove the “St” from the title. This was to be one man’s personal view of the story of Christ, featuring only events he reported where the only dialogue spoken would be the words he wrote down. There would be no clumsy modern dialogue, suggested motivations, omnipotent narrator or small talk. The film would play out often in silence, jump from event-to-event and the dialogue would faithfully reproduce the Gospel. There hadn’t been a Biblical epic like it.

It would also serve as a commentary of sorts on generations of artistic interpretations of the Gospels. The costumes and many of the compositions would reflect different eras of artwork, from Fra Angelina and El Greco onwards. The Romans and Herod’s guards would be dressed in a faux-medieval garb, the Apostles in more Byzantine robes. The execution of John the Baptist looks straight from Caravaggio, the massacre of the innocents like something from Brughel. The sprawling crowd scenes of the great artists would be reflected as much as the smaller intimate moments. The score would be a sea of different religious music, from Bach to Odetta (especially Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child) via African gospel choir and Blind Willie Johnson.

Pasolini was presenting a reporting of Jesus’ life, that also subtly commented on and absorbed thousands of years of artistic discussion on the same subject. It used visual and aural analogy to convey its story and any question of the “truth” or not was put to one side. It was not a chronicle, but an artistic exploration, where the subjective view removed any theological clashes and implied many more versions were available of the same story.

Pasolini was drawn to Matthew’s gospel as he engaged more with its energy and passion. It carries across here with a Jesus full of contradictions. He can be warm but also angry and passionate. He marches across plains, by turns preaching at and berating his followers, shouting homilies at bewildered farmers. He has the magnetism of a born leader. Fascinatingly, the Sermon on the Mount is filmed in extreme, lonely close-up (with Jesus framed in a Raphael-style pool of light) but his more energetic words against the priests or calling for something near revolution are shown to attract vast crowds (Pasolini’s version of Matthew’s Jesus is perhaps a revolutionary).

The Gospel According to Matthew dug deep into neo-realist Italian film-making traditions. As well as being shot on location, Pasolini recruited a cast of non-professional actors. Jesus would be played by a philosophy student. The rest of the cast would be made up of a sea of professions, from peasants to intellectuals. Unlike Bresson, who drilled his amateur casts mercilessly, they were encouraged to express the wonders their characters witnessed on their faces. Faces of course being Pasolini’s interest – few directors could recruit such a striking range of visages as he could.

Pasolini’s camera-work and film-making style also evolved. The film starts with a series of shot-reverse-shots as a pregnant Mary confronts Joseph. Much of the Nativity plays out in close-up, before the frantic burst of violent energy that is the massacre of the innocents. But as the film progresses, Pasolini mixes his style considerably. Jesus march through the plains is full of something approaching whip-pans. When Jesus preaches, the camera searches for the apostle’s faces with the odd roving mis-turn as if it was searching for them as well.

Shot-reverse-shot is used for the miracles (the element Pasoloini was most uncomfortable about – and embarrassed to bring to the screen), but as the film progresses a more mobile, immersive camera is used. From the Garden of Gethsemane on, the camera becomes almost a face-in-the-crowd, witnessing Jesus’ trial by the priests and Pilate through a sea of crowded heads and moving alongside Jesus through the streets. It follows Judas in a helter-skelter sprint through the plains to his suicide and avoids aerial shots for throwing us in amongst the action. While tipping the hat to art of the past, it is also a hand-held, edgy piece of cinema, putting us in the dirt.

There is much to admire in The Gospel According to Matthew but, it has to be said, the film is also rather slow (the section covering Jesus’ mission and preaching, including the performance of the miracles, in particular drags). The decision to use only the text of the Gospel frequently means the film lacks the sort of drive that spoken dialogue and character can bring. It would almost be superior as a wordless film that made use of captions since much of the dialogue scenes are rigid and the visually least-interesting moments. It’s a film that’s easier to admire than perhaps really love.

But it’s also a very true, fair and intriguing vision of the Gospels, that presents the ‘facts’ as they are and works hard to avoid prejudice and interpretation. Difficult as it may be, at times, to watch it is also challenging and thought-provoking. A melange of interesting filming styles and creative decisions, it has its flaws but many virtues too.

Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

Film adaptation successfully aims for drama and emotion over showbiz bells and whistles

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: Topol (Tevye), Norma Crane (Golde), Rosalind Harris (Tzeitel), Michele Marsh (Hodel), Neva Small (Chava), Molly Picon (Yente), Paul Mann (Lazar Wolf), Leonard Frey (Motel Kamzoil), Paul Michael Glaser (Perchik), Ray Lovelock (Fyedka), Zvee Scooler (Rabbi), Louis Zorich (Constable), Alfie Scopp (Avram), Howard Goorney (Nachum), Barry Dennen (Mendel), Ruth Madoc (Fruma-Sarah)

Sometimes it’s a surprise to remember Fiddler on the Roof is one of the most successful musicals of all time. A sensation when it opened on Broadway in 1964, it became the first musical to pass 3,000 performances and was soon playing all over the world. Based on a series of stories by Sholem Aleichem about life in a Jewish village in turn-of-the-century Imperial Russia, it feels like odd material for a hit. But it’s universal themes of the struggles between generations, persecution of a community and finding a balance between tradition and change struck a universal chord. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Jewison’s film version became the biggest hit of 1971.

It’s 1905 and milkman Tevye (Topol) lives his life by the traditions of his faith and Jewish community, balancing a series of competing demands like a fiddler perched on a roof playing his fiddle (it’s a tortured metaphor but it’s the title…). He has three daughters – sensible Tzeitel (Rosalind Harris), romantic Hodel (Michele Marsh) and kind Chava (Neva Small) – all of whom need marrying off, ideally to suitable husbands. But can life continue for ever when you live in a country rife with antisemitism, with pogroms as regular as clockwork?

Fiddler on the Roof was perfect material for a director as passionate about social issues as Norman Jewison. It balances comedy and theatricality very effectively with gritty realism and a sense of generational trauma at the suffering inflicted on innocent people for no reason other than their heritage. Although the film is undoubtedly too long (at nearly three hours), this does make the mood transition from gentle comedy to loss and bleakness something slow but relentless, helping it carry even more impact.

Jewison effectively translates stage musical to screen reality. Fiddler on the Roof is neatly edited, it’s opening number Tradition showing a montage of everyday-activities in the village (meat chopped, clothes sewn, pray books opened) with every action cut to mirror the song’s beat. It avoids glossy choreography in favour of something either more cinematically literate like this or more intimate, with many songs delivered in medium-shot, the camera zeroing in on the thought process and allowing the actors to give intense, emotional renditions.

Not that Jewison isn’t averse to a big theatrical number. Matchmaker, Matchmaker is the first number that could be on the Broadway stage but gets away with its moments of classical beats of choreographed movement because of the playfully-natural delivery of Harris, Marsh and Small. Jewison saves his real fire for Tevye’s Dream, liberated from the film’s realistic approach by happening in a dream. This number is pure theatre, with a chorus of dancing ghosts and a diva-ish spectre (played by Hi-de-Hi’s Ruth Madoc of all people) giving it everything they’ve got.

But Fiddler on the Roof’s main beat is realism. Oswald Morris’ Oscar-winning cinematography – its slightly sepia tone captured by stretching a pair of tights over the lens, its gauze clearly visible at points – displays a world that is, for all the vibrancy of the people living in it, frequently cold, unhospitable and difficult. That matches the attitudes of their Russian rulers, prejudiced bullies whose local representative stutters the sort of excuses about “just following orders” that are even more chilling with our knowledge of the horrors to come forty years later.

What makes the village flourish is its community. Run by tradition and faith, where (for better or worse) everyone understands their roles, duties and expectations. Fiddler on the Roof is about how far these can be pushed in changing times, structured around a man’s choice of his daughter’s husbands. Can Tevye accept a daughter choosing for herself? How about a daughter marrying a firebrand radical who wants to leave the village? How about another wanting to marry a gentile?

They are ideas initially beyond the ken of Tevye, a firm traditionalist with passing dreams of riches but who wants a world where nothing changes. To make this dyed-in-the-wool conservative a warm and entertaining figure, requires the right casting. In America, the role was associated with its originator Zero Mostel (desperate to play it on film). But Jewison felt Mostel’s personality was too large for cinema, that Mostel’s theatricality would work against the realist film he wanted. Instead, he cast the Israeli actor playing the role in London’s West End, Chaim Topol.

It was a masterstroke (much as it crushed Mostel and outraged fans). Topol, like Yul Brynner in The King and I, would define his career with the role, playing it over 3000 times on stage in a series of productions over almost forty years (eventually Harris would graduate from playing his daughter to his wife!). Astonishingly he was only 35 in 1971 – a brilliant combination of make-up and Topol’s gift for physical acting makes him feel 25 years older – and Fiddler, for a large part, relies on his charisma and charm. Topol is as comfortable with the conversational address to the camera – which dominates much of the film’s opening – as he is with the world-weary sadness and frustrated anger Tevye responds to the changing world around him with.

Topol’s performance works in perfect tandem with Jewison’s aim to ground and avoid flights of whimsy or vaudeville comedy. The harsh conditions don’t dampen the warmth in the community – wonderfully captured in the marvel that greets the arrival of tailor Mostel’s (an endearing, Oscar-nominated, Leonard Frey) sewing machine – and means the Tsarist repression and gangs of Cossacks who ride in, torches in hand, to burn and pillage carry real impact.

Jewison’s film carries foreknowledge of the Holocaust throughout, not dodging the knowledge that communities like this would be destroyed under Nazism. The film’s closing exodus may bring hope for Tevye and family (bound for New York) but also brings death to those who speak of heading to Krakow. It’s part of understands why tradition is so important to Tevye: as the imaginary fiddler follows Tevye’s family on the road, we understand the link to a shared cultural past is what gives identity and hope to a people facing persecution at every turn for thousands of years.

Fiddler on the Roof mines it’s material for emotion and character over showbiz bells and whistles. While it undoubtedly takes too long to explore in depth its slight plot, its length does conversely add even more impact to its closing look to the future. A fine musical adaptation.

What’s Love Got to Do With It? (1993)

Tina Turner biopic sails into dark marital waters in a hard-hitting film

Director: Brian Gibson

Cast: Angela Bassett (Tina Turner), Laurence Fishburne (Ike Turner), Vanessa Bell Calloway (Jackie), Jenifer Lewis (Zelma Bullock), Penny Johnson Jerald (Lorraine Taylor), Phyllis Yvonne Stickney (Alline Bullock), Chi McBride (Fross), Jame Reyne (Roger Davies) Richard T Jones (Ike Turner Jnr)

How did Tina Turner become the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll? The hard way. Possibly the hardest. Tina Turner’s relationship (and marriage) to her initial discoverer, Ike Turner, lasted almost twenty years after their first meeting in 1956. During that time, Ike helped form her style – and viciously beat and assaulted her on a regular basis, increasingly in drug-fuelled bouts of jealousy as her talent and fame surpassed his own. What’s Love Got to Do with It? sees Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne bring this biopic and spousal abuse drama to the screen.

Well directed by Brian Gibson, with neat mixture of mock-documentary and home video footage carefully spliced into the film, What’s Love Got to Do with It? is practically the dictionary definition of a tough watch. It doesn’t flinch in showing the escalating violence in the Turner marriage. Bleeding noses, black eyes, furious fists and a rape scene in a recording studio that is almost unbearably visceral, What’s Love Got to Do with It? indeed: this is marriage as Dantean hell.

Tina Turner later felt the film went too far in depicting her as victim, but also not far enough in showing the violence in their marriag [AN1] e. (Ike Turner, needless to say, was equally unhappy – but who cares.) What she praised though was Angela Bassett’s performance. Cast at short notice, Bassett worked overtime to master Turner’s vocal and physical mannerisms. It’s a nailed-on performance, but Bassett also completely drills down into the heart of a woman who finds herself lost in a situation outside of her control, terrified but discovering the inner strength needed to lead her own life.

It’s a hugely emotional performance. Bassett makes Tina fiery, determined and talented – but even the strongest person can find themselves trapped in (and defending) destructive relationships. Despite the early example of Ike’s previous girlfriend Lorraine (a very good Penny Johnson), driven to a suicide attempt by Ike, despite his vanity and jealousy being clear early on, (as well as his control freak desire to dictate every inch of her life ,including changing her name to Tina Turner without her agreement), Tina is captivated by Ike.

As their relationship deteriorates, for all his vileness, Bassett’s Turner defends and excuses her husband. Whether he beats her up at home in front of the kids (and brings a dress home later as an apology) or smashes a cake into her face in a restaurant, it’s never quite his fault. He’s fragile, he’s an artist, sometimes she just makes him mad. Bassett brilliantly shows how this Orwellian double think can settle in, so that a woman like Turnerstays with her abuser for 16 years of marriage, until she realises she can break free.

Bassett’s electric performance is perfectly complemented by Laurence Fishburne’s burning, self-pitying performance of weakness and insecurity masked by anger and fury. Fishburne turned down the film five times (it was Bassett’s presence that eventually persuaded him). He felt the film didn’t do enough to show why Turner became the man he did. To be fair, he’s probably right. Turner has an early scene where he speaks of his childhood trauma (a fig leaf for his bullying) which Fishburne gives a real humanity, and he invests the early sequences with charm and charisma.

But Fishburne, like Bassett, doesn’t slack on the energy. As cocaine and envy eat Ike up, his body language becomes more bear-like, his speech ever more mumbled. His eyes cloud over with a look of hate. Only actors who trust each other completely could play these appalling scenes of domestic violence with such complete and utter commitment. Both Bassett and Fishburne give a horrible life to these shocking and sickening moments of hurt and pain.

Both actors essentially elevate material that, at heart, is standard biopic stuff, built around the usual obstacles – albeit the obstacle this time is hideous domestic violence. We see the roots of Turner’s career, the early hits, the terrible turmoil, so appalling that the final act triumph really moves. Gibson recreates Turner performances with expertise, each packing a real punch. Bassett’s capturing of Turner’s performance style is spot-on and her lip synching is flawlessly convincing.

What’s Love Got to Do with It demonstrates how hard it is to escape abusive relationships. But, the film though doesn’t quite manage to fully build the real life behind the characters. I can get why Tina Turner felt the film positioned her as too much of a victim, as it prioritises this aspect of her life before all others. While it’s made clear that Ike lived a life in which he victimised a series of women, the film’s focus on this issue diminishes the other aspects of Tina’s life and the building of her own career, making her for a large part of the film a punching bag for an abuser.

So, the survival makes for deeply affecting viewing. To see Tina return the punches and flee from a hotel in LA to find refuge in another hotel (she was granted a free room by a deeply sympathetic hotel manager who can read between the lines). Her refusal to be scared when, like all bullies, Ike comes crawling back begging forgiveness and then switches smoothly to threats when that doesn’t work. And above all the triumph of her career. The only thing she wanted from the divorce was the name “Tina Turner” – she had bled for it. And we saw it. What’s Love Got to Do with It might be, in many ways, a standard biopic but with two such forceful performances it has special moments.

Othello (1952)

Welles distinctive Shakespeare epic is a masterpiece of turning the Bard into film

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Orson Welles (Othello), Michéal Mac Liammóir (Iago), Robert Coote (Roderigo), Suzanne Cloultier (Desdemona), Hilton Edwards (Brabantio), Nicholas Bruce (Ludovico), Michael Laurence (Cassio), Fay Compton (Emilia)

In the early 1950s Orson Welles was in the wilderness. After the implosion of his career in Hollywood, he was grifting a living in Europe, juggling multiple ventures and paying for things (or not) with cheques from quick film cameos. But the fire was still there. Welles wanted a project which he would have complete control over. Shakespeare was the ideal collaborator: both free and dead, here was a man who offered an ocean of ideas and not a word of criticism, who would make no demands he re-cut the picture. A marriage of convenience but it led to cinematic triumph.

Othello would be an Welles production from top-to-bottom. Largely self-funded, a few investors chucked in liras for a share of profits (you can imagine Welles as Shakespeare in Love’s Fennyman grinning that was fine because “there never are any”) it became a labour of love over years. Welles begged, borrowed and flat-out stole film stock and camera equipment from assorted productions, kept costumes from for-the-money roles he did to keep the operation flowing (famously his Othello coat was a costume which he’d requested a fur-lining added to, that went unseen in the film it was made for but came rolling out in Othello). Actors were summoned, sometimes months apart, to shoot. Scenes would start filming in one location and finish filming months later somewhere completely different. Welles sat in the middle holding the entire film in his head.

It’s extraordinary that Othello is even coherent. The fact that it’s also a masterpiece of film Shakespeare is a miracle. But, cut loose from the bonds of Hollywood studio execs and not giving a damn about the bills (he had the cheek of genius so never picked up a tab) allowed Welles the scope to experiment and do things “his way”. Othello is the most purely “Welles film” since Citizen Kane, and a tour-de-force of cinematic inventiveness with poverty and lack of resources drawing the best out of a director who marshalled all his gifts of editing and lighting to make resourceful use of limited resources. It’s guerrilla film-making that looks like an epic.

What you could argue Othello is not is a truly original look at Shakespeare’s play – or really an actor’s piece. Welles’ passions for Shakespeare always felt as much about having a grand canvas of poetic language to impose his own vision on, cutting and changing as needed. Thematically, Othello is pretty much what you would expect. Welles’ Othello is the noble Moor pushed into a spiral of jealousy. Michéal Mac Liammóir’s (the finest performance) Iago is a dastardly liar, with faint hints of sexually motived envy. Desdemona is as pure as the driven snow, Emilia a faithful servant, Rodrigo a simpering idiot, Cassio a pretty boy. Our sympathies lie firmly where Shakespeare would expect.

Everything that is unique about the film lies in its telling. Othello is a breath-takingly beautiful film, which uses its locations to astonishing effect. Column lined castle rooms and towering walls create caverns of light and shadow. Welles uses the fixed points of columns to add a dizzying level of speed to camera movements that see these columns whip past the frame. The shadows of grills are frequently cast across faces and light creates looming shadows across the floor. Welles plays into this with the creation of light pools, concentrating it on single fixed points, often faces, with the surroundings bathed in black. The film presents real locations in defiantly expressionistic ways, giving each of them an elemental power that heightens the tragedy.

It’s a film made up of stunning set-pieces. It’s opening funeral cortege – like Citizen Kane, Othello starts at the end with Othello and Desdemona dead and Iago in chains – follows a march over city walls, playing out in striking shadow against the brightness of the sun, with booming, Gothic music giving the sequence an imposing sense of inevitability. Iago is paraded by a mob and placed in a cage, lifted above the city wall (this same cage frequently appears throughout the movie – including, once, having Iago walk nonchalantly under it – as a grim reminder of where this is heading). It’s a perfect marriage of sound and music, disguising the small scale with cinematic force.

Taking advantage of limitations time-and-again makes Othello great. Another striking sequence was born from necessity. With most of the costumes impounded for non-payment of shipping bills, the attempted murder of Cassio is re-staged in a Turkish bath (who needs costumes when we have towels!) a decision that turns the sequence into a masterpiece of light through steam, increased by the frenetic energy Welles shoots the sequence with culminating in its Lang-inspired super-imposing as Iago thrusts his sword down into the floorboards to dispatch Rodrigo.

Othello is frequently filled with imaginative camera angles. Often characters observe others from great heights – twice through sky lights, starring down at conflicts, murders and suicides. Iago and Rodrigo spy on Othello’s gondola romance with Desdemona from a distant bridge. The ramparts of Cyprus provide towering angles, over soldiers or wave-crashed rocks below. The camera also takes a number of low-angle positions, making characters (often Othello) tower over us. Clever angles and perspective work create whole ships out of sheets of fabric and basic models.

It’s also a triumph of editing. Welles assembled the film from a never-ending supply of fragments. Frequently actors appear with their backs to the camera while we hear them speak – as Welles said, a sure sign the actual actor wasn’t there. Like few other films, Othello feels like a film excavated from its shooting. It’s a film almost constantly in motion, rarely stopping to focus on an actor delivering a line (Othello’s first speech, parts of Iago’s speeches and Emilia’s speech to Desdemona being the main moments the film focuses on actor’s delivery – no doubt connected to those three actors being the ones Welles trusted).

Away from that, the camera often fast cuts and delivers scenes in motion, with actors speaking off camera as we focus on the events around them. This means the dialogue is repeatedly chopped, changed and trimmed to meet the needs of the scene. It helps make the film even more pacey and frighteningly interior – conversations become snatched and fast, words flung from angles we cannot see, ramping up the paranoia. Large chunks of it is redubbed by Welles himself – a light version of his distinctive tones clearly emerges from Robert Coote’s mouth and Michael Laurence’s Cassio has a familiar cadence. In some cuts, Welles also replaced Suzanne Cloultier’s voice with Gudron Ure (with whom he played the role on stage).

If there is a major flaw in Othello it’s probably the acting, frequently looking under rehearsed, with Welles himself a leading culprit. His Othello is underpowered and feels under-defined. There is little sense of an interior to his mind and Welles’ surprisingly somnolent delivery tends to crush much of the emotion. It’s hard not to think Welles was so focused on juggling every other factor, that he compromised on his acting. Only Mac Liammóir, Compton and Edwards look truly comfortable with their roles – and even they offer traditional readings.

But Othello is about turning Shakespeare to cinema and if Shakespeare himself is slightly sacrificed in the push, it doesn’t detract from the stunning theatrical beauty we get instead. Othello becomes a lean, pacey thriller, crammed with stunning imagery and imaginative flourishes (Rodrigo’s faithful dog, following sadly after his master, is a gorgeously little playful touch). It’s a film where light and shadow are major plays, where footsteps in subterranean water pools create ripples of motion and echoes of noise, that shows the greatness that can be born from necessity. It’s one of the greatest Shakespeare films.

The Big Sleep (1946)

Bogie and Bacall flirt their way into legend in the iconic Chandler adaptation

Director: Howard Hawks

Cast: Humphrey Bogart (Philip Marlowe), Lauren Bacall (Vivian Sternwood Rutledge), John Ridgeley (Eddie Mars), Martha Vickers (Carmen Sternwood), Sonia Darrin (Agnes Lowzier), Dorothy Malone (Acme bookstore owner), Regis Toomey (Chief Inspector Bernie Ohls), Peggy Knudsen (Mona Mars), Charles Waldron (General Sternwood), Charles D Brown (Norris), Elisha Cook Jnr (Harry Jones)

The Big Sleep was actually shot in 1944 – you can spot the odd wartime reference, from a female taxi driver to Marlowe’s special gasoline permit – but was released almost two years later. A lot had changed since then (the end of the war for starters) not least the fact that Bogart and Bacall had become the most famous couple in the world. After previews, Warner Bros quickly twigged they could have a mega-hit if they took out some of the dull bits and replaced them with Bogie and Bacall flirting instead. Which they duly did, helping turn The Big Sleep from what could-have-been a fairly routine Chandler gumshoe adaptation into a sort of genre-defining phenomenon.

The first thing they sacrificed was the plot. Famously, nothing in The Big Sleep really makes that much sense – and it hardly matters. Bogie asked Hawks at one point just who exactly shoved the Sternwood unconscious chauffer’s into the river – neither Hawks or the several scriptwriters (including William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett) had a clue. It doesn’t matter, because few films are about “the ride” as much as The Big Sleep. Every moment has something in it to appeal to the hard-boiled detective fan. Not a scene goes by without either a glamourous lady eager to bed Bogie, a fight, a shooting or some combination of all three. All washed down by a hard-bitten Bogie at his absolutely best, over-flowing with charisma and an impish sense-of-fun at how cool it all was.

The Big Sleep sees Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) hired by General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) to investigate a series of mysterious debts run up by Sternwood’s carefree and wantonly flirtatious daughter Carmen (Martha Vickers). The plot inevitably thickens as Marlowe uncovers blackmail, prostitution, pornography rings and lord knows what else, all circulating around a sinister bookseller with a sideline in naughty photos, a brazen femme fatale (Agnes Lowzier) manipulating a series of weak-willed men and a tough gangster Eddie Mars (John Ridgeley) willing to use his secrets to win advantage. That’s not even mentioning Carmen’s austerely arch sister Vivian (Lauren Bacall) whose sultry flirtatiousness captures Marlowe’s attention.

The Big Sleep really is a series of hugely entertaining scenes, loosely tired together with a vague plot. The original cut had featured a dull scene with Bogie laboriously explaining what was going on to his dull-as-ditch-water police friend. What Hawks and co realised is no one really wants to see that when they could see Bogie and Bacall puffing cigarettes and talking suggestively (brazenly!) about how you need to ride a horse hard. They were probably right: after all, no one thinks about Psycho and says “my favourite scene is the bit with the psychiatrist’s explanation at the end”. Hawks realised if the viewer enjoyed themselves, no one would give a damn if it made almost no sense.

How else really can you explain scenes like Marlowe’s drop-in on an Acme bookstore where he meets the sort of drop-dead gorgeous bombshell store owner (Dorothy Malone, sexy as hell) who only exists in movies and happily closes the store in the middle of the afternoon to drink a bit of whisky (and more) with Bogie? It offers nothing to the plot that couldn’t be covered with a brief time-lapse montage – it’s all about the mood, the dialogue and the sensual charge between the two characters, with the illicit promise of no-strings sex (which, rather nicely for a 40s movie, they both seem well-up for). Who hasn’t dreamed of that?

It’s the same frisson that lies behind the whole Bogie and Bacall appeal. These two set the screen alight with the sort of temperature that came from basically watching them have an affair right in front of us. The two became an illicit item while filming To Have and Have Not and large chunks of The Big Sleep were held up due to Bogie drinking away his guilt. By ’46 they were an official item, but you couldn’t doubt it from the lingering, heated looks they give each other. Or the screwball lightness – and the one-upmanship and delight in making the other laugh – during their telephone call to the police department, as they pass the phone between each other putting on voices and pretending to be various members of an entire clan of troubled curtain-twitchers.

Humphrey Bogart was in his element here. Literally no one before or since could play this sort of super-smart, more-sensitive-than-he-appears hero who covers himself with a cynical, wise-cracking front than him. His Philip Marlowe has a joke for every occasion but also a strong moral sense close to the surface. He’s playful – the delight in which he affects the fusspot demeanour of a book collector early on is delightful – but superbly unruffled by threats.

No wonder Bacall’s Vivian is drawn towards him. Bacall is sultry and husky voiced, a slice of imperial sexiness. If the film doesn’t call for her to do much more than that, she certainly can deliver it. It’s a performance that is left surprisingly one-note (after all that one-note was all Hawks wanted from her). Chandler believed Martha Vicker’s inspired performance of childish selfishness and sexual shamelessness as her sister Carmen was if anything even better – and he’s probably right. But then Bacall has those famous scenes with Bogie – somewhere between His Girl Friday and Basic Instinct – and it’s those moments that cement themselves in your mind.

That and The Big Sleep’s effective moments of hard-edged violence. Elisha Cook Jnr gets his greatest role as a weakling who bungles his way into an early grave in a partially-silhouetted murder. There is a cracking shoot-out between Marlowe and Mars’ hired gun and a neat (if barely logical) final face-off between the outraged Bogie and Joh Ridgeley’s expertly judged Mars who crumbles from arrogant superiority to snivelling cowardice. There are equal delights in numerous other scenes that play out like stand-alone treats – from Bogie’s imperious swatting of bully-boy Brody to his greenhouse hiring by General Sternwood. Every scene in the film plays out with hard-boiled zing like its own cool little stand-alone movie.

It makes for a fun package – and it’s easy to see why The Big Sleep is the sort of film people list as “their favourite”. It’s playful and manages to seem extremely cool without seeming to make any effort. Bogart is sensational and every second of the film offers something good. What the hell does it matter if none of it really makes sense?

Dr Mabuse, der Spieler (1923)

Lang’s crime drama is a sprawling silent mini-series, still gripping today

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Dr Mabuse), Bernhard Goetzke (State Prosecutor von Wenk), Aud Aged Nissen (Cara Carozza), Gertrude Welker (Countess Dusy Told), Alfred Abel (Count Told), Paul Richter (Edgar Hull), Robert Forster-Larringa (Spoebri), Hans Adalbert von Schlettow (Georg), Georg John (Pesch), Karl Huszar (Hawasch), Grete Berger (Fine)

In a world before television, there were only two places for long-form stories – and Fritz Lang wasn’t a novelist. His four-and-a-hour epic Dr Mabuse der Spieler is really a sort of gargantuan mini-series, a rollicking action-adventure about a conscience-free conman wiling to go to any lengths to get the things he wants. It’s pulled together as a pacey, episodic yarn – each reel is basically an individual act (or episode) and filmed with such visionary vividness that it remains compelling today. Whether you decide to settle in for the long haul or split its parts and acts over a series of nights (and why not, the film was released in two parts, months apart) it won’t fail to entertain.

It was based on Norbert Jacques novel, a publishing sensation (so much so this was rushed into production while Jacques novel was still being serialised). At its heart: Dr Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), practically the dictionary definition of an omnipotent, amoral villain. Mabuse is a practiced liar, master-of-disguise, ruthless murderer, conman and has such demonic will power he is capable of extraordinary levels of hypnotic control, whose gang of acolytes switch between terror and outright worship of him. He can manipulate the rich into handing over their money as easily as he can the collapse of businesses on the stock exchange. No one knows who this malign spider is. But State Prosecutor von Wenk (Bernhard Goetzke) will make it his business to know.

Lang’s film is a gorgeous mix of the sort of urban realism he mastered in M and little touches of mystical realism more reminiscent of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, wrapped up in the sort of action that inspired everything from The Sting to Mission: Impossible. It’s opening section is a brilliant example of both. Essentially a twenty-minute prologue to introduce Mabuse’s nefarious genius, it sees our anti-hero masterfully execute a plot mixing heist, disguise, manipulation and brazen self-confidence to make a fortune on the stock exchange. The theft of a secret commercial contract from a train involves the sort of disguises and split-second timing (to throw the contract from a train passing over a bridge into a car passing under it) which would make Ethan Hunt’s heart race.

It’s a perfect entrée to our villainous lead, Mabuse. First introduced rifling through photos of the many expert disguises he will effortlessly assume during the film – he becomes everything from banker to magician, psychologist to hypnotist, tramp to member of high society – Mabuse has no moral code what-so-ever other than the accumulation of things. That ranges from wealth, to an obsessive desire for ownership over attractive women (and his desire for Gertrude Welker’s Countess Told eventually contributes to his undoing) to simply the having power over the wills of weaker men. Rudolf Klein-Rogge is magnetic as this monster of the dark, ruthlessly calm but equally wild-eyed, unflappable but willing to go to any lengths.

Spieler is often translated as “gambler” – but it’s German meaning is richer than that and many have commented a better translation might well be “player”. Mabuse is certainly that. He is a master actor, who can be lose himself in different roles, undetectable to others. He weaves elaborate games around his victims, where only he knows the rules (and, often, only he knows a game is even being played). Other people are pawns to moved and gambled with. He’s a monster, but one born from disillusion of the end of the First World War, part of the hedonistic self-regard of dissolute Weimar. We can see touches of this environment throughout Lang’s film, in its hedonistic gambling dens and the casual thoughtlessness of the rich. Mabuse flourishes because he is the rash an age has come out in. (Retrospectively, you can detect the shadow of Hitler in this ruthlessly power-mad monster who hides in plain sight but demands absolute control).

Mabuse is “the Great Unknown” and the natural target of methodical if uncharismatic von Wenk, played with a stolidness by Bernhard Goetzke, balancing Klein-Rogge’s larger-than-life portrayal perfectly. The duel between these two moves from gambling rooms to elaborate houses, from the streets to the jails of the city, taking in chases, bombs, shootings, kidnappings and all sorts of attempted moves and counter-moves, culminating in a shoot-out that surely inspired countless Hollywood gangster movies.

Through it all Lang directs with astonishing freshness and invention. Dr Mabuse der Speiler throws a slice of cinematic visual inventiveness into almost every scene. Lang makes extensive use of superimpositions, cross-fading, location shooting, fast-paced editing and brilliantly evocative lighting to create a world both highly realistic and also dancing to the tune of its demonic lead. Some of this has become such a part of cinematic language that it’s unlikely to draw comment from modern viewers today – we are unlikely to be wowed by night-time footage of Wenk pursing Mabuse in a car, but to viewers at the time such scenes of photorealism taken in darkness were unheard of.

There is plenty that will continue to thrill audiences. Lang’s visual portrayal of Mabuse’s hypnotic powers is superb. In his first confrontation with von Wenk (both men are disguised at the time – this really is a game of move and counter-move), Mabuse attempts to implant a hypnotic suggestion in von Wenk. Lang demonstrates with an astonishing use of lighting which slowly concentrates the light into a small pool on Mabuse’s face before his face seems to grow to fill the frame (technical effects like this were a small miracle in 1923). On a second attempt, the hypnotically suggestive words are imposed on the screen as a set of animated letters which loom over von Wenk and later seem to be almost leading him (in his car) to the clifftop Mabuse has suggested he drive off. It’s a superb way of showing the power of Mabuse, building on the intimidating cross-fade from our stock-exchange opening that briefly shows Mabuse’s face super-imposed over the clutter-filed room.

Lang mixes this imaginative dynamism with some superbly done realist scenes that help make Dr Mabuse der Spieler a gripping crime thriller. That stock-exchange opening is followed by car chases and murders – one character is dispatched in the streets after dark with a brutal suddenness. Lang creates a series of locations, all perfectly detailed but instantly recognisable, from the distinctive look of each gambling den (from art deco lined walls to a strange rotating gambling pit filled with cards and erotic dangers) to the objet d’Art packed rooms of Mabuse’s mark Count Told (a gloriously ineffective Alfred Abel – unrecognisable from the world controller he would become in Metropolis) to the white-lined jails and careful detailed offices of von Wenk’s police headquarters.

Dr Mabuse der Spieler uses these real locations to constantly remind us that, underneath the Moriarty genius of its lead, this is also a tragedy of real people caught in the web of an uncaring spider. Mabuse cares nothing for his underlings, sacrificing them as readily as pawns. None more so than Cara Carozza, beautifully played by Aud Aged Nissen, a seducer in love with Mabuse who dedicates her life to him, at the cost of her own. She makes a dark mirror for Countess Told, drawn into Mabuse’s web but drawing strength from her admiration of Cara who is, in her own way, deeply principled. Mabuse’s victims are prodded, pushed and outright shoved into punishing and often self-destructive behaviours, their lives flourishing or ending according to his whims.

As a sort of epic mini-series, Dr Mabuse der Speiler is sublime entertainment. Each act follows its own clear arc and the culmination in a brutal shoot-out throws in a nightmare of surrealist imagery at its close as a crucial character tips, under pressure, into madness and delusion. (This series of horrors, the ghosts of fallen characters arising to torment him, is a masterclass in ghostly horror). It gripped audiences then and its surprisingly brisk pace and pulpy sensibility still do now.

The Lion King (2019)

Soulless, heartless remake designed to make Disney as much money as possible

Director: Jon Favreau

Cast: Donald Glover (Simba), Beyoncé Knowles-Carter (Nala), Seth Rogan (Pumbaa), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Scar), James Earl Jones (Mufasa), Alfre Woodard (Sarabi), Billy Eichnor (Timon), John Kani (Rafiki), John Oliver (Zazu), Florence Kasumba (Shenzi), Keegan-Michael Key (Kamari), Eric André (Azizi)

We all like to pretend Disney is the custodian of our childhood dreams – that they exist on to give us even more gorgeous memories to treasure. Bollocks. It’s a corporate enterprise existing solely to create more money for shareholders. If you were in any doubt, cast your eyes across The Lion King, a bottomless collection bucket for the God of Mammon. There is literally no reason for this film’s existence, other than to lure people into the cinema for the express purpose of removing their pennies from their pockets and dropping them into Disney’s McDuck vault for the next time the shareholders want to take a dip.

Seen the original? Then you know the plot. At least Disney’s previous nakedly commercial “live-action” remakes of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin had the decency to introduce a few new plot elements so there was at least a little bit of surprise content. Even if it was tedious stuff like the Beast’s Tardis mirror to the past or the Genie’s love interest. Here the extra 15 minutes is made up solely of padding, dreadful unfunny comic and utterly unnecessary extra characters who make literally no impression (Timon and Pumbaa now run a sort of hippie commune).

Disney made huge play out of the fact this is a “live action” Lion King. That’s the selling point. So proud of this were they, that they were hilariously pissed off when the Golden Globes nominated the film for Best Animated Film. But nothing in this film is real, or live action – except, as Favreau later bragged, the first shot of the film showing the sunrise. Everything you see here is created in a computer: from the tufts of Mufasa’s mane to the grass that dances in the breeze. Far from watching a live-action film, this is an orgy of CGI wizardry that constantly pats itself on its back for the hard work and detail that went into its creation. Who cares if the result has no heart?

Because that’s the case. The Lion King is a soulless cultural abomination. It is almost entirely a shot-by-shot remake, with the only changes being the occasional introduction of new (less good) dialogue. The characters have the same conversations, with less snap, laughs and emotion. It’s the sort of film-making karaoke some people like to call affectionate homage, but instead feels like pandering and no-one having the guts to change even the slightest moment from the original. How hard would it have been to match the plot, but find new ways to film it? This however matches shots, camera moves, angles, edits – the whole damn thing. If you had a choice between seeing the Mona Lisa or watching a computer do a Mona Lisa paint-by-numbers, which would you choose?

It also feels like no one stopped for a second during their self-congratulatory film-making to ask one or two obvious questions. Firstly, I don’t think its racist to say this, but to my eyes most lions look the same. No real effort has been made to distinguish any of them from each other (with the obvious exception of Scar) – this particularly effects the lionesses who all essentially look the same. Secondly, one of the first things you’ll notice about most animals is that they have inexpressive faces that do not display emotion and that they have mouths that have not been designed for talking.

With an animated lion you can get round this. You can draw a look of fear on Mufasa’s face because you aren’t limited to only using the facial movements that a real lion can. Their faces can shift and change to match the emotions of a real person – they can look happy or sad, cynical or sarcastic, joyful or mournful. You can’t do this with a real animal, because animals don’t have expressive faces. The whole cast of The Lion King have stiff, stationary faces that never react to the emotional events around them. They often can’t even move their mouths to properly replicate speech (Favreau starts to get round this by having as much of the dialogue delivered off camera as possible).

What you end up with is a series of robotically cold shots of animals not emoting, mechanically going through the emotions to replicate a masterpiece. Mind you, perhaps it’s a good thing that the film tries to rip-off the original as much as possible because whenever it does its own thing it thuds face-first into a pile of animal dung. Pumbaa is given a hideously on-the-nose line about “I can’t stand bullies” (to replace his “they call me Mr Pig!” battle cry). Eichhorn, Oliver and Rogen litter the film with unfunny fourth-wall-leaning references which stink of over-indulged recording booth improv. A few songs are butchered (most noticeably Be Prepared) and several musical cues are reworked in a way that dramatically reduces their impact. Even the obligatory new song is lacklustre and weirdly tonally wrong for the moment it’s used.

The cast struggle, never quite sure how they should approach the content. Spare a little sympathy for Ejiofor, stuck trying to follow one of the greatest vocal performances of all time – but his response to this is to bend himself into all sorts of shapes to be as different from Jeremy Irons as possible. The result is an underwhelming Scar, who lacks presence, menace, or the glorious manipulativeness of the original. Other actors are flat-out fails, most particularly Eichhorn who turns Timon an unlikeable bitchey whiner. Only John Kani really does something that feels like a good mix of homage and original work as Raffiki – he’s one of the few genuinely African voices in a film that loudly “prided” itself on its mostly African-American cast, but still has all the lions speaking in reassuringly American accents – and casts white actors into almost every non-lion role.

But that’s a side note. The Lion King is a ruthlessly, exploitative attempt to make money. Which it managed to do to an enormous degree. So, I guess it hardly matters that surely no-one will be watching it in five years’ time. Or that its CGI created lions are expression-free automatons existing in a shiny world of non-reality. Or that the entire enterprise is a heartless, soulless, nakedly commercial stare deep into the belly of a conglomerate that sees people as nothing more than ATM machines. The Lion King is an abomination and will take pride of place in Hell’s multiplex for all time.

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

Warm Christmas fable will make you want to believe in Santa all over again

Director: George Seaton

Cast: Maureen O’Hara (Doris Walker), John Payne (Fred Gailey), Edmund Gwenn (Kris Kringle), Natalie Wood (Susan Walker), Gene Lockhart (Judge Henry X Harper), Porter Hall (Granville Sawyer), William Frawley (Charlie Halloran), Jerome Cowan (DA Thomas Mara), Philip Tonge (Julian Shellhammer), Henry Antrim (RH Macy), Thelma Ritter (Peter’s mother)

Santa Claus is a sweet little story we were told as kids, all part of buying into the magic of Christmas. How can we have been so silly as to think a jolly fat man with a red coat and flying reindeer delivered our Christmas presents? It’s the sort of fantasy adults are primed to burst like an over-inflated balloon. As a tribute to the earnest joy of believing in childish things, Miracle on 34^th Street should also be the sort of thing the adult in us can’t wait to mock. Instead, its warmth and good-natured sweetness carries you along and makes you want to believe.

It’s the build-up to Christmas, and Macy’s in New York is working overtime to bring the magic to its customers (and turn a tidy profit). Macy’s Day Parade director Doris Walker (Maureen O’Hara) is relieved when Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) takes the place of a drunken parade Santa and then occupies Santa’s Grotto in the store. Kringle is exactly the sort of guy you picture when you think of Santa – and, on top of that, claims to be Santa himself, much to the discomfort of Doris who doesn’t believe in all that stuff and certainly doesn’t want her daughter Susan (Natalie Wood) to. But when Kringle finds himself in court, fighting against being committed to an institution, with only Doris’ boyfriend Fred Gailey (John Payne) to defend him, can he prove there is a Santa Claus and it’s him?

Seaton’s film is an adorable delight which is funny and good-natured enough to avoid the trapdoor of sickly sentimentality. It’s a film about adults getting back in touch with the giddy delight of believing childish things. It flags up every cynical objection – and then gently suggests we’d be happier forgetting them. After all, what’s the harm in allowing ourselves in a few harmless flights of fancy – why should everything be measurable? Kris Kringle comes up against the hard-headed: harried mothers, businessmen, judges and lawyers and wins them over with his genuineness and warmth. He makes people want to believe – and doesn’t that, in a way, make him Santa?

It helps a huge amount that Edmund Gwenn is perfectly cast. Piling on the pounds and facial hair, Gwenn looks the part but also is the part. His performance is kind, considerate and bursting with warmth and good cheer. In a performance full of light, unforced playfulness, Gwenn gets the level of sweetness just right. A squeeze or two more and you would choke on the schmaltz of the whole conceit: but Gwenn is so adorable the audience wants to believe in him as much as the characters.

Especially as this Santa melts some of the cold commercialism of our modern Christmas. Miracle on 34^th Street has a lot of good-natured fun at how Kris confounds the latent money-making of Christmas. On hire he’s instructed to memorise a list of preferred products to push on children. Instead he points mothers towards competing stores where they can get the exact gift they want or pick up better quality goods than at Macy’s. Of course, the concept proves so popular with customers that RH Macy is confounded by the goodwill it creates in his customers (and the huge sales it will lead to from their loyalty). Even other department stores start doing the same.

It’s one of the recurrent themes of the film: Kris brings out the best in people. Maybe not always for the right reasons: the shop-owners who want money, the judge who wants re-election. But it shows what benefit a little bit of good can have in the world. Kris also shows how little touches of consideration can change lives. There is a truly heart-warming moment where Kringle meets a Dutch orphan who simply wanted to meet Santa – although her adopted mother warned her Santa can’t speak Dutch. Much to her surprise, Kris launches into fluent Dutch, to the delight of the child. Miracle on 34 Street has several moments where the unstudied delight of children is captured to great effect, not least Natalie Wood’s delighted response to discovering the reality of Kringle’s beard (it also, to be fair, has several fairly cloying child actors).

Eventually the forces of darkness – led by Porter Hall’s twitch-laden store “psychologist”, whose bullying self-importance makes him the only person Kringle dislikes – insist we all put away childish things and chuck Kringle in an asylum. Miracle on 34^th Street segues into a Capra-esque court-room drama (it’s hard not to detect touches of Mr Deeds Goes to Town) which pits Kringle’s home-spun honesty against legal cold professionalism. The clash becomes a delightful headache, as both the Judge and DA confront outraged children at home who can’t believe they are putting Santa on trial. It’s a great gag: who wants to be the judge who rules categorically Santa does not exist?

Alongside these gently amusing courtroom shenanigans (with John Payne doing an excellent job as Kris’ inventive lawyer) the film balances an endearing domestic plot. There is the inevitable will-they-won’t-they between Payne and O’Hara (if there is a bit of slack you need to cut the film today, it’s in Fred’s pushy wooing of Doris, including corralling Susan). But also, can O’Hara’s all-business professional, who’s raised her daughter with a Gradgrindish obsession with facts, melt her heart and allow both of them to believe a little bit? O’Hara handles this softening with all the consummate skill of a gifted light-comedian, while Gwenn’s delightful interaction with Wood’s precocious Susan, keen to access a world of imagination she’s never really known, is perfectly done.

it becomes a film about the power of believing. In our modern age we become expected to only base decisions on cold hard facts. Doris has taught her daughter to doubt imagination as a weakness to protect her from disappointment in the world (she is after all divorced, quite daring for a 40s family drama). But its also made Susan less likely to invest in faith, to open herself up to hopes and dreams. Its recapturing the ability to believe in something and be enriched by it that becomes one of the film’s richest messages.

It would be incredibly easy to poke fun at the good-natured naivety of Miracle on 34^th Street, where businessmen are money-focused-but-decent and lawyers are amiably ready to indulge Kris with a smile. But it’s a film that zeroes in on an in-built nostalgia for simpler times in all of us. We’ve all been little Susan, sitting in a car desperately wanting to believe in the magical. It’s a film that demonstrates the eventual emptiness of cynicism, encouraging the audience to just put all that aside for 90 minutes and remember what it was like to be a child again. Throw in with that Edmund Gwenn as the definitive Santa and it might just be one of the greatest Christmas films ever made.

Lancelot du Lac (1974)

Bresson’s bleak film is the least romantic, most depressing Arthurian film out there

Director: Robert Bresson

Cast: Luc Simon (Lancelot du Lac), Laura Duke Condominas (Queen Guinevere), Humbert Balsan (Gawain), Vladimir Antolek-Oresek (King Arthur), Patrick Bernhard (Mordred), Arthur De Montalembert (Lionel)

Only Bresson could have made a King Arthur film like this. Lancelot du Lac takes Bresson’s spare, thoughtful style and applies it to that most unlikely of genres, the historical epic. What we end up with (for better or worse) is something perhaps bleaker and more difficult than any other King Arthur film out there. Bresson repackages Camelot not as the dreaming spires of hope, but a spare, vaguely mechanical world where Arthur and his knights are going through the motions of duty and honour, while stumbling towards inevitable death. However much the characters want to believe in a higher purpose, they can’t escape the cynical truths of the world, or their own lusts and desires.

Lancelot du Lac opens with the return of the knights from a disastrous Grail Quest. The best of them, Percival, never came back. Neither did most of the rest, all dead in some distant land. Arthur (Vladimir Antolek-Oresek) is a worn-out man who doesn’t seem to know what to do next. He’s delighted to see Lancelot (Luc Simon) return. Just as pleased is his queen Guinevere (Laura Duke Condominas), whose historical affair with Lancelot is an increasingly open secret in Camelot. Lancelot talks about letting it lie in the past, but temptation inevitably fractures the kingdom as Mordred (Patrick Bernhard) plots a coup.

Bresson doesn’t compromise on any of his distinctive style. Scenes mix between carefully structured longer takes, that frequently feature on obscure parts on the body (in particular legs, whose motion frequently fills the frame) and simple cutting between the faces of two people in conversation. He casts non-professional actors and, as before, ruthlessly drills them until they deliver every line with a flat, defiantly non-actorly, monotone. Nearly every event of note happens off screen. Every human is a choiceless cog in a much larger machine, unable to impact or effect the actions around them.

There is no romance whatsoever in Lancelot du Lac. The film is bookended with what passes (in Bresson) for moments of action. A clash between knights at the start ends (after a very short and perfunctory swinging of swords) with a blood spurting decapitation and another blood spurting disembowelment. (The blood spurting style was effectively piss-taked within a year by Monty Python and the Holy Grail.) It ends with a deliberately underwhelming Battle of Camelan, in which we see no fighting only faceless knights dead in a woody clearing, as archers rain arrows down. There is no glamour here, no glory or honour in combat – just pointless, mechanical sacrifice.

It’s the same with the jousting tournament which takes up a surprisingly large portion of the film’s runtime. Bresson shoots this almost with an almost irritatingly cheeky lack of spectacle. As horses charge at each other, the camera lingers on: the arms of a bagpipe player, the legs of horses, the ends of spears and the impassive faces of Arthur and Gawain in the crowd. Occasionally flags go up to denote new jousts and helmets crash down over faces. But any sense of what’s going on, or the point of it, is secondary to the sense of the knights as nothing more than humble parts of a great, pointless machine, churning out martial events by rote.

That sense of a machine is behind all of Bresson’s vision of Camelot. The actors all wear armour, all the time, clunking around the set like clumsy automatons, every flinch accompanied by the clank of armour. (John Boorman’s Excalibur would present the Wagnerian contrast of this same aesthetic choice.) Towards the end, Bresson repeats four of five times in sequence near identical shots of knights slamming helmets over their faces making them look like even more like robots.

It’s here where the actors deliberately lifeless performances work, and actually create a sort of hypnotic power. Bresson’s style makes them all feel like tired, exhausted figures at the end of their tethers, scarcely knowing the point anymore. Lancelot looks like a middle-aged bank manager sticking to the letter of a code because it’s all he’s got. Arthur is so disengaged from any sense of the ‘dream of Camelot’, he practically allows a civil war to break out due to apathy. Gawain is so constrained by his idea of duty that he allows himself to be killed, seeking revenge for the death of a brother he couldn’t stand. Mordred is the only guy who really feels aware of the world he lives in, a middle-manager who stirs up trouble and then gets others to deliver for him.

No wonder Guinevere constantly questions the whole set-up and the point of anything anyone is doing. Why shouldn’t she and Lancelot try and cling to something real, even if it will destroy everything else? After all it’s not the original sin: Camelot was already long since corrupted, way before they hooked up. There is no sense in Bresson’s work that medieval honour really means much to anyone, and the only people who really talk about it (Gawain and Lancelot) respectively die for no reason and betrays everyone after convincing himself his betrayal was an act of honour.

There is a fatalistic, hypnotic quality to this after a while as we watch characters square their actions against abstract ideals irrelevant to the situation they are in. So, Lancelot steals Arthur’s wife and then rides to a pointless death for the man he betrayed. Arthur allows men to die on crusades, allowing his kingdom to become fatally weakened in pursuit of purity. Everyone talks about honour all the time, but no one does anything to turn the situation into something actually honourable. Instead, their lives are ones of empty, unknowing fatalism leading to inevitable ends. It makes for a powerfully bleak Bresson tale – and faith and Christianity is notable by its absence in this world. Without it, it seems the knights have nothing to cling to.

The Sixth Sense (1999)

Shyamalan’s opus has just enough to reward re-watching after the world learned its secret

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Cast: Bruce Willis (Dr Malcolm Crowe), Haley Joel Osment (Cole Sear), Toni Collette (Lynn Sear), Olivia Williams (Anna Crowe), Donnie Wahlberg (Vincent Grey), Glenn Fitzgerald (Sean), Mischa Barton (Kyra Collins), Trevor Morgan (Tommy), Bruce Norris (Mr Cunningham)

Does this film have the most famous twist of all time? M. Night Shyamalan’s opus is so dominated by its final reveal (look away now) that Bruce Willis was is in fact a ghost, that every single viewing of it afterwards is focused on watching every second and seeing if you can spot the joins. I’m not sure if that has made for a long shelf-life or not for The Sixth Sense, an otherwise surprisingly sweet Stephen King-ish story of a child coming to terms with a miraculous power. Is there much more to The Sixth Sense by a third viewing though – can the magician’s trick land a third time?

I’d say just about. A year on from the shooting of famed child psychologist Dr Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) by a former patient he failed to help, his traumatised wife Anna (Olivia Williams) has stopped speaking to him and Malcolm needs redemption. Could he find it with the case of troubled ten-year-old Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). Cole, despite his obvious good nature, is frequently moody and terrified by curious incidents. His mother Lynn (Toni Collette) despairs as Cole seemingly refuses to talk to her. Can there be truth in Cole’s belief that he can see, and talk with, dead people?

The Sixth Sense has the reputation of a supernatural chiller. But, bar a few jump scares as ghosts walk across screen to sudden, loud musical notes, it’s actually a far more gentle story. In Shyamalan’s world the ghosts are not malevolent or cruel – they are simply confused, lost souls (of course “some of them don’t even know they’re dead”) with unfinished business. They are, in other words, rather like the rest of us – and Cole’s realisation of this is actually rather sweet.

This humanity is the real triumph of the film, helped enormously by the untricksy care Shyamalan unfolds his story with. While almost every film he made since teetered from disappointment to disaster (with ever more desperate attempts to recapture the rug-pull zeitgeist to ever diminishing returns from increasingly savvy audiences), The Sixth Sense is a reminder of the road not taken. If Shyamalan had focused on small-scale, intimate character dramas like this he could have had quite the CV. His camera work is careful, often unobtrusive, gentle in its slow, immersive movement and he backs aware almost entirely from fast cutting. The Sixth Sense is really a spooky fairy tale.

It also creates an environment for four impressive actors to tackle four challenging roles. From Olivia Williams, whose marvellously detailed performance of utterly naturally not reacting goes a huge way to maintaining the film’s delicate tightrope to the (Oscar-nominated) Toni Collette, who superbly channels deep motherly love and pained helplessness under a blowsy exterior.

Bruce Willis (who only took the film on under contractual obligation) gives possibly his finest performance here. Suppressing his natural cocksure confidence into suppressed confusion and guilt, he convinces as an expert plagued with self-doubt. It’s a quiet, expressive performance that’s a tribute to the acting chops Willis had when he was moved beyond smirks.

It’s also a very supportive performance that helps bring the best out of a gifted child actor. Haley Joel Osment carries a large chunk of the film. He’s vulnerable and scared but also older than his years, alternating between the innocent excitement of a child and the weary reflection of a much older man. He creates a character you both want to comfort and also cheer for his growing strength. Shyamalan works with both actors to continually subtly shift the power balance between them without ever showing the film’s hand.

Because, of course, Cole knows the truth from the start – no one is better at spotting these things than him, and his unwillingness to speak to Malcolm within ear shot of others (such as during their first real consultation while his mother prepares dinner in the kitchen) speaks volumes. No wonder he keeps shooting him those looks of pity and concern which we, at first, interpret as fear.

You can’t escape that the film’s pretence, on repeated viewing, demands the viewer to reach some tenuous conclusions on how Ghosts operate. I think there is just enough there to suggest – from the sudden appearance and disappearance of ghosts – that they operate like we do in a dream, suddenly finding themselves in places with no memories of how they got there. They can move some objects, but only if they allow themselves to “see” them. They imagine what their own appearances are (the film implies Malcolm always appears in his blood soaked shirt to Cole, it’s just we see Malcolm’s perception of himself as a suited psychiatrist) and are subconsciously drawn towards people who can see them or who they have unfinished business with. The pretence just about sustains itself.

But is there more to the film than that? Pleasingly – and a little to my surprise – there is. While The Sixth Sense is more spooky than terrifying, that’s because it’s a film where helping and caring for people is the answer. No matter how horrific looking the ghosts seem, they are really scared people looking for help. This realisation – and the way Cole seemingly decides to commit his life to helping them – is actually extremely affecting. It’s a basic message of not judging a poltergeist by its cover, that really works.

It’s these beats that really work on a second or third viewing. I would trade the whole “he’s a ghost” twist for that gorgeous final scene between Collette and Osment in a car, where he finally confesses and shares a family secret from the grave to Collette’s initial confusion, anger and then emotional release. It’s a beautiful scene (it surely nailed Collette an Oscar nomination) and is the finest moment of Shyamalan’s career. It also shows the heart of the film – this is a parent-son film (with two parents), that’s about learning to love and accept. Everything else is really just set-dressing.

The magic trick (and Shyamalan hints at the sleight of hand he’s pulling by having Malcolm perform a similar distraction trick) may lose its mystique, but it then allows you to focus on the emotion that made you care about the trick in the first place. And, let’s be honest, the emotional heart is really what made the film a phenomenon. Any film can have a rug-pull twist – but it only really connects if people already cared about what they were watching. The Sixth Sense focuses on making sure we invest and it’s that which makes the film last, when all the glitz of the trick has faded.