Author: Alistair Nunn

Me and Orson Welles (2008)

A star-turn from McKay and a brilliant theatrical reconstruction makes a charming comedy

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Zac Efron (Richard Samuels), Claire Danes (Sonja Jones), Christian McKay (Orson Welles), Ben Chaplin (George Coulouris), James Tupper (Joseph Cotton), Eddie Marsan (John Houseman), Leo Bill (Norman Lloyd), Kelly Reilly (Muriel Brassler), Patrick Kennedy (Grover Burgess), Travis Oliver (John Hoyt), Zoe Kazan (Gretta Adler)

In the 1930s Orson Welles was the Great Man of American theatre, a genius blessed with Midas’ skill to turn everything he touched to Gold. He had conquered the stage and his success on radio transmitted his fame into households across America. All this and he was not even thirty. On top of his boundless charisma, creativity and magnetic leadership qualities, he was also vain, selfish, boundlessly ambitious and self-obsessed, seeing other people as little more than extras in his drama. It’s an exploration of the man central to Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, combined with the film’s wonderfully fond exploration of that magical world behind the curtain in the theatre.

Me and Orson Welles charts Welles’ landmark Broadway production of Julius Caesar: a modern-dress marvel (‘the fascist Caesar’) that reimagined a sharply cut, pacey production set in a world of jackboots, black shirts and Nuremberg-esque beams of light. Welles (Christian McKay) was, of course, front-and-centre as Brutus with his Mercury theatre players (nearly all of whom followed him to Hollywood for Citizen Kane) all around him. Newest to the cast is 17-year-old Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), away from school, dreaming of being an actor and falling in love with older production manager Sonja Jones (Claire Danes). As the production stumbles towards the stage under Welles’ mercurial hand, Richard worships Welles and loves Sonja – but will his hero-worship survive sustained contact with Welles?

Linklater’s film is set in a gorgeous recreation of 1930s Broadway theatre, full of love for the greasepaint, backstage gossip and theatrical tricks that create a world on stage. It also features an astonishingly accurate recreation of this seminal production, staged and lit to perfection, which gets as close as we can to capturing some sense of the astonishing experience the first night audience had watching the sort of Shakespeare production they had never seen before (Dick Pope, harnessing his experience of recreation Gilbert and Sullivan in Topsy-Turvy deserves major credit for his cinematography here, perfectly capturing Welles’ pioneering use of light).

Welles’ flaws are slowly discovered by Richard Samuels – a charming, deceptively light and winning performance by Zac Efron. Samuels is at first bowled over by Welles charisma – and Welles enjoys the ego-trip of taking a star-struck young man under his wing, who he can tutor and mould (who, after all, doesn’t love having a disciple). What Me and Orson Welles interestingly does is to have its young lead slowly work out that Welles may be a genius – but he’s also a fundamentally, principle-free shit who never means what he says, doesn’t think twice about dropping people when they have served their purpose and largely sees conversation as a one-way street where Welles monologues and the other person listens (and certainly never, ever, contradicts – Welles never forgives correction).

But Welles dominates the film, like he dominated life. He’s brilliantly portrayed by Christian McKay in his first major film role. McKay, an unknown, was selected after Linklater was wowed by his one-man show about the Great Man. (Linklater refused calls from the producers to replace him with a more famous actor). McKay dominates the film in what is not only a superb capturing of Welles vocal and physical mannerisms, but also a capturing of his mix of utter charisma, God-given talent and overwhelmingly selfish egotism. McKay roars through every scene with the same force-of-character you imagine Welles had, bowling over everyone around him and shaping the world into what he wishes it to be. Problems of money, timing and people are waved away (or left to be fixed by Eddie Marsan’s put-upon version of John Houseman) and McKay’s Welles uses sheer force of will to turn every event, outcome and single moment into an intended triumph (whether it is or not). Me and Orson Welles brilliantly captures Welles ability to shape his world.

We see the way he overwhelms the personalities of those around him. People like Joseph Cotton (a superbly captured performance by James Tupper) both love him and know that’s he’s a selfish, arrogant git who doesn’t seem to care about anyone but himself. Others, like Ben Chaplin’s tortured George Coulouris, allow themselves to be mothered by Welles, even though they know his motivations are more for the show itself (and the glory that shall be Welles’). Welles is the guy who gives the same heartfelt pep-talk to multiple actors, and writes identical jovial thank-you cards to all on opening night. The guy who uses nicknames for those around him because it’s a way to subtly assert control. Linklater’s film recognises his genius, makes him overwhelmingly attractive in his gung-ho confidence, but – and this is the brilliant thing about McKay’s stunning performance – also exposes his deep character flaws.

It superbly captures his vanity, selfishness and self-occupation. Welles cares little for anyone, assuming he can brow-beat or overwhelm them to fulfil his wishes. That could be a set designer, furious at Welles hogging credit for his work in the programme (Welles promises this will be amended, forgets about it and then later – when it’s too late to do anything about it – bluntly says he has no intention of not taking credit). It could be the radio show he turns up to record, clearly having not read the script, walking in seconds before live broadcast and promptly improvising a superb monologue (based on The Magnificent Ambersons) which at first puzzles, frustrates and then stuns into fawning admiration his fellow actors. What’s clear is that this is the sort of behaviour you can only get away with when you are flying high and all is perfect – Welles after all would self-destruct like few others in the next few years, never again able to yield such charismatic power again.

Me and Orson Welles uses a familiar structure – a love triangle of sorts – to bring this to life. Claire Danes gives a marvellously winning performance as an ambitious and super-confident woman, trying to make her way in a male world, perhaps drawn towards young Richard because he’s more thoughtful than the rest of the men around her. (Me and Orson Welles makes clear we live in a world where the actors of the company feel comfortable taking bets on who can bed Sonja, while she is also accepts that Welles can use the women of the company like a room-service menu). Both she and Richard are perhaps the forerunners of those who will finally be pushed too far by Welles, that would leave him a perpetual outsider.

This is a fun musing on the personality of one of the greatest film-makers of all time, brilliantly set in a luxurious recreation of classic Broadway. Directed with pace and wit by Linklater, with a fine cast giving it their all (and a career-defining turn from McKay), Me and Orson Welles is light, frothy but fascinating work.

Les Misérables (1935)

Odd choices are made in this Hugo adaptation, despite good photography and performances

Director: Richard Boleslawski

Cast: Fredric March (Jean Valjean), Charles Laughton (Inspector Javert), Cedric Hardwicke (Bishop Myriel), Rochelle Hudson (Cosette), Marilyn Knowlden (Young Cosette), Florence Eldridge (Fantine), John Beal (Marius), Frances Drake (Éponine), John Carradine (Enjolras)

There isn’t a more famous loaf of bread in literature, than that stolen by Jean Valjean to feed his starving family. There’s something quite sweet about the fact that Richard Boleslawski’s film of Hugo’s doorstop gives that loaf its moment in the sun, as its half-eaten remains are produced as evidence in Valjean’s trial. It’s an unintentionally funny moment, but feels right in a sometimes blunt film, that at times makes odd decisions for those of us so familiar now with the plot’s ins-and-outs and the moral up-righteousness of its lead character after forty years of the musical. Boleslawski’s version is an odd mix, part psychological drama, part atmospheric thriller, part thuddingly obvious soap where a loaf of bread needs to be literally seen. Parts of it work extremely well, other parts weigh the film down like the chains on its galley slaves.

The film is overwhelmingly focused on the clash between Valjean (Fredric March) and Javert (Charles Laughton). One a good man who wrestles with temptation, but follows the sprit of justice. The other a rigid fanatic, who sees the letter of the law as gospel and the rights and wrongs of a situation an irrelevance. First meeting when Valjean serves a decade as a slave at the oars in the galleys, their paths recross after a released Valjean has a road-to-Damascus moment after the intervention of a noble priest (Cedric Hardwicke). Reinventing himself as ‘Monsieur Madeleine”, he becomes mayor of a small town and protector of Fantine (Florence Eldredge) and her daughter Cosette (Rochelle Hudson). But he cannot escape the pursuit of Javert which carries him into hiding for years in Paris, where a now grown-up Cosette falls in love with reforming student Marius (John Beal), leaving Valjean with one last dangerous choice.

Les Misérables restructures the novel into three acts, each presenting Valjean with a moral quandary. As such, Fredric March’s impressive performance must be unique among Valjean’s: this version is forever tempted with greed, anger and his own desires, constantly struggling to overcome his baser feelings. March is very good at bringing to life this conflict, just as he sells the sense of awakening purpose Valjean feels washing over him after the Bishop’s intervention prevents him from being returned to prison. It’s a muscular, agonised performance of a man constantly striving, even in the face of his resentment, to live up to his adopted moral principles. So, much as Valjean would like to let another man be accidentally condemned for his crimes, or to keep Cosette to himself or pull a trigger on Javert (March’s skilfully communicating the deep internal conflict each time) he’ll still (however reluctantly) find himself doing the right thing.

He contrasts excellently, with Laughton’s rigid, well-spoken, self-loathing Javert who has absorbed his moral code so completely, its left no room for any other form of principle or emotional judgement. Introduced, lips quivering, as he explains being denied promotion due to his convict father, Laughton’s Javert has channelled that resentment to worshipping the penal code as God. As he repeats, several times, good or bad is irrelevant, it’s just about the law. Of course, Laughton’s performance bubbles with repressed frustration, his pursuit of Valjean clearly motivated by far more personal feelings of anger and envy than he is willing to admit. Valjean is a spoke in his wheel of justice, a factor that makes no sense to him.

Boleslawski’s film is at its best when these two face off. It’s also at its most stylistic for these sequences. Les Misérables is awash with Gregg Toland’s atmospheric, mist-filled photography and expertly uses his expressionistic shadows. It’s depiction of a Parisian uprising, just like it’s introduction of a fast-paced horse chase between Valjean and Javert, are snappily edited and throw in a parade of dynamic Dutch and high angles. At the end of each act, Christian imagery is well used (in two cases, shrines to Mary and Jesus) to add emotional heft. A pursuit through grime and mist-filled sewers near the film’s close has a Fritz Lang atmospheric strength (did Carol Reed watch this before The Third Man?) as well as the film’s most effective use of music to build atmosphere as Valjean desperately submerges himself and Marius to hide.

There is effective stuff in Les Misérables. So, you try your best to forgive the fact it’s full of extremely on-the-nose, obvious touches. The introduction of the bread at the trial is not an end of its obviousness: for starters, the galley’s were prison hulks, not actual ships rowed around by convicts (where do they imagine these enormous hulks are going?). Truncating so much of the book down – and focusing overwhelmingly on its two leads – means many other parts of the story are short-changed or make little impact or sense (the hilariously watered down Parisian revolutionaries don’t turn up until the final 40 minutes). Florence Eldridge’s Fantine (all references to her prostitution are of course cut) does almost nothing but die – although not before the film gives her a (unique) ludicrously sentimental reunion scene with her daughter (played by a highly irritating precocious film-school brat before she grows up into Rochelle Hudson). Clearly the actual tragedy here (a mother never sees her daughter again) was considered too much.

Then there are the strange mis-readings and mis-interpretations. I can understand why Marius and his law students are re-imagined, by conservative Hollywood, into legal reformers rather than idealisitic revolutionaries (Marius even denounces the very idea of overthrowing the government as terrible). Here they want only penal reform – although of course, while ensuring the guilty are harshly punished – and chat like champagne socialists. It’s a bit of a mystery why this call for slow-paced, moderate social reform erupts into throwing up barricades, but clearly audiences at the time couldn’t be expected to get on board with anti-Monarchist cells. They’d probably agree with Eponine (interpreted here as a sort of femme fatale and Marius’ secretary) that it’s all a silly, slightly disreputable, waste of time.

However, even more strange, is the inexplicable interpretation of Valjean’s desire to keep Cosette to himself not due to being a protective father-figure investing everything in his life into his daughter, but instead an unpleasant sexual desire to make Cosette his wife. Even leaving aside this utter perversion of the novel, since we’ve seen Valjean raise her from the age of about 6 it’s hard not to feel a bit of bile forming in your throat at the stench of grooming this gives the relationship. It’s almost as if Hollywood could only imagine a man going to great lengths to protect a woman if he wanted to eventually get in her pants.

It’s odd reinventions like this that don’t quite work even within the world presented by the adaptation, let alone compared to the original source, that weighs the film down too much. They are blotches in the streamlining of a huge novel. But when the film focuses on an increasingly personal clash between two men, both well played by March and Fredric, and its atmospheric visuals, it works much better.

The Dresser (1983)

One of the best films about the magic and trauma of theatre, with two powerhouse lead performances

Director: Peter Yates

Cast: Albert Finney (Sir), Tom Courtenay (Norman), Edward Fox (Oxenby), Zena Walker (Her Ladyship), Eileen Atkins (Madge), Michael Gough (Frank Carrington), Lockwood West (Geoffrey Thornton), Cathryn Harrison (Irene), Betty Marsden (Violet Manning), Shelia Reid (Lydia Gibson), Donald Eccles (Godstone), Llewellyn Rees (Brown)

For centuries British theatre was run by Actor-Managers. Stars with complete control of their companies, where they (and their wives) played the best roles – sometimes years past the point where it was still suitable – until the next generation emerged to build their own companies. The Dresser shows this world’s dying days, at the height of the war, when Sir (Albert Finney) a legendary actor is shepherding an aged company around the provinces to perform, while his health and mental sharpness teeter, Lear-like, on the edge of the abyss.

If Sir is Lear, his Fool is Norman (Tom Courtenay) his dresser. A waspishly camp man whose entire life revolves around every inch of Sir’s whims, shepherding, coaxing and bullying the man onto the stage, somewhere between a valet, son and nursemaid. Sir remains a force-of-nature, toweringly bombastic egotist and man of magnetic charisma, with an all-consuming, obsessive love for the theatre. The Dresser takes place in January 1942 in Bradford, largely during a performance of King Lear which Sir’s declining health has placed on a knife-edge. Can Norman hold Sir together to give life to Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy for the 227^th time?

The Dresser is based on Ronald Harwood’s play, which was semi-based on Harwood’s experiences as dresser then business manager to Donald Wolfit, one of the final breed of the old-school actor-managers Sir represents. (Harwood hastened to add, neither he nor Wolfit were portraits of Norman or Sir). While it’s a sometimes acidic look at the backstage politics and egos of touring theatre, it also richly celebrates the power of theatre and the momentary (and the film is unsentimental enough to show it is momentary) sense of family that can develop in theatre, that can end with that final curtain. In other words, The Dresser understands the brief, bright flame of theatre can be – and what a transformative feeling and dizzy drug it can be.

Both Sir and Norman are addicted to the grease-paint, their whole lives revolving around theatre and that elusive search for perfection. Even if Sir’s health is failing and sanity is crumbling – pre-show, Norman finds him raging in the streets of Bradford like Lear in the storm, only barely aware of who he is – ‘Dr Greasepaint’ can still briefly restore him to the man he was, spouting Shakespeare, bemoaning and relishing the huge weight of bringing art to life night-after-night. Norman is equally consumed by theatre: he can barely speak to others (such as train manager or a baker) without his conversation being littered with impenetrable theatre-speak. He’s as well-versed in Shakespeare as Sir is and flings himself into his backstage tasks with the same gusto Sir tackles a soliloquy.

These two have a symbiotic relationship: Sir for the support and dedication Norman exerts to get him on stage, Norman for the glorious world (and purpose) Sir gives him access to. Yates uses mirrors, framing and shared reflections to frequently frame these characters together, visually linking them in a Bergmanesque way as elements of the same personality. But, the relationship is never as straightforward as that, complicated by underlying feelings on both sides. Norman’s homosexuality – over-looked in a world where such feelings are a crime (another member of the company has recently been fired for what sounds like cottaging) – complicates his obsession with Sir, while Sir’s affection for Norman always has the hint of a Lord’s affection for his valet: a man he will confide in, but would never imagine inviting to dinner.

This complex interplay of both characters urgently needing the other, but with an underlying imbalance in their level of true emotional engagement is a subtle dance brilliantly handled throughout Yates’ and Harwood’s film: so much so, it is a surprise to many audiences that Sir utterly fails to mention Norman at all in his draft autobiography even though it’s about as likely as Churchill name-checking his butler in his. Sir and Norman may be partners in the same task – creating theatre – but Norman’s mistake is to see himself as an equal, something Sir never truly believes he is.

There is, however, no doubt about the partnership between the two actors. Tom Courtenay, who had played Norman on stage, is extraordinary. With his flamboyant hands and a voice divided between camp, whiny and ingratiating, constantly reaching for the bottle to power through the stress, Norman is as loyal, dutiful and comforting and he can be waspish, bitter, selfish, possessive and cruel. Courtenay can switch from coaxing Sir like a recalcitrant child, to throwing a potential rival for Sir’s attention to the wall and threatening all manner of damnation. It’s an astonishingly multi-layered performance, with Courtenay shrewd and brave enough to avoid making Norman a fully sympathetic figure but someone so soaking in desperation that even at his most self-pitying you feel for his desolation and emptiness.

Alongside him, Albert Finney is imperiously brilliant as Sir (playing a role almost 25 years older than him). Finney’s Sir is magnetic (they may grumble about him, but in person the company treat him with awe) and charismatic (his booming voice carries such power, it can even stop a departing train). But he’s also selfish, cruel, childish and intensely vulnerable. He’s got all the egotism of the actor (“The footlights are mine and mine alone. You must find what light you can.”), the productions revolve around him (he even continues to direct mid-performance, muttering instructions from Othello’s death bed). But he’s teetering, his mind crumbling, constantly looking to Norman for assurance, Finney living Sir’s fear at the approaching undiscovered country.

Both actors are extraordinary in a play that understands the addictive power of theatre. The Dresser avoids the trap of making Sir an Old Ham: in fact, the production we see (for all its old fashioned air) contains a performance of real power from Sir, rousing himself to touch something transcendent. Of all his 227 Lear’s this might be finest. Cynical technicians and wounded pilots weep openly. Thornton (Lockwood West), an ageing second-rate actor hastily promoted to Fool, talks of how the part has made him hungry for more. Oxenby (a marvellously louche Edward Fox), the youngest company member, clearly is ready for the new era (he carries a script full of bad language he longs to stage) but even he (after an initial point-blank refusal) throws himself into the backstage effort to create the storm. For all the rivalries, when the play is on, everyone briefly feels part of the same team working towards the same goal.

It’s a film with a melancholic feeling of an era coming to a close. It’s also one that punctures the character’s illusions. Sir is a star, but there are greater stars (with real knighthoods) in London; Norman may feel like his relationship with Sir is special, but Sir’s relationship with Madge (a brilliant Eileen Atkins, unflappably loyal and deeply pained under her professionalism) predates his and is more genuine. But it’s also one that understands the transformative power of live theatre. With stunning performances by Finney and Courtenay, backed by a marvellous, faultless cast it’s one of the finest films about theatre ever made.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)

Fun entry in the MCU, bright, pacey and entertaining – but never engages with its deeper issues

Director: Matt Shakman

Cast: Pedro Pascal (Reed Richards / Mister Fantastic), Vanessa Kirby (Sue Storm / Invisible Woman), Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Ben Grimm / The Thing), Joseph Quinn as (Johnny Storm / Human Torch), Julia Garner (Shalla-Bal / Silver Surfer), Ralph Ineson (Galactus), Sarah Niles (Lynne Nichols), Mark Gatiss (Ted Gilbert), Natasha Lyonne (Rachel Rozman), Paul Walter Hauser (Harvey Elder / Mole Man)

It’s taken almost seventeen years (can you believe the MCU has been going for so long?!) but ‘Marvel’s First Family’ finally make it to the party, escaping one of those legacy rights deals the comic giant signed before working out it could make films itself. Since, for those interested, there are already three Fantastic Four origins-films for you to seek out (they gained their powers from flying through a space storm), Fantastic Four throws us straight into the second Act of our heroes lives, communicating their origins in an in-universe TV show celebration of their achievements (including a montage of them defeating a parade of second tier villains, including Mole Man and an army of super-intelligent chimps) before throwing them up against their biggest challenge yet.

For their unofficial leaders, Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal – whose real life super-power seems to be that he appears in all movies) aka Mr Fantastic science super-genius and master strategist with limbs of rubber and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) aka Invisible Woman, the world’s greatest diplomat, who can create forcefields and make herself (and others) invisible) there is the challenge of impending parenthood. And for the whole gang, also including scientist and wild-child Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) – he can set his body on fire – and Reed’s best friend, astronaut and Herculean powered made-of-stone Ben Grimm – it’s the threat of Galacticus (Ralph Ineson) a planet-eating giant whose herald (Julia Garner) arrives on a silver surfboard and announces Earth will be his next snack, unless the Four hand over Sue’s unborn child.

The Fantastic Four’s decision to skip the origins story throws us straight into a story that’s a lot of fun. A very enjoyable romp with some well-sketched out characters (played by engaging and charismatic actors), a few extremely well-made set-pieces, plenty of humour, just enough heart and a decent, city-crushing, smackdown at the end. It’s directed with a lot of bounce and joy by Matt Shakman and despite being about literally earth-shattering events manages to keep the focus tightly on the family at its core (perhaps a little too tightly, but more on that later).

It’s also a delightful triumph of design. Set in a sort of cyber-punk 1960s (the idea being that Richard’s intellect has super-powered mankind’s development), it’s a gorgeously realised world of 60s design, all curving surfaces and primary colours, intermixed with souped-up 60s technology like ingenious androids that run on cassette decks and flying cars, like The Jetsons made flesh (doubly engaging as the film so obviously committed to real sets rather than blue-screen invention). I also rather liked the implied joke that the world has progressed only in the areas Richards’ considered worthwhile: so this world has faster-than-light travel, flying cars and abundant energy sources, but totally lacks hi-def television or social media (and who can blame Richards for that).

There is also a certain charm in how the Four are universally beloved heroes. Everywhere they go, they are flooded by admirers and merchandise wearing children (it’s quietly never explored if the Four paid for their colossal, futuristic tower and private space base with a fortune in image deals). Reed fills time between inventing the future with hosting a TV show about science for kids, while Sue essentially runs the United Nations. Johnny is the star of every social event and Ben bashfully lifts the cars for the kids in his Brooklyn neighbourhood and flirts shyly with a primary school teacher (Natasha Lyonne).

This world is pleasingly shaken up by the arrival of the Silver Surfer, a charismatically unreadable turn from Julia Garner (under a CGI naked silver body). First Steps successfully uses this threat to humanise a group of heroes who otherwise might have proved too good to be true. For starters, their confident assurances all will be well when they head for space turns out to be far from the case when they are comprehensively outmatched by an immortal planet eater and his physics-defying silver herald. First Steps most exciting and thrillingly assembled scene is their retreat from a first encounter with this giant, a brilliantly managed high-octane chase around a black hole with a few extra personal perils thrown in on top, made even more gripping by Michael Giacchani’s pitch-perfect score.

That’s before the devilish conundrum of balancing the fate of seven billion people with Sue’s unborn son. If First Steps refuses to really dive fully into it, it does successfully raise the emotional stakes. It’s also a ‘reasonable’ offer from Galactus, a surprisingly soulful anti-villain, played with a mix of disdainful arrogance and death-dreaming melancholy by Ralph Ineson (there is a lovely moment when he takes a break from imminent city-smashing to pick up and sniff a fistful of Earth as if he’s forgotten the smell) desperate to escape the cycle of endlessly devouring planets to maintain his interminable life.

Horrific as it is to imagine a baby taking his place, First Steps avoids really delving into this intergalactic trolley problem. Because, at heart, it’s a film where superheroes alarmingly make decisions for billions of people with no oversight or pushback. Having unilaterally decided to reject Galactus’ offer, the Four seem surprised the rest of Earth are less than thrilled at their impending demise because the Four won’t make a Sophie’s Choice. There is some rich potential here to really delve into the way the Four are, arguably, benign dictators, reshaping this world in their own image and accepting adulation and unquestioning following. First Steps ignores it – the world’s discontent underdone by a single speech from Sue – and only for a split second is the moral quandary treated as something meriting genuine debate. As the surfer points out, if the kid was an adult he would certainly accept: is it right to take that choice from him?

But it’s a comic book movie, right? So, let’s not overthink it. And Marvel was never going to darken its First Family with hints of elitest oppression, demanding sacrifices from others (and the world makes huge sacrifices to protect their child) but not themselves. First Steps is a fun film. I liked its vibe, like a live-action Incredibles (only not that good), I enjoyed the BB4-like robot Herbie, all four of its leads are highly likeable with excellent chemistry. So, I’m trying to just not think about where this onrushing trolley is going and instead enjoy the view.

Guns at Batasi (1964)

An excellent lead performance powers a solid film that slightly pulls it’s punches

Director: John Guillermin

Cast: Richard Attenborough (RSM Lauderdale), Jack Hawkins (Colonel Deal), Flora Robson (Miss Barker-Wise MP), John Leyton (Private Wilkes), Mia Farrow (Karen Eriksson), Cecil Parker (Fletcher), Errol John (Lt Boniface), Graham Stark (Sgt ‘Dodger’ Brown), Earl Cameron (Captain Abraham), Percy Herbert (Colour Sgt Ben Parkin), David Lodge (Sgt ‘Muscles’ Dunn), John Meillon (Sgt ‘Aussie’ Drake), Bernard Horsfall (Sgt ‘Schoolie’ Prideaux)

In the dying days of Empire, in an unnamed African nation, the British have agreed to a peaceful handover of power. Something that’s thrown out of kilter when an attempted coup takes place. That appals Regimental Sergeant Major Lauderdale (Richard Attenborough). His whole life has been keeping the peace in the colonies, making sure the mess is kept spick-and-span, drilling recruits, saluting portraits of the Queen and regretting he missed his chance to do his bit at Tobruk or El Alamein. A coup to him is nothing more than a mutiny, and harbouring the new overthrown government commander in the NCO’s mess from the troops looking to lynch him is both a matter of honour and (perhaps) a chance to fight his own little war preserving decency, honour and the British way.

Guns at Batasi is a fascinating slice of post-colonial film-making that succeeds as well as it does because it treats its lead character both as a sort of Blimpish moron and a tragic hangover whose Victorian principles are hideously out-of-step with the world around him. All of that is captured in Richard Attenborough’s rich, BAFTA winning, performance as he makes Lauderdale both faintly ridiculous (obsessed with neat collars, perfectly executed salutes and drill bullshit sitting) with an utter lack of interest in the world outside the parade ground and strangely likeable. He’s got a principled sense of right-and-wrong, a strangely affectionate regard for the soldiers he presses to the uttermost and an utter lack of cynicism or cruelty in his convictions.

It’s near career-best work by Attenborough, one well out of his wheel-house (at the time) of softly spoken eccentrics. In fact, he’s almost unrecognisable, transformed into a sort of walking bullet, rigid as his swagger stick and barking out his every utterance with a parade-ground bellow that emerges from a deep vocal bass. He’s a character soaking in absolute certainty, and Guns at Batasi gives him the dignity of letting him be both right and wrong without crowbarring in any moral judgement. Put bluntly, it trusts us to be intelligent enough to appreciate his determination to protect the lives of those under his care, just as we can feel uncomfortable at his parental attitude towards Africans.

Guillermin’s film places this bolted down man, absolutely certain of his understanding of the world, in two turmoils, one on-top of the other. Firstly, he’s the sort of bloke who wouldn’t have been out of place in the height of the Raj, barely able to believe that the British army (embodied by the decent, gentlemanly but subtly ineffective Colonel Deal expertly played by Jack Hawkins) doesn’t sweep everything before it anymore but has to negotiate with the locals. Secondly, he’s flung into the middle of a siege of the NCO’s mess, shepherding a mix of other sergeants, a young private (John Leyton) whose mocking 60’s swagger feels like he’s from a different planet and a painfully liberal visiting MP (Flora Robson) who feels Lauderdale is the problem not the solution.

Guns at Batasi builds its base-under-siege storyline very effectively, with Guillermin skilfully shooting a small set, interspersed with some well-staged action set pieces, not least Captain Abrahams (Earl Cameron) escape from his would-be lynch-mob. There is a neat sense throughout of a world pushing in on Lauderdale and his sergeants, from artillery pieces gathering on the lawn outside to an ever more searching series of questions for Lauderdale from the others about what exactly he thinks he’s preserving here. What’s well-handled about the film is you could see this as both Lauderdale making a stubborn stand that’s more about his pride than anything else, and a genuinely selfless noble attempt to save a persecuted man.

The film does slightly weight the deck in favour of Lauderdale. We warm to his witty sergeants-cunning to prevent the noble Abraham handing himself over to save lives (drafting a hugely wordy written order to do so, which he knows Abrahams will never stay conscious long-enough to sign). It’s hard not to sympathise with him, when the voice of liberalism is placed in the piously self-important lips of Flora Robson’s MP who insists, until she’s finally shown she’s terribly wrong, that coup lickspittle Lt Boniface (Errol John) isn’t the ruthless two-faced man-of-no-honour he so plainly is. It’s hard not to sympathise when Lauderdale tears Boniface off a titanic strip (a tour-de-force moment from Attenborough) or hard not to admire the professional pride in his duty to keep others safe.

If you could criticise the film, it gives less scope to putting into an explicitly critical viewpoint or giving much scope to Lauderdale’s probably less charming or attractive features. You could well imagine that, returning to Blighty, his attitudes could curdle into an unattractive ‘Britain First’ attitude. Sure, we are encouraged to see his obsession with perfectly ironed uniforms and the exact perfection of a salute as something quite silly. But he’s also a man who doesn’t question for a minute Britain’s inherent superiority or its right to dominate large chunks of the globe. But Guns at Batasi lacks a real character who challenges Lauderdale – even Leyton’s cheeky private ends up being adopted in an affectionate strict-fatherly way by the RSM, rather than someone who could really signpost Lauderdale’s relic nature or the potentially darker implications of his character. Just as the film treats the other sergeants lack of knowledge or interest in this country (right down to continually mis-pronouncing the local town as Battersea) as comedic rather than an insight into underlying complacent understanding as the world being a place run by and for the British.

But the film stands out as one of the best acting showcases Attenborough ever had, a swaggering role of bombast that he absolutely rips through while humanising it. There are great supporting turns from Horsfall, Herbert, Lodge and Mellion as wildly different types of sergeant and the film manages to be both quietly satirical, nostalgic and pack in some derring-do along the way. If it doesn’t quite manage to really seize on its potential, it’s still an interesting film.

The Goodbye Girl (1977)

Some funny lines isn’t quite enough for this romantic comedy to work as well as it should

Director: Herbert Ross

Cast: Richard Dreyfuss (Elliot Garfield), Marsha Mason (Paula McFadden), Quinn Cummings (Lucy McFadden), Paul Benedict (Mark Bodine), Barbara Rhoades (Donna Douglas), Nicol Williamson (Oliver Fry)

Working as a performer sucks. There’s no money and who knows when the next job is round the corner? It’s even tougher when you are forever unlucky in love. That’s the case for semi-retired dancer Paula McFadden (Marsha Mason). She’s been jilted twice by actors who disappear for a big break somewhere else, leaving only a cursory apology behind. It makes being a single mother to precocious-but-vulnerable ten-year-old Lucy (Quinn Cummings) even harder. Harder again is that her recent awful boyfriend, as a parting gift, sublet their apartment without her knowledge to Elliot Garfield (Richard Dreyfuss), an actor as neurotic as Paula, arriving in New York for his big break. Paula refuses to leave her home and the two kick off a territorial feud, which settles into a truce and a flat share. But could it lead to anything else?

It probably won’t be a surprise to say yes it does, in this sharply written film from Neil Simon, crammed with fast-paced, theatrical, gag-filled dialogue which keeps the film’s pace up without really converting it into something real. The main problem with The Goodbye Girl is that it’s hard to believe in, or really care for, either of its two lead character. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say both of them would be incredibly hard work to live with. After all, they can frequently be rather trying just to watch. Simon makes them both brittle, neurotic, high-strung and prone to performative bursts of euphoria and rage. Both can swing on a six-pence between these. It’s probably meant to make them the perfect match, like a feuding Bogart (who Garfield impersonates at one point) and Bacall, but after a while just starts to wear you down. You want to give both of them a bit of a shake and say “pull yourself together!”

The ability to stick with the film revolves around how charming you find both performers. Here, Richard Dreyfuss has the definite advantage. Coming off a hot-streak that had seen almost every film he had made turn into a smash hit, Dreyfuss’ performance made him (at 29) the youngest winner of the Best Actor Oscar. A late replacement for a fired Robert De Niro (can you even begin to imagine De Niro’s deadpan intensity working here?), the part is a perfect match for Dreyfuss’ youthful, madcap energy. He seizes on the rat-a-tat dialogue, embraces Garfield’s zany love for New Agey thinking (yoga, guitar and sleeping “buffo”) and bounces around the film as likely to make monkey noises while euphorically chinning up on a door frame as he is to play sweet imagination games with young Lucy. He brings a lot of charm to a highly strung, difficult man, uncovering a lot of his essential decency and kindness.

He actually settles more into the difficult balance than Marsha Mason, the person (Simon’s wife) who the film was written for. Mason never really manages to find the softness and likability in this role. It’s not entirely her fault: while the point is that Paula is a woman with serious trust issues, the film never gives her a moment of calmness or reflection to open up about this. Instead, it takes a lazier route of having this turn her into an abrasive comic character, the sort of person who responds to a “morning after” with a furious expectation of betrayal. Mason never quite manages to find a softness or likeability under this prickly defensiveness. Interestingly, for all the project was written for her, she has few of the truly funny lines and is effectively the obstacle that must be fixed rather than having the more engaging role of charming disrupter.

To be honest there is not a lot of chemistry between the two. Simon so enjoys the competitive dialogue feuding over territory, bills and who will have what room and when, that he rather forgets to show them actually falling in love. In fact, he ends up relying on the age-old formula of a precocious, New York Times reading child being the bridge to bring them together. Quinn Cummings is rather good as the sort of kid who only exists in the movies, as adept with the witty retort as the adults. But between Elliot and Paula, the romance always feels a bit too inevitable rather than natural, the eventual thawing occurring swiftly rather than feeling it has developed naturally and gently.

It’s part of the slightly formulaic nature of The Goodbye Girl. It’s a highly safe film, with a very conventional romantic storyline, that bubbles along to a happy ending. You can feel the box-ticking from scene-after-scene, just as you can feel the inevitability of its happy ending. It’s also overly theatrical, feels constrained by its location and never quite light enough on its feet. There are a few too many stand-up rows around the apartment block (their poor neighbours) and Herbert Ross’ direction struggles as much as Simon’s script to give us a reason to really root for this couple.

There are though some decent digs at the working life in the arts. Paula, trying to get back into the dancing game, is hideously off-the-pace and takes a job as an enthusiastic glamour-girl flogging Japanese cars at trade show. Elliot is forced to fall back a doorman gig at a strip club. It’s a tough old trade, especially as Elliot’s big break in New York falls apart after he is forced by a pretentious, talentless director to perform Richard III as a limp-wristed, 1970s stereotype of a gay man, mincing around and lisping his lines to the ridicule and disgust of audiences and critics. This comic highlight feels a little awkward now (the joke is the stereotyped gay behaviour, rather than the appalling idea, making it’s a little uncomfortable to watch at times, rather as if Elliot was being made to play it in black face).

The Goodbye Girl just isn’t quite charming or likeable enough and its characters are never people we really end up warming to or rooting for. Its sharp dialogue ends up making them feel less like real people and more like theatrical characters, bouncing off each other for effect. Dreyfuss comes off best here, but Ross’ direction is uninspired, its romantic coupling never really convincing and it tends to rather overstay its welcome.

Le Mépris (1963)

Godard’s film mixes virtuoso film-making with what feels a hard contempt for audience and characte

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Cast: Brigitte Bardot (Camille Javal), Michel Piccoli (as Paul Javal), Jack Palance (Jeremiah Prokosch), Giorgia Moll (Francesca Vanini), Fritz Lang (Himself), Jean-Luc Godard (Lang’s assistant director), Linda Veras (Siren)

The title translates as Contempt and, to be honest, it’s hard not to feel a bit of the contempt when watching. Of all the Great Directors, the one I find the hardest to like is Godard. When you settle down to watch Godard, it’s hard not to escape the feeling you are steeling yourself to be looked down on. Godard wants you to know he’s watched more, read more and thought more than you about everything. Godard is playing out his fantasy of being a Hollywood director and a Great Artiste and wants you to know it. In fact, the further you move away from his debut À Bout de Souffle, the more his films become (for me) overly pleased-with-themselves statements rather than actual films.

Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) is a writer, who wishes he could be producing great novels or plays, but is actually banging out crapola dialogue to fill American producer Jeremiah Prokosch’s (Jack Palance) Odyssey-opus, a film its director (Fritz Lang, one of Godard’s idols, playing himself) is trying to turn into art rather than the cheap sword-and-sandals epic Prokosch wants. But by taking the shilling, Paul earns the contempt of his glamourous wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot), who sleepwalks her way into an affair with Prokosch. Things come to head (as such) at Prokosch’s villa on Capri.

It was shot with a larger budget and a more controlling producer than any previous (or subsequent Godard film). God alone knows what they made of this – one suspects them reacting rather like Palance’s tantrum-filled producer when he inspects the arty dailies of statues and coastlines Lang has shot (“You lied to me Fritz!”). On some level Le Mépris is Godard playing a joke on his money men. The want a steamy relationship film, with plenty of Bardot on display? Have a slow series of elliptical conversations, a languid (but wonderfully filmed) argument scene in which Piccoli takes both a bath and a crap, and here are some deliberately functional shots of Bardot’s naked back on the bed while she and Piccoli intone empty dialogue. For a film that involves extra-marital sex, groping, a gun and a fatal car crash it’s deliberately unsensational – as if Godard was showing the money men he could ram anything they demanded into the film and still make it feels like a ticking-off.

To be honest, there’s also in Le Mépris a bit of Godard’s contempt for himself for selling out, as if he realised part way through he’d made a terrible mistake by taking the money and wanted everyone to know it. You can see it in the film’s visuals, that turn the demanded cinemascope wideness (which Godard loathed) into a series of pan-and-scan shots and tight close-ups that wipe-out the impact of the grand visuals. Godard may appear in the film himself, but is real substitute is his hero Lang, here a visionary polygot (the only person who can speak the full hodgepodge of languages the characters communicate in), who gives voice to Godard’s most closely held views about cinema and the only person completely assured and comfortable with what he is doing.

Not that there isn’t an awful lot to admire in Godard’s work here. As fits a director steeped in a love of film, Le Mépris drips with homages to cinema technique. Godard speaks the credits – Welles in Magnificent Amberson’s style – over an opening shot which is itself of an opening shot filming a crew filming the opening tracking shot of Le Mépris. There are touches of Ford, Hawks and Lang in the stylistic love of Godard’s heroes. Paul dresses like a mix of Sam Spade and Dean Martin and loves chatter about old movies (he’s very excited about the prospect of catching an old Hawks film). The tattered film studio is lined with film posters (including those depicting Godard’s former wife Anna Karina). We see the intricate procedures of film-making and post-production and Bardot even reads books about cinema in her downtime.

There is some astonishing film-making – Godard may be self-important, but he can shoot a film with grace. The tracking shots through the seemingly abandoned Cinecittà studios in Italy are beautifully done, as is the intriguing framework of the unique Capri villa and its striking staircase. The film’s highlight (and finest sequence by far, as well as its most human) is its middle act, a virtuoso choreographed sequence in the Javal’s under construction apartment (including French doors without glass, bathrooms without doors and intermittent furniture). The camera moves, brilliantly at a distance, to constantly frame these two characters interspersed between doorways, or kept apart by walls in the centre of the frame, barely ever managing to ever be in the frame together, the disjointed visual language perfect for communicating a conversation where they are never on the same page. It’s a superb way of filming partly an argument, partly a drifting out of love, partly a fumbling attempt to find common ground. There is a real emotional reality to this scene, something that isn’t present anywhere else in the film.

Even there though, it works because of its distance. Le Mépris is a strikingly distant film, Godard presenting a deliberately cold, hostile film that lacks any real warmth, empathy, wit or lightness, like he’s challenging us to swallow down this filmic medicine of cinematic inspiration and beautiful framing. Le Mépris also seems to despise its characters. Palance’s film producer (and this is a deeply uncomfortable performance from Palance, who constantly looks like he’s woken up suddenly and doesn’t know where he is) is a boorish philistine and an idiot. Piccoli’s writer is a shallow, preening lightweight who wants to be a Godard but is a hack with pretensions.

Interestingly the most intriguing character in it is Bardot – but she remains elliptical, perhaps because part of Godard can only see her as some sort of trophy or status symbol, something Paul fails to ‘deserve’ because he can’t maintain his principles. Her motivations remain a mystery and one wonders if there is much place for them in Godard’s masculine view of the world, where women are either secretaries or muses. Camille herself seems to see herself as sort of property, suspecting her husband of pimping her to a producer but then seemingly embracing that in any case (despite her contempt for Prokosch). There is an air in Le Mépris that Godard can’t really imagine either Bardot or Giorgia Moll’s Francesca (a striking presence, who has the best running joke with her rudimentary translations of Javal’s dialogue for Prokosch) as collaborators or equals to either the brutish producer or the tortured men, but people who can only be defined by their attitudes towards them.

Above all, Le Mépris wants you to know your place when watching it. To admire it, but also to know that you wishes for something more dramatic or humane are shallow, base desires. That really you should be seeking out the sort of arty stuff Fritz Lang is shooting on the island, not the page-turning nonsense the executives wanted. It’s an attitude that pours out of the film, and after a while its one that makes you want to spend your time elsewhere. Godard may be a clever guy, but he can be very poor company.

Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025)

Back-to-basics monster mash that feels like a reheated remix of several elements from the previous films

Director: Gareth Edwards

Cast: Scarlett Johansson (Zora Bennett), Mahershala Ali (Duncan Kincaid), Jonathan Bailey (Dr. Henry Loomis), Rupert Friend (Martin Krebs), Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (Reuben Delgado), Luna Blaise (Teresa Delgado), David Iacono (Xavier Dobbs), Audrina Miranda (Isabella Delgado), Ed Skrein (Bobby Atwater), Bechir Sylvain (LeClerc), Philippine Velge (Nina)

Those InGen scientists never know when to stop. The latest Jurassic film reveals yet another tropical island awash with prehistoric beasties. This one was also home to a Frankenstein-factory, where terrible genetic abominations were created, cross-bred dinosaurs with extra wow-factor (like flying velociraptors). But of course, almost twenty years later, they roam free, causing trouble for a team of mercenaries. Led by Zora (Scarlett Johansson) and Duncan (Mahershala Ali), they are working for Big Phama Baddie Martin (Rupert Friend) and friendly palaeontologist Dr Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) to capture blood samples from the three largest dinosaurs ever to unlock a cure for heart disease (and millions of dollars). Things don’t go to plan when they end up stranded on an island, with a young shipwrecked family in tow.

It’s called Jurassic World: Rebirth but it could be Jurassic World: Reheated. Gareth Edwards film is shot with nerdy charm and crammed with lots of 90s-child fan-bait images of “Objects are closer than they appear” mirrors and “When Dinosaurs ruled the Earth” banners. But it’s also a blatant reheat of many elements of the first three films, often presented in a strikingly similar way. Like the little-loved, low-key and formulaic Jurassic Park 3, a team of mercs is stranded on an island with a family in tow. Perilous journeys take them into the nests of pterodactyls and down river against a gigantic dinosaur opponent. Throw in many other recognisable beats and scenes and you’ve got a film that will be feel more enjoyable and diverting, the less familiar you are with the preceding seven films.

In fact, much as I have a childish glee for dinosaurs still, Jurassic World: Rebirth makes me feel actually we might have gone as far as we can go. Even if the last two films were not complete successes, at least their vision of dinosaurs emerging to become everyday creatures we might encounter anywhere felt different. Rebirth shuts that down in the opening credit crawl, stating dinosaurs could only survive long-term in the tropics. Once again, they reside live on deserted islands miles from rescue. To hammer (multiple) points home, it opens with Friend’s phama boss whining because a dying brachiosaurus is blocking his four-by-four in the New York traffic.

It’s so we can get the familiar set-up, with a rag-tag mix of unlikely heroes thrown together to survive while shrieking and running in the jungle. There is precious little to surprise you in Rebirth, not least the fate of the characters. Every single Jurassic film has thrown children-in-peril into the mix and Rebirth literally can’t imagine setting itself up without the same, so introduces the Delgado’s, a divorced Dad with two daughters the oldest of whom brings with her waster boyfriend who has “redemption in waiting” written all over him. Just as we’ve seen now countless times before, no matter how terrified and dangerous things get, these kids have tooth-proof plot armour. Not a T-rex by the river or a flying velociraptor (in an almost neat restage of the kitchen scene from the first film) stand a change of laying a claw on them.

In fact, the rest of the cast feels the same. There is a weary paint-by-numbers inevitability about who will bite it and when. The second Ed Skrein’s arrogant merc turns up, you know he’s toast – just as Rupert Friends’ cowardly, profit-focussed exec might as well put himself in a dino lunch box and save us all time (though first he has to prove to the viewer, how shitty he is). The team is made up of three big name actors and a parade of red shirts who look and feel like red shirts from the second their under-developed mouths spew out their formulaic dialogue. A thick coating of plot armour is strapped onto the backs of nearly every other character, and not once in the film did I either (a) really fear for the lead characters or (b) think that any of them would turn out to be anything other than saints (I briefly thought Henry almost sharing a name with Halloween’s mad scientist might be a subtle reveal… it isn’t).

In fact, this lot are the nicest parade of mercs you’ll ever beat and both Johansson and Ali carry with them the sort of character-developing past trauma that is such basic scriptwriting 101 you almost feel sorry for the actors working with it. (To wit: Ali is a grieving father, Johansson is dealing with the loss of a boyfriend on a past op – if you can’t work out where those motivations might take you, you need to see more movies). These mercs are decent, hard-working, honourable guys about a million miles from what you think real merc, who shoot guns at people for money, might be like. They’re more like charming humanitarians.

The most interesting stuff in Rebirth are the moments that feel new. A prologue, set 17-years before, showing how all hell broke loose on the lab is well-done (even if its a lift from Edward’s past Godzilla film), both in its mounting dread and its almost satiric ‘no security system works in the movies’ resolution of a discarded snickers wrapper short-circuiting a billion-dollar system keeping the abominations secure. The abominations are also interesting: a flapping, vicious velociraptor feels new (it even proves its chops by devouring a normal velociraptor) while the D-Rex hybrid (a sort of grotesque mix of a T-Rex and the creature from Alien) is artfully shot by Edwards in a series of slow half-reveals before we see its real horror.

It’s a shame there isn’t more of that. Because otherwise, Rebirth passes the time but it’s a film for people who vaguely remembered the original films rather than someone who has watched them more than once. For anyone who has, there is nothing either new or surprising here, nothing that does anything remotely different, no character who doesn’t feel like they’ve been plucked and retooled from one of the earlier films. It’s a back-to-basics approach (staffed, to be fair, with some good actors) that gives you exactly what you expect all the time. That might be fine at times, but it’s hard not to wish for a little bit more. It is at least, though, twice as good as the woeful fanbait that was Dominion.

The Love Parade (1929)

Lubitsch’s delightful early musical mixes European class with battle of the sexes wit

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Cast: Maurice Chevalier (Count Alfred Renard), Jeanette MacDonald (Queen Louise), Lupino Lane (Jacques), Lillian Roth (Lulu), Eugene Pallette (Minister of War), E. H. Calvert (Sylvanian Ambassador), Edgar Norton (Master of Ceremonies), Lionel Belmore (Prime Minister)

Sylvania has a problem with its ambassador in France, Count Alfred Renard (Maurice Chevalier) – largely that he can’t stop seducing anything that moves. Renard is swiftly recalled to his homeland… where he catches the eye of young, unmarried Queen Louise (Jeannette MacDonald), who immediately thinks he might just be the man for her. Renard isn’t averse to marrying into royalty, but quickly finds himself chafing in the role of Prince Consort – this isn’t what marriage is supposed to be, the husband doesn’t defer to the wife!

It is of course a slightly dated version of marriage, and The Love Parade could be seen as a very light piece of Taming of the Shrew style-action where a strong woman learns true happiness is sometimes being the number two. The fact that, despite this, The Love Parade is still charming, funny and more than a little delightful is partly due to the immensely skilled lightness it’s directed with by Lubitsch (it feels the whole sweet confection could burst with a puff of strong air) and the huge charm of its leads. After all, Chevalier is no-one’s idea of a Petruchio while Jeanette MacDonald manages to marry up romantic longing with being tired of the restrictive burdens of royalty, that you believe she’d be happy to share some of it out.

The Love Parade was one of the first ‘talkie-musicals’ and it’s assembled with such pace and energy by Lubitsch (at his very best) that you almost don’t notice how often its forced into static framing for the talking and singing (where couples frequently sit or stand opposite each other to burst into song). That’s because the film is awash with swift intercutting between different locations, often to great comic effect (not least cut aways to groups of ministers, soldiers and servants excitedly commentating from afar on the lead’s first date) and intermixes this with smoothly seductive tracking shots through grand Habsburg-style sets.

Lubitsch’s film however uses sound effectively and remarkably imaginatively. Establishing his confidence with it, it opens with us overhearing dialogue from outside a room before the door swings open and we see Chevalier stride in and confide directly to us. Sound is used throughout for comic effect, either in its presence – the highly suggestive ‘400 cannon blasts’ on the night of the wedding or the frustrated drumming of fingers on the table our happy couple do in the midst of an early row to the awkwardly quiet march-past of a group of soldiers trying not to disturb the Queen’s lie-in. It’s creative stuff, considering the limitations at the time, and bounces effectively off the parade of songs and witty dialogue that powers the film.

Alongside that, the film works because it’s such an interesting exploration of social mores and etiquette, not to mention a cheeky love of the sort of content code-Hollywood would have frowned on. The opening sequence revolves around the aftermath of one of Renard’s seductions, with shots of garters, a furious husband and a gun loaded with blanks (Renard seems to have a drawer full of these for just such occasions). Queen Louise is all too clearly extremely aroused by reading about Renard’s string of sexual conquests, immediately running into her dressing room to apply more make-up before she can greet him with all the coquetteish excitement she can manage.

There is innuendo throughout (“My wife has told me everything” one of Renard’s embassy colleagues announces, something Chevalier’s face tells us is clearly far from true). Lubitsch uses visual humour expertly, cutting away from Renard’s delighted recounting of one of his adventures to a shot outside where we watch Renard and his audience talking silently from the other side a window, with only their reactions clueing us into how saucy the story is. All this is classic ‘Lubitsch touch’, which thrives among these gorgeously grand sets and costumes.

The Love Parade manages to keep us feel sympathy for the likeable Renard, not least once he discovers, as Prince Consort, his duties seem to be little more than shaving (because, as he tells Louisa, he looks terrible in a beard) and resting (so he’s nice and ready for the evening’s fun later). He literally can’t eat a meal until Louisa arrives to eat first (he’s reduced to plucking an apple from a tree to beat off hunger) and finds his advice is instantly handed back to him unread by one of Louisa’s many court flunkies. Sure, you’d prefer that The Love Parade works its way into a proper partnership at the end, rather than just reversing the power to it’s ‘natural order’ but at least you can see Renard has a point.

It’s interesting that a more natural partnership actually seems to develop between their two servants, Renard’s valet Jacques (Lupino Lane) and Louisa’s maid Lulu (Lilian Roth). Lane and Roth give energetically charming comedic performances – and also by far the most engaging and dynamic musical sequences. The highlight here is ‘Let’s be common’, that brilliantly uses Lupino’s double-jointed flexibility to stage the film’s most overtly entertaining number. There is a Mozartian quality to these super-smart servants – so much so, I’d willingly trade a few of Chevalier or MacDonald’s numbers for a couple more with them.

Which isn’t to disparage the stars. Chevalier’s comic skills are exploited to the max here – his reaction to ‘being shot’ in the opening sequence is a masterclass in timing – and it’s a part he invests with huge charm which sells Renard’s slight selfishness as genuine likeability. Lubitsch throws in a few neat gags about his accent, not least Renard’s penchant to voice his frustrations in perfect, rat-a-tat French to bewildered Sylvanians (he’s deeply disappointed when he asks one obstructive courtier if he speaks French only to get the answer ‘yes’). Jeannette MacDonald is also skilfully sharp and just frustrating enough, from her opening scene where she is poutishly pissed that he flunkies can’t find her a consort (despite the fact she doesn’t want one) to her mix of romanticism and imperiousness that runs through the film.

The Love Parade is an engaging and funny Lubitsch masterclass in his particular genre of sophisticated comedy, as well as a strikingly original use of sound and music. It remains engaging and entertaining today.

2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)

Solid film stuck forever in the shadow of a landmark, all answers and no mystery

Director: Peter Hyams

Cast: Roy Scheider (Heywood Floyd), John Lithgow (Walter Curnow), Helen Mirren (Tanya Kirbuk), Bob Balaban (R. Chandra), Keir Dullea (Dave Bowman), Douglas Rain (HAL 9000), Madolyn Smith (Caroline Floyd), Elya Baskin (Maxim Brailovsky), Dana Elcar (Dimitri Moisevitch), James McEachin (Victor Milson), Natasha Shneider (Irina Yakunina), Vladimir Skomarovsky (Yuri Svetlanov), Mary Jo Deschanel (Betty Fernandez)

2010 is the film 2001 could have been. That’s not really a good thing. Where 2001 was invested with such Kubrickian mystique that is has engrossed and bewitched audiences for decades with its elliptical structure, haunting experience and complete lack of definitive answers or interpretations, 2010 is nothing but answers. Don’t get me wrong: 2001 is a tough act to follow, but 2010 is rather like rolling from looking at a Picasso to checking out a talented local artist. One produces art that you would happily hang on your wall – the other produces a priceless, timeless masterpiece that will define its medium for decades to come.

That’s the thankless position for Peter Hyam’s solid and basically perfectly fine science-fiction. In many ways, without the existence of 2001, it’s sensitive exploration of the deep-space thawing of Cold War relations, exploration of how more unites mankind than divides us, musing on questions of what makes us human would have felt quite hefty. 2010 however, forever in comparison to 2001, feels more like a well-made info dump, dedicated to answering any questions left over. As Heywood Floyd (Roy Schieder) takes part in a joint US-USSR mission to find the Discovery we are painstakingly told what the monoliths are, what they were for, what happened to Dave, why HAL went loco, where mankind goes next… all wrapped around a world teetering on nuclear war and the creation of a new star raced through in under two hours so swiftly that barely a scene goes by without breathless exposition.

It’s fine. Although anyone who sat through 2001 and wanted to know the exact science of the monoliths and the exact reasons for HAL’s psychosis may well have missed the point. Hyams film is a solid, decent, noble attempt to follow-up on a landmark that manages to pay a respect to the original (despite cringe worthy touches like a magazine cover in which Clarke and Kubrick cameo as the faces of the superpowers leaders – one of two wonky Kubrick references alongside Mirren’s character’s barely discussed anagram name) without wrecking its legacy. Dutifully the film replicates a few shots and throws in some already iconic sound cues. But it’s done in a way that manages to lift 2010 with some of the haunting poetry of the original, rather than dragging it down.

There is some decent stuff in 2010 a film swimming in Cold War tensions. The US and USSR crews start with an abrasive suspicion of each other, which refreshingly thaws out in a shared sense of team and there being no borders in space (despite the best efforts of their governments). A big part of this is the warmly-drawn relationship (with more than a touch of the romantic) between John Lithgow’s nervous engineer, on his first mission in space, and Elya Baskin’s deeply endearing experienced cosmonaut who takes him under his wing. More time is allowed to let this grow as a human relationship than any other pairing in the film, and it pays off in capturing on a personal level the film’s hopeful sense that tensions between two nations intent on MAD could thaw.

But the film mostly riffs on the original. The haunting presence of Kier Dullea’s Dave Bowman – now something beyond human – is effectively used at several points (a series of appearances to Roy Scheider’s Floyd inevitably sees Dullea rattle from shot-to-shot through every make-up stage he went through in Kubrick’s haunting conclusion to 2001, as 2010 continues to tug its forelock at its progenitor). The Discovery – now a dust covered relic in space – is fairly well re-created (even if the scale of the model is ludicrously off-beam in several shots featuring space-walking astronauts). Bob Balaban – bizarrely playing an Indian scientist, though thankfully without dubious make-up – has several scenes recreating Dullea’s floating in HAL’s innards, slightly undermined by the fact Balaban looks like he’s uncomfortably hanging upside down.

Tension is drawn from whether HAL himself – once again voiced with brilliantly subtle emotion just under his monotone earnestness by Douglas Rain – will once again flip out, but 2010’s generally hopeful alignment along with its ‘no answer left unturned’ attitude does rather undermine this tension. Just as we are never really left in doubt that Helen Mirren’s no-nonsense commander and Roy Scheider’s guilt-laden Floyd (who has had a character transplant from the coldly inhumane bureaucrat of 2001) will find a way to both respect each other and work together. You can however agree that 2010 does find more room for human feeling and interaction than 2001. Nowhere in that film could you imagine the hero sharing his anxiety about a risky space manoeuvre, huddled with an equally fearful Russian cosmonaut. Or 2001s version of Dave visiting his wife, or any of the characters entering into any sort of discussion on the morality or not of sacrificing HAL.

2010 also has some striking imagery among its cascade of answers and facts, But finally it’s only really a sort of epilogue or footnote to something truly ground-breaking. A curiosity of complete competence, which never really does anything wrong but also never really does anything astounding either. You’ve got to respect Hyams guts in even attempting it (I’m sure plenty of other directors flinched at the idea of recreating Kubrick) but you’ve also got to acknowledge that it falls into the traps of conventionality that 2001 avoided doing. 2010 is, at heart, really like a dozen other films rather than something particularly unique. Unfortunately for it, that was never going to be enough.