Category: Crime drama

To Catch a Thief (1955)

Cary Grant and Grace Kelly basically have a nice French holiday in To Catch a Thief

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Cary Grant (John Robie “The Cat”), Grace Kelly (Frances Stevens), Jessie Royce Landis (Jessie Stevens), John Williams (HH Hughson), Charles Vanel (Monsieur Bertani), Brigitte Auber (Danielle Foussard), Jean Martinelli (Foussard)

One of the nice things about being a powerful film director is, if you fancy a nice holiday in the sun, get a film greenlit in a nice location and settle in for a nice vacation. That’s perhaps the real story behind To Catch a Thief, a popular Hitchcock film that is, at best, a second tier entry in his CV – but has some truly lovely location shots of the French Riviera in it.

The film meanders through a plot that never really heads anywhere particularly interesting, other than crossing off some of Hitchcock’s familiar beats. Cary Grant coasts along as suave former French Resistance fighter and infamous jewel thief “The Cat”, now retired to a lovely vineyard on the French Riviera (presumably off the back of his ill-gotten gains). His French resistance past has basically made him immune from persecution, until a copy-cat thief starts to plunder the jewels of the rich. With Robie Suspect #1, who better to catch a thief than…another thief?

To Catch a Thief is so much about its style, its expensive Hollywood production standards and luxurious location shooting, that it almost forgets to have any substance at all. I suppose that doesn’t completely matter when this is very much one of Hitchcock’s entertainments – a luscious change of pace from his previous film Rear Window, which was all about confined spaces, voyeurism and seedy thrills. Here instead the focus is on beauty, charm and frothy comedy, with the plot unspooling so gently, that the final resolution is virtually thrown in as an afterthought.

Instead the focus is more on the extended game of flirting between Grant and Grace Kelly as daughter of wealthy American jewel owner Jessie Royce Landis. Grant was, of course, twice as old as Kelly (and only eight years younger of course than Landis, who played his mother four years later in North by Northwest), but the two make for a chemistry laden couple. (Hitchcock cheekily has one seductive late night conversation intercut – and end – with a fireworks explosion. No prizes for guessing what that symbolises).

Much of this fire comes from Grace Kelly who, fresh from her Oscar win for Best Actress, is brimming with confidence. Clever, sexy and dangerous – she’s excited by Robie’s life of crime and loves the idea of joining him in a life of crime, don’t get many leading ladies of the time being as daring as that – Kelly oozes sex appeal and looks like she could eat Grant for breakfast. It takes all the experienced cool and charm of Grant – who adjusts the part so neatly into his wheelhouse, he feels like he could play the thing standing on his head – to keep up. Kelly is radiant and magnetic and walks off with the movie. So much so you wish it gave her slightly more to do.

But then the plot of the film doesn’t give anyone much to do. Robert Burks (Oscar-winning) photography is lovely, really capturing the beauty and elegance of the French Riviera. But the events around it are nothing to write home about, an underpowered caper with little of the director’s energy and fire or his subversive creepiness. The identity of the copy-cat will be a mystery perhaps only to those who have never seen a movie, while the generally predictable beats in every scene make it feel like a hodge-podge pulled together from the offcuts of better films.

It’s got a lovely feeling of a holiday adventure for all and sundry. Plenty of French actors dutifully trudge through – although to a man their characters are either incompetent, bullies or crooks – with The Wages of Fear Charles Vanel clearly dubbed as a seedy ex-Resistance fighter turned restaurateur. It’s all very well mounted, entertaining enough and leaves almost nothing for you to digest after it’s finished.

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Robert De Niro and James Woods are gangsters in Sergio Leone’s sprawling indulgent masterpiece Once Upon a Time in America

Director: Sergio Leone

Cast: Robert De Niro (Noodles), James Woods (Max), Elizabeth McGovern (Deborah), Joe Pesci (Frankie), Burt Young (Joe), Tuesday Weld (Carol), Treat Williams (Jimmy O’Donnell), Danny Aiello (Police Chief Aiello), Richard Bright (Chicken Joe), James Hayden (Patsy), William Forsythe (Cockeye), Darlanne Fluegel (Eve), Scott Tiler (Young Noodles), Rusty Jacobs (Young Max), Jennifer Connelly (Young Deborah)

It had been thirteen years since Leone had made a film. During this time he turned down The Godfather in favour of his own dream of filming Harry Grey’s novel The Hoods. The final film, Once Upon a Time in America, seems destined to live in the shadow of The Godfather, from its settings and many of its themes through to its graphic design and cast. It’s a challenging, over-indulgent, sometimes difficult film that, never-the-less has its own sense of hypnotic power to it.

Told in a partly non-linear style, it opens with Noodles (Robert De Niro) a Jewish gangster on the run from thugs in 1930s New York days after the fall of prohibition. With his friends and his girl dead and his money stolen, Noodles flees the city – returning only in 1968 after a mysterious summons suggests his past is not as buried as he thought. Within this, the film weaves an intricate series of flashbacks that fill in the story of Noodles and his friend Max (James Woods) turning their teenage gang of hoodlums into an effective crew, muscling in on the money that can be made from prohibition. Carrying the story from 1918 all the way back to 1968, we discover why Noodles was on the run, what the money was, where it’s gone and who or what summoned him back to life.

Leone originally envisioned the film as a two-part epic: two films of three hours length. His original cut was almost ten hours long, cut down to six and then finally to just over four. This cut was released to critical acclaim at Cannes – but was still too long for the producers, concerned about making their money in America. To the fury of the cast (James Woods continues to be vocal about the butchering of the film), and the heartbreak of Leone, the film was cut again to just over 2 hours before its release in the States – a move that rendered it nearly incomprehensible and led to reviews that labelled it one of the worst of the year. Only with the much late release of the European cut (and work continues to restore something closer to Leone’s six hour cut) did the film find acclaim.

But you can see why the producers worried. Leone was never a director who felt the need to get where he was going quickly. As his films became ever more dominated by his love for artful compositions, meditative longeurs and drawing the tension out for as long as possible, so their running times ballooned. Leone matched this with a yearning to tell a story that was to be nothing less than about defining “America” – or at least, give a symbolic weight and depth to the Americana he loved. The film is overflowing with the feel of Old Hollywood gangster films and classic imagery of the immigrant experience in Manhattan. It’s like a brilliant coffee-table album bought to life and covered with blood.

So Once Upon a Time in America is a slow, lethargic even, film that takes its time to build up a picture of an immigrant community drawn together through bonds of culture and shared past that are nearly impossible to express – but fractured by the greed and capitalism of the American Dream, temptation to make an even bigger killing leading to old loyalties being sacrificed. Leone juggles some big ideas here, and if the film never quite comes to grips with any of them as it charts the fractured relationship of Max and Noodles, from brothers-in-arms to ambition, pride and private frustrations leading to betrayal it’s never less than strangely engrossing.

In many ways this is a hugely indulgent film, but it is also remarkable (strangely) for how restrained and elegiac it is. The razzamatazz of some of Leone’s Westerns are mixed in with a golden age romantic view of the past – and its lost opportunities and loyalties – in a film particularly fascinated with the coming-of-age of young men. The film is nothing less than an old man taking a ruminative journey through the past (both Leone and Noodles in his memories), looking back at a life time of bad choices and lost chances. It all makes for one of cinema’s greatest mood pieces ever, with faultless period reconstruction, but also a piece that for all its focus on personal lives at cornerstones of histories, makes its characters seem strangely impersonal.

Part of that lies in Leone’s clear love for the film’s long second act (nearly a third of its runtime), which charts the young Jewish hoodlums teenage lives in 1918 New York – their meeting, first scores, rivalries with other gangs and inevitably the loss of virginity. For all its overextended backstory, the section of the film hums with love and elegiac romance. It’s the richest part of the film. There is a beauty in beats of the watching the boys encounter everything from first crime to first love – and easy as it is to mock a good 3-4 minutes watching one of them eat a cake intended as an offer in exchange for a first sexual experience with the local floozy, moments like that have an innocence and a beauty to them that Leone really captures.

It’s a shame that it’s the back-end of the film that suffers – and its plot and narrative drive. It feels like Leone fought to keep the beauty of this early section and sacrificed drive and narrative later. The fracturing of the relationship between Max and Noodles is less clear, and their adult characters never quite come into focus. Perhaps there isn’t quite room for actors in the long sequences of wordless silence and atmosphere, punctuated by bursts of shocking violence, in Leone’s world. Certainly the cut doesn’t help, with most of the supporting cast (Joe Pesci, Treat Williams, Burt Young, Danny Aiello) reduced to little more than one scene each, their storylines – particularly a crucial Teamsters plot – barely making any sense.

Max’s growing distance from Noodles is perhaps rooted in everything from his ambition being frustrated by Noodles small-time viewpoints, perhaps even in suggestions of a frustrated homosexual love for the defiantly straight Noodles. James Woods does very well to piece to together a suggestion of deep psychological unease and confusion in a character who remains unknowable, a man to whom loyalty is everything until it isn’t.

As Noodles Robert De Niro anchors the film with one of his quietest, most reflective performances. Noodles is a deeply flawed, low-key, humble character who carries in him a capacity for self-destructive and vicious violence. Leone’s film suggests Noodles is perhaps troubled by feelings and longings he can’t begin to understand or appreciate. He is a romantic character, deeply infatuated with both Max and his childhood sweetheart Deborah, but unable to express or communicate his feelings until it is far too late, a man traumatised by emotional connection.

Not that this excuses Noodles for his actions, particularly towards women. If there is one troubling aspect of the film it is its attitude towards women. There are two prominent women in the film, both of whom are raped. One of them, Carol, is a shrewish temptress, who deliberately provokes Noodles to rape her and is then shown enjoying it. The second rape, this time of Deborah, comes from Noodles after a romantic date where he has finally done everything right. While Leone shoots the scene with an almost unwatchable grimness – Elizabeth McGovern’s screams and distress make for very hard viewing – the film still asks us to feel not only for her pain, but also (perhaps more so) Noodles regret. Further when they encounter each other late in life, Deborah matches him in sadness at chances lost – an unlikely reaction you feel for someone who has suffered as traumatic experience as she has.

But then to Leone perhaps this is part of the corruption of America – or rather the vileness of gangsters. The gangsters are a grotesque bunch in this film, killing without compunction, torturing, stealing, using violence as second nature. Loyalty is barely skin deep and arrogance abounds. There is no romantic sense of family behind it all – perhaps the thing Leone rejected most from The Godfather – just a series of people on the make and on the take.

But for all its faults and over extended length the film is increasingly hypnotic and engrossing, Leone’s understanding of mood being near faultless. While the ideas are perhaps not quite pulled into sharp focus in the film – and leave the audience having to do a lot of supposition – it still works over time. And the film has so many astonishing merits – from its awe-inspiring shooting and production to the sublime score from Ennio Morricone that gives the film even more poetic depth – it more than merits its existence.

And of course there is the cheeky sense Leone throws in that some – or indeed all – of what we are seeing may not even have happened. The film opens and closes with Noodles in an opium den, stoned out of his mind, in the 1930s. In the opening he lies there, haunted by the sound of a ringing phone (the memory of the phone call he made betraying Max), and we see him arrive at the film’s end taking his first puff and lying back with a grin. Is the film’s off-kilter 1968 even real? Or just an opium den dream? Is the past – and the film’s disjointed narrative flying back and forth – just a stoned man lost in his own fantasies? Who knows? What we do know is that Leone’s indulgent epic is a flawed but genuine masterpiece – and the opium fantasy angle may just be the perfect cover for the fact more than half the film is on the cutting room floor of history.

Casino (1995)

De Niro gets sucked into temptation and vice in Scorsese’s Casino

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Robert De Niro (Sam “Ace” Rothstein), Sharon Stone (Ginger McKenna), Joe Pesci (Nicky Santoro), James Woods (Lester Diamond), Don Rickles (Billy Sherbert), Alan King (Andy Stone), Kevin Pollak (Philip Green), LQ Jones (Pat Webb), Dick Smothers (Senator), Frank Vincent (Frank Marino), John Bloom (Don Ward)

Scorsese’s Casino often gets overlooked in the master’s CV. Marking his first gangster film since Goodfellas, Casino is a very different film, a sort of combination history lesson and slice of violent gangster interplay, in which Las Vegas first gives these gangsters all their dreams coming true before chewing them up and spitting them out like all the other hopeless gamblers. And in doing that, it’s a perverse sort of nostalgia for the little guys being allowed to run the show – even if they did that by putting heads in vices – before they were shunted out by the even more ruthless efficiency of the mega-corporations. Because a world like Las Vegas only makes it easier for basic greed and personality flaws to take hold and ruin everything that’s good.

Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro) is a gambling and odds fixer, a man so expert at what he does and how he does it, so skilled at working the odds to spin out a profit for the Mafia, that the Chicago mob hires him to run their casino in Las Vegas. Rothstein turns the casino into the ultimate money making machine, understanding the odds of every bet and squeezing money out of every pore of the operation. While Sam takes care of the money, childhood friend Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) handles the other side of the Mafia business – increasingly abusing his position to make his own fortune on the side. Sam is further undermined by the only “against the odds” bet he ever made in his life: falling in love with Ginger (Sharon Stone), a selfish, self-destructive former hooker who is happy to take Sam’s money but will never offer him the love he craves. Disaster awaits.

Part of the reason perhaps why Scorsese’s Las Vegas epic (and the film is nearly three hours long) doesn’t have the warm regard of many of his other films is its focus on an intricate – although fascinating – explanation of how a Las Vegas casino operates, and the film’s reliance on voiceover to convey a vast amount of backstory, personal motivation and character insight. The opening hour of the film is almost entirely narrated (largely by De Niro and Pesci, although other characters occasionally intrude), as Scorsese shows exactly how a mob-skimming operation works in a casino, as well as nearly every detail of its operation, from day-to-day workings to dealing with cheats. The mechanisms of Las Vegas – along with its corruption, violence and blatant theft – are what fascinates the film. These sequences are assembled with the expected grace and skill of Scorsese and his regular editor Thelma Schoonmaker, but they lack the emotional connection of Goodfellas.

In fact, Casino might almost be some sort of tribute to silent film, so much of it is images accompanied alone by voiceover and well-chosen pop songs. It’s a film where imagery is all, with the camera prowling along the red-lined interiors of the casino itself (where daylight never intrudes), or lovingly following the progress of coins from slot machines to counting rooms to bags stuffed with cleaned bills for gangsters to carry away to their masters. It all makes for a rich and fascinating social history, even if you do feel slightly distanced from it by its near-documentary style voiceover.

But then, this voiceover does allow for a surprisingly rich character study once you plug into it. With the design stressing the demonic red-lined rooms and lights of Las Vegas – and the Saul Bass designed title sequence of a man falling through flames into a neon lit underworld – the idea of this place as some sort of hell is there all the way through. This context allows us to see three characters who are corrupted and destroyed by the pressures and temptations of five years running an operation in America’s capital of temptation and excess. And as the film goes on, everything gets bigger, from the garish colours and clothes to the music to the increasingly graphic violence.

And this film is astonishingly violent. Heads are placed in vices, people are brutally murdered by everything from pens to baseball bats, hits happen with a gruesome immediacy. And the person carrying out most of these acts is Pesci, a demonic imp lacking any sense of charm. Pesci retreads his role from Goodfellas, but even worse if possible, a man for whom violence is as second-nature as breathing.

It makes a neat contrast through with De Niro, who dominates the film (and either appears in or narrates almost every minute). It’s one of De Niro’s calmer, most reflective performances ever in a Scorsese picture (arguably until The Irishman). He’s a quiet, meticulous, fastidious professional gambler, who never takes a chance professionally but takes huge gambles with his personal life. De Niro brings the film a calm centre, and the precision of a man who both loves what he does but is so obsessed with making things perfect he gets no pleasure from it. Unlike many De Niro roles in Scorsese, Sam is the closest you can see as a regular guy, someone who works in a world of theft and violence but sees that as a cost of doing business rather than a career choice.

It’s why he remains sympathetic, despite the destruction around him. Perhaps also helped by his simply appalling wife. Sharon Stone gets her finest part ever (she received the film’s only Oscar nomination, for Best Actress) as the self-destructive, greedy addict Ginger who doesn’t want to change anything about her life and marries Sam solely for his money, but continues her relationship with her pimp Lester (a sleazy James Woods) and snorts cocaine in front of her five-year-old daughter. But Sam takes the chance because he loves her – and this Jewish outsider, who moves in circles of Italian mobsters and Southern societies that control the state, wants nothing more than to be loved and accepted. It’s what keeps him close to Nicky – for all his horrific impulsiveness – because Nicky is the closest thing he has to a genuine friend.

It’s a theme that runs throughout the whole film. The Mafia allowed its “street” operatives to run this operation in Las Vegas – and would never allow such regular soldiers such power again – and Las Vegas itself closed its doors to these more “independent” operators in the future to give the riches to corporations and insiders. It’s part of what makes Casino such a fascinating history lesson – this is the Las Vegas we all kind of think of, dirty, corrupted and sexily run by gangsters (even if the film makes clear that these guys would crush your head for looking at them the wrong way). But it’s now a circus, an entertainment ride. Because our heroes here make the same mistakes as the guys that go through their casino – “the longer they play, the longer they lose”.

The Usual Suspects (1995)

The immortal gang in legendary twist thriller The Usual Suspects

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Stephen Baldwin (Michael McManus), Gabriel Byrne (Dean Keaton), Benicio del Toro (Fred Fenster), Kevin Pollak (Todd Hockney), Kevin Spacey (Roger “Verbal” Kint), Chazz Palminteri (Agent Dave Kujan), Pete Postlethwaite (Kobayashi), Suzy Amis (Edey Finneran), Giancarlo Esposito (Jack Baer), Dan Hedaya (Sergeant Jeff Rabin)

SPOILERS: If you have been living in a cave since 1995, don’t read on as I discuss the twist at great length…

“Convince me”. That’s what Customs Agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) says as he begins his interrogation of limping, low-time crook “Verbal” Kint (Kevin Spacey). That’s certainly what Kint does – and it’s what the whole film is aiming to do in this, the most famous confidence trick in movies. The Usual Suspects is one of those once-in-a-blue-moon films where everything comes together perfectly. It’s also a sleight-of-hand movie that remains hugely engaging and entertaining even when (as surely most people now do!) you know exactly what the magician has up his sleeve. Its solid gold entertainment factor even survives today, despite the slightly queasy presence of both Kevin Spacey and Bryan Singer in its credits.

Told in flashback, the film follows the coming together of a bunch of regular criminals, pulled in for a line-up and deciding to team up. Along with Verbal, the others include McManus (Stephen Baldwin), Fenster (Benecio del Toro), Hockney (Kevin Pollak) and ex-cop turned criminal Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne). After a successful series of heists, the gang are conscripted by suspicious lawyer Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite) to take on a dangerous hijacking job for shadowy – possibly legendary – master criminal Keyser Soze, the bogeyman of the criminal classes. We know the job will go wrong – after all Verbal is banged up telling the whole story, the only survivor of the job – but how? And who is the shadowy Soze – or is he even real at all?

The Usual Suspects takes what you know about movies and then works double time to use it against you. With a structure inspired by classic noir crime films from the 1940s – the whole operation has a touch of The Asphalt Jungle while the interrogation has more than a hint of Double Indemnity – mixed in with a lot of Rashomon, it’s a movie that has you primed so much for a reveal and a twist that it skilfully misdirects you into expecting the wrong thing. Because how could you guess that perhaps the whole movie is a spun-out-of-the-moment invention by Verbal, and that possibly almost nothing we see during the course of its run time even happened.

But how can we guess? From the very first scenes with Kujan and Verbal, Kujan is shot dominating the frame, always taller, always filling the screen. Verbal is sitting, meek, trapped by the frame, the camera frequently looking down at him. Every shot subliminally tells us that he is weak. The story has to be dragged out of him, with the investigation outside of the room forcing Verbal to expand on issues he doesn’t want to touch on. Like Kujan we invest in what we are finding out, because it looks like Verbal doesn’t want to tell it to us. That’s how they get you.

Because Verbal, in his story, is sprinkling in just the twist that Dave (and the audience) is probably expecting – that Gabriel Byrne’s Dean Keaton, the guy who claimed to have gone good, who just wanted out, was bad the whole time and was the criminal mastermind this whole time. Christopher McQuarrie’s ingenious script primes us for this: Dave Kujan is casting doubt on Keaton’s “death” right from the start, and as the audience surrogate figure we want to be as smart as he is. So what does it matter that we ”see” Keaton shot in the opening sequence of the film? Surely that was an illusion, and we’re as clever as Kujan in seeing through it.

The film even gives us a brilliantly assembled “reveal” series of edited flashbacks, in which every small moment and hint that has existed in the film is replayed for us (John Ottman’s editing is flawless here – and he should also have credit for composing the film’s hauntingly classical score) to convince us, beyond a shadow of a doubt that, yup, poor simple Verbal was taken in all the time by dastardly Keaton, the guy who looks like a film star. Only of course it’s bollocks. That charred corpse that Singer jump cuts to at the start of the film as police investigate the boat massacre is indeed Keaton. And the clever twist we thought we were working out, turns out to be a mass distraction laid out for us by Verbal and the film.

So we get a second brilliantly edited reveal sequence as it hits Kujan while he studies that most famous notice board in film, that everything he thought he had worked out had been spun out of hints and clues off the board – from asides and anecdotes to entire locations and characters. And Kevin Spacey limps and then walks away, shrugging off the skin of timid, weak Verbal to transform into the chillingly amoral Soze. It’s a trick that worked especially well when Spacey was an almost unknown actor at the time (today it’s less of a surprise to find out that Spacey could be a creep). There is possibly no better reveal in Hollywood.

But the film continues to entertain even when you know it because Singer’s film is stuffed with richly layered characters, scintillating scenes and some rich and spicy dialogue from McQuarrie. It’s a brilliant combination and provides every scene with a clear and electric dynamism that makes it impossible to tear your eyes away. There are some truly striking scenes – not least the iconic line-up scene – and the film carries an improvisational energy (that line-up scene is a magic use of outtakes, as the actors couldn’t keep a straight face during the sequence).

Part of the magic of it comes from the brilliant clash of a group of vastly different actors bouncing off each other: the self-consciously method Baldwin, the edgy energy of Pollack, the chilly technique of Spacey and the classically trained professionalism of Byrne, who pulls off with aplomb a difficult job of playing a decoy protagonist and antagonist in one. And that’s not mentioning the wild card of Del Toro who, working out his character was a one-note plot device, throws in an eccentric chic and impenetrable mumbling accent that is part affectation (the sort of thing that made the actor more trying later in his career) and part jaw-dropping show of confidence. And backing them up is a collection of actors as eccentric as Palminteri channelling Law and Order with a smile and Postlethwaite as a sinister limey lawyer with an accent that sounds like it hails from the Raj.

Singer’s direction is flawlessly confident, creating a rich tapestry that you could lazily call Tarantinoesque, but actually reminds you of John Huston in its carefully framed mise-en-scene. It’s a very classical movie in its way, that loves clever wipes, slow build ups, brilliantly edited and surprisingly low key in much of its framing and shooting. Everything is perfectly placed to help build up the illusion. Singer never touched these heights of confidence and control again. It’s also superbly edited throughout by John Ottman, each beat landing perfectly, each transition perfectly judged. It wouldn’t seem out of pace to see Cagney playing Kint (with Bogart surely as Keaton).

The devilish trickiness of the plot is kept largely under wraps until late on – Soze isn’t even mentioned until nearly halfway through the film – and the film’s confident misdirection suggests this might just be the gang aiming too high and getting burned rather than a shadowy mastermind manipulating it all. It’s a brilliantly judged change of pace, and all part of the impish delight of the film. It’s a clever game, but has more than enough force and invention in its story telling to keep you gripped time and time again. McQuarrie and Spacey won Oscars – and the film hinges so much on Spacey’s ability to both tell an anecdote and also not push his acting lame – and the film lives on forever in the memory as one of the finest twists. But it does so because the twist grows so organically from the film, and the film’s delight in tricking you is completely infectious.

Hustlers (2019)

Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez head out to get what they want in Hustlers

Director: Lorene Scarfaria

Cast: Constance Wu (Destiny), Jennifer Lopez (Ramona Vega), Julia Stiles (Elizabeth), Keke Palmer (Mercedes), Lili Reinhart (Annabelle), Lizzo (Liz), Cardi B (Diamond), Mercedes Ruehl (Mama), Wai Ching Ho (Destiny’s grandmother)

Greed. To many people, it’s what powers society. Those at the top believe anything can be bought, that they can have anything and everything they want simply because they have the money to pay for it. Hustlers suggests that nowhere is this more true, than in a New York strip club. The rich and the powerful, the masters of the universe, descend on these clubs for their after-hours play and assume their ocean-like wallets will open every door for them. Can we blame the strippers if they decide to exploit this for their own gain?

Opening in the build-up to the financial crash of 2008, Dorothy aka Destiny (Constance Wu) arrives at Moves, a prominent New York strip club, the night-time spot of choice for the super-rich from Wall Street. Money flows liberally in return for the strippers’ performances and their stroking of these masculine egos. Destiny comes under the wing of the club’s star, Ramona Vega (Jennifer Lopez), who teaches her how to manipulate men for cold hard cash. But when that financial crash comes, both women find themselves out of work. In the new atmosphere, the clubs are now staffed by dancers from Russia willing to go further with the men for money. Thrown back together, Destiny and Ramona start a new hustle – target rich men in clubs, get them drunk (and later just simply drug them), drag them to Moves and max out their cards (with the ex-dancers taking a healthy cut). But as the strippers themselves become rich, they start to get greedy. Things aren’t going to end well…

Sharply and wittily directed, Lorene Scarfaria’s film is an excellent crime movie with a little bit of social commentary thrown in. Fast paced and done with just the right amount of flash, it brilliantly rejigs the usual lens that we see strippers through in Hollywood movies. Rather than clichés, hookers with hearts of gold or props for the male characters, here the strippers are real, rounded people working a job – a job that just so happens to involve taking their clothes off. There may be fun to be had at times, but it’s a performance, a show – and a large part of Ramona’s skill is to effectively and convincingly play what she knows the men want to see.

That’s what Scarfaria’s film shows – it’s all a careful hustle, a clever series of tricks and techniques used by strippers to minimise the amount of contact with the customers (and the indignities of their lecherous hands) and maximise cash return, over the longest period of time possible. And these rich Wall Street types are too arrogant and convinced of their own excellence to even notice. The men come out spectacularly badly, a bunch of leering assholes who believe money gives them the right to do anything they like. Scarfaria shoots this with a snazzy Scorsese-ish zing which makes the entire film bounce along like a light version of Goodfellas and Wolf of Wall Street.

And the film has a great deal of admiration for these women who decided to turn the tables – who dealt with the fact that they were basically trapped into a certain role by society by using their skills to steal from the rich. The scheme of conning men is perfect at first – after all what powerful man is going to want to say that he was drugged and fleeced by a gang of attractive women? What is interesting is that the greed that corrupted the men, is gradually the thing the corrupts the women as well: the more successful their scam is, the richer they become, the more they become obsessed with status symbols, just as the men treated them. It doesn’t take long for crime to start moving on from its original Robin Hood targets into something far more indiscriminate.

Leading that charge into hitting any and every target for as much as they can get (rather than a careful but continual fleecing of a select group) is Jennifer Lopez’s Ramona. This is the role Lopez has been waiting almost twenty years for, a charismatic woman so firmly in control of her own life she doesn’t even notice when it starts to hit the skids. It’s the sort of scene stealing role that demands the energy and personality Lopez can bring to it, Ramona being part mentor and mother and part greedy livewire. If you forgot what a promising actress she was in the 90s, this is a great reminder. Ramona is a force of nature, the woman who demonstrates sex is a tool that can produce fabulous, fortune making results. But she’s arrogant enough to let greed and her innate belief in her own infallibility guide many of her decisions.

Lopez also forms a wonderful partnership with Constance Wu in the “Ray Liotta” part of the young naïve innocent, drawn under the mentor’s wings who eventually has to turn against her. Wu draws a lot of charm out of the young stripper learning the ropes, but crosses this really well with an ambition and ruthlessness that only late on finds its limits.

Hustlers bounds along telling a winning, crowd pleasing story with a depth and emotional force that produces great results. We root completely for its female leads, keeping them relatable even when their actions become less sympathetic. Strikingly directed by Lorene Scarfaria, it’s a film about women that makes themselves firmly the authors of their own destinies – and their own mistakes.

The Third Man (1949)

Orson Welles is the dark heart of The Third Man

Director: Carol Reed

Cast: Joseph Cotton (Holly Martins), Alida Valli (Anna Schmidt), Orson Welles (Harry Lime), Trevor Howard (Major Calloway), Paul Hörbiger (Karl the porter), Ernst Deustch (“Baron” Kurtz), Erich Ponto (Dr Winkel), Siegried Breuer (Anna), Bernard Lee (Sergeant Paine),Wilfrid Hyde-White (Crabbin)

It’s regularly held up as one of the cornerstones of classic 1940s film-making – and it has frequently won polls of the Greatest British Films of all time. Does The Third Man live up to expectations? No it excels them. I doubt there has been a film more perfectly assembled than this, one where all the component parts click together to make one perfect whole. No matter how many times you see The Third Man, it weaves its spell every time.

In immediate post-war Vienna, the city is divided into four zones, each run by a different great power (the UK, US, France and USSR). The black market is rife between the zones. Into this city arrives pulp Western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), here to visit his old school friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) – only to find on arriving that Lime died in a traffic accident, with British policeman Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) insisting that he was a black marketeer. Holly can’t believe Harry was a crook, and decides to investigate himself – on the way falling in love with Harry’s girlfriend Anna (Alida Valli) and finding that nobody’s story on what happened to Harry matches up. Could the accident actually be a murder?

Carol Reed’s atmospheric film is beautifully, perhaps flawlessly directed – so well made that for years there were fevered efforts to assign its brilliance to Welles himself. Which was studiously unfair to Reed, a director at the top of his game in the 40s. The Third Man was the crowning glory of a run of superbly stylish thrillers that matched thought provoking themes with striking film-making. The film is soaked in the atmosphere of post-war Vienna, a city half shelled out of existence. The film was shot on location, and Reed’s camera captures the “bombed about a bit” shambles of the city, its long shadows, cobbled streets and mysterious alleys.

The Third Man’s filming style also plays into this truly distinctive look. Working with (Oscar-winning) cinematographer Robert Krasker, the film is shot with a luscious almost German impressionistic style, with murky shadows and noirish lighting. Reed uses huge numbers of Dutch Angles to constantly present both this shattered city, and it mysterious story, from disconcerting angles. This visually represents the uncertainty and mystery that drip from every scene, making Vienna look like some sort of sinking ship, disappearing into a mire of crime and guilt. Reed’s camera fills the edges of the frames with tramps, beggars, the dispossessed and the plain scared – a brilliant snapshot of post-war Europe unsure about the future and ripe for exploitation.

The film looks simply stunning, with Reed’s visuals throwing up images that have stuck in film heritage, from fingers poking through a sewer grill, to the iconic entrance of Harry Lime itself (possibly the most famous entry ever). Shadows loom with gigantic proportions over the streets. A final sewer chase seems to take place in a nightmare world of water, false turns and foreboding architecture. And that final shot! Sublime cinema, the stillest shot in the film, and also a superb capturing of the film’s themes of loyalty, duty and betrayal.

The film was scripted by Graham Greene, and occupies a wonderful corner of Greene-land. His original concept was for Holly (or Rollo in the original script) and Harry to be British public schoolboys – a plan rejected when Hollywood co-funding came to call – but it did allow Holly to be transformed into a naïve American, lost in the cold realities of post-war Europe. Holly believes in the world of black and white, and writes stories where good triumphs over evil in the Wild West. He’s adrift in a Europe where everyone lies habitually, morality is flexible, and nothing is as it seems.

Holly is bound by old chains of loyalty to Harry – but how far does that loyalty stretch? What price personal loyalty when confronted with the impact of what a person has done? Joseph Cotton’s performance is pitch perfect, a middle-ranker who has orbited his whole life around brighter stars like Harry. How one-way was the relationship? Can Holly ever think for himself?

And is the right thing to do to walk away or try and correct the wrongs done by another?This divide is shown in the relationship between Cotton’s Holly and Alidi Valli’s sensational turn as Harry’s ex-girlfriend. A woman who has seen the harshness of the world, and been through a war-torn life that Holly would struggle to even comprehend, she’s a woman to whom personal loyalty trumps all things. Should you be loyal to the man you know, your experience of him – or do you have a higher loyalty that trumps that? Anna is firmly of the belief that she knows all that she needs to know of Harry and she needs to learn no more. It’s the sort of European post-war compromise that Holly can’t adapt to, the ideas of morality becoming mired in shades of grey.

It’s a world he struggles to adapt to, but is a cold hard reality for Trevor Howard’s Major Calloway – a superb performance of cool reserve that hides a strong sense of justice. Howard’s wry half-smile and control is perfect for the film, and his disgust at the actions of black marketeers is subtly and brilliantly conveyed by both the actor and Reed’s restrained direction – a visit to a children’s ward full of victims of Lime’s penicillin, is notable for leaving everything to our imagination and communicating another loss by showing a Teddy bear being dropped into a box.

And the cause of all this suffering? Why it’s none other than Harry Lime himself. No film ever captured Orson Welles’ impish charm as well as this, his shy grin and air of an enfant terrible turned terrible are brilliantly captured in the boyishly young but demonic Harry. A Mephistopheles placed on earth to tempt men like Holly, Lime argues what do a few people (or dots) here and there really matter in the long run? After all governments sacrifice them all the time – look at Vienna! – why shouldn’t we? What’s the problem? Lime grins and casually outlines a demonic view of the world, casually uses a cheap historical justification or two, and then saunters off never suspecting that he could lose the argument. Like Welles himself, he has all the glamour and magnetism that we could never have, and to live a few moments in his shadow, as Holly and Anna do, is to live a lifetime.

So Holly has to make a choice – the friend he knew, or the strangers he has seen harmed. The film charts the slow passage to making this hard choice, presenting us with a man who refuses to believe his friend could be anything other than the victim of persecution, to the man who is destined to turn him in. With the framework of Carol Reed’s superb filmmaking, it’s still an absolute treat.

And finally, The Third Man is blessed with perhaps the most perfect film score of all time. Recorded by Anton Karas – literally discovered playing the zither on the streets of Vienna – the score is jaunty, lyrical, schoolboyish even but can switch subtly to something quite disconcerting. It perfectly captures the schoolboy bravado of Holly and the childish lack of morals of Lime. As a match with the bombed out Vienna and its rundown, cynical citizens, it’s perfect. Like all things with The Third Man, it just works better than you could ever have hoped.

The Wild Bunch (1969)

William Holden and Ernest Borgnine lead The Wild Bunch into one last adventure

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Cast: William Holden (Pike Bishop), Ernest Borgnine (Dutch Engstrom), Robert Ryan (Deke Thornton), Edmond O’Brien (Freddie Sykes), Warren Oates (Lyle Gorch), Ben Johnson (Tector Gorch), Jamie Sánchez (Angel), Emilio Fernandez (General Mapache), Strother Marin (Coffer), LQ Jones (T.C.)

SPOILERS: Discussion of The Wild Bunch is pretty much impossible without discussing its ending – but then it does have a pretty famous ending. Well you’re warned…

It’s easy to look back the Wild West with rose-tinted glasses. To remember it as being when the American spirit was at its best and a romance ruled. To basically take the “Wild” out of the picture. Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is all about putting that “Wild” front and centre, a stunning exploration of the closing days of the Wild West that replaces sentiment and nostalgia with violence and a group of men who know nostalgia is just the vanity of hardened, brutal killers.

In 1916 Pike Bishop (William Holden) is the leader of a notorious gang of criminals, ruthless killers all, wanted by the law – and the rail company they have been robbing for years – at any price. Pike’s latest bank job winds up being a trap, with a deadly shoot-out taking place in the middle of a town (with the population lethally caught in the crossfire) as the rail company tries to kill Pike’s crew, their efforts led by Pike’s former partner Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), forced to work against Pike or return to the hellish jail at Yuma. The massacre sees only a few members of the gang survive – Pike, his best friend Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), the Gorch brothers Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector (Ben Johnson), Mexican gun-slinger Angel (Jamie Sánchez) and old-timer Freddie Sykes (Edmond O’Brien). The gang flees to Mexico, with Deke and his posse dispatched on their heels by the furious railway company. In a Mexico ripped apart by civil war, the gang are hired by would-be warlord General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) to hijack guns from the American army – but there are other dangers when Angel has friendly contacts with the Mexican revolutionaries.

Peckinpah’s film is a stunning exploration not only of the dying dreams and way of life of old men in the West – Pike, Deke, Dutch and Freddie are all old men while the Gorch brothers are hardly in the first flush of youth – but also the endemic nature of violence. Peckinpah’s film is unfailingly brutal in its depiction of violence, an infection that runs through every level of society. Everyone from the children – the film opens with a gang of children laughingly feeding two scorpions to a mass colony of ants, before setting all the animals on fire (look in vain for the “no animals were harmed in the making of this picture” message) – to the men themselves. The film’s opening shoot-out – a technical marvel and also a masterpiece of slow tension building by Peckinpah – is shocking in its brutality.

Unlike Leone, to whom violence is shocking in its suddenness, Peckinpah slows down the action so that we can see (and feel) the horror of each bullet. The Wild Bunch set some sort of record – in its final shoot-out sequence – for blood squibs used. It’s not a surprise after watching the opening shoot-out between the Bunch and the railway forces. With the Bunch using a passing Temperance march to cover their retreat, bullets are fired indiscriminately, killing passers-by and men from both sides alike. No one, aside from a furious and appalled Deke (the only character who has suffered himself from violence in prison) expresses a moment’s guilt for this massacre.

But then Pike and the bunch are hardened killers to a man. Pike cares nothing for the members of the gang lost – even forgetting until late on that he left a man guarding the bank staff while the gang rode out of town – and when a wounded survivor can’t ride and agrees that Pike should finish it, he doesn’t pause for a second. Any ideas of these men as being rogues or there being any charm to living a life on the margins of the law are rapidly dispelled.

And this violence isn’t just an American thing – it dominates life in Mexico as well, where the drunken, bullying General Mapache is a brutal would-be dictator, whose soldiers frequently terrorise, steal from and murder the villagers around them. In Mexico, the gun is law even more than the US, and these guys have even closer to being criminals in uniform, just as Deke’s posse could just as easily be working with the Bunch as against them.

So what motivates these men? What is brilliant about Peckinpah’s film is acknowledging that these violent killers may feud and fight, but they are still stretching for some sort of meaning in their life. These are world-weary old men with little to live for, who are trying to work out what – if anything – is left in their lives. And that life has to have some sort of code, some sort of grounding basis, even if everything else is up for grabs. Pike says when you “side with a man, you stay with him and if you can’t do that you’re finished”. It’s a flexible rule for these guys – and they frequently shirk it in the film when events are dangerous – but it’s a code they need to believe they would keep.

It’s that code that comes into play late in the film as Angel falls increasingly foul of Mapache’s anger and whims. It takes the gang a while to stand by it, but when they do it’s also partnered by a sad realisation that for these old men what else is there? Their lives have been ruled by the gun and shoot-out after shoot-out. Peckinpah views the West with no nostalgia, but he understands that men need to view their own lives with nostalgia at times, to understand that they may yearn to point at something and say that was what their lives were for.

And what else is there? Everyone in the film knows it’s over. They’re old men, and the world is moving on and leaving them behind. At one point the gang look on at wonder at a car owned by Mapache, and the Gorch brothers flat out can’t believe in the existence of an aeroplane. The modern world is ending the world of these guys, and Pike knows it: “We need to start thinking beyond our guns” he says at one point, but offers no solutions at all about what that might be. The modern world is the real deadly bullet that’s taking out the gang: in the final shoot-out, the key weapon even turns out to be a modern machine gun, spraying death at a level ordinary shooters can’t even begin to match.

That final shoot-out sees all these themes come together brilliantly. It could almost be a rebuttal of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (released the same year) that sees our heroes captured in romantic sepia freeze frame, charging into certain death against the Bolivian army. Here we effectively see the battle, with additional machine guns and thousands of blood squibs as the Bunch take on Mapache’s army in fury at Mapache’s murder of Sanchez. In a furious shoot-out lasting almost ten minutes, it’s a blood bath as the Bunch mow down dozens and dozens of Mapache’s army while themselves being repeatedly shredded by bullets, adrenalin alone keeping them going. Peckinpah even has the final fatal bullet that takes out Pike coming from a child soldier.

But the Bunch are taking this suicidal last stand because it’s their last – their only – chance to have stood for something, to have a code they stuck by. To stand by their partner and if that means going down in a hail of bullets, at least there is some sort of glory to it. And besides – what else have they got? The modern world has drained all purpose from their life, so why not at the end wordlessly agree to leave behind the greed that has dominated their lives and die for something?

Peckinpah’s film is simply brilliant, fabulously made and brilliantly shot and edited. The cast of pros is simply excellent. Holden’s world-weary faded glamour now leaving only a cold ruthlessness and a wish that he had more to show for it is perfectly partnered with Borgnine’s easy-going sidekick who wants to do the right thing but needs to find the reasons. Ryan is excellent as a guilt-ridden Deke, who finally has begun to understand the impact of violence. The rest of the cast also excel. The Wild Bunch may be the least nostalgia infected Western ever made, a grim reminder that the West really was Wild. But it’s also a stunningly well-made and challenging picture.

In the Heat of the Night (1967)

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger confront racism In the Heat of the Night

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: Sidney Poitier (Virgil Tibbs), Rod Steiger (Chief Bill Gillespie), Warren Oates (Sam Wood), Lee Grant (Mrs Colbert), Larry Gates (Endicott), James Patterson (Purdy), William Schallert (Mayor Schubert), Beah Richards (Mama Caleba), Peter Whitney (Courtney)

A slim, tight thriller with a social message, In the Heat of the Night won Best Picture in 1967, beating out Bonnie and Cyde and The Graduate (both films with a revolutionary impact on films making) as well as another Sidney Poitier starrer, the even-more message heavy Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. An unflashy, cleanly made, efficient film, In the Heat of the Night is in some ways a surprising winner – but the shocking depiction of racism in the Deep South at the time still hits home today.

In Sparta, Mississippi a wealthy industrialist from Chicago is found murdered in the street. Who committed the crime? Well surely it’s the well-dressed black man with a wallet full of money waiting to get out of town at the train station. The man is hauled in – only for him to reveal he is an expert homicide detective from Philadelphia named Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier). Tibbs is sucked in to assist local police chief Gillespie (Rod Steiger) to investigate the crime, partly on the order of his boss, partly due to his disgust at the police department’s racism and incompetence, and partly at the pleading of the victim’s widow (Lee Grant) who recognises him as the best officer for the case. But will Tibbs’ expertise crack the case in a town where the idea of a black man in a suit, asking questions and taking no shit, is a still a surefire recipe for a lynching?

Nominally In the Heat of the Night is a murder mystery, but you’ll be hard pushed to remember much about the case after you finish the film. The eventual killer emerges from left field and the steps of the investigation are often unclear. While the film is trim, it does mean the tension around the killer’s identity never really builds up and we never get a real sense of the personality of the suspects (apart from the uniform racism).

Where its real strength is, is in the mis-matched “buddy” movie structure of two men forced to work together, the difference being that both casual and violent racism underpins every interaction Tibbs has in the town. Poitier was seen as a calm and graceful figure, but In the Heat of the Night finally gave him the chance to mix dignity with resentment and anger that had never been seen in a black character on screen before. The film works due to Poitier’s inherent toughness, his lack of compromise and anger at injustice. Poitier was never more hard-edged, defiant and determined to get what he deserves. Unlike Poitier’s other racial buddy movie The Defiant Ones, you can’t imagine Tibbs jumping off the train to freedom to try and save Tony Curtis.

Tibbs isn’t just the smartest, toughest policeman on the screen – he demands to be treated like it. The film’s most famous scene – and shocking at the time – is during Tibbs’ questioning of genteel racist Endicott in his orchid greenhouse. Endicott – whose home resembles nothing more than a plantation, loaded with black workers – is well spoken but inherently racist, and slaps Tibbs when his questions go on too long – only to immediately receive a backhand from Tibbs in return. Endicott is as shocked as audiences were – the idea of a black man striking back was on unheard of.

It’s terrifying and sickening to realise however that the American South at the time was genuinely like this. The slap is a proud moment – but it marks Tibbs for retribution. There is a genuine danger Tibbs will get lynched in this film (twice he narrowly escapes murder at the hands of a gang of furious rednecks). In real life, Poitier was very hesitant to film in the South, and for the brief location shooting in Tennessee slept with a gun under his pillow. The film is littered with casually dropped racial slurs, the politest of which is “boy”. It leads to the famous line from Tibbs that back home “they call me Mister Tibbs” – but you forget that it follows from Gillespie asking him what an n-word copper is called in Philadelphia. And even after that Gillespie only calls him Virgil, as if still not quite able to compute the idea of a black man who can be a “mister”.

The relationship between Tibbs and Gillespie is the heart of the film. And the film is brave to not have this turn into “they were opponents but then they became the best of friends”. Instead there is a sort of grudging respect that grows, even though Tibbs clearly thinks Gillespie is an impulsive racist and Gillespie thinks Tibbs is a stiff-backed but brilliant n-word. Rod Steiger won the Oscar for Best Actor, and he does some fine work as the complex Gillespie. Keeping his explosive energy in check (despite the inevitable outbursts), Steiger sketches out a character who is smart enough to know he isn’t smart enough, who can respect Tibbs’ professionalism and understand on some level that racism is beyond all sense but still drop racial words with an instinctive ease.

Steiger’s Gillespie is a tough-talking, stereotypical cop but he’s also got a sad little hinterland – a late dinner at his home with Tibbs has him confess that Tibbs is his only guest for years – and while he arrests no fewer than three innocent people for the crime, there is no doubting his dedication to justice. Steiger doesn’t apologise for Gillespie’s appalling attitudes, but also does enough to suggest that his racism is learned rather than innate. While never completely sympathetic, especially today, the film lays hints of hope that a racist cop from the South could work side-by-side with a black officer – and that was considerable progress at the time.

But it’s Poitier’s movie, and while in many ways he has the simpler part (and Poitier generously ceded his admiration for Steiger’s skill and craft pushing him to a level he felt he not reached before), Tibbs is the centre of the film. Jewison skilfully shoots Poitier as always the outsider, from his looks and Sherlock Holmes style skills, to the way the camera focuses on his hands touching things – from dead bodies to door knobs – to the visible discomfort of the white men watching him. Tibbs may be arrogant but he’s right and Poitier’s refusal to compromise or offer any concessions is a striking thing – Tibbs is who he is and he won’t change a thing to be accepted by the white man. At the end, he may respect the steps Gillespie has taken – but I doubt he’d consider the man a friend and certainly not a professional equal.

In the Heat of the Night is still shocking for the openly displayed racism and menace of violence that black people faced in the Deep South in sixties America. Jewison’s film is efficiently assembled and tightly edited – not a single minute is wasted in one of the shortest Best Picture winners ever – and while its mystery is little to write home about, its portrait of racism in America is still shocking and stirring and its two lead performances are things to linger in the memory.

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Malcolm McDowell burns up the screen in Kubrick’s masterful but cold A Clockwork Orange

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Malcolm McDowell (Alex DeLarge), Patrick Magee (Mr Frank Alexander), Michael Bates (Chief Guard Barnes), Warren Clarke (Dim), Adrienne Corri (Mrs Mary Alexander), Carl Duering (Dr Brodky), Paul Farrell (Tramp), Clive Francis (Joe the Lodger), Michael Gover (Prison Governor), Miriam Karlin (Catlady), James Marcus (Georgie), Aubrey Morris (PR Deltoid), Godfrey Quigley (Prison Chaplain), Sheila Raynor (Mum), Madge Ryan (Dr Branom), Anthony Sharp (Minister), Philip Stone (Dad)

For decades, A Clockwork Orange was unseen in Britain. After a number of copycat crimes led to a backlash, Kubrick – who had complete control over the rights of the film in the UK, his adopted country – essentially refused to let the film be shown anywhere in the country during his lifetime. This gave Clockwork Orange a sort of mystique for UK audiences that it has only slowly worn off, the air of the banned product, impossible to see other than through a dodgy knock-off or by travelling to another country. Released from the vaults this century, the film still carries a chilling pull, even if it’s a compelling but still muddled piece of intellectualism.

Adapted faithfully from Anthony Burgess’ novel, the film follows the life of violent young man Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell), leader of a gang of street thugs who delight in evenings of “ultra violence”, with a bit of “the old in-out” thrown in for good measure. Which, in the invented Ingsoc style dialogue Burgess came up with, basically means Alex is essentially a psychotic rapist, albeit one with a huge degree of anti-authoritarian charm and cheek. Alex’s crimes eventually catch up with him however, whereupon he is imprisoned and volunteers for what he assumes is an easy option: an experimental psychiatric aversion treatment, designed to make him incapable of taking parts in acts of violence and sex. Released back into the world, Alex finds it and himself unchanged – the only difference being that violence makes him feel sick, which is poor defence as he encounters all his victims yet again, all bent on revenge.

Did something about the film scare Kubrick? Was part of his later mixed feelings about the film based around the fact the film is seduced by Alex, that it indulges his awfulness and utter lack of morality and makes points comparing the authoritarian government with the murderer they are trying to deal with. Yes, Kubrick makes clear that Alex feels nothing but pleasure about his awful acts, and the distorted fish-eyed lens he uses to capture much of this really hammers home the awfulness of his actions. But it’s also a film that takes a giddy delight in Alex’s charm and larger-than-life persona, and makes it easier for us to find him an attractive figure.

Of course part of this is through the way Kubrick seizes upon a once-in-a-lifetime performance from Malcolm McDowell, who roars through the film with such giddy power, such perverse force of nature electricity that he never captured it again. McDowell’s impish delight is what powers the film, and Kubrick’s clear admiration for the actor’s improvisation, his pushing of boundaries (the film’s most famous sequence, Alex singing Singin’ in the Rain while assaulting and – off camera – raping a woman, was McDowell’s own improvisation). McDowell’s performance is a magnet, his sneering contempt for authority and his sexy confidence and cultured intelligence makes Alex a character far more attractive than he should be.

And quite possibly to Kubrick as well. The film’s moral force loses some of its direction from the novel, by its skill in presenting in such a bravura way Alex’s horrors and because McDowell charges through the film. Kubrick was always the ultimate technician of film, so it’s not a surprise that A Clockwork Orange is a triumph of style and design; perhaps that is at the heart of its enduring power and impact. Kubrick’s design pushes the film a few degrees into the future from 1971, with a grimy, rundown look at Britain mixed with primary colours and garish 70s design. The look of Alex and Droogs is inspired, the sort of cos-play triumph that was way ahead of its time.

The film wants to make points about morality and free will, but these ideas get lost in the mastery of the film-making and the technical triumph of Kubrick (and John Alcott’s) camerawork. The film makes extensive use of fish-eyed, wide angle lenses that distort the world around Alex, hammering home the ultra-realism of the film. At several points Kubrick uses slow pan outs that go from tight shots to reveal more and more of the world of the film, granting an epic status to this squalid world (and increasing the status of Alex all the more). It’s sublimely made, but this is part of the problem.

The main problem is that Kubrick as a director is all technocrat genius, and no heart at all. He loses himself in what he can do, and forgets what he should do. It’s a film where it’s easy to sympathise with the anti-hero, as no voice is really given to the victims. Kubrick seems able to overlook the horror of the events, in his admiration for the actor and the technique. It muddies as well the questions of morality around the mind-altering control of the state – and these ideas are less thought-provoking than Kubrick might have thought anyway. It wants us to ask if a repressive state that prevents someone from committing violent acts – but does nothing to change their basic personality or desire to change, only forces them to do so – can really take the moral high ground? The film argues not – and the Kubrick’s general misanthropy is focused as much on how violence from one naturally begets violence in others – but this is pretty basic stuff.

Perhaps if Kubrick had invested more time in the reality of moments, to off-set the ultra-realism of Alex’s violence and the epic grandeur of McDowell, the film might have been able to explore this further. We see all of Alex’s victims respond with anger and fury and violence when given their chance for revenge in the second half of the film, but we don’t get a sense of the internal journey that takes them there. What we get is the look of horror (and later the near panicked reaction when he realises he has given shelter to his wife’s rapist) from Patrick Magee’s Mr Alexander, but that’s it. Otherwise, the focus places the victims on the outside of the drama and zooms in on the perpetrator and the government trying to control him.

It makes for a misbalanced film, which fails to make the points you wish it could make. Kubrick’s film is an electric piece of filmmaking, dynamic and skilled behind the camera, but the film lacks the heart it needs to counterbalance its coldness and slightly smug satire. It grips and envelops you when watching it – not least due to McDowell’s genius in the lead role – but it’s not a film that works as well as it should. You admire it and then realise its lack of soul.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

A masterplan goes wrong in John Huston’s crime drama The Asphalt Jungle

Director: John Huston

Cast: Sterling Hayden (Dix Handley), Louis Calhern (Alonzo D Emmerich), Jean Hagen (“Doll” Conovan), James Whitmore (Gus Minissi), Sam Jaffe (“Doc” Erwin Riedenschneider), John McIntire (Police Commissioner Hardy), Marc Lawrence (Cobby), Barry Kelley (Lt. Ditrich), Marilyn Monroe (Angela Phinlay), Brad Dexter (Bob Brannom)

“Doc” Erwin Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) is out of the slammer after seven years, and the self-proclaimed “Professor” of criminal plans has a scheme for one final job. But rather than sell it to the highest bidder, Doc approaches crooked lawyer Alonzo Emmerich (Louis Calhern) to fund the crime and then split the proceeds with Doc. To carry out his robbery on a jewellery safe in a bank, he’ll need a gang including get-away driver Gus (James Whitmore) and Gus’ pal and “hooligan” Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden). But even the best laid plans of criminals can fall foul of events and the basic untrustworthiness of criminals themselves.

John Huston surprised some by turning his attention – Oscar in hand from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – to noir cops and robber’s thrillers, but that was to forget he had made his name with his masterful adaptation of Dashell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. And in The Asphalt Jungle he created a small scale but almost perfect slice of criminalise noir, a brilliantly paced and acted film beautifully assembled that effortlessly chronicles the disastrous fall out of a robbery where it seemed everything was going perfectly.

Huston’s direction of the piece is, as nearly always, superlative. His painterly framing of scenes is dead on the money here, his framing of the actors within the scene absolutely without fault. Huston has an uncanny scene for arranging his actors in the minimum number of shots necessary, reducing dramatically the need for clumsy cut aways. Instead multiple actors are often artfully arranged in the frame, allowing the performers to react in the moment and the camera itself to capture the complete story in one smooth shot. It also allows for some great character intros, not least a shot of the Police commissioner in the background of the frame while foregrounded are the hands of his subordinate Dietrich, nervously fondling his hat. Straight away we get the mood of the scene.

This is all part of the brilliant noirish construction of a film that largely features sympathetic criminals – and it’s clear that the film’s sympathy is with the robbers here, the cops either incompetent, bureaucrats or corrupt themselves – either turning on each other, crumbling under pressure, making rudimentary errors that wind up getting them caught or failing into tragic fates that are left questioning what the point of it all was. This is all superbly caught in the moody darkness and shadows that soak over the picture, and highlighted further by the superb script, that packs some excellent lines and beautiful thematic points throughout the film.

It’s also helped by some great performances. Sam Jaffe (Oscar-nominated) is terrific as the cunning calm and businesslike “Doc” who seems unable to understand why things are not quite panning out as he planned, but is heartily sorry that it’s the case. He at least has honour among thieves, refusing to abandon his fellow criminals and quietly disappointed when betrayal raises its head. I love as well his screamish apology that the crime will involve one “hooligan” – or heavy – since he’s not the sort of guy who likes to resort to messy crimes (no matter that things quickly slide out of hand). He’s the sort of professional who expects everyone to play by the same rules, but that doesn’t stop him having his own private passions, particularly for the fairer sex, that will wind up catching him out.

He’s especially proved wrong since Sterling Hayden’s ‘hooligan’ Dix turns out to be the moral force of the gang, despite his down-on-his-luck scruffiness. Hitting crime as a way to finance his dream of buying back his family’s horse farm – and sadly losing most of that finance on the horses – Hayden is gloomy faced and gruff but has his own clear moral code in an affectingly gentle performance of vulnerability beneath the toughness. Debts and betrayal are anathema to him, and he winds up far more of the decent crook than any of the rest – he’s also the only one of the lot who can hold down a loving relationship, forging a genuinely sweet relationship with Jean Hagen’s Doll. Huston’s sympathies are clearly with the down-on-his-luck Dix, a decent guy who has just lost at life.

Of course the crook they can’t trust is the lawyer, a fine performance of snivelling weasliness under a veneer of culture from Louis Calhern. Puffed up, arrogant but desperate for the money and fundamentally weak and easily led, Calhern is excellent as the money man who only adds to the gang’s troubles, led on by Brad Dexter’s wonderfully impatient and ruthless hired gun. Calhern’s sad air of corrupted authority is only enhanced by his lecherous delight in his lusciously young mistress, a radiant early performance from Marilyn Monroe (shot like a classic painting by Huston).

Huston’s film throws this gang together flies together into a superbly detailed and gripping drama of the planning, execution and dreadful fall out of a robbery that clearly inspired the (perhaps even better) Rififi (so much so that it practically has the same story and structure), The Asphalt Jungle is a fabulously made and written pleasure, unpretentious but wonderful story telling marshalled expertly by a director at the top of his game.