Category: Directors

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Brilliant epic, one of the greatest films ever made – not to mention possibly my all time favourite

Director: David Lean

Cast: Peter O’Toole (T. E. Lawrence), Omar Sharif (Sherif Ali ibn el Kharish), Alec Guinness (Prince Feisal), Anthony Quinn (Auda Abu Tayi), Jack Hawkins (General Edmund Allenby), José Ferrer (The Turkish Bey), Anthony Quayle (Colonel Harry Brighton), Claude Rains (Mr Dryden), Arthur Kennedy (Jackson Bentley), Donald Wolfit (General Archibald Murray), I. S. Johar (Gasim), Gamil Ratib (Majid), Michel Ray (Farraj), John Dimech (Daud), Zia Mohyeddin (Tafas), Howard Marion-Crawford (Medical officer), Jack Gwillim Club secretary)

There is no beating around the sand dune. Lawrence of Arabia is probably my favourite film of all time. It’s also the apogee of David Lean’s career and, arguably, the entire genre of epic film-making. No other epic is as massively, awe-inspiringly grand as this and perhaps no other combines the stunning scale with such intense, fascinating and astute character insight. It’s a film that succeeds on every front and leaves any viewer with such a searing visual impression that, once seen, it’s almost impossible to forget. And, of course, everyone should see it.

It was decades in the making before Sam Speigel and David Lean marshalled it to the screen. Based on TE Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, it’s strikingly modern in that it’s a biography of Lawrence without attempting the full cradle to grave. Instead, told in what it’s easy to forget is interrogative flashback after Lawrence’s death in a motorcycle accident, it focuses exclusively on Lawrence’s (Peter O’Toole) campaigns with the Great Arab Revolt during World War One – but in a style heavily influenced by Shakespeare’s fast-and-loose approach to history, where events drill down into that elusive question: what sort of man exactly was Lawrence? In other words: “Who are you?”

And fascinatingly for a film increasingly misremembered today as some sort of imperialist fan-fare blower or white saviour narrative, the answer is frequently not particularly flattering. In line with his historical self, this Lawrence is a deeply conflicted figure, perfectly captured in Peter O’Toole’s breath-takingly superb performance as a quirky, thoughtful introvert who frequently role-plays as an extrovert barrelling into the limelight. He’s a man capable of staggering insight, devoid of the knee-jerk racism of his fellow Brits. But he’s also a bombastic egotist with a major messianic complex who compares himself to Moses. That’s not even touching on his repressed sexuality, sadism or his deep discomfort at his in-built relish for violence and bloodshed.

Throughout O’Toole treats triumph with a giggling schoolboy relish, then collapse into dead-eyed, silent gloom when grimmer repercussions emerge. It’s a stunning performance, and fascinating figure to set at the centre of a war epic. O’Toole’s Lawrence is handsome, charismatic and a genius – but also fey, camp even, nervous, confident only when he is in control, likely to collapse into nervous giggles when things go wrong. O’Toole also brilliantly conveys the growing darkness and cruelty in Lawrence, shocked and appalled by his excited relish in killing Gasim or his excited anticipation at the slaughter of a group of Turks. It feeds an ego that believes he is above normal men, stunned at the moments when he discovers he is not, that leads him to ever darker determination to prove he can change the world through will alone.

Lean’s film is remarkable in how it presents Lawrence’s achievements with the jaw-dropping marvel they deserve – but also in showing his failures, cruelties, delusions. It’s remarkable how often Lawrence is punctured or bought-down after moments of success – especially as any moment of success has him even further convinced of his own genius. His saving of Gasim in the Nefud desert is followed shortly after by his executing the same man to preserve the fragile peace in his Arab coalition. His conquest of Aqaba is followed by guiding his teenage servant Daud into quicksand. A successful attack on a Turkish train is followed by getting his other teenage servant, Farraj, killed. His almost suicidal pride in entering Derra alone dressed as an Arab, leads to his capture, beating and rape by a perverted Bey (a lip-smackingly sinister cameo from Jose Ferrer, who considered this his finest performance).

Is there an epic film more cynical and critical about British Empire building than Lawrence of Arabia? Away from Lawrence, the Brits are represented by the Blimp-ish Murray (Donald Wolfit in fine form), Allenby (a marvellous Jack Hawkins) who doesn’t let principle get in the way of duty and a duplicitous Dryden (a magnificently austere Claude Rains). Both Allenby and Dryden well understand the game they are playing (with varying degrees of enthusiasm) – help the Arabs, but not too much, bring them together, but not too much, get rid of the Turks put the Brits in their place. Lawrence of Arabia is far from a flag-waver, presenting a cynical, two-faced view of rapacious Empire building. Its even uncomfortably rejected by Anthony Quayle’s endearingly straight-forward Colonel Brighton (who stands out as the film’s most honourable character).

In comparison, the Arabs are seen as perhaps naïve and chaotic, but largely honourable and honest and their campaign for independence and self-government is presented sympathetically (only their most Westernised representative, Alec Guinness’ reserved Prince Feisel, can match Dryden and Allenby in ruthless politics). There is a vibrant genuineness in Arab culture, even if it’s also shown to be as full of bitter hierarchical rivalries between tribes as the British are in their club memberships. Much of this is captured in Omar Sharif’s extraordinary performance as Sherif Ali (a sort of Arab version of Lawrence, both introverted and extroverted), a man of deep principles whose discomfort grows with Lawrence’s increasing wildness.

Lawrence’s unpredictability is what the film circles round to again and again. It’s fascinating both how flawed and unknowable he becomes. You only need to look at his costume: in ill-fitting military outfit, the trousers too short, O’Toole feels utterly out-of-place compared to his comfort in flowing white robes. But those robes become progressively more filthy, transparent and ghost-like the longer the film goes on. Does any other epic lay so bare the complex sexuality of its hero, his sado-masochistic desires (“the trick is not minding it hurts” indeed!), his part-shame, part-excitement about his assault by the Bey, his unmistakeable relish for death?

It’s striking how Lean so frequently frames Lawrence as unseeable: watch the Act 2 train attack, where we see Lawrence from behind, his feet striding along a train and then his body framed with the sun behind him. Or the film’s conclusion that turns him into even more of a ghost, a spectral figure behind a curtain and a jeep passenger almost invisible behind a mud-smeared windscreen. It’s extraordinary visual work to communicate a depth of theme. Constantly, he’s framed as a figure shrinking into the chaos, slipping through our fingers when we think we understand him.

That’s in a film crammed with extraordinary images. “No Arab loves the desert” are true words, but Englishmen do and Lean certainly did. His shooting of this vast panorama of dunes and sand is second to none. Is there a greater shot in history than the slow arrival of Sharif from the wavy mirage mists of the desert? That stands out in a film of extraordinary images: Lawrence’s progress through the mountains; the tracking shot of the attack on Aqaba, that ends on the powerless guns; a train puffing through the desert; even the small moments – Lawrence’s goggles dangling on a branch after his accident is a gorgeously simply, brilliantly evocative image. Everything in Lawrence is perfect technically: John Box’s superb sets, Maurice Jarre’s breathtakingly evocative music; Anne V Coates flawless editing (witness one of the greatest cuts of all time).

But it’s always bought back to the sharp critical eye on its lead, powered by Robert Bolt’s superbly iconoclastic script and Lean’s directorial discipline. This is a film that mirrors Lawrence’s playful dance in his new robes, stopping to admire himself in the reflection of his dagger with Lawrence, 90 minutes of screentime later, echoing the gesture to stare in horror at his blood-soaked clothing. That makes its last military action not the capture of Damascus, but Lawrence’s brutal massacre of retreating Turks at Tafas. Which ends with its hero covered in failure and sent packing as an awkward figure in the new age by both sides.

It’s a huge thematic complexity that gives Lawrence the chance to cement itself as one of the greatest films ever made. With its matchless technical brilliance, it brings a sharply insightful, critical eye to its lead and resolutely refuses to indulge in any hero-worship at all. It brings great depth and passion to its portrayal of the Arab people (I will grant Guinness’ casting today is unfortunate – less so with Quinn who was always ethnically ambiguous and is knock-out, charismatically brilliant), showing them as warts and all but rejecting the temptation to present them as a noble but simple people, but instead of a rich, non-Westernised culture forced to play by someone else’s rules. Lawrence marshals this while constantly leaving us questioning and changing our mind about the lead character, so superbly bought to life by O’Toole you could make a case for it as one of the greatest performances of all time. You can certainly make the case for the film as one of the greatest, a stunningly assembled, wonderfully directed, breathtaking mix of spectacle and character study that rewards the viewer every single time they see it.

The Last Laugh (1924)

A hotel doorman faces despair, in this fluid piece of film-making brilliance from Murnau

Director: FW Murnau

Cast: Emil Jannings (The doorman), Maly Delschaft (His niece), Hans Unterkircher (The manager), Georg John (The night watchman), Max Hillier (The bridegroom), Olaf Storm (Young guest), Herman Vallentin (Guest with pot belly)

Released in Germany as the Der Letzte Mann, it became The Last Laugh in English-speaking cinema to avoid confusion with a long-forgotten silent comedy The Last Man. Having its title stolen seems very appropriate for Murnau’s masterpiece, a masterfully simple morality tale by Carl Mayer. The Atlantic Hotel’s doorman (Emil Jannings) is the highly respected master of his neighbourhood. All that changes when, due to his advancing age, he is stripped of his position and demoted to cleaning the basement toilets. Humiliation piles on humiliation as word of his new position spreads.

It’s a simple story, in many ways little more than anecdote or an Aesop’s fable of pride before a fall. But you can see it as having universal force, and a particular relevance to its time and place. The doorman, with his ramrod back, carefully manicured moustaches and, above all, his grand uniform emblazoned with epaulettes and tassels, looks like some sort of Field Marshal. He certainly behaves like one, walking through his neighbourhood like it’s a parade ground, dishing out salutes and accepting deference from all and sundry. He’s the puffed-up symbol of pre-War Germany, overwhelmingly certain of his position and obsessed with the ephemera of his office.

All that gets stripped from him in seconds, as he is bluntly called into an office, passed a note by a distracted manager informing him his glory days of greeting guests are over. His uniform is practically torn from him – a button falling from his coat and landing on the floor, a beautiful little moment of visual degradation – and he becomes a stooped, scruffy, shambling old man dressed in a non-descript white jacket. From Kaiser, he’s now the downtrodden and humiliated Versailles Germany, stripped of empire and reduced to passing a towel to guests for coins.

It’s a beautiful little metaphor for a whole country, captured in the collapse of status of a single man, told with a suggestive lightness that makes it universal. It becomes a domestic tragedy could be about anyone, anywhere – and the fact it is a perfect fit for post-war Germany is a happy marriage. Another happy marriage is the casting of Jannings. No actor in history embraced humiliation and masochism as much as Jannings. He eases into his old age make-up like a seasoned ham, his body shrinking and collapsing into a timid stoop. Jannings is left in near catatonic shock at his demotion, then desperately clings to a fantasy of preserving his status outside the workplace, all while he becomes increasingly dishevelled.

The Last Laugh presents this within a gloriously inventive, technically superb version by FW Murnau, working closely with cinematographer Karl Freund. Murnau’s desire to let the visuals do the storytelling sees The Last Laugh almost completely shed any on-screen captions (bar a few close ups on a letter, a newspaper and a final ‘note from the author’). Instead, the story unfolds perfectly and gloriously in images alone, the twists and turns expertly unfolding with perfect clarity.

On top of which, The Last Laugh is awash with cinematic verve. From its opening shot, a pacey tracking shot that reaches the hotel lobby via the lift and then pans through the lobby to the doorman, Murnau makes the camera mobile and engaging. The Last Laugh makes use of several crash zooms to accentuate points, be it shock (a zoom in to the face of the doorman’s housekeeper when she discovers the truth), foreboding (a zoom into the exterior of the hotel and its new doorman), to ironic glory (a diving crane shot that pulls into a trumpeter on the street whose music invades the doorman’s drunken fantasies), it’s a film of dynamic movement.

Murnau also uses doors, fittingly, as a neat visual metaphor. Repeated shots framed through the hotel’s revolving doors hint at the circular nature of fortune that its lead character discovers only too harshly. The doorman’s dismissal is shot from outside a pair of glass doors, the divide separating the shell-shocked doorman from his distracted manager. The door down to the basement toilet, swings shut with the finality of some sort of Dante gateway, leading to the gloom below. Doors appear throughout to separate or trap characters, especially the doorman. And in his fantasy, the doorman pictures himself guarding a revolving door so tall it would dwarf the hotel.

The doorman’s fantasies are another moment of influential cinematic invention. Hearing music in the street, after holding court during his niece’s wedding (dressed in a stolen uniform), the hungover doorman day dreams of being restored to his position. As his head bobs and sways, stationary in the frame, the room around him spins and rotates. Bleary, superimposed fantasy shots intrude as the doorman sees himself restored to glory in the foyer, lifting and juggling singlehanded the massive luggage crate he had been unable to pick up earlier.

The same swirling super-imposed images haunt the doorman when the truth of his demotion becomes known. He imagines a whirling collection of laughing faces, delighting in his humiliating fall. His final fate sees him escorted, late at night, to the bathroom by a kindly night watchman (Georg John), ending sitting against the wall framed in a pool of light, like a condemned man facing a never-ending sentence.

Or is he? Really the film should stop at the 80-minute mark, because there is no coming back from this – only a long trudge towards death. But the money men felt, “Mein got! that’s a bit depressing!”, so we get our first proper caption telling us that, unlike in real life, the author will provide a happy ending. So, the doorman inherits a fortune from an eccentric millionaire, becomes a guest at the hotel and is restored to all his former glory and then some. It’s a crazy ending, framed by Murnau in a comedic fashion (tellingly, the guests all continue to laugh at the doorman behind his back), but at least gives the doorman some sense of closing dignity.

Is it needed? Probably not. And, to be honest, it’s probably better to stop at that 80-minute mark, for all the cinematic invention that continues in that coda. But there is no denying that The Last Laugh is a virtuoso piece of film-making, crammed to the rafters with flair and invention, superbly directed and shot and with a towering performance of puffed-up pride turned shambling shame by Jannings (just the right side of hammy). It’s a film that stands as a milestone of cinema as a visual language.

Five Star Final (1931)

Overlooked gutter press drama, a bit melodramatic, but with strong performances

Director: Mervyn LeRoy

Cast: Edward G. Robinson (Joseph W Randall), Marian Marsh (Jenny Townsend), HB Warner (Michael Townsend), Anthony Bushell (Philip Weeks), George E. Stone (Ziggie Feinstein), Frances Starr (Nancy (Voorhees) Townsend), Ona Munson (Kitty Carmody), Boris Karloff (T Vernon Isopod), Aline MacMahon (Miss Taylor), Oscar Apfel (Bernard Hinchecliffe), Purnell Pratt (French), Robert Elliott (Brannegan)

The cynical newspaperman was a popular genre of the 1930s, most famously The Front Page (largely due to its wildly popular offspring His Girl Friday). Five Star Final (the title refers to a famous gutter press font), adapted from Louis Weitzenkorn’s hit Broadway play. Weitzenkorn was a former editor of New York Evening Graphic, a paper so prurient it was known as the “porno-Graphic”. Proving no one is more keen on their work than a poacher turned gamekeeper, Weitzenkorn’s play is a vicious attack on a newspaper industry that couldn’t give a hoot about the impact of its actions so long as its selling hundreds of thousands of copies daily into the hands of a muck-raking public.

Five Star Final’s hero feels like an idealised self-portrait of Weitzenkorn. Joseph W Randall (Edward G. Robinson) is editor of the New York Evening Gazette, a gutter-press rag which, with weary baby-steps, he has tried to drag up market for years much to the objection of publisher Bernard Hinchecliffe (Oscar Apfel), who firmly believes that salacious stories (with dubious, hypocritical moral angles) about sex and violence is what the people really want. Randall agrees to go muck-raking, dragging back into the limelight Nancy Voorhees (Frances Starr), a stenographer acquitted twenty years ago of killing the no-good boss who impregnated her. Nancy is now married to Townsend (HB Warner), who has raised her daughter Jenny (Marian Marsh) as his own. Jenny is about to marry scion of wealth Philip (Anthony Bushell) and is utterly unaware of the time bomb Randall is about to explode in their lives – with tragic consequences.

Five Star Final is, in many ways, interesting and engaging than The Front Page, even if it takes its story of journalistic ethics relentlessly seriously. It’s view of the newspaper industry is devoid of any hope for journalistic ethics. The paper reports events with a devil-may-care salaciousness using splashes sensationalist headlines without any care for their impact. Hinchecliffe and his staff are utterly unconcerned about morality, or indeed any higher calling to their trade: their focus is solely on circulation. They’re not alone in this – their rival papers have taken to literally launching oil-chucking assaults on newsstands selling the Gazette and countless other outlets climb on board the Voorhees story the second the paper drags it back to life.

The staff are, almost to a man, utterly devoid of any sense of shame. Recent recruit, femme fatale turned journalist Kitty Carmody (Ona Munson, on fine morally ambivalent form) is happy to use any wiles to pursue a story, her first instinct when confronting tragedy to demand a photo. She’s but a beginner compared to Boris Karloff’s reprehensible Isopod, his genteel manner the only thing left of his past as a defrocked priest (for seducing various women), now a tipsy sewer-rat who thinks nothing of dressing as a priest to wean embarrassing facts out of the Townsends and barely shrugs at the impact of his actions. The reporters are without any decency. They don’t even have the crack-a-jack wit of their compatriots in Front Page: you don’t enjoy spending time with them you just want to shower afterwards.

But perhaps even worse, in a way, is Robinson’s Randall – because he knows what he is doing is wrong, wrong, wrong (in case we miss this, we are repeatedly shown Randall washing his hand’s Pilate-like, in sudsy guilt-shedding). In one of his finest performances, Robinson nails the acid-sharp patter, but also his self-destructive embracing of his trade’s worst aspects: his arrogance and ability to beat down his own conscience being his Achilles heels. Robinson’s complex performance implies Randall so disgusted with Hinchecliffe and his ilk, he wants to demonstrate their moral vileness by spinning the paper even deeper. And he does it all from a position of believing he’s better than everyone around him (“put me on a cigar box and I’d be above our readers”), while his actions show him as morally bankrupt as the rest.

The moral cut-and-thrust of the newspaper world dominates the film. LeRoy gives it some real visual interest, from the opening shots of the phone operators taken from ‘inside’ the exchange (their bodies framed through wires) to the skilful split-screen effect used for later phone calls. By comparison, it’s very easy to see the domestic bliss-turned-tragedy in the Townsend home as from a far more theatrical, melodramatic film. Much of this is shot and played with a slightly hokey, home-spun sentimentality – while Frances Starr, in particular, is prone to the sort of middle-distance starring that wouldn’t seem out of place in a matinee.

But you can excuse it for the surprising power of the restraint LeRoy stages a late-act tragedy in the Townsend home, all filmed with use of shadows, implication and shots of agonised hands clutching door frames. HB Warner finds an emotional depth in a man forced to spin personal anguish while Marian Marsh and Anthony Bushell break out of otherwise thankless parts as oblivious lovers to lend real moral force to late outbursts.

But it’s the assault on the gutter press – literally so in the final image of the film, that sees a copy of the Gazette, smeared with mud, washed down a drain – that powers the film. It’s done with a real outrage, that you feel stemmed from Weitzenkorn’s self-loathing. The film relies on the excellence of Robinson’s restrained performance of moral ambiguity (he also has a lovely interplay with his Jiminy Cricket, Aline MacMahon’s secretary) to stop it being a little too shrill and insistent (which it still is at points), but as an impassioned cry for some sort of decency in the media you can see the roots of films like Network in it. Definitely worth uncovering.

Mister Roberts (1955)

Dry and stagey version of a theatre hit, that never quite comes to life cinematically

Director: John Ford, Mervyn LeRoy (Ward Bond, Joshua Logan)

Cast: Henry Fonda (Lt Jnr Gd Doug Roberts), James Cagney (Lt Cmd Morton), William Powell (Doc), Jack Lemmon (Ensign Frank Pulver), Betsy Palmer (Lt Ann Girard), Ward Bond (CPO Dowdy), Ken Curtis (Dolan), Philip Carey (Mannion), Nick Adams (Reber), Perry Lopez (Rodrigues), Patrick Wayne (Bookser), Harry Carey Jnr (Stefanowski)

Henry Fonda hadn’t made a film for almost seven years, spending the intervening years collecting garlands on Broadway: and a lot of those were for his over 1,000 performances of Mister Roberts. When the hit play came to the screen, he was the only choice (even if Fonda looked a bit long-the-tooth for a junior lieutenant). Fonda was less than happy with the film – despite its financial success and Oscar nominations – and it’s easy to see why. This is an uneasy mix of awkwardly opened up filmic sweep and stagy set up, with the original’s saltiness watered down to gain Naval co-operation.

Fonda is Lt Jnr Grade Doug Roberts, second-in-command of naval cargo ship Reluctant (known as the Bucket). It’s 1945 and the ship is under the tyrannical command of Lt Commander Morton (James Cagney), a lazy placeman riding Robert’s organised shirttails to career success. That’s why he’s unwilling to grant Roberts’ wish to be transferred to a combat ship so he can do his bit. Roberts is the buffer between Morton and the crew, Morton taking any opportunity he to impose his Bligh-like authority through punishments. How will the power struggle between the two men play out?

The most interesting thing about Mister Roberts is the immense turmoil of its making, burning through no less than four directors. Ford butted heads with Fonda (never the easiest guy in the world), who felt he knew far the material better than Ford. This eventually led to a punch-up and Ford hitting the bottle big-time before he was sent to a sanatorium. Ward Bond took over before Mervyn LeRoy was shipped in. LeRoy claimed to have directed over 90% of the film (allegedly in Ford’s style), before he too was replaced by Logan, the original Broadway director, who only didn’t get the job in the first place because Fonda had also fallen out with him. Logan felt the recut script ripped the heart out of the play and, like Fonda, that the film was not a patch on the original.

This chaos perhaps explains why this feels like such a bland and stagey affair. There is the odd widescreen shot of Reluctant puffing through the seas, or Fonda surveying the panorama. But these are outweighed by static camera set-ups of a sound-stage recreation of the ship. Scenes play out in angles that seem to basically replicate the way they were set on stage (most strikingly, a scene where the crew stare out at the nurses on the island through binoculars – you can almost picture the sailors peering out into the stalls). It’s the worst type of ‘opened-out’ film adaptations, where the opening-out is restricted solely to the odd widescreen shot of a vista while the rest of the film is shot and staged like it’s still in a theatre.

On top of this, Fonda and Logan was probably right that a lot of the play’s energy was lost when its harsher beats were trimmed. It’s not a surprise the saltier dialogue was thrown overboard. But Morton was changed from a Queeg-like bully into a broader, comic character, a ludicrous martinet whose obsession with his palm-tree pot-plant was dialled up to the max. James Cagney gives a broad performance, either frothing at the mouth or fainting away in fury. He’s such an absurd figure, he can’t be seen as a genuine threat, possibly because the Navy could not abide the idea that a bully who placed his own career before his crew’s wellbeing could ever land a command.

It rather mutes the more satirical points about the unpredictability of rigid command structures. You can still see beats of it in the film’s recurrent, slightly bizarre, ‘now hear this’ announcements over the intercom (a surprisingly M*A*S*H-ish touch) or in some of the more mad-cap destructive elements of Lemmon’s slacker Ensign Pulver. Just as the crew’s poor moral and willingness to find ever more obscure reasons to shirk duty might have played more into criticism of the domineering navy regime on stage. Not here.

With a slightly neutered content and flat direction, what Mister Roberts relies on is the strength of its performances. It certainly got a trio of legends and an up-and-comer destined for great things. A very fine Fonda, with that long experience, gives his trademarked decency mixed with a sensitivity for his men and bitterness at his commander. It plays out with an indulgent fatherly regard for his men and a subtle cheek for his captain. His disgust for Morton is tangible as is his emotion at the crew’s regard.

Equally good is William Powell, in his final role, an archly dry commentator on events, as playful forging whisky as he is quietly amused at the crew’s wild attempts to escape their duty. Jack Lemmon Oscar-winning turn as Pulver was an early display of both the manic comic energy, tinged with an adolescent sexual excitement, that he bought to several later roles. But he also manages to find some genuine moments of emotional depth. Cagney blisters in a 2D role, but few do bombast better.

But Mister Roberts frequently feels a little slow and dry, and it’s never quite funny or zany enough for what it’s trying to do. Not surprising, since Ford and LeRoy are hardly anyone’s idea of satirical, screwball directors. When it does go for zany energy, it ends up making its characters look like dicks – the crew’s shore leave (after a year on ship) is clearly meant to be amusing (Fonda gives them a ‘boys-will-by-boys’ smile). But the actions described (trashing an ambassador’s house, ripping clothes off women, turning a dinner party into a brawl) sounds more like drunken louts than charming rogues (hard not to feel Morton isn’t more than a little bit right to be furious).

It says a lot that the broad comedy lands less well than the serious moments – especially as the film’s sudden tragic ending is its most effective moment. The stagy, dry production feels like it has made only the most awkward transition to screen – I suspect Fonda was right to wish more people had seen it on stage than on celluloid.

A Farewell to Arms (1932)

Hemingway hated this lusciously made high romance version of this novel, very well-filmed

Director: Frank Borzage

Cast: Helen Hayes (Catherine Barkley), Gary Cooper (Lt Frederic Henry), Adolphe Menjou (Captain Rinaldi), Mary Philips (Helen Ferguson), Jack La Rue (Priest), Blanche Friderici (Head Nurse), Mary Forbes (Miss Van Campen)

If there was one thing Ernest Hemingway got out of David O Selznick’s A Farewell to Arms it was a lifelong mate in Gary Cooper. Presumably, they agreed never to discuss the film during their boozing sessions, as Hemingway loathed it. Probably because Selznick’s crowd-pleasing version carefully strips out the political and moral themes of Hemingway in favour of ramping up the romance. Of course, Selznick was right that it’s quite a damn big part of the book. But it’s not how Hemingway liked to see it.

In any case, a romance is what we get – and, of course,it’s tinged with tragedy. Lt Frederic Henry (Gary Cooper) is an American serving during the First World War with the Italian Army ambulance corp. Returning to hospital, he encounters English nurse Catherine Barkley (Helen Hayes), herself mourning the death of her fiancée. After an initial bad impression, they start a romance. One that’s hard to sustain across the vast distances of war and the jealous censoring of their mail by Henry’s friend Captain Rinaldi (Adolphe Menjou) who hates his pal losing his head over a woman. When a pregnant Catherine has desperate news, fate conspires to keep them apart.

Hemingway was of course right that this version of his novel was more a tragic romance, rather than the sort of state-of-moral-consciousness story he felt it was. It almost wasn’t even a tragic romance, since Selznick had two endings shot, with the happy ending attacked to many out-of-city screenings. The film still struggled, cut down by ten minutes after its release to meet the stringent requirements of the production code. But I wonder, did Hemingway really prefer the more serious, self-important remake that followed? (Probably not, since he famously told Selznick to shove it up his ass).

At least with this Farewell to Arms he had the rich, imaginative camera work by Frank Borzage. There are several striking tracking shots, as Borzage follows in the wake of characters entering the grand houses converted into hospitals. There is also some gloriously imaginative work where the camera takes the place of Cooper as he is wheeled into hospital on a gurney in a sustained POV shot. Ceilings track past us, faces loom in over the frame and it culminates in an almost completely unclear close-up of Hayes as she looms tightly into shot to inspect him. Combine that with a striking filmic montage that plays out the horrors of combat in one well-edited montage (in addition the very first shot is a corpse on a hill – no doubt war is hell) and you’ve got some striking film-making throughout from a director with an impressive visual eye.

Farewell to Arms also has a perfectly cast lead for Hemingway. Cooper is everything you might want from this novelist’s hero: a man’s man without a shadow of a doubt but, in true Cooper style, also sensitive, innocent and strangely child-like and vulnerable. There is no relish for combat in him, he’s an architect who lingeringly chats about his ideas. He’s got a playful bashfulness with women – few other actors would have made their character seem more innocent when framed playing with a good-time-girl’s foot across a table in a bar. By the end of the film, Cooper genuinely feels like a lost soul, like a big kid waiting for an adult to come along and fix things.

It works particularly well, because it’s important to Farewell to Arms construction that Cooper should never feel like a rogue. It’s only awful circumstances and terrible deeds that keeps him apart from Hayes. Left to his own devices he would have course rushed to her side: the film using this moral fidelity to justify the pre-marital sex the couple engage in. Much of the content more openly addressing this was, of course, snipped in the post-code re-edit – but it’s hard to escape when the entire plot revolves around Catherine being pregnant in the end.

The romance element remains however the primary calling card. Borzage, who often favoured high romance (especially in the face of adversity), clearly felt A Farewell to Arms was made for him. He even manages to work around the vast height difference (nearly a foot!) between Hayes and Cooper (who towers over her in mid-shot). Much of A Farewell to Arms is given over to their courtship and romance: from a muddled first meeting, confusion over a kiss to the warm embraces of Henry’s sick leave under Catherine’s care. Hayes gives a decent performance as Catherine, even if she seems a little more forced and mannered than Cooper’s relaxed naturalness. The increasingly grand tragedy of the film’s closing moments also leads to her leaning in a little too much towards intense stares and breathy line-deliveries.

Perhaps most interestingly though, there is another unspoken romance at the heart of A Farewell to Arms. The adaptation dials up the importance of Adolphe Menjou’s spaghetti-accented Captain Rinaldi. Menjou does fine work as this fun-loving, irreverent surgeon, but by making him the jealous reason for the lovers’ separation, it’s hard not to infer a homoerotic element in his feelings for Cooper’s Henry. Surely, it’s more than friendship that cause Rinaldi to travel across country to treat his friend. It’s hard not to read something into his continued irritated complaints about how ‘unmanly’ Henry is by allowing himself to he wrapped up in a woman, or the casually spiteful way he prevents them writing to each other. There is more than a little of the jilted lover to Rinaldi, a fascinating sub-plot you wish the film could explore more.

Borzage’s film may have been despised by the novelist, but it has some fine moments. Sure it’s romance often seems to fit very naturally into a traditional Romeo and Juliet style-template and its frequently more inspired in its framing than it is in the pace and depth of its storytelling (there is also, as well, a faint lack of chemistry between the stars). But there is a fine performance by Cooper and much to enjoy in its tight, lean frame, even if it never manages to find true inspiration.

The Story of Adele H (1975)

Distanced and measured film that becomes a heartbreaking study of lonely obsession and destruction addiction

Director: François Truffaut

Cast: Isabelle Adjani (Adèle Hugo), Bruce Robinson (Lieutenant Albert Pinson), Sylvia Marriott (Mrs. Saunders), Joseph Blatchley (Mr. Whistler), Ivry Gitlis (The hypnotist), Cecil de Sausmarez (Mr. Lenoir), Ruben Dorey (Mr. Saunders), Clive Gillingham (Keaton), Roger Martin (Dr. Murdock)

In 1863 there was, perhaps, no man more renowned in France than Victor Hugo. Which made it almost impossible to fly under the radar if you were his daughter. But that’s what Adèle Hugo (Isabelle Adjani) wants in Halifax, Nova Scotia, under the name Adèle Lewly. She’s there in pursuit of British army officer Albert Pinson (Bruce Robinson). Adèle loves Pinson truly, madly, deeply – and obsessively, believing he has promised marriage and ignoring his clear lack-of-interest. Adèle is willing to go to almost any lengths, spin any desperate story, burn through any amount of money, debase herself to a desperate degree to marry Pinson, as her own mental health collapses.

Based on Adèle’s own diaries (written in a code deciphered after her death), The Story of Adèle H unpeels the layers of a destructive obsession that has a terrible emotional impact on all involved. Truffaut’s film can seem cold and precise, as chilly at points as its Halifax settings (in fact shot in Guernsey, historically Hugo’s residence at this time after his banishment from France), his camera keeping an unobtrusive distance and slowly, carefully following the increasingly frantic actions of its lead.

But it’s part of Truffaut’s intriguing dance with our sympathies and loyalties. A more high-falutin’ personal drama may well have tipped us more strongly in our feelings about the desperate Adèle or the controlled Pinson. Instead, Truffaut’s film encourages us to see the story from both perspective and unearths a sort of as well as a tragedy in Adèle’s obsessive quest. But it also demonstrates Pinson’s unpleasant coolness and self-obsession, while allowing us to see his life is being destroyed by a stalker.

Of course, part of us is always going to be desperate for Adèle to shed her feelings for Pinson, who feels barely worth the obsessive, possessive desire she feels for him. A lot of that is due to Isabelle Adjani’s extraordinary performance. A young actor (over ten years younger than Adèle), she not only makes clear Adèle’s intelligence (this is a woman who composed music and wrote and red copiously) and her charm, but also her fragility and desperation. Adjani makes Adèle surprisingly assured and certain throughout, independent minded and determined – it’s just that her feelings are focused on a possessive, all-consuming obsession that is undented by reality.

It says a great deal for the magnetic skill Adjani plays this role with, is that we can both be frustrated and even disturbed by her actions but still see her relentless pursuit as (in a strange way) oddly pure. Truffaut twice quotes Adèle writing about the power of a love that will see someone crossing oceans to follow their beloved, and there is a daring bravery to it, a commitment to being herself and following her desires in a world that is still set up to favour of man over woman. It’s also easy to feel sympathy for her at Adjani’s tortured guilt about the drowning of her sister (vivid nightmares of this haunt her) just as the searing pain Adjani is able to bring to the role is deeply emotional.

But that doesn’t change the unsettling awareness we have of the possessive horror of her actions. Adjani’s Adèle is an addict, the shrine in her room she builds to Pinson just part of the self-destructive behaviour of a woman who lies to everyone about her relationship with Pinson and pours every penny of her income into her next hit of trying to win him. Like a stalker she moves from following Pinson around to the streets to ever more extreme actions: spying on Pinson with his new lovers, hiring a prostitute to sleep with him (as both a perverse gift and a bizarre way to control his sexuality), tell his fiancée’s family she’s a jilted pregnant wife, haunt Pinson on a hunt clutching a waft of notes as a bribe while carrying a cushion stuffed up her dress… Her actions become increasingly more and more unhinged – so much so her attempt to recruit a fraudulent mesmerist to hypnotise Pinson into marriage starts to feel like the most sane and reasonable of her plans.

And slowly we realise that Adèle, for all our first feelings towards her are sympathy, is destroying herself just like an addict jabbing another needle into their arm to try and capture her next hit. Her obsession starts to destroy her health, reducing her to a dead-eyed figure walking the streets in an ever-more crumbling dress, refusing to move on, reducing herself to penury but still following Pinson like a ghost. She alienates herself from people, lies to her family, steals money… it’s a spiral of a junkie.

We can wonder what she sees in Pinson – but, like all addictions, that’s hardly the point. It’s almost the point that Robinson’s Pinson is a bland pretty boy. (It’s quite telling that he’s so forgettable, than on arrival in Halifax Adèle even mistakes a random officer – played by Truffaut – as Pinson). Our first impression of him is as a coldly ambitious, selfish fellow, a rake on the chance. And maybe, to a degree, he is. But it’s hard to take Adèle as a fair witness for whatever claims she makes about the promises Pinson makes. And the longer it goes on, the more its hard not to feel for the destructive effect Adèle’s constant presence has on Pinson. It costs him a marriage, his status and nearly his career. Does he really deserve this for being, really, just a rather selfish guy?

The Story of Adèle H takes our perceptions and makes clear how our feelings can shift and become more complex. Because really Adèle’s problem is not that she has been jilted: but that she is clearly not well, her mental health collapsing in front of her eyes as solitude and secrecy feed her lonely obsession. Her obsession is so great that she can acknowledge she both loves and despises Pinson, but not let that dent her unrelenting , irrational determination to marry him. This destroys her life.

In fact, it becomes hard not to feel sympathy for both characters whose lives are scarred by unrelenting self-destruction. And Truffaut’s approach in his filming actually adds a great deal to this, its forensic distance on this terrible affair placing it under a microscope that reveals clearly the nightmare they are both trapped in. Match that with Adjani’s incredible performance, a star-making turn that burns through the celluloid in its intensity, and you’ve got a quiet but subtly moving film that grabs you almost unawares in its emotional force.

Nouvelle Vague (2025)

Endearing, hugely enjoyable, vibrant look at the French New Wave which almost feels like a documentary

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Guillaume Marbeck (Jean-Luc Godard), Zoey Deutch (Jean Seberg), Aubry Dullin (Jean-Paul Belmondo), Bruno Dreyfürst (Georges de Beauregard), Benjamin Clery (Pierre Rissient), Matthieu Penchinat (Raoul Coutard), Pauline Belle (Suzon Faye), Blaise Pettebone (Marc Pierret), Benoît Bouthors (Claude Beausoleil), Paolo Luka Noé (François Moreuil), Adrien Rouyard (François Truffaut), Jade Phan-Gia (Phuong Maittret)

If ever a film was made for film lovers, it might just be Nouvelle Vague. It’s certainly made by film lovers. You can feel Richard Linklater’s adoration for French New Wave cinema drip off the screen. Nouvelle Vague covers the making of A bout de Souffle in such lovingly researched depth and detail it effectively serves as a sort of making-of-film that was never made. The recreation of the time and era and sequences of the film is absolutely spot on. If you’ve ever watched A Bout des Souffle, you will find something here to delight you and make you want to rush out and watch it once again.

Of course, if you are not immersed (or at least vaguely familiar) with the workings of the burst of creativity that sprang from Cahiers de Cinema in the late 1950s and gave fresh life to an entire generation of French filmmaking, then Nouvelle Vague might be a bit impenetrable. For those not in the know, a host of film-loving French writers (all of whom dreamed of making films) created a monthly magazine awash with fascinatingly in-depth filmic analysis, reclaiming directors like Hitchcock, Welles and Ford as major artists and treating cinema as a serious art form.

Its natural then, that Nouvelle Vague is in love with the art of film-making and the often confused and meandering path a film takes to reach the screen. Few could be more meandering than Jean-Luc Godard (brilliantly recreated, in all his studied cool and casual intellectualism, by Guillaume Marbeck), whose style on A Bout de Souffle was to provide the barest shape of each scene and try to capture reality and truth – to see its lead actors, Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and American star Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) react naturally and in the moment in a host of real-life locations.

Nouvelle Vague dives into this with huge enthusiasm and manages to wear its history lesson nature lightly. That’s because Linklater’s film is spy and nimble enough not to wear us down with facts and potted biographies: the dialogue is refreshingly free of people summarising each other’s careers and inspirations. Perhaps Linklater worked out that the film buffs watching – and God, that’s surely most of the audience – are going to know who Truffaut, Rossellini, Bresson, Chabrol, Varda, Resnais et al are already and any newbies can work it out from context. He finds a neat middle ground with each character – and Nouvelle Vague works in practically a who’s-who of French filmic landmark contributors into its slim 90-minute run-time – introduced with a shot of them starring at the camera, their names appearing in caption beneath them.

This tees Linklater up nicely for a wonderful companion piece to Me and Orson Welles: an engrossing look at how a landmark piece of narrative art is created. Nouvelle Vague might have the edge though, because it doesn’t need to introduce any fiction to the story. Instead in its tight focus on the twenty-day shooting schedule for Godard’s first film (shot on the cheap, from a script by friend and rival Truffaut) it finds there is more than enough drama to be had from showing us how making the film went down.

These tensions largely revolve around Godard himself, whose unconventional, vibes-based directing style (he’s as likely to spent a day playing pinball as actually organising a shot) rubs up against his producer de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst), rightly irritated at waste of time and money, while his improvisatory style irritates Jean Seberg (a pitch perfect embodiment by Zoey Deutsch), who wants a clearer script and story. What she doesn’t want is Godard providing her gnomic, cryptic direction, off-camera, between every line she invents in the moment (working to notes, scribbled by Godard that morning), however much she respects Godard’s freshness and spontaneity.

But the most delightful thing about Nouvelle Vague is that, despite the gripes, disagreements and arguments over an intense period of collaboration, it’s also soaked in the love and excitement that comes out of a joint creative endeavour. There are many moments of satisfied, mutual excitement and satisfaction at a job well-done in Nouvelle Vague, and a gloriously warm sense of the respect and support in the French film industry at the time. Linklater’s film is charming, warm and funny when it simply stops and lets us spend time hanging with these people, making a movie that they have a good feeling about (and that we know will become a landmark).

It’s matched by the breathtaking, recreative detail that unpacks how several scenes were captured on camera (they seem to have located every original location!). Godard’s decision to record no sound on set meant the film could be recorded by a shaky, but light, camera that could bob and weave among unknowing Parisian extras, following its characters spontaneous reactions. It’s huge fun to watch Godard sit his cameraman in a wheeled box (to hide him) or see Belmondo (his back to the camera) shout smilingly at passers-by that they are just recording a movie. Linklater lovingly captures how the freshness of scenes, such as Belmondo and Seberg lying in a bedsit, riffing on Bogart films, came about.

Linklater also doesn’t overplay the success of the film – its release and impact is largely told in a few closing captions – and it doesn’t shirk on showing that, for all his genius, Godard could be a difficult and self-important man. Several Godard epigrams are worked into the dialogue, enough for you either to be wowed by his intellect or roll your eyes at his pretension (according to your taste). Instead, he allows the film to focus on the cathartic joy from artistic creation, the camera capturing moments of genuine novelty that would become part of cinematic history in their freshness and vibrancy.

It makes for a genuinely very enjoyable film, with enough energy and joy in it to appeal even to those who have never heard of Godard. And, I must confess, I got another slight jolt of comedy from it by reflecting that if he had ever seen this film, Godard would probably have thought it was nostalgic, soft-soap rubbish.

Romeo and Juliet (1936)

Tediously reverent version, lacking drama and energy with two miscast leads

Director: George Cukor

Cast: Norma Shearer (Juliet), Leslie Howard (Romeo), John Barrymore (Mercutio), Edna May Oliver (Nurse), Basil Rathbone (Tybalt), C. Aubrey Smith (Lord Capulet), Andy Devine (Peter), Conway Tearle (Prince Escalus), Ralph Forbes (Paris), Henry Kolker (Friar Laurence), Violet Kemble-Cooper (Lady Capulet), Robert Warwick (Lord Montague), Reginald Denny (Benvolio) Virginia Hammond (Lady Montague)

In The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Norma Shearer takes part in a comic skit as Juliet alongside John Gilbert, where they play the balcony scene in modern slang. It clearly gave her a taste for the role, since six years later she and powerhouse-producer husband Irving Thalberg bought the play to film for real. And not just any production: this cost north of $2million, hired an army of cultural consultants and was determined to prove Hollywood could do the Bard. It’s bombing at the Box Office (despite Oscar nominations) meant it would be years before Hollywood tackled Shakespeare again.

And you can see why. Decades later, Cukor called it the one film he’d love to get another go at, to get “the garlic and the Mediterranean into it”, by which I guess he means the spice. This production of Shakespeare’s play of doomed love is singularly lifeless, painfully reverential, lacks almost any original ideas, labours several points with on-the-nose obviousness and slowly curls up and disappears into a miasma of uncomfortable actors dutifully reading poetry. Is there any wonder it’s been lost by time?

It’s all particularly sad since it starts with something approaching a bang (once it gets the earnest, classical-inspired credits and list of literary consultants out of the way). Cukor stages the opening brawl between the Capulets and Montagues with a certain pizzazz, missing from almost all of the dialogue-heavy scenes that follow. Perhaps it was felt a dust-up in a lovingly detailed recreation of Verona, with sword fights and slaps, was far less stress for Hollywood folks who saw this as their bread-and-butter?

Either way, it’s an entertaining opening that grandly stages two lavish parades of the rival families arriving in parallel processions to a church, Dutch angles throw things into tension while extras whisper “It’s the Capulets! It’s the Montagues!”. The fight, when it comes (provoked by Andy Devine’s broad Peter, with his whiny, creaking voice and slapstick thumb biting) is impressive, with lashings of a Curtiz action epic, rapidly consuming the whole square in violence. Romeo and Juliet certainly puts the money on screen here – just as it will do later with a costume-and-extras-laden Capulet ball. Briefly, you sit up and wonder if you are in for an energetic re-telling of the classic tale. Then hope dies.

It dies slowly, under the weight of so much earnest commitment to doing Shakespeare “right” that all life and energy disappears from the film. Suddenly camera work settles down to focus on dialogue mostly delivered with a poetical emptiness that sacrifices any beat of character or emotion in favour of getting the recitation spot-on. That extends to the sexless, sparkless romance between our two leads, neither of whom convince as particularly interested in each other, let alone wildly devoted to death.

It doesn’t help that both leads are wildly miscast. It’s very easy to take a pop at them for being hideously too old as teenage lovers (Howard’s lined face looks every inch his forty plus years). But, even without that, both are brutally exposed. Ashley Wilkes is no-one’s idea of a Romeo, and Howard’s intellectually cold readings make him a distant, tumult-free lead it’s hard to warm too. His precision and cold self-doubt make him more suitable for a Macbeth, a thought it’s impossible to shake as he sets about his own destruction with a fixated certainty.

For that matter Norma Shearer would probably have made a better Lady Macbeth. Instead, she makes for a painfully simpering, vapid Juliet. She tries so hard to play young and innocent, that she comes across as a rather dim Snow White (not helped by her introduction, playing with a deer in the Capulet’s garden). Her ‘youthful’ mannerisms boil down to toothy grins and an endlessly irritating constant turning of her head to one side. Rather than making her feel younger, it draws attention to her age. It’s notably how much better she is in Juliet’s pre-poison soliloquy: even if her reading is studied, she’s better playing older and fearful than at any point as naively young.

Truth told, almost no one feels either correctly cast or emerges with much credit: except Basil Rathbone, clearly having a whale of a time as a snobbishly austere Tybalt (it’s joked this was the only time on screen Rathbone won a sword fight, and even then, it was only because Leslie Howard got in the way). Edna May Oliver mugs painfully as the Nurse, C Aubrey Smith makes Capulet indistinguishable from the army of Generals he had played. John Barrymore was allowed complete freedom as Mercutio, but his grandly theatrical gestures, camp accent and overblown gestures (not to mention looking every inch his drink-sodden fifty plus years) feel like he has blown in from an Edwardian stage.

Throughout an insistent score, mixing classical music and Hollywood grandness, hammers home the cultural and literary importance at the cost of drama. It’s combined with an increasingly painful obviousness. Romeo drops a dagger in Juliet’s bedroom for her to use later. Juliet lowers a rope ladder in expectation of an arrival of Romeo she can know nothing about. The Friar literally has a Frankenstein’s Lab cooking up industrial levels of his knock-out potion (what on Earth does he need this for? Investigation needed I think!). Poor Friar John gets a sub-plot we return to multiple times (to make the irony really clear) of being locked up in a plague house (“Hark ye! Help!” he cries, a fine example of the film’s occasional laughable mock-Shakespeare) as the other characters ride back and forth past the house oblivious to his vital news.

The whole production marinates in men-in-tights traditionalism, where the nearest thing approaching an interesting interpretative idea is Mercutio tossing wine up to some prostitutes on a balcony. Otherwise, all the beats you’d expect to see in a school production are ticked off – but done so on sets that cost a fortune, and in some impressive location setting filled with hordes of costumed extras. But it’s presented in a lifeless, passion-free, poetic sing-song; a dutiful homage, that drains all meaning.

Romeo and Juliet feels like a very long film. Any cinematic invention has long-since disappeared by the end (where you are rewarded with a brief burst of expressionist lighting for the Apothecary and a decently moody, shadow-lit sword-fight in the Capulet tomb). It’s replaced with a dry, lifeless, reverential deference to the Bard, as if everyone in the film was either apologising for having the gall to make it or defensively trying to prove they were doing their best. Either way, it doesn’t make for a good film or good Shakespeare.

No Other Choice (2025)

Jet black comedy, that makes strong, entertaining political points while testing our sympathies

Director: Park Chan-wook

Cast: Lee Byung-hun (Yoo Man-su), Son Ye-jin (Lee Mi-ri), Park Hee-soon (Choi Seon-chul), Lee Sung-min (Goo Beom-mo), Yeom Hye-ran (Lee A-ra), Cha Seung-won (Ko Si-jo), Yoo Yeon-seok (Oh Jin-ho)

Technology changes the world, sometimes so much it leaves people behind. That’s the starting point of Park Chan-wook’s dark (very dark!) comic drama, No Other Choice, which looks at the surreally bleak ends sudden unemployment in a changing labour market has on a regular joe who prides himself on being his family’s provider. It takes Parasite and mixes it with Kind Hearts and Coronets, but with the mood dyed jet black and a complex anti-hero who becomes darker the more we learn about him.

That anti-hero is Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a hard-working paper industry supervisor, right up until his new employers follow-up a 25-year loyalty reward with a P45. Because who needs so humans when your factory can be run by a machine? Flash-forward a year later and Man-su is desperate: he can’t land a new job in the reduced paper industry and his wife Lee Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin) is suggesting it’s time to sell the home he spent a decade working to buy. Man-su decides on a desperate new plan: identify his more qualified rivals for a possible vacancy, murder them, then murder paper plant manager Choi Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon) and apply for his job. What could wrong?

This extreme response to feeling irrelevant in a changing world becomes the heart of Park Chan-wook’s black comedy, directed with his customary sharp-edged beauty with images and camera angles that make you want to swoon. It also walks a tight line between portraying Man-su as sympathetic, an (at first) laughably incompetent killer and, increasingly, a deeply flawed, bitterly resentful man, who resolutely refuses to adapt himself in any way to a changing world.

At first of course it’s hard not to feel sorry for Man-su, cast aside like a dirty off-cut from a company he has given his whole life too. No Other Choice takes its title from the cringe-worthy, rent-a-therapy mantra a jaw-droppingly shallow careers advisor pushes a roomful of redundant staff to repeat over and over again. It’s a mantra that stresses their lack of power and also bluntly sums up how they feel about their future: there are sod all real choices out there, only to adapt or die.

That’s certainly what Man-su, a hard-working supervisor respected by his staff, finds a year later. In a beautiful static shot of grinding irrelevance, a year flashes by of Man-su humiliatingly stacking shelves having failed time-and-time again at applications. A parade of humiliation follows: Man-su stripping out of his overalls in front of his unsympathetic (much younger) manager to attend an interview (shot in security camera distance long-shot); Man-su flunking an interview with clumsy answers to obvious questions, squinting at his interviewers sitting in front of a sun-bathed window; the smug father of his adopted son’s best friend offering to buy a house Man-su has poured his heart and soul into, while constantly disparaging it; literally begging outside a bathroom for Seon-chul to read his CV….

Is it any wonder he is overcome with something between resentment and despair? All that hard-earned respect, years of experience and mastery of the intricate details of paper production means nothing. All those promises of working hard and getting your due reward exposed as a puff of bullshit.

Maybe murder is a fair way to deal with this. After all, it’s not really his choice, right? Advertising a job vacancy at a fake company, he collects his rival’s CVs and carefully selects the better qualified to remove them from the jobs market. He then embarks on a life of crime which Park depicts with a haphazard chaos. Man-su is no expert: he needs multiple attempts to even take a pop at his first target, leaves key evidence behind at crime scenes (only chance saves from arrest) and makes a mess of hiding his tracks.

Lee Byung-hun has a gloriously disbelieving look to him, constantly unable to fully process what’s happening to him. Instead, he’s trying desperately to keep up a front that slowly collapses. It’s a brilliant performance, one that keeps us liking Man-su, even as his previously well-hidden dark side bubbles to the surface. Man-su prides himself as a careful, methodical gardener and he applies the same to his family, who he wants to protect and nurture. Each murder sees him crush more and more of this quality in himself: the man who tries to shelter his first victim from his wife’s infidelity, later finds himself comfortable dispatching others with cold-faced, determined ruthlessness.

It’s part of what makes No Other Choice such a genuinely surprising film. It would have been very easy for Park to embrace the dark comedy of Man-su’s Kind Hearts removal of obstacles. You could well imagine a Hitchcockian black comedy version. But what Park does is make us question our sympathies with Man-su. Pride is shown as his major flaw. Despite a multitude of transferable skills, he never considers new careers (something he even berates one of his targets for not doing, a rant clearly aimed as much at himself). He refuses free treatment for his tooth infection from Mi-ri’s charming dentist boss. He doesn’t attempt to change his lifestyle – or outgoings – during unemployment, burning through his redundancy package. He can’t imagine anything other than stepping back into an identical position to the one he has left.

On top of this, he’s an insecure, fragile man. A recovering alcoholic, Mi-ri makes clear when on the booze he was short-tempered, even striking their son. He becomes consumed with jealousy at her friendship with her boss (even, pathetically, asking to smell her underwear to check she has remained faithful). He’s very aware of his poor background and limited academic achievements. It becomes clear his job had grown to define him as a man of worth: without it he’s terrified that he is nothing, for all Mi-ri makes clear she doesn’t feel like this (much like the wife of his first victim makes clear its not her husband’s unemployment that’s the problem, more his drunken, self-destructive, self-pity).

Park doesn’t make it easy with Man-su’s victims. These aren’t comic portraits, but deeply human figures, both of whom are eerie self-reflections of Man-su. Goo Beuom is a tragically self-pitying alcoholic. Ko Si-jo is a devoted father of a young daughter, working over time to try and provide his family. These aren’t comic caricatures we can enjoy watching get bumped off (like multiple Alec Guinnesses) but living-breathing people, touched by tragedy. That’s why Man-su can barely bring himself to look at them when the moment comes.

It’s a darkness that starts running more and more through No Other Choice as Man-su’s determination to regain his status starts to destroy the very things he claims to value most: his family, principles and peace of mind. No Other Choice is fiercely critical of a world of AI-powered industrialisation where human workers are irrelevant: but Chan-wook refuses to romanticise the bitter realities of the people left enraged and resentful at the impact on their lives. It makes for an uncomfortable and challenging comedy, full of moral quandaries and sharp political statements.

Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)

Herzog’s visionary epic remains one of the most impactful, haunting films in history

Director: Werner Herzog

Cast: Klaus Kinski (Don Lupe de Aguirre), Cecilia Rivera (Flores de Aguirre), Ruy Guerra (Don Pedro de Ursua), Helena Rojo (Inés de Atienza), Del Negro (Brother Gaspar de Carvajal), Peter Berling (Don Fernando de Guzman), Daniel Ades (Perucho), Armando Polanah (Armando), Edward Roland (Okello)

I first saw Aguirre, Wrath of God when I was young, a late night BBC2 showing. I’d never seen anything like it – and, to be honest, I’m not sure I have since. But then I am not sure anyone has. Aguirre was Herzog’s calling card and its haunting bizarreness, unsettling intensity and its mixture of extremity and simplicity is echoed in almost everything the eccentric German has made since. It seeps inside you and is almost impossible to forget, offering unparallelled oddness and lingering new nightmares every time.

It’s based on a heavily fictionalised piece of history, a rambling, possibly invented (and certainly over-elaborated) event: the mutiny of Don Lupe de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) during the Conquistador campaign in the Amazonian remains of the Incan Empire. Pizarro has led an overburdened expedition into the depths of the rainforest searching for the untold (and fictional) riches of El Dorado. Don Pedro du Ursua (Ray Guerra) is sent with a party to explore down the river, with Aguirre as second-in-command. Further disaster occurs, as Aguirre launches a coup, installs puppet ‘emperor’ Don Guzman (Peter Berling), decides to seize El Dorado for himself and descends into a megalomaniacal madness, dreaming of building grandiose castles in the sky and toppling the Spanish monarchy.

Herzog filmed this fever dream of exhausted, starving and lost characters (and, indeed actors!) struggling to tell truth from mirage. The stunning visuals and locations are matched with the immediacy of water-splashed, mud-splatted lenses capturing the action. Aguirre is one of the most immersive films ever made, not least because as we watch cannons being dragged through rainforest, actors trudge down the side of mountains in the rain or cling to barely submerged rafts through rapids, we seem to sharing the experience of people doing all this for real.

Aguirre is book-ended by two of the most haunting shots in cinema history. Herzog’s opening flourish pans down the side of a mountain – one side of the shot showing the mountain, the other the mist – its disconcerting orientation (it’s easy to think you are seeing a birds-eye view, until you spot the actors climbing down the narrow path) made even more unsettling by the electronic mysticism of Popol Vuh’s music. This shot’s beauty and subtle terror is topped only by the final shots, of Aguirre prowling alone on a ruined raft surrounded by the dead and a ‘wilderness’ of monkeys (bringing to mind Shakespeare vision of a land not worth the cost in love). Between these bookends unfolds a film that will long live in the memory.

Aguirre is about obsession and madness but also failure. It’s so steeped in failure and hubris, it practically starts there. What else are we to think as we watch the conquistadors flog through the forest, dressed in hideously unsuitable clothes (armour for the men, dresses for the ladies), dragging cannons, relics and luckless horses behind chained Incan slaves? From the moment Pizarro calls a halt, it’s clear the search has failed. What the rest of the film demonstrates is how this failure only grows under the burden of relentless greed and vaulting ambition.

Greed powers everyone down this river: greed for the El Dorado’s gold and the power it might bring. It’s leads men to follow Aguirre’s mutiny and sustains them as their journey becomes ever more wild-eyed. No one is exempt: certainly not the Church, represented by hypocritical yes-man Brother Gaspar (Del Negro) who responds to mutiny by muttering that, regretfully, the Church must be ‘on the side of the strong’ – but doesn’t let that regret get in the way of serving as prosecutor, judge and jury in a kangaroo court for Don Ursua or happily stabbing to death an indigenous fisherman (who he gives the last rites) for blasphemy after the poor man confusedly drops a Bible on the floor.

But Aguirre’s hungers seems purely for power, with gold almost an after-thought. He’s far different from the mission’s newly elected ‘Emperor’, bloated glutton Guzman, who veers between stuffing his mouth with the limited rations or passing ludicrously high-handed regal pronouncements. Aguirre wants something more: complete and utter willpower over his surroundings. He doesn’t need to be commander for this: knowing he holds the power is enough, the ability to control life and death for his men.

Much of Aguirre’s magnetic, horrifying dread comes from the qualities in the man who plays him. Kinski’s performance is strikingly terrifying, his stiff-framed walk (based on Aguirre’s real-life limp) as judderingly disturbing as the retina-burning glare of his stare, the bubbles of incipient madness and the relentless determination to do anything (from blowing up a raft of his own men to beheading a potential mutineer) that will keep his will predominant. Aguirre’s perverse desire for control extends to an unhealthy interest in his daughter (something very unsettling today, with our knowledge of Kinski’s own appalling actions) and curls himself into the frame like a hungry tiger waiting to pounce, unleashing himself for demonic rants to cement his power and ambitious plans.

As with so many Herzog films, the longer the journey, the more fraught it becomes with perils, greed and madness. The film invites us to watch an expedition that started teetering on the edge of sanity, topple into violence, death and despair. Perhaps that’s why Ursua is spared, to join us in watching in stubborn, appalled silence the rafts drift aimlessly down river, men picked off one-by-one by unseen forces while their minds slowly fracture. Herzog uses the mute Ursua as a horrified surrogate for us, his blank incomprehension mirroring our shock at how far men can slump.

The worst elements of many of them emerge. The monk who preaches the word while complacently doing nothing and dreaming of a golden cross. Guzman’s obese Emperor, guzzling food while his desperate men starve. Aguirre’s psychopathic sidekick Perucho, who whistles casually when taking on Aguirre’s dirty work. Others collapse into shocked stupor: Aguirre’s daughter, who can’t seem to process what’s happening around her; Ursua’s lover Ines (Helena Rojo) whose hopes to reverse the mutiny tip into suicidal defiance and the stunned, tragic, imprisoned Incan prince re-named Raphael, forced to witness the self-destruction of men who looted his country and are never satisfied.

Aguirre’s Conrad-istic vision reeks of colonial criticism. As these arrogant ‘civilised’ men, charge downriver into madness and death, they remain convinced they can control the environment around them. The people of the Amazon to them are savages or slaves in waiting, any gold they find theirs by right. Aguirre himself is like some nightmare collection of every single rapacious European ruler who wanted to tear a chunk off a map and claim it as his own: even in failure and death, he still sees no reason to stop, only to press on, claiming more land, wealth and power. It’s this terrible truth that give Aguirre such continued power and relevance.

Herzog’s film builds beautifully to inevitable destruction, but it matters not a jot to Aguirre, content with his complete control over a raft of dead men. Herzog films it unfold in a haunting mixture of static shots, carefully framed compositions inspired by Spanish paintings (including a bizarrely formal coronation shot of Guzman), accompanied by a chilling silence or the unsettlingly eerie sounds of Vuh’s music or the pipes of an Incan bearer. Aguirre, perhaps more than any other film, exposes the horrific hubris of empire building, the pride and greed that lies behind it and the piles of unsettling bodies (guilty and innocent) left in its wake.

It’s a film that deserves to be famous for more than just the crazed stories of its making. The clashes between Kinski – an impossible, wicked, man but a celluloid-burning presence – and Herzog are legendary (it was the film where Herzog threatened to shoot the ferocious star and then himself if Kinski followed through on walking out mid-shoot). But just as stunning is the film’s haunting, lyrical mysticism and the fierceness of its savagery. It can have a vision of a ship in the heights of the trees and a head that finishes its countdown separated from its body. It can leave you so deeply unsettled, so hauntingly present that it will stick with you as it has stuck with me for over twenty years, giving new remarkable visions every time I re-watch it.