Category: Directors

The Hidden Fortress (1958)

Kurosawa’s samurai entertainment is overlong but has just enough action and adventure

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Toshiro Mifune (General Rokurota Makabe), Minoru Chiaki (Tahei), Kamatari Fujiwara (Matashichi), Susumu Fujita (General Hyoe Tadokoro), Takashi Shimura (General Izumi Nagakura), Misa Uehara (Princess Yuki), Eiko Miyoshi (Yuki’s lady-in-waiting), Toshiko Higuchi (Prostitute)

A princess hides in a castle from the wicked forces who have captured her kingdom. Her only hope is a noble general who has concealed the kingdom’s gold in bundles of wood, hidden in a lake at a mysterious castle. The general needs to get the gold and the princess through miles of hostile territory, with only a pair of greedy, incompetent peasants to help. This fairy tale structure is spun by Kurosawa into a samurai action-adventure with Mifune (inevitably) as the general, Misa Uehara as the Princess and Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara as the peasants. It’s good fun, overlong, but an entertaining ride – and one now best known now for its influence over Star Wars.

Kurosawa, after pouring his heart and soul into Throne of Blood, needed to relax. He decided it was time for an entertainment, something to please the crowds. The Hidden Fortress is certainly that, Kurosawa’s first film shot on impressive widescreen Tohoscope, with plenty of horse-bound action and swordplay. It’s really a Kurosawa Westerns, with heroes on the trail on a mission with bad guys to foil. But, as is sometimes the case with Kurosawa, it’s length and scope frequently makes it feel slightly indulgent, while it’s mix of comedy and drama doesn’t always sit comfortably together.

The Hidden Fortress is though highly cinematic. As well as Kurosawa’s enjoyment of the wide-angle lens – soaking up the slopes of Mount Fuji, often rolling in a beautiful mist – it frequently employs Kurosawa’s love of fast-editing tricks, in particular fast wipes to move us seamlessly from one place and time to another (one of many flourishes that influenced George Lucas who made these Kurosawa wipes internationally famous). A horse charge, where General Makabe chases down the samurai hunting them, is a grippingly frenetic with its pace and energy.

Kurosawa mixes this with comedy, though his unusual POV characters. In another move cited by Lucas’ as the inspiration for C3PO and R2D2, much of The Hidden Fortress takes place from the perspective of its peasant sidekicks. But, unlike the genial droids, Tahei and Matashichi are greedy, cowardly and selfish, frequently proving themselves untrustworthy. But, then in a touch of social commentary, perhaps they don’t owe anything to a general who treats them as slaves and (initially) plans to kill them once they are no longer useful. They are played with energetic larger-than-life force by Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara that contrasts neatly with the gruff authority of Mifune.

It’s them we follow from the start, feuding over robbing the body of a slain samurai before being flung into the slave mines of the Princess’ former kingdom. One of Hidden Fortress’ gently played themes is the class difference between these two sons-of-the-soil and the upper-classes they (reluctantly) serve. For starters, that service comes with no choice – it never occurs to Makabe that they have a say in the matter – and they are told almost nothing about the purpose of their journey. They are instead tools for a higher purpose, just as the Princess’ similar-looking maid is sent to town to be captured and executed, to help protect the bloodline of the royal family.

It’s an attitude the Princess – well played by Misa Uehara as a stubborn young woman, full of righteous indignation at her restrictive office – comes to deplore. She, unlike anyone else among the elite, questions the idea of the poor as unimportant puppets for their betters, and it is she who is drawn to protect people, including a mis-treated prostitute who she insists Makabe buys the freedom of. It’s also she – more than anyone else, including the two peasants – drawn towards the anarchic Fire Festival they encounter, with its dismissal of worldly goods and embracing of enjoying life. But, perhaps Kurosawa’s point is it’s only the wealthy who can afford to indulge themselves with such thoughts: peasants have far fewer options and no choice but to scrabble in the dirt for coins.

This social commentary would perhaps be more widely discussed if the film had kept Kurosawa’s original title, Three Bad Men in a Hidden Fortress: a title that tips Tahei, Matashichi and Makabe into the same morally ambiguous pot, all obsessed with worldly needs (money or the continuation of the royal house) over any concerns about those around them. But, somehow, it’s easier to focus on the wheedling greed of the peasants, and overlook the lofty cold distance of the general, because he’s a noble guy, brave and daring who spares his opponent after a fair duel.

It’s also because The Hidden Fortress is less focused on these elements – Seven Samurai did the snobbery of the samurai class and the mixed motives of the working classes more effectively in any case – and more on being a rollicking, road-movie entertainment. It’s Western-style (in both ways) misfit band adventures, features expertly filmed action set-pieces. Best of all the previously mentioned chase, and a gripping one-on-one duel between Rakabe and his rival General Tadokoro (a fine performance of quiet dignity from Susumu Fujita), that is edge-of-the-seat in its mix of graceful camera work and exciting sword play.

The Hidden Fortress is entertaining, but it’s hard to escape the feeling there is too much of it. Despite not being as long as Seven Samurai, it feels less forceful narratively, largely features less compelling characters and is less well balanced between depth and action. Its plot feels almost deliberately lightweight and the resolution feels rushed. The film’s fairy-tale simplicity really needs a relatable hero at its heart – but the focus on the sometimes irritating peasants means we don’t get that. Fundamentally, The Hidden Fortress is an adventure story from a director, taking a rest from more complex work. It entertains, but feels like it lives in the shadow of other films, even before its connection to Star Wars turned it into a footnote in another film’s story.

Titanic (1997)

Cameron’s film is easy to knock, but is a triumph of romance, scale and real-life tragedy

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Jack Dawson), Kate Winslet (Rose DeWitt Bukater), Billy Zane (Cal Hockley), Frances Fisher (Ruth DeWitt Bukater), Kathy Bates (Molly Brown), Gloria Stuart (Old Rose), Bill Paxton (Brock Lovett), Suzy Amis (Lizzy Calvert), David Warner (Spicer Lovejoy), Danny Nucci (Fabrizio De Rossi), Victor Garber (Thomas Andrews), Bernard Hill (Captain Smith), Jonathan Hyde (J Bruce Ismay)

Get on any ship, and I guarantee you’ll see two people at the bow standing, one in front of the other, with their arms stretched out. If that doesn’t tell you something about the lasting impact of Titanic nothing will. Titanic was a sensation: top of the box office for months with the sort of repeat-viewing producers dream of; My Heart Will Go On went platinum and half the world was in love with Leonardo DiCaprio. It won 11 Oscars, made a billion dollars and is a film everyone knows even if (hard to believe) they ain’t seen it. James Cameron took an enormous punt on Titanic – Romeo and Juliet meets disaster movie on legendary ship – and it paid off in spades. Because, no matter your cynicism, you can’t deny he created a film millions of people invested in to an extraordinary scale, staged with the epic sweep, gorgeous detail and pounding disaster thrills that channelled David Lean, Luchino Visconti and Irwin Allen all at once.

Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) is destined for a life of dutiful, unimaginative marriage with spoilt millionaire Cal Hockley (Billy Zane) when she boards Titanic as a first-class passenger in Liverpool on 10 April 1912. Also boarding the ship (but in steerage) is drifter and would-be artist Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio). When he saves her from taking her own life by jumping from the ship, they form a bond which flourishes into a love that will change both their lives. But not as much as the iceberg the ship is ploughing relentlessly towards across the Atlantic.

It’s very easy to take a pop at Titanic. Its romance sometimes succumbs to Mills and Boon cliché and Cameron’s script has more than its fair share of clunky lines (it’s one of those rare Best Picture winners with no screenplay nomination). Plenty of people hated it in a fit of inverted snobbery as a whole generation took this modern romance to its heart. But Titanic reveals the truth of the magic of movies: it uses a traditional romance to build our emotional investment in the sinking and the lives of ordinary passengers, more successfully than any other Titanicfilm had before or since.

Cameron knew the mountain he had to overcome. After all, this was the most famous disaster since Pompeii: where was the tension? So, he opens with a modern-day setting, a treasure hunt among the real ship’s ruins, with the hilariously named Brock Lovett (a game Bill Paxton in a thankless role) searching for a priceless diamond, the Heart of the Ocean. His only link: the older Rose (a plucked-from-retirement performance of charm and hidden fire from 87-year-old Gloria Stuart), who becomes our window to the past. This allows the audience to be told the geekily excited “ain’t it cool” details of the sinking with the same sort of distance we’re used to thinking about it. The film then becomes a lesson in making us learn, like Brock, this wasn’t an anecdote but a horrific disaster that killed 1,500 real people (made worse because we know exactly what’s going to happen to this ship every step of the way). The MacGuffin is intended to look as trivial as it does by the film’s end.

His key tool for this was his Romeo and Juliet love story told, for all its airport-novel lack of originality, with a vibrant, earnest intensity. Helped by fantastic chemistry between two talented actors, you have to work hard not to care for Rose and Jack (no accident those initials). And through their eyes, the whole ship comes to life, Just as the special effects camera sweep through the ruins, turns it from a ghost shop into a living breathing place, where ordinary, real-life dramas play out in every corner. It’s a perfectly judged entry point for bringing history to compelling life, playing on emotions we’ve all felt: love and fear of death.

The film splits neatly into two acts. The first is the romance and, whatever you say, it’s a cinematic romance for the ages in its old-school sweep. As we watch them bounce round the ship, make each other laugh, dance and fall in love, the utter lack of cynicism is really winning. It’s so overwhelmingly genuine and heartfelt, you can’t help feeling it yourself. Both help each other find new depths: for Rose, the willingness to embrace her own choices, for Jack a maturity and responsibility he’s lacked. Bathed in golden cinematic light and backed by James Horner’s superb score, they become two people we really invest in being together. It’s so earnest and honest it even gets away with otherwise ridiculous scenes like “draw me like one of your French girls Jack”.

Both the leads carry-off it off superbly. No mean feat considering the challenge of making the film – not least being submerged for weeks in freezing cold water during night shoots. Kate Winslet makes Rose burst with life from the depths of fear and doubt, effortlessly carrying much of the movie. It’s often overlooked that Rose drives much of the pace of the romance, as well as clearly being the more sexually and romantically experienced partner. Leonardo DiCaprio – who found it a burden for years, as it turned him from proto-DeNiro to heartthrob pin-up – gives an infectious energy to Jack’s fortune-cookie mantras, while growing in authority as the film progresses towards disaster.

Cameron fills his golden-hued recreated Titanic with the sort of detail we’ve not seen since The Leopard. Sure, his view of the haves and have-nots is hardly subtle (from ruthlessly posh, heartless Brits to plucky, happy-go-lucky Irish working-class), but it makes it very easy to relate to the injustice, bullying and casual snobbery. In Rose’s fiancée Cal, Billy Zane unselfishly plays an utter rotter: a coward, a snob who mocks Picasso and has never heard of Freud, a bully who treats Rose like a pet dog and puts his own needs (and safety) first at every turn. Titanic might be a ship of goodies and baddies (most egregiously in its clumsy slandering of First Officer Murdoch, a clumsy mis-step Cameron later apologised to Murdoch’s family for), but it’s undeniably alive.

It’s that quality of life which makes the sinking of the ship so horrifyingly intense. Cameron’s extraordinary second-half of the film – effectively a souped-up, horrifying remake of A Night to Remember (including quoting shots from that film) – never lets us treat this like a historical curiosity. Instead, it hammers home in intense, tragic detail, the shocking loss of life and the desperate, futile attempts of so many people to survive. Told in close to real-time, superbly edited and practically dripping in freezing water, it’s terrifying in its unstoppable intensity. Suddenly the scale of this mighty ship shrinks into an ever smaller world of fear. Events advance with horrifying speed, as the ship slowly then terribly quickly, disappears, made worse by our knowing in advance every step.

Cameron breathes life into dozens of small tragedies that surround Titanic. The band that played on. The Irish mother who puts her children to bed, knowing they cannot escape. The wealthy elderly couple who lie together while the water washes up around them. The hysterical children separated from their weeping father who remains on board. The priest who spends his dying moments comforting his flock. The camera catches moments of terror in the eyes of people we have seen fleetingly in the film. Titanic drains any sense of perverse excitement at the disaster from you. By the time the survivors are pleading for rescue in the freezing Atlantic, you’ll be as shell-shocked and shaken as the witnesses in the lifeboats.

Watch Titanic with your cynicism parked, and it is an extraordinary piece of epic, romantic film-making. The cinematography, production design, costumes and editing are all perfect and James Horner’s inspiring score takes the film’s slightly mushy romance to a higher level. There are great performances from the likes of Kathy Bates and Victor Garber. And the second half grips like a horrific vice, never letting go. There’s a reason this film gripped the hearts of the whole world in 1997: it knows exactly what it is trying to do and excels at doing it. And never, in any film, has a historical disaster hit a viewer with as much punch as Titanic does.

Throne of Blood (1957)

Kurosawa’s Macbeth adaptation beautifully captures much of the spirit of Shakespeare

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Toshiro Mifune (Taketoki Washizu), Isuzu Yamada (Lady Asaji Washizu), Minoru Chiaki (Yoshiaki Miki), Takashi Shimura (Noriyasu Odagura), Akira Kubo (Yoshiteru Miki), Yōichi Tachikawa (Kunimaru Tsuzuki), Takamaru Sasaki (Lord Kuniharu Tsuzuki), Chieko Naniwa (Forest witch)

Shakespeare is universal. What more proof do you need, than to see Macbeth very much present in Throne of Blood, Kurosawa’s samurai epic version of the Bard’s Scottish play. Kurosawa’s film takes the plot of Shakespeare’s tragedy, with touches of Japanese Noh theatre, told with his distinctive visual eye. It makes for truly great cinema, one of Kurosawa’s undisputed masterpieces – even if it loses some of the greatness of Shakespeare along the way.

You can though see Shakespeare from the beginning in Kurosawa’s mist filled epic (bringing back memories of the Scottish Highlands). A badly-wounded soldier brings news to Lord Tsuzuki (Takamaru Sasaki) of the defeat of his traitorous former friend thanks to the brilliant generalship of Washizu (Toshiro Mifune). Meanwhile, in the forest, Washizu and his fellow general Miki (Minoru Chiaki) encounter a witch (Chieko Naniwa) who prophesies that Washizu will one day be the Lord. When other prophesies proof true, Washizu starts to think how he could make the last true as well. His ambitions are encouraged by his wife Lady Asaji (Isuzu Yamada), who persuades him murder is the best tool for succession. But can they live with the consequences of their crime?

So much, so Shakespeare right? Throne of Blood ingeniously translates Shakespeare’s plot to an entirely different setting, one of feudal Japan. It also translates some of the Bard’s most striking verbal imagery into visuals: the strange mixture of rain and sunshine (‘so foul and fair a day’) that Washizu and Miki wade through before they meet the witch; Miki’s horse thrashing wildly through the courtyard like Duncan’s; the lamps that light the way to Tsuzuki’s chamber (like Macbeth’s dagger). Kurosawa’s visual transformation of the play’s imagery is breathtakingly original.

On its release Throne of Blood was savaged by Western critics for its cheek, before critical consensus shifted to proclaim it one of the greatest of all Shakespeare adaptations. But do you still have Shakespeare without the language (and by that, I don’t mean from English into translation, but its complete removal). Kurosawa’s film makes no attempt to replicate the poetry of Shakespeare (most strikingly, its equivalent of the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech is Washizu shrieking “Fool! Fool” as he sits in frustration, a neat image but one where you’d wish Mifune had been given more to play). But Throne of Blood may not be a complete Shakespeare adaptation, but it’s possibly one of the greatest adaptations ever made of a Shakespeare story.

This is because Throne of Blood captures so many of the core thematic concepts of Macbeth, not least its destructive, nihilistic force and the terrible, crushing burden self-imposed destiny and ambition sets. Toshiro Mifune’s Washizu may more of a brute than Macbeth, but his blustering, aggressive exterior hides a weak man, insecure and dependent on others. His weakness is in fact a lack of imagination, his inability to picture a life outside of the tracks laid down before him by the witch. His lack of independent thought is recognised by his wife, Asaji who nudges and pushes Washizu in the direction she (and he, deep down) wishes at every opportunity.

Washizu is soon trapped in a cycle of murder and disgrace he can’t escape. The walls of the room where he and Asaji plot the murder of Lord Tsuzuki is still smeared with the blood from the seppuku of its former owner who also betrayed Tsuzuki. Whenever he enters the forest, Washizu seems almost wrapped inside its branches, unable to find his way. Before a dinner to host the murdered Miki, Washizu listens (like Claudius) to a noh actor recount details of a crime all too similar to his own. As Lord, Washizu cowers powerlessly in it just as its previous owner did. Even the film itself is a grim cycle of the inevitability of destruction: Kurosawa’s open mist rolls away to reveal a monument to the castle before the castle itself emerges to take its place, the film returning at its end to the same mist-covered monument. These bookends also stress how transient (and pointless) this grappling for power is – nature will eventually claim all.

But it also suggests a world where death is so inevitable, that you might as well seize what power you can when you can. Even Miki – the film’s finest performance from Minoru Chiaki, full of subtle reactions of resignation and disgust – turns a blind eye (despite his sideways glances of disgust at key moments) to Washizu’s crimes, to further his son’s promised hopes for the throne. Asaji is motivated by her belief that there is no sin in seizing what you can from our brief time in this world, firmly telling Washizu that not only is it his duty to deliver the prophecy but – in a world where Tsuzaki gained power by murdering the lord before him – he would hardly be the first and that no previous killer trusts a potential new rival in any case.

Asaji is strikingly played by Isuzu Yamada, a quiet, scheming figure who sees everything and has an inner strength her husband lacks. Like Mifune, she uses the striking poses of Noh theatre to fabulous effect – Asaji herself moves, on the night of the murder, in a noh dance craze – and to communicate the dance of power between them throughout that long night. Kurosawa also uses silence beautifully with Asaji, most strikingly of all her silent, almost supernatural, collecting of drugged saki for Tsuzaki’s guards: as she walks into, disappears into darkness, then reappears carrying the drink all that is heard is the squeak of her robes across the floor. Yamada’s controlled, Noh-chill makes her brief collapse into futile hand-washing madness all the more striking.

After the long night of the murder, Kurosawa presents a world that grows more and more uncontrolled. In a brilliant innovation, Asaji provokes the murder of Miki by lying (perhaps?) about being pregnant, making Washizu desperate to protect the chance of a royal line. Miki’s murder leads to his terrifying pale ghost silently challenging an increasingly wild Washizu, who thrashs weakly around the room seemingly without any control. Mifune’s powerfully gruff Washizu becomes increasingly petulant and desperate, lambasting his troops and clinging to the letter of the prophecies rather than their more detailed meaning. Mifune’s striking poses – inspired by noh theatre – seems to trap him even more as hyper-real passengers in a pre-determined story. If Kurosawa’s adaptation has rinsed much of their complexity out, he firmly establishes the couple at its centre as trapped souls in an inescapable cycle.

Kurosawa innovates further by introducing a sort of Greek chorus of regular soldiers, ordinary warriors under Washizu’s command whose faith in their commander (they clearly know he murdered Tsuzaki) shrinks as Washizu’s grip on the situation fails. Washizu clings to belief in his invulnerablity – even after the prophecy about the impossible circumstances needed for his defeat (as if a forest can ever move!) is told to him in a fit of mocking laughter by the androgynous witch and a string of suspicious woodland spirits.

It culminates in Washizu instigating his own destruction, bragging to his men about the obscure circumstances that will lead to his defeat – leading to his own disillusioned men fragging the panicked lord the second the situation comes to pass. Kurosawa’s ending is visually extraordinary, Washizu pierced with so many arrows he resembles a human porcupine (Mifune’s terror was real, the actor dodging real arrows). Just as Asaji collapses into madness, Washizu’s fate is ignoble – Kurosawa doesn’t even afford him Macbeth’s brave duel against Macduff, this great warrior instead going down without so much as inflicting a scratch on Throne of Blood’s Malcolm and his forces.

Throne of Blood focuses beautifully on some (not all) of the key themes in Macbeth. It presents a fatalistic world where choices are few and the deadly cycle of death never seems to stop. Kurosawa interprets this all beautifully, transferring Shakespeare’s verbal imagery into intelligent, dynamic imagery. Sure, in removing the text it removes the core thing that makes Shakespeare Shakespeare – and also leads to the simplifying of its characters, in particular its leads who lose much of their depth and shade. But as a visual presentation reinvention of one of Shakespeare’s stories, this is almost with parallel, a triumphant and gripping film that constantly rewards.

Late Spring (1949)

Ozu’s marvellous heart-rending simple tale of difficult family decisions carries universal strength

Director: Yasujirō Ozu

Cast: Chishū Ryū (Shukichi Somiya), Setsuko Hara (Noriko Somiya), Yumeji Tsukioka (Aya Kitagawa), Haruko Sugimura (Taguchi Masa), Hohi Aoki (Katsuyoshi Taguchi), Jun Usami (Shuichi Hattori), Kuniko Miyake (Akiko Miwa), Masao Mishima (Jo Onodera), Yoshiko Tsubouchi (Kiku Onodera)

In post-war Japan, Professor Shukichi (Chishū Ryū) and his twenty-seven-year-old daughter Noriko (Setsuko Hara) live together in contentment. But what is to be done when her Aunt Masa (Haruko Sugimara) proclaims its time Noriko left the nest and made her own life, with a marriage Masa can arrange with a family friend. Can Noriko’s reluctance be overcome, or will it need the imminent threat of her own father’s potential remarriage to an attractive widow?

From a small-scale, intimate set-up like this – a slight story that can be summarised in little more than a few sentences – Yasujirō Ozu crafts a story of family, ageing, maturity and loss, sacrifice and regret that’s both uniquely Japanese and universal. So carefully is the whole film assembled, so patient Ozu’s intricate, formal structure of each scene that it’s ending of quiet, emotional force takes you overwhelmingly by surprise. It also leaves you challenging all sorts of perceptions you might have had about the rights and wrongs of duty and familial obligation.

Ozu’s Late Spring, like the greatest of his work – which this undoubtedly is – uses a series of carefully designed, stationary camera shots (so much so, it feels a shock when a camera tracks alongside Noriko and her father’s assistant Hattori, as they cycle to a beach) to carefully build a world both intimate and immediate and also oppressive. Furniture in rooms loom around the edges of the frame of the low positioned cameras or are lined up in such a way as if to force movement in one direction (such as, at one point, two parallel rows of chairs leading inevitably to a doorway). Characters are framed in doorways or surrounded by furniture, their choices visually whittled down to a single path.

It’s fitting for a film all about a decision – that everyone believes is for the best – being pushed directly onto Noriko. On paper of course, it certainly is. Surely, it’s no life for a young woman to essentially become nothing more than a housekeeper to her father? Noriko organises the house, dutifully prepares his meals, reminds him to shave – and seems completely content with this. But surely, it’s not what she should want – or indeed what anyone would want for her?

But yet it’s what she wants. Noriko is beautifully played by Setsuko Hara, in the first of her collaborations of Ozu. Hara creates a woman who is warm, bright, funny and greets every day with a beaming smile. She is content with her lot, shrugging off any idea of change. She barely seems to recognise the shy attempts at seduction that Hattori (a suitably bashful Jun Usami) tries – smilingly turning down his concert invitation (a concert we then see him attend alone, his hat filling the second chair he purchased) and reacting with smiling happiness when he reaffirms his long-running engagement is indeed progressing to marriage (far from, it is clear, his first choice).

Noriko’s world is only shaken by the suggestion of marriage, an idea that reduces her to withdrawn, downcast quietness, shuttering herself off from the world. The only thing that could horrify her more is the idea of her father remarrying – she’d already confessed her distaste at her honorary uncle, Shukichi’s colleague Onodera, re-marrying. Her rejection stems from her desire, it seems, for things to remain as they are – and people to do so as well. But that’s also because change requires the old life to be left behind – and her father makes clear he will accept a reduced role.

You could argue its right to push Noriko away from a life of sheltered self-sacrifice and towards something that feels more real and mature. That feels like the modern world. But isn’t this just the old social rules reapplying themselves in new ways? Late Spring takes place at a turning point in Japan. Shukichi and Masa are of a pre-war generation: their homes and clothing are as well, even their formal movements, speech, Shukichi’s love of Noh theatre and (in Masa’s case) clinging to old wives tales smacks of a pre-1945 way of thinking. There everything has a natural order – and Noriko’s marriage is an inevitable part of this.

But there are signs of a new Japan all around them – literally so, as the path to the beach is lined with American military and Coca-Cola signs and a Tokyo increasingly filled with Western coffee bars, along with kids playing baseball and giggling talk of Gary Cooper and other film stars. Noriko even has an alternative path presented in the form of her friend Aya (a charming performance by Yumeji Tsukioka). Aya has decided not to remarry after her post-war divorce, learned English, trained as a stenographer and dresses in the latest Western fashions. Her home is full of Western furniture and the traditional Japanese floor sitting leaves her with sore knees after minutes. She’s the sign of a new Japan on the horizon, one where traditions carry less weight, and choices can be more personal.

The problem is Noriko’s conservative choices don’t work in either worlds. She’s not radical enough to follow Aya (despite half-hearted enquiries), and the idea of non-marriage is alien in the world she wants to stay in. As Ozu and Hara make clear, this locks her into clinging to no change at all. She clearly would never-leave unless pushed. And a white lie from her father is what does it: for Noriko knows that would end her role in her father’s home and her duty to him would be leave. It’s the only duty that would never be her choice.

Nevertheless it’s clearly what her father believes is best for her. Beautifully played by Chishū Ryū, he’s a seeming curmudgeon at first who reveals himself to be a man of deep feeling and self-sacrifice – there is a beautiful moment when he outwardly denies his white lie about intended marriage, while his face subtly twitches. Ryū makes Shukichi a man of quiet dignity, determined to do the best for his daughter, regardless of his own feelings (which are clearly to continue things as they are).

So both parties work towards the ending of a way of life they both desperately want to cling to, doing so in a misguided act of duty towards the other. Is it though? Ozu makes that hard for us to be completely comfortable: our last sight of Noriko, in her wedding garb, sees her bow one final time to the father she loves while the film’s coda gives a heartbreaking moment of unbearable emotional toil for Ryū while he simply sits peeling an apple.

Does it have to be like this? The idea of a daughter subjugating her life to her father feels mistaken, but isn’t that her choice not ours? But how alien is such a conservative and non-traditional choice, in a country at a turning point between tradition and new possibilities? And can you blame people for sacrificing what they want, because they believe the result is better for someone else? It’s an eternally relatable scenario that gives Ozu’s film an undeniable, compelling emotional force, which creeps up on you and crashes over you like high tide waves Ozu closes the film with. Marvellous.

The Terminator (1984)

Schwarzenegger becomes an icon in Cameron’s masterpiece, a darkly gripping sci-fi chase-thriller

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger (The Terminator), Michael Biehn (Kyle Reese), Linda Hamilton (Sarah Connor), Paul Winfield (Ed Traxler), Lance Henriksen (Hal Vukovich), Bess Motta (Ginger), Rick Rossovich (Matt), Eal Boen (Dr Peter Silberman), Bill Paxton (Punk)

“It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop… ever, until you are dead!”

If that description doesn’t grab your attention, I don’t know what will. James Cameron cemented his place in cult-film history with The Terminator, such a pure shot-to-the-heart of filmic adrenalin, its hard to think it’s been bettered since. Cameron takes a fairly simple story – essentially a long, relentless chase – and fills it with energy, black humour and a genuine sense of unstoppable menace, in a film that barely draws breath until it’s over an hour in and then promptly throws you straight into a final action set-piece. It uses its low budget effectively to create a world of mystery and dark suggestion and leaves you gagging for more. So much so, they’ve tried to recapture the thrill ride six times since (and only Cameron did it right, with Terminator 2).

It’s 1984 and two naked people arrive in Los Angeles in a ball of light. They’re both from 2029, time-travellers looking for the same woman. One of them nicks a tramp’s piss-stained trousers and runs from the police. The other is a stoic, impassive mountain of muscle who offs a few violent punks after they refuse his blunt instruction to hand over their clothes. Which one do you wish you were eh? Unfortunately, the second one is a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a machine in the skin of a man sent to eliminate Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), mother of the future leader of the post-apocalyptic human resistance to the machines. The first is Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), the man sent to save her. Tough gig, since the Terminator is relentless, almost invulnerable and holds all the cards.

The Terminator is pulpy, dirty, punchy film-making – and its huge success became James Cameron’s calling card for a lifetime of success. Set in a neon-lit, dingy Los Angeles (it never seems to be daytime in The Terminator), it taps into the core of a million nightmares, the fear of being chased and nothing you do ever sees to get you further away. It’s a really elemental fear which The Terminator brilliantly exploits, as impassive and impossible to negotiate with as your deepest, darkest dreads. Throw into that Cameron’s gift for tension and you’ve got the almost perfect thrill-ride.

It’s also a film that gives us the perfect level of information we need. Unlike the cops (and Sarah Connor) who can’t believe this story Reese is peddling them that they are up against an unstoppable metal killing machine, we know from the start the whole story. It’s enough for us to feel a cheeky frustration as they bend over backwards to fit logical explanations to the things they’ve seen and for us to feel the sneaking dread that storing Sarah away in a police precinct crammed full of heavily armed cops isn’t going to make a jot of difference. He won’t let anything stop him.

Is it any wonder quite a few people came out of the film sympathising with Sarah and Kyle – but feeling a sort of guilty admiration for the Terminator? This is the foundation stone of the Schwarzenegger cult, his role as the monosyllabic machine sending him into the upper echelons of Hollywood stardom. Cameron’s original idea was the Terminator should be a perfect infiltration unit, the sort of guy who wouldn’t stand out in a crowd (the original choice was Lance Henriksen, relegated instead to the second-banana cop behind Paul Winfield’s folksily doomed decent guy, fundamentally out of his depth). That went out of the window when Schwarzenegger came on board: say what you like about the Austrian Oak, but he stands out in a crowd.

Why is the Terminator darkly cool? (After all literally no one ever pretended to be Kyle Reese, but everyone has put on a pair of shades and said “I’ll be BACH”.) Because he embodies all the qualities we’ve been taught by films to respect. He’s strong and silent, calm and confident, never complains, doesn’t need help and never gives up. He’s exactly the sort of guy Hollywood has cast admiring eyes at since film spooled through a camera. We can’t help ourselves.

The film becomes about Schwarzenegger (even if he’s not in the last set piece, replaced by a budget-busting CGI android). Cameron knew how to get the best out him, his tiny number of lines (17 in total) delivered in his emotionless, euro-accent make him seem mysterious, different and cool, frequently responding with either deadpan seriousness or sudden violence. His under-statement lines are funny because we anticipate already the bloodbath that will follow. And, unlike despicable villains, he’s not motivated by greed, jealousy or wickedness: he’s almost the quintessential American hero, taking care of business – it just so happens his business is killing people.

Reese should be someone we admire more: he’s a plucky, resourceful underdog. But, unlike the actions-rather-than-words Terminator, he’s got to speak all the time – while the Terminator is a killing machine, Reese is the exposition machine. Biehn does a terrific job with a difficult role, a decoy protagonist who spends much of the movie alternating between gunplay and spitting out reams and reams of exposition explaining to anyone and everyone the future and terminators. On top of that, while his opponent gets on with, Reese’s constant refrain of how scared he is and everyone else should be (who wants to hear a hero say how terrified he is eh?) and his frustrated whining at no-one listening to his fantastic story marks him as weak. Charismatic heroes persuade their audiences: no one believes Reese until they are literally watching Arnie shrug off a whole clip of ammo.

Reese is, in any case, a decoy protagonist of sorts. His romantic longing for Sarah (having fallen in love with her photo in the future) and nurturing personality actually mark him out as the more conventional ‘female lead’. In the first of several films where Cameron would show-case heroic female characters, the actual ideal rival for the machine is Sarah. One of the most interesting things about The Terminator is watching Linda Hamilton skilfully develop this character from ordinary young woman into the sort of archetypal Western hero the film ends with her as (she even gets the sort of badass kiss-off line “You’re terminated FUCKER” you can’t imagine the less imaginative Reese saying).

On top of this The Terminator is a triumph of atmosphere. With its synth-score, it has an unsettling quality from the off helping to build the sense of grim inevitability that is its stock-in-trade. Just like the Terminator’s never-ending pursuit, the whole film is a well-judged, inevitable, time-loop. Sending people back in time turns out to be the very thing that guarantees that future will happen. Throughout, Cameron’s little titbits about the future (partly constrained by budget) are perfect in giving us just enough information to understand the stakes but leave enough mystery for us to be so desperate to know more, we fill in the gaps from our imagination.

But the reason The Terminator works best is that it’s an undeniably tense thrill ride, an extended chase sequence that rarely eases off and never loses its sense of menace. You never feel relaxed or safe while watching The Terminator and never for a moment that its heroes are on a level playing field with their opponent. Atmospheric, tense and terrifying, it walks a brilliantly fine line (so much so, the Terminator methodically massacring a precinct full of cops is both unnerving and the most popular scene in the film) and never once let’s go of your gut. It’s not only possibly the best, most perfect, Terminator film made also still one of Cameron’s finest hours.

Elmer Gantry (1960)

Burt Lancaster gives a magnetic, Oscar-winning, performance in this entertaining plot-boiler

irector: Richard Brooks

Cast: Burt Lancaster (Elmer Gantry), Jean Simmons (Sister Sharon Falconer), Arthur Kennedy (Jim Lefferts), Dean Jagger (William L. Morgan), Shirley Jones (Lulu Bains), Patti Page (Sister Rachel), Edward Andrews (George F Babbitt), John McIntire (Rev John Pengilly), Hugh Marlowe (Rev Philip Garrison), Joe Maross (Pete)

Elmer Gantry (Burt Lancaster) has the patter down perfectly. He can charm, wheedle and turn a phrase to set the whole room alight with laughter. He wants success but the big break never comes, perhaps because he’s selling two-bit vacuum cleaners rather than something people really want. Elmer is smart and works out, when everyone is afraid of dying, it’s a captive market for salvation. With his seminary background, he’s a natural preacher and inveigles himself into the revivalist roadshow of Sister Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons) which his force of personality shifts into a fire-and-brimstone exhibition of frenzied religious passion – just the sort of thing that gets the punters back into the church. But when the roadshow moves to the big city, will Gantry’s young affair with priest’s-daughter-turned-prostitute Lulu Baines (Shirley Jones) come back to bite him?

Elmer Gantry was seen as controversial and even outlandish at the time of its release – so much so a lengthy pre-credits opening crawl distances it from all those decent servants of the Lord who were worried it was tarring them with the same brush. But with TV evangelists raking in the cash and travelling preachers whipping crowds up into wild-eyed ecstasy, Elmer Gantry doesn’t seem so outlandish these days. Richard Brooks film adapts the middle-act only of Sinclair Lewis’ sharply satirical novel, and while it does smooth down the rough edges and offer touches of redemption for its charismatically selfish hero, it’s still a very entertaining plot-boiler with a well-delivered message and subtle character development.

Above all though it’s a defining star-vehicle for a perfectly cast, Oscar-winning, Burt Lancaster. Elmer Gantry plays to all his strengths: charismatic, larger-than-life and charming, overflowing with boundless energy and nimble, physical grace. Lancaster’s intense eyes and excitable grin burns through the screen and he’s totally believable as the sort of rogue everyone knows is a rogue but give him a pass because he’s so likeable. And he nails the magnetic charisma of fire-and-brimstone preaching, full of self-aggrandising comments about his own holy conversion from salesman to man of God. It helps that Lancaster’s physical prowess (at one point he does a body slide down the full length of the aisle mid-sermon) really helps build Gantry’s magnetic presence.

Elmer Gantry superpower isn’t that he’s shameless – he looks suitably guilty when calling his mother on Christmas day to explain, once again, he isn’t coming home – but that he can compartmentalise and forget shame so quickly. He manipulates and uses people with such charm they either don’t notice or don’t care – from charming clients on Christmas Eve with dirty stories to plugging Sister Sharon’s naïve assistant Sister Ruth (Patti Page) for details on Sharon’s life that he will then use to get his foot in the door of her roadshow. Even cynical journalist Jim Lefferts (Arthur Kennedy, warming up for effectively the same role in Lawrence of Arabia), who knows he’s a complete bastard, still finds him a great guy to hang out with.

But the truth is Gantry corrupts everything he touches. It happens by degrees, pushed along with winning arguments and eager ‘I’m just trying to help’ excitability, but its inevitable. Before he arrives, Sister Sharon’s roadshow is a dry but heartfelt and earnest mission focused on winning converts. Under Gantry’s influence it becomes religious entertainment. Because Gantry knows people need to have their passions stirred to really invest in something, and mesmerising patter is a huge part of that. Lancaster’s delivery of these showpiece sermons drip with eye-catching, inspiring passion – even when we know he’s a hypocritical bullshit artist who probably doesn’t truly believe word he’s saying, but sure does believe it in the moment. When even we feel stirred by it, is it a surprise his audiences start to get whipped into a frenzy, barking at devils and clawing across the floor to be saved by Gantry’s touch?

Sister Sharon’s manager and sponsor William Morgan (Dean Jagger skilfully playing a character who is far more susceptible to manipulation than he thinks) might have his doubts, but it works. Elmer Gantry takes a satirical swing at the Church as the reverends of the town of Zenith swiftly put aside any doubts (other than straight-shooter Garrison, inevitably played by Hugh Marlowe) and bring Sister Sharon’s Gantry-inspired roadshow into the big city to help drag more punters (and it’s quite clear that they see congregations as customers for religion) into their church. Elmer Gantry gets some subtle blows in on the commercialisation of the Church, even if it is careful to largely distance it as a whole from the tactics of Gantry.

Gantry’s corruption also touches Sister Sharon herself. Well-played by Jean Simmons, Sharon is earnest but surprisingly steely but as she lets a little of Gantry’s shallowness into her roadshow, so she starts to compromise on the very qualities that made her stand-out. From entering into a ‘good-cop-bad-cop’ performance for sinners to opening her heart to Gantry’s persistent seduction, Sharon becomes a portrait of corruption by degrees. Brooks’ film also implies in its dark finale that she has allowed herself to absorb Gantry’s spin that she could be a vessel of holy power, which puts her life at deadly risk.

Elmer Gantry is overlong and perhaps relies a little too much on Lancaster’s charisma – it fair to say when he is off-screen it’s energy lags. Its satiric edge is sometimes blunted by focusing on Gantry as the disease rather than a symptom of a church struggling to survive in a secular age. The introduction of Lulu Baines – an Oscar-winning Shirley Jones, playing against type as a bitter floozy – is a little late in-the-day and while her performance is solid enough, the character is more of a cipher in a plot-required final act conundrum than a fully-formed character.

But when the film focuses on Gantry, it’s a fascinating character study. How much does he believe in the things he says? Does he feel shame? How ambitious is he? When he says he loves Sharon, does he? Or does he feel everything he says in the moment, but it never sticks? Either way, it’s at the heart of Burt Lancaster’s compelling, charismatic performance which juggles a mountain of contradictions but never loses the sense of the shallow selfishness that lies behind the charm.

Hit Man (2024)

Inventive, playful, funny, sexy and dark this fabulous dark comedy changes gears with confident ease

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Glen Powell (Gary Johnson), Adria Arjona (Madison Figueroa Masters), Austin Amelio (Jasper), Retta (Claudette), Sanjay Rao (Phil), Molly Bernard (Alicia), Evan Holtzman (Ray Masters)

You might not want to hear it, but despite what the movies say there is no such thing as a hit man. In New Orleans, if you are talking to a mysteriously charismatic man who offers to take care of your ‘personal problems’ for a wedge of cash, you are probably confessing your desire to conspire to murder to a police agent. That agent would be mild-mannered psychology professor Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), a bland forgettable person who discovers a hidden talent for charismatic role-play, using his psychological skills to create a persona specific to his target. On a job, Gary becomes attracted to Madison (Adria Arjona), first dissuading her from ‘hiring him’ to kill her husband and then starting a relationship with her ‘in character’ as ‘Ron’. But relationships prove to be as risky for fake hit men as they would be for real ones.

To say where Hit Man, Linklater’s darkly twisted rom-com, heads would be to spoil it (let’s just say I didn’t see where it’s going) and the journey is a fabulous ride. Linklater and Powell collaborated on a (heavily) fictionalised version of this true story and pull together a smart, sexy, witty and at times surprisingly dark film, which make some shrewd points about the extent to which we choose and shape our own identities. Hit Man sees Linklater so confidently shift tone and mood within scenes, that you almost don’t notice how smoothly the film travels from farce to psychological insight to Postman Always Ring Twice sexiness to screwball wit to morally shady action. It’s a terrific ride.

It’s also a superb showcase for Glen Powell, who co-wrote the screenplay with Linklater. This should be a star-making role for Powell, in which he deftly plays mild-mannered and timid and darkly charismatic, often in the same scene. What’s so superb about Powell’s performance is how fluid it is, his two personalities (mild Gary and confident Ron) overlapping and merging into each other from moment-to-moment, or switching in response to sudden changes of situation. Powell and Linklater carry this out with real subtlety from moment to moment but watch the first scene and the last and you immediately notice the difference in our lead from the man we met at first.

Powell is both extremely funny – sequences showing the dizzying array of characters (from red necks to prissy Snape-ish goths) he becomes to lure in his targets are hilariously done – but also wonderfully engaging. Beneath the surface, it’s clear Gary is thrilled by how differently he is perceived when he becomes ‘Ron’, grinning as he overhears his police colleagues confess how exciting and sexy ‘Ron’ is compared to boring bird-watcher Gary. He finds he takes on a whole new confidence – and accompanying sexual prowess – as he throws himself into a dizzyingly sexual fling with Madison, who is also far more excited about the prospect of illicit sex with a killer than she probably would be with sweet rumpy-pumpy with a tenured psychology professor. Powell captures this all wonderfully, throwing himself into a tangled web of deceit with gleeful gusto.

Adria Arjona is similarly excellent as Madison, a woman who becomes harder and harder to read as the film continues. Its early stages really feels like a traditional rom-com – except the ‘meet cute’ features one person trying to hire another for murder, before they charm each other with cat puns – but the relationship shifts as much as the film itself does. Madison seems to come to life, filled with sexually excited recklessness, as she spends time with Ron. But Arjona is able to imply half a dozen things under the surface: is Madison a downtrodden girl enjoying a brush with danger, or is she some sort of manipulative femme fatale?

Linklater uses this to maintain a real high-wire tension in the film, which increasingly becomes impossible to predict. Both Gary and Madison are playing with fire here. If Gary’s dalliance with a former ‘client’ is discovered by his superiors – or if a chance encounter unmasks him to Madison – hell knows what might happen next. And can he keep the pretence that he is capable of ruthless, skilled violence, something much harder to do when your date takes you to a firing range and asks you to teach her? And what is Madison’s game, as it emerges that her break with her boyfriend isn’t as clean as she suggests it is – does she have something in mind that Gary isn’t prepared for?

Hit Man balances this brilliantly with the comedy, in one of Linklater’s most delightfully off-beat films, expertly played by Powell and Arjona. It’s underpinned with a deftly layered thematic message. Throughout we are reminded, by Gary’s psychology lectures to his increasingly engaged students, that people balance their own ids and egos and eventually ‘choose’ where they land. In doing so they create their own personality. It’s what we realise we are watching in this film. Both Gary and Madison decide they like more than a few of the elements of the people they are pretending to be – so why not mix them into their own personality? Suddenly they find themselves effortlessly capable of things they never thought possible – yet still embracing passions their playful alter-egos would find dull beyond belief.

It leads to a surprisingly ending that comes from left-field, but we realise we have been prepared for by Linklater and Powell almost from the film’s opening moments. It makes for a supremely entertaining and rewarding film, brilliantly played by its two leads (and it bears repeating that Powell is sensational here), with excellent support from Austin Amelio as a sleazy cop and Retta and Sanjay Rao as Gary’s more playful police colleagues. Hit Man is a dynamic, funny, sexy and surprising treat.

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Superb fantasy film, full of heart, visual imagination and beautiful story-telling, truly one from the heart

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Ivana Baquero (Ofelia), Sergi López (Captain Vidal), Maribel Verdú (Mercedes), Doug Jones (The Faun/The Pale Man), Ariadna Gil (Carmen), Álex Angulo (Doctor Ferreiro), Manolo Solo (Garcés), César Vea (Serrano), Roger Casamajor (Pedro), Pablo Adán (Narrator/Voice of the Faun)

What do you do when your world is terrible? Sometimes the only way to survive is to embrace your own world, even if that world has its own darkness and terrors. Guillermo del Toro’s masterful Gothic fairy tale mixes the terrors of Francoist Spain with one of untrustworthy magic and monstrous spirits and compellingly balances bleak horrors with the chance of hope. Visually stunning, thematically rich and heartbreakingly emotional, Pan’s Labyrinth is a Grimm’s fairy tale bought shockingly up-to-date, a uniquely heartfelt film from a distinctive director.

It’s 1944 in the woods of Spain and the Reds are still fighting their lonely crusade against Franco’s fascists. Captain Vidal (Sergi López) is here to stamp out these rebels and has summoned his heavily pregnant wife Carmen (Ariadna Gil) and twelve-year old step-daughter Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) to his distant command post so that he can be present at the imminent birth of his son. Ofelia hates the punctilious and coldly obsessive Vidal (rightly so – he’s capable of coldy indifferent but shocking acts of violence) and escapes more-and-more into her fairytale books. One night, she wanders into an old maze and encounters a Faun (Doug Jones), who tells her she is the long-lost princess of the fairy kingdom and must perform three tasks to return home. Ofelia now exists in two worlds: an increasingly Gothic fairy one of and a real one of violence, ruled by her monstrous father-in-law.

Pan’s Labyrinth is a beautifully balanced film of multiple interpretations. It’s never clearly stated whether Ofelia’s fairytale world is ‘real’ of a product of her imagination. It’s clearly a way a scared girl could process real world traumas – the death of her father, the appalling Vidal, the horrors of war around her – with many elements of the fairy world reflecting things happening around her. But on the other hand, the mandrake root the Faun gives her to help heal her sick mother by placing it under her bed has an immediate impact and Ofelia’s magic chalk and the labyrinth itself offer secret doorways that allow her to escape Vidal in the film’s final act (or perhaps a by then disoriented and drugged Vidal is just mistaken). Essentially, you are left to embrace the idea you prefer – much as it is implied Ofelia herself chooses the version of her life she wishes to embrace.

Choosing for yourself and not blindly following orders is one of the key lessons of Pan’s Labyrinth. The ‘real’ world of Franco’s Spain is full of regimented orders to be blindly obeyed without question. In this it has the collaboration of the Church – at Vidal’s dinner-party, a subservient priest self-satisfyingly fills his plate with food while shrugging off concerns of the starving poor – and Fascism echoes Church mantras (one of Vidal’s lieutenants repeats the same propaganda ‘prayer’ to Franco over-and-over again while he hands out the bread ration to the cowed villagers). Franco’s Spain is one of order and regimen, where individuality and choice is stamped out.

And there are echoes of this in Ofelia’s fantasy world. Played with a gentleness, vulnerability and strikingly earnest decency by Ivana Baquero, Ofelia refuses to accept the world must be the way it is (unlike her mother who has sadly accepted it must). But her fairy world, the Faun – expertly portrayed by Doug Jones’ lithe physicality – is a far from gentle guide. Creaking from the wood he is formed from, he’s sinister, mixes vague statements with subtly presented orders and constantly holds information back while presenting Ofelia with tight rules for her tasks. Just as Fascism takes choice away real world, the Faun presents Ofelia with a book that reveals the future (but only one page at a time) and her tasks increasingly demand complete obedience, under the threat of punishment.

This is not a comforting world. Ofelia – who at one-point wears costumes reminiscent of those other famous children in dark, surreal and dangerous fantasy-worlds Alice and Dorothy – confronts a vile toad and, most chillingly, an albino child-eater with eyes in his stigmata hands who lives in a room decorated with nightmare reflections of the real horrors of the 40s (most strikingly a Holocaust-reminiscent pile of children’s shoes). For all its fantastical, it’s also very much a nightmare version of a real-world that could have been dreamed up by a child processing horrors.

Pan’s Labyrinth celebrates individuality and choosing for yourself. Ofelia’s story is one of increasingly taking her own choices: from refusing to accept her mother’s new husband, to escaping into her fantasy world (twisted as it is), to finally outright refusing the increasingly dark instructions of the Faun. It’s in doing this that she can eventually prove herself a true hero, someone who does not accept the established order but can make her own decisions.

This makes her a contrast to Vidal. Truly he is one of cinema’s most loathsome monsters. In a superbly controlled performance by Sergi López, Vidal isn’t repulsive because he is a larger-than-life, sadistic monster but because he is a small, inadequate bully who has controls his small world in order to make himself feel important. Vidal is obsessed with order and detail – introduced tutting at the 15-minute-late arrival of his wife, his office is filled with the gears of the mill and he fetishistically cleans his pristine uniform, shaves himself and repairs his father’s watch. This watch – the only memoir he has of his hero father, who died when he was a baby – is the root of his obsessions, Vidal desperate to become his father and pass on his own toxic legacy of ancestor worship to his son. It’s striking that, as Vidal’s world collapses around him, his clothing and body becomes more and more scarred, bloody and disordered – his external appearance resembling the monster within.

In Vidal’s world everything fits neatly into place, governed by his Fascist ideology. Carmen – a fragile Ariadna Gil, struggling to accommodate to a world of harsh choices – is of interest to him only because of the baby she carries. He operates the mill as a tightly organised regime, in which the rebels are unwanted ghosts in the machine. He uses violence ruthlessly but as a tool, not with sadistic relish. He brutally beats a suspected rebel to death with a bottle with robotic indifference and tortures suspects with a practised patter. To him, everything is justified if it is obeying an order. So much so, that he literally cannot understand the refusal of Dr Ferreiro (in one of the film’s most moving moments) to blindly follow orders, no matter the consequences.

Dr Ferreiro (a beautifully judged performance by Álex Angulo) is one of two figures whose independent thought Vidal is unable to recognise, even when they are under his nose. His maid Mercedes (Maribel Verdú, one of the passionate hearts of the film) is fiercely independent, the sister of the rebel leader and working subtly against Vidal. She forms a bond with the gentle Ofelia while showing that refusing to be part of a blind system is a crucial part of humanity. She also provides possibly one of the most satisfying moments in cinema during a confrontation with Vidal.

Del Toro’s film beautifully balances these fascinating ideas of choice and independence within its brilliantly evocative design. It’s a beautifully shot film, in a gorgeous array of Velazquez-inspired tones, its moody darks and blues gorgeously captured by Guillermo Navarro while its design work is extraordinary in its texture and detail. But it’s a classic because del Toro’s superb creativity and quietly emotional direction. Pan’s Labyrinth makes us really care for this child just as it makes us despise the cruelty of her step-father. Combined with gorgeous design, del Toro’s film truly comes from the heart, a loving, very personal tribute to the power of stories and individual choices. The film is so powerful, you even forget that it opens as it ends, and that we know in our heart-of-hearts how this journey will finish. Nevertheless, Pan’s Labyrinth ends on a note of joy and acceptance so pure, it could only be from the fantasy world not the real one.

Five Graves to Cairo (1943)

Exciting and witty war-time spy thriller, an overlooked work from a master director

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: Franchot Tone (Corporal John Bramble), Anne Baxter (Mouche), Akim Tamiroff (Farid), Erich von Stroheim (Field Marshall Erwin Rommel), Peter van Eyck (Lieutenant Schwegler), Fortunio Bonanova (General Sebastiano), Miles Mander (Colonel Fitzhume)

It’s 1942 and the war is not going well for the British. The Germans are on the move in Africa under their ace commander Field Marshal Rommel. A tank drifts through the desert, bumping up and down sand dunes. Inside its crew slump, one dangling from his gun turret, another thrown on-and-off the gearsticks with each dune. It’s hauntingly Wilderish – a ghost tank charging through a never-ending desert – that Corporal John Bramble (Franchot Tone) wakes into, escaping across into the bombed-out Empress of Britain hotel run by panicked Farid (Akim Tamiroff), assisted by British-loathing Frenchwoman Mouche (Anne Baxter). Bramble’s hopes that he might lay low for a few days are thrown into danger when the hotel is requisitioned moments after his arrival by the German army with Rommel (Erich von Stroheim) himself setting up command there. Bramble passes himself off as recently deceased club-footed waiter Davos – only to discover Davos was a German spy and Rommel expects him to help delivery on his masterplan to crush the British.

Five Graves to Cairo is a magisterial juggling game of move and counter-move in which everyone holds tightly their own very specific parts of a greater mystery while trying to learn everyone else’s. Wilder does all this with wit and more than a little tension. Can Bramble keep up his pretence about being Davos while hiding his complete ignorance of Rommel’s masterplan? Will Rommel’s constantly alert, note-taking aide Lt Schwegler (Peter van Eyck) rumble him? The whole film is captured in one of its earliest sequences, as Farid carefully shepherds and blocks the view of Schwegler’s inspection of the foyer of his hotel, to prevent him seeing Bramble hiding behind the desk.

The whole film builds from there as Bramble constantly thinks on his feet, crafting obscure but convincing answers as he improvises wildly. All while limping around in a club-foot shoe and providing the sort of night-and-day waiting service the Germans expect. His improvisation is endless, from distracting a blowhard Italian general to steal his gun, to identifying himself quietly to a captured British officer being wined and dined by the smug Rommel by switching a whisky name chain on a bottle with his dog-tag (then smoothly passing off ‘Bramble’ as a rare spirit to the Italian general). His plans switch fast too, from a vague assassination attempt to being instructed by Miles Mander’s Montgomery-ish officer to uncover the Field Marshal’s schemes.

The Field Marshal himself is the epitome of Prussian arrogance. Played with a preening, puffed-up, Teutonic self-importance by an excellent Erich von Stroheim, Rommel never moves without his feathered swagger stick, pompously cavorting around the hotel, prissily demanding the finest sheets and best room. Far from the later ‘Good German’ image of the General, this Rommel is as snobbishly self-satisfied as a Bond villain, overwhelmingly pleased with his elaborate scheme (which he shrewdly set-up years earlier) and teasingly playing twenty questions with his British prisoners to see if they can work-out his intentions, while manipulating the game so his opponents can’t win. He’s an arrogant, hissable villain we are desperate to see taken down a peg or two.

Equally dislikeable is his whipper-smart aide, played with a thin-politeness by Peter van Eyck that hides his comfort with deception. With these villains as the face of the relentless German military machine, Wilder builds real tension around the importance of Bramble foiling Rommel’s scheme – and makes very clear to us that these ruthless sticklers for rules, certain of their own genius and superiority, will definitely not treat this accidental spy kindly if they catch him.

As Bramble, Franchot Tone does a decent job – although his Transatlantic vowels sound particularly odd when the similarly American Anne Baxter immerses herself in a French accent – even if Bramble himself is less interesting than his situation. A more charismatic actor might perhaps have helped lift Five Graves to Cairo to a higher level – after all it shares more than a few stands of DNA with Casablanca but Tone and Baxter aren’t quite Bogie and Bergman. What Tone does do well is morph swiftly from persona-to-persona, switching from heat-stroke confused soldier to would-be-assassin, to fast-thinking spy with a surprisingly natural ease.

He also builds a rapport with Mouche – Edith Head’s costumes for these two, with their contrasting blacks and stripes, quickly visually link them together – who discovers she hates the German more than she resents the British for abandoning her brother at Dunkirk. Baxter is very good as the real emotional heart of this film, a harsh woman hardened by loss, desperate to do what she can to save her POW brother but who finds a new cause to believe in. Baxter carefully lets her character build in statue from obstacle to reluctant aide to true believer, with real naturalness.

Her development reflects a whole film that uses its single claustrophobic location – nearly the whole film takes place over little more than a day or two in the hotel – to excellent effect, with potentially dangerous reveals lurking around every corner. Not least that the real Davos lies buried under rubble in the basement – not quite fully buried, Wilder’s focus early on Bramble’s orthopaedic show hinting at the vital ‘tell’ later on. Everyone – except perhaps the supremely self-satisfied Rommel – suspects there is more going on than they realise, and Wilder expertly ratchets up the tension through Hitchcockian time-bombs and carefully structured dialogue sequences to keep the audience firmly on the edge of their seats.

It’s makes for a fine caper, a careful riff on then current history that suggests Bramble might just have provided the vital clues to prevent the nefarious Rommel from claiming victory at El Alamein. While Five Graves to Cairo has a high entertainment factor, it’s not quite in the first league of war spy stories. But with entertaining performances – Tamiroff’s sweaty, stammering Farid and Fortunio Bonanova’s hyper-Italian Opera-singing general are also treats – and a real wit balanced with a well-developed tension, it’s a strong early film from a director who would go from strength-to-strength.

Scenes From a Marriage (1974)

Bergman’s compelling, emotionally charged film is an intense, impressive and surprising tale

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Liv Ullman (Marianne), Erland Josephson (Johan), Bibi Andersson (Katarina), Jan Malmsjö (Peter), Gunnel Lindblom (Eva), Barbro Hiort af Ornäs (Mrs Jacobi), Anita Wall (Journalist)

A loving couple sit with an interviewer to discuss how happy their relationship is. Ten years later, years after their divorce, they meet in their old weekend cottage for an assignation away from their new partners. Along the way, they’ll lie, fight, cheat but also show time-and-again few people know them better than they do each other. Based on his own marriages and relationships (not least his relationship with Liv Ullman), Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage is a fascinatingly intimate and intense portrait of the contradictory impulses we feel towards the people we know best: how we can, in the same moment, love them, hate them, want to be a million miles away from them and also yearn to take them in our arms and tell them everything.

Skilfully cut down from a six-part TV series – the episode titles become ‘chapter headings’, each signifying a time shift – it becomes a series of intense, almost real-time, conversations between middle-brow professor Johan (Erland Josephson) and successful lawyer Marianne (Liv Ullman). From their ten-year anniversary, their happy-but-functional relationship is shattered when Johan leaves for the (unseen) Paula, heading into divorce, Marianne’s growth in sexual confidence, her little acts of revenge over Johan and their later affair. At all times they prove capable of ripping emotional wounds into each other, but also remaining strangely dependent on love and affection from each other.

It would be easy to say that Scenes of a Marriage is a theatrical piece – it came, originally, from a play Bergman was working on and well over two thirds of its running time features Josephson and Ullman alone on screen. But if the close-up is the language of cinema, Scenes from a Marriage may be the most cinematic film every made. Shot in a cooly observational style by Sven Nykvist, vast swathes of Scenes from a Marriage plays out in searing close-up, the camera studying every inch of the emotional angst its two characters are putting themselves through. Bergman knows exactly how to build the punishing tension in these scenes, frequently climaxing in visceral outbursts.

It is a film about what we say and what we chose not to say and what we decide to hear. The conversation between the couples is framed by their careful considerations: when to hold fire and when to let rip; when to listen and when to choose not to hear. And it’s clear that, when we are first introduced to them, they have mastered the art of not saying anything at all. Smilingly parroting cliches to their interviewer, they later smugly compare themselves to their feuding friends Karatina and Peter (excellent cameos from a searing Bibi Andersson and a provocative Jan Malmsjö). But their conversation never touches on deeper issues (Bergman’s called this chapter ‘The Art of Sweeping Things Under the Carpet’) and their sex life has dwindled to timetabled functionality.

It’s clear they are aware of this growing distance themselves. Johan shares his poetry with a colleague (an expertly reserved cameo from Gunnel Lindblom), complaining Marianne considers it little better than spiritual masturbation and yearns for an expressive freedom he feels is impossible in his marriage. Marianne meanwhile speaks to a client, Mrs Jacobi (a tragic Barbro Hiort af Ornäs), whose story of a lifetime trapped in a loveless marriage with children she never really wanted clearly strikes Marianne as a chilling vision of her own future.

That doesn’t stop Marianne responding with shocked subservience that tips into desperate pleading when Johan announces he wants to leave her. Bergman stages this scene beautifully, with the ridiculous logic people sink into in tragic break-ups. Johan eats a snack meal prepared by Marianne, guiltily confessing his affair, but there is something very real about Marianne’s stunned reaction which sees her planning his packing (because he’s useless at it) and continue their bedtime preparation before she starts pleading him to stay. Just there is something very real in Johan’s reaction: having steeled himself for a fight, her subservience enrages him until he is cruelly tearing verbal lumps out of her. This is the sort of searing emotional up-and-down that rings true, one allowing shock to humiliate them the other transforming shame into defensive, accusatory blame.

But Scenes from a Marriage is a film that utterly understands how much we change under circumstances. Separation is not good for Johan: his new lover doesn’t interest him, his career stalls and he tips into self-pity. Marianne, once the shock and fear of separation passes, discovers she likes her freedom. Her wardrobe shifts to more form-fitting and revealing clothes, she embraces the opportunities of singledom and repays Johan’s desertion with a seduction of him she deliberately doesn’t follow-through on. They now talk more honestly than ever before – and it’s a blistering, verbally and physically violent exchange rammed full of resentment and petty cruelty.

To do this stuff you need actors at the top of their game and who completely trust each other. Bergman certainly has this with his two stars. Josephson’s self-contented smugness moves through arrogant selfishness to desperate vulnerability, his expressive face sometimes puppy-doggish, sometimes drowning in bear-like fury. Ullman is, of course, exceptional. Her masterful ability to react, to let thoughts and emotions play fleetingly across her face was made for Bergman’s close-up film-making and she takes Marianne on a fascinating journey, from near-submissive home-maker to vibrantly confident women of the world while never letting the vulnerability and doubt be too far from her eyes. It’s an extraordinary performance, searing and tender, as raw as knife-edge.

These two play absorbingly off each other, their conversations gripping minefields of repressed then hugely expressed emotions. Their collaboration, guided by Bergman’s close (but not intrusive) camerawork is extraordinary. Fashioned from Bergman’s experiences of relationships, Scenes from a Marriage is, however, strangely hopeful. One of its key themes is that, even when they hate each other, this couple know and trust each other more than anyone else. In times of crisis and pain they always turn to each for a consolatory word or comfort.

There is something strangely warm about their relationship, despite its turmoil, and the film is refreshing in saying friendship and love doesn’t have to end with divorce, but can transform itself into something else, perhaps even something better. Perhaps it’s that strange note of hope that makes Scenes of a Marriage so influential to a generation of filmmakers. It refuses the simple moral standpoints of judgement and suggests the decision to no longer be together (or even faithful to each other) need not be the end all, but instead a bump in a longer journey: that a relationship (and even a love) doesn’t end when a marriage does.