Category: Directors

The King of Comedy (1983)

Scorsese’s dark satire on the obsessive love of fame was miles ahead of its time

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Robert De Niro (Rupert Pupkin), Jerry Lewis (Jerry Langford), Sandra Bernhard (Masha), Diahnne Abbott (Rita Keene), Shelley Hack (Cathy Long), Frederick De Cordova (Bert Thomas)

Like moths to a flame, celebrity attracts obsessives, weirdos and those desperate to grab their slice of fame’s limited cake. In our world of influencers and social media, the sharp, uncomfortable and acidic King of Comedy has become a classic after flopping on release. The world seems full of Rupert Pupkin’s today, people who feel their mission in life is to share their gifts for entertaining with the world and feel ownership over their famous idols.

Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) feels like this about TV chat-show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis). Pupkin sees himself as a polite, affable comedy-star-in-the-waiting and only the fact that he and Langford have never met is preventing them from forming a deep and lasting friendship. In actuality, Pupkin is a fantasist with an elaborate fantasy-world he struggles to differentiate from reality. Believing Jerry wants to give him his big break, his stalkerish attempts to become the star’s protégé lead to inevitable rejection. Desperate, he allies with Jerry’s even-more-openly obsessive stalker Masha (Sandra Bernhard) to take desperate measures to break into the spotlight.

The King of Comedy gets, in a way few other films have done before or since, the dark outer-reaches of the allure of fame. It’s a film about people desperate, in different ways, to have a part of the glamourous exciting world are pressed up against the screen watching. It’s about the darkly-comic – and, in their way, terrifying – lengths people will go to feel special and noticed. To land a quiet moment with a distant superstar or (even better) to become the celebrity themselves.

There’s a little bit of Rupert Pupkin in all of us. Perhaps that’s why we find De Niro’s exquisite performance both hilarious, mortifying to watch but also strangely endearing. Who hasn’t spun in their head elaborate fantasies full of warm conversations with those we admire, where they fall over themselves to tell us how amazing we are? Or imagined a critical teacher going on television to tell the world how wrong they were? Or dreamed of impressing the person we fancied at school with tales of our high-flying success among the hoi-polloi?

What we perhaps don’t do, is build a replica TV studio in our apartment, staffed with life-size cardboard cut-outs of our heroes. Or act out, long into the night, the conversations we wished we had. We probably don’t try to force up fantasies weekend retreats with superstars into reality by turning up at their houses unannounced with a date we want to impress in tow. We might enjoy flirting with a little fantasy life, we’ve probably not started to believe it or started to resent the celebrities for not performing in real life the affection they show us in our mind.

But Rupert does. Superbly played by De Niro – this might just be his finest performance, hilariously over-eager, pathetic but with just the possibility of Bickle-like danger under the surface – Pupkin lives half in this world, half in his own. He doesn’t even seem to realise how socially awkward or desperate he is, approaching every conversation with an air of polite, calm decency. The sort of guy who hands over his own autograph to the girl he’s trying to impress, telling her it will be worth a fortune one day. Who, when he finally gets the chance to talk to his idol after ’rescuing’ him from a deranged fan (something we quickly realise is a set-up – and an indicator of the ends Pupkin will go to), seems literally unable to let the conversation end, utterly unaware each additional word that passes his lips makes it less-and-less likely Jerry will ever speak to him again.

Pupkin only looks normal when he’s compared to his partner in Jerry-obsession Masha, a superbly grating performance of unhinged monomania from Sandra Bernhard. Masha and Rupert – the sparky, bickering interplay between De Niro and Bernhard is electric, the two sounding like children feuding over the last cookie in the jar – are two halves of the same personality: Rupert the more polite, more capable of affecting normality part who longs for a celebrity to recognise him as one of their own; Masha is the possessive id, who wants to grasp her object of affection tight and never let them go, focused on celebrities because they are easier to follow than regular people.

But we’ve all been desperate to take a chance to get close to something we want haven’t we? When presenting himself at Jerry’s office with his demo tape, Pupkin politely but firmly refuses to read any social cues from the staff that they want him to leave. De Niro’s permagrin is a superpower, rejection bouncing off him unscathed. De Niro manages, under the smile and unassuming manner, to always demonstrate Pupkin’s belief fame is his due. The King of Comedy really understands the belief many feel that all which separates them from success is luck. Pupkin rejects hard work and honing his act, genuinely not understanding why he can’t graduate straight to prime-time TV. He’s a millennial ahead of his time, someone who believes if he really, really wants something he should get it.

What’s fascinating about Scorsese’s film is it encourages us to share Pupkin’s delusional perspective. Jerry Langford – a superb performance of bitter, dark self-parody by Jerry Lewis – is all smiles on TV but, as far as we can see, a surly bully in reality, frequently abrupt and rude. But think about it: we only really see him from the perspective of the invasive Pupkin and the frankly terrifyingly Masha. Would you cut these guys any slack? In brief moments where King of Comedy puts us in Jerry’s shoes, it’s clear his world isn’t always pleasant: the woman who responds to his polite refusal to talk to her son on the phone screams “You should die of cancer” at him and he’s obvious genuinely scared of Masha. Is it a surprise he clutches a golf club throughout his confrontation when Pupkin arrives at his home? He chooses his words carefully because too much interaction can be as dangerous as none-at-all.

What’s also quietly clever about King of Comedy is that Pupkin isn’t talentless as such. His problem is all his material is as derivative and carefully studied as his attempt to act normal is. When we see his act, some of the jokes land – but they land like with the carefully planned poise of an obsessive who has copied the tics of those with genuine talent. Pupkin is witty, but it’s outweighed by his obsessive desire for immediate fame. Everything about him is carefully crafted, his entire persona constructed to cope with the world. That’s why he retreats so often in fantasy, where everything is easier.

And maybe King of Comedy heads into fantasy, much as Taxi Driver perhaps does. Don’t trust a Scorsese-De Niro film where someone who we’ve seen as maladjusted, unaware and self-deceiving as Pupkin gets what he wants at the end. King of Comedy shares huge amounts of DNA with Taxi Driver – history repeating itself as farce – even if Pupkin is too childish and incompetent to be as much of a danger as Bickle is.

King of Comedy captures all this with a brilliant understanding of the addictive qualities of fame and celebrity. Sure we sort of like Pupkin sometimes, but we also understand why Jerry finds him so unbearable and unsettling – and also clear just how short a distance he would need to travel to become Masha. King of Comedy delivers all this with an unflashy skill and hosts a truly superb performance from De Niro, a pitch-perfect study in weakness, longing, delusion, repressed desperation and strange vulnerability. It speaks to feelings we’ve all had, but it also reveals the horrific end results of those longings.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

The Python’s finest hour is a hit-a-minute medieval comedy that I never fail to laugh at

Director: Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones

Cast: Graham Chapman (King Arthur), John Cleese (Sir Lancelot/The Black Knight/French Taunter/Tim the Enchanter), Terry Gilliam (Patsy/ Soothsaying Bridgekeeper/The Green Knight/Sir Bors), Eric Idle (Sir Robin the-not-quite-so-brave-as-Sir-Lancelot/Concorde, Dead collector/Roger the Shrubber/Brother Maynard), Terry Jones (Sir Bedevere the Wise/Prince Herbert/Dennis’ mother), Michael Palin (Sir Galahad the Pure/Leader of the Knights Who Say Ni/Lord of Swamp Castle/Dennis), Connie Booth (Miss Islington), Carol Cleveland (Zoot/Dingo)

I’ve sometimes found the surreal, satirical and sometimes plain silly humour of the Monty Python troupe hit-and-miss. But when it lands, it really lands and Monty Python and the Holy Grail may well just be their finest hour. Essentially a series of sketches loosely worked together into a sort-of-plot, but never taking itself too seriously, it’s an often-inspired collection of highly influential gags delivered by a troupe of performers at the top-of-their-game (it’s hard to believe that they have all said shooting the film was a tough, punishing and exhausting process).

What Python got right here is how easy – and hilarious – it is to poke fun at something so very po-faced and serious as medievalism had a tendency to take itself back then. In fact, it’s perhaps a lasting tribute to the film that no-one has ever been able to take it quite as seriously since. Monty Python and the Holy Grail also lines up shots at the arthouse high-brow seriousness of films like Andrei Rublev and, most famously, The Seventh Seal (those hilarious, moose-obsessed, opening credits are a flawless take-down of Bergman’s portentous opening) but also a dismantling of the likes of Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac (no-one can watch that film’s opening now without picturing the Black Knight protesting ‘It’s a only a flesh wound!’ as crimson spray flows freely).

I love Holy Grail. It’s practically designed for undergraduates to sit around and watch, while getting slowly pissed and then spend ages quoting at each other. Many of its jokes lean into bizarre surrealism and funny sounding words – “shrubbery!” just sounds funny, even more so when it’s squeaked out by a giant Michael Palin in a ridiculous helmet affecting a rhotacism. And the Pythons knew how to turn problems into genre-defining gags: thank God they couldn’t afford horses, so instead came up with the frankly genius idea to just mime the knights riding horses to the sound of two coconut halves being visibly tapped together by their squires.

And then to have the comic presence of mind to riff on enforced ideas like this so much (just how did coconuts turn up in medieval Britain?) that for generations, fans will ram their tongues earnestly into their cheeks debating the migratory habits and air speeds of laden and unladen swallows. It’s all part of a superbly written script, which get just the right balance between Thomas Mallory-esque medieval rhythms laced with nonsese ( “The swallow may fly south with the sun or the house martin or the plover may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land”) and a mix of anachronistic casualism and simmering middle-class frustration. All the time in Monty Python and the Holy Grail there are traces of the sort of serious, played-dead-straight, medieval film this could be, making the constant punctuation of surreal, fourth-wall leaning, silliness all the more hilarious.

A lot of this also comes down the highly skilled comic playing of the troupe. Graham Chapman, in particular, has the seemingly dull job of playing the straight-man. But his ability to play, even the most ridiculous encounters, with complete earnestness is crucial to the film’s success. Arthur is, really, a ludicrous figure, but Chapman knows he can never acknowledge this for the joke to work. Hilariously, the legendary king here becomes a sort of put-upon middle-manager, constantly frustrated while going about his day job, dumb enough to be unaware of how absurd he is, but smart enough to get frustrated at the increasingly dim antics of his followers.

It also allows the rest of the troupe to let rip with broader comic performances, all of whom have a whale of a time. John Cleese’s pompous bossiness and control-freak mania is perfect for the psychotic Sir Lancelot while his latent comic cruelty, combined with a passion for silly accents and walking, is perfect for the famed French taunter (the funniest Frenchman on screen). Palin’s goodie-two-shoes decency is great for the tempted Sir Galahad while his brilliant capacity for deluded self-importance nails the Lord of Swamp Castle – and who else could have taken such an impish delight in the Trotskyist mantras of the socialist peasant Dennis? For the rest of the troupe, Eric Idle’s mix of cheek, dressed-up poshness and wimpy weakness is expertly used while Terry Jones mocks academia as Sir Bedevere and whines brilliantly as Herbert. And no-one does dirty better than Terry Gilliam.

Gilliam and Jones also directed, allegedly not always harmoniously neither quite agreeing if this was a film or whether it was a comic show. But the presence of Gilliam behind the camera probably accounts for why this is the most visually striking Monty Python film, with mists rolling over the hills and the Scottish locations given a mythic power which makes the silly jokes that happen all around them even funnier – while Jones’ medievalist background surely helped define the film’s surprisingly authentic (and therefore even funnier) feel. Holy Grail also very successfully disguises that it was effectively all shot in one or two locations (Doune Castle is shot from so many angles it becomes about a dozen different locations).

But what really makes Holy Grail work is the quality of the jokes. And it opens with a run of gags of such consistent quality they are perhaps unparalleled in Python’s work. The Swallow debate. Bring Out Your Dead. Peasants nailing the ‘self-perpetuating autocracy’. The flesh wounds of the Black Knight. The witch trial. The French Taunter (“Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries!”). The Trojan Rabbit. Camelot being a silly place. The opening half of the film is one piece of solid comic gold and if the second half doesn’t have quite the same hit rate, it’s still more than funny enough.

And funny is what it is all about. You can say ‘it doesn’t have as good a plot as Life of Brian’. You can say it just ends, as if the troupe ran out of ideas. You can say it loses a steam. But it doesn’t matter when you laugh and laugh time and time again at its best bits. And you really do. And people who encounter it at the right age, will go on laughing at it for the rest of their lives., for decades to come.

Ashes and Diamonds (1958)

Wajda’s masterpiece of subtle but stinging Soviet criticism and one of the great European films

Director: Andrjez Wajda

Cast: Zbigniew Cybulski (Maciek Chełmicki), Ewa Krzyżewska (Krystyna), Wacław Zastrzeżyński (Szczuka), Adam Pawlikowski (Andrzej), Bogumił Kobiela (Drewnowski), Stanisław Milski (Pieniążek). Ignacy Machowski (Waga)

When the dust settles from the chaos of uncertain, terrible times what will we it leave behind: ashes or a diamond? It’s a question Poland is asking on the final day of the war, 8^th May 1945 –what fate will come under Soviet rule? Wajda’s War Trilogy comes to its end and, even considering the quality of the first two films in the series, Ashes and Diamonds is a quantum leap in filmmaking, an extraordinary mix of realism and poetic ambiguity. Wajda captures this turning point in Polish history with a series of encounters between a group of characters in a single location on one night. Ashes and Diamonds can lay claim to being one of the greatest films from Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, a breathtakingly rewarding mix of subtle messaging and tragedy.

Home Army fighters – those paying attention to Wajda’s earlier work will be well aware the Polish government strongly disapproved of these forces loyal to a democratic Polish government – Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) and Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) attempt to assassinate communist leader Szczuka (Wacław Zastrzeżyński). Instead, they accidentally murder two regular workers. They are ordered to take a second attempt on their target after he attends a celebration with a host of Polish and Soviet dignitaries at a local hotel. But triggerman Maciek is torn, trapped in a cycle of war that has killed his friends, uncertain about whether to continue in the crusade that has consumed his youth or explore a life he glances at with barmaid Krystna (Ewa Krzyżewska). Will Maciek complete his mission or accept Poland’s future lies not with the ‘liberating’ Soviets?

Wajda’s restructuring of Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel is the culmination of the entire War Trilogy’s style: a careful criticism of Stalinism, buried behind ambiguous characters and images that provide enough of an interpretative fig-leaf that the Polish authorities could convince themselves his work was politically acceptable. Nearly everything in Ashes and Diamonds is subtly open to interpretation, carefully hiding its message in plain sight: the war is bringing ashes to Poland, not diamonds. Certainly, today, that’s the only interpretation you could take from Wajda’s extraordinary ending: our assassin writhing in painful, fearful death-throws on a rubbish heap while the hotel guests dance slowly and hypnotically into a doorway bathed in light. The beautiful ambiguity though is clear: look, Wajda could say to his political masters, they’re heading into the light while the Home Army soldier literally dies in a pile of rubbish. How more pro-Soviet can you get?

The entire film is a sad poem to a lost Poland with Wajda carefully guiding our sympathy towards Maciek. On paper, there’s plenty to admire in Szczuka, clearly an honest, competent politician – but he’s also uncharismatic and dull, who we may respect but never love. All our sympathies are captured by Zbigniew Cybulski’s extraordinary performance as Maciek. Inspired by James Dean and Marlon Brando (having binged their films while studying in Paris), Cybulski effectively wears his own clothes and gives Maciek the sort of anti-authority cool Dean made his own. Our sympathies lie immediately with this young man turned reluctant warrior, angry and scared.

Cybulski’s performance isn’t just attitude. He makes clear Maciek is deeply traumatised by the things he’s seen and done. Those dark glasses he wears – which make him look both older, cooler and more cocksure (he looks noticeably younger and more vulnerable without them) – are a legacy of damage to his eyesight from the sewers of the Warsaw Uprising. There’s an odd childish vulnerability to him – he’s spooked by ants crawling across his machine gun during their opening botched assassination – along with a surly resentment at the never-ending demands of this war. But he’s also iconoclastic and passionate about the vision he’s been fighting for. All of this is beautifully captured by Cybulski.

Maciek is at the centre of this pained reflection on all that has been lost in the war. Wajda presents this lingering sense with a series of strikingly unforgettable images. Maciek and Andrzej toast their fallen comrades with burning shots of vodka, each lit like a candle as they remember another name. Flames mark death and loss throughout: the innocent man accidentally machine-gunned by Maciek falls with his jacket burning from point-blank gunfire, fireworks fill the sky when Maciek carries out his assassination.

And where is the Church in all this? Ashes and Diamonds come back time and again to the great spiritual guide in Polish lives (before Socialism). The early assassination takes place outside a countryside Church, its locked door failing to save the victims. It’s an ominous sign for a world where God may have fallen silent, or perhaps never spoke at all. In another brilliant touch of Wajda ambiguity, Maciek and Krystyna walk through a bombed-out church, encountering a giant crucifix hanging upside down. This is not only an extraordinary image – the thorns from Jesus’ head either seeming to visually skewer the lovers or pull them in – but also a confirmation or lament for how little God can help Poland. Maciek clearly doesn’t care, since he happily uses altar decorations to fix Krystyna’s shoe. Faith doesn’t matter in this world.

All people have to belief in is what they can muster in themselves. Perhaps that’s why Maciek has filled his life with the longing to keep the good old cause going. He’s lost so much, he can’t actually believe there is anything else he could really do. For all his flirting at the bar, brimming with cocksure cool, does he ever really believe he has any choice but to continue with what he has committed to do? Wajda frames Maciek in his final moments of choice, huddling under stairs, shadows seeming to box and cage him in.

He’s as trapped as the rest of Poland is. Szczuka is a decent man, but he’s also a Socialist fanatic horrified to hear his son fought for the ‘reactionary’ Home Army. Meanwhile, his Soviet paymasters carefully nuzzle themselves into control over the Polish authorities, Wajda presenting them always with a careful political neutrality. Cunningly, all criticism of them is placed in the mouth of a journalist who speaks nothing but the truth about the freedom-crushing Soviets – but he’s made a drunkard sleazeball (more than enough for the censors to dismiss his words).

Ashes and Diamonds is also a beautiful piece of filmmaking, crammed with Wellesian light and shadow. Despite mostly being a film about waiting and decision making, it’s also full of pace, energy and a sense of a world steamrolled out of existence. It has one of the legendary endings, not only the long, lonely death of our hero but also the hypnotic, slow dance of the Polish authorities, disappearing into the sunlight, unknowingly marching into a future that will extinguish them.

Wajda manages to communicate all this in a film which, thanks to its need to slip everything past the censors, is extraordinarily supple and subtle, never over-playing its hand and spreading its humanity. There are no real villains here, only a series of people at a turning point of history, presented with careful even-handedness, but in way that never intrudes on the obvious sympathies of the film. With extraordinary direction and a superb, era-defining performance from Cybulski, it’s a masterpiece of World Cinema.

Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)

Lusciously filmed melodrama that might also be an exploration of dangerous obsession

Director: Max Ophüls

Cast: Joan Fontaine (Lisa Berndle), Louis Jourdan (Stefan Brand), Mady Christians (Frau Berndle), Marcel Journet (Johann Stauffer), Art Smith (John), Howard Freeman (Herr Kastner), Carol Yorke (Marie), John Good (Lt. Leopold von Kaltnegger)

Faded pianist and lothario Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan) plans to skip town in 1920s Vienna before his duel with a reputed crack-shot. He’s packed up and ready to go, but halts when his butler passes him a letter from a woman unknown to him that opens “By the time you read this letter, I may be dead”. The writer is Lisa Berndle (Joan Fontaine), a young woman who has loved Stefan since first seeing him when she was an impressionable 15-year-old living in his apartment block in 1900. All her life she has shadowed Stefan and twice they have met – once ten years before, spending a few romantic days together and then again recently under another name – but Stefan has no idea who she is.

Adapted from a Stefan Zweig short story, Letter From an Unknown Woman becomes a richly elaborate display of film-making from Max Ophüls, a show-case for his gorgeous camera work and luscious sense of visual theatre. This is classic melodrama, the characters thrown together after years apart by chance and contrivance, heightened emotions guiding every scene, with the suspense hook at all times of wondering who will see clearly first: will Stefan recognise this woman who has loved him from afar all his life, or will Lisa acknowledge that what she wants from Stefan, a full recognition and genuine return of her feelings, he is unable to give?

It makes for perfect material for Ophüls almost-unmatched visual sense. Letter From an Unknown Woman is packed with the sort of elaborate, carefully planned tracking shots and fluidic camera movements Ophüls made his own. From the start, the camera roves upwards, following the young Lisa as she excitedly runs up a spiral staircase to creep into the apartment of Stefan. There is a superbly handled tracking shot through the street of Venice, as a mid-twenties Lisa walks with a soldier would-be-suitor whose proposal she will immediately reject. And, most triumphantly of all, a tracking shot through a grand society theatre, that roams past crowds of hoi-polloi with Lisa, before focusing on her reaction as she glances Stefan from a distance across the hall.

It’s a visual richness Ophüls triumphs at and he uses it to give an intensity to several scenes, in particular the lost opportunity weekend Lisa spends with Stefan. This is marked by a beautifully framed late-night café dance, before a walk full of romantic lingering in a nearly-abandoned fairground. What’s superb about what Ophüls does with these sequences is to make them look romantic while also suggesting a sort of broken decadence to them (the locations, like the slightly faded café with its bored band, are always slightly past their best). There is a faded grandeur in Letter From an Unknown Woman, with everyone clinging to something they’ve lost or never had, hopes of love or artistic success that are never quite going to happen.

It’s easy to see Letter from an Unknown Woman as a traditional romance of the loyal loving woman, who sticks with her love for a man for better-or-worse. But, particularly today, it’s also clear that the film walks a fine line where its possible to see its lead character as both richly romantic and a delusional, obsessive border-line stalker, fixated on a heartless seducer. Is love a force to be praised at all times, or a destructive force that prevents someone from maturing? For all the richness of the photography and music, it’s hard not to think it’s the latter. And I think Ophüls lets this play on the edges, the camera lingering at points on Fontaine’s face full of obsessive self-sacrifice monomania.

It make for a richly complex role for Joan Fontaine, playing the young Lisa from age 15 to 35, taking her from doe-eyed, love-struck teenager to a woman seasoned by years of regrets, obsessively clinging to has last chance of finding a love she has spent her whole life pining for. Fontaine is giddy, excited but that glimmer of obsession is always there. Ophüls presents her at one point standing, stalker-like, outside Stefan’s apartment, her eyes craning up for just a glance of the object of her affection. In his presence, she’s breathless and excited but also with a touch of pain and desperation, longing for him to give her some sort of validation after years of dutiful, unremarked-on love. Fontaine manages to keep Lisa vulnerable and sympathetic, even as she goes about her life with an obsessive self-destruction, discarding other suitors, spending years working a menial role in a dress shop on the off-chance it might lead to an encounter with Stefan.

Self-destruction is what this ‘relationship’ brings to Lisa, a woman who stubbornly refuses to move on in her life from the decisions and emotions she first experiences as a teenager and will discard attentive lovers, husbands and even children all to the chance of finding a few moments of bliss with the object of her affection. She does this with a real sense of fragility, a longing that keeps her vulnerable, but also something that keeps her from really living her life. Particularly since Stefan – and the film uses Louis Jourdan’s cool, detached arrogance to great effect – emerges as a heartless roué, who thinks only of the immediate and destroys his own promise in a hedonistic clinging to the moment rather than really building something.

For all its luscious romance, Letter from an Unknown Woman carries this air of self-destructive futility about it. Is cradling a teenage obsession healthy for Lisa? Especially as its object is scarcely worthy of the effort? After all, Stefan meets and seduces (as he sees it) the same woman twice several years apart without ever joining the dots up in his head- repeating the same smooth pick-up lines both time. It doesn’t stop Lisa, until the very end, lighting up with a sort of youthful joy you imagine she’s not felt at any other time But Ophüls is using it to build towards a moment where Stefan may perhaps finally remember Lisa – and even more strikingly may realise the shallow emptiness of his whole life and the lost opportunity of being genuinely loved by someone.

That feeling exists, even if you feel (as I do) that Stefan is the unworthy figure of an emotionally-immature woman’s unhealthy obsession. Perhaps Lisa’s life would have been better and happier if she had moved on, as we all do, from our first crushes. But Letter from an Unknown Woman also celebrates a sort of strength in this, by contrasting the morally pure and consistent Lisa with the shallow and mercenary Stefan. His flaws are obvious but, in a way, they also serve to cement Lisa’s own innocence and vulnerability – and add to the impact as Stefan realises the path not taken.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021)

Low-key, beautifully made short-story anthology, crammed with wonderfully little touches

Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Cast: Kotone Furukawa (Meiko), Ayumu Nakajima (Kazuaki Kubota), Hyunri (Tsugumi Konno), Kiyohiko Shibukawa (Segawa), Katsuki Mori (Nao), Shouma Kai (Sasaki), Fusako Urabe (Moka Natsuko), Aoba Kawai (Nana Aya)

Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy feels deceptively simple. But it’s the Japanese auteur combining an Ozu-inspired sensibility with the narrative flair of Chekhov. In its three acts, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy presents three short stories, each chamber pieces, each revolving around intimate, intense and life-changing conversations between two people. Hamaguchi demonstrates how lives can rotate on their axis in split seconds, with conversations shifting for one or both participants with no warning, generating unexpected, emotionally surprising results.

‘Magic’, the first story, revolves around model Meiko (Kotone Furukawa) and best friend Tsugami (Hyunri). During a long cab journey, Tsugami tells Meiko all about her new romance – only for Meiko to realise, part way through, she is talking about Meiko’s ex-boyfriend Kazuaki (Ayumu Nakajima) with whom Meiko may still love. ‘Door Wide Open’ sees distinguished professor and author Segawa (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) become the unsuspecting target of a honey trap by Nao (Katsuki Mori), after her friend-with-benefit’s Sasaki (Shouma Kai) had his media career-plans derailed by Segawa failing him. Nao and Segawa however find unexpectantly common ground. Finally, ‘Once Again’ has Natsuko (Fusako Urabe) excitedly bumping into her former high school girlfriend Aya (Aoba Kawai) at a train station – only to find, when they return to Aya’s home, both have mistaken the other for someone else. These two strangers however find it easier to talk and bond.

All three of these stories are deceptively simple. Only ‘Once Again’ features any unusual set-up (a computer virus has rendered all computers unusable, a sci-fi insertion that only exists to remove any chance of the mix-up being avoided). Hamaguchi shoots each story with an unaffected simplicity, frequently employing long-takes and staging the bulk of each story (each is about 40 minutes) in single, every-day locations – from taxis to offices to homes.

But Hamaguchi’s approach allows the performances to grow with a subtle, skilful naturalness, capturing intense (but often hidden) changes of mood in the slightest micro-expressions. Each of the three key conversations underpinning the stories develops in utterly unexpected ways and part of the magic of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is immediately wanting to play each of back and try and spot the moments where they changed their participants lives.

Hamaguchi carefully builds our empathy with these characters, using Ozu-inspired stationary set-ups complemented with unfussy two-shot set-ups, but culminating in moments of complete immersion where POV shots place us behind the eyes of each character, looking directly at the person they are talking with. It’s a superb way of quietly building our connection with the characters and the events they are experiencing and works brilliantly to immerse us in these moments that we know will shape their emotional development over months and years to come.

This gives these small scale – and they are defiantly small-scale – stories real impact. Hamaguchi’s film is about real people facing real problems: lost loves, frustrated ambitions, childhood regrets. The very human feelings in play here help make the stories affecting. It’s helped again by the subtle performances Hamguchi draws from the cast. When Meiko – a marvellous ambiguous Kotone Furukawa – fumes against her ex-boyfriend for moving on, is she angry at him or at herself for letting him go? Does Segawa (a perfectly dour, almost unreadable Kiyohiko Shibukawa) feel fear at his reputation being damaged or because of stirrings of sexual longing he has clearly repressed? Does Natsuko (a gorgeously fragile Fusako Urabe) relish the freedom of speaking her mind to a complete stranger even more than she would talking to the actual person she is recalling?

Hamaguchi mixes this with intriguing moments of fantasy. A deliberately clumsy camera zoom at one point indicates to us a no-holds-barred conversation in a café has just been in the imagination of one of its participants. Sasaki fantasises about himself reporting on the television about his former mentor. Hamaguchi also brings a wonderful sense of magic to everyday locations (not to mention the fairy tale like set-up of the final stories lack of computers, which feels like the aftereffects of a witch’s curse). The escalator Natsuko and Aya meet on takes on a mystic beauty as it moves them past each other on careful tracking shots. Meiko walks through city streets and stares back at a skyline that feels filled with meaning. Hamaguchi isn’t afraid to slow the film down at key moments to soak up atmosphere and observe the everyday beauty in objects around us.

It lends even more power to the sudden changes these characters experience. Each story carefully builds on the emotional impact of the one before, taking us through ambiguity to complex mixed feelings to a final cathartic moment at a train station that carries real emotional force. Every story ends in a very different place from what we expected at the start – or arguably even the middle – without Hamaguchi ever overplaying his Dahlish Tales of the Unexpected card.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a small-scale expression of Hamaguchi’s directorial mastery, a perfect expression of his ability to infuse small-scale stories with great emotional force and psychological depth. It’s a highly skilled piece of short-film-making, pulled together into an effective collection. A clear indicator that this – combined with Drive My Car – marks Hamaguchi out as a future great.

Written on the Wind (1956)

Sirk’s melodrama packs in plenty of tight psychological observation among soap suds

Director: Douglas Sirk

Cast: Rock Hudson (Mitch Wayne), Lauren Bacall (Lucy Moore Hadley), Robert Stack (Kyle Hadley), Dorothy Malone (Marylee Hadley), Robert Keith (Jasper Hadley), Grant Williams (Biff Miley), Robert J. Wilke (Dan Willis), Edward Platt (Dr. Paul Cochrane), Harry Shannon (Hoak Wayne)

Money can’t buy you love. The oil-rich Hadleys live the high-life off the oil-empire built by patriarch Jasper Hadley (Robert Keith). Unfortunately, his children are both deeply unhappy and emotionally stunted. Kyle (Robert Stack) is an alcoholic playboy, Marylee (Dorothy Malone) a lonely woman who plays with other people’s lives to make herself feel better. Both are, in different ways, in love with sub-consciously resentful Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), the poor-boy childhood friend turned geologist who their father sees as the son he wishes he had. Mitch is in love with Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall), an ambitious secretary at Hadley Oil – but Kyle also falls for her, marrying her. Marylee is in love with Mitch, who doesn’t feel the same. We already know from the film’s prologue all this is going to end with a bullet.

It makes for gorgeous entertainment in Douglas Sirk’s lusciously filmed melodrama, that helped lay out the template for the sort of soapy Dynasty-type TV monoliths that would follow years after. Sirk’s gift with this sort of material was to imbue it with just enough Tennessee Williams’ style psychological drama. Written on the Wind is awash with the glamour and beauty of wealth but, at the same time, demonstrates the immense psychological emptiness at the heart of the American Dream. What’s the point of all this luxury when those who have it are as deeply fucked up as the Hadleys are?

Their family is so wealthy the Texas town they live in is named after them and the run it like a private fiefdom, with the police running around like their errand boys. It’s not made them a jot happy. Both Maryann and Kyle are deeply aware of their own emptiness, rooted in the lack of attention (and love) from their father, a work-obsessed man who seems to have written his children off at an early age and invested far more time in training up Mitch like some sort of cuckoo-in-the-nest. Perhaps to try and win back their father’s love as much as to try and find meaning in their own, both of them want to possess Mitch: Maryann is destructively desperate to marry him, Kyle seems to want to become him and if one-way of doing that is by stealing the girl Mitch loves, all the better.

Wonderfully played by Robert Stack, overflowing with false confidence, jocularity and an utter, all-engulfing emptiness, Kyle talks endlessly about how Mitch is like a brother to him all while repeating as often as he can gently disparaging references to his poor-upbringing and dependence on the Hadley’s patronage. It’s coupled with his homoerotic (unspoken of course – it’s the fifties – but you can’t miss it!) obsession with Mitch. All of these confused, contradictory feelings wrap up in Stack’s (Oscar-nominated) performance, with the weak Kyle all too-readily believing Mitch might just be bedding his wife.

It’s an idea planted by Maryann, played with a scene-stealing bravado by Oscar-winner Dorothy Malone. Despite her vivacious energy and languidly casual confidence in establishing her pre-eminence over the newcomer Lucy, Maryann is a miserable, disappointed, deeply damaged soul, painfully bereft of any love and seeking meaning in casual couplings with a parade of gas attendants and hotel bellboys. Obsessively in love with Mitch, she dwells like Kyle on their childhood and the lost dreams of what might have been, but never was. This bubbles out over the course of Written on the Wind to an ever-more destructive Iago-like manipulation of the haplessly drunk Kyle, out of a mix of wanting everyone to be as miserable as she is and a desire to either own or destroy Mitch.

Malone and Stack triumph in these show-case roles, successfully building both frustration and sympathy in the audience. Opposite them, Hudson and Bacall (the stars!) play the more sensible, less interesting parts. Bacall’s strength and firmness balance rather nicely the contradictions in Lucy. A clear-eyed realist on meeting Kyle, attracted to the display of wealth while repulsed by his shallow, well-oiled, lothario routine, she never-the-less marries him, at least partly out of a desire to mother this fragile figure (she is genuinely moved by Kyle’s cockpit confessions of inadequacy and self-loathing while he flies her from New York to Miami for a date). From this Lucy confronts the psychological mess of the Hadley family with a stoic determination to make the best of things.

When does she start to develop feelings for Mitch? Mitch is clearly smitten on first sight, glancing fascinated at her legs while she stands behind a display board. But Sirk uses Rock Hudson’s similar stoic quality to great effect, turning Mitch into the epitome of duty, loyal enough to the Hadley family to bend over backwards to support the Kyle-Lucy marriage, all while clearly carrying an immense candle for Lucy. Saying that, part of the fun in Written on the Wind is wondering how much the patient Mitch is a conscious cuckoo, displaying all the intelligence, dedication and aptitude that Jasper so publicly lambasts his children for lacking (and whose fault is that?)

All these psychological soapy suds bubble superbly inside Sirk’s intricately constructed world. Every shot in Written on the Wind is perfectly constructed, splashes of primary colours dominating a world of pristine 50s class. Sirk frames the picture gorgeously, notably using mirrors effectively to place the characters in triangular patterns (Mitch at one point strikingly appearing in a mirror standing between Kyle and Lucy) or to suggest psychological truths (one shot angled to show Lucy brushing her hair in a mirror where we see a reflection of the reclining Maryann and don’t forget that marvellous closing shot of Dorothy subconsciously mirroring her father’s pose in the painting behind her while caressing a phallic model of an oil drill).

Sirk keeps events just the right side of melodramatic excess. A brilliantly staged sequence sees Maryann – dragged home from an assignation by the police – dance with a wild abandon in her bedroom while Jasper, horrified at realising how his disregard has warped Maryann, collapses to a heart-attack on the stairs. It’s a sequence that could be absurd but has just the right amount of reality to it, grounded as it is in Maryann’s self-loathing. Just as Kyle’s belief that impotence is going to consign him to being as much a failure in continuing the Hadley line as he is in everything else. Particularly since he’s constantly reminded of his inadequacy opposite the taller, smarter, better-at-everything Mitch who everyone else in the film openly seems to prefers to him.

It’s an extraordinary balance Sirk keeps, treating the characters with utter respect and affection while placing them in an over-the-top structure full of elaborate sets and overblown, melodramatic events and heightened feelings. Perhaps because Sirk never laughs at the concepts and content he’s created, we invest in both its truth and ridiculous entertainment quality. He does this while avoiding any touch of self-importance, never forgetting this is an old-fashioned melodrama. It makes Written on the Wind a hugely enjoyable, and surprisingly rich, character study mixed with plot-boiler.

Die Nibelungen (1924)

Wagnerian epic is crammed with gorgeous, dramatic imagery and relentless pace

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Paul Richter (King Siegfried of Xanten), Margarete Schön (Kriemhild of Burgund), Hans Adalbert Schlettow (Hagen of Tronje), Theodor Loos (King Gunther of Burgund), Hanna Ralph (Queen Brunhild of Isenland), Rudolf Klein-Rogge (King Attila), Bernhard Goetzke (Volker of Alzey), Rudolf Rittner (Margrave Rüdiger of Bechlarn), Georg John (Mime the Goldsmith/Alberich the Dwarf/Blaodel)

Fritz Lang wanted to create a film that would help a shell-shocked Weimar Germany start to feel proud of its heritage and culture. He would do this with a film of the legend of Siegfried. It’s not really Lang’s fault that this Aryan feel-good stuff, coupled with Lang’s flawless visual compositions dripping with power and authority, would turn into the wet dreams of the Nazi party Lang fled Germany to escape. Die Nibelungen has unfortunate associations, but it stands as a towering pinnacle of Lang’s visual artistry. An adaptation of the legend, not the Wagner operas, Lang created something both mystic but also subtly questioning the idealistic figures it celebrates.

He would do all this in two (epic of course) films, totalling almost five hours. In the first Siegfried, the hero (Paul Richter) overcomes dragons and murderous dwarves to gain powers of almost (that almost is key) total invulnerability, strength and invisibility. Powers he puts to the test to win the weak King Gunther of Burgundy (Theodor Loos) the hand of Brunhild (Hanna Ralph) by invisibly aiding Gunther best this Valkyrie at a series of challenges. He even takes on Gunther’s form to help lead Brunhild to the bridal bed. Brunhild however discovers the truth from the loose lips of Siegfried’s wife (and Gunther’s sister) Kriemhild (Margarete Schön). Brunhild’s tricks Gunther and his loyal heavy Hagen (Hans Adalbert Schlettow) to murder Siegfried via a spear in his one weak spot. In Kriemheld’s Rache, Kriemheld plots the destruction of everyone who conspired in the death of her husband, via a marriage with the warlord Attlia the Hun (Rudolf Klein-Rogge).

The first thing that strikes you about Die Nibelungen – aside from its surprisingly electric pace – is the powerful, undeniable beauty of nearly every single frame. Lang composed each image as if it was a painting, from Siegfried introduced in steaming smoke at the forge, to the formalist imperialism of the castle of Burgandy and the rigid order and symmetry of its soldiers. Locations, from grand castles to mystic forests, underground caverns full of scheming, wicked creatures are superbly bought to life. There is a martial power Lang’s composition of so many of these images, their perfect angles and symmetrical blocking: parts of Die Nibelungen are some of the greatest pageantry displays in movies.

There is a wonderful sense of overblown, geometric, artificiality in all this – Lang deliberately creates a world larger than life and full of the unworldly and impossible. Buildings tower over crowds, courts that hold thousands to view events of grand importance, sieges of burning halls that fill the frame, staircases up impossibly high buildings. The sort of world of medieval excess where Gunther and Kriemheld disembark from a boat by walking across a bridge of shields created by half-submerged knights. Power and magnificence come from every frame.

It’s matched with an impressive creation of the bizarre and magical. Of course Siegfried kills a giant, animatronic dragon (strangely it’s obvious – even then surely – fakeness works in a film where everything is a heightened, from the emotions to the buildings to the costumes). Siegfried trains in something not far off from Vulcan’s forge and the forest feels like a sort of fairy-tale wonderland. Lang pioneered cross-fades and double exposures to make extraordinary effects, as Siegfried disappears under a veil of invisibility and jumps impossible distances. There is an extraordinary shot where Brunhild, still in the midst of her Valkyrie-like super-powers, seems to jump straight into the camera lens at full force. A beautiful edit sees a tree seem to reform itself into a skill in front of the eyes of the grieving Krimhild.

But Die Nibelungen places its world of power and magical forces in an increasingly costly human world of realpolitik and conspiracy, where its mystical but naïve and simple hero is out of step. Even before then, Siegfried’s status as a hero is subtly questioned. The dragon he kills seems a peaceful, inoffensive creature for all is scale, sitting placidly when Siegfried attacks and stabs it in the eye. Lang introduces a lovely touch where it’s dying tail flick will send the leaf that shields a crucial spot of Siegfried’s back from the torrent of invulnerability-granting dragon’s blood he bathes in. Siegfried is easily manipulated by the dwarf Albereich (a Gollum-like, uncomfortably antisemitic in appearance) before a large dose of luck allows him to defeat his opponent and gain the treasure of Nibelungen.

At the court of Burgundy, for all his courage and blunt honesty, Siegfried is at sea among the subtle power dynamics. The kingdom is ruled by chronically indecisive weakling Gunther (a snivelling Theodor Loos), easily manipulated by Wagnerian-costumed Hagen (an imposingly arrogant and faintly psychotic Hans Adalbert Schlettow). Siegfried’s main acts are to trick and then break the resistance of Brunhild (a dynamic Hanna Ralph) while impersonating the weakling – hardly acts to brag about, which doesn’t stop Siegfried doing exactly that to his wife who then blurts it out to Brunhild in a fit of pique. This isn’t a hero covering himself with glory, just as even the formally idealistic Brunhild (much to her later self-disgust) is reduced to scheming and plotting revenge, a far cry from the noble actionee she prided herself on being.

It’s not a surprise to find Part 2 heads into a Götterdämmerung as Kriemhild’s obsessive, destructive desire for revenge against Hagen (her husband’s murderer) meets with Gunther’s own stubborn-short-sighted protection of his controlling vassal. Nearly half of Part 2 is dedicated to the prolonged siege of the King and his followers by the massed armies of Kriemheld’s new husband Attila the Hun, her manipulations of him helped a great deal by Hagen’s arrogant, impulsive violence against Attila’s people. This extended battle sequence is astounding in its scale, violence and excitement – you can see the influence it had on The Two Tower’s Helm’s Deep – and is shot with the same visual mastery as the more stately first half, even as it seeks into bloody desperation.

It must be stated that Die Nibelungen does feature more than its share of clumsily presented racism. As mentioned, the hook-nosed, gold-obsessed, murderous dwarf Albereich is a painful antisemitic stereotype. Rudulf Klein-Rogge is caked under layers of make-up as the ugly, Slavic Attila while his Hun army resemble crouching Orc like figures, frequently ripe for the sword edge of the relentless German soldiers. It’s the uncomfortable flip side of the Aryanism idealism and romantic framing given to Siegfried, that these un-German figures are painted so monstrously.

But Die Nibelungen’s subtle criticism of the flaws in its German leads – it would go some to call them heroes – balances this out. From the flawed, empty-headed, foolishness of Siegfried to the increasingly sadistic, unrelenting cruelty of Kriemheld (Margarete Schön’s performance is excellent, going from sweetly retiring to unblinking fanaticism over the course of the film) the Germanic characters are compromised, weak and cruel: Hagen and Gunther are no one’s ideas of admirable figures. Compared to them, for all his clumsy racist appearance, Atilla feels like a reasonable figure, loving his family, caring for his people and refreshingly free of vindictiveness and cruelty.

It makes for an intriguing complex undercurrent in a film which, of course, the Nazis interpretated entirely on surface-appearance as a celebration of Aryan super-might. Or at least they did for Part 1 – even they couldn’t kid themselves that Part 2 didn’t quite fit that bill. Today Die Nibelungen provokes the same interesting thoughts. But above all it’s a visual marvel from a gifted film director, a truly painterly masterpiece that, for all its great length, never flags and offers a new marvel, camera trick or miraculous composition with every frame. This is silent cinema at its best.

The Bells of St Mary’s (1945)

Schmaltzy but also rather charming, a superior sequel to Going My Way

Director: Leo McCarey

Cast: Bing Crosby (Father Chuck O’Malley), Ingrid Bergman (Sister Mary Benedict), Henry Travers (Horace P Bogardus), William Gargan (Joe Gallagher), Ruth Donnelly (Sister Michael), Joan Carroll (Patsy Gallagher), Martha Sleeper (Mary Gallagher), Rhys Williams (Dr McKay), Dickie Tyler (Eddie Breen), Una O’Connor (Mrs Breen)

When Bing Crosby asked America if they were Going My Way in 1944, the answer was a massive yes. It was inevitable we got a sequel –the first sequel to be nominated for Best Picture – The Bells of St Mary’s. In a stunning display of it ain’t broke so don’t fix it, The Bells of St Mary’s drops Father Bing (aka Chuck O’Malley) into another urban-parish-with-problems, this time turning round a rundown convent school, run by straight-laced Sister Ingrid Bergman (aka Mary Benedict). Can Father Bing and Sister Ingrid set aside their incredibly-good-natured rivalry to: (a) convince heartless local businessman Horace Bogardus (Henry Travers) to donate a new school building, (b) save sensitive young Eddie from easy-going bullying and (c) re-build the marriage of easy-going-bad-girl Patsy’s parents? If you have any doubt Father Bing can solve these problems without breaking his easy-going-sweat, you ain’t spent long enough going his way.

The Bells of St Mary’s score over its Oscar-winning forbear by being significantly less gag-inducing in its snowstorm of saccharine schmaltz. This is despite the fact it shares almost all the flaws of the original. It goes on forever, very little really happens, every single problem is solved with a little flash of Father Bing’s gentle insight, and it’s painfully predictable. But The Bells of St Mary’s manages to not outstay its welcome because it’s told with genuine wit and, in Ingrid Bergman, has a consummate performer who is actually charming and lovable rather than someone we are just told is charming and lovable.

It’s also somehow more down-to-earth, the resolution to its problems being a bit more relatable than Going My Way’s MET-opera finale for the tough kids. Father Bing is marginally less saintly smug and has an underhand cunning – having worked out his wise words ain’t melting the heart of Bogardus (how strange it is to see George Bailey’s Clarence as a child-hating arsehole), he quickly switches to a little conspiracy of suggestion to make Bogardus fret about being set on a highway to hell. Despite this of course, O’Malley remains blissfully perfect, a liberal churchman and bathed in perfection.

The Bells of St Mary has complete faith in the fundamental goodness of the church. The only questions are ones of approach: O’Malley favours a manly Christianity where decent men fight bullies, while Mary Benedict’s instinct is to turn the other cheek and take the moral high ground. O’Malley feels the kids will be served best if they relax, Mary Benedict sees virtue in hard work and self-improvement. Naturally, lessons are learned on both sides: O’Malley discovers sending the boys on holiday isn’t a ticket for good behaviour, Mary Benedict teaches bullied Eddie to box and prove himself to his bully.

Sister Ingrid might be a bit more serious because, unlike Father O’Malley, she’s lived a bit in her time. The tomboy-turned-nun can swing a baseball bat with the best of them and when she tells young Patsy you “have to know what you are giving up” when you become a nun, there is more than a hint Sister Mary might have snuck behind a few bike-sheds back in the day. Perhaps this contributes to The Bells of St Mary’s cheekily suggesting a little bit of sexual tension between the eunuch-like O’Malley and Mary Benedict. (Crosby and Bergman played up to this to tease their on-set Catholic advisors, at one point ending a take with an improvised passionate kiss – a gag that’s probably a little funnier than some of those in the film.)

Ingrid Bergman is actually rather marvellous here. It’s a reminder she had fine light comic chops, making Mary charming, warm and rather endearing – for all Sister Mary switches from hard-headed academic realism to a flighty faith that God Will Provide so long as they pray hard enough (very different from O’Malley’s God Helps Those Who Help Themselves angle). Bergman hilariously dances and prances, like Sugar Ray, while teaching Eddie to box but is also touchingly gentle when comforting a distressed Patsy. Bergman is such a good actress she pretty much lifts the entire film another level from its original.

She even lifts the game of Bing Crosby. Though he still largely coasts through on his own charm and persona, but he pushes himself into some more fertile dramatic territory. Even the film’s contrived plot developments like Sister Ingrid’s TB diagnosis – something which for reasons she can’t be told about (don’t ask) – end up carrying a touch of realistic drama. Not that Bing forgets what the people want to see: of course Patsy’s father is a piano player, so of course within seconds of him turning up at her mother’s flat he and Bing dive straight into a musical number.

Despite all the treacle that The Bells of St Mary’s wades through, there is enough genuine charm here (among all its sentimental, signposted silliness) for you to cut the film some slack. Leo McCarey directs mostly with an unfussy professionalism – although he does sprinkle in the odd good bit of comic business, noticeably a cat stuck crawling around under O’Malley’s signature straw hat, on the mantlepiece behind him during his first meeting with the nuns. And it might largely be due to Bergman’s skilful presence, but there is genuinely more substance here than Going My Way. It might still feel like gorging on candy, but at least this time you don’t feel your stomach groaning in pain after you’ve finished.

Kanał (1957)

Wajda’s war-epic is a brilliantly filmed, unsettling critique of the truth behind national myths

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Cast: Teresa Iżewska (Daisy), Tadeusz Janczar (Jacek “Korab”), Wieńczysław Gliński (Lt. Zadra), Tadeusz Gwiazdowski (Sgt. Kula), Stanisław Mikulski (Smukły), Emil Karewicz (Lt. Mądry), Maciej Maciejewski (Gustaw), Vladek Sheybal (Michał, the composer), Teresa Berezowska (Halinka)

By 1957, Wajda was working under a very different Polish government from the one in place for his debut feature A Generation. With the fall of Stalinism came an easing on restrictions and controls. Wajda could address themes he couldn’t touch before, helping make Kanał perhaps even more controversial than A Generation, as it explored Polish sacrifices during the Second World War and, by implication, asked what the point might have been. Focusing on the final days of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising – a revolt against the German occupiers which the Soviets effectively stood by and watched the Wehrmacht crush – Kanał gives a Polish National myth a tragic human face of futile effort.

Not quite what Wajda’s bosses in the Polish Film Industry expected. Perhaps the title should have tipped them off: Kanał translates as Sewer, hardly suggesting a heroic tribute to national sacrifice. Starting on the 54^th day of the Warsaw Uprising, the Home Army forces are beaten, clinging to a few streets. Introducing a unit commanded by Lt Zadra (Wieńczysław Gliński) in a long tracking shot through a devastated city, an unseen narrator bluntly tells us in the opening moments everyone we see is about to die. But not in a last charge against the Germans: instead it will be in the sewers, while attempting to escape, waist deep in shit, lost in the dark and stumbling into dead ends, madness, exhaustion and booby traps.

For many Poles this didn’t fit with the idea of the Warsaw Uprising being a heroic, necessary battle for the nation. It’s rather like in the 1950s, a British film studio had made a film about the Battle of Britain in which the pilots got tanked up on booze then took to the skies to be pointlessly shot down by the Luftwaffe over the channel. At least Wajda this time could present the Home Army – who, following the government line, A Generation had condemned as bourgeoise, fusspot cowards – as heroes. And Kanał is mercifully free of blunt political messaging: no one has time for any of that when they are simply desperate to survive.

What it’s also free of though is any tangible achievements from the Polish Resistance forces. Zadra’s unit holds onto a trashed district, under heavy fire, taking more and more casualties for about a day before being ordered to withdraw through a city pounded by shells through desperate civilians. During the entire course of Kanał the Poles inflict three casualties on the Germans: one tank is hit (but not destroyed), one unmanned motorised mine is stopped and one German soldier who falls into a defensive trench is beaten to death with a stone. Other than that, this is a one-sided curb-stomp where the Germans are hardly even seen and the Poles take huge casualties without even the most basic, morale boosting minor victory.

Kanał’s first half, which covers the war up-top is gritty, immediate and a truly scintillating piece of brutal combat. Wajda’s cinematic confidence is clear from the start with that long Wellesian tracking shot introducing all the characters as they move from one ruined district to another. His combat scenes take place on a wasteland of smashed buildings and have a panicked pointlessness to them – confused and desperate soldiers responding rather than planning anything proactive. The one undeniably heroic act we see – Jacek’s (Tadeusz Janczar, once again Wajda’s complex sacrificial lamb) taking down of the motorized mine – sees him near-fatally wounded, reducing him to a limping, slowly dying passenger for the rest of the film.

The atmosphere behind the lines is already tipping into desperation: number two soldier Mądry (a swaggering Emil Karewicz) is bedding young fighter Halinka (a fragile Teresa Berezowska) openly, while composer Michal (Vladek Sheybal, excellent as a haunted outsider) attempts to call through to his wife and children on the other side of the city, only to listen in on their deaths over a phone line. Any sense of chain of command is crumbling, and the soldiers are already hardened to death and destruction: retreating through the city, none of them can muster even a flicker of interest in a desperate mother begging for news of her lost child.

That’s nothing though compared to the bleakness of the film’s second half as the unit piles into the sewer. Here, time and space start to lose all meaning. The film’s timeline becomes as unclear for us as it does for the characters as they trudge through this Dantean sludge (Wajda makes sure we don’t miss the point, in a slightly clumsy touch, by having Michal quote the poet at length). With limited light, no real idea where they are going, low motivation and toxic gases being stirred up from the excrement they are crushing under their feet, slowly sanity slips, people revert to their worst instincts and selfish, unheroic decisions are made.

There is little to build a national myth on here. An incoherent colonel is left to die in the mire. Mądry and record keeper Sgt. Kula (a comradely Tadeusz Gwiazdowski) decide their own lives are more important than those of the company. Zadra clings to his duty, but lost and confused utterly fails to maintain any duty of care to his men. Michal, teetering already with the loss of his family, disappears into his own world. Their guide Daisy (a brilliantly humane Teresa Iżewska) abandons her duty in what we already know is going to be a futile attempt to keep Jacek alive. There is no dignity or final heroic act of death, with people meeting the end with stunned silence, clumsy tiredness or panic.

And over it all is the statement Wajda implies: since the Uprising achieved nothing but the massacre of its fighters, to a Wehrmacht driven out months later with ease by the Soviet forces, what was the point? That, however much the Communist state chose to praise the bravery of the soldiers, was it brave or foolhardy to single themselves out as targets in a one-sided battle that achieved nothing? Watching the fighters of the Uprising wade through excrement towards a lonely, uncelebrated death with nothing to show for it, makes you consider the complex feelings that lie behind National myths of sacrifice. And it’s a powerful and haunting message for this mesmerising sophomore effort.

Rollerball (1975)

Violent science-fiction dystopia satire ends up making blunt, uncertain points

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: James Caan (Jonathan E.), John Houseman (Mr. Bartholomew), Maud Adams (Ella), John Beck (‘Moonpie’), Moses Gunn (Cletus), Ralph Richardson (The Librarian), Pamela Hensley (Mackie), Barbara Trentham (Daphne), Shane Rimmer (Rusty), Richard LeParmentier (Bartholomew’s Aide)

It’s the future, but it might as well be Ancient Rome. The world is ruled by Corporate Caesars, holding supreme power, controlling information and plucking anyone they want for anything, be it for a job or as a partner in bed. The masses are kept pliant and happy by being fed Bread and Circuses. Namely Rollerball, the world’s most popular sport, a hyper-violent mix of American football and ice hockey played in a velodrome, with teams competing to score by thrusting a metal ball into their opponent’s goal, with rules to prevent only the most egregiously violent acts. It’s a game designed by with a simple message: the individual is powerless, the system is all.

Problem is, like any game, some players are better at it than others. And the best player there has ever been Jonathan E (James Caan) is a living legend for Houston, tougher and more passionate about the game than anyone else alive. He’s a living contradiction of the secret principle of the game: an individual can make a difference. Naturally the Corporation want him gone, offering him a generous package to retire. Problem is Jonathan doesn’t want to retire. What else is there to do, but to remove the few rules Rollerball has, and establish how futile individual effort is by killing Jonathan in the game. But Rollerball’s greatest ever player isn’t that easy to kill.

All of which makes Rollerball sound both cleverer and more exciting than it actually is. Because Rollerball is a deeply sombre, rather self-important film that makes obscure, slightly fumbled points about the war between the system and the individual, within a coldly Kubrickian framework that suggests Jewison and co misunderstood what made 2001 a sensation (it wasn’t just clean surfaces and classical music). It’s actually quite a problem that the only time Rollerball even remotely comes to exciting life for the viewer is during the game sequences: and seeing as the film is criticising our love of gladiatorial blood sports, that can hardly be what it’s aiming for.

Rollerball is shockingly po-faced and lacks even a hint of humour at any point (except perhaps a reliably eccentric cameo from Ralph Richardson as an only half-sane custodian of an all-seeing computer). There is little satirical spice that might provide a bit of lighter insight into the ruthless, business-driven world the film is set in, or that might demonstrate how concepts we are familiar with (sports and television) have been tweaked to manipulate and pander to the masses. Combined with that, every character in the film is sullen, serious and (whisper it) dull and hard to relate to.

This is best captured in Jonathan himself, played with a lack of an uneasy stoic quality by James Caan. Caan later commented he found the character lifeless and lacking depth, and you can see this in his performance. Caan never seems sure what angle to take: is Jonathan a defiant individualist or a guy utterly at sea in the system who can’t understand why he is being told to stop playing the game he loves? Rollerball wants to settle for both: it doesn’t really work. Jonathan spends his time outside the ring, moping and staring into the middle-distance. He holds a candle for the wife taken from him by an executive, but this is never channelled into a motivating grief or ever used as way to make the scales fall from his eyes about the nature of the system he’s working in.

In fact, Jonathan remains pretty much oblivious to the brutality and cruelty of the sport he’s playing – which, by the end of the film, regularly clocks up impressive body counts in every match. He’s still perfectly capable of throwing an opponent under the wheels of a motorbike, thrust a goal home and then bellow “I love this game!”. Never once does he, or the film, question this love. Not even an on-pitch assault on his best friend (which leaves him in a vegetative state) or watching his teammates being crushed, incinerated, battered and smashed seems to register with him intellectually or emotionally.

Rollerball needed a character with enough hinterland to grow into that or could denounce on some level (even privately) the violent spectacle he’s wrapped in, capable of a moral journey or making an imaginative leap. We don’t get either. Instead, Jonathan E feels like a care-free jock who wants to carry on doing his thing, because he has a good-old-fashioned dislike of being told what to do. In the end it fudges the whole film: Jonathan E is neither sympathetic or interesting enough to be a vehicle for the sort of satirical or political points the film wants to make.

Not that these ideas are really that interesting anyway, essentially boiling down to a mix of familiar “Big Business Bad” and “the proles will take any loss of freedom lying down, so long as they get some juicy violent action to watch”. None of this hasn’t been explored with more wit and wisdom elsewhere. Never-the-less Rollerball lets its points practically play trumpets to herald their arrival as they stumble towards the screen. There is nothing here Orwell didn’t cover better in a few paragraphs of 1984.

Norman Jewison does a decent job staging this though, in particular the violence of the Rollerball games, with bodies crushed, maimed and thrown-around. There is a fine performance of heartless corporate chill from John Houseman. But, when the film makes its points, I’m not sure what on earth it’s trying to say. Is it a tribute to the strength of one man’s character? Does it matter if Jonathan E acts out of a stubborn lack of knowledge or understanding? As the crowd watches a deadly match in stunned silence, have they finally had enough? As they praise Jonathan E rapturously is Rollerball suggesting we are just naturally inclined to love strong-men dictators? I’ve no idea what is happening here – and I’m not sure that Rollerball does either.