Category: Directors

The Holdovers (2023)

Alexander Payne’s hilarious Christmas-themed prep school drama is a heart-warming delight

Director: Alexander Payne

Cast: Paul Giamatti (Paul Hunham), Dominic Sessa (Angus Tully), Da’Vine Joy Randolph (Mary Lamb), Carrie Preston (Lydia Crane), Brady Hepner (Teddy Kountze), Ian Dolley (Alex Ollerman), Jim Kaplan (Ye-Joon Park), Michael Provost (Jason Smith), Andrew Garman (Dr Hardy Woodrup)

Christmas is a time when people come together – not always by choice. In 1971, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is a curmudgeonly classics teacher at Barton Academy, a New England boarding school for the wealthy which he once attended himself on a scholarship. He’s despised by teachers and students alike for his waspish wit, brutal marking and abrasive personality. As a punishment for refusing to give a donor’s son the grade needed for Princeton, Hunham must spend Christmas with “the Holdovers”, the students whose families cannot take them for Christmas. Principal among these is Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), while Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) the campus cook whose son (a former scholarship student at the school) was killed in Vietnam also remains on site. These three difficult, damaged people surprise themselves and each other as time together thaws each of them.

I found this film an absolute delight, funny, heartwarming and rather moving, a treat for any time of the year. Shot and edited with a deceptive simplicity, it’s only when you think back that you realise every scene was perfectly formed, every beat wonderfully timed and not a frame was wasted. This is serene film-making that never draws attention to itself. Payne textures the film like a missing 70s auteur piece – like other parts of his work there are strong elements of Hal Ashby, not least The Last Detail – and his measured, patient staging makes the moments of waspish or foul-mouthed humour land with as much impact as quiet moments of raw pain.

What’s really striking about The Holdovers is the warmth and regard it has for its three characters. Lesser films would set them up as standard tropes: people whose edges would be worn off due to the magic of reaching out to others. What The Holdovers does really well is establish from the start that, depressed and damaged as they are, they are all at heart kind, decent people. Paul’s hostility to his students stems from disgust at their entitlement – we’re completely with him when he hits the roof at the contemptuous “get over it” attitude one student shows to the grieving Mary. Mary’s motherly instincts express themselves in myriad ways. And Angus’ sardonic, smart-aleck waspishness doesn’t stop him comforting a vulnerable younger student.

To make this work as well it does, the acting is key and in its principals The Holdovers is blessed. Paul Giamatti is superb as the prickly Paul, who at first even we can find challenging. Like a bullying Mr Chips, Paul sets tests for Christmas, orders the holdovers to exercise and study during vacation and delights in insulting his students. But Giamatti slowly shows this is a shield for a man disappointed with life, who feels its injustice and imbalance very keenly and decides it’s best to attack life head on.

Paul is a man who really, really cares – so much so, that it’s easier to never allow himself to get close to anyone. Giamatti balances this heartfelt humanity with perfectly pitched comedy. Paul’s acidic put-downs, layered with dense classical references, are frequently hilarious but it’s also rather touching to see him trying to use the same references to try and spark small-talk with strangers (unfortunately the etymological origins of Santa Claus in Ancient Greece leave his audience baffled.). You believe him when he talks about finding the world a bitter and complicated place just as you can understand why he feels he has to respond in kind.

You can also understand why he starts to see the same traits in Angus Tully. Played with a wonderful naturalness by Dominic Sessa (in his film debut), Angus also uses humour and intelligence as a shield. Both he and Paul are sharply intelligent (Paul even grades Angus a B!), disgusted by the casual superiority of Angus’ classmates (in particular the awful – and surely not accidentally named – Kountze) and turn out to be all-but orphans struggling with the same depression. What’s delightful about Sessa’s performance though is he manages to show Angus is still just a kid – he can be vulnerable, moody but also innocent: he’s breathlessly excited when flirting with a girl at a party and bounds off to pack his bags with a whoop when Paul agrees to take him on a “field trip” to Boston.

Angus and Paul are surprising kindred spirits. They both stretch the “Barton men do not lie” mantra to the limit in a series of minor crises, from a hospital visit to a prevented barroom brawl to a meeting with Paul’s puffed up former Princeton schoolmate. The Holdovers also, refreshingly, avoids creating cheap melodrama between them. Promises that certain facts will remain entre nous are loyally kept, making the film’s close (with developments we could have an anticipated at the start) feel true.

The bridge these two meet across is Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s wonderfully warm yet brittle performance as a loving woman lost in grief. Mary had clearly focused every hour on her son since his birth, his death leaving her bereft. Around her house, his possessions are stored like mini-shrines. Mary keeps up her professionalism while screaming in agony on the inside, but she’s still determined to see the best in people. All three actors are astonishingly good.

The Holdovers sparks these actors off each other in a series of scenes that are, in turn, hilarious, surprising and then, from nowhere, deeply moving. It’s a lovingly optimistic film at heart. Except for Kountze and the headmaster, every character is deep-down decent (the holdover who spontaneously – and excitedly – invites his fellow holdovers to a skiing holiday is adorable). It’s a film that finds this good in people without being cloying, possibly because the characters puncture any sentimentality with a well-timed, foul-mouthed quip. It also swerves away from predictable tropes (despite Payne cheekily teasing more than a few) to create a sense of a story that feels true.

The Holdovers is also rare in American films for taking class as a strong theme. Barton is a sort of finishing school for the rich, where the size of the library a benefactor buys is more important than the academic skill of his son. Paul is, rightly, appalled by the casual assumption of superiority of many of the students, and their smug obliviousness to their privilege. Mary’s son, due to not being able to afford college, was condemned to enlistment in Vietnam in the hope of a GI bill education. Paul’s past misfortunes are steeped in class injustice and Payne frequently stresses the plush comfort of the school compared to the working-class town it sits inside. There is something quite British about this sharp-eyed look at a “classless society”.

The Holdovers is an intelligent but also magnificently heart-warming film with just the right touch of lemony bittersweetness. With three gorgeous performances, Payne’s film superbly shows how the defences we use to protect ourselves can hurt us as much as those around us. Avoiding sentimentality, it concentrates on making us care deeply for its three damaged souls as they stumble towards understanding. It does this with sensitivity, empathy and (perhaps most importantly) a lot of humour. The Holdovers is a small-scale triumph, the sort of film I can imagine watching again and again and always bringing a small tear to the eye.

The Decameron (1971)

Pasolini’s naughty-boy Boccaccio adaptation, aims for political but in loves with cheek

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Cast: Franco Citti (Ciappelletto of Prato), Ninetto Davoli (Andreuccio), Vincenzo Amato (Masetto), Maria Gabriella Maione (Madonna Fiordaliso), Angela Luce (Peronella), Giuseppe Zigaina (German Monk), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Giotto’s Pupil), Giacomo Rizzo (Friend of Giotto’s Pupil), Guido Alberti (Musciatto), Elisabetta Genovese (Caterina), Giorgio Iovine (Lizio)

The Decameron is a collection of a hundred tales written by Boccaccio in the 14^th century, which offers a rich mosaic of Italian life from the tragic to the comic. But it also has a reputation for a lot of bawdy naughtiness – and perhaps part of that comes from Pasolini’s cheeky, sex-filled adaptation, with its playful lingering on some of the most rumpy-pumpy filled yarns. Scholars of Boccaccio were appalled in 1971; it’s a gag that I think Boccaccio might have appreciated that today Pasolini’s film is required viewing on Boccaccio courses.

Much like with The Gospel According to Matthew, Pasolini shifted the location to fit his themes. Here most of the tales take place in Southern Italy – Neapolitan accents and dialect abound – and the new underlying theme explore the exploitations of simple, honest peasants by cannier, ruthless people from the richer north. Roughly linking the tales together is a pupil of Giotto – played by Pasolini himself – preparing a fresco in a monastery, inspired (it becomes clear) by the stories which may in turn be inspired by ordinary people he sees on the streets. The Decameron is aiming to be a playful musing on the chicken-and-egg nature of artistic inspiration and the way different artists in different genres can inspire and motivate each other to ever greater heights.

Or at least those themes are there. But they can be hard-to-spot beneath the surface, since The Decameron mostly delights in its array of sexual goings-on, which pretty much tick-offs every taste and inclination you can imagine from masturbation to orgies, as well as darker content like rape and paedophilia. To be honest, for all that Pasolini is an artist thinking earnestly about the classics, he’s also a very naughty boy eager to get a few erect penises into mainstream film-making (and The Decameron was a huge hit in Italy and played in arthouse cinemas the world over). The Decameron, for all its pretentions about art, is also a bit of end-of-pier soft-porn – or a hard-core Carry On.

There is something deliberately amateurish about The Decameron in its scatological humour and the bumpy, rushed nature of its film-making. In common with many Euro films at the time, it makes no effort (either in its Italian or English dubs) to match the words we hear with the movement of the actors’ mouths, with most of the sound having a muffled post-recording session feel to it. The camerawork and editing are frequently jolted and rushed, adding to the bawdy sense of things being thrown together, Pasolini using sped-up film and punch-line jumpcuts to keep up the improvisational energy. It makes the film feel at times like a student revue.

Pasolini shot the film entirely on location, with a cast of actors who were mostly unprofessional. As with many of his films, much of the casting seems to be based on people’s appearances more than anything else. The Decameron has a superfluity of striking faces. Toothy grins or missing teeth, hooded eyes, vacant grins, these faces look like they could have stumbled in from a Brueghel painting. Everyone looks distinctive and this parade of striking faces adds to the film’s wild energy.

It also makes everyone in this Boccaccio cheek and smut stand out. Pasolini’s trick was to argue that the medieval era, in many ways, wasn’t that different from today. He didn’t present it as a high-blown time of men in tights speaking poetry, but one where people were obsessed with money and sex (usually the latter) and showed no shame in chasing it. An era where the medieval world looked dirty, shabby and slightly sordid, rather than what the poets would have us believe.

This informed his choice of stories. When you start with a naïve young man nearly drowned in a pool of shit, you can tell that this isn’t exactly going to be Hollywood medieval epic. Pasolini’s chosen tales involve: a well-endowed gardener pretending to be mute so he can shag a convent full of nuns, a woman boffing her lover while her husband inspects the insides of a large pot, a dying sinner (who we’ve already seen proposition a child for sex) claiming to be a saint, a girl and her lover shagging naked on a rooftop, a monk tricking a man into allowing him to have sex with the man’s wife, and concludes with a man receiving a visit from the ghost of a dead friend telling him that sex is no sin and the angels of heaven say he should certainly give his girlfriend a good pre-marriage seeing to.

Throughout, Pasolini aims to show a world where simple pleasures mix with the exploitation by the rich and powerful of the simple, poor and naïve. It’s a not a theme that comes out all that much, especially since few people are going to remember the political message when we are all much more inclined to focus on the constant in-and-out. The Decameron might want to think it is a grand statement, but its really a great big joke, told by a director who is sort of laughing at us while he does it. It’s a rather juvenile piece of titillation, passing itself off as political statement.

Perhaps that’s why Pasolini felt a bit embarrassed about it all later. After a parade of knock-offs, he effectively disowned the film, claiming low-quality imitators that dialled up the sex even more had missed the point and buried the anti-capitalist message of his own film. Since I can imagine several people watching The Decameron and completely missing the point in the first place, I can’t help but feel he has only himself to blame.

Poor Things (2023)

Distinctive, challenging and hilarious film that mixes social issues with quotable dialogue

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Cast: Emma Stone (Bella Baxter/Victoria Blessington), Mark Ruffalo (Duncan Wedderburn), Willem Dafoe (Dr Godwin Baxter), Ramy Youssef (Max McCandles), Christopher Abbott (Alfie Blessington), Kathryn Hunter (Madame Swiney), Jerrod Carmichael (Harry Astley), Hanna Schygulla (Martha von Kurtzroc), Margaret Qualley (Felicity), Vicki Pepperdine (Mrs Prim), Suzy Bemba (Toinette)

“It’s Alive!” cries Frankenstein as his creation is sparked to life before abandoning it to become a revenging monster. Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things imagines a different creature – nurtured (admittedly as part of an eccentric experiment), maturing at an accelerated rate, discovering physical and intellectual stimulation and deciding they can’t get enough of either of them. Adapted from Alastair Gray’s novel, Poor Things is a vibrant and challenging film that, for all its sex, is a feminism-tinged Frankenstein that says no to societally enforced ideas of shame and conformity.

In Victorian London, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is the creature, a stumbling, barely articulate young woman when she is introduced to trainee doctor Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) by her guardian (her “God”) Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). “Bella” is resurrected corpse – the body of a suicidal pregnant woman, the brain of the child she carried. Developing at an accelerated rate, Bella is both Godwin’s experiment and his surrogate child. But as Bella discovers the pleasures of the body and the wonders of the world around her, she wants to experience life outside of the house. Eloping – with the agreement of her guardian – with roguish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), Bella discovers not only sensual pleasures but deeply engaging intellectual pleasures across Europe, determined to become her own woman defined by no-one.

Poor Things is practically a dictionary definition of a Lanthimos epic (fish-eyed lenses, spidery text captions, a jarring mix of period and modern) and is almost impossible to categorise. It is, in turn, serious and thought-provoking, laugh-out-loud funny, uncomfortable and challenging. Shot in a deliberately artificial manner, its cinematography and sets reminiscent of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it’s Victorian but also a remix of everything from Metropolis to the mansion at the heart of Sunset Boulevard, here turned into a Dr Moreau style den of freakishly spliced animals. It makes for something wildly, unpredictably unique visually, a smorgasbord of the real, the overblown and plain weird.

With a sharp script by Tony MacNamara, crammed with quotable lines (sometimes Lanthimos has a bit too much of an eye on creating GIF moments) Poor Things reinvents itself as constantly as its hero. Opening in rich black-and-white to chronicle Bella’s early years, it explodes into a gorgeously expressive Powell and Pressburger colours as she experiences the world. It superbly mixes the real with the weird, shaping its collection of bizarre characters into living-breathing people while keeping the world around them a melting-pot of styles and genres.

Poor Things has been attacked by some as semi-pornographic or exploitative. In fact, it’s a complex and daring look at female empowerment. On first discovering the pleasures of, well, self-pleasure (with a selection of vegetables), Bella is immediately told such things are not done in polite society. But Bella refuses to see “furious jumping” as shameful, but just a source of pleasure and experience like any other. If she takes pleasure in the act with someone, why should be ashamed? And if she makes all the decisions about what does and doesn’t happen with her body, who should judge her?

Bella is a curious hybrid her whole life: the body and feelings of an adult, with a swiftly developing brain, absorbing understanding of the world around her swiftly. Like a child she lashes out at the rules Godwin and his protégé Max place over her (partly for her protection, partly to continue their psychological development experiment). But this comes from her increasing frustration at having her horizons limited by these men, deciding what and who she can see. Lanthimos takes clear from the start Bella can take as much sensual pleasure in feeling fallen leaves under her body or watching fireworks in the sky as anything else and doesn’t feel she should be denied it.

Poor Things sees Bella demanding, and then making, her own decisions – and to hell with expectations. Whether throwing plates at dinner because she wants to leave or choosing to run away to Europe with caddish Duncan for the experience of it, she shall make her own choices. Decisions being made for her, infuriate her: Max’s refusal to let her leave or Duncan’s decision to take her, unannounced, on a cruise. Bella will talk to who she wants and experience anything she finds curious. If she decides to go on the game in Paris in a high-class brothel (on the basis that she enjoys sex, the hours are short and it pays well) who gives a damn if Duncan is appalled. He doesn’t – for all he might like to think so – own her.

These are complex and challenging ideas, as Bella jokes she has become “the means of her own production”. But Bella believes the only thing in the world should make us ashamed is the suffering of others: witnessing a slum in Alexandria she is moved to tears at the indifference that lets children die in poverty, with only platitudes for these “poor things”. And you can see her point: why flinch at personal misconduct but not even blush at the idea of others dying because of our inaction. That’s why she doesn’t want to be constrained by societies ideal, be that enjoying sex, reading Marxism, dancing all night long or wanting to punch a baby that won’t stop crying in a restaurant.

All these complex ideas are brilliantly captured in Emma Stone’s extraordinary performance. It is, of course, a physical marvel, her body slowly, jerkily, developing, but also a rivetingly complex embodiment of a hugely complex personality, absorbing everything around her, processing it and then shaping it into her own world view. It’s reflected in the gorgeous eccentricity of her dialogue – she is “a changeable feast” of views, peppering her sentences with astute (and funny) unique metaphors “finding being alive fascinating”. She makes Bella determined, naïve, exceptionally wise and insightful, uncertain, kind and unforgiving. It sits perfectly at the heart of a film about a woman refusing to be ashamed and determined to better the world around her. It’s a brilliant creation.

One of many in the film. Godwin, a hideously disfigured famous surgeon, was the subject of his own father’s experiments (Godwin describes with matter-of-fact scientific curiosity a series of repugnant surgical experiments, including the removal of organs to discover if the body needs them – “turns out we do”). Godwin seems at first a blinkered mad scientist, but in Dafoe’s brilliantly layered performance, a humanitarian with a sense of fair play is revealed, who genuinely cares for his creation and refuses to stand in her way. Although she calls him “God” he is far from a messianic tyrant, instead refusing to repeat the mistakes of his own tyrannical parent.

He contrasts neatly with Ruffalo’s rake. Ruffalo has a whale of a time in a ‘leave nothing in the locker room’ performance of comedic excess. Duncan seems at first a threatening rake, but becomes infatuated with the mysterious Bella (something she finds more and more wearing), crumbling from worldly-wise playboy to a spoilt schoolboy whining about things he can’t have. Ruffalo inverts Bella’s development: as she becomes more mature, he degenerates into a dependent child.

Which fits because Poor Things is a Frankenstein-in-reverse story of a woman not being defined by men. Those who try fail, left to choose either to support her or flail against her rights. Lanthimos’ work is striking, original and hugely dynamic, brilliantly mixing striking visuals with searching questions. Why shouldn’t women feel the same lack of shame in their bodies and accomplishments as Bella does? It’s an urgent question – that’s getting lost in discussions about the films. Often as wildly funny as it is freakily weird, its deliberate artificiality and anachronisms help create a film that is a playground of ideas. I’m still working out what I feel about it all now – and how refreshing to have a film as bold as that to consider?

The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933)

Lang’s masterful mix of gangster thriller and supernatural psychological drama is superb

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Dr Mabuse), Otto Wernicke (Inspector Lohmann), Oskar Beregi Snr (Professor Baum), Gustav Diessl (Thomas Kent), Wera Liessem (Lilli), Karl Meixner (Hofmeister), AE Licho (Dr Hauser), Theo Lingen (Karetzky), Klaus Pohl (Muller), Theodor Loos (Dr Kraum)

Did Fritz Lang invent the concept of the cinematic universe? Or after completing M, did he just wonder what it would be like if his detective Lohmann (Otto Wernicke) took on the dastardly criminal mastermind Dr Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) from his earlier epic crime drama. Either way, the hero and the villain from those two very different films face-off in The Testament of Dr Mabuse, a pacey crime melodrama spliced with a spooky ghost story, that rattles its way through a scintillating story tinged with the whiff of the dread of Nazism.

It’s eleven years after Mabuse’s reign of terror ended with him catatonic and under arrest. In a psychiatric hospital under Professor Baum (Oskar Beregi Snr), who sees him as a fascinating case study of deluded genius, Mabuse has not spoken in years instead filling his days with endlessly scribbling a series of blueprints and schemes for the criminal underworld, focused on destabilising the country and corrupting the currency. But, despite being under lock and key, a secret society of criminals is carrying out Mabuse’s scribbles, seemingly under the guidance of the man himself. Can death, when it comes, really take Mabuse? Or are Lohmann’s suspicions that the dread hand of the Great Unknown still controls events, even from beyond the grave, correct?

Lang’s gangster film throws together some of the best elements of all his German films. This is a pulpy gangster thriller, full of action, shoot-outs and explosions mixed with the unsettling double exposure appearance of ghosts and shady, unknown powers manipulating events. It’s Scarface meets A Christmas Carol, with Mabuse as a dreadful Marley’s Ghost causing devastation and chaos even after death. The Testament of Dr Mabuse sees realism meet thriller meet supernatural powers, but brilliantly combines all three up into a propulsive thriller.

And it’s a film, more than any of Lang’s others, about the malign influence of Fascism. For what is Mabuse’s dogmatic lust for chaos and destruction, but a terrible prophecy of the horrors Hitler would unleash. Mabuse, like the Fuhrer, is interested only in destruction wanting to pull the world down to rule over the ashes, to reforge the remains into his ideal vision of reality. His paranoid ramblings – and the spectral, transparent (brilliant use of double exposure at the technical possibilities of cinema, as always from Lang) presence he becomes parroting the same mantra of the nobility of destruction – are about leading the country into a morass of destruction. No wonder The Testament of Dr Mabuse was almost immediately spiked by Goebbels. Hitler’s magnetic powers of persuasion and control were surely the real-world apotheosis of Mabuse’s skills.

Mabuse’s powers are so great that even death can’t slow him down. Today it doesn’t take long to figure out exactly who the real mastermind – or after-death puppet of Mabuse’s – might be. As wardens in the hospital say, even in silence the fixed, controlling glare of Mabuse is enough to bend minds to his will. The rantings of his testament – Mabuse’s Mein Kampf – merely add to the force of his stare. Even the echo of Mabuse’s name will turn former police detective Hofmeister into a gibbering wreck. His power is absolute.

No wonder he appears after death, disfigured post-autopsy, his eyes bulging, to continue to direct his puppets, his ghostly form directing their actions. It’s a wonderful visual expression of the hypnotic control Mabuse had over his victims, that they continue to see his controlling, ranting form – across a desk or guiding them down corridors – even after they’ve gone. Mabuse’s ghostly form will literally emerge out of the body of his underling, crossing to sit opposite him and pour more instructions in his ear.

Ordering his underlings from behind a curtain that hides his true face, Mabuse’s commands are absolute and its threats always delivered. The gang, each a series of cells who work together only when instructed, are nearly all brain-washed fanatics, accepting orders without question. Much like Hitler, Mabuse’s followers cover a vast range, not just common criminals, or trigger-happy loons but also the middle-class and professional, in thrall to the words of a mad man promising a new dawn (sound familiar?) Much like in Mabuse’s hey-day, any deviation from absolute loyalty is met with swift, fatal punishment. What chance does Thomas Kent (Gustav Diessl – a spitting image for the young George Sanders) have when he decides the gang life is too risky for his girlfriend?

Up against this, Lang places his hero from M and his accustomed detailed fascination with the mechanics of investigation. The Testament of Dr Mabuse mixes this analysis of things like the forensic translation of scratches on a windowpane, with this outré pulpy set-up of Wizard of Oz-like criminal masterminds. The world of Lohmann is one of order and methodical investigation, grounded in realism and detail. It’s an adjustment for Lohmann who, in M, was more the jovial face of a failing institution – here he’s the last bastion of reasonable authority.

The Testament of Dr Mabuse is full of shrewd political observations – but it’s also a supremely entertaining film. Few directors were as good at crime drama set-ups than Lang. The film’s opening sequence, showing Hofmeister tracking the gang through a warehouse, is a masterclass of the tension of imminent discovery, then of explosive (literally) violence during a chase. A gorgeously inventive bomb sequence – where a flooded room is the best chance of safety – is another masterpiece of slow burn tension, while the insidious threat of Mabuse’s voice creates a miasma of terror.

That sequence plays beautifully into Lang’s increasing comfort with, and mastery of, sound. The film opens with a pounding heart-beat on the soundtrack as freelance investigator Hofmeister hides in the factory where Mabuse’s men assemble their latest schemes, capturing the fear as he constantly ducks and hides to (unsuccessfully) avoid detection. The sound of machinery grows to overwhelm the film and, as Hofmeister flees, his barracked by the sounds of engines and rolling oil-filled barrels that burst into flames. Sound skilfully stresses mood and bridges scenes, controlling mood and atmosphere and adding to the air of distrust and disturbance.

The technique shines out of several stunning set-pieces. A traffic light assassination – another masterpiece of sound – is a brilliant piece of gangster-ish business, the gangsters using a crescendo of car horns to cover a fatal shot. Watching its slow build-up and the carefully paced release of information to the audience (the presence of the killers, the gun, the tension of the wait) you can see why Lang often felt Hitchcock got a lot of credit for things he had invented.

Fast-paced and thrilling, it’s a perfect extension of both Lang’s previous films, a brilliantly unsettling and disturbing drama wrapped up in a gangster package. It’s supernatural touches are just the right side of psychological drama, a portrait of obsession and a fractured mind. A perfect expression of Lang’s mastery of mixing the high and low brow into an engaging, thought-provoking and thrilling package.

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)

Davies beautiful memory piece is quite unlike any other film in its poetic virtuosity

Director: Terence Davies

Cast: Pete Postlethwaite (Father), Freda Dowie (Mother), Lorraine Ashbourne (Maisie Davies), Angela Walsh (Eileen Davies), Dean Williams (Tony Davies), Jean Both (Aunty Nell), Michael Starke (Les), Debi Jons (Micky), Chris Darwin (Red), Pauline Quirke (Doreen)

When we study the past and our memories, we see an assortment of recollections of events and motionless snapshots of moments in time. The past can feel both distant and still, a long-ago series of happenings that our mind constantly shuffles and reinterprets depending on circumstance and situation. That vibe lies at the heart of Terence Davies’ poetic dive into that foreign land of memories, where events, people and snatched moments combine, shift and contrast in a visual attempt to reproduce our own sifting of our past lives.

Distant Voices, Still Lives follows the post-war lives of a working-class Liverpudlian family. Father (Pete Postlethwaite) is a depressive tyrant, who oscillates between moments of tenderness and acts of extreme violence. Mother (Freda Dowie) is a saint-like victim, who tries her best for her children. Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne), Eileen (Angela Walsh) and Dean (Tony Davies) grow up, marry and forge their own lives in the community, sometimes repeating the mistakes of their parents, all in largely warm and welcoming working-class community.

Terence Davies based much of Distant Voices, Still Lives on his own upbringing and memories of his family (a framed photo on the wall is of Davies’ own father). Shot with a rich, slightly sepia-toned classicism, the entire film replicates both the random workings of memory and watching a carefully constructed slide show. Events frequently are only tangentially connected to those preceding and following them: a memory of a marriage in the family, activates memories of the now-absent father at both his best and worst, a Christmas when he was affection itself, another when he overturned the dining room table in a sudden fury and demanded it cleaned up. It continues throughout the film, the narrative sliding from pre- to post-war, dictated more by tone and mood than by narrative.

It requires that you pay close attention to Davies’ film, to sift yourself through its moods and subtle shifts in tone. It opens with a carefully managed tracking shot that takes us inside the family house at an unspecified time, then fixes on a still shot on the staircase, while we hear conversation all around us. Is this happening at the same time? Or are we merely hearing the echoes of conversations past? In this film the past is both all around us and tantalisingly out of reach. Distant Voices, Still Lives is made up of frequent stationary, carefully assembled shots that resemble Mitchell and Kenyon photos that suddenly spring into movement (the image of the family preparing the wedding looks so like a photo, it’s a shock when all four actors suddenly walk out of frame). It’s a reminder that, to many of us, the past is a series of still lives, frozen in time.

Around everything, in a Dennis Potterish touch, is wrapped a musical backdrop of songs from the 40s and 50s. These tunes bring people together, knit together memories and (perhaps) even cover over and confuse events. Music is crucial in unity, the family and their friends frequently breaking into extended sing-alongs to popular tunes in the pub. It provides moments of warmth, closeness and intimacy – moments of mutual joy – which perhaps covers and balances the complex relations and struggles at home. It also makes the film often feel like an odd musical, like a sort of living slide show of images scored by the classics of yesteryear.

Distant Voices, Still Lives can be seen as a sort of poetic art installation, with its balance of still images bought to life and its poetic rhyming of events and persons. But it manages to involve the viewer, because it’s a very human film. There is real warmth and compassion in these memories and reflections. The love of a family, pulling together to survive trauma at home. Those moments of release in singing. The joy and delight – and tears – of coming together to watch a film at the cinema, swept up in the big screen emotion and imagination. Davies also finds a simple, pure beauty in the everyday: watching mother carefully tend and clean the house takes on a strange, natural beauty and power in the care and tenderness that lies behind it.

That’s particularly striking, considering the unflinching horror at home. Pete Postlethwaite is extraordinarily terrifying as a deeply unhappy and depressed man, who can process his complex feelings (and even, bizarre as it seems, his love for his family) only through anger and violence. He viciously beats his children and (in one terrible scene) his wife. He is charming and sweet with their friends. He oscillates between affection and fury. His children – particularly his son – are torn between despising the old man and wanting something – anything – from him in the way of affection. (Eileen will later bemoan his absence – due to death – at her wedding, to the disbelief and anger of her brother who often bore the brunt of his beatings). Davies’ film carries real power in its opening half, dominated by Postlethwaite’s tragic dark-heart, the ruler and gate-keeper of his home until his health collapses and he reverts to vulnerability.

The terrible impact on mother – beautifully played by Freda Dowie, in an extraordinary performance that feels like it’s been pulled direct from Davies’ memory of his own mother – dominates the emotional thread of the film. It also adds a dread to the possibility that Eileen’s own husband shows traces of jealousy and violence. But then the world is one of danger: the war could have ended the lives of the whole family (there is a striking sequence where they run trying to find their parents during an air raid warning, before finally finding the shelter and being greeted with relief and inevitable anger by their father). An accident nearly cripples Dean and Maisie’s husband – it’s echoes recurring throughout the film. Echoes touch nearly every moment of Davies film, flashes of memories activated by memories pulling together the film into an engrossing and heartfelt tapestry.

But the film’s real impact comes from the humanity that grounds it. It perfectly captures a moment of time, the bonds and interdependence of a working-class community in a film extraordinarily textured into something like a fictional documentary. The film is crammed with small moments of joyful intimacy, among the trouble and strife: friends laughing together, joy in music and film, laughing faces at shared jokes. All of this is shot with an exactitude that never manages to squash the tenderness at its heart. It’s a uniquely artistic, inventive and warm exploration of memory and time, with very few films even remotely like it – and rewatching it is a reminder of what a loss to cinema Terence Davies, a truly unique film-maker, is.

L’Argent (1983)

Bresson’s final film: challenging, cold, hard to watch, definitely leaves you thinking

Director: Robert Bresson

Cast: Christian Patey (Yvon Targe), Vincent Ricterucci (Lucien), Caroline Lang (Elise), Sylvie van den Elsen (Grey haired woman), Michel Briguet (Grey haired woman’s father), Beatrice Tabourin (Ka photographe), Didier Baussy (Le photographe)

Robert Bresson is today so widely acclaimed as one of the patron saints of cinema, it’s odd to think that in 1983 at Cannes he was furiously booed when he won the director prize for L’Argent. But Bresson’s style had always been divisive – before the vindication of history – and L’Argent, his final picture, is one of the purest, most uncompromising slices of Bressonism you are likely to see, not to mention an uncomfortable and deeply challenging work of art. Uncompromising in almost every sense, it is a film that climbs under your skin and troubles your mind for days after watching.

Based on a short story by Leo Tolstoy, L’Argent’s theme is the corrupting influence of money. Two rich kids, troubled by the small allowance from their parents, forge a 500 Franc note and exchange it for change in a photography shop. The owner, keen to get rid of the offending note, instructs his assistant Lucien (Vincent Ricterucci) to pay working-class Yvon Tonge (Christian Patey) with it. When Yvon uses it in a café, he is arrested and charged, his pleas of innocence ignored. Losing his job, with a wife and child to support, Yvon slides down a slippery slope encompassing theft, jail time, tragic bereavement and murder leaving him a brutal shell of the man he was before.

Bresson’s film deals with the inexorable inevitability of fate, once it is prodded in a certain direction by the destructive forces that govern our world. Those forces are themselves governed by cold, hard mammon and the selfishness and casual cruelty of those who have it or want it. Bresson’s film is littered with shots of hands at work – nearly always that work involves the passing of bank notes from one place to another. Money is what makes the world go around – it dictates power and privilege and it fundamentally decides who is believed and who is punished.

Yvon can plead in vain he is innocent of passing fake notes, because no one is going to listen to a working class joe with scarcely a penny to his name rather than the vouched-for employee of a respectable middle-class businessman. Yvon even ends his first court case by being rebuked for bringing into disrepute the names of such thoroughly respectable people. By contrast, when concerned her son might get caught up in the whole filthy affair, the mother of one of the original forgers simply hands over a wedge of cash to the cheated shop-owner to make the problem go away. Money talks.

And it has cast its verdict on Yvon, deciding he should be chewed up by the system and spat out a very different man. From the moment we first see Yvon arrested for the false note, we know he is doomed. Just as we know, from seeing Yvon’s first reaction to being accused (a violent shove that sends a waiter tumbling and glass smashing on the ground) that there is a capacity for violent revenge in him. Later, like a dim echo of this first moment, glass will shatter again on another floor, dropped by a grey-haired old woman hiding the fugitive Yvon. It’s a salutary reminder (one the film delivers on, with chilling impact, a few minutes later) that Yvon has a darkness that can harm others.

It’s a hardness sharpened by time in prison. Returning to the fertile ground of A Man Escaped, Bresson offers a chilling indictment of the prison system. Formal, cold and uncaring, it is a breeding ground for resentment and rage. The authorities read all incoming mail, but in no way think about its contents and the impact it will have on the receiver (the mail reading room is a voyeur’s paradise, the chance to observe the secret goings on of everyone before they even know it themselves). Incoming mail discovers Yvon’s sick daughter has died and his wife is leaving him for good. No attempt is made to support Yvon who quickly succumbs to rage (looking to strike a mocking fellow inmate with a metal serving spoon), punishment by isolation and a suicide attempt through stockpiling chill-pills (much easier to shut inmates up rather than help them).

Throughout Bresson shows the onslaught of cruel events on Yvon with his characteristic spare style (no music, well drilled actors, perfectly timed shots, composed to convey information in the most economical style possible). But L’Argent is also a film strikingly devoid of moral judgement. It’s very much left open to us when, how and why we may or may not lose sympathy with Yvon. After all we truly see him suffer, after trying his very best to play by all the rules (reporting where he got the fake note from, telling the truth in court) only for him to lose everything.

Is there a chance for redemption for Yvon? He discovers money talks and the world is fundamentally uncaring (after all it took his freedom, child, wife and a large part of his mental health). Photography shop assistant Lucien reaches the same conclusion: he’s been fleecing his crooked boss for weeks (‘I thought crooks looked after each other’ he tells his boss) but decides on one last theft to redistribute the wealth to the needy. Same conclusions, different methods to punish the world.

Yvon however decides to no longer restrain the dark impulses within him. He murders senselessly twice, grabs a few notes from a hotel cash desk and then finds himself protected be a selfless older woman (who he encounters initially eyeing up for theft). Staying in her home, her family in the same house, what will he do with this woman who does good things and expects nothing in return?

L’Argent is far from an optimistic film, with a hard-working family man turned into a family-free convict. In this uncompromising film, the final sequence is almost unwatchable in its bleak, terrible power as Yvon commits his final, inevitable, sins with a passion-free fixity of purpose almost impossibly horrible to watch. Bresson’s perfectly constructed film, full of detailed, clockwork precision has been slowly building to this horrific end, a natural one for a film highlighting the uncaring cruelty of the modern world.

Because money also doesn’t care about the damage it leaves, the collateral deaths or the cost on those on the margins. Was it this hopeless, systemic, inevitability the viewers at Cannes found so worthy of boos? The progress of events, one connected to another (and L’Argent, despite its structured formalism, is full of events of the least-Bressonist you can imagine, including a car chase) that forms a terrible, unsettling and unreassuring picture? Bresson leaves our judgement of Yvon entirely up to us: Tolstoy’s novella looked at the journey of redemption for its lead character. Bresson shows us the crimes and nothing else. If there is to be redemption or forgiveness we must ask ourselves if we can do it.

Serpico (1973)

Pacino is sensational in this sensational and gripping anti corruption thriller

Director: Sidney Lumet

Cast: Al Pacino (Frank Serpico), John Randolph (Captain Sidney Green), Jack Kehoe (Tom Keough), Biff McGuire (Captain McClain), Barbara Ede-Young (Laurie), Cornelia Sharpe (Leslie), Tony Roberts (Detective Bob Blair), John Medici (Pasquale), Allan Rich (DA Tauber)

Frank Serpico (Al Pacino) is a newly graduated cop in the NYPD. Passionate about changing the world, Serpico wants to clean up the streets – but not at any cost. The aggressive tactics and jobsworth disinterest of many of his colleagues infuriate him while his bohemian style and view that the way to be really effective as an undercover cop is to look like the people he investigates alienates other cops. As Serpico’s experience grows, he discovers the NYPD is overflowing with corruption and on-the-take cops, hoovering up cash and protection money and turning blind eyes. But when Serpico decides to do something about it, he puts himself in the firing line. Literally.

Serpico captures the anti-authoritarian fury of 70s cinema. Who can you trust when your suspicions of those who are supposed to enforce the law are right – they are as dirty, if not more so, than the criminals? Serpico mixes police thriller with paranoid conspiracy thriller, rotoscope filming placing everything in chilling focus, the grimy streets of New York a world where injustice is rampant and the powers-that-be will do anything to maintain the corrupt status quo.

Pacino grips the role of Serpico with the sort of fire-breathing force that made him a phenomenon in the 70s. Pacino transformed himself for the part, prowling the roughest neighbourhoods of New York for research and burying himself under a mountain of shaggy hair. Serpico was shot in reverse, so Pacino could progressively shave off parts of his mountain of hair, starting his work with the jaded, disillusioned Serpico and stripping back into the fresh-faced rookie (there is a neat joke in the fact that the naïve young Serpico looks the spitting image of Michael Corleone).

It’s a performance of bubbling, dizzying intensity, that dominates the film (Pacino is in nearly every scene), with Pacino slowly more and more coiling up with wild, frustrated tension. Edgy, fidgety but searingly naturalistic, Pacino gives this larger-than-life figure a searing sense of moral certainty and rigid principles, a man who slowly realises the world is not what he thought and increasingly furious at its essential shittiness. What Pacino understands is that Serpico doesn’t want to be a crusading whistle blower – he just wants to be a cop, but won’t sit back and watch his colleagues laughing with crooks. It’s a stunning, passionate, technically and emotional superb performance, from an actor at the pinnacle of his powers.

Serpico is a chilling exploration of police corruption. It’s casual, everyday and all evasive. From the free sandwiches handed out by café owners (“If I pay can I get what I want?” Serpico asks and is promptly told to shut up) to the casual brutality handed out to suspects. For a man like Serpico who wants to change the world, it’s a nightmare, even before a stuffed brown envelope is dropped into his hand and he’s urged to take it and shut up. It sits alongside crippling indifference: he can’t even arrest two rapists he spots on the street because the detective running the case is on leave (“They’re here now!” he screams down the phone before taking matters into his own hands.)

All this and more makes Serpico stick out to other cops. In an NYPD still overwhelmingly made-up of white, middle-class besuited guys (the collection of potential undercover cops in a training lecture are hilariously uniform in more ways than one) he’s a bohemian. Interested in the arts, reading books, listening to classical music and watching ballet. In his spare time he dates actresses and hangs out with arty types. He’s a world away from the cops, who view him with mistrust and a potential threat in more ways than one (a fellow cop, disgusted at overhearing Serpico talk ballet, accuses him of soliciting in the department bathroom and won’t be shaken in his belief).

So, he’s in huge danger when he eventually decides he can’t close his eyes to his army of colleagues on the take, but must do something about it. He’s already been warned that the answer “I don’t know” to the question if he would always vouch for any cop is the wrong answer. In a world where Lumet makes clear cops see as sharply divided between themselves and everyone else, where taking some extra payments is a perk of the job, someone like Serpico won’t be tolerated.

Inevitably the system turns on the whistle-blower. Serpico’s fellow cops close ranks, his superiors fob him off or treat him with suspicion. His colleagues move swiftly from offering to hold his cut in trust, to asking why he just doesn’t donate it to charity to finally loathing him. Eventually he’s an isolated, despised figure, padded down for wires, routinely ignored in the precinct and unable to trust anyone (rightly so, since the film opens at the end with Serpico shot after a raid, possibly by a cop, before flashing back to his graduation). And the ‘outside bodies’ he brings in? They move like slugs and Serpico’s disgust at their focus on scalps and not systemic change just re-enforces his isolation.

Serpico was shot quick and dirty on the streets of New York (Lumet shot in 51 days with editor Dede Allen editing each scene as it was finished). Lumet’s immersive camera throws the viewer straight into the gritty world of New York in the 70s, and the city has rarely ever felt more like a wretched hive of scum and villainy. It’s dirty and filthy with danger on every corner. There is virtually no sense of community or public duty and everyone, cops and robbers, are solely out for what they can get. It’s a brutal, terrifying world where injustice and violence are just part of the rations.

Wonderfully directed by Lumet, it’s powered by a tour-de-force performance of sheer, dynamite genius from Pacino in one of his greatest (and most overlooked) roles. Serpico is a searing indictment of a world that creates a friendly atmosphere for corruption and wickedness and where doing the right thing leaves you victimised, isolated and in a hospital bed with a bullet in your cheek.

The Trial (1962)

Welles exploration of paranoia and guilt is an easier film to admire than like (or enjoy)

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Anthony Perkins (Josef K), Jeanne Moreau (Marika Burstner), Romy Schneider (Leni), Elsa Martinelli (Hilda), Suzanne Flon (Miss Pittl), Orson Welles (The Advocate), Akim Tamiroff (Bloch), Madeline Robinson (Mrs Grubach), Paolo Mori (Court archivist), Michael Lonsdale (Priest), Arnoldo Foa (Inspector A), Fernard Ledoux (Chief Clerk of the Court)

It had never happened to Welles before: in 1960 producer Alexander Salkind shoved a series of literary works at him and said “make one of these into a film! Money no object and complete creative control!”. Welles wasn’t going to say no. It hardly mattered that he’d barely even let Kafka cross his mind before: he could see a way to do The Trial and, by God, he wasn’t going to pass up this chance. To purists, The Trial is one of the few “pure Welles” flicks – the one Welles shepherded from start to finish and more-or-less ended up with what he wanted at the end of it (no wonder he called it “his best picture” – although he said that about all his pictures at one time or another).

The Trial adapts, fairly faithfully, Kafka’s surrealist novel. Josef K (Anthony Perkins), a middle-management pen-pusher, is accused of a terrible crime without being told what it is. He stumbles from encounter to encounter, law court to law court, never given the ability to defend himself, spiralling down the rabbit hole with no sunlight. Welles’ The Trial captures this by turning Kafka’s work into a fever dream. Scenes link together with all the structural logic of a dream – locations seem randomly connected, with Josef turning corners and finding himself in courtrooms or opening cupboards to find surrealist sequences like his prosecutors being whipped by an angry functionary.

Welles shot much of the film on location in a single abandoned Parisian railway station, with the abandoned, decaying rooms redressed into a series of locations from the Advocate’s rooms, to a church to a law court. This was mixed with sequences shot in Zagreb industrial estates and a factory set made up of 850 extras banging typewriters in unison and all rising to end their working day at the same time. There is a horrible un-reality reality to The Trial, a deeply unsettling realisation you are watching something both set in a world real and impossible.

In fact, The Trial may be one of the most uncomfortable films to watch ever made in its innate understanding of the domineering terror of paranoia. Welles used a series of low angles and wide lenses to stress the oppressiveness nearness of walls and ceilings. Rooms always seem to loom in and crush the characters, with K himself frequently framed hemmed in by objects, walls and people. There is a sense of being “watched” in every scene – either from the oppressive bodies that surround K, or the prowling tracking cameras that follow him from location to location.

The Trial is a sort of paranoid’s wet-dream, a nightmare world where logic is gone, our lead character has no control over his movements or destiny and the entire world seems to be constantly bearing down on him and us. Who better to play the twitch-laden centre of this than Anthony Perkins. Awkward, uncomfortable and never anything-less than tense, Perkins features in almost every scene but always feels buffeted by events rather than controlling them. He makes K hugely uncomfortable with others – the many women who throw themselves at K he treats with suspicion mixed with terror. His self-loathing bubbles up whenever confronted with mirror images (such as Akim Tamiroff’s timorous Bloch), invariably reacting with barely disguised contempt.

What’s also interesting in The Trial is the possible insight into Welles’ character. The easy interpretation is to see K as Welles, the court standing in for the Hollywood machine that had shoved Welles from pillar to post and never given him a chance. But, if so, why did Welles urge Perkins to play the role as shiftily and uncomfortably as he does? There is an air of guilt around K throughout – as if The Trial was his nightmare about getting caught for whatever he did. Is this how Welles saw himself? How fascinating that this artistic behemoth read The Trial and seemed to see it as the paranoia of a guilty man. Did the film speak to a deep self-loathing in Welles himself? Did he, in the dark when the demons come, think he’d inflicted his destruction on himself?

It’s a fascinating idea and makes it even more interesting that Welles is all over the film. He plays the corpulent, arrogant advocate, meeting supplicants whole luxuriating in bed with his accustomed bombast. But he also speaks the film’s woodcut-illustrated opening parable (a story of a man waiting at a gate, that he moved from the books Priest to his faceless narrator). Welles’ tones are heard coming from a range of mouths as he overdubbed many of his Euro actors. He even speaks the credits. Everywhere you turn you see and hear Welles and it’s hard not to start to feel perhaps we are stumbling inside his own terrible fantasies. Perhaps The Trial is what Welles’ dreams (or nightmares) were like?

The feel of a nightmare often makes The Trial an uncomfortable and, if I’m honest, less than enjoyable watch for all the undoubted panache it’s made with. In fact, since the panache is partly designed to illicit that response, it’s almost a tribute to the film’s success. The Trial is masterful, but in its unsettling sense of paranoia also uncomfortable, although it’s fascinating to see Welles layering some (perhaps inner) guilt on top of Kafka’s tale of an innocent crushed in the system. Either way, there is plenty to admire if not love about The Trial.

The Gospel According to Matthew (1964)

Pasolini’s neo-realist Biblical epic is quite unlike any other retelling ever made

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Cast: Enrique Irazoqui (Jesus Christ), Margherita Caruso (Mary), Susanna Pasolini (Older Mary), Marcello Morante (Joseph), Mario Socrate (John the Baptist), Settimio Di Porto (Peter), Alfonso Gatto (Andrew), Luigi Barbini (James), Giacomo Morante (John), Rosario Migale (Thomas), Ferruccio Nuzzo (Matthew), Otello Sestili (Judas), Rodolfo Wilcock (Caiaphas), Rossana Di Rocco (Angel)

Pasoloni seems a strange choice for a film about Jesus. A Marxist-atheist intellectual? Pasolini had even been jailed briefly for blasphemy after featuring Jesus in his short film La ricotta. But he was fascinated by questions of faith and was a passionate admirer of the classics, from the Greeks to Boccaccio via the New Testament. Pope John XXIII made it one of his missions to reach out to non-Catholic artists (the film is dedicated to him) and Pasolini’s interaction with the Church made him interested in bringing the life of Jesus to the screen.

But on his own terms. Pasolini didn’t want a reverential epic, but something real and human amonf the divine. After scouting the Holy Land and concluding it no longer matched the ideal look required, he would set the film in South Italy. In this he followed in the footsteps of the classic artists, who had frequently transposed events from the Bible to the homelands of their patrons. (And, after all, as Pasolini surely reasoned, not all of the great Renaissance artists could have been passionate believers themselves).

Pasolini also chose his source carefully. Unlike other Bible stories, he would not use all the gospels. Instead he would exclusively dramatise St Matthew’s. Going even further, he would remove the “St” from the title. This was to be one man’s personal view of the story of Christ, featuring only events he reported where the only dialogue spoken would be the words he wrote down. There would be no clumsy modern dialogue, suggested motivations, omnipotent narrator or small talk. The film would play out often in silence, jump from event-to-event and the dialogue would faithfully reproduce the Gospel. There hadn’t been a Biblical epic like it.

It would also serve as a commentary of sorts on generations of artistic interpretations of the Gospels. The costumes and many of the compositions would reflect different eras of artwork, from Fra Angelina and El Greco onwards. The Romans and Herod’s guards would be dressed in a faux-medieval garb, the Apostles in more Byzantine robes. The execution of John the Baptist looks straight from Caravaggio, the massacre of the innocents like something from Brughel. The sprawling crowd scenes of the great artists would be reflected as much as the smaller intimate moments. The score would be a sea of different religious music, from Bach to Odetta (especially Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child) via African gospel choir and Blind Willie Johnson.

Pasolini was presenting a reporting of Jesus’ life, that also subtly commented on and absorbed thousands of years of artistic discussion on the same subject. It used visual and aural analogy to convey its story and any question of the “truth” or not was put to one side. It was not a chronicle, but an artistic exploration, where the subjective view removed any theological clashes and implied many more versions were available of the same story.

Pasolini was drawn to Matthew’s gospel as he engaged more with its energy and passion. It carries across here with a Jesus full of contradictions. He can be warm but also angry and passionate. He marches across plains, by turns preaching at and berating his followers, shouting homilies at bewildered farmers. He has the magnetism of a born leader. Fascinatingly, the Sermon on the Mount is filmed in extreme, lonely close-up (with Jesus framed in a Raphael-style pool of light) but his more energetic words against the priests or calling for something near revolution are shown to attract vast crowds (Pasolini’s version of Matthew’s Jesus is perhaps a revolutionary).

The Gospel According to Matthew dug deep into neo-realist Italian film-making traditions. As well as being shot on location, Pasolini recruited a cast of non-professional actors. Jesus would be played by a philosophy student. The rest of the cast would be made up of a sea of professions, from peasants to intellectuals. Unlike Bresson, who drilled his amateur casts mercilessly, they were encouraged to express the wonders their characters witnessed on their faces. Faces of course being Pasolini’s interest – few directors could recruit such a striking range of visages as he could.

Pasolini’s camera-work and film-making style also evolved. The film starts with a series of shot-reverse-shots as a pregnant Mary confronts Joseph. Much of the Nativity plays out in close-up, before the frantic burst of violent energy that is the massacre of the innocents. But as the film progresses, Pasolini mixes his style considerably. Jesus march through the plains is full of something approaching whip-pans. When Jesus preaches, the camera searches for the apostle’s faces with the odd roving mis-turn as if it was searching for them as well.

Shot-reverse-shot is used for the miracles (the element Pasoloini was most uncomfortable about – and embarrassed to bring to the screen), but as the film progresses a more mobile, immersive camera is used. From the Garden of Gethsemane on, the camera becomes almost a face-in-the-crowd, witnessing Jesus’ trial by the priests and Pilate through a sea of crowded heads and moving alongside Jesus through the streets. It follows Judas in a helter-skelter sprint through the plains to his suicide and avoids aerial shots for throwing us in amongst the action. While tipping the hat to art of the past, it is also a hand-held, edgy piece of cinema, putting us in the dirt.

There is much to admire in The Gospel According to Matthew but, it has to be said, the film is also rather slow (the section covering Jesus’ mission and preaching, including the performance of the miracles, in particular drags). The decision to use only the text of the Gospel frequently means the film lacks the sort of drive that spoken dialogue and character can bring. It would almost be superior as a wordless film that made use of captions since much of the dialogue scenes are rigid and the visually least-interesting moments. It’s a film that’s easier to admire than perhaps really love.

But it’s also a very true, fair and intriguing vision of the Gospels, that presents the ‘facts’ as they are and works hard to avoid prejudice and interpretation. Difficult as it may be, at times, to watch it is also challenging and thought-provoking. A melange of interesting filming styles and creative decisions, it has its flaws but many virtues too.

Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

Film adaptation successfully aims for drama and emotion over showbiz bells and whistles

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: Topol (Tevye), Norma Crane (Golde), Rosalind Harris (Tzeitel), Michele Marsh (Hodel), Neva Small (Chava), Molly Picon (Yente), Paul Mann (Lazar Wolf), Leonard Frey (Motel Kamzoil), Paul Michael Glaser (Perchik), Ray Lovelock (Fyedka), Zvee Scooler (Rabbi), Louis Zorich (Constable), Alfie Scopp (Avram), Howard Goorney (Nachum), Barry Dennen (Mendel), Ruth Madoc (Fruma-Sarah)

Sometimes it’s a surprise to remember Fiddler on the Roof is one of the most successful musicals of all time. A sensation when it opened on Broadway in 1964, it became the first musical to pass 3,000 performances and was soon playing all over the world. Based on a series of stories by Sholem Aleichem about life in a Jewish village in turn-of-the-century Imperial Russia, it feels like odd material for a hit. But it’s universal themes of the struggles between generations, persecution of a community and finding a balance between tradition and change struck a universal chord. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Jewison’s film version became the biggest hit of 1971.

It’s 1905 and milkman Tevye (Topol) lives his life by the traditions of his faith and Jewish community, balancing a series of competing demands like a fiddler perched on a roof playing his fiddle (it’s a tortured metaphor but it’s the title…). He has three daughters – sensible Tzeitel (Rosalind Harris), romantic Hodel (Michele Marsh) and kind Chava (Neva Small) – all of whom need marrying off, ideally to suitable husbands. But can life continue for ever when you live in a country rife with antisemitism, with pogroms as regular as clockwork?

Fiddler on the Roof was perfect material for a director as passionate about social issues as Norman Jewison. It balances comedy and theatricality very effectively with gritty realism and a sense of generational trauma at the suffering inflicted on innocent people for no reason other than their heritage. Although the film is undoubtedly too long (at nearly three hours), this does make the mood transition from gentle comedy to loss and bleakness something slow but relentless, helping it carry even more impact.

Jewison effectively translates stage musical to screen reality. Fiddler on the Roof is neatly edited, it’s opening number Tradition showing a montage of everyday-activities in the village (meat chopped, clothes sewn, pray books opened) with every action cut to mirror the song’s beat. It avoids glossy choreography in favour of something either more cinematically literate like this or more intimate, with many songs delivered in medium-shot, the camera zeroing in on the thought process and allowing the actors to give intense, emotional renditions.

Not that Jewison isn’t averse to a big theatrical number. Matchmaker, Matchmaker is the first number that could be on the Broadway stage but gets away with its moments of classical beats of choreographed movement because of the playfully-natural delivery of Harris, Marsh and Small. Jewison saves his real fire for Tevye’s Dream, liberated from the film’s realistic approach by happening in a dream. This number is pure theatre, with a chorus of dancing ghosts and a diva-ish spectre (played by Hi-de-Hi’s Ruth Madoc of all people) giving it everything they’ve got.

But Fiddler on the Roof’s main beat is realism. Oswald Morris’ Oscar-winning cinematography – its slightly sepia tone captured by stretching a pair of tights over the lens, its gauze clearly visible at points – displays a world that is, for all the vibrancy of the people living in it, frequently cold, unhospitable and difficult. That matches the attitudes of their Russian rulers, prejudiced bullies whose local representative stutters the sort of excuses about “just following orders” that are even more chilling with our knowledge of the horrors to come forty years later.

What makes the village flourish is its community. Run by tradition and faith, where (for better or worse) everyone understands their roles, duties and expectations. Fiddler on the Roof is about how far these can be pushed in changing times, structured around a man’s choice of his daughter’s husbands. Can Tevye accept a daughter choosing for herself? How about a daughter marrying a firebrand radical who wants to leave the village? How about another wanting to marry a gentile?

They are ideas initially beyond the ken of Tevye, a firm traditionalist with passing dreams of riches but who wants a world where nothing changes. To make this dyed-in-the-wool conservative a warm and entertaining figure, requires the right casting. In America, the role was associated with its originator Zero Mostel (desperate to play it on film). But Jewison felt Mostel’s personality was too large for cinema, that Mostel’s theatricality would work against the realist film he wanted. Instead, he cast the Israeli actor playing the role in London’s West End, Chaim Topol.

It was a masterstroke (much as it crushed Mostel and outraged fans). Topol, like Yul Brynner in The King and I, would define his career with the role, playing it over 3000 times on stage in a series of productions over almost forty years (eventually Harris would graduate from playing his daughter to his wife!). Astonishingly he was only 35 in 1971 – a brilliant combination of make-up and Topol’s gift for physical acting makes him feel 25 years older – and Fiddler, for a large part, relies on his charisma and charm. Topol is as comfortable with the conversational address to the camera – which dominates much of the film’s opening – as he is with the world-weary sadness and frustrated anger Tevye responds to the changing world around him with.

Topol’s performance works in perfect tandem with Jewison’s aim to ground and avoid flights of whimsy or vaudeville comedy. The harsh conditions don’t dampen the warmth in the community – wonderfully captured in the marvel that greets the arrival of tailor Mostel’s (an endearing, Oscar-nominated, Leonard Frey) sewing machine – and means the Tsarist repression and gangs of Cossacks who ride in, torches in hand, to burn and pillage carry real impact.

Jewison’s film carries foreknowledge of the Holocaust throughout, not dodging the knowledge that communities like this would be destroyed under Nazism. The film’s closing exodus may bring hope for Tevye and family (bound for New York) but also brings death to those who speak of heading to Krakow. It’s part of understands why tradition is so important to Tevye: as the imaginary fiddler follows Tevye’s family on the road, we understand the link to a shared cultural past is what gives identity and hope to a people facing persecution at every turn for thousands of years.

Fiddler on the Roof mines it’s material for emotion and character over showbiz bells and whistles. While it undoubtedly takes too long to explore in depth its slight plot, its length does conversely add even more impact to its closing look to the future. A fine musical adaptation.