Category: Directors

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.

Othello (1952)

Welles distinctive Shakespeare epic is a masterpiece of turning the Bard into film

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Orson Welles (Othello), Michéal Mac Liammóir (Iago), Robert Coote (Roderigo), Suzanne Cloultier (Desdemona), Hilton Edwards (Brabantio), Nicholas Bruce (Ludovico), Michael Laurence (Cassio), Fay Compton (Emilia)

In the early 1950s Orson Welles was in the wilderness. After the implosion of his career in Hollywood, he was grifting a living in Europe, juggling multiple ventures and paying for things (or not) with cheques from quick film cameos. But the fire was still there. Welles wanted a project which he would have complete control over. Shakespeare was the ideal collaborator: both free and dead, here was a man who offered an ocean of ideas and not a word of criticism, who would make no demands he re-cut the picture. A marriage of convenience but it led to cinematic triumph.

Othello would be an Welles production from top-to-bottom. Largely self-funded, a few investors chucked in liras for a share of profits (you can imagine Welles as Shakespeare in Love’s Fennyman grinning that was fine because “there never are any”) it became a labour of love over years. Welles begged, borrowed and flat-out stole film stock and camera equipment from assorted productions, kept costumes from for-the-money roles he did to keep the operation flowing (famously his Othello coat was a costume which he’d requested a fur-lining added to, that went unseen in the film it was made for but came rolling out in Othello). Actors were summoned, sometimes months apart, to shoot. Scenes would start filming in one location and finish filming months later somewhere completely different. Welles sat in the middle holding the entire film in his head.

It’s extraordinary that Othello is even coherent. The fact that it’s also a masterpiece of film Shakespeare is a miracle. But, cut loose from the bonds of Hollywood studio execs and not giving a damn about the bills (he had the cheek of genius so never picked up a tab) allowed Welles the scope to experiment and do things “his way”. Othello is the most purely “Welles film” since Citizen Kane, and a tour-de-force of cinematic inventiveness with poverty and lack of resources drawing the best out of a director who marshalled all his gifts of editing and lighting to make resourceful use of limited resources. It’s guerrilla film-making that looks like an epic.

What you could argue Othello is not is a truly original look at Shakespeare’s play – or really an actor’s piece. Welles’ passions for Shakespeare always felt as much about having a grand canvas of poetic language to impose his own vision on, cutting and changing as needed. Thematically, Othello is pretty much what you would expect. Welles’ Othello is the noble Moor pushed into a spiral of jealousy. Michéal Mac Liammóir’s (the finest performance) Iago is a dastardly liar, with faint hints of sexually motived envy. Desdemona is as pure as the driven snow, Emilia a faithful servant, Rodrigo a simpering idiot, Cassio a pretty boy. Our sympathies lie firmly where Shakespeare would expect.

Everything that is unique about the film lies in its telling. Othello is a breath-takingly beautiful film, which uses its locations to astonishing effect. Column lined castle rooms and towering walls create caverns of light and shadow. Welles uses the fixed points of columns to add a dizzying level of speed to camera movements that see these columns whip past the frame. The shadows of grills are frequently cast across faces and light creates looming shadows across the floor. Welles plays into this with the creation of light pools, concentrating it on single fixed points, often faces, with the surroundings bathed in black. The film presents real locations in defiantly expressionistic ways, giving each of them an elemental power that heightens the tragedy.

It’s a film made up of stunning set-pieces. It’s opening funeral cortege – like Citizen Kane, Othello starts at the end with Othello and Desdemona dead and Iago in chains – follows a march over city walls, playing out in striking shadow against the brightness of the sun, with booming, Gothic music giving the sequence an imposing sense of inevitability. Iago is paraded by a mob and placed in a cage, lifted above the city wall (this same cage frequently appears throughout the movie – including, once, having Iago walk nonchalantly under it – as a grim reminder of where this is heading). It’s a perfect marriage of sound and music, disguising the small scale with cinematic force.

Taking advantage of limitations time-and-again makes Othello great. Another striking sequence was born from necessity. With most of the costumes impounded for non-payment of shipping bills, the attempted murder of Cassio is re-staged in a Turkish bath (who needs costumes when we have towels!) a decision that turns the sequence into a masterpiece of light through steam, increased by the frenetic energy Welles shoots the sequence with culminating in its Lang-inspired super-imposing as Iago thrusts his sword down into the floorboards to dispatch Rodrigo.

Othello is frequently filled with imaginative camera angles. Often characters observe others from great heights – twice through sky lights, starring down at conflicts, murders and suicides. Iago and Rodrigo spy on Othello’s gondola romance with Desdemona from a distant bridge. The ramparts of Cyprus provide towering angles, over soldiers or wave-crashed rocks below. The camera also takes a number of low-angle positions, making characters (often Othello) tower over us. Clever angles and perspective work create whole ships out of sheets of fabric and basic models.

It’s also a triumph of editing. Welles assembled the film from a never-ending supply of fragments. Frequently actors appear with their backs to the camera while we hear them speak – as Welles said, a sure sign the actual actor wasn’t there. Like few other films, Othello feels like a film excavated from its shooting. It’s a film almost constantly in motion, rarely stopping to focus on an actor delivering a line (Othello’s first speech, parts of Iago’s speeches and Emilia’s speech to Desdemona being the main moments the film focuses on actor’s delivery – no doubt connected to those three actors being the ones Welles trusted).

Away from that, the camera often fast cuts and delivers scenes in motion, with actors speaking off camera as we focus on the events around them. This means the dialogue is repeatedly chopped, changed and trimmed to meet the needs of the scene. It helps make the film even more pacey and frighteningly interior – conversations become snatched and fast, words flung from angles we cannot see, ramping up the paranoia. Large chunks of it is redubbed by Welles himself – a light version of his distinctive tones clearly emerges from Robert Coote’s mouth and Michael Laurence’s Cassio has a familiar cadence. In some cuts, Welles also replaced Suzanne Cloultier’s voice with Gudron Ure (with whom he played the role on stage).

If there is a major flaw in Othello it’s probably the acting, frequently looking under rehearsed, with Welles himself a leading culprit. His Othello is underpowered and feels under-defined. There is little sense of an interior to his mind and Welles’ surprisingly somnolent delivery tends to crush much of the emotion. It’s hard not to think Welles was so focused on juggling every other factor, that he compromised on his acting. Only Mac Liammóir, Compton and Edwards look truly comfortable with their roles – and even they offer traditional readings.

But Othello is about turning Shakespeare to cinema and if Shakespeare himself is slightly sacrificed in the push, it doesn’t detract from the stunning theatrical beauty we get instead. Othello becomes a lean, pacey thriller, crammed with stunning imagery and imaginative flourishes (Rodrigo’s faithful dog, following sadly after his master, is a gorgeously little playful touch). It’s a film where light and shadow are major plays, where footsteps in subterranean water pools create ripples of motion and echoes of noise, that shows the greatness that can be born from necessity. It’s one of the greatest Shakespeare films.

The Big Sleep (1946)

Bogie and Bacall flirt their way into legend in the iconic Chandler adaptation

Director: Howard Hawks

Cast: Humphrey Bogart (Philip Marlowe), Lauren Bacall (Vivian Sternwood Rutledge), John Ridgeley (Eddie Mars), Martha Vickers (Carmen Sternwood), Sonia Darrin (Agnes Lowzier), Dorothy Malone (Acme bookstore owner), Regis Toomey (Chief Inspector Bernie Ohls), Peggy Knudsen (Mona Mars), Charles Waldron (General Sternwood), Charles D Brown (Norris), Elisha Cook Jnr (Harry Jones)

The Big Sleep was actually shot in 1944 – you can spot the odd wartime reference, from a female taxi driver to Marlowe’s special gasoline permit – but was released almost two years later. A lot had changed since then (the end of the war for starters) not least the fact that Bogart and Bacall had become the most famous couple in the world. After previews, Warner Bros quickly twigged they could have a mega-hit if they took out some of the dull bits and replaced them with Bogie and Bacall flirting instead. Which they duly did, helping turn The Big Sleep from what could-have-been a fairly routine Chandler gumshoe adaptation into a sort of genre-defining phenomenon.

The first thing they sacrificed was the plot. Famously, nothing in The Big Sleep really makes that much sense – and it hardly matters. Bogie asked Hawks at one point just who exactly shoved the Sternwood unconscious chauffer’s into the river – neither Hawks or the several scriptwriters (including William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett) had a clue. It doesn’t matter, because few films are about “the ride” as much as The Big Sleep. Every moment has something in it to appeal to the hard-boiled detective fan. Not a scene goes by without either a glamourous lady eager to bed Bogie, a fight, a shooting or some combination of all three. All washed down by a hard-bitten Bogie at his absolutely best, over-flowing with charisma and an impish sense-of-fun at how cool it all was.

The Big Sleep sees Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) hired by General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) to investigate a series of mysterious debts run up by Sternwood’s carefree and wantonly flirtatious daughter Carmen (Martha Vickers). The plot inevitably thickens as Marlowe uncovers blackmail, prostitution, pornography rings and lord knows what else, all circulating around a sinister bookseller with a sideline in naughty photos, a brazen femme fatale (Agnes Lowzier) manipulating a series of weak-willed men and a tough gangster Eddie Mars (John Ridgeley) willing to use his secrets to win advantage. That’s not even mentioning Carmen’s austerely arch sister Vivian (Lauren Bacall) whose sultry flirtatiousness captures Marlowe’s attention.

The Big Sleep really is a series of hugely entertaining scenes, loosely tired together with a vague plot. The original cut had featured a dull scene with Bogie laboriously explaining what was going on to his dull-as-ditch-water police friend. What Hawks and co realised is no one really wants to see that when they could see Bogie and Bacall puffing cigarettes and talking suggestively (brazenly!) about how you need to ride a horse hard. They were probably right: after all, no one thinks about Psycho and says “my favourite scene is the bit with the psychiatrist’s explanation at the end”. Hawks realised if the viewer enjoyed themselves, no one would give a damn if it made almost no sense.

How else really can you explain scenes like Marlowe’s drop-in on an Acme bookstore where he meets the sort of drop-dead gorgeous bombshell store owner (Dorothy Malone, sexy as hell) who only exists in movies and happily closes the store in the middle of the afternoon to drink a bit of whisky (and more) with Bogie? It offers nothing to the plot that couldn’t be covered with a brief time-lapse montage – it’s all about the mood, the dialogue and the sensual charge between the two characters, with the illicit promise of no-strings sex (which, rather nicely for a 40s movie, they both seem well-up for). Who hasn’t dreamed of that?

It’s the same frisson that lies behind the whole Bogie and Bacall appeal. These two set the screen alight with the sort of temperature that came from basically watching them have an affair right in front of us. The two became an illicit item while filming To Have and Have Not and large chunks of The Big Sleep were held up due to Bogie drinking away his guilt. By ’46 they were an official item, but you couldn’t doubt it from the lingering, heated looks they give each other. Or the screwball lightness – and the one-upmanship and delight in making the other laugh – during their telephone call to the police department, as they pass the phone between each other putting on voices and pretending to be various members of an entire clan of troubled curtain-twitchers.

Humphrey Bogart was in his element here. Literally no one before or since could play this sort of super-smart, more-sensitive-than-he-appears hero who covers himself with a cynical, wise-cracking front than him. His Philip Marlowe has a joke for every occasion but also a strong moral sense close to the surface. He’s playful – the delight in which he affects the fusspot demeanour of a book collector early on is delightful – but superbly unruffled by threats.

No wonder Bacall’s Vivian is drawn towards him. Bacall is sultry and husky voiced, a slice of imperial sexiness. If the film doesn’t call for her to do much more than that, she certainly can deliver it. It’s a performance that is left surprisingly one-note (after all that one-note was all Hawks wanted from her). Chandler believed Martha Vicker’s inspired performance of childish selfishness and sexual shamelessness as her sister Carmen was if anything even better – and he’s probably right. But then Bacall has those famous scenes with Bogie – somewhere between His Girl Friday and Basic Instinct – and it’s those moments that cement themselves in your mind.

That and The Big Sleep’s effective moments of hard-edged violence. Elisha Cook Jnr gets his greatest role as a weakling who bungles his way into an early grave in a partially-silhouetted murder. There is a cracking shoot-out between Marlowe and Mars’ hired gun and a neat (if barely logical) final face-off between the outraged Bogie and Joh Ridgeley’s expertly judged Mars who crumbles from arrogant superiority to snivelling cowardice. There are equal delights in numerous other scenes that play out like stand-alone treats – from Bogie’s imperious swatting of bully-boy Brody to his greenhouse hiring by General Sternwood. Every scene in the film plays out with hard-boiled zing like its own cool little stand-alone movie.

It makes for a fun package – and it’s easy to see why The Big Sleep is the sort of film people list as “their favourite”. It’s playful and manages to seem extremely cool without seeming to make any effort. Bogart is sensational and every second of the film offers something good. What the hell does it matter if none of it really makes sense?

Dr Mabuse, der Spieler (1923)

Lang’s crime drama is a sprawling silent mini-series, still gripping today

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Dr Mabuse), Bernhard Goetzke (State Prosecutor von Wenk), Aud Aged Nissen (Cara Carozza), Gertrude Welker (Countess Dusy Told), Alfred Abel (Count Told), Paul Richter (Edgar Hull), Robert Forster-Larringa (Spoebri), Hans Adalbert von Schlettow (Georg), Georg John (Pesch), Karl Huszar (Hawasch), Grete Berger (Fine)

In a world before television, there were only two places for long-form stories – and Fritz Lang wasn’t a novelist. His four-and-a-hour epic Dr Mabuse der Spieler is really a sort of gargantuan mini-series, a rollicking action-adventure about a conscience-free conman wiling to go to any lengths to get the things he wants. It’s pulled together as a pacey, episodic yarn – each reel is basically an individual act (or episode) and filmed with such visionary vividness that it remains compelling today. Whether you decide to settle in for the long haul or split its parts and acts over a series of nights (and why not, the film was released in two parts, months apart) it won’t fail to entertain.

It was based on Norbert Jacques novel, a publishing sensation (so much so this was rushed into production while Jacques novel was still being serialised). At its heart: Dr Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), practically the dictionary definition of an omnipotent, amoral villain. Mabuse is a practiced liar, master-of-disguise, ruthless murderer, conman and has such demonic will power he is capable of extraordinary levels of hypnotic control, whose gang of acolytes switch between terror and outright worship of him. He can manipulate the rich into handing over their money as easily as he can the collapse of businesses on the stock exchange. No one knows who this malign spider is. But State Prosecutor von Wenk (Bernhard Goetzke) will make it his business to know.

Lang’s film is a gorgeous mix of the sort of urban realism he mastered in M and little touches of mystical realism more reminiscent of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, wrapped up in the sort of action that inspired everything from The Sting to Mission: Impossible. It’s opening section is a brilliant example of both. Essentially a twenty-minute prologue to introduce Mabuse’s nefarious genius, it sees our anti-hero masterfully execute a plot mixing heist, disguise, manipulation and brazen self-confidence to make a fortune on the stock exchange. The theft of a secret commercial contract from a train involves the sort of disguises and split-second timing (to throw the contract from a train passing over a bridge into a car passing under it) which would make Ethan Hunt’s heart race.

It’s a perfect entrée to our villainous lead, Mabuse. First introduced rifling through photos of the many expert disguises he will effortlessly assume during the film – he becomes everything from banker to magician, psychologist to hypnotist, tramp to member of high society – Mabuse has no moral code what-so-ever other than the accumulation of things. That ranges from wealth, to an obsessive desire for ownership over attractive women (and his desire for Gertrude Welker’s Countess Told eventually contributes to his undoing) to simply the having power over the wills of weaker men. Rudolf Klein-Rogge is magnetic as this monster of the dark, ruthlessly calm but equally wild-eyed, unflappable but willing to go to any lengths.

Spieler is often translated as “gambler” – but it’s German meaning is richer than that and many have commented a better translation might well be “player”. Mabuse is certainly that. He is a master actor, who can be lose himself in different roles, undetectable to others. He weaves elaborate games around his victims, where only he knows the rules (and, often, only he knows a game is even being played). Other people are pawns to moved and gambled with. He’s a monster, but one born from disillusion of the end of the First World War, part of the hedonistic self-regard of dissolute Weimar. We can see touches of this environment throughout Lang’s film, in its hedonistic gambling dens and the casual thoughtlessness of the rich. Mabuse flourishes because he is the rash an age has come out in. (Retrospectively, you can detect the shadow of Hitler in this ruthlessly power-mad monster who hides in plain sight but demands absolute control).

Mabuse is “the Great Unknown” and the natural target of methodical if uncharismatic von Wenk, played with a stolidness by Bernhard Goetzke, balancing Klein-Rogge’s larger-than-life portrayal perfectly. The duel between these two moves from gambling rooms to elaborate houses, from the streets to the jails of the city, taking in chases, bombs, shootings, kidnappings and all sorts of attempted moves and counter-moves, culminating in a shoot-out that surely inspired countless Hollywood gangster movies.

Through it all Lang directs with astonishing freshness and invention. Dr Mabuse der Speiler throws a slice of cinematic visual inventiveness into almost every scene. Lang makes extensive use of superimpositions, cross-fading, location shooting, fast-paced editing and brilliantly evocative lighting to create a world both highly realistic and also dancing to the tune of its demonic lead. Some of this has become such a part of cinematic language that it’s unlikely to draw comment from modern viewers today – we are unlikely to be wowed by night-time footage of Wenk pursing Mabuse in a car, but to viewers at the time such scenes of photorealism taken in darkness were unheard of.

There is plenty that will continue to thrill audiences. Lang’s visual portrayal of Mabuse’s hypnotic powers is superb. In his first confrontation with von Wenk (both men are disguised at the time – this really is a game of move and counter-move), Mabuse attempts to implant a hypnotic suggestion in von Wenk. Lang demonstrates with an astonishing use of lighting which slowly concentrates the light into a small pool on Mabuse’s face before his face seems to grow to fill the frame (technical effects like this were a small miracle in 1923). On a second attempt, the hypnotically suggestive words are imposed on the screen as a set of animated letters which loom over von Wenk and later seem to be almost leading him (in his car) to the clifftop Mabuse has suggested he drive off. It’s a superb way of showing the power of Mabuse, building on the intimidating cross-fade from our stock-exchange opening that briefly shows Mabuse’s face super-imposed over the clutter-filed room.

Lang mixes this imaginative dynamism with some superbly done realist scenes that help make Dr Mabuse der Spieler a gripping crime thriller. That stock-exchange opening is followed by car chases and murders – one character is dispatched in the streets after dark with a brutal suddenness. Lang creates a series of locations, all perfectly detailed but instantly recognisable, from the distinctive look of each gambling den (from art deco lined walls to a strange rotating gambling pit filled with cards and erotic dangers) to the objet d’Art packed rooms of Mabuse’s mark Count Told (a gloriously ineffective Alfred Abel – unrecognisable from the world controller he would become in Metropolis) to the white-lined jails and careful detailed offices of von Wenk’s police headquarters.

Dr Mabuse der Spieler uses these real locations to constantly remind us that, underneath the Moriarty genius of its lead, this is also a tragedy of real people caught in the web of an uncaring spider. Mabuse cares nothing for his underlings, sacrificing them as readily as pawns. None more so than Cara Carozza, beautifully played by Aud Aged Nissen, a seducer in love with Mabuse who dedicates her life to him, at the cost of her own. She makes a dark mirror for Countess Told, drawn into Mabuse’s web but drawing strength from her admiration of Cara who is, in her own way, deeply principled. Mabuse’s victims are prodded, pushed and outright shoved into punishing and often self-destructive behaviours, their lives flourishing or ending according to his whims.

As a sort of epic mini-series, Dr Mabuse der Speiler is sublime entertainment. Each act follows its own clear arc and the culmination in a brutal shoot-out throws in a nightmare of surrealist imagery at its close as a crucial character tips, under pressure, into madness and delusion. (This series of horrors, the ghosts of fallen characters arising to torment him, is a masterclass in ghostly horror). It gripped audiences then and its surprisingly brisk pace and pulpy sensibility still do now.

Lancelot du Lac (1974)

Bresson’s bleak film is the least romantic, most depressing Arthurian film out there

Director: Robert Bresson

Cast: Luc Simon (Lancelot du Lac), Laura Duke Condominas (Queen Guinevere), Humbert Balsan (Gawain), Vladimir Antolek-Oresek (King Arthur), Patrick Bernhard (Mordred), Arthur De Montalembert (Lionel)

Only Bresson could have made a King Arthur film like this. Lancelot du Lac takes Bresson’s spare, thoughtful style and applies it to that most unlikely of genres, the historical epic. What we end up with (for better or worse) is something perhaps bleaker and more difficult than any other King Arthur film out there. Bresson repackages Camelot not as the dreaming spires of hope, but a spare, vaguely mechanical world where Arthur and his knights are going through the motions of duty and honour, while stumbling towards inevitable death. However much the characters want to believe in a higher purpose, they can’t escape the cynical truths of the world, or their own lusts and desires.

Lancelot du Lac opens with the return of the knights from a disastrous Grail Quest. The best of them, Percival, never came back. Neither did most of the rest, all dead in some distant land. Arthur (Vladimir Antolek-Oresek) is a worn-out man who doesn’t seem to know what to do next. He’s delighted to see Lancelot (Luc Simon) return. Just as pleased is his queen Guinevere (Laura Duke Condominas), whose historical affair with Lancelot is an increasingly open secret in Camelot. Lancelot talks about letting it lie in the past, but temptation inevitably fractures the kingdom as Mordred (Patrick Bernhard) plots a coup.

Bresson doesn’t compromise on any of his distinctive style. Scenes mix between carefully structured longer takes, that frequently feature on obscure parts on the body (in particular legs, whose motion frequently fills the frame) and simple cutting between the faces of two people in conversation. He casts non-professional actors and, as before, ruthlessly drills them until they deliver every line with a flat, defiantly non-actorly, monotone. Nearly every event of note happens off screen. Every human is a choiceless cog in a much larger machine, unable to impact or effect the actions around them.

There is no romance whatsoever in Lancelot du Lac. The film is bookended with what passes (in Bresson) for moments of action. A clash between knights at the start ends (after a very short and perfunctory swinging of swords) with a blood spurting decapitation and another blood spurting disembowelment. (The blood spurting style was effectively piss-taked within a year by Monty Python and the Holy Grail.) It ends with a deliberately underwhelming Battle of Camelan, in which we see no fighting only faceless knights dead in a woody clearing, as archers rain arrows down. There is no glamour here, no glory or honour in combat – just pointless, mechanical sacrifice.

It’s the same with the jousting tournament which takes up a surprisingly large portion of the film’s runtime. Bresson shoots this almost with an almost irritatingly cheeky lack of spectacle. As horses charge at each other, the camera lingers on: the arms of a bagpipe player, the legs of horses, the ends of spears and the impassive faces of Arthur and Gawain in the crowd. Occasionally flags go up to denote new jousts and helmets crash down over faces. But any sense of what’s going on, or the point of it, is secondary to the sense of the knights as nothing more than humble parts of a great, pointless machine, churning out martial events by rote.

That sense of a machine is behind all of Bresson’s vision of Camelot. The actors all wear armour, all the time, clunking around the set like clumsy automatons, every flinch accompanied by the clank of armour. (John Boorman’s Excalibur would present the Wagnerian contrast of this same aesthetic choice.) Towards the end, Bresson repeats four of five times in sequence near identical shots of knights slamming helmets over their faces making them look like even more like robots.

It’s here where the actors deliberately lifeless performances work, and actually create a sort of hypnotic power. Bresson’s style makes them all feel like tired, exhausted figures at the end of their tethers, scarcely knowing the point anymore. Lancelot looks like a middle-aged bank manager sticking to the letter of a code because it’s all he’s got. Arthur is so disengaged from any sense of the ‘dream of Camelot’, he practically allows a civil war to break out due to apathy. Gawain is so constrained by his idea of duty that he allows himself to be killed, seeking revenge for the death of a brother he couldn’t stand. Mordred is the only guy who really feels aware of the world he lives in, a middle-manager who stirs up trouble and then gets others to deliver for him.

No wonder Guinevere constantly questions the whole set-up and the point of anything anyone is doing. Why shouldn’t she and Lancelot try and cling to something real, even if it will destroy everything else? After all it’s not the original sin: Camelot was already long since corrupted, way before they hooked up. There is no sense in Bresson’s work that medieval honour really means much to anyone, and the only people who really talk about it (Gawain and Lancelot) respectively die for no reason and betrays everyone after convincing himself his betrayal was an act of honour.

There is a fatalistic, hypnotic quality to this after a while as we watch characters square their actions against abstract ideals irrelevant to the situation they are in. So, Lancelot steals Arthur’s wife and then rides to a pointless death for the man he betrayed. Arthur allows men to die on crusades, allowing his kingdom to become fatally weakened in pursuit of purity. Everyone talks about honour all the time, but no one does anything to turn the situation into something actually honourable. Instead, their lives are ones of empty, unknowing fatalism leading to inevitable ends. It makes for a powerfully bleak Bresson tale – and faith and Christianity is notable by its absence in this world. Without it, it seems the knights have nothing to cling to.

Napoleon (2023)

Scott’s epic of the most famous Frenchman of all time looks good but is empty at heart

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix (Napoleon Bonaparte), Vanessa Kirby (Josephine Bonaparte), Tahar Rahim (Paul Barras), Ben Miles (Caulaincourt), Ludivine Sagnier (Thérésa Cabarrus), Matthew Needham (Lucien Bonaparte), Sinéad Cusack (Letizia Bonaparte), Édouard Philipponnat (Alexander I), Ian McNeice (Louis XVIII), Rupert Everett (Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington), Paul Rhys (Talleyrand), Catherine Walker (Marie-Antoinette), Mark Bonnar (Jean-Andoche Junot)

Is Bonaparte cinema’s White Whale? Filmmakers have often tried and failed to bring this epic life – who else so dominated their era that’s its literally named after them? – to the screen. Abel Gance’s silent epic could only squeeze his early years into five-hours and the planned five sequels never materialised. Famously, Kubrick spent decades planning a Napoleon film (he had a veritable library of Napoleonic research) but could never deliver. Napoleon has popped up in films as wide ranging as Time Bandits and Waterloo, but the definitive film has never been made. Is Scott’s Napoleon it?

Napoleon takes a rather old-fashioned approach to the biopic. The fashion now is to focus on a single event that becomes a window into its subject’s life. Napoleon, in its two and a half hours, takes a far more cradle (or revolution) to grave approach. We join Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix) as an anonymous artillery captain and leave him (via 13 Vendémiaire, Egypt, the 18 Brumaire coup, self-coronation, Austerlitz, Borodino, Moscow, St Elba, Waterloo and Helena) dying in exile. It’s as swift and pacey a run-down of his life and times as it sounds like, with the film’s main focus being on his complex, love-loath relationship with Josephine (Vanessa Kirby).

Scott’s film is a visual treat – don’t those uniform’s look gorgeous! – and it works best as a coffee-table book of the life-and-times of one of History’s most controversial figures. What it doesn’t work as is as film where you feel you gain any real understanding of what motivated Napoleon or where the charismatic energy that made millions of soldiers flock to him time-and-time again came from. Scott’s Napoleon emerges as a maladjusted, emotionally-stunted oddball, apt to glower and sulk who is never the master of events or people. It’s a revisionist view that doesn’t ring true.

It’s not helped by a surprisingly low-key performance by Joaquin Phoenix, bulked up and lumbering, playing up the “Corsican Brute” angle that so alienated the Emperors he negotiated with. Phoenix’s performance is all pout and emotionally inarticulate self-pity, with small flashes of domineering force that come across as childish sulks. But it’s never the performance of a man who looks like he could motivate a nation to march with him into a mincer (several times!). Nor a performance that brings a sense of the fierce-ambition of a man who wanted to control and reshape the world. It focuses instead on one small aspect of his personality and misses vast swathes of his rich, autodidact personality.

It doesn’t help that filtering Napoleon’s life through his relationship with his wife feels like a gossipy approach used because tackling Napoleon’s complex attitudes towards his Corsican ancestry, contradictory interests in instituting democratic systems in a dictatorship and desire to bring peace to Europe via a series of destructive wars would be too tricky. Instead, we get a Napoleon who plans his movements and campaigns to compensate for his sexual inadequacy at being cuckolded by his wife, rushes back from Egypt to confront his cheating wife and seemingly escapes from exile because he’s pissed at his wife flirting with the Tsar. It’s not helped that the most interesting mechanism in their relationship – she was older and more experienced than him, with two children already – is compromised by Vanessa Kirby clearly being far younger than Phoenix.

Saying that Kirby is good in the film, conveying a complex set of emotions towards a husband who sometimes amuses her but, just as often, repels her with his bullying possessiveness (not to mention his militaristic sexual technique). Napoleon uses their relationship as a constant frame to interpret events, not only as motivation but also as a narrative device, letters between them constantly updating us on events off-screen. But the film only lightly sketches what drew them together in the first place (basically his attraction and her use of her sexuality to win protection) and the film ends up stuck in the same cycle of fall-out followed by Napoleon’s desperation to possess her again.

The time given to sketching out the broad strokes of this relationship means we never get a sense of history behind events or where the qualities, that made Napoleon the guy who governed most of Europe, came from. Scott’s film is (which, with its stressing of the deaths caused in his wars, settles for an anti-Napoleon stance) plays up his negative qualities and gifts him few positive ones. Phoenix’ performance is almost perversely anti-charismatic: he never laughs, is constantly shown as a pompous windbag who only children are wowed by, loses all his raconteur charm and is frequently victim to events – be that panicking at his attempted coup (where he’s bailed out by his brother) or only at Austerlitz looking like he has any particular military skill.

Still the film bowls along, too fast to ever really engage with events. A host of strong British Actors pop-up (their character names and functions plastered on the screen), but their appearances and dialogue are often so truncated it’s hard to really understand why they are there. Julian Rhind-Tutt’s Sieyes pops up to announce he plans to seize power with Napoleon and is never heard of again. Ben Miles and Paul Rhys rush through exposition as Caulaincourt and Talleyrand. A host of actors playing Generals stand in the background and snatch lines when they can. There are a few inadvertently comic casting choices – I did snigger when former News Quiz host Miles Jupp pops up as Francis I.

This historical gallop means years frequently pass between scenes and we often get very little idea why developments are taking place: for example, Napoleon seems to become Emperor on the basis of a half-muttered suggestion from Talleyrand. Conquests of whole countries are skipped over in seconds. Josephine’s offspring appear as children and are next seen as adults. Other than them, no one ages at any point over the film’s near 20 year span, with Phoenix and Kirby in particular looking little different at the end as they did at the start. (The film also rewrites heavily the comparative ages of its two leads – Josephine was in fact several years older, partly why conceiving an heir became such a problem.)

The battles are impressive though – even though they take up not quite as much screen time as you might think. The campaign in Egypt boils down to essentially a single cannon ball pot-shot at the Great Pyramid (never happened of course). Borodino is a cavalry charge. Austerlitz and Waterloo are the only battles that get real screen time, with both offering remixes of the actual history (Waterloo, incidentally, looks less impressive and smaller in scope than the Bondarchuk film managed). The photography is beautiful (as it is throughout) and the film doesn’t flinch on showing the impact of bullets and cannon balls. But it has no interest in understanding Napoleon’s actual strengths as a general (essentially, skilful movement of forces from a distance) substituting them with him leading not one but two cavalry charges – a suicidal risk he never took.

“At least it looks good” pretty much sums up the strengths and weaknesses of Napoleon. It’s enjoyable enough and buffs might enjoy the odd Historical Easter Eggs, but it never gets to the heart of understanding its subject and settles for a ticking off events and personalities rather than placing them into an informative context. You’d come out of this wondering how this guy got to where he was – and that makes you feel the film has failed to answer its implicit question in the tag line “He came from nothing. He conquered everything.” How, eh? How?

Caché (2005)

Haneke’s fascinating puzzle is a profound and challenging modern masterpiece

Director: Michael Haneke

Cast: Daniel Auteuil (Georges Laurent), Juliette Binoche (Anne Laurent), Maurice Bénichou (Majid), Lester Makedonsky (Pierrot Laurent), Walid Afkir (Majid’s son), Annie Girardot (Georges’s mother), Daniel Duval (Pierre), Bernard Le Coq (Georges’s boss), Nathalie Richard (Mathilde)

Is any film more aptly named than Caché? Haneke’s film keeps its cards so close to its chest, it’s entirely possible revelations remain hidden within it in plain sight. Caché famously ends with a final shot where a possibly crucial meeting between two people we’ve no reason to suspect know each other plays out in the frame so subtly many viewers miss it. It shows how Haneke’s work rewards careful, patient viewing (and Caché is partially about the power of watching and being watched), but also how unknowable the past can be. It’s a chilling and engrossing film that fascinates but never fully reveals itself.

Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) lives a life of success. A wealthy background, host of a successful TV literary debate show and living in an affluent suburb of Paris, he’s married to publisher Anne (Juliette Binoche) and father to young champion swimmer Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). But there’s a serpent in his Garden of Eden. Georges and Anne are plagued by a stream of videos arriving at their house. These show long, static shots of their home and are accompanied by crude, graphic drawings. Someone is watching their house and the dread that this could escalate at any time is consuming them. But does Georges know more – do the messages chime with guilty memories in his past?

Haneke’s film is a multi-layered masterpiece, a haunting exploration (free of clear answers) into the things we prefer to forget, the hidden horrors we supress. It’s a film all about the shame and guilt buried amongst the everyday. Haneke even shoots the film on hi-definition video so that the surveillance footage of Georges and his home visually merges with the ‘real’ images of the couple. Within that, Caché starts to unpack the hinterland we hold as individuals (and, quite possibly as entire nations) of the guilts of our past that keep bubbling to the surface to bite us.

Caché is shot through with Haneke’s genius for menace and veiled threat. Can you imagine anything creepier than a camera set up outside your home, filming everything you do – but never knowing where it is? It’s an invasion of privacy that is insidious and covered in the additional menace that, at any time, it could escalate to something worse. The creeping, invasive tyranny of surveillance is in every inch of Caché, its omnipresence giving every interaction the feeling of being watched (something Haneke plays up – watch a man watching Anne when she sits in a café with a friend).

So gradually the book-lined world of the Laurents becomes a base under siege, a feeling amplified by Haneke’s mix of smooth camera movements adrift from establishing shots: constantly the camera glides through a space where we feel we neither truly understand the geography or are confident about the time. It’s accentuated by the window-free room the Laurents largely inhabit. In fact, their whole home feels window free, with curtains frequently drawn and rooms plunged into darkness, the family throwing up a shield to protect them from the outside world.

Or is it to cut them off from the unpleasant facts of life? It becomes clear Georges has built a world around himself, where he is the hero and all traces of the unpleasant or disreputable in his past have been dismissed to the dark recesses of memory, never to be accessed. Played with a bull-headed arrogance by Daniel Auteuil, under his assurance Georges is prickly and accusatory, liable to lash out verbally (and perhaps physically, considering the threat he carries in two key scenes). Auteuil masters in the little moments of startled panic and stress that cross Georges’ face, a man so used to a world that matches his needs, that anything questioning that is met with rejection.

It’s why he lies to Anne about his growing suspicions about the source of the tapes. The cartoons hint at a series of (deeply shameful) interactions, when he was a child in the 60s, with a young Algerian boy, Majid, who his parents considered adopting after the death of Majid’s parents. It was Georges lies that forced this boy out of his perfect farm-house into the cold-arms of the unfeeling French orphanage system. This is the original sin of Georges’ life, arguably the foundation of his success – a guilty secret that so haunts and disgusts him, even the slightest mention of it brings out the muscular aggression he otherwise keeps below the surface.

Of course, it’s hard not to see an echo of France’s colonial past. One of the things that works so well with Caché, is that this subtext is there without Haneke ever stressing it. Just as Georges’ lies forced Majid into a life of depression and misery, so France’s treatment of Algeria is the terrible shame the nation would rather forget. Majid’s parents died in a famously brutal stamping out of an Algerian protest in Paris in October 1961 (the deaths of over 200 people at the hands of French government forces only came to light decades later). The anger many show when presented with inconvenient, horrible past deeds (both personal and national), only feels more relevant today with our culture battles over history.

Georges sees himself as a victim of a vicious campaign. But, when Georges meets Majid, played with startling vulnerability by Maurice Bénichou, he seems light years away from the sort of man who could possibly be capable of such a campaign. Indeed, when a video of Georges encounter with Majid is widely shared, it is Georges (as even he admits) who appears the bully and aggressor. Majid has been demonised in Georges’ memory – in his nightmare he becomes an axe-wielding monster-child – but he’s an innocent, who had everything taken from him in a micro-colonialist coup carried out by a 6-year-old Georges. A coup the adult Georges has let himself forget, making him little different from France itself. (We are reminded the cycle continues, with constant background news footage of Iraq, ignored by the Laurents.)

The mistakes repeat themselves, but they don’t trouble the complacent middle-classes who benefit from them. Georges will even use his influence to have Majid and his son bundled into a police van. Of course it leads to an outburst that will shake this world up. Haneke’s films have always been realistic when it comes to the visceral horror of violence, and Caché contains an act of such shocking violence that it will leave the viewer as speechless and distressed as the witnesses.

And still the question hangs: who? It could be anyone. At one-point Georges storms out of his front door to confront the mystery video-sender, only to return to find a video wedged in the door. It’s literally impossible for this video to be placed without him seeing it done. Haneke is so uninterested in the whodunnit part that, perhaps, he’s implying the perpetrator is the director himself, using the mechanics of film-making to entrap the guilty parties. It fits with the coldly intellectual steel-trap part of Haneke’s mind, the part that uses films (like Funny Games) to tell off and preach. What other director would be more likely to set himself up as unseen antagonist in the film?

And does Georges learn anything? He will continue to confront characters who challenge his world view and dispatch (like nations) his guilt to the recesses of memory. His begrudging peace with his wife – a superbly restrained Juliette Binoche, increasingly resentful at her husband’s secrets – seems built on the shaky ground of their continuing mutual comfort. And suspicions linger over his son, an increasingly hostile figure who (just perhaps) is learning more about the flaws of his parents than they would be comfortable with.

Of course, this might all be open to interpretation from multiple angles. After all the film is called Caché. Haneke has hidden enough subtle implications in it that it can reward analysis from multiple angles. Shot with his characteristic discipline that suggests a dark, creeping fear behind every corner, it’s a masterclass in suggestion and paranoia. Brilliantly unsettling and constantly reworking itself before your eyes, it’s a masterpiece.

The Killer (2023)

Fincher’s lean, spare film is a perfectly constructed thriller and an intriguing character study

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Michael Fassbender (The Killer), Tilda Swinton (The Expert), Charles Parnell (The Lawyer), Arliss Howard (The Client), Kerry O’Malley (Dolores), Sophie Charlotte (Magdala), Emiliano Pernia (Marcus), Gabriel Polanco (Leo), Sala Baker (The Brute)

A man sits in monastic silence, starring out of a window at the best hotel in Paris that money can buy. He moves only to sleep, exercise with a monotonous rigour and consume a carefully calculated daily calorie amount from McDonalds. He wears gloves all the time, never moves from the sheeting he lays across surfaces and sometimes assembles and reassembles his rifle. He’s a nameless hitman for hire (Michael Fassbender) and a freak accident on this job will shatter his world of pristine order and leave him hunted by his employers and on a campaign of revenge to guarantee his safety.

The Killer is a lean, slimmed-down thriller full of Fincher’s love for procedure and detail, that delights in every beat of its detailed look at how a professional killer might go about his daily business. Be it lock-ups crammed with mountains of equipment, from guns to false number plates and endless zip-bound folders of fake IDs (all using character names from 70s and 80s TV shows) to the practised ease with which he penetrates even the the highest security building with an Amazon purchased card copier and light-fingered pick-pocketing. All of it assembled with Fincher’s pin-point precision and clockwork eye for detail.

On the surface, you might expect The Killer to be a sort of twist on Le Samouri, Melville’s look at a zen-like hitman. The Killer seems to fit much of the bill. Embodied with an athletic suppleness by Fassbender (his body seems to be almost elastic in the parade of physical stretches and exercises he performs, not to mention the fingertip press-ups he relentlessly pumps his whipper-thin body through). But Fincher gives us a seemingly never-ending insight into the Killer’s inner-mind, via a prolonged (near continuous) monologue of his inner thoughts, ideologies and mantras that dominate much of the film (the first twenty minutes plays out in near on-screen silence, just watching Fassbender and listening to his voiceover).

What’s fascinating is this interior monologue is only a shade away from a stream of corporate middle-management think. (It’s even implied the Killer was originally recruited while training as a lawyer). There are mantras with the air of an assassin’s version of positive thinking (“Stick to your plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no one. Never yield an advantage. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight.”) and passive-aggressive demands to hit a personal standard (“Forbid empathy. Empathy is weakness. Weakness is vulnerability.”). Far from the glamour of an unknowable force acting to a mystical code, this Killer sounds alarmingly similar to a self-doubting white-collar worker using Sun Tze to plan out his pitch meetings.

Beneath the sheen of Fincher’s beautifully dark film, is the suggestion we are watching a character study of a man perhaps only partially aware that his life, and his inner picture of who he is, is falling apart. For starters, despite his mantra of perfection and continued assurance of ‘every detail covered’ and ‘every angle anticipated’, our Killer makes a host of errors. Almost everything we see him do goes wrong in some-way: from that initial hit that takes out the wrong target, to stabbings that leave victims bleeding out faster than he intended, doses of knock-out drunks that are incorrectly calculated, house invasions that fail to surprise the victim… The mantra is clearly an ideal not quite a reality and the Killer’s greatest strength actually turns out to be his ability to improvise in unexpected circumstances.

In addition, for all he maintains he acts only professionally and things are never personal, the entire film chronicles a campaign of revenge in which he takes out a host of targets for personal reasons. The idea of the killer as a man separate from connections is already shattered from his obvious distress, returning to his home in the Dominican Republic after his botched hit, to find his girlfriend seriously assaulted and hospitalised. Michael Fassbender’s mastery of micro-features throughout the film, suggests waves of doubt and insecurity flooding behind the eyes of a man who has tried to master himself as an unfeeling violent limb of faceless masters.

As such, The Killer is a sort of pilgrim’s progress of a man discovering small, unexpected elements of himself while as impassively as possible knocking off anyone he considers a threat (effectively anyone who might know where he lives). No attempt is made in this to make the Killer entirely sympathetic – he ruthlessly kills at least one completely innocent person, and doesn’t hesitate to murder those he has identified, no matter how much he might sympathise with them.

But the monastic chill he aspires to is cracking. You can see it in his conversation with “The Expert” played with a mix of relish and resignation by Tilda Swinton. A professional killer like him, the Expert has not let this stand in the way of “a normal” life outside her trade. She’s married, is a popular regular at a posh restaurant and has achieved a level of compartmentalism the Killer can only dream of. Is the envy and self-doubt in his eyes as he listens to her emotionally articulate reflection on the life they have chosen?

Fincher’s film quietly explores this alongside some skilfully assembled sequences. In many ways the film mirrors its lead character: limber, dedicated, obsessive, executing its sequences with clockwork exactitude and following a fit-bit like a metronome. But it’s also a dark character study of a man (perhaps) realising how empty he has made himself, drowning out doubts with the music of The Smiths. Fassbender is the perfect actor for this, few matching his skill to be both blank and overflowing with suppressed emotion at the same time.

It makes The Killer a fascinating film, a Fincher film that feels at first like a minor work but offers more and more depths for reflection. On one level an auteur John Wick, which brilliantly outlines each trick of its expert lead character. On another level, a sort of dark character study of a man in the midst of an epic breakdown, falling back on mantras and mottos, processing his doubts and guilt through the only thing he really knows how to do: kill people.