Category: Directors

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.

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.