Category: Directors

Persona (1966)

Bergman’s masterpiece, a fascinatingly brilliant Rorschach test that challenges and rewards the viewer

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Bibi Andersson (Alma), Liv Ullman (Elizabet Volger), Margareta Krook (Doctor), Gunnar Björnstrand (Herr Volger), Jorgen Lindstrom (Boy)

Even Bergman considered Persona a moment he “had gone as far as I could go…touched wordless secrets that only cinema can discover”. Persona, Bergman’s most consciously artistic and psychologically challenging work is a mass of contradictions and puzzles that defies easy categorisation (even Bergman claimed to be only half sure what definitively was happening). A whirling mix of themes, haunting moments and unknowable incidents all within a framework that constantly reminds us we are watching a film, Persona has been influencing, challenging and fascinating viewers for over 60 years. If cinema’s Everest is Citizen Kane, Persona is its K2.

The plot seems simple. Famed actress Elizabet Volger (Liv Ullman) fell silent for a minute during a production of Electra, then carried on. A day later she stopped speaking and hasn’t spoken since. Her doctors can’t find an answer so she is sent to an island to recuperate, with the support of a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson). On the island, Alma fills the silence with long monologues that become more and more confessional, intimate and personal. Does Elizabet betray these confidences in a letter to her doctor? Does Alma plot revenge? Are these events even happening? As the personalities of the two women blur, merge, swop and consume each other the film fractures (at one point literally so) until we are left as uncertain of who and what is real as perhaps the women themselves.

There is, in some ways, no understanding Persona. It perhaps best resembles a cinematic Rorschach test. I’d argue it’s a fool’s journey to stare at it for a definitive answer. Different days, different moods, different conditions will make the picture re-shape and resemble something else. Bergman has created a film devoid of traditional ‘clues’, that provides no trace of an ‘answer’, but instead asks – demands? – us to take away only what we choose.

Throughout, Bergman makes it vitally clear film is a constructed, artificial representation of reality. Persona starts and ends with film literally spooling through a projector, the arc lights cranking up to project a reality. The opening prologue is a host of suggestive images which may, or may not, relate to what we are about to watch. Their meaning is almost deliberately vague – much as the epilogue’s brief shot of Bergman and crew shooting the film is – but it lets us know beyond doubt this is a subjective presentation of a series of images, not real life. Perhaps reading meaning into it is as impossible a task as trying to interpret the contents of a library from the page of a single book.

Which is to say, I think Bergman is both inviting us to interpret the film but also warning us that this isn’t a jigsaw, but a deliberately obtuse and open-ended work, our experience of it controlled by the director. Film is after all a dream – a world where we think we move freely, but in fact we never do. Which might make you think Persona is Bergman’s punking the world, a Thermot’s Last Theorem designed to infuriate. It isn’t because it’s made with such grace, humanity and honesty.

To understand Persona you can only discuss – and wonder – at the complex, multi-layered themes and decide which speaks most to you on the day. A lot of this boils down to how you are affected by the breathtaking, seismic performances from Andersson and Ullman. Playing two characters whose identities merge, shift, mirror and absorb each other both performers give outstandingly intelligent, infinitely challenging and unreadable performances. For Andersson the film is virtually a monologue, where the more Alma talks, the more our grasp on who (or what?) she is slips through our fingers. Ullman’s impassive face, awash with micro-expressions (caught in scintillating close-ups) constantly disorientates – is that a sneer or a smile? Is that head-turn impatience or a desire to know more?

At several points I find myself falling into the trap Bergman lays of wanting to categorise the film, as I became convinced first one than the other of these women was just an element of the psyche of the other. It’s not as simple as that. They are both the same and different, two people and one. Bergman frequently frames their bodies overlapping and, in one horrifying moment, their face literally merged half-and-half. Elizabet, we think at first, is a near vampiric figure sucking the life out of Alma, drawing confessions from Alma to restore herself. Then Elizabet becomes a ghostly figure, moving in the margins of Alma’s life, a horrific silent figure from her subconscious holding her back. Then you feel Alma to be nothing more than Elizabet’s id, demanding her right to be independent.

The unreadability of the film becomes ever more acute at the half-way point. After an enraged Alma deliberately leaves Elizabet to cut her foot on glass, the film pauses, burns away and then restarts with an echo of its earlier montage. Has the story restarted? Did all or any of what went before actually happen? Or is everything from this point a cinematic fantasy? Later in the film Bergman throws in a sequence with Alma and Elizabet back in the hospital before returning to the island – is this a flashback or a dream or a vision or something else entirely?

Bergman’s mastery of horror comes to the fore. The haunting repeated shot of Elizabet embracing Alma from behind, the two of them starring into a mirror (and the camera) at times seems sexually charged, at others disturbingly possessive at others supernaturally controlling. Is Bergman’s point that the context of an image can change its meaning? These hazy definitions of truth and reality lie throughout. The confrontations between the two taking on an increasingly surreal nature.

In a stunning sequence, Bergman repeats the same Alma monologue twice, one focused solely on Elizabet (her face contorted with pain as she hears of her rejection of a child), the second on Alma (now dressed identically to Elizabet), Alma’s bitterness now taking on a totally different light. Alma, back in nurses’ outfit, confronts Elizabet screaming that she is her own person even as her words collapses into an incoherence that might as well match Elizabet’s silence. Which is projection and which reality? When they leave at the film’s end, do they go their separate ways or merge? Does Alma imagine herself with Elizabet’s husband, or when Elizabet’s husband recognises Alma as his wife is he tipping the nod to us?

Bergman gives no clear reasons for Elizabet’s silence. It could be connected to horror at the world’s terrors (Vietnam and the Holocaust are referenced). It could be shame at her own post-natal depression. It could be that the silent Elizabet is a projection of the Alma-Elizabet’s own turmoil and isn’t real in the first place. After all the hospital we are introduced to Elizabet in doesn’t feel like a real place but a sparsely dressed film set (and shot like it).

Sex weaves it’s way tellingly through the film. The sexual bond between Alma and Elizabeth, physically, seductively close and possibly sleeping together is clear. Alma relates a hugely erotic monologue about an orgy she and a friend initiated on a beach, the only time she describes herself a purely happy and content. Is this her memory or a fantasy of Elizabet’s? If Alma is Elizabet, is this what she longs for or the thing she finds missing now from her own life? Alma talks of wanting a family – but in a haphazard, casual way and has already had an abortion. Elizabet has a son but doesn’t want him – is Alma what she dreams she could be, or is Elizabet the truth Alma doesn’t want to face? At various points both, all or nothing of the above could be true.

The film opens with a mysterious boy starring at a blurred series of images of female faces. We never learn who he is (theories abound from Elizabet’s son to Bergman himself). He wakes seemingly from the dead, but perhaps he is given life by the film. Perhaps, Bergman is saying, Alma and Elizabet are themselves given life only by the film. That both of them are fictious illusions, as unreal as the blurred pictures on the wall. Persona is the sort of film only a director of pure courage could have made. An object that fascinates and frustrates but always leaves you wanting to reconsider and reposition it to see if the picture becomes clearer or if new truths are presented if you look at it from a different angle. Maybe Elizabet is a succubus. Maybe Alma is an angry inner self, longing to escape and liver her own life. Maybe Alma is the silent actress. Maybe Elizabet longs for the simpler life of the nurse. Perhaps every single idea is true and perhaps none of them are. That’s part of the mystery that makes Persona one of the greatest films ever made.

A Haunting in Venice (2023)

Branagh’s third Poirot outing lowers the scale but feels more real and involving than any others

Director: Kenneth Branagh

Cast: Kenneth Branagh (Hercule Poirot), Kyle Allen (Maxime Gerard), Camille Cottin (Olga Seminoff), Jamie Dornan (Dr Leslie Ferrier), Tina Fey (Ariadne Oliver), Jude Hill (Leopold Ferrier), Ali Khan (Nicholas Holland), Emma Laird (Desdemona Holland), Kelly Reilly (Rowena Drake), Riccardo Scamarcio (Vitale Portfoglio), Michelle Yeoh (Joyce Reynolds)

Branagh’s Poirot films have been a mixed bag. Big on starry cast and luscious locations, they’ve also succumbed too readily to bombast not to mention the sort-of tricksy directorial flourishes Branagh has such a weakness for. It’s a pleasant surprise then that A Haunting in Venice turns itself into the smallest-scale and tightest of his Poirot films and might just be the most successful of the lot.

It’s 1947 and a retired Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) lives as a recluse in Venice, studiously ignoring potential cases, his door firmly guarded by bodyguard (and retired policeman) Vitale Portfoglio (Riccardo Scamarcio). All this changes when he is visited by an old friend, crime novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) who recruits Poirot to help debunk spiritualist Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh). Reynolds is conducting a séance for retired opera singer Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), still grieving the recent death of her daughter Alicia. With other guests including Alicia’s former fiancée Maxime (Kyle Allen), PTSD suffering Dr Ferrier (Jamie Dornan) and his precocious son Leopold (Jude Hill) and housekeeper Olga Seminoff (Camille Cotton), the stage is set when a storm and a murder all strike on the same night. Finally, Poirot takes up arms again.

A Haunting in Venice has a fair bit of latitude to work with since there is not an Agatha Christie Poirot mystery actually called that (or even set in Venice). Instead, this is a fast-and-loose adaptation of Hallowe’en Party (definitely one of the lesser-known books) which shifts its location, reshuffles the characters backgrounds, brings a few off-page murders very much “on page” and repackages the story to take place in a sadness-tinged, post-war misery which neatly reflects Poirot’s private grief and guilt at a life which has seen so much death.

This actually works rather well. Contrary to much of the publicity, which played up the horror elements, this is about a million miles away from The Exorcist (although Branagh clearly rewatched Don’t Look Now for Venice scares inspiration), offering instead a camp-fire spookiness and a couple of jump scares. A Haunting in Venice is actually the first Branagh Poirot that feels it would fit into the Suchet-Poirot mould: a slightly maudlin atmosphere mixed with gentle humour, a tight interview-based structure and a (thankful) reduction in gun-toting stand-offs.

A Haunting in Venice is predominantly set in one crumbling Venetian house over one night during a wild storm. The house is given a ghostly backstory of a medieval orphanage left walled-up to prevent a plague outbreak spreading – and there are suggestions of supernatural mischief (objects fall down seemingly on their own) at various points (most of which are swiftly debunked by Poirot). The film is shot and framed with a series of fish-eye lenses and some oblique angles (as per Branagh, the second shot of the film is a Dutch angle) to maximise the dimensions of the house but also at key points stress its claustrophobia, all of which works rather well. It’s moodily lit in a series of shadows (to maximise those spooky jump scares) but its horror elements are lite – a whirligig of screaming and bloodshot eyes at the séance are about as far as it goes.

Instead, it unfolds in a traditional manner, bookended by a prologue and epilogue that indulges the beauty of the location shooting (including a luscious final aerial shot over Venice). The film effectively uses its post-war setting to add emotional impact – after suffering through a war that claimed millions of lives, is it surprising that people are more susceptible to the attractions of taking to the dead? The impact of war blights several characters, from Jamie Dornan’s doctor (Dornan is very good in the role), forever scared by the sights he saw liberating Bergen Belsen to a pair of young Eastern European refugees who have fled the Nazis.

Poirot’s background as a soldier and his own traumatic familiarity with death are also rather neatly wrapped up in questions of his faith. In Branagh’s quiet, melancholic performance (where its clear moments of warmth are only covering deep regrets), it becomes clear his faith in God is as lost as his belief that the world can be improved by deduction. His rejection of spiritualism is pointedly based on a belief that there is nothing outside of the tangible.He fits in witha house awash with traumatised doctors, opera singers lost in grief, housemaids who feel their lives have no purpose and even a crime novelist who’s last three books were flops.

Tina Fey is very playful as this Agatha Christie self-portrait, bouncing effectively off Branagh’s more sombre Poirot. The cast is in fact uniformally strong – a reduced cast list from previous Branagh Poirot’s means each one feels slightly more developed. Yeoh bites into the juicy part of Joyce with movie-star confidence, Reilly is subtly fragile, Cottin and Scamarcio both effectively hiding secret depths. Jude Hill, fresh from playing the young Branagh in Belfast marks himself as a kid with a golden future with a stand-out turn as the mature, worldly-wise young Leopold, comforting and caring for his emotionally scarred Dad.

All of this is marshalled into a tight murder-mystery – we get a bit of Grand Guignal slaughter as well as an effective locked room mystery thrown on top (as well as a homage to the originals apple-bobbing murder) – with a Poirot who is unsettled and out of sorts (for reasons that I guessed but make perfect, secular sense when revealed). It even wraps up on a quietly affecting note of hope. By dialling down the flourishes, scale and action (even if Branagh can’t resist a snorricam shot of himself through the house), A Haunting in Venice actually becomes more rewarding than either of the previous films in the series – and Branagh’s Poirot remains a strong, very human interpretation of the character. Surprisingly, despite its playing with the supernatural, it feels more grounded and human and, despite effectively creating a new story, closer to Christie.

The Lives of Others (2006)

Breathtaking, heartfelt and in-the-end deeply moving film which leaves you with a profound sense of hope for humanity

Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Cast: Ulrich Mühe (Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler), Sebastian Koch (Georg Dreyman), Martina Gedeck (Christa-Maria Sieland), Ulrich Tukur (Oberstleutnant Anton Grubitz), Thomas Thieme (Minister Bruno Hempf), Hans-Uwe Bauer (Paul Hauser), Volkmar Kleinert (Albert Jerska), Matthias Brenner (Karl Wallner), Herbert Knaup (Gregor Hessenstein), Charly Hübner (Udo Leveh)

For almost half the twentieth century, Germany was a country divided. West Germany was a world we might recognise today. East Germany was one George Orwell would have found eerily familiar, a surveillance state, where neighbour reported on neighbour, conversations and opinions were monitored and controlled, and the Stasi had ultimate power. Everything was designed to undermine personal loyalty, introduce mistrust into every relationship and keep in power apparatchiks who enjoyed privileges beyond the imagination of others. But what happens when humanity comes up against this system? Can the lives of others affect what the system’s agents think and feel?

1985, East Berlin. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is the perfect cog in the Stasi machine. Emotion isn’t an issue when he interrogates dissidents for hours at a time, or sits overnight listening to every word spoken in a suspect’s bugged house. All that starts to change when Wiesler is ordered to carry out an operation against noted playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). Dreyman appears to be the perfect citizen, but is suspected of dissident sympathies. More dangerously for him, he’s having a relationship with famed actor Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) who has attracted the lascivious attentions of the corpulent and corrupt Minister Hempf (Thomas Thieme). As Wiesler listens to Dreyman and Sieland’s lives, he finds himself deeply affected by exposure to art he has never experienced and begin to question the certainties of his world-view.

The Lives of Others is a moving, humane debut from von Donnersmarck, offering a rich and chilling insight into the horror of living in a country where thoughts are not free and words are strictly monitored. It carries such emotional impact because it gives us hope that, no matter the strictures of the world around us, common humanity and decency can break through and change us – even the most mechanical servants of a regime. The Lives of Others does this with realism and a lack of sentiment, showing life and the after-effects of our decisions in non-romantic detail, while also giving us hope that goodness can shine through no matter the cost.

Shot in a series of cold colours reflecting the featureless surroundings of East Germany, The Lives of Others exposes the beige hopelessness of Soviet life. It opens with Weisler’s long interrogation of “Prisoner 227”, cutting between it and a lecture hall, where Weisler plays tapes of it to teach a class. He shows no emotion of any type in either setting for the distressed, exhausted prisoner he’s talking to, and matter-of-factly marks down the name of a student who questions the ethics of what he’s doing. Weisler’s life is one of quiet exactitude: his apartment is featureless, his meals are bland pasta with ketchup, he has no friends and barely seems able to smile.

He contrasts totally with Geog Dreymon. Played with an ebullient innocence by Sebastian Koch, Dreymon has accommodated himself with the regime’s requirements. Does he believe in socialism? It’s one of the film’s mysteries – Dreymon may have an intellectual romanticism but he’s averse to making pointless protests or stands that will only lead to him being silenced. He is willing to accept the shelving of his director friend, for his works to be pushed into a realist factory-setting by plodding directors. His charm sees him befriend the high and mighty (“it was a gift from Frau Honecker” he tells a Stasi officer who questions his possession of a Western book) and he has boyish innocence, like someone who has never known the Orwellian horrors he lives amidst.

His friends however have. His director friend Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert) is an ‘unperson’ whose presence is an embarrassment at parties. Another is a closet radical who feels he should take a stance. Above all, Christa-Marie (a marvellous Martina Gedeck) lives with the abuse of Minister Thieme. This corrupt man – who orders Stasi investigations against people he doesn’t like and is the only character who looks overfed and well-dressed – fondles Christa-Marie at parties and forces her into sexual encounters in his chauffeured car. Corrupt men run this state – similarly Wiesler’s Stasi superior Grubitz (a wonderfully smug Ulrich Tukur), is interested only in promotion.

The system is propped up by men like Wiesler. But all that changes as listening to Dreymon’s life pulls something out of Wiesler he has never thought about before. What pivots this? Perhaps Wiesler truly listening to the warmth and vibrancy of Dreymon’s home life? Perhaps exposure to art? Von Donnersmarck masterfully shows (with complimentary camera moves between two locations) Wiesler teary, spellbound listening to Dreymon’s playing of a piano sonata. It opens up a new world of artistic and cultural understanding to Wiesler, who is drawn to the books in Dreymon’s apartment and begins turning more than a blind eye to Dreymon’s flirtation with dissidents.

In fact, Wiesler morphs from Dreymon’s dark shadow to his protective guardian angel. He awakens in himself a care for people around him, from the son of a neighbour to Dreymon and Christa-Maria. He conceals Dreymon’s involvement in a scheme to smuggle someone across the border (tragically the plan is a fake, designed to test if Dreymon’s apartment is bugged). He does his best to reassure Christa-Maria, “bumping into her” anonymously to provide her a moment of solace with a stranger and subtle counselling on her relationship with Dreymon. As Dreymon carefully writes an article, to be smuggled to the West, critical of the regime, Wiesler fills his reports with imagined plot details and quotes for the Lenin play Dreymon claims to be writing.

Dreymon is actually writing an article about the suicide rate in East Germany. Suicide becomes a heart-wrenching central theme. An oppressive, domineering regime like East Germany offers only one real escape: death. A state designed to make its own people suspect and turn on each other is designed to grind you into a choice between blank conformism or taking your own life. And we see the effects of this on multiple characters, as people are separated from the things that give their life meaning, stripped of their own identity, or made to betray those they love. For some, this is more than they can bear.

In this world, just displaying humanity is the victory. Ulrich Mühe’s breath-taking performance slowly fills with growing doubts, longings and passions under the surface of an impassive, quiet man who suddenly realises the world is larger and more magical than he ever imagined. Like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, he starts burrowing in the bowels of Stasi HQ, his eyes fixed only on what is in front of him. The film’s victory is turning this man into one who makes huge, unrewarded, sacrifices to protect another, the very attitude he quietly deconstructed in the film’s opening. Mühe is superb, the film constantly exploring his face for unspoken depths.

von Donnersmarck’s film ends with an extended coda of life after reunification. Some things are not as triumphant as hoped: Wiesler lives in poverty, the streets are lined with graffiti and tramps, cockroaches like Thieme remain in authority. But it is also a place where hope and friendship are possible, where things can be spoken rather than suppressed. It culminates in the sort of free-publishing Dreymon could never dream of and a tribute that could never have been spoken before.

After the crushing misery and suicidal pressures of the East, a world of possibility and freedom is one where we all could change our stars like Wiesler, to find an inner contentment from doing the right thing for no reward. Brilliantly filmed and deeply moving, The Lives of Others is a masterpiece.

War and Peace (1956)

Tolstoy is boiled down in this epic and luscious but soapy adaptation of the greatest novel ever

Director: King Vidor

Cast: Audrey Hepburn (Natasha Rostova), Henry Fonda (Pierre Bezukhov), Mel Ferrer (Andrei Bolkonsky), Vittorio Gassman (Anatole Kuragin), Herbert Lom (Napoleon Bonaparte), Oskar Homolka (Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov), John Mills (Platanov), Anita Ekberg (Hélène Kuragina), Helmut Dantine (Fedor Dolokhov), Tulio Carminati (Vasily Kuragin), Barry Jones (Mikhail Rostov), Milly Vitale (Lisa Bolkonskaya), Lea Seidl (Natalya Rostova), Anna Maria Ferrero (Mary Bolkonskaya), Wilfrid Lawson (Nikolai Bolkonsky), May Britt (Sonya Rostova), Jeremy Brett (Nicholas Rostov)

Let’s just say it right from the start: you can’t do Tolstoy’s War and Peace in three hours. All you can hope for is the little chunk of it you’ve bitten on is the most succulent part. King Vidor’s War and Peace zeroes in on the elements of the book Hollywood is most comfortably reproducing: a golden-tinged romance between Natasha and Pierre and the sweeping epic spectacle of Napoleon’s soldiers surging towards Moscow and limping home in the snow. While War and Peace, bravely, barely cuts a single major character or development, almost every other theme Tolstoy attempted gets shoved to the margins. This makes it both a SparkNotes version of the Greatest-Novel-Written, but also a very earnest attempt to do the impossible.

Tolstoy’s story stretched over seven years. The great Russian struggle against Napoleon is a backdrop to the lives of dilettante-turned-thinker Pierre Bezukhov (Henry Fonda), vivacious and impulsive Natasha Rostov (Audrey Hepburn) and stolid-but-thoughtful Andrei Bolkonsky (Mel Ferrer). Around them swirl other characters: Natasha’s warm-but-useless family, worthless womaniser Kuragin (Vittorio Gassman), his sister and Pierre’s faithless wife Hélène (Anita Ekberg), heartless roister Dolokhov (Helmut Dantine) and of course Napoleon (Herbert Lom) and his military antagonist, the pragmatic Kutuzov (Oscar Homoloka). Natasha falls in love with Andrei, betrays him then finds maturity caring for soldiers retreating from Napoleon, all while silently loved by Pierre.

This is compressed together into a film that certainly doesn’t feel like it is covering seven years despite its epic run-time. No one seems to age (just as well since everyone starts the film far too old) and the attempt to cover as much of the plot as possible means the film is moving forward so swiftly any sense of time is lost. It also means that the script frequently has to fill in the dots, communicating vital information that alters the lives of characters – major figures often die or are married off in short, easy-to-miss, sentences – and the ideas Tolstoy masterfully expounded about spirituality, destiny, fate, the quest for a life of meaning, are pretty much rinsed out in the plot focus.

War and Peace effectively reduces Tolstoy down into a sudsy romance against an epic backdrop. The romance is handled reasonably well, even if there is very little chemistry of any sort between any of the three protagnonists. Tolstoy’s rich leads, with the fascinating inner lives, are reduced to pen-portraits. There are odd moments where we have access to the inner thoughts and voices – sprinklings of voiceover dot around the picture – but they never feel real. Andrei has been robbed of the decency and warmth behind his thoughtfulness that attracts Natasha, while Pierre feels more like a second father or benevolent uncle than a soul mate.

This stripping down of Tolstoy’s complex characters to their bare principles fatally compromises all three lead performances. Hepburn comes off best, making a decent fist of Natasha Rostov. This is, after all, a character who embodies in her mix of passion, loyalty, fecklessness and self-sacrifice the very nature of Russia itself. No adaptation has ever managed to translate Tolstoy’s unplayable creation, but Hepburn has all the radiance and self-sacrificial guilt down pat. The film has to rush through her foiled elopement with Kuragin (Hepburn has more chemistry with Gassman than any of the others and their near elopement is artfully framed by Vidor with mirrors, reflections and a real illicit charge). Hepburn conveys the mesmeric impact this playboy has on Natasha and her selfish, tear-stained fury at the foiling of her disgraceful plans is laced with enough genuine guilt and pain by Hepburn to keep us caring. Hepburn skilfully translates this into a far wiser and more generous Natasha, placing others needs before her own.

By contrast, literally nobody reading the novel could picture Henry Fonda as Pierre (he’s the wrong age, shape, manner – there is nothing right about him at all), but Fonda does his best (as one reviewer at the time mentioned he’s one of the few actors who looks like he has read the book). He never convinces as the drunken playboy who gets into duels (he looks and sounds far too mature) and similarly doesn’t capture any of Pierre’s doubt and uncertainty (Fonda always looks like he knows exactly what he needs to do). It’s an intelligent reading for all that, but fundamentally miscast. Which is more than you can say about Mel Ferrer who turns Andrei into a stuff bore, ramrod straight and flatly monotone, an intellectual we never get interested in.

Honestly the film would have done better cutting more. Fonda is so unconvincing as the reckless young Pierre, they may as well have made him officially middle-aged to begin with. Similarly, Natasha’s brother Nicholas and his one-sided romance with cousin Sonya is given a mention so token its likely to confuse casual viewers. Andrei’s first marriage gets about five minutes and his sister Mary is reduced to a few dull scenes. Even John Mills’ thoughtful performance as Platanov strips out the characters worldview (and its profound impact on Pierre), turning it into one of simple, symbolic tragedy. It’s all the more noticeable when the film gets some stuff right, most notably Helmut Dantine’s bullying Dolokhov who war turns into someone with a sense of shame.

Faring much better are the historical characters. Like all War and Peace adaptations, this dials up the presence of Napoleon played with an excellent puffed-up grandeur by Herbert Lom, prowling with a swagger stick and collapsing into childish frustration, then silent tears as his plans for world domination collapse. Equally stand-out is Oscar Homoloka as scruffy realist Kutuzov.

Vidor’s film may offer a simplified, romantic vision of the characters but he delivers on the scale. If you can bemoan the fact the peace leaves the characters neutered, the film completely nails the war. War and Peace is a beautifully filmed by Jack Cardiff. From the sweeping vistas of the battlefield of Borodino, to the Dante-tinged flames at Moscow that cast orange light through the arches of a monastery where the Rostov’s take shelter, through the white-and-blue chill of the snow-covered retreat from Moscow, the film is an explosion of gorgeous colours. It’s also got the scale that old Hollywood loved. Borodino is restaged seemingly at 1:1 scale with a literal army of extras, soldiers and cavalry charging in their hundreds in long-shot and cannon fire peppering the land as far as the eye can see. Ballrooms are overflowing with extravagantly costumed extras and seemingly never-ending lines of Frenchmen march through the snow in the films closing moments.

It’s what this War and Peace is: a coffee-table accompaniment to the novel. You can look at the images it brings to life and the sweeping camera work Vidor uses to create nineteenth century Russia. But you’ll not understand anything that makes the novel great. In fact, to the uninitiated, you are likely to come away thinking the film must be a sort of high-brow Mills-and-Boon page-turner, a Gone with the Snow. What this tells us, more than anything, is that fifteen years on from the definitive Hollywood epic, Hollywood was still trying to remake it – and bringing Tolstoy to the screen was very much second to that.

The Exorcist (1973)

Unimaginable horrors seep into your mind in Friedkin’s hugely influential terrifying shocker

Director: William Friedkin

Cast: Ellen Burstyn (Chris MacNeil), Jason Miller (Father Damien Karras), Max von Sydow (Father Merrin), Linda Blair (Regan MacNeil), Lee J Cobb (Lt William F Kinderman), Kitty Wenn (Sharon Spencer), Jack MacGowran (Burke Dennings), Father William O’Malley (Father Joseph Dyer)

Growing up in the 90s in the UK it was easier to get your hands on a porno than a video copy of The Exorcist. For 12 years the film was banned because its influence was considered so insidious that it would inevitably lead to the corruption of the children who would (of course) dig out a copy to watch. Why was The Exorcist considered so powerful? After all no-one banned The Omen. Perhaps because there is something existential – unknowable, unexplained and unstoppable – at the heart of The Exorcist, while The Omen is a pulpy slasher about imaginatively bumping off Brit character actors. The Exorcist has a poetic nihilism, that reaches into your soul and takes a long-hard squeeze.

Hollywood actress Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) has problems. Her daughter Regan (Linda Blair) is growing increasingly unbalanced, suffering mood swings and saying the unsayable in grotesquely crude, sexual language. Doctors can’t find anything wrong with her. Above all they can’t explain her increased strength, contortions, the shaking of her bed and the freezing conditions in her bedroom. Could it be that Regan is possessed by a force darker than any we understand? After an unexplained death, Chris has no choice but to consult psychiatrist turned priest Father Damian Karras (Jason Miller) who reluctantly agrees that Satanic forces have taken control of Regan – and that an exorcism by himself and experienced Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) may be the only option.

Adapted from a chilling novel by William Peter Blatty (who also wrote the screenplay and produced), The Exorcist is an all-consuming experience film, directed with immersive power by William Friedkin. Everything in it is designed to unsettle, disturb and dig deep into the fears of the viewer. What could revile us more than a child, her body twisted into the features of a revolting, malign spirit, spouting revolting, bile-filled rants and revelling in a twisted, macabre sexuality? All this wrapped inside a film that makes your skin crawl with its coldness, precision and drained out colours, where sound is unpredictable, discordant and unnatural and which offers very few answers.

The Exorcist does this in spades. It’s methodical and quietly repetitive in aspects of its editing and framing, constantly using visual and audio association to build dread. Friedkin’s prowling camera glides constantly through the MacNeil’s luscious townhouse, gliding up the stairs to Regan’s bedroom to reveal new horrors. Friedkin builds the dread, his camera first studying the shock and horror on the faces of the characters, before cutting to reveal the terrors they are looking at.

We move from subtle moments – Regan’s Ouija board, through which she communicates with imaginary friend ‘Captain Howdy’, whose glider jumps unprompted from Chris’ hands. The moments of chilling flatness in Regan, such as when she tells a visiting astronaut he “will die up there”. The violent, uncontrollable, impossible shaking of her bed. Regan’s astonishing strength that can hurl people across rooms. All this builds us towards the real grotesqueness: her deformity, her sex-obsessed rantings, impossible body contortions and her revolting sexual defilement of a crucifix. It increases in immediacy, graphicness and in its breaking of social convention, until you get the feeling you watching something that can only be classed as a revolting, all-pervading, all-corrupting evil.

Evil is at the heart of The Exorcist. Friedkin superbly suggests a mystical, eternal clash between that and good at its heart. It’s opening sequence, with the discovery of the relics of the demon Pazazu in an Iraq is awash in suggestive menace: the percussive drum beat of the excavator’s tools, gusts of unexplained wind, the barking of battling dogs. A mist-filled skyline sees Merrin (and the granite faced von Sydow feels like a mythical figure) confronting a terrible statue of Pazazu. The moods –particular the audio features of this landscape – are echoed throughout the film, tying disparate locations together and subtly suggesting an age-long war that can never end.

That lies at the heart of The Exorcist’s ghastly appeal. Everything feels undefeatable, with regular streets and homes transfigured into places of inhuman dread. Little moments – a dog, a tramp, a train – take on echoes of sounds and sights associated with the demon. The brilliant repetitive use of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells provides a mesmeric rhythm that always echoes the discordant tones of other sounds and sights. Friedkin plays this up with visual touches – subliminal imagery is used to flash horrors past us and the film plays with visions of suggestive unease. The demon similarly plays on underlying fears – of guilt, inadequacy and repressed desire – that it flings horrifically to the fore, through parroting the voices of others to changing its shape and appearance.

No wonder medicine is flummoxed. The Exorcist, considering its reputation, surprises for being such a slow-burn. It takes nearly two thirds of the runtime before the idea of the exorcism arises, during which we watch never-ending medical tests on Regan. Friedkin shoots these with a cold, impersonal professionalism (an angiography, with blood spurting from Regan’s neck, is almost unwatchable in its realism) which makes it feel even more powerless against the demon’s existential evil.

The Exorcist gently glides over narrative and logic gaps (not least the sudden onset of Regan’s worsening condition) because it retains a mystic power and the nightmare inducing dread of knowing exactly what is happening, but being unable to step into the film and tell the characters. It all leads perfectly into the exorcism scenes, when the film’s horror culminates in scenes of extraordinarily intensity, difficult to watch, with just the right amount of gore and suggestion.

Is The Exorcist about anything? That might be its greatest flaw. So enamoured is it with infecting us with dread, that it neglects to offer much that can give lasting spiritual or intellectual nourishment. Like a brilliantly constructed haunted house, it thrills but leaves you with little else to consider (other the costly struggle against evil). At heart, it’s a superbly well-made B-movie, a terrific horror-thrill ride where every single moment is masterfully designed to illicit an effect from the audience.

It’s helped by the superbly horrific make-up (not to mention von Sydow’s hugely convincing ageing) and effects whose practical realism increases their dread. Friedkin – at the height of his dictatorial auteurism – directed with little regard for cast and crew, focused on producing the desired effect. Guns were fired to illicit shocks. He slapped Father William O’Malley seconds before shooting a scene to make him look distressed. Burstyn and Blair both suffered lasting back injuries from being jerked around and the exorcism was shot in such refrigerator conditions, the actors couldn’t spend longer than fifteen minutes in the room.

But Friedkin’s determination to produce his vision through every means necessary worked. The Exorcist has a power few other films can dream of. The actors do their part: Burstyn’s increasingly raw pain and distress grounds it extremely well, Blair’s innocence makes her later horrors (voiced by a gravelly Mercedes McCambridge) even more disgusting, Miller is very good as the film’s eventual hero whose soul becomes a battle-ground, von Sydow invests Merrin with a rich hinterland.

They are framed with a film that is immediate, discordant and subtly grotesque. It leaves little to the imagination, but nevertheless encourages the mind to add its own horrors. It feels like the film itself can be a quiet demon, working its way inside to change you. It’s a horrific ride, and if it feels like it ends on a beat of grimness and desolation (despite Blatty’s intentions) that feels fitting for a film that may have little to truly say but affects viewers in a way few other films do. That’s why it was seen as having such power, because it invests deep, subliminal meaning and import to what could have been just (as its sequels are) an exploitation flick. That’s why it was banned.

Barbie (2023)

Fabulously pink comedy with serious – and very earnest – things to say on sexism and gender

Director: Greta Gerwig

Cast: Margot Robbie (Barbie), Ryan Gosling (Ken), America Ferrera (Gloria), Will Ferrell (Mattel CEO), Ariana Greenblatt (Sasha), Kate McKinnon (Weird Barbie), Issa Rae (President Barbie), Alexandria Shipp (Writer Barbie), Emma Mackey (Physicist Barbie), Hari Nef (Dr Barbie), Sharon Rooney (Lawyer Barbie), Kingsley Ben-Adir (Basketball Ken), Simu Liu (Tourist Ken), Ncuti Gatwa (Artist Ken), Michael Cera (Alan), Rhea Pearlman (Ruth Handler), Helen Mirren (Narrator)

Who knew that the film which sparked the most conversation in 2023 about the roles of men and women would be one launched by a toy company, with the goal of selling toys? Barbie feels a little like a project happily hijacked. In another world this could have been a straight-forward, Adventures of Barbie flick, designed only to get kids crying out for that Margot Robbie Barbie to be appearing under the Christmas tree. Instead, thanks to the team of Gerwig and Robbie, this is a self-reverential, witty, smart and highly engaging look at gender politics which also manages to be a fun, gag-filled evening out at the cinema.

Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) leads a blissful life in Barbie-Land, where every day is the best day ever. Every Barbie knows they’ve inspired change for the better for women in the Real World. Everything is perfect until one day Barbie starts thinking about Death. Before she knows it, she has flat feet, cellulite and a crisis of confidence. The only way to fix this? A journey to that Real World to meet with the child who’s playing with her. But Barbie and Ken (Ryan Gosling) find the Real World very different from what they expected: all women’s problems are not solved and Ken discovers The Patriarchy, a wonder he is determined to bring back with him to Barbie-Land. Can Barbie save Barbie-Land and help rebuild a relationship between moody teenager Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) and her mother Gloria (America Ferrera) in the real world?

Barbie’s sharp playfulness mixes heartfelt messages on gender politics with the sort of joyful fish-out-of-water stuff beloved of family films where a naïve figure from our childhoods finds the real world a much harsher, more cynical place than they expected. Barbie’s expects our world to reflect of the female-dominated Barbie-Land is immediately exploded. Arriving in California, the reaction to an attractive woman roller-skating along a beach is remarkably different to what she’s used to. Wolf whistles, a parade of sexualised comments from construction workers (not a woman among them, to her shock) and a world where nearly all the top jobs are held by men.

Barbie addresses head-on whether a doll can really be an aspirational figure. In a surprisingly complex manner, Gerwig’s film looks at the pros and cons. Teenage Sasha doesn’t think Barbie has shown her world of possibilities, but instead sees her as a puppet of corporate America presenting a veneer of opportunity to women, while pushing them back into a box marked “pretty woman”. (This deadpan tirade provokes one the film’s many laugh-out loud lines as Barbie bemoans she can’t be a fascist as “I don’t control the railways!”.) Barbie may be able to do any job under the sun but this encourages attainment and also piles expectations on young women. If you can be almost anything at all, doesn’t that make it even the obligation to be something even more of a burden?

The real world is also a revelation – in a different way – to Ken. In our world, Ken discovers men (and possibly horses, Ken isn’t sure) rule though a marvellous thing called “the patriarchy”. Watching the Kens become infected by toxic masculinity, becoming high-fiveing bros who down beers, mansplain and call all the shots, is both funny and also a continuation of the film’s earnest exploration of gender politics. You can see, unpleasant as he becomes, that Ken might well want a piece of that action, coming from a world where men are so marginal they don’t even have homes (after all Mattel never made “Ken’s Dream House”). It’s also a neat gag that the other Barbies are easily brain-washed into accepting demeaning Stepfordish roles (dressed almost uniformly as French maids or in bikinis) because the confidence with which the Kens express their rightful place as masters-of-the-universe is literally mesmerising.

It’s also a neat part of Gerwig’s commentary here that the crucial factor to breaking out of this state is all about embracing the pressures of being expected to do it all: of being clever but not a know-it-all, ambitious but not a monster, raising a family but also having a career etc. If Barbie-Land in its beginning is a sort of vision of utopian feminism, then its salvation lies in accepting and embracing the struggle of marrying together a raft of contradictions and expectations. Sure, this isn’t exactly reimagining the wheel and its fairly easily digestible stuff – but it also rings true and you can’t argue with the connection its made with people.

All of which might make you think Barbie might be a po-faced political lecture. Fortunately, not the case when every point is filled with laugh-out-loud, irreverent humour expertly delivered by a cast clearly having the time of their lives. They are led by Margot Robbie, sensational in bringing to life a character who begins the film feeling like a doll made flesh and ends it as a three-dimensional character who embraces the contradictions of life. Robbie, who produced and set out much of the film’s agenda, is fabulous – funny, endearing, heartbreakingly vulnerable and extraordinarily sweet, mixing light comedy with genuine moments of pathos.

Equally good is Gosling playing the almost preternaturally stupid Ken with a winning sense of self-mockery, walking a brilliant line presenting a character who is (at times) the nominal villain but also a lost soul. Barbie also employs him and Robbie in some outstanding song-and-dance routines, deliciously performed and exquisitely funny. The other Barbies and Kens are uniformly excellent in their winning mix of initial shallowness and growing emotional depth while America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt are immensely winning as a mother and daughter overcoming a divide.

Barbie is also an explosion of delightful design and superb eye-for-detail, in its pitch-perfect recreation of a host of Barbie toys and props in real-life size, all thrown together with the perfect level of pink presentationalism. Drily narrated by an unseen Helen Mirren, every scene has a winning gag or laugh-inducing piece of business, especially when poking fun at the naïve optimism and artificiality of the Barbie world. Saying that, the film stumbles when it blurs the lines in the real world, which is half presented straight, half as a weirdly Wes-Andersonish oddity, particularly in the Mattel building and its corporate board, who are played as even more cartoonish than the actual toys populating Barbie-Land.

Barbie though generally works because it successfully mixes a heartfelt, earnest look at gender politics and the pressures on women with great gags, winning performances and a bouncy sense of off-the-wall fun that ensures nothing gets too serious. From its 2001 style opening, through its pink-led-primary colour settings, to its song-and-dance and larger-than-life-but-grounded performances, it’s a treat and in particular a triumph for its originator, producer and star Margot Robbie.

The Silence (1963)

Bergman’s third film in his “faith” trilogy, is an intriguing Sartresque puzzle

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Ingrid Thulin (Ester), Gunnel Lindblom (Anna), Jörgen Lindström (Johan), Birger Malmstein (Waiter), Håkan Jahnberg (Hotel porter)

Two sisters, Esther (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), mother to ten-year-old Johan (Jörgen Lindström), are travelling home on a train through Europe. Ester, a translator, is already ill and her health takes a sharp downturn, leading to the group being forced to rest in a hotel in a town called Timoka, in an unnamed (fictional) European country. Anna resents what she sees as the judgemental expectations of her older sister and sees her obligation to care for her as a burden. Over a few days in the hotel, the two sisters move awkwardly around each other, avoiding addressing their problems while struggling in a country where neither of them speak the language.

The Silence was the third, and final, film in Bergman’s loose thematic trilogy on the absence of God in the modern world. It’s also possibly his most bleak and Sartre influenced work so far, a film of oppressive silence (devoid of music, the only noises coming from objects in the rooms of the hotel) with events occurring in a disturbing, slightly surreal world, where the normal rules of human interaction seem to be hold. Perhaps that’s because the characters move, like ghosts, through a world where they have no ability to communicate other than stumbled words and hand gestures, residing in a hotel where there seems to be no timescale on how long they are (or have been) there.

It also feels like an entrée to Persona, Bergman’s next major work. Like that, The Silence revolves around a symbiotic relationship between two women, who together seem to form two halves of one personality. Esther is intellectual, reserved but also vulnerable and adrift, dependent on others for help and frequently resorting to drink to dull her pain. Anna is more earthy, sensual but insecure, resentful and feels judged by others, finding temporary peace in casual sexual encounters. Both sisters are locked in a relationship that feels both disconnected and mutually dependent, constantly clashing with each other but living in worlds defined by their feelings for the other.

They are played majestically by two performers at the height of their powers. Thulin seems cold but conveys great depths of pain and suffering beneath what seems like her confidence and assurance. Thulin’s expressive face communicates great emotional turmoil, even with only the slightest movements and gestures. It’s a beautifully delivered performance of a woman who is unknowable, distant, difficult but also highly sympathetic. Lindblom’s physical assurance is counter-balanced by the great uncertainty she manages to communicate in every beat of Anna’s life. Her general demeanour of icy chill, interrupted with emotional breakdowns which alternate rage with tears and hysterical laughter, is faultlessly delivered.

These two characters increasingly feel trapped inside a world where they can’t easily communicate, with the threat of turmoil constantly rumbling on the margins. This unnamed country teeters on the edge of war – tanks and other military equipment make constant intrusions on the streets and the train tracks and the rumble of planes can be heard in the air. They are also rendered increasingly mute and isolated by their inability to speak the language. Communication with people around them is impossible and understanding is only fractured.

This is where Bergman’s views on God slowly take their form. For, as he observed in other films in the trilogy, what is this world but one where we strain in vain for the voice of God? Isn’t that like being adrift in a country where the language is unknown? And if, as Bergman so heartily expresses elsewhere, God is love what does it mean that this film revolves around character who have such negative to indifferent opinions on others. Ester may love – as she argues – Anna, but Anna has interpreted this love as smothering and oppressive her whole life and rejects Anna utterly. Anna seems disinterested in her son Johan (who Ester yearns to be closer to, but can never quite find the way to close the gap) and impatient with her sister. Not only are the characters trapped in a world of silence, they are also trapped in circles of loveless relationships.

It’s striking then that this was Bergman’s most sexual film so far. Bizarrely – for a film as austere, glum and challenging as The Silence – it was a box-office hit. This was, in large part, connected to its comfort with sex scenes. Anna watches a couple sat next to her having passionate (and beautifully lit) sex in an opera house, before engaging in wordless (of course) intercourse with a waiter (Anna even mentions the benefits of the man not understanding a word she says). The more frustrated Ester masturbates alone – no coincidence that she later speaks of her disgust with the sexual act and its bodily fluids. This is a film without love but with a lot of base, meaningless, carnal love in it – all part of a Godless world leaning into its nihilistic close.

The Silence is extraordinary in its filmic confidence. It’s exquisitely shot by Sven Nykvist, his camera (far more mobile than almost any time before in Bergman) tracks down corridors and through rooms of its luxurious but chillingly empty hotel (you can see The Silence’s influence on Kubrick’s The Shining). It uses light, shade and shadow in strikingly meaningful ways, arcs of light suggesting a host of underlying emotions and unspoken longings.

The Silence is a film that invites analysis and theorising, partially because its characters speak in such gnomic, Bergmanesque mysteries. Some have theorised Johan is in fact Ester’s child, raised begrudgingly by Anna, now longed for by his real mother at her end. Some have suggested Ester and Anna are such contrasting sides they may in fact be the same person (traces of Lynch’s Mulholland Drive) others see an incestuous longing in Ester for her sister. Bergman increases the unknowing mystery by presenting much of the film from the perspective of the precocious (not many children read Turgenov) but innocent Johan, a child who sees but cannot interrogate the actions around him.

It makes The Silence feel like a bridge from one era of Bergman to the next. The last hurrah of his spiritual study, before a series of films that would explore the interconnected lives of women whose desires, needs and dependencies motivate and merge into each other. That makes it a fascinating and vital milestone in Bergman’s development – as well as another extraordinary, haunting and fascinating work from a great director.

Steamboat Bill Jnr (1928)

Keaton struggles to win his father’s approval in this brilliantly fast-paced farce

Director: Charles Reisner (& Buster Keaton)

Cast: Buster Keaton (William Canfield Jnr), Ernest Torrance (William Canfield Snr), Marion Byron (Kitty King), Tom McGuire (John James King), Tom Lewis (Tom Carter), Joe Keaton (Barber)

Steamboat Bill Jnr was meant to be a return to glory after the box-office disappointment of The General. Unfortunately for Keaton it shared all the traits of his previous film. An artistic triumph, today seen as one of the great silent comedies: but at the time an expensive misfire that hammered the final nail into Keaton’s filmmaking independence. Before he was swallowed by the MGM machine, Steamboat Bill Jnr was the last pure Keaton film, the last display of the master’s gravity defying stuntwork and all-in physical gag commitment.

Keaton is the forgotten son of paddle steamer operator William “Steamboat Bill” Canfield (Ernest Torrance) whose craft, the Stonewall Jackson, is being put out of business by the cutting-edge steamer The King named after its wealthy owner JJ King (Tom McGuire). William Jnr is a disappointment to his manly father: he’s clumsy, polite, decent has a pencil moustache (but not for long) and plays the ukelele. What kind of son is that? Worst of all, he falls in love with Kitty King (Marion Bryon), daughter of Steamboat Bill’s love rival. Can his son prove his worth when disaster piles on disaster and a cyclone hits the town?

Steamboat Bill Jnr is Keaton at his best. Although it has a romance plotline, this wisely plays second fiddle to the sort of role Keaton was born to play: slightly naïve and foolish sons, who are disappointments to their father. With his sad sack, impassive face and earnest, try-hard determination, Keaton was guaranteed to win the sympathies of the masses and Steamboat Bill Jnr is the fine-tuned ultimate expression of this classic Keaton role. He’s horrendously unlucky – he seems destined to trip over and activate vital levers or if he opens a door it will inevitable send someone tumbling off the boat – and at every turn well-meaning attempts to win his father’s favour backfire. It’s a superb exploration of a key theme in Keaton’s life and work – the struggle to win the regard of a domineering father in his own line of work, something Keaton had faced in his own life.

But despite that, like all the best Keaton heroes, he never, ever gives up. Adversity is milk-and-drink to him and, despite everything, his ingenuity and determination always wins out. He may look like a clueless, slightly ridiculous college kid adrift on a boat, walking around in his over-elaborate uniform: but the final reel, which shows him hooking up the boats systems via ropes and pulleys so he can control it singlehandedly proves it certainly wasn’t lack of attention that lay behind his mishaps.

And what’s really wrong with being a clearly middle-class kid who hasn’t spent much time on boats? It’s not like he’s a dandy or a layabout – he just doesn’t fit the mould his father expects – that of a flat-capped, oil-stained, tobacco chewer (and who knows not to swallow it!) never happier than when getting his hands dirty. Ernest Torrance is very good as this exasperated working-man, whose ideas of what counts as “manly” are very narrow (barely extending beyond the mirror) and sees any deviation in his son as highly suspicious metropolitan laxness.

Perhaps he feels his son looks too much like his puffed-up, slightly dandyish rival JJ King (an effective Tom McGuire). There is more than a touch of class warfare between these two, as well as a romantism that values the run-down-but-reliable Stonewall Jackson (right down to its Civil War era name) and the overly-polished-can’t-trust-it King. There are echoes (and not just in the names) in the generational family feud of Our Hospitality – not least in the fact that marriage seems destined to eventually bring the two families together in something approaching love and harmony.

Marion Byron gives a decent performance as Kitty – even if the film has little interest in her beyond love-interest device, including the inevitable moment where she becomes convinced Keaton’s character has let her down and decides to snub him. This snubbing takes place in a very funny scene of missed meetings and attempted evasions on the street; although this scene is itself a shadow of father and son meeting at the station, the son writing he will be recognisable by his white carnation, a flower everyone arriving at the train seems to be wearing (not helped by Keaton losing his).

Eventually matters proceed to blows and the arrest of Canfield Snr (and an attempted break-out foiled by the son’s inability to get his father to trust him) before the town is blown away in one of the great Keaton set-pieces. Rain and bad weather peppers the final thirty minutes of the film – including an exquisite sight gag when Keaton steps into a puddle and disappears up to his waist – and erupts into a cyclone that rips buildings apart, blows others across fields and raises the waters to wreck the paddleboats and wash other buildings out to sea.

And this storm is the centrepiece of another peerless display of Keaton’s physical determination and courage in the name of comedy. He gets trapped in a hospital bed blowing through the streets (after the building rips away to reveal him, a stunning in camera trick). He walks at almost 45 degrees against the wind. And, most famously, he stands in the perfect spot for the window of the façade of a house to save him when it falls on top of him. For this final stunt – insanely dangerous by any standards – even Keaton would later reflect on the suicidal risks he took. Either way, it’s a brilliantly elaborate set-piece (a riff on another set-piece from an earlier short) and a clear sign no-one did better than Keaton.

And no-one did. Watching Keaton bound like a squirrel up and down a paddle boat and dive into the flooded river, you know you are watching someone who really understand both the beauty of visual imagery and the peerless excitement of reality on film. Steamboat Bill Jnr combines this with a strong story, full of characters to root for and stuffed with sight gags (from a parade of hats stuffed on Keaton’s head, to a shaving from his father Joe) that make you laugh time and again. It’s a tragedy that this, one of his finest comedies, would also be his last where he had creative control.

Modern Times (1936)

Chaplin’s silent swansong, is a funny but quietly impassioned attack on corporate greed

Director: Charles Chaplin

Cast: Charles Chaplin (The factory worker aka The Tramp), Paulette Goddard (The Gamin), Henry Bergman (Café owner), Stanley “Tiny” Sandford (Big Bill), Chester Conklin (Mechanic), Al Ernest Garcia (President of Electro Steel), Stanley Blystone (Gamin’s father), Richard Alexander (Cell mate)

As cinema entered Modern Times of its own, Chaplin had a profound sense that he needed to move with those times. The legendary comedian, whose Tramp persona had made him (possibly) the most famous man in the world, was a silent comedian starting to be left behind by sound. There is a rich relish in the fact that Modern Times, a joke-packed criticism of the coldness of modern industry, is both Chaplin’s last silent and first sound movie, a dipping of the toe in modern times and a valedictory swansong for the past. It’s a film that bridges the ‘modern’ and classic of cinema.

Chaplin is an assembly line-worker eventually driven to a nervous breakdown by the relentless, fast-paced monotony of his work (not to mention a death-defying encounter with the internal workings of the factory machines). Sent to recover in a hospital, he emerges into to find there is little in the world that a dreamer and romantic like him can understand. Again and again, things go wrong. He’s arrested for picking up a red flag in a union march, fired as a night watchman in a department store for helping starving thieves, hopeless as a factory repair man and struggles with tongue-tied silence as a singing waiter. But he and a young ‘Gamin’ (Paulette Goddard), both hope for a better life.

Modern Times has a deceptive structure. It’s easy, at first glance, to see is as four two-reelers thrown together: mini-films in the factory, prison, department store and café. But what Chaplin has created here is a picaresque fable, with the Tramp in the middle. (Only one sequence, with the Tramp as a repairman in a factory, feels superfluous repeating some jokes from the opening act). A morality tale of the modern era, where the big bosses and machines are indifferent to those on the bottom rungs, continually punctuated by the police riding up to bear away the innocent on the slightest pretext. It’s a masterclass of subtle repetition, with moments of contentment forever snatched away.

Chaplin’s most subtly political work became his most controversial. In a way few other films of the 1930s did, Modern Times engages with the conditions and politics of the Great Depression. Housing for the poor is ramshackle, with walls literally held up by mops. The factory alternates exploiting its workers at ever dizzying production speeds with ruthlessly laying them off the moment a slight economic downtown takes place. Union movements are ruthlessly stamped out: when the Tramp accidentally joins a march, he is arrested while the Gamin’s father is shot by police crushing another march. Poverty is ever-present – the Gamin ‘steals’ unwanted food to feed others, laid off factory-workers rob stores for food and when the factories are re-opened there is an almighty struggle from the desperate to get through the gates and claim a few hours of work.

Unsurprisingly Modern Times was condemned as possibly communist and suspiciously anti-American: Chaplin, turning a mirror on conditions in America started to be seen more-and-more by many as a suspicious alien (after all, he’d never taken on American citizenship). Nobody wanted to hear the funnyman turn prophet and many were suspicious of the comedian who used jokes to sweeten the bitter pill (even if, as per many of Chaplin’s messages, it was a rather naïve and simplistic one). It didn’t matter that Modern Times boils down to a plea for a universal love and understanding, it was somehow a creeping sign of the political dangers in ‘modern times’.

Today, distanced from the Red Scare, Modern Times looks far more like what it actually is: a pathos-filled, liberal eye on the working classes that champions the dreamers and the little guys over the corporations and the system. And who better as a hero for that than The Tramp? After all, this was a figure who had struggled against the odds for decades. Modern Times would see that struggle on multiple fronts: against the system, against the machines (literally so, as they swallow him up) and against a way of life that seems to be betting against him.

Even cinema was betting against the Tramp. Chaplin knew he couldn’t put off converting to sound forever. But he also knew the Tramp was a universal figure – and a large part of that was his silence. He never speaks in Modern Times – and when he sings, it’s in garbled, funny-voiced nonsense that effectively keeps him as a universal mute. It’s The Tramp’s final victory lap.

Chaplin’s comic timing remains masterful, and Modern Times is awash with marvellous, balletic set-pieces. Most famous is the opening factory sequence (which owes more than a debt to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and feels remarkably prescient of Orwell’s 1984 with its Big Brotherish boss), a crazed ballet of repetitive, fast-paced movement on the production line – culminating in the legendary sequence of him being sucked into the very gears of the machine. The factory cares so little about the men there, that a machine designed to feed them as they work is dismissed as impractical rather than inhumane – though it gives us a great set piece of Chaplin assaulted by this machine with soup, custard pies and morsels rammed into his face by a mechanical arm.

The comic invention continues through the prison sequence. It’s a sign of the sting under the surface of Modern Times that the highlights of this sequence come about due to the Tramp (accidentally) being high on a mountain of cocaine. Foiling a jail break through coked-up bravado – another wonderfully done sequence, timed to perfection and filmed in one-shot – the Tramp’s reward is not being allowed to stay (and get the roof and food he needs) but early release. (Modern Times finds time, before he goes, for a final pop at ineffectual, superior middle-class do-gooders, lampooning a crusading priest’s wife as coldly distant and the subject of a cheeky gaseous gag).

Modern Times develops into a sweet fairy-tale romance with the introduction of the Gamin. Paulette Goddard gives a radiant performance, full of confidence and comic vibrancy – she becomes the first female lead given near-equal treatment by Chaplin. The department store sequence is grounded with their relationship, from the Gamin taking the opportunity to sleep in a beautifully prepared bed. Their time in the shop at night is full of wonder at the comfort and luxury – that they never see in their own homes – and culminates in a beautifully shot roller-skating sequence, with Chaplin circling balletically on the floors of the shop. (Tellingly though, he does so on the edge of precipice marked danger – Modern Times never forgets that danger lies just round the corner).

It’s the Gamin who lands them a job at a bustling café – awash with spoiled, rich customers – via her dancing ability (there is a fabulously simple transition that sees her pirouetting on the streets to ending the dance in glamourous clothes in the café). Even this moment of happiness is foiled by the law – illogically chasing the Gamin for past vagary offences rather than leaving her to work. But it’s made clear that they are a partnership: fitting the humane message of Modern Times that our best chance of being saved is sticking together.

Modern Times is shot by Chaplin with a striking, sprightly inventiveness. There are signs throughout of Chaplin’s overlooked visual and editorial skill, transitions that are hugely cinematic, storylines that are communicated with maximum efficiency and clarity. As well as the influences of Lang, Chaplin shows a debt to Eisenstein with a striking early visual cut that sees a crowd of sheep (with one black sheep in the middle) cut to a crowd of workers emerging from a subway into the factory. Modern Times pushes its humane message with a gentle persistency, but never lets it dominate the comic and emotional force of the film. Chaplin is an entertainer with a social conscience – but he is an entertainer first of all – and Modern Times is never anything less than charming and funny, even when it is spikey.

1900 (1976)

Bertolucci’s bloated, self-indulgent and simplistic film is a complete mess

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Cast: Robert De Niro (Alfredo Berlinghieri), Gerard Depardieu (Olmo Dalco), Dominique Sanda (Ada Fiastri Paulhan), Donald Sutherland (Attila Mellanchini), Laura Betti (Regina), Burt Lancaster (Alfredo Berlinghieri the Elder), Stefania Sandrelli (Anita Foschi), Werner Bruhns (Ottavio Berlinghieri), Stefania Casini (Neve), Sterling Hayden (Leo Dalco), Francesca Bertini (Sister Desolato), Anna Henkel (Anita the Younger), Ellen Schwiers (Amelia), Alida Valli (Signora Pappi)

After The Conformist and Last Tango in Paradise, Bertolucci could do anything he wanted. Unfortunately, he did. Perhaps the saddest thing about 1900 is that you could watch The Conformist twice with a decent break in-between during the time it would take you to watch it– and get a much richer handle on everything 1900 tries to do. Bertolucci went through a struggle to get his 315-minute cut released: perhaps the best thing that could have happened would have been if he had lost. Not only would the film be shorter, but it would be remembered as a lost masterpiece ruined by producers, rather than the interminable, self-indulgent mess we ended up with.

1900 – or Twentieth Century to literally translate its title Novecento – follows the lives of two very different men. Born minutes apart in 1901, Alfredo (Robert De Niro) is the grandson of the lord of the manor (Burt Lancaster), while Olmo (Gerard Depardieu) is the grandson of Leo (Sterling Hayden), scion of a sprawling dynasty of peasants. They grow up as friends, Olmo becomes a socialist and Alfredo an indolent landlord and absent-minded collaborator with the fascists, embodied by his psychopathic land agent Attila (Donald Sutherland). Their small community becomes a symbol of the wider battle between left and right in Italy.

In many ways 1900 is an epic only because it is extremely long and beautifully shot in the Bologna countryside by Vittorio Storaro. In almost every sense it fails. It offers nominal scale in its timeline, but its attempt to become a sweeping metaphor for Italy in the twentieth century falls flat and it focuses on a small community of simple characters, many of whom are ciphers rather than people. All of Bertolocci’s communist sympathies come rushing to the fore in a film striking for its political simplicity. It never convinces in its attempt to capture in microcosm the forces that divided Italy between the two world wars, nor invests any of its characters with an epic sense of universality.

Instead Bertolucci presents a world of obvious questions and easy answers. Every worker is an honest, noble salt-of-the-earth type, working together in perfect harmony to fight for rights. Every single upper-class character is an arrogant, selfish layabout, caring only about their back-pockets and the easy life. Bertolucci suggests fascism only arose in Italy as a means for the rich to control the poor, and never allows for one moment the possibility that any working-class person was ever tempted to take their side. It never rings true. (Bertolucci skips a huge chunk of the fascist 30s and 40s, possibly because this fantasy would be impossible to sustain if he actually focused on the history of that era.)

Bertolucci uses his two protagonists to make painfully on-the-nose comparisons between working class and rich with De Niro’s weak-willed Alfredo always found wanting compared to Depardieu’s Olmo. Even as children, Olmo is braver, stronger and smarter. Olmo has the guts to lie under the moving trains (Alfredo runs), Olmo stands up for what he believes in (Alfredo looks away), Olmo puts others first Alfredo whines about his own needs. Hell, Olmo even has a bigger cock than Alfredo (something they discover comparing penises as children and re-enforced when as young men they share an epileptic prostitute and she ‘tests’ them both).

The upper classes hold all the power but can do nothing without the working class. During the 1910s, a strike by the workers on the Berlinghieri leaves the clueless rich unable to even milk their moaning cows (they buy milk instead). Sterling Hayden’s peasant patriarch is a manly inspiration to all, while Lancaster’s increasingly shambling noble is literally and metaphorically impotent (Lancaster’s role is like a crude commentary on his subtle work in The Leopard). At one point he even pads around barefoot in horseshit to hammer home his corruption. (Incidentally this is the only film where you’ll ever see a horse’s anus being massaged on camera to produce fresh shit to be thrown at a fascist.)

For the rich, fascism is the answer. Continuing to shoot fish in a barrel, Bertolucci scores more easy hits by presenting our prominent fascist as an out-and-out psychopath. Played with a scary relish by Sutherland – in the film’s most compelling performance – no act of degradation is too far for Attila. Along with his demonic partner-in-crime Regina (a terrifyingly loathsome Laura Betti), he routinely carries out acts of violence, horrific murder and child-abuse, even literally headbutting a cat to death while ranting about the evils of socialism.

The poor meanwhile are all good socialists. Olmo, decently played by Depardieu, and his wife Anita (an affecting Stefania Sandrelli) rally the workers to stand against charging cavalry and protect their rights. Bertolucci even has Depardieu flat-out break the fourth wall for a closing speech, spouting simplistic platitudes direct to camera about the inherent wickedness of the landowner. Depardieu at least seems more comfortable than De Niro among this Euro-pudding (every actor comes from a different country and the soundtrack is a mismatch of accents and dubbing, not least Depardieu himself). Rarely has De Niro looked more uncomfortable than as the empty Alfredo, a role he fails to find any interest in, like the rest of the actors never making him feel like more than a device.

Bertolucci, stretching the run-time out, also embraces numerous tiresome excesses. Rarely does more than 20 minutes go by without a sex scene or a sight of someone’s breasts or sexual organs. From children comparing penises, to Depardieu performing oral sex on Sandrelli (just outside a socialist meeting), to De Niro and Depardieu getting hand-jobs from a prostitute, to Sanda dancing naked and high on cocaine or the revolting exploits of Attila and Regina, nothing is left to the imagination. As each goes on and on Bertolucci ends up feeling more like a naughty boy than an artist, so praised for his sexual licence in Last Tango that he feels more is always more. The excess doesn’t stop with sex either: at one point a worker silently cuts his ear off in front of a landowner to make a point about his stoic nobility.

1900 eventually feels like you’ve stumbled into a student debating club, where a privileged student drones on at great length about the evils of the rich, while quaffing another glass of champagne. It has moments of cinematic skill – some of its time jump transitions, in particular a train passing through a tunnel in one time and emerging at another, are masterful – but it’s all crushed under its self-indulgence. From its length to its sexual and violence excess, to its crude and simplistic politics delivered like a tedious lecture, everything is crushed by its never-ending self-importance.