Category: Directors

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

Steinbeck’s masterpiece is transformed into a richly humanitarian and heartfelt film

Director: John Ford

Cast: Henry Fonda (Tom Joad), Jane Darwell (Ma Joad), John Carradine (Jim Casy), Charley Grapewin (Grandpa Joad), Dorris Bowdon (“Rosasharn” Joad), Russell Simpson (Pa Joad), OZ Whitehead (Al Joad), John Qualen (Muley Graves), Eddie Quillan (Connie Rivers), Zeffie Tilbury (Grandma Joad), Frank Sully (Noah Joad), Frank Darien (Uncle John), Darryl Hickman (Winfield Joad)

If you can be certain of one thing, it’s that times of economic hardship rise and fall like waves on the shore. John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath was a searing, powerful exploration of the impact of the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression and new farming technologies on Oklahoma tenant farmers. It was almost immediately cemented as a Great American Novel. Just as Ford’s moody, heartfelt, humanitarian film of it was immediately hailed as a Great American Film.

In Oklahoma, Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) is released from prison (after killing a man in a bar fight) to find his farming community has been devastated. The Depression has shattered the market and the landowners now farm their land with tractors rather than people. Tom and his family have no choice but to load up a beaten-up van and migrate to California where they have hopes of work picking fruit for meagre wages. What they find on the way, among small acts of kindness, is exploitation, brutal policing determined to crush any protest from migrants and migrant camps in terrible conditions. Misery, death and the endless grind of fading hopes seems to be all they have to look forward to.

The Grapes of Wrath moved to the screen faster than almost any other novel in history. Published in April 1939, in months Nunnally Johnson had completed a script and shooting began in October for release in 1940. The unprecedented speed spoke to the book’s enormous impact, which has remained eternally relevant in its depiction of the hostility faced by migrants. Producer Darryl F Zanuck, despite his passion for the novel, worried it would be seen as pro-Communist propaganda – thankfully basic research showed Steinbeck had, if anything, played down the labour conditions. Zanuck was convinced he could defend any accusation of anti-Americanism – perhaps, as well, he decided recruiting the film poet of romantic Americana, John Ford, as director would lay any change The Grapes of Wrath could be seen as an attack on the US to rest.

Ford was in fact a near perfect choice as director. A man who held his Irish migrant roots close to his heart, he felt a powerful bond with these victims of changed circumstances. As a man with a romantic view of America’s Golden Age, he was equally critical of sharp technology changes (he shoots the tractors who plough through the Oklahoma farmland as monstrous tanks, crushing hope below their ominous caterpillar tracks). Working closely with cinematographer Gregg Toland, he shot a film with one foot in realism, the other in low-lit, moody impressionistic shadow, a rich visual treat that marries both methods to enforce the appalling economic situation it depicts.

From its opening shot, which frames Tom Joad walking across Oklahoma desert land framed with telegraph poles, the idea of ordinary people left behind by technological change rings out. Tom’s farmstead Tom is derelict with one tenant recounting his eviction in a cramped room lit by a single candle. The Joad’s leave for California in a truck so beat up, it only just starts and appears to be partially made of wood. The California shanty town they are herded into is contrasted with the sleek automobile of the landowner offering work for a pittance. In the government run camp, we see running taps and modern bathrooms that seem space-age compared to the squalor we’ve seen.

The Grapes of Wrath doesn’t shirk in its anger at the ill-treatment of these sons of the soil. In California, the bosses are cruel, uncaring and greedy. The flyers the Joad family clutch hoping for work, is one of thousands recruiting for only hundreds of jobs. Salaries are constantly undercut – at their second camp, the Joads work exhaustingly for just about enough to feed them for the day. The sheriffs are little more than heavies for the bosses, breaking up protests at pay, arresting and beating ‘trouble makers’ and turning a blind eye to any threats or danger to the migrants.

The injustice of it is captured in a superb speech by John Carradine’s Jim Casy, a former preacher whose faith has been replaced by a burning passion to protect the rights of the little guy. Shot by Toland in a shadow-drenched, candle-lit tent, Carradine delivers with impassioned brilliance an inarticulate but moving speech on the need for the workers to stick together to combat exploitation. He follows in the footsteps of an earlier ‘rabble rouser’, whose denunciation of a fat-cat businessman is met with gunfire from a sheriff (a woman being near-fatally shot in the aimless fire).

It’s feelings that will inspire Henry Fonda’s Tom Joad. Fonda is marvellous as this plain-speaking man with a streak of self-destruction, who learns to focus his anger aware from his own needs to fighting for others. With his father – well-played by Russell Simpson – increasingly ineffective, Tom transforms himself slowly into a leader. His lolloping stance doesn’t detract from his everyman nobility. Fonda even manages to make some heavy-handed, speechifying really work as a profound statement of human rights.

He’s joined in this with the film’s third stand-out, the Oscar-winning Jane Darwell as the indefatigable “Ma”. Darwell becomes the family lodestone and an epitome of resilient spirit, her pained but patient face returned to again and again. Darwell as at the heart of many of the most moving moments, perhaps the most one of its simplest: Ma quietly, with sad smiles, burning old mementoes and holding up a pair of earrings to study her reflection in the flickering candlelight. Ma holds the family together, from cradling the dying Grandma on the floor of the truck to desperately hiding Tom from the vindictiveness of the police. Ford closes the film with a powerful speech of hope and resilience from Ma, again wonderfully delivered by Darwell in simple, unflashy close-up.

Despite that delivery though, the end film’s final act doesn’t ring true with what has gone before. The film reshuffles the novel’s plot. That culminated in a bleak miscarriage in a windswept hut. The well-built government-run migrant town is a stopping off point, a moment of hope, in a grim journey towards desolation. Here it is the final destination – and the community dances, organised by benevolent caretakers, feels like a cheat of reality. Perhaps Zanuck felt a relatively hopeful ending was needed to balance those fears of Anti-Americanism. Either way, it never feels like a ‘real’ ending: this economic catastrophe didn’t end like this for many, so it shouldn’t for our everymen.

It is perhaps, though, the only major flaw in Ford’s superb film. It’s a film sprinkled with as many small moments of peace and hope as it is injustice. The Joads enjoying a swim in the lake, or the kindly garage staff who let Pa buy bread and sweets for the kids at a price far below their value warms the heart. The shanty towns are given a real sense of community by Ford. It makes the stark cruelty of those in charge stand-out all the more.

The film doesn’t shirk on the grim surroundings. The detail of the squalor is magnificently delivered, while the foreboding, shadow filled lighting of Toland’s photography is exceptional. With a host of excellent performances, Grapes of Wrath is the finest statement of Ford’s overlooked humanitarianism. He was a director with a warm regard for the common man, who believed in their righteousness and right to just treatment. This streak runs strong throughout The Grapes of Wrath and makes a film that is never sentimental, but arouses huge sentiment in anyone who watches it.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

Is there a place for Indy in the 2020s? The nostalgia-tinged would-be epic doesn’t provide an easy answer

Director: James Mangold

Cast: Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones), Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Helena Shaw), Mads Mikkelsen (Jurgen Voller), Antonio Banderas (Renaldo), John Rhys-Davies (Sallah), Toby Jones (Basil Shaw), Boyd Holbrook (Klaber), Ethann Isidore (Teddy Kumar), Karen Allen (Marion Ravenwood), Shaunette Renée Wilson (Mason), Thomas Kretschmann (Oberst Weber), Olivier Richters (Hauke)

Okay let’s get the elephant out of the room: It’s better than The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Yes folks, we have a new fourth-best Indiana Jones film. Is that something to celebrate? Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny makes some of the same errors as the previous valedictory effort, but at least it learned a few things and it’s been made by people who clearly love Indy. But they loved it too much, creating an often overblown, hellishly overlong, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink film which never just jump when it can flip, spring, bounce then explode at the end of it.

It opens with a (younger) Indy (Harrison Ford) battling Nazis in the dying days of the Second World War, trying to save a train full of precious artefacts. After defeating them, we flash forward to 1969 with Indy now a retiring archaeology professor to disinterested students in New York’s Public University, out of a place in an era where man has stepped on the moon. Grouchy, separated and fed-up, Indy’s life gets disrupted one more time when his god-daughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) turns up on the hunt for Archimedes’ Dial. Indy knows about this dial as it was also the obsession of Nazi physicist Jurgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), last seen on that train in 1945 and now the brains behind the NASA moon landings. Indy and the unscrupulous Helena end up in a duel with Voller to find the dial – the prize being what Voller believes is a chance to change history.

Back in the day, Raiders of the Lost Ark was largely made so Spielberg and Lucas could show they could make an action-packed, crowd-pleaser quick and cheap. Today The Dial of Destiny is one of the most expensive films ever made (lagging only behind assorted Avengers films, the recent Star Wars trilogy and various other franchise entries). So much mony to make something less than half as good.

What this has allowed is Mangold and co to act like kids given the keys to their parents’ car. The Dial of Destiny is an explosion of Indy ideas, all rammed into the film willy-nilly. It’s made by people who feel this is their only chance to make an Indy film and don’t want to miss the opportunity to include every idea they’ve ever had.

We end up with a film that feels both far too long and yet strangely rushed. The Dial of Destiny would be immeasurably improved if about twenty minutes (at least) had been cut from its run-time and its poorly sketched thematic ideas condensed down. Its narrative structure has one too many quests, with Indy and Helena forever searching for a thing that leads to a thing that leads to yet another thing. An entire sequence, involving a pointless cameo from Banderas as a one-legged diver, would have been better slashed to ribbons or cut altogether. Every single one of the mega-budget chase sequences go on at least 2-3 minutes too long, straining the interest.

At the same time, the film manages to feel rushed. Ideas are presented and then taken nowhere at all. We see Indy tipping most of a bottle of whisky into his coffee in the morning – this suggested alcoholism never rears its head again. Voller is working in partnership (it seems) with the CIA, but their motives for this are never explained and Voller calmly ditches them part way through the film. Indy is framed for murder, but this plot thread is judicially abandoned by the time we get to the end. John Rhys-Davies literally pops up to drive Indy to an airport and make a trailer-friendly speech.

Most strikingly, all the films blaring action and endless bangijg stuff buries the most interesting plot thread of a tired, depressed Indy who no longer knows his place is in the world. The film solves Shia LaBeouf’s toxic unpopularity by having Mutt die in Vietnam, giving Indy a burden of guilt and grief. This is an Indy who has fallen from his Princeton heights, as ancient to his students as the artefacts he lectures about. It’s a thread though that the film only intermittently remembers, so crowded out is it by overlong chases, so that when the film’s conclusion returns to it as a major motivator for Indy it feels forced.

In any case, the film’s action set-pieces peak with the 1945 opening section with a digitally de-aged Ford and Mikkelsen facing off on a speeding train. I think the de-aging effect is very well done (though Indy speaks with Ford’s current 80-year-old voice), and this sequence has a sort of nostalgic charm to it and at least it feels of a piece with the originals. Not that its perfect: it’s overlong and overblown of course – a castle explodes, Indy runs over the top of a speeding train – and looks like something created with blue-screens and digital effects rather than in reality. (It’s also clear a digitally de-aged Ford head has been placed on a stunt double at key points.)

But it’s a bright-spot. There are others: Harrison Ford, again, is perfect for the role – crusty, resigned but still with the glamour of excitement in his eyes. He and the film don’t back away from his advanced age – Indy looks more vulnerable than ever – and Ford sells the moments he’s allowed in the film’s breakneck speed to reveal Indy’s emotional turmoil. He also has a great chemistry with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who effectively channels Han Solo as an immoral adventurer who learns about decency. Mikkelsen’s mastery makes him an impressive villain.

I’ve been really hard on this film. It is fun I promise. I laughed and at times I was thrilled. But it is too much. Even the settings of the chases offer a sensory and time overload: a chase around a ticker-tape parade in New York onto a subway (with Indy on a horse) has an overload of visual details. A chase through the streets of Marrakesh goes on forever – and is over-built with our heroes chasing Voller while also being chased by Helena’s gangster-former-fiancee. film culminates in a final sequence which is just about not as silly as aliens – but by any other score is incredibly silly.

Essentially The Dial of Destiny is undermined by fan love. Mangold is a good director but doesn’t know where to stop. The film leans into nostalgia too hard but, above all, it offers far too much bang for your buck. The film is frequently at its most effective in its quieter, character-driven moments. Like Crystal Skull, it mistakes bigger for better. It’s still a more entertaining and a better film than Crystal Skull – but, somehow, its excessive overindulgence makes you feel strangely disappointed.

The Navigator (1924)

Keaton is cast adrift in a film that is all gags and no story or stakes and not the better for it

Director: Buster Keaton (& Donald Crisp)

Cast: Buster Keaton (Rollo Treadaway), Kathryn McGuire (Betsy O’Brien), Frederick Vroom (John O’Brien), Noble Johnson (Chief), Clarence Burton (Spy)

Buster Keaton claimed The Navigator was his best film. With all due respect he’s wrong. The Navigator was born out of the ahead-of-its-time failure of Sherlock Jr. When that marvel of cinematic invention didn’t land with audiences, Keaton played safe. He put a lid on the tricks and focused on the gags. In fact, he cast himself away in a boat with only Kathryn McGuire for company and they told jokes for 45 minutes. That’s the basics of The Navigator and, for me, the lack of plot, stakes or character ends up in a much weaker film.

Buster is Rollo Treadaway, a rich sap, who one day decides to get married and books the honeymoon before he’s asked his planned intended Betsy (Kathryn McGuire). When she says no, Rollo goes on honeymoon anyway but in a confusion at the docks ends up on the wrong ship, The Navigator. It’s owned by Betsy’s father – but spies for a foreign power plan to set it adrift. In further confusion, Betsy also ends up on board and she and Rollo wake-up drifting at sea. How will two pampered rich people work out how to look after themselves on a deserted ship?

The Navigator keeps things simple, cranking up the jokes in a film much closer in spirit to his shorts, all designed to be easy to digest and just tickly the funny bone. You feel they genuinely did just cast the ship out to sea and waited for Keaton to work out as many gags as he could until the camera ran out of film. Donald Crisp was hired to direct the dramatic stuff, but Keaton quickly realised he didn’t need him and didn’t like Crisp’s vague prologue about wicked spies (he was right, it’s totally forgettable unlike the equivalent opening of Our Hospitality) so set off to sea without him. (Crisp makes a visual cameo as the painting of the ship’s captain that swings in front of a porthole).

There are, for me, three key gags that work in The Navigator. Rollo’s spontaneous decision to get married (based on seeing a happy couple outside of the window), after which he distractedly bathes fully clothed then gets his chauffeur to drive him to Betsy’s house – on the opposite side of the street (the car does a big circular loop across the street). After the rejected proposal he informs the chauffeur, he needs a walk home to clear his mind.

This is, in many ways, the funniest, most inventive moment in The Navigator. It’s a great little showpiece as well for the (passionately not-getting-married) Kathryn McGuire and the finest example of Keaton’s capacity for easily led saps, overwhelmingly influenced by things they see around them. It’s the part of the film I enjoyed the most and its over after ten minutes.

The Navigator starts to drift as soon as it heads to sea. There is some neat camera work that suggests the haunting emptiness of the ship (it’s so vast we get an amusing series of visual jokes as Keaton and McGuire consistently miss bumping into each other while walking around it), but where other Keaton films would have explored more the ghostly darkness of this technological marvel (or the oppressive nature of it emptiness) The Navigator largely shies away from this.

The best sequence on the ship follows McGuire and Keaton’s attempts to cook a meal in a massive galley, hampered by the fact that (a) everything on the ship is set-up to cook for hundreds not two and (b) the two pampered souls have no idea how to open a tin can or boil a kettle, let alone cook a meal. Three potatoes are thrown into an enormous vat. Keaton goes through a series of trial error involving drills and carving knives to get into tins. McGuire can’t work out that sea water isn’t drinkable or how much coffee is needed for a cup. They are both befuddled by fish (which they basically eat raw) and can’t find cutlery so make do with kitchen utensils. It’s a sharply observed, well-constructed scene.

But other than this, the film struggles with a series of gags that rather disappoint. There is a painfully overlong underwater sequence where Keaton wrestles with a fake swordfish. There is a lack of Keaton’s trademark physical stunts (aside from a bit of business with a deckchair). An encounter with an island tribe – a bit uncomfortable today to watch these Black-skinned savages – is overlong and heads into a siege that is never particularly funny (other than a gag of Keaton accidentally dragging around a miniature cannon that no matter where he turns is always aimed at him – a gag later lifted for Jar-Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace).

The main problem I have about The Navigator is that this bag of gags never engages me because the film isn’t about anything. Neither of these people feel like real people (and, lord knows, Keaton characters were often lightly-sketched comic roles, but this is ridiculous), the film has no stakes and has no plot momentum, drifting like the boat they are stuck on. I need more for a comedy, to feel invested. Without that investment, it’s just stuff happening. A Keaton’s I won’t revisit. It was, however, his biggest hit. What do I know?

Sherlock Jr (1924)

Keaton invents Looney Tunes in this master-class in both cinema and comedy

Director: Buster Keaton

Cast: Buster Keaton (Projectionist/Sherlock Jr), Kathryn McGuire (The Girl), Joe Keaton (The Girl’s Father), Erwin Connelly (The Hired Man/The Butler), Ward Crane (The Local Sheik/The Villain), Ford West (Theatre Manager/Gillette)

If there is one thing you learn from watching Keaton’s masterpiece, Sherlock Jr, it’s this: all Looney Tunes cartoons are Buster Keaton films. The level of astounding, frantic, comic genius in Sherlock Jr hits new heights and its mix of slapstick, improbable stunts, chases and poker-faced reactions basically makes it resemble nothing less than the world’s greatest cartoon made real. There is something either delightful or double-takingly how-did-they-do-that impressive in every scene and the entire film is assembled and designed with invention dripping from every pore.

Buster is an absent-minded, day-dreaming projectionist in a local theatre. But what he really wants to be is a detective. He gets his chance when he discovers that the father (Joe Keaton) of the girl (Kathyn McGuire) he’s in love with has had his watch stolen. We know it’s her villainous suitor (Ward Crane), but Buster’s clumsy investigation only ends up getting himself framed, with only the Girl to clear his name. Back in the theatre, Buster daydreams himself into the film he’s projecting, where he is the famed Sherlock Jr, master-detective besting scheming villains and winning the heart of the Girl, all of whom now look like the people he encountered in the real world.

Sherlock Jnr resolves almost its entire plot in the opening fifteen minutes after Buster fails to prove his mettle as a detective. Bless, he goes about his investigation with a robotic lack of imagination, slavishly following the steps in his How to be a Detective book right down to following his suspect by almost literally dogging his footsteps (requiring a parade of sudden jerks, turns and dodges to avoid being seen). Fortunately, the Girl solves the crime for him, clears his name and heads to the theatre to tell him while he drifts off to sleep. What this means is that we can enjoy Buster’s day-dream of the movies without ever worrying about how he will solve the pickle he is in in real life.

Sherlock Jr can focus on its delightful fantasy sequence. In an oft-imitated stroke of double exposure shooting, the dream Buster emerges from the body of the sleeping Buster, picks up his (dream) hat and walks out of the projection room to the theatre where he is flabbergasted to see people he knows playing roles in the film. Why shouldn’t he be tempted to walk down the aisle and try to climb into the picture? Of course, the villain responds by tossing him out of the frame and back into the auditorium (just to reassure us again, Keaton cuts to the sleeping Buster in the projection room).

Keaton’s film has hugely inventive, creative fun with the medium as Buster re-enters the movie only to find – with the power of editing – his location changing with dizzying speed, without his position changing from shot-to-shot. He steps down a flight of stairs to find it turn immediately into a bench. He tries to sit on the bench but lands in a busy road. He walks down the road to find himself on a cliff edge. He peers off the edge to find himself among lions, then crawling through the desert, sitting on the shore, diving into a snow drift. This whole sequence is effortlessly, brilliantly assembled with Keaton’s position seemingly never changing but the location changing almost a dozen times. Think that cartoon when Daffy Duck goes to war with the cartoonist. No one before had understood the comic potential of editing, shifting locations and changed perspectives.

It’s perhaps the stroke of defining genius in a film crammed with moments from here to the end that leave you breathless with their chutzpah, daring and invention. From here, Sherlock Jr is full to the brim with hilarious comic stunts that Keaton makes look effortless but required such complex planning (and endless repetition on set to get right) that your admiration for their humour is matched only by the wonder at the dedication and sweat it took to deliver them.

In the dream-film, Sherlock Jr has just enough of Keaton’s comic clumsiness to be amusingly recognisable, but every detecting trick he plays turns up trumps. He tails suspects successfully, locates stolen jewels, unmasks criminals and he is never outwitted by the criminals (saying that he can also ride on the handlebars of a motorbike for miles not noticing that the driver has long since fallen off). Through it all, Keaton gives every set-piece the sort of physical commitment Hollywood wouldn’t see again until Tom Cruise started to embark on Impossible Missions.

All of this needed time. Imagine, if you will, the innumerable takes Keaton needed to execute a deluge of seemingly impossible trick shots in a game of pool, where every ball is pocketed except the number 13 (which has been replaced by a bomb). This is the sort of Newtonian logic of a Bugs Bunny cartoon but done for real. It’s doubly funny later when you realise Sherlock Jr wasn’t being phenomenally lucky but was in fact aware the ball was a bomb and was missing deliberately. Even without that knowledge, watching balls bend round the number 13 or divide perfectly so that two balls pass by without contact is breath-taking.

Equally so a stunt which sees Keaton fold up a disguise dress in a window, head into the room, then dive out of the window, straight into the dress, and walk away. The stunt is so incredible, Keaton even dissolves part of the wall of the building so we can see it done in one take. If that’s not enough, moments later he will seemingly dive into a wall through the chest of an accomplice who will then walk away – all in one take. Keaton wanted these magic tricks to seem impossible, to leave the audience helplessly trying to work out what they have seen. The answer, in every case, was endless attempts and vaudeville expertise. Just as Keaton worked out the comic potential of editing could transport him, in a single step, hundreds of miles – so he also worked out it could make impossible events look effortless by removing all the failed attempts.

The film culminates in a chase scene the Looney Tunes cartoons would riff on endlessly (the entire Wile-E-Coyote/Road Runner series is effectively a long version of the end of Sherlock Jr). Sherlock Jr races to rescue a girl, on the handles of a rider-less motorbike, racing over roads, blockages, train tracks and all sorts then switches with her to a car, that similarly does a series of improbably manoeuvres before it crashes into a lake and turns into a slowly sinking boat. All hilarious, all directed and played with a super abundant energy.

And then he wakes into a romantic reconciliation where our hero, slavishly, follows the romantic gestures of the man in the movie he is watching to win a kiss from the Girl. We knew the happy ending was coming – that’s why we enjoyed, pressure-free, the fantasy sequence where nothing was at stake. Sherlock Jr delivers a comic tour-de-force so packed with delightful tricks, committed stunts and joyous invention that it feels like it sails by even quicker than its 45 minutes. It’s a perfectly sustained and balanced series of gags all wrapped up in something that uses the medium perfectly. It’s the first and best Looney Tunes cartoon ever made.

Watch it now!

Meet Me in St Louis (1944)

Technicolour musical delight in this unashamedly nostalgic and feel-good Minnelli musicial

Director: Vincente Minnelli

Cast: Judy Garland (Esther Smith), Margaret O’Brien (“Tootie” Smith), Mary Astor (Mrs Anna Smith), Lucille Bremer (Rose Smith), Leon Ames (Mr Alonzo Smith), Tom Drake (John Truett), Marjorie Main (Katie), Harry Davenport (Grandpa), June Lockhart (Lucille Ballard), Henry H Daniels Jnr (Lon Smith Jnr), Joan Carroll (Agnes Smith), Hugh Marlowe (Colonel Darly), Robert Sully (Warren Sheffield), Chil Wills (Mr Neely)

“There’s no place like home” is the message lying behind two of Judy Garland’s most iconic films. While it might be at the heart of Wizard of Oz, that longing may be even stronger in Meet Me in St Louis. From the Arthur Freed production stable, this technicolour delight is relentlessly gentle and optimistic. It went down a delight in a year when so many Americans dreamed of the end of a war that had separated families and kept soldiers from their home and remains a delightful paean to a lost America (that perhaps never even was).

Set, of course, in St Louis in 1904 during the build-up to the World’s Fair (the gleam of the electric lights turning at the exhibition are the film’s final shot), Meet Me in St Louis follows the lives and loves of the Smith family. Patriarch Alonzo Smith (Leon Ames) is a lawyer (or something, the film doesn’t trouble itself too much), his wife Anna (Mary Astor) a devoted home maker. They have four daughters: Rose (Lucille Bremer) hopes for a proposal from Warren Sheffield (Robert Sully), youngest children Agnes (Joan Carroll) and especially “Tootie” (Margaret O’Brien) are perpetually in trouble and Esther (Judy Garland) is just starting to make eyes at next door neighbour John Truett (Tom Drake). But their contented life could all turn upside down when father announces they will be moving to New York. Surely, they can’t leave St Louis behind?

In many ways Meet Me in St Louis is an inverse The Magnificent Ambersons. While Welles’ film brilliantly charted the decline of a family of wealthy snobs (the Ambersons would certainly recognise the Smiths as equals) with technology an intruder, upending everything they understand about the world, Meet Me in St Louis is a gloriously entertaining celebration of nostalgia with new technology either a source of jokes (scrambled long-distance calls, jolly cable-car songs) or wonder (that closing light-show). Both have stylistic comparisons: from their use of title cards to their fluid camera showcasing sumptuous sets and costumes. But only one of them is about cheering you up.

Meet Me in St Louis only barely has a plot, so concentrated is it on charm and whimsy (father’s announcement, which introduces the real drama, arrives over half-way through). Adapted from a series of short stories by Sally Benson, it’s an episodic film built around events – parties, cable-car rides, a Halloween adventure and a Christmas Eve ball – with a few threaded plotlines of flirtation, principally between Esther and John. Freed sprinkles in a series of songs from his collected rights holdings (including the title song) with a few additional tunes from writers Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, the most notable being The Trolley Song (a ludicrously catchy-number you can’t get out of your head) and the iconic Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (although their original far more depressing lyrics were hurriedly re-written).

These last two are performed with astonishing bravura by Judy Garland in possibly her finest hour (until A Star is Born). Garland’s singing is almost effortlessly graceful and beautiful, and she matches it with a very warm, feisty and engaging performance. Esther lands perfectly between two stools: she can be rebellious, impatient and judgemental but also caring, sensible and forgiving. Garland is reassuringly collected, funny and luminous through-out – so much so it’s striking to read what a nightmare the shoot was, with the star frequently absent as she succumbed to the mental and physical ailments that would plague the rest of her life.

Part of the success of her performance was the closeness that developed between her and Minnelli – the first director to really treat her as an adult and collaborator (they started an affair during the film). Minnelli, in only his third film and first in colour, directs with the assurance and visual beauty of an accomplished pro. Meet Me in St Louis was his first Freed musical and it might just be his best. The sumptuousness of the visuals and design were to a large part due to him – you can see the influence this had on the later work of Visconti among others, particularly the ballroom scene – and Minnelli worked labouriously with the actors to build a sense of family between them.

This pays off in spades throughout the film, where the close chemistry between the actors only helps create a nostalgic glow for happy days gone by. Ames and Astor have a relaxed ease of a long-married couples, while the four sisters interact with each other with an easy, unstudied naturalness – sharing chairs, food from their plates and time together with an unfussy ease. In particular Minnelli helped guide Margaret O’Brien to the one of the most delightful child performances on screen: the Halloween sequence, where “Tootie” confronts a scary neighbour is a masterclass of childish excitement and fear, matched later by O’Brien’s affecting distraught tears at the prospect of leaving St Louis.

Minnelli shoots the film with a technical confidence and imagination that quickly makes you forget it’s simple plot. That Halloween sequence is an eerie wonder, shot with a low-angled, tracking shot unease that leaves a haunting impression. He and cinematographer George J Folsey deigned a gorgeous gaslight dimming sequence as Esther and John go through her house dimming the lights, the camera moving in a single, complex, take up-and-around them while Folsey adjusts the set light in sync. Later there is a brilliant shot that seems to pass through a window to lead us straight into the ball, which seems years ahead of its time in its technical accomplishment. The ‘Trolley Song’s sequence uses framing and costumes perfectly to turn a cable car into something that feels as large as a small theatre. It’s an exceptionally well-made film.

You could argue certainly that it is a conservative and unchallenging film. It’s a celebration of small-time life, an argument for staying where you are and embracing the status quo. It never crosses its mind to consider that it’s a lot easier to do that if you have a huge house and servants. Not a moment of anger or serious disagreement is allowed to enter the picture. Everyone is unendingly nice all the time. But does that matter? Sometimes you need a film like a warm hug. And, when you do, don’t you want it also to be a masterclass in filmmaking with a star like Garland at the top of her game? Of course you do.

Winter Light (1963)

Faith is thoughtfully questioned in Ingmar Bergman’s spare, bleak and striking masterpiece

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Gunnar Björnstrand (Pastor Tomas Ericsson), Ingrid Thulin (Märta Lundberg), Gunnel Lindblom (Karin Persson), Max von Sydow (Jonas Persson), Allan Edwall (Algot Frövik), Kolbjörn Knudsen (Knut Aronsson), Olof Thunberg (Fredrik Blom), Elsa Ebbesen (Magdalena Ledfors)

It would surprise many to hear Bergman held Winter Light in the highest regard among his films. An austere chamber piece, largely set in a cold, naturally lit church, it’s the middle chapter of his thematic trilogy on faith and it serves to correct any sense of hope left remaining from in Through a Glass Darkly. Winter Light – with its lead character a semi-biographical combination of Bergman’s father (himself a Lutheran Pastor) and Bergman himself – begins with a robotic preaching in a Church and ends firing up another such sermon to an empty Church. This is a world where, if there ever was a God, he has long since gone silent and disappeared over the horizon.

You could argue Tomas Ericsson is the most ill-suited priest in the history of cinema. He’s played with a peevish, grumpy lack of hope, inspiration or joy, self-loathing seeping from every pore by Gunnar Björnstrand in what might just be his finest hour. Björnstrand, more comfortable with comedy, struggled with this counter-casting (and his cold, which was written into the script), the bottled-up pressure of the role almost shattering his friendship with Bergman. Following a single afternoon in Ericsson’s life, Winter Light charts his complete disillusionment with his faith, his utter failure to provide spiritual comfort to parishioners and his mix of dependence, indifference and contempt for schoolteacher and some-time lover Märta (Ingrid Thulin), herself a needy, unhappy woman content to play second-fiddle to Tomas’ deceased wife.

Tomas’ faith in God has long since vanished. Winter Light is his own Gethsemane, a parade of painful events and conversations where he waits desperately for some sort of sign or word from the Almighty and is left instead wondering, like Christ, why God has forsaken him. Tomas has become bitter, self-obsessed and self-loathing, going through the motions with a dwindling congregation and unable to muster even the faintest bit of belief in the words that pass his lips.

Winter Light follows up ideas of Through a Glass Darkly (Tomas even talks of a “Spider God”, a destructive force at the centre of a world made of pain). There is an echo throughout of the idea that, if God is love, then letting love into your life (or acknowledging the existence of Love in the world) is proof enough that there is a God, even if he is now silent. If so, Tomas’ rejection of any form of love goes hand-in-hand with his rejection of faith. If he felt love, it was for his late wife – and her death matches the decease of his faith in God. Now he angrily slaps away offers of affection with the same contempt he addresses towards questions of faith.

That offer of love comes from Märta, a mousey teacher trapped under an unflattering hat, the bags under her eyes and spinsterish clothes. She’s played in a performance of sustained, emotive brilliance by Ingrid Thulin. Märta captures her feelings for Tomas – right down to her acknowledgement that she knows he does not love her – in a sprawling, stream-of-consciousness letter (which Tomas has delayed reading – and when he does, he scrunches it into a frustrated ball).

That letter is conveyed to us in a stunning, almost interrupted, seven-minute take where Bergman focuses the camera on Thulin in close-up who delivers the contents of the letter straight to camera. This is a tour-de-force from Thulin, by terms unblinking, honest, self-denying, pained, resigned, hopeful and frustratingly simpering, a masterclass that marks one of Winter Light’s most striking moments of directorial and actorly technique. Few actors could pull this scene off with the grace and emotional commitment Thulin brings to it – and still leave us understanding why Tomas later, with anger frustration, cruelly tells her he has simply had enough of her all-forgiving love.

There is no place for that sort of saintly, Christ-like, love in Tomas’ life. His focus remains his own self-loathing. When meeting with Jonas (Max von Sydow – even more carved from granite than normal, his fixed stillness contrasted with Björnstrand’s twitchy unease), who has come to Tomas for spiritual reassurance to help overcome suicidal thoughts, Tomas can only complain of his own lack of faith. Tomas fails utterly to offer any solace to Jonas, a further mark of his own failure as both a priest and human. Jonas’ suicidal misery at the dread of oncoming Armageddon in the nuclear age, becomes grist to Tomas’ own misery and our priest in turn feels no shame in turning to Märta immediately for reassurance and comfort.

The only person who seems to have considered the nature of faith is disabled sexton Algot (a marvellous performance by Allan Edwall). Algot reflects that the suffering on the cross was not Christ’s true sacrifice – after all that was over in hours. The real suffering was hearing God’s silence on that cross, of the horror of suddenly thinking your life’s work may have been a waste of time, that he evangelised for someone silent or indifferent or worse. It would tie in directly with Tomas’ own doubts – except it’s pretty certain Tomas isn’t listening to him.

Maybe that’s partly the problem. We don’t listen to God, because we no longer expect him to talk. At one point, Tomas asks why God has fallen silent while behind him light suddenly pours through the Church window. Is that a sign of a sort? If it is Tomas doesn’t look and when he does, he doesn’t think. Instead, he contributes to the silence of God – as the closest thing to his vessel he fails to listen, fails to help and focuses only on his own pain.

Winter Light is a gorgeous film, full of striking light and shade by cinematographer Sven Nykvist. It’s also a bleak, grim, hopeless film, the best hope it can offer being God might have been real but he’s long since turned his back on us, just as we’ve turned out back on him. It’s magnified when we reject the thing he might have left for us, love itself. Winter Light is intensely thought-provoking, but rivetingly intelligent in the way the best of Bergman is. Björnstrand is superb and Thulin is extraordinary, in a film that carries worlds of meanings in its spare 80 minute runtime.

Dirty Harry (1971)

Eastwood enters into cinematic legend in this grippingly entertaining pulpy cop thriller

Director: Don Siegel

Cast: Clint Eastwood (Inspector Harry Callahan), Harry Guardino (Lt Al Bressler), Reni Santoni (Inspector Chich Gonzalez), John Vernon (Mayor), Andy Robinson (Scorpio), John Larch (Police Chief Paul Dacanelli), John Mitchum (Inspector Frank DiGiorgio), Mae Mercer (Mrs Russell)

“Do you feel lucky? Well do ya? Punk” With these words, .44 Magnum in one hand and remains of a hot dog in the other (yes, Harry Callahan was so cool he didn’t even stop having lunch to take on a bunch of armed robbers), Clint Eastwood made a permanent mark on cinematic history. In 1971 Dirty Harry was condemned by some as fascist or reactionary, but really it’s just energetic, punchy, impossibly entertaining pulp. In a year where tough, rule-bending cops were de rigour, Dirty Harry may have more of a B-movie vibe than Friedkin’s Oscar-winning The French Connection but there is no doubt which one is the most viscerally entertaining.

“Dirty” Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) – so called because he gets all the jobs no-one else wants – is a tough-as-nails Inspector who values the Rule of Law over the Rules of the Law. Taciturn, not-suffering fools and always on the hunt for criminals (as the prototype gruff cop maverick, of course he works best alone), he prowls the streets of San Francisco and stops at nothing to take down bad guys and protect the innocent. He’s the guy you want on the case when the ruthless Scorpio killer (Andy Robinson) holds the city to ransom, shooting innocent people at random, seizing hostages and sending notes demanding payment to prevent more outrages.

Dirty Harry is lean, mean and a simply perfect piece of pulpy action. Directed with a tautness by Don Siegel, that never let’s go, it riffs on real life events – Scorpio is an obvious stand-in for the Zodiac Killer – and basically shifts a shoot-first-ask-questions-later cowboy into the heart of a modern city. Harry, embodied with sublime suitability by Eastwood (cementing his image) has a waspish sense-of-humour, speaks as he finds, never-ever-stops, has the ruthless determination we all wish we had and carries inside himself (buried deep) a maudlin sadness at his fundamental loneliness.

Dirty Harry doesn’t shirk in showing how a cop who bends the rules to deliver real justice can be an attractive figure. Harry doesn’t quite shoot first – he gives a cursory warning every time – but he always responds with lethal force when people are threatened. He’ll carry out illegal search operations of despicable offenders, he’ll follow a psychopath because he knows he’ll offend again (he’s right, but still) and when Scorpio won’t tell him where a hostage has been hidden, he doesn’t think twice about effectively torturing the guy to get him to talk.

Siegel’s film knows that this makes Harry the sort of guy we liberals tut about but, when push-comes-to-shove we need. Harry clones run through film and television history – what is 24’s Jack Bauer, but Dirty Harry fighting nuclear terrorists? – and it’s rooted in the fact that, although we know we should respect the rights of criminals, secretly we don’t want to. Surely, it’s not an accident that the film was set in San Francisco, the nirvana of liberalism in 1970s America. What makes that possible – cops like Harry.

The film stacks the deck slightly by making most of the besuited bosses Harry rubs up against punch-clock rules followers who place the letter of the law above its spirit. Of course, the DA will release Scorpio back onto the street because the damning evidence Harry has collected needs to be thrown out. Of course, he’ll order Harry to leave the clearly-mad-as-a-bag-of-bats Scorpio in peace. Of course, almost every other law official we see can’t hold a candle to Harry’s ruthless skill. Eastwood is so cool, we need to take a beat to remind ourselves that Harry is a widower who lives in an empty apartment, has no friends and he looks on with a quiet envy when his wounded partner is comforted by his wife.

But Harry is made for other things. Siegel’s character-defining set-piece early on, irrelevant to the plot, introduces everything we need to know about Harry. He effortlessly surmises a robbery is taking place at a bank across the street, calls for back-up and when he realises it will arrive too late, grabs that .44 Magnum and hot dog and strolls across the street into a shoot-up. At the same time, it’s a miracle no one is caught in the crossfire or crashing cars. He then bluffs another robber to stand down with a hard-as-nails bad ass speech, despite his chamber being empty of bullets.

To take on a guy like that, you need a truly inspired villain. Andy Robinson, his performance a master-class of twitch with a high-pitched giggle that acts like nails on a blackboard, provides it. He makes Scorpio a deeply unhinged, unpredictable predator who compensates for his slightness and youth (opposite Eastwood’s chiselled masculinity) by simply being an utterly unpredictable lunatic, with no sense of moral compass. Robinson pitches the performance just right, avoiding obvious histrionics to present a character larger than life but terrifyingly plausible.

The duel between them is shot by Siegel like an extended, grimly tense mix of chase and spy thriller. Opening the film with Scorpio searching the horizon for a new victim through a rifle’s telescopic lens, it throws us into a dark nightmare of San Francisco, with parks and baseball grounds places of unimaginable danger and a closing tense game of cat-and-mouse at an industrial plant. Through it all, Eastwood brings his softly spoken charisma to a man who knows full well there is little too him but the chase, but who puts the rights of the guilty a very, very distant second to the victims.

Dirty Harry plays like a punch to the guts, a superbly (and seductively) entertaining film that gives just enough hints at the dangers of Harry’s methods, while making their effectiveness abundantly clear. Siegel’s direction is pitch-perfect – this is one of the greatest cop thrillers ever made – and Eastwood’s performance is iconic. The French Connection maybe a more complex film – but Dirty Harry is more entertaining and the one you’d choose to put on with some popcorn.

Our Hospitality (1923)

Keaton’s feature-length debut is a masterpiece of comic invention and slapstick stunt thrills

Director: Buster Keaton (& John G Blystone)

Cast: Buster Keaton (Willie McKay), Joe Roberts (Joseph Canfield), Natalie Talmadge (Virginia Canfield), Ralph Bushman (Clayton Canfield), Craig Ward (Lee Canfield), Monte Collins (Parson), Joe Keaton (Train engineer), Jack Duffy (Train conductor)

It starts with a dark and stormy night. If that sounds like cheap melodrama that’s kind of the point. Keaton’s first feature length comedy would be different from his joke-crammed shorts. This would be plot-led comedy, a drama full of jokes. As part of that, Keaton started the film with a storm-filled, joke-free, DW Griffith-inspired opening salvo that sees the lead character’s father dead in Intolerance inspired opening. With its gun flashes and bodies, we know in this film bullets kill.

The father is John McKay and he dies along with James Canfield in a deadly exchange. It’s part of a long-running feud betwixt McKays and Canfields (any similarity to the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feud is entirely deliberate), and the rest of the Canfields swear revenge on McKay’s baby son-and-heir. Twenty-one years later, Willie McKay (Buster Keaton) has grown up in New York, ignorant of the feud. When he returns to his father’s ranch, he finds himself in the awkward position of having fallen in love with Virginia Canfield (Natalie Talmadge), daughter of his newly discovered deadly enemy Joseph Canfield (Joe Roberts). How will matters be resolved?

With a great deal of laughs and a breath-taking series of stunts. Our Hospitality is early Keaton but already it cements his legend of comic invention and physical daring as well as his dynamism and imagination as a filmmaker. Our Hospitality is crammed with comic bits of pieces that Keaton would go on to explore and finetune in even greater detail in later films, but also culminates in a (admittedly slightly tongue-in-cheek) but still surprisingly gripping action sequence as our hero battles to survive a mountainous waterfall and save his love from toppling.

The film neatly divides into four acts, each subtly different in tone but all unified by Keaton’s creativity. Stone-faced and implacable, Keaton never mugs or goes overboard for the laugh but trusts that, with the intimacy of the camera, the smallest inflection or slightest turn of the head will raise a chuckle. He’s also charmingly innocent, refreshingly resourceful and rather brave – a perfect combination for a little guy (it helps, as always, that Keaton is literally a little guy) we root for.

That charm powers a lot of the film’s second act, a long incident-filled train journey McKay takes to the South. Keaton was fascinated by the comic potential of early technology – watching Willie, po-facedly, cycling with an early peddle-free bike, his feet alternately propelling the bike and lifted in the air is hilarious (the Smithsonian even asked if it could display this perfect replica) – and he deliberately set the film in 1831 to introduce a Stephenson-style rocket train, pulling its open carriages behind it. This vehicle not only looks hilariously ramshackle and strangely incongruous, it also opens an ocean of possibilities.

It is, for starters, hilariously slow – Willie’s dog has no problem keeping up with it. Its tracks have been laid with a rigid rule-following lack of imagination – at one point they ride up over a fallen tree log, the train and carriages bumping over it. The train is forced to stop by a donkey that refuses to leave the line (eventually the engineer simply drags the tracks around the donkey). There is an on-going feud between the Engineer (played by Keaton’s father Joe) and ticket-master about who is actually in charge of the train. At one point it veers off the tracks and down a road (everyone comments about how much more smoother this is) and later gets separated from the carriages at a junction, requiring Keaton gymnastics to bring it together. By the time it trundles into the station – and note how beautifully the train is filmed – you’ve had more comic invention than most other comedies.

During this journey Willie falls in love with fellow passenger Virginia (played, a little awkwardly, by Keaton’s wife Natalie Talmadge), little knowing she is a Canfield. The Canfields swiftly discover his identity: Willie asks one of her brother’s directions to his ranch, and the brother guides him there, all the while darting away at every opportunity to try and borrow a gun to take his revenge.

Most of the second act, which gives the film its title, revolves around Willie’s invite from Natalie to dinner at the Canfield house. Southern gentility declares the Canfields cannot take revenge on Willie while he is their guest – as soon as Willie realises this he does everything he can to remain in the house, as the (literal) instant he steps outside the door, guns come out. (Keaton also gets a lot of comic mileage from the cumbersome one-shot guns, which Willie frequently pinches to discharge to give himself a few precious moments to move outside while various Canfield’s reload).

When Willie eventually flees the house – disguised as a lady – it leads into a glorious, action-packed chase scene. Scaling mountains and cliffs, shot with a vertigo inducing brilliance (in reality Keaton placed the camera on its side and made it appear with his genius physicality that he was climbing rather than crawling). There are falls into rapids, Willie is dragged behind a racing train carriage and finally bobs and floats down a rapid (including one shot, kept in the film, where Keaton’s rope snapped and he was literally washed head first down a river). It culminates in an athletic, stunt-filled, precarious balance on a log suspended over a waterfall (a brilliant backdrop shot makes this feel impossibly high), swinging desperately on a rope to save Virginia from falling.

Our Hospitality is awash with comic energy and genius touches of business but it’s also an impressively ahead-of-its-time in the skill of its plotting and structure – you could pretty much remake it exactly today (but with words) without changing a detail, and it would still be a hit. But it wouldn’t be a legend because the only thing you wouldn’t have is Keaton. And he’s the lodestone that balances the whole thing.

The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming (1966)

Ealingesque farce meets Cold War moralising in this not-quite funny enough farce

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: Carl Reiner (Walt Whittaker), Eva Marie Saint (Elspeth Whittaker), Alan Arkin (Rozanov), Brian Keith (Link Mattocks), Theodore Bikel (Captain), Jonathan Winters (Norman Jones), Tessie O’Shea (Alice Foss), John Philip Law (Alexei Kolchin), Ben Blue (Luther Grilk), Andrea Dromm (Alison Palmer), Paul Ford (Fendall Hawkins)

Off the coast of a New England island, a Russian captain (Theodore Bikel) wants to take a quick peek at the US of A. Bad idea. When his sub runs aground, they are forced to send a party ashore led by political officer Rozanov (Alan Arkin) to find a motor launch to get the sub back out to sea. They run into the Whittakers – playwright Walt (Carl Reiner), wife Elspeth (Eva Marie Saint) and their kids – take them hostage, steal their car, cut the telephone lines and try to save themselves. The town quickly hears news of the possible arrival of Russians, and the hysteria grows – just as Walt starts to feel his sympathies grow for the terrified Russian sailors. Can peace be reached across the divide?

The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming is basically an Ealing-esque comedy – written by Ealing veteran William Rose – translated not entirely successfully to America. Directed with an epic, widescreen sweep by Norman Jewison that sometimes crushes the life out of a comedy of confusion and coincidence, The Russians are Coming wants to be both a broad farce and carry an earnest message about the Cold War. It’s quite sweet that the film, made four years after Cuba nearly turned the world into an ash pile, wants to focus on what unites as humans rather than divides us, but the message is at times crow-barred in a little too forcibly.

It’s very hard not to see the Ealing influence on every single scene – and I suspect the film would have worked better as 4:3 black-and-white film full of harassed people in offices and homes, rather than the grand panoramas of the town and large crowd scenes. The Ealing influence can be seen in the townsfolk, who become a farcical panicked crowd of have-a-go heroes, making sweeping decisions based on no information at all, led by puffed up self-important, self-elected leaders determined to seize their moments of heroism. Misunderstandings abound, as tiny pieces of evidence balloon the “threat” into a full-blown invasion: the crowd are almost disappointed when they arrive at an airfield to find not a smouldering ruin but an operator blissfully unaware anything is going on.

Similarly, the Russians themselves fit nicely into the Ealing model of ordinary, decent, underdogs up against the system (in this case the townsfolk). In a brave touch, the Russian in the film is never translated – Theodore Bikel doesn’t have a line in English – meaning we only gradually learn what is going on and why, as Arkin’s character explains things to Whittaker in stumbling half-English. Arkin is, by the way, the film’s prize asset, demonstrating excellent comic timing and delivering his dialogue in a parade of Russian and fumbling English (there is a great sequence where he earnestly tutors his men on how to pass as officials clearing the street, teaching them phrases just a few degrees incorrect that will make them stick out like sore thumbs as soon as they open their mouths).

The film is never quite funny enough though and Jewison’s direction neither tight nor taut enough to keep the farcical pace up. There are one too many wrong turns taken by the Russians, one too many narrative cul-de-sacs as townsfolk barrel up and down the streets. The whole film plays out like this, many of its effective comic performers among the townsfolk lost among a sea of people and faces. Arkin and Reiner get the most impact, because their scenes tend to make place in individual rooms in set-ups that let us clearly see their faces and appreciate their comic skills.

The Russians are Coming largely struggles to keep the pace up – the best of the Ealing comedies told their farce-tinged struggles between the little-guy and the system, or confusion between two fundamentally sympathetic groups, in about 90 minutes, and this feels heavily over-stretched at a little over two hours. That’s partly because of the political statements which the film dresses up as a sub-plots. A romance between John Philip Law’s Russian sailor and the Whittakers’ babysitter Tessie O’Shea is all too obviously a plea for using love as bridge-building. The final alliance between the Russians and the townspeople, forged in their joint rescuing of an endangered child, bangs the “we are all the same” drum a little too persistently.

It makes the film today feel a little too much like it’s trying to have its cake and eat it: to be both a farce where Reiner’s playwright gets tied up to a librarian and the two struggle to free themselves in a series of pratfalls, and also a political statement about the bonds that can be built if we just let the Cold War melt a little bit. I won’t deny this must have had more impact in the 1960s, but today it makes for a film that is a little too grandiose where it should be nimble, and a little too lightweight when it should be important.

Freud (1962)

This intriguing film makes an excellent attempt at exploring the nature of thought

Director: John Huston

Cast: Montgomery Clift (Sigmund Freud), Susannah York (Cecily Koertner), Larry Parks (Dr Joseph Breuer), Eric Portman (Dr Theodore Meynet), Susan Kohner (Martha Freud), Eileen Herlie (Ida Koetner), Fernand Ledoux (Dr Charcot), David McCallum (Carl von Schlosser), Rosalie Crutchley (Amalia Freud)

Few thinkers had as much impact on the 20th century as Sigmund Freud. For generations, Freud’s theories on psychology and sexuality were defining texts shaping perceptions of our inner world. John Huston was fascinated by his work, translating its spirit into this thought-provoking, if at times clinical, film that focuses on a few key years in Freud’s life and does its very best to communicate the thought behind the theory, while being careful to never delve too far into thornier matters. (Despite the poster’s blaring tagline “He dared to search beyond the flesh!”).

Freud is played by Montgomery Clift, whom we meet in 1885 Vienna as a young doctor. Freud’s theories that physical ailments might have a psychological cause are widely dismissed by the medical establishment, represented by smug Dr Meynet (Eric Portman). However, Freud is convinced the secret of treating neurosis lies within – not least since he recognises symptoms of neurosis in his own dreams, haunted by half-memories of his mother and complex feelings for his father. Working with his mentor Dr Joseph Breuer (Larry Parks), Freud explores hypnosis to access patients’ repressed feelings, working closely with Cecily Koertner (Susannah York), a young woman who has inexplicably lost the ability to walk. Slowly Freud begins to form a theory of sexuality in children, as well as discovering guided discussions and word association to be more effective than hypnosis.

Huston’s film is shot in luscious black and white by Douglas Slocombe, composed of a mixture of images that balance painterly influences with surrealist nightmares. Freud and Koertner’s dream sequences are shot with a grainy intensity, a series of chilling images ranging from Freud being dragged towards his enthroned mother by a roped dwarf to Koertner’s mother domineering a beach from a grand tower. These surrealist touches tear through a film that otherwise presents a more earnest exploration of Freud’s theorising. It serves as a necessary contrast to the constraining formality of 19^th-century Vienna, where inner passions and feelings are routinely stamped down.

Freud studiously explores the evolution of its subject’s thinking, in particular through his analysis of the fictional Cecily (standing in for several patients). Played with gusto by Susannah York, the film carefully structures her psychological make-up as a detective mystery to be slowly peeled away, with wrong-turns, false dawns and incorrect assumptions abounding. Initially treated with caring patience by Breuer’s hypnosis, slowly Freud replaces his mentor first as a doctor and then (to his subtle discomfort) as the subject of Cecily’s transposed attractions. These interior searches, eventually culminating in Freud’s first experiments of psychoanalysis and word association, are fascinating moments that pivot the film, with convincing false conclusions regularly introduced to constantly challenge the viewer’s assumptions.

It leads to the formulation of Freud’s Oedipal theories that cross a Rubicon his mentor cannot. In that, Breuer is joined by most of the medical profession. Huston’s film is strong on the stuffy self-confidence of the establishment, too hide-bound by its own ideas to recognise genius in their midst. Portman’s grandiose Dr Meynet gently, but firmly and devastatingly, rubbishes any nascent idea that neurosis patients are anything other than idlers and whingers. Meetings where Freud presents papers offer choruses of raucous boos and naked fury (at one point a dignified doctor literally stands up and spits at Freud’s feet in disgust). Hypnosis, with its vague medical support for its method is used as something close to a parlour trick by an otherwise supportive Dr Charcot (Fernand Ledoux) to pass physical symptoms from patient to patient, demonstrating the symptom is psychological even as he does nothing to understand the cause.

The path to decoding the human mind – as the film firmly believes Freud’s theories have done, hammered home by Huston’s narration which opens and closes the films and intermittently provides an internal monologue for Freud – is a bumpy one. Freud is frequently disturbed by the implications of his investigations. A young solider – a fragile David McCallum – alarms him when, under hypnosis, he reveals a deep, sexual longing for his mother via the fondling of a mannequin (naturally concealed under his father’s uniform). Freud’s closeness to his mother – a marvellous Rosalie Crutchley – becomes wrapped up in his theories, his dreams and memories haunted by half-remembered encounters and longings that cause him great unease.

Much of the clarity of this unease – and the tension as the unsettling implications of Freud’s nascent beliefs become more apparent – owes its success to Clift’s performance in the lead role. Clift was in extremely poor health at the time, still suffering from the effects of a near fatal car crash (including cataracts that affected his vision). An addiction to painkillers and alcohol had shot his memory to pieces. He struggled to remember lines (so much so the studio attempted to sue him for the film’s many delays), but his soulfulness appears to glorious effect. He makes Freud a profound and troubled but artistic thinker, a humanitarian full of empathy which also makes him a conduit for guilt and shame. His impassive face makes him the perfect listener but does not hide his own torment. It’s a marvellous performance, one that manages to convey the power of thinking.

Unfortunately, its genesis is also bound up in the story of the film’s making, that has often dwarfed the film itself in discussions about this intriguing movie. Huston – increasingly angry at Clift’s unreliability, compounded by his alpha-male disgust at Clift’s homosexuality – bullied the actor relentlessly during the film’s making, forcing him into take-after-take after every line flub to the increased anger of the other actors (York, in particular, was outspoken in her disgust at this). Huston had also originally written a script with Jean-Paul Sartre but, not surprisingly, the two were incompatible, Sartre eventually having his name removed from the credits.

It’s a shame these stories have dominated the discussion of the film, as it is a rich, intriguing work directed with a thoughtfulness by Huston that helps it become a thoughtful and patient film, rather than a triumphalist one (the film lacks either a eureka moment or a closing triumph, leaving Freud still rejected by the establishment and quietly visiting his father’s grave, having come to terms with his own feelings). With a marvellous performance by Clift – even if his treatment on set was shocking – it’s an intelligent, intriguing and well-handled exploration of a complex theme. It’s more than a curiosity, it’s a measured and serious film with flashes of surrealism that engages intelligently with important themes.