Category: Directors

Nosferatu (1922)

Cinematic vampires are established – along with most of the finest horror filmic ideas – in Murnau’s iconic and masterful silent epic

Director: FW Murnau

Cast: Max Schreck (Count Orlock), Gustav von Wangenheim (Hutter), Greta Schroeder (Ellen Hutter), GH Shnell (Harding), Ruth Landshoff (Ruth Harding), Gustav Botz (Professor Sievers), Alexander Granach (Knock), John Gottowt (Professor Bulwer), Max Nemetz (Captain)

Dripping with menace, a ghastly figure rises to spread his influence across the whole world. In a similar way, FW Murnau’s Nosferatu has wormed its way into the public consciousness, with its iconic film-making beauty, laced with menace and horror – and its iconic vision of the vampire as a creature of disgusting, animalistic viciousness still carries a ghoulish impact on vampire movies today. Murnau’s film is an extraordinary piece of bravura film-making, a breath-taking example of pictorial beauty, crammed with nightmarish imagery that cements itself into your brain.

If the plot sounds familiar, you share the view of Bram Stoker’s widow. Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) is arrives in Transylvania to finalise a land deal with Count Orlock (Max Schreck). But, staying in Orlock’s terrifying castle, Hutter starts to dread that his nocturnal, deformed host with the long teeth and nails might have more to him than meets the eye. Orlock wants to move to Hutter’s home in Wisborg to put himself out in the world – but increasingly also due to his fascination with a picture he finds of Hutter’s wife Ellen (Greta Schroeder). Leaving Hutter imprisoned, Orlock (coffins and rats in tow) climbs on board the Demeter and sets sail. Any wonder Florence Stoker sued?

It’s nearly a miracle we even have Nosferatu today. Florence Stoker won every single court case she ever fought against the filmmakers, with the verdict almost invariably being that the negative should be destroyed. Thank goodness we do have it though, as this is not only the finest adaptation of Dracula ever made but also a landmark horror film whose reputation has only grown. Murnau created a film that is darkly insidious, worming its way inside your head just as Orlock inveigles his way into Wisborg, marking forever everything it touches.

It’s remembered often as the height of German Expressionism: but really Murnau’s film is one of classical, painterly beauty. Although he can certainly use the power of montage effectively when he wants to – witness the thrilling cross-cutting as both Hutter and Orlock race back to Wisborg, one by sea, one by land – Murnau’s real power here is in his compositions. Few people could shoot vistas – be they town or country – with soulful searchingness like Murnau. From its opening shot of the Wisborg square, through its haunting visions of the Transylvanian countryside (shot with slow pans that drip with unease), this is a film that finds unsettling tension in the beauty of our surroundings. Throw in compositions inspired by painters like Caspar David Friedrich and (in a group of scientists gathered around a corpse) Rembrandt, and Nosferatu takes its place in the story of art.

But it also has a place firmly in the story of terror. That’s due, above all, to the terrifying design of Orlock himself. Played with a rigid unknowability by Max Schreck – the mystery of what motivates Orlock remains exactly that – Orlock looks like something out of the deepest reaches of our subconscious nightmares. Rat like, wizened, with ghastly elongated nails and teeth and a stillness that feels both hunched and rigid all at once, he is a natural predator. It’s surely no co-incidence that he resembles the rats that travel with him in the Demeter, and the interpretation of his attacks by the townspeople link us to what this spirit is: death itself, unreasonable and unstoppable.

Murnau often frames him in arches and doorways, as if he was constantly positioning himself in coffins. There are innumerable flourishes to cement the awful terror he carries. In one sinister sequence, he seems to rise, utterly straight and rigid, from his tomb. He appears to a sailor on the Demeter like a nightmarish transparent figure. Hutter opens his door at night in the castle to see Orlock standing outside, like a wolf waiting to strike. In one chilling sequence, the camera watches up from the hold of the ship as he haltingly walks, framed by the rigging, to consume the unseen ship’s captain. Ellen will stare out of her window at night to half see him in an upper corner of the building opposite, watching her. Orlock’s claws reach into everything from The Exorcist to BBC adaptations of MR James ghost stories.

There is seemingly nothing human about him. At night he transforms into a wolf – and Murnau went to great lengths to secure not a wolf, but a hyena as this night-time abomination, its twisted, grinning features and distinctive face reminiscent of Orlock’s own dreadful form. What motivates him? We are given no insight into what might influence or inspire him, the way we are with Dracula. Unlike Dracula he lives alone in his castle – no brides for company here. His victims are consumed and die: none turn. He expresses no interest in the wider world and seems focused on people solely as commodities to consume.

The one difference might just be Ellen. As Orlock goes to kill Hutter on his final night at the castle, Ellen awakens thousands of miles away in Wisborg, as if she knows her husband is in danger. And Orlock seems to sense it too. In a beautiful example of cross-cutting, Ellen is at the right of the frame starring to the left in Wisborg, while Orlock is at the left of the frame starring back to the right in Transylvania. It feels like they are looking at each other, even though of course they can’t be – and it forms a link between them whose motives are kept deliberately unclear. Does Orlock want to consume or ravish Ellen? Is she repelled or intrigued by this monster? While the film downplays the sort of sexual fascination that later Dracula films (and the novel itself) would play to the hilt, there are touches of it there (not least in the strangely chaste marriage between the Hutters).

Murnau experiments beautifully with the burgeoning language of cinema. The frame is given a tint at every shot to tell us when in the day we are: daylight is tinged in yellow, dusk and dawn in red and Orlock moves freely in the blue-tinged night-time. The camera is frequently fluid. There are some quite gorgeous – and terrifyingly unsettling – shots of the Demeter sailing, seemingly uncrewed, at sea (its sails filled with Orlock’s monstrous breath) then drifting controlled but abandoned into Wisborg harbour. As Hutter rides to Orlock’s castle the screen shifts to photo negative, as if he is crossing some terrifying boundary. Only one invention doesn’t pay off today: to Murnau, sped-up film was disjointed, unsettling and terrifying. To us it’s Keystone’s Kops stuff: watching Orlock’s carriage speed around is likely to raise a surprised titter, rather than a gasp of terror.

Other elements of Nosferatu have also not aged as well. The acting is frequently performative and stagy and varies wildly in style. Von Wangenheim and Schroder strike poses, Granach’s Renfield-like Knock goes wildly over the top. Shreck’s work is often done by the make-up, although his chilling stillness carries strength. It also takes surprisingly little from Dracula in terms of themes: any references to technology, the key weapon against the count, are dropped – even van Helsing is turned into a clueless dolt; the Lucy Westerna figure is little more than an extra; the victims are almost exclusively men and the response to Orlock’s ”plague” is medieval terror not modern reason.

But Nosferatu rides above this because it is such a chilling, elemental film about death and oblivion. It can only end with that as two characters are absorbed into a dance of death that closes the film (Murnau even stages what looks like a literal dance of death at one point, as enraged townspeople chase an escaped Knock, convinced he is to blame). The association of Orlock specifically with a plague, rather than a homicidal or sexual threat, is telling: this is vampirism as a destructive danger that strikes without reason, and leaves nothing (not even a dark afterlife) in its wake. It feels like a very post-World-War-One vampire story, where whole communities are left destitute by a terrifying event outside of their control.

Nosferatu looks simply sublime, and is the work of a master-director using his craft for the first time to make something truly unique, magical and genre-defining. Horror would wear a different face after Murnau’s masterpiece: a drained, pale, toothy grin that stares fixedly at us from across the void of our nightmares.

Elvis (2022)

A brash, confident exterior hides a more sensitive and tender film – rather like its subject

Director: Baz Luhrmann

Cast: Austin Butler (Elvis Presley), Tom Hanks (Colonel Tom Parker), Olivia DeJonge (Priscilla Presley), Helen Thomson (Gladys Presley), Richard Roxburgh (Vernon Presley), Kelvin Harrison Jnr (BB King), David Wenham (Hank Snow), Kodi Smith-McPhee (Jimmie Rodgers Snow), Luke Bracey (Jerry Schilling), Dacre Montgomery (Steve Binder)

You know someone has reached an untouchable level of fame, when their first name alone is enough for everyone to know who you’re talking about. Few people are as instantly recognisable as Elvis. He had such impact, that the world is still awash with impersonators decades after he died. He’s an icon like few others – perhaps only Marilyn Monroe can get near him – and if Baz Luhrmann’s ambitious, dynamic biopic only at times feels like it has really got under his skin, it does become an essential, tragedy-tinged tribute to a musical giant.

Its slight distance from its subject is connected to Luhrmann’s choice of framing device. This is the life of legend, as told by the man behind the curtain who pulled the strings. The film opens in the final moments in the life of Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Whisked to hospital after a terminal stroke, Parker sits (hospital gown and all) in a Las Vegas casino (standing in as his own personal purgatory), bemoaning that everyone blames him for Elvis’ death and he never gets the credit for giving the world the genius in the first place.

Like a mix of Salieri and Mephistopheles, Parker is a poisonous toad, a cunning “snowman” who spins spectacles at travelling fairs with Elvis as his ultimate circus “geek”, a peep show for the whole nation. Played by Tom Hanks under layers of prosthetics, with a whining, inveigling voice and a mass of self-pitying justifications, he is an unreliable narrator who we should be careful to listen to (a neat way of justifying any historical amendments). It also helps prepare us for one of the film’s main themes: Elvis is a man so trapped by what others want, he doesn’t even get to tell his own life story.

You can’t argue Luhrmann isn’t a polarising film maker. Elvis starts, as so many of his films do, with an explosion of frentic, high-paced style. The camera sweeps and zooms, fast cuts taking us through the final fever dream of the dying Parker, 60s-style split screens throwing multiple Elvis’ up on the screen. It’s a loud, brash statement – much like that visual smack in the face that opens Moulin Rouge! You either love or loath Luhrmann’s colourfully brash style – love it and you are in for a treat.

Like Luhrmann’s other films, the attention-grabbing start is our doorway into a sadder, quieter, more reflective film. The early sweep of the camera, zooming in to Parker’s eyes and whirligigging around his giggling frame as he wheels himself through a casino, the transitions to comic-book style visuals, the location captions that loom over the scenes… it all builds to a sad, depressed and trapped Elvis sitting alone in his hotel room in America’s city of sin. Elvis is a film about an abusive relationship between two people, where the victim can’t imagine life without his Svengali. It’s Romeo and Juliet – but if Romeo was a poisonous succubus draining the lifeforce of Juliet.

Luhrmann is a master of quick establishment and has the confidence to make scenes that really should be ridiculous, work wonderfully well. The key musical influences on Elvis – the blues and Gospel – are introduced in a neat scene which shows the young Elvis moving from one to another on the same afternoon. His first performance captures the world-changing impact of the sex appeal of those swivelling hips by Luhrmann cutting to women, almost surprising themselves, by jumping out of their seats screaming and then looking around stunned at their reaction, before screaming again. It conveys whole themes in cheekily constructed vignettes like this.

It’s the same with stressing the obligations and influences that fill Elvis’ world. His dependence on the affection of a series of women – from his tough but demanding mother (strongly played by Helen Thomson) and then his loving but frustrated wife Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge) – is equally well established, as is Parker’s skill in sidelining these figures. The film deftly explores Elvis’ musical influences and that his success partly stemmed from being a white man singing black music. It’s an attraction Parker instantly picks up, and if the film does skirt over some of the more complex feelings of the black community towards this white singer, it does make Elvis’ debt to them hugely clear.

Luhrmann’s film takes a cradle-to-grave approach but manages to be a lot more than just jukebox musical. While there are performances – impressively staged and recreated – the music is used more to inspire refrains and ideas in the score rather than shoe-horned in as numbers. It’s a skill you wish the script had a little more of at times. Elvis doesn’t always quite manage to tell you about the inner life of this icon. We begin to understand his dreams of leaving a mark, but little of his motivations. His feelings for his wife are boiled down to a simple lost romance and his opinions on everything from politics to family dynamics (both subjects the real Elvis was vocal about) remain unknowable.

But this is film that focuses on the tragedy of an icon. And it makes clear that Parker – whose bitter darkness becomes more and more clear from the beginning – was responsible for crushing the life from a man who he turned into a drugged showpony, in a glittering Las Vegas cage. Parker and Elvis’ first meeting is a beautifully shot seduction atop a Ferris wheel, and helps cement in the viewer’s minds the power this man will have over the King’s life and career.

Crucial, perhaps above all, to the success of the film is Austin Butler’s extraordinary, transformative performance. This is sublime capturing of Elvis’ physicality, but he matches it with a beautifully judged expression of the legend’s soul. His Elvis is always completely believable as the most famous man on the planet, but also a conflicted, slightly lost man under the surface, lacking the confidence to build his own destiny. Butler’s recreation of Elvis’ singing is extraordinary and his performance bubbles with an unshowy tragedy. He breathes life into this larger-than-life icon in a subtle and eventually deeply affecting way that will make you want to throw an arm around his shoulder.

Luhrmann’s film ends a world away from its bright beginning. We’ve seen Elvis triumph, but we’ve also seen him buffeted by events, never really becoming their master. Elvis becomes a highly emotional tribute to a man who gave us so much, but was prevented from giving more. When the real Elvis appears on screen, singing Unchained Melody with passion, it’s undeniably moving. Even more so because we get a sense that performances like this was what we wanted to be doing. Luhrmann – and Butler, whose work cannot be praised enough – may not always manage to make us know the King as completely as we could, but it certainly makes us care deeply and share his regret.

Secrets and Lies (1996)

Hard truths and deep emotion combine with Mike Leigh’s warmth and humanism in this powerful, spectacular film

Director: Mike Leigh

Cast: Timothy Spall (Maurice), Phyllis Logan (Monica), Brenda Blethyn (Cynthia), Claire Rushbrook (Roxanne), Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Hortense), Elizabeth Berrington (Jane), Michele Austin (Dionne), Lee Ross (Paul), Lesley Manville (Social worker), Ron Cook (Stuart), Emma Amos (Scarred girl)

“Secrets and lies. We’re all in pain! Why can’t we share our pain?”. These words come from family photographer Maurice (Timothy Spall), fighting a losing battle against his own pain while doing his best to hold his family together. It’s the mission statement for one of Mike Leigh’s most powerful films, a heart-rending drama that left me tearful. This is as gut-wrenching as Leigh can get, with actors delivering performances that feel ripped from their souls. Despite this, it gets me because this is a hopeful film about the power of love, whose anguish builds from watching what could (and should) be a loving family, failing (almost until the end) to share pain long suppressed due to shame.

That family are the Purley’s. Maurice is a successful photographer with a charming house in suburbia, dotingly maintained by his perfectionist wife Monica (Phyllis Logan). Sister Cynthia, who effectively raised Maurice, remains a working-class single-Mum to 21-year-old Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook). This class difference fuels resentments between Cynthia and Monica.

Unspoken secrets abound. But our first introduction is middle-class black optometrist played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hortense Cumberbatch. (A running joke in the film is everyone’s unfamiliarity with this surname – how times change!). Hortense was adopted and now, with both her parents dead, wants to make contact with her birth mother. That birth mother – to her shock – is Cynthia, who gave birth to Hortense at 15. The relationship between Hortense and Cynthia becomes a catalyst for searing revelations, and shattering of emotional barriers, in the Purley family.

Leigh’s film is a triumph of his quiet, observational, unobtrusive directorial style, grounded on a deep and profound understanding of people and their strengths and foibles. As with his earlier films, the characters were developed after an intensive rehearsal process, with the actors given information only when their characters were. Secrets and Lies takes his approach to everyday life to its zenith, finding levels of tragedy (and warmth) in the simple pain of carrying on that other dramas can only dream of.

It is about how hopes can be both sustaining and damaging. A refrain heard in the movie is “You can’t miss what you’ve never had”. Au contrarie. The film is stuffed with people deep in grief about, or desperate to find, things they’ve never had. Hortense wants to discover where she came from. Cynthia’s life is one of lonely disappointment, resenting the domestic contentment of Maurice and Monica. Maurice and Monica are anguished by their childless marriage, Monica resenting Cynthia for having had the child she longs for. Roxanne wants a stable family, resenting her mother’s clumsy confirmation seemingly everyday that her birth was an accident (even if not a regretted one).

But, in typical British style, no one can talk about any of this. Instead, the Purleys cling to impressions of what the other family members are like. Monica sees Cynthia as a hopeless deadbeat, who can’t care for her children. Cynthia sees Monica as a snob, who stopped Maurice having a child. Roxanne sees Cynthia as constantly disappointed in her, Cynthia sees her as difficult, rebellious young woman unable to look after herself. And Maurice attempts to hold all this together, positioning himself as a jovial head-of-the-family, and whacking down any pain of his own.

Hortense, by comparison, is a model of well-adjusted upbringing. Leigh’s film doesn’t let us see much of her family – we witness her (non-adopted) siblings feuding over an inheritance – but the film constantly enforces the love she got from her parents, from the film’s beautifully staged opening at her mother’s funeral to her smiling reminiscences of parents (flaws and all) who did their best, were honest with her and taught her she was loved. Seen in conversation with her best friend Dionne (a neat single scene cameo by Michele Austin), she’s humane, warm and self-aware enough about her hopes and failings.

But she also has the fixated determination of the middle-classes – the sort of go-getting attitude completely alien to Cynthia, to whom events always happen rather than being something she starts. She disregards the advice of a social worker (a wonderful cameo of rushed professionalism, tinged with just enough genuine care by Lesley Manville) to make contact through social services and instead takes the plunge to contact Cynthia herself.

One of Secrets and Lies many strengths is its open-eyed honesty about the joy and pain of adoption. Hortense, as noted, found a loving family through adoption. But still she wants to know, why did her mother not even hold her when she was born? The answer isn’t simple, as Cynthia’s devastated reaction to the question shows: because if she held her, she would never have let go. This is the emotional centre-piece of an emotionally devastating but deeply uplifting scene at the centre of the movie as Hortense and Cynthia meet for the first time.

Shot in a café in a single near-seven-minute uninterrupted take with a stationary camera (a stylistic choice Leigh repeats at a family BBQ later in the film, as we wait for inevitable secrets to flood out), this is an acting masterpiece. Blethyn and Jean-Baptiste (both Oscar-nominated) give extraordinary performances throughout, but achieve the sublime here. Blethyn delivers nearly every line as if it was being pulled out of her soul by pliers, at points convulsed with teary shame unable to look Hortense in the eye: Jean-Baptiste, so assured throughout, is quiet, almost abashed but clinging to a professionalism to help resolve facing emotion head-on (right down to sitting next to Cynthia rather than opposite her).

Emotionally truthful performances run throughout. Spall is superb as a man who is no pushover – he quietly but determinedly shrugs off a drunken former mentor (a neat cameo from Ron Cook) asking to be given a chance – but who will bend over backwards to accommodate those he loves. Logan battens down hysterical guilt and grief under a house-proud fussiness. Rushbrook is a cauldron of resentments under a surly exterior. The relationship between Cynthia and Hortense – beautifully played by both actresses – quickly becomes one of genuine affection, for all their vast differences.

The film builds towards a celebratory BBQ for Roxanne’s birthday – which Cynthia brings Hortense to, claiming her as work friend. Leigh uses a long take as the family eats (we, the audience, constantly awaiting the emotional walls to break) before a devastating sequence as one after another family secrets come tumbling out, shattering emotional reserves, characters clinging to each other for comfort in floods of repressed tears, stunned onlookers open-mouthed.

It’s a scene of huge emotional impact – I cried – as regrets, loss and resentments built from years of understanding tumble out. But it’s hopeful, uplifting almost, because this is not the end. It’s a start. It’s very clear that, having finally said what they are really feeling, the extended family can move in a way that was impossible at the start. That they are closer now than ever. Hortense is the agent of positivity, and Leigh’s film closes with a quiet scene with Roxanne that suggests they have every chance of forming a warm, genuine, relationship.

Secrets and Lies is a superb film, a masterclass observation and domestic near-tragedy, powered by extraordinary performances of lived-in reality from the actors, that carries emotional strength but also has a rich vein of hope running through it. It is one of Leigh’s masterpieces.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Luscious visuals, hilarious gags mix with an air of sadness and regret in Wes Anderson’s masterpiece

Director: Wes Anderson

Cast: Ralph Fiennes (M. Gustav), Tony Revolori (Zero), F. Murray Abraham (Mr Moustafa), Mathieu Amalric (Serge X), Adrien Brody (Dmitri), Willem Dafoe (Jopling), Jeff Goldblum (Deputy Kovacs), Harvey Keitel (Ludwig), Jude Law (Young Writer), Bill Murray (M. Ivan), Edward Norton (Inspector Henckels), Saoirse Ronan (Agatha), Jason Schwartzman (M. Jean), Léa Seydoux (Clotilde), Tilda Swinton (Madame D), Tom Wilkinson (Author), Owen Wilson (M. Chuck)

I wrote recently I could forgive the flaws I’ve found in Kurosawa’s work, for the majesty of Seven Samurai. I can totally say the same again for Wes Anderson. He is a director I’ve sometimes found quirky, mannered and artificial – but God almighty he deserves a place in the pantheon for directing a film as near to perfection as The Grand Budapest Hotel, a delight from start to finish, as beautiful to look at as it is whipper-snap funny, as heart-warming to bathe in as it is coldly, sadly bittersweet. After three viewings I can say it is, without a doubt, a masterpiece.

Like many Wes Anderson films, its storyline is eccentric, halfway between fantasy and absurdity. In 1932, in an opulent hotel, The Grand Budapest, concierge Monsieur Gustav (Ralph Fiennes) is the pinnacle of his trade: precise, fastidious, perfectionist, he can fix anything anywhere – opera tickets, the perfect table placement and a night of passion at any time for the elderly widows who visit his hotel. When one of them, Madame D (Tilda Swinton) dies leaving him a priceless painting, Boy with Apple he suddenly finds himself framed for her murder. Only his ingenuity, and the dedicated help of his protégé, best friend and surrogate brother/son, lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori) will save him.

You can’t escape on the first viewing that The Grand Budapest Hotel is an extraordinarily funny film. Crammed with superb one-liners, it’s a showcase for a breathtakingly, blissfully funny performance from Ralph Fiennes whose comic timing is exquisite and whose mastery of the perfectly structured monologue of flowery language is as spot-on as his ability to deliver a crude punch-line. Anderson fills the film with clever sight-gags, bounce and a supreme sense of fun. You’ll laugh out loud (I frequently do, and I remember most of the gags) and wind back to watch them again.

But what lifts this is the wonderfully evocative, elegiac piece this beautiful film is. For all its comic zip, it unfolds in a romanticised past already a relic in 1932. We can’t escape the rise of Fascism that fills the film. Jack-booted soldiers accost and hunt Gustav and Zero. Adrien Brody’s furious heir to Madame D looks like a Gestapo officer, and his vicious heavy Jopling (Willem Dafoe so weathered, he looks like he’s been beaten by a carpet duster) has a stormtrooper menace. En route to Madame D’s funeral, Zero is nearly dragged off the train to be lynched by fascist thugs for being an immigrant and The Grand Budapest is taken over by this dreadful movement, filled with Mussolini-inspired ZZ insignia and blackshirts.

Under the jokes, the world Gustav represents has already died and been buried. We are never allowed to forget we are marching, inexorably, towards a very real-world war that will rip apart this fictional country and leave millions dead. Gustav’s gentile old-school charm ended with 1920s: and he sort of knows it. Fiennes, under the suaveness, conveys a man who falls back into potty language when he can no longer maintain his assured confidence that a straight-backed, polite assurance will solve any problem or a poetic reflection will allow them to put any unpleasantness behind them. Those days are gone and it makes for a deep, rich vein of sadness just under the surface.

It’s particularly acute because it’s made clear this is a memory piece. Anderson constructs the film like a memory box. It has no less than three framing devices. It opens and closes with a young woman in 2014 visiting a monument to a great writer, the author of the book The Grand Budapest Hotel. From there we flash back to the author (a droll Tom Wilkinson) in 1985 recounting how he met the man who inspired the novel, before heading again to a flashback to the 1960s where the young author (Jude Law) meets the man we discover is an older Zero (F Murray Abraham) who recounts the story we then watch. Each layer of the film descends deeper into Anderson’s artificial, carefully structured visual style, with its heightened sense of reality.

Old Zero – beautifully played by F. Murray Abraham – is introduced as a man of acute loneliness and sadness, who tells us early on the woman his young self loves, Agatha (a radiant Saoirse Ronan) will die and shuffles around the nearly abandoned The Grand Budapest (now a concrete nightmare of Communist architecture) with only his memories for comfort. No matter how jovial and bright the events of the 1930s are, we can’t forget that these are the reflections of a man full of regrets.

When old Zero’s narration turns to remembering Agatha, the lights around him dim: Agatha even enters the narrative almost by the side door: Gustav is arrested and imprisoned before she appears, along with a series of flashbacks-within-flashbacks to Zero and her meeting and her first meeting with Gustav, as if Zero had to steel himself to remember her (as reflected in Abraham’s tear-stained face). Later, when remembering the fates of Gustav (his best friend) and Agatha (the love of his life) he almost draws a veil over it (even their final scenes in flashback play out in monochrome). There is a deep, moving sense of humanity here, a powerful thread of grief that adds immense richness.

But don’t forget this is also a funny film! Anderson is an inventive visual and narrative director at the best of times, and here every single beat of his playful style pays off in spades. The entire 1930s section of the film (the overwhelming bulk of the narrative) plays out in 4:3 ratio, which to many other directors would be restrictive, but seems a perfect fit for a director who often composes his visuals with the skill of an expert cartoonist. The frame is frequently filled in every direction when within the grandeur of the hotel, but then feels marvellously restrictive for Gustav’s prison cell or the train compartments that seem to constantly carry Zero and him to disaster.

Anderson’s wonderfully precise camera movements also reach their zenith here. His camera is deceptively static, often placed in a series of perfectly staged compositions that places the characters at their heart, frequently looking at us. But then the camera will turn – frequently in a fluid single-plain ninety degrees to reveal a new image of character. There are Steadicam tracking shots that are a dream to watch. It’s combined with some truly astounding model shots (parts of the set are not-even-disguised animated models and miniatures, adding to the sense of fantasia) and the detail of every inch of the design (astounding work from Adam Stockhausen and Anna Pinnock) is perfection. The film is an opulent visual delight.

It’s a film of belly laughs and then moments of haunting sadness. But also, a wonderful celebration of friendship. The bond between Gustav and Zero is profound, natural and deeply moving – grounded, fittingly, in adversity from the agents of a hostile, oppressive state – and carries real emotional force. Newcomer Tony Revolori is hugely endearing as naïve but brave Zero, making his way in this new world (fitting the theme, he left his homeland after his family was destroyed by war) and sparks superbly with Fiennes and Ronan.

There is a wonderful beating heart in The Grand Budapest Hotel, amongst the farce, perfectly timed gags and cheekiness, that makes it a rich film you can luxuriate in. Anderson’s direction is faultless, Fiennes is a breathtaking revelation, both hilarious, affronted, decent and fighting the good fight. Gorgeous to look at, thought-provoking and laugh-out loud funny it’s a dream of a film.

Pickpocket (1959)

Bresson’s fascinating message of hope, simply but superbly deconstructs the addiction of a life of crime

Director: Robert Bresson

Cast: Martin Lasalle (Michel), Marika Green (Jeanne), Jean Pelegri (Police Inspector), Dolly Scal (Michel’s mother), Pierre Leymarie (Jacques), Kassagi (First Accomplice), Pierre Etaix (Second Accomplice), Cesar Cattegno (Inspector)

A man watches with fixed eyes, breathless and tense, as another man’s hands artfully dodge out from beneath his newspaper to caress the lapels of his fellow train passenger, coming away with a wallet clasped between the folds of his paper. It has a clammy sense of the illicit, a tempting underbelly of the world, where the normal rules don’t apply and the special can take advantage of others because they deserve the world’s benefits more. It’s about being a pickpocket, but it could be about any shadowy world just under what society permits, where the attraction is being part of the club more than any of the actual awards from the act.

No wonder pickpocket Michel (Martin Lasalle) starts to believe his own pumped-up hype: he’s no ordinary man, but a superman, an uber-mensch who has a right to help himself to the gains of others. Getting caught? It will never happen: after all just fools and little people stumble into that trap. Instead, Michel walks through the streets of Paris with the fixed glare of the addict, who can’t wait for his next stealing fix. He’ll take from anyone (even his own mother), ignore the pleas of friends, taunt a police inspector and hoard his gains in a secret nook under his bed. Even the glances that come his way from the daughter of his mother’s landlord, Jeanne (Marika Green), can’t win him away from his longing for the buzz of crime.

Bresson’s perfectly formed novella of a film (it clocks in at a trim 74 minutes) turns this into a profound journey into one man’s soul, where he will constantly dance between temptation and redemption. Loosely inspired by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (the criminal who thinks he is a better man, the police officer he engages in a battle of wits), Bresson uses this underlying idea to craft a profound, articulate and focused study of the emptiness behind indulging our worst instincts.

Because that’s what Michel is doing. He’s clearly smart enough to find a proper job, casting aside the offers of his friend Jacques to fix him up. But he can’t raise the passion for a normal life. Bresson, whose style embraced the rawness of unnatural performers, almost literally plucked Martin Lasalle from the streets. Carefully tutored by Bresson, all artificial effects were hammered out of him, leaving Lasalle a blank and exact performer. It works perfectly for Bresson’s concept of the criminal as a dysfunctional human, unable to relate to or understand others, unable to engage in the world, coming to life for his crimes and plodding through the rest of time with monotony and a striking lack of emotional engagement. (It admittedly works less well for those scenes where Lasalle must demonstrate emotion, which he plays with a mechanical dutifulness.)

Michel can’t bring himself to see his dying mother, dropping money off with Jeanne to pass over for him (money, it later transpires, he had stolen from her in any case). His friendship with Jacques sees him go blandly through the emotions. We constantly see him trudging up and down stairs, opening and closing his door, moving his few possessions around, all of it with clockwork regularity that seems relentless. He falls in with fellow pickpockets but doesn’t even learn their names. The most he ever seems engaged is during his sly exchanges with a police inspector (avuncular Jean Pelegri) who seems certain he’s a thief.

Perhaps Michel is so relatively animated in these exchanges because he’s desperate to be caught. Because how can you be a superman, if no one can really see what you are doing? The bitter irony is, your genius for theft can only be publicly acknowledged by being caught, the greatest failure of any thief. But Michel longs, in some part of himself, for recognition, praise and to stand-out. His life – in a grimy bedsit, wearing the same ill-fitting suit (which hangs about him, as if exaggerating his blankness) – is strikingly un-special. His best attribute as a pickpocket is that he’s a non-entity you wouldn’t look at twice. Is there a bigger slap in the face for the man who would be king, that his greatest strength is his ability to not be seen?

It must be particularly harsh, as Bresson makes clear Michel isn’t even a particularly adept pickpocket. He fluffs his first few attempts, his heart pounding so much that he can’t bring about the steady hands needed. His early crimes are clumsy and ineffective. At a race meet that opens the film, he filches cash from a lady’s handbag and only a lack of evidence saves him when he is immediately picked up. When he is finally found by his expert accomplice (played by real-life thief, and master of sleight-of-hand, Kassagi), his crude techniques are ruthlessly exposed.

This would-be superman never reaches the heights of Kassagi. Bresson’s shooting of the pickpocket’s crimes are edited like the greatest heist thrillers, tense moments of balletic beauty. We see hands carefully unbutton jackets from behind. Wallets knocked out of pockets and caught as they slide down a person’s body. Wrists are clasped and stroked as watches are removed. The pickpockets work in a team of three: one takes the wallet, passes it to a second who palms it instantly to a third who escapes. All this is caught by Bresson with all the grace of Gene Kelly. It’s exciting, dynamic – and also (you can’t escape it) sensual. You can see why Michel gets such a thrill out of it.

But he’s also the least of his team of three – and when the other two get nicked, he really should take the hint. He practises at length to make his fingers more supple, his ability to grasp watches and wallets more fluid. But his movements are never quite graceful enough, his face always a little too sweaty, his eyes flicking a little too much as if worried about being caught in an assignation. Later he travels to London but returns penniless, too inept to keep hold of his cash from card-sharps.

Bresson’s film reaches, gently but highly effectively, for a spiritual message. What joy or grace is there for Michel? Crime and the dreams of being someone special fill a void in his life. That void has no room for friends or family. Not even for God, who he’s touched by “for three minutes” at his mother’s funeral. Even the (to us) evident love of Jeanne can’t really touch him enough to change his ways. Or at least, perhaps not until he hits rock bottom where, like Paul on the road to Damascus, he will have a sudden vision, trapped behind bars, that life can be different.

To give that impact, Bresson has to show (and understand) the lurid temptation of a life beyond the rules and the norms. Pickpocketing was his tool – and it perfectly conveys the addictive glamour of feeling superior to others – but really it could have been the buzz of any addiction, the thieves hunting each other out with the knowing eyes of fellow addicts. These sensual delights are false though, engaging and absorbing as they are. Told without melodrama, it’s a stunning, hard-boiled thriller that ripens into a profound, subtle and intelligent parable, assembled with a cool, exact genius that makes filmmaking look simple.

All This and Heaven Too (1940)

Illicit romance, murder, scandal… it should all be so much more exciting than this film makes it

Director: Anatole Litvak

Cast: Bette Davis (Henriette Deluzy-Desportes), Charles Boyer (Duke Charles de-Praslin), Barbara O’Neil (Fanny Sebastiani de-Praslin), June Lockhart (Isabelle de Choiseul-Praslin), Virginia Weidler (Louise de Choiseul-Praslin), Jeffrey Lynn (Reverend Henry Martin Field), George Coulouris (Charpentier, Harry Davenport (Pierre), Montagu Love (Army General Horace Sebastiani), Helen Westley (Mme LeMarie), Henry Daniell (Broussais)

In the 1840s, Henriette (Bette Davis) arrives as governess at the home of the Count de-Praslin (Charles Boyer). She’s calm, collected, patient and caring: in short she’s everything that the count’s wife Fanny (Barbara O’Neil) is not, and it doesn’t take the count long to work it out. With Henriette swiftly becoming a second mother to his four children, the count and Henriette find themselves falling, unspokenly, in love. But Fanny isn’t fooled – and neither is the gutter press – and as scandal brews, the count takes drastic action to stop his wife, leading to a legal case that will shock France.

All This, and Heaven Too was conceived as a sweeping romance to rival Gone with the Wind. Money was lavishly splashed on sets and costumes (Bette Davis has no fewer than 37 costumes in the film, averaging at one every five minutes). Based on a famous murder case – that some felt had contributed towards the anti-monarchy atmosphere that led to the revolution of 1848 – All This, and Heaven Too had everything on paper to challenge Gone with the Wind in romance stakes. So why doesn’t it?

There is something too restrained, too slow and controlled about the film. It’s overlong – the original cut was over three hours, reduced to 2 hours 20 minutes – and takes a very long time to get going. The two stars underplay very effectively – with Davis cast very successfully against type as a mousey, rather timid Jane Eyre-ish figure – but it also means that the sort of grand romance the film is aiming for never quite takes fire, for all the careful shots of burning flames between the two lovers as they discuss their romantic predicaments in roundabout terms.

Litvak’s film saddles itself with a framing device that, while accurate to the real-life story, adds very little. The film opens with Henriette teaching children in America – children who have no respect for her, having heard whispers of her scandalous past – which leads into her telling the story to them (and us) about her past. The film returns to this framing device at the end, but as a whole it provides very little insight or interest to the core thrust of the film’s action. The film also wastes time on Jeffrey Lynn’s Reverend (Heinrette’s future husband), a relationship that seems largely in there to absolve Henriette of any possible indirect responsibility for the murder (she can’t be a hussy, she marries a man of the cloth!).

A large chunk of the film is designed to minimise what was a major scandal that rocked French society. This was a (possible) sexual affair between an unhappily married aristocrat and the governess to his children. It culminated in the countess being stabbed and beaten to death and her blood-stained husband found on the scene, claiming he had fought and chased away an intruder (which, writing it down, is basically the plot of The Fugitive). He never confessed, but committed suicide via arsenic in prison a few months later. Henriette was arrested as an accessory (presumably for encouraging the count to kill his wife) but released.

This should have been racy, racy stuff – but the film shies away from it. It’s probably linked to the expectation that the Hays Code would never accept the idea of Henriette as an adulteress who never goes unpunished. The possible Therese Raquin style set-up is instead translated into a more Jane Eyre model, with the employer in love but the servant too noble to act on her feelings and expose herself to disgrace. The film does pull no punches in making clear that the count committed the crime (the camera zooming in on Boyer’s starring eyes as he advances on his pleading wife) but since he was always destined to meet a historical punishment (he helpfully absolves Henriette on his deathbed) there were no concerns there.

All This, and Heaven Too can’t have a passionate, lusty drama so it avoids any overt spark between Boyer and Davis. Both actors play this unspoken attraction extremely well, but the film has to work overtime to get drama out of their several scenes of standing carefully apart or side-by-side, talking about everything except their own feelings. Boyer, as ever, is first class: his expressive eyes and beautiful ability to listen and react is as perfect for an unspoken romance, as it is for a man who becomes convinced murder is his only escape. Davis’ meeker, Joan Fontainesque role suits her extremely well, even if it disappoints those expecting fireworks.

Those fireworks come from Barbara O’Neil instead, raving and unreasonable as a woman driven to the edge by this semi-imagined affair, in an energetic performance that gained one of the film’s three Oscar nominations. But the film’s strange momentum affects her too: she is left to repeatedly hit the same notes over again, as the film repeats its established set-up over and over for 90 minutes before she is murdered (then squashes everything connected to the historical scandal and the murder trial into the final 40 minutes).

It’s productions standards are high and it’s well shot by Gone with the Wind cameraman Ernest Haller. There is some beautiful use of shadows and several ball scenes are expanded with some gorgeous use of mirrors. It ticks many of the boxes you expect a period romance to have, but is fatally hampered by its caution and by its restrictive narrative choices. It ends up feeling long and drifts too often through its build-up, forcing it to rush its pay-off. All of this contributes to its lack of challenge to GWTW in the romance stakes.

Triangle of Sadness (2022)

Östlund’s super-rich satire lines up straight-forward targets to easily knock down

Director: Ruben Östlund

Cast: Harris Dickinson (Carl), Charlbi Dean (Yaya), Dolly de Leon (Abigail), Zlatko Burić (Dimitry), Iris Berben (Therese), Vicki Berlin (Paula), Henrik Dorsin (Jarmo), Woody Harrelson (Captain Thomas Smith), Alicia Eriksson (Alicia), Jean-Christophe Folly (Nelson), Amanda Walker (Clementine), Oliver Ford Davies (Winston), Sunnyi Melles (Vera)

In my review of The Square, Östlund’s previous Palme d’Or winner, I described its targets as “so obvious, the entire film might as well be footage of fish being shot in barrels”. If only I’d known: Triangle of Sadness, his satire on the super-rich, takes this to the Nth degree: it’s an entire film of Östlund spraying machine gun bullets into an aquarium of drugged fish. That’s not to say there ain’t good jokes in here and several of its sequences are cheeky, engaging and funny. It’s well-made and high quality: but it’s also obvious and is in a such a rush to make its oh-so-clever satirical points that it frequently blunts its own impact.

The film revolves around a luxury cruise liner. On board: the self-obsessed, selfish, greedy representatives of the world’s oligarchs. A Russian who repeatedly amuses himself by bragging that he sells “shit” (fertiliser), a Danish app builder who splashes his cash, a married couple of British arms-traders who jovially bemoan how UN restriction on landmines made for tough financial years… you get the idea. Also on board: Instagram influencer supermodel Yaya (Charlbi Dean) and her insecure male model boyfriend Carl (Harris Dickinson). All of them treat the staff like slaves. But when the ship sinks after a storm and an attack by Somali pirates, the surviving passengers find they entirely lack the skills needed to survive on an island, unlike toilet-cleaner Abigail (Dolly de Leon) who rockets from the bottom to the top of the social hierarchy.

Östlund’s film lays into the emptiness, greed and selfishness of the super-rich with glee, even if it hardly tells us anything we don’t already know. The rich are only interested in their own needs and can only see others as tools for their own pleasure: who knew? Wanting to expand his satirical targets even further, Östlund also takes a pop at the social media generation. Apparently, they are shallow and interested only in commodifying their own lives. Who knew? It’s the sort of stuff that makes for a punchy student revue, but you want something a little bit more challenging that moves above cheap shots from a Palme d’Or winner.

In many ways the film’s most interesting section (and most subtle ideas) take place before we even reach the boat. The film’s first chapter exclusively follows Carl and Yaya. Carl auditions for a modelling job where he’s treated like a piece of meat (hilariously they mutter about him needing botox). At a fashion show, staff pleasantly demand three people move out of their seats to make way for VIPS – who immediately ask for one more seat. Everyone shuffles along one (the camera following this with a neat tracking shot), leaving Carl seatless. This is a more subtle commentary on the self-obsessive focus of the super-rich than anything that follows.

Carl and Yaya are in an interesting position: they are both part of the beautiful super-rich and not (they don’t have any money). That early act opener balloons from a disagreement over who pays for a meal into Carl inarticulately arguing for sexual-equality and mutual partnerships that defy gender roles. It’s more interesting than almost anything that follows, because it’s multi-layered and raises genuine issues we all face (to varying degrees).

But the film abandons multi-layered the second it steps foot on the boat. There are fun set pieces. Carl unwittingly gets a pool attendant fired because he’s jealous of Yaya’s admiration for his topless body. The staff on the boat gee themselves up for days of enthusiastic deference with a tip-expectant-group-chant. A Russian lady demands the staff all swim in the sea so they can have as much fun as she is having (and to show how ‘normal’ she is). The film’s most infamous set-piece occurs as a storm coincides with the captain’s dinner (with the fish courses under-cooked due to the aforementioned obligatory staff swim) leading to nearly all the passengers projectile vomiting across the state room, then sliding around the floors of the swaying ship in their own filth.

Amusing as that can be in its guignol excess, it tells you how subtle the film is. The film is awash with obvious, lazy jokes – of course the polite arms trading couple are called Winston and Clementine! To hammer home the social issues the film whacks us over the head with, the Captain (an awkward performance from Woody Harrelson) an alcoholic Marxist spends the storm pissed in his cabin, reading Noam Chomsky and his own anti-capitalist ravings over the ship’s tannoy. This takes up a huge amount of screen-time and manages to be both obvious and not very funny.

The film enjoys taking these pot-shots so much, it ends up feeling rushed when we arrive at the island. If we had seen more of Dolly de Leon’s Abigail earlier in the film (in actuality, the film sidelines her as much as the characters do, barely allowing her more than a minute of screentime in its first hour), the shift in social hierarchy would have carried more impact. If Östlund’s film had more patience to show the passengers expectation that shipwrecked life would be identical to that on the boat, then Abigail taking charge after a few days that would have carried more impact. Instead, Abigail takes command from arrival, and then essentially behaves (in a way I’m not sure the film quite understands) with exactly the same self-entitled greed as the passengers did. She takes the best cabin, establishes a hierarchy, keeps most of the food and turns Carl into a sex toy.

Because we’ve not really seen Abigail earlier in the film, we don’t get a sense of her earlier mistreatment (really, most of the film would have been better told from her point-of-view) or join her satisfaction at the tables being turned. The film also exhausts its commentary on the super-rich leaving it with little to say about in its third act Lord of the Flies set-up. Instead, the film dawdles its way to a conclusion and cliffhanger ending that feels unearned.

It makes you regret the loss of its earlier more subtle commentary on Instagrammers Carl and Yaya (good performances from Harris Dickinson and the tragically late Charlbi Dean) who are drowning-not-waving in a world where they must commodify their bodies but have no power over them, struggling to work-out where they fit in a world. It throws this overboard to go for some (admittedly at times funny) gags about greed and very obvious social commentary. If it had committed to its social underclass uprising earlier – or carried on with its more subtle themes from the opening prologue – it would have been a better film. Instead it’s as subtle and probing as the faceful of vomit it serves up halfway through.

Strangers on a Train (1951)

A man accidentally agrees to a murderous exchange in Hitchcock’s tense, seductive thriller

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Farley Granger (Guy Haines), Ruth Roman (Anne Morton), Robert Walker (Bruno Antony), Leo G. Carroll (Senator Morton), Patricia Hitchcock (Barbara Morton), Kasey Rogers (Miriam Joyce Haines), Marion Lorne (Mrs Antony), Jonathan Hale (Mr Antony), Howard St John (Captain Turley)

Two men meet on a train: Tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) and entitled playboy Bruno Antony (Robert Walker). They chat awkwardly, possibly because Guy is too polite to tell Bruno to sod off and leave him alone. They both have problems: Guy can’t marry his girlfriend, Senator’s daughter Anne Morton (Ruth Roman) because his trampy wife Miriam (Kasey Rogers) won’t give him a divorce; Bruno longs to escape from the shadow of his controlling dad. Then Bruno makes a suggestion: he’ll dispatch Miriam and Guy can kill his father. No-one will suspect a thing, as neither man has a motive. Criss Cross. Guy shakes hands and forgets all about it: until Bruno murders his wife and demands quid pro quo.

Hitchcock’s dread was to be arrested for a crime he did not commit. As a young boy, his father sent him down to the local police station with a note instructing him to locked up for a few hours to teach him a lesson. The horror stayed with Hitchcock for his whole life. Strangers on a Train was one of his best explorations of this concept (with the twist that the hero secretly wanted to but wouldn’t of course), and desperately attempts to prove his innocence and stop the psychopath he’s accidentally commissioned.

It’s a dream of a concept from Patricia Highsmith’s novel, superbly assembled into a tense thriller, where questions of whodunnit are (as so often in Hitchcock) irrelevant, with the real suspense coming from how the hero is going to get himself out of his predicament. That horrific predicament is masterfully assembled by Hitchcock into a series of striking set-pieces and shots, all of which carefully build a sense of being trapped in a terrible, oppressive nightmare as Guy realises there is no escape from the expectant glare of Bruno, determined that he fulfil his side of the bargain.

Bruno haunts Guy like a phantom. Guy sees him standing in front of an empty Lincoln memorial, Hitchcock shooting Walker like a distant black smear on the pristine white background. At a tennis match, Bruno sits fixedly starring at Guy, while every other face moves from side to side around him. Bruno inveigles his way into the home of Guy’s would-be fiancée and cheerfully sends him instructions on the best time and method for dispatching his father. The world seems to close around Guy – he’s framed through grills, trapped in rooms, never in control of his own destiny.

Bruno is relentless in his pursuit – and that feels like the right word for it – of Guy. It’s a superb performance from Robert Walker as this sexually ambiguous psychopath, chillingly amoral, fixated on his own desires and unrelenting in his sinister obsessions. Walker’s charisma and slimy, insinuating charm dominate the movie – he’s bizarrely sympathetic, so honest is he in his carefree sociopathy – and makes a great contrast with Granger. Here Hitchcock used the weakness of an actor to splendid effect. Original choice William Holden would never have been so meek and awkward talking with Bruno on a train: Granger, a less strong performer, utterly convinces as someone so inept at removing himself from an unwanted conversation he accidentally commits to murder.

The meeting between the two men on the train drips with homoerotic tension. It plays pretty much like a pick-up, Bruno smoothly working his way from sitting opposite Guy, to sitting next to him, to sharing dinner with him. Hitchcock introduces the two of them with tracking shots of their very differently shoed feet walking to a train, until they accidentally touch feet. Later a lounging Bruno stretches out his feet to touch Guy’s once more. Bruno essentially seduces Guy, Guy’s flustered awkwardness at least as much connected to a sort of sexual confusion as it is to the strange social interaction. Walker’s performance has a seductive purr and a beautiful delicate, feminine precision.

Not that it stops him committing murder. The killing of Miriam (wonderfully played with a slutty charm by Kasey Rogers) sees Bruno again as stalker, only this time with murder in mind. He prowls behind Miriam – dragging two horny lads along – as she moves through a fairground, keeping his distance but constantly catching her eye. Hitchcock tracks these flirtatious glances – this really is murder by seduction – and Bruno impresses her like a would-be lover with his prowess at the strong-man bell. It’s a dance, the two of them drifting down a tunnel in boats, one after the other.

And it culminates in an intimate killing by strangulation. Hitchcock uses a virtuoso shot: we watch the killing of Miriam reflected in the lens of her fallen oversized glasses, Bruno bearing down over her until she disappears. The perverse sexual excitement Bruno feels over the killing creeps into his fascination with Anne’s sister Barbara (played, for extra perverse points, by Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia) who wears similar glasses to Miriam. Bruno stares at her with dreadful, tingling excitement and eventually loses control of himself miming out strangulation on a guest at the Morton’s house, swept up in the thrill of it.

Of course, Guy is far too straight-laced (in every sense) to get to wrapped up in Bruno’s plot. (Rather different from Highsmith, where his equivalent character regretfully but willingly upholds his part of the bargain.) The film overplays its hand slightly as it heads into the denouement with an overextended tennis match intercut with Bruno attempting to retrieve Guy’s lighter from a drain (where he has dropped it, en route to planting it at the murder scene). It pulls it back though with a final fight on a wildly speeding-out-of-control carousel (just the right side of ridiculous).

The film is littered with little references to doubles and dark shadows and is a superbly constructed thrill ride by Hitchcock. Granger’s weaknesses as a performer are surprisingly well suited to his role, although Hitchcock failed to hide his lack of regard for Ruth Roman in a weakly written role. The film gets a superb dark momentum from Robert Walker’s marvellous performance and Hitchcock shoots it with a brilliantly unsettling stalkerish eye, with Bruno’s trailing of each of his targets tinged with a dark sexuality beneath the malicious intent. With good reason, Hitchcock called this his “first American movie” and it kickstarted a run of hits.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

A small town family is corrupted by a malign force in Hitchcock’s favourite of his films

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Teresa Wright (Charlie Newton), Joseph Cotton (Uncle Charlie Oakley), Macdonald Carey (Detective Jack Graham), Henry Travers (Joseph Newton), Patricia Collinge (Emma Newton), Wallace Ford (Detective Fred Saunders), Hume Cronyn (Herbie Hawkins), Edna May Wonacott (Ann Newton), Charles Bates (Roger Newton)

It’s a surprise to discover Shadow of a Doubt was Hitchcock’s favourite of his films (although the Master of Suspense was a notorious kidder). It rarely makes even the top ten of Great Hitchcock’s and for years was semi-forgotten in his CV. But delve into this small-town chiller and it becomes less of a surprise the master was so fond of it. Hitchcock’s first American-set film (his previous American films being British-set), this takes an idyllic, everyone-knows-your-name, no-doors-locked small town in California and injects into the middle of it a ruthless sociopath, as charming as he is shockingly ruthless. Doesn’t that sound like Hitchcock all over?

That small-town is Santa Rosa in California. There the Newton family is thrilled at the imminent arrival of Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotton) from New York. None more so than his niece Charlie (Teresa Wright), a precocious teenager who shares her uncle’s wit and worldly wisdom. He arrives laden with gifts – but also dragging two police detectives and swirling rumours of terrible crimes. Surely Uncle Charlie – hero to all and idol of his niece – can’t also be the ruthless “Merry Widow” killer, dispatching aged widows for their riches? And, if he is, what on earth will Charlie do about it?

A lot of what would become Hitchcock’s central concerns in his later, darker, mature works make their inaugural appearance in this dark, creeping mystery. Everything in the Newton home is perfect, until they welcome Charlie, whose amiable greed and self-interest tarnishes everything he touches. Despite this, he’s the most likeable, charismatic, charming character in the film. So much so, a big part of us wills him not to be the murderer we can all be pretty confident he is. He’s far too exciting and dynamic for us to want him torn away from us!

The two Charlies are close – so much so Hitchcock would surely have dialled up the incestuous spark between them even further if he had made the film fifteen years later. They have a near supernatural mental bond, seemingly able to predict where and when the other might be. They laugh and flirt. In arguments Uncle Charlie grasps his niece like a frustrated lover, clutching her too him. As well as sharing many character traits (implying it would be easy for Charlie to become like Uncle Charlie) they’re closeness feels as much like a courtship as it does familial closeness. When Uncle Charlie takes Charlie to a gin bar to gain her confidence and support to hide from the cops, the entire scene feels like the appeal of a would-be lover.

It overlaps another theme future Hitchcock have taken further: the thin line between innocence and killer. Uncle Charlie and his namesake have a special bond. They share the same world-view and many of the same ideas. They’re both charismatic and natural leaders. They both feel stifled by this small-town world. They are both ruthlessly determined when roused. One of them might be innocent and one might be good – but how much of a push would it be to turn one into the other?

Hitchcock probes this possibility throughout in a film stuffed with doubles and duality. Both Charlies are introduced with similar shots of them lying in bed, being questioned by others. Later Uncle Charlie will inherit Charlie’s room in the house. Greeting each other at the station, they move towards each with mirroring shots. They share the same name. Twins, doubles, mirrors and the number two abound in the film – a marvellous blog here captures this all in far more detail and insight than I could here.

Uncle Charlie slithers into Santa Rosa like the serpent into the garden of Eden. He offers temptation left, right and centre. The Newton family receive lavish (stolen) gifts. His brother-in-law’s bank gets a investment from the cash Uncle Charlie carries around (he’s old fashioned you see). He laughs and jokes, reminds Charlie’s mother of the joys of her past and inveigles himself into the heart of the family (he even sits at the head of the table). But he’s also a dark, sinister figure, frequently framed at the top of staircases, marching inexorably towards camera and (in one stand out moment) breaking the fourth wall to address us directly while coldly, contemptuously outlining his theory about the pointless burden useless lives have on the rest of us.

He’s played with a charismatic, cold-hearted, jovial wickedness by Joseph Cotton. Cotton is so good as this on-the-surface amiable man, with a soul devoid of any love, it you’ll wish he’d got parts like this more often. Liberated from playing decent best-friends, Cotton dominates the film with a malignant charisma, married with a growing only-just-concealed desperation at the fragility of his fate. Opposite him, Teresa Wright is marvellous as a young woman who finds her sense of morality fully awakened into outrage by this dark presence corrupting everything in her life.

Corruption is central to Shadow of a Doubt – no wonder Hitchcock loved it – with Uncle Charlie turning everything in the simple, honest town into something darker and tainted by his very presence. There is an almost cliched home-spun decency about the town (almost as if co-writer Thornton Wilder was parodying his Our Town), serving to make Uncle Charlie’s modern sociopathy even more of a destructive force.

Shadow of a Doubt is directed with immense care, but a great deal with subtle flourish. Staircase shots abound, to stress sinister motivations, positions of weakness and unease. Characters lurch towards the camera frequently, as if the whole film was hunting us down. An air of menace, lies and danger builds inexorably as Uncle Charlie’s true-nature leaks out. There is also wit: not least from Charlie’s father (a jovial Henry Travers) and eccentric neighbour (a scene-stealing Hume Cronyn) gleefully discussing true crime throughout. There is also Hitchcock’s love of irony, not least in the fact Charlies problems are largely caused by his attempts to conceal a newspaper article that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.

Hitchcock makes his cameo early on as a card player on a train journey. He’s revealed to be holding all the trumps. That’s how he likes it: and perhaps explains his fondness for Shadow of a Doubt. Low key but perfectly constructed, it’s a film that latches onto themes of corruption, dark temptation and ruthless violence. Film logic abounds – who cares that the detective’s investigation is so inept they’d never be employed again – and the second half is crammed with murder attempts as unsubtle as they are ingeniously dark. Shadow of a Doubt feels like a prototype for darker themes of obsession and temptation Hitchcock would explore in the future. Perhaps that’s why he was so fond of it: it’s where he started to spread his wings.

Seven Samurai (1954)

Superb, archetypal action-adventure men-on-a-mission film: Kurosawa’s masterpiece, brave, bold and thrilling film-making

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Toshiro Mifune (Kikuchiyo), Takashi Shimura (Kambei Shimada), Daisuke Katō (Shichirōji), Isao Kimura (Katsushirō Okamoto), Minoru Chiaki (Heihachi Hayashida), Seiji Miyaguchi (Kyūzō), Yoshio Inaba (Gorōbei Katayama), Yoshio Tsuchiya (Rikichi), Bokuzen Hidari (Yohei), Yukiko Shimazaki (Rikichi’s wife), Kamatari Fujiwara (Manzō), Keiko Tsushima (Shino), Kokuten Kōdō (Gisaku)

I’ve often been a Kurosawa sceptic. But it’s hard to stay critical, when he made a masterpiece as near perfect as Seven Samurai. It’s one of those films that is long (the favoured cut is nearly three and a half hours) but never once drags. Kurosawa directs with such intelligence, skill and pace, you can’t help but be swept up in it. It’s one of the finest action epics ever made, but also has a rich vein of sadness and melancholy. After all, the samurai may fight the good fight, but they always lose.

In the sixteenth century, a farming village is under-threat from a bandits, rogue samurai turned ronin, who plan to steal the harvest. To protect themselves, the village elder (Kokuten Kōdō) declares they need samurai of their own (and since the farmers have little to offer, they better “hire hungry samurai”). They recruit a team of seven, led by experienced Kambei (Takashi Shimura), who accepts out of nobility. Among the team is wild-card peasant-turned-wannabe-Samurai Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune). The seven arrive in the village and prepare for battle: but, even when working together, no one ever completely forgets the rigid societal boundaries of Japanese culture.

Seven Samurai is a wonderful character study, a sublime action film and complex and engaging exploration of Japanese history and society. It also has a perfect three act structure, it’s run time expertly divided into the samurai’s recruitment, preparation and defence of the village. This careful construction counters that epic run time – each act tells an almost self-contained story, meaning the film’s momentum never slackens.

It’s bought together by a director making a perfect fusion between Japanese cinema and his American and European influences. Kurosawa had never been shy about his admiration for directors like Ford and Hawks. You see elements of cowboy flicks throughout: from the set-up of the villagers as homesteaders, the samurai as the cavalry and the rogue ronin as the Indians, down to sweeping camera shots and vistas straight from Ford (the kinetic energy of Stagecoach is surely an influence). His Western influences always made Kurosawa more digestible than (for example) Ozu.

Seven Samurai is an also electric employment of Eisenstein style techniques of skilful editing, dissolves, fast cutting and an embracing of the language of cinema. Kurosawa accentuates action with slow motion: when Kambei dispatches a bandit (in his superb introduction scene), the body falls seemingly forever, death building in impact. Zoom cuts introduce locations, bringing us closer and closer to events. Kurosawa shot the battles with three cameras (a master and two roving cameras) allowing him to capture the kinetic action of his rain-soaked finale. Brilliant montages introduce concepts, characters and themes. It’s a masterclass.

It’s also masterful at quickly sketching character. We know from his first introduction – a brilliant cold-open fifteen minutes or so into the film – that Kambei is a man of both shrewd tactical awareness and puts duty before superficial pride, by his willingness to shave his hair so he can pass as a monk to rescue a child. (The gasps of those watching say it all at this willing acceptance of a cultural mark of shame). Kyūzō is introduced duelling with wooden swords. Why don’t we swop to real blades says his opponent: because you’ll die, Kyūzō matter-of-factly describes, his matter-of-fact bluntness and lack of bragging backed up by his immense skill when the chap dies seconds later. Gorōbei’s shrewdness is shown by the ease he dodges Kambei’s ambush test, just as Kikuchiyo’s rawness is when he blunders straight into it (and promptly loses his temper). Little moments like this abound, in a film stuffed with clever character beats.

The film presents a Japanese culture where concepts of honour and self-sacrifice sit awkwardly alongside regimented hierarchical and societal rules. The samurai can’t help but look down on the peasants – even while they see it as their duty to protect the weak. The villagers, in turn, look at the samurai as barely-to-be-trusted potential oppressors or dangerous parasites who steal their land and daughters (or both). Much of the film’s second act, as the samurai train the villagers to resist the attack, is about these two communities learning to respect each other. But it’s a tenuous alliance, held together by circumstance: when the dust settles, the surviving samurai are no longer welcome.

The samurai are a dying breed. Kambei knows the future belongs to people who provide industry and food. Samurai principles of honour and duty, pride in their skill, is also increasingly irrelevant in a world where the gun decides conflict. The ronin have three rifles and these deadly weapons are no respecter of skill or honour (none of the seven are bested in conflict, but all who fall do so to a bullet). Perhaps this is why the samurai cling to their principles and their honour. They know the world they knew is dying away and that there may be no place for them in the new.

This conflict is given a human shape by Kikuchiyo. Played with an electric, charismatic wildness by Toshiro Mifune (allowed to let rip, he’s a breath-taking explosion of jagged movements, eccentric line deliveries and unbound energy), Kikuchiyo is neither peasant nor samurai. Bought up from working stock – carrying stolen papers of nobility to try and pass himself off as samurai – he’s also rejected by his farmer peers for his warrior status. This makes him a character who can expose hypocrisies on both sides: denouncing the farmers pleading for help but cowering from the samurai; then angrily arguing samurai selfishness and pride have left the peasants with little choice but to horde food and riches to survive.

Not that Kurosawa is shy of admiration for the samurai. Yes, the flaws of their class are exposed – and we see more than enough their potential for arrogance, pride and violence. But the seven also contain a collection of their best traits. Takashi Shimura is brilliant as Kambei: selfless and honourable who takes on the task to honour the peasant’s offering all they can (however little that be). Heihachi (played by an ebullient Minoru Chiaki) represents generosity and warmth. Kyūzō (an enigmatic Seiji Miyaguchi) is awash with self-effacing warrior skill, shrugging off his feats with simple matter-of-fact statements. Shichirōji and Gorōbei are loyal and thoughtful warriors, Katsushirō (a charming Isao Kimura) a decent man eager to prove his worth. These are the best of their class.

They’ll need to be to win in this desperate action. Their preparation carefully outlines the obstacles facing to defence of this village – and to corral the villagers to defend their property. Houses outside the village walls are abandoned (Kambei seeing down a near rebellion on this, with threats of immediate justice), a raid on the ronin’s base aims to reduce their numerical advantage, the difficulty of turning the terrain against superior numbers repeatedly made plain. Kurosawa’s visual storytelling means the action when it comes is not only captivating, but completely understandable.

And what action. Seven Samurai can take its place on any list of the greatest war films ever made. The final hour features attack-after-attack on the village, interspersed with raids, skirmishes and derring-do. Both Kyūzō and Kikuchiyo take solo missions out of the village, though Kikuchiyo’s hunt for glory, even while he captures a rifle, leaves part of the wall undefended and leads to tragedy (Kambei is furious at this failure in discipline). It culminates in a rain-soaked final stand, shot with an all-absorbing power and engrossing kinetic energy.

The samurai sacrifice much for the village. But for what thanks? A peasant disguises his daughter as a boy, because he assumes, if discovered, the samurai will instinctively rape her. When the ronin don’t arrive as expected, the peasants grumble that the samurai are eating more than their fair share. As the samurai fall, their deaths are marked with a decreasing lack of notice (the final deaths don’t even gain on-screen funerals). With victory assured, the peasants return to their crop and don’t even lift a hand to wave the samurai goodbye.

It seems like poor reward for people who have sacrificed so much. But then that’s part of the point Kurosawa is making. Some samurai chose honour. Some choose the opposite. But they are always relics of a feudal system that is being left behind by events and the modern world. Its not just guns that will take them eventually. It’s a sadness that adds an even richer vein to this gripping, superb action drama. Kurosawa’s films may have flaws – but he doesn’t put a foot wrong in Seven Samurai.