Category: Directors

Moonstruck (1987)

Charmingly romantic comedy with little touches of Shakespeare in its celebration of family love

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: Cher (Loretta Castorini), Nicolas Cage (Ronny Cammareri), Olympia Dukakis (Rose Castorini), Vincent Gardenia (Cosmo Castorini), Danny Aiello (Johnny Cammareri), Julie Bovasso (Rita Cappomagi), Louis Goss (Raymond Cappomagi), John Mahoney (Perry), Feodor Chaliapin (Old man), Antia Gilette (Mona)

People do strange things all the time. We don’t always understand why, so why not say it’s a midsummer madness caused by the moon. Moonstruck seizes that old superstition of blaming the position of our nearest celestial neighbour for sending us all a bit barmy, and weaves it into a film that’s both a playfully eccentric romantic comedy and a sweet tribute to the power of a family’s loving bonds. John Patrick Shanley’s (Oscar-winning) script pulls these strings together so well, it’s not a surprise it’s the sort of a film that frequently ends up on people’s ‘favourite film’ lists.

Loretta Castorini (Cher) is an Italian-American widow, living with her parents, who is starting to wonder if she is cursed with spinsterhood. As the moon reaches its bright zenith, she agrees to marry her terminally dull, utterly unromantic boyfriend Johnny (Danny Aiello), because anything’s better than nothing (despite the fact he seems to see her as much a substitute for his mother as a romantic partner). She agrees to mend the bad blood between him and his younger brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage). Ronny is a picture-postcard of an eccentric, a one-handed baker (blaming his brother for that) prone to melodramatic fits of rage and outbursts of Operatic passion. Loretta and Ronny – blame that moon – are instantly smitten with each other. Who is going to sort that out?

It all pulls together into a sort of modern fairy tale, where everything has an air of gently heightened reality. It’s also the sort of thing that wouldn’t seem out-of-place in Shakespeare’s lightest comedies: people fall in love on a sixpence, feuds are fixed in minutes, cheating spouses instantly return to their wives and jilted suitors smile and join in the celebratory drinks. In this world of theatrical, fairy-tale comedy, it’s quite easy to buy that an exceptionally bright moon is sending everyone a little bit crazy (like Shakespeare’s Dream lovers in the forests outside Athens, going through one crazy doped-up night before settling suddenly into two loving couples) and eventually you just run with it in Jewison’s charming film.

With a script full of witty lines and theatrical bits of bombast (which Cage in particular, inevitably, rips through), Moonstruck is also one of those endlessly charming, relaxing and pleasant films where fundamentally everyone is at-heart decent. Sure, mistakes are made throughout; harsh words and truths are spoken, but within a film where everyone cares for each other. Ronny may (rather unjustly) blame his brother for briefly distracting him at work into losing his hand, but deep down he’s just waiting for an excuse to forgive his brother. Loretta may have a prickly relationship with her mother, but it’s roots are really firm and based around both protecting the other from knowledge of the knee-jerk philandering of her father. It takes the influence of the moon to suddenly spark these people into a few days of crazy behavior that changes their lives and leads them to re-address their relationships with each other.

It also makes Loretta, in an Oscar-winning comedic turn from Cher, face up to the fears about where her life is going. In a performance that is remarkably unglamourous – Cher plays every inch of the reliable window settling into spinsterhood and the film never falsely ‘transforms’ her – Cher invests Loretta with a deep fear and resignation below her surface of reliability and unflappability. Loretta is so used to being practical and dependable, organising the lives of everyone (even patiently instructing the confused Johnny on how to propose marriage), part of her romantic relief with Ronny is being able to let rip a more sensual and vulnerable part of herself. Cher lets the mask slip, as if having had love potion dripped into her eyes, letting her express her deeper feelings.

It makes sense then that she should fall in love with someone as self-willed and resistant to being mothered as Ronny. In an early role that straight away captures Nicolas Cage’s willingness to rip into a scene (what other actor would feel like such a natural fit for a lovably blow-hard, one-handed, baker melodramatically prone to threatening no end of harm on himself?), Ronny has all the sort of wildness and uncontrolled energy and excitement the rest of Loretta’s life doesn’t have. And he doesn’t want her to fill a surrogate role for another family member – he wants her to be part of an equal relationship on her own terms with him.

It’s probably the sort of relationship Loretta’s parents had at one point. Before her mother Rose (another Oscar-winner, Olympia Dukakis) become cynical and shut-off from her husband Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia). Cosmo has let his decency get squashed under a fear of growing old, clinging to a younger girlfriend (Anita Gillette) who he conducts an affair more out of habit more anything. No wonder Rose considers flirting with John Mahoney’s constantly-jilted professor (in a touch that hasn’t aged well, he keeps trying to date his students), but not going the whole hog, while Cosmo tries to feel young again by doubling-down on his quietly dying affair.

What’s surprising then is that Moonstruck bubbles all this romantic back-and-forth into a warm celebration of familial love. While romantic bonds are firey, they are transient – the bonds of family last. Moonstruck culminates in the family putting the sort of romantic divisions that have kept them apart aside to come together in a warm celebration: like Shakespeare’s lovers they have woken up and found out everything is in fact fine. There’s something really reassuring and hopeful about this – that our feuds and divisions can bring us together as much as they can tear us apart.

It’s another reason as well why this is a popular film. It’s helped of course by John Patrick Shanley’s well-crafted script, and the terrific playing of the actors. Cher and Cage both have great chemistry and get the tone of the eccentric but touchingly tender unlikely romance just right. Dukakis and Gardenia are both funny and sweet as their parents, Aiello gives a very generous performance as a dutiful-boy-who-never-grew-up and there’s a scene-stealing cameo from Feodor Chalipin as Loretta’s eccentric grandfather. Above all, Moonstruck is a playful, feel-good film that doesn’t take itself too seriously and lives you feeling hopeful that everything can work itself out – even when the magic of the moon sends us a little crazy.

Cabaret (1972)

Fosse’s influential adaptation reinvents the musical into a superb exploration of sexuality and wilful blindness

Director: Bob Fosse

Cast: Liza Minnelli (Sally Bowles), Michael York (Brian Roberts), Helmut Griem (Baron Maximilian von Heune), Joel Grey (MC), Fritz Wepper (Fritz Wendel), Marisa Berenson (Natalia Landauer), Elisabeth Neumann-Viertel (Fräulein Schneider)

Some say Life is a Cabaret (old chum) – but they may well be closing their eyes to what’s really going on around them. Much harder to do that in Cabaret, a dark study of Weimar Germany, the quintessential time-period where everyone was so wrapped up in having a good time they failed to notice the world was beginning to burn down around them. Fosse’s version is a musical, but song and dance fills just over a quarter of the runtime. At its heart, it’s a character study of two young people in a particular time and place with very different perceptions of the dangers around them. It makes for a dark, inventive re-working of the Broadway original with Fosse stretching his wings into the sort of complex work culminating in the forensic self-examination of All That Jazz – and make Cabaret one of the most unique and exceptional of musicals.

Our Babes in 1931 Weimar Berlin are Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) and Brian Roberts (Michael York). Sally is a would-be superstar, plying her trade singing and dancing at the Kit Kat Klub. The host of erotic and blackly comic numbers there is the unsettling MC (Joel Grey). Brian is an academic, a reserved and very English young man with a preference for other men. Housemates in the same boarding house, the two become very close – and both very close indeed to happy-go-lucky Baron Maximilian von Heune (Helmet Griem). Sexual, romantic and emotional feelings ebb and flow while in the background the Nazis march relentlessly towards power along a path of violence.

Fosse was desperate to direct Cabaret, a film he felt certain would be a hit– and producer Cy Feuer was keen to bring his raunchy, dynamic choreography to the seamy world of the Kit Kat Klub. But Fosse also wanted to do something very different to the original musical. He wanted to return more to it literary roots, the semi-autobiographical works of Christopher Isherwood. He also felt, based on his experience directing Sweet Charity, that realism and bursting into song didn’t work. So the original script was jettisoned in favour of a new story junking most of the musicals plot (and several key characters), change its male lead from a straight American back to a queer Brit and cut all but one song not inside the Kit Kat Klub, making them a commentary on the action.

It’s a master-stroke, making Cabaret both a compellingly staged musical, but also a dark social issues piece and exploration of sexuality. In fact, you could watch Cabaret and wonder if Fosse didn’t really want to direct a musical at all. His heart, I feel, lies in the increasingly sexually charged and fluidic relationship between the three lovers at its heart: Sally’s vivacious enthusiasm, Brian’s careful guardedness and Maximilian’s shallow glee. It’scaptured beautifully in a late-night drinking scene in Maximilian’s palatial house, with the camera sensually close as the three dance together, their lips inches away from each other, the desire bubbling between them.

There’s a striking comfort with sexual freedom in Cabaret. Brian’s homosexuality – or bisexuality after he and Sally together discover his previous disastrous liaisons were clearly with “the wrong three girls” – is treated unremarkably by all: after all the Kit Kat Klub has its share of drag queens (one of them sharing a telling look with Brian after they surprise each other at the urinal). It’s all part of a wider bohemian lifestyle, exemplified by Sally who is always dreaming that a big break is just around the corner. This is the decent, brave and accepting side of Weimar Germany.

But Cabaret is also about the danger all around the characters, which too many of them ignore. Brian is the most conscious and politically aware, for all his English reserve. But Sally’s major flaw is that she chooses to pretend it’s not happening. Minnelli’s gorgeous rendition of ‘Cabaret’ at the end is so often seen as a triumphant embracing of life on her own terms, that its overlooked Sally performs it having decided to turn her back on broadening her own life outside her comfort zone and is singing to a room increasingly full of Nazis who will stamp out the very life she’s dreaming about.

Sally is bought to life in a superb, Oscar-winning performance by Liza Minnelli. Minnelli’s singing is of course extraordinary – her rendition of ‘Maybe This Time’ is one for the ages – but she’s also superb at bringing to life Sally’s bubbly naivety and kindness while also suggesting the fragility and desperation to be liked under the surface. There’s something very innocent about her, for all her hedonism: her attempted seduction of Brian has the clumsy brashness of an over-eager virgin, and while instinctively keen to help others she’s clueless at dealing with real emotional problems (there’s a wonderful moment when Minnelli looks sideways in panic as Maria Berenson pours her heart out to her, as if trying to find a way to escape). It’s a gorgeous, endearingly sweet performance – and perfectly counterpointed by Michael York’s career-best turn as the sharp, gentle, thoroughly decent Brian, with his own unique moral code.

Around them, Fosse uses the musical numbers to darkly comment on the action, helped by the demonic feel of Joel Grey’s sinister MC (the first real shot of the film is Grey’s face looming up from below to flash a Lucifer grin), whose manner becomes increasingly cruel, Fosse cutting to brief shots of him knowingly grinning as the dangers of Nazism become increasingly hard to avoid. Grey (who originated the part on stage) has a look of Joseph Goebbels about him, and it’s hard not to feel he’s some sort of manic sprite given even more life and energy as the world fills with horrors around him.

The musical numbers are extraordinary, brilliantly assembled by Fosse and full of seedy glamour – there is a gorgeous shot in ‘Willkommen’ when the camera whips around the high-kicking chorus line that’s like a shot of adrenaline. They mix between the darkly funny – the troubling romantic longing of ‘If You Could See Her’ – and the gorgeously inventive, with the tightly choreographed movements of ‘Money, Money’. Grey is a crucial part of this, his charismatic singing and dancing burning through the celluloid – who can forget his cruel glee under the comic interplay of ‘Two Ladies’ – and the use of him as a cryptic chorus who never speaks except on stage is a master stroke.

From its early scenes, we are left in no doubt of the violence many are choosing to ignore. From a street lined with ripped up election posters which Sally and Brian stroll down, to cut aways to stormtroopers brutally beating opponents, we can’t escape the inevitable death of this happy-go-lucky world. It’s also Fosse’s masterstroke to make the only musical ‘number’ outside the Klub not only goose-bumpingly powerful but also a skin-crawling piece of Riefenstahl-framed Nazi triumphalism.

Cabaret superbly captures in this one moment the seductive power of Nazism. As an Aryan boy sings ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ (a slow camera pan reveals his SA uniform) at a beer garden, gradually the crowd joins in. The song builds into a resounding crescendo, people’s faces beaming with pride, full of fixed fanaticism, all of them sharing a special, powerful moment of belonging. Fosse’s unbelievable nerve is to present this utterly straight (someone with no knowledge of Nazism would be deeply moved watching it), making its seductive power even more chilling: because you can’t watch without also feeling a nausea inducing feeling of goose-bumps.

Hard not to agree with Brian when he wryly asks the smug Max whether he’s still sure the Nazis can be controlled. (Max parrots the upper class view that the Nazis are useful tools for getting rid of the socialists). It’s much easier for us to understand why Fritz Webber’s scruffy charmer Fritz (hiding his scuffed shirt cuffs) is scared of revealingly his Jewish heritage, even if it’s all he needs to do to win the love of Marisa Berenson’s shopping mall heiress. You don’t want to pop your head over the parapet in this world.

What’s clear in this superb film, is we can applaud the characters only so far: after all they decide to avoid the obvious that hedonism must be put aside to see the world for what it really is. There is a tragedy, in Sally in particular, that she can’t or won’t do this. As beautiful as her optimism is, it eventually becomes wilful blindness. This is part of what makes Fosse’s extraordinary film one that transcends its source material to become something truly unique. It’s a calling-card of a great director.

Sinners (2025)

Coogler’s mix of political statement and horror flick is overlong but very effective

Director: Ryan Coogler

Cast: Michael B Jordan (Elijah “Smoke” Moore/Elias “Stack” Moore), Hailee Steinfeld (Mary), Miles Caton (Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore), Jack O’Connell (Remmick), Wunmi Mosaku (Annie), Jayme Lawson (Pearline), Omar Miller (Cornbread), Delroy Lindo (Delta Slim), Li Jun Li (Grace Chow), Yao (Bo Chow), Buddy Guy (Old Samme)

In 1932 twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Michael B Jordan, pulling double duty) return to the racist South of Mississippi after years of war service followed by time spent working for the gangs of Chicago. They dream of setting up a juke joint for the Black community, flying in the face the racism of local Mississippi. But the dangers of the KKK pale slightly, when their opening night coincides with the arrival of vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell) who dreams of forming a new family of the dead – and wants to recruit Mississippi’s Black community, with promises of equality in his world they could never have in their own. Holed up in their juke joint, can the brothers and their families and friends survive a night long siege until dawn?

The basic set-up of Sinners is, to be honest, familiar. It delights in hueing close to Vampire mythology – garlic, wooden stakes, silver and sunlight are the key weapons here and the vampires are powerless to cross a threshold until they are invited – and the ‘base under siege’ that occupies the film’s final act is essentially taken direct from the sort of set-up John Carpenter excelled at in his heyday. What makes Sinners really stand-out is the richness of its character relationships and its social context.

That social context is, of course, the Jim Crow South. Sinners is a film steeped in the racial injustice of a particular time-and-place. In 1932, Black workers still pick cotton on plantations in exchange for wooden nickels. Families live in shanty towns and use different shops than the white folk (local goods dealers the Chow’s run two convenience stores, on opposite sides of the street, to serve their two clienteles). The danger of lynchings are everyday threats (Delroy Lindo has a haunting monologue, beautifully delivered, as Slim recounts the lynching of a former band partner, who unwisely produced his stuffed wallet at a train station). Virtually the only white people we see (other than Rennick) are KKK members.

In this world of radical injustice, it’s fascinating that Coogler suggests, in some ways, the afterlife of a Vampire is more just and fair than actual life. Rennick, himself the relic of a long-oppressed pagan Irish community, makes solid points about Smoke and Stack facing a losing battle trying to play by the white man’s game as entrepreneurs and would-be local businessmen. He even, genuinely, states he would be happy to kill the entire KKK just to wipe their hatred from the Earth. There is a certain truth in the fact that, in the legions of the undead, all are equal and race means nothing. That getting bit could be a doorway to a new world, free of racial oppression – even if it also seems to mean living in the sort of community Rennick alone crafts.

It becomes a fascinating idea, joined with the fact that Rennick also points out Christianity is a spirituality forced on the Black community. Unlike the blues music, that gifted young cousin to the brothers, Sammie (a lyrical performance in every sense from Miles Caton) plays so well it can cross the bounds of space and time joining Black souls together, the enslaved people didn’t bring Christianity with them across the water. It was forced on them, as much as the labour in the fields. Sinners isn’t quite brave enough to explicitly denounce the Church as just another wing of enslavement (even if Sammie’s preacher father uses trauma to hammer conversion on people, rather than offering comfort). But it does make clear that Sammie’s ‘coming-of-age’ is whether he will choose the culture of his ancestors or the culture of his oppressors.

This is thought-provoking stuff – and Coogler does a superb job of threading it through the blood-spurting, neck-biting, stake-hammering action that fills up a large portion of the film’s conclusion. Sinners is dripping in Blues music, which artfully and beautifully wraps itself around the film to perfectly capture its tone and pitch. The sequence where Sammi’s music fills the juke joint, is transcendent in more ways than one, powerful and transporting in its musicality and passion (Ludwig Göransson’s score, created in partnership with several Blues artists and the actors is exceptional). Coogler matches it with one his trademark, virtuoso, one-take shots, the camera seamlessly weaving in and around the juke joint as our 1930s characters dance alongside modern club dancers and musicians as well as tribal African musicians of the distant past.

It also rewards more as Coogler takes his time throughout the film’s long opening act to really establish the characters and their relationships. You can argue that Sinners is over-indulgent in the sometimes overlong (well over an hour) long ‘recruitment’ sequence as Smoke and Stack assemble family and friends for their opening night. But this careful exploration of the closeness and warmth between these people – their loving sense of family, loyalty and sometimes painful shared history – pays off in spades when they begin one-by-one to turn to Rennick and then on each other. Coogler then makes these corruptions of the living into the hungry undead really sting, just as we feel the pain of those left among the living who must stake their nearest and dearest.

That carries further impact from the strength of the acting. Jordan, one of the most charismatic actors out there, gives a superb double-performance as the two twins, expertly sketching out their contrasting personalities and their deep love for each other. He makes Stack charismatic, gregarious and fun, and Smoke gruff, reserved but endlessly loyal and protective. They are too sharply humane turns, with Jordan so naturally playing off himself you forget both are played by the same actor.

Equally fine are the rest of the cast. Miles Caton is youthful idealism being shaken by traumatic events on the greatest night of his life. Wunmi Mosaku gives Smoke’s wife Annie a moral authority and deep sense of lingering grief. Hailee Steinfeld is vivacious but similarly burdened by disappointment and pain at chances lost as Stack’s one-time girlfriend that prejudice thwarted. Delroy Lindo’s soulful skill invests Slim with a real grace under the drunkenness. Even O’Connell, at times transformed into an Orlock-like nightmare, has a lonely humanity behind his ruthless, never-ending desire to build a new community (which he controls) around him.

There are powerful subtexts throughout here, even if parts of Sinners could at times benefit from a little tightening. Coogler effectively gives a rich hinterland to some familiar genre settings: and he surprises us with two codas, one rich in satisfying revenge violence the other with a rhapsodic melancholy which feel like natural ends for both their characters. Sinners mixes its Spike Lee influences with its John Carpenter ones with excellent effect, and is another firm reminder of the visual flair and piercing individualism of Coogler as director.

Lost Horizon (1937)

Capra’s well-made Utopian dream lacks any of self-awareness of the flaws in its vision

Director: Frank Capra

Cast: Ronald Colman (Robert Conway), Jane Wyatt (Sondra), Edward Everett Horton (Alexander Lovett), John Howard (George Conway), Thomas Mitchell (Henry Barnard), Margo (Maria), Isabel Jewell (Gloria Stone), HB Warner (Chang), Sam Jaffe (High Lama)

Life can be such a never-ending rat race, the idea of chucking in that relentless pursuit of fortune and glory can be really tempting. Fortunately, it turns out there is a place you can do that: Shangri-La, a halcyon Utopian community buried deep in the Himalayas. There the mountains give it a gloriously perfect climate and preserves its residents youth for potentially hundreds of years. It’s a paradise for legendary diplomat Robert Conway (Ronald Colman), one of a group of Westerners whose plane crashes near-by, all of them invited to make their lives there.

It’s easy to see why this appealed to Frank Capra – even if his real idea of Shangri-La was Small Town America – and he poured years (and millions of dollars) into this dream project (it also took years to make back the investment). Conway is part of a group of mostly British Westerners escaping revolution in China. In Shangri-La, he’s deeply drawn to the peaceful ideology outlined by their host Chang (HB Warner) and Shangri-La’s spiritual leader, the Great Lama (Sam Jaffe). Not to mention the charms of resident Sondra (Jane Wyatt). Problem is, his brother George (John Howard) is desperate to return home. What will Robert choose?

Lost Horizon has a lot to admire about it, in among the incredibly earnest force of its telling, devoid of any drop of cynicism or irony. This is like a 101 of what to expect from Capra? It’s a celebration of the glories of living a simple, pure life without ruthless ambition and realpolitik. It’s filmed on a highly impressive scale by Capra – the gargantuan sets certainly show where the money went. Striking sequences, like a seemingly never-ending torch-lit parade of the people of Shangri-La marching towards Chang’s opulent estate, are breathtaking.

It hosts a fine parade of actors: Colman is perfect as the debonair, world-weary Conway, Horton and Mitchell make their supporting comic double-act genuinely funny (Horton, in particular, litters the film with wonderful bits of comic business using everything from mirrors to jewellery boxes), HB Warner makes a series of infodump ideological sermons more engaging than they deserve and Isabel Jewell creates a great deal of charm in the blousy Gloria. Interestingly, perhaps the most compelling sequence of Lost Horizon occurs before they even arrive, as these characters feud and panic on a hijacked plane taking them in totally the wrong direction.

But there is often something a little too pure about Lost Horizon. Even as the film-making beautifully unspools, it’s hard not to notice that for a huge chunk of this long film very little really happens beyond slightly sanctimonious speechifying comparing ‘our’ civilisation with the peaceful life of Shangri-La. In fact, it’s easy (particularly in our more cynical age) to start feeling a bit twitchy. So earnestly perfect is everything there, with a simplistic and unchallenging view of kindness and brotherly love, it starts to feel like being continually slapped by a SparkNotes copy of Thomas More. Capra uses John Howard’s blowhard George, to put a counter-view – but fills him with such ambition and desire that we are of course never in danger of taking him seriously.

Graham Greene wrote of the film “nothing reveals men’s characters more than their Utopias” before observing the design of Shangri-La resembled nothing more or less than a luxurious Beverly Hills Estate. Rarely has a truer word been spoken: this mountainous paradise, with its carefully designed gardens, well-stocked libraries, grand ballrooms and lush woodland perfect for riding feels like a slice of affluent middle-class Western civilisation in the middle Tibet. It makes for an interesting window into the film today.

Because it’s hard not to see Shangri-La as less of a land of beautiful contentment, and more as a sort of colonialist wet dream. Scratch the surface and it’s a very hierarchical community. Literally at the top of the hill, living in upper-class harmony surrounded by art, books, comfy armchairs and fine dining are the elite (all bar one of them Westerners). At the bottom, in their huts, live the Tibetan natives happily continuing their traditional way of life, happy to live and work (unlike the Chinese revolutionaries who Conway and co flee in the film’s opening) in the shadow of their betters. A smarter film than Lost Horizon might have pointed out the irony that Shangi-La is just a colony where the natives haven’t yet embraced political self-determination – but I’m not sure if such an idea occurred to Capra.

As soon as this crossed my mind, I couldn’t help picking holes in the calamitous internal logic of the film. Shangri-La’s only contact with the outside world is via a group of Tibetan sherpas who trek up and down the mountain once a month bringing supplies from the outside world – presumably its them who have trooped up thousands of books (including the complete works of Robert Conway!), hundreds of mediocre paintings and roomfuls of rococo furniture. The kindly inhabitants of Shangi-La’s palace never considered overseeing the construction of basic plumbing and power generation for the natives living in the valley below them (though they somehow recruited contractors to supply those things to their house on the hill).

In fact, the whole of Shangri-La’s world is set up on maintaining a strict two-tier system that keeps people content by making sure they never think for themselves. (What passes for education, is a series of patronising missionary-style sing-alongs). Even more chilling, the Grand Lama (a softly spoken Sam Jaffe, under mountains of make-up) has dreams of Shangri-La rebuilding global civilisation after its inevitable destruction, the whole world adopting his simplistic ideology. He means well, but I couldn’t help be reminded of Dr Strangelove orgasmically rising from his chair at the thought of creating a fascist Utopia of sexual bliss under an Earth poisoned by nuclear radiation.

None of these ideas enter into Lost Horizon’s simplistic world-view. It sticks with saying what the world needs is to be crafted into a sort of country estate, a sort of Tibetan Downton Abbey, with everyone happy with their assigned place in the chain. Lost Horizon gets as close as it can to any form of social criticism when Conway bemoans 90 ‘whites’ were saved from that opening Chinese revolution while thousands of natives were left to die. But aside from that, is exactly what it says on the tin: there are no flaws in Shangi-La.

And maybe I’m being impossibly cynical. Lost Horizon is a lovely film to bathe in for a while – after all Capra, at his peak, couldn’t make a clanger if he tried. But there is a more complex story on the edges here. If Lost Horizon had showed us more of Conway’s Gulliver-Like return to civilisation, lost in a series of spinning newspaper headlines, it could have given us more of that. But Capra is no Thomas More or Jonathan Swift. The satirical and suppressive elements under a hierarchical Utopia are alien to his mindset. Lost Horizon is a reassuring promise founded on shaky ground indeed.

The Exterminating Angel (1962)

Buñuel’s unique party-gone-wrong is a fascinating mix of comedy, surrealism and satire

Director: Luis Buñuel

Cast: Silvia Pinal (Leticia, “The Valkyrie”), Jacqueline Andere (Alicia de Roc), José Baviera (Leandro Gomez), Augusto Benedico (Dr. Carlos Conde), Enrique Rambal (Edmundo Nóbile), Luis Beristáin (Cristián Ugalde), Antonio Bravo (Sergio Russell), Claudio Brook (Julio), César del Campo (Colonel Alvaro Aranda), Rosa Elena Durgel (Silvia), Lucy Gallardo (Lucía de Nóbile), Enrique García Álvarez (Alberto Roc)

Imagine a party so good, you couldn’t bear to leave. Sounds great, right? Now imagine a party that wasn’t even that good, but you couldn’t leave anyway. A dinner party with the hoi polloi that locks you into a seemingly never-ending parade of days (or weeks) where you and everyone else were physically incapable of stepping over the threshold of the room you’re in. All of you forced to live in a tiny space, on top of each other, none of you having a clue why you can’t leave or why this is all happening. Imagine that, and you’ve got Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, a surrealist-tinged, open-ended mystery of a film that presents its situation and leaves you to make of it what you will.

Returning to Mexico after comprehensively incinerating his nascent re-alignment with Spanish cinema with Viridiana (a film made in Catholic Fascist Spain that mocked both the fascists and the Church), Buñuel creates a haunting elliptical masterpiece by harnessing an idea so compelling it’s been recycled, reframed and reexplored by countless films after. It’s an idea that has soaked into horror, of being trapped by some unknown force in a single place, unable to break free. It’s also sparked satire with its depiction of the thin veil of smug self-satisfaction over the bourgeoisie that collapses under the strain of covering primitive, violent instincts.

The Exterminating Angel tips us off from the start that we won’t be settling down to watch any old dinner party. As the guests assemble, the staff at the grand town house are practically falling over themselves to flee, as if subconsciously aware there is something wrong in the house. Buñuel throws the viewer off from the start by deliberately repeating scenes – a repetition so on-the-nose, that when watching I actually doubted myself about whether I had just seen what I thought I saw. We see the guests arrive – and make a forlorn call for their coats to be taken – twice in quick succession. It’s so blatant, even Buñuel’s editor gave him a panicked phone call about the ‘error’ just before the film’s opening!

Later the micro-repetitions of scenes, interactions and lines will pile up (it’s a film that rewards constant reviewing) making the whole set-up even more disconcerting. Two characters introduce themselves to each other three times, each time with a different emotional mood (from friendly to outright hostile). The same dinner toast will be greeted with rapture then complete indifference. Two couples will echo the same conversation. Oblique points about freemasonry and current affairs will be made over and over. Is Buñuel suggesting the whole whirligig of the social situation is just a slightly pointless merry-go-round where the same old bullshit happens over-and-over again and essentially means nothing? Sure, the characters notice they are literally trapped in the same room, but really aren’t they just metaphorically trapped in the same old rooms all the time?

Nevertheless, as the dinner party winds down, everyone is far too polite (or far too concerned with appearances) to openly say they feel like its physically impossible for them to cross the threshold and leave. Instead, the hosts quietly grumble that no-one seems to know when to go as the clock ticks into the wee small hours and the middle-class types here settle down in armchairs, on sofas or even on the floor to sleep. Come the next morning, polite embarrassment prevents anyone from saying exactly why they are still here. In fact, everyone promptly makes politely meaningless excuses about why they aren’t quite ready to leave yet: they’ve not had breakfast, nanny will look after their children, they don’t need to be anywhere quite yet.

In fact, I’m not sure anyone openly says they ever feel trapped. It’s like social faux pas everyone is horrified of pointing out. Not a surprise really as everyone here is from the height of professional society: doctors, conductors, army officers, businessmen, society grande dames. None of them wants to stand out like some panicked rube thrown by odd sensations. Instead, everyone slowly settles down into working around this bizarre situation no one wants to talk about. A cupboard is tacitly turned into a toilet. The food is carefully rationed. A water pipe is tapped into so everyone can drink. Sleeping areas are claimed. No one tries to solve the problem, because even acknowledging the problem feels like a cheeky liberty.

It leads into an increasingly fascinating blend of horror, dark satire and surrealist black comedy that Buñuel skilfully builds. A few shots show us the threshold of the room from the next room (a lush ballroom), and there are cuts to a crowd of rubber-neckers outside the house) who also cant enter. But otherwise, it’s all in this one room and as time – and the guests lose all track of that – drags on, the bonds of society both loosen under the polite instincts. Tempers fray, but there remains a formality even as the ravenous guests rip apart (off camera) and cook a sheep that wanders into the room. Some guests take advantage of the proximity to indulge in voyeuristic perversions, but when arguments erupt they are resolved with a Victorian duel mind-set. Only towards the end, as the world really fragments, does the danger of real violence (a suggested lynching of those judged responsible) flare up.

Buñuel would criticise himself later for not going far enough (if you want an idea of relatively tame he later thought it was, he argued cannibalism was one of the things he should have explored). But the fact that much of the behaviour remains grounded, recognisably stuck in a rut of upper-class restraint makes the film more effective. (Or as restrained as a party, where the cancelled ’entertainment’ at the original dinner was an unspecified event involving a tame-ish bear and three sheep, can be). Somehow, if the guests had regressed into the most animalistic behaviour possible, the film might have lost some of its enigmatic quality. As it happens, the fact the guests can never quite escape the trappings of their social rules makes it even more unsettling. It means that threats – such as the ferocity behind the ‘I’ll kill you’ response to a joke about someone being pushed out of the room – carries even more of a shock.

Buñuel throws in the odd surrealistic touch – after all he always claimed a dream sequence was in there when he had run out of ideas. We get two, one revolving about a nightmare of a disembodied hand moving freely around the house (it must be some sort of joke from Buñuel that the hand itself is the least convincing rubbery affair you can imagine) and later a sequence of disconnected images superimposed over a cloud filled sky. The film’s conclusion suggests a deadly, ever-expanding loop, based around the fact the characters suffer but learn nothing from it.

You can argue that The Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie, by allowing more physical freedom to its characters, allowed even more surreal, fascinating and intriguing exploration of the repressions, lies and hypocrisies of bourgeoisie life. But The Exterminating Angel has a claustrophobic horror to it, and the pressure cooker bubbling just below the surface of these trapped characters exposes class tensions in superbly unnerving ways. It makes for an expertly executed, shrewdly vicious social satire that lifts a lid on the many petty behaviours that govern so much of our lives. And it’s a mark of genius that you cannot imagine anyone other than Buñuel making it.

A Star is Born (1937)

One of the first iterations of the tale, and with two winning performances one of the best

Director: William A Wellman

Cast: Janet Gaynor (Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester), Fredric March (Norman Maine), Adolphe Menjou (Oliver Niles), May Robson (Lettie Blodgett), Andy Devine (Danny McGuire), Lionel Stander (Matt Libby), Owen Moore (Casey Burke), Peggy Wood (Miss Phillips), Elizabeth Jenns (Anita Regis), Edgar Kennedy (Pop Randall)

A Star is Born wasn’t the first time this story was told and it certainly wasn’t the last. Each generation in Hollywood has produced its own version of the story, not to mention a gallery of other culture creating their own unofficial and otherwise remakes. What Price Hollywood had even effectively told the same story five years earlier, and the entire concept has the air of a medieval ‘fortune’s wheel’ – two souls bound together, one goes up as the other goes down. There may in fact not be nothing new about A Star is Born at all but gave such a bright new polish to the familiar, that we’ve been inspired to come back to it again and again.

In the farmyard sticks, Esther Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) has a dream: to become one of those stars of Hollywood’s silver screen. With grandma’s (May Robson) money in her pocket (‘What have I got to spend it on?’) she heads to Los Angeles, only to find the city is awash with similarly starry-eyed dreamers desperate for a big break. Esther gets hers in an unusual manner: serving drinks at a Hollywood party she strikes up conversation with famous star Norman Maine (Fredric March). Norman is very taken with Esther – in fact he’s almost immediately in love with her – and arranges a screen test. Soon Esther has a new career, a new name – Vicki Lester – and a new marriage to Norman. Problem is, as her star rises and she becomes the next big thing, Norman stops letting “his acting get in the way of his drinking” and his career slides into oblivion.

It’s high romance, very effectively filmed by Wellman, that requires – and gets – two very strong, highly relatable performances from its leads. Wellman’s film carefully gives both of them the space to grow a relationship that begins shyly and becomes deep and tender. Gaynor is bright, naïve and gentle with just enough ambition and determination to impress. She’s eager to please, but also firm and knows her own mind, far from a pushover in this town of press releases and media spin. Gaynor never lets us forget that under ‘Vicki Lester’ there’s that ordinary Esther Blodgett (could there be a more grounded, less starry name than Blodgett?), a woman with principles in a world of fakes.

Perhaps even better though is Fredric March (it’s the first indication, borne out by nearly all the remakes, that Norman is the better part). March is charismatic, engaging, funny, down-to-earth and everything you would want from a star – while also being a mean drunk with anger management issues. He’s introduced getting into a drunken scuffle at the Hollywood Bowl, and his love of booze makes him just as likely to laugh and flirt with Esther as it can make him take a slug at a guy who looks at him the wrong way. March’s drunk acting is very effectively restrained and he captures extremely well the self-disgust behind Norman at his weakness. March makes him a star who burns away his career through appalling choices, who fervently believes he can stay on the wagon until he can’t. In his hands it becomes a classic tragic piece, a Greek hero destroyed by his fatal flaw, his inability to escape the bottle.

This rich romantic tragedy builds wonderfully, Wellman keeping us deeply invested in this couple. The good times are really endearing: it’s hard not to grin along as they laugh and joke in a camper van after their elopement, or as they cover each other with encouragement and support for their careers. It makes the bad times unbearably painful: Norman’s drunken crashing of Esther’s Oscar win, a shambling monologue of self-pity and resentment, both heartbreaking and excruciatingly embarrassing. Norman’s fateful final decision is full of romantic imagery, as he smiling walks towards a sun-kissed beach, a beautifully staged inversion of a romantic ending.

A Star is Born’s other most interesting feature is its inside glimpse at Hollywood: or at least the version Hollywood was willing to present of itself to people. It even has a meta-theatrical element to it, the film book-marked by images of the shooting script describing the action immediately following or preceding it. Here Hollywood is a ruthless machine, chewing up the dreams of wannabes. An agent bluntly shows Esther the vast numbers of phone calls of wannabe extras they receive every day. Esther struggles just as much as assistant director Danny (Andy Devine) to find regular work. Careers are made and broken by chance, whims or the reaction of the audience to your face on screen. Names in lights one month and being pasted over the next.

Hollywood loves to be cynical about itself. A Star is Born delightedly shows its spin operation as ruthless, cut throat and controlling, planting stories about stars, covering up their misdemeanours (a regular requirement for the drunken Norman) and repackaging their lives into saleable commodities. Lionel Stander, as a heartlessly controlling press agent, is the heart of this, and the film doesn’t hold back on showing the dark powers of these studio fixers in action. But this is just a version of Hollywood: its telling that in A Star is Born while the middle management are condemned, the studio heads are absolved completely. Adolphe Menjou’s Selznick-like producer is an avuncular, uncle-like figure, endlessly caring and supportive of his stars who wouldn’t dream of any funny games to earn some money. This is a portrait of Hollywood where the top man is an affectionate saint – exposure only goes so far.

A Star is Born is also an interesting time capsule. Esther stares in admiration at a host of Hollywood Avenue stars of people must of the viewing public today would struggle to name (Norman Cantor anyone?). Seeking to impress while serving at a dinner party she’ll do impersonations of Garbo, Hepburn, Crawford and Mae West (the last even named). It’s a world where the continual production of content is even more on-going than on Netflix and the studios can start or end careers instantly. It’s a fascinating extra piece of interest in a highly effective, well-staged film. Even with its slightly murky early colour photography (it looks like a colourised black and white film), it’s a well-staged, effective romance with two very winning performances from its leads. Possibly one of the best versions of the story.

The Talk of the Town (1942)

Overlooked but delightful comedy with three star actors at the absolutely charming top of their game

Director: George Cukor

Cast: Cary Grant (Leopold Dilg), Jean Arthur (Nora Shelley), Ronald Colman (Professor Michael Lightcap), Edgar Buchanan (Sam Yates), Glenda Farrell (Regina Bush), Charles Dingle (Andrew Holmes), Clyde Fillmore (Senator Boyd), Emma Dunn (Mrs Shelley), Rex Ingram (Tilney), Leonid Kinskey (Jan Pulaski)

Leopold Dilg (Cary Grant) is in a heck of a fix. A passionate campaigner for worker rights, all fingers point straight at him when a local factory burns down leaving an unpopular foreman dead. Dilg rather than wait in the slammer for an inevitably (fatal) sentence, he escapes and find refuge in the country cottage of former schoolmate Nora Shelley (Jean Arthur). Problem is Nora has sublet her cottage to straight-as-a-die legal professor Michael Lightbody (Ronald Colman), in the running for the Supreme Court. With Dilg passing himself off as a gardener, can he and Nora convince the ultra-serious Lightbody there has been a miscarriage of justice?

The Talk of the Town is a hugely enjoyable comedy with more than a pinch of social commentary, that gives three charismatic stars tailor-made roles under the assured hand of a skilled director. It’s a great mix of genres: it opens like a dark thriller, segues into an odd-couple-house-share comedy via a romantic-love-triangle, transforms again into a slightly zany detecting comedy with road-trip vibes and wraps up as courtroom drama with a Capraesque speech and happy ending. The fact all this hangs masterfully together makes The Talk of the Town stand out as a consistently surprising and enjoyable comedy, full of zip and smart, funny lines.

Stevens choreographs the film superbly, specifically in its initial set-up where the three lead characters weave in and out of each other’s lives in the house. Initially Grant hides in the attic – signalling from a window his desire for food (an excellent running gag is the amount Grant’s character enthusiastically eats), with Arthur going to acrobatic lengths to hide his presence from Colman. You can imagine other films getting an entire hour out of this: The Talk of the Town is brave enough to shake-up this set-up within twenty minutes, as Grant nonchalantly wanders downstairs to introduce himself, quick thinkingly introduced as a gardener by an as-surprised-as-us Arthur.

It’s a surprise, but a perfect one – after all it would be hard easy to consider Colman’s character a head-in-the-clouds dullard if he had been fooled for long by Arthur’s increasingly unusual behaviour. And The Talk of the Town needs us to like and respect all three of these characters, to root for all of them. What better way, but to get them rooting for each other?

The odd houseshare comedy that takes over Talk of the Town is all about its principles effectively falling in love with each other (there is a thruple version of Talk of the Town waiting to be made). Grant learns to respect Colman’s self-effacing, shy wit. Colman learns to enjoy Grant’s instinctive intelligence. Both of them find deeper feelings growing for Arthur’s feisty Nora, just as she finds herself drawn to the charm, good nature and honesty of the other two. Talk of the Town becomes delightful as we watch the three of them eat meals together, play chess and chat about the law late into the night. Few films have shown as skilfully friendships organically growing.

The tension that takes over is whether outside forces will tear this friendship apart. Namely, if Colman finds out Grant’s identity will he swop from buying Borscht for his friend (sweetly, Colman remembers a throwaway comment about exactly how much he likes it) to being duty bound to shopping him to the cops? Grant and Arthur are aware of the danger: they’ve been drop-feeding references to the unsound accusations against Grant throughout, all while desperately making sure he never sees Grant’s mugshot photo in the papers (right up to pouring eggs over the front page) – the way Colman eventually finds this out is a beautifully done reveal.

All of this entirely relies on three actors at the top of their game. Grant seems, at first, an odd choice for a worker’s rights campaigner, but this is one of his lightest, most overlooked performances: wry, knowing and playful. Arthur is excellent as the electric centre of this love triangle, energetically torn between two very different men and terrifically determined under the occasionally scatty surface. Colman is dapper, upper-class charm to a T, but full of egalitarian charm and surprisingly willing to begin to question his own views in conversation with others.

Colman’s initial rigidity is represented – in a plot point that’s slightly on-the-nose (literally) – by his goatee, which he wears as a metaphorical shield between him and the world (it’s also another neat running gag, as it garners endless unflattering comments). When Colman inevitably shaves it off (a moment so overplayed, his trusted valet breaks down in tears at the sight) it’s a sign that he has accepted there is more to the law than just its letter. It plays into the film’s final shift, as Colman fills the final act with a passionate speech to silence a crowded courtroom ready for a judicial lynching (hilariously littered with direct quotes from his Grant’s character).

Much to my surprise, the social commentary and democratic praise never outweighs the comedy. The film gives space to earnest debate, but still has time for a madcap chase that ends with Colman hiding up a tree from police dogs. Stevens successfully mixes styles, from Fritz Lang thriller to Preston Sturges comedy to a mix of Hitchcock and Capra. Stevens fuses all these together perfectly, making a film funny, exciting when it needs to be, but always engaging with characters you really root for.

The Talk of the Town is overlooked but a very well-made treat and an exceptional showcase to three charismatic, hugely engaging actors. It marries comedy and social commentary extremely well (it even has a Black character in Rex Ingram’s wise valet whose race is incidental to his personality, quite a thing in the 40s) and bowls along with a huge sense of fun. It’s definitely worth seeking out.

Viridiana (1961)

Luis Buñuel’s brilliant, multi-layered satire is a superb, darkly hilarious, masterful film

Director: Luis Buñuel

Cast: Silvia Pinal (Viridiana), Francisco Rabal (Jorge), Fernando Rey (Don Jaime), Margarita Lozano (Ramona), Victoria Zinny (Lucia), Teresita Rabal (Rita), José Calvo (Don Amalio), José Manuel Martín (“El Cojo”), Luis Heredia (“El Poca”), Joaquín Roa (Don Zequiel), Lola Gaos (Enedina), Juan García Tiendra (“El Leproso”)

In the 1960s, Luis Buñuel was invited back Spain after years of creative exile to spearhead a new wave of Spanish filmmaking. He produced a film that not only bit the right-wing hand that fed it, it snapped it clean off and chewed it up. Viridiana must have been the last thing the authorities had in mind. Gloriously exposing the guilt and vanity of the upper classes and charity, it was lambasted by the Catholic church for blasphemy and showed an organised world teetering on the brink of chaos, with the powerful either perverts or playboys, the poor singularly ungrateful for the paternalistic patronage they receive and our lead character a hopelessly naïve former nun. Not surprisingly it was instantly banned and Buñuel never made a film in Spain again.

Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) is our naïve nun, called to her uncle Don Jaime’s (Fernando Rey) home for one last visit before her confirmation. Don Jaime though has plans: Viridiana has an extraordinary resemblance to his late wife and Don Jaime intends to first get her to cos-play his wife and then marry him. Or failing that, to drug her and rape her. Guilt stops him from the rape – but doesn’t stop him from claiming he did it, a lie he instantly (fatally) regrets but which leads her to abandon her dreams of becoming a nun. In the aftermath, Viridiana and her cousin (Jaime’s bastard son) Jorge (Francisco Rabal) divide the estate, with Viridiana aiming to continue her religious ideals through excessively generous charity with quietly resentful local paupers, who she has a vision of turning into a religious commune. It does not turn out well.

Viridiana benches much of the surrealism of Buñuel’s most famous work, but it loses none of his acute social satire and ability to inject the absurd with sharp dark humour. It makes Viridiana a startingly complex work, brilliantly assembled by an artist where every frame has a different idea, all of which comes together into a darkly entertaining whole. Its not hard to see why the strictly Catholic Fascist Spain found the film so outrageous, with its mocking of religious imagery (from the crucifix that becomes a flick knife to the famous scene of the paupers forming a drunken, pose-perfect, tableau of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper), it’s acknowledgement of a host of fetishes and perversions among the upper-classes (orgies, feet, hinted necrophilia, incest) and the utter ineffectiveness of any system, no matter how charitable, to control the human spirit, with the poor frequently resentful under their veneer of deferential gratitude.

Viridiana splits neatly into two acts, both revolving around a complex relationship with guilt and how it guides our actions. Don Jaime (a superb performance of corrupted grandeur from Fernando Rey) is a lonely man, plagued with guilt and regret over his wife’s death, locking himself away in a time-locked country pile like a perverted Miss Havisham. In private he fetishistically admires her clothes (which he blasphemously keeps like holy relics) and admires his feet in her shoes. He’s fascinated by Viridiana’s resemblance to his late wife and fantasises that she might be persuaded to renounce the cloth to live as his wife.

With the convenience of his servant Ramana – an equally lonely, repressed soul tenderly played with a burgeoning sexual desire by Margarita Lozano – he guilt-trips Viridiana into dressing for one night in his wife’s bridal clothes, drugs her drink and takes her to bed. He even arranges the sleeping Viridiana into the exact pose his wife had when she was before him, adding hints of necrophilia to an already disgusting assault. Shame stops him from committing the deed and guilt then corrupts both of them. Don Jaime at his selfish lie, Viridiana at her indirect role in her uncle’s death and the forced abandonment of her vocation.

Inheriting her uncle’s home, alongside playboy cousin Jorge (Jaime’s bastard son, who he has barely met), Viridiana redirects this guilt into a commune for the poor and needy, where charity, work and faith sit side-by-side. Her efforts to essentially introduce a benign feudal church-system contrasts with Jorge’s modernising efforts, introducing electricity and other mod-cons. Buñuel demonstrates the discomfort of these two worlds with a beautifully assembled scene where Viridiana’s leads a group pray intercut with a series of shots of acts of manual labour (hammers smashing walls, cement splatted on bricks etc.), making he prayer meeting (which we know the attendees think is a pile of bunkum) seem even more outdated and ineffective.

Viridiana isn’t cruel about these characters though – it looks at them as real people, with faults and virtues, some good some bad. It’s also remarkably clear-eyed about charity. There is something performative about Viridiana’s efforts, as well as a clear sense it is as much for her (subconsciously – she’s too naïve for cynicism) as it is the welfare of the beneficiaries. Those beneficiaries are a brilliant series of pen portraits of people who take offered charity, but resent the paternalistic attitudes that come with it. The working classes are not passively grateful for religious charity – but they are smart enough to take a meal ticket. No wonder the church was furious: Viridiana ruthlessly exposes the lip-service the downtrodden give religious charity, while refusing to reshape their lives and views according to instruction.

The peasants remain earthy, irreverent and full of their own pleasures and prejudices. Despite Viridiana’s best efforts they abuse a (possibly leperous) beggar, tying a cowbell to him so they can hear him coming. When left alone in the grand house, they do what many of us might well do in their place: like teenagers resentful at their parents, they throw a drunken party and trash the place. Viridiana’s ‘dinner-party’ scene is Buñuel’s masterclass in riotous joy that slowly turns darker and more dangerous. Mockery leads to over-indulgence, anger and eventually violence. Viridiana will discover to her cost her attempts at kindness has done nothing to change their basic characters and it is as likely for someone to be downtrodden and deeply unpleasant as it is for them to be decent.

Charity in Viridiana doesn’t really change the world. It can improve lives, but not the system. And using it to shape people into what you want them to be is doomed to failure. The peasants are (mostly) not bad people, they just don’t feel want to reshape themselves into pious substitute nuns for Viridiana as a pay-off for room and board. Jorge is distressed to see a working dog tied to a cart and forced to run alongside it. He impulsively buys the dog – which to its original owner is not a pet but a working animal that must own its keep. Jorge clearly feels good about saving this dog: but seconds after he walks away with it, Buñuel pans across to another identical dog running behind a cart. Who was this charity for? The dog or for Jorge? The peasants of Viridiana? And did this one act change anything? And for some charity is entirely self serving: Viridiana visits Don Jaime solely out of thanks for his charity in paying for her time in the convent – surely an act only carried out for Jamie’s own perverted reasons.

None of this is what the Church or Spanish state wanted to hear. A downtrodden class that isn’t grateful to its leaders for lifting them up, but resents them for their patronising strictures. Lords of the manor, one of whom is a lonely pervert, the second a libidinous playboy who sleeps with multiple women. A deeply religious woman, who is completely naïve and fails utterly. And an ending – an ending Buñuel was ordered to change from the script and in doing so made even more suggestive and blasphemous – that implies the household will settle into a sexual menage.

It’s brilliantly, pointedly not what he was asked for – and stunning condemnation of the flaws in an entire system, caught in a brilliant parable. It’s superbly directed by Buñuel, by now a master of camerawork and editing with a beautifully judged performance by Silvia Pinal who makes Viridiana someone we deeply admire even as every decision she makes seems doomed for disaster. It’s a fiercely challenging, involving and complex work and infinitely rewarding for reviewing and patient consideration – no wonder Spanish critics later named it the greatest Spanish film ever made.

Dodsworth (1936)

A marriage disintegrates in this richly mature, non-judgemental film one of the best of the decade

Director: William Wyler

Cast: Walter Huston (Sam Dodsworth), Ruth Chatterton (Fran Dodsworth), Paul Lukas (Arnold Iselin), Mary Astor (Edith Cortright), David Niven (Captain Lockert), Gregory Gaye (Kurt von Obersdorf), Maria Ouspenskaya (Baroness von Oversdorf), Odette Myrtil (Renée de Penable), Spring Byrington (Matey Pearson), Harlan Briggs (Tubby Pearson), Kathryn Marlowe (Emily), John Payne (Harry)

Marriage is tricky. In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, bringing up a family, running a business and rushing between social events, what if you don’t notice you don’t have much left in common? That’s the theme of Dodsworth, one of the most strikingly modern of 1930s films, that tackles the breakdown of a marriage in a surprising subtle way, avoiding the sort of moral punishment and condemnation you’d expect from the production code. Combined with sharp writing, fine acting and some fluidly creative direction from William Wyler, and you have an overlooked classic.

Dodsworth kicks off with the retirement of car entrepreneur Sam Dodsworth (Walter Huston). Having sold his successful independent factory to a major business, Sam is now effectively retired and suggests that he and his wife Fran (Ruth Chatterton) take that trip to Europe they’d always discussed but never had time to do. The trip, however, starts to reveal fractures in their relationship. Fran isn’t ready to ‘rush towards old age’ like she feels Sam, with his touristy longings and interest in engineering mechanics is. She wants to be part of society and feel the excitement of flirtations (and more) with rakeish European types (from David Niven to Paul Lukas to Gregory Gaye), while Sam ticks off the sites and sits in cafés. Sam, it turns out, has far more in common with Naples-ex-pat Edith (Mary Astor) – but feels duty bound to do whatever he can to preserve his marriage with Fran.

It’s all adapted from Sinclair Lewis’ doorstop novel, skilfully boiled down into a clear dramatic journey by Sidney Howard, from his own theatre adaptation (which also starred Huston). It becomes both slightly sad, watching two people drift apart, while also offering rich vestiges of hope of what the future can hold if you dare to take a chance. It mixes this with dry wit, scenes of compelling narrative interest and an insightful look at two people effectively going through different types of life crisis during a ‘once in a lifetime’ journey. Because nothing can disrupt your thinking about your own life more than changing nearly everything about it in one swift barrage of events.

It’s assembled into a richly involving whole by William Wyler, who lands the film just the right side of melodrama. From the opening shot, tracking towards Sam’s back as he leans against a window looking out over the factory which gave his life meaning, there is a quiet air of its characters living in denial of their own melancholy. Part of Sam is already wondering what on earth he’s going to do without his factory – its why he immerses himself in the most banal details of the sights they will see in Europe, or the engineering of their cruise ship.

Sam feels his journey will give him new opportunities, but it often sees him uncertain and slightly adrift, from not knowing how to tip waiters to finding his mid-Western mindset unable to compute the sexually liberal rules of European high society. Fran claims the journey abroad will mean leaving behind the oppressive parade of the over familiar social scene in their small town. It quickly turns out, she’s only be bored of their small circle not the glamour of social events.

Sam is played with real skill and under-played grace by Walter Huston in one of his finest performances. He’s an overwhelmingly decent man, self-made, confident but hesitant and uncertain out of his element. There’s a fuddy-duddy quality to him you can understand Fran finding grating, but he’s also capable of genuine, unfiltered enthusiasm (watch his joyful spotting of a famous lighthouse during their journey – which hilariously he nearly misses while checking his watch – and the eagerness which he tries to share this with an irritated Fran and a politely bored Niven). What’s superb about Huston’s performance is the awkwardness, shyness and even timidity he brings to a successful man, the quiet air of confused anxiety behind Sam as his certainties melt away.

Both Sam and Fran are convinced everything between them is fine, constantly speaking (increasingly dutifully) about their love, as if trying to convince each other even as it starts to fall apart. Their home already feels invaded by their daughter and her husband, who absent-mindedly serves himself drinks from Sam’s cabinet. They’re in completely different mindsets. Fran is constantly embarrassed by her husband’s tendency to hickness. Sam feels Fran’s upper-class ‘friends’ wouldn’t look twice at her without the cash she can flash. Fran is horrified by Sam’s whimsical statement that they will soon ‘be a couple of old Grandparents’. She’s young at heart, being wooed and won’t give that up.

From a ship-bound flirtation with David Niven’s suave playboy where she seems shocked at his implication that they can take things further (Sam doesn’t help by telling her she only has herself to blame), she swiftly begins an all-but-open affair with Paul Lukas’ smooth gentleman (with Sam turning an embarrassed third-wheel blind eye) even sending Sam home to extend her holiday privately, while he fields awkward questions from their family and re-directs his inner fury at his public cuckolding into grumpy rants about other’s scrabble games covering his desk and fussily reaching for his Encyclopaedia to prove trivial discussion points.

By the time Ruth has convinced herself divorce will lead, inevitably, to a glorious new marriage with much younger aristocrat Gregory Gaye, she’s at the centre of an increasingly delusional mid-life crisis, full of false claims about her age and built on fantasies. Ruth Chatterton is very good, neatly bringing to life a woman who can’t face the idea of becoming old. The film (while siding with Sam) never fully condemns her for her behaviour – even if it maintains an American suspicion of her wealthy European upper classes. In fact, it’s very hard not to feel sorry for Fran when her lover’s mother (played by an imperiously shrewd Oscar-nominated Maria Ouspenskaya) punctures her delusions about the likely future of a relationship with her feckless son.

It’s all beautifully framed by Wyler. How can you not admire the lingering shot of Fran reading a telegram from Sam and letting Lukas’ Iselin set fire to it, the camera following the paper as the wind blows it across the balcony floor to disintegrate like the Dodsworth marriage? Dodsworth is full of such beautifully subtle moments, its imagery (and Oscar winning sets) wonderfully establishing a world in transit as much as the Dodsworths. Wyler also evens the score at points: Sam remains largely sympathetic, but its possible to be irritated by his naïve dullness, just while the frequently infuriating Fran is relatable in tragic fear that her life is behind her.

It’s this mature view of people drifting apart, making mistakes and not always being condemned that makes Dodsworth such a richly intelligent film. Sam would certainly by more happy with Edith (a very moving performance from Mary Astor), just as Fran would be better off without Sam. Dodsworth is largely refreshingly free of the sort of Puritan punishments other films dealing with similar themes would use under the Production Code. Instead Dodsworth is a superbly acted, directed and written melodrama with a serious tone that remains richly rewarding viewing.

A Place in the Sun (1951)

A great Hollywood romance obscures darker, more sinister implications that its makers seem unaware of

Director: George Stevens

Cast: Montgomery Clift (George Eastman), Elizabeth Taylor (Angela Vickers), Shelley Winters (Alice Tripp), Anne Revere (Hannah Eastman), Keefe Brasselle (Earl Eastman), Fred Clark (Bellows), Raymond Burr (DA Frank Marlowe), Herbert Hayes (Charles Eastman), Shepperd Strudwick (Tony Vickers), Frieda Inescort (Ann Vickers)

It’s based on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, but in some ways it feels like very British. After all, few American films are more aware of class than A Place in the Sun and there is something very British about a working-class man pressing his nose up against the window of the wealthy and wishing he could have a bit of that. In some ways, A Place in the Sun’s George Eastman is a more desperate version of Kind Heart’s and Coronets Louis desperate to be a D’Ascoynes or a murderous version of Room at the Top’s Joe Lampton not wanting his girlfriend to get in the way of wooing a better prospect. The most American thing about A Place in the Sun it is that what would be a black comedy or a bitter drama in Britain, becomes a tragic romance in George Steven’s hands.

George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) is from the black sheep working-class side of the Eastman clan, rather than the factory-owning elite side who live among the city’s hoi polloi. George is gifted an entry-level grunt job in the factory but works hard for progression. He absent-mindedly dates production line co-worker Alice (Shelley Winters), who thinks he’s the bee’s knees. Unfortunately for her, George meets Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor), daughter of the wealthy Vickers family, and they fall passionately in love. Just as Alice announces she’s pregnant and asks when George will do the decent thing. Can George thread this needle, rid himself of Alice and marry the willing Angela? Perhaps with the help of the Eastman’s lake side house and Alice’s inability to swim?

You can see the roots of a cynical tale of opportunism and ambition there, but A Place in the Sun wants to become a luscious romance. It is shot with radiant beauty by William C. Mellor, bringing us sensually up-close with Clift and Taylor whose chemistry pours off the screen. It’s soundtracked by a passionately seductive score by Franx Waxman. As we watch these two fall into each other’s arms, the film tricks us (and, I think, itself) into thinking these two lovers deserve to be together. And, by extension, everyone would be much better off if Shelley Winter’s gratingly needy Alice, who can’t hold a candle to Elizabeth Taylor’s grace, charm and beauty, just disappeared. Before we realise it, we and the film are silently rooting for a man with fatal plans to rid himself of this encumbrance.

What’s striking reading about A Place in the Sun is that Clift felt Eastman, far from a sympathetic romantic, was an ambitious social-climber (much like his role in The Heiress) too feckless, weak and cowardly to face up to his responsibilities. Clift’s performance captures this perfectly: at the height of his method-acting loyalty, Clift is sweaty, shifty and increasingly guilt-ridden with Alice, awkwardly mumbling platitudes rather than talking (or taking) action. It’s actually a superb performance of people-pleasing weakness from Clift. Eastman always says what those around him want to hear, whether it overlaps with what he believes or not. He can say sweet nothings to Alice and romantic longings to Angela. This is a great performance of an actor being, in many ways, more clear-eyed than the film about what the story is really about: a man who decides the best way to deal with the inconvenience of a pregnant girlfriend is to drown her.

What Clift didn’t anticipate is how much the power of photography and editing (not to mention the radiance of his and Taylor’s handsomeness) would mean many viewers would end up rooting for the selfish romantic dreams of this weak-willed heel. Steven’s film turns the Clift-Taylor romance into a golden-age Hollywood dream. Taylor, at her most radiant, makes Angela possibly the nicest, kindest, most egalitarian rich girl you can imagine. Their undeniable click is there from their first real encounter (Angela watching George absent-mindedly sink a cool trick shot at an abandoned pool table – how many takes did that take?). The sequences of these two together play out like a classic idyll, from slow-dancing at glamourous parties to lakeside smooching. Everything about what we are seeing is programming us to root for them – and I’m not sure Stevens realises the implications.

If we are being encouraged to relate to Clift and Taylor, everything in Shelley Winter’s Alice is designed to make us not want to be her. Winters lobbied for the part, desperate for a role to take her away from shallow romantic parts – ironically her success pigeon-holed her to dowdy, needy second-choice women, deluded wives and desperate spinsters. But she’s superb here, making Alice just engaging enough for us to imagine George would take a break from his self-improvement books, but also so fragile and needy we can believe she’d become both increasingly desperate and annoying. Angela, dancing radiantly at parties, is who we want to be: Alice, sitting up late in her cramped flat with a try-hard birthday dinner and carefully chosen gift waiting for the arrival of an indifferent George, is who we fear we are. If movies are an escape, we don’t choose her.

Steven’s film makes Alice’s pregnancy more and more a trap. (The film carefully skirts the much discussed but never named abortion option). When on the phone together, the camera tracks slowly into George as he huddles against a wall mumbling, the film’s world shrinking with his. In one of the film’s many beautifully chosen Murnau-inspired super-impositions, Alice appears like a ghost over George and Angela at the river. Alice’s increasingly fractious demands that George do his duty and marry her, with increasingly wild threats of social disgrace interspersed with her grating, desperate neediness makes us cringe with him. Possibly because we worry we’d be like her.

A Place in the Sun makes us root for a man plotting murder and guilty, at the very least, of manslaughter. That could make it the most subversive romance of all time – if it wasn’t for the fact that, even in the end, George is presented as the real victim. Even a priest gives him only a few words of criticism, while George is not even punished by losing the love of the faithful and trusting Angela. Even if George didn’t push Alice in, he also didn’t lift a finger to save her life. In the trial, Raymond Burr’s showboating DA helps us pity George as he presents a version of that fateful boat trip that we know isn’t true but is only a few degrees more horrible than what George actually did. Even his guards feel sorry for him, and Steven’s clunkily intercuts between George’s dutifully honest working-class family and the wealth of his rich uncle’s circuit to hammer home the tragedy.

Did Stevens realise all of this as he made the film? I’d argue possible not: that he was as much sucked into the romance as the viewing audience. But some American movies embrace optimism – and an American tragedy in that world is lovers kept apart. A British tragedy is an ambitious man destroying himself and others. There is a smarter, more ruthless film to be made from the material of A Place in the Sun. One where Clift’s George is a truly heartless go-getter and both Alice and Angela are different types of victim. And that would be American to: it would be one which consciously shows us how our longing for fairy tales and the American Dream can lead to perverse, outrageous outcomes. That film would be a masterpiece, rather than the unsettling work A Place in the Sun actually is.