Category: Epic

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.

Thirteen Lives (2022)

A real life rescue attempt that defied belief is bought to the screen with gripping power and skill

Director: Ron Howard

Cast: Viggo Mortensen (Richard Stanton), Colin Farrell (John Volanthen), Joel Edgerton (Dr Richard Harris), Tom Bateman (Chris Jewell), Pattarakorn Tangsupakul (Buahom), Sukollawat Kanarot (Saman Kunan), Teerapat Sajakul (Captain Anand), Sahajak Boonthanakit (Governor Narongsak Osatanakom), Vithaya Pansringarm (General Anupong Paochinda), Teeradon Supapunpinyo (Ekkaphon Chanthawong), Nophand Boonyai (Thanet Natisri), Paul Gleeson (Jason Mallinson)

In Summer 2008 one story gripped the world. In Thailand on June 23^rd, 12 members of a boys’ junior football team and their coach Ekkapon Chanthawong (Teeradon Supapunpinyo) were stranded underground in the Thum Luang caves by flooding. Rescue attempts would call for an international effort: Thai Navy Seals, American military, the local community and a team from the British Cave Rescue Council pooled talents and knowledge to help save the boys before they drowned, suffocated or starved to death.

It’s bought to the screen in Ron Howard’s gripping true-life disaster film, Thirteen Lives, a scrupulously respectful yet compelling dramatisation reminiscent of his Apollo 13: it wrings maximum tension from a story nearly all of us know the outcome of. Just like that film, it superbly explains the huge obstacles the rescuers faced – the near impossibility of navigating the flooded caves, the onslaught of water, the claustrophobic underwater conditions, the panic-inducing nightmare of swimming through kilometres of tight space for inexperienced divers…

Each of these is swiftly but carefully explained, before Howard focuses on the international effort resolving them. Onscreen graphics – in particular a map of the route through the cave complex, including distances and time spent travelling underwater (over four hours) – help us understand every inch of the journey and its implications. Carefully written scenes avoid the trap of exposition overload while making the dangers of an hours-long swim through dark, flooded tunnels clear.

Howard skilfully goes for show-not-tell where he can. The gallons and gallons of water running down the mountain and into the caves in the monsoon conditions are made abundantly clear. The first expedition of experienced cavers Richard Stanton (Viggo Mortensen) and John Volanthen (Colin Farrell) is staged in careful detail: the sharp currents, confined conditions (some parts of the cave are almost impassable – particularly when dragging two oxygen cylinders), the inability to see where you are going, the hours of oppressive time spent underwater.

In case we in are any doubt of how difficult any rescue will be, we see Stanton take a stranded rescue worker a short distance underwater: the man panics, nearly drowns them both and then nearly kills himself trying to surface. The eventual plan – to sedate each boy and have an experienced rescue diver carry him out – is as carefully explained as is its risk (if the dose is not exact, suffocation or panic induced drowning can and will occur). Howard’s careful, unflashy but captivating filming of the rescue attempt that follows is nail-biting and deeply moving.

Not least, because the film doesn’t shy away from the terrible risks. The accidental drowning of Navy Seal Saman Kunan – tragically volunteering from retirement – is sensitively, heartbreakingly handled. Every character is painfully aware of the dangers: Teeradon Supapunpinyo’s coach begs the families to forgive him for putting their children at risk (the children fall over themselves to praise him for saving their lives, in a heart-rending scene). Tom Bateman’s (fabulous) Chris Jewell breaks down in relief, guilt and a fear after he briefly panics during the rescue (no one blames him for a second – they all know each of them has been seconds away from the same countless times). This is a film that understands heroism is not square jawed machismo, but a grim awareness of the risks and a determination to not let that analysis stop you from helping those in need.

But Thirteen Lives is very pointedly not a white saviour story. It’s a story of teamwork and skills coming together: the British and Australian divers join a rescue effort being led by Thai Navy Seals, supported by local Thai officials. All of them are vitally assisted by a Thai water engineer who travels a huge distance to the site to help, and who brings vital knowledge, but can’t succeed without a local man who knows the terrain and a team of ordinary volunteers.

A triumphalist story would have opened and closed with one of our British heroes – the coolly professional ex-firefighter Stanton perhaps – and had them learning lessons and rising to the challenge. This film starts with the boys’ plans for a birthday party, and closes with the eventual much-delayed party. As soon as it’s revealed they are alive inside the cave complex, the film returns to them time and again and stresses their role was in many ways the hardest of all: trapped, lonely, terrified and slowly starving and suffocating, powerless to do anything. Howard’s film never forgets it is their story, or the courage they showed.

Equally, the film doesn’t forget the role of ordinary people. Thirteen Lives is full of people unquestioningly making sacrifices, putting themselves in danger or working at the limits of endurance to help. It’s not just the divers who carried the boys out who saved them. It’s the Thai farmers, living in poverty, who willingly agree that their farmlands (and crops) be destroyed by redirected water flow from the mountain to buy the boys time. The Thai volunteers battling for days with sandbags, pipes and eventually bamboo funnels against a never ending waterflow.

In this the British team are another group of (admittedly more prominent and vital) experts, volunteering their skills. Their presence is at first resented by the Thai Navy Seals – do they fear a white saviour story as well? – who feel a personal duty to rescue the children. Such clashes are not glossed over – but Howard’s film demonstrates the growing respect between them. The Seals are superb divers: but less experienced in the caving conditions the British team practically live in. The British are experts, but strangers in this land.

As those divers – this is surely the first Hollywood blockbuster to feature a hero from Coventry – Mortensen and Farrell are superbly committed and human. (There is a British delight to be had from their discussion of the merits of custard creams.) Mortensen is the hardened realist: he is sceptical that the impossible can be achieved and is firm that he won’t allow himself or others to undertake suicidal efforts. Farrell is great as his counterpart, determined to leave no one behind. Both actors spark wonderfully off each other – and their commitment, and that of the rest of the cast, to filming in these punishing conditions is stunning.

Thirteen Lives is a superb reconstruction of an incredible story, that wrings the maximum drama from an international sensation. It carefully celebrates internationalism and co-operation (its dialogue is largely not in English) and the struggles of the highly professional to find solutions to insurmountable problems. Channelling all Howard’s skills with biography, against-the-odds survival stories and ability to draw committed performances from actors, it’s his finest film in a decade and a worthy spiritual follow-up to Apollo 13.

Gone with the Wind (1939)

For decades unchallenged as the best loved Hollywood film ever made, but showing some signs of its age, it’s still an undeniable marvel

Director: Victor Fleming

Cast: Vivien Leigh (Scarlett O’Hara), Clark Gable (Rhett Butler), Leslie Howard (Ashley Wilkes), Olivia de Havilland (Melanie Hamilton), Thomas Mitchell (Gerald O’Hara), Evelyn Keyes (Suellen O’Hara), Ann Rutherford (Careen O’Hara), Barbara O’Neil (Ellen O’Hara), Hattie McDaniel (Mammy), Butterfly McQueen (Prissy), Oscar Polk (Pork), Rand Brooks (Charles Hamilton), Carroll Nye (Frank Kennedy), Jane Darwell (Mrs Meriweather), Ona Munson (Belle Watling), Harry Davenport (Dr Meade)

For most of the twentieth century, if you asked people to draw up a list of the greatest Hollywood films of all time, you can be pretty sure this would be close to the top. A landmark in Hollywood history, everything about Gone with the Wind is huge: sets, run time, costs, legend. It’s crammed with moments that have developed lives of their own in popular culture. Its score from Max Steiner – luscious and romantic – is instantly recognisable, practically Hollywood’s soundtrack. It’s the most famous moment in the lives of virtually all involved and for decades whenever it was released, it raked in the cash. But as we head into the twenty-first century, does GWTW (as it called itself even at the time) still claim its place at the head of Hollywood’s table?

It’s the love child of David O. Selznick. Never mind your auteur theory: GWTW credits Victor Fleming as the director, but parts of it were shot by George Cukor (the original director, who continued to coach Leigh and de Havilland), William Cameron Menzies (the legendary art director, who shot the Atlanta sequences) and Sam Wood (who covered for an exhausted Fleming for several weeks). This is a Selznick joint from top to bottom. GWTW is possibly the ultimate producer’s film: a massive show piece, where not a single cent isn’t up on the screen. Huge sets, vast casts, colossal set pieces, thousands of costumes and extras. It’s an extravaganza and Selznick was determined that it would be an event like no other. And a hugely entertaining event it was.

It would also be scrupulously faithful to Margaret Mitchell’s novel, with a dozen screenwriters working on it (including Selznick). GWTW was the ultimate door-stop romance novel. Set in Atlanta, Georgia, the entire film is a no-holds barred “Lost cause” romance of the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) is the passionate, wilful daughter of a plantation owner, desperately in love with Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), who is attracted to her but all set to marry his cousin Melanie (Olivia de Havilland). Also interested in Scarlett is playboy Rhett Butler (Clark Gable). Romantic complications are set to one side when the Civil War breaks out, bringing disaster to the South. As the war comes to its end will Scarlett and Rhett find love, or will Scarlett’s fixation on Ashley continue to come between them?

GWTW’s casting was the sort of national obsession not even the casting of a superhero gets today. Every actress in Hollywood seemed to screen test for Scarlett O’Hara, with Selznick playing the search for all the publicity it was worth. No one suggested Vivien Leigh. But, lord almighty, Leigh was placed on this Earth to play Scarlett O’Hara. GWTW is dominated by Leigh, dripping movie star charisma. She would be synonymous with the role for the rest of her life, and it’s no exaggeration to say this one of the greatest acting performances in movie history. Leigh balances a character stuffed with contradictions. Scarlett is wilful and vulnerable, impulsive and calculated, childish and dependable, selfish and generous, spoilt and sensible, romantic and realistic… But Leigh balances all this with complete ease. It’s an act of complete transformation, an astonishingly confident, charismatic and complicated performance.

There was no debate about who would play the romantic hero, Rhett Butler. He basically was Clark Gable. And Gable was perfect casting – so perfect, he was almost too scared to play it. But he did, and he is sublime: matinee idol charismatic, but also wise, witty and vulnerable (it’s easy to forget that Rhett is really in the traditional “woman’s role” – the ever-devoted lover who sticks by his woman, no matter how badly she treats him, spending chunks the latter half of the film halfway to depressed tears). For the rest, Leslie Howard was oddly miscast as Wilkes (he seems too English and too inhibited by the dull role) but Olivia de Havilland excels in a generous performance as Melanie, endearingly sweet and loyal.

These stars were placed in a film production that’s beyond stunning. Shot in glorious technicolour, with those distinctive luscious colours, astonishingly detailed sets were built (plantations, massive dance halls, whole towns). Everything about GWTW is designed to scream prestige quality. It lacks directorial personality – the best shots, including a crane shot of the Civil War wounded or a tracking shot on Leigh through a crowded staircase, seem designed to showpiece the sets and volume of extras. It’s a film designed to wow, crammed with soaring emotions and vintage melodrama. Nothing is ever low key in GWTW: disasters are epic, love is all-consuming passionate clinches. They built stretches of Atlanta so they could burn it down on camera. It’s extraordinary.

And much of GWTW is extremely entertaining. Especially the first half. It’s an often overlooked fact that if you ask people to name things that happen in GWTW, nearly everything (bar the film’s final scene obviously) they will come up with is in the first half. Rhett behind a sofa in the library? Atlanta on fire? Rhett and Scarlett at the ball? Scarlett surrounded by admirers at a garden party? “I’ll never be hungry again?” All before the interval. The first half is a rollicking, fast-paced rollercoaster that takes us from the height of the South to the devastation after the war. It grabs you by the collar and never lets go, supremely romantic, gripping and exciting.

The second half? Always duller. Bar the start and finish of the second half (nearly two hours in all), it’s a Less memorable film. Sure, it has the O’Hara’s in extreme poverty, Scarlett reduced to converting a curtain into a dress to glamour up some cash to keep Tara. It’s got Ashley and Melanie’s adorably sweet reunion. And it’s got possibly the most famous line ever in movies “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” (not to mention “Tomorrow is another day”).

Other than that? It’s a bitty, plot-heavy series of forgettable, episodic moments which you feel really should have been cut. Who remembers Frank Kennedy? Or Scarlett’s lumber mill? Rhett pushing his daughter in a pram? The London sequence? There is a solid hour of this film which is flatly shot, dully paced and devoid of anything memorable at all. GWTW owes all its beloved reputation to the first half: and to be fair you’ll be so swept up in that you’ll give the film a pass for its middling second act. After all you get just about enough quality to keep you going.

But what about the elephant in the room? GWTW, like no other beloved film, has a deeply troubling legacy. They were partly aware of it at the time – after all, every racial epithet was cut, as is every reference to the KKK (it’s referred to as a “political meeting” and Rhett and Ashley’s membership is glossed over) and we never see the attack they carry out on a shanty town of former slaves. But GWTW remains, in many ways, a racist film peddling an unpleasant and dangerous mythology that the “Lost Cause” of the South was all about gentlemanly fair play, rather than coining it off plantations full of enslaved workers.

GWTW, in many ways, plays today a bit like a beloved elderly relative who comes round for dinner and then says something deeply inappropriate half-way through the main course. The dangerous mythology is there from the opening crawl which talks of the South as a land of “Cavaliers and cotton fields” where “Gallantry took its last bow…[full of] knights and their ladies fair, of Master and Slave”. The third shot of the film is a field of smiling slaves, working in a cotton field. Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar (at a segregated ceremony) and she is wonderfully warm as Mammy, but her character is another contented underling. At least she seems smarter than the other main black characters, Pork and Prissy: both are like children reliant on the guidance of their masters.

The Cause of the South is luscious and romantic, as are the people who fight it. Nearly every Yankee we see is corrupt, ugly and greedy, rubbing defeat in our heroes’ faces. It’s not quite Birth of a Nation, but the second half has a creeping suspicion of freed black people. A carpetbagger from the North is a smug, fat black man who mocks wounded Southern soldiers. Scarlett’s walk through the streets of a rebuilt Atlanta sees her startled and mildly hustled by black people who no longer know their place. Every prominent black character is sentimental about the good old days. GWTW would make an interesting double feature with 12 Years a Slave.

It’s this dangerous and false mythology that makes the film troubling today. It’s why you need to imagine the entire thing with a massive asterisk – and why you should be encouraged to find out more about the era than the fake and self-serving fantasy the film peddles as reality. But for all that, GWTW is so marvellous as a film that it will always be watched (and rightly so), even if it was always a film of two halves and only becomes more controversial in time. But watch it with a pinch of salt, and it is still one of the most gorgeous, sweeping and romantic films of all time: that’s why it still remains, for many, the definitive “Hollywood” film.

Airport (1970)

Disaster awaits in the sky in this ridiculous soap that is less exciting than Airplane!

Director: George Seaton

Cast: Burt Lancaster (Mel Bakersfied), Dean Martin (Captain Vernon Demerest), Jean Seberg (Tanya Livingston), Jacqueline Bisset (Gwen Meighen), George Kennedy (Joe Patroni), Helen Hayes (Ada Quonsett), Van Heflin (DO Guerrero), Maureen Stapleton (Inez Guerrero), Barry Nelson (Captain Anson Harris), Dana Wynter (Cindy Bakersfeld), Lloyd Nolan (Harry Standish), Barbara Hale (Sarah Demarest), Gary Collins (Cy Jordan)

A busy Chicago airport in the middle of a snowstorm. Workaholic Mel Bakersfeld (Burt Lancaster) doesn’t have time to prop up his failing marriage to his humourless wife: he’s got to keep the flights moving, clear the runways and solve the problems other people can’t. He’s not dissimilar to his brother-in-law Vernon Demerest (Dean Martin), who hasn’t got time for his plain-Jane wife at home when he’s got a flight to Rome to run and a saintly pregnant air hostess girlfriend Gwen (Jacqueline Bisset), to deal with. Tensions will come to a head when depressed former construction worker Guerrero (Van Heflin) joins Demerest’s flight, planning to blow himself up so his wife can profit from his life insurance. Disaster awaits!

“A piece of junk”. That was Burt Lancaster’s pithy review of this box-office smash that was garlanded with no fewer than ten Oscar nominations. He’s pretty much spot on. Airport is a dreadful picture, a puffed-up, wooden soap opera that never takes flight, stapled together with a brief disaster plotline that only really kicks in during the final act of the film and is solved with relative ease. Other than that, it’s all hands to the pumps to coat the film in soapy suds, which can be stirred up by the strips of wooden dialogue that fall from the actors’ mouths.

Seaton adapted the script from a popular low-brow novel, though it feels as if precious little effort went into it. It’s corny, predictable dialogue does very little to freshen up the bog-standard domestic drama we’re watching in a novel setting. Both lead actors juggle loveless marriages with far prettier (and much younger) girlfriends. Those girlfriends – Jean Seberg for Burt and Jacqueline Bisset for Dean – play thankless roles, happily accepting of their place as no more than a potential bit-on-the-side and very respectful of the fact that the job damn it is the most important thing.

The film bends over backwards so that we find Burt and Dean admirable, despite the fact that objectively their behaviour is awful. Burt treats his home like a stopover, barely sees his kids and seems affronted that his wife objects he doesn’t attend her important charity functions and doesn’t want the cushy job he’s being offered by her father. Just in case we sympathise with her, she’s a cold, frigid, mean and demanding shrew who – just to put the tin lid on it – is carrying on behind Burt’s back. We, meanwhile, applaud Burt for showing restraint around the besotted Jean Seberg, merely kissing, hugging and chatting with her about how he’d love to but he can’t because of the kids at home damn it!

He looks like a prince though compared to Dean. Only in the 1970s surely would we be expected to find it admirable that a pregnant girlfriend happily takes all the blame – the contraceptive pills made her fat and she knows the deal – begs her boyfriend not to leave his wife and then urges him to not worry about her. Dean’s wife doesn’t even seem that bad, other than the fact she’s a mumsy type who can’t hold a candle to Bisset’s sensuality. That sensuality is overpowering for Dean, who at one point pleads with her to stay in their hotel room because the taxi “can wait another 15 minutes”. Like a gentleman his reaction to finding out Bisset is pregnant, is to offer to fly her to Norway for a classy abortion (rather than the backstreet offerings at home?).

This soapy nonsense, with its stink of Mad Men-ish sexual politics (where men are hard-working, hard-playing types, and women accept that when they age out, he has the right to look elsewhere) is counterbalanced by some laboriously-pleased-with-itself looks at airport operations. Baggage handling. Customer check-in. Customs control checks. Airport maintenance. All get trotted through with a curious eye by Seaton. Just enough to make parts of the film feel briefly like a dull fly-on-the-wall drama rather than a turgid soap.

Soap is where its heart is though. Helen Hayes won an Oscar for a crowd-pleasing turn (from which she wrings the maximum amount of charm) as a seemingly sweet old woman who is in fact an expert stowaway. Van Heflin and Maureen Stapleton play with maximum commitment (Stapleton in particular goes for it as if this was an O’Neil play rather than trash) a married couple whose finances are in the doldrums, leading the husband to take drastic steps.

It’s all marshalled together with a personality-free lack of pizzaz by Seaton, who simply points the camera and lets the actors go through their paces, with a few shots of humour here and there. There are some interesting split-screen effects, but that’s about the last touch of invention in the piece. It’s mostly played with po-faced seriousness – something that feels almost impossible to take seriously today, seeing as the structure, tone and airport observational style of the film was spoofed so successfully in Airplane (a much better film than this on every single level, from humour, to drama even to tension – how damning is that, that a pisstake is a more exciting disaster thriller?)

It smashed the box office in 1970 and got nominated for Best Picture. But its dryness, dullness and lack of pace mean it has hardly been watched since. Although it can claim to be the first all-star disaster movie, it’s not even fit to lace the flippers of The Poseidon Adventure, which far more successfully kickstarted the cliches that would become standard for the genre (and is a tonne more fun as well as being a disaster movie – this has a disaster epilogue at best). An overlong, soapy, dull mess.

The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

Our heroes climb up an overturned cruise liner in the film that launched a thousand enjoyable disaster movie clichés

Director: Ronald Neame (Irwin Allen)

Cast: Gene Hackman (Reverend Frank Scott), Ernest Borgnine (Mike Rogo), Red Buttons (James Martin), Shelley Winters (Belle Rosen), Jack Albertson (Manny Rosen), Carol Lynley (Nonnie Parry), Roddy McDowell (Acres), Stella Stevens (Linda Rogo), Pamela Sue Martin (Susan Shelby), Arthur O’Connell (Chaplain John), Eric Shea (Robin Shelby), Leslie Nielsen (Captain Harrison)

New Year’s Eve on the biggest cruise liner in the world and the money men have ordered “Full steam ahead!” into a storm – after all, it would be terrible publicity to arrive late at harbour. Needless to say, it’s a terrible idea, as the Poseidon is hit by a tsunami and flipped upside down. Everyone at the top of the ship is killed, leaving only the party goers in the promenade room alive. Who is going to make it out from the one of the most famous disaster films of all time?

Produced by the Master of Disaster himself Irwin Allen – he personally staked half the budget and made a fortune – the ship’s passenger log is a host of Oscar-winning stars, each balancing soapy plotlines. Gene Hackman is the maverick priest, body pumping with muscular Christianity, who believes God helps those who help themselves. Ernest Borgnine is a grumpy police chief, on a long-delayed holiday with his ex-call girl wife Stella Stevens. Shelley Winters and Jack Albertson are a retired couple heading to Israel to see their grandson for the first time. Red Buttons is an unlucky-in-love fitness freak, Roddy McDowell a plucky steward. Pamela Sue Martin and Eric Shea are two (unbearable) kids travelling to join their parents while Carol Lynley is the ship’s terrified singer.

The Poseidon Adventure cemented the tropes you’d come to know and love in disaster films. The maverick leader, the grouchy contrarian, a plucky pensioner with a vital skill, adorably brave kids, a self-sacrificing nice guy… They’re all in here, the actors playing these cardboard cut-out characters with gusto as they climb up the endurance obstacle course set of an upside-down cruise liner.

Allen’s film takes a while to get going: a quarter of the run time is dedicated to setting up the various character dilemmas. Is a member of the crew a former client of Stevens’ Linda? Will Gene Hackman find new purpose in his faith? Will Red Buttons find love? Neame shoots these opening exchanges with the uninspired professionalism the exposition-filled dialogue demands (there are several variations on “What am I doing on this ship? Let me tell you…” lines). But what makes the best of these films work is when the soapy shallowness manages to make the characters endearing. It’s what happens here: the cast could do these scenes standing on their head, but gosh darn it we end up hoping the Rosens will live to see their grandson at the foot of Mount Sinai.

The film of course “starts” proper with that wave hitting. At which point, Allen (and Neame) knows exactly what works. He makes the stakes clear, the target simple (climb up, get out) and taps into common fears of falling, drowning etc. He knows how to make us thrill at the stunts – that tipping ballroom, with various stuntmen plunging downwards – and throw in the odd moment to remind us how tragic it all is (like Red Buttons sadly laying his jacket across some poor soul).

It also understands that we need to feel smarter than the crowd of extras caught up in the drama. When Gene Hackman earnestly tells everyone their only chance of survival is up, we want to feel that we’d be smart enough to go with him, rather than join the sheeple listening to the literally-out-of-his-depth purser (“What you’re suggesting is suicide!”). Allen knows we need to feel smarter so much he later throws in another group led by a confident-but-wrong authority figure (the ship’s doctor) blithely walking downhill to the flooded aft, ignoring Hackman’s cries that they are striding to a watery grave.

No, we’d definitely be with the plucky stars. After all Hackman can’t be wrong! (Gene Hackman’s priest, for all his bluster, is remarkably unpersuasive – he even only just holds onto authority in the group). The stunt work and production design as the battered stars climb up the overturned ship to the hull are remarkable – not for nothing did this scoop nine Oscar nominations – and while the film is undeniably slightly cheesy, it’s played with an absolute earnest seriousness by the cast (Hackman, to his eternal credit, acts as if his life depended on it – which considering it’s clearly a pay cheque role other actors would have coasted through is admirable).

The set pieces are superb. As the cast is whittled down, the deaths carry a certain weight – again conveyed by the honesty of the grief from those left behind. Shelley Winters bagged the best role – and the most iconic scene – as an overweight old lady with a Chekhov’s skill, performing (at great cost) an act of heroism no one else could manage. (She landed an Oscar nomination, largely for this stand-up-and-cheer moment with a sting). Most get a moment to shine – although Carol Lynley’s pathetic, panicking singer (she can’t swim or climb or hold her breath or run…) who spends her time shrieking tries your patience no end.

The film is so much about the experience of seeing this group of people overcome death-defying climbs, swims and flames that when the survivors stagger into the sunlight, the film abruptly ends. It’s all about the ride, with most of the plot points established earlier settled by someone dying on the way up. But it’s entertaining and lands just the right side of involving. The characters may be artificial, but we still care about them.

The Poseidon Adventure was a massive hit and still the best maritime disaster film made (certainly much better than its belated, lame, remake). Allen cements a formula where swiftly sketched characters, played by recognisable actors, go through endurance tests in front of us via terrifying set-ups and death-defying stunts. It’s grand, old-fashioned entertainment, perhaps taking itself a little too seriously, but giving us lots to gasp and cheer at.

Ran (1985)

Kurosawa’s epic version of King Lear places style over substance, but offers many glorious visual treats

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai (Hidetora Ichimonji), Akira Terao (Taro Ichimonji), Jinpachi Nezu (Jiro Ichimonji), Daisuke Ryu (Saburo Ichimonji), Mieko Harada (Lady Kaede), Yoshiko Miyazaki (Lady Sué), Mansai Nomura (Tsurumaru), Hisashi Igawa (Kurogane), Peter (Kyoami), Masayuki Yui (Hirayama Tango)

An ageing Lord lays down the burdens of office to his three children. Two flatter the old man: the third tells him he’s a fool. The lord banishes the third child and treasures the other two, who betray him tipping him into a lonely madness, screaming on a moor. Sound familiar? Kurosawa takes Shakespeare’s King Lear and transposes it to the final days of Samurai Japan. Lear becomes Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai) and his daughters become sons, Taro (Akira Terao), Jiro (Jinpachi Nezu) and Saburo (Daisuke Ryu), with the latter two taking on Hidetora’s land.

Ran translates as “Chaos”. That’s really what the film is about. Kurosawa’s Lear is strikingly nihilistic. Anything from the original play that could be called remotely optimistic – there is no good servant figure, no sensible Albany and no Edgar caring for, and avenging, his blinded father – is removed. Instead, Hidetora’s decision leads to unrelenting death and destruction, a carnival of bodies piling up in burnt out, ruined castles. This is Lear, tinged with the sort of Beckettian-wasteland theorists like Jan Kott would love: bleak and hopeless with only suffering at its heart.

As you expect with Kurosawa, its filmed with poetic beauty. The more frantic, Western-action, stylings of Kurosawa’s youth are gone, a victim perhaps of his auteur reputation. Ran is a self-consciously important film, an epic taking place in a series of stately medium and long-shots (I can barely remember more than a few close-ups), in luscious Japanese countryside, peopled by hundreds of colour-coded extras. Kurosawa’s fault is that he sometimes focuses on this, at the cost of the thematic complexity of Lear.

But what he certainly gets right is the bleakness at its heart. Kurosawa is not remotely seduced by any glamour in Hidetora. Played by Tatsuya Nakadai in a deliberately classical noh-style (full of elaborate poses and declamatory, plot-heavy dialogue) designed to stress how out-of-touch he is, compared to the more modern styles of the other actors. A vain, proud man who expects to be obeyed without question, Hidetora is never a truly sympathetic figure until his final moments.

Everything we learn about him hammers home his past of violence and brutality – he wiped out of the families of both of his daughters-in-law to steal their lands, he blinded Ran’s prince-turned-beggar Tsurumaru, who wanders the wilderness and gives Hidetora shelter. Falling from power, he’s as stubborn and arrogant than ever, leading his retainers to their death in an ambush. There is none of the “very fond, foolish old man” about him (there isn’t much of that about Lear either), just a tyrant who brings himself low.

Hidetora’s greed has also introduced a serpent into his own nest. Many have seen Taro’s wife Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada) as a Lady Macbeth figure, but really she’s a sort of Edmond or Iago. Seductive, vengeful and interested only in furthering the chaos, she lives in her murdered father’s castle, married to the son of the man who killed him. She schemes to turn both brothers against each other, seduces Jiro and pushes him to murder his wife. Using her body and her brain, she works to destroy the clan, her hatred motivated by Hidetora’s past cruelty.

Chaos is the perfect time for her schemes to take hold. Kurosawa’s setting of Ran near the end of the Samurai era, adds an additional blood-tinged brutality to the film’s battles. This was the time when the Samurai were learning their swords and arrows were poor defence against muskets. The battles are massacres: massacres of people fighting two different kinds of war. One is that of guts and honour: another the brutal long-distance finality of the bullet. Samurai are mowed down in their dozens on futile charges, while two of Hidetora’s sons are shot down from a distance, never seeing their killer’s faces. It’s a million miles from the traditional boar-hunt that opens the film – and it’s a world none of the characters manages to adjust to.

The violence of these battles is the central touch of mastery in Kurosawa’s epic. A whole castle was built – out of plywood – solely so it could be burned down during the pivot sequence at the centre of the film. Hidetora’s last castle is surprised by the armies of both sons, whose soldiers spray it with a never-ending stream of bullets and fire arrows. Playing out in silence under a haunting score, this is a chilling showpiece for Kurosawa’s visual mastery, a terrifyingly nihilistic view of the horror and destructiveness of conflict.

Inside Hidetora’s men are ripped apart or punctured like pin cushions, leaking gallons of crimson blood. His harem commits seppuku. The castle burns down around him. All while Hidetora sits in stoic disbelief at the top of a tower, his connection with reality collapsing. He eventually leaves the castle – walking through the parting invading forces (a shot that could only be attempted once as the set literally burned down around him) and out of the smoking gates. It’s an extraordinary sequence, the finest in the film: wordless, poetic and terrifyingly, hauntingly, brutal.

From here, Kurosawa’s Ran embraces the bleakness of Lear: Hidetora loses all trace of sanity, rages in self-loathing in the same fields he lorded over in the film’s opening sequence, is reduced to pathetically begging for food from the man he blinded and ends the film cradling the body of his murdered son. Around him his fool – an extraordinary performance from Japanese variety performer Peter – mocks his actions and tells bitter jokes about the savagery of the world while despairing and raging at the horrific position he has been reduced to in caring for his master.

Kurosawa embraces that bleakness: but how much does of Shakespeare’s depth does Kurosawa grasp? I’m not sure. In stressing the cruelty and madness of Hidetora, he robs him of Lear’s growing self-realisation about the emptiness of power and his own failings as a ruler. Hidetora is a two-dimensional character, as are most of the others. Kurosawa’s simplification of Lear removes the destructiveness of fate, the grotesqueness of chance and the punishments of loyalty (there is no Gloucester character, while the Kent figure is largely sidelined – both I feel is a real loss).

In making Ran, Kurosawa focused on two things: a depressingly post-Nuclear age vision of the world as a wasteland in waiting, and the pageantry of grand-settings and beautiful imagery. Compare Ran to the faster-paced dynamism of his earlier films (Seven Samurai may be nearly as long, but it doesn’t feel like it compared to the slow-paced Ran). There is a self-important artiness about Ran: it’s more stately style feels like Kurosawa showing he could do Ozu as well as he could Ford, while it’s indulgent run-time (there are many moments of near-silent nihilistic wilderness, that add length and import but not always depth) can test your patience.

Ran is basically a simplification of Lear that takes the core of the story, strips out many of its themes and contrasting sub-plots, and focuses on a single message, of man’s inhumanity to man. In doing that it loses the scope of a play that astutely looks at the personal and the political, the intimate and the epic, that understands the self-deceiving flaws of good and bad men. It’s large and important, but it’s not as powerful a tragedy as Lear because its fundamentally a simple film.

Which is not to say it is a bad film. But it is to say that Kurosawa had perhaps become seduced by his status as a legendary “Great Director” into believing that long and beautiful were synonymous with quality and importance. Ran is a fascinating and chilling film, with many striking and haunting moments. But it also misses some of what made its source material great, and it’s a triumph of moments and visuals than it is of intellect and depth.

The Ten Commandments (1956)

DeMille’s massive, camp epic sets the table for what we expect from Biblical epics

Director: Cecil B. DeMille

Cast: Charlton Heston (Moses), Yul Brynner (Rameses II), Anne Baxter (Nefretiri), Edward G. Robinson (Dathan), Yvonne De Carlo (Sephora), Debra Paget (Lilia), John Derek (Joshua), Cedric Hardwicke (Seti I), Nina Foch (Bithiah), Martha Scott (Yochabel), Judith Anderson (Memnet), Vincent Price (Baka), John Carradine (Aaron), Olive Deering (Miriam), Douglass Dumbrille (Jannes)

“Let my people go!” Close your eyes and think of Moses. Chances are you’ll see an image of Charlton Heston, arms spread wide, parting the waves to lead his people to freedom. Heston had been partly chosen for his resemblance to Michelangelo’s sculpture of the famous law-giver. It’s also a tribute to how Cecil B DeMille’s slightly ponderous, very-very-serious Biblical epic pretty much defined what we expect from Bible stories.

The Ten Commandments would be DeMille’s final movie (and for all its many flaws, it’s way more deserving of the Best Picture Oscar than the valedictory pat-on-the-back his penultimate film got). It’s basically a triumphal capturing of his self-important style, with sonorously devout voiceover and a faultless hero chiselled from marble an excuse to fill the screen with action, campy scheming and lots of sexiness. The Ten Commandments became a massive hit because it’s a rollicking pile of nonsense and something you could persuade yourself was “good for you” because it’s about the Exodus.

It’s a BIG film. DeMille delivers an opening direct-to-camera address, dripping with pompous self-satisfaction, where he piously tells us about the level of historical and Biblical research he’s carried out. The credits list a stack of professors, historians, religious experts and, last of all, the Holy Gospels as sources (presumably the Gospels’ writers got no cut of the vast profits). DeMille, as per his style, marshals thousands of extras and some huge (and distinctly sound-stage looking) sets to play out a series of tableaux, many of them rooted in classic silent-movie framing and techniques. Special effects abound to create plagues (disappointingly the film skips seven of them) and parting of the Red Sea. DeMille narrates with the grandiose aloofness of a Sunday School teacher.

It’s almost enough grandeur to make you overlook this pageantry covers a rather camp, frequently silly piece of entertainment. The film is ripe with buff actors striking poses: Heston does a lot of this during the first half, matched by Brynner (who worked out at length so as not to be shown-up). Opposite them, gorgeous Israelite and Egyptian babes fawn and flirt. The film is at least as interested in the love/hate relationship between Moses and Nefretiri as it is in the Word of God, not least because DeMille knows that this soapy stuff really sells.

Perhaps that’s why Anne Baxter plays Nefretiri with a level of campy purring that would be almost laughable, if you weren’t sure that she’s in on the joke. Relishing the chance to play a sex bomb – in costumes designed to stress her assets – Baxter simpers, flirts, drapes herself across Heston’s ram-rod (in every way but one of course – he’s righteous man of God) Moses and gets to utter lines like “Oh Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid adorable fool”. She mocks and cajoles Rameses into rejecting Moses’ demands, partly because she can’t stand Moses is immune to her charms, partly because she can’t bear the idea of Moses leaving Egypt (and her) behind forever.

Ten Commandments elevated Heston to the rank of the immortals. Few actors could carry the weight of films like this as well as he. His performance is in two acts. The first is the visionary, egalitarian adopted son of the Pharoah: the guy who builds the best cities, turns rival kingdoms into allies, gives the stuffy priests’ grain to the slaves (even before he finds out he’s one of them) and whom Seti (a haughtily British Cedric Hardwicke) would rather took over the kingdom than Rameses. Discovering his roots, he morphs over a (long) time into the white-haired, broad-shouldered prophet, speaking most of his lines in sonorous block capitals (“BEHOLD. THE POWER. OF GOD” that sort of thing). Very easy to mock, but only Heston could have played such woodenly written silliness with such skilful conviction.

He generously said he believed Brynner gave the better performance. Brynner does have the more interesting material. A playboy monarch who is true to his word and seems (at first) torn with how he feels about this adopted brother who overshadows him at every turn, Brynner adds a lot of light and shade to a character written as a pretty much straight villain. Moses is presented as such an imperious stick-in-the-mud, it’s a little tricky not to feel a bit sorry for the put-upon, inadequate Rameses, for all he’s a tyrant.

Heston was the only actor who went on location for a few key shots (the others all perform on sound stages or in front of green screens). Keeping things sound stage based allowed DeMille to have complete visual control over the set-ups. This suited his conservative camera movements and editing – most of the scenes take place in a few carefully extended mid-shots, that allow us to soak up the pretty costumes and the theatrical acting. The Ten Commandments is partly a flick-book of devotional pictures – so much so that a tracking shot into Seti’s face when he banishes Moses stands out for the amount of camera movement.

That doesn’t stop DeMille throwing in plenty to look at in frame. With Heston spending half the movie as (in some cases literally) the voice of God, John Derek’s Joshua carries the action torch: chiselled of chest, he’s introduced zip wiring to save Moses’ mother from being crushed by a mighty stone. Like most of the “good” characters he gets very little to actually work with: the decent Jews are either excessively pure or aged men of physical weakness who commentate on the wonders around us. Still, it’s better than the hilariously cheesy dialogue of the regular Israelites (“We’re going to the land of milk and honey – anyone know the way?”) that contrasts laughably with the Biblical pastiche Moses and the other principals speak in.

DeMille has plenty of fun with the doubters and naughty among the Israelites. Edward G Robinson goes gloriously over-the-top as quisling Dathan, blackmailing Joshua’s girl Lilia (a timid Debra Paget) into years of servitude and taking every single opportunity to undermine Moses’ leadership. It works as well: no wonder Moses gets so peeved – the slightest set-back and the Israelites seem ready to stone him. Dathan leads the final act Golden Calf orgy (DeMille’s voiceover tuts constantly, while letting us see as much of the action as the censor would allow) while Moses is up the mountain picking up the Word of God.

Robinson has the tone right though: the cast is stuffed full of OTT actors. Vincent Price plays a perverted Egyptian architect with lip-smacking glee. Judith Anderson jumps over the top as Nefretiri’s nursemaid. Nina Foch (one year younger than Heston!) plays Moses’ adopted mother with grandiose gentleness. They know this is a big, silly, pose-striking pantomime passing itself off as a piece of devotional work.

But that’s why its popular. DeMille knows that people don’t want to see a devotional lecture – or even really have to think that much about the rights and wrongs of an Old Testament story that sees the Lord strike down a load of kids with a murderous cloud (even Moses is torn by this for a minute). The Ten Commandments is huge in every sense, full of campy nonsense, pose-striking acting and a mix of stuff it’s taking very-very-seriously and campy ahistorical nonsense. It’s a winning cocktail that doesn’t make for a great film (or even, possibly, a good one) but cemented it as a landmark everyone recognises even if they haven’t seen it. In a way, making it one of Hollywood’s most magic epics.

There Will Be Blood (2007)

Daniel Day-Lewis triumphs in this incomparable masterpiece from Paul Thomas Anderson

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis (Daniel Plainview), Paul Dano (Eli Sunday/Paul Sunday), Kevin J. O’Connor (Henry), Ciarán Hinds (Fletcher Hamilton), Dillon Fraser (HW Plainview), Russell Harvard (Adult HW Plainview), David Willis (Able Sunday), Hans Howes (William Brandy), Paul F. Tompkins (Prescott)

Citizen Kane’s original title was “American”. David Thomson observed perhaps there hasn’t been another film so deserving of that title until There Will Be Blood. This is one of those once-in-a-decade films, possibly the greatest American film of the twenty-first century and Anderson’s career-defining masterpiece. It’s a gripping exploration of what makes America tick, captured within the self-destructive greed and hunger for power of one man. It’s a stunning piece of work, a cast-iron masterpiece, that takes a stack of influences and reinvents them into something fresh, daring, bold and above all unrepeatably unique.

Adapted very loosely from Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil, the film follows thirty years in the life of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a misanthropic and fiercely ambitious empire-building oil man. Running a ‘family business’ with his adopted son HW (Dillon Fraser) – the boy’s father having been killed in a drilling accident – Plainview takes up a sea of leases across California. The film focuses on his exploitation of a rich seam under the community of Little Boston. A very religious community – dominated by the strong-willed Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), almost a mirror image of Plainview’s monomania – Little Boston becomes the setting for Plainview’s struggles with men and land, in a growing cacophony of drama that inevitably (as the title promises) builds towards an explosion.

Watching it you can see the inspirations. It reflects The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (which Anderson watched endlessly in preparation) in its chilling exploration of the impact of greed and Plainview is the grandfather of Charles Foster Kane. It’s set in a Fordian west, but filtered through the unique vision of Kubrick. But it’s not a slave to these: it’s a truly original work, an off-kilter epic, shot with a stunning beauty that’s half poetry, half gothic horror by Robert Elswit. It sounds like no film ever made, a deeply unsettling score that mixes discordant rhythm and baroque-inspired strings by Johnny Greenwood.

And it has two geniuses at its centre. Anderson, a director best known for large-scale ensemble pieces, inverts his style to focus on one single misanthropic force of nature, a man who sees people as only tools or rivals. His film hits every note from near silent-cinema expressionism, to Grand Guignol fever-dream intensity. It’s shot with an all-consuming urgency, long-takes of fluid camera movement, mixed with interrogative still shots. The film digs itself into your soul, takes hold and doesn’t let go. It’s at times as darkly funny, as it is horrifyingly bleak. No one else could have made it.

And no one else could have played Plainview. If There Will Be Blood cemented Anderson as one of the leading directors of the early 21^st century, it confirmed Day-Lewis as the era’s greatest actor. Day-Lewis is beyond superb here: this is the sort of, epoch defining performance you see only a few times in your life. Hunched forward, like a man constantly on the move, dark eyes gleaming and his voice a malevolently rolling John-Huston inspired baritone, Day-Lewis makes Plainview a misanthropic monster. He’s articulate, instinctive and destructive. Achieving his dreams only makes him even more inhuman and bitter. And Day-Lewis makes clear the stunted, half-grown creature under the skin of the confident businessman.

It’s clear he’s desperately lonely, but seemingly only has enough humanity in him for one relationship at a time – even then, people still must serve a purpose. HW – and later Henry, the man who arrives on his land claiming to be his brother (a wonderful inscrutable performance from Kevin J O’Connor) – become props in the family business. Plainview reaches out to them for emotional connection, but it’s all one way. When an accident robs the young HW of his hearing, Plainview is incapable of caring for him – he treats the deafness like a betrayal. He banishes HW, just as he will banish and punish all those who he sees as betraying him, including Henry. There isn’t a scene that doesn’t have a piece of performative magic from Day-Lewis.

Alongside this genius, Anderson’s subject is America. It’s a stunning exploration of how capitalism, greed and an insatiable hunger for more – be it money, land, power or anything else worth a jot of value – has shaped the country. Plainview is the dark soul of pioneering American entrepreneurial spirit, obsessed to the elimination of anything else, with accumulation. Oil is the life blood of the country, God’s own gift of power wrapped in a dangerous black liquid. It’s pumping through the country’s soil, and to control it is to control the country’s circulation. It’s Plainview’s faith – and it’s the faith of all these men forging an empire out of the ground, motivated by the desire for more. It’s partly why the film is so focused on men – because it’s always grasping men like this, titans of industry, who shape the dark soul of our civilisation.

Nothing will please Plainview until he controls all around him, confessing in a quiet moment (there are no words for how brilliantly unrepentant, yet also strangely regretful Day-Lewis is in this underplayed scene) that he has “a competition within him. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.” Like the country itself, he has forged himself from nothing through naught but will-power and a determination to never know failure. There Will Be Blood argues that, much as we might want to think otherwise, America is built on the backs of men like Plainview – monsters with the vision and determination to turn a desert into a city.

God himself has no place in these calculations. Anderson contrasts the obsessive sweat of Plainview with the dogmatic and vainglorious Christianity of Eli Sunday (a brilliantly weasly Paul Dano). Eli’s church is a haven of evangelistic worship and showmanship, which Plainview immediately finds disgusting (does he recognise another expert peddler of bullshit?). Eli has a moral arrogance and as much as a desire to control as Plainview, and the battle that grows between these two for dominance not only shows the ruthlessness of both men, but also reflects the struggle between religious obligation and Mammon that has run through America’s history.

The rivalry between the two men revolves around three crucial confrontations. Having effectively robbed valuable land from Eli’s family for a pittance, Plainview then humiliates Eli, forcing him head first into the mud, refusing to allow him any influence over his dig. Eli’s revenge comes in spades: controlling a vital piece of land for Plainview’s pipeline, he demands Plainview comes to his church to be rebaptised. The resulting scene sees him goad, provoke and demean Plainview for his sins, forcing Plainview into a series of humiliating confessions (both actors are earth-shakingly brilliant).

Their final reckoning closes the film – and is both its most controversial and overblown sequence. Jumping forward fifteen years, to Plainview’s sprawling mansion (where Day-Lewis has become a dishevelled hermit, his misanthropy unchecked and his victories only confirming his loathing of humanity) it’s the famous ‘milkshake’ scene, played with the sort of OTT intensity only Day-Lewis could risk and which the film has carefully built us towards accepting. Blood-dripped in a Kubrickian setting of a bowling alley, it’s the final expression of two men’s mutual hatred and views of a world – Eli’s that it owes him something for his faith, Plainview’s that he controls it through will alone.

Only a film that has built on such firm grounding of escalating tension and excess could make such a scene a success. This is a film that starts with a near-silent 15 minutes, of Plainview hammering with a pickaxe obsessively in the belly of the country’s soil. It ends – after a long journey that has seen Plainview wheedle, steal, bully and grasp – with him entombed again, this time in his mausoleum of a home, no daylight allowed and the air filled with Plainview’s hate-filled rants. Along the way, we’ve seen the plains of California as a place of dreamy beauty, marshalled to the will of one man to control all around him, scenes of striking beauty and haunting intensity.

There Will Be Blood is a masterpiece, an inspired parable for American history, a showcase for one of the greatest actors of his generation to redefine his craft and a marvel of character study, epic vision and haunting lyricism from its director. There is not a false note in it and it stands towering as a landmark in American film history. The greatest American film of the 2000s? Possibly yes.

The Big Country (1958)

Gregory Peck rides into town in The Big Country

Director: William Wyler

Cast: Gregory Peck (James McKay), Jean Simmons (Julie Maragon), Carroll Baker (Patricia Terrill), Charlton Heston (Steve Leech), Burl Ives (Rufus Hannassey), Charles Bickford (Major Henry Terrill), Alfonso Bedoya (Ramon Gutierrez), Chuck Connors (Buck Hannassey), Chuck Hayward (Rafe Hannassey)

From the very first frame when that score kicks in, you know you are in safe hands. The Big Country is a big film, and big entertainment. When I re-watched it I hadn’t seen it for years. I loved it. It’s a slab of prime Hollywood entertainment, not perfect, but it’s one of those films that always delivers.

It’s the American West, and James McKay (Gregory Peck) arrives in town to marry Patricia Terrill (Carroll Baker), daughter of local landowner Major Henry Terrill (Charles Bickford) who is in the middle of a turf feud with patriarch of a cowboy clan, Rufus Hannassey (Burl Ives). This is a town where men-are-men and a harsh word is met with a sock to the mouth. It’s a world where McKay is out of step: a seasoned naval captain, with more experience than anyone, he couldn’t care less what people think of him and won’t be goaded into doing something foolish. His self-assurance and strength of character are interpreted as wimpy yellow-belly-ness by nearly everyone, including Patricia and Terrill’s macho foreman Steve (Charlton Heston). Only local schoolteacher Julie Maragon (Jean Simmons) understands him. But as events come to a head, only McKay has the strength of character to step up and try resolve things without mass bloodshed.

The Big Country is the classic set-up: a stranger in town, who has the guts to stand up. The only difference here, is that McKay has the guts to stand up and not conform to the macho bullshit being driven by the two feuding patriarchs. Both of these men are, of course, far more similar than they would admit, being perfectly contrasting personalities. Charles Bickford plays a genteel man with the principles of a thug, while Burl Ives plays a thug with the principles of a genteel man. No wonder they can’t get on, both see in each other qualities they most likely despise in themselves.

Compared to them, McKay looks like the very model of twentieth century liberal coalition building. Or at least McKay is a liberal who packs a punch, since it’s pretty clear Peck is probably the toughest son-of-a-bitch in the town. What’s glorious in McKay – and Peck’s sensational performance of reserved warmth and wry amusement, mixed with world-weary sufferance – is that you get a definite sense he’s seen way worse than this before. A man who has sailed around the world for decades, in the hardiest conditions, who has been keelhauled and saved men from sharks, recognises this for the slightly pathetic parochial dust-up it really is, and has no interest – or need – to put his life or the lives of others at risk to make crude points about his manliness.

If only, the film argues, we could all be as confident in our own skin. McKay keeps his cool in a way no-one in film, except perhaps Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock, has managed so successfully. He laughs off his irritation at a hazing from the Hannassey’s – and makes clear, as the Terrill’s saddle up to fight back, that in doing so they are not acting in his name. He won’t make a fool of himself by trying to ride a wild horse in front of a crowd. He won’t rise to Steve’s provocation for a punch-up in front of the entire Terrill gang. McKay is a man who only needs to prove things to himself: so he’ll tame that horse in front of no crowd and swear the only witness to secrecy. He’s not one to brag.

And if it’s a fight that Steve wants, he’ll give him one on his own time and his own terms – those being a dusky morning in private. Wyler shoots one of the greatest fights of all time, an exhausting slugging match between Peck and Heston, played out mostly in long shot that soaks up the dawn Western atmosphere, as the two men fight themselves to an exhausted score-draw, with each punch landing with a punishing wallop. There is something very compelling about this unflashy, in-the-dust, clash of two alpha males, and the strange sense of respect that grows between them (as well as the dry wit of the script – “You certainly take your time to say goodbye”, Heston deadpans after this exhausting ‘I’m leaving but first this’ fight).

It also showcases how well Wyler uses sound (or the lack of it), the fight taking place often in a longshot silence that somehow makes the dusty scuffle even more effective. Silence also comes into play brilliantly to stress McKay’s isolation when first the Terrill men ride away to extract vengeance and then the disgusted Patricia closes the front door on him, leaving him standing in magnificent isolation on the porch. Silence will also come effectively into play during the late act ride of various characters through a white chalk lined gorge and to stress the danger that the kidnapped Julie is under when being held by the Hannassey’s.

The final act brings all the threats of danger and threat together into a brilliantly tense final confrontation. This sequence showcases, not only Peck’s granite principles and nobility, but also gives excellent opportunities for Ives to explore hidden depths in Old Hannassey (it surely helped him win the Oscar for Supporting Actor) and his dumb son Buck (excellently played with a swaggering arrogance by Chuck Connors) who is all mouth and no trousers.

Sure, at times the film overplays the anti-violence card. It’s particularly noticeable as it sometimes wants to have its cake and eat it, favouring probably a sort of gun-toting liberalism, of the “I could kill you but I want to make it so I don’t have to” variety. But then the film would be a heck of a less effective if we weren’t so convinced that Peck was as tough as they come and that his unwillingness to throw himself into events thoughtlessly is a mark of his unparalleled strength. Again, Wyler uses silence as effectively as sweeping camera movements and that brilliant score, to suggest moral strength.

There is probably very little tension about where the romantic plotlines are going, but both Carroll Baker and Jean Simmons are very good as two very different, but equally strong, women (although both women allegedly found Wyler’s perfectionist Kubrickian retakes on set extremely trying). But it still works a treat because of the strength of the acting, and its strongly scripted characterisation.

That and I’ve hardly mentioned the score, by Jerome Moross, which is powerful and famous you’ll instantly know it even if you’ve never seen the film. The Big Country is a Western where the hero has the strength to stick to his principles while still getting the job done. It’s superbly acted by Peck, with Simmons, Baker, Heston, Ives, Bickford and Connors all excellent in support. Wyler combines visual and a compelling story into a film that, while at points a little long, is still a bona fide classic. Again I’ll say: I loved it.

Doctor Zhivago (1965)

Julie Christie and Omar Sharif are star cross’d lovers in Lean’s epic but flawed Doctor Zhivago

Director: David Lean

Cast: Omar Sharif (Dr Yuri Zhivago), Julie Christie (Lara Antipova), Geraldine Chaplin (Tonya Gromeko), Rod Steiger (Victor Komarovsky), Alec Guinness (Lt General Yevgraf Zhivago), Tom Courtenay (Pasha Antipov/Strelnikov), Siobhan McKenna (Anna Gromeko), Ralph Richardson (Alexander Gromeko), Rita Tushingham (The Girl), Bernard Kay (Bolshevik), Klaus Kinski (Amoursky), Noel Willman (Razin), Geoffrey Keen (Professor Kurt), Jack MacGowan (Petya)

Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is one of the seminal 20^th century novels. Smuggled out of the USSR after being refused publication, it became an international sensation and led directly to Pasternak winning the Nobel Prize (although the USSR insisted he turn it down). A film was only a matter of time – and who else would you call but David Lean, master of the pictorial epic, to bring the novel about the Russian Revolution to the screen. Lean – with his masterful Dickensian adaptations – was perfect in many ways but Doctor Zhivago, for me, is the least satisfying of his ‘Great Films’. It’s strangely empty and sentimental, lacking some of the novel’s strengths zeroing in on its weaknesses.

Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) is training to be a Doctor in the years before the outbreak of the First World War. Married to Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin), the daughter of his father’s old friend Gromeko (Ralph Richardson), Yuri is part scientist, part poetic free-thinker. Events throw him together with Lara (Julie Christie), a young woman whose fiancé Pasha (Tom Courtenay) has ties to the revolutionaries, while she is trapped in an abusive relationship with the amoral Komarovsky (Rod Steiger). But are all these troubles worth a hill of beans in a country about to tear itself apart?

There are many things you can’t argue with in Lean’s film. It is of course unfailingly beautiful. Ironically filmed in Fascist Spain, it’s gorgeously lensed with a luscious romanticism by Frederick Young (who won his second Oscar for a Lean film). It’s not just pictorial beauty either: Young frequently makes wonderful uses of splashes of Monet red to dapple the frame. From poppies in a field to the ubiquitous communist imagery on uniforms and walls. There are some wonderfully cool blues employed for the snow, while slashes of light pass across eyes with a gorgeous lyricism.

Romance is the name of the game, with everything working overtime to stress the star cross’d lovers plot. Maurice Jarre’s score – in particular its balalaika inspired Lara’s Theme – mixes Russian folk inspirations with an immortal sense of longing. It plays over a film that, while very long, often feels well-paced, even if (just as the novel) its episodic and at times rambling. Lean’s direction of epic events revolving around personal loves and tragedies is still exquisite in its balance between the grand and intimate. The film is wonderfully edited and a fabulous example of long-form storytelling.

So, what’s wrong with Doctor Zhivago? In a film with so much to admire, is it possible Lean and co spent years working on something only to bring the word but not the spirit to the screen? The key problems come round to Zhivago himself. This is man defined by his poetic soul. His poetry becomes a sensation after his death. His balalaika is a constant companion, and his playing of it an inherited gift (which even has major plot implications). Inexplicably, the film has not a single word of poetry in it (when it had Pasternak’s entire back catalogue to work with) and Zhivago never so much as strums the strings of his balalaika. It’s like filming Hamlet and then making him a mute.

The problem is, removing the character’s hinterland makes him a rather empty character. Zhivago is a liberal reformer, in sympathy with the revolution but not it’s methods. This should be at the heart of understanding his character, but like his poetry the film has no time for it. Instead, Zhivago is boiled down into a romantic figure, nothing more. He has no inner life at all, a blank canvas rather than an enigma.

Suddenly those long lingering shots of Sharif’s puppy-dog eyes end up carrying no real meaning. They aren’t the windows to his soul, only a big watery hole with not much at the bottom. Sharif is awkwardly miscast – and lacks the dramatic chops O’Toole bought to Lawrence – but it’s not completely his fault. His character has had his depth removed. When we see him struggling at the front, trapped on a long train ride to Siberia or forced to work with partisans, he’s not a man who seems to be considering anything, but just buffeted by fortune, neither deep or thoughtful enough to reflect on the world around him. That’s not really Pasternak’s intention.

Instead, the film boils the novel down to his plot-basics and, in doing so, removes the heart of what got the book banned in the first place. Lean misunderstood the future of Soviet Russia so much, he even chose to end the film with a romantic rainbow at the foot of a waterfall. The horrors of the civil war and the revolution are largely there briefly: a gang of deserting soldiers unceremoniously frag their officers and Zhivago frequently stares sadly at villages burned out by Whites or Reds (or both). But the film is more of a romance where events (rather than politically and social inevitability) gets in the way of the lovers – like Gone with the Revolution.

By removing the more complex elements – and the poetic language of Pasternak – you instead have the rather soapy plotline (with its contrivances and coincidences) left over. Again, it’s Hamlet taking only the events and none of the intellect or language. (And Pasternak’s novel didn’t compare with Hamlet in the first place.) Both Zhivago and Lara are shot as soft-focus lovers, with Julie Christie styled like a perfectly made-up slice of 60s glamour. It’s a grand scale, but strangely empty romance, because both characters remain unexplored and unknowable – in the end it’s hard to care for them as much as we are meant to do. For all the epic scale, small moments – such as an aging couple sharing a cuddle late at night on a train floor – carry more impact. How did the director of Brief Encounter – a romance that speaks to the ages for its empathy – produce such an epic, but empty, posture filled romance as this?

Julie Christie does fare better than Sharif – she’s a better actor, and her character has a bit more fire and depth to her. But she’s not in the picture enough, and Lean quietly undersells the terrible trauma of her eventual fate. Ironically, the smaller roles are on surer ground. Geraldine Chaplin is rather affecting as Zhivago’s wife, a dutiful and caring woman who her husband loves but is not besotted with. Ralph Richardson is witty and moving in a tailor-made role as her eccentric father. Tom Courtenay landed the films only acting Oscar nomination as the reserved and conflicted Pasha. Rod Steiger is very good as the mass of greed, selfishness and barely acknowledged shame as Komarovsky. Alec Guinness is bizarrely miscast as Sharif’s younger brother (!) but handles some of the film’s duller scenes well (Lean’s decision to have him never speak on screen except in the film’s framing device works very well).

There is a lot of good stuff in Zhivago, but this is a neutered and even slightly shallow film, that’s far more about selling a romance than it is telling a true adaptation of the themes of the novel. In Lawrence, Lean showed us multiple aspects of a conflicted personality to leave us in doubt about who he really was. In Zhivago, he just presents a rather empty person and seems unsure if he wants to use to ask who he is. The film concentrates on making the romance sweeping and easily digestible. What it doesn’t make us do is really care for them as people.