Category: Family drama

Hamnet (2025)

A powerful film about grief that works best in its smaller moments rather than its grand ending

Director: Chloé Zhao

Cast: Jessie Buckley (Agnes Shakespeare), Paul Mescal (Will Shakespeare), Emily Watson (Mary Shakespeare), Joe Alwyn (Bartholomew Hathaway), Jacopi Jupe (Hamnet Shakespeare), Olivia Lynes (Judith Shakespeare), Justine Mitchell (Joan Shakespeare), David Wilmot (John Shakespeare), Bodhi Rae Breathnach (Susanna Shakespeare), Noah Jupe (Hamlet)

“Grief fills the room up with my absent child”. It’s possibly one of the most profound things said about grief and loss. Naturally, it came from Shakespeare who, more than any other writer, could peer inside our souls and understand their inner workings. Grief can strike anyone, and overwhelm them, leaving them hollowed out husks, uncertain how to carry on. It’s a terrifying force that grows to dominate Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s literary best seller: how it creeps, unexpectantly, into lives that are contented and happy and works to tear down their foundations.

Hamnet imagines the emotional impact of the death of a young boy on his parents: those parents in this case being Will (Paul Mescal) and Agnes (Jessie Buckley) Shakespeare. The film takes us from courtship to marriage, Agnes pushing Will to follow his dreams in London, the birth of their children and death’s seizure of their son Hamnet (Jacopi Jupe). It will have a deep impact on their lives: for Agnes a world of grief and isolation, for Will a cathartic injection of his grief into his new play, Hamlet.

There are many things in Hamnet that work extremely well, not least it’s strong emotional force. Much of the film’s second half is extremely moving, a lot of that from the gentle build of its first half. Grief isn’t an expectant force – it bursts, unannounced into lives. The first half of Hamnet is romantic and optimistic. Will and Agnes’ courtship, two awkward outsiders in a small, rural town, is touchingly portrayed, full of awkward gestures and flashes of joy. Their marriage – over the objections of many, but with the endearing support of Agnes devoted brother, played with real heart by Joe Alwyn – is very happy and they have delightful children who they love very much.

There are tensions: it’s tough to live under the roof of Will’s parents. His father John (David Wilmot) is an abusive bully, his mother Mary (Emily Watson, on excellent empathetic form under a harsh exterior) judgemental. Will is desperate for something more than being a second-rate glove-maker. It’s actually sweet that Hamnet interprets their living apart not due to marital troubles, but a recognition that their love doesn’t need constant contact. Will’s need of London’s bustle is balanced by Agnes’ desire for nature and (ironically) to protect her children from the disease-ridden big city.

It’s the first hour’s playful, graceful unfolding that makes much of the second half hit home. Zhao’s film has an ethereal romanticism, with the camera gliding with patient, unobtrusive warmth around Agnes and Will. While dealing with raw emotions, Zhao brings a sense of magical realism to the film without overplaying her hand. A large part of Agnes outsider status is based on perceptions of her as a witch, who spends her time in the forest building her herbal knowledge (Zhao introduces her with a phenomenal birds-eye shot, nestled womb-like in the roots of a large tree), trusts her dreams and has formed a deep link with a pet hawk. This other-worldly presence in Agnes, carries across in the film’s vibrant, dreamy nature – and shows why Agnes is so drawn to the shy, awkward poet, who similarly feels most alive in his own visions and dreams.

It makes the second half particularly impactful, as the truly shocking death of a child (surely one of the most traumatic child deaths put on screen, devoid of peaceful, Little Nell-like beauty and with Hamnet suffering in prolonged, agonising pain) rips into the happy haven of this life. Zhao’s compassionate distance works brilliantly here, as the film brings us into the pained lives of these bereaved parents, without every once making us feel like intruding voyeurs. Instead, we feel every blow of the film’s perfectly observed exploration of the mundane reality of grief.

A lot of that is also due to Jessie Buckley’s searing performance as Agnes. Buckley is perfect as this slightly jagged, eccentric but determined women who knows her own mind and refuses to bend to others, full of an earthy romanticism. Her vulnerability is there – there is a very moving moment during her twin’s birth, when Buckley rests her head on Watson’s shoulder and weeps pitifully for her (deceased) mummy. But it doesn’t prepare us for Buckley’s perfectly judged raw emotionality. From an agonised, near silent scream at Hamnet’s death, Buckley shifts brilliantly into a shocked quiet whisper that she must tidy up the mess. Over the next few scenes, she collapses into herself, berating her husband with cold fury, wanting him to feel as paralysed with grief as she is. This is a fabulous performance by Buckley, well-matched by Mescal, whose pained soulfulness is perfect for a man processing grief through drama.

But I found the transition of this grief into the creation of Hamlet strangely less moving and more contrived. I’ve always found the attempts to use Shakespeare’s work to fill historical gaps in his biography tiresome. Hamnet studiously ignores that the role was played first by the middle-aged Richard Burbage, rather than a young actor – Noah Jupe, brother to Jacobi playing Hamnet – resembling the late Hamnet. Hamnet carefully re-cuts and selectively stages scenes of Hamlet to present it solely as the tragedy of a lost, sensitive soul. Lord knows what the emotionally enthralled Agnes made of the parts of Hamlet the film doesn’t stage: Polonius’ murder, the abuse of Ophelia, Hamlet making “country matter” gags and so on. Fundamentally it’s a lazy conceit that art can only come by replicating someone’s real experience and is presented in an obvious way designed to score straight-forward emotional points.

Hamnet gets so much right, it hurts that it doesn’t always work. There is an emotional anachronism to the central concept that didn’t land with me: was Hamlet just an inspired, cathartic therapy session for Shakespeare (unlikely since he ripped the plot from an older Danish legend called Amleth)? It lifts me out of things, just as the production and costumes frequently feels a little too clean, a little heritage (even more so considering the raw emotions). Moments of dialogue don’t quite ring true and little things like Shakespeare’s swimming ability (a skill possessed by virtually no one in Tudor England) or its coy dance around confirming Agnes’ historical illiteracy that jar. I’ll also confess I’m irritated by the film’s carrying across of the books conceit in avoiding naming Shakespeare for as long as possible (for almost 100 minutes), while making it clear from quotes throughout exactly who Mescal is playing.

But of course, I know, it’s an emotional fantasia, so perhaps it doesn’t matter that it feels like something shot on a National Trust property. When Zhao’s poetic, observational realism works, it carries real impact. There is a moment at the film’s end when a mirrored overhead shot with the film’s opening, and a look of such radiant hope crosses Buckley’s face, you forgive the manipulative and obvious musical choice accompanying it. Hamnet works best, not in its final showboating act, but in the raw, quiet, everyday moments that show both happiness and grief it gets close to an emotional force that leaves a lasting impact.

Sentimental Value (2025)

A autuer director tries to bond with his daughters in this heartfelt drama of family dynamics

Director: Joachim Trier

Cast: Renate Reinsve (Nora Borg), Stellan Skarsgård (Gustav Borg), Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (Agnes Borg Pettersen), Elle Fanning (Rachel Kemp), Anders Danielsen Lie (Jakob), Jesper Christensen (Michael), Lena Endre (Ingrid Berger), Cory Michael Smith (Sam), Catherine Cohen (Nicky), Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud (Even Pettersen), Øyvind Hesjedal Loven (Erik), Lars Väringer (Peter)

Famed auteur director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) has seen his career quietly stall in the past fifteen years. He frequently failed as a father to his two daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) now a leading classical actor and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) a married academic researcher with her own son, who she and Nora give a care and attention they never received from Gustav. However, Gustav has an olive branch for Nora – a semi-autobiographical film about his mother that he wrote for Nora. When she rejects him, he secures funding with Hollywood star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) and remains a presence in their lives as he plans to shoot the film in their family home.

Trier’s compelling portrait of a family confronting their feelings, explores the bonds that tie families together and if they go deeper than just sentiment. Superbly directed, it masterfully explores the confused, awkward tensions between children and their father and is blessed with three superb performances from Reinsve, Lilleaas and Skarsgård that genuinely feel like a family unit. With a naturalness in their comfort with each other, all three give a master class in micro-reactions (and aggressions) that show the raw nerves a father can touch with his clumsy attempts to connect with his daughters.

The connection between Reinsve and Lilleaas is so intensely moving, it’s hard not to believe they aren’t sisters. These two extraordinary actors share scenes of sisterly love that are heartfelt in their simplicity. Just as their pained, struggling to hold back tears when expressing their feelings carries a huge impact. Beneath all the snapped words, both daughters have a genuine need to love and be loved by their father, someone they clearly don’t always like but who they also need – and, in a strange way, understand.

Reinsve (absolutely brilliant) shows Nora hiding her emotions but collapsing into herself when distraught. She’s reduced to shocked hostility when re-encountering her father, who she blames for her struggle to form emotional bonds with others. Reinsve is compelling as this fragile, empathetic person who has buttoned herself into a protective shell: she has a beautiful moment after opening her heart to a fellow married actor she is having an affair with, only for her to recoil with pain when he politely rejects her. Nora invests so much of her feelings in her acting, that it leaves her with crippling stage-fight before performances (a brilliantly staged scene sees her demand to be practically man-handled on stage mid-stage fright, which anyone whose acted can sympathise with). The more we learn about her pained background, the more Reinsve invests this character with a deeply affecting sadness just under the surface, making us more and more aware of her vulnerability.

She’s equally matched by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as Agnes, who feels she must provide the emotional glue to hold this strange family together. She has built the warm, protective home for her family which the others are drawn to (both Nora and Gustav are devoted to her young son Erik), but Lilleaas shows Agne has worked to re-channel her feelings. Having once played the child-lead in one of Borg’s films, she painfully tells him it was the best summer of her life as it was the only one where she had her father’s full attention. It’s a generous, subtle and deeply affecting performance, of emotional bravery as we discover the depths of her love and loyalty to her sister.

Skarsgård, meanwhile, gives one of the finest performances of his career as the egotistical but regretful Borg, whose pain at his growing artistic and familial irrelevance is clear. He’s full of charm and warmth, but also ruthlessness: he forms close bonds with those he’s working with, but moves on the second the project completes. It’s an attitude he has extended to his family, which he wishes to change, but lacks the emotional intelligence to do so, as the charm he uses for the festival circuit fails to land with his family. He’s a man who can only express his true feelings in the language of film, through art rather than his own words. It’s a superb performance.

Sentimental Value is frequently shrewd and funny about filmmaking. Borg is facing the dying of the light, making his film for Netflix and looking intensely pained when its suggested it may never be screened in a cinema. There is a brilliant joke where he gifts Erik a hideously inappropriate collection of DVDs (including The Piano Teacher and Irreversible) made even funny when Agnes says they don’t even own a DVD player. If there is one way Borg does differ from Bergman (his clear inspiration), it’s his boredom with theatre: he has never seen Nora act, clumsily assumes she is playing Orphelia in her next show (she’s actually playing Hamlet) and tells her (one of Norway’s leading stage actors) that appearing in his film could be ‘a big break’.

But in the film world, Borg is clearly a master: calm, patient and able to inspire with enthralling descriptions of proposed shots, able to tease out beautiful work from actors. No wonder Rachel Kemp wants to work with him. Elle Fanning is excellent in a nuanced, intelligent performance as a gifted Hollywood starlet who begins to instinctively feel she is wrong for the lead in a European auteur-epic blatantly written for someone else. Fanning has an extraordinary scene, where she gives a reading of a key monologue from Borg’s film: her talent is immediately clear, but her skilled emotional reading is also completely out-of-tune for the mannered, imagery-dense text. Fanning makes this character empathetic, respectful, earnest and a true artiste, Trier inverting our expectations of any pop at Hollywood self-obsession.

A beautifully played chamber piece, it’s not just the Bergman-inspired career of Borg (his proposed film is pure Bergman stylistic homage) that makes Sentimental Value feel like it has a little touch of the master. Trier brings his camera to focus intensely on his actors, to let their emotions fill the screen and play in front of us. He even indulges a Persona style flourish where their three faces merge and combine with each other, under-lining the essential bonds that tie them together.

In a classic Bergman-style metaphor, the film is framed around ancestral family-home which literally has a flaw crack running through it. The film opens with Nora recounting a school essay she wrote imagining her house responding to events filling it – a mix of her childhood play and ferocious parental arguments. Sentimental Value subtly layers in roots of adopted trauma, with memories of Gustav’s mother (an imprisoned and tortured resistance fighter) who committed suicide when he was a young boy, which deepen the emotional complexities and fraught baggage every character carries.

What’s also beautiful about Sentimental Value is that it always feels true. There are not artificial moments of actorly grand-standing leading to emotional breakthroughs, but quiet (and even more moving) moments of genuine truth and honesty. Trier isn’t afraid to make the film funny, but also brilliantly shows that there is a lot more than just sentiment drawing families together, with a revelation that while Borg may never be able to express it the way his daughters want, he understands and loves them in ways no-one else can. It’s a beautiful, masterfully made, deeply thought-provoking and emotionally mature work that continues to mark Trier (and his actors) as major talents.

Father of the Bride (1950)

Gentle, well-made comedy is elevated by a star turn from Spencer Tracy

Director: Vincente Minnelli

Cast: Spencer Tracy (Stanley Banks), Joan Bennett (Ellie Banks), Elizabeth Taylor (Kay Banks), Don Taylor (Buckley Dunstan), Billie Burke (Doris Dunstan), Leo G. Carroll (Mr Massoula), Moroni Olsen (Herbert Dunstan), Melville Cooper (Mr Tringle)

Apparently almost 70% of couples find wedding planning stressful. Perhaps they would be reassured to hear things haven’t changed much since the 1950s! Stanley Banks (Spencer Tracy) is a successful partner in a law firm whose domestic bliss is disrupted when daughter Kay (Elizabeth Taylor) announces she intends to marry boyfriend Buckley (Don Taylor). With the support of her mother Ellie (Joan Bennett), Kay dreams of a big church wedding – and Stanley is left counting the cost while struggling with his sadness at his daughter growing up and flying the nest for good.

Father of the Bride delightfully takes a simple idea and mines it for as much comic effect as possible. The structure is simple: the build-up to and staging of the wedding, with all absurdities of such things as fussy caterers and exacting church wardens pointed up. There are minor bumps and hiccups, but nothing that would make a viewer ever seriously worry that all will not turn out well. Instead, the film riffs on the constant exasperation of a father watching the plans (and cost) of the wedding spiral ever upwards, as more and more extras pile on top of others.

Much of its success is linked to Spencer Tracy, excellent as the eponymous father. The role was written for him and Minnelli demanded he should play it when producers suggested a more comic actor like Jack Benny might fit the bill better. (Katherine Hepburn did not take on the wife, though I can’t imagine she would found much to engage her in Joan Bennett’s underwritten role.) The entire success of the film revolves around our connection with Tracy, something never in doubt with his skill and assurance.

Minnelli cements this with an opening shot panning across wedding debris before craning up to introduce us to a fourth-wall breaking speech of resigned weariness from Tracy. His narrative voice is returned to again and again, as Tracy shares a wry and exasperated commentary. Father of the Bride is a testament to Tracy’s comic chops, his mastery of the micro-reaction providing constant laughs, from a look of disbelief across a dining table to one of shock as the latest bill flies in. It’s a hilariously effective performance, in which Tracy embraces the ridiculousness of farce. Like a practiced comedian he spays himself (three times) while attempting to open a coke or kids himself into believing he looks dandy in a morning suit several years too small for him.

But the performance – and the film – really works because Tracy also communicate its humanity. In his relationship with Elizabeth Taylor (suitably radiant as Kay, and full of a forceful personality she surely inherited from her father), Tracy makes clear his love for his daughter and his sadness at an end of an era: he won’t be ‘the man’ in her life anymore. Even with small inconsequential moments (such as Kay ignoring Stanley’s appeal to wear a coat before fetching it immediately when Buckley suggests the same), Tracy shows sadness dance across his face. The wedding is awash with bittersweet moments, with Tracy as harried host desperately attempting to speak with his daughter one last time before she leaves. Father of the Bride through Tracy’s performance mines a great deal of quiet, genuine emotion from a parent struggling with a child grown up.

It’s a bittersweet thread Minnelli’s film keeps pinging away under the comedy. Minnelli seems an unlikely choice (you’d expect a Cukor or Capra), but his skill with composition adds to the film without overwhelming the slender story with flash. The opening shot of wedding debris prepares us for the hustle and bustle of the big day, where a parade of carefully choreographed background events in the Banks’ house is as skilled as the bustling crowds of the event. Minnelli gives a Dali-inspired flair to Banks’ pre-wedding nightmare (his feet melting into the ground and clothes falling apart) and he plugs into Tracy’s reactive skill to frame these off-the-ball moments for maximum impact.

Editing also helps accentuate jokes. On hearing his daughter intends to marry, Banks reflects with horror on who this suitor might be, a montage of assorted suitors (from athletic, to bookish, to dancing) spooling past us. (The biggest joke now might be how utterly safe all these suitors are, the sort of lads you imagine fathers today would be desperate for daughters to bring home). Minnelli also fades in and out on blurry close-ups on glasses to communicate both the passing of time and Stanley’s rising inebriation (after a growing parade of martinis) when the Banks meet with Buckley’s parents.

This sort of comic energy helps carry the film very effectively. Of course it is all very simple – the 1991 remake added more moments of crisis and obstacles for the characters to overcome – and that can explain why events sometimes feel stretched out even over its slim 90-minute run time. For all the film’s tagline (“Bride gets the thrills; Father gets the bills!”) suggests frustration on Stanley’s part, moments where he weeds through a huge invite list (525!) or bemoans paying for an orchestra no one is listening to are generally underplayed (perhaps it was thought we could only sympathise so much before starting to think of Tracy as a penny pincher?)

But, overall, the film works very well indeed, mostly due to Spencer Tracy’s hugely effective performance – funny, endearing, likeable and hugely relatable with a perfect balance between comedy and emotional depth. It would have been nice to have had more of a contrast between Stanley and Buckley – when Buckley turns up to a heart-to-heart with father-in-law clutching a briefcase full of his work, I immediately thought ‘never has a woman more clearly married someone like her dad’. But what the film aims to do it, it succeeds at. And that’s to have some good-natured, heart-warming fun showing how even stars like Tracy can find weddings stressful.

The Man From Laramie (1955)

Psychological complexities abound in a gripping revenge Western full of intriguing characters

Director: Anthony Mann

Cast: James Stewart (Will Lockhart), Arthur Kennedy (Vic Hansbro), Donald Crisp (Alec Waggoman), Cathy O’Donnell (Barbara Waggoman), Alex Nichol (Dave Waggoman), Alice MacMahon (Kate Canady), Wallace Ford (Charley O’Leary), Jack Elam (Chris Boldt), John War Eagle (Frank Darrah), James Millican (Tom Quigby)

It’s the classic Western set-up. A mysterious man rides into town, shaking up the local rivalries while secretly searching for something himself. The final collaboration between James Stewart and Anthony Mann, The Man From Laramie proves to be one of their most complex and, in the end, uncomfortably unreassuring of them all. It seems to promise a fiendish scheme only James Stewart can blow apart. What we actually get is something far more haphazard, put together by a panicked villain, where our hero is only a few shades less compromised than the villain.

Will Lockhart (James Stewart) is nominally in Coronado to deliver goods to Barbara Waggoman (Cathy O’Donnell). But he’s really a cavalry officer searching for a mysterious person selling repeating rifles to the Apache; rifles that led to the ambush and slaughter of a cavalry troop. Lockhart soon finds himself butting heads with the impulsively angry Dave Waggoman (Alex Nichol), son of local rancher Alec (Donald Crisp) who runs the town with his trusted lieutenant Vic Hansbro (Arthur Kennedy) as mediator. Lockhart is more and more determined to uncover the truth.

No one in The Man From Laramie is quite what they seem – or who others see them as. Lockhart seems like the mild-mannered James Stewart, a humble trader looking to make money and move on. But he has obsession in his eyes, a capacity of sudden, compulsive violence and is hiding a complex past that leaves the town reeling. The Waggomans aren’t quite who they seem either. The Lear-like Alec feels like a domineering dictator, but he’s strong-willed but fair. His son Dave seems like a villain, but he’s more a spoilt, impulsive child and the reasonable Vic is more compromised than he appears, a nominal second-son to an Alec but painfully away he comes a distant second to flesh-and-blood. Even Jack Elam’s eccentric is also a dangerous man.

Donald Crisp’s stoic, gruff, hardened rancher is raging against the dying light, covering up his incipient blindness (he can barely read accounts or see the dials on his safe, let alone accurately count out money). He’s facing a conundrum: his actual son, Dave, is a foolish weakling who will be eaten for breakfast by Alec’s crushed rivals – and Vic isn’t his son. Not to mention pressures reveal Vic as liable to stupid, ill-thought out and panicked decisions himself. There is an obvious Shakespeare beats playing out in the wilds of the West.

This combines with a mission of personal revenge for Lockhart. Stewart excels again as an obsessively single-minded man who won’t let anything get in the way: even a gunshot to the hand doesn’t shake his determination. Slapped down early on by Dave –accusing Will of stealing salt and rustling cattle, Dave shoots his mules and burns his carts – he responds with slaps of his own, roughing up Dave in the street and with quiet determination sets about pointedly not doing what the Waggomans want, allying with their rival, sharp-tongued Kate Canady (a wonderfully arch Alice MacMahon) who likes a challenge as much as he does.

But the film avoids a Shane-like clash between little guys and ranchers that we expect. Alec, who clearly learned a lot getting where he is, makes a very generous financial offer to Will as an apology and has no delusions about the (lack of) qualities in his son. There are hints of a past relationship between Alec and Kate, making him less of a bully than you think. And when Alex objects that he never interferes once he appoints a sheriff, you feel inclined to believe him. Alec has risen to power through merit, hard work, investing wisely and reaping the rewards; in fact he’s almost an American business hero. And Lockhart isn’t interested in settling rights and wrongs in the town (he’s not the dangerous stranger Alec keeps dreaming about) however sympathetic he might be.

The Man From Laramie constantly unspools unexpectedly, all it filmed in gorgeous cinemascope that captures the vastness of the West. Mann is also confident with more intimate settings, captureing some truly striking images, not least a Stewart-focused dolly shot that sees the furious Lockhart march through a crowd for retribution against Dave. Mann also shows the terrible power of violence. Opening with the discovery of the smoked-out ruins of a cavalry patrol, it presents violence as the tool of bullies and a blunt instrument. Hand-to-hand battles are desperate, messy struggles in the dirt with no nobility at all. A shoot-out between rocks feels tight and scary and when bullets land the camera captures intense pain in the victim’s faces. The Man From Laramie’s most famous scene focuses violence as a tool, a humiliated Dave ordering Lockhart held down while he shoots him point blank in the hand (a reaction Stewart sells perfectly).

It leaves Lockhart visibility compromised for a large chunk of the film, his hand wrapped in bandages, barely able to aim and fire his rifle. It contributes to another great mini shoot-out where the near blind Alec attempts retribution on a one-handed Stewart, a great scene that deglamorises and builds empathy at the same time. And always we circle back round to Arthur Kennedy’s Vic, an expert portrait of a man who feels like he is constantly paddling violently under the surface to float serenely at the top.

It’s one of several excellent performances, lead brilliantly by Stewart, that round out a very well-shot and psychologically engaging Western that cleverly inverts and realigns expectations and presents a resolution that is deliberately unsatisfying (for us and for Stewart) and a comment itself on the strangers who ride into town to shake it up and then disappear. It’s a fine swan song for a great collaboration between star and director.

In Old Chicago (1937)

Entertaining melodrama leads into a very well-staged disaster epic that burns a city

Director: Henry King

Cast: Tyrone Power (Dion O’Leary), Alice Faye (Belle Fawcett), Don Ameche (Jack O’Leary), Alice Brady (Molly O’Leary), Phyllis Brooks (Ann Colby), Andy Devine (Pickle Bixby), Brian Donlevy (Gil Warren), Tom Brown (Bob O’Leary), Berton Churchill (Senator Colby), Sidney Blackmer (General Phil Sheridan)

San Francisco showed Hollywood the way: spice up a melodrama with a disaster-laden ending. The first took the San Francisco earthquake: In Old Chicago takes the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 which burnt down over three-square miles of the city, destroyed over 17,000 buildings and killed over 300 peoples. Despite a rather earnest message that research was scrupulously carried out with the Chicago Historical Society – other than the fire itself, the entire film is a great big fictionalised soapy melodrama, building towards a grandly staged recreation of the great conflagration itself.

The melodrama is built around the O’Leary family. In legend Mrs Catherine O’Leary, of the city’s large Irish community, was the fire’s unwitting cause after her cow knocked over a barn lamp. Here she is reimagined as Molly (Alice Brady), mother to a flock of sons. In the way of these melodramas one, Dion (Tyone Power), is a cheeky rogue with criminal links the other, Jack (Don Ameche), is a legal straight-shooter determined to clean this town up. Club owner Dion controls a stack of corrupt votes to get Jack elected Mayor – screwing over kingpin rival Gil Warren (Brian Donlevy) in the process – under the mistaken impression he can control his brother (dead wrong). Meantime, Dion bounces through a heated love-hate relationship with glamourous bar-singer Belle (Alice Faye), who knows a little too much about his corrupt dealings.

These elements are expertly melodramatically mixed together with very few narrative surprises to establish some recognisable faces for when the city-burning destruction kicks in, with its punishments and redemptions. King directs all this with a glitzy, big-budget flair while the shallow characters go through familiar motions. Truth be told, there isn’t much especially new about In Old Chicago, which follows the San Francisco model to a tee with soapy personal rivalries (skimming the surface of Chicago’s corruption) beefed up with (fairly forgettable) songs from Alice Faye. There’s even a literally soap-sud filled transition at the start to take us into a superbly re-constructed nineteenth century Chicago, in a film full of impressive production design. But yet, don’t get me wrong, it’s all done with such energy it’s consistently enjoyable.

The two brothers are, of course, studies in contrast (third brother, Tom Brown’s Bob is so decently dull he barely makes any impression). As the ‘bad’ brother, Tyrone Power enjoys himself as a lip-smacking cad obsessed with power. Smirking and full of self-satisfaction at his own cleverness (not as clever as he thinks), he’s a ruthless liar and manipulator who deceives everyone around him: his brothers, the woman he loves, his political allies and rivals. It’s one of Power’s most engaging performances, successfully making Dion the sort of bastard you love to hate without ever making him utterly deplorable. In fact, he feels like a big kid (and a mummy’s boy at that), literally leaning back in his chair and expecting praise for his cleverness.

Opposite him, Don Ameche is saddled with the impossibly noble Jack, a crusading lawyer (who wouldn’t think of charging low-earning clients) and who wants to become Mayor to change the town for the better. His straitlaced decency is constantly thrown off by his brother’s dastardly lack of principle (their relationship eventually culminates in an entertainingly well-staged, no holds-barred fisticuff scuffle). Ameche does a good job of investing depth in this on-paper rather dull character.

The film presents an entertainingly straight-forward picture of machine politics, with votes controlled by bosses, various voters encouraged to register (and vote) multiple times and bosses controlling vast teams of followers. Brian Donlevy brings a very fine sense of arrogant domination to would-be boss Gill Warren (the sort of guy who casually mentions a rival’s bar looks rather flammable during a shake-down). It’s all very much presented as bad apples spoiling the whole barrel (rather than the whole system being a bucket of corrupt snakes), but fun nevertheless.

The romance comes between Dion and Belle, played with a decent mix of rascally bad-girl and misunderstood decency be Alice Faye. Faye (taking over the role at short notice from the late Jean Harlow) gets a few decent songs but the meat of the role is her love-struck switching between adoring and loathing Dion, who (with his flirtation with Senator’s daughter Ann Colby, played by Phyllis Brooks) barely deserves her. Some of Dion’s initial courting – consisting of sneaking into her carriage, pinning her down and kissing her – hardly feels comfortable now, but it supports a neat running joke of Belle’s maid running for help only to return to find the two locked in a passionate embrace.

But all of this is just build-up for the main event: an impressively staged reconstruction of the Great Fire. Shot with a mix of real sets and models – you can see where the money was spent on (briefly) the most expensive film ever made. It throws at us buildings aflame, crashing to the ground, huge crowds of extras charging past the camera in tracking shots, a panicked army of bulls fleeing (and crushing those unlucky enough to get in the way). This sequence is genuinely grippingly put-together and impressively epic, utilising some very effective aerial model shots of the city to establish the scale of the fire and the devastation. It balances culminating its plot threads at the same time as embracing the disaster excitement.

This end sequence makes the slightly patchy, familiar soap beforehand retrospectively work even better. It certainly helped deliver a box office bonanza for the film – just as Alice Brady’s closing speech about the unbeatable spirit of Chicago probably helped her to an Oscar (it’s a part Brady clearly enjoys, cementing a stereotype of the domineering Irish mother). After San Francisco, In Old Chicago proved entertaining disaster epics could thrill audiences with destruction for years to come.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

An engaging film explores the difficult choices faced by a generation of women

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Ellen Burstyn (Alice Hyatt), Kris Kristofferson (David), Alfred Lutter (Thomas Hyatt), Diane Ladd (Flo), Vic Taybeck (Mel), Valerie Curtin (Vera), Jodie Foster (Audrey), Harvey Keitel (Ben), Lane Bradbury (Rita), Billy Green Bush (Donald Hyatt), Lelia Goldoni (Bea)

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore takes a traditional ‘woman’s picture’, and firmly updates it to the concerns of the 1970s. It’s a successful mix of hope, romance and compromise, that manages to capture a sense of what a difficult and unusual time for a generation of women who grew up told being a wife-and-mother was the be-all-and-end-all only to find themselves in an era of possibilities with more options in life.

Alice (Ellen Burstyn), a wife-and-mother in a comfortable but largely romance-free marriage, is suddenly widowed. She realises she has a chance of becoming what she wanted to be when she was a kid: a singer. She and twelve-year-old son Thomas (Alfred Lutter) leave town, hoping to find this dream in Monterey, where she grew up. Their road trip is interrupted as Alice searches for singing jobs to pay their way, eventually stalling in Tucson where she works as diner waitress and finds the possibility of romance with softly-spoken divorced rancher David (Kris Kristofferson).

What’s striking about Alice is that you might expect it to be a story of feminist independence: a woman, striking out on her own, seizing her dreams. But it’s actually a more realistic – you might almost say quietly sad – film, where dreams are notoriously hard to achieve. Alice attracted ire at the time as she didn’t fit the bill of a feminist role model. For starters, at times she remains just as keen on finding a man as she does making it as a singer. Her talent is good but not stand-out – even she claims her voice is weak with an odd wobble. And she makes a host of dubious personal decisions out of a desire to be liked or to accommodate herself to others.

Burstyn captures this in her outstanding, Oscar-winning, performance. Alice is caught at that cross-roads of not being ready to let go of the traditionalist outlook she absorbed growing up, while dreaming of standing on her own two feet. It’s a problem you can imagine many women in 70s America, a country fumbling towards gender equality, struggled with. We grow incredibly fond of her as she strives for independence, while also sometimes wanting to shake out of her timid reliance on affection from others.

ADLHAM is a film about complexities and defies easy answers. Her marriage seems like one of mutual convenience. Then it surprises us: Alice’s tearfully silent realisation that they she and her husband have nothing to really talk about is met not with incomprehension but with a tenderly affectionate hug from her husband. Alice has an undeniable deep grief at his death – but she’s also quick to feel emotions, and you could argue her quickness to move on suggests she mourns the loss of an anchor in her life.

Her relationship with her son is an a mix of motherly care and a desire to be his friend. Alfred Lutter is very good as this slightly spoilt pre-teen who can switch from sulking playful laughter. ADLHAM shows plenty of fun and games between these two, like a water-fight in a motel. But it also makes clear Alice’s inability to control Tommy and her tendency to let take the lead. She rarely (if ever) corrects his bad behaviour or language, allows him to play music at top volume whenever he wants (to the intense irritation of others) and you feel her discomfort with being an authority figure (only once does she put her foot down, and is consumed with tearful guilt almost immediately after).

Similarly, her need to be close to a man leads to a parade of dubious choices. She is unable to pick up on signals that a seemingly charming man she meets at a bar (Harvey Keitel) is a married man with a hair-trigger temper. The gentler David might seem like a better prospect, but there is enough in Kris Kristofferson’s manner to suggest he has only so much patience for Tommy and that he might also be as flat and dull a man as Alice’s first husband was. ADLHAM could be suggesting some people are trapped into making similar mistakes over-and-over again.

Burstyn is the heart-and-soul of this look at the difficult balance between hope and reality. Alice is deeply emotional, her heart perilously close to her sleeve. Tears come incredibly easily, in juddering waves that shake her whole body. Burstyn makes her both defiant – “I don’t sing out my ass” she tells one leering bar-owner – but also vulnerable and needy. She’s can be playful and comic – she performs skits for David, throws herself into banter with Tommy and loves putting on voices – and then touchy and judgemental. It’s a performance that mixes rawness with insight and delusion, where Alice can go from cold-eyed realism at her singing to convincing herself all her problems will be solved the second she arrives in Monterey.

Scorsese, directing with subtle, classical grace, makes this goal feel like a chimera. In fact, the constant postponing of the journey suggests it will never happen. Scorsese opens the film with a 50’s style prologue (deliberately shot on a soundstage and filmed like a mix of The Wizard of Oz and Powell and Pressburger) showing the young Alice at Monterey that hardly makes it feel like a golden future. In fact, it looks more like a step backward when Scorsese cuts from it to a wide-angled, rock-n-roll sound-tracked panning shot over Socorro in a whip-sharp transition.

There is a slight unease in ADLHAM that nothing is quite fixed, which Scorsese accentuates with the film’s subtle hand-held camera-work (every shot has some slight shaky movement in it). It’s balanced with some lovely old Hollywood touches (at one point Alice lights a cigarette for David in her mouth and passes it to him, a classic Hays Code metaphor for sex), genuine comedy and human connection. Lots of that comes from the Tucson dinner, either from Valerie Curtin’s hilarious inept waiter (introduced passing the same three meals between three people with increasing panic) and Diane Ladd’s (Oscar-nominated) turn as blousy but caring Flo, with whom Alice forms a surprising bond that surprises her. (It perhaps echoes the film’s complex message, that life-long waitress Flo, flirting for tips, seems more independent than Alice).

Alice is an interesting, refreshing look at how difficult this moment of time could be for people caught between two ways of thinking. It has a superb performance by Burstyn (who provided much of the drive behind making the film, including hiring Scorsese) leading a very strong cast (including a strikingly mature, relaxed performance from Jodie Foster as a precocious pre-teen tearaway). It’s ending breaks into something more reassuring and traditional, but it’s also soaking in hints that it is far from a full-stop: the possibility that Alice has entered into a new chapter in her life that might be more similar than she thinks to her old one.

Places in the Heart (1984)

Overcoming adversity and racism are themes not always successfully balanced in Benton’s family epic

Director: Robert Benton

Cast: Sally Field (Edna Spalding), Lindsay Crouse (Margaret Lomax), Danny Glover (Moze Hardner), John Malkovich (Mr Will), Ed Harris (Wayne Lomax), Amy Madign (Viola Kelsey), Yankton Hatten (Frank Spalding), Gennie James (Possum Spalding), Lane Smith (Albert Denby), Ray Baker (Sheriff Royce Spalding), Terry O’Quinn (Buddy Kelsey), De’voreaux White (Wylie)

Partially based on his own childhood memories, set in Texas 1935 as the Depression grips America, Robert Benton’s Places in the Heart is a tear-jerking tale of overcoming adversity, mixed with an earnest attempt to look at Southern racism. It’s often a little heavy-handed in the former, and a little fudged (if very well-meaning) in the second. Places in the Heart is a frustrating film with a genuinely engaging, engrossing story that, for various reasons, the film never manages to quite bring into focus, for all the undoubted skill in its making.

Sally Field plays Edna Spalding, a widow after her sheriff husband (Ray Baker) is accidentally shot and killed by a drunken Black teenager (promptly brutally lynched by the Klan the same day). With the bank pushing to foreclose on the farm she can no longer afford, poverty and homelessness seem certain until a chance meeting with Black drifter Moze (Danny Glover) offers hope. Moze is an experienced cotton worker, and he coaches Edna through getting the fastest cotton crop of the season (and the $100 prize for that feat). Edna and her children throw themselves into the task, and she starts to build a new family with Moze and blind war-veteran lodger Mr Will (John Malkovich). But will weather, the Klan and the banks allow it?

Benton’s film is, in many ways, a master-class in constructing a framework of highly impactful scenes. Places in the Heart is carefully paced with metronomic precision to give us an impactful, powerful scene roughly every ten minutes. From the shockingly sudden shooting of Sheriff Spalding and Edna cleaning his deceased body on her dining room table it gives us scenes that build perfectly to showcase high impact moments. Confrontations, tornadoes that place children in peril, triumphant confrontations with arrogant bankers and facing down corrupt cotton sellers, inevitable fireworks after a disastrous double date and heart-rending racist attacks. It’s a film almost completely constructed of tent-pole moments, to illicit maximum impact.

However, where it fails are the moments in-between. It’s so focused on nailing those big moments, that it allows the emotional journey that should inter-connect them (and make the story truly satisfying) to falter. The clearest example is Malkovich’s blind Mr Will: in no more than three scenes he goes from a man bitter at his disability, dumped on Mrs Spalding by a family who can’t be bothered to care for him, resenting her ‘hooligan’ children to risking his life to becoming their surrogate uncle. It’s a tribute to Malkovich that he sells this lightning fast emotional turn-around, but a more patient film would have spent this change feel organic (rather than, essentially, relying on a tornado act-of-God to complete the arc).

Similarly lightning fast work covers the bond between Edna and Moze: swiftly we go a few scenes from her greeting him with slightly less racist discomfort than her sister, to Jean-Valjean-like claiming she asked him to deliver to a friend the silver spoons he steals from her house, to him becoming another surrogate uncle to the kids and treated in the house like an equal (he notably doesn’t cross the door threshold for the first hour of the film). Now you can admire the efficiency here – for example, the film is good at establishing without fanfare the rope aids hung up around the farm to help Mr Will (vital for a later confrontation). But you can also regret that it is so keen to get to the emotionally cathartic moments, it skims on showing us the journey (after all, a one hundred mile walk seems less impressive if you only see the start and end).

Part of the problem is Benton keeps dragging us away from these engaging plotlines to wallow in a side-plot involving Mrs Spalding’s sister and her wayward husband’s affair with a school teacher. This storyline barely intersects with events on the Spalding farm, in no way serves as a commentary on events there (a braver film would have contrasted it with a romantic relationship between Edna and Moze, which you can be sure would not have been as genteelly resolved as that affair in a South as racist as this). All it really does – for all the efforts of Crouse (Oscar-nominated, presumably due to her husband-slapping confrontation scene), Harris and Madigan, it’s meandering, dull and feels pointless even while you are watching it.

And it always takes us away from the real interest on the farm. The depiction of triumph over adversity is fairly straight-forward – with a host of hissable strawmen, led by Lane Smith’s patronisingly sexist banker – but it’s told with such professional skill it can’t help but land. Who doesn’t enjoy a woman who never believed she amounted to anything, suddenly discovering an inner-fire and sense of purpose she never knew. You may notice the similarity to Sally Field’s other Oscar-winning role (Norma Rae). Her performance here is cut from the same cloth, only this time she can’t find the same naturalness: she is frequently mannered, precise and actorly when she should feel raw, grounded and real.

The real daring interest here is the way the film tries to address racism. You can’t deny there is a certain romanticism in its looks at the Ol’ South, but its balanced with putting on screen something of the real horrors of racism. Perhaps even more shocking than the sudden shooting of Sheriff Spalding is the sight of young Wylie’s disfigured body dragged behind a truck full of gun-totting racists. (And that this is objected to, not for the violence, but for the poor taste of dragging a dead man to Spalding’s wake). Needless to say there is no investigation or punishment for this crime whatsoever.

Moze’s story captures some of the perils of being Black in Depression-era Texas. Danny Glover, in the film’s finest performance, perfectly captures both the anger of the unjustly oppressed and the fear (and shame of that fear) that death could come from the wrong word or looking at someone the wrong way. Moze constantly shuffles himself to the back, casting his-eyes down and changing the timbre of his voice to something slower and more humble when confronted with white men of power. It’s markedly different from the warmth, decency and sharp opinions he shows with people he trusts. And Places in the Heart’s most appalling moment is when he is confronted with the white-hooded face of the South’s ‘defenders’.

At times this sometimes over-balances a film that, at heart, wants to be optimistic. (As you can tell, all too clearly, from its bizarre, overly demonstrative, deliberately dream-like ‘we-can-all-be-the-same’ ending which must have felt meaningful to Benton but to me feels shockingly trite). Moze’s suffering is shown with real compassion, but he is still presented as a character who magically shows up at exactly the time he is needed and then disappears when his task is done. It’s a film that imagines a utopia where a desperate mother, a blind white man and a Black man can learn all men are equal, while struggling to accept that this is nestled in a land riddled with Klan racists where the n-word is so casually used it doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. In the end cold, hard reality is a little too much for Places in the Heart to digest.

The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

Anderson marries heart, truth and a genuinely engaging and compelling plot with his unique quirk

Director: Wes Anderson

Cast: Benecio del Toro (Zsa-Zsa Korda), Mia Threapleton (Sister Liesl), Michael Cera (Bjorn Lund), Riz Ahmed (Prince Farouk), Tom Hanks (Leland), Bryan Cranston (Reagan), Mathieu Amalric (Marseilles Bob), Richard Ayoade (Sergio), Jeffrey Wright (Marty), Scarlett Johansson (Hilda Sussman), Benedict Cumberbatch (Uncle Nubar), Rupert Friend (Excalibur), Hope Davis (Mother Superior), Bill Murray (God), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Korda’s late wife), Willem Dafoe (Knave), F. Murray Abraham (Prophet), Stephen Park (Korda’s pilot), Alex Jennings (Broadcloth), Jason Watkins (Notary)

Wes Anderson is one of those directors I often sit on the fence about, with a style so distinctive it can in become overwhelming. But when it works, it works – and The Phoenician Scheme is (aside from his superb Netflix Dahl adaptations) his best work since his masterpiece The Grand Budapest Hotel. In this film, Anderson finds an emotional and story-telling engagement that adds depth to all the stylised invention. It’s a film I’ve found more rewarding the longer I’ve thought about it.

Set in an Anderson-esque 1950s (Andersonland?), notorious industrialist and arms trader Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benecio del Toro) spends his life dodging assassins. After one attempt gets close, he decides to try and repair his relationship with estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a novice nun who suspects her father might have had her mother murdered (he denies it). With governments, business competitors and others on his tail, Korda throws together a complex scheme for one last success in Phoenicia, a massive new development built with slave labour. As Korda juggles rivals and investors, will he repair his relationship with his daughter? And how will he fare in his recurrent visions of standing at the (noir) Gates of Heaven, being judged for entry?

Anderson’s film, of course, is another superb example of his visual style, constructed like an intricately layered work of art. Each shot could probably hang in an art gallery, framed to perfection with gorgeously sublime colours that soak off the screen. The elaborate set design and vintage costume work are striking as always, with every piece perfectly placed and every feature expertly judged. Within this, his carefully selected cast deliver the wry, dry and arch Anderson-dialogue with aplomb, embracing every moment (of many) where Anderson allows the characters to share a raised eyebrow or a pithy aside to the camera.

In other words, it might all be as you expect – a formula that started to feel a bit tired after intricate, insular films like The French Dispatch and Asteroid City, which felt so personal to Anderson that they were virtually impenetrable to everyone else. But what elevates The Phoenician Scheme is that Anderson embraces both a surprisingly tense plot-line – the closest he can probably get to a thriller, laced throughout with satire, humour and more than a fair share of the ridiculous – and gives a genuine emotional force to a father and daughter struggling to recognise what (if anything) could bring them together. Throw in questions around life, death and what constitutes making a life ‘worth living’ and you’ve got a rich, intriguing and rewarding film that could stand even without the Anderston scaffolding.

Perhaps only Anderson could mix an unscrupulous businessmen targeted by assassins (some of these are delightfully, blackly, comic – not least an opening plane bomb that sees Korda ejecting his pilot for refusing to attempt a crazy hail-Mary manoeuvre to survive an inevitable crash) with Korda closing vital deals (in a deliberately, impenetrably complex scheme) by shooting hoops with a pair of baseball-fanatic brothers (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston, both hilarious), taking a bullet for a fez-wearing gangster (Matheiu Almaric, wonderfully weasily) and forcing an eccentric naval captain (Jeffrey Wright, perfectly deadpan) during a blood donation to sign with a bomb. And spin out a joke where Korda hands over custom-made hand grenades to business associates like they are branded pens. All while dodging a shady government cabal (fronted by Rupert Friend’s Transatlantic Arthurian-nick-named Excalibur).

But The Phoenician Scheme works because under this comic twist on spy thrillers, it has a real heart. Anderson’s finest films are where he works with an actor who can bring depth and feeling to the quirk. And here, he might just have brought out the best from an actor prone to a little quirk himself. Benecio del Toro gives Korda a world-weary cynicism but also a subtle fragility. There is nothing that won’t flummox Korda, a guy tipped off on attempts on his life because he frequently recognises assassins he’s hired himself in the past. But he’s also quietly afraid his life has been for nothing: that he is, in fact, not a rogue but an out-and-out villain ruining countless lives. And that God (in the form of, who else, Bill Murray) isn’t going to be welcoming up there.

It motivates a careful dance of reconciliation and grooming to take over his business with his estranged daughter Liesl, delightfully played by Mia Threapleton (with just the right mix of dead-pan flair for the dialogue, while giving it an arch warmth). Liesl imagines herself as distant from Korda as can be – the novice (literally) to his expert manipulator – but she turns out to have far more talent for Korda’s mix of chutzpah, disregard for rules and ruthless improvisation. Watching the relationship – and recognition – between these two (beautifully played by both actors) is very funny and also surprisingly sweet (you know its Anderson when a nun suddenly pulling a small machete out of her wimple is both oddly endearing and absolutely hilarious).

This sense of emotional development and personal and dramatic stakes is improved further by the celestial semi-trial (cue Willem Dafoe as an advocate angel), in a black-and-white heaven that mixes Powell and Pressburger’s Matter of Life and Death (surely the name Korda is no coincidence) and the imagery of Luis Buñuel. This all leads into a surprisingly gentle but affecting tale of redemption and second-chances, including an ending that feels surprising but also somehow completely, wonderfully inevitable and fitting,

The Phoenician Scheme may even be slightly under-served by its Andersonesque framing and design: after all it’s become easy to overlook the depths when the display is as extraordinary as this. When Anderson unearths a deeper meaning, working with masterful performers who can imbue his quirky, witty dialogue with heft, he can be one of the best out there. And do all that without sacrificing an air of charming whimsy, and building towards the most hilarious fist fight since Bridget Jones’s Diary (between del Toro and Cumberbatch’s tyrannically awful Uncle Nubar). Not a lot of directors can pull that off – and it’s a lovely reminder that Anderson at his best is an absolutely unique, wonderful gem in film-making.

On Golden Pond (1981)

Sentimental drama, sickly-sweet, which owes any success it is to its legendary leads

Director: Mark Rydell

Cast: Katharine Hepburn (Ethel Thayer), Henry Fonda (Norman Thayer), Jane Fonda (Chelsea Thayer), Doug McKeon (Billy Ray Jnr), Dabney Coleman (Dr Bill Ray)

The, admittedly luscious, score by Dave Grusin gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect, as Billy Williams’ camerawork drifts over a sun-kissed lake. On Golden Pond is an overwhelmingly sentimental film, just about lifted above its Hallmark Classic material by its legendary cast. Justified residual affection for them made this frequently mawkish, sickly-sweet film a massive box-office hit. Instigated by Jane Fonda, as a late bridge for a final reconciliation with her father Henry, it won him an Oscar 41 years after his last (and only previous) nomination.

Henry Fonda plays Norman Thayer, a curmudgeonly academic on the cusp of his 80^th birthday, whose avuncular abruptness covers a fear of death and the slow decline of his wits. Along with his supportive, sparky wife Ethel (Katharine Hepburn) he’s spending this birthday at their summer home on the shore of New England golden lake. They are joined, unexpectantly, by their marginally estranged daughter Chelsea (Jane Fonda) with her new boyfriend Bill (Dabney Coleman) and his thirteen-year-old son Billy (Doug McKeon) in tow. Chelsea and Bill leave for a holiday in Europe, leaving Billy behind. Can Billy and Norman find common ground, and will the presence of this young man help Norman and Chelsea find reconciliation and understanding after years of tension.

If you don’t know the answer, you’ve not seen enough movies. Pretty much every development in On Golden Pond could be jotted down correctly on a pad in advance. Of course, Norman’s hostility will melt slightly as he rediscovers something of his playful youth and vigour in the kid. Of course, Billy’s contempt for the gentle pleasures of Golden Pond will wash away as he embraces the delights of fishing, reading classic novels and playing board games under the increasingly warm surrogate parental eyes of Norman and Ethel. Of course, Chelsea’s ostentatious determination to only refer to Norman by his name will eventually see her calling him ‘Dad’. Of course, Norman will finally allow himself to confess his love for his daughter.

All these inevitable emotional plot developments are hit with assured smoothness in Rydell’s straight-forward film, perfectly packaged for mass appeal. Every character is an archetype: the grouchy old guy with a heart of gold, the loving wife who devotes herself to exasperatingly caring for her husband and smoothing over those he offends, the prickly daughter whose resentment hides her desperate need for her father’s love… You could argue the film’s very predictability is the secret sauce behind its success.

It can be safely consumed as a heart-warming fable. So much so, it’s easy to miss how biased the film is in favour of the older generation. So sentimental is the eye it casts over Norman, so forgiving and sympathetic is it to his quiet raging against the dying of the light, that it effectively gives him a pass for any responsibility for the coldness between him and his daughter, partially born from his domineering expectations and demands of her.

When Chelsea complains to Esther about her father’s coldness, distance and high standards, she’s roundly told she should have seen past this to the love her father buried deep down. (Esther even slaps her for questioning it!). This is a film that firmly states the younger generation should adjust to fit in with the older. Chelsea should pull herself together, stop whining, and get over the fact her Dad never really told her how he feels: that, effectively, the problem they have is her expectations rather than his failures. It’s fitting with a film that, however charmingly it does it, also sees Billy adapting and changing to better fit in with the Thayers rather than any vice versa. God knows what it would make of something like Five Easy Pieces.

The film’s patronising, one-sided view of generational conflict and its soppy sentimentality would make it unbearable, if it wasn’t for the performers at its heart. Henry Fonda, with less than a year to live, takes a cliched character and invests Norman with a richness and depth of personality that is far more than the film deserves. Fonda’s precise diction and ability to turn those blue eyes cold is perfect for Norman’s grouching, but when those same eyes collapse into panicked fear (such as when Norman gets lost in woods he has walked all his life) it’s as moving as his attempt to shrug off his failing memory.

Fonda’s perfectly delivers both the irritation and hidden fear when he stares at photos of himself and his younger family and plaintively asks who they are. He makes the bond with Doug McKeon’s Billy (also excellent) genuinely rather sweet, these two kindred souls shooting the breeze and catching fish like life-long buddies (Fonda fills Norman here with an almost teenage sense of naughtiness). It’s a rich, charming performance.

He’s expertly supported by Katharine Hepburn, who brings her customary spark, fierce intelligence, take-no-nonsense assurance and dry wit to Esther. Truthfully the role, for which she won a record-breaking fourth Oscar, is almost identical to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Once again, she is the dutiful but loving wife, smoothing over the feathers her husband disrupts and speaking home truths to her disappointed child. Hepburn could probably do this standing on her head, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t nail it. Jane Fonda, a far more generous performer than she gets credit for, plays Chelsea with such emotional commitment it can’t help but pull some heartstrings. Even Dabney Coleman is restrained and gentle.

Of course, a lot of this success also comes from the deeply blurred lines between truth and fiction that abound in On Golden Pond. It’s no secret to anyone watching that the Norman-Chelsea relationship has multiple parallels with that of Henry-Jane. Jane Fonda had planned the film as a tribute to her father (much to the disappointment of James Stewart who dreamed of playing it), and when the duelling father and daughter quietly reconcile, it’s impossible to not also see the real actors themselves building bridges after a lifetime of disagreements. It’s a greater emotional impact than the actual film itself and surely contributed to its success.

On Golden Pond is less successful on its own merits. An overly sentimental film, with a golden-eyed regard for the dignity and decency of the older generation, where inter-generational conflict is resolved with a few gentle words and a backflip off a diving board. Remove the actors – and the emotional truth behind its making – and you have a very slight, predictable and manipulative movie.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

Excellent acting almost saves a neutered, inverted version of Williams’ powerhouse play

Director: Richard Brooks

Cast: Elizabeth Taylor (Maggie Pollitt), Paul Newman (‘Brick’ Pollitt), Burl Ives (‘Big Daddy’ Pollitt), Jack Carson (‘Gooper’ Pollitt), Judith Anderson (‘Big Mama’ Pollitt), Madeleine Sherwood (Mae Flynn ‘Sister Woman’ Pollitt), Larry Gates (Dr Baugh), Vaughn Taylor (Deacon Davies)

There is a fun little anecdote of Tennessee Williams running into a crowd of people lined around the block to catch Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at their local multiplexes and loudly begging them “Go home! This movie will set the industry back 50 years!” You can sort of see why Williams was a bit pissed. It’s a miracle really that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof works at all. The studio snapped up this Broadway mega-hit and promptly instructed Richard Brooks to remove all the content that worked with a bunch of New York Times readers, but wasn’t going to fly in a mid-West fleapit. What we end up with is a curious, mis-aligned, neutered work that arguably inverts several of Williams’ points and is reliant on its incredibly strong, charismatic acting to work.

Brick (Paul Newman) is a former College sports star, now adrift in life, trapped in an unhappy marriage with Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor) who he resents and blames for the suicide of close friend Skipper. All Maggie’s attempts to rediscover any love is met with cold, blank disinterest as Brick hits the bottle big-time. Maggie keeps up the front of wedding bliss, as she is determined they will win their share of the inheritance from Brick’s father ‘Big Daddy’ (Burl Ives) who believes he’s merely under-the-weather, but is in fact dying. This news is also being kept from his devoted (but privately barely tolerated by Big Daddy) wife Big Mama (Judith Anderson), while Brick’s brother’s Gooper (Jack Carson) and his wife Mae Flynn (Madeline Sherwood) makes aggressive pitchs to cement Big Daddy’s fortune for themselves.

This simmering Broadway adaptation of a Southern family weighted down by lies (or mendacity as they love to call it), concealments and barely disguised resentments, was a smash hit but a very mixed film. It’s weighed down by both too much respect of the theatrical nature of the play, and too little interest in its actual message. Richard Brooks’ production largely restricts itself to interspersing wider shots with some reaction shots and sticks very much to its ‘same location for each act’ set-up. It’s a surprisingly conservative and safe re-staging of a hit play.

Despite Brooks’ liberal re-writing of the dialogue (of which more later), it remains a very theatrical rather than cinematic piece, largely devoid of imaginative editing or photography. The attempts to ‘open up’ the piece introduced by Brooks feel pointless or add very little (such as witnessing the accident where Brick breaks his leg or travelling to the airport to see the arrival of Big Daddy’s plane). Compared to the inventive and dynamic use of single-location shooting in Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof feels considerably more stately and reserved, and is far less successful in using the tricks of cinema to successfully build tension and conflict.

What it shares however with 12 Angry Men is the electric acting. Elizabeth Taylor gives one of her finest performances, her Maggie bubbling with sexual and emotional frustration, reduced to hurling physical and verbal punches at Brick in an attempt to get any sort of emotional rise out of him. She makes Maggie, for all her desperation and confusion, surprisingly sympathetic. Taylor manages to be both selfish and domineering while also showing how broken up Maggie is with shame and guilt. It’s a detailed, intense, passionate performance.

It also works perfectly opposite Paul Newman’s brooding intensity as Brick. This is the handsome, blue-eyed legend inverting his charisma into something insular, at times merely starring in self-loathing into the middle distance as other speak at him, only rarely rising to let rip at others with contempt and fury. Newman is a force of quiet, emotional anger, even if (stripped of his character’s primary motivation) he comes across at times like a spoilt child who never really grew up rather than the tortured man trapped in a lie of a life, that Williams intended (Brooks even frames him at one point with a high-school football of himself behind him, his past literally haunting him).

Burl Ives would certainly have won an Oscar for this, if he hadn’t won that year for The Big Country. Recreating his Tony Award winning role, he’s a whirligig force of nature as Big Daddy, bullishly insistent on getting his own way, shrugging off with irritation his wife’s affection (an effectively unsettled Judith Anderson) and hiding his own fear at oncoming death in a relentless pursuit of the future. Ives also nails Big Daddy’s outstanding late speeches, investing them with a deep sense of melancholy and sadness under the bombast and strength. It’s a great performance. Jack Carson is perfectly, anonymously uninteresting as ‘other son’ Gooper and Madeline Sherwood hits the beats of shrill hostility she’s asked for as his wife Mae Flynn.

That these performances work so well is a tribute to the underlying strength of a play that has been radically, almost disastrously, lobotomised by Brooks into something that flattens, blurs and (at points) radically inverts the intention. Putting it bluntly, Williams’ original used Brick’s unspoken (perhaps even subconscious) homosexual attraction to Skipper as the root cause of his disastrous marriage and booze-laden depression. Maggie, all too-aware of her husband’s sexual orientation, fumes in frustration at his lack of interest in making the inheritance-required babies. Even Big Daddy suspects this massive unspoken secret at the heart of a family. The fact this remains unspoken to the end, that the characters carry on with the fake fiction of the Pollitt dynasty is a damning indictment of the hypocrisy of American family life.

That wasn’t going to wash in Hollywood. No hint of Brick’s homosexuality could be allowed: in fact, Newman’s heteronormative virility is repeatedly stressed (at one point he even embraces Maggie’s dressing gown in romantic longing). It weakens both characters – for all the skill of Newman and Taylor, it makes both characters shallower, two people letting sulks and pride stand between happiness, rather than two people trapped into a doomed cycle. The film resolutely associates happiness with love and duty to the family unit, emphatically not what Williams’ play suggested.

No wonder he was pissed. A daring play about Southern family hypocrisy and buried secrets, where the burden of the family is a deadweight crushing people is turned into a straight (in every sense) celebration of it. It makes the play a conservative, reassuring lie, as much as a mendacity as the characters talk about. So maybe Williams was right to berate that crowd. Still it pissed Brooks off mightily: he pithily retorted it was a bit rich of Williams to kick up such fuss over a film which made him very wealthy. I guess at least there Brooks makes a strong point.