Category: Female led film

Belle du Jour (1967)

Buñuel’s sensual mix of fantasy and reality, asks intriguing and searching questions with ambiguous answers

Director: Luis Buñuel

Cast: Catherine Deneuve (Séverine “Belle de Jour” Serizy), Jean Sorel (Pierre Serizy), Michel Piccoli (Henri Husson), Geneviève Page (Madame Anaïs), Pierre Clémenti (Marcel), Francisco Rabal (Hyppolite), Françoise Fabian (Charlotte), Macha Méril (Renée), Maria Latour (Mathilde), Marguerite Muni (Pallas), Francis Blanche (Monsieur Adolphe), François Maistre (The professor), Georges Marchal (Duke)

Desire can be a scary thing; a deep dive into the things that excite and titillate us can be deeply unnerving. That’s the heart of Buñuel’s compellingly intriguing Belle de Jour, where dreams and fantasy merge with confused and repressed desires struggling to find an outlet. It makes for a fascinating, unsettling and erotic film, powered by a fearlessly superb performance by Deneuve. Buñuel’s film avoids judgement, frequently inverting lazy moral judgements in a film that flirts with playfulness and dark dangers.

Séverine (Catherine Deneuve) is happily married to Pierre (Jean Sorel) but seems unable to find any sexual satisfaction with him. Sleeping in separate beds, the couple are supportive and loving but chaste. Séverine’s fantasy life though is awash with day-dreams of erotic, sadomasochistic desires in which she is degraded and humiliated, scenarios clearly alien in her marriage. Séverine finds an outlet for her desires by taking an afternoon job as a prostitute in Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page) high-class brothel, where she can experience an erotic thrill in debasement that she barely understands herself. But can her secret survive the probing of sinister Husson (a brilliantly creepy Michel Piccoli) or her confused fascination with gangster Marcel (Pierre Clémenti).

Belle de Jour explores the dark desires many of us hold but never acknowledge – either to the world at large or to ourselves. It’s told with Buñuel’s masterful control, moves with smooth narrative economy and throws our expectations off kilter with carefully controlled switches from reality to fantasy. Buñuel’s unsettling opening shows Séverine and Pierre riding in a carriage through a tree lined country lane, their conversation tinged with hostility. We wonder what film it might be – we probably don’t expect Pierre to order the carriage to stop, demand the drivers drag Séverine from it, take her into the woods, flog her bare back and then allows one of his burly men to have his way with her. Just as we don’t expect the look of pleasure on Séverine’s face.

Fantasies like this re-occur time-and-time again throughout the film, as Séverine’s only way of truly explore sexual fantasies her husband is (presumably) unable to fulfil. In her fantasies she is abused, tied up, has mud flung at her and services men in the full knowledge of her husband. Buñuel presents this, as you might expect (for a man whose foot fetish has become something of a running joke) with a striking lack of judgement or moral ticking off. Instead, it feels more like Séverine is a woman trapped between two stools of seemingly knowing what she might want, but struggling to find the sexual and emotional confidence to acknowledge it. None of this, in any case, has any impact on her love for her husband or the importance she places on their marriage.

Buñuel captures this brilliantly with her hesitancy to follow through on her desire to knock on the door of hostess Madame Anaïs (an excellent Geneviève Page). We watch Séverine dawdle outside the apartment block, doubling back, staring blankly at shop windows and waiting until she cannot be seen and then shuffling up the stairs and back-and-forth outside the door. Buñuel repeats the trick later (with a shot focused on her feet) as she hesitates about whether to push her way through the door again next week.

In the bedroom, Séverine frequently feels awkward and uncertain (even a little embarrassed), which is striking until you realise this is less of the fear factor and more a kink one. She’s fails utterly with the Professor (François Maistre), a client who desires to be punished, a lust completely counter to her own desires. However, she ends a session with a burly Japanese customer, whose physicality terrifies the other girls (he also carries with him a mysterious buzzing box – Buñuel joked he was asked more about the content of this box than anything else in his films), exhausted but with a look of reclining, feline satisfaction on her that we don’t see before or since.

Buñuel’s film slips and slides ever more intriguingly into oblique uncertainty as Séverine explores the further reaches of her sensuality. A fascinating sequence tips uncertainly between dream and reality. Séverine encounters a mysterious nobleman (an austere Georges Marchal) during a casual café pick-up. But his coach drivers are the same as those from her earlier dream (tellingly, Buñuel also makes a Hitchcockian cameo as a café customer –tipping the wink this might not be reality). At the Duke’s home, Séverine lies in a coffin (in another dream call back, the butler is ordered to keep the cats out, the same bizarre cry Séverine made during her woodside thrashing) while the Duke masturbates under the coffin before flinging her out of the house like trash. Fantasy or reality? Is exposure to wider sexual desires expanding Séverine own dreams?

How much has she told Pierre about what happens in these dreams? It’s hard to believe Jean Sorel’s straight-shooting doctor would be as blasé as he appears about a recurring fantasy of his wife on a carriage ride followed of sexual humiliation. Did she just tell him about the first part? Séverine seems determined to shelter Pierre from her desires, part of compartmentalising her inner and outer lives. You could argue the general autonomy and respect he gives her not only powers her love for him, but also runs so counter to her inclinations that she finds it represses all desire for him.

Belle du Jour sees no contradiction between a desire for casual, need-filling sex with strangers and a loving marriage. You could argue Buñuel’s film suggests Séverine’s problems only start when she finds emotional bonds blurring in a fascination with Pierre Clémenti’s brutal, scarred gangster Marcel, who arrives like the violent embodiment of her dreams and who she longs to see again and again. Only when genuine feelings start to intrude, does what she is doing even begin to feel like any sort of betrayal. Buñuel presents Marcel as a destructive raging id, impulsively violent. But he also plays with our expectations of moral punishment for Séverine, throwing in a moment of Pierre studying an abandoned wheelchair with such jarring foreboding it’s easy to see it as a subtle joke on our expectations for Séverine’s expected narrative punishment.

The ending tips back into fantasy, presenting us with a choice of how much we choose to believe is real or not. While Séverine fears Pierre’s discovery of her secret, you can also imagine the shame and humiliation she would feel would also satisfy many of her deeper fantasies, with her fantasies of Pierre routinely berating her as a slut. Buñuel’s brilliant merging of fantasy and reality, with audio and visual hints and call backs that intrude into and loop back over both worlds is brilliantly suggestive.

Belle de Jour also owes a huge part of its success to the sensitive, non-judgemental performance of Catherine Deneuve which is brilliantly subtle and ambiguous, never presenting us with a constantly shifting range of possibilities about Séverine’s emotions. Deneuve is compellingly sympathetic and frustrating in equal measure, perfectly attuning herself to Buñuel’s complex canvas. That is a picture of puzzles and possibilities, that asks us to take deep and unsettling looks at ourselves and our own desires. Buñuel’s gift here is to take what could be red-light zone smut and turn it into something profoundly, challengingly opaque and intriguing.

Madame Curie (1943)

Halting science biopic, that’s really an attempt to make a spiritual sequel to Mrs Miniver

Director: Mervyn LeRoy

Cast: Greer Garson (Marie Curie), Walter Pidgeon (Pierre Curie), Henry Travers (Eugene Curie), Albert Bassermann (Professor Jean Perot), Robert Walker (David le Gros), C. Aubrey Smith (Lord Kelvin), Dame May Whitty (Madame Eugene Curie), Victor Francen (University President), Reginald Owen (Dr Becquerel), Van Johnson (Reporter)

Marie Curie was one of History’s greatest scientists, her discoveries (partially alongside her husband Pierre) of radioactivity and a parade of elements, essentially laying the groundwork for many of the discoveries of the Twentieth Century (with two Nobel prizes along the way). Hers is an extraordinary life – something that doesn’t quite come into focus in this run-of-the-mill biopic, that re-focuses her life through the lens of her marriage to Pierre and skips lightly over the scientific import (and content) of her work. You could switch it off still not quite understanding what it was Marie Curie did.

What it was really about was repackaging Curie’s life into a thematic sequel to the previous year’s Oscar-winning hit Mrs Miniver. With the poster screaming “Mr and Mrs Miniver together again!”, the star-team of Garson and Pidgeon fitted their roles to match: Garson’s Marie Curie would be stoic, dependable, hiding her emotions under quiet restraint while calmly carrying on; Pidgeon’s Pierre was dry, decent, stiff-upper-lipped and patrician. Madame Curie covers the twelve years of their marriage as a Miniver-style package of struggle against adversity with Pierre’s death as a final act gut punch. Science (and history) is jettisoned when it doesn’t meet this model.

Not only Garson and Pidgeon, but Travers, Whitty, producer Sidney Franklin, cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg, composer Herbert Stothard and editor Harold F Kress among others all returned and while Wyler wasn’t back to direct, Mervyn LeRoy, director of Garson’s other 1942 hit Random Harvest, was. Heck even the clumsily crafted voiceover was spoken by Miniver writer James Hilton. Of course, the Miniver model was a good one, so many parts of Madame Curie that replicate it work well. But it also points up the film’s lack of inspiration, not to mention that it’s hard to think either of the Curies were particularly like the versions of them we see here.

Much of the opening half of Madame Curie zeroes in on the relationship between the future husband-and-wife who, like all Hollywood scientists, are so dottily pre-occupied with their heavy-duty science-thinking they barely notice they are crazy for each other. Some endearing moments seep out of this: Pierre’s bashful gifting of a copy of his book to Marie (including clumsily pointing out a heartfelt inscription to her she fails to spot) or Pierre’s functional proposal, stressing the benefits to their scientific work. But this material constantly edges out any space for a real understanding of their work.

It fits with the romanticism of the script, which pretty much starts with the word “She was poor, she was beautiful” and carries on in a similar vein from there (I lost count of the number of times Garson’s beauty was commented on, so much so I snorted when she says at one point she’s not used to hearing such compliments). Madame Curie has a mediocre script: it’s the sort of film where people constantly, clumsily, address each other by name (even Marie and Pierre) and info-dump things each of them already know at each other. Hilton’s voiceover pops up to vaguely explain some scientific points the script isn’t nimble enough to put into dialogue.

It would be intriguing to imagine how Madame Curie might have changes its science coverage if it had been made a few years later, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been eradicated by those following in Curie’s footsteps. Certainly, the film’s bare acknowledgment of the life-shortening doses of radiation the Curies were unwittingly absorbing during their work would have changed (a doctor does suggest those strange burns on Marie’s hands may be something to worry about). So naively unplayed is this, that it’s hard not to snort when Pierre comments after a post-radium discovery rest-trip “we didn’t realise how sick we were”. In actuality, Pierre’s tragic death in a traffic accident was more likely linked to his radiation-related ill health than his absent-minded professor qualities (Madame Curie highlights his distraction early on with him nearly being crushed under carriage wheel after walking Marie home).

Madame Curie does attempt to explore some of the sexism Marie faced – although it undermines this by constantly placing most of the rebuttal in the mouth of Pierre. Various fuddy-duddy academics sniff at the idea of a woman knowing of what she speaks, while both Pierre and his assistant (an engaging Robert Walker) assume before her arrival at his lab that she must be some twisted harridan and certainly will be no use with the test tubes. To be honest, it’s not helped by those constant references to Garson’s looks or (indeed) her fundamental mis-casting. Garson’s middle-distance starring and soft-spoken politeness never fits with anyone’s idea of what Marie Curie might have been like and a bolted-on description of her as stubborn doesn’t change that.

Walter Pidgeon, surprisingly, is better suited as Pierre, his mid-Atlantic stiffness rather well-suited to the film’s vision of the absent-minded Pierre and he’s genuinely rather sweet and funny when struggling to understand and express his emotions. There are strong turns from Travers and Whitty as his feuding parents, a sprightly cameo from C Aubrey Smith as Lord Kelvin and Albert Bassermann provides avuncular concern as Marie and Pierre’s mentor. The Oscar-nominated sets are also impressive.

But, for all Madame Curie is stuffed with lines like “our notion of the universe will be changed!” it struggles to make the viewer understand why we should care about the Curie’s work. Instead, it’s domestic drama in a laboratory, lacking any real inspiration in its desperation by its makers to pull off the Miniver trick once more. Failing to really do that, and failing to really cover the science, it ends up falling between both stools, destined to be far more forgettable than a film about one of history’s most important figures deserves to be.

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.

The Color Purple (1985)

Spielberg’s film has many strengths but is a little too sentimental and can’t always grasp everyday horror

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Whoopi Goldberg (Celie Harris-Johnson), Danny Glover (Albert Johnson), Adolph Caesar (Ol’ Mister Johnson), Margaret Avery (Shug Avery), Rae Dawn Chong (Mary ‘Squeak’ Agnes), Oprah Winfrey (Sofia), Akosua Busia (Nettie Harris), Willard Pugh (Harpo Johnson), Dana Ivey (Miss Millie), Desreta Jackson (Young Celie)

The Color Purple was Spielberg’s first foray into making ‘grown-up’ movies. He still seems like an odd choice for it today: author Alicia Walker was very hesitant, until ET proved to her Spielberg could make a film with empathy for a minority outsider. Producer and composer Quincy Jones actively courted Spielberg for the role – after all, this was a period where a mainstream film about the lives of Black people was rarely made without a white POV character (effectively, Spielberg filled that role instead). The Color Purple has several things about it that are hugely effective: but I found it much less moving than many others have. It feels like a film trying too hard, pushing its beats too firmly, sometimes timid and (interestingly) struggling to grasp the horror of relentless, everyday cruelty with the same understanding it gives explosive, violence.

Adapted from Walker’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel, it follows the life of Celie (Whoopi Goldberg) in the opening decades of the twentieth century. The victim of sexual abuse from her father (with whom she has two children, taken from her at birth) she is effectively sold to Mister Johnson (Danny Glover), a terminally inadequate man who violently takes out his frustrations on her. Forcibly separated from her beloved sister Nettie (Akosua Busia), Celie waits for years until she finds closeness with her husband’s lover, singer Shug Avery (Margaret Avery). Meanwhile, her adopted wider family encounter tragedy of their own, not least Sofia (Oprah Winfrey) the strong-willed wife of Johnson’s son Harpo (Willard Pugh) who unjustly finds herself persecuted by the law.

You can’t doubt the passion that’s gone into making The Color Purple. There is much to admire in it, not least the richness of its photography. Several sequences are profoundly affecting. The film constantly places Celie in a vulnerable position – the film’s opening constantly frames Celie and her husband together to stress his height and strength and to accentuate her vulnerability. This slowly inverts in the film as Celie starts to find a strength of character and independence. But the heightened trauma of her forced separation from her sister and the violence her husband is capable of is hard-to-watch.

It also works thanks to a subtle, low-key and tender performance from Whoopi Goldberg as Celie. With impressive restraint, Goldberg creates a woman beaten down by relentless misery who, for years, not only accepts domestic violence as something she deserves but as a regular part of the world (she even advises Harpo that he should exert control over Sofie with his fists). It’s genuinely affecting when, after over an hour, Goldberg finally smiles and begins to flourish as someone takes notice of her for who she is in her friendship with Shug. When years of pent-up fear and anger finally burst out of Celie, Goldberg really sells this cathartic moment that hits home all the more because of her quiet reserve of her performance.

In fact, the film is awash with fine performances. Danny Glover is very good as the weak-willed Mister Johnson, exerting the only power he has (domestic) with brutal force but treating others around him either with love-struck awe (Shug) or deferential fear (his father). Oprah Winfrey is excellent as a strong-willed, independent woman whose force-of-nature personality protects her at home but condemns her in a wider world that still revolves around racism. Margaret Avery carefully develops a woman who at first feels arrogant and self-absorbed into one revealed to be full of humanity (indeed it’s hard to understand what she ever saw in the pathetic Johnson). Adolph Caesar suggests sadism behind every sneer and muttered line as Mister Johnson’s appalling father.

These performances elevate a film that gets a lot right. The Color Purple understands how ashamed the abused can feel: from the guilt Celie feels at her father’s sexual abuse to the cowed, hollow person who feels she is ugly and worthless after years of oppression. It successfully displays a world where women are commodities, bought and sold by fathers and husbands with no say in their own lives. In this male-dominated world, Mr Johnson effectively rules his household like a plantation, treating his wife and children as he pleases. The camera doesn’t flinch when punches lash out.

But The Color Purple is also a sentimental film. Quincy Jones’ overly-empathetic score rings out over every scene, constantly telegraphic what we are meant to be feeling, choking the action. Some moments of humour land: a running-joke about the hapless Harpo falling through the roofs he tries to repair or Mr Johnson’s failed attempt to cook breakfast for Shug (and her furious rejection of this burnt slop) is refreshing. But the faint comic air given to Sofie’s post-jail employer Miss Milley, most crucially at her panic at the prospect of driving herself home alone leading her to insist Sofie breaks off re-uniting with her children after years of separation to take her home, works less well.

What’s fascinating about The Color Purple is that Spielberg, too me, can’t quite fully grasp casual everyday cruelty. Those petty acts of selfish cruelty, and the constant, demeaning talking-down and psychological cruelty of belittling people everyday. There is something about this relentless, unseen, low-key, damaging abuse that’s a little outside his world view. He understands the drama of slaps, punches and rapes but the everyday grind of an abusive partner effectively telling you every day you’re stupid and worthless is something the film can’t grasp (interestingly, the closest it can get to it is in trauma Johnson’s father has given his son). Tiny, reflexive, almost casual acts of cruelty and power play don’t quite land (in many ways, Johnson sleeping through his son’s wedding, is an act of cruel dominance not a gag) in the ways the violence does.

There has been criticism that a Black director should have taken on the project (and that’s fair) but really, I feel what this needs is a female director. Someone who could appreciate, in a way I don’t feel Spielberg quite can, the powerlessness of being a real outsider in a male-controlled world, constantly in danger. Because, in many ways, that constant disparagement is what has crushed Celine, even more than her husband’s fists. Instead the film is more comfortable with highlight moments of oppression, rather than continual misery. It can ‘t deliver on the grim grind of many years, it prefers the key moments that have immediate impact but lack the mortar binding them together.

It’s not the only part of the film where Spielberg blinks. The novel’s sexuality is stripped out, the romantic relationship between Shug and Celine almost completely ejected (you can feel the film’s discomfort whenever sex rears its head – Spielberg has never filmed sex with anything other than awkward embarrassment). It’s a loss of nerve Spielberg has acknowledged, in a film which leans hard into a sentimental and ‘all problems solved’ ending (that even gives a level of redemption to Mr Johnson that the novel avoided).

That’s the flaw with The Color Purple. There is something too well-planned and careful about it, a film building towards key points but which does that at the cost of a lot of the truth that underpins its characters. In the end it offers easier, more digestible versions of every theme it covers. It’s acting and filming is frequently first-class, but as a result I found it far less moving than I feel it should be.

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.

Norma Rae (1979)

Heartfelt political drama, with a powerful lead performance, which works surprisingly well

Director: Martin Ritt

Cast: Sally Field (Norma Rae Webster), Ron Leibman (Reuben Warshowsky), Beau Bridges (Sonny Webster), Pat Hingle (Vernon), Barbara Baxley (Leona), Gail Strickland (Bonnie Mae), Morgan Paull (Wayne Billings), Robert Broyles (Sam Bolen)

At their best, Trade Unions remind us we are never stronger than when we work together. That’s never needed more than ever when confronted with the crushing, soul-destroying working conditions of an unfettered industry. Norma Rae was based on the true story of Crystal Lee Sutton, a North Carolina textiles worker who fought tooth-and-nail to gain Trade Union representation for her factory. Fictionalised here as Norma Rae Webster (Sally Field), Norma Rae covers her political awakening and her channelling her inbuilt sense of justice and fairness and her quickness to anger, towards the constructive goal of changing the lives of her and her community.

Martin Ritt’s conventional but heartfelt biopic may not reinvent the wheel when it comes to telling life stories, but throws itself into all-consuming righteous indignation at the staggering unfairness of the American economic model. The factory at the heart of Norma Rae wouldn’t look out of place in a Victorian-set movie. Deafeningly loud, machines whir non-stop, the air full of cotton spores clogging up lungs, breaks sharply controlled (making an emergency personal call is a disciplinary offence), dismissal possible at the slightest whim, pay kept at rock bottom, workers with medical conditions forced to work through under threat of dismissal… the ghastly, oppressive, miserable textiles factory is like nothing more than a workhouse.

And it is a captive workforce because the workers there have no other choice. The entire community lives in the factory’s orbit, with no other opportunities in the vicinity. The town feels only a few steps up from a shanty town in the factory grounds, people living and dying in its shadow. Even the shift supervisors are only a rung or two up from those they manage. No wonder that anyone who takes a job monitoring the other workers is treated like a snitch. There are no prospects, no hope of change and nothing to look forward to: only day-after-day constantly grinding out clothing for minimal wages (that have not kept track with inflation) while the bosses get richer.

Despite this though, everything is set up to keep the status quo going. Many of these Southern workers have swallowed the management kool-aid that anyone arriving from the North talking about unions are commie, anti-American agitators. Particularly when they are New York Jews like Reuben Warshowsky (Ron Leibman). The factory owners do the absolute minimum to meet the requirements of Warshowsky’s legally-entitled inspection, or to ensure the workers rights to vote for representation. Local authorities, such as the Church, collaborate in maintaining the status quo. And Norma Rae doesn’t look-away from how the racism is used. The local preacher can’t decide if he is more at aghast at the idea of a union meeting in his church hall, or that the meeting will be non-segregated. The factory bosses shamelessly peddle the lie that a union is a tool for Black people to take control of the factory and drive white workers out.

But Ritt’s film clings to the hope that good people can change things, with reasoned argument and passion. That’s embodied in Sally Field’s Norma Rae. Previously best known for sitcom The Flying Nun (her character did exactly what the title says), Field seemed left-field casting as a trailer-trash single mother to three children from three different fathers, turned firebrand political agitator. But Field’s performance was an (Oscar-winning) revelation. She makes Norma Rae both a firecracker of perseverance and determination, but also acutely aware of her vulnerability, Field never losing track of the anxiety that makes her resolute stand-taking all the more impressive.

Martin Ritt’s film skilfully and economically sketches out her character from the start, helped by Field’s skilled playing. We are introduced to her impulsively and furiously berating both her supervisor and the factory’s tame doctor after the never-ending noise of the machine leaving her mother deaf, with no thought of her tenuous position. Later she will berate her own shallowness in sleeping with a married men – then infuriate him with accusations of selfish, ill-treatment of his wife. In a few short scenes, Field establishes a character with principles, a sense of honour and a fierce sense of justice but also prone to rash and kneejerk decisions.

Field’s performance soaks in righteous indignation but also has an emotionality under the surface. When arrested, she struggles like a wild animal to avoid putting in the car before taking on a stoic defiance in jail – only to break down in tears after being bailed. Field creates a women fiercely resilient and unshakeably resolute once she has found a purpose, with a strong sense of justice.

These are qualities recognised by Leibman’s visiting union organiser. Norma Rae draws a fascinating and extremely restrained platonic romance between these two who, despite their surface differences, are soulmates in the relentless focus, all-consuming dedication to justice. But both are spoken for: Warshowsky to a fiancé in New York, Norma to the man she has only just married, the decent-but-utterly-ineffectual Sonny (Beau Bridges). Their unspoken, subtle dedication to each other over late-night union work (which never spills out, even during a playful lake swimming session) is a restrained, very effective beat in a movie that keeps its fireworks for politics.

The film highlights the slow grinding of changing minds and energising people to fight for their own freedoms. Ritt highlights, in a series of underplayed meeting scenes, a host of characters sharing their stories, their faces showing them come to the realisation almost in that moment of how shabbily they are treated. He balances this with real moments of showmanship, that carry even more impact due to the underplayed nature of the rest of the movie.

Most famous, of course, is Norma Rae’s impassioned (literal) stand on principle as the management find a dubious reason to dismiss her. (Ritt frequently uses Field’s shorter statue to powerful effect, surrounding her with larger, overbearing men.) Standing on a table, she refuses to budge, clutching a hastily hand-written sign that just states the word ‘union’. In many ways, it’s a bread-and-butter heart-soaring moment, but Field and Ritt expertly sell emotion, from Field’s quivering, emotional determination to the workers slowly one-by-one shutting down their machines in solidarity.

Solidarity is what it’s all about, in a film that is more sympathetic and admiring of organised labour than almost any other Hollywood effort (it would make a fascinating double bill with On the Waterfront). Directed with effective restraint by Ritt with a power-house performance from Field, it’s also interesting to watch at a time when many in America are calling for a return to American industrial life like this but without any call for guarantees for the rights of workers. Norma Rae could be even more relevant in the years to come.

Materialists (2025)

Smug, contrived and misguided romantic comedy with a self important air

Director: Celine Song

Cast: Dakota Johnson (Lucy Mason), Chris Evans (John P), Pedro Pascal (Harry Castillo), Zoë Winters (Sophie), Marin Ireland (Violet)

In the modern world, what do we look for most in a partner? To professional matchmaker Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson) “the math is simple” (strap in folks, that’s a phrase you’ll hear a lot): we want someone who ticks plenty of our boxes, offers financial and social security as well as being the right height with the right level of charm. Love, you’ll notice, doesn’t play a role in that. So, what’s Lucy to do when she starts a relationship with ‘unicorn’ Harry (Pedro Pascal), exactly the sort of charming, super-wealthy and tall guy women dream of, just when her ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans), part-time-actor-and-waiter, suddenly resurfaces in her life. How strong will her principles to make the best deal possible be?

It sounds like the set-up for a romantic comedy. And honestly, it would have made a perfectly good one. Our heroine would be warm and charming even as she professed her cynicism, and the plot focussed on the whimsically old-fashioned concept of matchmaking would have gradually led her to embrace love (along with, inevitably, the poor but adorable love interest.) But Celine Song’s follow-up to Past Lives is a scrupulously dry character study, that wants you to think it’s got a deep and meaningful message about relationships in the world today, but eventually pedals the same rom-com message you imagine it would call trite.

But in a rom-com, the audience knows they’re watching a candyfloss fantasy – Song tries to staple the same “abandon realism here” kind of ending onto her ponderously, pretentious story, despite it contradicting the heroine’s entire personality and the characters’ painstakingly spelled out obstacles, and doesn’t seem to have noticed it makes the whole thing a complete dog’s dinner.

Putting it simply: I didn’t particularly like Materialists, found its smugly superior attitude irritating, its final message deeply confusing, and felt it eventually chickened out of making a real point about modern dating. It’s an art-house film, dressed as a rom-com, trying to fool you into thinking it’s a state-of-the-nation film while letting its lead end up in a reassuring fantasy that only happens in the movies.

Partly based on Song’s experience as a match-maker, the most interesting content in Materialists is its exploration of what makes people choose who to date. I think this is a very interesting topic: at a time when people find it harder to meet (and the financial demands of the modern world harder to cope with), hundreds of thousands of people will be making relationship decisions based on cold hard financial and social facts. And yeah, some of them probably do feel guilty about that, much as Materialists suggests.

But exploring the loneliness of modern life isn’t Song’s goal. Lucy’s clients (bar one) are deliberately awful caricatures – who cares why someone like that would be looking for love, right? The film is solely here for Lucy’s Great Dilemma: How far will she go in a relationship with a box-ticking man she likes, but whom she doesn’t love. (A more challenging version of Materialists might have left out Evans’ unbelievably-handsome-and-decent penniless actor, and just really explored this dilemma for Lucy.)

But instead, the love triangle offers an easy get-out card for Lucy. Because, unlike her clients, Lucy has already met her perfect match. In fact, while her desperate and deluded clients just want to meet someone who can stand to be at the same table sa them, Lucy has two gorgeous, considerate, tall, charming men begging her to let them commit their lives to her. (And who, by the way, can believe a charming, six-foot multi-millionaire who looks like Pedro freaking Pascal can’t get a date?) She’s got the lovely Harry, whose stunning Manhattan penthouse she gazes at awe-struck, like Lizzy Bennett at Pemberly. And there is literally nothing wrong with John, aside from his lack of income (he’s the only actor in the world who doesn’t have an agent and doesn’t want commercial work) – he’s kind and decent and trying to follow a dream. It makes her conundrum a false fantasy.

That’s one of the worst things about Materialists which, in many ways, is even less risky and daring than flipping Pretty Woman. It talks a big game about dating and relationships being economic and social decisions. It bangs on endlessly about this topic but, deep down, clearly doesn’t believe in it at all. Because even an astute analyst of people’s personalities (as Song can be) isn’t brave enough to make a film that commits to its initial proposition. Instead, Song sets up a parade of straw-man arguments that Lucy’s experiences can knock down to reach the ‘correct’ decision.

Ah Lucy. This mystifyingly motivated character who Dakota Johnson struggles to make coherent sense from. It’s not helped by Johnson’s breathy, evenly paced delivery that makes it very hard sometimes to work out what her character is meant to be thinking or feeling. Her air of dead-eyed professional monotone makes sense for her interactions with clients, but her colourless delivery of nearly all her lines made it almost impossible for me to work out when her character’s views change.

It’s not completely Johnson’s fault that Lucy is a deeply irritating character, but it would take a significantly more charismatic actor to make you overlook what a self-pitying, self-loathing waif she is, whose fundamental selfishness isn’t softened by constantly telling us she knows how selfish she is. Are we supposed to be rooting for her, when she essentially treats John (Evans, very likeable, sweet and witty) as an emotional-comfort-blanket, who can be dropped when she gets bored with him? Even when John calls her out on this, by the next sentence he’s absolving her for it.

Then in order to provoke her epiphany, the film clumsily introduces a sexual assault plotline for a supporting character, which exists solely to give Lucy the equivalent of “man-pain” – honestly, if the same plot was put in a film with a male lead, the socials would be burning up with cries of foul. This plotline is ludicrous from start to finish, while simultaneously treating a genuinely serious issue in dating like a ‘problem-of-the-week’ that can be solved with a hug. No male writer could have gotten away with the shallow, clumsy, plot-contrived development – and I don’t think Song should either.

Materialists takes place in a crazy world, where a dating firm has offices across the world, where the Manhattan police don’t respond to harassment call-outs from rapists, where everyone is paying tens of thousands of dollars to hook-up and John seems to be the only poor person. It’s dripping with smug assurance at its own cleverness, while offering a sort of moral message identical to a Sanda Bullock 90s romcom (but with fewer gags and chemistry). It’s frequently ponderous, stuffed with overly mannered dialogue and goes on forever. Having a Michael Haneke inspired closing shot, doesn’t change the fact the scene itself could have come straight out of The Runaway Bride. Materialists was not good.

Moonstruck (1987)

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

Director: Norman Jewison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Johnny Belinda (1948)

Small-town drama is a beautifully done exploration of prejudice with excellent performances

Director: Jean Negulesco

Cast: Jane Wyman (Belinda MacDonald), Lew Ayres (Dr Robert Richardson), Charles Bickford (Blackie MacDonald), Agnes Moorehead (Aggie MacDonald), Stephen McNally (Locky McCormick), Jan Sterling (Stella), Rosalind Ivey (Mrs Poggerty), Dan Seymour (Pacquet), Mabel Paige (Mrs Lutz), Alan Napier (Defence Attorney)

Small towns. Sometimes they’re safe, cosy little havens of the familiar. And sometimes they’re bitchy places of resentment and suspicion where everyone judges everyone else’s business. In an environment like that, it doesn’t pay to be different. Belinda MacDonald (Jane Wyman) is as different as they come: a deaf and dumb young woman, who (despite her intelligence and warmth) everyone assumes is a mentally deficient. Just as different, in a way, is Dr Richardson (Lew Ayres), a compassionate, well-educated man who forms his own opinions and is oblivious to other’s prejudices. Life’s going to be tough for this pair.

Dr Richardson is the only person in this small Canadian fishing town who can see the bright, vivacious young woman Belinda is. With his support, her father Blackie (Charles Bickford) rediscovers his love for a daughter, who he always blamed for her mother’s death in childbirth, while her austere aunt Aggie (Agnes Moorehead) thaws and proves her loyalty. Belinda will need them when she is raped by the popular Lucky (Stephen McNally) and trauma leaves her unable to remember who is responsible for the resulting child. The town, of course, blames Dr Richardson.

Johnny Belinda has all the ingredients of a melodrama: but it surprises as a mature, sensitive and moving story about real people. It’s amazing to see a 40s film this frank about rape and an illegitimate child, that lays not a finger of reproach on the victim, instead turning its fire on the small-minded judgements of those around her. It’s also striking it doesn’t define Belinda solely as a victim, either of deafness or rape. She gives birth to a child she dearly loves, refuses to let what’s happened haunt her and sees her life as one with blessings rather than curses. But neither is she an angelic character, being at times as capable of mistakes and quick judgements as the rest of us.

It helps that Jane Wyman (in an Oscar-winning turn) gives a perfectly judged performance. She’s never winsome or cloying, but fills Belinda with an uncomplaining grit to make the best of things, matched with a growing joy as her opportunities expand, from her discovery of sign language to the birth of her child. In complete silence (Wyman intensively learned sign), Wyman employs her expressive eyes to communicate a range of emotions from wonder to joy to fear to pain and grief (including a wordless rendition of the Lord’s Prayer). Belinda is a character we deeply empathise with, but never we nor the film treat her as an object of charity.

That also springs from Ayres’ Dr Richardson, a genial, kindly man whose inability to see the worst in people makes him a target-in-waiting for gossip. His less than regular attendance at Church has already raised question. Add his academic earnestness – and Ayres wonderfully embodies a man quietly passionate about making a difference – and you’ve got someone who doesn’t fit in a town that respects manly ruggedness. Richardson doesn’t pick up on this at all – just as he doesn’t even notice the clearly besotted devotion of his housekeeper Stella (an excellent portrait of quiet desperation by Jan Sterling).

Gossip is soon flying that Richardson is too close to Belinda. A trio of judgemental old woman, like Irish banshees, frequently stand on street corners to share little tit-bits of meanness. The town punches down on outsiders, fitting people into insultingly simple brackets. It’s partly why immigrant shop-owner Pacquet (Dan Seymour) becomes the ringleader of a morality lynch mob: he’s all too aware it otherwise won’t be long before he’s the target again. No one, of course, can imagine for a moment that the carefree, rugged Lucky (Stephen McNally, a wonderful portrait of utterly smackable shallow vileness) could be the sort of cruel, cowardly cad he is.

A cad who takes notice of a newly confident Belinda – and not in a good way. Part of Johnny Belinda’s power is you can sense the latent danger in those eyes on a newly radiant and confident Belinda at a town shindig, the shy wallflower turned smiling young woman enjoying the music through feeling the vibrations of a violin string (a lovely moment, played with a real burgeoning wonder by Wyman). It’s a mark of the cruelty of the world that this confidence just makes Belinda a target for the vile Lucky.

Again, it’s a mark of Johnny Belinda’s success that the cruelty of what happens hits so hard. Rarely have I despised a film villain as much as Lucky, perhaps because he’s so weak, snivelling and arrogant – the sort of guy so arrogant and stupid he crows over the good-looks of his illegitimate son. He’s a picture of the real villains out there: the weak, stupid and shallow who always get passes from those around them.

Johnny Belinda creates deep, engaging characters. Charles Bickford’s Blackie is presented as first as a gruff, careless father. But the film – and Bickford’s performance – slowly unpeels him as a tender, caring and decent man. The sort of man whose first instinct is to protect, who delights in his unexpected grandson and is thrilled with the excitement of sign language. Similarly, Agnes Moorehead gives a terrific performance as a woman who seems at first a bullying harridan, but becomes a pillar of familial strength. (Both of them and Ayres were Oscar nominated, Johnny Belinda one of the few films to get nominations in every acting category).

This affecting story of people who feel real and three-dimensional, is well directed with restraint and care by Jean Negulesco (easily his finest film) and shot with a real beauty in its rugged Canadian sea-town visuals by Ted McCord. Max Steiner’s excellent score mixes emotional melody with sea shanty influences. It’s a world where intense but very real emotions help ground a story of rape, murder, scarlet letters and court cases into something that feels real and relatable.

Johnny Belinda feels like an overlooked gem, a sort of perfect example of Hollywood issue film where the ‘issue’ isn’t pounded over our head but built organically into the plot. One where characters surprise us with developments that feel real, embodied by a series of excellent actors at the top of their game. It’s a small gem that deserves to be better known.

Firebrand (2024)

Atmospheric film attempts to redefine Katherine Parr, but fails to make a successful dramatic case

Director: Karim Aïnouz

Cast: Alicia Vikander (Katherine Parr), Jude Law (Henry VIII), Eddie Marsan (Edward Seymour), Sam Riley (Thomas Seymour), Simon Russell Beale (Bishop Stephen Gardiner), Erin Doherty (Anne Askew), Ruby Bentall (Cat), Bryony Hannah (Ellen), Junie Rees (Princess Elizabeth), Patsy Ferran (Princess Mary)

For years people had this muddle-headed idea that Henry VIII was a jolly fat-man with a charmingly eccentric habit of constantly marrying the wrong woman. In fact, this homicidal tyrant was one of history’s definitive arseholes, his hands scarlet red with the blood of anyone who annoyed him (including at least two of his wives). His last wife, Katherine Parr, is similarly often remembered as a dutiful matron than a dynamic and intelligent woman (who wrote a book on theology and ruled as regent for several months).

Firebrand is a noble attempt to challenge that narrative, drawing focus towards Katherine Parr’s (Alicia Vikander) zeal for religious reform and the near-fatal attention it brought her from the hard-core traditionalists around Henry VIII (Jude Law) not least Bishop Stephen Gardiner (Simon Russell Beale). This reimagining of the final months of Katherine Parr’s marriage to the bloated tyrant tries its very best to reclaim her as a major figure in the founding of the Church of England and if, in the end, it doesn’t quite manage this, it’s still good to have Katherine reclaimed from history’s trivia corner – and links her closely to the eternally popular Elizabeth I (poor Mary remains a dowdy fanatic, played by a gloomy looking Patsy Ferran – feminist sympathy can only go so far.)

Aïnouz does give Firebrand a freshly claustrophobic and sinister feel behind the costume details (bringing the sort of outsider eye that Kapur bought to Elizabeth). It has an imposing, doom-laden score of moody strings and sudden, discordant noise, frequently presenting the English countryside not as lush environment, but misty place pregnant with unknown menace. It’s a fine mood setter for a land where reformist religious practices are ruthlessly suppressed by a religiously conservative king (Henry’s only interest in reform being what he personally could get out of it – in his case a divorce and a mountain of monastery cash).

In the candlelit gloom of the court, the capricious king makes life as unpredictable and dangerous as he is. Henry is accompanied everywhere by a group of fawning hangers-on, whose job is to whooping up the court to collapse into hysterics whenever the king says anything approaching a joke. The most effective thing about Firebrand is it’s presenting of a Henry VIII who is one part Harvey Weinstein to two parts Josef Stalin. Jude Law gives a masterclass in preening cruelty and psychopathic bullying, as man so used to getting what he wants even the slightest suggestion he can’t sends him into a spiral of spittle-flecked rage. Firebrand plays up his corpulence, the suppurating stench of his ulcers (Law, in method style, wore a cologne that stank of piss during filming) making this king a million miles from the broad-shouldered Holbein image.

Henry paws openly at attractive court ladies and delights in humiliating those around him. He uses physicality as a weapon of control, constantly grasping people by the fae or neck to draw them towards him. Law is superbly cruel and domineering, while being pathetically needy, demanding complete and total affection from his wife and yo-yoing between randy affection and assault if he doubts for a second anything other than her complete devotion.

If only the film was able to make as compelling a case for Katherine Parr’s undoubted qualities, as it does for the King’s negatives. Alicia Vikander has a hard job – Katherine is rarely, if ever, not under observation so must constantly hide her thoughts and emotions behind a stoic shield. But it’s a shield that partly deadens her performance. Firebrand only finds a few moments, at its start, for Katherine to truly be herself, in the presence of Erin Doherty’s passionate firebrand Anne Askew (whose Protestantism overlaps with a socialistic political view which doesn’t quite ring true for Tudor England).

Vikander and Doherty’s relationship is one of the film’s most interesting, with more than a hint of romance between these two reformers, one who has never compromised and another who compromised so much she literally married her persecutor. Aside from that, Vikander has to work hard to try and communicate her fierce commitment to reform behind her eyes – something that’s a lot harder than using her skill at telegraphic her hatred and fear of Henry. Her management of the king does provide moments of interest, notably a fascinating sequence when Katherine publicly humiliates a potential mistress in order to re-spark the king’s interest in her (Henry, like other egotists, liking nothing more than young women fighting over him).

But Firebrand struggles to translate Katherine’s religious views into either something politically compelling or dramatic. Instead, it largely resorts to working hard to tell usthat Katherine was a feminist icon, the inspiration for Elizabeth I and the true mother of the Church of England – rather than showing it. It also has to awkwardly rework the actual historical events to facilitate this.

As such, we have her roundly rejecting the advances of Sam Riley’s lecherously ambitious Thomas Seymour (in real life she immediately married him on Henry’s death – showing even intelligent people can fall for terminally selfish idiots), arrested, imprisoned and threatened with burning (in real life Katherine avoided this by publicly submitting utterly to Henry’s ‘superior’ judgement in all things religious) and an optimistic ending of her and Elizabeth planning a feminist protestant utopia (as opposed to Elizabeth’s affair with Seymour that permanently fractured their relationship). Firebrand ends with a paean to how Parr’s writing laid the foundations of Anglicanism, which feels quite a reach to make from one book.

Strangely however, the film’s biggest historical deviation of fact – her final solving of her Henry problem – despite being a clearly fictional flourish is surprisingly satisfying (not least because of the vileness of Law’s Henry) and manages to ring spiritually true for what a parade of people (and Katherine as well probably) would have liked to do to the murderous maniac if given the chance. But it’s also too little, too late in a film that otherwise is a little too dry, a little too lacking in narrative drive. For all it wants to build up the reputation of Katherine Parr, it gives Vikander far too little meaty content to really play with while ceding much of the interest to its wallowing in the cruelty of the king.