Category: Female led film

The Lost Daughter (2021)

Motherhood, loss and guilt are at the heart of this over-extended drama that doesn’t feel like it focuses on the right things

Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal

Cast: Olivia Colman (Leda Caruso), Jessie Buckley (Young Leda Caruso), Dakota Johnson (Nina), Ed Harris (Lyle), Dagmara Dominczyk (Callie), Paul Mescal (Will), Peter Sarsgaard (Professor Hardy), Jack Farthing (Joe), Oliver Jackson-Cohen (Toni), Athena Martin (Elena), Robyn Elwell (Bianca), Ellie Blake (Martha)

Leda (Olivia Colman), a professor of Italian Literature, holidays in Greece. That holiday is disturbed by the arrival of a noisy, aggressive family from Queens. A member of that family, unhappy young mother Nina (Dakota Johnson) loses her daughter on a beach. Leda finds her, but it triggers her own unhappy memories of motherhood (Jessie Buckley plays the young Leda). She impulsively steals the child’s beloved doll, as her paranoia and mournful reflections grow.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut is a confident, assured piece of film-making, but I found it a cold and slightly unsatisfying film. There is a fascinating subject here, that the film fails to really tackle. One of life’s great unspoken expectations is that everyone should find being a parent – especially being a mother – hugely rewarding. This film studies a woman who didn’t, but still wants to reassure us of the love and happiness found in the bond with a child, no matter your mistakes as a parent. In doing so, it marginally ducks an important societal issue and reaches conclusions that feel predictable, for all the ambiguity the film ends with.

Colman’s expressive face and ability to suggest acres of unhappiness in a forced smile or gallons of frustration with a single intake of breath, are used to maximum effect. Leda is a woman comfortable with her own company, forced and uncomfortable in conversation, her eyes flicking away as if looking for an exit. She seems confused about how to respond to the quiet advances of handyman Lyle (a gentle Ed Harris) and increasingly resents the intrusion into her holiday of outsiders.

How much is this slightly misanthropic, isolated view of the world her natural personality, and how much has it grown from her choices in the past? Flashbacks reveal her struggles as a mother – and the strained relationship with her children today – and it’s clear Leda is a bubble of confused emotions, uncertain about what she thinks and feels.

That past, to me, is the real area of interest, rather than the distant, cold woman those choices have created. I’d argue a stronger film – and one that would feel like it was really making a unique point – would have focused on the younger Leda. Expertly played by an Oscar-nominated Jessie Buckley –brittle and growing in claustrophobic depression – she loves her two girls. But, most of the time, finds them overbearing, all-consuming and more than a little irritating. She’ll laugh at their jokes and be terrified when one of them gets lost, while still resenting their domineering impact on her life.

When she wants to work, they demand attention. When her daughter has a small cut on her finger, Leda is repeatedly asked to kiss it better like a broken record. Leda gives her other daughter her own childhood doll – and then throws it out of a window in fit of hurt fury when the daughter covers it in crayon and says she doesn’t like it. The kids get in the way of everything: be it work (she retreats behind headphones to focus), holidays, sex with her husband or even masturbation.

Her feelings go beyond post-natal depression. She is someone who genuinely loves her children, but can’t bear the idea of mothering them. This is the meat of the film, far more than the present-day narrative. Gyllenhaal sensitively tackles a rarely discussed topic: what can we do if we find parenthood was a mistake? Knuckle down or give up and run away? A film exploring this could have been compelling: but it only takes up a quarter of an over-extended film.

Instead, by focusing on the maladjusted present-day Leda, the film presents her motherhood difficulties as the root cause of her problems. Leda sees a potential kindred spirit in young mother Nina – a brash and exhausted Dakota Fanning – who seems equally frustrated by parenting. But Leda is so insular and self-obsessed, is she only seeing what she wants to see? If she thinks Nina is also failing as a mother, will that make her feel better about her own failures?

The Lost Daughter is an unreliable narrator film – and Gyllenhaal expertly suggests much of what we see are Leda’s perceptions rather than necessarily the truth. The menace from Nina’s loud and aggressive extended family is a constant presence: but is it real, or just Lena’s paranoia. Does the family really cover every tree with a missing poster for a child’s lost doll, or does it just that way to Leda? Does Nina share Leda’s own resentments with motherhood, or does Leda just want her to?

It’s a subtle ambiguity that continues until the film’s close. It leaves many questions unanswered and open to the viewers interpretation. Different viewers will take very different messages from it. But for me, the film wasn’t quite interesting enough – and shied away from exploring the questions of guilt and doubt about parenthood. At no point does Leda even voice the possibility that she regrets having kids – for all that she surely does – which feels odd. For me the film takes a long time to not quite say as much as I feel it could have done.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)

Transformative make-up can’t quite cover up this slightly empty film

Director: Michael Showalter

Cast: Jessica Chastain (Tammy Faye Bakker), Andrew Garfield (Jim Bakker), Cherry Jones (Rachel Grover), Vincent D’Onofrio (Jerry Falwell), Mark Wystrach (Gary S Paxton), Sam Jaeger (Roe Messner), Louis Cancelmi (Richard Fletcher), Gabriel Olds (Pat Robertson)

In the twentieth century, what better way to spread the Word of the Lord than television? The Eyes of Tammy Faye follows the lives of Tammy Faye Bakker (Jessica Chastain) and her husband Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield), who co-founded the evangelical TV network, PTL (Praise-the-Lord). The network is a huge success but their marriage flounders, until both collapse when Bakker is convicted of embezzling millions from the network’s on-air fundraisers.

At least that’s what I found out what happened when I looked the Bakkers up. Narratively, The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a mess that often fails to make either events, or their impact, clear. Part of this might be legal worries – the film skirts around accusations of rape made against Bakker, fudging it as unspecified, unsavoury allegations from an ex-employee – but for the embezzlement, something Bakker was convicted for, there’s really no excuse. It’s genuinely hard to tell exactly how this crime happened or worked – the Bakkers’ life falls apart in the same way it rose, via a swift, stylishly assembled montage of headlines and soundbites.

Perhaps the film is unclear because it’s worried if there was too much information about precisely what happened, it might look like Tammy Faye was in on it. The film wants so much to make clear Tammy had no idea where all the money comes from, it has to keep us in the dark as well. Instead, it settles for being a sympathetic portrait of Tammy Faye, a genuinely nice person who stood out in the 1980s evangelical scene for focusing on the love of God, rather than all the social and political trends right-wing Christians wanted to let people know God definitely hated.

Despite aiming to be as sympathetic as possible, the film ends up rather short-changing her. Tammy argued to keep politics out of religion, uncomfortable with growing links with the Republican party and Reaganism. Even more admirably, she believed God loved gay people as much as he did anyone else, and that meant it was God’s will to love and support the gay community during the AIDS crisis. This was an almost unique – and brave – viewpoint. Tammy hosted AIDS sufferers on her show and, Princess Diana-like, urged an end to the prejudice and fear of those diagnosed with the disease. No one at the time with a similar public image was saying the same thing.

But the film boils this down to a single scene with Tammy hosting a Christian pastor AIDS sufferer on her TV show, and a couple of throw-away remarks from hissable bad guy, Reverend Jerry Falwell (a menacing Vincent D’Onofrio). The principle behind making such a stance gets lost, as does her life-long dedication to supporting the gay community (she ended up as a regular guest at Pride marches). The film is so focused on showing us she’s a nice, decent and kind person it doesn’t bother to show the principles behind her views.

It offers no explanation for how a woman whose whole life was steeped in conservative religious views interpreted Christianity so differently to nearly everyone else around her. It has no interest in the grit it must have taken to take this stance. Instead, it largely turns her into a candyfloss doll who loves everyone all the time because goshdarnit she’s so sweet.

You could make a really interesting film here about a turning point in the politicisation of religion. Christian movements were flexing their muscles and pushing a conservative domestic agenda, heading down a road that would lead to violent debates on sexuality and abortion. The film could have used this life-story to explore these developments within the evangelical community. It flunks this opportunity, setting up goodies and baddies, skipping out details and draining a film that arguably should have been about politics into one that barely explains them.

It settles for being a conventional, safe and predictable cradle-to-grave biography about a nice person who gets in (unknowingly, of course) over her head, in a marriage to a man corrupted by fame. Jessica Chastain – winning a generous Oscar in a weak year – is lovable and perfectly captures the persona of Tammy Faye, but essentially just ticks off the expected biopic tropes. Andrew Garfield gives excellent support as her naïve husband, seduced by fame and money and confusion about his sexuality. (Another flunk of the film is never linking Tammy Faye’s support for the gay community with her obvious awareness of her husband’s suppressed feelings.)

The film won a second Oscar for its impressive make-up and hair, which transforms Chastain’s facial features (she did about 3-4 hours in the chair everyday) and plumps out Garfield’s face. It’s a trap the film gets seduced into: fascinating recreations of TV moments and appearances, that never really gets under the skin to help us understand either of the Bakkers’ at all.

The Barefoot Contessa (1954)

An enigmatic beauty finds fame but not happiness in Hollywood in Mankiewicz’ slightly muddled mix of satire, romance and tragedy

Director: Joseph L Mankiewicz

Cast: Humphrey Bogart (Harry Dawes), Ava Gardner (Maria Vargas), Edmond O’Brien (Oscar Muldoon), Marius Goring (Alberto Bravano), Valentina Cortese (Eleanora Torlato-Favrini), Rossano Brazzi (Count Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini), Elizabeth Sellers (Jerry Dawes), Warren Stevens (Kirk Edwards), Franco Interlenghi (Pedro Vargas)

Rain hammers down on a funeral in the Italian Rivera. A group of (mostly) men gather to pay their respects to deceased film star Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner). In flashback, two of the men who discovered her as an exotic dancer in a Madrid nightclub, remember her. Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart) is the world-weary writer-director and her friend and mentor, Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien) a publicist to power-mad producers and self-satisfied millionaires who wanted to use Maria for their own ends. Maria’s success goes with a growing loneliness and ennui: marriage to Count Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini (Rossano Brazzi) feels like a fresh start but leads only to further tragedy.

Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa was an attempt to do for Hollywood what he so superbly did for theatre in All About Eve. What’s fascinating is that it’s clear Mankiewicz loved the theatre – for all its bitchy acidness – but clearly didn’t like Hollywood that much. The Barefoot Contessa is a cold, cynical film where Hollywood is a shallow, selfish place with no loyalty and where people are only commodities.

The only exceptions are Dawes and Maria. Dawes – an obvious Mankiewicz stand-in (and who hasn’t wished they could be Humphrey Bogart?) – is an artist, with an abashed guilt about wasting his talents on shallow films. Played with a quiet, observational languor by Bogart (so ashen faced at times, he seems almost grey), Dawes narrates with a dry distance, seeing but avoiding involvement, an arched eyebrow for every event. He’s also got a level of principle and integrity largely missing from the other Hollywood figures.

What we see of them is often hard to like – could Mankiewicz already be so bitter about his profession, just a few years after dominating the Oscars? Maria’s first producer, Warren Stevens, is a spoilt millionaire (inspired by Howard Hughes), played with a stroppy greed by Kirk Edwards. Stevens humiliates underlings in restaurants, treats Dawes like a bellboy, demands total devotion from Maria (sulkily ordering her to stay away from a potential rival at a dinner party) and has not a shred of interest in art. Under his control, Dawes directs films which sound formulaic (Black Dawn!) and which he clearly despises. A screen-test for Maria is gate-crashed by a series of European producers who gossip about money, stars, finance and never art.

Maria rises above all this as a true romantic ideal, her tendency to go barefoot part of her defining characteristic as a natural free-spirit in touch with the Mother Nature (“I feel safe with my feet in the dirt”). Ava Gardner is perfectly cast as this romantic but enigmatic figure, an idealised figure we never quite understand. Introduced as curiously indifferent about auditioning for Hollywood (partly due to her instinctive dislike for Stevens), Maria almost drifts into stardom but finds little contentment. She lives the ultimate Cinderella story (as she comments on with Dawes) but never find a satisfying fairy tale ending after her rags-to-riches story.

The Barefoot Contessa starts as a Hollywood expose, but becomes an ill-focused study of this almost unknowable glamour figure. Gardner is, of course, nothing like what a Madrid dancer from the slums would look or act like, but she is perfectly cast as the idealised figure Mankiewicz wants for his Maugham-ish exploration of ennui and shallowness among the jet-set of Europe. They’re not that different from Hollywood producers: obsessed with status and class, and uninterested in truth and art. Marius Goring’s Italian millionaire turns out (for all his Euro-charm) to be as much a stroppy ass as Stevens (humiliatingly blaming Maria for his gambling losses). Her husband, the Count, seems to be her salvation, but turns out to be as much a deceptive empty-suit as anyone else.

I suppose it’s part of the point that we never get to hear Maria’s own voice, only the perceptions of the men around her. You could say the same about All About Eve’s Eve and Margo, but they were such rich characters our understanding of them was always clear. But Maria is never quite compelling enough and Mankiewicz never escapes from making her feel a variation on a fantasy figure (between sex bomb and earth mother). Mankiewicz was forced to compromise on his central conceit (rather than gay, her husband is cursed with ludicrous war-wound induced impotency) of Maria marrying the man least suited to giving her the family-life purpose she seeks.

The Barefoot Contessa – strangely for a film from a director whose best work was with women – eventually becomes a film about men, fascinated with a woman they can never really understand. Dawes gets the closest, the only man free of sexual desire for her, but to the others she is often seen as an unobtainable sexual figure (on a yacht, she defiantly confronts the lecherous stares of the men on board). When we finally see her dance, she has a freedom and naturalness you feel has been crushed by the circles she now moves in.

It feels like two films pushed together: one a Hollywood expose about a newly-grown star (that film is a broader, farcical one where Edmond O’Brien’s hammy Oscar-winning turn as a wild-eyed, famously sweaty publicist seems to fit); the other a novelistic musing on ennui in the moneyed jet-set classes, where an unobtainable woman is at last obtained by a man who can do nothing with her.

Mankiewicz’s weakness is not pulling these two narratives together into a coherent thematic whole. He himself was later critical of the films structure. It’s beautifully written of course – Mankiewicz is a master of theatrical pose – and Jack Cardiff’s technicolour beauty is outstanding. The Barefoot Contessa sits in the shadow, both of In a Lonely Place (Bogart’s vicious 1950 Hollywood expose) and films that loosely followed in its ennui-exploring footsteps, like La Dolce Vita. But it’s as if Mankiewicz got a bit lost (like Dawes) about what his intentions were in the first place.

Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

The multi-verse is at risk of ending – and only a disenchanted woman running a laundromat can save the day in this inventive science-fiction

Director: Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert

Cast: Michelle Yeoh (Evelyn Quan Wang), Stephanie Hsu (Joy Wang), Ke Huy Quan (Waymond Wang), James Hong (Gong Gong), Jamie Lee Curtis (Dierdre Beaubeirdre), Tallie Medel (Becky Sregor), Jenny Slate (Debbie), Harry Shum Jnr (Chad), Biff Wiff (Rick)

Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) has lots on her plate: running her laundromat, completing tax returns for a demanding IRS agent (Jamie Lee Curtis), her waning marriage to goofy husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) and drifting relationship with lesbian daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), not to mention her fear of the disapproval of her demanding father (James Hong) – its Everything Everywhere All at Once as it is: no wonder she struggles to cope when discovering from an alternate version of her husband that she, and she alone, is the key to saving the entire multi-verse from destruction.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is an endlessly inventive, imaginative and unique spin on everything from science fiction to philosophy, via the struggles of an immigrant family, familial dynamics and love, death and the universe itself. Did I mention it’s got jokes as well? There isn’t anything quite like EEAAO out there, and if the film does lose energy at an inflated runtime of 145 minutes, at least that’s because it must have been a struggle knowing what to cut.

In the mythology of EEAAO, Evelyn lives in just one of a myriad different realities. Every time a decision is taken, a new reality branches off, spawning innumerable different realities. If Evelyn can imagine it, then somewhere in another universe it happened. She should be a film star, a martial artiste, a chef, a blind singer, a pizza sign spinner…there are realities where mankind never evolved or where they evolved with hot dogs for fingers (a joke the film is a way too pleased with and seriously outstays its welcome).

With some technology from the “Alpha” universe – the first universe to discover alternate realities, where Evelyn and Waymond were pioneering scientists – Evelyn can access the memories and skills of her alternates. All she – and others with the right training and equipment – need to do to become experts at anything in seconds is to build a mental link to that reality by performing a highly improbable act. Whether that’s getting four consecutive papercuts, eating a lipstick, swallowing a model frog or – in a comic highlight – Evelyn fighting to stop an opponent shoving an “Employee of the month” award shaped like a dildo up their bottom in public (you’re not going to see that in many movies) – it’s a brilliant comic device that raises belly laughs a plenty.

EEAAO knocks spots off the recent Doctor Strange sequel (that made almost nothing of its parallel universe concept) by not only presenting radically different worlds (in this universe Evelyn is a pinata! Here she’s a rock!), but also exploring how the path-not-taken can have a mesmerising and inspiring/depressing impact. Evelyn – a woman who (justifiably?) believes she has achieved nothing, is both fascinated or heart-broken to see realities where her accomplishments are titanic. EEAO is superbly thought-provoking when it explores the emotional impact of questioning your choices, when you see turning right rather than left could have been the first step on a path of astonishing glory and success and, even, a completely different personality.

This leads into the film’s second half which, after the comic energy of the first, dives into a philosophical debate about the nature of choice. The villain attempting to destroy reality is motivated not by rage or power-lust – but simply by the fact that jumping to a billion realities has persuaded them it all means nothing. Everything is basically a combination of atoms that, with a few pushes and pulls, can turn from one thing to anything else. This nihilistic view of the world – what does it matter killing one person when there are billions of other versions of them, many of them ‘better’ – and balancing it with a more humanitarian view, becomes the film’s key debate.

It’s also rooted in the film’s opening, which is does a marvellous job of exploring universal family questions, while still grounded in the experience of an immigrant family. Evelyn and Waymond, having moved to America in search of their dreams as youngsters – and wound up running a laundromat – struggle to balance their relationship (her growing irritation at his perpetual optimism, his alienation from her cynicism) and, particularly in Evelyn’s case, understanding her more Westernised daughter. Two generations with very different experiences, struggling to understand each other.

On top of which, many of these problems are universal. Generational conflicts: the grandpa who can’t be told his granddaughter is gay, because her mother isn’t sure how he will react. The mother and daughter who have lost the ability to communicate and reduced to saying increasingly cruel things to each other (there is a shocking moment when Evelyn tries to tell her daughter she loves her but instead chastises her for getting fat). Waymond tries to hold things together but is too gentle and ineffective to do anything.

All of this is bundled together in a film stuffed with inventive and hilarious sequences. There are kick-ass fights (one involving Alpha-Waymond and a fanny-pack – bum-bag to us Brits – which has to be seen to be believed), hilarious segues, brilliant parodies of other films (2001, Ratatouille and In the Mood for Love for starters): and then the film will hit you for six with a genuinely heart-breaking moment. I will say there is almost too much good stuff here – ten minutes trimmed from the film would work wonders, and the continued trips back to Hot Dog Hands reality is a joke stretched to absolute breaking point – but better too much than too little.

At the heart of this fabulous work from The Daniels are superb performances, none more so than a career best turn from Michelle Yeoh. Channelling everything Yeoh has ever done in her career into a single film, she of course can handle the astonishing action but also displays an emotional depth and complexity that will break your heart. She’s bitter and trapped, then will shift on a sixpence to agonised guilt and longing. She’s astonishingly good. There is brilliant support from Hsu as her trapped and troubled daughter and Ke Huy Quan (last seen in The Goonies) is heart-breakingly endearing, funny and wonderfully sweet as her good-natured husband (like Yeoh he also plays multiple variants – from confident to cold and distant). James Hong is wonderful as her austere father and Jamie Lee Curtis is having a ball as a bullying IRS agent turned villain’s heavy.

When the major flaw in the film is that it is too damn long, you know you are onto a good thing. There are more ideas in a few minutes here than in the entire runtime of such things as the Doctor Strange sequel. Superbly directed with wit, energy and compassion by the Daniels and with a career-defining role for Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All At Once is destined to take its place as a year defining cult hit.

Widows (2018)

Sexism, racism and corruption get mixed in with crime drama in McQueen’s electric heist film

Director: Steve McQueen

Cast: Viola Davis (Veronica Rawlings), Michelle Rodriguez (Linda), Elizabeth Debicki (Alice), Cynthia Erivo (Belle), Colin Farrell (Jack Mulligan), Brian Tyree Henry (Jamal Manning), Daniel Kaluuya (Jatemme Manning), Jacki Weaver (Agnieska), Carrie Coon (Amanda), Robert Duvall (Tom Mulligan), Liam Neeson (Harry Rawlings), Jon Bernthal (Florek), Garret Dillahunt (Bash), Lukas Haas (David)

A getaway goes wrong and Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) and his criminal gang all wind-up dead and their loot burned up. Their last job was cleaning out the election fund of gangster-turned-electoral-candidate Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry). Manning believes he’s owed a debt by Harry’s widow Veronica (Viola Davis). On the hock for millions, Veronica has no choice but to recruit the widows of Harry’s gang to help her pull off the next job Harry planned: cleaning out the campaign fund of Manning’s electoral rival Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell).

Adapted from an 80s British TV mini-series, Widows has been run through Steve McQueen’s creative brain, emerging as a compelling, beautifully shot crime drama mixing social, racial and gender commentary with blistering action. It takes a traditionally masculine genre – the crime caper – and places at its heart a group of women motivated by desperation and survival rather than the lure of lucre.

What’s particularly interesting is that none of these women fit the bill of the sort of person you expect to arrange a daring heist. Viola Davis’ Veronica is a retired teachers’ union rep; Elizabeth Debicki an abuse victim, treated terribly by her husband and selfish mother; Michelle Rodriguez a shop owner desperately trying to give her kids a chance, despite her husband’s reckless gambling. Even the driver they hire, played by Cynthia Erivo, is a hairdresser and babysitter. These women are a world away from the ruthless criminals you’d expect to pull off this kind of operation.

It’s probably why they are routinely underestimated and patronised by men. Veronica is advised clear her debt by selling either everything she owns and disappear. As with the rest of the women, the world expects her to put up and shut up. These are women defined by their husbands and the expectation that their needs are subordinate to others’. Debicki’s Alice is all-but pushed into escort work by her demanding mother, while Rodriguez’s Linda is blamed by her mother-in-law for her husband’s death. But these women have a steely survival instinct that makes them determined and (eventually) ruthless enough to take this job on.

Davis is superb as a determined and morally righteous woman, whose principles are more flexible than she thinks. She efficiently (and increasingly sternly) applies her organisational skills to planning the heist, pushing her crew to adapt her own professionalism. Davis wonderfully underplays Veronica’s grief, not only at the loss of her husband but also the recent death of her son (shot by police officers while reaching to answer his phone behind the wheel of an expensive car – in front of a wall of Obama “Hope” posters, a truly striking visual image).

Her co-stars are equally impressive. Debicki has mastered the mix of vulnerability and strength behind characters like this (how many times has she played suffering, glamourous gangster molls?). Her Alice gains the self-belief to push back against those exploiting her. Rodriguez beautifully balances grief at the loss of her husband with fury at the financial hole he has left her in. Erivo gets the smallest role, but makes Bella dry, loyal and sharp. All four of them use the way men underestimate them – seeing them as widows, wives, weak or sex objects – to plan out their heist.

The reversal of gender expectations crosses over with the social political commentary McQueen wants to explore. This sometimes works a treat: the flashback to the shooting of Veronica’s son is shockingly effective. But the film’s dives into the Chicago political scene and the deep class divisions in the city don’t always have the impact they should. There is a marvellous shot – all in one take, mounted on the car bonnet – as Farrell’s Mulligan travels (in a few minutes) from a photo op in a slum back to his palatial family home, emphasising how closely extreme wealth and poverty sit side-by-side in America.

Both candidates are corrupted in different ways. Jamal Manning – a knife behind a smile from Brian Tyree Henry – is a thug talking the talk to line his pockets. Farrell’s Mulligan has more standards – and you wish for more with this fascinating put-upon son part on-the-take, part genuinely wanting to help. His domineering dad – an imperiously terrifying Robert Duvall, who wants to backseat drive his son in office – demeans his son, shouts racial slurs and bullies everyone around him. Politics: your choice is the latest off-spring of a semi-corrupt dynasty or a literal criminal.

But the film doesn’t quite find the room to explore these issues in quite as much detail as you feel it could: it’s a strong hinterland of inequality, but you want more. McQueen however, does have a gift for unique character details that speak volumes: the women’s operation is shadowed by an electric Daniel Kaluuya, as Manning’s calm yet psychotic brother, who listens to self-education podcasts on Black history and shoots people without a second thought. He, of course, underestimates the women as much as everyone else. That’s as much of a political statement as anything else: none of the men in this film seem to even begin to think that they could be in a world which is truly equal.

The film adds a late act reveal that doesn’t quite work – and the film as a whole is trying to do a little too much – but it’s a confirmation of what a gifted and superb film-maker Steve McQueen is. McQueen shoots even conventional scenes in unique and interesting ways – check out his brilliant use of mirrors throughout – uses editing superbly to set tone and is brilliant at drawing the best from talented actors. Widows is crammed full of terrifically staged scenes and gallops along with pace and excitement. It’s a fine example of a great director turning a genre film into something deeper.

Now, Voyager (1942)

Romance, make-overs and erotic cigarette lighting abounds in this classic luscious romance

Director: Irving Rapper

Cast: Bette Davis (Charlotte Vale), Paul Henreid (Jerry Duvaux Durrance), Claude Rains (Dr Jaquith), Gladys Cooper (Mrs Windle Vale), Bonita Granville (June Vale), John Loder (Elliot Livingston), Ilka Chase (Lisa Vale), Lee Patrick (Deb McIntyre), Janis Wilson (Tina Durrance)

“The untold want by life and land ne’er granted, / Now, voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find”. Walt Whitman’s words are the poetic urging of kindly psychiatrist Dr Jaquith (Claude Rains) to patient Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) before she embarks on a cruise that will change her life. Crushed under her imperious mother’s (Gladys Cooper) thumb, Charlotte grew-up an unloved ugly-duckling and self-loathing spinster. How will a taste of freedom change her life – and, with that taste, a love affair with unhappily married would-be-architect Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid)?

It’s easy to see Now, Voyager as a piece of soapy, romantic puff – and there are certainly suds in its DNA – but that’s to do an engaging, heartfelt character-study down. This is a sort of moral rags-to-riches story about a woman who has been mocked her whole life, finding the courage to build her own life. But that life is not the picture-perfect final image you might expect: instead, it’s about compromise and, more importantly, choosing your own compromises. Without knowing it, that is what Charlotte has been striving for. “Don’t let’s ask for the moon: we have the stars” are her famous closing lines, and it’s about the idea that choosing a compromised version of the life she actually wants is better than a life foisted upon her by others.

Now, Voyager works as well as it does, almost exclusively down to Bette Davis. She fought to get the role, hand-picked the director (an old friend) and stars (insisting on Henreid, despite a disastrous test) and reshaped most of the dialogue. It’s all justified by her superb performance. Charlotte Vale, with her ugly-duckling opening appearance, and operatic romance with Jerry, could have been a pantomimic performance. Davis though grounds her in sensitivity, reality and a deep emotional empathy. It’s a complex, heart-stirring performance.

Almost uniquely for stars at the time, Davis was not afraid to get ugly when the part demanded (she practically invented ugging-up). Charlotte Vale’s first appearance – Rapper teases the reveal by focusing first on her hands at her desk, legs as she descends a staircase before allowing her to fully enter frame – is a sight. With an eye-catching, hairy mono-brow, mousy glasses, a flattened haircut and dumpy clothing, she’s a million miles from our idea of 40s glamour. But Davis doesn’t make her a joke or play up to the appearance. She gives Charlotte a steel, born of self-defence – she snaps swiftly at Dr Jaquith when she thinks she is being condescended to – and a deep well of pain and ill-defined longing for a change she can hardly grasp.

Matters are beautifully inverted when she heads off on her cruise (you can criticise the film’s portrayal of therapy, which seems to be easy if you are stinking rich and can afford a cruise). Rapper repeats his intro trick again – this time revealing a physically confident and striking Charlotte, made-up and dressed to the nines. But, just as the self-loathing Charlotte had a defensive steel, so this ‘confident’ Charlotte has the same vulnerability and fear of ridicule and rejection just beneath the surface. Davis brilliantly gives the outwardly changed Charlotte, a different but equally moving vulnerability, a woman still working out who and what she is.

It’s a brilliant performance that gives the entire confection of the film a real emotional heft, as we experience every inch of this seminal voyage with her. And a lot of that life-change is filtered through the bond between her and fellow-passenger Jerry. Skilfully played by Henreid with a euro-charm that barely masks his own sadness, loneliness and guilt, Jerry may look the part but like Charlotte he’s close to succumbing to imposter syndrome. Unloved by his wife (this unseen harridan arguably deserves a film of her own – perfect role for Joan Crawford?) – but trapped into the marriage by his sense of duty and his love for his timid daughter Tina (Janis Wilson).

Jerry and Charlotte’s relationship blossoms from shyness into a genuine love affair. Reading between the lines of its 1940s code, it’s clear our two heroes get-it-on. Stranded in Brazil after a car crash (caused by an uncomfortably dated caricature portrayal of a Hispanic driver), the two of them ‘snuggle up’ for warmth while camping the night in an abandoned building. Any doubts about how far this went is removed when Henreid lights two cigarettes in his mouth in the next scene, passing one to Charlotte who sucks sensually on it. (This was the era when the language of cigarettes was crucial as a stand-in for bumping and grinding).

Of course, an affair could never be explicitly allowed, just as any idea of Henreid divorcing his awful wife was anathema. But its knowing that it-can-never-be which gives the film its romantic force. Charlotte will eventually find herself drawn to helping Jerry’s daughter Tina, their shared love for the child being the thing that will allow them to be married in spirit if not in actuality.

You could argue Charlotte’s decision to semi-adopt Tina as companion is not dissimilar from her own mother’s would-be exploiting of Charlotte as an unpaid nurse. But Charlotte has learned a lot from the cruel fierceness of her mother. Played with a witheringly cold grandeur by Gladys Cooper – at one point she taps her finger on a bed post in a way which captures oceans of barely repressed fury – this woman is selfish, self-obsessed and cruel. Standing up to her expectation that nothing has changed is the major challenge for Charlotte, with Bette Davis skilfully showing it takes all her strength to overcome.

Now, Voyager is an effective romantic film. It’s helped a great deal by Max Steiner’s beautifully romantic score, that perfectly complements and enhances every on-screen image. Superbly acted by its four leads – Claude Rains is also wonderful as the kindly and deeply professional Jaquith – it’s a detailed character study that manages to rise triumphantly above its soapy roots.

Klute (1971)

Paranoia runs rampant in this fascinating – and chilling – murder thriller that taps into into conspiracy thrillers

Director: Alan J. Pakula

Cast: Jane Fonda (Bree Daniels), Donald Sutherland (John Klute), Charles Cioffi (Peter Cable), Roy Scheider (Frank Ligourin), Dorothy Tristan (Arlyn Page), Rita Gam (Trina), Nathan George (Trask), Vivian Nathan (Psychiatrist), Morris Strassberg (Mr Goldfarb)

There is one question everyone asks when watching Klute: why the heck is it called Klute? Would calling the film Daniels have been too dull? Would Bree have made it sound like a history of cheese? Klute is dominated by its character study of Jane Fonda’s Bree Daniels, split between her desire to be an actress and the comforting sense of control and avoidance of intimacy her work as call-girl brings. Klute uses the conventions of the male detective movie to conduct a sympathetic, compassionate character examination of its female lead. Match that with Pakula discovering his affinity for creeping 70’s paranoia, and you’ve got one of the most interesting and rewarding films of the decade.

John Klute (Donald Sutherland) is a small-town cop called in as a private investigator after a six month New York police investigation fails to find his friend, businessman Tom Gruneman. The only lead they have is a series of obscene letters found in Gruneman’s office written to New York call girl Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda). Klute discovers Bree has no memory of Gruneman, but Klute believes she may be in serious danger. Together they investigate the crime further, which becomes more and more focused on a mysterious abusive client and even more complicated by the growing relationship between the quiet, reserved Klute and the strong-willed, independent Bree.

Klute uses the conventions of a gumshoe detective movie, spliced with a hard-hitting 70s fascination with grimy, sensationalist crimes (this was the same year as hard-bitten, shades-of-grey cops in Dirty Harry took on a serial killer and The French Connection explored the drugs trade), in this case the assault and murder of prostitutes. But this isn’t a whodunnit, or even really a detective story. The film is barely 45 minutes old before Pakula basically reveals who the killer is (the suspect list has only two people on it in any case). Most of the investigation takes place off screen. Some answers are kept vague. There is no cathartic moment of success.

Instead, the film feels far more like it’s using its Laura-ish set-up (the big difference here being the taciturn detective’s love interest is alive rather than just a painting) as a backdrop to deep dive in Bree’s personality. Bree is played with a stunning (and Oscar-winning) verisimilitude by Jane Fonda. Fonda immersed herself totally in the character, even living in the apartment set during shooting (Pakula had a working toilet installed) and developing a careful psychological background to Bree that is brilliantly introduced through our frequent cuts to her sessions with a coolly professional psychiatrist.

This is a portrait of a female sex worker on screen, where she’s neither a tragic or pathetic figure, or a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold (the standard tropes). Instead, this is a woman struggling with a crippling fear of intimacy and a compulsion to control, who finds a freedom and release in acting out the fantasies of others. Bree speaks to her psychiatrist of being a call girl not as a curse or source of shame, but something she takes a sort of freedom from. It’s clear that really makes her sweat is not adjusting herself to whatever men want (faking an orgasm while checking her watch with one John, or acting out an elaborate, detailed fantasy for a lonely tailor) but the idea of having to be herself, to display something emotional and true.

And prostitution has the advantage over acting as she sets the terms. We are introduced to Bree as just one in a row of sitting actresses auditioning for an advert, each of them dismissively given a score from A to C. She later auditions for Shaw’s Saint Joan with a detailed, heartfelt reading (she’s clearly a good actress) which is stopped mid-speech by a bored director. With Fonda making clear that control is vital to Bree’s sense of well-being, no wonder she struggles with this dismissive world. Or that she finds a greater freedom in high-end prostitution, where we see she sets the terms with a business-like professionalism and is the centre of the focus and attention of her John’s for the whole of their session. This is a feeling she doesn’t get from anyone else.

What really scares her is the thought of a genuine emotional intimacy with Klute. In their first encounters she assumes she can seduce him with the professional ease she does most men, dropping naturally into her role of seductive dream-girl, offering him sex in return for recordings he has of her from his investigation. Later she will prove a point by coming to him in the night and seducing him with a pretence of vulnerability and fear, as if to prove to him (and herself) that she can work out exactly what mood she needs to control any man.

But it’s buried in genuine fear about emotional attachment. To her psychiatrist she talks about not understanding why Klute seems, with no ulterior motive, to be concerned for her safety and well-being despite the things he’s knows about her or that she’s done and said to him.

There is a marvellous scene where the two of them go shopping for fruit (Klute of course knows exactly how to choose the best fruit, he’s that sort of guy). First, she impulsively steals an apple like a naughty, impulsive child. When Klute responds with a bemused half-shock, she stands behind him, a grin spreading across her face, then she lightly rests her head (almost not touching) on his back – then follows him down the street, holding the end of his coat. It speaks worlds of how something in her emotional growth has been slightly stunted somewhere along the line. And the fact this intimacy is followed in the next scene by a drug-fuelled blow-out, speaks volumes of her fear of it.

It’s a brilliant performance by Fonda, throbbing with empathy and emotional complexity. She’s perfectly abetted by Donald Sutherland, who proves himself once again one of the most generous actors in the game. Klute is in many ways the typical rube in the big city, the one honest cop. But he also has a wet-eyed vulnerability, a tenderness and an urge to protect that as motherly as it masculine. He reveals very little emotionally, not from fear but from a shyness.

He’s also an observer. And Pakula’s film partly draws links between detective and voyeurism. Let’s not forget Klute also bugs Bree’s phone and follows her. The camera frequently shoots the action from distance, through windows and looking down on the action: the idea of being constantly observed lingers over the picture, giving it a rich vein of paranoia. The killer listens to disembodied audio recordings of Bree, and these frequently play over the action not only echoing this paranoia, but re-enforcing how her personality is a fractured one between the independent exterior and the less certain interior.

Pakula’s film pulls all this together into something creepy and unsettling but is also a fascinating character study. That is perhaps its best trick. You come into it expecting a film noir or a detective story. What you get is a compelling analysis of the psyche of one woman, who emerges into the picture and takes complete control of it. Perhaps that’s why it’s called Klute – it’s as much a part of the misdirection as everything else. With its psychological complexity and creeping sense of being watched, this would set the tone for many other films that followed in the 70s.

Working Girl (1988)

Wall Street gets the Cinderella treatment in this romantic comedy of sexual politics and mega-hair

Director: Mike Nichols

Cast: Melanie Griffith (Tess McGill), Harrison Ford (Jack Trainer), Sigourney Weaver (Katherine Parker), Alec Baldwin (Mick Dugan), Joan Cusack (Cynthia), Philip Bosco (Oren Trask), Nora Dunn (Ginny), Oliver Platt (Jack Lutz), Kevin Spacey (Bob Speck), Robert Easton (Armbrister), Olympia Dukakis (Personnel Director), Amy Aquino (Alice Baxter)

Is there a more 80s film in existence? It’s got the hair, the fashion, the attitudes, the Reagonite go-getting celebration of the guts and glory of Wall Street. Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) looks and sounds like a dumb secretary, but she’s got the brains for business (but also, as she says, a bod for sin) – just never the opportunity to prove it. It looks like that might change under new boss Katherine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), who’s all smiles and talk of the sisterhood – but pinches Tess’ ideas and passes them off as her own. When Katherine is injured on a ski trip, Tess takes the chance to prove she’s got it by passing herself off as Katherine’s colleague and enlisting the help of mergers expert Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford) to put together a mega-bucks media merger. But what will happen when Katherine finds out?

Working Girl is really a great big Wall Street fairy tale, with Tess as the Cinderella invited to the ball only to have to run away leaving the business equivalent of her glass slipper behind. Katherine is a wicked stepmother, and Jack the handsome prince. It’s the sort of film where the heads of corporations are cuddly figures who place fair-play and honesty above making a buck and goodness, wins out in the end. Basically, it’s about as much a slice of business realism as Pretty Woman (this film could almost be a dress rehearsal for that).

Nichols directs the entire thing with confidence and pizzazz and draws some good performances from the actors, while keeping the entire thing light, frothy and entertaining. He had to fight tooth and nail to cast Melanie Griffith – but it was a battle worth winning as the role is perfect for her. Griffith always finds it hard to get good roles – her light, airy voice has condemned her to a string of airheads and bimbos – but here it’s perfect for a woman everyone assumes is dumb the second she opens her mouth. She’s even thinks of herself as not that bright, accepting her lot in life is settling for second best.

That’s personally and professionally. Her boyfriend, played with a wonderful smarm by Alec Baldwin, is a rat (she walks in to her flat to discover him mid-coitus – “This isn’t what it looks like!” he protests with an unabashed grin), who constantly reminds her that she’s punching above her weight dating him. Tess is at the bottom of an ocean of sexism on Wall Street: traders see her as little better than a perk, slapping her bum or stopping to stare at her behind when she walks past them. She barely avoids sexual assault from a coke-addled trader in the back of a limo (a piece of presciently perfect casting for Kevin Spacey). Her first boss (a puffed-up Oliver Platt) routinely humiliates her.

Oh my God! The Hair!

To be fair, the film makes clear that much of this is a woman’s lot in this poisonous world of Wall Street. Even her boss Katherine has to patiently remove groping hands from parts of her body, and wearily tells Tess that it doesn’t do to kick up a fuss when you never know who might become a vital contact in the future. Working Girl makes some pretty gentle points about workplace sexism – you can’t fail but notice Katherine and Tess are the only two women in the office who aren’t secretaries or HR people, and even Tess is pretending not to be – and the casual objectification of women.

Sadly, it blows a few of those points by still getting Griffith and Weaver to perform scenes in lingerie. Griffith even has a brief scene where she hoovers Weaver’s empty apartment topless. Sure, it’s a bit progressive on women’s rights in the workplace: but still, phroah, look at that.

Nichols gets one of his most relaxed and loose performances from Harrison Ford. Even if Ford at times looks a little abashed, working against such forceful performers as Griffith and Weaver (like a shy teenager in a school play), Nichols helps him feel light and funny without relying on the cool machismo that served him well as Indy or Han. Jack Trainer (such a Harrison Ford character name!), becomes giddy and playful under Tess’ influence and there is a sweet innocence about his courtship of her. It’s one of Ford’s funniest, most naturally instinctive performances.

Equally essential to the film’s success is Weaver, who plays up to perfection her glacial distance as a woman who is all smiles and “us, us, us” in person, but selfish looks and “me, me, me” in private. Weaver is very funny as a ruthless, amoral businesswoman masquerading as a campaigner for her sex and completely recognises that the role is essentially a wicked stepmother, pitching it just right between arch comedy and realism. She was Oscar-nominated, as was Griffith, and Joan Cusack who is triumphantly ditzy and warm as Tess’ best friend.

Working Girl pulls together all the tropes we expect. Tess is made up to look like the professional businesswoman she is aspiring to become, there is a neat bit of low-key farce as she passes off Katherine’s office for her own to Jack, a sweet bit of business chicanery as she Jack sneak into a wedding (the sort of thing that in real life would get you a restraining order) and it all leads into a “love and truth conquers all” resolution with a satisfying coda scene as Tess starts a new life. There is a lovely song by Carly Simon (over-used on the soundtrack – and fans should check out Michael Ball’s cover of it) and plenty of chuckles. It’s a fairy tale of New York.

The Turning Point (1977)

Two women struggle to have it all in a film that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the 1940s

Director: Herbert Ross

Cast: Shirley MacLaine (DeeDee Rodgers), Anne Bancroft (Emma Jacklin), Tom Skerritt (Wayne Rodgers), Leslie Browne (Emilia Rodgers), Mikhail Baryshnikov (Yuri Kopeikine), Martha Scott (Adelaide), James Mitchell (Michael Cooke), Alexandra Danilova (Madame Dakharova), Anthony Zerbe (Joe “Rosie” Rosenberg), Lisa Lucas (Janina Rodgers), Antoinette Sibley (Sevilla Haslem)

The demands of ballet are unlike any other artform there is. Complete physical and emotional commitment is needed to master it – so that means you got to make choices. The Turning Point is all about those choices. You might even call them ‘turning points’. DeeDee (Shirley MacLaine) and Emma (Anne Bancroft) were two young ballerinas who took radically different paths: DeeDee had a child with fellow dancer Wayne (Tom Skerritt) and left the profession behind; Emma remained with the company to become its prima ballerina. Now DeeDee’s teenage daughter Emilia (Leslie Browne) has joined the company: will she become the new prima ballerina? Or will she decide to focus on a relationship with playboy dancer Yuri (Mikhail Baryshnikov)? Will Emma and DeeDee resolve the tensions between them – and the conflict from their shared parental interest in Emilia?

The Turning Point was a big hit in 1977. That, and the fact that it was about (and featured a lot of) an artform as graceful as ballet seems to have convinced the Academy it merited a haul of eleven Oscar nominations. Come awards night, the film set a record for most unsuccessful nominations, converting none of them into Oscars. Perhaps that’s because, on closer inspection, The Turning Point is a fairly run-of-the-mill soap opera, that mixes in various clichés from backstage, traditional ‘women’s pictures’ and family drama to come up with a plotline that’s eventually very familiar.

For all its positioning as a female-led drama, it essentially boils down to the same old patterns that for decades such films have circled. Turns out women can’t have it all: you can have that successful career, but forever sacrifice the joy of being a mother or you can settle down and have the family but face a life of career unfulfillment. Twas ever thus, ‘tis one or t’other. Essentially the film boils down into a soapy drama about resentments and illicit backstage affairs and little more than that. It doesn’t even really double down on the fun this sort of set-up could provide, instead framing the whole thing as a very serious drama.

But then, the film was an autobiographical affair for those involved. Emma is based on Nora Kaye, who was married to the director Herbert Ross. DeeDee is based on Kaye’s childhood friend Isabel Mirrow Brown, who made the exact same choice as DeeDee, marrying a fellow dancer (just like Tom Skerritt’s character). Her daughter (and Kaye’s goddaughter) was Leslie Browne, who here plays a fictionalised version of herself based on her own experience of starting her ballet career. Characters based on Jerome Robbins, Lucia Chase and other leading figures from ballet and theatre appear. Only Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Yuri is purely fictional (although the character has more than few similarities with Baryshnikov himself, being a Soviet defector).

It does give an additional layer of interest to the film. Ross also mixes in a host of extended ballet sequences which showcase actual professional ballet dancers, with snippets from Swan Lake, Cinderella and The Nutcracker among others. The dancing is breath-takingly good. Not least from Baryshnikov and Browne, who are given multiple opportunities to showcase their skills. Baryshnikov in particular is at the height of his powers, a graceful artiste who moves with an astonishing finesse. Both landed Oscar nominations, one suspects largely on the basis of their dancing.

The acting is left to MacLaine and Bancroft as the leading ladies. There is something a little perverse that MacLaine, the former dancer, doesn’t so much as trot a step, while Bancroft (totally unexperienced) struts parts of Anna Karenina. However, the two actresses rip into these thinly written parts, giving them a lot more force than the film deserves. MacLaine balances motherly pride with bubbling feelings of something uncomfortably close to envy for her daughter’s success, spending time in New York trying to recapture some of her past (including a brief fling with Anthony Zerbe’s lecherous choreographer). Bancroft balances coming to terms with the end of her career as a ballerina with a growing regret that she has been left without a family. She becomes increasingly close to Emilia, mentoring her, dressing her and coaching her through a performance after relationship problems lead to Emilia getting roundly pissed in a bar before the show.

Needless to say, this unspoken squabble for ownership over Emilia – not helped by Emilia’s fury over her mother’s infidelity – only exacerbates tensions between the two women. It builds towards the film’s true climax (but unfortunately not its actual climax, as fifteen minutes remain for Emilia to be coached for her star-making performance) as the two women down drinks and exchange angry words and slaps, leading to a full blown cat fight outside the theatre. The fight later descends into cathartic giggling – and pity the two actresses who filmed it in ballroom dresses in what looks like a gale – but is acted with a great deal of attack by both, who bounce off each other (literally) hugely effectively.

But the scene is also a further confirmation that what we are really watching is a sort of high-brow family soap, that uses ballet as a backdrop for family feuds, scuffles, sexual escapades and tear-filled reunions. And it boils down to that struggle between career and family, the sort of struggle Bette Davis and Joan Crawford films were dealing with in the 1940s. Which is possibly another reason so many took to The Turning Point: even in 1977 it was an old-fashioned piece of entertainment, that did very little new.

That carries across to its whole execution: Ross competently directs the film (this was his annus mirabilis as he directed two Best Picture nominees, this and The Goodbye Girl) but really it gets all the force it has (and more than it perhaps deserves) from the two leads and a fine supporting cast (Tom Skerritt is very good as DeeDee’s laid-back, understanding father who perhaps masks secrets of his own). It’s a soap opera, solid but not spectacular, that really outside its showcase of ballet, doesn’t stand out from several other films of the same genre.

The Nun's Story (1959)

A nun struggles to balance faith and duty in this handsomely made, beautifully paced drama

Director: Fred Zinnemann

Cast: Audrey Hepburn (Sister Luke/Gabrielle van der Mal), Peter Finch (Dr Fortunati), Edith Evans (Reverend Mother Emmanuel), Peggy Ashcroft (Mother Mathilde), Dean Jagger (Dr van der Mal), Mildred Dunnock (Sister Margharita), Beatrice Straight (Mother Christophe), Patricia Collinge (Sister William), Rosalie Crutchley (Sister Eleanor), Ruth White (Mother Marcella), Barbara O’Neil (Mother Didyma), Colleen Dewhurst (“Archangel Gabriel”)

Gabrille van der Mal (Audrey Hepburn) has two passions in her life: her faith and a desire to heal the sick. Dreaming of combining these and working with native patients suffering from tropical diseases in the Belgian Congo, at 19 she joins an order of nuns who specialise in nursing. But the life of nun is far from an easy one, and Sister Luke (as she becomes) constantly struggles to square the circle of her faith, passion for medicine, ambitions and her natural antipathy towards authority. It’s a square she struggles with for almost twenty years, culminating in a crisis of faith during the German occupation of Belgium during World War II.

Zinnemann’s gracefully directed film, not surprisingly won the warm support of the Production Code Office, with its faithful depiction of the life and work of Nuns ticking all the boxes of a devout picture. However, The Nun’s Story is a more complex and intriguing film than this. While it finds much to praise in the self-sacrifice and devotion of the nun’s life, it isn’t afraid to look at how this institution (like many others) values obedience over innovation and praises submission over individualism. It stresses, in a way very few other films have done, how strikingly difficult it must be to lead your life in a religious devotion, and how much such orders (by their nature) demand we must put aside our natural inclinations.

Sister Luke is warned from the start by her doctor father (a genial Dean Jagger) that, with her stubbornness and independence, she is likely to find strictures on obedience hard to follow. He’s right. Superbly played by Audrey Hepburn (in her personal favourite performance), Sister Luke constantly finds it a near impossible struggle to submit herself to the authority of the order. Hepburn makes clear Sister Luke’s sincere faith, and her desire to belong, but also her unwillingness to accept that this might involve any compromise on her work as a nurse.

From the first she demonstrates she is unwilling to stop tending to a patient when the bell rings for her to attend prayer. She constantly reproofs herself for her inability to subjugate her personality to the requirements of her religious order. Training in tropical diseases at her medical college, she refuses a request from Mother Marcella to deliberately flunk an exam to prove her humility. As a ‘reward’, the best qualified nun in tropical diseases is dispatched to a sanatorium in Belgium to further learn obedience. Even when she is eventually allowed to work in the Congo it’s only in the “White’s Only” hospital (as they need the staff) and she is reproved for showing off when she makes much needed improvements to the hospitals working practices.

In many ways the film is a fascinating look at how hard it was for a woman to make a mark in the early 20^th century. Clearly Sister Luke should have trained as a doctor – she graduates fourth in her class in tropical medicines – but that door was closed to her, and her only chance of working in Africa was as a member of a religious order. She ends up working in a system where she must constantly make difficult calls between her two passions (faith and medicine) – with her order placing devotion and obedience as the primary goal.

Not that the film is disparaging of religion. The devotion and goodness of the nuns is above question. Their ability to turn the other cheek and forgive is shown as an unparalleled virtue – even a shocking crime in the Congo is patiently forgiven. Many senior nuns are more than capable of balancing Sister Luke’s devotion to medicine with the orders demands. Mother Christophe (wonderfully and warmly played by Beatrice Straight) at the sanatorium, disagrees with the exam choice forced on Sister Luke and supports her to find a balance between her work and her order’s demand for obedience. Mother Mathilde (a matronly Peggy Ashcroft) in the Congo encourages her improvements – with the proviso she is told first. Others – such as Reverend Mother Emmanuel (a gently reserved Edith Evans) – consider it more important that Sister Luke dilutes her individualism in the order.

It makes for a fascinating film, that praises the devotion and self-sacrifice of religious orders, while not shying away from how rigid they often (by their very nature) are. Sister Luke in many ways is an ill-fit for being a nun. She can’t, or won’t, put her own beliefs about what is right second and she has an obstinance and pride (which she admits herself) that should really have ruled her out from the order in the first place. While the film doesn’t quite do enough to give as much space to her faith as it does her passion for medicine, it also makes it clear many characters – most astutely Peter Finch’s coolly professional Congo-based atheist doctor – recognise that she isn’t able to make the ultimate sacrifice that being a nun requires: the full submission of her own will.

Zinnemann directs this with a graceful, careful pace that finds many moments of quiet emotion amongst the imposing world of the order. The film is bookended by beautifully done sequences of departure and arrival, with possessions carefully left-behind and doors opening onto new and radically different worlds (the ending in particular plays out in a powerful silence). The film is beautifully shot by Franz Planer, with a wonderfully restrained score by Franz Waxman. It’s perfect material for this director, who was always strongest when showing the individual struggling within a system that demands they turn against their own nature.

The Nun’s Story is perhaps a little overlong and at times takes it stately pace a little too slowly. But it has a wonderful performance by Audrey Hepburn (who is in nearly every single frame), gorgeous location shooting and is directed with restraint and intelligence by Zinnemann. It also manages the difficult duty of finding things to both praise and criticise in the life of a religious order and both respects and questions the lifestyle and its rules. A middle brow film no doubt, but a fine example of highly skilled and professional Hollywood film-making.