Category: Film about greed

La Dolce Vita (1960)

Ennui, emptiness and envy in Fellini’s coolly satirical portrait of a hedonistic Rome

Director: Federico Fellini

Cast: Marcello Mastroianni (Marcello Rubini), Anita Ekberg (Sylvia Rank), Anouk Aimée (Maddalena), Yvonne Furneaux (Emma), Walter Santesso (Paparazzo), Lex Barker (Robert), Magali Noël (as Fanny), Alain Cuny (Steiner), Nadia Gray (Nadia), Jacques Sernas (Divo), Laura Betti (Laura), Valeria Ciangottini (Paola)

It’s one of those films as much about everything as it is nothing. Fellini’s omnibus of interconnected shaggy-dog short stories follows Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), a would-be novelist writing a gossip column, as he mixes with the great and the good in Rome. Casual affairs, Hollywood stars, nightclubs, drunken parties and would-be orgies – Rome is a whirligig of the shallow and meaningless, all wrapped up in a classic façade. La Dolce Vita was gloriously popular and hugely influential – it seemed to be casting a cynical eye over the 60s, even as they were kicking off – and remains possibly Fellini’s best-known and most popular film.

At its heart is Marcello. Gloriously played with a shallow suaveness smothering deep self-loathing by Mastroianni, Marcello has enough insight to understand the world he occupies is an empty and meaningless one – but not enough drive, discipline or determination to do anything about it. For all his dreams of becoming a novelist and artist, he’s all too easily seduced by the glamour and the hedonistic pleasures of Roman high society. When presented with choices, he invariably takes the easier one. He has enough soul to wish he had more of one.

Fellini lays out his journey through Roman night-life with a painterly skill – the frame is often full of fresco like images, taking in multiple characters at once, all preoccupied and busy with their own needs and wants. Fellini uses a superb mix of shifting POV shots to constantly place us in and then immediately out of Marcello’s shoes. Characters stare direct at the camera – are they looking at us or Marcello? Marcello arrives at Steiner’s house in a POV shot – but then Marcello walks into the shot and suddenly we are witnesses again. It’s a film where we are always reminded we are on the outside, like participants in a dream.

La Dolce Vita is long, but also spry. This is a city of people universally keeping ennui at bay, by a never-ending parade of parties and sex. While we might see and hear life-changing statements – declarations of love, resolutions to build a better life, the severing of personal relationships – these lead to nothing. Fundamental relationships and patterns of living remain unchanged across the (unspecified) period of time the film covers. Words come and go as easily as parties.

La Dolce Vita is constructed from seven short stories, each exploring a different aspect of Marcello’s empty, hedonistic existence. They cover: a sexual encounter with society heiress Maddalena (Anouk Aimée) in the water-logged flat of a prostitute; a night Marcelo spends trailing Hollywood star Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) across Rome; Marcello and other reporters reporting on a ‘miracle’ just outside Rome; a visit from Marcello’s estranged father; a party at an aristocrat’ faded palazzo with a failed encounter with Maddelena; finally a beach-house party where a jaded Marcello fails to initiate an orgy and collapses into something akin to a mini-breakdown, which he shrugs off. Intercut with this is Marcello’s friendship with Steiner (Alain Cury), the intellectual family-man Marcello aspires to be, who transpires to be as depressed and trapped as Marcello – with disastrous consequences.

These encounters are open to multiple interpretations: and part of the film’s strength is Fellini’s lightness in telling the story. Interpretation and significance isn’t forced upon the film: it’s long because it is stressing the repetition of its cycles. Each ‘short story’ is told with a pace and skill, frequently shifting in tone. Fellini will make you hoot with laughter or swoon with sensuality in one scene – and then shift uncomfortably in your chair the next.

Part of La Dolca Vita’s aim is to move Rome on from the tourist-centred attractiveness it had been given by a host of films from Roman Holiday on. It’s essentially marrying films like that with Rome Open City and Bicycle Thieves. It’s Fellini’s attempt to compare (and perhaps question) Rome’s classical cultural background with the hedonistic casualness of today’s world. It opens with a statue of Jesus being helicoptered across the outskirts of Rome towards St Peter’s. The statue is a glorious reminder of the power of Rome’s religious significance: but what follows it? A second helicopter, flown by Marcello and Paparazzo (his photographer), smirking and trying to pick up the numbers of the sun-bathing women waving up at them. New and old Rome intermixed, and not favourably.

The film is full of moments like this. The party at the aristocrat’s palazzo takes place in gorgeous grounds and rooms lined with busts of Roman emperors. At first it feels like a comparison between class and classlessness. But then you remember that ancient Rome was a hub of orgies and violence, and everything at this party would probably look pretty tame to the emperors watching.

The false miracle suggests affectations of Christianity are stage-managed and willingly performed at the dictates of the media. A priest may denounce the whole thing, but it doesn’t stop an army of people desperate to grab a piece of the action – from the media to ostentatious worshippers – descending on a small field, all of them willingly playing their expected parts. It only takes a downpour of rain to turn this devotional crowd into a panicked mass of people, blindly charging from shelter to shelter – with tragic results for one pilgrim. TV journalists stage-manage the crowd, give lines to members it and turn the whole place into a film-set.

As the film progresses, elements of classical Roman architecture slowly drift out, replaced by the harsher modernist buildings and blocks of flat (we’re subtly reminded, particularly with the arrival of Marcello’s father, mysteriously ‘absent’ for much of Marcello’s childhood, that a lot of these buildings were fascist in origin). Ironically the most famous sequence buries itself in classical architecture: Marcello’s night vainly following Sylvia (an alluringly playful Anita Ekberg, channelling Marilyn Monroe) in the hope of a sexual encounter (she remains wilfully oblivious of this). It culminates in Ekberg’s famous Trevi fountain dance – inspiring millions of would-be imitators.

Marcello’s life takes place in nightclubs and drunken parties, where social and sexual morals are modern and casual. Marcello’s most significant relationships are with Maddalena (Aimée is wonderfully archly cold), who toys with a profession of love only to instantly sleep with another man, and fiancée Emma (a clingy and desperate Yvonne Furnaux), who Marcello dutifully maintains a relationship with. Marcello wishes to see himself as a glamourous playboy, but he’s frequently on the backhand – picked up when wanted by Maddalena, played with by Anita and oppressed by Emma. We see him as often ignored and rejected as we do conquering.

Who Marcello really wants to be is the intellectual Steiner, who seems to have it all: fame, respect, and a loving family. It’s after meeting Steiner that we see Marcello doing the only novel writing in the film. Sitting in a beach café, he chats with a young waitress, Paola, who he compares to an angel in Umbrian paintings. Paola is also the last face we see in the film: waving to Marcello from a distance after his depressingly bitter failed orgy, as the guests gather around a leviathan washed up on a beach. She seems to be trying to ask him how the writing is going: he fails to understand and walks away. Paola feels like a moment of hope – a representative of a more fulfilled life of creativity and meaning – rejected by Marcello in favour of wallowing in pleasure. Fellini ends the film with Paola staring directly at the camera: is she making the offer of meaning to us instead?

It’s open to interpretation – as is the whole film. A big part of Fellini’s skill is not to hammer his points home, but let events speak for themselves, leaving the film open to interpretation. I see it as a sort of Dantesque parallel. Nearly every story is framed with characters moving up and down stairs – like the circular descent of Dante through Hell. Its structure seems to be broken into Cantos. And each step sees Marcello descend a little bit further – culminating in Mastroianni impotently ripping up pillows and spraying feathers over a laughing woman.

Is modern Rome hell? That might be a little bit too far. But it’s definitely a soulless purgatory. Paparazzo doesn’t care who he hurts to get the photo – a dead child or a grieving mother are all game. Marcello’s uses what talents he has for empty and cynical purposes and to seduce women. Everyone thinks only about their next hedonistic encounter. It’s a wonder that Fellini makes this as strangely enjoyable as it is: but then he is a master. And La Dolce Vita remains his most popular and most recognised work.

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 Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand are the Macbeths in this brilliant, noirish, superb Shakespeare film

Cast: Joel Coen

Director: Denzel Washington (Lord Macbeth), Frances McDormand (Lady Macbeth), Corey Hawkins (Macduff), Brendan Gleeson (King Duncan), Harry Melling (Malcolm), Bertie Carvel (Banquo), Alex Hassell (Ross), Kathryn Hunter (The Witches), Moses Ingram (Lady Macduff), Ralph Ineson (Captain), Stephen Root (Porter), Miles Anderson (Lennox), Jefferson Mays (Doctor)

Shakespeare on screen is difficult to pull off. Focus too much on the language and you end up with something more theatrical than cinematic. Zero in on the visuals and you lose what makes Shakespeare great in the first place. That’s not even to mention that films – with their huge audiences – tend to focus on simple, more traditional interpretations of a play that add little to interpreting it afresh. These are all problems avoided by Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth which is bloody, bold and resolute and jumps straight into the upper tier of great Shakespeare films. Inventive, dynamic, gripping and excellently acted it succeeds in being both a creative production of the play and something truly cinematic.

Shot in a crisply clean black-and-white, the 4:3 frame frequently filled with rolling mist and stark white light (it’s superbly shot by Bruno Delbonnel), this is a Macbeth set in a Jan Kott inspired Samuel-Beckett-tinged wasteland, with Scotland a bleak, blasted country, its characters leading lives full of sound and fury that signify nothing. The Macbeth’s castle is an Esher like construction of perfectly formed empty rooms, towering walls and arches casting grim shadows and open ceilinged rooms allowing onlookers to observe everything. There are brilliant images: not least the handle to Duncan’s door which is strikingly lit to resemble a knife. Characters frequently emerge from the mist or the darkness to walk towards us and confess their darkest thoughts.

No Shakespeare film has better used set and location since Orson Welles’ Othello – a film this is sharply reminiscent of, with its brilliant use of angles and shade that constantly disconcerts the viewer (even leaving us confused at points on whether we are looking down or up). Coen also seems to have been inspired by Peter Brook’s grimly nihilistic King Lear film, with this Scotland being trapped firmly in a circle of destruction powered by the witches. All three are played by Kathryn Hunter, whose contortionist twisting and ability to switch her vocals on a sixpence from sing-song to a Gollumesque growl make them truly feel of the earth and yet not. Hunter is inspired casting – sometimes representing all three witches in a single schizophrenic body, at others playing all three at once. A brilliant image at one point shows her double reflection in a watery pool, turning her body immediately into a trinity.

Hunter’s movement is birdlike and agile – fitting since it’s suggested the witches can transform themselves into carrion crows, flying over Scotland picking bones clean of fresh. The first image is the three birds circling the Captain as he walks slowly across a beach to report to Duncan. Later Hunter perches on a crossbeam in another opened-ceiling room, subtly poking Macbeth on to greater monstrosities. There is a cycle of destruction here – and the film’s ending implies all this chaos is bound to start again.

Crucial to this is Ross. Following Polanski’s Macbeth – and again heavily inspired by Jan Kott – Alex Hassell’s unctuous Ross, ingratiates himself with all while happily engaging in acts of brutality. He personally executes Cawdor (by beheading), joins Banquo’s murderers, shows the way to the sacking of Macduff house and hands Malcolm both the crown and Macbeth’s severed head. But Coen takes it further again: rather than a cruel opportunist, this Ross seems to be an agent of the witches – or maybe even a witch himself. Hassell’s costume, with its curiously feminine robe and wing-like arms, echoes the witches and Ross moves smoothly from side-to-side even in the final acts, planting seeds of further destruction (including further implied murders) and collaborating directly with the witches to restart the cycle at the end.

All this makes Macbeth and Lady Macbeth at times feel like rather tragic puppets at the heart of a terrible cycle of events they cannot control. It certainly fits with Denzel Washington’s balanced and intelligent performance in the lead. While Washington doesn’t mine as much weight and meaning from the text as the great stage Macbeths, he gives his line readings an unstudied naturalism and a dynamic and thoughtful rhythm (even if he is prone a little too much to the “soft-slow/fast” approach). His Macbeth is a weak, indecisive man, happy only when he is in action. Clearly ambitious from the start, he binds himself in knots thinking but, once a decision has been made, has no hesitation. Violence is an instinctive tool – he kills several people with no hesitation and a lightening aggression – but he’s lost without direction. He clings to the crown as if it will somehow give the things he has done meaning.

Washington’s performance shifts gears once Macbeth has decided to fully commit himself to those scorpions that fill his mind, becoming an unbalanced mixture of fatalistic and recklessly impulsive. No wonder he has less need for his wife. Frances McDormand is perhaps even better as a Lady Macbeth who sees the crown as her last chance for legacy in a world that has left her behind. McDormand really understands the way to mine nuance from the language. Frequently inpatient with her husband, she is decisive where he is not, but squeamish around violence in a way he isn’t. Both Washington and McDormand manage to suggest a great deal of unfulfilled sadness in the Macbeths, two people in the twilight of their years who pounce on a chance for a last hurrah but find themselves psychologically unsuited for the consequences.

The two leads are at the head of a uniformly strong cast. Hunter and Hassell are both superb. Bertie Carvel is a brooding but honest Banquo. Corey Hawkins a forceful but thoughtful Macduff, played with guilt and wise from the start on Macbeth’s villainy. Moses Ingram brings a lot of warmth to a striking scene as Lady MacDuff. Ralph Ineson’s delivery of the Captain’s speech is spot on. Harry Melling is an immature, stubborn Malcolm.

But the real star here might just be Coen’s direction. The brooding, overbearing beauty of the film is all part of its atmosphere of creeping intimidation and danger. There are some truly striking, haunting images: the flame lit murder of Banquo, a deranged Macbeth fighting a spectral hallucination of Banquo, water pouring down into the flagstones after Macbeth’s final visions of the future, the smoke and mist filled murder of Macduff’s children (a shot of Wellesian brilliance), Lady Macbeth standing before a sheer drop, the imaginative arrival of Birnam wood, Macduff and Macbeth’s final duel in a narrow battlements. This is a punchy, brilliant, beautiful, intelligent and unique reimagining of the play that mixes Shakespeare, visual and has something clear and unique to say about staging the play. Comfortably one of the greatest Shakespeare films ever made.

The White Tiger (2020)

Adarsh Gourav is a willing servant (or is he?) in The White Tiger

Director: Ramin Bahrani

Cast: Adarsh Gourav (Balram Halwai), Priyanka Chopra Jones (Pinky), Rajkummar Rao (Ashok), Mahesh Manjreker (The Stork), Vijay Maurya (Mukesh “The Mongoose”), Kamlesh Gill (Granny), Swaroop Sampat (The Great Socialist)

“India is two countries in one: an India of light, and an India of Darkness”. It’s an idea that’s at the heart of Aravind Adiga’s Booker-prize winning novel, adapted here as a dynamic (if slightly overlong) film by Ramin Bahrani. Those two India’s are rooted in the country’s deeply ingrained class differences, the new caste system being simple: the haves and the have nots.

Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav) is very much one of the have nots. A poor young man, who missed out on his chance of a scholarship because his family needed the income he could bring them from breaking up coal. Balram sees his way out through becoming a driver for the son of the local landlord, Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) and his American-Indian wife Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jones). With the story being recounted by an older Balram, now a successful businessman, we know he finds a way to improve his life. But at what cost? And how many lives have been sacrificed to get him there?

Bahrani’s adaptation is a sharp, cinematic, electric piece of film-making, that makes superb use of montage and dynamic camerawork, particularly in its scene setting opening acts. Bahrani also engages brilliantly with the central themes of the novel, the all-pervading corruption of modern India (financial and spiritual) and the gulf in class and mindset that exists between the rich and poor. The wealthy upper classes see themselves as nothing less than masters of the rest of the population, who they hire and fire at will and frequently mistreat. Meanwhile, Balram argues, many of the poor cannot escape the mindset of servitude (the “chicken coop” as he puts it), unable to imagine any life other than living on the bottom rung.

It’s an idea Bahrani’s film brilliantly reinforces visually. The westernised wealth of the upper classes – living in gated communities and luxurious hotels, driving western cars with no contact with anyone outside other than servants – is contrasted with the slums and poverty of the rest of the population. Their parts of the city are run-down and crumbling. Many live on the streets. Balram himself lives on a mattress in the basement of his master’s hotel – while Ashok resides in a penthouse. You can’t escape the radical inequality – nor the violence (from slapping of servants to the implied threat of murder of your family if you step out of line) that keeps the system in place.

Part of the fascination of this film is wondering half the time, how much Balram is a willing participant in this system and how much he is longing to cast off its shackles. Sure we know, from the framing device of his later life, where he is heading. But is it his aim from the start? How genuine is his humbleness? As he schemes to have a rival driver dismissed, he talks in voiceover of his sadness – but on screen he merely shrugs and downs some sweetmeats. Does his resentment develop over the film, or is it there from the start – or does he only understand it as he realises he lives in a “chicken coop”?

As in the book its rife for interpretation – and Bahrani doesn’t lay on too think the unreliable narration element of Balram. It’s also helped immensely by Adarsh Gourav’s superb, BAFTA nominated performance in the lead role. He seems genuinely naïve and innocent – the very country pumpkin the other drivers at the hotel mock – but there is always an unknowable quality to him under the affable surface Gourav presents, a ruthlessness and also an anger. Watching both these qualities develop across the film – and questioning how well we know him – is a brilliant tight-rope walk, with Gourav maintaining our sympathies even as his actions become ever more ruthless.

He becomes an embodiment of the divide in India itself, between the mindset of being nothing more than a servant and the developing entrepreneurism in the country (represented both by the side jobs the rest of the drivers carry out as well as Balram’s later business success). It’s also fascinating to see the contrasts in his employers. Rajkummar Rao creates a character who is decent enough to know he’s treating people selfishly, while being lazy and immature enough to not bother to change. His wife, very well played by producer Priyanka Chopra Jones, speaks the language of a free America but is perfectly happy to force others to take the rap for her mistakes.

The film’s energy tails off in its second half as the plot catches up with the traffic accident that opens the film. The second half of the film tends to circle around the same issues of rich vs poor and the abuse of power that the first film explores with greater energy and wit. To be honest, you can tell an act of violence or betrayal is on the way – and the film takes too long to get there. A tighter film at an hour and 45 minutes would have been more effective and maintained the drive of the first half (even if it would have meant sacrificing some good individual scenes here and there).

But when the film is on song it works very well. The ideas it tackles around modern India feel very real and vital – and still carry plenty of relevance today. Bahrani balances the dark humour very well with the moral outrage and has a brilliant lead performance from Adarsh Gourav. It would have been better tighter which would have helped keep its pace and energy up, but this is still inventive and urgent film-making, a fine adaptation of an excellent novel.

Chinatown (1974)

Jack Nicholson struggles against the system – and loses – in Chinatown

Director: Roman Polanski

Cast: Jack Nicholson (JJ Gittes), Faye Dunaway (Evelyn Cross Mulwray), John Huston (Noah Cross), Perry Lopez (Lt Lou Escobar), John Hillerman (Russ Yelburton), Darrell Zwerling (Hollis Mulwray), Diane Ladd (Ida Sessions), Roy Jenson (Claude Mulvihill), Roman Polanski (Man with Knife), Joe Mantell (Lawrence Walsh), Burt Young (Curly), James Hong (Kahn)

“Of course I’m respectable. I’m old. Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” So says Noah Cross in the superlative Chinatown, the sort of the film you’ll want to start watching again the second it ends. Cross is of course a respectable businessman and an absolute monster. And his mantra applies just as much to Los Angeles as envisioned by Polanski and writer Robert Towne. It’s a corrupt, dirty place where terrible, appalling things are regularly allowed to happen but everyone pretends the place is fabulous. It’s such a sublime film, while also so bleakly, despairingly dark that you are surprised you fall in love with its excellence.

In 1937 private detective JJ “Jake” Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is hired – or so he thinks – by the wife of Water Board director Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling) to investigate his infidelity. When he does seem to uncover it, he founds not only was his client not Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), but that shortly after his pictures appeared in the press (without his knowledge), Hollis himself winds up dead, having drowned in a dry river bed. What does this all mean? And how does Evelyn’s father (and Hollis’ business partner) Noah Cross (John Huston) play into this all? Gittes investigates further, to uncover shady schemes to manipulate the cities water supply for profit, under-handed business deals and unspeakable family crimes that leave lives shattered.

Polanski’s film has such a timeless wonder about it, perhaps because it was filmed with such careful and beautifully designed classicism that it has never dated. Seen at the time as a film told in the style of the classic film noirs (although it is of course full of blazing LA sunshine), but crammed with a darkness and corruption classic Hollywood shied away from it now seems to take its place as the most masterful of Hollywood mysteries. It’s recreation of 1930s detail is perfect, while its film making is restrained, controlled, unflashy but creates an atmosphere of simmering mystery and tension behind every frame. It’s a masterfully restrained piece of film-making that deals with matters of shocking horror.

And tension there should be as this explores the darkest underbelly of America. With Jerry Goldsmith’s sublime music score under every beat – riffing on classic Hollywood tunes, but with a haunting faded grandeur that suggests a whole melancholic world going to the wall – the film looks like classic, beautiful America but uses that to counter-frame terrible, heartless acts. LA is corrupt from top to bottom. Businessmen are asset stripping the city and its surroundings to line their own pockets. Wealth brings total immunity from all sorts of crimes, regardless of how foul they are. Even family ties are polluted by terrible lusts and greed. And for Gittes, Chinatown is representative of this – a one word reference to his career as a cop, where his ability to do any good at all was forever compromised by corruption.

Jack Nicholson’s performance as Gittes is central to the film’s success. He’s in every scene and the story is told entirely from his point-of-view – so much so that when he is knocked out, Polanski slowly fades out sound and picture. Nicholson is best known for his flamboyance, but here he brilliantly underplays too present a complex picture of an idealist disguised as a cynic. Gittes tries his best to coolly accept the world is what it is, and even that he is just trying to get what he can out of it. But he’s in fact a decent and honourable man with a deep-rooted sense of morality, who struggles in the world because it’s ill-suited for a guy who just wants to do the right thing. He has a sort of outdated charm and nobility about him, an almost courtly gentleness at times, and only lashes out in anger when he feels is either being lied to or his sense of honour impugned. He has a natural sympathy for the little guy and for all he may try to spin the sort of cynical Marlowesque dialogue, you don’t feel his heart is really in it. He is a dreamer who wants to believe.

And he’s totally ill-suited to this world he ends up with. Gittes uncovers every inch of the mystery – but nothing he does has any positive impact. He completely fails to protect anyone, his attempts to ensure happy endings end in disaster, he’s regularly beaten to a pulp (most famously having his nose slit by a cameoing Polanski as a weasily little hoodlum) and he’s at sea when dealing with most of the characters of the film. Even his carefully built emotional armour breaks down, leaving him vulnerable to making even more mistakes. There are perhaps few characters so ineffective – and again it’s a credit to Jack Nicholson’s charisma that he makes this character feel like such a proactive figure.

Gittes senses at all times that there is some dark secret underpinning all these events he encounters. But he’s too innocent to begin to suspect the horrors that Evelyn has put up with at the hands of her abusive father. Faye Dunaway brings a marvellous fragility and vulnerability to a character who transcends the traditional femme fatale. (Dunaway famously hated both Polanski and working on the movie). At first seeming imperious and even suspicious, the film slowly breaks her character down into a wounded and vulnerable woman putting on a front, determined to try and protect herself but doomed to forever be the victim.

And Noah Cross is the dark heart of this. Played with a sensational sense of gentility masking supreme corruption and greed by John Huston, Cross is genteel and polite while being ruthless and grasping. He also reveals himself capable of huge, destructive acts, indifferent to the pain this causes and utterly implacable in his vileness. Huston’s performance – he’s only in three scenes – embodies the terrible dark heart of America, where money and power it seems can let you get away with anything you want, no matter who knows. (And I love the way he persistently mispronounces Gittes name, turning it into a growling Anglo-saxon “Gits”.)

Robert Towne’s superb screenplay is perfectly paced and pieces together an intricate and fascinating plot where every small detail mounts together into a devastating whole. It’s a film that demands careful watching, and that revels in small details and character beats that gain greater impact the more you see the film. Brilliantly, the macguffin here is water – the control of a substance that should be a right for every man, becoming a superb metaphor for the theft from ordinary Americans of justice and their country.

The film culminates – as you feel it must when watching it – in a nihilistic ending where evil triumphs and good loses out. “Forget it Jake – it’s Chinatown”, goes the famous closing line. It works so superbly, because in Towne’s and Polanski’s vision of America here, there is no chance of the right thing winning out if the powers that be would have otherwise. With Jake’s Chinatown career in the police force becoming emblematic of everything that’s wrong in American justice, sure it makes sense that his return there as a private eye would see the same outcome. Towne pushed for a more upbeat ending, but Polanski knew – correctly – that only the shock of murder could end this tale, especially a murder that would have no repercussions.

Polanski’s direction is faultless, cool, calm, wonderfully observant with a superb sense of the 1930s – the film looks beautiful – and using the sunlight and brightness of LA to stress that just because we can see clearly, doesn’t mean we understand what we are looking at. With one of the greatest scripts ever – and a superb performance by Jack Nicholson in one of his finest roles – this is one of the best mysteries in Hollywood history, a timeless classic.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

Three men go in search of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Director: John Huston

Cast: Humphrey Bogart (Fred C Dobbs), Walter Huston (Howard), Tim Holt (Bob Curtin), Bruce Bennett (James Cody), Barton MacLane (Pat McCormick), Alfonso Bedoya (Gold Hat)

Is there anything that warps the human character more than greed? Humanity sometimes seems driven only by the desire for more, to fill our pockets with cash and leave the rest behind. It’s greed that becomes the subject of John Huston’s masterful The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – and specifically the effect it has on Humphrey Bogart’s Fred C Dobbs. If you can pick up as much gold as you want off the ground around you, why does it become so difficult to watch others take it away?

Dobbs and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt) are down-on-their-luck drifters in Mexico, bumming spare change off American businessmen and struggling on hand-to-mouth jobs for shady businessmen. So how could they resist the chance to team up with fast-talking old-timer Howard (Walter Huston) who knows that there’s gold in dem da hills? Heading into the wilderness – partly financed by Dobbs’ lucky small lottery win – the three men strike lucky and start pulling the gold from the ground. Problem is as the piles grow, so slowly does the men’s suspicion each other – not least Dobbs, who grows increasingly paranoid and unbalanced at the thought of any danger to his gold. In the wilderness of Mexico, with bandits across the countryside can the men’s growing suspicion of each other be held off long enough to get the gold back home?

Based on a novel by B Traven – an author so notoriously private that even today no one knows who he was – John Huston’s classic is part adventure story, part treatise on the human condition. It’s also gloriously entertaining at every turn. One of the first major Hollywood films to be shot largely on location, it drips with the sultry heat of Mexico, beautifully filmed by Huston. Huston’s masterful script also packs the film with a punch, from quotable titbits (most famously the oft-misquoted “Badges? I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!”) to its Shakespearean touches as a rambling, mad, paranoid Dobbs walking alone through the desert wilderness like a cut-price Lear.

Dobbs is the heart of the film – and there is perhaps no anti-hero more ‘anti’ in the whole of Hollywood than this ruthlessly selfish, obsessive paranoiac. Bogart probably gives his finest performance ever as the scruffy, sweaty, unshaven and bitter drifter who finds he can’t abide the idea of having to give away any of what he sees as his share of the loot. And, worse than that, becomes convinced that the whole world is out to take it from him.

Bogart digs deep into the weasily, rat-like greed of this man. Bogart fought long and hard to play who he called “the worst shit you ever saw”. Dobbs has a strange moral code and sense of honour that’s entirely personal. Having his character impugned by others is an affront he can’t abide – though murder and violence are perfectly acceptable. He’s the sort of guy who will savagely beat a man who stiffs him for wages and then precisely take only what he’s owed from the guy’s wallet. Bogart is perfect as the cold-eyed loner who talks big at first about partnership, but later whines about how he staked most of the starter capital so should be getting a larger share of the profits. Bogart, in perhaps one of the biggest snubs in Hollywood history, missed out on an Oscar nomination in a notoriously weak year for Best Actor. Perhaps, the vision of Rick Blaine bitterly muttering to himself, covered in flies and filth, while plotting the murder of his friends in the Mexican outback was too much for the voters to take. Either way, Bogart’s late mental collapse into near-Shakespearean envy, jealousy and twitchy paranoia is as effective as it is subtly done.

More fortunate at the Oscars were the Huston family. John had written the part of Howard for his father Walter. It bought Huston Snr the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Walter Huston is wonderful as this fast-talking eccentric, rocketing through his dialogue at a hundred miles an hour, as if he has lived so long through the events he is talking about that he barely has the time or patience to tell the story at a normal pace. Huston adds touches of wonderful eccentricity, to Howard’s insane jig of joy when finally finding the site of the gold, to his infectiously unrestrained cackling laughter.

Eccentric as he is though, Howard is a decent and honourable man who has every intention of sharing the gold and is well aware of its corrupting influence. The wily Howard is also the only essential member of the crew – the only one with the experience to survive in the wilderness, the only one who can recognise and knows how to mine for gold. The most loyal to the fellowship, he’s the good angel to Dobb’s bad. In the middle of this moral spectrum, John Huston places Tim Holt’s Bob, a plain-speaking, more naïve figure who has elements of both characters in his pride and hunger for gold, matched with his sense of honour and loyalty. The film partly becomes an unspoken struggle for the soul of Holt’s Bob, as we wait to see which way he will fall.

Not that any of these men are angels. They are all determined to protect what they have. Struggling in shoot-outs with bandits is fine. They even vote on whether or not to execute a fellow drifter (played by Bruce Bennett) who encounters their stake and enquires about joining them for a share. Bennett’s Cody is, by the way, the smartest character in the film, who sees with pathetic ease through the nervy lies told by the three men, as well as acutely analysing their situation and options with a sharpness that seems beyond all of them.

Of course by that point suspicion between them – specifically Dobbs and Bob – has already grown dramatically. Dobbs takes to spying on his fellows and digs a separate hiding place to which he carefully takes his own share (Curtin takes to doing the same). John Huston includes a marvellous sequence where the three men each wake up in turn during the night – and react with suspicion on noting the absence from the tent of the others. Later Bob will think long and hard before saving Dobbs from a mining cave-in. Only Howard seems less affected about the gold – although with his talk of the corruption he has seen in the past, perhaps he was a Dobbs himself in the past, now grown wiser and more accepting of the easy-come-easy-go nature of gold.

Huston’s Oscar winning script (he also lifted the Oscar for Best Director, although Best Picture went to Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet) keeps the rich vein of irony running throughout the script, even while it shows how susceptible men are to corruption. The film’s final act – and the eventual fate of the gold – is a treat, a natural extension of the films theme of mankind being a dog-eat-dog world. What else can you do but sit in the dust and laugh at it all?

There are no heroes really in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – even the mountain remains named only in the title of the film – just three men, scruffy, seedy and not that smart, struggling to grab what they can from the earth. Life becomes more and more cheap as the film goes on – Dobbs and Curtin are like brothers at the start, but increasingly come to see both other people and each other as expendable rivals. With Dobbs like some scruffy Smaug, the film boils down to each man confronting his own emptiness. The only character with any emotional hinterland is the drifter Cody, looking for gold for his wife and kids (his story has real impact on Curtin), the rest are just living from moment to moment.

John Huston’s classic is a marvellous musing on the nature of greed and humanity, superbly filmed by Huston with not a single false note in acting or writing. Perfectly placed, it mixes a western vibe with a Shakespearean grandness – and has a simply wonderful performance by Bogart. A classic that really delivers.

Hustlers (2019)

Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez head out to get what they want in Hustlers

Director: Lorene Scarfaria

Cast: Constance Wu (Destiny), Jennifer Lopez (Ramona Vega), Julia Stiles (Elizabeth), Keke Palmer (Mercedes), Lili Reinhart (Annabelle), Lizzo (Liz), Cardi B (Diamond), Mercedes Ruehl (Mama), Wai Ching Ho (Destiny’s grandmother)

Greed. To many people, it’s what powers society. Those at the top believe anything can be bought, that they can have anything and everything they want simply because they have the money to pay for it. Hustlers suggests that nowhere is this more true, than in a New York strip club. The rich and the powerful, the masters of the universe, descend on these clubs for their after-hours play and assume their ocean-like wallets will open every door for them. Can we blame the strippers if they decide to exploit this for their own gain?

Opening in the build-up to the financial crash of 2008, Dorothy aka Destiny (Constance Wu) arrives at Moves, a prominent New York strip club, the night-time spot of choice for the super-rich from Wall Street. Money flows liberally in return for the strippers’ performances and their stroking of these masculine egos. Destiny comes under the wing of the club’s star, Ramona Vega (Jennifer Lopez), who teaches her how to manipulate men for cold hard cash. But when that financial crash comes, both women find themselves out of work. In the new atmosphere, the clubs are now staffed by dancers from Russia willing to go further with the men for money. Thrown back together, Destiny and Ramona start a new hustle – target rich men in clubs, get them drunk (and later just simply drug them), drag them to Moves and max out their cards (with the ex-dancers taking a healthy cut). But as the strippers themselves become rich, they start to get greedy. Things aren’t going to end well…

Sharply and wittily directed, Lorene Scarfaria’s film is an excellent crime movie with a little bit of social commentary thrown in. Fast paced and done with just the right amount of flash, it brilliantly rejigs the usual lens that we see strippers through in Hollywood movies. Rather than clichés, hookers with hearts of gold or props for the male characters, here the strippers are real, rounded people working a job – a job that just so happens to involve taking their clothes off. There may be fun to be had at times, but it’s a performance, a show – and a large part of Ramona’s skill is to effectively and convincingly play what she knows the men want to see.

That’s what Scarfaria’s film shows – it’s all a careful hustle, a clever series of tricks and techniques used by strippers to minimise the amount of contact with the customers (and the indignities of their lecherous hands) and maximise cash return, over the longest period of time possible. And these rich Wall Street types are too arrogant and convinced of their own excellence to even notice. The men come out spectacularly badly, a bunch of leering assholes who believe money gives them the right to do anything they like. Scarfaria shoots this with a snazzy Scorsese-ish zing which makes the entire film bounce along like a light version of Goodfellas and Wolf of Wall Street.

And the film has a great deal of admiration for these women who decided to turn the tables – who dealt with the fact that they were basically trapped into a certain role by society by using their skills to steal from the rich. The scheme of conning men is perfect at first – after all what powerful man is going to want to say that he was drugged and fleeced by a gang of attractive women? What is interesting is that the greed that corrupted the men, is gradually the thing the corrupts the women as well: the more successful their scam is, the richer they become, the more they become obsessed with status symbols, just as the men treated them. It doesn’t take long for crime to start moving on from its original Robin Hood targets into something far more indiscriminate.

Leading that charge into hitting any and every target for as much as they can get (rather than a careful but continual fleecing of a select group) is Jennifer Lopez’s Ramona. This is the role Lopez has been waiting almost twenty years for, a charismatic woman so firmly in control of her own life she doesn’t even notice when it starts to hit the skids. It’s the sort of scene stealing role that demands the energy and personality Lopez can bring to it, Ramona being part mentor and mother and part greedy livewire. If you forgot what a promising actress she was in the 90s, this is a great reminder. Ramona is a force of nature, the woman who demonstrates sex is a tool that can produce fabulous, fortune making results. But she’s arrogant enough to let greed and her innate belief in her own infallibility guide many of her decisions.

Lopez also forms a wonderful partnership with Constance Wu in the “Ray Liotta” part of the young naïve innocent, drawn under the mentor’s wings who eventually has to turn against her. Wu draws a lot of charm out of the young stripper learning the ropes, but crosses this really well with an ambition and ruthlessness that only late on finds its limits.

Hustlers bounds along telling a winning, crowd pleasing story with a depth and emotional force that produces great results. We root completely for its female leads, keeping them relatable even when their actions become less sympathetic. Strikingly directed by Lorene Scarfaria, it’s a film about women that makes themselves firmly the authors of their own destinies – and their own mistakes.

The Third Man (1949)

Orson Welles is the dark heart of The Third Man

Director: Carol Reed

Cast: Joseph Cotton (Holly Martins), Alida Valli (Anna Schmidt), Orson Welles (Harry Lime), Trevor Howard (Major Calloway), Paul Hörbiger (Karl the porter), Ernst Deustch (“Baron” Kurtz), Erich Ponto (Dr Winkel), Siegried Breuer (Anna), Bernard Lee (Sergeant Paine),Wilfrid Hyde-White (Crabbin)

It’s regularly held up as one of the cornerstones of classic 1940s film-making – and it has frequently won polls of the Greatest British Films of all time. Does The Third Man live up to expectations? No it excels them. I doubt there has been a film more perfectly assembled than this, one where all the component parts click together to make one perfect whole. No matter how many times you see The Third Man, it weaves its spell every time.

In immediate post-war Vienna, the city is divided into four zones, each run by a different great power (the UK, US, France and USSR). The black market is rife between the zones. Into this city arrives pulp Western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), here to visit his old school friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) – only to find on arriving that Lime died in a traffic accident, with British policeman Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) insisting that he was a black marketeer. Holly can’t believe Harry was a crook, and decides to investigate himself – on the way falling in love with Harry’s girlfriend Anna (Alida Valli) and finding that nobody’s story on what happened to Harry matches up. Could the accident actually be a murder?

Carol Reed’s atmospheric film is beautifully, perhaps flawlessly directed – so well made that for years there were fevered efforts to assign its brilliance to Welles himself. Which was studiously unfair to Reed, a director at the top of his game in the 40s. The Third Man was the crowning glory of a run of superbly stylish thrillers that matched thought provoking themes with striking film-making. The film is soaked in the atmosphere of post-war Vienna, a city half shelled out of existence. The film was shot on location, and Reed’s camera captures the “bombed about a bit” shambles of the city, its long shadows, cobbled streets and mysterious alleys.

The Third Man’s filming style also plays into this truly distinctive look. Working with (Oscar-winning) cinematographer Robert Krasker, the film is shot with a luscious almost German impressionistic style, with murky shadows and noirish lighting. Reed uses huge numbers of Dutch Angles to constantly present both this shattered city, and it mysterious story, from disconcerting angles. This visually represents the uncertainty and mystery that drip from every scene, making Vienna look like some sort of sinking ship, disappearing into a mire of crime and guilt. Reed’s camera fills the edges of the frames with tramps, beggars, the dispossessed and the plain scared – a brilliant snapshot of post-war Europe unsure about the future and ripe for exploitation.

The film looks simply stunning, with Reed’s visuals throwing up images that have stuck in film heritage, from fingers poking through a sewer grill, to the iconic entrance of Harry Lime itself (possibly the most famous entry ever). Shadows loom with gigantic proportions over the streets. A final sewer chase seems to take place in a nightmare world of water, false turns and foreboding architecture. And that final shot! Sublime cinema, the stillest shot in the film, and also a superb capturing of the film’s themes of loyalty, duty and betrayal.

The film was scripted by Graham Greene, and occupies a wonderful corner of Greene-land. His original concept was for Holly (or Rollo in the original script) and Harry to be British public schoolboys – a plan rejected when Hollywood co-funding came to call – but it did allow Holly to be transformed into a naïve American, lost in the cold realities of post-war Europe. Holly believes in the world of black and white, and writes stories where good triumphs over evil in the Wild West. He’s adrift in a Europe where everyone lies habitually, morality is flexible, and nothing is as it seems.

Holly is bound by old chains of loyalty to Harry – but how far does that loyalty stretch? What price personal loyalty when confronted with the impact of what a person has done? Joseph Cotton’s performance is pitch perfect, a middle-ranker who has orbited his whole life around brighter stars like Harry. How one-way was the relationship? Can Holly ever think for himself?

And is the right thing to do to walk away or try and correct the wrongs done by another?This divide is shown in the relationship between Cotton’s Holly and Alidi Valli’s sensational turn as Harry’s ex-girlfriend. A woman who has seen the harshness of the world, and been through a war-torn life that Holly would struggle to even comprehend, she’s a woman to whom personal loyalty trumps all things. Should you be loyal to the man you know, your experience of him – or do you have a higher loyalty that trumps that? Anna is firmly of the belief that she knows all that she needs to know of Harry and she needs to learn no more. It’s the sort of European post-war compromise that Holly can’t adapt to, the ideas of morality becoming mired in shades of grey.

It’s a world he struggles to adapt to, but is a cold hard reality for Trevor Howard’s Major Calloway – a superb performance of cool reserve that hides a strong sense of justice. Howard’s wry half-smile and control is perfect for the film, and his disgust at the actions of black marketeers is subtly and brilliantly conveyed by both the actor and Reed’s restrained direction – a visit to a children’s ward full of victims of Lime’s penicillin, is notable for leaving everything to our imagination and communicating another loss by showing a Teddy bear being dropped into a box.

And the cause of all this suffering? Why it’s none other than Harry Lime himself. No film ever captured Orson Welles’ impish charm as well as this, his shy grin and air of an enfant terrible turned terrible are brilliantly captured in the boyishly young but demonic Harry. A Mephistopheles placed on earth to tempt men like Holly, Lime argues what do a few people (or dots) here and there really matter in the long run? After all governments sacrifice them all the time – look at Vienna! – why shouldn’t we? What’s the problem? Lime grins and casually outlines a demonic view of the world, casually uses a cheap historical justification or two, and then saunters off never suspecting that he could lose the argument. Like Welles himself, he has all the glamour and magnetism that we could never have, and to live a few moments in his shadow, as Holly and Anna do, is to live a lifetime.

So Holly has to make a choice – the friend he knew, or the strangers he has seen harmed. The film charts the slow passage to making this hard choice, presenting us with a man who refuses to believe his friend could be anything other than the victim of persecution, to the man who is destined to turn him in. With the framework of Carol Reed’s superb filmmaking, it’s still an absolute treat.

And finally, The Third Man is blessed with perhaps the most perfect film score of all time. Recorded by Anton Karas – literally discovered playing the zither on the streets of Vienna – the score is jaunty, lyrical, schoolboyish even but can switch subtly to something quite disconcerting. It perfectly captures the schoolboy bravado of Holly and the childish lack of morals of Lime. As a match with the bombed out Vienna and its rundown, cynical citizens, it’s perfect. Like all things with The Third Man, it just works better than you could ever have hoped.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

A masterplan goes wrong in John Huston’s crime drama The Asphalt Jungle

Director: John Huston

Cast: Sterling Hayden (Dix Handley), Louis Calhern (Alonzo D Emmerich), Jean Hagen (“Doll” Conovan), James Whitmore (Gus Minissi), Sam Jaffe (“Doc” Erwin Riedenschneider), John McIntire (Police Commissioner Hardy), Marc Lawrence (Cobby), Barry Kelley (Lt. Ditrich), Marilyn Monroe (Angela Phinlay), Brad Dexter (Bob Brannom)

“Doc” Erwin Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) is out of the slammer after seven years, and the self-proclaimed “Professor” of criminal plans has a scheme for one final job. But rather than sell it to the highest bidder, Doc approaches crooked lawyer Alonzo Emmerich (Louis Calhern) to fund the crime and then split the proceeds with Doc. To carry out his robbery on a jewellery safe in a bank, he’ll need a gang including get-away driver Gus (James Whitmore) and Gus’ pal and “hooligan” Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden). But even the best laid plans of criminals can fall foul of events and the basic untrustworthiness of criminals themselves.

John Huston surprised some by turning his attention – Oscar in hand from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – to noir cops and robber’s thrillers, but that was to forget he had made his name with his masterful adaptation of Dashell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. And in The Asphalt Jungle he created a small scale but almost perfect slice of criminalise noir, a brilliantly paced and acted film beautifully assembled that effortlessly chronicles the disastrous fall out of a robbery where it seemed everything was going perfectly.

Huston’s direction of the piece is, as nearly always, superlative. His painterly framing of scenes is dead on the money here, his framing of the actors within the scene absolutely without fault. Huston has an uncanny scene for arranging his actors in the minimum number of shots necessary, reducing dramatically the need for clumsy cut aways. Instead multiple actors are often artfully arranged in the frame, allowing the performers to react in the moment and the camera itself to capture the complete story in one smooth shot. It also allows for some great character intros, not least a shot of the Police commissioner in the background of the frame while foregrounded are the hands of his subordinate Dietrich, nervously fondling his hat. Straight away we get the mood of the scene.

This is all part of the brilliant noirish construction of a film that largely features sympathetic criminals – and it’s clear that the film’s sympathy is with the robbers here, the cops either incompetent, bureaucrats or corrupt themselves – either turning on each other, crumbling under pressure, making rudimentary errors that wind up getting them caught or failing into tragic fates that are left questioning what the point of it all was. This is all superbly caught in the moody darkness and shadows that soak over the picture, and highlighted further by the superb script, that packs some excellent lines and beautiful thematic points throughout the film.

It’s also helped by some great performances. Sam Jaffe (Oscar-nominated) is terrific as the cunning calm and businesslike “Doc” who seems unable to understand why things are not quite panning out as he planned, but is heartily sorry that it’s the case. He at least has honour among thieves, refusing to abandon his fellow criminals and quietly disappointed when betrayal raises its head. I love as well his screamish apology that the crime will involve one “hooligan” – or heavy – since he’s not the sort of guy who likes to resort to messy crimes (no matter that things quickly slide out of hand). He’s the sort of professional who expects everyone to play by the same rules, but that doesn’t stop him having his own private passions, particularly for the fairer sex, that will wind up catching him out.

He’s especially proved wrong since Sterling Hayden’s ‘hooligan’ Dix turns out to be the moral force of the gang, despite his down-on-his-luck scruffiness. Hitting crime as a way to finance his dream of buying back his family’s horse farm – and sadly losing most of that finance on the horses – Hayden is gloomy faced and gruff but has his own clear moral code in an affectingly gentle performance of vulnerability beneath the toughness. Debts and betrayal are anathema to him, and he winds up far more of the decent crook than any of the rest – he’s also the only one of the lot who can hold down a loving relationship, forging a genuinely sweet relationship with Jean Hagen’s Doll. Huston’s sympathies are clearly with the down-on-his-luck Dix, a decent guy who has just lost at life.

Of course the crook they can’t trust is the lawyer, a fine performance of snivelling weasliness under a veneer of culture from Louis Calhern. Puffed up, arrogant but desperate for the money and fundamentally weak and easily led, Calhern is excellent as the money man who only adds to the gang’s troubles, led on by Brad Dexter’s wonderfully impatient and ruthless hired gun. Calhern’s sad air of corrupted authority is only enhanced by his lecherous delight in his lusciously young mistress, a radiant early performance from Marilyn Monroe (shot like a classic painting by Huston).

Huston’s film throws this gang together flies together into a superbly detailed and gripping drama of the planning, execution and dreadful fall out of a robbery that clearly inspired the (perhaps even better) Rififi (so much so that it practically has the same story and structure), The Asphalt Jungle is a fabulously made and written pleasure, unpretentious but wonderful story telling marshalled expertly by a director at the top of his game.

Parasite (2019)

The Kim family juggle poverty with dreams of improvement in the brilliant Parasite

Director: Bong Joon-Ho

Cast: Song Kang-Ho (Kim Ki-taek), Choi Woo-shik (Kim Ki-woo), Park So-dam (Kim Ki-jeong), Jang Hye-jin (Kim Chung-sook), Lee Sun-kyun (Park Dong-ik), Cho Yeo-jeung (Park Yeon-gyo), Jung Ji-so (Park Da-hye), Jung Hyeon-jun (Park Da-song), Lee Jung-eun (Gook Moon-gwang), Park Geun-rok (Yoon), Park Seo-joon (Min-hyuk)

I’m writing this in the glorious after-glow of Parasite’s shock win for Best Picture, finally breaking (after 92 years!) the taboo on foreign language films lifting the Big One at the Hollywood’s annual love in. So let’s just say: not only is it a delight to see Hollywood breaking “the 1-inch barrier of subtitles” (to quote Bong from his Best Director at the Golden Globes), but also it’s a thrill to see the Oscar go to something that can make a legitimate claim to being the Best Picture of the Year – not to mention a film that speaks to the modern world in a way very few nominees have done since Get Out.

Bong’s superb picture has found such universal appeal perhaps because it so completely understands questions of class and wealth in our modern world. Set in an unnamed South Korean city, we are introduced to both the extreme poor and the extreme rich. At the bottom end of the scale – living in a half-basement apartment – are the Kim family. At the top – almost literally, living in a sprawling, modernist apartment bathed in sun with a large private garden at the top of a hill – are the Park family. When son Kim Ki-woo (Choi Woo-Shik) lands a job at the Parks’ teaching English to their daughter, he quickly begins to work with sister Ki-jeong (Park So-dam) to manipulate Park Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeung) to hire each member of the family in turn in a job in the household. But from there, the best laid plans spiral firmly out of control.

The less you know about the structure and events of Parasite going into it, the more you will gain from the film. What Bong has created here is a superb medley of genres, developing from a black-comedy-heist-caper into thriller territory, with a splash of horror and lashings of intelligently subtle social commentary. This is a film for the modern age, addressing questions of class, cultural resentment, societal divisions and the damaging impact of the super-rich and super-poor living side-by-side in ways that are profoundly insightful and fundamentally universal.

Who are the parasites in Parasite? You could argue its society itself. At first it seems obvious on the surface that the Kims – living half beneath the surface of the city itself, inveigling their way into homes and roles, ruthless in acquiring their aims – fit the bill. But what about the Parks? So sheltered by money (“She can afford to be nice” says Kim dismissively of Mrs Park) they seem barely able to organise their own lives without the aid of an army of employees, placing no real value on them as people, only as extensions of their own house.

It’s all part of Bong’s skilful shift of perceptions throughout the film: the Kims are in some ways sympathetic (for the extreme poverty and desperation) but also they have no concern about hurting other people or manipulating them to get what they want. At the same time, we invest in seeing the well laid plans come to fruition, despite the impact it has on other people affected by their schemes. But as the film progresses, the innate selfishness and thoughtlessness of the Parks, their assumptions that their problems are of more concern than other people’s, that the world should revolve around them, makes them less sympathetic and the Kims more rounded and human.

Bong’s film brilliantly outlines this class war, every frame enforcing the insane split between such completely different worlds all rammed into the same city. The Parks’ apartment is a triumph of modernist design, the Kims’ flat a lightless dive with a regular tramp who pisses just outside their window. The Kims scurry to distant corners of the apartment to gain access to roving free wifi and stretch limited food supplies and their few pennies to the absolute limit. The family takes menial jobs to make ends meet, including folding a never ending pile of pizza boxes (boxes that seem to grow to dominate their flat).

At one point the camera follows the progress of the Kims as they leave the Park house and scamper, in an almost surreal series of long shots, down a never-ending parade of steps and streets, literally descending further down-and-down into the gutters of the city. It’s superb moments like this in Bong’s intricately designed film that constantly show us the divides between these people, the Parks living practically on Olympus with the Kims in Tartarus. These are problems that infect every society in the world, and the difficulty of making both rich and poor actually understand each other and find common ground to relate on are the problems we all see around us every day.

That’s even leaving aside the triumphs of Bong’s directing confidence, his mastery of tone and genre. The first half of the film is very funny – with Bong even leaning on this by having his characters drop dialogue that subtly refers to the ease with which the Kims’ plans come together – and has a delightful heist movie vibe. But the bubbling barriers between class hint at the tensions and danger that we feel lie in wait in the film, and threaten to break out. Korea is a volcano with the Kims and Parks sitting on the top, but it’s a volcano that the whole world can recognise. As Bong makes the film darker, leaner and even more menacing with hints of tragedy, it feels like the world correcting itself.

The acting is superb across the board with Song Kang-Ho hilarious and then deeply affecting as Mr Kim, a man slowly pushed beyond what he can bear. Cho Yeo-jeung is terrifically endearing and frustratingly thoughtless as the naïve Mrs Park. Park So-dam is brilliant as a super-smart Ki-jeong Kim, brilliantly manipulating left-right-and-centre. There is not a false note in the cast, the entire ensemble perfectly combining to create the class-conscious world of the film. To say too much more would be spoil it!

Bong Joon-ho’s film is Western break-through but really it’s a universal condemnation of the dangerous influence of class. And with Bong’s mastery of cinema – this is such a well directed film, both in terms of tone and every single shot contributing brilliantly to the whole – this has produced a film that feels like a very modern, prescient and profound masterpiece, a film that speaks to and almost defines the problems of the modern world. While at the same time being immensely entertaining and unpreaching. Thank goodness that 1 inch barrier came tumbling down.