Category: Films about mental health

Cries and Whispers (1972)

Bergman’s heart-rendering, challenging and compelling family drama: a slice of raw pain

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Harriet Andersson (Agnes), Ingrid Thulin (Karin), Liv Ullmann (Maria), Kari Sylwan (Anna), Anders Ek (Isak, the priest), Inga Gill (Aunt Olga), Erland Josephson (David), Henning Moritzen (Joakim), Georg Årlin (Fredrik)

It came to Bergman in a dream: a red-lined room, where four women dressed in white whisper intimate secrets to each other. It became one of his most elliptical, horrifying and haunting films, a cryptic puzzle about life and death, faith and despair, love and hate, sex and violence and almost every human experience in between, all filmed within an imposing (and beautifully shot) red-walled house that turns more-and-more into a nightmareish Satre-style trap. Cries and Whispers sits alongside Persona as one of Bergman’s most successful reaches for the sublimely unknown and if it doesn’t quite touch Persona’s astonishing mastery, it’s remarkable by every measure.

Two sisters gather to nurse a third as she goes through the final days of a long, painful illness. Karin (Ingrid Thulin), the oldest, is professional, distant and repressed; Maria (Liv Ullman) the youngest is sensual, flighty and slightly selfish. The dying Agnes (Harriet Andersson) yearns for love and affection, but is a natural outsider. Agnes is most devotedly cared for by the maid Anna (Kari Sylwan), a young woman who lost a child a few years ago. As Agnes’ final days approach, all four mull on life, their decisions and choices, each trying to grasp some understanding about the great mystery of life.

Cries and Whispers feels like a savage slash of raw pain. Perhaps no other film in Bergman hits like such a punch to the gut. In this red-lined house, everyone is silently screaming behind the whispers (literally so in Agnes’ case, the film opening with Harriet Andersson writhing in wordless agony on her bed for an almost unbearable shot held for almost four minutes). All four of these characters are carrying mountains of disappointment, despair and disillusionments on their shoulders, none of them able to see a way out of the constant grind of simply struggling through existence. You could argue that Agnes has the easiest path in death.

The overbearing red walls – not to mention the fades to ‘red-out’ that seem to drown out the faces of the four women as each stares into the camera before their own memory or dream is staged by Bergman – begins to feel increasingly like a trap. The lack of natural light adds even more to the sense that this is taking place in some sort of prison or oppressive womb, cooking up traumas. There doesn’t seem to be any escape from this pressure-cooker atmosphere (rather like the claustrophobic trappings of The Silence and Persona), with reality starting to fracture and dissolve.

It becomes clear there are decades of unspoken tensions between the three sisters. Karin and Maria seem to be tending for their system more out of duty than love: Maria sleeps through her watch, while Karin feels like a dutiful professional rather than a loving sister. There is precious little sense of intimacy between them. So much so, that both sisters will utterly reject (in a late dream sequence that topples into a nightmare) even the hint of tenderness or contact with the deceased Agnes (Maria will run, screaming, at the very idea). It’s the same between Maria and Karin, who seemingly have nothing except blood in common.

But then they could hardly be two more contrasting women. Liv Ullman is superbly multi-layered as a woman who feels at first flirtatious and light-hearted but emerges as manipulative and selfish with a rich vein of self-loathing, compensated by a malicious pleasure in hurting other people. Her sexual fascination with Erland Josephson’s aloof doctor is based less on his qualities and more on his frank deconstruction of her physical flaws, accentuated by the deep pain and distress the affair causes her husband. Similarly with Karin, she alternates between reaching out to in shared sisterly closeness, then denying she ever felt or said such things a day later.

Like other Bergman films there is dark implication of incest in the relationship between Maria and Karin. In their moments of reconciliation, their physicality (all stroking and kissing) stinks of sexuality, their unheard whispers incredibly suggestive. Is this a foul secret what that has made Karin so deeply disgusted by physical intimacy? This is after all a woman who (in a flourish where I feel Bergman goes too far) cuts her vagina with a piece of glass and defiantly smears the blood over her face in front of her husband to prevent him from claiming his conjugal rights.

Ingrid Thulin is extraordinary as Karin, a deeply repressed woman utterly bereft in the world, who secretly yearns for closeness and contact. She seems though to have a very little idea how to build emotional bridges with people, her manner reserved and cold, unable to even treat the dying Agnes as anything other than a duty. If Maria quietly delights in making people feel bad and is disturbed by feelings of warmth, Karin is unable to even begin to arouse feelings of any sort from other people. She lives in an isolation that has left her deeply unhappy.

Strangely, Agnes herself might even be the happiest – and she’s dying. Agnes is the only person Bergman allows to narrate her own flashbacks (the other three are all introduced in voiceover by Bergman himself). Beautifully played by Harriet Anderson as a woman full of hope, despite the appalling pain of her illness, she is a strange beacon of contentment. The priest at her wake (a beautifully delivered monologue from Anders Ek) even confesses he cannot help but question the strength of his own faith compared to the spirituality of Agnes. What sign is there of God in this world when he punishes with such excruciating pain the purest person in the film?

Harriet Andersson’s performance is not only almost unbearably in its raw physical commitment to pain, but also a quietly moving in its emotion. Agnes is a woman longing to be closer to her sisters – envying Maria’s closeness to their mother as a child (the mother is also played by Liv Ullman) – feeling closer to her mother only when observing her in solitary moments of pain. Her happiest memory is of the three sisters as adults, contently laughing together on a swing. This willingness to embrace love – always a matter of key importance to Bergman – singles her out from the two-faced Maria or the repressed Karin.

It also explains the link to Anna, played with a quiet observance by Kari Sylwan. Frequently silently, moving through the frame or performing duties, Anna is the only person in the house who categorically loves and respects Agnes. It’s she who cares for her, who tends her, nurses her through her pain and most readily responds to her desire for closeness. There is, in fact, a hint of sexual familiarity between the two – it’s very possible to imagine them as lovers. Do Agnes’ family recognise – and envy – that breach of distance, that leads them to offer only the smallest reward for her service and a curt dismissal after Agnes’ death?

Or are Anna’s motives as clear cut and noble as they appear? Grieving the (clearly relatively recent) death of a child, perhaps Anna uses Agnes to fill emotional holes in her own life. Her dream-like fantasy of Agnes’ after death rotates around Anna taking almost complete possession of her deceased mistress, dismissing the sisters and cradling the dying Anna in a pieta like grasp that resembles a mother and child rather than lovers. Is Anna desperately using this moment of death, just as Karin and Maria do, to fulfil longings in herself?

All these ideas are superbly explored in Bergman’s beautifully paced and powerful work, like the best of his films a hauntingly intriguing and challenging work that lingers long in the mind after it finishes. With four very different, but extraordinary performances, at its heart it may at times be a little too intellectual and Bergman may at times go a little too far, but for its extraordinary exploration of raw, vicious pain it can be hard to beat. A challenging but extremely necessary film.

Memento (2000)

Nolan’s Hollywood debut is still a mesmerising, inventive and inspiring noir thriller

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Guy Pearce (Leonard Shelby), Carrie-Anne Moss (Natalie), Joe Pantoliano (Teddy), Mark Boone Jnr (Burt), Jorja Fox (Catherine Shelby), Stephen Tobolowsky (Sammy Jankis), Harriet Sansom Harris (Mrs Jankis), Callum Keith Reinne (Dodd)

Memento is a twisty-turny thriller of man who can’t remember anything that has just happened to him. But it’s also a tragedy of a man who actually can never forget. Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) has anterograde amnesia, a condition that prevents him forging new memories. Every few minutes or so, his memory resets and he forgets what just happened to him. But he can never forget what happened to him immediately before his condition: the murder of his wife by a mysterious assailant. Effectively, Leonard lives forever in that last moment he remembers: it has always just happened, and has shaped his life into a relentless search for revenge.

It’s a realisation I made after a watching again Christopher Nolan’s sophomore calling-card, surely one of the most complete artistic statements of intent Hollywood has seen this century. You can see the roots of all that was to come here, from Batman to Oppenheimer, via Tenet, Inception and Interstellar. Memento is a gripping thriller and also a playful and intriguing dance with narrative conventions, largely told backwards (each seven minute or so section in colour occurs after the scene that preceded it) but also featuring a black-and-white parallel narrative that takes place (it is revealed) chronologically, that eventually links up with the other narrative (the film, effectively, ending somewhere in the middle of the story).

Far from a stunt, this is ingenious, exciting story-telling from Nolan, superbly recreating some idea of what it might be like to never remember why you are somewhere, where you have been or whether you have ever met the person you are talking to before or not. You could say the story, once rearranged in chronological order, is simple – but everything is easy to follow with a map.

Memento’s structure reflects part of Leonard’s perspective, forcing you constantly to watch the film in the moment and never be able to apply your wider knowledge of the narrative. No matter how familiar I become with the film, I find I inevitably become as confused and lost as Leonard is, your mind struggling to reorder and reinterpret “later” scenes as you discover the “earlier” ones, the whole film fracturing into mini-arcs (the chase where a bemused Leonard doesn’t know at first whether he’s chaser or chase; the bar conversation that starts in the middle; the mysterious woman who appears in a bathroom, and so on).

Even more ingeniously, we realise Leonard is essentially ‘re-born’ with every cut-to-black. He will never feel anger towards someone who wronged him minutes earlier or fondness towards someone who was kind to him. The Leonard dead-set on a goal one minute will cease to exist the next, with only any notes remaining to guide him. Essentially, Leonard is constantly handing over to himself: even he knows this: that decisions he makes in a moment effectively carry no implications, because he won’t remember them. He will never feel guilt, or regret, shame, pride and delight.

Leonard prides himself on making his life work through a rigorous system of mental conditioning. His short-term memory may be destroyed, but his ability to “learn” has not. He talks proudly of his system: carefully written notes, annotated polaroids of key people, places and objects, certain things always kept in certain places and, of course, a body littered with tattoos of crucial facts about his wife’s murder. What’s ingenious about Nolan’s film is that, like Leonard, we never know the context of any of this. When Leonard makes a note, what prompted him to do it? Like him we don’t know.

That lack of context exposes, over the course of the film, the nonsense of Leonard’s system. Trusting notes – particularly written by himself – implicitly from moment-to-moment, leaves him wide open to manipulation. If he has a polaroid of an object with the note “This belongs to you”, he will assume it is true. If someone produces evidence of a friendship or mutual interest, he will believe it. Even more chillingly, we discover Leonard himself is more than capable of leaving himself breadcrumbs he knows his future selves can (and will) misinterpret. After all he’ll never remember the deception and will never waver in the belief that he would never deceive himself.

Like Leonard we can never know the truth about the people he talks to. Should we listen to the message “don’t believe his lies” about the ingratiating weaselly Teddy – especially since the film “begins” with Leonard shooting him in the head as the killer of his wife. Or is Teddy, played with a perfectly smarmy, smart-alecky wit by Joe Pantoliano, the friend he claims to be? Does Natalie, the quiet but helpful woman who has also lost someone (memorably played with a beautifully balanced mix of the austere and tender by Carrie Anne-Moss), deserve the absolute trust Leonard accords her based on his annotated polaroids? After all, the manager of the hotel he’s staying at (a marvellously droll cameo from Mark Boone Jnr) cheerfully confesses to ripping him off, since he knows Leonard won’t remember it next time they speak.

What becomes clear is that Leonard, for all his surface assurance and confidence is a raw emotional mess, utterly lost in the world he inhabits and trapped forever in an emotional state of raw grief and fury, his politeness a ‘learned’ habit as much as his mantras and endlessly repeated stories. Guy Pearce gives a fantastic performance of a character both deeply vulnerable but carrying reserves of bitterness that are intensely dangerous when unleashed. Pearce’s empathetic performance, low-key and underplayed throughout, helps us build a deep connection with Leonard, making the audience want him to succeed, while never hiding the possibility of danger in a man who knows nothing about the world around him other it has deeply wronged him.

It’s that hidden emotional state Nolan’s twisting film hides in plain sight throughout. After all, we know Leonard is capable of acts of violent rage – its literally the first thing we see him do. Opening the film with a shot of a Polaroid developing, played in reverse (so the image gets fainter), Nolan even shows us at the start that the facts will become less clear as the film progresses. Despite both these things, it’s frequently shocking how what we think of Leonard and those around him changes.

It’s told with a superb streak of film noir, but also a dark wit (after all, a guy who you can be as blatant false to you as you like because he’ll act like your friend five minutes later, is inherently funny) that means sucker-punch moments when we make crucial discoveries about objects, characters and even the story of Sammy Jankis (a similarly afflicted man, investigated by pre-accident Leonard in his old life as insurance claims investigator) land with a real wallop.

Memento is truly unique, a near unrepeatable trick expertly pulled off by a director who even in his second film was able to present a complex, multi-layered narrative with the assurance of a veteran. What’s interesting about Memento is that, away from the mechanics of how it is told, there is very little self-conscious flash or bombast about it. It uses flair when it serves the story, but otherwise lets events speak for itself. And it unfolds like an onion, each layer rewatch revealing a fresh new layer that shocks the senses. Superbly acted and brilliantly made, it’s a modern noir masterpiece.

The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933)

Lang’s masterful mix of gangster thriller and supernatural psychological drama is superb

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Dr Mabuse), Otto Wernicke (Inspector Lohmann), Oskar Beregi Snr (Professor Baum), Gustav Diessl (Thomas Kent), Wera Liessem (Lilli), Karl Meixner (Hofmeister), AE Licho (Dr Hauser), Theo Lingen (Karetzky), Klaus Pohl (Muller), Theodor Loos (Dr Kraum)

Did Fritz Lang invent the concept of the cinematic universe? Or after completing M, did he just wonder what it would be like if his detective Lohmann (Otto Wernicke) took on the dastardly criminal mastermind Dr Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) from his earlier epic crime drama. Either way, the hero and the villain from those two very different films face-off in The Testament of Dr Mabuse, a pacey crime melodrama spliced with a spooky ghost story, that rattles its way through a scintillating story tinged with the whiff of the dread of Nazism.

It’s eleven years after Mabuse’s reign of terror ended with him catatonic and under arrest. In a psychiatric hospital under Professor Baum (Oskar Beregi Snr), who sees him as a fascinating case study of deluded genius, Mabuse has not spoken in years instead filling his days with endlessly scribbling a series of blueprints and schemes for the criminal underworld, focused on destabilising the country and corrupting the currency. But, despite being under lock and key, a secret society of criminals is carrying out Mabuse’s scribbles, seemingly under the guidance of the man himself. Can death, when it comes, really take Mabuse? Or are Lohmann’s suspicions that the dread hand of the Great Unknown still controls events, even from beyond the grave, correct?

Lang’s gangster film throws together some of the best elements of all his German films. This is a pulpy gangster thriller, full of action, shoot-outs and explosions mixed with the unsettling double exposure appearance of ghosts and shady, unknown powers manipulating events. It’s Scarface meets A Christmas Carol, with Mabuse as a dreadful Marley’s Ghost causing devastation and chaos even after death. The Testament of Dr Mabuse sees realism meet thriller meet supernatural powers, but brilliantly combines all three up into a propulsive thriller.

And it’s a film, more than any of Lang’s others, about the malign influence of Fascism. For what is Mabuse’s dogmatic lust for chaos and destruction, but a terrible prophecy of the horrors Hitler would unleash. Mabuse, like the Fuhrer, is interested only in destruction wanting to pull the world down to rule over the ashes, to reforge the remains into his ideal vision of reality. His paranoid ramblings – and the spectral, transparent (brilliant use of double exposure at the technical possibilities of cinema, as always from Lang) presence he becomes parroting the same mantra of the nobility of destruction – are about leading the country into a morass of destruction. No wonder The Testament of Dr Mabuse was almost immediately spiked by Goebbels. Hitler’s magnetic powers of persuasion and control were surely the real-world apotheosis of Mabuse’s skills.

Mabuse’s powers are so great that even death can’t slow him down. Today it doesn’t take long to figure out exactly who the real mastermind – or after-death puppet of Mabuse’s – might be. As wardens in the hospital say, even in silence the fixed, controlling glare of Mabuse is enough to bend minds to his will. The rantings of his testament – Mabuse’s Mein Kampf – merely add to the force of his stare. Even the echo of Mabuse’s name will turn former police detective Hofmeister into a gibbering wreck. His power is absolute.

No wonder he appears after death, disfigured post-autopsy, his eyes bulging, to continue to direct his puppets, his ghostly form directing their actions. It’s a wonderful visual expression of the hypnotic control Mabuse had over his victims, that they continue to see his controlling, ranting form – across a desk or guiding them down corridors – even after they’ve gone. Mabuse’s ghostly form will literally emerge out of the body of his underling, crossing to sit opposite him and pour more instructions in his ear.

Ordering his underlings from behind a curtain that hides his true face, Mabuse’s commands are absolute and its threats always delivered. The gang, each a series of cells who work together only when instructed, are nearly all brain-washed fanatics, accepting orders without question. Much like Hitler, Mabuse’s followers cover a vast range, not just common criminals, or trigger-happy loons but also the middle-class and professional, in thrall to the words of a mad man promising a new dawn (sound familiar?) Much like in Mabuse’s hey-day, any deviation from absolute loyalty is met with swift, fatal punishment. What chance does Thomas Kent (Gustav Diessl – a spitting image for the young George Sanders) have when he decides the gang life is too risky for his girlfriend?

Up against this, Lang places his hero from M and his accustomed detailed fascination with the mechanics of investigation. The Testament of Dr Mabuse mixes this analysis of things like the forensic translation of scratches on a windowpane, with this outré pulpy set-up of Wizard of Oz-like criminal masterminds. The world of Lohmann is one of order and methodical investigation, grounded in realism and detail. It’s an adjustment for Lohmann who, in M, was more the jovial face of a failing institution – here he’s the last bastion of reasonable authority.

The Testament of Dr Mabuse is full of shrewd political observations – but it’s also a supremely entertaining film. Few directors were as good at crime drama set-ups than Lang. The film’s opening sequence, showing Hofmeister tracking the gang through a warehouse, is a masterclass of the tension of imminent discovery, then of explosive (literally) violence during a chase. A gorgeously inventive bomb sequence – where a flooded room is the best chance of safety – is another masterpiece of slow burn tension, while the insidious threat of Mabuse’s voice creates a miasma of terror.

That sequence plays beautifully into Lang’s increasing comfort with, and mastery of, sound. The film opens with a pounding heart-beat on the soundtrack as freelance investigator Hofmeister hides in the factory where Mabuse’s men assemble their latest schemes, capturing the fear as he constantly ducks and hides to (unsuccessfully) avoid detection. The sound of machinery grows to overwhelm the film and, as Hofmeister flees, his barracked by the sounds of engines and rolling oil-filled barrels that burst into flames. Sound skilfully stresses mood and bridges scenes, controlling mood and atmosphere and adding to the air of distrust and disturbance.

The technique shines out of several stunning set-pieces. A traffic light assassination – another masterpiece of sound – is a brilliant piece of gangster-ish business, the gangsters using a crescendo of car horns to cover a fatal shot. Watching its slow build-up and the carefully paced release of information to the audience (the presence of the killers, the gun, the tension of the wait) you can see why Lang often felt Hitchcock got a lot of credit for things he had invented.

Fast-paced and thrilling, it’s a perfect extension of both Lang’s previous films, a brilliantly unsettling and disturbing drama wrapped up in a gangster package. It’s supernatural touches are just the right side of psychological drama, a portrait of obsession and a fractured mind. A perfect expression of Lang’s mastery of mixing the high and low brow into an engaging, thought-provoking and thrilling package.

L’Argent (1983)

Bresson’s final film: challenging, cold, hard to watch, definitely leaves you thinking

Director: Robert Bresson

Cast: Christian Patey (Yvon Targe), Vincent Ricterucci (Lucien), Caroline Lang (Elise), Sylvie van den Elsen (Grey haired woman), Michel Briguet (Grey haired woman’s father), Beatrice Tabourin (Ka photographe), Didier Baussy (Le photographe)

Robert Bresson is today so widely acclaimed as one of the patron saints of cinema, it’s odd to think that in 1983 at Cannes he was furiously booed when he won the director prize for L’Argent. But Bresson’s style had always been divisive – before the vindication of history – and L’Argent, his final picture, is one of the purest, most uncompromising slices of Bressonism you are likely to see, not to mention an uncomfortable and deeply challenging work of art. Uncompromising in almost every sense, it is a film that climbs under your skin and troubles your mind for days after watching.

Based on a short story by Leo Tolstoy, L’Argent’s theme is the corrupting influence of money. Two rich kids, troubled by the small allowance from their parents, forge a 500 Franc note and exchange it for change in a photography shop. The owner, keen to get rid of the offending note, instructs his assistant Lucien (Vincent Ricterucci) to pay working-class Yvon Tonge (Christian Patey) with it. When Yvon uses it in a café, he is arrested and charged, his pleas of innocence ignored. Losing his job, with a wife and child to support, Yvon slides down a slippery slope encompassing theft, jail time, tragic bereavement and murder leaving him a brutal shell of the man he was before.

Bresson’s film deals with the inexorable inevitability of fate, once it is prodded in a certain direction by the destructive forces that govern our world. Those forces are themselves governed by cold, hard mammon and the selfishness and casual cruelty of those who have it or want it. Bresson’s film is littered with shots of hands at work – nearly always that work involves the passing of bank notes from one place to another. Money is what makes the world go around – it dictates power and privilege and it fundamentally decides who is believed and who is punished.

Yvon can plead in vain he is innocent of passing fake notes, because no one is going to listen to a working class joe with scarcely a penny to his name rather than the vouched-for employee of a respectable middle-class businessman. Yvon even ends his first court case by being rebuked for bringing into disrepute the names of such thoroughly respectable people. By contrast, when concerned her son might get caught up in the whole filthy affair, the mother of one of the original forgers simply hands over a wedge of cash to the cheated shop-owner to make the problem go away. Money talks.

And it has cast its verdict on Yvon, deciding he should be chewed up by the system and spat out a very different man. From the moment we first see Yvon arrested for the false note, we know he is doomed. Just as we know, from seeing Yvon’s first reaction to being accused (a violent shove that sends a waiter tumbling and glass smashing on the ground) that there is a capacity for violent revenge in him. Later, like a dim echo of this first moment, glass will shatter again on another floor, dropped by a grey-haired old woman hiding the fugitive Yvon. It’s a salutary reminder (one the film delivers on, with chilling impact, a few minutes later) that Yvon has a darkness that can harm others.

It’s a hardness sharpened by time in prison. Returning to the fertile ground of A Man Escaped, Bresson offers a chilling indictment of the prison system. Formal, cold and uncaring, it is a breeding ground for resentment and rage. The authorities read all incoming mail, but in no way think about its contents and the impact it will have on the receiver (the mail reading room is a voyeur’s paradise, the chance to observe the secret goings on of everyone before they even know it themselves). Incoming mail discovers Yvon’s sick daughter has died and his wife is leaving him for good. No attempt is made to support Yvon who quickly succumbs to rage (looking to strike a mocking fellow inmate with a metal serving spoon), punishment by isolation and a suicide attempt through stockpiling chill-pills (much easier to shut inmates up rather than help them).

Throughout Bresson shows the onslaught of cruel events on Yvon with his characteristic spare style (no music, well drilled actors, perfectly timed shots, composed to convey information in the most economical style possible). But L’Argent is also a film strikingly devoid of moral judgement. It’s very much left open to us when, how and why we may or may not lose sympathy with Yvon. After all we truly see him suffer, after trying his very best to play by all the rules (reporting where he got the fake note from, telling the truth in court) only for him to lose everything.

Is there a chance for redemption for Yvon? He discovers money talks and the world is fundamentally uncaring (after all it took his freedom, child, wife and a large part of his mental health). Photography shop assistant Lucien reaches the same conclusion: he’s been fleecing his crooked boss for weeks (‘I thought crooks looked after each other’ he tells his boss) but decides on one last theft to redistribute the wealth to the needy. Same conclusions, different methods to punish the world.

Yvon however decides to no longer restrain the dark impulses within him. He murders senselessly twice, grabs a few notes from a hotel cash desk and then finds himself protected be a selfless older woman (who he encounters initially eyeing up for theft). Staying in her home, her family in the same house, what will he do with this woman who does good things and expects nothing in return?

L’Argent is far from an optimistic film, with a hard-working family man turned into a family-free convict. In this uncompromising film, the final sequence is almost unwatchable in its bleak, terrible power as Yvon commits his final, inevitable, sins with a passion-free fixity of purpose almost impossibly horrible to watch. Bresson’s perfectly constructed film, full of detailed, clockwork precision has been slowly building to this horrific end, a natural one for a film highlighting the uncaring cruelty of the modern world.

Because money also doesn’t care about the damage it leaves, the collateral deaths or the cost on those on the margins. Was it this hopeless, systemic, inevitability the viewers at Cannes found so worthy of boos? The progress of events, one connected to another (and L’Argent, despite its structured formalism, is full of events of the least-Bressonist you can imagine, including a car chase) that forms a terrible, unsettling and unreassuring picture? Bresson leaves our judgement of Yvon entirely up to us: Tolstoy’s novella looked at the journey of redemption for its lead character. Bresson shows us the crimes and nothing else. If there is to be redemption or forgiveness we must ask ourselves if we can do it.

Separate Tables (1958)

Guilt and shame under the politeness in this stagy and almost-very-brave Rattigan adaptation

Director: Delbert Mann

Cast: Rita Hayworth (Anne Shankland), Deborah Kerr (Sibyl Railton-Bell), David Niven (Major David Angus Pollock), Burt Lancaster (John Malcolm), Wendy Hiller (Pat Cooper), Gladys Cooper (Mrs Maud Railton-Bell), Cathleen Nesbitt (Lady Gladys Matheson), Felix Aylmer (Mr Fowler), Rod Taylor (Charles), Audrey Dalton (Jean), May Hallett (Miss Meacham), Priscilla Morgan (Doreen)

Bournemouth’s Hotel Beauregard offers comfortable rooms and separate tables for dining. No wonder it’s popular with a host of regulars and out-of-town guests. But at each of those separate tables, drama lurks. Unflappable Pat Cooper (Wendy Hiller) manages the hotel and is secretly engaged to John Malcolm (Burt Lancaster), a down-on-his luck writer a little too fond of a pint in The Feathers. Their secret relationship is thrown into jeopardy when John’s ex-wife Anne (Rita Hayworth) arrives from New York, keen to get John back. Meanwhile, Major Pollock (David Niven) hides a secret behind his “hail-fellow-well-met” exterior, one which will threaten his place in the hotel and friendship with mousey Sibyl (Deborah Kerr) – a woman firmly under the thumb of her domineering mother (and resident bully) Mrs Railton-Bell (Gladys Cooper).

Delbert Mann’s film merges two Terence Rattigan one-act plays into a single, respectable piece of middle-brow Masterpiece Theatre viewing, which Mann subsequently effectively disowned (even after its seven Oscar nominations) after losing control of both editing and scoring to producer Lancaster. (Mann, quite rightly, loathed the hilariously out-of-place Vic Damone crooner number “Separate Tables” that opened the film.) Mann had already replaced Laurence Olivier, who dropped out after Lancaster’s company felt the film needed two American stars to make it box-office (handily they chose Lancaster himself and his business partner’s fiancée Rita Hayworth).

Lancaster and Hayworth are incidentally the weak points in the cast, their Americanness hopelessly out of step with Rattigan’s extremely English style and setting. Both actors are all too clearly straining to “stretch themselves” in unlikely roles, giving the film a slight air of self-indulgence. (Hillier later archly stated her best scene from the original was handed to Hayworth, while Lancaster recut the film to move up his first entrance.) The will-they-won’t-they tug-of-war between the two of them is Separate Tables’ least interesting beat and it’s to the film’s detriment that it, and these two awkwardly miscast actors, dominate so much of the film’s middle section.

They were already playing the dullest half of Rattigan’s double bill. Rattigan’s passion, and by far the film’s most electric moments – even if they only really constitute just under a half the runtime – revolve around the scandal of Major Pollock. Pollock, it is swiftly revealed, is not only prone to exaggerate his class, schooling and military career (his knowledge of alleged alma mata Sandhurst and the classics is revealed to be sketchy at best) but also carries a secret criminal conviction for harassing young women in a cinema.

While such harassment is of course recognised as beyond the pale today, it’s very clear in Separate Tables that Pollock’s misdeeds are standing in for a crime that literally “dare not speak its name”. Rattigan was one of Britain’s most prominent closeted homosexuals and his original intention had been for the Major’s crime to be fumbled cottaging. In the 50s it was unspeakable for the lead to be a sympathetic frightened homosexual so, in what looks bizarre today, it was far more acceptable to make him a timid sexual molester. However, the subtext is very clear, unspoken but obvious. One only has to hear the tragic Major sadly say “I’m made in a certain way and I can’t change it” and talk about his shame and loneliness to hear all too clearly what’s really being talked about here. Isn’t the Major’s pretence about being “the Major” just another expression of the double life a gay man had to lead in 1950s Britain?

This sensitive and daring plot is blessed with a wonderfully judged, Oscar-winning performance by David Niven (dominating the film, despite being on screen for a little over 20 minutes – the shortest Best Actor winning performance on record). Niven had made a career of playing the sort of suave, debonair military-types Pollock dreams of being – so there might not have been an actor alive more ready to puncture that persona. Recognising a role tailor-made for him, Niven peels away the Major’s layers to reveal a shy, sensitive, frightened man, desperate for friendship and acceptance. His heart-breaking confession scene (clearly a coded coming out) is beautifully played, while the closing scene with its hope of acceptance gains hugely from Niven’s stiff-upper-lip trembling with concealed emotion.

Niven’s performance – (Oscar-in-hand he rarely felt the need to stretch himself as an actor again) – centres the film’s most dramatic and engaging content. The campaign against the Major is led by Mrs Railton-Bell, superbly played by Gladys Cooper as the sort of moral-crusader who needs to cast out others to maintain her own ram-rod self-perception of virtue. Cooper uses icy contempt and overwhelming moral conviction to browbeat the rest of the guests in a sort of kangaroo court into blackballing the Major, a neat encapsulation not only of the power of the loudest voice but how readily decent people reluctantly acquiesce to it to avoid trouble.

Her control has also crushed her daughter’s spirit. Deborah Kerr’s performance is a little mannered: Kerr works very hard to embody a mousey, dumpy, frumpy spinster and make sure we can see she’s doing it. But she works beautifully with Niven and her meekness means there is real impact when the mouse finally (inevitably) roars. The rest of the guests are a fine parade of reliable British character actors: Felix Aylmer reassuringly fair and May Hallett particularly delightful as a no-nonsense woman who doesn’t give a damn what people think and trusts her own judgement.

Linking all plots together, Wendy Hiller won the film’s other Oscar as the hotel manager. Hiller was born to play decent matrons, bastions of respectable fair play who reluctantly but stoically bear personal sacrifices as their own crosses. She’s a natural with Rattigan’s dialogue and brings the best out of Lancaster, as well as providing all the drama (and sympathy) in the film’s other plotline as a surprisingly noble “other woman”.

Separate Tables is a middle-brow slice of theatre filmed with assurance. But when it focuses on Major Pollock it touches on something far more daring and much more moving than anything else it reaches for. Here is true low-key, English tragedy: under a clear subtext, we see the horror of a man who pretends all his life to be something he is not and the terrible judgements from others when he is exposed. It’s that which gives Separate Tables its true impact.

What’s Love Got to Do With It? (1993)

Tina Turner biopic sails into dark marital waters in a hard-hitting film

Director: Brian Gibson

Cast: Angela Bassett (Tina Turner), Laurence Fishburne (Ike Turner), Vanessa Bell Calloway (Jackie), Jenifer Lewis (Zelma Bullock), Penny Johnson Jerald (Lorraine Taylor), Phyllis Yvonne Stickney (Alline Bullock), Chi McBride (Fross), Jame Reyne (Roger Davies) Richard T Jones (Ike Turner Jnr)

How did Tina Turner become the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll? The hard way. Possibly the hardest. Tina Turner’s relationship (and marriage) to her initial discoverer, Ike Turner, lasted almost twenty years after their first meeting in 1956. During that time, Ike helped form her style – and viciously beat and assaulted her on a regular basis, increasingly in drug-fuelled bouts of jealousy as her talent and fame surpassed his own. What’s Love Got to Do with It? sees Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne bring this biopic and spousal abuse drama to the screen.

Well directed by Brian Gibson, with neat mixture of mock-documentary and home video footage carefully spliced into the film, What’s Love Got to Do with It? is practically the dictionary definition of a tough watch. It doesn’t flinch in showing the escalating violence in the Turner marriage. Bleeding noses, black eyes, furious fists and a rape scene in a recording studio that is almost unbearably visceral, What’s Love Got to Do with It? indeed: this is marriage as Dantean hell.

Tina Turner later felt the film went too far in depicting her as victim, but also not far enough in showing the violence in their marriag [AN1] e. (Ike Turner, needless to say, was equally unhappy – but who cares.) What she praised though was Angela Bassett’s performance. Cast at short notice, Bassett worked overtime to master Turner’s vocal and physical mannerisms. It’s a nailed-on performance, but Bassett also completely drills down into the heart of a woman who finds herself lost in a situation outside of her control, terrified but discovering the inner strength needed to lead her own life.

It’s a hugely emotional performance. Bassett makes Tina fiery, determined and talented – but even the strongest person can find themselves trapped in (and defending) destructive relationships. Despite the early example of Ike’s previous girlfriend Lorraine (a very good Penny Johnson), driven to a suicide attempt by Ike, despite his vanity and jealousy being clear early on, (as well as his control freak desire to dictate every inch of her life ,including changing her name to Tina Turner without her agreement), Tina is captivated by Ike.

As their relationship deteriorates, for all his vileness, Bassett’s Turner defends and excuses her husband. Whether he beats her up at home in front of the kids (and brings a dress home later as an apology) or smashes a cake into her face in a restaurant, it’s never quite his fault. He’s fragile, he’s an artist, sometimes she just makes him mad. Bassett brilliantly shows how this Orwellian double think can settle in, so that a woman like Turnerstays with her abuser for 16 years of marriage, until she realises she can break free.

Bassett’s electric performance is perfectly complemented by Laurence Fishburne’s burning, self-pitying performance of weakness and insecurity masked by anger and fury. Fishburne turned down the film five times (it was Bassett’s presence that eventually persuaded him). He felt the film didn’t do enough to show why Turner became the man he did. To be fair, he’s probably right. Turner has an early scene where he speaks of his childhood trauma (a fig leaf for his bullying) which Fishburne gives a real humanity, and he invests the early sequences with charm and charisma.

But Fishburne, like Bassett, doesn’t slack on the energy. As cocaine and envy eat Ike up, his body language becomes more bear-like, his speech ever more mumbled. His eyes cloud over with a look of hate. Only actors who trust each other completely could play these appalling scenes of domestic violence with such complete and utter commitment. Both Bassett and Fishburne give a horrible life to these shocking and sickening moments of hurt and pain.

Both actors essentially elevate material that, at heart, is standard biopic stuff, built around the usual obstacles – albeit the obstacle this time is hideous domestic violence. We see the roots of Turner’s career, the early hits, the terrible turmoil, so appalling that the final act triumph really moves. Gibson recreates Turner performances with expertise, each packing a real punch. Bassett’s capturing of Turner’s performance style is spot-on and her lip synching is flawlessly convincing.

What’s Love Got to Do with It demonstrates how hard it is to escape abusive relationships. But, the film though doesn’t quite manage to fully build the real life behind the characters. I can get why Tina Turner felt the film positioned her as too much of a victim, as it prioritises this aspect of her life before all others. While it’s made clear that Ike lived a life in which he victimised a series of women, the film’s focus on this issue diminishes the other aspects of Tina’s life and the building of her own career, making her for a large part of the film a punching bag for an abuser.

So, the survival makes for deeply affecting viewing. To see Tina return the punches and flee from a hotel in LA to find refuge in another hotel (she was granted a free room by a deeply sympathetic hotel manager who can read between the lines). Her refusal to be scared when, like all bullies, Ike comes crawling back begging forgiveness and then switches smoothly to threats when that doesn’t work. And above all the triumph of her career. The only thing she wanted from the divorce was the name “Tina Turner” – she had bled for it. And we saw it. What’s Love Got to Do with It might be, in many ways, a standard biopic but with two such forceful performances it has special moments.

Othello (1952)

Welles distinctive Shakespeare epic is a masterpiece of turning the Bard into film

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Orson Welles (Othello), Michéal Mac Liammóir (Iago), Robert Coote (Roderigo), Suzanne Cloultier (Desdemona), Hilton Edwards (Brabantio), Nicholas Bruce (Ludovico), Michael Laurence (Cassio), Fay Compton (Emilia)

In the early 1950s Orson Welles was in the wilderness. After the implosion of his career in Hollywood, he was grifting a living in Europe, juggling multiple ventures and paying for things (or not) with cheques from quick film cameos. But the fire was still there. Welles wanted a project which he would have complete control over. Shakespeare was the ideal collaborator: both free and dead, here was a man who offered an ocean of ideas and not a word of criticism, who would make no demands he re-cut the picture. A marriage of convenience but it led to cinematic triumph.

Othello would be an Welles production from top-to-bottom. Largely self-funded, a few investors chucked in liras for a share of profits (you can imagine Welles as Shakespeare in Love’s Fennyman grinning that was fine because “there never are any”) it became a labour of love over years. Welles begged, borrowed and flat-out stole film stock and camera equipment from assorted productions, kept costumes from for-the-money roles he did to keep the operation flowing (famously his Othello coat was a costume which he’d requested a fur-lining added to, that went unseen in the film it was made for but came rolling out in Othello). Actors were summoned, sometimes months apart, to shoot. Scenes would start filming in one location and finish filming months later somewhere completely different. Welles sat in the middle holding the entire film in his head.

It’s extraordinary that Othello is even coherent. The fact that it’s also a masterpiece of film Shakespeare is a miracle. But, cut loose from the bonds of Hollywood studio execs and not giving a damn about the bills (he had the cheek of genius so never picked up a tab) allowed Welles the scope to experiment and do things “his way”. Othello is the most purely “Welles film” since Citizen Kane, and a tour-de-force of cinematic inventiveness with poverty and lack of resources drawing the best out of a director who marshalled all his gifts of editing and lighting to make resourceful use of limited resources. It’s guerrilla film-making that looks like an epic.

What you could argue Othello is not is a truly original look at Shakespeare’s play – or really an actor’s piece. Welles’ passions for Shakespeare always felt as much about having a grand canvas of poetic language to impose his own vision on, cutting and changing as needed. Thematically, Othello is pretty much what you would expect. Welles’ Othello is the noble Moor pushed into a spiral of jealousy. Michéal Mac Liammóir’s (the finest performance) Iago is a dastardly liar, with faint hints of sexually motived envy. Desdemona is as pure as the driven snow, Emilia a faithful servant, Rodrigo a simpering idiot, Cassio a pretty boy. Our sympathies lie firmly where Shakespeare would expect.

Everything that is unique about the film lies in its telling. Othello is a breath-takingly beautiful film, which uses its locations to astonishing effect. Column lined castle rooms and towering walls create caverns of light and shadow. Welles uses the fixed points of columns to add a dizzying level of speed to camera movements that see these columns whip past the frame. The shadows of grills are frequently cast across faces and light creates looming shadows across the floor. Welles plays into this with the creation of light pools, concentrating it on single fixed points, often faces, with the surroundings bathed in black. The film presents real locations in defiantly expressionistic ways, giving each of them an elemental power that heightens the tragedy.

It’s a film made up of stunning set-pieces. It’s opening funeral cortege – like Citizen Kane, Othello starts at the end with Othello and Desdemona dead and Iago in chains – follows a march over city walls, playing out in striking shadow against the brightness of the sun, with booming, Gothic music giving the sequence an imposing sense of inevitability. Iago is paraded by a mob and placed in a cage, lifted above the city wall (this same cage frequently appears throughout the movie – including, once, having Iago walk nonchalantly under it – as a grim reminder of where this is heading). It’s a perfect marriage of sound and music, disguising the small scale with cinematic force.

Taking advantage of limitations time-and-again makes Othello great. Another striking sequence was born from necessity. With most of the costumes impounded for non-payment of shipping bills, the attempted murder of Cassio is re-staged in a Turkish bath (who needs costumes when we have towels!) a decision that turns the sequence into a masterpiece of light through steam, increased by the frenetic energy Welles shoots the sequence with culminating in its Lang-inspired super-imposing as Iago thrusts his sword down into the floorboards to dispatch Rodrigo.

Othello is frequently filled with imaginative camera angles. Often characters observe others from great heights – twice through sky lights, starring down at conflicts, murders and suicides. Iago and Rodrigo spy on Othello’s gondola romance with Desdemona from a distant bridge. The ramparts of Cyprus provide towering angles, over soldiers or wave-crashed rocks below. The camera also takes a number of low-angle positions, making characters (often Othello) tower over us. Clever angles and perspective work create whole ships out of sheets of fabric and basic models.

It’s also a triumph of editing. Welles assembled the film from a never-ending supply of fragments. Frequently actors appear with their backs to the camera while we hear them speak – as Welles said, a sure sign the actual actor wasn’t there. Like few other films, Othello feels like a film excavated from its shooting. It’s a film almost constantly in motion, rarely stopping to focus on an actor delivering a line (Othello’s first speech, parts of Iago’s speeches and Emilia’s speech to Desdemona being the main moments the film focuses on actor’s delivery – no doubt connected to those three actors being the ones Welles trusted).

Away from that, the camera often fast cuts and delivers scenes in motion, with actors speaking off camera as we focus on the events around them. This means the dialogue is repeatedly chopped, changed and trimmed to meet the needs of the scene. It helps make the film even more pacey and frighteningly interior – conversations become snatched and fast, words flung from angles we cannot see, ramping up the paranoia. Large chunks of it is redubbed by Welles himself – a light version of his distinctive tones clearly emerges from Robert Coote’s mouth and Michael Laurence’s Cassio has a familiar cadence. In some cuts, Welles also replaced Suzanne Cloultier’s voice with Gudron Ure (with whom he played the role on stage).

If there is a major flaw in Othello it’s probably the acting, frequently looking under rehearsed, with Welles himself a leading culprit. His Othello is underpowered and feels under-defined. There is little sense of an interior to his mind and Welles’ surprisingly somnolent delivery tends to crush much of the emotion. It’s hard not to think Welles was so focused on juggling every other factor, that he compromised on his acting. Only Mac Liammóir, Compton and Edwards look truly comfortable with their roles – and even they offer traditional readings.

But Othello is about turning Shakespeare to cinema and if Shakespeare himself is slightly sacrificed in the push, it doesn’t detract from the stunning theatrical beauty we get instead. Othello becomes a lean, pacey thriller, crammed with stunning imagery and imaginative flourishes (Rodrigo’s faithful dog, following sadly after his master, is a gorgeously little playful touch). It’s a film where light and shadow are major plays, where footsteps in subterranean water pools create ripples of motion and echoes of noise, that shows the greatness that can be born from necessity. It’s one of the greatest Shakespeare films.

The Sixth Sense (1999)

Shyamalan’s opus has just enough to reward re-watching after the world learned its secret

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Cast: Bruce Willis (Dr Malcolm Crowe), Haley Joel Osment (Cole Sear), Toni Collette (Lynn Sear), Olivia Williams (Anna Crowe), Donnie Wahlberg (Vincent Grey), Glenn Fitzgerald (Sean), Mischa Barton (Kyra Collins), Trevor Morgan (Tommy), Bruce Norris (Mr Cunningham)

Does this film have the most famous twist of all time? M. Night Shyamalan’s opus is so dominated by its final reveal (look away now) that Bruce Willis was is in fact a ghost, that every single viewing of it afterwards is focused on watching every second and seeing if you can spot the joins. I’m not sure if that has made for a long shelf-life or not for The Sixth Sense, an otherwise surprisingly sweet Stephen King-ish story of a child coming to terms with a miraculous power. Is there much more to The Sixth Sense by a third viewing though – can the magician’s trick land a third time?

I’d say just about. A year on from the shooting of famed child psychologist Dr Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) by a former patient he failed to help, his traumatised wife Anna (Olivia Williams) has stopped speaking to him and Malcolm needs redemption. Could he find it with the case of troubled ten-year-old Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). Cole, despite his obvious good nature, is frequently moody and terrified by curious incidents. His mother Lynn (Toni Collette) despairs as Cole seemingly refuses to talk to her. Can there be truth in Cole’s belief that he can see, and talk with, dead people?

The Sixth Sense has the reputation of a supernatural chiller. But, bar a few jump scares as ghosts walk across screen to sudden, loud musical notes, it’s actually a far more gentle story. In Shyamalan’s world the ghosts are not malevolent or cruel – they are simply confused, lost souls (of course “some of them don’t even know they’re dead”) with unfinished business. They are, in other words, rather like the rest of us – and Cole’s realisation of this is actually rather sweet.

This humanity is the real triumph of the film, helped enormously by the untricksy care Shyamalan unfolds his story with. While almost every film he made since teetered from disappointment to disaster (with ever more desperate attempts to recapture the rug-pull zeitgeist to ever diminishing returns from increasingly savvy audiences), The Sixth Sense is a reminder of the road not taken. If Shyamalan had focused on small-scale, intimate character dramas like this he could have had quite the CV. His camera work is careful, often unobtrusive, gentle in its slow, immersive movement and he backs aware almost entirely from fast cutting. The Sixth Sense is really a spooky fairy tale.

It also creates an environment for four impressive actors to tackle four challenging roles. From Olivia Williams, whose marvellously detailed performance of utterly naturally not reacting goes a huge way to maintaining the film’s delicate tightrope to the (Oscar-nominated) Toni Collette, who superbly channels deep motherly love and pained helplessness under a blowsy exterior.

Bruce Willis (who only took the film on under contractual obligation) gives possibly his finest performance here. Suppressing his natural cocksure confidence into suppressed confusion and guilt, he convinces as an expert plagued with self-doubt. It’s a quiet, expressive performance that’s a tribute to the acting chops Willis had when he was moved beyond smirks.

It’s also a very supportive performance that helps bring the best out of a gifted child actor. Haley Joel Osment carries a large chunk of the film. He’s vulnerable and scared but also older than his years, alternating between the innocent excitement of a child and the weary reflection of a much older man. He creates a character you both want to comfort and also cheer for his growing strength. Shyamalan works with both actors to continually subtly shift the power balance between them without ever showing the film’s hand.

Because, of course, Cole knows the truth from the start – no one is better at spotting these things than him, and his unwillingness to speak to Malcolm within ear shot of others (such as during their first real consultation while his mother prepares dinner in the kitchen) speaks volumes. No wonder he keeps shooting him those looks of pity and concern which we, at first, interpret as fear.

You can’t escape that the film’s pretence, on repeated viewing, demands the viewer to reach some tenuous conclusions on how Ghosts operate. I think there is just enough there to suggest – from the sudden appearance and disappearance of ghosts – that they operate like we do in a dream, suddenly finding themselves in places with no memories of how they got there. They can move some objects, but only if they allow themselves to “see” them. They imagine what their own appearances are (the film implies Malcolm always appears in his blood soaked shirt to Cole, it’s just we see Malcolm’s perception of himself as a suited psychiatrist) and are subconsciously drawn towards people who can see them or who they have unfinished business with. The pretence just about sustains itself.

But is there more to the film than that? Pleasingly – and a little to my surprise – there is. While The Sixth Sense is more spooky than terrifying, that’s because it’s a film where helping and caring for people is the answer. No matter how horrific looking the ghosts seem, they are really scared people looking for help. This realisation – and the way Cole seemingly decides to commit his life to helping them – is actually extremely affecting. It’s a basic message of not judging a poltergeist by its cover, that really works.

It’s these beats that really work on a second or third viewing. I would trade the whole “he’s a ghost” twist for that gorgeous final scene between Collette and Osment in a car, where he finally confesses and shares a family secret from the grave to Collette’s initial confusion, anger and then emotional release. It’s a beautiful scene (it surely nailed Collette an Oscar nomination) and is the finest moment of Shyamalan’s career. It also shows the heart of the film – this is a parent-son film (with two parents), that’s about learning to love and accept. Everything else is really just set-dressing.

The magic trick (and Shyamalan hints at the sleight of hand he’s pulling by having Malcolm perform a similar distraction trick) may lose its mystique, but it then allows you to focus on the emotion that made you care about the trick in the first place. And, let’s be honest, the emotional heart is really what made the film a phenomenon. Any film can have a rug-pull twist – but it only really connects if people already cared about what they were watching. The Sixth Sense focuses on making sure we invest and it’s that which makes the film last, when all the glitz of the trick has faded.

Spellbound (1945)

Hitchcock dives into psychiatry with mixed success in a middle-brow effort

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Ingrid Bergman (Dr Constance Petersen), Gregory Peck (Dr Edwardes/John Brown/John Ballantyne), Michael Chekhov (Dr Alexander Brulov), Leo G Carroll (Dr Murchison), Rhonda Fleming (Mary Carmichael), John Emery (Dr Fleurot), Norman Lloyd (Mr Garmes)

Spellbound was born out of Selznick’s faith in the magic of psychiatry. It opens with a touchingly naïve dedication that stresses a little touch of Freud is a magic bullet: “once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear and the devils of unreason are driven from the human soul”. Oh, would that it was so easy. Spellbound turns psychiatry as a sort of detective game, the subconscious a sort of smorgasbord of clues that, when shuffled into the correct order, will produce the answer.

The mystery is what exactly has happened to the new head of Green Manors Psychiatric Hospital, Dr Edwardes, here to replace the not-exactly-happy-to-retire Dr Murchison (Leo G Carroll)? The man who has arrived claiming to be Edwardes (Gregory Peck) may be charming but his odd obsessions with dark parallel markings on white surfaces, tendency to faint and lack of familiarity with psychiatry in general raise suspicions. Dr Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman), leading light of the Hospital, deduces Edwardes or “JB” as he vaguely remembers his initials being, is suffering from guilt-induced amnesia. Petersen refuses to believe – despite mounting evidence – that this man she has fallen in love with could be a killer. On the run, she recruits her old mentor Dr Brulov (Michael Chekov) to help analyse JB’S dreams, convinced the answer to the mystery is there.

Selznick hired his psychiatrist to act as a consultant on the film. This didn’t matter that much to Hitchcock, who considered the film essentially another murder-mystery thriller with a bit of Freudian dressing and bluntly told the advisor at one point when she protested yet another inaccuracy “my dear, it’s only a movie”. Spellbound is a decent, mid-level Hitchcock effort, with a touch or two of the master’s invention and magic, but which slows down for an extended act three analysis scene crammed with dodgy psychiatry and a detailed Salvador Dali-inspired dream sequence.

Of course, no one watching the film (rather like Cary Grant in Suspicion) could ever believe for a minute that the charming, handsome Gregory Peck is actually a murderer. Hitchcock’s trick is to keep the tension up, since (at best) there are only two suspects (and only one of them has a heavily advertised motive). You could argue here the trick is a “howdunnit” rather than a “who”. What mystery is Peck holding in his head and why can’t he remember who he is? Hitchcock throws in a host of little flourishes to keep us guessing, and if he clearly cares very little about Freudian insight (just as well, imagine the field day Freud would have had with Hitch) that hardly seems to matter.

Spellbound still manages to fairly barrel along, with a sparky script by Ben Hecht interweaving screwball banter between Peck and Bergman with cod-psychiatry. Hitchcock lets most of this play out fairly traditionally, but punctuates it with moments of flair. An early romance dialogue takes place in voiceover over a series of shots of doors opening to reveal a never-ending corridor (a neat visual metaphor for delving inside the mind). A tracking shot on a disturbed Peck down a flight of stairs, focuses on a cut-throat razor in his hand, ending with the razor alarmingly large in-shot. Disturbing POV shots make objects appear ultra-large, from a glass of milk (echoes of Suspicion) to a gun barrel turned to face us at the film’s conclusion. All of this is accompanied by an excellent score by Miklos Rosza which brings together romantic strings and the theremin to suggest the unsettling undercurrents of the subconscious. Rosza, rightly, won an Oscar for his hugely atmospheric work.

Spellbound is also notable for the way it inverts gender expectations. Peck effectively plays the damsel-in-distress here. Vulnerable and scared about what he could do, he lapses into catatonic panicked silence as much as smooth banter. Instead, for all the film stresses her feminine weakness when in love, it’s Dr Petersen who is the protagonist here. Played with a relaxed authority by Bergman, Constance is an assured professional and a dedicated campaigner for the truth. It’s she who constantly drives the plot forward and its her who plays both doctor and detective to crack the case and confront (with an assured coolness) the killer.

Hitchcock’s film provides a subtle commentary on the experience of women. Searching for JB in a hotel lobby, Petersen is first pestered by a drunk traveller who drunkenly all-but calls her a cock-tease when she asks him to leave her alone. Even when saved from an unpleasant scene by a hotel detective, he assumes her to be a schoolteacher or governess, and Petersen immediately recognises that disguising her accomplishments is a perfect way to gain this would-be-saviour’s help. Petersen also has to shrug off the pestering attentions of a colleague (John Emery).

But it’s her who eventually deduces the meaning of JB’s dream. This dream was heavily promoted as the work of Salvador Dali. While full of striking imagery, it feels more like a pastiche of Dali, as if a Hollywood art director threw The Persistence of Memory and Eyes for Your Eyes at the wall see what stuck. Which is pretty much what happened: Dali’s work was largely discarded for being too weird and overlong and William Cameron Menzies was bought into create something in Dali’s style. Selznick hardly cared – what mattered was promoting the Dali collaboration (Hitchcock had little to do with the scene, until it drew praise and he then claimed authorship).

It’s another striking moment in Spellbound. But truthfully the film is a careful construction of striking moments and performances, which power a simplistic and unrealistic plot which relies on coincidence and bizarre logic gaps. Psychiatry is a magic bullet – it’s hard to imagine anyone in real life reacting with the sort of glee JB does here when he discovers he didn’t murder his brother in his childhood, only accidentally fatally impaled him on some railings outside his house. The “revelations” from the analysis takes an over-extended single session with the unconscious yielding a series of Agatha Christie-style clues.

But then that fits Spellbound in the tradition of Hollywood psychiatry, from this to Ordinary People to Good Will Hunting, a touch of confession on a couch eventually solves all problems (all the kissing Peck gets from Bergman – which didn’t stop off camera – also clearly helped). Hitchcock’s work here is professional, but middlebrow. However, the odd imaginative shot, and the impressive performances (Bergman, Peck and also famous acting-coach Michael Chekov, immensely playful and Oscar-nominated as Constance’s cuddly mentor) still make this an entertaining watch.

M (1931)

Lang’s masterpiece, a thrilling and complex crime drama that explores the horrors of crime and mob justice

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Peter Lorre (Hans Breckett), Gustaf Gründgens (Safecracker), Otto Wernicke (Inspector Lohmann), Ellen Widmann (Mother Beckmann), Inge Landgut (Elsie Beckmann), Theodor Loos (Inspector Groeber), Friedrich Gnaß (Franz, the burglar), Fritz Odemar (Cheater), Paul Kemp (Pickpocket), Theo Lingen (Conman), Rudolf Blümner (Beckert’s defender)

A murderer prowls Berlin’s streets. For weeks children have been murdered and the citizens are at fever pitch. The police are desperately trying every weapon in their investigative arsenal. The heightened police presence on the streets hampers the lives of regular criminals: they too decide to take matters into their own hands, pooling their resources to catch the killer. And the killer himself? Not a mastermind, but a peculiar, timid man (Peter Lorre), a slave to uncontrollable impulses.

All this forms Fritz Lang’s masterpiece, his first sound film and one of the greatest German films of all time. A rich, psychologically detailed procedural thriller it is a stunning indictment of mob violence, a detailed look at the flawed assumptions of the official forces and an unflinching look at the horrific personal impact of crime. Lang’s film is extraordinary, a brilliant mix of impressionistic insight and documentary realism covered in an all-revealing social tapestry. It’s gripping and extraordinary.

Lang’s film was heavily inspired by real-life cases, most notably Peter Kürten (“the Vampire of Dusseldorf”) and the structure of the Weimar police department. Just like the real Berlin, his fictional one has a criminal underworld governed by a sort of German mafia, the Ringvereine, who a bizarre social set of rules among criminals. M tied into debates around the death penalty: was it right to take a life, even for unspeakable crimes? Is a life in a psychiatric prison fair for the murderer of several children? M is fascinating as it provides enough ambiguity to support either side (Goebbels claimed, when watching it, that it was a sure sign that Lang would become “one of us”).

This stems from Lang’s superbly detailed, anthropological filming style, which throws the viewer into the centre of a world that feels extremely real. Streets are lined with beggars and an array of adverts, posters and political messages. The camera prowls down streets and over tenement blocks, catching shadows and gets lost in cigarette smoke. It captures every detail of the Berlin police department: forensic labs that breakdown fingerprints, annotated maps, criminal psychologists pontificating on the intellectual make-up of the killer based on his handwritten notes to newspapers. Detective Lohmann (an increasingly harried Otto Wernicke) puffs cigars, pulls together facts and fails to make any real progress, looking increasingly buffeted by events rather than controlling them.

It’s one of the film’s subtle criticisms of the political situation at its time. The official forces have every resource going, but seem powerless. Instead, Lang contrasts them ever more closely with the criminal underworld or use brute, uncontrolled, unordered force to tackle the problem. Is it my imagination, or is there the stench of Nazism in this group? Their nameless leader (Gustaf Gründgens) strides, with a leather-clad firmness, emotionlessly forward, fixated on the end result – despite, with at least three murders on his score card, arguably not being that different from the man he’s chasing killer. He instructs the criminals to effectively throw a dictatorial cordon around the city, their solution being stamping out freedom and taking unilateral action.

Lang’s film is sharply critical of the kneejerk horrors of this mob justice. Crowds are whipped up by press coverage (which they excitedly read, the papers hitting the streets with a special edition after every murder) into a mob desperate to lash out, crowding around posters offering rewards for catching the killer. A man giving the time to a child in the street is nearly lynched, a raised camera angle reducing him to a tiny figure compared to his aggressor towering over him. A group of people playing cards in a bar descend into blows after one accuses the other of behaving suspiciously. The criminal put together a show trial (with a token, powerless defence counsel) where the killer is allowed a few brief words before his pre-ordained lynching (no legality with Nazism).

Again, it’s hard not to consider the growth of street violence in Germany in 1931, an atmosphere where justice was slowly dying as the Nazi party argued people had the right to take violent action against those who they see as enemies of the state. The criminal organisation here are worryingly efficient and organised. Lang brilliantly intercuts between two meetings, both in smoke-filled rooms, as the police and the criminals plan their operations. Sentences started in one location are finished in another. Complementary camera angles echo each other. In the police meeting there are also calls for unilateral action. Lang criticises the authorities who are active but ineffective (and some sympathetic to the criminal’s viewpoint), as much as the brutal mob justice of the criminals.

And the killer himself? Brilliantly played by Peter Lorre (who resembles a perpetually frightened paedophilic toad), Hans Breckett is weak, feeble, as scared of himself as he is of others, unable to understand or control his urges. He is driven by a whistling tune of In the Hall of the Mountain King for Grieg (a whistling that he sometimes produces, at others seems to hear around him) and consumes the things he desires – be they apples, drinks or children – with an impulsive immediacy. His letters to the papers suggest he is desperate to be seen. But when he is, chased by the crowds, he’s weak, terrified and utterly unimposing, trembling amongst the flotsam of a factory almost indistinguishable from the debris around him. At his trial he attempts to vindicate himself with a whining desperation. But, as Lang quietly suggests, do we have the right to kill him?

After all, Breckett is almost certainly a war veteran. He shares that with several other characters – as we are reminded by beggars with wooden limbs. Maybe his split personality – perhaps that’s why he stares with curiosity at his own face in the mirror, as if he doesn’t recognise himself – is a relic of a conflict where men were encouraged to kill, then returned back into society where expected to do the opposite. Perhaps the same feelings also lie behind the ease so many people have with mob justice – and also those in the criminal jury who show some sympathy for Breckett’s forbidden urges.

As well as balancing these complex ideas, Lang’s film is also a masterpiece of visual and aural technique. A child’s death is suggested by a newly orphaned ball rolling into frame. A gorgeous hand-held camera shot wanders through the beggar’s bar, where beggars gather used cigars, rescued sandwich fillings and sign up to be the criminal’s eyes on the street. Sound transitions between scenes are handled with an extraordinary confidence. The silence of armies of policeman walking through the streets turning into burst of noise as they move through raids. The Grieg leitmotif is used to brilliant effect.

Lang’s film though never forgets the victims. we start and end with the parents. The mother of the film’s first victim, Elsie Beckmann, waits with increasing panic in her apartment, each knock of the door promising her daughter’s return but disappointing (we’ve already seen Elsie disappear, hand-in-hand, with Breckett’s whistling shadow). It’s to her the film returns to her at the end, her tear-stained face telling us no sentence will bring back the dead. Appearing over a wordless scene of Beckett’s actual trial (the result of which we never discover), its Lang’s subtle reminder that mob justice brings only false satisfaction, that killing never heals the wounds of loss and our effort would be better directed to protection rather than revenge. It’s a message that feels particularly poignant in a German film made in the final years before Nazism would lead the country into devastation.

Filled with stunning film-making confidence, mixing documentary realism and brilliantly confident visual and audio mastery, Lang’s M could be argued to be one of the greatest film noir detective dramas ever made – and also a brilliantly insightful look at human and social nature. M is a masterpiece, as gripping and relevant today as it was Lang filmed it.