Category: Films about revenge

The Searchers (1956)

Searchers header
Jeffrey Hunter and John Wayne on a long search, in John Ford’s exploration of racism in the West The Searchers

Director: John Ford

Cast: John Wayne (Ethan Edwards), Jeffrey Hunter (Martin Pawley), Vera Miles (Laurie Jorgensen), Ward Bond (Reverend Captain Samuel Johnson Clayton), Natalie Wood (Debbie Edwards), John Qualen (Lars Jorgensen), Olive Carey (Mrs Jorgensen), Henry Brandon (Scar), Beulah Archuletta (Look), Ken Curtis (Charlie McCorry), Harry Carey Jnr (Brad Jorgensen), Hank Warden (Mose Harper), Dorothy Jordan (Martha Edwards), Walter Coy (Aaron Edwards), Pippa Scott (Lucy Edwards)

John Ford’s career was a long tribute to the decency of the regular American. How fascinating then that one of his greatest films is in fact a dark investigation into the dangers of obsession, vengeance and prejudice in ordinary Americans. Working with his regular leading man, John Wayne, together they created a character who shared many qualities with Ford’s other leading men – a rugged, determined, taciturn man of the wilderness – but laced him with deeply negative attitudes and a horrendously damaged psyche. The Searchers becomes a masterpiece, presenting how narrow the line between hero and villain can be while – in an admittedly very gentle way – posing questions about the claims of the settlers to moral superiority.

Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) returns to his brother’s homestead from an unspecified (though clearly morally questionable) career as a gun for hire after fighting for the confederacy (a cause he sees no reason to disavow). He’s an awkward presence, with an unspoken love for his brother Aaron’s (Walter Coy) wife Martha (Dorothy Jordan) and a racial hostility towards their adopted son Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) who is one-eighth Cherokee. Shortly after his arrival, an Indian raid draws him and most of the local men on a futile chase. While they are gone, the Edwards’ homestead is destroyed, with the family all murdered except daughter Debbie. Ethan and Martin begin what becomes a five-year quest to find her and bring her home – although as he discovers Debbie has become wife to her kidnapper, the war chief Scar (Henry Brandon), Ethan’s aim shifts from rescue to executing Debbie for racial disloyalty.

Racism is what lies at the heart of The Searchers and around discussions of the film today. Firstly, let’s acknowledge how brave the film is in presenting Ethan’s racially motivated rage without excuse. This was after all John Wayne, the straightest shooter of the lot. Here, in no doubt his greatest ever performance, Wayne’s Mount Rushmore-like qualities are inverted into a bitter, lonely man whose murderous rage against the Native Americans is extreme, even within an environment which sees the tribes as a dangerous “other”.

Edwards’ racism tips into everything and is there right from the start: “I could mistake you for a half breed” he scowls at Martin. Later he will prevent Martin drinking alcohol – a clear reference to the belief among settlers that one drop of alcohol turns Indians into savage beasts. One of his first actions on the trail is to desecrate the buried corpse of an Indian, shooting out his eyes (condemning him to walk sightless in the afterlife). In a gunfight he has to be stopped from shooting retreating Indians in the back. Later, in a crazed fury, he guns down buffalo simply to deny them as food to the tribes. That’s not to mention his disgust with every trace of indigenous culture.

What’s striking watching the film is that, even though he’s the central character and is played by John Wayne, Ethan may well actually be the villain of the piece – or at best an anti-hero wild card. Our actual hero is the kindly, decent and brave Martin Pawley, played with a slight nervousness by Jeffrey Hunter. Martin is appalled by Ethan’s violence, his anger and above all by his plan for enforcing racial harmony by exterminating the niece he sees as a race traitor. It’s not just the fact he has Cherokee blood that makes Martin appalled by the danger in Ethan. It’s the simple fact that he’s just a decent guy, who recognises that good and bad isn’t a question of race but a question of people. And his presence on the quest, it’s made clear, is as much about protecting Debbie from Ethan as it is finding and rescuing her.

You can see these attitudes quite clearly late in the film, where the pair encounter white women who have been recovered from Indian kidnappers. These women are confused and traumatised. But while Martin attempts to communicate with and comfort them, to Ethan they are worse than nothing now. “They ain’t white anymore” he scowls at a soldier. Leaving them, Ford holds the shot on Wayne who turns to look back at them with a face dripping with such disgust and loathing, it sears into the memory.

Does the film condemn these attitudes? You can argue that the film plays into a racial nightmare – white women kidnapped and violated by savage tribesmen. But Ford is, I’d suggest, presenting racism here – and going as far as he could in the 1950s to attack it. Ethan and Martin encounter an Indian settlement that has been attacked by the cavalry. The settlement is a burnt-out husk, with Indian women and children among those indiscriminately slain – visually it is immediately reminiscent of the burnt-out Edwards homestead. Another later cavalry charge against the Indians will again see panicked women and children flee in terror. Even Scar, the villain of the piece, is motivated just like Ethan by anger – his actions are a response to the murder of two of his children. And his scalping, rape and murder don’t look so different from Ethan, who shoots people in the back, plans to murder his niece and later scalps a dead man.

The Searchers takes a slightly nihilistic view that the West was a violent place – for all the beauty Ford discovers in his crisply sublime shots of monument valley – and that many of the people in it had questionable motives and principles. A ”hero” for this time might well be Ethan, a sullen and violent man under a veneer of gentlemanly politeness, clearly motivated from the start far more by a desire for revenge for the murder of the woman he loves. Ford, Wayne and Jordan establish this love between Ethan and Martha subtly but unmistakably – the opening scenes are littered with moments of the two of them sharing glances and a hesitant but unmistakeable physical intimacy.

Again, a lot of the quality of this comes back to the wonderful work Ford draws from Wayne, helping the actor to find the cracks and flaws in this marble bust of Americanism. Wayne’s Ethan is awkward, angry, distant, difficult, cruel – a natural outsider, who has grown bitter against the world. Discovering Martha’s body, Wayne also allows Ethan to crumple into the sort of grief that translates within seconds into an iron loathing for the world and everything in it. He talks of the certainty of finding Debbie – but it’s a certainty born more of his idea of his own superior (white) determination rather than any faith (for all the language could suggest that). Ethan is in fact hostile and contemptuous of faith of any sort.

Ford frames Ethan frequently as an outsider, often framed uncomfortably in doorways, darkened walls seeming to close around him. Nowhere is this more beautifully done than in the film’s final shot which finds Ethan alone and forgotten outside the Jorgensen homestead, a man who has no place in the civilised world of family and friends, but an outsider with no place anywhere who must return to the wilderness. Wayne does this with a quiet, deflating gentleness – a beautiful suggestion of Ethan’s knowledge that the world is leaving him behind. Ford frames this beautifully in mid-shot to create one of the iconic images of cinema.

The Searchers isn’t perfect. There is a prolonged, slightly comic, sub-plot around Martin’s marriage to Laurie Jorgensen (Vera Miles in a thankless part), which culminates in the sort of fisticuff based comic stuff that looks more suited to The Quiet Man than here. The beautiful shots of monument valley are brilliantly done – but they also serve to point out the odd decision to shoot many of the exteriors on such obviously fake soundstages. While the film questions the attitudes and assumptions made about the Native American people in Hollywood films, the violent figure of Scar is the only Native American character given any real screen time (Martin’s accidental “wife” Look is treated as a joke, right up to her surprisingly tragic fate), making it easier to still see the tribes as an existential threat to civilisation, for all that Ford tries to contrast their suffering with the death of the settlers.

But Ford was trying to sneak something in here under the wire, at a time when people would only accept straight-forward stories of goodies and baddies in the West. He did this by turning Wayne for a pillar of taciturn goodness into someone who is almost a mirror image of his nemesis Scar, both men motivated by racial hatred. He parallels the violence of the Indians with the cavalry. He suggests in fact that there was good and bad on both sides. And I can’t think of another film where the viewer is convinced for a huge portion of the runtime that our hero intends to carry out an honour killing. The Searchers presents a man who holds racist views and trusts that we are smart enough to see the danger in Ethan’s extremism. Thankfully most of us are.

Gladiator (2000)

Russell Crowe dominates in Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning Gladiator

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Russell Crowe (Maximus Decimus Meridius), Joaquin Phoenix (Emperor Commodus), Connie Nielsen (Lucilla), Richard Harris (Emperor Marcus Aurelius), Oliver Reed (Proximo), Derek Jacobi (Senator Gracchus), Djimon Hounsou (Juba), Tomas Arana (General Quintus), Spencer Treat Clark (Lucius Verus), David Schofield (Senator Falco), John Shrapnel (Senator Gaius), Rolf Moller (Hagen), Tommy Flanagan (Cicero), David Hemmings (Cassius)

When Gladiator hit the big-screen the swords-and-sandals epic genre was dead. A relic of the early days of technicolour Hollywood, where the widest possible screens were designed to tempt audiences away from the television and into the movie theatre, Roman epics were often seen as stodgy things, usually carrying heavy-handed Christian themes while gleefully throwing as much of the decadence of the empire on the screen as possible. Gladiator changed all that, bringing an emotional and psychological complexity to the genre, as well as a rollicking good story and some brilliant film-making. An Oscar for Best Picture confirmed the genre was back.

In 180 AD General Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe) commands the final battle of the Roman forces to conquer the German tribes and bring them under the control of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris). The humble, dutiful and principled Maximus is a natural leader and the son Marcus Aurelius wishes he had, rather than the son he has the insecure and ambitious Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). When the Emperor decides that Maximus not Commodus will succeed him – with the brief to restore the Roman republic – Commodus murders the Emperor. When Maximus refuses to give Commodus his loyalty, the new Emperor sentences him and his family to death. Maximus escapes, although he is badly injured, but arrives too late at his home to save his wife and son from death. Collapsing, the General is taken by slavers, healed by fellow slave Juba (Djimon Hounsou) and sold to the North African Gladiator school of Proximo (Oliver Reed). Maximus will play the Gladiator game – because he longs to have his revenge on Commodus.

Gladiator is superbly directed by Ridley Scott, who perfectly mixes the epic scale of the drama with the intimate, human story at its heart. The film looks absolutely fantastic from start to finish, with the superb visuals backed by a breathtakingly beautiful score by Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard that skilfully uses refrains and themes to instantly identify the core emotions in the audiences mind. These themes are associated with emotional beats that immediately plug us into the interior thoughts and emotions of the characters. 

It works because of the emotional truth at its heart. Basically it’s a love story between a man and his dead wife, and isn’t afraid to explore the depths of love that we feel for those closest to us and our pain of their loss. Maximus’ wife and child are represented in silent flashbacks and by two small icons Maximus carries with him on campaign. When, late in the film, he is reunited with these items his raw, tearfully quiet joy carry as much force as any real reunion would do. What drives the film is less a drive for revenge – although there is no doubt this is a motivator for Maximus – but of a continued sense that he must fulfil all his duties (in this case restore the Republic as his surrogate father wished) before he can return to his wife and son (i.e. die).

It’s that which makes the film so easy to invest in emotionally, and which makes Maximus (a hardened killer) so easy to relate to. If he was just a raging man out for revenge, the film would carry a leaner harsher look. But he is instead a man motivated by love, who yearns to be with his family again. Mortality hangs over the entire film – the first shot of the film, famously of the hands in the wheat, have buried themselves in the consciousness because we can all relate to a man who longs to lay down his labours and be with the people he loves. Christianity doesn’t appear too much in Gladiator (unlike older Hollywood Roman epics) but faith is there in spades. And Maximus will do nothing that will jeopardise a reunion with his family in heaven.

This deeply involving story of a man who remains faithful to the memory of his wife – and Scott wisely removed any love plot with Lucilla, which would have felt like cheatingso strongly does the film build Maximus’ love for his wife – that audiences are happy to go with the film through all the violence that follows. Gladiator hit the sweetspot of having something for everyone, from emotion to action. And the action is brilliant. The opening battles is hugely impressive, from its scale to the imaginative interpretation of Roman tactics. It’s trumped by the more raw and ragged action that comes in the Gladiatorial ring, as Maximus transfers his brutal efficiency at war into the ring for the amusement of the crowd.

Like all Gladiator films and series the film successfully has its cake and eats it – so we get a sense of the horror of people fighting to the death for our entertainment, while also heartily enjoying watching our heroes kick ass. The sequence that uses this most effectively, as Proximo’s outmatched Gladiators follow Maximus’ strategic experience and military training to defeat a group of deadly chariot fighters, would-be a stand out in any movie.

The film further works due to the assured brilliance of the Oscar-winning Russell Crowe in the lead role. Crowe exudes natural authority as a general – he genuinely feels like the sort of man that first his soldiers and then his fellow Gladiators will follow to the bitter end. Crowe also dives deep into the soulful sadness at the heart of Maximus, the romantic longing and the searing pain of the betrayal and murder of his family. It’s a performance of immense, small-scale intimacy that also never once gets over-shadowed by the huge spectacle around him. I’m not sure many other actors could have pulled it off.

But the whole cast is extremely strong, Scott encouraging great work across the board. Joaquin Phoenix in particular takes the villain role to a bravely unusual place. His Commodus, far from a sneering Caligula, is in fact a weak, anxious, jealous even strangely pitiable man, so insecure and riven with envy for others that he becomes twisted by it. But we never lose a sense of the humanity at his heart, the sense of a little boy lost, scared by the world around him. It makes sense the Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla – walking a difficult line as a character who has to play both sides – could both fear and hate him but still love the fragile little brother she still senses in him.

Scott’s trusting of experienced pros – many you feel hungry for an opportunity like this – is clear throughout the whole cast. Richard Harris was pulled out of a career slump and reinvented here as an elder statesman, with a wry, playful and eventually moving performance as Marcus Aurelius. Scott’s biggest risk was pulling Oliver Reed from a life better known for drinking bouts to play Proximo. Playing his best role for almost thirty years, Reed reminded us all for one last time that as well as a chat-show joke he was also a powerful and dominant performer, his Proximo a snarling scene stealer. Reed’s death – his final scenes completed with special effects – made this a better tribute than he could have ever imagined.

There are few feet placed wrong in Gladiator. As an action spectacular it’s faultless, but this works because of the truth and love at its heart. It creates an epic that is emotionally involving as it is exciting to watch. The reconstruction of Rome is hugely impressive and Scott paces the film perfectly, letting its force grow along. You never once feel thrown by its scope, and so completely does it wrap you up that, as it becomes more operatic in the final act, the film is never at risk of losing you. It deserves to be remembered with the best of the Hollywood epics.

Hannibal (2001)

Anthony Hopkins rides again in the terrible Hannibal

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Anthony Hopkins (Hannibal Lecter), Julianne Moore (Clarice Starling), Gary Oldman (Mason Verger), Ray Liotta (Paul Krendler), Frankie R Faison (Barney Matthews), Giancarlo Giannini (Chief Inspector Rinaldo Pazzi), Francesca Neri (Allegra Pazzi), Zeljko Ivanek (Dr Cordell Doemling)

For Dino De Laurentis, The Silence of the Lambs was always the one that got away. Owning the movie rights to the Lecter character, de Laurentis allowed Orion, producers of The Silence of the Lambs, to use the character name for free. De Laurentis was desperate to make his own Hannibal Lecter film, to cash in on Lambs success – so much so he would have put any old crap on the screen so long as it was connected to Lecter. Perhaps Thomas Harris wanted to test that out with his novel Hannibal, a blatantly for-the-money piece of pulp.

Hannibal is everything that Silence of the Lambs is not. Where Jonathan Demme’s film was subtle, insidious and unsettling this is brash, gory and garish. Harris’ serial killer works always circled around the possibility of tipping into a sort of Poesque-Gothic netherworld. Hannibal dives in head first, reinventing its central character as a sort of Robin Hood of murderous psychopaths and introducing everything from vengeful faceless paedophiles, to Dantesque murders and man-eating hogs. The plot, such as it is, sees Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) living under an assumed identity in Florence. Back in America he is being hunted not only by Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore) but also Mason Verger (Gary Oldman, unbilled under a host of make-up) who wants revenge after being hideously disfigured by Lecter. Will Lecter turn the tables on these adversaries?

Both Jonathan Demme and Jodie Foster were offered more money than they knew what to do with for this film. Both turned it down, citing the book – and its grotesque and bizarre outcome that see Lecter and Starling becoming lover-killers together – as the major factor. Foster in particular was out-spoken about how she saw the books extremity as a betrayal of the work she did with the character in the first film. 

No such concern for Hopkins though, who took a bumper pay cheque to return. Hopkins always said Lecter was an easy role to play – basically a creepy voice and a lot of actorly tricks – and it certainly makes it easy for Hopkins to coast through the part here. Really Hopkins treats the role no differently from the countless chat shows where he had been asked to say “Hello Claressse”, the only real difference being he was paid about $20million to do it here. This is Hopkins on unthinking autopilot, in a film that tries to play up the black comedy but instead becomes a ludicrous, offensive farce, drowning in blood.

Ridley Scott directs and his painterly visuals and mastery of the epic shot strips comes at the cost of the very things that made the original film so involving and tense. The Hitchcockian suspense and intimacy of Demme’s direction is jettisoned. Instead everything is a dialled up to a brightly coloured 11. The entire film mistakes gore, blood and overblown, cartoonish villainy for horror. Watching people being mauled by wild hogs, or some more unfortunate being lobotomised and made to eat his own brain isn’t scary it’s more gross. And because nothing feels remotely real in this film, it doesn’t even carry much impact.

The entire film is based around the fact that it’s Hannibal we’re paying to see – especially Hopkins reprising the role – so by Jiminiy we better work a little bit to make this lethal killer from Lambs into something a bit closer to an anti-hero. So instead, Lecter is rejigged as a sort of charming, amoral cannibal. The sort of guy who prefers to eat the rude and unmannered, who loves art and is only really dangerous when provoked. The film carefully gives us reasons to dislike everyone Lecter kills, and slowly falls in love with his sinister magnetism. 

This reduces Julianne Moore – in a truly thankless task – trying to both forge some sort of identity for Clarice from the story that is both unique and a continuation of what Jodie Foster did so well in the first film. It’s not entirely her fault that she fails. This is a film that depowers Clarice, that goes as far as it dares to turn her into a moth around Hannibal’s flame. The film backs away from the romance of the book (even if the film hints at it enough), replacing the eventual ending with something almost as stupid but at least doesn’t turn Clarice into a brain guzzling serial killer.

The plot flies around two arcs, one set around Hannibal in Florence the other on his return to America. Both carry no resemblance to the real world. The first does at a least have a decent performance of nervy greed from Giancarlo Giannini as the Italian detective who (wrongly) feels he can go toe-to-toe with Hannibal. The second revolves around Gary Oldman’s (unbilled – due to an argument over billing or a sly joke, depending on who you talk to) repulsive Mason Verger, a villain so revoltingly gothic you can’t believe in him for a second.

The film looks good and has a decent score, but it’s basically a claret splashed mess that can’t decide whether it’s a horror or some sort of black comedy. It settles for being nothing at all. A truly terrible movie, where everyone is there for the money and I imagine no one thought about the movie for a second once their work on it was done.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

The Enterprise crew re-unite to face The Wrath of Khan

Director: Nicholas Meyer

Cast: William Shatner (Admiral James T Kirk), Leonard Nimoy (Spock), DeForest Kelley (Dr Leonard McCoy), Ricardo Montalban (Khan Noonien Singh), James Doohan (Montgomery Scott), George Takei (Hikary Sulu), Walter Koenig (Pavel Chekov), Nichelle Nichols (Uhura), Bibi Besch (Dr Carol Marcus), Merritt Butrick (Dr David Marcus), Paul Winfield (Captain Terrell), Kirstie Alley (Saavik)

After the overblown, slow and tedious The Motion Picture, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that we had seen the Enterprise crew boldly go for the very last time. If there was going to be a sequel Paramount had very clear guidelines for what it wanted: more entertaining, exciting, don’t involve Gene Roddenberry and above all make it for a fraction of the price. I think it’s fair to say that the decision to bring producer Harve (“I could make three movies for the cost of that first one!”) Bennett and above all writer and director Nicholas Meyer on board, saved the franchise.

Neither Meyer or Bennett were familiar with the franchise in advance. But they did what those involved in the first film should have considered doing (looking at you Robert Wise!) – they went back and rewatched all the previous episodes and tried to work out exactly what people enjoyed about the show to begin with. And then tried to make a movie based around that. So first and foremost they decided they needed a villain – so after running through all the previous episodes they decided genetically-engineered superman Khan Noonien Singh, left abandoned on a planet with his followers after the episode Space Seed – was the best pick. Giving the film a simple “revenge” structure, it became a taught battle of minds and wills between Khan and the man he blames for all his problems – Admiral James T Kirk (William Shatner).

Star Trek II opens with an ageing Kirk, unsure of his place in the world while stuck in a desk job and scared about getting old. Running a cadet training voyage with his old crew, Kirk is called back into action after Starfleet loses touch with Federation scientists working on the Genesis device, a terraforming rocket that will help the Federation build new worlds and civilisations. The problems with Genesis are directly linked – without Kirk’s knowledge – with Khan’s (Ricardo Montalban) hijacking of the USS Reliantafter brainwashing the ship’s captain Terrell (Paul Winfield) and his first officer Chekov (Walter Koenig). Khan blames Kirk for the disasters that have taken place on the planet he was marooned on – and is determined to exact revenge on Kirk no matter the cost.

Unlike the dry Motion Picture, Wrath of Khan builds is action around a compelling, emotionally charged, story that gives each character a clear and relatable motive for their actions. Building a film about revenge may not exactly be in Roddenberry’s ideal for the 23rdcentury: but by heck it makes for a much better film. Because, if nothing else, while we may struggle to understand what the hell V’Ger wanted in the first film, everyone understands the dangerous obsession of revenge. It helps that the film has an excellent villain – a scowling, unbalanced but still strangely honourable and decent Khan, played with a grandstanding relish by Montalban who is clearly having a whale of a time. Despite never sharing the screen (or even being on set at the same time) Montalban and Shatner go at the rivalry and its impact on both characters with a real intensity that makes for compelling viewing.

Meyer also tightened and refocused the entire franchise. Roddenberry may have struggled with the increasingly naval view of Starfleet in this film – it’s at least twice referred to explicitly as the military – but Meyer recognised that if the franchise was partly Hornblower in Space, then why not redesign the film with that in mind. The ship is run with naval precision, including yeoman whistling to signal shifts and orders, uniforms that have a stylish naval formality to them, a greater focus on the ship’s movements being described in strictly naval terms – even the photon torpedo bays are prepped by enlisted men in what Meyer called his “running out the guns” sequences. This makes the entire operation not only easier to relate to, but interesting and entertaining in its own right.

It also adds huge tension to the duel that develops between the Reliant and the Enterprise that plays out part naval battle and late on – when battle turns to the Mutara nebula where systems and sensors work only intermittedly – part classic submarine drama, with Meyer practically throwing in depth charges. The battle scenes are filmed with simplicity and economy – but because the personal clashes between Kirk and Khan are so compelling and involving, they absolutely drip with tension, as these two go through move and counter move.

Meyer’s film is lean, engrossing and thrilling, and superbly well directed. It goes from skilled set-piece to set-piece, and never for a moment overlooks character. Unlike the first film, we get the moments of Kirk-Spock-McCoy discussing key themes together so beloved from the series, while most of the main cast also get their moment in the sun, most especially Walter Koenig who, as a brainwashed Chekov, gets more to work with here than he got in the whole original series. 

But this isn’t just an action adventure in space. Meyer’s literate and intelligent script has far more depth and thematic interest in it than the faux intellectualism of The Motion Picture. Taking as its starting point Kirk’s fear of on-setting age (the film opens with his 50th birthday, and McCoy’s gift of antique spectacles), it expands into an engrossing mediation of how we react to the impacts of our actions and lose-lose situations. Kirk has also to face the mortality of age and the impact of past actions – like his son (Merritt Butrick channelling Shatner’s impulsiveness) – coming back to bite him. All this while flying a ship of young cadets round – who need to shepherded into the risks of conflict. Khan meanwhile is confronted time and again with the damaging impact of his choices to follow revenge and obsession rather than settling for a winning hand.

Meyer gets his best work ever out of Shatner (allegedly after realising Shatner over committed to early takes, he made Shatner take multiple takes in order to focus his energy). This is a Kirk getting old, dealing with inner resentments and made to face up to the consequences of his actions – both with Khan and meeting the son he fathered. Shatner tackles all this with a world-weary resignation and touch of sadness that many felt were beyond him, while still making room for the fireworks that are his calling card (I suppose the famous “Khan!” was Meyer’s one major indulgence of Shatner’s exuberance).

However the other element the film is well known for is of course it’s tragic ending – the sacrifice of Leonard Nimoy’s Spock. Lured back to the film, but not convinced about ever returning, Nimoy agreed to the final reel shocker (although he enjoyed making the film so much he willingly agreed to leave the door open for Spock’s resurrection). It gives the film an emotional heft that none of the others in the franchise has. For the first time, our heroes would not magically escape unharmed to fly off onto the next adventure. Just as the film started with the cadets learning that sacrifice and facing a lose-lose scenario is a part of command (a lesson Kirk cheated on in his day, and a situation he has never faced or understood, as the film teaches him), so the film ends on the same beat. The ship can escape – but only if Spock takes a fatal radiation dose to restart the engine.

Both Nimoy and Shatner play the heck out of these scenes, probably the most emotional in the franchise – a low-key but deeply affecting moments of two old friends sharing their last moments together. It’s this successful switch into showing the real cost and loss associated with adventures like this that cap the thematic depth Meyer bought to the film.

Star Trek II succeeds on every count. Meyer’s intelligent script quotes and riffs everything from CS Forrester to Dickens via Moby Dick, while giving both heroes and villains deep and rich character arcs. It’s grippingly filmed – you wouldn’t believe how much cheaper it was than the first film, as it looks ten-times better with not a penny gone to waste – and hugely exciting. It carries real emotional force, and it’s hugely benefited by a fantastic score by a young James Horner. Even now it’s still the high point of Star Trek on screen – and probably a highlight of the franchise as a whole.

Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

Albert Finney interrogates an all-star cast in Murder on the Orient Express

Director: Sidney Lumet

Cast: Albert Finney (Hercule Poirot), Lauren Bacall (Linda Arden), Martin Balsam (Signor Bianchi), Ingrid Bergman (Greta Ohlsson), Jacqueline Bisset (Countess Helena Andrenyi), Jean-Pierre Cassel (Pierre Paul Michel), Sean Connery (Colonel John Arbuthnot), John Gielgud (Edward Beddoes), Wendy Hiller (Princess Natalia Dragomiroff), Anthony Perkins (Hector McQueen), Vanessa Redgrave (Mary Debenham), Rachel Roberts (Hildegarde Schmidt), Richard Widmark (Ratchett), Michael York (Count Rudolf Andrenyi), Colin Blakely (Cyrus Hardman), George Coulouris (Dr Constantine), Denis Quilley (Antonio Foscarelli)

If there was a film that set the template for our expectations for an Agatha Christie adaptation, it was probably this one. A big starry cast. Luscious period detail. An engrossing plot with clues and double meanings in every corner. A healthy mix of the OTT and the chilling. Marshalled by Sidney Lumet, almost certainly the best director to take on a Christie mystery ever, this film was a massive hit then and remains a hugely enjoyable, rewarding treat now, the sort of masterclass in quality film-making and bravura acting that is guaranteed to leave a smile on your face.

You surely must know the plot by now right? Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) returning from a successful case in the East hitches a ride on the Orient Express on the way home. During the journey he is asked by American businessman Ratchett (Richard Widmark) if he would take up the role of his bodyguard after threats against his life. Poirot turns him down – and sure enough the next morning Ratchett turns up dead in his compartment, with no less than a dozen knife wounds in his chest. With the train stranded in a snow drift, the killer must be one of the other twelve passengers in the carriage. And so the case begins…

Sidney Lumet’s superb, classy piece of murder mystery is a triumph of design and style. The train looks superb, the period detail is perfect, the costumes are luscious. But what Lumet brings to it all underneath all this Sunday afternoon splendour is a genuine sense of chilling menace. Helped a great deal by Richard Rodney Bennett’s haunting musical cues, this film never lets the viewer forget that the heartless destruction of an entire family is at the root of the crime itself, or that the desires for revenge we find in ourselves can take us to dark places. 

Lumet’s film opens with a brilliantly constructed series of newspaper stills, establishing the horrors of the Daisy Armstrong case that underpins the mystery, the kidnapping and murder of a young child (based on the Lindbergh kidnapping) that led to tragic consequences for an entire family. This chillingly sad and tragic back story is echoed throughout the film, and immediately establishes the stakes for all involved.

So we spend the film then trying to work out how all the suspects might fit it into this story. Lumet’s concept of bringing together an all-star cast was a brilliant idea, not only giving each of the suspects a quickly established personality (partly inspired by the actor’s body of work), but also assembling a group of such talented actors that they can sketch out a character within a few moments. Lumet’s first recruit for the cast was his old collaborator Sean Connery – and the agreement of Connery to take on a supporting role brought a host of actors to follow. It all adds to the fun, an enjoyable star-spotting exercise, and also an amusing game of watching sometime wildly competing acting styles.

Connery plays Arbuthnot with a stiff-upper lip English reserve, but then you also have a wonderfully arch (and very funny) John Gielgud, a dementedly twitchy Anthony Perkins (McQueen seems to have been adapted into a junior brother of Norman Bates), a show-boatingly larger-than-life Lauren Bacall (great fun), a Germanic stern Rachel Roberts and an inscrutable Vanessa Redgrave. That’s just a few of a terrific collection of actors, and arguably only Wendy Hiller’s overly imperious Princess Dragamiroff is a bit of a miss.

Lumet’s strength in depth allowed him to push his actors into demanding places – complex set-ups and, most especially, a series of long takes in his often confined performance spaces. The highlight – in fact it won her an Oscar – is Ingrid Bergman’s five-minute (practically only) scene where the camera slowly rotates around her across five minutes as she tells her story. Bergman’s shy, nervy, gentle and timid missionary comes across as achingly vulnerable. Bergman had been offered the larger role taken by Wendy Hillier, but wisely turned it down for this show-stopping moment.

The advantage of having such accomplished actors was most clear in the burden placed on Finney as Poirot. Watching it now – familiar as we are with decades of David Suchet’s definitive performance – it’s easy to see Finney’s performance as a little too much. Covered with make-up and a fat-suit, his shoulders hunched around his neck, his hair plastered down with grease and his accent frequently heading way out over the top, Finney certainly leaves very little in the dressing room. His Poirot is an amiable showman, a man willing to adjust his personality and approach from suspect to suspect, but in the end a man with a well-being arrogance and a deep sense of personal morality as well as a profound sense of humanity.

Finney was a surprising Oscar nominee for Best Actor, but he almost certainly owed this to his final speech, an almost thirty-minute tour-de-force. Lumet, operating in small confines, determined that the best way of getting the most dramatic energy from the speech was to use long takes, elegant camera moves, and the minimum of cutting – to let Poirot cast his spell over the audience as much as he does over the suspect. As such Finney – in a tiny, crowded, set – performed the complete monologue several times (each time apparently flawlessly) so that the camera could be positioned in each point in the confined set at a time. The result is seen in the final sequence, which uses dizzying long takes and careful camera moves to draw us brilliantly into the reveals that come thick and fast.

Finney’s performance is magnetic in its theatricality and commitment, and Lumet’s directing decisions throughout the sequence really help to make this sequence as effective as it is. Lumet’s peppers this sequence with a series of brief flashbacks to earlier in the film, which skilfully present snippets of the characters testimonies represented at different camera angles, which is both eerie and also throws a new light on the scenes we have already seen. For all that Finney is a bit much at times, you can’t help but enjoy this piece of showmanship.

The final resolution remains justly famous, and it largely owes a lot to this film. Agatha Christie even was favourable to the film (one of only two films of her work she liked, the other being Billy Wilder’s adaptation of Witness for the Prosecution) although (in words I presume heard by Kenneth Branagh) she bemoaned the smallness of Finney’s moustache. There have been several film and TV adaptations that have followed, but only David Suchet’s version has challenged it for the title of the best. With its gorgeous settings, imaginative direction and wonderful cast I never tire of watching it.

The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)

Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow get wrapped up in murder and mayhem in The Talented Mr Ripley

Director: Anthony Minghella

Cast: Matt Damon (Tom Ripley), Gwyneth Paltrow (Marge Sherwood), Jude Law (Dickie Greenleaf), Cate Blanchett (Meredith Logue), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Freddie Miles), Jack Davenport (Peter Smith-Kingsley), James Rebhorn (Herbert Greenleaf), Sergio Rubini (Inspector Roverini), Philip Baker Hall (Alvin MacCarron), Celia Weston (Aunt Joan)

Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley – sociopath, confidence trickster, human blank piece of paper and murderer – is so unknowable he’s been played on screen by actors as wildly diverse as Alain Delon, Dennis Hopper, John Malkovich, Barry Pepper and, perhaps most famously today, by Matt Damon. Ripley’s complexity – Highsmith described him as “suave, agreeable and utterly amoral” – and his general blankness and ability to adapt to different situations make him a challenging character to bring to the screen. Minghella’s film goes for a dark, Hitchcockian feeling drama that gives a lot of focus to feelings of sexual confusion and inadequacy in Ripley that motivate his actions and increasingly spiral out of control, leaving him isolated and damaged.

Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) allows himself to be mistaken by the owner of a shipping line, Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn), as an old Harvard classmate of his son Dickie (Jude Law). Inveigling his way into Herbert’s trust, he is sent to Italy to persuade Dickie to return to America and take up a job in his father’s company. Happily taking the all-expenses-paid trip, Ripley finds himself besotted with the glamour and easy charm of Dickie, a handsome playboy, and soon positions himself as travelling companion to Dickie and his fiancée Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow). But Dickie’s attention is only fleeting, and soon Ripley feels betrayed as Dickie starts to refocus elsewhere – leading eventually to Ripley murdering Dickie in a fit of jealous pique and using his faint resemblance to Dickie’s passport photo to assume his identity and live off his allowance – all the while dodging meeting Marge, friends of Dickie and the police (who are searching for the disappeared Tom Ripley).

Minghella’s film is a complex, psycho-sexual thriller, shot with a sun-kissed warmth that accentuates the glamour and style of the Italian Riviera, while subtly keeping us distant from the characters and their increasingly complex motives. The richness and lushness of these expensive lives look as appealing and seductive to us as Ripley finds them when he arrives. However, its dark undertone is never lost, and the film is edited and assembled with a certain chill and coolness while Gabriel Yared’s score mixes some fun jazz remixes with more a ominous tone as the bodies start to pile up.

I love a lot of Minghella’s work. He’s an intelligent and literate director, and the script he prepared for this film shows that he’s a master of taking complex, multi-layered pieces of fiction and turning them into something impressive and cinematic. But watching The Talented Mr Ripley, with its effective mix of period charm and sixties swing, its clever apeing of sixties filming styles, its riffing on Hitchcockian tropes and its picture book locations around Italy, part of me wonders if this film started pushing him too far down the path of being a “literary” director. His film is intelligent, and alternates between being chilling and fun, but at times it’s also wearing its “important film-making” badge a little heavily. It’s like the film is straining a little too much for prestige, as if the luscious design, complex plotting, sharp dialogue and clever visuals are aiming a little too much for matching The English Patient’s Oscar hoovering.

Maybe that’s why, despite everything that is good here, this film doesn’t have quite the same success as that film. This is, I’ll confess, an odd thing to say in a film that is generally very positive – if a little too long – but there it is. Sometimes these things are intangible in a way. Part of the film’s problem is that very complexity of plotting and motivation that he (arguably) builds on from the book. One of the film’s biggest question marks hangs over Ripley himself.

Imagined here as a slightly diffident, awkward, closeted graduate, he never really convinces as the kind of ruthless opportunist the plot demands him to be. Much as the film – and Damon’s performance – nails the sociopathic blankness of Ripley, his ability to switch smoothly from persona to persona, at the same time Ripley either seems to care too much or too little. Damon never quite convinces as a man so in love with the highlife that he is happy living off the allowance of (and pretending to be) the adored friend he bludgeons to death in a boat. 

This is where the homosexual undertone of the original has been converted into a overtone – and the film’s overplaying of Ripley’s physical, puppy-dog attraction to Dickie make him feel more dependent. The film works really hard to make him as sympathetic and vulnerable as possible, to make him a victim of his own warped circumstances and morality, and it never quite manages to make this make sense, or to carry real consistency. For all you feel Minghella wants us to think we are drilling into what makes a killer, the more we learn about Ripley the less substantial as a character he feels.

Damon, despite this, gives a good and generous performance. Generous because, playing quite a pathetic, indescribably blank man, he really manages to fade into the background of scenes. It does mean that he cedes most of the best work to his co-stars. Jude Law is radiantly cool, fiery, passionate, selfish and hugely attractive in a star-making turn as Dickie. Philip Seymour Hoffman is the epitome of a Bullingdon club bully turned young adult as Dickie’s school friend, seizing scenes with a louche aggressiveness. Cate Blanchett is equally brilliant as a warm, friendly socialite who inadvertently stirs terrible ideas in Ripley.

These actors are all highlights in a superbly mounted production, but one which doesn’t reveal or tell us as much as we might expect. Instead, Minghella gets slightly lost in his own intelligence when adapting the book, pushing the story into deeper, psycho-sexual motivations for its character that end up obscuring and fudging the actions he carries out in the film. It’s a gorgeous looking film, packed with wonderful scenes, but Damon’s Ripley seems too sensitive, too prone to the edge of tears, impossible to see as a man who could become a serial murderer. By giving a greater hinterland to Ripley, Minghella also changes the character fundamentally. It makes for an interesting development – but Ripley’s desperation, his essential weakness, his lack of control make him feel inconsistent with the setting and plot he is in.

Bad Day at Black Rock (1956)

Spencer Tracy is the only just man in town, in brilliant modern Western Bad Day at Black Rock

Director: John Sturges

Cast: Spencer Tracy (John J Macreedy), Robert Ryan (Reno Smith), Anne Francis (Liz Wirth), Dean Jagger (Sheriff Tim Horn), Walter Brennan (Doc Viele), John Ericson (Pete Wirth), Ernest Borgnine (Coley Trimble), Lee Marvin (Hector David), Russell Collins (Mr Hastings), Walter Sande (Sam)

A man walks into a town. It’s a dust bowl town, looks like it’s just one street with a few buildings. The natives sit warily outside the bar and treat the stranger with suspicion. Trigger fingers are itchy. Is it the Wild West? No it’s 1945, but the new guy in town is about to find out just how unfriendly the American West can be. Just as well that, despite only having one hand, he’s more than capable of looking after himself.

Spencer Tracy, perfect as a man of rigid principles and certainties who won’t waver in the face of any intimidation, is our no-nonsense hero Macreedy. Arriving in town, he’s looking for Japanese-American farmer Komoko, father of a deceased colleague from the war, but no one wants to talk about where he is or what happened to him. Sheriff Horn (Dean Jagger) is an alcoholic who doesn’t want to know anything, the local doctor (Walter Brennan) doesn’t want to get involved and hotel clerk Pete (John Ericson) doesn’t want to give Macreedy a home. Macreedy is tailed on arrival by a couple of intimidating heavies (Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin – the go-to guys at the time for these sort of roles), and quickly works out the town is run by local businessman Reno Smith (Robert Ryan) – and any secrets it holds ain’t coming out easy.

Bad Day at Black Rock is a classic western, set in a time when the world of the West had been left far behind. American culture has a romantic longing for rural, small-town America, and the heroic past of the pioneers of the old West. Bad Day inverts a lot of this mythology: this America is horribly corrupt, unspeakably racist and hiding no end of dirty linen in its cupboards. In fact, small-town America is horrible, while the man from the big city represents all that is good – that in itself is quite a surprise turnaround from what you might expect from Hollywood.

In many ways it’s a very simple, very gripping, film. Macreedy’s arrival in the town sparks guilty consciences and sets the town bully, Reno Smith, into a quiet, panicked breakdown. We know watching it roughly where the film is likely to go. However, what Sturges does well is to invest this with so much attention. Huge chunks of the film involve both Macreedy and the men of the town, tensely trying to work out what is going on, or watching and waiting to see what opportunities there will be. It’s a film packed with moments of waiting or characters sitting and watching, talking around subjects rather than tackling the big questions they want to ask. It sounds slow but it actually builds up an extraordinary amount of danger and feeling of danger.

It’s a drama that works on the slow burn while also being a very short, snappily paced film. The best part of the first half-hour of the film is the careful establishing of the atmosphere, the relationships between the different characters, and the politics of this Western town. In the middle of this we have Macreedy, the man of mystery whom we know nothing about, who never seems to rise to the unfriendly intimidation he meets from every corner. You know that all this tension is going to erupt into something serious – but the film constantly leaves you guessing exactly how it will pan out and keeps you surprised about who ends up on which side.

You couldn’t get a better actor for this role than Spencer Tracy. There is something so rigidly determined about Tracy in this film, so adamantine and determined – the sort of man who operates in rights and wrongs, who even in this world of intimidation and terror tries to play by some sort of rules for as long as he possibly can. What’s so great about Tracy in this film is that he seems like both a stranger in black and a disappointed dad, with the people in the town constantly letting him down. The film also teases us for a long time – we suspect throughout that Macreedy is more dangerous and more capable of looking after himself than he appears. (It was Tracy who insisted, by the way, that Macreedy be made one-armed, as he thought it could give Macreedy an interesting vulnerability to overcome). 

The film makes us wait for its three action set-pieces: a car chase, a bar fight and a shoot-out. But it’s perfect in its patience, because violence always seems like it could burst out at any time. Marvin and Borgnine as the obvious heavies do great work as different types of overt muscle. Robert Ryan as the corrupt guy who really runs the town is especially good as a man who seems, under his dominance, to only just be holding onto his self-control, going to great lengths to prevent himself getting into trouble. It’s a point that Macreedy himself makes – deep down, Smith doesn’t have the guts to do his dirty work alone, and gets his strength from controlling others. All this delicate mixture of guilt and fear that bubbles under the surface of Smith is apparent in Ryan’s excellent performance.

But then no-one in the town is in control. Dean Jagger’s moral weakling sheriff is a drunk and a pathetic loser. Walter Brennan’s (very good) doctor wants to do the right thing, but lacks the guts to do it. John Ericsen’s hotel clerk knows he’s in the wrong, but isn’t brave enough to stand his ground. Their lack of control is in fact the root of the problem – Macreedy would never have suspected there were any dark secrets to uncover in the town if the people there hadn’t treated him with such overt suspicion. Sturges captures this perfectly (even if I think the Cinemascope width of shot isn’t perfect for a film that gets so much play out of claustrophobia and suspicion).

Politically the film is pretty simple – racism ain’t good you know – but as an example of brilliantly assembled Western tension and moral righteousness, mixed with a bit of action, adventure and claustrophobia, it works really well. Brilliantly directed, and very well written as a piece of expressive theatre, this is terrific with some wonderful performances. And front and centre is Spencer Tracy as the ultimate man in black, a man with moral certainty and courage, whom it’s impossible not to admire.

Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)

Samuel L Jackson and Bruce Willis Die Hard with a Vengeance

Director: John McTiernan

Cast: Bruce Willis (John McClane), Jeremy Irons (Simon Gruber), Samuel L Jackson (Zeus Carver), Graham Greene (Detective Joe Lambert), Colleen Camp (Detective Connie Kowalski), Larry Bryggman (Inspector Walter Cobb), Anthony Peck (Detective Ricky Walsh), Nick Wyman (Mathias Targo), Sam Phillips (Katya)

The Die Hard franchise has spawned multiple imitators, all with the signature format of a hero taking on villains in a confined space: everything from a boat, to a train, to a plane to a bus. Of course the franchise itself had already started to head away from this in Die Hard 2, which takes place across an entire airport. Die Hard with a Vengeance pumps it up even further by setting the action in an entire city. Sure it loses some of the magic claustrophobia of the original, but then it’s got to do something different right? 

John McClane (Bruce Willis) is on suspension, with his marriage in ruins and his life on the skids. No change there then. But he’s dragged out of retirement when terrorist Simon (Jeremy Irons) detonates a bomb in New York and makes it clear he’ll keep doing so until McClane agrees to take on a series of games and challenges across New York – each with deadly penalties. In the first of these, with McClane wearing a very unfortunate sign in the middle of Harlem, he is saved by Zeus (Samuel L Jackson), a shop owner with his own problems with white people, who is forced to join McClane on Simon’s deadly game. After a bomb detonates in Wall Street, McClane starts to wonder: does Simon have an ulterior motive?

Die Hard with a Vengeance is probably most people’s second favourite Die Hard film, and it’s easy to see why. It’s got scale, bangs, loads of action and jokes. It largely takes the best things from the two previous movies and tries to replicate them: so we’ve got the bigger scale and stakes of Die Hard 2, matched with the battle of wits that powered Die Hard. At the same time, it avoids Die Hard 2’s habit of squeezing in as many references and characters from the first film as possible, and tries to make something fresher.

But yet, as I get older, I’m actually getting less keen on it. Guiltily, I think I prefer both entries 2 and 4. I just feel there is something a bit mean about Die Hard 3, something a bit brutal and vicious. Now I am no shrinking violet, but there is a lot (and I mean a lot) of angry swearing in Die Hard 3 – which actually makes it feel rather dated. Everything is “f this” and “f that”. But it’s symptomatic of a particularly 1990s action vibe about the film.Anyway it’s all angry – everyone in the film is angry most of the time. I mean sure they are stressed, but McClane was stressed in the last two films but it didn’t just project itself through fury.

McClane himself, in the first two films, may be hard as nails but he’s also a regular guy doing his best to save lives. But in this film he’s just extremely angry – probably because the character is hungover – and feels less like a police officer interested in preserving life than a vigilante acting above the law. Twice in this movie he executes people (one of whom is trying to surrender (in German)!) with no real warning. The blood and guts count seems a lot higher. The camera lingers on corpses and spurting blood. The character just feels harder to relate to. 

It’s no great surprise that the original intention of the script was for McClane to become actually more and more unhinged by events. It gets lost at the end, when the film settles for a more generic and triumphant ending rather than the unsettling, low-key one originally filmed (which feels like a much better thematic fit for the film you’ve just watched). It would have been interesting to make a film where the hero becomes as damaged and ruthless as the villain – but the studio didn’t want that, so we don’t get it.

McTiernan’s attempt to recapture the vibe of the first Die Hard film also doesn’t quite click. Simon is an odd character, who utilises brute force one minute and then inexplicably spares lives the next. His eventual heist on Wall Street is partly blood-free, partly a brutal slaughter of any resistance. McTiernan is obviously aiming for a battle of wits, but the original concept of Simon setting McClane a series of children’s riddles to solve gets lost half way through the film. Like Die Hard there is an attempt to get a sense of gleeful enjoyment from Simon’s actions, but Jeremy Iron’s character (despite his best efforts) isn’t devilishly charming enough for this to work.

But then things in the film do work. The chemistry between Willis and Jackson is very good, and Jackson really nails a character who is part cocksure, angry radical and half squeamishly out of his depth. The film’s at its most involving when it gets wrapped up in cat-and-mouse games. The first half of the film, which focuses on this, is by far the most interesting and offers the best twist on the action – from riddles about the man going to St Ives, to having to cross New York in a fraction of the time needed, or trying to defuse a bomb by putting four gallons into a five-gallon jug. The more these riddles die away in the second half and the film goes for more generic shooting and killing, the less interesting it becomes.

Not that this sort of stuff isn’t good fun. Although McClane seems more bad tempered and ruthless – and the baddies are mostly faceless goons rather than people – it’s still fun to see him take on the odds so successfully, and to see him being underestimated by the villains (the character is always smarter than he appears). McTiernan, with a huge budget, throws everything at the screen from bombs to fist fights to car chases. He doesn’t manage to create the magic sense of heroism that the first film has in such abundance, or that sense of one man doing what he must to save others, but the film still broadly works.

There is something very 1990s about this film, from its swearing to its violence to its general atmosphere of gritty comic book thrills. It is fun to hear jokes about Hillary Clinton (jokingly named as the next President – oops) and Donald Trump. But it’s that lack of moral purpose to McClane that proves the biggest problem – he’s motivated less by saving lives than by revenge. It’s a crueller film, sharper and meaner, which means for all the enjoyment it can bring, I can’t love it like I do the first film. It takes McClane to dark places, and presents a bad tempered hero it would be hard to like without the first two films. He’s already starting to feel less like a regular put-upon guy and more like an angry maverick dealer in violence. There is less to build on in this film, and perhaps that’s why we had to wait a while until nostalgia made John McClane a character we wanted to see again.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

Guy Pearce and Jim Caviezel as friends turned foes in The Count of Monte Cristo

Director: Kevin Reynolds

Cast: Jim Caviezel (Edmond Dantès), Guy Pearce (Fernand Mondego), Dagmara Dominczyk (Mercedès Mondego), Luis Guzmán (Jacopo), Richard Harris (Abbè Faria), James Frain (JF Villefort), Michael Wincott (Armand Dorleac), Henry Cavill (Albert Mondego), Albie Woodington (Danglers), JB Blanc (Luigi Vampa), Alex Norton (Napoleon Bonaparte), Patrick Godfrey (Morrell), Freddie Jones (Colonel Villefort), Helen McCrory (Valentina Villefort)

Alexander Dumas’ novels are beasts. The Count of Monte Cristo is a real mountain of a book, a sprawling story of adventure and revenge. Kevin Reynolds’ film had a near impossible task to turn this into a film – most have gone down the route of adapting the book into a TV series – but triumphantly succeeds by locating in it a very clear, very filmic narrative.

In 1815, Edmond Dantès (Jim Caviezel) and Fernand Mondego (Guy Pearce) are young men serving on a merchant ship, who wash up on Elba where Napoleon (Alex Norton) is in exile. Tricked into taking a letter for Napoleon back to France, Dantès is betrayed by Mondego, who desires Dantès’ fiancée Mercedès (Dagmara Dominczyk) and resents his own envy for the far poorer Dantès. The corrupt magistrate Villefort (James Frain) colludes to protect his own family’s secrets, and Dantès is locked up in the dreaded Chateau d’If for 15 years, during which time he meets fellow prisoner Abbè Faria (Richard Harris) who teaches him politics, mathematics, philosophy and sword-fighting. Faria shares with Dantès the secret of the vast treasure he hid on the island of Monte Cristo – treasure Dantès dreams of using for his revenge.

This is actually a fairly nifty adaptation of a huge novel into something cinematic. Almost every change made to the original book ends up working extremely well – and adds an immediately understandable dramatic tension to it. I’d actually go so far as to say this might be a masterpiece of cinematic adaptation. The decision to make Dantès and Mondego childhood friends and rivals instantly adds a real frisson of betrayal to Mondego’s actions, as well as adding a very personal element to the revenge portion of the narrative. The simplification of the other “betrayers” also works extremely well, while the careful links throughout back to Dantès’ upbringing never let us forget the roots he has come from.

The script is also packed full of fun interjections. The idea of the chess piece, which Dantès and Mondego pass from one to the other, becomes laced with symbolism, while the changing of Jacopo into a sort of Brooklyn pirate works extremely well (Guizmán gets some of the best lines, but also gets to show a touching loyalty and concern for Dantès). On top of which, the pushing to the fore of the swashbuckling sword-fighting excitement sets us up for a cracking final sword fight between our two friends-turned-enemies. 

Reynolds also shoots the film extremely well with a host of interesting angles and framing devices showing how Dantès position and confidence change throughout the story. The film’s climactic sword fight is brilliantly staged and the film charges forward with a real momentum (there are of course no sword fights in the book!). 

Particularly well handled through is the sequence that is (in many ways) most faithful to the original book – Dantès’ time in the Chateau d’If. What I love in this sequence is that it’s a perfect combination of stuff from the book, Karate Kid style training, and some good old-fashioned warm character building. It’s also got two terrific performances from Michael Wincott as an almost comically dry sadistic guard and Richard Harris as the imprisoned Abbè Faria, the quintessential wise-old-mentor (the relationship between Faria and Dantès is beautifully judged).

The film perfectly balances its sense of fun and adventure with a very real-feeling story of a man who has to learn there is more to life than revenge. The plot that Dantès puts together probably isn’t the most complex piece of chicanery you are ever going to see, but it doesn’t really matter because the focus is the fun of the journey, and the thrill of someone being a few steps ahead of everyone else. 

Jim Caviezel is very good as Dantès, just the right blend of forthright moral strength and simmering resentment (few actors do stoic suffering better than Cavizel). There is a really nice questioning throughout the film of Dantès’ motives and whether revenge is really worth the candle, which adds a lovely depth to Cavizel’s performance.

But the film probably gets waltzed off by Guy Peace (who turned down the role of Dantès because he thought Mondego was more fun) who gets to campily simmer, sulk and fume at the edge of every scene. Mondego is brilliantly reinvented as a fearsomely proud, selfish, hedonistic aristocrat with a major inferiority complex, who takes everything from Dantès and still isn’t happy at the end of it. But Pearce has a whale of a time with his cruelty and resentment, and it’s a great reminder of how much he is (as an actor) in love with make-up, Mondego being scruffy, slightly pock-marked and increasingly bad of tooth.

He’s a villain you can scowl at and he’s a perfect counter-point for a hero whose emotional distance is designed to make him at times a difficult man to invest in. The film’s expansion of their personal relationship in its early section works really well, setting up the innate inequalities between them (wealth on one side, bravery and decency on the other) during the film’s cheeky and amusing opening sequence on Elba with Napoleon.

The Count of Monte Cristo is an extremely well structured, hugely entertaining adventure film. It’s very much like a 1930s swashbuckler, and every scene has some delightful moment that you’ll love. There are some very good performances in here as well, working with a very good conversion of this doorstop of a book into a film. Skilfully directed, interestingly shot, well acted – it’s a gem that’s far too overlooked.

If… (1968)

Malcolm McDowell as contemptuous bitter student Mick Travis in counter-culture classic If…

Director: Lindsay Anderson

Cast: Malcolm McDowell (Mick Travis), Richard Warwick (Wallace), David Wood (Johnny), Christine Noonan (The Girl), Robert Swann (Rowntree), Peter Jeffrey (Headmaster), Arthur Lowe (Mr Kemp), Mona Washbourne (Matron), Ben Aris (John Thomas), Robin Askwith (Keating), Robin Davis (Machin), Rupert Webster (Bobby Phillips), Geoffrey Chater (Chaplain), Anthony Nicholls (General Denson), Graham Crowden (History Master)

Lindsay Anderson’s If…emerged in the late 1960s, at a time of furious counter-culture reaction to the establishment. Only a few months before its release, Paris had been torn by student riots against everything from the government to class discrimination, which had sparked over a month of protests and strikes that consumed every part of society. If… was released in the midst of the aftermath to this event – and managed to capture the mood of Europe with an astonishing prescience.

In an unnamed English public school, “College House” is run by the senior prefects (“Whips”) who impose a harsh discipline upon the rest of the students. The head of house (Arthur Lowe) is an easily manipulated weakling, the school headmaster (Peter Jeffrey) is a well-meaning but distant figure, most of the staff are either bizarre, creepy, disinterested or all three. Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) and his friends Wallace (Richard Warwick) and Johnny (David Wood) are three persecuted lower sixth formers, who (particularly Mick) have a burning resentment for the structures and traditions for the school: a resentment that slowly builds towards outright rebellion.

Lindsay Anderson’s background was Cheltenham College followed by Oxford. Only someone so thoroughly grounded in the background of private education as that could surely have produced a public school film as furious as this one. The entire film is like a kick in the teeth. Anderson understands the cruel traditions and oppressive rules of public schools completely, and the entire film is awash with moments like this that govern school life. There is not a single, solitary moment where there appear to be any positives at all in the life at the school, or any educational benefits (the school is proudly focused on turning out “gentlemen”). 

Anderson shoots all this with a careful eye for the surreal and flights of fancy. Much has been made about the black and white sequences that pepper the film. The natural light in the chapel caused the colour stock to be over-exposed, forcing Anderson to shoot the scenes there in black and white. However, Anderson loved the effect, and filled the film with scenes shot in monochrome to unsettle the audience and make them question the nature of what they are seeing. And that’s something you need to do with If…, as the film walks a fine tightrope between what is real and what is imagination.

While the film starts off grounded in a reality of cruelty and traditions, as it progresses it develops into something unusual and perverse. An extended sequence where Travis and Johnny skip school and head into town, steal a motorbike, drive to a country café and Travis seduces a Girl (Christine Noonan) becomes ever-more hyper real. Is the Girl even real? The speed of her seduction certainly seems to owe more to the boys’ adolescent fantasies of attractive women than any reality. In fact, the use of Noonan’s character (as sex object) is both a dated moment and an expression of the boys’ immaturity and fantastical longings.

The film is building of course towards the final act of rebellion: a firearms-laden shoot-out after the rebel boys discover a secret cache of automatic weapons on campus (this is in itself unlikely) and then proceed to machine gun visiting dignitaries and their oppressors from the roof of the school, who in turn return fire with their own machine guns. How much of this is real and how much is a flight of fancy from the students and from the film makers? It’s unclear – there is no consistency in the filming of this sequence. When does reality in the film start to cross over to fantasy? There are plenty of moments where this could be happening.

It comes down to the title of the film. If – is this Kiplingesque title suggesting the possibility of such things happening, or such things coming to pass in certain situations, rather than an actual reality? Anderson’s fury at the ghastliness of the class system in this country, and the institutions that promote it (the army, politicians and the church get the same short shrift) suggest a fantasy of bringing the whole system down in a violent outburst. It’s a fantasy, initially grounded in reality, that suggests a poetic realism with lashings of the surreal (most famously the reveal of the schools bullying and vile chaplain as living in a large drawer of a desk in the Headmaster’s office).

The film’s fury and counter-culture joy has the perfect lead actor in Malcolm McDowell, whose simmering, edgy anger as an actor, and chippy rage with a sneering sense of defiance, are perfect for Travis. I’m not sure if McDowell ever topped this first performance, one where he burns through every frame and brilliantly seems to embody every single cog in the system that wanted to thumb its nose at the boss (to mix some metaphors). Anderson and McDowell are clearly working in perfect sync in this film (they collaborated three more times on spiritual sequels). It’s a beautiful performance of simmering resentment and fury at the hypocrisy around him.

The film’s exploration of the injustice of the school doesn’t feel outdated at all. The brutality of fagging and caning plays is like a darkly twisted version of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Robert Swann is particularly good as leading Whip Rowntree, a hypocritical patrician, and memorable sequences capture the eccentric inadequacy of the teaching, the drilling of school rules into new students (brainwashing them into continuing the pattern in the future) and the arbitrary cruelty of the Whips. Peter Jeffrey’s liberal but distant and ineffective Headmaster is a perfect Thomas Arnold parody, a man with grand ideas but no knowledge of the actual school he is running, who claims to understand the boys but knows nothing about them.

However, interestingly, it’s the rebellion itself that seems rather dated today. In the 1960s, it was easier to whole-heartedly invest our sympathies in the counter-culture rebellion of Mick and his friends – but it’s harder today, with our climate of school shootings in America (there was one the day before I watched this film), to root for our heroes carrying out an indiscriminate shooting, for all the vileness of the institutions Travis is taking on. Of course this sequence is shot with a surreal eye (and I’m not sure any of it is meant to be an expression of something that is literally true, just spiritually true), but it’s a little uncomfortable today.

But at the time, this gut punch of a picture by Anderson wouldn’t have been troubled by these doubts. It’s a brilliantly directed film, that burns with a genuine fury against the institutions it is addressing. There is virtually nothing sentimental or kind about the film – it’s entirely about kicking against the tracks. Nothing in the school is redeemable or decent, everything is corrupt and twisted. It’s a sneering, burning, angry shout of a movie that manages to avoid preaching to the audience and instead presents its hellish vision of class in this country with a witty grace. If… is a film that perfectly captures the mood of the time and understands the “small world” culture of public schools like few others: it’s an essential classic.