Category: Historical epic

De Gaulle: Parts 1 and 2 (2026)

Old fashioned but energetic and engaging WW2 biopic with a fabulous central performance

Cast: Antonin Baudry

Cast: Simon Abkarian (Charles de Gaulle), Niels Schneider (Philippe Leclerc), Thierry Lhermitte (Henri Giraud), Karim Leklou (Blazej), Simon Russell Beale (Winston Churchill), Campbell Scott (Franklin D Roosevelt), Matthieu Kassovitz (Admiral Darlan), Benoît Magimel (Marie-Pierre Koenig), Félix Kysyl (Jean Moulin), Loïc Corbery (René Pleven), Florian Lesiuer (Fernand), Anamaria Vartolomei (Livia), Pip Torrens (General Montgomery), Daniel Betts (Dwight D Eisenhower), Tom Mison (Anthony Eden), Stephen Campbell Moore (Harold Macmillan), Anthony Calf (Anthony Spears)

In 1940 France was in ruins. Crushed in weeks by the Nazi war machine, occupied and run by a collaborating government, its army defeated, morale crushed and future open to question. Should the ragged remains of its army fight on or not? The overwhelming consensus seemed to be no. Hundreds of commanders, willingly or not, aligned with Marshal Petain’s Vichy government, on paper the only thing with a claim to being the legal government. It was not a view shared by Charles de Gaulle (Simon Abkarian), newly minted as a French General and determined, against all logic, to carry on fighting.

By doing so, he became a national hero. But that was very, very far from being a foregone conclusion. Something that comes out loud and clear in Antonin Baudry’s reassuringly old-fashioned slice of military biography, handsomely filmed on an epic canvas. De Gaulle doesn’t shirk at all in showing how frequently De Gaulle’s building of the Free French and gaining recognition as a legitimate ally was a Don Quixote like quest. De Gaulle is even given a Sancho Pansa: Blazej a Polish plumber recruited as loyal aide (an invented character, designed to subvert a negative French stereotype). It perhaps could only have been achieved by someone as relentlessly focused, committed, uncompromising and shrewdly cunning like Le General. Truly right-man-right-place.

Across its two parts (and over five hours) De Gaulle mixes an atmospheric look at the back-room struggles for power in the Free French – the anti-Petain French forces being rive with conflicting agendas and awash with Johnny-come-latelies and Nazi-sympathisers who smell the way the wind is blowing – with well-shot and edited WW2 battle sequences. The latter have the added advantage of being less well-known (outside France) battles: Bir Hakeim (1942) and Ksar Ghilane (1943). Both showpiece heroic against-all-odds stands by the French against overwhelming German forces. They both also serve as a clear indication of the extreme lengths the Free French had to go to both their worth. Near suicidal acts of courage, with a heavy cost, essential to establish their moral and political force.

De Gaulle himself is absent from the battlefield, but very much engaged in a long-running struggle to build a Free French movement. From arriving in England, he meets obstinacy and defeatism. De Gaulle is very good at showing how this organisation is slowly and painfully built, almost a recruit at a time. The very qualities that will make De Gaulle such a powerful figure later – stubbornness, bluntness and unbending determination – frequently put-off supporters (there is a great expectation-defying scene where De Gaulle gives a hilariously blunt recruitment speech to captured French naval men, who respond by almost to a man refusing). Most of Part 1 covers the incremental steps of turning the Free French from a room of believers, to an actual military force that’s part military movie, part caper (with De Gaulle and co smuggled over African borders). So well does the film stress the difficulty, that each step forward is enormously satisfying.

De Gaulle suggests the main advantage its subject had was Winston Churchill recognising the prickly maverick as a kindred spirit. De Gaulle’s main relationship – awash with arguments as it is – is the love-hate bromance between De Gaulle and the British leader. Francophile Churchill – talking in an easy if stilted French – sees a lot to respect in another leader taking a stand when all seems lost. Excellently played by Simon Russell Beale, Churchill is a mass of realpolitik and teary sentimentality, backing De Gaulle when no-one else will, then frequently demanding he be cut lose in favour of a more pliant leader. But De Gaulle returns time and again to the sentimental affection and respect between the two, for all their vast differences.

You can’t say the same for De Gaulle and Roosevelt. Interestingly, if De Gaulle has a villain its the US President. Sure, the Germans are enemies on the battlefield – and brutal occupiers and torturers in Occupied France – but they are mostly anonymous or glimpsed only through dust-filled binoculars on battlefields. It’s the De Gaulle-loathing Roosevelt, played with self-satisfied superiority by Campbell Scott, who becomes the face of every obstacle in the way of a Free France, depicted as planning to turn the country into a US-occupied colony (a real plan, that never advanced as far as it is shown here).

Roosevelt backs a wave of alternative leaders, from collaborationist Admiral Darlan (Matthieu Kassovitz, suitably arrogant and two-faced) to the deferential General Giraud (Thierry Lhermitte, brilliantly using bluffness to hide how out of his depth he is). He excludes De Gaulle from decisions and refuses to work with him. De Gaulle is keen to show other Americans – noticeably Eisenhower – unhappy with this. But it’s a sign of current Euro-US relations that De Gaulle presents the Americans more as obstacles than crucial allies. (De Gaulle also shows many of the Free French’s most effective soldiers are Africans from their colonies – all of them, to a man, banned from D-Day thanks to American segregationist policies).

De Gaulle runs a parallel storyline of the growth of resistance movements in France. It does this with surprising nimbleness, seeing the development through the eyes of two young idealists: Fernand (Florain Lesier) and the Jewish Livia (Anamaria Vartolomei). At first, both these characters feel like representative figures – it’s one of Part 1’s neatest tricks to reveal Fernand is in fact very much real with a crucial role to play in world events. Livia, very well played by Vartolomei, represents a host of brave women caught up in the tensions and terrors of the resistance. The resistance itself, like the rest of the Free French, is a hard-won battle to form, fought by Félix Kysyl’s Jean Moulin (a very much real hero of the French resistance) – like De Gaulle a stoic but determined man, willing to take risks to save France’s honour. These sequences – from early student protests met with hard-handed Petain responses to the growth of networks and tense rooftop escapes from the Gestapo – have a palpable tension.

But the heart of De Gaulle is the general himself. It’s lucky the film has landed such a perfect actor for the role. Simon Abkarian not only looks a great deal like this ram-rod military man, but also brilliantly mixes De Gaulle’s utter self-belief and domineering refusal to compromise with small moments of doubt. Abkarian’s fantastic performance has just enough humanity to keep us rooting for him. De Gaulle charts the subtle developments of his political skills – from the imperious man of the start of Part 1 who alienates as many as he wins over, to Part 2 balancing his stubbornness with wily politicking and weaponizing of his unassailable reputation.

One of De Gaulle’s key insights is that the battle for France was as much – if not more – about deciding who would represent the country, as much as it was defeating the occupying forces. If France was led by non-entities or those (like Darlan) tarred by working with Germans, its place on the world-stage post-war would have been a very different one. De Gaulle also understands that presenting unjust against-the-odds battles (both military and political) very quickly leads us to admire and root for the heroes struggling to do the right thing.

It may be, in many ways, an old-fashioned film, carefully laying out events and focused on a grand canvas of the war, rather than recent trends for biographies to focus on single, representative events in detail. There are, as a result, scenes where characters essentially tell each other news to keep the plot going. It’s easy to see spiritual similarities with Patton, another epic biopic of a prickly figure with a messianic complex (although De Gaulle is far less ambiguous about its lead). But De Gaulle tells a story that, certainly outside France, is far fresher and less familiar.

And it manages to make the struggle to win France’s freedom and honour constantly on a knife-edge. Either on the battlefield or in the committee room, the odds never favour De Gaulle. Desperate punts are made, some of which fail spectacularly. Humiliations are frequent. But they make the success sweeter. It’s that – and Abkarian’s excellent recreation of the future French icon – that makes De Gaulle such a satisfying watch. I’d be fascinated in seeing a sequel, covering De Gaulle’s post-war French leadership, (De Gaulle pointedly states at one point he has recognised the UK will always favour the US over Europe, a neat wink at his later political positions). But for now, this is an old-fashioned, grand WW2 epic that tells a less familiar story with a great deal of energy.

The Emigrants (1971) / The New Land (1972)

Troell’s magnificent double bill is a beautifully filmed tribute to the migrant story

Director: Jan Troell

Cast: Max von Sydow (Karl Oskar Nilsson), Liv Ullman (Kristina Nilsson), Eddie Axberg (Robert Nilsson), Allan Edwall (Daniel Andreasson), Monica Zetterlund (Ulrika), Pierre Lindstedt (Arvid), Hans Alfredson (Jonas Petter), Ulla Smidje (Inga-Lena Andreasson), Eva-Lena Zetterlund (Elin), Gustaf Färingborg (Brusander), Åke Fridell (Aron), Sven-Olaf Bern (Nils Nilsson), Aina Alfredsson (Märta Nilsson)

Imagine back-breaking labour made even heavier from centuries of tradition weighing you down. Wouldn’t you be thinking about finding a New Land? That’s what millions of people in the nineteenth century did, making journeys their parents and grandparents couldn’t even imagine. Leaving ancestral homes behind, crossing oceans and continents to claim a share of the American dream. It’s beautifully told in Jan Troell’s epic two-part movie, a poetically filmed, sensitive and absorbingly low-key and naturalistic film that pulls the viewer into people’s lives and its hypnotic spell.

The Emigrants introduces us to Swedish farmer Karl Oskar Nilsson (Max von Sydow) and his wife Kristina (Liv Ullman). Karl Oscar slaves over poor land in appalling weather, labouring desperately to turn rocks into crops. His brother Robert (Eddie Axberg) is treated like a slave by his employer and Kristina’s uncle and lay preacher Daniel (Allan Edwall) and his protégé, former prostitute Ulrika (Monica Zetterland), are treated like criminals by the church. No wonder this group joins the Swedish exodus to America, an epic, exhausting journey with a dream. The New Land picks up (almost minutes later) with the life Nilsson and his family build in Minnesota, facing new problems but always working relentlessly.

Adapted from best-selling novels by Vilhelm Moberg, Troll’s film is measured, stately and plays like a gorgeously filmed fly-on-the-wall documentary. It is reserved, unrelentingly unmelodramatic and in many ways utterly engrossing. Largely because it feels forever grounded in the realities of its story, which feels universally true. These are honest, hard-working and decent people – in many ways unremarkable – but struggling with things we all worry about, searching for a better life for themselves and their children, and working hard to get the best out of the hand life has dealt them.

And it’s frequently a rough hand. Troell’s film doesn’t shirk in showing the toughness of farming on terrible land in Sweden – just as it doesn’t romanticise the struggle of building a new farm in the undeveloped vastness of America. Much of the opening half of The Emigrants focuses on that back-breaking labour in rock-filled Swedish soil. Resources are stretched so much the family can’t even afford to feed a cat – the household pet bagged up and reluctantly tossed in a river. All the time, nature kicks our heroes in the teeth. Nilsson’s father labours to clear rocks from his land only to break his leg falling into the pit he’s dropping them into. The rain the family have been waiting for brings with it lightening that burns down the barn. The idea of making a success of this land feels as impossible to us as it does to the Nilssons.

Even worse is the parade of woes life around throws at them. The local area is firmly under the control of the Church. The parish priest, of course, lives in a well-furnished home and sanctimoniously tells his parishioners they should be content with their humble, unrewarding lot. Anyone challenging this, like Daniel with with his lay celebration of Christ, is treated as a dangerous dissident. Any idea that anyone should forge a life of their choosing is resolutely slapped down as if it’s a revolutionary act.

Nilsson states grimly that “no matter how hard we break our backs” success is impossible. Kristina, who throughout their lives will always be the more conservative but also more emotionally-driven (unlike the stoic Karl Oskar), is appalled by his ‘blasphemy’. But the death of their daughter – a moment of heart-rending tragedy in its simple grief, channelled in silent tears by Kristina and loving casket crafting by Karl-Oskar – is the tipping point. Their late daughter’s shoe will be a totem they cling to for the rest of the lives, both Nilssons clasping it close at moments of doubt or worry.

Leaving this world behind is a decision of impossible weight. Troell captures this in the carefully timed, wonderfully paced static shot that holds the Nilsson’s perspective as they look back at Karl Oskar’s parents gradually receding in the distance. The sudden cut to the sea is a powerful visual contrast to everything we have seen before, the camera capturing the sprawling vastness of the ocean so different from the closeness of the hilly land in the Swedish village. It’s a journey of lice, seasickness and sudden death each stressing the difficulties and dangers of this journey.

It also builds bonds. Our central relationship remains Karl Oskar and Kristina, beautifully played by Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman. Von Sydow really captures the world-weary decency in Karl Oskar, a man who works without complaint but with a strong sense of justice. Ullman is equally wonderful as a sensitive woman, whose life takes a dramatically different course than the one she imagines as a young woman dreaming on a swing (an image she will return to her in mind late in life), quick to judge, liable to lash out, but also fiercely loyal who comes to life in small moments of joy.

Her quick-to-judge manner makes her at first immensely hostile to Ulrika, with her background of easy virtue. But Ulrika’s warmth, genuineness and lack of guile – and her fortunate finding of Kristina’s lost child during the journey – builds an unshakeable bond between them. During their life in America, Kristina will see her as a sister and confidant, Ulrika’s blunt plain-speaking coaching her through medical troubles and also giving her moments of girlish joy (Kristina’s face, lit up with glee, wearing Ulrika’s floral wedding hat is a wonderful moment). Moncia Zetterland is superb.

If only Karl Oskar had the same relationship with his brother. But he distrusts Robert’s dreamy disposition, his flights of fancy utterly contrary to Karl Oskar’s muscular realism. He will defend his brother loyally against outsiders – confronting his abusive master with dangerous threats – but lambast him privately as a burden and a fantasist. Eddie Axberg is marvellous as Robert, a sensitive dreamer constantly unready for the world’s hardness. In The New Land, he chases Gold in California. Dreams, not to Karl Oskar’s surprise, doomed to disaster – a sequence of jerky editing, woozy camerawork and intimidating silence, so jarringly different from everything else in Troell’s films it feels as an oppressive Odyssey to us as it does to Robert (whose spirit it painfully breaks).

Life in America feels in many ways so different from life in Sweden, but in others the same. Trains feel as alien when they arrive, as the bustling streets (shot with hand-held immediacy) of New York. But The New Land is equally full of back-breaking labour. It opens with a montage of never-ending carpentry and woodcutting as Karl Oskar builds a home. Crops are crafted in snow. Everything from taking delivery of letters to cows is expensive. In a scene, surely lifted for Empire Strikes Back, Karl is even forced to gut a precious cow during a snowstorm to wrap his freezing son in its innards. The soil may be more fertile and the houses and fields may rise quicker, but the work doesn’t change.

The New Land also, bravely, makes room to show a touch of the experiences of the indigenous people whose land is now the property of men like Karl. The remains of these communities are frequently glimpsed, drifting from place to place on the horizon. There are several references to how many have grown dependent on charity. Karl finds the mummified body of an indigenous man frozen in the snow. He’ll even be bluntly told that, as a man who has bought (from the US government) ‘stolen goods’, he is an unwitting party to injustice. The New Land isn’t afraid to show the brutal killing of innocent Swedish migrants in the Dakota War, but it also delivers a chilling near-silent sequence of dozens of Dakota Sioux executed in the snow.

Both films remain heartfelt tributes to the bravery and endurance of migrants. What’s really striking, towards the end of The New Land is how old and worn out our heroes are compared to their actual ages (Kristina in particular looks closer to mid-50s than 40). The final coda reveals how their children have assimilated in American culture, with American names, forgetting their Swedish language and culture. Their parents have built them a new life – but at the cost of their old. It’s a sad grace note of the sacrifice of migration, in a stunningly beautiful and very moving pair of films.

The Good Earth (1937)

Seen at the time as an artistic statement, despite its worthiness today its a Hollywood embarrassment

Director: Sidney Franklin

Cast: Paul Muni (Wang Lung), Luise Rainer (O-Lan), Charley Grapewin (Old Father), Tilly Losch (White Lotus), Walter Connolly (Uncle), Jessie Ralph (Cuckoo), Soo Yong (Aunt), Keye Luke (Elder Son), Roland Lui (Younger Son), Suzanne Kim (Little fool), Ching Wah Lee (Ching), Harold Huber (Cousin), Olaf Hyten (Grain merchant)

Adapted from a best-selling, Pulitzer-prize winning novel by Pearl S Buck (who grew up the child of missionaries in China), The Good Earth introduced to many Americans a view of Chinese life they’d never imagined. The story’s basic structure was probably familiar: a hard-working, noble peasant Wang Lung (Paul Muni) marries O-Lan (Luise Rainer), slave of the Great House. Through hard work he increases his farm on the ‘good earth’, before famine drives him to desperation. Refusing to sell their land, the family go to the city, get caught up in revolution but O-Lan lucks out in finding a bundle of jewels. Now rich and powerful, Wang Lung buys the great house – but, of course, in his newfound pride casts aside O-Lan for concubine Lotus (Tilly Losch) and quarrels with his now adult sons. Will a plague of locusts bring everyone together again?

You can’t really go far when talking about The Good Earth without addressing the rather loud elephant in the room. This is the most infamous yellow-face production in Hollywood history. It had originally been planned to find Chinese-American leads, but producer Irving Thalberg – to whom the film was dedicated – decided America ‘wasn’t ready’ for that. You kinda wish he’d tried harder, especially as clearly America was ready for a load of Chinese actors in the film as long as they weren’t in main roles. It’s more-and-more egregious as the film goes on, especially since Muni’s make-up job is awful and the likes of Connolly and Grapewin lead the way in making no effort to act or sound even remotely Chinese, instead feeling like they’ve just wandered in from New York.

This didn’t stop The Good Earth from receiving critical acclaim and nominations for several Oscars including Best Picture. It even won Luise Rainer her second (back-to-back!) Oscar. In this muted performance, Rainer’s quiet, sad-eyed, perpetually suffering O-Lan is called on to spend almost every scene with eyes cast down while suffering poverty, starvation, humiliation or half a dozen other things with stoic resignation. A more deserved Oscar went to Karl Freund’s impressive photography (including creating a locust plague from coffee grains in the wind).

You’d argue The Good Earth also deserved recognition for its recreation of China in the fields of California. Thalberg originally hoped to film on location in China, only to find Ching Ka-shek’s government was less than thrilled with the film unless they had complete creative control over it. Instead, the film flawlessly recreated Chinese wheat and rice fields in the Californian heat, as well as a lusciously built ‘Grand House’. You can argue that, like all the rest of the design aesthetic in The Good Earth – costumes, hair, orientalist music – it’s really a very Victorian pastiche rather than anything you could call China (the same goes for the film’s pussy-footing around questions of communist rebellion and revolt), but at least it looks great.

It’s a reminder the film means well. At heart it’s a grand, middle-brow, prestige epic, directed by competent safe-hands (Sidney Franklin went on to make a career producing films like this). It tells a family story over two generations full of nobility, suffering and sacrifice with a hero who, for all his Chinese heritage, basically happily embraces the American Dream. There are sudden time-jumps – Wang Lung and O-Lan’s children go suddenly from babies to children then even more suddenly young adults – with time vaguely marked by the flourishing of a tree planted by O-Lan on her wedding night.

Despite this grand scope, or perhaps because of it, The Good Earth can feel slow and ponderous, a little too pleased at its own literary self-importance. That isn’t to say there are not some fine sequences. Its depiction of famine is very well drawn, as plants wither and vultures circle over fallen calves. From the sad regret of Wang Lung about butchering his beloved ox (something he rather selfishly delegates to the long-suffering duteous O-Lan) to the family’s near lynching by a mob convinced that they must be hording food. These sequences are very effective, not least because it’s hard not to sympathise with the unjust reward of hunger and poverty for our heroes hard work.

The film’s finest sequence is in the big city, after a mass migration shot like a Western land grab. In the city, with its mass of humanity and grinding poverty, the film gets embraces Eisenstein inspiration as the city bubbles with revolutionary resentment. A speaker on the street is gunned down, leading into a fast cut riot, with one striking shot seeing a man crushed under an overturned cannon. O-Lan is swept up into a mob ransacking a house, trampled in a panic before nearly being executed by the military. There is a sense of physical peril here, of genuine stakes – as well as moral quandaries in times of desperation (Wang Lung ferociously beats his starving son for stealing from a market stall) missing elsewhere in the earlier more worthy sequences.

The Good Earth however leaves such drama and stakes behind for a more conventional Victorian melodrama as Wang Lung, corrupted by money, turns on all around him in favour of concubine Lotus (Anna May Wong furiously refused to play this role, outraged that the leading Chinese American actress, was being offered the only flat-out unsympathetic part). It’s all as you would expect: Wang Lung behaves badly, O-Lan suffers silently, the viewer watches disapprovingly. Muni’s performance slumps by this point – always an overblown actor, his early youthful enthusiasm transforms into an overblown, over-emphatic display that feels more and more like a Yank thrown into a Chinese farm.

The Good Earth rallies in its final sequence with a striking running battle with a locust invasion – impressively shot by Freund and arguably deserving of a visual effects nomination – before its sentimental ending. But sadly, there isn’t enough solid maintained quality in The Good Earth to make it easy to look past the yellowface today. In a sign of how times change, what on release was considered by Hollywood a major artistic statement, is today seen as a skin-crawling embarrassment best forgotten.

The Man Who Laughs (1928)

Gothic romance, wrongly remembered as a proto-horror, also has a dark sexual undercurrent

Director: Paul Leni

Cast: Conrad Veidt (Gwynplaine), Mary Philbin (Dea), Olga Baclanova (Duchess Josiana), Josephine Cowell (Queen Anne), George Siegmann (Dr Hardquanonne), Brandon Hurst (Barkilphedro), Sam De Grasse (James II), Stuart Holmes (Lord Dirry-Moir), Cesare Gravina (Ursus)

The Man Who Laughs often gets remembered as a horror film, which seems a bit odd when you actually watch this Victor Hugo adaptation. It’s really a sort of melodrama romance with a touch of conspiracy-tinged action. What possibly cements it as a comedy is the Glasgow-smile of its lead character Gwynplaine, played by that legend of silent cinema monsters Conrad Viedt. (It went on to inspire the look of The Joker, further cementing the film as horror in minds). But, far from a monster, Gwynplaine is a sweet-vulnerable figure who has find himself at the centre of an atmospheric drama with lashes of shadow and Gothic German expressionism from its director Paul Leni.

Gwynplaine has his twisted smile after his face was mutilated as a child, a punishment for his executed father, stripped of his lordship by order of James II (Sam De Grasse). Years later, in the reign of Queen Anne (Josephine Cowell), Gwynplaine is the leading figure of a travelling band of players, famous as the Man Who Smiles. He’s in love with the blind Dea (Mary Philbin) but disgusted and ashamed of his own appearance, which prevents him declaring his love. But his ancestry is discovered, as his (unwanted) claim to the title now held by the nymphomaniac Duchess Josiana (Olga Baclanova), and he becomes the centre of a scheme for power by the sinister Barkilphedro (Brandon Hurst).

The Man Who Laughs main focus is the gentle romance between Gwynplaine and Bea, which becomes absorbed into a tragic story of creeping gothic power. Gwynplaine wants nothing more than to be left alone. He hates being the centre of his attention, only really comfortable when disguised under theatrical make-up or with the blind Dea. Even then, Gwynplaine refuses to let her touch his face so terrified is he that she will reject the twisted facial features that she will find below her hands. This is told with a gentle, sympathetic sweetness by Leni, who dials down the misty misery and darkness that casts its shadow over the rest of the film, to allow this romance to spread hope.

It’s far different from the gloomy, gothic foreboding that covers the rest of the film in its frequently shadow and mist filled frame. From its opening in the bedroom of King James – lined with stony carvings that look like they’ve been peeled off the wall of an ancient Minster – it throws us into a grizzly execution for Gwynplaine’s father, locked into a spike-lined Iron Lady with a stoic look on his face. The banishment of Gwynplaine, along with the bizarre cult who deformed him, on a rickity ship passes through a frozen coast-line, where the young boy is cast aside the moment the going gets tough. From there, we see streets filled with hints of violence under the mists. Brandon Hurst’s darkly twisted Barkilphedro is the sort of man who thinks nothing of dispatching a witness to the torture chamber or dragging a victim in the middle of the night to who-knows-where. Hurst is an unsettling stand-out here, playing a man with no sense of loyalty or honour, happy to lie and manipulate as well as slimly ingratiate himself to anyone in power.

The gloomy sense of danger that this world is filled with is captured superbly in Leni’s film, which is stuffed with atmospheric compositions that only stress the unsettling sense of peril lurking around every corner. It’s also a world filled with perverse sexual longing. It’s hard to imagine The Man Who Laughs having a whisper of existing a few years later under the Hays Code, such is the dark sexual current flowing beneath it. Frequently sexual desire rears its head, from the coded glances Queen Anne gives the missing chair of the Duchess, to the base desires that drag Gwynplaine from his bed one night to explore a beguiling offer from the Duchess.

The Duchess is the heart of the sexual darkness in the film, an allusive seductress we are introduced to lazing practically naked on a bed, attempting to seduce Barkilphedro to follow her whims with him perching at the end of her bed and allowed a peek of her (possibly non-existent) underwear. Not until Basic Instinct would another villainous of such rampant, unabashed sexuality hit the screen. The Duchess is as sexually excited by the thought of men fighting over her on the street (and its implied would be more than happy to satisfy any number of winners) as she is hornily fascinated by Gwynplaine’s unusual features. She is able to puppet along Stuart Holmes’ clueless Lord, who can barely tear his eyes from her even while he knows she is treating him like dirt. Her sensuality even runs the risk of seducing our hero, and her unabashed revelling in her sexuality feels light years ahead of its time.

But the lasting impact of The Man Who Laughs comes from its lead character, wonderfully embodied by Conrad Veidt in one of the legendary silent performances. Labouring under the facial disfigurement make-up – which left his face and mouth sore and exhausted – Veidt belays the restrictive nature of his make-up to offer a parade of expressions, variations on the same smile. Devotion, shame, joy, excitement, fear and hope play across his face so clearly that, even with the lower part of his mouth rigidly fixed, it’s always certain exactly what he is feeling. Presented to the House of Lords at the film’s end, Veidt is given a marvellous set-piece of moral force, berating the crowing bewigged courtiers who turn on him and vigorously asserting his right to choose. It’s a crowning moment of a subtle and moving performance.

And it makes Gwynplaine so sympathetic, it’s even more unusual that it’s been remembered as a horror, for all the film ends in a gothic chase and the brutally bloody intervention of a loyal but fierce wolf hound. Because The Man Who Laughs is, in the end, a hopeful and undeniably romantic testimony to how love can in fact conquer all, which for all its gothic gloom, leaves us sailing into a sunset relieved that the future promises all the best for our heroes.

Captain Blood (1935)

Errol Flynn buckles swashes in this stirring and exciting pirate adventure

Director: Michael Curtiz

Cast: Errol Flynn (Peter Blood), Olivia de Havilland (Arabella Bishop), Lionel Atwill (Colonel Bishop), Basil Rathbone (Lavasseur), Ross Alexander (Jeremy Pitt), Guy Kibbee (Hagthorpe), Henry Stephenson (Lord Willoughby), Robert Barrat (Wolverstone), Hobart Cavanagh (Dr Bronson), Donald Meek (Dr Whacker), Jessie Ralph (Mrs Barlow), Frank McGlynn Snr (Reverend Ogle), David Torrence (Andrew Baynes), J. Carrol Naish (Cabusac), George Hassell (Governor Steed), Halliwell Hobbes (Sunderland)

Dr Peter Blood (Errol Flynn) is having a bad day. Plucked from his bed to tend to a dying man by close friend Jeremy Pitt (Ross Alexander), he’s arrested. That’s because it’s 1685 and Jeremy and tat dying man are part of Monmouth’s ill-fated rebellion against James II. Blood, Pitt and many others are shipped to Jamaica and sold into slavery. Blood is purchased by the ambitious Colonel Bishop (Lionel Atwill), whose daughter Arabella (Olivia de Havilland) is strangely drawn to the proud slave. Blood struggles to find freedom for his friends, helped by his medical skills successfully treating the governor’s gout, until a fortunate Spanish attack gives them the chance to escape and set up a career as pirates – all while dreaming of one-day clearing their names.

It’s all gist to the swashbuckling mill, in this rip-roaringly entertaining adventure, the first collaboration of Curtiz, Flynn, de Havilland and Rathbone, that would eventually lead to the genre-defining brilliance of The Adventures of Robin Hood. Flynn was essentially plucked from nowhere, taking the part after an asthma-suffering Robert Donat turned it down, coached (or bullied) through the performance by the relentless task-master Curtiz, opposite a de Havilland with less than a handful of credits to her name. Everything pretty much comes together in a celebration of old-school matinee thrills, with a star oozing charisma at its heart.

Because, say what you like about Flynn, if there is star quality they guy had it in spades. Whether that’s swinging by rope from ship to ship, staunchly standing against injustice against Judge Jeffries (shooting off a few cutting one-liners on Jefferies ill-health along the way), defiantly stating he will never be broken when tied to a pole for a lashing or delicately navigating a spikey love-hate relationship with the haughtily playful Arabella, you can’t take your eyes off him. Captain Blood’s dialogue is frequently slightly heightened, but Flynn’s ease with it (which he learned the hard way – Curtiz reshot several earlier sequences later when he had relaxed and got better) lets it sing, as he stands tall and talks of equality and justice.

Captain Blood is in many ways the perfect Flynn vehicle, setting the template for the roles the star would later triumph in: an egalitarian man of nobility and principle, who fights when he must, with determination and never bitterness. Captain Blood uses this to maximum effect, surrounding Flynn with a cast of seasoned pros virtually none of whom were taller than his shoulders (just to make him look even more heroic as he towers above them). This was the guy Hollywood had been waiting for since Douglas Fairbanks, a hale-fellow well-met slice of masculine charm and energy.

He triumphs in a film which is often wordier and plot-heavier than you think. It’s a credit to the relentless energy Curtiz bring to it, that you almost don’t notice it takes nearly an hour before piracy enters this pirate movie, almost half its run time dedicated to Blood’s struggles in Jamaica. It works because the character dynamics are very well-drawn. George Hassell’s slightly pathetic governor, constantly whining about his gout is as entertaining as the two useless doctors (Hobart Cavanagh and Donald Meek) easily bested by Blood’s practical brilliance. Curtiz is also able to lay-on the grim injustice of indentured servitude on Jamaica, embodied by a gigantic mill wheel the prisoners turn round and round, to the constant soundtrack of lashing (it has to be said, Captain Blood does feel a bit awkward, especially today, in its near complete absence of Black slaves).

But you can don’t feel any drag when sequences like Blood’s defiant trial in England or the carefully measured flirtation between him and de Havilland (full of intelligence and allure) is so well done. And then of course, when you get to the piratical antics, it’s well worth the wait. Flynn, as noted, was made for making principled speeches in the nominal role of rebel (these pirates solemnly swear, among other things, never to mistreat a woman). The naval battles – brilliantly assembled from a mix of miniatures, old footage from silent films and studio-bound sets – are quite gripping, full of exploding ships, cannon fire, boardings and frantically energetic sword fights.

That’s almost nothing to the location-shot, shoreline duel among the rocks between Flynn and Rathbone. Basil Rathbone was surely only cast for his ability to fight duels like this – his character, a French pirate captain, is so unnecessary to the plot and turns on Blood for such trivial reasons, it’s hard not to feel it’s been shoe-horned in to give the actor something to do before the swords come out. The duel is full of deathly cut and thrust, with its final shot of Rathbone lying in the sand, the turf washing over his face (it’s no spoiler to say that Hollywood’s finest fencer again loses) beautifully done.

Captain Blood is full of visual style and flair, Curtiz the master-craftsman showing us all how it’s done. The Rembrandt-inspired locations of Stuart England are filled with angular lighting and giant-cast shadows. The camerawork through the mix of studio sets and location footing seamlessly ties locations together. His management of the film perfectly marries the scale of the adventure set-pieces with the elements of character stories that run throughout. It’s a film that manages to be exciting and witty, rollicking adventure and light comedy.

It also helps that it has a host of leading Hollywood character players doing fabulous work. Lionel Atwill is full of pomposity, self-importance and casual, unthinking cruelty as the ambitious Colonel Bishop. Ross Alexander – who tragically died only a year after the film was released – has a fair degree of earnest charisma. Guy Kibbee is hugely entertaining as grouchy Hagthorpe, a stand-out in a parade of crewmen (Frank McGlynn, David Torrance, Forrester Harvey and J Carrol Naish) who fully embrace their concisely written characters. And, of course, Olivia de Havilland is romantic allure itself, determined and independent and more than a match for Flynn.

As is the way with this era of Hollywood, there are several period details that are all over the place (a street light outside Blood’s London home?), with things like coaches and de Havilland’s dresses parachuted in from several decades later. But these little details are almost by-the-by in a film as full of energy, entertainment and excitement as this, a swashbuckler that continues to thrill and delight almost 90 years on.

Viva Villa! (1934)

Despite some impressive moments, this largely fictional epic veers wildly in tone from scene to scene

Director: Jack L Conway

Cast: Wallace Beery (Pancho Villa), Leo Carrillo (Sierre), Fay Wray (Teresa), Donald Woods (Don Felipe), Stuart Erwin (Johnny Sykes), Henry B Walthall (Francesco Madero), Joseph Schildkraut (General Pascal), Katherine de Mille (Rosita), George E Stone (Emilio Chavita)

It’s not often a historical epic opens with text explaining pretty much everything you about to see in it is made up. But that’s what you get with Viva Villa!, nominally about the life of Pancho Villa, but so unconnected to real events that the Mexican government (who hosted a fair bit of the filming) called for it to be boycotted. This didn’t stop Viva Villa! becoming the biggest box-office hit of the year. This feels like bit of a mystery today with its strange mix of broad comedy, historical sweep and surrealist darkness. In other hands, it might have been a masterpiece (perhaps Howard Hawks’ hands, if David O Selznick hadn’t fired him and hired placemen Conway), but here it’s merely a competently executed semi-epic that works best if you accept its fictional.

As a boy, Pancho Villa (Wallace Beery) watched his father whipped to death by the Spanish Dons that rule the roost in Mexico. Now it’s the 1910s, and Pancho is a brutal bandit dishing out vigilante justice to the peasant’s oppressors. It takes a gentle man of vision, Francesco Madero (Henry B Walthall), to convince him there are better things to fight for than just grabbing a wife in every town. Pancho joins the revolution, helps place Madero on the (Presidential) throne – only to have his rival General Pascal (Joseph Schildkraut) orchestrate his banishment. But, when Pascal murders Madero, nothing is going to stop Pancho returning to wreak vengeance and bring justice.

Viva Villa may be, tonely, a very confused film (of which more later), but it undeniably has several moments of grand filming, James Wong Howe’s photography is a gorgeous parade of shadows, with scenes such as Villa’s unilateral execution of a parade of officials playing out with stream of light pouring from a window to cast gigantic shadows of hands and weapons on the walls behind them. Later war sequences, featuring further firing squads and executions, have a Goya feel to them with their thunderous dark lighting and towering shadows. The on-location shooting is impressively grand – so much so, it shows up the painfully unconvincing back projection that places Beery and others in front of troops of real armies.

However, the film never quite decides what to do with its hero (anti-hero?). Wallace Beery basically plays the same character he did in The Big House (but with a painful Mexeecan accent): a not-too-bright lug, with a capacity for violence and a childish sense of loyalty. The film never quite knows what to do with him. He’s introduced like a sort of Mussolini-strong man, cracking smiles when he has a group of “just following orders” officials gunned down in front of a ‘jury’ of recently executed peasants they have (not surprisingly) failed to convince. Like some sort of randy Speedy Gonzalez, there is a lot of fun had at his taking a wife in every town. He excuses his campaign of brutal violence during the revolution with a cheeky smile, like he’s been caught with a hand in the cookie jar. He leers over Fay Wray’s Teresa like a second King Kong and frequently kills with a smile and no second thoughts. He’s a ferocious force of destruction.

But then he’s given moments of genuine heroism. He accepts his banishment with a wry shrug. His loyalty is as highly praised as his “don’t take your hats off to me” egalitarianism. He’s presented as the sort of incorruptible, plain-speaker the country seems to need to solve its problems. Ahistorically becoming President, he remains uncorrupted, talks down his suitability for the job and humbly plays down his achievements – all while doing everything he can to protect those peasants rights. At moments like this, he’s less a chillingly ruthless men capable of great violence but a lovable rogue, bashfully pinching a minor treasure from the Presidential palace. But then he’s also a guy who a few moments earlier made an enemy for life by whipping Fay Wray half-to-death in a fit of frustrated lust (another scene making marvellous use of shadows).

There is no coherence to this: it feels like Villa is whatever the scene requires him to be in the moment. Moments of comedy land a bit awkwardly, when we’ve watched Pancho gun down a relatively inoffensive bank manager. And, vampish as Wray is, she hardly deserves her fate or the general indifference Pancho meets it with. The tone shifts feel awkward and jarring, just as the shifting of Pancho’s character feels random and calculated moment-by-moment. You can say the same for Madero, played with a wispy gentleness by Henry B Walthall: he’s partly a sort of secular-saint (with his own gently inspiring music), partly a naïve, weedy weakling who literally needs someone else to open his heavy office door whose enemies run rings run round him. At least Joseph Schildkraut, a preeningly camp villain caked in brown make-up, has a consistent character (even if its two dimensional) as an unashamedly selfish general, jealous of how much Pancho’s men love him. Similarly, socialist journalist John Reed is reimagined here in a tediously crude performance by Stuart Erwin as a barely competent drunkard.

It’s all part of what is a big, brash, crude epic that frequently aims for the crude, comic angles it can find whenever it can. Which is odd, as I say, for a film with such a ruthlessly high body-count (everyone from countless prisoners of war, weeping officials and even an inoffensive bank manager gets it) and has its vampish female lead fend off possible rape by our hero only to be beaten in silhouette and accidentally shot. What becomes clear in fact as it goes on, is that it seems to see Mexico as a country of wild, destructive children – like a sort of Lord of the Flies among the revolutionary set. Every Mexican character in it, except Manduro, is basically dirty, none-to-bright and impetuous (needless to say none of them are played by actual Mexicans).

Which, when you think about it, is a little uncomfortable (not helped by the fact the Spanish Dons – the likes of Donald Woods – all speak with comfortably refined mid-Atlantic accents). In that context, it’s less of a surprise to remember that the Mexican government basically banned it. There are several handsome moments of filming, and its scale is impressive, but with its tone varying wildly and a Beery lead performance that feels oddly out of place it only rarely works as well as it should.

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Almost as famous for the story of its making, a stunningly epic look at idealism and hubris

Director: Werner Herzog

Cast: Klaus Kinski (Brian Sweeney ‘Fitzcarraldo’ Fitzgerald), Claudia Cardinale (Molly), José Lewgoy (Don Aquilino), Miguel Ángel Fuentes (Cholo), Paul Hittscher (Captain “Orinoco” Paul Resenbrink), Huerequeque Enrique Bohórquez (Huerequeque), Grande Othelo (Stationmaster), Peter Berling (Opera manager), David Pérez Espinosa (Campa chief), Milton Nascimento (Opera house doorman), Ruy Polanah (Rubber baron)

Possibly no film is as famous (if not more so) for its making, as much as the film itself. Fitzcarraldo is the epicentre of the Herzog myth (that’s saying something for a guy who once ate a shoe on film and dismissed getting shot by an air rifle during an interview as ‘insignificant’ before continuing). Herzog not only committed his crew to pulling a steamer ship up a jungle mountain for real, but also continued his tumultuous partnership with the notoriously unpleasant Kinski (who the indigenous cast even offered to bump off). Chuck in that Herzog spent had to reshoot most of the film from scratch after original stars Jason Robards and Mick Jagger dropped out, and you have a film that could almost become a film itself.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the shores of the Amazon are being exploited by business barons. Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski) – known as Fitzcarraldo – wants to become one of them. But not because he hungers for money: his passion is opera, and his dream is to raise the capital to build an opera house in Inquitos. This leads to a final desperate throw of the dice: buying a claim to a stretch of rubber trees, inaccessible behind rapids on tributary stream of the Amazon. But there is only one way to get to it: take a ship down a parallel river, then drag it over a small mountain at the narrowest point, farm the rubber and drag the ship back to sail home. Simple right?

At one point, Fitzgerald calls himself the “Conquistador of the useless”. It’s also the title Herzog himself chose when he wrote about making the film, which was born out of his obsession with how ancient civilisations moved giant stone menhirs. You could (very easily) argue Fitzcarraldo is a self-portrait of a man compelled to bring his impossible ideas to life. There is no doubt a lot of the films power comes from knowing a real (admittedly 30-tonne rather than 320) steamship was pulled up a mountain by hundreds of people. It’s one of the reasons why the film’s more luxuriant pace sometimes drag – we want to get into the jungle as much as Fitzgerald does. We know it’s coming and the first hour leading to it, particularly on a first viewing, can try the patience.

Much like his last famous film in the jungles, Fitzcarraldo has a mystic, mythical and timeless quality. With Popul Vuh’s haunting music seeping into your soul, Thomas Mauch’s camerawork stresses the vastness of the jungle and the size of the ship. The riverbanks this ship will be dragged over seem to tower over it, but the ship itself is frequently framed in relation to the crew it dwarves. There is an impossible, suitably Operatic, quality to what Fitzcarraldo (film and man) is attempting, and Herzog’s film doesn’t shirk in presenting the awesome impossibility of it, the dizzying unlikeliness of success, that only the most obsessed would ever even think of attempting. When you watch this ship being winched painfully slowly up a hill, ropes screaming, it’s somewhere between awe-inspiring and rubber-neckingly compelling. Part of the magic of Herzog’s film is that you invest as utterly in its mad quest as its lead does.

Of course, even though the film nearly starred Jason Robards, the wild-eyed intensity of Klaus Kinski was the only suitable channel for this madness. Despite this though, Fitzcarraldo inverts your expectations by giving us Kinski at possibly his most boyish, sweet and endearing (the exact opposite of the actor’s own personality on set). He’s an excitable eccentric, giddy with joy at hearing Caruso sing live, bounding around, forming a natural bond with children and animals, pushing his vision forwards because he earnestly believes it can be done because it must be done. This might be Kinski’s least ‘dangerous’, most gentle role, Fitzgerald able to inject his passion into others.

Not all of course – its notable that, when he reveals his plan, almost the entire crew deserts en masse in shock, leaving him just the eccentric drunken chef, his world-weary captain and cynical indigenous engineer. But there is a messianic quality in Kinski’s Fitzgerald that sweeps up the indigenous tribes into making enormous sacrifices to assist his vision (Fitzgerald’s tragedy is that his naïve, optimistic excitement blinds him to the fact that their motives are radically different to his own).

But then Fitzcarraldo, for all of the stunning excitement of the feat at its centre, doesn’t let you forget this is a grand folly, built on the back of oppression and colonial greed. That the sole reason Europeans have piled down to the Amazon is to dig bucketloads of cash out of the ground and that Fitzgerald also has no problem with sacrificing indigenous lives and tearing up the South American countryside to suit his needs. Fitzcarraldo for all its sanity-defying gorgeous, is about the selfish cost of this, and we are not allowed to forget that Fitzgerald is also a ball of monstrous vanity, the self-proclaimed “spectacle of the forest”. That there is a huge element of hubris in his desire to bend nature to his will to fulfil his artistic dreams.

Early in the boat haul, a slipped rope sends the boat rolling backwards and crushing (horribly) the life out of several workers, with others pulled out to die agonisingly slow deaths. At no point does Fitzgerald break off from his dance of celebration as the boat moves to notice this. Later he offers payment to the indigenous workers in the form of blocks of ice (“do they know it melts” he sheepishly asks his translator). The countryside around the boat is torn apart to produce a mud slope to pull the ship up, and Fitzgerald’s grand plan is to industrialise the area. Really, is he that different from the robber baron industrialists, who are full of self-satisfied, cigar chomping greed, talking about civilising the land but really only interested in lining their own pockets.

They take whatever isn’t nailed down from the tribes, feed bottles of champagne to their horses, mockingly keep bonfires going with bundles of bank notes and congratulate themselves over poker games in posh clubs. Herzog records this all with a calm, measured preciseness allowing us to draw our own conclusions. Soon, we can’t miss that even Fitzgerald’s girlfriend (a charming Claudia Cardinale) makes the money to finance their venture from training up a host of extremely reluctant looking indigenous women in the arts of bordello prostitution (“it’s better than working the street” she blithely says).

For all Fitzgerald’s mission is a last desperate throw of the dice, to raise funds for his opera house (it’s striking by the way how many viewers misremember the steamship as the opera house, as if Herzog was dragging a building up a hill), it’s also a quietly subversive look at the arrogance of the West (Fitzgerald is eventually thwarted, as it never occurs to him that the indigenous tribes have motives independent of his own). It’s a reminder that behind many dreams, is often a selfish obsession around gain – be that for glory, money or art. Fitzgerald loves the opera for sure – but he also loves the idea of himself as the ambassador for the art in South America. That’s the real dream and lives will be lost on the way. Fitzcarraldo is willing to forgive him this; even after death and failure, it gives him a sentimental coda that feels almost not quite real in its quiet optimism. But it won’t turn a blind eye to the losses he has caused. Herzog’s film (and you could accuse it, as some of, of doing the same exploitation of others as Fitzgerald does) is still an impossible, marvellous folly that no one else surely could have imagined or made.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925)

Sumptuous silent-epic, full of exciting set pieces that was basically the model for the more famous version

Director: Fred Niblo

Cast: Ramon Novarro (Ben-Hur), Francis X Bushman (Messala), May McAvoy (Esther), Betty Bronson (Mary), Claire McDowell (Miriam), Kathleen Key (Tizah), Carmel Myers (Iras), Nigel de Brulier (Simonides), Mitchell Lewis (Sheik Ilderim), Leo White (Sanballat), Frank Currier (Arrius), Charles Belcher (Balthazar)

Of course, General Lew Wallace’s tombstone historical novel is now best known as the Heston-led, Oscar-winning behemoth Ben-Hur, the self-proclaimed most epic epic ever to arrive on the screens. But it was not the first time this novel had made its way to the screen. Wyler’s film owed a vast amount to this 1925 epic, which inspired so many of its key sequences you’d have to call his version a re-make. This gigantic silent film was itself the second attempt to screen Ben-Hur, but with all the strengths of the 1959 film (namely the set-pieces like that chariot riot) but without some of its weaknesses (its crushing length and heavy-handed self-importance) it’s the better film.

Opening with the birth of Christ, the story is, as always, that of wealthy Jewish noble Judah Ben-Hur (Ramon Novarro) whose old friendship with Roman Messala (Francis X Bushman) collapses into life-long loathing when Messala has Ben-Hur arrested on trumped-up charges and, for good measure, chucks his mother Miriam (Claire McDowell) and sister Tizah (Kathleen Key) into a dungeon. Judah becomes a galley slave until he saves the life of Roman General Arrius (Frank Currier). Adopted as Arrius’ son, Judah returns to Jerusalem for revenge against Messala and to find his missing family. With the best revenge possible being defeating Messala in a deadly chariot race.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ is gargantuan in a way only the great silent epics could be. It features huge reconstructions of ancient Jerusalem, crowded with armies of extras – in its opening shots alone, elephants ride through the gigantic gates of the city. Sprawling sets, shot with perfect wide scale to hammer home their size, run throughout the whole film, with the chariot race set a towering grandstand further increased by a skilfully used matte painting. Its set pieces – the naval battle and the chariot race – are both awe-inspiring in their scale, the match of anything in the 1959 film. It’s impossible not to be slightly taken aback by the weight of what it thrown up on screen here.

In this grand-scale, the expressive pose-striking of Ramon Novarro actually feels rather fitting. Particularly as his moments of distraught guilt and fear feels earned, considering the misery of the galleys and the emotion-packed struggle of his family to try and escape unjust arrest. But also, because Novarro has the handsome, matinee-idol looks of a guy you can root for (he replaced George Walsh, who was deemed insufficiently heroic looking). It works because Ben-Hur, for all its ‘Tale of the Christ!’ background, is basically a great big Roman-era soap, an entertainingly, rollicking tale through the turn of the millennium ups-and-downs of a handsome prince who always lands on his feet.

He does so via some truly excellent set-pieces. The naval battle, where Judah wins his freedom, is set on a truly impressive scale. Naval ships crash into each other, soldiers and pirates flood the deck of the flagship. During the battle limbs are hacked off, bodies are skewered and crushed (including one poor soul, tied to the head of the pirate’s ship batting ram, as it ploughs into the Roman flagship) and a newly released Judah escapes the watery doom of the galleys to spray pirate-defying death left, right and centre. It’s a gripping sequence, told on a huge scale.

Even more impressive though is the marvellous chariot race, a sequence so compellingly edited and assembled it not only was essentially used as a shot-for-shot reference in the remake, but its arguably inspired countless race sequences since. From its camera tracking alongside and in front of the racing chariots, low angles that see the chariots racing above, the frantic cutting that keeps momentum flying without ever losing narrative clarity, and the skilful way it keeps returning to Judah and Messala’s very personal battle, its masterfully done. In a nice touch, Judah drives the only white horses meaning we can always spot him. As chariots rip round bends, leaving dust spraying, crash into terrifying pile-ons or leaves competitors mangled and crushed on the track, it’s impossible not to feel impacted by the relentless momentum (certainly Willaim Wyler was – he was one of the assistants working on the sequence).

Away from these dramatic highlights, Ben-Hur remains a soapy, melodramatic tale. The tragic force is dialled up, with Judah’s family suffering for years in a blue-lens-tinged prison, succumbing to leprosy. Bushman’s Messala is devoid of complexity, embracing his role as pantomime villain with relish. Iras (Carmel Myers) bats her eye-lids to seduce both Judah and Messala, playing the two off each other. Its one of two soft-focus romances, that the film frames with unabashed sentimentality. Judah throws himself into a passionate advocacy of the coming of the Lord, the film frequently throwing him into military garb (at the head of a self-funded army to fight the Good Fight) that looks bizarrely like he’s stepped out of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen.

What makes this nonsense work is the film doesn’t take it too seriously and, unlike the 1959 version, doesn’t dwell on it all at great length. However, what it does share with the remake is the reverence for the story of Jesus. Some things never change, and Hollywood worked out an action epic could seem far loftier if it was marketed as “truly the film ever Christian should see!” The Messiah is a frequent just-off-camera figure (just as he would be in 1959), his hand heading into shot to heal the sick or pass a dying Judah some water. The final sequence plays out with the crucifixion front-and-centre and a grieving but rapturous Judah telling us all He will rise again.

Many of the recreations of the Bible – starting with its nativity opening – are filmed in a post-production painted early colour, with the references for the colour clearly being the very best religious art of the Renaissance, most clearly in its beatific Mary complete with halo-like effect. The film returns to these time-and-time again, taking a break from the soap opera to give us worthy shots of the history of Jesus, that look rather like reverent stained-glass windows. It’s all part of adding an important spiritual purpose to the film, to cement it as more important than just sword-and-sandals epic.

In that it’s not dissimilar from the remake. What it does though is manage to wear this slightly lighter and slightly less of an air of bumptious self-importance. Match that with the film’s compelling action highlights and truly stunning scale and you might have a leaner, faster and perhaps just as entertaining version of the story – even if it is in silent and black-and-white. It can certainly claim to be the finest version of Lew Wallace.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Brilliant epic, one of the greatest films ever made – not to mention possibly my all time favourite

Director: David Lean

Cast: Peter O’Toole (T. E. Lawrence), Omar Sharif (Sherif Ali ibn el Kharish), Alec Guinness (Prince Feisal), Anthony Quinn (Auda Abu Tayi), Jack Hawkins (General Edmund Allenby), José Ferrer (The Turkish Bey), Anthony Quayle (Colonel Harry Brighton), Claude Rains (Mr Dryden), Arthur Kennedy (Jackson Bentley), Donald Wolfit (General Archibald Murray), I. S. Johar (Gasim), Gamil Ratib (Majid), Michel Ray (Farraj), John Dimech (Daud), Zia Mohyeddin (Tafas), Howard Marion-Crawford (Medical officer), Jack Gwillim Club secretary)

There is no beating around the sand dune. Lawrence of Arabia is probably my favourite film of all time. It’s also the apogee of David Lean’s career and, arguably, the entire genre of epic film-making. No other epic is as massively, awe-inspiringly grand as this and perhaps no other combines the stunning scale with such intense, fascinating and astute character insight. It’s a film that succeeds on every front and leaves any viewer with such a searing visual impression that, once seen, it’s almost impossible to forget. And, of course, everyone should see it.

It was decades in the making before Sam Speigel and David Lean marshalled it to the screen. Based on TE Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, it’s strikingly modern in that it’s a biography of Lawrence without attempting the full cradle to grave. Instead, told in what it’s easy to forget is interrogative flashback after Lawrence’s death in a motorcycle accident, it focuses exclusively on Lawrence’s (Peter O’Toole) campaigns with the Great Arab Revolt during World War One – but in a style heavily influenced by Shakespeare’s fast-and-loose approach to history, where events drill down into that elusive question: what sort of man exactly was Lawrence? In other words: “Who are you?”

And fascinatingly for a film increasingly misremembered today as some sort of imperialist fan-fare blower or white saviour narrative, the answer is frequently not particularly flattering. In line with his historical self, this Lawrence is a deeply conflicted figure, perfectly captured in Peter O’Toole’s breath-takingly superb performance as a quirky, thoughtful introvert who frequently role-plays as an extrovert barrelling into the limelight. He’s a man capable of staggering insight, devoid of the knee-jerk racism of his fellow Brits. But he’s also a bombastic egotist with a major messianic complex who compares himself to Moses. That’s not even touching on his repressed sexuality, sadism or his deep discomfort at his in-built relish for violence and bloodshed.

Throughout O’Toole treats triumph with a giggling schoolboy relish, then collapse into dead-eyed, silent gloom when grimmer repercussions emerge. It’s a stunning performance, and fascinating figure to set at the centre of a war epic. O’Toole’s Lawrence is handsome, charismatic and a genius – but also fey, camp even, nervous, confident only when he is in control, likely to collapse into nervous giggles when things go wrong. O’Toole also brilliantly conveys the growing darkness and cruelty in Lawrence, shocked and appalled by his excited relish in killing Gasim or his excited anticipation at the slaughter of a group of Turks. It feeds an ego that believes he is above normal men, stunned at the moments when he discovers he is not, that leads him to ever darker determination to prove he can change the world through will alone.

Lean’s film is remarkable in how it presents Lawrence’s achievements with the jaw-dropping marvel they deserve – but also in showing his failures, cruelties, delusions. It’s remarkable how often Lawrence is punctured or bought-down after moments of success – especially as any moment of success has him even further convinced of his own genius. His saving of Gasim in the Nefud desert is followed shortly after by his executing the same man to preserve the fragile peace in his Arab coalition. His conquest of Aqaba is followed by guiding his teenage servant Daud into quicksand. A successful attack on a Turkish train is followed by getting his other teenage servant, Farraj, killed. His almost suicidal pride in entering Derra alone dressed as an Arab, leads to his capture, beating and rape by a perverted Bey (a lip-smackingly sinister cameo from Jose Ferrer, who considered this his finest performance).

Is there an epic film more cynical and critical about British Empire building than Lawrence of Arabia? Away from Lawrence, the Brits are represented by the Blimp-ish Murray (Donald Wolfit in fine form), Allenby (a marvellous Jack Hawkins) who doesn’t let principle get in the way of duty and a duplicitous Dryden (a magnificently austere Claude Rains). Both Allenby and Dryden well understand the game they are playing (with varying degrees of enthusiasm) – help the Arabs, but not too much, bring them together, but not too much, get rid of the Turks put the Brits in their place. Lawrence of Arabia is far from a flag-waver, presenting a cynical, two-faced view of rapacious Empire building. Its even uncomfortably rejected by Anthony Quayle’s endearingly straight-forward Colonel Brighton (who stands out as the film’s most honourable character).

In comparison, the Arabs are seen as perhaps naïve and chaotic, but largely honourable and honest and their campaign for independence and self-government is presented sympathetically (only their most Westernised representative, Alec Guinness’ reserved Prince Feisel, can match Dryden and Allenby in ruthless politics). There is a vibrant genuineness in Arab culture, even if it’s also shown to be as full of bitter hierarchical rivalries between tribes as the British are in their club memberships. Much of this is captured in Omar Sharif’s extraordinary performance as Sherif Ali (a sort of Arab version of Lawrence, both introverted and extroverted), a man of deep principles whose discomfort grows with Lawrence’s increasing wildness.

Lawrence’s unpredictability is what the film circles round to again and again. It’s fascinating both how flawed and unknowable he becomes. You only need to look at his costume: in ill-fitting military outfit, the trousers too short, O’Toole feels utterly out-of-place compared to his comfort in flowing white robes. But those robes become progressively more filthy, transparent and ghost-like the longer the film goes on. Does any other epic lay so bare the complex sexuality of its hero, his sado-masochistic desires (“the trick is not minding it hurts” indeed!), his part-shame, part-excitement about his assault by the Bey, his unmistakeable relish for death?

It’s striking how Lean so frequently frames Lawrence as unseeable: watch the Act 2 train attack, where we see Lawrence from behind, his feet striding along a train and then his body framed with the sun behind him. Or the film’s conclusion that turns him into even more of a ghost, a spectral figure behind a curtain and a jeep passenger almost invisible behind a mud-smeared windscreen. It’s extraordinary visual work to communicate a depth of theme. Constantly, he’s framed as a figure shrinking into the chaos, slipping through our fingers when we think we understand him.

That’s in a film crammed with extraordinary images. “No Arab loves the desert” are true words, but Englishmen do and Lean certainly did. His shooting of this vast panorama of dunes and sand is second to none. Is there a greater shot in history than the slow arrival of Sharif from the wavy mirage mists of the desert? That stands out in a film of extraordinary images: Lawrence’s progress through the mountains; the tracking shot of the attack on Aqaba, that ends on the powerless guns; a train puffing through the desert; even the small moments – Lawrence’s goggles dangling on a branch after his accident is a gorgeously simply, brilliantly evocative image. Everything in Lawrence is perfect technically: John Box’s superb sets, Maurice Jarre’s breathtakingly evocative music; Anne V Coates flawless editing (witness one of the greatest cuts of all time).

But it’s always bought back to the sharp critical eye on its lead, powered by Robert Bolt’s superbly iconoclastic script and Lean’s directorial discipline. This is a film that mirrors Lawrence’s playful dance in his new robes, stopping to admire himself in the reflection of his dagger with Lawrence, 90 minutes of screentime later, echoing the gesture to stare in horror at his blood-soaked clothing. That makes its last military action not the capture of Damascus, but Lawrence’s brutal massacre of retreating Turks at Tafas. Which ends with its hero covered in failure and sent packing as an awkward figure in the new age by both sides.

It’s a huge thematic complexity that gives Lawrence the chance to cement itself as one of the greatest films ever made. With its matchless technical brilliance, it brings a sharply insightful, critical eye to its lead and resolutely refuses to indulge in any hero-worship at all. It brings great depth and passion to its portrayal of the Arab people (I will grant Guinness’ casting today is unfortunate – less so with Quinn who was always ethnically ambiguous and is knock-out, charismatically brilliant), showing them as warts and all but rejecting the temptation to present them as a noble but simple people, but instead of a rich, non-Westernised culture forced to play by someone else’s rules. Lawrence marshals this while constantly leaving us questioning and changing our mind about the lead character, so superbly bought to life by O’Toole you could make a case for it as one of the greatest performances of all time. You can certainly make the case for the film as one of the greatest, a stunningly assembled, wonderfully directed, breathtaking mix of spectacle and character study that rewards the viewer every single time they see it.

Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)

Herzog’s visionary epic remains one of the most impactful, haunting films in history

Director: Werner Herzog

Cast: Klaus Kinski (Don Lupe de Aguirre), Cecilia Rivera (Flores de Aguirre), Ruy Guerra (Don Pedro de Ursua), Helena Rojo (Inés de Atienza), Del Negro (Brother Gaspar de Carvajal), Peter Berling (Don Fernando de Guzman), Daniel Ades (Perucho), Armando Polanah (Armando), Edward Roland (Okello)

I first saw Aguirre, Wrath of God when I was young, a late night BBC2 showing. I’d never seen anything like it – and, to be honest, I’m not sure I have since. But then I am not sure anyone has. Aguirre was Herzog’s calling card and its haunting bizarreness, unsettling intensity and its mixture of extremity and simplicity is echoed in almost everything the eccentric German has made since. It seeps inside you and is almost impossible to forget, offering unparallelled oddness and lingering new nightmares every time.

It’s based on a heavily fictionalised piece of history, a rambling, possibly invented (and certainly over-elaborated) event: the mutiny of Don Lupe de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) during the Conquistador campaign in the Amazonian remains of the Incan Empire. Pizarro has led an overburdened expedition into the depths of the rainforest searching for the untold (and fictional) riches of El Dorado. Don Pedro du Ursua (Ray Guerra) is sent with a party to explore down the river, with Aguirre as second-in-command. Further disaster occurs, as Aguirre launches a coup, installs puppet ‘emperor’ Don Guzman (Peter Berling), decides to seize El Dorado for himself and descends into a megalomaniacal madness, dreaming of building grandiose castles in the sky and toppling the Spanish monarchy.

Herzog filmed this fever dream of exhausted, starving and lost characters (and, indeed actors!) struggling to tell truth from mirage. The stunning visuals and locations are matched with the immediacy of water-splashed, mud-splatted lenses capturing the action. Aguirre is one of the most immersive films ever made, not least because as we watch cannons being dragged through rainforest, actors trudge down the side of mountains in the rain or cling to barely submerged rafts through rapids, we seem to sharing the experience of people doing all this for real.

Aguirre is book-ended by two of the most haunting shots in cinema history. Herzog’s opening flourish pans down the side of a mountain – one side of the shot showing the mountain, the other the mist – its disconcerting orientation (it’s easy to think you are seeing a birds-eye view, until you spot the actors climbing down the narrow path) made even more unsettling by the electronic mysticism of Popol Vuh’s music. This shot’s beauty and subtle terror is topped only by the final shots, of Aguirre prowling alone on a ruined raft surrounded by the dead and a ‘wilderness’ of monkeys (bringing to mind Shakespeare vision of a land not worth the cost in love). Between these bookends unfolds a film that will long live in the memory.

Aguirre is about obsession and madness but also failure. It’s so steeped in failure and hubris, it practically starts there. What else are we to think as we watch the conquistadors flog through the forest, dressed in hideously unsuitable clothes (armour for the men, dresses for the ladies), dragging cannons, relics and luckless horses behind chained Incan slaves? From the moment Pizarro calls a halt, it’s clear the search has failed. What the rest of the film demonstrates is how this failure only grows under the burden of relentless greed and vaulting ambition.

Greed powers everyone down this river: greed for the El Dorado’s gold and the power it might bring. It’s leads men to follow Aguirre’s mutiny and sustains them as their journey becomes ever more wild-eyed. No one is exempt: certainly not the Church, represented by hypocritical yes-man Brother Gaspar (Del Negro) who responds to mutiny by muttering that, regretfully, the Church must be ‘on the side of the strong’ – but doesn’t let that regret get in the way of serving as prosecutor, judge and jury in a kangaroo court for Don Ursua or happily stabbing to death an indigenous fisherman (who he gives the last rites) for blasphemy after the poor man confusedly drops a Bible on the floor.

But Aguirre’s hungers seems purely for power, with gold almost an after-thought. He’s far different from the mission’s newly elected ‘Emperor’, bloated glutton Guzman, who veers between stuffing his mouth with the limited rations or passing ludicrously high-handed regal pronouncements. Aguirre wants something more: complete and utter willpower over his surroundings. He doesn’t need to be commander for this: knowing he holds the power is enough, the ability to control life and death for his men.

Much of Aguirre’s magnetic, horrifying dread comes from the qualities in the man who plays him. Kinski’s performance is strikingly terrifying, his stiff-framed walk (based on Aguirre’s real-life limp) as judderingly disturbing as the retina-burning glare of his stare, the bubbles of incipient madness and the relentless determination to do anything (from blowing up a raft of his own men to beheading a potential mutineer) that will keep his will predominant. Aguirre’s perverse desire for control extends to an unhealthy interest in his daughter (something very unsettling today, with our knowledge of Kinski’s own appalling actions) and curls himself into the frame like a hungry tiger waiting to pounce, unleashing himself for demonic rants to cement his power and ambitious plans.

As with so many Herzog films, the longer the journey, the more fraught it becomes with perils, greed and madness. The film invites us to watch an expedition that started teetering on the edge of sanity, topple into violence, death and despair. Perhaps that’s why Ursua is spared, to join us in watching in stubborn, appalled silence the rafts drift aimlessly down river, men picked off one-by-one by unseen forces while their minds slowly fracture. Herzog uses the mute Ursua as a horrified surrogate for us, his blank incomprehension mirroring our shock at how far men can slump.

The worst elements of many of them emerge. The monk who preaches the word while complacently doing nothing and dreaming of a golden cross. Guzman’s obese Emperor, guzzling food while his desperate men starve. Aguirre’s psychopathic sidekick Perucho, who whistles casually when taking on Aguirre’s dirty work. Others collapse into shocked stupor: Aguirre’s daughter, who can’t seem to process what’s happening around her; Ursua’s lover Ines (Helena Rojo) whose hopes to reverse the mutiny tip into suicidal defiance and the stunned, tragic, imprisoned Incan prince re-named Raphael, forced to witness the self-destruction of men who looted his country and are never satisfied.

Aguirre’s Conrad-istic vision reeks of colonial criticism. As these arrogant ‘civilised’ men, charge downriver into madness and death, they remain convinced they can control the environment around them. The people of the Amazon to them are savages or slaves in waiting, any gold they find theirs by right. Aguirre himself is like some nightmare collection of every single rapacious European ruler who wanted to tear a chunk off a map and claim it as his own: even in failure and death, he still sees no reason to stop, only to press on, claiming more land, wealth and power. It’s this terrible truth that give Aguirre such continued power and relevance.

Herzog’s film builds beautifully to inevitable destruction, but it matters not a jot to Aguirre, content with his complete control over a raft of dead men. Herzog films it unfold in a haunting mixture of static shots, carefully framed compositions inspired by Spanish paintings (including a bizarrely formal coronation shot of Guzman), accompanied by a chilling silence or the unsettlingly eerie sounds of Vuh’s music or the pipes of an Incan bearer. Aguirre, perhaps more than any other film, exposes the horrific hubris of empire building, the pride and greed that lies behind it and the piles of unsettling bodies (guilty and innocent) left in its wake.

It’s a film that deserves to be famous for more than just the crazed stories of its making. The clashes between Kinski – an impossible, wicked, man but a celluloid-burning presence – and Herzog are legendary (it was the film where Herzog threatened to shoot the ferocious star and then himself if Kinski followed through on walking out mid-shoot). But just as stunning is the film’s haunting, lyrical mysticism and the fierceness of its savagery. It can have a vision of a ship in the heights of the trees and a head that finishes its countdown separated from its body. It can leave you so deeply unsettled, so hauntingly present that it will stick with you as it has stuck with me for over twenty years, giving new remarkable visions every time I re-watch it.