Category: Historical epic

The Vikings (1958)

Kirk Douglas has a whale of a time as one of The Vikings

Director: Richard Fleischer

Cast: Kirk Douglas (Einar), Tony Curtiz (Eric), Ernest Borgnine (Ragnar Lodbrok), Janet Leigh (Morgana), James Donald (Egbert), Alexander Knox (Father Godwin), Maxine Audley (Enid), Frank Thring (Aella of Northumbria), Eileen Way (Kitala), Dandy Nichols (Bridget), Edric Conner (Sandpiper), Orson Welles (Narrator)

There’s a big market for stories about Vikings. Perhaps there is something attractive in our more staid world for a “noble savage” culture, with warriors romantically travelling far and wide. Perhaps a race of brave warriors just seems rather cool. Either way, despite their reputation for ravishing and raiding, Vikings often get a decent deal from films, usually positioned as a race of anti-heroes. That’s definitely what we get from Richard Fleischer’s enjoyable swashbuckler, which has a nodding acquaintance with history.

After the King of Northumbria is killed by fearsome Viking Ragnar Lodbrok (Ernest Borgnine), his queen is raped by Ragnar. Northumbria name a new King, the corrupt Aella (Frank Thring), while the queen sends her baby son (who she knows is Ragnar’s son) to Italy for his protection. Jump forward twenty odd years and, wouldn’t you know it, that young boy turns up as Eric (Tony Curtis) a slave of Ragnar’s, loathed by his unknown half-brother Einar (Kirk Doouglas), Ragnar’s son. The only person who knows who Eric is, is exiled Northumbrian load Egbert (James Donald). Things get even more complex when Aella’s intended Morgana (Janet Leigh) is kidnapped in a raid, and both Eric and Einar fall in love with her….

The Vikings is a great deal of fun, its tongue stuck firmly in its cheek. The plot veers from scene-to-scene from being too dense (various complexities around the rightful king of Northumbria get so confusing the film eventually abandons them) too being shunted off to the sides in favour of the action. But then it’s more about broad, brightly coloured action (very handsomely filmed by Jack Cardiff) with its stars having a good time fighting and shouting.

It’s interesting watching the film as almost a dry run for Spartacus, where Douglas and Curtis would re-unite. Here the film revolves around a rivalry between the two that turns into an alliance of mutual self-interest. Douglas clearly has a whale of a time playing a semi-baddie with depth, his Einar a typical “Viking’s Viking” who drinks hard, fights hard and wants a life of adventure on the high seas. But he’s also got a strange sense of nobility about home and – even though he makes a half-hearted attempt to rape her – he seems to fall genuinely in love with Morgana. Even his eventual comeuppance comes from a moment of decency. It makes for a villain more complex than normal, while Douglas roars through the movie.

Curtis is left with the duller part as the noble son-of-a-king. Looking rather too pampered for a life of serfdom, Curtis feels like a slightly too modern, New Yorkish presence for period pieces (Spartacus would use his pampered prissiness to better effect) but he charges into the sword swinging, high romance of the story with relish, while also shining during Eric’s several moments of brave principle. Morgana, very well played by his real-life wife Janet Leigh, sees a character who could have been a victimised love-interest turn into an independent and strong-minded woman, brave enough to take a stand on the things she believes in.

But the film’s real interest is in the world of the Vikings. There has been some very impressive historical research into their culture and shipping, while the battles and scenes of drunken merriment are well staged and carry a lot of boozy buzz. Most of the cast enter into relish, following Douglas and Ernest Borgnine’s lead (Borgnine, playing Douglas’ father, was at best a few months older) with plenty of shouting, ale swallowing and axe throwing. While the film’s score makes a number of odd choices – this really needed a Goldsmith or Morricone rather than the odd mix we get here – Fleischer’s direction is crisp and adept and keeps things charging forward.

The politics at the Northumbrian court gets a bit forgotten about, with Alan Thring turning Aella into a sneering, unprincipled villain who barely gets much of a look-in. However, the savage punishments that Aella meets out to his rivals – and his ruthless condemnation of anyone seen as being against him – makes a neat contrast with the Vikings who, for all their blood-curdling violence, do at least have some sort of nominal sense of justice and some willingness to compromise.

But the film’s heart is in the action. Douglas, acting as producer, jumped at the chance to take on as many of the stunts as possible – including famously walking across the oars of a Viking longboat while it is at sea (he nearly falls in twice, but it has the sort of excitement of seeing the star doing something for real that you still get with Tom Cruise). He and Curtis eagerly take part in assorted sword battles, while balancing a love/hate relationship (well probably mostly hate) that keeps the film powering forward. All in it makes for some really enjoyable B-movie shenanigans.

Amadeus (1984)

Tom Hulce is the childlike genius in Amadeus

Director: Milos Forman

Cast: F. Murray Abraham (Antonio Salieri), Tom Hulce (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), Elizabeth Berridge (Constanze Mozart), Roy Dotrice (Leopold Mozart), Simon Callow (Emanuel Schikaneder), Christine Ebersole (Caterina Cavalieri), Jeffrey Jones (Emperor Joseph II), Charles Kay (Count Orsini-Rosenberg), Kenneth McMillan (Michael Schlumberg), Richard Frank (Father Vogler), Cynthia Nixon (Lorl), Patrick Hines (Kapellmeister Giuseppe Bonno), Jonathan Moore (Baron von Swieten)

Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus was a smash hit play, both at the National Theatre and on Broadway. With such a delicious plot line – captured so beautifully in its tag line “The Man, the Music, the Madness, the Murder!” – is it any wonder that this fable about the life of Mozart, framed around the envy of his contemporary Antonio Salieri who, as an old man, claims to have murdered the great genius, was swiftly bought to the screen? Radically reworked and restructured by Peter Shaffer for the screen, Amadeus may stand as one of the few times where the script for the film is superior to the script for the stage. And the film itself is so carved out of radiance, that every single production of the play will forever live in its shadow.

As an old man Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) confesses to the murder of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce). After a suicide attempt, he tells his tale to a young priest (Richard Frank). As a younger man, Salieri was the court composer to Emperor Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones). He has everything he dreamed of as a young man – fame, riches and a life of music – all of which fortune he sees as a sign from God. His world view is shaken with the arrival in Vienna of the young genius Mozart. A brilliant artist and composer, with a God-given gift for composition, Mozart is also everything the reserved Salieri is not – brash, rude, impulsive and a man of once-in-a-generation talent. How, Salieri wonders, could a man like him be given all the gifts, while Salieri’s music is merely competent? Salieri believes this is a cruel joke played on him by God – made worse by the realisation that alone in Vienna society, Salieri seems able to recognise the genius. Salieri decides to destroy this chosen child of God once and for all.

Shot on location in Prague – and Czech defector Milos Forman was treated as a returning hero when he bought the film there – Amadeus is perhaps one of the most strikingly beautiful films ever made. The cinematography is luscious, the production design – utilising every inch of the almost untouched-since-the-18th-century Prague settings (Thank God for Communist inefficiency Forman joked) – sinks you into the era completely while the costume design is striking, imaginative and excellent. The film is an opulent feast. But it is a million miles from being a staid period piece – instead this is something fresh, bold and modern.

Amadeus is perhaps one of my favourite films of all time. I just think it gets everything more or less right. Not least, capturing the idea of the passions and struggle of creativity. It’s clear why this story spoke so clearly to Hollywood, because no film captures as well as this one, the horrible plight of the competent journeymen, working every hour, while watching an effortless genius create masterpieces as easy as breathing. That’s the real tension here – and what makes us all empathise with Salieri, at least on some level. All of us have looked at the things we create – be it putting up a shelf to writing a play – and frustratingly seen our grasp exceed our reach, while seeing others do what we have so failed to achieve with frustrating ease.

Matched in with this, it’s a film that understands perhaps better than any other the burdensome process of creation. It’s easy for viewers to just remember the childish excess of Mozart – but Forman and Shaffer also show a dedicated and passionate worker. Hulce’s Mozart crouches over a billiard table, oblivious to the world around him while he composes (the soundtrack, as it often does, is flooded with the score he is composing, while his wife tries to get his attention – snapping to silence as soon as she succeeds). His dedication to his music is absolute – in his first scene, only hearing the orchestra starting to play his music before his arrival snaps him out of his raucously rude flirtatious banter with Constanze. Scenes of him conducting and directing rehearsals pinpoint his exactitude and perfection. Salieri as well is seen frequently labouring carefully and precisely over his work, while lacking the inspiration of Mozart.

It’s pinpointed with a beautiful late scene, where a bed-ridden Mozart dictates his Requiem score to Salieri. Mozart is electric, precise, his thinking fast-paced, complete, his passion for the score all-consuming – with poor Salieri desperately trying to keep up (“You go to fast” he frequently whines). It’s a scene that captures completely the intensity of mining creation. (Hulce apparently deliberately skipped lines during the scene, to add to Abraham’s confusion in the scene – with Abraham’s later agreement!). Its part of what the film beautifully captures, how being able to bring your ideas, perfectly formed, into the world is the most enchanting drug of all.

So you can see why Salieri grows too loath this blessed talent. In a wonderful moment – again perfectly utilising Forman’s decision to use the music as almost a character in the piece – he flicks through a portfolio of Mozart compositions, all of them first drafts devoid of any correction, the music playing in his head (and on the soundtrack) as he reads. It’s the sort of skill his diligent and slavish composition could never achieve.

It’s pinpointed even more in their first scene together, where Mozart arrives at Joseph’s court. The emperor plays a small welcoming march, composed by Salieri, which is fine. Mozart not only memorises the tune on first hearing it (“The rest is just the same?”) but then beautifully starts to play with it before suddenly turning it into an aria from The Marriage of Figaro, composing this beautiful piece on the spot. Nothing could be more devastating but to see your hack work improved in front of others into something genius – and the genius in question to be so oblivious of the impact, that he behaves like he’s done you a favour. No scene in the movies, I believe, has ever captured so completely this world of difference between the journeyman and the artist.

The film is crammed full of moments like this, all perfectly delivered by a perfectly chosen cast. The film was controversial at the time for using American actors – with their natural accents – rather than Brits (the “American accents jar the ear” whined Brit critic Leslie Halliwell). In fact it’s an inspired idea, that adds an air of modernity to the piece, but also principally opens the door to making the whole genre less stuffy (as if 18th century Venetians would speak with received pronunciation). The only characters who speak with English accents are the most upper-class, Italian-fixated, Opera purists. Everyone else – with even Simon Callow (the original stage Mozart, here in his film debut) adopting an accent – speaks with a Yank twang.

F. Murray Abraham beat out seemingly the whole Western acting world to land the leading role of Salieri. (In a backhanded compliment if ever I heard it, Forman suggested on meeting Abraham that he simply was Salieri). Abraham’s precise, detailed and beautifully judged performance – which allows gallons of resentment and self-pity to bubble under the surface of a tight self-control. He also has a wonderful spry lightness as his elder self, who has come to terms with his failures. It’s a brilliant role – and one Abraham struggled to match for decades to come.

Tom Hulce is equally superb as Mozart. I’ve talked a lot about how wonderfully the film – and Hulce – captures inspiration. But Hulce perfectly mixes this with a childlike vulnerability, an impulsive foolishness and sense of absurdity. His Mozart is frequently rude, obnoxious and interested only in a good time – frequently losing nights to drink, sleeping around with a crude sense of humour. But he’s also sweetly childlike, who needs to be looked after – Elizabeth Berridge (very good, a late replacement for Meg Tilly during shooting) as Constanze frequently has to mother him and manage his life and career. The rest of the cast are equally strong, from Jeffrey Jones’ studied normality as the Emperor, to Roy Dotrice’s firmness as Mozart’s disapproving father.

Amadeus brings this all together superbly – Forman’s direction is faultless – and mixes it together with Mozart’s music. Not a single piece of music is used twice in the film, and each quote from the music has been perfectly chosen to reflect the scene, from the film’s opening with Symphony #25 to its close with the Requiem. Sections from opera performances are shown – with the actors conducting (both learnt). The music soaks through the whole film – Shaffer and Forman believed it was the “third lead”. And it perfectly captures the tone and emotion every time, deepening and enriching the film itself.

Winning eight Oscars (including Picture, Director, Actor for Abraham and Screenplay), Amadeus is not only the best film ever made about classical music, it’s also one of the most fascinating and profoundly engaging films ever made about creativity. Does it matter that historically it’s all bunk? Not really at all, as a fictionalised exploration of how the average can be tormented by the extraordinary it’s perfect.

Moby Dick (1956)

Gregory Peck on a voyage of obsession as Ahab hunting Moby Dick

Director: John Huston

Cast: Gregory Peck (Captain Ahab), Richard Basehart (Ishmael), Leo Genn (Starbuck), Orson Welles (Father Mapple), Friedrich von Ledebur (Queequeg), James Robertson Justice (Captain Boomer), Harry Andrews (Stubb), Bernard Miles (The Manxman), Noel Purcell (Carpennter), Edric Connor (Daggoo), Meryn Johns (Pelog), Joseph Tomelty (Peter Coffin), Francis de Wolff (Captain Gardiner)

There might be fewer books that lend themselves less to being turned into a film than Herman Melville’s monumental Moby Dick. Perhaps the greatest of all American novels, its’ the story of New England whaler the Pequod’s Captain Ahab’s obsessive quest to kill Moby Dick, the great white whale that took his leg. But it’s also an intense intellectual and spiritual journey into the nature of humanity, which has thrown the book open to multiple interpretations, even more tempting with a book that defies explanation. Try capturing that on film.

John Huston’s Moby Dick is a noble attempt, more criticised at the time than it probably deserves, with the visual language of film unable to ever capture the metaphorical weight of the original novel. What Huston needed to do is to try and capture some of the spirit of the novel, bring its central story to life and make a film that ideally makes you want to search the book out. I would say Moby Dick succeeds on that score.

Reducing the monumental novel (often described as one of the great “unread” books in people’s homes) to under two hours, brings out the narrative, stressing the surface story as an adventure on the high seas, a doomed quest under an obsessive captain. The detail of the reconstruction of the whaling ship, its operations on the sea (including some graphic slaughter of some, fortunately, fake whales) and the atmosphere of the time is brilliantly reconstructed. The film is staffed by an extraordinary collection of actors, whose faces speak of lives led in salt-spray. 

So, starting with the idea that no film could ever capture the depth and richness of the book, Moby Dick is a decent, smart enough attempt. The key themes are there in strength. It captures obsession and the idea of the ship being a sort of microcosm of society, led astray by a leader who has his own passions at heart, over and above the well-being of the crew, but has enough magnetism to pull the crew with him nevertheless. 

Huston laboured long and hard to bring the film to life, in a wrestle with Melville. Even adapter Ray Bradbury claimed he had “never been able to read the damn thing”, with Huston and Bradbury clashing constantly during the writing process. It works, and Bradbury’s adaptation is beautifully done, but in a way John Huston himself was a sort of Ahab with the book as his whale. 

In fact you could argue – as many have – that Huston himself was the natural casting for Ahab (take a look at Chinatown to see what I mean). A charismatic raconteur, ruthless and fixated on his goals, that’s an Ahab we could buy into. Perhaps in that world, Orson Welles – here giving a neat little cameo that avoids bombast as Father Mapple – would have been the perfect director, marrying mastery of cinema with a wonderful understanding of transforming literature into film.

Gregory Peck is the Ahab we do get. At the time the casting was strongly criticised – people just couldn’t buy the straight-as-an-arrow Peck as the destructively bullying Ahab. Peck himself remained strongly critical of his performance here all his life. Separated from the time, Peck’s performance is stronger than you anticipate, capturing a gruff fixation and magnetic charisma that you can believe pulls people in. Peck may strain a little too hard for the elemental anger, but Peck’s Ahab has a bass richness, a sort of inverted Lincolnish (he even looks a little like Lincoln) self-righteousness that makes you believe he could rouse a ship to choose its own destruction. Peck also brings a spiritually dead look to Ahab, a man turned from hope to destruction. Huston teasingly keeps Ahab in reserve for almost a quarter of the film until his first appearance, allowing the build in the audience’s expectations.

The casting of the crew uses a fine selection of British and Irish actors (the film was shot in Ireland), with Harry Andrews particularly strong as jolly but non boat-rocking first mate Stubb. Leo Genn gets the meatiest material as Starbuck, a decent, working man with a firm sense of principle but who lacks any sense of the charisma needed to swing people to his point of view. The film bumps up Starbuck’s role, centralising his growing unease at Ahab’s madness, opportunities which Genn (nearly underplaying to contrast with Peck’s theatricality) works a treat. Richard Basehart – a good voice for narration but much less of a presence – gets a bit lost as Ishmael. There is an intriguing bit of casting – something that would never happen today – that sees Austrian aristocrat turned actor Friedrich von Ledebur play the Maori-inspired Queequeg, a visual disconnect that is more than a little distracting for a while.

Moby Dick is beautifully filmed and assembled, even if Huston throws in the odd obvious shot – sun beating down on the ship, a close up of the whale’s eye. It has a unique look – on the remastered blu-ray – with the image reflecting the faded, bleached look of whale prints (an effect achieved by superimposing a black-and-white negative over a colour one, draining most of the colours our), which gives it a great deal of visual interest. It’s never going to replace the book – but honestly what could? As an exploration of the ideas at its heart it’s wonderful – and a great prompt to pick it up – but with a marvellous sense of life on sea, a stirring score and a wonderful sense of intelligent construction it more than works.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Fonda and Bronson prepare to face off in Leone’s epic Once Upon a Time in the West

Director: Sergio Leone

Cast: Henry Fonda (Frank), Claudia Cardinale (Jill McBain), Charles Bronson (“Harmonica”), Jason Robards (“Cheyenne”), Gabrielle Ferzetti (Morton), Paolo Stoppa (Sam), Marco Zuanelli (Wobbles), Keenan Wynn (Sheriff), Frank Wolff (Brett McBain), Lionel Stander (Barman), Woody Strode (First Gunman), Jack Elam (Second Gunman), Al Mulock (Third Gunman

Sergio Leone’s Westerns were always based, first and foremost, on his own love for the genre – and the great filmmakers, from John Ford onwards, who made them. Returning to the genre for the final time – putting on hold (for what turned out to be nearly fifteen years) his plans for a New York gangster film – Leone wanted to make his final, and ultimate, tribute to the Hollywood western. Collaborating with Bernardo Bertoloucci and Dario Argento (now there is an odd trio!) on the scripting, Leone’s final Western is a sweeping, grandiose, operatic Western littered with visual quotations from films he loved.

The story rather takes second fiddle to the general ambiance and visuals, but it never bothered Leone to have only the sketchiest of plots stretched across the many hours of his movies. The railroad is being built across America – changing the face of the West as it goes. Frank (Henry Fonda), hired gun of crippled railway tycoon Morton (Gabrielle Ferzetti), guns down farmer Brett McBain and his children. He had been sent to threaten them to clear off the land of Sweetwater. But why? And how will the return of McBain’s new wife Jill (Claudia Cardinale) – now heir to all of Frank’s holdings – affect their plans? And why does the mysterious “Harmonica” (Charles Bronson) – a shadowy gunman with no name have such an interest in events, and in Frank in particular? And will criminal gunman Cheyenne (Jason Robards) and his gang – blamed for the McCain killings – be able to establish their innocence?

The answers to all these questions come slowly – and often confusingly – in this long, slow but – as with many Leone films – engrossing Western, which features 3-5 minutes of Morricone build-up and extreme close-up before even the slightest action. This makes it very easy to mock, and perhaps by this point Leone had started to believe too heavily that he was an artist daubing in genre, rather than a purveyor of entertainments. Certainly, Once Upon a Time in the West is consciously weighted down with its own importance, it’s ominous sense of events heading to a pre-ordained conclusion and its half-hearted attempt to depict itself as sitting at a crossroads in American history, as technology squeezed out the old West.

But somehow you give Leone’s film a pass for all its many faults because it’s assembled with such unrivalled skill and breathtaking pizzazz. Sure the film is only half as smart as it thinks it is, but when at its strongest it offers unrivalled entertainment. Leone also mastered here his balance between the slow, tense, agonising build-up to violence – followed by its sudden and brutal enactment. 

Never is that more clear than in the film’s opening ten minutes which features three gunmen (among them Ford favourite Woody Strode and reliable minor bad-guy Jack Elam) waiting at a train station for what turns-out to be the arrival of Charles Bronson’s “Harmonica”. The three gunmen sit, waiting, in silence. Around them the everyday sounds of windmills, buzzing flies and dripping water builds and relapses with all the dread of distant thunder. Leone’s camera crashes in for long, intense close-ups, as if drilling down into the souls of these bored men, the camera studying every detail of their faces. After almost ten minutes – during which the credits roll – “Harmonica” arrives. And promptly shoots all three men dead in seconds. You know it’s coming, but the tension and expectation of this confrontation makes the entire sequence compelling. 

It’s a trick that Leone repeats time and time again. Effectively the whole film is only prolonged extension of this sequence – the inconsequential back-and-forth of the lacklustre plot all really about giving us a chance to drill down into the character of Henry Fonda’s bad-to-the-bone Frank, while we wait for the inevitable gunfight between him and “Harmonica”. Leone’s film is a triumph of mood, filled with sweeping beautiful camera shot and luxiously paced editing, all mixed down with some stunning scoring from Ennio Morricone.

Once Upon a Time echoes a fairy tale in its title, and that’s what it is. For all that Leone attempts to throw in plotlines around progress, the influence of big money and the new order leaving gunmen behind, really everything it knows about America is taken from movies. Leone litters the film with visual quotes from High Noon, Shane and dozens of others, most especially Ford (he even insisted in transplanting some of the scenes to be shot at Monument Valley, which led to merry hell trying to get the other Spanish-shot locations to visually match). The entire film unfolds like a dream. At about the half way mark in particular – this might be due to cuts to be fair – the narrative suddenly becomes almost deliberately unconnected, key events seemingly skipped over and sudden character reversals taking place. There is a rumbling sense of everything in the film being artificial and the characters themselves being manipulated by something larger than them (like a film director!).

This is further heightened by “Harmonica” himself. Played with an empty blankness by Charles Bronson – the camera zooms into his expressionlessly craggy face endlessly as if searching for meaning – “Harmonica” is an almost mystical presence. He’s always in the right place at the right time, seems to be the only person in the film who knows what’s going on and Leone even shoots him regularly sliding into frame, as if the camera has stumbled upon him at the least expected times. Perhaps Bronson’s lack of real character helped make him perfect for this near-mystical presence. It also fits in with the shamanic feeling of a film where frequently not much happens at great length, but the inconsequential moments of events are filmed with a pregnant importance.

Compared to him the other principles are painted in earthy tones. Robards makes his bandit – who switches allegiances and escapes from undefined imprisonment several times in the movie – a jovial, grimy figure with a rogueish temperament. Claudia Cardinale – in what passes for a strong female character at the time – is a whore with a heart of gold who may, or may not be willing to do anything to ensure her own survival (the film is unclear). Is she a ruthless woman using sex as a weapon? Or is she the sort of radiant Earth-mother that the new West needs? Or is she a bit of both? The film isn’t really sure.

What it is sure about is that Fonda’s Frank is the meanest of the mean. Looking lean and tough, Fonda revels in the chance to play a villain – and not just any villain, this grinning sadist is so mean the first thing he does is gun down a child on screen. Leone loved Fonda – and above all he wanted those “baby blue” eyes to be the thing the viewers see as unspeakable deeds take place, expecting the cry of “Jesus Christ, that’s Henry Fonda!” Frank is a bully and tirelessly ambitious, and if we never get a real sense of what motivates him, it’s balanced by Fonda’s charismatic viciousness in the role.

It’s a pointer though to the fact that this is not a film about the West – as always the strange mixture of accents, faces and locations never makes the film feel for one moment like a real slice of America – but rather a film that is aiming to reflect the romance of movies. It’s a piece of Americana, that is really a love letter to other films. Perhaps it’s one of the first post-modern films ever made? But really your appreciation of the film can only really be complete if you have seen a lot of Westerns. Then it’s fairy tale like logic, and Leone’s operatic style and languid pace suddenly make sense. It’s not a film deep in meaning, other than perhaps our own love for cinema and the story it tells.

Gandhi (1982)

Ben Kingsley excels as Gandhi in Richard Attenborough’s Oscar winning epic

Director: Richard Attenborough

Cast: Ben Kingsley (Mahatma Gandhi), Rohini Hattaggadi (Kasturba Gandhi), Roshan Seth (Jawaharlal Nehru), Pradeep Kumar (VK Krishna Menon), Saeed Jaffrey (Vallabhbhai Patel), Alyque Padamsee (Muhammad Ali Jinnah), Virendra Razdan (Maulana Azad), Candice Bergen (Margaret Bourke-White), Edward Fox (Brigadier General Reginald Dyer), John Gielgud (Lord Irwin), Trevor Howard (Judge Broomfield), John Mills (Lord Chelmsford), Martin Sheen (Vince Walker), Ian Charleson (Reverend Charles Andrews), Arthul Fugard (General Jan Smuts), Geraldine James (Mirabehn), Amrish Puri (Khan), Ian Bannan (Senior Officer Fields), Richard Griffiths (Collins), Nigel Hawthorne (Kinnoch), Michael Hordern (Sir George Hodge), Om Puri (Nahari)

In 1962, Richard Attenborough was approached by Motilal Kothari, an Indian civil servant, who believed Attenborough was the man to bring the life of Mahatma Gandhi to film. All this despite Attenborough having never directed a film. But the life of one of history’s greatest men, and passionate advocate of peace and non-violence, spoke deeply to the socially-engaged Attenborough who dedicated 20 years of his life to bringing the film to the screen, immersing himself in Indian culture along the way and winning the support of Nehru (until his death delayed the project again) and Gandhi’s family. The eventual film was a huge success, cementing the public perception of Gandhi and beautifully capturing both the importance of the story, and its emotional heart.

Opening with Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, the film covers in flashback his life from combatting anti-Indian prejudice in South Africa as a young, British-trained, lawyer to his return to India and long involvement in the campaign to win India its independence from the British Empire, stressing non-co-operation, his eventual success but also his failure to hold the Hindu and Muslim parts of the country together and his attempt as “father of the nation” to put an end to religious violence, a failure that will eventually lead to his assassination. 

Attenborough’s grand, epic film marshals thousands of extras to bring to life pages of history. At times events fly by with speed, but Attenborough never loses sight of the emotional heart of the story – both Gandhi and the status of Indians as not being masters in their own home. Attenborough directs scenes of real power, most strikingly a heart-rending peaceful march on a salt works (the tax on salt use being a major burden on many poor Indians) that culminates in line after line of peaceful Indian protestors walking calmly forward to be beaten down by soldiers. Despite being the grandest and largest of films, it allows questions of pure morality and decency to lie at its heart and, supported by a parade of British acting greats, keeps the Indians at the heart of their own story and the masters of their own destinies.

The film’s impact though may be directly connected to the gloriously transcendent performance of Ben Kingsley in the title role. For years it was believed the film could only work with a British actor in the title role – imagine how it would be received today if Gandhi had been played by (as it nearly was) a browned-up Anthony Hopkins or John Hurt (who famously told Attenborough he looked absurd). Instead half-Indian unknown RSC actor Ben Kingsley took the role. Kingsley so completely and utterly immersed himself in Gandhi – everything, the physicality, the morality, the voice, the intellectualism – that not only has he become so completely associated with the role but it’s hard to imagine anyone else playing it.

Ageing almost 50 years over the course of the film, Kingsley’s Gandhi is above-all moral, softly-spoken, observant and considerate – the very spirit of the original man seems to be up on the screen. Far from the sort of histrionics you might expect from a subject of an epic movie, Kingsley is not afraid to be quiet, gentle even underplayed. He completely understands that the charisma and power in Gandhi laid in his moral authority, not his speech-making, but his careful example-setting of even-handedness, patience and desire for peace. 

But Kingsley is also willing to show Gandhi as shrewd and stubborn, even while mixing it with both a deep pain at the loss of life. Kingsley is superbly good at the smaller quieter moments – he wrings heart-rending force from the loss of his wife (a similarly impressive and quietly authoritative performance from Rohini Hattaggadi), which partly works because the film quietly centres the truth and faith in their marriage. This is extraordinary work from Ben Kingsley, that seems to carry not just the entire film but the sense of a nation.

Attenborough though was a director who was at his best when working with actors, and his ability to coax truthful and heartfelt moments from quiet scenes are what gives the other sequences the emotional force to make them work. Attenborough seemingly called in every favour to assemble the supporting cast that backs up Kingsley, many of them juggling only a few scenes. Among the stand-outs we have a martially certain Edward Fox as General Dyer, an archly arrogant John Gielgud and a frustrated John Mills as viceroys, Trevor Howard representing decent British rule as an honest Judge and Martin Sheen as a reformist minded journalist. That’s to overlook dozens of others in small roles, all of them clearly committed to the intention of the project.

The film though allows the Indians themselves to take centre stage, even if it is easy to criticise some of the simplifications of many of the issues that would eventually culminate in partition. The film has a clear hostility towards the idea of religion, seeing it as the root of much of the violence that erupted in India in the last years of Gandhi’s life. While Roshan Seth is excellent as Nehru, the character is portrayed more as the faithful follower of Gandhi than the shrewd politician in his own right (it’s a role most of the other leading members of congress are also placed in). Alyque Padamsee carries a high level of charisma as Jinnah, founder of Pakistan – but the film can’t quite resist painting him into the corner as a semi-villain, ignoring Gandhi’s desperation to get Jinnah to invest in a united India.

It’s part of what has been seen since as the film’s more hagiographic stance towards Gandhi. Certainly later historiography has outlined a few shades of grey in Gandhi – although I would argue that seeing him as a man and not a saint only heightens (similar to Mandela) the awe at what he went on to achieve. The film’s whistle stop tour of Indian history – taking in every major event and personality, some in a matter of moments – looks particularly old-fashioned now with our current trend being biographical films that focus only on crucial moments, not the whole life. It adds a slight air of schoolboy history to the project, an unfortunate side-effect of the passionate earnestness with which the story is told.

But then even in 1982 – when it lifted 8 Oscars including Best Picture, Director and Actor and most of the technicals – it was seen as slightly old-fashioned. Attenborough has generously repeatedly said that he believed Steven Spielberg was more deserving of Best Director for ET. And it’s true that Attenborough was in many ways a producer at heart with these epics than an inspired director like Lean. His marshalling of crowds, finances and simply forcing the will together to make the picture – and to allow it to focus on Indians rather than Westerners – is a tribute to his organisational skills. His strengths as a director were more in performances, and as with many of his epic films the most memorable moments are smaller, intimate ones. The larger moments are shot with an assured professionalism rather than inspiration, but Attenborough understands how to wring emotion from moments and how to let character drive action.

Gandhi works above all because even today you can see it is a passionate labour of love, that everyone involved in clearly believed in passionately. It may well be that at times it is workmanlike or simplistic – and covers the sweep of history with an earnest completeness, even while it is unafraid to be critical certainly of the British – but it still invests it crucial moments with humanity, life and deep emotion. You can’t help but be moved by it – and you are instantly stunned by the sheer brilliance of Kingsley as Gandhi, one of those performances like George C Scott as Patton which seems more like the man than the real thing. Gandhi may be old fashioned, but that’s not a crime when the quality is still there.

Amistad (1997)

Djimon Hounsou excels as a slave longing for freedom in Amistad

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Djimon Hounsou (Sengbe Pieh/Joseph Cinqué), Matthew McConaughey (Roger Sherman Baldwin), Anthony Hopkins (John Quincy Adams), Morgan Freeman (Theodore Joadson), Nigel Hawthorne (President Martin van Buren), David Paymer (John Forsythe), Pete Postlethwaite (William S Holabird), Stellan Skarsgård (Lewis Tappen), Razaaq Adoti (Yamba), Abu Bakaar Fofanah (Fala), Anna Paquin (Isabella II), Chiwetel Ejiofor (James Covey), Peter Firth (Captain Fitzgerald), Jeremy Northam (Judge Coglin), Xander Berkeley (Ledger Hammond), Arliss Howard (John C Calhoun)

After the American Revolution, independence left one issue in America that would profoundly split the country: slavery. This was a land divided, between abolitionists and plantation owners, the more emancipation-minded North and slave states of the South. Slavery was – and remains – the ugly stain on the American soul. Steven Spielberg’s film uses a significant court case of its day to shine a light on these contrasting and conflicting priorities in American society throughout much of the early 19th century, that would eventually lead to civil war.

The film tells the true story of the slave revolt on the Spanish slaver ship Amistad. Here the slaves, led by Joseph Cinqué (Djimon Hounsou) escaped captivity, rose up and killed most of the crew (leaving just two men alive to sail the ship) and tried to return to their home in Sierra Leone. Arrested by an American naval ship while collecting fresh water, the slaves are transported to Connecticut where they find themselves on trial as escaped slaves, facing charges of piracy and murder. Their cause is taken up by Northern abolitionists Lewis Tappen (Stellan Skarsgård) and his black associate Theodore Joadson (Morgan Freeman), and their lawyer Roger Sherman Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey) a property lawyer. However, the case’s international implications for slavery attracts the concern of President Martin van Buren (Nigel Hawthorne), eager to support the prosecution, while former President John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins), a lawyer and opponent of slavery, offers his advice to the defence.

Spielberg’s film has just the right balance of human interest and humanitarian concern to overcome its slight air of a civics lesson. Although largely a courtroom drama, what the film is really trying to do is capture in one moment the troubling contradiction of the land of the free built on slaves, and give a voice and empathy to the slaves themselves. 

Although some have criticised this as a “white saviour” film, I feel that’s unfair. This is a film that starts and ends with Cinqué’s story and filters America through his perception. We can well understand why he rages at his lack of comprehension of laws that can be adjusted, court decisions overturned or how words can be twisted to take on other meanings. A film front and centred, say, by Matthew McConaughey’s Baldwin and focusing on journey from seeing this as just another case into a crusade would be a white saviour film. Instead the white characters drop in and out of the story as the narrative requires, and it’s the struggles and courage of the black characters that form the heart of the narrative.

Spielberg also brings to life the cruelty and inhumanity of slavery and what it does to all of us. The film opens with the confined, appalling conditions of the slave ship while Cinqué (with hands running with blood) tries to release a nail from the wood which he will use to free himself from his chains. The film intriguingly opens without the African characters being translated – giving us a sense of their isolation and perhaps also stressing how different they are from the Western “civilisation” that has taken them from their homes. 

It isn’t until half way through the film, until a translator is found for Cinqué, that the film gives us the backstory that Cinqué has struggled to communicate. Spielberg spares no punches in showing the violence of abduction, the brutality and casual slaughter of the slavers, the starvations, the floggings that end in blood sprayed death, the cramped conditions practically designed to weed out the weak. A mother chooses drowning for herself and her child rather than life on the ship. Later the slavers chain unwanted slaves to a bag of rocks and cast them overboard to reduce their cargo load. If there was any doubt about the heart-rending evil behind slavery, it’s removed from your mind.

It also serves to hammer home the injustice of America’s own system. Under political pressure – van Buren is worried about the reaction of both Spain and the Southern States to the Africans being found innocent – the trial encounters interference and appeals every step of the way. It’s a system that prides itself on being the greatest in the world, but shows time and time again how it can be weighted against the weakest. The courtroom scenes – skilfully directed and played – show time and time lawyers valuing obscure property laws above right and wrong. And we are brought time and time again to the reactions and lack of understanding of the African characters, who come from a society where there is no equivocation and no words equivalent to “usually” or “perhaps”.

The film perhaps does take a little too long over its various legal machinations, and could do with losing a few minutes here and there. But that would be to sacrifice its many strengths. Looking wonderful, with a marvellous score by John Williams (riffing on the American pipes and African tribal influences), one of the strongest acting companies Spielberg ever assembled does outstanding work. Carrying much of the film is Djimon Hounsou, who makes Cinqué anything but a victim – he is a proud, defiant and intelligent man, humble enough about his qualities but quick to act to defend his rights. Uncowed but infuriated by the situation he finds himself in, he is never a passenger but at all times a key figure in his own liberation, even if his legal case must be fought by whites.

McConaughey enjoys himself under a bad wig, glasses and dirty teeth as the lawyer Baldwin, ambitious but with more than an air of decency. Postlethwaite is at his quietly authoritative best as his opposition counsel. Freeman lends the film a large part of his grace and dignity in a small, observant part of the freed-slave turned abolitionist, with Skarsgård more political as his white colleague. Hawthorne makes a van Buren a slightly flustered, impatient figure. Peter Firth demonstrates a great contempt for slavery behind an imperious exterior.

The film’s highlight performance though is Hopkins’ Oscar-nominated turn as John Quincy Adams. Adjusting his physicality to match the ageing ex-President, Hopkins captures his slightly nasal Massachusetts twang and adds a significant amount of twinkly charm and wry shrewdness to this adept political operator. A large chunk of the film’s final 20 minutes is given over to Hopkins, with the highlight a long monologue of Adams speech to the Supreme Court (in actuality a speech over eight hours in length!), that is a tour-de-force of skilled showmanship. It’s Hopkins’ last great performance of the 1990s. 

Spielberg’s Amistad is a superb courtroom drama but also a heartfelt condemnation of the inhumanity man can show to man. It never forgets either that while this was a victory, it was only a skirmish not the war. While the film at times overplays the inevitability of Civil War (which did not exactly start over this issue), it skilfully shows the divide in the American culture between abolition and slavery – and how many felt for the first cause, but feared the supporters of the second so much they would rather not address it. Either way, Amistad may at times be a little dry – but that gives its moments of emotion even more force.

Glory (1989)

Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington are among the first black American soldier in Glory

Director: Edward Zwick

Cast: Matthew Broderick (Colonel Robert Gould Shaw), Denzel Washington (Pvt Silas Trip), Cary Elwes (Major Cabot Forbes), Morgan Freeman (Sgt Major John Rawlins), Andre Braugher (Cpl Thomas Searles), Jihmi Kennedy (Pt Jupiter Sharts), Cliff De Young (Colonel James Montgomery), Alan North (Governor John Albion Andrew), John Finn (Sgt Mulcahy), Bob Gunton (General Charles Garrison Harker), Jay O Sanders (General George Crockett Strong)

The American Civil War started over slavery, but it took a long time for either side to admit it was a fight about slavery. Racism abounded on both sides, and it was a fight in which black Americans may have been the subject, but were rarely invited to join. Glory covers this point of history, and specifically the first all-black regiment and its struggle to be recognised as equal to the other regiments in the army. 

Wounded at the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick) returns home to Massachusetts and accepts command of the first all-black regiment, which is currently being raised by abolitionists in the state. With his friend Cabot Forbes (Cary Elwes) as second-in-command (no one was progressive enough to actually allow black officers for the regiment), he recruits a wide range of black Americans, from free-man and bookish intellectual Thomas Searles (Andre Braugher) – an old friend of Robert and Cabot – to former slaves such as the wise John Rawlins (Morgan Freeman) and the resentful Silas Trip (Denzel Washington). Training is a struggle, with the army denying the regiment supplies and support, and it’s an equal struggle when they reach the front line to be recognised for duties other than looting and latrine digging. Will the Massachusetts 54th be given the chance to prove itself in the front line – and establish a black man can fight as hard and bravely as a white man can?

Edward Zwick’s beautifully filmed, carefully re-created historical epic set the tone for much of his future career. It’s an often overly-sentimental film straining for a very self-conscious sense of importance, weighed down by the pride at the “message” it is carrying. It often does hit the mark with presenting scenes that carry emotional force – but then seeing as it treats nearly every scene as being a “moment” that should move us (with James Horner’s choral manipulation working double time to get us experiencing feelings), it’s no wonder that it succeeds sometimes.

Which is not to say the message it presents isn’t an important one. Black Americans have often been pushed into the margins of American Civil War history. Or worst of all presented as the victims, reliant on the courage and bravery of the abolitionists of the North to save them from slavery in the South. Until Glory it was very rare for anything to push their stories front and centre – or to tell a story where former slaves were allowed to fight their own battles and choose their own destinies. 

It’s one of the strongest marks of the film: these are soldiers unlike any other, who enter battles with less concern about their own survival, and more about having the chance to live as freemen and to make a mark on the world. To show that they, and people like them, could do just as a white man could do. And if they had to die to do that, better to live a day on their feet as freemen then a lifetime on their knees. It’s the principle emotional message of the film, and something Zwick translates with some skill, even if he frequently overeggs the pudding while doing so.

However, with such a strong message, it’s a shame so much of the film is filtered through the experience of its white lead character. For many of the films of the 80s and 90s dealing with these issues – Cry Freedom, the Steve Biko biopic, with Biko as a supporting character to his white South African journalist friend, being perhaps the key example – it was essential to have a white man at the centre, as if worried that audiences couldn’t understand the story they were seeing unless they had it filtered through the perception of someone who looks a bit more like them.

Matthew Broderick takes on the lead role here of Shaw – with the film giving a significant slice of its running time to its coming-of-age theme of Shaw learning to become a leader of men – and while the character is meant to be callow and an unlikely Colonel, it doesn’t help that Broderick lacks the charisma for the part. Perhaps he is a little too lightweight an actor for such an enterprise, for a film that demands greater force of character (you can imagine Tom Cruise doing a much finer job in the role).  Similarly, the familiar beats of a young man learning how to lead feel trivial compared to the life-and-death issues facing his soldiers.

But too often Zwick’s film returns us to Shaw’s point-of-view, the narrative filtering so much of the action through his perceptions and decisions that the black soldiers become supporting actors in their own stories. Broderick is not helped by the soldiers being played by some of the finest American actors of the last 30 years. Braugher is fabulous in the thankless role of the bookish man who must grow a spine. Morgan Freeman established a persona – the wise and level headed older man, who will not let hate and fury define his life and his choices – that would last him for the rest of his career, and is superb (his Oscar nomination for Driving Miss Daisy is probably the only thing that led to him not getting a nod for this film).

Denzel Washington took home an Oscar as the bitter, angry Trip – and it’s the sort of role an actor seizes with relish. Washington fills every frame with his rage at the system, his inarticulate, indiscriminate anger lashing out in every direction. It’s the fury of a man who has had all his choices taken from him in life, and would rather destroy things than run the risk of allowing himself to become committed to something, or form a bond. Washington probably won the Oscar alone for the astonishing scene where he silently, defiantly accepts a whipping (on a body covered with scars) for missing a curfew. He’s an elemental force of nature in the film.

There is plenty of strong stuff in Zwick’s work, but the film itself overplays its hand frequently. Moments of emotion are played so heavily to the hilt they sometimes fail to have an impact. It wants you to know at every turn that you are watching a film with an important social message – and the speechifying at points put into the mouths of the characters runs dry. While superbly made – veteran photographer Freddie Francis’ work is beautiful (and Oscar winning) – it’s a heavy-handed, overly pleased with itself film that knows all too well that it is about an important subject. While sometimes it lands – often in quieter moments, particularly those where Freeman and Washington are allowed to simply be human without overindulgent music cues hammering home the emotions – at others it comes across as too much.

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Robert De Niro and James Woods are gangsters in Sergio Leone’s sprawling indulgent masterpiece Once Upon a Time in America

Director: Sergio Leone

Cast: Robert De Niro (Noodles), James Woods (Max), Elizabeth McGovern (Deborah), Joe Pesci (Frankie), Burt Young (Joe), Tuesday Weld (Carol), Treat Williams (Jimmy O’Donnell), Danny Aiello (Police Chief Aiello), Richard Bright (Chicken Joe), James Hayden (Patsy), William Forsythe (Cockeye), Darlanne Fluegel (Eve), Scott Tiler (Young Noodles), Rusty Jacobs (Young Max), Jennifer Connelly (Young Deborah)

It had been thirteen years since Leone had made a film. During this time he turned down The Godfather in favour of his own dream of filming Harry Grey’s novel The Hoods. The final film, Once Upon a Time in America, seems destined to live in the shadow of The Godfather, from its settings and many of its themes through to its graphic design and cast. It’s a challenging, over-indulgent, sometimes difficult film that, never-the-less has its own sense of hypnotic power to it.

Told in a partly non-linear style, it opens with Noodles (Robert De Niro) a Jewish gangster on the run from thugs in 1930s New York days after the fall of prohibition. With his friends and his girl dead and his money stolen, Noodles flees the city – returning only in 1968 after a mysterious summons suggests his past is not as buried as he thought. Within this, the film weaves an intricate series of flashbacks that fill in the story of Noodles and his friend Max (James Woods) turning their teenage gang of hoodlums into an effective crew, muscling in on the money that can be made from prohibition. Carrying the story from 1918 all the way back to 1968, we discover why Noodles was on the run, what the money was, where it’s gone and who or what summoned him back to life.

Leone originally envisioned the film as a two-part epic: two films of three hours length. His original cut was almost ten hours long, cut down to six and then finally to just over four. This cut was released to critical acclaim at Cannes – but was still too long for the producers, concerned about making their money in America. To the fury of the cast (James Woods continues to be vocal about the butchering of the film), and the heartbreak of Leone, the film was cut again to just over 2 hours before its release in the States – a move that rendered it nearly incomprehensible and led to reviews that labelled it one of the worst of the year. Only with the much late release of the European cut (and work continues to restore something closer to Leone’s six hour cut) did the film find acclaim.

But you can see why the producers worried. Leone was never a director who felt the need to get where he was going quickly. As his films became ever more dominated by his love for artful compositions, meditative longeurs and drawing the tension out for as long as possible, so their running times ballooned. Leone matched this with a yearning to tell a story that was to be nothing less than about defining “America” – or at least, give a symbolic weight and depth to the Americana he loved. The film is overflowing with the feel of Old Hollywood gangster films and classic imagery of the immigrant experience in Manhattan. It’s like a brilliant coffee-table album bought to life and covered with blood.

So Once Upon a Time in America is a slow, lethargic even, film that takes its time to build up a picture of an immigrant community drawn together through bonds of culture and shared past that are nearly impossible to express – but fractured by the greed and capitalism of the American Dream, temptation to make an even bigger killing leading to old loyalties being sacrificed. Leone juggles some big ideas here, and if the film never quite comes to grips with any of them as it charts the fractured relationship of Max and Noodles, from brothers-in-arms to ambition, pride and private frustrations leading to betrayal it’s never less than strangely engrossing. 

In many ways this is a hugely indulgent film, but it is also remarkable (strangely) for how restrained and elegiac it is. The razzamatazz of some of Leone’s Westerns are mixed in with a golden age romantic view of the past – and its lost opportunities and loyalties – in a film particularly fascinated with the coming-of-age of young men. The film is nothing less than an old man taking a ruminative journey through the past (both Leone and Noodles in his memories), looking back at a life time of bad choices and lost chances. It all makes for one of cinema’s greatest mood pieces ever, with faultless period reconstruction, but also a piece that for all its focus on personal lives at cornerstones of histories, makes its characters seem strangely impersonal.

Part of that lies in Leone’s clear love for the film’s long second act (nearly a third of its runtime), which charts the young Jewish hoodlums teenage lives in 1918 New York – their meeting, first scores, rivalries with other gangs and inevitably the loss of virginity. For all its overextended backstory, the section of the film hums with love and elegiac romance. It’s the richest part of the film. There is a beauty in beats of the watching the boys encounter everything from first crime to first love – and easy as it is to mock a good 3-4 minutes watching one of them eat a cake intended as an offer in exchange for a first sexual experience with the local floozy, moments like that have an innocence and a beauty to them that Leone really captures.

It’s a shame that it’s the back-end of the film that suffers – and its plot and narrative drive. It feels like Leone fought to keep the beauty of this early section and sacrificed drive and narrative later. The fracturing of the relationship between Max and Noodles is less clear, and their adult characters never quite come into focus. Perhaps there isn’t quite room for actors in the long sequences of wordless silence and atmosphere, punctuated by bursts of shocking violence, in Leone’s world. Certainly the cut doesn’t help, with most of the supporting cast (Joe Pesci, Treat Williams, Burt Young, Danny Aiello) reduced to little more than one scene each, their storylines – particularly a crucial Teamsters plot – barely making any sense.

Max’s growing distance from Noodles is perhaps rooted in everything from his ambition being frustrated by Noodles small-time viewpoints, perhaps even in suggestions of a frustrated homosexual love for the defiantly straight Noodles. James Woods does very well to piece to together a suggestion of deep psychological unease and confusion in a character who remains unknowable, a man to whom loyalty is everything until it isn’t.

As Noodles Robert De Niro anchors the film with one of his quietest, most reflective performances. Noodles is a deeply flawed, low-key, humble character who carries in him a capacity for self-destructive and vicious violence. Leone’s film suggests Noodles is perhaps troubled by feelings and longings he can’t begin to understand or appreciate. He is a romantic character, deeply infatuated with both Max and his childhood sweetheart Deborah, but unable to express or communicate his feelings until it is far too late, a man traumatised by emotional connection.

Not that this excuses Noodles for his actions, particularly towards women. If there is one troubling aspect of the film it is its attitude towards women. There are two prominent women in the film, both of whom are raped. One of them, Carol, is a shrewish temptress, who deliberately provokes Noodles to rape her and is then shown enjoying it. The second rape, this time of Deborah, comes from Noodles after a romantic date where he has finally done everything right. While Leone shoots the scene with an almost unwatchable grimness – Elizabeth McGovern’s screams and distress make for very hard viewing – the film still asks us to feel not only for her pain, but also (perhaps more so) Noodles regret. Further when they encounter each other late in life, Deborah matches him in sadness at chances lost – an unlikely reaction you feel for someone who has suffered as traumatic experience as she has. 

But then to Leone perhaps this is part of the corruption of America – or rather the vileness of gangsters. The gangsters are a grotesque bunch in this film, killing without compunction, torturing, stealing, using violence as second nature. Loyalty is barely skin deep and arrogance abounds. There is no romantic sense of family behind it all – perhaps the thing Leone rejected most from The Godfather – just a series of people on the make and on the take. 

But for all its faults and over extended length the film is increasingly hypnotic and engrossing, Leone’s understanding of mood being near faultless. While the ideas are perhaps not quite pulled into sharp focus in the film – and leave the audience having to do a lot of supposition – it still works over time. And the film has so many astonishing merits – from its awe-inspiring shooting and production to the sublime score from Ennio Morricone that gives the film even more poetic depth – it more than merits its existence.

And of course there is the cheeky sense Leone throws in that some – or indeed all – of what we are seeing may not even have happened. The film opens and closes with Noodles in an opium den, stoned out of his mind, in the 1930s. In the opening he lies there, haunted by the sound of a ringing phone (the memory of the phone call he made betraying Max), and we see him arrive at the film’s end taking his first puff and lying back with a grin. Is the film’s off-kilter 1968 even real? Or just an opium den dream? Is the past – and the film’s disjointed narrative flying back and forth – just a stoned man lost in his own fantasies? Who knows? What we do know is that Leone’s indulgent epic is a flawed but genuine masterpiece – and the opium fantasy angle may just be the perfect cover for the fact more than half the film is on the cutting room floor of history.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Clint Eastwood is the Man with no Name in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Director: Sergio Leone

Cast: Clint Eastwood (“Blondie”/The Man With No Name), Lee Van Cleef (“Angel Eyes”), Eli Wallach (Tuco), Aldo Giuffrè (Union Captain Clinton), Mario Brega (Corporal Wallace), Luigi Pistilli (Father Pablo Ramírez), Al Mulock (Elam, one-Armed Bounty Hunter), Antonio Casas (Stevens), Antonio Casale (Jackson/Bill Carson), Antonio Molino Rojo (Captain Harper)

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly closed out Sergio Leone’s “Man with No Name” Western trilogy, the role that turned Clint Eastwood into a star. Unlike the other two films in the Dollars series, TGTBTU was shot on a larger and more expansive budget, and showed Leone stretching himself into something more than a peddler of Americana pulp. This was a film that was as much an artistic statement as it was an entertainment – perhaps more so. 

The plot of the film is very simple – considering its extended runtime. Three bandits and hired guns are on a quest for buried gold, while all around them the American Civil War rages. The bandits are: “The Good” (Clint Eastwood) – the taciturn “man with no name” who has more of heart than he lets on; “The Bad” (Lee Van Cleef) – known only as “Angel Eyes”, a stone-cold killer with no soul at all; and “The Ugly”, Tuco (Eli Wallach), a larger than life Mexican bandit, scruffy, scuzzy but with plenty of joie de vivre. The money is hidden somewhere out in a graveyard in the West – but who is going to get there first?

TGTBTU is Leone at a midway point of his career. Tonally the film falls between the more straightforward thrills of the first two Dollarsfilms, and leans closer towards the artistic epic canvasses that Leone would paint in his Once Upon a Time… films. Perhaps this is why TGTBTU is possibly the most popular of all Leone’s films, it’s more entertaining than either of the latter two but has more thematic depth than the earlier two. But that doesn’t change the fact that, watching it, I feel this is reaching for a moral and thematic richness and complexity that is just beyond Leone’s grasp. He’s straining for this film to be something more than his earlier films – and I’m not sure that’s something he manages to do. 

But let’s focus on what the film does right, which is a hell of a lot. This is the film where Leone really found his voice and ran with it. It’s a hyper real world he creates of the Old West, with a tone of artificiality about it. Part of that comes from the odd disconnect you get from the European actors and the dubbed voices that overlay them (not always completely accurately), but it’s there in every inch of the style of the film.

It’s an explosion of style, with artificiality frequently alongside reality, all thrown together into a sort of crazy Western world where everything seems to be happening at once (from bandit towns to the Civil War), and you could turn a corner and end up in either a desert, a battle field or a town under siege. His style is heightened, and makes for some wonderful shots, not least the way first Blondie and later Tuco’s banditos seem to drop into a wider frame, expanding the world suddenly as we watch it. 

Leone’s a director who practically invented the term “operatic” for cinema. His gun battles are 99% build up and 1% action, and it’s the simmering tension of those build-ups that really make his films stick in the mind. If you think of it, you’ll imagine that iconic Ennio Morricone score (recorded before the film was shot, so Leone could shoot the film to match it – composers dream of having such licence today!), followed by slow series of escalating cuts. Leone will cut to hands approaching triggers, then close ups of faces, then long shots for context, then all of these again and again, each time the hands getting closer, the close-ups getting tighter, the long shots being more prolonged, all of it about building the tension and then BANG the shooting is done in seconds.

The film was criticised for being violent at the time, but it’s more like extremely tense. You can see why Tarantino sites Leone as his master. Watch that introduction sequence for Angel Eyes, a long, quiet scene where he eats a peasant’s food while questioning him and then ends by a sharp series of shootings that leave the family devastated. It’s the style Tarantino was going for in Inglourious Basterds and a tone establisher for Leone. You always know the violence is coming, and you know it will be quick and merciless when it does, but the film makes you sit tensely waiting for it for minutes at a time. The violence when it comes is often cold and those who carry it out are cynics and thieves rather than heroes and villains.

It makes for a sprawling, epic, even rather unfocused film at times – and it means the runtime is hopelessly overextended at over three hours uncut – but it’s also what interests Leone. He sees a world where killers are cool, calm, calculating and don’t go in guns blazing. Where intimidation is an art and micro-calculations occur before any trigger is squeezed. 

And these ruthless killers are in a world of violence all around them. Around the edges of the film’s narrative, the world of the Civil War rages, claiming lives left, right and centre. It’s here that Leone targets a thematic richness that I don’t feel is completely successful. There are elements that work – and the Union prison camp that Blondie and Tuco end up in (staffed by sadistic guards under the guidance of Angel Eyes) is the best of them. Clearly paralleling Nazi extermination camps in the herding of prisoners, the trains that carry them to certain death, the brutal beatings and the Yankee soldiers who are forced to play music (literally for their lives) to cover the noise of those beatings, you can feel Leone’s anger at the horror mankind unleashes on itself. 

But it’s heavy handed at places and makes its points too bluntly, dropping them into the film rather than weaving them neatly into the overall narrative. Towns and villages are bombed out and dead men lie on the edge of roads, but it doesn’t really get tied into an effective contrast with the central treasure hunt narrative. This is Leone straining for greatness, but not having the chops to get there yet. Blondie may bemoan the pointless slaughter of civil war – and even comfort a dying soldier – but these beats could be removed from the film without affecting its overall impact. Leone’s real love is Americana pulp, and his focus on this sometimes gets in the way of achieving his wider aims.

Perhaps that’s also because the impact gets lost slightly in the film’s great, sprawling length – and Leone’s lack of discipline, his insistence in taking everything at his own pace (often a slow dawdle through details), while it works really well for some sequences it also gives us others (such as Tuco running through a graveyard) that seem to last forever for very little impact.

Leone also increasingly became more a director with epic visuals in which characters are only details, with this film. Eastwood – reluctant to return in any case – especially feels like a much blanker presence in this film, coasting through his role almost on autopilot. Although you could say he generously cedes much of the limelight to Eli Wallach, who roars through the film as Tuco. Wallach’s eccentric but heartfelt performance – full of odd mannerisms but underscored with a genuine emotional vulnerability at points matched with a childlike enthusiasm – becomes central to the enjoyment of the film (he’s really the lead character). Van Cleef meanwhile drips demonic, cold menace behind unflinching (Angel) eyes.

Leone’s epic work is a sprawling, over extended, self-indulgent epic that mixes moments of pure cinematic entertainment with heavy handed digressions into man’s inhumanity that are a little too on-the-nose and unthreaded into the central plot to carry as much impact as they should. But it remains one of the most popular films of all time partly because what it does well, it does better than almost anyone – those long, tense build-ups, that electric energy that Wallach represents, the otherworldly artificiality mixed with cold reality. The Good the Bad and the Ugly is Leone’s crowning achievement, and for all its flaws, it still packs a punch.

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

Laughton and Gable go head to head in Mutiny on the Bounty

Director: Frank Lloyd

Cast: Charles Laughton (Captain Bligh), Clark Gable (Lt Fletcher Christian), Franchot Tone (Roger Byam), Herbert Mundin (Smith), Eddie Quillan (Ellison), Dudley Digges (Bacchus), Donald Crisp (Burkitt), Henry Stephenson (Sir Joseph Banks), Francis Lister (Captain Nelson), Spring Byington (Mrs Byam), Movita Castaneda (Tehani), Mamo Clark (Maimiti), Byron Russell (Quintal), David Torrance (Lord Hood)

“They respect but one law – the law of fear…”. So hisses Charles Laughton as the definitively monsterish Captain Bligh in this Oscar-winning version of the most famous mutiny ever. It’s the quintessential adventure on the high-seas motion picture (never mind that the actual ship used could only get a few miles off the coast), but it’s also a feast of good acting and Hollywood class: the only picture to get three nominations for Best Actor, as well as the last Best Picture winner to only win one Oscar. It cemented the ideas around Bligh and Fletcher for generations.

Heading out on a two-year voyage in 1787 to transport breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies, the Bounty sets sail from Portsmouth with several members of the crew freshly press-ganged. In command is self-made man Captain William Bligh (Charles Laughton), while his second-in-command is gentleman Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable). A pair of fine sailors, the two of them are separated only by their methods. Fletcher is a man of the people, a motivator with a firm hand. Bligh is a man with just a firm hand, who never uses a dozen lashes of the crew when two dozen will do. Fletcher becomes more and more alienated by Bligh’s ruthless methods.

Frank Lloyd bought the rights to a novel that fictionalised the mutiny (introducing Roger Byam, a fictional version of Peter Heywood who later become a Post-Captain in the navy) with the intention of directing and playing Bligh himself. Fortunately he was persuaded to step aside on the acting front for Laughton, who is seized the part with relish.  Shoulders scrunched and neck jutting his head forward, with his lip curled, this is a Bligh constantly on the look-out for offence, a martinet whose anger stems from a self-loathing within. A chippy middle-class boy made good, he’s determined to enforce the letter of the law, and while a bully with no empathy he’s not exactly a bad man, just a bad captain. Laughton’s performance simmers with bitterness and a relish for being obeyed.

He makes a neat contrast with Clark Gable at his matinee idol finest. Worried about taking the role because it demanded the shaving of his lucky moustache (no facial hair in the navy), Gable gifts Laughton the flashier role to play the decent hero with only the best for his fellow man at heart. Gable’s Christian is decent, understanding, a natural leader who has a firm eye for justice. Not even bothering with the British accent, but settling for a mid-Atlantic ease, Gable is the Hollywood superstar to his core, his Christian the quintessential romantic ideal.

Between the two of them runs Franchot Tone’s Midshipman Roger Byam. Tone is the often forgotten third nominee for Best Actor, but he has in many ways the trickier part, which he handles with aplomb: the naïve young man who wants to serve his captain and his country, but also understands that his captain is not a man of justice. Tone gets the film’s highlight, a final speech to the court martial that helps make everything turn out alright, but his tortured pleading for justice and moral righteousness is delivered with a humble and effective forthrightness.

Lloyd has these fine performances (plus some great work from Mundin, Crisp, Digges, Quillan and others as assorted ship’s crew) and sets them all out perfectly on a film that captures the heart of the epic. The ship is brilliantly constructed and assembled, and Lloyd’s film reconstructs everything from day-to-day travails on sea to the impact of storms. The mutiny when it comes is shot with an Eisensteinesque immediacy, while he also manages to shoot Tahiti with a dreamlike paradise sheen. He paces perfectly the growing sense of tension and unresolvable fury between Bligh and Christian. 

And he certainly gets a brilliant sense of the cruelty and sustained violence of Bligh’s rule on the boat, as floggings come thundering down on the backs the sailors – often for the very meanest of reasons. A keelhauling (despite one moment of laughably bad model work) is brutal in its harshness. Bligh’s first act on boat is to flog a dead man (after all death doesn’t wipe out the need for punishment) and he goes from there. The film does give time to admire Bligh’s seamanship – and reconstructs surprisingly well his awe-inspiring open boat trip over 4,000 miles to take him and loyalists back to a safe port. Meanwhile Christian heads for the safety of Tahiti, a blissful series of images of our decent sailors enjoying homespun pleasures and hot Tahitian wives.

Of course it’s not actually what happened really. Bligh was a difficult, priggish and rather cold person with low personal skills but he wasn’t the monster he seems here. Christian had a certain aristocratic pull over the men, but he was also probably far more twitchy, young and stupid than the assured, experienced sailor he is here. Bligh’s ship wasn’t the bastion of cruelty it is here (punishments seemed in line with the rest of the navy, or even a little less according to the log), but Bligh’s lack of understanding of how men work and his endless drive, matched with his sailors’ seduction by the charms of an easy life on Tahiti perhaps led to the outbreak. Either way Bligh definitely didn’t command the HMS Pandorato hunt the sailors down, nor did the investigation into the matter end with him being snubbed as a wrong ‘un by Lord Hood.

But hey, if you know that this is legend printed as fact it’s fine. Because Lloyd’s film is still superbly entertaining, has three excellent performances among a fine ensemble cast and while its version of Bligh may be a monster made up, Laughton invests him with enough humanity and self-loathing you’ll despair at his poor choices as much as you’ll hate his cruelty. Prime Hollywood entertainment, perfect for any time.