Category: Literary adaptation

The Decameron (1971)

Pasolini’s naughty-boy Boccaccio adaptation, aims for political but in loves with cheek

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Cast: Franco Citti (Ciappelletto of Prato), Ninetto Davoli (Andreuccio), Vincenzo Amato (Masetto), Maria Gabriella Maione (Madonna Fiordaliso), Angela Luce (Peronella), Giuseppe Zigaina (German Monk), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Giotto’s Pupil), Giacomo Rizzo (Friend of Giotto’s Pupil), Guido Alberti (Musciatto), Elisabetta Genovese (Caterina), Giorgio Iovine (Lizio)

The Decameron is a collection of a hundred tales written by Boccaccio in the 14^th century, which offers a rich mosaic of Italian life from the tragic to the comic. But it also has a reputation for a lot of bawdy naughtiness – and perhaps part of that comes from Pasolini’s cheeky, sex-filled adaptation, with its playful lingering on some of the most rumpy-pumpy filled yarns. Scholars of Boccaccio were appalled in 1971; it’s a gag that I think Boccaccio might have appreciated that today Pasolini’s film is required viewing on Boccaccio courses.

Much like with The Gospel According to Matthew, Pasolini shifted the location to fit his themes. Here most of the tales take place in Southern Italy – Neapolitan accents and dialect abound – and the new underlying theme explore the exploitations of simple, honest peasants by cannier, ruthless people from the richer north. Roughly linking the tales together is a pupil of Giotto – played by Pasolini himself – preparing a fresco in a monastery, inspired (it becomes clear) by the stories which may in turn be inspired by ordinary people he sees on the streets. The Decameron is aiming to be a playful musing on the chicken-and-egg nature of artistic inspiration and the way different artists in different genres can inspire and motivate each other to ever greater heights.

Or at least those themes are there. But they can be hard-to-spot beneath the surface, since The Decameron mostly delights in its array of sexual goings-on, which pretty much tick-offs every taste and inclination you can imagine from masturbation to orgies, as well as darker content like rape and paedophilia. To be honest, for all that Pasolini is an artist thinking earnestly about the classics, he’s also a very naughty boy eager to get a few erect penises into mainstream film-making (and The Decameron was a huge hit in Italy and played in arthouse cinemas the world over). The Decameron, for all its pretentions about art, is also a bit of end-of-pier soft-porn – or a hard-core Carry On.

There is something deliberately amateurish about The Decameron in its scatological humour and the bumpy, rushed nature of its film-making. In common with many Euro films at the time, it makes no effort (either in its Italian or English dubs) to match the words we hear with the movement of the actors’ mouths, with most of the sound having a muffled post-recording session feel to it. The camerawork and editing are frequently jolted and rushed, adding to the bawdy sense of things being thrown together, Pasolini using sped-up film and punch-line jumpcuts to keep up the improvisational energy. It makes the film feel at times like a student revue.

Pasolini shot the film entirely on location, with a cast of actors who were mostly unprofessional. As with many of his films, much of the casting seems to be based on people’s appearances more than anything else. The Decameron has a superfluity of striking faces. Toothy grins or missing teeth, hooded eyes, vacant grins, these faces look like they could have stumbled in from a Brueghel painting. Everyone looks distinctive and this parade of striking faces adds to the film’s wild energy.

It also makes everyone in this Boccaccio cheek and smut stand out. Pasolini’s trick was to argue that the medieval era, in many ways, wasn’t that different from today. He didn’t present it as a high-blown time of men in tights speaking poetry, but one where people were obsessed with money and sex (usually the latter) and showed no shame in chasing it. An era where the medieval world looked dirty, shabby and slightly sordid, rather than what the poets would have us believe.

This informed his choice of stories. When you start with a naïve young man nearly drowned in a pool of shit, you can tell that this isn’t exactly going to be Hollywood medieval epic. Pasolini’s chosen tales involve: a well-endowed gardener pretending to be mute so he can shag a convent full of nuns, a woman boffing her lover while her husband inspects the insides of a large pot, a dying sinner (who we’ve already seen proposition a child for sex) claiming to be a saint, a girl and her lover shagging naked on a rooftop, a monk tricking a man into allowing him to have sex with the man’s wife, and concludes with a man receiving a visit from the ghost of a dead friend telling him that sex is no sin and the angels of heaven say he should certainly give his girlfriend a good pre-marriage seeing to.

Throughout, Pasolini aims to show a world where simple pleasures mix with the exploitation by the rich and powerful of the simple, poor and naïve. It’s a not a theme that comes out all that much, especially since few people are going to remember the political message when we are all much more inclined to focus on the constant in-and-out. The Decameron might want to think it is a grand statement, but its really a great big joke, told by a director who is sort of laughing at us while he does it. It’s a rather juvenile piece of titillation, passing itself off as political statement.

Perhaps that’s why Pasolini felt a bit embarrassed about it all later. After a parade of knock-offs, he effectively disowned the film, claiming low-quality imitators that dialled up the sex even more had missed the point and buried the anti-capitalist message of his own film. Since I can imagine several people watching The Decameron and completely missing the point in the first place, I can’t help but feel he has only himself to blame.

Poor Things (2023)

Distinctive, challenging and hilarious film that mixes social issues with quotable dialogue

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Cast: Emma Stone (Bella Baxter/Victoria Blessington), Mark Ruffalo (Duncan Wedderburn), Willem Dafoe (Dr Godwin Baxter), Ramy Youssef (Max McCandles), Christopher Abbott (Alfie Blessington), Kathryn Hunter (Madame Swiney), Jerrod Carmichael (Harry Astley), Hanna Schygulla (Martha von Kurtzroc), Margaret Qualley (Felicity), Vicki Pepperdine (Mrs Prim), Suzy Bemba (Toinette)

“It’s Alive!” cries Frankenstein as his creation is sparked to life before abandoning it to become a revenging monster. Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things imagines a different creature – nurtured (admittedly as part of an eccentric experiment), maturing at an accelerated rate, discovering physical and intellectual stimulation and deciding they can’t get enough of either of them. Adapted from Alastair Gray’s novel, Poor Things is a vibrant and challenging film that, for all its sex, is a feminism-tinged Frankenstein that says no to societally enforced ideas of shame and conformity.

In Victorian London, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is the creature, a stumbling, barely articulate young woman when she is introduced to trainee doctor Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) by her guardian (her “God”) Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). “Bella” is resurrected corpse – the body of a suicidal pregnant woman, the brain of the child she carried. Developing at an accelerated rate, Bella is both Godwin’s experiment and his surrogate child. But as Bella discovers the pleasures of the body and the wonders of the world around her, she wants to experience life outside of the house. Eloping – with the agreement of her guardian – with roguish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), Bella discovers not only sensual pleasures but deeply engaging intellectual pleasures across Europe, determined to become her own woman defined by no-one.

Poor Things is practically a dictionary definition of a Lanthimos epic (fish-eyed lenses, spidery text captions, a jarring mix of period and modern) and is almost impossible to categorise. It is, in turn, serious and thought-provoking, laugh-out-loud funny, uncomfortable and challenging. Shot in a deliberately artificial manner, its cinematography and sets reminiscent of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it’s Victorian but also a remix of everything from Metropolis to the mansion at the heart of Sunset Boulevard, here turned into a Dr Moreau style den of freakishly spliced animals. It makes for something wildly, unpredictably unique visually, a smorgasbord of the real, the overblown and plain weird.

With a sharp script by Tony MacNamara, crammed with quotable lines (sometimes Lanthimos has a bit too much of an eye on creating GIF moments) Poor Things reinvents itself as constantly as its hero. Opening in rich black-and-white to chronicle Bella’s early years, it explodes into a gorgeously expressive Powell and Pressburger colours as she experiences the world. It superbly mixes the real with the weird, shaping its collection of bizarre characters into living-breathing people while keeping the world around them a melting-pot of styles and genres.

Poor Things has been attacked by some as semi-pornographic or exploitative. In fact, it’s a complex and daring look at female empowerment. On first discovering the pleasures of, well, self-pleasure (with a selection of vegetables), Bella is immediately told such things are not done in polite society. But Bella refuses to see “furious jumping” as shameful, but just a source of pleasure and experience like any other. If she takes pleasure in the act with someone, why should be ashamed? And if she makes all the decisions about what does and doesn’t happen with her body, who should judge her?

Bella is a curious hybrid her whole life: the body and feelings of an adult, with a swiftly developing brain, absorbing understanding of the world around her swiftly. Like a child she lashes out at the rules Godwin and his protégé Max place over her (partly for her protection, partly to continue their psychological development experiment). But this comes from her increasing frustration at having her horizons limited by these men, deciding what and who she can see. Lanthimos takes clear from the start Bella can take as much sensual pleasure in feeling fallen leaves under her body or watching fireworks in the sky as anything else and doesn’t feel she should be denied it.

Poor Things sees Bella demanding, and then making, her own decisions – and to hell with expectations. Whether throwing plates at dinner because she wants to leave or choosing to run away to Europe with caddish Duncan for the experience of it, she shall make her own choices. Decisions being made for her, infuriate her: Max’s refusal to let her leave or Duncan’s decision to take her, unannounced, on a cruise. Bella will talk to who she wants and experience anything she finds curious. If she decides to go on the game in Paris in a high-class brothel (on the basis that she enjoys sex, the hours are short and it pays well) who gives a damn if Duncan is appalled. He doesn’t – for all he might like to think so – own her.

These are complex and challenging ideas, as Bella jokes she has become “the means of her own production”. But Bella believes the only thing in the world should make us ashamed is the suffering of others: witnessing a slum in Alexandria she is moved to tears at the indifference that lets children die in poverty, with only platitudes for these “poor things”. And you can see her point: why flinch at personal misconduct but not even blush at the idea of others dying because of our inaction. That’s why she doesn’t want to be constrained by societies ideal, be that enjoying sex, reading Marxism, dancing all night long or wanting to punch a baby that won’t stop crying in a restaurant.

All these complex ideas are brilliantly captured in Emma Stone’s extraordinary performance. It is, of course, a physical marvel, her body slowly, jerkily, developing, but also a rivetingly complex embodiment of a hugely complex personality, absorbing everything around her, processing it and then shaping it into her own world view. It’s reflected in the gorgeous eccentricity of her dialogue – she is “a changeable feast” of views, peppering her sentences with astute (and funny) unique metaphors “finding being alive fascinating”. She makes Bella determined, naïve, exceptionally wise and insightful, uncertain, kind and unforgiving. It sits perfectly at the heart of a film about a woman refusing to be ashamed and determined to better the world around her. It’s a brilliant creation.

One of many in the film. Godwin, a hideously disfigured famous surgeon, was the subject of his own father’s experiments (Godwin describes with matter-of-fact scientific curiosity a series of repugnant surgical experiments, including the removal of organs to discover if the body needs them – “turns out we do”). Godwin seems at first a blinkered mad scientist, but in Dafoe’s brilliantly layered performance, a humanitarian with a sense of fair play is revealed, who genuinely cares for his creation and refuses to stand in her way. Although she calls him “God” he is far from a messianic tyrant, instead refusing to repeat the mistakes of his own tyrannical parent.

He contrasts neatly with Ruffalo’s rake. Ruffalo has a whale of a time in a ‘leave nothing in the locker room’ performance of comedic excess. Duncan seems at first a threatening rake, but becomes infatuated with the mysterious Bella (something she finds more and more wearing), crumbling from worldly-wise playboy to a spoilt schoolboy whining about things he can’t have. Ruffalo inverts Bella’s development: as she becomes more mature, he degenerates into a dependent child.

Which fits because Poor Things is a Frankenstein-in-reverse story of a woman not being defined by men. Those who try fail, left to choose either to support her or flail against her rights. Lanthimos’ work is striking, original and hugely dynamic, brilliantly mixing striking visuals with searching questions. Why shouldn’t women feel the same lack of shame in their bodies and accomplishments as Bella does? It’s an urgent question – that’s getting lost in discussions about the films. Often as wildly funny as it is freakily weird, its deliberate artificiality and anachronisms help create a film that is a playground of ideas. I’m still working out what I feel about it all now – and how refreshing to have a film as bold as that to consider?

L’Argent (1983)

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

Director: Robert Bresson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Trial (1962)

Welles exploration of paranoia and guilt is an easier film to admire than like (or enjoy)

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Anthony Perkins (Josef K), Jeanne Moreau (Marika Burstner), Romy Schneider (Leni), Elsa Martinelli (Hilda), Suzanne Flon (Miss Pittl), Orson Welles (The Advocate), Akim Tamiroff (Bloch), Madeline Robinson (Mrs Grubach), Paolo Mori (Court archivist), Michael Lonsdale (Priest), Arnoldo Foa (Inspector A), Fernard Ledoux (Chief Clerk of the Court)

It had never happened to Welles before: in 1960 producer Alexander Salkind shoved a series of literary works at him and said “make one of these into a film! Money no object and complete creative control!”. Welles wasn’t going to say no. It hardly mattered that he’d barely even let Kafka cross his mind before: he could see a way to do The Trial and, by God, he wasn’t going to pass up this chance. To purists, The Trial is one of the few “pure Welles” flicks – the one Welles shepherded from start to finish and more-or-less ended up with what he wanted at the end of it (no wonder he called it “his best picture” – although he said that about all his pictures at one time or another).

The Trial adapts, fairly faithfully, Kafka’s surrealist novel. Josef K (Anthony Perkins), a middle-management pen-pusher, is accused of a terrible crime without being told what it is. He stumbles from encounter to encounter, law court to law court, never given the ability to defend himself, spiralling down the rabbit hole with no sunlight. Welles’ The Trial captures this by turning Kafka’s work into a fever dream. Scenes link together with all the structural logic of a dream – locations seem randomly connected, with Josef turning corners and finding himself in courtrooms or opening cupboards to find surrealist sequences like his prosecutors being whipped by an angry functionary.

Welles shot much of the film on location in a single abandoned Parisian railway station, with the abandoned, decaying rooms redressed into a series of locations from the Advocate’s rooms, to a church to a law court. This was mixed with sequences shot in Zagreb industrial estates and a factory set made up of 850 extras banging typewriters in unison and all rising to end their working day at the same time. There is a horrible un-reality reality to The Trial, a deeply unsettling realisation you are watching something both set in a world real and impossible.

In fact, The Trial may be one of the most uncomfortable films to watch ever made in its innate understanding of the domineering terror of paranoia. Welles used a series of low angles and wide lenses to stress the oppressiveness nearness of walls and ceilings. Rooms always seem to loom in and crush the characters, with K himself frequently framed hemmed in by objects, walls and people. There is a sense of being “watched” in every scene – either from the oppressive bodies that surround K, or the prowling tracking cameras that follow him from location to location.

The Trial is a sort of paranoid’s wet-dream, a nightmare world where logic is gone, our lead character has no control over his movements or destiny and the entire world seems to be constantly bearing down on him and us. Who better to play the twitch-laden centre of this than Anthony Perkins. Awkward, uncomfortable and never anything-less than tense, Perkins features in almost every scene but always feels buffeted by events rather than controlling them. He makes K hugely uncomfortable with others – the many women who throw themselves at K he treats with suspicion mixed with terror. His self-loathing bubbles up whenever confronted with mirror images (such as Akim Tamiroff’s timorous Bloch), invariably reacting with barely disguised contempt.

What’s also interesting in The Trial is the possible insight into Welles’ character. The easy interpretation is to see K as Welles, the court standing in for the Hollywood machine that had shoved Welles from pillar to post and never given him a chance. But, if so, why did Welles urge Perkins to play the role as shiftily and uncomfortably as he does? There is an air of guilt around K throughout – as if The Trial was his nightmare about getting caught for whatever he did. Is this how Welles saw himself? How fascinating that this artistic behemoth read The Trial and seemed to see it as the paranoia of a guilty man. Did the film speak to a deep self-loathing in Welles himself? Did he, in the dark when the demons come, think he’d inflicted his destruction on himself?

It’s a fascinating idea and makes it even more interesting that Welles is all over the film. He plays the corpulent, arrogant advocate, meeting supplicants whole luxuriating in bed with his accustomed bombast. But he also speaks the film’s woodcut-illustrated opening parable (a story of a man waiting at a gate, that he moved from the books Priest to his faceless narrator). Welles’ tones are heard coming from a range of mouths as he overdubbed many of his Euro actors. He even speaks the credits. Everywhere you turn you see and hear Welles and it’s hard not to start to feel perhaps we are stumbling inside his own terrible fantasies. Perhaps The Trial is what Welles’ dreams (or nightmares) were like?

The feel of a nightmare often makes The Trial an uncomfortable and, if I’m honest, less than enjoyable watch for all the undoubted panache it’s made with. In fact, since the panache is partly designed to illicit that response, it’s almost a tribute to the film’s success. The Trial is masterful, but in its unsettling sense of paranoia also uncomfortable, although it’s fascinating to see Welles layering some (perhaps inner) guilt on top of Kafka’s tale of an innocent crushed in the system. Either way, there is plenty to admire if not love about The Trial.

War and Peace (1956)

Tolstoy is boiled down in this epic and luscious but soapy adaptation of the greatest novel ever

Director: King Vidor

Cast: Audrey Hepburn (Natasha Rostova), Henry Fonda (Pierre Bezukhov), Mel Ferrer (Andrei Bolkonsky), Vittorio Gassman (Anatole Kuragin), Herbert Lom (Napoleon Bonaparte), Oskar Homolka (Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov), John Mills (Platanov), Anita Ekberg (Hélène Kuragina), Helmut Dantine (Fedor Dolokhov), Tulio Carminati (Vasily Kuragin), Barry Jones (Mikhail Rostov), Milly Vitale (Lisa Bolkonskaya), Lea Seidl (Natalya Rostova), Anna Maria Ferrero (Mary Bolkonskaya), Wilfrid Lawson (Nikolai Bolkonsky), May Britt (Sonya Rostova), Jeremy Brett (Nicholas Rostov)

Let’s just say it right from the start: you can’t do Tolstoy’s War and Peace in three hours. All you can hope for is the little chunk of it you’ve bitten on is the most succulent part. King Vidor’s War and Peace zeroes in on the elements of the book Hollywood is most comfortably reproducing: a golden-tinged romance between Natasha and Pierre and the sweeping epic spectacle of Napoleon’s soldiers surging towards Moscow and limping home in the snow. While War and Peace, bravely, barely cuts a single major character or development, almost every other theme Tolstoy attempted gets shoved to the margins. This makes it both a SparkNotes version of the Greatest-Novel-Written, but also a very earnest attempt to do the impossible.

Tolstoy’s story stretched over seven years. The great Russian struggle against Napoleon is a backdrop to the lives of dilettante-turned-thinker Pierre Bezukhov (Henry Fonda), vivacious and impulsive Natasha Rostov (Audrey Hepburn) and stolid-but-thoughtful Andrei Bolkonsky (Mel Ferrer). Around them swirl other characters: Natasha’s warm-but-useless family, worthless womaniser Kuragin (Vittorio Gassman), his sister and Pierre’s faithless wife Hélène (Anita Ekberg), heartless roister Dolokhov (Helmut Dantine) and of course Napoleon (Herbert Lom) and his military antagonist, the pragmatic Kutuzov (Oscar Homoloka). Natasha falls in love with Andrei, betrays him then finds maturity caring for soldiers retreating from Napoleon, all while silently loved by Pierre.

This is compressed together into a film that certainly doesn’t feel like it is covering seven years despite its epic run-time. No one seems to age (just as well since everyone starts the film far too old) and the attempt to cover as much of the plot as possible means the film is moving forward so swiftly any sense of time is lost. It also means that the script frequently has to fill in the dots, communicating vital information that alters the lives of characters – major figures often die or are married off in short, easy-to-miss, sentences – and the ideas Tolstoy masterfully expounded about spirituality, destiny, fate, the quest for a life of meaning, are pretty much rinsed out in the plot focus.

War and Peace effectively reduces Tolstoy down into a sudsy romance against an epic backdrop. The romance is handled reasonably well, even if there is very little chemistry of any sort between any of the three protagnonists. Tolstoy’s rich leads, with the fascinating inner lives, are reduced to pen-portraits. There are odd moments where we have access to the inner thoughts and voices – sprinklings of voiceover dot around the picture – but they never feel real. Andrei has been robbed of the decency and warmth behind his thoughtfulness that attracts Natasha, while Pierre feels more like a second father or benevolent uncle than a soul mate.

This stripping down of Tolstoy’s complex characters to their bare principles fatally compromises all three lead performances. Hepburn comes off best, making a decent fist of Natasha Rostov. This is, after all, a character who embodies in her mix of passion, loyalty, fecklessness and self-sacrifice the very nature of Russia itself. No adaptation has ever managed to translate Tolstoy’s unplayable creation, but Hepburn has all the radiance and self-sacrificial guilt down pat. The film has to rush through her foiled elopement with Kuragin (Hepburn has more chemistry with Gassman than any of the others and their near elopement is artfully framed by Vidor with mirrors, reflections and a real illicit charge). Hepburn conveys the mesmeric impact this playboy has on Natasha and her selfish, tear-stained fury at the foiling of her disgraceful plans is laced with enough genuine guilt and pain by Hepburn to keep us caring. Hepburn skilfully translates this into a far wiser and more generous Natasha, placing others needs before her own.

By contrast, literally nobody reading the novel could picture Henry Fonda as Pierre (he’s the wrong age, shape, manner – there is nothing right about him at all), but Fonda does his best (as one reviewer at the time mentioned he’s one of the few actors who looks like he has read the book). He never convinces as the drunken playboy who gets into duels (he looks and sounds far too mature) and similarly doesn’t capture any of Pierre’s doubt and uncertainty (Fonda always looks like he knows exactly what he needs to do). It’s an intelligent reading for all that, but fundamentally miscast. Which is more than you can say about Mel Ferrer who turns Andrei into a stuff bore, ramrod straight and flatly monotone, an intellectual we never get interested in.

Honestly the film would have done better cutting more. Fonda is so unconvincing as the reckless young Pierre, they may as well have made him officially middle-aged to begin with. Similarly, Natasha’s brother Nicholas and his one-sided romance with cousin Sonya is given a mention so token its likely to confuse casual viewers. Andrei’s first marriage gets about five minutes and his sister Mary is reduced to a few dull scenes. Even John Mills’ thoughtful performance as Platanov strips out the characters worldview (and its profound impact on Pierre), turning it into one of simple, symbolic tragedy. It’s all the more noticeable when the film gets some stuff right, most notably Helmut Dantine’s bullying Dolokhov who war turns into someone with a sense of shame.

Faring much better are the historical characters. Like all War and Peace adaptations, this dials up the presence of Napoleon played with an excellent puffed-up grandeur by Herbert Lom, prowling with a swagger stick and collapsing into childish frustration, then silent tears as his plans for world domination collapse. Equally stand-out is Oscar Homoloka as scruffy realist Kutuzov.

Vidor’s film may offer a simplified, romantic vision of the characters but he delivers on the scale. If you can bemoan the fact the peace leaves the characters neutered, the film completely nails the war. War and Peace is a beautifully filmed by Jack Cardiff. From the sweeping vistas of the battlefield of Borodino, to the Dante-tinged flames at Moscow that cast orange light through the arches of a monastery where the Rostov’s take shelter, through the white-and-blue chill of the snow-covered retreat from Moscow, the film is an explosion of gorgeous colours. It’s also got the scale that old Hollywood loved. Borodino is restaged seemingly at 1:1 scale with a literal army of extras, soldiers and cavalry charging in their hundreds in long-shot and cannon fire peppering the land as far as the eye can see. Ballrooms are overflowing with extravagantly costumed extras and seemingly never-ending lines of Frenchmen march through the snow in the films closing moments.

It’s what this War and Peace is: a coffee-table accompaniment to the novel. You can look at the images it brings to life and the sweeping camera work Vidor uses to create nineteenth century Russia. But you’ll not understand anything that makes the novel great. In fact, to the uninitiated, you are likely to come away thinking the film must be a sort of high-brow Mills-and-Boon page-turner, a Gone with the Snow. What this tells us, more than anything, is that fifteen years on from the definitive Hollywood epic, Hollywood was still trying to remake it – and bringing Tolstoy to the screen was very much second to that.

Faust (1926)

Murnau’s gorgeous masterpiece is a technical wonder and a painterly visual treat

Director: FW Murnau

Cast: Gösta Ekman (Faust), Emil Jannings (Mephisto), Camilla Horn (Gretchen), Frida Richard (Gretchen’s mother), William Dieterle (Valentin), Yvette Guilbert (Marthe Schwerdtlein), Eric Barclay (Duke of Parma), Hanna Ralph (Duchess of Parma), Werner Fuetterer (Archangel)

It’s a story that has fascinated for generations: is any deal worth your soul? Murnau’s breath-taking Faust myth throws in an extra wager: can evil corrupt a man so absolutely that not a single trace of good can be left? That’s the opening deal Mephisto (Emil Jannings) makes with his Archangel (Werner Fuetterer) counterpart. Their battleground? Faust (Gösta Ekman), an elderly alchemist, who has lived a life of faith and good works.

Faust was (until Metropolis) the most expensive German film ever made. Like Metropolis it was designed to help Weimar challenge Hollywood as the centre of the filmic universe. Murnau had direct control and several versions were made for distribution to key markets around the world. Faust was filmed over a huge period, partly for the all the multiple re-takes needed for those different versions, but also due to Murnau’s quest for perfection. Throw in cutting-edge special effects and luscious sets and you had Murnau’s own Faustian pact for success.

The film – as carefully restored today – that emerged is a work of expressionist genius jammed, particularly in its opening and closing acts, with a series of striking images balanced between fantasy and horror. Murnau used models, double exposure and transitional editing tricks to gorgeous, revelatory effect and crafted stunning images of supernatural horrors. Faust’s opening shot shows the horsemen of the Apocalypse riding through the clouds before a confrontation between a giant, satyr-like Jannings with huge wings and a similarly winged Archangel with flaming sword (the actors were strapped into stunning giant wings and Janning’s porcine like make-up is particularly demonic).

From there Murnau plays the first of his games of scale by showing Mephisto towering, mountainous, over Faust’s town, unleashing a black cloud of plague. Mephisto’s powers are demonstrated with a host of cinematic tricks: circular light then fire engulfs Faust when he summons him, Mephisto’s eyes are pinpricks of burning light (created by damaging the negative), he appears at every turn Faust makes and later shifts size, appearance and even duplicates himself while performing magic (always with gusts of terrible smoke).

The cinematic tricks continue as Faust is taken on a sort of magic carpet ride across Europe, Murnau’s camera dizzyingly flying over a series of highly realistic models of towns, forests, mountains and storming seas. The launch of this flying carpet is achieved by a miraculous double exposure shot that shows Mephisto and Faust flying out of a small window (standing upright on a cape) in one uninterrupted shot. The dizzying array of effects and visual imagination help us immediately understand why Faust is so tempted to harness the powers of this seemingly scruffy beggar (though Mephisto soon translates himself into a sharply dressed courtier).

It also ties in with extraordinary beauty of Murnau’s expert use of light and shadow. Faust is introduced as an old man, lecturing on astronomy to a room full of rapt students, lit by the glow of his astrolabe. Faust’s rooms are a light tunnel of instruments and books. His town turns from a thriving market, to a towering collection of shadowy buildings, holding a mass of swarming, panicked humanity, running in fear of the plague. Pools of light frame action: twice in the film, Murnau captures dying figures in perfectly composed outlines of light against a sea of black, the first (a priest) lying dead at his altar while smoke drifts up past the light he rests in.

Faust could almost be seen as a film about light. Murnau’s camera is continually artfully framed around painterly compositions with streaks of shadow and light. But it is also a thematic issue. Mephisto uses fog and smoke to power his magic, as if trying to obscure the light that represents the good. In Murnau’s world, light is frequently offers the possibility of hope – even the film’s closing fire offers a chance of redemption. Smoke becomes an obstruction, allowing evil to flourish.

Faust frames its hero initially as man using evil in desperation for the greater good against the plague. Faust is played Gösta Ekman, a Swedish actor in his thirties flawlessly made-up (the make-up is extraordinarily convincing) as the wizened alchemist before Mephisto restores his youth. Ekman is equally convincing in both roles, his angry rejection by the townspeople driving his descent into gred. Opposite him Jannings is a viciously cruel ball of scheming greed, under a surface of joviality.

Needless to say – after all this is a morality tale – it is the allure of sex that eventually brings Faust down. He surrenders his virtue for a night of passion with the beautiful Duchess of Parma. (The cruel Mephisto, having given Faust the sort of entrance to the court of Parma that inspired Disney’s Aladdin’s entry into Agahbar, maliciously murders the Duke after stealing his wife). Murnau’s Faust is all about the awful temptations of worldly pleasures over the hard graft of good works.

Faust also understands that temptation can come in reclaiming the moments we have lost. Faust longs for the sort of excitements he never had as a young man – too many books not enough bonks – but also for the simplicity of youth, where the possibilities of the future and happiness of home were everything. Faust’s middle section – and its weakest, an oddly farce-tinged dark-romantic-comedy – revolves around Faust’s courtship of Gretchen (Camilla Horn – in a part originally intended for Lillian Gish). Murnau raises the possibility that Gretchen’s feelings for Faust are controlled by Mephisto – via a magic necklace – but this idea is largely forgotten, possibly because Murnau’s film needed something uncorrupted by the Devil.

That incorruptible is what powers the final act of Faust as consequences – many caused by Mephisto, who cheats and abuses Faust’s trust and subtly works to destroy the lovers while bringing them together – come home to roost for its characters. Murnau’s film is very strong on the brutality of medieval justice – burnings and public executions are only moments away – but also on the spiritual strength from true love. Love is of course the answer, in Faust’s sentimental resolution, but there are worse answers to the question of what makes us human.

Faust returns to its heights in the torch-lit terror of its final section and the raw emotionalism of Ekman’s desperate, guilt-ridden performance, forcing his way through an enraged crowd hoping-against-hope that he can save the day. Faust is at its finest when centring Murnau’s extraordinary technique, a series of technical and visual marvels that makes you fall in love with cinema. At times it works best as a collection of extraordinary visuals and concepts – and I could do without some of that long middle act between Faust and Gretchen – and some of the acting is sometimes a little too broad. But it’s an extraordinary and unique piece of cinema – and a startling visual expression of the power and temptation of evil.

Aparajito (1956)

Generational clashes lie at the heart of Ray’s heartbreaking second entry in his Apu trilogy

Director: Satyajit Ray

Cast: Kanu Banerjee (Harihar), Karuna Banerjee (Sarbajaya), Smaran Ghosal (Adolescent Apu), Pinaki Sengupta (Young Apu), Ramani Sengupta (Uncle Bhabataran), Charuprakash Ghosh (Nanda-babu), Subodh Ganguli (Headmaster), Moni Srimani (School inspector), Ajay Mitra (Shibnath), Kalicharan Roy (Akhil)

Satyajit Ray initially saw Pather Panchali as a one-off, a story from the works of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, not the start of a multi-film fable on the life of its young protagonist. But, such was the impact of Ray’s debut, it almost demanded a continuation of the story. Ray then adapted parts of two Bandyopadhyay novels, re-shaping them into a tale of Apu’s late childhood and adolescence, that difficult crossing point between childhood and adulthood. In doing so, he created a film full of life but also profoundly moving and quietly devastating. Rich, confident and powerful, Aparajito may just be even more affecting than its forbear.

Beginning a few years after the conclusion of Pather Panchali Apu (played as child by Pinaki Sengupta and later as an adolescent by Smaran Ghosal) lives in the holy city of Varanasi with his dreaming father Harihar (Kanu Banerjee) and tireless mother Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee). Apu is still the same inquisitive, observant, fascinated child he ever was and when his father’s death leads to mother and son returning to the country, he excels at the local school. Winning a scholarship to college at Calcutta, Apu he finds Sarbajaya’s love for him smothering, just as she is heart-broken by his growing distance and reluctance to write or return to visit her.

This universal story of children struggling to outgrow their parents and their parents longing to help them grow but desire to keep them close, a situation causing pain on both sides, that gives Aparajito it’s huge emotional force. We can totally understand why Apu, swept up in the excitement of Calcutta and forging of his own life (one that has the promise of being so much more dynamic than his parents), begins to feel the ties of duty to his mother (almost alone in the world without him) constraining. At the same time, having witnessed the never-ending sacrifice, patience and quiet devotion of Sarbajaya to her son, we want to slap him for his selfishness and lack of thought.

Ray’s film is superb at making us understand the impossible burdens Sarbajaya has taken on herself to raise her son. Ray constantly frames Sarbajaya in the act of waiting: in Varanasi we never see her outside of the courtyard of their shared tenement block, constantly preoccupied with household tasks. Ray frames Sarbajaya frequently in doorways, visually presenting her as someone constantly waiting on the outskirts, shadows cast across her – someone vital for ensuring order, but easy to forget on the outskirts of rooms. It also serves to make her look constantly trapped and overburdened with duty, shadows constantly cast across her.

These burdens magnify for Sarbajaya after the death of Harihar. Apu’s decent father is still a dreamer who lacks the dedication and drive to make something of himself. Do memories of his father’s desire to become a writer ending in a fever in a tenement block, subconsciously drive Apu later? Harihar collapses near the holy river, ill from the damp of the city that he trudges through barefoot night and day, hitting the ground in a shadow lit passageway – much like his wife, as if the city has crushed him with its burdens.

The city seems very different to the young Apu. Ray’s camerawork is gentle, full of leisurely sideways pans, which serve to make the city appear to us as it does to Apu: a never-ending stream of visual wonders. Pans across the riverbanks of the Ganges, full of beautiful temples and river vistas look as magical to us as they do to the young boy. Similarly, the Dickensian hustle and bustle of the city itself, full of streets and alleyways that Apu and his friends rundown with glee feel like treasure-troves of adventure, rather than the never-ending streets trudge they look like when we see them from Harihar’s perspective.

Ray’s camera frequently brings us back to the searching, questioning, fascinated eyes of young Apu, always expanding his horizons. Education and the wonders that books bring him, far beyond the horizons of his mother who can only think about how to bring about tomorrow, offer a similar excitement. Young Apu excels at school and delights in trying to share the wonders he has learned – about science, astronomy and geography – with his mother. Ray shows a mastery of simple montage as years fly by in minutes as we see each of Apu’s passions before a masterful transition with a slow zoom in and out on a lit candle carries across years from Apu as a child to an adolescent.

An adolescent who feels the pull of a world away from what he increasingly sees as the smothering pull of his mother. It is, of course, impossible to watch this without feeling how unfair – but also how natural – this is. Your heart breaks as Apu heads off to Calcutta with only a single cursory glance back to his devoted mother. The mother who still packs his bag, gives him her savings – and asks him to come home as often as he can. You can understand why a young man finds this constraining, even as you want to tell him how sharp his regrets will be as Sarbajaya’s health begins to fail (naturally, the boy falls asleep as his mother timidly confesses her fear of old age and sickness to him).

Apu loves his mother, there is no doubt about that. One vacation, arriving at the train station to return to Calcutta, he decides to turn back (claiming he missed the train) to spend one more day with his mother. He still relies on her wisdom and unreserved love and he thinks often of her in the city. But he’s a teenager and wants his freedom. Sarbajaya even understands this, just as her heart breaks for the loss of and loneliness his departure brings. Is there a sadder shot in the movies as Ray focuses on Sarbajaya slowly sinking down as Apu walks away to his future?

The impact is only increased by the gloriously moving, hollow-eyed performance of Karuna Banerjee, exhausted but untiring in her work to protect family and home. It’s a performance of quiet, bubbling grief and loss tightly packed under optimism and support for her son – a grief that only the audience sees. Smaran Ghosal is also very fine as the adolescent Apu, a boy we can never dislike for very naturally wanting to forge his own path, in a performance that feels extraordinarily real.

The humanity shines out again in Ray’s follow-up to his debut. Moving confidently from location to location, in a novelistic structure translated perfectly to the screen, Aparajito is rich, beautifully told and carries real, unbearable emotional punch for anyone who has ever been a parent or child. Another masterwork in a mighty trilogy.

Pather Panchali (1955)

Satyajit Ray’s first film in his glorious Apu trilogy is one of the finest neo-realist films about childhood ever made

Director: Satyajit Ray

Cast: Kanu Banerjee (Harihar), Karuna Banerjee (Sarbajaya), Subir Banerjeee (Apu), Uma Das Gupta (Durga), Chunibala Devi (“Auntie” Indir Thakrun), Shampa Banerjee (Young Durga), Reba Devi (Sejo Thakrun), Aparna Devi (Nilmoni’s wife), Tulsi Chakraborty (Schoolteacher), Binoy Mukherjee (Baidyanath Majumdar)

The filming of Panther Panchali is almost as famous as the film itself. Ray set up on the first day of shooting having never made a film before, working with a cinematographer who had never shot a roll of film before and two inexperienced child actors he had not auditioned. He shot the sequence of quiet, observant young Apu (Subir Banerjeee) and his rebellious older sister Durga (Uma Das Gupta) walk in awed wonder through a field to discover a train whooshing by. Ray later wrote he learned more that day “than from a hundred books”. You can tell: so majestical, magical and mesmerising is the sequence (admittedly the one we see in the film was a reshoot) you can’t believe it was made by a novice. It was the centre-piece of Ray scrapping together funding for the rest.

Pather Panchali was adapted from the novel Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay – in a stunning act of loyalty, Bandyopadhyay’s widow turned down a large sum from a production company for the rights because she had promised them to Ray. Ray turned it into a masterful slice of life, that expressed everything he had worshipped from the neo-realism of Rossellini and De Sica (The Bicycle Thieves, which Ray adored, is surely Pather Panchali’s father) and the detailed, masterful camerawork of Jean Renior (who Ray and photographer Subrata Mitra had witnessed at work on The River). It became Ray’s calling card, and a pivotal moment in Indian cinema, a masterpiece that helped redefine the artistic boundaries of the country’s film industry as well as an award-winning international hit.

It’s a sedate, gentle, un-bombastic but quietly moving and engrossing drama focused on the nitty-gritty of life. Set in a small Indian village in the 1910s, we follow the lives of pre-teen Apu, a dreamer who takes after his Micawberish father Harihar (Kanu Banerjee) and his close relationship with his sister Durga, whose penchant for rebellion and stealing causes no end of strive with their harassed mother Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee). The family lives in poverty and Sarbajaya carries the burden, driven to quiet, repressed despair at the stress of constantly making ends meet and increasingly resentful of Harihar’s elderly relative “Auntie” Indir (Chunibala Devi) who she sees as taking but offering nothing. Despite, this we follow the childish delight Apu and Durga see in the world around them, a world in which darkness eventually (inevitably) intrudes.

Some have argued Ray’s film – and the subsequent films that followed in this landmark trilogy – had such international impact because it fit naturally into international perceptions of India as a rural, poverty-stricken nation. But that’s to do a disservice to the emotional humanism of Ray’s work and the universal themes of childhood, family and the fears of not being able to provide for it.

Pather Panchali, for all the lyrical beauty which Ray shoots it with, is cold-eyed and serious about poverty. There is nothing noble and sentimental about having no money to afford food. The strain of it is carving lines into the face of Sarbajaya, reduced to quietly pawning what possessions they have and frustratingly berating the dreaming Harihar who believes a career as a writer is just round the corner. The shame of poverty is a major theme: Sarbajaya cares nothing if Harihar’s employers are made aware of the family’s desperate need to for the money they owe him, but she will not countenance the shame of accepting charity from neighbours. Debts are repaid as a priority, at several points a relative’s offering of a few rupees is adamantly refused and Sarbajaya is appalled and shocked by Durga’s habit of stealing fruit from a local orchard owned by the village elders.

That orchard was once the property of Harihar – and its more than implied he was conned out of it by the villagers over imaginary debts. Its where we first encounter the young Durga, a delightful, playful and inquisitive child, running free and unashamedly stealing fruit and bringing it home for herself and “Auntie”. Its just another reason for Sarbajaya to resent the presence of this old woman in her household, as well as the close bond “Auntie” has with both her children, with Sarbajaya constantly playing the role of harsh authority figure.

The constant refrain of the train whistle at crucial points from the distant train tracks serves as a reminder of the possibility of change and escape. But it also means to the children a wider world of excitement and opportunity. Pather Panchali is about a child’s eye view of the world – we are literally introduced to the child Apu with a close-up shot of his eye has Durga wakes him for school. Ray’s film carefully follows their experiences and innocence, where every day presents the possibility of adventure and wonder. The struggles of the adults are unknown for them.

Pather Panchali is a great film about childhood. Apu and Durga run through fields, play and fight, share a deep and caring bond. They follow sweet sellers, wonder at the arrival of theatre troupes and brass bands, stare in awe at projected images of Indian landmarks. The entire village and its countryside is a wonderland to them, and the problems of life are something that they don’t need to concern themselves with. Ray shoots the film with a realism tinged with a pre-Tarvoksky love for the beauty of nature: lingering shots follow raindrops on lakes, the willowy blowing of plants in the fields and the movements of nature.

Through it all he draws superb performances from the children, frequently cutting to reaction shots that ground us in a children’s-eye-view of the world. It’s all there in the magic of that pursuit of the train. The freedom of the fields, the joy of running, the mystery of distant sounds and then the impactful glory of the train itself. Alongside this, there is a beautifully judged score by Ravi Shankar that captures both the mood of this humble village life, but also the exurberance of childhood.

It can’t last though. Mortality and tragedy intrude on this life. And just as Ray shot joy with a simplicity that carried a magical pull, so he calmly and unobtrusively observes pain and suffering in a way that will tear your heart out. The film’s episodic look at life becomes darker and more painful, rewarding the patient viewer (and you do need patience for Ray’s leisurely pace) with a powerful connection with the characters – and a final shot that leaves you longing to know what will happen to them.

Beautifully paced, atmospheric and immersed in a world that feels very real, Pather Panchali feels like the work of a master, not the plucky work of debutante. Perhaps that was a result of the nearly two years Ray took to make the film (he couldn’t believe his luck that the children did not noticeably age), allowed him the time few film-makers have to find every single moment of beauty in his story. Or perhaps he was simply that good to begin with. Either way, it became a landmark film – and led to a swiftly answered call for the story of Apu to be continued.

Vampyr (1932)

Dreyer’s vampire movie is enigmatic, dream-like, surreal and disturbing

Director: Carl Theodore Dreyer

Cast: Julian West (Allan Gray), Maurice Schitz (The Chatlain), Rena Mandel (Gisèle), Sybille Schmitz (Léone), Jan Hiéronimko (Doctor), Henriette Gérard (Old woman), Albert Bras (Old servant)

It feels like some sort of bizarre joke. What did Carl Theodore Dreyer direct after The Passion of Joan of Arc? A vampire movie of course! Vampyr for decades was seen as a curious footnote on Dreyer’s CV, so out-of-step with the rest of his filmography that cinematic experts have suggested it was nothing more than a naked attempt to turn a few coins at the box office (something which, like almost all of Dreyer’s work, is spectacularly failed to do). But this is the work of a master visualist film-maker: Vampyr is a vampire movie almost unlike any other, something so dark, surreal and unsettling that will haunt your nightmares.

Inspired by the work of Sheridan Le Fanu, Vampyr (subtitled The Strange Adventures of Allan Gray) follows the arrival of Allan Gray (Julian West) in a strange, secluded village where almost everyone seems to be in a trance, and a series of strange, unexplained events occurs. In the grand house of the lord of the manor (Maurice Schitz), his daughter Léone (Sybille Schmitz) lies dying and her sister Gisèle (Rena Mandel) can’t work out why. When the lord of the manor dies suddenly, West stumbles across what might be the truth: the terrible power of the undead, a mysterious creature that rises from its coffin every night to consume the living and send their souls to damnation.

Vampyr unfolds like something between a dream or a trance. It has lashings of the surreal in almost every scene, and it scrupulously avoids clear or even rational explanations. Events frequently happen for seemingly no rhyme or reason, dreams come to life, shadows gain mysterious powers and everything is designed to unsettle, confuse or mystify us. Camera movements seem designed to disorientate and confuse us about the geography of the locations in the film. It’s shot in a hazy slight blur (a deliberate effect by Dreyer and photographer Rudolph Maté) which adds to the sense that we are halfway between sleep and awake. It adds up to something unsettling, unpredictable but also hauntingly off-kilter.

Vampyr was Dreyer presenting a film the antithesis in almost every way to The Passion of Joan of Arc. He set up his own production company to make it – gaining funding from a Baron Nicolas de Grunsberg (who required that he play the lead role, under the pseudonym Julian West). Joan of Arc was filmed on huge sets, in stark close-up and a static camera, that would bore into every emotion of its characters. Vampyr would be shot on location with a constantly moving camera, performed by actors encouraged to perform as if hypnotised. Where one was about realism, the other would be about occultish fantasy, one about truth the other about concealment.

It ends with Dreyer creating a strikingly originally, deeply surreal and fascinating film, a vampire film in its way as influential as Nosferatu. While Murnau’s film would be unsettling in its painterly composition and the twisted, jittery movements of its lead,Dreyer’s would have the quality of a nightmare. From the start, images to unsettle and disturb the viewer are marshalled brilliantly. Gray’s arrival at his accommodation – with an unsettling, disturbingly long wait for a door to open – is intercut with shots of a mysterious man carrying a huge scythe waiting for a ferry to take him across the river. From such details, Dreyer imposes a sense of twisted unpredictability.

When Gray enters the house he will stay in, the camera seems to whip around the building, making sharp but smooth turns, constantly leaving us slightly disoriented as to where we are. It only gets worse for us as Dreyer throws in the first of a series of sequences where it is almost impossible to tell if what we are watching is real, a dream or something in between. Gray explores a nearby mill, the camera tracking smoothly away from him past a white wall, where we see shadows of a bizarre waltz play out to music, stopped only by the cry of a distant old woman for ‘Quiet!’. In the mill, Gray discovers an array of coffins, strange objects and the sounds of children and dogs – sounds which no one else can seem to hear.

Dreyer continues this unpredictable mise-en-scene throughout the film. The camera constantly focuses on the strange movements of shadows on floors and walls – scenes constantly play out only in shadow. The actors – nearly all of them amateur (and, to be fair, nearly all of them not great) – walk about as if in a daze, robotically delivering lines and as hazy and transmutable as the shadows. Gray even has a literal out-of-body experience, his ghostly double projection reflection separating from his body, to witness a dream (or premonition) of his own funeral.

This sequence is another chilling display of horror, as the ghost Gray opens a coffin to find himself inside – rigid and unable to move – before he finds himself in the coffin, witnessing the lid being screwed in (something we also witness from his POV), but able to see outside through a window in the lid. From this prone, trapped position he witnesses the coffin carried to the church and buried before he awakes. It’s but one nightmareish entombment we see in the film, another character facing the horrific fate of being buried alive under a mountain of freshly sieved flour, his hands grasping hopelessly for freedom above him.

Through it all we see nothing graphic – there is only one brief drop of blood – but everything remains unexplained and terrifying. Doors open seemingly unaided. Discordant sounds are heard (the film’s primitive, intermittent sound actually becoming a benefit for its unsettling effect) and its as if the whole world is collapsing in on itself into a small, nightmareish stumble around a house or garden in unpredictable, hard-to-interpret haze where nothing is as it seems and where everyone seems to be acting under a dark influence.

Dreyer’s Vampyr is horror in its most unexplained, unsettling and ungraphic style. It’s the fear of being trapped in a bad dream you can’t wake from, unfolding in a nightmareish atmosphere of unpredictability and terror where nothing is ever what it seems. Imagery and mood is crucial and Dreyer’s precise but ever-moving camera seems to float unnaturally through all the action. With its touches of the surreal and unpredictable it’s deeply unsettling, haunting and surprisingly effective. Far from a footnote, it shows the depth and ambition of Dreyer’s skill and cinematic vision.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

Steinbeck’s masterpiece is transformed into a richly humanitarian and heartfelt film

Director: John Ford

Cast: Henry Fonda (Tom Joad), Jane Darwell (Ma Joad), John Carradine (Jim Casy), Charley Grapewin (Grandpa Joad), Dorris Bowdon (“Rosasharn” Joad), Russell Simpson (Pa Joad), OZ Whitehead (Al Joad), John Qualen (Muley Graves), Eddie Quillan (Connie Rivers), Zeffie Tilbury (Grandma Joad), Frank Sully (Noah Joad), Frank Darien (Uncle John), Darryl Hickman (Winfield Joad)

If you can be certain of one thing, it’s that times of economic hardship rise and fall like waves on the shore. John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath was a searing, powerful exploration of the impact of the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression and new farming technologies on Oklahoma tenant farmers. It was almost immediately cemented as a Great American Novel. Just as Ford’s moody, heartfelt, humanitarian film of it was immediately hailed as a Great American Film.

In Oklahoma, Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) is released from prison (after killing a man in a bar fight) to find his farming community has been devastated. The Depression has shattered the market and the landowners now farm their land with tractors rather than people. Tom and his family have no choice but to load up a beaten-up van and migrate to California where they have hopes of work picking fruit for meagre wages. What they find on the way, among small acts of kindness, is exploitation, brutal policing determined to crush any protest from migrants and migrant camps in terrible conditions. Misery, death and the endless grind of fading hopes seems to be all they have to look forward to.

The Grapes of Wrath moved to the screen faster than almost any other novel in history. Published in April 1939, in months Nunnally Johnson had completed a script and shooting began in October for release in 1940. The unprecedented speed spoke to the book’s enormous impact, which has remained eternally relevant in its depiction of the hostility faced by migrants. Producer Darryl F Zanuck, despite his passion for the novel, worried it would be seen as pro-Communist propaganda – thankfully basic research showed Steinbeck had, if anything, played down the labour conditions. Zanuck was convinced he could defend any accusation of anti-Americanism – perhaps, as well, he decided recruiting the film poet of romantic Americana, John Ford, as director would lay any change The Grapes of Wrath could be seen as an attack on the US to rest.

Ford was in fact a near perfect choice as director. A man who held his Irish migrant roots close to his heart, he felt a powerful bond with these victims of changed circumstances. As a man with a romantic view of America’s Golden Age, he was equally critical of sharp technology changes (he shoots the tractors who plough through the Oklahoma farmland as monstrous tanks, crushing hope below their ominous caterpillar tracks). Working closely with cinematographer Gregg Toland, he shot a film with one foot in realism, the other in low-lit, moody impressionistic shadow, a rich visual treat that marries both methods to enforce the appalling economic situation it depicts.

From its opening shot, which frames Tom Joad walking across Oklahoma desert land framed with telegraph poles, the idea of ordinary people left behind by technological change rings out. Tom’s farmstead Tom is derelict with one tenant recounting his eviction in a cramped room lit by a single candle. The Joad’s leave for California in a truck so beat up, it only just starts and appears to be partially made of wood. The California shanty town they are herded into is contrasted with the sleek automobile of the landowner offering work for a pittance. In the government run camp, we see running taps and modern bathrooms that seem space-age compared to the squalor we’ve seen.

The Grapes of Wrath doesn’t shirk in its anger at the ill-treatment of these sons of the soil. In California, the bosses are cruel, uncaring and greedy. The flyers the Joad family clutch hoping for work, is one of thousands recruiting for only hundreds of jobs. Salaries are constantly undercut – at their second camp, the Joads work exhaustingly for just about enough to feed them for the day. The sheriffs are little more than heavies for the bosses, breaking up protests at pay, arresting and beating ‘trouble makers’ and turning a blind eye to any threats or danger to the migrants.

The injustice of it is captured in a superb speech by John Carradine’s Jim Casy, a former preacher whose faith has been replaced by a burning passion to protect the rights of the little guy. Shot by Toland in a shadow-drenched, candle-lit tent, Carradine delivers with impassioned brilliance an inarticulate but moving speech on the need for the workers to stick together to combat exploitation. He follows in the footsteps of an earlier ‘rabble rouser’, whose denunciation of a fat-cat businessman is met with gunfire from a sheriff (a woman being near-fatally shot in the aimless fire).

It’s feelings that will inspire Henry Fonda’s Tom Joad. Fonda is marvellous as this plain-speaking man with a streak of self-destruction, who learns to focus his anger aware from his own needs to fighting for others. With his father – well-played by Russell Simpson – increasingly ineffective, Tom transforms himself slowly into a leader. His lolloping stance doesn’t detract from his everyman nobility. Fonda even manages to make some heavy-handed, speechifying really work as a profound statement of human rights.

He’s joined in this with the film’s third stand-out, the Oscar-winning Jane Darwell as the indefatigable “Ma”. Darwell becomes the family lodestone and an epitome of resilient spirit, her pained but patient face returned to again and again. Darwell as at the heart of many of the most moving moments, perhaps the most one of its simplest: Ma quietly, with sad smiles, burning old mementoes and holding up a pair of earrings to study her reflection in the flickering candlelight. Ma holds the family together, from cradling the dying Grandma on the floor of the truck to desperately hiding Tom from the vindictiveness of the police. Ford closes the film with a powerful speech of hope and resilience from Ma, again wonderfully delivered by Darwell in simple, unflashy close-up.

Despite that delivery though, the end film’s final act doesn’t ring true with what has gone before. The film reshuffles the novel’s plot. That culminated in a bleak miscarriage in a windswept hut. The well-built government-run migrant town is a stopping off point, a moment of hope, in a grim journey towards desolation. Here it is the final destination – and the community dances, organised by benevolent caretakers, feels like a cheat of reality. Perhaps Zanuck felt a relatively hopeful ending was needed to balance those fears of Anti-Americanism. Either way, it never feels like a ‘real’ ending: this economic catastrophe didn’t end like this for many, so it shouldn’t for our everymen.

It is perhaps, though, the only major flaw in Ford’s superb film. It’s a film sprinkled with as many small moments of peace and hope as it is injustice. The Joads enjoying a swim in the lake, or the kindly garage staff who let Pa buy bread and sweets for the kids at a price far below their value warms the heart. The shanty towns are given a real sense of community by Ford. It makes the stark cruelty of those in charge stand-out all the more.

The film doesn’t shirk on the grim surroundings. The detail of the squalor is magnificently delivered, while the foreboding, shadow filled lighting of Toland’s photography is exceptional. With a host of excellent performances, Grapes of Wrath is the finest statement of Ford’s overlooked humanitarianism. He was a director with a warm regard for the common man, who believed in their righteousness and right to just treatment. This streak runs strong throughout The Grapes of Wrath and makes a film that is never sentimental, but arouses huge sentiment in anyone who watches it.