Category: Relationship film

Fanny (1961)

Pagnol adaptation is middle-brow entertainment, that feels contrived and little obvious

Director: Joshua Logan

Cast: Leslie Caron (Fanny), Horst Buchholz (Marius), Charles Boyer (César), Maurice Chevalier (Panisse), Georgette Anys (Honorine), Salvatore Baccaloni (Escartefigue), Lionel Jeffries (Brun), Raymond Bussieres (The Admiral), Joel Flateau (Césario)

The most entertaining story about this largely forgotten Best Picture nominee is that its director pushed heavily for it to be titled Joshua Logan’s Fanny – until the obvious was pointed out to him. The next is that Logan directed the original musical version of this Marcel Pagnol adaptation on Broadway; but the songs were dropped here, because producer Jack L Warner was convinced musicals were box office poison.

Fanny adapts Pagnol’s trilogy into a single, simple narrative. In 1920s Marseilles, Fanny (Leslie Caron) is a carefree young woman, in love with Marius (Horst Buchholz), who loves her but dreams of a life at sea – and certainly not of running his worldly-wise father César’s (Charles Boyer) bar. But this young couple won’t be honest with each other (or themselves): Fanny doesn’t want to hold Marius back from his dreams, Marius doesn’t want her to be forced to wait for him. After he leaves, Fanny discovers she is pregnant, so marries César’s old friend Panisse (Maurice Chevalier) who is more than happy to raise Marius’ son as his own. But how will Marius react when he returns?

Logan’s film takes this complex, almost Ancient Greek, set-up and makes it feel rather soapy and twee. It’s not helped by the fact that you can instinctively tell, watching the film, it is the book of a musical where the songs have ceased to exist. Time and again, the dialogue builds towards crescendos where songs are obviously meant to break out – but never do. Or scenes – such as old timers card-playing or romantic ambles – feel designed primarily for songs and now feel a bit aimless. It makes for a curiously disjointed affair, with the constant feeling something is missing.

It also doesn’t help that this very French story (Caron was worried about the reaction at home of taking on an American remake), feels like a rather picture-postcard image of French life. The gallic passions, the rough-edged café regulars playing practical jokes with hats placed over bollards (apparently in France, no one can resist kicking a hat on the ground), the berets and laissez-faire attitudes, the casting of two of Hollywood’s most famous French actors… It feels studied and not always natural. (Not helped by some woefully poor and obvious dubbing of a few of the actors).

Logan fails to bring to this any real flair in filmmaking and storytelling. Despite the presence of Jack Cardiff behind the camera, Fanny is a film full of basic compositions, one-shot/two-shot styles and visually flat storytelling, spiced up with the odd sweeping camera move. Time and again, the action is carefully set-up in theatrical medium shot to get three actors into frame. Logan several times punctuates moments of shock with crashing zooms into extreme close-up. Caron is frequently filmed with a gauzy romanticism in lingering close-up – an effect that looks odd when it’s not applied to any shot either side. Marseilles aerial shots also make the studio sets stick out even more.

As for the story, Fanny has a contrived reliance on no one ever really saying what they think or feel at any time. It’s so painfully obvious Marius is in love with Fanny – from his jealous, soda-squirting fury when Panisse flirts with her, to the looks of awkward devotion he shoots her on dockside walks together – it’s amazing to think they can’t work it out. Likewise, Fanny’s romantic feelings for Marius (captured in frequent doe-eyed close-up) are transparent. With the youth of both these characters – they start as teenagers – you can’t help but feel that there is no reason why they can’t agree to a few years apart before marriage. Instead, both believe the other demands unequivocal personal sacrifice from them, for no particular reason.

What Logan does do well, is draw some good performances from the cast. Leslie Caron is fairly radiant as Fanny, even if the character’s main function seems to be to pine sadly behind a brave face of self-sacrifice. It’s a shame Fanny often doesn’t call for much from her beyond that, since she gives the role a certain steel (none more so than her firm rejection of a returning Marius disrupting her new family life) including her hard-headed decision to marry a man she likes and respects but does not love. Buchholz does similarly well with a character who could be a frustrating Romeo, but who he manages to make his desperation not to be trapped into his father’s life understandable.

The real attraction is the casting of Boyer and Chevalier, who find a fair bit of charm in their characters (even though both are well within their wheel house). Chevalier, in particular, was thrilled to land a non-Musical role – and if the aged flirt he’s asked to play in the first half isn’t that dissimilar from his role in Gigi, his portrait of Panisse as increasingly scared at losing his new family is touching. Although the role really only adds little touches of overt tragedy and sadness to his standard role Chevalier’s charm adds a great deal of affecting vulnerability.

Chevalier campaigned hard for the Oscar nomination he had missed out on for Gigi – so I wonder how he felt that the Best Actor nod went to Charles Boyer instead. (I suspect lingering mud from collaboration slurs against Chevalier probably scuppered his chances). Boyer’s role is really a supporting one, but his smooth, effortless underplaying means he adds a lot of humanity to the otherwise larger-than-life César. Dispensing gruff worldly wisdom, playfully bantering with Chevalier, pained and angry at his son’s betrayal and determined to play a role in his (secret) grandson’s life, Boyer plays it all with an effortless ease which is the film’s greatest strength.

It’s a shame these performers are stuck in such a flat film which makes Pagnol’s story feel rather plodding and exposes its more contrived elements. It’s final resolution teeters on the edge of the unbelievably convenient – from Marius, it transpires, now living only a few miles away but never encountered by the other characters, to a ludicrous ‘happy’ ending that wraps every problem up with a neat bow (another moment where you can feel the missing musical roots). And it’s as uninspired as most of the rest of it. It’s definitely middle-brow entertainment. And, ironically, it lost out on Best Picture to that year’s Box Office smash – the musical West Side Story.

The Divorcee (1930)

In its way ahead of its time, a liberated but melodramatic look at women’s freedom in relationships

Director: Robert Z Leonard

Cast: Norma Shearer (Jerry Martin), Chester Morris (Ted Martin), Conrad Nagel (Paul), Robert Montgomery (Don), Florence Eldridge (Helen), Helene Millard (Mary), Robert Elliott (Bill), Mary Doran (Janice), Tyler Brooke (Hank), Zelda Sears (Hannah), Judith Wood (Dorothy), George Irving (Dr Bernard)

Jerry (Norma Shearer) and Ted (Chester Morris) are young, in love and have been married for three years. It’s not ideal then, that Ted’s ‘pal’ Don (Robert Montgomery) brings a surprise guest to their anniversary party: Janice (Mary Doran) who also happens to be Ted’s illicit squeeze. When Jerry catches them in a clinch, the truth comes tumbling out. Ted says, of course, it didn’t mean anything and he’d be perfectly happy for a bit of freedom in marriages especially in these modern times. Jerry, after a lifetime of being a good girl, promptly ‘balances accounts’ with Don – only for Ted to reveal that what’s good for the gander was very much not for the goose. Divorced, Jerry finds a new life of wild sexual adventures while Ted sinks into bitter alcoholism. Will Jerry take up the offers of the other man who wished to marry her, Paul (Conrad Nagel)? Or will she decide Ted was her real love?

It’s hard to imagine a film like The Divorcee being made even a couple of years later. It’s remarkably open about sex in a film where everyone is pretty much unashamedly at it. Nor can you really imagine a film from Hollywood’s Golden Age where we would be invited to sympathise with Jerry for engaging in tit-for-tat infidelity, especially after Ted’s fury (screw you Ted, you hypocritical wanker). Or where Jerry’s series of conquests across New York – rather wittily told through a montage of close-ups of hands clasped while we hear the voices of a Jerry and a parade of exotic sounding men – doesn’t see her being punished by public shaming, horrific illness or any other of the wallopings a woman behaving like this in a film made a few years later would have faced. In its own way it makes The Divorcee a bit of a landmark – albeit a landmark Hollywood would spend most of the next thirty years running away from.

It also makes The Divorcee rather refreshing, even if it’s a slight film shot with a mix of stagy theatricalism and some sharp-paced editing. It’s also a film that, despite the amount of sex going on, isn’t exactly awash with sensual chemistry between its various leads. It’s hard to put your finger on, but Leonard’s film never quite manages to bring out a real sense of connection, despite the devotedly puppy-dog eyes Nagel’s Paul shoots Jerry or the protestations of adoration between Morris and Shearer. In fact, it’s the lack of steamy flirtatiousness that actually makes The Divorcee seem old-fashioned, despite all its liberal openness about extra-marital sex. (Compare it The Awful Truth, the closest – comic – film to this from the Code Era, where you are never in doubt that no matter who they screwed, Grant and Dunne were crazy for each other.)

The Divorcee makes it mark on history as the film Norma Shearer won one of the first Best Actress gongs for. Shearer’s head-girl looks and slightly plummy voice is perfect for the good-girl life Jerry has been leading as the devoted wife, thrilled and excited at Ted’s proposal. But she also brings a heartbroken fury to her discovery of Ted’s betrayal – and a coolly determined energy to her conscious decision, in that case, to take advantage of Don’s attraction to her. From there, Shearer embraces the hedonistic joy of a woman determined to enjoy the bad side for the first time in her life – without ever letting us forget there is a good girl bubbling below the surface. It’s a good performance, the finest in the film – good enough to make it sad that Shearer was pretty much from here on straight-jacketed into stiff prestige roles in frequently self-consciously ‘noble’ pictures.

It’s also nice that the men in this story are frequently shown as inadequate, whining, self-pitying, cowardly or some combination of all four. Chester Morris gives one of his patented performances of smug roguishness, collapsing into pathetic self-pity at a series of worse-for-wear appearances at various posh parties. Robert Montgomery is energetic and funny as the appallingly selfish and shallow Don, rather funny in his blatant cowardice (fleeing to Europe the second he works out Ted is not exactly thrilled at knowing another man has bumped uglies with his wife). Conrad Nagel does what he can with a terminally dull role as Paul, cursed with a series of needy glances.

Paul is at the centre of the film’s main sub-plot. Jilted potential husband of Jerry, Paul leaves the hunting lodge party where Ted and Jerry get engaged, deeply pissed (in both senses) hitting the roads with a fury. As the back-projection swings from side-to-side like it’s been attached to a whirligig, the car overturns and Dorothy (Judith Wood) is left ‘hideously deformed’. (We never see what happens to her, only a shrieking reaction of someone else; in her later appearances she’s behind a shroud). Paul marries her out of guilt but is convinced she loathes him for the accident and can’t wait to be shot of him, meaning she need not be an obstacle for a reunion with Jerry.

But that would mean – even though they get divorced – Jerry turning her back definitively on Ted. And, as modern as the film is – it even gives Jerry an actual job, at which she is so successful she is promoted and moved to the London office – it’s not crazy enough to escape the idea that, at the end of the day, all girls really want is to be settled and married with the man of their dreams. The Divorcee settles in the end of a resolutely conservative ending. Much as you might want Jerry to carry on having a whale of a time and kick her drunken louse of a husband back to the kerb for his hypocritical one-sided views of sexual freedom, she of course doesn’t.

Naturally, Dorothy in fact is devoted to Paul (she even, pathetically, begs Jerry not to take him from her since, as she is so ‘deformed’ no other man will ever look at her). Naturally Jerry doesn’t want to be a home wrecker. Naturally, a happy ending looms. Even before the code, Hollywood was only ever going to go so far, wasn’t it? After all women really would rather be wives and mothers, wouldn’t they?

The Good Earth (1937)

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

Director: Sidney Franklin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

East Lynne (1931)

Nearly-lost Best Picture nominee is a bland melodrama that owes what fame it has to its rarity

Director: Frank Lloyd

Cast: Ann Harding (Lady Isabella), Clive Brook (Captain William Levison), Conrad Nagel (Robert Carlyle), Cecilia Loftus (Cornelia Carlyle), Beryl Mercer (Joyce), OP Heggie (Lord Mount Severn), Flora Sheffield (Barbara Hare), David Torrence (Sir Richard Hare)

East Lynne is one of the three hardest historical Best Picture nominees to find today. Along with The White Parade (1934), only one print of it exists held by UCLA (which is better than Ernst Lubitsch’s The Patriot from 1928, of which precisely no copies exist). That fact is probably now the most famous thing about it, with Oscar afficionados (like myself!) hunting down bootleg copies (thanks go to WestLynne for posting a copy, including the hard-to-find final ten minutes) on YouTube. It’s possibly one of the oddest illicit films you could hunt down, not least because in many ways it’s a hilarious dated piece of misery porn, soaking in melodrama and some stilted acting.

It’s loosely based on a tragic Victorian misery novel by Ellen Wood (who, at one point, was nearly as famous as Dickens) – I say loosely as that was written in 1861 and this film is largely set during the 1871 Franco-Prussian war (presumably because it was a cooler backdrop). Isabella (Ann Harding) marries wealthy Robert Carlyle (Conrad Nagel), to become mistress of his house East Lynne. However, that’s in name only as the shots are really called by Robert’s domineering sister Cornelia (Cecila Loftus) who loathes Isabella with a Mrs Danvers-like fury. Lonely in her own home, she flirts with old friend (and professional rascal) Captain William Levison (Clive Brook) but that’s as far as it goes. Cornelia reports her to Robert as a shameless hussy and, despite Isabella’s denials, Robert divorces her.

Separated from their child, she has no choice but to live with William who indeed turns out to be a selfish rascal – and a near-traitor and crook into the bargain. The two are stranded in Paris during that 1871 war, Isabella denied all access to her son – and it’s all downhill from there. She’s near-blinded in an explosion, uses the last of her failing sight to return home and see her son, is thrown out again and promptly walks off a cliff – just as Robert (inevitably) realises the error he has made in chucking this saint in the first place. Cue the hankees.

East Lynne falls very naturally into the Hollywood trend at the time of suffering women, constantly judged by society and chucked into ever more damaging, depressing and fatal, tear-jerking situations by cruel fate. Because, I suppose, few things are more satisfying than feeling sorry for someone whose life is unquestionably more miserable and disastrous than yours. The film makes tweaks to the novels set up to dial up the injustice – the book’s version of Isabella is undoubtedly guilty of infidelity, whereas the film version is tempted but certainly doesn’t give in. (Also neatly making her more sympathetic to conservative Hollywood audiences).

That is if we believe her denials of course. No reason not to, since Ann Harding’s affronted denials of misdeeds followed by her despondent desperation, hammering on a door to be allowed back in to see her child are clearly meant for us to believe in. To be honest, watching it today, it’s hard not to see (cruel as Robert is in severing, Karenin-like, Isabella from her child) that Robert has a point. There is more than a little enthusiasm in the passionate kiss Isabella shares with William on the night in question – and Lloyd’s decision to cut the scene with Isabella’s bedroom door closing on her and William leaves us with only her word that she instantly threw him out.

A slightly more interesting film therefore lurks under the surface – especially since Isabella adapts very quickly to a life of semi-disgrace among the more flexible society of Vienna and Paris, sharing a home with William after her divorce. I’d actually prefer a version of this story where Isabella at least made some independent choices (although it would give even more of an air of punishment to her ‘reward’ of being abandoned, blinded and killed for it). Especially since Robert – played with a rather wooden stiffness by Conrad Nagel, which at least makes him suitably boring – is hardly anyone’s idea of an ideal husband.

Especially since he’s utterly controlled by his sister, introduced with a tracking zoom shot by Frank Lloyd which hammers home the cold lack-of-welcome she gives this woman who she sees as, at best, a crude interloper in their home. It’s very easy to see the roots of Rebecca’s Mrs Danvers in Cornelia – did du Maurier see East Lynne as she planned that novel I wonder? – sharing with her the same dislike and subtle bullying designed to undermine Isabella’s position. Cecila Loftus does lack the vicious, insinuating, two-faced venom the part really needs (she’s really more of a smackable snob) but again it’s an interesting idea.

East Lynne is a film however full of decent ideas that never quite deliver, not least because it’s all dialled up to the melodramatic max. Isabella’s eventual fate is only the ultimate expression of it – the sight of Ann Harding stumbling through a wood, her hands reaching out in front of her, audibly provokes laughter in the UCLA audience on the bootleg, and who can blame them. The misery piles on and on relentlessly, Isabella tumbling through a conga-line of misfortune, scorn and miserable denial. Not helped of course by the fact the Clive Brook – whose patrician manner and cut-glass accent seem ill-suited to playing the sort of rogue he is here – makes William an utterly selfish rogue.

Ann Harding pushes through all this with maximum commitment, her voice throbbing with emotion as yet more tricks of cruel fate lash her. She has to go for it, since even the slightest doubt or reserve would probably make the ridiculousness of the film stand out even more. But Harding manages to make Isabella just flawed enough to not be a saint – those little touches of good-time-girl that attract William – while unquestionably capturing her devotion and love as a mother. And no one could have sold that arms-out-stretched “blindness” acting that East Lynne closes with.

East Lynne is exactly the sort of competently-made but basically bland melodrama that makes for a very odd Best Picture nominee over 90 years later. The fact that its fame largely rests on its scarcity is fitting – otherwise it would quite happily have been lost altogether and no one would probably have batted an eyelid. Certainly, it wouldn’t challenge any retrospective lists of the great films of 1931.

Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980)

Biography of Loretta Lynn, faithful to the official line but sometimes lacking in dramatic interest

Director: Michael Apted

Cast: Sissy Spacey (Loretta Lynn), Tommy Lee Jones (Doolittle Lynn), Beverly D’Angelo (Patsy Cline), Levon Helm (Ted Webb), William Sanderson (Lee Dollarhide), Phyllis Boyens (Clara Ramey Webb), Bob Hannah (Charlie Dick)

Born in poverty, in a Kentucky coal mining community, Loretta Lynn became one of the biggest Country and Western stars in America. Based on her hugely successful biography, Loretta and husband Doolittle were closely involved in this faithful translation of her life story (or at least the official version of it) to the big screen, Lynn handpicking Sissy Spacek to portray her from age 13 to 35. Coal Miner’s Daughter traces her life from teenage marriage to Doolittle (Tommy Lee Jones), to leaving her family home, Doolittle pushing her into performing with her musical talents, through to success with their loving but sometimes tumultuous marriage as a backdrop.

Coal Miner’s Daughter really splits into two halves. The first is an extremely well-observed and respectful portrait of Lynn’s working-class routes among a coal mining community which, while far from perfect, is a community full of honesty and decency despite the odd bad apple. It’s in this half that it feels the heart – and much of the drama – lies. Strangely, once Lynn starts singing (nearly an hour into the film), its second half feels a lot less dramatic, much more of a ticking off of various landmarks in what feels like a mostly uninterrupted march to success (this is despite the odd marital feud, the death of Lynn’s mentor Patsy Cline and a nervous breakdown).

Perhaps that’s because the film hues so closely to the Lynn “official line” that the film ends up feeling very curiously structured. A lot of this is in the portrayal of Lynn and Doolittle’s marriage. I don’t doubt the undoubted strength of this marriage – or the devotion of these two for each other – but, with an outsider’s eye, it’s hard not to feel its presentation here is a little odd. Apted’s film frequently presents it as borderline abusive and toxic relationship, while simultaneously celebrating it as a romance for the ages. The mismatch in tones can be hard to process when watching it, the film setting up narrative zigs before offering up layer and layer of zags.

Loretta Lynn was devoted to her husband, while cryptically saying it was a relationship she fought for. Perhaps today one of the strangest things about it is that Lynn aged herself down by two years (a fiction the film repeats), meaning that here she marries the 22-year-old Doolittle at 13. It’s harder to see this as charming today, instead seeing Doolittle as a borderline groomer. Especially as he caps the wedding night by playfully raping Loretta, who has been wildly unprepared for married life (she seems to not fully understand what has happened to her here, so is pleasantly untraumatized feeling instead guilt at not being good enough at sex for Doolittle’s high standards). Before the marriage of their first child, Doolittle will have: thrown her out of the house as a punishment for her domestic failings; cheated on her; raised his hands against her in an argument (breaking a cardinal promise he made to her dad).

He also merrily breaks the other without a second thought by carrying her hundreds of miles away to start a new life. Under the influence of booze and drink, Doolittle can have a slightly childish, sulky temper – although Lynn herself will give as good as she gets (at one point she breaks his finger by walloping him with her handbag). The two of them frequently seem never quite on the same page at the same time. Alongside this, Doolittle drives his timid wife into performing at bars and honky tonks at least partly to show her off, as much as enjoying hearing her sing.

What’s unusual – and in some ways anticlimactic – in Coal Miner’s Daughter is that these marital negatives remain un-resolved and unengaged with. Perhaps it’s because, not that far down, Doolittle really is proud of his wife and does love her music. He dedicates himself to furthering her career – at least in part so he can share in the rewards – and as she grows in fame, the power subtly swings in the relationship. Now she drags him out of the backseat of a car from a floozy, harshly deals with his bouts of drunkenness, and rejecting his attempts to try and control her image (including repeated demands that she should never wear make-up, because he doesn’t like it).

It’s never quite clear to me what the film wants us to make of all this. Is this Lynn turning the marriage into one of equals? Doolittle being put into his box? A subtle commentary on a relationship that perhaps didn’t always bring out the best. What you end up with – and I’m aware this is way more likely to be an issue today than in 1980 – is a relationship presented with several obvious negatives, continuously celebrated as a force of good. And I get that the Lynn’s themselves saw the marriage that way – but I wonder if a film they were less involved in the making of might have raised a bit more of a critical eye.

You can’t doubt the chemistry between the two actors though. Sissy Spacey won an Oscar for a near-note-perfect capturing of Lynn, and her quirky oddness fits very well for a timid country girl struggling to find her place, even as her spikey self-confidence grows. It’s a very well observed and interesting performance, Spacek also very effectively transitioning from child to adult without jarring. Tommy Lee Jones is also excellent as Doolittle: charming, relaxed, capable of real anger but also of a deep and lasting affection, loyal in his own way even when he’s disloyal. It’s a relaxed, impressive performance that makes a slightly unclear character work.

But the finest parts of the film are in the perfectly observed Kentucky mining community of Lynn’s childhood – far more dramatically interesting that watching her tick off local stations on her way to the Grand Ole Opry. Apted’s documentary experience perfectly captures the casual poverty – bedrooms lined with newspaper, a radio that needs to be turned off because there is no money for batteries, the permanent dirt of the coal dust everywhere, the moonshine. It’s all wonderfully pulled together, and Lynn’s childhood home is one of love and gentleness, helped by very impressive performances from Levon Helm and Phyllis Boyens as her devoted parents (who just about come to terms with her young marriage to a slightly wild man).

It’s a shame that backend of the drama doesn’t capture either the same depth or carry the same dramatic energy, largely because the sort of resolution (or even addressing) of the complexities the film has been displaying never comes. Despite strong performances, Coal Miner’s Daughter eventually feels like it offers little real challenge or exploration of its subject’s self-image.

Bad Girl (1931)

Somewhat mistitled film, which is really a sort of dramedy of misunderstandings

Director: Frank Borzage

Cast: Sally Eilers (Dorothy Haley), James Dunn (Eddie Collins), Minna Gombell (Edna Driggs), Claude King (Dr Burgess)

Boy meets girl, they fall in love – what could go wrong? Quite a lot it turns out. Dorothy (Sally Eilers) works in a department store and enjoys nights out with best friend Edna (Minna Gombell). On one such trip she a man she meets is annoyed by her ukulele playing (who can blame him) and then doubles down on his crime by not flirting with her. But she’s fascinated by Eddie Collins (James Dunn) and, before they know it, they are into a whirl-wind marriage. Within months, both are convinced the other believes they have made a terrible mistake and want out.

Despite its salacious title – and the look of its poster – today Moderately Cheeky Girl would be a better title than Bad Girl. A better title than either would really be A Dramedy of Errors. Because that’s really what it’s about: two slightly naïve, decent people terrified that the other feels trapped. It’s the sort of gentle melodrama where the entire plot would fall apart in thirty seconds flat if either spoke honestly to the other. Instead, mistakes and misunderstandings are (often wilfully) allowed to continue, as they conceal things or allow misunderstandings to continue out of social embarrassment.

As such, it’s hard not to think Bad Girl as being both rather slight and silly. It just about manages to counteract this by its careful pacing and the sweet earnestness of the performances by Sally Eilers and James Dunn, counter-balanced by the sparky comic sharpness of Minna Gombell. Between them, these three just about keep Borzage’s sentimental translation (of a far spicey book) going. But, rather like the characters dilemmas, if you stop to think about it, it’s strikingly artificial.

Most of the many misunderstandings revolve around Dorothy’s pregnancy. This pregnancy itself is practically the last vestige of ‘bad’ left in the film: it’s very heavily implied this baby has its roots in a spicey piece of pre-marital sex shortly after they met. (Borzage rather artfully communicates this with a slow pan from a middle-of-the-night shot of a bed to the two lovers hugging – fully clothed – in a chair the other side of the room). But it serves as a jumping off point for paranoid misunderstandings, rooted in Dorothy’s fears that (like her mother) she’s destined to die in childbirth.

First, Dorothy is too panicked to admit she’s pregnant (worried that Eddie will disappear over the horizon the second he finds out he’s destined to be a dad). So she speaks about needing to find her own job, leading to Eddie blowing his entire life savings on setting them up in a fully furnished flat to reassure her she doesn’t need to work. This calamitous decision ends at a stroke both Eddie’s dream of setting up his own business and burns through their reserves for the incoming infant. As such, when Dorothy sweats over needing the finest doctor, Eddie is reduced to (secretly) throwing himself into being beaten to a pulp in a prize fighting ring and then literally begging the doctor to work for free to help her – all while allowing her to believe he doesn’t really give a toss.

The film’s love of melodrama is never clearer than when Dorothy greets the bruised, late-night returning Eddie with a weary contemptuous assumption he’s been out on the piss and Eddie doesn’t even try to correct her. Neither does she question how they can suddenly afford the best doctor in town, nor does Eddie attempt to inform her. In a series of misunderstandings stemming from neither talking honestly to each other at all, Eddie remains convinced Dorothy can’t bear the thought of a child while Dorothy believes Eddie feels she and the child have ruined his life.

How much you run with this sort of stuff, rather depends how much you can lose yourself in a drama where you might be dying for someone to knock some sense into these tyros. Minna Gombell’s Edna seems best suited to do this but, partly due to not wanting to stick in her nose too far, partly because she almost can’t believe these two can be so blind, she doesn’t. Fortunately, James Dunn finds a great deal of little-boy-lost charm in the try-hard but quietly anxious Eddie, while Sally Eilers Dorothy has a winning quality of sounding more worldly than she actually is.

The misunderstandings comprehensively outweigh the “badness” which looks incredibly tame today. She likes to flirt, looks for dates out on the town and doesn’t mind seeing a boy late at night – what a temptress! In fact, if anything, the way poor Dorothy and Edna constantly fall back on a parade of invented prize-fighting husbands and protective grandfathers to fend off the unwanted attentions of lascivious bosses and customers makes them feel rather sympathetic.

Borzage won an Oscar for his direction, which feels slightly surprising today considering the light melodrama of the script (like a puff of air) and the fairly comfortable mid-shot most of the film is shot in. There are some flashes of invention – the film’s opening is a neat misdirect, with Dorothy kitted out in wedding attire for what turns out to be a fashion parade at her department store; there is a neatly shot toboggan ride – but largely Borzage’s main achievement here is not making it seem totally ridiculous. The drama around Eddie’s investment in a top notch apartment they can’t afford actually carries a fair bit of impact – helped by the shocked horror of Eilers when its unveiled in front of a room of their friends – and the film’s final, slightly ridiculous reveal of the truth manages to just about work even though it’s the most swiftly contrived thing you can imagine.

Bad Girl is an entertaining enough little melodramatic semi-comedy of misunderstandings, that powers through with its genuine earnestness and rather winning sweetness. It may not be anything particularly special or striking, but it slides past with a crowd-pleasing ease.

Darling (1965)

Christie is superb in a film that’s more prudish than its reputation – and feels more sympathetic to its heroine today

Director: John Schlesinger

Cast: Julie Christie (Diana Scott), Laurence Harvey (Miles Brand), Dirk Bogarde (Robert Gold), José Luis de Vilallonga (Prince Cesare della Romita), Roland Curram (Malcolm), Basil Henson (Alec Prosser-Jones), Helen Lindsay (Felicity Prosser-Jones), Carlo Palmucci (Curzio della Romita), Alex Scott (Sean Martin), Trevor Bowen (Tony Bridges)

Perhaps no film screams “Swinging Sixties” more than Darling. Diana Scott (Julie Christie), a beautiful and charming model, decides the best way to move up the social ladder is to use those skills. She throws her first husband aside for high-brow TV journalist Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde), before starting an affair with heartless, philandering marketing executive Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey) all while moving ever upwards. But will she learn there is nothing worse than getting what you want?

You can get a sense of how seismic it must have seemed. Darling was free and open about sex in a way very few films had been before. Today it can seem a bit coy – this is hardly Performance and most of the juicier stuff is implied – but the film starts with adultery and spirals into sex parties, orgies, couple swopping and menage a trois via bisexuality and a hint of transsexuality. What could be more sixties than that – and many at the time were excited (and tantalised) by the world of opportunity it seemed to present.

But, watching today, it hardly feels like Darling celebrates this stuff. Instead, this is a dark satire that heartily endorses the idea that behind all this hedonism is not very much at all. In fact, the most dated thing about Darling might be its air of 1950s frowning discomfort at all the naughtiness – and most of all, a disapproving frown for the ambitious young women at its heart, determined to get what she wants. It’s hard not to escape the feeling the film judges Diana harshly, while giving a pass to Bogarde’s Robert who (to be honest) is scarcely much better.

So why does the film still work – and much better than I expected? Because Schlesinger’s direction of Raphael’s arch and satirical script is inventive and playful enough to nullify the moral lecture elements. There is enough wit in the presenting of puffed-up, hypocritical powerbrokers (like Brian Wilde’s MP, breaking away from a moral sermon to drool over Diana) as two-faced meanies to sooth the moral pronouncements. In fact, with so many elements of that, its possible (and, arguably, hard for a modern viewer not to) to say ‘good on you’ to Diana for chancing her hand.

It’s also hard not to sense Darling taking pops at Diana’s middle-class sister and her husband – so constrained, they apologise to each other in bed – or the pretentious bores at an art gallery or the tedious self-importance of a Waugh-ish author who Robert idolises (and Diana finds boring as shit). This tone of spreading the mockery makes the film feel far even-handed (if a little scattergun). It even has a go at the conservative British public (actual real people) who, in Bogarde’s vox-pop interviews, blame laziness, immigrants and homosexuality for all the faults of Britain in 1965 (how times change).

Take all that into account and balance it against the strength of the performances, with Julie Christie astonishingly good as Diana. Winning an Oscar, Christie bursts at the seams with charisma and wit, making it almost impossible to dislike her, even when part of the film is appalled by her. Christie makes Diana witty, smart but also vulnerable, her manipulation of people is more instinctive than overt and there’s a great deal of sadness in her. She’s a lonely woman who believes being the centre of the attention will cure that feeling – whereas, in fact, the more she does so, the lonely she feels. And it leads to self-destructive behaviour that destroys relationships she cares about.

That loneliness surprisingly powers a lot of the film, giving Darling a sad after-taste. There is something very tender in Diana breaking down in tears at a photography session. Christie brilliantly plays her anxiety at finding the ‘classy’ Parisian joint Miles has taken her is a borderline sex party, translating itself into a desire to fit in, culminating in a burst of childlike delight when she has a hit in a mean-spirited game of abusive comments. And Darling gifts a fantastic scene to Christie near its conclusion, as Diana undergoes a near breakdown in her gilded Italian mansion prison, ripping furnishings, smashing ornaments as she collapses into self-loathing misery.

It’s this tenderness that underpins – or rather undermines – the film’s satirical ticking off for Diana that keeps it entertaining today. Not to mention it’s harder today to find as much sympathy (as I suspect the film wants) for Bogarde’s Robert. Bogarde is very good as this middle rung on society’s ladder, a guy who loves the idea of a hot young mistress but who slips quickly into cardigan-wearing dullness, becoming the same humiliated cuckold told transparent lies by Diana and her lover as her made her first husband.

But Robert is also a hypocrite, cowardly walking out on his family without a backward glance and seeing no irony at all in his own practised ease at planning affairs (he even knows you need to bring a stuffed suitcase to your hotel assignations). And while the film finds a silent disapproval for Diana’s abortion, it’s hard not to notice that Robert is hardly doing cartwheels when she announces her pregnancy.

Surprisingly it’s actually easier to see the shallow Miles as the most honest person in the film. Played with an ice-cold distance by Laurence Harvey (vocally partly channelling Richard Burton), Miles may be a cad but at least he never pretends to be anything else. While every other man spins Diana a self-aggrandising story, Miles openly treats their relationship as transactional and never lies. It says a lot for Darling’s view of its era that the most honest man is a morality-free advertising executive.

He fits in neatly into a world where anything important is roundly ignored. The film opens with Diana’s latest billboard being pasted over a Third World hunger campaign; Diana later presents prizes at a charity fundraiser for this campaign, where the wealthy hoi polloi are more interested in stuffing their faces and gambling (and the only Black people in attendance are servants – one upper class pervert lasciviously asks if they are ‘available’, like they are items on a menu).

On top of this, Diana keeps up a running voiceover commentary, frequently blatantly contradicting her actions on screen. But her tone is so breezy and blissfully guilt-free that, again, it’s a little hard not to warm to her – even as she claims ignorance for deeds we see her carrying out. Schlesinger frequently demonstrates the irony of this spun version of her life.

In all, there is much to enjoy in Darling – more than I was in fact expecting. It’s extremely handsomely filmed (there is a great shot of Diana striding down Miles’ boardroom table from a low angle and a lovely day-to-night cut at a harbour that really stands out) and has some very sharp lines, blessed by a fantastic performance by Christie and great character turns from Bogarde and Harvey. I suspect part of the interest now is delving down into the deeper implications of the film. What may have once been seen as a dark celebration of freedom, now feels at point judgemental and prudish – but, to counter that, its lead now feels less like an amoral temptress and more of a confused and lost tragic soul with genuine warmth. It’s a test case in how time can both define and change perceptions of a film.

The Country Girl (1954)

Acting with a capital A in this ultra-serious addiction drama, that makes its points with heavy hand

Director: George Seaton

Cast: Bing Crosby (Frank Elgin), Grace Kelly (Georgie Elgin), William Holden (Bernie Dodds), Anthony Ross (Philip Cook), Gene Reynolds (Larry), Jacqueline Fontaine (Lounge singer)

Adapted from Clifford Odet’s play, George Seaton’s The Country Girl is serious with a capital S, with acting with a capital A from its stars, both of whom (to the delight of the Oscars) play wildly against type. Frank Elgin (Bing Crosby) is a faded song-and-dance man, a weak-willed people pleaser who hit the bottle big time, filled with guilt about the death of his young son. He’s married to the dowdy Georgie (Grace Kelly), whose whole life has become an endless chore propping up the feeble Frank. Elgin is hired by hot-shot Broadway director Bernie Dodds (William Holden) for his new musical. Bernie soaks up Frank’s lies that Georgie is a demanding, controlling bully rather than Frank’s go-to comfort blanket. Can Georgie hold Frank together for the previews, despite Bernie’s misguided belief that Frank would fare better if she was shipped home?

The answer, not surprisingly, is no. The Country Girl, in many ways, is quite Victorian in its sense of domestic tragedy. The death of Frank and Georgie’s son – killed by traffic when Frank let go of his hand for some publicity photos – has a real classic melodrama ring to it, a feeling added to by the Frank’s memories coming storming back whenever he hears the refrain of the song he had been recording moments before the accident. It’s the cause for a series of scenes of half-cut self-loathing from Frank, who powers his way through life both through the bottle and whining at Georgie to fix his problems.

Frank is an innate people-pleaser, desperate to be adored. (He even pathetically asks a barman, between shots, if he likes him). But behind that is a demanding prima-donna, turned incessant self-pitier. He moans about everything to Georgie – his lack of a dresser, being pestered by his under-study, the pressure of learning the lines and carrying the show – and then instantly assures Bernie moments later that he’s delighted with everything. Worse than that, he spins constant lies that Georgie does everything she can to batter his confidence so can control his life and give meaning to hers.

Frank even shifts his attention seeking suicide attempts and hotel smashing drunken outbursts onto her, painting himself as a victim too decent to fight back against his bullying wife (even using repurposed speeches from his old stage triumphs as material). It’s music to the ears of William Holden’s Bernie, filled with bitterness at his own ex-wife who he sees as a jealous burden holding back his own career. He laps up believing that Georgie’s demands are her self-important power plays rather than filtered demands from his cowardly star.

Bing Crosby took on his biggest acting challenge, miles away from his aw-shucks Oscar-winning Going My Way charm. Crosby put in extreme effort – rather like Frank with Bernie, George Seaton ruthlessly coached him – but the problem is you can see it all. Seemingly every scene sees Bing shaking, on the edge of tears, looking into the middle distance, and battening down the musical richness of his voice into a weak mumble. There is a lot of earnest, sad-eyed starring in The Country Girl and this softly-spoken, rather mannered performance puts everything out there (the film even throws in a few in-play musical numbers, which Crosby delivers as per his usual style, so that we can really soak up the difference in his performance).

It’s similar with Grace Kelly, her glamour disguised as much as humanly possible under an ill-fitting cardigan, glasses and bags painted under her eyes. Much like Crosby, Kelly goes all out to wring every emotion possible out of this bitter, tragic woman who loves and deeply resents her manipulative husband. Kelly won an Oscar – beating Judy Garland in A Star is Born (allegedly by about 6 votes) – and the performance smacks of the sort of Acting Oscar loves (in many ways it’s a miracle Crosby lost to Brando’s subtle work in On the Waterfront). She even has a late speech, where Georgie lets out all her buttoned-down resentment, that has ‘for your consideration’ written all over it. Much like Croby, its very mannered – you admire its professionalism but can see all the effort.

Both stars hard-work is particularly noticeable when compared to the easy naturalism of Holden, who has the least flashy role but is arguably the best thing in it. He subtly downplays the eagerness which Bernie transfers his own marital resentments on to the Elgin’s marriage, just as he lets Bernie’s growing frustrations with both Elgins develop naturally. He even manages to make Bernie’s late intense attraction to Georgie not seem like it comes as wildly out of left field as the script make it.

The Country Girl works through its melodramatic events with a largely predictable series of beats, as Elgin goes from sweating through rehearsals to smashing up a bar, to drying out in his dressing room. The photography adds a lot of atmosphere, with shadow-cast moments adding a real sense of oppression to the film’s gloomy progress (there is a particularly lovely shot of Kelly buried in the shadows in the theatre wings). There are affecting moments, even if the film lays many of them on somewhat heavily with a trowel. But Seaton’s dialogue is strong, even if it is somewhat melodramatic and his directing is sound.

And you can’t deny the effort he gained from the two stars, even if their performances are so earnestly committed that it becomes a little overbearing to see the Acting in action. It’s fascinating to wonder how much more effective The Country Girl might have been if it had not played almost all of its emotional beats so heavily to the max, but had trusted us to discover the emotion for ourselves.

L’Atalante (1934)

Vigo’s gorgeous, marvellous, magical film is his only finished work but exceeds the resumes of director’s with dozens of credits

Director: Jean Vigo

Cast: Michel Simon (Père Jules), Dita Parlo (Juliette), Jean Dasté (Jean), Gilles Margaritis (The Peddler), Louis Lefebvre (The cabin boy)

In his short life Jean Vigo made only L’Atalante, the anarchic short film Zéro de conduit (a surrealist black comedy about rebellious school kids) and two brief documentaries on Nice and the swimmer Jean Taris. But you could argue, in L’Atalante alone, he presented the sort of cinematic resume that would make a director with decades of work behind them green with envy. Vigo shot L’Atalante’s astonishing mix of poetry and realism while dying from tuberculosis (he may even have never seen the final film, leaving instructions for the shooting of its final shot and the final trims for its editing) but he would surely have been delighted at the film’s lasting impact.

It’s story, like some of the greatest, is beautifully simple. Juliette (Dita Parlo) is a country girl who marries Jean (Jean Dasté), captain of a commercial canal barge L’Atalante, crewed by young cabin boy (Louis Lefebvre) and crusty old sea dog Père Jules (Michel Simon). Juliette dreams of escaping her village to see the sights of Paris, Jean’s dreams are more humdrum and the clash between these will play out over the first days of their marriage as the couple get to know each other, feel the first flush of passion and go through their first real argument. Will love find a way to bring them back together?

L’Atalante takes this simple set-up, and invests it with something truly magical and universal, in a film crammed with as much cinematic bravura and beauty as it is gentle observation of human foibles. You can see why a film as beautifully assured and playful as this has such a legion of admirers. It mixes detailed observation of Jean and Juliette walking through the industrial docks of the various towns they stop at (shots that look like they come straight from Godard) with splashes of magical realism, as Jean throws himself into the canal to experience a mystical vision of Juliette dancing underwater. It’s a film that shifts and embodies different moods and styles from moment to moment while feeling like a remarkably coherent whole.

It’s also a strikingly humane film which develops richly multi-layered characters of intriguing depth and contradictions. Juliette and Jean’s marriage is, in many ways, a true love match (it will become clear that Juliette honestly believes in Jean as her soul mate), but Vigo still shoots the marriage procession (from church to barge) like a funeral march, black-clad villagers following behind pair-by-pair and standing at the dock staring as they depart like mourners. (There is even a low-angle tracking shot taking us past a foreboding grandmother, almost like she’s a prophet of doom). From the beginning, Vigo makes clear that there is a disconnect somewhere along the line here, between romantic hopefulness and the reality of two people who have perhaps made an impulsive decision.

Juliette boards the boat, but heads straight to the prow to stare forward into the mist (how unclear is that future!), startled when Jean approaches (he frequently struggles to find her in the barge, including losing her in the mist). It feels at first as if this is a marriage of convenience between two strangers: so much so that it’s a surprise that Juliette seems to remember herself and allows herself to be wrapped into Jean’s warm embrace. And Vigo shows their obvious sexual bond as soon as they relax.

It leads into a scene that plays like a few days of a glorious honeymoon. They share a bed together (so passionately, that when one of Père Jules’ many cats spawns a litter on their bed, Jules jokes they must be the parents), they laugh and joke and playfully wrestle on the roof of the barge. Jean crawls across the barge roof towards the waking Juliette first thing in the morning like a cat in heat. They are a couple who cast aside any hesitancy or shyness they felt at first into a burst of giggling, heady passion.

It’s also though a passion that’s matched with a mix of poetic romanticism. Juliette tells Jean she saw a vision of him when she plunged her head into a bowl of water years ago. It’s a feeling, it becomes clear, she has total faith in – it’s part of the deeply charming romanticism that’s in Dita Parlo’s beautiful performance as Juliette, who is both a fragile dreamer and a hardened realist who can just get on with it. So much so, that she’s more than a little annoyed when Jean implicitly mocks it by sticking his head into first the bowl and then plunged into the canal itself and claims, try as he might, that he can’t see her vision at all. He’s joking of course, but she really means it.

And perhaps she’s right, since Vigo returns to this theme with the full force of romantic poetic realism in the film’s final act. But first that has to come after the couple have found themselves in far more tumultuous waters. Juliette finds the rough-and-ready life of Jean on the boat (where he stuffs his laundry mountain into a cupboard almost literally for a rainy day) trying, throwing herself into domestic drudgery to add some order. It’s a pay off she’s willing to make, while sewing a dress to wear around the streets of Paris Jean has promised to take her. Dreams shattered, when the rest of the crew leave the barge when it is docked there forcing Jean to cancel their planned night (much to her crushing disappointment).

Jean offers her a back-up at Le Havre, taking her to a dance bar – where, to his jealous fury, Juliette enjoys dancing far more with a garrulous, charming, relaxed peddler (Gilles Margaritis, with energy pouring out of him). We already know Jean can be jealous – he throws a teenage-angst fit of rage when catching Juliette spending time alone with Jules, smashing parts of the room up). When Juliette sneaks into town, its enough for Jules to disappear over the horizon with his barge.

So far, so everyday realism of a marriage gone wrong, a love match founded on shallow roots. Only Vigo returns to the magic realism he had played with earlier. Separated by miles, the depressed Jean and the lonely Juliette seem to bond and hear each other from miles apart. Sleeping, they toss and turn in a mix of frustration, loneliness and increasingly erotic connection as the film cuts between the two of them. Jean runs from his bed to hurl himself into the canal, to see the vision of Juliette. Suddenly we are in a film of almost magical unreality, where spiritual and vocal bonds (like Jane Eyre) stretch over miles and bring people together in ways they can’t imagine.

It’s also fitting that the couple’s reconciliation is powered by Michel Simon’s Père Jules, who had at first seemed like the ogre at the heart of the ship. Simon’s performance is animalistically brilliant, a lunk of a man with seemingly bestial appetites (and there is a sneaking suspicion part of Juliette is excited by his rawness) who also displays a sensitive, tender side. His den on the boat is filled with exotic mementoes of his life on the seas (including the severed hand in a bottle of an old friend who he talks about with the wistfulness of a lover), as is his tattoo-covered body. He will delicately repair a gramophone, loom over Juliette with sexual suggestiveness and the dance around for her entertainment in a patchwork dress. It’s a brilliant, visceral, inventive performance.

It’s part of a patchwork put together with such luminescent brilliance by Vigo, that even thinking back on how it’s staged and assembled is exciting and moving. L’Atalante constantly stuns and surprises, with the gorgeousness of its filming and the power of its emotions and sexuality. It manages to take a story that could feel small and everyday and give it a quiet mythic force that lends it a universality. So brilliantly done is the film, that it makes you even more heart-broken that Vigo was not granted the time for a full body of work. But it this was to be his only film, it was a beauty.

Children of a Lesser God (1986)

Clumsy Pygmalion drama that very uncomfortably mixes its messages during its obvious plot points

Director: Randa Haines

Cast: William Hurt (James Leeds), Marlee Matlin (Sarah Norman), Piper Laurie (Mrs. Norman), Philip Bosco (Dr Curtis Franklin), Allison Gompf (Lydia), Bob Hiltermann (Orin)

Adapted from a hit Broadway play, Children of a Lesser God (its title plucked from Tennyson’s The Passing of Arthur – though, like much of the film, I’ve no idea what point it’s trying to make) was hailed as a landmark in disability representation. Truthfully, it’s possibly slightly more retrograde than Johnny Belinda (made almost forty years earlier) and certainly not as good a film, its plodding plot and confused message not salvaged by two excellent performances.

James Leeds (William Hurt) is a charismatic teacher, newly arrived at a New England school for the deaf. His mission is to encourage the kids to speak, as he’s convinced they will struggle in the world on sign language alone. He becomes fascinated with the school’s janitor Sarah Norman (Marlee Matlin), a recent student, whipper-smart but defiantly silent, speaking only through fluent, witty sign language. Determined to teach her to speak and open-up a panorama of new opportunities for her, James and Sarah start a passionate relationship that increasingly flounders on the language barrier between them and Sarah’s own insecurities.

The positives first: both leads are excellent. Hurt is dynamic, engaging and charming – so much so it’s easy to overlook what a dick his character is (of which more later). Hurt accompanies all his dialogue with fluent sign language (no mean feat) and convinces utterly as the sort of maverick teacher who wins minds while carrying a prickly ego from uninterrupted success and validation. Opposite him, Matlin (still the youngest winner of the Best Actress Oscar) is electric: defiant, unaccommodating, sensual and damaged but able to burst into a radiant smile of confidence. Matlin makes her prickly but sensitive, defensive but determined and passion bursts out of her.

These two leads display obvious chemistry (although Matlin’s later recounting of Hurt’s serious domestic abuse during their relationship, barely denied by him, casts an uncomfortable shadow over the film). This lifts an otherwise straightforward film. It’s awash with expected plot points and beats from a meet-cute, to growing passion, falling outs and reconciliation. Aside from a few under-water shots (Sarah feeling completely comfortable under water, where her hearing is the same as everyone’s), it’s flatly filmed (it’s not a surprise Haines lost out a Best Director slot to David Lynch for Blue Velvet) and would not have looked out of place as a TV movie-of-the-week.

However, it’s main issues are the plays it makes for representation, while presenting deafness as an obstacle where the onus is on the deaf people themselves to fit in as much as possible. For a film about two people struggling to find a middle-ground between sound and silence, it never once dares us to experience the world as Sarah does. From its insistent score onwards, sound is an ever-present. None of Matlin’s dialogue is subtitled (she speaks aloud only once), with all of it translated by Hurt. For a film about finding common ground, its not interested in letting us experience even a taste of Sarah’s world.

Would it have killed them to have one scene where, perhaps, we walked around the school hearing what Sarah hears (nothing)? Or a scene where James and Sarah speak only through sign, with captioned translation? Instead, without really realising it, the film largely vindicates James’ position that not being able to speak is an abnormality Sarah is sticking to out of wilful, self-damaging stubbornness, rather than a choice she is entitled to make to engage with the world on her terms.

Unpack this stuff, and suddenly the whole film is a confusing mess of unclear positions and perspectives. James’ maverick teacher – in true Dead Poet’s style he wins the kids over by being unstuffy – is peddling a message that the deaf kids would be better off, if they became as much like him as possible. The film never once comments on James ignoring the one student in his class immune to his charm, essentially exiling him from his ‘in crowd’ during class. Is this great teaching? James has an unattractive messianic complex and a large part of his initial interest in Sarah is based on an arrogant belief that he can ‘save’ her from life as janitor, expecting her gratitude in return.

This Pygmalion like set-up quickly demonstrates it has way less insight about the self-occupied arrogance of its teacher than Shaw. It becomes clear to Sarah, that her successes (and the successes of James’ students, who under his tutelage perform a song-and-dance routine at parents day) are seen as his successes. When she wows James’ colleagues at a poker night with her wit and skill, they praise him (right in front of her), which he soaks up with a smug pleasure. The film never quite puts these dots together, or sees the irony in James’ bored disengagement with her deaf friends or his giving up on explaining Bach to her.

Worse than this, James ignores her early comment that she doesn’t want to be made to speak (she tells him that, as a teenager, she used sex to silence boys who pushed her to talk). Despite his vows, he increasingly, insistently demands she speaks, and fails to recognise when she resorts to using sex to try and shut him up. The film never pulls him up his selfishness and pushy imposing of his views, its sympathy for Sarah not changing its quiet view that her own problems are a major brick in the wall between them.

The film doesn’t really question James’ arrogance, because it can’t shake its habit of viewing her a problem to be solved. It effectively endorses James’ view that she should adjust and change as much as possible. Is it really wrong for Sarah to want to live on her own terms, not other people’s? To refuse to perform as James demands?

In fact, much as the film wants us to dislike Philip Bosco’s rules-bound obstructive headmaster, he makes two very valid points: one, it’s not for James to decide what’s best for Sarah and it’s not appropriate for James to fuck someone who is both a junior member of staff and (effectively) his student. Children of a Lesser God doesn’t even try to explore the moral complexities of any of this, instead settling for the idea that a disability can be overcome if someone works hard, overcomes their own issues and defers to an inspirational teacher. Combine that with its plodding, unoriginal story and you’ve got a film that hasn’t aged well.