À Bout de Souffle (1960)

Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo get obsessed with their own images in À Bout de Souffle

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo (Michael Poiccard), Jean Seberg (Patricia Franchini), Daniel Boulanger (Police Inspector Vital), Henri-Jacques Huet (Antonio Berruti), Roger Hanin (Carl Zumbach), Jean-Pierre Melville (Parvulesco), Liliane David (Lilane)

The French New Wave emerged from a group of film critics from influential magazine Cahiers du cinema in the 1960s, led by Francois Truffaut (who contributed a four page story outline to this film, although Godard later minimised his contribution as much as possible). The movement believed the director was the “author” of the film, stamping their personality on it. Packed with references to classic Hollywood movies, the films were shot with an improvisational lack of formality (that often hid brilliant cinematic technique) inspired by Italian neo-realism.

Breathless, Jean-luc Godard’s revolutionary masterpiece, was one of the central films in this school of filmmaking. It followed the last few days of Michael Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo). A young man drifting through a life of petty crime, who idealises Humphrey Bogart’s style, he one day steals a car; it happens to have a gun in it, and in a moment of casual indifference he shoots a policeman trying to arrest him and flees. In Paris, while being hunted by the police, he reunites with his girlfriend, American student Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), and their self-absorbed relationship plays out under the shadow of the police net getting tighter and tighter.

Jean-Luc Godard’s film was hugely influential, as it seemed to re-write the rules of how films were to be made. Godard’s film is down and dirty, it’s almost guerrilla, but filmed with a wonderful, improvisational beauty. Shots are hand-held and dynamic, the action is all filmed on location, the framing is rough and ready, the camera gets up close and personal with the actors, throwing us in with them with an overwhelming sense of realism. The whole film feels irreverent, casual and cool, and gets a wonderful sense of urban Paris. It magnifies and reflects the very qualities the lead characters believe they have themselves.

Godard’s most influential touch was the use of jump cuts within scenes, with action jumping from moment to moment within a scene seemingly spontaneously, giving an impression of constant movement and ripping out the sense of time between actions. It also gives a sense of the film always driving forward, bouncing from beat to beat. According to rumour, this influential use of editing was a happy accident. The original cut of the film was well over two hours, and the distributors wanted something less than 90 minutes. Rather than cut whole scenes, Godard cut the small moments of movement or peace in scenes, giving the film a jagged freshness.

The whole film is full of these moments, the jumps over silences and conversational gaps, jumps in time lags between walking from point A to point B. It really works as well. The exterior scenes buzz with an exciting freshness. The long second act, basically nothing more than a conversation in a bedroom between the two leads, is edited almost like an action scene in a modern film – perfect for the self-dramatising energy the two characters are leading their lives with.

It’s those two leads who really help to make the film. Seberg picked up a quarter of the film’s budget to be the “name” lead, and she brings the film a soulful but distant sense of coolness. Belmondo was the real find, turning himself overnight into a mega star. In the sixties these were the people that your cool student wanted to be. Belmondo nailed his sense of iconoclastic cool in the opening moments – particularly when turning casually to the camera while driving his stolen car, to involve us personally in the story of his own life that he is constructing.

You can see how the performances (and characters) of the two leads had such impact on filmmaking. Energetic but also listless, contemptuous of authority and certain that whatever the world has in store for them it is definitely something more, self-absorbed and selfish, immature and convinced that their lives are more important that the average people around them – they are the predecessors of Bonnie and Clyde, of the young killers in Badlands. And nothing seemed to capture the counter-culture cool than Belmondo with a cigarette dangling from this mouth, apeing Bogart. 

But both lovers are equally selfish and obsessed with their own stories. Or rather, self-consciously living their lives like they are in a narrative – in fact you could say that the film predicts the self-obsession of the social media age. Michael lives a life that is all an entirely constructed front. He’s a would-be gangster, with a carefully studied front of gritty cool. He spends endless time making sure that his look, his clothes, his postures, his manners are always spot-on. He constantly keeps up a stream of consciousness narrative about his own life and situation, positioning himself as the sort of representative of modern American hip.

And Patricia is the same. Although at first she seems the more natural and grounded of the two, it’s clear her self-obsession is just as profound (if not more so) than Michael’s. Patricia constantly reviews and rebuilds the narrative of her own life, discussing her romantic life like it was a carefully constructed fiction, or some sort of hyper-cool Mills and Boon. “Do I love you? Should I love you? Can I make myself not love you?” Patricia’s construction of her own narrative – and her desire to shape and control it completely – makes her as completely artificial as Michael is. 

She’s so determined to construct her own narrative, that she shrugs off a string of revelations about Michael as if they didn’t exist. He’s a killer? Okay. He’s got at least two names? Hardly matters. He’s married? Nobody’s perfect. When deciding to betray Michael to the authorities, the action seems almost motiveless, but it quickly becomes clear that it is led by her latest review of the life situation and deciding it’s not what she wanted. Surrendering Michael to the law is her chance to say “No, I shape the story here – and I get to control who I feel love for, no one else”. By betraying Michael she is cutting a part of a life narrative out like she was removing a tattoo, something that she is not sure she wants any more but finds hard to remove.

One area where I do struggle with the film now is the attitude it has to its heroes. I think it wants us to kind of admire Michael – for all his faults – as some sort of unconventional hero looking to lead his life. I struggle to feel the engagement with a guy who is literally a murderer as much as the film wants me to – but I think this is the result of a major change from the more rebellious 1960s, to our changed times today. But then I’m also not sure that the film has as much heart as it wants to have – its characters are so consciously artificial that you never really get a sense of them as human beings. They are always characters, never people – and the film is always focused on their constructed images rather than anything real for you to invest in. There is much to admire, and not much to love.

And that doesn’t change the influential nature of the film. While it’s easier to admire the film than to love it – for all the strength of the performances, the characters are selfish fantasists – and its technical achievements sometimes distance as much as they throw us into the action, it’s still brilliantly put together. It’s masterfully made, and while I’m not sure it really has any heart, it’s got enough energy, force and urgency to make dozens of films.

The Danish Girl (2015)

Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander struggle with questions of identity in the overly sentimental The Danish Girl

Director: Tom Hooper

Cast: Eddie Redmayne (Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe), Alicia Vikander (Gerda Wegener), Matthias Schoenaerts (Hans Axgil), Ben Whishaw (Henrik Sandahl), Amber Heard (Ulla Paulson), Sebastian Koch (Dr Kurt Warnekros), Pip Torrens (Dr Jens Hexler), Nicholas Woodeson (Dr Buson), Emerald Fennell (Elsa), Adrian Schiller (Rasmussen)

Working out who you are can be a lifetime’s struggle for some people. Finding out that who you are is someone outside the bounds of what society considers normal or acceptable often calls for a special kind of bravery. That’s the kind of bravery that Einar Wegener had when he realised that he felt he was a woman, not a man. Einar became one of the first ever recipients of sex reassignment surgery, becoming Lili Elbe. It’s an inspiring true-life story, fudged in Tom Hooper’s syrupy, sentimental film.

Eddie Redmayne plays Einar/Lili, slowly realising his fascination with women’s clothing is actually part of a far larger realisation, that she identifies as woman rather than a man. Her wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander), helps Lili explore her identity, herself journeying through pain at losing her husband to final acceptance and support as Lili begins surgery to complete her transition.

Tom Hooper’s film is shot and framed with the magnificence you expect from his previous films. Hooper’s mastery of framing not only presents people in striking contexts (he has a particular eye for positioning people artfully in a frame with fascinating walls behind them), but also uses the camera to drill into its protagonists (throwing backgrounds into soft focus) to help you begin to empathise with them. It’s a great way to build a connection with the lead characters. But the film never quite adds enough depth and real understanding to its beautiful visuals. I’m not sure it really gets inside the mind of Lili and gets a real understanding of her.

For starters, the structure of the film is confused. The main problem is that the dramatic thrust of the film is Lili realising she is a woman. The character’s emotional and psychological conflict is all bound up in struggling to accept this: the journey of the film is Lili’s internal journey to know and accept herself. Once this realisation is made the drama drains out of the film. Try as it might, it can’t make a series of operations to make complete Lili’s transition dramatically interesting. It also fails to really get inside the psychology of Lili at this point, making her feel more like an exotic, occasionally selfish, passenger through a series of treatments, rather than someone who feels like she has real dramatic thrust.

This is partly because the film splits the perspective more or less equally between Lili and Gerda. While the film follows the passage of Lili realising who she is, if anything more of its empathy and understanding (and interest) is invested in how Gerda reacts to this change. You can see the logic of some complaints that the story of this leading LGBT figure is filtered through the perceptions of their heterosexual wife. Gerda’s emotional journey – pain, anger, rejection, sorrow, despair, acceptance and support – is what really drives the film, far more really than Lili’s realisations. 

But this slightly skewed perception is all part of a film that never quite feels true. I appreciate that Lili moved in some bohemian circles, but surely more people would have been more outraged in the 1920s and 30s by this change. The only people in the film we see reacting in any way negatively are two doctors and a pair of thugs in Paris. Other than that, far from a struggle for acceptance, people seem to fall over themselves to tell Lili how wonderful her new identity is.

The most supportive figure of all is Lili’s childhood friend, Hans Axgil (played very well by Mattias Schoenaerts) – who’s the centrepiece of another major issue with the film. This wonderfully warm and kind man befriends and supports both Lili and Gerda. I left the film wanting to find out what happened in real life to this man who seemed too good to be true. Guess what: he was literally too good to be true. He didn’t exist. In fact no one in the film existed other than Lili and Gerda. Furthermore the timeline (and many of the events) of the film have been changed, as have some of the facts around their relationship. For a film pushing itself as an inspiring “true story” this feels more than a little bit like a cop out.

This is part of the film simply trying too hard. From lingering shots of Einar longingly fingering women’s clothing early in the film, to the syrupy music sore that hammers home as many of the emotional beats of the film as possible, it’s a film that wants to do things as obviously as possible for the audience. It wears its “importance” very heavily: you can tell all involved believed that the project they were working on was going to have an impact on viewers across the world.

Not that we should detract at all from two lead performances. Redmayne immerses himself utterly in the role and performs with sensitivity, giving Lili an early sense of fear that develops into an increasingly relaxed and confident determination. Vikander is equally good, running the full gamut of emotions: she probably is the movie’s heart (making her supporting actress Oscar feel even more like character fraud). Two fabulous performances – and plenty of striking visuals, well directed – but it’s a film that really never quite feels like it gets into the heart of its lead, and always feels like it’s pushing you into feeling an emotional reaction, straining for you to shed tears, rather than letting them come naturally.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)

Charlie Hunnam is a “Proper LEGEND” in disasterous geezy gangster King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

Director: Guy Ritchie

Cast: Charlie Hunnam (King Arthur), Jude Law (King Vortigern), Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey (The Mage), Djimon Hounsou (Sir Bedivere), Aidan Gillen (Goosefat Bill Wilson), Eric Bana (King Uther Pendragon), Kingsley Ben-Adir (Tristan), Craig McGinlay (Percival), Tom Wu (George), Neil Maskell (Back Lack), Annabelle Wallis (Maggie), Katie McGrath (Elsa), Freddie Fox (Rubio), Mikael Persbrandt (Greybeard), Michael McElhatton (Jack’s Eye), Geoff Bell (Mischief Jack)

Okay we’ve all seen bad movies. And we’ve all seen movies that don’t make a lot of sense. But it’s a pretty special film that is both at the same time. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is one of those. It is jaw-droppingly terrible and also insanely, ludicrously, incoherent. It’s completely impossible to follow what the hell is going on. Considering the studio planned this as the first of at least ten movies in an Arthur-verse, it’s practically a textbook on how not to start a movie franchise.

Anyway the plot, such as I can work out, is something like this: back in ye olde England times, magic and Mages have been nearly wiped out after (I think) an attempt by Mage Warlord Mordred to seize the throne. Then former Mage pupil and jealous brother of King Uther Pendragon (Eric Bana), Vortigern (Jude Law) kills his wife to get powers to seize the throne. Only young Arthur survives – and an unspecified period of time later (he ages, no one else does), Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) is a cocky geezer running a brothel in Londinium in the shadow of the Coliseum (yes really). Then one day Uther’s sword Excalibur turns up buried in a stone and Vortigern gets everyone to try and pull the sword out of the stone, so he can find the true heir (Arthur) and then when he finds him he puts on a show trial and it looks like he’s going to execute him because Arthur has become a legend in five minutes. Then Arthur is rescued by rebels who want Arthur to lead them, because the sword has special powers which Arthur can control if he can only get over his doubt and when it works… Oh God I can’t believe I’ve just tried to puzzle it out.

Scenes in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword follow each other with barely any structural link from one to the other. The film is convinced that the best way to pique our interest in a mystery is to throw us into the deep end and then info-dump flashbacks and voiceover throughout the film. The effect is rather like an ove- excited child trying to tell you a story (“And then a MASSIVE OLIPHANT SMASHED THE BRIDGE, and Uther fought it with a sword and it went boom and there was a big funeral and then Vortigern killed his wife and he was sad and he shouted and then a BIG DEMON killed Uther because the sword couldn’t go boom and then Arthur grew up”) who keeps leaving out the key details so has to throw them in later (“oh and Vortigen killed his wife because he needed to become a BIG DEMON and could only do it if he killed someone he loved and he had to become a BIG DEMON because it was the only way to stop Uther from making the sword go boom and he needed to get the sword – umm – well I’m not sure why but he needed it to build his tower. Did I mention his Tower? I think it was why he wanted to become King so he could build the tower. I think the tower made him a powerful magician. But of course he already was a magician he just wanted to be a betterer one. Did I mention that Arthur got the sword and made it go boom?”).

Instead the film showcases absolutely all the worst instincts of Guy Ritchie. All of them. Everything happens really fast and incredibly loudly. There are huge senseless battles and enormous CGI beasts who attack for no reason whatsoever. Arthur and his cronies are all transformed into cockney wide-boys, with Vortigern’s enforcers basically gangsters, all speaking with the Lock Stock rat-a-tat vibe that was fresh in 1998 but feels impossibly dated and tiresome now. This mixes with the ridiculously loud and fast pace of the film that makes it almost literally impossible to work out what is going on – and certainly makes it impossible to give a shit about anyone or anything in the film as events, characters, action and dialogue fly past with nothing dwelling to make any impact.

Everything has been thrown at this. Monsters! Gangsters! Chinese Martial Artists! Knights as Nazis (Jude Law’s Vortigen hosts a full blown Nuremberg Rally)! None of it really ties together. Nothing makes sense. Everything is filmed dull and murkily.

Probably because the producers worked out what they’d put together was an impossible turkey, the film has been cut to ribbons. To try and make a virtue of this, frequently characters explain events that are going to happen, while the events themselves play out on screen. Ritchie pumps this up to the next level by having the dialogue delivered with manic speed, which clearly passes in his mind for cool. This is when it explains things at all. More often events speed by so swiftly that we just have to assume massive time jumps have happened. This sword must be important (its name is in the title) but when it pops up out of nowhere, we get no sense that Vortigern has spent any time looking for it. Not only that, his system of forcible sword tests is both a well-oiled machine and something Arthur (who lives literally in the shadow of Vortigern’s castle) has never heard of. In less than two minutes of screen-time after he pulls the sword, Arthur is spoken of as a legendary figure who must be killed publicly to kill his legend. What? How much time is passing here?

The film has both way too much plot going on, and not enough interesting plot going on. It’s so determined to set up future movies that we get lots of incoherent information about Mages, magic and powerful swords dumped on us really quickly. Anything that could be seen as a “special effect” has been left in, while it feels like anything dialogue-related has been cut. So we have a way, way, way too long sequence of Arthur in some place called the Darklands battling monsters for reasons never explained by the plot (its stated purpose, to get him to master the sword, doesn’t even work – making it a complete cul-de-sac). We get a battle at the start where we literally don’t know who is fighting whom or why. At one point, the Mage commands a giant snake which pops up to save Arthur and is never used again. On the counterside, we are never clear what Vortigern is trying to do or why he seized the throne, why he is building a huge tower or why he needs the sword – or indeed why the sword is important other than it makes things go BOOM.

The actors stumble about the wreckage of this film, like shell-shocked survivors of some kind of apocalypse. Perhaps this is at last the end of Charlie Hunnam as a star of big budget movies – he is, to put it bluntly, awful: a complete non-presence. Jude Law swans through the film as if just turning up was repaying a favour to Ritchie – although god knows Vortigern is a character that makes no sense at all. The rest of the actors make no impact – Aidan Gillen looks a little ashamed to be there – with the one exception of Neil Maskell who gets some very small emotional force out a father-son relationship. But to be honest, this is one where you want to be forgotten.

A film that wants to start a franchise but gives us no reason to care about anyone in it, is on a hiding to nothing. What on earth in this movie would make you want to come back and see the future adventures of Arthur and Pals? I can’t think of anything. If you can work out what is going on you are welcome to it. Lord knows no one else wants it.

All Is Lost (2013)

Robert Redford is in trouble at sea in All Is Lost

Director: JC Chandor

Cast: Robert Redford (Our Man)

Imagine the horror of facing death alone in the middle of nowhere. To what ends would we go to try and avoid it? All Is Lost is a film all about that seemingly impossible struggle to defy the odds. It’s a gripping survivalist story, brilliantly assembled with a wonderful, near wordless, performance from Robert Redford.

Redford is our man in more ways than one, a nameless sailor on a voyage in the Indian Ocean. When his yacht is struck by an abandoned shipping container, he wakes up to find water pouring in from a hole in the side of the boat. With stoic determination, he sets about attempting to repair and salvage the ship, in the face of fierce storms, hull breaches, dwindling supplies, equipment failures and practically everything else the gods can throw at him. 

JC Chandor’s film is a marvellously assembled and directed film that deals brilliantly with the intense claustrophobia of being alone in a small boat in the middle of a seemingly never-ending ocean. Despite being nearly wordless – after an opening monologue, Redford speaks no more than seven words throughout the rest of the film, one an exasperated end-of-his-tether scream of “Fuck!” after one more disaster – the film is full of sounds, and the never ending slap and lapping of ocean water is a constant reminder of the danger that surrounds the boat.

Chandor shoots the film with an immaculate intimacy: he carefully planned each shot so that the camera was never more than a certain distance away from the hero. The effect is to completely connect us with him –we feel as if we are right next to him, as immersed in his survivalist story as he is. It really makes the story feel as much like our struggle as Redford’s. 

Redford is also a perfect choice as the hero. An actor who has (deliberately) worked very little over the last 20 years – focusing on his directing and producing projects – Redford’s cache is unpolluted by overexposure as so many other of his contemporaries are (could you imagine Al Pacino in the role?). Redford – amazingly for such a famous actor – disappears into the role. His performance is a masterclass in stoic underplaying, of grim determination. The film is a series of tasks that the actor is required to execute – repairing holes, trying to fix a radio, steering the boat through a storm, preparing meals – and Redford performs them all with an unshowy realism. 

So committed is the film to the mastery of these details, that the entire story becomes increasingly engrossing. The bizarre thing is that the strange excitement of watching all these tasks being executed makes you want to jump in a boat yourself and head out to sea – even while watching Our Man face near certain death alone in the middle of the ocean. (Although I never, for one minute, could face adversity with such stoic determination – I’d be punching the walls of the boat and raging against the ocean). 

It’s that threat of near certain death that hangs over the film. Opening with a narration from Redford that sounds a hell of a lot like a last will and testament, while the camera passes by what will soon be revealed to be the abandoned shipping tanker that doomed the yacht, the expectation from the start is that it will not end well. How much does the man accept this over time? How much does the fear that this could be the end play on his mind (and for how long). The film ends (without wanting to give away too many spoilers) with a question hanging over the man’s fate, that you can decide depending on your optimism or realistic pessimism. 

Chandor intended the film, I believe, as spiritual journey. The man goes through great hardship – in near wordless silence – facing a string of obstacles like some sort of biblical parable. The aim is for him to come to terms with himself – and to find peace with his fate and what his life has been. It’s a hard and difficult journey, but one that the man must travel in order for the journey to have meaning.

But it’s also about the desire we have to cling to life – to not let go no matter what obstacles are placed before us. How our best qualities sometimes emerge when we meet adversities like triumphs, about never letting despair enter our souls.  The man’s journey is engrossing and overwhelming because we all feel (or like to feel) that we would never despair or give up in the face of these odds. All Is Lost maybe the title, but it never really is until we give up.

Laura (1944)

Dana Andrews investigates in the shadow of Gene Tierney in film noir Laura

Director: Otto Preminger

Cast: Gene Tierney (Laura Hunt), Dana Andrews (Mark McPherson), Clifton Webb (Waldo Lydecker), Vincent Price (Shelby Carpenter), Judith Anderson (Ann Treadwell), Dorothy Adams (Bessie Clary)

Laura is the sort of film noir that on the surface gives you what you would expect, but actually shakes its formula up pretty successfully. The femme fatale starts the film dead (although anyone who has seen a mystery will be expecting a twist when we hear a shotgun has destroyed her face beyond recognition). The detective does very little detecting, and engages in hardly any police business. One of the lead suspects is allowed to tag along to every interrogation to spray witty barbs around. There are only four potential suspects and barely any other characters. The solving of the mystery often takes a back seat to flashbacks and character beats. When the reveal comes, it feels like it’s been hiding in plain sight the whole time. But yet it really works.

Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) is a leading female advertising executive found murdered in her apartment. Detective McPherson (Dana Andrews) is called in to investigate, with the suspects being: Walso Lydecker (Clifton Webb), a waspish newspaper columnist who was her mentor; Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), a parasitic southerner, sponging off Laura’s success; and Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson), a matriarch who may or may not be conducting an affair with Shelby. But is all as it seems? Well of course it isn’t, and as McPherson gets more obsessed with Laura, so does the mystery of her murder deepen.

Otto Preminger took over the direction of Laura mid-way through the production, after the rushes of the original director (Rouben Mamoulian) underwhelmed. Preminger repackaged the film as a sort of part-thriller, part-shrewd black comedy, and gave huge scope to Clifton Webb’s hugely enjoyable performance as the waspish Waldo, a turn that totally dominates the film. Clifton Webb’s arch performance is a complete delight, and the film plays subtly with Waldo’s sexuality. Introduced in a bath with a typewriter, like some gossipy Marat, Waldo is heavily implied to be at least ambiguous in his sexuality, a dandy about town with more knowledge about clothing and high society than the initial ingénue Laura. 

To be honest, watching it today, Waldo is so clearly a possessive creep – a preening, domineering personality who takes an obsessive pleasure from “owning” Laura – that you’re far less likely to be surprised to find he has a considerable dark side than many of the viewers of the original film. For all the witty barbs he throws about – “Haven’t you heard about science’s latest invention, the doorbell?” he snaps at an welcome intrusion from MacPherson – Waldo remains part comic delight, part intensely black-hearted weirdo. It’s a line Webb’s performance walks extremely well.

It does mean that there is very little room in the film for Andrews and Tierney as the film’s two leads. Laura is the presence that hangs over the film – quite literally at times, with many scenes taking place in her flat, beneath an enormous portrait of her. But despite this, she becomes less and less interesting as the film progresses. Essentially, Gene Tierney is so striking looking as the lead – and the build-up she gets from Waldo in particular is so extreme – that her acting can’t quite live up to the presence. The character is possibly the least well written of the film, an enigma that we never quite get into – or feel inclined to try.

McPherson is a far more interesting part. The film suggests (indeed Waldo says it outright) that McPherson is falling hard for the victim. There is a wonderful sequence where McPherson stays overnight in Laura’s apartment, moving through the flat, rearranging things in her rooms, drinking her whisky then settling into a chair and starring up at her painting before going to sleep. It’s like a date with only one person there. McPherson gets a very personal investment in the case – so it’s a shame that he’s played so flatly and boringly by Dana Andrews, a serviceable sort of B-list film noir lead who brings no spark to the part at all.

The two leads can’t compete with Webb, or the playful performances in the supporting roles from Price and Anderson. Preminger gets the tone just right with these big performers, playing both characters just on the edge of satire. Price is languidly dry, delighting in his gauche lack of interest in other people and his selfishness. Anderson is a strangely needy matriarch, a woman hiding her need for the interest of a younger man, archly proud but slightly tragic. Throw these colourful performers at the edge of the picture and it’s not hard to lose interest in the two leads – especially as they are playing characters so different from what you expect from these films.

The mystery itself is not too much of a puzzle. There are two or three twists in there, two of which I was able to predict and the third one I didn’t pick up on some early signposting (including in the opening lines). But the enjoyment here isn’t from the puzzle but from the colour that it’s put together with. Preminger stages the whole thing like a jet black comedy and mixes it with plenty of gorgeous film noir lighting. The story is slight but staged with real energy and dynamism – you can’t believe how swiftly it flies by. The film probably has more sympathy for the eventual murder than a modern audience will feel – but that’s no big deal. Well written, spicily played by the supporting cast and well directed, you can see why this is one of the classic film noirs.

Goodbye Mr Chips (1939)

Robert Donat is superb (and Oscar winning) as an (eventually) beloved teacher in Goodbye Mr Chips

Director: Sam Wood

Cast: Robert Donat (Mr Chipping), Greer Garson (Katherine), Lyn Harding (Dr John Hamilton), Paul Henreid (Max Staeffel), Terry Kilburn (John Colley/Peter Colley I/Peter Colley II/Peter Colley III), John Mills (Adult Peter Colley), Scott Sunderland (Sir John Colley)

Goodbye Mr Chips is the sort of film that feels ripe for spoofing. The sort of idealised stuff-upper lip, Tom Brown’s Schooldays look at the past that should have you spluttering and chuckling. But it’s done with such warmth, such genuine emotion and tenderness, that instead you can’t help but feel yourself welling up while watching it. I certainly did (although I was watching it at half seven on a Sunday morning…)

The film follows the fortunes of Mr Chipping (Robert Donat) from his first joining the school in 1870 as a naïve young Classics teacher, struggling to exert authority over the children, to a beloved elder statesmen of the school in 1933. Along the way, he deals with a host of personal and worldly trials and tribulations, falls in love with a young suffragette Katherine (Greer Garson) who recognises his tender soul, and eventually helps the school through the national trauma of World War I.

It’s a quite beautifully done piece of old fashioned film-making, crammed with those moments of suppressed emotion and unspoken depths that get me every time. Maybe it’s something peculiarly English, but nothing can touch our repressed souls than seeing a kindred spirit struggle to keep his emotions locked down. Chipping loves his job, he loves the children he teaches and he will work tirelessly to give them the best start in life he can. The schoolchildren across 60 years are his children – can he express any of this before his deathbed? Of course not, he’s British.

It’s a film that celebrates the strength of that indomitable British characteristic of keeping on, of struggling forward, of keeping traditions and decency going. It’s a strongly conservative message, I’ll give you that, but it’s carried by such nobility and morality that it stresses the positives of this patriarchal affection. And Wood’s direction avoids over-sentimentality at nearly every point, helped by a wonderfully constructed script by Journey’s End playwright RC Sheriff (among others).

And Chipping himself is such a gentle, unassuming and kindly character – a decent, compassionate man who does everything he can to help others – that the film never feels forced. Indeed, it gives many scenes a real emotion. The courtship between Chipping and Katherine is all the more affecting for understanding how unnatural and difficult it is for the shy and reserved Chipping to open himself up to love. It’s also deeply sweet and endearing to see how Katherine is able to see past his awkwardness and bashful quietness to understand the caring, deeply humane person below the surface, and how hard she works to help this better man flourish.

This humanity is behind everything that Chipping does in the film: from the start it’s clear he cares deeply for the pupils at the school, even if he struggles to build a connection. It’s there on his first day where he tries – ineffectually – to comfort a new boy. At first he is led to believe domineering discipline is needed to keep his authority. What marriage – and Katherine’s love – teaches him is that he can allow people to see his natural warmth, and that personal affection makes discipline all the easier and natural. And makes him a better teacher.

It’s that romantic subplot between Katherine and Chipping that really gets the cockles warmed at the centre of the film. Beautifully played, with sensitivity and tenderness, by both Donat and Garson this is an extremely sweet relationship, where Katherine has to make most of the running to get round Chip’s shyness. You can enjoy – as Chip’s best friend Max Staefel (a lovely performance by Paul Henried) does – the fact that his colleagues expect Katherine to be some sort of aged harridan rather than a beautiful young woman. And it’s clear to see why the boys become devoted to someone warm, friendly and charming like Katherine. In Greer Garson’s first major role, she is superb – a character you feel as strongly about as Chips does, and feel her loss as deeply. 

The death scene – and its reaction – nails everything perfect about Robert Donat’s Oscar-winning performance. Chipping’s shell-shocked, robotic return to work is a brilliant demonstration of his trauma, his determination to not let it affect his work, and (in his quiet, middle-distance staring) his utter inability to get over the pain of losing the most important person in his life. Donat’s performance is superb throughout, convincingly ageing over 60 years during the film, but never losing that consistent sense of Chips being a man who has to learn how to find the balance between the warmer side of his character and the needs of being in a position of authority.

It’s a balance he finds wonderfully, by slowly allowing his humour to be seen by the boys – winning him a reputation as a sort of beloved eccentric, and surrogate father to hundreds of boys. This comes together beautifully as he guides the school through the horror of World War I. The film captures perfectly the shock and horror – under that English reserve – of so many dying for so little, of entire generations of former pupils being lost. Donat’s speech in the church near the war’s end seems to capture these feelings of reeling at the senseless violence.

But what the film does so well is not to make these moments sickly, but play them straight and let the emotions of these moments speak to themselves. We don’t need sentimental camera tricks or swooping music, or zooms into tear laden faces. Robert Donat’s performance brilliantly plays into this – he’s an absolute pillar of gentle reserve and kindness and every moment (he’s in every scene) rings absolutely true. It’s a beautiful, gentle, star turn at the heart of a film that slowly becomes deeply moving.

Panic in the Streets (1950)

Paul Douglas and Richard Widmark race against time to prevent plague in Panic in the Streets

Director: Elia Kazan

Cast: Richard Widmark (Lt Commander Clint Reed), Paul Douglas (Captain Tom Warren), Barbara Bel Geddes (Nancy Reed), Jack Palance (Blackie), Zero Mostel (Raymond Fitch), Alexis Minotis (John Mefaris), Dan Riss (Jeff), Guy Thonajan (Poldi), Tommy Cooke (Vince Poldi)

It feels like a very modern nightmare: a plague of catastrophic proportions breaking out in a major city and threatening to wipe out thousands of people. This feeling helps to make Panic in the Streets feel more like a film from today rather than the 1950s. The only thing missing is a terrorist angle – everything else could have been pulled from the nightmare fuel of our modern age.

In New Orleans, a murdered man is found near the docks. The emergency button is pressed when the coroner detects a deadly infection. Naval doctor (and emergency co-ordinator) Lt Commander Clint Reed (Richard Widmark) quickly takes command and determines that the victim carried pneumonic plague before being shot. Tracking down the men who killed him, and who may also be carrying the disease, becomes urgent, before the infection spreads. The authorities don’t want panic, so Reed and Captain Tom Warren (Paul Douglas) – initially of course reluctant partners – must work together to quietly track down the killers. The killers meanwhile, Blackie (Jack Palance) and his crew, continue regardless with their small-town crime empire building.

Panic in the Streets was one of the first films to shoot extensively on location – and it’s a brilliant choice, as Elia Kazan’s use of real life, grimy, New Orleans locations, from back streets to the docks, is pivotal for the sense of urgency and realism that runs through the entire film. Kazan’s camera work is brilliant throughout, and it adds a real gritty sense of danger to the entire film. It’s also brilliant that he selects possibly the least attractive parts of New Orleans for his locations – Blackie’s world of run-down buildings and dives just feels perfect for the film.

Kazan keeps the focus tight and avoids too many distractions from the film’s narrative – except maybe some tiresome insights into Reed’s slightly troubled domestic life (with Barbara Bel Geddes in a particularly thankless role as his wife, who alternates between supportive and the inevitable just wanting him at home more). Other than that, the film follows Reed’s search in forensic detail, from questioning suspects to working out the radius of possible infection. There is more tension here in a meeting with the city mayor to try and wrestle the authority Reed needs to carry out his job than in dozens of car chases.

The script is tightly written, and focused on plot over character, but still allows moments for character beats that good actors can seize upon. Widmark makes Reed a driven professional, who still has enough personal insight to register that his flaws include arrogance and impatience. In many ways an interesting piece of counter-casting, Widmark’s slightly menacing air is inverted really well as a doctor frustrated by the lack of understanding he encounters from those he is trying to save from a potentially deadly infection. He’s the perfect actor for a character who is a hard-bitten professional with a ruthless streak, and who’s a little hard to like.

He has a great foil in Paul Douglas as a professional, down-to-earth, but skilful and whip-smart police detective. One of the film’s pleasures is the bond that slowly grows between this odd couple – it’s not unexpected if you’ve ever seen a movie before, but it is very well done. The film, however, is almost stolen by Jack Palance as the villainous heavy, intent on empire building and oblivious to the fact that he is probably carrying a deadly plague that could wipe out half the population. Equally good is Zero Mostel as his weaselly, sweaty side-kick.

It’s odd watching it now that the authorities aren’t more terrified by the prospect of such a deadly infection – but that is a sign of how things have changed since the film was released. It’s sometimes a rather cold film, fascinated by slimmed down procedure – from the procedures of tracking people down, to the inoculations Reed administers right, left and centre to those who may be exposed. Despite this general mood, Kazan still gets the tone just right for the later shoot out that tops off the film.

Panic in the Streets does have a few too many slower moments. The scenes showing Reed’s home life are particularly drab – although we do get a marvellous scene with his wife where Reed acknowledges that his attitude to Captain Warren has been arrogant and condescending. The politics of lowlife New Orleans criminals are completely dependent on the charisma of the actors – remove Palance and Mostel’s performances and they would be exposed as dull and irrelevant. But the rest of the time, the film has a genuine feeling of grimy reality and keeps the pace up a treat. It’s a little B movie gem that feels ripe for discovery in our terror-obsessed modern world.

Into the Woods (2014)

James Corden and Meryl Streep in the strangely flat Into the Woods

Director: Rob Marshall

Cast: Meryl Streep (The Witch), Emily Blunt (The Baker’s Wife), James Corden (The Baker), Anna Kendrick (Cinderella), Chris Pine (Cinderella’s Prince), Tracey Ullman (Jack’s Mother), Christine Baranski (Cinderella’s Mother), Johnny Depp (The Big Bad Wolf), Lilla Crawford (Little Red Riding Hood), Daniel Huttlestone (Jack), Mackenzie Mauzy (Rapunzel), Billy Magnussen (Rapunzel’s Prince), Tammy Blanchard (Florinda), Lucy Punch (Lucinda), Frances de la Tour (Giant’s Wife), Simon Russell Beale (Baker’s Father)

Musicals are big box office. Everyone has a side of themselves that enjoys the razzmatazz of song and dance numbers. In the world of the musical, Stephen Sondheim is often seen as the pinnacle of musical master craftsmen – and for years, studios had tried to bring Into the Woods, his musical reimagining of fairy tales, to the big screen. Was it worth it? Um, possibly not.

A baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt) are desperate to have a child. A witch (Meryl Streep) claims she has cursed them after the baker’s father (Simon Russell Beale) stole magic beans from her garden. She will lift the curse in return for four items she can use to lift a curse on her – a milk white cow, a red coat, a glass slipper and some golden hair. Well if you know anything about fairy tales it won’t take you long to figure out which tales we are going to be heading into with that list – and sure enough Jack (Daniel Huttlestone), Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), Cinderella (Anna Kendrick) and Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy) all make appearances. But here the happy ending comes half way through the story – how will the characters deal with the impact of their choices when they have to face the consequences of their actions?

Okay I’m going to be honest, Into the Woods left me a little cold as just a musical. I didn’t really get into any of the numbers as they were playing, and the basic storyline is an odd combo: half satire, half social commentary on the dangers of getting what you want at all costs. I mean that’s clever stuff, and some big themes, but the movie certainly seems to wear them very heavily. And the movie also fails to make the musical sections engaging or inspiring – instead they are rather leadenly staged with very little real vibrancy or joy.

What’s already a rather disengaging musical isn’t helped by Rob Marshall’s leaden direction, which positions each scene with a flatness where the actors get lost in the wide screen and murky set design. Into the Woods is an astonishingly boring film to look at, murky and dimly lit, mistaking lighting (or lack of it) for mood. Every single scene is dingy and poorly framed, with events occurring in front of the viewer but never really getting engaging or interesting. Nothing strikes you interest.

It becomes a film that really isn’t that interesting to watch. This is despite some very strong efforts from nearly all the cast. Meryl Streep inevitably captured most of the praise as the Witch, and she is good, but there is something a little too artificial about her performance for my taste, something not quite heartfelt. But Emily Blunt is very good (and an excellent singer as well – who knew!) as the Baker’s wife, full of humanity and warmth. Chris Pine brings some excellent comic timing to the impossibly vain and preening Prince. There are plenty of other good moments as well, as most of the cast throw themselves into it. 

But these moments keep getting lost in sequences that just aren’t interesting. For every amusing sing-off between the two princes on a waterfall, or moment of genuine warmth and charm between the baker and his wife, we get sequences of unbearable smugness (principally Johnny Depp’s appalling look-at-me cameo as the Big Bad Wolf). British character actors abound all over the place, but most have virtually nothing to do. In addition, the violence and horror elements of the original musical – as the cast deal with the terrible consequences of their actions and turn on each other – are toned down considerably.

In fact, as leading characters start dying left, right and centre, it’s not really shocking enough (as the darkness of their fates is skirted around), as Marshall’s camera meekly turns away  from anything that might cause a fraction of upset. Wasn’t the whole point of fairy tales – and I suppose the original musical – to deal with both the darkness and the light? Why make such a dark musical and then try and force it into being a 12A rating? Why make a movie that tackles dark themes and then shy away from them as often as possible?

It’s part of the slightly incoherent mood of Into the Woods – it never really clicks. It doesn’t really offer much to enjoy: the musical numbers (after the opening title number) are pretty unengaging, and they are filmed with a dull unimaginativeness. Despite the money spent on it, the film looks really cheap. While there are a couple of good performances, others – like Anna Kendrick – are trying a little too hard. It’s a story that is supposed to be about the dark heart of fairy tales, and how reality after a happy ending often isn’t as jolly as we think it is – instead it’s a story that never really feels like it’s about anything.

Oblivion (2013)

Tom Cruise goes all Top Gun (Olga Kurylenko is along for the ride, pretty much all she does in the movie) in would-be intellectual sci-fi thriller Oblivion

Director: Joseph Kosinski

Cast: Tom Cruise (Jack Harper), Morgan Freeman (Malcolm Beech), Olga Kurylenko (Julia Rusakova), Andrea Riseborough (Victoria Olsen), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Sykes), Melissa Leo (Sally)

Spoilers: I’m going to discuss the entire content of the plot from the third paragraph. You’ve been warned!

It’s 60 years after an alien attack. The world has been destroyed, cities lie in ruins, and mankind has fled to Jupiter’s moon Titan. Earth is being drained of its last few resources to power the new civilisation on Titan by massive machines. Drones fly around the planet, protecting the machines from the last surviving alien forces still on Earth. The drones are tended by Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and Vika Wilson (Andrea Riseborough), whose memories have been wiped for security reasons and who are dedicated to keeping the drones functioning. 

Or is this all a lie?

Well it won’t be a huge surprise to hear that it is, of course. And there are some decent ideas in Kosinski’s film: the twist reveal that the organisation Harper and Wilson are working so hard to preserve is in fact the very alien invaders they so hate, or that the strange figures on the planet they are helping the drones to kill are actually the last surviving remnants of mankind. Harper and Wilson are clones of NASA astronauts captured 60 years ago and replicated over and over again in order to serve the robots. The “Tet” in space that they believe is their HQ is the alien mothership. These are all decent twists. So why do they combine together to have so little real impact?

I think it’s because Kosinski rushes the film. He’s so pleased with the narrative rug pulls that he seems to want to reveal many of them one after the other. Additionally, the biggest twist – Tom Cruise is actually working for the baddies! – immediately makes most of the rest easy to predict. Not least the constant references to Base 49 where he and Vika work – sure enough it’s a clone number, so the planet is filled with clones of this pair. The only thing stopping them bumping into each other is that they have been told everything outside of their “patrol zone” is irradiated and they must never enter it. 

All of this world building – and the film does take its time establishing it a piece at a time early on – is interesting stuff. But it loses its way once the film surrenders itself to a string of reveals that overwhelm it. By the time we are watching super-man Jack shooting down drones from his helicopter, the film seems to have lost the more meditative start. With Jack at first we get a sense of a guy longing to find more depth to live with. But the film loses this sense, with Jack become steadily less interesting the more we find out about him.

Then once you accept the idea of Cruise and Riseborough being endlessly cloned, the logic gap starts to click into place. It’s never explained why the aliens are so reliant on human engineers for their drones – if they have conquered loads of planets before without them, why do they need them here? Furthermore, we are told the first wave of Jacks were mindless soldiers who killed everyone on the planet – why then are these engineer Jacks and Vikas given so much independent thought? Why not just make them automatons? Why clone them and then lie to them about who they are working for – why not just program them to obey the robots?

Then after a slow build of questions and revelations about Jack’s world, we get a standard Independence Day style mission up into space to “blow up the mother ship”. Of course this is a mission that only your man Tom can do. And do it he does, because Tom Gotta Do What Tom Gotta Do. It’s all a rather disappointing resolution to a film that toys around with being something a bit more complex and interesting earlier on.

Ah, Tom Cruise. To be honest he’s probably miscast here. There is something so incredibly, movie-star strong about Cruise that he somehow overpowers the shocks and make them seem silly. On top of which, the part is another ego-stroke. Jack is the ultimate man’s man – he fixes things, he loves sports, he builds a cabin in the woods, he’s clearly dynamite in the sack; but he’s also sensitive and caring and in touch with his feelings. On top of which both female characters in the film – Riseborough’s sadly besotted Vika and Kurylenko’s mysterious astronaut who lands on Earth and awakens strange memories in Jack – are both pathetic ciphers who need Tom’s help for everything, while of course also being way, way, way too young for the Cruiser.

But the film still looks good, and still has some very interesting twists. The design and visuals are faultless – in fact they seem to become the main focus, all those long shots of deserted, sand consumed parts of New York. Its main problem is that it’s low on themes – I guess it’s trying to make a case that humanity can’t be bashed out of us, no matter how many times we try and clone it out of someone – but it gets lost a bit in plot mechanics and the delight the director has in executing them. For a film that only really has four characters in it, I still felt they were hazy and undefined. A lot is left to the viewer’s own suppositions, so the film gets pretty reliant on your adding the depth it needs. If you are inclined to do so, this works. But the essential dramatic thrust of the film itself isn’t compelling enough to make you willing to make the effort the film needs.

Oblivion wants to be the next big, thoughtful, twist-filled, sci-fi epic. But it just doesn’t have enough interest and complexity to really engage the viewer. Instead it all becomes a bit forgettable – not because it’s bad but because, at the end of the day, it’s nothing special.

All the Money in the World (2017)

Christopher Plummer dominates (at short notice!) Ridley Scott’s pedestrian true-life kidnap thriller All the Money in the World

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Michelle Williams (Gail Harris), Christopher Plummer (J. Paul Getty), Mark Wahlberg (Fletcher Chace), Romain Duris (Cinquanta), Timothy Hutton (Oswald Hinge), Charlie Plummer (John Paul Getty III), Andrew Buchan (John Paul Getty II), Marco Leonardi (Mammoliti)

In 2017 something quite extraordinary happened. A string of unpleasant allegations emerged about Kevin Spacey, turning him overnight from the toast of Hollywood into a pariah. Not good news for Ridley Scott’s Getty kidnap drama All the Money in the World, which was only a month away from opening – and had Kevin Spacey in a central, Oscar-bait role as J. Paul Getty. The film looked like box office poison – until Scott decided to reshoot large chunks of the film four weeks before opening, with Christopher Plummer taking over the role of Getty. And of course they would still make the release date.

John Paul Getty (Christopher Plummer) is an oil tycoon, and the richest man in history, worth at least a billion dollars (the film opens with a dry history lesson showing how Getty gained a monopoly for selling Saudi oil for the Saudis, thus becoming richer then Croesus and Midas rolled into one). Scott’s drama follows the kidnapping of Getty’s grandson John Paul Getty III (Charlie Plummer – no relation) in Rome in 1973. The kidnappers want $17 million dollars. The famously frugal Getty’s response is that he’s got 13 other grandchildren and won’t run the risk of seeing them all being kidnapped for cash, so he won’t pay a dime. This leaves the kidnapped boy’s mother Gail Harris (Michelle Williams) in despair – after a divorce from Getty’s son, she agreed to not take a penny and can’t pay the ransom. Getty does send his fixer Fletcher Chace (Mark Wahlberg) to work with the police and negotiate – but basically Gail hasn’t a hope unless Getty relents.

Spot the difference: Spacey (left) heavily made up and Plummer

It’s astonishing Scott managed to completely recast, re-shoot and re-edit the second most important part in the film at such short notice – and apparently in eight days. It’s also brilliant that this gives us another vintage Christopher Plummer performance. With cold firmness, gimlet-eyed focus, and a dark twinkly charm which switches in a moment to disengaged indifference, Plummer is so perfectly cast as Getty you wonder why they didn’t get him in the first place. Plummer set a record as the oldest Academy Award nominee for his work on this film – and surely also set some sort of record in being nominated for an Oscar less than two months after he signed on to make the film!

We should be glad that Plummer got this great role – particularly as, to be honest, his performance and the story of how it came about is literally the only reason to remember this film. If it lasts at all it will solely be because of such chutzpah at defying the odds – as a film, this is a dud almost from start to finish.

Long, turgid, dull, lacking in any emotional or human interest, no sense of drama – rarely has a kidnap victim been so boring, or his fate carried so little tension – shot with a lazy blue filter that seems to say “it’s the 1970s, everything was a bit faded”, this turns a compelling story into a viewing chore. How can this happen? How can such an interesting story be made so bloody flat?

A film like this should either be a pressure-cooker, against-the-clock drama or a Faustian journey into the darkness of a man (Getty) who sold his soul for riches, or a sort of dark comedy wherein a billionaire refuses to pay out comparative peanuts. What it becomes is none of those things. It relishes Getty’s greed, but never really gets under the skin of what makes him like this. It gets bogged down in the mechanics of kidnapping but never makes them interesting. It enjoys (and most of this is down to Plummer) Getty’s indifference and selfishness, but doesn’t have the guts to go for black comedy. It’s a nothing film.

Part of it is the film’s odd opening structure. Much of the first 30 minutes is a confusing series of flashbacks and flashforwards, establishing multiple events – Getty’s fortune rising from the 1930s, the story of young Getty’s parents’ divorce in the 60s, the kidnapping of young Getty in 1973 – all are cut together with such a lack of regard for narrative drive that it’s both difficult to follow what is happening and when, and also hard to engage with anyone involved in the story. From there, when we reach a conventional timeline, events feel like they are being ticked off rather than being fashioned into a compelling and tense drama. It’s all just flat and lifeless.

It should be a film where Michelle Williams’ Gail comes to the fore, and we feel her pain, fear and frustration at being unable to save her son. Instead she is competing with so many alternative viewpoints that her story gets truncated down into the sort of performance we admire as being basically good, but develop no real empathy for. It’s a real shame, but she’s a victim of this being such a dry and lifeless film. 

It’s not helped that she also has to share screen time with Wahlberg. The two actors have virtually no chemistry whatsoever, and Wahlberg is way out of his depth here, totally unable to bring anything to the part other than his earthy chippiness. Chase is a dull character who ends up feeling increasingly irrelevant – eventually an invented scene showing him threatening Getty to stump up the cash is thrown in, you feel to give Wahlberg a “moment” rather than because it grows out of a sense that Chase has grown closer to Gail and her family.

But then that’s the whole film – it feels perfunctory and routine where it should be compelling. Rather than building a terrifying momentum as the kidnapping becomes more and dangerous for the young Getty, the tension seems to leak out of the edges. By the end you barely care about anyone involved in it. It really says something that, with only a week’s notice or so, Plummer blows most of the rest of the cast out of the water with his performance. He and his casting are the only reason to ever remember this turgid disappointment.