Richard III (1955)

Olivier stamps his claim to Shakespeare’s greatest villain in this gorgeous theatrical epic

Director: Laurence Olivier

Cast: Laurence Olivier (Richard III), Cedric Hardwicke (Edward IV), John Gielgud (Clarence), Ralph Richardson (Buckingham), Claire Bloom (Lady Anne), Helen Haye (Duchess of York), Pamela Brown (Mistress Shore), Alec Clunes (Lord Hastings), Laurence Naismith (Lord Stanley), Norman Wooland (Catesby), Clive Morton (Lord Rivers), Douglas Wilmer (Dorset), Stanley Baker (Richmond), Mary Kerridge (Queen Elizabeth), Esmond Knight (Ratcliffe), John Laurie (Lovell), Patrick Troughton (Sir James Tyrell), Michael Gough (Murderer)

Olivier had played the greatest Shakespeare hero in Henry V and made Hamlet the most romantic princes of film. Having scaled those heights, did he also want to set the benchmark for Shakespearean villainy? Perhaps, with his vaulting ambition and competitiveness, he knew his clipped, precise tones and physical suppleness was perhaps best suited to playing the villain. What better role to prove it than the “poisonous, bunch-backed toad” himself, Richard III. Olivier bought to the screen a performance that would be as influential as his Hamlet (perhaps even more so), an embodiment of the role that all future Richards would be compared to.

I like to think of Richard IIII as a twisted inversion of Henry V. Like that film, the action is shot in lusciously beautiful technicolour, with beautiful costumes and a marvellously stirring, magnetic score by William Walton. It has courtly intrigues, a charismatic lead, the seduction of a young princess, many of the same actors and caps itself in a bravura battle shot on location. The only difference being that, instead of “the mirror of all Christian kings”, our lead is a twisted, remorseless killer who acts as his own Chorus to bring us on-side with his Machiavellian schemes. (There is a fun little opening message, stressing that this is a legend not the truth, that almost feels like an apology in advance to the Ricardian societies of today).

Olivier’s performance is the heart and soul of this film, and it’s possibly his finest cinematic (and certainly his finest screen Shakespeare) role. This Richard is openly – almost proudly – cruel and hypocritical, sociopathic in his amoral ease with the death and slaughter of his nearest and dearest (including his beloved wife, brother and nephews to whom he is sweetness and charm), overwhelmingly impressed with his own cunning and eagerly inviting us to share in his villainy. Olivier practically caresses the camera in his readiness to get close to us, forever turning towards it with a smile, quick aside or delighted breakdown of schemes to come. Olivier inverts his matinee idol looks into a stooped smugness (his costume, with its dangling sleeves, frequently makes him look like a spider) and his clipped vocal precision is dialled up to stress his heartless self-confidence.

Stare into Richard’s eyes and all we see is an uncaring blankness, the chill of a man who cares for nobody except himself. His sigil maybe a boar, but he resembles a wolf, devouring the Lords around him. Much of the first two thirds sees him keep a steady illusion of outward good fellowship. He comforts Gielgud’s Clarence with genuine care, greets Hastings like an old friend, is mortified and hurt by the suspicions cast on him by the Queen and her family, smiles with affection at his cousins. It means the moments where Olivier lets the mask slip even more shocking: the matter-of-fact abruptness he urges murderers not to take pity on Clarence, the whipped glare of pure loathing he shoots at the princes after an ill-advised joke about his hunched back or the imperious hand he shoots at Buckingham to kiss after being acclaimed by the crowds, harshly establishing the hierarchical nature of their ‘friendship’.

While the charisma of course is natural to a performer as magnetically assuring as Olivier – and this Richard is truly, outrageously, wicked in his charm – he also nails the moments of weakness. Having achieved the crown, Olivier allows not a moment of enjoyment of his feat, but his brow furrows into barely suppressed concern and anxiety that he may be removed by schemes exactly like his own. The threat of armies marching on him sees him first lose his temper publicly and then leap to cradle the throne in his arms like a possessive child. The morning of Bosworth, he even seems quietly shocked at the very idea that he could feel fear.

Richard III, despite its length, makes substantial cuts to the original play, including throwing in elements from Henry VI. Several characters – most notably Queen Margaret, whose major confrontation scene with Richard is lost altogether – are cut or removed all together. Olivier reshuffles the order of events, most notably shifting the arrest of Clarence to split up the seduction of Lady Anne. Richard’s late speech of remorse before the battle of Bosworth hits the cutting-room floor (Olivier’s Richard never seems like a man even remotely capable of being sorry for his deeds). Several small additions from the 18^th century by Colley Cibber and David Garrick are kept in (most noticeably his whisper to his horse on the eve of battle that “Richard’s himself again”).

The film is deliberately shot with a sense of theatrical realism to it, Olivier favouring long takes so as to showcase the Shakespearean ease of the cast (much was made of the cast containing all four of the Great Theatrical Knights of the time in Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud and Hardwicke). The camera frequently roams and moves, most strikingly during the film’s first monologue from Olivier, where it flows from the coronation retinue outside the throne room, through a door, to find Richard himself waiting for us in the hall. It’s set is similarly theatrical, a sprawling interconnected building (with some very obvious painted backdrops) where the Palace of Westminster, the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey seem to be one massively interconnected building.

The film makes superb use of shadows, the camera frequently panning from our characters (especially Richard) to see their shadows stretch across floors and up walls. The claustrophobia of the interconnected set also helps here, making events seem incredibly telescoped (it feels like the film takes place in just a few days at most). It makes the court feel like a nightmare world completely under the control of Richard, who knows every corner to turn and can seemingly be in several different places at once. In that sense, filming Bosworth outside on location in Spain seems like a neat metaphor for Richard’s lack of control of events: suddenly he’s in a sprawling open field, where it’s possible to get lost and it takes genuine time to get from A to B.

Olivier may dominate the film with a performance of stunningly charismatic vileness, but he has assembled a superb cast. Ralph Richardson is superb as a supple, sly Buckingham, a medieval spin doctor whose ambitious amorality only goes so far. While I find Gielgud’s delivery of Clarence’s dream speech a little too poetic, there are strong performances from reliable players like Laurence Naismith’s uncomfortable Stanley and Norman Wooland’s arrogant Catesby while Stanley Baker makes a highly effective debut as a matinee idol Richmond. Claire Bloom superbly plays both Lady Anne’s fragility but also a dark sexual attraction she barely understands for this monster. Perhaps most striking though is Pamela Brown’s wordless performance as Mistress Shore (mistress first to Edward IV then Hastings), a character referred to in the play but here turned into a sultry, seductive figure who moves as easily (and untraceably) around the locations as Richard does.

Fittingly for a film obsessed with the quest for power, we return again and again to the image of the crown. It fills the first real shot of the film, bookmarking its beginning and end and frequently returns to fill the frame at key moments. With the films gorgeous cinematography, it’s a tour-de-force for its director-star and a strikingly influential landmark in ‘traditional’ Shakespeare film-making.

Cleopatra (1934)

DeMille’s blockbuster is a fun, camp spectacle with plenty of his suggested sex and naughtiness

Director: Cecil B DeMille

Cast: Claudette Colbert (Cleopatra), Warren William (Julius Caesar), Henry Wilcoxon (Marc Anthony), Joseph Schildkraut (King Herod), Ian Keith (Octavian), Gertrude Michael (Calpurnia), C Aubrey Smith (Enobarbus), Irving Pichel (Apollodorus), Arthur Hohl (Brutus), Edwin Maxwell (Casca), Ian Maclaren (Cassius), Eleanor Phelps (Charmion), Leonard Mudie (Pothinos)

When a sand-and-sandals epic opens with a not-particularly-disguised naked woman cavorting erotically with incense, you know you are in Cecil B DeMille territory. Thirty years before the ill-fated Taylor-Burton epic, DeMille’s Cleopatra was the box-office hit of 1934. It was also a stompingly silly film, crammed with hammy performances and sexual imagery which it got-away-with in those pre-code days because it was an important historical subject taking place on humongous sets. But Cleopatra is also extremely good fun, a film so camply delighted in its naughtiness (and bowling along with such pantomimic energy) that it knocks spots off the turgid 1963 flop.

This Cleopatra follows pretty much the same structure (literally in half the time). Cleopatra (Claudette Colbert) is at war with her brother for the throne of Egypt. Smuggled into the presence of Julius Caesar (Warren William) wrapped in a carpet, she reveals the evil machinations of her rival Pothinus (Leonard Muddie) and seduces Caesar (possibly more with the prospect of controlling Egypt, since this Caesar is a power-mad cold-fish). When Caesar is dispatched by conspirators during the Ides of March, Cleopatra’s focuses on man’s-man Marc Anthony (Henry Wilcoxon) who is very open to her seduction. Before they know it though, the two are at war with envious technocrat Octavian (Ian Keith) who marches all of Rome to Cairo to crush the two. Bring on the asps!

DeMille shoots all this with relentless energy and pace, though not quite enough that you don’t notice the dialogue clunking out of the actor’s mouths (“You and your Friends, Romans, Countrymen…” a bitter Octavius observes about Anthony’s funeral oration). Cleopatra, like many of the Great Showman’s finest films (of which this is unquestionably one) gives us all the sex and smut we could possibly want, disguised in its classic setting. Cleopatra absolutely drips in lust and is crammed with suggestive imagery from top to bottom.

From that cavorting incense-carrier, we cut to the rooms Cleopatra has been kidnapped from. These look like nothing less than the aftermath of a kinky orgy, including a hog-tied servant who looks like he’s passed out in an asphyxiation sex-game. Colbert models a series of deep-dive dresses that leave little to the imagination. Poor, randy Marc Anthony doesn’t stand a chance (we know he’s a hot-blooded man because he never goes anywhere without his two barking greyhounds). Cleopatra even dresses at time like some musicals starlet, trailing billowing fabric behind her as she descends stairs.

Meeting her on her pleasure barge (this ship is practically Tardis-like in its interior dimensions) he’s treated to the sort of show that wouldn’t be out of place in Amsterdam’s Red-Light district. Scantily-clad ladies cavort, dancers dressed in skin-tight leopard skin are marshalled by a whip-carrying ring-master, while they cavort and engage in (literal) cat-fights until broken up by a crack of the whip. All the time Cleopatra reclines on a silk-covered bed, Colbert’s eyes flashing unmistakable “come hither” glances. No wonder the randy sod quickly finds himself going all-in on Egypt.

Along with sex, the film mixes in plenty of action. Caesar’s assassin is rather imaginatively filmed through a POV shot (“You? You too Brutus?!” Warren William intones in despair), as daggers fly in. The forthcoming battles are teased in an early scene where Caesar, bored with an Egyptian delegation, fiddles with various models of siege engines. All of these come into play in the film’s later sequences, that sees a parade of fast-cut war scenes overlaid: siege engines fire, armies plough at each other over deserts, ships clash at sea, men drown in agony. Much like the epic scale of Cleopatra’s court and barge, the film doesn’t skip on the epic conflict.

Between these two tent poles, we basically get a soap dressed to-the-nines in sandals, short skirts and armour. Claudette Colbert in a banner year (this was one of three hits she had, and she won the Oscar for It Happened One Night) is sultry, playful and if she never feels for even-one-minute like a figure from antiquity, at least she has that in common with the rest of the cast. She gives Cleopatra a charismatic energy that makes her believable as a figure round whom all else revolves. Wilcoxon plays Anthony with a thigh-slapping, hail-fellow-well-met quality. Warren William underplays as Caesar – which can make him look dull in a film as overblown as this – but makes for an effectively cold and calculating man.

Egypt, in its voluptuous naughtiness makes all Rome look rather dull though. Our capital is introduced in a house-party where the conspirators pose and moan like hammy matinee performers, stroking their historically incorrect beards, while the ladies bitch like New York housewives gleefully spreading catty gossip. Octavian is re-imagined as whining middle-manager, a weasily Ian Keith constantly moaning about never getting enough attention and clearly far-too inhuman to ever be stirred by Cleopatra the way the lusty Anthony is. With the frame of the film being classic antiquity, we can even pretend this is somehow serious drama when really it’s just Dallas.

These actors march their way through a series of break-ups and get-togethers, punctuated by moments of silly drama. (Cleopatra, Hamlet-like, even stabs Porthinus through a curtain seconds before he can assassinate Caesar!) But it all kind of works because you suspect nothing is really taken that seriously. DeMille is making a big pageant here, a walloping epic of lusty suggestion, powered by larger-than-life performances. It’s meant to fill you with excitement and awe, to make you gasp in awe. It doesn’t really matter that we get a shit-stirring King Herod (a smirking Joseph Schildkraut) or an Enobarbus who puffs like a regimental sergeant-major (C Aubrey Smith, giant of beard). It’s all about the spectacle, the drama and showmanship. And no one really does that sort of stuff better than Cecil B DeMille.

M (1931)

Lang’s masterpiece, a thrilling and complex crime drama that explores the horrors of crime and mob justice

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Peter Lorre (Hans Breckett), Gustaf Gründgens (Safecracker), Otto Wernicke (Inspector Lohmann), Ellen Widmann (Mother Beckmann), Inge Landgut (Elsie Beckmann), Theodor Loos (Inspector Groeber), Friedrich Gnaß (Franz, the burglar), Fritz Odemar (Cheater), Paul Kemp (Pickpocket), Theo Lingen (Conman), Rudolf Blümner (Beckert’s defender)

A murderer prowls Berlin’s streets. For weeks children have been murdered and the citizens are at fever pitch. The police are desperately trying every weapon in their investigative arsenal. The heightened police presence on the streets hampers the lives of regular criminals: they too decide to take matters into their own hands, pooling their resources to catch the killer. And the killer himself? Not a mastermind, but a peculiar, timid man (Peter Lorre), a slave to uncontrollable impulses.

All this forms Fritz Lang’s masterpiece, his first sound film and one of the greatest German films of all time. A rich, psychologically detailed procedural thriller it is a stunning indictment of mob violence, a detailed look at the flawed assumptions of the official forces and an unflinching look at the horrific personal impact of crime. Lang’s film is extraordinary, a brilliant mix of impressionistic insight and documentary realism covered in an all-revealing social tapestry. It’s gripping and extraordinary.

Lang’s film was heavily inspired by real-life cases, most notably Peter Kürten (“the Vampire of Dusseldorf”) and the structure of the Weimar police department. Just like the real Berlin, his fictional one has a criminal underworld governed by a sort of German mafia, the Ringvereine, who a bizarre social set of rules among criminals. M tied into debates around the death penalty: was it right to take a life, even for unspeakable crimes? Is a life in a psychiatric prison fair for the murderer of several children? M is fascinating as it provides enough ambiguity to support either side (Goebbels claimed, when watching it, that it was a sure sign that Lang would become “one of us”).

This stems from Lang’s superbly detailed, anthropological filming style, which throws the viewer into the centre of a world that feels extremely real. Streets are lined with beggars and an array of adverts, posters and political messages. The camera prowls down streets and over tenement blocks, catching shadows and gets lost in cigarette smoke. It captures every detail of the Berlin police department: forensic labs that breakdown fingerprints, annotated maps, criminal psychologists pontificating on the intellectual make-up of the killer based on his handwritten notes to newspapers. Detective Lohmann (an increasingly harried Otto Wernicke) puffs cigars, pulls together facts and fails to make any real progress, looking increasingly buffeted by events rather than controlling them.

It’s one of the film’s subtle criticisms of the political situation at its time. The official forces have every resource going, but seem powerless. Instead, Lang contrasts them ever more closely with the criminal underworld or use brute, uncontrolled, unordered force to tackle the problem. Is it my imagination, or is there the stench of Nazism in this group? Their nameless leader (Gustaf Gründgens) strides, with a leather-clad firmness, emotionlessly forward, fixated on the end result – despite, with at least three murders on his score card, arguably not being that different from the man he’s chasing killer. He instructs the criminals to effectively throw a dictatorial cordon around the city, their solution being stamping out freedom and taking unilateral action.

Lang’s film is sharply critical of the kneejerk horrors of this mob justice. Crowds are whipped up by press coverage (which they excitedly read, the papers hitting the streets with a special edition after every murder) into a mob desperate to lash out, crowding around posters offering rewards for catching the killer. A man giving the time to a child in the street is nearly lynched, a raised camera angle reducing him to a tiny figure compared to his aggressor towering over him. A group of people playing cards in a bar descend into blows after one accuses the other of behaving suspiciously. The criminal put together a show trial (with a token, powerless defence counsel) where the killer is allowed a few brief words before his pre-ordained lynching (no legality with Nazism).

Again, it’s hard not to consider the growth of street violence in Germany in 1931, an atmosphere where justice was slowly dying as the Nazi party argued people had the right to take violent action against those who they see as enemies of the state. The criminal organisation here are worryingly efficient and organised. Lang brilliantly intercuts between two meetings, both in smoke-filled rooms, as the police and the criminals plan their operations. Sentences started in one location are finished in another. Complementary camera angles echo each other. In the police meeting there are also calls for unilateral action. Lang criticises the authorities who are active but ineffective (and some sympathetic to the criminal’s viewpoint), as much as the brutal mob justice of the criminals.

And the killer himself? Brilliantly played by Peter Lorre (who resembles a perpetually frightened paedophilic toad), Hans Breckett is weak, feeble, as scared of himself as he is of others, unable to understand or control his urges. He is driven by a whistling tune of In the Hall of the Mountain King for Grieg (a whistling that he sometimes produces, at others seems to hear around him) and consumes the things he desires – be they apples, drinks or children – with an impulsive immediacy. His letters to the papers suggest he is desperate to be seen. But when he is, chased by the crowds, he’s weak, terrified and utterly unimposing, trembling amongst the flotsam of a factory almost indistinguishable from the debris around him. At his trial he attempts to vindicate himself with a whining desperation. But, as Lang quietly suggests, do we have the right to kill him?

After all, Breckett is almost certainly a war veteran. He shares that with several other characters – as we are reminded by beggars with wooden limbs. Maybe his split personality – perhaps that’s why he stares with curiosity at his own face in the mirror, as if he doesn’t recognise himself – is a relic of a conflict where men were encouraged to kill, then returned back into society where expected to do the opposite. Perhaps the same feelings also lie behind the ease so many people have with mob justice – and also those in the criminal jury who show some sympathy for Breckett’s forbidden urges.

As well as balancing these complex ideas, Lang’s film is also a masterpiece of visual and aural technique. A child’s death is suggested by a newly orphaned ball rolling into frame. A gorgeous hand-held camera shot wanders through the beggar’s bar, where beggars gather used cigars, rescued sandwich fillings and sign up to be the criminal’s eyes on the street. Sound transitions between scenes are handled with an extraordinary confidence. The silence of armies of policeman walking through the streets turning into burst of noise as they move through raids. The Grieg leitmotif is used to brilliant effect.

Lang’s film though never forgets the victims. we start and end with the parents. The mother of the film’s first victim, Elsie Beckmann, waits with increasing panic in her apartment, each knock of the door promising her daughter’s return but disappointing (we’ve already seen Elsie disappear, hand-in-hand, with Breckett’s whistling shadow). It’s to her the film returns to her at the end, her tear-stained face telling us no sentence will bring back the dead. Appearing over a wordless scene of Beckett’s actual trial (the result of which we never discover), its Lang’s subtle reminder that mob justice brings only false satisfaction, that killing never heals the wounds of loss and our effort would be better directed to protection rather than revenge. It’s a message that feels particularly poignant in a German film made in the final years before Nazism would lead the country into devastation.

Filled with stunning film-making confidence, mixing documentary realism and brilliantly confident visual and audio mastery, Lang’s M could be argued to be one of the greatest film noir detective dramas ever made – and also a brilliantly insightful look at human and social nature. M is a masterpiece, as gripping and relevant today as it was Lang filmed it.

The Last Command (1928)

Hollywood and the revolution meet in von Sternberg’s sympathetic look at White Russians

Director: Josef von Sternberg

Cast: Emil Jannings (Grand Duke Sergius Alexander), Evelyn Brent (Natalie Dabrova), William Powell (Lev Andreyev), Jack Raymond (Assistant director), Nicholas Soussanin (Adjutant), Michael Visaroff (Serge)

Hollywood director Lev Andreyev (William Powell) flicks through photos of extras, searching for someone to play the Russian General in his WW1 epic. His eyes light up – the perfect face! Sergius Alexander (Emil Jannings) is summoned. But Andreyev has ulterior motives: Sergius Alexander is a former Grand Duke who clashed with the revolutionary Andreyev in Russia ten years ago and this is the chance for revenge Andreyev has longed for. A cousin of the Tsar, Sergius Alexander was commander of the Western Front. Imperious but noble, deeply patriotic, he gave everything for Russia, despite falling in love with revolutionary Natalie Dabrov (Evelyn Brent). The revolution turned Sergius into a traumatised shell and kitting him out in uniform again impacts his sanity.

Von Sternberg’s The Last Command is two films mixed into one. It’s partly a satire on Hollywood, a machine specialising in creating artificiality that chews extras up and spits them out with little regard for their well-being (rather like the trench system the film is set in). The other – and more dominant – part is a classic melodrama of a noble Russian lost and powerless as his world collapses around him. It’s this second part that dominates the film, almost an hour of its ninety-minute run-time being taken up with its Russian flashback sequence. Like many von Sternberg films it’s charged with a mix of sex and sadomasochism, while also being a sympathetic, white-Russian look at the revolution.

Emil Jannings received the first ever Best Actor Oscar for this (and the now lost The Way of all Flesh). At the time Jannings was seen as one-of (if not the) greatest actor in the world, based on his mastery of the expressive arts of silent cinema. Janning’s physicality, his emotion-filled piercing gaze is duly showcased. Jannings effectively plays two parts: the Sergius Alexander of the Russian era, the Russian aristocrat who emerges as a man of honour, dignity and patriotism; and the Sergius Alexander of the present day, a timid, broken man, forever twitching, scared to look people in the eye. In both cases, von Sternberg’s camera constantly pulls back to Jannings whose ability to transform and twist his body – from ram-rod officer to broken husk – is executed perfectly.

Von Sternberg’s gives the bulk of the film’s run-time over to the build-up of the Russian revolution. While The Last Command gives some criticism to the ancién regime – our first shot is of a poverty-stricken mother and baby sitting in the snow, while the Tsar is a paper king more interested in parades than reality – von Sternberg’s affection is clearly for the decent nobles trying to make the system work. The revolutionaries are largely violent or shadowy manipulators (we get a brief scene with obvious Lenin and Trotsky stand-ins, presented as hypocritical middle-class looking schemers focused on power). On the contrary Sergius Alexander is interested only in the good of Russia.

It’s that which wins him the unexpected respect of feared revolutionary Natalie Dabrova, well played by Evelyn Brent. Dabrova is a power-keg whose fire and passion seizes the fascination of Sergius. Their initial meeting is the only time von Sternberg presents him as a tyrannical figure, sitting in an office questioning potential revolutionaries for his own amusement (including a whip across the face for Andreyev). But from there Sergius’ essential decency emerges – his politeness, his old-school chivalry. He treats her like a lady and (eventually) courts her with a Victorian gentility.

That contributes to Natalie’s shift towards seeing Sergius as a man trying his best in difficult circumstances rather than the ogre she assumed. Von Sternberg masterfully shoots the pomp and pageantry of the old Russia, full of military parades, fine dining and smart uniforms using this pageantry to show how it disguised the real threat facing the country. There are also elements of the sado-masochistic in the relationship between Natalie and Sergius. This bastion of the system is attracted to this woman who wants to burn the whole thing down. Visiting her in her bedroom, spotting a hidden pistol, is there an air of debased excitement when he turns his back on her and all but invites her to shoot him? In turn, Brent is almost a prototype of the classic Dietrich character, a strong, imperious woman, who dominates men, torn between conflicting desires.

There is a neat series of contrasts and contradictions in all the characters in The Last Command. Sergius is both a Tsarist bully, a decent man interested only in his country and a shattered husk in Hollywood. Lev is a firebrand revolutionary and an aristocratic Hollywood director. Natalie is a fascinating mix: a banner-waving anarchist who fits neatly into Sergius’ cocktail parties, who despises and loves the General. Duality and hidden identities hints at hidden desires within all the characters in a world tearing itself apart.

That collapse of order is the stunning heart of von Sternberg’s film. The seizure of Sergius’ train by revolutionaries, the final act before his exile, is superb in its vibrant tracking shots and Eisenstein-inspired energy. Jannings is placed at the heart of the crowd in a series of tracking-shot marches through baying crowds all pulling, spitting, pushing and abusing him that is part walk to calvary, part fantasy of humiliation. There are moments of understanding for the masses – a scene shows Tsarist soldiers machine-gun down a mob – though it’s balanced by the ruthless shooting they carry out on wounded soldiers. Sergius is reduced to the lowest-of-the-low, a humiliated figure shovelling coal for his revolutionary masters while they conduct (what looks like) an orgy in his state compartment.

Humiliation is also the name of the game in Hollywood. While The Last Command is more about its sympathetic look at good White Russians let down by the system (fitting von Sternberg’s imperialist sympathies), it throws in to its first and final act an uncomfortable look at Hollywood. Extras crowd at the studio door as another sea of desperate humanity (Sergius’ buffeting here in this crowd, must remind him of that humiliating walk through the mob in Russia). Costumes are flung at people identified only by tickets. Assistant directors treat people like dirt and extras are seen only as props.

But the satire is blunted by the fact that the treatment on set is motived by personal animosity. After all this is Lev – William Powell, rather good and clearly channelling von Sternberg – living out his own revenge fantasy. A sharper satire would have had no link between director and extra, merely seen the heartless system exploit a past trauma for its own benefit – with terrible consequences.

The Last Command is less a satire on Hollywood and more a rose-tinted look at the decent figures in the Tsarist system, with touches of satire on revolutionaries who are either power-mad middle-classes or working-class simpletons seduced by the temptations of drink and sex. It’s also a subtle smuggling in of the director’s own sexual fascinations, with Jannings a superb vehicle for this fantasy of humiliation with Brent shot with the sultry imperiousness of a potential dominatrix. For all this it’s a fine film, a visual marvel and a fascinating character study.

Apu Sansar (1959)

Satyajit Ray’s trilogy comes to close with another masterfully done small-scale story of hope and loss

Director: Satyajit Ray

Cast: Soumitra Chatterjee (Apu), Sharmila Tagore (Aparna), Alok Chakraborty (Kajal), Swapan Mukherjee (Pulu), Dhiresh Majumdar (Sasinarayan), Sefalika Devi (Sasinarayan’s wife), Dhiren Ghosh (Landlord), Tusar Banerjee (Bridegroom), Abhijit Chatterjee (Murari)

As he stands, consumed with despair, watching a train rush perilously close to him, does Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee) remember when he ran with excitement after the trains as a boy? Apu Sansar, the conclusion of Ray’s breathtakingly humanist trilogy, concludes another cycle in Apu’s life; one touched, as with the previous ones, with loss, tragedy and a dream of hope. Beautifully filmed, simple but deeply affecting, it’s a breath-taking culmination of this masterful trilogy.

Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee) is now a young man longing for a career as a writer in Calcutta. Attending the marriage of his friend Pulu’s (Swapan Mukherjee) cousin Aparna (Sharmila Tagore), he finds himself surprisingly roped into the role of groom to take the place of the unsuitable intended (as part of Hindu tradition to prevent the risk of Aparna never marrying). Returning with Aparna to Calcutta – and a life of poverty she is unused to – their romance flourishes into a happy marriage, until tragedy strikes leading to Apu tumbling into years of drift and depression.

Apu should be used to tragedy by this point. In Ray’s series, death has always raised its deadly force in his life. In Pather Panchali his beloved sister passed away from sudden illness. In Aparajito the death of his mother leaves Apu stricken with guilt and grief. It’s natural that Ray’s subtle trilogy continues to look at how closely tragedy and sadness dog hope and contentment. Tragedy this time strikes Apu out of the blue, a searing, raw pain that Ray conveys to us almost entirely through a series of still, tender shots of Soumitra Chatterjee’s face as Apu’s world falls apart around him.

Ray’s film, with its beautiful observational style and low-key camera work (and use, at several points, of low angles) reminded me sharply on this viewing of Yasujirō Ozu. Apu Sansar follows in Ozu’s footsteps in its careful, focused study of the lives of ordinary people and how whole worlds of love, hurt and joy can be contained within small rooms. Unlike Pather Panchali or Aparajito, there are few shots of the widening countryside or the scale of the cities. Instead, Apu’s world seems smaller and more intimate, its focus on his apartment and a few other locations, site of momentous events that will shape his life.

Marriage is at the heart of that. His relationship with Aparna has an inauspicious start, Apu roped in as a husband due to the mental incapacity of Aparna’s intended. (There are hints that the possibility of a replacement husband being expected lie behind the last minute, out-of-the-blue invite Apu receives from his friend Pulu which, if true, does add a slightly more manipulative quality to his amiable college friend). The two of them don’t know each other and have little or no idea if they even have anything in common. Their first night together is one of slightly awkward, exploratory talking and it leaves the viewer wondering if common ground can be found.

But Ray sketches out the development of this relationship into something strong, living and (eventually) heartbreaking with a mastery of little touches and his skill with montage and transition. Aparna is at first thrown by the poverty of Apu’s life in Calcutta (similarly to the Dickensian nature of Aparajito he lives in a rain-soaked apartment on a month-to-month basis). But she sets to work to turn this place into a home and soon little touches abound that denote their growing closeness. A cigarette pack hidden under Apu’s bed that Aparna has written a message in, pleading him to smoke only after meals. Late night conversations – which involve a brilliant Ray cut as the camera zooms into the fan between them and out again as a transition finds them sitting again opposite each other on a different night. The pleasure Apu takes in buying her the smallest gifts and the pride Aparna has in turning his home into something cleaner and more decent.

The future seems bright for them. In Ray’s trilogy the future and the march of time and civilisation has often been represented by trains. This theme continues masterfully in Apu Sansar, however this time with the train taking on a more sinister, dangerous presence. Apu’s apartment overlooks a major railway junction his home frequently invaded by the sounds of the train and an onslaught of smoke from the engines. Rather than offering tempting possibilities, this increasingly feels like an intrusion, an outside force intruding into the haven that Apu and Aparna are trying to create.

This sense of invasive menace is captured exquisitely in a beautiful but haunting shot as Apu stands on his balcony – the train sounds build and then smoke from the engines pours across the balcony and seems to envelop Apu. His home can be a place of wonder and beauty, but its harmony is always under siege from transportation that, like time, relentlessly moves forwards. It’s the train that will carry Aparna away from Apu, back into the countryside for her fateful lying in before giving birth. It’s a gift of a toy train – a chance at a future together – that Apu’s son will throw in his face five years later. It’s the same train, that dangerous future finally left behind, that Aparna’s father will clutch to him as Apu heads into a more hopeful future. Throughout trains intrude, threaten and signal danger and separation for Apu.

Soumitra Chatterjee is excellent as this young man who has seen so much, learned so many things, but also seems destined to repeat the mistakes of the past. Like his father he is a dreamer, planning a loosely autobiographical novel and beginning to exhibit the same Micawber-like expectations that something will turn-up. Perhaps over time, without tragedy, Aparna might have become his mother, beaten down with the burdens of being the sensible rock for a flighty man unable to settle.

Perhaps tragedy is what is needed for Apu – Apu Sansar is notable for its lack of romanticism for poetic longings and its favouring of embracing actual responsibilities. There are few other films where the destruction of a nascent novel could be met with such bitter-sweet acceptance. Certainly, no Western films, where the dream of having it all is baked in. The Apu Trilogy is partially about accepting things as they are and taking on your responsibilities: dreams and self-focused desires have no place in that. After all the trilogies hero, perhaps even more so than Apu, is his mother Sabarjaya who gave everything to give Apu opportunities.

Apu finally accepts his place in this cycle after years of denial and grief by seeking to build a relationship with a son he has never met. Ray charts this slow thawing between strangers with a delicacy and emotional force striking in its simplicity. It’s really striking to me how each film in this trilogy is slightly shorter than the one before, as Ray mastered that less really can be more with every frame: that sometimes the emotional force of a single glance can be greater than that of a tracking shot. Apu Sansar is a film brimming with confidence, from a director who has mastered his aim and subject. A heart-breaking, but also heart-warming, conclusion to a great trilogy.

Venom (2018)

Totally unoriginal and standard comic book caper, saved only by its inventive lead performance

Director: Ruben Flesicher

Cast: Tom Hardy (Eddie Brock/Venom), Michelle Williams (Anne Weying), Riz Ahmed (Carlton Drake/Riot), Scott Haze (Roland Treece), Reid Scott (Dan Lewis), Jenny Slate (Dora Skirth)

Did this film catch me in a good mood? Much to my surprise I rather enjoyed this dopey attempt to bring fanboy-fav villain Venom to the big screen. Last seen adding to the silliness in the utter mess that was Spider Man 3, the outer-space slime who possess its host returns as an anti-hero. Sure, he likes to eat people and suchlike, but when push-comes-to-shove he’s on our side helping to keep our world safe. Safe sums up Venom, which offers a series of set-pieces none of which are troubled with originality. What makes it stand out is the delight Tom Hardy brings to the role.

Hardy is Eddie Brock an investigative journalist framed by the film as a success who gets unlucky, but embodied by Hardy as a loser (it’s the first sign of Hardy’s originality butting up against the film’s obviousness). Fired after his investigation into shady goings-on at Biotech company Life Foundation – run by charismatically cold billionaire Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) – Brock goes from hero-to-zero and his fiancée, lawyer Anne Weying (Michelle Williams) leaves him after finding out he stole from her to gain access to Life Foundation. Brock continues his investigation after homeless people start to go missing. They were unwilling test subjects in Drake’s attempt to bond human beings to mysterious alien symbionts. Eddie is infected with one of the symbionts, Venom, the two of them forming an uneasy partnership in their body share. Will they work together to save the Earth?

Most of the success in Venom is exclusively down to Hardy. Where the film zigs, Hardy zags. Venom clearly wants a traditional, handsome, charismatic journalist hero, the sort of guy who puts the greater good first and only fails when he’s let down. Hardy plays him as a grungy odd-ball with a whiny voice, frames most of his decisions as taking the easy path and is happy to show him backing down from challenges. Hardy then pounces on the chance to counter-balance this with Venom, a gravelly id-machine that ends up playing like the dark underbelly of Brock’s hidden desires.

The most interesting parts of the film by far is the internal conversation between these two Hardy performances. Venom is the foul-mouthed monster who wants to indulge himself, Brock is the passive timid figure forever asking Venom to behave himself. Hardy gives the film a sort of gay subtext as frenemies Brock and Venom settle into an odd-couple life partnership. At one point Venom infects a second character: how does he “re-enter” Eddie? Through a passionate kiss between the Venomised second host and Brock. The two of them spark off each other like a feuding married couple, with Venom’s decision to protect the Earth based eventually on ‘liking’ Eddie.

It’s the main original beat in the film that Hardy seizes upon to make its heart. His performance is droll, playful, physically committed, strangely funny and rather sweet. It’s a heck of a lot better than the film deserves and its leaning into making its personality-split lead a weakling and a monster who effectively, unspokenly, fall-in-love feels very different from things we’ve seen elsewhere.

Which is good because almost everything else has been seen and done elsewhere. Fleischer largely fails to make any of the action sequences particularly new or interesting. There is a punch-up in an apartment (which does see Hardy bouncing around the room with a symbiote induced athleticism), a traditional car chase full of car smash-ups that Flesicher is so excited about he presents the smash-ups occurring multiple times from different angles. A SWAT team chases Venom around a building before a Terminator 2 style tear-gas filled foyer smackdown – with the hero imploring the killing machine he’s working with not to hurt anyone. (The humanising of Venom does have echoes of the taming of Arnie’s Terminator).

As in multiple Marvel films the villain is a dark echo of the hero. Riz Ahmed coasts through a barely written role of an egotistical Steve Jobs type, before merging with a-properly-Evil symbiote intent on loosely defined global destruction. This inevitably leads to a prolonged film-closing CGI-smackdown, as two opponents with the same skills face-off to control the launch of a rocket. No interesting comparisons or contrasts are drawn between Brock and Drake who gets only a whiff of motivation.

There are more interesting beats – though again not quite original – with Michelle Williams’ former fiancée who is given both a few proactive beats and a highly likeable and sympathetic new boyfriend in Reid Scott’s Dan Lewis (playing against the sort of smug roles he is often cast in). These fine actors bounce well off Hardy – and share in his delight in dopey humour and slapstick, noticeably in a posh restaurant sequence that sees Hardy sink himself in a lobster tank and eat the inhabitants.

Away from this though Venom is nothing special. So why did I enjoy it? Because I suppose in its derivativeness it at least offers brain-relaxing fun and it’s lifted to a slightly higher level by Hardy’s inventive approach. Aside from him there is almost nothing original, interesting or different here – but yet I enjoyed it while it passed the time.

The Omen (1976)

Extremely silly horror with a great score, more interested in inventive deaths and genuine fear or dread

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Gregory Peck (Robert Thorn), Lee Remick (Katherine Thorn), David Warner (Keith Jennings), Billie Whitelaw (Mrs Baylock), Patrick Troughton (Father Brennan), Leo McKern (Carl Bugenhagen), Harvey Stephens (Damien Thorn), Martin Benson (Father Spiletto), Robert Rietty (Monk), John Stride (Psychiatrist), Anthony Nicholls (Dr Becker), Holly Palance (Nanny)

“Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666.” One of the sweetest things about The Omen is that the number of the Beast was considered such an unknown concept to original viewers, that its painstakingly explained to us. In some ways The Omen is quite sweet, a big, silly Halloween pantomime which everyone involved takes very seriously. If The Exorcist was about tapping into primal fears, The Omen is a gory slasher (with a cracking score) that’s about making you go “Did you fucking see that!” as actors are dispatched in inventively gory ways. It’s brash, overblown and (if we’re honest) not very good.

Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck, selling every inch of his innate dignity for cold, hard lucre) is an American diplomat told one night in Rome that his pregnant wife Katherine (Lee Remick) has given birth to a stillborn child. “Not a problem” he’s told by an absurdly creepy Priest (Martin Benson) – just so happens there’s another motherless new-born child in the hospital tonight so he can have that one, no questions asked, and his wife need never know. Flash forward five years: Thorn is Ambassador to the Court of St James and young Damien (Harvey Stephens) is a creepy kid, with few words and piercing stare. In a series of tragic accidents people start dying around him. Could those people warning Thorn that his son is in fact the literal anti-Christ himself, be correct?

Want to see how powerful music can be? Check out how The Omen owes nearly all the menace it has to it imposing, Oscar-winning score from Jerry Goldsmith (wonderfullyGothic full of Latin-chanting and percussive beats). It certainly owes very little to anything else. The Omen is an exploitative, overblown mess of a film, delighting in crash-zooms, jump-cuts and extreme, multi-cut build-ups to gore. Richard Donner never misses an opportunity to signpost an approaching grisly death, by cutting between the horrified face of the victim, the object of their demise and then often back again. For the best stunts – including a famous demise at the hands of a sheet of glass – Donner delights in showing us the death multiple times from multiple angles.

This slasher delight in knocking off actors – people are hanged, impaled, crushed and decapitated in increasingly inventive manners – is what’s really at the heart of The Omen. None of this is particularly scary in itself (with the possible exception of the hypnotised madness in the eyes of Holly Palance’s nurse before her shocking suicide at Damien’s birthday party) just plugging into the sort of delight we take in watching blood and guts that would be taken in further in series like Halloween (which owed a huge debt to the nonsense here). Donner isn’t even really that good at shooting this stuff, with his afore-mentioned crude intercutting and even-at-the-time old-fashioned crash zooms.

With Goldsmith’s score providing the fear, The Omen similarly relies on its actors to make all this nonsense feel ultra serious and important. They couldn’t have picked a better actor than Gregory Peck to shoulder the burden of playing step-dad to the Devil’s spawn. Peck has such natural authority – and such an absence of anything approaching fourth-wall leaning playfulness – that he invests this silliness with a strange dignity. Of course, Atticus Finch is going to spend a fair bit of time weighing up the moral right-and-wrongs of crucifying with heavenly knives the son of Satan! Peck wades through The Omen with a gravelly bombast, managing to not betray his “for the pay cheque” motivations, and investing it with his own seriousness of purpose.

Peck’s status also probably helps lift the games of the rest of the cast. Lee Remick may have a part that requires her to do little more than scream (and fall from a great height twice) but she does manage to convey a neat sense of dread as a mother realising her son is not quite right. David Warner gives a nice degree of pluck to a sceptical photojournalist (while also bagging the best death scene). Troughton and McKern ham it up gloriously as a drunken former devil-worshipping priest and an exorcist archaeologist respectively. Best in show is Billie Whitelaw who filters her Beckettian experience into a series of chillingly dead-eyed stares as Damien’s demonic nanny.

The Omen does make some good hay of its neat paedophobia. Harvey Stephens with his shaggy hair, impish smile and pale skin (not to mention darkly sombre wardrobe) looks like your worst nightmare – he’s creepy enough that the film doesn’t need to gift him a vicious rottweiler as well. Donner’s decision to never have Damien show a touch of any real emotion for most of the film also pays off, meaning even something as silly as Damien inflicting slaughter from behind the pedals of a child’s tricycle seems scary.

Of course, if Damien was savvy enough to present himself as a bright and sunny child perhaps Troughton, Warner, McKern and co would have struggled to convince Peck he was the Devil’s seed. In that sense he takes after his dad: Satan loves an over-elaborate death, and from a storm herding one victim to a fatal impalement under a tumbling church spire to popping the handbrake of a glass-bearing van for another, no trouble is too much for Satan when bumping off those who cross him. (The Omen could be trying to suggest that maybe everything is a freak accident and Thorn goes wild and crazy with grief – but that Goldsmith score discounts any possibility other than Damien is exactly what we’re repeatedly told he is.)

The Omen trundles along until its downbeat, sequel-teasing ending, via a gun-totting British policeman who sticks out like a sore thumb in a country where the cops carry truncheons not pistols. Donner balances the dialled up, tricksy, overblown scares with scenes of po-faced actors talking about prophecies and the apocalypse, all shot with placid straight-forwardness. There is a really scary film to be made here about finding out your beloved son is literally a monster, or how a depressed father could misinterpret a series of accidents as a diabolical scheme. But it ain’t The Omen – this is a bump-ride of the macabre. The Devil may have the best tunes – but he needs to talk to his Hollywood agent.

Blackberry (2023)

Comic-drama about business collapse wants to The Social Network but lacks its deft touch and humanity

Director: Matt Johnson

Cast: Jay Baruchel (Mike Lazaridis), Glenn Howerton (Jim Balsillie), Matt Johnson (Doug Fregin), Rich Sommer (Paul Stannos), Michael Ironside (Charles Purdy), Martin Donovan (Rick Brock), Michelle Giroux (Dara Frankel), Saul Rubinek (John Woodman), Cary Elwes (Carl Yankowski)

“We’ll be the phone people had before they had an iPhone!” I’ve always found successful products that collapsed overnight fascinating. The Blackberry tapped into something people didn’t even realise they wanted: a phone that combines a computer and pager, a status symbol that told everyone you were a Master of the Universe. It was the product everyone wanted – until Steve Jobs announced the iPhone that did everything the Blackberry did better. It should be material for an entertaining film – but Blackberry isn’t quite it.

The film is set up as a classic Faust story. Our Faust is Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), co-founder and CEO of Research in Motion, a tiny Canadian business with an idea for lovingly crafted cellular devices. Our Mephistopheles is Jim Balsille (Glenn Howerton), an aggressive blowhard businessman who sees the potential – and knows he can sell it the way the timid Lazaridis never could. The angel on Faust’s shoulder is co-founder Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson), who worries the quality-and-fun parts of the business will be sacrificed. Nevertheless, Mephistopheles tempts Faust into partnership and they turn Blackberry into a huge business destined to all fall apart.

Blackberry desperately wants to be The Social Network. What it lacks is both that film’s wit and sense of humanity. It’s a film trying too hard all the time, always straining to be edgy. You can see it in its hand-held, deliberately soft-focus filming style, the camera constantly shifting in and out of blur. (Watching after a while I genuinely started to feel uncomfortable, with a wave of motion sickness nausea.) It goes at everything at one hundred miles an hour, but never manages to make its depiction of a company bought low by arrogance and unwillingness to adapt either funny or moving. It’s aiming to capture the chaos, but instead feels slightly like a student film.

It’s Faustian theme of selling out your principles for glory is just too familiar a story – and the dialogue isn’t funny enough to make the film move with the zingy outrageousness it’s aiming for. It also lacks momentum, the woozy hand-held camerawork actually slowing things down, a very shot lurches into focus. It’s a film crying out for speedy montage and jump-cuts to turn it into a sort of cinematic farce, as the business makes ever more sudden, chancy calls which switch at the mid-point from paying off to unravelling. Instead, it stumbles around like a drunken sailor.

At the centre, Jay Baruchel delivers the most complex work as the awkward and timid Lazaridis who slowly absorbs more and more smart business styling and ruthlessness over the film. But the film fumbles his corruption. His opening mantras – that “good enough is the enemy of humanity”, that Chinese mass production equals low quality because the workers aren’t paid enough to care about the product, that companies should focus on human needs – are all-too obviously dominos set up to get knocked over as Lazaridis gets corrupted and cashes out his principles to turn out exactly the sort of bug-filled mass-produced crap he railed against at the start – but this makes the character himself feel more like a human domino himself rather than living, breathing person.

The other performances all verge on cartoonish. Glenn Howerton channels Gordon Gekko and The Thick of It’s Malcolm Tucker as abusive, sweary, would-be Master-of-the-Universe, only-interested-in-the-bottom-line Jim Balsille. Balsille will do everything Lazaridis won’t do: he’ll cut corners and browbeat his way into meetings. A smarter film would make clear Balsille is in many ways more effective than Lazaridis – that without him Research in Motion would have gone bust years ago. It could also have looked with more sympathy at a guy who so believed in his one shot at glory he re-mortgaged his house to pay for it. But the film leans into Howerton’s skill at explosive outburst and never really humanises him, constantly shoving him into the role of villain.

The film also fails with its more human element. Director Matt Johnnson plays Doug Fregin, Lazaridis’ best friend and business partner. Fregin is set-up as the angel in Lazaridis shoulder, the decent guy against selling out. But Johnson’s performance lacks charm or likeability. Fregin – like many of the other workers of the company – is a geek-bro, his veins pumping with fratboy passions, who thinks the best way to get people working is to throw a string of parties. He’s, in a way, as wrong as Balsille is on what makes long-term business success. Crucially as well, the friendship between him and Lazaridis never really rings true, not least because Fregin browbeats and bullies the timid Lazaridis as much as Balsille does.

With no-one to really care for, the tragedy of this business never hits home. It does capture the sense of desperation as the once-mighty company collapses in the face of Apple – Lazaridis ramming his head into the sand and refusing to believe anyone would want a phone sans keyboard – but it fails to successfully illustrate why an innovator lost his ‘magic’ touch. The script fails to land much of its humour, and tiptoes around positioning Lazaridis as increasingly corrupted, even as starts hiring brash businessmen (epitomised by Michael Ironside’s sergeant-major fixer) to say the thing to his underlings that he’s too scared to. The financial shenanigans that land Blackberry in trouble with the SEC aren’t properly explained, and the actual reasons the iPhone finally put Blackberry in the dust bin of history are hand-waved away (“minutes… data… look just accept it ok”)

Blackberry would, in the end, have been better as an hour-long documentary, with dramatic reconstructions supported by informative talking heads. The film we have fails to deliver on a concept that bursts with comic and dramatic potential.

Persona (1966)

Bergman’s masterpiece, a fascinatingly brilliant Rorschach test that challenges and rewards the viewer

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Bibi Andersson (Alma), Liv Ullman (Elizabet Volger), Margareta Krook (Doctor), Gunnar Björnstrand (Herr Volger), Jorgen Lindstrom (Boy)

Even Bergman considered Persona a moment he “had gone as far as I could go…touched wordless secrets that only cinema can discover”. Persona, Bergman’s most consciously artistic and psychologically challenging work is a mass of contradictions and puzzles that defies easy categorisation (even Bergman claimed to be only half sure what definitively was happening). A whirling mix of themes, haunting moments and unknowable incidents all within a framework that constantly reminds us we are watching a film, Persona has been influencing, challenging and fascinating viewers for over 60 years. If cinema’s Everest is Citizen Kane, Persona is its K2.

The plot seems simple. Famed actress Elizabet Volger (Liv Ullman) fell silent for a minute during a production of Electra, then carried on. A day later she stopped speaking and hasn’t spoken since. Her doctors can’t find an answer so she is sent to an island to recuperate, with the support of a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson). On the island, Alma fills the silence with long monologues that become more and more confessional, intimate and personal. Does Elizabet betray these confidences in a letter to her doctor? Does Alma plot revenge? Are these events even happening? As the personalities of the two women blur, merge, swop and consume each other the film fractures (at one point literally so) until we are left as uncertain of who and what is real as perhaps the women themselves.

There is, in some ways, no understanding Persona. It perhaps best resembles a cinematic Rorschach test. I’d argue it’s a fool’s journey to stare at it for a definitive answer. Different days, different moods, different conditions will make the picture re-shape and resemble something else. Bergman has created a film devoid of traditional ‘clues’, that provides no trace of an ‘answer’, but instead asks – demands? – us to take away only what we choose.

Throughout, Bergman makes it vitally clear film is a constructed, artificial representation of reality. Persona starts and ends with film literally spooling through a projector, the arc lights cranking up to project a reality. The opening prologue is a host of suggestive images which may, or may not, relate to what we are about to watch. Their meaning is almost deliberately vague – much as the epilogue’s brief shot of Bergman and crew shooting the film is – but it lets us know beyond doubt this is a subjective presentation of a series of images, not real life. Perhaps reading meaning into it is as impossible a task as trying to interpret the contents of a library from the page of a single book.

Which is to say, I think Bergman is both inviting us to interpret the film but also warning us that this isn’t a jigsaw, but a deliberately obtuse and open-ended work, our experience of it controlled by the director. Film is after all a dream – a world where we think we move freely, but in fact we never do. Which might make you think Persona is Bergman’s punking the world, a Thermot’s Last Theorem designed to infuriate. It isn’t because it’s made with such grace, humanity and honesty.

To understand Persona you can only discuss – and wonder – at the complex, multi-layered themes and decide which speaks most to you on the day. A lot of this boils down to how you are affected by the breathtaking, seismic performances from Andersson and Ullman. Playing two characters whose identities merge, shift, mirror and absorb each other both performers give outstandingly intelligent, infinitely challenging and unreadable performances. For Andersson the film is virtually a monologue, where the more Alma talks, the more our grasp on who (or what?) she is slips through our fingers. Ullman’s impassive face, awash with micro-expressions (caught in scintillating close-ups) constantly disorientates – is that a sneer or a smile? Is that head-turn impatience or a desire to know more?

At several points I find myself falling into the trap Bergman lays of wanting to categorise the film, as I became convinced first one than the other of these women was just an element of the psyche of the other. It’s not as simple as that. They are both the same and different, two people and one. Bergman frequently frames their bodies overlapping and, in one horrifying moment, their face literally merged half-and-half. Elizabet, we think at first, is a near vampiric figure sucking the life out of Alma, drawing confessions from Alma to restore herself. Then Elizabet becomes a ghostly figure, moving in the margins of Alma’s life, a horrific silent figure from her subconscious holding her back. Then you feel Alma to be nothing more than Elizabet’s id, demanding her right to be independent.

The unreadability of the film becomes ever more acute at the half-way point. After an enraged Alma deliberately leaves Elizabet to cut her foot on glass, the film pauses, burns away and then restarts with an echo of its earlier montage. Has the story restarted? Did all or any of what went before actually happen? Or is everything from this point a cinematic fantasy? Later in the film Bergman throws in a sequence with Alma and Elizabet back in the hospital before returning to the island – is this a flashback or a dream or a vision or something else entirely?

Bergman’s mastery of horror comes to the fore. The haunting repeated shot of Elizabet embracing Alma from behind, the two of them starring into a mirror (and the camera) at times seems sexually charged, at others disturbingly possessive at others supernaturally controlling. Is Bergman’s point that the context of an image can change its meaning? These hazy definitions of truth and reality lie throughout. The confrontations between the two taking on an increasingly surreal nature.

In a stunning sequence, Bergman repeats the same Alma monologue twice, one focused solely on Elizabet (her face contorted with pain as she hears of her rejection of a child), the second on Alma (now dressed identically to Elizabet), Alma’s bitterness now taking on a totally different light. Alma, back in nurses’ outfit, confronts Elizabet screaming that she is her own person even as her words collapses into an incoherence that might as well match Elizabet’s silence. Which is projection and which reality? When they leave at the film’s end, do they go their separate ways or merge? Does Alma imagine herself with Elizabet’s husband, or when Elizabet’s husband recognises Alma as his wife is he tipping the nod to us?

Bergman gives no clear reasons for Elizabet’s silence. It could be connected to horror at the world’s terrors (Vietnam and the Holocaust are referenced). It could be shame at her own post-natal depression. It could be that the silent Elizabet is a projection of the Alma-Elizabet’s own turmoil and isn’t real in the first place. After all the hospital we are introduced to Elizabet in doesn’t feel like a real place but a sparsely dressed film set (and shot like it).

Sex weaves it’s way tellingly through the film. The sexual bond between Alma and Elizabeth, physically, seductively close and possibly sleeping together is clear. Alma relates a hugely erotic monologue about an orgy she and a friend initiated on a beach, the only time she describes herself a purely happy and content. Is this her memory or a fantasy of Elizabet’s? If Alma is Elizabet, is this what she longs for or the thing she finds missing now from her own life? Alma talks of wanting a family – but in a haphazard, casual way and has already had an abortion. Elizabet has a son but doesn’t want him – is Alma what she dreams she could be, or is Elizabet the truth Alma doesn’t want to face? At various points both, all or nothing of the above could be true.

The film opens with a mysterious boy starring at a blurred series of images of female faces. We never learn who he is (theories abound from Elizabet’s son to Bergman himself). He wakes seemingly from the dead, but perhaps he is given life by the film. Perhaps, Bergman is saying, Alma and Elizabet are themselves given life only by the film. That both of them are fictious illusions, as unreal as the blurred pictures on the wall. Persona is the sort of film only a director of pure courage could have made. An object that fascinates and frustrates but always leaves you wanting to reconsider and reposition it to see if the picture becomes clearer or if new truths are presented if you look at it from a different angle. Maybe Elizabet is a succubus. Maybe Alma is an angry inner self, longing to escape and liver her own life. Maybe Alma is the silent actress. Maybe Elizabet longs for the simpler life of the nurse. Perhaps every single idea is true and perhaps none of them are. That’s part of the mystery that makes Persona one of the greatest films ever made.

A Haunting in Venice (2023)

Branagh’s third Poirot outing lowers the scale but feels more real and involving than any others

Director: Kenneth Branagh

Cast: Kenneth Branagh (Hercule Poirot), Kyle Allen (Maxime Gerard), Camille Cottin (Olga Seminoff), Jamie Dornan (Dr Leslie Ferrier), Tina Fey (Ariadne Oliver), Jude Hill (Leopold Ferrier), Ali Khan (Nicholas Holland), Emma Laird (Desdemona Holland), Kelly Reilly (Rowena Drake), Riccardo Scamarcio (Vitale Portfoglio), Michelle Yeoh (Joyce Reynolds)

Branagh’s Poirot films have been a mixed bag. Big on starry cast and luscious locations, they’ve also succumbed too readily to bombast not to mention the sort-of tricksy directorial flourishes Branagh has such a weakness for. It’s a pleasant surprise then that A Haunting in Venice turns itself into the smallest-scale and tightest of his Poirot films and might just be the most successful of the lot.

It’s 1947 and a retired Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) lives as a recluse in Venice, studiously ignoring potential cases, his door firmly guarded by bodyguard (and retired policeman) Vitale Portfoglio (Riccardo Scamarcio). All this changes when he is visited by an old friend, crime novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) who recruits Poirot to help debunk spiritualist Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh). Reynolds is conducting a séance for retired opera singer Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), still grieving the recent death of her daughter Alicia. With other guests including Alicia’s former fiancée Maxime (Kyle Allen), PTSD suffering Dr Ferrier (Jamie Dornan) and his precocious son Leopold (Jude Hill) and housekeeper Olga Seminoff (Camille Cotton), the stage is set when a storm and a murder all strike on the same night. Finally, Poirot takes up arms again.

A Haunting in Venice has a fair bit of latitude to work with since there is not an Agatha Christie Poirot mystery actually called that (or even set in Venice). Instead, this is a fast-and-loose adaptation of Hallowe’en Party (definitely one of the lesser-known books) which shifts its location, reshuffles the characters backgrounds, brings a few off-page murders very much “on page” and repackages the story to take place in a sadness-tinged, post-war misery which neatly reflects Poirot’s private grief and guilt at a life which has seen so much death.

This actually works rather well. Contrary to much of the publicity, which played up the horror elements, this is about a million miles away from The Exorcist (although Branagh clearly rewatched Don’t Look Now for Venice scares inspiration), offering instead a camp-fire spookiness and a couple of jump scares. A Haunting in Venice is actually the first Branagh Poirot that feels it would fit into the Suchet-Poirot mould: a slightly maudlin atmosphere mixed with gentle humour, a tight interview-based structure and a (thankful) reduction in gun-toting stand-offs.

A Haunting in Venice is predominantly set in one crumbling Venetian house over one night during a wild storm. The house is given a ghostly backstory of a medieval orphanage left walled-up to prevent a plague outbreak spreading – and there are suggestions of supernatural mischief (objects fall down seemingly on their own) at various points (most of which are swiftly debunked by Poirot). The film is shot and framed with a series of fish-eye lenses and some oblique angles (as per Branagh, the second shot of the film is a Dutch angle) to maximise the dimensions of the house but also at key points stress its claustrophobia, all of which works rather well. It’s moodily lit in a series of shadows (to maximise those spooky jump scares) but its horror elements are lite – a whirligig of screaming and bloodshot eyes at the séance are about as far as it goes.

Instead, it unfolds in a traditional manner, bookended by a prologue and epilogue that indulges the beauty of the location shooting (including a luscious final aerial shot over Venice). The film effectively uses its post-war setting to add emotional impact – after suffering through a war that claimed millions of lives, is it surprising that people are more susceptible to the attractions of taking to the dead? The impact of war blights several characters, from Jamie Dornan’s doctor (Dornan is very good in the role), forever scared by the sights he saw liberating Bergen Belsen to a pair of young Eastern European refugees who have fled the Nazis.

Poirot’s background as a soldier and his own traumatic familiarity with death are also rather neatly wrapped up in questions of his faith. In Branagh’s quiet, melancholic performance (where its clear moments of warmth are only covering deep regrets), it becomes clear his faith in God is as lost as his belief that the world can be improved by deduction. His rejection of spiritualism is pointedly based on a belief that there is nothing outside of the tangible.He fits in witha house awash with traumatised doctors, opera singers lost in grief, housemaids who feel their lives have no purpose and even a crime novelist who’s last three books were flops.

Tina Fey is very playful as this Agatha Christie self-portrait, bouncing effectively off Branagh’s more sombre Poirot. The cast is in fact uniformally strong – a reduced cast list from previous Branagh Poirot’s means each one feels slightly more developed. Yeoh bites into the juicy part of Joyce with movie-star confidence, Reilly is subtly fragile, Cottin and Scamarcio both effectively hiding secret depths. Jude Hill, fresh from playing the young Branagh in Belfast marks himself as a kid with a golden future with a stand-out turn as the mature, worldly-wise young Leopold, comforting and caring for his emotionally scarred Dad.

All of this is marshalled into a tight murder-mystery – we get a bit of Grand Guignal slaughter as well as an effective locked room mystery thrown on top (as well as a homage to the originals apple-bobbing murder) – with a Poirot who is unsettled and out of sorts (for reasons that I guessed but make perfect, secular sense when revealed). It even wraps up on a quietly affecting note of hope. By dialling down the flourishes, scale and action (even if Branagh can’t resist a snorricam shot of himself through the house), A Haunting in Venice actually becomes more rewarding than either of the previous films in the series – and Branagh’s Poirot remains a strong, very human interpretation of the character. Surprisingly, despite its playing with the supernatural, it feels more grounded and human and, despite effectively creating a new story, closer to Christie.