Dirty Harry (1971)

Eastwood enters into cinematic legend in this grippingly entertaining pulpy cop thriller

Director: Don Siegel

Cast: Clint Eastwood (Inspector Harry Callahan), Harry Guardino (Lt Al Bressler), Reni Santoni (Inspector Chich Gonzalez), John Vernon (Mayor), Andy Robinson (Scorpio), John Larch (Police Chief Paul Dacanelli), John Mitchum (Inspector Frank DiGiorgio), Mae Mercer (Mrs Russell)

“Do you feel lucky? Well do ya? Punk” With these words, .44 Magnum in one hand and remains of a hot dog in the other (yes, Harry Callahan was so cool he didn’t even stop having lunch to take on a bunch of armed robbers), Clint Eastwood made a permanent mark on cinematic history. In 1971 Dirty Harry was condemned by some as fascist or reactionary, but really it’s just energetic, punchy, impossibly entertaining pulp. In a year where tough, rule-bending cops were de rigour, Dirty Harry may have more of a B-movie vibe than Friedkin’s Oscar-winning The French Connection but there is no doubt which one is the most viscerally entertaining.

“Dirty” Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) – so called because he gets all the jobs no-one else wants – is a tough-as-nails Inspector who values the Rule of Law over the Rules of the Law. Taciturn, not-suffering fools and always on the hunt for criminals (as the prototype gruff cop maverick, of course he works best alone), he prowls the streets of San Francisco and stops at nothing to take down bad guys and protect the innocent. He’s the guy you want on the case when the ruthless Scorpio killer (Andy Robinson) holds the city to ransom, shooting innocent people at random, seizing hostages and sending notes demanding payment to prevent more outrages.

Dirty Harry is lean, mean and a simply perfect piece of pulpy action. Directed with a tautness by Don Siegel, that never let’s go, it riffs on real life events – Scorpio is an obvious stand-in for the Zodiac Killer – and basically shifts a shoot-first-ask-questions-later cowboy into the heart of a modern city. Harry, embodied with sublime suitability by Eastwood (cementing his image) has a waspish sense-of-humour, speaks as he finds, never-ever-stops, has the ruthless determination we all wish we had and carries inside himself (buried deep) a maudlin sadness at his fundamental loneliness.

Dirty Harry doesn’t shirk in showing how a cop who bends the rules to deliver real justice can be an attractive figure. Harry doesn’t quite shoot first – he gives a cursory warning every time – but he always responds with lethal force when people are threatened. He’ll carry out illegal search operations of despicable offenders, he’ll follow a psychopath because he knows he’ll offend again (he’s right, but still) and when Scorpio won’t tell him where a hostage has been hidden, he doesn’t think twice about effectively torturing the guy to get him to talk.

Siegel’s film knows that this makes Harry the sort of guy we liberals tut about but, when push-comes-to-shove we need. Harry clones run through film and television history – what is 24’s Jack Bauer, but Dirty Harry fighting nuclear terrorists? – and it’s rooted in the fact that, although we know we should respect the rights of criminals, secretly we don’t want to. Surely, it’s not an accident that the film was set in San Francisco, the nirvana of liberalism in 1970s America. What makes that possible – cops like Harry.

The film stacks the deck slightly by making most of the besuited bosses Harry rubs up against punch-clock rules followers who place the letter of the law above its spirit. Of course, the DA will release Scorpio back onto the street because the damning evidence Harry has collected needs to be thrown out. Of course, he’ll order Harry to leave the clearly-mad-as-a-bag-of-bats Scorpio in peace. Of course, almost every other law official we see can’t hold a candle to Harry’s ruthless skill. Eastwood is so cool, we need to take a beat to remind ourselves that Harry is a widower who lives in an empty apartment, has no friends and he looks on with a quiet envy when his wounded partner is comforted by his wife.

But Harry is made for other things. Siegel’s character-defining set-piece early on, irrelevant to the plot, introduces everything we need to know about Harry. He effortlessly surmises a robbery is taking place at a bank across the street, calls for back-up and when he realises it will arrive too late, grabs that .44 Magnum and hot dog and strolls across the street into a shoot-up. At the same time, it’s a miracle no one is caught in the crossfire or crashing cars. He then bluffs another robber to stand down with a hard-as-nails bad ass speech, despite his chamber being empty of bullets.

To take on a guy like that, you need a truly inspired villain. Andy Robinson, his performance a master-class of twitch with a high-pitched giggle that acts like nails on a blackboard, provides it. He makes Scorpio a deeply unhinged, unpredictable predator who compensates for his slightness and youth (opposite Eastwood’s chiselled masculinity) by simply being an utterly unpredictable lunatic, with no sense of moral compass. Robinson pitches the performance just right, avoiding obvious histrionics to present a character larger than life but terrifyingly plausible.

The duel between them is shot by Siegel like an extended, grimly tense mix of chase and spy thriller. Opening the film with Scorpio searching the horizon for a new victim through a rifle’s telescopic lens, it throws us into a dark nightmare of San Francisco, with parks and baseball grounds places of unimaginable danger and a closing tense game of cat-and-mouse at an industrial plant. Through it all, Eastwood brings his softly spoken charisma to a man who knows full well there is little too him but the chase, but who puts the rights of the guilty a very, very distant second to the victims.

Dirty Harry plays like a punch to the guts, a superbly (and seductively) entertaining film that gives just enough hints at the dangers of Harry’s methods, while making their effectiveness abundantly clear. Siegel’s direction is pitch-perfect – this is one of the greatest cop thrillers ever made – and Eastwood’s performance is iconic. The French Connection maybe a more complex film – but Dirty Harry is more entertaining and the one you’d choose to put on with some popcorn.

Our Hospitality (1923)

Keaton’s feature-length debut is a masterpiece of comic invention and slapstick stunt thrills

Director: Buster Keaton (& John G Blystone)

Cast: Buster Keaton (Willie McKay), Joe Roberts (Joseph Canfield), Natalie Talmadge (Virginia Canfield), Ralph Bushman (Clayton Canfield), Craig Ward (Lee Canfield), Monte Collins (Parson), Joe Keaton (Train engineer), Jack Duffy (Train conductor)

It starts with a dark and stormy night. If that sounds like cheap melodrama that’s kind of the point. Keaton’s first feature length comedy would be different from his joke-crammed shorts. This would be plot-led comedy, a drama full of jokes. As part of that, Keaton started the film with a storm-filled, joke-free, DW Griffith-inspired opening salvo that sees the lead character’s father dead in Intolerance inspired opening. With its gun flashes and bodies, we know in this film bullets kill.

The father is John McKay and he dies along with James Canfield in a deadly exchange. It’s part of a long-running feud betwixt McKays and Canfields (any similarity to the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feud is entirely deliberate), and the rest of the Canfields swear revenge on McKay’s baby son-and-heir. Twenty-one years later, Willie McKay (Buster Keaton) has grown up in New York, ignorant of the feud. When he returns to his father’s ranch, he finds himself in the awkward position of having fallen in love with Virginia Canfield (Natalie Talmadge), daughter of his newly discovered deadly enemy Joseph Canfield (Joe Roberts). How will matters be resolved?

With a great deal of laughs and a breath-taking series of stunts. Our Hospitality is early Keaton but already it cements his legend of comic invention and physical daring as well as his dynamism and imagination as a filmmaker. Our Hospitality is crammed with comic bits of pieces that Keaton would go on to explore and finetune in even greater detail in later films, but also culminates in a (admittedly slightly tongue-in-cheek) but still surprisingly gripping action sequence as our hero battles to survive a mountainous waterfall and save his love from toppling.

The film neatly divides into four acts, each subtly different in tone but all unified by Keaton’s creativity. Stone-faced and implacable, Keaton never mugs or goes overboard for the laugh but trusts that, with the intimacy of the camera, the smallest inflection or slightest turn of the head will raise a chuckle. He’s also charmingly innocent, refreshingly resourceful and rather brave – a perfect combination for a little guy (it helps, as always, that Keaton is literally a little guy) we root for.

That charm powers a lot of the film’s second act, a long incident-filled train journey McKay takes to the South. Keaton was fascinated by the comic potential of early technology – watching Willie, po-facedly, cycling with an early peddle-free bike, his feet alternately propelling the bike and lifted in the air is hilarious (the Smithsonian even asked if it could display this perfect replica) – and he deliberately set the film in 1831 to introduce a Stephenson-style rocket train, pulling its open carriages behind it. This vehicle not only looks hilariously ramshackle and strangely incongruous, it also opens an ocean of possibilities.

It is, for starters, hilariously slow – Willie’s dog has no problem keeping up with it. Its tracks have been laid with a rigid rule-following lack of imagination – at one point they ride up over a fallen tree log, the train and carriages bumping over it. The train is forced to stop by a donkey that refuses to leave the line (eventually the engineer simply drags the tracks around the donkey). There is an on-going feud between the Engineer (played by Keaton’s father Joe) and ticket-master about who is actually in charge of the train. At one point it veers off the tracks and down a road (everyone comments about how much more smoother this is) and later gets separated from the carriages at a junction, requiring Keaton gymnastics to bring it together. By the time it trundles into the station – and note how beautifully the train is filmed – you’ve had more comic invention than most other comedies.

During this journey Willie falls in love with fellow passenger Virginia (played, a little awkwardly, by Keaton’s wife Natalie Talmadge), little knowing she is a Canfield. The Canfields swiftly discover his identity: Willie asks one of her brother’s directions to his ranch, and the brother guides him there, all the while darting away at every opportunity to try and borrow a gun to take his revenge.

Most of the second act, which gives the film its title, revolves around Willie’s invite from Natalie to dinner at the Canfield house. Southern gentility declares the Canfields cannot take revenge on Willie while he is their guest – as soon as Willie realises this he does everything he can to remain in the house, as the (literal) instant he steps outside the door, guns come out. (Keaton also gets a lot of comic mileage from the cumbersome one-shot guns, which Willie frequently pinches to discharge to give himself a few precious moments to move outside while various Canfield’s reload).

When Willie eventually flees the house – disguised as a lady – it leads into a glorious, action-packed chase scene. Scaling mountains and cliffs, shot with a vertigo inducing brilliance (in reality Keaton placed the camera on its side and made it appear with his genius physicality that he was climbing rather than crawling). There are falls into rapids, Willie is dragged behind a racing train carriage and finally bobs and floats down a rapid (including one shot, kept in the film, where Keaton’s rope snapped and he was literally washed head first down a river). It culminates in an athletic, stunt-filled, precarious balance on a log suspended over a waterfall (a brilliant backdrop shot makes this feel impossibly high), swinging desperately on a rope to save Virginia from falling.

Our Hospitality is awash with comic energy and genius touches of business but it’s also an impressively ahead-of-its-time in the skill of its plotting and structure – you could pretty much remake it exactly today (but with words) without changing a detail, and it would still be a hit. But it wouldn’t be a legend because the only thing you wouldn’t have is Keaton. And he’s the lodestone that balances the whole thing.

Coming Home (1978)

Emotional but a little too worthy Vietnam message movie, well-directed with great performances

Director: Hal Ashby

Cast: Jane Fonda (Sally Hyde), Jon Voight (Luke Martin), Bruce Dern (Captain Bob Hyde), Penelope Milford (Vi Munson), Robert Carradine (Robert Munson), Robert Gintu (Sgt Dink Mobley), Mary Gregory (Martha Vickery), Kathleen Miller (Kathy Delise)

Vietnam is a jagged scar on the soul of America but, more than that, it’s been a literal scar for the veterans. Luke Martin (Jon Voight) was a college athletic star, now returned from the frontlines as an angry paraplegic, struggling with post-traumatic stress. Helping him – eventually – is old school-friend Sally Hyde (Jane Fonda), married to a Marine captain Bob (Bruce Dern) who has himself shipped out to Vietnam. Sally and Luke find themselves growing closer and closer emotionally, as their hostility towards the brutal war grows. But how will Bob – still loved by Sally and himself ever more scarred by trauma – react when he returns from the front?

Coming Home was released in the same year as The Deer Hunter and makes for an interesting comparison. While Cimino’s film is a horrific plunge into the grisly horrors of war, combined with a sort of mesmeric epic poetry, Ashby’s Coming Home is a quieter, more domestic piece, an earnest attempt to explore trauma. There is no doubting the passion of all those involved: but Coming Home is at times a little too earnest. Despite its moments of undeniable emotional impact, its sometimes feels a little too pointedly like a “message” film, worn a little too heavily on its sleeve.

But, saying that, there are many positives. It’s shot with a skilful casualness by Ashby, whose unobtrusive camera makes us a witness to events (at one crucial point it is even half obstructed by a door). Ashby has a poetic sensibility that flies in the face of what could have been its soapy roots. He lets scenes unfold with such ease and gentleness of touch that you only slowly notice how extremely well assembled the film is. There is a whimsical, lyrical sadness about the whole thing – matched with a striking lack of condemnation of people, only for a system that bends and twists human beings into killing machines.

It uses a parade of hit songs, but the songs play not as snippets but as full performances, playing out over several scenes, scenes which at first seem to be directly counter to the lyrics and tone of the song itself. Then you notice the skill with which the film has been edited to the beat of the music, and how much The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Hendrix, Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan and many others set the tone for a whole era. Coming Home captures this tone, an era of optimism crushed by brutal contact with the cold, dark realities of the world. The songs weave themselves in and out of scenes, capturing an overwhelming sense of a nation lost and confused.

It’s in this framework the relationship between Luke and Sally flourishes as Luke begins finding purpose in his life. Heavily based on the life of Ron Kovic, Jon Voight won an Oscar for his extraordinarily committed performance. From early outbursts of naked fury and pain, wheeling himself around on a hospital bed, his outbursts seemingly only prevented by medication, Voight charts the development of Luke as a humanitarian and compassionate man, committed to helping others overcome their pain and loss.

He also develops an attachment to Sally that transcends physical attraction: the two are kindred spirits. Fonda (effectively the film’s producer), generously takes on the film’s least interesting role as the disengaged, homespun Sally, increasingly horrified by the war’s impact on veterans – and the lack of interest from others (capturing the whole sweep-it-under-the-carpet attitude of the armed services, her military wives’ club refuses to include a report from Luke’s hospital in their newsletter because it’s too depressing). This translates into a deep attraction for Luke, the only other person who truly shares her growing resentment for the war.

Coming Home gained much attention at the time for its frank depiction of sex, with Luke and Sally tenderly overcoming the barriers of his disability. (Although today, their coupling – with Fonda replaced by a body double – culminating in Sally’s first ever orgasm feels a little too obvious in its comparisons with her passionless flings with Bob). But sex is less important than sharing their feelings, from Luke’s talk of dreams where he can still walk to Sally’s doubts about her life choices.

If there is a problem with Coming Home, it’s that the film doesn’t really know what to do with these characters other than showcase their pain. It tends to make sharp jumps – Luke’s recovery from initial rage to tender, thoughtful man feels very swift. And although Penelope Milford is good value as Sally’s best friend, struggling to deal with her veteran brother’s collapsing mental health, her plotline and performance is a little too obviously designed to contrast with Sally’s.

The basic problem with Coming Home is that in its rush to establish the fundamental decency of its characters – and the appalling horror of the war they are wrapped up in – it often avoids drama of struggle. It makes an interesting contrast with Zinnemann’s The Men which turned Brando’s paraplegic veteran’s psychological recovery into an entire movie: here Luke’s finding of a new purpose is as swift as his mood shift is.

The film’s most interesting plotline actually follows Dern’s Bob Hyde. Dern gives the film’s most complex performance as a dedicated solider, struggling with deep denial about his growing disaffection and unacknowledged PTSD, confronting his wife’s infidelity with a mix of anger and desperation to receive a comforting hug from her. Hyde’s discovery of the affair is its most melodramatic moment, but also strangely its most unpredictable – and a film exploring this character’s switch in perspective might just have been a little more challenging.

But Coming Home has plenty to recommend it. Voight has never been better, warm, tender and throbbing with emotion, his closing speech to a roomful of students exhorting them not to fight and choking back tears that taking another life is never worth it, is worth the price of admission alone. Ashby’s film has a poetic sensibility to it and if it sometimes feels a little too self-righteously earnest about its anti-war credentials, and a little too aware of its status as a “message movie”, at least it is a message that needs to be heard.

The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming (1966)

Ealingesque farce meets Cold War moralising in this not-quite funny enough farce

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: Carl Reiner (Walt Whittaker), Eva Marie Saint (Elspeth Whittaker), Alan Arkin (Rozanov), Brian Keith (Link Mattocks), Theodore Bikel (Captain), Jonathan Winters (Norman Jones), Tessie O’Shea (Alice Foss), John Philip Law (Alexei Kolchin), Ben Blue (Luther Grilk), Andrea Dromm (Alison Palmer), Paul Ford (Fendall Hawkins)

Off the coast of a New England island, a Russian captain (Theodore Bikel) wants to take a quick peek at the US of A. Bad idea. When his sub runs aground, they are forced to send a party ashore led by political officer Rozanov (Alan Arkin) to find a motor launch to get the sub back out to sea. They run into the Whittakers – playwright Walt (Carl Reiner), wife Elspeth (Eva Marie Saint) and their kids – take them hostage, steal their car, cut the telephone lines and try to save themselves. The town quickly hears news of the possible arrival of Russians, and the hysteria grows – just as Walt starts to feel his sympathies grow for the terrified Russian sailors. Can peace be reached across the divide?

The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming is basically an Ealing-esque comedy – written by Ealing veteran William Rose – translated not entirely successfully to America. Directed with an epic, widescreen sweep by Norman Jewison that sometimes crushes the life out of a comedy of confusion and coincidence, The Russians are Coming wants to be both a broad farce and carry an earnest message about the Cold War. It’s quite sweet that the film, made four years after Cuba nearly turned the world into an ash pile, wants to focus on what unites as humans rather than divides us, but the message is at times crow-barred in a little too forcibly.

It’s very hard not to see the Ealing influence on every single scene – and I suspect the film would have worked better as 4:3 black-and-white film full of harassed people in offices and homes, rather than the grand panoramas of the town and large crowd scenes. The Ealing influence can be seen in the townsfolk, who become a farcical panicked crowd of have-a-go heroes, making sweeping decisions based on no information at all, led by puffed up self-important, self-elected leaders determined to seize their moments of heroism. Misunderstandings abound, as tiny pieces of evidence balloon the “threat” into a full-blown invasion: the crowd are almost disappointed when they arrive at an airfield to find not a smouldering ruin but an operator blissfully unaware anything is going on.

Similarly, the Russians themselves fit nicely into the Ealing model of ordinary, decent, underdogs up against the system (in this case the townsfolk). In a brave touch, the Russian in the film is never translated – Theodore Bikel doesn’t have a line in English – meaning we only gradually learn what is going on and why, as Arkin’s character explains things to Whittaker in stumbling half-English. Arkin is, by the way, the film’s prize asset, demonstrating excellent comic timing and delivering his dialogue in a parade of Russian and fumbling English (there is a great sequence where he earnestly tutors his men on how to pass as officials clearing the street, teaching them phrases just a few degrees incorrect that will make them stick out like sore thumbs as soon as they open their mouths).

The film is never quite funny enough though and Jewison’s direction neither tight nor taut enough to keep the farcical pace up. There are one too many wrong turns taken by the Russians, one too many narrative cul-de-sacs as townsfolk barrel up and down the streets. The whole film plays out like this, many of its effective comic performers among the townsfolk lost among a sea of people and faces. Arkin and Reiner get the most impact, because their scenes tend to make place in individual rooms in set-ups that let us clearly see their faces and appreciate their comic skills.

The Russians are Coming largely struggles to keep the pace up – the best of the Ealing comedies told their farce-tinged struggles between the little-guy and the system, or confusion between two fundamentally sympathetic groups, in about 90 minutes, and this feels heavily over-stretched at a little over two hours. That’s partly because of the political statements which the film dresses up as a sub-plots. A romance between John Philip Law’s Russian sailor and the Whittakers’ babysitter Tessie O’Shea is all too obviously a plea for using love as bridge-building. The final alliance between the Russians and the townspeople, forged in their joint rescuing of an endangered child, bangs the “we are all the same” drum a little too persistently.

It makes the film today feel a little too much like it’s trying to have its cake and eat it: to be both a farce where Reiner’s playwright gets tied up to a librarian and the two struggle to free themselves in a series of pratfalls, and also a political statement about the bonds that can be built if we just let the Cold War melt a little bit. I won’t deny this must have had more impact in the 1960s, but today it makes for a film that is a little too grandiose where it should be nimble, and a little too lightweight when it should be important.

Freud (1962)

This intriguing film makes an excellent attempt at exploring the nature of thought

Director: John Huston

Cast: Montgomery Clift (Sigmund Freud), Susannah York (Cecily Koertner), Larry Parks (Dr Joseph Breuer), Eric Portman (Dr Theodore Meynet), Susan Kohner (Martha Freud), Eileen Herlie (Ida Koetner), Fernand Ledoux (Dr Charcot), David McCallum (Carl von Schlosser), Rosalie Crutchley (Amalia Freud)

Few thinkers had as much impact on the 20th century as Sigmund Freud. For generations, Freud’s theories on psychology and sexuality were defining texts shaping perceptions of our inner world. John Huston was fascinated by his work, translating its spirit into this thought-provoking, if at times clinical, film that focuses on a few key years in Freud’s life and does its very best to communicate the thought behind the theory, while being careful to never delve too far into thornier matters. (Despite the poster’s blaring tagline “He dared to search beyond the flesh!”).

Freud is played by Montgomery Clift, whom we meet in 1885 Vienna as a young doctor. Freud’s theories that physical ailments might have a psychological cause are widely dismissed by the medical establishment, represented by smug Dr Meynet (Eric Portman). However, Freud is convinced the secret of treating neurosis lies within – not least since he recognises symptoms of neurosis in his own dreams, haunted by half-memories of his mother and complex feelings for his father. Working with his mentor Dr Joseph Breuer (Larry Parks), Freud explores hypnosis to access patients’ repressed feelings, working closely with Cecily Koertner (Susannah York), a young woman who has inexplicably lost the ability to walk. Slowly Freud begins to form a theory of sexuality in children, as well as discovering guided discussions and word association to be more effective than hypnosis.

Huston’s film is shot in luscious black and white by Douglas Slocombe, composed of a mixture of images that balance painterly influences with surrealist nightmares. Freud and Koertner’s dream sequences are shot with a grainy intensity, a series of chilling images ranging from Freud being dragged towards his enthroned mother by a roped dwarf to Koertner’s mother domineering a beach from a grand tower. These surrealist touches tear through a film that otherwise presents a more earnest exploration of Freud’s theorising. It serves as a necessary contrast to the constraining formality of 19^th-century Vienna, where inner passions and feelings are routinely stamped down.

Freud studiously explores the evolution of its subject’s thinking, in particular through his analysis of the fictional Cecily (standing in for several patients). Played with gusto by Susannah York, the film carefully structures her psychological make-up as a detective mystery to be slowly peeled away, with wrong-turns, false dawns and incorrect assumptions abounding. Initially treated with caring patience by Breuer’s hypnosis, slowly Freud replaces his mentor first as a doctor and then (to his subtle discomfort) as the subject of Cecily’s transposed attractions. These interior searches, eventually culminating in Freud’s first experiments of psychoanalysis and word association, are fascinating moments that pivot the film, with convincing false conclusions regularly introduced to constantly challenge the viewer’s assumptions.

It leads to the formulation of Freud’s Oedipal theories that cross a Rubicon his mentor cannot. In that, Breuer is joined by most of the medical profession. Huston’s film is strong on the stuffy self-confidence of the establishment, too hide-bound by its own ideas to recognise genius in their midst. Portman’s grandiose Dr Meynet gently, but firmly and devastatingly, rubbishes any nascent idea that neurosis patients are anything other than idlers and whingers. Meetings where Freud presents papers offer choruses of raucous boos and naked fury (at one point a dignified doctor literally stands up and spits at Freud’s feet in disgust). Hypnosis, with its vague medical support for its method is used as something close to a parlour trick by an otherwise supportive Dr Charcot (Fernand Ledoux) to pass physical symptoms from patient to patient, demonstrating the symptom is psychological even as he does nothing to understand the cause.

The path to decoding the human mind – as the film firmly believes Freud’s theories have done, hammered home by Huston’s narration which opens and closes the films and intermittently provides an internal monologue for Freud – is a bumpy one. Freud is frequently disturbed by the implications of his investigations. A young solider – a fragile David McCallum – alarms him when, under hypnosis, he reveals a deep, sexual longing for his mother via the fondling of a mannequin (naturally concealed under his father’s uniform). Freud’s closeness to his mother – a marvellous Rosalie Crutchley – becomes wrapped up in his theories, his dreams and memories haunted by half-remembered encounters and longings that cause him great unease.

Much of the clarity of this unease – and the tension as the unsettling implications of Freud’s nascent beliefs become more apparent – owes its success to Clift’s performance in the lead role. Clift was in extremely poor health at the time, still suffering from the effects of a near fatal car crash (including cataracts that affected his vision). An addiction to painkillers and alcohol had shot his memory to pieces. He struggled to remember lines (so much so the studio attempted to sue him for the film’s many delays), but his soulfulness appears to glorious effect. He makes Freud a profound and troubled but artistic thinker, a humanitarian full of empathy which also makes him a conduit for guilt and shame. His impassive face makes him the perfect listener but does not hide his own torment. It’s a marvellous performance, one that manages to convey the power of thinking.

Unfortunately, its genesis is also bound up in the story of the film’s making, that has often dwarfed the film itself in discussions about this intriguing movie. Huston – increasingly angry at Clift’s unreliability, compounded by his alpha-male disgust at Clift’s homosexuality – bullied the actor relentlessly during the film’s making, forcing him into take-after-take after every line flub to the increased anger of the other actors (York, in particular, was outspoken in her disgust at this). Huston had also originally written a script with Jean-Paul Sartre but, not surprisingly, the two were incompatible, Sartre eventually having his name removed from the credits.

It’s a shame these stories have dominated the discussion of the film, as it is a rich, intriguing work directed with a thoughtfulness by Huston that helps it become a thoughtful and patient film, rather than a triumphalist one (the film lacks either a eureka moment or a closing triumph, leaving Freud still rejected by the establishment and quietly visiting his father’s grave, having come to terms with his own feelings). With a marvellous performance by Clift – even if his treatment on set was shocking – it’s an intelligent, intriguing and well-handled exploration of a complex theme. It’s more than a curiosity, it’s a measured and serious film with flashes of surrealism that engages intelligently with important themes.

Escape from Alcatraz (1979)

Siegel’s quietly observed prison break drama masters the small details

Director: Don Siegel

Cast: Clint Eastwood (Frank Morris), Patrick McGoohan (The Warden), Fred Ward (John Anglin), Jack Thibeau (Clarence Anglin), Larry Hankin (Charley Butts), Frank Ronzio (Litmus), Roberts Blossom (Chester “Doc” Dalton), Paul Benjamin (English), Bruce M Fischer (Wolf Grace)

In 1962, three men dug their way out of the cells in Alcatraz, climbed into a raft made of raincoats and sailed into San Francisco Bay and mystery. Not a trace was ever seen again of Frank Morris (Clint Eastwood), John Anglin (Fred Ward) or Clarence Anglin (Jack Thibeau), but their story became a cause celebre. Some say they disappeared to South America – many more believe they drowned in the freezing cold water of the Bay. Siegel’s film covers the details of the escape attempt – and leaves more than a hint that they escaped.

Escape from Alcatraz is a quintessential prison movie. It’s got the complete genre checklist: sadistic wardens, bullying in the courtyard, the threat of rape in the showers, solitary confinement, boring routines and jobs, unfair access to privileges, cagey alliances, the little details of a plan coming together, hair’s-breadth escapes from being caught and a “we go now or not at all” climax. It’s all mounted extremely well by Siegel, shot on location with such a searing coldness you can practically feel the chill the prisoners suffered all the time.

Alcatraz is made up of two things: quiet and time. Siegel’s film therefore delves into both of these things. From its opening montage detailing Morris’ arrival at the prison – on the boat, checking-in, cavity searches and tramping naked down to his cell – images and silence tell their own story. For the guards, words are formulaic and repetitive. Eastwood as Morris is barely ever out of shot but doesn’t speak for ten minutes. It’s the same for many other sequences, detailing prison life: quiet conversations in the yard, the pointless moves from place to place, the grinding procedure.

Time stretches without meaning in Alcatraz, so it’s no great sacrifice for Morris to work out that he can scratch away the brickwork around the drain in his cell and create a hole large enough to allow him to get to the unguarded ventilation corridors on the other side. (He works out it connects – eventually – to the outside by observing a cockroach crawl out of his cell.) Morris then reckons he’s got nothing better to do than to scratch away at that wall with a stolen nail pick, a labour that will take him months to extend the hole to something he can climb through.

Siegel also makes a great deal of this through his long-earned knowledge of how best to work with his star. This is one of Eastwood’s finest performances, a slate of determined, dry-witted stillness that communicates great thoughtfulness and ingenuity behind a stoic exterior. Morris maybe a compulsive thief, but he’s no fool – and he doesn’t suffer them either. He’s contemptuous of the self-importance of many of the warden and unrelenting in his determination to use whatever he can lay his hands on to help facilitate his escape attempt.

You’d be desperate to escape from Alcatraz too. Grim, very cold and crowded with bullies like Wolf (Bruce M Fischer), a puffed-up psychopath looking for a new punk (though as Quentin Tarantino said in a recent book, no one alive would look at Clint Eastwood and believe he’d be an easy shower victim). Meals are vile and the punishment of solitary is beyond tough: pitch black cells, only interrupted by the door being flung open so a high-pressure hose can ‘shower’ you with cold water (even Morris is reduced to something close to trembling wreck after a month of this treatment in the hole). It all leads into his determination to use anything he can to get out.

Siegel’s film loves the tiny details of small, inconsequential items converted into the means to escape. Unwanted magazines from the library become papier-mache to craft dummy heads to disguise the gang’s absence from their beds while they make preparations the other side of their wall. An accordion case smuggles goods around the prison. Makeshift candles are assembled. A set of portrait paints are used to paint the dummies and create a cardboard fake wall to place over the newly created hole. We see the painstaking effort to assemble enough coats to create their life-raft, the puzzling out of what is needed to get them from the ventilation roof to the other side.

Escape from Alcatraz presents these Herculean labours with simplicity but a patient eye for detail that makes them become strangely noble and hugely tense. You put aside your knowledge that these are hardened criminals – the film does everything it can to downplay their offences – and instead focus on them as victims of an unjust system, with “the man” crushing any hope from them.

As such, Patrick McGoohan has a huge amount of fun in a lip-smacking role as the prison warden. (It’s fun to see the world’s most famous Prisoner as the man handing out the numbers.) McGoohan’s unnamed warden has everything the men have not – not least words. He’s not starved by silence, but pontificates at pompous length about his theories of incarceration and the inevitable pointlessness of rehabilitation. Just to make sure our sympathy for the prisoners is complete, he’s also a vindictive bully, stripping prisoner “Doc” (Roberts Blossom) of his painting privileges because he doesn’t like a portrait made of him (tipping Doc into depressive self-harm), then provoking old-timer Litmus (Frank Ronzio) into a risky physical altercation. He’s unjust, unfair and mean.

So when he says at the end that he’s certain the prisoners died, of course we don’t want to believe him. Not least since we’ve been with the prisoners every minute of their desperate throw of the dice. In real life, they almost certainly froze to death in the Bay, their raft not being strong enough to help them complete the mile long swim before the icy water paralyzed them. But Escape from Alcatraz makes you want to believe they could have got away.

Andrei Rublev (1966)

Tarkovsky’s masterpiece is one of the greatest films ever made about art and creativity

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

Cast: Anatoly Solonitsyn (Andrei Rublev), Ivan Lapikov (Kirill), Nikolai Grinko (Danlil Chyorny), Nikolai Sergeyev (Theopanes the Greek), Irma Raush (Durochka), Nikolai Burlyayev (Boriska), Yuriy Nazarov (Prince Yury/Grand Duke Vasily I), Rolan Bykov (Jester), Mikhail Kononov (Foma)

I’ve always been a Tarkovsky sceptic. But Andrei Rublev is a masterpiece. Perhaps only Tarkovsky could have made a film about an artist and never once show a paintbrush in action or design a film about creativity that drips with shocking violence. Andrei Rublev avoids the cliches of cradle-to-grave biography – helped by the fact we know almost nothing about this medieval icon painter – presenting instead a series of vignettes suggesting possible influences on the work of an artist. It makes for an intriguing, fascinating film, challenging but infinitely rewarding.

Tarkovsky’s film roughly chronicles 24 years (1400-1424) in the life of Andrei Rublev (Anatoly Solonitsyn). But this is far from a straight-forward narrative, and the episodes themselves often seem only loosely linked and the movement of time and location often feels hazy. In many of these scenes Rublev is often a quiet observer or a man searching for depth and meaning, uncertain of his own views, aspirations and how he wishes to express his faith.

Over the course of the film, he observes a travelling Jester (Rolan Bykov) punished for mocking the social order, debates theology with his mentor Theopanes the Greek (Nikolai Sergeyev), is tempted by a pagan orgy in the forest and witnesses shocking acts of violence (including taking a life himself) in a civil war between two feuding noble brothers. Eventually taking a vow of silence, it is his witnessing of the rapturous reception of the successful casting of a giant bell – and the relieved shock of the teenage bell-master (Nikolai Burlyayev) that confirms to him the spiritual importance of providing consolation and joy to others through religious art.

Shot in a luscious black-and-white, Tarkovsky’s film presents a series of beautifully composed images that constantly invites us to re-interpret and re-imagine what we are seeing. This is not history as picture-book or progressive story. This is Tarkovsky at his best, a sprawling dream that never tries to clumsily link events to artistic outcomes or obvious motivations, but to suggest how the atmosphere of the world can form an artist’s spirit.

This is a medieval world that feels immersive, grimy and real – but also hums with a gorgeous sense of possibility. Tarkovsky frequently shoots horses, his camera lingering on these free-spirited animals that represent the freedom nature can give us. A close connection with the natural world draws the characters in time and again: Theopanes sits contentedly and allows ants to swarm over his legs, the bell is born in a dug-out crater in the earth itself. Water recurs as a symbol of possibility and temptation: Rublev’s pupil Foma daydreams of flying while washing brushes in water and later meets his death in a river; Andrei spies the naked pagan celebration in the river, then averts his eyes when rowing past their inevitable arrest. In the film’s prologue an early balloonist flies across a river, while at its conclusion Rublev and Boriska crouch and comfort each other in a water-logged field. Nature is elemental, bringing characters closer to an understanding of themselves and others.

In contrast, Tarkovsky’s film is striking for presenting what a destructive, violent and brutal force the ambitions of man can be. A yearning for power and recognition time and again develops into of violence. The jester is consigned to beating and years of imprisonment due to the close-minded resentment of intelligent-but-uninspired monk Kirill (Ivan Lapikov). A group of stonemasons are brutally blinded in the forest (violence even corrupts nature) by the Grand Duke’s men for standing by their rights. Most strikingly, Andrei witnesses a brutal massacre (vividly shot with hellish detail by, the entire sequence echoing the Eastern Front in World War II) in the city of Vladimir, where the Grand Duke’s brother’s forces indiscriminately rape and slaughter the population (including a horde of survivors searching for sanctuary in the church Rublev has just decorated with icons) and brutally torture and murder a monk (culminating in feeding him a melted golden cross). Even the bell-makers labour under the threat of instant death should their work fail and the bell crack.

Tarkovsky perhaps suggests the possibility of beauty and violence goes hand-in-hand for all of us. I feel that is the message of his fascinating – but never clearly explained – prologue. Set in an unspecified time and place, a medieval balloonist takes to the skies while, on the ground, panicked villagers (seeing the flight as witchcraft) attack his assistants. The balloonist flies with joy over the river – then crashes to the ground (and probably his death). This Icarus fable is, perhaps, about the difficulties of reaching for the sublime when the world constantly wants to pull us down. There is little place for invention and creativity in an existence that places a premium on earthly concerns, where art is just another tool for maintaining the power of the elites and the masses fear change.

It’s what Rublev is straining to rebel against. He lives in a world – and it’s hard to resist the idea Tarkovsky was suggesting Soviet Russia was little different – where art is a tool of control, feathering the glory of the powerful. He struggles to paint a Last Judgement because, as he argues with fellow artist Danlil (Nikolai Grinko) he doesn’t want to create an image designed to terrify the masses into faith. The Duke’s motivation for painting his Church is to make it grander than his brother’s. The bell is cast as a show for foreign dignitaries. The jester’s performance is punished for its satire.

Andrei is contrasted with the more overtly intellectual – but uninspired and untalented – Kirill, played with surely resentment and self-loathing by Ivan Lapikov. Judgemental and arrogant, Kirill dreams of having his genius recognised (approached by Theopanes to work with him, he is more interested in having the offer repeated publicly than the work itself) and lashes out at both the jester and his own dog for having the sort of freedom he can never find in himself.

Temptation and vanity also stands in the way of achievement. Shot in a style reminiscent of Christ in the wilderness, Andrei is fascinated by the pagan orgy he witnesses. He is similarly drawn, for reasons he seems not quite to understand, towards the beautiful holy fool Durochka (Irma Raush), who he will brutally defend from rape in Vladimir. A vow of silence – and a Sisyphean labour moving heated rocks around a snow-bound monastery – is his self-appointed punishment for both his dreams of glory and his yearnings for romantic couplings. Art can be challenging.

But its results can be beautiful and inspire higher feelings. In the aftermath of the massacre of Vladimir, Andrei imagines a discussion with the long-dead Theopanes (Tarkovsky skilfully shoots this sequence with Theopanes appearing at every turn Andrei makes) who scorns Andrei’s grief and guilt over his burned church icons (and the false clash their beauty makes with the brutal world around them) and proclaims their beauty is a purpose in themselves. It’s a feeling Andrei only understands when seeing the people react with joy to the casting of the bell.

The final bell sequence – which brings all characters together to witness – would in itself make a masterful short movie and is certainly the finest extended sequence Tarkovsky ever made and a wonder in its own right. Immersed in the detail – and offering a fine portrait of bullish determination and artistic dictatorialness from Nikolai Burlyayev’s laser-focused Boriska – shot with a striking series of long shots and edits (some of the birds-eye shots are extraordinary) Tarkovsky creates a sequence of inspiration and tension. The careful, omnious, build-up to see if the bell will ring creates the same joyful relief in the audience as it does the watching crowds. It’s also perhaps the finest example on screen of the strangely empty, nervous release the culmination of creativity can bring.

Andrei Rublev is a fascinating, challenging and deeply engrossing art-house picture that alone cements Tarkovsky’s position among the greats. Finding colour only at the end with a series of awe-inspiring studies of the details in Rublev’s paintings, it reaches a finer understanding of the struggles in the soul of the artist than hundreds of more traditional biopics. Solonitsyn is superb as the enigmatic Rublev, the film a brilliant pageant of events (much like the medieval passion play Rublev remembers witnessing) that uses incidents to give us a final picture of understanding. It becomes one of the most oblique but constantly thought-provoking explorations of artists ever made – and a film where hours of thinking only scratches the surface of its possibilities.

Hardcore (1979)

Familiar ideas from better films are mixed together in this revenge thriller

Director: Paul Schrader

Cast: George C Scott (Jake van Dorn), Peter Boyle (Andy Mast), Season Hubley (Niki), Dick Sargent (Wes De Jong), Leonard Gaines (Bill Ramada), Dave Nichols (Kurt), Gary Graham (Tod), Larry Block (Detective Burrows), Ilah Davies (Kristen van Dorn), Marc Alaimo (Rattan)

A man prowls the urban streets, his face fixed with disgust at their degeneration, looking for a soul to save, the whiff of potential violence strong on him. He hunts for a lost family member, in an obsessive quest where it’s not even sure he will want to take her back even if he finds her. If that makes Hardcore sound like a remix of Taxi Driver and The Searchers… well that’s because it is. Schrader’s film is a well-made, initially well-executed riff on familiar themes that eventually tries to settle for something far easier to digest, with an ending that stinks of a shallow Chinatown.

Jake van Dorn (George C Scott) is a devoutly Calvinist businessman in Michigan. A single father, whose wife has left him, his beloved daughter Kristen (Ilah Davies) disappears one day after a church-sponsored visit to California. Van Dorn leaves no stone unturned to investigate, eventually hiring sleazy PI Andy Mast (Peter Boyle), who discovers an 8mm porno film starring Kristen. Was she kidnapped? Is she in danger? Van Dorn will find her, throwing himself into the seedy world of porn in an obsessive quest where no line will be uncrossed until he brings his daughter home.

There are many things to admire in Hardcore. Shot by Taxi Driver veteran Michael Chapman, it’s immersive seedy view of the underbelly of California is extremely striking. Schrader also quite neatly counterpoints this with the picket-fence conservatism of van Dorn’s stomping grounds at home. Van Dorn starts as a man who expresses hesitation that a shade of blue in his office might be too garish, and ends donning fake wig and moustache alongside loud shirt to pass as a porn baron.

What’s interesting about Hardcore is that, even though its actually Schrader’s second film, it feels like an over-anxious debut. It’s blatant stylistic and thematic call-backs to Taxi Driver – hammered home as we watch van Dorn cruise the streets of California, the porn shops and theatres neon signs reflected in his windows – makes you feel Schrader wished he had held on to the rights to direct that film himself. It’s extremely on-the-nose pinching of most of the structure of The Searchers feels like a loving tribute from a director yet to find his own voice.

Schrader however does an excellent job with much of the film’s first half. The oppressive tension build-up from the moment Mast arrives (Boyle’s casting, of course, being another eerie reminder of Taxi Driver) really grips. Scott’s stunned, shattered and increasingly appalled, primal reaction to watching his daughter in a porno is delivered with the sort of gusto and commitment that only a great actor can pull off. His increasingly-obsessive, won’t-take-no-for-an-answer delve into the world of porn – from knocking shops to porn film sets – has just the right sense of van Dorn slowly developing into a time bomb that could go off, while never losing our sympathy.

Hardcore is contemptuous of porn. Sharing van Dorn’s perspective of the industry, the film cements the industry as being based in a Danteish circle of hell, with violence, exploitation and misery round every corner. Schrader also enjoys poking fun at the porn industry and the film industry (a flashy porn director trained at UCLA, much like Schrader’s contemporaries). Searching for witnesses, van Dorn sets up fake auditions for a new porn movie, attended by a series of optimistic, hopeful guys with show reels and CVs. The money-first producers look and sound like any other Hollywood executive – it’s just they openly trade in skin.

The problem is Hardcore can’t settle for this: as if worried that poking some fun at the seedy industry might get in the way of us relating to the gut-punch horror van Dorn feels. In the second half, Schrader sets up (out of the blue) a snuff film premise, with an anonymous big bad behind it all (a figure so undeveloped that the most interesting thing about him is he’s played by Marc Alaimo who played Deep Space Nine’s villain Gul Dukat) just so we can have someone so obviously unspeakable that we have no mixed feelings at all when the violence kicks off.

Which is a shame because Hardcore looks, for a moment, like it is about to go somewhere more interesting. Van Dorn is broken from his obsessive focus only by meeting with Niki (played with just enough ballsy cuteness by Season Hubley), a girl on the margins of the industry dreaming of an escape. The two of them are drawn together in unexpected ways: she respects his religion in a way no-one else does, while van Dorn becomes the only man who doesn’t see her as a sex object, treating her with a fatherly gentleness you suspect he never showed his actual daughter. The film’s ruthless jettisoning of this plotline strives for hard-nosed reality, but ends up feeling like a too obvious attempt at pathos.

Despite all this Hardcore has its moments, not least thanks to George C Scott’s fire-cracker performance in the lead. Scott may have hated Schrader (allegedly begging him to never direct a film again), but he breathes life into this Ethan Edwards-Travis Bickle clone, making van Dorn just the right mix of pained, aggrieved and dangerous. Unfortunately, the film settles for something far more conventional, a revenge thriller with an obvious and inarguably horrible character created solely to make us feel good when he is dispatched.

All the President’s Men (1976)

The greatest film about journalism ever made? This dense, detailed conspiracy thriller is a marvel.

Director: Alan J Pakula

Cast: Robert Redford (Bob Woodward), Dustin Hoffman (Carl Bernstein), Jason Robards (Ben Bradlee), Jack Warden (Harry M Rosenfeld), Martin Balsam (Howard Simons), Hal Holbrook (“Deep Throat”), Jane Alexander (The Bookkeeper), Stephen Collins (Hugh W Sloan Jnr), Ned Beatty (Martin Dardis), Meredith Baxter (Deborah Murrah Sloan), Penny Fuller (Sally Aiken)

If anything, even remotely, dodgy happens in politics than, quick as a flash, you can bet the suffix “gate” is added to it. It all stems from Watergate, the Washington building that was the location of the most disastrous attempted burglary in political history. Agents from the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP to you and me) broke into the Democratic office on a dirty tricks mission. They got caught, Nixon and his cronies decided to cover it up and obstruct justice – and when the story broke, it broke Nixon and his Presidency as well.

All the President’s Men covers the early days of how that story was broken by two junior reporters on the Washington Post: Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman). Involved in the case from the night of the break-in, the film (adapted from the book by ‘Wood-stein’) covers their pain-staking investigation to work out what lies behind this burglary and, if there is a conspiracy of silence, how far up the chain of the Presidency it reaches. As well as winning the trust of sources, they must also persuade editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) their reporting is rigorous and worth placing the full might of the paper behind them.

Produced by Redford, All the President’s Men is grounded in realism and the painstaking, methodical series of telephone calls, knocked doors, flicked reference books and sleepless sorting of facts and theories that lies behind investigative reporting. While never once slacking on the patience-defying, unglamourous, exhausting work, All the President’s Men may just have inspired more journalists to choose their career than any other film. This is journalism in all its freedom-of-speech, speaking-truth-to-power might and with Woodward and Bernstein already the most famous journalists alive, their glamour could only be doubled by being played by Redford and Hoffman.

The main obstacle All the President’s Men faced during its development was, how do you make the most famous political scandal in history suspenseful? After all (particularly in 1976) everyone watching the film knew more than the characters at every single step. The solution was fascinating. Not only does the film only focus on the second half of Woodward and Bernstein’s book – culminating in one of their biggest blunders – but the film would try and match the same confusion the journalists felt. All the President’s Men takes an already dense conspiracy – with a plethora of names and uncertain links – and works hard to make it more obtuse and obscure at every turn. Just like the journalists, mist surrounds us. Leads peter out. The focus shifts from scene-to-scene, from people to money. Nothing has been simplified or stream-lined. Instead, the film brilliantly captures the confusion the reports felt, making each revelation a beam of light.

It should, therefore, make the film disengaging and alienating. It’s quite the opposite. Alan J Pakula was already a master of 1970s American paranoia noir, and All the President’s Men is awash of the tension of questions answered and threats and dangers left hanging. There are shadowy implications throughout of dark forces at work, blocking our heroes. Potential witnesses seem terrified – in particular a CREEP book-keeper (a superb, Oscar-nominated, cameo of suppressed fear and nervy strength of purpose by Jane Alexander) who sits rigidly still, willing herself to share revelations.

Pakula’s film is tightly paced and frequently jumps over what could be otherwise clumsy narrative structures – the journalists frequently jump from A to C with the film avoiding functional scenes showing how they passed through B. With its quiet air of looming, indefinable menace – Gordon Willis’ photography makes for a superb mix of light and shade – All the President’s Men makes the unspooling of this conspiracy into pre-tension filled cinema.

It’s also a triumph of sound-mixing and editing. Sound levels drop in and out on key conversations – sometimes phrases are deliberately missed, at other times background sound drops out to sharply narrow our focus. The office of the Washington Post is a hive of background noise. Bernstein talks to a source and literally has to shout over a passing plane. The film sets its sound stall out with an opening eighteen seconds of grayish silent screen – until a crash like a gunshot reveals we have been starring at paper in a typewriter, the keys hammering letters in with earth-shattering impact.

It’s attention to journalistic detail is stunning. The offices of the Washington Post were recreated in detail, shot by Gordon Willis with a low-ceilinged brightness that contrasts completely with almost every other location in the film (in particular the car park, laid out with pillars that echo the office, where Woodward meets with shady informer “Deep Throat” it’s darkness where secrets are hid the polar opposite of a newsroom where secrets are revealed). In gripping single-takes, we watch Woodward conduct phone calls juggling sources (Redford even flubs a line at one point but works it seamlessly into the take) or Bernstein desperately track down sources for last-minute confirmations.

Willis uses a split dopter to brilliant effect. Effectively, this splits the lens in two – one half becomes a close-up, the other long-distance focus. It makes the screen a deeply unsettling mix of blur and crystal-clear clarity. So, while Woodward sits at his desk, we see blurred distance immediately around him – but on the other side of the screen far away other journalists clearly. Not only does this brilliantly create a sense of the endless bustle of the newsroom (also helped by the sound designs superb mix of typewriters and office noise) but also adds a visual metaphor of misty confusion that literally envelops our heroes.

All the President’s Men is a resolutely unflashy film for all of this. Its brilliance is all in its mastery of small details. It means more attention-grabbing shots – like the aerial shot of a circular library – carry even greater impact. The lack of flash also carries across to its stars, who have arguably never been better. Initially presented in two-shot exchanges (particularly in their first encounter over Bernstein rewriting Woodward’s text without his agreement), the two increasingly share the frame. Redford and Hoffman even learned each other’s lines so they could complete each other’s sentences – they almost become one character (‘Woodstein’).

The two actors were also wonderful contrasts, reflecting the two men they played. Redford, who worked hard to keep the project grounded, has a WASPY boy-scout decency and a relaxed unfussy star delivery, Hoffman the twitchy fiddling of the working-class reporter made good. Both actors have rarely been better. Equally good is the Oscar winning Robards who perfectly captures Bradlee’s avuncular professionalism while Holbrook is superbly enigmatic as the shadowy ‘Deep Throat’.

All the President’s Men demands attention like few other films – but it’s deliberately dense plot exactly matches the mystifying journey of the journalists themselves. It also turns journalism itself into a cause for typewriter knights (you could argue the downside of its legacy is journalism focused on ‘gotcha’ rather than informing). Pakula’s marvel is crammed with stunning sound and visual design and a lingering sense of paranoic fear. The film wants us to be as uncertain about what is happening as the characters – but in doing so it makes the greatest argument in favour of the power of journalism ever made by cinema.

Con Air (1997)

Big bangs and silly action abounds in Nicolas Cage’s enjoyable action epic

Director: Simon West

Cast: Nicolas Cage (Cameron Poe), John Cusack (US Marshal Vince Larkin), John Malkovich (Cyrus ‘The Virus’ Grissom), Steve Buscemi (Garland ‘The Marietta Mangler’ Greene), Ving Rhames (Nathan ‘Diamond Dog’ Jones), Colm Meaney (DEA Agent Duncan Malloy), Mykelti Williamson (Mike ‘Baby-O’ O’Dell), Rachel Ticotin (Guard Sally Bishop), Monica Potter (Tricia Poe), Dave Chappelle (Joe ‘Pinball’ Parker), MC Gainey (‘Swamp Thing’), Danny Trejo (‘Johnny 23’)

A rickety plane full of the worst of the worst and very low security. Battles to the death over the fate of a cuddly bunny. A car dragged after a flying plane. On any other day, that might all be considered strange. In Con Air it’s just grist to the mill. Made in the heart of Cage’s post-Oscar swerve from off-the-wall indie star to pumped-up, eccentric action star, Con Air is loud, brash, makes very little sense, feels like it was all made up on the spur of the moment and is rather good fun.

Cameron Poe (Nicholas Cage) is an Army Ranger who ends up in jail after he is forced to protect himself and his wife (Monica Potter), with deadly consequences, in an unprovoked bar brawl. Seven years later he is finally about to be released from prison to meet his young daughter for the first time. To get him to his release though, he’ll need to hitch a ride on a prison transfer plane that is shuttling the ‘worst of the worst’ to a high security prison. With criminal genius Cyrus ‘The Virus’ Grissom (John Malkovich) and his number two ‘Diamond Dog’ (Ving Rhames) on board, what could go wrong? Needless to say, the criminals seize the plane – can Cameron, with help on the ground from US Marshal Vince Larkin (John Cusack) protect the hostages and save the day?

There isn’t really any way of getting around this. Con Air is a very silly film. Nothing in it really bears thinking about logically. To the tune of a soft rock score and Leann Rimes (actually, How Do I Live is a damn good song, and I won’t hear a word otherwise), Simon West shoots the entire thing like it was a primary-coloured advert for action movies. It’s the sort of film that feels like the action set-pieces were written first – “The plane will crash on the in Las Vegas! Right, how do we get the plane to Las Vegas and out of fuel?” – and where the actors thrash around trying to make a plot that feels made-up on the spot full of try-hard dialogue work.

But despite this, Con Air seems to work. Whether it’s because of its brash confidence in its own ridiculousness or because it hired enough scribes to pen one-liners and character quirks to just about give the film a sense of wit and character (Poe’s ongoing effort to protect the cuddly bunny he intends to give his daughter is just one of a decent set of running gags – “Put the bunny. Back. In the box.”). You suspect watching it that there was the intention somewhere along the line to make something darker and more violent – the criminals’ seizure of the plane is surprisingly bloody – that just got forgotten about when it was decided it worked best as a dumb end-of-term panto.

A large part of its success stems from Cage’s droll performance. Turning himself into a sort of every-day action hero with just the odd trace of his famed grand guignol eccentricity here and there, Cage’s Cameron Poe makes for an intriguing lead for a balls-to-the-wall action film. Poe is softly-spoken, invariably polite, sweetly excited about seeing his daughter and pretty much encounters every unlikely event he sees with a laconic dead-pan (“On any other day that might be considered strange” he murmurs when witnessing the plane drag a sports car behind it through the air).

Cage of course looks ridiculously pumped up and spends most of the film in an obligatory Die Hard style vest. He hands out ruthless beatings of ne’er-do-wells – although only Cage could impale a serial killer on a pipe and sadly intone “Why couldn’t you just put the bunny back in the box”. Only Cage would take a part clearly intended as a Bruce Willis smirker and turn it into a sort of kick-boxing Paddington Bear. His stubborn refusal to take the film seriously means he cancels out Simon West’s ridiculously macho aesthetic that otherwise infects almost every frame. While everything else is loud, sharply cut and features actors spouting try-hard tough dialogue, the film’s central character spends the opening of the film learning Spanish and exchanging surprisingly sweet letters with his daughter and strolls around earnestly trying to do the right thing.

John Cusack similarly runs counter to the tone. Clearly counting the minutes until he can cash his cheque, Cusack turns his US Marshal into a laid-back, sandal-wearing boy scout, quietly exasperated about the wildness around him. I suspect half of Cusack’s drily low-key dialogue was written by him just to keep himself interested. Malkovich is cursed with the film’s worst try-hard tough-guy dialogue, but even he enjoys downplaying the role into softly spoken comedy. The three leads leave the blow-hard silliness to their foils Colm Meaney (as a permanently angry DEA agent) and Ving Rhames (as a violent would-be revolutionary).

With most of the people in it not taking it seriously, it generally means the ridiculousness of the plot – an aimless capture of a plane built around a series of set-pieces – and flashes of violence get watered down in favour of comic nonsense that of course ends with a rammed slot machine hitting a jackpot and the villain being stabbed, launched, electrocuted and crushed in a super-display of overkill. Whether this is what West intended who can say? But it’s certainly a lot better this way.

After all who cares if the villain’s masterplan depends on the sudden appearance of a sandstorm or that no war hero would ever go to jail for protecting his wife in a bar (Poe must have the worst lawyer in the world). It’s all about the jokes (a body at one point has a message scrawled on it and is literally posted into thin air), the bangs and, above all, the weary, half-smirking performances of the leads who can’t believe the nonsense they are sitting in the middle of.