The Water Diviner (2014)

Crowe’s enjoyable debut is traditional but heartfelt with a well-meaning message

Director: Russell Crowe

Cast: Russell Crowe (Joshua Connor), Olga Kurylenko (Ayshe), Dylan Georgiades (Orhan), Yılmaz Erdoğan (Major Hasan), Cem Yılmaz (Sergeant Jemal), Jai Courtnay (Lt Colonel Cyril Hodges), Jacqueline McKenzie (Eliza Connor), Isabel Lucas (Natalia)

Russell Crowe’s directorial debut is a heartfelt, well-meaning, if rather traditional movie that explores the lasting impact of one of Australia’s deepest national scars, the Gallipoli campaign. Joshua Connor (Russell Crowe) is a water diviner who, in 1919, after the death of his wife, travels to Turkey wanting to bring home the remains of their three sons who all died on the campaign. He finds the country to be far more complex than the enemy nation he had expected, with the Turks themselves struggling with occupation. With the help of Lt Colonel Hodges (Jai Courtenay) and the Turkish Major Hasan (Yılmaz Erdoğan), Connor discovers two of his sons’ bodies – and hears rumours that his third son may in fact still be alive somewhere in Turkey. Meanwhile, a bond is forming between Connor and hotel owner Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko) and her son Orhan (Dylan Georgiades).

Crowe’s film in many ways tells a very traditional morality story: deep down, despite all the ways we’re different, we are all the same, and the biggest part of coming to terms with anything is taking the decision to move forward and put it behind you. The film bravely attempts to engage with this national trauma, that saw tens of thousands of ANZAC troops ruthlessly (and arguably pointlessly) sacrificed in an ill-planned Turkish campaign. Rather than just presenting the ANZACs as victims, it builds sympathy and empathy with the Turkish side and points out violence and crimes on both sides, from executing prisoners to equivalent casualty lists (including pointing out that the Turks were defending their home from invasion).

It brings this home by filtering this experience through one personal story. Connor is a man who has lost everything to this campaign, who has sacrificed his sons and has every reason to blame the Turks for his loss. But, bar one moment of provoked rage, his natural decency and quiet humility cause him to quickly see these former enemies as people as scarred by war as him. It’s a note the film repeats constantly. The characters we are intended to relate to – such as Connor and Lt Colonel Hodges – frequently treat the Turks with respect (which is returned), while more bitter figures are shown as blinkered and misguided.

Of course, the film can’t resist capturing this détente in a personal relationship, showing the growing intimacy between Connor and Turkish war widow Ayshe. It’s a gentle, but not at all surprising romance – a shame that there is such an age gap between Crowe and Kurylenko – but it does at times feel like a slightly on-the-nose personal reflection of growing understanding between Turks and Aussies.

It’s arguably unnecessary anyway, since a more engaging relationship develops between Connor and Yılmaz Erdoğan’s honourable and slightly world-weary Major Hasan. The very image of the worthy opponent, Hasan is practically human decency made flesh, a man who goes out of his way to help Connor’s quest and becomes the human face of a Turkish army that suffered as many losses as the ANZAC forces. The warmth between these two characters is really the emotional heart of the film, for all it tries to interest us in a will-they-won’t-they romantic relationship elsewhere.

The film is not without flaws. It’s been pointed out that it makes no reference to the Turks’ atrocious actions during the war towards Armenians and Greeks (indeed some dirty Greek vagabonds make an entry late on as final-act baddies). While this isn’t a film trying to tell that story, a single line of acknowledgement – even if it was dismissed by a Turkish character – would have gone a long way. To speed up the search for his sons’ bodies, Connor is given some sort of loosely defined Shamanic power connected to his ability to find water (later he has vision in his dreams) – it’s a bit of magic that the film could do without. The film introduces several clumsy obstructive Brit officer characters (because nothing brings Aussie and Turk together like a loathing for arrogant Brits!), that serve as script-required roadblocks, either uninterested or fanatically intent on stopping Connor as the scene requires.

But fundamentally this is a very earnest and straightforward plea for understanding and forgiveness that doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but is a decent piece of storytelling. Crowe directs the thing with assurance (helped by some beautiful if slightly chocolate-box photography from Andrew Lesnie), contributing a low-key, reserved performance of quiet emotion. There are decent performances throughout: it’s great to see Jai Courtenay get a proper acting role, while Erdoğan is the stand out as Major Hasan. As a gentle Sunday afternoon would-be-epic it more or less fits the bill exactly.

The Servant (1963)

Through a glass darkly: Dirk Bogarde and James Fox in a dark drama as master and The Servant

Director: Joseph Losey

Cast: Dirk Bogarde (Hugo Barrett), Sarah Miles (Vera), James Fox (Tony) Wendy Craig (Susan Stewart), Catherine Lacey (Lady Agatha Mounset), Richard Vernon (Lord Willie Mounset)

Imagine a world where Bertie Wooster was a weak-willed, sexually confused drunk and Jeeves a malign force, to whom control over and destruction of his master go hand-in-hand. That’s the basic set-up of Joseph Losey’s masterpiece The Servant, a fascinating and brilliant exploration of class and sex in Britain in the 1960s, a lean, razor sharp, gripping and sinister film that lingers in your memory like a nightmare you can’t shake off.

Tony (James Fox) is a louche, rich young man returning home to Blighty, looking to expand his inherited fortune through dodgy property investments in Brazil. Before then, he needs a home to call his own – and a gentlemen’s gentlemen to run it. Tony hires Barrett (Dirk Bogarde), a scrupulously polite, observant man, able to meet every single one of his employer’s needs. But why is Tony’s fiancé Susan (Wendy Craig) so instinctively hostile to Barrett? And what is Barrett’s exact relationship with the housemaid Vera (Sarah Miles) he introduces into the house – and who quickly becomes the focus of Tony’s interest? Over time, the balance of power between servant and master becomes more and more uncertain.

Losey was an ex-pat American, driven out of the country by the McCarthy hearings. This adaptation of a Robin Maugham novel is the sort of brilliant deconstruction of (and assault on) the British class system and manners that perhaps only an outsider) could have made. The film drips with an air of corruption and vice. Even the earliest, most unobtrusive frames carry an air of over-observant malice. No coincidence this is also the leading quality of Barrett, perhaps one of the most darkly malign forces on film, whose piercing intelligence sees everything and whose self-control never slips. Losey’s camera constantly lingers over the slightest shot and detail, to an increasingly unsettling degree. As the plot becomes increasingly dark, claustrophobic and horrifying, the film’s exploration of the class-fuelled psycho-sexual, alcohol-fuelled relationship between Barrett and Tony becomes ever more pointed.

Losey partnered with the perfect script writer in Harold Pinter (who also briefly appears as a posh restaurant goer). Pinter’s lean, spare and menacing dialogue, with its corrupted poetry and acute psychological insight, is easily his finest film script – and perhaps the only one that truly could sit alongside his finest stage work. Pinter’s brutal vision of this twisted world is coated in a dark menacing commentary on Wodehouse (Susan and Barrett’s “duel” over the placing of a vase comes almost straight out of Jeeves) – and above all on the weakness that underlies those dependent on servants, as well as the loathing a servant can develop for his master, while still loving the control he has over his life.

Losey responds to this masterful script with some inspired work, making the house where the action takes place increasingly claustrophobic and disturbing. The camera work slowly becomes more intimate as the film progresses – and Barrett entraps Tony increasingly into a total, infantile dependence on him. Takes become longer as the house itself – increasingly dishevelled, with Barrett’s property increasingly appearing throughout the property, while Tony’s goods are disposed of – seems to close in around the action. Reflections and mirrors increasingly dominate the film, as if pulling us with Tony through a glass darkly.

It’s a good servant who understands his master’s needs before he knows them. Barrett is the best kind of servant. Within seconds, the unctuous, Uriah Heap-like Barrett (ever so ‘umble), has dissected the character of the foppishly weak playboy Tony, and identified him as man with no will of his own, ripe to be dominated and manipulated. Dirk Bogarde has never been better than his work here, a terrifyingly precise and soulless manipulator, whose veneer of obsequious service drops away with his affected accent to reveal a deeply corrupted, terrifyingly cruel man. Bogarde never allows a second of doubt to enter Barrett’s mind – even when it (briefly) looks like he’s lost his position, Barrett’s face is contorted with a contemptuous curl of the mouth and a cocky defiance. It’s brilliant work from Bogarde, creating one of cinema’s greatest monsters, destroying because he can.

His tools are of course to use his master’s fondness for booze and pretty faces against him. Vera – played with a sparkingly flirtatious richness by Sarah Miles, which disguises her ruthless disgust for Tony and his selfishness – is inveigled into the house as Barrett’s “sister” (actually his mistress), and swiftly instructed to seduce the hapless Tony, bending this playboy to her will. Losey’s camera follows in smooth shots as this woman moves from one man’s bed to another – while you can feel the influence of Pinter in the spare, sexually charged power Vera uses to seduce Tony (and the hints of submissive excitement in Tony). Losey soundtracks their first encounter – Miles erotically discussing the weather, pure Pinter genius, while Fox’s throat is so dry you can almost feel it yourself – with first the dripping of a tap, then the rocking back and forth of a pan in the sink. It brilliantly suggests the way Tony himself seems to be being consumed in a hypnotic trap.

Not that Tony is particularly sympathetic himself: a weak-willed, rather feckless and languid playboy whose interests in pleasure quickly tip into addiction. James Fox is perfectly cast in a role that plays on his aristocratic assurance, but finds deep reserves of doubt and inadequacy in him. Pinter and Losey draw more than a bit of a question mark over the sexual undertone in the relationship between Barrett (at least metrosexual) and Tony, that travels across sharing the favours of Vera. After (temporarily) throwing Vera and Barrett out, Tony collapses into a grief-stricken mess over Vera’s bed – the bed shared with Barrett – the camera gliding gently over male nudes pinned to the wall. Later Tony will debase himself fully to Barrett, reduced to crawling around the floor, his tie used as leash, dragged to perform with prostitutes for Barrett’s dark amusement.

If there is a character who sees through this early it’s Wendy Craig’s sensitively played Susan – but even she can have no idea of the horrors of Barrett’s plans to break Tony completely to his will. Susan recognises – even if she can’t understand why – the sinister satanic nature of Barrett, even while she seems powerless to do anything about it. Her attempts to empower Tony to break his dependence on this omniscient figure fail completely. In a beautiful Pinterish touch, at the end she almost considers joining their bizarre, sex and alcohol fuelled menage – as close as cinema as perhaps got to skirting a sort of sexual hell.

The final act of the film (it has a neat three act structure, Pinter superbly constructing the screenplay to show Barrett and Tony’s shifting power relationship), sees an almost infantalised Tony now meekly accepting (almost apologising) as Barrett lets rip – all pretence at humbleness gone and Northern vowels increasingly let loose – with his abuse and disgust.

In a brilliantly dark commentary on the upper and serving class, such is the dependence on one for the other, that the house collapses in Barrett’s temporary absence. The power may lie with Tony – but when Barrett stops collaborating with that, the imbalance between them is revealed. It’s Barrett who can actually do things – from cleaning to cooking – that Tony cannot. The drive and will of the middle classes eventually overwhelms and breaks the upper class, turning them into a vehicle for their own entertainment, like some sort of dark National Trust.

The Servant is a profoundly brilliant film, one that could stake a claim for being one of the greatest British films ever made. Losey’s sharp outsider’s eye brilliantly dissects both the tensions between the classes, but also the disturbingly awkward relationship the British have about sex, a drug for the reserved, a pot of unspoken but deeply desired treats. Bogarde is quite simply superb, Barrett is one of the greatest monsters of cinema who could strike fear into the heart of Hannibal Lecter. Pinter’s dialogue is brilliant. This psycho-sexual class drama is a work of art and essential viewing.

The Eagle (2011)

Jamie Bell and Channing Tatum on a spectacularly un-fun adventure in The Eagle

Director: Kevin Macdonald

Cast: Channing Tatum (Marcus Flavius Aquila), Jamie Bell (Esca), Donald Sutherland (Marcus’ Uncle), Mark Strong (Guern/Lucius Caius Metellus), Tarah Rahim (Prince of the Seal People), Denis O’Hare (Centurion Lutorius), Douglas Henshall (Cradoc), Paul Ritter (Galba), Paul Ritter (Galba), Dakin Matthews (Legate Claudius), Pip Carter (Tribune Placidus), Ned Dennehy (Chieftan)

Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle is one of the classic young adult stories of all time. An enjoyable odd-couple-turned-brothers-in-arms series, with plenty of action and adventure it arrives on screen as a dark, gloomy and above all not-really-fun-at-all story that doesn’t seem to know whether it’s aiming for a boys-own yarn or an adult adventure. It basically fails to make either work.

In Roman Britain AD 140, Marcus Flavius Aquila (Channing Tatum) is a young centurion whose father was one of the commanders of the Ninth Legion, which disappeared twenty years before somewhere in the North. Now Marcus is working to save his family honour – but his career as a centurion is cut short after he is injured almost single-handedly saving his garrison from attack. Depressed, he resolves to head north to try and find his father’s legion’s missing eagle standard – accompanied only by his strong-willed slave Esca (Jamie Bell), who hates Rome but owes his life to Marcus who saved him from execution in the gladiatorial ring. Heading North they find the eagle is in the hands of a savage tribe of warriors, who take no quarter.

Kevin Macdonald’s film probably should work like a Bernard Cornwell novel remixed in Roman Britain – or, better yet, like a proto-Simon Scarrow novel. There should be a growing sense of odd-couple bond – or at least chemistry – between Marcus and Esca as unlikely allies who become even more unlikely friends. Sadly, Macdonald misjudges the mood and instead turns the film into a grimly serious, mud spattered and miserable travel saga, which slowly drains any sense of enjoyment out of the story and its mission.

Instead, Esca and Marcus seem to hate each other’s guts for most of then movie until the plot finally absolutely demands that they lay down their lives for each other – at which point, an unearned switch takes part. Rather than an amusing “opposites attract”, men on a mission banter that the film sort of needs, instead everything is morose, angry and very, very serious. By the time the film hits the sort of banter tone it needed at the start, the credits start to roll.

It’s not helped by the choices of the two lead actors. Tatum is at his most “serious” here, with none of the playfulness and lightness that can make him an engaging presence. Instead he’s muscle bound and frowning, dispatching enemies without a second thought and forever gloomily reflecting on his father’s lost honour. Bell gets the tone slightly more on point, but he’s given almost nothing light to work with, instead having to juggle guilt and resentment at the oppression his people face and his part in it. With the dreary photography, all this misery finally starts to wear the viewer down.

Where’s the enjoyment of all this adventure? I get the film wants to make a serious point about the cost of empire and conquest, but did that have to be at the cost of any sense of fun? At least the film does take an interesting decision to make all the Romans American – reflecting the fact that America is “the new Rome” – but it doesn’t really take these revelations anywhere.

Not that you would really want it too as this is supposed to be an adventure story. Instead it’s a gloomy trip of two angry people in extreme cold and mud to grab a metal eagle, punctured by darkly framed fights, dully assembled dialogue scenes and a bubbling dislike between the two lead characters that never flowers into respect until far too late. By making neither of the two lead characters particularly likeable, we never really invest in their journey – and in the end just plain don’t care about what happens to them or if they ever get that eagle at all. For an adventure story, this is one trip you’ll insist you’d rather stay at home and guard the base.

King Kong (1933)

The end of an unsuccessful New York vacation in King Kong

Director: Melville C Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack

Cast: Fay Wray (Ann Darrow), Robert Armstrong (Carl Denham), Bruce Cabot (Jack Driscoll), Frank Reicher (Captain Englehorn), Sam Hardy (Charles Weston), Noble Johnson (Native Chief), Steve Clemente (Witch king), Victor Wong (Charlie)

Of course, Citizen Kane is possibly the greatest and most influential film ever made. But, let’s be honest the paw prints of Kong is what we see most often in the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Kong may have met his end atop the Statue of Liberty (a death the poster spoiled), but his children are everywhere, from Alien to Jurassic Park to Avengers: Endgame. King Kong basically sets the template for special effects movies and Hollywood has almost been remaking it, in some way shape or form, for almost ninety years. But few films can match its momentum, action – or above all the heart it gives to its beast.

Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) is a Hollywood director who has a plan to make his next film a huge success. He’s got a map to Skull Island (no need to worry with that name) where he’s heard rumour that a mighty creature is just waiting to star in his next film. Denham needs a female lead – so plucks Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) off the streets promising her the adventure of a lifetime. During the voyage to the island, she falls in love with first mate Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot). On arrival at the island they find a tribe of ferocious narratives, who kidnap Ann intending to sacrifice her to their god Kong – a massive gorilla. Instead Kong falls for Ann and carries her into the jungle. When Driscoll and Denham go to save her they find Skull Island is a dangerous place (who knew!), stuffed with brutal dinosaurs and scary beasts – and that Kong himself has no plans to give Ann back.

King Kong’s final hour is essentially little more than a stream of action scenes. However, few action films since have paced its action as well as this film does. With special effects by Willis O’Brien, one of the earliest masters of stop-motion, Kong in turn takes on a T-Rex, a pterodactyl, a village of natives and then most of New York in a series of escalating and dramatic sequences which use all the tricks Hollywood had, from animation to models and back projection. Each of these sequences are perfectly done and carry the sort of awe that stop-motion animation can project – all those hours of work! – helped by the successful (and brilliantly clever) use of back-projection to have these battling beasts seeming to tower over the human cast. You can imagine how thrilling it must have been – I’m not sure anything like this had been seen before.

But the film has really lasted because Willis O’Brien’s skill is to add humanity and sensitivity to Kong himself. There is a reason why Peter Jackson (director of the sensitive but overextended remake) talked of weeping when he saw Kong meet his end. From almost the very first shot, Cooper and O’Brien cut to Kong’s eyes, which have a surprising soulfulness to them. And after all what does Kong really do wrong in this film? He is perfectly happy on Skull Island – he even only attacks other creatures when they make the move on him – he has no desire to go to New York and spends half the film trying to protect Ann from danger (not that she thanks him for it). The animation takes several moments to create the soul in Kong – from the ripples of his fur to his curious inclines of the head. After defeating creatures, he curiously picks up their crushed bodies, as if surprised to find them unresponsive. He gently moves Ann. There is a sort of innocence to him. After all what is he but a small-town guy who heads to the big city and falls for the wrong gal?

As such it’s rather hard not to root for him – or feel his pain (and shock) when attacked by planes at the top of the Empire State Building. You can see in Kong’s eyes the lack of understanding about what these metal objects are that are punching through his skin. The shooting gallery is tinged with tragedy – and it’s hard not to cheer when Kong manages to take one of these planes down. For all his fierceness, Kong seems like a real person, a vulnerable guy taken out of his depth against his will. The cruelty of exploiting Kong for Broadway ticket sales, as Denham plans to do, seems particularly un-just. It brilliantly allows us to get the best of both worlds: we can enjoy the spectacle of the wild animal Kong snapping the jaws of T-Rexs but we also feel for him as a confused and frightened animal put to death in a world he doesn’t understand.

Perhaps its easier to sympathise with Kong because so many of the human characters in it barely register. The first forty minutes is low-key – and often frankly rather flat – competently filmed but fairly-stiff build-up, carefully (and at times rather pointedly) establishing the situation and themes. None of the actors make much an impression (not helped that the second half of the film is so Kong focused that they hardly have a line to share). Robert Armstrong is effectively arrogant and ambitious as Denham. Bruce Cabot is pretty wooden as Driscoll (his first film after being recruited from the studio doorman staff, he has said he essentially stood where he was told and that was it). Fay Wray has a certain sweetness and charm as Ann, but barely opens her mouth other than to scream after the first forty minutes (in a neat bit of wit, her rehearsal on ship is standing still and practising screaming silently at an object she can’t see). With its blundering Hollywood director at the heart of all the chaos, King Kong could also be one of the first Hollywood satires.

Intentionally or not the film has an imperialism to it. Denham is an arrogant man out of his depth – although I am not sure how far the film is aware of this – and the crew come across as arrogant and clueless, blundering into a wild environment with an armed over-confidence (that quickly gets them all killed – most of them tumbling to their doom with an almost sickening rag doll snap after a meeting with Kong). You can sense that as well in the awkward lack of PC in framing the (black) residents of Skull Island as blood-thirsty savages with a lust for human sacrifice. However, with its eventual sympathy for Kong, there is enough here to allow the viewer to read into it a certain amount of post-colonial criticism of this sort of H Rider Haggard meets Arthur Conan Doyle world.

The film is very proud of its “Twas beauty that killed the beast” concept (it’s repeated numerous times in the film – not least most famously at the end) – but it’s an idea that is already framing Kong as the victim. So, for all the triumph of the design – the production design is stunning, rarely have Hollywood back lots looked as good – and the awe of Kong, the idea of him as a victim is there from the start.

A lot of that awe though comes from possibly the film’s MVP: Max Steiner. King Kong is one of the first films to use a full orchestral score and the music is vital to adding heft, drama and danger to this stop-motion beast. Steiner’s score superbly uses motifs to build Kong’s presence and operatic crescendos that brilliantly heighten the drama. It’s certainly one of the most influential scores ever written – and it’s impact on film history is so lasting, that watching the film today you take it’s revolutionary nature for granted, so often has the way of using music become part of our accepted cinematic language.

King Kong lasts because of the awe it builds for the monster, but also the way we start to feel for him. Complimented by the professional skill of Cooper and Schoedsack’s direction, King Kong still grips today, for all that you need to read into it more depth than is (perhaps) there. But depth isn’t what made Kong great. It was the excitement and drama of the spectacle – and its so exciting you barely notice that Kong dramatically increases in scale as the film continues. And while special effects have moved on, the power of what’s presented here hasn’t. Deserves to be listed as one of the most influential films ever made.

The Sound Barrier (1952)

Ann Todd and Nigel Patrick on a dangerous mission to break The Sound Barrier

Director: David Lean

Cast: Ralph Richardson (John Ridgefield), Ann Todd (Susan Garthwaite), Nigel Patrick (Tony Garthwaite), John Justin (Philip Peel), Dinah Sheridan (Jess Peel), Joseph Tomelty (Will Sparks), Denholm Elliott (Christopher Ridgefield), Jack Allen (‘Windy’ Williams), Ralph Michael (Fletcher)

David Lean’s film career can be divided into two eras: his early films are British-based literary adaptations and family dramas, many of them front-and-centring the experiences and tribulations of women. The later era are the jaw-dropping epics he became best known for. The Sound Barrier is towards the end of the first era – and it’s almost a bridge between the two, an impressively filmed story of man’s triumph over nature, that sneaks under the wire an emotional family-in-crisis storyline, with a daughter suffering the damaging impact of her father’s obsession.

That father is John Ridgefield (Ralph Richardson), a famous aeronautical engineer and airline entrepreneur who, with the end of the war, returns to his fixation: discovering a way to make a plane fly so fast it breaks the sound barrier. It’s a vision that has dominated his life, but which his daughter Susan (Ann Todd) finds hard to understand. John is a domineering, demanding father, whose son Christopher (Denholm Elliott) gets himself killed trying to qualify as a pilot to win his father’s respect. In his place, Susan’s husband Tony (Nigel Patrick), a test pilot, is claimed by John as a surrogate son and equally pushed to risk all to try and fly faster than sound.

Lean’s film is a wonderful mix of post-war military-based exploits and stiff-upper lip exploration of family dynamics, where resentments and passions go unspoken but shape everything. With a superb script by Terence Rattigan, whose work is filled with monomaniacs like Ridgefield and sympathetic and emotionally intelligent women like Susan, The Sound Barrier might seem like a celebration of British pluck (it hardly matters that we Brits didn’t actually break the sound barrier first – no mention of Chuck Yaeger here…), with some stunning aerial photography. But it’s a lot more than that.

What’s fascinating about The Sound Barrier – and what makes it such a rewarding watch – is how much it questions the value of these sort of quests. The film’s focus is less on the engineering struggles and the bravery of the pilots (compare and contrast this film with the more straightforwardly triumphant The Dam Busters), and more on the human cost of obsession and this sort of adrenalin-fuelled airborne machismo.

The Ridgefield family has been damaged almost beyond repair – under their wealth and comfort – by their father’s demanding perfectionism. Ralph Richardson is superb as this bluntly-spoken man who sees no reason to sugar coat anything or hide any disappointment. The character has more than a hint of a Gradgrind of engineering – and just like Hard Times patriarch, his well-intentioned but misguided parenting has distorted both his children.

His hero-worshipping son Christopher (a wonderfully fragile and charming Denholm Elliott) pushes himself through chronic air-sickness to lay down his life trying to follow in his father’s footsteps (John greets his death with a sad criticism of his flying skills and goes back to work with his jet-plane models straight after the funeral). Susan has a cold relationship with her father (strikingly she calls him Father while everyone else – even her husband Tony – calls him Dad), and can’t understand why all this goal is worth sacrificing lives and any chance of simple domestic happiness. Her father’s coldness and distance from his children – not to mention his obvious and continual disappointment that she was born a girl – has led her to treat him with respect but not love.

It’s a dynamic completely missed by her husband Tony, played here with a bluff simplicity by Nigel Patrick. But then it’s pretty clear that this risk-taking pilot is quite simply not that bright. His lack of independent thinking is even identified by engineer Will Sparks (a ‘sparkling’ performance of avuncular surrogate fatherdom by Joseph Tomelty) as his major weakness as a test pilot. Tony has no idea of his wife’s concerns or emotional problems with her father, and instead quickly gets sucked into filling the role of “son I never had” for John. But then Tony has everything John wants – the flying skills Christopher never had without the questioning independence of Susan. He’s exactly the sort of weak-willed would-be-hero who can be quickly sucked into taking huge risks.

The film’s sympathies though are with Susan, played with a real warmth tinged with a sad expectation for disaster by Ann Todd, whose presence slowly grows to dominate the film. She can’t understand why it is necessary to risk all for this nebulous goal: it’s a refrain she repeats throughout the film “I wish I knew, I really wish I knew”. We’ve just gone through a second calamitous war – why are we throwing our lives away for a concept? Why should her husband put himself at huge risk like this for a brief mention in the history books and nothing else? Why not be content with a happy family life and living to see his son? Not to mention that the film proves her right – the nice-but-dim Tony isn’t good test pilot material and Susan’s new family is destroyed just like her old one.

At first it might seem that Todd’s character is the stay-at-home “don’t go Darling” type, but the film increasingly shows the validity of her doubts. There is a slightly toxic “carry on” Englishness about Tony and her father. Obsession is shown to drive out all over considerations – and Richardson has a late scene that carefully but brilliantly demonstrates how it has left him isolated and alone. It’s telling the barrier is finally broken by devoted husband and father Philip (a very decent John Justin), who is aware of the danger and has the most settled family life of the lot (and who greets his triumph with tears of relief rather than cheers).

The Sound Barrier could have easily been a “Britain triumphs in the skies!” with soaring music and heroic filming. Instead, it demonstrates the danger of obsession and the damaging impact it can have on people and their families. It concentrates not on the men in the sky, but increasingly the potential widows on the ground, forced to acknowledge that life with the family is less important than the chance of glory. It’s a rich and emotionally intelligent film, very well directed by Lean with warmth and humanity and with three terrific actors leading from the front.

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

May Whitty is searched for by Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave in The Lady Vanishes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Margaret Lockwood (Iris Henderson), Michael Redgrave (Gilbert Redman), Paul Lukas (Dr Hartz), May Whitty (Miss Froy), Cecil Parker (Mr Todhunter), Linden Travers (“Mrs” Tothunter), Naunton Wayne (Caldicott), Basil Radford (Charters), Mary Clare (Baroness), Catherine Lacey (Nun), Googie Withers (Blanche), Sally Stewart (Julie)

In his conversations with Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut declared every time he tried to study The Lady Vanishes, all its tricks and mechanics, he always ended up too wrapped up in the plot to notice them. It’s about as fitting a tribute as a film can get, that it got one of the world’s ultimate film buffs just sit down and enjoy the ride. The Lady Vanishes is Hitchcock’s penultimate British film and it might well be one of the most enjoyable and entertaining films he ever made.

It’s late 1930s in Europe and a group of mostly British travellers have got stuck waiting for a train in the fictional country of Bandrika (but it’s clearly Germany). Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood) is on her way back home to (perhaps somewhat reluctantly) get married, exasperated by the loud noise made in the room above through the night by folk music expert Gilbert (Michael Redgrave). Charters (Basil Radford) and Caldicott (Naunton Wayne) are cricket obsessives, desperate to get home for the big test match. Mr Todhunter (Cecil Parker) is a lawyer, keen not to draw attention to the fact Mrs Todhunter (Linden Travers) isn’t actually his wife. When the train finally leaves the station the next day, Iris is hit on the head by a plant plot (was it pushed?) that very nearly hits governess Miss Froy (May Whitty). Miss Froy takes care of Iris on the train – but when Iris wakes after a rest, she finds Miss Froy has disappeared and – furthermore – everyone denies she ever existed in the first place. While a Bandrikan psychiatrist Dr Hartz (Paul Lukas) claims she may be suffering from concussion, only Gilbert believes her story. Will they be able to prove Miss Froy is real and rescue her from whatever peril she has found herself in?

Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes shouldn’t really work – not least since it takes nearly 20 minutes before we get any indication that we are watching anything other than a romantic comedy. But perhaps that’s also why it works, because those first 20 minutes are beautifully scripted, with some cracking dialogue and some skilfully drawn character work that invests us in these people long before any danger arises. It also serves as a brilliant counterpoint to the nearly non-stop tension and action that comes in the final hour of the film – who could have believed that all that light hearted banter in a guest house could end in a ruthless shoot out in the woods?

It all seems to change pace on a classic Hitchcock touch – a folk singer is suddenly, violently, strangled by an unseen assailant (why? I’ve no idea. The film doesn’t think you’ll care about the logic gap, and you don’t). But a large part of the film’s success stems from Hitchcock’s collaboration with Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder on script-writing duties. Gilliat and Launder made a number of changes to the original novel, adding a greater espionage element. Even more importantly, they overhauled several of the characters, not least changing the Gilbert character from an engineer into a charming (if eccentric) folk music expert with a deadpan wit. Even more successfully, they introduced the hilarious ultra-British Charters and Caldicott, classic eccentric grown-up public schoolboys with a fascination with cricket (the combo was so popular Naunton and Wayne played versions of these characters another eleven times).

The script’s wit, playfulness and scintillating dialogue is what drives most of the film’s energy – and certainly what helps to make it as entertaining as it is. In particular, the dialogue exchanges between Lockwood and Redgrave hum with the sort of love-them-hate-them banter that wouldn’t seem out of place in a screwball comedy (“You’re the most contemptible person I’ve met in all my life!” “Confidentially I think you’re a bit of a stinker as well”), and the two actors shine in roles that start with classic feuding but subtly and beautifully come together as a romantic couple by the film’s end. Lockwood has pluck, guts and determination, a mix of socialite and head girl determination. Redgrave is superb as Gilbert, showing the sort of matinee idol wit and charm – not to mention an unconventional romantic sex appeal – that he very rarely got to exhibit again (sadly he didn’t get on with Hitchcock, and never worked with him again).

The film is full of wit and invention, but mixes it with a properly engrossing mystery. Every character has very clear reasons for denying the existence of Miss Froy (May Whitty is superb as a seemingly dotty old woman, hiding cunning and an unexpected capacity for action). We know that of course Iris is right – but even so, it’s hard not to begin to suspect that maybe the oily Dr Hartz (Paul Lukas whose professional smoothness neatly tips into cruelty) is right and she is suffering from concussion. The unravelling of this mystery is half Agatha Christie (vital clues pop up here and there), half famous five adventure – but the nearly “real time” playing out of the mystery injects huge amounts of tension and excitement, particularly as the villains start to be revealed.

The film also serves, interestingly, as a plea for British invention in European affairs in the era of appeasement. The train is stuffed nearly exclusively by Brits, most of whom are quite content at first to let things drift and not rock the boat. However, when the chips are finally down and its time to make a stand, the majority of the characters knuckle down and get their hands dirty to fight for justice. Even Charters and Caldicott take up arms (with a typical British reserve) to protect their fellow passengers, while Gilbert has already shown himself capable of being a man of action (as well as a pretty neat impressionist and physical comedian) when called upon. It’s telling that Cecil Parker’s Mr Todhunter is the nearest thing we see to an appeaser on the train (with a fear-and-hope-tinged expectation that everyone is playing by his own antiquated rules), and he’s the only one who angrily questions taking a stand.

It’s not surprising from Hitchcock, who made an even more passionate plea for intervention a few years later with Foreign Correspondent. Neither is it a surprise how superbly the film is made. Hitchcock is at the top of his game here, shooting the train brilliantly (the set was tiny, not that you could tell from the number of angles Hitch finds here). His mastery of the pace and tone of the film is spot on: the second half never lets up, and you never for one minute lose the film’s wit, even while the stakes become more bigger and bigger. The film has possibly the most winning romantic pairing in all of Hitch’s movies, helped hugely by the natural and winning playing of Redgrave and Lockwood. It so successfully builds up the possibility of Iris being mistaken, that it makes the audience start to question what they’ve seen.

It’s a superbly directed film, but above all it’s supremely entertaining in a way few other films can hope to be. Its re-watch value – from hearing the jokes again, to spotting the early clues – means it will be rewarding audiences for decades to come.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

Gal Gadot is delightful again in superior sequel Wonder Woman 1984

Director: Patty Jenkins

Cast: Gal Gadot (Diana Prince/Wonder Woman), Chris Pine (Steve Trevor), Kristen Wiig (Dr Barbara Minerva), Pedro Pascal (Maxwell Lord), Robin Wright (Antiope), Connie Nielsen (Hippolyta), Kristogger Polaha (Handsome man), Lucian Perez (Alistair), Ravi Patel (Baba Jide), Oliver Cotton (Simon Stagg), Stuart Milligan (President of the United States)

Wonder Woman in 2017 received the sort of rave reviews superhero films dream of. It was refreshing to have an action flick with a woman as the driving force. But Wonder Woman was, aside from that, very much a conventional superhero origins movie, with little truly original about it. Perhaps memories of it as being more revolutionary than it in fact was, lie behind the more hesitant critical reaction to Wonder Woman 1984, in many ways a more entertaining and smarter film.

In 1984, Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) works at the Smithsonian, and fights for justice in her spare time as Wonder Woman (it’s not clear how she this striking woman manages to keep her identity secret bar smashing a few CCTV cameras). However, she leads a private and lonely life, still mourning the death of Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) during the First World War. Her confidence is admired by her ditzy and nervous (and clearly smitten!) colleague Dr Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), who longs to be like her. An exhibit arrives at the Smithsonian – a mysterious stone that legend has it will grant any wish that the person holding it asks. Diana, in a whimsical moment, wishes for the return of Steve – and is shocked when a man claiming to be Steve appears in her life. Dr Minerva meanwhile wishes to be like Diana in every way – little knowing her secret powers. But the stone has other people interested in it: it could be just the tool that ambitious, but failed, entrepreneur Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) needs to turn his life around. But is there a cost for all this gift giving? What will the stone take in return – and can humanity survive a world where the slightest wish could come true?

Wonder Woman 1984 has a clear theme: taking the easy path might help you to get what you want, but an unearned victory is never a true one. It’s a concept introduced from the start, in an opening flashback section where a child Diana takes a shortcut in an Olympics race, and is denied victory by her mentor Antiope (Robin Wright in a welcome cameo). Antiope, in the way of all mentors, reminds her we learn lessons from loss and defeat, and short-cutting around failure never pays off in the end. It’s a clear message that being granted your wishes without working for them is empty.

And of course there is a cost! The stone takes from you the thing you value most, in exchange for what you want the most. In Diana’s case – having made her wish unknowingly, in a single moment of whimsy – what she loses is her strength, the thing that makes possible the thing she values most: her ability to change the world for the better. In turn, when Barbara wishes to be like Diana, the stone takes from her the very humanity that made her such an endearing and sweet person.

These sort of exchanges are not new to anyone who has ever read a fairy tale. But they are told here with refreshing honesty, not to mention a certain level of charm. Above all, this simple morality tale works because we are invested in the characters. Even without the memory of their relationship from the first film, Gadot and Pine are so likeable and charming in this film (Pine in particular is a delight, his eyes filling with wonder at the modern era – from a childish glee at escalators to tear-filled awe at the space programme) that, even though you know from the start what they are doing is “wrong” (after all Steve is inhabiting another man’s body, and every audience eventually the hero needs to do the right thing and give that body back), you still feel their joy at being together and Diana’s anguish at the thought of giving up the only (selfish) thing she’s ever wanted.

The same is true for the other two characters affected by the stone. Although nominally villains, both Wiig and Pascal play characters who, if anything, are deeply-flawed anti-heroes. Wiig is absolutely endearing as the gentle and shy Barbara, so much so it’s heartbreaking to see her freeze up as the film progresses. Pascal is hilariously overblown as a wannabe Gordon Gekko, but his relationship with his son is nicely drawn and his character is tinged with an underlying insecurity. Wonder Woman 1984 is refreshing in that it doesn’t present heroes and villains, but ordinary people needing to find the courage to reject their dreams for reality. Some do, others don’t.

It’s not a perfect film by a long stretch. As with the previous film, a final act fight scene lacks humanity and is dull. The film is probably fifteen minutes overlong. The various action scenes are well staged, but lack freshness. Some of the humour doesn’t always land. It’s hard not to snigger at a late act revelation of a new power for Wonder Woman. And while the film thankfully avoids the crassness of the first and its trenches setting, a photo of Wonder Woman helping to liberate concentration camps feels horrendously out of place (it’s meant to show her goodness, but I just wondered why on earth did she wait so long to do anything about the Holocaust?).

But the bad is outweighed by the good in a genuinely entertaining and charming movie whose freshness and lightness exceeds the original. Gal Gadot is still wonderful in the lead role – determined but sweet – Chris Pine does some of his best work and Wiig and Pascal are very good. I’d confidently say this is a better film than the first, a richer character study inspired by fairy tales, that really gets to the emotional heart of its lead character. I may be alone in that, but that’s what I think.

Around the World in Eighty Days (1956)

David Niven and Cantinflas head Around the World in Eight Days in this Oscar-winning epic

Director: Michael Anderson

Cast: David Niven (Phileas Fogg), Cantinflas (Passepartout), Shirley MacLaine (Princess Aouda), Robert Newton (Inspector Fix), Charles Boyer (Monsieur Gasse), Joe E. Brown (Stationmaster), John Carradine (Colonel Proctor), Charles Coburn (Steamship clerk), Ronald Colman (Railway official), Melville Cooper (Mr Talley), Noel Coward (Roland Hesketh-Baggott), Finlay Currie (Andrew Stuart), Marlene Dietrich (Hostess), Fernandel (Paris coachman), Hermione Gingold (Sporting lady #1), Cedric Hardwicke (Sir Francis Cromarty), John Gielgud (Foster), Trevor Howard (Denis Fallentin), Glynis Johns (Sporting lady #2), Evelyn Keyes (Paris flirt), Buster Keaton (Train conductor), Beatrice Lille (Revivalist), Peter Lorre (Steward), Victor McLaglen (SS Henrietta helmsman), John Mills (London coachman), Robert Morley (Gauthier Ralph), Jack Oakie (SS Henrietta captain), George Raft (Bouncer), Frank Sinatra (Piano player), Red Skelton (Drunk), Harcourt Williams (Hinshaw)

In the 1950s, cinema struggled to encourage people to come out of their homes and leave that picture box in the corner behind. Big technicolour panoramas and famous faces was what the movies could offer that TV couldn’t. This led to a trend in filmmaking that perhaps culminated in 1956 with Around the World in Eighty Days triumphing among one of the weakest Best Picture slates ever seen at the Oscars. Around the World had everything cinema knew it could do well: big, screen-filling shots of exotic locations filmed in gorgeous colour; and in almost every frame some sort of famous name the audience could have fun spotting. It’s perhaps more of a coffee table book mixed with a red carpet rather than a narrative film: entertaining, but overlong.

Faithfully following Jules Verne’s original novel (with added balloon trips), Phileas Fogg (David Niven) is a punctilious and precise Englishman of the old school, whose life is run like clockwork and whose only passion is whist. Nevertheless he accepts a challenge from his fellow members of the Reform Club (among them Trevor Howard, Robert Morley and Finlay Currie) to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days or less. Setting off with his manservant – the recently hired, accident prone Passeportout (Cantinflas) – Fogg races around the world, from Paris to Cairo to India to Hong Kong to Japan to San Francisco. Along the way he rescues Princess Aouda (Shirley Maclaine) from death by human sacrifice in India and has to confront the suspicions of Inspector Fix (Robert Newton) who is convinced that Fogg is responsible for a huge theft at the Bank of England. Can Fogg make it back to the Reform Club hall on time to win his bet?

Around the World was the brain-child of its producer Michael Todd. A noted Broadway producer, Todd had been looking to make a similar splash in the movies. Perhaps it’s no surprise that he decided the finest way to do this (after the mixed success of a movie version of Oklahoma) was to produce something that‘s pretty much akin to a massive Broadway variety show. Around the World – as you would expect – is an incredibly episodic film, seemingly designed to be broken down into a number of small sequences either to showcase the scene’s guest star or to provide comic opportunities for Cantinflas to display his Chaplinesque physical comedy.

That and lots of opportunities for some lovely scenic photography. Nearly every major sequence is bridged with luscious photography capturing some exotic part of the world – from the coast of Asia to the Great American Plains. It’s pretty clear this is a major attraction of the film: come to the movies and see those parts of the world you’ve always dreamed of, just for the price of a movie ticket! Surely introduction of a hot air balloon to allow Fogg and Cantinflas to travel from Paris to Spain was purely to allow lovely aerial shots of the French countryside and chateaux. It’s the sort of film that proudly trumpeted in its publicity the number of locations (112 in 13 countries!), the vast number of extras (68,894!) and even the number of animals (15 elephants! 17 fighting bulls! 3,800 sheep!). It’s all about the scale.

That scale also carries across to the guest cameos. Between enjoying the scenic photography, viewers can have fun spotting cameos. Can that really be Noel Coward running that employment agency! The chap who owns the balloon, I’d swear that’s Charles Boyer! Wait that steward: that’s Peter Lorre! Good lord that’s Charles Coburn selling Fogg tickets for the steamer! Oh my, Buster Keaton is helping them to their seats on the train! Marlene Dietrich is running that saloon – and good grief that’s Frank Sinatra playing the piano! Most of the stars enter into the spirit of the thing, even if they frequently start their shots with backs to the camera, before turning to reveal their star-studded magnificence. Sadly time has faded some of the face recognition here, not helped by David Niven (perfectly cast as the urbane and profoundly English Fogg, so precise that his idea of romantic talk is to recount past games of whist) probably today being one of the most famous people in it.

Todd marshals all this with consummate showman skill. It’s handsome, very well mounted and generally entertaining – even if it is painfully long (it’s not quite told in real time, but can feel like it at points). The film is nominally directed by Michael Anderson. However, I think it’s pretty clear his job was effectively to point the camera at the things Michael Todd had lined up (be they location or stars) – Todd had already dismissed the original director, John Farrow, after a day’s shooting for not being sufficiently ”co-operative”. To be honest it’s fine as this is an entertainment bereft of personality, instead focused on being “more is more”.

Part of its extended runtime is due to the long comedic sequences given to Cantinflas. A charming performer – and possibly the most famous comedian in Latin-America at the time – Cantinflas can be seen doing everything from bicycle riding, to bull fighting (for a prolonged time), to gymnastics to horseback riding. (Far different from the unflappable and spotless English gentleman Niven is playing.) Your enjoyment of this may depend on how far your patience lasts. I’m not sure mine quite managed to last the course. Sadly one of Cantinflas’ greatest comedic weapons, his Spanish wordplay, was completely lost in translation.

There are some decent sections. The iconic balloon flight is well mounted and gives the most impressive images (the famously vertigo-suffering Niven was replaced by a double for much of this). Others, like the bullfight or an interminable parade in San Francisco go on forever. The casting of Shirley MacLaine as an Indian princess is an uncomfortable misstep (even at the time MacLaine felt she was painfully miscast), made worse by an offensive “human sacrifice” storyline – that got cut when the film was screened in India. Robert Newton though is very good value as the misguided but officious Inspector Fix.

Around the World in Eighty Days is grand, handsomely mounted entertainment. But to consider it as a Best Picture winner feels very strange. It’s not a lot more than an entertaining variety show, its plot impossibly slight (made to feel even more so by its vastly over-extended run time). While you can enjoy it in pieces, it finally goes on too long for its own good. Entertainingly slight as it is, it’s still one of the weakest Best Picture winners ever.

The Searchers (1956)

Ford’s dark tale of obsession and racism is one of the finest Westerns ever made

Director: John Ford

Cast: John Wayne (Ethan Edwards), Jeffrey Hunter (Martin Pawley), Vera Miles (Laurie Jorgensen), Ward Bond (Reverend Captain Samuel Johnson Clayton), Natalie Wood (Debbie Edwards), John Qualen (Lars Jorgensen), Olive Carey (Mrs Jorgensen), Henry Brandon (Scar), Beulah Archuletta (Look), Ken Curtis (Charlie McCorry), Harry Carey Jnr (Brad Jorgensen), Hank Warden (Mose Harper), Dorothy Jordan (Martha Edwards), Walter Coy (Aaron Edwards), Pippa Scott (Lucy Edwards)

John Ford’s career was a long tribute to the decency of the regular American. How fascinating then that one of his greatest films is in fact a dark investigation into the dangers of obsession, vengeance and prejudice in ordinary Americans. Working with his regular leading man, John Wayne, together they created a character who shared many qualities with Ford’s other leading men – a rugged, determined, taciturn man of the wilderness – but laced him with deeply negative attitudes and a horrendously damaged psyche. The Searchers becomes a masterpiece, presenting how narrow the line between hero and villain can be while – in an admittedly very gentle way – posing questions about the claims of the settlers to moral superiority.

Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) returns to his brother’s homestead from an unspecified (though clearly morally questionable) career as a gun for hire after fighting for the confederacy (a cause he sees no reason to disavow). He’s an awkward presence, with an unspoken love for his brother Aaron’s (Walter Coy) wife Martha (Dorothy Jordan) and a racial hostility towards their adopted son Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) who is one-eighth Cherokee. Shortly after his arrival, an Indian raid draws him and most of the local men on a futile chase. While they are gone, the Edwards’ homestead is destroyed, with the family all murdered except daughter Debbie. Ethan and Martin begin what becomes a five-year quest to find her and bring her home – although as he discovers Debbie has become wife to her kidnapper, the war chief Scar (Henry Brandon), Ethan’s aim shifts from rescue to executing Debbie for racial disloyalty.

Racism is what lies at the heart of The Searchers and around discussions of the film today. Firstly, let’s acknowledge how brave the film is in presenting Ethan’s racially motivated rage without excuse. This was after all John Wayne, the straightest shooter of the lot. Here, in no doubt his greatest ever performance, Wayne’s Mount Rushmore-like qualities are inverted into a bitter, lonely man whose murderous rage against the Native Americans is extreme, even within an environment which sees the tribes as a dangerous “other”.

Edwards’ racism tips into everything and is there right from the start: “I could mistake you for a half breed” he scowls at Martin. Later he will prevent Martin drinking alcohol – a clear reference to the belief among settlers that one drop of alcohol turns Indians into savage beasts. One of his first actions on the trail is to desecrate the buried corpse of an Indian, shooting out his eyes (condemning him to walk sightless in the afterlife). In a gunfight he has to be stopped from shooting retreating Indians in the back. Later, in a crazed fury, he guns down buffalo simply to deny them as food to the tribes. That’s not to mention his disgust with every trace of indigenous culture.

What’s striking watching the film is that, even though he’s the central character and is played by John Wayne, Ethan may well actually be the villain of the piece – or at best an anti-hero wild card. Our actual hero is the kindly, decent and brave Martin Pawley, played with a slight nervousness by Jeffrey Hunter. Martin is appalled by Ethan’s violence, his anger and above all by his plan for enforcing racial harmony by exterminating the niece he sees as a race traitor. It’s not just the fact he has Cherokee blood that makes Martin appalled by the danger in Ethan. It’s the simple fact that he’s just a decent guy, who recognises that good and bad isn’t a question of race but a question of people. And his presence on the quest, it’s made clear, is as much about protecting Debbie from Ethan as it is finding and rescuing her.

You can see these attitudes quite clearly late in the film, where the pair encounter white women who have been recovered from Indian kidnappers. These women are confused and traumatised. But while Martin attempts to communicate with and comfort them, to Ethan they are worse than nothing now. “They ain’t white anymore” he scowls at a soldier. Leaving them, Ford holds the shot on Wayne who turns to look back at them with a face dripping with such disgust and loathing, it sears into the memory.

Does the film condemn these attitudes? You can argue that the film plays into a racial nightmare – white women kidnapped and violated by savage tribesmen. But Ford is, I’d suggest, presenting racism here – and going as far as he could in the 1950s to attack it. Ethan and Martin encounter an Indian settlement that has been attacked by the cavalry. The settlement is a burnt-out husk, with Indian women and children among those indiscriminately slain – visually it is immediately reminiscent of the burnt-out Edwards homestead. Another later cavalry charge against the Indians will again see panicked women and children flee in terror. Even Scar, the villain of the piece, is motivated just like Ethan by anger – his actions are a response to the murder of two of his children. And his scalping, rape and murder don’t look so different from Ethan, who shoots people in the back, plans to murder his niece and later scalps a dead man.

The Searchers takes a slightly nihilistic view that the West was a violent place – for all the beauty Ford discovers in his crisply sublime shots of monument valley – and that many of the people in it had questionable motives and principles. A ”hero” for this time might well be Ethan, a sullen and violent man under a veneer of gentlemanly politeness, clearly motivated from the start far more by a desire for revenge for the murder of the woman he loves. Ford, Wayne and Jordan establish this love between Ethan and Martha subtly but unmistakably – the opening scenes are littered with moments of the two of them sharing glances and a hesitant but unmistakeable physical intimacy.

Again, a lot of the quality of this comes back to the wonderful work Ford draws from Wayne, helping the actor to find the cracks and flaws in this marble bust of Americanism. Wayne’s Ethan is awkward, angry, distant, difficult, cruel – a natural outsider, who has grown bitter against the world. Discovering Martha’s body, Wayne also allows Ethan to crumple into the sort of grief that translates within seconds into an iron loathing for the world and everything in it. He talks of the certainty of finding Debbie – but it’s a certainty born more of his idea of his own superior (white) determination rather than any faith (for all the language could suggest that). Ethan is in fact hostile and contemptuous of faith of any sort.

Ford frames Ethan frequently as an outsider, often framed uncomfortably in doorways, darkened walls seeming to close around him. Nowhere is this more beautifully done than in the film’s final shot which finds Ethan alone and forgotten outside the Jorgensen homestead, a man who has no place in the civilised world of family and friends, but an outsider with no place anywhere who must return to the wilderness. Wayne does this with a quiet, deflating gentleness – a beautiful suggestion of Ethan’s knowledge that the world is leaving him behind. Ford frames this beautifully in mid-shot to create one of the iconic images of cinema.

The Searchers isn’t perfect. There is a prolonged, slightly comic, sub-plot around Martin’s marriage to Laurie Jorgensen (Vera Miles in a thankless part), which culminates in the sort of fisticuff based comic stuff that looks more suited to The Quiet Man than here. The beautiful shots of monument valley are brilliantly done – but they also serve to point out the odd decision to shoot many of the exteriors on such obviously fake soundstages. While the film questions the attitudes and assumptions made about the Native American people in Hollywood films, the violent figure of Scar is the only Native American character given any real screen time (Martin’s accidental “wife” Look is treated as a joke, right up to her surprisingly tragic fate), making it easier to still see the tribes as an existential threat to civilisation, for all that Ford tries to contrast their suffering with the death of the settlers.

But Ford was trying to sneak something in here under the wire, at a time when people would only accept straight-forward stories of goodies and baddies in the West. He did this by turning Wayne for a pillar of taciturn goodness into someone who is almost a mirror image of his nemesis Scar, both men motivated by racial hatred. He parallels the violence of the Indians with the cavalry. He suggests in fact that there was good and bad on both sides. And I can’t think of another film where the viewer is convinced for a huge portion of the runtime that our hero intends to carry out an honour killing. The Searchers presents a man who holds racist views and trusts that we are smart enough to see the danger in Ethan’s extremism. Thankfully most of us are.

Ice Station Zebra (1968)

Rock Hudson takes command in the rather turgid cold war thriller Ice Station Zebra

Director: John Sturges

Cast: Rock Hudson (Commander James Farraday), Ernest Borgnine (Boris Vaslov), Patrick McGoohan (David Jones), Jim Brown (Captain Leslie Anders), Tony Bill (Lt Russell Walker), Lloyd Nolan (Admiral Garvey), Alf Kjellin (Colonel Ostrovsky)

Rumour has it that Howard Hughes loved this movie so much, he insisted on the Las Vegas TV broadcaster he owned to screen the film over 100 times. For most of the rest of us, once will probably be enough to take in all the fun that can be pulled out of this sub-par Alistair MacLean Cold War thriller, a poor relation to The Guns of the Navarone and Where Eagles Dare.

It’s the middle of the Cold War and US submarine commander James Farraday (Rock Hudson) is ordered to the North Pole to rescue a British scientific team. However that mission is just a cover for the real goal – something to do with retrieving a top secret gizmo from a crashed satellite. Farraday is ordered to transport British intelligence agent “David Jones” (Patrick McGoohan) to the Pole, who has bought Soviet defector Boris Vaslov (Ernest Borgnine) along with him. En route, sabotage nearly downs the sub, and on arrival the base has been nearly destroyed. Looks like there is a traitor on board – but is it Boris or recently arrived marine Captain Leslie Anders (Jim Brown)? Who can tell?

To be honest most people watching the film. It’s one of many not-particularly-intriguing mysteries in a hopelessly over-extended film that takes nearly two hours to get going, and then crams its paper-thin characters into a series of adventures that bounce from dull to cliché with giddy haste. Directed with a professional lack of engagement by John Sturges (who could believe the director of Bad Day at Black Rock and The Great Escape could have made something as flat as this?).

It’s a film that mistakes lack of explanations and rushed conclusions for intriguing mystery. There is barely enough actual plot here to sustain an hour and a half let alone the nearly two and a half hours the film takes to get nowhere in particular. The middle of the film is given over to a series of submarine escapades that would have already felt familiar at the time from The Enemy Below and have been bettered since in countless submarine films. From deep dives to furiously leaking compartments, there isn’t anything particularly new here.

When we finally arrive at the polar base, there is finally some decent mystery – as well as a haunting atmosphere – as the characters explore the badly damaged base and its traumatised residents (You can see how this film influenced John Carpenter as he directed The Thing). Sadly, what the film hasn’t managed to do up to this point is make us care at all about any of the characters. Rock Hudson, never a particularly inspiring performer, makes a dry and unengaging lead (first choice Gregory Peck would have made the world of difference). Patrick McGoohan does his best as the mysterious British agent, but the character is so lightly written that you never really feel particularly intrigued by his mystery. Ernest Borgnine chews the scenery as the ex-Pat Soviet while Jim Brown is serviceable as the marine captain. Virtually no other character makes any real impact.

The film culminates eventually in a confusing stand-off between the Americans and the Soviets, until the villains reveal themselves and a détente that doesn’t end up destroying the world is revealed. That’s about the sum total of interest the film can spark. Other than that, it’s slow pace, unengaging characters, uninvolving plot and unoriginal action make it a great deal of fuss about nothing in particular. Howard Hughes may have wanted to watch it a hundred times. You probably won’t want to.