Tag: Best Picture

On the Waterfront (1954)

Marlon Brando reinvents film acting in On the Waterfront

Director: Elia Kazan

Cast: Marlon Brando (Terry Malloy), Karl Malden (Father Barry), Lee J. Cobb (Johnny Friendly), Rod Steiger (Charley “The Gent” Malloy), Eva Marie Saint (Edie Doyle), Pat Henning (Timothy Dugan), John F Hamilton (“Pop” Doyle), Ben Wagner (Joey Doyle), James Westerfield (Big Mac)

When’s the right time to speak out for what you know is right? It’s a question we’ve all faced at some point, and it’s the question that changes the life of Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) after he is indirectly, and unwittingly, involved in the murder of a fellow dock worker. The killing was ordered by the corrupt, mob-connected union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), who rules the workers of the shipyards of Hoboken, New Jersey with an iron fist. The victim was going to talk to the cops, and suddenly Terry finds himself in the middle of a major ethical bind: should he give evidence or play “D and D” (deaf and dumb) like the rest of the workers.

His bind grows ever tighter as the local priest Father Barry (Karl Malden) takes up breaking the power of the union as his own personal mission. Not to mention Terry’s growing closeness to the victim’s sister Edie (Eva Marie Saint), with whom he finds himself slowly falling in love. On the other side is his brother Charley (Rod Steiger), a lawyer and right-hand man of Johnny Friendly, who has been running his brother’s life forever, ruining Terry’s boxing career by ordering him to take a dive so Friendly could make a killing on the betting circuit. What will Terry do?

Elia Kazan’s multiple Oscar winner is a powerful, beautifully made, engrossing and uplifting modern morality drama that still packs a wallop today. Shot largely on location in New Jersey, with lashings of Kazan’s brilliant realism and ability to bring poetic beauty and emotional force to the most everyday of settings, On the Waterfront is sublime, a film to make you rail against the injustice of corruption and the unthinking cruelty of everyday folk when given a chance to stigmatise someone.

Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg (whose script is a beautifully judged mixture of soulful dialogue and the rhythms of every day conversation) were both drawn towards the story after their engagement with McCarthyism in Hollywood. In this hunt for reds under the Hollywood bed, both Kazan and Schulberg named names. Both of them felt that they had been lied to and exploited by the communist movement in Hollywood – and also that Stalinist Russia was not a cause worth defending – but that didn’t stop many people rejecting them for breaking the rule of silence (the same rule that runs through this film). On the Waterfront is a heartfelt defence of the whistleblower (or the informer), and why that can sometimes be the only option open.

Based on a true story, Kazan’s film is a masterclass in carefully controlled, intelligent direction bringing out brilliant acting performances (always one of Kazan’s major strengths as director). Leading the way here is Marlon Brando, giving possibly the most famous, most influential acting performance in film history in the lead role. It’s not really an understatement to say it changed the face of movie acting. Brando here performs with a low-key, casual, almost tender naturalism that stands completely at odds with the more exhibitionist performers of the late 40s. And he funnels all this beautifully into Terry Malloy, a tough guy whom he inhabits with a vulnerability and gentleness that never once feels out of place with his temper and pride. There is instead an awe-inspiring transformation here, of the actor becoming the mumbling, uncertain character – not afraid for words to be lost, not worried about making eccentric or unexpected choices as a performer.

Two scenes stand out. In the first, Brando has his first long conversation with Edie Doyle, having rescued her from being set on by union men. In a single take – a carefully orchestrated willingness to let the actors explore the emotional truth of the scene from Kazan – Brando’s Terry shyly, gently, haltingly asks about her life and tries to explain his own. At one point, Edie drops her glove and Brando picks up the glove, fiddles with it and then puts it on – the sort of inspired naturalism that feels like nothing on paper, but on film carries a strange emotional force, a physical representation of the bond between them (and don’t underestimate the way Saint pulls the glove gently from his hand). The entire scene has the air of reality to it, Brando chewing gum, Saint wondering how much of herself to show to a man she isn’t sure she can trust. It’s masterful.

The other scene is of course possibly one of the most famous scenes in movies ever: I coulda been a contender. For films, this is like the To Be or Not To Be speech, a speech that has been quoted and riffed on ever since. But again, Brando resists the temptation throughout for histrionics – when Charley pulls a gun, Brando reacts not with shock or anger but sadness, almost tenderly pushing the gun aside and letting his voice fill with a world of regret for what has become of their relationship. Steiger is superb in this scene, but you can’t look at anyone except Brando here, awkward, sad, struggling to work out what to do with his life and finally confronting the broken past between the brothers with pointed regret and calm realisation rather than the anger and rage that other actors would have chosen. This is an actor who redefined his profession, at the top of his game.

The film is crammed with excellent performances. Eva Marie Saint (Oscar winning) has just the right measure of gutsy determination, fear and tender sweetness as the woman who opens Terry’s eyes to right and wrong. The film gained three Supporting Actor nominations (they all lost). Steiger is cocksure but self-loathing as Terry’s ambitious brother. Lee J. Cobb rages as only he can as the blowhard bully Friendly, demanding absolute loyalty. But on this rewatch, I loved Karl Malden’s moral certainty, courage and stubbornness as Father Barry. In any other film Barry’s speech railing against the dockers for being part of the system that oppresses them, all the time being pelted by food, would be the highlight of the film: here it’s just one of several stand-out moments.

Kazan was a superb visual stylist, this black-and-white masterpiece brilliantly shot by Boris Kaufman to create a world that feels the perfect mixture between the documentary realism and the theatrical. And working with a superb script that he felt such investment in helps to create a story that carries real emotional force, carefully investing you right from the start in Terry’s fundamental goodness and naivety, inviting you to feel rage on his behalf as he is sent to Coventry by his workmates. Topped off with a beautiful score by Leonard Bernstein – part jazzy, part wonderful orchestral stylings – this has barely aged a day in it’s over 60 years.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

Jack Nicholson is superb as McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Director: Milos Forman

Cast: Jack Nicholson (Randle P McMurphy), Louise Fletcher (Nurse Ratched), Will Sampson (“Chief” Bromden), William Redfield (Dale Harding), Brad Dourif (Billy Bibbit), Sydney Lassick (Charlie Cheswick), Christopher Lloyd (Max Taber), Danny DeVito (Martini), Vincent Schiavelli (Bruce Frederickson), Dean Brooks (Dr John Spivey), William Duell (Jim Sefelt), Scatman Crothers (Turkle)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of the landmark films of the 1970s, one of those films that’s on everyone’s list for great masterpieces. It lifted all five of the Big Oscars (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay), one of only three to do so. It’s widely loved for its celebration of rebelliousness and individualism, but there is more to the film than that. It’s as interesting for the things it doesn’t explore as much as the things it does.

Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) has himself sent to a mental institution rather than a prison farm, under the belief that serving his time in the institution will be far easier than doing hard labour. However, he finds the ward he is locked into is under the authoritarian control of Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), a passive-aggressive bully with a strict interest in the rules at the cost of all humanity. The inmates are cowed, but McMurphy encourages them to express themselves and seize their freedoms – little realising that his freedom is dependent on being signed off by the doctors, not the length of his original short sentence, and he has made no friends in the hospital authorities – or that Ratched is determined to break his influence over the other patients.

Forman was a perfect choice for directing a film that directly echoes his own iron-curtain upbringing. OFOTCN is a film that celebrates the freedom of the individual – but also recognises that authority and the state always wins out in the end. The hospital ward is cold, oppressive, a white-lined world where Ratched observes and quietly controls everything from her booth, softly issuing directives that carry a quiet menace. The film rotates around clashes between McMurphy wanting to do his own thing and Ratched stridently reinforcing a fixed hospital agenda. At one point Forman’s camera tracks from McMurphy on the basketball court, up to Ratched watching behind a full length window like an imposing Stasi officer. Forman totally understands the struggle of expression and free will in oppressive regimes, and it’s this that has given the film such a rich life – who doesn’t want to land on the side of freedom?

It helps as well that representing freedom we have possibly Jack Nicholson’s finest performance as McMurphy. A roaring, bubbling, manic, burst of nature, an impish anti-authority figure who rips through every scene with intense energy. It’s a marvellous, inspiring performance. And it makes McMurphy exactly the sort of rebel without a cause we would like to be, the guy who can inspire and lead through force of will alone, who refuses to be cowed or crushed. 

Nicholson’s performance however is a perfect mixture of larger-than-life drama and moments of reflection. The film splices in a few conversations between Nicholson and the doctors that, over the course of the film, change more and more from spry defiance and mockery towards a quieter, more despairing resignation as he slowly begins to realise how trapped he is. Not that he wants to show any of that to his fellow inmates, or to Ratched with whom he keenly engages in a battle of wills.

Ratched herself is exactly the sort of cold, rules-bound, inflexible authority figure we are naturally placed to hate. Louise Fletcher is wonderful, with her softly spoken iciness matched with certainty about her moral position. Is she even interested in curing the patients? Her focus seems to be completely on controlling and running the patients’ lives rather than changing the status quo. 

This battle of wills drives the film, but it’s interesting as well for what it tells us about McMurphy. He seems to have no understanding of the fact that, while his fellow inmates are cowed, they are all to some degree mentally ill and certainly all frightened and unpredictable. McMurphy sees them as people who need to be encouraged to seize their own destinies, but these are people who are incapable of really understanding what McMurphy is trying to do or have any interest in it. He shakes up their world, but has little real impact on them in the long term.

It’s not a film that engages in any great understanding of mental illness, but suggests that perhaps McMurphy and Ratched are in their own ways as insane as the people they are fighting over in the asylum. McMurphy is a self-destructive force who pushes for small things with huge passion, but then drifts through the major things. He acts without thinking and doesn’t try to understand the people around him. Ratched meanwhile is so obsessed with controlling her own small universe, she has defined her entire life around her governance of the ward.

The film has a slightly troubling relationship with women – which is not necessarily a criticism, but an observation since the film’s only prominent female character is Ratched and all the inmates are men. The things that Ratched stops the men from doing are the sort of typically “male” activities that McMurphy delights in – gambling, sports, girls – while McMurphy himself is (in what is the only truly dated moment in the film) in the slammer partly for having under-age sex with a girl, which he eagerly describes to his doctor. McMurphy pushes all the inmates to become more like the sort of man he understands men should be, and while it is a freedom of expression, it’s also one that has little place for women in it, other than as sex objects.

But that’s not the real aim of the film, so you can forgive it. McMurphy is not an intellectual or a man on a mission, he’s an unthinking burst of energy that burns up the world around him and demands the freedom to not be told what to do. That’s what gives the film its real emotional impact and why it spoke so much to Vietnam era America, and continues to speak to us today. And of course it’s linked to the fact that the film is a massive tragedy.

Because in the end the forces of oppression do win and McMurphy’s spirit is crushed. Sure McMurphy more than contributes to his own failures – he allows his own to drift away, and his pushing of his own agenda of what he feels men should want dooms poor Billy Babbit (a stuttering slice of timidity played by Brad Dourif). The film has a Pyrrhic victory in his inspiring the “Chief” (William Sampson), a giant native American flying under the radar by pretending to be deaf and dumb, into carrying out McMurphy’s dreams.

But for our hero it’s a bust. Forman’s film is a brilliant celebration of the energy and futility of lords of misrule like McMurphy, with a commanding performance from Jack Nicholson that’s one for the ages. A wonderful piece of ensemble playing in a set that becomes a metaphor for oppressive regimes, it’s remained remarkably undated and a force to be reckoned with on any top ten list.

Tom Jones (1963)

Albert Finney flirts with Diane Cilento (among many, many others) in Oscar winner Tom Jones

Director: Tony Richardson

Cast: Albert Finney (Tom Jones), Susannah York (Sophie Western), Hugh Griffith (Squire Western), Edith Evans (Miss Western), Joan Greenwood (Lady Bellaston), Diane Cilento (Molly Seagrim), George Devine (Squire Allworthy), David Tomlinson (Lord Fellamer), Rosalind Atkinson (Mrs Millar), Wilfrid Lawson (Black George), Rosalind Knight (Mrs Fitzpatrick), Jack Macgowan (Patridge), Freda Jackson (Mrs Seagrim), David Warner (Blifil), Joyce Redman (Mrs Waters/Jenny Jones), Rachel Kempson (Bridget Allworthy), Peter Bull (Thwackum), Angela Baddeley (Mrs Wilkins), Julian Glover (Northerton)

In early 1964, America was at the height of Beatlemania. Everything about Swinging Sixties London was the height of cool, so what better way to reflect that at the Oscars than naming Best Film of the previous year as being Tom Jones, the film that turned Henry Fielding’s work into the epitome of the era’s vibe. Watching Tom Jones today is a cruel reminder that generally nothing dates as hard or as fast as cutting-edge film techniques, and that time is often not kind to comedy. But Tom Jones was the first truly British film to lift Best Picture since Olivier’s Hamlet in 1948, so it was a sign of the short-lived all-conquering cool of British culture.

Adapted with a frenetic style from Henry Fielding’s novel, the film follows the trials and tribulations of Tom Jones (Albert Finney), adopted by Squire Allworthy (George Devine) after he is found abandoned on Allworthy’s bed as a baby. Growing up, Tom is a roisterer and rodgerer (especially keen on rodgering) but fundamentally decent, in love with Sophia Western (Susannah York) and the target of jealous rumours from his cousin Blifil (David Warner, looking a bit lost in his film debut). Banished as a result of Blifil’s schemes, he journeys to London encountering adventures along the way, not least a night of bliss with a Mrs Waters (Joyce Redman) who may (or may not) be his mother. Will Tom be able to prove his innocence, win the love of Sophia and escape his destiny of being “born to hang”?

Tony Richardson came to Tom Jones fresh from directing several searching, morally complex kitchen-sink dramas – and basically seemed determined to cut loose with this film by having fun. What he comes up with is an explosion of multiple different styles, from silent film to sped-up Benny Hill chases. Not a single editing or camera trick is unused, with the film stuffed to the gills with fades, wipes and freeze frames. Richardson basically used every single trick in the book. He was also lucky to have a perfectly judged score from John Addison (winning an Oscar).

It makes for a frenetic and fast-paced film, in love with its own 60s cool of anarchic comedy, sexual liberation and tongue-in-cheek lack of reverence all washed down with a bucket load of thigh-slapping bawdiness. It’s a film that’s inordinately pleased with itself, using Fielding’s interventionist narration style as the licence to break the fourth wall frequently and introduce a dryly hammy voiceover from Michael MacLiammóir. All of this was seen as the height of daring film-making back in the day – especially since Hollywood expected literary adaptations to be treated with reverence rather than as a high-brow Carry-On. But it’s dated badly.

Its smug, overbearing sense of zeitgeist cool comes across terrifyingly passé today, and the film’s daring use of every single cinema style makes it tonally feel like a complete mess. Richardson will segue from farce straight to an immersive hunting sequence where we are invited to feel every moment of the blood lust and violence, straight to a pastoral sequence showing the courtship of Tom and Sophia in glorious countryside.

Richardson himself – despite winning Best Director for his very self-consciously flashy work – also had mixed feelings about the film, recutting it shortly after its Oscar win into a shorter version which remains the version most people have seen today. He said of it that it “felt incomplete…and botched in much of its execution…whenever someone gushes to me about Tom Jones, I always cringe little inside”.

It’s a fair assessment of a film that is all flash – and way too much of it – and so little substance that it frequently becomes trite, smug and unpleasant to watch. John Osborne’s script (which apparently he submitted than refused to redraft) is in all honesty a mess (much of it was rewritten on set while the narration was a post-production addition to make it all make sense), with barely any quotable lines, and whatever skill the film has is all in the telling and the editing. 

Did Richardson take the whole thing as a lark and then work out later on that comedy is harder than it looks? The entire film was a complete mess on set – several errors were in fact left in the film (such as Western falling off his horse due to Griffith’s drunkenness) and then turned into jokes through the voiceover. There is a slight air from all involved that this isn’t proper film-making, that this is just one to flog for a bit of cash. Its Oscar win is inexplicable, but can be chalked up to a horrendously weak year at the Oscars.

Albert Finney goes through the entire film on autopilot – little matter than it made him a star – and he seems a curious choice for a young lover, throughout the film he channels instead a sort of horny Arthur Seaton. Finney thought the entire thing bosh and a waste of his talents – an attitude that does come across on the screen. Lightness is not always Finney’s strength, and his distant disengagement with the film becomes more striking with every viewing. 

Many of the rest of the cast mug shamelessly. Hugh Griffith bizarrely landed an Oscar nomination for a performance of gurning over-the-top mania. The film had three nominations for Best Supporting Actress: Edith Evans emerges best, although she could play this domineering Mrs Western standing on her head; Diane Cilento brings an attractive lightness to buxom Molly while Joyce Redman is good value and gets the film’s most famous sequence, a slobbery eating sequence with Finney where food is consumed in a very suggestive way as foreplay. Arguably the best supporting roles come from Joan Greenwood as the sexual but cruel Lady Bellaston and George Devine as the decent Squire Allworthy (the only character who isn’t some sort of caricature).

Tom Jones is most of all a memento of a particular brand of fast-paced, technique heavy, manic sixties comedy. It made a lot of money and won a lot of awards, so led to a torrent of similar films from bawdy Hogarthian costume dramas to sex comedies in modern London with naïve but well-endowed young men. Richardson and co. should have credit for catching this vibe first – but it makes for an odd experience today, like a slightly uncomfortable museum piece.

Gigi (1958)

Louis Jourdan forms an unusual romance with Leslie Caron’s Gigi

Director: Vincente Minnelli

Cast: Leslie Caron (Gigi), Louis Jourdan (Gaston Lachaille), Maurice Chevalier (Honoré), Hermione Gingold (Madame Alvarez “Mamita”), Eva Gabor (Liane d’Exelmans), Jacques Bergerac (Sandomir), Isabel Jeans (Aunt Alicia), John Abbott (Manuel)

In 1958 Gigi was littered with Oscars, winning all nine of its nominations to become one of the most successful films at the ceremony ever. It’s bizarre considering this is a run-of-the-mill musical with all the production values you would expect from an Arthur Freed production, but not really anything special compared to several other films from the same stable. It’s one of those moments when you remember Singin’ in the Rain didn’t even get nominated for Best Picture. 

Anyway, based on a book by Collette, Gigi deserved some sort of award for sneaking under the Hays code a story about a young girl training to be a courtesan, and the heartless playboy her family want her to seduce. Leslie Caron is Gigi, while the man who she has a sisterly affection for is Gaston (Louis Jourdan), the man around town bored with all the artificiality around him. Both Gigi and Gaston are heavily guided by their mentors: in Gigi’s case her grandmother, famed former courtesan Madame Alvarez (Hermione Gingold), in Gaston’s his uncle Honoré (Maurice Chevalier) a charming old rake. Everyone wants the two of them to become lovers, but do Gigi and Gaston want the sort of relationship of convenience their mentors expect?

That the film exists at all is a triumph of careful negotiation between Freed and the Hays Code, not usually open to films about high-class prostitutes and their marks. It does make for an occasional bit of confusion from the viewer – and a truncated plot as key ideas are circuited around (or over) – but also marvellous scenes, well written by Alan Jay Lerner, where Madame Alvarez and her sister (and courtesan trainer) Aunt Alicia (Isabel Jeans) discuss Gigi having “matured” to the correct age to become Gaston’s mistress by using unfinished sentences and raised eyebrows.

It makes for a slightly odd viewing experience today, especially with our far more enlightened views of the role women can have in society. The film mines comic material out of Gaston’s jilting of an unfaithful mistress (including Honoré toasting him for having driven the poor girl to attempted suicide after her public humiliation), while the comedic training sequences as Alicia attempts to turn Gigi into every man’s dream of the perfect mistress carries more than a whiff of exploitation today. But the film comes from a different r time, where such matters wouldn’t have occurred to either audiences or film makers.

Theres is a similar vibe in the film’s now most notorious sequence (and its opening) as Maurice Chevalier’s Honoré introduces the film and its world by crooning “Thank Heaven For Little Girls”. It’s a great catchy song (wonderfully delivered by Chevalier) but its lyrics thankful that “little girls get/Bigger every day”, matched with the septuagenarian Chevalier leering at a group of schoolgirls playing in the park, carry more than a whiff of the paedophile today. 

While you could say that this is all part of Minelli and Lerner’s intentions – that under the elaborate design of the film, there runs an undercurrent of selfish men carelessly using women for their own entertainment and many women enabling and encouraging this – it’s presented with such lightness, froth and charm that any potential darkness underneath it gets lost all together. Instead, its charming outer confection tends to obscure the difficult morals under the surface and prevents the viewer from engaging with them.

And the film’s design is what it’s really about. The first major musical to be shot largely on location – compare to An American in Paris which recreated the city of romance on a sound stage – its camera work is fairly reserved and focused on admiring the sets and locations more than providing a bit more to really engage the eye with. The design is impressive, mixing art nouveau and Cecil Beaton’s elaborate style, and the sets and costume (all Oscar-winning of course) really impress, even if the opulence ends up becoming overwhelming, not least with the overpowering reds that fill Gigi’s rooms. Minelli’s love of opulence and art ends up crushing the film.

That design also overwhelms the character. It’s telling that among its nine nominations, not a single one was for acting. Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan do perfectly acceptable jobs, but their characters are not particularly interesting. Surprisingly for a musical – one starring Leslie Caron! – there is no dancing either. The film really misses the presence of people like Gene Kelly, the kind of leading man or woman who could carry a film on charisma. The real charisma comes from Chevalier (the one surprise to miss an Oscar nomination), who is so perfect as Honoré, so charming and dry (and who delivers his songs so well) that the film flags dramatically when he is absent (which he is for much of the final act). But the film misses a real heart.

It makes for a film that looks good, but is more a triumph of style and ingenious storytelling than it is storytelling with impact. Its Oscar win is perhaps a tribute to its faultless opulence and big budget spectacle. Because, boiled down to it, it’s a film with a story that hinges slightly on things that aren’t exactly tasteful revolving around people who aren’t very interesting. It has some good songs and moments from the Alan Jay Lerner script, but there is a reason this Best Picture winner has stuck in the collective memory so little, despite its record-breaking haul.

In the Heat of the Night (1967)

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger confront racism In the Heat of the Night

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: Sidney Poitier (Virgil Tibbs), Rod Steiger (Chief Bill Gillespie), Warren Oates (Sam Wood), Lee Grant (Mrs Colbert), Larry Gates (Endicott), James Patterson (Purdy), William Schallert (Mayor Schubert), Beah Richards (Mama Caleba), Peter Whitney (Courtney)

A slim, tight thriller with a social message, In the Heat of the Night won Best Picture in 1967, beating out Bonnie and Cyde and The Graduate (both films with a revolutionary impact on films making) as well as another Sidney Poitier starrer, the even-more message heavy Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. An unflashy, cleanly made, efficient film, In the Heat of the Night is in some ways a surprising winner – but the shocking depiction of racism in the Deep South at the time still hits home today.

In Sparta, Mississippi a wealthy industrialist from Chicago is found murdered in the street. Who committed the crime? Well surely it’s the well-dressed black man with a wallet full of money waiting to get out of town at the train station. The man is hauled in – only for him to reveal he is an expert homicide detective from Philadelphia named Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier). Tibbs is sucked in to assist local police chief Gillespie (Rod Steiger) to investigate the crime, partly on the order of his boss, partly due to his disgust at the police department’s racism and incompetence, and partly at the pleading of the victim’s widow (Lee Grant) who recognises him as the best officer for the case. But will Tibbs’ expertise crack the case in a town where the idea of a black man in a suit, asking questions and taking no shit, is a still a surefire recipe for a lynching?

Nominally In the Heat of the Night is a murder mystery, but you’ll be hard pushed to remember much about the case after you finish the film. The eventual killer emerges from left field and the steps of the investigation are often unclear. While the film is trim, it does mean the tension around the killer’s identity never really builds up and we never get a real sense of the personality of the suspects (apart from the uniform racism).

Where its real strength is, is in the mis-matched “buddy” movie structure of two men forced to work together, the difference being that both casual and violent racism underpins every interaction Tibbs has in the town. Poitier was seen as a calm and graceful figure, but In the Heat of the Night finally gave him the chance to mix dignity with resentment and anger that had never been seen in a black character on screen before. The film works due to Poitier’s inherent toughness, his lack of compromise and anger at injustice. Poitier was never more hard-edged, defiant and determined to get what he deserves. Unlike Poitier’s other racial buddy movie The Defiant Ones, you can’t imagine Tibbs jumping off the train to freedom to try and save Tony Curtis.

Tibbs isn’t just the smartest, toughest policeman on the screen – he demands to be treated like it. The film’s most famous scene – and shocking at the time – is during Tibbs’ questioning of genteel racist Endicott in his orchid greenhouse. Endicott – whose home resembles nothing more than a plantation, loaded with black workers – is well spoken but inherently racist, and slaps Tibbs when his questions go on too long – only to immediately receive a backhand from Tibbs in return. Endicott is as shocked as audiences were – the idea of a black man striking back was on unheard of.

It’s terrifying and sickening to realise however that the American South at the time was genuinely like this. The slap is a proud moment – but it marks Tibbs for retribution. There is a genuine danger Tibbs will get lynched in this film (twice he narrowly escapes murder at the hands of a gang of furious rednecks). In real life, Poitier was very hesitant to film in the South, and for the brief location shooting in Tennessee slept with a gun under his pillow. The film is littered with casually dropped racial slurs, the politest of which is “boy”. It leads to the famous line from Tibbs that back home “they call me Mister Tibbs” – but you forget that it follows from Gillespie asking him what an n-word copper is called in Philadelphia. And even after that Gillespie only calls him Virgil, as if still not quite able to compute the idea of a black man who can be a “mister”.

The relationship between Tibbs and Gillespie is the heart of the film. And the film is brave to not have this turn into “they were opponents but then they became the best of friends”. Instead there is a sort of grudging respect that grows, even though Tibbs clearly thinks Gillespie is an impulsive racist and Gillespie thinks Tibbs is a stiff-backed but brilliant n-word. Rod Steiger won the Oscar for Best Actor, and he does some fine work as the complex Gillespie. Keeping his explosive energy in check (despite the inevitable outbursts), Steiger sketches out a character who is smart enough to know he isn’t smart enough, who can respect Tibbs’ professionalism and understand on some level that racism is beyond all sense but still drop racial words with an instinctive ease.

Steiger’s Gillespie is a tough-talking, stereotypical cop but he’s also got a sad little hinterland – a late dinner at his home with Tibbs has him confess that Tibbs is his only guest for years – and while he arrests no fewer than three innocent people for the crime, there is no doubting his dedication to justice. Steiger doesn’t apologise for Gillespie’s appalling attitudes, but also does enough to suggest that his racism is learned rather than innate. While never completely sympathetic, especially today, the film lays hints of hope that a racist cop from the South could work side-by-side with a black officer – and that was considerable progress at the time.

But it’s Poitier’s movie, and while in many ways he has the simpler part (and Poitier generously ceded his admiration for Steiger’s skill and craft pushing him to a level he felt he not reached before), Tibbs is the centre of the film. Jewison skilfully shoots Poitier as always the outsider, from his looks and Sherlock Holmes style skills, to the way the camera focuses on his hands touching things – from dead bodies to door knobs – to the visible discomfort of the white men watching him. Tibbs may be arrogant but he’s right and Poitier’s refusal to compromise or offer any concessions is a striking thing – Tibbs is who he is and he won’t change a thing to be accepted by the white man. At the end, he may respect the steps Gillespie has taken – but I doubt he’d consider the man a friend and certainly not a professional equal. 

In the Heat of the Night is still shocking for the openly displayed racism and menace of violence that black people faced in the Deep South in sixties America. Jewison’s film is efficiently assembled and tightly edited – not a single minute is wasted in one of the shortest Best Picture winners ever – and while its mystery is little to write home about, its portrait of racism in America is still shocking and stirring and its two lead performances are things to linger in the memory.

Marty (1955)

Betsy Blair and Ernest Borgnine are two shy people out on a date in Marty

Director: Delbert Mann

Cast: Ernest Borgnine (Marty Piletti), Betsy Blair (Clara), Esther Minciotti (Mrs Piletti), Augusta Ciolli (Aunt Catherine), Joe Mantell (Angie), Karen Steele (Virginia), Jerry Paris (Tommy)

Strange to think today, but until Parasite, only one other film had won both the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Picture. That film was Marty and if that fact seems odd today when you watch the film, it’s easy to forget how revolutionary a film about a regular guy with an average job and boring life was back then. Films were about larger than life guys doing big manly things. They weren’t about butchers who lived with their mamas and can’t get girls.

Our butcher is Marty Piletti (Ernest Borgnine) and one night he meets Clara (Betsy Blair), an equally shy chemistry school teacher. They spend the whole night talking, and Marty excitedly plans to call her the next day. Problem is, a brief meeting with his mother (Esther Minciotti) is a disaster – not least because she’s worried Clara could mean her being thrown out of Marty’s home like her sister (Augusta Ciolli) has been – and Marty’s best friend Angie (Joe Mantell) doesn’t think Clara is much to write home about. Under these peer pressures will Marty make that call or not?

That plot summary by the way effectively covers 95% of the film. Today Marty seems so lightweight and slight it’s almost a puff of air. The film was adapted from a one hour TV play, and beat a host of Broadway adaptations (Picnic, The Rose Tattoo and Mister Roberts) to the big one. Today of course a TV play would never be adapted into a movie (in fact if anything Paddy Chayefsky’s play would probably be expanded into a ten episode Netflix drama), but in 1950s America a TV play would have been screened once and then disappeared forever. What better for Hollywood but to assume the one-off delights of TV could be as mined as easily as the best work on Broadway?

So Marty was made and won and it’s a decent, reasonably charming movie even though it’s really hard to see what the fuss is about now. The main delights lie in the script by Paddy Chayefsky, one of the greatest screenplay writers of American film history here winning the first of his three Oscars. The script is simple, well observed, full of cracking little lines, creates some marvellously rounded characters and is careful not to overbalance the overall low-key effect of the film. 

Chayefsky has teed the whole film up so well that most of those involved simply run with the great material they have been given. None of the actors – or Delbert Mann, who received a generous Best Director Oscar – ever hit these heights again. But then that’s about right for a film that is all about the triumph of the little guy (or at least the little guy getting a small day in the sun). Mann marshals the actors (some of whom were in the original TV production) to good effect and basically doesn’t get in the way of the script.

The story itself covers just two days in the life of Marty, but it’s still a gift of a part for Ernest Borgnine, who won an Oscar (surely to the chagrin of Rod Steiger who played the role on TV). The role subtly subverts Borgnine’s persona – Marty has the build for muscular action that matches the series of smarmy, working-class heavies Borgnine had played up to this point (characters much like some of his friends in the drama) but he moves with the nerves of a timid man. Borgnine is as gentle and careful as the picture itself, a shy man who has given up on good things happening to him but comes alive when he meets someone who sees him for who he is rather than what he is not.

That first long date – it takes up well over half the film’s runtime – sees him slowly go through stages from nerves, to stumbled confessions to an excited jabbering as he is so excited to be with Clara he keeps failing (accidentally) to let her speak so keen is he to share everything with her, through to a protective regard and a euphoric celebration. The only slight dated misstep is Marty’s reaction when denied a kiss – which he goes for with the entitlement of a Mad Men era male – but it’s swiftly course corrected in the film as another sign of Marty’s clumsy lack of knowledge of how relationships work. Throughout all this Borgnine is charming, heartfelt, tender and sweet and deserving of recognition for the role.

Opposite him for most of the film is Betsy Blair, who won the role after vigorous campaigning from her and her husband Gene Kelly (who announced he would refuse to do his next film if she was not cast). Mousy, timid and shy but looking for warmth and affection in life, Clara is just like Marty: a woman who isn’t sure what the next step in her life is but is certain that she doesn’t want to spend it growing old alone. It’s another heartfelt performance. The cast is rounded out by the sort of solid minor supporting players who don’t usually stand out, with Joe Mantell getting an Oscar nomination repeating his role as brash best friend Angie from TV. Stand out though is Esther Minciotti (also repeating her role) as Marty’s loving but domineering mother.

It all comes together into something very small, sweet and low-key and if it’s strange to see what the fuss is all about, it’s probably because there have been so many more movies made about ordinary people since then that this first trend setter now looks like nothing too special. But with a marvellous script and some wonderful performances from actors who never got an opportunity like this again, it’s truly a magic moment for all concerned, a once in a life-time film before most of them returned to jobbing roles once more.

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

Laughton and Gable go head to head in Mutiny on the Bounty

Director: Frank Lloyd

Cast: Charles Laughton (Captain Bligh), Clark Gable (Lt Fletcher Christian), Franchot Tone (Roger Byam), Herbert Mundin (Smith), Eddie Quillan (Ellison), Dudley Digges (Bacchus), Donald Crisp (Burkitt), Henry Stephenson (Sir Joseph Banks), Francis Lister (Captain Nelson), Spring Byington (Mrs Byam), Movita Castaneda (Tehani), Mamo Clark (Maimiti), Byron Russell (Quintal), David Torrance (Lord Hood)

“They respect but one law – the law of fear…”. So hisses Charles Laughton as the definitively monsterish Captain Bligh in this Oscar-winning version of the most famous mutiny ever. It’s the quintessential adventure on the high-seas motion picture (never mind that the actual ship used could only get a few miles off the coast), but it’s also a feast of good acting and Hollywood class: the only picture to get three nominations for Best Actor, as well as the last Best Picture winner to only win one Oscar. It cemented the ideas around Bligh and Fletcher for generations.

Heading out on a two-year voyage in 1787 to transport breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies, the Bounty sets sail from Portsmouth with several members of the crew freshly press-ganged. In command is self-made man Captain William Bligh (Charles Laughton), while his second-in-command is gentleman Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable). A pair of fine sailors, the two of them are separated only by their methods. Fletcher is a man of the people, a motivator with a firm hand. Bligh is a man with just a firm hand, who never uses a dozen lashes of the crew when two dozen will do. Fletcher becomes more and more alienated by Bligh’s ruthless methods.

Frank Lloyd bought the rights to a novel that fictionalised the mutiny (introducing Roger Byam, a fictional version of Peter Heywood who later become a Post-Captain in the navy) with the intention of directing and playing Bligh himself. Fortunately he was persuaded to step aside on the acting front for Laughton, who is seized the part with relish.  Shoulders scrunched and neck jutting his head forward, with his lip curled, this is a Bligh constantly on the look-out for offence, a martinet whose anger stems from a self-loathing within. A chippy middle-class boy made good, he’s determined to enforce the letter of the law, and while a bully with no empathy he’s not exactly a bad man, just a bad captain. Laughton’s performance simmers with bitterness and a relish for being obeyed.

He makes a neat contrast with Clark Gable at his matinee idol finest. Worried about taking the role because it demanded the shaving of his lucky moustache (no facial hair in the navy), Gable gifts Laughton the flashier role to play the decent hero with only the best for his fellow man at heart. Gable’s Christian is decent, understanding, a natural leader who has a firm eye for justice. Not even bothering with the British accent, but settling for a mid-Atlantic ease, Gable is the Hollywood superstar to his core, his Christian the quintessential romantic ideal.

Between the two of them runs Franchot Tone’s Midshipman Roger Byam. Tone is the often forgotten third nominee for Best Actor, but he has in many ways the trickier part, which he handles with aplomb: the naïve young man who wants to serve his captain and his country, but also understands that his captain is not a man of justice. Tone gets the film’s highlight, a final speech to the court martial that helps make everything turn out alright, but his tortured pleading for justice and moral righteousness is delivered with a humble and effective forthrightness.

Lloyd has these fine performances (plus some great work from Mundin, Crisp, Digges, Quillan and others as assorted ship’s crew) and sets them all out perfectly on a film that captures the heart of the epic. The ship is brilliantly constructed and assembled, and Lloyd’s film reconstructs everything from day-to-day travails on sea to the impact of storms. The mutiny when it comes is shot with an Eisensteinesque immediacy, while he also manages to shoot Tahiti with a dreamlike paradise sheen. He paces perfectly the growing sense of tension and unresolvable fury between Bligh and Christian. 

And he certainly gets a brilliant sense of the cruelty and sustained violence of Bligh’s rule on the boat, as floggings come thundering down on the backs the sailors – often for the very meanest of reasons. A keelhauling (despite one moment of laughably bad model work) is brutal in its harshness. Bligh’s first act on boat is to flog a dead man (after all death doesn’t wipe out the need for punishment) and he goes from there. The film does give time to admire Bligh’s seamanship – and reconstructs surprisingly well his awe-inspiring open boat trip over 4,000 miles to take him and loyalists back to a safe port. Meanwhile Christian heads for the safety of Tahiti, a blissful series of images of our decent sailors enjoying homespun pleasures and hot Tahitian wives.

Of course it’s not actually what happened really. Bligh was a difficult, priggish and rather cold person with low personal skills but he wasn’t the monster he seems here. Christian had a certain aristocratic pull over the men, but he was also probably far more twitchy, young and stupid than the assured, experienced sailor he is here. Bligh’s ship wasn’t the bastion of cruelty it is here (punishments seemed in line with the rest of the navy, or even a little less according to the log), but Bligh’s lack of understanding of how men work and his endless drive, matched with his sailors’ seduction by the charms of an easy life on Tahiti perhaps led to the outbreak. Either way Bligh definitely didn’t command the HMS Pandorato hunt the sailors down, nor did the investigation into the matter end with him being snubbed as a wrong ‘un by Lord Hood.

But hey, if you know that this is legend printed as fact it’s fine. Because Lloyd’s film is still superbly entertaining, has three excellent performances among a fine ensemble cast and while its version of Bligh may be a monster made up, Laughton invests him with enough humanity and self-loathing you’ll despair at his poor choices as much as you’ll hate his cruelty. Prime Hollywood entertainment, perfect for any time.

The Godfather Part II (1974)

Al Pacino defines his career (and film history) as The Godfather Part II

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Cast: Al Pacino (Michael Corleone), Robert Duvall (Tom Hagen), Diane Keaton (Kay Corelone), Robert De Niro (Vito Corleone), John Cazale (Fredo Corleone), Talia Shire (Connie Corleone), Lee Strasberg (Hyman Roth), Michael V. Gazzo (Frank Pentangeli), GD Spradlin (Senator Pat Greary), Richard Bright (Al Neri), Gastone Moschin (Don Fanucci), Morgana King (Mama Corelone)

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his soul? It’s the question that drives this triumphant, Oscar-laden, sequel to Coppola’s cinema-defining masterpiece, The Godfather to create what is, without doubt, the greatest one-two punch in cinema history, two films that develop and contrast each other naturally it’s very easy to consider them as one perfect film.

It’s 1958 and Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) has seen his power grow to control Crime across several states. However problems confront him including rivalry from Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) his business partner, a disaffected capo Frank Pentangeli (Michael V Gazzo) talking to a Senate investigation and growing tensions in his marriage to Kay (Diane Keaton). The story is intercut with the rise to power of his father Vito (Robert DeNiro), a man raising his family in Little Italy and realising the temptations of a life of crime.

Happy with just one Godfather film, Coppola only agreed to a second in return for a pile of cash and complete creative control. He used that to create a film even deeper, richer and mesmeric (perhaps) than the first film. While The Godfather is high grade pulp fiction, shot and assembled with arthouse skill and layered with depth, Part II is a profound family saga, an arthouse epic spliced with rich vein of pulp fiction at its heart. A multi-generational story that illustrates the dark corruption at the heart of America from top to bottom, it also demonstrates the stark differences in personality and action between two ruthless, authoritarian father figures who do all that they do in the name of family, one of whom sees that family prosper and grow around him, the other who destroys everyone near to him.

Coppola’s film removes much of the slightly cuddily family element from the Corleone family to show a darker, bleaker, chillier movie than its landmark predecessor. Coppola uses his control to expand and deepen the Corleone saga both in the past and present, but also in the dark hearts and secrets of a family built on crime, extortion and murder. It’s a thematically rich, engrossing and beautifully assembled piece of film-making. Exquisite in every touch and beat, completely convincing and breath-taking in its confidence it is clearly the greatest sequel ever made.

The film charts the final descent of Michael Corleone into the dark recesses of his own worst desires and instincts. The brutal, unforgiving, unrelenting coldness and absolute certainty matched with the overwhelming hunger to win that has left him hollowed out and unrecognisable from the naïve, idealistic young war hero we were introduced to at the wedding that opens The Godfather. Of course, even at the start of the film, as Michael holds court with a chilling coolness and maintains only awkward contact with his family – all of whom must submit to him and his wishes or face lethal consequences – it’s clear that the man who talked of “it’s my family Kay, it’s not me” is a long, long way away.

During the film we see Michael seem to harden even further, an adamantine chillness captured superbly by Al Pacino. In, without doubt, the greatest performance of his career, Pacino restrains bar maybe three times, the explosive energy and ferocity that has been the hallmark of his career (a feat that allegedly made him physically ill). Instead, he presents a Michael who is an almost pathologically cold fish, a fiercely intelligent, scheming observer with eyes that observe and understand everything, jet black boreholes that suggest only whirlpools of emptiness behind them. He’s unrelenting, lacks any doubt and (it becomes clear) has not a vestige of pity left in him, with empathy forced out of his body like water from a squeezed sponge. Pacino prowls every frame like a quiet tiger, oozing sharpness, intelligence and lethal, ruthless ambition.

Everything is done to protect and secure his family and its legacy, but each action seems to strip him one by one of everyone he claims to be protecting. His children seem to live in intimidation and later terror of him. His wife turns from misery to loathing to being ejected from the family home, even aborting her pregnancy to prevent herself bringing another Corleone into the world (a reaction that leads to a final, relationship severing explosion of rage from Michael). His brother Fredo, poor sweet, foolish Fredo, is sacrificed to an unrelenting desire for revenge. The man who did everything for “the family” ends the film by having his last surviving brother executed. The brother who, the film’s coda reveals, was the only member of the family to support his signing up for service in World War Two.

As Coppola’s camera drills into the face of Michael, cold, greying, alone in an autumnal garden – and how often the film simply studies the ruthless calculation of Michael, the man who understands every move everyone makes before they even make it – you know we are looking at a man who has damned himself, who has destroyed everything who claims to hold dear while working to protect it.

Brilliantly, Coppola intercuts the storyline of Michael’s damning collapse into complete moral damnation with the rise of his father. The Young Vito Corleone – played with Oscar-winning skill by De Niro who superbly channels the basic facets of Brando’s performance mixed with his own charm – arrives in America to find it a land as in thrall to the rule of the gangs as his hometown in Sicily. Like Michael in the first film, he is tempted by the world of crime and finds he has a natural aptitude for it: like his son he is a man who people follow, and the man who has the will to do what must be done. Like him he is an empire builder who commands respect and honour.

But unlike his son, he is a man capable of warmth, of empathy. He is man who can be playful, who respects others, who can feel forgiveness, who sees others as people, not just (as Michael does) simply being tools to be manipulated. Vito may be a murderer like his son, but he loves his wife, he loves his children and he can form bonds with them – natural, warm, loving bonds – that Michael can only dream of doing. For Vito it is all about the family, and providing for them is what inspires his actions. For Michael it’s words, but for Vito – it is everything.

Coppola masterfully intercuts these two storylines so they brilliantly comment and contrast with each other. Each step of Michael’s struggles to overcome the plots around him, are perfectly bookended with contrasting moments of Vito’s own rise to power, and the bonds of loyalty he builds even as Michael destroys those own bonds in his own life.

But then Michael is dealing with high stakes. While Vito’s early life shows Mafiosi running Little Italy, and calling the shots on the neighbourhood, a local tradition inherited en masse from the mother land, Michael moves in the worlds of government corruption. The empire we see Vito start to build is destined under his son to interfere in the rule of whole countries in Cuba, and commit unspeakable crimes to bring Senators and witnesses under their control in Senate Hearings into Organised Crime.

Coppola had intended the storyline around the reluctant family witness to be Clemenza, but Richard Castellano famously refused to reprise his role unless he was allowed to write his own dialogue. (The Godfather Part II was blighted with actor disputes: Brando refused to reprise his role in the film’s coda, while James Caan was paid more for a day’s work than he was for the whole of the first film). Instead the role was passed to Michael V Gazzo (Oscar nominated) as Frankie Pentangali, a loud-mouthed Capo manipulated into thinking he has been betrayed by the family. This threat hangs over the second half of the film – but Michael barely seems to break sweat under interrogation.

He has more problems with the Meyer Lansky inspired Hyman Roth (played by Pacino’s teacher, the legendary Lee Strasberg – also Oscar nominated). Roth it is who immerses Michael in a corrupt takeover of the Cuban government by the Mafia – an attempt foiled by the revolution – and Roth who becomes his nemesis, an old man in a hurry, who believes he can match the ruthlessness of this man without a soul. Coppola’s scenes of Cuban excess – not to mention the danger on the street as the country starts to tear itself apart – are of course masterful.

Cuba destroys Fredo, a snivelling John Cazale (inexplicably not nominated, despite extraordinary work here – never mind nomination he arguably should have won). Cazale’s Fredo is endearing but simple, a fundamentally weak man in a family of wolves, whose guilt is almost embarrassingly easily unveiled. Petulantly – but terrifyingly – raging late in the film at Michael at being passed over, he sits (sweaty and veins throbbing) in a reclining chair that bounces on each point he makes – a simple touch that makes him seem more and more impotent and pathetic every second.

The film echoes much of the structure of the first film, but here retold with a chilling coldness as the warm heart that – for all his crimes – Vito bought to this family is removed. The opening family event, Anthony’s confirmation, is a public show with no personality at all, where the Italians feel all at sea, their culture not known or cared for. Doors are closed on Kay with an alarming regularity – their marriage is so non-functional that even at the start they seem to have very little to say to each other. Vito returns to Sicily, as Michael did, but this time to extract revenge for his parents not to fall in love. The ending of the film culminates in a dark, ruminative and tragic hinged cleansing of Michael’s – crucially not the families but Michael personally – enemies.

The film is blessed with a brilliant array of supporting turns, from Diane Keaton’s soft-faced sadness masking deep and lasting resentment as Kay, to a flashily amusing tone from GD Spranlin as the greasily corrupt Senator. Robert Duvall does unsung but powerful work as a Tom Hagen coldly loyal, perhaps even in slight fear of his adopted brother, but despite his seeming decency willing to carry out truly terrible deeds for the family. Talia Shire (also nominated) is great as the rebellious Connie who pleads in vain for Fredo’s salvation.

This is all beautifully packaged together by Coppola into a film that meditates on the building and the destruction of a family, two stories neatly told together in parallel, with each echoing the other. It is a film shot at a riveting but controlled pace, that uses the classical filmic style of the original but mixed even further with the genius shooting of Gordon Willis to add a dark tinged 1970s style to ever shot. The film is an art house classic, but also a superb plot boiler, a gangster film that tells us profound truths about the attitudes that make us men and those that destroy us, just as it suggests that the darkness at the heart of crime will eventually consume the very thing it starts out to protect (even if it does take generations). While it is not as entertaining or engaging perhaps as the first film – it is perhaps an even greater achievement, a superb triumph of atmosphere and tone and a terrifying insight into the darkness that man can achieve.

For at the end Michael has won utterly. But he is also utterly defeated.

Midnight Cowboy (1969)

Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman are an odd couple in the Big Apple in Midnight Cowboy

Director: John Schlesinger

Cast: Jon Voight (Joe Buck), Dustin Hoffman (Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo), Sylvia Miles (Cass), John McGiver (Mr O’Daniel), Brenda Vaccaro (Shirley), Barnard Hughes (Towny), Bob Balaban (Young Student), Ruth White (Sally Buck), Jennifer Salt (Annie)

Even today it still feels like an odd Best Picture winner: two down-and-outs in the slums of New York, both trying to hustle, develop a strangely symbiotic relationship part brotherly, part semi-romance. It’s even more bizarre when you remember the year before the Academy had given the Big One to the super-safe family-friendly charms of Oliver! Still the only X-rated film to win Best Picture (though it looks hilariously tame for such a rating today), Midnight Cowboy is both the first step towards the fresh, modern film-making of the 70s and also a dated landmark of a particular era of film-making.

Joe Buck (Jon Voight) is the would-be Cowboy, escaping the hum-drum life of dishwashing in a run-down restaurant in Texas (not to mention a backstory darkly hinted at of a childhood of neglect and traumatic sexual encounters of the past) to make the trip to the Big Apple to find a new career – as a gigolo. After all he “ain’t a for-real cowboy. But [he is] one helluva stud”. Sadly making a career of sleeping with rich women for money ain’t half a lot harder to pull off than you might think. Not least when you are quite the naïve rube, certainly compared to more practised hustlers like “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a crippled, seriously ill born-and-bred New York who lives a hand-to-mouth on the streets desperate for each coin he can find. Both hustlers team up to try and make their wealth from Joe’s attractions – but life is tough for the desperate underclass of American society.

Released in 1969, the film stunned the States with Brit John Schlesinger’s insight into the dark underbelly of the American dream. Schlesinger, in a way few film makers before had, focused on the scuzzy poverty of the American loser, the two dreamers who fantasised about turning their lives around into the American ideal, but instead met failure and depression at every turn. This was a million miles from the “poor boy made good” vision of past films, or the sort of Capraesque spin of small-town guys winning out in the big city due to their inherent pluck and honesty. There’s none of that in Midnight Cowboy. 

Throw in Schlesinger’s style – the way his camera immerses you in New York with its “on the hoof” immediacy (Schlesinger couldn’t afford to get the streets closed, so simply shot the actors in medium or long-shot in real streets and locations, with real people) – and you got a vision of America you hadn’t seen before. The use of locations gives triumphant shots – Jon Voight emerging head and shoulders above the New Yorkers as he walks through bustling streets – and also moments that hum with authenticity. Most famously Hoffman’s “I’m walkin’ here” outburst when the actor was nearly mowed down by a taxi mid-shot while crossing a road. Midnight Cowboy takes you down in the gutter with these characters, and makes you feel part of their world. When we see the freezing poverty they live-in – in an abandoned apartment block – you practically shiver with them.

Throw in with this Schlesinger’s (and Waldo Salt’s fabulous script) careful and sensitive exploration of the bonds between the two men. Starting as strangers, both Ratso and Joe slowly find themselves drawn together in a symbiotic way that’s part soul mate, part unspokenly romantic. It’s implied throughout that the two characters feel a connection towards each other that they lack both the emotional and intellectual language to understand. But it’s there for the audience to pick up on, even if the sexuality of the two characters is something they seem barely able to understand (Joe’s sexuality is certainly far more fluid than he can even begin to grasp, while Ratso hurls around homosexual slurs so often you can tell he doth protest too much). These characters become inseparable, tending to each other (at one point an ill and soaking Ratso loosely embraces Joe, while Joe uses his shirt to dry his face and hair), sharing dreams and hopes for the future, forming a bond that goes way beyond questions of sexuality. For both of them it’s more than clear that an emotional bond like this is something alien to them both, a connection they have long feared in a cruel world.

Both actors excel in the two roles. Voight – in a career making performance – is understanding as a man who is naïve, easily fooled, caring but distant, who slowly begins to replace his wide-eyed innocence with a greater understanding of himself. Joe is a hopeless hustler – a failure as a seducer of women, and twice reduced to tragically mismanaged male prostitution, a stud who ends up paying his first customer to spare her feelings. The film carefully sketches in a backstory of emotional frigidity which adds context to a character who is charmingly selfish but learns to make a connection with another human being.

Hoffman was equally keen for the role, desperate for a part that would be the polar opposite of Benjamin from The Graduate. While Voight plays with a grounded naturalism and unaffected genuineness, Hoffman’s performance pushes the envelope of quirk. There is no end to the affectation of the role – scruffy, limping, sweaty, loud, twitchy – it’s a show-off of a role, with the moments of emotional vulnerability seized on with an actorly relish. But it still works because, despite it all, Hoffman communicates a genuine empathy and sorrow in the role, and because the performance bounces so well off Voight’s stiller, more balanced work.

The film works less well when it drifts away from this central pairing. The “marks” get short shrift, with the women in particular either hornily manipulative (Sylvia Miles, receiving a generous Oscar nod for five minutes work) or serenely wise (Brenda Vaccaro as a woman with more insight into Joe’s fluidity of sexuality than himself). Joe’s male marks are a tragically ashamed young student (Bob Balaban in an effecting debut) or full of messed up self-loathing (Barnard Hughes). 

Similarly, Schlesinger’s directorial flourishes may have looked like modern cinema verite at the time, but don’t half look like dated, heavy-handed touches today. Joe’s backstory – told in wordless sequences with different film stock – not only seem tiresome and alienating but also flimsy in the extreme in their psychological insight. Schlesinger’s satire on the Warholesque arty high-life of New York is heavy handed in the extreme, and its filming style outrageously clunky. The film’s psychological depth is thin and insight often blunted, while Schlesinger’s analysis of character often seems dependent on actors (some overindulged) rather than a true vision.

But despite that, Midnight Cowboy works because the characters are so rich and the insight into the life down-and-outs in New York still feels real. Voight and Hoffman (for all his indulgence) are excellent and the sexless romance between the two characters is intriguing and, by its conclusion, carries real emotional weight. While dated and lacking in as much insight as you might wish, it’s still a film that reflects on the damaging gap between dreams and reality, and the difficulty of casting the former aside.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins carry out a strange dance in the compelling The Silence of the Lambs

Director: Jonathan Demme

Cast: Jodie Foster (Clarice Starling), Anthony Hopkins (Dr Hannibal Lecter), Scott Glenn (Jack Crawford), Ted Levine (James “Buffalo Bill” Gumb), Anthony Heald (Dr Frederick Chilton), Brooke Smith (Catherine Martin), Diane Baker (Senator Ruth Martin), Kasi Lemmons (Ardelia Mapp), Frankie Faison (Barney Matthews)

Is there a more unlikely Oscar winner than The Silence of the Lambs? In fact, double down on that: is there a more unlikely film to have won all five of the Big Ones – Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay – only the third film in history to have achieved that (It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest being the others)? Re-watching the film, it’s actually a triumphant vindication for Hollywood to have chosen a thriller for the ages, a complex and intriguing puzzle wrapped in an unsettling outer layer of thrills and horror, as if the academy was (late in the day) finally tipping an award-lined hat to the film’s spiritual grandfather, Hitchcock himself.

Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is a trainee FBI agent, in the final weeks before her graduation. Out of the blue she is plucked from Quantico by the head of the Behavioural Science Unit, Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn), to interview notorious psychiatrist-turned-cannibalistic-serial-killer Dr Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), now interned in a psychiatric prison-cum-dungeon in Baltimore. Crawford hopes the Lecter might be able to shed light on the motives of “Buffalo Bill” (Ted Levine), a serial killer kidnapping and skinning young women across a number of states. Lecter can shed some light – but the price is an opportunity to investigate further into the psyche of the determined and ambitious Starling. A three-way game of cat-and-mouse between Bill, Clarice and Lecter soon starts to emerge.

Demme’s film is a sublimely made entertainment that brilliantly pulls together the trappings of multiple genres (there are splashes of horror, thriller, police procedural, romance and black comedy to name but a few) into an unsettlingly tense and engrossing whole. It’s truly a film Hitchcock would have been proud of, a masterfully assembled thrill ride where every shot serves a purpose, and each scene is carefully constructed to establish a clear story and push the audience’s buttons. It has two of the best tense “prolonged misdirects” in film history (wittily signposted in advance by an early car chase that is revealed in a pull-away to be a training exercise in Quantico – don’t trust your eyes!) and it brilliantly immerses you in the world and emotions of Clarice Starling.

Demme’s aim was to get us to empathise above all with Clarice, as she descends into the dark underbelly of this terrifying world. Demme uses a carefully selected combination of POV shots and straight-to-camera addresses to deliberately put us into the position of actually “being” Clarice Starling. From following her perspective through rooms and corridors, to seeing the characters she is talking to address the camera directly as if talking to us, through to carefully placed close-up shots that allow us to study the thoughts and feelings travelling across Clarice’s face, it brilliantly allows us to invest overwhelmingly in her without us even really noticing we are doing it.

And of course that is put together with Jodie Foster’s extraordinarily brilliant performance in the role. One of the film’s many strengths is exploring the nature of being a determined, brave and ambitious – but still slight and feminine – woman in the alpha-male world of crime investigation. Clarice fends off in virtually every scene not just discrimination and instant judgement, but a parade of half-spoken advances and flirtations from male colleagues. Foster’s brilliance is to make a character who is determined but humane, slightly vulnerable while never weak. She’s the key driver of the story, but also both an insider and outsider in her world, partly motivated by a desire to prove herself, partly by an attempt to vanquish haunting childhood memories of weakness and loss.

It’s these feelings under the surface that attract the interest of Hannibal Lecter, and the strange dance between them is the heart of the film’s appeal and it’s magic. Why does Lecter want to know about the facts of Starling’s life (that quid pro quo he archly asks for)? Does he want to analyse her? Does he want to help? Does he want to amuse himself with her terrible memories? Or is he just bored? He hardly seems to be certain himself, but the intimacy shared revelations provide is neatly played with by Demme in sequences between the two (they barely share the frame by the way more than twice) that hum with a tension of danger, but also a thrill of illicit romance, mixed with incestuous interest (Starling the orphan, Lecter the father-like man of wisdom helping her catch the killer). And it works with us as well – we are so invested in Starling that, just like her, we end up liking Lecter (even though we know we shouldn’t).

Of course it helps that Hannibal Lecter is portrayed in a performance of magnetic, career-defining brilliance by Hopkins. Hopkins modestly claimed playing Lecter was easy once you mastered the voice and the physicality – but that’s to downplay the extraordinary skill mastering those aspects concern, and the bravura brilliance with which Hopkins plays to the camera but never tips into absurdism. It’s an arch, knowing, winking performance that also carries with it an intense, psychotic menace, a delirious capacity for violence (as we find out). Demme introduces the character sublimely – after the build-up, his ram-rod stillness, polite manner and refined behaviour are somehow even more unsettling. Sure Brian Cox in Manhunter may be more conventionally chilling, but Hopkins is like an elemental demon playing with our childhood bogeyman fears, a guy who seems even more dangerous as he playfully chats one minute, then beats you to death with a truncheon the next.

The scenes between these two characters dominate the film (even if they take up no more than ten minutes of its runtime), and their relationship (beautifully shot as a game of one cagey upmanship that turns into semi-flirting, that turns into something in between) defines the movie and its legacy. Lecter’s magnetism was such that in later movies he would increasingly become an anti-hero of sorts, a lord of misrule rather than a brutal and indiscriminate killer, but here he’s terrifying and satanic, just as Starling is courageous and noble as the lady on a quest.

And that quest targets Buffalo Bill – a deeply unsettling performance of psychological unease and self-loathing by Ted Levine. The film was controversial at the time for its killer being both a transsexual and gay (although the film makes clear it’s a desire to be anyone apart from who he is that drives all these feelings), especially as at the time these groups were barely represented positively in the movies. But it also makes for singularly unsettling character, living in a subterranean cave-like basement, surrounded by moths, his voice slurred childishly while carrying no sense of shame or regret for his actions.

The hunt for Bill is the film’s story, and Demme uses the devices of cinema to make this as tense and unsettling an experience as needed. The camera prowls terrifyingly around Bill’s domains. Howard Shore’s score makes a deeply unnerving use of mournful refrains. Frequently scenes – such as the post-mortem inspection of a victim’s body – are often silently scored, making the mechanical noises of the investigator’s trade (such as the loudly clicking and whirring camera) deeply jarring. The film is grim, but relies more on reaction rather than bathing us in horrors, and implication brings the greatest terror. Every sequence of the film is perfectly assembled to leave us struggling to breathe – not least as events place Starling in more and more peril.

With its playful sense of black comedy, mixed with genuine terror and thrills, The Silence of the Lambs genuinely feels like the film Hitchcock was born to make. Everything in the film is perfectly assembled to serve the film’s aims – there is not a foot wrong in its assembly, and it’s sad that Demme never hit these sort of heights again. But the film is like a twisted companion piece to Psycho (only better), and in Hopkins and Foster produced two landmark performances. While the film engrosses us in Starling’s struggles in a man’s world, it also overwhelms us with Hopkins’ devilish magnetism and dark mystery. And what to make of the relationship between Starling and Lecter? It’s a mystery so enigmatic that it continues to grip today and it’s the secret behind the success of this compelling masterpiece.