Twelve to catch

I'm not as enamoured of lists as some on the movie-obsessed part of the Web - I find the voluminous year-end top ten exercise to be queasily repetitive after a while - but I've been enjoying entries in the recent meme that encourages bloggers to select twelve movies they would like to see from among the many titles that aren't easily available.

These lists are fascinating glimpses into the interests that drive many different lovers of the medium, completely free from any artificial twelve-month restriction, no matter how imaginatively interpreted that time period might be. I'm especially struck by how disciplined other people are in their interests: there are distinct themes - of time period, genre, national origin - running through many of the lists, whereas mine has the look of an accident involving a dozen darts, a couple of beers, and the Time Out film guide. And so, without further ado, I'll pull back the curtain.


Beyond Reasonable Doubt (1980, New Zealand, John Laing) I took a college course on Australian and New Zealand cinema - easily the highlight of my undergraduate education, and a course that strongly influences how I look at movies - and one of the big advantages of the latter country's cinema is that it's pretty easy to see most of the films produced since the modern industry took off in the late 1970s. One of the few exceptions - and, from what I read, a notable one - is this docudrama account of a 1970 double-murder and its infamous legal aftermath, featuring David Hemmings in a lead role. Director John Laing has been behind the camera on various American-financed TV productions filmed in New Zealand; this film, his first, looks to have been the artistic highlight of his career.

Stork (1971, Australia, Tim Burstall) Another film that's a leftover from that long-ago college course, one of the rambunctious and no doubt deeply disreputable 'ocker' comedies that emerged from Australia in the early 1970s and which, not incidentally, helped to pave the way for more artistically-minded film work once it became clear there was a market for locally-produced films (other examples include Alvin Purple, also directed by Burstall, and Bruce Beresford's London-set The Adventures of Barry McKenzie). Since Stork was first out of the traps, it seems only appropriate to start here; I can't help thinking it would be fun to screen this as a double bill with Picnic at Hanging Rock.


Eat the Peach (1986, Ireland, Peter Ormrod) Growing up in Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s homegrown movies were few and far between, and when something with an Irish connection did appear it was invariably a hard-hitting drama, unlikely to appeal to the average 10-year-old (think Neil Jordan's Angel, Colin Gregg's Lamb, or Pat O'Connor's Cal). Eat the Peach was marketed as rip-roaring fun, the tale of the quixotic attempt to build a motorcycle Wall of Death in the middle of nowhere, but for some reason I never saw it in the theatre and missed every TV showing (usually around Christmas); I suspect that it's an artifact of a pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland that's now long gone and that, as much as anything, makes me curious to finally catch up with it.


Im Lauf der Zeit/Kings of the Road (1976, West Germany, Wim Wenders) Despite his status as a critics' darling through the 1980s (he has lost the plot over the last decade or so) it's awfully hard to see Wim Wenders' key early films - titles like this one, Alice in the Cities or The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty. This three-hour meditation on German manhood and society, complete with gorgeous-looking Robby Müller photography (to judge by the trailer) seems the biggest omission of all, and not just because of its running time.
Paris s'éveille (1991, France, Olivier Assayas) Despite pretty glittering critical reviews for his later work, it's tough to get hold of Olivier Assayas's first decade of film work. His debut film, Désordre, captured a certain 1980s anomie and atmosphere with great skill - the film emanates a terrible sadness - but that film and his next four features (including L'Eau froide, which has one of my favourite cinema scenes of all, an extended sequence at a teenage party) are difficult to trace. Paris s'éveille is high on my wish list for its intriguing cast - Godrèche, Léaud, Langmann, Lamotte - and because I love the Jacques Dutronc song with which it shares a title (I wonder if the song appears in the movie).

Is-slottet/Ice Palace (1987, Norway, Per Blom) I stumbled on this film, already half over, late one night when I was in college, and was immediately absorbed by the haunting setting and tone, but decided to stop watching in the hopes of being able to see it from the beginning. Sadly, I've never seen the film pop up again, and despite what seemed an impressive piece of work on this occasion, writer-director Blom appears never to have made another film.

Il Caso Mattei/The Mattei Affair (1972, Italy, Francesco Rosi) Two of Rosi's other semi-documentary features, Salvatore Giuliano and Hands Across the City, made it to DVD a couple of years ago - and deservedly so - but this one is languishing somewhere in a vault. Given the state of post-war Italian politics and business - Rosi's film sounds like a reflection on the 1970s as much as on Mattei's life - it seems like a particularly gaping hole in the director's filmography.

I used to love watching atmospheric old British movies - and their Hollywood backlot equivalents - on television when I was growing up, and while Thorold Dickinson is hardly unknown, I have only been able to find his 1940 version of Gaslight here in the US (as an extra to George Cukor's 1944 American version). I'd love to see The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, Java Head, or The Next of Kin, just to name three.

The Phenix City Story (1955, US, Phil Karlson) I recorded this when it played on TV perhaps ten years ago, but when I went to watch the film something had gone terribly wrong with the sound and it didn't seem right to watch it as a silent. However, for reasons I don't fully understand the film isn't commercially available [2011 update: the film is now available on DVD in the US]. It's set in an Alabama town with a sin city reputation, and was filmed on location, a relative rarity; Jonathan Rosenbaum, an Alabama native, rates the movie's unsparing take on local life very highly, and that's a sound recommendation for me.

Heimat 3 - Chronik einer Zeitenwende (2004, Germany, Edgar Reitz) It's cheating a little since this film is mainly seen as a TV mini-series, though it did get a theatrical premiere, and also because I could order the DVD without any trouble, but I wonder how I'd find the time to actually sit down and do it justice. I loved the first two installments -- from 1984 and 1993 respectively -- but these days I just don't seem to have the multiple evenings of free time that this film demands, and watching it haphazardly over the course of months would surely diminish the cumulative effect of this superior soap opera/chronicle/social commentary/historical sketch. I was transfixed by moments -- of human connection and disconnection, or unexpected plot twists -- in the earlier films, and can't help but feel that they were earned by virtue of plunging into Reitz's world for a week at a time.

Le Wazzou polygame (1971, Niger, Oumarou Ganda) It's not news that African films are hard to find on DVD, especially in the English-speaking market (there is a French company with a reasonably impressive roster of films: you'd think that it might be worth their while to add an English subtitle track to some of their releases). We can only see four features by a filmmaker of Ousmane Sembène's stature -- and not always, to my mind, his finest work -- but there are entire directorial careers lost to the watching public, small as it might be. Oumarou Ganda was an important 1970s filmmaker from Niger, whose career was cut short by his untimely death in 1981, and I'm immensely curious to know how his work fit together with other African films of this time. (The film is available at most French cultural institutes as part of an admirable box set released in 2005, featuring all of the winners of the FESPACO film festival, but I haven't been able to track down a copy).

The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933, US, Frank Capra) I'm on the fence about Capra -- as his career developed, he became a little too sentimentally overblown for my taste, whereas I love most of what he made in the early 1930s -- but it's extraordinary that this isn't available on DVD given the continued popularity of many of his films. I thought that the 2007 Barbara Stanwyck centenary might have provided an opportunity, but I think I need to call time on that idea.

Ruggles of Red Gap (1935, US, Leo McCarey) I've seen plenty of appreciations of Leo McCarey's directorial talents around the web in recent years, but this one's here for Charles Laughton, a performer of extraordinary physicality. As with France's Michel Simon, it seems amazing that someone with a physique like his ever became a star at all, but there seems to have been no shortage of outsize roles for him: in the same year he appeared as Javert in Les Misérables and as Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty. Some enterprising soul uploaded the entire thing to Youtube, but a film like this surely deserves better (I'd love to be able to decide for myself).

(Top picture: Im Lauf der Zeit/Kings of the Road; other pictures are linked to the film immediately below the picture.)