Not quite a femme fatale

This is my contribution to the For the Love of Film (Noir) blogathon, hosted by the Self-Styled Siren (Farran Smith Nehme) and Ferdy on Films (Marilyn Ferdinand), to benefit the Film Noir Foundation. Please check out the various contributions - and most importantly, please donate!

Kathleen Ryan in Odd Man Out (1947, UK, directed by Carol Reed)

Before a film unspools, you never quite know what's going to pique your interest. Just after the credits of Cy Endfield's Try and Get Me (also known, aptly, as The Sound of Fury), Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) arrives home after an all-night drive which establishes his precarious circumstances, out of work in California after a long trek west from Boston. In a brief sequence that recalls Ozu's I Was Born, But... Howard walks through his neighborhood, surrounded by children, before striding up to the path to his own house. Inside, his wife Judy (Kathleen Ryan) and son Tommy await, and when the woman opens her mouth she has an unmistakable Irish accent - no stage brogue here but the actress's natural voice. I'm Irish myself, and my curiosity was immediately roused: I'd been searching for an interesting Irish noir connection, and it was only after I'd given up in frustration and set out in a new direction that I happened across what I'd been looking for all along.

Kathleen Ryan in Try and Get Me (1950, US, directed by Cyril Endfield)

I confess that before that scene, I had no idea who Kathleen Ryan was: her relatively brief career in the 1940s and 1950s was overshadowed in the Irish star stakes by Maureen O'Hara, and Ryan essentially disappeared from the screen after 1957, with few of her films enjoying a long afterlife. She should have been familiar to me from her best-known role, in Carol Reed's 1947 Odd Man Out, except that I hadn't seen the film, an omission I rectified immediately afterwards: Ryan's two performances form a rare bridge between American noir and its more fitful British incarnation.

Although the subject matter is crime and - mob - punishment, Try and Get Me is a film filled with consciences: Howard's own conscience, constantly gnawing at him, the Italian professor who tries to oppose reason to emotion, the sheriff who seeks to preserve the integrity of the law (it says much about Endfield's view of American society that he sees more honour among the officers of the law than among the gentlemen of the press), or the wife who tries to give a sense of the pitiful reality that led to her husband's terrible choices.

Judy Tyler is a woman beaten down by the worry of making ends meet, by the dashed hopes that lie behind her. The Tylers' journey from Boston has revealed that there's no California dream, and their new life gives the lie to the idea that the 1950s were a time of untroubled prosperity for the war's returning soldiers. Inadvertently or not, that Irish accent also suggests a longer journey, one made in response to an American ideal sold - in films as much as anywhere else - to the hopeful and the desperate across the globe. That's one of the most subversive aspects of Endfield's film: he's using one of the most powerful of American publicity tools to undermine the images of American prosperity and success so often seen onscreen (the previous year, Endfield's fellow blacklistee, and beloved noir director, Edward Dmytryk, cast Kathleen Ryan in Christ in Concrete, another examination of the harsh realities of the American dream).

Ryan's character is, for most of Try and Get Me, a background presence, remaining at home while her husband goes in search of work. Still, there's a lovely scene where Howard massages his wife's aching back: pregnant again and desperate to avoid the expense of a doctor, she turns to her husband for some relief from the pain, and the sequence gives a vivid sense of their life together. Judy leaves her home behind late in the film, determined to provide an alternative take on the tabloid headlines spun by the local newspaper. It's Ryan's strongest scene in the film: she reads haltingly from a letter written by her husband, a handkerchief balled in one hand, before finding herself overcome with emotion.

Three years earlier, Kathleen Ryan's role in Odd Man Out, her first film appearance, was another portrait of a woman living in the same house as a troubled man - the leader of "the Organisation," a stand-in for the IRA. Again, Ryan's character, Kathleen Sullivan, is a background presence for most of the film, stuck at home - despite her best efforts - while the men enmesh themselves ever deeper in illicit activity. Both films invite us to sympathize with morally compromised men - doing the wrong thing for perhaps the right reasons - while trying to give us a sense of the consequences on the home front.

It's presumably at director Carol Reed's request, but Ryan's expression in Odd Man Out is almost always downcast: she's often literally looking downward, or else remains below the eyeline of the other actors, as though she's subdued by the tensions around her. It's unfortunate, though, for her fixed expression makes it rather more difficult to believe that Kathleen hides deep passions, or that she's capable of inspiring similar passions, since her emotions seem entirely sublimated into a dutiful mask. Even later in the film, when she refuses to be bound by the injunction to stay behind closed doors, there's a dourness to her character that's at odds with the world-weary wisdom of the film's older female characters, though her mask serves her well in the film's shocking, self-immolating climax.

Ryan's own life was a world away from these intense working-class women, though she may have learned a thing or two about inner strength from her mother, Agnes Harding. Kathleen was one of eight children, and her father died when she was just ten, leaving behind a thriving chain of shops, the Monument Creameries, which Agnes further expanded - suggesting, perhaps, that the business skills belonged as much to wife as to the more celebrated husband, Seamus Ryan, who served briefly in the Irish senate. (The first of the Monument Creamery stores was on Dublin's Parnell St, and Kathleen's second film, Captain Boycott, features a brief appearance by Robert Donat as Parnell).

That business empire seems to have provided Kathleen and her siblings with a very comfortable upbringing: though her parents were self-made people from Tipperary villages, Kathleen grew up in the patrician surrounds of Burton Hall (the extensive grounds are today part of a mental health rehabilitation institute), and her 1944 wedding, to Limerick doctor Dermod Devane, garnered extensive coverage in Dublin's social columns. The family seems to have been well-connected in Irish artistic circles - Kathleen's younger brother John was a well-known artist and patron of the arts, while Kathleen served as the model for Louis Le Brocquy's Girl in White, from the very beginning of the artist's career (as of this writing, Le Brocquy is still alive, closing in on a century of life).

The Girl in White - Louis Le Brocquy, 1941

After Ryan's early success, she attracted the attention of Hollywood, with The Irish Times blaring about a seven-year contract on its front page in 1950; Ryan regularly appeared in the newspapers about to jet off to a shoot on the next plane from Shannon, though she always returned home to husband and children in between (with the exception of one 1969 appearance, her entire screen career took place during her marriage, which was annulled in 1958 for reasons I've been unable to determine). Newspaper pictorials from the period depict her buying presents for her children and trying on haute couture; a memorable photo from 1950 shows her smiling with a spoon in hand and a "genuine giant-sized banana split" in front of her, with the newspaper helpfully adding that "According to American films these concoctions are the staple diet of American adolescents".

Still, it wasn't all roses: Ryan found herself in serious legal hot water in 1954 when she had a car accident, injuring a travelling salesman so severely that he lost a leg, and compounding her problems by leaving the scene. While she managed to avoid criminal penalties, the civil courts weren't as kind: she had to pay the unfortunate man £7,000 (well into six figures in today's money). Despite the initial promise of a seven-year Hollywood contract, Ryan's screen career was entering its final phase by then, as she only made a couple more films after the civil trial (she managed to have the initial case postponed for three months to accommodate her work on Douglas Sirk's Captain Lightfoot, although that film was shot in Ireland). Whatever the reality of her circumstances, it's hard not to imagine that by the late 1950s Ryan, her marriage and career now over, may have understood better than ever before something of the terrible pressures in the lives of the two women to whom she gave life a decade earlier, her own life taking on echoes of the kind of plotline - financial ruin, marital strife, cars careening out of control - that set many a noir in motion.

**

Thanks to our son Shay, born two-and-a-half weeks ago, who cooperated enough to allow us to watch several films since his birth, and to my wife, who allowed me to make the viewing selections at a time when she really deserved full control of the remote.

Update April 2011: A reader alerted me to the fact that Kathleen Ryan's final screen credit on the IMDB is incorrect. The Kathleen Ryan who appears in the 1969 film The Tree is a different actress (indeed, the New York Times review of that film calls the actress Kathy Ryan, and indicates that she is much younger than Kathleen Ryan would have been).

Odd Man Out

1947, UK, directed by Carol Reed

I wrote about Try and Get Me as part of the For the Love of Film (Noir) Blogathon.

Try and Get Me (aka The Sound of Fury)

1950, US, directed by Cyril (Cy) Endfield

I wrote about Try and Get Me as part of the For the Love of Film (Noir) Blogathon.

About a Boy

2002, UK/US/France/Germany, directed by Chris and Paul Weitz

In writing about Groundhog Day, I mentioned the cheap redemptions routinely handed out to characters in Hollywood films, and while About a Boy is set in London, and based on a book by Nick Hornby, it fits the standard American template rather well (no great surprise, with American directors and an American scriptwriter).

In theory there should be nothing to like about Hugh Grant's character, the privileged layabout Will (book and film try to render him less distasteful by providing a comical source for his income since a toff with money would set up a whole different set of associations in Britain). He's smug, terminally self-centered, and almost irritatingly unambitious (though I'm not entirely sure why lack of ambition is a character flaw). And the film somehow hands him the good life on a plate.

There is indeed precious little to like about Will himself - that's sort of the point - but I find Hugh Grant so charming as a performer that he makes the character more than worth persisting with, and Hornby's novel/Peter Hedges's script hands him a terrific array of dry one-liners. There aren't all that many outlets these days for Grant's style of light comedy, and while his comfort zone as an actor is relatively limited he plays this kind of cad to perfection.

Animal Kingdom

2010, Australia, directed by David Michôd

A crime thriller that barely shows any crime - although what does occur is leached of any criminal romance - Animal Kingdom is a portrait of a family slowly disintegrating from within, collapsing under the weight of internecine mistrust and betrayal. As such it's a complete contrast to the Australian TV shows that have dramatized some of the same criminal activity - from Blue Murder in 1995 to the more recent Underbelly series - with considerably more focus on the tabloid aspects of Australian gangland violence.

Although the film isn't without its moments of humour, particularly in one early sequence where one crim tries to convince another of sound stock market investments, it's also refreshing to find a crime film that avoids the psychopathic-but-quotable characters so prevalent in Scorsese's movies. Indeed, Scorsese, Tarantino, and the Coen brothers seem almost entirely absent here, at least in dialogue terms, unlike in another recent Aussie noir, The Square, though that film shares a terrific sense of place with Animal Kingdom.

Jacki Weaver stole most of the acting plaudits, primarily on the strength of one terrific scene, but Ben Mendelsohn is, to my mind, even more impressive, in a genuinely unglamorous part that's quite a contrast to his usually charismatic roles. Weaver, though, has been around since the beginning of the modern Australian film industry with appearances in ocker comedies like Stork as well as artier fare like Picnic at Hanging Rock, as well as plenty of TV work, and she certainly deserves the career recognition.

Groundhog Day

1993, US, directed by Harold Ramis

I don't have a whole lot to add to the extensive dissections of Groundhog Day - by everyone from film critics to philosophy professors - not least because I watched the movie in that hazy week after our first child was born. After taking in Ghostbusters 2 the evening before I was struck, though, by the way in which Bill Murray and Harold Ramis, who directed Murray in Caddyshack, play with Murray's well-established curmudgeonly screen persona (I'm just waiting for Murray's turn in a Walter Matthau biopic) as the film evolves. Indeed, that persona seems critical to the film's exploration of just what it means to be stuck in an apparently endless present. Where a standard Hollywood film would give a character like this an unlikely redemption, and an even more unlikely psychological transformation, within a few days or weeks, here Murray has to ultimately confront and make peace the possibility that he'll never escape this alternative dimension. His character's acceptance of that reality is what gives the film its power, for that requires a genuine shift in his way of seeing the world, a shift that's possible only when he stares into the abyss, as it were. And somehow Ramis manages to combine that profound reflection with a genuinely sweet, convincing conclusion - quite a trick.

Ghostbusters 2

1989, US, directed by Ivan Reitman

I have no particular affection for the first Ghostbusters, perhaps because I didn't see it until years after the original release, thus eliminating childhood nostalgia, but the sequel has its moments, almost all of them centered on Bill Murray's character, Peter Venkman, an arch-cynic entirely in the mould of Murray's usual onscreen persona. Though Ivan Reitman is no great shakes as a director - much of the film feels remarkably flat, with Reitman resorting to montages set to the film's signature song to give some lift to proceedings - after four films together he knew how to get what he needed from Murray, who is introduced as the host of a dreadful World of the Psychic, a wonderfully tacky cable show. Although he apparently hates the film, Murray disrupts every scene he's in for the better, upsetting the balance with off-colour remarks until the film finally feels the need to force the character to conform.

The Fighter

2010, US, directed by David O. Russell

Notwithstanding the fact that he tends to be tough on movies I like, I enjoy David Cairns's forays into newer releases, and his recent take on The Fighter is both amusing and illuminating, particularly his analysis of Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and his girlfriend Charlene Fleming (Amy Ryan), or more accurately the film's version of Micky and Charlene. Still, I wouldn't mind seeing the Rashomon version of the story, given how the film portrays Micky's mother and his truly dreadful coven of sisters, each one more sullen than the last; unlike the real-life Micky Ward and Dicky Eklund, his half brother, the women were notably absent from press coverage of The Fighter, and I wonder to what extent the film slights them. It's a truism of boxing movies that fighters struggle in the lower social depths, but the film implies that Micky's greatest challenge is neither money nor the drugs that consume his brother but rather the predations of his female relatives; they come off much worse than his later, male promoters, usually the source of all that is wicked in the world of boxing.

How to Train Your Dragon

2010, US, directed by Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders

The sheer exuberance of How to Train Your Dragon is beguiling, with the directors placing the emphasis on out-and-out fun rather than on Meaningful Moments; the moral, very much present, doesn't threaten to overwhelm the material here. The pacing and wit are tremendously enjoyable, although the film lacks the consistently polished look of the Pixar competition; it's as though the filmmakers have elected to pour their onscreen resources into certain sequences (the beautifully animated dragon book or the thrilling flight sequences) rather than others (the backgrounds when we first encounter the film's main dragon look rather like those of a standard computer game, lacking the richness and realism of Pixar fare, where every scene is beautifully rendered).

Easy A

2010, US, directed by Will Gluck

Although there are several enjoyable character bits - Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as a pair of indulgent parents, and Thomas Haden Church as a trying-to-be-cool teacher, in particular - this is Emma Stone's movie, and she seizes her lead role with such zest and charm that it doesn't really matter that she's clearly too old for high school. It's one of those parts where you suddenly sit up and pay attention to a performer, irrespective of the quality of the rest of the movie - a mixed bag in this case, with some rather obvious high school stereotypes and narrative obstacles, although the film does give a vivid, enjoyable sense of the speed with which gossip travels in the Facebook age.

The King's Speech

2010, UK/Australia/US, directed by Tom Hooper

The King's Speech is a rather unexpected royal-imperial fantasy, in which the empire extends across the earth but thankfully doesn't have to be dealt with too much in close-up: the crowds on Empire Day, when the film opens, look reassuring like those at any 1920s football match (in reality, the crowd was probably filled with children given a half-day off school), with the imperial residents themselves safely at the other end of transmitters marked Barbados, Bechuanaland, and so forth. There's something oddly moving and yet absurd about the way that the film still invokes, in 2010, the idea of imperial solidarity despite the fact that even the Australians featured onscreen clearly bore the brunt of much English contempt.

As in The Damned United, Tom Hooper's previous film, The King's Speech is primarily concerned with the actual human being behind a public persona, and while the narrative is brisker and more confident this time around, Hooper's visual choices are less illuminating. He used light and dark, for instance, rather usefully as a window into the mind of football manager Brian Clough, whereas here the sometimes eccentric framing choices, squeezing the king into a corner of the frame at times, don't add much to our sense of George VI as a person beyond perhaps emphasizing that he was ultimately as frail as any other human being.

By contrast, the straightforward close-ups at moments of great tension, the already outsize microphones looming larger in front of the king, are simple and effective, conveying the dreadful fears in George's mind as he attempts to deliver his few words. Colin Firth is quietly terrific in these scenes, his face conveying a sense of the terror that accumulates with each passing second, before he's even uttered a syllable; he does a fine job with the king's line in self-deprecation, too, keeping his voice bone dry. Geoffrey Rush, in careful counter-balance to Firth's controlled performance, overplays most enjoyably, playing up his Aussie impudence; it's hard to imagine that the real Lionel Logue was anything like as disrespectful, even for therapeutic purposes, but the pairing works well on film (by contrast, Timothy Spall, generally a fine actor, is terribly miscast as Churchill, far too patrician a character for the more working-class Spall, while it's a shock - a veritable slap in the face - to see Anthony Andrews so suddenly old, his appearance somehow betraying the memory of his ever-youthful characters in Danger UXB and Brideshead Revisited).

Brooklyn's Finest

2009, US, directed by Antoine Fuqua

There's barely an original idea in Brooklyn's Finest - Antoine Fuqua even recycles from his own movies, most obviously Training Day - so the movie's principal pleasures come from watching the narrative pieces click into place and from several strong, if occasionally overblown, performances. The script is ultimately too neat, the parallel lines intersecting in rather unlikely style, although the final sequences, in a claustrophobic apartment block, are among the film's strongest: grimy, tense, and unheroic. The three main characters, played by Don Cheadle, Richard Gere and Ethan Hawke - are all generically troubled cops, but Cheadle and Gere in particular manage to make something interesting from the raw materials, injecting a little soul into the conventions, with Gere playing an unusual unlikeable character by his standards.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

1961, US, directed by Blake Edwards

In her appreciation of the career of Blake Edwards, penned just after his death last year, The Siren makes a convincing case for excusing the flaws of Breakfast at Tiffany's based on the wonderful final scene. The film is complicated enough, though, that you could almost as easily make the case that a single scene might cause you to overlook all of the film's virtues. You could choose any of the scenes featuring Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi, a Japanese caricature of cringeworthy insensitivity, as your Exhibit A.

I found those scenes so troubling that it was somehow easiest simply to block out their existence to focus on the film's strengths. There's the brittle emotional texture, with constant, confident shifts in tone, from comedy to pathos to a kind of urban ennui to romance; the terrific use of screen space, whether in the famous party sequence - an apparently chaotic scene that's actually perfectly controlled, with multiple visual storylines unspooling in parallel - or in a quieter moment like the scene at the bus station where Holly, Doc Golightly, and Paul each seems to occupy just the right spot in relation to the other; the perfectly judged movement in the suspenseful, even Hitchcockian, scene where Holly, observing from outside a window, discovers the truth of Paul's situation; the lush overhead shot of Holly just after she finds out about a death in the family. Enough, just perhaps, to balance out the ill-judged Mr. Yunioshi scenes?

Toy Story 3

2010, US, directed by Lee Unkrich

I couldn't help but get the feeling I was supposed to like Toy Story 3 more than was actually the case. Like all of Pixar pictures, the film is exquisitely crafted, with astonishing attention to detail both in the construction of scenes and the physical details we see (the true-to-life scratches on the bottom of a plastic container, for instance), but the emotional core didn't quite grab me as intended.

As Glenn Kenny notes in his review of Rango, Pixar movies often seem to reach for the Meaningful Moment, something that was underlined in director Lee Unkrich's Oscar acceptance speech, and that can come at the expense of the sheer joy of a rollicking story. For instance, late in the film there's a perilous setpiece that's constructed like a finely calibrated emotional rollercoaster, but the resolution of the sequence is so foreordained that I found myself losing interest. There's also an inevitable repetitiveness that comes with sequel territory, as the toys join forces for the third time to solve a major problem. Still, the care lavished on every detail of the screen makes the film consistently worthwhile, and there are several terrifically funny sequences, particularly when Buzz Lightyear accidentally gets re-programmed in Spanish.

Young Frankenstein

1974, US, directed by Mel Brooks

For my money, easily the most successful of Mel Brooks's series of parody/pastiche films, perhaps because his love for the source materials shines through so clearly. Even as he pokes fun, it's clear that he's unspooling scenes he's watched dozens of times with the greatest of pleasure, and the jokes are only improved when his viewers share that affection. Although Brooks doesn't have the same visual interests as James Whale, on whose films he draws most obviously, he still ensures that the black and white looks the part here, so that it's not simply a 1970s imitation but has the richness of the 1930s originals.

The cast, too, is terrific: they look nothing like the kinds of actors who made their names in Universal's classic horror movies - with the possible exception of the blockheaded Peter Boyle - but their timing is masterful: Kenneth Mars is particularly wonderful as an Inspector with an apparently fake arm that misbehaves at the most inopportune moments, though Marty Feldman always steals the movie for me, his rubber face never more perfectly put to use than as Igor, though his way with a throwaway line is equally memorable.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

1951, US, directed by Robert Wise

Despite the film's intergalactic plotline, in its own way it's very much a plea for the kind of values associated with small-town America - getting along with one another, creating a safe place for the younger generation, and being able to accept even the more eccentric residents. Of course, the tolerance has its limits; though Washington, DC occasionally has the feel of a village, where you'd trust your son with a new arrival, it's a village filled with white folks; there's more diversity at the scientific conference that's at the centre of the film than on the streets of the city.

This is very much from Robert Wise's early, brisk period: there's not an ounce of fat in the running time, with the director wasting no time on lengthy exposition, getting his space traveler onto the ground as quickly as possible. He creates an arresting sense of the panic that the arrival created, through the now-clichéd use of journalist talking heads from a variety of locations; there's a nod or two in the direction of Welles's legendary dramatisation of The War of the Worlds before the film goes in a different, more domesticated direction.

Soul Kitchen

2009, Germany, directed by Fatih Akin

Soul Kitchen has the same urgency, the almost frenetic pacing, of Fatih Akin's previous work, but where the whirlwind spun in destructive directions in Gegen die Wand, here the energy is positive, with the sense that good things can happen almost overnight. There's a romance, and a winning naivete, that harks back to Akin's earlier romance Im Juli, with here a hint that perhaps multiculturalism still has something to offer for the immigrant in Germany; that's probably placing more weight, though, than really belongs on a film which narrates an ecstatic triumph over the odds.

True Grit

2010, US, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

While the original film is very much a John Wayne vehicle, with Rooster Cogburn front and center, the Coen brothers center their take on the material instead on a battle of wills between a grizzled older man and a young girl who is at least as stubborn as her elder. Two early scenes fix the personalities of Rooster Cogburn and Mattie Ross, the former narrating his part in a shooting, relishing and burnishing his own already outsize reputation, while the latter refuses to stand down even when the only place she can track Cogburn is to the outhouse. There's a warmth throughout the film, especially in the central relationship, that sometimes seems absent from the Coen brothers' work - although they've always had an affection for the character actor, and they serve up several gemlike smaller roles, finely-sketched types drawn from many an old Western, like the country lawyer or the undertaker.

Ondine

2009, Ireland, directed by Neil Jordan

Fables and things not-quite-what-they-seem are recurrent themes in Neil Jordan's films (and novels), and he begins Ondine with no preamble as we see what appears to be a mermaid fished up from the deep off the coast of Cork. The drab colour schemes signal that this is no upbeat fairytale, however, despite the picturesque filming locations; indeed, it's occasionally hard to make out what is going on, as Jordan opts for a very restricted palette.

More challenging again is the dialogue, for the actors frequently speak so indistinctly that it's difficult to make out some of their lines (we initially thought we had a sound problem, but the rest of the soundtrack is just fine). It's presumably deliberate on the filmmaker's part, for as the characters begin to emerge from their shells - Colin Farrell plays the main character, an introverted fisherman - the problem becomes less acute. The accents and colours lend a sense of realism to the more offbeat story elements, keeping us constantly uncertain as to whether we're in the realm of fantasy or kitchen-sink reality; the ending is a not-entirely-successful attempt to marry both strands, straining for a happy ending by dishing out unhappy outcomes for many of the supporting characters.

The Negotiator

1998, US, directed by F. Gary Grey

The Negotiator is ludicrously over the top, with a hostage situation that appears to consume the resources of the entire Chicago police force and a flair for the wildly dramatic, but it's also an absolute pleasure to watch and re-watch, one of those finely-tooled, bombastic Hollywood thrillers filled with carefully engineered moments of narrative payoff, and a script for both leads and support to chew on.

It's assembled from many of the clichés of the cop film - from the central story of corruption to the imagery of mourning officers in dress uniform, and the shots fired at graveside, to the throwaway supporting roles for women - but director F. Gary Grey invests them with an almost ferocious conviction, as if, this time, those clichés really matter. He's also blessed with a terrific cast, with a nice opposition between his leads, the headstrong Samuel L. Jackson and apparently perfectly controlled Kevin Spacey; their distinctive acting styles are a nice complement to the characters, and Spacey in particular seems to relish the words he's given to work with. As so often in Hollywood, the supporting case is a real treasure chest: J.T. Walsh is as effectively oily in his final role as he was in so many other films, but there are also nice turns from Paul Giamatti (on the way up), David Morse, Ron Rifkin and other familiar faces.

The Kids Are All Right

2010, US, directed by Lisa Cholodenko

I've been trying to cram as much PhD study as possible into the final weeks before parenthood upends everything I've been accustomed to, and while I've continue to see a reasonable number of films I've been remiss in writing up any notes afterwards. As a consequence, before I managed to construct any sensible thoughts on The Kids Are All Right I read the terrific end-of-2010 discussion at Dennis Cozzalio's blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, which features the film prominently.

Dennis himself and Sheila O'Malley, proprietor of The Sheila Variations, hit on several of the issues that bothered me when watching the film, most obviously the resolution: although it has a certain open-endedness, suggesting a story that continues well beyond the credits, the conclusion still came across as far too neat for a film that was otherwise trying to give a sense of nuance to our picture of family life. Indeed, the overall narrative is familiar from more ostensibly mainstream fare - a settled, closed group, in this a family with two moms, disrupted by the arrival of a new presence, the sperm donor who made the family possible. The film, to me, seems to want to have its cake and eat it - suggesting a more unusual narrative than it is ultimately prepared to deliver, just as it complicates our picture of lesbian sexuality while also seeming to suggest that some lesbians just need to find the right man.

What does work, though - beyond the terrific acting ensemble - is the loose, sunny feel of the film, set against a perfect California summer when everything in this particular family is on the verge of change. Cholodenko transitions easily between gorgeous establishing shots of her suburban locations and handheld camerawork that underlines the jittery tension of other sequences, such as the angry confrontation that ensues when Mark Ruffalo's easygoing character gives a motorbike ride to his (biological) daughter. The motorbike ride itself is just one in a series of lovely scenes extolling the pleasures of life on the move - an early sequence with a bike gives a sense of never-ending youth, while later a long drive on the highway somehow functions as a catharsis for the befuddled, angry characters.

Casablanca

1942, US, directed by Michael Curtiz

Casablanca seems to have passed into popular lore as the perfect example of the virtues of the Hollywood studio system, where skilled artisans of all kinds collaborated to produce a transcendent work almost without the intervention of a director. Curtiz, though, is an extremely skilled operator, and I think that what we're seeing instead is the work of a man with a very steady hand on the tiller, marshaling the resources of his studio and extracting terrific work from veterans like his cinematographer Arthur Edeson, as well as a gallery of studio players from across Europe, to craft a film that gives plenty of play to his own interests.

There's a wonderful sense of rhythm, the easy movement from dry comedy - most obvious in every line delivered by Claude Rains - to drama, romance, or violence. Curtiz also has a clear sense of when to allow the bit players their moments to shine - see the scenes stolen by S.Z. Sakall, Leonid Kinskey, Curt Bois and numerous others - and when to bring us back to the main focus of the film. The film feels as though it's been stuffed almost to bursting with such incidents, a succession of treasurable moments, and yet Curtiz never loses sight of the overall narrative, or the relationships that give the film its force.

There's a playfulness to Curtiz's work, too, as though he's setting himself challenges to keep things interesting. He introduces each of the major players a little differently - the dolly shot that brings us close in to Dooley Wilson's piano, the camera that retreats before the imposing Sydney Greenstreet as he marches into Rick's place, the traveling shots that accompany Paul Henreid and Ingrid Bergman on their first, nervous walk across Rick's, the furtive entrance of Peter Lorre, passing almost unnoticed between other customers, or the way that Bogart himself is introduced as a pair of hands; we're forced to wait several more seconds before his face is revealed.

Curtiz's familiar shadowplay is much in evidence, too, whether in the expressionistic scene where Rick - his silhouette looming on the wall - opens the safe in his office, the slats of the shutters across the characters' faces at night, or, in a lighter key, the shadow of Sydney Greenstreet's blue parrot. The shadows are reversed in the shots of the exterior of Rick's - the whole set is bathed in darkness until a bright spotlight sweeps across the door.

The Charge of the Light Brigade

1936, US, directed by Michael Curtiz

Although Michael Curtiz directed so many films - over a hundred in the Hollywood portion of his career alone - that it's perhaps hard to speak of a 'typical' Curtiz picture, The Charge of the Light Brigade lacks several of the qualities that grace his stronger films, most obviously a careful sense of pace and a consistent element of visual inventiveness.

In this case, those gaps may reflect how quickly the film was rushed into production following the success of Curtiz's previous smash hit with Errol Flynn, Captain Blood: Curtiz and Flynn were back on set, on a very ambitious scale, within three months of that film's opening night. Still, given his career output Curtiz was surely no stranger to working fast, so perhaps he simply wasn't that invested in the material, or perhaps there wasn't much he could do with the rather leaden script he inherited.

There are hints, early on, of his more familiar interests, notably in a strikingly spare Indian palace, where the giant silhouettes echo those of the courtoom scenes in Captain Blood. Such flourishes aren't sustained as the film moves along, however. More problematic is the film's pacing, with the film moving fitfully along, appearing to gather steam only to crash to a halt for yet another scene that brings together Flynn's character with either his brother or his fiancée, often to no narrative purpose (even worse are the repetitive interludes involving Nigel Bruce and his shrewish wife). Everything is, of course, building to the eponymous charge - a spectacular, visceral sequence, albeit one that's uncomfortable to watch if you've even a passing interest in equine welfare - but it's quite a slog to get there.

Even by Hollywood standards, the history here is a travesty, with the charge at Balaclava re-written as both the climax to a story of brotherly rivalry and as a form of misguided vengeance for events modelled on the Indian Mutiny (never mind that the Mutiny took place three years after Balaclava). It's unclear as to why the writers couldn't have concocted a romantic backstory that actually related to the events of the Crimean War, although the entire film is another fine example of the way that Hollywood waved the flag of British Empire throughout the 1930s; with such stalwart support in Los Angeles, it must have been quite the shock when Washington proved much less supportive of Britain's Empire as the Second World War drew to a close.

Despite the complete disregard for factual accuracy, the script manages to capture some echoes of the actual empire, particularly the imperial idea that certain Indian groups - most notably the Bengals - were dissolute and feminine, as opposed to the vigorous, manly British (the British applied similar logic in dealing with indigenous groups from Africa to New Zealand). Even more inadvertently, no doubt, several of the character actors' accents give a sense of the way in which the officer corps offered opportunities to those from the fringes of the home islands, with Irish and Scottish officers particularly prominent on the ground.

The Comancheros

1961, US, directed by Michael Curtiz

This is my contribution to The Late Show, the Late Films Blogathon organized by David Cairns, proprietor of the wonderful Shadowplay.

Michael Curtiz was an extraordinarily prolific director, releasing at least one film a year - and sometimes many more - from his early career in Hungary to The Comancheros, which appeared just six months before his death. Although his most fertile creative years were behind him by the 1960s, there's no mistaking the craft in his final movie, giving the lie to the (fairly lazy) conventional wisdom that this was John Wayne's project, with Curtiz merely along for the ride.

That conventional wisdom stems mostly from the fact that several key personnel, particularly behind the camera, had prior connections with Wayne--writer James Edward Grant, producer George Sherman and cinematographer Bill Clothier, to name but three. However, it's not as though Curtiz was submerged by untested talent: Sherman, a pedestrian director himself, assembled a fine group of collaborators here, a group of experienced movie men whose careers dated back to the 1930s.

In any case, Curtiz was hardly a novice at quickly integrating with a new production team given his own long and varied career: it's hard to direct over a hundred movies without being able to rapidly find your bearings within a new crew. Most written accounts suggest that Curtiz's work on The Comancheros was restricted to the interiors given his own advancing cancer, but James Crighton Robertson unearthed evidence, in his book The Casablanca Man, that Curtiz was injured on location in Utah while shooting a scene with Wayne.

The imaginative staging of several of the outdoor sequences certainly suggest his experienced hand - for instance in the striking shot where Wayne and Stuart Whitman debate their options, with one outcome suggested over Wayne's shoulder. In any case, as David Niven's famous "bring on the empty horses" story indicates, Curtiz was not the kind of director to sit idly by while the second unit worked. Of course, quite what Niven was doing on set at that stage of The Charge of the Light Brigade is anyone's guess, since his character had exited stage-left long before the climactic scenes were filmed. One assumes, not for the first time, that he was recounting a tale told by others, although improving it in the process.

Wayne had just come back from shooting Hatari! when the production began, and he headed off to make The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance just days after The Comancheros wrapped. This is admittedly a minor in-between affair, but very nicely staged, owing something more to Howard Hawks than to John Ford, particularly in the laconic banter between Wayne and, well, everyone else in the film.

Indeed, the film comes across as something of a prototypical buddy film, a western Midnight Run with the roles reversed: here the prisoner (Whitman) is the hair-trigger member of the duo, whereas Wayne, who plays a Texas Ranger, is the almost infuriatingly easygoing partner, with quite a selection of trademark lines (proving it's no bad thing to have screenwriter pals).

Curtiz moves ably back and forth between comic and dramatic scenes, integrating the action sequences with wonderful character actor interludes. He has the same instincts for the ripe character moment as he had in his Warner Brothers days, giving time here to perennial bit-part actors like Guinn Williams (unfortunately uncredited, and doubly so, for this proved to be his last role; another Late Show) and Edgar Buchanan. The most notable supporting role, though, goes to Lee Marvin, onscreen for just a couple of indelible scenes, his head half-shorn and his temper all mean. His scenes with Wayne are a treasure, the Duke remaining impassive as Marvin progressively loses his rag, with predictable consequences.

I think there's something to David Cairns's suggestion that Curtiz was not in his element with the bright colours of postwar Hollywood, although he did made wonderfully atmospheric use of an early two-strip Technicolor process in Doctor X (1932; Craig Keller has some terrific screen grabs) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). Black and white seems much more suited to the kind of shadowplay he clearly loved, although there are hints of the past in a jailhouse scene, shadows from the bars making a variety of patterns on the walls, or on Lee Marvin's face, half in shadow, in the poker scene. Even if colour wasn't Curtiz's preferred medium, he still crafts magical moments like the shot when we see Ina Balin framed in an archway, an instant that might have been lifted from an Indian film.

Curtiz is also adept at using the frame to achieve a sense of depth, such as in the sequence when Wayne allows Whitman - who he's just arrested - to confirm that he's been abandoned by the woman he loves; the empty spaces tell us what we need to know. Wayne, waiting in the background, might be paying homage to the famous shot that concludes The Searchers, except this time we see him framed from a different angle.

Similarly, a scene where Wayne and Marvin sober up over steaks is carefully constructed to include a glimpse of a poker game that will quickly become important to the plot; no mere background colour here.

All this is to say that Curtiz was, at the end of his directorial career, exactly the kind of professional that Wayne and company were probably looking for when they hired him. The film, routine enough by big-budget Western standards, looks great, and Curtiz clearly still found enjoyment both in constructing the individual shots and finding the overall rhythm of his film. Perhaps, then, he was indeed along for one last ride, but it looks as though he enjoyed every moment in the saddle.

The Men Who Stare At Goats

2009, US, directed by Grant Heslov

More interesting as an idea than in the execution, The Men Who Stare at Goats suffers from something of an identity crisis, never quite sure whether it wants to be an out-and-out comedy, or a more sober commentary on the absurdity of war. While he gives some sense of the bizarre side-alleys of the US military, which spent some time and money looking at the possibilities of psychic warfare, director Grant Heslov ultimately seems more interested in playing with our image of George Clooney - whose character goes through several unflattering shifts of hairstyle and moustache - than in political commentary. Heslov also creates a major problem for himself by introducing Jeff Bridges in a terrific scene-stealing role as Bill Django, a truly unconventional army officer, and then keeping him offscreen for lengthy, distracting periods while a less compelling story unfolds. The brief montage that provides us with Django's back story looks like an altogether more interesting film than the one that remains.

I Am Love

2010, Italy, directed by Luda Guadagnino (Original title: Io sono l'amore)

Luca Guadagnino's film is an adept and enthralling latter-day re-working of some of the melodramatic territory of both Sirk and Hitchcock, but without the literal-mindedness of Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven, a compelling film that nonetheless remained tied rather too closely to its inspiration, unable to imagine the same emotional territory in a different setting.

Hitchcock's influence is most obvious in Guadagnino's use of music, heightening already tense scenes, or adding danger where none initially seems present - and pushing right to the limits of the absurd, such as in a sequence where Tilda Swinton, the film's central character, accidentally runs into a chef friend of her son's. His profession is central to the film's theme of food as a method of communication and as a store of memories; a particular soup recipe, borne from Russia to Italy, is at the heart of the narrative, precipitating the film's most shocking, change of tone (which recalls a similar moment in another Italian film, The Best of Youth).

There's an extraordinary sensuousness to the film, where everything is heightened, whether it's the intensity - almost frenzied - of the music, the close-ups of glistening food, the quick rhythm of a dash through a town, or the abstract, sun-dappled body parts on a lazy summer afternoon (Guadagnino slows the film right down for this sequence, as if to emphasize each blade of grass, each breath, recalling the languid pace of Apichatpong Weerasethakul).

The Fall

2006, US/India, directed by Tarsem (Singh)

Shot in some 18 different countries, Tarsem's second feature is both a gorgeous travelogue - at times it's like a National Geographic greatest hits - and a self-deprecating fable, entirely aware of its own potential portentousness and using humour to keep the tall tale grounded. It's also a surprisingly deft commentary on the magic of early movies, seamlessly integrating action sequences from invented films of the 1920s, and paying homage to the extraordinary feats of early stuntmen by avoiding computerised special effects. The film interweaves the framing story of an invalid in a Los Angeles hospital with the yarns he spins for a fellow patient, a little girl. The boundary between reality and invention is always fluid, and is comprehensively breached as the film progresses, with the storyteller and his audience suddenly intruding into the stories. The location work is quite extraordinary, a gorgeous cascade of imagery from Italy to India, with dazzling geometric patterns and colours (such as in the shot of Jodhpur, above); the warm, languid atmosphere of the hospital allows us to return, briefly, to earth between chapters.

An Education

2009, UK, directed by Lone Scherfig

The central narrative of An Education holds few great surprises - from the beginning, the romance between Jenny (Carey Mulligan) and her suave, older suitor David (Peter Sarsgaard) is undercut by musical suggestions of problems on the horizon - but Lone Scherfig is more interested in using that simple template to comment on early 1960s England. In that, she's largely successful, deploying the film's title in multiple overlapping ways: the romance itself becomes an initiation into the ways of the world, compromising, at least for a time, Jenny's path to a place in Oxford (the obsession of her suburban London father). But the film is also about the lessons that Jenny misses: the fraught social status of her Jewish paramour, desperate for acceptance in worlds that are still off limits to him, or the even more precarious social standing of a black family that Jenny sees, fleetingly, through a car window. Scherfig is an acute observer of the fine gradations of the British class system - Jenny is as snobbish as they come, despite being an up and comer herself - as well as the British tendency to romanticize its urban gangsters, in the scenes at a dog track where Peter mixes with the more brutish end of the criminal fraternity.

Paprika

2006, Japan, directed by Satoshi Kon

As with other anime films I've seen, Paprika seems to have two distinct levels of imagery, the one relatively straightforward and almost plain in terms of the visual approach - simple line drawings, and characters who don't look all that different to those from children's animation shows - and the other extraordinarily rich in colour, tone, and background detail. The contrast seems especially effective here, however, where the film revolves around the interplay between the "real" and dream worlds, with the two gradually becoming ever more closely entwined, with the bizarre imagery of the dream world ultimately invading the workaday reality. The film's complicated plot and constant back and forth switching - and occasionally even the specific imagery, such as the use of elevators or a floating body in a hotel lobby - seem to share something with the - later - Inception, providing an interesting complementary approach to some of the same ideas of shared dreams and psychological exploration.

The Secret of Kells

2009, France/Belgium/Ireland, directed by Tomm Moore

As you might expected, the visuals are the thing here, with Tomm Moore's film making liberal use of inspiration from the Book of Kells itself, and other Celtic/religious artwork of the period. He finds much of the visual energy latent in the original drawings and breathes literal life into those pictures, giving us a sense of the world from which the art emerged without being excessively literal. This is, after all, a mythological origin story rather than a history, taking one of the possible explanations for the creation of the Book of Kells and running with it.

At times, the imagery is so powerful that it seems to overwhelm the characters: while the young characters' voices are wonderfully evocative and the late, lamented Mick Lally does a fine job as Brother Aidan, Brendan Gleeson's abbot seems somehow remote from what we see onscreen, as though his otherwise rich voice doesn't quite jell with the images.

The Town

2010, US, directed by Ben Affleck

Ben Affleck has spun a pretty decent career out of his Boston connection, and as in his previous film, Gone Baby Gone, he proves to be an adept chronicler of the city, particularly in its blue-collar incarnation, with a good sense of the invisible lines that criss-cross the area, and the mental maps by which people conceive of their territories. That lends a real edge, for instance, to the unexpected entrance of Jeremy Renner to a sun-dappled Harvard square scene: not only is he unwelcome in the particular context, but in another sense he shouldn't be there at all, not wandering on that street at that time.

The film isn't quite as downbeat as its predecessor, finishing on a possibly redemptive note (that recalls, perhaps deliberately, the conclusion of The Shawshank Redemption), while recognizing the complex, troubled morality of Affleck's character; Affleck as director suggests that his freedom is simply another form of prison, with sins to be purged. There's also an enjoyable vein of humour, sometimes of the darkest kind, in the cat and mouse interplay with Jon Hamm's FBI agent, as well as in a terrific visual joke after one of the bank robberies that structure the film.

Affleck's style remains unfussy and straightforward: it's clear that he doesn't feel the need for directorial fireworks, a sign of confidence in both his material and his actors. He's also attentive to the casting of both the key supporting roles and the film's smaller parts, whether through the use of local non-professionals or seasoned performers like Pete Postlethwaite (recycling his In the Name of the Father Belfast accent), Jeremy Renner, and Chris Cooper, while also integrating fresher faces like Rebecca Hall, who played a crucial part in the first film of the Red Riding trilogy. While Affleck manages to give almost all of his actors a scene or two in which to shine, he's careful, however, to ensure that this doesn't detract from the film's momentum. That's a flaw in several of Judd Apatow's films, for instance: his work is constantly grinding to a halt because of the director's generosity toward his players.