The Illusionist

2010, UK/France, directed by Sylvain Chomet

Every now and then I watch a good movie at a bad time, and it's hard to be fully objective about the film's virtues afterwards. This was a fine example: Saturday night, baby in bed at a reasonable hour, glass of wine to hand, curled up on the couch with a reasonably short film from a director whose previous outing, The Triplets of Belleville, we'd both enjoyed. In the context, though, I was completely unprepared for the film's languid rhythm and insistently melancholic air, very different to Chomet's eye-popping previous work.

Of course, his inventiveness is on display here as before, with exceptional identical to details such as the blinking of a neon light outside a window or the constant, amusing passage of cars through the streets of Edinburgh. Chomet's ability to convey nuances of emotion with few or no words is also deeply impressive, perhaps never more so in the finale, making use of objects to reflect back on the film's characters. There are dozens of individual shots to treasure, too, whether it's the sweeping overhead shot of Edinburgh, the striking mirror image of a train crossing a bridge, or the references to other films and books - the in-joke featuring a brief sequence of the animated Jacques Tati watching his real self onscreen, or the wink at the cover of Hergé's The Black Island. Indeed, Hergé's style seems ever-present here, in the attention to details of setting but also on occasion in the subtleties of the character drawings themselves. One to revisit, I think.

Le Cercle rouge

1970, France, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

This is an entry in the second Late Films Blogathon, conjured out of thin air by David Cairns at Shadowplay.

Though he wasn't an old man when he died, there was nothing unexpected about Bourvil's death at the age of 53. He had been diagnosed with cancer in the late 1960s, and had known that the disease was incurable at least since 1968, when filming his role in L'Arbre de Noël - a film, oddly enough, about a young character with a terminal illness. Each of Bourvil's films from that point on was made in the knowledge that it could be the cap to his twenty-five-year screen career.

Still, few of those films seem burdened by a sense of legacy. For the most part they hark back to familiar themes and personnel, both in front of and behind the camera, whether it's Le Cerveau, in which he was once again directed by Gérard Oury, or his final role, filmed days after he completed Le Cercle rouge, in Le Mur de l'Atlantique, whose wartime setting not only recalls his biggest hit, La Grande Vadrouille, but also features one of his co-stars from that film, Terry-Thomas. Despite his crowded plate in those final few years, Bourvil was actually a rather more cautious man than several of his fellow comic stars, at least by the credit-happy standards of French cinema. While he made over 60 films, his key early influence, Fernandel, amassed over 100 credits in the same time period, and both were left in the shade by Louis de Funès, who had racked up 150 screen credits by the quarter-century mark.

Le Cercle rouge sticks out from the pack not only in that Bourvil is cast in an entirely atypical role, but also because he is credited as André Bourvil - not his real name, which was André Raimbourg, but the only time he was credited with more than a single name. While there are dramatic parts scattered through his filmography, notably a pair of roles in 1958 when he appeared as both the villainous Thenardier in Le Chanois's expansive version of Les Misérables and as Michèle Morgan's petty husband in Le Miroir à deux faces, his turn as Commissaire Mattei was something different again, a tightly controlled, often taciturn performance from an actor better known for expansive gestures and loquacious characters. That's entirely in keeping with Melville's style of course, not least in this film, which features a terrific, virtually silent heist sequence, and in which men (there are essentially no women in the film) communicate most frequently with few or no words.

When Meville approached Bourvil for the part, he took him out to dinner and afterwards to the movies: the director wanted his actor to see Richard Brooks's In Cold Blood, for he envisaged the character of Mattei in the same mould as that film's Alvin Dewey, played by John Forsythe. Bourvil's reaction was apparently to exclaim of Forsythe, "But he's handsome," and Melville had to convince the actor that he, too, was handsome, even that his character was seductive to a degree. While Mattei is certainly a compelling character, it's a little harder to see the evidence of his seductiveness given the lack of female characters. His only interaction with a woman is a brief scene, filmed from through a glass door, of apparently pleasant conversation with a barmaid. The woman turns out to be an informant, and our only glimpse of Mattei's private life shows him feeding his cats, of whom more later. Still, it's hard to imagine Melville's original choice for the part, Lino Ventura, in such a quiet moment of domesticity: Bourvil's casting gives the part a greater depth, akin, perhaps, to Hitchcock's casting of Cary Grant or James Stewart.

Bourvil is introduced in the opening scene, in a car careening toward a railway station - the same motif re-appears in Melville's next film, Un Flic - where Mattei and a prisoner board a night train to Paris. The prisoner, Vogel, is played by Gian Maria Volonte, who played a character called Mattei himself a year or two later. Melville apparently found Volonte a real handful to deal with, and complained at length about the Italian actor's "unprofessional" attitude on his set, though their differing politics hardly helped. Actually, Meville has few words of praise for anyone, in front of or behind the camera, on the film: Bourvil is one of the very rare people for whom the director appears to have unreserved respect, and after the actor's death, a few weeks before Le Cercle rouge premiered, he eulogized his star in moving terms.

Vogel sets one of the film's plotlines in motion by escaping - a strange turn of events, in many ways, because you'd expect it to undermine the viewer's confidence in Mattei and yet it proves to be the springboard for a demonstration of his competence. He's no Javert, whose success seems to lie as much in his sheer doggedness as anything else, but is an intelligent and surprising flexible man who nonetheless sets strict limits on his actions. Still, he's clearly troubled by his own willingness to pressure his witnesses and informants. One of the film's key sequences is a short scene with Santi, a mafioso played by François Périer, who suggests that people are unable to change their true nature. Santi cites that as a point of pride, suggesting that he'll never squeal, but the same might be equally true of Mattei's ethics; Santi is confident that the policeman won't transgress certain limits. The scene features a telephone on an extendable frame, and given Melville's encyclopaedic knowledge of film it wouldn't surprise me to discover that the prop is a conscious reference to Edward G. Robinson's moral struggles in Five Star Final, in which a similar telephone becomes almost a character in its own right.

But back to that train, now minus Vogel, which stops near Mersault L'Hôpital, a small town whose cinematic significance lies primarily with Bourvil: a key sequence in La Grande vadrouille was filmed there a few years earlier, and the town's website still features a picture of Bourvil and co-star Louis de Funès, which may not say a whole lot about the excitement of the intervening decades. It's not the only time a location in Le Cercle rouge recalls the actor's earlier career. The film's final scenes are filmed on the ample property of Jean-Claude Brialy, with whom Bourvil made the 1959 film Le Chemin des écoliers, along with a very youthful fellow by the name of Alain Delon. On that occasion Bourvil played Delon's father; by the time of Le Cercle rouge Delon was all grown up, and the two men share only a few minutes of screen time given the film's separate plotlines. Bourvil has even less time to play off one of the film's other stars, Yves Montand, with whom he has the very briefest, and most terminal, of exchanges; ironically, given the nature of their exchange, it was Montand who took over Bourvil's part in La Folie des grandeurs the following year, the film that was to mark his triumphant reunion with Louis de Funès, though the character was substantially re-written in light of the casting change.

 Ah, the cats. Our host Mr. Cairns comments that the three cats that Bourvil feeds on a couple of occasions - in near identical scenes, with only the animals varying the routines - are Melville's own pets, going by the wonderful names of Ofrène, Grifollet and Firello. Melville mentions his cats a number of times in interviews, suggesting that in his home life he has no interest in surrounding himself with more than four fellow creatures - his wife and the trio of cats (in that order). While Mattei doesn't seem quite such an anti-social fellow, it's hard not to read a certain amount of Melville into his driven, highly professional character. What's most impressive, ultimately, about Bourvil's performance is that his work makes you forget almost everything that's come before: as Melville said, Adieu le pitre, farewell to the buffoon. Farewell, indeed.

Jacques Lorcey's 1981 book Bourvil was something of a treasure trove of information, along with Rui Noguiera's 1972 book of interviews with Melville, Melville on Melville.

Standard Operating Procedure

2008, US, directed by Errol Morris

I couldn't help feeling that this was a major missed opportunity. Sure, it reawakens the outrage that many of us felt as photos of abuse and apparent abuse appeared from Abu Ghraib, and suggests that the photos were evidence of a much more systemic set of attitudes to Iraqi prisoners. However, Errol Morris's unrelenting focus on those photographs contributes to lack of accountability further up the line, because we cannot see those people committing or ordering criminal acts, as opposed to what we can see in the photos of lower-rank personnel. By limiting the consideration to the examination of the pictures we see, there's little sense of what went on outside the frame because that evidence would take a very different form. As an aside, although I've generally enjoyed Morris's visual style in the past here I found the shots of his interviewees were often distractingly unflattering, whether through choice of close up/angle (Lynndie England comes off particularly badly) or background (which does no favours for Janis Karpinski, for instance).

Unstoppable

2010, US, directed by Tony Scott

Tony Scott's last couple of films have taken place over a compressed period of time, and Unstoppable extends that trend to its logical conclusion, with a story told virtually in real time as a runaway train thunders toward a grimy Pennsylvania town. Despite the presence of Denzel Washington on his fifth outing for Scott, the trains dominate the screen for much of the running time, colour-coded, and no doubt colour-corrected, against the striking rust-belt locations.

Washington's character seems like an extension of the solid career man he played in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, albeit this time at the controls of a train rather than in the operations room; that job is taken here by Rosario Dawson, who is terrific as a straightforward woman focused on solving problems rather than respecting hierarchies. Despite the film's physical drama, Scott is also strikingly attentive to workplace details: these people, concerned about office politics, union policies, and chilly corporate decision-making, are nicely drawn despite the film's adrenalized presentation, although the corporate types are, for the most part, rather less subtly drawn.

Fire in Babylon

2010, UK, directed by Stevan Riley


A terrific portrait of the fearsome West Indies cricket team of the 1970s and 1980s, set against the backdrop of the cultural and political ferment from which bubbled forth reggae's global rise and the raw-edges of The Harder They Come, Fire in Babylon is a little lacking in broader cricket history, never mentioning, for instance, the deeply controversial "Bodyline" tour of the 1930s, which soured Anglo-Australian relations to an astonishing degree over the use of physical intimidation (by England). As the film tells it, the lethal West Indies fast bowl attack was developed as a response to Australia's fiery tactics, accurate enough for the short term, but an irony indeed when seen in the context of vociferous Australian objections to such intimidation in decades past.

Such tactics were a major innovation for a Windies team still emerging from the colonial shadow, ay a time when they were often dismissed as fun-loving calypso cricketers. As the film tells it the 1976 tour of England marked a major turning point in Caribbean identity, including for those in the diaspora who had endured two decades of unwelcoming treatment in the alleged mother country. Indeed, the team's performances seem to both feed off that broader awareness and contribute to it, most often in brashly joyous ways.

For the sportsmen themselves there was clearly much more on the line during the period, most notably during that 1976 tour of England, during which the athletic young West Indian players made England look, quite literally, like a bunch of old men - surely sowing the seeds for a major change in training and conditioning by cricket players. The players weren't just making a sporting point: England's captain, the South African-born Tony Greig, made a spectacular, if likely inadvertent, miscalculation when he commented that he intended to make the West Indies "grovel" during the course of the series. That he made his comments at a time of great unrest in South Africa - the Soweto Uprising began during the tour - only reinforced the sense that the West Indies were playing for rather more than sporting victory, and even in the interview 35 years on there's an icy tone to Viv Richards's comments when asked about Greig's ill-chosen words. It's one of the highlights of the film, giving a glimpse of the steel for which Richards, who played without a helmet, was known.

Poster art credit: Bose Collins

The Story of Temple Drake

1933, US, directed by Stephen Roberts

This Paramount pre-Code isn't as snappy as its Warner Brothers counterparts, with the action dragging on toward the end, but there's no shortage of hair-raising content - rape, murder, drunken lechery, prostitution and gangster shenanigans, all wrapped in an old dark house that might have wandered in from the back lot at Universal.

Miriam Hopkins, whose work is mostly unfamiliar to me, plays the eponymous Temple Drake, a carefree and rather careless party girl who ends up way over her head when a night-time escapade goes wrong. I haven't read the William Faulkner novel, Sanctuary, on which the film is based but as the film tells it Temple is essentially the architect of her own unpleasant destiny. While individual responsibility is surely no bad thing here Temple is required to destroy her honour, in the eyes of her peers, despite being one of the film's primary victims.  The content may be modern, then, but the sexual politics certainly aren't, although arguably not much has changed for many people similarly victimized.

The central sequence in a decrepit mansion populated with bootleggers is terrifically atmospheric - sheets of rain, wonderful use of shadow, sweaty, perhaps crazed, characters - and there's an interesting slice of class tension at work, too, with Temple suddenly exposed to a part of the Southern underbelly usually only seen in her grandfather's courtroom.

Chippers

2008, Ireland, directed by Nino Tropiano

A compelling documentary on what might seem a small phenomenon, the Italian chip shop owners of Ireland, Nino Tropiano's film nicely opens links to much bigger questions of emigration and integration, with many of his subjects remaining far more connected to their ancestral villages in Casalattico, in the interior of the Italian peninsula, than to their new home. Although the film doesn't explore the theme to any great extent, it also functions an interesting corrective to the idea that Ireland was only a place to emigrate from; clearly, for some, the grass was greener there than in their home countries.

The film doesn't claim to tell the full story of the Irish chipper - there's no mention of Beshoff's or Burdock's, two of the most famous of Dublin chippers, both founded by Russian immigrants - but it fleshes out the extremely tough realities behind an order of post-pub chips, and the challenges of passing along a family business at a time of great change in Irish society (where "authentic Irish-Italian" chippers are increasingly staffed by new migrants from neither of those countries). Chippers is also something of a tribute to the efforts of Barbi Borza, very much the centre of Ireland's Italian community for many years, and an enthusiastic amateur historian; it's through his good offices that Tropiano gets his access to the community, though the corpulent Borza, no great advert for the virtues of chipper food, sadly passed away in early 2007 before the film was released. Perhaps appropriately, though, he was on his home turf of Casalattico at the end of his life.

Le Corniaud

1965, France/Italy, directed by Gérard Oury

Although they had been paired onscreen briefly a couple of times before, this was the first occasion on which Louis de Funès and Bourvil shared top billing, and the collaboration was such a success that they were reunited the following year for an even bigger hit, La Grande vadrouille. That title, which roughly means the big trip, could just as easily have been used here, as Le Corniaud takes the two men on a peripatetic journey from Naples across the south of France.

Although Gérard Oury tends to emphasize his actors' less subtle comic stylings -- Bourvil's exasperated sighing with hands flung in the air, De Funès's rubber-faced mugging -- there are more graceful moments, too, particularly near the end when Bourvil soft-shoes away from his pursuers, his gait reminiscent of Jacques Tati. That moment is the more enjoyable because it's where his character finally turns the tables, revealing himself as something more than the titular sucker.

The film looks terrific thanks to Henri Decaë's scope photography -- I love the shot above where de Funès is just about visible in the background, crammed into a small car, while the oblivious Bourvil chatters away to him by means of a radio phone, but Decaë also does nice work with colour in other sections of the film, notably in a campsite sequence with brightly-lit tents. He had quite the career, switching back and forth between nouvelle vague directors and French (and later American) commercial cinema with ease.

Pour cent briques t'as plus rien

1982, France, directed by Edouard Molinaro

I'm not sure what it says about the glory days of the early Mitterrand era, but this is the third 1980s French comedy I've watched in a row in which one or more hitherto upstanding characters is rather easily persuaded to take the money and run. The idea is taken to its farcical extreme here, with the film's title giving an indication of the steep cost of Parisian living, and bank robbery the obvious solution to the problem--indeed, the solution is so obvious that everyone wants a piece of the action. This kind of thing was Daniel Auteuil's pre-Jean de Florette bread and beurre - actually, this is rather better than his 1980s average for the most part - and there are few hints of the future direction of his career; by contrast, Gérard Jugnot has ploughed a pretty consistent comic furrow in the intervening years, with occasional forays into sentimentality.

Les Spécialistes

1985, France, directed by Patrice Leconte

The first big step away from the comedies, mostly derived from plays, that were Patrice Leconte's bread and butter for a decade, Les Spécialistes is a fairly straightforward buddy film, albeit on the kind of widescreen canvas that recalls many of France's biggest comedy hits of the 1960s, most obviously those pairing Louis de Funès and Bourvil. Though they are less comically inclined than such illustrious predecessors, Bernard Giraudeau and Gérard Lanvin make an engaging tandem, their onscreen banter surely a major reason for the film's huge success in 1985; indeed, Lanvin had two huge successes in a row with Marche à l'ombre, directed by and co-starring Michel Blanc, and then this film, but he never re-formed either working partnership.

There's a hint of Bertrand Blier in Les Spécialistes, too, especially in the film's concluding scenes, although there's nothing of Blier's provocative take on sexual politics, and little to foreshadow the richer work that Leconte did at the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s. Still, the pacing is brisk, the location work and stunts often excellent, and the central heist sequence convincingly constructed; in other words, the great majority of the film's original entertainment value has survived the intervening years intact.

Les Ripoux

1984, France, directed by Claude Zidi

A huge hit in its native country, Les Ripoux is still pretty entertaining as a slice of seamy Parisian life, with an ebullient central performance from Philippe Noiret, but it seems terribly dated in terms of filmmaking technique. While I'm pre-disposed to like Thierry Lhermitte for his exuberant earlier work as a member of the Splendid café-théâtre troupe, he's almost entirely in Noiret's shadow here and there's barely an attempt to render credible the narrative arc that sees his strait-laced young cop make the transition to a rather more flexible view of the law. His character is also saddled with an unconvincing romance plot that regularly prompts director Claude Zidi to crank up the muzak and call for the soft-focus lenses, all of which only underlines how much better the film is when Noiret is front-and-centre. There are pleasures, though, from several of the character actors, especially those playing the film's petty criminals--among them Ticky Holgado and Michel Crémadès, both of whom subsequently incarnated numerous memorable oddballs.

Black Sheep

1935, US, directed by Allan Dwan

A nifty ship-board film centered on a bunch of card sharps and hustlers, Black Sheep features an engaging early appearance from Claire Trevor. She gives considerable depth and nuance to what might have been a throwaway role in support of Edmund Lowe, whose subsequent career was nothing like as interesting as Trevor's. They make a terrific pair here, deploying their dialog with plenty of crackle. The support cast, as so often in classic Hollywood, is eye-catching in its own right, whether in the form of gravel-voiced Eugene Pallette, Tom Brown (as fresh-faced here as in Judge Priest and Hell's Highway), or Herbert Mundin as a recurring drunken joke, and the resolution is poetically satisfying, particularly for those rooting against the aristocrats.

Five Star Final

1931, US, directed by Mervyn LeRoy

Given the recent revelations about immoral but standard operating procedures in the Murdoch newspaper empire, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the final shot of Five Star Final is entirely accurate both in its suggestion that such newspapers are true denizens of the gutter - and that they will continue to operate whatever the qualms of an individual journalist or the condemnation of a government. It's only when the buyers turn their backs on the product en masse, as the post-Hillsborough residents of Liverpool chose to do with The Sun, that any meaningful change occurs. The "journalists" at work here would no doubt have found lucrative employment at The News of the World or its American cousins, as they insinuate themselves by any means into the lives of their prey, events then spiraling out of control at breathtaking pace. Although Edward G. Robinson is the film's moral centre, however belatedly, it's Boris Karloff, as a spectacularly amoral hack, who steals the show; the character's personal proclivities and his willingness to smoothly lie his way through any situation roll together, his soft, British tones only enhancing the creepiness of the effect.

It

1927, US, directed by Clarence G. Badger

Where I struggled to comprehend the fuss made over Mae West's charms, I had no difficulty understanding just why Clara Bow's star blazed so brightly in the late 1920s: she's almost mesmerizingly charming, completely dominating the screen with her energy. In her way, Bow's character is as single-minded as West's in She Done Him Wrong or Barbara Stanwyck's in Baby Face, but her zestful approach to life is more endearing, if ultimately a similar exercise in social climbing. There's a striking zoom shot near the beginning that's highly unusual for the period - distractingly so at this remove, since I kept wondering whether the zoom lens had been invented that early or whether the filmmakers had used some other trick to achieve the effect.

Wings

1927, US, directed by William Wellman

I've only seen a sliver of William Wellman's sizeable filmography, and nothing in the last couple of years, but what struck me most here was his mastery of tone, adeptly navigating the switch from comedy in the idyllic pre-war phase through to poignant farewells, dramatic combat action and ultimately, even inevitably, catastrophe. Despite the scale of the production, there's a visual economy to his work, efficiently signaling emotional tone through placement of his actors - Clara Bow and Charles Rogers at play in a tight shot under a car, not a care in the world, followed later by the sober shots of Rogers's rival Richard Arlen and his parents as he prepares to head to war, with the film reaching is emotional high-point in the sequence reuniting Rogers and Arlen late on, the two men joined in tragic embrace at the centre of the frame as signs of destruction surround them.

Wellman displays an extraordinary invention in his shot choices, too, his camerawork often startlingly "modern" to my eye. An early shot of two lovers on a swing has the camera mounted on the swing itself, foreshadowing the woozy shot in Mean Streets where Martin Scorsese attaches the camera directly to Harvey Keitel. More showy still, and yet entirely in keeping with the liberating feel of the sequence, is the wonderful travelling shot through the patrons at the Folies Bérgères. Elsewhere, Wellman simply uses camera placement, rather than motion, to achieve his effects - as in the low-angle shot that emphasizes the enormous bulk of a German bomber.

I saw the film at the Chevalier Theatre in Medford, with live organ accompaniment by Peter Krasinski. His work became such an absorbing part of the action that it was easy to forget there was an actual human being up there near the screen, adding drama and, not infrequently, humour to the visuals. The choice of film was no accident: the Chevalier in question was a wartime pilot from Medford.

Picture credit: Still scanned/uploaded by Silent Film Still Archive.

Hot Tub Time Machine

2010, US, directed by Steve Pink

There can be no claims of false advertising with Hot Tub Time Machine: it does indeed feature the eponymous time-travel device, and it's about as silly as you might expect, though at least there's a certain unpretentious honesty on the filmmakers' part. It starts out brightly enough: most of the best jokes are in the first half, at which point the script-writers seem to run out of steam. The second half is a kind of manic, higher-pitched repetition driven mostly by energetic performances from Craig Robinson, by far the most sympathetic of the central quartet of time-travelers, and an incredibly profane Rob Cordrry. John Cusack, by contrast, is reliably catatonic in John Cusack style; although he's listed as a producer here, he gives off the air of a man who can't quite believe, after a quarter century in the business, that he's reduced to starring in fare like this.

Central Park

1932, US, directed by John G. Adolfi


Central Park manages to squeeze an awful lot into a running time of less than an hour - hoodlums, robbery, a beauty contest, gunplay, a kindly cop about to retire, a love story, an escaped lion, a mad prison escapee, and plenty of Depression-era background colour, including some nice footage of the eponymous green space. It's a little frantic at times with so much ground to cover, though the scenes between Joan Blondell and Wallace Ford have a lovely feel of two confused souls finding some solace, while Guy Kibbee as the aforementioned cop is terrific, playing a character who has a surprising kinship with the live-and-let-live Pacific island store owner he plays in the same year's Rain.

Turn Back the Clock

1933, US, directed by Edgar Selwyn

It's a Wonderful Life is surely the most famous version of the old "What if I'd had a different life?" (or in this case "wife") plot, but this is an energetic variation, scripted by Selwyn and Ben Hecht, which focuses on the comedic possibilities for most of the running time. Lee Tracy, as the man who gets to see his alternative path, is aware more or less from the beginning of what's happened to him, though his manic delight in being granted a do-over causes consternation among those close to him until he figures out a way to channel both his knowledge of future events and his energy. As with so many 1930s films, there's virtually no fat. Barely any time seems to pass between Tracy's return to his humble soda jerk origins and his appointment as a presidential adviser, with the film skipping huge chunks of time from one scene change to the next, but the narrative remains entirely coherent despite the frantic pacing. While I found Lee Tracy to be a mis-cast distraction in Doctor X, he's perfect here, over-caffeinated in precisely the spirit of Hecht's snappy dialogue.

Quick Millions

1931, US, directed by Rowland Brown

Before he turned saintly, circa 1938, Spencer Tracy played many a roughneck, and in Quick Millions he provides a pre-Scarface template for a criminal rise to the top. George Raft practices for his turn in that film by playing the same right-hand-man role here, although he is in rather more loquacious form than in Howard Hawks's film. The early 1930s seem to be littered with people who have an extraordinarily single-minded attitude to success in their chosen profession, and the fast-paced style of the early talkies tend to reinforce the sense of a dizzying ascent: the to-the-point montage sequences compress events so that in no time a two-bit hoodlum is making deals with the major players, although director Rowland Brown also makes time for insightful character asides, particularly when Tracy tries to show he's qualified to hang with the city's older money. The finale intercuts scenes at a church with an outbreak of violence, a good four decades before Francis Ford Coppola alternates between the same elements in The Godfather.

Hell's Highway

1932, US, directed by Rowland Brown

Like Scarface, which appeared the same year, Rowland Brown's film takes a social problem and exposes it to the harsh light of day as part of a call to government action, though on this occasion the issue is the treatment of miscreants behind bars rather than the actions of those same miscreants in the streets. That alone marks the gulf with today's cinema. It's hard enough to imagine a mainstream drama concerned with the treatment of prisoners in quasi-privatised work camps, never mind one that sees the government as a likely source of assistance, since these days prison administrations seem as likely to be in cahoots with private enterprise as they are to be concerned with prisoner welfare. Where's the Hollywood exposé of Joe Arpaio's methods?

There's a fierce energy to Rowland Brown's filming, and a bluntness in the way he depicts the physical realities of the prison camp - the dreadful food, the constant effort to save money at the prisoners' expense, the brutal work regime in which any hint of exhaustion is interpreted and punished as serious insubordination - that's mirrored in the physical presence of his lead, Richard Dix, the alpha male among the prisoners. Both Brown and Dix's character, Duke Ellis, pair a certain bullishness with strategic cunning, eyeing opportunities to make their points with either fists or brain as the occasion demands. 

The Forest for the Trees

2003, Germany, directed by Maren Ade (Original Title: Der Wald vor läuter Baumen)

Maren Ade's film school graduation project, The Forest for the Trees is a challenge to watch: with no histrionics or sentimentality, it charts the disintegration of a personality under what seem like banal strains - a new job, a new town, the struggle to define oneself and to find friends that aid in the endeavour. Technically, there are certainly rough edges, with the video sometimes looking washed out, but the nuanced performances, and Ade's acute observation of interactions between her characters, down to subtleties of tone and choice of words, give the film considerable power. It's rather like watching a show like The Office at times, where the film's ability to gnaw at the viewer stems from the recognizable reality it depicts, particularly the slightly off-key central character, though there's barely a note of humour throughout.

Revenge of the Nerds

1984, US, directed by Jeff Kanew

I'm not sure if it's chutzpah or complete obliviousness, but there's something impressive about the way that Revenge of the Nerds attempts to balance surprisingly inclusive views on Nerd-dom with extraordinary retrograde sexual politics, creating a safe house, literally, for all those excluded by the jock element on campus while happily invading the privacy of the sorority sisters. The energetic playing and direction almost make up for the contradiction -- there's a terrific shot of the nerds rampaging through a sorority house, the camera pulling back as they advance toward it -- while the filmmakers capture rather well, if in wildly exaggerated form, the way in which college can seem like a social experiment in which classes are at best a distraction from the wider education that's going on. There's not a single moment dedicated to the classroom experience, for instance, and the one time the jocks assemble for football drills the coach realizes, as the sequence concludes, that the team has forgotten to practice.

The Passing of the Third Floor Back

1935, UK, directed by Berthold Viertel

Yet another viewing prompted by David Cairns, who wrote at length about the film a couple of years ago, The Passing of the Third Floor Back puts Conrad Veidt in the difficult position of needing to be compelling while remaining saintly. As John Milton well knew, the devil is generally a more eye-catching character than the angel, but Veidt controls his performance, and particularly his voice, to hypnotic effect in order to counter-balance Frank Cellier's exuberant playing of Mr. Wright, the film's representation of all that is wicked.

As David notes in his piece, the religious symbolism is often quite overt, using crossed shadows, for instance, though to rather different effect than in Hawks's Scarface. The texture of secular London life of the period is equally present - references to the tenements that give Mr. Wright his filthy lucre, the organ grinder and his monkey, the joyous day out on the steamer. The cross-section of English society as gathered together in the boarding house also gives the film ample room to explore contrasts and contradictions in Britain's inter-war class system, too, although it's occasionally a struggle for the film to reconcile those differences with the narrative's need to bring the lodgers together in specific scenes.

I'm not all that familiar with the details of Berthold Viertel's career, but this feels like a much more personal outing than the following year's Rhodes of Africa, with its rather plodding narrative; the visual touches that render this film so consistently interesting are far less noteworthy in the biopic, too, although Viertel does create an interesting tension between the oppositional role that Paul Kruger is supposed to occupy and his rather endearing onscreen presentation. It's not hard to sense an echo of the contrast between Veidt and Cellier, both physically and psychologically, in the dynamic that operates between Walter Huston as Rhodes and Oscar Homolka as Kruger; Cellier re-appears in a small part in the later film, too, as a more sympathetic London striver.

The picture above is lifted directly from David's piece on MUBI; I couldn't make anything decent from my copy of the film, which is rather frayed around the edges.

Mid-August Lunch

2008, Italy, directed by Gianni Di Gregorio (original title: Pranzo di ferragosto)

Most of the reviews I've seen for Gianni De Gregorio's film use the word "slight" or some variation, which as far as I can tell is another way for the writers to express the idea that the film is light on plot. That's true - the film is about a few days in the life of a middle-aged slacker, played by the director, while he looks after his mother and several other older women - but the implication that the film itself is thus somehow lacking in substance is entirely misplaced. De Gregorio was one of the many writers credited on Matteo Garrone's film Gomorra, and there's a surprising continuity between the two films - an opening that takes one to the heart of the matter with virtually no context for instance, but particularly the rich series of character portraits, each carefully delineated so that we're able to follow the dynamic that develops between the unlikely group. Equally, there's a profound sense of place, of the details of Rome's August rhythms far from the tourist trail, with De Gregorio indulging his love for the city in the wonderful moped sequence that simultaneously pays homage to Nanni Moretti's very different celebration of Rome in 1994's Caro Diario.  In its quiet way, the film also eviscerates the lip-service paid to the cult of the "mama", revealing the reality for all too many older women without ever allowing the tone of the film to become embittered. Terrific performances all around, too, dignified and honest.

She Done Him Wrong

1933, US, directed by Lowell Sherman

I had only seen a handful of Mae West clips before She Done Him Wrong, all of them showcasing her brassy way with a one-liner and her unique vocal style, so the full-length film came as something of a surprise. Billed as a comedy, and certainly treated as such by the critics, it nonetheless features Mae in a role that flirts with the textbook definition of a sociopath: she's remorseless, self-absorbed, exaggeratedly promiscuous, and with apparently nary a care about the fate of her fellow man or woman. While her va-va-voom charms are amusingly in-your-face, there's a pitiless side to her character that's entirely without humor, and which only deepens as the film progresses, most obviously in a sequence where she tosses off a song after a violent death.

I wondered afterwards if West's reputation has remained so strong because later generations were simply able to see her films while many other strong women characters were suppressed by the strictures of the Production Code; now that so many other Pre-Code films are back in circulation, Mae's persona doesn't seem quite as unique when compared to, say, a Ruth Chatterton or a Barbara Stanwyck, to give but two examples. She's still a fascinating character, though not necessarily in a comic sense.

After enjoying Matt Moore's turn in Rain, it was nice to see his big brother, and bigger silent screen star, Owen show up here as Mae's incarcerated boyfriend, although his part doesn't demand much in the way of subtlety.

Scream 2

1997, US, directed by Wes Craven

Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson do their best to have their cake and eat it, rushing a sequel into production to capitalize on the success of their first installment while decrying the vapidity of most sequels. While the self-referential tone works well in the early going, particularly in the amusing re-creation of Scream's tightly-wound opening, before long a grim air of repetition sets in, occasionally enlivened by an amusing cameo or a clever set-piece, such as that involving a soundproof glass booth from which a character can only watch helplessly as the killer methodically sets to work.

The Italian Job

1969, UK, directed by Peter Collinson

I saw this years ago on television, and remembered only the extended chase scenes involving three colour-coordinated Minis, though half of the chase seems as much an excuse for automobile choreography as it is an actual escape attempt. By contrast, I had no recollection of the surprisingly lengthy preamble narrating a variety of Michael Caine escapades, nor of Noel Coward's royal-obsessed crime kingpin, who lives in the lap of luxury inside Her Majesty's prison bars. The cocky Cockney act is inevitably somewhat dated at this stage - there's finally some questioning of the romanticization of London's criminals, though these fellows are mostly of the non-violent type - but the chase sequence remains entertaining, and the cliffhanger ending, which I'd also forgotten, is impossible to imagine these days in a similar caper film.

Beauty and the Boss

1932, US, directed by Roy del Ruth

I half expect Warren William's name to appear in the credits as "Dastardly Warren William," for that was his modus operandi in the pre-Code years, and he plays to type here, dashing about from one woman to the next, hiring beauties to act as secretary while he auditions them for other roles, all the while opining about the role of women in the workplace. The film has a lot of fun with the different facets of his personality, never more so than in the scenes where he fires a woman with whom he's becoming infatuated only to turn, literally, on a dime to ask her out as soon as she's been fired - after all, she's no longer a subordinate, so where's the harm? Of course, the needs of drama demand that he meet his match, delivered here in the form of the mousy Marian Marsh, who undergoes a gradual makeover. There's not a shred of credibility to William's character as the film concludes - you never really want this rogue to reform - but the interplay between William and Marsh, each trying to put the other through their paces, is a frenetically enjoyable dance.

Judge Priest

1934, US, directed by John Ford

Judge Priest is a troubling and at times beguiling film: it weaves a captivating down-home atmosphere of 1890s Kentucky but the film's attitude to its black characters, even if rather better than most films of the period, leaves a puzzling taste, never more so in the scenes featuring Stepin Fetchit, an actor whose legacy still hasn't been adequately examined. While Fetchit profited from his career in movies, the price sometimes seemed rather high given his slow-witted, near-incomprehensible drawl and the overall portrait of sloth that reinforced so many (lazy) clichés. While Ford's film is perfectly happy to cast white characters in an unappealing light too - as country hicks, judgmental bigots, and so forth - the worst of the indignities do seem to be reserved for the black characters, not least when they are asked to break into a spirited rendition of "Dixie".

Elsewhere, though, Ford achieves a terrific sense of small-town place through the titular character, played by Will Rogers. The Judge is himself not averse to a spot of work-avoidance, and indeed that is the source of his bond with Fetchit's character, Jeff Poindexter, with whom he goes fishing. There's wonderful, wry comedy in the Judge's attempts to broker the peace both in the wider town and within his family: he's a political animal quick to spot others' weaknesses and vanities. The film's strongest sequence strips the Judge of his own vanities as he speaks in moving terms to his dead wife and child before turning in one evening; there's a moment where he touches their portrait, commenting on damage to the frame, that's heartbreakingly real, perfectly capturing the sense that this is just a brief extract from a much longer, if one-sided, conversation.

The Blue Lamp

1950, UK, directed by Basil Dearden

Although it's probably best remembered today as the (unlikely) progenitor of the long-running BBC serial Dixon of Dock Green, which featured the kindly bobby played by Jack Warner all the way to 1976 even though the plot here has him considering retirement, The Blue Lamp was a huge hit in 1950. It didn't do too well with the critics, though, who thought it compared rather unfavourably to American crime pictures, although I can't help thinking that this fails to pay much mind to the differences between the US circa 1950 and Britain in the same year, as well as implying that most American crime films of the period were gritty and hard-boiled (The Window, for instance, intersperses scenes of kindly, oblivious cops that make those of The Blue Lamp seem like relentless bloodhounds).

There's also some terrific location work that gives a vivid sense of several London corners, most obviously the scenes set at the dog track, long since dismantled by the wrecking ball, and it's nice to see someone other than John McCririck demonstrate traditional bookie hand signs. The sequences leading up to the climax recall Ozu's or Mizoguchi's use of desolate urban spaces, undermining the sense of the city as a vibrant, finished place.

Viva Riva!

2010, Democratic Republic of Congo/France/Belgium, directed by Djo Tunda Wa Munga

As much as I understand the motivations of the generation of African directors who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, who consciously worked against Hollywood cinema in particular, it's hard to avoid the impression that there's something approaching a taboo around the idea of fun in the average film from the continent. That is, in some ways, testament to the continued influence of Ousmane Sembène, who took the view that cinema was an important educational tool, though that's not necessarily an unproblematic idea since most colonial administrations took exactly the same view, even if the intended lessons were somewhat different. While there have been notable earlier exceptions, Ça Twiste à Poponguine or Quartier Mozart to name two, the explosion of Nollywood cinema, often wildly, wilfully entertaining even when engaged in social commentary, often makes the festival-circuit filmmakers seem a little staid.

Viva Riva!, then, is the first film I've seen in quite some time to comprehensively overturn preconceptions about African cinema: as one writer commented, it's as though Tony Scott took his camera to Kinshasa and cooked up one of his over-heated extravaganzas on the banks of the Congo. That's true of both the film's strengths - frenetic pacing, a justifiable cynicism about everyone's motivations, wildly colorful characters - and its weaknesses, most obviously its sexual politics, which are a muddle of progressive attitudes and retrograde images, although the sexual frankness is refreshing for African cinema, sometimes notably coy about matters of the flesh. The opening section is perhaps the strongest of all, a brilliant montage that sets up a background of financial penury and criminal energy with no fuss and no dialogue, while also giving us an unfiltered glimpse of African street life without a hint of ethnography. Even if the rest of the film can't quite rise to that level, it's a wild ride capable of pointed commentary: the ending is a rather bleak commentary on the realities of Kinshasa life.

Kongo

1932, US, directed by William J. Cowen

It might be easier to catalogue the ways in which Kongo doesn't offend against the (then still pretty toothless) Production Code. The film features prostitution, drug addiction, alcoholism, incest, torture, sadistic violence, widow-burning, mockery of religion, lascivious leering, and an all-around atmosphere of bone-weary seediness. The film is based on Chester Devonde's play, previously filmed by Tod Browning in 1928, and while I haven't seen the earlier version it's hard to believe that Browning, even with his penchant for the unusual, came up with anything quite so lurid: the atmosphere of moral and physical decay in deepest Africa is utterly unrelenting, making even a Kurtz figure seem relatively benign by comparison.

The film has plenty of rough edges, with several abrupt transitions in tone and characters who appear to be able to conquer their terrible demons of addiction in the cut from one scene to the next, but the overall atmosphere of ruin eats away at the viewer, while Walter Huston incarnates one of the most thoroughgoing screen villains I've encountered. He's a truly misbegotten character for whom even the film's brutal form of redemption seems insufficient in comparison with the outrages he has perpetrated up to the climax.

Even by the standards of 1930s Hollywood, the depiction of African characters is appalling, whether it's the casual use of names like "Fuzzy" or the venal motivations ascribed to virtually all of the African characters (who, of course, barely get any meaningful screen time). While some of the demeaning treatment of Africans is a reflection of the behaviour of Huston's character -- casually shooting a man in the back, for instance -- on other occasions the fault lies with the script (or perhaps the original play), such as the extended sequences which depict widow-burning, which appears to have been borrowed from India since it's at most a very isolated phenomenon in Africa.

11 Harrowhouse

1974, UK, directed by Aram Avakian

I'm following, yet again, in David Cairns's fine footsteps here. I was a little distracted initially by the intermittent plot similarities with the more recent Flawless - a diamond heist featuring an employee of the diamond company on the verge of retirement, American actors in prominent roles in a British setting - but 11 Harrowhouse ultimately occupies different territory, mostly because of Charles Grodin's voiceover, constantly commenting on and undercutting the onscreen action.

The effect is a little like watching a James Bond movie with a friend who provides a witty ongoing appraisal; it's not hard to imagine Grodin sitting right beside you, subverting the narrative, in which a couple of amateurs rather unexpectedly turn into note-perfect thieves. The point of films like Ocean's Eleven is that the thieves are skilled pros going about their work: those films are a celebration of the virtues of a job well done, whereas here the sheer unlikeliness of the transformation is what lends tension to the outcome, with inexperience threatening to trip the grand plan up. Although it's Grodin's smart underplaying that anchors the film, there are several fine turns from British thesps, too, most obviously James Mason, entirely convincing as a man on the verge of an unhappy retirement, though I also enjoyed John Gielgud's preeningly nasty performance.

Fric-Frac

1939, France, directed by Maurice Lehmann 

Maurice Lehmann was best known as a theatre director, and all of his four films were adaptations of stage plays, with three of the four involving Claude Autant-Lara as some form of co-director. Fric-Frac had a successful stage run in 1936, with both Michel Simon and Arletty reprising their roles from the original show, supplemented by Fernandel in all his toothy glory, perfectly cast as a naif. All three were established screen stars by 1939, and the interplay between the actors remains strikingly fresh even though the plotting sometimes feels rather forced.

The dialogue makes extensive use of le javanais, a Parisian argot that the film implies was the preserve of the criminal classes, although the characters are constantly translating their words for Fernandel's character, who's a respectable petit bourgeois with a couple of pals from the other side of the tracks. The interpretation, itself the subject of some repetitive jokes, tends to lessen the disorienting effects of the slang since nothing remains mysterious for very long.

While the performances are a delight - though I can only imagine the on-set clash of egos - the cinematic translation of the play isn't entirely successful: Lehmann and/or Autant-Lara elect to use close-ups and cuts at times when a medium shot featuring all of the characters would have better served the material, such as in a sequence when Arletty and Simon give contradictory messages to Fernandel's character before the eponymous break-in; instead of seeing the different expressions simultaneously, the directors cut from one face to the next in sequence, undermining the comedy value.

Rhodes of Africa

1936, UK, directed by Berthold Viertel

Although the film lays claim to a balanced portrayal of Rhodes (Walter Huston), mostly by making clear that he was a difficult man to like, single-minded and uninterested in opposing views, there's no real attempt to assess the man's actual impact and legacy in Africa: the film is so abbreviated that it mostly centers on a few personal relationships, jumping from one incident to the next over the years with little wider context, and implying that Rhodes laid claim to vast swathes of territory through sheer will (the film uses the term "superhuman" to describe its subject at one point).

It goes almost without saying that the film has essentially no interest in the impact of Rhodes's policies on Africans - the first African we meet is dismissed as untrustworthy, to be subjected to humiliations by his white bosses, and the only African character of any real note, Lobengula, the king of the Ndebele, is portrayed as a pathetic dupe, though the film doesn't linger over his fate or that of his people. There's marginally more interest in the Afrikaners, as represented by Paul Kruger (an arresting performance by Oscar Homolka), though the film implies he can be bought. Near the very end, Rhodes concedes that one African chief had the soul of a poet, given the man's choice of burial place; Rhodes's own similar final resting place comes across, then, as an act of intellectual theft...

As was the case for Sanders of the River, released the previous year, the film is split between studio sequences shot in Britain and location footage that is occasionally, and unconvincingly, patched together with the main players. The sections shot in Africa (based on the credits, they appear to have been filmed in Botswana and South Africa) are of some historical interest: these areas didn't appear onscreen much, and the mining and claim scrabble sequences give a fairly vivid sense of the realities of the mineral rushes of the period.

Scream

1996, US, directed by Wes Craven

Fifteen years later, after sequels, imitations and parodies, as well as the rise of an entirely new horror genre, it's hard to recall just what it was like to encounter Scream for the first time: like Halloween, it's as if the film is simultaneously unpicking both the teen horror film and its own deconstruction of that genre as it unspools. Although the tone is mostly light-hearted, playing with our knowledge of cinema convention by luring our attention to the corner of the screen or setting up what seem to be obvious boo moments before going in other directions, the filmmakers are still focused on delivering scares, though not necessarily with what's onscreen. After all, they even undercut the visual power of the bloody imagery by mentioning that movie gore is just red corn syrup, and so keep us off balance instead with constant changes in sound volume: I was particularly conscious of this with a young child sleeping elsewhere in the house as the volume suddenly jumped to deliver a thrill; the effect must have been much greater in a packed cinema in 1996.

Scarface

1932, US, directed by Howard Hawks

I won't try to add much to the wealth already written about Howard Hawks's film, a truly pared-down piece which charts the rise and fall of Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) as he marches relentlessly toward his inevitable end, the film discarding characters left and right without regard to potential audience sympathies. It's that single-mindedness that lingered most in my mind: even the apparent asides, such as the scenes in Camonte's parental home or the bits of comedy with his dim-witted assistant - not that Camonte himself is over-endowed with more than brutish intelligence - are ultimately germane to the outcome, with the comedy reversed to grim effect.

Although I've never cared for Brian De Palma's overblown 1983 version of the same tale, not least because Al Pacino's performance so unbalances even that most shrill of films, I better understood where it was coming from: Pacino's character, if not necessarily his performance, seems much closer in spirit to his 1930s predecessor than I originally realized, both men thuggishly single-minded and entirely oblivious to the likely consequences of their destructive behaviour. Paul Muni's brooding performance embodies a kind of Mr. Hyde character, all id with no sense of consequences; indeed, the characterization might have emerged from a 1930s horror movie as much as from the crime headlines. Ann Dvorak's performance, by contrast, seems to come from a later generation: there's a heart-rending authenticity to her fear and anger, far removed from the stylized screams of a Fay Wray.

(I was particularly amused by the scene where one of Camonte's underlings reveals the ending of the play, and 1928 film, Sadie Hawkins, particularly since Lewis Milestone's reworking of the story, entitled Rain, was in production right around the time that Scarface was released in early 1932.)

Rain

1932, US, directed by Lewis Milestone

Drawn from a stage play, and previously filmed in 1928 under the original title of Sadie Hawkins, Lewis Milestone's version retains a sense of the material's origins notwithstanding his occasional attempts to "open up" the material with brief forays to the outside world: the overwhelming majority of the film takes place in a creaky store/bar/boarding house that functions as a refuge from the driving monsoon of Pago Pago.

Indeed, apart from a few sections of "documentary" background which don't feature the main players, almost all of the action transpires on the ground floor or its various verandahs; Milestone makes use of crane shots and a surprisingly mobile camera to give the action a more cinematic profile. An early shot that circles around the cast, and the room, is repeated to comic effect a short time later, although those attention-getting flourishes are gradually de-emphasized as the darker heart of the story emerges in a confrontation between Sadie (Joan Crawford), a prostitute in search of a new life, and an inflexible man of God, the Reverend Davidson (Walter Huston), who sees Sadie as either a conversion project or an evil that must be cast out.

The pre-Code elements of the film aren't hard to find. Davidson is explicitly likened to a witch doctor by a perceptive local woman, and as the film progresses his maniacal tendencies become ever deeper, with Milestone shooting Huston such that his eyes are barely visible, a frightening character who might have wandered in from a Universal horror film of the period rather than from the pulpit. Although the character lacks much in the way of nuance, it's not hard to imagine how effective a stage actor Walter Huston must have been: a key scene where he declaims, over and over, the Lord's Prayer, is mesmerizing in its effect (within the film and for the viewer). Joan Crawford is allowed a degree more subtlety, her character struggling with a variety of choices for her future, although she's much more compelling when Sadie's in zesty flow with a string of men following in her wake (not unlike her turn in the same year's Letty Lynton). Sadie's comprehensive turnaround under the brow-beating of the preacher never seems entirely credible given her earlier brash self-confidence.

I was most taken with actor Matt Moore, given his unmistakable Irish accent; his character, a doctor who's a kind of counterweight to Huston's preacher, is a thoroughly decent, open-minded man. Despite his origins, I'd never heard of Moore, but he and his siblings Owen (Mary Pickford's first husband), Tom, Joe, and Mary formed quite the silent-era acting dynasty, with hundreds of screen credits between them - Meath's biggest Hollywood exports until Pierce Brosnan. Although Matt had a very healthy career in the silent era, with numerous lead roles, by the early 1930s his parts were getting smaller, and he's uncredited for most of his final two decades onscreen. He turns in a fine character performance here, sympathetic and humane in his dealings with Sadie, and authentic enough that I briefly wondered if he was an actual doctor.