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GLORY

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In 1863 an all-black regiment in the Union army suffered heavy losses in a futile attack on a Confederate fort, and their courage inspired many other black Americans to enlist, helping the Union side to eventually triumph in the Civil War. This film tells the story of the regiment and their young white colonel, Robert Gould Shaw.   This is done in a conventional manner and therefore the result might have been a rather dull piece of hagiography, but f ortunately this is not the case, thanks to the unobtrusive direction by Edward Zwick and to some fine performances. When we first meet Shaw he is a fresh faced 23-year old who is a captain in the Union army due to his parents being wealthy and well connected Bostonians. Shaw’s first experience of warfare is an ignominious one in which his men are routed and he falls to the ground, pretending to be dead. But back home he is made colonel of the first ever black regiment.  It’s a promotion but a daunting one given that his men l...
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MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (2017)

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I was in the mood for something undemanding and comforting, so I decided to watch Kenneth Branagh's take on the Agatha Christie classic. Although I have to confess that this is not one of my favourite Christies.  It's one of those stories of hers where once you know the outcome there's not a lot of pleasure in going over it again because neither the plot mechanics nor the characters are that interesting. And unlike say the Ustinov adaptations ('Death on the Nile' and 'Evil Under The Sun') this story doesn't lend itself to a light or camp approach. We start off with a dire but mercifully short episode in Jerusalem which introduces us to Hercule Poirot.  Well, a version of the famous Belgian detective at least.  Not one that is very close to Christie's creation - that would of course be David Suchet's portrayal on TV.  Nor a version that has Peter Ustinov's charm. Instead this Poirot is very active (he can run for example when the need arises),...
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5 CARD STUD

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Having just watched a disappointing Western directed by Henry Hathaway (‘Nevada Smith’) I didn’t have high hopes for this one released two years later in 1968. However I was pleasantly surprised. Intriguingly the basic story is a Western version of ‘And Then There Were None’ except here it is five characters who are getting knocked off, rather than the ten in Agatha Christie's original.  The five in question are guilty of murdering a newcomer to the town who is exposed at cheating at cards during a poker game.   A seventh player at the game (Van, played by Dean Martin) had stepped away at the crucial moment and was unable to prevent what happened. He doesn’t approve of the lynching but nor does he feel like helping the marshal arrest the guilty parties.  Maybe that’s because their ringleader Nick (a superb performance by Roddy McDowell) is the brother of Nora who is sweet on Van.   Presumably Nora is aware that Nick is an obnoxious jerk (he makes no effort to hi...
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NEVADA SMITH

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Nevada Smith was a character in the hit 1964 film ‘The Carpetbaggers’, a former Wild West outlaw who becomes a film star.  Given that the film hints at Smith's early life being an eventful one, including a prison escape, s omeone had the bright idea of making this film two years later which tells the story of that life. Who better to play Smith than rising superstar Steve McQueen who had already enjoyed success in both a Western (‘The Magnificent Seven’) and a prison escape film (‘The Great Escape’)? Given that the whole thing is directed by veteran Henry Hathaway (who knows where to point the camera) and written by John Michael Hayes who had written the screenplay for 'The Carpetbaggers’ (not to mention 'Rear Window’ ten years earlier) what could possibly go wrong? Well quite a lot as far as the critics were concerned, and I too found this a hard slog.   For starters McQueen is badly miscast.  It’s not simply that he is about ten years too old, it’s more that the ro...
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THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG

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This 1964 French film musical, written and directed by Jacques Demy, is entirely sung, by a cast whose voices are all dubbed.  Add to this that the score, by Michel Legrand, contains only one memorable song and one would think this would be a film to avoid. But no, it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and I for one was totally taken by it, Francophile that I am. It helps that is stars a young Catherine Deneuve, and that it is gorgeous to look at despite being shot entirely on location in the port city of Cherbourg.  Demy achieved the picture's vibrant look by careful repainting of facades, the changing of wallpapers, etc. The story itself isn't very complicated, featuring as it does barely half a dozen characters, but on the other hand it does go in unexpected directions.  We start off with a couple of young lovers, Geneviève and Guy, who are separated when Guy is drafted to go fight in the Algerian war, but not before a night of passion, which has the...
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ROBOCOP

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Depending on your point of view this 1984 science fiction film is either a brilliant satire or an excessively violent piece of trash.   As a centrist dad I necessarily fall somewhere in between these two extremes.   It is set in some near future where a megacompany (Omni Consumer Products or OMP) is being paid to help the Detroit police force, which certainly needs it judging by the amount of crime going on.  When a cop (Murphy, played by Peter Weller) is shot to pieces and killed by a gang of sadistic criminals what remains of his body is used by OMP to create a cyborg policeman. It's debatable who are the most obnoxious characters in this entertainment, the aforementioned criminals or the top executives at OMP who have lost any semblance of humanity in their desire for money and power. Not altogether surprisingly it emerges that the head criminal and the CEO of OMP are in cahoots, and the story ends up as a kind of revenge tale with Robocop going after both of these vil...
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THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT

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This 1951 comedy starring Alec Guinness has a weird science fiction premise to it, the possibility of creating a  synthetic cloth that never wears out.   Sidney Stratton (Guinness) is obsessed with the idea, and given that he might be a brilliant scientist (rather than a simple crackpot) maybe he is right. No one though is prepared to back his ideas so he gets himself employed at textile mills in order to carry out experiments surreptitiously, before then getting fired when he is discovered. This is the pattern until he meets Daphne Birnley (played by the delightful Joan Greenwood) who thinks he might be on to something and persuades her father, who owns a mill, to give him all the resources he needs. Cue a series of comic explosions, but then (eureka) Sidney succeeds!  It will revolutionise the clothing industry and Mr Birnley is all set to tell the press of this amazing breakthrough.  Not only is the cloth indestructible but it repels dirt as well.   Sidn...
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