Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

I saw the original National Theatre production of 'Glengarry Glen Ross' and it blew my socks off. So I'm always happy to watch a film written by David Mamet, even those he also directed such as 'House of Games' or 'The Spanish Prisoner'.  Usually they have an intriguing plot, unusual characters, and great dialogue. This film though has none of these things, and is a real let-down. The main character is a homicide detective Bobby, played by the reliable if dull Joe Montegna, who is the detective on two unrelated cases.  Of these the more interesting is the murder of a Jewish grandmother. Bobby himself is Jewish, and the main themes of the film seem to be Jewishness and antisemitism but it doesn't have much of interest to say about these subjects, that I could see anyway. The murder investigation is mildly interesting although at the end of the film we learn that Bobby (and therefore we) have been pursuing a red herring, and the case is solved off camera. ...

This is a film noir, albeit without a femme fatale, about corruption: the corruption of power as represented by celebrity columnist J.J.Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), and the corruption of ambition as represented by struggling press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis). Their seedy and symbiotic relationship is at the heart of the film.   Falco needs items in Hunsecker’s column about his clients, and Hunsecker needs Falco to dig up juicy items of gossip and to do his dirty work. The power dynamic between them is very much in one direction, with Falco prepared to debase himself every which way, and Hunsecker all too happy to show his contempt for Falco. The film has impressive production values: stunning black-and-white location photography of New York by James Wong Howe, a jazzy score by Elmer Bernstein, and a screenplay by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets.  The only surprise perhaps is that this very American film is directed by British Alexander Mackendrick, whose experience ...

The second half of this 40-minute masterpiece by Buster Keaton is an extended dream sequence.  It starts with our eponymous hero, who is a film projectionist as well as an amateur detective, entering the film that is showing at the cinema where he works. Whilst Woody Allen could happily do something similar in the 1980s in ‘The Purple Rose of Cairo’ one imagines that the relatively unsophisticated cinema audiences of the 1920s must have struggled to get their minds around what they were watching, let alone find it funny. So maybe it is not surprising that this film was a commercial flop. The film also lacks any of the really spectacular stunts that we might expect from Keaton, but to compensate there is a terrific amount of comic inventiveness on show, especially in the aforementioned dream sequence. The film also ends on as fine a visual joke as one could hope to see. All in all I find this film to be a joy from start to finish. RATING :  ✓✓✓ Absolutely Fabulous

I'd been putting off seeing this film for getting on for fifty years, for no very good reason other than that I thought it might be a bit depressing, watching a young Al Pacino play the real-life cop, Frank Serpico, battling in vain against corruption in the 1970s NYPD. But hey, it's Sidney Lumet directing Pacino, a couple of years before they got together again for the brilliant 'Dog Day Afternoon'. The big surprise for me is that the first half of the film is quite light and entertaining - Frank has a playful side to his character, and has oodles of charm even if it is lost on most of his colleagues and superiors. The trouble for Serpico is that those colleagues who are on the take (seemingly most of them) can't leave him be, when all he wants to be is a good, honest cop.  As a result Frank becomes increasingly concerned for his safety (rightly so, as it turns out) and resorts to whistle-blowing, first within the department, and then outside. This takes a big toll...

Of all the great Preston Sturges film comedies this is my favourite by some distance, it's simply perfect - and any list of great romantic comedies without this at or near the top is not worth your time. Henry Fonda is perfectly cast as the unworldly and bookish Charles Pike, son of a wealthy beer baron, ably supported by a stellar supporting cast: Charles Coburn as the conman "Colonel" Harrington, Melville Cooper as his aide Gerald, William Demarest as Charles' minder Muggsy, Eugene Pallette as Charles' father, and best of all Eric Blore as a conman pretending to b e an English aristocrat, Sir Alfred McGlennan Keith. But the person who lifts this film to classic status is the great Barbara Stanwyck as Jean Harrington, daughter of the Colonel.  She is totally convincing as the con artist who can twist Charles around her little finger whilst also falling for him, as he does for her.  The scene when he rejects her after discovering the truth about her is heart-rendi...

The funniest part of this body share comedy is Steve Martin's somewhat improvised dancing with Lily Tomlin over the closing credits, which just emphasises that the film itself isn't anywhere near funny enough. Sure there's no denying the skill with which Steve Martin portrays a man half of whose body is being controlled by Lily Tomlin, and this physical comedy does deliver some laughs, but this quickly palls. Whilst the plot in a comedy is not super important it is a problem that the plotting here is so slack. Steve Martin's character Roger starts the film engaged to a woman who clearly isn't right for him. This is a familiar staple of romcoms and although we know the couple will end up going their separate ways usually this parting occurs in an amusing or entertaining way.  Not so here, where the fiancée provides no comedic value and simply drops out of the film midway. There is a subplot involving the divorce case of Roger's boss, but again this fizzles out. W...

The only film I would give a 100% rating to is an unimpeachable masterpiece such as ‘Vertigo’. This film gets a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which points to a fundamental flaw with their algorithm.  A film like this getting 100% merely means that it does what it says on the tin sufficiently well to garner universal favourable reviews. And yes it does do what it says on the tin i.e. it is an entertaining and competently made crime film. The criminal gang here hold hostage a subway carriage in order to extract a ransom from the New York mayor.   As a plan it is far better than Dennis Hopper‘ s mad scheme in ‘Speed’ where he has no control over when and if his hostages die. However it does suffer from the problem of how they are going to escape to the surface without being caught.  Their solution is fairly obvious and depends on the NYPD not thinking to post men at all the relevant subway exits. Then again most of the people we encounter in this film, from the mayor down,...

This film might not seem to have much going for it - it's basically a black-and-white 'B' movie, with a silly plot, no stars and a then unknown director, Don Siegal.  But Siegal directs the proverbial out of this unpromising material, to create a classic, one of my all-time favourite sci-fi films. There's something about 1940s and 1950s small-town America I find very appealing, and especially the idea of evil lurking beneath the innocent surface, as in 'Shadow of a Doubt' or 'Blue Velvet' for example. Here the evil takes the form of pods which have arrived from outer space, which can develop into an exact copy of a human, albeit without any emotion or soul, replacing the original.  Sure it's a bit daft, but it's also a scary and powerful idea, of people being taken over, which can serve as a metaphor for whatever worry is predominant in society at the time.  In 1950s America it was a fear of Communism, so you can see this film as a warning about ...

This is one of those films where the director Steven Soderbergh makes it all look so easy.  Just take an aging British film star from the 1960s (Terence Stamp), drop him into LA trying to find out the truth behind his daughter's death, and let him rub up against a variety of unsavoury or odd characters, chiefly Peter Fonda as a vacuous and sleazy film producer.   There isn't even much of a plot to keep track of,  or denouement, so we can just relax and enjoy Stamp single-mindedly stomping through the landscape. But of course it takes a master director like Soderbergh to make this kind of thing sparkle. The sound editing is very tricksy, juxtaposing dialogue and sound from other scenes into the current scene.  Maybe this is intended to convey Stamp's disorientation, or maybe Soderbergh just likes to give himself technical challenges.  Or maybe Soderbergh was concerned about the basic simplicity of the story and felt the need to tart it up (to use a technical...