Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

In ‘Jaws’, his third film, Steven Spielberg provided a masterclass in suspense, but in ‘Duel’, his debut feature, he had already given ample proof of his proficiency in this genre. Taking a short story by Richard Matheson, Spielberg wrings every last ounce of jeopardy from a conflict between a car driver and a truck driven by a virtually invisible driver. It’s a primal battle with an almost mythic air about it, a stripped down battle with no fat on its bones.  The unfortunate driver is David Mann, a salesman played by Dennis Weaver. In an early scene he phones his wife to try to clear the air after an argument they have had, because he didn’t do enough, as she sees it, to ‘defend her honour’ at a party. This short conversation, showing us that he is henpecked, together with his surname, suggests that a subtext is going to be his need to prove his manhood. This interpretation is supported by the fact that throughout he is ineffectual in his dealings with people, and that he is treat...

This 1950 Western starring James Stewart and directed by Delmer Daves is a landmark film in terms of its sympathetic portrayal of Native Americans.  Admittedly the main Native American characters are played by white actors but hey, Rome wasn’t built in a day.  It’s loosely based on real events, mainly the negotiations that ended the Apache Wars. It is narrated by Stewart who plays Tom Jefford, who played a key role in those negotiations through his friendship with the Apache leader Cochise. A film about peace negotiations may not sound riveting but it did enough to hold my interest. It helps of course to have Stewart at the centre as someone weary of killing, and who is prepared to put up with accusations of being a traitor to white Americans, or an ‘Apache-lover’. There are some action sequences because whilst the negotiations are in progress there’s still a war going on; and even once the peace treaty is signed there are people on both sides who still want to fight.  To...

The only Rambo film I had seen prior to this was the fourth (confusingly entitled 'Rambo') which is nothing to write home about, but I felt I should give this first film in the franchise a go since it was a huge commercial hit and the critics didn't hate it. Assuming this film is accurate it was a shock to me how badly Vietnam veterans were treated at this time (early 1980s).   John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) trudges weary and hungry into a Pacific Northwest town (ironically named Hope) somewhat downhearted because he’s just learned that an ex-comrade he was hoping to reconnect with has died of cancer. You might think the locals would be friendly, but no, no t a bit of it - straightaway the  sheriff makes it clear that ‘his sort’ is not welcome by driving him to the town limits and telling him that there’s a diner 30 miles up the highway. When Rambo then starts back into town he’s arrested on a made-up charge, and then abused at the local station. This triggers his PTSD, ...

This 1939 film is the first collaboration between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, so  I was quite prepared for it to be a bit odd, but I didn't expect the first half of it to be quite as disorientating as it was. The year is 1917, and the two main characters are a German U-boat commander, Hardt (played by Conrad Veidt) and Fräulein Tiel (Valerie Hobson), his contact in an espionage plot to destroy a significant proportion of the British Fleet at Scapa Flow. She is pretending to be a schoolteacher,  Miss Burnett, on the Orkney Islands, and her home forms a base for a few days for her and Hardt, plus a disillusioned Royal Navy officer, Ashington, who is prepared to betray his country. As I was watching this I was thinking, wow, am I really supposed to be rooting for them to succeed?  Surely not, especially since there is a sinister bit of business early on where German agents drug the real Miss Burnett and then throw her off a cliff. Admittedly Hardt seems a de...

I   was wanting to watch an undemanding action film to take my mind off a toothache I was suffering from, and this unnecessary addition to the Bourne franchise was made to order. It has the familiar formula: Jason (Matt Damon) is simply trying to find out more about his past, but the CIA director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones, at his most gnarly) is so worried that Jason will release incriminating info about the CIA's latest blackop projects that he will stop at nothing to have him killed. The film has two new major characters.  There is Alicia Vikander as Heather Lee, the CIA head of Cyber Ops, an ambiguous figure who ends up helping Jason for her own reasons.  And there is 'the Asset', a CIA assassin who blames Jason for being captured and tortured in Syria (played by Vincent Cassel). There's also a subplot which ends up not adding a great deal, wasting Riz Ahmed as a Mark Zuckerberg-type character. The main plot is kicked off by Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) hacking i...

This 1948 film is a perfect example of the type of romantic melodrama that was made by Hollywood at its peak: take a fine piece of literature (a novella by Stefan Zweig), make a few alterations here and there to make it more palatable for its target audience and for the censor,  and then hand it over to the likes of  Max Ophüls, a director known for his lyrical visual style and for his affinity to romantic themes. It cannot fail to succeed, and broadly speaking it doesn't, provided one is in the right mood.   It's set in turn-of-the-century Vienna, where Stefan (Louis Jourdan) is about to flee in order to avoid certain death in a duel.  But then he gets side tracked into reading a letter from Lisa (Joan Fontaine), which is a cue for her to narrate the rest of the film in a series of flashbacks. She starts off as a teenager who develops a crush on handsome Stefan, a talented pianist who lives in the next-door apartment.  He of course barely notices her. She ...

This was one of those 'must-see' classics I have forever been putting off, mainly because I thought it might make for grim viewing.   And yes, the subject-matter, Algeria's fight for independence from France, is no laughing matter, but there's always something rather exhilarating about watching a film that's as good as this one.   The Battle of Algiers turns out not to have been some massive street combat as I had imagined, but a series of terrorist attacks and reprisals over a period of twelve months in 1956-57.   The film mainly concentrates on this period although it also contains some footage relating to before and after.  Footage is an apt word because the director, Gillo Pontecorvo, pulls out all the stops to make us think we are watching archival material. Black-and-white photography, non-professional actors, documentary-style captions, a newsreel style - they’re all here. The two main protagonists are Ali la Pointe (a real person) who was one o...

In 1949, 'A Letter to Three Wives' was released which earned Joseph L Mankiewicz two Oscars, one for Best Director and one for Best Adapted Screenplay. Then the very next year this masterpiece was released, and yes, once again Mr Mankiewicz won the same two Oscars. Quite an achievement. It's a long time since I first saw this picture, but the basic storyline had stuck with me: ambitious young actress Eve Harrington (played by Anne Baxter) supplants aging actress Margo Channing (Bette Davis).   But I had forgotten that this film starts by giving away the ending, with an awards ceremony where Eve is the star turn.   We then get a series of flashbacks, narrated by different characters, which show us how we got to this point. By doing this the film removes some element of mystery (where is the film heading?) and replaces it with suspense (how will Eve's startling rise to stardom affect Margo and her friends?).  I'm sure Hitchcock would have approved - see 'Vertigo...

The Wikipedia summary makes clear that this is a polarising film - either you think it's a clever homage to Agatha Christie's 'And Then There Were None', or it's a ludicrous rip-off.   There was only one way for me to to find out where I sat on this spectrum. Over the opening credits we learn that Malcolm is a convicted mass murderer who is about to be executed, and we meet Dr Mallick (Alfred Molina), his psychiatrist. We also learn that because of some last-minute new evidence, an emergency hearing has been arranged in the middle of the night, for the judge in the case to decide whether to stay Malcolm's execution. After this preliminary scene-setting we then switch to an isolated motel where ten characters take shelter from a torrential downpour which has rendered many local roads impassable.   Then one by one they start to get murdered.   Here I had a minor niggle: together with the dodgy motel manager we have eleven potential victims rather than the te...

This is the third film in Richard Linklater's extraordinary 'Before trilogy', following 'Before Sunrise' and 'Before Sunset'. Each film is made nine years after the one before, and collectively they track a relationship between American Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and French Céline  (Julie Delpy). The most remarkable thing about these films is that they don't have much in the way of a plot but instead include prolonged dialogue scenes between Jesse and Céline  which seem very natural. At the end of 'Before Sunset' Jesse and Céline  had rekindled their relationship.   Nine years on  they are still together, living in Paris, and are parents to beautiful twin girls.  Jesse is now a successful writer and Celine has her own career, something to do with environmental projects.   Does this mean that everything in their world is rosy? Well not exactly.   Jesse is worried that he doesn't see enough of Hank, his teenage son from a fail...

This is yet another film I had been avoiding for no good reason, I just thought it was going to be a silly bit of sub-Freudian psycho-nonsense. But I was reassured from the outset - the makers of this film are not content with simply a caption telling us that this is a real story, they have distinguished broadcaster and journalist Alistair Cooke on screen to tell us directly that this is the case, and have him provide voiceover narration throughout complete with the dates of each important event. The unfortunate person at the centre of the drama is a timid housewife and mother Eve White (played by Joanne Woodward) who, suffering from headaches and blackouts, becomes a patient of a psychiatrist with the sinister name of Dr Luther (played by Lee J Cobb). He uncovers a second personality hiding within Eve White, who is her opposite - extrovert, outspoken, flirtatious, etc, who is dubbed Eve Black (see what they did there?). Whilst Dr Luther is trying to find a way of "curing" Ev...

This is Michael Mann's feature debut, about a professional thief Frank, played by James Caan. Frank has some similarities to Neil, the Robert De Niro character in 'Heat'.  Both are meticulous in their planning and execution of their jobs, and both are careful to work only with people they can trust to be competent and trustworthy. But whereas Neil takes care to avoid emotional attachments, so that he can leave at any time, Frank is dating Jessie (Tuesday Weld) with a view to going straight and starting a family. The main question at stake is whether Frank can succeed in leaving his life of crime, and being an experienced filmgoer I knew what the answer would be.   Whereas Neil's nemesis is Al Pacino's police detective, here the forces of law enforcement are not a problem, to the point where their presence in the film is a comedic one.  No, Frank's problem is that he gets entangled with Leo, a Chicago crime boss.  Frank agrees to do one big score for Leo, after w...

I normally avoid finding out anything about a film I am going to watch.  So when I had finished this 1958 crime picture directed by Don Siegal I had a few unanswered questions.   Why were the San Francisco police detectives so dull?   Why was the SFPD shown in such a positive light that the film seemed like a promotional video?   Why the title when the only line-up was shoehorned in and was completely irrelevant to the plot? The answer to all these questions came courtesy (yet again) of Wikipedia. This film was a spinoff of a successful TV series, called 'The Lineup', so naturally the actors from the series get to play the same parts in the film (although that didn't happen in the case of 'Miami Vice'), and naturally there has to be a line-up. So anyway the first half-hour or so is fairly 'oh hum' as we follow the dull detectives getting to grips with a plot whereby tourists from the Far East are unwittingly smuggling drugs into the US. Things only pic...

If you're into cattle then this 1948 Western is just the ticket, since it's about a fictionalised cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail.  Highlights include a spectacular stampede at night, and the crossing of the Red River itself. But there's a lot more to this film than just cows. We start off with a series of short scenes that together form a prologue of sorts that introduces us to the three main characters: Tom Dunson (John Wayne), his friend Groot (Walter Brennan, doing what Walter Brennan does best), and Matt, a young lad they pick up along the way. (Incidentally, between 1936 and 1940 Walter Brennan managed the extraordinary and unique feat of winning no less than three Oscars for Best Supporting Actor.) Anyway, these early scenes establish that Dunson is a single-minded individual intent on establishing a large cattle ranch.  He's so focussed on this that he somehow manages to resist the impassioned plea of Fen, the love of his life, to be allowed to come along...

I have a strong childhood memory of reading a picture-book version of this Alexandre Dumas story, maybe in the 'Look and Learn' magazine. Given that this latest film adaptation runs to nearly 3 hours yet is described as a streamlined version, what I read as a boy must have been very abridged.  That it has stayed with me all these years is a testament to the power of what is the ultimate revenge narrative. An i nnocent man is framed for a crime he didn't commit, is left to rot for the rest of his life in an island prison, manages to escape and acquire a massive fortune, enters high society under a new identity, and then is able to avenge himself on the three men who were responsible for his incarceration.  It's a terrific tale, and this sumptuous adaptation does it full justice, provided you overlook that the writers have made wholesale changes to the original. Rest assured, I'm not going to even begin to try to enumerate all the changes, most of which I am sure are...