Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

Very confusingly there is no character called Colonel Blimp in this 1943 classic by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The central character in the film is in fact Major-General Clive Candy.  When we first meet him in 1942, when he is well into his sixties, he does indeed seem to be a Colonel Blimp type,  Blimp being a cartoon character created in 1934 who is pompous, irascible and jingoistic, and associated with reactionary views.   But we then embark on a series of flashbacks starting forty years earlier, taking us through Candy's life, which help us to see him in a much more sympathetic light. In 1902 he is on leave from the Second Boer War (where he earned a Victoria Cross) but soon he is on his way to Berlin to help a stranger, Edith Hunter, counter the spread of anti-British propaganda.  Candy is rather hot-headed and inclined to speak his mind, so he soon finds himself fighting a duel with a Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (chosen by drawing lots from the ...

Middleclass white Americans in the 1950s never had it so good, but that doesn't mean they were happy, as William Holden's character, Hal, discovers when he turns up in a small Kansas town.  He's planning to look up an old college friend, Alan (Cliff Robertson),  whose father is probably the richest guy in town and who may offer Hal a job . One of the first people Hal happens to meet is 19-year old Madge (Kim Novak) who's the prettiest gal in town, and who just happens to be dating Alan (it's a small world).  But is she happy?  Not at all.  Turns out she doesn't love Alan and doesn't feel that she will fit into the country club set.   She is also prone to complaining that people only like her because she's pretty.  Fair enough, except she doesn't seem to have much else to offer by way of personality or talents.  Unlike her younger sister Millie, say, who has just won a scholarship.  Needless to say Millie isn't happy either, because she e...

Anthony Asquith made something of a speciality of directing adaptations of plays, this being a prime example.  He was clearly confident enough in the material that he makes no effort to make this film cinematic in any way, not even adding any music. It all takes place at an army barracks where the court martial of Major Carrington VC is happening; indeed we spend a high proportion of the running time in a single bare room where the trial is conducted. But it's not at all boring, given that the play is in its quiet way a very effective drama, and that the cast is more than capable of putting it over.   Carrington (David Niven) is accused of stealing money fraudulently, and his defence is that he did it out of necessity and that he had informed his commanding officer, Colonel Henniker, of what he was doing.  Henniker, who envies Carrington's war record and his popularity with the men under him, denies this. One person who can help corroborate Carrington's story is his ...

This animation was a big hit with critics, for whom it is a heart wrenching story about friendship.  So I am rather embarrassed to say that I wasn't that taken by it, to the point of almost nodding off during the middle section. It's set in a 1980s New York inhabited by animals rather than humans. The main character is a dog (let's call him Dog) who is lonely, so he buys a robot companion (Robot). They hit if off straightaway but their first visit to the beach ends badly when Robot loses power and is stranded there, where he has to stay until the beach is reopened next summer. So we then get a series of episodes mainly comprising of Robot dreaming of being reunited with Dog, or of Dog either trying and failing to repair Robot or occupying himself some other way. The ending is a major surprise in that Dog and Robot are not reunited.   Instead Robot ends up in a scrapyard and gets repaired (in a fashion) by a new owner.  Meanwhile Dog buys himself a new robot companion...

I’m always up for a film about US politics and this one didn’t disappoint. How could it, with Jeff Bridges playing the President?   He’s Democrat President Evans and he’s nominating a new Vice President after the death of the previous occupant.  He could choose Governor Hathaway who has just heroically tried to save a woman whose car crashed into a river, but instead he opts for a woman, Senator Hanson (Joan Allen). She’s clearly competent but that's irrelevant  - he just wants to be the first President to nominate a female VP. Her main obstacle to becoming VP is Republican Senator Runyon (Gary Oldman) who chairs the relevant committee and who wants to stop her nomination at all costs. He is over the moon therefore when a story surfaces on the internet (complete with graphic photos) alleging that Hanson while at college participated in some kind of drunken sex orgy as part of a sorority initiation. Hanson refuses to answer questions regarding the story, on the principle t...

I had two reasons to watch this run-of-the-mill musical from the 1950s.  It was the first musical where Bob Fosse did the choreography, and one of the lead roles is played by Carol Haney. Carol Who, I hear you ask. Well, I first became aware of her because of a one-minute (yes, literally one minute) dance routine she and Fosse performed (uncredited) in the middle of the 'From This Moment On' number towards the end of the film version of 'Kiss Me, Kate'.  It's an electric minute, trust me. Back in 2008 when I was going through a low period in my life I was perusing (as one does) 'The Rough Guide to Film Musicals' which mentioned this routine and identified the female dancer as Carol Haney (who of course I had never heard of). This enabled me to use the internet to do some research into her life, which for a short while I became rather obsessed about. The high point of her career came after 'Kiss Me Kate' when she won a Tony for her performances in the...

We're in Florida, so inevitably this is a tale of a guy who makes the mistake of getting involved with a woman who is unhappily married to a rich dude. The sap in question is homicide detective Kyle Bodine, played by Ed Harris.  Given his job it is very predictable that (a) the husband will get killed (b) Kyle will be implicated in the killing, and (c) he will be investigating the crime.   Sure enough all this comes to pass, with the important wrinkle that it is Kyle's junior partner Lamar (Benicio del Toro) who does an ace job of working out what happened.  It turns out there is a good reason for his excellent police work in this particular case, which we'll get to. The femme fatale is Rachel (Madeleine Stowe) who is married to nasty Charles Dance, who himself is having a steamy affair with one of his employees, and who has a habit of knocking Rachel around.   Kyle falls for Rachel in a big way, and considering the scene where she undresses before jumping ...

This film is based on a true story about a man who was either a Lovable Eccentric or a Crazy Egomaniac depending on your point of view. His name is Donald Crowhurst and since he is played by Colin Firth we are naturally sympathetic to him, especially given that the early scenes establish that he loves his family, comprising wife Rachel Weisz and three adorable children. The year is 1968 and Donald, a somewhat unsuccessful inventor, gets the idea into his head to enter the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race.  It's a crazy idea because Donald is at best only an amateur sailor, and because to raise the money to build a boat he has to give his house and business as security. His wife is unbelievably supportive.  Early on I think she is just humouring him (fair enough) but you'd think that she'd blow a fuse at the idea of their home and livelihood being put at risk.  Then again it was 1968 and women were expected to be subservient....

This nuclear thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow is certainly hard hitting. A nuke appears over the Pacific, source indeterminate, and before you can say 'Dr Strangelove' it is heading for the continental USA (gulp). Two interceptor missiles are launched, but the enormous amount of money spent on them appears to be poor value because one has a technical glitch and the other reaches its target but fails to blow up the incoming missile. Shockingly that's it as far as Chicago is concerned; the 10 million inhabitants have about 15 minutes left to live, just about enough time for the US Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris) to have a final conversation with his daughter, before committing suicide by jumping off a tall building.   I wasn't clear why more interceptor missiles aren't launched, except that we are told that the US has a limited supply so maybe they should be husbanded in case of further attacks.  But even so, surely Chicago is worth saving? Especially since th...

Considering how huge a movie star Johnny Depp is it’s surprising how few films of his I have seen, but that’s what comes of steering clear of both the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ franchise and the films of Tim Burton. This 2009 film by Michael Mann is a rare example of Depp playing the role of a conventional leading man, that of the 1930s gangster John Dillinger. It’s not an obvious fit for Depp’s talents so it is to his credit that I found him credible, although  I was a little doubtful that Dillinger was as sartorially elegant as he is shown here - for example, did he really wear tinted glasses to a movie theatre on the evening he was shot dead?  The answer apparently is ‘yes’.  And it was also the case that on that fateful evening the film he watched was indeed a gangster movie ‘Manhattan Melodrama’ in which we see Clark Gable utter the words “Die the way you live: all of a sudden. Living any other way doesn’t mean a thing”, words which seem rather too  on the nose...

Either the US Army was indeed involved in the North Africa campaign in 1942 or this film, starring Humphrey Bogart and released in 1943, sure was taking some liberties. He’s in charge of a tank after a crushing defeat for the Allies.  The order is to regroup which means making tracks across part of the Sahara with precious little water.   Besides two of his men Bogart has with him several Brits, as well as first an Italian prisoner and then a German prisoner. There’s a dark moment early on when Bogart decides,  given their shortage of water,  to leave the Italian in the desert to die, but he then relents. It’s easily the most dramatically compelling sequence. Fortunately one of the Brits is a Sudanese who has an intimate knowledge of the terrain including the location of the odd isolated well.   When they find one with some water Bogart gets the suicidal idea to defend the well to the death in order to hold up the advancing Germans. After a couple of d...

Well, finally I got around to seeing this beloved coming-of-age film, directed by Rob Reiner during his remarkable run of films that had started two years previously with 'This Is Spinal Tap'.  There's nothing flamboyant here, it simply delivers on its promise of a slice of childhood nostalgia, recounting the adventures of four twelve-year old boys one weekend in 1959. They have accidentally learned (as one does) the location of the dead body of a local boy who is missing, the only problem being that it is some twenty miles away, so off they hike to find it and thereby make themselves famous. Although this is an adaptation of a Stephen King story, there's no horror element, and indeed dramatically speaking not a lot happens en route to the body, other than when a couple of the boys are almost crushed beneath an oncoming train.  But no matter, this is a vibes movie in which we can bask in the warm glow of the friendship between Gordie, Chris, Teddy and Vern.    The st...

In 1949 Carol Reed directed 'The Third Man, set in post-World War 2 Vienna, one of the great British films of the twentieth century.  A few years later he directed this film which seems to be covering similar ground except that we're in early '50s Berlin. The film begins with a British woman, Suzanne (played by Claire Bloom) arriving in West Berlin to visit her brother Martin (a British army doctor) and his German wife Bettina. It soon becomes obvious to Suzanne that Bettina is anxious and distracted, although Martin being busy (and British) is oblivious. The Berlin Wall is still a thing of the future, so moving between West and East Berlin is relatively simple.  Bettina takes Suzanne sightseeing in East Berlin (well, why wouldn't you?) and there they come across 'an old friend' of Bettina's, Ivo (played by James Mason).  Suzanne is attracted to charming Ivo even though a sinister character, Halendar, is always lurking in the background. It seems that Halend...

The American public really went overboard for this story in the early 1950s.  It started off as a bestselling Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in 1952, then it was adapted first into a play in 1953, then into this film in 1954 (which was nominated for several Oscars), as well as a TV film in 1955. It's hard to judge the quality of the novel from what we have here, which is a highly condensed version which concentrates on the character of Lieutenant Commander Queeg, played by Humphrey Bogart. Getting the cooperation of the US Navy was time-consuming given that (understandably) they weren't keen on the idea of a fictional madman as captain of a US navy vessel in World War 2, so the screenplay equivocates as to whether Queeg is a mentally ill paranoid or merely someone suffering from battle fatigue.  And the film also goes out of its way to emphasise that the US Navy had never experienced a mutiny. Bogart received his third and final Oscar nomination for his performance which is fair...

Having said that I would never watch another Randolph Scott Western, after being thoroughly underwhelmed by 'Ride Lonesome', here I am again. And I am pleased to say that this outing, directed again by Budd Boetticher, was much more to my taste.  It has a straightforward and compelling narrative (based on an Elmore Leonard short story) which plays to Scott's strengths as an actor. After some deceptively quiet scenes the bad guys (Richard Boone plus a couple of young guns) make their entrance, trying to rob a stagecoach.  Unfortunately they've held up one carrying no money, but on the plus side one of the passengers is a newly wed, Mrs Mims (Maureen O'Sullivan) whose father is very wealthy. So naturally she becomes a hostage, whilst her husband is sent off to communicate the ransom demand.  Scott happened to be on the stage coach and for some reason which is never satisfactorily explained he is not immediately killed. He knows that once the ransom is paid, he and Mrs...

This is the first, and generally regarded as the best, adaptation of Somerset Maugham's famous novel. The fact that a novel of over 600 pages has been compressed into a film with a running time of less than 90 minutes suggests that a lot of the subtlety and depth of the book has been lost. For example, what sort of bondage are we talking about? Since the main focus of the film is Philip's infatuation with a waitress Mildred who doesn't love him, and which almost brings him to ruin, I came away from it with the idea that the bondage Maugham is referring to is that of unrequited love, especially since Philip has relationships with two other women (Norah and Sally) who love him far more than he does them. However having now read some reviews of the novel this would seem to be an oversimplification.  From these I get the impression that part of Philip's problem, in that he is unhappy, is that he is always searching for something unattainable that he thinks will bring him ha...

In 1975 glam-rock band Slade were very big in the UK, but instead of cashing in with a crowd-pleasing film along the lines of say 'A Hard Day's Night' they made this gritty warts-and-all attempt to depict the reality of the music business. It's about a fictional band called Flame (played by Slade naturally). After some nice comedic moments early on when they are unknowns they attract the attention of a promoter / manager (played by Tom Conti, always watchable) who's not at all interested in their music but sees their potential to generate cash.  They soon hit the bigtime and the film then takes a surprising turn when their first manager (a nasty bit of work) crawls out of the woodwork because he wants a slice of the action.  He is quite prepared to use violence to get his way, and so Conti decides he's had enough and he hands the band back.   It's a pyrrhic victory though because unbeknownst to both managers Flame has fallen apart due to festering tensions w...

This is an adaptation of a novel, "The Haunting of Hill House", in which a researcher into the paranormal, together with some assistants, spend a few days in a supposedly haunted house. In adapting the novel the screenwriter Nelson Gidding had the interesting idea of turning it into a story about the insanity of one of the main characters, Eleanor (played by Julie Harris) so that we are left wondering how much of what we are seeing is real and how much is in her head.   A lthough this idea was largely abandoned, elements of it do remain in the final film in that we see things largely from Eleanor's perspective, and there something of a question mark over her sanity.   Eleanor has been invited to the house by Dr Markway because he thinks she is more in tune with the supernatural than the average person, having supposedly had an experience with a poltergeist in her childhood. She's already in a bad way before she arrives, feeling guilt about the death of her mother two...

This 1954 offering from director Nicholas Ray has to be the strangest Western from that period. For a start, notwithstanding the title it is two female characters who totally dominate, with the male characters taking a back seat for the most part.   I was aware coming into this film that Joan Crawford has a lead role.  She plays Vienna, a woman with a dodgy past (probably prostitution, don’t ask) who has somehow managed to build a saloon bar/casino.  It's in the middle of nowhere for now but Vienna knows that a railroad depot is going to be built there any day soon. Vienna just wants to be left alone to make money but there's no hope of that whilst the other female character, Emma, is around.  The entire plot of the film is driven by Emma's attempts to destroy Vienna, such is the intensity of her hatred for her.  Emma is played by an actress new to me, Mercedes McCambridge, who gives an extraordinary performance as a seething ball of anger. I was a little ...

As a Hitchcock completist it was inevitable that one day I would get around to seeing this 1949 flop, a costumer set in 1830s Australia which is more of a romantic melodrama than the thriller which audiences would have been expecting. What we have here is not so much as a love triangle as a love rectangle. In one corner we have Sam Flusky (Joseph Cotten) who came to Australia as a convict, but is now a rich landowner who has something of a chip on his shoulder about not being accepted by local high society.  He started off life in Ireland as a humble stable lad who eloped with his employer's daughter, Henrietta, and then shot dead one of her brothers. In another we have his wife, Lady Henrietta Flusky (Ingrid Bergman) who has stuck with him despite his murdering her brother, but who is struggling with a severe alcohol problem. In another there is the newly arrived Hon. Charles Adare (Michael Wilding), the charming but indolent second cousin of the local Governor of New South Wales ...

This film when it came out was well received and represented something of a revival in Hitchcock's fortunes, so it is strange that in the 1950s he felt the need to remake it, as if he was disappointed in the original.  The two versions differ in many respects, but they share the same fundamental setup: a married couple on a foreign holiday stumble upon a scheme to assassinate a foreign politician, and to keep them quiet their child is kidnapped.   And in both films the assassination attempt takes place during a concert at the Royal Albert Hall.  It makes for a very suspenseful set piece so I can see why Hitchcock kept it in the remake. We start off in the Alps where the Lawrence family (Bob, Jill and daughter Betty) are on holiday.  It's not that long before a Frenchman who is dancing with Jill is shot dead.  It's an effectively shocking moment even if shooting someone through a window at night when they are in a crowded danceroom is an unlikely way to go a...

In 1935 Hitchcock directed the incomparable 'The 39 Steps', about a man on the run from the police who needs to identify the real murderer in order to establish his innocence. So it's a surprise that only two years later Hitchcock revisited the same terrain by directing this film which was bound to be inferior in every way.  And it is. If you can stop comparing it with the earlier classic I guess it's a mildly diverting tale, but I confess my attention was in danger of wandering throughout. There's a surprising lack of dramatic incident and of suspense.  The accused man, Robert, seems remarkably laidback about the bind he is in, and similarly the young woman Erica who helps him is relaxed right from the off about being on the run with an accused murderer. Inevitably these two young people fall in love but the actors playing them don't have any chemistry that I could see.  In particular I found Derrick De Marney (who plays Robert) irritating throughout because of...

I can watch Russell Crowe in pretty much anything, even a film as unappealing to me as this variation on 'The Exorcist'. Crowe plays a real Catholic priest, Father Amorth, who claimed to have performed tens of thousands of exorcisms, which is plainly absurd and ridiculous.  I've no idea whether he was anything like Crowe's portrayal which manages to give him both gravitas and quirkiness.   The latter quality is signposted by him getting around on a red-and-white motor scooter.  He even uses it to travel between Rome and Castile in Spain, a distance of over a thousand miles;  no wonder he needs a shot of whisky when he arrives. Why is he in Castile?  Well, because there's a ruined abbey here where a young American boy Henry is showing signs of demonic possession.  This is after Henry has not said a word for a year, since his father died in a car accident where Henry was present.  Father left the abbey to Henry's mum Julia, and now they, together wi...