Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

I have a clear memory of seeing this film at the cinema when it came out in 1971, and quite enjoying it.   So out of nostalgia I revisited it although I had no memory of any specific scene or moment.  As I watched it this time nothing rang any bell with me, until  near the end when Anthony Hopkins slightly loosens the front of a blouse of a young woman so that she can distract a guard. For some reason this moment evidently created a memorable erotic frisson for me.    The woman then strokes the barrel of the guard’s gun suggestively and asks whether it is loaded. That I had no recollection of this unsubtle innuendo suggests it passed right over my head (well, I was only 14 years old and those were innocent pre-internet times). This is Alistair Maclean’s adaptation of his own bestseller and the producers hoped it would repeat the success of ‘Where Eagles Dare’ and maybe even be the start of a new franchise to rival the James Bond movies. But it was a commerc...

This 1939 adaptation of a 1936 bestseller is directed by John Ford, and a prime piece of Fordian mythmaking it is to be sure. The film covers the period from  1776 to 1781, which takes us from the Declaration of Independence to the surrender of the British.  These hist oric events form the backdrop to the story of a  community in the Mohawk valley in upstate New York, and in particular  a newlywed couple of Gil and Lana (Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert) who are creating a home for themselves. Things seem to be going swimmingly (after a shaky start) until the day when the rest of the community is at their farm to help clear the land for cultivation, when out of the blue a party of Native Americans attack, destroying Gil and Lana's home.  This sets the pattern for what follows: the community trying to get on with their lives, punctuated by attacks, and by the menfolk going off to war. Fonda is the perfect person to portray the virtues of resilience, decency and ...

Having recently watched 'Arabesque' which was an unsuccessful attempt by director Stanley Donen to replicate the success of this earlier film I decided to go to the OG, which I had seen before, some time ago. It has so much going for it compared with the later film, notably a twisty plot which has a simple and intriguing premise.  Audrey Hepburn's husband has died in mysterious circumstances, and then three sinister figures turn up claiming that he had stolen money from them which she must now have.  They were comrades of her husband in the war who together stole some gold from the US government.   It’s a frightening situation for her but thankfully handsome Cary Grant turns up like a white knight to help her.   Except that she soon discovers that he is not who he says he is and that he is not a disinterested party.   A lot of the pleasure in the film is in the ups and downs of their relationship and whether she can trust him, whilst all the time they ...

Well finally I got round to watching one of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s celebrated melodramas.  This one is about a brother and sister, Kyle and Marylee, (played by Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone) who are filthy rich because their father is an oil tycoon (we’re in Texas). Needless to say their money doesn’t make them happy. Marylee is in love with handsome Mitch (Rock Hudson) who she has known since childhood. Problem is that he only loves her as a brother.  It might also be the case that he recognises that she spells Trouble with a Capital T. Mitch is Kyle’s best friend and works as a geologist for Kyle's dad's oil company.  Mitch is the opposite of Kyle; he has studied and worked hard, and he’s not an alcoholic.  In comparison with Mitch, Kyle doubts his masculinity and resents the fact that his father would probably prefer that Mitch was his son. Into this combustible mix walks Lucy (Lauren Bacall) who both Kyle and Mitch fall for instantly, but it’s Kyle she marries, n...

The title credit announces this as 'Hammerstein's Carmen Jones' which seems rather tough on Bizet who after all did write the music.    All Oscar did was to adapt the opera so as to create a stage musical set in World War II which features an all-black cast.  Otto Preminger then adapted the musical for the cinema.   My understanding is that in so doing he moved the music more back to its opera roots.   Maybe because of this  the end result is a film that falls between several stools, not being wholly successful as either a musical, or an opera, or as a drama.  Bizarrely we have two lead performers (Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte) who are fine singers in their own right but who here are dubbed by opera singers.  Although the dubbing is done well enough it still seems odd for Belafonte in particular to be singing in an operatic style. Preminger deserves credit for getting the film made with an all-black cast but having them  wo...

This is a superficially enjoyable comedy which is totally disposable, and so forgettable that it was only towards the end that I realised I had seen it before. It’s about a couple of male figure skaters who are complete opposites and rivals but who out of desperation (both having been banned from singles competition) become a pair, because it turns out there’s nothing in the rule book that prohibits two men doing this.  One of the skaters is Will Ferrell,  who is the only reason to watch this film. He plays a crude show-off who claims to suffer from sex-addiction (there‘s a funny scene when he attends a therapy class) But his crassness is about the only joke we have here and it wears thin after a while.   The other skater, played by Jon Heder, doesn’t bring much to the party comedy-wise.   Inevitably he and Ferrell get to bond over the course of the story, but the film makes no effort to make this plausible. There's a rival pair of ruthless brother-and-sister skaters...

This 1941 Frank Capra film takes some swings which don't all totally come off, but it's a fascinating piece of 'Capra-Corn' which tackles some big ideas.   The great Barbara Stanwyck plays a resourceful newspaper columnist, Anne, who invents a fictitious man, whom she names John Doe, who is so angry at the state of the world that he threatens to kill himself on Christmas Eve, some months hence.   John Doe so captures people's interest that Stanwyck comes up with the bright idea, as a stunt to increase the newspaper's circulation, of taking someone off the street to pretend to be him. The guy she chooses, Gary Cooper, is a homeless man who used to be a baseball player before he injured his elbow. He's a simple fellow who is happy enough to be pampered by the newspaper.   And he's sufficiently taken with Stanwyck that he turns down an opportunity to make money by exposing the stunt, and instead delivers on radio a rousing speech which she has written, exto...

To call this a Western would be to give scant justice to its epic scale, but then what else would you expect from a film directed by Cecil B. DeMille?  It has a running time of 135 minutes, extras fill the screen at every opportunity (even in the saloon scenes) and there are two spectacular trainwrecks along with all the other drama.  Considering it is ostensibly a celebration of the completion of a railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean it is a surprisingly entertaining film.   It is established early on in the story that a tycoon who pretends to be backing the Union Pacific Railroad secretly wants to sabotage the building of the track in order to make a huge financial killing (the details of which can safely be ignored).  To this end he employs shady gambler and saloon owner, Sid Campeau (Brian Donleavy), to use gambling, booze and women to cause trouble among the labourers. In response to the success of Campeau's efforts, the railroad company recruit...

Having been somewhat underwhelmed by the 1943 version of this classic tale (which I watched recently) I was really hoping that this more recent version might be more to my taste.  We start off with a disorientating beginning in which an adult and tearful Jane takes refuge at the house of St. John Rivers and his two sisters, having fled Thornfield Hall. In due course we embark on a lengthy series of flashbacks to explain how Jane got to this sad state  In this version Jane's aunt Mrs Reed lives in a luxurious house full of colour (quite a contrast to the stark black-and-white cinematography of the earlier version) but she's still as unkind to Jane, and Jane still suffers a miserable time at the Lowood School for Girls. Anyway she's soon arriving at Thornfield Hall, run by kindly Mrs Fairfax (Judi Dench) as a governess to young Adele. Eventually of course Mr Rochester turns up, played by Michael Fassbender.  He's a far less intimidating but more interesting and nuanced ch...

I’m not the biggest Shakespeare fan but I was tempted out to the cinema to see this adaptation because it comes in at less than two hours, it is set in modern day London, and it stars Riz Ahmed who impressed me in the splendid 'Night Crawler' over ten years earlier.  I greatly enjoyed it even though I would have got even more out of it had I watched it at home with subtitles on.  I did find some of the dialogue going over my head, either through simply not being able to make out the words or not being able to understand Shakespeare's subtlety of thought.  In particular I struggled with every scene between Hamlet and Polonius, although I did gather that they weren't best buddies.  The latter is played by Timothy Spall who proves that he can play vicious very well. An advantage of not knowing the play in detail was that I was capable of being surprised, as though I was watching a crime thriller for the first time. This was especially the case in the exciting conclusion...

This is one of the most successful British films ever, based on audience numbers, and whilst it’s no classic I can readily see its appeal.  It’s a ripping yarn, set in the late seventeenth century, which is well directed and acted, and which must have been a tonic to audiences when it was released a few months after the end of World War II. Many British women had tasted their first experience of independence and responsibility during the war years, so I can't help wondering what they made of the titular character. Were they taken with her free spirit, with her refusal to accept what society expects from her, and with her pursuit of love wherever it takes her and whoever it hurts? Or were they repelled by her selfishness and irresponsibility, which does degenerate into true wickedness well before the end? The 'wicked lady', Barbara, is wonderfully played by Margaret Lockwood.  One writer on film described her as  "one of the most beautiful, energetic, and spirited actre...

I was expecting this 1962 World War II movie directed by Don Siegel to be lean, mean and exciting.  Which it is, towards the end, w hen a US company attacks a heavily protected German pillbox.  But before then, the film is very much a curate’s egg with some surprising elements, not least Bob Newhart of all people doing a variation on his comic monologue routine. It takes an unusual approach for a war movie of this period in zooming in on an insignificant incident, based on the experience of the screenwriter Robert Pirosh during the war, when a mere handful of US soldiers in France in 1944 are given the suicidal job of trying to defend part of the Allied line.   Being woefully undermanned, at first they find some creative ways to give their German opposite numbers the impression of having greater numbers.  This buys them some time but eventually they decide their only hope is a desperate attack on the aforementioned pillbox. After this fails, reinforcements arrive, le...

In this action comedy Hutch (played by Bob Odenkirk) is on the face of it a real sad sack of a nobody. The state of his marriage to Becca is summed up by the rolled up sheet she has placed as a barrier between them in their bed.  His job is a monotonous accounting-type gig with a small business owned by his father-in-law, who doesn’t hold him in high regard. But guess what? It turns out that back in the day Hutch was a formidable assassin working for the US government, until he tired of it and developed a yen for a conventional marriage and suburban lifestyle. When a couple of inept burglars tangle with Hutch the worm finally turns, and not before long he is beating up five young punks on a bus, in an enjoyable fist fight that is well choreographed and makes creative use of the available fixtures and fittings.   Quite believably Hutch doesn’t have it all his own way (after all, it is five against one) and he comes out of it with a fair amount of bruising as well as a stab...

The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther criticised this 1961 Western, Sam Peckinpah's directorial debut, for moving "at the pace of a hearse". Which is only as it should be given that the story centres on the transportation of a corpse, that of a young boy, who is shot dead accidentally during a shootout in the middle of town (an occupational hazard in those days, I guess). His mother Kit (played by Maureen O'Hara) arrived in the town a few years earlier, pregnant and without a husband.  Despite her claims that her husband had been killed, she's a single mum of dubious morals as far as the town is concerned, and so she's ostracised and has had to make a living in the town music hall. Due to her treatment by the townspeople she rejects the idea of a funeral for the boy there, and instead she's going to take him to be buried with his father.  There's one small problem: it means a journey through Apache country and none of the townsfolk feel like escort...

I have to confess that I struggled to get through this 1966 comedy spy thriller, and my attention was increasingly going AWOL as it went on. It’s directed by Stanley Donen as the follow-up to his successful effort in the same genre in 1963, ‘Charade’.  That film is set in Paris, stars Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, as well as a strong supporting cast, and has an entertaining plot.  Donen, who is best known as a director of musicals, was able to take these ingredients and make them into a charming soufflé of a film. In the case of 'Arabesque' the ingredients are less promising: we have Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren with not much by way of a supporting cast, and a plot which most critics found confusing.  The end result for me was less a soufflé, more like a rubbery omelette. Cary Grant turned the project down which suggests he knows a bad script when he sees one.  He may also have wondered whether he would have made a convincing professor of Egyptology (spoiler alert:...