A Troubled Inheritance: A Cultural History of Post-War Italian and French Cinema

An academic piece written earlier this year. Perhaps a bit preschool for the serious cinefile, but hopefully still interesting in points.

The works of post-War Italian and French film are vastly important to the aesthetics and history of the cinema, most crucially, for the former, in the impact of Neo-Realism and its subsequent mutations, and, for the latter, the era of the Nouvelle Vague and its influence. And yet neither France nor Italy as nations had the happiest histories in the period following World War 2, illustrating perhaps the adage that troubled times generate great cultural energy. Italy, a battleground for much of the war, was left poverty-stricken and shattered, to move painfully and inconsistently out of the Fascist era into a modernising, industrialising period. France contended with a distinct and visible decline in its colonial and international political influence, most baldly revealed by the military defeats in Vietnam and Algeria, and the lingering suspicions of the myth of the Resistance obscuring the truth of widespread collaboration with the Nazis. Each nation reacted to the powerful influence of the United States, both politically in the era of Cold War side-taking, and culturally, in contending with Hollywood and the new popular culture.

The Italian film industry, and by that I mean the whole industry and not merely the momentary vogues for Neo-Realists and “Alienation”, was arguably one of the most consistently productive and commercially successful in post-War Europe. The huge number of genre works, a sea of Maciste, Hercules, spaghetti westerns, and horror films, established Italian cinema as the low-rent Hollywood of choice through the ‘60s and ‘70s, and it’s highly possible today more cineastes are familiar with the works of Sergio Leone, Mario Bava, and Dario Argento than with Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. That this owed a certain debt to the Fascist-era infrastructure, the large new studio Cinecitta and the industrially-honed of skills of filmmakers like Visconti, De Sica, and Rossellini, considering the conscientious attempts to erase the Fascist memory from the cinema landscape as well as political, had a certain irony. But no country, or industry, can begin with a completely clean slate.

The correlation of a shift from the so-called ‘white telephone’ movies to nitty-gritty subject matters, and the political death of Fascism and the new democracy, is easy to note. Perhaps too easy, considering the debt owed to pre-war ideas, and the way in which individual Neo-Realist films often channelled generic influences ranging from broad melodrama and Chaplinesque comedy. But certainly, they were the product of a time and place, and a confluence of ideals, ideas, and influences. Neo-Realism was, as most film scholars concede, hardly a consistently codified aesthetic approach, despite the efforts like those of the films’ leading screenwriter, Cesare Zavattini, to define it. Raw necessity and expedience, and a desire to reflect a cultural moment in all its drama, drove the production of the initial Neo-Realist films like Roma Citta Aperta (Roberto Rossellini, 1945) and Paisa (Rossellini, 1946). The aesthetics of Neo-Realism were essentially that of no-budget, rock-bottom filmmaking: natural lighting, no colour (the prettiness of the era’s Technicolor seen more as decoration than accuracy), and use of non-professional actors, and so the movement was as much a provisional stop-gap as artistic response, as Roberto Rossellini readily confessed.

This blossomed into a powerful and momentarily popular genre of films that took as its building blocks people and experiences often left out of the Fascist, and, indeed, out of much of cinema in general – ordinary tradesmen, working women and street kids – without recourse to sentimental narrative arcs of tribulation and triumph. And yet as Italy moved into the Fifties, and both the nation and the cinema became richer, more confident, and able to take on a broader range of references and aspirations, it was probably inevitable, even without social context, that Neo-Realism would come under strain. By the mid ‘50s, it seemed that Neo-Realism was dying out, and yet possibly this was misconceived: neo-Realist techniques became a permanent part of the lexicon of domestic and indeed world cinema, and the directors, though no longer to rely only on its precepts, could still build upon it. Even if they’re more psychological, ‘bourgeois’, symbolic, or altogether stylised, subsequent films like Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia, Fellini’s I Vitelloni, La Strada, La Dolce Vita, and 8½, Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi Fratelli and Il Gattopardo, and Antonioni’s L’Avventura, can be seen as taking neo-realism into “unexplored territory”, as John Russell Taylor put it in 1964. They maintain a consistent, even compulsive, interest in the relationship of individual protagonists with the society and temporal identity they share.

No longer motivated by the necessities of survival as dictated by war or extreme poverty, and consumed by anxiety in a world losing traditional parameters of church, state, family life, and musty morality, the frigid, lost bourgeoisie of L’Avventura and La Dolce Vita, the wayfaring circus folk of La Strada, the can-do family of Sicilians in Rocco, all fall victim to disintegrating assurances and consuming, irrational passions without any apparent goal. Il Gattopardo, although set a century earlier, in many ways captures the zeitgeist of the previous eighteen years, as its narrative stretches from the chaos of war and the exhilaration of new possibilities and shifting power, to the settling of a new order, the forceful repression of rebellious forces, and the end of a moment of possibility.

As in France, the next generation of filmmakers were vitally concerned both with leftist politics and questions of cinematic semantics. Bernardo Bertolucci’s Prima della rivoluzione(1964), both as a title and a film, can be seen as summarising the attitudes of the new cinema and its creators – young men and women under the influence of left/socialist ideals, waiting for the new society, righteously critical of the old, and yet all too aware of the seductive force of seemingly frivolous things – sex, money, movies. Whilst socially revolutionary possibilities in Italy came to look less and less likely, the arrival of counterculture mores inItaly prodded new examinations.

Bertolucci’s Novocento (1975) took a valiant stab at portraying Italian society up until the end of World War Two with a thematic interest in recording the violent conflict of proletariat and bourgeois social strata, and creating a new scope for reconciliation without violence. At the same time Pier Paolo Pasolini looked at the mores of the past through countercultural perspectives in works like his own vicious look at the Fascist era, the notorious Salo. The ghosts of Fascism, both Bertolucci and Pasolini suggested, far from having been exorcised, still haunted every repressive instinct, and the schism between capitalism and socialism threatened to consume the orderly new world with war every day.

From the early ‘60s on, the growing popularity of Italian genre fare overseas, with their westerns, obviously indebted to American models, and yet, in essence, repositioned versions of the Hercules and Maciste films, called ‘neo-mythologism’ by Vittorio Cotofavi, and horror films, led into a new era of pop-aesthetic, and also cultural cross-pollination. The works of high-style maestros like Leone, Bava, and Argento had common roots in the newly lush approach of Visconti and Fellini, and had an effect on Hollywood product. Leone’s westerns gave that genre a last shot in the arm before running out of steam in the mid-’70s. Although the ‘art’ cinema model lived on, and some filmmakers – the Tavianni Brothers, Ermanno Olmi, Giuseppe Tornatore and Nanni Moretti, a chief satirist and portraitist of Berlusconi-era Italy, to name a few – have maintained visibility on the world stage, Italian cinema largely lost the relevance and force it had in this era, at least in terms of overseas perception, before the Cannes success of Gomorrah and Primo in 2008.

The post-war French cinema differed from the Italian in that, initially, its cinema went on largely as it had before, in the interregnum that the Nouvelle Vague critics and filmmakers disparaged with the label of “the Cinema of Quality” or the more directly generational le cinéma du papa, lacking aesthetic and political immediacy or risk. Which is not to say the era lacked good filmmakers: the diverse styles and preoccupations of directors of Marcel Carne, Jean Renoir, René Clément, Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Henri-Georges Clouzot, Andre Bazin believed, kept alive “French art's talent for a certain novelistic, by which I mean transformative, intelligence”, as Bazin said in his 1957 essay, ‘Fifteen Years of French Cinema’. Men like Melville, who had worked for the Resistance, and Clouzot, who had been banned from working for a time for making films for a German-sponsored company, personified in complex ways the divided national spirit. They, and cultural nurturers like Bazin and Henri Langlois, prefigured the Nouvelle Vague, a grouping which it was recognised early on was, like Neo-Realism, more a concordance of spirit than a real school of aesthetics.

The younger directors’ redefinition of the cinematic outlook drew on a new cultural eclecticism distinctly more cosmopolitan and multicultural in breadth; they also seemed to reject the “social pessimism” Bazin felt had defined many of the pre- and post-war directors. The openness and vivacity of the Nouvelle Vague, and also its air of dedicated criticality, announced a generation whose experiences were formed not by engaging in a period of struggle but in having been young during it. It’s possible that the atmosphere of endemic struggle and visions of the everyday world collapsing in Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous Appartient (1960) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1963) and Week-End (1967), reflect a fear of the repetition of a recalled WW2 as much as they are statements of contemporary political engagement.

The New Wave, like Neo-Realism before it, often made virtues both political and artistic out of the limitations of low budgets, location filming, and the attendant baggage of anti-establishment attitude. Unlike Neo-Realism, they openly embraced virtues beyond mere tactile realism and simple humanism, using their array of diverse influences as an aesthetic weapon, utilising the widest variety of cinematically expressive techniques. This wasn’t merely aesthetic, for their outlook was deconstructive and interrogative. The cinema of a mob of young critics was inherently intellectualised even when chasing poetic subjects, intensely aware of the problems of the control and employment of image.

The defeat of Dien Bien Phu signalled the faltering attempts to bring about a French Colonial renaissance, and the culture soon reflected disenchantment, breaking up the loose post-War consensus and setting genuinely fractious political forces in play. In such a setting, a film like Paris nous Appartient reveals a quietly paranoid, even self-destructive bohemian-left subculture contending with blocks of power. Playful disseminations on genre filmmaking like A bout de souffle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959) and Bande à part (Godard, 1964) and personalised visions of childhood like Les Quatre Cents Coups (François Truffaut, 1959) were all well and good, but tackling more charged material, like tangentially depicting the political schisms invoked by the Algerian war with Le Petit Soldat, was enough to get that film temporarily banned. Battle lines were being drawn.

Those lines were well illustrated in Godard’s excoriating letter to Culture Minister and former leftist author Andre Malraux, for banning fellow director Rivette’s La Religieuse (1966). Godard’s personal drift towards ever-more politicised and radical filmmaking was rare in its extremity, indeed he was the only real radical of the movement, but it seemed in tune with the zeitgeist that culminated in the epic May riots of ’68. In such a milieu a film like Melville’s personal, haunting Resistance tale L'armée des ombres (1969) could be dismissed as “Gaullist filmmaking”. But the Gaullists won, the political crisis faded, and the spirit of revolt was left somewhat floundering afterwards, as documented in Jean Eustache’s epic La maman et la putain (1973).

Echoes of the era’s cultural arguments still ring through the discussions of French cinema, up to the minor controversy surrounding Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulain (2001), in which leftist critics like Serge Kaganski and Philippe Lancon accused the filmmakers of fulfilling a reactionary fantasy in painting a fairy-tale Paris, erasing the bustling, often fractious, multicultural city now inclusive (and often un-inclusive) of the citizens of former colonies and the third world, portrayed in works like Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), and condemning fantasies of simpler times.

Such remarks can be seen as part of a wider modern fray, setting an ill-defined native French model, which in some ways is once again the Cinema of Quality, against a more vigorous but fantastic Hollywood cinematic template, exemplified by the efforts of Luc Besson. Unlike the Italian industry, the French never really exported its native genre cinema in large quantities, except for relatively odd creations by directors like Melville and Claude Chabrol, and so to try and keep up with Hollywood’s game, rather than using it for own ends, is a relatively new and culturally problematic departure.

The House That Dripped Blood (1971)

The other British studio to specialise in Horror in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Amicus, could never quite offer productions were as well-conceived and solidly produced as Hammer’s, and the series of Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg-produced omnibus films generally offered sketch-like, dime-store vivacity as well as generic cheesiness. After Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1964), which Subotsky and Rosenberg wrote themselves, they turned to Robert Bloch, who adapted many of his old short stories into screen tales hanging from a negligible framework narrative. Where Dr Terror and first successor Torture Garden (1967) had been directed by the stolidly reliable Freddie Francis, The House That Dripped Blood was handled by first-time feature director Peter Duffel. The series maintained the snappy, morbid tradition of magazine horror with their gimmicky Gothicism and sick humour.

Perhaps, thanks to its title, the most famous of the Amicus productions, House is, like most omnibus films not called Kwaidan – and I’m including distant ancestor, Dead of Night (1945) in this – too flimsy to truly compel and unnerve, and Amicus’ slapdash production doesn’t help much. Duffel’s direction is mostly tamed and hemmed in by the low budget and fractured narrative, sporting only occasional flurries of strong imagery. He does gamely satirise his own inexperience in the film’s final chapter, “The Cloak” in which Jon Pertwee’s hammy horror star Paul Henderson, and self-declared genre aficionado, berates modern horror films, and his fresh-from-TV director. The house of the title is a decaying Victorian mansion, and a police detective, Holloway (John Bennett), investigating the disappearance of Henderson, and learns from a local sergeant (John Malcolm) and the house’s mordant realtor Stoker (John Bryans) the grim fates of the previous three tenants.

In the first episode, “Method for Murder”, Denholm Elliott’s murder-mystery writer Charles Hillyer moves into the house with his sickly sweet wife Alice (Johanna Dunham) and dreams up a strangler character, Dominick, who soon begins appearing to him. His wife sends him to a psychiatrist after she swears that an assault on her, which Charles thought was being committed by Dominick, was actually done by himself. This leads to a tartly surreal moment in which the psychiatrist (Robert Lang) assures Charles it’s all in his head as Dominick sneaks up behind him and strangles him. Of course, it’s really a plot, engineered by Alice and her actor lover (Tom Adams), to set up Charles, but the persona of Dominick finally proves to have overtaken the actor too.

The second episode, “Waxworks”, sees a retired stockbroker (Peter Cushing) take over the house, and he and his visiting friend (Joss Ackland) both become fascinated by a Salome figure in a waxworks in the nearby town, which tantalisingly resembles a woman they had both loved years before. The figure proves to be the embalmed body of the waxworks’ proprietor’s (Wolfe Morris) wife, still attracting men with her temptress soul long after death, provoking the proprietor to murder all who are transfixed by her. This is easily the most negligible episode, failing utterly to communicate lingering totemistic/fetishistic obsession, to make it more than a penny dreadful punchline.

The fourth episode, with its overt self-satire, usually gets all the attention, with Henderson purchasing the eponymous garment from a sinister antiquarian (Geoffrey Bayldon) as a prop for his new movie a cloak that turns its wearer into a vampire. This proves to have been arranged by his co-star and lover Carla (Ingrid Pitt), who, being herself a vampire, announces that her fellows ghouls love Henderson’s movies so much they wanted him to join their ranks. When Bennett finally penetrates the space beneath the house in searching for the missing actor, he dispatches the bloodsucking thespian with a stake to the heart, but falls prey to Pitt.

The first and last stories reference that self-reflexive strain in a lot of horror literature that Stephen King has taken to the nth degree in tales like The Dark Tower and Secret Window, with fictional characters coming to life and that wheezy old idea of the actor’s part taking over his life. They gain most of their pep from the actors, especially Elliott, who was great at essaying febrile fearfulness (see To The Devil…A Daughter), and Cushing and Ackland buoy their episode with good work (and a reminder that Duffel got a gem of a performance out of Ackland three years later in England Made Me). Pertwee has a ball as the conceited actor, mustering much the same energetic humour he offered in his stint in Doctor Who.

But it’s the third story, “Sweets for the Sweet”, that’s both the most low-key and interesting, featuring Christopher Lee as a stern father who’s terrified of the possibility his young daughter (Chloe Franks) might prove to be a witch like her mother. He moves into the house and cuts her off from all contact with other children, hiring instead a tutor (Nyree Dawn Porter) for her. But the very thing he means to keep in check soon claims him victim when his little girl, obeying encyclopaedia instructions, and, possibly her mother’s communing spirit, builds a wax effigy of her father and takes dainty delight in torturing him with needle pricks. It’s a memorable psychodrama that presents a terse parable for family perversion, patriarchal repression and resurgent feminine will entwined in a vicious dance, climaxing with Lee’s horrid screams echoing as his effigy melts in the fire. In this episode, Bloch and Duffel comes close to a minor genre landmark.

Mongol (2007)

In any movie, poisoning a young prince’s father, robbing his possessions, enslaving and exiling him, and then stealing his wife, would be infelicitous acts. When the prince in question is the future Genghis Khan, such actions appear positively unwise. Sergei Bodrov, who once made the fine Prisoner of the Mountains (1995), takes a stab here at melding that film’s flavourful, folk-tale mystique with the Braveheart-esque blockbuster epic and many visual and thematic flourishes plainly indebted to Zhang Yimou’s superior Hero.

Bodrov’s most at home communicating the intimate, rough-hewn yet still homey culture of the Mongols, drifting on the edge of the other civilisations Temudjin (Tadanobu Asano) will eventually unite them to destroy, and his direction drinks in the natural expanses of the Steppes. The early sequences set the story, and emotional imperatives, in motion with fluidic intensity, performing the hitherto imaginable feat of making Temudjin an empathetic hero as he is endlessly outmatched, betrayed, and generally screwed over.

But the absorbing first 45 minutes soon give way to too much crummy CGI and fall prey to a paper-thin script, offering recurring capture and escape as its chief narrative tactic, whilst proving amazingly shallow in exploring Temudjin’s psychology and growing strategic genius. For a film that proposes to reveal Genghis Khan’s origins, it has nothing more to do than quote a dozen old matinee plots in scrappy and incomplete fashion, unwilling to obey its own melodramatic impulses, setting up baddies ripe to be chastised and then forgetting abut them, and tragic brotherly quarrels that have no climax or complexity. How Temudjin finally stakes his claim to being a leader of great hordes of men is skipped over because, well, it’s too complicated for the filmmakers to contemplate handling. The recasting of Temudjin as a nice family guy who likes frolicking with kids in between forcibly remoulding his nation through violence and ruthlessness has a quality of strong-government propaganda not far from that of Hero, that film’s least attractive quality, without its attendant poeticism.

And of course behind every great man is a great woman, here the comely Börte (Khulan Chuluun), who becomes both pliable pawn and single-minded player in the games of frontier machismo, and to whom Temudjin is drawn from their first meeting at nine years old. But Bodrov can’t work up any convincing force to suggest transcendent, irrational passion, and finally he retreats into badly employed pseudo-mythical flourishes, like a thunder storm that intervenes at just the right moment so that Temudjin can awe the Mongols with his lack of fear of lightning. Rather than offer a contemporary Alexander Nevsky, Bodrov finally gives us a pissweak remake of Conan the Barabarian.

Factotum (2005)

The mythology of Charles Bukowski gets another go-round in this fitfully funny and acerbic, but shapeless and style-free, cut-rate Canadian-shot adaptation of a Bukowski roman-a-clef. Matt Dillon fills out the author's scruffy, bitter, occasionally rowdy yet largely passive persona perhaps more accurately than Mickey Rourke’s full-bore machismo in Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly (1987), but otherwise that was an entirely superior film for capturing the nitty-gritty pseudo-poverty that Bukowski’s pseudo-autobiographical heroes revel in.

Instead we get plastic indie-budget blandness and a couple of slumming semi-stars. But Factotum is still worthwhile, detailing the decline of hero Hank Chinaski from semi-employed wannabe to down-on-his-ass wastrel. Along the way he gets caught up in a successful betting scam, gets caught in an on-again, off-again tryst with the horny, ineffably plebeian Jan (Lili Taylor), fights with his critical, angry, strait-laced father (James Noah), and is briefly initiated into the circle of a plutocrat weirdo, Pierre (Didier Flamand), who adopts barroom flotsam, thanks to one of his girls, Laura (Marisa Tomei).

Director and co-writer (with Jim Stark) Bent Hamer portrays a world of crummy jobs and bullshit bosses, full of folk for whom the bloom of youthful self-delusion has long since worn off, leaving them with little but fractious appetites and wayward impulses that can be just as well fulfilled by a good fuck as by cash, until the temptation to flee for security often becomes overwhelming. Or, in Hank's case, to run away from security. Moments like when Pierre plays his self-penned opera on an organ to his audience of floozies, possess an almost Lynchian conceptual flavour that might have come grotesquely alive, but Hamer largely settles for a flat and flaccid realism.

Meanwhile Hank essays his own constant self-defeat with a Zen master’s dedication to avoiding becoming anything as long as his true life project continues to be unfulfilled, until, at last, his breakthrough comes at the same moment he’s completely divested himself of all worldly status – that is, sitting on the pavement, homeless and drunk. Whilst it all barely hangs together as cinema, as a transposition of Bukowski’s perspective, it’s competent enough. This was Adrienne Shelly’s second-last film as an actress, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it part.

Redacted (2007)

Brian De Palma returns to his roots whilst simultaneously constructing one of the most angry, and far from subtle, films to deal with the Iraq War. The cultural memory of Vietnam and De Palma’s own early films like Greetings! (1968) looms large over Redacted’s libellous bent, as well, of course, as his ferocious if ill-focused Casualties of War (1989). It’s interesting that the most ambitious efforts to deal with a multimedia age of late have come from older directors like De Palma, Assayas and Romero. De Palma, who failed to get the rights to real pieces of film and video for a documentary, goes the full distance in trying to make Redacted look like a collage of found footage and internet MPEGs.

Built around a terrible true story, of a teenage Iraqi girl’s rape and murder by American servicemen, Redacted attempts to mimic the look and feel of embedded war-zone action, absorbing through unblinking technology the horror and madness it conjures, but it's not really as concerned with reproduced realism, the facile appearance of docudrama immediacy so popular with contemporary directors, but, like all of De Palma's movies, turns realism into a mode of expression first and foremost. He portrays a panoply of contemporary cultural responses to horror, tossing in abusive radical chicks ranting on You Tube and the greasy ooze of insurgent websites, suggesting a polarised world of rogue loonies, fanatics, and ideologues, squeezing the sane and conscientious between them with lethal intent, as spiralling violence feeds the dark fantasies of all. Most of the film’s narrative is sustained through the aestheticised pretence of a supposedly French-made documentary, complete with languorous Handel music overscoring the gritty reality, and the fly-on-the-wall documentary Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) is making about his unit’s deployment in the hope to be admitted to film school. Much like Robert De Niro's Jon Rubin in Greetings!, the reproduced image is far more important to Angel than the actual moment, and like him war becomes only a new, strange zone to explore his obsessions.

De Palma’s fascination with the metastasising perversities of observation through technological media and the way it entwines with questions of political perspective, blurring into scarcely distinguishable quandaries, is as urgent as ever. Again, like many of De Palma's recent films, it's also disinterested in nuances of tone. He doesn’t chase artful award-worthy cool. His murderous GIs are drooling redneck beasts, a feat of broad manipulation indeed, but also a sustained and stinging critique of the notion that a violent purpose can be ennobled by rhetoric but fought by social dregs. De Palma makes clear his revulsion for the hints in such incidents as the one he’s fictionalising and the readily referenced Abu Ghraib, that America’s armed forces have been beefed up with economic conscripts containing unreconstructed racists and thugs who, not being allowed to run rampant in their own country, find ample opportunity in foreign adventuring. The air of hysteria that envelopes their more conscientious fellows is compulsively convincing, bullied by psychopaths handed all the power they want on one side and by a military structure anxious not to see anymore bad publicity on the other.

Simultaneously, De Palma encourages a note of jet-black humour which clashes queasily with the despairing compassion, especially in a lengthy sequence where the two avatars of unleashed aggression (Patrick Carroll and Daniel Stewart Sherman) attempt to complete the video project of their murdered squad mate Angel, calling him their “own Private Ryan” and seguing into Sherman’s long monologue about his murderous brother – here De Palma’s delight in bleakly funny improvisatory sequences could have been transferred directly from his early films. Simultaneously, De Palma’s perspective on the opinions of home front know-it-alls, like the aforementioned ranting chick, is just as revealing and suggestive of the way people and societies simultaneously use media to essay truth and yet also construct their own realities: De Palma helps define that intellectual echo-chamber many discern in contemporary cultural sectors.

Whilst not as poised and overtly thrilling as Kathryn Bigelow’s intensive but conventional The Hurt Locker, Redacted is far more disquieting and indeed original. De Palma makes ruthless meta-critical fun of the idea of corralling reality within the limits of any artful metaphor, as when Salazar first ignores and then later purposefully includes the famous Somerset Maugham passage at the beginning of John O’Hara’s “Appointment in Samarra”, reading the words of self-dramatising import, hoping he’s found a perfect epigraph for his work. Which of course he has, and yet cannot comprehend the immediacy of the threat. He will, naturally, later be hoisted by his own petard when he’s used as a prop in a vicious piece of fundamentalist theatre. Redacted almost succeeds in burning the war movie itself down to the ground, as it keeps the spirit of enquiring, experimental narrative as defined in '60s art alive and relevant.

Rescue Dawn (2006)

Werner Herzog’s welcome comeback to feature filmmaking is a rare and curious mix: both a success as a nail-biter escape flick, and a fine continuation of Herzog’s career fascination with obsessive men of civilisation lost in alien landscapes at the mercy of natural and human cruelty. Based on the same true story Herzog had already recounted in his documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Rescue Dawn accounts the travails of Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale), a German immigrant who joined the US Navy to become a pilot, but gets shot down on his first mission, an illegal bombing mission on Viet Cong targets in Laos. He’s stuck in a prison camp with five other men, including Steve Zahn’s taciturn Duane and Jeremy Davies’ crumbling Eugene, at the mercy of mean guards who themselves are underfed and desperate. Dieter’s can-do attitude, and dexterity with finicky details, serves him well as he constructs and executes a plan for escape.

Bale, at his most committed and intelligent, avoids playing Dengler with a Germanic lisp, instead offering a slightly too bright, too folksy characterisation to suggest both his discomfort and adoration of his assumed identity, greeting Viet Cong with a chirpy ‘Howdy!’ and chowing down on worms and grub with his cheery determination only sharpened to a purposeful point. Herzog avoids overt politics, but his sense of visual detail is acute in laying out the chasm between the locals, to whom the Americans are only frightening, outrageous beasts from the sky to be harassed and tortured for their transgressions, and the invaders themselves, stripped of their technology and support, rendered pathetic and virtually helpless. Likewise, Dieter and his fellow flyers are finally in as much conflict with the representatives of their own shifty government’s spooks as they are with Charlie.

The care with which Herzog tells a heroic tale without bombast or appeals to crude nationalism is admirable, and he’s too eccentric a filmmaker to take easy paths. Rather than play Rescue Dawn as a straight melodrama, he laces it with drolly funny touches of the accidentally surreal, like the midget guard who’s the prisoners’ best friend, self-willed machine guns and a dancing dog, and portraits of vivid humanism, like Dieter’s pathetic but joyous birthday party, and his care not to kill the nicest of the guards. Then comes the exhausting, utterly corporeal detail the difficulties of Dieter and Duane’s flight, finding existential terror in wrestling through masses of weeds before casual calamity comes in the fall of machete blades. Dieter has to reinvent his civilisation with a single nail.

In this regard, Rescue Dawn is an interesting thematic riposte to the neuroses of film like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, where the disintegrating Yankee psyche takes on apocalyptic scale, and indeed many of Herzog’s early films, full of supermen ready to plunge into deepest savagery. Dieter’s precise, watchmaker’s sense of technique – how do I get out of handcuffs? How do I feed myself in the bush? – refuses to countenance the jungle and the guards as anything more than problems to be circumvented, even whilst he and Herzog’s camera absorb its teeming, grandiose beauty and threat. Dieter has no psychodrama to enact in the jungle other than his own script for survival. Which is not to say he and his fellows do not face, and suffer, brutal and tragic consequences to their stab at freedom, but as well as being extremely watchable, Rescue Dawn is a hymn to the idea of a man as his own deliverer.

Cradle Will Rock (1999)

Tim Robbins is an extremely talented director, and Cradle Will Rock looks for much of its length like the best Robert Altman film Robert Altman never made, offering a fresco of late ‘30s culture revolving around the Federal Theatre Project, part of FDR’s colossal federal works scheme, and the efforts of Mark Blitzstein (Hank Azaria) to construct a genuinely American and radical kind of musical theatre in his pro-union show “The Cradle Will Rock”. Orson Welles (Angus MacFadyen) and John Houseman (Cary Elwes) agree to stage the show as a follow-up to their hit all-Black Macbeth, but increasing agitation of the politicisation of the Federal Theatre sees the Project’s idealistic but tough manager Hallie Flanagan (Cherry Jones) failing to fend off cutbacks and censure, and the premiere of “The Cradle Will Rock” is cancelled, the theatre sealed off by soldiers, no less. But the wit and will of the cast and hands still manage to give the work an heroic presentation.

Robbins weaves into this (mostly) true story various subplots: starving singer Olive Stanton (Emily Watson) gets a job first as a stagehand and then a part in the show; Joan Cusack’s mousy anti-communist Hazel Huffman testifies to a scalp-hunting senate committee, drawing bitchy ventriloquist Tommy Crickshaw (Bill Murray) in her wake, suppressing his own radical past in his attempt to make her; Vanessa Redgrave’s society matron Constance LaGrange supports the players despite the fact her magnate husband Gray Mathers (Philip Baker Hall) is doing business with Italian fascists; and Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) contends with Diego Rivera (Ruben Blades) in the infamous incident of his mural for the Rockefeller Centre, tackled again not three years later in Frida. This latter aspect is Robbins’ largest overt conceit, for “The Cradle Will Rock” was staged in 1937 and Rivera’s mural destroyed in 1933.

It’s not, then, to be taken as accurate, or even especially deep portraiture of some awesome cultural figures. There’s a certain broad amusement to be had in the constantly quarrelling Welles and Houseman, but it offers no real insight into their personalities. Robbins tips his hat to many of the artistic modes the narrative encompasses: a mural structure a la Rivera; Wellesian tracking shots; touches reminiscent of Upton Sinclair (in Constance's subplot); narrative quotes from the era's showbiz films like 42nd Street and screwball; sequences in which Blitzstein’s exhaustion and grief-stricken imagination conjures scenes from his show out of his surrounds, making choruses out of jailed protestors; and broad agitprop moments, like when Crickshaw gives into his impulses and has his dummy sing “The Internationale”. But this doesn’t entirely excuse Robbins’ tendency to hector, building to a ludicrously try-hard scene in which Rockefeller and his fellow capitalist heavies conspire to replace political art with the cool ambiguity of abstract impressionism, whilst dressed up as French courtiers of just before the revolution.

Such heavy-handedness, and dubious historical and artistic theory, kind of makes you think Rockefeller had a point about keeping art and politics separate, which isn’t actually the idea. Like Blitzstein's, Robbins’ notions aren’t all that particularly interesting, in comparison to his urgent desire to put them over, and Citizen Kane is a far more profound study of the split character of pre-WW2 America, for all the patronisation of Welles as a drunken playboy. Still, it’s a film big-hearted enough to get a thrill out of the scene in which Rivera, Rockefeller, Frida Kahlo and sundry models dance in careless joy, and give even its rat-fink anti-heroine a happy fadeout. The whole movie has a vibrant and spirited humour that renders easily forgivable the caricatures and catechisms by the time the climactic performance of the show rolls around, the cast getting around their being banned to act in it by their union by doing the whole thing from the theatre seats and Blitzstein hammering it out on his piano. At its best, Cradle Will Rock is a hymn to human creative and communal energy.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)

Sydney Pollack’s film of Horace McCoy’s novel manages to be the ultimate in both retro-Depression gothic and late-‘60s fatalism. Comparisons to Reality TV are inevitable in contemplating this movie’s subject today, if only to remind us that a taste of gawking, patronising exploitation in spectators entwined with a desperate need for attention and riches on the behalf of the participants wasn’t invented by Survivor and Big Brother. But They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is larger than a mere mordant satire on modish huckstering and carnivals of humiliation, becoming a metaphor for both a prostituted version of the “American Dream” and, finally, the human condition itself, asking how much any individual can be expected to withstand or see inflicted. Bracing in its unblinking gaze on assailed humanity and even more depressing then you expect, Pollack and screenwriters James Poe and Robert E. Thompson can’t quite avoid overstating the themes, and dilute the finale’s dread import by telegraphing at it all the way through, but in general they did an excellent job in transposing an almost unbearably Darwinian tale to the screen, communicating livid physical exhaustion and spiritually corrosive straits.

A marathon dance contest held in an LA pavilion pier pits hard-as-nails survivor Jane Fonda, dreamy wanderer Michael Sarrazin, platinum-haired wannabe starlet Susannah York, energetic but febrile old-timer Red Buttons, Oakie couple Bruce Dern and Bonnie Bedelia, and sundry others in competition for $1500 and the chance of perhaps being noted by a Hollywood big, medium, or little shot. This horror show drags on for two months and grinds everyone down into pits of physical and moral exhaustion, a process watched over by Gig Young’s indelible Emcee, who mixes glimmers of compassion with a flimflammer’s casual psychopathy in such a way that eats away at without quite dispelling his slick façade.

The acting is uniformly excellent, sporting what is probably Fonda’s most sustained and forceful performance, with Dern maniacally convincing, York appropriately pathetic, and the later ill-used Sarrazin lucid as the young man whose idea of common feeling can encompass mercy killing. The film builds to hideous punchlines: Fonda dragging Buttons’ dead body on her back to win a “derby” race, York washing with her clothes on and cowering before Young’s soothing entreaties, and the final fade-out that leaves the Emcee’s hype ringing like the death knell of civilisation. By comparison, the bullet Sarrazin puts in Fonda’s head really is merciful, for people for whom the competition has long since gone beyond being a means to end and has become revealed all their secret weaknesses. What the film finally says is that although the marathon eats people up, it only speeds up the normal social process. If there’s a fault to all this, shared with works based in scabrous rage of the ‘30s, like Day of the Locust and Johnny Got His Gun, it’s that it so broadly reverses the Good Ship Lollypop for crushingly cosmic horror. Which is not an excuse to avoid it.

Travels With My Aunt (1972)

Middling George Cukor adaptation of Graham Greene’s jolliest novel is mostly redeemed by Alec McCowen’s dab hand at portraying a stuffy middle-aged bank manager, Henry Pullings, whose life is turned upside down when his mother dies and her long-lost sister, Augusta (Maggie Smith), comes calling. Former Courtesan, perpetual bohemian, and consummate intriguer, Augusta is desperate for finances to save her long-time lover, Mr Visconti (Robert Stephens) from a gruesome death at the hands of north African brigands, and she draws her unlikely nephew into her schemes and restless peregrinations.

This puts Henry in the company of Augusta’s much younger, pot-smuggling Sierra Leonese lover Wordsworth (Lou Gossett Jnr) and a careless hippie chick (Cindy Williams!) on the road to all sorts of illegality and general funny business. Travels’ production was hampered by Katharine Hepburn’s having to drop out, requiring Smith’s hurried participation (the screenplay was written by Jay Presson Allen, who wrote the stage and screen adaptations of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), and Smith is energetic but also broader than usual, and always obviously too young for the part. Much like fellow Hollywood old-timer Billy Wilder’s films of the early ‘70s, Cukor tips his hat to faded glories of yesteryear and retro ideals of glamour mixed with tarter, contemporary dashes of sauce and irony, with some sprightly flashbacks to Augusta’s carefree youth.

Otherwise the film is heavy-handed and caked on as thick as Augusta’s make-up. It also drains away the melancholy that underpinned the knockabout grace of Greene’s work, including the darker final act which essayed the intriguing theme that often happiness demands consciously ignoring the tragic, and substitutes some half-hearted efforts to be swinging that were dated when this was made. Still, it’s worth a look on a slow Sunday.

Crime Wave (1954)

Impressively gritty, detailed, but to-the-point Andre de Toth thriller utilises a magnificently seamy Sterling Hayden, as Detective-Lieutenant Sims, a man of few scruples about pressuring and oppressing his informants, especially when a trio of stick-up artists (Ted DeCorsia, Charles Bronson still in his Buchinsky phase, and Nedrick Young) kill a policeman after knocking over a service station, setting him to work like a shaggy, hungry puma.

Young is wounded in that confrontation, and makes his way to the apartment of his former cellmate Steve Lacey (Gene Nelson), where he expires on his lounge chair. Steve, having gotten married to Ellen (Phyllis Kirk) and gone straight, now working as an airplane mechanic, contends with a doctor-turned-veterinarian, Hessler (Jay Novello), whom on-the-lam crims rely on to patch up their wounds, and then with DeCorsia and Bronson, when they come around seeking their dead friend, soon realising as they do that Steve is the perfect replacement for Young in their upcoming big job, and can force him to do anything they want with Ellen in their hands. Steve is, soon, caught in a vice between apparently, equally careless representatives of the law and the underworld.

Hayden is memorably boorish and weary in his seen-it-all cynicism, dragged out of bed to inspect a murder scene, unshaven and wearing his tie back-to-front, and then grilling an array of frightened, anguished stoolies: there are eight million losers in his naked city. He takes a bare-faced pleasure in rattling his quarries that borders on the sadistic, but he finally proves not such a bad old soul. The stripped-down portrait of policing as a potentially morally ambivalent business, which can be as cruel as any of the criminality it purports to put down, is matched by crisply shot, almost constant location shooting, with plentiful procedural detail, revelling in a mix of fastidious realism and nocturnal fatalism that flows through many of the best ‘50s noir films (eg Armored Car Robbery, The Asphalt Jungle, The City Never Sleeps).

A thoroughly convincing cast (House of Wax fans like myself will of course spot all the recurring De Toth actors), except for the slightly too square Nelson, is peppered with professional creeps, especially the frayed, ineffably sleazy Novello, and a fabulous appearance by the immortal Timothy Carey as a hophead sex fiend in whose dubious hands DeCorsia leaves Kirk for the duration. It’s a great pity then that it resolves in a curtailed conclusion which badly disappoints the mounting tension and offers an easy escape hatch where the narrative has carefully closed off the alternatives.

Humoresque (1946)

What might have been a standard studio weepie is alchemised into a genuinely poetic-realist epic by Jean Negulesco’s brilliant filmmaking and the archly committed performances of John Garfield and Joan Crawford. You know the jazz: young man works hard to become champion violinist/boxer/bullfighter/apiarist/ostler, falls in love with no-good society queen in a tryst from which no good can come. Except that Negulesco paints this with the lightest dusting of haute-expressionist chic that makes the fullest use possible of the classical music backdrop in providing an grandiose score for a grandiose tale. Garfield is Paul Boray, the son of an immigrant grocer (J. Carroll Naish) who commits himself body and soul (sorry) to becoming a violin virtuoso, but finds he can only break into the kind of concert career he desires with the help of a patron – enter Crawford’s Helen Wright, a drunken, acerbic, secretly ardent society hostess, who helps launch Paul and soon enough commences a volatile affair with him.

The screenplay by Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold, from Fannie Hurst’s story, sports highly familiar characters, including the wise if brittle momma (Ruth Nelson) and the forlornly ignored gal-pal (Joan Chandler), who stick around to remind Paul of his contract with planet Earth, but the dialogue is remarkably intricate and the characters full-bodied and voluble in their oversized impulses and yearnings. It also encompasses telling portraits of anxiety over social mobility for immigrant children, and, more quietly, sexism and the politics of success. But of course, in the end, it’s all about the effervescent thrill of watching beautiful creatures suffer and die.

Perhaps only a bitch like Crawford could play a character like Helen with such spiky yet self-immolating intensity. The film sports perhaps a few too many musical sequences that stretch its running time excessively, as if to repeatedly show off the cleverness of the faking of Garfield’s prodigious talent (and, admittedly, let us hear Isaac Stern’s marvellous playing), and likewise works Oscar Levant’s wondrous drollery a bit too hard to offset the spiralling craziness. Like the equally overwrought, stylised, and subtly hysterical Bette Davis vehicle, Now Voyager (1942), however, Humoresque is an ideal of the ‘40s melodrama, which, curiously enough, treated their characters far more seriously and empathetically than any modern equivalents can manage.

And it’s perhaps too little recognised what strange, lustrously artful creations they are – like Voyager’s Irving Rapper, Negulesco never made as good a film, littered with lush lighting effects and dreamy dissolves that corrode the normally hard-bitten boundaries of the old studio form. Negulesco cuts loose with filmmaking that takes the idea of melody and drama being entwined to rare heights, including a strange montage of that links Paul’s labours with the workaday rhythms of the city, and the epic finale which intercuts Paul playing a version of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde with Helen’s succumbing to suicidal impulse and marching into the sea. As the film progresses, the naturalistic sense of New York’s street life and immigrant-kid grounding melts away, until all that’s left is a kind of gothic-moderne world of iconographic posters, dwarfing theatres, swanky apartments, and shadow-crammed night-spots, as Paul ascends into delirious realms of artistry, cash, and passion, and Helen descends into the briny deep. In some scenes, Negulesco predicts some of the operatic morbidity of Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Oh, and yes, that is Robert Blake playing the young Paul.

The Naked and the Dead (1958)

I should really hate Raoul Walsh’s adaptation of Norman Mailer’s great novel as much as my friend Marilyn Ferdinand hates Otto Preminger’s film of The Man With The Golden Arm, and the film’s first sequence justifies the prejudice entirely, turning the novel’s foul-mouthed but life-loving redneck Wilson (L.Q. Jones) into a rubbery, hooting caricature, cavorting with curvaceous dancers in a Honolulu night spot. It’s also problematic that it plays as a virtual follow-up – sharing director Walsh and stars Aldo Ray, Raymond Massey, and Jones – to the execrable adaptation of Leon Uris’s Battle Cry from three years earlier. Mailer’s own acerbic account of how he came to sell the film rights and then sue the producers is one of Advertisements for Myself’s most valuable and amusing segments. As it was, the defining WW2 novel of 1948 became just another addition to the endless roster of '50s war flicks. And no-one even says "fug".

Some weird casting – Joey Bishop? – doesn’t help initial credulity either, as the film substitutes the novel’s rich, cleanly analysed gallery of pan-American types, with terse caricatures. But whilst the film is sapped of subtlety and performs some dodgy narrative alterations, it proves a surprisingly direct and occasionally smart adaptation of a complex, rhetorical tome. It is, at the very least, a true film of the novel, rather than some reimagined piece of opportunism, and it avoids prestige production showiness, as Walsh’s stripped-down direction coolly allows extended sequences of crucial dialogue and gritty action to play out with simple intensity. Most importantly, the film's mordant ambivalence, neither exactly didactic or stoic, lets it hold its head up with The Bridge on the River Kwai and Paths of Glory from the year before in the emerging strain of ironic, anti-heroic war films.

Particularly, in two set-pieces of almost naturalistic flow of interaction that allows the story's depth to peek through. The first is between the soldiers in the platoon run by the malignant hard-ass Sgt. Croft (Aldo Ray), boiled on moonshine, which sees Croft deliver his addled speech on the necessities of soldiering and hatefully assaults the caricatured blonde Wilson has painted inside his sleeping bag, resembling as it does his own unfaithful wife (Lily St. Cyr). The second is between the prospective self-appointed übermensch General Cummings (an appropriately oily Massey), running the campaign to conquer the Japanese-held island of Anopopei, and his playboy liberal adjutant Lt. Hearn (Cliff Robertson, in a compact, promising performance). I don’t know if a touch like the flashback that sees Hearn recalling his endless sexual conquests in a pageant-like montage is witty or idiotic, but it does actualise the constant erotic fancy that the novel presented squarely in its soldiers, and gives some relief from Ray’s ugly mug.

The film also sports an eerie, compelling Bernard Herrmann score that captures the lurking menace of latent fascism and psychopathy endangering the lives of its PBI heroes, from the megalomaniac Cummings and the war-addicted Croft, both of whom symbolise and summarise the uglier faces of humanity revelling in violent combat. Where the script is flat and declarative, Herrmann's music and Walsh's taciturn film-making serve to do something like what Mailer's punchy prose achieved, and realise a moody, threatening kind of Technicolor combat film. Importantly, the movie doesn't elide the power and philosophical clashes struggles that are at the tale’s heart, which both Cummings and Croft have with the out-of-his-depth Hearn, and even manages to hint at the homoerotic underpinnings of Cummings’ persecution of Hearn. Walsh also retains many of the bitingly anti-climactic touches, the casual deaths for the most likeable characters, like the almost satirically cruel end of Roth (Bishop) on the mountain Croft finally tries to conquer, Moby Dick-like.

It does however monkey with the tale to make it Hearn rather than Wilson who’s carried back through the jungle by a desperately dedicated team, and he survives, rather than becoming a martyr to a conspiracy by varieties of power that was Mailer’s grim thesis and prediction for the post-War era. And Croft, who on the page fails only to achieve his triumph over the mountain, receives a straight villain’s comeuppance.

Such alterations weaken the irony of the conclusion in which one of Cummings’ functionaries wins the battle the General had planned to make his consummation, before a dreadful final summary from Hearn nearly but not quite despoils a tolerably neat film that’s neither flat-out disaster or a quiet triumph. It does stand relatively tall amongst Walsh's last few, mostly desultory films: he was 71 by the time this was released. But Charles Laughton’s hoped-for adaptation remains a tantalising dream. As it was, the Naked and the Dead could well have been the personnel of RKO Studios, which folded shortly after the film's completion.

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960)

Although it does not lack some pat, familiar refrains of both the popular theatre and filmmaking of its era, Delbert Mann’s adaptation of William Inge’s play is nonetheless richly conceived and lucidly handled. The film caused a stir at the time for its comparative frankness about sexuality, and it’s still rather more adult than many contemporary takes on the subject, looking with acuity into the relationship between marital and sexual frustration and social and fiscal anxiety, and confirming that fear of losing the footloose freedoms and potencies of youth are hardly a contemporary invention.

In the mid-1920s, Garrulous but failing Oklahoman paterfamilias Rubin Flood (Robert Preston) goes through a rough week when he loses his job as a salesman of livery as the motor car solidifies its place in American life. The film begins pointedly with Preston hoping for some morning glory and getting a rebuff. Anxious over his lack of education and still half in love with his rambunctious youth spent as a roustabout, he’s scared, especially considering that even before this he wasn’t bringing in much money, a fact that was causing his wife Cora (Dorothy McGuire) much angst and enforcing their waned sex life.

Drunk and near-hysterical, Preston returns home and has a concussive fight with his wife, leading to his slapping her and walking out to stay at the house of his not-quite girlfriend, Mavis Pruitt (Angela Lansbury), a widow who’s quite in love with Preston, but he’s not quite in love with her. McGuire finds herself staring down the barrel of real misery, and makes an entreaty to her self-important, irritating, but finally loyal sister Lottie (Eve Arden) and her repressed doctor husband Morris (Frank Overton). Meanwhile, mousy daughter Reenie (Shirley Knight), who’s scared sick of making her social debut, strikes up a tentative romance with a cadet, Arthur Golden (Lee Kinsolving), whose lack of familial support or social ease as a Jew in the provinces, is eating away at his febrile psyche.

As ever in Inge the bottle of booze is secreted in the kitchen cupboard, but The Dark at the Top of the Stairs is finally not a bitter familial melodrama, but a kind of melancholy comedy, laced with hysteria, that perhaps tries a bit too hard to reassure us things will be mostly alright in the end, but then again its roster of home truths sting sufficiently to require such reassurance, especially after confronting the worst in human nature and social situations that can consume families and individuals with equal aplomb. Mann doesn’t entirely erase staginess from Preston and McGuire’s performances, but they’re generally excellent in keeping their characters’ muted despair and determination to survive in balance, before the truly charming punchline. And the ever-terrific, ever-underused Knight and the tragic Kinsolving are salutary in their youthful talent.

The Banquet (Ye yan, 2006)

An altogether more persuasive and involving attempt to meld classical tragedy and wire-fu action than Zhang Yimou’s tiresome and overblown Curse of the Golden Flower, Xiaogang Feng’s The Banquet is a recognisable adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with some notable alterations. Most notably, as I recall, there was never this much high-flying, high-kicking action in Shakespeare, akin, to reverse the cultural traffic, to sticking multiple gunslinger duels into Dream of the Red Chamber. Feng and screenwriters Gangjian Qiu and Heyu Sheng also toy with the story to make Gertrude into Zhang Ziyi’s Empress Wan, not the mother of the Hamlet character but his former amour and then his stepmother, roped into marriage by his father the Emperor, and then seduced by usurping uncle Li (You Ge). Wan’s a sensual egotist whose only apparent positive trait is her still ardent attachment to the melancholy Prince, Wu Luan (Daniel Wu). Li, after snatching the imperial throne and Wan, whom he desperately wants to love and be loved by, tries and fails to have Wu Luan assassinated, along with the troupe of masked actors he’s been working with for three years.

But Wu survives, and makes it back to the palace to confront Wan and smoke out Li with his version of “The Mousetrap”. The Ophelia figure is Qing Nu (Xun Zhou), daughter to one of Li’s ministers, Taichang Yin (Jingwu Ma) and brother to his son, General Sun Yin (Xiaoming Huang). She receives a bitter taste of Wan’s wrath when she threatens her efforts to retain Wu’s affections, but refuses to back away, finally dying from a goblet full of poison intended by Wan for her husband at a celebratory banquet. The following massacre, appropriately, consumes all of them, except for Wan, who stands alone in a desolate triumph, but there’s still a nasty surprise waiting for her.

Like many recent Chinese mega-productions, The Banquet throws its lustrous visuals and scattershot ideas at the screen without much care for setting up either the plot, characters, or firm logic of narrative – the crucial relationship of Wu and Qing is terribly established – and Feng doesn’t quite work out how to effectively fuse the intimacy of high drama and the absurdities of modern wu xia action flicks. But nor does he retreat into the empty, jagged formalism Chen Kaige’s been specialising in the past decade, and he tackles the project with such voluble intensity it doesn’t matter too much in the end, for he digs into the aching hearts of all the major characters, and renders them compelling by the time the inevitable bloodbath rolls around. Zhang (equipped, amusingly, with an occasional body double to flesh out her character’s saucy charms) delights in playing an evil minx, and Zhou is lovely as the endangered Qing. But it's Ge who stands out with a marvellously measured turn as the cunning, vicious, but secretly romantic Claudius stand-in.

Go for Broke! (1951)

Robert Pirosh, who provided the pithy screenplay for William Wellman’s mighty Battleground (1949) and had an artful way of translating GI humour into screen-safe terms, wrote and directed this diverting little film about the 442nd Regiment, composed of Japanese-Americans, “Nisei”, who fought their way to a staggering number of citations and casualties during the Italian and French campaigns of WW2. It combines, then, two major ‘50s genres, the war flick and the social-problem drama, and succeeds through being relatively understated as it charts the conversion of Texan good ole boy Van Johnson from prejudiced martinet to stalwart defender of his charges, who don’t actually need much defending.

Pirosh almost completely resists speechifying, instead concentrating on convincingly portraying growing camaraderie, and noting the elisions of prejudiced mentalities. He (perhaps inevitably) romanticises the controversial action in the rescue of the “Lost” 36th Infantry Battalion at Biffontaine, where the Nisei suffered nearly 50% casualties, and offers some stock figures – e.g. the resentful roughneck, the likeable goofball trying to keep a pet (a pig, no less), etc – but resists forcing their individual arcs in any particular direction: only sudden death provides sure closure, without gung-ho heroics or foul-ups making good. Pirosh insists on restrained, humanist warmth, sparing a few thoughts for the intriguing spectacle of men with roots in Eastern culture but planted firmly in the American now immersed in a European landscape studded with remnants of yet another culture.

Pirosh furthermore essays a studiously sarcastic humour throughout, in observing the soldiers’ efforts to deal both with warfare and social tension, as in their extended riffing on their attachment to a Texan unit that sees them greeting each-other with endless ‘howdies’ and B-Western dialogue, a fair reminder moreover that today’s pop-culture-inflected humour derives a great deal from GI lingo and artworks derived from it. The constant drollery keeps Go For Broke! from feeling heavy and dutiful, and distracts from Pirosh’s flat staging of action and the evidently low budget. The film also faces with surprising directness the Nisei’s anger over their family’s situations in the relocation camps and their own frustration in not being allowed to fight in the Pacific. Many of the “Buddha-Heads” are played by real veterans of the 442nd, with uneven performances, but they all radiate disingenuous appeal. Whilst nothing especially distinguished, Go For Broke! remains a worthy work precisely by not trying so hard to be worthy.

The Evil of Frankenstein (1964)

The third Hammer Studios Frankenstein film was the first in six years, and in current parlance it constituted a reboot of the franchise, for director Freddie Francis, and screenwriter Anthony Hinds (writing under his pseudonym of John Elder), took over the reins after Terence Fisher suffered a car crash, adding to his woes after the failure of the archly romantic The Phantom of the Opera (1962). Evil begins in line with the series continuity, with Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing), exiled and hunted out by guardians of morality everywhere, returning to his old town of Karlstaad to try and salvage some remnants of his inheritance. He’s still accompanied by his scientifically curious assistant Hans (Sandor Elès), and soon gains a third assistant in the form of a deaf-mute beggar girl (Katy Wild).

Evil soon diverts from the series narrative when Frankenstein explains to Hans the circumstances of his original exile, tossing out the story of Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and substituting a tale that allows for a new development: Frankenstein discovers his original monster frozen in ice, and now bearing a distinct resemblance to the old Boris Karloff monster design. This contrivance takes advantage of the fact that Hammer, whose films were being distributed by Universal, had struck a deal to imitate the Jack Pierce monster, unfortunately realised through some staggeringly clumsy make-up that more closely resembles Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein (1974). The film digs further back into the Universal template, borrowing a castle-levelling calamity from Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and the idea of the monster entrapped in ice from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). In this way, Evil becomes more a one-off tribute to famous forebears than a member of the Hammer cycle.

It also allows Francis and Hinds to push even further the redesignation of Frankenstein, hinted at in The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), as a closet humanitarian, and now make him a long-suffering, less ambiguous figure that the borderline psychopathic, grossly privileged aristocrat of Curse. Thus, when he arrives back in Karlstaad, he’s horrified to find his shuttered chateau has been looted and trashed, and, outraged to see his possessions in the hands of local potentates. But it’s a fairground hypnotist, Zoltan (Peter Woodthorpe), whom Frankenstein approaches to stimulate the creature’s addled brain once it’s been thawed and revived, who utilises the monster for means of theft and vengeance.

The drunken, power-seeking Zoltan, then, becomes Frankenstein’s guilty conscience, which is exactly what the creatures in Fisher’s Frankenstein films tend to become, and also a substitute as malefic misuser of medical arts. But the half-hearted script doesn’t find much charge in that contrast, and the film as a whole doesn’t work up anything like the serial pace and force of Fisher’s works, which papered over even the thin script of another series reboot, 1966’s Dracula, Prince of Darkness. Francis was a technically proficient filmmaker who took advantage of Hammer’s higher budgets in the mid ‘60s to make some good-looking films. But he was also a fairly plodding director who never could dig into the more scurrilous side of genre in the way that Hammer stable-mates like Fisher, Peter Sasdy, or Seth Holt could.

Still, if you’re after an enjoyable old horror film, it’s certainly worthwhile, because at this point Hammer’s template still demanded sober telling and decent acting. Evil manages to be quite entertaining even whilst being one of the least worthy early Hammer productions, because it is well-produced by Hammer standards, whilst retaining the studio’s crisp, no-nonsense solidity in settings and lustrous colour, and replicates Fisher’s imbuing the Baron’s experiments with the flavour of some lost mid-ground between Victorian science and alchemy.

But Zoltan’s villainy never gains any real crackle because his sub-plot is rushed and clumsy, his reasons for misusing his influence badly articulated, as is the tentative relationship between the speechless, victimised girl and the hulking but malleable monster, whilst both the Baron and his beast become, in essence, pathetic victims. The finale consequently fails to build much real tension, or to generate any pathos in their (apparent) mutual destruction.

Where Fisher in Curse and Revenge managed to construct dark complexity in making the Baron both despicable in his free and easy sense of life and death, and yet moving in his dedication to his vision constantly threatened by self-righteous and intrusive, destructive people, here he’s just a put-upon anti-hero. Cushing, nonetheless, is as committed to the role as ever and even gets to exhibit some of the swashbuckling dash he had as Van Helsing.

State of Play (2009)

Is it just me, or does many a thriller these days start off well, and yet fail to nail its concluding act? Many of them suffer from divided personalities that usually cannot quite reconcile to being either intense and believable, or hyped-up and spotted with action, and they all seem to finish up revolving around the same tricks of secreted recording devices and waved guns. State of Play, adapted by Kevin Macdonald from his own British teledrama, is no exception, being a deliberately low-tech, noir-inflected drama about investigation, but sporting unlikely physical confrontations and a throwaway last-minute twist that’s neither especially believable nor compelling, but feels merely dutiful.

State of Play is about unravelling both public and private malfeasance in Washington, with its doughy, scruffy antihero Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe), as shaggy and endangered as the form itself, an experienced and skilled print journalist, saddled with outmoded ideals and some unacknowledged conflicts of interest, digging into scandal and murder teeming around his old college buddy, Rep. Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), who may be the target for discrediting by monstrous private security form Pointcorp, chief beneficiary of outsourced military contracts and employment of mercenaries in the War on Terror, when his chief researcher (and girlfriend) turns up dead.

In the course of his excavations, Cal takes on a kind of acolyte in goggle-eyed but whip-smart blogger Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), not much more than a gossip columnist, who has to grow up swiftly on the job when she’s faced with immediate violence and morally slippery expediencies, as when a witness is shot in front of her, and when Cal confronts her with some of the sleazier tactics of journalism. The usual imagery and gimmicks of the conspiracy-flick come into play: the rogue shadowy assassin, the omnipotent evil company, the structure that entwines the lowest person on the street with the highest spheres of office, the plucky hero only partly aware of his own frailty both physically and ethically, all portrayed in a teeming landscape of capital edifices and bland constructions spot-lit amidst inky night-scapes.

This is merged with a surprisingly straight variation on the old deadline-beating reporter drama that was old-hat by His Girl Friday, and inevitably evokes All the President’s Men as Cal and Della try to keep their hard-assed but finally supportive editor, Cameron Lynne (Helen Mirren), on their side. Like Tykwer’s The International this year, and last year’s Michael Clayton, it’s unashamedly paranoid in its suspicions about corporate prerogative, and, again like both of them, can’t quite work out how to escape the octopus’s clutches in a logical fashion, without clumsily compromising its essential themes and still delivering a satisfying finale. The days when Hitchcock tied these together with both efficiency and spectacle or Alan Pakula did it with spare menace are sorely missed.

At least the film has characters of some substance, for Cal and Stephen are more closely and fractiously linked than either would like, with Cal having had an affair with Stephen’s wife Anne (Robin Wright Penn, affectingly soulful – perhaps bit too much so) that binds all three of them in knots of friendship, resentment, and guilt. The efficacies of being both a seamy bastard oneself and yet possessing a scrupulous sense of truth are intriguingly introduced through both Cal, who shambles along like a homeless dog whenever he’s not the bloodhound tracking a scent like a drug, and Collins, who’s caught in a bind he can’t escape from, but pushes ahead anyway. But the film’s generic bent dulls opportunities to make it truly rich in this regard: the human drama proves to be little more than complicating back-story on the way to Cal scoring a younger girlfriend.

But what am I complaining about? Accepted clichés, compromises, and all, State of Play is engaging and thoroughly entertaining, mostly because of its cast, studded with excellence down to the smallest parts, and who tackle it with gusto. Crowe pulls off the trick of being effortlessly magnetic even when playing a character who’s seventh-tenths jerk...okay not much of a stretch there. Casting the adorable McAdams here, as in Red Eye, seems akin to an act of sadism, but McAdams is a cagey actress who knows how to turn her “dewy cub reporter eyes”, as Lynne describes them, and perky suburban voice to advantage, for she and Crowe play off each-other beautifully. Mirren herself is terrifically wry as Lynne, and Affleck is effective as a golden boy going to seed. Kudos too for Jeff Daniels, sleek and convincing as a fascist disguised by hypocritical religious scruples, Harry Lennix as a dry and reprehending detective, and Jason Bateman in what I think can now be called the Jason Bateman role, that of a slick, glib twit in over his head.

Goya’s Ghosts (2006)

Not quite as bad as some critics said, and yet also a long way from great, Milos Forman turns in a sloppy and dispiritingly disjointed work here. Which may not entirely be his fault, for the film shows signs of editing-room butchery and production problems, but that would not have saved it either way from a corny and ill-focused storyline. A terrible pity, because it is a project of potential: a film charting the painter Francisco Goya’s (Stellan Skarsgard) perspective on Spanish society in the late Enlightenment, and the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion.

Unfortunately, this perspective is awkwardly realised through his relationship with two fictional characters: Lorenzo (Javier Bardem), a priest of the Inquisition who tries to revive the old practises in order to repress new tides of thought; and Inés (Natalie Portman), a merchant’s daughter and one of Goya’s favourite muses, who is accused of being a “Judaiser” when it’s noticed she doesn’t like eating pork. She is tortured and sent to rot in prison when she confesses to end the pain. Her father, Tomás (José Luis Gómez, very good), uses Goya to ask for Lorenzo’s help, for Goya is painting Lorenzo's portrait. The priest, prompted to check on Inés, is affected by her beauty, and he takes advantage of her when she’s shackled naked in her cell. In the film’s best scene, Tomás invites Lorenzo to dinner, and strings up from the ceiling in approximation of the Inquisition’s tortures, and forces him to sign a confession to being a monkey, as proof of the Inquisition’s idiocies. But the church officials, led by the unctuous Father Gregorio (Michael Lonsdale), still won’t let her go, and Lorenzo soon has to flee the country when Tomás gives his confession to the King (Randy Quaid, oddly cast to say the least, but decent).

Fifteen years later, when the French invade, Ines is finally released, a withered and sickly hag, pining for the daughter she had in jail to Lorenzo, who, as absurd screenwriting or fate would have it, has come back to Spain as a French legate. The obvious point, as it soon proves, is that Lorenzo has swapped one all-sweeping conviction for another, with nearly exactly the same prerogatives. He and Goya, who has gone deaf in the meantime, search for Inés’ now-grown daughter Alicia (Portman again), and the painter finds her working as a prostitute. Lorenzo tries to pack her off to America, but she and other whores are captured by British soldiers, so Alicia returns to Madrid as the mistress of an English officer, there to cheer on Lorenzo’s final execution when he decides to stand on his principals and refuse to repent.

The film’s relevance as parable isn’t elided, as it purposefully explores torture as a tool of state and the intricate relationship between repressive violence and fanatical conviction, and knowingly portrays the Bonapartist soldiers expecting to be greeted as liberators. Forman and co-writer Jean-Claude Carriere also cast a rather trashy eye on the sado-mashochistic violence inflicted on women's bodies in the intensely sexualised humiliation encoded within Inquisitorial practises. But it adds up to little, because virtually nothing in the film develops any real substance: it’s stranded fatally between wanting to be a work of genuine historical portraiture, and grandiose yarn-spinning.

The characterisations are barely coherent, and the themes fragmented by the silly plot, which isn’t handled with the verve required of epic melodrama, and certainly can’t be considered in the realms of seriousness of its obvious precursor, Andrei Rublev. The fairly absorbing early segments are betrayed by amazingly flat anti-climaxes, leading to a finale that tries for ironic tragedy and yet carries no weight whatsoever. Goya is practically absent from his own film, the very real and intense artistic and social conscience that inspired his famous sketches of the war unforgivably fumbled in the portrayal. Forman manages a few interesting images, as when the deaf Goya perceives street-fighting as soundless flashes of light and smoke, and yet Forman completely fails to effectively conjure a sense of a fragmented, violence-wracked society: his montages are ineffective and disconnected from the overall texture. The actors do what they can: Portman has a blast in playing dewy young Inés, twisted older Inés, and fiery Alicia. But the film is a colossal failure.

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2008)

What could have been a Lost in Translation for the iTunes crowd is wounded by the irritating insistence of modern romantic comedies to play out like thrillers, with bitchy ex-paramours to spurn and heroic acts of self-determination to make – which boils down here to hero Nick (Michael Cera) abandoning former girlfriend Tris (Alexis Dziena) in downtown Manhattan on her own in the middle of the night. I call ungentlemanly and contrived on this, sir. And I sincerely doubt, even in these great post-Giuliani days, that club life in New York is quite so squeaky-clean as portrayed here.

Otherwise Nick and Norah’s a charming and vivacious stab at creating a young-hipster romance, achieving an elegant variety of contemporary teen comedy, laced with keen detail in the milieu and characters it portrays. It also sports that night-time odyssey structure I’m always a total sucker for: this one lands somewhere between the soft-pop of Adventures in Babysitting and the hard-core of Eyes Wide Shut (okay, far closer to the former than the latter), whilst referencing classic screwball, obviously invoking in its protagonists' names The Third Man, as well as It Happened One Night, with more than a dash of American Graffiti. And yet the story is built around a gimmick pinched from that old episode of The Wonder Years where the characters spent all night trying to find the Rolling Stones gig.

The plot, such as it is, sees Nick, bass player for a queercore band, currently called The Jerk-Offs – Nick’s the straight one of the trio, lacking as they do a drummer of either orientation – and about to head off to college, suffering from a severely broken heart after the cheating Tris finally dumps him. His bandmates drag him out for a gig, and there’s the teasing promise of a performance sometime during the night by the legendary band Where’s Fluffy?, who never announce their gigs but leave clues around town to guide fans thither.

Which is pretty dumb marketing, if you ask me, but moving right along...Tris drags her useless new boyfriend to the gig, and two of Tris’s school friends also end up there: straight-laced Norah (Kat Dennings), and her boozy friend Caroline (Ari Graynor). Norah worships Nick unknowingly as the compiler of marvellous mix CDs which he’s been sending to Tris, who promptly throws them away. Taken with his gawky cool when finally meeting him, she tries to deflect Tris’s bitchiness by asking Nick to pretend to be her boyfriend for five minutes. Many shenanigans and misunderstandings intervene before their dawn-light departure from the city as a couple.

Playlist manages that tricky balancing act of making its two heroes both insanely cute, and yet also volatile and recognisably human, as Nick and Norah constantly trip over each-other’s hang-ups and anxieties in their teasing back-and-forth conversations, which are lithe and witty but thankfully not hammered into angular stylisation a la Juno. One particularly telling moment sees Nick decry accepting any particular label and Norah rolling her eyes in cliché of the statement, of which they’re both painfully aware. And yet Norah herself, a Jewish princess who’s the daughter of a famous recording studio owner (a fact that causes her more pain and embarrassment than anything else, although it does get her into clubs with speed), can't live up to her status, being often as awkward and malleable as she is smart-mouthed and spry. Flirtation alternates with argument and the clumsiness of two young people still trying to work themselves out is well-portrayed, and they consummate their attraction in a sequence that manages to be gorgeously erotic without showing a thing, as they make love in a recording studio, Norah's first actual orgasm registering on the sound bench's dials.

Cera seems to be a one-trick pony as an actor, but he’s still damnably likeable, and allowed to stretch his legs here with an effective characterisation, and the unbearably comely Dennings delivers a fine characterisation. Graynor has a lot of fun as Caroline, who spends most of the film stumbling around in an alcoholic daze, whether plucking her chewing gum out of the toilet and leaping up with a Christmas tree on her head during a gay revue.

Lesbian Vampire Killers (2009)

It might be utterly foolish to call a film called Lesbian Vampire Killers a disappointment, especially considering that it aims low and scores quite a few funny goals, but it is still a lost opportunity. It’s a title no film could really live up to without pushing the boundaries of censorship and mainstream taste to the limit, and not, more importantly, without a bolder grasp of the subgenre it tackles satirically. Directed by Phil Claydon, from a screenplay by Stewart Williams and Paul Hupfield, LVK tries to do for ‘70s Hammer and Euro-horror what Edgar Wright, Nick Frost, and Simon Pegg did for zombie flicks and cop thrillers, but with an edge borrowed more from TV comedy that plays the portentousness of genre clichés against low-brow contemporary mores of lad culture and the popular zeitgeist’s T&A obsession.

Two Londoner losers, Jimmy (Matthew Horne), recently dumped for the seventh time by his horny, wayward girlfriend Judy (Lucy Gaskell), and his portly mate Fletch (James Corden), just fired from his job as a party clown for clocking a bratty kid, decide to escape their troubles, and lack of bread, by heading off for a hiking holiday. Having tossed a dart at a map to decide their destination, they finish up in the remote village of Cragwich in rural Devonshire. That town has been cursed for centuries by vampire queen Carmilla (Silvia Colloca), causing every girl in the village to become one of her army of undead gal-loving ghouls on her eighteenth birthday, keeping the men in the village alive only to help them snare new prey. When they enter the compulsory creepy tavern filled by weird-looking blokes, Jimmy murmurs that he feels like he’s stumbled into a “medieval gay bar”.

Jimmy, gentle and bewildered, and Fletch, foul-mouthed and desperate to get laid, hook onto a holidaying foursome of jiggly Swedish students (in a VW microbus, no less). Whilst Fletch tries to make one of the others who dance to crap techno and smoke copious amounts of pot, Jimmy is taken with their most sensible member, Lotte (foxy MyAnna Buring), who proves to combine traits of three of the genre's favourite female figures: the virgin waiting for the perfect man, the nerdy student of folklore who knows all about the legend of Carmilla, and the kick-ass action heroine.

Pretty soon of course her three fellows have been snatched away and chowed on by the vamps, and the two twits and their plucky gal pal have to fight off the rest, with the aid of the village’s vigorous Vicar (Paul McGann, amusingly channelling Peter Cushing’s iron moralism), who’s desperate to stop the vamps before his own daughter Rebecca (Emer Kenny) comes of age at midnight. Carmilla’s former lover and leader of the horde, Eva (Vera Filatova) realises that Jimmy is the descendent of Carmilla’s slayer, a heroic knight of yore, and his blood mixed with Lotte’s virginal blood can resurrect Carmilla. But Carmilla, and the entire curse, can be laid to rest by the knight’s sword, with a handle that’s rather too phallic for the boys’ comfort.

Claydon employs the imagery of classic gothic-horror with intelligence and vivacity, depicting Cragwich’s woods as gnarled, fog-riddled abodes, and the vampires as wraith-like spooks, so that LVK is by default the best visual approximation of the gothic style since Sleepy Hollow. Symbolic of the horror film in general, the lesbian vampire subgenre, depending on how it’s played, can be either the most prurient and reactionary or the most scurrilous and sensual of breeds, and the filmmakers tackle it with a jokey comprehension of the symbolism it invokes, particularly in that phallic weapon, made by the underworld demon “Dieldo”, as the annihilator of the lesbian bitch-queen. Filatova’s Eva has exactly the right attitude of sepulchral sauciness. The script explicitly counterpoints the heroes’ sexual frustration and emasculation, and latent gay panic, against the sensualised liberation of the Sapphic trollops, building to some decent comic punch-lines, like the death of one recently-turned vampire – they all liquefy upon expiring – leaving Fletch clutching her silicon implants. But the film fluffs many gags, and lurches to a conclusion, played very nearly straight, with sloppy story development. Even in loopy comedy, you can't just toss the ideas at the screen.

Writers Wiliams and Hupfield apparently originally conceived the tale as a B-movie, and it’s a pity they didn’t roll with a more serious realisation, because the core ideas, especially the notion of a town in which all the women are heir to a vivid sexual transformation that inverses the power structure, has a certain cheeky, unrealised potential, particularly in the subplot of Rebecca, which provides the film’s clumsiest aspect. In this way LVK never develops into a truly sophisticated crossbreed like obvious precursors An American Werewolf in London and The Fearless Vampire Killers. When it comes to its central conceit, in acknowledging so baldly the sexiness of the genre, it’s weirdly shy of that aspect, as if looking squarely as its lesbian vamps doing lesbian vamp things might take the spotlight away from its dopey heroes and the laddish humour style, and, by implication, is finally afraid of the erotic peril at the heart of the type of tale it intends to mock and exploit.