Backfire (1950)

Posted on November 14, 2014 by badblokebob

2014 #43
Vincent Sherman | 87 mins | TV | 4:3 | USA / English

Before he was the romantic male lead in musicals like Tea for Two, Oklahoma! and Carousel, Gordon MacRae starred as a war veteran out to prove his friend’s innocence in this underrated film noir.

MacRae is Bob Corey, our hero, whose hospital bed is visited by a woman (Viveca Lindfors) who tells him his army buddy Steve (Edmond O’Brien) has been in a horrible accident. The staff dismiss his story as an hallucination, but when he gets out, Bob and his new love, nurse Julie (Virginia Mayo), set out to find out what’s happened to Steve — who, it turns out, is wanted for murder — and find themselves negotiating a complex web of past events and future dangers….

Backfire doesn’t seem to be very well regarded on the whole (though, in spite of that, there’s a surprising amount of production detail on Wikipedia). This may be because at times it feels more like an Agatha Christie mystery than a film noir: a pair of clean-cut amateur sleuths bumble their way through a string of clues, learning more and more about the plot thanks to other characters’ flashbacks. I like a good Christie mystery though, so the pairing of styles isn’t a problem for me.

Besides, even if the film seems to forgo the usual gritty noir trappings for a pleasant “English murder mystery”-type tale at first, it actually has its fair share of dark elements and noir-ish features, which only increase as it goes on: secretive gangsters, nightclub singers, revenge shootings… Then there’s the photography which, again, transitions from a fairly ‘regular’ (for want of a better word) style early on, to a world of rain-slicked streets and high-contrast lighting.

The story is reportedly “lifted from other, many times better, films”, which may well be true, but clearly I’ve not seen them. It all builds to a twist that I didn’t see coming, which is always good in my book; plus a final shoot-out featuring something that never seems to happen in films: the villain loses because he runs out of bullets! Along the way, the movie challenges the audience to keep up with which flashback is taking place when and how they’re connected to each other — indeed, the really attentive viewer might be able to use that to correctly guess the ultimate reveal.

MacRae is perfectly decent as the perfectly decent chap, who somehow manages to be a much better detective than any of the detectives. He’s aided by a sterling supporting cast, from the club singer’s tag-along roommate (Sheila Stephens — later Sheila MacRae) to the ex-army buddy mortician (Dane Clark), from the slightly creepy hotel desk clerk (who isn’t adequately credited) to the wisecracking police chief (Ed Begley).

It’s in the latter’s case that the writing gets a chance to shine, too: the chief’s flashback is littered with snappy dialogue that feels kinda like he’s telling you the story himself, not just a matter-of-fact “here’s what happened earlier” objective account. Other flashbacks retain a degree of subjectivity — we only see events the characters could have witnessed, and in some cases the way they witnessed them (like the cleaning lady who only sees customers’ feet, before spying through a keyhole in a shot complete with keyhole matte) — but there’s an idea there, briefly glimpsed in that detective’s flashback, that would’ve made for an even more interesting film.

As it stands, Backfire isn’t all it could be, but I think it’s good for more than the consensus allows.

Backfire is on TCM (UK) tomorrow, Saturday 15th November 2014, at 1:15pm.

La Belle et la Bête (1946)

Posted on November 11, 2014 by badblokebob

aka Beauty and the Beast

“When it comes to “fairy-tale movies” — if such a genre exists as something other than a profit center for the Disney corporation — there is Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast and then there is everything else.”

So states Geoffrey O’Brien in his essay “Dark Magic” (included in the booklet for Criterion’s Blu-ray release of La Belle et la Bête, and available online here). Despite the varied list of titles people have selected to cover for the Fairy Tale Blogathon, I feel it’s a pretty accurate statement — ask most people to name a film based on a fairy tale and they’re going to come out with a Disney; ask a cinephile and I suspect, as a rule, Cocteau’s acclaimed film would come to mind ahead of most others. After all, it’s on a variety of well-regarded best-ever lists, including both the cineastic (TSPDT, Sight & Sound, Cahiers du cinéma) and the mainstream (the Empire 500, IMDb Top 50s for Fantasy and 1940s). It’s a film considered almost without peer in its now-animation-dominated sub-genre.

I imagine you know the story — it’s a tale as old as time, after all — but let’s recap anyway: in lieu of her father, Belle (Josette Day) goes to be the ‘guest’ of the animal-like Beast (Jean Marais) in his castle. Initially repulsed by him, Belle comes to realise there’s something there that wasn’t there before as she grows attracted to her captor. Meanwhile, Belle’s would-be suitor (Marais again) resolves to kill the Beast…

As if I haven’t made it explicit enough with my shoehorning of song titles and lyrics, the elephant in the room when discussing La Belle et la Bête today is Disney’s 1991 adaptation of the same story. It may have come 45 years later and I’m sure is less kindly looked upon by cineastes, but there’s no doubting its popularity — and acclaim, in fact, notably being the first animated movie to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Simply put, Cocteau’s film is less accessible than the Disney version. That might sound like it goes without saying, but even allowing for the differences in production style (slick colourful animation with catchy Broadway-style tunes vs. black-and-white French poetic realism), here the characters’ relationships are more complex and ambiguous, particularly at the climax. It isn’t a simple “see the true beauty behind the ugly exterior” moral fable; indeed, if anything, Marais’ Beast is more beautiful than the man he becomes.

There are several reasons for that. One is the visual: Marcel Escoffier’s resplendent costuming, Henri Alekan’s gorgeous cinematography (more on that later), and, primarily, Hagop Arakelian’s make-up. Taking five hours to apply every day, the look of the Beast is in no way a dated ’40s special effect, but a marvellous, expressive, essential part of the character. Nonetheless, as O’Brien notes,

[The Beast says,] “You mustn’t look into my eyes.” It is, of course, his eyes that we look at, glistening from within the multilayered makeup… makeup so expressive that Marais’ real face seems a blank by comparison.

As is alluded to there, it’s not just the stuck-on fur that makes the man a Beast, but Marais’ performance. The eyes may indeed be the window to the soul, for it’s through them that we can see he’s a man underneath the beastly visage. But even in that sphere the character is a man transformed — his manner, his voice, and the steely look that often lies behind those eyes. In her essay named after the film in the BFI’s Gothic – The Dark Heart of Film compendium, Marina Warner summarises the cumulative effect of the numerous filmmaking disciplines that created the character:

[Cocteau] imagined a beast who has no rival for hideous fascination among fairytale beasts before or since: Jean Marais’s growling, slowed, incantatory delivery, his sweeping, elaborately princely magnificence of apparel, his thick pelt curling out exuberantly from his lace collar and fine linen as he springs and lopes, and, above all, his staring pale eyes in the great leonine and brindled mask of his face with the two sharp incisors defining his mouth, has never been matched for erotic power. He captures a perfect and irresistible synthesis of repulsiveness and attractiveness.

That final idea, of the erotic or sexual in the film, seems a favourite theme for critics: O’Brien reckons “the magic is sexual throughout — a fantastic… sex magic”, and I think we’ll skip Warner’s lengthy discussion of the feelings the film elicits in her. How prevalent such undercurrents are is surely in the eye of the beholder — O’Brien notes that “it is so chaste that no censor could have ever assailed it”, and I suspect many a viewer would feel the same. That said, the soft-lensed scene in which the Beast gently laps water from Belle’s delicately cupped hands may make viewers with a particularly-disposed mind think of certain other acts.

A more defining feature of the film’s depiction of magic, I think, is its groundedness. O’Brien sums it up most succinctly when he says that “if this is magic, it is a shaggy, palpable sort of magic… we sense at each moment that we are caught up in a process governed by laws”. We rarely know what these laws are, in fact, but there’s a sense that there’s some governing order to what occurs, that some things are possible and others not — there’s clearly no love potion to solve the Beast’s problem, for instance. Many uses of magic in the film come with associated “how to use it” guides from one character or another; not presented in some kind of deconstructionist technical-manual style, but neither are they a hand-wavy “it’ll do whatever we need it to when we need it to”. To quote O’Brien again:

Cocteau was able to realize the fantastic not as an escape from the real but as an extension of it… He approaches the paraphernalia of the fairy tale — those enchanted mirrors, keys, gloves — with a technician’s dispassion, no more taken aback by their existence than by the existence of trees or streams or horses or rose gardens.

Cocteau was trying to move away from a wishy-washy kind of fantasy — indeed, he says as much in the press book for the film’s US premiere (a piece entitled “Once Upon a Time” and also included in Criterion’s booklet): “To fairyland, as people usually see it, I would bring a kind of realism to banish the vague and misty nonsense now so completely outworn.” In these respects you could probably draw a line from Cocteau to something like Peter Jackson’s films of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where a not-real world with magical qualities is rendered with the precision of historical drama, and even Game of Thrones, which you could certainly mistake for a real-life medieval epic (until the dragons turn up). Cocteau’s vision feels a little more storybook than either of those, but everything’s a step on a journey.

Plus, unlike either of those examples, Cocteau’s film needs to draw a line between the everyday world and the fantastical one. Much as with the Beast, this is achieved with a synthesis of production elements. The farmhouse of Belle’s family is shot on location, providing inescapable realism, and with relatively straightforward photography from Alekan. It’s not that these section are unimaginative, just that they present a world that is ‘normal’. The Beast’s castle, on the other hand, is heightened and expressionistic. Christian Bérard’s production design offers sets with lots of black emptiness in place of floors and walls, with decorations and dressings that shine, gleam and glow in Alekan’s lighting — not to mention the candelabras with self-lighting candles, held by moving arms; or the faces set in the fireplace, whose roving eyes follow the action; or the hand protruding bizarrely from the tabletop, there purely to pour the wine.

It’s in the Beast’s castle that the most enduring images of the film are played out, most famous among them being Belle’s father’s arrival, with the candles igniting themselves and the hands pointing the way, and Belle’s own arrival, a slow-motion run with billowing dress and curtains — if you haven’t seen the original, you’ve surely seen an advert inspired by it. For all the groundedness Cocteau and co may be bringing to the fantastical, it’s still a strange realm; one rendered with loving beauty in its design and photography, but with an unsettling effect. Right on the money, then.

And if we’re talking about “unsettling beauty”, we’ve surely come back round to the Beast himself, and in particular his role in the ending. You know how that turns out: having been able to see the true goodness beneath the ugly exterior, Belle is rewarded when the Beast is transformed back into a handsome prince. Hurrah — she gets a hubby who is both nice and pretty! But is it such a victory after all? Not if Cocteau gets his way:

My story would concern itself mainly with the unconscious obstinacy with which women pursue the same type of man, and expose the naïveté of the old fairy tales that would have us believe that this type reaches its ideal in conventional good looks. My aim would be to make the Beast so human, so sympathetic, so superior to men that his transformation into Prince Charming would come as a terrible blow to Beauty, condemning her to a humdrum marriage.

Good moral message, but isn’t the “superior” Beast the same fella as Prince Charming? The way a felled Avenant is transformed into the Beast at the same time as Charming is unveiled as a more-perfect duplicate of Avenant (it’s Marais in all three roles, of course) suggests some kind of parallel should be drawn. Warner wonders, “Has the Beast taken on [Avenant’s] appearance because [Belle] admitted to him that she was fond of Avenant?” Could be, but isn’t that a bit simple? She has another theory: “does Cocteau want to suggest that a ne’er-do-well like Avenant can also be transformed by love?” Could it be Avenant is about to get a lesson in how to be a better person, as Charming has already endured?

These are all attempts to find a positive reading of the ending, I think — one where love conquers all, and what it hasn’t conquered is a mission for the future. O’Brien is a bit more pessimistic, concluding the film is “a story more full of suffering than of wish fulfillment”. Oh dear. He believes that “even as Belle and her prince (the Beast transformed into the double of the unreliable Avenant) soar in the sky, she seems already to realize that this is not exactly what she wanted.” It’s certainly true that every character in the film goes through some misery, be it small (Belle’s sisters being snubbed from social engagements) or big (the family’s destitution), and by the end very few of these are resolved. If Belle thought she was getting an honourable Beast and instead has to suffer a preened Avenant for her foreseeable future, then she’s lost out too. Indeed, the only one who got what he wanted was the Beast: transformed back into a man, and with a lovely new wife to boot.

There’s a cheery message to end on. But then, this is “a fairytale for grownups” — a quote from Warner, but, to an extent, it would seem Cocteau agreed (by implication, with his statement at the start of the film urging the audience to embrace child-like acceptance of the story they are about to see) — and the resolutions of grownup stories are rarely “happy ever after”.

This review is part of the Fairy Tale Blogathon. Be sure to check out the many other fascinating articles collated at Movies Silently, including my review of fairytale-inspired miniseries The 10th Kingdom.

The 10th Kingdom (2000)

Posted on November 9, 2014 by badblokebob

2014 #104a
David Carson & Herbert Wise | 416 mins* | DVD | 4:3 | USA, UK & Germany / English | 15**

Created by British screenwriter Simon Moore (writer of Traffik, the Channel 4 miniseries that went on to inspire Steven Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning film, and the first Dinotopia miniseries, which could not-too-inaccurately be described as “The 10th Kingdom with dinosaurs”), The 10th Kingdom is a miniseries that I seem to remember Sky made quite a fuss about when they aired it over here, nearly 15 years ago. Sadly it flopped on NBC in its native America, so we haven’t been treated to the mooted sequel(s), but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth investigating now: unlike the abundance of Lost-inspired rolling TV narratives that are ruined when (almost inevitably) they’re cut short, The 10th Kingdom tells a complete self-contained story.

Said story takes place in both present-day (well, turn-of-the-millennium) New York and the fantasy world of the Nine Kingdoms — unlike the depiction in the title sequence, New York doesn’t mutate into a fantasy kingdom. Although it may not be storyline-accurate, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that’s one of the greatest title sequences of all time. In just a couple of minutes it conveys the style and theme of the show with effective, striking imagery. OK, the CGI is a little dated now, looking kinda rough around the edges, but it’s not so bad that it diminishes the sequence’s impact. It won an Emmy for Outstanding Main Title Design, and it was well deserved.

Anyway, the Nine Kingdoms is the place all our fairytales come from — the part of the narrative set there takes place “almost 200 years” after the “Golden Age”, when the events we know from stories actually happened. We’re led into this world by Virginia (Kimberly Williams) and her dad, Tony (John Larroquette), after indolent monarch-to-be Prince Wendell (Daniel Lapaine) flees to our world while escaping the Evil Queen (Dianne Wiest) and winds up taking the two New Yorkers back to his world. Along with Wolf (Scott Cohen), a chap with animalistic tendencies, the quartet try to stop the Evil Queen’s evil machinations.

So it’s a quest narrative, the staple of fantasy storytelling; but, in this case, that allows Moore to explore a fair chunk of the world he’s created. It goes about that at its own, somewhat literary, speed. Published alongside the miniseries’ airing was an epically-sized novelisation by Kathryn Wesley (a pen name for couple Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith), which is how I first got into the programme. Unlike the innumerable sub-par novelisations published in the history of moviedom, this one was very good (and well-reviewed, if I recall, so it’s not just me). It’s ironic to me, then, that the series itself feels like a page-for-page adaptation of a novel. It’s something to do with the pace and style — the amount of time it’s prepared to devote to certain scenes or story elements, the way big twists and developments aren’t perfectly timed for episode endings (for example, our Manhattanite heroes enter the Nine Kingdoms just before the one hour mark — right in the middle of the first episode as originally aired, somewhere early in episode two of the ten-part version). It also means the way it’s been edited into one long movie on DVD feels quite natural: it’s one long story with arbitrary breaks, not a series of finite episodes. (If you’re thinking, “of course it’s one story, it’s a miniseries”, plenty of single-narrative series and miniseries still function as discrete episodes that build to a whole.)

Like a certain recent TV programme, the Nine Kingdoms is a world stitched together from numerous familiar stories; but, unlike that programme (the less said about which the better, in my opinion), it isn’t a land of po-faced ‘adventure’. Instead, it’s loaded with wry humour — after all, “fairytales are real and all took place in the same place” is a pretty silly concept, so why not mine it for laughs? As one character informs us, “things have gone down hill a bit since [the Golden Age] — happy ever after didn’t last as long as we’d hoped”. Rather than that meaning things are Serious and Troubling (and, based on how Once Upon a Time turned out, inadvertently laughable), things have gone to pot in a way that is amusingly reminiscent of our own world. This is mainly through a witty appropriation of real-world tropes: it begins at Snow White Memorial Prison, for example, with a worldmap that features a large arrow proclaiming “you are imprisoned here”; when some trolls believe they’ve been trapped in a witch’s pocket, they hope that if they behave they’ll be let out after serving only half the spell; later, there’s a cocktail bar that serves “A Long Slow Spell Against the Wall”; and so on (I don’t want to spoil them all!)

This gives the whole thing a heightened comedy tone, emphasised by many of the performances. A gaggle of troll siblings are irritatingly over-played, but Cohen’s meat-obsessed Wolf is a hammy delight (pun very much intended). The entertainment value means we quickly warm to the characters, so that when more perilous aspects of their quest do come into play later on, we care what happens. Plus, like most of the original fairytales (as opposed to Disney-style sanitised re-tellings), there’s the odd darker undercurrent. For instance, you may think the story of Snow White ends with a kiss and “happily ever after”, but here we’re told how the stepmother who poisoned Snow White was made to wear fire-heated iron shoes and ‘dance’ at the wedding until her feet were burnt raw, before being thrown out into the snow. Very dark and grim (and possibly from the original tale, for all I know).

In the main, however, The 10th Kingdom takes fairytales, not for their grimness, but for the chance to subvert, play with, or expand on them. So, for example, when Wolf and Tony come across a woodchopper who’ll tell them what they want to know if only they can guess his name — and if they get it wrong, he’ll chop off one of their heads — Tony signs them up without a second thought: he knows this one. With Wolf’s head on the block, he declares “Rumpelstiltskin!” The woodchopper replies, “wrong!” Uh-oh. This feeds into Tony’s growing annoyance with why people in this world can’t just tell you things, or exchange money for services, but instead always pose riddles — real-world logic clashing with the fairytale tradition. And it has a funny pay-off, too.

Little details in this vein abound: an apple tree has grown by Snow White’s cottage (don’t eat those apples!); the site of her glass coffin is now a tourist attraction; if you break a mirror, you genuinely get seven years’ bad luck… There’s also a pair of golden shoes that can turn you invisible, but the more you wear them the more you desire to use them all the time — what a precious idea (wink wink nudge nudge). These subversions also manifest in a strain of pleasant practicality; for instance, the abundant magic mirrors aren’t “just there”, but instead have been manufactured by dwarves. It lends the feel of a fully-conceived and rule-bound world, rather than an “anything can happen”, “just because” environment.

Even with all this, there remain a few major fairytales that aren’t touched upon. The Little Mermaid is one; another obvious omission is Beauty and the Beast — except there is a version of that included: the romance between Virginia and Wolf. The comparison isn’t drawn out in the text, particularly as Wolf isn’t an ugly hairy monster (though he does have a tail), but the similarities are there: his first encounter is actually with her father; he pursues Virginia even though the attraction isn’t mutual; she gradually comes around to him; there’s a third-act complication (spoilers!), before they eventually end up together (surprise!) It doesn’t have the same thematic heft as a proper retelling of Beauty and the Beast because it doesn’t have the whole “seeing the true beauty inside” thing — Wolf may give in to his urges once or twice, most notably in a storyline set in a town dominated by the Peep (as in Little Bo) family, where prejudice comes to the fore and Virginia has to defend him, but he’s never a full-on monster. There are elements of the tale’s other subtext, about a woman having power and control (or not) over her future, but, again, not in quite the same way: Wolf is besotted with Virginia and she doesn’t (initially) reciprocate his numerous advances — a world away from being locked in a castle until you change your mind. If this sounds like criticism, it isn’t. I’m not arguing the love story element of the series is unsuccessful — I’m sure it engages plenty of fans as the series’ primary attraction, even — but, on reflection, I’m not sure reading it as a Beauty and the Beast variation is actually that illuminating.

That’s fine, because the value of The 10th Kingdom lies not in how it retells its fairytale inspirations, but how it takes their familiar symbols and tropes and then reconfigures and expands on them, how it follows their implications through with real-world-logic, or mashes them up against the banalities of our world, often to comical effect. It’s a series that requires a basic knowledge of the tales used as its basis — not in an academic way, but in the way most of us have, thanks to exposure through childhood story-time or endless Disney movies. By playing on such ingrained knowledge, the pay-offs can be huge. Put those amusing subversions alongside likeable characters and a story that is at once world-endangering and deeply personal for our heroes, and you have top-drawer entertainment.

This review is part of the Fairy Tale Blogathon. Be sure to check out the many other fascinating articles collated at Movies Silently, and come back here on Tuesday for my second contribution, a review of Jean Cocteau’s 1946 adaptation of La Belle et la Bête.

* That’s just under seven hours to you and me. Most DVD releases present that as a non-stop movie, however in the US it was originally aired as five two-hours (which is reportedly how it’s presented on the 2013 DVD re-release), and in other regions (including the UK) as ten one-hours. ^

** Yes, it really is a 15. That must be thanks to some kind of technicality (use of knives, imitable violent techniques, etc), because it feels completely unwarranted. ^

John Dies at the End (2012)

Posted on November 4, 2014 by badblokebob

Based on the cult novel by Cracked.com editor David Wong, John Dies at the End is a bizarre horror-fantasy that defies easy explanation or summary.

It’s definitely an acquired taste — some will genuinely love it, some will genuinely despise it. I often fall in the middle when that’s the case, though I err towards the former here. It’s scrappy and weird and wrong in so many ways, but, on balance, pretty entertaining.

Plus, in an era when every mainstream movie (and many so-called independents) are essentially the same story told the same way, kudos for trying to do something different.

In the interests of completing my ever-growing backlog, I decided to post ‘drabble reviews’ of some films. For those unfamiliar with the concept, a drabble is a complete piece of writing exactly 100 words long. You’ve just read one.

* What do you have to do to get an 18 these days? The BBFC would’ve cut this to shreds in their scissor-happy heyday! It would seem the fact it’s a comedy allows the extreme gore to pass at a lower rating. ^

Space Battleship Yamato (2010)

Posted on November 3, 2014 by badblokebob

A live-action adaptation of the popular, influential and long-lasting anime franchise, known in the US as Star Blazers (here’s a very good history of the series and its significance courtesy of Manga UK). Set in a future where Earth has been ravaged by alien assault, a nearly-defeated humanity learns of a device that might turn the tide of the war, but it’s located on the other side of the galaxy. The World War II battleship Yamato is retrofitted with spacefaring tech and its crew set off on a last-ditch mission to save mankind.

You can see how that setup is designed to fuel a lengthy series — it’s as much about the journey as the destination. Fortunately, the makers of this version haven’t gone all-out-Hollywood and attempted to launch a trilogy: without meaning to spoil the ending, the entire story is contained herein. It does occasionally feel like it’s been culled from a longer and more detailed narrative, not least in the abundance of central characters, but that’s not too detrimental. One distinct advantage (both of having a long-running predecessor and not aiming for sequels) is that nothing’s held back for future use — including characters. Not everyone makes it out alive, adding a genuine sense of peril that’s missing from most action-adventure movies. As someone not familiar with any previous version of the story, I can attest that this adaptation remains not only understandable, but very entertaining.

Some of the character arcs are a little on the predictable side — the maverick who comes to accept responsibility, etc — but there’s plentiful well-realised action to keep things rattling along. Some will moan about the CGI (as a space-based movie, there’s rather a lot of it) because it’s not mega-budget slick. But this isn’t a mega-budget production (Manga UK’s review refers to the “colossal ¥2.2 billion budget”, but that converts as only $24 million), so such criticism is misplaced. And it doesn’t even look that bad. Besides, if you only watch films for flashy CG spectacle, you shouldn’t be trying to venture outside Hollywood’s summer tentpoles anyway.

With a solid premise, engaging storyline, exciting action, likeable characters, and the bonus of telling an epic story in a single movie rather than forcing it to sprawl off (possibly-never-produced-)sequels, Space Battleship Yamato has an awful lot going for it. While a couple of niggles with its length and some amateurish-round-the-edges moments hold me back from giving it full marks, I greatly enjoyed it, and I think more broad-minded fans of action-adventure sci-fi will too.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Posted on October 17, 2014 by badblokebob

2014 Academy Awards
5 nominations — 0 wins

Nominated: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay.

When someone says “100-million-dollar epic”, you probably don’t imagine a film about a swindling stockbroker; but, with a three-hour running time and a nine-figure budget, that’s exactly what Martin Scorsese’s black comedy biopic is.

Based on a true story, the film sees Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) start out as a stockbroker on Wall Street just before 1987’s Black Monday, which sees the firm he works for close down. Desperate for a job, he finds employment shilling cheap, crap shares to unsuspecting normal folk. Bringing his big-money skills into a grimy little environment, he revolutionises the way business is done, and soon finds himself back on Wall Street, where drug- and drink-fuelled parties, expensive houses, cars and yachts, and dodgy (well, flat-out illegal) business practices are the name of the day.

Some critics and viewers reckon the film is condoning or even glamourising that lifestyle. To which the only sensible response is, really?! How much must those people need their morality spelt out clearly and handed to them on a plate? Scorsese doesn’t out-and-out condemn the behaviour depicted, but nor does he present it as a jolly good time brought low by the cruel machinations of The Man. He’s more of an observer: this is what happened, both what they got away with and what they didn’t; both what was fun and exciting and what went wrong. There’s everything from moments where our own independent morality/irony is clearly meant to be brought to bear on these characters (such as the scene where they’re discussing dwarves) to sequences that outright depict the downside of their behaviour (such as the sequence where Jordan and Donnie take ‘Lemmon’, or indeed a good deal of the movie after that point). The film does not judge these people, but invites us to — and the closing shot clearly shows how many people have already judged them to represent something desirable, regardless of what position the film might take. Some people want this lifestyle, in spite of all the problems it wrought, and even if the film had clearly condemned it that wouldn’t change. In the end, to say Scorsese approves of it purely because he doesn’t lambast it is too simplistic a reading.

Despite the real-life nature of its tale, and the fact the illegal actions surely brought misery to many, the film nonetheless works best as a comedy, which is fortunately its default tone. In the rare moments it shoots for drama, it doesn’t function quite so well — whatever the results of their action, these lives and situations are so outlandish that it’s hard to find an empathetic foothold. The characters may be based on real people, but they don’t live in a world of “real people”; but that’s OK, because I don’t imagine the actual people involved would come over as much more than “characters” if you encountered them in real life.

In this regard, every cast member is excellent. You may most easily identify that quality among the top-billed names (Leo, Jonah Hill, break-out star Margot Robbie), or the masses of recognisable faces in cameo-sized roles (Matthew McConaughey, Jon Favreau, Joanna Lumley, Jean Dujardin…), but almost every supporting character gets a memorable line or scene, a moment where they shine brighter than everyone else; and even when the smaller roles aren’t dominating a scene, they’re part of a first-rate ensemble that functions like a well-oiled machine. My personal favourite was P.J. Byrne’s ‘Rugrat’, but yours may well be someone else.

One criticism I will hold with is that it’s too long. There’s fun packed throughout, but every now and then the pace flags or I found myself checking the clock. I can well imagine that on a re-watch the less-engrossing bits will be thumb-twiddlingly irritating while waiting for the quality memorable material to roll around. A tighter focus, probably at the writing stage but maybe it was salvageable in the edit, might’ve helped this.

And if you’re wondering how it cost $100 million, it’s packed to the rafters with CGI. Some of it is obvious (specifically, when they attempt to sail a yacht through a storm, with disastrous consequences), but there are also tonnes of more subtle digital set/location extensions and changes — check out this video if you want them revealed. Plus they used visual effects to obscure a gay orgy and avoid an NC-17. So that’s nice.

As one of two period comedies about real-life financial crime that contended at the 2014 awards (and neither of which won a single Oscar, as it turned out), The Wolf of Wall Street is the more entertaining victor, for me. However, despite many high-points, some scattered niggles throughout its excessive running time hold back unequivocal praise.

The Wolf of Wall Street debuts on Sky Movies Premiere today at 9pm, and is already available on demand.

A Beautiful Mind (2001)

Posted on October 4, 2014 by badblokebob

The big winner at the 2002 Oscars (four gongs from eight nominations), A Beautiful Mind adapts the true story of John Nash (Russell Crowe), a Cold War-era mathematics student at Princeton who hit upon a groundbreaking theory and ended up working covertly for the government…

Reviewing A Beautiful Mind is initially a choice between spoiling or not. There’s a Big Twist that they skilfully kept out of the advertising, and which many people have done a fair job of keeping quiet for the past 13 years; but, unlike most Big Twists, this one isn’t at the end of the film — in fact, it’s pretty early on, and the bulk of the movie is spent dealing with its fall-out. As with any movie that’s based on a true story, there has to be something that makes the tale remarkable and worth adapting into fiction. Here, it’s actually the post-twist portion that’s the draw; so it was a clever feat of marketing to have found another “this is why it was made” element to sell to the public. That’s not an instance of the much- (and justly-) criticised bait-and-switch style of marketing, but instead an effective rug-pull. So I’ll try to maintain that.

Both sides of the reveal lean on the central performance, and Russell Crowe is up to the task. His initially twitchy, uncomfortable representation gives way to a fragile, broken, confused shell of a man, and both sides of the character are convincingly depicted. They’re also both a world away from the grandstanding military leaders of Gladiator, Master and Commander, Robin Hood, Les Misérables, et al, Crowe’s best-known and most-frequented screen persona. He didn’t win Best Actor — losing to an equally atypical turn from Denzel Washington in Training Day — but the display of range probably merited it; perhaps more so, in retrospect, than his win for Gladiator the year before.

As Nash’s wife, Jennifer Connelly did take home the Supporting Actress trophy. It’s a less (for want of a better word) showy role, but like so many secondary leads in films with large central performances, her well-judged support props up the more obvious Acting of the lead.

Ron Howard is a safe pair of hands in the director’s chair. Early on the visuals occasionally display the easy familiarity of Heritage cinema, and if the rest doesn’t exactly transcend that then it at least stops being too distracting. The same isn’t always true of James Horner’s plinky-plonky music, which chooses to do things like score a car chase as if it’s a romantic scene. Different, at least, but feels more like a “look how changing only the music affects the mood” demonstration rather than a solid artistic choice. In fairness, in many other places the score is perfectly effective or, at worst, unobtrusive; but those action beats… It doesn’t need to be Hans Zimmer, especially as this really isn’t an action movie; but it distracted me, and that means it didn’t work.

A Beautiful Mind won Best Picture in spite of being up against the incredibly more innovative, entertaining, and game-changing double-bill of Moulin Rouge and The Fellowship of the Ring, which certainly says more about the predilections of the American Academy than the quality of films released in 2001 (innovation, entertainment and game-changing-ness aren’t among their favourite attributes). Still, it’s an interesting tale, well told, and excellently performed.

* Another one. ^

Clear and Present Danger (1994)

Posted on September 30, 2014 by badblokebob

2014 #67
Phillip Noyce | 135 mins | TV | 2.35:1 | USA / English | 12 / PG-13

I don’t know if it says more about me or the two Harrison Ford-starring Jack Ryan movies that I wrote 250 words of this review before I realised I was actually talking about Patriot Games. Weirdly, it’s this sequel that I thought was better.

This time, Ryan finds himself getting a promotion thanks to his boss falling ill, just as a crisis explodes around drugs trafficking from Mexico to the US: a friend of the President is killed by the cartels, then exposed as being in cahoots with them. Uh-oh! Behind closed doors, and unbeknownst to Ryan, elements within the government plot to illegally send a super-secret squad into Mexico and kill those so-and-sos. As Ryan investigates the to-do legally, he begins to suspect something else is going on…

Like its predecessor, the story for Clear and Present Danger winds out across multiple threads that aren’t directly connected for quite some time. However, their interrelation is a bit clearer, making the film feel more focused, in spite of its boosted running time. The plot isn’t exactly inspiring, sadly, but it does allow for a few more memorable sequences: an alleyway ambush on an American convoy, with Ryan in the thick of the action (a scenario which is apparently still used to train real troops); and, in a very modern twist, a sequence where Ryan hacks into a corrupt colleague’s computer, while the colleague tries to delete the files Ryan is looking for. Pretty cutting-edge for 1994.

It’ll come as no surprise that Ryan ends up exposing the nasty conspiracy — which goes as high as the President! But what does a good American patriot do when he finds out the practically-holy President has committed such a sin?! The novel ends with Ryan confronting him… and then deciding not to expose his secret war. Presumably this is thanks to Clancy’s obviously-Conservative political views. “Liberal” Hollywood, on the other hand, has given us a more just — and more satisfying — conclusion. Thank goodness for that.

Though an improvement on its immediate predecessor, I wouldn’t say Clear and Present Danger was quite a stand-out addition to the espionage genre. Following an aborted attempt to restart the franchise eight years later in The Sum of All Fears, and what looks to be another twelve years after that, in last January’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, perhaps Jack Ryan’s popularity is destined to remain literary.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is available on Now TV now and premieres on Sky Movies Premiere this Friday.

Patriot Games (1992)

Posted on September 29, 2014 by badblokebob

2014 #53
Phillip Noyce | 112 mins | TV | 2.35:1 | USA / English | 15 / R

A sequel to The Hunt for Red October in technicalities only (it’s another Jack Ryan adaptation, but he’s been recast; only one actor returns, in fact), Patriot Games is another political/espionage thriller from the pen of Tom Clancy.

On a working holiday in the UK, former CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford) coincidentally thwarts an IRA assassination attempt on members of the royal family, killing one of the assailants. Also among the terrorists was the dead one’s brother (Sean Bean), who sets off on some new terrorising plot that ultimately leads him to the US, where he plans revenge…

That’s more or less a summary, anyway, because Patriot Games is a sprawling tale. Although most of the major characters start off connected by that failed assassination, they soon splinter to go about their business in unconnected sequences, which finally come back together towards the end. To describe it as “novelistic” might be obvious, considering it’s based on a novel, but it’s not been streamlined for the big screen. The 112-minute runtime (PAL) looks speedy by today’s standards, when every blockbuster comfortably passes two hours, but it’s a lengthy narrative from a time when big movies were less overblown and got on with things — tell this amount of story today and you’d probably pass the three-hour mark.

Unfortunately, sometimes it feels like Patriot Games has. Progressing multiple separate narratives gives a disjointed feel, leaving the viewer waiting for it to all tie together in some way. The storytelling is fitfully slow and kind of baggy, lacking pace. There’s a nasty synth score, just to make things drag more. There are some moments of brilliance though, not least the beautifully-shot boat chase climax. There’s also the dubious joy of seeing Sheffield’s most famous son, Sean Bean, doing an Irish accent. Co-terrorist Polly Walker is English though — twist! Not that her subplot really goes anywhere. Possibly she just couldn’t do the accent.

Amusement comes unintentionally, and mainly thanks to its depiction of the Irish characters. One’s called Paddy O’Neill. No, really. Another seems to spend his time just sat around watching Clannad videos.

Given its pedigree you’d expect Patriot Games to be a classic ’90s thriller. I’ve always been a bit surprised that it’s often around, but not more talked about. Now that I’ve seen it, I see why. Disappointing.

Patriot Games is on More4 tonight at 9pm. The most recent Jack Ryan movie, Shadow Recruit, is available on Now TV now and premieres on Sky Movies Premiere this Friday.

Tomorrow, I’ll take a look at the second Harrison Ford-starring Jack Ryan adaptation, Clear and Present Danger.

Touch of Evil (1958)

Posted on September 24, 2014 by badblokebob

1998 Reconstructed Version

A bomb is stuck to the underside of a car. As the vehicle pulls away, the camera drifts up into the sky, and proceeds to follow the automobile through the streets of a small Mexican border town, until it crosses the border into the US… and explodes. It’s probably the most famous long take in film history, and probably the thing Touch of Evil is most widely known for; that, and it being one of the most commonly-cited points at which the classic film noir era comes to an end.

So who planted the bomb? Who was their target? And why? None of those questions matter. I’m sure they’re answered, but I don’t recall what those answers were, because they’re not what the film is about. What it’s about is Charlton Heston vs Orson Welles. The former is Vargas, a righteous Mexican drugs enforcement officer who witnesses the bombing while out walking with his new American wife. The latter is Quinlan, the policeman charged with finding the culprit — and he isn’t an honest copper. When Quinlan works out who he thinks is guilty, he makes sure there’s the evidence to back that up. And I don’t mean by doing thorough police work. Vargas catches him more-or-less in the act; Quinlan won’t allow himself to be exposed. It’s a game of cat and mouse; at stake, not just two men’s reputations, but justice and the law (not the same thing); and just waiting to get tangled in the middle, Vargas’ new wife — sweet, innocent Janet Leigh.

This is not film noir as many think they know it. Instead of a doggedly determined wisecracking PI solving a slightly seedy case, Touch of Evil is suffused with a sweaty and disquieting atmosphere. It’s like a terrible fever dream, with events and characters that sometimes seem disconnected, but nonetheless interweave through a dense plot. In this sense Welles puts us quite effectively in the shoes of Vargas and his wife — out of our depth, out of our comfort zone, out of control, struggling to keep up and keep afloat. It might be unpleasant if it wasn’t so engrossing.

Similarly uncomfortable are the film’s moral implications. Well, possibly. In the booklet accompanying Masters of Cinema’s Blu-ray release, French critics François Truffaut and André Bazin both assert that Welles’ Quinlan, while ostensibly the villain, is really a hero; that though he technically breaks the law, he’s morally right to do so. Essentially — or in Truffaut’s case, explicitly — they are defending policemen who fabricate evidence to ensure a conviction. Unfortunately for all their so-called intellectualising, Welles completely disagrees: “The personal element in the film is the hatred I feel for the way the police abuse their power… The things said by Vargas are what I would say myself… that’s the angle the film should be seen from; everything Vargas says, I say.”

Amusingly, Bazin is indeed forced to admit that “in the interviews which he gave me… Welles challenged this interpretation. He maintains that his moral position is unequivocal and he condemns [Quinlan] absolutely”. Meanwhile, Truffaut’s praise-filled essay asserts that, in the film’s ending, “[Vargas’] sneakiness and mediocrity have triumphed over [Quinlan’s] intuition and absolute justice.” Elsewhere, Welles summarises that “it’s a mistake to think I approve of Quinlan at all… there is not the least spark of genius in him; if there does seem to be one, I’ve made a mistake.” You can get pretentious about it all you want, and bring to bear political views that the film doesn’t support (after all, within the film Quinlan is punished for his crimes and the “mediocre” (Truffaut’s word) moral hero triumphs), but sometimes a spade is a spade; sometimes a villain is a villain; sometimes your disgusting moral perspective isn’t being covertly supported by a film that seems to condemn it.

Welles:

What I want to say in the film is this: that in the modern world we have to choose between the law’s morality, and the morality of simple justice, that is to say between lynching someone and letting him go free. I prefer a murderer to go free, than to have the police arrest him by mistake. Quinlan doesn’t so much want to bring the guilty to justice, as to murder them in the name of the law, and that’s a fascist argument, a totalitarian argument contrary to the tradition of human law and justice such as I understand it.

So that’s the end of that.

Welles’ beliefs about filmmaking were similarly forthright, stating that “all of the eloquence of film is created in the editing room” — the images were important, but the real art was in how they were placed together in the edit. It must have been especially hard for him, then, that so many of his films were “violently torn from [his] hands”: as of 1965, he says only Citizen Kane, Othello and Don Quixote were movies he’d been allowed to edit to his own specification (and that last one barely counts).

Notably and obviously absent from that list is Touch of Evil. It was taken away from Welles during the editing process, and though he submitted an infamous 58-page memo of suggestions after seeing a later rough cut, only some were followed in the version ultimately released. Time has brought change, however, and there are now multiple versions of Touch of Evil for the viewer to choose from; but whereas history often resolves one version of a film to be the definitive article, it’s hard to know which that is in this case. Indeed, it’s so contentious that Masters of Cinema went so far as to include five versions on their 2011 Blu-ray (it would’ve been six, but Universal couldn’t/wouldn’t supply the final one in HD.) The version I chose to watch, dubbed the “Reconstructed Version”, tries to recreate Welles’ vision, using footage from the theatrical cut and a preview version discovered in the ’70s to follow his notes. Despite the best intentions of its creators, this can only ever be an attempt at restoring what Welles wanted. Equally, although it was the version originally released, the theatrical cut ignores many of the director’s wishes — so as neither version was finished by Welles, surely the one created by people trying to enact his wishes is preferable to the one assembled by people who only took his ideas on advisement?

But that’s not all, poor viewer! There’s also the issue of the film’s aspect ratio: Welles was forced to shoot the film for projection at 1.85:1, but he did so on the understanding that an open matte 1.37:1 version would be shown on TV. He penned an article the same year as Touch of Evil’s release, called “Ribbon of Dreams”, in which he firmly advocates the Academy ratio and shows a strong distaste for widescreen (reading it today, it’s reminiscent of and comparable to Christopher Nolan’s comments on the film vs digital debate). With that considered, the full screen version would seem the preferable choice. To quote from Master of Cinema’s booklet, “the familiar Wellesian framing appears in 1.37:1: indeed, the “world” of the film setting emerges with little or no empty space at the top and bottom of the frame, almost certainly beyond mere coincidence.” There are things to recommend the widescreen experience (“a more tightly-wound, claustrophobic atmosphere”), and undoubtedly the debate will continue… and such is the wonders of the modern film fan that, rather than having to make do with someone else’s decision on what to put out, all the alternatives are at our fingertips.

Obviously I can’t speak for all the different cuts of Touch of Evil, but considering its constituent elements, it’s hard to imagine a version that isn’t complex, thought-provoking, perhaps a bit uncomfortable, and all-round an impressive work of cinema.

Touch of Evil was viewed as part of my What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen…? 12 for 2013 project, which you can read more about here.

100Films.co.uk

100% movies. Except when it's about TV.

Category Archives: adaptations