Nicely filmed and lit. Bit cheesy in parts (especially the in-car driving scenes), but overall pretty good.
6 Likes
A documentary of Steve Bannon a week after he leaves his White House post, following him around the world as he stokes the flames of a global “populist movement”.
Not that well made but definitely interesting to watch.
1 Like
Excellent film. The sequel isn’t as good but still worth a watch.
Sorry to be off topic, but Mike, stream the new Ray LaMontagne album to double check, but I think you will find it more to your taste than his last two or three. Jeff A
Surely the sountrack is worth mentioning, at least in my opinion.
Not yet on Netflix.
I have to check with Apple TV.
55 Days at Peking
AA produced film from the early sixties about the siege of the Foreign Legations in Peking in 1900.
Generally with older films my wife and I give them fifteen minutes or so to see if they are worth the time, and in this case it was. I find both Niven and Heston to be good company, although here they are playing very much to type.
The film opens with the Boxer ‘Rebellion’ in full swing and we see a Christian missionary being tortured as a troop of US marines arrive in the capital. From here the broad strokes of the positions are laid out, although there is no time spent on the Opium wars and the enforced selling of the drug by the British into China it is made plain that the ‘Great Powers’ are picking over the bones of the Chinese Empire. Certainly while not wanting to see the Christian Chinese and Legations killed I was sympathetic to the arguments of the Dowager Empress.
What will jar with modern viewers is the heavily made up occidental actors playing oriental roles. Although mildly distracting I am not bothered by it, it was a commercial reality of the time, and also will have made the roles somewhat more sympathetic to the audience of the time.
Overall where the film kept me engaged was in the smaller scale drama of the characters. The doubt and personal pain. There is action but the hopelessness of the Legations position is made plain, and the derring do leads to no resolution, or simply fails.
Not a great piece of cinema, but no turkey either.
M
3 Likes
The third version of Stephen King’s classic novel. In the face of De Palma’s definitive 1976 version with the brilliant Sissy Spacek, Kimberley Pierce’s 2013 version feels a bit pointless, but it’s not a complete turkey: Chloe Grace Moretz is good in the title role, Julianne Moore excels as the demented, fanatical mother, and the toxic high school bullying culture is well drawn, though it would have made for a more interesting, original film if the social media thing had been explored further. It is all rather unnecessary, though, you’d be better off watching the original.
1 Like
From 1938, a classic Hitchcock. Here, in this tale of pre-war intrigue and international espionage, made a year before he moved permanantly to Hollywood, the great director is at his most playful, and working in a peculiarly English idiom. The cast, led by the gorgeous Margaret Lockwood, is top-notch; an elegant Michael Redgrave, Dame May Whitty, Cecil Parker and career-defining turns from Basil Radford and Naughton Wayne as Caldicott and Charters, a pair of cricket-obsessed English eccentrics. Sidney Gilliat, Frank Launder and Alma Reville’s script sparkles and the use of music (or not!) typically perverse/Hitchcockian. A taut, amusing little film that was deservedly a huge hit in its day, and which still holds up beautifully in 2020.
2 Likes
Two movies that surprised in quality.
Both more a psychological thriller than horror, but taking obvious cues more from classic horror movies that didn’t rely on visual gore.
From 1959, a gritty low-budget Brit thriller, set in Soho and tautly directed by John Lemont. Recently-released career criminal and racketeer Augie Cortana (the always excellent Terence Morgan) decides to try a new trick – pornography and blackmail, using a model school as a cover. There’s a great cast that includes Harry H Corbett, Bill Owen, Hazel Court and Donald Pleasance. There’s also a fantastic jazz score by Philip Green, which deserves to be better known.
1 Like
From 1933, and starring the gorgeous Madeleine The 39 Steps Carroll, this Victor Saville-directed British picture was a huge box-office smash in its day, both here and the US. It’s the true story of Marthe Cnockaert, a Belgian woman who, during the Great War, became a nurse and who passed secrets on to the British (ironically the Germans awarded her the Iron Cross). Cnockaert survived the war and later became a successful novelist, dying in 1966.
A couple of bits of trivia – Madeleine Carroll was, in 1938 at the peak of her success, the highest paid actress in the world (she was also the first British star to be offered a major Hollywood contract); and the art direction for I Was a Spy was by Alfred Junge, who did all the fantastic AD for Powell & Pressberger in the 1940s.
1 Like
Ivan Passer’s 1977 crime comedy has a fabulous cast – see poster above (Joss Ackland, Charles Gray, Jay Leno and Jeremy Dent also feature) but largely wastes them in a silly and convoluted story abut silver smuggling. Caine is always watchable, but even for a big fan like me, this picture tested my patience more than a little.
1 Like
Here’s a strange one – a Blu-ray of Oh… Rosalinda!!, Powell & Pressberger’s 1955 version of Strauss’ comic opera Die Fledermaus, moved to Vienna in the early 1950s when the city was still under Allied postwar occupation.
As one might expect, it is a gloriously inconsequential piece of fluff, but an incredible feast for the eyes (and ears). Following their hugely successful version of Tales Of Hoffmann a few years earlier, P&P took their vision of a “cinematic opera” even further. Thus, the picture is still more unreal, yet more dreamlike, the sets even more stagily expressionistic. But this is no film of a staged opera – it couldn’t exist as anything but a movie; it could not exist in a theatre, only on the soundstage at Elstree Studio. Although many of them are dubbed, the cast excels – Michael Redgrave, Ludmilla Tcherina as the titular Rosalinda, Mel Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Dennis Price and, as Dr Falke (“the bat”), the great Anton Walbrook. Best of all are Hein Heckroth’s costumes and extraordinary art direction; and Christopher Challis’ sumptuous, eyeball scorching photography (in Technicolor and Cinemascope).
A rather strange film, and one that flopped at the time and which is largely forgotten today, and perhaps only of interest to Powell & Pressberger nuts. But bloody marvellous as far as I’m concerned, and I’m not particularly a Strauss fan.
1 Like
