The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

As ever, a beautifully shot film by Roger Deakins.

Directed by Andrew Dominik
Written by Andrew Dominik, Roy Hanson (novel)
Starring Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Rockwell, Sam Shepard


I've spoken before about twists, and about the spoiling of them.  It's not always easy to talk about a plot that takes a sudden and unexpected turn, without at least hinting about the change of direction.  On the other hand, do any of us really want to spoil a big twist in a film for anyone else?  Do we really want to give the ending away, do we really want to take away the joy of discovery?

It is with some relief, then, that I come to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.  If ever a film was upfront about its intentions, this must be it.  There's no trickery in that title, there's no leading you down the wrong path.  Nor is it fundamentally incorrect, like Krakatoa East of Java.  Nor, for that matter, is it gently prodding you to the wrong conclusion, in the sense that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance wants you to believe that the fellow in question is James Stewart rather than John Wayne.  Nope, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford does exactly what it says, and never lets you forget it.  We've read the last page of the book, and now we're bound to watch the earlier pages being fitted into place.

In a sense, we're involved, we're voyeurs, we're caught in a story that we know will certainly end in death.  We know who's going to be killed, we know who's going to do the killing.  And this isn't a story like, say, Titanic, where we know the iceberg is coming but here's a girl and a boy making fools out of themselves to distract you for three and a half long, tortuous hours.  Nor is it Gandhi, a film that begins with the certainty of a shooting but never lets you think that the shooting is the be-all-and-end-all of the story; it's a conclusion that we have to reach, but there's so much more to see along the way.  No, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford isn't about anything else.  You're here to see the murder.  The title even tells you that it's not going to be a noble or heroic death.

However, the characters don't know this.  Hence the voyeurism; we know exactly what's coming, and how ugly it's going to be, but we're going to watch all concerned find out for themselves.  It's very appropriate that the film has us follow not the charismatic, legendary outlaw, but the coward of the title (a superb performance by the younger, and arguably more talented Affleck), his weakness, his guilt.  Jesse James is often distant, or part in shadow, or moving away from us - while we stay much closer to the antihero of the tale.  And that, ultimately, is where we belong; we can relate to the coward far more than we can relate to the outlaw.

Relating to the coward, following him voyeuristically, these are not easy subjects, and it would have been very easy for this film to fail, to become preachy and heartless.  Fortunately, it doesn't fail at all (although it could have been twenty minutes shorter without losing anything), thanks to a fine script and beautiful and inventive photography by the always wonderful Roger Deakins.  It's the elegance of the movie that allows us, nay makes us engage with Ford's weak and petty everyman.

Towards the end of the picture, Ford is asked why he did it:

Well, he was going to kill me.
So you were scared, and that's the only reason?
Yeah, and the reward money.

 Fear and avarice, in the end, are dreadfully human qualities, whether we want to admit to them or not.

Never Let Me Go (2010)

Directed by Mark Romanek

Written by Alex Garland, Kazuo Ishiguro (novel)

Starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley

Why is it that we’re so engaged by dystopian fantasies?  Why the fascination with a world that has headed off, or will head off, down a different and more problematic route to our own?  After all, there unquestionably is a fascination there – going back through Blade Runner, Nineteen Eighty-Fout, Metropolis, to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and far more points in between than I’ll be going into here*.  And if the surge in popularity of counterfactual novels  (or alternative histories, or uchronia) is anything to go by, it’s an allure that’s growing. 

But why?  Perhaps it’s because we live in uncertain times, and on-screen bleakness and suffering holds up a mirror to threats in the world we live in, much as Hollywood’s golden age of horror in the 30s and 40s coincided with darkness beyond the cinema’s walls.  Perhaps we’ve become used to a world so controlled and understood that any risk posed by events beyond our control seems exaggerated in its size and menace.  Or perhaps we just like to be reminded of how much worse things could be, perhaps it offers a crumb of comfort in showing us that life isn’t all that bad after all. 

Most dystopian and counterfactual stories deal with big, dramatic changes:  the Nazis won the war, Napoleon conquered the world, robots became intelligent, society collapsed under a global nuclear conflict, Kennedy wasn’t killed, Franz Ferdinand wasn’t killed, Hitler was.  However, in reality, it’s just as often small details and lifestyle changes that end up setting history on a different course entirely – changes that might not be noticed at the time, just as the passengers on a train don’t see the points being changed. 

As I’m writing this, physicists at the CERN institute are announcing that they’re a significant step closer to proving the existence of the Higgs field, an invisible flood of energy spread throughout the universe, thought to be responsible for allowing atoms to have the mass they need to exist.  It’s a big day for physics, with a number of others hopefully to come, and gives hope of the answers the project was looking to find.  Yet CERN has had a dramatic and unexpected impact on all of our lives (definitely on your life, you wouldn’t be reading this otherwise):  the software designed for sending data and theories and whatnot back and forth around the globe became the world wide web. 

These changes, slow-burning, little-noticed-at-the-time but ultimately huge, frequently emerge from technological and scientific discoveries, slowly filtering out from the academic community until they leave no-one untouched.  There are few if any counterfactual tales that ask ‘what if Jenner hadn’t discovered the smallpox vaccination?’ or ‘what if Lister hadn’t given the world antiseptic medicine?’, probably with very good reason from a literary point of view, but that doesn’t mean they transformed the world any less entirely. 

The world-changing breakthrough in Never Let Me Go is a medical one too.  But it’s also a discovery that's morally very questionable, one that saves countless lives while harming others.  Most importantly, it’s one viewed solely from the point of view of those who are harmed by it, those whose lives are not transformed for the better but lessened and shortened by the change.  This is where the dystopia exists – not for all those saved, happy and presumably either ignorant of the harm caused to others or choosing to look the other way, but for those who have to live a fractured shadow of a life. 

All of which raises a difficult question – to what extent, if any, should we be allowed to cause suffering in order to save lives?  Never Let Me Go, though raising the question poignantly and from the heart, does not seek to impose answers.  What it does, and does with great panache and elegance, fragile and delicate, is to give a very human dimension to a deeply moral question.  Not all dystopian tales must be universal; sometimes, a brighter future for the many ends up being built on the suffering of the few.

*Not least because there's no shortage of such lists out there; dystopianfilms.com is as good a place to start as any.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

Henry Fonda, workers' hero.

Directed by John Ford
Written by Nunnally Johnson, John Steinbeck (novel)
Starring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine




A little over three years passed between the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and American intervention into the war at the end of 1941.  This time might seem at first to be one when the storms of the world, of Japanese conquest as well as the Nazis’ spread across Europe, fell quiet when they reached the coasts of the United States - but appearances can be deceptive, especially when viewed from such a distance.  It was a time of great change and great national debates – a time when isolationist faced interventionist, a time when left met right met various points in the middle in argument and with conflict barely suppressed, a time when waves of immigrants fleeing totalitarianism in Europe and Asia brought countless new skills, new experience, new beliefs and new traditions to the country that had rescued them.  It was also a time when the US began, finally, to pull itself clear of the greatest crisis in its history, the catastrophe of the Great Depression.

That said, there was one respect in which the Depression wasn’t a disaster, but a revelation.  The movies – particularly in Hollywood, though the groundbreaking output of Weimar Germany should never be overlooked, even if that is another story for another day – boomed spectacularly, launching into a Golden Age built on innovation, grandeur, and an audience desperate for a spot of sunshine, an audience who went to the pictures in numbers unmatched before or since.  When this glittering cinematic explosion barrelled on into the new shapes of American society found at the end of the 30s, the films that emerged make for an astonishing catalogue of innovation and wonder.  Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, The Wizard of Oz, The Grapes of Wrath, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, The Great Dictator, Mr Smith Goes To Washington, Suspicion, High Sierra, The Roaring Twenties, Fantasia, The Philadelphia Story, Rebecca… it would be easy to go on.  And on.  It was a quite remarkable period in Hollywood history, and one that was ended suddenly and utterly when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour.

That’s not to say, of course, that there were no American films of such a standard made during the War – of course there were:  Casablanca, Double Indemnity, and Gaslight spring immediately to mind – but they’re fewer and further between.  More importantly, they’re not quite the same, less questioning, less of anything that could be seen as UnAmerican (a word that would become rather too relevant in the decade that followed).  And even after the war was over, and a slew of genuinely great pictures burst forth in the second half of the 40s, filmmakers were never again really able to utilise the power of Hollywood at its most chest-out and bright-eyed without the heavy knowledge of what they weren’t allowed to do weighing upon them.

Of course, even by 1938, Hollywood was restricted in what it could do – the Production Code was introduced in 1930 – but restricted in terms of morals, of kissing and sharing a bed and letting the bad guy win, not in terms of ideas.  Two of the films mentioned earlier, John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath and Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, both reach conclusions that make an inescapable political statement:  America, along with so much of the western world, was going badly wrong in how it treated ordinary people, and the left can show a far better and fairer way forward.  In both cases, the main character concludes with a powerful, affecting speech about unity and equality and giving ordinary working people a decent chance in life.  They’re both undoubtedly stirring moments.  However, stirring wasn't always enough.  For J. Edgar Hoover, Chaplin’s speech – don’t give yourself to these unnatural men, machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! – was the last straw, the last he’d take from a little foreign guy who cared about the poor a bit more strongly than could be accepted. 

Chaplin's speech has much in common with the end of The Grapes of Wrath:  

 A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody ... Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.

Ford's film won two Academy Awards, and was nominated for five more (The Great Dictator was nominated for five Oscars), but acceptance of these principles didn't last much beyond 1940.  Chaplin was exiled in 1952, a year after John Ford and John Steinbeck were investigated by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee for The Grapes of Wrath (film and book separately, as you'd imagine, although Steinbeck was hugely impressed both by Ford's interpretation and by Fonda's career-transforming turn as Tom Joad).  Today, McCarthyism is as dead as the Cold War, The Great Dictator is hailed far and wide as the masterpiece that it certainly was.  But The Grapes of Wrath, though still acclaimed, doesn't enjoy anything like the popularity of Ford's great westerns.  Perhaps the association of one of America's very finest and most innovative directors - and its most American - with an explicitly socialist tale is still uncomfortable.  Or perhaps his westerns are just too beloved in the imagination to allow much space for other tales (and of course, Ford later went on to deconstruct the frontier myth in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance).  It's dangerous, I suppose, to read too much into people's behaviour.

Still, it's worth flagging up, whatever the reason, because of how much of a treat is being missed here by those who overlook it, or simply aren't aware of it.  The Grapes of Wrath is every bit as good as any western Ford ever made, and better than most (maybe all), a genuine high-water mark in an extraordinary period for American cinema.  Powerful, poignant, and deeply political, we should hail Ford not only for creating an exceptional piece of work, but also for the courage shown in standing up for the ordinary worker against big business and insitutions (Steinbeck and Ford, as well as being investigated during the McCarthy era, also received death threats from the Associated Farmers of California).  We ought also to hail him for making a film that retains a deep and important truth today, more than seven decades later; today, as in 1940, the ordinary worker finds himself driven further and further down, while those at the top reap ever more of the profits of his labour.  The Grapes of Wrath is as much a film for today as it is a Depression-era classic.

One final point:  John Ford quite rightly receives the lion's share of the acclaim for this wonderful picture, but there's someone else who shouldn't be ignored.  Here is a film that's gorgeously, strikingly, inventively shot, a film made so much better for looking so good.  The director of photography deserves his share of the credit.  Fellow by the name of Gregg Toland.  I think I might have mentioned him before.

Shooting the Past (1999)

Tim Spall. Is there an actor working today who's as dependably wonderful?

Directed by Stephen Poliakoff
Written by Stephen Poliakoff
Starring Lindsay Duncan, Timothy Spall, Liam Cunningham, Billie Whitelaw, Emilia Fox



Well, this is a little different.  I'm doing something for the first time, something that I might perhaps never do again - or which, at most, I'll only be doing very, very sparingly.  I think.  We'll see.  I mean, I can't really rely on myself to do what I want, but... so far as I can tell, writing about television will be a rare event, or less frequent than that.

But then, why not write about television?  Every picture here that I've rambled in the broad vicinity of was watched via a DVD, on a screen at home.  So was Shooting the Past.  And it's a three-hour miniseries (shorter than Apocalypse Now Redux, and far less flabby), not something that ran for weeks and months.  Neither of these, however, are the reason why I decided to sit down and write about something made entirely for TV.

Nope, it's all down to Stephen Poliakoff.  See, Poliakoff has made films for the cinema - not that they've been terribly successful, well-received or, um, good - but at some point in the mid-90s, he decided that television was the medium he wanted to work in.  Given the thoroughly unexceptional nature of his ventures into theatrical releases, that's probably not a bad idea (although, to be fair, those movies were right at the beginning of his career, so we should let him off).  But it's also not a bad idea - a very good idea, indeed - because few filmmakers today have quite the same gift for televised drama as Poliakoff.  His films - or plays, perhaps, I think it's entirely reasonable to call them plays, and that word probably suits better than films in most cases, certainly better than movies - his plays have become something to look forward to, a regular joy from a unique talent.  If Poliakoff recognises that he can create his best work in television, I think it would be rather churlish for me to turn my nose up at it.

Shooting the Past is the film/play that first established his name in the medium*, and still stands as arguably his finest work.  A beautifully paced and constructed homage to memory and the huge breadth of human experience, given emotion by a superb cast, Poliakoff offers us an image of just how much we stand to lose - and how little we're often aware of it - when we unthinkingly choose the modern over the past.  Progress and change are important, yet so frequently we let the brightness and energy of the dawn take all of our attention, so easily we lose our grip on what we had before.  And that's something which, once lost, can never be recovered; when we all forget, the past dies, scattered on the winds, forever out of our reach.




*before the brief venture into cinema, Poliakoff had a successful career writing and directing for the stage.

All About Eve (1950)

Eve (second left), whom the film is all about.

Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Starring Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders



Welles, Toland and Mankiewicz.  The holiest of holies, the triumvirate primarily responsible* for the greatest film ever made.  And, for what it's worth, I think it probably is - I know it's horribly clichéd to go on about Citizen Kane being better than anything cinema has seen before or since, but as far as I'm concerned there's nothing out there to compare.  Sorry to be obvious, but there it is.

But then, I'm not here to go on about Kane.  In fact, I commit to that:  there's nothing left to be said about that picture, indeed there hasn't been anything left to be said for at least the last thirty years.  So I'm not going to waste my time adding to the pile of needless repetition.  However, I didn't raise it wholly without reason.  See, the names of Welles, Toland and Mankiewicz are unimpeachable: they're like Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, like Roald Amundsen, like Yuri Gagarin, like James Watson and Francis Crick - they did something extraordinary and unique, upon which they have and will retain forever the sole claim.  Orson Welles, Gregg Toland and Herman J. Mankiewicz.  They made Citizen Kane.  And that first name (and middle initial) is important, because of the other Mankiewicz.

It's strange to think of it now, but there was a time - a very long time, in fact - when Herman J. was by no means the most famous Mankiewicz.  He'd been an occasional contributor and (usually uncredited) rewriter to a lot of films - most notably The Wizard of Oz, for which he's generally now recognised to have written most of the Kansas scenes - but also a washed up alcoholic, who'd had an argument over the writing credits to a 1941 picture that critics loved and audiences mostly ignored.  Meanwhile, little brother Joseph L. was a giant.  Writer, director, producer - often a mixture of the three - he has to his name classic pictures like The Philadelphia Story, Sleuth, The Barefoot Contessa, Cleopatra, The Quiet American, A Letter to Three Wives, Dragonwyck, The Ghost and Mrs Muir and Guys and Dolls.  He joined a very exclusive club in winning two Oscars at the same ceremony for A Letter to Three Wives (best screenplay and best director) in 1950, and then a club all of his own in repeating the feat twelve months later with this movie, All About Eve, which I'll get around to eventually.  Joseph L. Mankiewicz ought to be held up to this day as one of the greatest names in Hollywood history.  Well, the Joseph L. bit should be, seeing as Mankiewicz already is.

And I don't mean this as any slight on his older brother - anyone who claims Kane and The Wizard of Oz amongst his achievements has done more than enough as far as I'm concerned - but rather that there needs to be room for two of them, there needs to be a greater respect for the remarkable talents of the younger Mankiewicz.  Sure, he didn't write the greatest film ever made.  But there aren't many names in the long tale of cinema to have done much more than Joseph L. did.

The film?  Quite possibly his best work as writer/director (he didn't direct The Philadelphia Story, which happily saves me from having to pick a favourite), what starts as a light, charming romantic comedy, all good fun, rapidly shifts into a dark study of manipulation, jealousy and cruelty.  The cast is superb, Mankiewicz - as I may have mentioned - was a brilliant writer and director, the film is photographed with elegance and energy by the ever-dependable Milton R. Krasner, there's a very fine Alfred Newman score... it's wonderful.  I see nothing wrong with this film, which is probably why I've not actually written much about it.  What is there to write about it, really?  All About Eve is magnificent.  That is all.




*I think Herrmann and possibly Houseman also deserve more credit than they get. But still, the point stands.

Panic in the Streets (1950)

A beautifully lit Jack Palance (in his debut movie).

Directed by Elia Kazan

Written by Richard Murphy, Daniel Fuchs, Edward and Edna Anhalt (story)

Starring Richard Widmark, Paul Douglas, Barbara Bel Geddes, Jack Palance

What if we’re all about to die, and don’t know it?  We’re in control of so much in the world, we can take its resources from anywhere (and cause untold damage in the process), we can explore the deepest seas and the highest mountains, we can study how life can flourish in wildernesses of ice, jungle and burning desert and use that knowledge for our own ends.  We can transport ourselves rapidly from any point on the planet to any other.  We can ramble pointlessly on a blog and publish it instantly for the entire world to read.  Or ignore.

But what if we’re all about to die, and don’t know it?  Deep down, we can’t shake the awareness of our own fragility, the tenuous hold we really have on the world.  We’re not really in control, we’re just fiddling around with the details, and the world is never slow to show us just how tiny we are:  hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, tsunamis.  And the more we learn, the more we find out just what nature might have install for us – life on earth has been dealt a devastating blow with considerable regularity over the years, with mass extinction events being triggered variously by objects dropping from the sky and chemicals and heat bursting up from under our feet.  On top of that, there’s the inevitability of the sun eventually packing it in, and the likelihood of the magnetic field flipping and failing to protect us for long enough that we all die, not to mention the alarming possibility that the universe may exist in a false vacuum (which could be replaced at any time by a lower energy or total vacuum, casually annihilating all matter in the process).  Should the universe get a bit tired of us, there’s really not a lot we can do about it.

Over the years, cinema has never been slow to pick away at this particular wound on our consciousness.  Where once catastrophes beyond man’s control could be nothing other than the wrath of a vengeful god, the silver screen took one of its favourite plot devices – chance – and expanded it out to threaten great swathes of humanity on the whim of outrageous fortune.  Even in the earliest days of film, we find Fire!, James Williamson’s dramatic and innovative tale of, well, a fire; a little over a decade later, when the collision between the Titanic and a ruddy great iceberg brought news of genuine disaster to the world’s radios and newspapers, the movies weren’t at all far behind with their own tales of the collision (Mime Misu’s Nacht und Eis and August Blom’s Atlantis were both released within months of the accident).

Skip forward a century – hopping dextrously over the giants of disaster, over-the-top we’re-all-going-to-die flicks like The Poseidon Adventure, Airport, Earthquake and The Towering Inferno – and the last couple of months before writing have given us a couple more.  Lars von Trier’s Melancholia follows the ever popular (and comparatively new) sub-genre of mass extinction as a consequence of large objects flying through space, whilst Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion threatens us all with the possibility of a devastating pandemic, following the likes of Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain, Wolfgang Peterson’s Outbreak and Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys.

The last of which takes a somewhat unusual approach – rather than addressing the pandemic itself, which evidently can’t be cured, Bruce Willis gets sent back in time to stop those responsible for spreading it in the first place:  no carrier, no outbreak.  And it’s this approach (albeit without the time travel) that Elia Kazan introduced in Panic in the Streets, a taut , bleak thriller following noir-staple Richard Widmark’s desperate hunt for the carrier of plague before he can transmit it through New Orleans and onwards through the whole of the United States.  Of course, this being 1950, it really is just about protecting the United States, not the rest of the world (which was presumably too full of Communists and other Enemies of America to really care about).

 But I really shouldn’t quibble about the American-centric view of the end of the world (not least because it crops up in so many pictures).  Panic in the Streets is far, far too good for that, an exemplary piece of classic noir from one of the finest directors of the time.  And a superbly crafted drama it is, rich on tension and human emotion, closely tied to Widmark’s desperation as the doctor trying to find the shreds of information in a community used to keeping its mouth shut – while Kazan never takes the camera away from that community, from those around the doctor and the difficult world they inhabit, never fails to show the tide against which he’s swimming in all its murky depth.

There’s a striking scene right at the beginning of the picture that illustrates the skill with which Kazan handles the world of his picture.  In a mortuary, an autopsy is in progress; two men who work there are arranging to meet for lunch; and a couple are asked to identify another corpse.  The three events are entirely unrelated, but they take place in the same location – and, most importantly, at the same time.  This isn’t a film which allows the story to go about its business unmolested and in a straight line, but one which embeds its tale of pursuit and impending doom in a world of activity and competing interests.  It’s a difficult job:  after all, if we are all going to die, society isn’t going to face it hand in hand and all singing from the same hymn sheet.  The human world is chaos, and we’re not really in control of all that much. 

Kazan holds a mirror up to this chaos with extraordinary panache, shaping a thriller of terrific energy and suspense.  I don’t want to go into the personal controversies that surrounded him; I just feel it’s important to recognise one of cinema’s greatest talents.  He was a magnificent director, and Panic in the Streets deserves to be considered alongside his best, and more famous work. 

Shutter Island (2010)

Shutter Island looks good - pity about the screenplay.

Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Laeta Kalogridis, Dennis Lehane (novel)
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow



At what point does the big twist of a film become sufficiently well-known to be talked about in public?  I know that I've not exactly been slow to throw in the odd spoiler - for which I would apologise but, well, I'm not going to, it's your fault if you've not seen the film before - but there's a difference between letting slip a detail of how the film progresses and giving away the big reveal.  After all, the whole point of a twist in the classic sense is that you, the viewer, are encouraged to believe one thing throughout the film before discovering, often (though not always) in the picture's final moments, that you were wrong all along, that what you've learnt needs to be reinterpreted and put together again in light of the revelation.

If the twist is given away in advance, then there's not going to be a wrong interpretation to correct later, and the reveal won't mean anything.  The film has built up to a moment of Oh! Now it all makes sense!, and that moment's lost if you know what's coming from the start.  The magic of the great climactic discovery - who Keyser Sözé* is, what Rosebud means, what's the connection between Bruce Willis and the little boy, what's inside Jaye Davidson's pants - depends entirely on being a surprise; there's no magic if you can see up the conjuror's sleeve.

Unfortunately, in Shutter Island, the conjuror's sleeves are rather baggy to begin with - you don't really need to be told what's hidden up there to know just what's going to come out.  It probably doesn't help that the twist is somewhat similar to that of a very well-known picture (with elements of few others) that I shan't name, but frankly, even if you'd never heard of the precedent, I'd be surprised if you couldn't tell what was going to emerge at the end of this film.  I don't want to spoil it for you, but that thing you'll be thinking halfway through the film, yes, it's that.

All of which is a bit disappointing.  It goes without saying that Scorsese is a magnificent director, not to mention a great student of the cinema - which probably explains why the look of this movie reminded me so much of The Shining.  Scorsese being Scorsese, that probably wasn't an accident.  Indeed, it shouldn't be:  The Shining looked superb, full of tension and foreboding, and Shutter Island doesn't fail in that respect, bleak, taut, confusing, intimidating.  And by and large, it has a fine cast - although I have to confess to a long-term lack of respect for DiCaprio.  Not enough to discourage me all too much - and I loved Inception - but enough to make me think that it really should have been someone else.  Personally, I blame Richard Herring, for firmly fixing into my mind the notion that DiCaprio's face is too small for his giant sprout head (it's probably on youtube somewhere).  Anyway, aside from DiCaprio and his small face, what was I going on about?

A film that's really not that interesting.  Hence the diversion.  Great director, fine cast, and a dull, unimaginative screenplay with lumpen dialogue and a good few pages more than it ought to have had.  Movies being too long has always been a bugbear of mine - since longer films stopped meaning markedly higher costs for the studios, the art of cutting unnecessary time has been largely lost - and it's disappointing to say that a picture is lengthier than it ought to be when it's only a little over two hours.  But Shutter Island drags throughout much of the film, it repeats itself, it pulls out scenes longer than they need to be.  It's flabby.  Although, to be honest, a good trim wouldn't solve all the problems, wouldn't improve the rather obvious twist.  It's not a bad film, but if you want to see something by Scorsese, he's done so much that is an awful lot better than this.




*I have no idea how to spell this.  It's never written down in the film, and doesn't appear in the credits for obvious reasons.  It's bloody annoying.  He should have been called Keith Smith.

The Roaring Twenties (1939)

Men really knew how to dress in gangster pictures.

Directed by Raoul Walsh

Written by Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay, Robert Rossen, Mark Hellinger (story)

Starring James Cagney, Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart, Jeffrey Lynn

Whatever else Prohibition might have been responsible for, it certainly did the cinema a world of good. I rambled on last time about the three genres with exclusively American roots: the musical, the western, the gangster flick. Musicals come from the stage, of course, from the Vaudeville traditions that gave us so many early screen greats. Westerns come from, well, the west, that grand American foundation myth of brave heroes taming the wilderness.

But the gangster flick wouldn't exist without Prohibition; not merely because of the wealth of stories the era offered up, but also – crucially – because of the glamorisation of crime it engendered. The Eighteenth Amendment was hugely unpopular across much of the United States – especially in the major cities – and fighting it grew into a popular crusade. In the westerns, the bandits were there to be defeated by the dashing, maverick hero; in the gangster flick, the leaden-footed enforcers of a hated law were the villains, the bootleggers the stars of the show.

And the violence? Nobody, wherever they live, wants violence in their lives. But most Americans were never affected by the Tommy guns and the beatings; these existed in newspaper reports, on the radio, on the screen, not on their street. Just as war when seen from a distance has heroism without the brutality, nobility without the squalor, so the rise of the bloodthirsty gangster and the millionaire who took his money from the hands of the dead and dying couldn't possibly be so grim and repellent when projected onto the silver screen.

Time provides even more distance than geography. When Prohibition sank unmourned in 1933, the bootlegging era was cut adrift*, and its heroes and villains became ever more distant, and ever easier to build into tales of adventure and dynamism. After all, that period was half-over by the time sound – another essential ingredient of the gangster flick – made its way into the movies, and nostalgia never struggled to find a way into the stories and legends that were already growing apace.

The Roaring Twenties is a very nostalgic gangster film. Cagney may be playing a criminal, he may be playing a man of violence, but there's never any question that his heart is in the right place: here is a man who just wanted his job back when he returned from the Great War, and when that was denied him, he had no other choice but to pursue a life of crime. He devotes himself to helping a young girl who wrote to him during the war, and when she goes off with a fellow more her own age, he's disappointed but never vengeful. Even in a genre that relished nostalgia, the rosiness of Raoul Walsh's view back to the 20s is strikingly simplistic and uncritical.

Yet, for all that, it's in no way a bad film. Suspend your disbelief for a moment – just as you would for all those westerns which aren't filthy and ridden with disease, malnutrition, poverty and gore; just as you would for all those musicals where bursting into co-ordinated song in an instant seems a perfectly normal thing to do – suspend your disbelief, and the charm of the lost world and the deep-down-goodness of Cagney's gangster-hero is as engaging as it is delightfully crafted. The Roaring Twenties is as much a nostalgic homage to the genre as it is to the era it glorifies, and a thoroughly enjoyable one at that. Forget realism, this is just very good cinema storytelling

*of course, in reality, most of those involved simply moved on to other things – criminal organisations of that size were never likely to just disappear overnight. But it makes a better movie for their kingpins to end the story dead or defeated, particularly for gangster films in the 30s and 40s, before the world had entirely moved on, before a more critical and impartial eye could be cast on events of the time. Later gangster pictures – notably Leone's Once Upon A Time In America – tend more to reflect the continuation of organised crime into other areas once alcohol became legal again.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Two men of the old west, one of the new.

Directed by John Ford
Written by James Warner Bellah, Willis Goldbeck, Dorothy M. Johnson (novel)
Starring John Wayne, James Stewart, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin



Look at it; it was once a wilderness, now it's a garden.

There are three genres in cinema that find their roots entirely and exclusively in American soil; the gangster movie, the musical, and the western.  Yet only one of the three seems lodged in a long-distant halcyon age of Hollywood:  the gangster genre is as much about Scorsese as it is about Jimmy Cagney, while musicals have had many distinct ages - the Busby Berkeley-dominated era in the early days of sound, the time of Rodgers and Hammerstein in the 50s and early 60s, the less relentlessly cheerful 70s pictures (such as Fiddler on the Roof or Cabaret), more recent musicals like Chicago, Mamma Mia!, not to mention all those Disney animations.  Oh, and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.  Mustn't forget that.

And the western?  As a genre, it's tied inextricably to one period of time - from the mid-1930s to the beginning of the 1960s.  It's tied to one actor, John Wayne.  And it's tied to one director, the peerless John Ford.  Of course, there have been westerns since - and recently indeed, with the likes of Seraphim Falls, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and the remake of 3:10 to Yuma.  And certainly, Sergio Leone made a tremendous stab at a one-man revival of the genre, yet even his outstanding work in westerns reflects an outsider trying to reinvigorate a world that had died - like the westerns of the past decade, Leone's are a homage to the classic style, rather than a new direction.

The west changed, and the world changed.  The old ways, of big men with big guns and big horses shooting evil, shallow, one-dimensional Indians and/or bandits just weren't relevant any more.  It had been done, and done to death, in a time when the simplicity of an ever-victorious fight between the good ol' US of A and those who seek to stop them was what so much of the public was after; come the 60s, come a new generation with a new set of priorities and a new politics, that world had gone, and it took the western with it.  And come the 70s, the western makes a rare appearance as something antiheroic, something negative and bleak - take Robert Altman's masterful McCabe and Mrs Miller: it has no time for the proud gunslinger and good-hearted young lady, instead giving us a gambler and a prostitute, running a brothel.  The west is not heroic, the west is not the bold and upstanding and fearless foundation of America.  The west is unpleasant, rough, selfish, grubby.  The west is a place and a time to regret.  This is not the west of John Ford and John Wayne.

And yet, it is.  If you wanted to pin down the end of that era, it's here, the last western that Ford and Wayne made together.  It has all the building blocks of the genre - apart from Wayne as burly sharpshooter in love with The Girl, we've a violent and fearsome bandit (Marvin) and his goons, we've a local marshal who's too weak and drunk and gluttonous to do anything about it, we've a brave outsider (Stewart) riding in to transform the present and the future of the frontier town.  But the blocks aren't stacked the right way, the edifice is falling.  The outsider isn't a heroic frontiersman, he's not a cowboy or a sheriff or an outlaw-come-good.  He's a lawyer and sometime politician.  He can't shoot a gun straight to save his life.  When he finally decides that, as the noble hero, he should confront the bandit, he's wearing an apron.

Meanwhile, Wayne, big, strong John Wayne, seems only to slip further into the shadows.  Nothing stands more clearly for the death of the west than the isolation of his character - at first, the brave hero, the only man who really tries to defend his town, but after Stewart rides in, he finds himself gradually yet completely driven aside.  The gunslinger, the quick, strong, western icon, comes to mean so little in the face of a new world.  As law and order, literacy and politics seep into the life of the little town, the role of the old warrior is reduced to nothing more than a murderer hiding in the shadows.  The man of the old west is beaten; all respect him, but none look to him to lead them any longer.  Stewart, his books and his words, represents the future.  Wayne is isolated.  Wayne is the past.  And, ultimately, Wayne hands over the town - and the west - to Stewart to carry forward.

And, in the end, we have Stewart and The Girl riding across the prairie - not in a stagecoach, not on horseback, but in civilised comfort on the railroad.  The west they're leaving behind, she says, has transformed from wilderness into garden - and it's Stewart that's responsible, it's the encroachment of the world of laws and letters that planted the seeds, the seeds which now blossom outside the window of the carriage.

It was the civilising of the west which gave birth to Hollywood, and Hollywood which gave birth to the story, the legend of that vast, open land.  Eventually, the two had to let go of one another.  It's only right and fitting that it fell to Ford and Wayne to write the last word.

The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)

It's a real shame that modern posters stick to stills and nothing else.

Directed by Otto Preminger
Written by Walter Newman, Lewis Meltzer, Ben Hecht, Nelson Algren (novel)
Starring Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, Kim Novak



So, Frank Sinatra.  There's Sinatra as charming rogue (Ocean's Eleven, The Kissing Bandit), Sinatra as war hero (Von Ryan's Express, None but the Brave), Sinatra as stylish gumshoe with fedora at a jaunty angle (Tony Rome, Lady in Cement), and inevitably, Sinatra being musical (Anchors Aweigh, Guys and Dolls).  Sinatra as broken, hopeless junkie?  It doesn't seem to fit quite so well, does it?

Well, here we are.  Ol' Blue Eyes plays a professional card dealer, fed up of being swindled and manipulated, but too overrun with the addiction to do very much about it.  And he really does a perfectly acceptable job, too; I can't say I expected much, but I was pleasantly surprised.  It's not a spectacular performance, no-one's going to hold it up as the stand-out junkie role in cinema history.  But it was more than good enough, certainly, no cause to complain.

That said, I suppose that now, in 2011, the representation of the addiction might seem a little tame (particularly if we compare the cold turkey scene here with the rather more dramatic and brutal one in Trainspotting) - but then, this is 1955, this is Code Era, if you expect visceral reactions and babies on ceilings, you probably need to look for it elsewhere.

On the other hand, what The Man with the Golden Arm gives us is a tense, involving and very bleak drama.  I should stress bleak:  Preminger really has created something overwhelmed by negativity, a tough ride which gets grimmer and grimmer as it goes along.  You want Sinatra to be okay, for everything to work out for him, but there's scarcely a moment when you'd really believe it could.  The road downhill doesn't have many corners in it, even in the uncertain, hard-fought, cracked salvation of the ending.

I need to make a couple of final points.  Firstly, I love the graphic design of this picture, the heavily stylised - and unmistakably 50s - titles and matching, handdrawn poster.  Secondly, Elmer Bernstein's jazz score genuinely is superb, and elevates the film through the odd stumble.  And there are stumbles - The Man with the Golden Arm is no masterpiece, the story drags in places, it's not as well-paced as it could be, and losing fifteen or twenty minutes wouldn't hurt.  But, like Sinatra's acting, it's more than good enough; not great, but more than good enough.

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Heaven, as a John Martin landscape

Directed by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Written by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Starring David Niven, Kim Hunter, Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey



"When I saw that Archers logo at the start, I knew I'd be watching something special".  The young Martin Scorsese understood when he was on to a good thing - The Archers, those arrows thudding into the target, meant a film written and directed by Powell and Pressburger (and usually shot by the peerless Jack Cardiff), and special isn't the half of it.  Did they ever make a bad film?  Did they ever make a merely-alright film, for that matter?  The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Spy In Black, One of Our Aircraft is Missing, Ill Met By Moonlight, and, of course, A Matter of Life and Death.

The consistency of the partnership was astonishing, and it's a dreadful shame that for so long (although happily no longer) their films were largely ignored, shoved to one side, all because of the controversy over Powell's brilliant but disturbing Peeping Tom.  It's true that that picture (telling the story of a murderer who gets his kicks filming the last, anguished expressions of his victims) was bleak, troubling, and not at all what was expected of such a scion of the British establishment - and also a superbly directed and constructed movie, which shouldn't be forgotten - but nothing should have been allowed to overshadow the career of one of this country's finest filmmakers, nor of his Hungarian associate.  The eventual rehabilitation of Powell and Pressburger, led by Scorsese and Robert De Niro, was long overdue and very much deserved.

And in the middle of their partnership, we find A Matter of Life and Death.  There's a clear difference between this picture and most of their output, thrillers with a strong psychological edge (such as The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Spy in Black).  Instead, we have a beautiful film, romantic, funny, elegant, inventive, charming.  David Niven couldn't be better suited to the part - I mean, seriously, upper-middle-class RAF hero, writes poetry, romantic lead, who else are you going to cast? - and everything else that's wonderful about the picture grows from there.  Everything else that's wonderful, by the way, being an awful lot - particularly the cinematography.  The contrast between the black and white, clean, elegant style of heaven and the bright, rich colours of earth is striking and works perfectly; heaven is graceful, earth is passionate.  Both are gorgeous.

There's really nothing about this film that isn't delightful.  But it's important to recognise that there's more to the movie than just being lovely from start to finish - it is very inventive, a superbly crafted and unique drama, involving and engaging and always sure to keep you hoping for Niven, Livesey and Hunter to succeed, and to suggest that it's no more than a wonderfully charming romance is missing the point completely.  It is wonderfully charming, it is romantic, but it's also powerful, innovative, and artful.  Frankly, it's a masterpiece.

Crazy Heart (2009)

Jeff Bridges.  I like Jeff Bridges.  Look at him, isn't he lovely?

Directed by Scott Cooper
Written by Scott Cooper, Thomas Cobb (novel)
Starring Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Robert Duvall, Colin Farrell




I like Jeff Bridges.  Doesn't everyone like Jeff Bridges?  There's something comforting about his name appearing in the titles of a film, and more so as he gets older, as he grows into a fine vintage of bearded gentility.  There always was something about The Dude that suited Bridges, easy-going, charming, likeable; as the man says in The Big Lebowski, 'he fits right in there'.  Jeff Bridges, an actor who fits right in.

Anyway, there's a point to all this, and it's not really anything to do with The Big Lebowski.  It's a lot more to do a question of balance.  See, on the one hand, I look at this film Crazy Heart, I've heard some good things about it, not sure if I'd really be interested, but hey, Jeff Bridges.  I like Jeff Bridges.  Doesn't everyone like Jeff Bridges?  On the other hand, here's a film that threatens to be full to the brim of country music (and it carries out said threat with ruthless efficiency), and that's not something likely to endear a picture to me.  That said, the country music's largely performed by Bridges himself, so... well, that just confuses the issue, doesn't it?

And in the end, I have to say that I'm rather glad I did see it.  It's a simple, straightforward picture - one of the long history of little American Indie* flicks, where someone in difficulties meets people, not a lot happens, and their life ends up a bit better.  But it really is a fine example of the genre: very nicely put together, endearing, charming, believable.  There's little more important in a film of this nature than the characters being sympathetic, being people you can relate to and who you want to succeed; after all, the film is all about the people in it, no big flashes or bangs, no giant robots and things that go whoooosh.  The characters need to be the kind of folks that you'd side with, that you'd help out if you happened upon them.  What does Crazy Heart have to offer?  Jeff Bridges.  Of course you'd side with Jeff Bridges.  Of course you'd help him out.  Of course you want things to work out well for him.

There's really not a great deal to the film, but it's all the better for that.  There are only a few characters - Maggie Gyllenhaal as the nice girl, Robert Duvall as the old friend, Paul Herman as the sensible and considerate agent, Colin Farrell as the, um, other old friend - and they're all likeable and hope-for-the-best as well.  Simple, straightforward.  Nice.  Charming.  The kind of movie that it's really hard to dislike, and a lovely way to spend a hundred minutes of a Sunday evening.

Now, if they could only have found a way to do it without quite so much country music...



*I'm not particularly comfortable with that word, but it serves a purpose here.

The Constant Gardener (2005)

Rachel Weisz and Ralph Fiennes, nice people.

Directed by Fernando Meirelles

Written by Jeffrey Caine, John le Carré (novel)

Starring Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Hubert Koundé, Danny Huston, Pete Postlethwaite

Sooner or later, I’ll find myself writing about a film with a weak cast, or, at least, with a poor choice for the lead. There’s no shortage of them around, after all. I’m also bound to find myself writing properly, sooner or later, about Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, seeing as I’ll be mentioning it again here. But that’ll have to wait until the dvd emerges, as it really is a little too long since I’ve seen it. If you’ve made the effort to read this, you probably want something that’s fresh in my mind, yes? Anyway, I’m going to pretend that you care about that, not too concerned about the truth of the matter. 

John Le Carré is concerned about the truth. In place of the usual disclaimer in the credits of a fictional film – any similarity to the name, character or history of any person is entirely coincidental and unintentional – we have a message from the author:

Nobody in this story, and no outfit or corporation, thank God, is based upon an actual person or outfit in the real world. But I can tell you this; as my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realise that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard.

The man has a point. I’m not here to argue about the behaviour of the pharmaceutical industry – not that I dispute Le Carré’s assertions nor any of the other damning criticism and horror stories about such companies’ roles in poorer countries, far from it; I simply wouldn’t like to claim that I have any particular knowledge about the subject. Rather, I’m writing about the movie, as a movie rather than as a protest, and yes, it does have certain similarities to a holiday postcard. 

That’s not to say it’s a bad film; it isn’t. Nor is it to say that I didn’t enjoy it, because I did. Perhaps it didn’t help that it was lacking the elegance, subtlety and rich emotional undercurrents of the most recent picture from a Le Carré novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Perhaps the comparison is unfair: The Constant Gardener is an entirely different (and much newer) story, and I accept that it’s not entirely reasonable to set the two movies alongside one another just because they came from novels by the same author. On the other hand, I’m not an entirely reasonable person. Most of us aren’t. 

Anyway, even if I put Tinker, Tailor to the back of my mind, I nevertheless stand by my postcard comment. There’s nothing essentially wrong with postcards. A good postcard is attractive, interesting, offers a straightforward method of communication for simple ideas, coupled with a nice, straightforward, uncritical picture of where you are. So it is for The Constant Gardener.  I’ve no qualms with the look of the film – César Charlone has photographed a fine piece of work, taking every drop of beauty from the gorgeous east African vistas, without compromising the bleakness of the poverty. But the look is what postcards tend to do well. 

What they lack is the scope for a complex message, for a depth of understanding, and depth and complexity are both sadly lacking from The Constant Gardener. The good guys are good, pure, noble, lovely. The bad guys – the Three Bees pharmaceutical company and its supporters in diplomatic circles – are unswervingly evil. I’m sure there are deeply unpleasant people in pharmaceuticals and diplomacy, and I’m sure there are terrific individuals fighting against them, but it might have been nice if the brush strokes had been a little less broad, if there’d been some shades of grey, if the conflict between Good and Evil had been not quite so absolute. Only Rachel Weisz plays a character at all in the middle between nice and nasty, and even then – as a dedicated campaigner against the dangerous and abusive behaviour of Three Bees – we’re never in any doubt on which side she really falls. 

So, ultimately, we’re left with a tremendous cast all slotting into obvious and shallow roles. And with such acting ability, with a gifted DP and a fine director in Meirelles, the lack of complexity seems wasteful. Yet, as I said, it’s not a bad film, and I enjoyed it. But it could have been a magnificent film, and I could have loved it. That it didn’t work out that way really is a bit of a shame.

Love Is The Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998)

Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon - the artist, not the philosopher-scientist.

Directed by John Maybury

Written by John Maybury

Starring Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig, Tilda Swinton

Call it what you will: divine intervention, sudden happenstance, the random element; a chance development drops in and entirely changes the direction of the plot. Banal Michael Caine vehicle Blue Ice gives us a large piece of, well, blue ice plummeting from the sky – as per the urban myth –and on to an invitingly shady character. Rather more credibly, Janet Leigh was doing just fine, set to build a new life with all that stolen money, until she happened upon the wrong motel. Robert Rodgriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s grammatically flawed From Dusk Till Dawn shifts from heist movie to action-horror with an unexpected stop amongst a den of vampires. The Toy Story world is transformed by the out-of-the-blue arrival of a shiny new Buzz Lightyear action figure (who then himself bursts unexpected into the try-your-luck world of the three-eyed alien toys).  

The new story dropping on to the old through means beyond anyone’s control crops up, rather literally, in John Maybury’s Love Is The Devil. Whether there’s actually any truth in the tale of small-time criminal George Dyer falling through a skylight into Francis Bacon’s studio is a secret that the two men took to their graves – not that it matters. It’s a fine tale, and were it ever to emerge that they met on a night out or bumped into one another while out shopping, we may be wiser but also a tad disapponted. And Maybury’s certainly not too concerned with such historical questions: his Dyer plunges from the heavens, his Bacon (Jacobi) invites the visitor to bed, and from there the erstwhile burglar rapidly slips over into being the artist’s lover, model, muse.

It’s the rise and fall of this relationship about which the picture revolves, as simple, working class Dyer (Craig) tries to adapt to his new life, the new world he occupies, Bacon’s world, the artist’s fame and friends and wants and demands. Tries, and fails. Bacon needs Dyer, artistically and physically, yet he’s irritated by a man so unlike himself or those he normally spends his time with; the artist grows tired of his muse, but cannot let him go – so ends up funding his collapse into alcoholism and despair, whilst the art, inspired by and often depicting Dyer, reaches extraordinary new heights.  

And Jacobi’s performance is every bit as towering; indeed, it rather holds the film together in places, for whenever we move beyond the boundaries of Dyer and Bacon’s storm, the fire dies and the picture slows to a drab, staid, predictable progress. The artist’s circle of friends are a muddle of by-numbers stereotypes, straight from the cinema’s big book of extroverted homosexuals – while Dyer’s equivalent, if rather smaller, cluster of acquaintances are all Cockney ne’erdowells, a little bit dodgy, and blimey mister they don’t rightly trust these toffs, folk who aren’t like us, who’ll just use you and throw you away. Had they been on screen a little longer, I’m sure one of them would’ve started selling eels.  

Maybury could easily have found himself also slipping up over the presentation of the picture. After all, his subject was a figurative, abstract painter, one indelibly associated with dramatic and vivid bursts of colour; it’s only natural for the director to bring a comparable artistic sensibility to the movie. However, there’s a fine line between an expressionist touch and outright pretentiousness, and after all, Maybury has not the same talent in that area as Bacon had. There’s a risk of the director ending up looking as though he's simply trying to imitate Bacon, and although he managed to stay on the right side of that rather fine line, it wasn’t by much.  

Perhaps he was able to do so because the picture as a whole is lifted by Jacobi’s performance. And I really can’t stress this enough – the performance was exceptional, powerful, magnificent; ably supported by a typically effective and engaging display by Craig, but it remains the veteran’s turn as Bacon that stands out, that carries the film from worthy mediocrity to something far more impressive.

 

In recent weeks, I’ve seen a film – Tomas Alfredson’s superb Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – in which an outstanding cast built upon the lustre of an otherwise very fine picture, and another – Franklin J. Schaffner’s frankly embarrassing The Boys From Brazil – in which the outstanding cast didn’t and couldn’t rescue a shockingly poor film. Love Is The Devil falls between these two stools, a reasonable enough movie made far better by its cast. In that respect, it’s definitely worth watching; in that respect, it could never be a masterpiece.

Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Dennis Hopper in a very nice picture.  I've not mentioned him at all.

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Written by Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius, Michael Herr, Joseph Conrad (novel)

Starring Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall

I’m not going to bother writing much about Apocalypse Now. For the most part, this is because I assume – and I think it’s fair to assume – that nearly everyone who’s likely to see it has done so, has formed clear opinions about it, has read or heard or talked about it. Like Citizen Kane, or Star Wars, or Casablanca, it’s one of those films that’s gained such prominence over the years that there’s really nothing left to say. 

 

But there’s another reason for not really writing about Apocalypse Now. It’s because I’ve not really seen it for a few years. Not how it ought to be seen. What I have watched rather more recently is Apocalypse Now Redux – yes, that’s Redux, not Director’s Cut. The difference is apparently important. According to Wikipedia,  

Redux is usually considered by fans and critics, as well as director Francis Ford Coppola, a completely new movie altogether.

Now, when I got to see a completely new movie, I’d normally hope that it wouldn’t contain two-and-a-half hours of an existing movie, and a classic at that, but let’s not split hairs. Coppola wants us to know that this isn’t a director’s cut, but rather the cut that he, the director, would like the world to see. As I said, it’s an important difference. Apparently. And I certainly wouldn’t suggest for one moment that Coppola wants to be seen as doing something more artistically and cinematically significant than other directors. Not that kind of guy at all. Not the kind of director who would see himself as a step above everyone else, the kind of director who wouldn’t allow anyone to see Abel Gance’s Napoleon unless they watch his own edit with his father’s score, rather than the way Gance wanted it to be seen. What? Oh, right. 
 

Anyway, I digress.

Twenty-odd years before the Redux, Coppola and editor Walter Murch felt able to discard the material that surfaced in the Completely New Movie version.  As is normally the case with director’s cuts – not that this is a director’s cut, of course – there are a few scenes that are a little more bloated than they originally were, a minute here, thirty seconds there, short clips of footage trimmed for good reason and now restored because the director likes them. But it’s the two long scenes that have been added that really mark the difference between the Redux and the original cut, and which account for most of the extra fifty minutes that the new version runs for; the first of these is an odd detour into farcical sex-comedy, as the men pay for shambling, hurried sex with the Playboy bunnies they’d met earlier; the second has the boat stop off at French plantation, bury Clean, and have a chinwag over dinner.    

Two long scenes that Coppola and Murch once felt able to discard. What changed? What is it about a clumsy scene of small-scale prostitution or a dull diversion with a few Frenchmen that had no place in a superb movie of 1979 but are now deemed absolutely necessary in the twenty-first century? Well, the former is inescapably 70s, seemingly escaped from a sexploitation flick, so quite how that contributes to making a Completely New Movie for today, I’m not certain. And the latter, although it briefly threatens relevance with the opportunity to pay respect to the death of such a young man, is mostly concerned with eating up time whilst achieving nothing in particular – the kind of dull, misguided scene that ends up on the cutting room floor when an awful lot of films come to be edited.

 

And that, really, is my point. I know it’s taken an awfully long time to get here – I need to be edited a bit more – but there it is, the point of all this rambling. Those two scenes weren’t cut at random, they were cut for a bloody good reason: that their absence makes for a better film. And that’s true of a good ninety per cent of all new cuts, be they director’s cuts or whatever; once in a while, a film (such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil) will be torn apart in editing, with much of what’s good about the picture taken away – but only very rarely. Mistakes happen in all walks of life, bad decisions are made, and it should never be assumed that the director knows best how the finished movie should appear. He usually doesn’t. That’s why editors exist. That’s why a good editor can make so much difference to a film.

Steven Spielberg, when editing Jaws with Verna Fields, didn’t want to lose a second of shark footage, largely because he’d spent months trying to get that damn rubber fish to work and hoped to make the most of it. Fields, thankfully, put her foot down, and the director recognises today that Jaws became the film it was largely because there’s so little of the shark and so much of the men. 
 

On the other hand, Richard Kelly clearly didn’t recognise the work put in by editors Sam Bauer and Eric Strand when it came to Donnie Darko. The m0vie that made it to the cinemas was ingenious, enigmatic, energetic, thought-provoking and thoroughly good fun – an outstanding 80s teen movie with a just-confusing-enough sci-fi story stirred in, and one of the most striking and acclaimed films of the decade. However, the release of the director’s cut showed us that Kelly was after something entirely different, a long, daft story in which every fantasy detail was explained in the clearest and least interesting terms possible. That godawful mess was Kelly’s baby, and he must have been horrified to see the editors cut it into something brisk, entertaining and, well, good.  

Given how much he put into it – financially, physically, emotionally – it’s easy to see how every second of footage recorded for Apocalypse Now would be Coppola’s baby. And easy to see how much of an itch it must have been for him, knowing for two decades that two substantial scenes of his work, his creation, remain abandoned and unseen. I hope he’s happier now that fifty minutes is out there for the public to see – but that’s no reason for the rest of us to be interested. The 1979 original was wonderfully edited, and a magnificent piece of cinema. Watch that. Don’t indulge Coppola. He’s had more than enough indulgence as it is.