This is a new 4K restoration and is also being screened on March 26th and 28th. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Martin Scorsese transforms a
debilitating convention of 80s comedy—absurd underreaction to
increasingly bizarre and threatening situations—into a rich,
wincingly funny metaphysical farce. A lonely computer programmer
(Griffin Dunne) is lured from the workday security of midtown
Manhattan to an expressionistic late-night SoHo by the vague promise
of casual sex with a mysterious blonde (Rosanna Arquette). But she
turns out to be a sinister kook whose erratic behavior plunges Dunne
into a series of increasingly strange, devastating incidents,
including encounters with three more treacherous blondes (Verna
Bloom, Teri Garr, and Catherine O'Hara) and culminating in a run-in
with a bloodthirsty mob of vigilantes led by a Mr. Softee truck.
Scorsese's orchestration of thematic development, narrative
structure, and visual style is stunning in its detail and fullness;
this 1985 feature reestablished him as one of the very few
contemporary masters of filmmaking. Dave Kehr
This 35mm screening is part of the Stanley Kubrick season at the Prince Charles. You can find all the details here.
Chicago Reader review: Arguably
Stanley Kubrick's most perfectly conceived and executed film, this 1956
noirish thriller utilizes an intricate overlapping time structure to
depict the planning and execution of a plot to steal $2 million from a
racetrack. Adapted by Kubrick from Lionel White's Clean Break, with an
extraordinary gallery of B players: Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, J.C.
Flippen, Elisha Cook Jr., Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards, Ted de Corsia,
Joe Sawyer, and the unforgettable Timothy Carey. Orson Welles was so
taken with this film that after seeing it he declared Kubrick could do
no wrong; not to be missed. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is the trailer.
This film is also being shown on March 13th and 30th (a 35mm screening). Details here.
Time Out review: There’s a superb and important early scene in Ang Lee’s absorbing spy
romance, set on a stylised (studio-shot) Hong Kong tram in 1939, as a
young troupe of Chinese actors board, flushed with the rousing success
of that night’s patriotic play. (The Japanese have already occupied
their homeland, British-run Hong Kong is soon to fall.) The exhilarated
lead character Wong Chia Chi (a remarkable, film-dominating debut
performance by newcomer Wei Tang) thrusts her head out the window to
taste the rain, as if to make physical and personal the night’s small
triumph. You see in that moment how the innocent young actress may be
persuaded, in patriotic duty, to adopt an alias, spy on and seduce, in
order to kill Tony Leung’s collaborationist chief of police. You
could call Lee’s Chinese-language version of Eileen Chang’s novella a
revisionist wartime thriller. Its sub-Brechtian moments are muted, but
it is more than happy to pay self-conscious attention to the period
setting, design and clothes to highlight, in echo of David Hare’s
‘Plenty’, the seductive role of dress as disguise and mask. Like Hare
(with his OAS volunteer, Kate Nelligan), Lee is interested in applying
an emotional and psychological realism to his heroine’s incredible
bravery. It seems, in wartime, some are able to assume grave
responsibilties, but – as Lee’s film quietly and provocatively suggests –
the actions of those that do make mockery of conventional, sex-based,
notions of what constitutes courage, honour, love or even patriotism
itself. In this sense, the real battlefield, the genuine theatre of
truth, in ‘Lust, Caution’ is the bed – the sex – in the arranged flat
three years later in Shanghai, something of a last tango wherein Leung’s
previously almost obsequiously mannered ‘traitor’ shows his true
colours, and Miss Wong, under her alias Mrs Mak, is transformed by the
ever-present knowledge that discovery is death. It’s not a companionable
film – Lee’s directorial discipline, objectivity and lack of
expressionist touch in the use of either Rodrigo Prieto’s camerawork or Alexandre Desplat’s score can push the viewer close to outsider-dom or voyeurism – but its dark romanticism lingers in the mind. Wally Hammond
Time Out review: Talk about heart-on-your-sleeve cinema. Sean Penn uses cinema as an
alternative to the analyst’s couch in this adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s
book, which details the fatal journey of Christopher McCandless, a
22-year-old graduate from a comfortable Virginian background who, in
1990, gave his $24,000 savings to Oxfam, hit the road and wandered
through California, Arizona and South Dakota before hitchhiking to
Alaska, where he ate the wrong berries and died in a rusty old schoolbus
in which he’d been camping between hunting moose, dodging bears and
reading too much Jack London. Eric Gautier’s photography is beautiful, the pace is swift, Emile Hirsch gives
a terrific performance and Penn’s script moves back and forth neatly
between the past and the present, cleverly using the bridge of a
voiceover from McCandless’ sister (Jena Malone) to sketch a troubled family background. Dave Calhoun
This 35mm presentation is also being shown on March 31st. Full details here. Chicago Reader review: Pier
Paolo Pasolini's last feature (1975) is a shockingly literal and
historically questionable transposition of the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom to
the last days of Italian fascism. Most of the film consists of long
shots of torture, though some viewers have been more upset by the
bibliography that appears in the credits. Roland Barthes noted that in
spite of all its objectionable elements (he pointed out that any film
that renders Sade real and fascism unreal is doubly wrong), this film
should be defended because it "refuses to allow us to redeem ourselves."
It's certainly the film in which Pasolini's protest against the modern
world finds its most extreme and anguished expression. Very hard to
take, but in its own way an essential work. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is the trailer.
This film is part of the Alfred Hitchcock season at Prince Charles Cinema. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: The
Hitchcock classic of 1946, with Cary Grant as a charming and
unscrupulous government agent and Ingrid Bergman as a woman of low
repute whom he morally blackmails into marrying a Nazi leader (Claude
Rains, in a performance that makes a sad little boy of him). The
virtuoso sequences—the long kiss, the crane shot into the door key—are
justly famous, yet the film's real brilliance is in its subtle and
detailed portrayal of infinitely perverse relationships. The concluding
shot transforms Rains from villain to victim with a disturbingly cool,
tragic force. Dave Kehr
Cinema Museum introduction: Wonder
Reels return to the Cinema Museum with their unique events featuring
live performances from outstanding London musicians followed by a
35mm screening of a full feature film chosen with the artist in mind.
The evening will start with a concert by British songwriter James
Howard whose first solo record Peek-a-Boo
came out in 2023 and was praised by the music press for its “lyrical
shrewdness” and the unsettling beauty of its “lilting
lunar lullabies.” His songs are full of places, objects and
people—including actor Jackie Coogan, who played alongside Chaplin
in The Kid and was an inspiration for album opener Child
Starz. For Wonder Reels Howard plans to write a special number in
response to our chosen film—and play it just the once! The
performance will be followed by a 35mm film screening of Warren
Beatty’s 1978 Oscar-winning movie Heaven Can Wait,
which he produced, co-wrote, co-directed and starred in. This
delightful romantic comedy tells the story of a Californian
quarterback sent to heaven before his time, only to be given a second
chance at life in the body of a recently murdered millionaire, which
leads to many ludicrous and eerie situations. Please
note this original 35mm print has some colour fade.
Time Out review: The superbly labyrinthine plotting of Blood Simple must have been
a hard act to follow; praise be, then, to the Brothers Coen for
confounding all expectations with this fervently inventive comedy.
Sublimely incompetent convenience-store robber Hi McDonnough (Cage, at
his best yet) seems doomed to return repeatedly to the same penitentiary
until true love hoves in view in the form of prison officer Edwina
(Hunter). Spliced in a trice, the frustratedly infertile couple kidnap
one (surely he won't be missed?) of the celebrated Arizona quintuplets,
heirs to an unpainted-furniture fortune. But happiness being evanescent,
complications ensue when a pair of Hi's old cellmates turn up in search
of sanctuary; and then there's the problem of a rabbit-shooting biker
of hellish hue, hired by Arizona Senior to find his missing brat. What
makes this hectic farce so fresh and funny is the sheer fertility of the
writing, while the lives and times of Hi, Ed and friends are painted in
splendidly seedy colours, turning Arizona into a mythical haven for a
memorable gaggle of no-hopers, halfwits and has-beens. Starting from a
point of delirious excess, the film leaps into dark and virtually
uncharted territory to soar like a comet. Geoff Andrew
This screening is part of the Wong Kar-wai season at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find the full details here.
Time Out review: Wong Kar-Wai’s
long-awaited, sumptuous follow-up to ‘In the Mood for Love’ makes for a
rapturous cinematic experience. It’s not just the stunning production
design (William Chang), exquisite camerawork (Chris Doyle,Lai Yiu Fai,Kwan Pun Leung) and superbly used music (various artists and composers, includingShigeru Umebayashi),
which together give the film the febrile intensity of a
nineteenth-century opera (Bellini features on the track). It’s also the
subtlety and complexity that distinguish Wong’s charting of the
emotional odyssey undergone by Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung) as he goes
through a series of relationships with different but likewise lovely
women: a prostitute (Ziyi Zhang), a gambler (Gong Li), a cabaret singer (Carina Lau), and his landlord’s daughter (Faye Wong). With
such beauties surrounding him, you’d expect Chow to be happy, but the
film mainly takes place in the mid-’60s, the years immediately following
his heart-breaking encounter with a married woman (Maggie Cheung in ‘In
the Mood for Love’). It’s a relationship that still shades and shapes
his reactions to every woman he meets, and it therefore also influences
the allegorical sci-fi novel he’s writing, set in the year 2046 (after
the number on a hotel-room door) but inspired by his own memories and
desires… Wong intercuts scenes from this book with Chow’s various
affairs and non-affairs, allowing Wong to build layer upon bittersweet
layer of meaning in a work as cerebrally rewarding as it is sensually
seductive. It may help if you grasp the many allusions to Wong’s earlier
films (including, notably, ‘Days of Being Wild’), but it’s far from
necessary. This, after all, is undeniably real cinema. Geoff Andrew
BFI introduction: Paolo Taviani‘s first film following the death of his brother in 2018
(and his first solo feature as a writer-director) proved to be a
beguiling and beautiful elegy for Vittorio. It’s a celebration of
post-war Italian cinema and a return to the fertile stories of Luigi
Pirandello, including the bizarre saga of the burial of the author’s
ashes.
This is the fifth night in the exciting 'Last Movies' season at
the ICA Cinema. Full details of all the screenings in the five-month
long repertoire can be found here.
Last Movies remaps the first century of cinema according to what a
selection of its key cultural icons saw just before dying. Conceived and
created by Stanley Schtinter to enable an audience ‘to see what those
who see no longer saw last,’ the ICA hosts a five-month programme to
coincide with the publication of his book of the same title, described
by Alan Moore as ‘Profound and riveting . . . a remarkable achievement,’
and by Laura Mulvey as ‘deeply thought-provoking.’
According to
Erika Balsom, Last Movies ‘abandons all those calcified criteria most
frequently used to organise cinema programmes ... period, nation, genre,
director, star, theme: nothing internal to these films motivates their
inclusion, their ‘quality’ least of all ... Last Movies embraces
chance.’
Introduction to tonight’s screening: In 1986, CM von Hausswolff travelled to the depths of Iran to visit
the ruins of Alamut castle, the famed residence of Persian emperor
Hassan I-Sabbah, master of the Ismaili sect known as the ‘assassins’.
Only on returning to Tehran did Hausswolff discover that the prime
minister of Sweden, his home, had been assassinated leaving the
cinema. The killer remains at large. When Hausswolff told Schtinter
this story, he immediately asked: ‘But what had he just seen?’
This was fundamental to the birth of the Last Movies project.
Hausswolff will join Schtinter on this, the final instalment of Last
Movies at the ICA, with the two artists discussing occult Islam, the
recording of ghosts, and trips to ‘nowhere’.
Chicago Reader review: Like Borges and Bioy-Casares’s no less questionable Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, this satirical look at the presumptions of the avant-garde is apt to be funnier to people who dislike most of the avant-garde on principle than to those with more sympathy–who maybe in for a bumpy ride. Either way, Suzanne Osten’s Swedish comedy certainly has its laughs, although a certain rhythmic monotony and sameness in the scenes prevents it from building as much as it should (in the sense that, say, Mel Brooks’s The Producers and Albert Brooks’s Real Life do, to cite two other celebrations of eccentric theatrical excess). A typical scene begins with the director of an avant-garde production of Don Giovanni asking members of his company to do something outrageous (“Do something erotic with objects”), and ends with a musician grumbling or making threats (“If you say I’m antagonistic once again, I’ll hit you with my shoe”). Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review: All right, so it starred Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif. You wanna make
something of it? Blake Edwards’s film was still one of the few examples of a
genuinely expressive visual style to come along this year, an
uncompromised love story with some remarkable spiritual overtones.
Posterity, not the New Yorker, has the last word. Dave Kehr (a fuller review appears here)
This film is part of the Screen Cuba season at Garden Cinema and will feature an introduction by Tania Delgado, director of the Havana Film Festival.
Chicago Reader review: This extraordinary film, the first Cuban feature by a woman, has been
celebrated as feminist by some critics, partly for its story but also
for its narrative style. It follows the relationship between
schoolteacher Yolanda (Yolanda Cuellar) and factory worker Mario (Mario
Balmaseda), but instead of imposing a patriarchal authorial voice,
director Sara Gomez provocatively combines fiction sequences with
documentary footage, and her playful use of form is both startling and
purposeful. The film begins abruptly, as if in midscene, with a
documentarylike record of a workers' meeting; the credits are followed
by an actual documentary segment on housing development in the early
60s, complete with didactic voice-over. Sections that seem to be
dramatic are later revealed to be documentary, while other apparently
dramatic scenes are interrupted by discursive sequences. The film's form
questions itself, as do the characters: Mario, torn between machismo
and his growing revolutionary commitment, turns a malingering worker in
to the group, but then worries that doing so was “womanly.” Most
importantly, the editing encourages an active viewing process—when the
lovers meet a man named Guillermo, a title asks “Who is Guillermo?” and
the film then cuts to a slightly closer shot of the same title—just as
the overall film encourages us to seek wider interpretations. Sadly,
Gomez died in 1974 while the film was being edited, and it wasn't
completed until three years later.
Fred Camper
This film is part of the Screen Cuba season at Garden Cinema and will
be followed by a Q&A with Michael Chanan, filmmaker and renowned Cuban
cinema specialist, and Tania Delgado, director of the Havana Film Festival.
Chicago Reader review: A pleasant, very funny social comedy with a faint black lining. The film is full of hommages to silent comics—a Laurel and Hardy scene from Two Tars,
some precipice tottering from Harold Lloyd—but its taste for quaint
caricature and topical satire places it closer to the Ealing comedies
made in Britain in the 50s. Amazingly, it was actually made in Cuba in
1966, by a director, Tomas Gutierrez Alea, who later traded his comic
sense for social allegory (Memories of Underdevelopment, The Last Supper). Dave Kehr
This screening
will feature an introduction by Alastair Phillipsand will be followed by an informal post-film discussion in the Garden
Cinema Bar.
Chicago Reader review: The mood of Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1953 masterpiece is evoked by the English
translation most often given to its title, “Tales of the Pale and
Silvery Moon After the Rain.” Based on two 16th-century ghost stories,
the film is less a study of the supernatural than a sublime embodiment
of Mizoguchi’s eternal theme, the generosity of women and the
selfishness of men. Densely plotted but as emotionally subtle as its
name, Ugetsu is one of the great experiences of cinema. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: One can easily pick apart this Jane Campion adaptation of a thriller by
Susanna Moore: it isn’t very satisfying as a thriller, and certain
details—like the heroine assigning Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
to her inner-city high school students—come across as just plain silly.
But I still consider this the best (which also means the sexiest)
Campion feature since The Piano, featuring Meg Ryan’s finest
performance to date and an impressive one by Mark Ruffalo. Scripted by
Moore and Campion, it takes on the unfashionable question of what sex
means for a single woman drifting into middle age, and what it says on
the subject veers from the obvious to the novel. Campion is better with
moods than with plot, and her capable handling of some actors (including
Jennifer Jason Leigh and an uncredited Kevin Bacon) ameliorates the
hyperbolic characters they’re asked to play. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins excel in Rouben Mamoulian’s superb
adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella, now beautifully restored in 2K and part of the 'Restored' programme at BFI.
Chicago Reader review: Directed
by Rouben Mamoulian, this 1932 screen adaptation of the Robert Louis
Stevenson classic is a remarkable achievement that deserves to be much
better known. Fredric March won a well-deserved Oscar for his
performance as the lead, and Miriam Hopkins and Rose Hobart play the two
women who match the opposite sides of the hero’s nature. The
transformations of Jekyll are a notable achievement for March and
Mamoulian alike, and the disturbing undercurrents of the story are given
their full due (as they weren’t in the much inferior 1941 Victor
Fleming version with Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, and Lana Turner).
Mamoulian was at his peak in the early 30s, as this film shows. Jonathan Rosenbaum
A rare foray into the area of first-run films to highlight the extended run for this film, by one of our best contemporary directors, which is finally getting a UK run.
New Yorker review: The story of Lizzy (Michelle Williams), a sculptor in Portland, Oregon,
who’s preparing to exhibit at a local gallery—is an instant classic of a
life in art. Kelly Reichardt, who wrote the script with Jon Raymond, invests
the film’s meticulously observed action with a quiet yet passionate
grandeur. Lizzy has a day job in the office of an art college—her boss
is her mother, Jean (Maryann Plunkett)—and has too little time for her
exquisite work, small clay statues of women. Her self-absorbed friend
and neglectful landlord, Jo (Hong Chau), makes more spectacular art and
has two prestigious shows opening at the same time. Lizzy’s vain father
(Judd Hirsch), a retired potter, and her troubled brother (John Magaro),
who is mentally ill, require her attention; amid her efforts to be both
a good person and a good artist, her gruff and terse candor is a
bulwark against frustration and distraction. Working with the
cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, Reichardt films as if in a state
of rapt attention, reserving her keenest ardor and inspiration for the
art itself: as Lizzy sculpts and assembles and glazes and even just
ponders, the film’s visual contemplations seem to get deep into Lizzy’s
creative soul. Richard Brody
Chicago Reader review: “Down With Ford! Long Live Wyler!” was the title of a 1948 article by
French writer and filmmaker Roger Leenhardt, and I’m hard-pressed to
think of a more dubious pronouncement by a major critic. But it starts
to become plausible if one compares William Wyler’s gritty and
beautifully photographed western Hell’s Heroes (1929) with John Ford’s
sentimental remake, 3 Godfathers (1948). Three escaping bank robbers
find themselves caring for an orphaned baby in the cruel desert, and
Wyler does a matchless job of keeping this Christian allegory life-size
and unsentimental without ever diluting its emotional power. With
Charles Bickford, Raymond Hatton, and Fred Kohler. Jonathan Rosenbaum
BFI introduction: John Barry provides a lush, minor-key score for Carol Reed’s final film.
Michael Jayston’s stuffy Charles is jealous of his American wife (an impressive
Mia Farrow) and has her tailed by Topol’s private detective. She soon
realises she is being followed, prompting a romantic game of
cat-and-mouse between the pursuer and pursued. The results are charming
and playful, with Barry’s atmospheric, dream-like soundtrack
accompanying some great shots of early 1970s London.
BFI introduction: This early drama interweaves the stories of four men with complex
personal lives (one of whom is a film director) and political
affiliations, linked by their presence at a – real-life – public
figure’s funeral. The Tavianis’ breakthrough film demonstrates their
belief in the power of cinema and includes a nod to Jean-Luc Godard’s
then recent Pierrot le Fou.
This film is part of the Alfred Hitchcock season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 film was one of the sound cinema’s first
experiments with minimalism: the entire picture takes place in a small
boat, as the survivors of a torpedoed luxury liner find themselves cast
adrift with the captain of the U-boat that sank them. The drama is
developed without recourse to flashbacks or cutaways, and it is done
cleverly and stylishly, though it lacks Hitchcock’s usual depth. At
times, the film seems on the verge of rising above its frankly
propagandistic intentions, but it never really confronts the Darwinian
themes built into the material. With Tallulah Bankhead, John Hodiak,
Walter Slezak, and William Bendix; script by Jo Swerling, from an
original story by John Steinbeck. Dave Kehr
BFI introduction: Set on a secluded island, Boom introduced a new, minimal ‘music box’
sound that Barry frequently used in the years immediately before his
move to the US. The powerhouse combination of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at their
most florid propels Joseph Losey’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. Wonderfully camp, it bombed in
1968. But time has been kind to it. And Noël Coward has a star turn as
Bill Ridgeway, ‘the witch of Capri’.
Time Out review: A long weekend in the lives of an extended family of strangers in South
London. Dad and mum (Jack Shepherd and Kika Markham) have long since settled for
habitual resentment, their general disappointment accentuated by runaway
son Darren. They also have three grown daughters: Nadia (Gina McKee) has
resorted to the lonely hearts columns; Debbie (Shirley Henderson) is the eldest,
with an 11-year-old boy and a good-for-nothing ex (Ian Hart); the youngest,
Molly (Molly Parker), is pregnant, and blissfully happy with her partner,
Eddie (John Simm). Only Eddie's getting cold feet. Winterbottom's best film
by some measure offers an intimate, suburban panorama of London life
now. In the past, this director has slapped style over substance with
more vigour than sensitivity; here he's opted for handheld 16mm cameras
and a skeleton crew to shoot on the streets of Soho and SW1. The result
rings true in a way precious few London films have managed, so that the
experience of going to the movie in a local cinema practically blurs
with what you've seen on screen. Not that the technique obscures the
humanity in Laurence Coriat's fine screenplay, which keeps tabs on
half-a-dozen emotionally deprived lives, and endows mundane occurrences
with an unforced resonance. Shored up with a memorable Michael Nyman score, this achingly tender film makes most new British cinema look downright frivolous. Tom Charity
BFI introduction: This Cinderella-esque tale focuses on Anni, a cabaret singer who
impersonates an aristocrat and who is forced to choose between love and
money. Arzner’s directorial philosophy clashed with studio heads during
production of her first and only film for MGM. In particular, her
trademark butch style infuriated Louis B. Mayer. But her collaboration
with Joan Crawford led to a lifelong and often creative friendship.
This classic, being shown from a 4K digital restoration, is part of the Taviani Brothers season, and also screens on February 10th. Full details here.
Time Out review: A bandit plays bowls with the head of an old woman's husband, a peasant
turns werewolf, a hunchback gets trapped in an outsized olive jar, a
tyrant denies tenants the right to bury their dead, and Pirandello
shares his sorrows with his mother's ghosts. The common link between the
stories, adapted from Pirandello, is the vast, empty Sicilian landscape
harbouring a richness of dramatic tales at once emotional and
elemental. This is a film of fierce sunlight, bleached rocks, dark
interiors, silent stares, and dialogue as rough and sparse as the land.
In the years since the Tavianis' Padre Padrone, naturalism has
given ground to a more grotesque vision of the past, allowing black
comedy to creep into the always subtle socio-historical subject matter.
Exhilarating. Martin Auty
Chicago Reader review: Canadian filmmaker Sidney J. Furie apes the dull flash of the British
New Wave (Richardson, Reisz, et al) in this 1963 tale of teenage sexual
confusion laced with a Freudian appreciation of the art of motorcycle
maintenance. Dave Kehr
This 35mm presentation, part of the Taviani Brothers season, also screens on February 28th. You can find the full details here.
BFI introduction: Some 15 years after the creative success of Kaos, the Tavianis returned
to one of their literary touchstones, adapting two contrasting stories
by Pirandello. A 1930s-set, musically themed satire opens the film. It
is followed by the tougher, but no less involving, story of two
kidnappings that take place a century apart. A stunning and richly
emotional film: what makes You Laugh so compelling is the way the
Tavianis find a common ground between these very different tales.
Time Out review: Alexander Mackendrick and Ealing's resident American writer William Rose had already collaborated on The Maggie
when they came together again for this, the last, most enduring and
best known of all the studio's comedies, in which the sheer blackness of
the central concept is barely disguised by the accomplished farce which
surrounds it. Little Katie Johnson, the innocent hostess to a gang who
find it easier to silence each other than her, proves resistant to
science (Alec Guinness' fanged 'Professor'), strategy (Parker's 'Major') and
all shades of brute force and ignorance as she unwittingly foils a
criminal getaway that never reaches beyond St Pancras. A finely wrought
image of terminal stasis, national, political (Charles Barr suggests the
gang as the first post-war Labour government), and/or creative (the
house as Ealing, Johnson as Balcon??). Whatever, Mackendrick immediately
upped for America and the equally dark ironies of Sweet Smell of Success. Paul Taylor
Time Out review: It’s 50 years since the late, great Bengali writer-director Satyajit Ray made
his debut with this, the first and finest installment of his
ground-breaking ‘Apu Trilogy’. It was the first Indian movie to attract
attention in the West, and if your experience of subcontinental cinema
extends no further than Bollywood’s romantic musicals, it’s not just
the film’s enduring status as a landmark of world cinema that makes it
essential viewing. It remains a miracle of lyrical realism: the
detailed, documentary-style observation of village life as experienced
by young Apu, his sister Durga, their parents and ancient grandma is
inflected by a marvellous use of motifs (trains beckoning to another,
industrialised urban world, water as a symbol of cyclical regeneration)
to turn a simple rites-of-passage story into pure poetry. A hymn to
curiosity, courage and conscience, it introduces Apu as an opening eye,
innocent of adult anxieties but alert to adventure and, finally, moral
discovery. Ravi Shankar’s music is great too. A masterpiece, inarguably. Geoff Brown
