Chicago Reader review: One of the loveliest of Nick Ray’s movies: this 1952 feature begins as a
harsh film noir and gradually shifts to an ethereal romanticism
reminiscent of Frank Borzage. Robert Ryan is the unstable hero, a
thuggish cop sent upstate in search of a murderer; he ends up falling in
love with the killer’s blind sister (Ida Lupino, who took over some of
the direction when Ray fell ill). Ray excels both in the portrayal of
the corrupt urban environment, a swirl of noirish shadows and violent
movements, and in his exalted vision of the snow-covered countryside,
filmed as a blindingly white, painfully silent field for moral
regeneration. With Ward Bond and an excellent score by Bernard Herrmann. Dave Kehr
This is a 35mm screening and is part of the Rio Forever season. More details here. Director and Rio Patron
Asif Kapadia (Senna, Amy, Diego Maradona, 2073) will introduce the
film, discussing its importance to him both as a director and film
lover. Here is an excellent article by John Patterson in the Guardian on the movie.
Time Out review:
It’s
worrying that 1974’s ‘The Godfather Part II’ is now best known for
being the film-lover’s kneejerk answer to the question ‘which sequel is
superior to the original’? It’s a pointless discussion, because both
films are damn close to perfect: two opposing but complementary sides of
the same coin. If ‘The Godfather’ was a knife in the dark, its sequel
is the long, slow death rattle; if the first film lusted after its
bloodthirsty antiheroes, the second drowns itself in guilt and
recrimination. Two stories run in parallel in ‘Part II’. In the first, a
young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) rises to power in New York,
fuelled by vengeance and brute, old-world morality. In the second, set
50 years later, his son Michael (Al Pacino) struggles to reconcile his
father’s ideals with an uncertain world, and finds himself beset on all
sides by treachery and greed. This is quite simply one of the saddest
movies ever made, a tale of loss, grief and absolute loneliness, an
unflinching stare into the darkest moral abyss. Tom Huddleston Here (and above) is the trailer.
This 35mm screening is on sale at £1 for Prince Charles Cinema.
Time Out review: Jerry Schatzberg might be a very urban cowboy (Panic in Needle Park, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, Sweet Revenge,
etc), but there's no evidence here of slick, Altman-style condescension
to country 'n' western culture. Instead there's an unforced equation of
the upfront emotional currency of C&W lyrics with a simple
triangular plotline pared down from Intermezzo (singer Willie Nelson and
wife Dyan Cannon almost come apart over the lure of the road and one more
infidelity). Nothing new under the sun - but the easy-going fringe
benefits are well worth the ticket: Nelson's a natural, and the duets
with Cannon are pure gold. Paul Taylor
This 16mm screening is introduced by Gregory La Cava researcher Annabel Jessica Goldsmith.
Chicago Reader review: With this 1935 film, Gregory La Cava turned his talent for ensemble improvisation (My Man Godfrey,Stage Door) to melodrama rather than comedy, and the result is a tearjerker of unusual sobriety and heft. The setting is a mental hospital, where the new director (Charles Boyer) is resented by the staff for his scientific detachment, while doctor Claudette Colbert tries to extricate herself from an overly warm working relationship with a married colleague (Joel McCrea). While the drama seeks to define precise emotional distances, La Cava’s camera adheres to his actors with a respectful mobility that still seems strikingly modern. Dave Kehr
This is a Funeral Parade screening. Full details of the strand can be found here.
Time Out review: Hemmed in by an arid marriage, paunchy
middle-aged banker John Randolph
grasps another chance at life when a secret organisation transforms him
into hunky Rock Hudson and gives him a new start as an artist in
Californian
beach-front bohemia. Freedom, however, turns out to be a rather daunting
prospect, and the struggle to fill the blank canvas comes to typify
Hudson's unease with his new existence. Saul Bass' unsettling title
sequence sets the scene for the concise articulation of fifty-something
bourgeois despair, as visualised by James Wong Howe's distorting
camerawork and the edgy discord of Jerry Goldsmith's excoriating score.
After that, the film's uptight view of the hang-loose West Coast feels
like a slightly forced argument, until Frankenheimer regroups and the
jaws of the narrative shut tight on one of the most chilling endings in
all American cinema. Little wonder it flopped at the time, only to be
cherished by a later generation, notably film-makers Siegel and McGehee
who drew extensively on its themes and visuals in their debut Suture.
(This downbeat sci-fi thriller completed Frankenheimer's loose
'paranoid' trilogy - earlier instalments being The Manchurian Candidate
and Seven Days in May). Trever Johnston
This 35mm presentation, also screening on May 11th, is part of the British Postwar Cinema (1945-1960) season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Time Out review: "I hate you," goes the most explosive line in Carol Reed's
marvelously plotted murder mystery, all the more powerful for being
spoken by an adorable eight-year-old in short pants. We've already seen
curious Phillipe (Henrey) romping around the airy chambers of France's
ambassadorial mansion in London (his dad's the often-absent diplomat)
and bonding with his pet garden snake, MacGregor. Phillipe's true hero,
and the idol of the title, is affectionate butler Baines (Richardson),
whose stern head-maid wife nonetheless has it in for the boy to an
almost pathological degree. So empathic is the movie toward its young dreamer that when
complications arise, you wince on his behalf. Baines has a secret lover,
Julie (Morgan), whom he meets for a chaste rendezvous in a pub; after
Phillipe surprises them, Baines introduces the youngster to his "niece"
and to the concept of private confidences—many of which are to follow,
this being a thriller. Reed, of course, is better known for his next movie, The Third Man, also penned by novelist Graham Greene. But The Fallen Idol is
arguably the superior film; both deal with the seasoning of naive
innocents, but unlike Joseph Cotten's charmingly soused pulp novelist,
young Phillipe actually deserves his time in happyland, making his
awakening a true stab to the heart. And Reed's signature noirish side
streets work even better as the scary vistas of a boy outdoors long
after bedtime. Joshua Rothkopf
This is a 35mm screening which is also being shown at the Prince Charles Cinema on April 29th and June 18th. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: The ultimate family film. Francis Ford Coppola gives full
due to the themes of clannish insularity that made Mario Puzo's novel a
best seller, though his heart seems to be with Al Pacino's lonely,
willful isolation. This 1972 feature is sharp, entertaining, and
convincing—discursive, but with a sense of structure and control that
Coppola hasn't achieved since. With Marlon Brando, James Caan, Robert
Duvall, Sterling Hayden, and Diane Keaton. Dave Kehr
Here (and above) are some excerpts from the opening scenes.
This film (being shown on May 16th, 29th and 30th) is part of the Brazilian Cinema season at BFI Southbank. You can find the details here. Time Out review: Glauber Rocha's
first major film introduced most of the methods, themes and even
characters that were developed five years later in his Antonio das
Mortes. Set in the drought-plagued Brazilian Sertao in 1940, it explores
the climate of superstition, physical and spiritual terrorism and fear
that gripped the country: the central characters, Manuel and Rosa, move
credulously from allegiance to allegiance until they finally learn that
the land belongs not to god or the devil, but to the people themselves.
The film's success here doubtless reflects the 'exoticism' of its style,
somewhere between folk ballad and contemporary myth, since the
references to Brazilian history and culture are pervasive and fairly
opaque to the uninitiated. But Rocha's project is fundamentally
political, and completely unambiguous: he faces up to the contradictions
of his country in an effort to understand, to crush mystiques, and to
improve. Tony Rayns
The screening of We Are Also Brothers on Friday 1 May will be introduced by Dr Felipe Botelho Correa, King’s College London. This is part of the Brazilian Cinema season at BFI Southbank. You can find the details here.
BFI introduction: Two Black brothers opt for very different career paths in Rio. One
pursues education and respectability, while the other is drawn into
petty crime. Burle blends melodrama with social critique and uses his
characters’ stories as a platform to confront Brazil’s myth of racial
harmony.
Chicago Reader review: Despite its self-deprecating camp and convoluted plot, there is an
appealing honesty to Bruce LaBruce’s Super 8 1/2. The director plays
Bruce, an over-the-hill porn star trying to restart his flagging career,
in part by acting in a documentary about him by an up-and-coming
lesbian filmmaker. We see footage from his porno loops and scenes from
the film in progress and hear comments on Bruce’s own “unfinished” epic,
“Super 8 1/2.” The title’s two obvious references are to Fellini’s
famous film about his problems making a film and to the low-budget
medium of Super-8. But a third meaning is supplied by a woman who
suggests that it’s Bruce’s own overoptimistic view of his own endowment.
In the explicit sex scenes, LaBruce moves beyond narcissism to its
opposite. As one “critic” suggests in a pretentious voice-over analysis
of one of the porn films, Bruce’s performances acknowledge the camera,
and his self-consciousness suggests a kind of emptiness that works
against any sex appeal he might have. The way the film constantly turns
back on itself, with its films-within-films and comments on them, leaves
the viewer without any firm ground, suggesting the void behind
self-absorption. Bruce’s agonized cries, heard after the final credits,
perhaps acknowledge the terror of that void. Fred Camper
This screening is part of Violet Hour’s City of Angels
season, where we peel back the silver screen and gaze into the sordid
underworld of Los Angeles. A city of duality, this season is an ode to
the ultimate American nightmare masquerading as a dream. Violet Hour showcases the dark,
transgressive and enigmatic side of the screen. Exploring the darker
aspects of life through cinema, they screen and discuss works that "unsettle, undo us and challenge our perceptions."
Chicago Reader review: It pains me to say it, but I think Brian De Palma has
gotten a bad rap on this one: the first hour of this thriller represents
the most restrained, accomplished, and effective filmmaking he has ever
done, and if the film does become more jokey and incontinent as it
follows its derivative path, it never entirely loses the goodwill De
Palma engenders with his deft opening sequences. Craig Wasson is an
unemployed actor who is invited to house-sit a Hollywood Hills mansion;
he becomes voyeuristically involved with his beautiful neighbor across
the way, and witnesses her murder. Those who have seen Vertigo
will have solved the mystery within the first 15 minutes, but De Palma's
use of frame lines and focal lengths to define Wasson's point of view
is so adept that the suspense takes hold anyway. De Palma's borrowings
from Hitchcock can no longer be characterized as hommages or even
as outright thievery; his concentration on Hitchcockian motifs is so
complete and so fetishized that it now seems purely a matter of
repetition compulsion. But Body Double is the first De Palma film
to make me think that all of his practice is leading at least to the
beginnings of perfection. Dave Kehr
This film is part of the intriguing 'Cinema and Sound' programme curated by Mark Jenkin. Here are the full details of the season.
Time Out review: Depending on how you look at it, Mike Figgis' fascinating film is the story of an alcoholic movie producer on the verge of a nervous breakdown; or it's about a two-timing lesbian starlet who gets her first big break; or it's a critical day in the life of a fledgling film production company; or it's a portrait of spurned wives, lovers and actresses on the LA scene. Four movies in one,Timecodesplits the screen on a horizontal and a vertical axis to showcase simultaneously four unbroken shots, each 93 minutes long. The initial dizzying sensory overload doesn't last. An ingenious sound mix and the familiar faces of Stellan Skarsgård, Selma Hayek, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Julian Sands, Holly Hunter and Saffron Burrows invite you to conspire order from the chaos. Characters from the top left screen bump into their neighbours from bottom right, while at two o'clock they're bitching about those assholes screwing them at eight. Like a riff on Robert Altman'sShort CutsandThe Player, it adds up to a properly jaundiced satire of Hollywood on the rocks. The movie is a stunt, a conceptual in-joke; or it's a portent of cinema to come; or it's a brilliant but hollow technical exercise; or it's a dynamic if erratic ensemble improv. Make of it what you will, it's certainly something to see. Tom Charity
Time Out review: Neither straight remake nor looser homage to Jean-Luc Godard's A Bout de Souffle;
better by far to just enjoy it on its own terms when it turns out at
least three parts better than anyone predicted. Richard Gere is the rockabilly
punk living permanently on the edge, on the run from a cop-killing, and
certain of at least two things: how to steal cars and his obsession with
his girl. Together they conduct a fugitive romance across LA, a common
enough idea from Hollywood (Gun Crazy is a motif) but one which is
burning with a rarely seen passion. The breathless shooting style
lingers forever on Gere's pumping, preening narcissism, which leaves you
in no doubt that the true romance is not between boy and girl, but
between Gere and camera. The film's other star is LA, which is filmed as
a series of dazzling pop art backdrops - cultural vacancy and hedonism,
yoked together by violence: a city for the '80s. A wanton, playful
film, belying the stated despair by its boiling energy. Chris Peachment
This is a 35mm presentation, part of Mark Jenkin's Cornish Trilogy which is being screened at BFI Southbank. The film screening will be preceded by an intro by writer-director Mark Jenkin, and actors Edward Rowe and Mary Woodvine.
Time Out review: It
may look like it was made on a shoestring 50 years ago, but this
abrasive seaside parable is a quietly thrilling piece of filmmaking.
Using old 16mm cameras, scratchy black-and-white stock and a handful of
coastal locations, Cornish writer-director Mark Jenkin has conjured up
something truly arresting: a debut film rooted in local traditions, with
a dark humour and an atmosphere that’s as brooding as its Atlantic
backdrop. Filmed mostly in unblinking close-ups, its central character is
scowling Cornish fisherman Martin (Edward Rowe). He’s a fundamentally
good-hearted man who nurses a bundle of unexpressed grudges over the
flood of new money into his fishing village. His equally gruff brother
(Giles King) uses their dad’s old trawler to take tourists on pleasure
cruises, while the family’s quayside home has been sold to the kind of
well-heeled urbanites Martin so resents. To add insult to injury,
they’ve installed a porthole. ‘Bait’ is a story of gentrification and class friction that builds
and builds, searching for the release that inevitably comes. But it has
deeper currents too, as Jenkin explores the day-to-day slog of
maintaining a generations-old way of life – you’ll learn a lot about
lobster potting – and the near-spiritual pain of being prised, like a
barnacle off a rock, from your place in life by forces beyond your
control. He’s abetted in that by a wonderfully human performance from
Rowe, all bruised pride and righteous fury. It’s clear where Jenkin’s sympathies lie, and one or two of the
middle-class characters tiptoe towards caricature, but ‘Bait’ never
feels polemical or didactic: it’s more of a quiet lament than a shaking
fist. It feels almost like a modern-day sea shanty. Let its hypnotic
rhythms wash over you. Phil de Semleyen
Time Out review: Like the Bob Hope movies which it alludes to, Manhattan Murder Mystery
is as light and brazenly generic as Woody Allen's early work. As a result, it
is both unusually insubstantial, and, at least in the second half,
extremely funny. Hope-like in his panicky cowardice, Larry worries not
only about the feelings of his wife Carol (Diane Keaton, refreshing) for his
old friend Ted (Alan Alda), but about her determination to investigate the
death of a neighbour. At first, Larry thinks Carol is fantasising, but
then he starts to witness strange events. Cue to a fast, ramshackle,
thrill comedy as entertaining as it is removed from the realities of
contemporary New York. A movie inspired by movie escapism. Minor, but
surprisingly, almost defiantly upbeat. Geoff Andrew
This is a 35mm presentation. There will be a Q&A with writer, director and Rio Cinema patron Sally Potter herself, to be hosted by curator and author of many books including The Cinema of Sally Potter, So Mayer.
Time Out review: Virginia Woolf's 1928 modernist novel, but the joy is that the film
comes over simply: a beautiful historical pageant of 400 years of
English history, full of visual and aural pleasures, sly jokes,
thought-provoking insights, emotional truths - and romance. It begins at
the opulent court of Virgin Queen Elizabeth (Quentin Crisp), where the male
immortal Orlando receives favour and an estate; and thence follows his
quest for love in 50-year jumps through the Civil War, the early
colonial period, the effete literary salons of 1750 (by which time
Orlando is a woman), the Victorian era of property, and finally a 20th
century postscript added by Sallly Potter. The fine, stylised performances from
an idiosyncratic international cast are admirably headed by Swinton's
magnificent Orlando, who acts as the film's complicitous eyes and ears;
and there's little to fault in Alexei Rodionov's cinematography, which
renders the scenes with rare sensitivity. It's a critical work - in the
sense that it comments wryly on such things as representations of
English history, sexuality/androgyny and class - but made in the spirit
of a love poem to both Woolf and the England that made us. Wally Hammond
This is a 35mm screening from Lost Reels. The presentation will include an online Q&A discussion with filmmaking legend John Sayles and his producer and partner Maggie Renzi.
Time Out review: John Sayles is spokesman for his generation, the babies of the post-war boom
who made love and fought their wars within themselves. Their growing
pains came late: Lianna (Linda Griffiths) is thirty, married and the mother of
two, when she falls in love with Ruth (Jane Hallaren), her night-school
teacher. Sayles sympathetically maps the hurricane-like effects of this
on Lianna's life - thrown out by her philandering husband,
cold-shouldered by her straight friends, stormy scenes with her lover -
his sparkling dialogue illuminating every aspect of Lianna's sexuality
with a zeal that is almost proselytising. The love scenes are infused
with a tender erotic glow that deepens the shadows around the
titillation of Personal Best, and the comedy in Lianna's
post-coital glee as she cruises other women and announces herself as gay
to people in launderettes is irresistible. A gem, rough-hewn by Sayles
and polished to perfection in peerless performances.
This film is part of the intriguing 'Cinema and Sound' programme curated by Mark Jenkin. Here are the full details of the season and here is the directo's introduction to the movie: 'When it comes to the creative use of sound, I could have picked any
Nicholas Roeg movie as a key influence. Bad Timing is the film that most
clearly, simply and effectively illustrates the potential of sound to
confound the expectations of the viewer, and to open up the creative
potential of the form in the starkest way.'
As with a number of movies by director Nicolas Roeg the producers did not know or,
possibly, like what they had on their hands here and this was poorly
distributed at the time.
It isn't surprising the film suffered indifferent attention from the
studio and puzzlement from the critics on release as this is a
disturbing and complicated work. Labyrinthine plotting; cross-cutting;
masculinity crisis and dazzling camerawork - all the touches associated
with Roeg are here. If you like the Roeg oeuvre you are in for a treat.
The ending stayed with me for quite some time.Here's an essay by the excellent Richard Combs on the movie.
Time Out review: One of Nicolas Roeg's most complex and elusive movies, building a thousand-piece
jigsaw from its apparently simple story of a consuming passion between
two Americans in Vienna. Seen in flashback through the prism of the
girl's attempted suicide, their affair expands into a labyrinthine
enquiry on memory and guilt as Theresa Russell's cold psychoanalyst
lover (Art Garfunkel) himself falls victim to the cooler and crueller
investigations of the detective assigned to her case (Harvey Keitel in
visionary form as the policeman turned father-confessor). But where Don't Look Now
sustained its Gothic intensity with human intimacy, this film seems a
case-example of how more could have been achieved with less editing,
less ingenuity, less even of the bravura intelligence with which Roeg at
one point matches Freud with Stalin as guilt-ridden spymasters. Don Macpherson
This screening will feature a Q&A with director Shane Meadows (work permitting). It is part of the season devoted to boxing films at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details here.
Time Out review: Those who have seenShane Meadows' camcorder gemSmalltimewill already know the young writer/director is one of Britain's most promising talents. This, his first full length feature, lives up to expectations splendidly. Though it's never quite as funny as the earlier movie, and the bigger (£1.5m) budget has resulted in more conventional characterisation and plotting, the extra polish comes with no significant drop in energy, flair or invention. Darcy (Bob Hoskins) decides to inject a sense of community and purpose into the disaffected youth of a Nottingham suburb by reopening a club. While determination and a canny ability to win over most people he meets results in camaraderie and a modicum of sporting success, resentment, cynicism and even violence are so deeply ingrained in certain locals that the club is never entirely without enemies. What lifts the film beyond the constraints of this potentially corny story is Meadows' engagingly blend of authentic naturalism, robust rapscallion humour, jaunty editing and off-the-cuff lyricism. Geoff Andrew
A unique example of activist experimental cinema on the survival of
people during a time of occupation, thanks to the power of art, this film is preceded by a pre-recorded intro by Mathilde Rouxel, co-founder of the Association Jocelyne Saab.
New York Film Festival review: “I’ve invented places, as if by making a
work of fiction about them, I could preserve them,” the Lebanese war
correspondent–turned–filmmaker Jocelyne Saab said of her interest in
fiction. Her 1985 drama The Razor’s Edge
takes place during the Lebanese Civil War and centers on the bond
formed between Karim (Jacques Weber), a fortysomething painter, and
Samar (Hala Bassam), a teenager who grew up during the war (Juliet Berto
has a small but striking role as Karim’s friend). Underneath the
character-driven narrative is another story, that of a place. Saab
started her career as a journalist working for French television and her
reporter’s eye deftly captures the destruction of war-torn Beirut and
the disparate but vibrant people wandering through its rubble and ruins.
Screenwriter Gérard Brach (The Tenant, Identification of a Woman)
worked on the final version of the script, and the result, juxtaposing
the creation of art with violence, is an arresting meditation on
humanity’s struggle in the face of unthinkable horror.
Following this special screening wmany of the film’s
cast will be present for an in-person discussion including Lee Ingleby, Bryan Dick,
Alex Palmer, Robert Pugh, Jack Randall, Max Benitz, Edward Woodall and
William Mannering.
Time Out review: 'Off tacks and main sheet!' commands
Russell Crowe's pony-tailed,
gimlet-eyed Royal Navy captain, 'Lucky' Jack Aubrey, in Peter Weir's
rousing
1805 adventure, adapted from two of Patrick O'Brian's much-admired
seafaring novels. Aubrey's three-masted frigate HMS Surprise,
cruising the coast of Brazil on the lookout for Napoleon's allies, comes
under splintering fire from the fleeter French privateer Acheron
and lifts off in the fog. The sailing master (Robert Pugh) counsels
caution,
but the standfast Aubrey, who fought with Nelson on the Nile, will have
his man, whatever the odds, come hell or high water. Thanks in no small
measure to Perfect Storm designer William Sandell, this handsomely
mounted actioner exudes the authentic tang of salt, sweat and gunpowder.
Cameraman Russell Boyd gives painterly expression to the ship's 'little
world' and, as in Gallipoli,
Weir shows his adroitness at action and the psychology of men at war,
helped by a string of sterling performances, notably Bettany's
Darwin-esque doctor (Aubrey's friend, cello partner and obverse) and
young Pirkis as a heroic aristocratic midshipman. Nice too to hear
English accents in a major US production, especially Crowe's clipped
tones, and a well used classically oriented score stripped of bombast.
If there's a problem, it's the insistence on the warrior/man-of-science
dichotomy, which has the film meander off on a naturalist jaunt through
the Galapagos to tension-slackening effect. But in the main, a fine
old-fashioned Boy's Own yarn. Wally Hammond
Time Out review: It's difficult to know why Robert Mitchum, slouching through a few scenes in
the ill-fitting disguise of an ageing, bearded academic with little
girls on his mind, should have accepted this part. Elizabeth Taylor, however, is
very fine as a tacky madonna: a devout prostitute who's offered a
respite from the streets when a regressive child-woman called Cenci
(Mia Farrow in long wig and Pollyanna tights) adopts her as substitute
mother and moves her into a mansion of art-déco splendour. No wonder
then that Taylor/Laura should fervently pray 'Oh Lord, let no one snatch
me from this heaven'; and as the strange 'secret ceremonies' begin, her
treatment of Cenci displays the same mix of greed and generosity.
Losey's mannered direction, somehow entirely appropriate, makes for a
memorable film. Jane Clarke
Time Out review: The first British Hell's Angels pic, and just about the blackest comedy to come out of this country in years. It features a bike gang called The Living Dead, whose leader (Nicky Henson) discovers the art of becoming just that. So he kills himself and is buried along with his bike, until he guns the engine and shoots back up through the turf; two victims later, he drives to a pub and calls his mother (Beryl Reid), a devil worshipper ensconced in her stately old dark house with George Sanders as her sinisterly imperturbable butler, to say he's back. This level of absurdity could be feeble, but director Don Sharp knows how to shoot it straight, without any directorial elbows-in-the-ribs. Consequently, much of the humour really works, even though the gang as individuals are strictly plastic. David Pirie
This screening will be introduced by freelance writer and programmer Savina Petkova. It will feature English subtitles.
Synopsis:
Papatakis’s debut unfolds in a country home where two domestic servants are cruelly exploited by the family they work for. When their abusive employers push them too far, it provokes a shocking and escallating rebellion. This allegorical portrait of the Algerian resistance was inspired by the real-life story of the Papin sisters, two maids who brutally murdered their employers in 1930s France - also the basis for Jean Genet’s influential 1947 play The Maids and Claude Chabrol’s 1995 psychological thriller La Cérémonie.
Curator’s note:
Boycotted by the selection committee of the 1963 Cannes Film Festival, Les Abysses was publicly defended by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, André Breton, and Jean Genet. The case of the two sisters has long been cited in French left-wing intellectual circles as a perfect example of working-class struggle. In Papatakis' view, the sisters' violence stemmed directly from their living conditions - the humiliations they endured and the exploitation they suffered at the hands of their employers.
The film exemplifies Papatakis' hyper-stylized, expressionistic approach, escalating the domestic conflict into paroxysmic class warfare. Like ancient Greek tragedies where masked actors embodied archetypes rather than nuanced psychological portraits, the performances are deliberately exaggerated - raw and symbolic rather than naturalistic.
Here (and above) is an interview with the director at the Cannes film festival in 1963
This film is creening as part of 'The Consummate Professional: John Schlesinger at 100' season. You can find all the details here.
Time Out review: Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton) is not the ideal tenant: he trifles with
razor blades, cultivates cockroaches, and doesn't pay the rent. It's a
sign of the times when the landlord gets all our sympathy, but that's
the general idea. Live-in lovers Drake and Patty (Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith)
buy a sprawling Victorian house in San Francisco. To pay for
renovations, they rent out apartments to a quiet Japanese couple and to
the psychopathic Hayes, who proceeds to strip the fittings and terrorise
everyone in the house. But the law is firmly on his side. Schlesinger
stages the action with smooth assurance, gradually building tension
until Hayes goes completely round the bend. The problem lies in Daniel Pyne's
script: the relationship between Drake and Patty is half-realised,
while Hayes' motivations remain strangely muddled. That said, Keaton is
chillingly convincing. Collette Maude
Time Out review: Peter Weir's first film set in America explores a theme familiar from his
earlier work: the discovery of an all but forgotten culture in modern
society: in this case the Amish, a puritanical sect whose life in
Pennsylvania has remained unchanged since the 18th century. Threat
explodes into this community when an Amish boy witnesses a murder; cop
Harrison Ford investigates the case and, finding his own life endangered, is
forced to hot-foot it back to the Amish ranch with the bad guys in
pursuit. The film also allows Ford to fall in love with the boy's mother
(Kelly McGillis), and comments on the distance between the messy world Ford
leaves behind and the cloistered one in which he takes refuge. Powerful,
assured, full of beautiful imagery and thankfully devoid of easy
moralising, it also offers a performance of surprising skill and
sensitivity from Ford. Richard Rayner
Chicago Reader review:Though Jack Smith never quite completed Normal Love (1963), what he left behind maintains a consistent level of intensity, its weirdly costumed characters cavorting before the camera in role-playing more twisted than the word “drag” could ever convey. Mostly filmed the year Smith?s orgy-comedy Flaming Creatures became a famous obscenity case, Normal Love is a kind of lyrical sequel, replacing the earlier film’s bleached-out black and white with lush color (faded somewhat in this restoration) and its urban claustrophobia with rural locales outside New York City. Over the years Smith showed Normal Love in various versions; the present film was assembled using notes from actual screenings and records he’s known to have played with it. His cast of “creatures,” including Mario Montez and Tiny Tim, perform in a series of disjointed sequences that oscillate between trancelike impersonation and utterly reflexive self-parody: a mermaid in a tub, for example, is larger than life yet totally ridiculous, her tail phonier than the worst B-movie costume. Smith’s gender-fuck visions, more radical than mainstream concepts of drag, conflate dress-up with striptease, ludicrous acting with a sure belief that one can become one’s costume. His visual style is a dense and demented re-creation of von Sternberg, the smallest fashion accessory a radiant surface as camera and character—and character and costume—move in a coordinated ballet at once graceful and spastic.Fred Camper
This 35mm presentation, which also screens on April 24th, is part of the season devoted to boxing films at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details here.
Chicago Reader review: Convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison in 1967, boxer
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (Denzel Washington) spent years asserting his
innocence, growing increasingly hopeless until he was befriended by an
American teenager living in Canada (Vicellous Reon Shannon). In this
deeply moving biopic, some of the characters who rally to Carter’s
defense seem like saints, and some who oppose him seem like demons. Yet
the narrative–a complex structure of flashbacks and shifts in
perspective that’s part inspirational story, part courtroom drama, part
character study, part expose–never makes it seem that history is being
oversimplified. Lisa Alspector
This 35mm presentation, which also screens on March 30th, is part of the season devoted to boxing films at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details here.
Time Out review: With its mean streets and gritty performances, its ringside corruption and low-life integrity, Body and Soul
looks like a formula '40s boxing movie: the story of a (Jewish) East
Side kid who makes good in the ring, forsakes his love for a nightclub
floozie, and comes up against the Mob and his own conscience when he has
to take a dive. But the single word which dominates the script is
'money', and it soon emerges that this is a socialist morality on
Capital and the Little Man - not surprising, given the collaboration of
Robert Rossen, Abraham Polonsky (script) and John Garfield, all of whom tangled with the
HUAC anti-Communist hearings (Polonsky was blacklisted as a result). A
curious mixture: European intelligence in an American frame, social
criticism disguised as noir anxiety (the whole film is cast as one long
pre-fight flashback). But Garfield's bullish performance saves the movie
from its stagy moments and episodic script. Chris Auty
This 35mm screening is part of director Mark Jenkin's 'Cinema and Sound' season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Time Out review: Wolfgang Petersen's movie of Sebastian Junger's bestseller chronicles the last voyage of the Andrea Gail,
a swordfishing boat out of Gloucester, Massachussetts, lost at sea in
October 1991. In his foreword, Junger admits any attempt to recreate the
crew's experience can only be a matter of conjecture: 'I toyed with the
idea of fictionalising, but that risked diminishing the value of
whatever facts I was able to determine.' No such scruples for the
movie-makers, of course, but given that they're making it up, there's no
excuse for lines as corny as 'I wanna catch some fish - it's what I
do!' It doesn't much matter though. This is one of those films where
actions speak louder than words. Regular guy George Clooney may be too
intuitively smarmy to play your straight-ahead skipper, but the
authentically grizzled beard helps, and Petersen loads the boat with
plausible working-man types. And this is what's striking about the
movie. It's the first blockbuster in recent memory to hold faith with
everyday heroes just doing their jobs. More impressive still, their
heroism is a kind of unconscious blunder, a macho bluff compelled by
hard economic choices. The special effects are staggering and the last
hour builds from sinking dread to exhilarating defiance and, finally,
remorseful exhaustion. Tom Charity
Time Out review: A companion piece to Flesh, with Joe Dallesandro as a down-and-out
junkie living on New York's Lower East Side whose heroin addiction has
rendered him impotent; just as Joe's desirable virility formed the
(nominal) subject of Flesh, so his undesirable impotence is at the centre of Trash.
The surprise value of Paul Morrissey's films (the 'liberating nudity', the
frankness about sexuality, the playful reversals of sex-roles)
camouflaged a number of crucial failings. Flesh and Trash
are both eulogies to Dallesandro's body, but are also both moralistic
to the point of being puritan about sex in general, and the female sex
in particular. Tony Rayns
This is a Funeral Parade screening. Here are the details of the screenings in the regular season at the Prince Charles Cinema.
Time Out review: In Theorem, Pasolini achieved his most
perfect fusion of Marxism and religion with a film that is both
political allegory and mystical fable. Terence Stamp
plays the mysterious Christ or Devil figure who stays briefly with a
wealthy Italian family, seducing them one by one. He then goes as
quickly as he had come, leaving their whole life-pattern in ruins. What
would be pretentious and strained in the hands of most directors, with
Pasolini takes on an intense air of magical revelation. In fact, the
superficially improbable plot retains all the logic and certainty of a
detective story. With bizarre appropriateness, it was one of the last
films made by Stamp before he virtually disappeared from the
international film scene for some years. David Pirie
Peter
Mandelson’s grandfather Herbert Morrison, deputy Prime Minister in
Clement Attlee’s landmark post-War Labour government, famously carried
his Desert Island Discs choices in his wallet, expecting the call to
appear on the programme.It wasan invitation that sadly was never extended to himandI thought of that tale when I wasactuallyasked to contributeto the most famousof all moviepolls, run by Sight & Sound magazine. All those years of trawling the previous decades choiceswith rapt fascination, readingthe articles on the canonand the time keeping thatrunning list of my ten all-time favourites that wereinevitablemixed up withthegreatest in my headwas not wasted. Now,though,I was going to be forced to think about it and make a definitive list. Othersweredoing the same,prompting responses varying widely from“it’s a bit of fun” to “it’s agony”.
The
more I thought about it the more I wanted my contribution to be just
that, a genuine heartfelt one, made up of the films I desperately wanted
people to seebut had not been consideredin the previous voting,and modestlyhoping fora re-evalutionof the choices.I made two rules.All ofthe films in my list(reproduced below) would deserve to bepart oftheSight&SoundGreatest poll conversation andallthe choiceswould not havereceived a single vote in the 2012 poll.
Some in this list are simply neglected favourites but in other cases thereareverygoodreasonssome ofthese
films have been overlooked. Jean Grémillon, for instance, faded from
view after an ill-fated directorial career, and has only resurfaced in
the last decade with devoted retrospectives and DVD releases. The
heartbreaking Remorques is one of his masterpieces. The Alfred Hitchcock melodrama Under Capricorn, which quickly disappeared afterbombing at the box officeand thesubsequentdissolving of the director’sproduction company,deserves high rank in the Master’s work but languishesin limbo, only seen at major retrospectives.The Exiles and Spring Night, Summer Night are bothoncelost American independent classics only just receiving their due after recent rediscovery.White Dog,after a desultory release overshadowed bymisguidedaccusations of racism, was not in circulation for many years.Warhol's Vinly, based on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, wasshownin 2013from(fortuitously I later discovered)16mm in an ICA gallery and feltthrillinglyauthentic,thesoundof thewhirring projectorand the artist’s singular framingcombining to create a mesmeric experience. Here is the full list:
Remorques/Stormy Waters (Jean Grémillon, 1941)
Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949)
The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)
La Baie des anges/Bay of Angels (Jacques Demy, 1963)
Vinyl (Andy Warhol, 1965)
Spring Night, Summer Night (Jospeh L. Anderson, 1967)
Heroic Purgatory (Yosgishige Yoshida, 1970)
Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)
White Dog (Sam Fuller, 1982)
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2005)
Six from the list have been shown in a London cinema since the poll appeared and now we have a rare screening of the brilliant director Sam Fuller's late masterpiece at the Nickel Cinema.
Chicago Reader review: Samuel
Fuller's 1982 masterpiece about American racism—his last work shot in
this country—focuses on the efforts of a black animal trainer (Paul
Winfield) to deprogram a dog that has been trained to attack blacks.
Very loosely adapted by Fuller and Curtis Hanson from a memoir by Romain
Gary, and set in southern California on the fringes of the film
industry, this heartbreakingly pessimistic yet tender story largely
concentrates on tragic human fallibility from the vantage point of an
animal; in this respect it's like Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar,
and Fuller's brilliantly eclectic direction gives it a nearly comparable
intensity. Through a series of grotesque misunderstandings, this
unambiguously antiracist movie was yanked from U.S. distribution partly
because of charges of racism made by individuals and organizations who
had never seen it. But it's one of the key American films of the 80s.
With Kristy McNichol, Burl Ives, Jameson Parker, and, in cameo roles,
Dick Miller, Paul Bartel, Christa Lang, and Fuller himself. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This screening includes an extended intro by BFI National Archive preservation and curatorial staff, and writer Ken Hollings. The film is screening as part of the Trash season at BFI Southbank and is also being shown on April 21st. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Bela Lugosi died during the making of this low-budget
science fiction programmer, but that didn't faze director Edward Wood:
the Lugosi footage, which consists of the actor skulking around a
suburban garage, is replayed over and over, to highly surreal effect.
Wood is notorious for his 1952 transvestite saga Glen or Glenda? (aka I
Changed My Sex), but for my money this 1959 effort is twice as strange
and appealing in its undisguised incompetence. J. Hoberman of the
Village Voice
has made a case for Wood as an unconscious avant-gardist; there's no
denying that his blunders are unusually creative and oddly expressive. Dave Kehr
