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.
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
