Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 262: Sun Sep 21

 Remorques/Stormy Waters (Gremillon, 1941): Cine Lumiere, 2pm 

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 was an invitation that sadly was never extended to him and I thought of that tale when I was actually asked to contribute to the most famous of all movie polls, run by Sight & Sound magazine, the latest of which was in 2022. All those years of trawling the previous decades choices with rapt fascination, reading the articles on the canon and the time keeping that running list of my ten all-time favourites that were inevitable mixed up with the greatest in my head was not wasted. Now, though, I was going to be forced to think about it and make a definitive list. Others were doing 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 see but had not been considered in the previous voting, and modestly hoping for a re-evalution of the choices. I made two rules. All of the films in my list (reproduced below) would deserve to be part of the Sight & Sound Greatest poll conversation and all the choices would not have received a single vote in the previous 2012 poll.

Some in this list are simply neglected favourites but in other cases there are very good reasons some of these 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 after bombing at the box office and the subsequent dissolving of the director’s production company, deserves high rank in the Master’s work but languishes in limbo, only seen at major retrospectives. The Exiles and Spring Night, Summer Night are both once lost American independent classics only just receiving their due after recent rediscovery. White Dog, after a desultory release overshadowed by misguided accusations of racism, was not in circulation for many years. Warhol's Vinly, based on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, was shown in 2013 from (fortuitously I later discovered) 16mm in an ICA gallery and felt thrillingly authentic, the sound of the whirring projector and the artist’s singular framing combining 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 the Jean Grémillon film gets three screenings at Cine Lumiere on September 21st, 23rd and 26th. Full details can be found here.

Chicago Reader review:
Dave Kehr has rightly called Jean Gremillon “Jean Renoir's only serious rival in the prewar French cinema,” largely on the basis of Gueule d'amour (1937), Gremillon's first film with Jean Gabin. But the director released three comparably impressive features during the occupation, starting with this 1941 drama about a gruff, married salvage-boat captain in Brittany (Gabin) falling for the recently estranged wife (Michele Morgan) of a ruthless captain whose merchant ship he's towing to safety. Gabin and Morgan may have been the hottest couple this side of Bogart and Bacall, and despite some awkward use of miniatures in the early stretches, this benefits from stormy atmospherics, masterful characterization, and expressive use of sound. The script was adapted successively by Charles Spaak, Andre Cayatte, and Jacques Prevert from a novel by Roger Vercel. With Madeleine Renaud.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.