Roman Holiday (1953)

 

Dir.: William Wyler

Plot: A runaway princess falls into the path of an American journalist in Rome. He realises the exclusive on her whereabouts would be the story of a lifetime, but as they spend the day together she starts to seem more than just a meal ticket.

If the plot sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because it’s a very loose reworking of Frank Capra’s 1934 prototype for the genre which became romantic comedy, It Happened One Night. In the two decades that separate the two films, a lot had happened to cinema, and it shows in the European flavour which radiates not only from the gorgeous setting but also from its star.

The Tree of Life (2011)

Dir.: Terence Malick
Plot: The death of his brother prompts a middle-aged man to reflect on his conflicted childhood in 1950s Texas

Like the chubby girl who 'doesn't even go here' in Mean Girls, as I approached the local multiplex to see notoriously challenging auteur Terence Malick's divisive Palme d'Or winner, I had a lot of feelings. Chief of which was a decidedly unprofessional last-minute urge to duck into the screen next door and rewatch Deathly Hallows Part 2 -an urge apparently shared by the two people who walked out during the first hour of The Tree of Life, although that was a mild reaction compared to the pockets of rebellious critics who loudly booed the film at its screening in Cannes. Of course, the self-appointed elite vocally professing their disdain for anything that becomes popular enough to win a prize is a long-established tradition at the festival, but nonetheless I was uncertain: what exactly was I about to see? Just what had Malick put on the screen that so aroused the ire of many well-respected critics, including the likes of Mark Kermode, no less?

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2

Dir.: David Yates
Plot: If you don't know by now, it's kind of a long story.

I just got in from seeing the last Harry Potter film today, so I thought I'd regale you with my first impressions. For context, I've seen all the films and read all the books except the last one (for reasons explained below). Spoilers tossed around like Stupefy spells, so be warned.

Not the best film by far (Azkaban, as though you had to ask), but much less boring than Part 1, whose main protagonist was apparently a forest, given the ratio of trees to actor screentime, Deathly Hallows Part 2 is meatier, pacier and generally far more engaging than its predecessor. It culminates in an extended battle which, wonderful SFX aside, would certainly be too long if it weren't for the weight of the Potterverse underpinning it, the fight for Hogwarts becoming like a battle to hold onto our own Potter-infused childhoods. I have to admit that seeing the castle reduced to chunks of smouldering rubble gave me a funny feeling in my stomach, like watching a tiny fraction of myself disappear. And that's from someone who was never more than a casual fan. This feeling of slow and sometimes painful detachment from the wizarding world is heightened by the absence of so many things we'd come to identify with the series - no Quidditch, no common room scheming, no warm Butterbeer at the Three Bromsticks, no Gryffindor/Slytherin rivalry over the dinner tables. On one hand, this undeniably contributes to the gloomy, uncertain and even cynical tone of the movie; yet it also means the whole magical sensibility of the movie universe feels a little flat in places.

The Steel Helmet (1951)

Dir.: Sam Fuller
Plot: In war-ravaged Korea, a ragtag group of US Marines and their orphan mascot try to stay alive whilst holding an important observation post in enemy territory.

I've been waiting to see The Steel Helmet for a long time now, being a fan of Fuller (my display pic is from his whacked-out western Forty Guns), and on the whole I was not disappointed with his characteristically unflinching portrayal of a war which at the time was still in its infancy. Made over ten days in late 1950 with a handful of UCLA students as extras, this is guerilla filmmaking at its rawest; and yet, it managed to make an astonishing $6 million at the box office on a budget of $104,000. Called right-wing fantasy by the left and Communist propaganda by the right, The Steel Helmet was incredibly polarising and hugely influential.

The Shepherd of the Hills (1941)

Dir.: Henry Hathaway
Plot: The arrival of a stranger in an Ozark mountain village changes the lives of its residents, especially that of a young man out for revenge.


Let me start by saying that I've always got a huge kick out of seeing pre-50s colour films, simply because many wonderful actors were rarely (and sometimes never) shot in colour, and were usually past their prime when they finally got around to it. So it was an especial joy to catch this early John Wayne picture because wow, does the boy look good in Technicolor! He had the most beautiful eyes, and being able to appreciate them in colour changes his whole aspect. He plays second fiddle, however, to the Ozark mountains (or, as is rather more likely, rural California), which fills the screen with resplendent forest scenery for the duration of this utterly bizarre melodrama-cum-parable-cum-Western.

Dan In Real Life (2007)

Dir.: Peter Hedges
Plot: A single father finds love in an unexpected (and awkward) place whilst holidaying with his extended family.

Not feeling particularly great and seeing it was on BBC iPlayer, I sat down to watch this on a whim with fairly meh expectations. In fact, it turned out to be one of the most engaging little movies I've seen all year. Quiet but charming widower Dan (Steve Carell) falls for a woman (Juliette Binoche) who he meets in a bookshop whilst visiting his parents for a big family reunion, but when he gets back to their house, there she is: unfortunately, she happens to be his brother's new girlfriend. Over the next few days, Dan becomes hopelessly infatuated with Marie, something which is increasingly difficult to disguise from his close-knit family.

Meet John Doe (1941)

Dir.: Frank Capra
Plot: A broke newspaper makes a naive hobo into a folk political hero, but shadowy forces are out to manipulate his influence to their own ends.

Remember how in The Big Lebowski, the titular tycoon hollers "The bums always lose!" at the Dude? Well, the bums win (sort of) in Capra's Meet John Doe. Barbara Stanwyck stars as a reporter who, trying to save her job after a takeover, invents a suicidal working stiff who uses her column to detail his discontent with the world around him. Her 'John Doe' unexpectedly catches on in a big way, so the newspaper finds a suitably malleable hobo, played by Gary Cooper, to take on the persona of the working-class philosopher. However, as the movement grows bigger and bigger, with inspired citizens forming John Doe clubs and organising a third party, Cooper begins to feel uncomfortable with his new, artificial, influence. Added to this, the newspaper's sinister proprietor (go-to guy for evil politician/businessman roles, Edward Arnold) seems to have shadowy designs of his own for the new movement.

X-Men: First Class (2011)

Dir.: Matthew Vaughan

Plot: A young Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr must organise their mutant brethren to stop a mutant supremacist bent on causing nuclear war.

The year is 1962, people; and in case you forget, here’s a bunch of mobsters and playboy bunnies listening to rock and roll. Holocaust survivor Erik Lehnsherr is on a quest to track down the man responsible for his mother’s death, a sinister mutant supremacist using the name Sebastian Shaw. Meanwhile, promising scientist Charles Xavier is at Oxford (as a current student, background glimpses of the Sheldonian and Rad Cam generated much involuntary squealing on my part) preparing his thesis on, you guessed it, mutation. He is approached by Moira MacTaggert, a CIA agent who has witnessed Shaw’s shenanigans first hand and begs Xavier to help stop Shaw from provoking a nuclear war between Russia and the US. With Xavier and Lehnsherr’s paths now fully intertwined, the two set about training a group of young mutants to avert global disaster.

Sherlock Jr. (1924)

Dir.: Buster Keaton
Plot: An amateur detective falls asleep at his job as a projectionist and dreams himself into the movie, as the great Sherlock Jr.


To be honest, after seeing a couple of his movies I didn't think Buster Keaton was for me, but this absolute gem has changed my mind. I couldn't have felt more differently than I did when I watched The General (bored and drifting into a coma. An undercranked man running up and down a train for an hour, for Gawd's sake...). Anyway, for those yet to see it, Buster plays a detective-obsessed cinema projectionist who gets framed for pilfering his girlfriend's father's timepiece (it was really his rotten, moustachioed rival, of course). Too shy to properly defend himself and deeply depressed, he drifts off in his projection booth and, in a groundbreaking moment in cinema history, his dream self emerges from the sleeping body and takes a running leap into the movie screen. Inside the film, he scrambles to solve a missing jewellery case not dissimilar to his own - but this time as suave, canny detective 'Sherlock Jr.'.

Mean Streets (1973)

Dir.: Martin Scorsese
Plot: A young man in Little Italy tries to keep his head above water whilst protecting his unpredictable friend from loan sharks.

For me, Scorsese is a director who, bafflingly, reached his peak before he’d even really got started. Mean Streets is a mesmerising exhibition piece which vividly highlights every quality which has since made Scorsese a legend. Shot through with both pathos and humour (the whole 'mook' sequence still gets me), it's an intensely personal but unromanticised look at life in Little Italy.

Winchester '73 (1950)

Dir.: Anthony Mann
Plot: A tough sharpshooter scours the plains in search of the man who killed his father, with a seemingly random assortment of characters slowly dragged into the quest.

Jimmy Stewart ditches his ever-comforting impersonation of warm molasses to play hard-bitten avenger Lin McAdam, on the trail of Dutch Henry Brown, the man who killed his father. On paper, it sounds like it's been done a hundred times before. However, this is a uniquely clever revenge western, revolving not around a simple pursuit, but rather around the titular rifle. Won in the opening scenes by Lin, stolen by Dutch and passed through a succession of people, all of whom contribute in some way to the bigger picture of Lin's quest, it ties the story together with peerless elegance. Everyone who comes into possession of the rifle seems almost supernaturally to become embroiled in the story as it unfolds.

Meek's Cutoff (2010)

Dir.: Kelly Reichardt
Plot: A band of 19th century pioneers led astray by a manipulative charlatan start to unravel in hostile terrain.


Described helpfully in the accompanying leaflet as an ‘indie Western’, cult filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s latest offering is a bleak, bleached-out odyssey following a cluster of lost would-be pioneers in 1840s Oregon plodding hopelessly through untamed territory. Tempted off the main trail by Stephen Meek, a colourful frontiersman with promises of a shortcut, the three couples come to bitterly regret their decision, their spirits ebbing away in conjunction with their supplies. Distrustful of their guide and of an Indian captive they cannot decide whether or not to kill, their fragile hopes start to crumble into an existential dread.

Friendly Persuasion (1956)

Words cannot express my love for this tagline...

Dir.: William Wyler
Plot: A Quaker family in the 1860s try to reconcile their pacifist beliefs with the danger of the approaching Confederate forces.

You'd really have to have a heart of stone not to like this simple but accomplished picture about a Quaker family trying to cope with the Civil War in rural Indiana. Gary Cooper and Dorothy Maguire turn in career-best or near career-best performances as the father and mother of the house. Maguire is an actress I've never really cared for, but she really sells the primness of her character without losing her likeability. Cooper, on the other hand, I've always liked and he has some of the best scenes of his career here - the battlefield sequence in particular stands out as a beautiful piece of acting from the often unfairly-maligned Coop.

The real mystery of the Thin Man reboot is what exactly is the point?

What do you get when you mix the director of the latest in the rapidly deteriorating Pirates of the Caribbean series, the screenwriter of that revered classic Bad Boys 2 and an actor who reached his dramatic peak in 1997 and hasn’t put in a really interesting performance since 2004?

Apparently, if you’re an executive at Warner Brothers, you get exactly the right ingredients to remake one of old Hollywood’s most sparkling jewels, namely 1934′s superlative and surprisingly enduring comedy-mystery The Thin Man.  The film, for those of you who don’t know, is based on a novel by the great Dashiell Hammett, and centres around a wealthy, witty, hard-drinking married couple who end up entangled in a murder mystery during a Christmas visit to New York.  Johnny Depp (for it is he) has been dragging his pitch for a remake around Tinseltown for a while now, and it seems as though the project is finally getting off the ground, with release tentatively scheduled for 2013, although given Depp’s committment to the PotC franchise, this date might well get pushed back. UPDATE: It was. Deadline reports that the movie is been flung into production deep freeze. And the gods rejoiced.

Three Came Home (1950)

Dir.: Jean Negulesco
Plot: A colonial official's wife struggles to survive imprisonment in a Japanese POW camp in Borneo.

To be honest, I downloaded Three Came Home simply because the story sounded interesting. Empire of the Sun is one of my favourite movies and I do love a good POW drama, especially ones like this that are based on a true story. However, I could not have known that I was about to discover one of my all-time favourite films. So many things about it knocked me for six, but the first and foremost of these has to be Claudette Colbert's lead performance as Agnes Keith.

True Grit (2010)

Dir.: Joel Coen
Plot: In the post-Civil War West, a fourteen year-old girl and a drunken marshal form an unlikely partnership to find her father's killer.

Well, the folks in Hollywood have finally deigned to release True Grit in the UK, and not a moment too soon - the waiting was killing me. The Coens are my favourite filmmakers of the modern era and seeing a new film of theirs in the cinema is like being able to go back in time and see a Frank Capra or Howard Hawks movie on opening night. Luckily, thanks to some sharp-elbowed maneoeuvring, I managed to bag myself the job of reviewing it for The Oxford Student (editorial privilege) and I thought I'd share it with you here, a whole four days before it will be appearing in print. So, without further ado...

SPECIAL: The Thin Man - Lux Radio Theater, 1936

It's been a fair few years now since I first watched The Thin Man, and I dread to think how many times I've watched it since. Twelve would probably be a very conservative estimate... Anyhow, I just got hold of the radio adaptation that aired two years after the film's release, starring most of the original cast, and seeing as I'd never listened to one of these Lux Theater adaptations before, I thought it might be fun to give it a listen. The recording can be found here, thanks to the wonderful Internet Archive.

As you probably know, back in the heyday of radio, way before the arrival of home video, it was very common for actors to reprise their roles for a condensed radio version of a popular recent picture, usually as part of series entitled 'Lux Radio Theater'. The drama would be punctuated (indeed, deflated might be the better word) by occasional plugs for Lux soap ('nine out of ten beautiful screen stars' apparently use it, though I'm somewhat doubtful the evidence for these figures could be produced). In this case, we get a message purportedly from Claudette Colbert read out by a rather dreary male announcer proclaiming her passion for Lux toilet soap. If I thought switching soaps would make me look like Claudette Colbert, I'd be banging on the doors of the warehouse... Anyway, radio may not quite be live theatre but it was certainly pretty challenging, with little time for rehearsal and no retakes (in fact, Powell makes a joke about it afterwards). Quite a few flubbed lines, some awkward pauses (weird, given that I assume they all had scripts in front of them), and some abominably wobbly delivery make this a far less polished affair than the epitome-of-slick movie, but absolutely fascinating nonetheless.

The pair looking down from the relevantly-named Telegraph Hill whilst shooting 'After The Thin Man' the same year.

So how do they all do? How do the cast cope in this different medium? William Powell is as one would expect, charming and witty, although he stumbles over some of his lines and outright flubs one or two (hearing the divine voice falter is really quite surreal). In fact, he doesn't seem quite himself when you can't see his uniquely expressive face, and he sounds almost aware of this. Myrna Loy is an utter pro, never seeming to trip over her words despite the fact that both of them are clearly speaking not only faster than natural but even faster than the mile-a-minute pace of the average 1930s movie, presumably to cram everything into an hour. The only upside of this filletting of the narrative meat is that we lose the movie's dull prologue and start right at the good stuff, ie. the introduction of Nick and Nora. Unfortunately, as mentioned further along, we also lose a lot else, including many of the elements that made the film so special in the first place. Amongst the supporting actors, Porter Hall becomes unintentionally hilarious by recreating his role as Macaulay intonation-for-intonation and emphasis-for-emphasis, leading me at first to suspect that his lines had simply been copy-pasted from the movie. The real surprise is Minna Gombell, whose portrayal of Mimi is the only performance which is as vibrant and lusty on the radio as it was on screen. Amongst a cast which seem a little unsure of themselves, she lights up the production every time she opens her mouth and for this deserves high praise.

One interesting feature of this production is the interludes by the film's director W.S Van Dyke, presumably so that the cast could have a drink and clear their throats. Even if he was the man in charge, 'Woody' Van Dyke seems a bad choice of host - he sounds deeply uncomfortable speaking and at times appears to be struggling with a stammer. His comments consist mostly of highly scripted anecdotes about various Hollywood frolics, which always seem to end by segueing neatly into Lux commercials. I swear, Lux were like soap commercial ninjas...

"Lux... when you least expect it."

To (finally) draw to an end, the most noticeable difference between the two versions is that on radio the story plays like far more of a straight mystery than the delightful comedy that made the film so likeable. Think, for instance, of that lovely facial exchange between the two when Nora walks in on Nick with his arms around Dorothy. Added to which, the severely condensed script cuts out many of the jokes and several of the best scenes (notably the Christmas party, luminous on screen but sadly absent here, as well as completely omitting Nick's being shot by Morelli), and mashes some together with unsatisfying, rushed results - now Nora accompanies Nick to Wynant's shop instead of being packed off to 'Grant's Tomb'.

Just one of the scenes you won't get to hear on tonight's Lux Radio Theater!

Stripped of most of its best elements, the radio production comes off as a down-the-line mystery (complete with crashing orchestral blasts at every mildly dramatic moment), which happens to have a few jokes thrown in as an afterthought. This change in tone doesn't do the material any favours, given that the actual plot still remains incomprehensible, it's just no longer surrounded by all the stuff that made us not care about the plot.  Still, it's great to hear Powell and Loy in this variation on the original, and to hear Powell speak as himself at the end and if nothing else, the radio play is worth a listen for the chance to shudder and thank the Lord someone caught the magic on screen.

Holiday (1938)

Dir.: George Cukor
Plot: An adventurous young man travels to meet his fiancee's stuffy, aristocratic family but finds himself becoming increasingly drawn to her free-spirited sister.


Cary Grant was never as winning, Katharine Hepburn never as fascinating as they both are here, playing two confirmed individuals amongst a flock of wealthy sheep in New York high society. He is Johnny, a poor boy made good, an orphan who put himself through Harvard and is now on the cusp of a successful career, and she is Linda, the eccentric eldest child of a suffocatingly staid family. He arrives at their mansion engaged to her sister Julia, one of those dry, unexciting types that Cary Grant characters always seem to pick first before seeing sense. Upon getting to know her father, Johnny begins to realise that a dull future in business has already been mapped out for him and starts to wonder what he really wants. In the meantime, he strikes up a friendship with Julia's unconventional sister, whose spontaneous nature seems to offer a glimpse of a different kind of life.