Lawless (2012)

Note: a slightly truncated version of this review first appeared on Kubrick on the Guillotine

Dir: John Hillcoat

Plot: Three moonshining brothers in 1920s Virginia find their activities disturbed by the arrival of a ruthless lawman determined to wipe them out.

Lawless isn't a very good name for a movie, is it? A bit generic. A better name for this would be The Beverly Killbillies. Excuse the corny wordplay, because it serves a higher purpose. Not only does it sum up the plot of the Nick Cave-penned bootlegging drama, it also sums up its fundamental flaw - it isn't sure whether it's a bloodsoaked thriller or a good ol' boy yuk-fest and it never tries probing deep enough to find out.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (1945)

(This review originally appeared on Kubrick On The Guillotine, a great film site that you should check out)

Dir.: Elia Kazan
Plot: A bright young girl comes of age in a turn-of-the-century Brooklyn tenement, witnessing the tensions and struggles of her family.

Rarely does a young director’s first feature film contain such striking beauty and power as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But then again, rarely is that director Elia Kazan. And the young auteur had hardly set himself an easy task: coming off the back of nothing more than a short film about coal mining in Tennessee, Kazan was to condense an enormously popular 500-page novel by Betty Smith into a 2-hour studio production. The result is an astonishingly assured mini-epic which dampened handkerchiefs across the nation, and launched Kazan into a career that would change American film.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Dir.: Christopher Nolan
Plot: A reclusive Bruce Wayne is forced to reassume his alter ego Batman to protect Gotham from a ruthless terrorist with designs on Gotham.

SPOILERS ABOUND

You can’t have your cake and eat it. This is a fundamental rule of many things in life, and movie making is one of them. The Dark Knight Rises tries to straddle the line between bleak psychological drama and extremely fast motorbikes and doesn’t quite manage it. The result is a frustratingly uneven epic - bolstered with good performances, excellent direction and some memorable set pieces but ultimately overlong, turgid and weighed down with questionable subplots and 2D characterisations.

The Dick Van Dyke Show, Season 2 (1962-3)

The first series of The Dick Van Dyke Show is really good fun, as well as being a textbook example of how to develop rounded, likeable characters. However, this is the season which really gets going, comedically-speaking. It's a mixture of old-fashioned comedy - slapstick, Borscht Belt one-liners, musical interludes - and modern tropes which now make up the staple of sitcoms everywhere. The humour of contemporary domestic tensions, social relationships and suburban pressures was really pushed to the fore for the first time, with smart characters stuck in unavoidable farce yet showing unexpected moments of self-awareness that were previously unseen on television. This season of the show particularly is a fascinating bridge from old to new.

City For Conquest (1940)

Dir.: Anatole Litvak
Plot: An ex-boxer returns to the ring to support his younger brother and impress his ambitious fiancee, with tragic consequences.

 James Cagney didn’t get too much credit as a serious dramatic actor before his Oscar-winning turn as George M. Cohan in 1942. City For Conquest is therefore a rather rare opportunity to see a pre-Yankee Doodle Dandy Cagney giving it his all in a heady, romantic melodrama which demands very little of the bantam histrionics which had defined him for much of the 1930s. An uneven, sudsy affair kept afloat by several strong, affecting performances, it is possibly most notable for its proto-Manhattan use of New York as a romantic metaphor.

Ever In My Heart (1933)

Dir.: Archie Mayo
Plot: A German-American family is torn apart by xenophobia during the First World War, with harrowing consequences.

One of the more unusual early Stanwyck B-pictures, Ever In My Heart is a breathless 68-minute melodrama with a strong first act, an excellent second one and an astoundingly dumb third one. But let’s start from the start.

Wild Boys of the Road (1933)

Dir.: William A. Wellman

Plot: Two suburban teenagers run away from home in search of work after their families are hit by the Depression and enter the dangerous world of underage hobos, at the mercy of police, railroad guards and each other.

 Eddie (Frankie Darro) and his friend Tommy (Edwin Phillips) are wisecracking best pals whose friendship is tested when they decide to run away from home after the Depression strikes their families. Leaving behind a carefree world of co-ed dances and jalopy rides they hop a train bound for Chicago and hopes of a job, but soon find they have become part of a wandering tribe of hundreds. Chased from town to town by police and attacked by train guards, these teenage outlaws drift from place to place and anger and desperation soon explode into violent confrontation.

Christmas in Connecticut (1945)

Dir.: Peter Godfrey
Plot: A single, city-dwelling journalist is forced to fake the rural domestic bliss she writes about in her lucrative column when her editor and a war veteran invite themselves to her home for Christmas.

Christmas in Connecticut has an excellent premise. Babs Stanwyck plays a Elizabeth Lane, a newspaper columnist famous for her slice-of-life features focussed around her beautiful home, delicious home-cooked food and charming husband and baby. In reality, however, she is a single city gal who lounges around her bohemian apartment whilst her obliging Hungarian neighbour (S.Z Sakall, of whom more later) dreams up the recipes which win her such renown. When a recovering war hero (Dennis Morgan) appeals to the newspaper's editor (Sidmey Greenstreet) for a perfect Christmas holiday with Elizabeth and her family in their country house, things threaten to go off the boil. Enlisting a besotted neighbour (Reginald Gardiner) for help, she sets about creating the grand illusion her columns have painted, but things turn awkward when she starts to fall for the handsome veteran.

The Glass Key (1935)

Dir.: Frank Tuttle
Plot: Erm... much the same as the more famous 1942 remake. A semi-corrupt politician sparks a gang war, and his trusty lieutenant has to navigate both sides in order to save his boss' career and, increasingly, his own life.

George Raft might not really have been able to act (even at the time, NY Times critic Andre Sennwald remarked that Raft success here was due to his being 'happily cast in a rôle which allows him to be sinister and suave without making excessive demands on his talent') but he could look great just standing around. If you saw nothing but stills of him, you would probably think he was a terrific actor. In what is probably his best role, as ill-fated sidekick Little Boy in the original Scarface (1932), he barely utters more than a few terse lines. And yet the scene in which he first meets Tony's sister, watching her at her window whilst tossing a coin, is one of my favourites in the whole movie. Here, for instance, he has all the thoughtful intensity of Spencer Tracy, but when he opens his mouth, it's the same old Raft.

Gunga Din (1939)

Dir: George Stevens
Plot: Three British soldiers and their water-boy encounter intrigue and danger on the trail of mythical gold in imperial India.


It's been said a thousand times, but it bears repeating -1939 was a remarkable year in cinema. It might well be THE year in cinema, at least as far as Hollywood goes. Miracles were wrought in all genres across the board - Garbo laughed, Vivien Leigh's cut-glass vowels went all Southern belle on us, and Thomas Mitchell shrewdly hedged his Oscar bets by adopting various disguises in an apparent attempt to star in every nominated picture of the year (of course, it paid off - out of the 5 Oscar-nominated films he starred in that year, it was his turn in Stagecoach that brought him his personal glory).