Category Archive: Classic Film
The Servant
"I'm afraid it's not very encouraging Miss..."
(1963) (Dir. Joseph Losey) From a slight 1948 novella by Robin Maugham, a script worked on by Harold Pinter, and with director Joseph Losey, racked with pneumonia during a brutal winter, phoning instructions to stand-in director Dirk Bogarde (who was the only real name in the cast), this remarkable film, bleak, grim, black with snowy dashes of white, was odds-on to fail. Tony, a delusional, well-heeled young wastrel (James Fox) has moved in to new digs and needs a manservant for…”well everything! You know.” Gentleman’s gentleman Barrett (Bogarde) fits the bill, despite a venal, visceral, almost innate hatred between him and Tony’s…
Continue Reading →Woody Allen’s Moral Universe
"Dostoyevsky or Turgenev?"
The Varnished Culture is conflicted: L dislikes Woody with his gaunt, Hebrew gamines, his obsessions, his recherché nostalgia, his nihilistic sentiment and relentless chauvinism. P loves him, truth to tell, for the same reason. He cites a brace of films, maybe with one addition, as examples of his comic, cosmic, genius: Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanours, and Husbands and Wives. These films suffer, like his other works, from a stuffy and noisy egocentricity but they are also, by far, the best depictions of modern morality – wise and wicked. Check out, for example, Judy Davis’ sublime failure to succumb to the…
Continue Reading →Chimes at Midnight
(Dir. Orson Welles) (1966) Welles amalgamates Shakespeare’s Henry plays and more: apparently made on a shoestring, in Spain, and technically a shambles, it still reeks of authenticity (like Welles’ Macbeth and Othello) and soars due to sterling performances and a script justly centred on the père / fils triangle between Henry IV (a chilly, imperious John Gielgud), Falstaff (a rambunctious Welles) and young Prince Hal, errant royal buck soon to grow (or shrivel) to dour, dismal, ungrateful King. Falstaff is a giant figure in literature (other than in adapted, borrowed and diminished form in the Bard’s by-the-numbers comedy) and here Welles,…
Continue Reading →Watch on the Rhine
At the Movies, London, 1943
(Dir. Herman Shumlin) (1943) Nazis, ISIS, Port Adelaide Football Club…the forces of evil bring us together and so it proves here, in Warner Brothers’ film of Lillian Hellman’s play about a member of the resistance and his family, seeking refuge from the Nazis in his wife’s family dream house in Washington DC, some time before Pearl Harbour shook the American lethargy… Bette Davis and Paul Lukas are given some very snappy lines, but they rise above them and give us performances that convince us of a couple driven to poverty and danger, for a cause. Bette Davis is wonderful (some thought her role marginalised and consequently…
Continue Reading →The Adventures of Robin Hood
(Dir. Michael Curtiz, William Keighley) (1938) It might be a wall of corn, but as they say in showbiz, “the colour of corn is Gold”. This is the lushest, most colourful, most joyous blood-and-thunder adventure ever to burst out of Hollywood in the Golden Age, a filmed comic book that puts modern actioners in the shade. It has been written that Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland were very much in unrequited love, and this shines forth in the film. Olivia is pretty as a picture and she glows here, without the treacle-and-vanessa-redgrave emoting she sheds in, say,…
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