The Wages of Fear
(Le Salaire de la Peur) (dir. H.G. Clouzot) (1953) Four men volunteer to drive 2 trucks bearing high explosive over rough terrain to help douse an oil fire. It’s a suicide mission but better than remaining stranded in their no-horse town. Real people and real action, gloriously French and politically incorrect.
Continue Reading →Vertigo
(dir. Alfred Hitchcock) (1958) Hitch’s greatest, weirdest film melds his various obsessions: food, drink, shopping, murder, sightseeing and icy, vacant blondes.
Continue Reading →The Vanishing
(dir. George Sluizer) (1988) A Dutch couple on their summer holidays fight, then make-up. She goes to get some things from the service station shop and that’s it – gone girl. From there, we work backwards, into the dark canals of human activity. Forget the 1993 remake; this French/Dutch original version is brilliant – funny, creepy; one of the best studies of men compelled to plumb life’s mysteries, with fatal results.
Continue Reading →The Turner Exhibition
(2013)* The Tate’s collection of works by J W M Turner came to Adelaide. Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway 1844 with its ludicrous train and hare is not in this collection, thank god, the picture that doubtless drove Dali, the consummate draftsman, to say “The worst painter in the world, from every point of view, without the foggiest hesitation or any possible doubt, is named Turner.” This is harsh, considering JMW’s Lorrain-inspired Carthage paintings and some of the more inspired proto-impressionist swishes of colour but really, he never could draw and his vivid whites, yellows and blacks…
Continue Reading →Twelve O’Clock High
(dir. H. King) (1949) Bureaucratic office thriller masquerading as WWII bomber film. If Gregory Peck chewed out a shirker today as he lashes Hugh Marlowe, he’d be prosecuted for bullying.
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