A sequel that basically does the same as the first movie. Here Susanne Collins’s heroes are thrown back to the lions in a 75th Celebration of the Hunger Games, uniting past champions in another game to the death. No expense has been spared by the Capitol on this suicidal spectacle. And no expense has been spared by the producers either as Catching Fire is bigger, louder and more spectacular than its predecessor. That does not necessarily mean better. Other than some interesting action sequences, there is nothing in Catching Fire that we didn’t twig in The Hunger Games. By the end of this one, the game has been spoiled and revealed as a con and Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdene is left contemplating being the fiery catalyst for a revolution. Oh dear. I suppose it was inevitable.
A preposterous second sequel to the enjoyably incredulous The Hunger Games is not helped by being overlong even at under two hours and having an underground rebellion which bears striking similarities to the despotic society they are trying to overthrow, demonstrating I suppose that extreme left and right wing politics are interchangeable, only the names differ. Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss 'Mockingjay' Everdene at least finds her heart, but her slow burn romance with Peeta 'the Baker' Mellark is spoilt by the dastardly Coriolanus Snow, who has poisoned him against her. Unfortunately, Julianne Moore’s rebel leader is the most uninspiring and creepy rebel leader I have ever seen in dystopian fiction. No wonder Katniss is popular – you’d follow her Lady Robin Hood charms anywhere. A cast of older stately actors provide all the homespun wisdom, James Bond gadgetry and sci-fi wizardry and a host of tech guys provide adequate CGI for the cityscapes, whether bombed out or not. The script is lumbered with cliches and the story is naïve beyond belief. It only picks up briefly towards the end when melodrama forsakes for action – there is almost no action in Mockingjay: Part One anyway, so Katniss and Peeta’s combined breakdowns hold your attention because nothing else has. At least half of what I was watching felt irrelevant and the other half felt tedious. Not a good advert for filmmaking. It made money though, lots of money, so somebody loved it. Somewhere. District 13 perhaps?
I watched The Rip on Netflix, the new Joe Carnahan film with Damon and Affleck. As an action thriller it's really very good indeed, the leads are both excellent (Damon perhaps the standout of the pair) and the story builds tension really very effectively, and it's really not clear what's going on or who to trust (well, there's one character I think you can guess might be suspect from the start, but I won't spoil it!). It also has a very pleasing Where Eagles Dare-style scene and has a very satisfying payoff, even if perhaps the final act isn't quite as strong as that which preceded it. But it's an actual proper film from Netflix, and if you fancy a thriller I'd recommend it.
I'd see it at the cinema, I don't know, there's an appetite for that kind of movie, why would I want to see it on a MacBook? But thanks for the heads up.
Donald Sutherland’s Coriolanus Snow gets his due. Julianne Moore’s Alma Coin gets hers. Jennifer Lawrence’s continually pained Katniss Everdeen plots her own agenda from start to finish. Flashy at times, miserable at others, Mockingjay: Part Two is a bore enlivened only by a battle against mutants – where did they come from, I asked myself – in an enormous underground sewer. The narrative is basically The Hunger Games played out in a real war zone. Given the film is based on the second half of Suzanne Collins’s third dystopian set novel, it stretches and stretches interminably and you do wish there had been a stronger hand on the screenplay tiller as this journey is obvious, dull and uninteresting virtually from the start. The overt snatching of genuine Roman history, of how the kingmakers championed, elected and assassinated emperors, has merit, but naming half your characters after Roman gods, generals and philosophers is drawing the analogy so plain you’d need to be a dunce not to see it. Every page of the script must have had the words ‘No Surprise’ printed on it. The manipulation of the underclass has been a theme from the first film and continues here, as does the baffling paradox of wonderful technological advances set against twentieth-century seeming landscapes. When peace is restored, Katniss returns to her now peaceful and deserted District 12, but you wonder what happened to all the miners. Did the population of Panem suddenly not need coal for fuel or diamonds as a commodity or whatever it was they dug out of the earth? Throughout the series there has been a fundamental lack of attention to the intrinsic details, foregrounding instead a weepy love story, some vile hunting games for adolescents and a monstrous overlord or two to hiss at panto-style. That might please younger minds, but it baffles me.
Let’s be kind and say I didn’t not enjoy it.
Note:
There’s a rather decent, if romanticised, coda to Mockingjay: Part Two where Katniss finally admits her love to Peeta in a beautifully framed ending; the oft-repeated question ‘real or not-real’ drawing them into an embrace.
However, unable to stop there – I said the movie was stretched too much – we have a second less successful coda set a few years in the future where Katniss discusses her past with her new born child. The scene was so remarkably similar to Madeleine Swann’s monologue to her daughter in No Time To Die I had to roll eyes. Like much of the narrative here, it was suddenly obvious where the inspiration for the Bond writers originated. They won’t admit it, but these kind of cross-overs are not incidental. I didn’t like the end of No Time To Die. It has slipped even further in my estimations now…
Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize winning stage play about an alcoholic and his hallucinatory friend Harvey, a six-foot white rabbit, is an amiable star vehicle for James Stewart, who played the role on Broadway for a year during its long, record breaking run. Putting aside the film’s [and the play’s] warm view of alcoholism and alcoholics, the film is a generous and affable fantasy with several great performances and a line of humour that is both sophisticated and whimsical. Suspend your disbelief for a couple of hours as scatty Josephine Hull tires of her inebriated brother’s approach to life and attempts to have him committed, only for the pleasantness of Elwood P. Dowd [Stewart] to convince everyone that there really just might be a better way to live. So, the film isn’t really about Harvey at all, it is a call to communicate, to offer friendship and fairness and understanding. Most of the contrivances are all due to people refusing to engage, failing to listen or making assumptions – the three fundamentals to a failing relationship. Dowd and the titular Harvey reunite everyone and leave the stage on a happy note.
The film alters the play somewhat by suggesting Harvey is genuine, or at least is imagined as being genuine, by more than just Dowd and his highly strung sister. In modern hands, the dramatist might have delved more deeply into the theory of trauma to explain Dowd’s mental state, but Chase, and the uncredited screenwriters Oscar Brodney and Myles Connolly, are happy to let the audience make up their own minds. Originally premiered in late 1944, the stage play’s feelgood factor tapped into a hopeful post-war outlook; that’s rather missing here. Dowd is a happy, slow drunk and in small doses most people like him. I think even I would. After a while, the charm wears thin, which is where we join Veta Simmonds, his sister. Josephine Hull is fabulous in a dotty role that is all thumbs and fingers, and in both believing and disbelieving in Harvey she is clearly a woman as traumatised as Dowd. You wonder if their childhood was not as happy as they seem to recall. The psychiatrist Dr Chumley comes across a little too cheerful; in the play he is more devious in unravelling Dowd’s mental state and does not fall for the white rabbit trick.
Overall, Harvey is a super film, watchable and extremely pleasant with the occasional rock solid laugh. It is one of Stewart’s best performances, certainly one of his most likeable. The film’s dated a lot, but it still produces smiles. Afterwards, one feels like taking a trip to the Windsor Castle and sharing a pint or two with a white rabbit…
I looked forward to watching this because it was directed by Powell and Pressburger. I've seen "A matter of life and death", "Black Narcissus" and "The red shoes" and those movies are some of the best British movies of the time. River Plate is nowhere near that level, but It's a good movie. The movie was in many ways a standard mid-century navy movie. I did enjoy all the huge warships. Those are inherently cinematic. I found it facinating how analogue and badic much of the opwrations on the ships were. Trumpets or even crewmen standing by stairways hearing orders being shouted and repearing them to men further down the ship. This was the age of radar and soon computers and atom bombs, but a lot was done like they were in Hotatio Nelson's time.
The story is from the early days of WWII. The German pocket battleship Graf Spee was sent to the Indian ocean and the South Pacific three weeks before the war started to raid merchant ships, basically piracy. This was back in the day when battle ships were still seen as viable naval ships, but most knew aircraft carriers were obviously taking over. Three British warships manage to find the Graf Spee off the coast of South America and injure the battleship to the degree it has to seek harbour in Montevideo in Uruguay. Uruguay was neutral, so a game of diplomacy, deception and espionage starts. I won't give away more here.
Early in the movie we see British seamen captured by the Graf Spee getting transfered to the supply ship Altmark. We don't see the Altmark again in the movie, but its story is actually both interesting and important. The Altmark managed to sneak into the North Sea using several fags and names. As a supply ship to the German navy it was sort of in a grey area between a navy ship and a civilian ship. The British knew there were British onboard and desperately wanted to free them. The Altmark managed to sneak into the fjords of neutral Norway (See - everything is really about Norway! 😁). The Norwegian navy boarded Altmark, but somehow managed to miss the 300 British man below deck. When the Altmark was hiding in Jøssingfjord in the far south of Norway British naval ships (also) breached Norwegian neutrality and freed the prisoners. This was a propaganda victory for the British Royal Navy and Churchill and an embarrassing sign of weakness for Norway. In Germany the Altmark affair was seen as proof that Norway wasn't willing or able to protect its neutrality and spurred on the invasion later in 1940. The tiny nazi community in Norway started calling pro-British countrymen "Jøssings" after the fjord. Later in the war patriotic Norwegians started using the term as a badge of honour, perhaps not too different from African-Americans using the N-word.
That was quite an tangent! When it comes to casting we find Bernard Lee and Patrick MacNee in key roles. I also recognized the former SOE agent Antony Quayle, perhaps better known from "The guns of Navarone". This movie is best enjoyed of you're into battleships and/or WWII history.
Spoilers:
The Graf Spee didn't blow itself up outside Monetvideo, it scuttled itself. The captain took his own life three days later. I wonder if it would be a better ending if the sinking of the ship was made more of a mood scene, with relief mixed with the melancholy of a dying giant. Instead the shock scene could be the captain discovering the truth and later killing himself.
Thanks for that review @Number24 one of the lesser P & P movies, but as you say, worth a look.
Now, more mundane matters:
MURDER AT THE EMBASSY (2025)
a.k.a An Invitation to Murder: A Death in Cairo
An Invitation to Murder was a 2023 mystery thriller about a florist obsessed with Agatha Christie novels. That was handy as the adventure evolved much like a Christie, with a rich benefactor being bumped off while all the guests at his mansion are suspects of one kind or another. Blessed with an eidetic memory, Miranda Green sets out to solve the murder. The same thing happens in Cario, as the Second World War looms and Nazi sympathisers are everywhere. This sequel dips pretty low for this kind of fare. I could name any number of episodes of stuff like Whitstable Pearl, Father Brown, Death in Paradise, etc, that could give Murder at the Embassy a run for its money and probably sprint to the finish first.
Misha Barton is serviceable as the obnoxious sleuth and she’s given the barest of support from a game but frankly wooden cast. The script gives nobody any support whatsoever. The best actor was the dog. The plot creaks and groans like the secret door handily revealed among a garden of gardenias. Normally I would pass this sort of movie off as a bit of light hearted fluff, but I am flummoxed by its ordinariness. All I can say is, ‘Don’t watch it.’ I spent most of my viewing wondering how on earth Murder at the Embassy got a distribution deal. Apparently there is a third film due out this year.
Maverick director Peter Watkins had his first taste of success, celebrity and controversy with his BBC film Culloden which tells the history of the last battle fought on British soil and the death of the Great Jacobite Rising of 1745. Watkins chose to tell the story of the battle using a pseudo-documentary style which puts the viewer directly in the mind of the combatants. All opposing views, hopes and fears are on show. Researched meticulously with historian John Prebble and basing much of the action around the writings of eye witnesses and archivists, Culloden highlights what would be Watkins’s career raison d’etre: working with amateurs to produce work of intense detail and honest provision.
The lot of the Clansman is presented in as bleak a fashion as the Scottish weather Culloden is filmed in. There is not much for any of them to smile about. Their overlords are a frigid bunch, stymied by blind loyalty to Bonnie Prince Charlie, who is a numbskull of a military commander. Their fate is as grim as that weather. The government forces [never the English from the narrator, that is a term of offence used by the Jacobite Clansmen, who also resent the Hanoverians being German] are ruthless and mercenary in their battles and in the aftermath. Atrocities abound. The camera does not shirk the bloodlust of the victorious troops. Nor does it shy from the terror and god awfulness of combat. Photographer Dick Bush gets up close and personal to the action. Ann Brodie’s make up shows most of the Clansmen dirty, haggard and already scarred from various previous battles. As the killings begin, blood replaces mud on those taut faces. The film offers a historical foretaste of the kind of reporting viewers would see of the Vietnam War.
Watkins directs with a keen economical eye. Faces frame the picture. Landscapes are swiftly scanned. The black and white photography gives the film a grimy, stark, atmospheric palate; you feel you can touch the soldiers, hear them, feel the lashing rain. The small cast – including all the extras it looks no more than fifty – are placed carefully to manufacture the idea of huge armies and highhanded commanders. The actual or imagined words of the participants are obliquely presented to us, both in English and in Scots Gaelic. The narrator provides an all knowing voice to link the various characters. Watkins would go on to use similar techniques for The War Game (1966) and his cinema debut, the underrated Privilege (1967).
As a historical document, Culloden may be missing something in the way of balance, but as a film it is groundbreaking, certainly for television. This kind of ‘enacted’ documentary is all the rage these days, although it is mostly done in mime, but you can clearly see the influence Watkins has had on the subgenre through the mini-marvel that is Culloden.
This movie has been nominated for nine Oscars and I can see why. Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a man obsessed by table tennis and himself. He's a world class table tennis player, but he's also a con-man in desperate need of a moral backbone. Marty is an arrogant narcissist. He steals, lies and plots to get to the fame and fortune he thinks and deserves. This makes life for the people who cares for him more difficult, and he undermines himself again and again.
"Marty supreme" is an old-fashioned drama-comedy that could in many ways bee from the 70's. The actors are shot in an unflattering way that film stars never are today and the film is about character and story, not spectacle and CGI. The cutting and the pace of the movie isn't typical of the 70's, but the frantic cutting and energy (much like table tennis) works for the film. The story i set back in the 1950's, but much of the music is much more modern. I think this works because the music isn't source music, instead it's about the mood of the scene and Marty's mind.
Table tennis doesn't sound like much of a topic for a movie, and Marty doesn't sound like much of a main character. But I found myself really caring about him and the matches he plays. I'm putting Marty Supreme on my list of best movies of last year!
Thank you for the excellent recommendation and a great review as always.
THE NET (1995)
Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock), a systems analyst working for Cathredal Systems, is caught in a deep conspiracy, when a floppy disk arrives at her door. 'Mozart's Ghost', the computer program on the disk contains a mysterious backdoor.
Once Bennett logs in, her entire life is erased.
Clandestine syndicates, assassins, imposters, pagers, dial up modems...
This movie has it all...
A very entertaining film from the 90's, that still has a charm to this day.
@Sonero THE NET was a closet favourite back in the day. One of the key scenes was a very tense moment when Bullock is downloading files under some duress and the computer transfer seems to get slower and slower as it reaches towards 100%. Oh, I remember those days! Not a brilliant piece of filmmaking, but a very enjoyable movie all the same. And it has the wonderful Sandra Bullock in it... 😍😍😍
First showing on telly for this acclaimed Holocaust drama loosely based on the Martin Amis novel of 10 years' earlier.
It depicts the family of a Nazi commandant at home, with modern Art Deco trappings albeit with that touch of 1930s austerity, and a spacious garden. From over the garden wall we hear odd sounds, machinery operated, dogs barking, sometimes screams. It continues like this during the course of the film while the well-to-do family go about its often humdrum business of family life, which the commandant returns to each day.
The photography is superb, unlike anything else I've seen, it is pin-sharp and contrasty. It seems to sum up its time.
We infer gradually and are then informed that the commandant's home borders Auschwitz, the camp he oversees. His family goes about its daily tasks, largely ignoring what goes on over the wall. It seems a metaphor because I suppose no SS family really lived right on the edge of the camp, of course I could be wrong. I wish IMDB chat forum still existed, but given that a few pages in discussion would turn to Holocaust denial even for Pixar's latest CGI family entertainment, I doubt this film would have escaped it.
It's a bit of a one-note film, you can't call it one-joke because of the subject matter, but it has its central conceit and sticks with it. Its styling is minimalistic and downbeat, with no conventional soundtrack to influence or lead viewer reaction. It might be better to watch at the cinema because it has your undivided attention. On Channel 4 it was shown without ad breaks, possibly to show respect for the subject matter, or maybe because no advertiser would want to be associated with the theme? I didn't know this and sometimes felt in an uneventful section like nipping out to make a coffee or go to the loo briefly only to find that in that one-two minutes there had been some plot development timed to assuage the very boredom I was beginning to experience.
The theme of the film effectively explores just how normalised it is to turn a blind eye to horrors, though it becomes clear that the family is only too aware of what is happening. The ending is a real jolt, again filmed in the same minimalistic way. It's highly effective.
I wondered if the late Martin Amis would have seen this film. most probably he did. I looked it up and it turns out this film premiered at Cannes on the exact day that Amis died.
Jonathon Glazer doesn’t make many films, but when he does they are usually exceptional – think Sexy Beast, Under the Skin and this one, The Zone of Interest, a fascinating oblique insight into the appalling behaviours of man to his fellow man.
Nominally based on Martin Amis’s historical novel, The Zone of Interest concerns Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, his wife and his family who live an idyllic life metres beyond the walls of the prison compound. The horrors of internment, of destitution, hopelessness, the appalling execution chambers, the vile scum of the aftermath, is rendered here by nothing more than sound. The family play out an ordinary slice of real life as if nothing extraordinary and unreal is occurring over the grey wall beyond their pretty villa, Italian garden and lofty greenhouse. Glazer’s intention is to demonstrate the banality of their wartime existence. Cut off from the physical war, Rudolf and Helga Hoss and to a lesser extent their children, carry out day-to-day activities with all the carelessness of peacetime. They discuss holidays to spa towns, celebrate birthdays, hold children’s garden parties, family excursions, gossip, ponder, argue, fight and make up, everything as normal and unassumed as you’d expect a household to act.
Yet behind the commonplace activities lies the enormous guilty secret. The sounds of the concentration camp never leave the house. Day and night the howls, cries, sobs and screams, the gunshots, the orders and shouts, the cackling laughter, the chugging trains and the whir of alarms inhabit the atmosphere, creeping through the walls and windows, a constant chilling cold whisper of death. Decease and dismay are inescapable, yet life carries on uninterrupted. Glazer never once takes us inside the camp. This amplifies the horrifying behaviour of these individuals who remain blasé, untouched and unemotional about the plight of the Jews.
It is never clear whether Rudolf Hoss ideologically hates the Jews and wishes them exterminated. Glazer remains ambivalent over Hoss’s intrinsic nature. There is a scene reminiscent of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List where the commandant waits for a pretty Jewess to appear in his office; as Hoss finishes a phone call, she prepares for sex. Afterwards we see him frantically washing himself clean in the same manner he does after discovering the local river is polluted with the bones of the dead. It is clear his moral boundaries are broken. At the film’s end when he should be enjoying a swanky officer’s gathering in Berlin, Hoss ponders how quickly he could gas all the guests. Shaken to the core by his own inhumanity, he is violently sick. We know of course that he will return to carry out thousands more murders – Glazer has him disappearing into darkness down a corridor, the long passage to his soul. The scene is juxtaposed with a contemporary sequence where cleaners mindedly polish and shine exhibits at the Auschwitz memorial museum, watched from behind sparkling glass by the detritus and debris of the slaughtered, shoes, gold, capes, trinkets. Glazer suggests that the commercial has overtaken the commemorative, making us as complicit in the fading memory as the very people who perpetrated the crime.
Occasionally the real world filters into the Hoss’s existence. Helga is brusque and insulting to her domestic staff. At one point she threatens a young maid with being burned to death. The height of her anger is reserved for her husband when he drily announces he is to be reassigned. The argument which ensues is the same as any the world over: why didn’t you tell me, when did you know, what about our life here, the children, etc. She brokers an agreement which solves the problem but satisfies neither of them. While Hoss is away, the young maid leaves apples for the prisoners. She finds a script of music abandoned by a prisoner and plays it on the family piano, a moment of catharsis and calm among the encroaching, unbridled tension. The nanny meanwhile is a drunk, caring little for the baby in her charge. These moments of insight and servile defiance are complemented by scenes featuring the seemingly unaware children. The youngest son plays with his toys, overhears the guards shouting and stares out of the window before replacing the curtain with a shiver. The girls giggle about the soldiers facetious comments written in the visitors book. The eldest son locks his frightened brother in the greenhouse and sits on guard outside hissing like escaping gas. They know, exactly like the servants, like their mother and grandmother, what is occurring outside their idyl, it is the master of the house who shows no reaction to it.
The film is masterfully composed and photographed. It has a rasping, unspoken choral music score, which drives hard at the senses, a lingering soundscape of horror. Throughout, the award winning sound effects of the concentration camp permeate the landscape. We, as well as the Family Hoss, are never far away from murder and mayhem. It is only the extremes of their own encampment which bars us, and them, from witnessing the brutality of inhumanity. Instead we see it in the boardrooms, the grand parties, hear it in the businesslike discussions, the unemotional planning meetings, the numbers of the dead carelessly banded, an almost tortured day-to-day where the edifice seems to want to crack yet never does. Instead, the inhumanity simply festers and multiplies, affecting even the docile children, ultimately informing, testing and censuring the audience.
The Zone of Interest is a superb film which fully deserves the acclaim it receives. It is a difficult watch and will not be to all tastes. That does not stop it being important and meaningful. Glazer and his team have created a brilliant expose of the complicit, selfish and uncharitable nature of people trusting to a system of falsehood, indoctrination and exploitation. We should really take note as these ugly democracies are rearing their head once more around the globe, perhaps not as explicitly, but certainly with a degree of martial intent and utter contempt for humanity.
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Elvis Presley in Roustabout (1964)
In the year that the Beatles were conquering the world and released their debut film A Hard Day's Night, praised by one critic as 'the Citizen Kane of jukebox movies', we got this from the King.
Let's be fair. If you want to see Elvis still young and handsome, wearing black leathers and riding a motorbike, sticking it to anyone he comes across, not to mention in full colour in the great outdoors, you will pick this over the moptops hanging around studios in grim black and white.
ChrisNo1 reviewed this a few posts back.
Elvis plays a jerk.
I suppose we all turn into our dad at some point, and this did it for me. I just can't see how he can be a role model. Some of his transgressions are borderline - you can see he was provoked. But many are not. The opening has him sing a song in a coffee shop - I thought, this isn't the normal Poison Ivy tune, then realised too late he was singing Poison Ivy League, to wind up some college boys who are jibing him. That's a decent bit of anti-Establishment behaviour right there, though it's unclear how bail money gets him out of jail after the fight the three lads start up afterwards, didn't he break one of their arms? He leaves his girlfriend behind because nobody controls him and she isn't good looking enough to be lead. Actually, I guess he's skipping bail, right?
So Elvis skips town on his bike and this is where problems begin. We see him singing a song - the musical can't decide if it is doing the Cabaret trick were songs are performed in a stage context, or play it like The Sound of Music, where a character will just burst into song and an invisible band or orchestra will accompany them. So here Elvis on his bike mimes to his pre-recorded track - it doesn't quite work though I read that Elvis was annoyed his usual backing singers weren't allowed. 'You're on your bike, where are the other singers coming from?' asked the director. 'The same damn place as the band!' the singer replied.
Elvis espies a hot teenage girl in a Jeep driven by her dad with her mum in the passenger seat. He catcalls her shamelessly and artlessly, to the annoyance of the dad who tries to run him off the road. It all feels quite graceless on both sides but it feels like it could go the way of Cape Fear, where Robert Mitchum targets a family for the duration of the film. As ChrisNo1 wrote, Tarantino singles this out for praise and you feel Elvis here could be a Michael Madsen character, without redemptive qualities, gyrating and combing his hair as he tortures a young cop to the strains of Stuck in the Middle With You.
As my fellow scribe observes, a still-sexy Barbara Stanwyck isn't given much to do, though if I met her in my prime I'd find something for her to do.
Matters come to a head when the teenager enters her mother's caravan to find Stanwyck straddling the King, naked from the top down, her hands in her hair, her still perky breasts pointing out defiantly. Her daughter is outraged, then curious, then a willing participant. Naturally this scene was cut by the odious Colonel Tom Parker to allow for a family release and the footage was long lost until it resurfaced in the Library of Congress only 10 years ago; Sky Arts now shows the uncensored version. Okay, all of this is made up from the words 'Matters come to a head' onwards but your mind tends to wander during this kind of film.
Elvis continues to be a jerk and it is hard to see how he can be any kind of role model, coming after a film such as The Zone of Interest, it seems like another example of strange shocking behaviour, albeit with no moral parity but on the same spectrum. Then again I suppose the Beatles harassed poor Colonel Smithers that same year in their train compartment, didn't they.
Presley's behaviour in this film is at odds with his real day-to-day persona, which was well-mannered and deferential. It's strange that the setting is a failing carnival, of which Stanwyck and her husband are co-owners, and subject to a hostile takeover by a rival, given that was Colonel Tom's origins too.
To be fair, Presley's movie output was like early Britney Spears records; they're not meant to be good, they're meant to sell. Once you make quality any kind of criteria, you make it a risky venture. If it fails, you're seen to fail in a way that matters more than if you didn't really care. If it succeeds, you simply raise the bar for future films and make yourself a load of stress.
One of the cast- a minx fortune teller with an annoying voice who tries to in vain to tempt our hero - showed up in last week's The Man from UNCLE. A then unknown Raquel Welch is in the opening scene in the coffee shop, sitting with the Ivy Leagues.
I say all this, then yesterday evening I caught Marty Supreme (2025) at the cinema.
Now, again in this Timothée Chalamet plays an obnoxious character, the lead, crazed with the dream of becoming world number one table-tennis player. It's set in the 1950s but as @Number24 observes, it's shot like a 1970s film before Spielberg and Lucas got their hooks into things - it's gritty, downbeat. It's not unlike One Battle After Another as the plot is really one thing after another and is quite random and episodic, we follow Chalamet as he hustles and cons his way to the big time, often enough the need to con and hustle comes from his own pratfalls and obnoxiousness. Scenes are thrown in that seem superfluous - in particular one shaggy dog tale - but I guess it hints at Marty's redemptive qualities.
So it's not too different from Elvis in Roustabout, only we enjoy it this time because, well, it's Chalamet doing his Oscar bid, following on from his role as Dylan and Call Me By Your Name, plus it's got Paltrow back on screen too - it is funny how the audience reading a film in the context of the time informs its attitude. So maybe Elvis' sociopathic conduct in Roustabout was excused at the time because, well, it's the King and we've seen him in these kind of films before, plus to be insubordinate is the fashion then and we all know he'll make right in the end.
Maybe in half a century someone will watch Marty Supreme on telly and think, well, I don't see why we should applaud such an obnoxious character, I mean why should we? What were they thinking?
I suppose I will now go and find out how much of the story is based on truth, in that rather self-defeating, deflating way.
I made the joke about 'Chicken Supreme' at the cinema but the ticket seller wasn't very impressed.
The Frogmen, directed by Lloyd Bacon, details the brave exploits of the US Navy's Underwater Demolition Team 4 (UDT 4) during WWII.
Lt. Cmdr. John Lawrence (Richard Widmark), undertakes two dangerous missions in the Pacific with his team; one surveying a Japanese held island to locate a safe landing area and the other to destroy a Japanese submarine pen.
A well made, realistic war film with great performances by its lead and supporting actors.
...and Richard Kiel is there, too, as the strongman.
Nicely accurate review. I'm glad you mentioned the "Matters come to a head" scene; it's been so long since I've watched this that I was beginning to think I'd imagined it.
The OST album knocked The Beatles off No1, which was the last time this happened.
I reviewed this sometime last year or the eyar before, I forget when. Here's an update:
I didn’t mean to watch this last night, but it was on and despite my best efforts, having started, I felt I had to finish. The Magnificent Seven has that unaccountably compelling nature all the best films do, right from the first bars of Elmer Bernstein’s brilliant theme. It wasn’t very popular on initial release, which is astonishing when you consider how influential it became. Occasionally rough at the edges, but watchable from the off with a host of great characters acted by a host of great actors. Thoroughly enjoyable and no comments or synopsis is necessary.
Initially made as a pilot episode for an NBC TV serial; L.A. Takedown, directed by Micheal Mann is a 1989 crime action film, which was later remade as 1995's 'HEAT', starring screen legends Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Val Kilmer.
After an armed robbery ends up in the killing of three armored car guards, an LAPD team headed by Detective Vincent Hanna (Scott Plank) goes on the hunt for a crew of professional criminals led by the master crook Patrick McLaren (Alex McArthur).
A solid, well-made action film, which fans of 'HEAT' will greatly appreciate.
Actress Elizabeth Banks is most famous for playing the over-decorative fashionista in The Hunger Games movies. She was watchable in that. Banks also happens to be a dab hand at directing watchable movies, as proven by the fun and games of Cocaine Bear, a comedy-horror loosely based on a real incident. A large haul of cocaine is dropped from a plane over the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest by [real life] drug smuggler Andrew Thornton. He dies in a parachute malfunction [that really happened], leaving his drug shipment spread across the forest. When an unsuspecting American black bear ingests kilos of cocaine, all chaos breaks loose for the Park Ranger, the local police and ambulance services, some local vandals, Ray Liotta’s hapless dealer gang, hikers and even a Mom desperately searching for her runaway daughter. Every incident, whether foolish, horrific or sentimental is treated by Banks and writer Jimmy Warden with the crass, mockingly dark humour it deserves. I wondered if they were being satirical about drug enforcement, but they are not. They are simply reading the situation for the hilarity it possesses. There is some gore as well, but barring the occasional tossed limb or two, it isn’t over shocking. Good, dead pan performances abound. The CGI bear was brilliantly realised. The two teenagers were a good value pairing until the bear disturbed their cocaine tasting, when things got hastily nasty and hastily edited. One of them is played by precocious actress-filmmaker Brooklynn Kimberly Prince who was excellent in Sean Baker’s bitter sweet The Florida Project when only six-years-old. Nothing so serious here. Cocaine Bear is all very silly and quite enjoyable enough to pass a winter’s Saturday evening. The title’s brilliant.
Cocaine Bear is brilliant rubbish. It's set in the mid-80s or thereabouts so it's got some tracks of the time in there, often played in inappropriate moments when the bear is going after folk, to inform us we shouldn't take anything too seriously. It signposts when a character is introduced as a jerk so we know they are going to get their comeuppance soon enough and we shouldn't care enough about their demise but in fact enjoy it - all down with a wink to let us know it doesn't matter. That said, despite the female director, it does seem the benchmark for the women's flaws is somewhat lower - being a bit of a nag, or a control freak - than that for the men (being a murderous drug dealer).
I think CB was one of those 'back to the cinema' post-Covid movies but if it was filmed in lockdown it's not too obvious. If this was Ray Liotta's last film then his final celluloid moments are quite undignified.
Critics were not kind to Richard Attenborough’s tribute to the fallen heroes of Arnhem. Big budget expansive World War Two films – big budget expansive films full stop – were not in vogue in 1977. The movie looked old fashioned compared to America’s new generation of cowboy filmmakers, the Scorsese’s and Bogdanovich’s, et al. It also looked grimy and historic compared to the flashy sci-fi trickery of Star Wars and Close Encounters. The years have been much more kind to A Bridge Too Far and it has been reassessed as a fine historical war film, accurate to a fair degree and displaying and explaining both heroic individual deed and bitterly foolish operational incompetence. Much of what genuinely happened in the rushed planning and exposition of 1944’s Operation Market Garden is laid bare for all to see. The haphazard and optimistic planning, the rule book orders, the appalling communication breakdown, the botched landings, supply and relief, the stupidest rear advance column along a single lane highway surrounded by dykes and floodplains, the snubbing of Dutch resistance intel, the failure to chase victory when a mere mile from success – Montgomery’s American counterpart General Patton wouldn’t have withdrawn so close to an objective – lastly the abysmal British weather, is what drives the film. Writer William Golding used the criticisms raised in Cornelius Ryan’s book to highlight military ineptitude. Attenborough uses a fey Dirk Bogarde as Lt-General Frederick Browning [Daphne Du Maurier’s husband, no less] to suggest the old school tie, breakfast and good-form is more important than winning a war. Gene Hackman’s Polish Major-General Sosabowski sees through the act, while Sean Connery’s saturnine Roy Urquhart accepts the bad with the good until it is all too late and making a complaint becomes futile. “As you know,” pines Bogarde's Browning, “I always said it was a bridge too far.” He never did: a liar as well as an incompetent.
What Attenborough truly achieves, after he’s bashed the British end and backhandedly complimented the American thrust, drive and initiative, is a memento to heroic failure. Market Garden was 90% successful and had Arnhem been held or retaken by the Armoured Divisions, Germany might have had a war to fight on three sides of an encroaching triangle, not just the traditional two. This is the story of how thousands of Allied troops fought their way by parachute, glider, tank and foot along a sliver of road, captured five strategic bridges of varying sizes across vital river courses, all the while under immense bombardment and unexpectedly strong German resistance, a defence reinforced by Panzer divisions. The stories are individually small, snippets of personal notice, such as Johnny Frost’s idiosyncratic command, US Sergeant Dohun’s mad drive to save the life of his captain, Urquhart’s airsickness or Kate Ter Horst reading the Bible to a dying soldier, but altogether they offer an interpretation of war that has seldom been bettered on screen. The fighting is bloody. The devastation culpably real. The confusion believable. The desperation and disappointment shocks. Tragedy, of course, is never far away in combat. There is, too, some unexpected humour.
A Bridge Too Far tells its story in an almost documentary style, taking after The Longest Day, but not quite having the strength of its convictions. A few more onscreen titles to explain who was who and fighting where and when would assist clarity, but for all that, the muddling gives the audience an impression of the soldier’s view. The man on the ground had as little awareness of proceedings as his superior or the high command safe at Allied HQ. Early, easy victories give way to life and death struggles, street fighting and crazy daytime river assaults or nighttime evacuations. The film does not forget the enemy either, prone too to the same lapses in authority. Attenborough, with his sure studied cameras, ensures the grit and determination is etched front and centre on everyone’s faces. He is aided by a multi-starred cast including many of the great American stars of the day [Ryan O’Neal, James Caan, Eliott Gould, even Robert Redford] and a long list of British luminaries, topped by Lawrence Olivier who pops up as a Dutch doctor.
Geoffrey Unsworth helms the cameras with much aplomb and the film is edited brilliantly by Antony Gibbs. It isn’t a snatch and grab edit, but a film of slow definitive cuts, stretching many sequences to increase tension rather than simply go all-out for the violent conclusion. Some of the framing shots are fantastic: the armada of aeroplanes overhead disturbing a church service, the tanks sweeping across Nijmegen Bridge, the wounded in the makeshift garden hospital, perhaps best of all the final shot of Kate Ter Horst and her children in silhouette walking away from obliterated Arnhem across a dyke, her son lagging behind still playing war games – will the young ever learn from the previous generations? Composer John Addison [who fought in the Market Garden offensive] provides a fantastic, uplifting theme that reminds us of the heroes who died and lived; his incidental score is powerful in its understatement and much of the action occurs without music. Goldman’s screenplay is succinct and provides enough character nuance without becoming bogged down in personality.
One might suggest it is a trifle long and perhaps lacks a grandstand sequence [as Saving Private Ryan, The Dambusters or The Longest Day does – the latter has many] but it has a central core that understands soldiers and soldiering, of orders and obedience, of the chain of command and the consequences, however bitter and uncomfortable. “I went in with 10,000 men, “ says Roy Urquahart when offered a bed to rest, “I came out with less that two, so you’ll forgive me for if I don’t.” War is hell and it has hellish significance for lives, for communities, for nations. A Bridge Too Far, through acknowledging the debt owed and the casualties suffered, informs us thus. Recently, I saw the film was voted the second greatest war film of all time [Channel 5, I think, or Sky Arts maybe, I forget the exact program] and while that may be a stretch, A Bridge Too Far certainly stands up better than some more patriotic flag wavers of the immediate post-war era. Perhaps with time and understanding we’ve come to recognise how fine a film it is for telling a less than accomplished history.
Comments
It is excellent, one of Hitchcock's very best.
THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (2013)
A sequel that basically does the same as the first movie. Here Susanne Collins’s heroes are thrown back to the lions in a 75th Celebration of the Hunger Games, uniting past champions in another game to the death. No expense has been spared by the Capitol on this suicidal spectacle. And no expense has been spared by the producers either as Catching Fire is bigger, louder and more spectacular than its predecessor. That does not necessarily mean better. Other than some interesting action sequences, there is nothing in Catching Fire that we didn’t twig in The Hunger Games. By the end of this one, the game has been spoiled and revealed as a con and Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdene is left contemplating being the fiery catalyst for a revolution. Oh dear. I suppose it was inevitable.
THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY: PART ONE (2014)
A preposterous second sequel to the enjoyably incredulous The Hunger Games is not helped by being overlong even at under two hours and having an underground rebellion which bears striking similarities to the despotic society they are trying to overthrow, demonstrating I suppose that extreme left and right wing politics are interchangeable, only the names differ. Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss 'Mockingjay' Everdene at least finds her heart, but her slow burn romance with Peeta 'the Baker' Mellark is spoilt by the dastardly Coriolanus Snow, who has poisoned him against her. Unfortunately, Julianne Moore’s rebel leader is the most uninspiring and creepy rebel leader I have ever seen in dystopian fiction. No wonder Katniss is popular – you’d follow her Lady Robin Hood charms anywhere. A cast of older stately actors provide all the homespun wisdom, James Bond gadgetry and sci-fi wizardry and a host of tech guys provide adequate CGI for the cityscapes, whether bombed out or not. The script is lumbered with cliches and the story is naïve beyond belief. It only picks up briefly towards the end when melodrama forsakes for action – there is almost no action in Mockingjay: Part One anyway, so Katniss and Peeta’s combined breakdowns hold your attention because nothing else has. At least half of what I was watching felt irrelevant and the other half felt tedious. Not a good advert for filmmaking. It made money though, lots of money, so somebody loved it. Somewhere. District 13 perhaps?
I watched The Rip on Netflix, the new Joe Carnahan film with Damon and Affleck. As an action thriller it's really very good indeed, the leads are both excellent (Damon perhaps the standout of the pair) and the story builds tension really very effectively, and it's really not clear what's going on or who to trust (well, there's one character I think you can guess might be suspect from the start, but I won't spoil it!). It also has a very pleasing Where Eagles Dare-style scene and has a very satisfying payoff, even if perhaps the final act isn't quite as strong as that which preceded it. But it's an actual proper film from Netflix, and if you fancy a thriller I'd recommend it.
I'd see it at the cinema, I don't know, there's an appetite for that kind of movie, why would I want to see it on a MacBook? But thanks for the heads up.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY: PART TWO (2015)
Donald Sutherland’s Coriolanus Snow gets his due. Julianne Moore’s Alma Coin gets hers. Jennifer Lawrence’s continually pained Katniss Everdeen plots her own agenda from start to finish. Flashy at times, miserable at others, Mockingjay: Part Two is a bore enlivened only by a battle against mutants – where did they come from, I asked myself – in an enormous underground sewer. The narrative is basically The Hunger Games played out in a real war zone. Given the film is based on the second half of Suzanne Collins’s third dystopian set novel, it stretches and stretches interminably and you do wish there had been a stronger hand on the screenplay tiller as this journey is obvious, dull and uninteresting virtually from the start. The overt snatching of genuine Roman history, of how the kingmakers championed, elected and assassinated emperors, has merit, but naming half your characters after Roman gods, generals and philosophers is drawing the analogy so plain you’d need to be a dunce not to see it. Every page of the script must have had the words ‘No Surprise’ printed on it. The manipulation of the underclass has been a theme from the first film and continues here, as does the baffling paradox of wonderful technological advances set against twentieth-century seeming landscapes. When peace is restored, Katniss returns to her now peaceful and deserted District 12, but you wonder what happened to all the miners. Did the population of Panem suddenly not need coal for fuel or diamonds as a commodity or whatever it was they dug out of the earth? Throughout the series there has been a fundamental lack of attention to the intrinsic details, foregrounding instead a weepy love story, some vile hunting games for adolescents and a monstrous overlord or two to hiss at panto-style. That might please younger minds, but it baffles me.
Let’s be kind and say I didn’t not enjoy it.
Note:
There’s a rather decent, if romanticised, coda to Mockingjay: Part Two where Katniss finally admits her love to Peeta in a beautifully framed ending; the oft-repeated question ‘real or not-real’ drawing them into an embrace.
However, unable to stop there – I said the movie was stretched too much – we have a second less successful coda set a few years in the future where Katniss discusses her past with her new born child. The scene was so remarkably similar to Madeleine Swann’s monologue to her daughter in No Time To Die I had to roll eyes. Like much of the narrative here, it was suddenly obvious where the inspiration for the Bond writers originated. They won’t admit it, but these kind of cross-overs are not incidental. I didn’t like the end of No Time To Die. It has slipped even further in my estimations now…
You can get Netflix on your telly nowadays 😜
HARVEY (1950)
Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize winning stage play about an alcoholic and his hallucinatory friend Harvey, a six-foot white rabbit, is an amiable star vehicle for James Stewart, who played the role on Broadway for a year during its long, record breaking run. Putting aside the film’s [and the play’s] warm view of alcoholism and alcoholics, the film is a generous and affable fantasy with several great performances and a line of humour that is both sophisticated and whimsical. Suspend your disbelief for a couple of hours as scatty Josephine Hull tires of her inebriated brother’s approach to life and attempts to have him committed, only for the pleasantness of Elwood P. Dowd [Stewart] to convince everyone that there really just might be a better way to live. So, the film isn’t really about Harvey at all, it is a call to communicate, to offer friendship and fairness and understanding. Most of the contrivances are all due to people refusing to engage, failing to listen or making assumptions – the three fundamentals to a failing relationship. Dowd and the titular Harvey reunite everyone and leave the stage on a happy note.
The film alters the play somewhat by suggesting Harvey is genuine, or at least is imagined as being genuine, by more than just Dowd and his highly strung sister. In modern hands, the dramatist might have delved more deeply into the theory of trauma to explain Dowd’s mental state, but Chase, and the uncredited screenwriters Oscar Brodney and Myles Connolly, are happy to let the audience make up their own minds. Originally premiered in late 1944, the stage play’s feelgood factor tapped into a hopeful post-war outlook; that’s rather missing here. Dowd is a happy, slow drunk and in small doses most people like him. I think even I would. After a while, the charm wears thin, which is where we join Veta Simmonds, his sister. Josephine Hull is fabulous in a dotty role that is all thumbs and fingers, and in both believing and disbelieving in Harvey she is clearly a woman as traumatised as Dowd. You wonder if their childhood was not as happy as they seem to recall. The psychiatrist Dr Chumley comes across a little too cheerful; in the play he is more devious in unravelling Dowd’s mental state and does not fall for the white rabbit trick.
Overall, Harvey is a super film, watchable and extremely pleasant with the occasional rock solid laugh. It is one of Stewart’s best performances, certainly one of his most likeable. The film’s dated a lot, but it still produces smiles. Afterwards, one feels like taking a trip to the Windsor Castle and sharing a pint or two with a white rabbit…
The battle of the river Plate (1956)
I looked forward to watching this because it was directed by Powell and Pressburger. I've seen "A matter of life and death", "Black Narcissus" and "The red shoes" and those movies are some of the best British movies of the time. River Plate is nowhere near that level, but It's a good movie. The movie was in many ways a standard mid-century navy movie. I did enjoy all the huge warships. Those are inherently cinematic. I found it facinating how analogue and badic much of the opwrations on the ships were. Trumpets or even crewmen standing by stairways hearing orders being shouted and repearing them to men further down the ship. This was the age of radar and soon computers and atom bombs, but a lot was done like they were in Hotatio Nelson's time.
The story is from the early days of WWII. The German pocket battleship Graf Spee was sent to the Indian ocean and the South Pacific three weeks before the war started to raid merchant ships, basically piracy. This was back in the day when battle ships were still seen as viable naval ships, but most knew aircraft carriers were obviously taking over. Three British warships manage to find the Graf Spee off the coast of South America and injure the battleship to the degree it has to seek harbour in Montevideo in Uruguay. Uruguay was neutral, so a game of diplomacy, deception and espionage starts. I won't give away more here.
Early in the movie we see British seamen captured by the Graf Spee getting transfered to the supply ship Altmark. We don't see the Altmark again in the movie, but its story is actually both interesting and important. The Altmark managed to sneak into the North Sea using several fags and names. As a supply ship to the German navy it was sort of in a grey area between a navy ship and a civilian ship. The British knew there were British onboard and desperately wanted to free them. The Altmark managed to sneak into the fjords of neutral Norway (See - everything is really about Norway! 😁). The Norwegian navy boarded Altmark, but somehow managed to miss the 300 British man below deck. When the Altmark was hiding in Jøssingfjord in the far south of Norway British naval ships (also) breached Norwegian neutrality and freed the prisoners. This was a propaganda victory for the British Royal Navy and Churchill and an embarrassing sign of weakness for Norway. In Germany the Altmark affair was seen as proof that Norway wasn't willing or able to protect its neutrality and spurred on the invasion later in 1940. The tiny nazi community in Norway started calling pro-British countrymen "Jøssings" after the fjord. Later in the war patriotic Norwegians started using the term as a badge of honour, perhaps not too different from African-Americans using the N-word.
That was quite an tangent! When it comes to casting we find Bernard Lee and Patrick MacNee in key roles. I also recognized the former SOE agent Antony Quayle, perhaps better known from "The guns of Navarone". This movie is best enjoyed of you're into battleships and/or WWII history.
Spoilers:
The Graf Spee didn't blow itself up outside Monetvideo, it scuttled itself. The captain took his own life three days later. I wonder if it would be a better ending if the sinking of the ship was made more of a mood scene, with relief mixed with the melancholy of a dying giant. Instead the shock scene could be the captain discovering the truth and later killing himself.
Thanks for that review @Number24 one of the lesser P & P movies, but as you say, worth a look.
Now, more mundane matters:
MURDER AT THE EMBASSY (2025)
a.k.a An Invitation to Murder: A Death in Cairo
An Invitation to Murder was a 2023 mystery thriller about a florist obsessed with Agatha Christie novels. That was handy as the adventure evolved much like a Christie, with a rich benefactor being bumped off while all the guests at his mansion are suspects of one kind or another. Blessed with an eidetic memory, Miranda Green sets out to solve the murder. The same thing happens in Cario, as the Second World War looms and Nazi sympathisers are everywhere. This sequel dips pretty low for this kind of fare. I could name any number of episodes of stuff like Whitstable Pearl, Father Brown, Death in Paradise, etc, that could give Murder at the Embassy a run for its money and probably sprint to the finish first.
Misha Barton is serviceable as the obnoxious sleuth and she’s given the barest of support from a game but frankly wooden cast. The script gives nobody any support whatsoever. The best actor was the dog. The plot creaks and groans like the secret door handily revealed among a garden of gardenias. Normally I would pass this sort of movie off as a bit of light hearted fluff, but I am flummoxed by its ordinariness. All I can say is, ‘Don’t watch it.’ I spent most of my viewing wondering how on earth Murder at the Embassy got a distribution deal. Apparently there is a third film due out this year.
Yikes!
CULLODEN (1964)
Maverick director Peter Watkins had his first taste of success, celebrity and controversy with his BBC film Culloden which tells the history of the last battle fought on British soil and the death of the Great Jacobite Rising of 1745. Watkins chose to tell the story of the battle using a pseudo-documentary style which puts the viewer directly in the mind of the combatants. All opposing views, hopes and fears are on show. Researched meticulously with historian John Prebble and basing much of the action around the writings of eye witnesses and archivists, Culloden highlights what would be Watkins’s career raison d’etre: working with amateurs to produce work of intense detail and honest provision.
The lot of the Clansman is presented in as bleak a fashion as the Scottish weather Culloden is filmed in. There is not much for any of them to smile about. Their overlords are a frigid bunch, stymied by blind loyalty to Bonnie Prince Charlie, who is a numbskull of a military commander. Their fate is as grim as that weather. The government forces [never the English from the narrator, that is a term of offence used by the Jacobite Clansmen, who also resent the Hanoverians being German] are ruthless and mercenary in their battles and in the aftermath. Atrocities abound. The camera does not shirk the bloodlust of the victorious troops. Nor does it shy from the terror and god awfulness of combat. Photographer Dick Bush gets up close and personal to the action. Ann Brodie’s make up shows most of the Clansmen dirty, haggard and already scarred from various previous battles. As the killings begin, blood replaces mud on those taut faces. The film offers a historical foretaste of the kind of reporting viewers would see of the Vietnam War.
Watkins directs with a keen economical eye. Faces frame the picture. Landscapes are swiftly scanned. The black and white photography gives the film a grimy, stark, atmospheric palate; you feel you can touch the soldiers, hear them, feel the lashing rain. The small cast – including all the extras it looks no more than fifty – are placed carefully to manufacture the idea of huge armies and highhanded commanders. The actual or imagined words of the participants are obliquely presented to us, both in English and in Scots Gaelic. The narrator provides an all knowing voice to link the various characters. Watkins would go on to use similar techniques for The War Game (1966) and his cinema debut, the underrated Privilege (1967).
As a historical document, Culloden may be missing something in the way of balance, but as a film it is groundbreaking, certainly for television. This kind of ‘enacted’ documentary is all the rage these days, although it is mostly done in mime, but you can clearly see the influence Watkins has had on the subgenre through the mini-marvel that is Culloden.
Excellent.
Marty supreme (2025)
This movie has been nominated for nine Oscars and I can see why. Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a man obsessed by table tennis and himself. He's a world class table tennis player, but he's also a con-man in desperate need of a moral backbone. Marty is an arrogant narcissist. He steals, lies and plots to get to the fame and fortune he thinks and deserves. This makes life for the people who cares for him more difficult, and he undermines himself again and again.
"Marty supreme" is an old-fashioned drama-comedy that could in many ways bee from the 70's. The actors are shot in an unflattering way that film stars never are today and the film is about character and story, not spectacle and CGI. The cutting and the pace of the movie isn't typical of the 70's, but the frantic cutting and energy (much like table tennis) works for the film. The story i set back in the 1950's, but much of the music is much more modern. I think this works because the music isn't source music, instead it's about the mood of the scene and Marty's mind.
Table tennis doesn't sound like much of a topic for a movie, and Marty doesn't sound like much of a main character. But I found myself really caring about him and the matches he plays. I'm putting Marty Supreme on my list of best movies of last year!
@chrisno1
Thank you for the excellent recommendation and a great review as always.
THE NET (1995)
Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock), a systems analyst working for Cathredal Systems, is caught in a deep conspiracy, when a floppy disk arrives at her door. 'Mozart's Ghost', the computer program on the disk contains a mysterious backdoor.
Once Bennett logs in, her entire life is erased.
Clandestine syndicates, assassins, imposters, pagers, dial up modems...
This movie has it all...
A very entertaining film from the 90's, that still has a charm to this day.
Recommended.
(115 minutes - Directed by Irwin Winkler)
@Sonero THE NET was a closet favourite back in the day. One of the key scenes was a very tense moment when Bullock is downloading files under some duress and the computer transfer seems to get slower and slower as it reaches towards 100%. Oh, I remember those days! Not a brilliant piece of filmmaking, but a very enjoyable movie all the same. And it has the wonderful Sandra Bullock in it... 😍😍😍
I’ve seen a whole bunch of movies over the past few weeks but haven’t had the time to post reviews, so just a quick entry for each…
Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning - A good end to the series 3.5/5
Die Hard 2 : Die Harder - Action-fest sequel 4/5
Raw Deal - Standard early Arnie movie - 2/5
Anaconda - Jon Voight gets eaten by a snake - 2.5/5
Nowhere To Run - Van Damme in probably his best movie 3/5
Total Recall - Arnie on Mars, good fun 4/5
The Woman In Cabin 10 - Murder on a boat - 3/5
Border Hunters - Utter drivel 0.5/5
The Quest - Our Rog and Van Damme, pretty lame 1.5/5
The Avengers - Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman as Steed and Mrs. Peel, not as bad as critics make out 2.5/5
Kelly’s Heroes - Clint Eastwood and his gang steal a load of gold during WW2 4/5
Dead Of Winter - Emma Thompson in a weak suspense thriller 2/5
Turbulence - 4 people in a hot air balloon, poor green screen effects 2.5/5 and I’m being generous in that score.
Hannibal Brooks - Oliver Reed takes an elephant over the Alps in WW2 actioner, barely passable, the elephant’s good 2/5
Jurassic World: Rebirth The 7th in the franchise retreads old ground, better than the previous effort 3/5
In case you’re wondering…Mrs CHB loves action movies, henceforth some of the choices are hers (my excuse, anyway) 😀
Interesting list
The Zone of Interest (2023)
First showing on telly for this acclaimed Holocaust drama loosely based on the Martin Amis novel of 10 years' earlier.
It depicts the family of a Nazi commandant at home, with modern Art Deco trappings albeit with that touch of 1930s austerity, and a spacious garden. From over the garden wall we hear odd sounds, machinery operated, dogs barking, sometimes screams. It continues like this during the course of the film while the well-to-do family go about its often humdrum business of family life, which the commandant returns to each day.
The photography is superb, unlike anything else I've seen, it is pin-sharp and contrasty. It seems to sum up its time.
We infer gradually and are then informed that the commandant's home borders Auschwitz, the camp he oversees. His family goes about its daily tasks, largely ignoring what goes on over the wall. It seems a metaphor because I suppose no SS family really lived right on the edge of the camp, of course I could be wrong. I wish IMDB chat forum still existed, but given that a few pages in discussion would turn to Holocaust denial even for Pixar's latest CGI family entertainment, I doubt this film would have escaped it.
It's a bit of a one-note film, you can't call it one-joke because of the subject matter, but it has its central conceit and sticks with it. Its styling is minimalistic and downbeat, with no conventional soundtrack to influence or lead viewer reaction. It might be better to watch at the cinema because it has your undivided attention. On Channel 4 it was shown without ad breaks, possibly to show respect for the subject matter, or maybe because no advertiser would want to be associated with the theme? I didn't know this and sometimes felt in an uneventful section like nipping out to make a coffee or go to the loo briefly only to find that in that one-two minutes there had been some plot development timed to assuage the very boredom I was beginning to experience.
The theme of the film effectively explores just how normalised it is to turn a blind eye to horrors, though it becomes clear that the family is only too aware of what is happening. The ending is a real jolt, again filmed in the same minimalistic way. It's highly effective.
I wondered if the late Martin Amis would have seen this film. most probably he did. I looked it up and it turns out this film premiered at Cannes on the exact day that Amis died.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
####### SPOILERS #######
THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023)
Jonathon Glazer doesn’t make many films, but when he does they are usually exceptional – think Sexy Beast, Under the Skin and this one, The Zone of Interest, a fascinating oblique insight into the appalling behaviours of man to his fellow man.
Nominally based on Martin Amis’s historical novel, The Zone of Interest concerns Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, his wife and his family who live an idyllic life metres beyond the walls of the prison compound. The horrors of internment, of destitution, hopelessness, the appalling execution chambers, the vile scum of the aftermath, is rendered here by nothing more than sound. The family play out an ordinary slice of real life as if nothing extraordinary and unreal is occurring over the grey wall beyond their pretty villa, Italian garden and lofty greenhouse. Glazer’s intention is to demonstrate the banality of their wartime existence. Cut off from the physical war, Rudolf and Helga Hoss and to a lesser extent their children, carry out day-to-day activities with all the carelessness of peacetime. They discuss holidays to spa towns, celebrate birthdays, hold children’s garden parties, family excursions, gossip, ponder, argue, fight and make up, everything as normal and unassumed as you’d expect a household to act.
Yet behind the commonplace activities lies the enormous guilty secret. The sounds of the concentration camp never leave the house. Day and night the howls, cries, sobs and screams, the gunshots, the orders and shouts, the cackling laughter, the chugging trains and the whir of alarms inhabit the atmosphere, creeping through the walls and windows, a constant chilling cold whisper of death. Decease and dismay are inescapable, yet life carries on uninterrupted. Glazer never once takes us inside the camp. This amplifies the horrifying behaviour of these individuals who remain blasé, untouched and unemotional about the plight of the Jews.
It is never clear whether Rudolf Hoss ideologically hates the Jews and wishes them exterminated. Glazer remains ambivalent over Hoss’s intrinsic nature. There is a scene reminiscent of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List where the commandant waits for a pretty Jewess to appear in his office; as Hoss finishes a phone call, she prepares for sex. Afterwards we see him frantically washing himself clean in the same manner he does after discovering the local river is polluted with the bones of the dead. It is clear his moral boundaries are broken. At the film’s end when he should be enjoying a swanky officer’s gathering in Berlin, Hoss ponders how quickly he could gas all the guests. Shaken to the core by his own inhumanity, he is violently sick. We know of course that he will return to carry out thousands more murders – Glazer has him disappearing into darkness down a corridor, the long passage to his soul. The scene is juxtaposed with a contemporary sequence where cleaners mindedly polish and shine exhibits at the Auschwitz memorial museum, watched from behind sparkling glass by the detritus and debris of the slaughtered, shoes, gold, capes, trinkets. Glazer suggests that the commercial has overtaken the commemorative, making us as complicit in the fading memory as the very people who perpetrated the crime.
Occasionally the real world filters into the Hoss’s existence. Helga is brusque and insulting to her domestic staff. At one point she threatens a young maid with being burned to death. The height of her anger is reserved for her husband when he drily announces he is to be reassigned. The argument which ensues is the same as any the world over: why didn’t you tell me, when did you know, what about our life here, the children, etc. She brokers an agreement which solves the problem but satisfies neither of them. While Hoss is away, the young maid leaves apples for the prisoners. She finds a script of music abandoned by a prisoner and plays it on the family piano, a moment of catharsis and calm among the encroaching, unbridled tension. The nanny meanwhile is a drunk, caring little for the baby in her charge. These moments of insight and servile defiance are complemented by scenes featuring the seemingly unaware children. The youngest son plays with his toys, overhears the guards shouting and stares out of the window before replacing the curtain with a shiver. The girls giggle about the soldiers facetious comments written in the visitors book. The eldest son locks his frightened brother in the greenhouse and sits on guard outside hissing like escaping gas. They know, exactly like the servants, like their mother and grandmother, what is occurring outside their idyl, it is the master of the house who shows no reaction to it.
The film is masterfully composed and photographed. It has a rasping, unspoken choral music score, which drives hard at the senses, a lingering soundscape of horror. Throughout, the award winning sound effects of the concentration camp permeate the landscape. We, as well as the Family Hoss, are never far away from murder and mayhem. It is only the extremes of their own encampment which bars us, and them, from witnessing the brutality of inhumanity. Instead we see it in the boardrooms, the grand parties, hear it in the businesslike discussions, the unemotional planning meetings, the numbers of the dead carelessly banded, an almost tortured day-to-day where the edifice seems to want to crack yet never does. Instead, the inhumanity simply festers and multiplies, affecting even the docile children, ultimately informing, testing and censuring the audience.
The Zone of Interest is a superb film which fully deserves the acclaim it receives. It is a difficult watch and will not be to all tastes. That does not stop it being important and meaningful. Glazer and his team have created a brilliant expose of the complicit, selfish and uncharitable nature of people trusting to a system of falsehood, indoctrination and exploitation. We should really take note as these ugly democracies are rearing their head once more around the globe, perhaps not as explicitly, but certainly with a degree of martial intent and utter contempt for humanity.
Brutally, astoundingly brilliant.
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Elvis Presley in Roustabout (1964)
In the year that the Beatles were conquering the world and released their debut film A Hard Day's Night, praised by one critic as 'the Citizen Kane of jukebox movies', we got this from the King.
Let's be fair. If you want to see Elvis still young and handsome, wearing black leathers and riding a motorbike, sticking it to anyone he comes across, not to mention in full colour in the great outdoors, you will pick this over the moptops hanging around studios in grim black and white.
ChrisNo1 reviewed this a few posts back.
Elvis plays a jerk.
I suppose we all turn into our dad at some point, and this did it for me. I just can't see how he can be a role model. Some of his transgressions are borderline - you can see he was provoked. But many are not. The opening has him sing a song in a coffee shop - I thought, this isn't the normal Poison Ivy tune, then realised too late he was singing Poison Ivy League, to wind up some college boys who are jibing him. That's a decent bit of anti-Establishment behaviour right there, though it's unclear how bail money gets him out of jail after the fight the three lads start up afterwards, didn't he break one of their arms? He leaves his girlfriend behind because nobody controls him and she isn't good looking enough to be lead. Actually, I guess he's skipping bail, right?
So Elvis skips town on his bike and this is where problems begin. We see him singing a song - the musical can't decide if it is doing the Cabaret trick were songs are performed in a stage context, or play it like The Sound of Music, where a character will just burst into song and an invisible band or orchestra will accompany them. So here Elvis on his bike mimes to his pre-recorded track - it doesn't quite work though I read that Elvis was annoyed his usual backing singers weren't allowed. 'You're on your bike, where are the other singers coming from?' asked the director. 'The same damn place as the band!' the singer replied.
Elvis espies a hot teenage girl in a Jeep driven by her dad with her mum in the passenger seat. He catcalls her shamelessly and artlessly, to the annoyance of the dad who tries to run him off the road. It all feels quite graceless on both sides but it feels like it could go the way of Cape Fear, where Robert Mitchum targets a family for the duration of the film. As ChrisNo1 wrote, Tarantino singles this out for praise and you feel Elvis here could be a Michael Madsen character, without redemptive qualities, gyrating and combing his hair as he tortures a young cop to the strains of Stuck in the Middle With You.
As my fellow scribe observes, a still-sexy Barbara Stanwyck isn't given much to do, though if I met her in my prime I'd find something for her to do.
Matters come to a head when the teenager enters her mother's caravan to find Stanwyck straddling the King, naked from the top down, her hands in her hair, her still perky breasts pointing out defiantly. Her daughter is outraged, then curious, then a willing participant. Naturally this scene was cut by the odious Colonel Tom Parker to allow for a family release and the footage was long lost until it resurfaced in the Library of Congress only 10 years ago; Sky Arts now shows the uncensored version. Okay, all of this is made up from the words 'Matters come to a head' onwards but your mind tends to wander during this kind of film.
Elvis continues to be a jerk and it is hard to see how he can be any kind of role model, coming after a film such as The Zone of Interest, it seems like another example of strange shocking behaviour, albeit with no moral parity but on the same spectrum. Then again I suppose the Beatles harassed poor Colonel Smithers that same year in their train compartment, didn't they.
Presley's behaviour in this film is at odds with his real day-to-day persona, which was well-mannered and deferential. It's strange that the setting is a failing carnival, of which Stanwyck and her husband are co-owners, and subject to a hostile takeover by a rival, given that was Colonel Tom's origins too.
To be fair, Presley's movie output was like early Britney Spears records; they're not meant to be good, they're meant to sell. Once you make quality any kind of criteria, you make it a risky venture. If it fails, you're seen to fail in a way that matters more than if you didn't really care. If it succeeds, you simply raise the bar for future films and make yourself a load of stress.
One of the cast- a minx fortune teller with an annoying voice who tries to in vain to tempt our hero - showed up in last week's The Man from UNCLE. A then unknown Raquel Welch is in the opening scene in the coffee shop, sitting with the Ivy Leagues.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I say all this, then yesterday evening I caught Marty Supreme (2025) at the cinema.
Now, again in this Timothée Chalamet plays an obnoxious character, the lead, crazed with the dream of becoming world number one table-tennis player. It's set in the 1950s but as @Number24 observes, it's shot like a 1970s film before Spielberg and Lucas got their hooks into things - it's gritty, downbeat. It's not unlike One Battle After Another as the plot is really one thing after another and is quite random and episodic, we follow Chalamet as he hustles and cons his way to the big time, often enough the need to con and hustle comes from his own pratfalls and obnoxiousness. Scenes are thrown in that seem superfluous - in particular one shaggy dog tale - but I guess it hints at Marty's redemptive qualities.
So it's not too different from Elvis in Roustabout, only we enjoy it this time because, well, it's Chalamet doing his Oscar bid, following on from his role as Dylan and Call Me By Your Name, plus it's got Paltrow back on screen too - it is funny how the audience reading a film in the context of the time informs its attitude. So maybe Elvis' sociopathic conduct in Roustabout was excused at the time because, well, it's the King and we've seen him in these kind of films before, plus to be insubordinate is the fashion then and we all know he'll make right in the end.
Maybe in half a century someone will watch Marty Supreme on telly and think, well, I don't see why we should applaud such an obnoxious character, I mean why should we? What were they thinking?
I suppose I will now go and find out how much of the story is based on truth, in that rather self-defeating, deflating way.
I made the joke about 'Chicken Supreme' at the cinema but the ticket seller wasn't very impressed.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
THE FROGMEN (1951)
The Frogmen, directed by Lloyd Bacon, details the brave exploits of the US Navy's Underwater Demolition Team 4 (UDT 4) during WWII.
Lt. Cmdr. John Lawrence (Richard Widmark), undertakes two dangerous missions in the Pacific with his team; one surveying a Japanese held island to locate a safe landing area and the other to destroy a Japanese submarine pen.
A well made, realistic war film with great performances by its lead and supporting actors.
Recommended.
(96 minutes)
...and Richard Kiel is there, too, as the strongman.
Nicely accurate review. I'm glad you mentioned the "Matters come to a head" scene; it's been so long since I've watched this that I was beginning to think I'd imagined it.
The OST album knocked The Beatles off No1, which was the last time this happened.
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960)
I reviewed this sometime last year or the eyar before, I forget when. Here's an update:
I didn’t mean to watch this last night, but it was on and despite my best efforts, having started, I felt I had to finish. The Magnificent Seven has that unaccountably compelling nature all the best films do, right from the first bars of Elmer Bernstein’s brilliant theme. It wasn’t very popular on initial release, which is astonishing when you consider how influential it became. Occasionally rough at the edges, but watchable from the off with a host of great characters acted by a host of great actors. Thoroughly enjoyable and no comments or synopsis is necessary.
My favourite film of all time…I think I might have mentioned this before 😁
Not "Cool hand Luke"? 🤔
L.A. TAKEDOWN / SHOWDOWN IN L.A. (1989)
Initially made as a pilot episode for an NBC TV serial; L.A. Takedown, directed by Micheal Mann is a 1989 crime action film, which was later remade as 1995's 'HEAT', starring screen legends Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Val Kilmer.
After an armed robbery ends up in the killing of three armored car guards, an LAPD team headed by Detective Vincent Hanna (Scott Plank) goes on the hunt for a crew of professional criminals led by the master crook Patrick McLaren (Alex McArthur).
A solid, well-made action film, which fans of 'HEAT' will greatly appreciate.
Recommended.
(92 minutes)
Cool Hand Luke stands solidly in my top 10 favourite films list, and Luke Jackson is my favourite film character of all time…yes, even above JB.
COCAINE BEAR (2023)
Actress Elizabeth Banks is most famous for playing the over-decorative fashionista in The Hunger Games movies. She was watchable in that. Banks also happens to be a dab hand at directing watchable movies, as proven by the fun and games of Cocaine Bear, a comedy-horror loosely based on a real incident. A large haul of cocaine is dropped from a plane over the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest by [real life] drug smuggler Andrew Thornton. He dies in a parachute malfunction [that really happened], leaving his drug shipment spread across the forest. When an unsuspecting American black bear ingests kilos of cocaine, all chaos breaks loose for the Park Ranger, the local police and ambulance services, some local vandals, Ray Liotta’s hapless dealer gang, hikers and even a Mom desperately searching for her runaway daughter. Every incident, whether foolish, horrific or sentimental is treated by Banks and writer Jimmy Warden with the crass, mockingly dark humour it deserves. I wondered if they were being satirical about drug enforcement, but they are not. They are simply reading the situation for the hilarity it possesses. There is some gore as well, but barring the occasional tossed limb or two, it isn’t over shocking. Good, dead pan performances abound. The CGI bear was brilliantly realised. The two teenagers were a good value pairing until the bear disturbed their cocaine tasting, when things got hastily nasty and hastily edited. One of them is played by precocious actress-filmmaker Brooklynn Kimberly Prince who was excellent in Sean Baker’s bitter sweet The Florida Project when only six-years-old. Nothing so serious here. Cocaine Bear is all very silly and quite enjoyable enough to pass a winter’s Saturday evening. The title’s brilliant.
I was wondering if you'd review that, @chrisno1 !
Cocaine Bear is brilliant rubbish. It's set in the mid-80s or thereabouts so it's got some tracks of the time in there, often played in inappropriate moments when the bear is going after folk, to inform us we shouldn't take anything too seriously. It signposts when a character is introduced as a jerk so we know they are going to get their comeuppance soon enough and we shouldn't care enough about their demise but in fact enjoy it - all down with a wink to let us know it doesn't matter. That said, despite the female director, it does seem the benchmark for the women's flaws is somewhat lower - being a bit of a nag, or a control freak - than that for the men (being a murderous drug dealer).
I think CB was one of those 'back to the cinema' post-Covid movies but if it was filmed in lockdown it's not too obvious. If this was Ray Liotta's last film then his final celluloid moments are quite undignified.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
A BRIDGE TOO FAR (1977)
Critics were not kind to Richard Attenborough’s tribute to the fallen heroes of Arnhem. Big budget expansive World War Two films – big budget expansive films full stop – were not in vogue in 1977. The movie looked old fashioned compared to America’s new generation of cowboy filmmakers, the Scorsese’s and Bogdanovich’s, et al. It also looked grimy and historic compared to the flashy sci-fi trickery of Star Wars and Close Encounters. The years have been much more kind to A Bridge Too Far and it has been reassessed as a fine historical war film, accurate to a fair degree and displaying and explaining both heroic individual deed and bitterly foolish operational incompetence. Much of what genuinely happened in the rushed planning and exposition of 1944’s Operation Market Garden is laid bare for all to see. The haphazard and optimistic planning, the rule book orders, the appalling communication breakdown, the botched landings, supply and relief, the stupidest rear advance column along a single lane highway surrounded by dykes and floodplains, the snubbing of Dutch resistance intel, the failure to chase victory when a mere mile from success – Montgomery’s American counterpart General Patton wouldn’t have withdrawn so close to an objective – lastly the abysmal British weather, is what drives the film. Writer William Golding used the criticisms raised in Cornelius Ryan’s book to highlight military ineptitude. Attenborough uses a fey Dirk Bogarde as Lt-General Frederick Browning [Daphne Du Maurier’s husband, no less] to suggest the old school tie, breakfast and good-form is more important than winning a war. Gene Hackman’s Polish Major-General Sosabowski sees through the act, while Sean Connery’s saturnine Roy Urquhart accepts the bad with the good until it is all too late and making a complaint becomes futile. “As you know,” pines Bogarde's Browning, “I always said it was a bridge too far.” He never did: a liar as well as an incompetent.
What Attenborough truly achieves, after he’s bashed the British end and backhandedly complimented the American thrust, drive and initiative, is a memento to heroic failure. Market Garden was 90% successful and had Arnhem been held or retaken by the Armoured Divisions, Germany might have had a war to fight on three sides of an encroaching triangle, not just the traditional two. This is the story of how thousands of Allied troops fought their way by parachute, glider, tank and foot along a sliver of road, captured five strategic bridges of varying sizes across vital river courses, all the while under immense bombardment and unexpectedly strong German resistance, a defence reinforced by Panzer divisions. The stories are individually small, snippets of personal notice, such as Johnny Frost’s idiosyncratic command, US Sergeant Dohun’s mad drive to save the life of his captain, Urquhart’s airsickness or Kate Ter Horst reading the Bible to a dying soldier, but altogether they offer an interpretation of war that has seldom been bettered on screen. The fighting is bloody. The devastation culpably real. The confusion believable. The desperation and disappointment shocks. Tragedy, of course, is never far away in combat. There is, too, some unexpected humour.
A Bridge Too Far tells its story in an almost documentary style, taking after The Longest Day, but not quite having the strength of its convictions. A few more onscreen titles to explain who was who and fighting where and when would assist clarity, but for all that, the muddling gives the audience an impression of the soldier’s view. The man on the ground had as little awareness of proceedings as his superior or the high command safe at Allied HQ. Early, easy victories give way to life and death struggles, street fighting and crazy daytime river assaults or nighttime evacuations. The film does not forget the enemy either, prone too to the same lapses in authority. Attenborough, with his sure studied cameras, ensures the grit and determination is etched front and centre on everyone’s faces. He is aided by a multi-starred cast including many of the great American stars of the day [Ryan O’Neal, James Caan, Eliott Gould, even Robert Redford] and a long list of British luminaries, topped by Lawrence Olivier who pops up as a Dutch doctor.
Geoffrey Unsworth helms the cameras with much aplomb and the film is edited brilliantly by Antony Gibbs. It isn’t a snatch and grab edit, but a film of slow definitive cuts, stretching many sequences to increase tension rather than simply go all-out for the violent conclusion. Some of the framing shots are fantastic: the armada of aeroplanes overhead disturbing a church service, the tanks sweeping across Nijmegen Bridge, the wounded in the makeshift garden hospital, perhaps best of all the final shot of Kate Ter Horst and her children in silhouette walking away from obliterated Arnhem across a dyke, her son lagging behind still playing war games – will the young ever learn from the previous generations? Composer John Addison [who fought in the Market Garden offensive] provides a fantastic, uplifting theme that reminds us of the heroes who died and lived; his incidental score is powerful in its understatement and much of the action occurs without music. Goldman’s screenplay is succinct and provides enough character nuance without becoming bogged down in personality.
One might suggest it is a trifle long and perhaps lacks a grandstand sequence [as Saving Private Ryan, The Dambusters or The Longest Day does – the latter has many] but it has a central core that understands soldiers and soldiering, of orders and obedience, of the chain of command and the consequences, however bitter and uncomfortable. “I went in with 10,000 men, “ says Roy Urquahart when offered a bed to rest, “I came out with less that two, so you’ll forgive me for if I don’t.” War is hell and it has hellish significance for lives, for communities, for nations. A Bridge Too Far, through acknowledging the debt owed and the casualties suffered, informs us thus. Recently, I saw the film was voted the second greatest war film of all time [Channel 5, I think, or Sky Arts maybe, I forget the exact program] and while that may be a stretch, A Bridge Too Far certainly stands up better than some more patriotic flag wavers of the immediate post-war era. Perhaps with time and understanding we’ve come to recognise how fine a film it is for telling a less than accomplished history.
Very good indeed.