The African Queen (1951)

Humphrey Bogart impersonates a hippopotamus.

I quite like boat-films set on rivers.  I'm not a fan of boats, and have in past made sweeping statements about my lack of interest in films set at sea, but there's something rather pleasing about this and 'Aguirre: the Wrath of God' (1972) and 'Apocalypse Now' (1979), stories set in tiny boats traversing tangled rivers in the middle of jungles.  It's never clear whether the river will go where it ought, and in each film we're told it would be madness to attempt the course, but times are always desperate.  The river's basically a road that nobody built and nobody knows, and it could easily lead you into traps or else disappear entirely, leaving you lost without hope.  Thinking about it, perhaps that's why I don't like being in boats, but as the concept for a movie it really works.

At first the film doesn't look to be so boaty.  We're introduced to the continent (Africa, if you're curious) with a scene of Katharine Hepburn playing the harmonium for her unnamed brother, a missionary who we're meant to dislike from the off: he makes the Africans moan English hymns (and moan they do, in what seemed a rather racist portrayal of black incompetence to a basic task), and he bitches about how he ought to be a bishop by now.  He's mercifully released from the film inside a quarter-hour by some World War I Germans, meaning we can focus on the real stars.

Into Katharine Hepburn's life comes Humphrey Bogart.  Not the slick Bogart of 'Casablanca' (1941), but a crude and stubbly commoner, with a proper workman's tan.  It's not the sort of role I'd associate with Bogart, more the sort of thing I'd expect of Charlton Heston - indeed, Chuck appeared in a film of strikingly similar tone and setting two years later, 'The Naked Jungle', except that had killer ants rather than the German army, but was in all other respects cashing in on the success of this picture.

Katharine Hepburn pours away the gin.  Based on my recent experiences, a good idea.

So With the 'natives' written out as a homogenous crowd of no intelligence, and the missionary a berk, and a dead berk at that, it's left to Humphrey Bogart to carry the film.  Him and Katharine Hepburn, but with such a prim character she has a fight on her hands if she's to rival his charisma in this old age of men.  Her somewhat puritanical manner gives us the delight of watching a slow transformation, as she discovers the pure physical delight of white-water rafting, a love of danger that turns her into a reckless Mary Poppins, more than a match for Bogie.

The premise seems to promise constant jeopardy, with the dangers of water, jungle and war all in close proximity.  In actuality, our pair of heroes are hardly ever under threat.  For the first hour, what we get is almost a two-hander, the most of the film an unfurling romantic comedy between the two characters.  Indeed, the film seems much more interested in showing us colour footage of elephants, crocodiles and the like (it's strange to think of this as having a novelty value) than delivering on the river's potential for tension and drama.  But when threats come they are tense indeed, and John Huston showing himself to an incredibly good director (an attribute he hid expertly in 1967's 'Casino Royale', for instance).


P.S. I always confuse Katharine Hepburn with Audrey Hepburn who was in 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' (1961), and confuse both of them with Barbara Hepworth, whose sculptures littered my garden when I used to live in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

P.P.S. The African Queen of the title is the boat, though I suppose on some metaphorical level it may be Ms Hepburn.  There's never any suggestion that it might refer to anyone who's actually African.

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The Island of Lost Souls (1932)

At the start of the thirties, with the arrival of audible dialogue, films seem suddenly more basic, less ambitious and altogether less impressive - or at least, the English-language ones do.  Fritz Lang somehow got away with the transition, making his talking pictures more grounded than his silents, but no less exciting.  But then, he was one of the best silent directors, so naturally he still had talent and a sharp mind in the age of the talkies.

This, though, is an American film at a time when that didn't portend slickness or coolness.  Not that it's a bad film, it simply doesn't inspire in the same way as those hectic twenties.  It's an early horror film, but less horrific than 'Nosferatu' a decade earlier, its moral less memorable than that of 'Häxan' (1922), for instance.

The Speaker of the Law (Béla Lugosi)

So what is there to recommend the film?  Well, there are scenes on ships and in the sea, things one couldn't see on stage (which is surely the major rival to the talking pictures).  Everybody speaks clearly, and the set-up for the story is interesting and memorable, the story itself being H.G. Wells' 'The Island of Dr Moreau'.

Moreau joins Doctors Mabuse, Caligari and Nicholson in being a wretched villain with a twisted mind (doctors in the films I've been watching are, it seems, wholly malign until 1965 gave us the double-whammy of Who and Zhivago), but at least Dr Moreau is only tampering with nature, operating on animals to turn them into humans (which makes less sense the more you think about it), rather than murdering, hypnotising, stealing diamonds or working as a psychiatrist.  His beasts have exciting prosthetic heads, the hairiest of which is Béla Lugosi (the first screen Dracula, an actor now best known as a historical figure, as played by Martin Landau in Tim Burton's 1994 biopic 'Ed Wood').  The beasts are all male, except The Panther Woman, who is far less exciting than one might expect from her name, and who doesn't have fancy prosthetics or make-up at all.  Perhaps she's there to titillate the audience, but this would surely be more novel, less boring, if she had a head like Lugosi's all-over beard.  Or am I expecting the wrong things from actresses?

Even after a good restoration, 30s films tend to look rather grainy.

There's a human drama played out amidst this tale of monstrous science, but within a few days I've forgotten all its details.  I suspect it, and the moral dimension, had a greater depth and emphasis in the original novel - the film is all about spectacle.  Still, it's short and it isn't dull, but it doesn't delight me.

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Das Security Bathroom (2006)

So, in 2006 I made a short movie about a rival to Noah's Ark.  Today I present the first ever video edition of The Penciltonian, regarding that motion picture.


You can't tolerate viewing a video, and yearn for text?  Well, in short the story's a bit of a mess, my camerawork and editing were unduly haywire even compared to the films of my peers (if I could find an online copy of Tom Hagley's 'The Invisibility Hat' from the same year, I'd give it as evidence).  The resources were there, the cast were good and the set was beautiful, and with rather more thought and more imagination put into its script it would still be worth watching today.  As it stands, the thing's almost all talking and fighting, and the pictures aren't allowed to tell the story.  It also verges on misogyny, which just doesn't do, you know.


P.S. With this entry, I've covered every year of the Noughties - my first complete decade.  Congratulate me, please!  Here's a list of every film viewed, if you're curious.  It's as clear a picture of the Penciltonian as you could really hope for.

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An assortment of relevant items on Youtube:
• 'Das Security Bathroom' (2006)
• 'Pencilton and the Giant Spider' (2012), my only more recent foray into writer-directing.
• 'Der Tod Des Viel Verfluchten Buckligen' (2004), a short film by Tom Hagley and Johnny Sidle, featuring several of the same cast as 'Das Security Bathroom', and in general a more pleasingly visual piece.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

Living skellingtons are terrifying, and there's one inside you right now!

Since this Ray Harryhausen classic leaps from spectacle to spectacle to eye-boggling spectacle, it would seem wrong to give you a mass of text.  Rather, I present screen-shots and captions (as I once did for 1937's 'Way Out West').

I'm told the city has not changed at all in the last two-thousand years, except in its spelling.

The film is miscellaneously Eastern, meaning it's full of white people in exotic costumes who pepper their dialogue with Allah this, and Baghdad that, in just the way no modern film would or could.

Raaarghhh!

Technicolor and Dynamation, the new miracle of the screen!  You'll believe a Cyclops can lumber.

Sinbad and his shrunken bride

Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) speaks with a Very American Accent, of the sort one now only hears from Britons doing poor-but-apparently-at-least-historically-accurate impressions.

Not quite as frighting as the real-live dragon in 'Die Nibelungen' (1924), but it seems churlish to complain.

The spectacles and effects are tremendous for their time.  Any earlier, and they'd have been mind-blowing, any later and they'd have been strange and embarrassing but nonetheless charming - like all things of true beauty.

This is how frightening the film is!  Exceedingly so.

'The Thief of Bagdad' did something very similar in 1940, but lacked Harryhausen's stop-motion creations.  The earlier film had a cooler genie, or perhaps just a balder, fatter, bluer one.

 A lovely, fluffy Roc.  I should like one for a pet

It isn't too long, and it's never dull, and when the villain perishes he does so with a satisfying squelch.  What more can one ask of a tale of high adventure?


P.S. The next update will be 1962's D-Day reënactment 'The Longest Day'.  And yes, I believe that's a valid use of a diaeresis.

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...and hey, the DVD has all three classic Sinbad films on it.  The middle one has Tom Baker in it.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916)

Captain Nemo, telescoping

I recently read Jules Verne's '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea', and enjoyed it very much.  Now, I'd probably recommend you read 'Around the World in 80 Days' instead, as its educational content is more colourful and readable, less scientific and statistical.  Nonetheless, Verne's submarinal thriller is a fine tale of high adventure, and well-written, to boot.  As I did with Dickens, I assumed I knew Verne without reading him, and was surprised to learn that his prose style is very entertaining, and his characters well-drawn and very human.

Perhaps it was a mistake, then, to go straight from the book to the film, especially to this very early adaptation, made shortly after Verne's death.  After all, films are often (though not always) less satisfying than the original books.  And, indeed, the best films tend not to have been books at all.  This 1916 work is a technical marvel.  Proudly it proclaims itself 'the first submarine teleplay ever filmed', as it has the first ever underwater shots.  These were achieved, not through invention and use of an underwater camera, but by filming through a periscope of sorts, meaning that any shot with a fish in it is rather blearier and somehow less deliberate-looking than the above-water shots.

I could have shown you a shot of sharks, but they were blurry and awful,
and reading this caption is more likely to thrill you to terror.

This movie was less a story told in pictures and supported by words (which, to my mind, is the aim of film storytelling), more an illustrated synopsis.  The whole plot can be found in the intertitles, and almost nothing is revealed visually.  This is a relief in some ways, as the shots and editing are relatively crude.  Partly, this is down to the age of the film, but partly, too, a lack of flair and innovation.

I can't condemn the film for lack of ambition, as it not only adapts that great submarine work '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea', but throws in its sequel 'The Mysterious Island', which, somebody has clearly decided, happened exactly simultaneously.  One affect of this is that the real story of the original book, and its emotional core - Ned Land and Monsieur Arronax trying to escape - is cut entirely.  Another unfortunate impact is that there are too many characters.  The lack of any close-ups at all, and the fact that everybody dresses the same (except Nemo, who dresses like Father Christmas) means the myriad characters are indistinguishable.

All in all, it's a bit of a mess.  In its time, a fabulously expensive mess, and one which did at least give audiences their first view of real live fish under the sea, a spectacle entirely lost on more fish-savvy modern viewers.

Seriously?  He probably left it out on purpose.

P.S. In about fifty films, I've somehow managed to watch three set in submarines.  The others, if you're curious, were 'Das Boot' (1981) and 'Yellow Submarine' (1968), and they're about as diverse a trio as you could find in the blog, or in the century.

P.P.S. The next update is from eleven years later, and will put this film to shame.  Since I've got a '20s film following a '10s one, I might see if I can post one from the 30s after that, and give you ten consecutive posts from consecutive decades, if that makes any sense.

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I bet, after my descriptions, you don't want to watch the film.  But in case you do, here it is.

Das Boot (1981)

It was a lovely, sunny day yesterday, so I stayed in and watched 'Das Boot'.  There's a whole genre of submarine films, apparently, and I've seen a couple of them, but 'Das Boot' is the only one that has so far won my affection.  By dint of not being set in the 80s, it doesn't get in on the old almost-firing-nuclear-missiles schtick, and so refrains from melodrama.

When it was first screened in America, I'm told some of the audiences applauded the slide at the start declaring that, of the 40,000 U-boat sailors in the second world war, only 10,000 survived.  I have a dislike of war-films, or of the older, more jingoistic sort of war film that the 40s and 50s produced, which invite the viewer to cheer the goodies and shout condemnation at the evil villains.  'Das Boot' is something very different, as it shows us the men of a German submarine, not as villains, but as people.  We see them going about their everyday lives, which just so happen to take place on a u-boat, and involve the pursuit and torpedoing of British freighters.

The inside of a German sub is a setting that's entirely alien to me, but it's rendered so believably here, and apparently so true to life, as to be quite revelatory.  This is what cinema is for, or is one of its functions at least.  As for believability, well, this is a beard film.  That is to say, if you find beards interesting, you'll find delight here.  Since the film was shot in the order that we see it, the crew of the submarine start clean-shaven and grow full beards over the film's three hours.  One particularly officious character apparently keeps shaving until the film and the voyage are almost over, giving in and growing stubble only when survival becomes improbable and his spirit is broken.

At one point, the u-boat makes a stop in Spain, and thereafter
bananas and pineapples linger at the back of each shot.

It's long, claustrophobic and at times extremely tense.  There are few rooms, and small, in the submarine, and a lot of crew.  Long stretches pass without shots of the water's surface or the outside of the submarine.  We get to know the characters very well, as most of their time is spent waiting, for orders to come, for ships to be sighted, or waiting in silence for the enemy destroyers overhead to stop depth-charging and move away.

They're good men, quite ordinary, very genuine.  Not, as one might imagine from their pursuit of Nazi Germany's military aims, evil killers.  Like the British, or like any nation, these sailors are just men doing their job, fighting for their country in a time of war.  At one point they torpedo a British freighter, then hide under water for six hours until the area clears of enemy ships.  When they resurface, the ship they shot is still burning, and its un-rescued sailors cry out for help and jump from the burning deck, hoping the German submarine will rescue them, as their own forces haven't done so.  It's a harrowing scene, and the sub's officers are clearly distressed by this, but know they can't take any prisoners, so the Kapitänleutnant gives the order to drive away, leaving the British sailors to burn or drown.  Towards the end, the sub's dishevelled officers are called ashore in a Spanish harbour, where smartly dressed officials hail them as heroes, and throw an embarrassing buffet, giving fancy fruits and accolades to men who need, instead, rest, consolation and peace.

Several times, the submarine and its crew come close to obliteration, being fired on and depth-charged, sinking too low, to where the pressure outside threatens to crush the ship entirely.  Theirs is a truly perilous, often awful life.  After getting very close to the crew, and seeing how they suffered and how much exhausting work they put into their ship and their survival, I became very upset when I first saw this film, the shocking injustice of its conclusion.  They survive so much, work so hard to scrape escapes from grim and desperate situations that when the terrible end comes for them at the close of the film, it seems entirely unfair.  I'm won't spoil the end for you, but I will say again, when it came it was so far from my hopes for the characters that I was troubled for a long time.  It seems ridiculous to wish a better fate for fictional characters, but I know their real-life counterparts, our enemies, must have had very similar stories.


A brief note on 'Das Security Bathroom' (2006):

I find I spend a lot of time advocating 'Das Boot'.  It's a favourite film of mine, and like so many films I care about, I try to persuade people it's worth the watching.  To date, I don't believe I've been particularly successful, but I did the next best film, and made a tribute film to it.  That's right: when I was at university, and before I saw this fine movie, I wrote and directed a short film called 'Das Security Bathroom', which I based on what I thought 'Das Boot' would be like.  It's a Biblical submarine epic set entirely in a bathroom, and is full of water, shrieking and very-obviously-ketchup blood.  Watch it on Youtube, if you dare!

P.S. 'Das Boot' isn't pronounced like 'boot', but like 'boat'.  Having once heard this fact, I've found it's taken a lot of time to adjust to.

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'Das Boot' is a fine film, and, since sound is so hard to record inside submarines, the audio was all added in post production, so when the actors recorded their dialogue in the original German, the same actors recorded an English soundtrack, meaning that even those of you most opposed to subtitles or foreign-sounding films can watch this film, if you've the time to do so.

Ben-Hur (1959)

Ben-Hur is my favourite film.  I don't think I'd claim it as the best film I've looked at, or even as the film I think is the best, but it's the one I'm closest to, and love the most dearly.

I saw it as a child, but forgot almost everything about it except that it was long, exciting, and that it spans enough time for the main character to grow a beard.  I rediscovered it almost by accident in 2004, when I stayed up all night writing an essay for university, then realised I had just enough time to take in the movie's three-and-a-half-hours duration before breakfast.  I did so, and was overwhelmed.

What I'd entirely forgotten about this ancient epic was that it's about Jesus of Nazareth.  By most standards, he's a very minor character here, as he only appears in about 5 or 10 per cent of the film, and we never see his face or hear him speak; nonetheless, he's at its heart.  The film's oft-forgotten subtitle, 'A Tale of the Christ', probably tipped me off ahead of time, but since he appears only very briefly at the one-hour mark, then disappears until the film is almost over, the climax featuring his trial and execution caught me unprepared.

Judah, Messala, Judah's mother and sister.  In very widescreen.

So, what's the story about?  Charlton Heston plays Judah Ben-Hur, a young Jewish prince in Jerusalem, AD 26.  His boyhood friend, a Roman called Messala, returns to the city having been placed in charge of the garrison, and tries to persuade Judah to give up the names of Jewish troublemakers and those who oppose the Roman rule.  This invitation to treachery mars their friendship sufficiently that, when a lose slate falls from Judah's home it's wilfully misinterpreted as an attack on the new Governor, who was passing at the time, and Messala condemns his friend Judah to become an oarsman in a Roman galley - a very terrible form of slavery - and locks up his mother and sister.  So, as with 'Die Nibelungen' (1924) or perhaps 'Julius Caesar' (1950), the first half of the film shows matters getting worse and worse, and the second half is about revenge.

The thing is, when Judah is struggling across the desert towards his fate in the galleys, he meets Jesus.  Or rather, he meets some guy, who gives him water as he's perishing of thirst.  We've already seen a brief glimpse of the nativity in a (somewhat religiose) scene before the opulent opening credits, and seen Joseph the carpenter, so the long-haired bloke is obviously Jesus.  This moment comes back to Judah at various times on his adventures, and on his return to Jerusalem he meets Balthazar, the wise man (you know, 'We Three Kings' and all that), who saw the Christ as an infant, and has come back from Alexandria to find him again before he dies.  Balthazar can see Judah's murderous intent, but urges peace and forgiveness.  From this point the viewer, or this viewer at least, knows Judah Ben-Hur needs to depart from his anger and find peace with his erstwhile friend Messala, but we also want to see him revenge himself with appropriate violence for his years of great suffering.

This excellent conflict drives the film's second half - the call to forgiveness and the need for bloody vengeance.  Charlton Heston, an actor I've grown to like very much since seeing him in this (I have most of a foot of 'Heston section' on my DVD shelf, next to, and dovetailed with, the Biblical epic section), performs this sort of conflict very well.  I find his scenes of anguish, distress and obvious internal torment very affecting, though I can see it's an acting style that's less popular these days, and that his egregious firearm politics of later life have marred him in many people's eyes.  If you're not familiar with him, know only that he'd make an excellent Indiana Jones or a damn good Batman, and that the sort of roles once written for him now go variously to Swarzenegger or Will Smith.

Judah resolves to have his revenge

I was a bit wary of going back to 'Ben-Hur' this year, after watching all these many films for this blog.  I've been so impressed by the quality of film-making in general and special effects in particular in films from the 30s, 20s, 10s and even 1900s that I worried this magnificent epic would seem less impressive in comparison, now that I was judging it less ignorantly.  I'm delighted to say that it's an excellently shot film, the sets huge and believable, the famous chariot race is real and the sea-battle tense rather than embarrassing.

The two big action set pieces are astounding things.  The chariot race was done for real and is about as good a chase or race sequence as you could ever hope to see.  Parts of it are shot-for-shot lifted from the 1925 film of the same novel (which has also lent its-self to the storyboards of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg) but Ben-Hur seizes the inspiration and adds rich colour and the widest widescreen you've ever seen.  The chariots really do go at thrilling pace, there's the thunder of hooves and the roar of a real excited crowd.  The sequence runs for almost twenty minutes without any sign of flagging - as the horse-drawn chariots thunder nine times around the vast arena, with many catastrophic accidents along the way.  What makes the chariot race yet better is the complete absence of incidental music.  Often, as here or in some of the Roger Moore bond films (to give an unlikely example), edge-of-your-seat sequences become far tenser when the music stops, and we're just given the sounds of the environment, loud or quiet as they would be.  The music can blare in once the action is through.

It's no great surprise that it won a lot a lot of Oscars at the time, and I could happily single out all eleven of them for special praise, but I'll settle here on two.  First, the film editing, which allows a tremendous, if hardly plot-necessary, tension builder as the hortator of the galley hammers out the increasing speeds for the the oarsmen: battle speed, then attack speed, then ramming speed - with the pace and urgency of shots rising with that of the hammers, the oars and the music.  Second, the wonderful performance by a possibly-slightly-blacked-up Hugh Griffith as Sheikh Ilderim, who shines as the film's comic relief, a man of gusto and gleeful intelligence, who laughs along so graciously and patronisingly with the Romans' slurs against his ethnicity, knowing the joke is turned round against them, and who shows a great kinship with his four white horses, who ought to share his Oscar for best supporting actor.

A reflection in a bloody puddle

The end of the film is the part that stunned me when I watched it early one morning in 2004.  Judah learns that his mother and sister live, but are lepers, and are dying.  Esther, the rather wet romantic lead (though she's better and stronger in an argument toward the end) has persuaded him that the wondering Rabbi (oh, you know who) can heal them.  He takes them to see him, but finds the streets deserted, as everybody is away watching Jesus' trial.  Judah tries to help Jesus carry the cross, and tries (unsuccessfully) to offer him water as he thirsts, realising then that this is the man who once saved him.  Jesus is crucified, and everybody looks on helpless.  It's miserable, seeing this man who's done nothing wrong, has only acted kindly and gently in this film, nailed up to die.  He hasn't even said anything, anything - this isn't, as some imagine, and as I had imagined back then, somebody in any way judgemental.  He's a man who, by his actions, has cared, saved, and challenged.  Balthazar, who has come so far to see the man he met as a child, sees him executed, 'taking upon himself the sins of the world'.

Judah's family departs and hides in a cave from the rising storm, but find themselves, in the moment of Jesus' death, healed physically, as well as given hope and reason to live.  This is what confused and alarmed me back then.  For years I'd thought of the atrocity of the crucifixion as a failure, or at least as a dark and terrible thing, a reason for Good Friday to be bleak, with Easter the only associated hope.    It seemed obscene to see the family of Hur given reason to rejoice and be glad, to be healed in the moment of Jesus' death.  It was only then, having been ostensibly but half-heartedly Christian for most of my life, that I realised the Good Friday was the day that sin was conquered.  It was then, not at Easter, that Jesus declared 'it is finished'.  It was accomplished, as it was for that sin, our sin, and in this film Judah's violent anger as much as that of the crucifying Romans, for which Jesus was executed.  This is why the Friday is counted good, and though death was shown to be defeated on Easter Sunday, the more important barrier, the sin which had so long stood between humanity and God, was broken down in that moment.

Since seeing this in 2004, I've watched the film every year on Good Friday, or as close as I can manage, and to me it marks the real end of Lent.  It carries me in to see why Jesus' mission was important, why the crucifixion, and how we can be saved.  Once the film is over, once I'm relieved and have dried my eyes as necessary, it's practically Easter already, and hope can burgeon.  The film doesn't reach as far as Easter Day.  It needn't.  Judah returns to Esther and tells her he was there til the end, and heard Jesus forgive his executors from the cross, and that 'it was if he took the sword out of my hand'.  Reconciled with Esther, Judah learns that his family are safe and well, and we see the sun rising with the cross in the background and an (apparently unscripted) shepherd leading his sheep.

There are surely greater films, better made or more innovative - even, perhaps, more epic - but there are none I value more highly than 'Ben-Hur: a Tale of the Christ'.

A Roman who can't bring himself to berate Jesus for watering Judah.

P.S. I could probably end the blog here and be content, but the numerically obsessive part of me says I should plough on and do all hundred years - and so I shall!

P.P.S. When people say 'film adaptations are never as good as the original book', William Wyler's Ben-Hur is a great counter-example.  The book is very good, but the story-telling and the dialogue are notably superior in the film.  This also means other adaptations are never a patch on this version, though the 1925 silent film is quite something.  Incidentally, each of the adaptations (I've sought out other film, TV and radio versions) tell completely different stories about Simonides, Judah's former slave, all quite incompatibly.

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Unless the prospect of long films or 50-year-old films is utterly inimical to you, you should totally see this film.  For various reasons, I have several Ben-Hurs on my shelves, so you're welcome to a lending copy.

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

This is one of three very different Russian Revolution films I'd like to cover during this 100-films experiment - and the only one in Russian.  The trio are 'Nicholas and Alexandra' (1971) which I like very much indeed, 'Doctor Zhivago' (1965) which I don't like at all, though I concede that it has great artistic merit; and this, 'Броненосец «Потёмкин»', which I admire as a piece of work, but can't claim to have a great preference on either way.  We don't watch propaganda films because they make us happy, but because they're well-wrought, interesting and historically significant.  One doesn't watch 'Triumph of the Will' (1934) through a joy at seeing Hitler's little face.  By no means!  It's a major piece of history in itself, and has brass bands and rich oratory (however objectionable) to keep the attention.

So it is with 'Battleship Potemkin'.  The propaganda films that last long enough to be counted as classics tend to be worth watching for their artistry and innovative techniques.  Most striking here are the montages, the tensest moments juxtaposing images - the mutinous sailors quailing beneath a tarpaulin, a firing squad of their fellows tensing to fire, the fire-and-brimstone priest thumping his hand with a golden cross, all cut together to produce the most emotive reaction in the spectator.  To make us angry at the unfairness, to see the suffering of fellow workers and the cruelty of oppressive officers.

It makes a compelling case.  I admire these sailors and pity the people of Odessa, gunned down by the Tsarist troopers for supporting the mutinous cause.  It's a revolution easy to support, but history has left it seeming bitter.  I don't know much about Soviet Russia, but I know I wouldn't want to live there.  The revolution, as in the microcosm of the Battleship, got rid of the most visible villains, but in the long-term life got no better.  If I didn't know this, such a film might have incited me to action.

It's constructed with an amazing clarity of vision based on political conviction.  Such fervour in the hands of an artist can produce incredible works, and the whole thing is about as striking and sure of itself as one could hope for in a ninety-year-old movie.

One of the delights of silent films is the choice of musical scores that tend to accrue.  I've watched several recently which gave me a selection of different musical styles to choose from, and director Sergei Eisenstein was well aware that this was how the future would be.  He said that 'Battleship Potemkin' would always be relevant so long as a new soundtrack was created for it every 20 years.  On this occasion, I watched it with the 2004 score by the Pet Shop Boys - a combination currently available only on Youtube, though film and music are both purchasable separately.  The new(ish) soundtrack is something one could dance to, or at least gyrate rhythmically to, and certainly gives the film a boost and an immediacy, but has the effect of making the flickering pictures seem ancient, as well as timeless.  Perhaps Youtube's diabolical picture quality played a part here - I know twenties films are capable of scrubbing up rather better than this, and I'm sure the film is available in a more beautiful state on shiny disc.  So yes, as I like the Pet Shop Boys' style, so I shall watch out for any future release marrying this soundtrack to a cleaned up print on blu-ray.  It's got to happen eventually.

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Why not watch a far better quality copy than I did? Or listen to the music - it's quite something.

Life of Pi (2012)

I've already told you about one 2012 film, so under the terms of my experiment I've really no business saying anything here about 'Life of Pi', but it's in the cinemas now and I think you should probably see it (whoever you are), so I'll make this exception.

The novel won the Booker Prize in 2002, which means it ought at least to be a story worth telling, and which can be told well.  I've enjoyed very much the only Booker-Prize-winning book I've read (and have appeared on-stage in a blues-musical about a Booker Prize loser, and once lived for a troubled year with the grandchild of the 1974 Booker winner), but haven't read 'Life of Pi', and was assured by a friend that it was a book that must never, ever be made into a movie.

Despite this, it made an enthralling and stunningly attractive film, one of the most visually delicious I've encountered, with a wealth of colour and animals and truly special effects.  Despite this, it's thoughtful, though not unexciting; ambiguous but never vague; it's stylised, but you can believe in it.  I only hesitate to describe it as 'intelligent' because I suspect I'd be taken aside and assured that the whole thing is a nonsense when compared to the book.  Well, so be it.

A real live tiger, probably.

The majority of the film follows a boy, Pi, trying to live simultaneously as a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim while adrift on the ocean in a small lifeboat, which he shares with a ferocious tiger.

I like animals - not in person, but in theory - and this is an animal film, with entrancing zebras and flying fishes, Richard Parker the tiger, orangutans, boars and flamingos.  My favourite was a hyena, whose fluffiness, aggression and voracious appetite reminded me of an owl puppet of my acquaintance.  To look at this as a story of nice and horrible and enjoyable animals isn't at all to miss the film's point, or to ignore the questions at its heart.  If you would like to be charmed and alarmed by animals, and yet be left pondering some long while after the film has ended, I don't think you would regret watching 'Life of Pi'.

This is what night looks like on the pacific, from above.

I might well look out the book during 2013, and am left keen to see some more films from or about India (where, I have wholly failed to so far mention, the eponymous Pi Patel starts his journey).  On that front, a film of Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children' (another Booker Prize winner) has also come out this week, and I've been looking forward to it for some while - and my parents have lent me 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel', but that seems to be entirely about retired white people with India merely a vacation, so may be the opposite of what I'm after.  Both of these are 2012 releases, so you probably won't hear about them here again, at least for a while.

Yellow Submarine (1968)

When I first heard 'Eleanor Rigby' it was just a song in the background.  Perhaps it was in the foreground, but I hardly gave it my full concentration.  Later, when I first paid attention to its lyrics, it became suddenly far sadder.  A dismal, believable picture of the world I lived in.  Ms. Rigby's loneliness is something I've managed to avoid, but Father McKenzie's situation seemed more familiar.  It was a shock to find something so grim from a band I'd assumed, from their popularity and classic status, were habitually happy.  When I was young, I think I assumed happiness and popularity always coupled closely, so the gradual discovery that some Beatles works weren't just pop was confusing.

'Yellow Submarine' is a very odd film.  When first it was shown to me, in wretched-quality download at university, I walked out a quarter of the way through saying that if the Beatles weren't in it nobody would remember it - and that the Beatles weren't in it - the voices are just impersonators.

I was wrong to condemn it as forgettable.  Perhaps it was the difference in picture and sound quality, but this viewing showed it to be something far more precious.  Nothing made by human hands has ever much resembled 'Yellow Submarine' except when directly imitating it - and on this level I couldn't fail to be impressed.  It's a striking set of pictures, but I can't quite make up my mind whether it's beautiful.  Perhaps that means it isn't - but it's deliberate.

Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name.

Nobody came.

The film brought to mind my young confusion about the Beatles.  This is, after all, a whimsical family film, a vehicle for antics, lively banter and puns, a meandering plot to support a string of otherwise unconnected songs and psychedelic experiences.  Isn't psychedelia meant to be fun, if not funny?  One of the songs, though, is 'Eleanor Rigby'.  Another is 'Only a Northern Song', one of many slightly bitter, uncomfortable Beatles works.  Despite my earlier protestations, The Beatles certainly are in this film, in the songs, set alongside or against the characters in the comedy - the real Beatles and the folk-memory of the Beatles.

The plot - Pepperland is encumbered by the Blue Meanies, so a submariner goes to get the Beatles, who make music and champion colour and joy, and so drive away the blues - is simple enough, but scene-by-scene the film is mind-bogglingly unpredictable.  The comedy is occasionally very funny, and had me laugh aloud at a couple of points - but the context is all so strange, both colourful and bleak, with the Beatles often set against empty white backgrounds and similar dearth of background sound, the fun misplaced in a void.  Perhaps this would all make more sense to me if I'd seen it as a child, and could look back on it with the warmth of nostalgia - or seen it in the sixties, when I like to imagine people lived in Nostalgia, or a cloud of Nostalgia-flavoured smoke, as it all happened to them.  As it is, the parts tinged with unhappiness - the emptiness, the tragedy of the songs, and the knowledge of the Beatles' conflicts and end only a couple of years later - make the whole thing seem unsettling rather than lively.

Why don't people a) dress and b) stand like this any more?

This sounds like I didn't, or couldn't, enjoy the film.  On the contrary, I came out of it enthused.  The whole thing was an experience, a dream of images and ideas, like 'Russian Ark' (2002) or the bizarre 1967 'Casino Royale'.  A simple call to peace, revolution and humanism.  It was an experiment, like the equally eccentric and uneven White Album, released the same year, part fun, part angry, part slightly rubbish.

Perhaps, in wanting something more cohesive and straightforwardly enjoyable I'm proving myself square, like the despicably mundane Mr Jones in 'Ballad of a Thin Man' by Bob Dylan, that corrupter or Beatles.  If this had been an easier film to enjoy, it probably would have been far less like the actual Beatles.  The use of cartoon Beatles in a comic fantasy and real Beatles in the songs is more appropriate, I think, than asking the real four to act like pictures of themselves and deliver somebody else's Beatle dialogue.  That way lies 'Help!' (1965), a terrible film when compared to this.  This, at least, looks like a work of art rather than a caper vehicle for four non-actors.

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If I haven't put you off the whole fascinating film, why not get a copy - or to save yourself money and support council ventures, borrow it from your local library?