The Crow (1994)

Eric Draven (Brandon Lee †) rocks out on a rooftop, because he can.

So, some guy called Eric rises from the grave on the anniversary of his death to wreak a bloody revenge on his fiancée's murderers.  On the basis of that pitch I was wary of the film, expecting it to be distressingly horrific and charmlessly dour.  As it transpired I was quite mistaken: 'The Crow' turned out to be excellently enjoyable, with a genuine wit, warmth and lightness of touch.  The heroes are extremely likeable, enviably cool, and share a friendship that's appealing to watch.

The villains, on the other hand, are outlandishly despicable, and seem to constantly invite their own destruction.  Not in the ridiculous and pantomimesque way we saw in last week's 'Battlefield Earth' (2000), but through a habitual disdain for everyone not in their gang, almost a violent snobbery, expressed through exploitation and extreme physical abuse.  The villains are cool too but, unlike in the later 'Battlefield Earth', never threaten to eclipse the Heroes.  Indeed, if I've one criticism of 'The Crow' (which, as you may note, I'm rather taken with), it's that the gang of villains are on the back foot from the start.  The format of the film is invulnerable Eric Draven busting their asses, which means that, though the baddies present a substantial threat to society, there's really no prospect of our hero losing.  The villains are doomed.

Sarah (Rochelle Davis) and Sergeant Albrecht (Ernie Hudson)
Eric's friends and allies, down at the hot-dog stand. 

It's a visually striking film, and had as significant an effect on the fashions of the alternative and gothic scenes as did 'The Matrix' half a decade later.  The film has the flavour of Batman noir, a tone at which early-nineties cinema excelled.  Watching this, I also realised where the 'Doctor Who' TV movie two years later stole all its most memorable shots and images.

It was a particular delight watching this film so soon after the aforementioned 'Battlefield Earth', that superficially exciting plodder in which no two elements complemented one another, as it showed up this film's wonderful consistency.  Here the sound and picture, dialogue and story, mythology and character all work together to make something that's amply enjoyable to sit down and watch for a couple of hours.  I'm rather surprised it took quite so many years for this film to be set before me, and I'll be glad to see it again.

Myca (Bai Ling) enjoys gouging out eyes.  She's a villain, by the way

P.S. I'm aware that almost any film would probably delight me after 'Battlefield Earth' (2000).  Even if I'd watched 'Doctor Zhivago' (1965) straight afterwards (to pick a well-made film that I nonetheless don't enjoy at all), I'd probably have come away saying it was great fun and sparkling with wonder.  Nonetheless, I found 'The Crow' to have many merits.

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Hey look, optical media!

The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008)

Everybody smoked constantly in the 60s.

On this occasion it's Ulrike Meinhof

This film regards historical events of which I was wholly ignorant, but which would be far more familiar had I ever lived in Germany.  There's certainly enough here to make sense of it all to an outsider, though I was rather caught off-guard to find so overwhelmingly sympathetic a presentation of this violent terrorist group.  If I was simply given the resumé of the RAF (the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang) I might have counted them as plain villains, but this film gets into why they did what they did, and makes an extremely compelling case.

In short, Germany in the late sixties was a troublesome place, with its politicians supporting dubious American wars in Vietnam and the Middle East, and their police extremely violent in their dealings with peaceful protestors (a suggestion corroborated by 1992's 'Die Zweite Heimat').  People who where children during the Nazi government and World War II can see their parents' generation once more equipping the boots of oppression, a resurgence of those old terrors.  When it becomes clear that peaceful protests won't change the minds of the country's leaders - a realisation that eventually reaches everybody who's been on a protest march - people start to take up different forms of protest.  Bombs are harder to ignore.

Andreas Baader lights up a cigar at his trial

Since peaceful protest and violent action seem to be met with the same police response, the latter begins to look the more credible.  Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu, whom you may have seen in 1998's 'Run, Lola, Run') is firmly entrenched in the life of a pretty damn cool violent criminal (and hot-tempered jerk, to boot) when the film starts, but Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) is a journalist, a pacifist, a writer who uses words rather than actions, at least until Baader's circle condemn her for this, and give her a chance to be of more practical use.

Hers is the most fascinating role, and the most exciting performance, and I shall happily add Gedeck to my list of German actors for whose sake I actively seek out other films.  As to Meinhof, I place a lot of faith in the ability of a free press, online as much as on paper, to change minds and change society for the better; I can see, though, how somebody in Ulrike Meinhof's position could eventually resolve that words alone weren't changing society, that a gun would be louder.

For a good third or half of the film, the gang's actions, while increasingly extreme, with creeping body-counts, are presented as, if not a benign solution, at least a reasonable one.  I can't quite think how it worked now, as it seemed a logical progression while I was watching, and over the following week, but seems absurd and frightening now that I think back on it, a month later.  For instance, it's almost unthinkable that anyone would make a British film sympathetic to the bombing campaign of the Irish Republican Army, a violent order closer to home.  But, so far as I'm aware, the IRA's work was more about revenge, about who you were related to and how you were brought up, while the RAF's attacks were much more a response to the international political situation.

Police brutality

Bruno Ganz (oh, you know, Adolf Hitler) plays Horst Herold, a notable historical figure who doesn't even get a page on English-language Wikipedia.  Herold was in charge of the German anti-terrorist squad, and despite being innovative and capable, the nation's worst terrorist activities happened on his watch.  What Herold is keen to stress, at least in this film, is that there's no point in trying to track down and stop established terrorists without enquiring into their motives; more than once he out and says that the RAF have some justification, and that what must change is the activities of politicians - that American wars in the East are the reason for violent unrest at home, and that this problem won't go away.

It's surely a deliberate piece of casting, to see the man now so famous for playing the Führer in 'Downfall' (2004) voicing such controversial, relevant and liberal sentiments.  It's certainly a message worth listening to.  I still feel I've no idea why the 9/11 or 7/7 attacks occurred, since the way they were reported focused on inherent foreign villany, or religiously-motivated insanity, rather than enquiring into what the terrorists were so angry about, and how these desperate measures were reached.

Ulrike again, at the trial

The second half of the film regards the trials of the gang's surviving members, Baader and Meinhof chief among them.  The trial is presided over by judges unwilling to listen to or engage with the defendants, and it's uncomfortably reminiscent of the trial at the core of 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' (1928).  Both films were able to work directly from court transcripts, and both seem grotesque travesties.  In each, the authorities are angry, rather than just, and the defendants are sure from the start to suffer at length, and to die, but not be forgotten.  What St. Joan lacked, which the RAF unfortunately did not, is a second and third generation of increasingly extreme and murderous terrorists in the outside world, inspired by their acts but entirely outside their control.  Actually, thinking about it, Joan may have had something like that too, but it's more of an issue here than in her film.

What came back to me several times in the week after watching this film was how the country rallied to the RAF's support.  When the police and the anti-terrorist department step up their search for the Baader-Meinhof gang, our heroes are forced to go under-cover, and though they already have a reputation for robbing banks (sort of hooray), blowing up office buildings and shooting policemen (markedly less hooray), a sizeable minority of the German public, when asked, proffer support for the gang, many saying they would shelter gang members from the authorities.  This wasn't just a violent gang threatening the nation, they were standing up for the people and against a malign state, and the people were glad of this.  It's certainly a more inspiring, more intelligent Crowd than we get in 'M' (1931) or 'Julius Caesar' (1950).  What I have since been asking myself: would I shelter gang-members, if they stood up in this way to authorities so cruel and wilfully ignorant of their electorate's needs, a state that needed to be stopped?  Maybe.  I'd like to think so, even.  Would I end up making bombs for them?  I hope not, as I'm terribly clumsy.


P.S. Oh, it's a good film, by the way.  A strong script, direction, hurdy-gurdy, hurdy-gurdy.  As happens on occasion, I seem to have found myself talking about the message and the ideas, and not about the film under consideration.  That probably means the film works very well indeed.

P.P.S. With 'Die Baader-Meinhof Komplex', 'Das Testament Des Dr Mabuse' (1933) and 'Die Nibelungen' (1924), I've achieved a pointless mini-goal of mine, to see films starting with the masculine, feminine and neuter German words for 'the'.  A complex, it seems, is masculine, a Testament is neutral, and a Nibelungen?  Well, actually that's plural in this case, so I haven't strictly speaking achieved what I sought, even if I did get a Die, Das and Der.  Thankfully homelands are feminine, at least in language, and 'Die Andere Heimat' (2013) is in cinemas this October, at least in Germany, and I'm very keen indeed to see it.

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This is a film worth watching.  It is, as you may expect, violent in a number of ways, though not gratuitously so - but if you think that may be a problem for you, steer clear of it.  Otherwise, give it your full attention.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

This film was exceedingly controversial when it came out in the late eighties.  It's based, not on the gospels, but on a novel about Jesus, and does the two things one can always expect from New Testament fan-fic: Jesus is romantically linked to Mary Magdalene, and he asks Judas to betray him.  And then, of course, there's his last temptation, but I'll get to that.  In spite (or even because of) this portrayal of a remarkably weak, human and troubled Christ, this is an excellent film and worth the watching, both for style and content, and one that I'd recommend with the warning that the crucifixions (of which there are several) are very unpleasant indeed (hence its inclusion in this blog's 'horrible films' tag).

From the off, this Jesus is not the confident and charismatic crowd-winner we're used to.  He's wracked by conflict, as God calls him to fearful duties and Lucifer puts to him, again and again, the idea that he's mistaken, that he's no messiah and should simply live his life.  The crowds simply aren't convinced by his speeches, and familiar sermons meet with derision and doubt, rather than open-eared adoration.  As it becomes clearer to Jesus that he really is the son of God, he's dismayed and terrified, as he knows where it will lead.  This Jesus is the only carpenter who'll make crosses for the Romans, and he's despised for it, by himself, as much as the other Jews.

Judas, comforted by Jesus

Rather than praise everybody involved in the making of the film for their style and quality of their performances, I'll save time and name some names.  Martin Scorsese is directing, Peter Gabriel composing, with Willem Dafoe as the Christ.  His lack of physical beauty and easy charm probably makes him the closest screen Jesus to the one Biblical description of Jesus' looks, which crops up in Isaiah: 'he had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him'.  Harvey Keitel is a flame-haired and muscular Judas, the only person Jesus can really rely on.  As usual, it's a fairly white cast for something set in Israel, but unlike most Jesus biopics, the Jews here look and sound Jewish, Jewish-American, to be precise, which works very well.  I feel obliged to mention that there's a single scene cameo by David Bowie as Pontius Pilate, and he's good, quiet, pensive, but is given very little to do here, so my favourite screen Pilate remains Frank Thring in 'Ben-Hur' (1959).

What of the Last Temptation of the title?  It's the whole point of the film, but is constrained to the final fifth of a two-and-a-half hour movie.  I'll be sauntering somewhat into spoiler territory here, but since you may have already seen that screen-cap down there it's already sort-of too late, but this really isn't a film that relies greatly on twists, so I don't think your viewing experience will be diminished.  So, as you may know, Jesus goes out into the desert for forty days to fast and meditate, and while there is thrice tempted by Satan.  It's brilliantly realised in this film, which paraphrases events as well as words, and so makes both dialogue and visuals engaging and surprising.  Satan says that Jesus will see him again, and it's at this point that Jesus takes up the main body of his mission.

Aged Jesus and his guardian angel

As per the Bible, after the Last Supper, Jesus begs God to release him from his fate, to save him from dying on the cross.  Despite this, he's nailed up to die, but just as he's on the cusp of perishing, he cries out, asking why he's been forsaken.  At this point, a young English-accented girl, his guardian angel, tells him God has had mercy and released him from this terrible fate.  He climbs down from the cross, though the crowd still see him there, and he goes on to live a long and mainly happy life.  He marries, has children, grows to old age.  This, though he doesn't see it, is his last temptation.

It's highly likely this film inspired 'Human Nature' that Tennant-era Doctor Who classic: in each, our hero is offered a vision of a normal human life, the delight of love, family, and a good, natural death of old age - and each has to choose whether to live the life they yearn for, that they've certainly earnt, or to die unjustly and save the world.  Eventually Jesus begins to hear people condemn him for failing to be the crucified and resurrected Jesus they're preaching, and who the people need to save them.  For me the film's highlight is a scene in which old Jesus runs into a highly animated Paul of Tarsus, given the film's most enjoyable performance by Harry Dean Stanton, and condemns him pretending that there had ever been a crucifixion, let alone a resurrection.

I suspect the film's ongoing controversy arises largely from the idea (all in the fantasy of this last temptation, and largely, though not wholly, implied rather than shown) that Jesus had sex.  With, y'know, women.  The weakness and doubt shown in this presentation of Jesus is likely another factor, as well as the role of Judas and the notable amount of casual nudity. (My friend Tom Hagley described this as a 'nipple film', venturing that a high percentage of shots contain at least one visible, often Willem Dafoe's).  I don't think these things should count against a very good film about Jesus, which really gets to the core of why the crucifixion was necessary to reconcile man to God, and why God didn't relieve Jesus of this burden even when he begged for another solution.  If you want a modern, well-shot and horribly bloody film about Jesus, his mission and his death, 'The Last Temptation of Christ' is a far more interesting, enjoyable and helpful film than 'The Passion of the Christ' (2004).

Pondering it over the week, I'm tempted to venture that this might even be the best film yet made about Jesus of Nazareth.  Feel quite at liberty to disagree in the comments.  For another film of a novel about Jesus, albeit one in which he hardly features, tune in on Easter Sunday for my comments on my favourite ever film, 'Ben-Hur: a Tale of the Christ' (1959).

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Häxan (1922)

So, this is a documentary about witches.  It's a subject I'm fairly ignorant on, though I know my thaumaturgy from my theurgy.  My limited understanding is that there are three main kinds of witch with nothing in common to one another: firstly the term is sometimes used to describe practicers of Wicca, a hippy religion that seems to have come to prominence as part of the same movement as the campaign for real ale and the revival of morris dancing, secondly people actually dabbling with demons to gain superpowers, and thirdly people accused of the second, usually without good cause (and fourthly fictional witches, of course, who rarely fit any of these classes at all).

From the film's subtitle, 'witchcraft through the ages', it sounds like it might feasibly encompass all of these in some measure.  In actual fact, director Benjamin Christensen tells the sensational story of the second kind, replete with broomstick flights and kissing the bottom of the devil, under the pretence of telling us about the less lurid third kind, the false accusations.

The pencil of judgement!

Since this is superficially a serious documentary, rather than the exercise in schlock horror thrills it turns into, it starts out quite soberly with a proto-powerpoint presentation.  We're shown pictures and diagrams of witches, familiars and hell, and a rather exciting animated model of the Earth-centred cosmos, with Sun, planets and stars all circulating, and God looking down from a photograph of Heaven.  Into these images, a pencil (or, on larger models, something like a snooker cue) occasionally protrudes to point out details, presumably, in lieu of close-ups on relevant areas.  This being a silent film, this sequence is accompanied by descriptive intertitles - though for some reason my memory keeps insisting that it was a voiceover.

The cosmos, yesterday.

I wonder whether, back in '22, this is what Benjamin Christensen thought would be the future of the movie documentary: a straight replacement for the text-book, with on-screen text broken by illustrations.  After perhaps twenty minutes of this, however, we move to a set with actors, where we're shown a witch cooking up her brew.  Just, you know, as an illustration.  Or so it seems!  In no time at all, this illustration grows into a plot, and educational intent takes a back seat.  We're led into a story about a family in which everybody, deliberately or inadvertently, implicates everybody else as witches. The inquisition turn up, as fat as you like, and torture one unfortunate for so long that she has no option but to claim to be a witch (going into lots of detail on the kissing-the-bottom-of-the-devil thing, which seems to be Christiansen's favourite part of the whole venture, and which we get to see in a blue-tinged flashback).  Of course, since she's been tortured at length and now is sure to be killed for her admissions, she drops in the names of everyone she dislikes, naming them as accomplices.

So, in short, everyone dies.  Except the portliest churchmen, of course.  And Satan, played by (you may have guessed it) director Benjamin Christiansen, who's having great fun throughout, and also turns in a wafer-thin cameo as a spectral Jesus.  His Devil makes a terrifyingly sudden appearance (aided somewhat by Bronnt Industries Kapital's excellent new soundtrack), and spends most of his time leering through windows and flicking his tongue in and out with a comedic rapidity suggestive of all the sort of x-rated antics I'm unlikely to name on this ostensibly wholesome blog.

Christiansen makes a credible point about biology

So, everybody from the main plot dies or becomes irrelevant, but the film isn't yet over.  There's still time for a convent full of nuns to totter about, jive and jitter in (no pun intended, but it sort of works here) mass hysteria.  And then on to the modern day, where, in a lively attempt to reclaim academic credibility, Christiansen shows us a few short scenes about kleptomania, hysteria, sleepwalking - that sort of thing.  The problem isn't the Devil, or so the intertitles tell us, it's that women have always been too hysterical, and the appropriate response isn't to burn them but to institutionalise them, locking them away in sanatoria for their own sake.

This seems almost as alarming, in its own way, and times have thankfully changed again since 1922, and locking people up to keep eccentricity out of society (and, we're clearly seen, out of women) is no longer seen as the wonderful modern answer.  Had it been made nowadays, the documentary might have advocated medicalisation (which I'm keen not to stigmatise, but is still a very imperfect solution, as it can occasionally medicalise the social and drug away legitimate quirks of personality).

This is what supposed witches used to look like.  Nowadays,

such enjoyably wrinkly people just get to play them in movies.

I'm not quite sure the documentary is entirely sincere on the locking-up-your-hysterical-daughter front, as by this point the intertitles have developed a dry sense of humour, which I'm tempted, without any real evidence, to describe as 'characteristically Scandinavian'.

I'll leave you with an enjoyably bizarre sequence from the torture room.  We cut away from the narrative for a moment, as the intertitles (tidy, Swedish, Times New Roman) inform us that 'one of my actresses insisted on trying the thumbscrew when we shot these pictures'.  We see the actress in question, giggling away as the unseen director tightens the screws.  Suddenly her mouth opens in an amused yell.    Says Christiansen: 'I will not reveal the terrible confessions I forced from the young lady'.


P.S. My many thanks to Decline for the recommendation.  Tune in again on the Ides of March, when I'll finally tackle a film from that most neglected of decades, the 1950s, with an obscure 'Julius Caesar' featuring a young Charlton Heston in some sort of loincloth, if that's what floats yer boat.

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It's a visually delicious piece of work, and not quite as evil as the cover would suggest.

Madhouse (1974)

A Vincent Price horror movie about Vincent Price horror movies.  Whenever Vincent Price falls asleep, 'Dr Death', his character's most famous character comes to life and commits foul murders.  But is it really Vincent Price behind the mask and gloves?

As you may note, I find something satisfying about so much as typing the name Vincent Price.  He's a very enjoyable fellow, and in his element here - and the metafiction, using scenes from his older films as the back-catalogue of the actor he plays here, renders the whole thing more self-aware and more interesting than a plain murder mystery.

'Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrghhhhh!'

So, 'Dr Death' kills Vincent Price's fiancé; she quite literally screams her head off (see directly above) but this doesn't cause anyone from the party downstairs to pop in and check she's ok, or the film would be over in the first five minutes.  Everyone assumes Vincent Price did the deed.  Even Vincent assumes this, and the odd suggestion seems to be that there was no real police investigation or public outcry - but it sets his career back somewhat and he has to be persuaded out of retirement by Peter Cushing to resurrect his old movie character for a British commercial TV channel - with murderous consequences, as the killings begin.

This film is full of people looking in big mirrors

while failing to spot things right behind them

For some while it seems that this might not be a murder-mystery at all, but rather an open-and-shut case.  Vincent Price seems to be the only person with both opportunity and motive.  But it seems - or seemed to me, in any case, likelier and likelier that the great Vincent was indeed doing the murders during some series of blackouts and mental breakdowns.  There are quite a lot of other candidates, of course, all just antagonistic, or just eccentric enough for them to privately be crazed murderers, but none of them quite seem far-gone enough to be behind this spate of wild and outrageous killings (one girl has her head cut off with a pen-knife, apparently.  Another is hanged with her own hair, and so on.  All shocking and ridiculous, rather than gory and terrifying, but tense nonetheless).  Is our hero also the villain?

A cameo from Michael Parkinson as himself interrupts the action finale

As the film pressed on I swung back towards the idea, even the hope, that perhaps Vincent Price was behind it all.  It would seem clean, appropriate, that his character had gotten out of hand.  That he had created a monster even within himself.  We don't quite get the ending I wanted.  It becomes apparent that there are two Doctor Deaths: Vincent Price in costume for his new TV series, and the murderer, impersonating him.  What would have seemed more satisfying and fitting, to my mind, would be for our hero Vincent Price to remove the villain's mask to reveal that it was himself, another Vincent Price.  It wouldn't make a great deal of sense, but it's what I was holding out for - that he might have created another self in Dr Death, detached from himself to exercise those murderous instincts he so finely details to Michael Parkinson.  Sadly Dr Death doesn't murder this real-life interviewer - a missed trick, if ever there was one.

One of too few nice shots

It's not a very visually exciting film, and seems to belong more in the past than in its own time.  This is a seventies in Britain that looks, fashions aside, a lot like the sixties - two decades between which I've always placed an artificial division.  Perhaps it's a deliberate nostalgia for Vincent Price's past, or at least his character's, but it seems odd when the man's clearly in his prime.  Thankfully the strength of his performance, and the mainly-believable grotesquery that surrounds him, keeps the film lively and fun.  Characters walk with blissful stupidity into situations in which they'll obviously be murdered, and this is very pleasing.  The use of old footage in the character's screenings and memories allows us cameos from Basil Rathbone and  Boris Karloff, from beyond the grave, which seems appropriate.

I fear I've given away a fair bit of the film's mystery in these comments, but there's still plenty I haven't revealed, so if it sounds appealing, you may find some strange delight in it.  Incidentally, the title 'Madhouse' is quite irrelevant, and could apply equally well to every other film I've seen this year.  'Idiosyncratic Studio' would be far more accurate, and considerably less generic.

P.S. This was yet another of Opai's  grab-bag of unusual suggestions - the good senor also recommended me 'Way Out West' (1937), 'Daisies' (1966) and the frightful 'Na Srebrnym Globie' (1977).  When other people have made me multiple suggestions I've openly chastised them, but these have all been intriguing, unlike one another, and unlike any film I've chosen for myself.  My apologies to those of you who've made suggestions that I haven't yet reached - I hope to cover most in time.

Faust (1926)

The three horsemen of the apocalypse!

Perhaps there was no room for famine, or is it pestilence.

The missing one, whoever that is.

It's a magnificent and wonderfully visual film, so I'm once again going to tilt this toward pictures and captions, with bursts of comment between each.  When the pictures move, of course, they're far more ominous, merry and exciting, but I didn't want to enter the strange world of the animated gif, so let's enjoy what we have, shall we?

Mephisto looms over the town and blocks out the sun with his wing.

Plague issues from his loins

So Mephisto and the Archangel have a bet.  Can this demon tempt Faust, and so become Master of the Universe?  Probably, yes.

Elderly Faust looks on the dying, but cannot save them

Marlowe's Dr Faustus is a favourite character of mine, and one whose flaws I share.  The Faust of this film, and of the old German legend, has relatively little in common with him.  I do think this is what I'll look like when I grow old, though, and possibly long before that.

If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing with loads of fire and smoke.

Under these terms, everything in this film is well worth doing.

Here Mephisto rejuvenates Faust

Faust's attempts to use Mephisto's superpowers for good go pretty badly.  He tries to heal the sick, but can't bear to look on the holy cross, so people throw stones at him.  We've all had days like that, but Faust takes it really badly, and in a fit of pique flies all over the world being young and lusty.

Young Faust imagines his Heimat

Faust yearns to go home, and falls in love with a young lady called Gretchen.

Flirtatious Mephisto gazes through a window

Mephisto, meanwhile, flirts with her aunt.  They have cocktails together, and chase around most merrily.  Emil Jannings's Mephisto is the real stand-out performance here, because he gets to be so evil, so terrifying, and then so whimsical and ridiculous, before being utterly evil again.

Mephisto fixes himself a drink.

Gretchen's aunt looks on, smitten and bedevilled.

Mephisto fixes it for Gretchen's brother to have a sword-fight with Faust, then helps Faust win, and cries 'Murder' to the whole town.  What a jerk!

"MORD!   MORD!"

German films so often come down to this little word, shouted aloud.

Honestly, why does Faust hang out with this guy?  Obviously evil character is obviously evil.

The condemned Gretchen's cry stirs Faust to action!

Faust goes to the rescue of Gretchen and renounces his youth (handily his aged self has been trapped in a mirror all the while).  And then this happens:

No, no, Erzengel!  That's far too much text for one intertitle!

The above is, I should note, an exception.  Most of the captions are concise and beautiful, but the Archangel really lets rip at the end, telling Mephisto exactly where his evil scheme has failed.  The temptation has not destroyed all that is divine in Faust.  Not on your nelly.  It all comes down to one word, and I'll give you three guesses what that word is.

An excellent and exciting piece of cinema, though perhaps it sags just a smidgen (or perhaps just moves away from the story I wanted or expected to watch) when it turns into a (somewhat dubious) romance in its second half.  Very pleasing performances all round, and the thing that constantly surprises me in 20s films, tremendous special effects.  Clearly I need to raise my expectations.

P.S. From here on, I want to post two regular updates a week on Thursdays and Sundays, occasionally using Tuesdays for wild novelties (as you'll be seeing this coming Tuesday) or for films that don't fit my hundred-film-hundred-years thing, so films from too long ago, or from years I've already assigned to particular films.

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Exciting stuff, and here it is on DVD, should you be seized by a compulsion

The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)

Who determined that men must wear their hair short?  Someone, somewhen must have decreed it, and done so with great power.

These are the films that made me grow my hair long.  Everybody here (and in 90 per cent of this adventure, 'everybody' is synonymous with 'all the male characters') - the wizards, the men and the dwarves, have long, magnificent, flowing hair.  The hobbits have rather less, but still a good deal more, I'd say, than the male average when the thing saw release.  How I admired the hair (and the general style and bearing, but the hair seemed both achievable and symptomatic) of Aragorn, of Elrond, of Gandalf the Grey, the most magnificent.

It's been long and short ever since.  It takes time to make it long but I ill care for it, or the pressures of 21st century Britain demand its loss.  I think I'd still be glad to grow up to be Bilbo or Radagast (but now, you see, I'm talking in the wrong film), but am wary of letting my pate come to resemble that of Grima Wormtongue or Jimmy Saville.  Ah, you cry, this is not a hairdressing blog.  Indeed not!  Shall we return to the matter at hand?

The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Sean Bean is Boromir.  Doomed, of course.

Well, you've all seen these films, perhaps several times at ever-increasing lengths, so there's little I can tell you about the content.  The big surprise, rewatching this first part, is how real some of the locations look.  I've always accepted the grand locations augmented by CGI and cunningly composited model-shots in the later films, without consciously registering that this is how they were put together, but the places roamed through in 'The Fellowship of the Ring' feel like real places you could visit - as if anybody with a camera and a few Orcs could go and gather the same footage, without having to find a portal to a real fantasy kingdom to get the scenery they're after.  Only a handful of slightly dodgy slo-mo footage seems to date the film, the remainder seeming magnificently timeless.

The fellowship is peopled by excellent characters, well-cast.  Four hobbits, two men (one dark and handsome; the other Yorkshire and treacherous), a wizard (Gandalf, of course), an elf (Legolas manages to be stylish, effete and dully humourless all at once) and a dwarf (Gimli is somehow very Scottish and very Welsh at the same time - an excellent combination).  For some reason, this is the only one of the films where we see dwarves other than Gimli.  Presumably they're occupied somewhere else during the ensuing world-war, but they could have made a few of the battles much less precarious if they'd done as the Elves do and sent a couple of battalions to Helm's Deep or Pelennor Fields.

A friend of mine, who presents the Minute Doctor Who Podcast, suggested that Elijah Wood was poor casting for Frodo, and that this was the films' greatest hindrance.  It seemed a curious suggestion to me - perhaps because I watched the films long before reading the books, so to me he is Frodo and Frodo is him.  The vibrant relationship between him and Sean Astin's Samwise Gamgee is the heart of the films, and everything else is window-dressing - even the battles, even Gandalf, even the pretty lights and colours of the Balrog and the fireworks and the eye of Sauron.

The Two Towers (2002)

Frodo, perhaps about to kill slimy old Gollum.

So the Fellowship fell to pieces.  I expected this film to show them taking separate routes only to be reunited and carry on as before, but by the time this sequel starts, they're irreparably divided, like Earth in the time of Peleg, and we're following several stories at once.

I'll take this chance to say something about sequels, as it seems to bear some relevance to this blog and experiment.  I'm meant to be looking at a hundred films from a hundred years, but it doesn't seem quite right to take up three per cent, and three consecutive years, on The Lord of the Rings - a fine series, but one with a very consistent style.  It's better, perhaps, to count it as one big film, and tie it to just one of those years, allowing me to re-use 2001 for 'Moulin Rouge' and 2003 for 'Good Bye Lenin' (for instance).  I'll apply the same thinking to my 1971-3 trio of Shaft movies.  If I didn't go with this sort of thinking, I'd be able to have a long weekend binge of the canonical Bond movies and wipe out almost a quarter of my 100 films at the expense of variety.

Back to 'The Two Towers', then.  A sequel without new characters would be a pointless thing (please let me know if you can think of any good examples), and two fine adventurers enter here.  Firstly, the cadaverous form of Theoden, from whom Gandalf (if I may spoiler a spoiler) exorcises Saruman, and who subsequently gets his groove back, once he realises that his obviously evil servant Grima Wormtongue is evil, obviously.

I can't easily screen-cap blu-ray, so I photographed my TV.  Does it show?

Secondly, Gollum: seen in the distance in 'The Fellowship of the Rings', but a hero and a villain from here on.  Just as we've gotten used to Frodo and Sam adventuring alone, the relationship is shaken up by this CGI monstrosity.  Sam, who's been nothing but hearty good-humour and encouragement, suddenly reveals a nasty streak, despising this slimy churl, a creature who alternates saving the day and threatening murder.  It's an arresting, horrible yet sympathetic performance which owes at least a little to Peter Lorre in 'M' (1931), and it's not without reason Gollum is still so celebrated and impersonated.

There's a great deal of fighting, here as in the threequel.  I still can't tell where the real soldiers and sets end and the models and CGI begin, so I'm content to say the sequences work as impressively as intended.  Everything's beautifully designed and strikingly attractive.

Starting in this film, Aragorn has a choice of two wives - a storyline plumped up considerably to make the lack of women in these films less embarrassing.  Of course, since Aragorn is royal, and this is the real Olden Days, he could probably fix the problem with bigamy - or since he and Arwen are both very long-lived, he could marry Eowyn first, wait for her to grow old and die, and then marry Arwen.  Perhaps I'm being unduly unromantic making such practical suggestions, but I thought it worth suggesting.  As it is, Aragorn gives his full attention to his sword and his battles, perhaps waiting to see who survives before ironing out the destiny of his loins.

The Return of the King (2003)

Andy Serkis is a real person, not just the puppeteer of Gollum

'Return of the King' holds my two favourite scenes of the trilogy. First, before the film's title dares appear, we're treated to Gollum's back-story, as Smeagol and Deagol fight over the newly-found precious.  It was an unexpected delight, watching this for the first time in the cinema, to see Andy Serkis in the flesh.  An appropriate reward, I think, for his years being motion captured - his voice and movements were celebrated, but only here is his face seen.

My other favourite scene is the one with the beacons - a moment the book covers with half a sentence, but which in the film is a beautiful triumph.  Here, grizzled old Denethor is most reluctant to call for aid, but young Pippin scrambles up to light the city's waiting bonfire beacon, and once its flames have grown, we see another light spring up on the far horizon in answer.  The camera flies over distant and inhospitable mountains as beacon answers beacon, the signal going out for aid, calling stations presumably maintained for this purpose for many generations.  It's an awesome, surprisingly emotional sight.  Like the defiant singing of La Marseillaise in 'Casablanca' (1942), it gives me a thrill of hope in the midst of desperation.  For me, this is the best part of the eleven-hour adventure.

Frodo just gets dirtier and dirtier in these films, and not in a saucy way.

Watching the films in their extended form (as seems appropriate), it's easy to grow a touch fatigued during this final instalment.  The first two went up from three hours to three-and-a-half apiece.  'The Return of the King' was already three-and-a-half hours long in the cinemas, which felt about as extended as was required, and so ends up almost four-and-a-half hours in duration.  The ending sequence, which was derided (unfairly, to my mind) is under twenty minutes in length from the destruction of the ring to the start of the credits - not inappropriate when compared either to the extent of the adventure that precedes it, or to the equivalent portion of the book (more than forty-thousand words, not counting the appendices).  Twenty minutes seems about as long as one can acceptably make an audience cry with a mix of sadness, merriment and relief.  Each strand is tied up, everyone goes home, and Frodo, Gandalf, and Bilbo in his dotage resolve that they must leave Middle Earth forever.  For a happy ending, it is very sad.

Nine years later, enough time has past since this massive epic that I very warmly welcome 'The Hobbit', by way of a prequel.  But that, as they say, is another story.

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You would think that the extra capacity available in a lavish blu-ray box-set would allow the inclusion of both the extended and the sensible editions of these films, wouldn't you?  Nope.

Die Nibelungen (1924)

The terrifying dragon, Fafner

Sometimes I like to browse Amazon's recommendations page  - a curious set of things the site believes I ought to want, along the lines of "I see you've bought a bright green pancake pan from us, so you'll be wanting this Ken Dodd DVD" and other such eccentric and confusing links.  I'd almost lost faith in them when, once upon a time, the site happened to mention that ace German director Fritz Lang had made a five-hour silent film about the Nibelungs.  "Oh Amazon," I cried aloud, "you do know me!"

It's a movie in two films - which isn't to say it's an original and a sequel.  Rather, it was the fashion in the early twenties to make films with 22-hour intermissions, so go to the cinema, watch part one, go home, and come back the next day for part two.  The back of the box describes it as 'stately' and 'hypnotic', which in combination with the stated duration made it sound like it might be rather slow.  I was daunted, but cautiously optimistic.

If you're at all familiar with Wagner's four-opera 'Ring Cycle' (and I'll quite understand if you aren't - I only am because I like an epic, or feat of endurance, and perhaps because I like it be known that I like an epic), you might reasonably expect the plot of this double film to be familiar, for they both draw on the same source, concern Siegfried and Brunhild and the Nibelung gold.  But no!  Wotan and the rest of the Norse gods are out, Attila the Hun is in (with amazing makeup and performance that make him seem like some kind of space alien).  Brunhild is not a Valkyrie, just a brilliantly strong woman with a hat that looks like the offspring of a saucepan and a goose.

Brunhild's amazing hat

Fritz Lang certainly put in some effort to make the film he wanted to see.  Rather than going to a forest to shoot his forest scenes, he built the trees out of concrete.  If he wants to burn a building down and have it collapse he'll just burn it down, and if it falls on the actors it's all to the good so long as the cameras catch the moment.  Rather than waiting patiently for someone to invent CGI or stop-motion animation, he built a real live dragon and had it breathe real fire on his lead actor.  Indeed, this last thing is so extraordinary I feel I must compel you to see a clip of the terrifying dragon, inside which are many terrified technicians and puppeteers.

It's a big old story full of battle and flame grand vistas, but at its heart all about the knotty personal dramas of its key characters, with their extraordinary dancing movements, their strange silent faces acting out the intense drama of it all.  To my surprise and relief, the film sustained my attention and interest across its great duration.  I'd recommend it highly, if its combination of silence, length, ancientness and German-ness weren't sure to put y'all off.  Tell you what: watch Lang's Metropolis instead, and come to this as a long pudding, should you want more of the same.

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Got a lot of time on your hands? Then why not buy the film on blu-ray or DVD and wonder at the crude beauties of 1920s film-making. Fear the dragon! Observe the magnificent hat! Feel the flames!