'Die Andere Heimat', or 'Home from Home' (2013)

Before I get to ‘Die Andere Heimat’, let me tell you a little about the Heimat trilogy.  ‘Heimat’ (1984), is either a film, or a series of films, or a TV series shown in cinemas.  It was followed by ‘Die Zweite Heimat’ (1993), and the more-boringly-named ‘Heimat 3’ (2004).  Between them, they make up an epic of Biblical proportions - and I’m not just flinging that around as a cliché: one of my favourite things about the Heimat series, and about the Old Testament (in particular the Pentateuch and the books of Samuel and Kings) is the way they take their time to tell a very long story, spanning generations; by necessity full of gaps, but peppered with great details, character sketches, and sudden moments of focus on things that are either significant or charmingly domestic.  In each case, it suggests that the whole of history is one long story, and helps us see how intimately the present day is linked to the beginning of humanity.  I really like stories, and I especially like these great hunks of story, into which all others fit.

‘Heimat’ tells the story of the small German village of Schabbach, out in a neglected corner of Germany where the people talk like farmers, from 1919 to 1982 - in particular, we focus on the family of Paul and Maria Simon.  Paul Simon (pronounced ‘Powell Semen’) walks out of the village, and out of the movie, at the end of the first couple-of-hour instalment, leaving Maria to take the focus and raise the next generation.  As per the Books of Kings, time passes, the new generation gradually take the focus, and by the end of 15 hours real-time and 60 years of story, everyone we were watching at the start is dead.

‘Die Zweite Heimat’ (sort-of meaning ‘the second home’, or ‘the second homeland’) focuses on my favourite character from the series, or from anything, Hermann Simon, a sexually precocious child who leaves to study music composition in Munich - and Clarissa Lichtblau, a cellist whose celling goes awry.  The 26 hours of this second Heimat take us from 1960 to 1970 - a fascinating decade in Germany, and everywhere.  Watching it was the only time I’d ever really believed that the sixties were a real era from the world I live in, rather than being a weird fantasy genre like Sci-Fi or Western.  ‘Heimat 3’ is a more concise, at eleven hours, and tells the story of Hermann and Clarissa’s return to Schabbach, and fills in the gap from the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, up to the year 2000.  It brings in a lot of characters who were present in the first first but absent from the second, and most of them die, so much time having passed.

Brazil: a popular part of the Americas, if you're a 19th Century Prussian

For a long time, that seemed to be it.  A strong trilogy, spanning 81 years in what felt like real-time, but actually only lasting as long as the James Bond canon (including the first CR and NSNA).  In 2011, writer-director Edgar Reitz made a surprising announcement - there was going to be one more instalment, ‘Die Andere Heimat’, or ‘The Other Heimat/Home’ (though it was actually released over here as ‘Home from Home’, a reasonable title, but one that annoyingly breaks the pattern of the series).  This new film is a prequel, regarding ancestors of the Simon family in 1840s Schabbach, and deciding whether or not to leave frosty Prussia for the verdant warmth of South America.

How does it differ from the earlier films?  What makes this a film for the 2010s?  Well, we're in very wide widescreen, at last - I realise that's a 1953 innovation, but it's clear that this is a wholly-cinematic piece, not a TV-cinema hybrid like those earlier works.  Its much shorter duration (225 minutes) might represent modern tastes and attention-spans, or might just tell us that the director is near retirement, and the funding for sober dramas is hard to come by.  There's a rather more active camera, at one point following a full-pelt run through the village, and showing off the full run of 19th century building facades.

There's also a rather different use of colour to the earlier films.  The original 'Heimat' was made in black and white and colour (and on a variety of film-stocks, but this fact is slightly less obvious on the small-screen).  It starts off almost entirely monochrome, with colour shots used very rarely to highlight emotions, ideas or temperatures.  As the years go on, there's more and more colour (with the big switch to almost-all-in-colour coming at the the switch-on of West German colour TV in 1967), and this carries on until the end of 'Heimat 3', which is almost entirely colour.  'Die Zweite Heimat', coming in-between, uses it differently, giving us Munich's daytime in monochrome, and night-life in colour, to show the difference between the two worlds.  'Die Andere Heimat', set in history, is overwhelmingly monochrome, but very occasionally introduces a colour element into an otherwise black-and-white scene - a searing-hot horse-shoe, a green skirt during a discussion of colour language, or the great comet of 1844, for example.  It's something that was tried very briefly in the earlier films -a shot of colour sausages in a monochrome window in 1963, for example.  It fits in nicely, and makes good use of modern technology, but to anyone unschooled in Heimat it must seem an odd novelty.

Johann Simon (Rüdiger Kriese) and a splash of colour.

After all my feverish anticipation I’m afraid I’m a little disappointed with 'Die Andere Heimat'.  It’s good, but ‘Heimat’ was great.  If you've heard any publicity for it, you'll know it's about Jakob Simon deciding whether he wants to emigrate - but he seems to spend ages on the decision, getting into various scrapes along the way, and in the end we haven't learned a lot that couldn't be picked up from the trailer.  I wanted more.  I wanted bigger.  There’s a lot to recommend it - it’s engrossing, it's attractive to look at, it's educational, giving a convincing picture of a place, an era, and the people who lived there; the funeral for babies is as memorable as the original Heimat's funeral for Maria in the storm, so there are still some striking images.  It all just feels so short.  I realise three-and-three-quarter hours doesn't sound short, but compared to the earlier Heimats, this feels like a flash in the pan, like a first episode of something longer.  

Since starting this blog, I've watched a whole lot of films to represent the past hundred years of cinema, and while there's been a lot to delight in, it's made me weary of movie-shaped movies, films with the clear, familiar structure.  You can do a lot in 90 or 120 minutes - just look at 'Man With a Movie Camera' (1929) or 'Thirty Two Short Films about Glen Gould' (1993), for instance, but most films feel like pretty short, pretty limited stories, and I've probably found the most pleasure in the films that have done something outside the usual pattern of the movie-shaped movie, or entertained and engaged me so intensely that I forgot to watch analytically.  Now, 'Heimat' has always been a triumph of long-form story-telling, but 'Die Andere Heimat' feels more like a movie movie, a normal movie, than a Heimat movie.  At the end, it all felt a little insubstantial.  What happens next week?  Heck, what happened in Schabbach between 1844 and 1919?  It's a big old gap, and (alas) I'm not sure Heimat fan-fiction exists - at least, not in English.

(Perhaps I'm being a little harsh on films in the above paragraph, but compared to the great long-form storytelling of the modern TV serial - 'Orange is the New Black', 'The Killing' or 'Daredevil', for instance, which do so much with their characters and scenarios, movies seem very light sketches of their subjects.  A season of OitNB isn't a bad comparison to 1993's 'Die Zweite Heimat', as both are divided into 13 'episodes', each of which gives a good chunk of time to the main character - Piper and Hermann, respectively - while explicitly giving focus to a character-of-the-week, really mining into their character, situation and story.  They're both pretty intense in the drama stakes, though OitNB is more inclined to resolve to happy endings, while Heimat is bleaker, or more like real life, or more German, depending on your perspective.  They both suit binge-watching).

Margarethe (Marita Breuer) and Jakob (Jan Dieter Schneider)

Despite my complaints, I'm delighted by the existence of this new slice of time.  The whole of Heimat-dom is bigger and better for it, and when I'd finished it I really wanted to move on to the first episode of 'Heimat' proper (but I held back, as I know that's a slippery slope requiring a lot of hours and tears).  Marita Breuer, one of Germany's best method-actors, is the real star of both films - Maria in the 1984 original, and Margarethe here.  She's a great performer, and it's a real pity she's not known in the UK, and I'd happily go out of my way to watch her in anything you care to recommend.  The village, the family, and even the technology at the forge (which I thought of as crude in 1919, but can now see as rather ingenious) are all enriched by the extra context.  Go back another hundred years, and you'll notice all the things that aren't there, and that you took for granted.  It's this richness and detail and depth -- Heimat isn't like movies, it's like life.

P.S. If the 'Heimat' formula of something that's kind-of a movie and kind-of in episodes sounds odd, compare it to 'Die Nibelungen' (1924), a 5-hour movie designed to be watched in two parts on consecutive days, or 'Les Enfants du Paradis' (1945), a movie and its sequel, designed to be shown as a double-bill because it was briefly illegal to make films longer than 90 minutes, and this was the only way to tell the whole story.  Or 'Das Boot' (1981), which was made for German TV as a six-parter, and simultaneously prepared for abridged international cinema release, and is now mainly thought of as a movie.  Did I watch those films just so I could compare them to 'Heimat'?  Maybe, but they were astonishing in all the good ways.

P.P.S. I’ve been waiting very excitedly for this film to be released, and then be released with English subtitles, for as long as this blog has existed (which is to say, since the end of 2012).  This was always meant to be the 2013 movie, but it’s taken until now for it to come out on DVD and blu-ray.  Finally, the Penciltonian’s original intentions have been met.  It’s been a lively ride.  Good work, readers!

DVDs of Heimat, Die Zweite Heimat (and soundtrack),
Heimat 3, Heimat: Die Fragmente, Home from Home.

A few fannish, spoilery thoughts, of interest to Heimat devotees:

I think the Simon family tree now goes something like this (with a lot of guesswork on dates, and things I'll need to check on rewatch):

Großmutter Mathilde begat Johann Simon (or possible Margarethe?)

Johann and Margarethe Simon (born 1785-1790ish) begat three children who didn't live to adulthood, plus Gustav (in 1824) and Jakob (in 1826)

Gustav Simon married Henriette (whose name I may have noted down incorrectly, as I can't find her in the cast-list) and they begat Mathilde (in 1843) and Jacobine (1844), the latter of whom may be the ancestor of the South American Simons who come to celebrate Paul's big birthday in part ten or eleven of the original 'Heimat'.

Jakob married Florinchen Niem, and must have begotten some children, probably starting around 1845-1850.  Original film grand-patriarch Matthias Simon was born in 1872, so the dates work out well for him to be their grandson.  It's hard to imagine a time when he wasn't ancient.  I've always rather ignored him as a character, assuming the laters Simons inherited their merits from Maria and Katharina, admirable women both - but knowing he's a descendant of wide-eyed Jakob makes me want to reconsider him.  It's a pity we never get to see him in his prime.

In short, the male line runs Johann, Jakob, mystery person, Matthias, Paul, and the trio of Anton/Ernst/Hermann (kind-of).  Looking at those who became Simons by marriage, and so took charge of the Simon house, it runs Mathilde, Margarethe, Florinchen Niem, ???, Katharina Schirmer, Maria Weigand, and then it was boarded up, and for the life of me, I can't think what becomes of the house after Paul puts his commemorative plaque on it at the start of the 1980s.

I will need to re-watch the film to be clear about a few characters.  There's one who might be Jakob's sister, though I was a bit confused on that point.  I assume (based on casting) that she or Jakob begat a daughter who married a son of the Pastor we see in this film, Dorfpfarrer Wiegand, as he is presumably the grandfather of Maria's dad Alois Weigand (1870-1965).

Anyway, I'd be very glad of any advice or corrections on sorting all this out.

Herostratus (1967)

The main reason I came to watch 'Herostratus', other than liking the title and cover, is that it came out in the BFI Flipside series of DVD/Blu-ray dual format releases.  It's a run of obscure, interesting British films from the archives, forgotten marvels given a chance to shine again.  'The Bed-Sitting Room' (1969), which I very much enjoyed, was one such release, and on the basis of it and BFI's release of 'Winstanley' (1975), I find the line very encouraging.

Then, of course, there's the film's basic idea.  In short, a young man goes to an advertising agency to get maximum publicity for his act of suicide.  It's an unpleasantly interesting concept, grim, but ripe for satire and social commentary.  I'd say the film grapples with both of these, but fares less well as a drama or comedy.

So, we follow Max, the main character, as he approaches the advertising man Farson, a very sixties businessman who comes across like a Number 2 from the same year's psychedelic stand-out 'The Prisoner'.  Farson puts Max up in luxury and sets about publicising a sellably bland version of him to win public support.  The film then intercuts Max's reclusive days in a comfortable black void with archive footage of Ginsberg, Roosevelt, Churchill and Hitler, and juxtaposes sexy dancing with swirling offal, while making ironic comparisons between Max's herostratic desire for suicide and the conspicuous death of Jesus.

It feels like an investigation of ideas, rather than a narrative- or character-led piece.  A discussion, and quite a long one, at two-hours and forty minutes.  At times I wished the film would hurry itself along.  Perhaps I'm too impatient to really engage with this kind of art, or perhaps the film was making its point more slowly than necessary.  I'm inclined toward the latter, as the release also features director Don Levy's 'Time Is' (1964), which wants to wow its audience with the suggestion that time, as we understand it, is a human construct, a point that it makes quite effectively in the first five minutes, but persists with for another 25 - perhaps appropriate, given the content.

'Herostratus' has a chilling lack of glossiness, making it resemble Eastern and European films more than the American sort that I've come to think of as cinema's default.  The blood red and golden lighting, and the frequent cuts away to black, made me think of the then-recent Ukrainian movie 'Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors' (1964).  (I feel pretentious comparing this art-film you probably haven't heard of to another art-film you probably haven't heard of; I'm only aware of them because I'm doing this film-based blog, and have deliberately sought out some obscure items in the hope of finding treasure.  Somehow it feels like it would be more acceptable if I was doing this with novels, because everybody knows books have an inherent cultural value).

I didn't find a lot of pleasure in 'Herostratus'.  It interested me, but stretched that interest very thin, and I found myself wondering whether I have too much love for the easy comforts of commercial cinema to really get on with art films.  Or maybe I just didn't like this one.  Never mind.


P.S. Herostratus, if you're curious, was an ancient Ephesian who set fire to the Temple of Artemis (one of the Seven Wonders of the World) purely because he wanted to be famous for something.  It worked, and his name lives in infamy, as 'herostratic fame' today means fame at any cost, even fame for atrocities.  Anything to make one's name linger in the public mind.

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Gone With the Wind (1939)

1939 seems to be the year that films got colourful.  There had been excursions away from monochrome as early as 1903, but suddenly, in the last year of the thirties, we had 'Gone With the Wind' and 'The Wizard of Oz' and many lesser-remembered pictures, and it seemed that nothing would ever be the same again.  Alas, global war appears to have caused a relapse into black-and-white, and colour didn't really dominate until the big films of the fifties, and then practically all films from the mid-sixties onward.

1939 is also the year I missed, in my attempts to watch films from every year.  I rather liked the idea of leaving the project frustratingly incomplete, and made no real attempt to rectify the omission.  Eventually, a month after the Penciltonian officially ended, Saskia reminded me that there was a copy of 'Gone With the Wind' in the house; I'd sought it out after our American cousin Cassandra had seen the film and found herself surprised at how enjoyable it was.  It's easy to be daunted by classics, and the famously famous don't always deserve their reputation.

Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) and Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh)

The film, if you don't know, is a great American epic, and a romance of sorts.  It regards Scarlett O'Hara, an excellently self-absorbed Southerner, who has to survive the American Civil War (which is to say, the period of time shortly before the era most Westerns are set in.  Lincoln was on the throne, and his Northern states fought the Southern, partly because of slavery).  It's sometimes classed with 'Ben-Hur' (1959) as an 'Intimate Epic', perhaps because its scope is vast and vistas magnificent, but its focus intensely personal: it matters more what happens to our heroes than whether their country prospers or falls.

It is, as Cassandra noted, an extremely engaging film.  Scarlett is immediately likeable, a young woman too selfish to be dull.  She's wilfully ignorant of the dreary talk of a coming war, and she refuses to submit to social obligations, preferring to dance than mourn, and glad to marry people she doesn't love purely to spite those that she does.  Her story is exciting, surprising and colourful, and holds the attention very well for three hours (though after that, I begun to hope the resolution would come along).

Scarlett O'Hara, agitated and sultry.

It's a very handsome picture of America, at least in its visuals.  Other than the aspect ratio (widescreen being more than a decade away from popularity at this point) there's really nothing here to tell us that this was made in the 1930s.  Morally it's rather less appealing.  We're not really meant to agree with Scarlett's extreme measures, nor with those from the cruelly charming Rhett Butler who joins her in a complicated romance.  We are, however, expected to admire the American South, and its age of chivalry and slavery.  A slide at the film's start explicitly mentions slave-ownership as a positive part of the Sourthern States' history, and black characters in the film conform to and reinforce a number of stereotypes.  Hattie McDaniel deserves much credit for her performance as Mammie - a crude character played with an amazingly enjoyable gusto that quite rightly merited an Oscar.  Less commendable is Butterfly McQueen's Prissy, a submissive and incompetent character played with so much excitement as to bring to mind that more recent symbol of racism, Jar Jar Binks.

It's a troublesome movie, in some ways a successor to 'Birth of a Nation' (1915), that other huge tale of the American South.  It's not a good film to find yourself compared to.  'Gone With the Wind' is far more entertaining and enjoyable, which might make it the more dangerous of the two.

Hattie McDaniel as Mammie.

With 'Gone With the Wind' behind us, it seems the work of The Penciltonian, this century of cinema, can truly end.  The full list of films covered can be found here, and I think it makes a good place to start and to finish.

I suppose I ought to find some 2014 film to comment on, since the new year is now underway, but then what?  I'm giving some thought to repurposing the blog or (if the concept is different) starting a brand new one.  Not another obsessive catalogue or box-ticking exercise, but something new.  I'd be happy to hear any ideas you may have, even very terrible ones.

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All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

I'm rather wary of war films.  As part of my job I visit elderly people in their homes, and I've known a couple of them to spend their entire lives sitting before the television, watching war-film after war-film.  They wake in the morning, put on a war adventure channel, and watch it until bed-time, every day until they die.  It's one way to spend retirement, I guess, but one of them shouts and screams death-threats at the films' villains, 'bloody Japs', 'we're gonna kill ya', and so on, and many phrases far too coarse or murderously racist for me to reproduce in the pages of The Penciltonian.  War films seem to play to, and encourage, a horrible sort of xenophobia.

For this reason I spent a long while avoiding 'All Quiet on the Western Front', which I'd bought from a very interesting charity shop in Walkley (the right-hand half of the shop was a charity shop like any other, and the left-hand side was a pet-shop.  One of the shop assistants was a giant dog).  If I'd given the film's packaging slightly more attention it might have allayed my fears.  Firstly, the protagonists are WWI Germans, an unlikely set of heroes for an American film, and secondly this is a famed anti-war picture.  That's a genre I can more easily get behind.

War.

I've heard it said that it's impossible to make an anti-war-film, as war always looks really cool.  I'm not sure I agree with the argument, but it's an interesting one.  War looks absolutely awful all the way through this movie.  The youths, a class of boys, are stirred up by their schoolmaster with a torrent of rhetoric about glory and duty to defend their country.  They chant joyfully about their fatherland as one might today yell 'U-S-A!  U-S-A!'  Inside twenty minutes they're on the front lines, and everybody starts starving and dying, being blinded, losing limbs and freaking out.  The main character, Paul Bäumer (Lew Ayres) sees all his friends and contemporaries wiped out, and, when he returns to his home-town on leave, finds his old community refuse to believe his stories of a futile, unwinnable war.  They're too convinced by their own opinions, and by the propaganda from the media.

In Britain today, the old idea that soldiers are all inherently heroic is making a return, meaning that any future wars will be far more appealing to our society.  So far as I can ascertain, soldiers have two main jobs: shooting people, and threatening to shoot people if they fail to obey.  As a career, it's a very exciting way out of the poverty of austerity Britain - glamorous, masculine, and with the chance to punish the enemies most cursed by xenophobic tabloids.  One needn't be heroic to find that appealing.  One need only be physically fit.  Perhaps I'm excessively liberal, but I favour peacemakers to gun-toting peacekeepers, and find teachers, firefighters, missionaries and (when they're not being scary) police officers more admirable than armed drones.

The opening slide of the movie

I was pleasantly surprised to find 'All Quiet on the Western Front' so well-made and watchable.  If you've been following The Penciltonian with an obsessive avidity, you may recall that I've really liked the 30s films from Germany and Russia, but found the English-language stuff like 'The Island of Lost Souls' (1932) and 'Lives of a Bengal Lancer' (1935) for instance, to be rather heavy-going.  This was made only three years after the first feature-length talking picture, and the transition from silent films to talkies was a pretty bumpy one.  Here, though, is a well-crafted film, directed with a flair - with, for instance, some extremely disturbing shots of mass death when the British come over the top - and which wouldn't seem outdated even if it were released a decade or two later.  This is an impressive film with a message worth hearing.


P.S. Happy Poppy Day, if that's what floats yer boat.

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The Godfather (1972)

1971's 'Shaft' and 1972's sequel 'Shaft's Big Score!' seemed terribly similar to one another, seeming to present too homogenous a picture of the early seventies, so I resolved to watch another film for one or both of the years, to get a little variety in.  Since I felt I'd ill-appreciated the movie when I first saw it in 2007, I thought I'd watch 'The Godfather', commonly regarded as one of the greatest movies of the Twentieth Century.

Well, it turns out to be excellent.  It feels much more relaxed, more lifelike than 'Doctor Zhivago' (1965), for instance (if I may take an example of a substantial film from the previous decade, the direction and storytelling of which I had applauded).  But you don't need me to commend 'The Godfather'.  So many words have been spent, this last 41 years, in this film's praise that it would be a waste of your time for me to say anything more.

P.S. This is why The Penciltonian won't even be watching 'Citizen Kane' (1941)

P.P.S. I'm aware I've replaced one 1972 New York crime movie with another, but they're as different as they could be.  Nobody would have thought to append an exclamation mark to this movie's title.

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Doctor Zhivago (1965)

I was expecting to write about how 'Doctor Zhivago' is a film that, though I respect as great, well-made and technically excellent, I don't like at all, and find intolerable to watch.  Disconcertingly, though, watching it for a third time, I found myself enjoying it tremendously, not irritated by the wet passivity of the eponymous poet, not wearied by the tragedy, but interested and engaged.

What had gone wrong this time, or right this time and wrong before?  Perhaps, because I now knew the order of events, I knew what I was meant to care about - or perhaps Yuri Zhivago irritated me less this year because, since seeing it last, I had a lodger, a scientist from Dijon, who strongly resembled Omar Sharif's bright-eyed, moustached humanist, meaning I find the character more familiar and sympathetic than I did before.  I'm disinclined to suggest that this is a case of my tastes maturing in the last five years, as that would seem an insult to my younger self, who I believe found legitimate reasons to dislike the film back in 2007 and 8 - and might imply that I'm now more inclined to accept the boring.  No, I wonder whether the real reason for my turnaround is that we are now living in revolutionary times.

Zhivago, after the revolution

Before I get to that, let me praise the film for a moment.  Like 'Bridge on the River Kwai', this is a film by David Lean (this time adapting the work, and to an extent the life and the funeral, of Boris Pasternak), and there's good reason Lean is so well-regarded, and is the favourite director of another erstwhile housemate of mine.  His 'Doctor Zhivago' is exceptionally well directed - and I know I've been saying that about a lot of films without really explaining what can be an empty phrase, so on this occasion I'll try to explain what I mean: Lean presents a convincingly freezing Russia, and makes good use of quick cuts and transitions, sudden jumps through actions or conversations, to give us what we need to see but suggest a story in which everything takes even longer than this long film can put on screen.  He makes fine use of a limited palette of black, white and brown, with occasional red for the Bolshevists and big yellow flowers in the spring.

His images are striking and his camerawork inventive, sometimes moving through the dark to peer through different ice-covered windows, sometimes following in characters' drafts, making their way through dense crowds or packed rooms where there hardly seems space for a camera.  My favourite moment in the film comes straight after the intermission and entr'acte - the screen is entirely black, but not empty.  There's the sound of a steam-train, and after almost a minute a pinprick of light appears in the centre of the screen, and grows, until we realise our camera is mounted on the front of the train, and we've been watching a journey through a long, dark tunnel.  This isn't just a lot of fancy technique, indeed a lot of it is subtle unless one is watching for it - but it builds a real epic, lives fuller and more complex than we see on screen and a huge and deeply troubled Russia in need of a revolution, and then suffering from it.  The way the film is made, and the story told, raises questions: there is something fascinatingly odd about the meeting between the two Zhivagos, Yuri (Omar Sharif), the doctor and poet, and Yevgraf (Alec Guinness), his half-brother, the secret policeman, who bookends and narrates the film.  On the one occasion they meet, we never see Guinness speak to his brother.  His side of the conversation is carried entirely through narration in the past tense, leaving the two terribly distant even in their one happy union.

Says Klaus Kinski: "I am the only free man on this train.
The rest of you are cattle!"

This the second Russian Revolution film I've watched for The Penciltonian.  The first was 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925), which had the merit of actually being Russian.  That film was a work of propaganda, so presented the revolution with great optimism.  Perhaps rightly so, as change was surely needed, and the men well motivated, but 'Doctor Zhivago' gives us the unpleasant 'what happened next', and even the unpleasant 'what happened during'.  It starts with peaceful protests, but our media often tells us how unsuccessful those are, and what tends to happen to innocent protestors.  Alas, it seems the police will always put down peaceful protest, as is memorably the case here, and as they did in New York and other cities two years back, tearing down the Occupy camps, and in many cases exceeding their jurisdiction, and that of any human being.

'Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex' (2008) made a convincing case that peaceful protests are always punished and never achieve their aims, and that violent action and domestic terrorism are the only ways one can really highlight injustices and strike against their causes.  They're extreme and unpleasant techniques, but it may explain why peaceful protests, where they don't peter out and fail, tend to grow into the kind of revolution we see here.  As the film shows us, the Russian Revolution wasn't clean and wasn't very successful.  The old order was certainly overthrown - and eventually we'll get to 'Nicholas and Alexandra' (1971) for the Tsar's sorry side of the story - but despite the change of regime, the social injustices stayed, or got far worse.  It's the same story of hopeful revolutions gone bad that we see in Iran in 'Persepolis' (2007) or in England in 'Winstanley' (1975).  Watching this as the story of a troubled Russia, rather than simply that of a mild-mannered medic, made the story come alive for me on this viewing.  This isn't merely a tragic romance, though it certainly is that - it's the story of revolutionary times, such as the world is experiencing today.  They're terrible times, where hope is trodden down in the name of progress, or else survives to blossom into something yet uglier.

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Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

Is it better to die for what you really believe in or compromise your principles and live?  It's a strange question, but cinema never tires of asking it.  I'm always tempted toward the former option, but Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) agrees so vehemently that he'd seemingly die for almost anything, any point of the law, however small, and have his men die with him.  He's quite fantastically stubborn, and it really doesn't go well for him, or for anyone, except the people he's trying to defy.

This is 'Bridge on the River Kwai', from a novel by Pierre Boulle who also gave us 'Planet of the Apes' (1968).  Both are exciting movies full of apparent hope in the midst of catastrophe, and each uses a tale of thrilling adventure to convince us that all human endeavours are ultimately futile, and that we might as well just hurry up and die.  Unavoidably, by the way, I'll be spoiling the end of this film for you.  But like the end of 'The Wicker Man' (1973), I think it isn't hard to see it coming.

Colonel Saitu!

It all starts with the surrendered Colonel Nicholson marching his men into a Japanese concentration camp in the middle of the Second World War, somewhere between Bangkok and Rangoon.  Colonel Saitu (Sessue Hayakawa) intends to set the British soldiers to work building a railway-bridge over the Kwai, and Nicholson is fine with that so long as the officers don't have to join in.  It's in the Geneva convention, see.  What follows is an excellent hour-long stubborn-off, with calm British resolve against Japanese rage, a clash of two national stereotypes which comes off as excellently tense unfolding drama, and which left me quite exhausted wanting one side or other to compromise even just a little.

Of course, once things get worked out, Colonel Nicholson is determined that the British should build, not just a bridge, but the best bridge on the continent, which causes problems when the film moves its focus to a new set of heroes travelling out to sabotage the bridge and slow the enemy's supply-lines, not realising that it will be so well-built.  We then alternate between the two teams of heroes, one believing that completion of the bridge is the only worthwhile thing they can really do with their lives, the other realising that their chances of survival are low, and the only thing they can hope to achieve in their remaining time on Earth is the destruction of the bridge.

Aaaarggghhh!

I've a notion that in Boulle's original novel the bridge isn't destroyed, but this is a movie and movies don't work like that.  If we're promised an exploding bridge, then gosh-darn-it, there's going to be the most explodey bridge that the super-widescreen of Cinemascope can show.  It's a long film, but it's an excellent film.  David Lean is directing, and he really knows how to handle an epic, and build up tension.  His next two films were the magnificent 'Lawrence of Arabia' (1962), and 'Doctor Zhivago' (1965), which I really don't like at all but will concede is a very good film.  It's easy enough to make a big film, is scarily simple to make a long film, but David Lean really knows how to get the details right, so that every shot is well constructed, every element works together, and nothing goes to waste.  He especially knows how to use Alec Guinness, who appears in all his better-known films (notably as Fagin in the not-a-musical version of 'Oliver Twist' from 1948), and gives one of his best performances here, managing to make Colonel Nicholson something other than an agitating jerk.

I once had a house-mate who took great personal inspiration from Colonel Nicholson, as well as from Yuri Zhivago and T.E. Lawrence.  One of his greatest skills was the ability to give flawlessly loud renditions of the final scene of any David Lean movie, and his one-man performance of the end of 'Bridge on the River Kwai' was a thing to behold.  The scene builds up so gradually and so quietly, with a train audibly on its way for ten full minutes before it arrives at the explosive-covered bridge; the tension racks up, as Nicholson, slowly and methodically, discovers and uncovers the cable that connects the explosives to their detonator, a realisation growing ever clearer in his military mind.  Those long minutes are deafeningly quiet, verging on silence before at last we reach the cry, so often repeated by Ted, of 'Blow up the bridge? BLOW UP THE BRIDGE!  BLOOOOWWWW!?   BLOW UP THE BRIDGE!  HELP!  HEEELP!   HEEEEELLLP!'

BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

And when it comes it's not a model, but a real explosion with a real bridge and a real train, and it makes all the difference.

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Heimat (1984)

Heimat!  This Chronicle of Germany is a firm favourite of mine, and not just because of its fabulous duration.  Heimat and I both entered the world 29 years ago, in 1984, and it was watching this intimate overview of the century that first set me on my current course of watching a hundred films from a hundred years, making some sense of the twentieth century as a single story.  As you may note above, there is a video edition of this entry for those happier with dozens of clips than hundreds of written words.

Normally when you watch a film you sit down, you watch, things happen to characters, and you get your resolution and the film stops.  Heimat, though, just keeps going.  It is, in fact, very long, taking around sixteen hours to tell the story of a small village in rural Germany, and a family who live there.  It starts in 1919 and just keeps on rolling until its 1982, by which time our central characters have grown up, grown old and begotten from their loins the new generation of central characters.  In a film of such expanse I think it's no spoiler to say that almost everybody alive at the start of the story has died by the end.  There's something fascinatingly unusual, something Old-Testament-like, about a story in which the main characters at the end aren't present at all at the start, and the only characters we meet in the first hour aren't there at all at the end.  Heimat isn't like other films.  It's like life.

1938: Otto Wohlleben, who begat Hermann Simon

When I first saw it I made a mistake that's easy in real life too - I concentrated on the older generation, on Maria Simon, the film's main character, on Paul and Pauline and Eduard, and I ignored the children, forgetting that they would soon turn into real people, and I'd have no idea where they'd come from.  By the fifties the film has slowly switched its emphasis and become the story of Maria's children Anton, Ernst and Hermann, the last of whom went on to star in the 'Die Zweite Heimat' (1993) and 'Heimat 3' (2004), where he became the cinema character I know best and care about the most - but that's another story.  Characters who'd been the centre of their own lives, and at the heart of the community, become parents, become grandparents, they die of age or accident or war, or equally often we leap forward a few years and they're just gone, just dead.  Quite disconcertingly, the film raises the strange prospect that our grandparents may once have been children and people with lives as fun and interesting as our own.

The film is made up of a number of films - see the postscript for quite how that works - and is shot variously in colour, sepia and monochrome, and on a variety of film-stocks.  It starts almost entirely black and white,' because, y'know, things just were in those days, but is almost entirely in colour after colour television is introduced in West Germany in 1967 (August 25th, if you like to celebrate anniversaries).  It takes a little getting used to, but seems utterly appropriate given how the century's story is one of technological advancement.  Integral to the human stories playing out in the village are the introduction of the radio, the motorcycle, aircraft, and especially the development of advanced camera lenses, as a rural community in the middle of nowhere becomes part of the modern, industrial world.  In the first half the town's core seems to be Matthias's forge - and I'm delighted to see that the prequel 'Die Andere Heimat' -  set in the 1840s and coming to cinemas near you later this year - sees some prominent use of it.  By the end, new industries have risen and fallen, and the village is quite radically different, but remains utterly recognisable.

1944: Anton Simon adjusts a lens.  He later founds Simon Optik

The final telling in particular is perfectly filmed, timed and edited, and despite its optimistic tone and happy ending of sorts, I'd forgotten how upsetting I found it.  There are a lot of images there that linger in the mind, Hermann Simon arriving late to a funeral to find a thunderstorm has scattered the mourners, leaving the casket alone in the sopping street - and the strangely terrifying flyover of the Hunsrück landscape that follows.  This last part uses some strange and unusual techniques, things we don't see anywhere else in Heimat, but uses them to tell a story properly, a story I really care about.  And I don't think this teil's impact comes from its position at the end of an epic - I think anybody who hadn't seen a frame of Heimat could watch 'The Feast of the Living and the Dead', or even just its opening quarter hour, and find something fascinating, tense, engaging, sad and real, which is surely a good set of things for a film to be.

'Heimat', and its follow-ups 'Die Zweite Heimat' (1993) and 'Heimat 3' (2004) are high on my list of favourite things in the world, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if future generations value them highly for their quality as drama as well as their value as historical chronicles.  It's just a pity that, being extremely long German films, most of my fellow Britons haven't found the time or urge to watch them.

1982: Glasisch, who sees the whole story

Finally, and by way of a postscript: is this really a movie, as Wikipedia tells us, or a TV miniseries as IMDB claims?  Well, it's kind of both.  It's a film made of films.  Eine Chronik in elf Teilen.  Its threequel 'Heimat 3' is clearer, 'Film in 6 Teilen'.  I'm a dilettantish speaker of German , but that's surely one film in six tellings, or eleven tellings of extremely irregular duration as the case is here.  But wait, how can something in more than one discrete portion be a single film?  Well, earlier in The Penciltonian I talked about 1924's 'Die Nibelungen', one film in two portions which at five hours was so long viewers went to see part one, Siegfried, then came out to the cinema again the following day to see part two, Kriemhild's Rache.  Then there was 1945's 'Les Enfants du Paradis', which was made in Paris when the occupying forces didn't permit films longer than 90 minutes, so the three-hour story was told as a double bill of a film and its sequel, always meant to be watched together.  And then there was 'Das Boot' (1981), made for cinemas, but also shown in expanded form on telly as a mini-series.  Did I spend eleven hours watching those particular films entirely so I could use them as examples when talking about Heimat?  Maybe!  But they were excellent!  So anyway, Heimat was shown in cinemas, and people would go to watch a few instalments, then go back the next week for the next few films of film.  Rather wonderfully, I understand people started to recognise the regular viewers at the cinemas, and started meeting up with them before and after the screenings, having Heimat parties.  Why don't you have a Heimat party, dear viewer?

P.P.S. I first discovered Heimat by accident, when an erstwhile housemate of mine mentioned seeing it in a local shop, accidentally reduced from £39 to £3.99, and suggested that I go out and buy two copies, one for him and one for myself, before the shopkeepers realised their error.  It was an inauspicious start to a love affair.

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The Heimat trilogy. Is there anything more alluring? No siree!

Cabiria (1914)

The giant statue of Moloch consumes another victim!

'Cabiria' was the first truly epic film - and I do like an epic.  It's a story of melodrama, adventure and rescue set during the second Punic War - which is to say Phoenicans, Carthaginians and Romans in the minus-second Century, with Hannibal and his elephants.  The film plays out on huge sets with a real sense of depth, and tells a story tremendous scope, with crowds engulfed in convincingly hot smoke as they flee the flaming mount Etna.   For the 1910s, it's quite a thing.  It's strange to think that people almost a hundred years ago were making movies at all, let alone movies as grand and impressive as this.

To begin with, the pictures, sets and framing reminded me of the yet earlier 'La Vie et La Passion de Jesus Christ' (1903), but this is an even more ambitious picture, less reliant on an audience's knowledge of the story being told.  Unfortunately it gets around this unfamiliarity by asking the audience to read what's happening rather than watching it, with paragraph-long intertitles of an occasionally poetic character.  Still, in terms of telling its tale clearly and presenting attractive pictures, this eclipses the other 1910s films I've seen and wouldn't seem too shabby in the mid-'20s.  It leaves 1915's 'Birth of a Nation' looking crude and ugly, a reminder that America was still a decade or two away from being coolest country.

Thanks intertitles.  Thintertitles.

Being a decade ahead of your time is quite impressive in early cinema. The only things I'd really complain about are the length (though it is an epic), the amount of off-screen politics we're expected to follow, and the dearth of mid-shots and close-ups, though of course those hadn't really been invented yet.  Watching this left me appreciating the facial closeup far more than I have before.  Without it, the main characters all seem a little too distant, like members of the crowd. Without an audible voice an actor really needs their facial expressions visible if they're to present any emotion beyond flailing-armed distress.  Still, considering how much I found to bemoan and condemn in 'Birth of a Nation' or the 1917 '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea', this really is the great triumph of the decade.

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You can see the whole thing on Youtube if you fancy.  It's like looking back in time: everyone involved is surely dead.

Stalker (1979)

Outside the Zone, everything is sepia and slow

I'm afraid I'm inevitably going to spoil the end of 'Stalker', not that it ends with a twist.  No, it's just that the things I expected all the way through, which I rather looked forward to, never came to pass.

This is a Russian SF movie, a horror, perhaps, though nothing especially horrific occurs, set in a mysterious Zone, which few dare visit.  The Zone, we hear, must be respected.  Those who disrespect this grassy locale will find themselves caught in horrific and unpredictable traps, twisted, killed, destroyed.  At the heart of The Zone is a room where your heart's desire will be granted, but the less direct route is always safer.  So, after a (deliberately boring) first half hour ending with a journey into The Zone (on a wonderful little railway cart), our three protagonists, The Writer, the Professor and the Stalker take the most rambling and indirect path possible, rather than just walking in a straight line for about a hundred yards and either dying horrifically or ending the film early.

Inside the Zone, everything is ostensibly deadly

This circuitous route through a capricious realm of sudden death makes for an extremely tense film.  It's drawn out even longer by lengthy pauses to rest, close eyes, to think, and talk philosophy.  In general this heightens the tension, and the great length of each camera-shot leaves open the constant and growing suggestion that any moment now the Zone will do its thing, and one of the travellers will be punished with death.  It's really extremely fraught.  Until, that is, the viewer realises that the horrible deaths are never going to come.  In the original novel, 'Roadside Picnic', characters perish in the meat-grinder and in many other grizzly ways.  Not so in the movie; they speak of the murderous traps, and the chance of our characters dying very suddenly and in ways that kinda serve them right always seems terrifyingly imminent, but it just doesn't happen.  The anticipation of blood and mysterious violence makes its non-appearance tremendously disappointing.

Now, there's an exciting film that could have been made here, though a rather shallower one.  Pump up the cast of characters with some trap-fodder, cut the rambling, improvised-sounding philosophy, and have the most folly-filled adventurers explode in showers of blood once in a while and you have a crowd-pleasing thriller - a charmless work, but such films do well enough at the box-office.  Perhaps I was raised in a more bloodthirsty generation?

The Stalker's daughter regards beverage conveyances.
Stalker, here, doesn't mean seedy deviant, but hunter.

After the difficult opening half-hour, I found most of the film quite satisfying, if low on incident.  I reassured myself that it was far better that 'Na Srebrnym Globie' (1977).  Both are two-and-a-half-hour ventures into the gritty and Wintery SF of the Eastern Bloc, and both films ran into political trouble for their miserable vision of the life as grey, dirty, bleak and awful.  In this, though, I knew who all the characters were, where they were going and what might happen to them.  Had the ending not undermined all that went before, or had the body of the film have been less gruelling, I might have come out of it all more positively.  For the last half-hour I waited for the film to end, and reflected on how this Penciltonian project prompts me to watch films I wouldn't otherwise have watched, and finish them so that you, dear viewer, need not.

Opai suggests that I've failed to see the film's merits, or have written it off unduly.  Perhaps I'll revisit it some day to see what more I can find in it, but it won't be soon.

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I realised after I watched it that it's a film by Andrei Tarkovsky.  He's meant to be rather good, you know.  He did 'Solaris' (1972), didn't he?

The Longest Day (1962)

The British invasion

This is a film about D-Day.  In fact, this is the film about D-Day, and covers the day itself in great detail, and from all angles.  British and American stars (Sean Connery and Richard Burton and Roddy McDowall and Rod Steiger and John Wayne and many more) play the British and American forces, German notables (all famous, though Bond villain Gert Fröbe is the only one I knew) play the Germans, and French celebutantes (including Arletty and Jean-Louis Barrault From 1945's 'Les Enfants du Paradis') play the resistance.  It's like a war version of 'Love Actually' (2003), as myriad plot-lines are played out discretely; concise stories told economically, each with its international superstars, building into the larger story of the movie.

Watching this film, it became suddenly apparent to me that I didn't really know anything about D-Day at all. Indeed, I'd confused it in my mind with the Dunkirk evacuation, and couldn't have told you where or when it was, except that it involved British boats and continental Europe, and was a big deal for the second world war.  The film, then, was a revelation.

He got up so quickly that he put his boots on the wrong feet

I don't generally care for war-films, as too often they tend to be about our goodies against inherently evil foreigners, and play on the audience's xenophobia.  Now, I won't claim that the forces of Nazi Germany weren't the aggressors here, but the individuals in the German army probably didn't think of themselves as fighting for the cause of evil.  Indeed, one German officer, seeing the British progress rhetorically exclaims 'you know, sometimes I wonder which side God is on'.  Here, as in 'Das Boot' (1981) and 'Downfall' (2004), we get to see the German forces played as real characters, not as insane pantomime villains.

It helps, I think, that the four nationalities' stories - the French, British, German and American parts of the film - were all made separately, with each part assigned a director from the relevant country.  This, then, is four films, weaved into one.  Such a thing could be an appalling mess, but the style and flavour, the drama and humour, is consistent enough that it all comes together properly.  Among the film's advisors were the generals who plotted the invasion and those who masterminded the defence, meaning that the film has historical merit, and takes all the sides seriously.

John Wayne, who I usually can't abide, is actually very good in this.

The whole thing looks and sounds like a forties war-movie, albeit a very expensive one - in monochrome with dialogue spoken very clearly, and a big war song at the end - but is framed in the super-widescreen of the late fifties, the Cinemascope usually reserved for productions in extremely full colour.

It's an exciting and interesting film, as the large number of small storylines means we get all of the highlights and skip past the padding.  The ridiculous cast of the famous and the soon-to-be-famous is one that's rarely been matched, and all do what they do best.  There's a lot of fun had, with soldiers on all sides seen as plucky, good humoured and occasionally very eccentric.  It's all the more alarming, then, when they come to fight against one another, and we see vast numbers mown down with machine guns in almost every location.

Hey, it's that mime from 'Les Enfants du Paradis' (1945).  That was a great movie.

I'm very glad to have seen it, since it gave gave me a much clearer idea what D-Day was about, and what happened.  Frustratingly, despite a hefty duration, it seemed to end just as things were getting going.  Things had clearly swung in the allies' favour, but I'll need to do some further research to find out quite what happened next, and how we got from this great surge, with all its unlikely good fortune, to the ultimate victory in Europe and end of the war.  We won, or so I'm told, but I don't yet know how.  Thinking about it, that's a fairly substantial gap in my general knowledge.


P.S. Tune in next time for 'Stalker' (1979), a Russian film that I still don't really understand.

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...and here it is, if you'd care to watch it.  You might well find it as excitingly educational as I did.

Les Enfants du Paradis (1945)

Not sure if this is a romantic or a cynical statement.  Maybe both?

This film was made in German-occupied Paris in 1945, at a time when the authorities forbade the production of films any longer than ninety minutes.  Consequently, 'Les Enfants du Paradis' masquerades as two films, or as a film and its sequel, which are always to be shown as a double bill, thus giving us one long story which just happens to have credits before and after its intermission.  Premiere Epoque: 'Le Boulevard du Crime', Deuxieme Epoque: 'L'Homme Blanc'.  I knew I was onto a winner as soon as the words 'The Boulevard of Crime' came onto the screen.  It stirred something within me.  This is one of the most excellent films I've ever met, and I count it a great pity that it's not more widely watched and celebrated.

The story is set in the Paris of the 19th Century, at a time when there were two types of theatre: the classy sort with dialogue and wealthy audiences; and the Pantomime - not the Panto of modern Britain, but a mute sort of melodrama, somewhere between mime, ballet and cartoon, to which the poor flock for their entertainment, and, on a good day, get to see unplanned physical fights break out among the cast on stage.  The 'paradis' of the title, by the way, is the uppermost circle of audience seating, which in the UK is called 'the gods'.

Shakespearian charmer Frédérick Lemaître, and the elusive Garance

Much of the film is set in and around these two sorts of theatre, especially The Funambules, which can only afford a licence to stage pantomime.  Rising to prominence is the truly brilliant Baptiste, who when we first see him witnesses a robbery on the boulevard and reports what he saw to a policeman, communicating only through the medium of excellently enjoyable mime.  Baptiste is a clown of the truest and best kind, like a 19th Century Chaplin: hilarious, but tragic, sentimental and beautiful.

It's an interestingly stylised work, perhaps drawing inspiration from the theatres it describes.  When I first watched it, I wondered whether this was a melodrama of sorts, with everything 'writ large', since some characters seemed at first to be types: the optimistic charmer with theatrical ambitions, the villainous cad with the moustache and the murderous manner, and so on.  As it goes on, though, the characters show themselves to be far more interesting, and far more real, making intelligent decisions at odds with my expectations, and showing themselves to be much more nuanced than they first appeared.  Though told very colourfully, even joyfully, this is a world of real human mistakes and rectifications, passionate but destructively asymmetrical love-affairs.

Lacenaire is kinda the villain I've always wanted to be, except...

Much of the story revolves around Baptiste, who is the first truly great mime performer, the first to compare with the greatest of actors, whose performances are convincingly heartbreaking or cruel.  He falls passionately, too passionately, in love with Garance, a courtesan who matches him for beauty, and who stands out as an unusually interesting and independent female character for this era of films, not at all cold, but never dependent on the male characters, nor ever under their power except for a dark period between the two films.  I'm often surprised by the merits of female characters in the older films I've viewed, especially compared to the stereotypes that come up in more recent, more popular works.  I ought to praise the script here, which is uniformly excellent in dialogue and in the engaging, entrancing story that unfolds in a manner fresh, amusing but ultimately terrible.  I must also add Jean-Louis Barrault and the mononymous Arletty to my list of actors worth watching in anything, though of course there are, of course, many more excellent performances in this double film, but these two deserve special attention.

The film also follows Lacenaire, who somehow manages to be the film's villain without ever really opposing the film's heroes, and Lemaître, a chancer who leaps into acting on a whim, and finds himself excellently popular.  Lemaître has a dream of acting some Shakespeare (oh, you know, that British guy who wrote all those brutal and vulgar melodramas), and tears apart lesser writers, memorably ad libbing a new ending to a disappointing play, refusing to die on cue, and taking the whole audience with him into a magnificent condemnation of the playwrights.

Baptiste and Garance

The four characters all prosper, in some way or another, whether growing in fame or in notoriety, or getting married and having children, but with the wrong person.  None of them seem to find any great security, though Baptiste and Lemaître seem to draw a lot of their skill at performance from their volatility - though this leads to the odd duel or cancelled performance.  Many fine and upsetting things ensue, and twists I yearned for refused to arrive, or are terribly undermined by more complicated, more painful answers.  In the end, in the midst of the bustling carnival, Garance slips away forever into the crowd, and Baptiste, in desperate pursuit of his true and obsessive love, finds himself fighting helplessly through a sea of revellers, all dressed as his famous stage persona.  It's a desperate scene, and a distressing end to a character.  I don't like to spoil endings, but this moment is just a small fraction of the conclusion to the film, and the many stories of the two theatres.

Despite having seen this only twice, I'd happily claim it as one of my favourite films, and even in translation one of my favourite scripts to anything.  Despite its tragic turns and complications, few films make me so happy as this, and very few are so suited to my tastes.  Said François Truffaut, "I would give up all my films to have directed Children of Paradise".  As a writer of sorts, I'd happily say something very similar of the screenplay.  Off-hand, I'd be hard-pressed to find something I'd more happily be responsible for than this.  Its lightness of touch, its sense of freedom, beauty and delight is all the more notable for the fact it was filmed in an occupied country in the midst of a war.


P.S. It turns out the actors I praised are both in 'The Longest Day' (1962), which I accidentally bought from a charity shop last year, so I imagine I'll be slipping that in somewhere later in the project.  Is it any good?

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I'd urge you to watch this film some day.  It's extremely good, and it saddens me to think something so good, so well-made, so enjoyable, with these performances and this dialogue, is as good as unknown in the UK.