Shutter Island (2010)

A twin delight of writing The Penciltonian and having access to Netflix is that I'm able to catch up on some of the big movies everybody else seems to have seen at The Cinema.  Since I'm not immensely sociable, and since movie theatres are unappealing for dozens of reasons, I've managed to miss almost all the blockbusters of the last half-decade, so I had ample choice for 2010's movie.  I left the choice up to Saskia, since she worked in a cinema at the time, and she picked 'Shutter Island', as I said I knew nothing about it, nothing at all.

Apparently complete ignorance is a good starting-point for this film, so if you think you'd like to watch it (and it is very good) I'd skip the rest of my comments, though I intend to say little and spoil less.  I knew only that it was set on an island.

So Leonardo DiCaprio is a detective, ferried into an island asylum for the criminally insane, there to investigate an implausible disappearance.  This much is clear in the first ten minutes, and it's really all I need to talk about.  It's a fine, attention-grabbing set-up for a film, and he's an actor I quite enjoy.  I was wary of the whole 'island of insane criminals' concept, but once Sir Ben Kingsley turns up as a quiet, intense, but generally agreeable psychiatrist we get a decent discussion of medical and surgical responses to the island's prisoners and patients (this being 1954, and the age of needless brain-surgery) and his own preferred method, the talking cure.  The mentally ill prisoners are shown to be irrational, sometimes unpredictable and in some circumstances dangerous, but for once they aren't presented to us as monsters.

I'm rather pleased to have discovered so recent a film about crime and psychiatry, as it's a pair of themes that are often coupled in the movies.  From pictures I've seen this year, 'Das Testament des Dr Mabuse' (1933) and 'Der Cabinet des Dr Caligari' (1920) both tell of murderous psychiatrists who dwell within their asylums, and 'Häxan' (1922) ends with a familiar discussion of whether institutionalising our eccentrics is really much of a move up from burning them to death.  'The Island of Lost Souls' (1932) also leapt to mind, since it too begins with a hero on a boat to a dangerous island ruled by a doctor, his guards and patients.  Its a pity I didn't make room for Hitchcock's 'Spellbound' (1945), which popularised all the common psychiatrist stereotypes while telling a tale of a murder investigation.  Cinema has taught us to be immensely suspicious of psychiatrists, and this film spends a long while asking us, and DiCaprio's detective, what we should make of Sir Ben Kingsley and his Germanic colleague Max von Sydow.

What we get is engrossing and rather fascinating, and feels much like a cross between 'The Wicker Man' (1973) and 'The Prisoner' (1967).  Indeed, it does the things that 'The Prisoner' did very much better than that series own 2009 remake, and is, as a result, extremely satisfying and much to my tastes.  If I've one complaint it's that the last few minutes of the climax are too laboriously thorough, telling us something we already know to make sure we get the point.

At the end I discovered this was yet another Martin Scorsese film.  These keep creeping up on me during my Penciltonian viewings, so this one goes on the list with 'Taxi Driver' (1976), 'The Last Temptation of Christ' (1988) and 'Goodfellas' (1990). Only Peter Greenaway and Fritz Lang have lent me so many movies, and I'd be happy to see more by any of 'em.

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Mary & Max (2009)

My friends Cassandra and Fnord recommended me this film, and lent me a copy, urging me to watch it without my first finding out anything about it.  When I saw them next, they lent me another copy, and it became apparent that they thought I should see it, and would enjoy it.  Now, Cassandra and Fnord make very good recommendations, and know me as well as anybody can be said to, so I found some time and lent it my attention, and oughtn't to have been surprised when it turned out to be excellent.

It tells the story of Mary, a young girl in a sepia-toned Australia striking up an unlikely pen-friendship with Max, a middle-aged man in monochrome New York.  Mary is lonely but habitually optimistic while Max is weary, socially awkward and extremely solitary.  Despite the fact that
both live rather bleak lives filled with tragedy, the story of their friendship manages to be light, fun and charming, though always terribly sad.

Mary, with her rooster Ethel.  Her favourite colour is brown.

The film plays into a few of my interests quietly indulges my love of toilet humour and cheery grotesquery.  From the off we learn that Mary has a birth-mark 'the colour of poo', and that her father has retired to his shed to taxidermise alarmed-looking birds he's found.  It's never horrid or disgusting, but borders on the naughty.

The whole film is led by a narrator, the calm and reassuring Barry Humphries, with the vast majority of dialogue either given in his affable narration or in the letters written from Mary to Max or typed in return.  Were the images not so compelling - fascinating, blanched and misshapen claymation - one could almost enjoy the work entirely on audio.  The film doesn't hurry to make its points, but takes its time showing to show us beautiful things.

One of Max's lists.

The characters are few, meaning we grow to know Mary and Max extremely well as the former grows older and the latter broader.  We see calamities in their surroundings and their friendship that they can't see or understand, and I, at least, spent half the film hoping they could one day meet in person, and the latter half fearing that such a difficult meeting had grown inevitable.

I've already described it as beautiful, sad, fun and charming, and don't particularly like to repeat myself, nor want to inflict thesaurus-scrapings on you, but I don't think I can better describe the film than that.  There's plenty more to it that I'd love to enthuse about, but it's better that you see it for yourself.

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Here it is on shiny disc, if you have the urge.  Some nice looking extras on there, too, but I really do commend the main feature to you.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Dr Caligari!

This is one of the great classics of German expressionist cinema, a genre which, in my crude understanding, manifests itself in highly stylised sets of strange angles, with performances to match.  It's a technique used on a much larger scale and budget in 'Metropolis' (1927), but which here manages to be far more original, and so far less impressive.

There's an extent to which circumstances have contrived against 'Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari' winning more of my approval.  For one thing, I'd already seen several monochrome German horror and crime films more to my tastes: the aforementioned 'Metropolis', 'Faust' (1926), 'M' (1931) and 'Das Testament des Dr Mabuse' (1933), all of which were slicker, faster and more unsettling.  For another, I had a choice between watching it on second-hand VHS and watching it on Youtube, neither of which is great for an 83-year old film.  I plumped for the latter which may have been a mistake; it turned out this silent film was silent indeed, and I had to provide my own soundtrack, either through humming or (more practically) through playing what incidental music I had on my phone - the works of Michael Nyman, Roger Limb, and the Radiophonic Workshop.  Watching a slow film in silence is almost unbearable, and thankfully this music wasn't too jarring in tone.

The eponymous cabinet.  I expected something more substantial.

I ought to extend this film some due acknowledgement.  It was made in the 1910s, yet it actually has some facial close-ups, a novelty in those early times, and tells its story clearly enough to follow but only slightly too clearly.  It has cinema's first twist ending, which I initially failed to grasp, but which seems to throw a new light on the rest of the film, and it has a striking central idea, the somnambulist who sleeps in a coffin waking only to predict the future and commit crimes, somewhat in the vein of the Hashshashins of ancient Araby.

Alas, the wonky buildings and the idiosyncratically-painted backdrops work better in film when they're rendered more dynamically, and when the picture quality is better.  It's a style I like, but in recent years it's an aesthetic that's been co-opted by pantomimes, and the low-budget woodwork that makes up this film's tiny sets leaves them with the feeling of a provincial theatre production.  The film is so early that its great innovations have all been repeated and bettered through the decades, and especially so in the remainder of the twenties, making it hard to appreciate how striking the movie must have been when it was new.

In short, I'm pretty sure this is better than any of the films I've seen from earlier years, but it's very much eclipsed by everything that came after.  I feel rather rude dismissing this seminal piece of art as insufficient or comparatively disappointing, but there it is.  It's good, but I'd recommend any of the aforementioned films as better.

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Well, here it is on DVD if you're curious.

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.

Taxi Driver (1976)

I mentioned my film-watching antics to my friend Rob Reed, who lectures in film-related things, so seemed likely to suggest films I hadn't seen and wouldn't have thought of.  He knows how ignorant I am of cinema (or rather, he knows which areas of film I've fixated on, and therefore what I've missed), and, when Christmas came, gave me a film wrapped in festive paper.  'Taxi Driver' was that film (or else this paragraph would seem irrelevant, would it not?).  

The only Martin Scorsese-directed films I'd seen at this point were 'The Last Temptation of Christ' (1988) and 'No Direction Home' (2005), a documentary about Bob Dylan - both of which apparently lay some way outside his usual style.  I had a notion that his films were violent, dark, and full of Italian-Americans shouting at each other (a prospect I've now found hails from his 1990 work 'Goodfellas', which Rob likewise pressed into my hands).

Oh look, some guns.

I suspected that this film would lead to a violent finale, but I wasn't certain even of this.  For the first half-hour, this could just turn into an idiosyncratic romantic comedy, except that our taxi-driving protagonist is just a tad too intense, too socially awkward, and then increasingly so.  For some reason, it hadn't to me occurred at all that the plot would actually be about a man driving a taxi around, but that's how it went.

From the off this was far more attractive than the other 70s films I've looked at so far.  Richer, more menacing, with the taxi prowling, leonine.  We see Robert de Niro thinking, as he drives his taxi, but we don't know what about.  Even in his narration, he gives few clues.  Only the music is overtly menacing - and it's Bernard Hermann composing, so it could hardly be otherwise.

I'll jump past the main body of the film, as I've no interest in reciting synopses in this blog.  In what I took to be the final ten minutes, the film seems to slip into another genre - the practiced violence, the spree I'd spent the last hour preparing for, is far, far dirtier, less clean and easy than I'd expected.  The colours fade and the world slips into slower and slower motion until time seems to stop to show us the whole mess.  Then, when I most expected the film to end, it doesn't.  There are five or ten more minutes, which serve to make the scenario even more unsettling, the idea that the events in this film could happen anywhere, to anyone, for no particular reason.

Bang!

I sometimes wonder what it's like to live in America, where films such as this are set, not in some bigger, cooler, distant and more important nation, but in your homeland.  The States always seem much grander that Britain, even when that just means grimmer and more horrible - and the accents, to one who never visited, mark New York out as a genre rather than a region.

Anyway, I feel I've been writing too many words about some films lately, so, while I could go on rather longer, I'll curtail this here.  Less is more, as they say.

P.S. Since the last update was from the 60s and this was from the 70s, you can expect an 80s film on Thursday, a 90s one on Sunday, and so on, until I grow bored and frustrated with the pattern.  It might prompt me to finally watch something from the 1950s, a decade untouched by the last forty-four films I've watched over the past four months.

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The film, if you yearn for it.

Das Testament Des Dr Mabuse (1933)

Murder!

Mabuse, villain of the earlier 'Dr Mabuse, Der Spieler' (1922) has, since his arrest, gone insane and possibly then gone sane again.  He sits in the asylum, wild-eyed and wild-haired, never speaking a word, but writing page after page after page of instructions on how to commit perfect crimes.  And far across the city, somebody is committing those crimes.

This is recognisably the same Berlin as in 'M' (1931).  The criminal criminal underworld acts with a certain gusto, and seems a relatively agreeable side of society, for those willing to join in - living, laughing and cooking sausages together when not indulging in petty crimes.  The only real evil among them comes from those rare crimes, murders.

Thomas Kent and Lilli in a soggy situation

At the four corners of this adventure are are the aforementioned Dr Mabuse; Professor Baum, the psychiatrist who studies him; Thomas Kent, a handsome and for-some-reason-American-named, basically law-abiding crook who won't commit the murderous instructions passed down from his unseen master; and reprising his role from 'M', the excellent Otto Wernicke as the equally excellent Inspector Lohmann.

Unusually, the presence of both Lohmann and Mabuse makes this a sequel to two different films, taking the hero from one and the villain from the other.  I haven't seen 'Dr Mabuse, Der Spieler' (1922), but I was delighted to see the return of Lohmann (or rather, I'd forgotten him utterly, as I hadn't seen 'M' for five years when I watched this, but he was so enjoyable here that I immediately rewatched 'M' and was delighted to see him return there, even if it was more of a pre-turn).  It's a full-blooded performance with a great amount of humour where it's needed.

The Spectre of Mabuse over Professor Baum

Mabuse is suitably sinister and cadaverous, and is played here by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who was the fascinatingly alien Koenig Etzel (that's Attilla the Hun, to you or me) in 'Die Nibelungen' (1924) and Rotwang in 'Metropolis' (1927).  Yet more frightening, perhaps, is Professor Baum (Oscar Beregi, Sr.).  Film after film, from the thirties to the sixties, show psychiatrists as more prey to neuroses and what used to be termed 'criminal insanity' than anybody they might actually treat, so it's little wonder they're so feared today, and 'Das Testament Des Dr Mabuse' gives us a classic example.  It beats Hitchcock's 'Spellbound' (1945, often counted with popularising all the main psychiatrist stereotypes) by a good decade.  This whole film, in fact, has a great deal of Hitchcock to its style and flavour, and it would surprise me very little to hear he'd given it his attention.

I can see why this is less well remembered, at least in the English-speaking world, than 'M' (1931), which got there first, and had Peter Lorre on its side - but it's a pity that, bar the odd Amazon recommendation, I've never heard this spoken of.  Anyone who enjoys 'M' enough to rewatch it will find a great many of its merits reproduced here.  The special effects are as bold as I've now come to expect from 20s and 30s cinema, and the DVD cover is an exciting one indeed.  Perhaps not the right way to judge a film, but it's a test that's often led me right in past.

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Tempted to investigate?

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.

M (1931)

This is Fritz Lang's other film.  Other, of course, to 'Metropolis' (1927), a film almost everybody, hearing about this blog, has recommended I watch.  'Metropolis' (like his lesser-remembered 'Die Nibelungen' - 1925) was fantastical, vast, full of crowds, epic vistas and expressionist images.  'M', by contrast, is smaller, grounded in the real world of downtown Berlin.  Streets, apartments, offices, warehouses.  Perhaps this was a practical move to offset the cost of audio for these newfangled talkies - or perhaps silent films, like mime or ballet - can afford to be more flamboyant without seeming silly.  Nonetheless, despite this move towards something like the real world, this film is not without flair or dynamism.

I watched this the same week I revisited 'Shaft' (1971), and despite the four decades between them they have a similar flavour.  Crime, the streets, men looking cool in their long leather coats, a gradient of morality between the police and the criminals.  The authorities here are embodied by Inspector Lohmann - a brilliant performance by Otto Wernicke for whom I've much praise.  The antagonist, despised, feared and sought by the whole city, is the Kindermörder, the child-murderer, a no-less-striking Peter Lorre.  Between them is Berlin - its crowd has a better claim to being the main character than either of this pair.

If this was made today, I suspect the implication of paedophilia would be found somewhere in accusations against the murderer.  A man abducting children merely to murder them seems almost naive by today's standards, though I understand it has been done, notably to Fanny Adams.  Anyway, nothing is known about the child murderer, and the whole city gets itself into a frighteningly familiar lather of paranoia and groundless accusation.  Any grown man so much as saying hello to a child is a candidate for condemnation by the lynch mob.  The police are working overtime, and raiding the usual haunts of criminals with such frequency that the whole criminal underworld band together to track down the child-murderer, just to get themselves some peace and quiet.  It's a brilliant concept.  Soon the cops and criminals race to catch the unknown killer.

Die Kindermörder!

When we finally meet the child-murderer, he's presented quite alarmingly sympathetically.  This is not a man filled with malice and evil - just an ordinary person.  He's pathetic, pudding-faced, wide-eyed as a bush-baby.  When he's finally challenged over his crimes he grows distressed: it's a compulsion, an addiction.  He's driven to it, this obsession.  There's no apparent motivation, and we're left with the frightening suggestion that such a person could appear at any time, in any society, with a feeble inability to quash their urges to befriend and dismember infants.

Peter Lorre is better-known in the West for his appearances in American film noir, but this was his first big role - an astounding, upsetting performance.  He makes this compulsive murderer's impotent fear real, and manages to seem inexplicably amiable even as he pursues his quarry.  Otto Wernicke's Inspector Lohmann is no less engaging, and it's little wonder Lang brought him back to play the same role in 'Das Testament Des Dr Mabuse' (1933).  He manages to bring some excellent moments of comedic business to what could be a doomy film: at one point being so shocked by a revelation that he drops his cigar from his mouth, and lets his hands spend some time looking for it before his mind can catch up.

Kriminalkommissar Lohmann in shock

There's a lot of fun to be found here.  My favourite moment likewise features Lohmann, who devastates a petty criminal with the false news that the man he'd punched unconscious has died of the injury - before the director allows us a fade to the 'victim' in question, alive and enjoying a slap-up meal of sausages and beer.  Though Fritz Lang undoubtedly has a dark and upsetting message to convey about humanity's propensity for evil, he's made a lively film, full of wit and invention.  It was this movie, along with 'Das Boot' (1981) and 'Heimat' (1984) that convinced me German films were very good films indeed, and caused me to seek them out hungrily.  And if you follow this blog for long enough, I suspect you'll be reading about a good many more of them.

P.S. Some time next week I'll find time to comment on this this film's semi-sequel 'The Testament of Dr Mabuse' (1933), but for variety's sake the next two updates will be 'The Birth of a Nation' (1915) and 'Up' (2009).

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This is certainly a film worth watching, and German cinema is always worth a look in.  Why not get yourself a copy, or just borrow mine, or we could all watch it together and have pancakes if y'all would pop over.

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

I'm not sure whether I ever believed in Father Christmas, whether I simply played along, taking the whole thing to be a game of pretending.  It was a long time ago, and my memory doesn't stretch to my early childhood, but I don't recall ever believing in my heart that this mysterious figure really climbed down my chimney (but through the help of such chimney-cleaning films as 'Mary Poppins' (1946) and 'The Water Babies' (1978) I must have believed chimneys to be climbable, at least for infants - so maybe I thought it feasible).

In 'Miracle on 34th Street' - that Christmas classic - Doris Walker (Maureen O'Hara) doesn't believe in Father Christmas, and has raised her daughter Susan to likewise doubt the existence of the jolly fellow, never telling her any fairy-tales, discouraging her imagination.  I suspect the audience are meant to dislike Ms Walker for this sentiment - and, this being the 1940s, for being a divorcee and strong independent woman.  The 21st Century liberal in me is wary of seeing her lifestyle condemned, while the 16th Century Puritan in me (I am both these things in equal measure) commends her decision not to lie to her daughter.  How we might expect children to believe anything about Christmas if we spend their formative years insisting on Santa, I've no idea.  'I think we should be realistic and completely truthful with our children,' she says, which is reasonable enough, but Susan's life lacks fun, and even I with my puritanical streak hoped mother and daughter might soften, if not be wholly cured of their realism.  This is a magical Christmas family film, after all.

'I am not in the habit of substituting for spurious Santa Clauses'

Enter Kris Kringle (Best Supporting Actor, Edmund Gwenn), who inadvertently finds himself hired as a mall Santa for a large department store.  But as well as working as Father Christmas, he is Father Christmas.  I don't just mean to tell you the character's identity - Edmund Gwenn is Santa, if anybody has ever been so.  The performance is perfect, the sparkling wit of his dialogue, his openness to new experiences, his ready delight and his overwhelming honesty even at his own expense.  Kringle champions peace and imagination, and shows himself willing to put up a fight when justice and decency are under threat.  It seems inconceivable that a character so very good can avoid being twee or bland, but I could watch a great deal more of this St Nick, and could happily (and, I suspect, easily) befriend him.  If the legend of Father Christmas lasts another thousand years, some actor may equal Edmund Gwenn's performance as the great man, but none shall ever better it.

Hired to sit in a store's grotto and push overstocked toys on unsuspecting children, Kris Kringle openly opposes this charmless commercialism, preferring to serve the children's needs and direct overstressed parents to other stores for their needs when appropriate.  This is a Santa I can get behind.

'Maybe he's only a little crazy, like painters or composers,

or some of those men in Washington'.

Films of this era take a great glee in exhibiting over-zealous Freudian psychiatrists inhibited by great neuroses of their own, and there's a particularly churlish example here in the person of Granville Sawyer (Porter Hall).  Kris Kringle is keen to point out his respect for legitimate psychiatry, but Sawyer is a horrible and sweaty creep, too keen to diagnose and invent complexes in his patients.  Very soon, Father Christmas is on trial to prove his identity and his sanity.

I've seen a few trial movies lately (with 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' and 'M' awaiting review shortly) and it's a relief and a delight to find a court-room so full of wit and charm.  Where the film could have become tense and climactic for the sake of a little drama, it leans to its lightness and humour, with the prosecutor unable to deny the existence of Father Christmas in front of his young children, and the supreme court judge coming up for re-election and daunted by offending the Christmas goodwill of the electorate.  Kris Kringle's case seems hopeless, but far more important to him is the hope that Doris and Susan come to believe in him.

Despite considerable competition, this is my favourite Christmas movie.  I understand it's been remade a number of times (most notably in 1994), but I find it almost impossible to believe it's ever been managed so agreeably, with such a perfect Father Christmas, with the originality and flair on display here.  I stumbled on this film quite by accident, on a VHS thrown out by a housemate (hence the curious quality of the screen-captures here) and entered it with low expectations.  It's been a pleasure to rewatch it this Advent, and I'll do so again gladly.

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It's still Christmas for a few days yet, and it's always Christmas in your heart (except on Tisha B'Av, the Jewish Day of mourning), so why not seek out a copy of this festive delight?