The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)

Gary Cooper, considered quite the dish of the day

I was recommended this film by my grandmother Mopsy, who saw it shortly after it came out.  It clearly had a fairly broad appeal, as it was also enjoyed by Adolf Hitler, who apparently saw it thrice, and who was in most important respects unlike Mopsy in character.  I fear its merits have fallen away somewhat as the years went by.  Moustaches and European domination of ostensibly lesser countries have both gone out of fashion, and talking pictures have increased their scope and flair.

It has the flavour of a war film, though I'm fairly sure we weren't actually at war with India in the 1930s.  Our handsome and moustached hero (the very famous Gary Cooper, who I always thought was a dancer, but apparently wasn't) and his comrades have to fight the handsome and moustached villain, Mohammed Khan, whose name alone will tell you why this film is unlikely to be remade.

The villainous Mohammed Khan

In my last update, 'Metropolis' (1927), the silent film reached its full extent, a vast, visual feast, a story told in pictures; it's rather distressing to find out the state of cinema these eight years later.  Now that money and time are poured into audio recording, the visuals seem to matter far less, and long, static dialogues take place in plain offices.  Perhaps it's just that 'Metropolis' was highly stylised, while this is much more naturalistic, but that too is probably a consequence of sound-recording, as something so extreme as 'Metropolis' with dialogue would seem bizarre, even comic.  Either way, on all fronts, 'The Lives of a Bengal Lancer' seems a far less impressive, less cinematic way of telling a story.

Oh, the talking scenes are intercut with charges and skirmishes, some high-quality explosions and an extremely dated scene in which the characters have great fun sticking pigs with spears, an effect achieved simply, by having the actors really go out and stab pigs with spears.  This all seemed rather uncharming.  The spectacle is there, but the story, and the drama, is all in the talking.

The playing of a pungi summons a snake, with hillarious consequences

The film isn't without merits, but at each level I find myself thinking it could be better.  The lively banter and camaraderie of the main characters could be even more fun, and the film would be more engaging if it was.  The slight tragedy of the ending could have been richer, less of a footnote.  Far more could have been wrung out of the central conflict: Lieutenant Stone tries in vain to gain some affection from his father, a Colonel, who doesn't wish to show favouritism - a thread with no real resolution.

All in all, a bit disappointing.  I was left a little concerned for the fate of the talking pictures, wondering whether the move toward dialogue would present a string of wordy disappointments.  Thankfully the three films I watched thereafter, from the forties, fifties and sixties respectively, were all excellent, and have together restored my faith in the talkies.  Unless calamity befalls me, they'll be the next three posts.

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I can't truly recommend this film, but as a Briton neither can I fail to advertise a chance to spend your money with a multinational corporation.

Metropolis (1927)

The film looks better than this: I photographed my TV to get screen-caps
Still, what a wonderfully symmetrical city.

When I first told people about this hundred-films-from-a-hundred-years project, quite a lot of them told me I ought to watch this.  I almost didn't, so stubborn am I - but I remembered having liked it when I first saw it a few years ago, and didn't fancy my chances of finding a better or more interesting film to represent 1927 (though 'Napoleon' might have been exciting).  You probably all know about 'Metropolis', even if you haven't seen it, so I'm a mite concerned you will have heard it all before.  I'll try to be brief, though I may not succeed.

Freder sees somebody more beautiful

Freder, the wealthy, handsome and oblivious son of the master of Metropolis, accidentally discovers that his garden paradise is built over a vast dystopian undercity of oppressed, exhausted workers, whose whole grey lives are dedicated to their tedious labour.  The film is an allegory, by the way.  He falls in love with Maria, who offers a particularly Christian hope to the workers, persuading them not to despair or revolt, but to wait for the Mittler - the mediator, or Messiah.  As it happens, Freder is that Mittler, and pretty much gets to be Jesus and Moses at the same time, and defy the modern Tower of Babel.  It's a bit like 'The Matrix' (1999), if you can imagine the film without the computers.

Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who I'd so enjoyed as King Etzel (you know, Atilla the Hun) in 'Die Nibelungen' (1924) appears here as Rotwang, the archetypal mad scientist, whose science seems to made primarily of magic.  Rotwang has created a maschinenmensch, a mechanical version of Freder's dead mother, but chooses to model her face on Maria.  Thus, Brigitte Helm gives the film's most amazing performances, playing both the incarnation of charity and humility, and the sultry robotic succubus who makes the tuxedoed upper crust pant with uncontrollable lusts.

The Maschinenmensch and Rotwang.
His name, in German, denotes rosy cheeks, not a rotten wang, by the way.

So, it's an opulent sci-fi epic, of Biblical character, and it's set in a huge futurist city of extreme angles and stark lighting.  Fritz Lang pulls out all the stops to make the thing look magnificent, even filling the model-shots of the city with working cars, trains and aeroplanes.  Even the intertitles are bolder than usual, as they gleam with light, or drip with blood, or scroll up or down between shots of elevators.  The editing, too, is far more advanced than I've come to expect from the silent era.  Lang takes the montage technique we saw two years earlier in 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925) and does it faster, less literally and more psychedelically, if one can be psychedelic in monochrome.  Clue: one certainly can.

Silent films never looked better.  I don't think that's overstating matters: this film is the absolute peak of the silent era.  This is much more ambitious than anything made in the next decade, as the advent of sound, which began in earnest with the same year's 'The Jazz Singer', set back cinema's visuals significantly.  By the time studios and audiences had adjusted to the change, colour and widescreen had sent the movie in completely different directions. There could never again be anything like 'Metropolis', and it could never be challenged on its home ground.

The most exciting intertitle.

P.S. I seem to have failed to give you any screen-shots of the larger sets or more beautiful parts of the city, mainly because my photos all looked very terrible indeed.  Here's the trailer, then, which may knock your socks off.

P.P.S Since I've managed to post about a 1910s film followed by a 1920s film, I'll see if I can get through ten consecutive decades like this.  The next two films are from 1935 and 1944, and at least one of them is excellent.

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Once more, the film looks nicer than my screen-caps suggest.  Screen-capping a blu-ray is a tricky thing, so I ended up photographing my CRT's screen with a cell-phone camera.  The real film looks beautiful - except the recently recovered scenes, of course, which can only be properly described using the Bristol Stool Scale.  Discover for yourself!

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916)

Captain Nemo, telescoping

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seriously?  He probably left it out on purpose.

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

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

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

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.

Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)

Cigarettes aren't cool, except this one.

For some reason, I always imagined this would be in monochrome.  It's a title I've often heard, and I know the famous poster, and I've been coasting on certain assumptions from that, it seems.  What did I know about this film before I saw it?  I had a notion it was a classic, probably a romance or romantic comedy, and that it was exceptionally classy.

So why, if it's clearly a good, cool, and well-regarded film, had it never been placed before me?  I couldn't think of anyone who claimed it as their favourite, or had enthused to me about it, as they do about other famous romances of the forties and fifties (decades to which I'd hitherto tied this work of the early sixties).  I believe the answer may be this: Mr. I.Y. Yunioshi.

Mickey Rooney as I.Y. Yunioshi

In the midst of a highly entertaining romantic comedy, Mr Yunioshi is a grotesque Japanese stereotype played outrageously and with great gusto by a yellowed-up Caucasian.  This, as we have learnt in more recent decades, is just not on.  Indeed, by the sixties, they really ought to have known better.  He's not in much of the film, but when he's on-screen he's certainly noticeable, and he's the second character to appear, so his outlandish role and performance are some of the first things to meet the unprepared viewer.

I'm tempted to go on saying 'if we ignore this unfortunate blemish, the film is great fun,' and so on, but I'm not sure casual racism is something we ought to ignore.  Now, I'm more liberal than some on the issue of blacking up, yellowing up and such, and will offer an attempt at defence of Laurence Olivier's Othello in 1965, or John Bennett's Li H'sen Chang in 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' (1977), as it's just feasible that they were the best of the available actors for those dramatic roles at the time, but Mickey Rooney's performance here just takes the biscuit: histrionic, clumsy, myopic and perpetually outraged, with the gigantic teeth that one can likewise find in inherently horrible Japanese characters in Hergé's Tintin.

Seized by a compulsion, Holly and Paul shoplift some animal masks.

The rest of the film is good, is funny, and touching.  It's a fine romance and a successful comedy, and the characters are likable and complex enough to be genuinely interesting.  Audrey Hepburn plays the lead, Holly Golightly, a role written for Marilyn Monroe, an eccentric young socialite who meets a handsome writer (George Peppard, later known for 'The A-Team' in the 80s).  The two get on well, cavort most merrily, and in general have a highly-charged friendship that is probably romantic, though the two seem reluctant to make that overt.  It's a format that I particularly enjoy, so I found myself somewhat anguished when, inevitably, complications of history, money and future arise in the film's midst and pretty much destroy the relationship's merits and prospects.  They'd been so innocently happy together (and in a brief moment of petty shoplifting, guiltily happy) that it seems everything is rather irreparably spoilt.

There's hope, on and off, though I shan't say any more about what ensues.  It's a well-written film, adapting a novella by Truman Capote, which seems to be enough of a selling-point that I ought at least to mention it.  As I intimated above, I can't quite come to recommend it, as Mr. Yunioshi is a small but significant sour point in something that ought to be sweet.  On the basis of his appearance, planned screenings of the film are on occasion cancelled or boycotted, and the reputation of the whole is marred.

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Nonetheless, here's your chance to exercise your rights as a materialist.

Train to Hell (maybe 1993, but let's say 1998)

...featuring Malcolm McDowell as 'STRANGER'

First things first.  This is a 98-minute film called 'Night Train to Venice', except that the version I saw was only about 70 minutes long, and was entitled 'Train to Hell', and seems to be a shortened, retitled version of the original.  Wikipedia claims it came out in 1996, or possibly 1992, and Amazon says 1993, and the laserdisc thinks it was 1994, while IMDB suggests its original German release was 1995, and its appearance at Cannes was 1996.  Given the nature of my blog's project, I'd be very glad of any pointers on this.  Anyway It's an English-language German film with an Italian director, set in Venice.

It stars Malcolm McDowell and a young, not-yet-famous Hugh Grant, and is beneath their dignity.  It also prominently features Rachel Rice, a child actress of average quality who went on to win Big Brother in 2008.  It's an attempt at gothic horror, and it sees Hugh Grant play a writer taking the Orient Express to Venice, carrying with him the manuscript of his exposé of neo-Nazism.  However, the train also harbours a number of skinheads, and a nameless slow-motion man of malignity, the frowning STRANGER.

It looks to be a doomed romance, but turns out just to be a romance.
How disappointing.

There's the germ of a good and frightening story here: a writer smuggling his book on neo-nazis on a train full of 'em, and arriving in Venice to find that they own the publishing house he's travelled to visit.  Unfortunately, the skinheads are played rather extraordinarily, and not in a good way.  The STRANGER, that malign Englishman who spends the film looking at people and causing them to hallucinate flashbacks and flash-forwards, is the film's real villain.  Or is he?  He's hardly hands-on, and while he clearly has some influence over minds, and comes across as habitually sinister, he never actually does anything.  Nothing at all.  He seems to have some influence on a crash late in the film, but since it hinders the skinheads far more than the heroes, perhaps The STRANGER is not a satanic being, but a force for good, albeit one with the manners of a pervert.

So yes, since the villains hardly bother him on the train journey (thus making the film's first half less exciting than it might have been), Hugh Grant has ample time to fall into a fairly nineties romance with Vera (Tahnee Welch).  It has all the hallmarks of a doomed romance, and a tragedy all-round, with omens erroneously portending the death of Vera's simpering daughter and a great number of allusions to 'Romeo and Juliet' (1595).  The film seems, up to this point, keen to ape 'Don't Look Now' (a credible horror film from 1973, which I've always preferred to call 'Don't Look Now, Vicar!' as if it was instead a mildly saucy farce) - but doesn't deliver on the promise of its horror.  It's rather disappointing, in fact, that the film doesn't end with the promised bloodbath, but with a long being-in-love montage of an amnesiac Grant smiling, and Vera smiling, and her daughter smiling, and everyone being generally glad, and a pigeon flying over Venice, and some sex-having, and then some more smiling.  All this for two or three minutes over a not-wholly-tuneful love-song.  It's my hope, though research has not yet backed it up, that there exists a version of this film with a more gruesome conclusion.

Will the child fall off the balcony?  I guess so.

'Train to Hell' is one of a trio of DVDs which made an unexpected appearance through my letter-box on Monday.  I'd heard it spoken of, and Andrew, who had done the speaking, realised that the best way to make me watch it (and I watched it immediately) was to get it into my house.

So, why do I suppose he thought I should watch 'Train to Hell'?  Well, we both help out on a young people's holiday-camp each August where, among other things, we help the young people shoot and edit videos.  He knows my penchant for either saving or ruining un-extraordinary scenes with alarming editing techniques: slowing down reaction shots to 10% of their proper speed, say, or cutting in fragments of footage from the wrong scene to give the audience something unexpected.  Both of these techniques, which I had never dared to expect in a professional work, are used with tremendous frequency throughout 'Train to Hell', with McDowell's ominously-looking-at-things shots, which make up the large portion of his action, routinely stretched to two or four times their original length, and intercut with shots of dogs and low-budget Nazi rallies.

The STRANGER, again.  Looking on in slow motion, again.
Ought we to boo him, do you think?

I'm especially glad that some people are willing to recommend me films which are unusual and bad, or at least not conventionally good.  Quite a lot of ordinarily imaginative people have recommended me 'Metropolis' (1927), as if it really needs any recommendations at all, and I'm sure that when I get to it I'll find it easy to watch and easy to enjoy, but almost impossible to write about in a new or interesting way, since everybody knows it's epic, beautiful and magnificent.  But the mysterious 'Train to Hell'?  There's far more meat here for The Penciltonian.  Andrew has recommended the similarly questionable-looking 'Ninja Terminator' (1985), and I'm reminded of Opai's distressing recommendation of 'Na Srebrnym Globie' (1977).  Wouldn't this blog be tedious if I only looked at the stone-cold classics?

On the subject of tedium, let's return briefly to the issue of what year I'm attaching to 'Train to Hell'?  A great deal of googling has revealed no real authority on the issue, but I have a theory, which I've backed up with another look at the closing credits.  Here's my idea: 'Night Train to Venice' was made in 1993, as any later and Hugh Grant would have been too famous.  That's presumably the 98-minute version, and was released some time between 1993 and 1996.  However, since this retitled version, 'Train to Hell', is rather shorter, I reasoned it must have been a significant re-edit (to make it shorter, better or simply different), put out a few years later.  There is indeed a small credit for 'Reedited Version by Toni Hirtreiter and Heinrich Richter', and a copyright date of 1998.  So let's go with that, shall we?  'Night Train to Venus' from 1993ish, and this snappily-titled cut-down released 5 years later, in '98.


P.S. Perhaps the closest amateur work I've seen to the tone of 'Train to Hell' is a short horror movie of dubious merit, made by my old housemate Chris Bambling, and entitled 'Retail II' (2009ish).  He gave up part-way through shooting, and eventually gave me the footage to edit, so I cut out all the punchlines to jokes, and made as much of a meal of the edit as I could.  The similarity between the two works is concerning for 'Train to Hell', but I feel 'Retail II' is somehow vindicated.  Watch its eight terrifying minutes here on Youtube, if you dare.

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Should you have the urge to check my findings, here's the thing on DVD.  Enjoy, but beware!

Persepolis (2007)

Of the animated films I've so far watched - 'Yellow Submarine' (1968), 'Up' (2009) and this, 'Persepolis' is comfortably my favourite in animation style and in content too.  This is an adaptation of Majane Satrapi's graphic novel, and co-director Vincent Paronnaud borrows her occasionally Hergé-esque 'ligne claire' style and puts it in motion.  Most of the film is told in monochrome flashback.  The individual shots are clear, handsome and often striking.

I understand the original book was at least semi-autobiographical.  It's a story of young Marji growing up in Iran of the 70s and 80s, a country torn by war and revolution.  The children don't take it especially seriously, accepting only that people get arrested, soldiers march around with guns, and it's a fine time to lark around.

Things get grimmer as she grows older.  People die, or are imprisoned, and nobody can openly speak the truth.  It's still not a bad place to have a party, but it can end badly.  The revolution makes matters worse, not better, and the new government obliges women to wear veils.  A lonely education in Europe seems the only escape.  She grows up, endures a number of unenjoyable romances, and is left without any clear idea where she can call home.

It's sad, and difficult, and often great fun, so feels very much like real life.  The animation style is excellent, fascinatingly watchable, giving a stylised, childlike view of the world.  It's a very good film, and I found it to be quite an education.  'Persepolis' gives a picture of an interesting country of real, ambitious people, marred, oppressed and set back by a theocratic government of extremely conservative Islamic fundamentalists.  I've realised my knowledge of modern Iran is terribly limited, and though I used to work for an Iranian woman, I never really asked about the country she seemed glad to leave behind.

I'd be curious to seek out the original comic from which the film was adapted, and Marjane Satrapi's other writings, to learn more.  Since she co-directed the film, I can well believe it captures the spirit of the original.  I'd recommend it to almost anyone, though some of the language is sufficiently strong, and the themes mature, that I'd err away from showing it to a weakly child.  And since it's animated, you have the choice to watch it with either French or English audio.  Both seem equally legitimate, and I only went with the French because so much was actually set in France.

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I'd say it was worth your time.  Someone's borrowing my copy at present, or I'd lend it to y'all myself.

GoodFellas (1990)

This is a story about a guy who gets into crime - organised crime and killing people crime - not reluctantly or through necessity, but because he thought that life would be cool, fun and easy.  And it turned out he was entirely right.  It's an appealing story, and a true one.  He and his wife would have gotten away with it for as long as they lived, had they not grown so very careless and full of drugs.

Rob Reed gave me his copy of the film at the same time he passed me 'Taxi Driver' (1976), and since I've also watched 'The Last Temptation of Christ' (1988), Martin Scorsese joins Peter Jackson, Peter Greenaway and Fritz Lang in the circle of most-watched directors on this blog.  This is probably the longest of the three films, and the one with the most humour and the most violence.  It's a toss-up, though, which of the three is the bloodiest.

Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) borrows a knife from his mother (Catherine Scorsese)

Ray Liotta plays Henry Hill, who throws himself into the criminal lifestyle, and finds that it pays exceedingly well.  Unlike 'The Baader-Meinhof Complex' (2008), there's no suggestion here that the crimes are particularly benign or well-motivated, but it's clearly a better career move than brick-laying.  For the most part he seems a nice guy, but he laughs too long at acts of unprompted brutality - indeed, he seems to laugh almost deliberately at these, not with mirth, but to be seen laughing.  He works his way up from errand boy to crime boss, reluctantly goes on an awful date with a woman called Karen (Lorraine Bracco), who, since she's far more bold and interesting than she first appears, goes on to be his partner in crime and wife.

Like Hugh Griffith in 'Ben-Hur', Joe Pesci got the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor here simply by being fantastically entertaining.  His role seems at times like the comic relief, but is really more exciting and disturbing than that.  He's persistent, almost flamboyantly vicious, and enjoyably short, and seems to speak constantly and magnificently.  As you may tell, I found him to be the film's great highlight.  Robert de Niro and Samuel L. Jackson are in there too - indeed, it's a very good cast all-round, made up of people who are rightly famous, or ought to be more so.

It's directed with pace, style and tension, of course, and the script finds some exciting ways to tell the story.  I'm sure I could have gone on for another four paragraphs, had I written this up immediately after watching it, but you got lucky as I left it so long, dear reader.  Most of what I now remember are twists, lines, images.  In short, the things you'd be better off discovering for yourself by watching the film.  I try not to spoil these things for you.

P.S. I'll be back this weekend with 'Persepolis' (2007), and then I'll probably have to watch some more movies, or I will have run out of stuff to tell you about.

P.P.S. This isn't strictly-speaking true.  I could tell you about 'The Last Remake of Beau-Geste' (1977) or 'The Baby of Macon' (1993) or 'Das weiße Band' (2009) or 'Ted' (2012), but we've done those years already, and I'm keen to push on towards the hundred-different-years goal.

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So, yeah.  Here's the bit where I show you how you can legitimately watch the thing.

Das Boot (1981)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Miś (1980)

A cat, dressed as a rabbit

I was urged to watch 'Miś', and informed only that it was a Polish comedy, and a cult film.  I've been keen to see some Polish comedy, as everything I've seen from that nation has made it out to be entirely miserable and wretched, and I thought something with a lower body-count than 'Na Srebrnym Globie' (1977) or 'Dekalog' (1989) would give me a brighter perspective.  That it was a cult film, I found marginally less encouraging, as that occasionally means it's a treat, but sometimes denotes something nobody could like accidentally.

I'm reluctant to use the English language title, 'Teddy Bear', as I can't believe it's a very accurate translation.  The giant straw animal, which has no effect on characters or plot, may be a bear but resembles no teddy I've ever seen, and I suspect it hails from a different tradition entirely.  The movie regards a man called Ryszard racing his ex-wife Irena to Britain and withdraw a small fortune the pair lodged in an English bank.  At the start she damages his passport, making swift passage through the iron curtain almost impossible, and the body of the film shows his elaborate but almost feasible plan to get to Britain, a scheme which requires him to find his exact double, and cause that double to lose his hair.

Distressingly, the subtitles were all in yellow comic sans.

The film was interesting, rather than enjoyable, which isn't ideal for a comedy .  Actually, I'm afraid it's interesting, rather than interesting, as it didn't keep my attention as well as I'd hoped.  Since amazon reviewer Richard J. Brzostek describes it as 'a hilarious comedy', I'll give it the benefit of the doubt, though, as it's possible I just don't get it; it's a satire on a political situation of which I'm almost entirely ignorant.  There are several scenes either presenting ridiculous exaggerations of aspects of life in communist Poland, or else giving a rye, unexaggerated look at exactly what happened in those days - and I couldn't tell which of these was being presented.

Either way, this is a Poland of austerity, cunning, and government excess, the latter to present a propagandist suggestion of prosperity, hence the giant toy bear.  In this picture of Poland, meat is so hard to come by that people have to go to the theatre to see a joint, and restaurants chain their cutlery to the table, but in such a way that only one person can use a spoon at once, as when one person pulls to make the chain longer, their partner's chain gets shorter.  I've been told this latter point was a real feature in some Polish cafes, but I'm not sure I believe it.

A teddy-bear?

The film does one thing that I like very much: I've long enjoyed foreign films' portrayals of Britain, which offer a surprisingly rare chance to see what stereotypes the world has of us.  Here, the British seem very calm and placid, in stark contrast to the manic Ryszard; bank clerks in London are prone to going on strike, but do so very politely and very meticulously, sitting quietly in their booths until the exact second their strike is due to end, before carrying on with their business.  Also, the British speak English, but with Polish accents.  For anyone else curious to see British stereotypes in European films, I'd recommend 'Laissez-Passer' (2002), a fine French movie set in the film industry of occupied Paris in the 40s, which surprised me with a sudden trip to England and a trio of petulant interrogators who won't stop making unwanted tea.  Ah, but now I'm talking about the wrong film, so shall stop here.


P.S. Wikipedia claims this film was out in 1980, but IMDB says 1981.  I've gone with the earlier date, as it suits my purposes.  I have two pretty exciting possibilities for 1981, but my backup for 1980 is famously awful.

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This isn't the version of the DVD I saw, so the quality, not least of the subtitles, may be higher

The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008)

Everybody smoked constantly in the 60s.

On this occasion it's Ulrike Meinhof

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

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

Andreas Baader lights up a cigar at his trial

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

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

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

Police brutality

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

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

Ulrike again, at the trial

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

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


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

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

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

...and incidentally, a merry Easter Octave to all of you at home

I've been on holiday this week, or should I say holiday has been on me?  Either way, I've neglected to write up any Pencilton-shaped comments on films, or to watch any films, but I've notes and memories enough to resume this coming Wednesday with 'Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex' (2008), and carry on from there.

Just, y'know, reassuring y'all that the blog hasn't been abandoned.

P.S. I could absolutely write you a short set of notes on a film this evening, but I can't be bothered.