Dr Mabuse, der Spieler (1922)

A disguise of Dr Mabuse

Many months ago, I wrote about this film's sequel, 'Das Testament des Dr Mabuse' (1933), which pitted Inspector Lohmann from 'M' (1931) against the villainous Dr Mabuse from this silent picture, 'Dr Mabuse, the Gambler'.  At the time I was faintly curious to know what Mabuse had been up to before his insanity and institutionalisation, but at the time I was wary of silent films, so passed the opportunity by.  However, my trusty CRT television broke down and died a few weeks ago, so I upgraded to HD at last, and ordered myself a copy of this movie to test it out.  I learnt early in The Penciltonian that director Fritz Lang created pictures worth looking at.  As in 'Metropolis' (1927), he casts Rudolf Klein-Rogge as a charismatic villain, and as in 'Die Nibelungen' (1925) he tells his story over almost five hours, with the audience watching the first half of the film one day, returning to the cinema a day later to find out what happened in the second half.

Nice hat and pattern there, Aud Egede-Nissen.

This film breaks the division I'd imagined in Lang's directorial career.  In my mind, he spent the 20s making epic sci-fi and fantasy silent films, before moving into (slightly) more grounded Berlin-based crime thrillers with the advent of sound in the 30s.  But this is a silent crime film of gargantuan character, and feels like it belongs in both portions.  It's the age of monocles, of cocain and of intertitles.  Dr Mabuse is a psychoanalyst, a gambler and a hypnotist.  An evil hypnotist, mind.  As in the sequel, there's something of a mystery over whether his powers are granted by a knowledge of human psychology, by a triumph of patented German will-power, or by some force yet more malign and magical.  Mabuse is a brilliant and terrible individual, a stylish and intense fellow and a master of disguise.  He dresses up a lot, coaxes people into losing vast sums at cards, and uses his pawns to engage in the more practical criminal fare of theft, un-theft, stock-market cunning and (eventually) murder.  In short, he's The Master, 48 years early.

Chief Inspector Norbert von Wenk regards the artworks of high society.

Within ten minutes of the start, I was excited about some day rewatching the film.  It had an energy, a flair and a visual style that I found very alluring.  I used to have a rather dim opinion of silent films (an opinion you can share if you watch 'Birth of a Nation', 1915, first), but films like this are so rich and exciting, and tell their stories with a directness and drama that you wonder why spoken dialogue ever seemed like a necessary invention.  I love the scene of hypnosis that we see from the point-of-view of the hypnotee, as everything except Mabuse's face grows blurry and the playing cards change their faces.  I love the scenes of miss Cara Carozza dancing - she's an amazing dancer, but not necessarily a good one, but her unembarrassable flailing and jiving is something I one immediately wished to imitate - a strangely attractive, undisciplined style, with plenty of gusto.  I dig the amazing and scary expressionist art that stocks the houses of the city's upper crust; Mabuse says expressionism is just 'spilerei', 'playing about' - but he sees nothing wrong with playing about.  He's a Spieler!

The film very briefly passes the Bechdel test when Cara and Gräfin Dusy Told talk to
each other in prison, but in no time they're on about Dr Mabuse this and Dr Mabuse that...

It's a fine thriller, with a timeless flavour, if not a modern one.  Scenes that I take to be innovative (though they may already have been old hat) are things which later became clichés, but remain ever exciting: a taxi-driver surreptitiously pulls a lever releasing knockout gas in his passenger compartment, for instance.  It feels as if James Bond could break out at any moment.  This is so far advanced, so far advanced in terms of ambition, style and depth from that other tale of silent criminality, 'Dr Nicholson and the Blue Diamond' (1913, and yes, all doctors in cinema were evil until 1965) that it's hard to believe only a decade has gone by.  This is a sinister and exciting story, and is comfortably up to the standards of Fritz Lang's more famous crime-films.  And it's impressive indeed to remain exciting for so many hours.


P.S. This was the same year as 'Nosferatu' and the amazing 'Häxan'.  What a year for European cinema!  Over in the states 'King of Kings' was happening, so the year's merits may have been international.  Of the lot, I believe this is my favourite.  I may need to re-watch 'Das Testament des Dr Mabuse' again now, to remind myself what happened next.

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It may surprise you to learn that ancient cinema looks beautiful on blu-ray.  It isn't a format I advocate often, but it brings out every crinkle, every wall-paper, and is a fine way to take these thrilling stories.

A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (1978)

'A Walk Through H' is one of my favourite pieces of art, and worth just as much as a visit to a gallery.  It's pictures and narration, so my comments will follow suit.

The story is told in 92 maps, with occasional birds.
It's almost animation, but the pictures don't move, only the camera does.

A red path has guided the ornithologist through these many maps,
but may not be reliable.

The maps begin to fade, leaving only the image of a signpost,
or the skeleton of a windmill.

The maps hail from a variety of sources, and seem to have been selected by
Tulse Luper.  In reality, they're drawn and painted by Peter Greenaway,
my favourite director, and a painter at heart.

The maps have an unusual beauty.

An important map, reproduced from a bogus ecological textbook.

This map was stolen from Van Hoyten, the Owl Keeper at Amsterdam Zoo.
Van Hoyten appears (in person) in 'A Zed and Two Noughts' (1985),
which I hope to tell you of some other time.

A map on the plumage of an upside-down partridge. 

"My wife took a drawing I had bought to be framed. It was a drawing I didn't know too well, but well enough to know that, when it came back, it had been exchanged for another. This is that replacement. I said nothing to my wife but, taking the receipt, I went to find the frame-maker. I couldn't find him. I mentioned to my wife that I'd passed the shop where she'd had the drawing framed, she only looked surprised for a moment."

As the ornithologist nears the end of his journey, time is taken for
exultant music, and many birds. 

"Tulse Luper suggested my journey through H needed 92 maps. Anticipating my question he suggested the time to decide what H stood for was at the end of the journey and by that time it scarcely mattered."

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This film is on Volume 1 of The Early Films of Peter Greenaway, along with 'Windows' (1976) and 'H is for House' (1974), which I have talked about elsewhere.  Volume 2 has my favourite, 'The Falls' (1980), which I would have made you read about and watch, dear reader, were my copy not on semi-permanent loan to an actress in Leeds.

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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Münchausen (1943)

I've seen films made during wartime from Britain, America and France, so I was very keen to find one from Germany.  I'm aware there were other countries involved in World War II, but these are the four we see in 'The Longest Day' (1962), which seems a fair criterion for The Penciltonian.  'Münchausen' is a lavish comedy made by order of Joseph Goebbels, to prove that Nazi Germany could rival anything Hollywood could produce.

The film tells the story of Baron Hieronymous von Münchausen, the famous teller of tall tales (or as he's presented here, man of bizarre adventures).  He rides on a cannonball, wins the love of the Empress of Russia, and travels to the moon, where he learns that time works quite differently to how it does on Earth.  It's a story that suits the colour and ambition on display here, and the inventive film-craft available in the country that produced 'Metropolis' (1927).  It's a lavish tale, intended to rival 'The Wizard of Oz' and 'Gone With the Wind' (both 1939) for splendour, so accordingly the movie is full of the most astounding hats, costumes and model shots.

The Baron meets the fastest man in the world

At first it seems we're watching the Baron in the 18th Century, but we soon learn that an apparent descendant of his is holding a costume ball, so the old-fashioned costume and music give way to automobiles and electricity, and what seems to be a black character played by a white actor turns out to be a white character whose make-up comes off easily.  There's a pleasing artificiality to the film, right from the start, which excuses some of the fantastical stylisation of the rest of the film.  The modern day Münchausen tells the story of the famous Baron, and we flash back to all manner of unlikely adventures.

The body of the film is full of the bizarre antics and prop comedy I'd expect from 'The Goodies': a wardrobe of clothes get rabies and attack our hero, a bugle is too cold to sound a note but once it warms up indoors it plays incessantly until stamped to pieces, and a giant pastry is opened to reveal a dwarf playing a tiny harpsicord.  It's a very silly film, but it's more fun than funny.

Münchausen, in a fez, meets a eunuch in I-don't-know-what-that-hat-is-but-oh-my.

Hans Albers plays Baron Münchausen, and gives his best performances in quiet close-ups rather than the wild action sequences.  I'm inclined to think he's a bit too old for the role: this is a character who wishes for, and gets, the gift of ageless immortality for as long as he wants it.  He looks about sixty, so seemingly has eternal youth without the youth.  It's like watching the latter half of the Roger Moore era of James Bond, with a hero running around and seducing women a fraction of his age.  Münchausen even meets an aged Giacomo Casanova, the implication being that Casanova has grown too old to be chasing women, while the Baron has retained his mojo.  The women grow older while Münchausen stays the same, and one is forced by her family to join a convent, a fate from which the heroic Baron notably doesn't save her.

It's an lively and watchable film, but doesn't quite live up to the movies it seeks to trump.  It gets more interesting as it goes on, with a memorable trip to the moon where a babies grow on trees, and people's heads galavant without bodies, and fashions are just amazing.  There, Münchausen's trusty servant ages to death over the course of a few days, and the film suddenly seems less ridiculous, and really rather sad.  "The moon is a rather exhausting star," as the Baron notes.  It this film, death (in males, at least) seems to be something that should be chosen.  Dying suddenly in the heat of battle seems acceptable, but choosing mortality seems to be the ideal.  Since the film was ordered into existence by the minister for propaganda, I wonder how close that was to the dominant philosophies of forties Germany.

On the moon, a friendly disembodied head with amazing hair sits on a flower.

I'm glad to have sought this film out, as, though I've watched a great many German films for this Penciltonian project, there was a large gap between the early films of the twenties and thirties, and the later ones from the eighties onwards.  My knowledge of the nation's output seemed to disappear with the rise of Nazism, and wasn't restored until decades of apparently awkward post-war Heimatfilm had gone by.  Perhaps that was for the best, in terms of quality: I've been watching films from the best eras of German cinema.

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The Kid (1921)

I'd nearly gotten through the whole project without watching any Chaplin, and I'd almost filled the 1920s with foreign-language films (not that this is especially noticeable when they're all silent).  'The Kid' goes some way to rectifying both of these things.  I spent a great many years with a very fixed idea of what a Charlie Chaplin film is like, and was surprised and delighted when I finally saw 'The Great Dictator' (1940) and found it to be extremely funny, rather emotional, and not at all what I expected.  Since then I've enjoyed 'Limelight' (1952) and not been wholly convinced by 'The Gold Rush' (1925) though in the latter case I wasn't watching the silent original, but a later version which dubbed sound and dialogue over a film that never needed them.  'The Kid' is the first time I've actually seen Charlie Chaplin in a silent movie.

The concept, in short: a woman 'whose only sin was motherhood', abandons her newborn baby in a stranger's car.  The crooks who then steal the car are alarmed by the baby, and leave it by some dustbins, where it's discovered by a tramp - it was still acceptable to call people tramps back then - who is inspired by the heartfelt note left by the woman, and raises the baby as his own.  Five years later the tramp and the kid are still living quite happily together in a situation of dire but endurable poverty.

Chaplin (credited as Charles, rather than the more familiar Charlie) wrote and directed the film, plays the lead and composed the music.  This sort of monomania is excusable, as all the elements are excellent; Chaplin was an extremely talented man, and applied his talents with good judgement, so it's not without reason that he became incredibly famous.  As in his other films, he manages to couch very silly comedy in a sentimental story - not saccharine, but highly emotional, with reasons to really care about the characters.  He has some serious social points to make about poverty and the tremendous stigma attached to single or unmarried mothers, and makes them here, in the midst of all manner of slapstick and myriad laugh-out-loud moments.

I could write much more, but it's a short film and a silent one, so will leave the rest as screen-shots and captions.

The kid is taken away by Social Services.  What an amazing look of distress!
Jackie Coogan was the first great child actor, and grew up to be Uncle Fester.

Silent films are renowned for their subtlety.

I really like it when Chaplin laughs.
He always looks like he's having a great time.

As you may know, I love pancakes, and have long sought good pancake films.
'Bucket of Blood' has a pancake-pan as a murder implement, but
no film I have watched contains such a platter of pancakes as this.

Edna Purviance rocking an amazing outfit here.
Please kill more animals, reader.

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Alexander Nevsky (1938)

Alexander Nevsky had terrible hair, but a nice tunic.  He lived a nine-hundred-ish years ago, and was a prince and a saint and a general all at once.  He was the Christian Mohammed, the Orthodox Jeanne d'Arc, and he kept a peace with the Mongols, that the Russians of Rus might war against the Teutons, who were all a load of jerks.

This, then, is an anti-German film made in thirties Russia.  It was intensely popular, then banned when the government realised how nice the Germans were, then unbanned and intensely popular again when the Germans became the enemies once more - all this inside three years.  It was an exciting time.

Parp!

The film is directed by Sergei Eisenstein, who made that other handsomely-edited propaganda piece 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925).  Like that film, 'Alexander Nevsky' is much easier to appreciate than to enjoy, though it surely has its merits.  One such merit is the famous musical score by Prokofiev - at least, I've often heard it's famous.  I wasn't sure I recognised it, but it had a great power to make me exclaim 'uh oh' and (more crudely) 'oh crap' at my television whenever it indicated the stirrings of impending catastrophe.  The Teutons, you see, are very horrid enemies, and whenever the film cuts to them in their vast and amazing helmets the dialogue disappears and the music takes over.  Though 'Алекса́ндр Не́вский' is a talkie, it's a silent film at heart, meaning the Catholic foe are presented for the most part as mute, unutterably malign, communicating only through helmet-size and loud instruments.

The other thing for which the movie is famed is the battle on the ice, which takes up the latter third of the duration.  It's a tremendous spectacle, and it left me thinking that Eisenstein could have made a really watchable 'Birth of a Nation' (1915).  At the time it was the greatest battle in all of cinema, and it's hard to know when it was surpassed.  The battle is immensely long, showing the overall flow of the fight, and great amounts of detail, from seething crowds to small moments of character or comedy.  It's easy to see how we got from this to The Battle of Helm's Deep, and though I'm sure Tolkein had some experience of real-life battles I wouldn't be surprised if he had seen and enjoyed this film.

Alexander Nevsky says 'Fish'.

I thought I would like Alexander more than I did.  He turned out to be rather a dull sort of fellow with little to humanise him.  He did his job, winning the war, well and functionally, and showed little reason to be posthumously canonised.  A fair résumé for a hero in the age of Stalin, but not great for a movie protagonist.

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Don't buy the DVD - the print is soft and shaky - not to an offensive degree, but it could look much better.  Get yourself the soundtrack instead, which comes with Prokofiev's music to 'Lieutenant Kijé' (1934) too.
 

Dragnet (1987) and Ghostbusters (1984)

Friday, with a chill dog, Streebek with salad

For four months now, it's been established that as soon as we had some hot-dogs in the house there would be an evening of hot-dogs and 'Dragnet', a reasonably enjoyable comedy based on a very sober old-time radio police-procedural of which I'm tolerant, even fond.

The great novelty of the original is that tries to present a realism, with characters umming and ahhing and making irrelevant or domestic conversation, just like in the real lives of police officers.  Time is taken while people walk from one side of the office to the other.  Joe Friday, the cop at the series' heart is not flamboyantly adventurous or heroic, he's a serious-minded public official doing his job.  It was the first radio series to be so dry, earnest and factually-based, so its main appeal in recent years (if I may call 1987 a recent year) is as an object to be parodied.

Friday and Streebek undercover as typical criminals

In this movie, Dan Akroyd plays Joe Friday, the nephew of the radio original, but very much the same in character.  He's obsessively precise and disciplined, and takes no time for fun, so his world is shaken up when he's partnered with the wise-cracking Pep Streebek (Tom Hanks), who is, by his standards excessively liberal.  I'm inclined to think Hanks overplays his role, making Streebek rather more manic than is needed: the concept for the film seems, originally, to have been pairing a ridiculous character with the intensely serious Friday, but Akroyd is too warm, and Friday too fun, to be a straight-man to Hanks's Streebek.  Indeed, Friday is so odd that he would have better been paired with somebody a little less hysterical.  Too often Hanks seems to be trying to steal the scene, where he could more profitably have shared it.  Akroyd is too good and too subtle to let his scenes be stolen.

In no time the two find themselves embroiled in a web of crime, a vast network of villainy known as P.A.G.A.N., criminals who engage in orgiastic dancing while wearing majestic goat-leggings and chanting 'kill the good', who impersonate police officers and seem to be linked in some way to the charismatic clergyman Jonathan Whirley, a fine performance by Christopher Plummer, who happens to be one of the actors I most like to watch.  It's a wonderfully clear-cut world of good and evil, and it knows it.


Oh, and a couple of weeks later we watched:

Ghostbusters (1984)

...which it seems only reasonable to mention at the same time, it being another fine eighties comedy with Dan Akroyd in a leading role.  If you haven't seen it, I shall explain in brief: there are some ghosts and some people who bust the ghosts and you should certainly watch it today as it is an embarrassing hole in your education that will be enjoyable to fill.

But of course you've seen 'Ghostbusters', and isn't it excellent?  I really haven't a word to say against it.  It was just the thing to test out the new television (the old one having perished of old age), and I could watch it again tomorrow, if this Penciltonian project wasn't pressing me toward less familiar years.

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My Man Godfrey (1936)

'All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kinda people'.

I bought this film a long time ago because I thought it might have David Niven in it.  As it happens, I was really after the 1957 remake, but at least this way I had something on my shelves to stand for 1936.  'My Man Godfrey' is a screwball comedy, meaning that everybody speaks at twice the normal speed, and regards a family of upper-middle-class twits, New York's high society, taking in a homeless man to work as a butler.  Said butler, Godfrey, then becomes romantically entangled with the daughter of the family, but feels it's inappropriate for a mere butler to woo, or be wooed by, a socialite so high above his station.

Godfrey (William Powell) is a fine fellow, and immediately likeable, with his position as a 'forgotten man' made good use of.  The rich ninnies he serves are immensely patronising to him on account of his recent homelessness, but Godfrey doesn't take offence, preferring to remain perfectly gracious, coolly receiving their awkward compliments in the spirit in which they were meant.  He's quietly amused by the outrageously dysfunctional family, and eventually saves them from their folly and, with a Gilbertian inevitability, turns out to be a man from their own class who had arrived at hard times almost on purpose, and is thus an appropriate suitor for the daughter (whether he wants to be her suitor or not).  It's a classic American happy ending: a family difficulty in the great depression is solved by the butler investing in stocks and bonds, so capitalism saves the day.  You could tell the same story today, but I'll be happy if you don't.

Godfrey is opposed at every point by the other daughter, Cornelia, that villain.

It's an entertaining film with a witty script, well performed, but isn't particularly extraordinary by the standards of the time.  The DVD release I watched presented so unrestored a print, crude and fuzzy in sound and picture that when I first watched it I was put off '30s cinema for several years.  I now realise that a good scrub and a more tender preparation for release might have let it show its merits - there's probably a pretty watchable film under all the noise.

P.S. The rule seems to be that 30s films are better if they aren't in English.  Or perhaps the sample of purchasable 1930s films from abroad is smaller and weighted towards the excellent, whereas there's a great deal of 30s Americana to be had.  Alternatively, crappy sound is more of a problem when you aren't reading subtitles.  I think I prefer my first theory, and my suspicion that America, and its cinema, wasn't the best or the coolest until World War II, at which point the whole nation suddenly got its jiggy on.

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Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)

I've a friend and co-writer who occasionally claims that all British films fall into two narrow categories, Richard Curtis London rom-coms, and grim, gritty tales of the bleak North.  It's a limited viewpoint, which forgets Peter Greenaway, Richard Lester and the Bond films, but 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' fits very neatly into the latter category.  Factories, cigarettes, back-alley abortion, beer and austerity, with an aggressive, adulterous worker as its cocky protagonist.  All it's missing is mass unemployment, though that hadn't really been invented yet.

My 1960 film was meant to be 'Psycho', if only to show a massive contrast in style and scale with the previous year's 'Ben-Hur', but it struck me that American cinema was overbalancing my project, while Britain, my nation of preference, was getting a little neglected.  So here's England, the industrial North, and young Albert Finney, before he was a Sir.

Norman Rossington and Albert Finney down the pub.
Why is Rossington's face so familiar to me? What on Earth have I seen him in?  Hmmm...

A few weeks ago I described 'Orphée' (1950), probably erroneously, as being grounded in kitchen sink drama.  This, though, is the real kitchen sink, with life's small highlights embedded in a world of work and tedium, in which nothing is extraordinary and there is no lasting excitement.  It's a grim view, and one that doesn't particularly appeal to me in films.  In some ways it's too real, insufficiently fanciful, as the film's events probably played out in much the same way all over Britain in real life.  I'm always glad to see the cold truth in a film, but I prefer to see it told with more imagination.

In other places I've praised 'Die Zweite Heimat' (1993), the events of which likewise begin in the austere, 50s-tinged world of 1960, and I've often described that as being more like life than like a film - but it has an epic quality, taking in the whole decade over two-dozen hours, and bears some suggestion of romance, art and progress.  'Die Zweite Heimat', or its forebear 'Heimat' (1984) could easily take an hour or so to look at bleak, inescapable cycles in the manner we see here, but would do so as part of a larger, more interesting story.  By the same author as 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning', Alan Sillitoe, I prefer 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner' (1962), which captures the same mood, but is generous enough to provide a likeable protagonist and the element of surprise.

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The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Lawnmower, man.

Do excuse my fortnight absence from writing up films for The Penciltonian; a blend of business and laziness left me indisposed, but I'm back with these words on 'Lawnmower Man', a serious-minded vision of a year 2000 in which VIRTUAL REALITY is credible, practical and nineties beautiful.  You can tell it's from the nineties, as the CGI sequences resemble 'ReBoot', and every important scene is lit wholly in blue.

Our hero is a scientist played by young, dark-haired Pierce Brosnan, a couple of years before he became Bond.  At this point in his career he's just Some Guy and accordingly gives a less subtle, more theatrical performance than I've become accustomed to.  In looks and manner, he's a cross between Gaius Baltar and Dr Lucian Sanchez.  He works with the most colourful screen-savers, and is making breakthroughs in either brain chemistry or software.

The future of computing.

When his chimp dies of science, he recruits Jobe (who has extreme learning difficulties, but whose performance in no way resembles any of the learning-disabled people I work with), treating him with all the sciences combined in order to increase his brain, and the prominence of his naked torso.  Poor Jobe soon abandons his lazily-worn dungarees and takes to driving, sex and catastrophic mental spasms.  'Awesome dudical!'

What follows is a cyberspace horror, as Jobe's mind becomes inseparable from the Day-Glo CGI that dwells inside all computers, and he goes on a rampage of embarrassing character.  The special effects aren't what I'd describe as good enough for Youtube, and are probably the least impressive that I've seen during my century of film-watching.  The visual effects from 'Orphée' (1950), for instance, would stand up far better today than these do, and it's a great pity that the point where this film ought to turn from sci-fi to horror, it in fact loses its credibility and becomes 'Garth Marenghi's Darkplace'

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Rear Window (1954)

For years I assumed this film's title would refer to the rear window of a car, and that we'd be treated to a paranoid driver obsessively checking his rear-view mirror.  It is, in fact, about a housebound Jimmy Stewart, who gets his kicks as an imaginative voyeur.  He's a globe-trotting photographer, but he's been stuck at home for the past seven weeks with his leg in a cast, so he's taken to watching the goings-on in the housing block opposite.

Most of what he sees through his neighbours' windows are romances, either requited or one-sided, giving us, in a series of brick-framed silent films, Hitchcock's 'Love Actually'.  In one window, though, our inquisitive hero believes he has seen clues to something far more sinister: either he's found evidence of an uncommonly calm murderer, or else he's just being paranoid.  Of course, characters in Hitchcock movies are always told they're being paranoid.  It's part of what makes the films so tense.

Thelma Ritter as the wonderfully down-to-earth nurse Stella,
and Grace Kelly as the glamorous Lisa.

The film alternates between James Stewart watching other people's stories, and getting on with his own tale of romance with Grace Kelly, before the two strands finally come together in the movie's thrilling climax.  It's a slow build, with a blend of strangers' stories and a good deal of humour.  It's a simple concept, and excellently visual.  A great deal of it is told in P.O.V. shots down binoculars or through Stewart's camera, meaning that for once the most alarming thing that could possibly happen, and which inevitably will, is if the apparent murderer looks at the camera and sees the audience.

Through no particular planning I've managed to watch three of Grace Kelly's films this month - 'High Noon' (1952), 'Rear Window' (1954) and 'High Society' (1956), and for some reason all three films show her in a romance with a man a generation her senior.  She's excellent here as James Stewart's equal and opposite.  He's a traveller at heart, but is encumbered by his broken leg and must spend the film looking and thinking, while she's more inclined to home comforts, but has to take all the action in the film, venturing into danger, and travelling into the places Stewart has often seen but never visited.

I'd seen the film once before, but was unprepared for how enjoyable it was to watch, how immediately likeable the characters were and how much comedy Hitchcock used to include in his alarming tales of violent crime.  For the severalth time during this Penciltonian project, I'm reminded to learn that famous directors can make really good films.

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The Robe (1953)

There was, in the olden days of fifties cinema, a brief fad for Biblical films and, what's more, for Bible spin-offs - adventures about characters who don't appear in the Bible at all, or who only get cameos in the gospels.  Thus we have 'Quo Vadis' (1951), about Peter and the early church, 'Ben-Hur' (1959) about a young Jewish Prince, and 'Barabbas' (1961) about the murderer Barabbas who was freed by Pilate on the eve of Jesus' crucifixion.  Since the stories only need to touch very briefly on Biblical events they're freer to be more visual, less religiose, and where possible allow the heroes to be violent, deceptive and all-in-all conventional heroes before last-minute conversion to Christianity, whereupon they renounce their (hitherto very useful) violent ways.  Crucially, if your main character is Jesus it's hard to have him kill the villain at the end, and movie-goers like to see the villain trounced.  In an adventure story, forgiveness looks less exciting than revenge.  'Ben-Hur' probably does it the best, but 'The Robe' is shorter, so gets plenty of TV repeats.

The film follows a Roman soldier, Gallio, who turns out (eventually) to be the centurion who crucified Jesus.  Here, he happens to inherit Jesus's robe (it's red, as per the gospel of Matthew); anyone who's read the book of The Trial and Death of Pontius Pilate (Bible fanfic from the second century, and plenty of fun) may recall that Jesus' robe was considered to be a relic of unpredictable magical powers (with, as they say, hilarious consequences).  It's similar here, though that makes the film sound considerably more entertaining than it actually is.  What we get is a film about a soldier sent to destroy the early church, who, seeing God's work in the lives and hearts of the early Christians, comes to faith.  At points its rather too earnest, but at times it's rather exciting, as the loving pacifists find in Gallio a mighty defender, skilled with sword and political rhetoric.

Turns out this widescreen thing is really good for sword-fighting

The film is one of the earliest examples of anamorphic widescreen, and was shot in the super-widescreen of Cinescope which leaves ample black bars even on a widescreen TV.  It gives impressive scope, especially to landscapes and crowd scenes.  It's still not quite right, with long shots looking rather distorted around the edges.  Unlike the later 'Ben-Hur' (1959), there seems a reluctance here to use facial close-ups, meaning we're never really given actors expressions to scrutinise.  (The first time we get to see the pores in anyone's skin cones after two hours and two minutes).  Coupled with Richard Burton's habit of wearing a helmet in as many shots as possible, we get to see far too little of his performance, and his dialogue is too functional to allow him much freedom of expression.

His opponent, the Emperor Caligula, is, as they say, worth the price of admission.  I've seen him described as 'unforgettably camp', and he has an amazing delivery, rendering 'Christians' as 'kress-chuns', and getting more vowels out of Gallio than one might think believable.  This is Caligula as he might have been played in sixties 'Batman'.

The film makes slightly too much use of characters being inspired by simply
looking at Jesus, rather than being inspired by (say) his words or actions.

The real surprise, which I mean now to spoil, is the ending of the film.  The genre would seem to expect a daring escape, and Caligula defeated.  Instead, the villainous Caligula prospers and sentences our heroes to death, and they are taken outside to be executed, and this martyrdom is treated as a happy ending, with the hope of resurrection the real reward.  I was taken aback to see an adventure film, and a schlocky, campy one at that, giving us life in Christ as the true prize, rather than something's more tangible, crude or conventional.  I can't imagine a modern film presenting such a martyrdom as a happy triumph.  I suppose 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' (1928) and 'The Last Temptation of Christ' (1988) come close, but we know those stories so their endings seem inevitable.  As it is, Caligula has to wait for the sequel, 'Demetrius and the Gladiators' (1954) to get his comeuppance.


P.S. This film has the rubbishest Pontius Pilate.  My Pilate of preference is Frank Thring, but I'll also speak up for David Bowie.

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