This Island Rod

The earliest surviving directorial work of Fritz Lang, The Spiders, a two-part adventure epic, stands with Lang’s great later work like Dr Mabuse, the Gambler(1923), Metropolis (1926), and Spione (1927) as a wellspring of pop-cultural definition. Here are the common roots of the serials made by Republic Studios, James Bond, Indiana Jones, and just about any other adventure movie where a dashing hero battles gangs of evildoers, trots the globe, and makes escapes by the skin of his teeth. Translating late Victorian and Edwardian Boy’s Own pulp into cinematic terms, and clearly inspired itself by Louis Feulliade’s serials like Fantomas(1913), Les Vampires (1915), and Tih-Minh (1918), The Spiders nonetheless carved out new territory, through Lang’s greater scope of action and peculiar flourishes in creating escapism for a post-War world. Already present are Lang’s pet themes of insidious and conspiratorial forces, solitary and assailed heroes on the hunt for founts of purity, and pulp storytelling dusted with a numinous gleam of otherworldly beauty and threat: surrealism is even more nascent here than in Feuillade's. The hero is Kay Hoog (Carl de Vogt), a reputed gentleman sportsman of San Francisco who has a quest thrust by fate right in his lap, when he finds a message in a bottle sent by a Harvard professor – whose death is glimpsed at the outset – who’s gone missing in South America, claiming to be captive of a lost Incan tribe that lives by a “Golden Lake,” and guards a fabulous cave of less metaphorical gold. Hoog sets out to track down the Golden Lake, but doesn’t know that one of the society guests he recounts his discovery to, Lio Sha (Ressel Orla), is a major figure in the international crime syndicate known as the Spiders, who leave a dead, petrified Tarantula as their calling card.

Even folks who find the pacing of silent cinema awkward could surely lap up the first half of The Spiders, which rockets at a pace any contemporary blockbuster director could appreciate - faster indeed, as Lang has no need to pay heed to today's expected niceties of set-up - whilst maintaining a tightly focused and controlled sense of storytelling that defines the elemental appeal of such rollicking cinema. Within minutes, Hoog is thrust into danger as he travels to South America, whilst Lio Sha pays the denizens of a seedy tavern to kill him: pure coincidence sees Hoog enter the tavern, recognise his danger, and bail everyone up with two trusty six-shooters. Then Hoog takes off on horseback, pursued by his foes, finally grabbing on at the last second to a rope trailing from the hot air balloon of an explorer friend – a great moment of pure cliffhanger pizzazz. Hoog hops off the balloon in the middle of the jungle, close to the land of Incan tribe and the Golden Lake, where the tribe’s anointed “Sun Priestess” Naela (Lil Dagover) swims each day in solitude as part of her ritualised existence. Anticipations here of Lang’s UFA stablemate and rival F.W. Murnau’s Tabu (1931) as untouchably pure maiden entices cultural breach and rupturing worlds, as well as the Edenic glades where Siegfried battles the dragon in Die Nibelungen (1924). Freudian symbolism ignites as Hoog saves the virgin from a lurking snake. Naela returns the favour by hiding Hoog from her tribal fellows by taking him to her private, sacred grotto (more Freudian symbolism?) where a hidden waterfall hides the sunken path through to the cave of gold. In hot pursuit of Hoog, Lio Sha is captured by the Incans, and intended as a sacrifice which Naela will be forced to perform, in order to reawaken the great Incan empire.

Lio Sha is clearly moulded in the image of Feuillade’s Irma Vep and Diana Monti, nominally a wilful, exotic Chinese dragon lady, but with Orla scarcely made to look Asian as Lang makes the play-acting obvious (interestingly, Lang’s Japonaise work, Harakiri, was released between the two episodes of The Spiders). None of the other Spiders, not even ingenious safecracker Four-Finger John (Edgar Pauly), come close to her for dominating the narrative, and Orla projects a marvellously imperious arrogance in the part, although Lio Sha never quite takes on the grandeur of Feuillade’s femme fatales, except at a crucial narrative juncture. Hoog saves Lio Sha – he’s too much of a gentleman to let that sort of funny business stand – and the first episode climaxes in a superbly orchestrated sequence as Lio Sha’s men break into the temple and battle with the Incans, before they break into the gold cave, only to bring about their own destruction by accidentally flooding the cave, whilst Hoog and Naela escape. Tragedy awaits however, as Lio Sha survives the deluge, tracks Hoog back to San Francisco, where she tries to command Hoog’s affections, only to be rejected in favour of Naela, sparking Lio Sha to terrible revenge, having Naela assassinated. Hoog is bereft and vows his own campaign of destruction against his enemies.

Lang had been forced to pass on directing his script for Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (1919) because he was committed to make this, which was intended to be a four-part epic in a manner not that different to modern franchise epics. Lang’s early technique is lucid and simple for the most part, but hard-paced and occasionally confirming the presence of a great cinema pioneer at the helm throughout. Lang’s fascination for deliberately static, two-dimensional framings in the stage-like manner of very early films and utilised often in Dr Mabuse and Die Nibelungen, is mostly absent here, placing less emphasis on mise-en-scenethan on shot-for-shot rhythm, as appropriate for this mode of storytelling. And yet Lang’s gift for visual constructs that replicated design effects and assumptions of Cubist and other early-modern art forms is apparent in the Incan temple, a conglomeration of gigantic blocks and rectilinear shots that emphasise ritualism in the posturing of a gaudily attired Naela, seated above the Incan high priest as he orchestrates Lio Sha’s sacrifice. He conjures clever visual exposition devices and quirks, opening with Lio Sha and the other club guests expecting Hoog’s arrival for a yacht race and instead treated to his tale of discovery, explicated through flashback. A later sequence offers a seer trying to trace the history of a missing diamond that traces the faces of each generation of a family through to the present. Lang also makes a lot of use cross-cutting, some of it rough, as the rules for smoothly shifting between scenes still seem happenstance, but still maintaining coherency. A level of self-mockery is also apparent, in a manner anticipatory of the pulp satire of decades to come like Get Smart, as Hoog stows away aboard a Spider ship inside a large crate that is equipped with all the creature comforts, including an electric light, nice wine selection, and a well-stocked library.

All of this gives flesh and verve to the free-form narrative which takes the notion of the underworld to an extreme that anticipates a frightening number of later connections, from Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962) to Big Trouble in Little China (1986) to Guillermo Del Toro’s delight in worlds within worlds, as Hoog tracks the Spiders down into an “underground Chinese city” that’s been constructed beneath San Francisco. The underlying racial politics in the pulp tale are odd and blurred. The discovery of the Incan tribe and Naela’s image of unspoilt pagan beauty feels of a unit with early twentieth century German fascination for the spiritual purity of the noble savage (see also Carl May’s Winnetou stories), certainly cross-breeding with Lang’s own fascination with the mystique of the Edenic, from which civilisation represents an inevitable fall into human depravity wrought by intense emotions, a drama enacted in spare and personal terms by the Hoog-Naela-Lio Sha drama. This coexists with hints common to a lot of pulp of the period (see also Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels) at an insidious erosion of white western dominance and attempts by other races to achieve dominance, as the Incans seek renewed power, and the Spiders’ Hindu helpmates who want to throw out western imperialists, whilst the Chinese quite literally undermine the American city. But Lang emphasises the apolitical, multinational Spiders as a manipulative pan-global conspiracy, with meetings between their members a gallery of suited Europeans and more colourfully attired Asiatics, who seek to turn the dream of Asian independence to their own tyrannical ends.

Much of The Spiders’ ingenious and exotic landscape accords with Lang’s interest in creating worlds as psychological expressions, turning his San Francisco into an early variation on the collapsing Weimar of Dr Mabuse, the forest/city schisms of Die Nibelungen, and the multifarious zones of Metropolis and The Tiger of Eschnapur/The Indian Tomb(1959) with underground chambers filled with sealed-off terrors as literalised id, to accompany the dreams of transcendence expressed through skyscrapers in Metropolis and here in the Golden Lake. The Spiders clearly anticipate not just Lang’s own criminal cabals in Dr Mabuseand The Big Heat (1953), but SPECTRE in the Bond films and every other menacingly named villainous organisation in cinema, TV, and comic books to come in the following century. Reference is made to Lio Sha’s overlord, a mysterious unseen Leader, a spidery presence at the centre of all. The driving tensions between the familiar and stable and the threatening and corrosive are arranged along a new-old axis, as is so often the case in the Bond films, with the Spiders meeting in sealed underground chambers walled with smooth steel, where Lio Sha keeps an eye on them with something very like a television, establishing the film however vaguely within the realm of science-fiction. Hoog lounges in his spacious Victorian manse, an icon of leisured, moneyed privilege who deigns to combat evil anyway, thereby adding Batman to his list descendants. Hoog’s campaign to bust the Spiders sees him track down the hidden headquarters and help the police in raiding it, parachuting onto the roof from a buddy’s plane and penetrating the inner sanctums, but missing Lio Sha.

The second half is much more fitful than the first, lacking its compulsive pace and flagrant inventiveness, although the early scenes of Hoog’s campaign against the Spiders and penetration of the Chinese city suggest no fall-off in imagination. The story this time around, as diamond magnate John Terry (Rudolf Lettinger) is targeted by the Spiders because his family own the “Budda-Diamond”, a totem that will drive the Diamond Ship, although what the Diamond Ship is remains frustratingly unexplained and unexploited. The narrative instead steadily loses steam as Terry’s daughter Ellen (Thea Zander) is kidnapped for blackmail, whilst Hoog is forced by Lio Sha to take her and her henchmen to the Falkland Islands, where he learns the Budda-Diamond is buried. A splendidly overripe flashback to the Terrys’ pirate ancestor and his crew burying their treasure there doesn’t compensate for a narrative quickly steam, with a rushed, deus-ex-machinacomeuppance for Lio Sha, sparing Hoog any unsporting gestures, before as easy rescue for Ellen from the clutches of the Spiders’ hypnotic genius Dr Telphas (Georg John). It’s quite clear then why Lang abandoned the project well before its projected completion, as he lost interest in thinking up more elaborate thrill situations with the grand staging of the first half lapsed into cramped situations. On the other hand, here Lang is clearly straining to create a different kind of dramatic thriller touching on Dr Mabuse’s and Metropolis’ fascination with mental domination and more intimate tyrannies: the only thing eluding him here was the ability to create more complex psychological settings in this straightforward context. In spite of the wane in the last third, The Spiders is still a hugely enjoyable and ebullient marvel that genuinely bridges the very last days of cinema’s infancy and the onset of its new maturity.

Luis Buñuel’s repute as one of cinema’s mightiest talents rested for a long time on his outrageous early works, made in partial collaboration with Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age d’Or (1930), and the films he made after his return to European cinema in the 1960s and ‘70s. By that time, his deeply acerbic perspective accorded well with a society that had caught up with his refined instinct at sniffing out the more contemptible aspects of Western civilisation with a skill at once airy and unsparing. It’s possible, however, that Bunuel’s greatest body of work came from the long period of his exile and subsistence as a commercial filmmaker in Mexico, where his sharp-honed wit dug insidiously into whatever fare he tackled. Whereas Buñuel’s later return to satire laced with surrealism was perfectly in tune with an age of postmodernist and countercultural sentiment eager to sever the last threads of the old social presumptions, whose tyranny was swiftly becoming history outside of reactionary strongholds like Buñuel’s native Spain, his works in the 1950s still have the feeling of a genius outsider carefully a ruthlessly fine line in provoking and pleasing his audience, commenting on some issues scarcely anyone was touching at the time. He managed to make brilliant films, including the fabled drama Los Olvidados (1951), about street kids, which almost got him assaulted at its premiere, the remarkable study in sexual neurosis and domestic violence Él (1953), his uneven but brilliantly conceived version of Wuthering Heights, Abismos de Pasion (1954), the pungently honest racial and sexual drama The Young One (1960), and his parting gifts to the national cinema after he was finding new international success, the ingenious apocalyptic fable El Angel Exterminador (1962) and the pithy parable Simon of the Desert (1965).

Buñuel’s work in Mexico sometimes saw him trying to appeal to the English-language market, as he did with The Young Oneand with The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the first of his two superlative adaptations of classic novels (out of many he wanted to tackle). Unlike the highly personalised, heavily rewritten Abismos de Pasion, however, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoedeclines to overtly inflect the work with Buñuel’s twists and tweaks: it is, on the surface, a very faithful retelling of Daniel Defoe’s novel. Buñuel digs and investigates Defoe, however, noting his blind spots as well as amplifying his best, half-latent ideas. Buñuel emphasises Crusoe as a misbegotten product of civilisation’s tendency to create useless people supported by institutions and niceties that keep the people who provide for them in check, and the potential disaster of this: the underpinnings of his voyaging are highlighted early on as a divergent wish to claim independence from his father and to obtain slaves in Africa so he can make his planting fortune. Buñuel plays the first third of his film as a borderline satire of the novel as his Crusoe (Dan O’Herlihy) smoothly and easily adapts to his situation after being shipwrecked on a tropical island off the South American coast, cannibalising his ship’s wreckage and swiftly constructing a little colonial fortress within minutes. Buñuel traces and emphasises the birth and development of Crusoe’s brilliance as a survivor as he learns painstaking method and trial-and-error invention, recreating the basics of civilisation from the seed of his own desolation. “Now it can be said that I’ve truly worked for my bread!” Crusoe declaims proudly once he finally thrashes out wheat he’s grown himself. Notably, the film was co-written by Hugo Butler, who was on the run from the blacklist, giving the film some spiritual kinship with the same year’s The Naked Jungle, also an overtly metaphoric jungle adventure written by a blacklistee.

Buñuel’s zippy, waggish approach to this aspect of the story soon however gives way to a new and different contemplation of Crusoe’s anguish when, once the fear of survival and his quest to regain something of the simple, dignified talent of a subsistence farmer are concluded, he is then faced with bottomless existential angst when his beloved dog Rex dies of old age. Terrified by his own solitude, he heads to the “valley of the echoes” where he bellows the Lord’s Prayer into a chasm to hear the words echoing back at him just for the sake of hearing his human voice as something real. At once he becomes insignificant in the face of an empty world and godlike in presence as the one voice, the lone entity of perspective in that world: the sudden collapse of faith immediately sends him scurrying from Bible to surf with a torch like a suicidal messiah before the life urge kicks back and drives him back ingloriously. The price Crusoe pays for this tenuous balancing point where he resists temptations of self-destruction is to become virulently paranoid: the powerful symbol of the footprint in the sand becomes a spark of maddening disruption in self-absorption, and Crusoe discovers signs that other human beings visit his island, he becomes hysterically fearful and warlike. There’s good reason for this, as the visitors soon prove to be ritualistic cannibals who come to his island specifically to slaughter and eat their human prey. Crusoe, never bothered by them, eventually makes his own live-and-let-live peace with the idea of fellow, brutal but equally self-directed humans, only being forced to intervene and save an escaping man from his pursuers, this of course being the man he dubs Friday (Jaime Fernández).

Friday immediately offers Crusoe the opportunity for a relapse into colonialist attitudes as he teaches him his first two English words, his own new name arbitrarily assigned from the day of the week, and, of course, “Master.” With Master and servant comes the fear of brutal revolt, as Crusoe chains Friday to a bed to exculpate his own terror of being murdered in his. But Friday finally convinces Crusoe that he has an actual friend and the two cast away exclusions. Even Crusoe’s attempts to evangelize run aground as Friday – having already been vaulted to the state of pipe-puffing philosopher – immediately picks De Sade’s objection to the idea that God gives freedom to choose between good and evil: “We does he get mad?” Crusoe can only hem and haw. Simon of the Desert and its embattled sky-communer are presaged, as Crusoe often postures as just as sagaciously assured and is just as vexedly confronted. Yet virgin birth occurs: Crusoe’s cat has kittens, leaving Crusoe clueless as to their father, “the one mystery of the island I never solved,” like proof of a watching deity in a prankster humour towards this wayward underling.

Crusoe himself becomes semi-benevolent deity, lording it over the bugs, as he feeds one species to the other. This provides Buñuel’s compulsory insect cameo, Buñuel’s familiar use of them as tactile emblems of the power of anarchic nature partly mitigated and given odd new dimension by Crusoe’s attitude to them, noting the strangeness and beauty of the desire to play and require a god, to adjudge and coordinate the world according to whims of sympathy. Not surprisingly, Buñuel tried to film that notable rewrite of Defoe, Lord of the Flies, for several years afterwards. El Angel Exterminador’s enforced, supernatural stranding is both anticipated and carefully counterpointed here, as the disintegration of the haute bourgeoisie in the later film isolates and forces devolution on its characters who nonetheless learn nothing and must recommence their lesson, whilst both Crusoe and Friday evolve in mirroring processes, as Crusoe learns to adapt to authentic life whilst Friday springs from naked savage to proto-gentleman, each without losing their fundamental character. Rather, towards the end, as proof of the general murderousness of men comes to hand, Crusoe finally asks Friday if he’s not afraid of the civilised world. A scarecrow clothed with a salvaged dress becomes a momentarily beckoning erotic salve for the desperately lonely man; later, Friday appals and entices him by jumping out of nowhere attired in another dress, unaware of its totemic meaning for the European, and profoundly distressing Crusoe with the spectacle of blurred and tempted sexual as well as racial norms. Even more charged: when Friday takes the dress off, stripping with the sudden, clueless but certain introduction of shame into his life.

In spite of his stature as one of cinema’s most definitive artists, Buñuel’s ever-concise, beautifully simple filmmaking was anything but pretentious. His blithe camera precision is constant evidence here, making use of the gaudy hues of ‘50s Technicolor to paint the locations in a fantastical manner (Alex Philips' cinematography is bright and clean but lacks perhaps the expressive incision Buñuel’s regular collaborator Gabriel Figueroa might have brought to the film). The opening shipwreck is depicted in a shadowy model play, a maelstrom of perverse greens and blacks, a plunge from a dream-world that resolves in the stark brightness and solidity of Crusoe’s new kingdom, a thematically apt inversion that confirms Buñuel’s attitude for the world of men as the false one. A drunken revel lets Crusoe cut loose to the accompaniment of an invisible choir of drinking buddies (“Down Among the Dead Men” their ominous shanty of choice) and then sudden, cold cessation, with Crusoe dissolving in a weeping fit, to be abandoned to grief and solitude via a slow track away. A gently odd dream sequence has Crusoe suffer a fever that passes as ritual cleansing for his rude pilgrim, seeing his father as a judgemental patriarch (played by O’Herlihy too, of course) tasking his son, who suddenly perceives himself as a crucified sufferer suspended in a pool of the water he’s begging for but cannot reach.

O’Herlihy’s performance was, surprisingly, nominated for an Oscar when the film gained release two years after shooting in 1954, and it’s not hard to see why, as O’Herlihy has to carry the film with two difficult modes of expression, as a silent actor on screen for much of the film, and as a voiceover artist, utilising his resonant baritone to create an aural character who registers at first as a pompous bluff in initially recording his adventures and then in increasingly frayed and emotional terms, before resurging in newly natural, confident tones. Fine, too, is the minatory agony that clearly passes through his face and flesh when he sees impossible femininity projected upon his scarecrow and, then, disquiet when he sees it again on Friday. Buñuel offers thrills and action enough too in the meantime to keep his popular audience happy, as he and Friday battle off murderous emissaries from his tribe, whilst the climax sees Crusoe and Friday save a victimised sea captain from his mutinous crew, whose arrival is heralded in a good joke as Friday and Crusoe rehearse doing battle with the neighbours, Crusoe pretending to throw his homemade bomb but hearing a very real blast. A little swashbuckling and some trapper’s cunning sets things right. Crusoe indulges a long last survey of his hand-built, self-made world, dons his dated finery, and takes a look at the man he once was in the mirror, before leaving the mutineers to face Crusoe’s own trial by exile with the hope of cleansing their filthy souls, whilst he and Friday set out to re-educate the world. The film as a whole isn’t in the top drawer of Buñuel’s remarkable oeuvre, but it is quietly excellent nonetheless. More officiously revisionist versions of Defoe include Man Friday(1976) and Crusoe (1988), but perhaps not as effective; more inventive, Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964).

Gordon Willis, who died yesterday at the age of 82, was a great cinematographer, one whose gifts found the perfect time and venue to mature, and ideal collaborators whose works he could lend them to. The famous use of underexposure in the photography of The Godfather films imprinted a certain visual language in the minds of a mass audience, a sombre palette of muted colours and invasive blacks, where the mystique of family pride and historical survival always seems under assault by a hostile universe, by an inky moral rot, eternally poised between Manichaean extremes. Alan Pakula's stringent modernist nightmares demanded and received Willis' equal achievement, stripping these cinematic worlds down to glades of assailed humanity amidst implacable space, ruthless systems, and paranoiacally elliptical viewpoints. Willis' work for Coppola, for Pakula, and even for Woody Allen exemplified a stylistic hand who could build an image with a precise sense of effect - nostalgic or realistic, romantic or incisive, painterly or abstruse, mysterious or revealing, or, sometimes, many of these at once. He could be as cold as Klee, he could be as warm as Velazquez. Willis’ works throughout the decade and beyond nonetheless confirmed his independent eye with a gift for oblique composition, and belonged to a generation of cinematographers including László Kovács, Vilmos Zsigmond, Vittorio Storaro, and Michael Balhaus, who inflected the era’s cinema with an expressivity that today has a legendary patina, for the sensual and aesthetic thrill of artisans in love with the very tactile nature of their art.

Widely acclaimed at the time as both a revival of the grand movie epic and a revivification of the Western genre enabled by a pro-Native American tilt, Kevin Costner’s debut film as director captured the 1990 Best Picture Oscar, only to be remembered chiefly thereafter by cinephiles for cheating Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas of that glory. In retrospect that was classic divergence of artistic outlook in two different takes on the concept of genre revisionism, between Costner’s sad but elegiac, idealistic take on terribly known yet still unfinished history and Scorsese’s scabrous anatomy of modernity’s id. The AMPAS always knows which choice to make in such situations. Dances With Wolves wasn’t really that original in its outlook or incisions, standing in the shadows of films like Little Big Man (1970), A Man Called Horse(1970), Soldier Blue (1971), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or: Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976), and other scattered Westerns from the genre’s sunset decade. It could be said Costner’s film lacks the ambivalence of some of those films, which tended to look askance at the savage side of both white and red men. Dances With Wolves is unabashed in manipulating the audience into loving its Sioux heroes and presenting the emissaries of European settlement apart from damaged war veteran John Dunbar (Costner) as brutal, sleazy, or moronic caricatures.

Costner’s film, a leisurely three hours in release cut (four in the director’s cut, which I watched when I finally caught up with this film), is at least admirable for its refusal to hurry, trying to attune the viewer to the beauty of the unspoilt west and the notion of natural harmoniousness, offering a space around the characters and their ways of seeing the world that prevents the film from lapsing entirely into either smarmy new-age fable or sado-masochistic fantasy like A Man Called Horse. Dunbar is introduced on a Union Army field hospital table about to have a leg sawn off after receiving a wound in a Civil War battle: rather than suffer the fate of a cripple, he pulls his boots back on and rides out hoping for the enemy’s coup-de-grace. Costner makes a play immediately for cinematic grandeur as Dunbar rides in slow-motion before the guns of the Confederacy with arms spread in best crucifixion pose, suggesting Dunbar – whose background and life story remain irritatingly opaque throughout the film – is a Christ figure and sacrificial lamb for white civilisation who is reborn as a new prophet of frontier race relations.

The visual language here is mythic, the actual mechanics of the sequence pretty absurd. Costner’s posing also harks back to other male movie stars who courted messianic suffering and ascension like Brando, Hopper, and Newman, but Costner never matches their gifts for capturing the suffering. Dunbar is a blank slate for the modern audience to project upon as he survives this unlikely adventure, is saved and decorated by a General, and, as is his privilege, volunteers for duty on the further fringes of the frontier. Dunbar’s journey west is punctuated by glimpses of such moral and mental rot in his world visualised in the most clichéd terms as he encounters gross and pathetic emissaries of that world, including an alcoholic Major, Fambrough (Maury Chaykin), who urinates in his own pants and shoots himself moments after Dunbar leaves him, and Dunbar’s slovenly agent escort to the frontier, Timmons (Robert Pastorelli). The hapless CO in charge of Dunbar’s intended post leads his bedraggled and mutinous men away just before Dunbar arrives, leaving behind a scarred and blemished place that haunts Dunbar with its Marie Celeste-like quality. Dunbar however enjoys his solitude and respite from conflict, kept company only by a single, bedraggled coyote, and then has his little world visited by a nearby encampment of Sioux.

The film is at its best in the section where the solitary soldier and the aboriginal warriors suspiciously, half-foolishly probe each-other for signs of aggressive intent or potential amity, and develop friendship in a manner Costner does his darndest not to rush. Oneida actor Graham Greene plays Kicking Bird, the tribe’s medicine man, and the first to encounter Dunbar, scared off by the sight of the soldier advancing on him in anger whilst stark naked, as Kicking Bird seems to be stealing his horse. Kicking Bird, like the Reverend who saw Yossarian in the tree in Catch-22, discerns a magnificent omen in this, whilst his fellows, like hot-headed Wind In His Hair (Rodney A. Grant), at first see only an intruder to be chased off or killed. Contact is soon made, however, as Dunbar charms his neighbours by grinding coffee for them and saving a tribally adopted Anglo woman, Stands With A Fist (Mary McDonnell) from suicide after her husband is killed in battle with the Pawnee. He’s finally accepted as a friend by the tribe when he alerts them to a passing buffalo herd and helps in the hunt. He is steadily absorbed into their number, even landing the name Dances With Wolves for his habit of cavorting with his wolf pal in the moonlight, and begins to romance Stands With a Fist, a pairing that pleases his fellows although she’s still supposed to be in a mourning period for her first husband.

Australian cinematographer Dean Semler, who had painted the Aussie mythological west in similarly sprawling, hyper-vivid terms in The Man From Snowy River (1983), won an Oscar amidst the film’s clutch of awards for his efforts here, and his work was certainly integral to the film’s lustre. Dances With Wolves is constantly punctuated with Semler’s lovingly crafted images that paint the Dakota locations in roiling curves of brown and rays of gold, cleansed by nature and cleansing the soul of the receptive. But Costner’s directing is uneven and largely prosaic, settling for a moseying pace and simple scene set-ups, and using Semler’s vast landscape shots as punctuation rather than poetry: if the film’s substance and drama are flagging at any point, here’s another gorgeous vista to knock your socks off. Whereas for David Lean or John Ford landscape was an expressive instrument tied to the psyches of their characters and the ebb and flow of social values upon the arena of an antipathetic environment, for Costner it’s Edenic tourism, a clean and pretty universe to match his idealised vision of Native American life as communal idyll about to be disrupted by big bad civilisation. Still, Costner’s direction reveals acuity for occasionally eye-catching images, including of himself standing bare-assed before a vast landscape. He often effectively mimics Ford’s method for animating a potentially empty frame with diagonal and lateral compositions, as columns of horsemen and wagons cross the screen, mobile islands of humanity on oceanic plains.

Costner and screenwriter Michael Blake (adapting his own novel) noticeably cop out of studying any clash between Dunbar’s PTSD humanism and the inimical aspects of the Sioux’s attitude, and set up conflict situations where the wheels of cross-cultural communication might jam, but then abandon them. Dunbar looks askance at their casual butchery of some hunters for doing the same to some buffalo, and his romance with Stands With a Fist, which violates a taboo, only to be casually let off the hook by Greene’s grumpy but indulgent Kicking Bird. Such discursions essentially turn the bulk of the film into a frontier situation comedy where a man gets along with his kooky neighbours and learns to laugh and love with them, in spite of all the pretences. Apart from intimations of unease about how the tribe will eat before the herd shows up, Dances With Wolves feels romanticised to a tendentious degree, offering a cleaned-up wild west where hunger is not a problem at the moment, the bad guys are an evil band of Pawnees (led with swagger by the ever-striking Wes Studi) who relish murdering Timmons, or sweaty, uncouth Union thugs, whilst life amongst the Sioux adds up to an idealised vision that even the commune dwellers of Easy Rider (1969) might find a bit dubious. Dunbar’s low-key romance with Stands With A Fist would be less funny if McDonnell’s hair didn’t look like the before shot in a Garnier Fructis ad and played as so decorously pre-Raphaelite. Certainly nothing as humorously bawdy as Little Big Man’s extended sister shag gets through here.

Not to suggest that represented any more realistic a version of Native American social niceties than this, but Costner’s film certainly smoothed the crude fodder of both history and art down to a palatable paste fit for equitable consumption, the earthiness the film proposes to celebrate actually carefully tamed. Costner’s approach is actually diametrically opposed to the gritty ethics of the ‘70s genre redefinition. Costner films a few buffalo slaughtered by hunters as a tremendous tragedy – effectively and efficiently sensitising the viewer to the Sioux viewpoint of this as disgusting waste – but then essentially dismisses the subsequent killing of the hunters, which happens off-screen, only momentarily stalling Dunbar’s emotional gravitation to the tribe, thus leaving Dunbar’s emotional landscape seeming awfully shallow. That Costner gets away with this sort of thing is chiefly thanks to the quality of his casting, and the loping-paced but enveloping rhythm he hits on, a rhythm that gives the illusion of contemplative realism and a quiet emotionalism. Greene’s effectiveness as the quietly philosophical, concerned Kicking Bird matches Costner’s generally unshowy performing, and the two men interact well, especially in a later sequence when Dunbar works up the nerve to warn Kicking Bird what’s coming in the inevitable white invasion. Grant is excellent as the fearsome but deep-feeling Wind In His Hair, as is Floyd Red Crow Westerman as Ten Bears, the village elder. By comparison, Chaykin is humiliated by a foolish few minutes of overdrawn instability.

The film’s most famous sequence is the tribal buffalo hunt, staged by Costner and filmed by Semler as an ebullient piece of widescreen showmanship, rendered with a skill that cuts to essence of both the corporeal and spiritual sides of the Western genre, liberation of the spirit and unification with the land enacted in the most primal and pragmatic of activities. Another, less effective action sequence comes when Studi’s Pawnee band raids the Sioux whilst most of the warriors are away, forcing Dunbar to loan out his guns, allowing victory with old folks and women and cementing Dunbar as Dances With Wolves, the name he finally claims as his own when he’s captured and beaten by Union soldiers who turn up uninvited at the outpost. Costner’s seriousness repeatedly wanes when he tries to incorporate blunt melodramatic satisfactions. He determines to make sure no-one objects to the Sioux killing white soldiers by not only making them mostly a collective of obnoxious bullies who beat and maim Dunbar, in a study of excess: he’s knocked out after trying to attack one of them no less than three time, and his fellow soldiers also kill his horse and his wolf friend. That, sir, will not stand. The Pawnees are also signalled as evil because they kill a Sioux guard dog, as if it wasn’t enough that Studi has already riddled Timmons with arrows and scalped him alive. Costner adds a smidgen of ambiguity by having a well-behaved Yankee officer killed in the attack that saves Dunbar too.

Dances With Wolves never however feels like a work that’s had a deep amount of thought poured into it. It represents rather a series of strong if convenient emotional postures. Native Americans are good, except those ones; white Americans are bad, except for that one. War is bad at the start, but murderous revenge is cool. Dunbar saves his new community by introducing it to the arts of mechanised slaughter he’s supposed to be running away from, and Costner and Blake have no apparent interest in the contradiction. Visual oppositions and cultural clashes are simplistic. Whereas the final image of Jeremiah Johnson moved me greatly because it offered a moment of recognised kinship that came in spite of and because of the acknowledged brutality of the West, Costner’s film offers pat escapes and dull uplift. But his film is a long way from bad, for it remains absorbing and sleekly watchable even at such a length, and has genuine love invested in its frames. Undoubtedly, Costner’s arrow hit its mark in his moment’s culture, taken as a much-needed corrective, whilst turning himself into the biggest star in the world in the process, for a reign that proved very short as he overreached. The impact of the film also all but rescued the Western from total oblivion (along, perhaps, with the successful teen-oriented Young Guns, 1988) after Costner had starred in one of the last major entries, Silverado, five years earlier, whereas a small glut followed, some of them trashy and popular (Tombstone, 1993), some epic and doomed (Geronimo: An American Legend, 1993; Wyatt Earp, 1994), and another Oscar-garlanded hit, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven following just two years later. But two filmmakers who ran much further with Costner’s thematic ball were Jim Jarmusch with Dead Man (1995), which, most tellingly, picked up on the spirituality in Costner’s narrative and turned it inside out, along with some of the racial politics, and Terence Malick would take up the theme of violated Edens and imminent calamity in more inventive terms with The New World (2005). Edward Zwick's The Last Samurai (2003) is a rip-off in different locale, whilst James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) is remake in sci-fi clothing.

In the 1940s, bombs were dropping on Britain and its fresh-faced young men were doing their duty in khaki. Meanwhile, black-haired, velvet-voiced James Mason became Britain’s hottest domestic film star by turning women on with characters antipathetic to the Blitz spirit: dark marauders, demon seducers, Byronic antiheroes, and highwaymen wielding pistols and double entendres. He tapped into the latent sado-masochistic fantasies of his audience, whether trying to clip Ann Todd’s fingers with his cane (in The Seventh Veil, 1945) or hacking Margaret Lockwood to death with a sabre (in The Man in Grey, 1943), before finding sainthood through blood loss in Odd Man Out (1947) and thus earning his ticket to Hollywood. Many of the films Mason strutted his stuff in during this time were made with crisp method and propulsive energy by Gainsborough Pictures, one of Britain’s most prolific studios before it was eventually swallowed up by Rank. Quite a few of the “Gainsborough melodramas” and their ilk were essentially prototypical Harlequin romances, except with a vital strain of fetid sexuality and delight in finding the hot collar under the stiff upper lip and a quality of knowing, pulp energy that tickled the audience by taking their fantasies seriously, but not too much. Such films were the flipside to the era’s reputable war films, historical yarns that took a battered audience and let them bathe in a bit of lusty materialism for a while. Lockwood was Mason’s closest female equivalent, and the duo tussled with barely concealed erotic force and naughty dialogue in one of the most successful films of the period, Leslie Arliss’s The Wicked Lady (1945), where even Mason was forced to second-string status by Lockwood's florid villainy.

The Night Has Eyes, also made by former journalist and screenwriter Arliss (no relation to the acting star George), seems to have laid down some of the blueprint for the melodrama craze, and represented one of Mason’s first real starring vehicles after several years of prominent supporting roles. Produced not at Gainsborough but by Associated British Picture, The Night Has Eyes casts bubbly blonde Joyce Howard against her type as Marian Ives, an uptight school teacher, crisply dressed and bespectacled in a manner reminiscent of Joan Fontaine in Suspicion(1941). Marian ventures into the unknown with her fellow teacher, the horny Doris (Tucker McGuire), in half-conscious search for any sign of what happened to their friend and colleague Evelyn one year earlier, when she disappeared whilst on a hiking holiday. Their vinegary elders in the school theorise snidely about her vanishing, which gets Marian up on her hind legs for swift rebukes. Doris tags along with Marian in protective acquiescence as they venture into the perpetually gloomy studio moors, with Marian’s obsession blinding her to the attentions of a good-humoured doctor on the train Barry Randall (John Fernald). With almost otherworldly compulsion, Marian leads Doris across the moors until they happen upon a remote house where the sole inhabitant is Stephen Deremid (James Mason), a dour recluse and former composer who greets the ladies with lines like, “I enjoy storms” and makes sure their doors are locked to any unwanted visitations during the night.

Deremid has retreated from life since fighting in the Spanish Civil War and receiving a head wound. He’s oddly in a hurry to get rid of the two attractive women who stumble into his tiny world, but of course such brooding antisocial behaviour lights Marian’s fire, and she finds excuses to stay behind even after Doris departs in search of some less complicated men. Clearly made in the shadow of Hitchcock and the permanent mark he left on the British thriller, The Night Has Eyes also anticipates places Hitch would go. It also represents a pole of the romantic melodrama perilously close to the horror film, a genre banned for the duration of conflict by the British censor (indeed, genre historian William K. Everson included the film in his early ‘70s survey Classics of the Horror Film), although the film constantly hints at both imminent eruptions of violence and intimations of the supernatural that never quite resolve. Rather, the film strips the mechanics of Rebecca (1940) and its myriad Gothic predecessors down to the bare essentials of spooky house, naïve heroine, and brooding lover/killer, and also a bit of Gaslight (1940) and its ilk, whilst defining some vital thematic strands of the coming noir film, including having a hero who can’t be sure of his sanity because of war wounds. For further critical archaeological interest, here’s also distant anticipation of not just Psycho (1960) but also the giallofilm’s appropriation of Gothic fiction canards for psychological symbolism, as Deep Red’s (1976) sealed room with skeletal secret is prefigured. Deremid is the archetypal stormy artist, possibly based on the composer Peter Warlock, and a Rochester type who tries to repel Marian with stern disdain that conceals his febrile desire, of course making Marian all the more determinedly interested (note to men: this only works if you’re James Mason).

The dance of attraction and repulse between the duo deepens as Marian dons a Regency gown dug up from the attic after peeling off those wet things, hinting at social regression in a remote place to a different time, recasting the modern duo as their historical avatars, to better enact longed-for sexual roleplaying, thus essentially writing the thesis for an oncoming genre of historical bodice-rippers. Romance between the couple continues in violent alternations, from Marian dancing in liberated abandon to Deremid’s piano-pounding, to advancing on the camera in face-twisting anguish after he tries to run her off with insults, only for him to lose his nerve and chase after her. Intimations of that S&M quality common to these tales are on hand, as Deremid laughs over Marian falling into a water trough and then hefting her on his shoulder like a potato sack. Like the Women’s Pictures coming out of Hollywood, however, the appeal of this style of moviemaking very much hinged on appeal to female moviegoers, and The Night Has Eyes contains common motifs of the style, particularly in its heedless heroine on an adventure of self-discovery. Far from the odd blend of full-on melodrama and tongue-in-cheek proto-camp of The Wicked Lady, however, Arliss maintains a firm control and generates a deliciously treacly atmosphere and a precise pace in a 79 minute film. His fantasy Yorkshire a place of never-ending overcast, the old dark house bordered by one of those natural features you know is going to figure in the plot prominently, the grim swamp where a slight misstep means horrible sucking death. Three paths through the mire are on hand, but only one is safe, which someone is inevitably going to have to choose between by film’s end.

One interesting, uncommon element here is very real: Deremid’s bitterness as a has-been veteran of the Spanish conflict, mentioning his spurning by his government and resentment that his health’s been used up and now has to sit out the new struggle against fascism. Although Arliss' script assures that the world has caught up to his prescience, the acknowledgement is rare from a film of the time. Deremid’s abusive angst is soon revealed as more rooted in the fear that his wound has left him mentally unbalanced. He’s prone to blackouts during the full moon and fits of murderous stalking. Marian seems to witness good cause for this fear, as she comes across him in the night with the strangled body of a pet monkey in his hands. His housekeeper Mrs Ranger (Mary Clare) and handyman Jim Sturrock (Wilfrid Lawson) confirm this to Marian, as Ranger has remained to take care of Deremid since encountering him as a nurse in the recovery ward. Lawson gives a nicely off-kilter performance as Sturrock, seemingly a buffoonish hillbilly (calling his Capucin monkey a “cap-oo-cheen-ee”) but has the faintest hint of something perverse and threatening under the surface. The inevitable suspicion comes to Marian that Deremid might have killed Evelyn in such a spell, who finds signs around the house that she had visited it and constantly feels her presence, as if her shade haunts the place. Marian soon suspects the house’s fabled hidden room might contain her remains.

Penetrating this potential larder of Bluebeard is the last stage in Marian’s mission which has brought her with inexorable purpose from the cosy environs of her Girls’ School to the blasted heath of primal sexuality and lunacy. And indeed a skeleton sits boding in a chair waiting for her. But Arliss has a cool twist up his sleeve about both the nature of this discovery and the mystery enfolding the assailed lovers. He wraps up the film in a gleefully nasty confrontation out on the swamp where, of course, those three paths turn into Russian-roulette punishment for villainy, a one-in-three chance to escape, with the added kicker that although the safe path is chosen, hysteria and frenzied self-interest ends up feeding the swamp regardless. Howard, only 20 years old at the time, was a charmer in the mould of English film roses like Googie Withers, Binnie Hale, or a less posh Madeleine Carroll, and had made a mark in Love on the Dole (1941) where she worked with future ex-husband Basil Sydney; subsequently she made the equally nifty They Met in the Dark (1943) again with Mason before her acting career faltered and sank. She reinvented herself as a writer, anthologist, and socialite in Hollywood, whilst of course Mason went on to become a huge, if rather perpetually underrated star. The Night Has Eyes is one of the modest but real pleasures of ‘40s British cinema, but sadly good prints are hard to come by.

The debut film of neophyte writer-director Blair Erickson, The Banshee Chapter is that rarest of modern cinematic beasts: a genuinely creepy horror film. Superficially, it seems to be another entry in the found-footage movie stakes. But actually Erickson uses the device sparingly, via pieces of footage the characters in the movie proper watch, or interpolated through the film as a whole as a narrative refrain, offering piecemeal glimpses of unholy experimentation and a legacy of evil that dogs the film’s unwitting characters. In fact The Banshee Chapter is a very classical horror film, evoking the Val Lewton method of horror by suggestion with all brief, snatched glimpses of things strange and chilling. Moreover, Erickson exploits some genuine and disturbing phenomena with rich and authentic folkloric power, particularly the real-life horror of the infamous CIA-backed MKUltra experiments which saw volunteers given doses of drugs, including LSD, in the hunt for behaviour-altering power: Ted Kaczynski, the future Unabomber, was one such volunteer. Placed in the mix as well are an equally eerie real-life phenomenon, numbers stations, enigmatic broadcasts from the far reaches of the Earth that can be filled with strange drones, number-reciting voices, Morse code and musical snatches, well-known to radio enthusiasts (and musicians, including Wilco and Boards of Canada, both of whom have included samples from real numbers stations in albums). Erickson’s cunning tale gathers together these fillips of modern paranoia into a story that condenses conceits from several disparate sources in the modern horror and sci-fi genres, but manages to feel skittishly original and manages to maintain tension to almost the end.

Anne Roland (Katia Winter) is the spunky, whip-smart young internet journalist who is haunted by the mysterious fate of her college pal and not-quite-boyfriend James Hirsch (Michael McMillian), who was writing a novel based on the MKUltra experiments. James went missing after taking a potent drug developed for the government program, sent to him by a source he only describes as “friends in Colorado.” As recorded by a an alarmingly discontinuous video of the event taken by his friend Renny (Alex Gianopoulos), James was quickly visited by a paranoid conviction that something was coming to his house, whilst a strange broadcast began to sound on his radio: a shadow looming at the window is followed by shattering glass, and then a brief glimpse of James grossly transformed, with black eyes and bloodied mouth. Renny was interrogated by police who suspected he killed his friend, but then Renny went missing too. Anne sets about investigating, checking out James’ house in rural Nevada, where she finds some clues about where the drug might have come from, as well as a partly erased video tape that contains footage from an MKUltra project that involved the synthesis of the drug using samples from dead bodies, and the spectacles of terror and pity inspired in test subjects. Anne is creeped out by strange noises in James’ cabin. She talks to a radio expert, who might also be a former NSA spook, who identifies the strange radio noise in the video as a numbers station whose broadcasts can normally only be picked up somewhere out in the Black Rock Desert’s wilds in the middle of the night. Only good things can happen doing that on your own, right?

Anne heads out to the desert fringe to listen for the radio broadcast and does pick it up, only to suspect something is stalking her in the dark, and when she catches sight of a vague figure in the fringe of her headlights, she hurriedly flees the site. Her editor Olivia (Vivian Nesbitt) helps fill in a missing piece of the puzzle when she suggests the missive to “friends in Colorado” might be a reference to a novel written by author Thomas Blackburn (Ted Levine), a burlesque on Hunter S. Thompson, although Ken Kesey was the actual noted counterculture writer who did participate in MKUltra. When Blackburn tells Anne over the phone that the title of his new novel is “Fuck Off,” she approaches him in a bar in the guise off an enthusiastic fan (giving Winter a nice little spot of acting within acting as Anne, who’s English, puts on an acceptable American accent), and seems to charm him sufficiently so that he invites her to his place to take the drug along with his friend, alt-cultural chemist wiz Callie (Jenny Gabrielle), who synthesised the same batch that James took. Blackburn soon enough reveals that he’s rumbled Anne’s secret identity, and fools her into thinking she’s taken a dose of the drug, whilst Callie, who really has taken it, falls into the same trembling, terrified state as James did, raving that something is approaching the house, and that “They want to wear us!” Something indeed seems to invade the house and knock out the lights before snatching Callie off into the night, with a brief glimpse of her face now similarly misshapen and gruesome.

The Banshee Chapter ingeniously builds drama around real things that coherently if abstrusely combine real-life tropes that reek of post-World War 2, Cold War-era atmosphere, laden with hints of totalitarian power, amoral experimentation for furthering the ends of that power, and technological ephemera that speaks of the grey zones in the modern world’s cohesion, the toxic fall-out of an age of super-science and super-states. There’s some similarity here to the paranoid, white noise-fixated otherworldliness of The Mothman Prophecies(2002), as well as that modern touchstone for all things based in covert flimflam and wingnut suspicion, The X-Files. Erickson cross-breeds this with familiar supernatural menaces that deserve comparison with M.R. James, and indeed the mixture of immediate and layered storytelling here comes close to James’ writing approach. The film makes overt reference to H.P. Lovecraft, as Blackburn recites the general plotline of “From Beyond” at a most inopportune time for Anne as she ventures into an abandoned house, not congenial to resting shredded nerves. This turns out to be the right reference point, however, as Anne comes to realise that the drug operates on the human mind in the same way that the tuning fork in the story is supposed to, turning it into a kind of chemical receiver and conduit that attracts…what? Beings from unseen planes of existence that really do want to “wear” us. The extended, increasingly intense periods of nothing happening following by side-swiping pay-offs, often in the fake footage sections, is reminiscent of Paranormal Activity, but the film’s ability to sustain similar tension in more traditional sequences suggests the influence of Ti West, if rendered a touch less preciously than that tyro’s work. Elements of the finale, particularly the unknown thing beating mercilessly on the door, recall no less a horror film than Robert Wise’s The Haunting(1963), where that director recalled some of the lessons he’d learnt from his mentor Lewton.

Thus Erickson is perfectly able to justify his unseen threats via a low budget by eliding them nimbly, building tremendous tension in some extended stare-at-the-screen found-footage patches and more traditional forays into old dark houses and abandoned military bases. The old taped fragments of the MKUltra experiments depict apparently dead bodies suddenly grabbing doctors and strapped, dosed patients in isolation chambers somehow escaping their bonds and pounding on two-way glass in mortal terror. Sometimes Erickson does lapse into a gauche theatricality with some of the punchlines to his expert tension building, and what The Banshee Chapter ultimately lacks is a proper, methodical approach to its dramatic exposition. Apart from some early refrains recalling Anne and James’ collegial days and her signalled regret at turning down his romantic overtures, the film’s time for characterisation is pretty scant. Which is a pity, because a feeling of blasted, haunted romanticism lurks within the material. Anne is driven by pain associated not just with the loss of a great pal and intellectual soul-mate but also of the openness of young adulthood, whilst Blackburn is tormented by a connection to the ensuing horrors to a degree he doesn’t seem aware of. Anne is an appreciably determined heroine, perhaps a little too much so, because the film’s urgent, tormented last hour that sees circumstances forcing her and Blackburn to do what any sane person would least like to do in such a predicament, might have had more impact if the characters were just a little more rattled by their situation. But Anne ploughs forthrightly in and Blackburn’s who-gives-a-shit attitude carries him in her wake.

The film doesn’t really live up to the realistic menace invoked by the MKUltra experiments either, which are used chiefly to give the film a crackle of verisimilitude, whilst the narrative moves into some familiar settings for terror-mongering, like a deserted old government research station filled with creepy medical equipment and tanks full of weird shit. Levine’s faux-Thompson is an unusual and inspired protagonist for a horror movie, and Levine’s performance is a great reminder of what an unusual, physically imposing, charismatic actor he can be. Blackburn’s presence offers ripe opportunities to coalesce Thompson’s famously scabrous worldview with events worthy of his famous catchphrase, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,” and explore the real, subterranean link between the MKUltra experiments and the burgeoning of the counterculture, which annexed and repurposed its wares and assumptions. Certainly the film’s narrative cleverly literalises the psychedelic culture’s idealisation of reality-shifting and drug use as a tool of contact with higher powers, and takes it a step further in making it prove to be a very bad trip indeed. But Blackburn never takes on much depth, a last minute revelation about his connection to the experiment adds very little to what’s already been guessed, and his part in the film remains a sketch for a better version.

Whilst the film mostly obeys the Lewtonian principles it sets out to honour with rigour, with the emanation stalking Anne only ever seen in the most vague and swift of manners, it could be argued that the inclusion of the found-footage conceit violates a basic rule of Lewton’s template, which was based around creating a dissonance between viewer and film that implied the untrustworthiness of the film as a record of the characters’ fears: the Lewton style was carefully subjective where the found-footage gimmick affects objectivity. And this in turn hurts the film’s thematic engagement with a porous sense of reality created by mind-altering experiments. The compressed, same-night rush of action in the film’s second half both helps Erickson sustain his nightmarish tone but also retards his opportunities to make deeper incisions into both the drama he’s created and the themes he’s pursuing: he’s put a lot of effort into making his film scary but not enough into make it substantial. Erickson also gets a bit too cute and familiar in its “unexpected” resurgence of the seemingly defeated dark force, which is by now so regulation that to do anything else would see revolutionary. But it’s no sin that Erickson wanted to make an effective horror film first and foremost, which he’s certainly achieved. The climax is a terrific piece of extended menace in the abandoned facility, which bears traces, ominously, of having been hurriedly evacuated and left to whatever godforsaken entity now uses it as a hive. Erickson manages to whip a frenzy of alarm whilst still keeping his evil menace off screen, and the rush of action hurls Anne through states alternately distraught, fearsome, and desolate. Winter’s strength is a major pleasure here. For all its faults, hesitations, and final impression of subtle but definite letdown, The Banshee Chapter is still a relishable experience.

Critically dismissed and a scant commercial success at the time of its release, Tora! Tora! Tora! marked 20th Century Fox honcho Darryl F. Zanuck’s repeating his efforts to alchemise the debris of history into popular entertainment as he had managed with The Longest Day (1962). Zanuck’s next pet project took a similar approach to his depiction of the events leading up the attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, kick-starting America’s entry into the Second World War, providing a string of mostly authentic, episodic illustrations of the people involved and the issues at stake. Perhaps the unenthused response to the film was all but inevitable: in spite of lip-service to the horrors of war, the D-Day film recalled a great triumph in a giddy, mobile fashion, whereas a sober, docudrama-style movie about one of America’s worst military disasters was only ever likely to be a glum experience for a broad audience, unless one tackled it in a manner like Michael Bay and Randall Wallace would thirty-one years later, as a pulp melodrama of martyred suffering and rousing comeback.

The utter disgrace that was Bay’s 2001 blockbuster highlighted the qualities of Tora! Tora! Tora! anew. Some criticisms levelled at the film were fair: the special effects swing from beautiful to tacky, and the acting is sometimes patchy. The film lacks a controlling viewpoint, too, not like Patton, Fox’s more successful and lauded epic released the same year, unless it’s Isoruku Yamamoto (Sō Yamamura), the Japanese admiral who concocts a plan to win a war scarcely before it begins, whilst nursing silent dread of the forces he knows he’s unleashing. I quite like the variety of exacting, detail-specific, broadly focused, almost holistic approach the film takes however, as an exacting analysis of what was for one side a military triumph and the other an enraging sucker punch, largely free of hyperbole and histrionic conveniences, and ending not on a note of imminent triumph but of queasy, ominous import. Tora! Tora! Tora! is the kind of film which, in hindsight, is hard to believe ever got made. It certainly couldn’t be done today except on subjects enacted on a far more limited scale, like Paul Greengrass’ reportorial films, which this film certainly anticipates.

Perhaps the most fabled aspect of Tora! Tora! Tora!’s production for cineastes was the involvement of Akira Kurosawa in preparing the Japanese half of the film’s bifurcated viewpoint, an experience that turned toxic for Kurosawa and almost wrecked his career. Kurosawa was fired and replaced by the experienced journeyman Toshio Masuda to handle dramatic scenes, and future cult auteur Kinji Fukasaku, who had already helmed a Japanese-American co-production, The Green Slime (1968), was hired to bring his expertise to bear for more difficult production elements. The English-language side was handled by Richard Fleischer, whose breadth and ingenuity as a helmsman was rarely appreciated in his lifetime. Fleischer was the rare major Hollywood filmmaker of the period who had handled significant special effects work, on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), but Tora! Tora! Tora! fits with notable ease into his run of studiously composed, superficially detached studies in true-crime tales, including Compulsion (1960), The Boston Strangler (1968) and 10 Rillington Place (1971), and even has structural elements in common, based around the careful deployment of detail and a sense of mounting unease before an eruptive fight for survival, with his horror film See No Evil (1971).

The film coherently pits two productions and two world-views against each-other. The proud Japanese naval men under Yamamura, left out of the Imperial Army’s brutal conquests but now expected to cover its ass by fending off the increasingly disapproving US, are geared up for victory but find themselves becoming cogs in an unstoppable apocalypse, where the Americans are split between the generally indolent and the confused and ineffectively concerned. Tora! Tora! Tora! was important not least for humanising the Japanese perspective on the event, an aspect that helps make the film as a whole ahead of its time. Which is not to say the film lacks a moral perspective, as it paints Yamamoto and his opposite Admiral Kimmel (Martin Balsam) as tragic figures who each have fine qualities but also exemplify something seriously awry in their nations’ outlooks at the time, respectively war-obsessed and naïvely distracted. Fukasaku's fulminating rage at the Imperial era's militarism, borne of experiences when he was a teenager and which would be worked out memorably if metaphorically in Battle Royale (2000), was unavoidably given little scope here. But the film doesn't shy away from identifying Gen. Tojo (Asao Uchida) as Yamamoto’s Army nemesis, who has shunted him into fleet command for hampering his agenda too often in cabinet, and exemplifies chauvinist aggression when he's brusquely relieved that he can’t call back the attack in spite of a diplomatic entreaty from F.D.R. The film finds time for noting the comradely excitement, almost painfully intense, of a pair of Japanese airmen in realising they’ve pulled off their impossible mission, and note off-hand eccentricities like Yamamoto’s subordinate Capt. Kameto Kuroshima (Shunichi Nakamura), nicknamed “Gandhi” for his monkish, old-fashioned habits, pouring over the raid plan with awe for its “fool-proof” precision, a devotee to the Zen of war satisfied to find a holy text.

That plan is concocted by Cmdr. Minoru Genda (Tatsuya Mihashi) and put into action by dashing Lt. Cmdr. Mitsuo Fuchida (Takahiro Tamura), whose charismatic leadership is key to pulling off the raid with the discipline required. Tora! Tora! Tora! feels like a product of the late ‘60s-early ‘70s penchant for war films with a thornier attitude towards officialdom, hierarchy, and militarism in general, although Zanuck’s main revisionist intent had been to defend Kimmel and General Short (Jason Robards Jr) in their concern for sabotage, which resulted in considered moves that had the by-product of making their ships and planes sitting ducks for the attack that really came. Tora! Tora! Tora! isn’t so much cynical as interrogative and coolly expository about the failure of governance and military exigencies to properly mesh, counterbalancing the chilling perfection of the Japanese war machine with its selfless human parts with the American mechanism composed of faulty cogs, as bucks get passed, poltroons foul up, and foot soldiers bewildered by flimflam before paying the price, as Pericles’ famous oratory about the difference between the warriors of a democracy and those of a military state is reflected via a perfect contemporary illustration.

The most emotionally direct moments are indeed not found in combat but in interpersonal exchanges of vehement anger and distress stemming from lines of fouled communication. George Macready’s brief but memorable appearance as Cordell Hull confronting the Japanese Ambassador Nomura (Shôgo Shimada), who’s had to front up with a declaration of war too late, sees Hull release a broadside of devastating anger still couched in statesmanlike wording but finally dissolving into a memorably totemic plea and command, “Go!” Lt. Kaminsky (Neville Brand), having failed to get his superior Capt. Earle (Richard Anderson) to react to an early warning, points to the blazing fleet through the office window when Earle comes in: “You wanted confirmation? There’s your goddamn confirmation!”

The film has its share of potential heroes from the official roster: the matinee-idol Fuchida contends, whilst “Bull” Halsey (James Whitmore) slouches in and out of sight with grouchy, hard-assed humour befitting a John Ford character. But Fleischer’s heroes here tend to be little guys trying to be heard amidst the din of international rivalry combusting: worrisome code-breakers Kramer (Wesley Addy) and Bratton (E.G. Marshall) trying to get bigwigs to pay attention as repeated cries of wolf quickly earn disinterest, radar operators confused by strange signals and unsure whether to stick at their posts, a hapless bomber commander (Norman Alden) perturbed to find himself flying into a war “unarmed and out of gas,” a green young destroyer commander (Jerry Fogel) who finds himself having to destroy a midget submarine, and the two out-of-luck USAAF fighter pilots (Rick Cooper and Carl Reindel) who think they’ve been transferred to a remote landing strip because they win at poker too often, and find they’re the only ones who can get into the air and fight back.

The film’s middle third is a comedy of errors played straight, except for a finite note of anxious humour found in the unlikely minutiae that compose momentous events, as Kramer has to get his wife (Leora Dana) to drive him all around nocturnal Washington trying to get someone to take his alert seriously, and the precision of the Japanese plan is foiled in one of its most simple yet vital aspects, as Nomura’s embassy aide can’t type out the coded declaration of war fast enough for it to be delivered in time, even after he strips off his jacket and really gets down to work. The most awkward elements are familiar in this kind of filmmaking, with sketchy segues to characters handing out exposition by way of waving at charts or surveying model fleets, and awkward performing from some of the cast, even the normally unflappable Robards, when having to make an impression and a plot point in swiftly telegraphed scenes.

But the natural intensity of the event gives the film shape and a remorseless, escalating tension that the film relieves with some well-judged if slightly goofy humour, including a flight instructor alarmed to find herself in the midst of a flight of Zeros, and the USS Nevada’s band leader trying to crank out the national anthem before all hell breaks loose. The attack, when it finally arrives, is still a major piece of cinematic spectacle, although some of the Oscar-winning special effects overseen by Fox’s veteran experts L.B. Abbott and Art Cruickshank, looked flimsy even at the time: realistic earthbound effects on the level of what Stanley Kubrick’s team had managed for space in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) were still in the future, and the film is rife with some annoyingly obvious back-projection and model work. But the blend of maximalist detail including huge mock-ups of battleships and aircraft to be destroyed and model work coalesces into a furious and compulsively watchable inferno where the snatched visions of individual heroism, like Dorie Miller’s (Elven Havard), are glimpsed not for titanic bombast but as noble, gutsy, but essentially futile gestures in the midst of an omnipresent massacre.

The editing that stitches this colossal sequence together is as impressive as the staging, a whirlwind of images of destruction and struggle amidst seething flames and gushing waters, machines ripping themselves apart and juddering under explosive blows. One famously close call for a couple of stuntmen, as a mock-up P-40 exploded, careened through a row of similar mock-ups, and crashed against a fuel tanker bare feet from a stumbled stuntman, is recorded here in breathtaking posterity, and the intended stunt work, including a one-wheeled B-26 landing, is all the more impressive from the perspective of today when CGI is used to take the risk out of opening a can of soft drink. On the other hand, some shots see actors shaking about on flimsy sets with cardboard debris falling on them like a ‘50s B-movie. If Tora! Tora! Tora! occasionally suffers from some busting stitches at the seams, that was perhaps inevitable for a movie made on such a scale at a time when Hollywood was undergoing a prolonged and painful generation change. What’s rare about the film’s cumulative achievement in spite of that is not only that it dramatically and accurately portrays a fraught pivot in human history, but in the way it animates a feeling of genuine disquiet by its closing frames, a refusal to offer closure or false uplift, but rather leaving the film like a gaping wound in a manner that strongly resembles Fleischer’s similarly implacable endings in Ten Rillington Place, Soylent Green (1973),and Mandingo(1975).

Perhaps the film’s most powerful motif is one of beholding dreadful spectacle, anticipating Steven Spielberg’s obsession with that grace-note, as Kimmel does first from the crisply cut lawn outside his residence, then again later as the Arizona explodes and a spent bullet smacks through the window, injuring his stomach, but leaving him to lament that it didn’t kill him. Kaminsky’s abuse of Earle and the beggared survey of Halsey and his crew as they sail into the maelstrom of smoke and fire similarly invoke witnessing as a dread but important event in the face of such horror, the spirit indeed that animates the film: to look, to know, and to understand in doing so. The bleak impression of the conclusion is partly thanks to Jerry Goldsmith’s scoring, with the last images of Yamamoto standing upon the deck of his flagship, an ant-like human in command of, and also now at the mercy of, a colossal war machine, his probably apocryphal “awakened a sleeping giant” quote hanging menacingly in the air as a useful piece of foresight nonetheless as the end credits roll over the blazing ships of the line. The filmmakers make it clear that what’s coming, from Midway to the Atom Bomb, will be a calamity, and any time this Pandora’s box is opened is a grim one for humanity in general.

Here there be spoilers

Films that start out with voiceovers telling you how this movie’s not going to be like other movies automatically place themselves on probation, headed almost inevitably for remand. This astoundingly overrated piece of pablum commences by congratulating its target audience on being too cool to fall for the clichés it then sets about foisting assiduously. Shailene Woodley’s charm is the crutch The Fault in Our Stars’s director Josh Boone leans on, rocking the cutest set of nostril oxygen inlets you ever did see, hair in a waif cut that would make Audrey Hepburn jealous, playing a teenage girl who exists precariously on the edge of mortality with cancer in her lungs whilst never looking less healthy than the average Olympic pole vaulter. She plays Hazel Grace Lancaster, who clings to life thanks to a variably effective experimental drug, and is pushed by her parents (Laura Dern and Sam Trammell) to attend a dippy support group run by amusingly earnest, guitar-strumming Jesus freak Patrick (Mike Birbiglia). This dubious experience proves worthwhile when she encounters the most totally hot guy with one leg you could ever hope to meet, Augustus ‘Gus’ Waters (Ansel Elgort, which must be an anagram of some kind*), a big block of bland who talks in the same post-Joss Whedon-Veronica Mars rhythms as her, with an added layer of sunny overconfidence; and yet the verbal articulateness and writer’s-room arsenal of quips the duo have been given are in no way substitutes for actual character. Gus has survived a bout with the Big C himself at the expense of having one leg amputated, and has a positive outlook which he insists on expressing in most excruciating ways. He initially appals Hazel by sticking a cigarette in his mouth but then explains that he does not light them because he does not give it the power to kill him. She finds this crap charming, and soon Hazel and Gus are head over heels, only for Hazel to ward him off for fear of his heartbreak when he loses her.

Hazel is obsessed with a novel called “An Imperial Affliction,” by expatriate American writer Peter Van Houten, about a girl also dying of cancer, with an infamously curtailed ending, and Hazel transmits her enthusiasm to Gus, as well as curiosity over the unanswered questions left by the novel. A trip to Amsterdam financed by a Make-a-Wish Foundation stand-in allows the young couple to find out first hand and of course provide a catalysing setting for a snog-fest. This movie was itself based on a very popular and well-regarded YA novel by John Green, which I haven’t read, though many tell me the specific, wonky rhythm of the source material is missing. The audience around me, doubtlessly familiar with the book, reacted to specific moments with fetishistic intensity is if holy writ was being portrayed. Undoubtedly the film’s pot-shots at predecessors take aim at Love Story (1970) amongst many, but what’s interesting about the difference between even Erich Segal’s drippy tale and this one is the way the social context important to Segal’s story has been removed: everyone here is from a nice leafy suburb with no health care problems. If it can't reach such low-hanging fruit, this film certainly can't approach classic sob-fests like Camille (1936) or Dark Victory (1939) for offering intimate humanity pushed to operatic extremes of suffering. The main difference between The Fault in Our Stars and such weepie melodramas about doomed lovers registers in the stream of gallows humour the couple offer, and the self-aware, ahead-of-the-game perspective Hazel’s voice-over is supposed to imbue upon the material and our response to it with a distanced appreciation of the experience. “This is the truth,” she tell us at the outset, and notes later encounters with crucial, clichéd pivots of cancer dramas, like the “last good day.” But the film’s attacks on cliché are of course only skin-deep, masking a cheaply sentimental series of laboured sequences designed to induce sympathy pains, including interludes in sparkly Dutch restaurants and, most tediously, Gus listening to his own eulogies, which gives the filmmakers eminent opportunity to swat the audience between the eyes with pathos.

Grace and Gus are equipped with a funny friend, Isaac (Nat Wolff), who’s lost one eye to a tumour and is about to lose another; his pain and anguish, especially over losing his girlfriend Monica (Emily Peachey), is played for comic relief from the main business of ogling precisely the sort of pretty people suffering preciously to cool music which we’ve been promised we won’t get. The first moment when Isaac wakes up blind, now there’s a terrible moment that should be confronted in a film that is telling “the truth.” But no, Isaac is nudged out of the story and then brought back when his blindness can be used as the stuff of cheap gags and false catharsis, as he and the lovers go to toss eggs at Monica’s sports car. Willem Dafoe’s cameo as the bilious, alcoholic Van Houten does momentarily offer the characters – and the film – the shock of dark emotion. As things turn out, the seemingly amicable invitation to visit furnished by the author actually came from his long-suffering secretary Lidewij (Lotte Verbeek), who hoped to stir the author’s heart, but the encounter only ends with fury and humiliation. This subplot is played simply to offer a bit of blunt, schlocky disillusionment and set up an entirely silly late twist, where it might have been used to complicate the story’s approach to its meta conceits and to explore the impact of loss on loved-ones through loss – Van Houten’s daughter was the inspiration for the tale – as opposed to Hazel’s cosily cool parents. But real pain is quelled in favour of mawkish conceits, and emotional intensity is squandered. The meeting with Van Houten precipitates the young couple surrendering at last to passion in the Anne Frank Museum, a notion that might have been played as proof of the ferocity of human desire and life-hunger in the face of extinction, and indeed that’s what it’s supposed to communicate, but instead arrives limp and more than a tad tasteless. So too does the narrative twist wherein suddenly it’s revealed that Gus and not Hazel is going to be first of the duo to die.

The inevitable moment when Van Houten turns up at the end on a make-amends excursion tries to play against the grain by leaving Van Houten unredeemed except as proof reader. But his part in the story goes well beyond a glib deflowering of Hazel’s optimism, played as a hatefully extreme figure who opposes the teens’ vague spirituality with caricatured pragmatism (“You are nothing more than a failed experiment in mutation!”). This film fascinatingly posited to me the possibility that it is less a study of the tragedy of doomed youth than a work using disease to justify its millennial-aged target audience’s resentment of any world view that doesn’t confirm them as the centre of the universe. The Fault in Our Stars is at its best when the dark humour shared by the young sufferers used to living with dread is pushed to the fore, like their wry rejection of the kind of shallow uplift proffered by Patrick with his weak grasp of English particulars, mostly thanks to the well-oiled repartee between Woodley and Elgort. But Elgort fumbles early on with making his character seem much more than whatever the male equivalent of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is (a field for further research?), and can’t make his later fear and resentment voluble. Woodley’s capacity to deliver less pleasant emotions is well utilised in a couple of scenes, particularly when she confronts her parents over their seeming incapacity to truly accept her inevitable end. But the film remains disgustingly squeaky clean even when offering a peek of Gus’s curtailed leg when in bed – safely post-coital – with Grace. This is romantic tragedy as iPhone app. For actual heartfelt subversion of the genre, check out Valérie Donzelli’s Declaration of War (2011), or better yet, Paul Verhoeven’s genuinely raw Turkish Delight (1974).

* my fellow cineaste Michael W. Phillips Jr proposes "eternal slog."

The mantra of “cinematic” as a purely visual realm has dominated discussion and teaching of film in the past few decades, degrading the once fruitful connection cinema once had to the stage. But films that experiment with highly compressed, verbal drama aren’t strictly based on plays, and there is an art to filming talk and the people doing it that can test the mettle of a filmmaker in some refined and rigorous ways. Steven Knight’s Locke is one such experiment, delivering an unusual film experience: the title character, Ivan Locke, played by Tom Hardy, is the only character to appear, and the entire film takes place in his car on a ninety-minute car trip from Birmingham to London, most of which he spends talking to assorted colleagues and family on his speaker phone. This sounds dry to the point of tedium in abstract, but Knight, debuting as director after writing some quality screenplays amidst a long and laborious career in TV writing, manages for the most part to make it a riveting journey through the steadfast belief that any dramatic conceit can be made compelling if the drama is strong. Such a conceit requires a serious actor and Hardy delivers, with his voice dropped to a low, dextrous midland burr, which sounds uncannily like Richard Harris in his more thoughtful performances. The first shot surveys an empty building project, which Locke leaves in his BMW: faced with a crossroads, Locke zones out in deeply distracted contemplation whilst indicating a turn, until a truck blaring its horn at him rouses him. He heads off in a different direction, leaving town and getting on the motorway, before he begins making a series of phone calls that drip-feed vital information to the viewer and quickly paint a fraught picture of a man whose life is about to unravel. Locke is a construction foreman at the forefront of his trade, in charge of a record-breaking concrete pour for the foundation of a massive skyscraper being built by a Chicago-run conglomerate. But conscience, based in a deeply personal motive, sends him instead to London because a woman he had a one-night stand with, Bethan (Olivia Colman), is having his child. Caught off guard and forced to explain and minimise the damage his scruples will cause, Locke is forced not only to leave behind his job, resulting in inevitable sacking by the higher-ups and mediated through his cranky corporate liaison Gareth (Ben Daniels), but also to tell his wife Katrina (Ruth Wilson, whose voice is better utilised here than her whole body was in The Lone Ranger) what’s happening.

Needles of humiliation and dread constantly prick Locke and the audience who are forced into identification with him: his family are preparing to watch a big football match, his wife greets him cheerily on the phone, his boss is alternately irate and beggared. Locke’s reputation as the most steadfast and thoroughly committed man in all things is hauntingly shattered, the ultimate calamity for a man whose life, we learn, is built on reaction to and resentment for his own vagrant father, and instead strives towards correctness and dedication in all things. The potential dead spots in the film are filled by Locke’s bilious rants at his father, whom he imagines riding in the back seat, wishing he could dig up his corpse to force him to watch his self-sacrificing quest to do what his father failed to do, and attend the birth of a son. Locke’s predicament, and his response to it, reveals an igneous strain of honour and stringent, self-sabotaging truthfulness. He thoroughly expects the worst, and even provokes it, by refusing to hide behind a good excuse or expedient fib, clearly in large part to castigate himself for his singular transgression. The phone becomes his lifeline to an existence he is increasingly cut off from, the isolating bubble of metal and movement both allowing him time to wage his battle on multiple fronts whilst also staving off the moment when a new reality will confront him. Locke’s cool under pressure is tested to breaking point, but still only results in occasional violent eruptions of profanity when not on the phone, and his coldly furious speeches to his imagined father confirm the long withheld resentment and anger that he’s long since transmuted into fuel for obsessive labour. Locke’s genius for detail and leadership is revealed as he coaches his Irish assistant Donal (Andrew Scott) through the minutiae of getting the site ready for the huge pour, and resisting Gareth’s efforts to impose a new foreman on the operation. Locke’s depth of knowledge and determination on the behalf of a project that’s no longer his sees him pulling rabbits out of hats, tracking down a council yes-man in an Indian restaurant to secure a vital permit, and sending Donal running after a crew of road workers Locke knows to fetch them for an urgently needed repair job. Locke’s legerdemain in his trade is counterbalanced, however, by his inability to translate it in his relationships. His dedication is resented by his wife once the skin of amity and affection is whisked off by his scalpel-like attitude. His blind spots are revealed pitilessly even as he thinks he’s illuminating them, in his attempts to placate Katrina and fend off Bethan’s desperate need for expressions of affection, dismissing Bethan to Katrina as “no oil painting,” an ageing wretch he slept with because of booze and pity. Yet the portrait that sneaks through of Bethan suggests a cultured and intelligent woman in emotional straits.

Knight here has tackled a daunting and ambitious dramatic mode that comes damn close to classical Greek tragedy. The compressed time period, limited setting, the chorus-like device embedded in Locke’s monologues, the imperial-scaled moment of his triumph brought low by ill-starred fortune: all evoke that ancient mode. So too does the ultimate theme of Locke’s hubris, and the irony of his private moral compass demanding his own destruction in the face of that hubris, evoking “Oedipus Rex” no less. Simultaneously, the film’s stunt-like form and theme of entrapment and phone calls painting an unexpectedly ugly picture of an individual’s situation recalls Lucille Fletcher’s famous radio play “Sorry Wrong Number” and Anatole Litvak’s film of it (1948), with the genre tension removed. Locke also could be described as a blue-collar variant on Knight’s former collaborator David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis (2012), with the same motif of a successful protagonist within a car that becomes home and prison and refuge, detonating his existence. Knight’s attention to detail means that the zones on the other end of the various phones seem real and immediate, whilst the conversations Locke intricately foreshadow, underline, and revise those before and still to come. Landing an actor with Hardy’s dexterity was Knight’s major coup. Adopting that sustained Harris impression, with an occasionally wandering accent to boot, might have been a grave mistake. But Hardy constructs Locke as an unusual blend of the blunt and the fastidious, the intelligent and the blinkered, and his voice polarises Locke's individuality. What’s really important is Hardy’s commitment to Knight’s words, which sometimes suggest the influence of such stylised modern theatre mavens as Pinter and Stoppard in their blend of everyday argot and slippery formalism. That formalism is presented as Locke’s weapon in keeping control and asserting himself against, the careful, tense rhythm of his words linked with his sonorously expressive voice. Locke’s identity is fragmented and distorted even as he protests “I am myself.” Hardy can invest a role with both a simmering aggression and slyly magnetic gravitas, both of which he sublimates here into Locke’s overriding priorities: Locke the beloved father, Locke the great boss, Locke the seducer, Locke the jerk, Locke the fool, all come and go with scarcely a ripple in his force of purpose and yet finally creating a psychic drag that becomes exhausting. Telling hints of gloating enter his voice when things start going his way, doomed to be dashed, before Hardy delivers the final, curious grace note that suggests release and new hope when his life seems to be broken beyond repair, found simply in the fact that he’s passed the worst test he could set himself and has been met by new life.

Knight’s main fault is his tendency to do too much, to try and fill every moment when space and quiet might have built more tension and ambiguity. He provides a portrait that’s just a little too neat and convenient, particularly in those monologues, which offer up the keys to Locke’s psychological and moral reflexes far too obviously and tritely. The script toys with contrivance in having too many colliding crises – we have not just an impending construction job on a pharaoh’s scale, but that abutting an emergency caesarean and guilty adulterer’s admission. Knight’s direction, fixated with blurred lights of passing cars and portents offered by racing police cars lassoing wrongdoers left and right whilst out guilty hero proceeds, is a tad sophistic as Knight fights to keep his gimmick vacuum sealed until the very end. The best moments in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2012), a film not that dissimilar in terms of both form and overarching concepts, tended to be the islets that took time-out from the forced march that was the main narrative as well as adapting a rhythm that fit that march, and Knight’s focus cheats him of the chance to make subtler artistic refrains with his camera. Cronenberg wrung Knight’s script for Eastern Promises (2007) for an ephemerally atmospheric tale that suggested a Grimm fairy tale for adults, particularly in its potentially melodramatic finale; Knight doesn’t yet offer such spryness, and his sense of the lyrical is chiefly verbal. A line spoken by Wilson over the phone, “At least I won’t have to deal with your footprints turning to stone in the kitchen anymore,” lends an unexpected dash of bleak poeticism to the tale, taking a minor physical detail – Locke’s worship of concrete has the side-effect of leaving traces of it caked on his kitchen floor – and turning it into the cruel yet ethereal aural image of a man turning into a Golem in this face of his wife and children. Locke is definitely imperfect, but is still a fascinating ride that, like its hero, sets out to do something difficult and does it well.

Joseph Losey’s The Big Night could well stand alongside Nicholas Ray’s Knock on Any Door and They Live by Night (both 1949) in presenting a fascinating transition from film noir to Hollywood’s oncoming, grudging interest in social-realist filmmaking that would spawn works like On the Waterfront (1954) and Edge of the City (1957), and youth drama, including Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and The Young Stranger (1957). Losey, whose career had commenced on the stage, had found early movie work making noir films, but clearly had ambitions beyond genre demarcations, with his fascination for characters driven by dank obsessions and self-destructive streaks, and concept of the modern world as a Faustian pit. The Big Night, his virtually forgotten swan song in America before McCarthyism drove him to work in France and then Britain, represents a fascinating tipping point as one era gives way to another. It follows Knock on Any Door in studying a young man’s response to a hostile and violent urban landscape, but anticipates the later teen flick sprawl in emphasising the youth’s virulent attempts to define his personal honour and masculinity in the face of an uncomprehending adult world.

Losey found his generational avatar in John Barrymore Jr, 18-year-old son of the late acting legend John Barrymore and Dolores Costello, and future father of actress Drew, who would be named for John’s self-adopted middle name. Raw in talent and presence, Barrymore anticipates Brando and Dean in his commitment to expressing the tortured interior of young men who can’t stand a world that tells them what their limits should be. What he lacks is the refinement they had, the humour and charm they could swing, as well as the skill in leaping between bravura and finesse. But he persuasively portrays Losey’s young antihero George La Main, who starts off as a passive, bespectacled young man with an armful of books, what later slang would dub a nerd. This nerd is product of a working-class, big-city environment, glimpsed at the outset being mercilessly razzed by pals in black leather and their girlfriends. They, as other characters suggest in the film, sense something masochistic, even delighted in suffering in the young man, which his lack manly desensitisation in such an environment seems to entail. George’s father Andy (Preston Foster) runs a small bar, and George has been raised without a mother and emotionally detached from his old man. Man Friday Flanagan (Howland Chamberlin) tends bar and mediates between father and son but also remains tight-lipped according to his role, never presuming to alter the dynamics of communication, or lack of it.

Celebration of George’s birthday, with birthday cake perched on the bar and one candle tauntingly left alight by his blowing, is interrupted by the sudden, ominous entrance of Al Judge (Howard St. John), George’s favourite sports columnist. Cane-wielding Judge enters with imperial force and is able, through some mysterious semaphore of adult power, to force Andy to strip his shirt and prostrate himself on the floor so that Judge can beat his back bloody with his walking stick. Andy picks himself up and limps up to his bed, leaving George distraught and consumed with rage at both his father’s apparent impotence and his own. George steals his father’s gun and heads out into the night to chase down Judge, planning to dominate and humiliate him at a boxing match George was going to attend with his father. His naiveté is quickly assaulted as he gets shaken down by a creep named Peckinpaugh (Emil Meyer) who pretends to be a cop after seeing George scalp his father’s ticket, and a tiny accident cheats him of the chance to confront Judge. George finds a Dante for his urban odyssey, however, in the man who bought his spare ticket, Dr. Lloyd Cooper (Philip Bourneuf), a philosopher and academic and also a cartographer of nocturnal activities.

Losey’s work here is ripe with anticipations and connections. The theme of the night odyssey through a big city is a common and powerful one in noir film, from Ben Hecht’s spiritually similar progenitor Angels Over Broadway (1940), up to and including Eyes Wide Shut (1999), whilst also prefiguring Rebel Without a Cause’s dawn-to-dawn structure in depicting a crucial juncture in a young man’s life. The figure of the cane-wielding overlord who affects high-class but is actually very low-life is common in film noir, but here also interestingly prefigures a figure that crops up in Losey’s later work, Alexanger Knox’s scientist of The Damned (1962). That film also, crucially revolves around the motif of offended youth doomed by adult transgressions, a notion which also reappears, much distorted but still recognisable, in King & Country (1963) and Accident (1967). The Big Night also irresistibly predicts Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957) in its portrait of a journalist as master of two worlds butting heads with a young idealist. Losey’s film may even be the more complex in of the two works in its approach to the kingpin, in mirroring the man of power and the kid who challenges him, and the processes that can forge one into the other. Judge proves to be an immigrant kid who’s changed his name and achieved power and profile but still knows the roots of his strength on the street level, communing with lowly imps like Peckinpaugh and stooping to personally punish Andy for a transgression that remains mysterious for most of the film.

The business of manhood is still vague to George, who wants to claim the mantle but doesn’t yet know the forces that drive its sign language, the desires and responsibilities that force reactions that seem incoherent, even inhuman, such as Andy displays in prostrating himself before Judge. This incomprehension is cleverly portrayed in the enigmatic details offered in the first scene, ranging from seemingly throwaway – Andy’s unwillingness to talk about his girlfriend, as George asks why she’s not coming to the bout – to the inescapable, in whatever business is played out between Andy and Judge. Of course, these enigmas prove to be linked. The power games which Losey would later visit explicitly in his collaborations with Harold Pinter, The Servant (1964) and Accident, are present here in their least subtle parameters, as boy is desperate to prove himself as a man, and driven to commit an act of violence to prove his love for his father, whilst the seething underlying world of sexuality makes men do mad things and thus, ironically, makes them like children again.

Losey’s jittery, unusual scene grammar jumps from deep-focus surveys to intense, frame-filling close-ups, often with the camera trained on Barrymore’s face from just above or just below and at a slightly skewed angle. Frames are subdivided by columns and room layout, and familiar editing patterns avoided. Fragments of lucid surrealism abound, from Andy heaving himself back into the frame like a saurian beast trying to be reborn as a human being, back mottled with lash scars, to George tending a baby with fraternal solicitude with a gun in one hand. The visual patterns are cumulatively disorientating, elusive, mimicking George’s blinkered plunge into his mission. Losey’s Wellesian inspirations are borne out as much by his style with crane shot and deep-focus lensing as they are by casting Dorothy Comingore as Cooper’s girlfriend, nightclub denizen Julie Rostina, and the son of the star of The Magnificent Ambersons (1941).

The film’s most memorable and unique sequences come at a nightclub Cooper drags George to after he’s laid out Peckinpaugh. George, drinking for the first time and overwhelmed by alcohol and exhaustion-stoked emotion, has delirious visions of his birthday cake hovering amidst the nightclub, and then a jazz drummer’s thunderous soloing recalls Judge’s assault, his stick’s brutal, concussive rhythm like a metronome keeping the time to the drummer’s wild displays. A black chanteuse, Terry Angelus (Mauri Lynn), takes the stage and offers George a momentary salve as he loses himself in the song and singer, Losey cutting between their faces in startling close-ups where they threaten to merge in an ecstatic space of emotional expression. Losey here captures the raw emotional intensity of adolescence on the cusp of true adulthood, the protean, engulfing state of that time. Losey then immediately skewers it with a cruel coda: George meets the singer outside the club, and praises her for her singing before saying, “You’re so beautiful—even if you are a—.” He cuts himself off but the damage is immediately plain in the lady’s eyes, and George’s distraught pleas for forgiveness falling on deaf ears as she retreats into wounded, emotionally depleted distraction, leaning in bleak, poeticised solitude on a lamppost whilst George is dragged off by Cooper and his girlfriend in a taxi, gazing out the rear window as the vehicle slides off into the dark in desperate awareness of his fall from grace.

This moment is an islet of excellence in the film as a whole, but it serves a function in terms of that whole too, as it presages the theme of George’s discovery that his attempt at self-empowerment is actually bound by an unconscious inheritance that binds parents to children and individuals to communities, through values and prejudices, genes and experience alike. George’s confrontation with Judge sees the film’s moral impetus not exactly reversed – Judge is still a creep and a thug – but George is forced to face the reality that he had some real justification for his act, and to recognise a peculiar nobility as well as substantial guilt in his father’s submission. In spite of the interludes of greatness and prolific inventiveness, the flaws of The Big Night are significant, leaving it as a somewhat diffuse experience. The project as a whole feels caught between two modes, with Losey’s artistic impulses still forming as he wrestles studio-mandated compromises and generic expectation to an uneasy and anticlimactic draw, and the fact he had to abandon editing the film and flee the country ahead of HUAC subpoenas surely didn't help the film's ultimate lack of cohesion. The script, co-written by Losey and Stanley Ellin, who wrote the source novel, along with an uncredited Hugo Butler and Ring Lardner Jr, fails to develop much of the scenario’s potentially rich expanse, with a jumble of elements competing for attention in a running time that barely breaks the seventy minute mark. George’s encounters with Cooper and Julie don't go anywhere particularly interesting, nor does George’s brief encounter with Julie’s younger sister, the protective but stymied Marion (Joan Lorring), whose girlish face belies the fact she’s somewhat older than George, which doesn’t stop her from kissing him. This interlude wants to generate a pathos that doesn’t quite arrive.

The finale is awkward and overstated, too, as paternal sacrifice and filial anguish find new understandings amidst breathless revelations, and the film has a compromised ending that doesn’t quite offer a jarringly happy ending but also notably backs off from the darkest inferences it seems to be making about guilt and responsibility. But Losey’s striking vignettes and displays of directorial invention continue to nearly the end, as he tracks George in his nocturnal visits to a churning newspaper press, holds a taxi driver at gunpoint, and runs home in shame and fear through labyrinthine industrial streets where he’s rendered an ant scurrying lost in a steel forest. A soundless vignette filmed through fluttering curtains depicts a father’s quick, determined action to save his son, without any words needed. This gem of visual exposition intensifies the let-down of the subsequent, flimsy father-to-son talk that wraps up the film. Hal Mohr’s cinematography is all grimy surfaces and tar-dark shadows, rendering The Big Night thoroughly noir in its visual patterns if not in its thematic stresses, carving out woodblock print-ready galleries of gnarled and wearied proletarian faces, like the flotsam who sit at Andy’s bar. Mohr shifts into suggestions of incandescence and surrealism in Lynn’s sequences, echoing that most magic-realist of noir films, The City That Never Sleeps (1953).

Young Barrymore, who would be destroyed by similar appetites to his father’s, had instincts that weren’t yet honed, and his constant affectation of boyish anguish borders on excessive (as would his subsequent overripe turn as a mad killer in Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps, 1953). But he does suggest a reservoir of talent and intensity waiting for a committed coach to mould, and his youth, unlike too many avatars for troubled teen experience in the following decade, is genuine and raw here, giving George a palpable realism all the same. Foster, long one of Hollywood’s least appreciated male leads and left sad-looking and heavy-set in middle-age, is excellent as Andy. Lorring is convincing as a young woman bruised by loss of the protective envelope that used to surround her, and now finds herself too naïve for life and too old to be sheltered, whilst Comingore, the former Susan Alexander Kane, looks the part of an aging lush who takes a few moments’ dreamy escape from time in George’s arms upon the dance floor.

Blockbuster action, 1943 style. I first saw this film as a kid, and some of the more vividly cruel touches, including a lifeboat loaded with filth-smeared, panting shipwreck survivors being rammed, and a U-boat captain laughing boyishly after torpedoing a cargo ship, welded themselves on my brain. And this is still a superlative example of classic Hollywood’s craft and instinct for turning grim realities and touchy subjects into grand entertainment. Raymond Massey is old school merchant marine skipper Steve Jarvis, and Humphrey Bogart is stalwart first mate Joe Rossi, taking on Nazis on the high seas. Director Lloyd Bacon was a weathered Hollywood pro who had helped define Warner Bros.’ reputation for earthy, realistic, tough-minded and tautly fashioned cinema across a variety of genres. He’s probably best known today for mixing Depression-era realism with a restrained, prototypical version of Hollywood glamorous panache to sneaky effect on 42ndStreet and Footlight Parade (both 1933), and here does a similarly compulsive job mixing wartime exploits with a blue-collar bent and the usual exigencies of WW2 propaganda. And Bacon does bring something like the nimble physicality and sense of forward motion demanded by a good musical to the proceedings. Bacon had also made the first sound adaptation of Moby Dick (1930), a fitting anticipation for this study in obsessive combat on the high seas. Bacon was fired before production was finished, however, and so Byron Haskin and Raoul Walsh both contributed to the final product.

The heroes are working stiffs at sea, a research sample of American sailors with variable backgrounds and lifestyles. Their ship, the Northern Star, laden with gasoline, gets a torpedo in the side from a cruising U-boat, and erupts into a floating fireball. Much of the crew is forced to abandon ship, and Jarvis and Rossi flee only after failing to save trapped engine room crew. Copious injury becomes grievous insult as the U-boat captain insists on interviewing the survivors from his lofty conning tower whilst one of his officers films them, earning a round show of up-yours thumbs. The Germans retaliate by ramming the lifeboat, costing the lives of more crewmen and the ship’s cat. After drifting for ten days, the survivors are picked up and returned to New York where they disperse to their separate lives, but most of them come back together when Jarvis is assigned a Liberty Ship, the SS Sea Witch, which joins a massive convoy bound for Murmansk in Russia.

Action in the North Atlantic isn’t as marvellously, breathlessly pulpy and narratively dense as Bogart’s subsequent transatlantic wartime escapade, Passage to Marseille(1944). Nor does it seem at first glance to be as ruthless or as daring in its expression of wartime idealism as the similarly gutsy Bogart vehicle Sahara (1943). And yet Action in the North Atlantic is a quintessential exhibit of the positive spirit during the war and the progressive messaging it allowed before the post-war, right-wing reaction. The portrayal of the sailors engaged with a union, complete with black seamen (included at Bogart’s insistence), was direct enough to get this branded as a left-wing, subversive work. The script was credited to John Howard Lawson, with dialogue contributions by future Robert Aldrich collaborator A.I. Bezzerides and crime writer W.R. Burnett, and an uncredited Alvah Bessie. Bessie and Lawson would later be two of the Hollywood Ten, and Bezzerides was also harassed. It all looks innocuous today, political messages mixed with hard-charging action mixed with stereotyped but vivid character humour. Action in the North Atlantic’s communal focus is also familiar from other films of the era, with a certain similarity with pre-war swashbucklers where hearty crews under dashing heroes groused and grumbled but did sterling service anyway: the presence of Alan Hale as the much-married ‘Boats’ O’Hara emphasises this similarity. But this also has definite, powerful link to Warner’s pre-war run of socially conscious films about ordinary Joes and Janes, people doing a job of work, only with the pressure of survival now provided by war rather than the Depression. The film is structured around long sequences where the proletarian heroes lounge about playing cards, waiting to get down to business, swapping japes, jibes, and running gags. The film drolly examines maternal instincts in these hard-bitten sailors, revealed in their concern for the ship’s cat(s), but ultimately, passionately validates their roles and patriotism.

Dane Clark is Johnnie Pulaski, who lets his pals know that he wants a land job because he’s afraid of dying at sea and leaving his family abandoned, sparking a quorum in the sailors’ union on the virtues and problems of patriotism for working class men versus general responsibility: Pulaski is shamed, but his point is still valid. Twenty years later he would be the main hero, the cautious everyman who remains sceptical about official heroism but does right by his pals. Here he is clearly, and interestingly, both the most physically brave of the sailors but also the one most keenly alert to his vulnerability, and signalled in the end as the one most likely to ascend to a leadership role. Sam Levene is ‘Chips’ Abrams, who murmurs Kaddish amidst a general prayer for the dead. Dick Hogan is Ezra Hogan, a young cadet who Jarvis distrusts on principal as a “book-learning” boy who hasn’t learnt his sailing the hard way like he, Rossi, and the others have.

Hogan, like the Liberty ship itself, is the product of a new age of mass-produced knowledge and machines to cope with the raw exigencies of modern warfare, but the film is dedicated to denying the notion that the human parts are as interchangeable as the mechanisms. The motley crew are governed by sharply divergent characters whose different modes of life are revealed in coupled vignettes. Jarvis lives in a suburban home with a white picket fence, and has a doting, long-weathered wife (Ruth Gordon in a delicately affecting cameo) to welcome him, whilst Rossi is a nightclub sharpie who hits the taverns in his pinstripe suit. He surreptitiously knocks out an overly-talkative patron who doesn’t believe that loose lips sink ships as he blabs about a new convoy, and strikes sparks with chanteuse Pearl O'Neill (Julie Bishop).

Jarvis, used to his mate’s womanising ways, mistakes Pearl for one of the chippies he regularly gets entangled with, when he comes to fetch Rossi at his apartment, only to learn they’ve gotten hitched. Jarvis and Rossi nonetheless have a great working relationship, Bacon’s camera picking them out in a dreamy fog, emerging as iconic, timeless figures on oceans of legend, then immediately imbued with reality as Rossi cradles a persistent toothache. Bogart, at least, had actual experience in this sort of thing, having served as an able seaman on the USS Leviathan during the waning months of WW1, where he may (or may not) have received his career-defining facial scar. The most famous anecdote from the film’s production depicts Bogart and Massey getting pie-eyed whilst watching their stunt doubles work, and then doing a dangerous stunt dive themselves; whether true or not, it feels apt in the context of a film where it really looks like the actors were taking chances at times. The emphasis on diverse people whose fate depends on mutual reliance (sans more prominent African-Americans, sadly) as depicted on the microcosmic level of the crew is linked to internationalist war effort, as the Sea Witch sails into Halifax harbour to join its convoy as crews hail each-other in a dozen tongues, including Chinese, with ecumenical vibrancy.

Bacon wields the technical resources of a top-grade Warner Bros. production to pull off some thunderous set-pieces, sporting excellent black-and-white photography by Ted D. McCord. Bacon’s attempts to combine slick, venturesome hype with authenticity extends to a very uncommon touch at the time, allowing the Germans, when seen, to converse at length untranslated, the subjects of their conversations usually clear enough but left impenetrably alien, thus servicing documentary-like immediacy and propagandistic distancing at the same time. The sinking of the Northern Star is dazzlingly staged in a maelstrom of boiling fire and dashing dolly shots, and the film is replete with model work of a standard that wouldn’t be matched too often in the next forty years. The voyage to Russia sees the convoy having to scatter when it runs into a wolf pack, memorably visualised in an eerie underwater shot of shark-like submarine silhouettes, and all hell breaks loose in a panorama of destruction and frenzied reaction as the ships madly dodge each-other amidst explosions of torpedoes and depth charges.

Subsequent battles with fighter planes and another, perniciously dogged U-boat are equally tremendous, whilst never devolving into spectacle for its own sake. These are men battling for the lives and pals, like Pulaski and Hogan flinging themselves in harm’s way to save the ship by manning a gun, climaxing with one plane crashing into the Sea Witch’s bow, with Hogan killed because his clothing gets caught on the gun, a great example of the kind of small but attentive, expertly intensifying visual vignette that elevates the film. And of course, the finale offers tables quite neatly turned as Rossi rams their tormenting U-boat, Bacon offering unseemly delight in letting the audience see the German Captain drowning in his flooding vessel, to elicit the same kind of relish in a bad guy’s demise in, say, that slow-motion, vertiginous shot of Hans Gruber falling to his death in Die Hard (1988). The only major drags on Action in the North Atlantic, which feels a tad distended at a fraction over two hours long, are the pauses for the inevitable propaganda moments, although Bacon and Lawson did their best to contour the message beats into the drama, including a pause for contemplation of sacrifice over a row of flag-draped coffins following a battle with airplanes that leaves the ship looking like a wrecking yard littered with corpses and machine parts. This is grand old moviemaking all the same.

Lukas Moodysson, a former poet, has been a popular filmmaker outside his native Sweden since his feature debut with Fucking Amal (aka Show Me Love, 1998), which established him as a fine hand at portraying youthful anomie, and his follow-up Together (2000) about commune life in the mid-‘70s. He then went serious with the admirably grim, if excessively blunt and questionable Lilya 4 Ever (2005), and made an English-language sojourn for Mammoth(2009). We Are the Best! is more in the vein of his early work. An overt crowd-pleaser, We Are the Best! depends on his capacity to capture, with naturalistic good-humour, the vicissitudes of being young in modern society’s zones of flux. The essential concept, adapted from a comic book by his wife Coco, is irresistible: in the early ‘80s, two 13-year old, androgynous-looking wannabe-hellions, Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin), are obsessed with punk rock and start their own band in spite of having no musical knowledge whatsoever. Their self-declared outsider status sees them bickering with girly-girl classmates about whether “punk is dead,” happily mocking school concerts, and inspires them to improvise a song, “Hate Sport,” decrying obsession with sport in the face of the world’s problems, after their PE teacher sentences them to laps of the gymnasium. They reach out to a prim, religious classmate, Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne), whose self-composed talent as a guitarist tantalises the girls with elusive promises of actual musical quality, and in spite of their divergent values the girls fuse together into a loyal unit.

Moodysson’s skill with young actors is evident as he lets his young scamps burst with unruly energy. His familiar thrum of laidback humanism underscores the proceedings as he waggishly offers pint-sized tyros taking on anyone who offends them, starting with hair metal band Iron Fist who hog the practice space in their neighbourhood youth centre: capitalising on a technicality about booking the space and backed up by the centre’s comically officious hippie youth counsellors, they take over the space and the communal instruments after kicking Iron Fist out, and then bash on their instruments with all the abandon of the Lord of the Flies kids. When they reach out to Hedvig, they find her surprisingly receptive to their musical obsessions and ambitions. They also offer her friendship, something she lacks, although their attempts to give her a punk haircut results in her mother (Ann-Sofie Rase) threatening to report them to the police, but then giving them a sweet lecture over milk and cookies about the hypocrisy of trying to impose their own standards of in-crowed chic on others when they’ve been avoiding that themselves. A more serious potential for a rift forms when the three girls reach out to a band of slightly older boys who have a band, Sabotage, often featured in the fanzine they read assiduously. The asymmetric hook-up sees the boys in the band, Elis (Jonathan Salomonsson) and Mackan (Alvin Strollo), having recently shed a member, interested in Klara and Hedvig, leaving Bobo, who suffers from low self-esteem, is hurt by the excision. She contacts Elis herself in a naked play for his affection.

I won’t pretend I’m a big fan of Moodysson. I haven’t seen his ventures into more oblique and experimental cinema with A Hole in My Heart (2004) and Container(2006), but his mainstream films don’t reveal a particularly imaginative filmmaker for all his poetic background – for instance, his attempts to get magic-realist in Lilya 4 Ever were clumsy, and there’s something twitchily frustrating about this film, like one of those bugs that can skate across a pond without falling in at the cost of ever noticing the depths. We Are the Best! is a pleasant affair that might well try nerves for all its pleasantness. I know it did mine at times. It pays shallows heed to the waning days of punk and turns that raucous art form essentially into a noisy but entirely acceptable expression for kids whose postures, far from being transgressive, are based for the most part around very safe, nice, bourgeois Swedish concerns. Even a brief argument about religious faith between the girls driven by Klara’s acceptance of the iconoclastic precepts of the music ends with a cute smirk. Compared to the searing engagement of Dennis Hopper’s report from the same year this is set, Out of the Blue (1982), this is all but a Disney film. An unfair comparison, perhaps, as the aims of the two films are so disparate, but We Are the Best! is too squeaky-clean and blithely tempered for its own good. How entertaining you find the film may depend on your tolerance for the characters’ windy mix of brashness and childishness, twisting the audience’s arm to laugh at switchbacks like Bobo transformed by a cut into a sobbing wretch afraid she’s going to lose her hand. The anxieties underlying the girls’ ventures into pubescence, with Bobo bemused by her mother’s revolving door relationships and disinterested in a visit by her father, and her quiet feelings of inadequacy, are described but aren’t invested with enough interest to matter much. The film passes pretty blithely over the minor complications it throws our way, perhaps out of an over-zealous desire to validate its heroines.

Still, the film’s paucity of pretence and surplus of intimate joie-de-vivre mostly makes up for its absence of ambition and real cultural comment. To Moodysson’s credit, his comedic flourishes don’t feel forced, even with insistently whimsical touches like making Klara’s father a jaunty clarinettist joining the girls for a nonsensical hoedown, or the girls trying to beg money from strangers to buy an electric guitar. At its best the film feels breezily authentic, a mirror where just about anyone from anywhere might recognise their own youths, like the girls staging a sneak raid on Klara’s older brother Linus’ student party, stealing booze to get nauseously tipsy. Perhaps the best scene in the film sees Bobo, Klara, and Elis climbing to the top of an apartment block, surveying the Stockholm landscape from their icy vantage, with Klara and Elis embracing, wrapped in steamy breath, to Bobo’s shambling chagrin: the dizzying force of protean teenage attraction and the sharply divisive emotions it can inspired are beautifully visualised. The finale, in which the girls try to perform their ramshackle anthem at a gig arranged by the youth counsellors in the satellite town of Västerås, amusingly avoids any triumphalism as they foul up badly and finish up insulting the already intolerant crowd, sparking a tiny riot. Nonetheless they count it as a success having stirred a crowd, perhaps headed for oblivion as artists but having made damn sure their youth rocked. Ulf Brantås’ cinematography is a plus, utilising inevitable hand-held camerawork but essayed in bold colours, turning the cityscapes it describes into playpens for its heroines’ imaginations, its boxy, drab buildings into places where humans make their own realities.

Based on a popular video game, Need for Speed is, for all its flashy modern trappings, essentially a B-movie, of the kind that used to skid across drive-in screens regularly back in the ‘70s. Slickly produced, swathed in shiny digital textures and looking as colourful and enticing as a candy bar wrapper, it’s clearly way more expensive than its forebears, and can’t match the honourably trashy, down-to-earth ethics of something like White Lightning (1973) or Death Race 2000 (1976), but it’s such a beguiling mix of the breezy and the speedy it earns its spurs. The impetus to make this probably came as much from the Fast and Furious series as from the game’s popularity, but Need For Speed bears more than a passing resemblance to Vanishing Point (1971), as it follows a sympathetic but heedlessly focused driver defying law and nature trying to race across the American landscape in two days, aided by a friendly voice in a broadcasting booth somewhere. The story beats, however, reject the fashionable individual-against-the-system tilt of the model and go back to the primal elements of melodrama, dredging up good old-fashioned railroaded justice and revenge to motivate our hero Tobey Marshall (Aaron Paul) to take on the bad guy and drive his way to victory, man. Hell, never mind Steve McQueen or Burt Reynolds: it’s easy enough to imagine Richard Barthelmess and Ricardo Cortez starring in this, in some imagined black-and-white Howard Hawks quickie of the ‘30s.

At the outset, upstate New Yorker Tobey has inherited his father’s custom car-building garage and employs a team of stalwart pals, but his victories in illegal street races don’t reap enough cash to keep the business going. An old rival from the local scene, Dino Brewster (Dominic Cooper), who’s become a car dealer and well-regarded race driver, gives Tobey a lifeline, by asking him to finish building a refurbished, seriously souped-up Ford Mustang started by deceased engineering legend Carrol Shelby. Tobey’s team produce a brilliant racer. Julia Maddon (Imogen Poots), a buying agent and expert car appraiser who works for English collector, Bill Ingram (Stevie Ray Dallimore), agrees to purchase the car for millions after Tobey proves it can make superlative speeds. Dino, offended that Tobey ignored his command to not drive the car, dares Tobey and his young pal Little Pete (Harrison Gilbertson) to race him on the street in a pair of imported Ageras. When it becomes clear both are going to beat him, Dino rams the rear of Pete’s car and accidentally sends his car flying off a bridge. Tobey distraughtly returns to the crash site but Dino shoots through. Tobey is blamed for the accident and imprisoned for manslaughter. Four years later, when he’s released on parole, Tobey naturally has payback on his mind and glory to seek. He convinces Ingram to loan him the Mustang, as he plans to enter it into a highly illegal and dangerous “De Leon” street race organised annually by the mysterious millionaire dubbed Monarch (Michael Keaton), who webcasts enthusiastically on his favourite racers, and acts quite like one of the old “benshis” who narrated and spelt out morals in Japanese noh theatre and silent cinema. Tobey knows he has to impress Monarch enough to earn an invitation to the race, which he only knows will be held in California, so he begins a high-speed, cross-country dash eluding police and Dino’s bounty hunters all the way, showing off with some free-form fancy driving to attract Monarch’s attention. And Julia invites herself along for the ride with Tobey to protect her investment.

You probably already know by reading this synopsis if this is just not your cup of Earl Grey. But Need for Speed has garrulous, straight-arrow pizzazz and a pleasing lack of shame in purveying its over-the-top genre buzz that overcame my objections. Objections I had, to the cheesy insta-exposition Monarch spouts, and to the sometimes cringe-worthy disregard for public safety we’re expected to swallow. The film needs a lot more of that quickly sketched marginalia that ‘70s genre cinema was so good at - the goitred redneck sheriffs, the random weirdos from diverse pan-continental cultures, the teeming human comedy of American life. The unlikely escapades of Tobey’s flyer pal Benny (Scott Mescudi), who spots clear patches of road for him from a Cessna, but also somehow manages to talk an Army buddy into lending him a helicopter that proves handy at one juncture, provide excessive silliness. And that’s frustrating because, in its way, Need for Speed does otherwise stay true to the earthbound, high-speed, antisocial vicissitudes of the classic drive-in crash-and-bash fare it recalls. Nor does the film bend as far backward as the Fast and Furious films have to prove street cred: indeed, it could well be offering a little deflating satire on those films' glamorisation of gearhead lifestyle as a ticket to a badass high life, as a bunch of models snort derisively at the pick-up attempts of mere mechanics. This was produced by Dreamworks and there’s a faint flicker, as there was in the first, tolerable Transformers film (2007), of the old Spielbergian ethic here, as the film tosses some likeable actors together playing clichéd but defined characters and bothers to try and gets us on their side. Paul does a good embattled hero, Cooper gives good oily creep, and that’s all we need to give the film that basic pulpy charge required to forgive its trespasses.

Helmsman Scott Waugh is a former stuntman whose debut as director Act of Valor (2011) hardly set the world on fire, but his work here is slick and visually coherent, for the most part avoiding dizzying edits and jerking camerawork, and going for reflex-fast filmmaking that nonetheless has some classical elegance to it in tracing lines of motion of fast-moving objects painted in the same colours as the average preschool's walls. This pays off in some dazzling moments of technical cinema, particularly Pete’s crash, filmed in slow motion, young dreamer launched into zero gravity for a few precious seconds of transcendence before hitting the ground in a fireball, and a terrifically unexpected crash late in the film that throws the story, and our heroes, for a loop. Probably the main draw for anyone who’s not 13 years old or a terminal petrol head here, however, would be the intrigue factor of seeing Paul, everybody’s main man from his work on Breaking Bad (2008-13), try his hand at anchoring a too-cool action film. Paul’s an unusual choice in that regard, as a low-key and realistic actor possessing neither the looks of a Tom Cruise nor the magnetic bearish appeal of Vin Diesel or Dwayne Johnson. But with his supple expressive register is on display throughout, Paul is more emotionally convincing than those guys, and he even invests a character based on a mass of pixels with expressive alertness: he actually does seem to be in pain in the moments when he lets down his taciturn guard and lets his loss and the wrongs done to him register. Tobey, although he knows how good he is and doesn’t mind showing it, also thankfully isn’t one of the breed of obnoxiously macho, one-upping heroes too many recent films have.

Perhaps the chief pleasure of Need for Speed lies in how Paul and his supporting cast actually seem to be having a good time, particularly from Poots and Rami Malek as one of Tobey’s crew, Finn. Julia is introduced posing as an airheaded posh bird to lead Tobey and Pete on whilst assessing their vehicular prowess, but quickly shows her chops as a gearhead and leaps gleefully into the fray with Tobey, hanging out the window to help Finn with on-the-move refuelling and duelling with bounty hunters at high speed. Poots gets to pull the same gag Katia Winter did in The Banshee Chapter (2014) in slipping from home county class into her best good ole gal accent as the moment demands. Malek, who’s been hovering in the background lately (The Master, Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2, both 2012) has one great scene that gives Need for Speed the right kind of sauntering, adolescent cheek, as Finn’s taken a job working in a cubicle office for some corporation, but when his friends pull up outside with a super car and a host of cops on their tails, he quits his job and makes sure he can’t come back, strips off all his clothes save for a pair of multi-coloured socks, snogs his office crush and swaps brief confirmations of mutual humanity with a middle-aged fellow employee in the elevator (“I’m in accounting.” “Does it feel like you’re dying inside?” “Yes.”). In the wrong hands this moment might have seemed unbearably crass, but here it’s emblematic of the film’s brash and general, if more than slightly reckless good-humour. There’s a nominal love triangle between Tobey, Julia, and Anita (a rather fazed-looking Dakota Johnson), Pete’s sister and Tobey’s former girlfriend who’s since become Dino’s concubine, in a subplot that has a reason for existing narrative-wise but never feels remotely interesting. But on the whole, even if this is pretty dumb, it’s a charming kind of dumb, and it could well stand as the best video game adaptation yet made – a very low bar, admittedly.

Conquest of Space is perhaps the most of obscure of major 1950s science-fiction films. Clearly intended as an apotheosis, both cinematically and thematically, of the series of films in the genre producer George Pal had been making since his production Destination Moon (1950) essentially kick-started the genre craze, Conquest of Space was however roundly rejected by critics and audiences of the time, and has remained poorly regarded ever since. Pal retreated into straight fantasy with tom thumb (1958) before returning to sci-fi with 1960’s The Time Machine, whilst he wouldn’t work again with his fittest directorial collaborator, Byron Haskin, until The Power (1968), when their moment had most definitely passed. What went wrong with the brand, and the film? Unlike the Technicolor sturm-und-drang of When Worlds Collide (1951), War of the Worlds (1953), and The Naked Jungle (1954), with their feverish vistas of destruction and epic-scaled action, Conquest of Space followed Destination Moon in emphasising a realist approach to sci-fi spectacle. Pal and Haskin annexed two popular speculative non-fiction books by Willy Ley and Werner Von Braun as a basis for an attempt to create a believable portrait of what future space exploration might look like, and utilised the artist who had illustrated Ley’s book, Chesley Bonestell, to help create that portrait. One problem with Conquest of Space is that, in spite of its futuristic (to 1955) setting and more expansive ideas, it’s essentially the same film as Destination Moon, ending a gruelling journey across space with a big spaceship mock-up sitting around on a sound stage edition of an alien landscape, with astronauts milling around without anything much to do. SEE! the amazing trek of the heroes to collect rock samples! THRILL! as these pioneers of the stars collect…more rock samples!

Conquest of Space has more ambitions than only offering mere theoretical authenticity, and it anticipates a lot of subsequent spacefaring adventures, including, unavoidably, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), with which it shares the desire to express awed fascination with the idea of life in the final frontier, rotating space stations, and deep space explorers, as well as Nebo Zovyot (1959), through to Sunshine (2007) and Gravity(2013). Considering that even the most basic manned space flight was still six years away when this movie was released, many of the images, particularly of the astronauts working in zero gravity and the paraphernalia of their work, culled from the pages of the source books and illustrations from a plethora of ‘50s magazine articles, reveal how most subsequent space technology was already blueprinted by this time. The special effects do show their age now, as the models are over-lit and bland-looking, and the matte work shows at the seams by comparison to the far more convincing but also more time-consuming front projection work Kubrick used on 2001. And yet there’s still an attractive, pictorial beauty and vividness to the visuals, particularly in the spaceship’s close encounter with an asteroid and landing on Mars. The fact that Pal and Haskin were able to get Eleanor Parker and Charlton Heston to fight off bugs in The Naked Jungle but could only get third-string, competent but unexciting B-movie actors for their sci-fi endeavours says a lot about how ghettoised the genre was at the time, or at least how much of their relatively limited budgets was soaked up by the effects team. But the real problem with Conquest of Space lies in its inability to find a way to glean real excitement or dramatic capital from its storyline.

The film’s most interesting angle is its portrait of humankind struggling to deal with the fear of the infinite and the physical and psychological extremes of a new environment, anticipating the major theme of Alex Garland’s script for Sunshine, as a crewman goes mad and becomes determined to prevent a blasphemous encroachment on the universe. The setting is sometime in mid-1970s, on a space station manned by an international service with a quasi-military hierarchy. The station has been built partly to facilitate the construction of a large, recently-completed interplanetary spaceship. The space mission is led by Colonel Samuel T. Merritt (Walter Brooke), an experienced leader whose John Ford-esque adjutant Sgt. Mahoney (Mickey Shaughnessy) has been serving under him in “Korea, Africa, and China” (raising some intriguing, and disturbing, alternate-history possibilities), before directing the construction of the station. Also aboard is Merritt’s son Barney (Eric Fleming), who’s chafing at having been separated from his wife for a year in following his old man on this boondoggle venture, and, more subtly, from living in the shadow of a legendary father whose dedication came at the cost of his family’s happiness. Mahoney hero worships Merritt unabashedly with near-religious fervour whilst disdaining Barney. Whilst the station is manned by functionaries dressed in light brown overalls, the specialist team of space engineers intended for the spaceship’s moon mission dresses in blue. They’re mocked roundly by the others for their special diet of protein pills and strict regime. One of the team, Cooper (William Redfield), freezes up during an extravehicular mission and knows, to his chagrin, that’s washed out when he’s given a proper meal at dinner time.

The others in their select unit include blue-collar Brooklynite electronics expert Jackie Seigel (Phil Foster), wry Japanese Imoto (Benson Fong), and Eastern European Andre Fodor (Ross Martin), who are asked by Merritt to accompany him when he is ordered to launch the spaceship not for the Moon but for Mars. Barney, on the verge of going home, tears up his transfer order and joins the team, but Merritt rejects Mahoney as too old. Mahoney nonetheless stows away aboard the spaceship, which has to dodge flaming meteors in its voyage to the red planet. The notion of international cooperation in an interstellar future has the clear ring of Star Trek’s idealism, and Conquest doesn’t belabour the point, except with an odd but interesting moment when Imoto makes a speech taking his own national history as cautionary example, suggesting that shortages of resources partly drove Japan to aggressive acts. He wants the mission to Mars to succeed as Earth’s resources are depleted and the possibility of exploiting other worlds will prevent future conflicts. The real problem with Conquest lies in its script, which is, apart from Imoto’s key scene, flatly and dully written, even passing silly at times, as when Seigel is outraged by his girlfriend Rosie (Joan Shawlee) appearing on a news report dolled up and bathing in his heroic spotlight whilst obviously seeing another beau. Apart from the study of Merritt as a crumbling paternal-authority figure reminiscent of John Wayne’s Thomas Dunson in Red River (1948) and echoing back to Captain Ahab, the characterisations are stereotyped, and the acting styles and interpersonal relations are mostly pitched on the level of a low-budget war movie.

The scenario was written by a battery of writers who had impressive experience in writing fantastic tales, including Them! author George Worthing Yates, and former Val Lewton collaborator Barré Lyndon, but the screenplay, actually written by James O’Hanlon, is so heavy-footed it would make Godzilla on a bender seem twinkle-toed. Conquestanticipates much later special effects-based cinema with frightening alacrity in that regard, the time and effort spent on those effects unmatched by the dramatic level and engagement with the human level. And yet Conquestisn’t hollow, as it offers a study in the potentially overwhelming nature of space travel and confrontation with the infinite, and with more care might easily have been another Pal and Haskin classic, indeed perhaps even their best work. By touching on an early version of generation gap angst that the era’s teenagers would have understood intuitively and soon would become a basic cultural given, the film sets in play a father-son conflict that binds with the theme of exploration as a process of divestment as well as achievement, threat of loss as well as discovery, with intimations of old, patriarchal religious sensibilities clashing with modernity’s revisionist urges and arrogant, all-conquering spirit, raising the spectre of minds and philosophies that haven’t moved fast enough to cope with such extremes. Pal’s sci-fi productions tended to emphasise a brand of safe, pious sentiment agreeable to his mid-’50s audience, particular in The War of Worlds where that element contradicted H.G. Wells’ pitiless logic and yet also helped power the film’s feverishly poetic apocalypse. Merritt, who’s hiding the effects of “space fatigue,” a malady that has already washed out Cooper, begins to unravel when confronted by deep space and new, strange horizons. The death of Fodor in a shower of fiery meteor fragments lays the seeds for Merritt’s complete disintegration.

Merritt devolves into a religious mania, convinced they’re committing an act of sacrilege by invading a domain not prescribed for human use as per Biblical instruction, and eventually becomes determined to prevent the mission landing. He almost foils the touchdown, and then attempts to sabotage the ship once on the Martian surface, even firing bullets at Barney to stop him, leading to a tussle which results in the older man’s death. Mahoney, who arrives during the fight, is appalled and, with his blind loyalty to Merritt, swears to make sure Barney will be court-marshalled and hung for the killing. The flavour of this moral drama is appropriately bald and Oedipal, fit for the founding of new worlds and myths, but the film lacks the authorial snap to make it truly momentous. Conquest does to a certain extent see the atavistic import behind a seemingly super-modern act and interrogates how we might respond to such widened vistas: indeed Conquest works as a parable of relevance to the modern world as so many, faced with new ways of understanding the universe and our place in it, retreat into older ways and a kind of wilful blindness that reaffirms we humans as the centre of things. But Conquest also counterbalances the theme of future shock by offering up visions of transcendental grace in unexpected environs – a funeral in space that sends a body floating off into the blazing light of the galaxy, a cross assembled from junk on the blasted Martian surface, a tiny sprout from a plant on the Martian surface appearing out of a grave, and a seemingly miraculous Yuletide snow falling from the red planet’s sky.

Such fragments of marvel arrive thanks to Haskin’s direction, with his quietly baroque visual sensibility and gift for wrangling cramped budgets to conjure films that seemed somehow vast and visionary, offering frames cut into geometric forms by the curlicues of his set design and adroit camera placement, and expressive use of colour in creating a vivid pictorial sense of otherworldly extremes. Nicholas Meyer acknowledged the debt owed to the funeral sequence for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Paul Verhoeven, fan of The War of the Worlds, may well have remembered this for another similar scene in Starship Troopers(1997). The film’s moments of corporeal suffering still have a surprising punch, like Fodor’s wide-open mouth as a red-hot rock shoots through his suit and body, and flash cuts to the faces of the crew during the emergency take-off from Mars, each man with blood flowing from his face as they’re pummelled by G-force, and the sight of Fodor’s dead body, tethered to the spaceship whilst drifting, has a haunting sense of vulnerability and pathos in the face of an inimical universe that anticipates where Kubrick, Cuaron, and others would aim for. Where Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke were cleverer in their take was in finding a way to dramatize the deistic fantasies and fears of engaging with the cosmos whilst maintaining a rigorous approach to the microcosmic detail. By contrast Conquest quells its dramatic conflicts too early and leads to the same anticlimax that has dogged real space exploration for the past forty years: after you’ve landed on some big ball of rock in the void, what then? Haskin returned to Mars for Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), a semi-sequel that leapt from Melville to Defoe for inspiration and expanded on this film's hints of desolate beauty.

James Franco’s journey from Spider-Man co-star to multifarious would-be Renaissance man has culminated in a small bombardment of film projects in the past eighteen months. These labours have included two Faulkner adaptations, last year’s As I Lay Dying and the upcoming The Sound and the Fury, and a gruelling, unfiltered, but somehow compelling version of Cormac McCarthy’s hillbilly grunge epic Child of God. Franco officially co-directed this oddity, although Interior. Leather Bar. seems to be more the brainchild of collaborator Travis Mathews, chiefly a documentary filmmaker whose subject is the more confronting zones of gay life. Blending meta-narrative and art-happening stunt, Interior. Leather Bar. meditates on the nature of acting as a way of grazing the edges of personal reality, in the context of confronting cultural depictions of unfamiliar sexuality. The film supposedly depicts, documentary fashion, Mathews’ attempt to recreate a legendary 40 minutes’ worth of hard-core footage cut from William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980). That film, shot on location in New York’s leather bar scene, had a troubled production and reception owing to the controversy of its depiction of that milieu, which was viewed through Friedkin’s delirious, infernal conception of modern urban life. Censorship only seemed to confirm institutionalised homophobia, turning what was authentically recorded of the era’s real niche gay life by the film into shadowy, culturally redacted netherworld. Cruising’s problematic achievement as both document of the period, exploration of the dark side of human sexuality, and polarizing product of a time when such reassuringly squeaky-clean, mainstream-friendly queer fare as Beginners or The Kids Are All Right (both 2011) were unheard of, has made it, whether one approves of it or not, a totemistic moment and a battleground to this day.

So Mathews and Franco set out to recreate the texture of the era’s hedonism, like art historians rebuilding some shattered monument to plug the hole left in a cultural landscape. Franco explains at length that he’s taking on the implicit rendering of gay sexual activity, or indeed any non-normative behaviour, as a realm of taboo otherness, a construction of unfamiliarity which creates prejudice as well as being a product of it. Much of Interior. Leather Bar. purports to be a making-of record of the recreation project, of which only relatively brief snatches are seen. Whilst depiction of gay sex is crucial in the film, on another level this is fundamentally about acting, in terms of personal identity, and the creation of false realities that serve the needs of an audience. Actor Val Lauren, who starred in his biopic of Sal Mineo, Sal (2011), is cast here as stand-in for Al Pacino. Like Pacino the man and actor who worked on the original, perhaps, and certainly like his character in the original film, Lauren is called on to perform in contexts where the acting must at some point confront a personal limit, where the straight actor’s reflexive disinterest or even distaste in the gay sexual activity might snap in – or, prove non-existent, per macho anxiety. Thus Lauren's internalising of the gay panic of thirty years ago seems at first a little old-hat, but one question here is how much have we really evolved, culturally speaking, since 1980, in terms of what we allow representation on screen.

Tackling that question, Mathews and Franco set out to normalise the verboten heart of Cruising’s expressive lode in portraying raw homosexual behaviour. But they also explore how an audience relies on actors to transmute our fantasies into performance, a creation of observable experience. To achieve the full recreation of the Cruising sex scenes, the filmmakers need performers who can actually do them - that is, gay actors or men willing to perform sex acts on camera. For the actor, playing a movie role entails actually doing a thing, or a simulacrum of a thing, that allows vicarious pleasures and pains for others. Though the capacity to slip in and out of such identities is precisely the one thing we pay and prize actors for, there is always going to be a limit of distance on what an actor will and can do to suppress their own identity. Val and another actor who says he’s straight stumble clumsily through preparations for the extended stunt whilst feeling each-other out - cruising, in a way - about their feelings in this situation. Interpolated throughout are shots of various actors and actuals who say their little piece about their motivations for getting into the project, whilst Lauren chats on the phone with his agent and his wife to release his discomfort and confusion.

The very final shots suggest that in the same way that Lauren is expected to become Pacino, who is in turn expected to play a character who is trying to fit in in an environment where his alienness must sooner or later be revealed, Mathews and Franco are interested in chasing Cruising’s fascination with psychological dissolution, a common theme of Friedkin’s. Interior. Leather Bar. remains mostly a theory for an interesting exploration of this theme, aping Cruising’s driving notion of identities becoming blurred in close contact with new languages of flesh, without going anywhere with it. Mathews and Franco's filmmaking mimics Friedkin’s in an act of appropriation that rhymes with what the performers are asked to do, multiplying realms of media reality, a reflection within a reflection. And yes, Mathews and Franco do a good job recreating the specific, grimy, almost neo-expressionist look and sound of Cruising, seen in short sequences composed of staccato edits punctuated by vivid, hardcore shots. Such shots bluntly earn the film’s spurs as transgressive fare. But the film threatens to devolve into a rather trite moral, that watching gay sex up close will make you chill out generally on the subject. Franco’s participation borders on self-congratulatory as the inherent riskiness on making such a film is reiterated several times, but his method of playing confrontational provocateur is here more sophisticated than in Child of God’s gauchely contemplated necrophilia. The perpetual, invisible quotation marks that hovered around Franco’s participation in a mainstream variation on the same ideas, This Is The End (2013), always feel present here too, however, and the film as a whole distanced me from the very idea that I could see the "real" Franco or Lauren in this context; they play dramatically convenient projections of themselves, and want us to know that. The hour-long run time means that the film ultimately feels more essayistic than dramatic, in spite of the genre-blurring, and ultimately it feels caught between two different modes of expression without satisfying either.

The project succeeds at least in its gazing, presenting as a climax (in both senses of the term) an extended lovemaking session between a couple of leather daddies with a masturbating voyeur in the scene and a crew of filmmakers beyond the scene, a real sex act performed for aesthetic recreation transmitted through layers of watching. This casts a weird spell through the purposeful attempt to remove precisely the aesthetic that was key to Friedkin’s film: the thudding dance music, stroboscopic lighting and editing, and grinding hysteria give way instead to a kind of zoological documentary, with the act of detached third-person viewing, represented by Val-as-Pacino-as-cop/outsider, taken by Mathews as more important than the sex acts themselves. How the viewer responds is the phenomenon under study; the dividing line not just between gay and straight, actor and audience comes under question, but divisions of intimate and public behaviour, art and pornography, capturing not merely the surface reality of something usually kept under wraps but privileged with a glimpse of a strange zone of nullity where no such demarcations apply. Interior. Leather Bar. doesn’t forge any grand, new territory for the perverted arts, but it does have a surprising breadth of ambition, and it tackles those ambitions with enough balls to achieve a minatory grace.

Hossein Amini has had a variable but mostly strong career as an accomplished, professional film writer, penning excellent scripts for Michael Winterbottom’s Jude (1995) and Iain Softley’s The Wings of the Dove(1997) back when, and recently scoring big hits working on Drive (2011) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), as well as the not-so-big 47 Ronin (2013). Undoubtedly the hits helped him make his feature directing debut, an adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel. The Two Faces of January delves into territory inevitably reminiscent of her Tom Ripley novels, although the theme of two men locked in a criminal folie-a-deuxis more reminiscent of her Strangers on a Train. The setting is Athens, 1962: Oscar Isaac is Rydal, an American in self-imposed exile in Greece subsisting as a tour guide, petty scam artist and lover boy for good-looking Yankee girls. Rydal strikes up a relationship with the rich and pretty Lauren (Daisy Bevan), but has his eye drawn by a couple, Chester (Viggo Mortensen) and Colette (Kirsten Dunst), at first because Chester reminds him of his father. Rydal resisted returning home after his father’s recent death because he was still sitting on lodes of intense resentment for his demanding intellectual regimens and emotional detachment.

Drawn into casual friendship with the couple, Rydal soon finds himself sucked into Chester’s multi-continental criminal escapades: having fled the US with the profits of a stock scam, Chester is confronted by a private detective, Paul Vittorio (David Warshofsky), who’s been sent by extremely unhappy investors to collect the proceeds at gunpoint. Chester manages to attack Vittorio, who dies in the melee, but he manage to fool Rydal, who catches sight of him dragging the body down a hotel corridor, into thinking that he’s dragging a drunk back to his room. Chester however soon makes most of his situation plain to Rydal and appeals for his help so he and Colette can flee Greece. Rydal arranges for false passports for them, skimming some of the profit for himself, and then volunteers to escort the couple to Crete for the several days it will take for the passports to be ready. Rydal’s motivation in this is clearly beyond money, and his designs on winning Colette away from Chester seem pretty blatant, even as the two men maintain another, loaded, uneasily Oedipal relationship, false father and untrue son tussling for control of woman and fortune.

Amini’s direction displays gifts for economy in the first twenty minutes that call to mind a good classic Hollywood director tackling the same sort of material: mid-career Anatole Litvak, say, or Fred Zinneman before he got prestigious, quickly sketching character outlines, situational underpinnings, basic relationships and the stakes of the oncoming drama, before getting busy with a sudden swerve into plot. Amini pieces together some decent suspense sequences, avoiding the kind of prestigious bloat that afflicts a lot of this brand of “old-fashioned” thriller film. Whereas Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mister Ripley (1999) lumbered on for two and a half hours, Amini maintains nimbleness whilst remaining open to the landscape the setting provides, capturing a sense of bleary dislocation and washed-out romanticism when his bedevilled trio awaken by the sea after a night of anxious drinking, and using a stony plain they walk along to communicate the jagged desolation that fills their psychic horizons. An eerie sequence that pays off in violence and tragedy is staged in an ancient Minoan ruin, with frescoes depicting ancient, dangerous bull dancing rituals reflecting the gnawing psychological battle entangling the protagonists. A fine chase through an Istanbul bazaar late in the film sees Mortensen dashing through gullet of shadowed mazes, where metalworkers pounding away in infernal abodes.

The crisp, muted yet definite colours of Alberto Iglesias’ photography suspend the characters in a world existing in some Venn diagram mid-point between period tourist postcard and that small genre of midday noir, of which Rene Clement’s take on Highsmith, Plein Soleil (1960) was a major example. That film was surely a strong influence here, whilst the suspense sequences, from Chester trying to hide the dead private eye’s body to the final chase, clearly have more Hitchcockian pretences, although here perhaps the aesthetic seems more in line with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) than Strangers on a Train (1951). And yet there’s something oddly laborious about Amini’s direction and the film as a whole, and the qualities which I praised above ultimately conspire to dampen the film. Amini’s approach to building scenes is a literal as his screenwriting, spelling out whilst never developing a convincing mood of neuroticism or contorted reality. The material does feel partly at fault too, which treads territory too well-worn in Highsmith’s oeuvre, whilst her redeeming on-page psychological subtlety and control of viewpoint slips out of Amini’s fingers. There’s a difference between generating a sense of tragic inevitability and just plain predictability, and Two Faces doesn’t quite know it. The intrinsic theme of the two men competing over the woman is as old as the hills and even the skill of the three actors can’t make it feel anything more than obvious.

Moreover, although generational conflict is wound into the story, the film is set in the past without feeling convincingly of its past nor of its generations as players in their time. Amini offers a brief exchange between Chester and Vittorio, where the private eye ruefully notes that he’s been sent back to Europe after never giving a damn about it when he was here as a young soldier: this moment is loaded with a sense of middle-aged regret, the shared understanding between the two men of what time has done to their expectations in life and sense of the world, and is more convincing and telling in the thirty seconds or so it takes to play out than anything we get between Chester and Rydal. That pair stand in for the disaffected sons of the WW2 generation, a beatnik escapee feeding off the loose change of the post-war plutocracy – except that Amini doesn’t engage with these men on any such level, preferring to invoke different class backgrounds to supply the asymmetry to their yearnings and resentments. Where the immediacy of sexual and fiscal jealousy can believably propel a story like this, the underlying sense of both rivalry and connection between Chester and Rydal required to make both the more complex psychodrama work, not to mention the finale, is communicated too bluntly and scantly to convince. Two deaths occur in the course of the story, both essentially accidents that nonetheless clearly stem form a landslide of bad decisions, and a sense of quiescent dread of when eventually the situation will combust is built, only to defuse awkwardly, with one character’s final redemptive act seeming more than a little wimpy in narrative terms. The Two Faces of January might have become a mercilessly Sartrean thriller about hell being the people we’re stuck with, even an Antonioni-esque story where thriller stakes mask contemplations of the godforsaken things people do to one-another, but it finally remains too much in thrall to its own classiness and literate poise. Still, the film’s pleasures are worth noticing, most particularly Mortensen’s reliably good performance as a professional charmer with a desperate streak who finishes up destroying almost everything he loves.

This much-maligned but hugely enjoyable eco tract-cum-monster movie by John Frankenheimer is one of the most sublime junky pleasures I’ve stumbled upon in a while. Frankenheimer’s unmoored, gun-for-hire phase in the late ‘70s, though reputedly bedevilled by a drinking problem, had already produced his rock-solid thrillers French Connection II (1975) and Black Sunday(1977), and Prophecy quickly declares pretensions above and beyond the glut of Jaws(1975) rip-offs it surely belonged to. An opening credit sequence presents an oddly abstracted series of shots of lights drifting in the dark, accompanied by the slowly composing sounds of boots thundering across the earth and dogs howling: hallucinatory ambience turns into frenetic motion and urgency, as the lights are revealed to be torches in the hands of rangers on the hunt for a missing lumberjacks and Native American eco-terrorists, only to find themselves at the mercy of a malevolent and inimical force in the dark. Frankenheimer shifts to a daylight shot of mangled, half-eaten corpses lying near pellucid Arcadian waters, the first of many refrains to an almost David Cronenberg-esque obsession with physical destruction and perversion of natural forms, but contextualised in a seemingly Edenic locale, where the industrial travesties are invisibly leeching into the earth and the body, and the by-product is now lurking in the bush ready to eat you.

The hero is Robert Foxworth’s glumly dedicated, lefty do-gooder public health inspector Dr. Robert Verne (after the previous year’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, health inspectors were having an Indian summer as Hollywood heroes) who’s burnt out his conscientious spirit ministering to inner city tenements. He and his orchestra cellist wife Maggie (Talia Shire) head to a forested area in Maine (although obviously actually filmed in British Columbia), as an EPA pal asks Robert to help arbitrate in a dispute between a paper mill and the forest’s owners, who call themselves Original Peoples, or “Opies.” Robert and Maggie are quickly treated to a glimpse of how heated the conflict has become as mill boss Bethel Isley (Richard Dysart, warming up for more monster business in The Thing, 1982) tries to barge through a cordon thrown up by Opie leaders John (Armand Assante) and Ramona Hawks (Victoria Racimo), resulting in a chainsaw-vs-axe duel between John and Isley’s goon Kelso (Everett Creach) that almost gets John killed. Isley gives Robert and Maggie a tour of the parent company’s logging activities and the mill, where all seems above board. But Robert soon sees unnaturally huge salmon and tadpoles, before killing a maddened, mutated racoon that invades his and Maggie’s cabin. He connects with John and Ramona, and they show him multiplying evidence that something grotesque is happening to both their fellow tribal members and to the local wildlife, leading to the discovery of a bear cub that’s been born as hideously mangled and tortured as the mutant baby of Eraserhead(1977).

What’s all this got to do with the local legend of the baleful, protective demon Katahdin, which Ramona’s elder grandfather, Hector M’Rai (George Clutesi), claims to have seen, and describes as having “part of everything in God’s creation” in its obscene physiognomy? Plenty, it turns out, because the mill’s actually been dumping mercury into the lake, which sinks to the bottom and won’t show up in water testing but has seeped into everything and has, with its mutagenic properties, created dragons. The notion that Native American myth could coincide with a very real threats standing in for natural payback for man’s ravaging of the Way of Things was pretty common in post-Jaws monster movies, including in Claws, Orca (both 1977), and The White Buffalo(1978), and even, in a different fashion, the magnificently whacko The Manitou (1978), and Prophecy might have felt a bit old-hat in that regard by the time it came out. Prophecyalso treads similar territory to Grizzly(1976) and Claws in turning the woodlands into a claustrophobic place where any stray bush might hide a terror. More interestingly, the script by David Seltzer has telling similarities to his prior big hit as a screenwriter, The Omen(1976), in playing on paranoid fears about modernity’s tense relationship with ethical codes inherited from pre-technological societies – the wormwood star of The Omen’s obsessive source text Revelation has surely fallen in this film – and parental anxiety over unborn children.

For most of the first hour, Prophecy feels like a melodrama about marital tensions and environmental and land rights issues, Red Desert (1965) reset in the woodds. Robert’s ambivalent intensity smoulders and Maggie is increasingly tormented by her secret pregnancy, knowing that Robert doesn’t want to bring children into a troubled world but unable to face an abortion. The film’s efforts to seem important and timely, drawing on the terrible Minamata poisonings in Japan as inspiration for mutant monster shenanigans, are more than a touch heavy-handed. And yet the theme of natural perversion, with an edge of body-horror grotesquery apparent in gruesome visual fragments and pervading the dramatic landcsape, gives the film a disquieting punch rare to the usually clean-cut monster genre. This aspect dovetails with the theme of parental unease and intensifies it with sadistic glee, once it becomes clear that in drinking the local water supply Maggie has placed their unborn child in danger of the mutagenic toxin. In the film’s final phases she’s stuck playing clinging mother to the misshapen bear cub, tied to the wailing thing that’s an actualisation of every parental nightmare imaginable. This touch adds to the film’s ghoulish intensity, which builds and combusts suddenly in a third act that ranks high in the pantheon in fight-and flight thrill-rides, and the scarcity of monster action before this, whilst a touch puzzling as it plays out, helps the film in this regard.

After the opening, only one sequence showing the Katahdin’s deadly work intrudes before the relentless last act, as the beast is heard as a dread rumbling in the woods overheard by the hiking Nelson family on a bucolic afternoon, before father (Burke Byrnes) and his two kids (Mia Bendixsen and Johnny Timko) are attacked in their night camp. Young Timko in his sleeping bag is grabbed up by the monster and then hurled against a rock, which explodes in a shower of stuffing feathers. This moment is the film’s most well-known image, generally regarded as a goofy moment of strangeness by genre fans, but what’s interesting about it is that Frankenheimer here works a variation on the more famous moment from The Manchurian Candidate (1962), when Senator Iselin is shot in the heart through the milk carton he holds, the milk pouring out in a startlingly odd simulacrum of flowing blood. Here the feathers again stand in for blood and guts Frankenheimer doesn’t want to show and replaces it with something rather surreal and redolent of symbolism for slain innocence. That’s not to say it works, exactly, as a visual flourish, but it’s not just random weirdness. There is a kitschy quality to some aspects of the film, with the dated make-up and animatronic effects, particularly in the Katahdin’s look, which suggests a rough sketch for Chris Walas’ Brundlefly crossed with a melted Barney the Dinosaur. And yet the hefty budget and all the scope for staging that allows for once wasn’t squandered, because Frankenheimer and his editor Tom Rolf give the film a pulp vivacity as well as a veneer of committed artistry.

The odd, stylised tone of the opening for instance is justified later as Frankenheimer inverts the early structuring, when the real monster business gets going, as the Katahdin, which is actually a grossly deformed and mutated bear, attacks a gathering at Hector’s tribal encampment. The beast forces the humans to flee into underground storage tunnels for a scene where Frankenheimer uses soundmemorably, attuning the audience to the desperate panting of the terrified people who listen to hideous ends for those trapped above and then crane their ears trying to detect whether the monster’s still waiting above, whilst surveying the actors’ faces in clever multi-plane shots and then zeroing in to read their individual, sweating terror, before a gleefully nasty punch-line when the first to stick their head up gets it ripped off. Frankenheimer might have been trying to prove desperately that he wasn’t slumming in loading the film with such showy effects mixed with self-serious themes, and yet he leapt happily into pure horror territory when the time came.

The last half-hour is therefore compulsively gripping as Robert, Maggie, John, Ramona, and sundry other players have to try to escape the remote woods and elude the Katahdin, which proves devilish in both its invulnerability and predatory cunning as it tracks the protagonists, driven to destroy in its wounded rage. Isley makes a mad dash for a remote antenna array to try and call in aid, whilst the others, in a marvellously tense and relishable sequence that seems to draw on The Wage of Fear (1953) for inspiration, crawl their way to town on a painfully slow-moving truck, scanning the forest with searchlights in vigilance for the beast that lurks in the dark. The very climax throws in silhouetted maulings, beheaded men, a fog-shrouded pier, underwater monster breathing, and a brief besiegement in a cabin as the remaining heroes make a stand, with breathless verve. There’s even one of those black-out shocks right before the end credits, capping off the film with a gloriously cheesy switchback that underlines its final absurdity in just the right way. The casting of Shire and Foxworth is a nice reminder of a time when actual adults were allowed to star in this sort of thing, and indeed the film as a whole, in its belief that this sort of fare could sustain audience interest through such character drama, seems a bit of a relic now. Young Assante all but oozes charisma and has dash to spare, and yet he’s just as enjoyably overripe as ever, somehow managing to overact even with his eyes as they stare through the substance of material things and invite martyrdom by chainsaw. Prophecyisn’t exactly what you’d call reputable pleasure, and yet it is, in its way, a quintessential monster movie experience.

A spot of cross-promotion. Starting later today at Ferdy on Films...

Cheap, brief, daft, and blissful fun for old B-movie spelunkers, The Mysterious Doctor is jerry-built pulp fiction from the midst of WW2, combining mild horror spun from already long-hoary story tropes and regulation wartime messaging. The setting is the perpetually foggy corner of a Warner Bros. approximation of Cornwall. The eponymous doctor, Frederick Holmes (Lester Matthews), comes lurching out of the mist, supposedly on a walking holiday, and fetches a ride from a peddler driving a wagon to get him through the murk. The peddler is, naturally, nervous about the locale and won’t tarry long in the nearby village of Morgan’s Head, home to a legend of a roaming headless ghost who has staked a deadly claim to the local tin mine. The doctor is greeted at the door of the town inn by the proprietor, Simon (Frank Mayo), who wears a black hood and doesn’t provide the warmest of welcomes: Holmes purchases the amicable company of local blabbermouth Hugh Penhryn (Forrester Harvey) when he buys the inn’s clientele a round of drinks, and learns the hooded host was badly disfigured in an accident with dynamite. Reports of a German parachutist landing somewhere out on the foggy moors brings the yokels to the door of Holmes’ hotel room demanding to know who he is and where he comes from, with eminent local personage Sir Henry Leland (John Loder) taking charge. The good doctor’s explanations satisfy them for the moment, and he thrills and perturbs the crowd by announcing he will plumb the mystery of the silver mine.

The actual plot involves one of those fake hauntings so popular in the comedy-thrillers of the ‘20s and ‘30s – The Cat and the Canary (1927), The Bat (1926), The Phantom Light (1935), Oh, Mr Porter! (1937) – where the guises and tropes of supernatural melodrama are both exploited and subverted, by having those tropes prove to be masks for more earthly nefarious ends: this sub-genre would have its most famous day transmuted into animated television for Scooby-Doo. In the heyday of that mode, it was a blatant metaphor for dispelling irrationalism in the face of modernity’s glare, making light of the darker fantasies inherited from European traditions and plied so memorably by the continental Expressionist cinema of the time. But the baddies of most of those movies – usually smugglers, gangsters, jewel thieves and the like – were much less urgent villains than Nazi spies. The theme is only really adjusted to the epoch insofar as the ore from the mine is a valuable war resource and so the motives of the bad guy involve keeping the resource from being exploited, and the doctor proves to be a mineralogy expert sent by the authorities to assess the mine’s worth. What makes The Mysterious Doctorinteresting lies in the way it plays with the mode's conventions by playing some twisty games. Richard Weil’s scant script fills out the film’s incredibly crisp 57 minute running time with a surprising number of sharp turns, in a model of the kind of narrative economy this kind of filmmaking could offer.

Most engagingly, Weil’s screenplay keeps changing expectations of who the protagonists are going to be. The “mysterious doctor” at first seems to be a likely villain, then prospective hero, but seems finally to fall prey to the headless ghost. Other potential heroes and villains rise to the fore. Leland, who seems to be the solicitous squire, has some questionable family roots. Lt. ‘Kit’ Hilton (Bruce Lester) and Letty Carstairs (Eleanor Parker) are introduced as the regulation clean-cut young lovers, with Hilton speechifying to the miners about wartime duties and leading the hunt for the doctor’s killer. Letty protects the town’s unstable loner Bart Redmond (Matt Willis, best known for playing the hapless werewolf slave of The Return of the Vampire, 1944), who’s been beset by mental troubles since his parents' mysterious death and has become a favourite butt of teasing by schoolkids, and becomes Hilton’s main suspect for the killing of the doctor, in a sub-plot that stumbles into proto-Ryan’s Daughter (1970) territory. The viewer, however, already knows that somebody or something inhabits the guise of the headless ghost, seen stalking through the mist and tracking the doctor in the mine, as does Simon, who momentarily bares his disfigured face to put on a gas mask to follow the doctor in the mine. The film then pulls a neat, if not exactly surprisingly switch about who proves to be under Simon’s hood by the end, after the bluff of just who does get killed in the mine and who eventually saves the day.

The headless ghost itself is wonderfully goofy, with torso jutting high to hide the head of the actor, but at least it is supposed to be fake insofar as it’s a villain’s costume rather than an actual wraith, and its attacks do have a certain charge, particularly when it stalks the heroes in the depths of the mine with silent, remorseless progress. 21-year-old Parker, stunningly beautiful, is obvious star material playing a likeably defiant heroine who combines elements of the classic Gothic romantic heroine, of the type Parker would essay four years later in The Woman in White, and the chipper, can-do wartime woman like Penelope Dudley Ward played so well in The Demi-Paradise(1943), or Elizabeth Allan in Went the Day Well? (1943). Her instincts alone prove correct in a narrative that makes, in its quaint and incongruous fashion, an urgent point about being too quick to attack strangers, outsiders, and scapegoats in the context of such a paranoid epoch. Letty has the spunk to protect Bart not just from angry townsfolk who want to lynch him, but also from her pompous boyfriend’s self-righteous manhunt, in a manner that amusingly undercuts his status as appointed military patriot, even interfering with a shot he takes at the fleeing Bart. As with a lot of movies actually made during WW2 rather than retrospectively, there is no single, infallible leader: the social context and part to play for all is emphasised. The finale is breathless and ridiculous, involving secrete passages into manor houses, the young lovers held captive in a room full of dynamite, and superhuman heroism on the part of unlikely characters. Former comedy short and Fox quickie director Ben Stoloff gives you all the menacing silhouettes and dry-ice mist swathing fake trees you could possibly ask for.

I admit that much of Roman Polanski’s later oeuvre has left me cold. Sometimes I wonder if this offers me an overly-easy psychological exit point from contemplating Polanski’s infamy in artistic terms, but the fact remains that most of what he’s done since Bitter Moon (1992) has to me lacked the potency of his early career, as he’s often left the zone of queasy psychodrama that was his specific, ingenious stock-in-trade. The self-evidently second-rate material he’s often worked with hasn’t helped much, from the excessively theatrical and obvious Death and the Maiden (1996) and Carnage (2011), to the minor but diverting The Ninth Gate (1999). The Ghost Writer (2010) was made with sublime poise but proved a film as a cheaply, shallowly cynical as Chinatown (1974) was brilliantly, devastatingly so, whilst his heavy-duty prestige work in The Pianist (2002) and Oliver Twist (2006), scarcely left any impression on my memory, seeming more like competent TV movies by smooth artisans than works by a man who was once a high-tensile stylist and bitterly incisive wit. Venus in Fur seemed set to be a reprise of Carnage as another adaptation of a recent, fashionable stage work, a minor aside from the ageing, embattled director. And yet Polanski uses it to stage his most invigorating and amusing plunge into psycho-sexual folly since, yeah, Bitter Moon.

That very “minor” status of the project helps. The set-up is limited, the theatricality again unbound, a folie-a-deux of role-playing and art-life null-zone where the denouement is obvious from five minutes in, and yet it prevents a perfect stage for Polanski’s scourging humour and obsessions to take root, evoking his early work in spades. The enclosed setting and intensely sadomasochistic gamesmanship of Knife in the Water (1962) and Cul-de-Sac (1966), particularly the latter’s gender kink, except that whereas Cul-de-Sac showed a weak man claiming potency but leaving himself more isolated than ever, Venus in Fur shows a self-appointed emperor falling under the heel of a tyrant and loving it. The subject is playwright-turned-debuting director Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), who’s staging his own adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s pivotal tome “Venus im Pelz,” but can’t find an actress to fit the part. He’s just on the verge of giving up for the day and leaving the cavernous theatre he’s all alone in on a dull and stormy eve, when in walks a seemingly ditzy candidate, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner). She soon proves a slippery character with a rare and remarkable grasp on her role, and starts claiming the high ground over the hapless auteur. Polanski kicks off with pointed satire that hits several targets, as Amalric’s jerk-off anti-hero rants over his mobile phone to his fiancé about the immaturity of the actresses who auditioned for him, and bemoaning the absence of classically mature femininity: he invites the audience to laugh with a touch of knowing agreement with Thomas, but also primes the audience then to share in his take-down.

But another theme is already percolating, as Polanski reflects on the way closeness to death has defined ideas of maturity in social mythology until recently: Thomas laments that a woman the age of Wanda, Sacher-Masoch’s antiheroine, would’ve had “a husband, six kids, and tuberculosis by now” when the actresses who audition for him are all in the state of perma-adolescence we’re now familiar with. An irony is also already implicit: Sacher-Masoch’s tale came to a conclusion, interesting today and radical in its time, after all the fetishistic roundelay, that men and women couldn’t become real companions until granted the same privileges, and yet Thomas’ project smacks of a desire to revel in retrograde ideals. At least three levels of adaptation are implicit: Polanski adapting David Ives’ source play, which riffed on Sacher-Masoch, poking holes in his dated assumptions but annexing the power of his ideas, and of course Thomas is the representing interlocutor. Little of the dreamy fantasia that was integral to Jesus Franco's loose take on the novel is present here. Vanda gives Thomas his wish as she steadily transforms from caricature of the sort of contemporary airhead he despises into his ideal Wanda, seeming to fulfil his artistic ideal but actually, simultaneously sniffing out the wish-fulfilment underside of the art in the artist. The fact that Seigner is Polanski’s wife and Amalric, who’s long inspired double-takes from me because of his resemblance to the director, is his image, primes us for a sense that Polanski’s offering a comedic but genuine self-portrait here. But the possibility that Polanski is baiting us is equally strong. Nonetheless, as with Tess (1979), Bitter Moon, and Death and the Maiden, the sense that Polanski is diagnosing his impulses to both criminal and victim is implicit, amidst his familiar mordant and tar-dark observations of human behaviour. Venus in Fur doesn’t aim for the same degree of discomfort and threat as his greatest works do, except perhaps for a faint edge in the very climax, and yet it lurks beneath: after all, the plot is quite similar to Takashi Miike’s Audition (2000) as it portrays a women who uses her ability to turn herself into the image of a powerful artistic man’s desire to entrap and abuse him.

Polanski stops well short of Miike’s end-point for such a paranoid, sadistic misandrist fantasy, in part because his subject is officially about the perverse nature of desire and how it contradicts surface behaviour and even personal will: Thomas in the end wants to be dominated. Seigner readily played the unspoilt naïf encouraged to grow into a untameable monster in Bitter Moon for Polanski, and the angel from hell in The Ninth Gate, and Venus in Fur works as partial self-satire in this regard, the conceit of the duo stepping in and out of the roles in the play allowing for instant auto-criticism and meta-commentary. But Polanski knows far too well how easily the force of intense emotion subsumes attempts to rhetorically corral them – indeed it’s the essential assumption of his career, as well as an ugly truth about his life – and that Vanda and Thomas are locked from the get-go in a journey to an inevitable end. Polanski plays at peeling back layers of reality nested in the apparently straightforward tale, as Vanda proves to be not just a superlatively manipulative actress but one with a different motive, logically related to Thomas’ current situation and his simultaneous desire to find safe ground and indulge his phantom tastes. The suggestion that Vanda in fact might even be Venus or one of the Bacchanals who tore Dionysus to pieces, and thus a genuinely strange and cruel goddess, is mooted more than once.

Venus in Fur is littered with neat jokes about theatre and role-playing, smirking at a phallic cactus left on the stage from a production of a stage version of Stagecoach (doubtless with all its phallocratic colonial machismo intact) that becomes Thomas’ crucifix-cum-rack in the end, a joke reminiscent of Ken Russell. The protagonists steadily take on the costume and then personalities of their characters. Most hilariously, the couple suddenly turn with a few tweaks of setting and costume into a patient and psychoanalyst, as Vanda reveals alarming insights into Thomas’ fiancé and his state of mind that prove later to not come from mere insight. But Polanski often seems to be digging into something slightly apart from the usual life-art stuff, as he investigates a problem he sees as inherent in his artform(s), the theatrical and cinematic worlds, which usually congratulate themselves on their tolerance and progressiveness and yet still often cede awesome power to individual egos, who are then given carte blanche to manipulate others into fulfilling their designs, one usually caricatured popularly as a dominant man wrangling diva actresses into line. Venus in Fur sees Thomas getting what he secretly wants by steadily losing agency, as Vanda proves to be a genius in all forms of theatre, becoming not just mistress of Thomas but director.

Polanski settles for the most part to film unobtrusively and subtly manipulate whilst pretending to lurk under Vanda’s wing, quietly tweaking camera angles and lighting effects to render his characters progressively less familiar and stylised. The director’s gift for both wielding the effects of horror cinema and simultaneously burlesquing them is on show as Thomas becomes a glowering shadow wanderer and burning-eyed wraith, before Vanda reconstructs him as a kind of drag-queen Frankenstein monster, and then finally turned into an S&M version of Cesare from Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1919), whilst Vanda emerges in the end as leering, high-camp vision of dominant female sexuality, wrapped in fur and dancing in Grecian style whilst leering like the daughter of Joel Grey and Divine to tease her mate/prey, a climactic moment that blends the eccentric, the unsettling, and high camp humour with careless pleasure. The pathos of George in Cul-de-Sac, who likewise submitted playfully to a coolly manipulative woman’s gender-bending games, has become here sarcastic punch-line. Brisk, deft, taunting, and sinuous, Venus in Fur is satisfying on some wicked level.

The Spiders (Die Spinnen): Part 1: Der Goldene See (1919) / Part 2: Das Brillantenschiff (1920)

The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1954)

The Spare Poetics of Gordon Willis

Dances With Wolves (1990)

The Night Has Eyes (1942)

The Banshee Chapter (2013)

Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)

The Fault in Our Stars (2014)

Locke (2013)

The Big Night (1951)

Action in the North Atlantic (1943)

We Are the Best! (Vi Är Bäst!, 2013)

Need for Speed (2014)

Conquest of Space (1955)

Interior. Leather Bar. (2013)

The Two Faces of January (2014)

Prophecy (1979)

Halloween Horror Fortnight at Ferdy on Films

The Mysterious Doctor (1943)

Venus in Fur (La Vénus à la fourrure, 2013)