The title of this article is wrong. I got to thinking about the Titanics I had seen on film, and I realized there were at least four of them that have featured in semi- (or pseudo-) historical cinematic retellings of the tragic events of April 14-15, 1912. (This is not counting Titanic cameos: Time Bandits, Raise the Titanic!, and recent goings-on on Doctor Who.) So the awful pun that popped into my mind when said mind contained but two Titanics (James Cameron’s and the Titanic lionized in today’s rant, the Titanic of A Night to Remember: Hello, Bi-tanic!) morphed into Tri-tanic when I recalled Germany’s early Nazi-era go at the story (S.O.S. Titanic, essentially a diatribe against the shortcomings of capitalism: a very odd film, to say the least), and finally hit the shoals of nonsense and sank when I remembered the Titanic of 1953, starring Barbara Stanwyck, as a four-way Titanic pileup, or, of course Quar-tanic.

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There’s a moment at the beginning of the second act of Key Largo (the film was adapted from a play by Maxwell Anderson, and certain theatrical conventions– the sense of an act-break, the semi-proscenium blocking of some of the scenes– remain) where young widow Nora Temple (Lauren Bacall), having fallen asleep during the film’s centerpiece hurricane near Frank McCloud (Humphrey Bogart), seated watchfully next to her on the floor of the lobby of the Largo Hotel, wakes, raises her head, and looks up into his eyes, and he looks back at her. That’s all. In a moment, the gangster dramatics of the film will resume, as Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) and his men plot how they will get themselves and their counterfeiting money to Cuba now that the hurricane has passed, but for now we can enjoy simply being privy to a key to Bogart’s success: the fact that Hollywood’s most legendary tough guy knew the absolute importance of tenderness.

Key Largo was Bogart and Bacall’s fourth, and final, film together. (A year earlier, in 1947, their third co-billing, Dark Passage, played to less-than-enthusiastic reviews: the film, about a wrongly accused, escaped con [Bogart] who has plastic surgery in order to elude recapture, is fascinating and nightmarish; we follow Bogart’s character up and down the impossible hills of San Francisco via first-person point-of-view until it’s revealed midway through the film that the surgery has “given” him Bogart’s face. Not having Bogart actually present on-screen for half the film’s running time, as well as the script’s weak ending [Bogart finds the real killer, but she commits suicide before he can bring her to the police], stifled Dark Passage at the box office.) In real life, despite a twenty-year age difference, they’d been happily married for several years, and to critics it showed: they were too comfortable with one another onscreen. The sexual spark they’d displayed in To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep was gone.

To which I respond: Stifle it, naysayers. Key Largo is an entirely different type of animal.

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Psycho (1960)

Oscar Nominations: 4

Best Supporting Actress (Janet Leigh), Director, Black & White Cinematography, Black & White Art Direction Set Decortaion

Oscar Wins: 0

One of the all-time cinematic greats, Hitchcock’s Psycho revolutionised the industry at a time when sex and murder were mutually exclusive. Risque, provocative, and unquestionably terrifying, Psycho ranks up alongside The Birds as one of the masters all time great scary movies.

Still frightening by today’s standards, Psycho is a riveting piece of filmmaking, in gorgeous black and white photography, using some of cinemas most imitated camera angles in this ground breaking, revelation of a film. Claustrophobic, terrifying, utterly captivating, Psycho treads the fine line between glib, self assured cliché, and devastating murder/drama, in such a way that it’s since been referenced in hundreds of other films (mostly, parodies) ever since. The famous “shower scene”, in which Marion Crane is hacked to death by a vague shadowy shape, is perhaps among the top ten most famous scenes in film history, a feat that is a testament to the movie’s remarkable power.

Marion Crane, a young secretary who is having an illicit affair, steals a bunch of money from her employer, and takes off across the country to escape the law. On her journey, she stops off the highway at a lonely, dark motel, owned by Norman Bates, a polite young man who assures her of her safety and privacy while she stays at his establishment. it doesn’t take long, however, for the murderous rampage of Psycho to kick in, as, while Crane is enjoying a nice post-larceny shower, she is murdered by somebody (who may, or may not be, the very man who she just spoke to, Mr Bates). Meanwhile, back in the big city, Marion’s friends are concerned, and try to track her movements, in order to locate her.

Hitchcock has crafted a delicate, intimate, sexually charged encounter in this film, the heady mix of violence and sex unusually provocative for it’s time: less so now, however, one can imagine how audiences must have felt upon watching this movie. The opening, with the long camera movement into a high-rise apartment bedroom, complete with post-coitus Marion Crane and her lover, divorcee Sam Loomis (John Gavin), is exceptionally brave, given when the film was made. The hot and heavy petting and dialogue, charged with sexual tension, is scintillating, and extremely well acted by the cast.

As we move past this preamble and into the first act, where Marion steals the cash from her boss, Hitchcock crafts a kind of heightened sense of tension, almost palpable in it’s illicit, erotic emotions simmering on the screen. Janet Leigh, as Marion Crane, is superb, her gorgeous features perfectly capturing the wide-eyed horror and thrills she must go through to make good her escape plan. There are moments, especially when the traffic policeman wakes her by the side of the road, when her paranoia almost gets the better of her. Hitchcock stings the audience along for a while, not quite sure what to make of this developing scenario, as the officer seems reticent to believe Marion’s claims that she’s okay, that there’s nothing wrong. Marion, of course, thinking the officer is aware that she’s just made off with a bundle of cash, has a near panic-attack, and eventually makes her way to the city, where she swaps vehicles (watched by the policeman again, who spots her as he drives past) and continues on her way. The way Hitchcock shoots this, the way he never cuts to the policeman’s emotional or mental POV, only serves the heighten the tensions, because we simply do not know what he’s thinking. Will she get caught with the stash of cash? Will she get away?

And just when we think she does, and Crane decides to come clean and return to the city with her stolen loot, she’s butchered in the Bates Motel. It’s very rare that a film will kill off one of it’s major stars and characters half way through the film, and for this reason the audience is taken aback a little, shocked almost to find somebody they’d come to know and empathise with suddenly hacked to death and dumped in a swamp. For this reason, I think, the second act of the film is either more potent, or strangely emotion-free, depending on your point of view. If you’ve identified with Marion Crane, you’ve become emotionally invested in her and her story, only to see it stop suddenly, you may find it difficult to suddenly jump to the secondary story in the film, that of Marion’s sister, and lover, searching for the slain woman. Their search is a far inferior storyline for the film, given all that has come before it; however, their dedication to Marion is such that both Vera Miles, as the sister, and John Gavin as Mr Loomis (Marion’s lover) are convincing, yet somewhat flat by comparison. Martin Balsam plays the private investigator, Arbogast, as a kind of Sam Spade-lite, suspicious yet not quite giving the character the element of danger perhaps required of somebody so close to finding out the truth. Arbogast questions Bates a few times, gradually wearing down the calm exterior of the motel owner, until there is an almost tangible element of danger to the PI, something the audience can only guess as to how it will resolve itself.

The effect this film has had on modern pop culture and cinema is not to be underestimated. Plenty of ink and copy has been written about Psycho, the way it was filmed, the camera angles and the music. Speaking of music, I found out recently that apparently, Hitchcock did not want the iconic shower sequence to play with any music, merely using only foley and ADR sound to ramp up the tension and sheer horror. Composer Bernard Herrmann asked Hitch to play the scene with a music cue he had written (the famous screech screech violin motif) and Hitchcock found it added an extra layer of power to the scene.

Herrmann’s score for Psycho is one of cinema’s most enduring. Everybody knows the central theme, even if they haven’t seen the full film. Which is a pity, because there’s more to Herrmann’s score here than just the eee eee eee moment, sending shivers up viewers’ spines ever since. While made up of predominantly strings, such as violins and cellos’, Herrmann’s score is replete with vibrancy and tensions, as almost every cue merely serves the heighten the tension. The off-key soundtrack seems to give us the heebie-jeebies, coupled with the stark, moody black and white cinematography, and you have the perfect recipe for a nightmarish film that tapped into the psyche of an entire generation of audiences.

If you asked a hundred different people to name the top five Hitchcock films, you’d probably get a hundred different responses, however, it’s a fair bet that Psycho would remain in all of them: it’s Hitch’s masterpiece and enduring legacy, for which film-makers around the world can be thankful. And deservedly, a true classic.

Rating:

We drop down through grey mist, through clouds. We hear an icy whisper of wind. Mountains below: slabs of granite, peaks gashed with snow. Then a lake, the boats gliding along its shoreline tiny enough to give us vertigo in this Panavision, this early (and many say visually richer) version of iMax: we’re still at a great height. A bird sings, then sings again; a piccolo calls and responds. We soar across staggered hills, over dark clutches of pines. And finally, on the wing, on a rising sweep of music, of French horns and strings, we come up on a high Alpine meadow. A young woman is striding toward us, dressed in a coarse black dress, a practical grey apron. Her cropped hair shines golden in the sun. She’s tall, slender, long-boned. She opens her arms to the glorious day surrounding her and sings

The hills are alive with the sound of music.

She is Julie Andrews, and this is her second appearance in a major motion picture. (The film’s producers at Fox hesitated about casting her– though Andrews was a seasoned stage performer, she had never appeared in a color film, let alone a film on the scale of this one– until they persuaded Disney to allow them to see rushes of her in Mary Poppins, which at the time was still in production.) At this moment, in 1965, she is at the height of her power as a singer. She’s sung professionally since the age of seven; hers is an astonishing four-octave range. At the age of twelve, she performed for the Royal Family of England, and now she is the queen of the musical stage, having originated the roles of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady and Guinevere in Camelot. Her coloratura soprano is as clean and clear as the stream she steps across now, here in the Alps.

I’m not sure how much explanation we need for The Sound of Music, in terms of background or plot; I’ve loved the film for so long– going on four decades now (oh, my God–!)– that I can’t conceive of anyone not being aware of it, or being aware of it for itself and not as an object of camp or parody. Here, a bit of background: The movie, roughly, with Broadway’s and then Hollywood’s eye for storytelling practicality, is based on the real-life Trapp Family Singers. Georg Von Trapp was a captain in the Austrian navy; a widower, he’s been left with seven (SEVEN!– and Ernest Lehman’s script provides appropriate moments of shock over that fact) children; Maria (here Andrews, on stage Mary Martin), a young novitiate at a local convent whose rambunctious ways (she’s playing hooky when we find her singing high up in that mountain meadow) call into doubt her suitability to become a nun, is sent to act as governess to the Von Trapp children. In short, in the film as in real life, the children grow to love her, the Captain does, too, and a newly married Maria (she was less newly married in real life, but that’s the economy of Hollywood and Broadway for you) and her family escape over the mountains into Switzerland when the Nazis demand that the Captain accept a commission in the German navy, right at the start of World War II.

What grounds these films– these grand, classic, ultra-widescreen musicals– is, in fact, just that. Both The Sound of Music and West Side Story have deeply real external settings. Those settings are as unalike as it’s possible to be: The Sound of Music finds its heart in the soaring crags of the Alps around Salzburg, Austria: rolling meadows, the bristle of pines, the deep grey-blue of lakes sparkling under high-altitude sunshine. In West Side Story, in contrast, we see not even a single blade of grass, the green of the parks and campuses over which we fly in the film’s opening minutes being utterly alien to the world we’re about to visit: the Lower West Side of Manhattan in the early sixties is boxed with tenements, bound by rivers of stained pavement and cracked sidewalks, rattling with chain-link fences.

The Sound of Music is, rightly enough, a triumph of music on film. As arranged by Irwin Kostal for a seventy-piece orchestra, the all-American oompah of the Rodgers and Hammerstein song “My Favorite Things” becomes something like the lead entry in a sweeping new canon of Strauss waltzes. In contrast, songs like “Edelweiss” and “Something Good,” in which Maria and the Captain wryly but tenderly confess their love for one another, bring intimacy to the picture without shrinking its scope.

Musicals are the hardest “sell” for a movie audience. We can accept spaceships and aliens, superheroes, supervillains, slam-bang stunts and special effects, but we less willingly suspend our disbelief when it comes to watching someone burst into song on screen. (Another matter still, and not one I’ll be discussing in detail here, is how willingly we accept that people will simply burst into song on stage.) Part of what enables us to suspend our disbelief regarding The Sound of Music is not only the fact that Andrews sings like it’s the only possible thing a benevolent deity might have put her on the Earth to do but the fact that Christopher Plummer, who plays the Captain, is one of us: he brought a healthy sense of cynicism to the set, a wariness. He insisted that the Captain should have a flinty edge and a droll sense of humor; screenwriter Ernest Lehman obliged him. Plummer had a capable voice, but he wasn’t a singer (his songs were dubbed after the fact, much to his surprise and disappointment, and that of his co-stars; it’s uncanny how neatly his vocal stand-in matches his timbre), but he was a highly trained stage actor, and onscreen in 1965 he is strikingly, hawkishly handsome, with eyes of the sort of piercing blue for which rich, hyper-realistic color processing like Todd-AO was ideally suited. (In the film, he looks exactly like the picture of Alexander Hamilton currently printed on the U.S. ten-dollar bill, but that’s just my opinion, and I’ll admit it’s a strange one.)

Rich without ever seeming garish, an absolute celebration of music with realistic, panoramic settings, The Sound of Music is the pinnacle of film musicals. You’ll forgive the sugary sweetness of the story for the beauty of it. A wide-swinging comparison, perhaps, but if The Dark Knight were a musical, and a musical about a family, for families, and that musical ended on a high note (literally: the last shot of the The Sound of Music sees the Von Trapps hiking along the grassy, windswept crest of a mountain on their way into Switzerland), it would be The Sound of Music. The film, with a budget of eight million dollars, went on to gross nearly $170 million following its initial release in 1965. Without the Internet. Without chatboards and viral marketing. Without DVDs or CDs or Blu-Ray.

With nothing but those great craggy Alps, too many children, a cranky Canadian, and a lanky young British actress, a theatre veteran with the voice of an angel.

West Side Story, which won eleven Academy Awards in 1961, is nearly, as I noted above, as unlike The Sound of Music as it’s possible to be. The most striking difference, aside from the settings, the documentary sweep and natural grandeur of The Sound of Music versus West Side Story’s unrelenting inner-city grit, is in the music: Richard Rodgers’ score for The Sound of Music is pit-band friendly, all easy keys and simple counterpoint. Leonard Bernstein wrote the music for West Side Story, and he couldn’t have given less of a damn about the comfort of the show’s accompanists. He was a brilliant composer and conductor; as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, he was accustomed to working with the best of the world’s best musicians. Time signatures that don’t occur in nature, blinding flurries of thirty-second (and sixty-fourth!) notes, syncopations that can throw your back out if you’re not careful: his score for West Side Story is full of them.

But the effect is electrifying.

It’s a story of violence, violence in itself and the tender violence of doomed love. Here, in terms of drama, is where West Side Story and The Sound of Music briefly cross paths (and where West Side Story in turn crosses paths with Moulin Rouge): love. Love that damns us, saves us, transforms us and our lives. Love that can kill.

West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet updated for the gang wars of New York in the 1950s and 1960s. We could say the gangs could be any gangs, in any city, in any decade; here, they’re the homegrown Jets, Caucasian– Italians, Irish, Poles, Germans– and the Sharks, Puerto Rican immigrants. They speak in the street slang of the sixties, and at first those “Daddy-O”s sound strange, until you remind yourself that all gangspeak is automatically insular, just as automatically quaint and dated. At a gym dance, Tony (Richard Beymer), a former Jet and best friend of the Jets’ current leader, Riff, meets and falls in love with Maria (Natalie Wood), sister of Bernardo, leader of the Sharks. They fall, of course, with movie-style immediacy, but Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood play the scene with believable, dreamy incredulity; in the film, as in the stage play, the world around them fades away as they shyly approach one another across the floor of the gym.

Critics have said that brown-haired, brown-eyed Natalie Wood doesn’t look sufficiently Puerto Rican as Maria; I’ll argue it against them. She looks fine. If nothing else, Wood brings a workable combination of spine, spark, and wide-eyed innocence to the part. She’s beautiful. Maria tells Tony he must stop an impending fight between the Sharks and the Jets, and stop it absolutely, even though he’s already worked to downgrade the battle from a general melee to a match-fight between Bernardo, the best of the Sharks, and Ice (lean, angular Tucker Smith), who’s to represent the Jets. In short, Tony gets himself trapped between the gangs, Riff is stabbed and killed, and then Tony himself, in anger and confusion, stabs and kills Bernardo. As in Romeo and Juliet, best intentions lead to tragedy.

And, as in Shakespeare’s version, the tragedy doesn’t stop there. In the end, Tony lies dying in an empty playground, gunned down by Chino, Bernardo’s faithful right-hand man. Tony, believing that Chino in fact killed Maria, is shot right as he and Maria spot each other across said empty playground; in the best tragic tradition, he dies in her arms while she does her best to keep him focused on the future they’ll have together (a reprise of the beautiful “One Hand, One Heart”: “Even death won’t part us now,” she whispers, as he dies– and if you’re not crying at this point, your heart is made of solid stone.).

A film has never blended dance, music, and raw emotion as perfectly as West Side Story. Maria, rising from Tony’s side, demands the gun from Chino; crestfallen, stunned, he meekly gives it to her. She points it at him, then at the Sharks and the Jets, who have gathered to watch; they step back in wide-eyed fear. “How many bullets are left, Chino?” she asks. “How many can I kill– and still have one bullet left for me?” Unlike Romeo and Juliet, though, West Side Story doesn’t present us with a lesson learned from the deaths of all its protagonists. Rather, it ends with a somber message of hope: members of the Sharks step in to help the Jets who are trying to lift Tony and bear him away; a Jet gently settles Maria’s shawl over her head like a veil, and she walks with dignity behind those who carry Tony, a symbol of newfound peace between the gangs. She and the gangs ignore Lieutenant Schrank (burly Simon Oakland) and kindly but weak Doc (Ned Glass), the owner of the soda shop where Tony worked. Chino is arrested, but the other teens leave: the adults in the film have provided them with little else than brutality or indecision, and they’ve found the path to maturity on their own. Maria explains it for them, for the Jets and the Sharks alike: Guns don’t kill. Knives don’t kill. Hatred kills. Now, at least for the time being, the gangs know enough to put their hatred aside.

It shouldn’t work. Never mind that dated gang dialogue:  the producers expect us to buy into a story featuring gangs who dance and sing. But the grime of the settings grounds the movie; it takes only seconds to realize that what we’re seeing isn’t dance as such but a form of martial arts, beautiful and graceful, yes, but proud, athletic, and violent, too (especially in the person of Russ Tamblyn, who brings charm and acrobatic prowess in equal measure to the part of Riff); and Bernstein’s score is difficult, jolting, playful, and gorgeous. In terms of setting, West Side Story couldn’t be less like The Sound of Music if it tried, but they’re both masterpieces in the purest sense of the word.

In a less-pure sense of the word– but meaning no disrespect, and certainly with nothing less than the greatest affection– we find Moulin Rouge. In 1965, The Sound of Music literally saved 20th Century-Fox: after throwing twenty million dollars (at the time a sum beyond astronomical) into Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, which was to be the studio’s greatest bomb, Fox stood at the brink of bankruptcy. The Sound of Music brought a flood of money to the film’s coffers, saving the studio from disaster; now it’s thirty-six years later, and Baz Luhrmann is kicking off Moulin Rouge, his ode to bohemian living in the Paris of 1900, with a musical nod to the film that kept Fox viable.

Young Christian (Ewan McGregor) has come to Paris from London to write about the “bohemian ideals”: freedom, beauty, truth, and love. There’s just one problem, thinks Christian, our narrator, as he sits in his high garret room, he’s never been in love. He’s stumped. Fortunately (please add question marks to taste), at that moment an unconscious Argentinian falls through the roof of his room, and Christian finds himself in the midst of a rehearsal for an as-yet-unfinished (in fact as-yet-largely-unwritten) musical to be staged by artist Toulouse-Lautrec and his friends. They’re at creative loggerheads, and not just because their lead, the Argentinian, is narcoleptic. They bicker over lyrics; Christian, trying to be heard, finally belts out in song out the words he’s been trying to make them hear:

The hills are alive with the sound of music.

There’s irony here, but not mockery. The joke of the scene lies in the reaction of Christian’s new artist friends: his words are, they insist, the perfect embodiment of their revolutionary artistic creed– Truth! Beauty! Freedom! Love!– and Luhrmann incorporates “The Sound of Music” into his brash new movie with the purest enthusiasm, with nary a trace of a wink or a nod. McGregor, to his credit, sings with great enthusiasm and sincerity. That he can’t sing worth a damn  (at times, he and key signatures are but distantly acquainted) doesn’t matter in the least. Unlike Gerard Butler, another non-singer cast in a musical, who butchered the big-screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera by shouting at the songs until they went away, McGregor is perfectly cast here: he’s the rare modern actor who can be innocent and wide-eyed without seeming callow. When Satine, the Moulin Rouge’s star attraction, a courtesan who leads the theater’s cabaret performers, tells him she can’t fall in love, a smitten Christian blurts out “That’s terrible–!”, and we sense his sincerity even as we understand what he, for now, does not: Satine can’t fall in love because falling in love is “bad for business.”

But fall she does, both romantically and, by the film’s end, fatally. Satine, you see, is dying. A bearded, bedraggled Christian tells us so right at the opening of the film, before the flashback that begins the story proper. He tells us flat out: “The woman I love is dead.”

By modern standards, this is a very daring move on Luhrmann’s part. (Never mind the critics who immediately invoked the shades of La Boheme and a dozen other tragedy-centered operas; I think it was kind of them to stop by, and they wouldn’t be yowling if Luhrmann’s film hadn’t struck a nerve.) Moulin Rouge is a whirl of color and motion, a wonderful jumble of music, quick-cut editing, and photographic effects. To base the whole thing on a tragic tale took guts, to put it bluntly; sure, Luhrmann had filmed a modern take on Romeo and Juliet, but there death is no secret: everyone knows that story. Here death comes as a surprise, and its prevalence in the movie, when you sit back from the flash and motion and bombastic sound and think about it, is amazing: the death of a century, the death of a way of life, that of the garish, exuberant, freakish world of the Moulin Rouge and its inhabitants, and the death of the woman on whom, for our purposes, that world depends.

That woman, Satine, is Nicole Kidman. Like Ewan McGregor, she is not a singer. She and the key nod at one another in passing, in any given song. But, like Marlene Dietrich, who well understood not only the strengths but the limitations of her dusky voice, Kidman knows how to put a tune across. She vamps dazzlingly in Satine’s showcase number, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” and she and McGregor knock the lid off the heights of heartbreak when they sing the film’s show-stopper finale, “Come What May.”

(A note regarding “Come What May”: in the annals of Academy Award injustices, the passing-over of “Come What May” for Best Original Song ranks in the top ten. It’s eminently singable; it’s shamelessly tuneful and romantic. Partly, though, its snubbing was Luhrmann’s fault: he’d written the tune for his updated Leonardo DiCaprio/Claire Danes Romeo and Juliet, then decided not to use it for the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack. According to the nitpicking bylaws of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, then, “Come What May” was not “original” as far as Moulin Rouge was concerned– even though the song had never before been used in any medium. Ridiculous– and an utter pity.)

The obvious comparison here, since we’ve noticed Shakespeare lurking in the wings, is with West Side Story. There we lose Tony– or Romeo; here, we lose our Juliet in the person of Satine, doomed by that most romantic of deadly catch-alls, consumption. But the films are at their core extremely different. Certainly, both of them are bursting with energy; certainly– if you’re anything like me, anyway– they’ll leave you emotionally sapped but purified (which is a fancy way of saying you’ll cry your damn eyes out, but you’ll be glad you did). But West Side Story is a triumph of musical composition: Leonard Bernstein basically takes Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet of Romeo and Juliet and puts the music on modern jazz-beat steroids. Moulin Rouge, on the other hand, hasn’t a single original song– save for “Come What May,” as noted above, and even that one ended up labeled a loaner– in its nonetheless sincere heart. The musical numbers are a pastiche of popular songs: in addition to songs by Rogers and Hammerstein, we hear ditties penned by David Bowie, Nirvana, Queen, Paul McCartney and Wings, the Police, a dozen or more others. It works, cleverly: Luhrmann and his cast (most notably Jim Broadbent, as Harold Zidler, the owner of the Moulin Rouge, a showman supreme) bring life and sincerity to the film’s soundscape. But this makes Moulin Rouge, unlike West Side Story or even The Sound of Music, less a musical than a popular entertainment. And that, ironically, makes Moulin Rouge more like the oldest of the musicals in the group we’re looking at today: Singin’ in the Rain.

“Singin’ in the Rain,” the song, was written in 1929; like Moulin Rouge, Singin’ in the Rain-- the film, now– engages its audience through the use of popular tunes. Of course, the songs popular in the twenties and thirties were better known to the audiences of 1952 than they are to us today, but they’re dandy ditties nonetheless. (Oddly, though– and this is an aside– I know “You Are My Lucky Star” best from its use in Alien, from the scene late in the film where a terrified Sigourney Weaver whispers the lyrics like a mantra to keep herself focused.)

Also like Moulin Rouge, Singin’ in the Rain deals with the death of an era: here, silent film. But the death stops there: we’ve moved out of the realm of musical tragedy (or a poor man’s Madam Butterfly, perhaps) and stepped into the sunlight of musical comedy. (In a film with “rain” in the title, mm hm: yes, I saw that one coming. Sure I did.)

Singin’ in the Rain is cheerfully obsessed with deceit. In Moulin Rouge, Satine at first mistakes Christian for the tightly wound, foppishly lascivious Duke who is to fund the film’s centerpiece play (and who sees Satine as a “bonus” for his willingness to invest); later, she and Zidler pass Christian off to the Duke as the writer of said play; later still, Fantine strings the Duke along while meeting with Christian, romantically, on the sly. Here, now, the lies are more blithe and boldfaced, if more MGM-innocent:

As the film opens, the superstars of Monument Pictures (not at all a pass at Paramount, I’m sure), Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont, arrive at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood for the premiere of their latest picture, a costume melodrama called The Royal Rascal. The year is 1927, and Lockwood and Lamont are at the height of their popularity as an onscreen romantic duo. On the red carpet, a radio gossip columnists asks Don, flanked by Lina and his best friend, Cosmo Brown, to regale his and Lina’s adoring fans with the story of his life; eyes twinkling, his teeth flashing in a rakish grin, Gene Kelly– Don– proceeds to spin a whopper.

He and Cosmo, says Don, grew up together. They attended the finest academies of music and dance (which we see as a string of smoky pool halls and beer joints). They also attended the theatre (as the boys duck past the box office at the local cinema to sneak into the latest silent potboiler). They played the finest venues (in towns with names like Dead Man’s Fang, Arizona, and Coyoteville, New Mexico). Don and Lina’s chemistry was present from the moment they met (or at least her foot was present at his backside when he answered a snub with a snub: Lina treated him like dirt when Don was a lowly all-purpose stuntman in her films, but she was all too ready to get cozy when R.F. Simpson, the head of Monumental, offered Don a contract. “Are you doing anything tonight?” asks flashback-Don, the newly minted star. Lina shakes her head and takes his arm, smiling seductively. “Too bad,” Don says, smoothly freeing himself. “I’m busy.”).

The MGM sound crew of 1951 obviously had a ball recreating the cinematic soundscape of the late twenties. During the red-carpet interview with Don, the sound tightens and narrows; if you look away from the screen, you hear him as he– and his cheery bundle of lies– would have sounded on the radio. Then there’s the accurate– and ludicrous– depiction of Monumental’s efforts, in response to the gauntlet thrown down by Warner Brothers in the form of The Jazz Singer, to make its own talking picture in the form of yet another Lockwood/Lamont costume melodrama, The Dueling Cavalier.

“It’ll be a sensation,” beleaguered R.F. tells his stars and Roscoe, his even-more-beleaguered chief director. “Lockwood and Lamont: they talk–!”

“Well, of COURSE we talk,” Lina points out. “Don’t everybody?”

And R.F. and Rosco, Don and Cosmo all look at one another in stunned– and horrified– realization.

Let us pause for a moment of explanation. The transition to sound pictures in Hollywood cracked up against two basic problems. First up were technical limitations. Early recording equipment was tremendously clumsy, and the idea of sound editing or remixing was still a good distance off down the pike. Microphones were usually concealed– poorly– somewhere on the set, which often led to actors standing rigidly about, all the life and movement they’d enjoyed on the sets of silent films frozen out of them as they tried to stay in range of the recording equipment. The cameras themselves, which made an unholy racket, had to be housed in boxes or windowed wooden closets so that their rattle and clatter wouldn’t end up on the soundtrack. In Singin’ in the Rain, the set mike for The Dueling Cavalier starts out in a bush, migrates to Lina’s shoulder, and finally ends up stuffed down her decolletage. Why? Because she can’t talk into the darned thing to save her life.

Not that her talking into it helps in the long run. This leads us to problem two of the early sound era: the cognitive divide.

Hard to explain, maybe, to a generation that never knew the time before people onscreen talked without intertitles. I have trouble imagining it myself. Here, try this: Have you ever read a book, then listened to that book on tape or disc? I, for one, grow accustomed to hearing my own voice in my head as I read; hearing someone else can be a real jolt (that doesn’t include the chorus of voices I hear in my head normally, outside of reading or books on tape, thanks kindly). If that someone else happens to be the book’s author, things can be especially jarring. We develop very particular impressions of how our favorite authors should sound, and the same was true– perhaps even moreso– of silent film audiences and the actors they loved.

For this reason, many actors making the transition to sound were rightly terrified. Darkly handsome John Gilbert, for instance, who was Greta Garbo’s co-star in a handful of smash hits for MGM, fell from the cinematic heavens when his too-ordinary tenor voice didn’t prove dashing enough for audiences. (Garbo herself soldiered on, her beauty and poise more than a match for her heavy Swedish accent, which actually came to complement her exotic mystique.) Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne were among the stage actors– after all, stage actors knew how to talk all along, right?– recruited for the movies, as was lean, urbane Robert Montgomery, who became a staple leading man for MGM. But the fact remained: many actors didn’t successfully make the transition to sound. “What do you have to know?” R.F. insists to Roscoe, a little helplessly, as they contemplate making The Dueling Cavalier a talkie. “You do what you always did. You just add talking to it!”

Which leads us back to problem two, or, more specifically, for purposes of Singin’ in the Rain, Lina.

And Lina’s voice.

For Lina, actress Jean Hagen employs a vocal mix that sounds not unlike a cat being squeezed through a wringer on the New Jersey turnpike. Lina has so far gotten by on a combination of beauty (blonde, fresh-faced, wide-eyed, and utterly blank) and carefully orchestrated publicity: at all their public appearances (on the red carpet at the film’s opening, for instance), Don does all the talking for Lockwood and Lamont. But now the world will hear Lina’s ghastly voice. What to do…? Vocal coaching has no effect whatsoever; between Lina’s paint-scraper tones and a series of technical flubs, the test screening of The Dueling Cavalier becomes an early candidate for Mystery Science Theatre 3000-style reaming, as people in the audience hoot and catcall or walk out aghast.

Cosmo has the solution: why doesn’t Don look back to his vaudeville roots and make The Dueling Cavalier into The Dancing Cavalier, a musical? Young Kathy Selden (a nineteen-year-old Debbie Reynolds– yes, Princess Leia’s real-life mom), a charming and talented young actress who’s pal to Cosmo and Don, and who’s as smitten with Don as he is with her (rumors of a Lockwook/Lamont romance being just that: grist for the publicity mill), enthusiastically backs the idea.

Here we return to the idea of deceit. If Lina can’t talk, she certainly can’t sing. The solution? Kathy will re-record Lina’s dialogue and singing on the sly. Not only are we present at the dawn of sound, we’re witnessing the birth of dubbing, too. R.F. is keen on the idea, and things proceed melodically apace.

Until Lina finds out, of course. And not only does she find out, she proves a far shrewder businesswoman than she’d have been were Singin’ in the Rain made today. “What do you think I am, DUMB or somethin’–?” she demands, before outlining, with venomous sweetness, how she can take Monolith to the cleaners if R.F. doesn’t do exactly what she wants: not only is Kathy to go uncredited for The Dancing Cavalier, but Kathy will go on talking– and singing– for Lina for the entire five years of Kathy’s contract.

Not to worry, though. In one of the best literal reveals of all time, Lina gets what’s coming to her. Not fatally, of course: we’ll leave the death of anything other than eras to Moulin Rouge and West Side Story.

Bursting with Technicolor, sly, and very funny, Singin’ in the Rain is one of the last of the great Golden Age musicals. Like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, Gene Kelly here is at the height of his power as a performer. He’s not much of a singer– his singing voice is, as it always ways, thin but serviceable– but he’s confident and charming, and he’s a hell of a dancer. His is an effortless but muscular grace; like Hugh Jackman’s career in reverse, maybe, you’d believe that Kelly could have gone from being the dancing star of the silver screen to popping Wolverine’s adamantium claws from between his knuckles. A consummate professional, Kelly co-directed Singin’ in the Rain with Stanley Donen, so that he could bring a dancer’s eye to the film’s ambitious production numbers. (Similarly, choreographer Jerome Robbins shares co-directors’ credits with Robert Wise for West Side Story.)

The most unwieldy suspension of disbelief. The most emotionally moving– or devastating– cinematic experience: the melding of story with music. All different, all similar, all great favorites (and one or two other people might, I dare say, agree with me), these are four of the best musicals ever. Go ahead: like ‘em. Have a laugh. Sing along. And don’t be afraid to have a good cry. That’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of.

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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Oscar Nominations: 4

Oscar Wins: 1

Best Visual Effects (Stanley Kubrick)

Towering, revolutionary, benchmark film from director Stanley Kubrick, 2001 ranks as one of the true all-time great examples of what is achievable with the motion picture camera.

By today’s standards, this film still remains as powerful as it did the day it was first released. Back in 1968, when 2001 was released, man was about to step onto the moon, mobile telephones had yet to be invented, and the concept of interstellar space travel was still a pie in the sky idea touted by scientists as the next big advancement in human evolution.

The film revolves around a mysterious black monolithic block, which appears at several moments through Earth’s history, including The Dawn Of Man, as well as in a future where human’s live and work on the Moon, and in satellites orbiting the planet. Apes, space archaeology and a giant computer inside a spaceship with murderous intentions all add us to one of the most divisive, epochal motion pictures of the modern era.

Coupled with Sci-fi genius Arthur C Clarke, Kubrick fashioned a glimpse into a realistic future, based on knowledge of space at the time, with a grace and ease that has given us some of the most quoted and ripped-off scenes in movie history. The opening titles, of the Earth in the sun’s glare, to the tune of Also Sprach Zarathustra, are among the most recognised of all cinema sequences, as is the moment one of the astronauts, Dave, (played by Keir Dullea) removes the components from HAL’s processor to switch the system off. HAL, as a film villain, has been copied and sent-up more times in film that you could want to count. The calm, malevolent voice is chilling in it’s placation of the crew, as it calmly sets about killing them in order to preserve it’s own life.

Often touted as one of those films you should be high on weed to watch to fully understand (due to the fact it came out in the 60’s, this is probably an outdated idea, but one that’s interesting nonetheless) 2001 remains a cerebral affair, lacking in sledgehammer subtlety; if you think it’s going to be a simple space romp like Star Wars, you’re in for a shock.

Now, for the casual observer, 2001 is a fairly dense film to try and enjoy; in fact, it’s not a film you can really “enjoy” in the true sense of the word. I’d class this as a film you need to “appreciate” more than “enjoy”, as it’s subject matter tends towards the more abstract, with a reliance on symbolism and iconography rather than dialogue. The dialogue is relatively basic, fairly straightforward material, yet it’s the context that’s the key here. HAL’s dialogue, while certainly containing a sense of menace within the context of the film, is fairly harmless. Yet, when those red lights of death flash up on the hibernation chambers of the crew of the Discovery 1, you just know something bad is about to happen.

And that single, impassionate red eye is virtually unreadable, a symbol of automation’s unambiguous nature. The slow, deliberate space travel between Earth and the moon is significant within the context of this film, as most sci-fi films would have shown some super-rocket blasting it’s way straight into docking: instead, we have the careful precision driving of human astronauts who have to rely on absurd things like mathematical calculations and logic to obtain correct vectors and thrust-to-power ratios.

But aside from that, it’s the mind bending final act that confounds and divides most viewers. My wife, for example, despises this film as a waste of two hours of her life, an absurd film with no place in her list of movies she’s liked. Personally, I find 2001 to be a wonderful cinematic event, like looking into the very soul of humanity and our place within the solar system, within this cosmos. Yes, it’s deep, but not for everybody.

Just because a film is classified as a “classic” doesn’t mean every single person who watches it will subsequently enjoy or appreciate it.

The films narrative is multi-layered, a kind of homage to the art of film, within the film itself. We commence at the Dawn of Man, progress to “not too far into the future” and then a decade or two into the future, as we follow the abstract appearances of the Black Monolith. The Monolith is never explained, never understood by anybody within the film, and to this day remains as elusively distant as it did when we first saw it. Unlike the similarly themed Space Probe in Star Trek IV (you know, when Kirk and Crew return to Earth to hunt for Humpback whales… it’s everyone’s favourite!) this Monolith comes to Earth with no known motivations. It’s not covered with alien writing, it gives no clue as to it’s origin or purpose. This is one of the myriad baffling concepts raised by Kubricks seminal film.

The final stargate sequence, with Dave the Astronaut seeming to fly through space and time at quantum speeds, ending up in a  room reflected as a segment of his own mind (I think!) and gradually aging, until he becomes a giant planet-sized star child, has been often deemed the work of a deranged, or possibly drug-fuelled, mind: yet, it’s the symbolism that people still search for within the film that drives us crazy. Having no explanation as to the definitive answer to this question, has created a kind of mythology that surrounds the film and adds to it’s mystique.

It’s our general inability to understand what Kubrick was on about, and perhaps a cynicism on our part requiring us to look for an answer when none exist, that have created this cinematic paradox. We like our films to have a point, a conclusion, and if these two things don’t happen we can’t handle it.

But, since 2001 remains the most enigmatic of all Kubricks films, and while as obscure and strange as the narrative and point might be, it’s still a brave film to try and appreciate.

For the casual observer, this film will be a roundly unqualified disaster. For the more appreciative viewer, somebody who watches film and enjoys the subtleties and nuances it is able to offer, this will be a stunning investment of your time. It’s certainly not for everybody, yet it deserves appreciation for it’s technical and emotional accomplishment.

However, all the fluffery and smoke blowing over this film isn’t worth anything as far as figuring out whether 2001 deserves the title of a classic film. Most people in the know, you know, the kind who are often referred to as “they say”, would say that yes, this film’s quality is as indefinably classic as you can get, however, it’s subject and emotional distance are prejudiced to work against it.

2001: A Space Odyssey remains one of the pinnacles of a directors work, a masterpiece of cinematic storytelling and unconventional narrative. And yes, even though you may not “enjoy” this film in the truest sense of the word, there’s an undeniable power at work behind and in front of the camera here that is palpable, decades after it’s creation.

Rating: 

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Schindlers’ List (1993)

Oscar Nominations: 12

Oscar Wins: 7

Director (Steven Spielberg), Picture, Original Score, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction/Set Decoration, Cinematography, Editing

It’s almost hard to quantify my feelings about this film. I first saw this film when it arrived out as a new release on the old VHS brand (where is that now I wonder?) and it moved me terribly. I was visibly and emotionally shaken by the end, tears streaming down my face. A film so powerful that wasn’t a soppy, heart-string-tugging romantic comedy drama thing, no, this was film-making at it’s highest level.

It’s hard to read anything about this film without the words “magnificent”, “towering achievement” and “brilliant” coming to mind. I have half a mind to simply repeat those words ad-nauseum throughout this review until you get the point. Plenty of reviews have come before this one about Schindler’s List, and no doubt there will be others, and all of them will be more eloquent than I. Still, I have to give it my best shot.

For those who were born after 1945, you will not know first-hand the horrors of World War II (and I include myself in that number) and to be honest, I am thankful. The problem WWII, apart from the human toll of death, misery and suffering it inflicted upon countless millions, is that it’s so open to review and romanticism, the chest-beating heroism of the US troops straddling France and beating the Nazi’s back to Berlin, the gallant snowfield fighting of the Russian troops, the earthshaking destruction of the Blitz across London: all have, in one form or another, been the subject of countless films and television shows. For the most part, people want to reflect on the heroism of war, the struggle by one man to save his platoon from certain death kind of thing. Nobody wants to really dig deep and suck on the harrowing, evil nature of men and women doing things you’d only dream of in your nightmares.

With Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg demonstrated a reserved, calm expose on the horrors of Nazi wartime activities, and the desperate attempts of the few in a position to save people who stood up and did something. More renowned for his adventure/action blockbusters, Spielberg’s rather personal journey into his own family’s past allowed us to humanise all sides of the conflict: in this case, the persecution of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Graphic, stark and unrelenting, this is film-making at its peak. Taking several stories and interweaving them around the one man, Oskar Schindler, who saved 1000 Jews during the course of the war, leaves a powerful and lasting impression of how class and wealth stood for nothing during this period.

Oskar Schindler was an German industrialist businessman, a war profiteer who turned his factory into a kind of slave labour camp for Jews and Polish residents who were being persecuted by the Nazis. The trouble for Oskar was, his factory never actually made anything that could be used, and was merely a front for the employment of these “lower class citizens” in order to protect them. Roundly praised later in life for his actions, Oskar Schindler is portrayed in this film by Liam Neeson, in what I would describe as his most perfect performance. Schindler is a hard man, a man who usually gets what he wants and flashes his money about to obtain it. His chemistry with Sir Ben Kingsley, who portrays the reliably prescient accountant Itzhak Stern, one of Schindlers’ Jewish recruits, is palpable and well played. Neeson and Kingsley are superb on screen together, their performances a tour-de-force within the film, and while Neeson comes out the victor, it’s Kinglsey who serves as the rock in the cast: his nervous, twitchy accountant is the film’s resident every-man character. He’s us.

If Schindler is the very soul of benevolence in this film, then the antithesis of that is Ralph Fiennes, in his best role as malevolent SS Officer Amon Goeth. Goeth is simply an animal, a man bereft of feelings and emotions as he wallows in the slaughter of countless millions, and Fiennes manages to capture something of the insanity of the man, who kills without remorse and little empathy. It’s a stunning move by Spielberg to let us get into the mind of the “enemy”, but, after all, the Nazis were just human like the rest of us, so why not? Still, there’s something about Goeth that beggars belief; that anybody could be so callous and cruel without feeling something is extraordinary, yet this character is rooted in real life experiences, so I guess there’s something in it for all of us. Fiennes deserved an Oscar for his role here, his icy stare and childlike stammering for affection and understanding from Schindler during a critical moment is the films showpiece for me.

While Goeth seeks to rid the world of it’s undesirables, Schindler seeks to save as many as he can, realising that his allegiances with the Nazi party are going to come back to haunt him in the long term. He can foresee a time when the war will be over, and people like him will be seen as the enemy.

The film portrays the war in stark black and white cinematography, which Spielberg utilised base don the notion that most of us have grown up seeing the war in old B&W footage over the years, and it’s the way we know of the horror that went on. An increasingly small number of us were actually there, and i think its right of Spielberg to film things this way. The use of colour on the girl in the red dress, symbolising hope dashed aside and the blood of the victims, is heart-wrenching.

Truth be told, this film is heart-wrenching all the way through. The opening moments, the closing montage of the actual survivors placing pebbles on Schindlers’ grave, the concentration camps, the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto: all are portrayed as realistically and humanly as possible. It was a wake-up call for audiences, especially those who had grown up on the butch-masculinity of John Wayne and his friends saving the day with a swagger and a grin. Here was war portrayed as realistically as we’d ever seen it, blood, viscera and gore are not shied away from here. The moment Goeth shoots a Jewish architect who gives him some bad news is forever etched in my memory as a defining moment in film.

How does Schindler’s List stand the test of time, however? In the intervening years we’ve seen films like Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line and others all vying to make war seem like hell. At least, in a way different from Oliver Stone’s Platoon and Edward Zwick’s American Civil War in Glory. All have been revolutionary in defining different battles, different political agendas and the monstrosity of man’s ability to dehumanise himself for the motive of war.

Spielberg won his first Academy Award for this film, which was vindication that he was capable of making a film that made people think, and that told a dramatic story without resorting to using Whoopi Goldberg. Whereas before Spielberg was simply a man who made blockbusters (and indeed, his other film in 1993 was Jurassic Park, which went on to become the then-highest grossing film of all time) and Hollywood owed him nothing for that; now he was a man with one of those little golden statues in his hand, a lifelong dream finally fulfilled. There was never a more deserving moment in cinema history, I think, than when Spielberg won that Oscar.

If I had to boil it all down into a single, simple summary, it would probably be this: Schindler’s List is the finest example of an anti-war film ever made, and deserves both your time and respect in viewing it. This film should be required viewing for the warmongering political powers on this earth, and is one of the defining moments in cinema when the landscape of cinema forever shifted in what was, and still is, an amazing film.

Rating:

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To Kill A Mockingbird (1962)

Oscar Wins: 3

Best Actor (Gregory Peck), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction (Black & White)

Still widely regarded as one of the great films of all time, nowadays regarded by school students as a waste of time, Lee Harper’s wonderful novel was turned into a feature film in 1962, and won star Gregory Peck the Oscar for best Actor. As part of school syllabus across the nation, To Kill A Mockingbird is a wonderfully realised tale of racism, bigotry and hatred that paints a dire picture of redneck America, as lawyer Atticus Finch takes on a case that is doomed to failure; a black man is accused of raping a young white woman. In the days before DNA testing, security cameras and lie detectors, cases such as this were all about character: if you were a black man in the deep south of America during the 1930’s, and you were accused of a crime, you were generally considered to be guilty, regardless of proof to the contrary. This deep seated level of racism and bigotry still pervades some parts of the land of the free, however Harper Lee’s novel went a long way to bringing these issues to the forefront of American society, whether they liked it or not.

Atticus is regarded as Pecks greatest role, and is perhaps one of the greatest examples of an actor perfectly suiting the role, in the fact that nobody, including Lee herself, though anybody else could do the part justice.

Filmed in beautiful black and white, with wonderful use of shadows in key moments of the film, TKAM remains a timeless tale, a kind of early Stand By Me, if you want, told from the point of view of Atticus’s young children, Scout and Jem. Both kids are dealing with typical kid issues, from bullying at school to a lack of things to do around the house. They befriend a new neighbour, Dill, and together they embark on a series of adventures that see’s them tormenting the town monster (a supposedly deformed, intellectually disadvantaged young boy named Boo Radley) who is supposedly locked up in the basement of the rather creepy Radley house, a few blocks down the street. With their father under pressure by the local constabulary to take the case of Tom Robinson, who is accused of a heineous crime against a young white woman, the kids offer their point of view of the world as one in which there is no such thing as a shade of grey. It’s either true, or not. It’s either right, or wrong. There’s no room in their young minds for maybe’s, sort-ofs and could-be.

The film is superbly realised due in part to the fact that the screenwriters and director (Robert Mulligan) have managed to evoke the same feeling as the original novel. In much the same way that Peter Jackson and his cohorts kept the feeling from the Lord Of The Rings novel and simply transposed that emotion into the film version, so to Mulligan has managed to keep the tone and feeling of Lee’s novel and put that into the film. A structural fine-tuning of the script from the novel was warranted, of course, but the feelings of hope, remorse and childish misunderstanding remain intact, and as a result make for a lovely film.

The cast are uniformly excellent, including the child actors. Mary Badham steals the show as a churlish, impish Scout, Finch’s young daughter. Her smile and cheeky demeanour perfectly capture the innocence of youth so desperately needed to carry this story. The script deals with such dark material at times, the need for somebody to counterpoint this is prevalent, and perfectly realised. Scout’s older brother, Jem, is played with pre-pubescent perfection by Phillip Alford, in a older-brother-is-wiser style that is wonderfully done. The confusion Jem suffers as he tries to behave like an adult, yet still returns to his childish ways, and his constant one-uping of his younger sister, are as close to real life as possible, and both his and hi sisters vantage points create the perfect dynamic in which to tell this narrative.

Gregory Peck delivers as close to pinpoint accurate a performance as you could ever want to see. His principled, morally centered Atticus Finch is steadfastly a family man, yet prepared to take a stand against the iniquities of life when he sees them. One scene, where Atticus is forced to put down a rabid dog in front of his children, perfectly encapsulates this complex, proud character. Taking a life, or condoning violence, is anathema to Finch, and he would prefer not to be responsible enough to have to do the task at hand; yet, he is wise enough to realise that things must be done to serve the common good, no matter his principles.

Special mention must also go to Robert Duvall’s debut screen appearance as Boo Radley, late in the film. While not having a real impact, Duvall’s screen debut resonates regardless.

The key sequence, the trial of Tom Robinson for a crime he has obviously not committed, is heartbreaking, with all the key players delivering bile-filled, poisonously racist statements to the contravention of logic and reason: Tom Robinson is going to pay for his perceived crime of rape. Yet, with all the evidence stacked against the persecutors, and the magnificent argument against irrational bigotry by Finch closing the case, Robinson is always doomed. And such is the harsh reality facing people of the day; and something that both confuses and enrages Finch’s children. They can see Robinson’s innocence, and yet are unable to comprehend the forces raging against truth and justice. They do not see Robinson as a black man, they see him simply as a man. The colour of his skin is irrelevant. It is their childhood innocence that is the crux of the film; the ability of adults to overcome their moral centers and persecute the innocent simply for their own sense of betterment, or even for some inadequacy of power against their plight, is something children do not possess, and it’s using the childrens’ perceptions of the case that makes the themes resound all that much more heavily.

To Kill A Mockingbird is one of the great dramatic films of all time, and while it is studied and reviled by school students across the country who study it, the film version remains as close to perfectly realising Lee’s novel as any form of entertainment can do.

So how does it stack up by today’s modern eyes?

Well, the film moves at a languid pace, ensuring descriptions of “boring” by the younger generation. The camera angles and editing of scenes is revelatory, a kind of “this is how a great film is made” school for viewers: in particular, a scene where Jem, Scout and Dill attempt to prank the doorbell of the Radley house. This scene, of all in the film, is the greatest example of how to generate tension on screen in such a palpable way, it still makes your skin crawl. The film is technically brilliant, from the lighting to the use of sound to evoke emotions. It is also an example of one of cinemas great courtroom showdowns.

While most who grew up with colour films and the use of computer effects to tell stories will decry this film as boring and slow, and lacking in the refinements currently on offer in Hollywood, To Kill A Mockingbird should be mandatory viewing for anybody with a conscience, as well as those who seek to become filmmakers as a masterclass in simple, direct, storytelling. After all, it’s the story that’s key here, not a fancy computer generated monster.

TKAM remains one of cinemas true classics, and the themes within the narrative embody all our struggles against oppression, bigotry and persecution by those who seek to control us. Does it deserve the title of “classic”?

Yes, and if you have not yet seen this magnificent film, then I strongly urge you to do so as soon as you are able.

Rating: 10/10

Celebrating the Worst Films of All Time, fernbyfilms.com brings you another in the list of possibly the cruddiest movies you’ll ever see…. perhaps, though, you should take our advice and never glance upon these celluloid travesties…. EVER! You have been warned!!!

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Alien invasion, animated undead, screaming heroines, plucky cops, big name stars: all the makings of a great serious Sci-Fi. Or you could make “Plan 9 from Outer Space“.

When Ed Wood made this film, he intended it to be an attempt at serious horror. Instead, it was the first film in history to be a spoof of itself. If you haven’t seen this iconic failure, let me walk you through some of its features.

Plot: In an attempt to invade earth, the aliens use their special technology to raise two dead bodies (why?). These bodies, in an effort to conquer the world, manage to kill two undertakers (why?). In fact, the first moment that there is any chance of them threatening the hero the aliens turn the device off (why?) reducing them to dust. The hero’s uncanny instincts lead them the the mother ship (parked locally, and manned by an invasion force of two) where they confront the aliens. The leader is shot and the space craft flies into the sky and bursts into flame (why?).

Script: It includes lines such as this from the head of the alien invasion, said when confronted and told his invasion will fail – “You humans and your stupid plans! (stamps foot repeatedly) Stupid, stupid, stupid!”

Costume: The leader of the alien world sits at a wooden desk wearing a medieval tabar complete with axe insignia.

Props: Not only can you see  the spaceship strings, but you can still make out the ridges on the paper plate they use. Watch it jiggle as it flies!

Casting: Ed got funding and publicity on the grounds that Bella Lugosi would be in the film. He was for a 5 sec cameo, after which he (and his character) died, and the part was played by Ed Wood’s Grocer, who looked a little like the late actor. No one was fooled.

Direction: I’m sorry, could you repeat the question?

Acting: Best actor award goes to Bella Lugosi… After his death.

In summary, if you have ever had aspiration as a film maker, here is a simple “How Not To”. Thank goodness we were spared Plans 1 to 8!

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The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)

Oscar Nominations: 8

Oscar Wins: 3

Best Supporting Actress (Shelley Winters), Art Direction, Cinematography

One of the most moving experiences of my recent trip to Europe was a sojourn to the house where Anne Frank lived, in the middle of Amsterdam. While perhaps not as horrific as trudging the soil of a concentration camp, the house is still horrifying, but for an utterly different reason.

During WWII, the Germans invaded and occupied Holland, and the Jewish residents of Amsterdam suffered the same fate as those of other cities; persecution. During this occupation, one man, Otto Frank, hid his family and several friends in the secret annexe of his business. Such was the desperation by the Franks not to be discovered and deported to a death camp, they resorted to herculean feats of bravery and supression of their own basic desires.

The Frank family, the Van Daan family, and a dentist named Mr Dussel, lived in the tiny attic of the small building for 2 years, until their betrayal and capture in early 1945. For two years they had stayed inside, never venturing out, never making a sound that could give them away.

Otto Franks youngest daughter, Anne, wrote a diary about the experience, with all the trials and tribulations a thirteen year old girl goes through when a captive in her own home. Upon Otto’s return from Auschwitz after the war, he discovered Anne’s diary among the remains of their personal belongings, and according to her wishes, had it published.

The Diary Of A Young Girl, published for the first time in 1947 and in English in 1952, became a bestseller. The tragic story of flight, persecution, tension and hope against hope resounded with a public still recovering from the war. The fact that such an insightful book was written by somebody who had yet to turn sixteen was simply astounding for all its emotional clout and elegiac prose.

The house is now a museum, and one can actually wander through the halls and rooms that Anne made famous in her diary. One gets the sense of just how cramped they all were, living in each other’s pockets while the fear of certain death pervaded every moment of their time there. The stairs up the secret annexe are incredibly steep, the windows were blacked out (and still are) adding to the sense of claustraphobia that must have been overpowering.

Of course, the tragic nature of the book meant that Hollywood would always come calling. It was a sure fire Oscar winner, and so, with Otto Frank as an advisor on set, the film was given to George Stevens to direct. Stevens had had a number of hits up until that point, with the classic Shane and Gunga Din among them. Much was made at the time about the casting of the character of Anne Frank, such a pivotal person in the story, with the likes of Audrey Hepburn and Natalie Wood being mentioned in the same sentence for the part.

The role eventually went to Millie Perkins, a teenage model who wad never appeared in film before. With such a heavy weight on her shoulders, Perkins was accompanied by some first rate talent on screen, with Joseph Schildkraut reprising his stage role of Otto Frank, Shelley Winters as Mrs Van Daan, and the wonderful character actor Ed Wynn as Mr Dussel. Richard Beymer, who played the Van Daan’s son Peter, would go on to star in West Side Story, and The Longest Day.

With the cast and crew ready, the film commenced production, on a studio set of the annexe. Otto Frank, as the films adviser, had a great deal of input into the set design, ensuring the highest possible level of accuracy where required. Of course, a two year odyssey cannot possibly be accurately captured by a three hour film, so some time compression was required: the film is utterly brilliant in moments, and languid and turgid in others.

So what’s good about the film?

Shot in fabulous black and white, with a widescreen 2.4:1 aspect ratio, the film is moody and dark. In keeping with the nature of the story, the moments of levity are somewhat brighter, but for a fair portion of the film, it’s the shadows that play a key role in the emotion and tension. In the same way those old horror films always worked better in black and white, so to does this story of terror and hope. One key scene, with Anne and Peter engaged in a romantic moment, is shot almost in utter silhouette; almost as if the moment is too private for us to view.

Stevens manages to create some wonderful moments of tension throughout; in particular, when people are creeping around downstairs and the Franks et al have to remain perfectly quiet lest they be discovered. The camera moves through the set a la Fincher’s Panic Room and captures all the action in one, smooth shot. These scenes, which last for minutes at a time, are staggeringly tense and you almost find yourself holding your breath along with the cast. The set itself, with dark corners and a room with a view unlike any other, is magnificent. The set is cluttered, decayed and dusty, as it must have been, and utterly adequate to the task of keeping these people prisoner in their own home.

The acting is almost uniformly excellent. Schildkraut, as Otto Frank, and Millie Perkins, are particular standouts for me, they seem to relate to each other better than any of the other cast. This would perhaps be due to the nature of having the girls actual father on set each day, that this dynamic was perhaps played better than the others. Shelley Winters won an Oscar for her role as Mrs Van Daan, although for the life of me I cannot understand why. She screeches and overacts to everything, creating an essentially one note performance that somehow counteracts all the good work done by the rest of the cast.

So what’s not so good about the film?

Several things about The Diary Of Anne Frank are somewhat lacking by todays standards, among them is the stagey nature of the setups. The cast move around the room, yet the camera remains mostly distant, with minimal cutaways to closeup shots of the actors. In a way, this could be seen as an attempt to allow the actors to generate their own tension in the film, by using long takes and wide angle shots; but for the most part its somewhat annoying to this member of the modern filmmaking generation to not be given more close up shots of the actors in character. Often, only Anne or perhaps her father are given this treatment, yet the film still feels like it’s been filmed on a stage, in front of an audience. And while the acting is first rate, the camerawork is alternately good and bad. Often, actors are acting with their backs to the audience, something that in Filmmaking 101 is always taboo (unless for a specific effect). Even worse, sometimes the camera is positioned so that the actor speaking is obscured by some piece of set, something that initially could have been a way of provoking a sense of claustraphobia, but after a while becomes irritating and tedious.

While perhaps these decisions by Stevens could be construed as artistic license, trying to imbue the film with a certain sense of menace (and indeed, there’s a subtle nuance of the Hitchcock about the way the film is shot) it ultimately falls somewhat flat. Thankfully, the acting and story itself can generally rise above such trivial things, and The Diary Of Anne Frank remains one of the great stories to emerge from WWII.

For me, the most harrowing moments of the film are those when the families are simply waiting waiting for the workers in the rooms below to go home, waiting for the burglar to finish robbing their home and leave, and waiting for the Nazi soldiers to find nothing out of the ordinary and get out. These are scenes of almost unbearable tension, and are themselves worthy of specific praise.

Shot in 1958 and released in 59, The Diary Of Anne Frank remains a poignant tribute to the courage of the human capacity for survival, to rail against tyranny oppression, and the love of one man for his family. For those looking for a rewarding and well made film, this is one that I would highly recommend.

Rating: 8/10