Review: ABIGAIL

A precision hi-tech kidnapping in which the perps don't even know each others' names. The little girl is taken to the hideout (a large country mansion) and they are told by their host that they now just have to take care of the girl while the ransom is negotiated. There's a bar and a kitchen and rooms they can use. He even gives them nicknames so they can call each other something. He leaves them to it and when they hit the bar they get both loose and restless. There's already a simmer, no one likes the others, and it looks to go all the way to boil. But there's something else: that girl really might not be what she seems.

The trailer for this spoils one of the major plot points of this film and I'm not going to repeat it. If you can go in without it, do so and this will be a lot more fun. Suffice to say, once the thread is taken up it's held tight in this high action comedy thriller. With nods to Agatha Christie (very funny reference in the kind of library shelf that makes an appearance in Christie novels) and caper crime movies of the '70s and '90s as well as a few horror tropes, Abigail yet holds its own in being neither self conscious nor overly generic.

A cast that includes Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens (in great form) and Kathryn Newton offers a unit of types with just enough individuality to tell them apart and expect behaviour from them. The real turn, though, is Alisha Weir in the title role, who takes her character from heart rending innocence to raging terror, handling both physical gags and well wrought monologues with a grin that could freeze at twenty paces.

Apart from that there's not a great deal to say about this film but by that I mean that it does its job. If there's a flaw it's a needless stodging of the pace in the second act that has a slight dampening effect on the final scene. It's not that serious but if you know (which you do, now) that this is the same Radio Silence team that made the dizzyingly wonderful Ready or Not you might wonder where that commitment to constant energy went. If Abigail had done a skerrick more to justify this by deepening the theme or adding weight to the action the problem would be unnoticeable.

However, the charm of this movie is that it really doesn't pretend to be more than it is and what it does provide that works, works a treat. After the bludgeoning of ironic filmmaking of the last thirty years which pushed its winks and nudges at its audiences, it's refreshing to find more recent fare free of such burdens. Abigail, like the little girl dancing to an empty auditorium during the opening credits, a luxury version of ballet practice, is happy just to
entertain.

ELECTION @ 25

Jim loves being a high school teacher. He really seems to have found a vocation nurturing young minds. Tracey has such a mind but lacks the social pallet to see the border between being bright and self propelling. When she runs unopposed for student president, Jim, losing sight of borders himself, persuades the goofy and popular Paul to run against her. When a bizarre love triangle irritates his adopted sister Tammy, she runs for president, as well, stunning everyone with a platform of apathy and contempt for politics. It brings the house down. Vote early, vote often.

Alexander Payne's breathlessly energetic and idea-rich satire broke his name after the still obscure indy Citizen Ruth. While his directorial efforts have remained toward the indy margins, his work is well enough regarded for movie-goers to get a ticket on the name alone. 1999 was a great year at the marginal mainstream cinema with the likes of Fight Club, The Blair Witch Project, Being John Malkovich and many more (which I be revisiting throughout this year) so Election, just as those titles do, has a lot of weight pulling to do if it is to linger in the memory.

One of the forward features of those titles and even mainstream fare like the Matrix was a quirky freshness that made it feel like the medium was getting a reboot. So, for Payne to take a new bestseller and bring it to the screen with this mix of faith to the source and divergence from it, meant that this was a cinematic workout. His hand at this, though, was so firm but light that it not only flies by but the number of concepts bombarding the viewer is both great and unburdensome. 

First, he keeps the multi-narrator structure from the novel. We just don't get time to settle too comfortably as Jim's matter of fact voice gives way to Tracey's strident one, Paul's goofy optimism and Tammy's teenage anger as their voiceover accounts play over Simpsons/South Park like montages. The speed and energy of this prevent it ever getting too samey. When it's time to slow down it goes deep (e.g. Jim with a bee stung eye peering around the corner of a room in his house to see the worst thing his wrongdoing could have served up).

Matthew Broderick gives us a Jim trying to do good but struggling with a conscience that won't quite leave him alone. Reese Witherspoon, already a child and then indy actor, strikes gold with Tracey Flick, accentuating her skull like face with the piercing blues, die cut diction and spasmodic motion. Chris Klein brings the same daggy popular guy he'd add to the American Pie movies which is perfect here. Jessica Campbell shines as the awkward adolescent explosion of Tammy. Between these and a solid supporting cast there really isn't a false note heard.

Payne shot the novel's ending but chose his own instead. By doing so he sealed the film as cinema rather than a tv adaptation (that distinction was already on the blur with the likes of The Sopranos) and gives the conclusion a timeless feel that might just as easily be from the end of the '60s as from Broderick's own Ferris Bueller '80s. This was significantly produced by MTV and if you saw it at a cinema in 1999 the logo animation might have caused a few stirrings of unease. Were we about to see a sellout teen comedy with incomprehensibly rapid editing, less substantial that the air between the nuggets of our popcorn? 

It didn't turn out that way. Payne made sure he gave a shot of wit in the first few minutes and kept it up. If you look now at his rap sheet you might be struck by the kind of middle aged social realist comedy taking up most of the list. Sideways, The Holdovers, Nebraska. There's not great contradiction, here, Payne is interested in the depths of his characters' humanity, he just started young.

Election is available through Stan, Paramount+ (subscription), online renters like Prime, Apple or Google. 

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE @ 50

After a solemn crawling title and voiceover announces that the story we are about to see is true, we fade to black with flashes of gruesome images of rotting corpses and a rising radio commentary about the discovery of a sculpture found in a cemetery of a body fashioned from corpses. We move back from the spectacle slowly, taking in the weird artistry of it and pounding questions about the kind of mind that would do such a thing. 

Cut to a roadkill armadillo. A group of young adults is driving a Kombi van out to the country to a disused house in the family of two of them. They stop for petrol but the servo has run out (they do have barbeque, though) and go on to the house. On the way they pick up a hitchhiker who was too edgy and weird to continue in the community of Deliverance who talks about animal slaughter and creeps them out so much they cast him back on to the road. Unsettled they get to their place and explore the house while wheelchair-bound Franklin has to listen while staring at the symbol the hitcher has left in blood on the side of the van.

Kirk and his girlfriend Pam go off in search of a water hole and see a house in the near distance. Maybe they have petrol. Kirk goes in first, finding the door open. He sees the bizarre wall through another door, which is clothed entirely in animal heads. Curious, he goes to take a closer look. In the interest of being spoiler free I won't go on but I can say that what happens to him is sudden and shocking and that he doesn't get out again.

Tobe Hooper's 1974 shocker is one for the ages. On one hand it doesn't mess around, starting with an ominous warning and following up immediately with a visceral payoff, starting the tale proper with a memento mori before diving into some of the nastiest violence seen on screen to date. Add to that the seemingly ever deepening sources of cultural commentary and you have a movie you can just watch as a scream fest and something you can talk about for years. There are five separate commentaries on the copy that I watched, as well as an analysis so dense it needs a second listen or even a third before the sound of the voice can be smoothed into receivable meaning. And that's just about the mask.

Having just watched it for the unknownth time, I am all but out of things to say. That was how I get to the end credits last night and then sampling some of those commentaries (some of them were revisits). I just watched a movie that deserves its status as an influential cinematic icon, and is just a bloody effective horror movie, and I had nothing to add. So I slept on it.

I'm going to start very personal and say that everything I see set in places like Texas reminds me of growing up in North Queensland. The Kombi, the roads shimmering with heat, the glare, the smell of the long, dry grass, walking around the big wooden country houses. Apart from the accents, this film feels like it could have been shot around where I grew up in Townsville. This means that there is an extra sheen of creepiness I sense whenever I watch the movie. I never knew of any of the corpse mutilations that the film starts with locally but my memory of the kind of heaviness I'd feel outside the city limits, the sense of things going wrong without warning, is very strong. Growing up, the tales of hitch hiking always turned a little weird from either hitchers getting into bad cars or bad hitchers getting into straight cars. 

If you think that my pre-internet childhood would have exacerbated this effect of the great lore of hearsay I can only offer that no instrument spread urban myths faster nor more widely than the online world, it's just that hearing it without the claim of it exposed did make it feel authentic. If you'd told me the plot of Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a few local place names thrown in I, at twelve or so, would have believed you. That uneasy surface carries nostalgia with it.

That nostalgic recall of believing the worst of people beyond the sway of the family home is what struck Tobe Hooper when he wrote the screenplay in memory of hearing about Ed Gein, killer and bodysnatcher whose house was filled with repurposed human remains. Hooper remembered the case from people gossiping about it (he stayed with relatives in Wisconsin where the crimes took place). That's about as close as this film gets to its claim about being a true story but, as such claims are still made, regardless of their veracity, I think we can give him a pass on that. The act of it, though, impresses me, like those dream accounts you hear that flow far more freely and vividly than anything you yourself can muster. Tobe Hooper found something in his memory, under the school days and first dates, that haunted him to see again, and made a cinema classic from it. I'm simplifying this but I'm doing that to bring it closer to me and push it further away from more formal criticism.

One of the features of the film that would later become a staple of teen slashers was the mask. I was surprised to be reminded that Leatherface is referred to by that epithet in the film itself (it's also used in the cast list in the end credits). I'd thought this was a fan invention like Hellraiser's Pinhead but there it is, from the off. I digress. Leatherface is one of the most frightening baddies of any horror movie. He has no lines beyond a kind of disturbing whimper when stressed. He never reveals the face below the human skin masks he wears and the only indicators of what lies beneath it are the slightly bucky teeth and impenetrable coal eyes. Apart from the masks he adopts different costumes, assuming changing personae. He's brutal here and cowing and whinnying at his brother's chastisement. He could hammer you like a cow in the slaughter house, lower you on to a meathook or chase you with a screaming chainsaw or he could curl up like a roly poly bug in a corner if he thinks he's done the wrong thing. There is no history given, it's just how he lives. And that's before you meet his brothers and grandpappy upstairs whose age has given his own face the look of a desiccated corpse. 

The thing is that this isn't really that much like hick horror when you think about it. The Duelling Banjos scene in Deliverance goes a lot further along that sleazy road. Some of the scenes showing the locals talking a little crazily in the sun do more. The family itself are only durn rednecks by their accents, their culture of meat life, extended carnivory and advanced barbeque technique say more about the overall culture. When Sally's non stop screaming ordeal at the table takes place, its base is butchery.

Hooper and co. are inviting us to examine what's on the end of our forks, how the sausage is made. When the crew in the Kombi go past the slaughterhouse they talk of things like head cheese. Franklin says to his sister that she'd probably like it if she didn't know how they make it. One of the others wants them to stop talking about slaughter methods because she likes meat. The interspersed shots of cattle in metal enclosures contain no violence done to them but there doesn't need to be any shown. We know what's going to happen to them. As a result the sight of them is profoundly eerie.

And that's the thing about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: eeriness. For all its violence (only a little of it actually done with a chainsaw) and screaming nightmarish panic, it remains a film of shivers. There is no bargaining with the family; they are on a course of generations' standing and will not change. The realisation that their celebratory slaughter is only an slightly sharper point poking from the national culture, is a shiver. The blood is just the colour of the makeup.

Viewing notes: I saw this on Second Sight's fantastic 4K disc but it is available for free through Brollie, by subscription through Shudder and rentable form the usual spots.

LIFE OF BRIAN @ 45

Brian Cohen is born to Mandy in Bethlehem around year one AD. They are visited by three wise men bearing gifts who worship Brian until one of them finds the real nativity scene a few doors down. As a young adult, Brian and his mum come across the other one delivering the beatitudes from the mount. But they're at the back where all the "blessed are-s" are getting mangled by the listeners. Later, Brian is hawking Roman snacks at the local colosseum and runs into a group of would-be terrorists and is particularly struck by Judith of their number. Suddenly inspired with Judean patriotism he joins them, setting him on a parallel to the more famous one that leads all the way to Golgotha.

Along the way we get a dizzying ride through the Jerusalem of Pilate and Christ, a time of complicated imperial flexes and violent religious extremism. A public stoning goes horribly wrong after its terms of reference get impossibly knotted, Brian, literally falls into the place of a market preacher and the impromptu nonsense he has to come up with, at first ridiculed by the crowd, wins him a cult like following in minutes. A leper cured by Christ, now without legitimate cause to beg for his living has to convince people he is an ex-leper. Pontius Pilate's r-lisp has his guards strain to keep from laughing as they see him punish anyone who breaks with life or death penalties. The twisted logic of the student collective style terror group meetings often leads them to forget the motions they were debating. If the previous outing Holy Grail satirised legend-making and the idea of Merrye Englande, Life of Brian pushed back against religious politics and its justifications from the Roman Eagles to the barefoot faithful on the streets (and in the same geographical neighbourhood, just quietly).

Brian remains the most coherently written narrative of all the Python movies and is the one whose production values and performances most closely resemble a mainstream blockbuster. You do this when you really have a thing to say, and this is the most focussed of the team's efforts. That its attack on religious convention is still potent today testifies to that concentration. That it is still funny is a reward to its creators for the commitment. But here, we hit a snag or two. 

The controversy on its release from religious groups was the same as those that inadvertently aided the causes of Godard's Haily Mary and Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ. The famous debate on the BBC (moderated by Tim Rice, lyricist for the also-beleaguered Jesus Christ Superstar) has two leading Christian figures attempting to browbeat John Cleese and Michael Palin of the Pythons into submission with some heavy-head-in-the-sandedness even for forty five years ago, bypassing the message of independent thought and insisting it was a lampoon of Christ. Really, they had nothing. They actually had less than the nun on U.S. television who predicted California would fall into the sea as a result of Last Temptation (well, it is on a fault line). This broadcast is all over YouTube and I'd recommend it. But this as a debate has long passed.

The contentious moments of Life of Brian have to do with cultural shifts in the decades since its release. There are many points of any generations-old cultural artefact that might appear problematic after decades of social change but for this case, I'm going to pick only two. Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam play (apart from a number of other roles) a pair of prison lowlifes. Gilliam is made up as a Boschian grotesque and might well be a torturer. He is portrayed as deaf and insane. Idle is given a grinding stutter. The joke of it is that this slows down scenes in which characters need information quickly. On the surface of it, it looks like the stutter is the butt of the joke, but it's really the frustration of the delay. Also, there is a very strong and brief payoff that completely reverses our impressions of the characters, adds a layer of absurdism, and acquits the team of cheap shooting. It's risky but it wins.

In greater contention, though, is the early scene in which Eric Idle's character as one of the People's Front of Judea declares himself a woman and wants to have babies. When that is shouted down, another member suggests the compromise that he ought to at least have the right to have babies. Now, the machinery of the joke still works fine, it just has not made it through to now without scar tissue. I don't primarily  write that with the notion that someone might feel hurt to see the scene (though that is important) but that the concept of trans people is no longer presented as an absurdity. The idea in 1979 was not unknown, and certainly not new but its passage into mainstream society feels so natural that joking about it sounds old. Old in the way a comedy bit about a drunk, cross-eyed and staggering, no longer works. It's just not funny now.

For those who blitheringly use the term woke to dismiss anyone with a social conscience, the scene might even serve as a kind of badge of defiance. I'll leave them, and anyone who considers contrarianism anything but self-consuming bullshit, to their own songs. I watched the scene in company (same age range and very similar sensibilities) and we all kind of distanced ourselves from it, not in some haughty, righteous manner, or even sadness, more noting that it no longer worked. As, someone who finds himself further left leaning than he was decades ago as an undergraduate, I, by contrast, found the depiction of the terrorist meetings as minefields of ideological soundness hilarious, I yet have perspective on this other issue. Like the loping comedy drunk or the wisecracking woman-hater of yore, my response to the transphobia is closer to embarrassment than censure.

Can we get past that to the rest of the film and find it funny? I think so but I understand if someone directly affected by the joke would write all of it off. Hey, it's a great comedy but, really, it's also only a movie. My case for it has to do with its concentrated push against prescribed thinking, and its broadsides against the brutality of military occupation. At the risk of cheapening my own argument here I will say that any movie that saves a character from a fatal situation by having him suddenly abducted by an alien warship, will always get my attention. Like any strong comedy, Life of Brian must be prepared to dig at its own times. That that can mean it errs against future community feeling is an impossible point of judgement. And guess what, almost all of it is completely bloody funny.

Review: LOVE LIES BLEEDING

Lou works at a gym into which one day strides Jacqueline who is built for power. Instant mutuality bound with some shared violence, a hot night at home and they're an item. Lou's never been outside of her one-mule New Mexico town but Jack has drifted from Oklahoma, on her way to the bodybuilding championships in Vegas. Play it by ear, maybe. Lou's sister is married to a assaultive man who all but puts her in a coma with a face like a granite formation. Lou's anger transports to Jack who pays a visit on fisty JJ. Well, you know what they say, love's all fun and games until someone puts an eye out. It's more than an eye but you get my drift.

On the one hand, I could never have predicted that the writer/director of Saint Maud would have offered something like this as a follow up. On the other hand, the theme of dependence and its power plays is a pretty direct port to this neo-noir. Also Rose Glass's strong use of sudden absurdism is in great shape with some eyepopping moments on screen. As I like to avoid the laziness and mediocrity of criticism by comparison it is my happy duty to report that this outing is so confidently its own film that suggesting the influence of other filmmakers would be unhelpful.

That said, as enjoyable as recognising this style is there is a tension that becomes counterproductive. It lies between the cool (love story) and the cruel (violence). The threads do weave but they are at such odds that the small town slow can dominate over the slowburn by which the story is better served. This is corrected in the third act but it does make the middle drag. When we want someone to get up and do something, we wish the protocol of the underworld were less politely observed.

That said, if you let the romance take centre screen and only notice the build of the other characters and story you should do ok with this steamy, sensual girl noir. Kristen Stewart again proves the substance in her powers of performance (how many times does she have to, seriously?) with a detailed portrayal of a woman surprised to discover her own potential. It's also pleasant to find a director who opts out of fetishising her delicate urbane beauty in favour of giving it some more mortal sweat and sunlight. We get a lot of close up skin, most of it either stretched over solidly built muscle or moving with neural expertise and the effect is beautifully sculptural.

Katy O'Brien as Jackie adds to her ripped muscularity a commitment to exploring the loss of control vs growing power from a reliance on performance enhancers. A scene where she seems to absorb Lou's powerless rage is extraordinary. Ed Harris, looking like Rocky Horror's Riff Raff in his third age, delivers a gruffness he and his character have earned over decades as well as a surprising tenderness which reveals his sophistication. It's a well judged approach.

So, having seen Rose Glass emerge as a whole artist with the creeping horror of Saint Maud (see for free on SBS on Demand) and then hone her art with this noir it occurred to me that I want to see her have a crack at a dark sci-fi (preferably in space). Then she can do what she likes (I've sent word to her of this and I'm sure she'll be relieved). Want to see a bold new original voice in contemporary cinema  sing out? Go and see Love Lies Bleeding. And stay through the credits for a brief but beautiful shadow play.

Love Lies Bleeding is currently on general release. Rose Glass's debut feature Saint Maud can be found at SBS on Demand or hired from the usual online providers.

1984 @ 40: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM ST

Teen Tina, wakes from a nightmare in which she was pursued by a man with a burnt face and a glove with razor fingers. It felt so real that before she dares sleep again, she asks friends Nancy and Glen over for support. Nancy has no trouble believing Tina's story as she's seen the same figure in her own dreams. There is another dream attack, ending in Tina being torn to shreds for real and her big goofy boyfriend the main suspect. Who's for coffee?

Pop cinema visionary Wes Craven had developed a name on the wrong side of the movie tracks with intense exploitation epics like The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. He burst into the '80s teen wave with Nightmare, adding a new iconic villain to the Jasons and Michael Myers's. But what he added was depth. Halloween didn't need to be much more than a vehicle for a final girl to find her courage. Friday the 13th kept the final girl and added gore. Freddy Kruger, like Jason and Michael, had a violent backstory but his influence over his prospective victims seeped into their unconscious, not just at night but in sleep debt moments in class where a monster who can look like anyone or anything as well as his terrifying self came to life. You carried Freddy around and were likely to meet him again at any time of the day. The psychological torture of that was compounded by the physical threat as that razor glove did real damage. Keep a stone wall between yourself and Jason and you're fine but Freddy is wherever you are.

As the teenagers who spend this film's middle act working out how to combat Freddy, they uncover his origin story and the concealment that implicates their parents in vigilante murder (this includes the current town sheriff). This follows Nancy's institutionalisation for sleep disorder where she comes out of a dream with Freddy, hanging on to his hat now in the real world. As we step back from this, look at all the fractured marriages and dysfunctional families in the neighbourhood, see if you're not torn as a viewer between fearing Freddy and understanding that he has a point. Then, the next scene he's in, his violence is so committed he's back on the terror list. What Craven does to ensure this is to add cruelty to Kruger's M.O., he doesn't just chase his victims and trap them, he taunts them, even as they are closing in on their own deaths.

All this and it still plays like a candy coloured pop movie with teenaged detectives. Before Tim Burtons bubblegum gothic put down roots, Nightmare on Elm St pumped its sets with the pallet of musk sticks and lemon drops in far more solid tones than even Spielberg was doing with his dirty-space version of suburbia. The dollhouse décor that holds alcoholic parents or the memory of absent ones is ripe for invasion by the toadlike monster of the kids' nightmares as he chases them down back alleys and boiler rooms. 

Heather Langenkamp as Nancy has been held up for the awkwardness of the performance but, every time I revisit this one I just see more naturalism in it. Her odd grimaces and facial twisting are exactly the kind of unrehearsed personal grotesquery of the teenager. The teenagers in Nightmare are on the side of those in Christine rather than the quipping bratpack of John Hughes. This is complicated by the goofy homemade booby traps that Heather sets for Freddy which are straight out of cartoons but by that stage, she is fighting a phantom and the school science project feel to the gags do fit into a kind of appropriate logic. Then, when the complications with her overall scheme appear to rupture her imagined outcome, there is a realism to it that also satisfies. 

A Nightmare on Elm Street has the honour to be among that rarest of horror franchises with creditable sequels. Craven himself returned to it for the meta New Nightmare. #2 is commonly held up as a queer cinema take. #3 is lauded to the point of being considered superior to the original. Yes, there is dreck in the lineage where the elements were just swished around in the mix again and served to the same people. While it can easily fit into the slasher sub-genre, Nightmare made it more of a challenge, adding parents to the cast who had to confront their generation's mistakes while the kids worked it out for themselves. You could still have (and did) teen knifing galleries but the smarter money was on establishing trust with the young audience the way that those John Hughes movies did. Of course, Craven gleefully went against this with his next game-changer, Scream, in which a cine-literate group of teens quipped their way through a slasher gauntlet. By then, though, he'd earned that decision.

DR STRANGELOVE @ 60

A rogue air force general orders a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. As the president and military brass, along with the Soviet ambassador, try to stop and then control the impending holocaust, it is revealed that the rogue male general had a very personal motive: he thought tampered water had made him impotent. His name is Jack D. Ripper, the president is Merkin Muffley, another general is Turgidson, and so on. This is not Fail Safe, it's the story of failed machismo in a system where sexuality and violence on a global scale have become indistinguishable and it is one of the bleakest satires ever devised. 

Stanley Kubrick began with a serious source novel and intended to make a political thriller. He began working with the novel's author Peter George but soon came to see the possibilities of comedy in the dizzying cold-war notion of mutually assured destruction. Add touches by Terry Southern and Red Alert becomes Dr Strangelove or How I stopped Worrying and Love the Bomb. What this meant was that however comedic the resulting film became it was also based on meticulous research that gave its settings a  authentic look. Compared to the oft compared Fail Safe (same year) with its necessity-driven patchwork of technology, Strangelove looks and feels darker.

That said, the obvious question about this film is how it travels over the decades to generations who were raised without the threat of nuclear war. In no small way the rival Fail Safe delivers an ending that anyone can be sobered by as it involves massive sacrifice following a mistake. Strangelove gives us an ironic fulfilment which didn't take place when the going got tough. What we are left with is more like an elaborate and bitchy comedy of manners that slips into documentary mode here and there. While I think that's true if the film is to be taken as given, there is still too much on offer to withstand such easy dismissal.

The major underlying theme is sex and anxiety about sex. The opening sequence of a plane refuelling mid-air is an act of penetration between two war machines that would not tax the dullest imagination. The fuel pump is phallic but it's the scrotal bulge in the mechanism that seals it and when it withdraws, the open flaps beside the circular entry point are a relaxed vulva. The muzak strings on the audio play an arrangement of Try a Little Tenderness. Jack D. Ripper's monologue about how he discovered his impotence is given in disturbing denial of his own failing physiology. He thinks it inconceivable (nyuck nyuck) that he should come to this; it has to be the commies and their collectivist syndicalist fluoridation of the water supply. His "precious bodily fluids" failure to appear have been enough to start World War III. Buck Turgidson is having an affair with his secretary who is also Playmate of the Month in the copy of Playboy in their bedroom. In a move that doesn't travel well through time, the President's name of Merkin Muffley is intended to write him off as a pussy. The Soviet Premier on the phone is partying hard and probably privately. It's not the sex that's bad, it's the sublimation of it into politics. Disarm the horny!

Once that's out of the way (although it never really exits) there is the decaying matter of ethics as humanity's time is racing to a big finish. The magnificently imagined Pentagon War Room is a mid-century paring down of German Expressionism with its blocky map of the world, metal columns and massive up-lit conference table. Amid the flatly delivered data about the plummeting chances of recalling the plane, and Turgidson's cocky outbursts, there is Peter Sellars in one of three roles as the President who must limit his activity to receipt until he is engorged with intel by which time there is so very little he can do beyond looking for a humane solution. It is to Sellars' credit that he plays Muffley straight and reserved. Against George C. Scott's tempest (Kubrick effectively tricked a bombastic turn out of Scott and it's worth reading about) we are increasingly led to trust at least the motives of the chief, if despairing of his efficacy. 

Sellars turn as the R.A.F. officer who tries to control the chaos at Ripper's base, involving containing Ripper himself, while it offers more of the actor's talent for comedy, is still more of a moral centre. He might speak in the tones that Sellars as a Goon would have ridiculed but he insists on the character's core goodness. He must; Sterling Hayden's rigid (and, yes, toxic) masculinity admits no room for variance. Hayden, an actor cast for his physical power, commanding voice and hard presence in westerns and crime dramas, expresses Ripper's obsession as though speaking through a trance. He is so wholly seduced by his own crank logic that it has become quasi religious. His unblinking gaze when talking of his impotence and its supposed cause (in almost every one of his lines) will be familiar to anyone who has witnessed a party conspiracy goof all but physically shrink back into the shadows of their refurbished unreality. All of Ripper's scenes are played for laughs (however black) but the bleakness at their core makes them increasingly eerie.

And then there is the title character, the one Sellars uses to steal the show from himself. Dr Strangelove is twisted in his wheelchair, part designer of WMDs for the American Way, part never-quite-ex-Nazi, he holds the floor with scenarios of the post apocalyptic realm in which the very male-domination of the world would not just be repeated but intensified. Sellars, in hoch show-off mode, manages to impose himself from his mangled form, even doing battle with his own sieg-heiling right arm. His calculating psychopathy is overdone and stunning all at once, from his first gentle voiced statements to the Hitlerian screaming he adopts to the final line which manages to be both pathetic and horrifying at once.

As for Kubrick, beyond the exactness of the performances he drew from his cast (of which I've only scratched the surface) he remains in the black and white of most of his previous films but it's for the last time. But this is a black and white of riches. Whether it's the noir chiaroscuro of the Ripper scenes, the faux stock footage of the attack on the air base, the grainy real footage of B52s at rest and in flight, the cathedral-like muted greyscale of the War Room or the back projected endless vistas of the Russian country, it's a showcase of what may be made of monochrome. After this came the cosmic colour of 2001: A Space Odyssey, workaday Britain of A Clockwork Orange, the landscape and courtly painting of Barry Lyndon and so on, exploring the possibilities of the infinite pallet. For now, though, the sobering look of the daily news.

It's wroth noting that the score, when it isn't smirking at the mating aircraft, centres our attention on the progress of the bomber as it heads into mass destruction. The theme is an old American Civil War song When Johnny Comes Marching Home which is loud with hurrahs but really mostly celebrating the return of the warrior rather than his exploits. (It's worth noting, also, that both sides of that conflict adopted the song.) It starts as a tune for a single trumpet but, when we return to the bomber, the arrangement grows until it is a deafening orchestral blare with brittle snare drums sounding the march. This was done by Laurie Johnson, a U.K. composer with a  long and distinguished career whose theme for The Avengers won him a lifelong admiration in my heart.

I was twelve when I first saw this. It was on tv and I was helped through it by the laughter and appreciation of older siblings who got the political humour where I wouldn't have. If I knew irony from any ingested culture up to that point I now could name it and recognise it on sight. My '70s in Townsville, which was and remains a significant military centre, was overcast with nuclear threat. I also saw Fail Safe around the same time and thrillers with a World War III theme were effectively worrying. I recall that, while being delighted by the comedy of Dr Strangelove, I was also bluntly reminded of the stakes of its story. It was also easy to see that bad guys could wear good guy uniforms and that the worst things might come out of tiny gripes. I saw that in the movie but it was also evident in the playground at school. It's also in the news as I write this. For the worst and best reasons, this is a film that does endure, even if its intended laughs seem scarcer than they used to be.

Viewing notes: I saw this on the splendid locally available 4K but, really, it has always looked pretty good on home formats so you can't go far wrong. Also available for hire through a few online sources. 

Review: IMAGINARY

Jessica writes and illustrates popular children's books with a kiddy gothic slant. She persuades her new family to move into her childhood home where a sketchy trauma left her in care and her father in intensive care. She's having trouble getting her stepkids to like her but is making some progress with the younger one who shows signs of trauma of her own. The teen bitch older one is not letting her in at all. So, during a bonding game of hide and seek, young Alice goes down to the creepy basement where she finds an old teddy bear and makes a new imaginary friend. Cool and normal.

I can say in this film's defence that its persistent pursuit of the theme of trauma-enforced imagination keeps it coherent and logical. Beyond that it's a matter of a string of convincing practical effects, some deft ol' fashioned film technique and a score that continually says, "FEEL THIS!". These characters and events feel standard, copied from the training manual. If that has set you on an ironic thought that a film called imaginary has been made without imagination, it should. 

Acting is fine but rendered hollow by a screenplay that tells rather than shows (the character of Gloria becomes an on-set narration sidebar at one point), so it doesn't matter how well these actors perform, they are at the mercy of material that forbids escape. Also, while there are slivers of creativity in some scenes, effects, moments of eeriness, the movie wrenches its audience back from the brink lest it should ... scare you, or summin'.

As I left the cinema and began my short trek home, having bade ta ta to my similarly unmoved companions, and the experience of this movie was crumbling to tiny crystals which fell to numb space around them, I wondered what I could think to write about this title. The answer is before you and it's, "not much."

Review: THE ZONE OF INTEREST

Rudolf and Hedwig live in a beautiful country house close to a river which is great for the kids. Hedwig has really got into her garden which is a mix of floral beauty and practical mini crops. Every day, Rudolf goes to work in the the big smelly factory over the wall but that is what pays the bills. If the routine seems a little stiff and repetitive it at least keeps everything buzzing in a sober and predictable way and if the pair can seem a little formal with the kids their pillow talk is warm and engaging. Then, Rudolf gets a promotion and has to move everyone. Hedwig stands her ground on the house she has done so much to build into a perfect home. But the bosses are the bosses and he'll have to work something out. Oops, sorry, forgot to mention, the big factory over the wall is the Auschwitz death camp and Rudolf is its commandant. It's World War II and the sunny serenity of this life fuels the engines of industrialised mass murder.

So, you'd think, idyllic on one side of the wall, hell on earth on the other; roll end credits. But the point of this film is to live with these people and watch them. You are free to judge them, as all history has, but once you get over that you might just be overtaken by your fascination. When Hedwig takes delighted delivery of fine clothes, she gets the pick of them in a huge fur coat while the local servants are given lingerie items to choose. Late at night, on the top bunk bed, the older son uses a torch, not to read a comic but to look at and play with extracted teeth with gold fillings.

At no point are we led to believe that these people, even the kids, are unaware of what happens over the wall. While we see none of it directly on screen, the audio is constantly haunted by the sounds of gun fire, barking dogs and sergeants, and massive machinery. While we grasp with relief at Rudolf's concern over daily matters and his relatable anxiety as he delays telling Hedwig about the move, we also listen as he near-erotically tell his wife over the phone how he imagines gassing everyone at the lavish Nazi reception he's attending (we see them in a startling extreme high shot), how the problem to solve is to deal with the high ceiling.  There is none of the cognitive dissonance suggested by Hannah Arendt's coinage "banality of evil" (itself long blanched by overuse): it is a life of choice.

Jonathon Glazer, a director whose work is very much film by film rather than an auteurist whole, is an ace at Kubrickian world building. Take the house and garden out of the context and we'd go to that air bnb without a second thought. The house is pristine but really feels lived in. The constant smokestack with its infernal glow and thick black plumes keep the context running without an off switch. Hedwig's mother is haunted by the sight, she wakes and goes to the window at night, staring into the fire and smoke with what looks like a nausea she will know until her last breath. When we see Rudolf in the grand settings of Nazi homebase, he walks along corridors and staircases that are so solid and intimidating that one slip would surely end in a major fracture. The uniformed clerks of genocide move through the halls and ornate interiors they seem disturbingly made for them. The single act of resistance is shown in a stark negative process as a girl hides fruit in the soil of the work areas around the camp. One of these sequences uses the widescreen to the full as she does this beneath the slivery plumes of exhaust from the prisoner trains clanking overhead. The quiet heroism of it and the refusal to use conventional cinematic triggers to enhance it make it deliver a gut punch.

The dialogue is mostly in German (no Cherman eccented English which would have distracted) and the cast is either German or Polish as the characters are. Christian Friedel as Rudolf delivers a man of his circumstances, vulnerable here to the protean forces in his family life and icily efficient in the carriage of his career. It is a thanklessly nuanced performance. Sandra Huller, though, is the heart of the film and also the poster girl of its proffered puzzle. Far from resting as the baby-machine the Reich demanded she be, she is a fiery homemaker and obstinate ruler of her lebensraum (a Nazi-era term she makes poignant use of in an argument with Rudolf) and she is, without a moment's ambiguity, a Nazi from the marrow out: she delivers this shock in steady doses so we never quite feel numbed by it, but shock is what it is.

We still need art about atrocities. In an era where we are shocked by the continued incidence of military violence, it is well to be reminded that we are still not very far from sticks and stones and that the volume of millennia has not lifted us beyond all that. And when we find ourselves back, looking on like drivers around a pile up, it is well we recall how the smoke over the wall is made. Glazer has given us another reminder. I had feared on going in that I was in for a flat moving art installation of a movie but when the frozen opening of Mica Levi's extraordinary music against a dark, featureless background gave way to the glistening riverside idyll, I knew I was in good hands. There is warmth here. There probably shouldn't be, but it's what keeps us watching and then it's also what starts to worry us. And that's only right.

Review: ALL OF US STRANGERS

Blocked screenwriter Adam stares at an empty screen in his flat and procrastinates when his building alarm goes off. While on the street he looks up at the tower and notices a man also in his thirties who hasn't evacuated. He's standing at the window, looking down at Adam. It's not just curiosity. Back home after the all clear, Adam answers a knock at the door. It's the man in the window, Harry, pleasantly drunk from the connoisseur bottle of whisky he's flailing with. While the doorstep encounter is warm, Adam declines the company and closes the door.

In a homage to his own past, perhaps for writer's inspiration, Adam takes a train back to his childhood hometown. There he meets his parents, the ones who died in a car accident when he was ten. They recognise him and ask him in. After a pleasant evening of catching up he returns to his London flat and, emboldened by his experience, finds Harry and they let each other in.

Adam enjoys the intimacy with Harry as someone who has done without love for too long and it drives him to return to his parents in their home on the border of mortality and grief. Adam comes out to his mother who, though young in appearance struggles to conceal her 1980s panic. Later, his father is begrudgingly accepting. Later still, you know where this is going. Except you don't.

It reminds me of an affectation I have whenever I see an old tv. It might be a portable or an old furniture-scaled box with a bulging screen and a numbered dial for the stations (including the never used 5A). These might be part of a retro-style display at someone's place or part of the cute decor in a cafe but the effect on me is always the same: I want to be able to switch it on and watch old television. Not just the shows but the news and the commercials. There's an ache that comes with this but it's not just nostalgia, it's more of a cry of frustration. Somewhere between the goopy old fashions and the darker iterations of dodgy values comedy that would sour any fond recollection, there's a chance to grab the missteps and interpersonal atrocities and smooth their spiky edges into harmony. That's what I was feeling when I watched this intricate and mesmerising film. Adam's loneliness and grief have him building monsters and heroes even when everyone looks and sounds normal, when everything just keeps looking beautiful. There's a scene near the climax that might start taking you out of the film but I'd advise you to just hang on and let it do its work. It's worth it.

There are only four speaking parts in this film and each is given crucial material for the construction of the whole. Claire Foy and Jamie Bell are the parents, conveying the difficult status of being both past and present at once, awestruck at their own appearance but with clearly delineated characters continuing through the lost years. Paul Mescal's Harry gets us to the danger point between a yearning attraction and recklessness. But the weight of the film is on Andrew Scott's shoulders. It is an intense performance of a character whose action almost entirely takes place inside his skull, but Scott builds this from the gravity of his portrayal of constant, endless loneliness. Like the distorted image he hallucinates of his childhood self with a head warped by reflection into a Francis Bacon scream, he demands our unfaltering attention. We grab at moments of levity and warmth like crumbs, knowing that we will soon return to his swollen base of pain. That might not read as a great recommendation for anyone seeking a cosy escape into whimsy but the richness of it will soon have you keeping up.

All of Us Strangers fills a need to examine grief and how addictive it is. That it does so with such expertly drawn interplay between characters in pain of loneliness and others racked by fear of their own place in the time that must leave them behind in the universe is a credit to Andrew Haigh's writing and direction and brings him to a peak in his studies of humanity at an intimate remove. You might think it's not one to see if you're at a low ebb but I can promise without spoilers that the quiet apotheosis in its final moments will lift you.

All of Us Strangers is currently in cinemas.

ALIEN @ 45

Industrial ship The Nostromo is on its way back to Earth when it receives a distress signal. The crew is thawed out of hibernation and goes to investigate. They find the wreck of a huge ship that contains a fossilised giant at the controls and a massive chamber of egg-shaped objects. One of the team goes in for a close-up and gets one of the hatchlings, a kind of scorpion crab, right in the face. Back on board, the thing eventually dries up and falls off. Then at lunch it's next stage makes a spectacular entrance. That signal, was it a distress call or a warning?

Ridley Scott's second feature is a lean and mean organism (apologies to anyone who thought I was going to write "machine"). His previous was The Duellists, an engaging epic of persistent aggression over decades in the Napoleonic era. Costuming and setting aside, Alien isn't a million conceptual miles away. There is a core of violence to both that is handled to great fascination. What Scott added to progress his own practice was to keep it minimal. Like spacecraft design itself, there would be no room for anything inessential; this wasn't a saga, it was a slasher and it would enter cinema history as one of the best. Even its opening sequence of the slowly completing letters of the title against the background of a dark ringed planet. At first (to Jerry Goldsmith's eerie score) they look like an off world alphabet but, piece by slowly appearing piece, they spell out what we're already feeling.

Dan O'Bannon's screenplay is similarly lean but it suggests universes. Unfairly described as a rip off of Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires, O'Bannon wrote of colonisation, interstellar commerce, gritty industry, and enterprise bargaining as a bed to what only needed to be a monster movie. And those other things, the world building, add enough grimy realism to allow its audiences to forget about all the sci-fi on screen as the survival story keeps them at their seats' edge.

The third essential element was the design of H. R. Giger. The Swiss artist brought his painstaking and disturbing aesthetic and rendered the film impossible to forget with its machine organic ick. Debbie Harry had inadvertently supplied the title of her solo album when shown Giger's cover art: Koo Koo. So we see spaceships with large vaginal entrances, rows of vertebral spikes as interior design, and an alien that prevented all future contenders from looking like actors in suits. Giger's alien (later dubbed the xenomorph which is a Greeker way of saying alien) had aspects of deadly insects, reptiles, the big cats, and something more distressingly mechanical. When it opens its fanged mouth another mouth extends and its like a razor toothed eel. It's tail is active, spinal prehensile and penetrating. It speeds across the floor but climbs like a snake. It's also hard to envisage as it's almost entirely seen in shadow. This was a practical decision as the complex animatronics needed to operate the Alien meant that it was impractical to build a complete body that moved the way the creature needed to. There are a few shots of the entire body but they obey the balance of sight vs articulation by being static. 

Despite the awestriking work this took to realise, the film takes pains to prevent it from just being humans being picked off. That does happen but by the time it starts we've got to know them. The term dirty space later coined to describe space-set cinema that blended the fantastic nature of the stories with mechanical realism was advanced here. I first noticed it when I went to see Star Wars in 1977 (now called A New Hope) and saw rusty space ships. The dirty space of Alien is sweaty, oil drips and steam flushes in the engine room. There's ugly ducting and fatigued keys on data entry consoles. The maintenance staff complain about shares and are only quietened when told that not responding to the distress call would result in forfeiture. These people actually work on this ship.

And what people. John Hurt (with an ashy cigarette possibly another first for sci-fi on screen), Ian Holm as the creepily emotionless Ash were stalwarts but Tom Skerrit, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto and Veronica Cartwright were on the rise from bits to leads. No one plays like it's Star Trek or Star Wars, if anything the performances are closer to the naturalism of a Ken Loach. But this is Sigourney Weaver's film. Her Ripley emotes intellect and, driven to action, hurls herself into rationally sound violence. She lets this break in the finale but at that stage we're with her panic and wide eyed at her quick thinking. For all its technical virtuosity, she made this film as it then made her. She not only had a great ignition but her career remains sound and busy.

Alien redefined the sci-fi movie as a horror setting, bringing it both closer (worker's privileges) and pushing it further out (the alien and its planet) in relation to its Earthly audiences. I was sufficiently struck by its believable weirdness that I had a nightmare: I was guarding a house that held a holy figure. The windows were black and I wasn't meant to look into them. I did, of course, and saw the one behind me was like the alien's mouth, opening on mouth after mouth of razor sharp teeth. The blackened valley around the house offered no escape.

There were sequels and some of them have merit. The prequels were disgraceful revisions by Scott who seemed to have done got religion in the meantime and were better left unmade. Scott himself in the shorter termed future, continued to make strong cinema but this was his breakthrough, the one that gave his name to the anticipation of his next, Blade Runner. It's tag line, "In space, no one can hear you scream," oddly enough resonates like the distant scream in the first few moments of the title sequence, never explained nor even identified, something that really did establish the horror of the endlessness of space. We're relieved to see the Nostromo glide into view and hear the crew talking like real people. But that, of course, is just the start.

Viewing notes: I watched my 4K disc for this blog. It's a sublime, deep transfer with a big dynamic audio track. I chose the 1979 cut for authenticity's sake and noticed no difference from memory (the director's cut is actually shorter but not by much). It's rentable from the usual outlets and available at Disney+ for subscribers. If you have 4K, just get the disc. You'll hang on to it. 

THE SIXTH SENSE @ 35

Recovering from a patient's attempt on his life, psychiatrist Malcolm Crowe takes on the case of a troubled young boy who claims to see ghosts. They're an odd match: the boy Cole is angering his single mother as she struggles to keep things going, the man is dealing with the implosion of his marriage, feeling increasingly powerless to reverse the motion. At least he can help the boy back to reality with treatment and that might benefit his troubled sense of self. But what if the ghosts were real? And if they are, what do they want with Cole?

M. Night Shyamalan's international breakthrough was his third feature but it came loaded with an M.O. that continues to serve him in his decades long career. With a zest for the weird tale, Shyamalan became famous for his stories' twists. A South Park episode that involved the Pentagon consulting Hollywood figures to help them with terrorists had Michael Bay offering special effects sequences and M. Night Shyamalan coming up with twists (they went with Mel Gibson; it's a hilarious episode). When you're "honoured" by South Park in the early '00s, you've pretty much made it. Then, by the time he got to Lady in the Water and The Happening the public who'd flocked to his movies were decreasingly impressed with what was feeling too much like formula. At this point, though, the engine was only getting started and felt accomplished and confident.

Shyamalan shoots his hometown Philadelphia with what feels like a nostalgic care. Overcast days bring out the colours against the blue grey of the older buildings and leafy streets. Interiors of schools and grander homes are all wood panelling and spiral staircases. This setting combines both the present of the story with the past of memory in concordance with the developing closeness of Malcolm and Cole. The man first sees the child from afar, across a street, leaving his house on his way somewhere and it's Malcolm's interception that begins their story, almost as though the man is meeting himself as a child. This adds depth to what is a fairly stretched simple story as it gives each of the paired characters a motive of discovery.

The much celebrated Haley Joel Osment as Cole keeps his side of the partnership solid, bearing a burden that might only get heavier as he grows older. His evident intelligence is clear when, in pushing the experience, he confronts what might well be fatal fear. His shouldering of the unworldly has rendered him worldly and the sophisticated kid we eventually see has shed his fear with honours.

Bruce Willis, having gone from the quirky Moonlighting tv show and into the realm of the action hero quite abruptly, had sought throughout the '90s roles that could expand his public image. He went back to quirk in Pulp Fiction but in Twelve Monkeys he spent most of his screentime drooling and sedated. There were more of these but because his biggest draws were the Die Hards and Fifth Elements he was still seen as a quipping G.I. Joe figurine. The reserve and intellect he brought to Malcolm whose actions played only in his head and whose potency seemed deactivated when faced with his wife's suitors rendered him a surprise to audiences which earned the same kind of approval as Osment. It's a sober but nuanced performance.

This wasn't Toni Collette's debut in American movies but the notices it drew from critics ensured it wouldn't be her last. Her beleaguered mother deals tough love with a bitten lip and her youthful beauty has been worn to hardness. When her breaking moment arrives her performance is delivered with a restraint that can give its witnesses the strain of the ugly cry face, as though we're downloading it. It doesn't flash into the explosiveness of her maternal role in Hereditary but shouldn't; it's one of those moments where you as audience feel prepared to be wrought by experts.

This tale of confrontation and reconciliation remains more than watchable with a confidence of conviction palpable in every scene. Shyamalan handles jump scares as effortlessly as suspense setups (the room at the top of the stairs is a terrifying moment but it's entirely suggestion). The confidence is largely due here  to Shyamalan's own in pressing ahead with a story of  industrial strength emotional pain in a sombre supernatural setting, offering an action hero as a melancholy figure and banking on a child actor to carry so much. 

I had this film spoiled for me in one of the groups on Usenet (it was in the title, in caps, of a post, so there was no avoiding it. For a movie that was sold as a big twist fest that should have been fatal. I went to see it with a friend and didn't spoil it for him. He was impressed with the machinery of the revelation. I chose to watch scenes alternating between knowing what I knew and letting them flow over untainted. It worked differently from intention but it still worked. And that's the point, really: if you're human story is strong enough and delivered well enough you should find yourself caring that you know someone on screen is going to be unmasked as a secret real estate agent from the planet Zingo. 

Shyamalan has returned from his critical wilderness with creditable fare like Old or The Knock at the Cabin. If he still indulges his twist endings he also brings solid filmmaking to the table. My gripes with his work overall is that he has also indulged tendencies toward magical plot hole fillers like in Signs (most people go on about the contradiction in the alien invasion but I can't stand the final moments and the completely uncritical acceptance of the reason given). When he keeps the twist simple and its delivery subtle he works (there's a good one in The Visit). If I prefer Unbreakable to this among his early movies it's only because the plot is more engaging but seeing this again was a pleasure, a visit from an old friend with whom you can resume a decades old conversation.

Viewing notes: I watched this on Disney + in 4k which was a delight but it has been available in a range of versions since it was new. 

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT @ 60

The Beatles as themselves go to London to record a tv appearance. Oh, and Paul's troublemaking grandfather is along for the ride as well as the band's manager Norm and his sidekick Shake, a paranoid tv director and a great legion-headed monster of fangirls. Then, they leave again. And that's it except that this film, meant to be a kind of feature length commercial to keep things going before the inevitable commercial demise of some fly by night beat group, was made with such skill and energy that it became the way movies about pop music would be made in perpetuity.

Prior to it was a mixed bag of showcases (performance clips stitched together with a basic plot) and attempts to expand the stars' horizons by getting them to act in full strength narratives. But for every solid Jailhouse Rock or Expresso Bongo (a title that makes me wince just to type, it's like hearing someone say excape) there were countless soggy promo jaunts or cinematic outings built around pretty bipedal voids. This might have been one of those. There are good reasons why it wasn't.

First, Dick Lester, American ex-pat who had made short films with the Goons comedy troupe, had lifted one of those showcase scripts to comedic heights in It's Trad Dad. Instead of having to shoehorn his stars into a PR-written screenplay, he worked with Alun Owen's genuinely funny script. Owen had spent time with the band, picking up character tips and the kind of interpersonal wit that they would soon typify them throughout the world. Oh, that's the other thing: Rather than Cliff (all respect) Lester had The Beatles.

The Beatles had just spent a year that took them from a modestly charting northern English outfit to the biggest band in Europe. The term Beatlemania was coined to cope with the phenomenon of the mass of screaming young women who seemed to burst from the plumbing like stormwater whenever the band appeared in public. The film production company United Artists were chiefly interested in sales of the accompanying soundtrack and paid little mind to the quality of what amounted to them as an ad. Between pre-production and production, though, The Beatles landed in New York, went for a tiny live tour and appeared on salient tv shows that amounted to them becoming a multi-megaton culture bomb and, in a few weeks, rendered them the biggest act of any kind on the face of the Earth. So, the movie was going to hit, whatever it was, but that it was this movie that has kept it respected across decades.

After a title sequence deals with the mania like it's an epic scaled male toss fantasy, the band get on the train for one of the most enjoyably blocked, written and performed opening sequences of its time. Their characters are established, the subplot of Paul's grandfather is introduced and a sequence involving the stuffy older generation is played out with an expansion which heralds the departure this outing is making from more standard pop movie fare. From mugging in the carriage window at the posh banker to suddenly appearing outside the train, banging on the window and calling: "hey mister, can we have our ball back?" If it looked like a light faux documentary before that it wouldn't from that point. From the solo spots to the breakout in the sports field to the police chases this is going to be a promo exercise and a pisstake all at once.

That's where The Beatles themselves come in. While the screenplay was written and ready before the explosive American tour, the footage coming back from it, the sharply funny press conferences and the Maysles' documentary of it with its own train scene that could have been a first draft for the fictional one, informed this film. The guys were young, energetic, ambitious and naturally funny. The press party scene is reality pushed very little and the laddish larking on the train, in anything, constrained by the script. While the tv performances in the movie are mimed to records, the live performances on Ed Sullivan were tightly delivered. The movie felt, suspended disbelief aside, real. Even the production constraint of using black and white helped as it kept the look and feel closer to the Billy Liars or Kind of Lovings of the British new wave than the bright technicolour of the Cliff Richard movies which, by comparison, looked like showbiz.

The solo spots work away from this, though, putting each one into a character signifying situation. John has a small but funny mini comedy of errors with a gossiping tv staffer. Ringo goes paradin' around London and shows some promise as a film actor. My favourite is George walking into the marketing office and dealing with the hyped up ideas man, trading buzzword proposals with flat Scouse knockbacks. Paul's was dropped from the edit as it dragged the pace. The film was destroyed but you can still read the scripted scene with a Google search. None of the band individually is given lines longer than about ten words. The object was not to make Richard Burtons of them but to sell the "naturalism": if this is showbiz let's make showbiz more interesting, let's make it at least feel real.

Wilfrid Brambell as Paul's troublemaking grandfather is perfect casting. The running gag about him being so clean is in direct reference to his iconic tv role as old man Steptoe who was always the "dirty old man". If The Beatles are knockabout and larky, he is constantly undermining, an agent of chaos. Oddly enough, for a film about youthful freedom, it's his unredeemed chancing and undermining that expresses most of that sense of unbridled action. The managerial team of Norm and Shake are possibly the least convincing as comic figures with Norman Rossington's frustrations at failing to control John feeling like they come from an old army life comedy. John Junkin as Shake is more successful, being given some of the weirder side moments and lines like wincing as George shaves his reflection in the bathroom mirror, which are more in keeping with the contemporary comic feel. Beatles movie stalwart Victor Spinetti's paranoid tv director feels a little too contrived over the decades but the contrast between his high strung superiority and the big, fluffy Dr Seuss jumper he's wearing does a lot of the talking.

And then there's the music. Yes it's mimed (but impressively so, you can easily follow chord changes on fretboards and drumming as they do it) but it sounds better for all that. The tv live set is compacted (with more than a few crossfades between songs. The point of going through all of it is really to show the bargain: you scream for it, we'll play it. The mini Beatlemania in the next to last scene, after all the fun chases and banter and satire and jibes is what sold the most tickets as the girls paid to see people identical to themselves screaming out the explosive thrill of being young and electric and, however briefly, powerful. (Incidentally, if you look at the audience here you'll also note how multi-racial it is. It's not presented as a big point but it wouldn't look like that if they'd made this in America.) This is the film's climax in more than one sense and it's compelling. We're not witnessing idolatry so much as mass assertion and it's not on stage but in front of it. Whatever reasons they gave for creating their music this was, at this time, the number one, the demographic which, in other circumstances they would need to pursue was rushing at them as a tsunami of adoration, such that I will never be able to fully imagine.

Finally, for all its contrivances, A Hard Day's Night works now the way the things it most immediately influenced don't. Apart from the song scenes, any given episode of The Monkees is a dragging watch. I'll give John Boorman's Catch Us if You Can a point for bearing some serious social commentary (with the Dave Clark Five!) but it still doesn't reach these heights. For me, it's the kind of contrived naturalism that the members of the biggest band in the world affected when witnesses were about. Whether in their matching suits or Emperor's New Psychedelic Threads, The Beatles playing up to cameras, trading wordplay with journalists or clowning felt like them. It meant that there was no question of selling out as they were already unassailable. That meant that anyone who tried to use the formula came a cropper or produced something that looked like a respectful copy which was against the point. Hard Day's Night still works because, as preposterous as this sounds, it feels real.

Viewing notes: I watched the splendid Criterion 4K of this but it can be seen for free on Brollie and SBS on Demand.

THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON @ 70

A palaeontologist finds a bizarre claw like fossil while at a dig along the Amazon. Taking it to colleagues in the US, he returns with a team of experts, led by the qualified but corrupted by managerialism and greed boss of the institution. At first finding nothing, the team move operations further along, to a lagoon off the main flow and soon attract the attention of one of the owner of the claw's descendants. When the creature's stalking gets reversed all that managerial go and funding greed activate and soon it's a battle of wills to turn the gill man into a take home assignment. Who will win? 

The thing that might clue you into where this monster movie stands ethically happens right at the start. In a prologue about the formation of the universe there is an initial mention of a god creating the universe. That quote from Genesis is the last you'll hear of it. The narration goes on to deliver a superficial but accurate account of speciation. An early scene at a diving platform involves a female scientist telling the palaeontologist about the dangers of the bends. There are mentions of tectonic plate movement and discussions on the rights and wrongs of hauling a strange animal out of its habitat and others on whether that should be dead or alive. The first uttered statement of the film might have mentioned a god but, as Hamlet almost said, the rest is science.

And the science is not mad. The worst character here is Mark the boss who gets and goes mad with reputational lust and is driven to present the monster to the world and be nearly blinded in glory. The more restrained David is ready to consider the bigger picture and reach beyond his paranoid decade right into our own with his concerns about the ecosystem. As clunky as the dialogue can get and as overwrought the blocking, this creature feature sci-fi horror keeps to what it knows. 

Unfortunately, after that initial scene in which Kay explains the relationship between divers and water pressure, she doesn't get much more to do except sound off like a smoke alarm whenever the scaly danger appears. She does, however, get one of the most celebrated setpieces in all mid century genre when she goes for a dip in the lagoon and unwittingly performs a water ballet with out creature who has taken an instant shine to her. This is a breathtakingly beautiful sequence. A subsequent viewing will add the detail that the matching of water tank and location exterior is all but seamless.

One good reason for that is that the film was originally shot in 3D and projected to a very quirky cool set of audiences sporting sunglasses with different coloured lenses. I have never seen this presentation though I'm told that stereoscopic screenings have appeared in my lifetime. I will not miss the next one that I can get to. And there's something about that that should impress you. While you can pick out some moments filmed to capitalise on the 3D, before you know that it won't occur to you. Contrast almost every other 3D film you've seen or heard of in which things are meant to poke through the screen or lunge at the audience (Friday the 13th Part Three is a good example), flaunting the technology. The underwater scenes in this film are at base level dreamy and beautiful.

Another reason to give this oldie a good spin is the creature costume. Designed by the stylishly skilled Millicent Patrick the one-piece outfit is a marvel that neither creases with movement nor stretches like rubber. Patrick was until recently swept aside in the credits for the design in favour of Bud Westmore who led the makeup team and commissioned the practical creation of the suits (one for land and one for water). Not only is the costume pretty convincing even now (in 4K!) but the details work, the gills around the head breathe in a way that looks natural rather than mechanical. Until practical effects improved in the following decades and a handle was found on the CGI, this was the gold standard in monster costumes. It even allows emotion: a moment that always strikes me is the one when the creature scales the hull of the boat and angrily tears a piece of the structure off. The actor who did that, in those few seconds, kept the monster from being a thing with an immovable face.

There's the other thing. While the creature's wrath is meant to menace the sense that the expedition has invaded his home is palpable from the off. His wrath at their incursion and the effects of their self defence is vengeful but the threat of this, wherever it has originated, still makes him a figure of terror. A measure he resorts to in order to sabotage their progress is genuinely disturbing (no spoilers) when thought about.

This is one of the roundest of all the Universal monster movies, adding compassion to the intended terror. So, they lifted the creature's infatuation with the beautiful Julia Adams as Kay straight from King Kong but this was, after all, intended to sell tickets and popcorn first. Yes, the tongue trumpet use (blaaaaaare!) is overcooked, some of the performances uneven, and if the locals aren't quite iggrant natives they're not quite autonomous citizens, either. However, rather than have things to say to our time (which we should already know) it's both wondrous and shaming to see that such issues were concerns three score and ten years ago. Find it. See it.

SEVEN DAYS IN MAY @ 60

It's the eve of a disarmament deal between the US and the USSR and Colonel Casey (aka Jiggs) is noticing strange things happening around him. His boss, General Scott, seems to be gearing up for a profile lift and it's working. He's attracted the support of conservative media figures. Even the protestors outside the White House have reduced their conflict point to support of either President Lyman or the General. Jiggs, loyal to the General for many years, is getting worried about a possibly too secret communications section and some cryptic wires passing between the chiefs of staff that appear to be about betting on horses but look suspiciously like code. Nothing is quite adding up to normal so, as General Scott makes a fiery speech against the disarmament talks, Jiggs goes straight to the President and reports his suspicions. Things are pointing to a military coup. A few crucial details gets him taken seriously and he is asked to report from the belly of the beast.

For political thrillers, this one really couldn't have a better pedigree. John Manchurian Candidate Frankenheimer was slated to direct Rod Twilight Zone Serling's adaptation of the Cold War thriller of the same title and the cast was stellar. With the likes of Frederick March as the President, Martin Balsam as his adviser, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas at full strength as the General and Jiggs respectively, as well as a poignant turn by Ava Gardner as a cast off Washington wife, things are set to work. And work they do.

Frankenheimer's challenge was to render this wall to wall talkfest into a compelling thriller. In doing so, he extended the work of his solid classic The Manchurian Candidate to add a box of tropes for political thrillers down to now. Sudden disappearances in public places, deep focus dialogues, guerrilla filmmaking at buildings and even a warship to break open some veracity, as well as a few sneakily inserted predictive technologies like the video conferencing in one scene (it's subtle about it but the story is set several years into the future, in 1970, easily missed today).

Burt Lancaster brings a layered character to the General. He is boomingly self-entitled as a political actor but observes the military code of allowing his medal salad on his uniform to tell his story without embellishment. He seems more ashamed at the potential that his incriminating letters to his ex might embarrass him through their intimacy than with any revelation of state secrets or illicit ambitions. In his exchanges with Jiggs, especially once his awareness of the betrayal at hand is clear, he travels from a whispered confidence to a barely controlled contempt, the stiffness of his posture containing thunder.

Kirk Douglas plays Jiggs as a career officer who is watching as the tide turns, doesn't like it but must accept it. For all the respect he has for Scott he knows Scott's tilt at politics will see him falling through the void if successful. He conceals his disdain for the world of politics as he understands that it is necessary if the tenets of his beliefs (like the Constitution) are to be maintained. 

Both Lancaster and Douglas were action heroes and both were already getting through a decade in which the principles of the self-justifying hero could no longer apply. They adapted into roles like The Swimmer and The Arrangement which featured their demographic laid bare. Their efforts didn't and couldn't shut down toxic masculinity (which can still claim biology as its teacher, pleasantly or not) but they could do turns like this which suggest that while the world of barking machos might reappear after other options prove effective, there will always be a need to grab the muzzles and regroup, pause for a breath and a good look around, and walk gently back into humanity. Movies like this can help us remember that.

I hired Seven Days in May through Prime Video but it should be available on comparable sources.

THE PARALLAX VIEW @ 50

A political assassination. A committee who look like angels of death declare it to be free of conspiracy. We already know better, having seen the professional looking choreography in the opening scene. Three years later, Lee Carter, journalist and witness to the crime visits fellow reporter Joe Frady (also at the assassination) in fear for her life. She shows Frady the list of high profile attendees who have since met violent deaths. Frady dismisses it and sends her on her way. He's looking at her corpse on a slab in the morgue the next day. Begging an advance from his long suffering editor, he goes to a small town in pursuit of another figure under threat, finds him gone. A spoilable scene later and Frady is back on the road with a bundle of documents from an organisation that seems to be recruiting fall guys for political and industrial assassinations. The only way to get into this one is to ... get into it. It's going to be a dark trek.

Alan J. Pakula's paranoia thriller came just after Watergate and the assassinations of the '60s in the U.S. What might have otherwise come across as a tale of political sci-fi now appeared a plausible  scenario. As with his previous Klute, Pakula keeps the histrionics at arm's length and allows the horror of the situation to develop with a workaday pallet and performances that are stronger for their underplaying. By this, he created a genuinely unnerving image of an organisation for hire in quiet control of the government.

This needs good casting if it is to rise above the kind of adolescent conspiracy thinking it suggests and the film's coup was to put Warren Beatty at its centre. Beatty was not only very hot property by the early '70s as the hunque de jour of Hollywood, he was politically active and leaned left: easy on the eye and believable in the field. The star power and the checkout tabloid appeal could keep the most politically apathetic voter rivetted to the story. Beatty even got the character's profession changed from cop to reporter, however grimy the glamour upgrade might have been, it was a better fit. To his credit, Beatty does play this earnestly to the extent that the deeper he gets the more he resembles his cover story characters. The self-isolation he is heading for is clear midpoint and he begins shedding glamour by the scene.

This film is famous for the psyche test scene. Frady sends the creepy questionnaire into the Parallax Corporation and is summoned to their impressive space in a downtown office where he enters a viewing room with a single chair. There are sensors on the arms. A gentle male voice instructs him to sit, keep his hands on the sensors and watch the show. The lights go down and then we see what he is seeing. To call it a slideshow is to under sell it. The Parallax View psyche test is a nightmare of emotional coercion. A series of stills plays out with intertitles suggesting themes like love, mother, me, home, enemy and so on. This is played over a score that goes from the most wholesome country rock imaginable. But this starts changing, the titles and images stop matching, often taking on the opposite of their first iterations. A famous shot of a mother and son goes from the intended warmth to a disturbing smirk at a child's torment. The enemy might start with images of Hitler or Castro but it comes back as a superhero or a group of affectionate friends. If you had thought the written test was disturbing this show will have you white knuckled.

I have encountered a theory that Parallax are not looking for high emotion in the test results but the impassivity of  the truly dangerous. This is pretty scary and might still work but, considering the opening scenes of assassination and the chase of the perpetrator, the recruitment program might well have a built-in disposal system.

I mentioned the score just then and need to address it. Michael Small's music for The Parallax View is extraordinary. Two contrary motifs weave into each other. The first uses the major thirds and drops to a fourth of military or patriotic music like the bugle tune Taps or The Last Post. The second is a series of dissonant tight intervals played high on a piano keyboard. They have the troubling, unresolved feel of mystery movies. Small introduces both at once in the opening shot of the Congressional committee as the camera tracks closer to them. A pedal note or drone, if you will, holds as the second motif plinks above it. As the leader of the committee reads the final statement, French horns quietly begin the first motif but with a more sinister harmony in the lower strings. The two are woven effortlessly, patriotism and intrigue until, by the time the credits have run they feel like one piece of music. The remainder of the score allows for expansion but retains its character. At one moment the strings playing the dissonant motif threaten to turn into a hoedown but it's just a very brief signalling moment. At another, a sombre scene is filled with the patriotic motif where another composer of this era would have put something more jarring. By keeping in close touch with his material, Small maintains integrity with a film score many have sought to evoke but few come close. Small never bettered it.

As he had done with intrigue in Klute, Pakula brought the political thriller into the new decade and did so at a point where it's really only the differing technology that distinguishes it from recent cinema. John Frankenheimer's earlier Manchurian Candidate covered similar territory but it responded to paranoia in the system. The Parallax View plugs into the community's unease at finding itself at a time when the best were murdered and the worst celebrated while the crooked presided and a bad war seemed to go on forever. Parallax was a service and the question of who was using it remains unanswered. 

While we see the intimidating office complexes and feel our flesh creep at the recruiter Younger gently croon reassurance to his potentially explosive candidate, and the wowing deep focus shots of the finale, we also move through the look and feel of the everyday. Coppola had done this for organised crime with the Godfather, Friedkin for horror in The Exorcist, and Scorsese with Mean Streets, Sidney Lumet would manage it for broadcasting in Network despite a wildly over-literate screenplay. The decade by 1974 had already proved this approach appealed to a community who hungered for the truth of an experience at the cinema. This one gave them the heebie jeebies. It's still scary.

Viewing notes: I watched my Criterion blu-ray of this but the local release on Imprint is more affordable (and might well be the same transfer) with more extras.