More BAFTA winning screenplays

2020. Promising Young Woman Emerald Fennell. 

Adapted: The Father. Christopher Hampton, Florian Zeller.

2021. Licorice Pizza. Paul Thomas Anderson, 

Adapted: CODA. Sian Heder.

2022. The Banshees of Inisherin. Martin McDonagh, 

Adapted: All Quiet on the Western Front. Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson, Ian Stokell.

2023. Anatomy of a Fall. Justine Triet, Arthur Harari. 

Adapted: American Fiction. Cord Jefferson.

2024. A Real Pain. Jesse Eisenberg. 

Adapted: Conclave. Peter Straughan.

2025. Sinners Ryan Coogler.

Adapted. One Battle After Another. Paul Thomas Anderson.

Ealing Studios Double Bill: Passport to Pimlico (1949 Henry Cornelius) / The Lavender Hill Mob (1951 Charles Crichton)

Stanley Holloway, Betty Warren and daughter Barbara Murray. John Slater and Jane Hylton. Paul Dupuis. Raymond Huntley. Philip Stainton. Sydney Tafler. Hermione Baddeley. Margaret Rutherford. Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne. Charles Hawtrey.

I was interested to see that not everyone is in a suit and tie, notably Holloway who rarely wears a tie. Many shirts have rolled up sleeves and did I actually spy a T-Shirt in that busy (black) market?

It was shot in Lambeth in the rainy summer of 1948. Cornelius, a perfectionist, would often lose his cool, for example bawling out 18 year old Barbara Murray in from of the extras, and frequently fighting with Michael Balcon - apparently a six week shoot took six months. It was, however, a big hit with the public and the critics.

It's also a Georges Auric double bill.

Alec Guinness, Stanley Holloway (it's also a Stanley Holloway double bill), Sid James, Alfie Bass.

Brilliantly written, by T.E.B. Clarke: The Geegaws casting process; that Guinness is helping the police find the gang; the schoolgirl's 'boyfriend' is a copper; chase through Police exhibition; the heist goes immediately wrong.

Photographed by Douglas Slocombe.

We Brits love it when people get away with cheeky crimes.

Avanti (1972 Billy Wilder & co-scr)

It's Izzy Diamond's birthday.

So brilliantly written. Love the way 'Permesso' / 'Avanti' turns into a kiss.

It must be the most successful long comedy - two hours 25.

Best of Waking the Dead

Anger Management. The flamenco one. And Boyd in therapy. John Milne, Andy Hay

Final Cut. The Performance one. Stephen Davis.

Waking the Dead - Seasons 4/5 (2004-5)

Shadowplay by Ed Whitmore. Mentally unbalanced women are being manipulated to murder by the mysterious 'Shepherd'. At first we think it's overly-enunciating Paul Kaye, then suspect his brother, James Larkin, but of course it's Ed, so it's someone else entirely.

With Lucy Gaskell, Laurence Penry-Jones, Eve Best.

Eve Best was in The Shadow Line and The Honorable Woman

Mike Spragg is on camera. He shot 66 episodes of this, pretty much the whole of Seasons 3 - 9.

It was Claire Goose's decision to leave the show - she'd before it had a three year stint on Casualty. It was a bit of a shock to have Holly Aird (who in 2004 lived 'just round the corner' from her in Chiswick) depart also (she was pregnant).

Thus in the Season Five opener, Towers of Silence, we have a new DS 'Andy' Stephenson, played by Georgia Mackenzie, who unfortunately isn't assimilated very well into her first story, and also a new pathologist, 'Felix' (I know, what's going on?) Gibson, Esther Hall. The other surprise is to find Spence in prison, but in Joe Cozens' screenplay all is not what it seems.

The story involves some shadowy insurance company and a dodgy Indian importer / exporter of fake drugs, who all get away with it.

It's interesting watching these things in a continuous run - most people have to wait until the next year (at least) to watch the next series.

Waking the Dead Season 4 (2004)

Fugue States by Ed Whitmore. A young man injured in a traffic accident is discovered to be a missing five year old from fifteen years ago - Joe Armstrong. He claims not to know where he's been. And where's his twin sister?

Into this comes a different strand - a former doctor Sean McGinley who was renowned for taking abused children out of their families. And a hospital doctor Ray Stevenson and his daughter and wife Maimie McCoy and Denise Black.

Mel accidentally shoots a deaf man who it turns out figures; Mel we learn has herself been adopted with an unfit mother, who she anonymously goes to visit.

In Anger Management, written by John Milne and Andy Hay, who also directed, Boyd is seeing a therapist and trying to learn how to control his anger - good work from Trevor Eve here. A man - who is an incredible flamenco guitarist - Nigel Terry - comes out of prison. And a man at his halfway house has committed 'suicide'. Into the mix comes a criminal T.P McKenna and his ex-con assistant Q (who was in Silent Witness as well), and a former prisoner (who's also practising anger management) Andrew Tiernan.

Part one ends with a brilliant flamenco performance cross cut to the assault on Frankie, a seriously well edited sequence by Adam Trotman and / or Joanna Garrard. Kevin Byrne is credited as the flamenco composer but the just brilliant guitarist isn't credited. 

Loved Boyd losing it with Q in a swimming pool - "Why didn't you make the right choice??" (This is an actor who rather mysteriously refers to himself as 'Q'. Nothing to do with my Q.)

I've just seen young Terry in The Lion in Winter and he was also Arthur in Excalibur and played Caravaggio in 1986.

Then in The Hardest Word (Doug Milburn) Boyd and the team are forced to work alongside somewhat dodgy coppers Phil Daniels and Paul Reynolds (who was in Press Gang!) as they investigate seemingly kinky murders. A distinguished cast includes Phyllida Law, Julian Glover, James Dreyfuss and Emma Fielding, a psychiatrist who it turns out has her own murky upbringing.

I Walked With a Zombie (1943 Jacques Tourneur)

It was 34°C.

It's unavoidable. Give me a hot, late night, a glass of cognac and a spliff, and I'll be watching I Walked with a Zombie, a film I would defend as being worthy of the Top 100 title for its consumptive, rich, eerie and utterly oneiric atmosphere. Is it, to use William Boyd's great word, a work of febrile imagination? Or is it, to defer to Lewis Carroll, tulgey?

Words are no good. Let's consider the stripy, textured lighting of one undersung hero, J. Roy Hunt. Witness the magic of this simple light on / light off:

If that isn't enough to conjure up the correct mood, how about some dreamlike stairs shots?

Frances Dee and Tom Conway:

 

Not just stripes, textures:

Unforgettable night walk through the cotton fields conjures up Onibaba:

Dee with Christine Gordon...

...meeting Darby Jones

It is my favourite of all the Val Lewton RKO horrors: Mark Robson was still editing then and the legendary Roy Webb wrote the music. If Roger Corman didn't have these strangely haunting films in mind when he produced his own series of horrors, I'd eat the hat I don't own. (He doesn't mention them in his autobiography 'How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime'.)

There's quite a lot of opacity to this tale - Tom Conway's wife (Christine Gordon, her only performance) cannot be a zombie - yet when she is stabbed, she doesn't bleed. And what was going on with her - was she about to leave him for his brother, drunkard James Ellison?

Tourneur met Val Lewton when both were working for David Selznick on David Copperfield in 1935. When Lewton set up his mini-studio at RKO, producing that series of intelligent and atmospheric horror films, Tourneur was his first choice, and he directed Cat People, this and The Leopard Man, all of which are terrific - but for pure atmosphere, and its subtext of island culture and slavery, this one takes the cake. And eats it, if that doesn't scramble metaphors too badly.

Frances Dee is the nurse, Edith Barrett the enigmatic Mrs Rand. Sir Lancelot (a Trinidadian singer who lived until the age of 98) seems like a nice polite man, but when he finds Dee on her own, he's almost threatening her with his calypso (Q says warning). Theresa Harris is charming as the maid, Darby Jones memorable as Carrefour (was he stoned, or had the RKO medics given him starey potion?) I love that moment when he's at the house, advancing, and there's a close shot of him that's quite out of focus - it doesn't matter, in fact it may have been deliberate. 

 It's a beautifully curious film, from Tom Conway's opening dialogue with Frances Dee "That luminous water - it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies - a glitter of putrescence." It's very moody, considering it's studio set - the sugar cane fields beautifully done. 

There's a terrific melancholy also under the surface about slavery - that statue that was the ship figurehead is the last shot of the film. Plus the rites of the household staff.

Alcoholism, voodoo, drums, a horse which will take its drunk passenger home, the beautiful irony of the 'witch doctor', a zombie, that haunting finale in the sea, stripes and shadows.....

A heady and unbeatable concoction.

It's J Roy Hunt's finest hour and is one of the most texturally interesting examples of cinema photography ever.. A cameraman on B pictures, he's also known for the noir Crossfire (Roberts Young, Mitchum and Ryan), In Name Only (Cary Grant and Carole Lombard), the original She, and the first Astaire-Rogers pic Flying Down to Rio; many others since 1916.

Love those wind-powered hanging flute bowl things, same sort of principle as an Aeolian Harp.

The suspense sequence where Carrefour approaches the plantation with Frances Dee in the garden is pure Tourneur.

Writers Ardel Wray and Curt Siodmak researched voodoo deeply. According to Chris Fujiwara, author of 'Jacques Tourneur: Cinema of Nightfall' Wray rewrote it and introduced the slavery element which makes it so resonant. Sir Lancelot helped them find genuine voodoo musicians, and that calypso he sings was his own composition. The art direction by Albert D'Agostino and Walter Kelly is inspired. 

According to Joel E Siegel's book, because of the title, hardly anyone went to see it.

Teresa Harris, an essential member of the cast. Also in Baby Face, Jezebel, Tourneur's Out of the Past, The File on Thelma Jordan

Waking the Dead: Season 4 (2004)

In Sight of the Lord. Tony McHale. Murders by nine inch nail through the head, going as far back as 1948. There's a military connection. The thugs involved beat one of their own platoon so badly he's in hospital for six months - and doesn't shop them / there's no enquiry? I think there would have been. Still, quite a haunting story, with Michael Byrne, a steady worker since 1963, Geoffrey Bayldon, Clive Wood, JJ Feild.

False Flag. Stephen Davis. An old IRA killing is uncovered - it's Timothy West's son (and Dearbhla Molloy). But a 'false flag' is where a country makes out another country is the culprit, and in fact it's the UK turning on its own. Also Boyd and the unit are being investigated by Caroline Lee-Johnson.

With Danny Webb, Tom Georgeson.

I believe it's Petersham Place SW7.

Above, Boyd not talking any shit from authority, something he shares with other beloved TV detectives like Morse.

Waking the Dead - the missing episodes (2003)

Where the BBC fears to tread, U will provide. I'd never even heard of U. So Stephen Davis' screenplay is about institutional child abuse - why is that a reason to keep it off iPlayer?

Charlie Creed-Miles had received repressed memory counselling uncovering abuse in a care home; Navin Chowdhry is a fellow damaged survivor. Saskia Reeves is the counsellor who brings the story to Boyd's door. Michael Pennington, Ian Hogg and Tom Bell are possible suspects (I picked the wrong one - in fact I'm not quite sure who the guilty party was now).

The Blue Gardenia (1953 Fritz Lang)

Covered in Peter Bogdanovich's interview only as this:

This is a particularly venomous picture of American life.
The only thing I can tell you about it is that it was the first picture after the McCarthy business [Lang had been blacklisted as a Communist], and I had to shoot it in 20 days. Maybe that's what made it so venomous. [Laughs.]

What's venomous? A woman (Anne Baxter) is jilted by her Korean war soldier beau; accepts a blind date with a womanizer who gets her drunk and tries to rape her. So she slugs him with a poker; then as the police close in, feels increasingly guilty. She approaches a seemingly sympathetic journalist (Richard Conte) who shops her to the police. Oh, Ok - fairly venomous, then.

Raymond Burr is the creep who gives her one too many Polynesian Pearl-Divers, whilst Nat King Cole sings the title song in a rare live appearance. (Well, not that rare. He was in The Blue Dahlia as well.) 'Chinese peas'? Is there really such a thing? (Yes, smart arse - also known as Snow Peas. I'm so suggestible I now really want Chinese food.) Charles Hoffman adapted Vera Caspary's story.

It's a Warner Bros picture - Nick Musaraca imported from RKO. Music by Raoul Kraushaar.

With friends Ann Sothern and Jeff Donnell, Richard Erdman (photographer), George Reeves (detective), Ruth Storey, Victor Sen Yung (uncredited waiter).

Waking the Dead Season 3 (2003)

We seem to have gone into the stupid era of television filmmaking - you know, when there's a big whoosh sound effect with edits. It's so overdone. A particular culprit is found in Multistorey (Ed Whitmore) which involves a multiple shooting from a car park - every flashback opens with a gun shot sound effect which is unnecessary and also confusing as actual gunshots are heard throughout.

Sean Pertwee is in prison for the shooting, which we feel he can't have done... Boyd's mate was one of the victims. Ed does one of his signature crazy Boyd moments in a scene where he works out witness Brendan Coyle didn't actually see the killer - then tells no one about this huge piece of news. (As it turns out this was probably a good move, but doesn't seem so at the time.)

The gun squad is headed by Robert Pugh and vixenish Kim Vathana, with a seemingly helpful Jason Hughes. Guy Henry is also in it also, thus reuniting him and Pugh from Sword of Honour. And Cliff Parisi, Shirley Anne Field. It's one of those ones that when it's over you feel it wasn't, on balance, particularly credible.

Then in Walking on Water, Boyd is tested by a 'Maria' who was a 'Mark', mixed up with a fishing family, three members of which have disappeared. A quick search of the Thames Estuary and the sunk boat and corpses are recovered, leading to sinister horror film sound effects and creepy dead people appearing - we don't need this sort of treatment at all, thank you. Homosexuality and cocaine reveal themselves as story points (Simon Mirren wrote it).

Boy, the tide comes in quickly around these parts. Boyd and Mel are only out there for about five minutes when the tide's come in and completely cuts them off.

Here we go again with over-sensitive BBC - iPlayer doesn't contain the next story, Breaking Glass, by Stephen Davis, which IMDB summarises as 'The CCS is alerted to sexual abuse of young boys in care homes. The team race to identify the murderer before his vengeful victims reach him.' Which seems pretty chicken shit of them.

And then, the Performance episodes - well in my mind, anyway - written by Stephen Davis and directed by Betsan Morris Evans, edited by Pamela Power, who I've never heard of but whose claims to fame would be from cutting The Duellists (1977) and The Hunger (1983). There's a really dizzying opening montage, also featuring an old car, which triggered the opening of Performance - and that was before I'd seen a very familiar style of property in Notting Hill. It's not 25 Powys Square, but it's very similar:

There's good humour amongst the team for a change and lots of great energy with interrupted lines all over the place. The story involves London crime gangs, an Obeah woman (Sharon D. Clarke - Ellis! - a committed performance) and Spence's missing Dad.

Richard McCabe is an entirely dodgy estate agent:

To keep the Performance theme going, there's also a sub-plot about a controversial film shot in 1967 called 'Projections' featuring gangland ultra-violence. 'The studio got so freaked out they took it off and re-cut it.' Exactly the fate of Roeg & Cammell's film. Also, a famous rock star is going to move into the house! Come on... That was Ken Russell as the director. (The film clips have amusingly really bad sound effects.)

Long scene filmed for real on old London bus all adds to the resonance:

With Gina Bellman, Earl Cameron (Pool of London), Pat Bowie (above). It's called Final Cut, by the way.

OCD Double Bill: The Aviator (2004 Martin Scorsese) / As Good As It Gets (1997 James L Brooks & co-scr)

My heart sank when I realised Marty's film was two and three-quarter hours - in fact it's only two hours 36 if you factor out the credits. Still, it manages to hold the attention, unlike Best Years which is riveting throughout. The problem here is that Howard Hughes isn't a particularly sympathetic figure, in fact not at all. So we don't really care about his design / financial / relationship problems. It was written by John Logan.

It is well acted by Leo Di Caprio and Kate Blanchett (who won the Oscar) playing Katharine Hepburn. Plus John C Reilly, Kate Beckinsale, Alec Baldwin, Alan Alda (good), Ian Holm, Danny Huston, Gwen Stefani (Harlow), Jude Law (Errol Flynn).

Technically, Robert Richardson's Oscar-winning cinematography is partly down to VFX designer Robert Legato who manipulates the images to give the early Technicolor look. And Tom Fleischman does some wonderful stuff in the sound mix, particularly with the many music tracks that appear throughout (notably the Charles Mingus - was it Charles Mingus? It doesn't appear in the credits so maybe it wasn't? Close - it was Artie Shaw - 'Nightmare'.) Thelma's editing is snappy (and won Oscar).

Evidence of clever digital split-screenery

Jack Nicholson is juicily insulating in As Good As It Gets - "No need to stop being a lady," he tells Greg Kinnear - "You'll be back on your knees in no time", but the film is stolen by Jill the dog.

It was his third Oscar - in total he was nominated twelve times, making him the most nominated actor in the Academy history.

We didn't mean to put on an OCD double bill - it just happened that way.

The Best Years of our Lives (1946 William Wyler)

There were only two nominations for black and white photography that year - Anna and the King of Siam, Arthur C Miller - which won - and The Green Years, George Folsey. Not this?? Who was it who called it 'deep space'? Mark Cousins? Andre Bazin? Walter Murch?

I hear he used wide 24mm lenses to help get that deep space. But notice in the booth scene between Andrews and March - March's background is pure black.

May I repeat last time:

The way Teresa Wright tenderly dries Dana Andrews' face. When Frederic March is drunkenly dancing with Myrna Loy there's a sudden, brilliant moment when he looks like he doesn't recognise her. The way Gregg Toland's camera very elegantly moves in the ladies' scene to find a more intimate mirror shot with focus on Teresa Wright learning what Andrews's wife Virginia Mayo is really like. (I could make a short film just about this scene. Are there two camera moves? It's very subtle. There's an intriguing use of mirrors throughout, e.g. when Wright comes in to parent's bedroom you think she's there but in fact it's her reflection that's just walked in.) When March confronts Andrews in the booth at Butch's and tells him he can't see Wright any more, the length of time the camera just rests on Andrews' face, such a long linger, while he's furiously thinking - Dana Andrews' finest moment on film. And the way he tears the foursome photo in half, so it's just he and Wright, but then tears that up as well (a perfect show don't tell). And throughout it all, that emotive, brave, proud score by Hugo Friedhofer (one of its seven Oscars).

Poor old Homer - his family just needed to be really open about it all, especially his little sister - who I'm sure would have adapted to it all quickly as young people can do.

I have to add that the bags that are being carried e.g. by Dana at the beginning, trying to find a flight home, look properly heavy, as they would be.

Waking the Dead Season 2 (2002)

Thin Air. Ed Whitmore writes a Boyd gone mad. In 1989 a girl disappeared from Hampstead Heath and was never found. Her dress and some memorabilia are uncovered belonging to the son of a dolls house maker, Justin Salinger. Under pressure from the Commissioner, Boyd rashly arrests him without examining any other evidence. Strike 1. Then an old mate of Spence Steve Toussaint is suspected of being involved, and Spence goes to see him without any other officers - big mistake. And Strike 2. Then Boyd meets the dead girl's sister Sophie Winkleman without any colleagues being present - inappropriate and Strike 3. But in the maddest of moments, she comes to visit Boyd alone, comes on to him and manages to convince him to wear her sister's dress and go for a night walk across the Heath. Strike 4. Che cazzo? Has the world gone crazy? Who let Ed write such madness? I was half expecting for Boyd to wake up and find that bit was just a dream.

There's an 'Alice in Wonderland' reference and what with the doll's house and the night / red dress scene there's something fairytale going on here, something that perhaps became diluted along the line.

The parents are Roger Allam and Cherie Lunghi, whose appearance in Excalibur in 1981 was by no means her first and who has rarely been off our TV screens since her debut in 1964.

A hallmark of this show has been the quality of the acting, which is generally excellent - Winkleman sadly something of an exception. Who was the 'show runner'? The producer?

Graham Frake is on camera again and throws in one of his quick circular moves.

Ponies (2026 Susanna Fogel, David Iserson)

1977 Moscow. Two Americans are told their husband have died in an air crash. They appeal to the local CIA man Adrian Lester to stay on and be of use to him. His superiors think this a great idea as the KGB would never think of women as operatives. (Um. Those of us who have read and seen 'From Russia With Love' will have other ideas.)

They are Emilia Clarke and Hayley Lu Richardson. Ems is college educated and speaks Russian (her grandmother is Harriet Walter); Hayls' only asset is fearlessness.

It's rather sweetly filmed in 1.66:1 and the soundtrack is peppered with 1970s music.

It's no Spy City.

Go On (2012-3 Scott Silveri)

Radio sports presenter Matty Perry has lost his wife, joins a grief counselling group led by Laura Benanti. The reasonably oddball characters are Julie White (gay and prickly), Suzy Nakamura (actually I can't remember what her schtick is ), Brett Gelman (just weird), Sarah Baker (cat mad, The Kominsky Method, Big Little Lies), Tonita Castro, Tyler James Williams, Seth Morris (tall ex army), Bill Cobbs (That Thing You Do!, Silkwood, Get Low, The Hudsucker Proxy). Cobbs seemed to suddenly disappear from the series but carried on working.

John Cho is his radio colleague / BF. And Allison Miller the cute office, er - don't know what she does - daytime TV watcher.

Waking the Dead - Season 2 (2002)

Loved the moment where Mel is attacked in prison by rapist / killer Samuel West and she (quite easily) turns the tables on him and has him in a painful wrist lock. This is in a story called Life Sentence by John Milne. Susannah Harker is the only survivor of the murderer's spree and there's a weird bond between them. We sort of knew the identity of a guilty party as soon as we saw him, though missed that in the first few seconds the survivor is living in a house by a railway track, which figures prominently. With Mark Aiken, Patterson Joseph.

Deathwatch is about organised crime in the sixties - it becomes apparent that an entire jury has been bumped off as revenge for their verdict that hanged a man in 1963. (Not sure the Django Rheinhart type guitar track in the flashback particularly sounded '1963' to me.) The man's dead brother isn't dead after all - had this story already - it's Ronald Pickup! And the ex police detective (who as Q immediately observed 'seems to have done well for himself') is none other than David Hemmings, and Warren Mitchell also appears. Stephen Davis wrote it.

David Hemmings 2002 / Blow Up 1966

There's some interesting revolving camera stuff going on in this, shot by Graham Frake, directed by Maurice Phillips, notably a team conference scene in which the camera artfully sweeps around the table, and later in a confrontation on a deserted wharf opposite the Millennium Dome.

And David Thacker's Special Relationship begins with a bravura piece of camerawork as we start outside a posh London residence and follow a burglar break in, down the stairs, into a bedroom where he starts stealing stuff, notices a dead women and flees, in one shot. David Thacker is the director, Graham Frake on camera again. It's partly about senior ministry cover-ups, the CIA and affairs and jealous wives.

Corin Redgrave is the dodgy Minister, Ruth Gemmell a detective from Boyd's past. With Patricia Hodge, Anton Lesser, Amanda Root (dead woman's lover, 1995 Persuasion, Foyle's War, lots of TV), Kika Markham (Minister's secretary).

Ruth Gemmell, who we've seen earlier this year in The Inspector Lynley Mysteries and Silent Witness

Boyd steals DNA! And shouts at Grace! And arrests the Minister twice!