Point Blank (1967 John Boorman)

Interesting thriller notable for inventive use of flashbacks and complex time structure, thus quite influential, certainly to Steven Soderbergh, whose The Limey was a sort of homage.

Lee Marvin is double-crossed at a heist which takes place in Alcatraz - comes to get his revenge (though all he claims he wants is his money) against The Organization. With John Vernon, Angie Dickinson, Keenan Wynn (Song of the Thin Man), Caroll O'Connor.

Written by Alexander Jacobs, David and Rafe Newhouse, from Richard Westlake novel. Photographed by Philip Lathrop in Panavision, edited by Henry Berman, music by Johnny Mandel.

The 'special photographic effect' shot of John Vernon falling is not very successful - quite funny. Overall though I love the feeling, the texture, of 1960s American film.

I reliably informed myself that there's a Hergé edit (see here) at 1:05:44.

Boorman had only made one movie in England, Catch Us If You Can, before being snapped up in America, where after this he made Hell In The Pacific, again with Marvin; then the great Deliverance was bookended by two interesting failures, Leo the Last and Zardoz. Later good films were Excalibur, Hope and Glory, The Emerald Forest, The General, The Tailor of Panama.

The Bear - Part II (2023 Christopher Storer & scr)

Thankfully the shouty conflict has been well toned down in continuing drama in which a new restaurant is being furbished with help from Uncle Oliver Platt. (Not quite sure how their ballpark cost of upgrade was $100k then they suddenly needed $800k?)

L-Boy Marcus Brooks spends some time in Copenhagen, being taught by Will Poulter. Ayo Edebiri is trying food all over town, beginning to think Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) isn't going to be the best partner.

Oh dear. Suddenly all the loud conflict is back in almost unbearable Christmas flashback episode, overlong and horribly explosive - I can see why it's there, it's important for plot and character background, and the cinema verité style is fitting, but a difficult watch. Like the series as a whole it could do with some judicious paring down, there's too many long and irrelevant conversations throughout  - throwing the pacing off.  Guests here Jaime Lee Curtis and Bob Odenkirk.

Ends on opening night with Carm amusingly being locked in the larder. Ricky has had a personality transplant, following a spell in Carm's old restaurant, and possibly because he talked to Olivia Colman, and saves the day on the pass.

We quite liked some of the super-slick editing. And some of the music choices.

10x30.

P.S. Quite a winner in the January 2024 Emmys - though surprised to see it listed in 'Comedy' category!

Noose (1948 Edmond T Greville)

An interesting film which almost becomes a really nasty thriller, anticipating Performance. But then it goes a bit weak. So not quite They Made me a Fugitive.

At the centre is a vicious but untouchable Italian Soho gangster, Joseph Calleia (Touch of Evil), and his sidekick, rapid-talking cut-your-throat-from-ear-to-ear Nigel Patrick (Trio, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, The Browning Version, Encore, Sapphire, The Trials of Oscar Wilde). Pitted against these, journalist Carole Landis and her fiance Derek Farr, detective Stanley Holloway.

Quite nasty in suggestions of knuckle-dusters, high murder rate, death of girl in gymnasium, but descends into a Boy's Own dust up between gang members in a night club, and a model (Carol van Derman) losing her dress. Shame as great scenes such as wannabe police informer Ruth Nixon (her only film) at nightclub being 'disappeared' to sad French song. With John Slater, Edward Rigby (briefly), Leslie Bradley, Hay Petrie (as menacing killer 'Basher').

Greville was French. DP Hone Glendinning, shot at Warner Bros. Teddington. Written by Richard Llewelyn from his stage play in which Patrick also acted.

Some of Performance (1968, 1970 Nic Roeg, Donald Cammell)

I was in a Tony Gibbs mood, and you know it's his editing which partly makes this so incredibly distinctive, and why I was so dazzled by it when I first saw it at The Scala Cinema on 2 January 1980.

But I was also picking up this incredible sharp focus pulling (uncredited - perhaps Roeg himself?)

Sound / music editing / mixing also notable.

Some people are in it too.

Saint Jack (1979 Peter Bogdanovich & co-scr)

It was his birthday, and this is one of our least seen of his films. It's a beautiful film, considering it's about a pimp in Singapore - a sort of Rick in Casablanca character, a friend to everyone. As such you have to love Ben Gazzara, who infuses the character with warmth, melancholy, weariness, humour - he worked on the script with Peter out in Singapore, where they made friends with several prostitutes who became extras, and the money they earned allowed them to escape home.

It was also lovely to see one of his great films with the added treat that he himself plays a significant role in it - let's not forget Peter was initially an actor, and remained - if I may say so - a rather good one.

Denholm Elliott is marvellous as an accountant who Ben befriends - at the end you're left wondering whether that friendship was more significant than even the man's marriage (it's a subtle screenplay, derived from Paul Theroux's novel, which Ben and Peter rewrote substantially when on location).

With James Villiers, Joss Ackland, Rodney Bewes, Mark Kingston (a disreputable bunch of ex-pat Brits if ever I saw one), Lisa Lu (briefly, from The Arch - she's also an associate producer), Monika Subramaniam, Judy Lim, George Lazenby.

Nimbly photographed by Robby Müller.

Peter's thrillery scenes are as well done as his comedy.

Warning: features sinister, high-waisted Chinese types.

The Spirit of St Louis (1957 Billy Wilder & co-scr)

Billy and Wendell Mayes don't allow us to get bogged down in Lindbergh's 30+ hour flight by flashing back to his earlier life, including his days as a stunt flyer and mail pilot. And there's these great little touches, like the woman (Patricia Smith) who provides the mirror (and the handy way Wilder uses this to show the audience the essential aircraft workings) and the St Christopher that is dropped into his sandwiches. It's a (another) great performance from Jimmy Stewart - note his exhausted, bewildered response at the end as he's dragged from his beloved aircraft at the end by a cheering French horde (anyone who's ever been on a long car journey will know that feeling of bonding with the machine that got you there).

Wilder wanted to use a true story he'd heard that Lindbergh has a night of passion with a waitress before the flight took off; and then on a Fifth Avenue parade at the end, the girl is there waving at him, but he doesn't notice her. But Lindbergh would have none of that, nothing about his personal life, just the flight itself. Which is perhaps why the film, inventive as it might be, cannot disguise the fact that it's a little anodyne with regards to the man himself.

The film benefits from a fine Franz Waxman score. Photographed in CinemaScope by Robert Burks and J Peverell Marley, Arthur Schmidt the editor, the indispensable Doane Harrison a 'production associate'. Produced by Warner Bros.

The Favourite (2018 Yorgos Lanthimos)

Written by Deborah Davis, and Tony McNamara, who went on to write The Great in a similar vein, as well as the underwhelming Cruella. A fabulous female trio of Olivia Colmans (winning the Oscar), Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz (really good) lead this rude and funny look at court life in eighteenth century Britain, accompanied by music of the period (Handel, Purcell, Bach etc.) which fits really well. It's splendidly photographed by Robbie Ryan in what looks like natural light - but why use these really wide fish-eye lenses? It's pointless and distracting, and I have to say that again I don't really understand the point of Mr. Lanthimos's film, with its strangely inconclusive ending. Is it about power?

Edited by Yorgos Mavropsaridis. With Nicholas Hoult, Mark Gatiss, James Smith, Faye Daveney.

The Seven Year Itch (1955 Billy Wilder & co-scr)

With George Axelrod (How To Murder Your Wife, The Manchurian Candidate, Breakfast at Tiffany's), based on his play. Wilder wanted Matthau as the lead - Fox wouldn't risk it. Tom Ewell is the married book publisher with the over-active imagination. I think Billy wanted a sign that they had indeed slept together but either the studio or the censor wouldn't allow it - his films were constantly being thwarted in this way.

It's not just the Rachmaninoff that this film has in common with Brief Encounter - the fades into the fantasy scenes are done in a similarly creative way. Photographed by Milton Krasner in CinemaScope.

Q wanted a Billy Wilder weekend - and why not? This one we hadn't seen in ages. Billy and his co-writers adapted material from all sorts of sources especially plays (they had the structure built in) but of them all this is the most play-like, I guess because it's mainly set in one apartment - and for that reason, well no, not for that reason - The Man Who Came To Dinner is set almost entirely in the house, yet that doesn't suffer as being too 'play like'. Why?

With Evelyn Keyes, Sonny Tufts, Robert Strauss, Oscar Homolka. Music by Alfred Newman, Doane Harrison an associate producer, Hugh Fowler the editor.

A Taste of Honey (1961 Tony Richardson & co-scr)

From Sheelagh Delaney's play. You only have to look at the opening netball scene to see how good Tony Gibbs was already. He has this incisive way of cutting dialogue scenes too.

Rita Tushingham is very wonderful as the young woman, though Dora Bryan deserves credit also as her terrible mother. With Robert Stephens, Murray Melvin, Paul Danquah.

Music by John Addison, photographed in natural light by Walter Lassally with Desmond Davis as the operator and Manny Wynn as the (uncredited) focus puller - cut to The Uncle. A Woodfall film.

Literally a Kitchen Sink drama

Davis said that Lassally once lit a scene by screwing a Photokem light bulb in to an overhead light fitting and saying 'We're ready!'

The Major and the Minor (1943 Billy Wilder & co-scr)

There's something very risqué about this film, in which Ginger Rogers plays a twelve year old, particularly in early, delicious scenes on train with Ray Milland. I love that when she meets Diana Lynn the latter immediately bursts her bubble by saying 'You're not twelve - and why are you talking like you're six?' 

Then, when she's playing her mother (who is in fact her real mother Lela Rogers), it's head-spinningly trippy. (She then - at the movie's finale - plays herself for the one and only time.)

It's a wonderful debut. Ginger agreed to it after winning her Oscar for Kitty Foyle and then had a nickname for Wilder 'MFD' ('My Favorite Director').

Shot by Leo Tover, edited by Doane Harrison.

With Rita Johnson, Robert Benchley.

The Curse - Season 2 (2023)

Our hapless band of criminals are now in Spain, of course (it's the 1980s), but also turn to Pablo Escobar to trade gold for cocaine - really? Relentless cop Paul Kaye is after them.

Tom Davis, Allan Mustafa, Hugo Chegwin, Steve Stamp, Emer Kenny.

Avanti (1972 Billy Wilder & co-scr)

I was marvelling at the long takes between Lemmon and Juliet Mills, who I am determined we should interview about her great performance - for example at dinner on terrace of Grand Hotel Excelsior, and basking like seals on the rock - she easily holding her own alongside the great Lemmon.

"Then you will have to pay for the road sign he knocked down - Bad Curve Ahead."

Talking of food, didn't think much of Willie and Kate's dinner choices, drink or food - we certainly wouldn't have ordered gnocchi or ravioli and as for the duck - surely the Catch of the Day would have been the wisest option. OK to the Biancolella, though.

More screen shots ahead:    

'Pop!'

I just love the way the Maitre D' Guidarino Guidi offers to take the apple away and have it 'peeeeled'.

The Uncle (1964 Desmond Davis & co-scr)

My childhood was slightly later then this, but everything seems horribly familiar - I could even smell what the sweet shop was like - both in the environment and the feelings evoked.

I don't know who Davis is, but his film deserves an honourable place with those other venerated films about the internal world of children - Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive, Dotora Kedzierzawka's Crows, Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups and Robert Mulligan's To Kill a Mockingbird.

Displaying signs of the French New Wave, this distinctly British film tells of a seven year old boy and episodes over a summer with his same-aged nephew, who is a pain in the ass, and other local kids. The story, by Margaret Abrams from her novel, screenplay written by her and the director, doesn't go where you frequently think it might.

Very well directed, the kids are great. Not heard of any of sterling cast and crew. Robert Duncan superb as the boy. With Brenda Bruce as the mother (one of Peeping Tom's victims), Rupert Davies the father, Ann Lynn the boy's sister and William Marlowe her husband, Maurice Denham the friendly shop-owner and Helen Fraser (Repulsion, Billy Liar) his daughter, Christopher Ariss the nephew and Barbara Leake the cleaning lady.

Beautifully shot by Manny Wynn (primarily a focus puller on films like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and A Taste of Honey, both for Walter Lassally) in black and white, and brilliantly edited by Brian Smedley-Aston, using tricks like comic book inserts, titles over action and displaced background sound (credited as an editor on Performance, no less). As for John Addison's music score fitting the action, I have only one word: perfect.

Among many beautiful shots I loved the boy being dropped off and the camera zooms back revealing him to be in the corner of a deserted road - a lovely way of showing not telling and a really good use of the over-used zoom.

Davis directed the 1964 Girl with Green Eyes with Rita Tushingham and Peter Finch, was a camera operator, and worked on the same two Lassally pictures referred to above, as well as Tom Jones, on which Wynn shot the second unit. Davis also made I Was Happy Here with Sarah Miles and Cyril Cusack in 1966, then directed much British TV, as well as the feature Clash of the Titans!

I'd never even heard of it. It was great.

Somewhere In Time (1980 Jeannot Szwarc)

1980 (and 1912). We're back in Mackinac Island again. Richard Matheson's novel 'Bid Time Return' was adapted by himself. It's a mysterious, romantic and silly film, after which it's finished you can't help but say 'Aaahhh' like an idiot.

I wondered how Isidore Mankofsky managed to get that saturated look in the flashbacks - perhaps with a filter? I'm cooking on gas today.

John Barry's score is appropriately lush for lush couple Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeves. Didn't really understand Christopher Plummer's behaviour.

Lovely to see Teresa Wright in later, albeit brief, role. Bill Erwin is the eternal bellhop, small roles since 1941. Universal.

Derek Malcolm

17 July 2023, aged 91. 'Derek Malcom's Personal Best - A Century of Films' is a great read. Loved, for example, the revelation that Satyajit Ray kept all the awards he'd won under his bed! And that Malcolm could feature films by Cocteau, Tarkovsky et al alongside the porn film Behind the Green Door (no doubt just to stir up feeling).

He seemed fair, and clearly got to know well some of his subjects, which I think is pretty essential when in this sort of role. An advocate too, for a long time, of World Cinema.

Wish I Was Here (2014 Zach Braff & co-scr)

Cowritten with his brother Adam, and starring Zach himself as failing husband who won't contribute to family life, preferring to pursue dream as actor; meanwhile poor wife Kate Hudson is stuck in a job she hates, and Zach's father (Mandy Patinkin) is a judgmental, but dying, Jew. The kids are Joey King and Pierce Gagnon, Alexander Chaplin the nice rabbi, Josh Gad the brother, Jim Parsons fellow actor.

It's good. Nicely shot by Laurence Sher.

The Sixth Commandment (2023 Writer Sarah Phelps)

I know - the dreaded Phelps. True story over four hours about evil man, Adrian Rawlins, who inveigles his way into life of gay, sweet Tim Spall, then poisons and kills him, and then Anne Reid, to whom he tries to do the same (she dies). Luckily her daughter Annabel Scholey (also The Salisbury Poisonings - she's getting typecast!) becomes suspicious, alerts copper Jonathan Arris. With Conor MacNeill (Belfast, No Offence) as the killer's suckered accomplice, Sheila Hancock.

It's as much fun as it sounds.

The Big Picture (1989 Christopher Guest)

Unconfidently directed movie business satire, with Kevin Bacon as novice in Hollywood who loses his head at once, pursues the Wrong Woman, betrays his best friend and trades his cute 1954 Nash Metropolitan for a Porsche. 

With a rather uncontrolled Martin Short, JT Walsh, Emily Longstreth, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Teri Hatcher. It's OK. With that telling credit 'Screenplay by Michael Varhol & Christopher Guest & Michael McKean'. I was kinder to it here.

What's the best bit? There isn't one! Hahahahahahahahaha...... No - it's the terribly made courtroom drama clip shown as one of the award nominees right at the front.

That's probably enough films-about-films for now.

Dolores Claiborne (1995 Taylor Hackford)

A Stephen King novel adapted by Tony Gilroy, with Kathy Bates and Jennifer Jason Leigh as her estranged daughter, who's not been back to Maine (actually Nova Scotia) in fifteen years. And we find out why. These two, and David Strathairn and Judy Parfitt, are great. Christopher Plummer and John C Reilly represent law and order, and we must mention Ellen Muth as young Jennifer. There's a reference to Shawshank Prison, and fittingly Bob Gunton (the governor) turns up as a bank manager. (It's a Castle Rock production.)

A cunningly laid out film, with good transitions to flashback via cool blue into full colour. DP Gabriel Beristain certainly likes his clouds (as do I) and stuff. Very enjoyable.

It's one of Leigh's more controlled performances, thus one of her best.

The music's by Danny Elfman. Mark Warner is the editor.

Beristain's Mexican. Funnily enough, one of his first films was Jarman's Caravaggio; latterly Magic City.

Treasure Island (1972 John Hough, Andrea Bianchi, Antonio Margheriti)

Welles had written the script and tried to get the film made as far back as 1965. Here the adaptation is credited to him as 'O.W. Jeeves' (perhaps as a reference to W.C. Fields writing as 'Mahatma Kane Jeeves', which he did partly in reference to Welles) and Wolf Mankovitz, screenplay by Hubert Frank, Antonio Margheriti and Bautista de la Calle (it was an English-Italian-French coproduction).

Apparently some copies don't have Welles' own voice - I did wonder at this one, shown by TPTV.

It's not a bad version, with Kim Burfield as Jim Hawkins, quite full-bodied, but with unconvincing acting and dated direction. With Lionel Stander, Walter Slezak (Lifeboat), Angel del Pozo.

That's apparently Welles' own parrot and monkey.

We saw another film that was cropped to 4x3 in two days - not good enough!

Both the 1934 and 1950 versions are better, apparently. Though I've a feeling neither probably catches the horror and excitement of Stevenson's novel.

As Good As It Gets (1997 James L Brooks & co-scr, prod)

 Mark Andrus story / co-writer.

"Where did they teach you to talk like this, in some Panama City sailor hump hump bar, or is this getaway day on your last shot of his whisky? Sell crazy some place else - we're all stocked up here."

This is Todd Solondz, one of three director cameos (the other being Laurence Kasdan and Harold Ramis)

Mistress (1992 Barry Primus & co-scr)

 ..with JF Lawton. I think our print is cropped to 4x3. Who is Barry primus? He's an actor, in The Irishman, Joy. Who's Robert Wuhl? He's sort of Albert Brookish, in Good Morning Vietnam and 80s films.

A failed producer (Martin Landau, excellent as ever) tries to get financing for Wuhl's screenplay, enlists help of clock retailer Eli Wallach and his girlfriend Tuesday Knight, Danny Aiello and his girlfriend Jean Smart, and entrepreneur Robert de Niro (good) and his girlfriend Sheryl Lee Ralph (feisty). It's quite fun but descends into something of a mess. With Jace Alexander and Laurie Metcalf. And Christopher Walken.

Edited by Steven Weisberg.

The movie he keeps watching is Renoir's  La Grande Illusion