M*A*S*H (1970 Robert Altman)

Scr Richard Hooker (& novel), Ring Lardner Jr.

Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt, Sally Kellerman, Robert Duvall, Roger Bowen (Colonel), Gary Burghoff (Radar), Micahel Murphy, Jo Ann Pflug, Bud Cort.

Ph. Harold E Stine, Panavision.

Another film Q didn't want to watch then thoroughly enjoyed. Radar stealing Colonel's blood; dog in Sugar Lips line-up; Keystone Cop moments; overlapping dialogue; frequently pointless PA system; completely useless priest.

Kinamand / Chinaman (2005 Henrik Ruben Genz)

Bjarne Henriksen, Vivian Wu (The Last Emperor, many others). Linkun Wu (working as a bus driver when cast fo this, his first film).

Scr. Kim Fupz Aakeson.

Maybe a shade too gentle and slight. But fun. The first Chinese-Finnish co-production.

Une Femme Infidèle (1969 Claude Chabrol & scr)

Stephane Audran, Michel Bouquet (an unforgettable performance), Maurice Ronet.

Beautifully simple.

Loved the giant Zippo!

Ph. Jean Rabier

 

Sophie's Choice (1982 Alan J Pakula & scr)

Meryl Streep (AA), Kevin Kline, Peter MacNichol.

Ph. Nestor Almendros.

It wasn't all depressing, contrary to urban myth.

Oh, Mr. Porter (1937 Marcel Varnee)

Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat were writers.

Will Hay, Moore Marriott, Graham Moffat (the three often appeared together; Moffat is the 'Seven Sisters sergeant' in Canterbury Tale.)

Funny gags at outset not sustained ('What happened to him?' 'I don't know, but I remember we sent a wreath') but good windmill and train chase scenes.

Ph. Arthur Crabtree.

The Poseiden Adventure (1972 Ronald Neame)

Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Stella Stevens (his wife), Red Buttons, Roddy McDowell, Shelly Winters, Jack Albertson (her husband), Pamela Sue Martin, Eric Shea (her brother), Carol Lynley (the singer), Leslie Nielsen (difficult now to take seriously in anything).

I though the other preacher looked familiar - Arthur O'Connell from Anatomy of a Murder, written by Wendell Mayes, who also wrote this (with Sterling Silliphant). Music John Willimas.

It was more tragic than I remembered. And, therefore, not as much fun. The lengths some filmmakers will go to show off girls' legs...

Le Feu Follet (1963 Louis Malle)

Maurice Ronet kills himself.

Malle doing Bresson before Bresson.

Volker Scholdorff is assistant director.

Zazie Dans le Métro (1960 Louis Malle & co-scr)

Catherine Demongeot, Phillipe Noiret, Hubert Deschamps, the striking-looking Carla Marlier.

It's as though Malle saw what the New Wave were doing (referenced in the film), then threw away the rule book. The dazzling tricks and colour (ph. Henri Raichi) seem to have influenced Amelie, or closer in time, Dick Lester's Beatles films and the swinging sixties, though the hilarious chase sequence is pure Warner Bros. cartoon. Zazie's coarse language also makes us think of Paper Moon.

But it's all too much - needs a chill-out section, which it nears in a night scene with a great jazz-pop score - and the end punch-up in the restaurant is just silly (though even here there's a very Godardy device of background images being bigger than the foreground). The scenes atop the Eiffel Tower are terrifying.

Richard Ayowade reckons he watches this film once a month.

12:01 (1993 Jack Sholder)

Richard Lupoff's story was first published in 1973 and filmed as a short by Jonathan Heap in 1990.

Lupoff and Heap were 'outraged' by Groundhog Day but no legal action was taken (presumably a David and Goliath scenario would have ensued).

Jonathan Silverman, Helen Slater, Martin Landau, Jeremy Piven.

Beggars of Life (1928 William Wellman)

If you screw your eyes up and peer hard into the screen you can just about make out the faces of Louise Brooks, Richard Arlen and Wallace Beery in the tinted murk of my copy of the ultra-rare Beggars of Life. After a while, the totally unsynced classical music background (Swan lake, most inappropriately) is so distracting it's better to watch with the sound of birds in our garden instead. Funnily enough, it's playing at the BFI next month, having been restored by George Eastman House, with the Dodge Brothers playing the music.

Anyway, I managed to pick out enough film to realise it's brisk and modern. Lulu's story is told with no titles, and of course all eyes are on her, until Beery turns up behind a case of XXX moonshine, larger than the other beggars, and following a hilariously worded kangaroo court, decides to make Lulu his 'ward', a tight corner she manages to sly her way out of. There are some thrilling scenes with trains, looking uncomfortably real.

The source was Jim Tully's 1924 'hobo autobiography'.

Valerie a Týden Divu / Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970 Jaromil Jires)

About as close to a dream as you can get, whilst remarkably holding the attention, and quite unlike anything I've seen, inspiring thoughts of Cocteau, Borowczyk and Rollin. Film writer Michael Brooke usefully introduces us to poetist author Vitezlav Nezval, inspired by Gothic literature and dream theory, and film collaborator and writer Ester Krumbachova (you start sounding very intelligent rolling names like this off the tongue), and argues that the film is not strictly surrealist and it's not 'continually trying to subvert a world view'. He also points to the influence on Angela Carter's 'Company of Wolves'.

The kaleidoscope of dream / flawed logic ('I've never had a girlfriend before'), startling imagery (birds, weasels, fire, horses), characters whose identities constantly change, shifts of mood, the familiar in the bizarre, are stunningly shot by Jan Curik and scored by Lubos Fiser. The flashes of nude grapplings are not as erotic as claimed and seeing as Jaroslava Schallerová actually was thirteen at the time, it's probably just as well.

An Education (2009 Lone Scherfig)

Carey Mulligan (BAFTA), Peter Sarsgaard (what a shit!), Alfred Molina, Olivia Williams (teacher), Rosamund Pike (her face of boredom in classical concert is brilliant), Dominic Cooper, Cara Seymour (mother), Emma Thompson.

scr Nick Hornby from Lynne Barber memoir
Ph. John de Borman

49th Parallel (1941 Michael Powell)

I really don't know where Powell was going with this one: where's the great talent he supposedly surrounds himself with? In this paltry assemblage, he finds Oscar-winning Pressburger, David Lean as editor, Frederick Young on camera and some dude named Vaughan Williams composing, and could then only find the likes of Olivier, Leslie Howard, Eric Portman, Anton Walbrook and Raymond Massey to act in it.

The German U-Boat crew are memorably nasty, except of course for nice Raymond Lovell, who's shot for wanting to be a baker. Damn those Nazis!

Une Femme Douce (1969 Robert Bresson)

After Une Femme Douce was over Q asked me if it was good, and I said "I don't know"... It has an astonishing opening and its treatment of the relationship of Dominique Sanda and Guy Franqin is typically lean and Bressonian. It's one of his 'lucid' films, his first in colour (Ghislain Cloquet again), and very hard to get hold of, even in France.

Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud / Lift to the Scaffold (1958 Louis Malle)

Existential 1950s night-time Paris, with Miles Davis score and even Lino Ventura: does Sunday morning get any better? Malle's debut followed a stint on A Man Escaped, cueing priosony lift sequences (Bresson, with Renoir, Malle's heroes) and sort of Hitchcocky too. Henri Decae's naturalistic photography highly influential to nouvelle vague, of which Malle was not a part.

The Hills of Home (1948 Fred M Wilcox)

Edmund Gwenn, Donald Crisp, a wooden Tom Drake, Janet Leigh.

Ph. Charles Shoenbaum

Lassie doesn't like water, gets chloroformed in very washed out Channel 4 print.

Emotional. Not sure if we'd seen it before.

Tristana (1970 Luis Buñuel)

Hitchcock apparently loved Tristana and told Buñuel as much over dinner at Cukor's. I bet he coveted Catherine Deneuve's cool blondness and I think he probably relished the protagonist losing her leg. An intriguing beginning (a silent football match) and ending (fast rewind to the start), both to the sound of the sea; a quick dream sequence; even as a teenager I was underwhelmed by Buñuel's 'surrealism'. I find him more of a sardonic observer of people's strange behaviour. Still, Powell ('I defer only to Buñuel'). So probably one to watch again a few times. Filmed in Buñuel's beloved Toledo.

Gone With the Wind (1939 Victor Fleming)

Also directed by Sam Wood and George Cukor. Amongst many Oscars were film and screenplay (Sidney Howard, from Margaret Mitchell's bestseller), for Vivian Leigh and Hattie McDaniel, and an honorary award to William Cameron Menzies 'for outstanding achievement in the use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood' - an odd award considering he was the production designer extraordinaire.

It is Hattie's finest achievement - she was the first black person to be invited to the Oscars, let alone to win one. Her character is actually the strongest in the story.

Noted Harry Davenport as the doctor and Ona Munson as Belle.

According to the ASC, Lee Garmes 'shot a considerable portion...Many consider the famous railyard scene amongst his finest efforts'. At least an hour of the film is his including setting up the tracking shot of the wounded, the Twelve Trees barbecue, the introduction of Rhett, and Scarlett killing the soldier. He was using a new type of film giving a softer look but Selznick wanted 'primary colours' and sacked him, thus credit is given to Ernie Haller and Ray Rennahan.

Despite the enormous budget and attention to detail, we noticed a wonky banister outside one of the houses!

The first Blu-Ray we watched - it was amazing, especially stuff like the burning of Atlanta.

Scenes like this must acknowledge the amazing work of special effects genius Jack Cosgrove

Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff (1931 Erich Engels & Fyodor Otsep)

Not quite what Dave Godin had led me to expect but for its year was a remarkably agile sound film rather contradicting Powell's lament that sound killed the art of the motion picture. I personally couldn't see the influences it might have had on Citizen Kane, which for me is a marvellous box of tricks, and its style seems very Soviet, particularly the dazzling horse chase sequence. Directed by a German and a Russian and featuring Anna Sten. According to Mr. Godin, Bernard Herrmann most admired the film for its creative music score.

Funny Games (1997 Michael Haneke & scr)

Splendidly acted (Arno Frisch manages to be chilling and funny), sly and more accessible than Haneke's other films (we recently caught The White Ribbon where amusingly almost nothing is resolved), Funny Games was thankfully not as upsetting as some fainthearts would have it (Eden Lake was far worse); and it's partly because we're involved in the joke that we're a step removed. But does Haneke's lesson - focusing us to acknowledge our roles as accomplices in screen violence - really make any difference? We have, after all, been participating since the days of Shakespeare and Greek tragedy. He at least agrees with Hitchcock, that the more intelligent the villain, the better the film. And his inspiration - that perpetrators of violent crime can be well-off and unmotivated - is unsettling.

With Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Mühe, Frank Giering.

Ph. Jürgen Jürges