Three Films Make A Post: Where the cashiers have no name

Supermarkt aka Supermarket (1974): If you know German director Roland Klick mostly for his psychedelic noir western Deadlock or his Dennis Hopper coke freak-out White Star, you’ll be in a for a whole world of pain in the form of an hour of very earnest Hamburg-set naturalism pasted onto the beginning of a pretty great, naturalist, heist film. Needless to say, simple guy as I am, I don’t appreciate this approach much.

However, it’s not that Klick isn’t good at the earnest naturalism bit – one could imagine him going on to become a German Ken Loach figure in a more interesting German cinema – the problem is all mine. I just find earnest naturalism the least interesting mode for a fictional narrative possible and have never seen the point to it. Surely,if you want to go for straightforward representation of the world as it is, why not make a reportage or a documentary? Hell, I might even praise you for that one (if only with backhanded remarks that I prefer Herzog style documentaries all about poetic truth, of course). As it stands, this just isn’t a film for me.

Only the River Flows aka He bian de cuo wu (2023): Speaking of films that aren’t for me, this arthouse crime drama for the Cannes crowd by Wei Shujun suffers from what I see as a weakness of most of the minor wave of mainland Chinese arthouse noir cop films of this style: an attempt to make genre films so critical of their genre they go out of their way to extract all joy and excitement from it. No thrills in our serial killer thriller, sir! No excitement to finding the killer! Hell, not actually finding the killer clearly is the way to go.

This particular example of the form eventually descends into a vague kind of surrealism, akin to Lynch without a sense of humour or a heart (so not very much like Lynch at all), without the power to actually make its surrealism feel like anything of substance or with a point; indeed, things are so opaque in the end, I have no idea why the film exists at all.

Admittedly, it is very well shot, and decrepit 90s China is evoked just as well – I don’t have any idea why, though.

Fantomas (1947): This second attempt to drag Fantomas into the sound film era after one in 1932, as directed by Jean Sacha, certainly has no ambitions at being anything more than a potboiler.

As such, it has decent entertainment value eighty years later: there are a handful of nice, mad science-y sets, some of the action is staged on a more than decent level, and after pacing issues early on, things zip along nicely, and mindlessly. The whole affair suffers from a very flat Fantomas performance by Marcel Herrand, but kinda makes up for it with a very young Simone Signoret running circles around every other actor as the villain’s virtuous daughter Hélène.

In an uncommon move for 1947, Hélène is a rather competent heroine who even takes part in the physical parts of the plot, which obviously is the sort of thing I like in my pulpy nonsense films.

Three Films Make A Post: The Strangest Girl-Hunt A Man Ever Went On!

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017): Following the Andrew Garfield movies Jon Watts’s new Spider-Man version is a little wonder, what with it being a film that actually has a concept what its hero is about, with a plot that knows what it is about, a proper villain in Michael Keaton’s working class version of the Vulture, and a good grip on the idea of a teenage superhero. It’s more than just a bonus that lead Tom Holland – despite being 20 – as well as the script actually sell Peter Parker as a teenager this time around, and that Watts’s direction is just as showy as needed, no more, no less. The integration into the Marvel mainline universe works well, too. Why, unlike with the last two Spider-Man films, this one feels as if it was made by people who actually care about the character and what he means. Personal bonus points for this not being another origin tale.

Casque d’Or (1952): Jacques Becker’s tale of crime and heated romantic passions taking place in the underbelly of Belle Epoque Paris is one of those films that pop up in most lists of “the greatest films of all time”, and it’s not difficult to understand why, for this is one of these note perfect films high brow, mid brow and low brow viewers should all get something out of, be it its portrayal of romantic passion, the way Becker creates a criminal underworld that at once feels romantically-stylized and real, or how the film posits ritualized male violence as the true cock blocker of the ages. While the director’s at it, he also creates a film that feels like the sort of proper tragedy art for a long time didn’t allow us of the lower classes to take part in as anything but servants and comic relief.


Rebirth of Mothra aka Mosura (1996): After they had sewed up the Heisei cycle of Godzilla movies, Toho went about reviving kaiju fans’ favourite giant moth. Directed by Okihiro Yoneda, this is very much an attempt to make a Mothra film as a Japanese interpretation of a Spielberg-style family movie. Consequently, it is at times kitschy and cloying, and at other times perfectly okay with having its kid (and fairy) protagonists deal with pretty heavy problems. I could have lived rather well without some of the comedic bits here, but the monster fights are tight, and it’s impossible to be too down on a film whose main villain is a tiny fairy goth riding an adorable miniature dragon.

The Deadly Affair (1966)

Shortly after intelligence officer Charles Dobbs (James Mason) interviews civil servant Samuel Fennan (Robert Flemyng) because of anonymous letters hinting at least at communist sympathies, Fennan commits suicide, supposedly driven by his talk with Dobbs. The thing is, though, Dobbs was quite convinced Fennan was perfectly innocent on anything beyond having ideals, and told him he was cleared of any suspicion of being a spy.

Dobbs is also less than happy to find his boss, The Adviser (Max Adrian), and the rest of the intelligence community all too willing to write the situation off as a suicide for which he is somewhat responsible. Particularly when Dobbs finds certain things about Fennan’s suicide as well as the behaviour of the man’s wife Elsa (Simone Signoret) do not add up as they should. Dobbs is so angry about the whole situation he even decides to step down from his position completely. At least, until he has investigated the suicide to his own satisfaction. With the help of retired copper Mendek (Harry Andrews) and his now former colleague Billy Appleby (Kenneth Haigh), Dobbs does stumble upon rather interesting facts, even while he’s living through another crisis in the marriage to his wife Ann (Harriet Andersson).

Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair is actually an adaptation of John Le Carré’s first George Smiley novel, Call for the Dead. Lumet couldn’t use the Smiley character name because Le Carré sold it off together with the rights to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which only goes to show that copyright can get pretty bizarre. At least we got some fine films out of the situation.

Tonally, the film still is very much a Le Carré adaptation, with all the sadness, the guilt, and betrayal that suggests. Smiley/Dobbs as performed by James Mason is clearly a man who has seen and done too much already to should have any illusions left about life but who is still trying to cling to a concept of human decency, in his business life as well as in a marriage that has become painful both him and Ann for reasons they both don’t really have control over.

In fact, the film is very good at not seeking any guilty party in the rather messed-up marriage but treats Dobbs’s and Ann’s respective helplessness with compassion. As it also does treat most of its other characters, all the betrayals and hurts and crimes notwithstanding. As always in Le Carré’s world, there are possibly moral and emotional grounds worth defending, yet his characters have lost any idea of moral certainty long ago, the best of them – like Dobbs – demonstrating a tired and sad way to go about the things that they think they have to do, even if they aren’t even sure why anymore.

Lumet films this in his concentrated mode (except for one or two lame jokes I could have lived without), keeping the camera and his eye close on the actors, while subtly supporting them without showing off. The cast is rather perfect for this approach too, full as it is of middle-aged and aging men and women who all look as if life had battered them in one way or another. In some cases, this is the consequence of some really fine acting, while in other’s, like Simone Signoret’s, the role and the actor’s actual state of mind seem to be rather close; perhaps even too close for comfort. While some of the actors may be tired, their performance aren’t, though.

What The Deadly Affair isn’t – of course, given the material it is based on, but people sometimes go into films with strange expectations – is much of a spy thriller of the more outwardly exciting kind. While the film’s two action scenes are staged by Lumet with perfect and appropriate ruthlessness, this isn’t a film whose spy story is meant to provide surface thrills as much as it is meant to enable a better look at life and what it does to some people.

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