keithhmessenger

That this highly complex 'who's fitting up who' 1957 British film should have been written by detective/crime writer Francis Durbridge does not come as a great surprise - that it was directed by soon-to-be 'king of the Carry Ons', Gerald Thomas, as his third big screen feature and delivered with some aplomb, is however something of a revelation. To be honest, I watched the first 30 minutes or so of Thomas' film with a mix of dumbfounded amazement and a (somewhat dismissive) feeling of being led on as John Mills' doctor, Howard Latimer, is subjected to a living nightmare of unexplained coincidences and 'garden path wanderings', amounting to one of the most convoluted 'fittings up' I have witnessed on the big (or, indeed, little) screen.

However, I was pleased I didn't switch off, since Messrs. Durbridge and Thomas (eventually) do a highly respectable job of explaining the unexplainable and elucidating that the various inconvenient murders, impersonated phone-calls, fake diary appointments, police miraculously appearing at the door at just the right (or, more probably, wrong) moment, etc, are all part of the murky underworld of a passport forging/drugs-related scam. Along the way, as well as one or two rather stilted performances from some of the peripheral characters, we are treated to plenty of fine acting turns - not least by Mills as the troubled, but stoic, Latimer, Derek Farr as Latimer's chummy and (erstwhile) trusted ex-college friend, Kenneth Palmer, Roland Culver as the omnipresent, meticulous Inspector Dane, Wilfred Hyde-White as Latimer's mysterious 'friend', Brady, Mervyn Johns as Latimer's ensnared fellow doctor, George Kimber and (the ever reliable) Lionel Jeffries as the slippery 'journalist', Geoffrey Windsor.

Thomas' film also has a nicely nostalgic look and feel - its fast pacing and sense of suspense reminding me a little of Basil Dearden's 1961 film Victim - with Otto Heller's cinematography mixing claustrophobic moments for Latimer, with some nostalgic 50s shots of London and its environs (Royal Festival Hall, Cleopatra's Needle, London Zoo, London (Heathrow) Airport, etc) and accompanied by Stanley Black's rousing (at times, a little too rousing) score. Not a classic, therefore, but worth seeing for some impressive acting and (for anyone with a taste for complex 'whodunnits') its suspenseful plotting.

Phew! That's a significant undertaking, sitting through all 3½ hours of Martin Scorsese's epic film based on the real-life exploits of Philadelphia 'Irishman', gangster and middle-man, Robert de Niro's Frank Sheeran, but it really is required viewing for all Scorsese fans. With its basis in fact, the obvious comparator in the Scorsese oeuvre is 1990's Goodfellas, but The Irishman is slower, longer(!), more contemplative (and hence intimate) and with a greater focus on ageing and mortality (covering the period from the 1950s to the turn of the century). There is also a feeling that with Sheeran's seeming inability (as opposed to unwillingness) to really face up to the consequences of his actions, Scorsese is very deliberately not (by any conceivable notion) letting his protagonist off the hook. De Niro's character's middle-man role sees him coming between Joe Pesci's 'middle-ranking' mobster, Russell Bufalino, and Al Pacino's powerful union man (with whom the mob have 'financial dealings'), Jimmy Hoffa, and it is this three way tussle, essentially for loyalty, which sits at the heart of The Irishman. Of course, it being a mega-Hollywood Scorsese film, The Irishman's production values are second to none, with stunning production and costume design (the latter by Sandy Powell), plus cinematography (including a revolutionary de-ageing process, which I found to be hardly noticeable) by Rodrigo Prieto. Robbie Robertson's original score also impresses as does his choice of period soundtrack (which memorably includes songs like The Five Satins' In The Still Of The Night and Smiley Lewis' I Hear You Knockin').

Given the film's main subject matter, the focus is necessarily on the male of the species, but family loyalty, as expected, comes high on the priority list for Scorsese's protagonists. One of film's most memorable threads concerns Sheeran's daughter (one of four), Peggy - played impressively as a young girl by Lucy Gallina and as a young woman by Anna Paquin - who has some form of (female) intuition around her father's activities, staring, ominously mute, at Sheeran when some unexplained (obviously mob) murder is reported on the TV news. Peggy's closeness to Hoffa also presents another torturous dilemma for Sheeran, when Russell's superiors deem Hoffa has defied them once too often, ultimately leading to one of the film's most powerful scenes with Sheeran needing to phone Hoffa's wife to reassure her (which he is essentially, physically, incapable of doing) around her husband's disappearance. The film's mood and pace is slow, interspersed with bouts of violence, with the narrative related in flashback by the elderly Sheeran from his care home residence - a mood which lends itself, particularly via Pesci's Bufalino, to a matter-of-fact treatment of the pair's 'trade', with time spent celebrating culinary prowess, as well as Scorsese peppering the film with a number of idiosyncratically comedic scenes, based on trivial matters (wives taking smoking breaks, turning up late for meetings, not wearing 'proper' meeting attire, the man with the big ears, a dislike of booze and watermelon, buying fish, etc.). Reminding us, also matter-of-factly, of the true consequences of the lives lived in this world, though, we get, on the introduction of a new character, the insertion of screen titles indicating how they met their, invariably grisly, end. There are also one or two references back to Scorsese's earlier films, probably most notably (à la Taxi Driver) the scene where Frank is choosing a weapon from a selection spread out on a bed.

Acting-wise, again, as you would expect with this brand of Scorsese film and the talent on show, the film pretty much uniformly impresses. I can't remember seeing a recent film (even a shorter one!) with such a single, repeated and prolonged, focus on a single protagonist's visage, as here with De Niro's, often nonplussed, expression, seemingly disguising his internal agonising (or just perhaps, his inability in making a moral judgement) - whatever, it is De Niro at his conflicted best. Pesci is equally good, the more animated Pacino perhaps a little less so, whilst there are also impressive cameos by Harvey Keitel, Bobby Cannavale and Domenick Lombardozzi, the latter as the Mr Big, Fat Tony Salerno. There is even a cameo for Bruce Springsteen sideman Steve Van Zandt as crooner Jerry Vale.

Despite the film's length and its relatively slow pace, due to Scorsese's superlative mise-en-scène, particularly the look of the film and its editing, it never really drags. If it was to be pruned anywhere it should probably be during some of the more extended Hoffa union/political sequences, even if this backdrop (the Kennedys, Cuba, etc.) is an important context for some of the character inter-relationships. The final half hour or so, where Sheeran gets closer and closer to his own mortality represents some of Scorsese's finest career moments. After just a couple of viewings, I wouldn't place the film quite on a par with Goodfellas or with something like Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In America, but The Irishman still represents a fitting (near?) culmination in the career of one of America's finest film-makers.

Director and co-writer Theodore Melfi's 2016 film, which is (loosely) based on the book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly, covering the work of three black American mathematician women for the embryonic NASA as part of the 1950/60s space race, is both a highly entertaining and enlightening watch. I, for one, had no prior knowledge of the trio's accomplishments and, even if the filmmakers have used creative licence in some of the dramatic detail here ('based on true events' is the film's 'get out'), the very fact of the women's contributions in such a period of landmark scientific achievement and that this occurred during a period of widespread racial segregation in the country is undeniable. Each of the three main actresses Taraji P Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae as, respectively, Katharine Goble Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson acquit themselves well, as does the ever-reliable Kevin Kostner as determined, uncompromising (fictional) head of the Space Task Group, Al Harrison.

The film portrays a convincing backdrop to the (apparent) urgency of America's need to compete successfully with the USSR to put the first man in space (and, of course, thereafter on the moon) and the high levels of security and confidentiality that go with such government imperatives. The film touches on themes of sexual politics, for example as Katharine dismisses military officer Jim Johnson's (played by Mahershala Ali) surprise that a woman might be doing a key job in government science, and this element is interwoven with the career progression difficulties that the trio of women experience in respect of their colour ('that's just the way it is', is the film's oft-repeated 'mantra'). Another positive for the film is its soundtrack with many songs written by Pharrell Williams to reflect a 1960s soul style.

The film's narrative arc very much follows the Hollywood template and does overdo the sentimentality at times. Nevertheless, for bringing its important historical observations to a wider audience I have upped its rating by a star.