La Dolce Vita (1960)

Everybody knows that La Dolce Vita is Fellini’s masterpiece and one of the greatest movies ever made. But is everybody right about that?

This is a movie that has been so lavishly praised that if you don’t like it you can find yourself doubting your own judgment. It must be a great movie - all those critics and film scholars said so.

One thing that can be said for certain is that this is an incredibly depressing nihilistic movie. 

I’m not surprised that Martin Scorsese loves this movie. He saw when it first came out, at the age of 18. And it’s a movie guaranteed to appeal to teenaged aspiring arty intellectuals.

The plot is just a series of incidents in the life of journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni). He doesn’t really like to think of himself as a journalist. He’s actually a writer of serious literature. As the film progresses we come to suspect this is merely a cope. He doesn’t actually write serious literature. He just talks about writing it. The reality is that he’s just another sleazebag journalist.

Marcello has a girlfriend, Emma (Yvonne Furneaux). He treats her very badly but it has to be said that she’s irritating and whiny and needy and incredibly emotionally manipulative.

His first encounter in the movie is with sexy glamorous Sylvia  Rank (Anita Ekberg). He tries to get her into bed but fails. Being a movie star she might not have high moral standards but she does have enough self-respect not to sleep with sleazy second-rate journalists.

He’s equally unsuccessful with the aristocratic Maddalena (Anouk Aimée). She flirts with him and plays emotional games with him but she’s not going to lower herself to sleeping with him. That would be like sleeping with the gardener or one of the footmen.

We start to suspect that Marcello is not a very successful philanderer. He only seems to score with women with zero self-respect.

He runs into an old friend named Steiner (Alain Cuny). Steiner is an intellectual. He’s as shallow and empty as all the other characters but he can make misery and self-pity sound impressive.

Marcello also encounter the Roman proto-counterculture - pseudo-arty misfits trying to shock the bourgeoisie.

And he visits the countryside where he finds that the peasants are still living in the mental world of the Middle Ages.

The aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the poor, the counter-culture types, the intellectuals  - all stupid and empty-headed. And the journalists and the paparazzi flocking around the rich and famous are the most corrupt and shallow of all.

This was the era of the Italian economic miracle of the 1950s. The economy was booming but Fellini clearly thought that Europe was doomed by rampant materialism and decadence.

La Dolce Vita was considered revolutionary for its lack of interest in any coherent linear narrative. This suited the subject matter - aimless people living in an aimless society, moving fast on a road to nowhere. Unfortunately the movie does not move fast. At almost three hours it is very slow and since every single character is contemptible (either selfish and narcissistic or self-pitying) there’s not much to engage the viewer’s interest. And it’s shot in stark black-and-white. It’s quite an achievement to make one of the world’s most beautiful exciting cities seem ugly and dull but this film manages to do just that. And he makes the picturesque Italian countryside look like a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Anita Ekberg is the one bright spot. She seems to be enjoying herself and her character, Sylvia, might be shallow but she seems almost alive.

And while he might be satirising the shallow hedonistic decadence of the new Europe and he might have been intending to make the decadence seem tawdry and sordid and they might be valid intentions the fact remains that La Dolce Vita is a bit of a slog. There’s also some heavy-handed symbolism.

At the end of the day you have to wonder if the cinematic journey was really worth it. I can see why people were excited by the movie at the time and it is one of those movies that you have to be able to say you’ve seen but it left me cold.

Bluebeard’s Castle (1963)

In 1960 Peeping Tom ended Michael Powell’s career as a film director in Britain. After that he took work where he could get it. Bluebeard’s Castle is a low-budget German TV-movie and in anyone else’s career it would be an oddity. But Powell’s career was full of oddities.

The project was conceived by Norman Foster, who was the producer and star, and production designer Hein Heckroth. Heckroth had worked with Powell and decided he’d be the ideal choice to direct. So this was not a Michael Powell project from the outset.

It was intended for television broadcast but shot in colour so as to allow for a possible theatrical release as well. It was completed and then pretty much sank without trace until its rediscovery in the late 70s.

It’s a filmed version of Bartók’s very obscure 1911 opera.

It is obviously based on the fairy tale.

The libretto by Béla Balázs strips the fairy tale’s plot down to almost nothing. It becomes a psychological exploration.

In the film Bluebeard’s eighth wife Judith arrives at his castle to find that there are seven locked rooms. She insists on having the seven doors opened.

It’s all heavily symbolic. The doors don’t really lead to rooms in the castle, they lead to compartments of Bluebeard’s mind. Judith hopes that she will learn what makes her husband tick. What she finds is lots of darkness. But she finds no explanations. Neither Judith nor the audience has any idea why Bluebeard’s other wives met such unpleasant ends.

In the accompanying interview film critic Ian Christie suggests that it’s all rather Freudian and very very Jungian. It probably is. There are lots of elements that are symbolic of something although I have no idea what. The weaknesses of the film are undoubtedly inherent in Balázs’s libretto so Powell cannot be blamed.

The production design is all full-blown artistic modernism (and artistic modernism is one of my least favourite things in all the world). The visuals are extraordinary and wildly imaginative although also extremely ugly. Some of the visuals are effectively startling and memorable but some just seem overdone. But they are interesting and if you have more of a taste for modernism in art than I have you’ll enjoy them more than I did.

The ugliness was no doubt intentional - to represent the ugliness inside Bluebeard’s mind but since we have no idea of the reasons for his inner darkness the impact is not all it should be.

I’m also not particularly a Bartók fan which probably didn’t help.

This movie was a logical step for Powell. Powell and Pressburger had had a huge artistic and commercial success with their ballet movie The Red Shoes. They had followed it up with the even more ambitious The Tales of Hoffmann which combines ballet, opera and cinematic magic in a breathtaking way. It was not, alas, a commercial hit. Bluebeard’s Castle was done much more cheaply on a much smaller scale but it’s no surprise that Powell was delighted to get the directing gig and thoroughly enjoyed himself.

There are only two cast members. Ana Raquel Satre looks striking and is very good as the bewildered but adoring wife.

I don’t want to give the impression that I disliked this movie. I didn’t love it as much as I had hoped to but it is breathtakingly daring and visually extreme and in 1963 it was wild wild stuff. And it’s impossible not to admire Powell’s ambition. And its visual outrageousness is undiminished.

Bluebeard’s Castle is recommended as a unique slice of cinematic folie de grandeur.

The BFI Blu-Ray looks superb and there are some extras. This release includes the movie on DVD as well.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)

Paramount’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars is an offbeat science fiction movie from 1964. Cinematic science fiction in the pre-2001 era was remarkably varied. This movie really is an adaptation (albeit a pretty loose one) of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe.

An American spaceship reaches Mars where it has an unfortunate encounter with a meteorite. The two crew members, Colonel Dan McReady (Adam West) and Commander Christopher Draper (Paul Mantee), eject in their escape pods. Draper reaches the planet’s surface safely but McReady doesn’t make it. Draper is now stranded all alone on Mars. Well not quite all alone. Mona survived as well. Mona is the ship’s monkey.

Draper is an awkward fix. Even assuming that a rescue mission could find him it could take months or years for such a mission to be organised and he has no way of contacting Earth. He has enough water for two weeks but that won’t help him since he has enough air for just 60 hours. He’s doomed.

Of course we know he can’t really be doomed because in that case the movie would have a running time of about twenty minutes.

The movie’s solution to the air problem is ingenious and original.

His water supply problem is solved by Mona. She is pretty much the brains of the outfit.

Draper is only able to remain reasonably sane by talking to Mona. He talks a lot. Maybe there’s just a bit too much talking in this movie.

And then the evil spaceships arrive, bent on destruction. And he meets Friday (Victor Lundin). Friday is a slave who has escaped from the evil aliens. Solving the communication problem with Friday takes quite a while but it’s eventually solved and they become friends and allies. Luckily Mona likes Friday.

Draper, Friday and Mona set out on a trek for the polar ice cap but the attacks by the aliens continue. It becomes a battle for survival.

An interesting aspect to this movie is how much is left unexplained. Friday’s people have been enslaved by the evil aliens but where do Friday’s people come from and how did they come to be enslaved? Friday appears to be completely human but he’s certainly not from our solar system. The movie makes the interesting choice not to make Friday’s people native Martians. Perhaps by 1964 the notion of Mars having a native population was no longer considered plausible.

Where do the evil aliens come from? How alien are they are? What do they want? They appear to be conducting mining operations on Mars but we’re not given any details. Are they humanoid?

This unexplained elements are so glaring that one has to assume that this was a deliberate choice. The emphasis is on the the battle for survival of Draper’s party and the growing comradeship between Draper and Friday. Perhaps it was felt that too much focus on the evil aliens would make it a totally different kind of story - a fairly conventional space opera.

Friday is a mysterious figure, he is very taciturn and he never learn to speak more than rudimentary English so it’s hard to judge Victor Lundin’s performance.

Paul Mantee is OK but given that Draper is the only character we get to know at all the part really needed an actor with a lot more charisma. I can’t help thinking that this is the sort of part that would really have suited Charlton Heston but they probably couldn’t afford him.

Mona the monkey walks off with the acting honours - she should have had a better career!

The special effects are disappointing. Within a few short years 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes would raise the bar dramatically when it comes to science fiction movie visuals. Even by 1964 standards the spaceships seem hopelessly unconvincing and the visuals just don’t stand out. Given the state of knowledge about the surface of Mars in 1964 they’re not wildly unrealistic but they just don’t dazzle.

The movie was directed by Byron Haskin, a fine director with a good track record in both the science fiction and adventure genres including the superb The Naked Jungle (1954) and the brilliant 1953 The War of the Worlds.

The screenplay was co-written by Ib Melchior was scripted some wild crazy sci-fi movies such as Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962) and The Angry Red Planet (1959) and course Reptilicus (1961).

Robinson Crusoe on Mars failed to excite movie audiences and it was a flop. Its main problem was probably that it needed a substantially bigger budget.

It’s a slightly oddball movie and while it’s not a complete success it’s worth a look as an example of the sheer variety of pre-Star Wars science fiction.

Lilith (1964)

Lilith, released in 1964 and written, produced and directed by Robert Rossen, is one of those movies that has fallen through the cracks. Despite being extremely interesting it doesn’t attract much attention. That might partly be because it’s difficult to classify. It’s set in a mental hospital but it’s not a Social Problem Movie and it doesn’t have a political axe to grind. It’s not a horror movie and it’s not a psychological thriller. It is a romance, of sorts.

After leaving the army Vincent Bruce (Warren Beatty) returns to his home town and gets a job in the Poplar Lodge mental hospital. He is a trainee occupational therapist. Vincent has a reasonable degree of self-awareness. He knows that people attracted to this sort of work often have some personal motivation. In his case it has to do with a family member.

Vincent has a flair for the job and he’s keen. It looks like he’s going to do very well.

This is not a state hospital. This is an exclusive private clinic. The families of the patients pay huge amounts of money to have their loved loved ones cared for there. There are no high walls, no locked wards and there’s almost no security. The patients are high-functioning schizophrenics. They’re crazy but harmless.

The problem for Vincent is Lilith (Jean Seberg). She’s a patient. She’s very high-functioning, or at least she appears to be. She can give the impression of being a perfectly normal bright cheerful vivacious young woman. She is however entirely disconnected from reality. She is also intelligent and manipulative and very pretty. And very crazy.

Vincent isn’t stupid. He knows she is trying to seduce him. He knows this is a dangerous situation. But he’s inexperienced. And she’s so cute and adorable. He knows he can fix her. His love can fix her.

He really does believe that he is reaching her. There are warning signs which he ignores.

A complication is Stephen Evshevsky (Peter Fonda). He’s a patient too. He’s very neurotic, understands nothing about women and is hopelessly in love with Lilith.

There’s another female patient who adds another complication to the situation.

We know this is all probably not going to end well but this is not a horror movie or a psychological thriller so if and when disaster strikes it won’t necessarily involve violence and mayhem.

Lilith pleased neither critics nor the public on its release and is now totally forgotten. It’s just not even close to being a typical mainstream Hollywood movie. It’s an eccentric arthouse movie that feels very European. It’s a movie about people who are detached from reality and that’s how the movie feels. There’s no firm reality to grab hold of. It flirts with realism and then veers into full-blown surrealism. And even the moments of realism have a disturbing not-real edge. Lilith thinks that people keep lying to her. She doesn’t trust anything that anyone says to her. Vincent doesn’t trust anything that Lilith says to him. And we can’t trust anything we see in this movie. Which is not a flaw in the movie.

But it is the sort of thing that was always going to alienate mainstream critics and audiences.

And as the story unfolds reality becomes more and more shadowy and unreal.

And while it deals with a woman who is mad it does not approach this subject in a manner that would be approved by feminist orthodoxy. Its lack of interest in ideological axe-grinding is certainly the reason it continues to be ignored.

It’s a movie that is interested in the mechanics of madness - the way reality just keeps slipping away and the ways in which truth gets confused with lies and lies get mistaken for truth. We cannot trust what we see and we cannot trust our emotions.

In this movie there is certainly a link between madness and sex but again this is not handled in a politically correct manner.

And it has the sort of ending guaranteed to further exasperate mainstream viewers.

Seberg considered this to be her best performance. She really is both dazzling and very very unsettling. Warren Beatty is excellent, giving a performance in which his habitual self-confidence is inexorably eroded. It’s a subtle complex performance. I have never liked Peter Fonda as an actor but in this film he’s delightfully neurotic.

It’s amusing that some reviewers complain that the movie is muddled and implausible. It’s a movie about insanity! We are seeing everything from the point of view of characters whose grip on reality is so tenuous as to be virtually non-existent. By the time you get to the ending you understand why nothing you have seen quite adds up.

It’s also incredibly amusing that some reviewers think it’s unrealistic that a metal hospital would be run in such an unprofessional way. These dear sweet innocent children have clearly never had any dealings with actual mental hospitals.

Lilith is a superb movie, daringly out of step with mainstream tastes at the time and still awaiting intelligent re-evaluation. Very highly recommended.

I've also reviewed the source novel, J.R. Salamanca's Lilith.

La Vérité (1960)

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La Vérité (The Truth) was released in 1960. For many people this is the movie that established Brigitte Bardot as a serious actress but it’s interesting for a number of reasons.

This is a courtroom drama with most of the story told in a series of flashbacks but the French criminal justice system (and their entire legal system) is radically different from British or American systems. If you don’t know that then you will be extremely perplexed. A young woman, Dominique Marceau (Brigitte Bardot) is on trial for murder. She has a defence counsel but the victim’s mother is also represented in court by counsel. In this movie he is in practice acting as a second prosecutor.

And the fact that Dominique shot and killed her lover, Gilbert Tellier (Sami Frey) is not in dispute. Her defence is based on the claim that this was a crime of passion and in France until the 1970s that was a legitimate defence. It could make the difference between the guillotine or a very short prison term, or could even mean acquittal. What that means in this story is that it is the strength of her love that is on trial.

La Vérité is also interesting because of the social milieu in which Dominique moves. She is part of a group of what are essentially beatniks. 1960 was a time when juvenile delinquents and youth subcultures were causing much excitement and hysteria. And the Sexual Revolution was just starting to gather steam. The prosecution in this story is in practice putting Dominique on trial for flouting traditional morality. In her social circle sexual promiscuity is taken for granted.

Dominique is actually a bit wild but to the middle-aged members of the jury and the officers of the court she is a monster of depravity. They are shocked to learn that after leaving her parents’ home in the provinces and moving to Paris she has frequented coffee shops and cinemas.

In Paris she meets Gilbert Tellier, a student of music. He was her sister Annie’s boyfriend. Gilbert soon decides that the free-spirited Dominique is much more exciting than the staid resectable Annie.

Gilbert and Dominique but from the start there’s trouble. And there are dramas and breakups and reconciliations and betrayals. It was always likely to end badly. And it does.

The title makes it clear that this movie is a search for the truth. But what exactly does that mean? This is not a conventional mystery. We know precisely what happened. We know that Dominique shot and killed Gilbert and then tried to kill herself. We need to know how exactly that came about. We need to know if Gilbert ever truly loved her, and if she ever truly loved him. And given that her defence relies on the claim that it was a crime of passion both the court and the audience have to find out exactly what was in Dominique’s mind when she pulled that trigger.

And when the court and the audience know what was in her mind they have to decide if her passions were so inflamed that she can be forgiven.

And of course this is a trial, with both the defence counsel and the rival counsel having their own versions of the truth which they hope they can persuade the court to accept. Lawyers know that the secret is to present and package the truth in just the right way.

And Clouzot feeds the truth to us slowly. One obvious truth quickly emerges. Gilbert and Dominique were terribly young, terribly in love and terribly and spectacularly mismatched. They were always going to hurt each other. They both realised it, and could do nothing about it. Dominique knows Gilbert is the wrong man for her but she cannot get him out of her mind and her heart.

They both behave badly. Dominique cheats on Gilbert repeatedly but that’s the inevitable result of their being so mismatched. He’s a very serious minded ambitious musician with no time for fun. Dominique is a high-spirited passionate 20-year-old girl who needs fun and excitement as much as she needs oxygen. That does not excuse her betrayals, but the betrayals were inevitable. Dominique cannot change who she is.

There is a girl who is perfect for Gilbert - Dominique’s sister Annie. Annie is serious minded and respectable and equally career-oriented. They are an ideal match. But Gilbert dumps her because Dominique is much hotter and is dynamite in bed.

And Clouzot is not going to make it easy for us. Do we ever learn the real truth? Will it satisfy us if we do? You’ll have to watch the movie and decide for yourself.

Bardot is absolutely superb. We like Dominique but sometimes we want to shake her and tell her, “Girl, you just can’t do that.” But we know that she will anyway. Bardot captures her elusive and contradictory personality perfectly, and her youthfulness. There’s no point in expecting Dominique to think anything through. She cannot. She is not evil, but she’s like a driverless runaway car. And she can be manipulative. Could she be lying about the shooting? Perhaps. But she could be telling the absolute truth. And she could be telling the truth as she sees it.

It’s a complex movie and it necessarily takes its time unravelling the story of this disastrous love. But it is enthralling and Bardot is mesmerising.

La Vérité is highly recommended.

Pale Flower (1964)

Pale Flower is a 1964 Japanese film relased, surprisingly, not by Nikkatsu Studio but by rival studio Shochiku (although it was independently produced). It’s a film noir but not a conventional one and it’s a yakuza movie but not a conventional one.

Muraki (Ryô Ikebe) is a yakuza who had just been released from prison after serving a sentence for killing a member of a rival gang. Now he discovers that the two gangs have joined forces, but there are no hard feelings.

Muraki is obsessed by gambling. He meets a strange girl, a fellow gambling obsessive. Her name is Saeko (Mariko Kaga).

They are drawn to each other, but not just by their shared love for gambling. They both feel somehow doomed, as if their lives have no meaning and no direction and can only end in disaster. The gambling is clearly symbolic - they both have a desire to play for the highest stakes of all, life itself. There are lots of gambling scenes in this movie.

It’s important to note that the plot has not offered us a single reason why these two people see their lives as having no value or purpose. It’s something missing within them.

Perhaps they fall in love. They don’t seem quite sure about that. Perhaps their obsession with each other is like their passion for gambling - it’s just a way to deal with the boredom.

The plot kicks in slowly but this is not a heavily plot-driven movie. The two now united yakuza gangs are facing a challenge from a powerful Osaka-based gang. Muraki will be a key player in the defensive moves against this encroaching gang. Muraki believes he will have a high price to pay but he accepts this with his usual indifference.

Ryô Ikebe as Muraki gives a very noir (and very good) performance. Mariko Kaga as Saeko is rather mesmerising.

Saeko is not really a femme fatale. It’s more that these are two doomed people drawn together, not to try to save each other but to share their doom.

Director Masahiro Shinoda claimed that the background to the movie was Japan’s political position at the time as a not entirely willing U.S satellite which he felt had robbed the country of a sense of purpose. This is the kind of thing that exercises the minds of intellectuals while ordinary people are too busy living their lives. I cannot see any political angle whatsoever to this movie, except perhaps that it does give us a sense of a society adrift, and individuals within that society adrift. But mercifully there’s no overt political content whatsoever.

Although stylistically they are poles apart in its own way this movie is, like Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter and Branded To Kill, an attempt to reinvent the yakuza movie. There’s an intriguing subtly surreal dream sequence.

The film is set in Tokyo but the location shooting was done in Yokohama. It has a very noir look.

It certainly has plenty of noirish impending doom vibes. But it’s not quite straightforward noir. Muraki knows that he’s headed for disaster but unlike the typical noir protagonist he makes no attempts to escape his fate.

Muraki’s motivations are to some extent determined by the yakuza code of honour but to me this doesn’t feel like a conventional yakuza movie, or even a conventional Japanese movie.

I got some rather French vibes from it. A definite whiff of existentialism. If Camus had written a screenplay for a yakuza movie he might have come up with something like this. It doesn’t feel quite Japanese. There’s some Christian symbolism. It seems to be about people finding all the existing belief systems (traditional Japanese values, the yakuza code, Christianity, materialism, consumerism) unsatisfying. So they’re left with a vague existentialism of a warped kind - a death fetish.

There’s also a fascinating hint that both Muraki and Saeko have an erotic interest in death, and particularly in murder. In fact that’s the whole basis for their attraction. Saeko is attracted to Muraki because he killed a man (that’s why he was in prison). But not only that. He enjoyed it. It was the greatest pleasure he had ever experienced in his life. Muraki is attracted to Saeko because she understands how he feels about killing. And then there’s a wildcard in the pack - Joh, a stone-cold half-Chinese hitman also in love with killing.

This is vaguely similar to the territory explored years later in Basic Instinct. In this case we have three characters with a sex-death fetish.

This is a very dark disturbing provocative movie. Very highly recommended.

It’s on Blu-Ray in the Criterion Collection.

Topaz (1969)

Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz came out in 1969 and it’s a movie that was doomed from the start for various reasons that we’ll get to later.

It’s a spy thriller based on a novel by Leon Uris. He’s now entirely forgotten but was once hugely popular. His books were immensely long and there are good reasons that he’s forgotten.

It is 1962. The Americans have a top KBG defector and he’s told them how to get the information they need about what’s happening in Cuba. The problem is that the necessary contact cannot be made by an American. This contact will only deal with the French.

So CIA bigwig Michael Nordstrom (John Forsythe) persuades his friend Andre Devereaux (Frederick Stafford) to make the contact. Devereaux is a French spy, but he can only act unofficially since the French have no desire to get mixed up in America’s problems.

Devereaux has to travel to Cuba, with unexpected personal consequences. He is having an illicit affair with the influential but fiercely anti-Castro Juanita de Cordoba (Karin Dor). She’s also involved with the Cuban chief of security, Rico Parra (John Vernon).

That KGB defector mentioned Topaz but refused to give any information. No-one knows who or what Topaz is, but it’s something very important. And Topaz will also have personal consequences for Andre Devereaux.

There are therefore two espionage plots running in parallel.

So what went wrong? Firstly, there’s no star power here. No star power at all. John Forsythe is the only cast member who had any profile at all in the U.S. and he’s OK but it’s a minor supporting role. Frederick Stafford is dull. He has no charisma. In fact he has negative charisma. John Vernon is great fun but he was not an A-list star. Karin Dor was a huge star in Germany and a fine actress but was pretty much unknown to American audiences. Dany Robin (as Andre Devereaux’s wife Nicole) was a minor star in France.

With zero star power there was no way of effectively marketing this movie. There is a fascinating rumour that Hitchcock wanted Sean Connery and Catherine Deneuve.

The second problem is that it feels so old-fashioned. Hitchcock revolutionised the spy genre with North by Northwest in 1959 but three years later the first Bond movie, Dr No, came out and immediately made Hitchcock’s style of spy movie seem ridiculously old-fashioned. Dr No felt faster, more energetic, cooler and sexier. And Dr No helped to usher in the whole Swinging London thing.

Hitchcock’s 1960s spy movies, Torn Curtain and Topaz, feel very 1950s.

In Topaz the problem is made worse by the fact that it was made in 1969 but set in 1962 which made it seem even more outdated.

The third problem is that at 2 hours and 23 minutes it’s very very long.

A lot of the problems probably go back to the source material. Leon Uris saw everything in simplistic good vs evil terms. As a result the Cubans are portrayed as cartoonish villains, there’s no questioning of the morality of the manner in which the Americans deliberately lie to their French allies and there’s no questioning of the morality of the appalling manner in which the Americans deliberately lie to their French allies and there’s no questioning of the morality of Nordstrom’s manipulation of a man who is supposed to be a friend. I get the impression that Hitchcock was trying here to make a serious hard-hitting spy movie but I think the script needed more work.

On the other hand it’s a superbly crafted movie. There are so many very Hitchcockian very stylish visual set-pieces. They’re not violent action set-pieces and they are perhaps the sorts of subtle visual flourishes that a mainstream audience will miss. The initial escape is very nicely done. And there’s that one superb moment which I won’t spoil for you, involving the use Hitchcock makes of a blue dress.

On more than one occasion Hitchcock shoots dialogue scenes in which we cannot hear a single word. It’s a clever touch and it works. We can imagine what is being said.

And then there are the endings. Three of them were shot. There’s a ridiculous cartoonish ending, the “duel” ending. That was the original ending but preview audiences hated it. Hitchcock shot a different much bolder ending (the “airport” ending) which he preferred to the original. Eventually a third very conventional ending was chosen. The Blu-Ray gives us the airport ending which makes sense since it’s the one Hitch liked. The others are included as extras. Depending on which ending is used Topaz becomes three different movies, with the airport ending version being by far the best.

Topaz is superbly crafted. Hitchcock had lost none of his visual touch. It’s not a bad movie at all but it’s too slow and it needed more energy and it desperately needed some star power. Certainly not top-tier Hitchcock but worth a look.

Sweet Charity (1969)

Sweet Charity is a 1969 musical directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse. It was Fosse’s first feature film. The stage version of Sweet Charity was based on Fellini’s 1957 film Nights of Cabiria, the story of a prostitute’s search for happiness and love.

The 60s was a fascinating period for movie musicals with massive hits like The Sound of Music and huge box-office turkeys like Doctor Dolittle, Hello Dolly, Star and Darling Lili. Sweet Charity turned out to be one of the biggest flops of all.

Charity Hope Valentine (Shirley MacLaine) is a dance hall hostess. She dreams of falling in love. She does fall in love. Often. It never works out.

At the beginning of the movie she’s involved with a sleazebag named Charlie. He’s such an obvious louse that you immediately start to wonder about Charity’s judgment.

Then there’s a handsome charming Italian movie star played by Ricardo Montalban. She makes it as far as his bedroom, but not as far as his bed.

Then she meets Mr Right. He’s Oscar (John McMartin) and he’s as wholesome as freshly baked bread. Of course she can’t tell him she’s a taxi dancer. And what if he discovers that she’s not a virgin!

Lots of emotional angst follows.

It’s not hard to see why this movie flopped. There are so many things wrong with it.

The first problem is that at two-and-a-half hours it’s an hour too long. It is so slow.

Some of the songs are good but most are awful.

It’s an unstructured mess.

The biggest problems stem from what they did to the source material. In Fellini’s movie the heroine is a prostitute. That was changed for both the stage and screen versions of Sweet Charity. Had Charity been portrayed as a hooker the movie would have received an X rating which would have doomed it.

The trouble is that if she’s not a hooker the entire story makes no sense at all. All of Charity’s indulgence in self-pity and shame makes no sense. Oscar’s behaviour stretches credibility beyond breaking point.

And we’re seriously expected to believe that Oscar, a sophisticated New Yorker, is shocked and horrified by the thought that Charity might not be a virgin.

It all comes across as silly and we lose patience with both Charity and Oscar.

And they made her a dance hall hostess? A taxi dancer? In New York City in 1969? A profession that hadn’t been heard of for twenty years.

The only way this bowdlerised version of the story could have worked was as a period piece. In a 1920s, 30s or 40s setting it might have made sense. In a 1969 setting it’s an absurdity.

Some of the dance routines are well done. Fosse’s approach to choreography is genuinely fresh and exciting. But that’s maybe three musical routines in a long long long movie.

The Rhythm of Life number comes across as a desperate attempt to climb aboard the Summer of Love bandwagon. It doesn’t fit in the movie at all.

Visually it’s all over the place. The scenes in the Pompeii Club are excellent - they have a very euro decadent vibe.

I also have to say that I just didn’t warm to Charity as a character.

Sweet Charity just didn’t grab me at all. I can’t in all honesty recommend this one.

The Running Man (1963)

The Running Man is a 1963 Carol Reed crime thriller and it’s a somewhat overlooked entry in his filmography. This is what I call a “little movie” - it’s rather low-key, it’s not overly ambitious and it’s essentially just an entertainment. But with a script by John Mortimer and Carol Reed in the director’s chair it’s quite a clever and nuanced little entertainment.

It opens with pretty American Stella Black (Lee Remick) grief-stricken at the memorial service for her husband Rex. A keen aviator, he was killed when his glider crashed into the sea. His body was never found. So why does Stella give that odd little smile when nobody is looking?

We soon find out the reason, when Rex (Laurence Harvey) walks in the door.

Rex and Stella are pulling an insurance fraud.

Stella is asked quite a few questions by insurance investigator Stephen Maddox (Alan Bates) but it’s obvious that he’s quite satisfied with her answers.

Obviously they will have to abroad. Rex is after all supposed to be dead. Once they have the insurance money they will meet up in Spain, in Malaga.

In Malaga Rex manages to get hold of a passport belonging to rich Australian sheep farmer Jim Jerome (John Meillon). He steals his identity. It crosses Rex’s mind that if Jim Jerome were to die suddenly Rex and Stella could pocket another nice little insurance payout.

There is trouble in paradise. Stella and Rex had been madly in love. Now Stella is not sure this is still the man she loved. He has changed. He seems colder, with a touch of cruelty. Perhaps it isn’t possible to remain the same person once you become a criminal.

And then Stephen Maddox turns up in Malaga.

Of course Rex and Stella know that he must be on to them. Rex decides that they need to get pally with him. To find out how much he knows. Stephen gives every indication that he is falling for Stella. He of course thinks she’s a widow. He has never seen Rex so he accepts him as Jim Jerome.

Now things start to get a bit twisty. Is Stephen really sweet on Stella? Is she sweet on him? He’s a very nice guy and he isn’t irritable and cruel the way Rex is these days.

The twists get more interesting with some lovely little ironic touches. Mortimer’s screenplay is nicely plotted.

I like Laurence Harvey a lot and he manages the subtle changes in Rex's behaviour pretty well. But his (mercifully brief) attempt at an Australian accent is excruciating!

Alan Bates is excellent as the shy very diffident but very likeable Stephen. You can see why Stella might be attracted to him. Rex is exciting and glamorous but Stella isn’t sure she wants any more excitement. Stephen is gentle without being boring.

Lee Remick gives her usual fine performance. She conveys Stella’s conflicted emotions and sense of guilt skilfully and subtly.

The scene between Stella and Stephen in his hotel room is a fine example. What exactly is she feeling? Perhaps she isn’t sure herself.

Perhaps The Running Man’s problem is that it looks very conventional but it’s filled with subtle ambiguities (not necessarily resolved) and ironies. It’s a very pretty film but it’s cleverer than it looks and it’s not as cheerful and lighthearted as it looks.

Rex is a bit of a villain, but he isn’t really evil. He’s reckless and irresponsible and the whole saga began as a result of his own carelessness (which resulted in an earlier quite legitimate insurance claim being rejected), and his inability to take responsibility for his own mistake. Stella’s emotions are complicated.

The Running Man is highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed lots of Carol Reed’s movies - The Fallen Idol (1948), Our Man in Havana (1959), Girl in the News (1940), Trapeze (1956), The Man Between (1953).

Dante’s Inferno (1967)

Dante’s Inferno is a 1967 Ken Russell documentary/biopic about Pre-Raphaelite painter/poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was made for the BBC and screened as part of their Omnibus series.

Russell had been making arts documentaries for the BBC since 1959. At first they were fairly conventional documentaries. The BBC did not approve of having actors portraying historical figures in documentaries. That policy was gradually eased. For The Debussy Film Russell solved the problem by having a film within a film. The critical acclaim for the Debussy Film finally convinced the BBC to let Russell make his documentaries the way he wanted to. It was one of the most sensible decisions the BBC made during the 60s.

Russell’s later BBC documentaries, Dante’s Inferno, The Dance of the Seven Veils and Isidora, are hybrid dramatised documentary-feature films but in practice they’re really feature films. They were in black-and-white and in the 1.37:1 aspect ratio so they were suitable for TV broadcast but they were shot in 35mm so that they could be given at least limited theatrical releases.

Russell was fascinated by artists and composers but he wasn’t interested in treating these figures worshipfully. He wanted to get down to the nitty-gritty of what made them tick. He was interested in genius, but he was particularly interest by geniuses who were either failures in their personal lives or partial failures in their artistic lives.

These mid-60s films are essentially Ken Russell’s personal response to various artistic figures.

The Pre-Raphaelites were all but forgotten by the beginning of the 1960s but there was about to be an explosion of renewed interest in the movement. Dante’s Inferno certainly played some part in fuelling this renewed enthusiasm.

Dante’s Inferno focuses a great deal on Rossetti’s relationships with women, especially his difficult relationships with Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris. Lizzie Siddal modelled for Rossetti, became his muse and a complicated romantic involvement began. For various reasons (some of them quite reasonable) Rossetti put off any thoughts of marrying her. Lizzie’s health problems led to a reliance on laudanum which became a serious addiction.

Lizzie painted and wrote poetry as well. Her paintings have been ludicrously overpraised for ideological reasons. She had some talent, but those talents were very limited.

In Russell’s version Siddal’s insistence on scrupulous defence of her virginity and Rossetti’s unwillingness to marry her led to predictable problem. A few years later Jane Morris (one of the most famous artists’ models of all time) entered his life which led to a fraught romantic triangle between Rossetti, Jane ands Jane’s husband William Morris. The fact that William Morris and Rossetti were close friends and artistic colleagues complicated things further.

Like all the Pre-Raphaelites Rossetti was besotted with the Middle Ages, with the romance and the chivalry. It was an ideal to which to aspire but he was never able to Iive up to those ideals. The ideal of courtly love was an impossible ideal for Rossetti. He enjoyed the more carnal varieties of love too much.

Rossetti’s career began to falter, partly due to his own drug addiction but perhaps also to the invariably less than unhappy outcomes of his passionate love affairs with women. In this film Russell certainly suggests that he was also increasingly aware that he had failed to live up to his lofty ideals.

As Rossetti Oliver Reed gives one of his finest performances. Reed could be mercurial and passionately intense and extravagant as an actor but he could also be subtle and sensitive and he had extraordinary charm and all of these qualities are in display here.

Judith Paris as Lizzie is wan and needy but that’s presumably deliberate and is perhaps a fair interpretation of Siddal.

Casting Gala Mitchell as Jane Morris was a masterstroke. She was a model with no acting experience but she looks perfect. She has the same kind of beauty as Jane Morris. She looks like the ideal Pre-Raphaelite woman. Mitchell doesn’t get much dialogue. She doesn’t need it. She just has to look Pre-Raphelite-ish and stunning.

One of the things that amuses me about modern critics is the way they so often respond to what they wish the movie said, rather than to what it actually says. There’s a good example here, among the extras. The critic naturally reads Rossetti as the villain and Lizzie as the victim and sees the brilliantly talented Lizzie as having been sucked dry artistically and emotionally by Rossetti. But when you actually watch the movie Lizzie comes across as a whiny, needy, manipulative emotional vampire. And her overdose comes across as a passive-aggressive act. “If I kill myself he’ll be sorry.” Watching the movie one gets the impression that it was Lizzie who sucked Dante dry emotionally. And the movie makes it clear that Lizzie’s talents were meagre.

Russell wanted to make Dante’s Inferno in colour but the BBC wouldn’t come up with the money.

Dante’s Inferno is a typical Ken Russell biopic - it’s his own totally personal response to Rossetti. It’s a brilliant movie, as good in its way as any of his later feature film biopics. Highly recommended.

The BFI Blu-Ray also includes the equally good Isadora and Always On Sunday, his film on Henri Rousseau.