Panic Station

$14 million, near enough, is not exactly big money in the peculiar world of film financing (it’s about a tenth, at most, of the budget of the new Planet of the Apes film), but for the likes of you and I (I am assuming there are no oil sheikhs or other eccentric billionaires reading this, as usual) it’s still the sort of sum you would feel the loss of if it happened to go missing. And yet you still occasionally come across a low-to-mid budget film which has apparently been dumped, abandoned, given up on.

Such is the case with Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s I.S.S., which as I write is most likely not screening at a cinema anywhere near you. A poster advertising this one did appear briefly at the local Curzon, but it looks like the chain has decided not to show the actual film; likewise, I’ve never seen a trailer for it anywhere. Were it not for the occasionally idiosyncratic scheduling policy of the independent cinema just down the street from where I live, I doubt I would have seen the film at all – but it’s showing there a total of four times. Of course, the lack of publicity means that – based on the audience at the screening I went to – it’s probably only going to be seen by about eight people in total, but it’s still nice to have the chance, and one can’t help feeling that this is just a film which has been somewhat unlucky (we shall return to this).

Doing my pre-film due diligence it did occur to me that I knew the name Gabriela Cowperthwaite from somewhere, and it turned out that she was responsible for Blackfish, one of the most significant documentaries of the last few years – well, certainly significant if you’re on the board of SeaWorld (a US theme park chain), for the impact of the film’s allegations about the treatment of orcas in the parks caused a massive drop in the corporation’s profits. It’s therefore a little surprising to find her in charge of what’s essentially a space thriller movie – but I.S.S. is still a pretty solid film.

I should say at this point that I turned up to this film knowing very little beyond the names of the director and leading lady and the fact that it would very likely involve the International Space Station (yes, I am noted for my intuitive genius and also my knowledge of abbreviations), which meant that most of what happened came as a complete surprise to me. This may mean that I was more impressed by the boldness of the premise than I would have been if I’d known more of the outline in advance. Possibly this is one of those films which really lends itself to being seen with a minimum of foreknowledge. I mention this because there are obviously going to be spoilers after the image.

The film opens with NASA biologist Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) on her way to the I.S.S. with her colleague (John Gallagher Jr) – they are greeted there by their American superior (Chris Messina) and three Russian cosmonauts. (I know what you’re thinking, and we will come to this.) The atmosphere aboard the station is mostly quite genial, except for a moment when someone plays Wind of Change by the Scorpions and it all gets a little bit tense. Foster finds herself struggling a bit to establish herself and acclimatise to life in zero gravity.

Then, after a day or so, she wakes up to find a state of mild concern amongst her crewmates – the internet connection with Earth is down and they are having trouble getting in touch with ground control. Kira goes up to the cupola (the bit with the big windows you always see in documentaries about the I.S.S.) to relax, only to notice fireballs blooming across the surface of the planet below…

On reflection I think the movie possibly misses a trick at this point – contact is briefly re-established with Earth, confirming that a military confrontation is in progress, and both groups are secretly instructed to secure control of the I.S.S. for their respective nations. It might have been rather more effective to leave everybody guessing and have the two sides wrestling with the dilemma of whether or not to act on their own initiative. As it is, it’s a moderately tense story with a tendency to slide into melodrama (several characters abruptly become ruthless nationalists) and a slightly predictable arc. It doesn’t have the slickness or flair of Gravity or Life (two of the more obvious points of reference), and the way in which the interactions of the Americans and Russians on board take on a kind of metaphorical significance – they symbolise their countries – could have been handled with a lighter touch.

It would be interesting to see how it compares to The Challenge, a Russian film from last year which was partially made on location with professional actors on the actual I.S.S. – it does feel like the novelty of doing a movie merely set on the I.S.S. must necessarily fade in these circumstances. We should bear in mind that I.S.S. was filmed three years ago, however, and has presumably been sitting on a shelf for much of the intervening period.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this is because the film was written before the war in Ukraine broke out, transforming its vision of nuclear conflict between the US and Russia from an abstract notion to a grimly plausible possibility. (Naturally there’s no explicit mention of Ukraine in the script.) It may seem implausible for US-Russian co-operation to still exist in the film, but the real-life I.S.S. still has a mixed crew on board; it would be fascinating to learn about how they negotiate the reality of their situation.

As it is, the arresting nature of the film’s premise is also possibly its biggest problem. ‘What would happen on the I.S.S. if nuclear war broke out on Earth?’ is the question the film is asking, to which most people’s answer would probably be, understandably, ‘who cares?’ – the fate of one space station being pretty small potatoes in the face of potential armageddon. The film tries to address this problem, revealing that one of the research projects on board could be decisive in which side ultimately becomes dominant, but this never really convinces. The most visually striking element of the film is the various shots of the station gliding serenely past the camera while the planet burns in the background. In every sense, you can’t help focussing on the latter rather than the former.

This is a major flaw which the film never really finds an answer to. But there are some nice performances (Pilou Asbaek, who has one of those faces you’ll recognise from somewhere or other, plays the most reasonable of the Russian characters), it looks fine, and it attempts to portray some tricky things quite successfully, like zero-gravity hand-to-hand combat (though I suspect the film-makers underestimate how difficult it is to inflict serious blunt-force trauma in these circumstances). This is, as I say, a solid movie, but once you get past the impact of the premise it doesn’t have anything tremendously interesting to say for itself.

Leader of the Pack

Joe Dante wanted to be a cartoonist growing up, but was persuaded against the idea by people telling him it wasn’t really an art form – so he went into films instead. You can, perhaps, make out something of the gleeful energy and willingness to play  with convention of a Chuck Jones short in many of his later films, but some of the early ones in particular can come across as relatively serious, at first glance anyway. Like so many other familiar names from mainstream popular culture – Jack Nicholson, William Shatner, Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich – he was helped in his ambition by an early opportunity offered to him by Roger Corman, who as I write has just died. Corman was never an especially famous figure, but I can’t think of anyone else who had such a formative influence on so many of the people responsible for modern commercial cinema. His legacy, even if just considered in terms of his various proteges’ films, is immense.

Dante’s 1981 film The Howling is as good an example of Corman-style cinema as any, even if it isn’t one of the 450 or so films which the great man was directly involved with behind the scenes. It opens with Los Angeles TV news reporter Karen (Dee Wallace, a year or so before she got the fairly thankless role of the mum in E.T.) tangled up in an unsettling relationship with a man named Quist (Robert Picardo from various bits of Star Trek) – Quist claims to be responsible for a string of recent brutal murders. A meeting takes place, in a booth at an adult entertainment store – something bad happens, with something else even worse on the cards until two passing cops (one played by Kenneth Tobey from The Thing) shoot and kill Quist.

Case solved, or so you’d think – but Karen is having nightmares, half-recalling what happened in the booth, and it’s affecting her relationship with her husband Bill (Christopher Stone). Her boss (Kevin McCarthy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers) isn’t too impressed either. A psychiatrist of her acquaintance, George Waggner (Patrick Macnee, playing it absolutely straight, for once), suggests a break is in order, at the Colony – a community just up the coast where people can work out this kind of psychological kink. So Karen and Bill head up there. Meanwhile two of her colleagues (Dennis Dugan, occasional actor and seemingly one of the worst film directors of recent years, and Belinda Balaski) are investigating Quist’s background and interest in the occult – and discover his corpse has vanished from the morgue, the drawer seemingly ripped open from the inside…

Up at the Colony, things are much more chilled out, although many of the older residents seem to still be struggling with issues of their own. Karen seems to find it all quite restorative, although she doesn’t notice her vegetarian husband Bill falling under the sway of rare-meat-loving nymphomaniac Marsha (Elisabeth Brooks). Some of the local wildlife seems a bit overactive, too, not to mention very vocal – Bill even gets attacked by something in the woods one night and slightly bitten…

As I often say, we are not dumb (well, you’re not dumb, I’m not so sure about me sometimes) and it’s very unlikely that anyone has ever watched The Howling and not known in advance that it’s a werewolf movie, perhaps one of the most influential werewolf movies of all time. So the eventual revelations that Quist is a werewolf and the Colony is also infested with them are not the greatest twists in the history of cinema, and the film’s decision to pitch the story as a mystery is not entirely successful as a result.

That said, it’s only a mystery up to a point, and the film is notable in the way it plays with werewolf lore – mainly the Hollywood kind. Everyone’s first point of comparison for The Howling, it seems, is same year’s An American Werewolf in London, which is much more up-front about its subject matter. American Werewolf goes with the classic story of the innocent who gets nipped and has to nervously await the arrival of the next full moon before going on a mindless rampage, which is a solid enough premise for a story. If you look at werewolf films and media since 1981, however, a sizeable proportion of them find the full moon thing to be rather limiting, dramatically, and also find much to be explored in the whole notion of a werewolf society and subculture operating in secret on the fringes of human civilisation. It’s also worth noting that, between American Werewolf‘s quadrupedal monster and the towering wolf-headed anthropoids of The Howling, it’s the latter that has become the dominant image of the werewolf in popular culture. (Also worth mentioning, perhaps, that both films managed to win the Saturn Award for Best Horror Movie, even though they came out in the same year: The Howling somehow managed to pick up a gong while it was still in production, which is a neat trick.)

Then again, The Howling is a notably savvy movie – even today, very few films have quite as many in-jokes embedded in them as this one. Most obviously, there are characters named after the directors of The Wolf Man, Curse of the Werewolf, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Legend of the Werewolf, House of Frankenstein, The Mad Monster, and quite probably more; characters watch The Wolf Man on TV at various points. Dante does his usual thing of paying tribute to genre films of years gone by by hiring a few veterans for this movie – John Carradine’s in there, alongside Kevin McCarthy, Kenneth Tobey, and so on. Dick Miller and Corman himself turn up, too, perhaps inevitably. But there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly laboured about it all – the references are there if you get them, but The Howling still works as a straight horror movie if you don’t.

Even so, the self-awareness of the film as a piece of media doesn’t stop with all the cameos – often the characters find whatever’s on their minds being commented on by whatever they’re watching on TV; the movie opens with TV static, and there seems to be something very intentional about the fact that Quist has his first encounter with Karen in front of a violent exploitation movie. The subtext seems to be that American culture forty years ago was so saturated with bloody violence that hardly anyone is capable of recognising the genuine supernatural horror of a werewolf attack. The climactic transformation is shown on live TV; the film cuts to various scenes of amused audiences generally concluding that the special effects were pretty good, but nothing more than that. In a sense, horror has become an everyday thing and the werewolves have won.

Of course, the special effects in The Howling are indeed pretty good – mostly courtesy of Rob Bottin, who started his movie career on the de Laurentiis King Kong, before a brief stint as the tallest member of the Modal Nodes, and then subsequent work on Humanoids from the Deep, The Fog, The Thing, and the RoboCop franchise. I’ll be honest and say that I don’t think the big transformation sequence here is quite as striking and visceral as the equivalent one in American Werewolf (not least because the plot requires an onlooker to stand around watching it happen rather than running away), but it’s still very impressive.

This is a solid movie in every department, and much better than solid in some ways. If there’s a problem it’s almost that the film seems to be predicated on the idea that discovering this is a werewolf film is going to be a shock for the audience – in which case, calling it The Howling is a bit of a mistake, as are some of the details included on the poster. There are still plenty of surprises and lots to enjoy here, though – this is one of the best werewolf films ever made.

Decline and Fall and Rise

As you might expect, given it was the prospect of the first new Planet of the Apes film in a quarter of a century that first got me wittering on about films on t’internet, any new activity from this particular franchise will naturally grab my attention quite firmly. And yet I have to say that, the buzz of a new trailer aside, I found myself feeling a bit conflicted as information about Wes Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes started to filter out. The trilogy of films that appeared during the 2010s was obviously very solid and accomplished and not a disgrace to the Apes name, but in a sense it felt like the actual planet-with-the-apes-in-charge suggested by the title never really arrived, and nor did the big ideas and allegorical stories which made the original films so memorable.

This would be a good spot to revisit Charlton Heston’s words explaining why he was dubious about doing any sequels at all to the 1968 film – ‘there’s only the one story… you can further adventures among the monkeys, and it can be exciting, but creatively there is no film’. I suppose on some level I was anticipating the new film would just be another action-adventure post-apocalyptic runaround, which we could all probably live without.

Initially it looks like this may be exactly what’s happening: the film opens with the funeral of Caesar, protagonist of the 2010s films (Andy Serkis, who played him, gets a credit as ‘special consultant’ in quite small print come the end credits), before moving forward in time ‘many generations’. We meet Noa (Owen Teague), a young chimpanzee who is just about to come of age in the Eagle Clan, a group of apes living somewhere in what used to be the Los Angeles area. Apart from preparing for an upcoming ceremony involving an egg (the clan are, as their name suggests, keen falconers), the main thing concerning Noa is the disquieting possibility that feral humans may have moved into their territory.

Everyone soon has much bigger issues, however, as the clan is attacked by masked apes on horseback wielding technologically advanced weapons – there is a degree of burning and pillaging before the majority of Noa’s friends and family are dragged off to parts unknown. As befits a young protagonist in this situation, Noa vows to find and release them.

The film has been solid enough up to this point, but it becomes genuinely interesting as Noa encounters an orangutan named Raka (Peter Macon) on his journey – Raka is one of the last of a sect of apes revering Caesar as the founder of their culture and their lawgiver (a deft call-back to the original series), and he retains a fascination for the relics of the old human civilisation which still litter the landscape. This sense of the past as an ominous, lingering presence and the different ways in which the characters try to make sense of and engage with it becomes one of the main themes of the film, and lift it above the level of a simple action adventure.

To some extent this extends to the new film’s relationship with the franchise’s history, as the duo encounter a mysterious, unusually intelligent human girl (Freya Allan) whom Raka proceeds to christen Nova (‘we always call them Nova,’ declares Raka, another neat gag). However, things take a darker turn when Nova and the group of feral humans she has joined become the quarry of a group of hunting gorillas.

This is a bit of a watershed moment for the franchise as it’s the first time one of the ‘new’ movies has revisited a specific sequence from the original series, and it’s done with considerable confidence, even to the point of reusing the original music cue (Jerry Goldsmith, the original composer is credited for ‘thematic elements’, which seems to me to be understating his contribution a little). It all underpins the sense that this is a movie which is very comfortable in the same sort of narrative space as the ones which made this series so famous.

The plot moves on the kingdom of the title, where an ambitious ape politician, Proximus (Kevin Durand) has claimed Caesar’s mantle as the leader of the apes and is putting his people to work in an attempt to breach a vault containing, everyone believes, relics and treasures from the old human civilisation. Sure enough, soon Proximus is trying to recruit Noa and the others to help him in this – but what really lies within the vault, and are the surviving humans really as innocuous as all the apes seem to assume…?

There is certainly a sense in which this is exactly the sort of summer blockbuster you might expect – it’s a long, lavish production clearly made on a very big budget, and whatever you think of the plot and themes, the technical craftmanship on display is very nearly impeccable – the ape animation is excellent, and the post-apocalyptic landscapes utterly convincing and actually rather beautiful – one of the notions the film plays with is the idea that, from a certain point of view, the planet is really much better off with the technological human civilisation consigned to legend. This is part of a surprising degree of ambiguity built into the script – the main characters aren’t strictly heroes, for they distrust each other and have radically different goals. Ancient antipathies and prejudices between humans and apes die very hard, and the question of just whose planet this really is has become a live one by the end of the film.

This level of thoughtfulness is slightly unusual in a big studio film, and is to be commended, I think – as is the decision to focus on character and atmosphere over big action sequences (not that there aren’t a few of these). It’s also interesting to see a film like this with hardly any well-known names attached to it – probably the most famous actor involved is William H Macy, whom I haven’t seen in anything for about twenty years.

The fact that this is intended as the first instalment of a new Apes trilogy is made fairly apparent by the end of the film – while this is essentially a standalone, there are certainly some plot elements which are highly suggestive when it comes to the direction of future episodes. I’m very interested to see where they take this story next – the balance they have struck here between new and old, as well as commercial demands and thoughtful SF, will hopefully provide a template for future films in this series. As it is, this is probably the best Planet of the Apes film in over half a century.

New Balls, Please (Redux)

If you had to choose between being a critically-revered maker of heavyweight dramas that do well at awards season, or a master of the commercial end of cinema that shifts tons of popcorn and keeps studios afloat… well, of course, if you’re Christopher Nolan, you get to be both. For the rest of us I suspect it would be nice just to have the choice.

Most of the Italian producer-director Luca Guadagnino’s films have had at least a whiff of the art house about them – although, to be fair, the remake of Suspiria and Bones And All were both at least nominally from the horror genre. Now he seems to be having a concerted crack at the mainstream, in the form of Challengers, which looks on paper like a romantic sports drama set in the world of tennis but which, on closer inspection, proves to be… possibly something quite different. This is being released alongside all the other big shiny summer films, although it’s definitely not one to take granny or the kids to see; likewise taking a step into new territory is the increasingly unavoidable Zendaya Coleman, who is top billed.

Coleman has pretty much risen without trace over the last six or seven years, helped of course by some smart and lucky film choices – I should add that her success is partly based off her participation in a successful TV show which I haven’t actually seen – but (insidious generalisation alert) her relatively few big-screen performances have all been in hefty studio spectaculars and franchise movies, usually in supporting roles. This is her first time headlining anything you could genuinely describe as a drama, and how well she and the film do will probably play a big part in deciding if world domination lies in her immediate future.

The odds are not bad, for this is a rather impressive movie, not least in the way that Guadagnino marshals one of those tricksy achronological narratives that inevitably cause problems when one is trying to summarise the plot of the film. But let’s have a go anyway.

The framing narrative is set in 2019. Young Zenny plays Tashi Duncan, a former tennis prodigy long since retired after a serious injury, now the coach and wife of top men’s player Art Donaldson (Mike Faist); quite how she has become as famous and influential as the film suggests, given she apparently never actually played on the pro circuit, is not quite clear, but this is a minor niggle. Art is coming towards the end of his career and struggling to recover from an injury; to build his confidence Tashi has him entered into a comparatively minor tournament in the hope that demolishing a few journeymen will do the trick.

However, also playing in the same tournament is Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), now one of the journeymen in question, but once Art’s best friend and doubles partner. These days they barely speak, and the reason for this stems from events that unfolded when the two guys first met Tashi back in 2006. Let’s just say there’s more than just sporting tension in the air, and it’s not just prize money and possible US Open qualification riding on the outcome.

This opening section of the film is very impressive just for the way that it brings the reality of life as an experienced tennis player vividly to the screen – both as a big name approaching the end of a career, nursing your body through yet another set of gruelling qualifiers, considering your sponsorship and post-playing opportunities, and as a low-ranker scraping along from one minor tournament to the next, scrabbling for money and even maybe sleeping in your car. This alone would make the film noteworthy.

However, it’s the way the narrative pendulums back and forth between the slightly jaded, thirty-something version of the characters and their teenage selves which turns this into an unusually gripping piece of drama. (One should say that Zenny (27) is probably a shade more convincing as the teenage incarnation of her character, while her co-stars (32 and 33) struggle somewhat to play adolescents with complete credibility.) The question is, how did they all end up at the crucial match which is at the heart of the film? And the answer turns out to have a few twists and turns to it.

I remember reading a behind-the-scenes article about the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, one juicy factoid from which was the way in which some enterprising athletes found a way to use the electronic scoreboard in the Olympic village to, erm, propose prospective social interactions of an intimate nature with other members of their community. This was eye-opening at the time but on reflection it seems fairly understandable that sports people, being healthy, energetic, active, assertive people in their professional life, should carry this through into their spare time. Whether things behind the scenes on the pro tennis tour are quite as pulsatingly lubricious as Guadagnino is suggesting here is another matter – all I can say is that it was never like this on Today at Wimbledon. (I had one of those foggy moments on the way in and found myself asking for tickets to Tennis Threesome.)

But we should bear in mind that the director is an artist, and – other than the odd long shot of a reposing winky early on – the film manages to be uproariously highly-sexed without ever being particularly graphic and certainly not clumsy. There’s a lot of suggestive behaviour – people are forever dribbling sweat or spitting on each other – but I suspect the film’s 15 rating is mostly down to an F-bomb count that John McEnroe in his prime would have been proud of. (It appears that Johnny Mac’s brother actually worked on the movie, but apart from the odd poster of Andy Roddick it exists at a discreet distance from ‘actual’ tennis history.)

The actual tennis is nicely wrangled but it’s the stuff happening off the court which makes the film such engaging fun. And it must be said that all three leads are terrific, creating fully-rounded individuals with credible relationships. Which sort of brings us back to the issue of genre – Challengers uses sport as a backdrop, but it’s about much more than that; it’s also hardly what you’d call conventionally romantic – for these guys relationships are about establishing power dominance, not intimacy. It sounds bleak but it’s actually rather thrilling, helped by a pumping disco soundtrack.

Anyone doubting Zenny C’s credentials as a proper movie star will probably end up accepting that the kid has chops, as she is effortlessly convincing as a very tough cookie (not always especially sympathetic) who cheerfully uses others when it suits her and is, it is implied, quite happy to continue her own career vicariously through that of her husband. O’Connor and Faist aren’t quite so well served (one of the pitfalls of not producing the movie, I guess) but I would be very much surprised if we didn’t see more of them in years to come as well.

This is a slick, good-looking movie, not afraid to be bold in its choices (the way the film ends is particularly cheeky); Guadagnino keeps it all firmly under control throughout. I suppose in the end it’s just a slightly over-excitable sexy melodrama, but it’s one that oozes class and is thoroughly entertaining throughout. Recommended.

Thin Red Lines, Toffs and Taffs

People who are always on the lookout for something to get outraged about (it seems odd to me that, given the outrageous nature of the society and world situation that previous generations have saddled us with, they always choose such niche issues) recently had fun with the recent revelation that Disney’s much-loved adaptation of the famous tale of the supernatural domestic dominatrix, Mary Poppins, recently had its UK certification bumped up from a U rating (suitable for everyone) to a PG (still suitable for everyone, as long as everyone’s parents are okay with it). Newspaper letter columns were throbbing with grumbly people venting their very active spleens.

The cause for this very minor amendment wasn’t even Dick Van Dyke’s accent, but the fact that at one point one of the supporting characters describes a couple of soot-covered children as looking like ‘Hottentots’, which is apparently unacceptable these days as it’s technically a racial epithet, albeit one nobody actually uses any more. I know a little bit about history but I wasn’t aware of the etymology of this word, which has been banned in South Africa. Well, it’s a fair cop; you wouldn’t have Julie Andrews mouthing off with the N-word, and it’s not as if this makes any substantive difference to anything that actually matters.

Still, that’s the modern world for you: wise people have observed that the rise of streaming sites and similar technologies means that the culture of the past is now readily available in a way that would have been unimaginable even a couple of decades ago (I spent £200 for the first seven seasons of The X-Files on VHS, second hand; ten years ago you could get the complete run for £50 on DVD, new; nowadays you just need a Mouse Plus sub), which means we are that much more likely to be exposed to ‘attitudes of the time in which the film was made’, to paraphrase how Talking Pictures TV generally describes this.

Even in the old days (by which I mean the 20th century, mainly), you still heard the odd expression of disquiet – usually about really, really dodgy things like The Black and White Minstrel Show, which was heavily criticised as far back as the early 1960s, but lingered on until 1978 (the accompanying stage show was around until the late 1980s). Curiously exempt from this, and until quite recently pretty much bullet-proof as far as this sort of reassessment is concerned, was Cy Endfield’s 1964 film Zulu. This seems odd considering the extremely high profile the film maintains, considering it’s sixty years old – it’s a TV perennial, usually around Bank Holidays, and it’s permeated the culture to a significant degree.

The film is, in theory, based on actual events which took place in what is now South Africa in 1879, opening with the aftermath of the massacre of a British army column by a local force of the Zulu tribe. Historically – and the film does not go into causes – this was the opening engagement of the Anglo-Zulu war, one in which the British were the aggressors, motivated by the desire to establish white minority rule across the region. From here the scene switches to a mass wedding of the Zulu people, with two Swedish missionaries (Jack Hawkins and Ulla Jacobson) as the only outside witnesses, guests of the Zulu ruler Cetshwayo (played here by his own great-grandson Mangosuthu Buthelezi, latterly a controversial political figure in South Africa). There is a lot of lingering on the supposed exoticism of the Zulus and their customs, and if this is an attempt to make them more than just faceless bad guys later on it’s not entirely successful.

Anyway, news of the slaughter arrives and the missionaries quickly head off to warn the next group of British troops in the line of fire, who are based out of a supply depot and hospital somewhere called Rorke’s Drift. There are two contingents on the scene, a group of engineers led by a Lieutenant Chard (Stanley Baker), and some regulars under the command of Lieutenant Bromhead (Michael Caine in his breakthrough role) – this being a British movie, there is of course some class-related tension between the middle-class Chard and the aristocratic Bromhead. (Endfield was an American emigre, and Caine credits this with the fact he got the part, claiming no English director would have cast a working-class lad like him as one of the nobility.)

Four thousand Zulu warriors will soon turn up, which sounds like very bad news for the British garrison, numbering less than two hundred men. But Chard, who has assumed overall command, decides to dig in and fortify the station as best he can, hopeless though the situation seems…

And in the end – well, no spoilers, but we win, courtesy of one of the most stirring displays of close-order firing drill ever committed to celluloid – a .45 calibre miracle, as Chard puts it. I don’t think this counts as a spoiler as who actually wins any battle in a movie is seldom if ever in doubt – it’s never the who, but most often the how that matters.

Zulu asserts that it is the traditional British virtues of stoicism and loyalty that won the day at Rorke’s Drift – although possibly ‘British’ isn’t quite the right word. Baker, who also produced, was apparently proud of his Welsh roots and the garrison as depicted in the film has many more members from west of the Severn than was actually the case in real life. This is almost certainly the most pro-Welsh action adventure movie ever made, with Baker recruiting his friend Richard Burton (born in Pontyrhydyfen) to do the opening and closing narration, and an absolutely magical moment when the defenders all sing ‘Men of Harlech’ to keep their spirits up as the Zulus perform an eerie battle-chant (‘Welshmen never yield!’ is the last line of the film’s version of the lyrics).

And up to a point this is all fine, as it makes for a great film – Zulu genuinely is a rock-solid classic, with a great ensemble cast and some terrific battle sequences, carefully set-up. No-one could object to something which helps the Welsh feel good about themselves. On the other hand, however, there is the issue of the way in which the film cheerfully impugns the character of a Victoria Cross recipient – Hook (James Booth), the malingering skiver who comes good under extreme pressure in the film, was a model soldier in real life, and his relatives stormed out of the premiere of the film in disgust. (Needless to say, Hook is English – this was the role Caine initially auditioned for.)

And beyond that… well, the question is whether you view Zulu as nothing more than a tremendously thrilling war film, or some sort of imperialist tract cheerleading for the cause of white supremacy. As noted, the events of the film are certainly stripped of their historical context – the film is framed with the Zulus as aggressors, and the British army just defending itself, with the wider picture not considered at all. It’s impossible to imagine a film like this being made today – what few recent attempts have been made at telling similar stories, and the only one which springs to mind is the most recent version of The Four Feathers, haven’t met with any meaningful success (possibly because it’s simply impossible to retool this kind of story to reflect a more pluralistic worldview).

The thing that probably saves the film and has allowed it to continue to be acceptable viewing even now is that, while there are no Black characters in it worth mentioning, the Zulus themselves are treated quite respectfully – their bravery and tactical nous are given full credit. It’s true that the story doesn’t really focus on them, but then you never really see a German in Dunkirk, either, and no-one complained about that. The film isn’t about the specifics of this war, or the morality of empire, but it’s a study of men under fire and the way in which this forces them to show their essential character – Caine, for example, increasingly drops Bromhead’s more foppish affectations as the film goes on, and displays some real tenacity of his own. (Caine himself had a fairly tough shoot – his decision to base Bromhead’s mannerisms on those of the Duke of Edinburgh nearly got him fired, according to his autobiography, and it was Baker who insisted he be retained.)

Someone will always find a reason to complain about anything these days, but I think Zulu has stood the test of time and its makers have no more to feel ashamed about than those of many other films of this period – and probably less than some. For a film looking back at the zenith of British ambition, there’s something almost ironic about the way it looks increasingly like the standard bearer for one of the last moments in history when a British film could match the biggest offerings from Hollywood. If this is not a classic, there are no classics any more.

 

Men and Their Dinosaurs

There are films from the past which are worthy of remembrance and which possibly deserve to be sought out and rewatched in a spirit of artistic enquiry. And then there are the majority of the films ever made, which these days mainly exist to be trowelled into gaps in the schedule on the high-numbers archive channels. As somebody nearly said about something else (oh, all right, it was supposedly Dr Johnson about the Giant’s Causeway), they are possibly worth seeing but almost certainly not worth going to see. Sometimes, however, you just feel like throwing the dice and seeing what turns up.

In the past we have occasionally touched on the odd phenomenon where films share names but not much else – there’s a Canadian indie called Roadkill, which is also the name of a mid-budget studio teen horror film from about twenty years ago; there are also at least seven films called Twilight, only one of which contains twinkly vampires. But when we come to Sam Newfeld’s 1951 film Lost Continent, which is one definite article away from having exactly the same name as the 1968 Hammer film The Lost Continent, we genuinely are in the situation of having two films which (nearly) share both a title and a premise – although it must be said the Hammer version is much madder.

The film gets underway with the naughty old US government testing one of their rockets, the unstated implication being that this is a grim necessity if the commies are going to be halted in their drive to subjugate the world. Well, it was 1951, after all. But something goes awry and the rocket goes out of control before vanishing off the radar somewhere in the Pacific. A grave member of the top brass makes a grave speech, gravely, about the importance of finding and recovering the data from the missing rocket, as it may prove essential to the continued existence of the USA.

So, naturally, given we are dealing with existential issues of world geopolitics, they send six dudes in a plane to go looking for it. Flying the bird is Major Joe Nolan (Cesar Romero, perhaps best remembered today as the first actor to play the Joker, and for the fact he wouldn’t shave his moustache off for the part), with him are a bunch of scientists and airmen – half of them are utterly forgettable, except for John Hoyt (one of those prolific and distinctive actors who never became associated with one particular role) as the chief scientist, Rostov, and Sid Melton as a representative of the common man who gets most of the comedy relief.

Off they all go to the South Pacific. It must be said that this is verging on a poverty row production (Sam Newfeld and the producer, his brother Sigmund Neufeld, were veterans of this stratum of Hollywood) so there is a bit of a wait before they even reach the lost continent of the title, let alone see anything especially interesting on it – all this exciting stuff costs money, you know. But soon enough something conks out the engines of the plane and it crash-lands on a remote tropical island.

The place is almost totally uninhabited except for a beautiful local girl and her kid brother. She is played by Acquanetta (whom we have previously met in Captive Wild Woman), but only for about five minutes as she is basically just here as Exposition Girl: yes, the rocket crashed on top of a nearby plateau, scaring off all the islanders except for her and her brother. You would expect Nolan to do the decent thing and invite Native Girl and her brother along to brighten the expedition up a bit – but no, this trip is for big strong men only.

This is such a departure from the usual conventions of the low (or indeed big) budget monster movie that it’s the most distinctive thing about Lost Continent – you get the beasties, you get the big strong lead, and then you usually get the beautiful damsel in distress, costume no doubt artfully disarrayed. But not this time. Perhaps this hints at a curious puritanical streak on the part of the film-makers. Whatever the reason, it transforms the rest of the film into a gritty, slightly Hemingway-esque tale of men somewhat at odds with each other, bereft of female company.

Anyway, off they go up the mountain, which apparently has a lost continent on top of it (a geographically curious notion which would no doubt prove a head-scratcher for the cartographers). It’s a very big mountain, which is why there follows a lengthy (most would say too lengthy) mountain-climbing sequence, shot in the studio like the rest of the film. It would be understandable if you felt your patience was being somewhat presumed upon at this point, but maintaining interest are some unexpectedly good and down-to-earth character scenes between the expedition members. Usually in this sort of film everybody is just a cardboard cut-out who only performs a set of plot functions, but they really make an effort here and it keeps the film just about watchable.

Once they get to the top of the mountain, they find the inevitable dinosaurs – in another curious touch, the usual appearance by a theropod predator is absent, and they just end up being menaced by a brontosaurus and some ceratopsians. The animation is nothing special but the film gets two brontos in my copy of The Illustrated Dinosaur Movie Guide, which I would generally concur is fair enough. In the end, the story largely resolves through human interaction anyway – all the way through, Nolan has had doubts about the true loyalty of Rostov, and the way in which this resolves is genuinely unexpected and quite refreshing. Then there’s the obligatory volcanic eruption and the lost continent falls down – someone has a line to the effect of ‘good riddance’, which strikes me as a bit harsh.

There would be a degree of semantic violence involved in claiming that Lost Continent is consistently entertaining, but it’s usually fairly diverting, with some stronger storytelling virtues than other, much better known and bigger budgeted films. It probably isn’t worth going to see, but if you happen to come across it accidentally and have nothing else to do it might be worth seeing anyway.

The Curious Case of the Absent Professor

If you live in the UK, then I suspect there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve come across something by Anthony Horowitz, who has been quietly prolific for some decades now – mainly as a novelist, but also as a screenwriter in TV and occasionally films. I think I first came across him in the mid-1980s when he was one of the writers recruited when Richard Carpenter couldn’t manage to do the third season of Robin of Sherwood single-handed; since then have come many children’s novels in different genres, various genre TV shows (prominent on the charge sheet must be that Horowitz was the creator of Midsummer Murders and the thankfully-almost-forgotten Crime Traveller), and novels for adults, including some more-than-half-decent Ian Fleming pastiches (one of which I wrote about here way-back-when).

So it’s not entirely surprising that the Conan Doyle estate got onto Horowitz with view to him channelling the creative essence of Sir Arthur, too: his heirs are well-known (one might even say notorious) for their hawkish attitude to protecting and promoting his literary legacy (not so long ago they were suing Netflix on the grounds that while Sherlock Holmes may have come into the public domain, Sherlock Holmes-with-functioning-emotions only featured in the latter short stories and was thus covered by copyright). One hears talk that the estate are set on doing unto the Sherlockian and wider Doyle canon what Sony seem intent on doing to Spider-Man – further adventures for Professor Challenger don’t sound like an instantly terrible idea, but you have to have your doubts about Irene Adler as a character capable of carrying her own series, to say nothing of the prospect of stories starring homicidal card-cheat Sebastian Moran.

Oh well. Anyway, ten years ago or so Horowitz wrote an authorised Doyle pastiche (is it a pastiche? Let’s be generous and call it a homage) entitled Moriarty, which looks very much like another case of the same thing, with the advantage that everyone knows, or thinks they know, who and what Professor Moriarty is. He’s Holmes’ arch enemy, well-known for such evil schemes as… er… well…

As Horowitz himself suggests in his introduction to The Final Problem (included in the paperback edition I came across, along with a ‘true’ Doyle pastiche of relevance to the text, which also purports to explain the true relevance of melting butter in the case of the Abernetty family), the thing about Moriarty is that he’s hardly Holmes’ arch-enemy (one might propose there is no such animal) – he’s Holmes’ nemesis, which is not quite the same thing, created solely to kill the great detective off. He appears in one short story, if ‘appears’ is quite the word – Watson thinks he spies the Prof from a distance, but apart from this we only learn of him indirectly via reports from Holmes. Doyle does a splendid job of bigging Moriarty up as a worthy terminal foe for Holmes, with some lovely incidental detail – but there’s virtually no substance. Perhaps this explains the multitude of very different versions of the character as presented in Sherlockian adaptations, played by actors as diverse as Orson Welles, Malcolm McDowell, Eric Porter, Jared Harris, Andrew Scott and John Huston.

Naturally this gives an inventive writer like Horowitz plenty of room to manoeuvre, even if it isn’t always perfectly clear what he’s up to. Doyle’s Moriarty is a smoke-and-mirrors figure, solely there to help the writer rid himself of a creation he believed himself to have outgrown; Horowitz’s Moriarty is a sort of literary conjuring trick, highly entertaining, but to talk about it in any real detail is to spoil the fun.

Well, let’s have a go anyway. The story is presented as an account of the adventures of a different detective duo, Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard (a minor character from the Doyle canon) and Frederick Chase of the Pinkerton agency. We first meet the pair standing over a corpse which has been fished out of the Reichenbach Falls – it seems that Professor Moriarty will trouble the world no more.

This is good news for Jones but bad news for Chase, for – as he is quick to tell his new colleague – an American criminal mastermind named Devereux has recently set up shop in London, a man possibly even worse than the late professor. Devereux and Moriarty apparently have arranged to meet, and it was Chase’s hope that Moriarty would lead him to his quarry. Jones agrees to assist Chase in running Devereux down, and so they commence their investigations…

A pleasantly twisty-turny plot ensues, clearly the work of (at least) a superior craftsman – it does a decent job of feeling like ersatz Doyle, with occasional diversions into the more macabre sort of gothic London explored by other writers in recent years. Horowitz limits himself to the actual Doyle canon when it comes to re-using existing characters, and we are treated to a Scotland Yard meeting with Lestrade, Gregson, Hopkins and Jones all in attendance, plus a chance to catch up with John Clay (late of The Red-Headed League). It’s not really a spoiler if I reveal that Colonel Moran also turns up before the end. But the original characters are also engaging.

Does it ever really feel like Conan Doyle? Well, possibly not – there are occasional diversions into gory unpleasantness with which Sir Arthur would probably have had no truck, implied torture and the threat of torture, and a juvenile psychopath who kills for pleasure. But it’s consistently readable and more than enough of a page-turner to keep the casual reader from wondering exactly why it is that this tale of two men named Jones and Chase, in pursuit of another man named Devereux (and his gang), should be entitled Moriarty…?

Well, as I say the book is largely a piece of sleight-of-hand intended solely to entertain, and I would imagine most readers will happily allow themselves to become complicit in their own misdirection. Horowitz obviously knows his stuff and his good-natured examination of the various plot holes that emerge if you consider The Final Problem and The Empty House as a whole is highly enjoyable – if he seems to be poking fun at Doyle, it’s done with love. But at the same time it never quite feels entirely authentic – an amusing and clever take on the whole mystery of the canonical Moriarty, but somehow less satisfying than some of the other takes on the character. A slick and very entertaining book nevertheless.

Death-defying Lives and Second Chances

The weather round here is still dismal, but it looks like it really must be early summer as films clearly aspiring to blockbuster status have started to appear – along with the odd bit of counter-programming, of course. Making an early break for it is David Leitch’s The Fall Guy, based on one of those 80s TV shows that everyone sort of vaguely remembers without much genuine affection.

There was a time – quite a long time – when every old TV series you cared to mention was dusted off, smartened up and sent back to the big screen, nostalgia and name-recognition outweighing originality in the dark algebra of studio heads. (You could potentially blame this on the success of the Star Trek movies, which boldly blazed a trail for this sort of thing, though probably the best and most successful example would be the Cruise-fronted version of Mission: Impossible.) After the boom in the late 90s and early 2000s where even things as obscure as The Mod Squad and SWAT ended up on the big screen, it all seemed to die down, but you do occasionally hear of another project along these lines still mired in development hell (still no sign of the big-screen Six Million Dollar Man, for example) and every now and then one does actually reach the screen.

That said, Leitch’s movie doesn’t bear much resemblance to the TV show which allegedly spawned it. That was about a veteran stuntman with a side-line as a bounty hunter, a premise which combines a good gimmick with a great deal of latitude for finding stories. I remember watching it when my age was in single digits but even then I’m pretty sure I rumbled to the fact that a lot of the more impressive stunts and action sequences were clearly edited in from somewhere else (standard practice at Universal’s TV division for a long while – Steven Spielberg apparently got very cross when half of his movie Duel turned up in an episode of The Incredible Hulk).

At least the movie version of The Fall Guy is All New Stuff. Ryan Gosling plays Colt Seavers, formerly a top stuntman but now (literally) fallen on hard times after an accident on set. However, redemption comes a-knocking when film producer Gail (Hannah Waddington) phones him up with the offer of a job on a big movie filming in Sydney – the director has apparently asked for him personally. Never mind a second chance professionally, there’s a chance of a new start on a personal level too, as the director is Colt’s ex-girlfriend Jody (Emily Blunt).

So off Colt flies to Australia to work on Jody’s film Metalstorm (which to be honest looks like a rather dismal sub-Zack Snyder sci-fi headbanger), where his main job is to double for horrendous action-movie diva Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson – the film was clearly in the can too late to include any gags about the kerfuffle over Taylor-Johnson maybe or maybe not being the new James Bond or his reported grumbles about not wanting to spend the rest of his life doing action films). But Ryder has dropped out of sight, imperilling the behind-schedule and over-budget production, and so Gail prevails upon Colt to save Jody’s big opportunity by tracking their missing star down…

As you can perhaps see, the movie retains virtually nothing from the TV show beyond the name and job of Gosling’s character – although Lee Majors does turn up for the obligatory cameo (and his bionics look in pretty good nick for a man of 85). The effect of this seems to be more liberating than anything else, as the TV version was pretty thin, formulaic stuff, and the movie is honestly a lot more fun.

Leitch’s own background is as a stuntman, though these days he’s much better known for directing or co-directing films like John Wick, Atomic Blonde, Hobbs and Shaw, and the second Deadpool – all of these have very good action sequences, but for the most part they also have an engaging sense of humour (or at least an appealing sense of their own ridiculousness). The Fall Guy really leans into this, being a comedy much more than anything else, and a smart comedy at that. It’s very in tune with Gosling’s usual ironic, slightly detached persona, and not afraid to assume the audience is made of intelligent, cine-literate people – though I suspect many of the jokes still work even if you don’t get all the film references packed into the story. (Behind-the-scenes clips from previous films Leitch has produced or directed are inserted into the narrative near the start, for example.) Much of the story is rather preposterous, but the film is clearly aware of its own ridiculousness and inviting the audience to be in on the joke, which just adds to the fun. I should say I laughed more and harder during The Fall Guy than during any other recent film that I can think of.

Which is not to say that it doesn’t also work as an action movie too, with some terrifically choreographed fights and chases – particularly a mid-film sequence with Gosling fighting a guy in a skip which is being dragged at high speed through the centre of Sydney. It works superbly as both comedy and a piece of action, and also carries a bizarre amount of emotional heft due to the decision to soundtrack it with Phil Collins’ Against All Odds (I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this was the latest old tune to make a surprise reappearance in the charts following it featuring in a high-profile soundtrack, per Stranger Things and Saltburn). The concluding set piece is particularly clever, as the script manages to come up with a big stunt sequence which happens to actually be about a diegetic big stunt sequence on the set of Metalstorm.

Even so, the film wouldn’t be much without the marvellously winning performances of Gosling and Blunt – the film also manages to be a functioning rom-com, too – while Hannah Waddington’s progress towards world domination should be aided nicely by a well-judged turn. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is less prominent, but pretty game considering the nature of the role. In all respects this is a much cleverer, funnier, more involving take on The Fall Guy than the TV series ever managed to be. Big studio summer movies seldom get much better than this.

The Mouldering

No-one seems to be entirely sure whether the actress and film-maker Emily Mortimer is British or American or some combination of the two (I always thought she was one of ours), but what is undeniable is that she had a pretty good career in progress back, as they say, in the day: nice parts in films as diverse as Harry Brown, 51st State, Bright Young Things, and Hugo. That said, she was never what you’d call a properly big star and so I didn’t really notice when she essentially dropped off my radar quite some years back – the last thing I saw her in, I think, was The Sense of an Ending, back in 2017.

It turns out Mortimer has made a sensible career move behind the camera, to some extent, writing and directing for movies and TV, though she still does the occasional movie job. This came to my attention recently when I stumbled upon Natalie Erika James’ Relic, from 2020 – not to be confused with Peter Hyams’ The Relic from 1997. Some confusion may be on the cards as they’re both technically horror films, but while The Relic is fairly dumb, fairly derivative action horror, Relic is much more measured and thoughtful.

Robyn Nevin plays Edna, an elderly widow living alone in (one assumes) southern Australia, off in the countryside somewhere remote. Her daughter Kay (Mortimer) and granddaughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) don’t see her very much; Edna’s slightly strained relationship with Kay is paralleled by Kay’s own struggle to connect with Sam (this sort of familial echoing is a minor theme of the movie). The movie opens with Kay getting a call from the police in Edna’s town, reporting that her mother seems to have disappeared – naturally she goes up there to see what’s happening.

And, from a certain point of view, the answer is ‘not very much’. This isn’t a movie of big set pieces or constant incident, ‘slow burn’ is almost certainly the best way to describe it. There’s a slow incremental drip of disquieting detail as the story progresses – black mould has established itself upstairs in the house, Kay begins to have nightmares about what she finds in a derelict shack on the property, a teenager from a neighbouring house reports he was ordered by his father not to go anywhere near the place any more. A very heavy and brooding atmosphere is gradually established, and this is before Edna makes an equally mysterious reappearance, wondering what all the fuss is about.

There is certainly some evidence that Edna is showing signs of senile dementia, and Kay begins the process of looking for a care facility for her in Melbourne, where she lives; Edna is firmly against this. Further complicating the situation is Sam’s suggestion that she moves in to care for Edna, rather to Kay’s annoyance – Sam seems to be drifting through her life, another source of friction between them. But Edna’s increasingly erratic behaviour makes it seem as though this isn’t a possibility – she has returned with an odd black bruise on her body, and keeps talking about something having broken into the house. It’s just the dementia talking – isn’t it…?

All horror movies are arguably to some extent metaphorical, relying on the existence of primal universal fears for their effectiveness. Some of those fears are more fanciful and abstract than others, of course. Recently we’ve seen a rise in the number of horror movies where the metaphor largely takes the place of the actual plot, with Alex Garland’s Men a notable example; unless you’re interpreting the film wholly symbolically, it doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Relic comes very close to crossing this line before the end, which in its own way is an impressive achievement for a film which starts off seeming a bit like a underplayed post-horror exercise in creeping unease.

Part of what makes Relic a disturbing and often uncomfortable film to watch is that the primal fears it is dealing with are not abstract or outlandish ones – being eaten by cannibals, for instance – but ones which could strike very close to home for many members of the audience. The film is absolutely about the fear of ageing, and the process of watching your own parents deteriorate to the point where they become unrecognisable to you (and you to them). Coupled to this is the brute fact that whatever happens to them may well lie in store for you, too.

The film is very upfront about the fact that, as a supernatural horror movie, it’s about the dark, corrosive presence that has taken up residence in the house (and within Edna herself), appearing in visual terms as the creeping black mould. But it’s also equally clear about the fact that the unwelcome visitor is dementia itself, given physical and spiritual form. For this reason I can readily imagine many gorehounds who’d be perfectly okay with Savini-esque gore and dismemberment finding themselves squirming their way through Relic quite uncomfortably.

The idea is smartly and inventively expressed, with the visual symbolism of the corrupting mould a particularly clever touch – spreading almost imperceptibly, gradually destroying whatever it touches, whether that be furniture, the structure of the house, or Edna’s personality. Naturally, it also lends itself to some rather gruesome moments come the climax of the film. There’s also an imaginative sequence where the interior of the house becomes a baffling, chaotic labyrinth, almost as if Edna’s perceptions have become contagious and are afflicting the others.

It’s a very well put together movie (possibly not quite the low-budget project you might expect – amongst the producers are Jake Gyllenhaal and the Russo brothers, who can presumably raise quite good money if they wish to) with excellent performances from the three leads. And yet I’d really struggle to describe it as a film that I genuinely enjoyed – it’s genuinely quite uncomfortable to watch in a way that more fantastical horrors usually aren’t. Its roots in reality, and its concern with the ageing process and infirmity, strike too close to home for it to be conventionally entertaining. But this is precisely because it is such a powerful, affecting and well-made film.

Autumn in Sherwood

What is success? Is there an objective definition we can all agree upon? Yes, I know, it’s early in the day for this sort of semantic profundity. Possibly the answer is obviously ‘no’ and we can all move on and talk about something more interesting, such as an unsuccessful film that is actually pretty good. But isn’t this itself something of an oxymoron, privileging the financial elements of a movie’s performance over the creative ones? Formulations like this do tend to confirm that the film business is just that, an economic undertaking rather than a creative one. It would feel very odd to describe Minions or most of the Transformers films as failures, even though the consensus is they’re terrible – the fact remains they made more than enough money to keep their series running.

This line of thought always has a tendency to induce a state of mild depression in me, which if nothing else is an appropriate mood to enjoy the subtle pleasures of Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian, from 1976. Lester is best remembered for a series of boisterously cheerful films he directed in the sixties and seventies, starting with A Hard Day’s Night and Help! (with, to coin a phrase, the Beatles), proceeding to a couple of adaptations of The Three Musketeers, and then concluding with one-and-a-bit Superman films for the same producers (he was brought in to replace Richard Donner during Superman II). Robin and Marian is, for the most part, a more muted piece of work, but none the worse for it.

One immediately noticeable thing about the film is that this adaptation of a famous English folk legend was made entirely on location somewhere completely different: rural Spain. The scenery and landscape is gorgeous, but it doesn’t exactly scream the midlands. Perhaps it’s slightly better at being medieval France, which is where the movie opens. Many years have passed since the point at which most Robin Hood films conclude, and Robin (Sean Connery) has been in the service of Richard the Lionheart (Richard Harris) all this time – now he is a worn-out, heavily-scarred old soldier, still accompanied by his faithful lieutenant Little John (Nicol Williamson, who’s very average-sized for the part). Robin finds his loyalty tested by the king’s increasing greed and arrogance, and is nearly executed for insubordination – but Richard dies of an infected wound, setting the duo free as his last act.

So they return to an England which they have not seen in decades, supposedly intent on living quietly in Sherwood – though Robin does find his mind turning to his old lover Marian, whom he rather ungallantly left without explaining himself all those years ago. Soon enough they hook up with their old friends Will Scarlet (Denholm Elliot) and Friar Tuck (Ronnie Barker), who have strange tidings to tell – Marian has taken the veil and is now the Mother Superior of the local convent.

Robin finds this hard to believe but decides to pop in and see her anyway – and finds Marian (Audrey Hepburn) far from delighted to see him, on this of all days. This is because the new king (Ian Holm in a cameo) has fallen out with the Pope and ordered all leaders of the Church expelled from the country. This includes Marian, but she has refused to leave, and so the Sheriff of Nottingham (Robert Shaw) is under orders to take her into custody. It’s just like old times again suddenly!

But of course it isn’t, really, and the passage of time is really what the film is about. Encroaching mortality isn’t a common theme in big studio pictures even nowadays; though films about older people have become more common (their money is as good at the box office as anyone else’s), they’re invariably of the subverting-expectations-living-life-to-the-full type, not the slow-creep-to-the-yawning-grave. The film was originally titled The Death of Robin Hood until the studio insisted on a change (possibly also to get Hepburn’s character into the title); contrary to what some sources suggest, no-one has ever actually died on screen while playing Robin Hood, but Connery comes as close as anyone (possibly tying for the award with Michael Praed, though there’s a touch of ambiguity there). The film has an honesty about human frailty – there’s a tough authenticity to the period setting from the very start, which contributes to this (even if the football shorts which Connery appears to be wearing under his costume in some scenes seem just a bit anachronistic).

Mixed in with this is the fact that this is very possibly the only truly revisionist Robin Hood film – inasmuch as you can revise something which probably wasn’t true to begin with. The characters are looking back on the events of their distant youths, and in general concluding that the legends which have grown up around them are just that. The Sheriff isn’t a snarling pantomime villain this time, but someone it’s easy to like – demanding the respect his position deserves, but also mindful of the lives of his men and unwilling to see them wasted. ‘I should have taught you better,’ he murmurs to the bodies of his soldiers after one bloody skirmish with the outlaws. In comparison, it’s Robin who is reckless with his followers’ safety, leading them out to an unwinnable pitched battle because the only alternative is to admit he is just a man and not invincible. This all leads up to a conclusion which is potentially crushingly downbeat.

That it isn’t, and that the film is rather beautifully poignant and moving rather than simply bleak, is mostly due to a wonderfully poetic script from James Goldman, which gives the characters space to breathe and reflect on their lives and the choices they have made. Marian speaks quite matter-of-factly of attempting suicide after Robin abandoned her for the Crusades (it was this which led her first to the convent), but still finds herself unable to resist him, despite the passage of the intervening years. It’s a marvellously warm and tender performance from Hepburn, playing well against an on-form Connery. His Robin seems rejuvenated by seeing Marian again, refusing to accept that time has had any effect on him at all, despite the evidence to the contrary. It’s a subtle and layered turn from an actor in his prime, and a long way from the thin but lucrative roles that were to become Connery’s bread and butter in subsequent decades.

It’s a beautifully made and very touching film, but it’s not that difficult to understand why it might have faltered at the box office – for if the heroes and heroines of legends aren’t guaranteed a happy ever after, what chance the rest of us? It’s a hard pill to swallow but Lester, Goldman and the cast coat it in honey. There is warmth here as well as wisdom.