A Sprinkling of Basil

The Sherlockian films starring Rathbone and Bruce as Holmes and Watson felt like they were on all the time when I was young, but they seem to have fallen out of fashion somewhat in recent years – one can only hope that the fulsome praise lavished on them by Moffat and Gatiss, and the credit they’re given as an influence on Sherlock, will bring them to the attention of a younger audience.

One with more to interest this constituency than most is The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, made in 1939 and directed by Alfred Werker. This was the second Basil Rathbone Holmes film, and the last to take place in anything approximating a period setting (the Second World War, which entered the public consciousness in the same week as this movie, would prove to have an influence on Rathbone’s subsequent Holmesian career).

Anyway: it all kicks off in the London of 1894 with the nefarious Professor Moriarty (George Zucco) in the dock, accused of murder. The jury know he’s guilty. The judge knows he’s guilty. (Moriarty knows he’s guilty too, but sensibly keeps his mouth shut.) But there’s no proof, and being upstanding, cricket-loving British folk they are obliged to let him go. Holmes arrives on the scene with evidence just after the nick of time has passed, and the two arch-enemies share a pleasant cab ride.

Holmes confesses to Moriarty he’d like to extract his brain and donate it to science. Moriarty takes this rather well and in turn confesses to Holmes that he’s getting bored of life as a master criminal – he’s going to commit one more really big crime, so audacious and shocking that its success will destroy Holmes, and then retire to spend more time with his algebra.

And so the stage is set – however, and I’m by no means the first to point this out, at this point the structure of the film turns out to have a serious flaw in it. Moriarty’s plan, which is as fiendishly clever as his rep would lead one to expect, is to carry out a relatively dull crime (stealing the crown jewels – see what I mean about the Sherlock connections?), having first ensured that Holmes is looking the way by throwing a really macabre and weird mystery into his lap.

It’s this story that takes up the bulk of the film, and it concerns Ida Lupino as a troubled young woman, her possibly-dodgy lawyer fiance, lucky chinchilla feet, Andean funeral chants and a bolas-wielding Inca gaucho hitman with a club foot. Although original to the play this movie is based on (written by William Gillette, the first Sherlock to wear a deerstalker), this plot is authentically Doylean in both its atmosphere and many of its details.

On the other hand, we’re always aware that it’s nothing more than a very intricate blind contrived by Moriarty and as a result it never completely engrosses. Holmes, obviously, also figures this out, but quite how – other than because the script requires it – is never made clear. The whole climax of the film has a slightly rushed and perfunctory air about it, which is shame given how lavishly solidly its opening section is.

But never mind, there is much to enjoy here – Basil Rathbone’s dynamic, rather genial Detective, Nigel Bruce’s pompous and slightly petulant but still rather endearing Watson, and George Zucco’s silkily sinister Moriarty. Moriarty is revealed to have a touch of the green fingers on this appearance, which somehow doesn’t feel quite right, but it’s hardly a major element.

One serious plot-hole doesn’t get mentioned – the bizarre death Moriarty arranges as a distraction for Holmes is, apparently, eerily similar to one which occurred ten years previously. Now, does this just mean Moriarty really plans ahead? Or does he just keep up with the True Crime section of his local bookshop, where he read about this crime and figured out how to replicate it? The other alternative is for him to borrow HG Wells’ time machine and pop back to do it himself – not quite as implausible as it sounds, given that the film’s most off-the-wall moment has a heavily disguised Basil Rathbone performing a high-energy song-and-dance version of ‘I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’ (for no reason required by the plot), a song not written until 1907.

Different people want different things from their Holmes adaptations, whether that means painstaking accuracy to the canon, scintillating plotting and dialogue, or broad character comedy and visual pyrotechnics. The virtues of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes lie in its broadly faithful performances and characterisations, its convincing period setting, the atmosphere Werker creates, and its breezy pace. There have been much bigger and more colourful Sherlock Holmes movies, but few which have combined fun with fidelity with quite such success.

The Gentle Touch

It was with some dismay that I learned of the plans to disband the collective of film-makers who operate under the name of Steven Soderbergh (it surely being impossible for any single individual to direct so many films as diverse and accomplished as the ones with Soderbergh’s name on them). More than in most cases, the presence of the Soderbergh name on a production is as close to a guarantee of quality as one can realistically expect, regardless of the tone or subject matter involved. The new Soderbergh movie, Haywire, continues this tradition – although, having effortlessly reinvented genres as disparate as the caper movie (Ocean’s Eleven), the true-life drama (Erin Brockovitch), the arty SF movie (Solaris), and the all-star disaster movie (Contagion), the Soderberghs have now effectively invented a unique genre of their own: the pro-celebrity cage-fighting movie.

Gina Carano (a former mixed martial arts fighter, ex-American Gladiator, and pretty much the textbook definition of a strapping lass) plays Mallory, a delicate young flower of womanhood who we first meet going into a diner in upstate New York. Here she meets Aaron (Channing Tatum), a young man of her acquaintance. After Aaron is ungallant enough to smash a cup of coffee over her head and pull a gun on her, Mallory wastes no time in beating him half to death and leaving in the car of another patron, to whom she explains The Story So Far.

Mallory is, of course, an ex-marine specialising in high-risk covert operations – a mercenary, on the books of Kenneth (Ewan McGregor), her ex-lover. After returning from a mission in Barcelona, and on the verge of quitting the company, Kenneth persuades Mallory to take on – oh ho ho! – one last job. She is to masquerade as the wife of MI6 agent Paul (Michael Fassbender) while he investigates a dubious chap in Dublin. However, it becomes apparent that Mallory has been told a pack of lies, and somebody wants her dead…

When I first saw the trailer for Haywire – tough but comely female lead, heavy action and martial arts content, dubiously twisty-looking plot, lashings of style – my reaction was ‘Crikey, Luc Besson’s really rushed his new movie out,’ so similar to the likes of Nikita, Leon, and Colombiana did it appear. The appearance of Steven Soderbergh’s name at the end rather discombobulated me. But why shouldn’t Soderbergh give us his take on an action movie? He’s done practically everything else.

And yet, there’s a sense in which the highest compliment I can pay Haywire is that it’s exactly like a Besson movie, stylish and exciting, but stripped of all the usual excess and with a startling infusion of taste and restraint added to the mix. Not to mention a very distinguished cast – in addition to McGregor, Tatum, and Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas and Bill Paxton also show up and do their usual reliable work.

One gets the sense that this gallimaufrey of talent may have been recruited to make up for a perceived weakness in Carano as a leading lady. Given that she was allegedly recruited after one of the Soderberghs saw her fighting on TV, this would not come as a surprise – I’m reminded of the bet one Hollywood producer made his golf partner that he could make the world’s least likely person a major star, with the result being the career of Steven Seagal – but to be fair to her Gina Carano acquits herself perfectly acceptably.

That said, the script is carefully written so that Carano has the minimum to do acting-wise – Mallory’s not the most demonstrative of individuals – and gets the maximum chance to let rip in the action sequences. Just running down the street Carano looks unstoppable, but in the fight scenes she is simply astounding. Haywire almost completely avoids the martial arts movie cliches – hero takes on twelve people in a garage, hero fights giant, hero fights lead henchman – in favour of a series of one-on-one fights between its lead and proper Hollywood A-listers. In terms of realistic action, these are exemplary in every way: the sequence in which Carano and Fassbender kick the living crap out of each other at some length in a Dublin hotel room is one of the most visceral, exciting movie fights I’ve ever seen.

I suppose one could make the criticism that Mallory Kane falls victim to the usual problem afflicting action heroines, in that her characterisation doesn’t extend much beyond ‘man with breasts’ in any positive sense. Certainly, working with a less talented director, Carano as a screen presence could become as clunky a cipher as Van Damme or Seagal, which may be an issue if her career has any longevity.

To be honest the film does a good job of walking the tightrope between working on a cinematic level and simply staying realistic. One friend of mine didn’t like it, saying it was boring, for this reason. And the action is a little thinner on the ground than in some movies of this ilk. You really have to stay with the plot and trust that everything will be explained come the end, which it is – but on the other hand, just when most action movies would start building to a riotously implausible climax, Haywire resolves its story in a much simpler and unexpectedly low-key (but still satisfying) way.

This really didn’t bother me – Haywire is an immaculately made and pleasingly bare-boned action movie. It’s the kind of thing Soderbergh knocks out on a lazy afternoon, managing to surpass genre specialists in the process. I thoroughly enjoyed it, although this was largely due to the Gina Carano-beats-up-famous-actors schtick. My literary advisor and I thought this was a brilliant idea and within five minutes of leaving the theatre had drawn up our own list of people we wanted to see her pound into the earth in the sequel: Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Orlando Bloom, Ryan Reynolds… There’s a lot of potential here. Notable careers have been built on considerably less, and I’ll be very interested to see if Gina Carano can live up to the promise she shows so devastatingly here.

My Struggle

As regulars may have noticed (and possibly appreciated), it’s been quiet for a few weeks on the uke front: well, as in the blog, so in life. I’m not quite sure why this should be but it surely can’t be a coincidence that it’s happened since I went to the first meeting of the local uke group.

It’s always interesting to go to a new pub, although this may turn out to be a singular pleasure as sheer numbers mean that the group has outgrown this particular boozer and we’re all off to a place I’ve been to a few times as of the next get-together. The Mighty Uke screening seems to have had a catalysing effect inasmuch I wasn’t the only newcomer there.

All in all I think nearly twenty people turned up wielding a variety of different uke makes and models; I was initially worried that I’d be the only one packing plastic but a few other Makalas were also present. I’m pretty sure I was the only lefty there, though.

The meeting was graced by the presence of the prime mover of another local uke group who proceeded to run through the basics of the instrument and then half-a-dozen songs. This format seemed to be very popular with the assembled ukers and I must confess I can’t think of a better one with which to replace it. But I must confess to being slightly ambivalent about the experience.

Firstly – and let’s get this out of the way – I decided not to join in with the singing. This was partly due to the fact that I’d only just met these people and didn’t want to get chucked out on the first night, but also the reality of playing as part of a group felt completely different to playing alone, and was actually rather more challenging. On the one hand going off the rhythm or flubbing a chord change wasn’t that big a deal as the noise from everyone else covered it up, but on the other hand I was still aware of it and it was a little disconcerting to know I was making so many mistakes.

The other major thing was that, as a largely autodidact uker, I’m used to coming up with my own (probably rather eccentric) strums to suit the different songs I tackle – well, they’re derived from the books I have, but I inevitably end up spinning them a bit. At the group we played six rather diverse tunes, all of them using the same strum (Swiss Army or calypso or whatever you want to call it). This was completely different to what I was used to.

Another disconcerting issue was the fact that my uke seemed to be losing its tuning every five minutes, which isn’t like it at all. Rastamouse, my advisor on all things musical, has suggested that I may be strumming harder or for longer periods, which may explain this phenomenon. Possibly the vibrations from nearly two dozen massed ukes may have been having an effect as well. Not sure. Not really a big deal as long as I remember to pack my tuner I suppose.

So yes, I am going again, although I haven’t put nearly as much uke time in recently as I did in December. Partly this is because other stuff has been going on rather a lot: trips to the cinema, stuff to do with the diploma, and so on. I used to squeeze in ten or fifteen minutes late-night practice at the end of a busy day but the young woman in the garret adjoining mine has made it very clear through the medium of banging angrily on our shared wall that she would rather I didn’t.

(Knowing someone can actually hear me fooling around on the thing has sort of made me a bit reluctant to practice at all, if we’re honest. Nevertheless all it takes is a little casual strumming and a quick rattle through House of the Rising Sun or Edelweiss or When I’m Cleaning Windows and I’m as keen on the uke as ever.)

So we shall see: firstly how the uke group gets on in its new environs (changes in my workload mean I won’t be able to stay until the end of the meeting this week, but that can’t be helped), and then about finding regular practice time at a reasonable hour of the evening. The omens are not that great, but such are the realities of diploma year I suppose.

War by Other Means

All hail to Ralph, lord of the house of Fiennes

Respected well both here and o’er the pond

An Oscar did he get for Schindler’s List

He’s also the new bad guy in James Bond.

Director now bold Ralphie has become -

A thing’s more worth the doing if it’s hard! -

A complex tale his debut offering:

He’s giving us his vision of the Bard.

No well-known play he’s gone for, no sirree

But obscure Roman saga, Coriolanus

And old Will Shakespeare’s versing’s kept intact

Which must have been a right pain in the neck.

So hence my tribute in this verse that’s blank

The key thing to it (and this I must stress)

Is in the correct placement of the stre… er, beats

At least irregular rhyming is allowed.

(Although this conceit’s wearing rather thin -

I think the time has come to pack it in.)

Oh, be quiet: it’s not like you’re having to pay for this, is it? Yes, it’s the new adaptation of Coriolanus, directed by and starring Ralph ‘Little Sunbeam’ Fiennes. (Rather mind-bogglingly, the script is credited to one John Logan, although some Shakespeare guy gets an ‘original material’ nod.) Now, I know this will come as a shock to regular readers, but there are limits to my erudition and this is not one of the plays with which I am terribly familiar. As a result I recruited an expert in literature to accompany me to the cinema, although the fact that his first words of wisdom on the play were ‘It’s a bit like 300‘ led me to worry I wasn’t paying enough attention when it came to the ancillary staff situation. Hey ho.

Fiennesy plays Caius Martius, respected and feared general in the service of the Roman Republic. The Volscians, old enemies of Rome, are playing up under the command of their military leader Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler – hey, what do you know! He was right!). The Romans come off better in the clash, though the personal feud of the two generals is unresolved.

On his return to Rome, he is gifted with the honorary name Coriolanus and, as is customary and expected (we’ll come back to this), proceeds towards the distinguished position of Consul, a source of much pride to his frankly scary mother (Vanessa Redgrave). However, while a brilliant soldier, Coriolanus is fatally lacking in the common touch and any kind of political sensitivity. His domestic enemies find it very easy to turn the population against him, with dire consequences for both countries and individuals…

Of necessity, any outline of Shakespeare’s plot wholly omits exactly how Fiennes chooses to present it. This is by far the most striking thing about it – rather in the same way that Ian McKellen’s Richard III movie took place in a 1930s Europe falling under the sway of Fascism, so Fiennes’ Coriolanus is contextualised in a world like the Balkans of the early 90s: bloody, senseless fighting; APCs rolling through bleak European cities; murky, self-interested politicking. This seems entirely appropriate for a film which takes as its theme the chaos which ensues when war and politics intersect.

That said, the text has a wider focus to it, and one which may possibly surprise people with only a passing familiarity with Shakespeare. This is a startlingly cynical film – the patrician class are scourged for their contempt and disdain for the wider population, but the public themselves are implicitly depicted as foolish sheep for allowing themselves to be so easily manipulated. Hardly any of the characters are presented in a remotely positive light, with the possible exception of Menenius (Brian Cox), one of Coriolanus’ political allies.

Cox, Fiennes, and Butler are just the most prominent members of an extremely strong cast, which also includes Jessica Chastain, James Nesbitt, Jon Snow, and, most prominently, Vanessa Redgrave as Coriolanus’ mum. Redgrave in particular is electrifying as a domineering, deeply controlling woman who is clearly the source of all that is both good and bad in her son’s character. Fiennes himself gives a striking central turn – he’s terrifying as Coriolanus the soldier, then chilling later on as the man falls from grace. That said, I don’t feel he ever quite gets to the heart of the character in terms of his pride and arrogance – Coriolanus the politician just comes across as awkward and a bit distant, rather than someone temperamentally unsuited to this course.

Another problem with the film is that, inevitably, the scissors have come out and much material has been excised (though my literary consultant distinctly muttered ‘I don’t remember that bit in the text’ at one point). Amongst the stuff that’s gone, alas, is whatever explanation is given for Coriolanus’s decision to become Consul. He seems fundamentally unsuited to the job and doesn’t actually seem to want it, so why’s he bothering? Is it just the done Roman thing? Is he being pushed into it by his mum? It’s central to the plot, so we really need to know why it’s happening.

Oh well – in many ways this is a very impressive film, and one that really works as a film in its own right most of the way through (although, one climactic scene has rather too much of a whiff of the Stratford stage about it in the way it’s staged). The acting is fantastic, the story is about as easy to follow as obscure Shakespeare play movie adaptations get (hmm, mayhaps damning with faint praise there), and it’s visually very interesting. If it doesn’t offer any easy answers to the questions it raises about what happens when the boundaries between soldiers and politicians blur, that’s perhaps because it would be fatuous to do so. I can’t honestly believe Coriolanus will wholeheartedly convert anyone going to see it with no prior knowledge of the play, but people with a better education than mine will probably find it a very rewarding experience.

There once was a soldier named Caius,

Lambasted for anti-prole bias.

When kicked out of town

He said with a frown

‘I suppose this stuff’s just sent to try us.’

Hispanic Attack

As fate and the vagaries of my DVD rental package would have it, we go straight from Touch of Evil‘s handling of cross-border prejudice and political corruption to another film with a slightly different take on the same themes: Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis’ 2010 movie Machete. Marching towards this review with ineluctable certainty are the words ‘from the sublime to the ridiculous’… oh look, they’ve arrived.

Machete, as you may or may not know, originated as one of the spoof trailers that accompanied the two Grindhouse movies on their various releases (a complex story). It apparently received such a positive response (I must admit I probably enjoyed it rather more than Planet Terror, the film it was accompanying) that a full movie was duly made. As such, this film is arguably a textbook definition of being an extended joke.

The meandering and not especially coherent plot concerns the exploits of a Mexican ex-cop known as Machete due to his love of sharp objects (and also of hitting people with them). He is played (well, this is a bit of an issue, which we will return to) by Danny Trejo, a leather-faced performer who has carved out a bit of a niche for himself as convicts and lowlives on movies and TV. Machete is illegally working as a labourer in Texas when he is hired to assassinate John McLaughlin (Robert de Niro – yes, that Robert de Niro), a senator whose support mainly comes from his toxically anti-Mexican rhetoric – he also associates with a gang of murderous vigilantes led by Von Jackson (Don Johnson – yes, that Don Johnson).

Accepting mainly so he can pass his fee on to an underground network for the betterment of Mexican illegals run by Lus (the divine and radiant Michelle Rodriguez), Machete sets out to kill the senator – but rapidly discovers he’s been set up by McLaughlin’s aide (Jeff Fahey), intent on creating sympathy for the senator’s views and drumming up anti-Mexican sentiment. Needless to say, our man embarks on a blood-splattered revenge against those who have ruthlessly betrayed him.

(And I haven’t even mentioned Jessica Alba as a government agent, Steven Seagal (yes, that Steven Seagal) as a drug baron, or Lindsay Lohan (yes, that Lindsay Lohan) who wanders through the final section of the film as a gun-toting nun. It’s not that the plot is especially complex – far from it – it’s just utterly all over the place.)

Well, you know, I sat down to watch Machete with reasonable expectations, willing to cut it some slack – Robert Rodriguez is, if nothing else, a consistent film-maker, I’ll watch anything with Michelle Rodriguez in it, and Danny Trejo has certainly got presence. I was hoping for a moderately OTT action movie pastiche that didn’t take itself too seriously. The problem I have with Machete is that it’s actually… well I’m not really sure what it’s supposed to be, and I suspect some of the people involved don’t know either.

Spoof, satire, parody, broad comedy, genuine exploitation (perhaps in this case that should be Mexploitation) movie: the film lurches back and forth across genre boundaries almost at random, its intelligence level going up and down wildly in the process. Particularly baffling is all the stuff about the rights of Mexican illegals in the USA – while I understand this parallels the political dimension of blaxploitation films of the 70s, it’s not in itself particularly funny if it’s here as a parody, and if it’s seriously meant then it’s horribly trivialised by its inclusion in such a determinedly stupid film (‘the most absurd thing I’ve ever read’ was the verdict of one major actor who declined to participate).

That said, some of the Mexican jokes are quite amusing – there’s a running gag where Machete infiltrates the bad guy’s house simply by pretending to be the gardener, and later on beats up a bevy of henchmen using horticultural equipment – even if the climax (our hero raises an army of illegal labourers to battle the forces of evil, and they all turn up waving the accoutrements of their jobs) is again too silly to be genuinely funny. Basically, as a comedy, Machete is only consistently amusing if you subscribe to an oh-ho-ho-isn’t-this-just-so-intentionally-crap? sensibility, and as anything else it’s undermined by the presence of all these laboured attempts at humour.

Compared to this, the film’s problems in the acting department are relatively small beer, but – come on, this is a movie with Danny Trejo in the lead role, which if nothing else demonstrates that presence and charisma are not the same thing. On the strength of this outing Trejo’s range as an actor runs from A to very nearly the far end of A. It’s like making a movie with Chewbacca playing the lead – Trejo just lumbers around making noises and everyone else either tries to copy his style or wildly overacts in an attempt to compensate for it. Almost all the other performances are paralytically lousy, one way or another, which is especially shocking given some of the people Robert Rodriguez has (God knows how) assembled.

Not that long ago, Robert de Niro was routinely being hailed as the greatest screen actor of his generation – one has to wonder what happened, given that his late-period work seems to mostly consist of deeply underwhelming extended cameos in things like this and Killer Elite. Never mind being acted off the screen by Jason Statham, here de Niro is outperformed by, of all people, Steven Seagal. Steven Seagal! To be fair, the world’s least agile martial arts star is on rather good, self-parodying form here.

When Steven Seagal’s acting is one of the best things about a movie you know you’ve slipped a long way off the map of cinematic excellence. Still, neither that nor Michelle Rodriguez kicking ass in a bikini top were quite enough to redeem the movie. At the end of Planet Terror I told anyone who’d listen that it’s all too easy to make a bad film by accident, and plenty of people do every year, and so for a film-maker like Robert Rodriguez to make a bad film intentionally felt like a terrible squandering of both time and talent. I feel exactly the same about Machete, except perhaps even moreso. Of course, I am in the minority, as usual: financing for the two sequels we’re threatened with promised at the end of this film has apparently already been secured, and production is only waiting on Rodriguez to finish writing the scripts. Don’t rush on my account, Bob.

Some Kind of a Movie

The lovely old tradition of the classic cinema revival is in danger of being thoroughly smeared for the basest of motives. Seeing older movies back on the big screen has brought me some of my best moviegoing experiences, from watching Seven Samurai, The Wicker Man and Taxi Driver during my student days, to catching Star Trek II in rep just last summer. These days, alas, the revival is as often as not another mechanism used to attempt to prop up the tottering 3D edifice – last year saw The Lion King 3D, with Titanic 3D and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace 3D already on the horizon (not that I’m absolutely ruling out the possibility of seeing one of those…).

Nevertheless, proper, sensible, non-stereoscoped revivals continue to take place, which is how I was able to watch the restored version of Orson Welles’ 1958 movie Touch of Evil. Given that the director also plays a major acting role, it may, of course, simply be the case that the 3D technology does not yet exist which is capable of handling Welles’ – er – heroic physique, but the reason is insignificant compared to the result.

The plot runs thusly: night in a small town on the US-Mexican border is shattered when a car bomb kills a local American businessman and his girlfriend. On the scene coincidentally is Mexican government agent Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston, Hispanicked up for the part) and his new bride (Janet Leigh). Worried about the diplomatic implications should a Mexican have murdered an American, Vargas involves himself in the case, despite the fact he’s already mixed up in the prosecution of a local crime family.

This puts Vargas in the path of the local law, personified by Hank Quinlan (Welles), something with severe consequences for both men. Vargas quickly realises that Quinlan will go to any lengths to punish the guilty – and if this extends to roughing up suspects and planting evidence, so be it. The Mexican resolves to expose Quinlan’s methods, not realising that an alliance between his target and his own enemies may put not just him but also his wife in danger…

A summary of the plot does little to explain quite why Touch of Evil has become such a revered movie, and one of the two or three cornerstones on which Orson Welles’ legend rests. The story itself is not that special, but then if this film is remarkable it is not for the tale but the manner of its telling. Welles makes his ambitions clear from the very beginning of the film, with its justly famous, insanely complex three minute shot, in which the camera travels the length of the town as it tracks the progress of the car carrying the bomb. It’s an ostentatiously brilliant flourish – nothing else in the movie quite matches it for sheer verve, but it makes it clear that this is not going to be a run-of-the-mill production.

The camerawork in this movie is almost absurdly accomplished simply on a technical level, but what really makes an impact is the atmosphere that Welles conjures up – the film takes place in a filthy, sweaty, half-lit world of guilty comprises and dirty secrets, with the purity of classic noir becoming stained by the outriders of a new and more frantic culture – biker gangs, rock ‘n’ roll and marijuana are beginning to supplant hoodlums, jazz and cheap booze.

Quinlan is one of cinema’s great monsters: a shabby, obese, brutal racist – but never an inhuman one. Hints of a backstory suggest how this man came to be as he is, and while never sympathetic he is not quite without virtue – if he has abused his power it is not for personal ends, but in the pursuit of what he sees as his duty. If there is any real evil in Quinlan, then it is only a minor element of who he is – a touch of evil, but no more.

As both director and actor, Orson Welles dominates this movie whether on the screen or off it – his arrival as Quinlan may not be as iconic as his first appearance as Harry Lime in The Third Man, but at the screening I attended it was greeted by soft chuckling throughout the audience: this was the man we had come to see. Of course, he does not disappoint, even if his performance at times borders on being a little too mannered. As ever, one is left infuriated by both the quixotic nature of his vast talents and the shortsightedness of Hollywood in making so little use of them.

It has become something of a running joke that Charlton Heston makes an unlikely Mexican, but, oddly, this suits the movie rather well. The star is incongruous in the part, but then again everything that Heston always embodied – a kind of muscular conviction and self-assurance – is equally out of place in the world of the movie. Some of the film’s most electric moments come from the clash between Heston’s monolithic certitude and the intangible ambiguities that always seem to swirl around Welles in his greatest moments.

Elsewhere in the cast, Janet Leigh starts well but after a while simply has very little to do beyond lie around in a stupor – she has virtually nothing to do following a sequence where she checks into a remote motel with a twitchy weirdo in charge (Leigh’s career in the late 50s involved quite a lot of this sort of thing). The performances of the rest of the cast, with the exception of a luminous Marlene Dietrich as Quinlan’s old flame, are really presenting grotesques of various kinds. The only performance which really oversteps the mark is that of Dennis Weaver as the motel nightman: he really is a bit too OTT by modern standards and unintentionally funny as a result.

But, then again, Touch of Evil is really all about presenting a tale of a clash between moral idealism and corruption in an irresistibly exaggerated style – and while Heston may be victorious at the conclusion of the story, one gets no sense that he and Leigh have done anything to amend the wider world in which they live; they are the aberrations, not Quinlan. Even then, the film is too extravagantly stylish and too magisterially made to really feel downbeat. Welles’ great achievement in Touch of Evil is to transform the crime melodrama into the cinematic equivalent of grand opera – but then again, one would surely expect no less of a man who was larger-than-life himself in almost every respect.

The Adventure of the Three Fables

So – second series of Sherlock, eh? The obvious thing to say is that Steven Moffat didn’t do himself any favours with a first series that was so unutterably hit-the-ground-running brilliant, and – foolish boy! – has continued to make life difficult for himself by overseeing a just-as-good second run. One could grumble about the fact that, on pretty much any level you care to mention, his second pass at Sherlock totally eclipsed his second full series of Doctor Who (and come to think of it I did) but this would be a bit churlish, and I’m not the kind of person to endlessly draw fatuous parallels between either the series or the characters.

Anyway, as the ongoing adventures of a fiercely intelligent, asexual hero temporarily pause with the central character forced to fake his own death as a consequence of an unexpected rise in his profile, let’s look back at the three episodes.

Thinking about this piece, my initial response to A Scandal in Belgravia was that this was one of those practically perfect pieces of art that are actually quite difficult to review without just gushing. Then I remembered beyond all the usual Moffat verbal and narrative pyrotechnics, to the remarkable plunge into pathos and genuine emotion of the second half of the episode. The bit that sticks with me is of Benedict Cumberbatch and Mark Gatiss together outside the morgue, a brilliant written and underplayed scene, with – for me – Gatiss never better: ‘There’s a limit to how much damage you can do.’

I’m not such a dyed-in-the-wool Sherlockian as to venerate Irene Adler as much as some do (much grumbling in some circles, I understand, concerning the handling of the character in Game of Shadows), but I thought the Sherlock version was very engagingly written and played. Some elements of the plot rattled by just a bit too fast to completely keep track of but for me this remains, probably, the best episode of the six so far.

I suspect it was inevitable that Mark Gatiss would demand the rights to the Sherlock version of the most famous Conan Doyle story of them all, and The Hounds of Baskerville turned out to be very characteristic. For the first time, the series had the problem of dealing with a plot which is well known – there are people who haven’t a clue about the plots of any of the short stories in the canon, but who are familiar with the story of Hound from one of the other umpteen versions that have already been made. In some ways this was a more faithful episode than some others, in terms of character names, but more energetically free in many respects, as well as being fun and intelligent. I must confess to guessing a) the nature of the hound’s dreadful influence and b) the identity of the villain, if not his motivation, but these are fairly small quibbles.

And so to The Reichenbach Fall, waltzing delicately through the same narrative territory as Game of Shadows. Certainly Sherlock‘s enthusiastically deranged Moriarty is some considerable distance from Doyle’s character, an interesting choice given that Jared Harris’s very faithful interpretation is, if anything, just as effective. That said, Andrew Scott was terrific in the role, just as good in his own way as Harris.

This is the best thing I’ve seen from the pen of Steve Thompson, but having said that this is the kind of story I can imagine myself returning to in future and going ‘Haaaaang on a minute…’ about. Viewing it the first time, the rush and surprise of it do a very good job of papering over the holes in the narrative, but I don’t think that’ll hold up for subsequent viewings. On the other hand, the handling of Sherlock’s celebrity was intelligent and depressingly believeable.

Looking back, I enjoyed the nod to Moriarty’s stealing-the-crown-jewels caper from the 1939 Basil Rathbone movie. And, on a similar note, I wonder how many non-obsessives spotted the presence of the 92-year-old Douglas Wilmer in a cameo role, Wilmer having played Holmes for the BBC nearly 50 years ago? In itself a sobering reminder of how few notable Sherlocks of years gone by are still with us.

Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes remains a going concern, of course, but the writers really were in a corner when it came to the climax of the series. The real final problem, of course, is that everyone knows that Holmes dies at the end of the original story – but also that he rises from the dead some time later! How to achieve the proper emotional impact without killing the character off for real?

Well, they managed to come up with a suitably shocking climax, but the jury is surely still out on the manner of Holmes’s resurrection. The danger was that his death wouldn’t convince – the problem turned out to be that it was just too believable! Without even the hint of an explanation (not even the tiniest trace of a miniaturised aqualung or its equivalent), his inexplicable survival looked ominously contrived.

Still, better that than the end of what’s surely a contender for drama series of the year (and January only just half over). Given the rocketing profiles of Cumberbatch and Freeman, it’d take a brave person to predict when the series will be back, but surely no-one would not expect it to be worth the wait.

Space Oddity

Various cinematic shades hang over Duncan Jones’ Moon, almost exclusively of the classic-70s-SF variety – even before the opening credits had finished I was already thinking in terms of Silent Running, Alien, 2001, and so on. This sort of homage goes on all the time, of course, but the question is whether this is just a cheap visual gimmick – an ingratiating wink at the cognoscenti – or born of a deeper affection for and understanding of what these films are actually about.

Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, the sole inhabitant of an industrial outpost on the dark side of the titular celestial body. Sam’s job is to oversee a number of semi-autonomous robotic mining vehicles which harvest energy-rich helium-3 before it is processed and fired off back to Earth. Almost totally isolated and unable to communicate directly with Earth, his only companion is Gerty, the embodiment of the base AI (voiced, inimitably, by Kevin Spacey). Sam’s been here for three years – a long haul – and he is looking forward to the end of his contract and returning to his wife and child. However, as his time grows short, he becomes aware of strange phenomena – he seems to be having hallucinations, occasionally glimpsing others in the base or seeing recordings of himself he has no recollection of making. Things come to a head when he becomes dangerously distracted while out on the lunar surface and crashes his tractor into one of the helium miners.

Sam recovers consciousness in the base infirmary with no recollection of what happened. But almost at once he becomes suspicious – Gerty seems to be having conversations with Earth behind his back and the base is unaccountably sealed. He manages to make his way outside, but on returning to the crash site he makes a shocking discovery – inside the wrecked tractor is an injured man, and it appears to be him…

The most obvious thing about Moon is the level of technical achievement involved in what is, after all, an extremely low-budget film. This is not remotely apparent on screen: the production is immaculately designed and realised, with the only slightly peculiar element being extensive use of models rather than CGI. Even this feels like a refreshing break from the norm, and if I say parts of the film rather resemble parts of the Gerry Anderson canon, I mean this in a good way.

The centre of the film is the interaction between the two Sam and this is flawlessly executed – there’s even a brief sequence where they play each other at ping-pong during which my jaw literally dropped open. Here the movie transcends the technical limitations of the films it’s inspired by while keeping something of their soul. However, that this element works as well as it does is due just as much to Sam Rockwell’s performance. The two Sams are very different characters and constantly believeable as such – but at the same time, Rockwell never overdoes it and makes them into wholly different people.

Recently I discussed the difficulty of defining the nature of SF, and one of the better suggestions I’ve heard is that it revolves around conceptual breakthrough of some kind – characters slowly coming to a better, truer understanding of the nature of the world and their place in it. This theme is certainly at the heart of Moon and certainly influences the structure of the film – this isn’t an action movie or really an adventure of any kind, but more an examination of character. As such it’s both engaging and rather moving.

If the film has a weakness, it’s that once all the layers of mystification and strangeness have been resolved, the story is rather stuck for things to do in terms of a climax. Lots of things happen, for sure, and the end of the film is satisfying – but it somehow doesn’t have the richness or thoughtfulness of the earlier sections.

Moon, as I believe is quite well-known, eventually led to Duncan Jones being given the director’s chair on Source Code. In retrospect, it’s easy to see what the two films have in common, as they’re both tightly limited in terms of location and are concerned with individuals trapped in a repetitive cycle to the point where they begin to question their own identity. They’re both very good, but for me Moon is easily the superior of the two – not just a homage to a collection of classic movies, but a classic in its own right.

Preach for the Stars

I was catching up with my sister over the Christmas break and, as usual given the lack of anything else we have in common, we ended up talking about what films we’d enjoyed in 2011. I mentioned Never Let Me Go, as you would, and said I thought it was the best SF movie of the year – perhaps for many years.

‘Never Let Me Go‘s not SF,’ said Spea.

‘Yes it is. Why is it not SF?’ I asked.

‘Well, SF movies are set in the future and happen on other planets.’

‘What about E.T.?’

‘Well, that’s got a spaceship in it.’

‘Terminator?’

‘Killer robot and a time machine.’

‘So, for a movie to be SF it’s got to be set in the future, or on another planet, or have a spaceship, a robot, or a time machine?’

‘Basically, yes. Does Never Let Me Go have any of those things in it?’

‘No.’

‘Well, then.’

‘It’s got clones in it though.’

However, by this point I think Spea’s mind was elsewhere: having two children under the age of four about the house appears to interfere somewhat with properly rigorous genre analysis. Nevertheless, what does and doesn’t count as SF has been a historically vexed question – even the editors of the superlative Encyclopedia of SF can’t quite manage to come up with a sufficiently comprehensive yet non-equivocal definition. In particular, the fringes of the genre are extremely porous – if a novel set 100 years in the future is SF, why not one only five years hence?

When it comes to movies, things are, if anything, even less clear. Most people have a fairly well-defined idea of what an SF movie looks and sounds like – usually something brash, possibly garish, either intellectually vapid or deeply pessimistic, frequently containing horror elements, and somehow quintessentially cinematic in that it is a fundamentally visual piece of art. This is another way of saying that many SF films stand or fall by the quality of their visual effects – and that being FX-heavy is almost the sine qua non of the genre.

SF movies without an element of the visually spectacular or innovative – or, to put it another way, much in the way of special effects – are an interesting subgenre. Many of these float around the fringes and aren’t usually described as such (as happened with Never Let Me Go, probably on purpose, but also with films like War Games), while others are relatively obscure – the British movie Seven Days to Noon, for example.

I was recently pointed towards the 1952 movie Red Planet Mars by a friend who promised I would love it. This turned out to be utterly untrue in the sense of me actually liking the thing, but nevertheless this movie (obscure in the UK for reasons which will no doubt become apparent) is fascinating: partly because it’s so deeply weird, but also because there’s a sense in which it’s a purer piece of genuine SF than many other much more celebrated 50s SF films.

‘This is a story not yet told,’ drawls the narrator – which is just as well, given the movie’s only just started at the time. (‘This is a story already half-way through,’ would not work so well as an engaging opening line, I suspect.) The narration is actually admirably concise and restrained compared to the melodramatic and/or quasi-religious excesses to be found in other movies, but the movie soon makes up for that as we meet radio astronomer Chris Cronyn (Peter Graves, long before his tape player started exploding) and his wife Linda (Andrea King). Chris and Linda are visiting some scientist friends who share their interests in Mars and painfully clunky expository dialogue. The other scientists have photos of Mars which suggest an advanced civilisation exists on the planet. This is of great interest to Chris as he has spent years, with Linda’s help, building a highly-advanced transmitter to contact the planet.

This must have been a trying undertaking for Chris as Linda soon reveals herself to be an obsessive doom-mongering pessimist, much given to bleak predictions about the impending death of the world, and going on about the diet of fear she and every other woman in the world is forced to live on. How exactly did these two get together? He is a brilliant scientist who lives for his work, while she appears to be a psychotic anti-intellectual maniac – if Chris succeeds in his ambition of contacting the Martians, says Linda, he’ll be the next to advance science, ‘and maybe us – INTO OBLIVION!!!‘ All I can assume is that Linda must be a really good cook.

Maybe they’re just keeping it up for the sake of the kids. Chris and Linda’s sons pop up repeatedly throughout the movie and are clearly meant to be loveable all-American scamps, paragons of wholesome boyhood. Needless to say I found them creepy and irritating, and the scenes extolling the virtues of traditional American family life and values more than a little stomach-churning. Never mind laying it on with a trowel: Red Planet Mars gets to work with a fleet of JCBs.

Oh well. Things become a little more engaging when the scene changes to a hut high in the Andes where we meet Franz Calder (played by Herbert Berghof, who gives the closest thing to an acting performance of anyone in the movie). Calder is a disgraced ex-Nazi scientist who invented the transmitter Chris is using; at the behest of his Soviet paymasters Calder is trying the same thing. Pausing only to scoff at a nearby statue of Christ – ooh, those Russians! – the Soviets depart leaving everyone to get on with the plot.

Chris succeeds in contacting Mars, but initially struggles to find a basis for communication with this alien society. Okay, so it’s not very sophisticated, but it’s a world away from movies like This Island Earth where everyone on Metaluna speaks fluent English. Rather predictably, despite the presence in the room of a brilliant scientist and a decorated cryptographer, it’s one of the junior Cronyns who cracks the problem, which I suppose wipes out any credit the film earned for itself on this score.

Never mind, the movie continues in idiosyncratic style as communications are established between Earth and Mars. The social and cultural implications of alien contact are a vanishingly rare theme in SF cinema and Red Planet Mars instantly becomes interesting, even though it tackles the topic in a crushingly simplistic fashion. The signals from Mars have a devastating effect on western civilisation, especially its economy: news that fossil fuels have been adandoned causes the mining industry to collapse, while suggestions of improvements in agricultural have a similar effect on farmers. What lets the film down is the perfunctory way this is handled – no-one on Earth actually has the slightest idea how the Martians generate their power, but being informed of the very fact they do it differently is enough to cause Earth people to abandon their existing system. (Then again, this is quite a short film.)

However, a movie that looked to be quite unusual and thoughtful goes – frankly speaking – completely off the deep end as the real secret of Martian success is revealed: the Martians have all found God, and are mildly critical of Earthlings for ignoring the message imparted to them by the Almighty two thousand years previously. Not content with causing a massive international depression, the Martians now start a global religious revival – ‘Take them curlers outta your hair, we’re going to church,’ one minor character orders his wife – which leads to… ah, I’m on the verge of spoiling the rest of the plot.

Needless to say, Linda, who has been banging on throughout about the awful dangers of communicating with Mars, now performs an astounding feat of hypocrisy and starts telling anyone who’ll listen how wonderful all of this is. Chris, on the other hand, initially resists the release of the good news from Mars to the public, on the grounds that it doesn’t make sense. (With you all the way, Chris.) Come the climax of the movie, of course, they have reconciled their differences, agreeing that talking to other planets is indeed a good idea, as long as it allows God to get on the airwaves like some ineffable ham radio operator.

The final permutations of the plot reveal Red Planet Mars to be – in some ways – the dark, homuncular twin of Watchmen, and really destroy any aspirations it may have been to be taken seriously as a piece of genuine SF. This movie is often written off simply as a propaganda film, and to some extent it is – but while the Soviet machine is routinely demonised, this isn’t really anti-Communist propaganda, but pro-Christian.

Lip service is paid to the idea that other religions are benefitting from the spiritual revival just as much as the Church, but there’s precious little evidence of that on screen. It’s not just that the Martians are believers, they’re actually Christians, and this is depicted as being part and parcel of their status as a superior civilisation. By extension, the God-fearing Americans are better than the heathen Soviets – Christianity, conservative moral values, and the American nuclear family are not just equated but presented as being virtually indistinguishable.

To say that this is not done subtly is a major understatement. Even if you agree with Red Planet Mars‘ strident views on politics and religion – and I suspect that there are many in America even today who do – you would probably find the film embarrassingly hokey and primitive to watch. To hell-bound observers such as myself, it often borders on the laughably crude. Most of the film takes place on the same five or six small sets, and the only special effects sequence, depicting an avalanche, strongly resembles someone pushing over a pile of soap flakes. Director Harry Horner can do little to overcome the story’s origins as a stage play, given the obviously low-budget nature of proceedings.

Some 50s SF movies have withstood the passage of time better than others, with a few having become acknowledged classics. Red Planet Mars is nowhere near such distinguished company. It’s not just that the cramped and talky production isn’t that entertaining – it’s that this film was never really designed to entertain in the first place. It is, to be honest, simply a lengthy and melodramatic tract, concerned with singing the dubious praises of a very American kind of religion. The fact that it does touch upon some genuinely interesting SF ideas along the way is ultimately irrelevent – but the scenes in question are one more reason to watch a movie the very bizarreness of which makes it oddly watchable.

The Silence of the Frenchies

If you were to saunter into the offices of any major movie studio and request $15 million to engage the services of much noted international talent so that they might make a lavish black-and white movie set in 1920s Hollywood, featuring virtually no dialogue to speak of and with a key role played by a Jack Russell terrier, you would probably yourself rapidly expelled from the same offices very shortly afterwards, possibly… Zut alors! Pardonez-moi, mes amis, I’m having a touch of the deja vus. Actually, when you put it like that, Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist isn’t quite so unusual compared to some of the other films on major release right now. But even so…

Jean Dujardin plays George Valentin, a rather Douglas Fairbanks-ish silent movie star in 1920s Hollywood. Valentin is a big star and rather full of himself, and initially doesn’t pay much attention when he crosses the path of aspiring actress Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo). Valentin gets her a job as an extra on his new movie, and while there’s obviously chemistry between them, events conspire so that nothing comes of it.

Time passes and Peppy’s star waxes, even as news of a strange new invention reaches the studio: talking cinema. Valentin refuses to even contemplate making a sound movie and embarks upon his own financially risky project, while his former bosses give Peppy her own star vehicle – with sound, of course. One of them is clearly rising, but is the other’s fall inevitable? And can they come together long enough to recapture the brief spark they once shared?

Everyone seems to be talking about The Artist, which is probably just as well given that nobody’s actually talking in it. Even better, they all seem to be going to see it – as I’ve mentioned before, it’s regularly playing to sold-out houses at the local arthouse. Glowing reviews and a smidge of novelty value clearly have considerable combined influence – and the movie does live up to expectations.

Is this just a novelty film, though? Certainly, making a silent movie pastiche sounds like a very gimmicky idea, and there’s a sense in which it’s slightly perverse to be making a silent movie about the advent of sound – just as it would be to make a black and white film about the coming of colour. On the other hand, black and white movies are still being made now, over seventy years after the invention of colour stock – perhaps it’s a stylistic choice like any other, and Hazanavicius is using the silent format in the same way that, say, Abel Ferrara used monochrome in The Addiction?

Hmm. Even if this was being given as the reason why, I would be dubious – black and white films hung in there for thirty years or more before finally being consigned to the realms of the arty and the terminally low-budget. With a very exceptions, talkies displaced silent movies completely and very rapidly within a handful of years. So it seems unlikely that Hazanavicius is rediscovering a lost and distinct art form. Apparently The Artist emerged from his admiration for the era and its film-makers and also its focus on visual storytelling, and both of these are richly visible in the film itself.

That said, the most obvious kisses to the past in this movie go to Citizen Kane and Singin’ in the Rain, both of which were talkies! (The re-use in this movie of parts of Vertigo‘s score has also been the subject of much recent flapping, which if nothing else has spared me from burbling on about how authentically the soundtrack imitates Bernard Herrmann…) The visual storytelling in The Artist is the real joy of the film, however – there are relatively few intertitles, and the rest of the movie relies on ceaseless inventiveness and some brilliant flourishes – there are several uses of films-within-the-film, and so on – but also a tremendous understanding of the grammar of editing. The director isn’t afraid to play with the conventions of the form, and doesn’t let himself be straitjacketed by it either – at a couple of points sound intrudes into The Artist‘s silent world, always with good reason and to spine-tingling effect.

One of the great things about silent cinema is its ability to travel internationally with a minimum of reworking – and in a similar vein, an international cast coexists here very happily. Jean Dujardin and the winsome Berenice Bejo’s previous work in knockabout Bond spoofs will probably be receiving a lot more attention now, while John Goodman and James Cromwell turn up in surprisingly minor roles. The performer getting the most attention, however, is Uggie the Dog for his scene-stealing turn as the Dog. The Artist has already won the prestigious (it says here) Palm Dog – ‘for the outstanding canine performance at the Cannes Film Festival’ – and moves have been made to have Uggie nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar this year. Somehow I can’t see the collective dignity of the Academy standing for that, but it’s a nice idea – even if he’d probably end up sharing the stage with Spielberg’s flippin’ horse…

Anyway. I’m pretty sure the success of The Artist is a one-off – the subject matter really lends itself to this kind of treatment, while I suspect a great deal of the film’s appeal derives from a peculiar combination of novelty value and nostalgia. (Even so, I am bracing myself for a slew of inferior knock-offs, not to mention the two leads being shoehorned into unflattering supporting roles in big-budget American films a la Sharlto Copley, Monica Bellucci, etc.) Nevertheless the film itself is great fun, witty, romantic and occasionally moving, and it’s exactly the kind of self-consciously nostalgic, classic entertainment that Oscar’s shown a distinct fondness for in the past. I suspect the Palm Dog will end up with some equally distinguished company before too many weeks elapse.