THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE: too theatrical to make it real

THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE disguises it's theatrical origins pretty well right up until the grand climax when the schoolteacher protagonist and her young Judas start hurling lines of dialogue at each other such as are heard only in overheated climax scenes played out on stage.
The bitter home truths and angry indignations that spew forth sound like nothing that real people would utter and completely like observations carefully crafted by a playwright or screenwriter intent on using his characters to pass deep and meaningful comment on human nature.
It's totally theatrical and uttery false.

In truth Maggie Smith's entire performance in the title role is theatrical but she's so good at breathing life into Miss Jean Brodie that it's easy to forgive her somewhat larger than life portrayal, right up until the point when the aforementioned contrived denouement exposes the artifice.
Smith's performance takes no prisoners. She literally stormed her way to the Best Actress Oscar in 1969, forcing her co-stars to hang on to her for dear life or face being thrown aside. Robert Stephens plays it broad and manic as the art teacher, married with six kids and obsessed with Miss Brodie, Gordon Jackson stands around open-mouthed too much of the time waiting for his fellow actors to finish their line so he can say his, while Pamela Franklin is implausibly old beyond her years as one of Miss Brodie's "creme de la creme" who curdles.
Despite the blatant theatricality of it all, there's enough nuance in Smith's performance to divide viewers on the goodness or badness of Miss Brodie's intentions. Misguided idealist or sinister manipulator of young minds? - you decide.   

GRAN TORINO: Clint plunders his own past

It would be fascinating to learn what a space alien would make of GRAN TORINO.
An intelligent life form from another planet is the only being that could come to this film with no preconceptions about Clint Eastwood. My bet is they'd describe his performance as “interesting but uneven.”
For us earthbound humans it’s impossible to view GRAN TORINO without making connections to Eastwood’s cinematic history and, in particular his spaghetti westerns and ‘Dirty Harry’ films.

Now imagine the Eastwood character from these movies forty years later, retired and living in a rundown suburb of Detroit. Instead of being called The Man with No Name or Harry Callahan, he's Walt Kowalski. His working life has been spent not as a cop or vigilante but on the production line at a Ford factory. Before that he served in the US Army in Korea where he saw and did things that have haunted him ever since.
As the film opens Walt is burying his wife, and this is where the unevenness first creeps in because it’s impossible to imagine him living with anyone for forty years. He’s a buttoned-down, cranky, misanthropic loner, “a relic from the 1950s” as one of his sons describes him, with a face frozen into a permanent expression of disgust.
Contempt dripping with sarcasm is the only emotion he’s able to express. It’s quickly obvious that this is not just a reaction to the loss of his wife; this is a lifelong condition.
He’s had a problem with Asians ever since the Korean War which makes him a less than ideal neighbour for the Hmong family who move in next door. His prejudice boils over when he catches their teenage son, Thao (Bee Vang) trying to steal his prized 1972 Gran Torino as a gang initiation rite, but it also forces him – very reluctantly – to confront his racism as the family insist on befriending him while making amends for Thao’s transgression.
As Walt learns more about the family and the Hmong way of life he also finds himself drawn into a conflict which can only end in violence.
It gives little away to reveal that, having become involved in the conflict, Walt believes he has no choice but to take the law into his own hands and this is where the weight of Eastwood’s cinematic past crushes our ability to see Kowalski as a three dimensional character in his own right.
I half expected him to utter the iconic question “do you feel lucky punk?” with a cheroot clenched between his teeth and a poncho over his shoulders. Not only does Walt Kowalski channel Blondie, Mongo, and Harry Callahan but also Clint Eastwood doing an impression of himself.
There’s a surprising amount of laughter in GRAN TORINO and much of it derives from Eastwood appearing to send up his own screen image. The humour, although genuinely funny, sits a little uneasily alongside the serious drama.
The result is unsettling because it makes Kowalski less of a credible character and more an amalgam of everyone Eastwood has previously played on screen.
But before I can come to a definitive decision on my reaction to GRAN TORINO I think I need to watch it again to get past the constant distraction of Eastwood’s apparent plundering of his back catalogue of characters.

THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS: caution - may cause drowsiness

Make that definitely will induce a deep slumber reminiscent of hibernation.
1972's THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS is the most boring film I've seen in a long time. This tale of two mismatched brothers meanders along for what seems like an eternity until one of the characters finally flips out and grabs a gun. A moment longer and I'd have beaten her to it.
Jack Nicholson is David, the depressed brother, and Bruce  Dern is Jason, the deluded one who draws his brother into his latest pie in the sky scheme to get rich quick. What's so frustrating is that David knows exactly what his brother's like and he still goes along with him.

The message here would appear to be that blood is thicker than water, although the real thickness is to be found in the skulls of these two men. It's difficult to generate much sympathy for two such obviously stupid people and impossible to believe that a character as passive as David could ever have carved out a successful career for himself as a teller of tall tales on late night radio.
Nicholson is positively catatonic in his portrayal of David. It's left to Dern and a wildly overacting Ellen Burstyn in particular, as an unstable, over-the-hill showgirl to provide the histrionics.
This movie's one saving grace is it's setting. Much of the action takes place around the boardwalk and decayed glamor of a pre-casino, out-of-season Atlantic City. With it's decrepid clientele shuffling along the seafront and through the lobbies of the monstrously unattractive hotels the resort resembles God's waiting room.
But atmosphere alone is not enough to sustain the interest for an hour and forty five minutes. As a sedative THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS is an award winner, but as a piece of entertainment it's a dead loss.

ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II: what the f***?!!

This can't have seemed like a good idea even at the time.
Patch together a montage of film and newsreel clips charting the history of the Second World War and set it all to music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney performed by other artists.
The result almost defies description. 
Almost.
Thankfully the English language includes the word dreadful, and that's what this fiasco is.
Whoever it was who dreamed up the idea of turning World War Two into an eighty four minute music video had to have been under the influence of something that should have been banned or available only on prescription.
How else to account for Helen Reddy trilling "The Fool on the Hill" over images of Hitler looking dictatorial, or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to the tune of "I am the walrus" by Leo Sayer?
Some of the song-image match ups sort of make sense - "Here comes the sun" for Japan's preparations for war, and "Nowhere Man" for Mussolini, but what the heck does "Hey Jude" by The Brothers Johnson have to do with the Russians, or the battle for Guadalcanal with "I am the walrus" (again)?
Released in 1976, ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II was not the only occasion during the 70s when Hollywood turned to The Beatles looking for inspiration and wound up doing grievous bodily harm to some of the finest pop music of all time. Two years later, George Burns, The Bee Gees and Frankie Howerd did their best to beat the Fab Four's finest work to a bloody pulp with the excruciatingly bad "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." 
While both films bombed at the box office and rapidly sank from view, the music has endured, which proves Lennon and McCartney not only wrote classics but bombproof classics to boot.

BIGGER THAN LIFE: exploding the myth of the nuclear family

BIGGER THAN LIFE is a brutal full-frontal assault on Eisenhower-era American family life.
Director Nicholas Ray exposes a reality distinctly at odds with the cosy paternalism of the nuclear family depicted in so many movies and tv shows of the time.

James Mason is schoolteacher Ed Avery, a man with a perfect wife, Lou (Barbara Rush) and a tousle-haired son (Richie). They live in a spacious, well furnished home in an unnamed New England town and life appears, on the surface, to be good.
But Ed's hiding a secret from his family. Several afternoons a week after school he heads to a second job, working as a dispatcher for a cab company. He's doing it for the money but he doesn't think his wife would approve.
But that's just a tiny crack in the facade of perfection compared to the enormous fissure that opens up when Ed's diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease and starts abusing Cortisone, the brand new miracle drug he's prescribed to keep him alive and healthy. He becomes psychotic. What starts out as a surfeit of physical energy escalates into rampant obsession, egotism, authoritarianism and talk of murder.
While it's slightly disconcerting to watch Mason play an American schoolteacher with no explanation offered for his obvious Britishness, he does a good job of portraying Ed's descent into psychosis. By the time his illness reaches it's final stages he is a genuinely terrifying figure, capable of doing absolutely anything including ritually sacrificing his own son.
It's Barbara Rush, though who has the toughest part to play. For the story to work she has to be convincing in her reluctance to call in outside assistance, even though her husband's behaviour is threatening to destroy everything that they have. Given her obvious intelligence and instinct to protect her son it would not have been plausible for her to simply have folded under the pressure and acquiesced to Ed's deluded ranting. 
Her success in portraying Lou's conflicted loyalties allows us to believe in the story. My one reservation is that it all happens too fast. The film's ninety five minute running time is not enough to allow events to unfold in what should feel like real time. Ed goes from normal to crazy in 45 minutes and the pace feels forced. In retrospect, I should have realised that the unseemly speed with which the opening titles were flashed on the screen was a subtle indicator of the pace of the storytelling ahead.   
The Criterion label, which is releasing BIGGER THAN LIFE on DVD later this month, describes it as "one of the great American films of the 1950s." That's an exaggeration, but it is an interesting film. I wouldn't recommend buying it, but it's definitely worth renting.
 

IN THE LOOP: not as smart as it thinks it is

The humour on show in IN THE LOOP is drier than the most barren stretch of desert on Earth on a particularly dry day following a long dry spell. The humour is so dry it's in danger of shriveling up.
It's just too damn dry for it's own good.
What I'm trying to say here is that IN THE LOOP is not even 25 per cent as funny as it thinks it is.
This political satire pokes fun at the clash of cultures between a barely disguised George W Bush led US administration and an equally thinly disguised Tony Blair-era British Labour government in the lead up to an only ever vaguely defined outbreak of American-led hostilities in the Middle East.
The film's targets aren't the leaders themselves but their mid-level ministers and operatives - the people whose competing machinations are pushing the two countries towards war.
It's a study in incompetence, intrigue and ego which pits the bumbling insecure, pintsized British Secretary of State for International Development, Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) against the PM's uber-aggressive foul mouthed Director of Communications Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi channelling Alastair Campbell) and the supercilious unscrupulous and disturbingly Donald Rumsfeld-like US Secretary of Defense Linton Barwick (David Rasche). 
Throw in attempts by a peace-loving US General (James Gandolfini) and a war-averse State Department assistant secretary to block the march to war and the result is armour piercing satire - except it isn't. 

The script by noted British satirist and comedian Armando Iannucci is more clever than sharp. It raised a few appreciative half-smiles and a couple of chuckles but for the most part it succeeds in being clever rather than funny, and I'm not using clever as a compliment. Just how the script came to be Oscar nominated is one of 2010's biggest mysteries.
I never got bored but I didn't feel particularly entertained either. IN THE LOOP is a collection of sophisticated observations on politics that never really goes anywhere. I kept waiting for the story or the humour or something to kick up a gear and start firing on all cylinders but it never did.  

EVERY GIRL SHOULD BE MARRIED: but should every man be stalked?

There's two ways of reading this movie.
1. It's an incredibly cute rom-com about an incredible cute young lady called Anabel (Betsy Drake) who uses her feminine wiles to land the man of her dreams;
or
2. It's a disturbing tale of an obsessed young woman named Anabel who relentlessly hunts down her prey, stalking the poor man for weeks and bamboozling him into marriage.

In both instances the heroine is painted in a less than flattering light. In the former she's a love-sick simpleton whose only goal in life is to land a husband, while in the latter she's become unhinged under the weight of society's pressure to conform. She's been brainwashed into believing a woman isn't whole without her husband and has become manic in her efforts to find one.
In 1948, when EVERY GIRL SHOULD BE MARRIED was originally released it's unlikely there would have been many who would have agreed with the latter interpretation. The film's lighthearted title reflected a popularly held sentiment, particularly among the millions of men who'd recently returned from the war and were eager to reclaim the jobs that had been taken over by women during their absence. 
60 years ago Anabel's behaviour may have been viewed as rather over-enthusiastic but, after all, she is only acting on her biological urges. The pretty little thing is to be admired for demonstrating some initiative in landing her man who obviously doesn't know what's good for him..  
The poor sap who doesn't stand a chance is Dr Madison W. Brown, a noted baby doctor who's too busy enjoying his bachelor lifestyle to realise it's not what he wants. As played by Cary Grant, Dr Brown is something of a mystery. Resolutely single and initially impervious to Anabel's dubious charms he only starts to succumb when she begins displaying the kind of behaviour which is more normally grounds for the issuance of a restraining order. 
What's particularly frightening is that when she finally reels him in he admits he was onto her all along, and still he wants to marry her. On the basis of no evidence whatsoever he appears to believe that once the ring is on her finger all this obsessive behaviour will simply vanish and he'll have a perfectly contented little wife to come home to everyday. While Dr Brown's imagining Myrna Loy in "The Best Years of Our Lives" I'm thinking the reality's likely to be someone closer to Alex Forrest in "Fatal Attraction."
Some may accuse of me of reading too much into a frivolous piece of Hollywood fluff - and it's not even a particularly good piece of fluff - but mainstream Hollywood was all about maintaining the status quo in the 30s and 40s and made much use of fluff such as this to explore and resolve social issues in a way that disguised their true intent.
In what may have been a case of life or imitating art, or may just have been pure coincidence, Grant and Drake were married a year to the day after the film's release. And they didn't live happily ever after.   

CRAZY HEART: whiskey soaked magnificence

With his best days far behind him, has-been country music star Bad Blake is on a booze soaked, chain-smoking back road to oblivion, eeking out a living by trading on those past glories in the bars and bowling alleys of rural Texas and New Mexico.

At one such gig he's introduced to Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a single mom and journalist who wants to interview him for an article.  Despite the age difference and Blake's serious alcohol problem the two hit it off and a budding romance develops. But is Jean's love enough to pull him out of his downward spiral?
I'm not going to give away the ending. I'll just remind you that Blake's a country singer and country is not a genre built on celebrating the redemptive qualities of the love of a good woman.
The smell of whiskey and stale cigarettes permeates Jeff Bridges' masterful portrayal of Blake. He doesn't just play the part, he is  the part so completely and utterly that you'll forget within minutes that you're watching Bridges and believe in Blake as a real-life character. He gets under the skin of the part in a way we rarely seen on screen. There's not a single false note from start to finish, and the authenticity is enhanced by having Bridges sing his own songs. I'm no fan of country music but these sound like the real deal; genuine stripped down, unaffected, old school country tales of lives mis-spent and good love gone bad.

Magnificently impressive as Bridges is, the film's biggest surprise is Colin Farrell's convincing performance as Blake's former protege, Tommy Sweet, who's now enjoying the kind of career Blake should had if his demons hadn't led him astray. Farrell displays the kind of maturity and depth that's been glimpsed but rarely in his previous films.   
CRAZY HEART is a film that takes it's time and for that I'm extremely grateful because it allowed me to spend more time getting to know Blake and share in his travails. 
Both Bridges and Gyllenhaal are totally deserving of their Oscar nominations and, much as I enjoyed George Clooney's Best Actor Academy Award nominated performance in Up in the Air there will be something seriously wrong if Bridges doesn't walk off with the Oscar tomorrow night in Hollywood.

THE PUMPKIN EATER: most definitely not a date movie!

1964's THE PUMPKIN EATER is a bleak and depressing examination of mental illness and infidelity within the confines of a middle class marriage. Think of it as a British cousin to "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' and you'll have a good idea what to expect.
Jo (Anne Bancroft) has commitment issues and an obsession with reproduction. When we first encounter her she's on her second husband and fifth child. Before long she's left him for film scriptwriter Jake Armitage (Peter Finch) and a sixth kid is on the way.

Jake's convinced he can cope with the instant family but it's not too long before he finds himself resenting the constant noise, and the paucity of quality time with Jo, for whom the kids always come first.
Frustrated at the lack of attention at home he begins to look for it elsewhere, and while Jo is slow to cotton on to his extramarital activities, when she does, it shatters her mental equilibrium.
THE PUMPKIN EATER is as much a study as it is a story; a study in what educated, civilised adults can do to the person they profess to love most in the world, and the mental pain that behaviour inflicts. 
With a screenplay by playwright Harold Pinter this film is anything but uplifting but there is much pleasure to be derived from watching Peter Finch at work. In the hands of a lesser actor Jake could easily have become little more than a stereotypical male heartless bastard, but Finch endows the character with depth, breadth and complexity. Jake's behaviour is inexcusable but he has his reasons, and they are reasons not excuses.
Finch holds the attention whenever he's on screen and he makes it look so effortless. He really is one of the finest and most underrated actors of 1960s cinema, and I wish he would have had more scenes with co-star James Mason. The one substantial scene they do have together doesn't quite generate the same level of excitement as DeNiro's much anticipated head to head with Pacino in 'Heat' but I reckon it comes close.
Anne Bancroft, in contrast, appears slightly miscast. She performs well but it's a part for a British actress. Bancroft seems a little too foreign, too exotic, to be entirely convincing. 
THE PUMPKIN EATER is not a film with broad appeal. Many will find it too slow, too uneventful and too depressing, but it's worth it to watch a master practice his craft. 

THE ENTERTAINER: a great name acting like his career depended on it

THE ENTERTAINER is a masterclass in acting from one of the masters of acting. 
Laurence Olivier stars as Archie Rice, a moth-eaten music hall entertainer with an ambition that greatly outstrips his talent. He and his act are corny, old fashioned, pathetic and tired, but Archie just keeps plugging away convinced that his big break will arrive any day soon. 

His singleminded pursuit of the unattainable has made him a particularly unattractive and selfish character, willing to sacrifice those nearest and dearest to him if it'll edge him closer to his ultimate goal, and the story explores the impact on his long suffering family.
Archie Rice was a new departure for Olivier. Long established as Britain's leading thespian, he specialised both in playing noble, well-spoken and well-bred types on film and on stage, and in  bringing Shakespeare to the masses. 
Archie, by contrast, was a character at the cutting edge of the new big thing in British theatre.circa 1960, summed up in the phrase 'kitchen sink drama.' Life among the working class was in and drawing room dramas were out. Olivier wanted to be a part of this new scene and commissioned playwright John Osborne, the angry young man of British theatre, to write something for him. The result was THE ENTERTAINER.
Olivier throws himself wholeheartedly into this new style of storytelling, playing Archie as a kind of third rate Max Miller, but to anyone accustomed to seeing him as 'Henry V' or 'Richard III' or Heathcliff in 'Wuthering Heights' it's a bit of a surprise. It's not as embarrassing as watching the dad who still thinks he's got it busting a move at his daughter's school disco, but it's definitely unsettling. 
To me, Olivier as Archie is acting - in the best sense of the word. He is playing the part, not being the part. He plays it very well - he acts his socks off bringing Archie to life - but not for one minute did I forget that I was watching a great act-or essaying a shabby, disreputable working-class type. 
Olivier had toured with the play to great success before embarking on the film version and it's theatrical roots show, most notably in Brenda de Banzie's overheated performance as Archie's long-suffering wife. In contrast, rising stars Alan Bates, Albert Finney and Joan Plowright, demonstrate a better grasp of the idea that less is more in film acting, although their characters are less showy to start with.
Despite the critical success of THE ENTERTAINER Olivier did not persevere with this new style of film acting. As the 1960s unfolded he reverted to playing characters that were less of a stretch in terms of challenging expectations. 
Today THE ENTERTAINER stands as an ambitious experiment by a great performer who wanted to step outside his comfort zone. From this point of view, it's well worth investing two hours of your time to watch.