I WANT TO LIVE!: And I want to believe!

Susan Hayward picked up the Best Actress Oscar at the 1959 awards for playing real life convicted murderer Barbara Graham.

Graham had been executed 4 years earlier in the gas chamber at San Quentin for the killing of a crippled woman during a robbery, and her case became something of a cause celebre as lawyers and journalists battled in vain to save her, arguing an innocent woman was being put to death.
Barbara Graham wanted to live!
And I wanted to believe! Oh god how I wanted to believe in Hayward's portrayal.
But I couldn't. I just couldn't.
I can understand how the part caught the attention of Academy voters. All the histrionics, the wailing and the beating of fists against the wall which proceeded the out-of-control partying, drinking and petty crime simply scream Oscar nomination.
Any self respecting actress would grab at the chance to play this sleazy, slutty, amoral, good-time girl rushing headlong from one bad decision to the next and unleashing a full range of emotions. It just shrieks "LOOK AT ME!! I'M PLAYING AGAINST TYPE! SEE MY RANGE!! I'M A REAL AC-TRESS!!!
So why do Oscar and me part ways?
Because despite all the histrionics and the gusto with which Miss Hayward dives into the part, I didn't find her convincing in the least.
It's not so much that she struggles to force her facial muscles to convey any kind of genuine emotion, nor is it the fact that she doesn't age at all despite the passage of time and the ordeal she undergoes (which are enough to drop a few pounds and add a few wrinkles on any normal human being).
It's her hair that ruined the illusion for me.
Her hair does not change or move at all for the entire duration of the movie. It's the same style and length at the start, when she's living it up with sailors on leave at a party in San Francisco, as it is at the very end when she's living three feet from the door of the gas chamber.
She has a lot of hair so it's impossible not to notice it. 
To convincingly play a part like Barbara Graham there has to be a few concessions to the ravages of time and the United States legal system. The thing with their hair says to me, here is an actress who didn't want it enough to mess up her hairdo, to cut it short or colour it or even wear a wig.
This is an actress who believed she could persuade us by sheer force of personality.
And she was right.
The Academy bought it. They believed Miss Hayward gave a better performance than Elizabeth Taylor ("Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"), Deborah Kerr (in "Separate Tables"), Shirley MacLaine (in "Some Came Running") or Rosalind Russell (in "Auntie Mame").
That's the real crime committed in I WANT TO LIVE! And unlike the evidence against Graham, which the film would have us believe was shaky at best, the proof is indisputable, sitting right in front of us on Susan Hayward's head!

FEAR IN THE NIGHT: silliness on the big screen

Realism was never a strong point with Hammer movies.
Their stock in trade was the supernatural - ghosties, ghoulies, vampires, satanism and anything else that went bump in the night.
The films appeal to our fears and superstitions, and a willing suspension of disbelief is a prerequisite to truly enter into the world of Hammer.
That said, it's almost impossible to find anything good to say about the studio's 1972 release FEAR IN THE NIGHT.
Hammer's deep well of creativity had run dry by the time writer-director Freddy Sangster committed this monstrosity to celluloid. The only scary thing about it is just how ridiculous it is.
Starting with the title.
Other than the initial incident which, given the nocturnal habits of the lead character Peggy Heller (Judy Geeson), is - strictly speaking - more mid to late evening than nighttime, all of the fear-inducing events take place in daylight.
Peggy is the ultimate stock horror movie victim, the pretty but mentally fragile heroine who can can convince no-one of the reality of the horrible events happening to her because she's recovering from a nervous breakdown and is, therefore, subject to delusions with no-one need take seriously.
This device was beyond threadbare by 1972 having been worn down to a tiny nub by constant overuse in the preceding decades, and is just an annoying and totally implausible distraction.
And then there's the fear-inducing events, which involve Peter Cushing as an unknowingly deluded private school headmaster with an artificial arm and a seemingly bottomless fortune which allows him to indulge his delusion.
Cushing had loyally played all kinds of bizarre and ridiculous characters for Hammer over the decades but even he struggles to bring any kind of plausibility to this one. Another Hammer stalwart, Ralph Bates, similarly flounders as Peggy's husband and chief driver of the "I don't believe what you're telling me because you were mentally ill" storyline.
Had Sangster written this script eight years later FEAR IN THE NIGHT would have made for a fair to middling episode in the 'Hammer House of Horror' tv series, but as a 95 minute feature film it's a bust.

MIRACLE IN THE RAIN: look past the leads to find the real star

There's not much to recommend this 1956 World War Two-based weepie from Warner Bros.
Certainly not the sappy performances by its stars Jane Wyman and Van Johnson, and definitely not the tedious story or lifeless black and white photography.

The only reason to suffer through this dragged out tale of love, loss and longing is to marvel at the wonders actress Eileen Heckart achieves with the typically thankless role of the heroine's best friend.
According to the ABC of Hollywood romance/drama/rom-com storytelling the sole responsibility of the heroine's best friend is to make the heroine look good. Sure, she can provide a shoulder to cry on when the romance goes wrong and she might even be the purveyor of nuggets of wisdom which get that romance back on track, but she can only land a fella for herself once the heroine's fixed up, and she must never NEVER be more attractive than the female lead.
It's not kind of role many actresses aspire to. Not just because it doesn't say much about your looks but also because there's also not a whole lot of scope to stretch one's acting chops. The best friend is there to loyally back-up the star and ensure her on-screen life builds to a bed of roses, while hers - more often than not - remains a bed of rose thorns.
Heckart grabbed my attention because she transcends these cliches and expectations to create in Grace Ullman a three dimensional living and breathing character that I actually cared about and empathised with. 
Yes, Grace is there to encourage and support friend and work colleague Ruth Wood (Wyman) in her budding romance with soldier on leave Art Hugenon (Johnson), but we're also given a real sense that she also has a life and dreams of her own. Grace lives alone and would like to be in a relationship but she isn't living her life vicariously through Ruth and Art.
When Ruth brings her along for moral support on her first date with Art, there's no sense of Grace being the intrusive, unwanted third wheel. Socially she's considerably more adept than Wyman's awkward over-age spinster and contributes enormously to the success of that first night.One senses that without Grace's participation Art would have scared off the timid Ruth with his overbearing good nature and relentless chatter.

But the moment that absolutely confirmed to me that I was watching a great actress at work (and in her film debut no less!) occurs an hour and 13 minutes in, when Grace finds a despondent Ruth moping in Central Park over her lost love. Wyman is the one weeping, emoting and wringing her hands, but Heckart was the one I couldn't keep my eyes off of as she offers just the right amount of consolation and reassurance, while only hinting at the pain she's experienced in her own life. It's understated, real and deeply moving, and on checking out her bio on imdb afterwards I wasn't surprised to learn that she went on to pick up numerous acting nominations and awards later in her career including - in 1972 - the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
The saccharine storyline may play havoc with your blood sugar level, but if you want to watch a great character actress at work, it's worth the discomfort. What Heckart achieves is the real miracle of MIRACLE IN THE RAIN.

LES MISERABLES: left me disconsolate and dispirited

Forget waterboarding, THIS is real torture.
LES MISERABLES is an interminable two and a half hours of singing every single bleeding line that could be condensed into ninety minutes if only the cast would speak their lines instead.
Of course, LES MISERABLES would not then be a musical but it might be more of a viewing pleasure than the painful ordeal it is in its current form.

When I say the cast sing their lines I use the word 'sing' in its loosest form since much of what emits from the mouths of Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Reymayne and Russell Crowe is more like talk-singing slightly speeded up. Their words would sound a whole lot more sensible, plausible and bearable being spoken instead of talk-sung because they are lines of dialogue NOT song lyrics.
And that's only half of the irritation.
Because for the most part these sentences are talk-sung to a completely unhummable tuneless tune. The actor just makes up whatever tune they want when uttering the lines. It's like listening to free-form poetry set to music but without any rhythm, harmony, melody or any other word which might suggest music is being made.

Russell Crowe has come in for particular criticism for his lack of singing ability but as far as I could tell this particular ability is not a pre-requisite for the part he is performing. He sounds no worse than the rest of the cast and certainly has a more masculine style than Eddie Redmayne, who sings like a castrato, which is rarely an appealing trait when playing the juvenile romantic lead.
The insistence on this godawful - and relentless - talk-singing makes it almost impossible to get swept up in the emotion of what is supposed to be a tragic and uplifting story. My overwhelming feelings were of frustration and annoyance coupled with a growing despair that this dimly-lit nightmare would ever end.
There's nothing subtle about LES MISERABLES.
From the star-studded cast talk-singing their hearts out, to the plot - which is little more than a series of highly implausible coincidences strung together with big gaps in time between them during which the characters apparently exist in suspended animation - to the dazzling profusion of computer generated imagery, the film's entire intention appears to be to batter the viewer into submission before expelling them from the movie theater in a state of weeping exhaustion.
Jean Valjean may have thought he had it tough but he should have seen it from the other side of the screen. Out here in the dark, clutching an overpriced tub of popcorn and a 40 ounce bucket of coke, is where the real suffering is taking place.

THE BROADWAY MELODY: movie history in the making

As Oscar winners go, THE BROADWAY MELODY is not one of the immortals.
The production values are primitive, the acting stilted, and the direction pedestrian at best.
From today's vantage point it can seem puzzling if not downright nonsensical that the infant Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences chose to bestow the Oscar for Outstanding Picture of 1929 on such a creaky production.
But dig a little deeper into the history of the Hollywood film industry in the late 1920s and the award starts to make more sense.

THE BROADWAY MELODY was released in June 1929, a little more than 18 months after the first official talkie "The Jazz Singer" had caused a sensation at the box office. But that sensation had not translated into an overnight switch to sound by the Hollywood studios. Many in the industry remained skeptical about sound's long term future and those studios that were starting to shoot their films in sound and vision were still struggling to get to grips with the new medium.
That uncertainty about how to incorporate sound into the pictures, and the limitations imposed by the new recording equipment, are both evident in every scene of THE BROADWAY MELODY.
The film's "putting on a musical show" storyline (one that Warner Bros were to perfect in the 1930s with their marvelous series of Busby Berkeley musicals), necessarily featured a lot of musical numbers with much singing and dancing. But while the dancers tapdanced their way across the stage from side to side and back to front the camera remains static. It fails to mimic the movement it's photographing, resulting in dancers disappearing out of frame to be replaced by empty stage. There's very little cutting between long shots and medium close-ups, and the impression is of a flat, filmed stage musical shot head on. The technology had no yet caught up with the uses it was being put to.
These limitations are glaringly obvious to sophisticated modern cinema-goers but to film fans in 1929 THE BROADWAY MELODY must have appeared to  be at the cutting edge of mass entertainment. MGM's first full length all-talking picture was the top grossing film of 1929 and spawned a series of sequels stretching to 1940.
In this light it's possible to interpret the bestowing of the best picture Oscar as a reward to one of Hollywood's biggest players for overcoming their doubts about sound and proving it had a viable future.

But THE BROADWAY MELODY is not only a snapshot of a major industry in transition it's also a fascinating reminder of how cultural attitudes changed over the course of the 20th century toward what constituted the ideal female form. The film is awash with showgirls, high kicking and tap dancing their way across rehearsal halls and Broadway stages in a variety of revealing costumes. They all - without exception - have legs of a size more commonly found today holding up rugby players. These ladies are solid rather than shapely and that - judging by the leering expressions on the faces of the wealthy backers of the show - was exactly what was required to ring a gentleman's chimes in the 1920s.
The film's star, Anita Page, is an excellent example of this. Nicknamed "The Girl With the Most Beautiful Face in Hollywood" it sat a-top a body that would best be described today as 'husky.' 'Hunger Games' star  Jennifer Lawrence looks decidedly skinny standing next to Miss Page.
While THE BROADWAY MELODY may be found wanting as a piece of entertainment by today's audiences, it remains infinitely rewarding as a window on a moment in history when the world's most powerful entertainment medium was struggling to find its feet with a new technology that we can't now imagine being without. 

HYDE PARK ON HUDSON: Murray's FDR is DOA

HYDE PARK ON THE HUDSON possesses all the elements necessary to make a memorable and enjoyable movie. It's got a fascinating and charismatic central character, an intriguing true story, and a great cast.
Unfortunately director Roger Michell fails to pull the parts together to create a satisfying whole.
The end product is flat and unrewarding with an undertone of humour that mostly misfires.

The story focuses on the affair between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his fifth cousin Daisy Stuckley, which was conducted under the nose of Mrs Roosevelt at the family home of Hyde Park on the Hudson River in upstate New York. Most of the action centres on the summer weekend in 1939 when the President hosted the new (and young) British monarch, King George VI and his wife, Queen Elizabeth at Hyde Park.
Daisy (Laura Linney) is the amused observer of the turmoil the Royal visit inflicts on the Roosevelt household, and of her lover's determination to democratise the stuffy and traditional King by feeding him hot dogs at a picnic.
Roosevelt was one of America's most influential and charismatic Presidents, a man who changed the course of history by force of personality, but if Bill Murray's impression of him is your first introduction to the great man you'll be hardpressed to understand what all the fuss is about. Murray plays him mostly as a bon viveur with an eye for a pretty lady, but not much else. There's little indication of the visionary and master political operator who moved the United States from sleeping giant to world superpower status in less than a decade.
Murray fails the most basic test in neither looking nor sounding like the man, and it smacks of stunt casting to have a comedian who made his name in 'Ghostbusters'. 'Caddyshack' and 'Stripes' playing FDR. I'm certainly not arguing against an actor's right to grow and take on parts different to those which originally made them famous. Murray has amply demonstrated his range and versatility in films like 'Lost In Translation' and 'Broken Flowers' but I'm not convinced he's convincing as a real-life President.
Ironically, it's not Murray - the famous comedian - who provides most of the film's humour but British actors Samuel West and Olivia Colman as George and Elizabeth. The Royal couple were still finding their feet on this now famous first visit to the USA, but they won a lot of friends and helped cement the 'special relationship, between Britain and the USA which proved essential in determining victory in World War II. So it's more than a little baffling that director Michell has chosen to portray them as a couple of chinless, clueless aristocratic buffoons. Other than the stutter, West's King George bears no relation to Colin Firth's magnificent, Oscar winning interpretation in 'The King's Speech.'
HYDE PARK ON HUDSON is a wasted opportunity. It fails to engage as a drama, a comedy or a dramedy, and exudes no real sense of the historical importance of the characters or events it portrays. This is lazy superficial history telling and all involved deserve better.

THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES: the American Dream from riches to fancy rags

There's a wonderful moment midway through THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES which sums up exactly what this 2012 documentary is all about.

Having been forced to downsize by business reverses following the 2008 Stock Market crash, the wife of the man building the biggest single-family private home in America, has been forced to abandon the corporate jet and fly commercial to a family reunion. Arriving at a small regional airport in upstate New York she proceeds to the Hertz counter to pick up her rental car.
"And what is the name of my driver?" she asks the clerk behind the desk.
The look on his face of disbelief and incomprehension says it all.
Rich people just don't get it. Even when they're trying ever so hard to show us how normal they are. Even when they came from an ordinary background and marry into obscene wealth.
And the Siegels are obscenely wealthy. Or, at least, they were when director Lauren Greenfield started her film project.
Back before the 08 crash 74 year old David Siegel was the king of the timeshares, owner of the biggest private timeshare company in the world and possessor of so much money that he decides to build an enormous mansion modeled on Versailles just outside Orlando in Florida.
Why?
"Because I can."
With 7 children, 19 staff, numerous dogs, snakes, mice, fish and lizards, and enough possessions to fill several lifetimes, the Siegels have outgrown their current home, a decent but sub-palatial sized mansion on an island near Orlando. It's easy to blame David's 40 year old trophy wife, former model Jackie, for the conspicuous consumption. After all, she's the one doing the bulk of the spending, but that's only because he lets her. Shopping keeps her out of his thinning hair while he attends to his first love - business - but also ensures she has the clothes, the make-up and the hairstyles to look glamorous enough to show off to his famous and powerful friends, like Governor Jeb Bush and President George W. Bush (early on in the film Siegel boasts that he singlehandedly won Bush the Presidency by swinging Florida to him in 2000).
The Siegels fall from grace after September 08 when the banks demanded back the vast sums of money they'd lent his business is spectacular, and also changes entirely the focus of the film. Greenfield started out planning to chronicle the construction of the Siegels new palace but after financial problems halt work she focuses instead on their response to their newly reduced circumstances.

David becomes consumed by his efforts to save his company, leaving him little time for his family beyond barking at them for leaving all the lights on in the house, and it's left to Jackie to try and reduce the family's grotesque monthly expenditures, something she's ill-equipped to do despite her modest upbringing.
At times it's difficult to decide whether to laugh or cry at her alternately well-intentioned and clueless attempts. She veers from sincere to pointless token gestures in an instant and never really demonstrates a genuine grasp of what it means to cut back on unnecessary spending. Sure she buys the kids Christmas presents at Walmart but she purchases 6 or 8 shopping carts-worth before checking in at the clinic for her latest chemical skin peel and Botox injections.
THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES is a salutary lesson for anyone who still believes in the American dream, and that hard work leads to wealth and happiness. Everything David Siegel has worked for turns to crap during the course of the film, and while they're nowhere near penniless by the end one senses their near future looking less than bright. David's likely to spend his remaining years trying to dig himself out of the deep hole he's put himself into, while Jackie has to decide how long she can continue being understanding about his stress induced bad temper and intolerance of his family.
I'd love to revisit them a couple of years from now to discover what happened next.
Funny, infuriating, disturbing, and surprisingly human, THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES will not only make you feel better about not being obscenely rich, it'll also - despite everything - make you feel just a small amount of sympathy for those that are.

THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY: a depressingly familiar adventure

Hang on!
Haven't I seen this already?!
I have.
This is a retread of the first part of the "Lord of the Rings' trilogy with a less famous cast.
Same scenery, same beards, some of the same characters, same story arc, same mix of dwarves and giants, dragons and elves, lost kingdoms and inescapable quests.
And that same damned ring again.

LAWLESS: clueless

I'm at a loss to figure out exactly what kind of a film LAWLESS wants to be.
Is it a straight down the line period crime drama, a 21st century take on a period crime drama, a slightly humorous take on a period crime drama, or something else entirely?
Large parts of it reminded me of the 1989 Patrick Swayze "classic" 'Roadhouse' blended with dollops of 'The Dukes of Hazzard.'
What it most emphatically is not is a good movie.
Musician turned screenwriter Nick Cave seems unsure of how to pitch his story and director John Hillcoat is no help in helping him figure it out.

This Depression era (based on a true) tale of the three bootlegging Bondurant brothers (Shia LaBoeuf, Tom Hardy & Jason Clarke) and their bloody battle with the law in the mountains of Franklin County, Virginia, veers from dark and serious to wacky humor to sentimental folksiness without managing to settle anywhere.

Add to that a tendency on the part of many of the cast to mutter and mumble (Hardy in particular is no less intelligible after he's had had his throat cut than before), a ridiculously caricatured performance from Guy Pearce as a bizarrely foppish corrupt special deputy, and some period inappropriate music and the result is both unsettling and less than conducive to the willing suspension of disbelief.

And that's without mentioning what looks like some ill-advised editing decisions which have cut chunks out of the story and left some things hanging while rendering others irrelevant. The prime example of the latter is the brief appearance of Gary Oldman as a Chicago gang boss in a side story that adds almost nothing to the main events. Oldman also features in an example of the former, spectacularly shooting up a rival on the main street of the Bondurants home town in a murder that attracts absolutely no attention from anyone and is never spoken of again.
In both instances I was left with the impression that there was more to these two threads that had been cut out of the film in the interests of keeping the running time under two hours. Either that or poor storytelling technique. Perhaps the DVD release will reveal the director's true intentions.
As it stands, LAWLESS has little to offer beyond the violence and the blood. Hardy's brooding, monosyllabic good bad-guy soon tires, LaBoeuf is unconvincing and Jessica Chastain's character is misplaced and underutilised. She spends most of her time hanging around observing the action and waiting for the next of her meagre quota of lines.
LAWLESS proves that quirky does not necessarily equal good or even interesting.

ABBA: The Movie: one of us is spoiling this film

Ignoring cheap jokes about the music there's just one problem with ABBA: THE MOVIE.
It's the plot.
Rather than shoot a documentary chronicling the Swedish group's week-long tour of Australia in 1977, writer-director Lasse Hallstrom decided to weave a story around it following an incompetent radio DJ's efforts to land an interview with the foursome.
And it just destroys the film.
In the interests of full disclosure I admit that I came to this movie with more inside knowledge than the average viewer. I worked in the UK commercial radio industry for almost two decades and interviewed countless pop acts, so I understand the process involved in lining up an interview with an act as hot as Abba were in 1977.

This is absolutely not how it happens, and anyone with an ounce of commonsense should be able to figure out that the proposition presented here is never going to work.
On the very day that Abba start their tour down under, the boss of Radio 2TW orders his overnight DJ (the lowest position in the on air line-up) to get an in-depth, up close and personal interview with Anni-frid, Bjorn, Benny and Agnetha that can be broadcast the following weekend. No matter that the DJ, Ashley (Robert Hughes), is a country and western music specialist, with no record industry contacts that could get him anywhere close to the group.
I'm not going to claim that the radio industry is managed by a bunch of Einsteins but this guy is particularly stupid. Apart from anything else he's sabotaging his own station by assigning an almost impossible task to the person least likely to succeed at it.
To his credit the young DJ does express his doubts, but his boss doesn't want to hear them, so Ashley sets off in pursuit of Abba, chasing them from Sydney to Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne lugging an unwieldly tape-to-tape recorder and sweating profusely into one blue shirt which he never changes. Of course, without a press pass or any contacts within the Abba entourage he's not able to ask a single question let alone record the group's innermost thoughts on life, love and the whole damn thing.
These silly sequences of Ashley being rebuffed at every concert and press conference just get in the way of what could have been a far more interesting behind the scenes look at life for four young Swedes at the height of their success making their first visit to a country where almost the entire population turned out to greet them. The off-stage documentary footage that Hallstrom has allowed to intrude into Ashley's story is mostly pedestrian and unimaginative, suggesting that little effort was expended in searching for interesting angles. What does come across is the group's lack of ego, their general 'niceness' and their infinite patience with the inane questions from the Oz media. Anni-frid et al also dutifully play along with Hallstrom's vision for the film although I find it difficult to believe they were happy with the outcome. As a record of their first triumphant tour down under it leaves a lot to be desired.