NAKED ALIBI: caution - film may not deliver on promises inherent in title

I'm not sure how Universal slipped this one past the Bureau of Consumer Protection, but they did.
Despite the title's bold claim, this 1954 crime drama features absolutely no nudity or alibis - clothed or unclothed.

On the plus side, it does co-star the deliciously sexy Gloria Grahame, but on the minus side it's a very poorly written part which does nothing to showcase her particular talents.
She plays Marianna, a saloon singer in a sleazy town on the US side of the Mexican border, who manages to get herself involved with both an ex-cop (Sterling Hayden) and the suspected cop-killer (Gene Barry) he is obsessively pursuing.
Even by the often convoluted standards of film noir (which this movie aspires to be) plotting, the story makes little sense, but there's little else to distract the attention. Hayden sleepwalks through his part with the air of an actor focusing on his paycheck rather than the script's obvious flaws, while Barry struggles unsuccessfully to create some sort of plausible whole out of the many inconsistencies in his character. In one scene he's a baker and family man wrongly accused by bullying detectives of murdering an officer, and in the next he's a big shot gangster (without a gang or criminal purpose) on the Mexican border, splashing the cash, roughing up the locals, and inflicting his particularly aggressive brand of lovin' on Miss Grahame.
Quite how or why he leads this double life doesn't trouble director Jerry Hopper. In fact, very little seems to bother Mr Hopper. Not the implausible plot, the waste of talent (Grahame and Hayden) or the film's slapped-together-on-a-shoestring feel. NAKED ALIBI was shot in large part on the Universal backlot and it looks it. The town square will be instantly recognisable from countless other movies made by the studio, while the border town's back alleys and loading docks are littered with those empty wooden crates one only ever sees in such large numbers in low budget movies where they're trying to fill in the space without spending money on props. Production values are so low that NAKED ALIBI plays more like a lacklustre 1950s tv drama than a big screen entertainment.
If Hopper thought he was contributing to the often stylish and memorable canon of low-budget film noir thrillers which many studios turned out in the early 1950s he was wrong. The confused plot, unimaginative camera-work and cast going through the motions put paid to that. For the Gloria Grahame completists among us this is a must-see, for everyone else there's plenty of other, much more rewarding things, you could be doing with your time.

WE'RE THE MILLERS: that's absolutely nothing to brag about

REALLY?!
Jason Sudekis quit Saturday Night Live for a career making garbage like WE'RE THE MILLERS?
This film is so godawfully unfunny it makes SNL look like an episode of Frasier or Friends or Seinfeld or ..... well, you know, one of those genuinely laugh-out-loud funny tv comedies.
The red flags were clearly visible long before Sudekis stepped before the cameras for the first time.
Even if he hadn't read the script he would have known he would be co-starring alongside Jennifer
Aniston, and who among us is old enough to recall the last time she starred in a film that left you feeling like you'd got your money's worth?
All that pre-release hullabaloo about Aniston playing a stripper who actually strips down, says dirty words, and gives her pretend son a lap dance was just so much pr baloney. Sure she strips down to

lacy underwear which reveals precisely nothing (and looks especially un-alluring in the process), but she's no longer the adorable young Rachel Green of 'Friends' fame. She's kept herself fit but she can't disguise that weird heads grows larger thing that tends to happen to people when they reach middle-age, and a definite whiff of desperation clings to her performance.
Sudekis is adequate at best but lacks the comedy chops to wring anything memorable or truly amusing out of a lame script which makes barely a token effort at creating anything resembling a coherent storyline.
As I write this WE'RE THE MILLERS has just passed the $100 million dollar mark at the US box office. This sorry state of affairs suggests one of two things - either US audiences are so starved of quality comedy entertainment that they'll grab at anything that's put in front of them, or - sadly what's more likely - Hollywood has finally attained its ultimate goal - achieved thru years of churning out increasingly bland Aniston rom-coms - of so lowering audience expectations that they no longer have any memory left of what a really, genuinely good and funny comedy actually looks like.

KILLING SEASON: deadly dull

Presumably the intention of casting two heavyweight - and expensive - Hollywood stars in a film is to double the number of bums on seats. It creates an event, attracting not only fans of each of the two stars but also those interested in seeing the two working together - in this case for the first time.
Remember how much extra publicity the pairing of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino generated for 'Heat'?
Well, KILLING SEASON is nothing like 'Heat.' It doesn't even rise to the level of 'Righteous Kill'

which was the disastrous attempt to capitalize on the buzz generated by 'Heat' by reuniting De Niro and Pacino and putting them together in practically every scene. It was just unfortunate that every scene stank.
KILLING SEASON gives us the first on-screen pairing of De Niro and John Travolta but completely fails to capitalize on their presence. The film is a total non-event, and the only thing that'll keep you from nodding off is the grating sound of Travolta's ridiculous attempt at a Serbian accent.
But, in retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised.
DeNiro's been turning in cruise and collect performances for years (with the notable exception of last year's 'Silver Linings Playbook') while Travolta's been milking his 'Pulp Fiction' rebirth for even longer (with the notable exception of 'Hairspray').
Rarely have two such big names contributed so little to a film, other than the further tarnishing of their reputation.

WHITE HOUSE DOWN: make that Shite House Down

Merely suspending your disbelief won't cut it. Even suspending, hanging, drawing and quartering it doesn't help.
WHITE HOUSE DOWN is so shouting at the screen in anger bad that no amount of withdrawal from the real world will allow you to experience anything remotely approximating escapist pleasure. Director Roland Emmerich's sole purpose is to blow up as much as possible of one of America's most iconic landmarks while ensuring there's not a hair out of place on the head of cinema's latest Bruce Willis self-effacing action hero wannabe, Tatum Channing.

He plays Capitol Hill cop John Cale who just happens to be on a tour of the White House with his young, politics-crazy daughter, Emily, when a bunch of terrorists masquerading as home theater technicians seize control of the mansion and take the President (Jamie Foxx) hostage.  Having just moments earlier been rejected for a job with the Secret Service because he's unreliable and doesn't follow orders, Cale now finds himself the President's sole hope of survival and the world's only defense against the outbreak of nuclear war.
As a ridiculously well informed news media covers every nail biting moment from ridiculously close to the scene of the action, the big question is - can Cale rise to the occasion or will he screw it up?
What do you think?
For all Emmerich's efforts to create a sense of uncertainty, the end result is never in doubt and the only real question is how much of the White House will be left standing by the time Cale's through proving to Secret Service Special Agent Carol Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal) that she made a big mistake when she turned him down.
Despite being grotesquely outgunned by terrorists who've managed to smuggle a veritable arsenal of weapons into the most closely guarded government building in the world, Cale clearly has a whole gang of angels watching over him. How else to explain the terrorists complete inability to hit him with a single bullet despite firing hundreds at him and their marksmanship in taking out dozens of highly trained police and secret service agents with a single shot?
WHITE HOUSE DOWN is not the first action thriller to pit a lone individual against a gang of well armed, fanatical crack shots but it is the first one I can think of to represent the US government as both benign and totally incompetent at protecting itself from such a small-sized threat. Every single

security system it has in place to protect the President and the White House and the Capitol Building and Air Force One fails, at the same time as the scores of supposedly highly trained Secret Service agents and police demonstrate their total unpreparedness to respond to a surprise attack - which is presumably what all that training was intended to prepare them for.
Seen in this light WHITE HOUSE DOWN is actually a deeply disturbing critique of the current political-military obsession with security and secrecy, dressed up as a celebration of the enduring belief in the power of the individual to make a difference. We should be out in the streets protesting en masse at the continuing surrender of our rights and personal freedoms in the name of protecting our security! And maybe we would be if enough of us had actually gone to see the film but - sadly (or not) - at the time of writing the film has yet to recoup even half of it's estimated $150 million dollar budget at the box office.
I'm not surprised at the failure to capture the public's imagination. Despite the similarities with, and references to, Emmerich's 1996 box office smash 'Independence Day', WHITE HOUSE DOWN doesn't come close to recapturing that magic and, at times, it veers dangerously close to an unamusing parody of that earlier blockbuster. Tatum makes a bland and unmemorable leading man, while Foxx carries too much baggage as an action star to be plausible as an ultra-liberal, cerebral, never-handled-a-gun chief executive who's more than happy to defer to Cale when it comes to defending himself from the bad guys. The producers could not have made a worse choice had they cast Wesley Snipes in the part (his disagreements with the US government over taxation policy aside)!
Contrived, implausible, cliched, predictable and just plain stupid, WHITE HOUSE DOWN features everything I hate about summer blockbusters. Bring on the fall and a return to something close to more intelligent filmmaking.

FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS: the bravery, horror, confusion and deceit of war

When six GIs were photographed raising the American flag over the Japanese island of Iwo Jima on 23 February 1945 they had no idea it would change their lives forever.

FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS is the true story of how that one black and white picture helped win

World War Two. It’s also the story of how it was misrepresented and the soldiers featured in it manipulated to serve a greater cause.

 One of them was Navy corpsman John “Doc” Bradley (Ryan Phillippe). Afterwards he would never talk about his wartime experiences, so following his death his son sets out on a journey across the USA to interview the last survivors of that bloody battle, in an attempt to discover the truth of what happened.

The reality he uncovers reveals how a legend is created, and how that process distorts and rewrites the truth to suit a different purpose. The flag raising photo was one of many taken that February day by a journalist accompanying the troops, but it seized the imagination of a war weary nation. To them it represented victory. The fact that it actually happened just five days into a thirty five day battle for control of the island when the outcome was still far from certain, was immaterial.

The US government was quick to recognise the propaganda value of the picture. After more than three years of fighting the United States was almost broke, and there was a real fear that they would be forced to negotiate a peace treaty with the Japanese because they could no longer afford to pay for guns and bullets.

The photo became the focal point of a new campaign to raise desperately needed funds by persuading the American public to buy more war bonds. The order went out for the soldiers in the picture to be brought home to front the campaign, touring the country and speaking at rallies where their presence as real life heroes would encourage people to open their wallets.

There were just two problems. All the soldiers in the photo had their back to the camera and no one could remember for certain who they all were. Some of them were already dead, killed in the fierce fighting. The other problem was that the photo actually captured a second flag raising. A different group of soldiers had already planted Old Glory on the top of the mountain. This was just a replacement, and on neither occasion was it raised in the heat of battle.

For the US government and military however, the symbolic value was too important to let the facts get in the way, and the three somewhat bewildered surviving soldiers were brought home to do their patriotic duty. Of the three it is Private Ira Hayes, played by Adam Beach, who has the hardest time dealing with the deceit. The film charts his mental disintegration as he turns to alcohol, unable to cope with being labelled “a hero” by the same people who patronisingly call him “chief” and treat him as a second class citizen because he’s American Indian. Today, we would also recognise him as suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.

But it’s wrong to assume FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS is an anti-American film. Director Clint Eastwood’s aim in telling this story is not to denigrate the myth, mock the patriotism or belittle the achievements and sacrifices of the men involved. What he does is return the flag raising event to its proper context, portraying it as an event performed by a group of men who gave it little thought at the

time because their energy was focused on capturing the island. They were true heroes not for planting a flag on top of a mountain, but for the incredible bravery they displayed in taking on an enemy which was prepared to literally fight to the death.

The camera doesn’t flinch in showing us the full bloody horror and confusion of war, and how thousands of young men died fighting for each other. They weren’t thinking of the Stars and Stripes or abstract notions of patriotism and heroism when they charged towards Japanese machine gun nests. They were trying to save their own life and the lives of their buddies. The battlefield sequences are nightmarish scenes of graphic carnage, made disturbingly real by Eastwood’s decision to drain them of colour, giving them the look of genuine World War 2 newsreel footage.

The message to take away from this film is that, despite the official manipulation and dishonesty, the flag raising photo stands as a symbol of the heroism displayed by thousands of GIs on the battlefield, rather than a heroic act in itself, and therefore still has value. But it must also be remembered that these men were real people with families waiting for them back home, and those that survived were haunted by their experience for the rest of their lives.

This is not the easiest film to get into. The first thirty minutes are very disorienting with the story jumping around in time, from the battle on the beaches at Iwo Jima, to the present day, to the war bonds tour across the USA. This lack of a stable storyline creates the same kind of confusion that happens in war. We are not really sure what is going on because we cannot see the full picture. It is in exactly this kind of situation that an event can be taken out of context by people not in full command of the facts and used to promote a message not anticipated by those involved in the original event.

THE DEPARTED: savoring Nicholson at the top of his game

Watching Jack Nicholson ply his craft when he’s firing on all cylinders is one of cinema’s great experiences. It’s something we’ve been deprived of since 2006 and his ‘no-one can top me’ performance as Boston Irish Mafia boss Frank Costello in THE DEPARTED.

Frank’s a man obsessed with uncovering the rat in his organisation, but Jack’s the one chewing at the scenery. Costello is a uniquely Nicholson creation. When he speaks the film’s opening line, “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me” it can be taken both as Costello wanting to shape the world he lives in, and Nicholson dominating the film he’s acting in.

He draws on his decades of experience and legend building to create a character that – until the Whitey Bulger trial – most of us non-Bostonians believed could only exist in a film. Costello’s evilness is operatic in scale and appearance. It’s a mark of his acting brilliance that he manages to go over-the-top without taking it too far. When he’s on-screen it’s like he’s in Technicolor and everyone else is black and white.

And it’s to the immense credit of director Martin Scorsese that Jack gets the space to be Jack without overwhelming the story to the detriment of the rest of the cast. Costello is the most colourful character but he gives his co-stars plenty of room to do their thing.

This story of lies, betrayal, and sacrifice was a welcome return to form for Scorsese, reminding us of the storytelling skills which earned him the title of “world’s greatest living director” in the 1970s and 80s, and winning him the Oscar for Best Director (the film also picked up Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay). It’s a title I believe he fully deserves, but it’s also been a burden because everything he’s produced in the decades since has been measured against those earlier works. THE DEPARTED is not in the same category as “Taxi Driver”, “Raging Bull” or “Goodfellas” but it comes close. It certainly deserves to rank alongside “Casino.”

Matt Damon is Colin Sullivan, an arrogantly cocky and ambitious Massachusetts State Police officer with seriously divided loyalties. Growing up, his surrogate father was Costello, so when Sullivan gets into the force it’s natural that he keeps Sullivan informed of law enforcement’s attempts to build a case against Boston’s number one criminal.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Billy Costigan, a fellow Massachusetts State Police officer who goes

undercover as a member of Costello’s gang to help build that case. It soon becomes clear to Costello and the police that each has a traitor in their midst, and Costigan and Sullivan are tasked with discovering the identity of the rat.

Damon is icily impressive as the cold, devious and manipulative cop who’s completely unable to feel any genuine human emotions, while DiCaprio’s greatest achievement is to make you forget you’re watching tabloid tv’s favourite pretty boy superstar heart throb, and instead appreciate him as a serious actor totally dedicated to his work.

THE DEPARTED returns to one of Scorsese’s favourite themes – the family. There are repeated references to the importance of knowing where a person comes from and who his people are, when deciding whether or not they are trustworthy. Sullivan stands out in having no discernible family history, and he makes it clear in one scene with his girlfriend that he wants no childhood photos on display in their apartment.

The irony is that for all the talk about the importance of family in judging character, no one has what could be described as an ideal family. The only effectively functioning family are the tribal ones – the Irish, and the police. Senior figures within each fulfill the role of father figure; Costello for the gangsters, and Captain Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen) for the police.

The three big names aside, there are so many other superb performances to savor in this film. Alec Baldwin, Ray Winstone, and Mark Wahlberg, who bagged himself a best supporting actor Oscar nomination, are all class acts. The one weak link in the project is Madolyn, the police psychiatrist, played by Vera Farmiga. She’s so flaky and unstable that she falls apart at the first hint of conflict or resistance. She’s just not credible as a professional whose job it is to counsel hardened police officers and offenders on probation.

Madolyn is thankfully a minor irritation in what is otherwise a masterful and exciting drama which building to a bloody and shocking climax. Scorsese finally got his hands on the best director Oscar in 2007 after 5 previous nominations not because the Academy felt guilty for having passed him over so many times in the past, but because he richly deserved it.

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE: Homer's overhyped and underperforming

Two minutes into THE SIMPSONS MOVIE Homer stands up and announces “I can’t believe we’re paying to see something we get on tv for free. If you ask me everybody in this theatre is a giant sucker – especially you!”

And with that he points his finger directly at the viewer. It’s a joke by the film’s makers at their own expense, anticipating criticism of this big screen adaptation of the smash hit Fox tv cartoon as somehow cashing in on and selling out fans of the show.

Eighty five minutes later, as the final credits roll, the joke doesn’t seem half as funny. Chances are we will be feeling like we’ve been suckered into shelling out $15 for the DVD of a film which is – at best – no more than averagely entertaining.

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE was one of the most eagerly anticipated films of 2007. Simpsons creator Matt Groening and his team had been talking for years about making a big screen version of the show, and they whetted our appetite for its arrival with a series of trailers which promised great – and most importantly – funny things for the movie.

In a sense, there was no way that they could live up to the hype. Die-hard Simpsons fans (and I’m one) hoped and expected that the film would mark a return to the glory days of seasons six to eight in the mid 1990s when it was undoubtedly the sharpest, most irreverent and funniest show on television.

Why we would think this I’m not quite sure since many of the writers responsible for making those episodes so funny are no longer with the show. It was much more likely that the film would reflect the most recent seasons of ‘The Simpsons;’ seasons which have become so lame and unfunny that they are practically unwatchable.

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE doesn’t quite plumb those depths but it comes perilously close. The film has a running time equivalent to four of the twenty two minute tv shows but that doesn’t translate to four episodes worth of great gags and storylines.

The action has been slowed down and the jokes scattered across the film’s eighty seven minute running time to ensure neither runs out before we get to the end of the story. As a result there are long stretches where nothing very funny happens, and a comedy which fails to make its audience laugh just isn’t doing its job.

What makes the very best episodes of ‘The Simpsons’ worthy of the description “comedy classics” is their ability to veer off at crazy tangents without warning, inserting the characters into increasingly ridiculous and surreal situations which poke fun at popular culture. These situations didn't need to have a point to them. It is enough that they are laugh out loud funny.

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE has no such flexibility because it sets itself the goal of telling a story

which has a definite beginning, middle and end. Therefore everything which happens within the film has to relate in some way to this template. Unfettered creativity, and the behaviour of the characters, must yield to the demands of the plot.

The plot concerns the efforts of Marge, Homer, Bart, Lisa and Maggie to save Springfield from destruction after Homer’s thoughtless dumping of a silo of pig droppings in the local lake results in the town being labelled “the most polluted in the history of the planet” by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Practically every character that ever graced an episode of ‘The Simpsons’ (with the exception of Patti and Selma) is given a few seconds of screen time, although the downside of this is that there is no time for any of them to really shine. Mr Burns, Dr Hibbert, Krusty, Grandpa Simpson et al are reduced to making cameos in their own show while too much time is given over to a rather annoying Ned Flanders.

Among the DVD extras there’s a choice of two commentaries; one is by the film’s directors while the other features Matt Groening, Dan Castellaneta (the voice of Homer), and Yeardley Smith (who voices Lisa) among others.

The latter is great if you enjoy listening to the sound of a bunch of guys laughing at their own jokes, but it’s not hugely enlightening. There’s no hidden gems among the deleted scenes, and the ‘special stuff’ (which includes The Simpsons as judges on ‘American Idol’ and Homer doing the monologue on’The Tonight Show’) is not the kind of stuff worth watching more than once.

BABEL: Big Oscar Loser is a Real Winner

Babel, according to the story in the Bible, is the place where Noah’s descendants tried to build a tower up to heaven. God did not look kindly on this display of human arrogance and punished the builders by causing each of them speak in a different language. This created confusion and brought an end to the building project. It also scattered and disconnected the people across the planet.

It’s the confusion and disconnect caused by language that lies at the heart of BABEL. Even when the characters are speaking the same language they still fail to communicate because they don’t listen to one another.

Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has crafted a complex narrative out of four separate story threads, each set in a different part of the world. The film jumps with unsettling abruptness between the Moroccan desert, the suburbs of San Diego, Baja California in Mexico, and the urban jungle of central Tokyo, and each location is apparently unconnected to all the others.

Not only are they all separated by space, but also by time. The perception that all the stories are running in parallel to one another comes under increasing challenge as the story lines unfold. No sooner are we able to begin making tentative connections between them than we are forced to reassess what we think we know because it is not at all clear when these events are occurring in relation to each other.

It’s a device that Inarritu used to brilliant effect in his previous film “21 Grams.” And BABEL similarly demands your full attention.

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett provide the anchor for these seemingly disparate storylines. They play Richard and Susan Jones, travelling with a busload of British and French tourists through the barren valleys and mountains of Morocco.

It soon becomes clear that they are a couple in crisis although the cause of their problems is unclear. They allude to it without really talking about it. She is unable to articulate her anger, and he can’t explain why he did whatever it was that he did which has made her so upset.

While we are trying to understand the dynamics of their relationship we are also attempting to establish their connection to a couple of young Moroccan boys tending their family’s herd of goats on an inhospitable desert mountainside, and playing with their father’s newly acquired high powered rifle.

And how do these two story strands connect with Amelia (a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominated Adriana Barraza), a middle aged Mexican woman and live-in nanny for a young American brother and sister? She’s trying unsuccessfully to find someone to take them for her so her nephew Santiago (Gael Garcia Bernal) can drive her back into Mexico to attend her son’s wedding?

Most confusingly of all – what could possibly be the connection between these three strands and Cheiko, (Rinko Kikucki, also nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar) a teenage deaf mute volleyball player, living with her father in a high rise apartment building in Tokyo, and mourning the mysterious death of her mother?

To reveal anymore of the plot would be to spoil what is a compelling and complex web of relationships.

Pitt and Blanchett are the names above the title, but their performances are more than equalled by their lesser known co-stars. Barraza and Kikucki are outstanding in their portrayal of women driven to desperation by their circumstances. It was only the fierceness of the competition in their category

which denied one of them the gold statuette on Oscar night.

BABEL was up for seven Academy Awards at the 2007 ceremony but took home only one, for Best Original Score. Director Inarritu was unfortunate in being nominated for Best Director in the same year that Martin Scorcese was also up for the award for directing his best piece of work in years.

Inarritu’s intricate and thought provoking tapestry of situations and people forces us to recognise the narrow, fragile rail upon which each of our lives runs, and how it can so easily be derailed by the random and unthinking action of another.  

It also challenges our expectation that if our well ordered life is suddenly thrown into chaos, we will be able to rely on those around us to help, whether that’s our spouse, our parents, our friends, our government, or simply our fellow human beings. Are we right to expect more from those with whom we share a language and a culture, and less from those we regard as foreign?

The answers BABEL offers are unexpected and sometimes disturbing, but always thought provoking. This is a film whose images and characters will stay with you long after the final credits have rolled.

FOUR MEN AND A PRAYER: a prayer won't cut it, this film needs divine intervention!

This 1938 misfire from the usually dependable John Ford is best enjoyed if viewed as a live-action cartoon rather than the adventure mystery it's intended to be.
I found that watching it as if it were a big budget condensed version of one of those Saturday morning serials put out by Republic in the 1930s and 40s made it easier to tolerate the caricature characters, ethnic stereotypes and ridiculous plot.
A very young David Niven, George Sanders, Richard Greene and William Henry are the titular four men although, in truth, Greene looks so young that Three Men and a Youth might be a more honest title. He looks even younger than Henry who's playing his kid brother, and certainly not old enough to have obtained employment as a diplomat at the British Embassy in Washington DC. As for saddling him with responsibility for playing Loretta Young's love interest, let's just say 'Three Men, a Youth, and a Cradle Snatcher' would have made for an even more honest title. Miss Young's game attempts to appear besotted by Greene's pre-manly charms are considerably less than convincing.
Other than servicing 20th Century Fox's efforts to build Greene as a romantic leading man, she's pretty much superfluous to the story. She's not even effective as the love interest since Greene's character spends most of the movie rebuffing her amorous advances with the intensity of a 19th
century student at Oxford whose stroll to the crease, cricket bat in hand, is interrupted by a flighty young thing wanting to give him a kiss for luck.
The film starts out promisingly enough, with the court martial of Colonel Loring Leigh of the British Indian Army for a military blunder that's cost the lives of 90 soldiers. As Leigh is played by

C.Aubrey Smith he obviously can't be guilty. With his ramrod posture, stiff upper lip and British integrity oozing from every pore, Smith only ever portrayed characters of the highest moral fibre, so clearly there's something fishy going on. When, shortly afterwards he's found dead from an apparent suicide it's left to his four sons to solve the mystery and clear his name.
Which is where it all starts getting very silly and slapdash.
The sons split up to search for witnesses, with two heading back to India and the other two taking the boat to South America. Now 1930s Hollywood was never going to win any awards for accuracy in its representation of other countries and other cultures, but the stereotyping here is particularly lazy and offensive. According to 20th Century Fox's worldview, India and South America are indistinguishable from North Africa and both are peopled entirely by swarthy, shifty, pidgin-English speaking natives harboring murderous intentions towards the white man.

Naturally, Sanders, Niven, Greene and Henry, being products of the British Empire, have no truck with such misguided prejudices and simply breeze through everything the locals can throw or fire at them while barely raising a sweat.  Their simplistic, faulty and primitive powers of detection and logic are blithely overlooked in the interests of moving them onward through one implausible scenario after another to the inevitable conclusion.
FOUR MEN AND A PRAYER is so bad it's enough to make one reassess Ford's standing as a legendary director. It doesn't do anything for the reputation of his cast either. Sanders gives no indication of the talent that was about to make him a star, Young is just embarrassing, Greene's shortcomings have already been discussed, and it's just bizarre watching Niven mugging away as the dimwitted comic relief. Who would have pegged him as a romantic leading man after a performance like that?   At least Smith had the good sense to die 15 minutes into the story and minimise his involvement with the whole misguided affair.
To put it kindly, the whole thing is a mess, a sloppy, contrived, cliched and disjointed mess completely lacking in the self-awareness to recognise its own awfulness.

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE: Oscar winning indie comedy brightened my day

A motivational speaker stands on a spot lit stage, presenting his 9-step “Refuse to Lose” program to an unseen audience in the darkness.

A little girl sits in the family room repeatedly watching and rewinding a videotape recording of the climax of a Miss America contest.

A teenage boy works out in his bedroom, lifting weights and doing press-ups. There’s a half opened parachute hanging from the ceiling. An enormous portrait of the philosopher Neitszche, painted onto a bedsheet, is pinned to one wall.

An old man snorts heroin off a small mirror in a locked bathroom.

A woman talks on a cell phone as she drives her car. She has a cigarette in one hand, and is telling the person the phone that “of course I’m not smoking!”

A suicidally depressed looking bearded man sits motionless in a wheelchair in a hospital room, attached to a drip, as the film’s title LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE appears on screen.

Welcome to the dysfunctional Hoover family of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Over the course of the next one hundred minutes we will become so attached to these characters that there will be a sense of genuine sadness when we are forced to say goodbye as the screen fades to black for the final time.

The motivational speaker is Richard Hoover, played by Greg Kinnear. Olive (Abigail Breslin) is his 7 year old daughter, sitting at home in front of the tv absolutely entranced by the emotional reaction of the contestant to being named Miss America. Her older brother Dwayne (Paul Dano) is pumping iron in his bedroom, getting himself fit for his dream future as an Air Force pilot.

It’s their grandpa, Richard’s dad, played by Alan Arkin, we see snorting drugs in the bathroom of their suburban home. Their mom, Sheryl (Toni Collette) is the woman in the car. She’s driving to the hospital to collect her brother Frank (Steve Carell).

As is revealed shortly afterwards in an embarrassingly inappropriate conversation at the family dinner table, Uncle Frank was in hospital because he’d tried to kill himself over an unrequited love affair with one of his adult male students.

This is not a group of people who should spend any length of time together in a confined space, but that is exactly what happens when Olive gets a last minute call-up to compete in the “Little Miss Sunshine” beauty pageant in Redondo Beach, California.

They all pile into their ancient bright yellow VW bus for the 800 mile road trip west. The two day journey swiftly turns into a survival test for the Hoovers as they’re forced to confront disappointment and death. Will the six of them manage to keep it together as a family or will the group implode under the pressure?

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE is a comedy about characters not action. The focus is on how they cope with each other rather than external events that happen to them as a group. Fans of “Lost in Translation,” “Garden State” and “Sideways” will love this family.

The film’s Oscar nomination for Best Picture Best Supporting Actress (Breslin) and wins for Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Arkin) are richly deserved. It’s a wonderful example of independent cinema’s ability to offer an accessible alternative to mainstream Hollywood’s staple diet of special effects laden blockbusters. Arkin is laugh-out-loud funny as the foul mouthed grandfather

who’s devoted to his granddaughter; while 10 year old Abigail Breslin’s adorable and totally natural performance forms the heart of the story.

These two were singled out by the Academy, but the whole cast is superb. They are totally convincing as real people we can identify with, rather than simply characters in a film. They bicker with each other, and they push against the constraints of the family unit while also recognising that they need each other.

The fact that LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE is the first feature film from husband and wife co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris makes their achievement all the more impressive. On one of the two director’s commentaries that accompany this DVD, they reveal it took them almost six years to get the project from the drawing board to the big screen. When they finally received the green light they were given just thirty days and a small budget to shoot it.

Funny, touching and – above all – believable, fans of all that is great about American independent cinema will want to make this film a permanent part of their DVD collection.