THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL: message gets lost in the mystery

Made in 1959, during the height of the Cold War, THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL exploits the very real fear of annihilation by nuclear attack to explore issues of racism and humanity, but they're unfortunately overshadowed by the mushroom cloud-sized nagging question of what exactly has happened to humanity.

African-American mining engineer Ralph Burton (Harry Belafonte) emerges after five days trapped in a collapsed tunnel in Pennsylvania to discover he is apparently the only person left alive. Everywhere is completely deserted, homes and vehicles have been abandoned in what looks like a mass panic. Heading east he makes his way to New York City searching for signs of life but all he finds are eeriely empty and silent streets and skyscrapers. 
From what he can piece together from newspapers and radio recordings, life on earth has been wiped out by a deadly radiation cloud released by an unnamed enemy. Then a blonde haired, attractive young woman suddenly appears. Sarah Crandall (Inger Stevens) has also escaped the poison cloud.
With this mismatched and reluctant couple thrown together by fate, the question is can they  overcome their prejudices and preconceptions to make a life for themselves? Can they even bring themselves to touch each other? 
This was 1959 remember; the rise of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement to national prominence was still several years away, Belafonte and Sidney Poiter had only recently emerged as cinema's first Black leading men, and the idea of a Black man kissing a white woman on screen was still beyond the pale. The film makes a fairly half-hearted attempt to explore these taboos but our attention is distracted with wondering just what has happened to all the people.
New York is a city of eight million souls and it's clear from the enormous jams of abandoned cars that most did not make it beyond the George Washington Bridge, yet there's not a single body in sight. All these millions and millions of people have just vanished. It defies logic and science. Yes, some of those closest to a nuclear blast will be vaporised but as the experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed, tens of thousands more died slow, painful and visible deaths.
And anyway, according to THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (hereafter referred to as TWTFATD) it was a radiation cloud not a bomb which wiped out the human race, so it's highly unlikely to have also made every last body vanish. 
While I'm a sucker for these 'last man on Earth' movies, mostly because I love the idea of having a completely intact Manhattan entirely to myself, this glaring lack of corpses stinking up the streets seriously weakens the film's efforts to discuss loftier concepts.
Belafonte is an impressive screen presence and a fine actor - his second release of 1959 "Odds Against Tomorrow" is one my favourite films of the 50s - but as producer of TWTFATD as well as the star he lets himself down by sanctioning this enormous hole in the plot.
And as for the ending - please don't get me started! All I'll say is if there was an Oscar for the year's most implausible, biggest cop-out finale it would be known as the TWTFATD.

CABIN FEVER: pumping new blood into a tired body

You're out in the woods with four friends, miles from anywhere.

Your car and mobile phone don’t work, and there’s a disturbing looking hobo lurking out there in the trees.

Then one of your friends falls sick with an illness which makes their skin peel off like wet papier-mâché.

What do you do ?

Do you bravely set out on foot to get help, or do you lock them into an outbuilding, and pray that they haven’t infected you ?

That’s the dilemma facing Paul (Rider Strong), Karen (Jordan Kidd), Bert, Macey and Jeff in CABIN FEVER, a genuinely scary and gruesomely funny 2003 horror flick which is unashamedly inspired by low budget classics of the 70s like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", and "The Hills Have Eyes".

Those films managed to scare audiences silly without resorting to multi-million dollar computer generated images, and first time director Eli Roth achieves much the same result with a cast of unknowns, numerous buckets of fake blood, and a tight, no-nonsense story.

All the familiar elements of a horror movie are present and correct, from the teens in terror, to the in-bred hillbillies, and the isolated location, but there are none of the tiresome, self referential jokes that had become the staple of Hollywood horrors in the early noughties with the "Scream", and "I Know What You Did Last Summer" series.

CABIN FEVER also neatly sidesteps the stale clichés of the horror genre.

None of the group decide it would be a good idea to split up to search for help, no one creeps silently up behind someone else, grabs their shoulder, scaring them half to death, then says “hey Brad, we’ve been looking for you”, and neither of the girls twists her ankle while running for her life.

Roth’s twist on the formula is to make the terror invisible. Its not a masked man with a chainsaw, or a family of deformed cannibals, but an ebola-like flesh eating disease which turns the teenagers end of college holiday into a living nightmare.

CABIN FEVER is funny, scary and a refreshing change of style. Just don’t watch it on your own.

CHRISTMAS IN JULY: I'm happy it could not be Christmas everyday

CHRISTMAS IN JULY was the second film to be directed by the yet to become legendary Preston Sturges and on the basis of this it's difficult to discern exactly what all the fuss is about.
Sturges' latter day reputation as a great comedy director rests on a handful of comedies he made in the 1940s and this isn't one of them. The story is dragged down by the two central characters, Jimmy MacDonald and Betty Casey, who are so sappy that it's impossible to empathise with them. They both deserve a good slap.
Not only are they wetter than the Atlantic Ocean but there's something a little disturbing about the 36 year old Dick Powell in the part of a young man on the make. Jimmy MacDonald is a supposedly humorous spin on the kind of characters Powell made his name playing in Warner Bros backstage musicals in the early 1930s. Back then he looked convincing as a fresh faced juvenile trying to make his way in the world and woo the equally young lady of his dreams. By 1940 he had assumed a more mature appearance but here he is still living at home, still trying to make it in the rough and tumble of New York City, and still wooing his young lady.
Guy Kibbee, Hugh Herbert, Warren Williams and all those other members of the Warner Bros stock company whose job it was in those early musicals to place obstacles in the path of young Dick's route to happiness and success have been replaced by lesser known actors such as Raymond Walburn, William Demerest and Harry Hayden but otherwise the film pretty rehashes the themes and scenarios which were presented to much better effect in "Gold Diggers of 1933", "Footlight Parade" and "42nd Street."
Preston Sturges is admired for his acerbic characters and sharply witty dialogue but there's precious little of either here. CHRISTMAS IN JULY is a very minor entry in his canon and if you want to discover just why he is so admired by many cinephiles I recommend you start with the movie he made immediately afterwards.
"The Lady Eve" with Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda and a wonderful cast of character actors has everything that this film doesn't.

UP IN THE AIR: I see Oscars on the horizon

UP IN THE AIR is a masterclass in how to achieve more by doing less. There's no discernable acting involved in George Clooney's performance as Ryan Bingham. He doesn't play the part,  he just is Bingham and he does it so effortlessly that it's easy to forget Clooney isn't simply being himself.
There's two reasons for that. Clooney is undoubtedly a very fine actor but, more importantly, the character of Bingham so closely resembles Clooney's own public persona that it's easy to believe he's playing himself. Bingham is a resolutely heterosexual bachelor, openly interested in no-strings attached relationships with women that are purely sexual, and vocally opposed to the idea of settling down or having children. He's a man perpetually in motion, subconsciously fearful that - like the shark he compares the human race to - he'll die if he stops moving.
Bingham is a creation of the 21st century - a corporate downsizing expert. He lives his life out of a perfectly packed carry-on suitcase criss-crossing the USA firing employees on behalf of employers who are too cowardly to do the deed themselves. In an era of downsizing and economic recession it's a rare boom industry.
The job keeps Bingham so busy that he's almost never home and he couldn't be happier. "Last year I spent 322 days on the road" he says, "which meant I spent 43 miserable days at home"; a point that's emphasised with a brief trip to his studio apartment which reveals a small, souless all white space resembling a hotel room, completely devoid of any personal touches. Home for Bingham is the first class cabin of an American Airlines jet at 33 thousand feet. His one ambition is to rack up 10 million air-miles and earn one of the airline's coveted silver cards giving him a lifetime of flying privileges.

Director Ivan Reitman explores and illustrates the consequences of Bingham's compartmentalised, emotion-free life through the no-strings-attached relationship which develops with Alex (Vera Farmiga). A successful businesswoman who is also constantly on the road, she is apparently his female equivalent. They flirt in a hotel bar by trading comments on the relative quality and service of car rental companies and compare their respective collections of customer loyalty cards before retiring to his room for sex.
Running in parallel is the reluctant relationship which develops between Bingham and Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), a hotshot young graduate hired by his employer to take their business to the next level. Her big idea to fire people remotely by videolink rather than in person, threatens Bingham's whole way of life, but he's forced to take her on the road with him to help her learn the ropes.
Without writing a four page essay it's impossible to discuss all of the themes and ideas which are so skilfully introduced in the course of the film's 1 hour 50 minute running time. Clooney is magnificent in his portrayal of this hollow man whose way of life is shaken to its core by his interaction with Alex and Natalie. Both Farmiga and Kendrick more than hold their own in the face of such formidable competition. It's the strength of their performances which make Clooney as effective as he is. 

If there's any justice (and often in Hollywood there isn't) 'm predicting Oscar nominations for Clooney as best actor, Farmiga as best supporting actress, a best director nod for Reitman, and best screenplay for Reitman and Sheldon Turner.
UP IN THE AIR is not the kind of film that blows you away while you're watching it. The impact is more subtle. This is a film that gets better and better the more you think about it afterwards - and you will. 

Louis de Funes & his LE GENDARME movies: to Russia and loved

Cinematic comedians who've made a career out of playing halfwits have an uncanny knack for crossing national boundaries to find love and admiration in the most unlikely places - places where they can't even be understood in their own voice for heaven's sake. 
American Jerry Lewis is a god in France, Briton Norman Wisdom is revered in Albania, while Frenchman Louis de Funes is a perennial favourite on Russian tv.

His series of Le Gendarme comedies in the 60s and 70s made him at one point France's favourite actor but it's difficult now to discern exactly what it was about these films that so charmed the French - who could understand what he was saying - let alone what it is that continues to entice the Russians, who can only appreciate him in dubbed form.
In six films between 1964 and 1982 he played Marechal des Logis-chef Ludovic Cruchot, a sergeant in the Gendarmerie Nationale, based in St Tropez on the French Riviera. Cruchot alternated between toadying obsequiousness towards his slightly dimwitted boss and abrasively insulting the 3 or 4 police officers under his command, while dragging all of them into all manner of foolish escapades.
LE GENDARME A NEW YORK (1965) saw him let loose in the Big Apple, ostensibly to attend an international conference of police officers, while 1978's LE GENDARME ET LES EXTRA-TERRESTRES found him back in St Tropez tackling space aliens with the unnerving ability to take on the form of his fellow officers. Both films feature an awful lot of shouting, exasperation, and running around by de Funes which he, French and Russian audiences clearly mistook for comedy.
It isn't.
It's just a balding man in a Gendarme uniform shouting, getting exasperated and running around a lot. The attempts at humour are unerringly infantile, and I don't mean that in a good way. de Funes in action is like watching someone with no sense of humour trying to replicate the sight gags and situations they've seen in a Laurel and Hardy short. There's a fine art to idiocy and where Stan Laurel created classic routines using a fine-tipped paint brush, de Funes attempts the same with a yard broom.
The result is clumsy, tiresome and unamusing. 
I don't resent the chunk of my New Year I gave up to watch these films. It's added to the sum of my cinematic knowledge and - just like when I had my wisdom teeth extracted - it's an experience I'll never have to go through again.

JULIE AND JULIA: Meryl triumphs in culinary smackdown

JULIE AND JULIA pits "old" Hollywood against one of cinema's hottest up and coming actresses but the final result is never in doubt. Meryl Streep easily wipes the floor with perky newcomer Amy Adams.
The film's not intended to be an intergenerational boxing match but it's difficult to avoid making the comparisons. It's not often that we get to see a film with two strong female leads given equal screen time and acting in their own spaces. 
JULIE AND JULIA is about the relationship which develops between 30 year old New Yorker Julie Powell (Adams) and legendary tv chef Julia Child (Streep) although the two never meet. Separated by space and time the connection is Childs' famous cookbook "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" which inspires Julie to attempt to create all 524 recipes in one year while writing a blog charting her efforts.
Julie's progress is mirrored by Julia's, from bored wife of an American diplomat (Stanley Tucci) in late 40s Paris through her apprenticeship in cordon bleu to the final publication of her book.
Streep effortlessly dominates as the warbly-voiced, slightly bohemian and definitely tall Childs. Hers is a character which lends itself to easy parody but it's a measure of Streep's talent and experience that while her jaws may occasionally lock on the scenery she never resorts to gnawing it. She keeps Childs' real while also expressing her unrestrained uniqueness.
Julie by comparison is small and mousey and ordinary. The story unconsciously suggests that modern day living has sucked all of the individuality out of us. Perhaps it's just a severe case of rose-tinted glasses syndrome but life and people were more vibrant, more alive, 60 years ago. Julia is irrepressibly optimistic while Julie is weighed down by the burdens of the world.

Perhaps it's not entirely fair to compare the two as equals. Julia was living the relatively privileged life of a diplomat's wife, while Julie is a government worker, trapped in a cubicle in downtown Manhattan taking phone calls all day from relatives of those killed and injured in the Twin Towers attack on 9/11. Perhaps the deck was stacked in Streep's favour before a single foot of film had ever been shot, but she's not an star given to scene-stealing or diva demands. She did her thing while Adams did hers, and experience won out.
Just as Gena Rowlands blew Kate Hudson off the screen in the otherwise eminently forgettable "The Skeleton Key" so does the 60 year old Streep demonstrate how age and a few wrinkles can make for a more satisfying performance than the youth and a perfect figure which Hollywood studios believe we want to see all the time.

 

THE INVENTION OF LYING: the honest truth

THE INVENTION OF LYING is a very good idea for a one hour tv romantic comedy. It's considerably less effective as a 99 minute movie. There's just not enough story to sustain the concept, and the acting and direction are flat and unfocussed.
British comedy wunderkid Ricky Gervais must take the lion's share of the blame for this. He not only stars in but also produced and co-wrote and co-directed the film with newcomer Matthew Robinson, and it all seems to have gone to his head. Gervais is undoubtedly a very talented comedy writer and actor but he's not Orson Welles. THE INVENTION OF LYING shows him very clearly in over his head.
He plays Mark Bellison, an overweight loser in a world where everyone always tells the truth about everything. The idea of lying just doesn't exist until Bellison finds himself in a particularly stressful situation and tells an untruth. The result is miraculous. It gets him exactly what he wants because no one can conceive that he is being anything less than honest, and this initial success inspires Mark to reshape his entire life into what he wants it to be rather than what it is. At the top of his list is winning the love of Anne McDoogles (Jennifer Garner), a highly desirable young lady who, by mutual consent, is out of his league.
This is where everything in the story starts to lose focus. 
Mark decides he's not going to lie to Anne to get what he wants from her, although he does lie to her about plenty of other things including the existence of "the man in the sky" who controls everything in the world.
Although it's never explicitly confirmed, it's obvious that the Man in the Sky is God, and Mark finds himself cast in the role of God's messenger by a public fanatically eager to learn more. But the story isn't very clear on whether it's suggesting that Mark invents religion as well as lying, or whether there's an inherent connection between the two.
At more or less the same time as the focus fades the same thing happens to the comedy. THE INVENTION OF LYING is never laugh out loud funny but once the apparent invention of religion is added to the mix it ceases to be anything more than very intermittently slightly mildly amusing. The situation's not helped by the oddball cast who fail to gell or demonstrate the slightest talent for genuinely funny comedy. Cameos from Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ed Norton, Tina Fey, Christopher Guest, Justin Bateman, and Rob Lowe all add nothing to the proceedings, and a brief scene between Gervais's "Extras" co-stars Stephen Marchant and Shaun Williamson only serves to suggest what might have been.
The film's an even bigger disappointment because it was so badly missold by the cinema trailers. They promised a sharp, witty and very dry comedy but what we get is a stillborn mish-mash of comedy styles with barely a hearty laugh to be had and even less of a story. 
Extremely unsatisfying. 

CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT: the dream factory has Christmas all wrapped up

A word of caution about CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT - don't watch this film on an empty stomach. There's so much talk about juicy steaks, roasted chickens and chocolate cakes topped with ice cream, that it'll send you running to the kitchen to raid the fridge.

Food is the thread that pulls together the disparate elements of this World War II comedy - a shipwrecked sailor, a magazine columnist, a pompous architect, an overweight publisher, and an equally rotund Hungarian restaurateur with a knack for mangling the English language.

The sailor is Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan), hailed as a hero by the newspapers for surviving 18 days on a life-raft after his destroyer is torpedoed by a German U-boat. Recuperating in hospital, Jones reveals he's never had a real family and dreams of spending a traditional Christmas surrounded by loved ones and large amounts of delicious home cooking.

Spotting a golden opportunity for publicity, Alexander Yardley (the wonderful Sydney Greenstreet), publisher of the bestselling magazine "Smart Housekeeping", bullies his star columnist Elizabeth Lane (the equally wonderful Barbara Stanwyck), into inviting the sailor to join her and her perfect family for the holidays at their perfect farmhouse in Connecticut.

Lane is the Martha Stewart of 1940s magazine cookery writing. Her weekly column with its gushing references to her husband, infant son, and their idyllic home, is read and admired by millions of Americans. But Elizabeth is hiding a very guilty secret. She has no husband, child or farmhouse and - even worse - she can't cook. All her recipes are created by a Hungarian restaurant owner called Felix (S.Z.Sakall).

Yardley's edict, and his decision to join the Lanes for Christmas himself, sets in motion a comedy of errors which keeps the story bubbling merrily for the ensuing 90 minutes.

Originally released by Warner Brothers in mid 1945, CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT is a superb example of the Hollywood studio system's ability to create entertainment that was both escapist and rooted in the reality of a world coming to the end of a devastating world war.

The film taps into the hopes and dreams of hundreds of thousands of families looking forward to a reunion with husbands, sons and fathers after four Christmases apart while they were away fighting for their country and for freedom. Jones' story reminds audiences just why the sacrifices were necessary, and anticipates to a brighter future when the grimness of war would be banished to history, and people could concentrate on the simple human pleasures of friendship, love and food.

Even if a traditional Christmas is not in your plans this film is guaranteed to lift your spirits, and that is due in very large part to the wonderful and extraordinarily talented cast of actors who have since become Hollywood legends.

Stanwyck is an absolute delight as Elizabeth Lane. One of the most versatile female stars of the 30s and 40s she was as deft at comedy as she was at film noir. In fact CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT was her first film since starring as cold-hearted femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson in "Double Indemnity."

The same is true of Sydney Greenstreet. Typecast as the sinister heavy is films like "The Maltese Falcon", "Casablanca", and "Passage to Marseille," he reveals an unexpected talent for light comedy as the overbearing boss who's really a giant teddy bear.

Acting alongside these two powerhouses could have easily overwhelmed the lightweight and non-descript Morgan so it's to his credit that he more than holds his own and succeeds in making Jones likeable and credible as the everyman who is naive yet also charismatic enough to seduce the leading lady.

Warmhearted, funny and full of affection, CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT simply oozes Yuletide cheer.

It's a film to fall in love with.

GOODBYE LENIN: communism's never been so much fun!

The words comedy and German cinema are rarely seen in close proximity to each other, but the two concepts collide head on in GOODBYE LENIN.

Although it opens in East Berlin in 1989 and spans the period from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the reunification of Germany, this is most definitely not a history lesson. Instead, it’s a funny, sad, heart-string tugging family story, using the collapse of the East German communist state as a backdrop.

The family are Alex (Daniel Bruhl), his sister, and their mother, Christiane (Katrin Sass), who’s a dedicated socialist. She slips into a coma just days before the fall of the Wall and when she awakens 8 months later, her doctors warn Alex her health is so fragile that any shock could kill her.

So he embarks on an ambitious and increasingly ludicrous scheme to prevent her from learning of the monumental changes that have occurred by pretending not only that the GDR still exists but that it has actually triumphed over capitalism. This involves shutting her off from the outside world, then creating fake tv news programmes on video to persuade mum that West Germans have become so disillusioned with the excesses of free enterprise that they’re swarming east in their thousands. He also bribes friends and family, and even a former cosmonaut, to participate in the charade.

It sounds like the set up for one of those farcical comedies where the audience is asked to suspend disbelief in the quest for an easy laugh, but its to director Wolfgang Becker’s credit that the story is anything but that. He skilfully blends the comic potential of a ridiculous premise with the sadness of seeing an entire culture swept away in the space of a few months to create what he describes as “a sad comedy” of ordinary folk caught up in the whirlwind of uncontrollable change.

GOODBYE LENIN picked up 9 awards, including Best European film, on its release in 2003, and became the most successful German film to date, but that's not why it's worth seeing. You should watch it because it's a damn good story very well told.

MILDRED PIERCE: solid gold entertainment with so much to say

MILDRED PIERCE is the golden age of Hollywood at it's very best - a compelling story beautifully told.

Joan Crawford deservedly won the Best Actress Oscar as the abandoned housewife and mother who claws her way to business success by sheer force of personality only to discover that money doesn't bring happiness. 
The film's subtext is that women who succeed in a man's world must be punished for their audacity. In Mildred's case she's cursed with the most ungrateful daughter (Ann Blyth) in the history of cinema and dragged down by the weak-willed, sponging and greedy men she chooses to surround herself with.
Bruce Bennett, an actor who exuded solidity and terminal dullness, is perfectly cast as Bert Pierce, Mildred's bland, weak, philandering husband whose abandonment of her for a woman who'll service his needs sets her off on the path to material success and emotional meltdown.

Mildred replaces him with Wally Fay (a bravura performance by the underrated Jack Carson), Bert's former business partner and a grade-A sleaze who literally drools at the mouth as he gropes her while describing what her wants to do to her. Unsurprisingly (to everyone except Wally) Mildred gives him the heave-ho when he introduces her to handsome, suave but impoverished playboy Monte Baragon (Zachary Scott), a man with little self respect and even less spine.Mildred's ambition emasculates Monte, consigning him to the role of the female in the relationship, dependent on handouts from Mildred to keep him in the style to which he is accustomed. Mildred meanwhile assumes an increasingly masculine attire. 

It's a message that would not have been lost on audiences when the film was first released in October 1945. Millions of men were returning home after service in World War Two expecting that the millions of women who'd taken their place in factories and many other traditionally male domains for the duration would now revert to their former status as wives, mothers and homemakers.

Even if we put aside the social context of the film's creation, MILDRED PIERCE remains a powerhouse production. Crawford is magnificent under the direction of the superbly talented Michael Curtiz. The film relaunched her career after she'd been ignominiously dumped by MGM and recast her as a woman destined to suffer for daring to believe she was the equal of any man. 
With so much to offer on so many different levels, MILDRED PIERCE is a must see film for anyone who is serious about cinema.