THE CAT AND THE CANARY: scarily over-rated

Newly released on DVD, the1939 comedy thriller THE CAT AND THE CANARY is garnering a lot of favorable press  primarily - it would appear - from reviewers who've read the press release from Universal rather than watched the film itself.

The plot is as creaky as the floorboards of the creepy Louisiana bayou mansion in which it's set. A mismatched group of relatives gather for the reading of the will of it's wealthy, deceased owner. Their disappointment at discovering the old man's left everything to Paulette Goddard is compounded by their fear on learning that not only do they have to spend the night in the dark old house but that one of them may be a murderer.
Hope, as the aptly named Wally Campbell, offers to protect Goddard even though he's a solid gold coward, and he soon finds himself torn between his natural urge to run the other way and his desire to impress her with his courage.
The problem is that many of Hope's verbal retorts and physical responses lack a pay-off line. They just deflate. It's possible that director Elliott Nugent was anticipating that a gale of laughter from the cinema audience would provide the equivalent of a ba-dom-cha! on the drum and cymbal, but that requires that the gags and double-takes be funny, which for the most part they aren't.
The weak smile and muted titters they provoke don't provide the pay-off these comedy bits desperately need. 
To call THE CAT AND THE CANARY a classic is to lavish it with far more praise than it's due.  

PRINCE OF THE CITY: a little longer than a New York minute

Director Sidney Lumet's painstaking and multi-layered portrayal of an investigation into corruption in a New York Police Narcotics Unit is so long that by the end of it I felt like I'd watched the two year inquiry play out in real time.
PRINCE OF THE CITY runs almost 3 hours but there's never a wasted moment. This is a story that demands plenty of time in the telling. At it's heart is Danny Ciello (Treat Williams), a Detective with a small, hugely successful Special Investigative unit which comes under investigation itself by a Federal Task Force.
The feds assure Danny that he's clean and ask for his help in rooting out corruption among his fellow officers. Reluctantly, and after gaining assurances that he won't be asked to turn in anyone he's worked with directly, Danny goes undercover wearing a wire to record dozens of hours of incriminating conversations with cops and criminals. 
His motivation for turning informer isn't entirely clear, even to Danny himself. But as the story unfolds we watch him change from a swaggering confidence to conflicted and tormented vulnerability. He wants to do the right thing but naively believes he can do it on his terms, and doesn't appreciate until he's in too deep the inevitable consequence of the investigative train he's set in motion.
Lumet tells his story in a restrained docu-drama style. There's no flashy camerawork, no car chases or shoot-outs and no star turns. The biggest name in the cast is Treat Williams (and he won't mean much to anyone under the age of 35) and this lack of recognisable faces adds to the film's feeling of authenticity. Star names bring expectations with them and without this distraction it's easier to believe in the characters as real characters rather than actors playing a part.
Williams acquits himself well in his first starring role although there are a couple of scenes where he goes a little over the top in conveying Ciello's inner turmoil at being "a rat."
An excellent companion piece to Lumet's 1973 corrupt NYC cops drama "Serpico" PRINCE OF THE CITY rewards the viewer who has patience and attention. Both are required to get the most out of this movie. It's not necessarily what you expect but you won't be disappointed with what you get.

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA: superstar Streep saves the day

Thank god for Meryl Streep!
She gives THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA more class than it deserves.
Without her marvelously monstrous portrayal of Miranda Priestly, longtime editor of the upmarket fashion magazine 'Runway' this would be just another unimaginative and predictable coming of age yarn wherein a naive young woman (Anne Hathaway) comes to the big city hoping to start her climb up the ladder of success, is forced to choose between career and lovelife, and discovers the price is ultimately not worth paying.
Streep's performance earned her a record 14th best actress Oscar nomination and it really is the only reason for sticking with this film.

SLEUTH: this is how to make cinema out of theatre

SLEUTH is that rare breed of film based on a stage play where the obvious theatrical origins don't act against it. Too often the film version of a hit West End or Broadway show looks like little more than a filmed version of the stage production. The biggest giveaways are too much of the action taking place in very limited number of settings, and dialogue that's written to be declaimed rather than spoken.
Anthony Schaffer's SLEUTH has both yet it never feels constrained or 'stagey.'
There's two main reasons for this - Laurence Olivier's wonderfully entertaining performance, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's direction. 

Olivier's Andrew Wyke is magnificently hammy yet totally believable. An egotistical, arrogant, self-obsessed, upper class, writer of detective thrillers Wyke lives his life as if he's on stage, declaiming, proclaiming, enunciating, and orating rather than simply speaking, and accompanying everything with dramatic gestures, even though he's only playing to an audience of one.
That one is Michael Caine as Milo Tindle, an aspiring celebrity crimper, who's having an affair with Wyke's wife and wants to marry her. The two men come together when Wyke invites Tindle to his country manor to discuss the situation. What starts out as a civilised conversation soon descends into a battle of wits as Wyke bullies his younger rival into playing an increasingly dangerous game designed to resolve their mutual problem.
The action all takes place within the overdecorated confines of Wyke's stately pile yet it never feels claustrophobic. Mankiewicz breaks the story free from it's theatrical constraints by having his camera and his two main characters constantly on the move, creating a liberating sense of continuous forward motion.   
This effect is enhanced with the use of cut away shots of Wyke's collection of mechanical toys, highlighting and emphasising individual details in a way that's simply not possible in a stage play. 
It's almost impossible to write about the film's biggest weakness without giving away a major plot twist so I'll just say that I figured it out the moment it first appeared on screen and if you're giving the film even half your full attention you'll figure it out too.
But even if you do work it out before it's revealed there's still enough in SLEUTH to make it an enjoyable viewing experience - Olivier's performance alone is worth the price of admission. 

WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS: you'll believe a Redwood can act

WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS features more B-grade stars than you can shake a stick at. Just start shaking while I reel off the names - Dana Andrews, Vincent Price, Thomas Mitchell, Ida Lupino, George Sanders, Rhonda Fleming, and Howard Duff. I bet your arm got tired before I finished.
Some of them were never big enough to carry a film on their own, while the others were no longer big enough by 1956 to pull an audience on their own. I'm talking about you Dana Andrews.
But package them all together in a thriller directed by the great Fritz Lang and you've got something that's worth watching. Or, at least, that's the theory.

Andrews heads the ensemble as talented newspaper journalist Edward Mobley who finds himself caught up in an increasingly vicious power struggle between three senior executives at his New York City paper following the death of its longtime publisher, Amos Kyne.
Kyne's successor is his ineffectual and embittered son Walter (Price) who attempts to assert his authority by offering the newly created position of Executive Director to whichever of the three is the first to solve the "Lipstick killings" currently gripping the city. Mobley finds his experience as an investigative reporter suddenly in demand but his real interest lies in persuading longtime fiancee Nancy to marry him. 
It's Andrews as Mobley who waters down what should be a heady brew of politics and passion. Never the most expressive of actors, by middle age he had hardened into a piece of wood more solid than a giant Californian Redwood. Clearly this unflappable dependability was seen as an asset by the studios which continued to cast him in leading man roles for two decades, but he comes across as dull and bloodless.
There's no sense of genuine passion behind his constant professions of love and (shock, horror!) lust for young Nancy and one wonders what on earth she sees in this dull middle aged man. Surely she can foresee the boring life of fetching his pipe and slippers that stretches ahead of her should she yield to his entreaties.  
Andrews plodding style sucks much of the life and sparkle out of the story and out of his fellow actors' enthusiasm for their parts. They turn in perfectly adequate performances but none of them give the film anything close to everything they've got. It's a B-list effort from Lang as well whose penultimate Hollywood film this was.
I stuck with WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS out of affection for Lang's previous work, and he succeeded in  holding my attention but at the end of it all I was left thinking of what could have been.

COCO BEFORE CHANEL: out of misery comes magic

COCO BEFORE CHANEL is a beautiful and achingly sad story which reaffirms Audrey Tautou as one of the finest actresses working in cinema today.
She can express greater depths of emotional turmoil with her soulful brown eyes and a slight tilt of the head than many of her contemporaries achieve working every muscle in their body.Her Coco Chanel sheaths her fragility beneath an outer coating of steely determination and stoic acceptance of her lot in life in much the same way as Tautou's most famous creation Amelie Poulain.

As the title suggests, COCO BEFORE CHANEL is the story of how the young Gabrielle Chanel evolved into world famous fashion designer Coco Chanel and I use the word evolved advisedly as her rise was neither meteoric nor pre-ordained. There was no "Eureka!" moment when the young Gabrielle first stood in front of a roll of fabric with a pair of scissors in her hand and morphed into Coco. In screenwriter-director Anne Fontaine's telling of Chanel's story she drifts almost inadvertently into designing clothes and - more surprisingly - might never have become a fashion designer at all had her lovelife not been such a total disaster.
Her early ambitions to become an actress condemned her to a twilight existence in turn of the 20th century French society where wealthy men would accept her as a mistress but never a wife. Initially rigid in her refusal to play along with such hypocrisy she slowly  and reluctantly mellows as she realises the material benefits to be gained and allows herself to fall in love with one particular suitor.
Her story plays out against a series of luxuriously decorated country homes peopled by the idle rich for whom Chanel is never more than a barely tolerated interloper. She's not an easy person to warm to with her face fixed in an expression of contemptuous indifference for much of time,  but it's also impossible not to empathize with her longing for a place to belong and  to be loved for who she is.
Stylistically and thematically CHANEL BEFORE COCO is a cross-Channel cousin of the Merchant Ivory stable of Brit-centric period dramas with the addition of occasionally hard to read subtitles (note to subtitlers - white lettering on a white background just doesn't work). 
Subtitles aside the main gripe is the lack of pace. I don't expect the early life of Coco Chanel to unspool at the same speed as a Jackie Chan comedy but it does drag in places and feels considerably longer than its 1 hour 45 minute running time. 
Absorbing though it is this is not a film to watch late night on a comfy couch.

LOST IN AMERICA: a classic case of what could have been

Writer-director-star Albert Brooks sets out to do great comedic things with LOST IN AMERICA but seems to lose his nerve halfway through, abandoning them in favour of a sprint to the conclusion.

Brooks and Julie Hagerty play David and Linda Howard, a professional couple in their thirties, who decide to drop out and live life as free spirits after David fails to win promotion at work. They figure that with frugal spending they can make their nest egg stretch to cover the rest of their lives, giving them the freedom to cruise around the United States in their Winnebago. Unfortunately they decide to make their first stop in Las Vegas resulting in a plot twist that will dawn on you several moments before in dawns on David.
Brooks sets up the story so well that there's a real sense of being shortchanged when he fails to follow through on the initial premise. The Howards are a couple with genuine comic potential but he fails to exploit this to the full extent possible.
The ninety minute running time is just too short to properly explore the idea of a mainstream middle class couple giving up everything they've worked for since school to throw themselves into this alternative lifestyle without giving any serious thought to what they're doing beyond repeated references to the movie classic "Easy Rider."  
There's a difference between leaving an audience wanting more (which is good) and leaving them feeling unfulfilled (which is bad) and LOST IN AMERICA definitely leans heavily on the side of the latter.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO: dark secrets Swedish style

There's not a single wasted moment in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. No pointless subplots, no meaningless conversations, and none of those moody lingering shots with no apparent purpose.
That's pretty good going for a film with a two and a half hour running time.
Everything and everyone that director Niels Arden Opley puts on screen has but one purpose - to drive the story forward. And it's one heck on a story.

Investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is hired by the elderly patriarch of the wealthy Vanger family to find out what happened to his favourite niece, Harriet, who disappeared forty years earlier from a family gathering at the Vanger estate on a remote island off the Swedish coast.
Blomkvist is joined in his search by an enigmatic young computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace). Heavily tattooed and adorned with numerous facial piercings Salander is a closed book, concealing a troubled past behind a wall of aggressive silence. They make an odd but effective couple pooling their talents to probe a murky and disturbing mystery and uncover secrets which put their lives in mortal danger.
You might imagine from all the hype surrounding the novel on which this film is based that THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (TGWTDT) is the greatest thing since the invention of the printing press. It's not.
It's actually not that different from the dozens of investigative thrillers produced by British tv in recent years. That's meant as praise not criticism. The best of these tv thrillers create flesh and blood characters and immerse them in complex stories which keep us hooked until the very end. These shows have the luxury of six or eight fifty minute episodes in which to unfold their story. TGWTDT achieves the same result in just a hundred and fifty minutes without it ever feeling rushed.

Some of the 7 million fans of Stieg Larsson's weighty blockbuster novel may be a little disappointed at what's been left out but there's still plenty of detail here both in the story and the people. Salander is a fascinating character with, I feel, more to reveal than what we learn about her in this first adventure.
A Hollywood remake is already in the works with Johnny Depp, George Clooney, Carey Mulligan and Viggo Mortensen among those rumoured to be heading the cast. While I generally admire these actors I'm afraid that the finished product will be overblown and underwhelming. Tinseltown has a way of smothering the original idea in it's efforts to ramp up and Americanise the action and do away with those pesky subtitles (which really aren't particularly distracting).
Do yourself a favour and catch this original version. The sombre Swedish landscapes and the absence of star names with all the baggage they bring with them, make THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO a refreshing change of pace and style.

ME AND ORSON WELLES: hitching a ride on the great man's coat-tails

By placing Me first and Orson Welles second in the title director Richard Linklater dares to suggest that me - in the form of Zac Efron as Richard Samuels - is as interesting as, and on an equal footing with, the legendary Orson Welles.
Fat chance.
When measured across the entire span of the great man's life Samuels registers as something rather smaller than a gnat on the hide of an elephant. Even within the considerably narrower confines of this film he is barely more than an annoying buzzing bluebottle.
Ostensibly ME AND ORSON WELLES recounts the experiences of 17 year old would be actor Samuels who lucks into a supporting role in Welles' 1937 Mercury Theatre production of "Julius Caesar."  
This was a year before Welles was to scare the bejesus out of America with his now legendary "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast but he was already a prodigious talent with an ego to match. Samuels quicky discovers that staying in Welles' good graces requires complete compliance with his every instruction and total subservience of personal needs, including girlfriends.
While the story unfolds from Samuels' point of view it's Christian McKay as Welles who dominates the action. McKay is not exactly a Welles look or sound alike but he succeeds in channeling the great man's presence making it reasonably easy to suspend disbelief and believe that this really is him. His interpretation is fully rounded, presenting Welles as an explosive, mercurial and self-centered talent capable of of enormous creativity and cruelty.
Samuels, by contrast, is a rather vapid character, endowed with little depth. He's clearly out of his league compared to the other members of the Mercury Theatre troupe, and the overriding impression is of a child who's climbed out of bed and wandered downstairs to join they party his parents are throwing for their friends. It's difficult to determine whether Efron is acting his socks off or simply playing himself.    
As an avid devotee of the American entertainment industry of the 1930s and 40s I'm a sucker for these kind of recreations of great moments and personalities, but they almost always leave me disappointed. The cinematic re-imagining rarely lives up to the imagining in my mind, which usually plays out in black and white and features the actual stars rather than impressions. I was impressed with McKay's take on Welles but the colour bothered me. Being so thoroughly immersed in black and white movies while growing up I find it difficult to believe in a 1930s America presented in colour. It just doesn't feel real.
This personal reservation aside, ME AND ORSON WELLES is to be admired for putting his name back in front of cinema audiences a quarter of a century after his death, and reminding them (or possibly, informing them for the first time) that there was considerably more to this man than those tv commercials for Paul Masson and the voice of a talking planet in The Transformers movie.

JOHN RABE: the Nazi's own Oskar Schindler

Humanitarian and Nazi and not words ordinarily found in close proximity to one another but in the case of JOHN RABE they go together very well.
Rabe was director of the Siemens factory in Nanjing when the Japanese attack on the Chinese city in late 1937 precipitated the now infamous "Rape of Nanjing." 300,000 Chinese  were butchered by the forces of the Imperial Japanese Army and that number would undoubtedly have been tens of thousands higher were it not for Rabe's actions.

Working with others in the beleaguered international community he created an International Safety Zone centred on his factory and took in an estimated 200,000 Chinese civilians, promising to protect them from the slaughter beyond its walls. Using only his authority as an unofficial representative of  the Third Reich, and leaning heavily on the partnership Germany and Japan had recently cemented with the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact, Rabe bargained with the Japanese military authorities for the lives of these innocents.
This film is his story and what makes it so astonishing is that it's true. Rabe did what he did despite being an ardent German patriot and Nazi. Having not lived in Germany since 1910 it's doubtful whether he really understood the true nature of Hitler's regime but he never expresses the slightest criticism of his government's policies and is genuinely bemused when the local American doctor (an excellent Steve Buscemi) refers to him contemptuously as a Nazi.
What's almost as surprising is that this most unlikely of heroes is being celebrated by German  cinema. JOHN RABE is a German language production, shot on location in Nanjing and Shanghai, with a European approach to recreating history which emphasizes the personal but eschews much of the gratuitous sentimentality that mainstream Hollywood is so fond of.
Ulrich Tukur is magnificently understated in the title role, imbuing John Rabe with a quiet dignity and restraint, and a reluctant sense of responsibility. Rabe does what he does because he can see no other choice, although he'd much prefer not to have to do it at all. In rousing himself to action he becomes a beacon of hope to the terrified citizens of Nanjing and inspires his fellow westerners to dig deep within themselves and find the courage to face up to an apparently hopeless situation.
JOHN RABE can be criticised for focusing on the power struggle between two mismatched groups of foreign invaders and relegating the Chinese to the role of victims caught in the middle with no control over their own lives or country. But the film also deserves to be commended for shining a long overdue spotlight on an area of the turbulent 1930s that has been mostly overlooked by western filmmakers.