THE PROWLER: corrosive corruption of the soul

THE PROWLER is one of the best film noir you've probably never seen.
I first discovered it more than 25 years ago on late night tv in the UK (those were the days when the BBC still screened old movies) and it hooked me right away. The story of illicit passion and murder exuded an incredibly compelling sense of suffocating claustrophobia and barely suppressed tension, and that memory's stuck with me for the ensuing quarter century.

So when I was finally able to get my hands on a VHS copy my concern was that the reality wouldn't live up to the memory, and I'd be left wondering what on earth is was I ever saw in the film.
I watched THE PROWLER again last night all my worries were put to rest. This 1951 film is a five star classic.
Van Heflin stars as Webb Garwood, a police patrolman in an upscale neighborhood in Los Angeles. One night he and his dull as ditchwater partner, Bud Crocker, are called to investigate a prowler at one of the big houses on their beat. They find an attractive young woman, Susan Gilvray, home alone and Webb takes an instant liking to her. Even though she's married and initially resists his advances, Webb determines to seduce her and use her to get what he wants out of life.
Heflin's masterful performance is a major factor in this film's effectiveness. As an actor he often played characters who exuded a certain vulnerability borne of physical or moral weakness, but here he turns it into a strength. Garwood's moral compass has been so eroded by the acidic bitterness of failed dreams that he's no longer restrained by any sense of right and wrong. He targets Susan like a tiger stalking its prey. His cynical and unscrupulous manipulation of her undermines everything that his police uniform represents. 
In the hands of Evelyn Keyes, Susan is a not entirely unwilling victim. Looking and acting like a bargain basement Lana Turner, she comes across as only slightly less untrustworthy than her seducer. Trapped in a loveless and controlling marriage to a much older man, she wants to believe that Webb is the solution to her unhappy existence, and at times it's difficult to determine just who is manipulating who.
On a larger scale THE PROWLER is an unsettling indictment of the corrupting influence of materialism on the American Dream. Webb bitterly resents his inability to get ahead yet he's unwilling to put in the honest toil required to bring even his modest ambition of running a motel within his grasp. Susan has more than Webb can ever aspire to yet she lives the life of a bird trapped in a gilded cage, paid for by her husband's syrupy, insincere shilling for the sponsors of his late-night radio show.  

What is perhaps most depressing is the lack of viable alternatives offered up by the story. A man in Webb's situation, it says, has no choice but to act boldly and disregard accepted norms of behaviour if he's to avoid being crushed by conformity. The best that the American Dream can offer is the life of mind-numbing soul destroying tedium embodied by Webb's middle-aged partner Bud. The biggest kick in Bud's life is showing off his collection of rocks amassed during his annual vacation to the California desert.
Reportedly shot in just 17 days on a budget of $700,000 THE PROWLER offers up more food for thought than any of the bloated, special effects engorged thrillers which pass for cinematic entertainment these days. 
Beg, borrow, buy or steal a copy of this film. It will stay with you for life.

GET HIM TO THE GREEK: let's hear it for the geek!

GET HIM TO THE GREEK is a far better film than I expected. It's certainly not high art or even high brow but it is fun and that's due in large part to Jonah Hill. He was the nerdy roly-poly one in 2007's "Superbad" and he plays a pretty similar role here albeit a few years older and slightly more successful with women.
His Aaron Green is a geeky intern at an LA record label run by the foul-mouthed meglomaniac Sergio Roma (a fine performance from Sean 'P Diddy' Combs). In the opportunity of a lifetime Aaron is sent to London to collect out-of-control British rock star Aldous Snow and escort him to LA in time to perform a money-making comeback concert at the Greek Theater. It sounds like a simple enough assignment except that Snow's not a man given to doing what he's told or following a timetable.  
What ensues are the three most exhilarating, terrifying and challenging days in Aaron's entire life as he attempts to cajole, persuade and drag an increasingly distracted music legend from the UK to the West Coast.
It's Brand who has the showy part in this story and he succeeds in portraying Snow as extravagant, eccentric, willful, unpredictable and mildly self destructive without ever going over the top, but Hill still manages to steal the film from him.His reactions to the excesses and indignities heaped upon him by Snow are priceless and, perhaps most importantly, he's likable where Snow isn't. Snow is what we Brits would call "a bit of a wanker." He's entertaining enough to be around (providing you're not in his firing line) but he'll screw you over in a heartbeat if the mood takes him.

GET HIM TO THE GREEK is not the first film to set itself in the world of rock star excesses but it is perhaps the first to present it in a disapproving light right from the get-go. There is nothing attractive or appealing about Snow or his lifestyle, and it doesn't take more than five minutes for Aaron's illusions about his music idol to be shattered.
Producer Judd Apatow has carved a niche for himself as Hollywood's premier purveyor of overage man-child comedies ("Anchorman", "The 40 Year Old Virgin", "Knocked Up", "Superbad" etc) and while this latest addition doesn't break the mold it does succeed in feeling fresh and funny. 

FOLLOW THE BOYS: it's not what you think

What was his agent thinking?! 
Movie tough guy George Raft starring in a film called FOLLOW THE BOYS? 
What's that going to do to his image as a snarling, cold blooded gangster? 
Chances are Raft believed that signing on for the film would do his image nothing but good. 

Despite the rather misleading title FOLLOW THE BOYS is actually a red, white and blue flagwaving all-star tribute to the boys in uniform who were fighting and dying to defend democracy from the fascist regimes of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.
The film would also have appealed to Raft because it only required him to play a fictionalised version of himself. He wouldn't have to travel very far to get into character which was a blessing because Raft had what is politely described as "a limited range" as an actor. Whether he was emoting crazy mad with anger or crazy mad in love.he tended to employ the same expression and tone of voice. 
He plays hoofer Tony West who dances his way from vaudeville to Hollywood and marriage to musical star Gloria Vance (Vera Zorina). They're the Fred and Ginger of emotionless dancing until the Japs bomb Pearl Harbor and Tony's turned down by the Army because of a bum knee (seems it's ok to dance on but not march on). So he pours all his energy into drafting his fellow showbiz stars to entertain the troops, traveling the world to put on shows just behind the front-line. But all this war work leaves him no time for Gloria and a series of misunderstandings on both sides tears them apart. 
The marriage split is a less than subtle effort to convince the audience that big stars understood and shared in the real life misery of separation from loved ones being experienced by millions of couples because of the war. It's a persuasive argument if you ignore the fact that Tony and Vera's separation is caused by both of them failing to take five minutes to listen to one another, rather than by Uncle Sam sending the husband off to war and possible death in a distant corner of the planet.
But, coded messages apart, the primary aim of FOLLOW THE BOYS is to show the stars doing their bit to support the men in uniform. Orson Welles saws Marlene Dietrich in half, WC Fields performs a billiards routine using a trick table, Dinah Shore and The Andrews Sisters sing, Jeanette McDonald trills, Sophie Tucker talk-sings, Artur Rubenstein adds gravitas with a piece on the piano, and there's tricks from a  bunch of trained dogs in costume.
Compared to Warner Brothers two star studded morale boosters "Thank Your Lucky Stars" (1943) and 1944's "Hollywood Canteen", and MGM's "Thousands Cheer" also from 1944, this contribution from Universal is bargain basement stuff. It's not just Raft's monotone performance and Zorina's lack of charisma, it's the sense of disconnection between the various star turns, it's the shoddy editing between long shots of actual performances at army camps and studio based recreations in close-up, and it's the dearth of real stars. With the exception of Welles and Dietrich the wattage is determinedly B-list.
As a curio piece - and for the opportunity to see Raft hoofing on a flatbed truck in a rainstorm - FOLLOW THE BOYS is definitely worth seeing, but as a morale booster it's decidedly depressing.

CADDYSHACK: one big yawn

My god is CADDYSHACK a huge waste of space!

For a film touted as one of the 1980s more memorable comedies it's unbelievably devoid of laughs.
Bill Murray's slack-jawed grounds keeper, locked in a life or death feud with a pesky gopher,  is self indulgently stupid, Rodney Dangerfield over-acts appallingly, while Chevy Chase sleepwalks through the film offering not a shred of evidence to justify his reputation as one of America's top funny men of the period.All three stars are comprehensively outperformed by the gopher and he's nothing more than a mechanically operated prop.
CADDYSHACK is just the kind of film we Brits offer in evidence when making the case that Americans have a weird sense of humour, and by weird we mean a propensity to laugh at material that's just not funny.
Nothing that's actually funny happens in CADDYSHACK. There's plenty of scenes and characters with comic potential if only someone had remembered to write some genuine humour into the script rather than settle for a ragbag of half-finished routines and one dimensional characters. There are too many set-ups which simply peter out before they reach the punchline. Even the grand climax - the thing the whole story's been building up to - falls flat.
I've got nothing against American comedy - I'm a big fan of Woody Allen, Groucho Marx, Laurel and Hardy, David Letterman, Larry Sanders, and Jack Benny  among others - nor do I dislike low brow humour. It can be the funniest comedy in the world if it's done right, But I do object to a bunch of over-rated 'comedians' who've so bought into their own inflated reputation that they believe absolutely anything they do must be funny simply because they're doing it. Today we call it 'Will Ferrell syndrome' and there's really only one cure for it. Make these people earn the title of 'funnyman' instead of just bestowing it on them because they tell us they're funny.

GEORGY GIRL: it's the heart not the looks that really count

It's got the catchiest theme song ever to adorn the opening titles of a 60s movie. "Hey there Georgy Girl" by The Seekers will stick in your head for days afterwards. 
But not only is it infectious it also sets out in plain unambiguous English the premise for the story about to unfold. And just in case you are having trouble understanding the lyrics director Silvio Narizzano helpful matches up the words with images of Georgy "swinging down the (high) street (in London) so fancy free."
"You're always window shopping but never stopping to buy" warble The Seekers at the exact moment that Georgy pauses to look at the clothes in a shop window. 
GEORGY GIRL is not a subtle film. There's nothing here to interpret or decode. What you see is what you get. 

And what you get is a fascinating time capsule - a window on the working class end of the swinging 60s as they probably never existed but were purveyed by British movies of the time. Lynn Redgrave is Georgy, overweight, fat faced and ugly (her words) and longing for a boyfriend, a love life and a future not spent on her own. James Mason plays Mr Leamington,  a wealthy dirty old man who lusts after Georgy, and Alan Bates is Jos, the hedonistic, immature and dashingly handsome boyfriend of Georgy's beautiful flatmate Meredith, played by Charlotte Rampling.
Georgy is out of place not only because of her appearance but also because she doesn't subscribe to the live for today ethos which has infected everyone around her. She's an old fashioned girl with a heart of gold  looking for someone worthy of sharing her love with. 
GEORGY GIRL is not quite the story of the ugly duckling who blossoms into a gorgeous swan; it's more of a voyage of self-discovery filled with bittersweet moments on the way to a surprising conclusion.
Redgrave is magnificent as Georgy. Self deprecating and brutally honest about her shortcomings, there's not a trace of ego in her performance. Mason is superb as her oily benefactor while Bates is just about bearable in his hyper-exuberant interpretation of the swinging 60s made flesh.
Had Bates dialed down his performance a couple of notches and  events unfolded at a slightly less frantic pace it's possible that a more serious and meaningful film would have emerged. As it is the moral of the story gets buried under the film's brash, slick exterior and its focus on playing almost everything for laughs.

MIAMI VICE: what a crock(ett)!

Director Michael Mann's 2006 big screen version of the 80s smash hit tv show is a bloated empty hulk devoid of interest or entertainment.

No amount of snappy editing and flashy camerawork can conceal the fact that there's absolutely nothing worth watching going on here. The action is framed with all the style and grace of a fidgety kid with way too much energy, presumably in the mistaken belief that a multitude of movement will somehow distract from the lack of meaningful story.
Colin Farrell as Sonny Crockett and Jamie Foxx as Ricardo Tubbs are little more than ciphers - one dimensional characters going through the motions of being cardboard cops chasing a bunch of stereotyped, foreign accented drug dealers back and forth across the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. 
But MIAMI VICE isn't just boring, it's also largely unintelligible. When Tubbs and Crockett aren't muttering to each other they're mumbling, and Farrell's dreadful attempt at an American accent doesn't help matters. Quite why Mann felt an Irish actor was the only man capable of taking on the part made famous by Don Johnson is a mystery. Beyond a droopy moustache and appallingly awful haircut Farrell brings nothing memorable to the part.
Foxx's greatest achievement, meanwhile, is in making his interpretation of Ricardo Tubbs even less memorable than that of Philip Michael Thomas.
This is a surprisingly misstep for Mann who's work on "Heat", "Collateral" and "The Insider" has earned him a reputation as one of the most distinctive and stylish directors currently working. MIAMI VICE shares many of his trademark touches but in this case they just don't add up to anything worth investing 2 and a quarter hours of your life in.

AFTER LIFE: more questions asked than answered

There's no escape from bureaucracy even after death if AFTER LIFE is to be believed.
Rather than shuffling off this mortal coil and straight through the doorway to either heaven or hell there's a waiting room in a drab school building, an interview and some homework to be navigated first.
This low budget 1998 Japanese drama, shot in a semi-documentary style, follows a group of recently deceased people as they pass through this nondescript way station en route to eternity. Each of them is assigned to a caseworker who, after notifying them officially that they are dead, asks them to choose one memory from their life to take with them into the here-after.

Once selected, the caseworker and his colleagues will recreate the memory in a short film to be screened to the deceased before every other memory is erased from their mind and they're sent on their way.
For some it's an easy decision while others struggle to recall anything meaningful or worthwhile despite encouragement and gentle guidance from their caseworker.
AFTER LIFE's concept of an afterworld run by civil servants through which the newly dead are forced to transit is nothing new. I was reminded of the 1944 Warner Brothers drama "Between Two Worlds" with the wonderful Sydney Greenstreet as the white suited celestial examiner whose stamp of approval was required to pass through the Pearly Gates.
But in director Hirokazu Koreeda's imagining we are not judged for our actions on Earth nor asked to justify our behaviour. The task of the caseworkers here is not to determine who is worthy of heaven and who should be damned to hell. In fact it's made clear early on that these alternatives don't even exist. Their job is to encourage each of the deceased to review the entire span of their life and come to a thoughtful decision on which moment of it was really most important to them. Which one memory will keep them happy through all eternity.
There's much here to engage our curiosity, from the participants' complete lack of distress at being dead, to grappling with the idea of being burdened with just one memory for the rest of time and beyond. Surely even the happiest recollection will eventually drive you mad if it's the replayed over and over with no ability to switch it off.
AFTER LIFE also leaves the notion of the ultimate hereafter to our imagination. No one expresses any interest in their final destination and no information is offered. Perhaps the dead are too engrossed in appraising their past to wonder about the future.
What I found most disconcerting is that this after life appears to exist on the same plane as life as we know it now. Traffic passes by on the street beyond the school and, in one sequence, a young caseworker walks into the city centre and looks in shop windows as the yet-to-be-deceased pass her by without reaction. She is a ghost in their midst, visible yet unseen.
This all adds up to a story that will frustrate those who insist on a strong degree of closure at the end of their films. The relentless focus on the everyday, sometimes mundane, activities of the caseworkers and their clients leaves no time for exploration of metaphysical ideas of life after death. 
That's not a criticism it's a compliment because it leaves us space for our imagination to roam. Thought-provoking and tender yet unsentimental, AFTER LIFE will definitely provoke reflection and debate.

BEING THERE: thought provoking brilliance

If Peter Sellers is remembered at all today, it is for the series of ‘Pink Panther’ films he made in the 1960s and 1970s as the comically inept Inspector Clouseau.
But even that is a fading memory, as a new generation of moviegoers grows up believing Steve Martin created the character in 2006’s abominable retread of ‘The Pink Panther.’
Much like Martin, Sellers also squandered his talent and tainted his reputation with a series of mediocre and painfully unfunny films but, similarly, he was also capable of brilliance.
BEING THERE is a stunning example of the British comedian’s talent when he chose the right material. He displays a depth and maturity he had rarely if ever shown before, and hints at what more he could have done had he lived.
Sellers spent almost a decade trying to persuade a studio to make the film. It finally went before the cameras in 1979, just a year before his untimely death from a heart attack.
The result is one of my top three all-time favourite films.
Sellers plays Chance, a fifty-something year old man-child who’s lived his whole life in the confines of a Washington DC townhouse, tending to the garden, and protected by a wealthy and kindly benefactor.
When he isn’t gardening he is watching television. As he’s never left the house his only knowledge of the outside world comes from what he has seen on tv.
When his benefactor dies, the lawyers throw Chance out onto the street, leaving him helpless in an unfriendly and unsupportive world that is totally beyond his limited powers of comprehension.
Fortunately a traffic accident brings him into contact with Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine), the young wife of the elderly, sick, and incredibly wealthy industrialist and political powerbroker Benjamin Rand (played by veteran Hollywood leading man Melvyn Douglas).
Fearful of a lawsuit, she takes Chance back to the Rand mansion where Rand warms to the younger man, mistaking his simple-minded references to gardening for profound political observations.
Before long and completely without his doing, the people around him have transformed Chance the Gardener into Chauncey Gardiner, a mysterious and influential political advisor with the ear of the US President (Jack Warden), and the one man that everyone who’s anyone in DC wants to meet.
On one level BEING THERE is a critique of the cultural impact of television on the United States. Chance relates everything in the outside world to what he’s seen on tv, and one of the film’s most intriguing aspects is director Hal Ashby’s choice of real television clips from the era. Anyone who grew up in 1970s America will find much that they recognize, but its meaning in the context of the story is less clear.
Despite repeated viewing I’m still trying to fully understand the message of this film, and that’s what makes me keep on coming back to it. Each time I watch it I’m left with something new to think about.

BEING THERE is also a sharp and very black satire on the inability or refusal of America’s political elite to accept people at face value, preferring instead to project their own interpretation onto the actions and behaviour of others, to create meaning and significance which just doesn’t exist.
Chance remains totally oblivious to the misunderstandings of those around him. He is the same mild mannered, simple minded man at the story’s end as he is at the beginning. What has changed are the people around him. Those who protected him from the harsh realities of the world have been supplanted by ruthless political operators who see in him their best chance to attain their selfish objectives.
Sellers was deservedly Oscar nominated for his performance, while Douglas won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The whole film is beautifully cast and directed, and the Rand mansion (actually the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina) where much of the film is set is particularly atmospheric.
Satirical, funny, dramatic, subtle, and thought provoking, BEING THERE is a neglected masterpiece of 70s cinema. Do your bit to restore it to its rightful place in cinema history. Watch it.

ECLIPSE:overwhelmed by inertia

Michelangelo Antonioni's ECLIPSE is a masterpiece of hypnotic boredom. To describe it as languid would be to grossly insult things generally considered to move at a slow pace - like snails and tress.
Even the word meandering suggests something able to generate faster forward motion than the narrative of this 1962 film.

ECLIPSE is hynotically boring because it drains the viewer of the willpower to look away and indulge in a more stimulating activity such as blinking while breathing.
I knew within minutes that this film was going to be more boring than a roomful of accountants discussing socks yet I found myself totally unable to do anything about it. ECLIPSE sedated me to the point where it became too much effort to stop watching.
And now that the experience is over and I've regained the use of my free will I find I'm troubled by the cinematic equivalent of post traumatic stress disorder.I'm having these terrible flashbacks to Monica Vitti's really unconvincing interpretation of the emotional torment when a relationship ends.
Please... somebody, make her blank-faced acting go away........ 

PULP FICTION: it's just so 1994

Last night I watched PULP FICTION again for the first time since it's original cinema release back in 1994.
As the story unspooled whole scenes and chunks of dialogue came flooding back to me. Not because I was one of those Quentin Tarantino anoraks who memorised every frame and every line of the script but because so many others did and then talked about them - on tv, on the radio, in print, and in everyday life. 

Anyone who was around in 1994 would be hard-pressed to forget John Travolta's description of the French version of the McDonald's Quarter Pounder with cheese, or Samuel L.Jackson's expletive laden recitation of Ezekiel 25:17, or Christopher Walken recounting how one of his prisoner of war comrades hid a wristwatch in his ass to keep it safe from his North Vietnamese guards..
This hip, irreverent, pop-culture laden dialogue was writer-director Quentin Tarantino's trademark. It had been perfected in his directorial debut "Reservoir Dogs" two years earlier, and that film's incredible success had made him the hottest property in Hollywood. Stars queued up for the chance to work with him have a little of that coolness rub off on them and their career. PULP FICTION brought John Travolta back from the dead and confirmed Jackson as the hippest actor in town.
But what appeared so exciting, fresh and original 16 years ago felt contrived and tedious upon second viewing last night. The plot repeatedly ground to a halt while Jackson and Travolta spewed minute after minute of mostly pointless dialogue. If I met either of these characters in real life they'd have to hold their gun to my head to compel to listen to their self-indulgent ramblings.
The fault for this lies less with Tarantino than with popular culture (in the form of the tabloid media, manufacturers of pop culture posters and postcards, and those sad mo-fos who deludedly believed that memorising chunks of film dialogue would make them 'cool') which elevated everything about PULP FICTION to such unrealistic heights of adulation that a fall was inevitable. 
For me this film has not stood the test of time. What had been fresh, funny and original in 1994 is now tiresomely annoying and an ordeal which (for academic reasons) had to be endured.