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.
   

SHUTTER ISLAND: nightmares in a damaged brain

Director Martin Scorsese's first foray into the horror genre is a major disappointment. SHUTTER ISLAND trots out every cliche in the "How to Make a Horror Thriller" handbook with not even a single smudged fingerprint to indicate this is the handiwork of the greatest living American film director.
If it weren't for the presence of the (still) unfeasibly babyfaced Leonardo DiCaprio I'd swear I was watching the 1966 cinematic bastard lovechild of William Castle and a young Roman Polanski. Imagine "Cul de Sac" meets "Strait Jacket." 

With a blaring discordant soundtrack and cast of demented murderous souls locked away on a remote island institution and guarded by a staff whose own sanity appears dubious, I half expected a late era Joan Crawford or Bette Davis to loom out of the darkness on the other end of one of the pairs of arms reaching through the bars to grab at the hero as he stumbles down a damp, dark corridor in a mental hospital.
SHUTTER ISLAND is derivative, hokey, overblown and peopled with stock characters. There's Ben Kingsley as the smooth head doctor whose professions of concern for his patients may or may not be sincere; Max von Sydow as the German-accented psychiatrist who may or may not be a Nazi war criminal; Ted Levine as the warden whose honesty and openness may be concealing a sadistic dark side, and DiCaprio as the outsider, menaced on all sides and starting to doubt his own sanity. 
In the hands of William Castle this would all add up to a taut, entertaining B-movie chiller but it's not worthy of a director of Scorsese's stature. His 2004 film "The Aviator" for which he was undeservedly Oscar nominated looks like "Raging Bull" compared to SHUTTER ISLAND.   

WALL STREET: a bloated bore

This probably puts me in a minority of one or two but WALL STREET did nothing for me. The film has been glowingly referenced so frequently in articles on 80s cinema that I was expecting something akin to the second coming of Jesus but all I got was bored.
Not possessing an MBA or twenty years experience trading shares on the floor of the Stock Exchange I found much of the script to be incomprehensible.I appreciate director Oliver Stone's insistence on authenticity but - really - the film needed subtitles to explain to us mere Main Street mortals what was going on.
In their absence I settled for spotting the now famous lines - "Lunch is for wimps," "Greed is good" etc - and nodding appreciatively, happy to have actually understood some small portion of the plot.
I wasn't blown away by Michael Douglas or Charlie Sheen either. Neither of them were bad but not for one moment did I believe in either of their characters as real characters. 
Man's capacity for greed is timeless but WALL STREET has dated as badly as the "cutting edge" housebrick sized cell phone that Douglas's Gordon Gekko wields to show he's king of the castle.

BERLIN EXPRESS: derailed by reality

With the benefit of hindsight BERLIN EXPRESS looks like a fairytale, but even when it was first released in 1948 it must have seemed to many cinema-goers to be hopelessly and naively optimistic.
At the heart of this post war thriller set among the ruins of a defeated Germany is the notion that the four victorious allied powers can co-exist peacefully if they just spend a little time and get to know each other personally.
When a German diplomat with a plan for peaceably reuniting his divided homeland is kidnapped by Nazi fanatics while en-route to an important conference in Berlin four of his fellow passengers about the titular train team up to track him down and thereby save Europe from another conflict.
Conveniently the four comprise a brash, confident American (Robert Ryan), a stereotypical "toot-toot toodle pip old chum" British school teacher (Robert Coote), a rigid and suspicious Soviet army officer, and a feisty little Frenchman called Perrot (Charles Korvin). They're initially reluctant to work together, basing their assumptions of each other on national stereotypes, but urged on by the diplomat's loyal secretary Lucienne (Merle Oberon) - who keeps the four guessing about her nationality - they rapidly coalesce into an effective if unorthodox search and rescue team.

Unfortunately real life events were conspiring to undermine the film's message almost from the moment it hit cinema screens in May 1948. The already shaky relations between the Soviet Union and the three Western powers occupying Germany had become increasingly belligerent since the British, French and Americans unveiled plans to unify their zones of occupation, and in late June the Soviets cut off all western access to Berlin. The Allies responded by launching the Berlin airlift.and the frosty relations between the former partners froze into the Cold War.
Outside of the unfortunate timing BERLIN EXPRESS works reasonably well as a taut little thriller. Director Jacques Tourneur keeps the action moving briskly along and makes good use of the on-location shooting. Apart from a few glaringly obvious back projections early on most of film is actually shot where it's set and it's shocking to see just how devastated big cities like Frankfurt and Berlin remained almost three years after the end of the war. 
Robert Ryan is solid and dependable but doesn't really shine, although that's more the fault of the part than his acting. Merle Oberon, meanwhile, is adequate but hardly enticing as the object of her male co-stars attentions. The real star is Paul Lukas as the kidnapped German diplomat. He effortlessly exudes old world charm, dignity and sense of duty and dominates every scene he's in simply by standing there.
After watching Lukas in BERLIN EXPRESS you'll want to see more of him. 

PEACOCK: this film has nothing to do with birds sporting large colorful feathers

If Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" is the grandmammy of psychotic cross-dressing mommy-obsessed murder movies then PEACOCK is a first cousin on the ever-so-slightly less demented side of the family.
Cillian Murphy stars as John Skillpa, a shy and socially awkward bank clerk in a small Nebraska town whose life is suddenly exposed to unwelcome public scrutiny when a train accident occurs - literally - in his backyard. John it appears, has been harboring a secret wife, a young woman called Emma who is considerably more graceful and friendly than her withdrawn husband.

What's soon revealed to us but not the townsfolk, is that John and Emma are the same person. Each morning Emma rises to hang out the laundry and prepare John's breakfast before retiring upstairs where she changes into John and returns downstairs to eat the breakfast and cycle to work.
While it rapidly becomes clear that John is wrestling with identity issues spawned by an unhappy childhood with a strict and unaffectionate mother, it's less obvious whether John and Emma are aware of each other's existence. And when the local prostitute (played by Ellen Page) reveals that John has fathered a child with her, the two facets of his tormented personality become locked in an increasingly bitter battle for custody of the boy.
This may all sound like a piece of grand guignol-style horror but PEACOCK is actually a very low key story which too often becomes a little too subdued for it's own good. The camera lingers over the small details, building the picture piece by piece while big events like the train wreck which triggers the unraveling of John's meticulously organised life are dispensed with in a momentary blur of movement.
While I appreciate the attention to detail I found that the action moved just too slowly to hold my uninterrupted attention. PEACOCK feels like a short story that's been stretched beyond it's natural elasticity to fit a pre-assigned running time. Director Michael Lander attempts to hold our interest with a plethora of star cameos (including Susan Sarandon, Bill Pullman and Keith Carradine) but once you've got over wondering why Josh Lucas would take such a small part in a small film there's still plenty of time left to start fidgeting again over the story's languid pace.
Murphy is impressively convincing in the dual lead role, imbuing both characters with a real  believability, which is more than can be said for Ellen Page who is miscast as the town trollope.
PEACOCK is an interesting misfire which would have benefited from a little more story or a little less running time.

FISH TANK: living life on the bottom

FISH TANK tells a story that can be taken as a damning and depressing indictment of society's failure to provide opportunities for those at the bottom of the pile to better themselves, or as a heartwarming, if unwashed and foul-mouthed, testament to the resilience of the human spirit in overcoming adversity and making lemonade out of lemons.
The reality is somewhere in the middle and though, by the end of the story our heroine is striking out for pastures new it's more because she's run out of options at home than because she's refused to give-in to her circumstances.

Mia (Katie Jarvis) is a combative15 year old girl living with her younger sister and their unemployed boozy, single mum in a flat in a rundown council high-rise on a charmless estate in the Essex suburbs of London. Faced with a mother who resents her kids for robbing her of her youth, Mia has become withdrawn, with a tough outer shell; relying entire on her own wits, and treating everyone with suspicion and contempt.
Dance is her only outlet, the one time she feels good about herself, but even that is a solitary pursuit. She practices her hip hop routines in an empty flat on the estate, showing them to no one. That changes when her mum's new boyfriend, Connor, starts showing an interest in her and encourages her to pursue her dream. 
But as Mia slowly lets down her guard in response to Connor's warmth, his fatherly concern for her wellbeing begins to take on more disturbing overtones.
While the plot may sound familiar FISH TANK succeeds in being more than just another teenage rites of passage drama because of Jarvis's compelling performance. Mia's life story may check all the boxes in the list of "top 10 signs you've had an underprivileged upbringing" but Jarvis makes them a living, breathing reality.Mia is not an easy character to like but Jarvis makes it possible.
Michael Fassbender is also extremely effective as Connor, bringing real depth to a character who has so much potential for good right up to the moment when he succumbs to his baser instincts.
FISH TANK is gritty, rough-edged stuff. Think of it as the flipside to "An Education" which is reviewed elsewhere on this blog.  The big difference is that where the latter ended on an optimistic note, the former can't make any such promises.

THE MAN ON THE EIFFEL TOWER: I can see the end of the story from here!

The City of Paris gets fifth billing in the opening credits of this threadbare 1949 murder mystery shot on location in the French capital yet there's not a single solitary genuine French or man or woman in the cast.
Instead we get Englishman Charles Laughton as the great French detective Inspector Maigret, American Franchot Tone as a Czech medical student, and Burgess Meredith as a bright red haired American pretending to be a foreigner of indeterminate nationality. 
They spend their whole time running around an eerily deserted Paris, chasing each other in an effort to resolve the question of who murdered a wealthy American woman for her money. Except it's not a who done it or even a who cares who done it because we know who done it right from the start and we still don't care.
The film is tedious in the extreme. First time director Meredith shares his character's poor eyesight when it comes to picture composition. The scenes are so unimaginatively presented that it appears Meredith did little more than point the cameras in the general direction of the action. One wonders why he didn't use a little of the time and energy he saved by not being creative to inject some much needed enthusiasm into Laughton's lacklustre performance, and keep Tone's twitchy over-acting in check.
The only real excitement comes in the final few minutes when the murderer tries to evade from the police by climbing up the Eiffel Tower. It's not the most obvious escape route but it does make for some heart-stopping stuntwork and spectacular aerial shots of Paris.
Dull and plodding with sub-standard performances all round, the best thing about this film is it's title. 

FLAME:nostalgia ain't what it used to be

FLAME will be a puzzlement to anyone who didn't live through the British music scene in the mid 1970s.
They're going to struggle to understand how and why this film ever got made. 

It stars four of the period's least photogenic musicians (and that's some achievement considering just how unattractive many of the British top 40 acts were in the mid 70s!) in a dingily shot low budget drama which starts out with grand ambitions but then inexplicably races to an unsatisfactory conclusion after apparently running out of ideas or funding or both.
The four guys with perfect faces for music radio are members of the real life rock group.Slade. With 17 consecutive top 20 hits during the 70s they were, according to the book 'British Hit Singles and Albums' the top UK group of the decade and all that success gave someone the bright idea that all the fans of Slade's glam-rock music would also pay money to see them act.
Quite how playing a guitar automatically qualifies someone to be an actor is a mystery to me, but the guys are actually not as bad as I'd anticipated. Guitarist Jim Lea and drummer Don Powell acquit themselves pretty well , while frontman Noddy Holder transitions effortlessly from shouting-singing to shouting-acting and buck-toothed, stupid haircut wearing guitarist Dave Hill  simply play himself.
The supposedly semi-autobiographical story charts their rise from playing the grimy clubs of the West Midlands to chart success as members of the rock band Flame, and the unscrupulous, parasitic managers who latch onto them and exploit them for their own ends. Director Richard Loncraine lavishes much attention on the lads' working class roots and culture, making a genuine effort to portray them as 'real' characters but then undoes all his good work by abandoning the story midway through the second act to rush suddenly to the climax, bringing down the curtain with unseemly and unconvincing haste.
When I got my first radio as a tenth birthday present and discovered pop music Slade were the first band that I was a fan of, so I was disappointed that, with the exception of 'Far far away,' there were none of their big hits on the soundtrack. 
Despite this youthful connection I can't say FLAME produced any pangs of nostalgia. The portrait of England circa 1975 offered in the film is so relentlessly grey, dirty and depressing that my primary response was one of relief that it's no longer like that. I don't begrudge the hour and a half I spent watching this film but I felt that I needed a long shower by the end of it.

JUNEBUG: quirky, disturbing and adult.

The moral or the message of JUNEBUG if indeed one is intended, is that nobody's perfect and we should all just try to make the best of what we have. 
It's not a particularly uplifting or inspiring message when one considers the circumstances of the two characters chosen to convey it.

Ashley Johnsten (Amy Adams) is heavily pregnant and married to Johnny, a young man who's fallen into a deep depression at the prospect of impending fatherhood. While she cranks up her optimism levels to 11 to compensate, he mopes around like a moody teenager, barely able to grunt a monosyllabic word to her. 
Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz) is an art dealer from Chicago, newly married to Johnny's older brother George, who finds herself effectively abandoned by her husband when her brings her home to rural North Carolina to meet her in-laws for the first time. The moment he steps through the front door of the family home he reverts to a younger, pre-flight-from the family-nest version of himself leaving Madeleine to cope with his distrustful mother, distant father, sullen brother and Ashley, the hyper sister-in-law.
What's most disturbing about this scenerio is the willingness with which the two women put up with their husbands' selfish and unsupportive behaviour. Ashley's not booksmart but she's not stupid either yet she makes endless excuses for Johnny's behaviour, choosing to see him as still the handsome go-getting high school guy she fell in love with rather than the frustrated, withdrawn and angry man he's become. If she weren't so heavily pregnant you'd want to shake her to make her see sense.
Madeleine's passive acceptance of her husband's unbelievably selfish behaviour is even more reprehensible because she is educated, worldly and sophisticated. George leaves her alone with people she's never met before and who, with the exception of Ashley, are somewhat less than welcoming, yet she never once challenges him over his lack of support for her in this unfamiliar environment. 
This passivity on the part of two otherwise strong-willed and focused women is puzzling but it's not the only element of the story which challenges preconceptions. George's family may not be the backwoods hillbillies they appear to be, and Madeleine's enthusiastic embracing of her new discovery, an "outsider" artist who paints highly individual images of Civil War battles filled with figures sporting oversize genitals, suggests her university education and cultured manner aren't a guarantee of good taste and wise judgment.
JUNEBUG is as much about mood as it action and events. Everything unfolds at a leisurely pace punctuated by lingering shots of empty rooms which serve no real other purpose other than to impress upon us that director Phil Morrison isn't going to be rushed in telling his story. The culture-clash subject matter is not particularly original but the examination of it is unpredictably adult, and come the conclusion there's a sense of having experienced something meaningful and unsettling which refuses to be neatly resolved Hollywood style - a bit like real life. 

TO SIR, WITH LOVE: unconvincing and dated yet strangely uplifting

Even though much of the story and the acting are unconvincing it's difficult to avoid getting swept up in the liberating sense of empowerment and discovery which flows through this film.
Sidney Poitier is Mark Thackeray, a budding engineer who takes a teaching job at a rundown high school in the East End of London while he waits for something better to come along. He's assigned to a class of rambunctious undisciplined teenagers who can't wait to be finished with school and start adult life. 
The situation presents the inexperienced young teacher with the biggest challenge of his life. Can he win their respect before they break him in the same way they destroyed his predecessor?
The answer is not as hard to discern as screenwriter -director James Clavell might have hoped. This is Sidney Poitier after all. As Hollywood's first black leading man a decade earlier he'd overcome tougher challenges than taming a classroom of gobby teenagers, and established a screen persona for himself as a man of dignity and unyielding determination. 
So the question really is not if but how he's going to teach these kids to respect themselves and others. His chosen method succeeds (producing the lump in the throat of the viewer in the process) as much because the students are poorly drawn stereotypes of troubled teens, as it is because of his calmly authoritative presence.

As Denham, Thackeray's chief antagonist, Christian Roberts gives a piss-poor impression of a leather-jacketed class tough, while a chubby faced Lulu as the class tart looks about ten years too old to still be in school.- and she's not the only one. 
When the main act of rebellion by this bunch of overaged teenagers is staging lunchtime dances in the school hall, one has to wonder what the teachers are all getting so stressed about.
TO SIR, WITH LOVE has not aged well. Even if it bore some slight connection with reality on it's original release in 1967 (and it is only slight. Do we really believe that Poitier was the only non-white in the whole East End?) it now exists as a quaint snapshot of a long ago England as imagined by an outsider (Clavell). Watch it for the pleasure of Poitier's performance but don't fool yourself that you're getting a history lesson on British society.