Murder on the Orient Express

1974 - Dir.: Sidney Lumet - 2 hours 8 minutes
Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 26th April, 2014

It has to be admitted that at one time this film was never off the telly. However, those of us who saw it in the cinema have always felt that the small screen really didn’t do it justice. It’s a big film, made with big money, with big stars, big music and big acting - hardly the sort of thing to be confined to a box in the living room. Now, like so many pre-loved classics, it’s been dusted off, cleaned up and digitally restored to its sparkly, glossy bigness and is fit to dazzle us on the big screen once more.
It’s set 1934 - at a time where the very rich live a charmed existence born along on a fluffy cloud of luxury - or, in this case, in a fluffy train of luxury - untroubled by any thoughts of the poverty and strife endured by the lower orders (nothing changes!). It might be sacrilege to suggest that Agatha Christie was a snob but, let’s face it, she was. Servants and working folk are always “colourful” and quirky and quite often are proved conveniently to be the murderer (thus allowing the nobs to carry on with their carousing unhindered by the hangman’s noose). This story is perhaps her most socialist - we shan’t mention the reason lest there are any of you who have never read the book or seen the film. Let’s just say it’s an equal opportunity murder.
One of the enduring delights of this movie is the lush score by Richard Rodney Bennett. It was originally intended to do it on the cheap and get Bennett to arrange some 1930s tunes for the soundtrack. Bennett, a classical composer who loved jazz, persuaded the director to let him compose an original score. The composer wrote many film scores and one of the last was for “Four Weddings and a Funeral”.
The 84-year-old Agatha Christie attended the movie premiere in November of 1974. It was the only film adaptation in her lifetime that she was completely satisfied with. She felt that Albert Finney's performance came closest to her idea of Poirot though she hated his moustache.

The Great Beauty

La Grande Bellezza
2013 - Dir: Paolo Sorrentino - 2 hours 14 minutes
Shown in FeckenOdeon 2 on 6th April, 2014

The Film:
“Rome is the Eternal City, but it is also one of the great cities of cinema, which means continuous change and flow. “The Great Beauty” plunges headlong into the current. All you can do is plunge in there with it and clamber out a couple of hours later, sopping wet, gulping the air and perhaps having lost a shoe.” - extract from the Daily Telegraph review - you have been warned! 
Rome:
“Rome is alive at night. If New York is the city that never sleeps, Rome is the party that never ends. (Clubs don't get going until after midnight.) Discos compete for extravagant themes and décor and provide a great evening for the young and foot loose. Thursdays through Sundays are club nights when the whole city seems to be out on the town.” - from a tourist guide to Rome.
This is the back ground against which this film is set and which provides a stark contrast with the classical beauty of the city. It is said that the film is a commentary on the world of Silvio Berlusconi - enthusiastically bunga-bunga partying (like Nero fiddled)... while his city, and the nation headed for certain destruction. It’s a theme echoed in the work of other Italian directors - Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini to name but two - and perhaps the “Eternal City” refers to the perpetual nature of hedonism and corruption that clings to this most lovely place.
The Director:
Paolo Sorrentino isn’t a well know name in the UK but that may all be about to change. The success of this much lauded film is about to propel him onto the international mainstream scene. His next project is to be “Into the Future” and will star Michael Caine. He’s also due to make a TV series for Sky entitled “The Young Pope”. 
Sorrentino was born in Naples in 1970. His first film as screenwriter, “Polvere di Napoli”, was released in 1998. He also began directing short movies before making his feature-length debut with One Man Up (L'uomo in più), for which he was awarded the Nastro D'Argento prize. A string of successes followed, including a controversial biopic of politician Mario Andreotti and an English language film “This Must be the Place” starring Sean Penn..
This film “The Great Beauty” is his most spectacular success. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in the 2014 Academy Awards as well as the  BAFTA award for Best Film Not in the English Language. It also carried off the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It has not been widely shown in the UK

Hitchcock

2013 - Dir.: Sacha Gervasi - 1 hour 33 minutes (UK)
Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 29th March, 2014

Sir Alfred Hitchcock remains one of the most famous directors in movie history, not only because of his droll public image, but also because of the enduring appeal of so many of his films. He knew something universal about moviegoers, and it may come down to his most familiar theme: The Innocent Man Wrongly Accused. It's surprising, then, that his most successful and infamous film, "Psycho" (1960), had no leading characters who were innocent, certainly not Norman Bates and not even the purported heroine, played by Janet Leigh. This film tells the story of the making of Psycho from the point of view of Mr & Mrs Hitchcock. It dwells less on Hitch’s supposed obsession with young blonde ladies (as other films and a recent stage play have done) and looks at the strains and stresses placed on the relationship by the creative and financial process of making a film that no-one else wanted made. Who can say if it was actually like this? Perhaps, in the spirit of The Master, we really shouldn’t care if it makes good cinema - and, with two of our most forceful actors on screen, how could it fail to be good cinema? This film received a bit of a lukewarm critical reception - perhaps because it appeared very soon after another film and a TV play about Hitchcock. It certainly takes a different standpoint and, one suspects, it doesn’t take itself as seriously - rather like Hitch himself.
● Real-life serial murderer Ed Gein inspired the character Norman Bates in the original Robert Bloch novel 'Psycho'; Gein also inspired the character of Jame Gumb (Buffalo Bill) in 'Thomas Harris''s novel 'The Silence of the Lambs'... and Gumb was chillingly played by Anthony Hopkins in the film version.

The Band's Visit

Bikur Ha-Tizmoret
2007 (Israel) - Dir: Eran Kolirin 1 hour 27 minutes
Shown at the FeckenOdeon on 14th March, 2014
When you travel to an unfamiliar foreign country you’re bound to feel nervous. If you’re Egyptian and you travel to Israel you’re understandably going to be even more nervous. The two countries haven’t always seen things the same way and the slightest mistake could be misunderstood and build into an international incident. Under such circumstances you’d be extra careful... probably. But anyone can make a mistake - even the grandly titled and immaculately costumed Egyptian Police Ceremonial Band. Even Ceremonial bandsmen are human... and fallible. When you’ve got yourself lost in the middle of nowhere and the last bus has gone there’s nothing for it but to get on with the people you’ve been taught to dislike. The revelation that they’re like you - ordinary, bored, wanting company... love, peace... comes as a welcome shock. It’s a bit like discovering that even Parisians have a sense of humour (oh yes they do!) or that Milton Keynes has a nice pub. This likeable film doesn’t preach about how we should all get on together and break down the walls that divide us - it acknowledges that ordinary folk like us can do nothing about the entrenched attitudes of politicians and zealots - so we might as well just get on with people in general. 
First-time writer and director Eran Kolirin, whose film was inspired by a real-life incident of a lost Egyptian police orchestra in Israel, spent years developing the script. He eventually drew on talent from both sides of the Arab-Israeli world to make a film that drives its message home through the very fact that it was possible to make it.

The Band's Visit won seven Ophir Prizes from the Israeli Film Academy, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and acting awards for stars Ronit Elkabetz (her third Award of the Israeli Film Academy), Sasson Gabai (his first win after three nominations) and Saleh Bakri, plus awards from festivals all over the world, including three from Cannes, the most prestigious festival in the world, including the FIPRESCI prize. It was, however, disqualified as Israel's entry for Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award (Oscar) nominee because over 50% of the dialogue was in English and denied a nomination for the very astute point that the film makes about communication in the modern world. If you don’t speak Egyptian you speak English - if you don’t speak Israeli you speak English! Time to revise the categories?! Even without the nomination, The Band's Visit was one of the most well reviewed films and financially successful foreign imports to the USA in 2008. Now impressario Harold Prince has decided to present The Band’s Visit as a stage musical. It will open in Tokyo later this year before going on to Broadway.

The Apartment

1960 - Dir.: Billy Wilder - 2 hours 5 minutes
Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 22nd February, 2014

When Billy Wilder made “The Apartment” in 1960, offices were only on the edge of being mechanised and armies of people were needed to operate them. One of the opening shots in the movie shows Jack Lemmon as one of a vast horde of wage slaves, working in a room where the desks line up in parallel rows almost to the vanishing point. This shot is a deliberate tribute to King Vidor's silent film “The Crowd” (1928), which is also about a faceless employee in a heartless corporation. Strangely the “open plan” office has made a comeback in recent years. 
This is the director’s second collaboration with Jack Lemmon, who plays a variation on that recurrent Wilder character, the weak guy who becomes a pimp or a gigolo to advance his career. In this instance, he's an insurance company clerk who wins promotion by lending his Manhattan flat to lecherous senior employees, among them his chilly departmental chief, superbly played by Fred MacMurray, also making his second appearance in a Wilder film. Alexander Trauner's sets are unforgettable and Shirley MacLaine is deeply moving as the exploited lift attendant Lemmon comes to care for. One of the striking things about this film isn't the romance, or even the comedy, but the shabbiness, pettiness and nastiness of the office politics - many of us will sympathise!
● The scene on the cold night on the park bench was really cold. Jack Lemmon had to be sprayed with anti-freeze to stop him frosting over.
● The nasal spray was actually milk - real spray wouldn’t have shown up on the black and white flm
● C.C. Baxter is just a poor worker - but inside his apartment are two authentic Tiffany Studios lamps, worth hardly anything when the film was made, but now worth between $30,000 and $40,000 each.

The Sapphires

2012 - Dir: Wayne Blair
Shown at the FeckenOdeon on 14th February, 2014

This is a light hearted film but the plight of Australia’s native people is hardly the jewel in that county’s crown. Until 1967 Australian law classed Aboriginal people as "flora or fauna." The government had the authority to remove light-skinned native children from their families as part of a program (depicted in "Rabbit-Proof Fence") to make them part of the white community. It’s against this background that the film is set. The fact that it’s based on a real group and that they did indeed become successful despite all the odds is encouraging - but one fears that it is not the end of the story of Aboriginal repression. The film is co-written by the son of one of the real-life singers and directed by Wayne Blair, who starred in the play based on their story, "The Sapphires" is clearly a labour of love for all involved. It's also a warm tribute to four women for whom success as performers was just the beginning.
The film is only partially accurate - there really was an all-female Australian aboriginal singing group named The Sapphires in the 1960s, although originally there were three of them: Laurel Robinson (the mother of screenwriter Tony Briggs), Beverly Briggs and Naomi Mayers. They performed at hotels, pubs, cabarets, clubs, parties, army barracks and universities around Melbourne. When they were invited to Vietnam to perform for the troops, Briggs and Mayers declined, as they were against the war, so Robinson enlisted her sister Lois Peeler to join her. In Vietnam, the duo of Robinson and Peeler performed backing vocals for a New Zealand Maori band they had performed with in Melbourne. It was this Maori band who introduced them to soul music; the character of Dave Lovelace, portrayed in the film by Chris O'Dowd, did not exist.... but without him there would have been no love story... and without the feisty four it wouldn’t have been half as entertaining. There was controversy surrounding the film’s American release when the distributor chose to promote Chris O’Dowd as the “star” and relegated the band to the background. 
The Sapphires was an enormous box office success in its native country - the biggest earner of 2012. Despite a clutch of awards from film festivals around the world, the big distributors chose to ignore it. It received minimum publicity for a minimal release of just 5 weeks at “selected screens” in the UK  and fared equally poorly in the USA. As is often the case it has been left to community cinemas and film societies to pick up the pieces and the film has been showing throughout the country to packed and appreciative houses. We’re delighted to be part of this “underground” circuit.

Quartet

2012 - Dir.: Dustin Hoffman - 1 hours 38 minutes
Shown at the FeckenOdeon on 25th January, 2014

All of a sudden it’s OK to be old in the movies - not only old but old and British. A crop of box office hits including “Calendar Girls” and “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” convinced the big cinema chains that the wrinkly pound was worth chasing. It won’t last long of course. The studio executive committees are busy grinding out predictable clones and there have already been a couple of fairly nauseating examples - including one that virtually repeated the plot of Calendar Girls (only with chaps - try not to think about it!). 
Quartet could easily have turned out that way but it’s saved by a director who eats, sleeps and dreams cinema - and who, surprisingly, has never directed a film before. Dustin Hoffman was 75 when he first shouted “action” on a movie set and you can feel his determination to make this one count (perhaps his first and last chance?) - undoubtedly his sympathy for the subject matter is perfectly natural. He’s helped by a literate script by Sir Ronald Harwood (76) who rewrote his stage play of the same name. 
The play ran in London in 1999 and 2000 and was a popular success.  The Daily Telegraph commented: "...the show's heart is in the right place and a cherishable company of senior thesps give it everything they’ve got, breathing vitality into a script that could be an inert embarrassment if performed by less accomplished players." The senior thesps involved in 1999 were  Sir Donald Sinden, Alec McCowen, Stephanie Cole and Angela Thorne. Tonight’s quartet are no less senior and no less cherishable!
Tom Courtney (75), Maggie Smith (78), Billy Connolly (70) and Pauline Collins (72) relish the chance to prove that it really ain’t over until the fat lady stops singing.
PLEASE REMAIN SEATED DURING THE CREDITS - apart from the fact that the music is beautiful, there are fascinating “then and now” pictures of members of the cast - many of whom have been performers on the operatic and musical stage for a very long time (opera lovers should look out for former Royal Opera stars Dame Gwyneth Jones (76) and John Rawnsley (a mere 62).

To Catch a Thief

1955 - Dir.: Alfred Hitchcock - 1 hr 46 mins

Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 28th December, 2013

Alfred Hitchcock devised this witty romantic mystery to team his blonde obsession at the time, Grace Kelly, with his old favourite, Cary Grant. This box-office hit follows a retired jewel thief's attempts to catch a copycat criminal. Grant and Kelly are on sparkling form, as is Jessie Royce Landis as the latter's formidable mother, and the French Riviera is beautifully captured by the Oscar-winning cinematography of Robert Burks.

It’s a good thing the sheer force of star power carries the film, because the plot only works if you don’t think about it. Even if you think just a little, you realize that there about a thousand ways for Cary Grant to accomplish his goal that are easier and safer, but then he would not have had to spend 100 spellbinding minutes juggling the attentions of Grace Kelly and Brigitte Auber.

The only thing that really doesn’t work in this film is the character Bertani, played by french actor Charles Vanel. He spoke no English at all and the English dubbing in his scenes is not just bad, but embarrassingly bad. It probably would have been much more effective to have Vanel learn his lines phonetically, like Bela Lugosi did for Dracula.

But that can’t detract too much from the gorgeous scenery, Oscar-winning cinematography and the pure unadulterated pleasure of watching Cary Grant and Grace Kelly remind us what it once meant to be real movie stars.

 

Life of Pi

2012 - Dir.: Ang Lee - 2 hours 7 minutes

Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 30th November, 2013

Special effects, animation and model work are taken to the ultimate level in this most realistic of films. The caption “No animals were hurt in the making of this film” is pretty well redundant - barring a couple of shots of animals in the wild, all of the furry creatures have been created through CGI and conventional stop frame animation. The special effects team had been able to practice on the Narnia films but this is on a scale that even they couldn’t have imagined.
Taiwan-born Ang Lee rapidly established himself in the 1990s as one of the world's most versatile film-makers, moving on from the trilogy of movies about Chinese families that made his name to Jane Austen's England (Sense and Sensibility) to a martial arts movie in medieval China (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) followed by a spy thriller in wartime Shanghai (Lust, Caution), and then a western about a gay relationship in present-day Wyoming (Brokeback Mountain). He adopts different styles to fit his new subjects, and while there are certain recurrent themes, among them the disruption of families and young people facing moral and physical challenges, there are no obsessive concerns of the sort once considered a necessity for auteurs. He has a fastidious eye for a great image but he also has a concern for language. There are differing opinions as to the success of his interpretation of Yann Martel’s novel but it’s certainly one of the most intelligent and beautiful pieces of work to emanate from a Hollywood studio in recent years.

The Women on the 6th Floor

2010 - Dir: Philippe le Guay - 1hr 37mins

Shown in FeckenOdeon 2 on 15th November, 2013

This delightful film was never going to win any awards or break any boundaries - but not all films have to do these. Not all films have to shock, astound, amaze or provoke. This one is likely to make us smile. It’s constructed with us in mind. The Friday night, end of the week, drink in hand crowd. Let the wind blow, the fog swirl and the malignant approach of the frantic festive season fade into insignificance as we cocoon ourselves in gentle escapism. Cheers!

If you saw "Potiche" you’ll recognise the lead actor, Fabrice Luchini - here in a more relaxed and droll role. Fabrice is a long time favourite of French audiences having appeared in 72 films since his debut in Erich Rohmers’s "Claire’s Knee" in 1970. His career has had its ups and downs - "Emanuelle 4" in 1984 could hardly be counted as a highlight - but his likeable character and solid professionalism have ensured that he’s always worked. Since this film he’s completed the latest Asterix movie and an Alain Tanneur film intriguingly entitled "Cycling with Molierre" - with a script by tonight’s director Phillippe le Guay. Fabrice is currently filming "Gemma Bovary" for release next year.

Director Philippe le Guay has an equally long track record. He’s been making films for 20 years - many of them with Fabrice Luchini. He says that he based the character in this film on his father - only his father never had the chance to break free. He says of the setting "If you ever go to Paris and look down the streets, you have a look at the buildings that have been built by the end of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th century and you will notice that under the roofs there are these little maid rooms with no running water. No heating. It was part of the approach of society. So the architecture says everything already. I took inspiration from the way things are made. When you leave an upstairs apartment kitchen, you step into another world. It’s almost like that series The Twilight Zone. Of course my film is very realistic, it’s not science fiction, but the metaphor works that way.

The late and much lamented Chicago Sun film critic Roger Ebert wrote of his last reviews about this film: "The Women on the 6th Floor" is a pleasant movie, even-tempered, a romantic fantasy. It works because Fabrice Luchini makes a sympathetic hero, Sandrine Kiberlain makes a bewildered wife, Natalia Verbeke as Maria is warm and friendly, and the maids as a group believe in solidarity forever. There's some mild political and social satire as the lifestyle of the proletarian maids challenges the stodgy owner-managers, and as the Jouberts come to understand a marriage they seemed to accept unthinkingly. There are few reasons you must see this movie, but absolutely none that you should not."

12 Angry Men

1957 - Dir.: Sidney Lumet - 1 hour 36 minutes

Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 26th October, 2013

 
 In form, "12 Angry Men" is a courtroom drama. In purpose, it's a crash course in those passages of the United States Constitution that promise defendants a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. It has a kind of stark simplicity: Apart from a brief setup and a briefer epilogue, the entire film takes place within a small New York City jury room, on "the hottest day of the year," as 12 men debate the fate of a young defendant charged with murdering his father. This is a film where tension comes from personality conflict, dialogue and body language, not action. It is a masterpiece of stylised realism.

The story is based on a television play by Reginald Rose. Rose and Henry Fonda acted as co-producers and put up their own money to finance the film. It was Sidney Lumet's first feature, although he was experienced in TV drama, and the cinematography was by the veteran Boris Kaufman, whose credits ("On the Waterfront," "Long Day's Journey into Night") show a skill for tightening the tension in dialogue exchanges. To make the room seem smaller as the story continued, he gradually changed to lenses of longer focal lengths, so that the backgrounds seemed to close in on the characters. "In addition," Lumet writes, "I shot the first third of the movie above eye level, shot the second third at eye level and the last third from below eye level. In that way, toward the end the ceiling began to appear. Not only were the walls closing in, the ceiling was as well. The sense of increasing claustrophobia did a lot to raise the tension of the last part of the movie." In the film's last shot, he observes, he used a wide-angle lens "to let us finally breathe."

This film is commonly used in business schools to illustrate team dynamics and conflict resolution techniques.
Nominated for 3 Oscars, the film lost out in all its categories to The Bridge on the River Kwai.
The "unusual-looking knife" is an Italian stiletto switchblade with a Filipino-style Kriss blade.

Wadjda

2013 - Dir: Haifaa el Mansour
 Shown in FeckenOdeon 2 on 18th October, 2013

As the first woman to shoot a Saudi Arabian feature film, writer-director Haifaa Al Mansour has already assured herself of a small place in history. And yet Wadjda stands on its own merits. The road is dusty, bumpy and fraught with danger but up ahead lies a bittersweet party and the scent of a happy ending. Wadjda knows it is there and she bears down on the pedals. In Saudi girls don’t ride bikes and they certainly don’t ride them with their male friends... in fact Saudi girls aren’t allowed to do much at all. This tale could so easily have delivered its message in a worthy, plodding way. Instead it’s light, funny and very human - and opens up a window on a world we westerners know little about.
While the film has no direct moral message, it becomes a clear illustration of how many of the rules Wadjda faces are not about being a moral person, but about control—control of women by men. The main drama in the film revolves around the absurdity of laws that control the independent movement of women: Wadjda has to watch with envy as her male friends bike around the neighbourhood streets for fun, while her mother has to rely on an unreliable driver just to get to work. As she learns the Koran by heart, Wadjda also begins to figure out which nonsensical rules she should subvert and which ancient lessons she should aim to follow.
It took Mansour five years to pull together the funds to film Wadjda - the money eventually came from a German company.  Her crew had always to be on the lookout for religious police during the six-month shoot and she was often obliged to hide in the back of a van to avoid detection. She was driven to make the film that she says is based on a niece, whom she described to the New York Times: "She's very feisty, she has a great sense of humour, but my brother is more conservative, and he wanted her to conform," she said. "To me, that's a great loss. It reminds me of a lot of girls in my home town who had great potential. They could change the world if they were given the chance."
While Haifaa al-Mansour's gruelling effort to make the film is certainly impressive, Wadjda doesn't rest on the accomplishment of being an international first - the film is excellent by any standard. It would be a great film even if it were the fourth film shot in Saudi Arabia or the hundredth.