Sherlock Holmes - A Game of Shadows

2012 - Dir: Guy Ritchie - 2 hours 9 minutes
Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 26th May, 2012

This is a rare case of the sequel being better than the original. Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law seem to have settled into their characters and director Guy Ritchie has gained the confidence to have real fun with the genre. It has to be said that if you came with the idea that this was going to be a calm exercise in forensic deduction you’re in for an explosive surprise. This is a Victorian Holmes made for the 21st century and it employs every trick in the digital film maker’s arsenal. It all happens at breakneck speed so it’s no small miracle of acting that the characters emerge recognisable but not entirely unscathed.  The plot is so devastatingly twisted and complex that it doesn't bear too much deconstruction, but the action sequences linked by the twisted knots are bigger, faster, louder and more elaborate than anything Indiana Jones got involved in. There's not an awful lot of detecting going on - not that's any use to us, anyway; close-ups of Robert Downey Jr's eyes, inter cut with details he's looking at tell us he's working on something, but because he's always so far ahead of everyone else, it's usually quite a while before we catch up, making it more a case of sitting back to enjoy the ride than trying to work out where it's going - but the ride is undeniably great fun!… oh, and perhaps we ought to warn you.. There’s rather more of Stephen Fry on show than might be thought desirable… you may wish to avert your eyes… not a sight for the squeamish!

• This film is primarily based on the short story "The Final Problem" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (and to a lesser extent on "The Empty House"), but also uses elements of other Sherlock Holmes stories: "The Sign of Four"; "The Greek Interpretor"; "Valley of Fear"; "The Speckled Band"; "The Dying Detective"; "Bruce Partington Plans"; and "The Second Stain". 
• The world's last sea-going paddle steamer, PS Waverly, is seen when Holmes and Watson cross the English channel. The PS Waverly is docked and in regular use on the River Clyde, Glasgow. 
• The chariot that delivers Holmes to the anarchists HQ, is named "Les Sept Grenouilles" (The 7 Frogs). This is a cunning disguise for a gypsy - apparently they’re scared of frogs.  Not a lot of people know that.

High Anxiety

1977 - Dir: Mel Brookes - 1 hour 34 minutes

Shown at the FeckenOdeon on 31st March, 2012

Mel Brookes isn’t subtle. Mel Brookes takes the proverbial sledgehammer to crack a nut. Mel Brookes is an acquired taste (and, judging by one comment in our audience survey, at least one of our members has yet to acquire it!)…. BUT Mel Brookes loves movies. Most of his films are affectionate tributes to classic genres - westerns in Blazing Saddles, Horror in Young Frankenstein, silents in Silent Movie, etc. In High Anxiety he tackles Hitchcock - The Master’s technique involves grand set pieces, overplayed characters and spectacular visual effects - all grist to the Brookes mill but it could be said that the target is too obvious. The big Hitchcock moments all receive the treatment - let’s face it, they’d been asking for it! Perhaps the one major mistake Brookes makes is in casting himself as the straight man - he’s incapable of playing straight and we could wish for less mugging and more acting. To be fair, he took the role at short notice when Gene Wilder’s schedule on another film overran. The “supporting cast” is magnificent - Madeleine Kahn as a breathy (verging on the asthmatic) blonde, Harvey Korman as a mad doctor and, towering below them all, Cloris Leachman as the terrifying Nurse Diesel. It’s all great fun and doesn’t ask to be taken seriously so have another drink, relax and just allow yourself to be carried along by the silliness of it all… Howard Morris, who plays Professor Little Old Man (Lilomann!!!), is better known as the voice of thousands of cartoon characters. He rarely appeared in vision and died aged 85 in 2005 shortly after completing the voices of a Lion and a Zebra in “The Wild Thornberrys”. The bird droppings were actually mayonnaise and chopped spinach - you really wanted to know that!

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

1934 - Dir: Alfred Hitchcock - 1 hr 17 minutes

Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 31st March, 2012

Following the dismal failure of his first and only musical, Waltzes from Vienna, Alfred Hitchcock gratefully accepted a five-year deal with Michael Balcon's Gaumont British studios. The Man Who Knew Too Much, released in 1934, was the first in a series of increasingly confident pictures which would make his name worldwide, and lead ultimately to his departure for Hollywood in 1939. The film's theme of ordinary people caught up by chance in a grand conspiracy is one that Hitchcock would rework throughout his career. He even remade The Man Who Knew Too Much in Hollywood (in 1955), with James Stewart and Doris Day replacing Leslie Banks and Edna Best, in a version which is certainly slicker but arguably inferior to the original.His mastery of visual terror is becoming evident. The images are graphic rather than explicit and the dramatic black and white photography is worthy of the silent era German expressionists. Hitchcock achieved a casting coup in attracting the German actor Peter Lorre to play the villain. Lorre was passing through Britain on his way to Hollywood, where he would find new fame in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. Lorre and Hitchcock shared what has been described as “an unusual sense of humour”…..

The Dam Busters

1955 - Dir: Michael Anderson - 2 hours 4 minutes
Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 25th February, 2012

Although this was described at its opening as a "war film" it’s really the grandfather of the modern "docudrama". The director worked for 2 years researching the characters and events and the result is an accurate and gripping realisation of the what actually happened. He decided to shoot the film in black and white, in order to allow the integration of original footage of the bomb trials, and to preserve a 'gritty', documentary-style reality. By good fortune, the Ruhr was in flood at the time of shooting, allowing the crew to film the flooded towns and valleys and incorporate this into the closing scenes. As a reconstruction of one of the great moments of a long and bloody war, this could hardly be bettered today, even with the aid of CGI. Michael Anderson had three bombers at his disposal (hired from the RAF for £130 a day) and he makes them look like a full squadron. The Dam Busters stood head and shoulders above the stiff-uppered, jolly-good-show-chaps, congratulatory, feel right, post war propaganda movies of the time, in which Tommy was brave and Fritz wasn’t. It is testament to Anderson's authoritative, quiet guidance that the performances are largely realistic, and multi-dimensional. The end of the film might, in other hands, be an opportunity for jingoistic flag-waving, but instead Anderson emphasises the human cost of war without falling into sentimentality.

• The bombs shown were the wrong shape because the actual shape (a stubby cylinder) was still secret at the time this film was made. Much of the footage of the bombs bouncing was taken from film of the real tests but the shots were doctored to conceal the secret "back spin" that caused them to bounce.
• The film opened 12 years to the day of the actual raid
• Gibson's dog "Nigger" was dubbed into "Trigger" for the sensitive US market. The dog that played him was also called "Nigger". One wonders what he’ll be called in the forthcoming re-make!
  

Potiche

2011 - Dir: Francoise Ozon
Shown in FeckenOdeon 2 on 10th February, 2012

In a way, "Potiche" is a trifle: Set in 1977, it adopts a candy-box color palette that evokes the fluffy comedies of the late '60s and early '70s. It's funny, broad and never stops moving. It's made to please, and succeeds. But it's also the movie that Catherine Deneuve has been heading toward for the better part of two decades. Once the cinema's ice goddess, Deneuve has become less guarded, less cold and less certain in her screen incarnations, and "Potiche" completes that work.
The word potiche translates into English as "trophy wife," though in French the word seems to have an extra implication of complete uselessness. Deneuve plays Suzanne, the sheltered wife of umbrella factory owner (Fabrice Luchini) who is in the midst of a labour dispute with his workers. He doesn't take her seriously, and neither do her kids.
A supersized Gerard Depardieu plays a leftist politician who shares a past with Suzanne, and his scenes with Deneuve are a tender acknowledgment of the movies they made when they were young (and before he started to look like Arthur Mullard crossed with Les Dawson). Even the umbrella factory is an oblique reference to Deneuve’s earliest hit "Les parapluies de Cherbourg".
This is never going to be the greatest or most profound feminist movie ever made - but it has to be the most heart warming and colourful experiences you can (legally) enjoy on a chilly February evening.

A Bunch of Amateurs

2008 - Dir: Andy Cardiff - 1 hour 27 minutes
Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 28th January, 2012

This is very much a stereotypical quaint British film, but this is no bad thing and any lack of originality is made up for by the thespian talent on show. Derek Jacobi and Imelda Staunton carry the flag, supported by Samantha Bond (best known as the latest Miss Moneypenny) and despite the storyline sometimes becoming flimsy, the acting quality carries the film through any rough patches. Burt Reynolds does a great self parodying turn and the dialogue is enlivened by the pen of Private Eye’s Ian Hislop.

It’s probably a style of film making that only the British can enjoy - and then only certain sections of British society. Like many of the classics of old it gently makes fun of our way of life and our eccentricities. Our country and our activities are portrayed in a less than flattering but endearing way. Somehow this pushes all the right buttons and we laugh at ourselves. This approach doesn’t appeal to the more demanding metropolitan Brit - hence the downright snotty reviews the film received in the posher papers and glossies. Because it doesn’t contain explosions, car chases, amputations or aliens it didn’t get a full commercial release but it has done very well in community cinemas and film societies. It’s probably time for someone to make a quaint British Film about film societies.....

• The film was chosen to be shown at the annual Royal Film Performance. The Queen and Prince Philip were so impressed that they requested a copy for all of the Royal family to watch at Sandringham over Christmas.
• The setting of the little village of Stratford St. John, which is mistakenly confused as Stratford-Upon-Avon, was not even filmed in England but at two farm villages in the Isle of Man.
• Burt Reynolds last filmed in the UK for “Rough Cut” - 28 years before this film was made.
• Charles Durning, who plays the agent, was 85 at the time of filming. He and Burt Reynolds are great friends and have made 8 feature films and numerous TV shows together. Burt Reynolds is 76
  

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

1953 - Dir.: Howard Hawkes - 1 hr 29 mins

Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 27th December, 2011

Our main feature was released just a few months before “The Belles of St Trinian’s” but they could hardly be more different. St Trinian’s was shot in black and white in a mere six weeks while Blondes got the full Hollywood Technicolor treatment and took months to get in the can. Such a comparison is no criticism of either - merely an indictor of the state of the film industry in their respective countries not long after a major war.

20th Century Fox originally battled to buy the rights to the story with the intention of using it as a vehicle for Betty Grable. Columbia pushed up the price because they wanted it for Judy Holiday. Grable’s nose was pushed firmly out of joint when Fox finally won the rights… and promptly gave the part to the new kid on the lot. Marilyn Monroe had impressed the producers with her performance in the steamy thriller “Niagara” - so on her 26th birthday in 1952 she got a big part in a big musical and what became her signature tune (Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend). Co-star Jane Russell was an established name and a consummate professional. She’s been credited in keeping the nervously afflicted Monroe on track. She died earlier this year aged 87.

The story used here was serialized in Harper's Bazaar - the diary of flapper Lorelei Lee was a Jazz Age sensation. Lorelei's spelling was as bad as F. Scott Fitzgerald's, and she began every sentence with a conjunction. But, stringing along wealthy courtiers on all-expenses-paid shopping sprees, she showed a foxy intelligence in matters of the heart—unlike her best friend, Dorothy, an unlucky-in-love brunette wiseacre modelled on Anita Loos, the silent-film scenarist who'd invented them both. The stories became a best selling book in 1925 and hit the Times Square Theater's stage in 1926. It was first filmed in 1928 (silent), but it was Carol Channing’s Broadway performance in 1949 which brought Hollywood calling, and resulted in the “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” we see tonight.

Blonde Dumbness....

Anita Loos was no dumb brunette and she didn’t write about dumb blondes. Her characters were far from dumb - Lorelei may seem to be a stupid gold digger but she got what she wanted - so strike the stupid bit out. Marilyn Monroe, for all her faults, wasn’t dumb either and expressed great reservations about some of the lines in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”. “I thought you were dumb,” says Esmond Senior. “I can be smart when it’s important,” Lorelei replies. “But most men don’t like it.” Marilyn herself suggested this piece of dialogue. In fact Lorelei would not work as a character – we wouldn’t like her and she would be unbearably cold and cynical – if it wasn’t for Marilyn’s clever and thoughtful acting and her perfectionism. She often insisted on re-taking scenes even when the director had accepted them… which prompted Howard Hawkes to say “There are three ways to get this picture finished: replace Marilyn, rewrite the script and make it shorter, and get a new director."

The Belles of St Trinian's

1954 - Dir: Frank Launder - 1 hr 27 mins

Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 27^th December, 2011

“The Happiest Days of Your Life” (1950) was such a huge success that a follow-up was inevitable - and Ronald Searle's much-loved cartoons about the riotous, thankfully fictional girls' school St Trinian's provided the perfect inspiration. Searle was heavily involved with the screenplay and this, the first in the series, is probably the closest the film makers ever got to the strange world inside the cartoonist’s head. The main titles are drawn by Searle. “The Belles of St Trinian's” reunited Alastair Sim and Joyce Grenfell and threw in a bevy of 1950s character actors. The standout is George Cole as Flash Harry, Arthur Daley's spiritual ancestor, but there's sterling support from Hermione Baddeley, Irene Handl, Beryl Reid, Joan Sims and Sid James, while cameos include Searle and his wife and editor Kaye Webb as concerned parents. St Trinian's is presided over the genial Miss Millicent Fritton (Sim in drag), whose philosophy is summed up as: "in other schools girls are sent out quite unprepared into a merciless world, but when our girls leave here, it is the merciless world which has to be prepared".

Four sequels followed - “Blue Murder at St Trinian's” (1957), “The Pure Hell of St Trinian's” (1960), “The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery” (1966) and “The Wildcats of St Trinian's” (1980). Launder directed them all but they could be said to be flogging the proverbial dead horse as the idea ran out of steam. Even deader were the two updated sequels “St Trinians” (2007) and “St Trinian’s II” (2009) which starred such talents as David Tennent and Colin Firth… they really must have been short of cash!

The Shawshank Redemption

1994 - Dir: Frank Darabont - 2 hours 16 minutes

Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 26th November, 2011

"The Shawshank Redemption” was released in 1994 to a warm critical reception, but failed to make a profit at the box office. Finding an audience through TV and video, it gradually grew to become a phenomenon, a canonised classic, and something close to a religious experience for many. Now it is regarded as the ultimate feel-good film - but it only achieves this status by first visiting the darkest places imaginable. It's easy to forget how violent and depressing the story is and it's only by evoking a powerful sense of horror that Frank Darabont's masterful screenplay, based on a Stephen King story, earns its climactic feeling of release. The narrative obviously inspired the makers as much as it does the audience and it marks a career high for most of the considerable talents involved. The cinematography by long-time Coen Brothers collaborator Roger Deakins is a masterpiece of subtle composition. Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins gave touching and restrained performances and Darabont's direction displays the mastery of a man making his twentieth film, rather than, as this was, his first.“The Shawshank Redemption” is perhaps the only undisputed classic of the 1990s, although it's more popular with the public than with critics, who tend to be slightly sniffy about it's feel-good magic. In this respect, it has much in common with the other classics, with which it is often compared, such as “Casablanca” and “It's A Wonderful Life”.....which suggests that it will remain a favourite of the people for decades to come.

• The American Humane Association monitored the filming of scenes involving a convict’s pet crow. During the scene where he fed it a maggot, they objected on the grounds that it was cruel to the maggot, and required that they use a maggot that had died from natural causes. One was found, and the scene was filmed.
• In the original story, the prisoners watch a screening of “The Lost Weekend”. Because the rights to this were owned by a different studio, the director looked to see which old films he could show without incurring costs. He was delighted to see that one that he was able to use was “Gilda” - one of Rita Hayworth's greatest hits - there’s a poster for it hanging in the auditorium tonight.

Coco Before Chanel

2009 - Dir: Anne Fontaine

Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 11th November, 2011

There are few names more iconic than Chanel, yet few think of the word as anything other than a fashion brand. With Coco Avant Chanel, director-screenwriter Anne Fontaine portrays how Gabrielle Chanel, dispatched, along with her sister, to an orphanage on the death of her mother, transformed herself from lowly would-be orphan to the epitome of style and class, via the salons and boudoirs of the Belle Époque.

Fontaine spares us the grand arcs of an overwrought biopic, offering instead the quiet successes and failures of everyday life as experienced by an impoverished but brilliant young woman at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Chanel had no illusions about herself. Small-bosomed and narrow-hipped, she once said said, “Cut my head off and I look like an adolescent boy.” In fact, this “female Beau Brummell” (Cecil Beaton’s words) modernized women’s clothing in part by ransacking her lovers’ closets. Early on, as a milliner, she replaced heavy, ornate hats with severe straw boaters. As the girlfriend of polo-playing entrepreneur Boy Capel, she pioneered sportswear separates. Paramour Grand Duke Dmitri of Russia (Rasputin’s co-assassin) inspired the her to pile on exotic jewels. Instead of marrying the he-man millionaire Duke of Westminster, she appropriated his salmon fisherman’s sweaters and tweeds. This film would not have impressed her - moviemakers throughout her career loved her - Chanel did not return the compliment. She described Holywood as “the Mont-Saint-Michel of tit and tail,” and considered its celluloid goddesses to be distasteful.

Audrey Tautou is hardly a celluloid goddess... yet! She first came to international attention in the quirky “Amelie” (shown here in April 2010). She’s worked consistently since that 2001 triumph but has never hit the same stellar note. She was particularly miscast in the tedious DaVinci Code. In this film she has a role to suit her better.

• The designs and costumes for the film were supervised by Karl Lagerfeld - Chanel’s Chief Designer. Audrey Tautou wears one of Coco’s own outfits in the final scenes.
• There was speculation that Coco Chanel had been a Nazi collaborator and/or spy during WW2. She remained in Paris and is alleged to have had affairs with German officers. More likely is the theory that she merely manipulated the Germans in order to continue living in luxury at The Hotel Ritz.
• Jackie Kennedy was wearing a pink Chanel suit when JFK was assassinated in Dallas in 1963.
• Coco Chanel died, aged 87 in January 1971 in her wartime home the Hotel Ritz in Paris.

Gandhi

1982 - Dir: Richard Attenborough - 3 hours 11 minutes

Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 29^th October, 2011

This is one of the last old-school epics ever made, a glorious visual treat featuring tens of thousands of extras (real people, not digital effects) and sumptuous Panavision cinematography. But a true epic is about more than just widescreen photography, it concerns itself with noble subjects too, and the life story of Mahatma Gandhi is one of the noblest of all. Richard Attenborough's treatment is openly reverential, but, given the saint-like character of his subject, it's hard to see how it could have been anything else. He doesn't flinch from the implication that the Mahatma was naïve to expect a unified India, for example, but instead lets Gandhi's actions speak for themselves. The outstanding achievement of this labour of love is that it tells the story of an avowed pacifist who never raised a hand in anger, of a man who never held high office, of a man who shied away from publicity, and turns it into three hours of utterly mesmerising cinema. Attenborough is quite justified in regarding this as his finest achievement. The director struggled for years to get financing for his huge but "non-commercial" project.

Various actors were considered for the all-important title role, but the actor who was finally chosen, Ben Kingsley, makes the role so completely his own that there is a genuine feeling that the spirit of Gandhi is on the screen. Kingsley's performance is powerful without being loud or histrionic; he is almost always quiet, observant, and soft-spoken on the screen, and yet his performance comes across with such might that we realise, afterward, that the sheer moral force of Gandhi must have been behind the words. Apart from all its other qualities, what makes this movie special is that it was obviously made by people who believed in it. What is important about this film is not that it serves as a history lesson (although it does) but that, at a time when the world is a confusing and depressing place, it reminds us that we are, after all, human, and thus capable of the most extraordinary and wonderful achievements, simply through the use of our imagination, our will, and our sense of right.

• 300,000 extras appeared in the funeral sequence. About 200,000 were volunteers and 94,560 were paid a small fee. The sequence was filmed on 31st Jan 1981, the 33rd anniversary of Gandhi's funeral. 11 crews shot over 20,000 feet of film, which was pared down to just over 2 minutes.
• Richard Attenborough and his wife Sheila Sim owned a share of the rights in Britain's longest-running play "The Mousetrap" which they sold to fund the production of this movie.
• Sir Ben Kingsley was born Krishna Pandit
  Bhanji in Snainton, North Yorkshire, England, the son of Anna Lyna Mary (née Goodman), an actress and model, and Rahimtulla Harji Bhanji, a medical doctor who came to the UK from Kenya. Sir Ben is now 68 and is currently filming “The Dictator” for release in 2012. He is a Quaker.
• Baron Attenborough of Richmond on Thames is now 87 and confined to a wheelchair. He appeared as an actor in 64 films and directed 12. His brother, David, is quoted as saying that he doesn’t think Dickie will be making any more films... for now.
  
  
  
  

I Served the King of England

2006 - Dir.: Jiri Menzel.

Shown in FeckenOdeon 2 on October 14th, 2011

Many of us first got to know the Czech director Jiri Menzel through his whimsical 1966 Oscar-winner "Closely Observed Trains." Veteran critic Roger Ebert looked up his review of the earlier film and found a sentence that also could apply to this movie: "If you're charged up emotionally, you'd better lie down for an hour or two before going to see it. It requires an audience at peace with itself." Don't assume, however, that Menzel's "I Served the King of England" is a snoozer; for that matter, don't assume it has anything to do with the King of England. It's a film filled with wicked satire and sex both joyful and pitiful. But Menzel doesn't pound home his points. He skips gracefully through them, like his hero. He takes the velvet-glove approach. Here is a film with a hatred of Nazis and a crafty condemnation of communist bureaucracy and cronyism. It seems to be a comic tale of the long and somewhat uneventful life of Jan Dite, who worked as a waiter, bought a hotel with stolen postage stamps and was jailed because he wasn't quick enough to figure out what the communists, when they came to power, really wanted from him.

Director Jiri Menzel, like the film’s hero is a survivor. He began his career in the false dawn of the Prague Spring. Unlike his contemporaries Ivan Passer and Milos Forman, he didn't move to the US following the Soviet invasion of 1968, and publicly dissociated himself from his pre-invasion films, including Closely Observed Trains. Now 70 he’s able once again to work freely as a senior figure in the Czech film industry and there's no one left to complain about the political subtext in his movie, or to try to censor the sex scenes. No one will doubt the skill and exuberance with which he continues to bring to his work. This film has a zest that belies the director's age. There is no sense here of a distinguished director striking a ponderous and introspective note at the twilight of his career. Visually, I Served the King… is lithe and imaginative. It uses music, montage and silent-movie conventions with wit and energy. In Common with most of Menzel’s movies, this is based on a novel by his close friend Bohumil Hrabal, who died in 1997.

• The scenes for the Hotel Pariz restaurant were filmed in the main restaurant in Prague's Obecni Dum (Civic House), just around the corner from the actual Hotel Pariz. Both restaurants were designed in the Art Nouveau style by artist Alphons Mucha, but the Obecni Dum restaurant is larger.
• Ivan Barnev, who plays Dite, is a Bulgarian television actor much loved for his performance in the soap “Priyatelite Me Narichat Chicho”. Showered with awards for this performance, he’s now shooting major feature films... in Bulgaria.