PERSONAL FAVES: The Insider

Following on from his sumptuous, critically acclaimed adaptation ‘The Last of the Mohicans’, Michael Mann’s epic 1995 drama ‘Heat’ cemented his position as one of America’s finest directors. A visceral, moody existential re-examination of the crime movie, it teamed him with Robert de Niro, Al Pacino and a who’s who of dynamic actors. It was a hard act to follow.

Four years later, re-teaming with Pacino – and harnessing the talents of a post-‘L.A. Confidential’, pre-global-stardom Russell Crowe – Mann didn’t just follow it. He surpassed it. ‘The Insider’, one of the most intelligent and precisely directed mainstream films of the ’90s, boasts the gripping, compelling narrative and powerhouse acting performances of its iconic predecessor, as well as the same slow-burn intensity played out across a two-and-a-half hour running time, but does so without recourse to heists, shoot-outs and chases.

‘Heat’ is cerebral, suspenseful and packs in a goodly number of shit-hot action scenes. ‘The Insider’ is quite simply cerebral. It’s about corporate power, freedom of speech, the strictures of the law, the necessity of conscience, the pull of family, and the integrity of the serious journalist vs the machinations of big business. And that’s just for starters. On a human level, it’s also about one man trying to keep his word and another man coming to a decision about the wrongdoings of his employer and the public’s right to know, even though the imperatives for keeping his mouth shut are very real and freighted with heavy consequences.

Big, dramatic stuff. Now factor in the factual basis of the story, and ‘The Insider’ really takes off. The starting point was Marie Brenner’s 1996 article for Vanity Fair, ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’. A suitably Hitchcockian title for the story of an inside man, a corporate whistle-blower, a man whose family life disintegrates under the weight of potential financial desuetude, pervasive media scrutiny and death threats. Apposite, then, that it was expanded and adapted into a movie whose most tense scenes – an unspoken threat at a golf range, a piranha-like lawyer trying to silence a key witness even as he attempts to give a deposition – achieve a level of cinematic frisson that Hitch himself would have been proud of.

Brenner’s article focuses almost exclusively on former Brown & Williamson employee (that’s employee as in high-ranking senior management type on six-figures and a fuckload of benefits a year, as opposed to how the rest of us understand it) Jeffrey Wigand, and how he went public with information pertaining to the deliberate manipulation of tobacco products for maximum addiction potential. His story was featured on the influential and high-rating public affairs show ‘60 Minutes’, produced by Lowell Bergman for the CBS network.

Mann’s film expands on Brenner’s article and counterpoints Wigand’s struggle against the legal shenanigans of his former employers with Bergman’s internal stand-off against the corporate and legal departments of CBS who balk at the possibility of litigation from Brown & Williamson, particularly with a buy-out in the offing that would net big dividends for the top brass. It’s in a lot of people’s interest to keep Bergman’s section, if not off the screen entirely, then certainly edited and self-censored.

The screenplay – co-written by Mann and Eric Roth, whose then still-unproduced script ‘The Good Shepherd’ Mann had admired – finds a tense through-line and ties together what could easily have been discursive, digressive and rambling. It gives a high-quality cast – Pacino and Crowe are supported by Christopher Plummer, Diane Venora, Bruce McGill, Colm Feore, Gina Gershon, Stephen Toblowsky, Lindsay Crouse and Michael Gambon – the opportunity to engage in the dialogue equivalent of swordplay which intermittently erupts into some of the most verbally volcanic explosions this side of ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’.

Pacino’s performance recalls the glory days of the ’70s, when he appeared in one masterpiece after another. Crowe’s is quite simply the best work he’s done onscreen, more than confirming the promise inherent in ‘L.A. Confidential’. It’s a crying bloody shame that he went on to become so famous so quickly and has essentially not been called upon to deliver acting of this calibre since.

Mann’s direction, too, represents his highest professional achievement thus far. Subsequently, ‘Ali’ proved incredibly well-made but perhaps a shade too reverent; ‘Collateral’ fell foul of an occasionally clichéd script and a stilted performance from Tom Cruise, while ‘Miami Vice’ was an exercise in the visual potential of digital film-making which offered a jargon-heavy script and zero chemistry between its leads. (Having said all that, the forthcoming ‘Public Enemies’ with Johnny Depp and Christian Bale has got me authentically excited.)

‘The Insider’ is a gem … and that’s not a lapse into cliché. Like a gem, it’s multi-faceted. It reflects and refracts and dazzles. It provides essays on the quality of light. In terms of recent American films, I can only think of Alexander Payne’s ‘Sideways’ that infuses the screen with the quality of light so effectively. Mann conjures images that are haunting, sometimes surreal (the sequence of images that open the golf range sequence are astounding), and effortlessly poetic.

‘The Last of the Mohicans’ is more romantic and audience friendly, ‘Heat’ more exciting, and I have no doubt that ‘Public Enemies’ will positively ooze cool from its every frame. But ‘The Insider’ is peerless. I am convinced it is the film Michael Mann will be remembered for.

Personal faves: the story so far

It’s a year to the day since I posted my list of 100 Personal Faves. The intention was to write about one a week, a discipline which would have seen me work through the list in just under two years.

A year on and I’ve covered 33 of them. Last year was something of a roller coaster and my attention got a little sidetracked from The Agitation of the Mind for a while. Still, things are back on course now and to celebrate the first anniversary of the Personal Faves project I’m doubling up. I’ve pulled two titles out of the hat – corporate malfeasance in one, Salma Hayek doing a snake dance in the other – and I’ll be posting on them over the next two evenings.

I’ve also spent this evening gazing back through the reviews I’ve posted so far. So if you’ll permit me the laziest post I’ve ever put on this blog, here’s a quick resumé of the Faves so far and what I said about them:


Blazing Saddles
“… quite simply one of the funniest movies ever made, with an inspired ending that's as demented as it is subversive …”
(posted as a tribute to Harvey Korman)

Bowling for Columbine
“… Moore using his acceptance speech for the Best Documentary Oscar to lambast Dubya. ‘Shame on you, Mr President. Shame on you’ …”

Das Boot
“… you never really think of them as Nazis, consequently you quickly stop thinking of them as Germans; ultimately, they’re simply men … thrust into the middle of a war they’d rather not be fighting.”

Charley Varrick
“Siegel’s direction finds and maintains a spot-on balance of wry humour, pacy narrative and a handful of excellently staged and edited action scenes.”

Death in Venice
“… acting on another level. Bogarde progressively tears away layer after layer of his character, culminating in a moment of heart-breaking acceptance …”

Deep Red
“… the combination of image, music and camera movement add up to one of the most effective head-fucks in cinema.”

Donnie Darko
“… demonstrates, more slyly and effectively than any other film I can think of, how every act has a consequence.”

Downfall
“… a film that seeks not to demonise, but neither sympathise; not to try to ‘understand’ Hitler and his actions, but neither deny or obfuscate them; a film, instead, that portrays him.”

Emperor of the North
“… full-on, attitudinous and brutal – of course it is: this is Robert freakin’ Aldrich we’re talking about …”

The Exorcist
“… a film about possession and exorcism, about the testing of faith by satanic evil, that is shot through with such documentary clarity that you can easily forget it’s a horror film …”

Fitzcarraldo
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film about failure that’s emerged as so gloriously life-affirming.”

Freaks
“It’s unique. A true one-off. It would never get made today, given the prevailing climate of political correctness.”

The French Connection
“The best car chase in the movies. Ever. So says I and anyone who disagrees is welcome to accompany Doyle and Russo down the station and talk about it there.”

From Russia With Love
“It’s the most un-Bond of the Bond movies ... and, paradoxically, that’s what makes it the best.”

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
“… a film where the Ugly grungily fits the description, the Bad is even badder than bad, and the Good is only the good because (a) he’s marginally less of a bastard than the other two, and (b) Clint Eastwood’s playing him …”

The Incredibles
“… taut and suspenseful, the structure intricate, the writing witty and intelligent, and the whole thing put together with eye-catching visual flair.”

LA Confidential
“… stylish, gripping, intriguing, multi-layered and downright well-directed …”

A Matter of Life and Death
“It does everything cinema should do, everything art should do, and speaks to the heart, the mind and the soul with equal intensity and sincerity.”

North by Northwest
“… a masterpiece of narrative propulsion, joining the dots between the set-pieces with such speed and glib humour that stopping to examine the construct under the critical lens would just be bad sportsmanship.”

Ocean’s 11
“… there really is no other way of describing ‘Ocean’s 11’: it’s cool. Suavely, stylishly, seriously cool.”

The Prestige
“Does it agitate the mind? Oh, you sweet fucking-A betcha!!”

Ratatouille
“The cooking scenes are so evocative you can almost smell the food.”

Seven Days to Noon
“… a bloody good thriller that … comes across, and does so emphatically with repeated viewings, as years ahead of its time.”

Shadow of a Doubt
“… rich in gallows humour and laced with irony.”

The Straight Story
“… easily the most non-David-Lynch David Lynch film, and yet it’s quintessentially Lynch. No-one else could have put such a quirky and individualistic spin on the story.”

Taking Liberties
“… seek out a copy of ‘Taking Liberties’, watch it, press it on to all of your friends and - god damn it! - get angry.”

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
“Never mind that there aren’t that many action scenes, the sheer sense of urgency propels the narrative.”

A Tale of Two Sisters
“… proves that ‘The Ring’ doesn’t necessarily have the monopoly on freaky women with lank black hair creeping slowly towards you …”

That Obscure Object of Desire
“… Buñuel achieves cinema’s most absolute – and phenomenally witty – comment on sexual frustration.”

The Train
“… a shatteringly nihilistic ending … the ostensible villain is passionate, articulate and an aesthete, and the ostensible hero little more than a bull-headed thug.”
(posted as a tribute to Paul Schofield)

Wallace and Gromit in Curse of the Were-Rabbit
“… a series of frenetic set-pieces culminating in a showdown at the vegetable competition …”

Where Eagles Dare
“I know that war is hell … but we’re talking about straight-down-the-line action movies here and ‘Where Eagles Dare’ ranks among the best.”
(posted as part of Final Girl’s Hey-Internet-Stop-Being-Such-Cynical-Effing-Douchebags blog-a-thon)

Wings of Desire
“… pure cinema, from its director’s astoundingly realised vision, to the pitch-perfect humanity of Bruno Ganz’s performance, to its captivating romantic heroine.”
(posted as a tribute to Solveig Dommartin)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

There’s a scene in Terry Gilliam’s ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ where Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and Dr Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) – thinly fictionalised versions of Hunter S Thompson and Samoan attorney Oscar Acosta – are driving through the neon-lit artifice of Las Vegas in a convertible. They pull up next to a car full of straight-laced, middle-aged, middle-class white people (let’s call them ‘squares’ for short). Duke is hunched over the steering wheel, under the influence of just about every narcotic substance known to mankind; Dr Gonzo is hanging out the window, whining and blubbering pathetically, his moustache and the side of the car pebble-dashed with vomit.

The squares try heroically to ignore him. Then Dr Gonzo addresses them directly: “You folks wanna buy some heroin? God damn it, I’m serious. All I’m trying to sell you is some pure fucking smack. This is the real stuff. You won’t get hooked. I just got back from Vietnam ... I wanna sell you some pure fucking smack ... puuuuure ... fuuuuuuck ...”

One of them snaps: “God damn it, you bastards!” he yells, hammering on the car window with his fist. “Pull over! I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you.”

Which was pretty much how the critics reacted when ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ was originally released in 1998. “Simply unwatchable” opined Mike Clarke in USA Today and he wasn’t alone in that opinion. The majority of the film-going public didn’t even have an opinion – ‘F&L in LV’ did about $10 million at the American box office, earning back just over half of its budget.

I saw it on the big screen back in ’98 and loved it. Bought the video – loved it. Wore the VHS out and bought the DVD – still love it. And yet most people I talk to haven’t seen it; many have never heard of it. It came as pleasant and long-awaited validation, when I started the new job a few weeks ago, to find that one of my colleagues had not only seen the film but loves it wholeheartedly, and we had a grand time comparing our favourite scenes.

‘F&L in LV’ is zonked-out, screwed-up film-making with an emphasis on self-destructive behaviour, illicit substances and the over-consumption thereof. Politically incorrect? Hell, yeah. Irresponsible? Probably, but who’s counting? Not me. There’s a case to be made that we need a few more films to be irresponsible and politically incorrect – otherwise cinema, as with any art form that’s not given a thorough shaking up every so often, stagnates.

‘F&L in LV’ sets out its stall in the first scene, Duke and Dr Gonzo cutting through the desert in a big open-top car with fins and whitewall tyres and a flame red paint job. They’re on the outskirts of Barstow and the drugs have just kicked in. “We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, screamers and laughers,” Duke enumerates (Depp’s pitch-perfect voiceover is one of the chief joys of the film). “Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get into locked a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.”

By this time the pair have hallucinated a sky full of attacking bats. It gets worse: checking into a plush hotel, Duke’s base of operations while he ostensibly covers a motorcycle race in the desert, the psychedelically patterned carpet comes bleeding to life. A lounge full of bloated gamblers turns into a rutting grotesquery of giant lizards.

It gets worse: Duke and Dr Gonzo freak out, run up epic room service bills, destroy said hotel rooms, skip paying for both, damage cars, terrorize the innocent, insult authority, brandish weapons, rail against a government and a country going to hell, and merrily drink, snort and in any way possible ingest everything they can get their hands on, all the while encountering any number of other oddballs from an underage and possibly mentally deficient artist (Christina Ricci) who paints nothing but portraits of Barbara Streisand (Duke warns Dr Gonzo off her thusly: “in a few hours, she'll probably be sane enough to work herself into some kind of towering Jesus-based rage at the hazy recollection of being seduced by some kind of cruel Samoan who fed her liquor and LSD, dragged her to a Vegas hotel room and then savagely penetrated every orifice in her little body with his throbbing, uncircumcised member”) to a traffic cop (Gary Busey) who enthusiastically pursues a way over-the-limit* Duke only to let him off with a warning and ask for a kiss (“I’m very lonely here”).

For all that the critics didn’t get it and the majority of cinema-goers didn’t bother with it, ‘F&L in LV’ achieves a perfect marriage of source material, cast and director. It’s a blast, a trip and a head-fuck. Anyone whose sensibilities are easily offended would do best to avoid. But to anyone who likes cinema in the fast lane, 100mph, drunk in charge and not wearing a seatbelt, all I can say is: buy the ticket, take the ride.



*In both senses.

Gonzo: the Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson

Having gone out to bat against corporate evil and political evil in, respectively, ‘Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room’ and ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’, documentarist Alex Gibney’s latest is a change of direction – a celebration of someone who was on the side of the angels … if, that is, your definition of the side of the angels is elastic enough to admit a heavy-drinking dope fiend with a predilection for political agitation and gun ownership.

‘Gonzo: the Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson’ is about … well, the clue’s in the title. Hunter S Thompson was the enfant terrible of American journalism – and the patron saint of Gonzo journalism. He didn’t coin the term, but he certainly invented the concept. Gonzo is a style of reporting where the reporter is at the centre of the story, their experiences reported subjectively, in the first person and informed by personal opinion, instead of objectively and in the third person.

Thompson made an early impact with a non-fiction book on the Hell’s Angels, research for which entailed ingratiating himself into a local chapter and immersing himself in their lifestyle, but it was his article “The Kentucky Derby is Depraved and Decadent” – with illustrations by the incomparable Ralph Steadman – that truly defined his literary style.

It opened the door for his key works, ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ and ‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail’, the former a thinly fictionalised account of Thompson’s hallucinogenic attempt to find the American dream (he finds fear and loathing instead), the latter an account of the 1972 election campaign – one of the most coruscating and jaw-droppingly brilliant pieces of political writing in print.

Then there was the little matter of Thompson’s own electoral campaign, when he stood for Sheriff of his home town of Aspen, Colorado. He shaved his head just so he could refer to his opponent, who sported a sharp military buzz-cut, as “a long-hair”, and went after what he called the “freak power” vote, ie. appealing to the sensibilities of students, hippies, dopers and basically anyone from whom the prevailing white middle-class Aspen citizenry would run in fear. The surprise is not that he lost, but that he lost by such a small margin.

Of course, there was a price to be paid. You don’t bait the establishment for most of your career without becoming a legend – and it’s awfully hard to remain a legend unless you die young. Thompson was defined by his Gonzo image, and the line between the man and his public persona quickly blurred. There were those who thought he’d done his best work by the ’70s and what remained was a cliché of himself.

I’ve probably not read enough of Thompson’s work to call it. What I will say, on the basis of Gibney’s documentary is that he was a complete one-off: by turns a man of great integrity and a raving loon, a liberal and gun nut, penetrating insightful and fiercely dedicated to proscribed substances, a man of the people and a collector of celebrity friends.

It was one of the most iconoclastic of these friends, Johnny Depp, who paid for Thompson’s typically flamboyant funeral, his ashes fired from a 150ft tube amidst a blaze of fireworks.

Depp also contributes to the documentary, giving wonderfully resonant readings from Thompson’s work. Footage of the good doctor is plentiful, friends and family are forthcoming, colleagues are candid and the Hell's Angels (in the form of Ralph “Sonny” Barger) are hellishly antagonistic. There are anecdotes, particularly from Ralph Steadman and Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner, that are screamingly funny. A sense of the absurd lingers over the entire film.

And the soundtrack - featuring just about the best of everything from the ’60s and ’70s - is freakin’ awesome.

Che - Part Two

‘Che – Part Two’ is at the same time more immediate and less satisfying that its predecessor.

More immediate because it’s free of the self-consciously arty black-and-white New York City sequences that interrupt the flow of part one; because the pursuit of Guevara and his small band of Bolivian freedom fighters by a remorseless military gives the film a constant senses of movement, as well as imbuing every frame with threat and tension.

Less satisfying for mostly the same reasons.

As with the first film, it’s not a biopic – it’s a treatise on the logistics of organising a revolution. As such, it feels very much like a variation on a theme. The main differences are geographical (Bolivia instead of Cuba) and historical (the ’60s, not the ’50s; Guevara is an older man) – but the principal different is the outcome.

The Cuban revolution was successful. Guevara’s Bolivian campaign was a failure.

Abandoning the political stage, a heavily disguised Guevara (Benicio del Toro in even more impressive form than part one) fetches up in Bolivia. With no supplies and with none of the manpower he had as Castro’s right hand man, he attempts to transform a painfully small and disorganised group into guerrilla fighters. Everything is against him: his health worsens (the asthma attacks he suffered before have become more severe, more debilitating); his men are undisciplined and infighting abounds; food is hard to come by; the peasants they are fighting to protect betray them under bribery and threats from the Bolivian army; American involvement exacerbates things.

The two films are yin and yang. Opposites but mirror images. Part one is the rise of Che Guevara. Part two is his fall. Part one is about the planning and coming together of a revolution. Part two is about disintegration. Part one ends in triumph, part two in failure.

Part one works as a stand-alone film. Part two doesn’t. It needs the events of the first instalment for context, otherwise it would be too fragmentary, too downbeat; the sucker punch of the ending wouldn’t resonate half as effectively.

When I wrote about ‘Che – Part One’, I was disappointed that I hadn’t had the opportunity to see the four and half hour roadshow version. I’m glad now that that was the case. The similarities would have been too pronounced.

So would the differences.

McLibel

‘McLibel’ documents the longest-running case in British legal history, that of McDonald’s Restaurants vs. Morris and Steel. It dragged on for seven years. McDonald’s retained the best legal team money could buy*, haemorrhaging millions in legal fees. David Morris and Helen Steel, denied legal aid because this was a defamation case**, represented themselves and spent £30,000, a defence fund contributed by supporters and well-wishers.

It’s appropriate, then, that the film itself has a chequered eight-year history and was made for little or nothing. Not only was David and Helen’s battle with McDonald’s an according-to-Hoyle David and Goliath saga; so was the production of the film that tells their story.

Director Franny Armstrong originally made ‘McLibel’ as an hour-long TV documentary in 1997. Cuts demanded by the BBC brought the running time down to 40 minutes. Ten days before its scheduled transmission, legal pressure was brought to bear and the BBC pulled the plug. Channel 4 showed some interest, but their legal department balked: “McDonald’s would almost certainly sue Channel 4 and would almost certainly win” (quoted in Franny Armstrong’s article in The Guardian, 19 June 1998 – click here to read the full text).

In 2005, Armstrong updated the documentary in light of David and Helen’s appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, who found that the case had violated their rights to freedom of speech and to a fair trial. Accordingly, Armstrong documented their visit to Strasbourg for the hearing and updated ‘McLibel’ into a feature length (85 minute) film.

The no-budget ‘McLibel’ is almost overshadowed by the very story it documents. And yet it holds up as a piece of film-making. Besides, to criticise it for its production values is to miss the point. David Morris and Helen Steel (and, boy, does that lady have an apposite surname!) took on a corporation who had happily bullied everyone from Time Out to the BBC into retracting and apologising for negative reporting about them. They refused to be intimidated and they refused to back down. It’s utterly in keeping that the film which champions them is itself an underdog. So forget the utilitarian camerawork, occasional deficiencies in the sound quality and the surprisingly dull courtroom re-enactments (surprisingly given that Ken Loach directed those scenes – kudos to him, though, for offering his services gratis).

‘McLibel’ kicks off with an inspired bit of scene-setting. A title crawl in bright yellow letters, hilariously reminiscent of a certain George Lucas film, announces:

A long time ago there was a company that made lots of money by selling bits of meat between two bits of bread.

Many people were employed to put the meat between the bread and many animals were killed to be the meat. A friendly clown persuaded children to love the company.

Some decades passed and all was well. The company became very, very rich. Richer even than many countries.

And then some people wrote in their newspapers than eating lots of the meat and bread could make people ill. Other people said on television that too many trees had been cut down and that the workers were unhappy.

This made the company very angry.

The company looked around the world and saw that in England there was a special law that could stop people saying things the company didn't like.

And make them say sorry.

Using interviews, news footage and (mercifully) keeping the re-enactments to a minimum, Armstrong tells the story efficiently and, certainly during the latter stages of the documentary, with some sense of pace. It all started in 1989 when David and Helen, members of London Greenpeace (not affiliated with its significantly more famous oil-rig-protesting namesake) distributed a pamphlet entitled ‘What’s Wrong With McDonald’s’.

Private detectives infiltrated the group. There’s an irony to be relished that McDonald’s outsourced from more than one firm without letting on to the existing operatives: “The spies spent as much time spying on each other”. Then, in 1990, McDonald’s slapped David and Helen with writs. The corporation was confident of an easy victory within a few weeks.

They didn’t get it. As the case dragged on, McDonald’s offered on the QT to resolve things out of court. Their only stipulation was that David and Helen discontinue public criticism of the chain and limit their anti-McDonald’s comments to privately expressed opinions to immediate friends. Helen’s response was priceless: that McDonald’s similarly discontinue advertising and only recommended the restaurants to friends.

Despite a dearth of representation, staff or funds (barrister Keir Starmer, seeing how one-sided the trial was, offered his assistance; a group of volunteers ran their campaign HQ), David and Helen managed to find witnesses – including Stephen Gardener of the District Attorney’s office, Texas, who flew over to give evidence. Gardener had investigated McDonald’s in the mid-80s over deceptive marketing. Interviewed for the documentary, he says, “The point was, the whole advertising campaign – not just one claim in one little ad – the whole campaign was intrinsically deceptive … and I do believe that for McDonald’s to call its food nutritious is lie to the public, whether the British or the American public.”

Even more damning is a comment, apropos of McDonald’s specific targeting of children in the advertising campaigns, from Geoff Guiliano, a former Ronald McDonald: “I was like the guy in the Third Reich who was the propaganda minister.” That’s right, kiddies, Ronnie McD is Goebbels in greasepaint.

Perhaps the most pertinent quote is from Helen Steel herself – a summation not just of what ‘McLibel’ is about but why they refused to back down to McDonald’s in the first place: “The government referred to fact that the protection of freedom of speech should require that campaigners put the balance in their leaftlets, McDonald’s responses for example, but there’s no requirement for McDonald’s to put the balance in their advertising.” To which Dave adds: “The campaigners are the balance and we’ll continue to campaign till there’s a just world.”



*Led by Richard Rampton, QC, who is alleged to have charged £2,000 a day for his services. Am I alone in finding that almost obscene?

*They were also denied their right to a jury. In essence, a single judge heard everything and decided the whole thing himself. So much for our wonderful English legal system.



(More information on this film and McLibel trial itself, including witness statement transcripts, can be found on the McSpotlight website.)

Samantha Morton: respect!

Work commitments prevented me from attending, but I wish I’d been at the Old Market Square in my home town of Nottingham yesterday afternoon to hear Samantha Morton’s speech outside the Council House.

Lending her weight to healthcare union Unison, Ms Morton spoke out against proposed budget cuts that threaten closure of one of Nottingham’s four children’s homes.

Ms Morton was born in Clifton, a few miles outside the city centre, and spent her formative years in a children’s home. In the footage shown on last night’s local news, it was clear how passionate she is about the subject; that her success as an actress has definitely not eclipsed memories of her upbringing.

“I was in care most of my life,” she said. “I wouldn’t have got where I’ve got today without the care of the social workers and residential social workers.

“I’m proud of Nottingham,” she added, “I’m proud of being from Nottingham and I’m proud of being a kid in care. Children’s homes work, they really work.”

Fingers crossed that the council listen.




Click here to read an article in The Independent about Ms Morton’s protest.

French Connection II

I’m going to say something controversial:

William Friedkin directed ‘The French Connection’ and John Frankenheimer ‘French Connection II’ – it should have been the other way round.

Frankenheimer was at his best helming films where attention to detail was the key: the raison d’être for narrative and mise-en-scene. Please, before you haul me up against a wall, give me the kind of hiding that makes ‘The Sweeney’ look like the girl scouts and accuse me of picking my feet in Poughkeepsie – all of which I probably deserve for my two sins of (a) suggesting Friedkin shouldn’t have directed ‘The French Connection’ and (b) being a pretentious twat by using raison d’être and mise-en-scene in the same sentence – allow me to explain. Just give me one paragraph. That’s all I ask.

Okay. John Frankenheimer did his best work when close observation of a milieu and precise attention to detail were the watchwords of plot, narrative and aesthetic. Consider ‘The Train’, which I have described elsewhere in these pages as “a battle of wits between the two men, a game of forward thinking and low cunning, not unlike a chess match but with the French railway system as the board and a steam loco and a couple of dozen waggons for pieces. Frankenheimer's …talent for incorporating technical minutiae into the narrative - indeed, using it as the cornerstone of scenes of suspense - is pure genius.” Or ‘The Manchurian Candidate’, an exercise in documenting the logistics of a conspiracy – its planning and execution. Or atmosphere and routine of prison life in ‘Birdman of Alcatraz’. The procedural aspects of ‘The French Connection’ – surveillance, evidence, tailing suspects, putting the case together – would have seen Frankenheimer in his element. Friedkin, on the other hand, was renowned as a director who put his actors through the mill. Imagine his take on the cold turkey sequence which forms the centrepiece of ‘French Connection II’. Imagine the cultural clash element of the film shot through with Friedkin’s trademark sense of belligerence.

As it was, though, Friedkin directed the first film and made a classic. Frankenheimer helmed the second and, to be fair, came bloody close – the problem with ‘French Connection II’ is something no director could arguably have surmounted anyway.

The problem is the ending of the first film. Not only has Doyle shot a fellow cop, not only does the last frame of the film suggest he’s crossed the line between grimly determined policework and certifiably obsessional behaviour, but a closing credits title card informs us that Doyle and Russo were transferred out of narcotics and reassigned.

And yet the opening scene of the sequel has Doyle (Gene Hackman) happily – well, no, not happily: the man’s a total fucking grouch – arrive in Marseilles, on secondment to the local cops and hellbent on taking Charnier (Fernando Rey) down. Charnier, improbably living in the same house (after narrowly escaping a sting that sees the rest of his collaborators arrested, you’d think he’d have gone to ground), is still looking to corner the American market: in an undeveloped subplot, he’s seen making a deal with a corrupt US army officer.

Without Russo to provide double-act bantering possibilities, Doyle’s conversational imperative becomes a one-note exercise in how to offend his hosts (on national differences: “I’d rather be a lamp-post in New York than the President of France”; on the local cuisine: “What did you do, cremate it? Where’s the mayo?”). Meanwhile, the Marseilles PD prove more effective in putting a tail on Doyle than actually locating Charnier.

The first film was based on an actual case, Doyle and Russo prowling their home turf, knowing when something doesn’t add up, knowing when someone’s dirty. It’s immediate, edgy, gritty. The sequel – an entirely fictional work – squanders its first half on Doyle’s fish-out-of-water integration into a different city, a different country, a different culture. It’s only when Charnier’s men shanghai him and shoot him full of H that things get interesting.

The second half is one barnstorming set-piece after another: Doyle going cold turkey, the dry dock shoot-out, Doyle indulging in a little pyromania to flush out Charnier’s men, and a full-tilt exhausting chase scene (the car chase of the original here transmuting into something just as pounding but on foot) which climaxes in one of the most abrupt endings in mainstream film.

Ultimately though, I can only damn ‘French Connection II’ with faint praise: it’s a well-made and eminently watchable film that served no purpose in being made.

PERSONAL FAVES: The French Connection

I’ve been laid up with a nasty case of the man ’flu (is there any other kind? can the man ’flu by its own definition ever be anything other than all-out life threatening?) for the last couple of days. Activity-wise, the pleasures of the cinema, the pub and my favourite Italian restaurant are out of the picture, so I’ve mainly been watching DVDs and surfing the net.

It was during the latter activity that I came across the latest in Jeremy’s Images from my all-time favourite films series on Moon in the Gutter: ‘The French Connection’. Out came the DVD and 100 minutes of classic cinema ensued. Thanks, Jeremy.

The film’s genesis was a non-fiction book by Robin Moore which detailed the efforts of New York narcotics cops Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso to seize and nail the prime movers behind a shipment of heroine from France to the USA. They began by surveilling a known crim, the spectacularly named Pasquale Fuca, on little more than gut instinct. The trail led to French drug lord Jean Jehan, who was assisted in his innovative import scheme by TV celebrity Jacques Angelvin.

Ernest Tidyman, in adapting the book, took certain dramatic liberties, hence a fair bit of name changing: the cops are now Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider), the neighbourhood hood is Sal Boca (Tony Lo Bianco) and the Marseilles mastermind, xenophobically nicknamed “Frog One” is Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) and the celeb in his pay is Devereaux (Frederic De Pasquale).

I’ve not read the book and I have only the most cursory knowledge of the real life case. I have, however, seen the film – the first of William Friedkin’s two bona fide masterpieces – more times than I can count and it was still as immediate and uncompromising and dynamic when I watched it yesterday as it was the first time I saw it – as it was, I imagine, when it first hit cinema screens in 1971.

I probably don’t need to rehash any of the plot. I probably don’t need to issue a spoiler warning when I talk about my favourite scene. I seriously doubt that a litany of classic moments is necessary (just check out the sequence of images on Moon in the Gutter – if they don’t make you immediately want to rewatch it, you might want to take a cardiogram just to check you’re not clinically dead). But screw it, for the record:

Doyle, dressed in a Santa suit, punching the hell out of a suspect. “Do you pick your feet in Poughkeepsie? … You son of a bitch, you sat on the edge of the bed, you put your finger between your toes and you picked your feet.” Surely the greatest non-sequitur in the history of cinema.

Russo doing a B&E on Doyle’s apartment after Doyle’s last night’s pick-up leaves him restrained to the bed with his own cuffs.

Doyle and Russo shaking down a bar, cheerfully abusing the customers and punching out an informer just to protect his cover.

Doyle and Russo freezing their extremities off during a surveillance, scarfing junk food and chugging foul coffee while Charnier and an associate spin out a three-course meal at a luxurious restaurant.

Doyle almost coming to blows with the Federal Agent, Mulderig (Bill Hickman), who’s been seconded to the case. Mulderig has a low opinion of Doyle, holding him responsible for the death of a colleague in an earlier, botched operation. And where do they go at each other like men possessed? In front of the Chief, at the site of fatal traffic accident. Subtle!

Doyle tailing Charnier to the subway where the cunning European successfully evades him. Doyle hurls his trademark pork pie hat to the ground with such vehemence that the hatband bounces off.

Doyle taking an assassination attempt by Charnier’s hired gun very personally. Commandeered car / L-train / 80mph chase in downtown traffic. ’Nuff said. The best car chase in the movies. Ever. So says I and anyone who disagrees is welcome to accompany Doyle and Russo down the station and talk about it there.

Doyle haranguing a police mechanic when a suspected car is stripped to pieces. “I’m had everything off but the rocker panels,” the old-timer protests. “Aw, come on, Irv, what’s that?” Cut to: an air chisel slicing through the rockers. Guess where the stash is?

And then there’s that brilliantly, unforgettably cynical ending. As Charnier escapes (oh sorry: this is the plot spoilers bit, btw; so was the paragraph above, actually), leaving the rest of the conspirators, French and American, to take the rap, Doyle plunders about vengefully in a deserted factory. Russo joins him and almost gets shot for his pains. Then Doyle sees a figure in a doorway and empties his gun. It’s Mulderig: dead. Russo is shocked. Doyle barely registers what’s happened. “Frog One’s here and I’m going nail him,” he declares. He goes sprinting into another part of the factory. A single shot rings out. The screen goes black.

Damn near every frame of ‘The French Connection’ gives you a memorable image, a quotable line or some banter that zings (Hackman and Scheider play off each other effortlessly and with perfect timing); but it’s the ending I remember above all. It’s so chillingly ambiguous. Leaves just enough open.

Then, of course, they made a sequel. But that’s another story.

Metallica: Some Kind of Monster

There are two Metallicas.

There’s the Metallica who recorded ‘Master of Puppets’, the black album and last year’s blistering (if ridiculously titled) return to form ‘Death Magnetic’; the Metallica who played an awesome gig at the O2 Arena on Monday night that left me pumped with adrenalin and half deaf.

Then there’s the Metallica of ‘Some Kind of Monster’, an epic (two hour twenty minute) account of a band in crisis. Directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky set out to put together a “making of” documentary on ‘St Anger’, Metallica’s first studio album in six years. They ended up with a portrait of egomania and vulnerability; rehab and therapy; struggles with interrelationships and the creative process; and the departure of Jason Newsted, their bassist of fifteen years since the death of original line-up member Cliff Burton in 1986.

The axis of the group – the Mick ‘n’ Keef as it were – are drummer Lars Ulrich and vocalist/rhythm guitarist James Hetfield. Their friendship/rivalry/power struggle similarly forms the axis of the film. Neither of them come out of it smelling of roses.

Hetfield’s leave of absence to enter rehab for what is diplomatically described as “drinking and other addictions” prompts Metallica’s management, concerned as to how long this will detract from the recording of the new album, to retain the services of a former therapist, Phil Towle, to act as a “performance-enhancing coach”. What follows, in essence, is that a middle-aged guy with a penchant for cardigans sits down with some middle-aged guys with a penchant for heavy metal and encourages them to share their feelings and resolve their issues.

Sounds excruciating, doesn’t it? And in a way it is. Let’s face it: we want our rock stars, our guitar heroes, our headbanging bad boys in the studio or on stage – not on the psychiatrist’s freakin’ couch. We want them acting out the lifestyle that would get the rest of us cuffed, booked and had up before the beak if we ever tried it – not analysing themselves. We want them stoned, drunk, loaded, rip-snorting and going through a bevy of nubile groupies like a dose of salts – not sitting around talking about their issues. After all, you don’t see a nebbish and neurotic Woody Allen alter ego grab an electric guitar, thrash out some power chords, scream “Raaaarrrrhhhhhrrrrrrr!” into a mike, chug a bottle of JD, hoover up some Colombian marching powder and chuck a TV out of a window, so what’s with the role-reversal on Metallica’s part?

And yet it’s this intrinsic incongruity that makes ‘Some Kind of Monster’ fascinating and compelling viewing. There’s the businesslike manner in which new bassist Robert Trujillo is signed up; you feel they ought to be wearing suits and sitting in a boardroom. Now compare that with Ulrich snapping during an argument with Hetfield and yelling “FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!” right in his face at high volume. There’s producer Bob Rock encouraging Ulrich to get this anger out of his system and into the songs; Ulrich screams the same profanity into a microphone, screams himself hoarse, screams himself into a collapsed heap, exhausted and gasping for breath. “Good,” Rock says blandly. “Now do it four more times.”

There’s Ulrich selling his paintings (an impressive gallery of grotesquerie) for millions and desperately vying for the approbation of his father.* There’s lead guitarist Kirk Hammett fretting that the perceived direction of the new album – a raw, blunt, immediate sound – doesn’t allow for guitar solos. There’s Towle trying to talk the band into continuing their, ahem, counselling after they decide he’s outlived his usefulness and try to oust him from the ’Tallica camp.

And then there’s the music itself: ‘St Anger’ is a brutal, jagged album, as raw and immediate as the band intended it to be.

And every word of it was written in therapy sessions.



*I quit bothering what mine thought about me years ago and feel a whole lot better for it.

Heads down, see you at the end

Springtime, and a young man’s thoughts turn to … headbanging. Off to see Metallica at London’s O2 Arena tomorrow, so I’m taking a few days’ break from The Agitation of the Mind.

‘Che – Part Two’ and ‘Gonzo: the Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson’ are on the slate when I return, the latter giving me a hankering to watch ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ again.

I’ve got a seven-film Luis Buñuel season planned for the latter part of the month. And who knows, if I survive the gig without incurring partial deafness, I might even reapproach the ’Tallica documentary ‘Some Kind of Monster’.

Right now, though, I’m ready to rock.

Dial M for Murder

I watched ‘Dial M for Murder’ over the last two evenings. I don’t normally split films over two nights unless we’re talking ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ or ‘Fanny and Alexander’ type running times. In this case, however, I just couldn’t bring myself to watch the whole thing in one sitting. And not because the tension was eating away at my nerves, either.

‘Dial M for Murder’ scores 8.1 on IMDb and ranks at 204 in their top 250. I must be missing something.

The plot (spoilers abound) in a nutshell: Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) isn’t happy that his wife Margo (Grace Kelly) is two-timing him with American crime writer Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings). He engineers a meeting with former college friend Charles Swann (Anthony Dawson), on whom he has some incriminating information. Wendice coerces Swann into undertaking Margo’s murder. Wendice has it all worked out and Swann’s hardly in a position to say no, particularly when Wendice sweetens the deal with the promise of £1,000 in cash.

Only Margo proves more resilient than either man suspects and despatches Swann (in the most notorious – but not the best – scene) with a pair of scissors. Wendice calmly seizes upon the presence of a corpse on his living room floor and his wife in a state of shock, and sets Margo up to take the rap. Only he’s reckoned without the obstinacy of Halliday and the suspicions of Chief Inspector Hubbard (John Williams).

‘Dial M for Murder’ works – despite its staginess, its naff back-projection and its moments of overwrought melodrama – whenever Wendice is locked in a battle of wills with someone. Ray Milland delivers career-best acting: smooth, suave, cool, calculating; the villain par excellence. Grace Kelly is luminous and elegant in the early scenes and although she disappears from the screen for long periods in the second half, provides the only trace of a human element during the rampant plot mechanics of the finale. Anthony Dawson is by turns reptilian, pitiful and dangerous as Swann; he makes an excellent foil to Milland.

The supporting cast let things down badly. Cummings is stiff and unconvincing, nobody’s idea of the kind of romantic hero who could sweep Grace Kelly off her feet! Williams overdoes the old-school in his characterisation of Inspector Hubbard, tipping his every scene into cliché.

Worse, apart from the murder scene itself (hampered by some hamfisted editing and am-dram acting) and a bit of business involving a hidden key, there’s none of Hitchcock’s trademark suspenseful set-pieces. What there is, however, is a lot of talk.

Hitchcock’s source material is a play by Frederick Arnott. And boy, does it show! Even ‘Rope’ – an experiment in recreating a theatrical experience for the cinema screen – feels more like a movie than ‘Dial M for Murder’.

Granted, Arnott’s play is an intricate and well-thought-out treatise on the perfect murder, an ingenious improvisation when the plan goes awry, and the fatal flaw – the forgotten detail – that proves the perpetrator’s downfall. It probably grips and entertains on the stage. But I’ve never been that great a fan of the theatre – ‘The Royal Hunt of the Sun’ and ‘Taking Sides’ are probably the only two plays I’ve really enjoyed.

I’m a film fan, and ‘Dial M for Murder’ adds nothing to the language of film.

Strangers on a Train

Trains feature prominently in some of Hitchcock’s best work: ‘The 39 Steps’, ‘The Lady Vanishes’, ‘Shadow of a Doubt’, ‘North by Northwest’. So when he sticks “train” in the freakin’ title it’s gonna be good, right?

Oh, yeah. Abso-bloody-lutely!

Hitchcock had already made a name for himself as cinema’s most accomplished purveyor of suspense films and thrillers before the war with a string of British films that delivered pacy narratives, tense set-pieces and brilliantly executed chase scenes. Then, in the ’40s, his integration into the American studio system saw him at the helm of some stagey, static productions such as ‘Rope’, ‘The Parradine Case’ and ‘Lifeboat’, as well as a couple of projects that took him out of his directorial comfort zone – costume (melo)drama ‘Under Capricorn’ and prestige literary adaptation ‘Rebecca’.

Of course, there were masterpieces during that decade: ‘Foreign Correspondent’, ‘Shadow of a Doubt’, ‘Spellbound’, ‘Notorious’. But as the ’40s ended and Hitchcock greeted the next decade with one the tired and creaky ‘Stage Fright’, there were definitely signs of depletion in the quality control department.

Then he scored a triumphant return to form with ‘Strangers on a Train’, kicking off the second half of his career and a decade-and-a-half run of classic films that would only occasionally flag (the remake of his own ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’ is neither here nor there), and not stall until the twin disappointments of ‘Torn Curtain’ and ‘Topaz’.

‘Strangers on a Train’ is an adaptation of the debut novel by Patricia Highsmith, a writer who specialised in dark psychology, compromised morality and tangled webs. The set-up is ingeniously simple: two strangers meet on a train (the clue’s in the title) – Guy Haines (Farley Granger) is an up-and-coming young tennis player saddled with a two-timing wife who won’t agree to the divorce that would enable him to marry his new love Anne (Ruth Roman); Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) is the layabout heir to a family fortune that his father is unwilling to subsidise him with.

Bruno posits a solution that rids them of the respective thorns in their side: he kills Guy’s wife; Guy bumps off Bruno’s dad; the perfect, motiveless murder. Guy humours him, agrees that it’s a fine idea and gets off the train PDQ.

It’s not long, however, before his wife is dispassionately murdered. Guy, horrified, keeps quiet; after all, as Bruno reminds him, he’s complicit. Furthermore, Bruno’s got his hands on a bit of evidence that would fit Guy up quite nicely were he to plant it at the murder scene. From hereon in, Bruno becomes a constant in Guy’s life, showing up at tennis matches, society parties, lurking outside his house … Waiting for Guy to fulfil his part of the bargain.

From an audience point of view, you can pick the level you want ‘Strangers on a Train’ to function on – straight thriller, black comedy, cynical character study, meditation on the nature of guilt and complicity, or all of the above – and it delivers the goods. Just after 101 minutes of entertainment? You got it! Want something more, something that makes you think, something that sneakily subverts audience expectations? Right there, same movie!

For me, the key scene is Bruno’s stalking of Guy’s wife (Laura Elliott) at a fairground. The juxtaposition of bright lights, chirpy music and gaudy spectacle with the dark business at hand is archetypal Hitchcock. Guy’s wife is running around behind his back with a couple of football jocks; on top of this, she catches a glance of Bruno and mistakes his stalking of her for flirtation and responds implicitly. (A key theme of the film is complicity; to what degree people determine their own fate, even if things then spiral out of their control.) Hitchcock manipulates audience expectation using shadows and suggestion, a scream heard offscreen, to imply a staging of the murder, before gleefully revealing it as a bit of misdirection. He allows you to laugh, almost lets you off … then hits you with the real murder scene. And it’s brutal. Not explicit, but cold and harsh. Then, rather than make a hurried getaway, Bruno deferentially stops to help a blind man across the road, accepting his thanks with a smile and a pat on the shoulder.

In contrast we have Guy: petulant, weak-willed, a man who – through his silence – puts Anne and her family at peril. A man who, with time running out when he needs to recover the vital piece of evidence, instead of throwing a tennis match wastes value time in his determination to win. A man who wishes his wife dead, gets his wish, endangers his new girlfriend and gets to keep her. A man who, for all that his wife is a two-timer, has himself taken up with someone else while still married.

Bruno’s a villain, no doubt about it. But he’s not always villainous. He certainly doesn’t kill for the sake for it. And he’s arguably one of the few characters in the film with any integrity. Ultimately, he does what he says he’ll do.

The fairground scene also lays the groundwork for the finale, a revisiting-the-scene-of-the-crime set-piece that’s a textbook example of Hitchcock’s mastery of suspense. That the out-of-control carousel is set on its destructive course when a trigger happy cop plugs the operator instead of Bruno is another indication that, as M. Night Shyamalan puts it in his appreciation of the film on the DVD special features, “the rules don’t apply”.

That’s an excellent summation of the film, and one steeped in Hitchcockian irony given how flawlessly ‘Strangers on a Train’ operates as mainstream entertainment.

Stage Fright

Wannabe actress Eve Gill (Jane Wyman) is carrying a torch for the dashing Jonathon Cooper (Richard Todd). Only problem is, Cooper’s the current boy-toy of middle-aged but still glamorous showbiz star Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich). When Charlotte’s husband suffers a nasty case of death, it’s Cooper that Charlotte prevails upon to help cover the whole thing up.

And when the cover up goes awry and Cooper finds himself on the run (yup, we’re definitely in Hitchcock territory), it’s Eve that he prevails upon to help prove his innocence and shelter him from the cops.

Eve obligingly stashes Cooper at her eccentric but resourceful father (Alistair Sim)’s seaside pad, adopts an alias and takes a job as Charlotte’s dresser in order to get close to the one person who knows the truth. To this end, she enlists the help of Nellie Woods (Kay Walsh), the woman who found the body. Only Nellie’s banking on the controversy surrounding Charlotte as her meal ticket, selling her exclusive story to the gutter press; and when it seems like Eve might be digging up a more profitable bit of dirt, Nellie turns blackmailer.

To compound Eve’s problems, Detective Inspector Smith (Michael Wilding) is on the case and wanting some answers, her father is playing amateur sleuth rather too enthusiastically, and Cooper has turned up back in London and in harm’s way …

On paper, ‘Stage Fright’ should be the perfect Hitchcock film: a man on the run; a plucky heroine putting herself in danger to save him; hidden identities; dark secrets; shadowy corridors and duplicitous shenanigans backstage. Throw in a couple of chase scenes, a couple of suspense scenes and a soupçon of humour, and you’re set for 105 minutes of rollicking entertainment, right?

Ummmm. No. Actually you’re not. ‘Stage Fright’ is perhaps the creakiest, wheeziest entry in Hitch’s canon. Wyman, best known for the melodramas ‘Magnificent Obsession’ and ‘All That Heaven Allows’, is a simperingly unengaging heroine, Todd mistakes sulky frowning for smouldering intensity, and Wilding shows his profile a lot.

Marlene Dietrich does her usual smoky, husky, seductive routine (but, hey, when it works that well, why step outside the comfort zone?). Unfortunately her big musical number was so effectively parodied by Madeleine Kahn in ‘Blazing Saddles’, that I kept thinking about that film during the last half of ‘Stage Fright’. By the end, I was willing Cleavon Little to run on stage and go “Hey, where’s the white women at?”

A typically British supporting cast – including Sybil Thorndike and Joyce Grenfell – are wasted in some excruciatingly unfunny comedic scenes; and things only really pep up when Alistair Sim is on screen.

The set-pieces seem curiously perfunctory and there’s only a grimly ironic finale, which takes the phrase ‘final curtain’ somewhat literally, to indicate that Hitchcock even showed up during the shoot. Maybe his mind was on his next project: ‘Strangers on a Train’.

The Wrong Man

What’s the scariest thing Hitchcock put on screen? Norman Bates dressed as his mother doing non-culinary things with a bloody great kitchen knife in ‘Psycho’? Scotty Ferguson making over a guilt-addled woman in the image of the dead woman he’s become morbidly obsessed with in ‘Vertigo’? The necktie killer assaulting and throttling his latest victim whilst murmuring “lovely, lovely” in ‘Frenzy’?

Or is it Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda) helplessly trying to protest his innocence as the relentless wheels of the justice system grind him down in ‘The Wrong Man’?

Manny is a jazz musician whose unsociable hours take him away from his wife Rose (Vera Miles) and two children. Money is tight. Rose blames herself for being a bad housekeeper. Manny, brushing her self-criticism away, determines to raise some cash-in-hand by borrowing against his insurance policy.

Manny doesn’t go to the bank often; it’s usually Rose who does so. In his overcoat and hat, his angular frame striking, he reminds one of the tellers of an armed robber who held her up. She coolly finishes serving him, then alerts the police.

Manny is arrested outside his house and taken down the precinct. His pleas of innocence are met sympathetically, but it all comes down to witness identification. He’s put in a line-up. The teller picks him out without hesitation.

It’s a case of mistaken identity, simple as that. A coincidence of height and physical appearance. But the police have a key witness in the teller and she’s unwavering in her testimony. Suddenly, it’s not about being innocent until proven guilty. Manny’s locked in a cell, had up before a magistrate, bound over until a trial date’s set, bundled into a van and taken to the lock-up.

Hitchcock, in these scenes, achieves an almost documentary sense of realism. The police station, courtroom and holding cells are grim*. Scenes of Manny being transported from court to cell, he and his fellow defendants manacled and herded like cattle, a haunted and defeated look on his face, still pack a punch fifty years after the film was made. Hitchcock puts the audience through his hero’s ordeal like never before.

Plenty of Hitch heroes have found themselves in the frame and on the lam, wanted men, but they usually seize upon a chance to escape and the narrative evolves into a chase movie. The authorities in pursuit of a fugitive; the fugitive in pursuit of the truth.

Not here. Manny has no opportunity to flee. He doesn’t even get to mount a defence until his family put up his bail, and even then he’s reliant on well-intentioned but inexperience lawyer Frank O’Connor (Anthony Quayle) to take his case. O’Conner urges Manny to bring forward witnesses who can attest to his whereabouts on the day of the robbery. An easy task, you’d think, given that he was anywhere but at the bank with a gun in his hand.

Not so. As witness after witness is discounted (they’ve died, they’ve moved away), the strain starts to tell on Rose as badly as on Manny. Worse, in fact. Not just an innocent man accused, but in hock to his lawyer, his wife in a sanatorium and a date in court …

‘The Wrong Man’ is perhaps the most un-Hitchcock Hitchcock movie. It is devoid of suspenseful set-pieces, suave heroes, mysterious and alluring heroines, devious twists in the tail and sprigs of acidic humour. Nor is it founded on a set of narrative contrivances à la ‘North by Northwest’ or the machinations of Fifth Columnists as in ‘Saboteur’.

It’s a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God story (based on an actual case) where one person, the teller, without any motive of spite or malice, makes a mistake. A mistake that’s taken as gospel by the legal system. And an ordinary man is caught in the great unstoppable machine of legal process. Every frame of film emphasises that it could happen to anyone. It happened to Manny Balestrero.



*Hitchcock filmed at the Court Square prison, Queens, New York (Fonda is detained in the same cell the real Balestrero was put in), the actual sanatorium Rose was housed in and the night spot – the Stork Club – where Manny played. The locations bring the film to life.

I Confess

One aspect of Hitchcock’s films that has always irked me is his over-reliance on back projection and matte paintings. It’s jarringly evident in the later films, such as ‘Topaz’ or ‘Torn Curtain’ where horribly artificial studio-bound sequences contrast harshly with second-unit location footage.

‘Shadow of a Doubt’ – one of my favourite Hitchcocks – was shot chiefly on location and benefits from it immeasurably. The small town atmosphere is one of the key elements that makes it such a great movie. Much of ‘The Trouble with Harry’ was filmed on location in Vermont and the colour and vibrancy that results establishes the tone of the film beautifully.

‘I Confess’ and ‘The Wrong Man’ both use location shooting to maximum effect. They were released just three years apart (1953 and 1956 respectively), both are variations on one of Hitchcock’s favourite themes – the innocent man wrongly accused – and both are free of the dark, absurdist humour present in even such cynical Hitchcocks as ‘Psycho’ and ‘Vertigo’. They are arguably the darkest films he ever made.

‘I Confess’ was shot in Quebec, Canada, and from the outset the city’s distinctive architecture becomes an integral part of the fabric of the film. The steep, narrow cobble-stoned alleyways through which the murderer flees during the opening sequence could be a metaphor for the tortured mind of Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift), our morally compromised hero.

Logan knows that shady lawyer Vilette (Ovila Legare) has been killed by – I would say ‘spoiler alert’ but since Hitch has the guilty party make the eponymous confession five minutes in, I’m not really giving anything away – German immigrant Otto Keller (O.E. Hasse), but can’t say anything since it was Hasse himself who told him … in the sanctity of the confessional.

Hard-nosed copper Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden) isn’t impressed with Logan’s evasiveness, particularly when it comes out that Vilette was blackmailing Ruth (Anne Baxter), the wife of a D.A. Pierre Grandfort (Roger Dann) over her relationship with Logan, with whom she was in love before the war and still has feelings for.

With Keller, a verger at Logan’s church, continually torturing him with his very presence, Logan’s behaviour grows increasingly erratic, convincing Larrue that Logan is the guilty party. ‘I Confess’ is – pardon the pun – a something of a curate’s egg: part psychological character study (Keller’s fear and guilt provide counterpoint to Logan’s inner turmoil), part detective thriller (Larrue locks horns with his superiors who are decidedly uneasy at him pointing the finger of suspicion at a man of the cloth), part courtroom drama (Logan ends up in the dock, barely able to lock eyes with Keller, who’s seated amongst the crowd), part melodrama (Ruth’s histrionic narration of her ‘past’ with Logan feels like it was spliced in from a Douglas Sirk production), and the whole thing pays off with an archetypal Hitchcock set-piece (a chase through the kitchens and ballroom of a plush hotel).

When ‘I Confess’ works, it works well: Montogomery Clift and Karl Malden give fine, understated performances; the internal struggle of Father Logan is realised effectively; Hasse gives a venal but strangely compelling account of Keller, trace elements of corroded humanity occasionally evident amidst his increasing desperation.

It’s the middle section that lets things down badly, however, the script handing over the film’s narrative to Anne Baxter (a last minute casting decision after the studio nixed Hitch’s first choice*), who runs the gamut of misty eyes, trembling lips and pained expressions. It’s a hammy performance made worse by the naturalism of Clift and Malden’s acting, and it over-emphasises a character who serves, at best, as a plot device.

Hitchcock expanded on the themes and concerns of ‘I Confess’ in ‘The Wrong Man’. I’m tempted to describe ‘The Wrong Man’ as the flipside to ‘I Confess’, but that wouldn’t be quite right. ‘The Wrong Man’, avoiding the pitfalls of melodrama that beset ‘I Confess’, is definitely the A-side.



*Anita Björk, a Swedish actress Hitchcock had admired in Alf Sjöberg’s adaptation of Stringberg’s ‘Miss Julie’. Studio bosses were concerned that Björk, as an unmarried mother, would attract the wrong kind of publicity and the role went to Baxter. A damn shame, on all levels.



Tomorrow: ‘The Wrong Man’ – Hitchcock’s scariest film?

PERSONAL FAVES: North by Northwest

In the late 50s, Alfred Hitchcock was attached to an adaptation of Hammond Innes’ novel ‘The Wreck of the Mary Deare’. At the suggestion of his frequent collaborator, the composer Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock engaged Ernest Lehman to write the script. Lehman wrestled with the adaptation for a while, but couldn’t find a balance between the tense opening of the novel and the static courtroom drama it develops into. Hitch encourage him to write something else*. Lehman confessed that he’d always wanted to write “the ultimate Hitchcock movie”. Ideas were batted back and forth: some made it into the movie (a murder at the U.N., a crop-dusting plane, some vertiginous business on Mount Rushmore) and some didn’t (a murder at a Detroit auto plant, a tornado).

A decade beforehead, Hitchcock had discussed with journalist Otis Guernsey an idea based on a story Guernsey had stumbled on during the war: a fictitious British agent whose peregrinations had led his German counterparts a merry dance. Guernsey had prepared a treatment, but nothing progressed beyond that. With Lehman on board, the pieces started falling into place.

The plot – on the off-chance anyone reading this has been living in a cave for most of their life and hasn’t seen one of the most famous and oft-referenced (most recently in the ‘Family Guy’ episode “North by North Quahog”) movies ever made – involves slick ad man Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) being mistaken for a secret agent called Kaplan. Thing is, Kaplan doesn’t exist. He’s a figment of the imagination of a spymaster known only as The Professor (Leo G. Carroll), invented to draw attention away from The Professor’s real operative, who has successfully infiltrated the ranks of an organisation run by the sophisticated but sinister Vandamm (James Mason).

When Vandamm’s men kidnap him, Thornhill protests that he’s not Kaplan. This cuts no ice. They force a bottle of bourbon down him and bundle him behind the wheel of a car. He survives, but is picked up by the police – to the social embarrassment of his mother (Jessie Royce Landis)**. The police disbelieve his story and Thornhill sets out to track down Kaplan. His investigations lead him to the United Nations, where he’s set up for a murder. On the run from the authorities, trying to survive the murderous overtures of Vandamm’s henchmen, Thornhill meets mysterious blonde Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) and finds that romantic entanglements are just as compromising as anything in the murky world of espionage.

So: is ‘North by Northwest’ the ultimate Hitchcock film? I’ll leave that for others to decide. For my money, it’s certainly the quintessential Hitchcock film:

It’s got a cracking score by Bernard Herrmann (and perhaps his most recognisable after ‘Psycho’).

It’s got an iconic title sequence by Saul Bass – titles and music have seldom gelled to such masterful effect as they do here.

It’s got an innocent-man-on-the-run narrative so beloved of the director (from ‘The 39 Steps’ in 1935 to ‘Frenzy’ in 1972, it’s arguably the overriding theme in Hitchcock’s filmography).

It’s got a knockout blonde with a designer wardrobe to die for.

It’s got a MacGuffin (a bit of microfilm, but who cares about microfilm when there’s planes and trains and chases and elegant blondes to look at?).

Lehman’s script is a masterpiece of narrative propulsion, joining the dots between the set-pieces with such speed and glib humour that stopping to examine the construct under the critical lens would just be bad sportsmanship. The whole film is, let’s be honest, built upon nothing of any real substance. It’s a cinematic soufflé. In the hands of many a director, it would have collapsed the moment it emerged from post-production. Hitch keeps the pace fast without being hectic, the tone light without being spoofy, the story intriguing without being overly convoluted.

He’s served by a great cast: Cary Grant is the perfect choice for Thornhill, Landis is hilarious, Saint is arguably the most appealing of Hitchcock’s heroines, and Mason does cultured/amoral/sinister with stylish aplomb.

I really don’t need to talk about the set-pieces, do I?

Or the deeply unsubtle Freudian symbolism of the last shot? It says something that the cut from Grant helping Saint into a couchette bunk to the train thundering into the tunnel is pretty much the only bit of symbolism in a film loaded with visual iconography. It’s Hitchcock’s instruction to people like me who can’t watch a movie without feeling the need to hammer out 800 words afterwards: it’s entertainment: don’t analyse it – just enjoy it.



* ‘Wreck of the Mary Deare’, directed by Michael Anderson from a screenplay by Eric Ambler, was released the same year as ‘North by Northwest’. It proved Lehman’s point: the courtroom scenes are static and unengaging.

**Landis was 63 when the film was made, just eight years older than Grant.

Stone walls do not a prison make? Yeah, right!

I’ve been temping for a healthcare trust for the last few weeks, and today they sent me over to a secure facility for patients with serious mental health disorders. Fortunately I’m just providing admin cover and not undertaking a patient facing role.

I’ll not name the facility; let’s just say that a couple of people who made the headlines in murder cases a few years ago are being kept here, and that the place was the subject of a headline-making TV documentary in the late ’70s.

Arriving this morning, I was photographed, searched and asked for ID; a call was also placed to the office I’m usually based to confirm my identity. The facility’s security is on par with that of a prison, as well as, architecturally and in terms of the high fences that surround it, the look of one.

Images of every prison movie I’ve ever seen floated through the corridors with me as doors clanged shut behind me and large keys turned in them.

If the atmosphere is heavy, my duties have been light. I’ve mainly been arranging logons and passwords for staff training and being on-hand to help with any queries. The actuality has been a couple of hours’ worth of surfing the net, catching up on my favourite film blogs and thinking about posting a top-five-prison-movies kind of entry.

Only I find myself not liking prison movies very much. Like courtroom thrillers and hostage dramas, the very nature of them denies much in the way of movement. With a very few exceptions (’12 Angry Men’, ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’), I can’t get on with stagey films. And also like courtroom thrillers and hostage dramas, there’s a sense of the lowest common denominator at work, humanity-wise.

In fact, I can only think of ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ (a perennial favourite since I first saw it) and ‘The Birdman of Alcatraz’ as examples of prison movies I can watch more than once. And after a day at this downbeat venue, it might be a while before I approach either of them.

Irony enough that, in preparation for next week’s Second Annual Hitch-Fest, I’ve got the claustrophobically intense classic of the innocent-man-caught-in-the-machinery-of-the-legal-system genre ‘The Wrong Man’ to look forward to. I think I’ll be kicking off with ‘North by Northwest’, just to keep things upbeat.

Slumdog Millionaire

I have an inverse reaction to hype. The more something gets talked up, the more buzz there is around it, the more pundits who exhort that I absolutely have to see it, the less inclined I am to bother with it … No, bother’s the wrong word. I don’t so much shut myself off against it, I simply shelve it as something I’ll approach later, months or maybe a year or two down the line. Let the hype and superlatives and the unrealistic expectations ebbs away. Thus ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. I’ve read so many glowing reviews, a couple of cautious ones, and one exceptionally well-argued piece that ravages it. I’ll wait a while. In the meantime, my thanks to Viv Apple for sharing her thoughts on the film.

When my friend Alex and I came out of the cinema after seeing ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, we agreed that the little inconsistencies and “what?” moments in the narrative were forgivable, because the whole thing was really a kind of fable. So in both senses of the word, it was a fabulous film.

Considering that it opens with a scene of excruciating torture in a police station - the first of many hide-behind-the-sofa scenes - it is perhaps strange that ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ has been described as a “feel-good” movie. But as the film progresses, its atmosphere becomes more and more electric, like that of the ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ studios around which the story revolves. We know in our hearts that the main character, Jamal (Dev Patel) is bound to win his millions - but we don’t know how or why, and that is the crux of the matter.

This film is not afraid to go to extremes. Director Danny Boyle echoes the head-in-the-toilet scene in ‘Trainspotting’ with an even more disgusting one which I will not detail, which I could only watch by repeating to myself that the boy Jamal was actually covered in chocolate. Children are forced to work as beggars, some even blinded for the purpose, and yet we root for Jamal because he and the others somehow survive through it all to the up-beat ending of the film. But as I write this I can feel the discomfort of knowing that these kids are real, and this is a difficult feeling. The premise - that Jamal knew the answers to the ‘Millionaire’ questions through the experiences he’d had in his life - is dubious, and the happy ending even more so. But this is an attention grabbing fable, and should be judged as such.

by Viv Apple

M.I.A.: the late period Dirk Bogarde

Jeremy has devoted February at Moon in the Gutter to twenty-eight films missing in action on DVD. He has already unearthed a cornucopia of curios and classics, all of them criminally overlooked.

I’d like to weigh in with four titles – one because it’s been at least fifteen years since I’ve seen it – and the others because I’ve never seen them and would welcome the opportunity. They represent four consecutive appearances in Dirk Bogarde’s filmography, the last proving of such great personal frustration to him following the director’s re-editing of the Bogarde-approved original cut (“he fucked up my performance and he fucked up the film”, as the great man unequivocally put it during a TV interview in the ’90s) that he withdrew from film-making for over a decade and would only return to the big screen once more, in 1991 for Bertrand Tavernier’s ‘These Foolish Things’.

If for no other reason than selfishness – it would greatly aid me in putting together the Third Annual Dirk-Fest later this year – here’s a big plea to whichever distribution companies have the rights to them for the following titles on DVD:


The Serpent (1974) – I’d love to see this purely because of its eclectic cast: Bogarde, Yul Brynner, Henry Fonda, Philippe Noiret and Virni Lisi. Apparently it’s something of a Euro-pudding, with locations (and languages) flitting between the UK, Germany and France. Bogarde, in a letter to Penelope Mortimer, describes the part as necessitating “very little except stand[ing] about in a black raincoat looking enigmatic”. Ah, but no-one did enigmatic like Dirk Bogarde … and surely the film’s worth it for that alone.

Permission to Kill (1975) – more spy shenanigans. Bogarde described this one, in another letter to regular correspondent Penelope Mortimer, as “a nice simple CIA-chase-round-the-airport” sort of movie, adding that his fee would foot the bill for a new terrace at Clermont, his home in France. Again, the film allays Bogarde with some interesting co-stars: Ava Gardner, Frederic Forrest and Timothy Dalton.

Providence (1978) – Alain Resnais’s darkly comic tale of a dying novelist and his dysfunctional family is a brilliant, multi-faceted meditation of life, death, art, memory and the blurred lines between fiction and reality. Bogarde co-stars with John Gielgud, Ellen Burstyn and David Warner. This is high-profile stuff and with the long-unavailable Tartan VHS release changing hands for upwards of £20 a copy, it’s long past due for the DVD treatment.

Despair (1978) – if ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’, the movie that well fucked Sean Connery off with film-making, can be readily acquired on small shiny disc, then why can’t we get a chance to make our own minds up about the production that was almost Sir Dirk’s final hour. With box-sets of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s earlier work on the market, surely ‘Despair’ – from a script by acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard (loosely adapting a novel by Nabakov) and Bogarde in the lead role – has an audience of genuine movie-lovers eagerly awaiting its release?