The horror, the horror ... Italian stylee

Tomorrow, the Italian horror movie blog-a-thon kicks off over at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies and runs till All Hallows Eve. Hence the funky Sesame-Street-meets-Leatherface stylee imagery on the banner.

I can't promise that my contribution will feature owls wielding power tools in a manner not strictly advocated by the manufacturer, but I will be looking at a dark little product from the uniquely warped mind of Lucio Fulci.

The Wind Cannot Read

Did I say I was running out of material with 'The Mind Benders'?

Scratch that.

'The Mind Benders' is freakin' 'Rashomon' compared to 'The Wind Cannot Read'.

Directed by - it's that man again! - Ralph Thomas from a novel by Richard Mason, 'The Wind Cannot Read' is the kind of they-don't-make-'em-like-that-anymore melodrama that perfectly demonstrates why they don't make 'em like that anymore.

The title is from a Japanese poem which states:



A decent metaphor for a narrative about transience, uncertainty and those twists of fate which blow us off course and against which it is as futile to struggle as a rose petal against the wind.

And if you think my emphasis of the title is heavy-handed, wait till you see how Thomas gets stuck into it. He structures the opening sequence - which, to be fair, contains some effectively grim imagery of emasculated survivors, the bones of the not-so-lucky and the dark shapes of the vultures who have picked them clean - around the retreat from Burma, RAF pilot Michael Quinn (Dirk Bogarde) and two of his fellow airmen almost at death's door by the time they make it to safety. They stumble upon a beautifully cultivated garden with - yep - a sign urging them not to pick the flowers. Thomas slaps the poem over this image, then follows it up with the title in letters so big and garish they fill the entire screen.

Later, just for good measure, he includes some husky-voiced crooner singing "the wind cannot read" at the exact moment that Quinn first lays eyes on Sabby (Yoko Tani). Our boy's been sent to India by this time, studying Japanese while he recuperates so that he can be useful in an intelligence role. It's here that he crosses swords with up-his-own-arse officer type Fenwick (Ronald Lewis). Predictably, Sabby just happens to be the class's new instructor. Equally predictably, it's Fenwick who discovers Quinn and Sabby's taboo-busting, definitely-against-regulations cross-cultural romance.



The ensuing complications are interrupted when Quinn gets orders to return to Burma. It gets even more melodramatic than that, but on the slim chance you're keen on seeing 'The Wind Cannot Read' (word of advice: have a book to hand; maybe some knitting), I won't spoil it for you. Just don't say the title didn't tell you so when it finally lumbers to an end. Oh, and look out for a young Donald Pleasance in the last sequence.

Quinn and Sabby's romance - progressing from tentative courtship to marriage - occupies two thirds of the film and is played out against a tourist board vision of India where everybody wears bright colours and mostly ride on elephants, the beggars are clean and Thomas shoots the Taj Mahal from every conceivable angle during a pointless scene that seems to have been concocted purely to accommodate this barrage of National Geographical style shots.

Actually, a back copy of National Geographical would probably hold more interest than 'The Wind Cannot Read' - you'd at least learn something about the countries visited and there's always the off-chance of some bare-breasted tribeswomen.

But I digress.

What makes it worse is that 'The Wind Cannot Read' could have been, Mason's tortuous narrative notwithstanding, an interesting project.

David Lean began pre-production on 'The Wind Cannot Read', under the auspices of producer Alexander Korda. He wrote a screenplay in colloboration with Richard Mason and began scouting locations. When Lean discovered 22-year-old Japanese actress Kishi Keiko, he was convinced she was perfect for Sabby. Determining to capture the real India on film - as well as telling a passionate and poignant love story - Lean's enthusiasm was running high. Then came a series of conflicts with Korda - over the script, over casting - which remained unresolved when Korda died in early 1956. By this point, Lean was already in talks with Sam Spiegel for 'The Bridge on the River Kwai'. Everything fell through and the property passed to the Rank Organisation; Lean turned his attention to 'Bridge'; and Keiko - who had been brought over to Britain in a storm of publicity and talked up as the next big thing - was robbed of a potential breakthrough role for western audiences and returned home.

When the project passed to them, Thomas and his partner/producer Betty E Box worked from Lean's script (although the credits suggest Mason wrote the script single-handedly) as well as using some of the locations Lean had already scouted. But Ralph Thomas was no David Lean (his pedestrian direction sucks the life out of scene after scene) and it's impossible to watch 'The Wind Cannot Read' without a frustrating curiosity nagging away at you as to what might have been.

Although Lean would certainly not have cast Bogarde (Kenneth More was his preferred choice), it's certainly down to Bogarde's popularity that 'The Wind Cannot Read' was a box office hit. In his magnificent biography of David Lean, Kevin Brownlow records that the director's response, when he saw the eventual film, was to ask Thomas for a share of the profits.

The Mind Benders

It is Dirk Bogarde's collaborations with Joseph Losey (five films) and Luchino Visconti (two films) that are made the most of by the critics. But what of his four-film association with Basil Dearden? It was under Dearden's direction that the world got its first glimpse of the dark side of Dirk - as Tom Riley in 'The Blue Lamp'. They did their finest work together with 'Victim' - an incredibly brave, taboo-busting film which helped change public perception and attitudes towards gay men. For these two films alone, Bogarde and Dearden can be forgiven a couple of misfires: 'The Gentle Gunman', more John Mills's show than Bogarde's and a film that leaves a nasty taste with me in its confused quasi-sympathies with its IRA protagonists; and the production under consideration today, 'The Mind Benders'.

It's a curate's egg of a film, starting out with a tense bit of scientist-on-the-run business which recalls the Boulting Brothers' 'Seven Days to Noon', then edging into scientific/behavioural paranoia territory that would be exploited far more effectively in the later '60s and in the '70s ('The Mind Benders' was made in 1963) in everything from 'The Manchurian Candidate' to 'The Parallax View'. Both of these are about brainwashing. 'The Mind Benders' treads a similar path, but is more concerned with the mind's susceptibility and how isolation experiments change the subject: their behaviour, their personality, the likelihood of their responding to influences which would normally be alien to them.

All the ingredients for ... well, whatever you want to make of them. Tense thriller. Social satire. Just-round-the-corner speculative sci-fi. Dearden and writer James Kennaway could have gone anywhere with the material. In the hands of a bizarro visionary like Dario Argento (okay, I know he'd barely started out in cinema by then; indulge me), there would be scope to go crazy with the material. Hell, even Ken Russell would have turned it into a subversive symphony of brain-boggling visuals. Dearden arranges slab-like utilitarian Sixties architecture into some decent compositions and conjures a moodily effective image of hero-by-default Professor Longman (Bogarde) as his personality begins to change, but for much of its scant 95-minute running time 'The Mind Benders' is crushingly ordinary.

So why select it for the Dirk-fest? Truth is, I ran a little short of material this time round. There is so much of Bogarde's filmography still unavailable on DVD. 'Providence' is floating around on the personal faves list and I'm tempted to write about it from memory (even though it's a good fifteen years since I've seen it) but the ever-hopeful part of me opts to bide its time until that belated DVD release occurs. Quite a few of the titles that are available, I don't want to write about - films that Bogarde owed his matinee idol status to (the 'Doctor' films, for example) but are actually pretty lame. I notched up seven films apiece on the First and Second Annual Dirk-Fests, and between what's in the collection and what the Lovefilm queue has come up with I've only just made it to seven this year.

(I'm already thinking that next year's Dirk-fest might of necessity focus on Dirk Bogarde the writer, principally his autobiographical works.)

Also, 'The Mind Benders' is not entirely without merit. The isolation experiment Longman undergoes, robbed of all sensory stimuli as he floats underwater, is effectively realised, particularly when Longman realises the movement of his hand through the water can restore one of the senses - touch - to him; the eroticism with which his mind seizes on this is demonstrated by a simple but effective overlay:

The cast is strong: a host of British cinema stalwarts (some at the very start of their careers) turn in sterling work - John Clements, Michael Bryant, Wendy Craig, Terence Alexander, Edward Fox, Geoffrey Keen and an excellent, often underrated Mary Ure. Bogarde, needless to say, is peerless. A scene where he is confronted with his own culpability in an experiment that mentally scarred a colleague sees him swing between defiance and doubt, bitterness and regret. Bogarde doesn't miss a beat in his multi-faceted characterisation. He gives the material a credibility it probably doesn't deserve.

Hot Enough for June

Nore - in Godalming, Surrey - was the last and most extravagant of the country houses Dirk Bogarde owned in England before he upped sticks for France and settled in a Provence farmhouse. Set in ten acres, it was more of an estate, with two cottages and a studio in addition to the house itself, which boasted ten bedrooms and eight bathrooms. Bogarde and his manager/partner Tony Forwood paid £40,000 for it. That was in 1962. When it went on the market in 2004, the asking price was £2.5million.

Imagine the upkeep! It's no coincidence, as John Coldstream points out in his magnificent biography of Bogarde, that he began "accepting parts purely for the money". Even then, he wasn't enamoured about appearing in 'Hot Enough for June', Ralph Thomas's adaptation of Lionel Davidson's novel 'The Night of Wenceslas'. It was only when Tom Courtenay was in the frame for Nicholas Whistler, the hapless linguist who becomes a spy without even knowing it, that Forwood, as Coldstream recounts in the biography "said to Dirk in front of the producer and director: 'I'm not sure, Dirk, that you can afford to turn this down. Everyone knew that 'afford' was meant in the literal sense."

It wouldn't be the last time Bogarde gritted his teeth and made a film he had no interest in - nor the last time he'd do it to fund the upkeep on a house. In the 70s, he again returned to the espionage genre (with 'The Serpent' and 'Permission to Kill') and sunk the paycheques into Clermont, his property in France. I've not seen either of these, although both have eclectic casts and sound like they might be highly entertaining films. I have seen 'Hot Enough for June', though, and while it's not the abject mess that many critics would have you believe neither is it (unfortunately) a camp, spoofy underrated gem ripe for rediscovery.


That it never really gels is because it isn't camp or spoofy enough.

The plot in a nutshell: aspiring writer Nicholas Whistler (Bogarde) is happily signing on at the Labour Exchange when he's given an interview, ostensibly for a trainee management position. Picked for an overseas assignment due to his fluency in Czech, he has no idea that his new boss, Cunliffe (Robert Morley) is actually a big wheel in MI5, or that he's an unknowing courier, there to collect a formula and carry it back to London. Arriving in Prague, he is assigned a chauffeur: the glamorous Vlasta (Sylva Koscina). He has just as little idea that Vlasta's father, Simoneva (Leo McKern) is a ranking member of the Secret Police and Cunliffe's opposite number. Simoneva wants Whistler for his contact and the formula. Vlasta just plain wants him. Hilarious shenanigans ensue.

Or should have ensued. The opening scene, even before Whistler is recruited, sets the scene for the film 'Hot Enough for June' could have been. In a non-descript office, spymaster Roger Allsop (John le Mesurier) returns to the quartermaster a plethora of gadgets, ruing the untimely demise of the agent to whom they'd been issued. A cut to an index card reading "007 - deceased" provides the punchline. Although the number is never mentioned, it's clear Whistler has been recruited as 008. Only without anyone actually bothering to tell him.

At this point (ie. three minutes in), Ralph Thomas and scripter Lukas Heller - best known perhaps as co-writer, with Nunnally Johnson, of 'The Dirty Dozen' - could have gone one of two ways: absurdist humour played dead straight (a la 'Dr Strangelove'), or out-and-out camp spoofery. Sadly, 'Hot Enough for June' is neither one thing nor the other, and such pleasure as it does offer are incidental ones. Such as Morley and McKern chewing up the scenery, the latter bringing a brusque physicality and a droll wit to his characterisation of Simoneva.

There are wry touches - although much more humour could have been milked from them - in a smattering of scenes which point up the differences between Whistler and his better-known predecessor: when Whistler dons a tux it's not to make a dashing entrance into an opulent casino but to impersonate a head waiter as he makes his escape through a restaurant (he tarries long enough to serve up a Hungarian goulash with dumplings; when Whistler needs a mode of transport to get away from his pursuers it's not an Aston Martin DB5 with modifications but a stolen push bike.

Bogarde bumbles through the (deliberately) half-arsed action scenes like a good sport, maintaining an air of perplexion throughout. The man was no stranger to light comedy at this stage in his career, as his almost unholy popularity as Simon Sparrow in the 'Doctor' films attests. He even invests his scenes with Sylva Koscina with a bit of sparkle.

But, ah Sylva Koscina! If there is any reason to watch 'Hot Enough for June', it's Sylva Koscina. Playing Vlasta as an ice-maiden one moment and a purring, coquettish kitten the next - and with a twinkle in her eye that lets you know the whole thing's one big joke - she sways and shimmies through the film with a knockout 60s hairdo, an hourglass figure and a disarming amount of likeability.

Never really achieving the Hollywood cross-over success of Sophia Loren, Koscina propped up any number of forgotten thrillers and sex comedies in the '60s and '70s. Coincidentally, her motivation for accepting roles was not dissimilar to Bogarde's: most of the money went into her well-appointed villa in Rome's affluent Marino district.

Campbell's Kingdom

Ah, the great and prolific actor/director relationships: John Wayne and John Ford, Robert de Niro and Martin Scorsese, Johnny Depp and Tim Burton, Dirk Bogarde and Basil Dearden Joseph Losey Ralph Thomas.

Bollocks!

It pains me to discuss the Bogarde/Thomas relationship (nine films together compared to the five he made with Losey and the four with Dearden) since Thomas was a journeyman director and did little to tap into either the brooding sensuality or the tortured intensity of Bogarde as an actor. Nevertheless, it was the likes of the 'Doctor' films ('~ in the House', '~at Sea', '~ at Large', '~in Distress'*) which made him a matinee idol. His dreamy turns in 'A Tale of Two Cities' and 'The Wind Cannot Read' went over big with his legions of fans, as well. 'Hot Enough for June' - considered elsewhere in this year's Dirk-fest - didn't quite recapture the mainstream magic, while their final collaboration, 'The High Bright Sun', is largely forgotten.

Which leaves 'Campbell's Kingdom' - certainly my favourite of a frankly not-that-remarkable canon. Adapted from Hammond Innes's bestseller, it opens with Bruce Campbell** (Bogarde) turning up at ramshackle Canadian mining town Come Lucky having inherited his late grandfather's land, a tract the old man was convinced was rich in oil. Old man Campbell's undoing was an unscrupulous partner who defrauded their backers, amscrayed with the money and left Campbell to take the fall ... and do some time. Bruce, recently given six months to live following (it transpires) something of a misdiagnosis, decides Campbell's Kingdom is a nice isolated spot to end his days.

He hasn't reckoned with crooked contractor Owen Morgan (Stanley Baker) who is cutting corners and using cheap materials in the building of a dam which will eventually flood Campbell's land. Prevented from even visiting the Kingdom (the only way to the high ground it occupies is a clanking industrial hoist which Morgan owns and controls), Bruce bristles at Morgan's assertion that the land is worth nothing and is suspicious of the geologist's report Morgan produces which indicates there was no oil. Refusing to sell Morgan the land, Bruce makes contact with the geologist, Bladon (Michael Craig), and discovers that Morgan falsified the report.

Never mind that he's pale, weary and at death's door, Bruce gets a new lease of life fending off Morgan's overtures (which graduate from fiscal imperatives to acts of sabotage) and determining to prove that his grandfather was right about oil under the Kingdom. To this end, he engages the services of roughneck driller MacDonald (a spendidly miscast but loving-every-minute James Robertson Justice) who in turn employs world-weary trucker Tim (an equally miscast Sid James) to head a convoy hauling his equipment from Calgary to the Kingdom. A five hour drive with the little matter of roadblocks and Morgan's hoist at the end of it.

What follows is the centrepiece of Thomas's proficient thriller: a contrived but decently executed quarter of an hour's worth of hairpin bends, vertiginous drops, rock falls and dynamited bridges as Campbell, Boyden and MacDonald strive to outwit Morgan and has vicious crew and get the convoy up to the Kingdom. Scenes of truck wheels spinning and failing to gain traction as chasms yawn beneath them homage Clouzot's 'Wages of Fear' (released three years earlier), while the mechanics of the hoist and its tense ascent of the unforgiving mountainside predate 'Where Eagles Dare' by more than a decade.

This and a couple of other set-pieces (a night attack on the Kingdom and the inevitable climax as the jerry-built dam bursts) tick the right boxes; Baker is rugged, menacing and properly hissable as the villain; the Rockies provide a dramatic backdrop (even if Ernest Steward's cinematography does tend to come on a bit like a tourist brochure); and at a tight 100 minutes it never outstays its welcome.

On the flipside, the presence of half of Thomas's usual stable of Rank Organisation bit-players is somewhat offputting - you know you're in Canada because of the mountains but it all seems a bit East End, dahnit? - and Bogarde resolutely fails to gel with Barbara Murray in the shoehorned-in romantic subplot. The ending's a bit of a cop-out, as well, but to be fair it's replicated more or less faithfully from the source material (the only false note in Innes's otherwise pacy and atmospheric novel). Thomas's worst sins, though, are his blithe rejection of the standard editing room modus operandi of actually having shots that match. I don't think I've ever seen more screamingly blatant day-for-night shots than in 'Campbell's Kingdom'. Day-for-night? More like bright-blue-sky-for-pitch-black. The high bright sun, indeed.

*The latter a belated, almost cameo-like, return to the role.

**No relation to the prominently-chinned actor.

Appointment in London

Glancing back at 2007's inaugural Dirk-fest, I see that in a somewhat tossed-off review I rubbished 'The Spanish Gardener' as "a nothing film".

Which it is. I make no retraction of that statement.

Where I have sinned in that long-ago article is my dismissal of Philip Leacock as "a journeyman director ... his only other film of note is the WWII melodrama 'Appointment in London'."

Reapproaching 'Appointment in London' for this year's Dirk-fest, I realise I may have been hasty in that description. I remembered 'Appointment in London' as melodramatic because of the romantic rivalry between brash American pilot Mac Baker (William Sylvester) and driven British Wing Commander Tim Mason (Bogarde) over Eve Canyon (Dinah Sheridan), a widowed naval intelligence officer. I remembered it as melodramatic for its red-herring "careless talk costs lives" subplot.

But there's more to 'Appointment in London'; more than its thuddingly clunky title suggests. Let's get that title out of the way before we go any further. The film is set mostly on a Bomber Command airbase (presumably in Lincolnshire: it's very flat) and the title refers to the invitation to Buckingham Palace received by Pilot Officer Pete Greeno (Bryan Forbes) - nicknamed "the Brat" for his casual, daring-do attitude - to collect the DSO and bar.

Quite the Mr Popular is Greeno. Only Mason isn't too happy about his habit of making post-mission phone calls - in code. Not wanting to believe that Greeno might be a turncoat, Mason browbeats the truth out of him: the calls are to "a girl", to let her know he's safe. Mason tears him off a strip, then dismisses him. On Greeno's next bombing run, before he can keep his appointment in London, his plane crash lands on his return and he's killed outright.

It's against the sobering effect that Greeno's death has on the airbase that Mason's obsession with completing yet another and another mission is contrasted. He's notched up 87 as the film opens and both his superior and the Medical Officer are urging him to quit. 30 missions was the standard for a tour of duty on Bomber Command, with airmen lucky if they survived a third of that number. Mason's total - and his determination to push it up to 90 - comes across as borderline suicidal.

His last few death-baiting flights play out against his burgeoning relationship with Eve, their romance further counterpointed by the arrival at the base - looking for closure - of Greeno's mystery "girl": actually his very homely wife Pamela (Anne Leon). It's with mixed feelings, then, that Mason undertakes that fateful 90th mission. A nasty accident before the plane has even left the ground suggests that the flight might be jinxed ...

Easy to see why I'd recalled 'Appointment in London' as a melodrama. It has all the elements. But Leacock clearly isn't interested in them. They're only there as an excuse for a plot. Leacock's agenda is the minutiae of life in Bomber Command: the men, the planes, the equipment, the cameraderie, the drawn out periods of waiting between bombing runs and the proximity of violent and fiery death during them. What he isn't interested in, despite the cheesier aspects of the script, are gung-ho heroics, tub-thumping jingoism or the target for Mason's 90th mission being a secret base of our-best-chance-to-shorten-the-war importance.

I may have missed it, but I don't think Leacock really bothers identifying what the target for said mission is. The point is, the pilots and master bombers and radio operators and tailgunners took the same risks, chanced their lives in what were colloquially known as "flying coffins", and often limped back home riddled with anti-aircraft fire or an engine gone and it didn't matter if they'd been sent out to destroy a factory, a munitions dump or a railway yard (never mind something as dramatic as, say, a heavy water plant) - it was in a night's work.

I'm no plane buff but the few comments 'Appointment in London' garners on IMDb are from guys who seem to know there stuff and the consensus of opinion is that Leacock employs the right planes and the right technical details in accurate locations and situations. Disregard the Mason/Baker/Eve triangle and some talky longueurs, and 'Appointment in London' proves a thoughtful, detailed and quietly engrossing film.

Darling

Promiscuity. Infidelity. Celebrity. Degeneracy. Sex 'n' snobbery. Orgies. Abortion. Kleptomania.

By rights, 'Darling' ought to be a full-throttle, rip-snorting (or coke-snorting) lurid delight, a guilty pleasure of the highest order. In the hands of Russ Meyer it could have been a trashy soft-core romp a la 'Beyond the Valley of the Dolls'. With Richard Lester at the helm, it might have been the bona fide document from the Swinging Sixties that actual director John Schlesinger so obviously wanted it to be.

'Darling' starts with Diana Scott (Julie Christie) recounting her life story to an interviewer. There she is as a little girl on a school outing. There she is as a little girl in the school play. There she is aged twenty and all grown up with it, sashaying through the great metropolis when up comes a production assistant on a current affairs show presented by Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde). She contributes a few casual lines to an interview on social attitudes and the generation gap and next thing you know Diana and Robert are merrily swanning around together.


Trouble is, he's married. So's she. Oooooh, controversial. Robert comes off as the heel for leaving his wife and children (a shot of him, suitcase in each hand, trudging sheepishly away from the house pulls back through the living room window to reveal he's left an envelope on the mantlepiece addressed to the luckless Mrs Gold), while Diana does an effective character assassination on her ex in just a couple of lines of voiceover (he's a "nice boy" apparently, and "playing at" being married). I may have missed it, but I don't think the poor chap even gets the dubious courtesy of an envelope on the mantlepiece.

Diana and Robert set up home together, but Robert does inconsiderate things like typing up the scripts for his TV show and treating Diana sensitively, so she does what any self-respecting vacuous amoral chic chick would do: she hooks up with filthy rich advertising executive Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey)* who has no class but looks good when he takes his shirt off and has a flash apartment and a Mercedes sports car. Because these are the things that count.

Sorry, was I being facetious?

Outwardly 'Darling' is a serious, multi-layered film that deconstructs the archetypes of the Sixties as determinedly as the aforementioned Richard Lester celebrated them. Not the least of its achievements is suggesting that Diana's outwardly respectable and starchly middle class parents are the people who schooled her in the elegantly empty small talk and studied self-confidence that greases the wheels as she makes her way up in so-called society.

Schlesinger's satire finds its outlet in the panoply of supporting characters: the sleazy MP (a pre-'Porridge' Brian Wilde) who drools over Diana, the dissipated photographer who captures an image that wins her the first of many lucrative modelling and advertising contracts, the fast-buck producers who cast her in a B-movie potboiler, and Miles's bohemian friends in Paris who think nothing of making out in front of each other and playing truth or dare. Ooooooh, even more controversial. (This, incidentally, is the most awful moment in the film: Schlesinger trying to be all arty and European and stylishly debauched but concocting, instead, a scene so flatly unerotic and unintentionally hilarious it makes your average Robin Askwith tits 'n' milkmen flick look like 'Citizen Kane'.)

Schlesinger draws parallels between these various stratas of society. When Diana meets the MP it's at a fundraiser whose rich patrons are doing their bit for the poor (particularly the minorities). Schlesinger cuts from a fat white woman stuffing herself to three black youths done up in period garb as serving boys watching her resentfully. Later, when Diana meets the Paris set, their liberal credentials are established by the inclusion of a sexually active black man as one of their own.

The fashions, the cars and the yappy John Dankworth score root 'Darling' firmly in the Sixties (albeit a view of the Sixties filtered through the consciousness of a director critical of the rapidly changing social mores). So, embarrassingly, do the unreconstructed values. For all that the fundraiser scene makes a point about prejudice, hypocrisy and condescension, the overall treatment of foreign characters (British Africans and Italians come off the worst) is as dubious as the treatment of gays (stereotypical) and the treatment of women. Schlesinger and scripter Frederic Raphael's portrayal of Diana is borderline misogynistic. With a less appealing, less charismatic and less meltingly beautiful actress than Julie Christie - and without Dirk Bogarde lending real acting chops to the first third of the film - 'Darling' would have been scuppered.

Fortunately, though, Christie is iconic. She turns an underwritten cypher into a sometimes confused, sometimes provocative and ultimately tragic heroine. The final scenes, where the loneliness and the desperation close in, are compelling. It's her film in the final analysis, but Bogarde's in the first third. As the cerebral, sardonic, slightly rumpled Robert - a man who ruefully walks out on his family only to find his new life isn't what he wanted - Bogarde brings depth and gravitas to the proceedings. His is a slow-burn performance - he mostly underplays, giving Christie the limelight - culminating in his discovery of Diana's affair with Miles and their verbal showdown as they leave a private viewing at a swanky art gallery. Diana makes to hail a cab, but Robert stops her.

Robert: We're not taking a taxi.
Diana: Why not?
Robert: I don't take whores in taxis.
Diana: What do you mean?
Robert: That's what you are, isn't it? A little whore. Isn't it? You've been back from Paris two days already. If you don't want me to find out what you're doing, don't leave your ticket and passport lying about all over the place.
Diana: Robert, I knew you'd get the wrong end of the stick ...
Robert: Your idea of fidelity is not having more than one man in the bed at the same time. You're a whore, baby, just a whore. And I don't take whores in taxis.

By nature of its attack on superficiality, 'Darling' inhabits a shallow milieu. Correspondingly, as the film progresses and Diana moves towards what is simultaneously her apotheosis in social climbing and the final stage of her objectification by the male gaze, characters become little more than set-dressing; emotions drain to hollowness and a facade of bored civility prevails. In depicting the stagnant, 'Darling' stagnates. The break-up between Diana and Robert is the high point of the film, their argument played out as, still in evening dress, they take the escalators down into an Underground station, the other punters nondescript, shabby and vaguely embarrassed by these two elegant individuals letting rip at each other, Diana's accent slipping as she yawps at him like a fishwife. It's the first, and only, time that the social masks drop and something raw, passionate and all-too-human is revealed.

*He makes his money by selling products and his name's Brand. I'll bet they were up all night thinking of that one! (By the same token Gold is belatedly identified as the only man who was worth anything to Diana, so he's called Gold. Diana is an attention seeking blonde whose sole talent is saturating the media with her own image, and who ends up a princess by dint of a loveless marriage, so she's called --- ... oops, better not go there.)

King & Country

'King & Country' - the very title just the first of several bitter pills the viewer is forced to swallow - was the third of Dirk Bogarde's five collaborations with Joseph Losey. For me, it's second only to 'The Servant'. Powerful, unflinching and bludgeoningly grim, it's no surprise it did sod all at the box office. Forty-five years on, its impact is undiminished. This is partly because of Losey's low-key and brutally realistic portrayal of trench warfare, and partly because of a cluster of great performances. It says something that this is one of the rare titles on the Bogarde filmography that he doesn't steal from his co-stars, wittily and elegantly, every time he's onscreen.

Briefly, and with SPOILERS ALL OVER THE PLACE, 'King & Country' concerns the trial and execution (told you it was a spoiler fest!) of Private Hamp (Tom Courtenay), charged with desertion after he leaves his post and goes walking away from the British lines. He was, he explains, trying to walk home. Assigned to defend him, educated officer Captain Hargreaves (Bogarde) finds himself unexpectedly moved by the working class, simple-minded Hamp.

Convinced that Hamp - a volunteer (on account of his wife and mother pressuring him) who has been in the trenches a soul-destroying three years - acted while the balance of his mind was disturbed, and with sympathetic testimony from Hamp's superior Lieutenant Webb (Barry Foster), Hargreaves makes his case. But he's up against by-the-book prosecutor Captain Midgley (James Villiers) and a Colonel (Peter Copley) who's already made his mind up about Hamp. To make matters worse, Captain O'Sullivan (Leo McKern), the orderly Hargreaves hopes will corraborate the medical evidence, refuses to play ball, scorning the suggestion of nervous breakdown or mental illness and asserting that Hamp was basically yellow.

Bogarde's verbal duel with McKern in this scene is intense. Bogarde - at the height of his fame in the early 60s - was wilfully casting off the matinee idol image and engaging with progressively more challenging material. Gone the dashing heroism of 'Ill Met by Moonlight' and 'They Who Dare'; in its place a harried, world-weary characterisation that points the way towards the controversial roles of his later career - a shift already heralded by his slithery turn as Barrett in 'The Servant', made a year before 'King & Country'. McKern is also on top form, Foster does easily the best work of his career, and Courtenay disappears into his character so completely it's as if he were a chameleon.

'King & Country' opens with a series of extended close-ups of a war memorial - a huge, joyless sculpture of a soldier lying lifelessly on a plinth - and ends with an archive photo of a dead horse adrift in the shell-scarred mud of no-man's-land. Losey incorporates other archive photos at pertinent moments. When Hamp speaks of trying to walk home, Losey cuts to a picture of a featureless terraced house that could be on any street in any working class town anywhere in England, a woman sweeping up outside. The image is anonymous to the point of bland. Then the poster on the wall leaps out at you: 'WOMEN OF BRITAIN SAY GO!', a reminder like a slap in the face of the spousal and matriarchal motivation behind Hamp's enlistment.

Losey's black-and-white camerawork conjures life in the trenches as a symphony of mud. The incessant crump of shells - sometimes way off in the distance, sometimes dangerously close - is a constant. The rain is ceaseless. Shattered emplacements, fetid puddles and the agony of waiting. 'King & Country' is a war film without scenes of battle. The Germans are never shown. They don't need to be. The trenches themselves, the conditions in which men are forced to live (and die) - these are the enemy. What men become when war comes to define them, what they are reduced to by the stubbornness and arrogance of their leaders - these are the enemy. There are no Germans in 'King & Country'. They're not needed. The British are bastards enough.

Hamp's fellow tommies stage a mock trial with a rat standing in for him. Cruel? Definitely, but nothing compared to their behaviour on the eve of Hamp's date with the firing squad. They crowd into his cell, ply him with rotgut. Thoroughly drunk, he is barely aware of what is happening as they blindfold him and enact a mock execution. The whole thing degenerates into a grotesque approximation of blind-man's-bluff, Hamp - finally snapping - blundering around arms akimbo, yelling "Where are you, you bastards?" just as the padre enters. It's a horrible scene to watch and as damning an indictment of man's inhumanity to man and the pointlessness of war as anything in 'All Quiet on the Western Front' or 'Paths of Glory'.

Passing judgement on Hamp, the Colonel dictates his report for onward transmission to his superiors. He omits everything Hargreaves introduced into evidence, adding "Don't make any mention of mental illness. They don't need to know about that kind of thing at HQ." When Hamp is taken out to be shot, it is under the watchful gaze of O'Sullivan; his executioners are the men who made a mockery of his last night alive, and Webb is forced to give the order to fire. When the fusilade fails to kill him outright, it is left to Hargreaves to adminster the coup de grace.

Told you there were spoilers. Told you it was grim.

Introducing the Third Annual Dirk-Fest

I started this blog in November 2007. Less than a month after my inaugural post, two events coincided: I found myself laid up ill and my wife (then my girlfriend) took pity on me and bought me the 'Screen Icons' Dirk Bogarde box set to cheer me up. I was off work a week and watched all seven of the DVDs in the set in short order - and blogged about them just as rapidly.

Bogarde has long been my favourite actor. He had a waspish sense of the sardonic about him coupled with a sometimes camp sometimes brooding tendency to engage with the dark side of his characters, kind of like Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward crossed with Jack Nicholson or Harvey Keitel. His eight volumes of autobiography are like old friends to me, books I've returned to time after time, often revisiting a specific passage or turn of phrase (Bogarde on an American limo driver who deposits him with a patently insincere have a nice day: "I nearly thanked him"), even though it's been demonstrated by his biographer John Coldstream that wholesale swathes of poetic licence were woven into the fabric of his memoirs.

Speaking of Coldstream, his biography of Bogarde is one of the best examples of its kind, up there with Kevin Brownlow's book on David Lean or David Weddle's account of Sam Peckinpah's turbulent life and career. It was 'Ever, Dirk', edited by Coldstream from reams of Bogarde's correspondence that prompted The Second Annual Dirk-Fest in late 2008.

The films covered so far have been:

The First Annual Dirk-Fest (2nd - 12th December 2007)
The Blue Lamp
Hunted
The Sleeping Tiger
The Spanish Gardener
Victim
The Servant
Accident

The Second Annual Dirk-Fest (25th September - 26th October 2008)
The Night Porter
The Singer Not the Song
A Bridge Too Far
Death in Venice
These Foolish Things
Ill Met By Moonlight
The Damned

Welcome, then, to The Third Annual Dirk-Fest. We've got three very different war films, a despatch from the Swinging Sixties, an oddity that pretty much stands as Bogarde's only sci-fi movie (or social horror, depending on how you want to look at it), a spy spoof and an example of the clean-cut heart-throb type product that made Bogarde a matinee idol in his younger years.

Coming attractions / Sam, Dirk, Andrei and the Class of 1984

The Peckinpah poll closed earlier today with ‘Straw Dogs’ just beating ‘The Wild Bunch’ into first place with 14 votes (24%), while Pike Bishop and the Bunch take 13 votes (22%) and happily mow down an army of Mexican revolutionaries while they're at it.

The big surprise was ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’ in third place with 13%. For a long time, I was convinced I was in a minority for loving this movie: most people I talked to had never heard of it, others just plain didn’t like it. I remember a screening at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema as part of their now-defunct "Shots in the Dark" festival, where half of the audience responded enthusiastically to Peckinpah’s dark-to-the-point-of-nihilistic humour while the other half sat there in stony silence.

In joint fourth place, ‘Ride the High Country’, ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’ and ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ garnered 5 votes (8%) apiece. Out where the iron crosses grow, there were 3 votes (5%) for Bloody Sam's only war movie. ‘The Getaway’ made off with 2 votes (3%), while the elegiac ‘Junior Bonner’ and the less-than-elegiac ‘The Killer Elite’ and ‘The Osterman Weekend’ scraped 1 vote (1%) each.

There was no love at all for ‘The Deadly Companions’, ‘Major Dundee’ or ‘Convoy’.

And for a while I was quite impressed that the computer had worked out the percentages for me ... until I realised that the whole thing only adds up to 94%. I'm going to assume the missing 6% is in honour of his acclaimed TV movie ‘Noon Wine’ and move swiftly on.

The Peckinpah tribute gets underway on 1st December with the whole month dedicated to the maverick maestro here on The Agitation of the Mind. Feel free to join in. Swipe one of these banners, share your thoughts on all things Peckinpah and let’s mark the 25th anniversary of his passing on 28th December in fine style.

In the meantime - and celebrating a personality about as different to Sam Peckinpah as you can get - October kicks off with the Third Annual Dirk-Fest. Mid month, the Tarkovsky retrospective considers two very different works by the chuckle-free Russian director, while Sergio Leone takes centre stage on 26th October when I’ll be writing about ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ as part of This Distracted Globe’s "Class of 1984" blog-a-thon.

Marion Cotillard

The almost impossibly gorgeous - and ferociously talented - Marion Cotillard is 34 today.

Which is the only reason I needed to post this picture.

When Eight Bells Toll

In the late '20s to mid '30s, huge amounts of "quota quickies" were pumped out to satisfy the terms of the Cinematograph Films Act 1927, which stipulated that a certain percentage of all films shown at British cinemas had to be British productions.

I'm convinced a similar piece of legislation was in force between the early '60s and the late '70s, requiring that a certain percentage of all films produced were Alistair Maclean adaptations. Some were big-budget, big box-office affairs such as 'Where Eagles Dare' (already covered on these pages as part of the personal faves project) and the inexplicably popular 'Guns of Navarone'; others, like 'Puppet on a Chain' and 'Caravan to Vaccares', were interchangeable Euro productions that deserve the "quota quickie" comparison.

Then you've got the mid-tier stuff. 'Fear is the Key' has a plank-like Barry Newman in the lead role, but boasts good turns from John Vernon, Ben Kingsley, Ray McAnally and a gorgeous Suzy Kendall, and a terrific, poundingly edited car chase. 'Breakheart Pass' is a weird conflation of Agatha Christie mystery and wild west iconography which, thanks to Lucien Ballard's sumptuous cinematography, has the look of a Michael Cimino film. Or there's 'Force 10 from Navarone', which I personally prefer to its overlong and self-important predecessor. While no-one's idea of great cinema, 'Force 10 from ~' is less talky and more action-packed than 'Guns of ~', with shoot-outs, knife fights and a blow-the-dam/destroy-the-bridge finale that manages to rise above some obvious model work.

'When Eight Bells Toll' slots into this mid-tier. Etienne Perier's direction is largely pedestrian, much of the action indifferently staged, the romantic subplot shoehorned in and devoid of any frisson, and the story twisted into overplotted WTF-ism the way only Alistair Maclean could.

Basically: naval operative Philip Calvert (Anthony Hopkins) and intelligence bod Hunslett (Corin Redgrave) are despatched by spymaster Uncle Arthur (Robert Morley) to Tobermory on the Isle of Mull, to investigate a spate of hijackings which have targetted ships carrying gold (can't you just tell this is a Maclean plot?). Posing as marine biologists, their ship is immediate boarded by "customs officials". Calvert makes them as bad guys straightaway. Later, a couple of locals hand out a beating intended to warn him off. It doesn't work. Uncle Albert, concerned that Calvert's a maverick and contemptuous of his superiors, sends a couple of crack commando types to sneak aboard a ship he's earmarked as the hijackers' next target. When they turn up dead, Calvert wonders if there's any connection to the recent appearance of a flashy yacht belonging to a Greek shipping tycoon (look, I said this was a Maclean adaptation, okay? what were you expecting? subtlety? characterisations that didn't rely on stereotyping?). Unsurprisingly, there is.

It all gets needlessly complicated, with a kidnapping subplot thrown in alongside Calvert's attraction to duplicitous femme fatale Charlotte (Nathalie Delon), whose motives couldn't be more obvious if she had "I'm secretly in league with the bad guys" tattooed on her forehead.

Then Uncle Arthur turns up and the maverick undercover agent and his port-sipping old-school-tie boss are forced to work together.

I guess the intention was that Calvert and Uncle Arthur would provide a sparky comedic double act, but by this time - roughly the mid-way point - Perier has established a fairly dour atmosphere, making brooding use of the rugged Scottish landscape and the dark rolling waves of the North Atlantic, while the action is devoid of heroics or Hollywood veneer (although I stand by my earlier comment about indifferent staging: a fist fight is lackadaisically choreographed, a helicopter crash shoddily effected) and the resulting shift in tone is as out of place as Walter Stott's magnificently over-the-top score.

Striving for the immediacy of Monty Norman's James Bond theme and the urgency of David Shire's 'Taking of Pelham One Two Three' soundtrack, it swerves between them and emerges as a souped-up big band swing-fest. And it kicks in, without any variation or modulation, every time anything remotely actionful happens. A helicopter takes off - BAM! the music erupts. A speedboat zips across the harbour - POW! it's that OTT theme again. It's barmy, intrusive and incongruous - it's genius! The cast is solid. Notwithstanding the ill-judged Calvert/Uncle Albert buddy movie concept, Hopkins and Morley are on fine form. 'When Eight Bells Toll' was only Hopkins' fourth or fifth movie and his first leading role, and he makes mundanity memorable, delivering servicable dialogue as if it were laced with meaning. Lower down the credits, Maurice Roeves as a seat-of-the-pants helicopter pilot, Del Henney as a gun-toting heavy and Jack Hawkins (dubbed by Charles Grey) as the shipping magnate are all value for money.

There's also a brilliantly cold-hearted scene where Calvert, cold-cocking an antagonist, wraps a chain around the man's legs and drops him overboard; a human anchor! Plenty of films would have chickened out and had him dragged back up, still alive, to be handed over to the authorities. 'When Eight Bells Toll' doesn't. The dude gets chucked overboard and stays overboard; he's a goner. Calvert, like Smith in 'Where Eagles Dare', is a typical Alistair Maclean do-or-die man-of-action protagonist. But because the average Maclean hero is utterly predictable doesn't mean he can't be a bit of a bastard.

Alistair Cooke at the Movies

Since Alistair Cooke's death in March 2004, his legacy has passed from the airwaves to the printed page. Reprints of 'Alistair Cooke's America' and 'Six Men' have appeared, as well as a comprehensive single-volume selection of his 'Letters from America', the long presumed lost manuscript 'American Journey', and themed volumes of his writing which chronicle his political commentary and his love of golf.

Now we have 'Alistair Cooke at the Movies', edited by Geoff Brown: 300 pages of film reviews, character sketches on the good and the great, and general musings on moviegoing. The earliest pieces date from his college years in the late 1920s, when he contributed reviews to The Granta; largely written in a florid, gee-whiz-check-out-my-IQ undergraduate style, they contain trace elements, nonetheless, of the erudition and dry wit that would charm generations of listeners across seven decades of radio broadcasts.

Indeed, as Brown points out in his introduction Cooke's inaugural broadcast for BBC radio programme The Cinema "reads almost like a 'Letter from America'. As so often, he's describing a New York Scene - Broadway's riot of electric lights. He's precise, vivid, personal; and he's drawing us in."

As the talks for The Cinema continue - they are supplemented by articles for Sight & Sound and the Spectator - Cooke reveals himself as a proletariat of film criticism. He sees movies, sometimes several times over, with paying audiences rather than form his opinions in the rarefied atmosphere of the press screening. He has no truck with the idea that foreign movies are sacrosanct or should be discussed within different perameters just because they're foreign. He makes no apology for enjoying the mainstream.

It should be noted that the majority of what's collected here dates from the 1930s, and the mainstream of Cooke's preference is the cinema of Charlie Chaplin and Frank Capra, Henry Hathaway and Michael Curtiz, Fritz Lang and Cecil B de Mille; the cinema of Robert Donat and John Barrymore, Claudette Colbert and Myrna Loy, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. What Cooke would have made of today's mainstream is anybody's guess. By the 1970s, he's already finding bona fide classics 'The Godfather' and 'Taxi Driver' "appalling.

This, for me, is where the collection doesn't work. As a sparkling, slightly indulgent celebration of cinema in the '30s, the book is a gem. Outside of that decade ... hmmm.

Alistair Cooke always struck me as a man for whom elegance was paramount. For someone so suave and debonair, I guess the edgy, visceral, exciting wave of film-making that swept through American cinemas in the '70s must have been like a slap in the face. The small amount of commentary he affords to Coppola, Scorsese et al demonstrates an anachronistic sensibility.

A quick skim through the index reveals a fixation on Carole Lombard, Katherine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper and Loretta Young. A just as cursory perusal brings up a list of the missing, particularly in the director's chair: Raoul Walsh, Orson Welles, Robert Aldrich, Sam Fuller, Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols. Absent, too, are Powell & Pressburger, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders.

Still, there is plenty that is effective in 'Alistair Cooke at the Movies', notably in a piece where the voice of the refined raconteur recedes ever-so-slightly and a more incisive point of view comes to the fore. Such as Cooke discussing Greta Garbo - not in the context of her prowess as an actress, but in terms of her manufactured image; her status as a commodity: "Hollywood has never made an effort to discover the particular human being that was Greta Gustafsson. Somebody saw possibilities of simplifying that complex creature, of reducing it to the proportions of a gigantic sullen doll. And they called it Greta Garbo. As they planned, she has become every man's harmless fantasy mistress. By remaining a fiction ... she remains the safest and most easily disposable of sirens ... She gives you the impression that if your imagination has to sin, it can at least congratulate itself on impeccable taste."

I can't help but raise a glass to Alistair Cooke's own sense of impeccable taste - not to mention his seemingly effortless capacity for the impeccably turned phrase - even if I don't always agree with him.

TARKOVSKY RETROSPECTIVE: Mirror

For some reason, when I started out on the Andrei Tarkovsky retrospective, I took to writing italicised plot synopses as preambles to the articles proper. You'll notice there isn't one for 'Mirror'. There's a reason for this: the film isn't about anything.

Well, actually it is. It's about childhood and memory and the intensely personal interplay of the two in Tarkovsky's own life. 'Mirror' was immensely important and meaningful to him. In 'Time Within Time', Kitty Hunter-Blair's translation of his diaries from 1970 - 1986, he repeatedly dwells on the necessity of making it, every reference steeped in the nostalgia of his own past. Even while he's ostensibly busy working on 'Solaris', his thoughts are consumed with making 'Mirror'.

However, for all that I've read 'Time Within Time' and have a slightly-better-than-average working knowledge of Tarkovsky's family history and working life, I must confess that 'Mirror' doesn't mean much at all to me.

Werner Herzog once described the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard as "intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film". Of Tarkovsky himself, the Bavarian maverick had this to say: "[he] made some beautiful films but he is, I fear, too much the darling of the French intellectuals, something I suspect he worked a little bit towards". I'm very much inclined to agree with Herzog on the evidence of 'Mirror'. Every frame of it screams "art film".

As a viewing experience, I find 'Mirror' too insubtantial in its construct and enigmatic in tone - and deliberately so - to engage with it on any level. It never coheres, either narratively (which in itself is no big deal: Tarkovsky was never big on narrative anyway) or in terms of the kind of internal logic which lends, say, David Lynch's 'Mulholland Drive' a sense of structure and completeness in and of itself even though individual set-pieces may be baffling and the denouement less a conclusion than an ouroboros.

I wonder how much Lynch is influenced by Tarkovsky. In its weirder moments, 'Mirror' puts me in mind of Lynch's erratic genius - particularly Tarkovsky's conjuration of a rural environment in which the commonplace is suddenly disturbed by a burning barn, a chicken killed for the pot becomes a statement on the loss of innocence, and gusts of wind through long grass seem mysterious and portentous. He also seems to have influenced Hideo Nakata: the best scene in the film (a black-and-white dream sequence) conjures an image that suggests Sadaka in 'The Ring' has Russian ancestry.

These are images redolent of bad dreams and proof positive of Tarkovsky's ability to achieve a sense of the dream-like on screen. Elsewhere, though, 'Mirror' is curiously flat, Georgiy Rerberg's cinematography bland in comparison to Vadim Yusov's work on 'Ivan's Childhood', 'Andrei Rublev' and 'Solaris'. It's an irony coloured darker by the compromised circumstances in which Tarkovsky made virtually all of his films, and one I'd rather not dwell on. I want to like 'Mirror', believe me. I want to find in its pastoral reveries an evocation of childhood that is timeless and universal, one that acts as a corollary to the too-soon-ended childhood depicted in his first film. But I'm afraid I find 'Mirror' an artily self-conscious and inscrutable film and the irony remains that Tarkovsky's most personal film - the one closest to his own life - is also his most lifeless.

TARKOVSKY RETROSPECTIVE: Solaris

The future. Chris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is sojourning at his father (Nikolai Grinko)’s country estate when he is asked to undertake a mission to a space station orbiting the ocean planet Solaris to assess the cosmonauts’ mental state and report on the value, or otherwise, of continuing the project.

Kelvin is visited by Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky), who believes he saw something while flying over the surface of Solaris; however, footage shot from his craft revealed only clouds and he was discredited at subsequent hearings. Kelvin is dubious and Burton departs angrily.

Arriving at the space station, Kelvin finds that crew member Dr Gibarian (Sos Sargsyan) has died; reviewing a tape Gibarian made before his death, the circumstances are revealed as suicide. The remaining crew members Dr Snaut (Juri Jarvet) and Dr Sartorius (Anatoli Solonitsyn) are behaving unusually and Snaut cautions Kelvin not to panic should he witness anything strange.

Kelvin comes to suspect that other people are on board and are being hidden by Snaut and Sartorius. Kelvin soon receives a "visitor" himself – his wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk). Problem is, Hari’s been dead for ten years: she killed herself following a bitter argument with Klein.


If the basic premise of ‘Solaris’ sounds melodramatic – the histrionic ‘Event Horizon’ is basically a fast-and-loose rip-off for the stalk ‘n’ slash generation – its execution is anything but. In Stanislaw Lem’s original novel, the emphasis is on the sheer alien-ness of what the scientists encounter on Solaris and how unprepared they are for it. This was a major theme in Lem’s fiction; he was famously contemptuous of science-fiction’s tendency to depict alien species as humanoid.

Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 adaptation focuses on the relationship between Kelvin and his late wife, relying heavily on flashbacks to document their increasingly fragile relationship.

Tarkovsky, though, turns his version into an aloof, cerebral meditation on family, spirituality and conscience. In other words, whereas Lem externalises (the novel is about mankind’s place in, and response to, the cosmos), Tarkovsky uses the vastness of space and the huge impenetrable vistas of the surface of Solaris itself in order to internalise. Herein lies both the film’s genius and its difficulty.

‘Solaris’ was the first Tarkovsky film I ever saw, back in 1991. It was shown as part of BBC2’s "Moviedrome" season, introduced by Alex Cox. I remember his exhortation not to let the slow pacing put you off, that ‘Solaris’ built to a conclusion that was – I think this is more or less how he put it – "on a conceptual level, better than the ending of ‘2001’."

Now, I’ve always been impressed by ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ – but primarily on an audio-visual level. It looks amazing and Kubrick’s choice of music is inspired. On any deeper level than that … hmmm, not convinced. (I’ve described my issues with ‘2001’ elsewhere on these pages: "I’m still no closer to deciding whether it’s a profound, cerebral, philosophical work of art, or a self-indulgent, egotistical, intellectually hollow con job.") So, with the possibility in mind that I was in for a more satisfying cinematic experience than ‘2001’, I settled down to watch ‘Solaris’.

And was captivated. The snail-like pace became hypnotic. The soundtrack, alternating between J.S. Bach’s Choral Prelude and Eduard Artemyev’s ethereal incidental music, was low-key where Kubrick’s choices were iconic artistic statements in and of themselves. There was something more chilling in Kelvin’s struggle with his own flawed humanity than in Dave Bowman’s conflict with the murderous HAL 9000. And there was that ending. At that stage of my (self-) education in cinema, ‘Solaris’ was a revelation. A science-fiction film where the sci-fi was in hock to intellectualism and not vice versa.

Then I began to discover Tarkovsky’s other works and I’ve experienced a paradigm shift. I still admire the film greatly, but I think that’s the thing: I admire ‘Solaris’ rather than like it. I prefer the immediacy of ‘Ivan’s Childhood’, the visceral intensity of ‘Andrei Rublev’, the poetic resonances of ‘Nostalgia’. ‘Solaris’ – brilliant as it is in many ways – is bloody hard work; as hard as ‘Stalker’ with its bleakly earned small moment of hope at the very end; as hard as ‘The Sacrifice’ with its Bergmanesque spiritual debate.

Tarkovsky’s first draft screenplay set much of the narrative on earth, with only the last third taking place on the space station. I think I’d have been happier watching this version. As well realised as the space station is (it’s typically Soviet: utilitarian, characterless and slightly weathered), it’s a bland backdrop to the dark drama being played out. The scenes on Kelvin’s father’s estate contain moments as achingly poetic as anything Tarkovsky achieved. The contrast, then, is brutally evident when the scene shifts to the space station and the visual beauty of the film drains away, no matter that Tarkovsky tries to retain a sense of aesthetics with occasional flashbacks to Kelvin’s childhood (images of earth, water and fire abound: Tarkovsky summons metaphors for life even as Kelvin soul-searches in the sterile confines of the space station) and reproductions of the old masters on the walls of Snaut’s library.

The other thing that troubles me is admittedly a personal issue. My relationship with my father has been a turbulent one that eventually resulted in estrangement. Conversely, my relationship with my wife has been every bit as loving and intimate as my relationship with my parents wasn’t. I won’t labour the context any further – this blog may be called The Agitation of the Mind, but that’s a still from Herzog under the title, not a psychiatrist’s couch – suffice it to say that this colours my perception of the final scene:

SPOILER ALERT

Sartorius, convinced the ocean dominating the surface of Solaris is a sentient being responsible for creating the "visitors", devises a scheme to transmit the thought patterns of one of the crew members (he "volunteers" Kelvin) to the ocean in an attempt to communicate. The experiment succeeds. The "visitors" disappear. Sartorius reports, however, that islands are starting to appear in the ocean. Kelvin reappears in the woodland surrounding his father’s estate. He approaches the house and peers through a window. He sees his father moving around inside, but something is "off" about the scene. Rain is falling, but the rain is inside the house. Moreover, his father seems impervious to it. Eventually his father comes to the door and Kelvin falls to his knees before him.

The camera pulls back as mist drifts above the house, across the woodland. The estate is revealed to be one of the islands on the surface of Solaris. Solaris has created, from Kelvin’s thought patterns, the thing he wants most in the world.

SPOILERS END

Personally, I'd have thought Kelvin would have more business seeking his wife’s forgiveness than his father’s.

PERSONAL FAVES: Django

Challenge ten people at random to write a synopsis of their favourite western, and I'm betting at least eight out of the ten would start "Deke/Zeke/Jake [delete as applicable] rides into town and ..."

In Sergio Corbucci's 'Django', the eponymous anti-hero walks into town and ...


Whoa. Let's back up a moment. Django (Franco Nero) doesn't even get into town before his misadventures start. Dragging a coffin behind him, Django arrives at a rope-bridge on the outskirts of town where he witnesses a group of Mexicans flogging a woman, Maria (Loredana Nusciak). Before he can intervene, the Mexicans are gunned down by a bunch of Yankees. Rather than rescuing Maria, however, it's their intent to tie her to a cross and burn her. This time Django does intervene.

So: body count already in double figures, a heroine who's earned the disapprobation of rival factions, and an enigmatic outsider about to play those selfsame antagonists off against each other. And we're only five minutes into the movie. Our boy hasn't even opened that coffin yet ...

Once in town, Django encounters the sadistic and xenophobic Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo), a man who gets his kicks forcing Mexican peasants to run for their life then shooting them in the back. He commands a private army (their uniform: KKK-style face masks, only red instead of white) as well as holding a post at a nearby US cavalry fort. A bar-room altercation sees Jackson's henchmen dead. Django casually enquires how many men he's got left. Forty-eight, Jackson replies. Django casually invites him to come back with all of them. Jackson obliges.

This is where our boy opens the coffin.

So: body count now pushing three figures courtesy of an off-the-wall shoot-out that most films would have saved for the denouement, and we've still got the little matter of Mexican revolutionary General Hugo Rodriguez (Jose Bodalo), his relationship with Django, their collaboration on a daring robbery at the very same US fort Major Jackson's affiliated with, and acts of betrayal and counter-betrayal that set up a truly excruciating finale where Django, his hands broken in a retributive beating, has to go up against his erstwhile antagonist while he can't even hold a gun, let alone pull the trigger.

Made in 1966, 'Django' was a cheaply and quickly produced spaghetti western, badly dubbed and aimed squarely at the American market. It became a phenomenon, spawning at least thirty sequels (only one of which, the slightly disappointing 'Django Strikes Again', was an official, linear follow-up with Nero reprising the title role). Countless other spaghetti westerns were quickly retitled to include the name Django, even though the character makes no appearance. Takeshi Miike's recent 'Sukiyaki Western Django' sets itself up as a bizarro prequel.

It also established Corbucci as the most popular and influential director of spaghetti westerns after Sergio Leone. Both were admirers of Kurosawa and saw 'Yojimbo' at impressionable stages in their careers. It's no coincidence that their breakthrough films - 'Django' for Corbucci, 'A Fistful of Dollars' for Leone - display similarities to Kurosawa's samurai classic.

'Django', though, ups the ante on even Leone's amoral reworking of 'Yojimbo'. Django is one of the genre's most inscrutable protagonists: he announces himself as Django, but refers to what's in the coffin as Django. He even refers to wanting to bury Django. Of course it's a fucking big gun in the coffin, not a person, so is Django admitting that he's lived by the gun for so long that he's lost his humanity to it, that the gun itself is Django and he's simply the mode of transport that hauls from one town to the next, one killing to the next? He has a grudge against Major Jackson over the killing of a former girlfriend, but the backstory is never revealed. Django saves Maria, but seems to abandon her to Rodriguez later on. The only other woman he takes an interest in, he uses to stage a diversion so he can steal off with a consignment of gold.

But he's angel compared to Jackson and Rodriguez. These two set the standard for corruption. Everyone's dirty. Even the town itself is a feculent mud-hole.

Corbucci ups the ante on the violence, too. There are fist fights, whippings, emasculation, death by pick-axe, a pre-'Reservoir Dogs' bit of ear-slicing and whole swathes of extras mown down when Django cuts loose with the Gatling gun.

And yet it's more than just a cheapie exploitationer. Enzo Barboni's cinematography is exceptional, Corbucci's direction is assured (in addition to the prerequisite shoot-outs and bar-room brawls, he pulls off an extended scene of Hitchcockian tension as Django attempts to abscond with the gold), and the film is rich in ambiguous imagery. Particularly religious imagery. Crosses are everywhere, from the marquetry on the top of Django's coffin, to the burning crosses Jackson's men carry, to the headstones in the cemetery where Django's final confrontation with Jackson occurs.

There's even a striking scene of Django, broken and remorseful, kneeling before a cross.

Umm. No. Wait. He's using it to aim his gun.