The 100 Most Underappreciated Films: Part Ten.
By Darren Williams
24th November 2009
91. The Bed Sitting Room (1969; Richard Lester)
Based on a satirical play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus, The Bed Sitting Room takes place in a London destroyed by the third World War, which lasted less than three minutes. A cast that includes some of the most iconic names of British comedy, including Ralph Richardson, Rita Tushingham, Spike Milligan, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Arthur Lowe and Michael Hordern try to make the best of life in this post-apocalyptic world. Nuclear fallout is affecting the survivors and producing strange mutations, people transform into furniture, a parrot and the titular bed-sitting room. The plot revolves around the first pregnancy of the post-war period, and the fate of the child after 17 months in the womb. The main focus of the satire, other than the absurdity of war itself, is the British idea of keeping things going in the face of destruction. The Bed-Sitting Room has been compared to the works of Beckett in the past and like Beckett it offers a combination of bleakness and absurdist black humour.
92. The Crimes of Stephen Hawke (1936; George King)
Tod Slaughter was the king of early British horror cinema. In truth it often doesn't really matter which of his films you might choose to see as they all have a similar quality to them. Slaughter plays an over-the-top villian with unrestrained glee and nothing else about the film usually matters. All that you're really watching the film for is the larger-than-life Slaughter in a lot of cases. I can't say all the time because there are certain films that work for reasons beyond Slaughter. The Crimes of Stephen Hawke is one of these films, with Slaughter playing a character with a more human side than normal. He seems to all to be be a respectable moneylender, but the fact is he's also known as The Spinebreaker and is currently on a murderous rampage across London.
93. Flaklypa Grand Prix (1975; Ivo Caprino)
Flaklypa Grand Prix is a stop-motion animated film from Norway. In the town Flaklypa, the inventor Reodor Felgen lives with a nervous, melancholy hedgehog named Ludvig, and a magpie named Solan. Reodor is an inventor who devises several weird contraptions. They discover that Rudolf, a former assistant, has stolen a design for a car engine and used it become a champion racing driver. They secure funding from an Arab sheik and enter the race themselves. Flaklypa has the same kind of quirky charm as the Wallace & Gromit cartoons, and given that both feature a human inventor with animal companions, you have to imagine it must have been an influence on Nick Park.
94. Grey Gardens (1975; Albert Maysles, David Maysles)
Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter (Big and Little Edie) are fallen aristocrats, relative of Jackie Kennedy, who despite their mansion home, live in poverty. They made headline news in America following a police raid and soon the Maysles were filming this documentary. The focus is on the dysfunctional relationship between the mother and daughter. Both of them feel like refugees from a Faulkner novel, or Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Little Edie performs for the character. She dances, threatens to leave and stays as flamboyant as possible. Performance is what drives her. You feel without an audience she'd cease to exist. Big Edie acts as if she doesn't care about the camera, but she's performing just as much as her daughter. The presence of cameras gives them the chance to reclaim some of their faded glory and they try their best to grab at their dreams.
95. Husbands (1970; John Cassavetes)
Husbands is a film that's not even considered a favourite among many Cassavetes fans. Many people find the mixture too maddening.Even by Cassavetes' terms, it's confrontational. There's an absolute refusal to compromise the characters or make them likeable in any way. Three New York friends, Archie (Falk), Harry (Gazzara) and Gus (Cassavetes), all are approaching middle-age, all are married and feeling trapped by it, and all are badly shaken by the death by heart attack of a close-friend. This has led them to contemplate their own mortality. They decide to go on a drinking binge following his funeral that sees them flying to London for afew days. The trip is a descent into despair involving drink, gambling, squabbling like children and cheating on their wives in an attempt to reach some form of self-discovery. Husbands is a bleak view of suburban life in the sixties and the way it trapped the individual. The leads have all been stunted by their responsibilites and what it means to be a man in suburbia. They're weighed down by the pressures of life, by the responsibilites of being 'husbands'. Even if they're bad ones. Of course that doesn't change the fact that these men would be have ended up unpleasant whereever life had taken them. They fully believe in their own macho bullshit. They think they can find truth in their debauchery, but when they return home the experience hasn't changed them at all and they'll all end up exactly the same as they were before the funeral.
96. Industrial Symphony No 1: The Dream of the Broken-Hearted (1990; David Lynch)
Industrial Symphony is a haunting collaboration between David Lynch, Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise. David Lynch was invited to stage a show at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music and this musical spectacle was a result. Taking its name from a series of art projects he created when he was a student, Industrial Symphony fits perfectly into Lynch's world. Lynch and Badalamenti took Cruise's music, basically half of her gorgeous 'Floating Into Night' album, and combined it with surreal imagery and a few new compositions in order to produce a unique concert. Ofcourse, Lynch being Lynch, this is no standard concert. It's more like a work of abstract theatre or performance art. Cruise floats in the air, various stage props include plastic dolls, the shell of a car, industrial smoke and flames, blinking lights and various supporting performances including a near-naked woman in the car, a dwarf sawing a log and a bizarre man on stilts. Lynch was always fond of industrial nightmares and this film feels like a throwback to the horrors of Eraserhead.
97. The Last Wave (1977; Peter Weir)
A group of Aboriginals are arrested and charged with murder, Richard Chamberlain plays a young middle-class lawyer, David Burton, assigned by Legal Aid to defend them. At first, ancient tribal rules prevent him from gaining information from the suspects. Burton has been suffering from strange, prophetic nightmares that seem to provide him with details about the case, so he steeps himself in Aboriginal history with one of the accused acting as his spiritual guide. But what does the case have to do with the freak weather conditions that have been battering Australia? If you judged Peter Weir only on his later Hollywood films, you'd probably have no idea that he could create a film as atmospheric and intelligent as The Last Wave. At least I wouldn't have anyway, Weir's Australian work is about as far removed from Ethan Hawke standing on a desk as it's possible to get. The Last Wave is shot through with unease and uncertainty. The unknown hangs over this film in the form of ancient tribal magic and the possibility of a coming armageddon, and Weir manages to make it both terrifying and seductive.
98. The Rebel (1960; Robert Day)
The Rebel finds Tony Hancock in his familiar guise of himself, at least the character who bore his name. Hancock was forever playing himself as a pompous little man, desperate to improve his lot in life, convinced of his own greatness, but constantly at war with everyone and everything that surrounded him. The Rebel sees Hancock playing a London clerk, fed up with his life and seeking rebellion in whatever minor ways he can find. He spends his spare time indulging his passion of becoming a great artist, usually sculpting monstrosities in his rented room. Frustrated with his life, the lack of appreciation for his 'art' and his job, he quits and moves to Paris where he attempts to pass himself off as an existentialist painter. Far more convincing as a speaker than he is as an artist, he becomes the leader of a new art movement, 'Infantile' art. He becomes a sensation among the pseudo-intellectual circles he moves in and eventually his name reaches the ear of an art expert. The expert mistakes the paintings of Hancock's friend for his own and exhibits them, believing them to be great works, turning Hancock into national icon in the process. Of course the problem comes in when Hancock is required to produce more great art.
99. Tropical Malady (2004; Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Weerasethakul crafts an enthralling, mesmerizing, experimental film from a relatively simple story. The plot begins with a group of soldiers in a field in Thailand. They've found a body and are posing with it and taking pictures of themselves gathered around the corpse. One of the group, Keng, finds himself attracted to a young man, Tong, who lives nearby with his family. Over the course of an idyllic summer they spend time together and Keng loves this pleasant but shy boy. But the boy vanishes at the end of the long summer. Then we begin the second half of the film where the story takes a real twist. In the film's second half, we're introduced to a local folk tale about a shaman who could transform into a wild animal. Keng enters the jungle on the trail of this mythical creature in the form of a tiger that's been killing local livestock. The jungle is a dreamlike space, where a tiger can become a man and it's possible to hold a conversation with a monkey. On first glance the second story seems to have little to do with the first. But of course they really are the same story at heart. The first story is in the form of an idyllic but bittersweet love tale and the second is an . unpredictable spiritual journey, but they both tell the same tale of the pursuit of overwhelming love. Along the way bringing up age-old themes like man's relationship with the natural world and sexual desire within the culture you live in.
100. Vampires in Havana (1985; Juan Padron)
Von Dracula, a mad scientist, finds a cure for vampire's affliction to sunlight, Vampisol. Dracula wants to announce how to make the drink free of charge over the radio, in order to help vampires everywhere. But when vampire leaders hear the news, they try to get the formula first in order to make a profit. Meanwhile American vampires make a lot of money from creating underground beaches for vampires and are planning on branching out, if the formula gets out then leader Johnny Terrori will lose everything. Dracula's nephew, Joseph is a trumpet player who has unwittingly been his uncle's test subject. Joseph becomes the target of a manhunt for all the vampires throughout the seedier sections of Havana. This gloriously insane animated film has the transgressive feel of a Bakshi mixed with a more whimsical sense of humour. It should be essential viewing for anyone interested in animated or offbeat cinema.