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50. The Red Shoes (1948, Powell and Pressburger) |
The Archers' epic, sprawling opus about love and dance stars Moira Shearer as Victoria Page, a young dancer who manages to score lessons with Boris Lermontov's (Anton Wallbrook) dance school. She's an instant hit, and eventually dances to world wide acclaim, particularly in the ballet 'the Red Shoes'. But when she falls for the company's composer Julian Crastner (Marius Goring), things begin to go wrong. I really enjoyed the Red Shoes, especially its sprawling scope. It gives a sense of grandeur to the subject of ballet, something that wouldn't usually get such a treatment. It's a beautiful film, and perhaps P+P's most visually arresting film that I've seen. The dance sequence, in particular, where the young Page finally gets up on stage and dances the Red Shoes, is visually breathtaking. An explosion of colour and art, all played out with an awe-inspiring technicality and physical precision, the sequence is the film's best. The characters are all well drawn too, particularly Wallbrook's Lermontov, who goes a long way in matching his performance in my personal Powell and Pressburger favourite, the Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. But the star is Moira Shearer as Page, a girl forced to choose between her two loves; dancing and her husband, Crastner. Beautifully written with a downbeat ending that suggests if she can't have both she would prefer neither, P+P's sprawling dance epic is a joy to watch. It's only downfall is the sheer length, and the luvvy attitude of some of the characters, which sometimes annoyed me, but other than that I was riveted from start to finish. JB. |
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49. Rome, Open City |
Awaiting review... |
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48. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford) |
Awaiting review... |
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46. To Be Or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch) |
Awaiting review... |
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46. I Walked With a Zombie |
I Walked With A Zombie is actually a loose adaptation of Jane Eyre, without the idiotic ending. Zombie takes the Rochester segment of Eyre and transports it to a plantation in the West Indies. Betsy is hired to care for Jessica Holland, the wife of Paul Holland, owner of a sugar plantation on the island of Saint Sebastian, an island in the Caribbean populated by the descendants of African slaves. The small white community all occupy positions of power, doctors and other officials. The black community practice voodoo and there is a strong belief in zombies. Jessica appears to have lost her will and is in a trance-like state, is it medical, or is the belief in zombies more justified than Betsy imagines? In one memorable scene, Betsy discovers Jessica sleepwalking at night, her whole appearance seemingly otherworldly and ghostly. Jessica's doctor puts this down to a tropical fever, but Betsy decides to investigate the voodoo cult. Like other films in Val Lewton's RKO horror series, I Walked With A Zombie is nowhere near as lurid as the title would suggest. Instead, it's a master-class in creating scares and atmosphere through the power of sound and suggestion. It also manages to create some incredible unnerving yet elegant images. The film's greatest achievement is the unforgettable walk through the sugar cane fields to find the Homfort where the voodoo cult perform their rituals, passing the zombie Carre-Four along the way. The hypnotic feel of the scene, where the women appear to float through the fields is so strong that I would rank the scene among the all-time cinema classics .While I think Carre-Four himself is one of the most memorable creations of the 40s. Zombie effectively blurs the edges between fantasy and reality by treating everything with such ambiguity. You're never really sure if Jessica suffers from a medical condition or a supernatural one. That sense of ambiguity that Lewton would bring to so many of his films is what has helped them survive and be recognised as the classics that they are, not just of horror cinema but of cinema as a whole. A compelling and poetic film that deserves to be seen and recognised as one of the finest of its era. DW.
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45. Key Largo |
Awaiting review...
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44. The Great Dictator (1940, Charles Chaplin) |
“The Great Dictator”, Chaplin’s last really great film (“Limelight” is good, but doesn’t match the standard of any of his classics), tells the story of a Jewish Barber (played by Chaplin) living in the ghetto, and his doppelganger Hynkel (also Chaplin) who is the dictator of Nazi-esque Tomania. Their fates, despite their different social statuses, wealth, and opinions, are oddly entwined, and Chaplin’s film studies how the effects of dictatorship are felt right down to the smallest entity. It was certainly a brave film to make, and it’s quite obvious how Chaplin’s film satirizes Nazi Germany and its dictator at the time, who had just started the second world war almost single-handedly. Most of the jokes stem from just how ridiculous his campaign actually is, and how his lust for destruction and domination tends towards the farcical. The scenes between Chaplin and a rival dictator, where their dictatorial respect makes way for blatant penis envy, are amongst the best in the film. Of course, Chaplin allows his trademark slapstick and sentimentality take the foreground, particularly in the scenes in the ghetto, and the romance between Chaplin and Paulette Godard’s Hannah is undeniably sweet. There are also some smart jokes to like, most notably how the two foreign dictators are reduced to pieces by some English Mustard, which – as one of them describes it – is “the really hard stuff”. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before from Chaplin, and it’s certainly more hit and miss than some of his earlier stuff (which is probably why I’m giving it a four rather than a five), but it’s certainly a worthy, respectable addition to the director’s considerable canon. JB.
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43. Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer) |
Set in a small Danish village in 1623, Day of Wrath is Dreyer's dark tale about the Danish church's persecution of women accused of witchcraft. Anne is married to the local vicar, Absalon. He's many years her senior and she is not in love with him, marrying him more out of gratitude than affection. When his son Martin comes to visit, he and Anne quickly become friends, then they fall in love and begin a secret relationship. At the same time, Anne grants refuge to Marte, a woman accused of witchcraft and fleeing from the church. Absalon discovers her and hears her confession. Marte taunts him over the accusations of witchcraft against Anne's mother and says she could easily accuse Anne of witchcraft. Absalon condemns Marte to death, largely to protect Anne from accusation. Meanwhile Anne is starting to wish death on Absalon so she can continue her relationship with Martin in the open. When tragedy strikes, Anne soon finds the blame falling on her. Day of Wrath is an extraordinarily beautiful film, the stark beauty of the images provide an interesting contrast with the darkness of the film's plot. Dreyer's intense film opens with horrific scenes of the torture and burning of a women accused of witchcraft. This downbeat introduction provides us with the mood for the rest of the film. There's a relentless sense of despair and doom hanging over this entire film. We know that the film isn't going to end well for all of the characters, we're just waiting to see how desperate their situations become. One of the film's strongest aspects is the psychological complexity of the characters. Despite much being made of the allegorical nature of the film, the characters aren't mere cyphers. They're fine examples of the mentality of townsfolk under extreme pressure and paranoia. Movin's Anne is a remarkable creation, a surprisingly sensual character for the period, easily able to stand alongside Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or Simone Simon in Cat People. Day of Wrath was filmed during Nazi occupation, and it is often claimed that the film is an allegory for the Nazi regime, and I think that's an understandable reading. A look at the hypocrisy of the church would be another strong reading, the church is ruled by men like Absalon, who preach of a higher power but are willing to bend the rules they claim to live by in order to get what they want. But I think Dryer had just as much interest in the way women were crushed by the men in their lives. DW.
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42. The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges) |
On a luxury cruise liner, the S.S. Southern Queen, a trio of con artists, Jean Harrington (Stanwyck), her father "Colonel" Harrington (Coburn) and his partner Gerald (Melville Cooper) plan to fleece rich and naive Charles Pike (Fonda), the heir to the Pike Ale fortune. Pike is a shy snake expert, fresh returned from an expedition up the Amazon. Things go wrong for the grifters when Jean falls for Pike and tries to protect him, but when he discovers the truth about her and ends the relationships, she goes all out for revenge. To the casual observer the screwball romantic comedies of the late 30s/40s are nothing more than lightweight throwaway affairs. How wrong they are, at their very best they were sophisticated, hilarious, intelligent and romantic, with far more equality between the sexes than the vast majority of modern day examples of the genre. Maybe that's because so many of the best screwball comedies actually set themselves up as a battle of the sexes. The women in the early comedies gave as good as they got, they didn't simply have to fall for the man's bumbling charm or teach him how to love. One of the most striking things about the screwball genre in general, and The Lady Eve in particular, is the way it's able to show the sexual desires of the leads and still maintain an easy and innocent charm that's proven near impossible to replicate (As films like What's Up, Doc? have proven). Sturges also blended more serious themes into his work, even if he did them with an often satirical eye. In The Lady Eve he looks at the fall of man, skilfully mixing it into the hilarious onscreen action, from literal pratfalls to references to Adam & Eve (Jean's pseudonym to fool Pike and Pike's love of snakes being the two biggest nods) and Pike's metaphorical fall when he rejects Jean. If you've ever seen a Preston Sturges film then it's pretty pointless raving to you about the writing, you already know what an incredible ear for dialogue Sturges had. The acting is superb as well. The often underrated Coburn is a blast as the "Colonel" and it's pretty much taken for granted that Stanwyck could nail this kind of role. It was Fonda who was the real surprise for me. In the kind of bumbling scientist role that Cary Grant would often take on, he makes the change in character from naive charm to prude to romantic lead look effortless. If you want to see comedy writing, acting and directing at it's finest, then you could do a lot worse than watching The Lady Eve. DW.
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41. Great Expectations (1946, David Lean) |
TRIVIA! The title song became the theme tune for Eddie Cantor's radio program. |
I’m not going to lie and say that I’m a huge Charles Dickens fan, because I’m not. That’s not to say I don’t like his books either, I just haven’t really got an opinion either way. I’ve read three or four of his books, and only one of them really lives up to the hype, and that’s Great Expectations. It’s the story of Pip (Wager as a boy, Mills as a man), a humble and naive orphan who becomes the inheritor of a large fortune from an unknown source. He leaves the shack where he has been raised and heads to London to learn how to be a proper gentleman, receiving help from Alec Guinness along the way. But the true heart of the story is Miss Havisham (Martita Hunt) and Estella (Valerie Hobson and Jean Simmons at various stages of age), the latter of which Pip is desperately in love with. With an anti-Lean short running time of 118 minutes, Great Expectations is different to most of the director’s oeuvre in one major way. I’ve always thought that Lean was great at doing two things; complex storytelling and complex settings. Unlike most of Lean’s later work (Bridge of the River Kwai, Ryan’s Daughter, A Passage to India and – of course – Laurence of Arabia), here Lean seems to put the emphasis on the former rather than the latter. And that works well within the context of the source novel. Dickens’ book, and subsequently Leans’ film, does have its moments of grandeur (including a most memorable scene on a boat), it’s mostly a straight-forward biopic of its fictional protagonist. This is the story of Pip, not the landscape around Pip. Like in most Lean films, the landscape does become a character, and London plays the part of the evil upper-class snobbery that Pip fears he is falling into. But here, the lead character is never overwhelmed by the terrain that is threatening his place in the film. I think that’s also why Lawrence of Arabia is so good (the desert, although important, is never more important than Larry himself) and Ryan’s Daughter (where scenery is so much more important than Robert Mitchum or Sarah Miles) is so average. Here, Pip is the heart of the story, and London provides enough of a challenge to him to be taken into account but not enough to overwhelm him and knock the balance of the movie. The performances here are great too, with Mills putting in the performance of a lifetime as the naive but stiff-upper-lipped Pip, and Guinness supplying excellent support in a somewhat limited and unchallenging role. JB. |
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