A Girl & A Gun

Advise & Consent (1962), Otto Preminger

I was disappointed to miss Laura when it screened last week, but managed to catch Advise & Consent by accident. It's a twisty and complex political portrait which sits uncomfortably on the brink of the 1960s. Henry Fonda plays Leffingwell, the dying Presidents nominated Secretary of State. His unimpassioned performance doesn't really justify the  Presidents determination to get him into office, or the resulting political snake party. Worth watching for Laughton's final performance, and for the typically Preminger styled gay bar scene.

The inner workings of a US Senate sub committee circa 1960 is a topic which is only going to appeal to a certain type of film watcher, and they'll probably be patient enough to put up with the slow pacing.

This was also the first of six movies Preminger (who played Mr. Freeze in the Adam West Batman teevee show) cast the previously blacklisted Burgess "The Penguin" Meredith - he plays Gelman, a man who had once mistakenly found himself in a four-person Communist cell.

Camelot (1967), Joshua Logan

Directed by Joshua Logan, who obviously wasn’t put off by the slating he took for using a non-professional 'singing' cast since he went on to get Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin belting out show tunes in Paint your Wagon two years later. Camelot with its grating historically inaccurate referencing pans out like Bedknobs and Broomsticks with unhilarious sexual innuendo instead of animation. At one point Vanessa Redgrave sings to a horse about inappropriate desires.

Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave are creepy and awkward as Arthur and ‘Ginny', although there may be an argument to be made that this makes them a fairly accurate portrayal of a royal family. Franco Nero cleans up considerably from Django, although his Italian accent remains intact. He plays the French wonder-knight ‘Lance’ Lancelot Du Lac as a hairy-chested, medallioned saint – a role so cunningly absurd that there is no way of actually knowing if he pulls it off or not. Everyone bursts into song, including David Hemmings who is actually well cast here as the evil, campy Mordred. 

This actually won 3 of the 5 Academy Awards it was nominated for in 1968 – a timely reminder that an Oscar isn’t a guarantee of an even watchable film.

The Haunting (1963), Wise

Claire Bloom, Russ Tamblyn, Julie Harris and Richard Johnson

Robert Wise (Editor on the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Citizen Kane; director of The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, The Sound of Music) delivers a faithful version of Shirley Jackson’s early second-wave feminist horror story, The Haunting of Hill House, published four years earlier. The genius of the story lies in its grim reading of domesticity. Influenced by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic, The Yellow Wallpaper, the central character is a woman ravaged by social expectation.

Julie Harris plays the lead character - Eleanor 'Nell' Lance, who has spent her life caring for her sick mother and now is reduced to living on the couch in a home she shares with her bullying sister’s family. When she receives an invitation to assist Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson – every inch the English academic) who is investigating a reportedly haunted house, she grabs the opportunity to escape from her horrible existence.

The film is dominated by two elements: Nell’s constant, anxious inner dialogue and the mysterious, threatening noise of Hill House.  Also, a great bendy door effect.

Peeping Tom (1960), Powell

I'm really not a fan of Michael Powell's stuff. I have an intense dislike for The Red Shoes that can only be explained by some repressed childhood trauma or by the fact it's a rubbish film. In Peeping Tom, Mark Lewis (Karl Heinz Böhm), the shy photographer, psychologically tortured by his father throughout childhood in order to pad out a couple of research papers, hasn't repressed anything - in fact he has a handy archive of dad's experiments to which he continues to add.

It's an interesting and engaging film with some great characters (and some terrible two-dimensional ones), and the weird mystery of why someone born and brought up in London would have such a strong German accent. Or even more strangely, why no one in the entire film would comment on it. It's not as good a film as Psycho which was released the same year, but I'd happily argue that  Karl Heinz Böhm makes a far more likable and sympathetic serial killer than Anthony Perkins.

Alfie (1966), Gilbert

Watched this sometime this week. I'm currently in the grip of a terrible illness and watching this didn't really help me feel much better about being alive. It offers commentary and analysis on the social and political mores of the 1960s in the same way as Loaded magazine did for the late 1990s - that's to say, it reiterates the worst misogynistic stereotypes without taking any responsibility for perpetuating their miserable tedium. Caine delivers a great performance but it's hard to see why the film is so well respected or why A Level students are currently forced to squeeze some significance out of Alfie's idiot savant tour of 1960's moral panics. Alfie is in fact so stupid that if he ended up in court for any of his activities a jury probably wouldn't be able to find him responsible for his actions.   

The main thing I found interesting was the way in which Michael Caine looked like a more substantial David Bowie every so often, although even during his frightwig days, Bowie never had such appalling hair.

There are loads of other films dealing with the same issues at the same period, but with some intelligence - A Taste of Honey would be my recommendation. I'll be continuing to avoid the recent remake, although I've got to admit to some car-crash like curiosity. It's a choice that completely scuppers any fantasy about Jude Law being normally smart though.

Cape Fear (1962), Thompson

All these resent posts have been films screened on TCM, as part of their current Crime Wave season (yes - even High Society, which makes sense if Bing Crosby horrifies you as much as he does me). And this has been the best one so far. Robert Mitchum is an actor that I just appreciate more the older I get, and this has got to be his finest role. Absolutely terrifying as rapist Max Cady, Mitchum moves like a man who knows his body as a weapon.   

He's come to town to exact his revenge on the family of Gregory Peck's upstanding lawyer Sam Bowden, who found him attacking a woman seven years ago and testified against him. The film just gets scarier, as the extent of Cady's capacity and aptitude for violence becomes apparent.

The only weakness in the film is Lori Martin as Sam's prepubescent daughter Nancy Bowden. She was given the hair style and clothes of a middle aged woman, which makes her look like... a tiny 55 year old. The Director wanted Hayley Mills for the part and you can imagine that she would have been charismatic enough to make an impact. Martin just simpers and widens her eyes through the movie, but it's still clear that by the end everyone has been irredeemably traumatised.

About a million times more intelligent and  frightening than the 1991 Scorsese version.

BUtterfield 8, Mann (1960)

Watched this on my own on Wednesday night - it's part of some satellite channel's Oscar themed programming, since Elizabeth Taylor snagged the best actress award for her portrayal of the absurdly named good-time girl Gloria Wandrous. Taylor looks like she's heading down hill, which is exactly right for the role, but has far too many opportunities to do her usual whiny and slightly too high-pitched melodrama delivery, which I've never been a fan of.

Weston Liggett (yes I know! There's even a character called Fanny Thurber!) is an  unhappily married lush who finds true love with Gloria. Played by workaholic Laurence Harvey (who put 4 films in the can in 1960), you can see from his performance here why he was a natural for unlikable Sargent. Raymond Shaw in the far superior The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

It's not a very good film but it provides a fascinating study in crappy female arch types. Gloria is promiscuous and heartless because she was sexually abused as a child. Her mother can best be described as pathetic and unable to acknowledge the reality of her daughter's lifestyle. Liggett's wife is actually frightening in her determined subservience.

More spoilers after the jump.

La Caduta degli dei (aka The Damned), Visconti (1969)

Watched this at the weekend on my own.

As films about the rise and eventual strangle-hold of Nazism go, this one is a spectacularly inaccurate and compulsively hysterical version. In an historic and operatic mash up, Helmut Berger plays Count Martin Von Essenbeck, wealthy heir-apparent of a rich industrial family, as a transvestite Caligula. In fantastically cruel and pitiful performance, Martin switches from the drag of Marlena Dietrich to the chilling fancy dress of the SS.

Shouldn't really work but Visconti carries it off.

Link to the BFI's Visconti pages.

The Manchurian Candidate, Frankenheimer (1962)

Watched this on my own on Xmas night.

Although I was slightly disappointed a few years ago to discover that Raymond had been brainwashed in Manchuria, China and not Manchester, England (a scenario the crappy remake should have perhaps considered), this is a top film. There are some classic scenes that every film fan should be familiar with, notably The Petunia Society ladies/evil mind controllers meetup.

The part where Janet Leigh hits on a twitching, sweaty Frank Sinatra on the train may possible go down in film history as the scene that makes the least sense, ever.

Angela Lansbury has been rightly lauded for her role as Mrs. Iselin, the cinemas greatest female evil genius:   

"But now, we have come almost to the end. One last step. And then when I take power, they will be pulled down and ground into dirt for what they did to you. And what they did in so contemptuously underestimating me. "

L'Avventura (aka The Adventure), Antonioni (1960)

My lovely friend Andy Small sent me this tape for my birthday.

Watched it on Saturday night and was completely blown away. This film has one of the most soul destroying endings I’ve ever seen. It’s an essential for anyone with the slightest intrest in film. Anti-narrative, and slipping into surrealism at times. Just go watch it, so I have people to talk about the scenes with Gloria Perkins (Dorothy De Poliolo) in, and the scene which ends in the not buying of the blue paint. Monica Vitti, who plays Claudia, is inhumanly beautiful. The allegorical nature of the story is possibly never more apparent than with the dull and uncharismatic Sandro’s mysterious attractiveness to women.

If anyone knows of a good feminist critique of this film, either electronic or print, could you please let me know?