White Squall: Ridley’s forgotten movie

White Squall (1996), Dir. Ridley Scott, 129 mins, Freevee (HD)

28 years later… is not just an upcoming zombie movie; this weekend marks my 28th wedding anniversary, and as we looked back on things, we remembered going to the Showcase Cinema (now rubble, alas) on the eve of our wedding day for one last trip to the cinema (maybe defusing any pre-wedding jitters), watching Ridley Scott’s then-new film, White Squall. I remember quite enjoying the film, albeit back then I was always a little frustrated with him making ‘normal’ pictures when I thought he should be utilising his talents on genre films. It was sunny when we went in, but upon leaving the auditorium (in which the film culminated in a wild storm sequence) we stepped out of the cinema into a stormy carpark, rain crashing down in strong winds, the skies full of dark clouds. Portents?

I think we’ve maybe watched the film once, since, on a television showing, over the intervening 28 years, but certainly never bought the film on DVD or Blu-Ray (I’m assuming it came out on Blu-Ray) which clearly defines it as an outlier, as I have always made a point of collecting most of Ridley’s filmography on disc. The film is clearly a largely forgotten film of Ridley’s, certainly doesn’t get mentioned much in career retrospectives that bring up the usual suspects (Alien, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator etc.) but its not alone in that- films like Matchstick Men and A Good Year also spring to mind on that front.

Anyway, I noticed the film by chance, on Prime’s Freevee service, where films and tv shows are available for streaming with the caveat they get occasional interruptions for ads. A pretty abhorrent practice as far as a film-lover is concerned, but it did offer an opportunity to watch the film again, in widescreen at least (I think that old TV showing we saw was probably still back in the pan and scan days). So 28 years later, what did I think?

It was… pretty solid; actually better than I’d remembered. Not great or anything, this is still lesser Ridley, but it was stronger than I recalled, albeit with expected weaknesses. Back in 1996, Ridley was still shaking off that ‘pretty pictures, vacuous drama’ rep,  films dominated by their visuals. Which is rather ironic, , considering this is ‘a Ridley Scott film’, as I was surprised how good it looked- it was really nicely photographed, by the late Hugh Johnson, who wasn’t a long-term collaborator with Ridley (he also shot the following year’s G.I. Jane, and was second-unit cinematographer on Ridley’s magnificent Kingdom of Heaven (2005)). There are some gorgeous shots (tricky in the bright sunshine, no doubt) and lovely use of both colour and texture. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ridley had tried to get Vangelis hired for the music score, because the one composed here by Jeff Rona is full of nods to Vangelis in its melodies and electronica, a sort of Vangelis-lite kind of score. With its emphasis on the ocean and sailing, it would have seemed a perfect fit for Vangelis, as he loved the sea (and had worked with Ridley on his previous film,  1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992)).

The highlight of the film though is inevitably Jeff Bridges, the star of the film and bringing to it an assured, strong performance which really deserved a better film. He has a gravitas, a sense of believability in the role, which is typical of him, but nonetheless hugely impressive, and he was definitely in his prime here.  I think the weakness of the film is its fairly formulaic script, that just seems too familiar and unremarkable, following the usual coming-of-age tropes. Based on a true story, it is written as an ensemble piece but is spread too thin, and while it seems to aim for an emotional crescendo/catharsis akin to that of Dead Poets Society (1989) in its conclusion, it just falls utterly flat.  I think the screenplay needed another pass, if only to iron out some of the characterisations that were left one-dimensional or lacking focus.

The film is cast really pretty well though, with many of the actors doing a lot with very little- John Savage and Caroline Goodall, in particular, spring to mind. Goodall is fantastic, one of those unsung character actors who deserve more praise, I think, and features here in a particularly harrowing death sequence, just horrible! Scott Wolf, who at the time I thought was surely destined for superstardom just because he seemed to have an uncanny resemblance to Tom Cruise (he could have passed as his brother), plays the nominal lead, although inevitably overshadowed by Bridges. I note that Wolf was 27 years old, playing a 15 year old and completely getting away with it, incredible. Wolf has indeed had a very successful career, but it has been predominantly in television, not cinema, appearing in TV shows I never saw, or even heard of, mostly.

So anyway, 28 years later… White Squall. I doubt I’ll be around in another 28 years for another return to it…. but you never know…

Suzhou River: Watery reflections of Vertigo

Suzhou River aka Suzhou he (2000), Dir. Lou Ye, 83 mins, Blu-Ray

Yes, another Radiance release. Killing my wallet.

This is a strange one; the references I’d heard regards this film’s similarities to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), one of my favourite films, is a little misleading. Sure, it shares Vertigo‘s central theme of male obsession and doomed love, but other than that it is, at least upon first viewing,  quite different. For one thing,  Hitchcock’s classic wasn’t overly obtuse,  certainly it made perfect sense after seeing the whole film. Suzhou River is absolutely obtuse, with what I would certainly describe as an unreliable narrator telling us the story- the film making really little sense especially when looking back on the whole and trying to decipher it, at least, as I say, first time around (maybe it’ll click better the second time I watch it?).

The narrator is an unseen, unnamed character in voiceover only- we ‘see’ his point of view, either from his own eyes or that of his video camera; we never see him in the third-person (the nearest to seeing him is his hands when they come into shot reacting to something). He’s a videographer for hire, filming his surroundings as if for some journal as he travels around, absently, or from gig to gig. The opening sequence, as he travels down the titular Suzhou river winding through commercial and industrial areas of Shanghai, buildings often derelict or in disrepair, seeing the various people who live and work on or around the river, is worth the price of this disc alone. I was quite mesmerised by it.

The narrator is hired by a Shanghai nightclub owner to film his main attraction- a huge tank in which a woman pretends to be a mermaid, smiling at its patrons. This woman is Meimei (Zhou Xun) with whom the narrator strikes up an affair. Meimei enigmatically questions him if, if she left one day and didn’t come back, would he look for her, like Mardar did?  She doesn’t explain what she is referring to, or who this Mardar was.

All this is still being told in the first-person eye of the narrator or that of his camera, with which he seems to record everything. We are told that Meimei sometimes leaves, and doesn’t return for days. There is then a sequence in which the narrator is looking out from his balcony, and he tells us he waits to see her coming back across the bridge to his apartment, and he watches (and records) the people walking, riding, driving by, ignorant of his attention and his camera. He sees a motorcycle rider, a courier, across the street, and -and here’s where I may have missed something- the narrator pretends that the rider is the mysterious Mardar referenced by Meimei. He then starts an (assumed) fictional narrative involving Mardar and his eventual obsession/doomed love for Moudan, who looks remarkably like Meimei (she’s also being played by Zhou Xun). Mardar is hired to shuttle Mourdan on his motorcycle to her Aunt occasionally, whenever her father is entertaining his mistress- but this eventually becomes a criminal enterprise, when Mardar’s associates turn it into a kidnapping, ransoming Mourdan for money. Feeling betrayed by Mardar, Mourdan throws herself into the Suzhou river, presumably drowning, but not before telling Mardar she’ll come back to him, as a mermaid. The kidnapping botched and one of his associates dead, Mardar is arrested and put into prison.

So now we have a clear allusion in Mourdan’s last words to Meimei (who looks identical to her), playing a mermaid in the bar, having an affair with our narrator. But here’s where maybe I’ve missed the point of what’s going on, because we then see Mardar leave prison three years later, and looking everywhere for Moudan, thinking she may have survived her fall into the river (we are pointedly reminded the police failed to find her body). Inevitably Mardar frequents the bar where Meimei is working and takes her for Moudan, and he even meets the narrator, and I’m thinking, fiction has somehow impinged upon our narrator’s reality, or he’s still telling us a story, diverting from his reality as he waits for Meimei to return? I’m feeling like some kind of idiot, I’ve missed something- or have I?

One of the video essays on this disc attests that the director, who likely had indeed seen Vertigo prior (how can any film maker NOT have?)  wasn’t consciously influenced by it when making this film, and I can believe that. Its absolutely not a homage to the extent to which De Palma’s Obsession (1976) was. Its possibly to the detriment of the film though that its producer, and particularly the film’s composer Jörg Lemberg, certainly did pick up on it, because the film’s score  doubles-down on referencing Bernard Herrmann’s’ evocative Vertigo score in a number of sequences. I think this may actually hurt the film, it should have been left to be more of its own thing and minus the lean towards Hitchcock’s film. Still, if you’re going to reference a past film, make it a good one…

Its not that this film doesn’t make any sense at all, although there is certainly an argument that it is a case of style over content The film really works best as a tone-poem, a mood piece, rather than conventional narrative storytelling.

Unless I completely missed something on first viewing; the way I took it, the narrator starts telling a story that he makes up following a comment from his girlfriend, and characters from that story -fictional, remember, albeit based on real people he sees from his window- suddenly impinging upon the narrators own ‘reality’ in the  final third of the film- as a viewer I was intrigued and wondering if some revelation or twist (similar to that Vertigo had, so there’s that music score distraction) would drop to suddenly make sense of it, but that doesn’t happen.

In any case, that style over content thing… what incredible style! For a film as deliberately grungy and fractured as this one is -shot on 16mm with jerky, unfocused shots, lots of grain, sudden camera movement, intense colours blooming-out imagery, jump cuts etc-  the whole shebang of visual distractions, its nonetheless a beautiful-looking film. It really is an enchanting, mesmerising piece of work that I feel I didn’t quite grasp properly first time around, but still thoroughly enjoyed. Reminded me rather of when I first watched David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive. In any case, its definitely another winner from Radiance and I look forward to rewatching it and seeing what I may have missed.

The Shape of Night: Beautiful Despair

The Shape of Night aka Yoru no henrin (1964), Dir. Noboru Nakamura, 108 mins, Blu-ray

Yoshie (Kuwano Miyuki) is a beautiful young woman working in a factory by day, and a bar in evenings, where she falls for one of the regular patrons, a handsome young man, Eiji (Hira Mikijiro). Yoshie doesn’t realise, until she’s already fallen in love with him, that Eiji is a low-level Yakuza (so ineffectual that the gang nickname him ‘princess’) who rapes her once gets her to his apartment, and then coerces her into prostitution to pay off the spiralling debts he owes his bosses. The doomed lovers are caught in a downward spiral of neon-drenched tragedy, self-destructive and inescapable.

When/if I get to the end of 2024 and look back on the best of the films that I saw for the first time this year, The Shape of Night will surely be among the very best of them. A delicately crafted, beautifully-shot study of an innocent woman’s downward spiral, its a disturbing, often harrowing film which, like most Radiance releases, I never knew even existed before this disc was announced.

Hmm, yes, here we go again- another glimpse of what world cinema has to offer, a further tantalising reminder of all the great films that I will never see, and indeed that most people here in the West will never see.  I doubt anyone I know has ever heard of this film either, or will ever see it (I’m not even sure how many own a disc player in their home anymore, which narrows it down significantly). Most of what we’d call ‘water-cooler chat’ in the office revolves around reality tv shows or police dramas… the truth is most people have no interest or feel any need to watch films like this,  even if they knew these films existed.  Hmmm, maybe I’m the peculiar one,  but then again, I love movies, whereas for many folks, they are just a diversion, disposable entertainment.

Why we are here- me writing this, you dear reader reading this, whoever wherever whenever you are.

(As an aside, I watched Barbie a few days after seeing The Shape of Night; maybe I should be rejoicing the wide variety of  what film as an art form has to offer, but it left me in a bit of a funk, as if creative art has regressed since 1964 into a cinematic black hole (no matter how pink it is, in Barbie‘s case). There’s no attempt for anything profound in Barbie (its ‘message’ such as it is, is as dumb as you’d find in a girls comic back in the 1970s), but then again, it isn’t trying to be complex or study the human condition, its just an attempt to ‘entertain’ and more importantly, make money, which it succeeded at immensely. Box Office success being what it is, I’m looking forward to the Action Man rebuttal from whoever gets the hopefully inevitable Palitoy/Hasbro deal. Oh boy, I’d love to see that Action Man movie, presuming it dared to champion a certain point of view, if only to see the meltdown reaction…).

But back to this film. Released in 1964, The Shape of Night dates back to  before I was even born, which seemed frankly impossible, when I was watching it. The film feels so bold, daring, controversial, that it felt very modern, and it certainly LOOKS ahead of its time – the film I kept thinking of while watching it was Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976); probably it was the saturated colours, the moody score, the sense of alienation and despair of characters caught in the underbelly of society. The cinematography is beautiful, all neon blues and reds lighting up its nightmare, midnight world and bathing its daytime scenes in lovely pastel hues.  The film actually opens with us seeing Yoshie (Kuwano Miyuki) working the streets, extreme close-ups of her beautiful, albeit coldly dispassionate, face bathed in blue and red neon. The titles immediately evoked thoughts of Taxi Driver, and also the films of Wong Kar-Wai- it looks quite ravishing, which belies the horrors to follow, but certainly those lingering, soft-focus shots immediately mad me think of Taxi Driver’s similarly dreamlike opening titles. 

Taxi Driver itself is something of an outlier, really- there’s not many American films as powerful as that one, and it could only have been made in the ‘seventies. Another film that sprang to mind was, naturally Billy Wilder’s Irma La Douce (1964) because it dates from the same period as The Shape of Night and also concerned itself with the same subject matter (prostitution) but in typical Hollywood fashion somehow turned it into a romantic comedy (at least it dropped the songs). The Shape of Night is certainly no comedy, and neither is it an escapist fantasy like Pretty Woman (1990), another Hollywood film about the oldest profession.  I think The Shape of Night is undoubtedly the truer and most realistic of the films regarding what prostitution is and how it can destroy the lives of those women caught up in it.

Japanese cinema of that time clearly had issues with sexuality and post-War Westernisation, commercialisation, permissiveness,  the roles of the sexes, feminism etc. Only a few months ago I saw another Radiance Blu-Ray, I the Executioner (1968). in which women at a hen party stirred up by watching pornography gang-raped a young man who then killed himself in shame, and were later being hunted down and killed by a violent stranger obsessed with his idea of moral revenge. There is an anger, a tension in these films that is tangible.

Films had a short life-span back in the ‘sixties, especially those like The Shape of Night which would have extremely limited appeal or distribution outside its own country; they would be released in cinemas and then would disappear, maybe appearing once or twice on Japanese television someday. I suppose that’s the biggest positive regards physical media (and to a lesser extent, the hundreds of streamers/tv channels devouring content) – its brought back, in however limited a fashion,  films once destined to obscurity and oblivion and also widened their distribution into foreign markets probably undreamed of when they were made. Its a curious irony, when one considers just how much media is thrown at us these days, all the streaming channels, social media platforms etc and yet there is so much that remains impossible to experience- life is too short, and the world is bigger than the Internet fools us into thinking it is. With these physical media releases, we film fans are archaeologists like Indiana Jones searching for and discovering hidden treasures- thankfully boutique labels like Radiance are providing us with something akin to those treasure maps on old parchment that Indy scoured over.

I suppose what I’m getting at is, how many other films like The Shape of Night will always escape me? I already know of a film or two featuring the lead actress Miyuki Kuwano in similar nihilistic films/roles, like Cruel Story of Youth, released on disc several years ago here in the UK but sadly now OOP, or films like Gate of Flesh (1964) an apparently thoroughly nasty exploitation flick which appears at least to be available to rent on streaming.  Its curious reading through lists on IMDB of titles of films similarly themed to The Shape of Night. The internet leaves us a treasure map, its up to us to dig around following its leads. Treasure or junk? I guess that’s up to us (ha ha, not everybody loves Blade Runner as much as I do). 

A Woman’s Vengeance: Behave, boys, or else….

A Woman’s Vengeance (1948), Dir. Zoltan Korda, 96 mins, Blu-ray

Staying with Indicator’s Universal Noir Vol.2 box, we arrive at more familiar noir territory with A Woman’s Vengeance, written by Aldous Huxley (of Brave New World fame) and based upon his own short story The Gioconda Smile– its a film of entertaining misdirections and perhaps even more so  (from a 2024 perspective) decidedly uncomfortable sexual politics. One has to excuse films for simply being of their time , but there’s more than a few moments during this film where viewers coming to it today will surely wince and grimace, but on the whole its such a good, well-told yarn that one can easily forgive such transgressions (this film is, after all, some 76 years old now).

The first of the film’s misdirections is the strained relationship between dashing Henry Maurier (Charles Boyer) and his sick wife Emily (Rachel Kempson), when it is quickly revealed that Henry is cheating on her with a beautiful and very, very young (teenage!) woman, Doris (Ann Blyth). Not only that, but Henry is also seen almost absently flirting with a neighbour’s pretty daughter, Janet (Jessica Tandy) who is at least closer to his own age (although he disparagingly notes that at thirty-five she “used to be quite beautiful… ten years ago”). The man is cad and a cheat, clearly, but is he entirely the villain that the film seems intent on making us think he is?

Inevitably (this is a noir, after all), Emily suddenly dies, and while its immediately assumed to be a result of her long chronic illness, it soon transpires that she was poisoned.  What we don’t know is, did Emily commit suicide as revenge for his adultery, knowing that Henry would be suspected of her death, was it indeed Henry intent on dumping the moody shrew for the younger and more pliant Doris, or… was it someone else? There’s enough suggestions of a number of characters benefiting from Emily’s death that one can suspect most everyone, although the prime suspect is clearly Henry, especially with all the evidence pointing in his direction.

Curiously, Henry is utterly bemused when he immediately marries Doris following Emily’s death, ignorant of how the ill timing could possibly implicate him as a suspect when its learned that Emily was poisoned. The truth is that Henry is a handsome idiot who has had it far too easy in life (and indeed, the family doctor observes with some sadness to Henry that “I feel extremely sorry for you sometimes. Being born with a lot of money – it’s no joke.”). Henry is the kind of fellow who sails through life without any stumbling blocks or anyone questioning or refusing him anything.

Functioning as a murder mystery loaded with bad sexual politics, I had a lot of fun with this one, primarily because of its great cast who all do fine work. but especially Jessica Tandy.  There is a wonderful scene in which she reveals her love for Henry while a huge storm rages behind her that is staged and executed so memorably I’ll remember it always, utterly arresting albeit distinctly melodramatic. Likewise a later scene in which she confronts Henry while he is on death row is filmed with such imaginative expressionist lighting and stagecraft, its quite wonderful, ‘classic’ Hollywood and more than the film possibly deserves, especially when it becomes derailed by a ‘happy’ ending in which the real culprit is revealed in a rather awkward fashion- echoes here of the ending of Singapore, as if these noir couldn’t really see things through to their deserved, authentically noir conclusion. While that’s a shame, there’s a lot of fun getting there.

But it does feel all kinds of ironic; the Studio was so hellbent on restoring audience faith in moral justice by ensuring a happy ending, while utterly ignorant of all the film’s examples of misogyny that seemed absolutely fine at the time but might be considered  the real ‘evils’ of the film decades later.

Scary Movie/s

I was reading an online article about Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon films, and the films co-writer (yes, shock, the films had a script and, yes, this guy’s owning up to his part in it) Kurt Johnstad reveals that the directors cuts of  “both movie one and movie two will be released on the same day and the same time. So…. you can sit down and for six hours have a non-interrupted experience of Zack Snyder.”

Two things: six hours of  Snyder sounds pretty scary… and also, isn’t it telling that his name has become a thing, an experience? You don’t hear anyone say anything along the lines of “six hours of ‘James Cameron’ or ‘Ridley Scott’ ”  as if that were a ‘thing’. Mind, the article also states that the new cuts, averaging three hours each, are rated R for… “brutal bloody violence and gore, sexual content, nudity and language” and I don’t remember much of that from the two films I’ve seen, they rather sound like completely different movies, and who knows, maybe they are (I’m waiting for some press release claiming they are the ‘real Rebel Moon‘ or that these are ‘the real Zack Snyder experience’.

I doubt buckets of blood, gore and nudity could ‘fix’ them for anyone but the rabid Snyder fanbase. It has rather made me wonder, as the films are obviously Star Wars knock-offs, or at least have been claimed originated as treatments for a Star Wars film,  the idea of the Star Wars films we know and love having alternate cuts… As if that would be a thing in some alternate universe. You know, the child-friendly 1977 film released in cinemas as we knew them, and then Lucas putting out a more violent, sexy, gory version on VHS. Mind, following that kind of logic, imagine Alien being released back in 1979 in some kiddie-friendly version with a sanitised chestburster scene (or maybe an alternate, ‘safer’ sequence when the alien pops out some other way -suggestions on a postcard please) and then releasing the proper more graphic version on VHS.  Thank goodness all this alternate cuts madness wasn’t a thing back in the day, but yeah, imagine a world in which those Star Wars Special Editions back in 1997 were less about CGI visual effects and more about making the films more… adult, more Zack Snyder. Scary. Just look at these Rebel Moon films….

Singapore: its all about Ava

Singapore (1947), Dir. John Brahm, 80 mins, Blu-ray

The third film in Indicator’s Universal Noir Vol. 2 box and this one’s a doozy, certainly the most noir film of the set so far. I must say, I was very much surprised by how enjoyable this film was, considering my low expectations from the poster (Fred MacMurray as a sailor? Sorry, but give me a break!). I expected an escapist Hollywood romance/drama set in exotic, foreign climes – Affair in Trinidad springs to mind, but obviously there’s more than a few nods to the classic Casablanca, and while the latter is true, the film turned out be to much more than that. Mainly because of Ava. To suggest that for me she steals the film from everyone else is some kind of understatement. It’s not that she acts everyone else off the screen, more just a matter of sheer screen magnetism and presence.

Regards MacMurray, I’ve become resigned to the fact that whenever i see him in a film, I’m always predisposed to have a dislike/distrust of whatever character he is playing, simply because my first experience of watching him was in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, in which he played an adulterer, cheat and utter bastard with such consummate finesse it proved wholly definitive. I suppose in that sense, his casting here was rather perfect (actually it dates just three years after his similarly impressive turn in Wilder’s Double Indemnity) as he’s playing a character with some dubiety. He’s not a wholesome character here, rather a guy with a shady past who’s always trying to keep one step ahead of the authorities, but also someone who might be redeemed by the love a good woman.

As far as the plot is concerned, its fairly conventional, albeit enlivened by a few twists and turns that make it far more interesting than I had expected. Shortly after WW2, Matt Gordon (Fred MacMurray) returns to Singapore after having fled five years before when the Japanese invaded. He returns to the hotel he used to stay at, intending to retrieve a fortune in pearls he was smuggling out and had stashed in there when the war breaking out upset his plans. Seeing a table and chairs in the bar/restaurant he slips into a reverie and voiceover, the film fading to a flashback from five years before, when he was about to get married to Linda Grahame (Ava Gardner) after a whirlwind romance. Before they could get married, they became separated during the Japanese bombardment when  Gordon attempted (and failed) to retrieve the pearls, only returning to the church to see it burned to the ground and Linda presumably killed. Despondent, Gordon fled Singapore to join the war effort.

The complications of course are what makes this interesting- the film returning back to the ‘present’ of 1947, Gordon is being watched by both Deputy Commissioner Hewitt (Richard Haydn) who is well aware of Gordon’s criminal past and suspects he has returned to retrieve the pearls, and likewise mobster/fence Mauribus (Thomas Gomez) who wants the pearls himself, presumably from some deal the two had years ago.  So far, so routine-thriller as Gordon attempts to outwit both the law and the criminal fraternity, but then he suddenly sees Linda… alive. But now she’s Ann Van Leyden, devoted wife of plantation owner Michael Van Leyden (Roland Culver), with no knowledge of Gordon at all, or of a woman named Linda Grahame.  Is it Linda, or just some woman who uncannily looks like her? There’s a few more twists yet, but the real pleasure of the film is undoubtedly Ava.

Ava Gardner; one of the most beautiful actresses who ever appeared in film, she has this relationship with the camera that is like some kind of sorcery- the camera just loves some women, there is this spark… other examples include Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak.. but here its just… well, she steals every scene she’s in. The plot, the other actors in the scene, they all kind of fall away… Its not even how beautiful she is, its some kind of energy in that relationship between actress and camera that defines screen icons…

A featurette on the Indicator disc goes into some general detail regards Ava’s life and career. I found it fascinating, a little disturbing and rather enchanting. I was left to idly imagine her life, being as beautiful as she was, that whole 1940s/1950s Golden Age Hollywood era, fame, fortune.  I’ve not seen many films featuring Ava- the last one I saw her in was On the Beach, released in 1959, some twelve years after Singapore but seemingly many years more than that – too much living , maybe, taking its toll on her? Certainly she was on her third divorce by then. She was a strong woman who seemed to suffer men,  famously uninhibited for the time which seemed scandalous to many (she was blamed for ending Frank Sinatra’s marriage in a scandal that threatened both of their careers): frankly, its the stuff of a Hollywood movie all in itself, glamour, drinks, affairs, betrayal, divorce… She certainly lived.

I thoroughly enjoyed Singapore, but have to admit its mostly from being so bewitched by Ava’s presence in it. I suppose this might be surprising because she’s not playing a femme fatale, certainly its a very different character to the one she played in The Killers. I think that’s some reflection of how much of her impact here stems from her sheer presence, her relationship with the camera, rather than something doubled upon by the script or outrageous (for the time) clothing etc. Instead she’s beautiful and sensual while being largely restrained- maybe that’s why having seen both The Killers and On the Beach, its seeing her in this – undoubtedly a lesser film- which has me finally bowled over by her and looking to see her in more features.

Time Out of Mind: Not a noir at all, alas

Time Out of Mind (1947), Dir. Robert Siodmak, 89 mins, Blu-ray

While the previous film in Indicator’s Universal Noir Vol.2 box, Lady on a Train, was borderline noir at best, I can’t imagine anyone really having any argument for Robert Siodmak’s Time Out of Mind qualifying as noir in any way at all. This is really just a historical romantic drama, adapted from a popular book of the time written by Rachel Field. Its general thesis is for women to stand by their man, trust their heart and that love conquers all in the end… sentiments that any proper film noir would kick in the trash with utter contempt. I can only imagine that Indicator thought its inclusion worthy if only because it was directed by Siodmak, who had great success in noir with films like The Killers, Phantom Lady, Cry of the City and Criss Cross. As such, I suppose this has some worth as a curio, and certainly its got some interesting moments and direction… characters separated by doorways or windows, for instance, to represent their relationship or social standing/separation. The film also features Ella Raines, so brilliant in Phantom Lady, but alas utterly wasted here.

The plot of Time Out of Mind is pretty dull- it’s 1899, and Christopher Fortune (Robert Hutton) the son of a wealthy shipping magnate in Maine angers his father by preferring a career in music rather than the family business, and is encouraged to follow his dreams rather than family duty by servant girl Kate (Phyliss Calvert) who loves him dearly, but of which Christopher is oblivious.  Kate helps Christopher find the finances to enable him to flee to Paris where he will enrol in a music school. Three years later, he finally returns home, but married, breaking Kate’s heart. The marriage is doomed, as Christopher’s bride is a beautiful, rich but thoroughly nasty, using her father’s wealth to further Christopher’s musical dreams and live vicariously through his success, but Christopher’s heart isn’t in it, he feels a fraud.  Can Kate’s endless love for him put him on the right path to success and happiness?

Hmm, take a guess how this film ends. Hardly your usual noir there. The whole thing is pure melodrama, feels artificial and staged, and you can see where its all going from the start.  It doesn’t work at all, and Siodmak himself dismissed it. There’s indications of where a noir would go with something like this- Christopher’s sister Rissa (Ella Raines) is so obsessed herself with Christopher that her attention is borderline incestuous – so I could imagine this becoming transformed into something genuinely subversive, with three women fighting over a man too self-obsessed to really notice or care, but this was released in 1947, after all, and far too early to expect something like Twin Peaks. Shame- a David Lynchian take on Time Out of Mind would be a film I’d like to see.

As it is, there’s little here to encourage repeat viewings. At least Lady on a Train, likewise hardly noir at all,  was snappily paced, with genuine twists and turns and a captivating leading lady. This film really labours for little reason at all.

Lady on a Train: an unlikely Christmas noir

Lady on a Train (1945), Dir. Charles David, 95 mins, Blu-ray

Wow, Deanna Durbin- who was this lady? Seems she was the child star that saved Universal Pictures, a beautiful, gifted singer and actress who eventually got away, refusing to be chewed up by the Hollywood machine- but that came several years after she featured in this film. Here she’s Nicki Collins, the titular lady of the title, although she isn’t on the train very long- the first of several misdirection’s this film lays on viewers, the chief one being its classification of ‘film noir’ that qualifies its inclusion in Indicator’s splendid Universal Noir Vol. 2 box.  Lady on a Train is more a Nancy Drew-type murder mystery, more screwball comedy of errors, than what might be considered genuine film noir. While film noir is a fairly vague catch-all term that can frustrate some when titles like this get bundled in a noir box, I’ve found it to be an enjoyable way of discovering films I’d never otherwise notice. After all, when was the last time Lady on a Train was aired on television? Would it ever be aired again, in the future?

And this film may be slight, but its very enjoyable. Its really very odd -as this disc’s commentary track notes- a decidedly curious mash-up of genre: is it a thriller, a drama, a comedy, a musical?  There are times when it looks very much like a noir, dark shadows and expressionistic lighting,  times when it looks (and sounds) like a glossy Hollywood musical, times when its a madcap comedy. That certainly keeps the viewer on ones metaphorical toes, so to speak – just keeping track of Durbin’s changing hairstyles can make one dizzy enough- rather  a delicious smorgasbord of 1940s Hollywood. Maybe Steven Spielberg is a fan; it rather feels as wildly exuberant (and confused) as his 1941 did.

The plot, such as it is, has Nicki on a train journey from San Francisco to New York on Christmas Eve, noticing a murder being committed in a trackside building’s window as her train pauses approaching her station. She tries to notify the police but they aren’t interested, so instead decides to investigate herself with the help of a popular mystery crime writer. Its as silly as it probably sounds but its clearly more comedy than gritty noir thriller, and is so fast-paced one hardly has time to consider just how daft it all is. Slight as it is, its nonetheless surprisingly a whole lot of fun.

The pleasures of this film are many, but chiefly arise from the excellent cast featuring some of the best character actors working in Hollywood at the time.  Edward Everett Horton, Patricia Morison, Samuel S Hinds, Allen Jenkins, Ralph Bellamy, David Bruce, Dan Druyea, are all a joy, doing a lot with very little. They are perfectly cast, characters established simply with just how they look, how they deliver their lines; very often I just sat and admired the sheer efficiency of the film, the perfect timing, the looks and expressions, the visual interplay. They are all there to serve Durbin, as this is clearly a Durbin vehicle, Universal apparently trying to find something that sticks as regards finding her a line of films now that she was now an adult. Durbin is very good herself in what might seem a fairly thankless role; she has real screen charm, a natural beauty with one of those switch on/off smiles that Hollywood ladies used to be so good at As well as very good actress with a gift for comic timing, she was also an accomplished singer with an operatic voice, three numbers given to her in the most unlikeliest fashion just, well, because (one when she sings Silent Night in its entirety over the phone to her father. the other two when she poses as a cabaret singer in a nightclub). Durbin is the Real Deal and I was quite taken by her performance. I was surprised to discover later that she only made films for three more years, with just twenty-three films in her IMDB filmography, She retired to rural France and left all that Hollywood nonsense behind, something that few other child stars caught in the Hollywood system likely managed- here’s a noir with more than one happy ending.

Rebel Moon Part Two: Not terrible. Its worse.

Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver (2024), Dir. Zack Snyder, 122 mins, Netflix

This was so bad. The bar was set pretty low after suffering through Rebel Moon Part One, but all the same, it still managed to disappoint.  The scary thing is, I really don’t think Zack Snyder can see it. He’s so out of touch with film-making reality, lost in his Snyder-verse of what makes a decent film, that he just cannot see it. There’s something genuinely tragic about that. This is a guy with considerable visual talent, but my goodness his flaws are like a gaping maw, swallowing his career up.

I liked his Dawn of the Dead remake more than I expected, and 300 was a pretty decent stab at converting a Frank Miller graphic novel to film, and I will always defend his Watchmen (even if Alan Moore won’t)  as one of those unfilmable projects that somehow worked out. But after that, its been a long slow slope of style over substance finally crashing into the rank cesspool that is the Rebel Moon project. It’s not like we couldn’t see its coming- Sucker Punch, Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Justice League… they were all films with isolated moments of visual brilliance, moments of Pure Cinema, increasingly dragged down by abysmal plotting, cardboard characterisation and risible dialogue, steadily becoming more and more banal almost to the point of sheer lunacy. There is something increasingly juvenile, perhaps bordering on infantile, in how narrative functions in these films which curiously corresponds with his vociferous fanbase of teen nerds who refuse to grow up.

Nobody can really match him for his visual flair in transferring the energy of comicbook panels to the silver screen, so vividly managed in 300 that it has shaped -and limited- his career ever since. His slo-mo is the equivalent of Tarantino’s penchant for littering his own films with bad language, its become shorthand for his directorial method (but at least Tarantino can write, for all his own faults, his films at least make sense). But comics are dumb, (largely) made for kids- or at least kids who would later grow up and start reading proper books. There is a reason why, back in the 1970s, there was huge disbelief and media attention when the Salkind’s bet a fortune on making a big-budget, serious motion picture based on that old Superman comicbook. Comics were for kids, films were for adults. At least, that’s how it used to be. Has it gone full circle now, are the comics for the adults and the films for the kids?

Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver is so stupid, so badly written, that even the world’s finest actors couldn’t save its dialogue or plot- and this film’s actors are NOT the world’s finest actors. They are clearly not helped by Snyder’s direction, either, which I suspect primarily involved stand here, pose like this and frown, and repeat, etc. Even the action is boring and badly staged, and that’s usually Snyder’s prime selling point- here the endlessly repetitive slo-mo doesn’t intensify anything, instead it constantly veers into parody.  This film could be given a laugh track and it would probably work as some sit-com piss-take of Star Wars. I was watching it appalled at just how lazily it telegraphs everything, how badly it is paced and edited and how it is riddled with plot holes like the craters on the moon.

Basically, its a lesson in how not to make a movie, but more importantly, maybe its the film that wakes up Netflix and other streamers to how Hollywood creatives are taking them for a ride. Quality should mean something, it shouldn’t just be content for content’s sake, and the creatives should be taken to task for taking the piss like this. If this film crashed and burned at the box-office with huge noise and attention, instead of just disappearing on a streamer, it would likely derail Snyder’s career. Instead I guess he’ll just carry on as usual, and we’ll get more of the same.

Tales That Witness Madness: Hard to forgive

Tales That Witness Madness (1973), Dir. Freddie Francis, 90 mins, Talking Pictures TV (SD)

It was the cast that made a fool of me, suckered me in. Its an old film gambit that invariably works, and why some actors were paid well and always got work- past glories lending their casting some weight to undeserving movies. You’d think I’d learn by now. But I saw Kim Novak, Jack Hawkins, Donald Pleasence, Joan Collins and Michael Petrovitch in the cast and thought that it might be worth a watch… well, lets just say that this film is hardly the finest cinematic hour for any of them. The hard truth is, while some of us film fans like to think of film as an important art and craft with historical worth, for most of the folks in the business its just a pay cheque to keep the wolves from the door. Quality might even be accidental; I wonder if any of the thespians etc behind this film later looked back on it and thought, “that was my new car I bought back in 1974” or “well that paid for the swimming pool extension that year” and nothing more than  that. Is that, after all, all that films are?

The only slight plus is the irony of as wooden an actress as Joan Collins playing a wife competing with a dead tree for her husband’s affections… and losing. Its like some cruel microcosm of her career.

Mind, often even bad old movies have some worth to them, maybe some element of fun. Not so here with this frankly excretable horror feature from 1973.  Watching it, I wondered what people thought, actually paying hard-earned cash back then to watch rubbish like this in town cinemas. Maybe they expected less from movies; this film is terribly, nonsensically written, poorly cast, edited, directed, a stinker of the first order. I don’t know what the shooting schedule was like for films like this back then, but what, maybe two weeks, maybe? It looks like it was made by people tired of making movies,

Tales That Witness Madness is one of those portmanteau horror films that were popular back then, telling three of four short stories tied together by some over-arching narrative. In this case, its Dr. Tremayne (Donald Pleasence) working in an asylum recounting to his  summoned colleague Nicholas (Jack Hawkins) the case histories of four patients whose cases he has brilliantly ‘solved’. I don’t know if I actually fell asleep and missed something at the end, but I stuck with the film for just two reasons – a) to see what Kim Novak was doing in it (the buggers knew what they were doing, holding her segment till last) and b) to see what this cunning ‘solution’ actually was, that was the reason for the tales, hoping for some kind of clever twist. But as might have been expected, there’s no such genuine explanation, only a nonsensical cop-out in which Nicholas somehow gets attacked by the suddenly no-longer-invisible tiger from the first story. Its so stupid, I’m surprised the bar for what amounted to releasable films was so low back then- no wonder the industry was in dire trouble, it was hardly competing with television with dross such as this. Maybe audiences were more forgiving, too?