Strange Films.

ETRANGE FILM FESTIVAL 2019.

Conveniently in the month before Pordenone, they do L’Etrange Film Festival

at Le Forum des images in the Les Halles development in Paris, an event dedicated to everything weird in movies. It’s a concept that could go anywhere, heir to the seventies when fans of exploitation cinema were ticked off that their favorites were excluded from the respectable (subsidised) festivals and went into business for themselves.

The organisers are calling this their Twenty Fifth outing but I remember the Paris Fantasy festivals fifty years back in the great days of Paul Naschy and Ishiro Honda who would be hard pressed to relate to some of the latest offerings. That was the first place I saw Picnic at Hanging Rock and here it was back again, one of the extensive Australian entries spread among the guest programmers retrospective and new releases, along with Barbarosa, Walkabout, Ghosts of the Civil Dead, Justin Kurzel’s Tue History of the Kelly Gang and Kiah Roache Turner’s Nekrotronic.

The only one I caught was Serge Ou’s  Iron Fists and Kung Fu Kicks stitched together by a collection of Australian State Film Corporations, another Oz compilation of the (mainly) Asian Exploitation films - think Not Quite Hollywood or The Search for Weng Weng.

This one runs to four thousand plus edits put together in five months, kicking off with the sixties martial arts adventures of Chen pei pei & Jimmy Wang Yu. There’s no mention of pre Shaw Brothers activity. They describe a massive demand following the U.S. distribution of Chang Che’s 5 Fingers of Death revoiced in one all night, beer fueled session. A clip shows how slap dash the matching was. When Bruce Lee dipped out to David Carradine for the Kung Fu series, he went back in disgust to Hong Kong where Run Run Shaw passed him over, missing the cycle’s greatest phenomenon. The film samples the Bruce Lee imitators and the mash ups represented by Game of Death and films carved out of his child star movies & funeral actuality, along with offering an interview with his niece.

The martial arts films connected with minorities producing blaxploitation where it got mixed in with hip hop music & break dancing. Jackie Chan, Liu Chia liang and Kung Fu comedies get a nod. Video and grind house stars Richard Norton, Cynthia Rothrock, Dan The Dragon Wilson, Ron Van Clief comment.  Brian Trenchard Smith is in there and Sammo Hung is represented by The Man from Hong Kong (!) Jane Fonda’s exercise videos are good for a laugh,  Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Matrix, Ong Bak & U-Tube stars lead to African child champions whose skills inspire resistance to a wave of kidnappers. 

This later material is largely unfamiliar and the old Hong Kong clips come nostalgia laden. The film is thrown together from what the makers could get but it might have been a lot worse.

The main festival program was a bizare collection of programmer favourites including King Kong,  Robert Patinson in the Canadian The Lighthouse, Werner Herzog’s Family Romance LLC, David Gregory’s Blood & Flesh, his life of Al Adamson, along with Adamson’s 1969 Satan’s Sadists, Cornel Wilde’s superior 1965 The Naked Prey, William Wyler's The Collector, Vera Chytilova’s Sedmikrasky / The Daisies, a Meyer Deren program, Bunuel’s El Angel exterminador, Gerard Potterton ’s 1981 Heavy Metal, Jackie Chan’s Police Story, Kevin Brownlow’s 1964 It Happened Here and a couple of Alexander Jodorowskis. Try and draw a straight line through that lot.

I concentrated on the new and unfamiliar titles which proved a smart move - a jolting reminder of what present day cinema has become. A few of these had already made it to Australia. Among those, Zhang Yimou’s stylish Ying / Shadow benefited from the big screen and the design, with black and white settings and constant rain, is extraordinary. The battle when it finally arrives - the blade umbrellas against bows and spears - is the best thing in the director’s work since the attack on the calligraphy school in Hero but all the Florentine court intrigue that takes up the body of the film is just tedious.  

Zhang Yimou's Ying

 

 

 

 

 Also already seen, Penny Lane’s Hail Satan is a passably surprising account of a Satanist movement whose branches are popping up round the globe, focused on the outfit taking a stand against US Religious Right groups like Westboro Baptist Church’s anti-LGBTQIA demonstrations. The cult registers quite sympathetically marching under Black & White Stars & Stripes flags and complaining when they can’t get tax breaks because they are considered a protest movement rather than a religion.  The line between show business and faith is suitably blurred. “Atheists are dull. They have no iconography.”

In the unfamiliar material, Japan’s Hatsukoi / First Love showed Takashi Miike in good form even if it does outstay it’s welcome.

We start as we mean to go, with boxer Masataka Kubota working out with ear ‘phones & punching out an opponent - cut to the severed head of the Philippino gangster hurled into the street still grinning. The boxer collapses in the ring when he has the match sewn up, to his manager’s exasperation and he’s told he has a fatal tumor. This makes him indifferent to death.

A deluge of sub-plots follows - girl junkie Sakurako Konishi isn’t cutting it as a whore paying of her dad’s debts. The specter of her old boy friend wearing glasses under a bed sheet haunts her. The Yakusa boss comes out of jail and one of his soldiers plots knocking off a drug haul in association with a crooked cop, taking the girl along. (don’t ask) Knocking off the drug courier sets off the gun in his pocket injuring his attacker. The madam who has been abusing the girl becomes distraught about her fate, bursting into the Yakusa boss’ dignified meeting waving a sword, even giving the gangster driver a blow job while he’s at the wheel like the Ringo Lam Full Contact. Sheet man who only the girl can see, dances to the head phone music in the subway train.

Takashi Miike's First Love

Striking moments abound even if the film can’t keep up the pace. After the night of frantic incoherent activity, we get  a totally momentum killing finale which would be more welcome if we’d worked up more sympathy with the young leads.

Coming from fashion photography and modeling, Alice Waddington offered Spanish made Paradise Hills, an orchidacious take on the body snatcher movie - a mix of Seconds, Pat McGoohan’s The Island series & The Stepford Wives. She herself cites Picnic at Hanging Rock  and Alice in Wonderland.

 At green lipped Emma Roberts fancy dress wedding, guests are choreographed to St. Saens “Carnival of the Animals.” Emma does a runner - time laps and she wakes up in some kind of verdant Escher maze which the white suits describe as Paradise.Turns out she’s in an island boot camp for rich wayward girls where Milla Jovovich presides over their retooling - nice study in fading beauty malice.The design aspect dominates - pink parasols, brass butterflies, greenery, holograms and the glamorous girls become an element.

Jovovich & Roberts Paradise Hills.

 Avoiding the drugged nightcap Emma discovers the underground laboratory where lab coat technicians work with white bandaged subjects.

A welcome shift of loyalties produces a change of outcome. With all this, the subject and the style end as up-market Bertrand Mandico. Maybe decadent is what people are buying this year.

New Zealand promoter Ant Timpson’s Come to Daddy is a Canada-New Zealand-Ireland-U.S. co-production shot in New Caledonia with Hollywood leads, an agreeable though hard edged departure from the expected.

Summoned by a father he doesn’t know, Elijah Wood takes the bus to a Vancouver Island forest verge stop and makes his way to the isolated “UFO” timber home to be greeted with incomprehension by a ravaged, bearded Stephen McHattie. There are rumblings in the night. Wood’s one of twenty numbered Gold ‘phones gets knocked into the lake and McHattie drunk comes at him with a meat cleaver only to succumb to a heart attack. 

Turns out there’s a history of criminal conspiracy and Wood has to take down the heavies at a Swinger’s convention with a call girl bondage mistress and a menacing document spike. “He’s got a flaming cross bow and I’ve got nothing.”

The final scene with Martin Donovan actually manages to be quite touching.

Sakamoto's Aragne

 Saku Sakamoto’s Aragne: Sign of Vermillion is a stylish, sinister Japme feature “Animated for the big screen with a production crew of one."

Rin, the whispy student heroine made the mistake of buying off the plan into an apartment development, gleaming in the sales brochure, to find it’s a grubby, diseased high rise slum, its elevators and mail boxes already rusting. Disgust increases when an ambulance carries a body away and she sees a giant larvae emerge from the arm of the dead woman. Girls are found with their heads twisted at right angles - super yuk.

This one uses imaginative design and a feeling for the grotesque to hold its own with big budget animations.The film’s emphasis on decay and morbidity evokes a more sinister Roland Topor, coming with the much same shock that  first viewing Suspiria provided in back 1986.

Avez vous vu Carolyn Harper?

Chicago film maker Jennifer Reeder’s Knives and Skin got off to a flying start when she threw lapel badges reading “Cunty Sluts” into the audience and announced she wanted to introduce feminism into the area of Hitchcock & David Lynch. The gore in her films is menstrual blood (“very hard to wash out”) She added “In the Trump area, art & culture will save us.” I joined the applause. The video Alice Wadington sent of  blowing a kiss to the camera was totally eclipsed.

In Knives & Skin, Mid West Middle River High School Band girl Raven Whitley is parked with the school jock, scratching a light up  “C” on his brow (?). When she determines not to come across, he throws her out of the car to die in the woods, a bit of a stretch but it introduces the River’s Edge model the director is working too.

Whiteley’s mother Marika Engelhardt starts a search. Her day job is leading the school choir with a Prom Dress over her work clothes, setting up a number of the film’s best elements - a song  joined by characters including the dead girl, a choir session where the girls’ asides are put up as sub-titles over the music or Engelhardt being comforted by the female quartet (two black and one wearing a hijab) who re-assure her by breaking out in a choral version of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”

Throw in the black sheriff whose wife is having a false pregnancy. The jock’s sister, Grace Smith has a line in taking cash for her mum’s used underwear from the town’s prominent men, including her school’s principal. When Olwyn demands his team jacket back from one conquest, he finds she has stitched “Andy Kitzmiller treats girls like shit” into it. Even he gets some sympathy, visiting Whitley’s memorial to put her lost glasses on a deposited teddy
bear.

The ending has the kids on the play ground shout at the black student on the roof not to jump but he calms them, explaining that he goes up there to see the highway. “I want to know that there is a way out of this place.” It all makes Middle River an effective addition to the awful American movie small towns like the ones in the Edward G. Robinson Dark Hazard, Helmut Kautner’s The Wild and the Innocent / The Wonderful Years, The Deer Hunter and the rest.

Reeder’s attempt to jam so much into the piece makes it incoherent at times but hers is a strong voice waiting to be heard.

... and for those who have seen everything they added the second screening in ninety years of the 1921 silent La galerie des monstres directed by Jaque Catelain the leading man of Marcel L’Herbier's dreadful L’Inhumaine. Turns out Catelain’s an even worse director than he was an actor.

Doubling as star, Catelain plays one of the tribe of gypsies who sleep in the snow outside the Castilian walled town. He & local girl Lois Moran (with Al Jolson in Mammy) in her first role, decide to pair up and they go to see her grandfather who instead of protecting them shows them to the door. 

Galerie des Monsters : Catelain

 Later (how much later?) they are raising a baby in the Buffalo Traveling Circus arriving in Toledo. Jean Murat the Lion tamer has eyes for Moran and a chubby tootsie in spangles moves on Catelain. Montage of acts - a tumbler, cowboys, clowns, musicians and a fakey menagerie with a rigged human torso, a bearded lady who is obviously a bloke & the skinny girl as a mermaid - a shadowy anticipation of Freaks. The owner lusts after Moran and, when spurned, while she dances in a cage (so so montage) he lets the lion in. Catelain is made to do his act while they are waiting for the doctor. The locals in flat hats go wild for this - implausibly. Hard to see how Catelain-Riquets' sub-Harlequin dance has made him the star of the company.

The circus performers turn on boss Buffalo and the leads and their baby get to drive their caravan back to her village (!) Flossie the spangles girl and the cowboy lion tamer who stole a kiss from from injured Moran are considered to have redeemed themselves.

La galerie des monstres had only curiosity value, even with it’s excellent Lobster Films restoration in a square format. The company's Serge Bromberg did a nice piano accompaniment at the Forum des Images show.

That’s just a dip into their eighty plus programs. I should have got to more of those and cut for instance a draggy Cinémathèque season of French forties movies but there’s no way any one viewer can do that much material justice - that’s one Paris event doing more Cinémathèque than any Australian center can muster in a year - superior too, even with the clunkers.

Elijah Wood in Come to Daddy

William S. Hart at Pordenone

THE RETURN OF WILLIAM S. HART.

I’ve been on William Surrey Hart’s case for pretty much all my adult life. After a disappointing introduction with a clip jammed into the old RKO compilation, I snapped to attention at a screening of Kodak’s battered The Return of Draw Egan and was wowed by Hell’s Hinges which my Mark Donskoi fan fellow Sydney Film Society  members assured me was a film to be laughed at not laughed with.

Down the years, odd pieces of Hart’s work came my way from collectors (Alan Saunders was strong on these) and European Cinémathèques. I have copies of some sitting on the shelf, including ones that Pordenone were showing this year.

After such an extensive familiarisation I was ambivalent about the festival making his retrospective their center piece. The old buzz proved hard to recover  faced with sixteen films drawn from his 1914 to 1918 Triangle Company collaboration with Thomas Ince and into his Paramount work, which we are assured was his best period, a notion that sits uneasily with Hart’s imposing final Wild Bill Hickock and Tumbleweeds.

The program included some of Hart’s two reelers: In the Sage Brush County (1914 - hold up man protects mine owner’s daughter carrying pay roll) The Man from Nowhere (1915 - treacherous saloon keeper hides water in the desert cf. The Law & Jake Wade) The Sheriff’s Streak of Yellow (1915 - law man spares outlaw son of his benefactor but redeems his reputation in their final face-off) The Taking of Luke McVane (1915 - law man and quarry fight off Indians) Bad Buck of Santa Ynez (1915 - fugitive halts his flight to bury a pioneer) A Knight of the Trails (1915 - reformed Mystery Bandit saves waitress from fortune hunter Frank Borzage) and Keno Bates Liar (1915 - gambler shields his cheating victim’s mum from the truth).

Hart’s feature-length movies are more mature and ambitious than the 20 short dramas he was batting out for Tom Ince in 1915, averaging two every month. Those were OK for their day but it’s the mature features which provide his claim to distinction, though the early films already offer bits of business identifying the Hart character - striking the match on his thumb, pausing on the sky line to circle his hat in the air - and the rest. 

 However the event that turned round my attitude to William S. Hart was Pordenone’s screening of The Narrow Trail of 1917 which may well be the actor-star’s best work, displacing Hell's Hinges as my long time favorite. I once tried to program that with The Devil's Doorway.

Here we kick off with a familiar plot line. The Nevardas outlaws, headed up by Bill Hart / Ice Harding, trap the wild horses, with our hero roping their leader, who we will recognize as Fritz the Pinto, bringing him down and telling him they’ll be spending a lot of time together.

Trouble is that, after his riding Fritz in their banditry, the animal has become recognisable and the other bad hats want Bill to get rid of him. No, that’s not on for our hero. The bond between man & horse is plausible and a key element of the plot.

On a stage hold up, masked Bill is smitten with (Australian) Sylvia Breamer traveling with her supposed Easterner business man uncle, Admiral Milton Ross. Bill quits the gang and passes himself off in Saddle City as a rancher, squiring Breamer around the western scenery. Turns out that both of them are presenting false faces which is a stronger dynamic than we are used to and gives this one a lot of its extra charge.

She refuses to join Ross’ scheme to cheat Bill’s out of his bank roll and leaves. Hart decides that she is the one “clean ” thing in his life and follows to San Franciso where he encounters Bob Kortman and his pugilist chum on the waterfront with the tall ships. The pair plan to shanghai him and start getting him drunk in the Barbary Coast saloon where the boxer’s match photos line the back room. However who should be queen of the dancing girls but Sylvia. Our hero is shocked (“If you’re bad, ain’t nobody in the world good”) and rejects her, angrily punching it out with the pug and having to (plausibly) take down half the customers in a bar brawl. When he’s decked them, the other half cheer him on.

It’s back West and who should he find but Sylvia having rejected her sinful ways and returned to “the mountains where things are clean - clean - the only noble thing in my life and I want to remember it.” Bill re-assesses the situation and fesses up on his own lawless past. “I reckon I ought to ask your pardon.” The pair plan to start a new life and the way to bank roll this is for Bill win the town’s thousand dollar horse race. However down at the stable the cowboys opine that the Pinto looks like the fast animal the bandit used to ride and if it wins the big race, the sheriff will have all the proof he needs.

Hart figures there’s only one way out. He leaves his side irons with Sylvia and gallops to victory, snatching the prize money and and scooping her up - like the end of Hidden Fortress -  from the trackside to ride into the sunset before the law can grab him. The race coverage is notably superior to that in the John M. Stahl In Old Kentucky of some ten years later.

 More entertaining than any film of 1917 has a right to be.

While a large part of Hart’s work has been circulating one way or another, Pordenone did
surface a couple of unfamiliar titles. The Gunfighter of 1916 had existed in various single
reel 9.5 mm. editions and fifteen minutes of thirty five millimeter turned up in Switzerland. A team of restorers lovingly gummed these together to make a plausible version of the original.

Hart & friends :The Gunfighter.

In this one Hart is Cliff “The Killer” Hudspeth, leader of a gang of Arizona outlaws rival to Roy “El Salvador” Laidlaw’s band. Laidlaw’s side kick Milton Ross again is living it up in the Golden Fleece saloon, running of at the mouth on the things he would do if he ever confronted The Killer. Hart overhears him and throws him out of the bar humiliating the man. He knows that when he goes out into the street there will be a confrontation.

Stepping through the door he finds milliner the winning Margery Wilson there and warns her to take shelter. He kills Ross in a main street shoot out and Wilson is appalled at what she sees as an act of murderous brutality, confronting Hart.  Shaken by her attack he makes off with the girl to his mountain hideaway where she comes to understand the fact that he is haunted by the memory of his victims and thoughts of his late mother.  The pair bond and, to become worthy of her, The Killer swears he will never take another life. This relationship could only exist in a William S. Hart movie.

However a delegate from the State House arrives and offers our hero a pardon if he will eliminate the lawless El Salvador. This puts Hart in a spot, bound by his oath. However Laidlaw makes off with Wilson and to rescue her, Hart has to kill him, hoping that she will understand that he did it to protect her. 

Hart & Wilson : The Gunfighter.

We get more of the ridin’ shootin’ and glimpses of frontier life that Hart’s films featured.

Even more iconic is the long missing 1916 The Aryan. The word now reaches us with the stain of Eugenics and the Nazis attached.

Prospector Hart arrives in Yellow Ridge with his hard earned poke of gold and the saloon crowd put dance hall floozie “The Firefly” - vamp Louise Glaum - in his path, keeping the telegram announcing his mother’s fatal illness away from Hart. The next day he wakes without the gold and finds the telegram. In a fury he blazes away at his deceivers and flings Glaum over his saddle, carrying her away to be his slatten-slave in an outlaw community where he has authority. 

A wagon train of Mississippi farmers crossing the desert faces exhaustion and death. Hart is unmoved by their plight. However then eighteen year old Bessie Love at her most unsullied pleads with him and he’s faced with the decisive argument “She is of my people!” His hard heart softens.

Hart is not all that sensitive in his dealings with race. His films abound with murderous Mexicans occasionally played by Hawaiian Japanese, and we don’t get many noble red men either. The Indians are generally there to form “a circle of death” in the desert shoot out. Trying for something more shaded in Tumbleweeds has Bill using sign language, prompting Iron Eyes Cody, who was once hired in to sign for a single shot in The Dude Goes West, to comment “He signs like a squaw.” The strong, silent men could be remarkably snide, with Hart asserting Tom Mix dressed like a clown.

The Aryan is always mentioned as a key work from Hart but the pleasure of finally seeing this one is muted by it coming from the Argentine source that produced the extended Metropolis. The quality is equally dire, having gone through the same multiple inferior dupings.

In The Silent Man prospector Budd Marr / Hart comes off the desert with Nicodemus his donkey and a poke full of gold dust. What he wants in the Hello Thar saloon in Bakeoven town is long glasses of water, avoiding the fixed gaming wheel on his way to register his claim. Robert McKim’s villainous saloon owner, "Handsome Jack" Pressley, however has his floozy wife Dorcas Matthews vamp Bill into a crooked card game.  A fight breaks out and our hero is jailed while the nasties steal his claim but, with a bandana over his face, Bill holds up the coach from Alkali on which McKim is transporting the gold and bringing back his new bride Viola Vale. Silent W.S. forces the dastard down the bank and makes off with the girl, taking her to Preachin’ Bill Hardy / George (White Gold) Nichols’s half built log church in the woods - which we just know is going to go up in smoke like the one in Hells Hinges.

The bearded cleric puts her straight about McKim’s existing marriage (complete with star burst silent swear words) and Viola and Bill go wander through the greenery before a surprise ending with a lynch mob and State Troopers.

Also on show was that old favorite 1916’s The Return of Draw Egan. One of the most widely circulated of Hart’s films, this opens with a quite presentable chase with a posse after the outlaw riders which ends with the bad men seemingly trapped in a hillside shack but leader Draw Egan / Hart has them use the floor trapdoor to escape, him going last with a wordless look back at the fallen comrade like Jimmy Stewart’s departing pause to consider the carnage from the battle with the Indians in The Naked Spur.

Wilson & Hart :The Return of Draw Egan.

Hart/Egan fetches up in the lawless Broken Hope Saloon where his ability to dispatch a bad hat impresses Yellow Dog Reform League official Mat Buckton. Just a glance at Buckton’s daughter, Margery Wilson again, convinces Bill to take the job of sheriff and he sorts out the roughneck element at speed. However old gang associate Arizona Joe / Robert McKim shows up and threatens to reveal Bill’s past, planning to loot the town from a base at the saloon where Louis Glaum is queen. Compare Noah Beery in 1930’s The Mighty or James Gregory in The Big Caper, films where the heavy’s mission is a Hells Hinges style destruction of the community. Bill can take no more and faces off against McKim on main street, knowing that the townspeople and Wilson will discover his sinful past. He disposes of the nasty but the grateful locals want him to hang on as law man.

Not a little simple minded and showing some of the rough edges of its day, this one remains agreeable entertainment. It’s probably the most conventional of Hart’s films.

His Blue Blazes' Rawden is made in 1918, that is after Birth of a Nation and Intolerance turned round film making. It has only the shadow of this development visible in Hart’s style.  It is one of his frozen North movies where he comes on in a ‘coon skin cap - not not your full Davy Crocket but still a departure from his cowboy head gear. His Rawden is the master of a Timber Cove logging gang  " "Hell's Babies, virile, grim men of strong pleasures and strong vices." There’s a hope that they will be shown as despoilers of the forest "God's vast cathedral" but any proto ecology theme vanishes almost immediately.

Instead things settle into a conflict in designer G. Harold Percival’s elaborate two storey timber Far North Saloon, where Bill has to duke it out with bruiser barman Jack Hoxie who is beaten for the first time and becomes his adherent, and to face off with the owner, Robert McKim (again), who dies trying to cheat Bill in a card game for the ownership of the establishment. His Indian-French mistress Maude George goes to the winner. The Stroheim actress makes a departure from the pale flowers and low life vamps that populate the Hart films, lusting after Bill with no scruples. This move from formula is not a real success.

The crunch is that McKim’s mother Gertrude Claire is on the way to see her son, bringing his young brother Robert Gordon. Dying McKim was promised that the new saloon owner will protect them from the truth and, stirred, Bill signs the place over to the family as belonging to the dead man and threatens to rip out the tongue of anyone who breathes the truth, carrying Claire through the river to the new grave where he has had her son’s marker replaced with a more lauditory description. Mad with desire, Maude however tells the brother, causing a shoot-out in which Bill is injured. He leaves in the freezing storm in which he may die and rejects George’s pleas to accompany him.

The film is a re-make of  the Hart two reeler 1915 Keno Bates, Liar / The Last Card also shown, where Louis Glaum was the jealous saloon girl - and before that of 1914’s Broncho Billy’s Fatal Joke.

Hart already had the cowboy skills - handling guns & horses - that William Boyd, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, even John Wayne and Buck Jones, needed to learn and you can recognise that. He belonged to the era of Mark Twain, Peter B. Klyne and Jack London where the hard men found themselves protecting women and children but he also looked forward to the grim vendetta westerns of Borden Chase, Philip Yordan and Niven Busch. It’s particularly interesting to find elements that will become familiar in the later Hollywood western already present here, possibly for the first time. The crooked card game in 1917’s The Silent Man prefigures My Darling Clemantine complete with the cards signaled by the bar girl and the giveaway reflection - in the brass lamp. Hart’s films are more like the mature John Ford westerns than Ford’s own silents.

Of course Hart did not make these films alone. He settled into the structure established by pioneer producer-writer-director Thomas H. Ince, a major player at his Santa Inez cañon Inceville studios. There were disputes about the director credit of the Hart westerns, however in retrospect we can see Hart as the active ingredient. Ince’s own major effort Civilization is ponderous and clumsy and even his own westerns like the 1914 Last of the Line suffer in comparison. Under Ince, Hart did find himself working with the most prestigious Hollywood writer of the silent period, C. Gardner Sullivan, later to script the J. Warren Kerrigan Captain Blood, All Quiet on the Western Front and sound Gary Cooper - De Mille spectaculars and working with newly promoted cameraman Joseph H. August who would film major works for John Ford (Seas Beneath, The Informer, They Were Expendable) and RKO (Gunga Din, The Devil & Daniel Webster). Writer-director Lambert Hillyer began a career which would have him working with later cowboy-stars, heading up the admirable 1936 Karloff piece The Invisible Ray and earning a small place in the collective awareness as directing Batman’s first screen appearance, in the 1943 serial. Even now it’s possible to spot distinguished collaborators’ input. We see August’s slanting sunshine from Hells Hinges come back again in the Laughton Hunchback of Notre Dame twenty years later. Hart stepping from wide shot to screen filling close up all the while in sharp forcus, is something which would defeat many cameramen for decades. 

Making Fritz a prominent character, as he is in The Narrow Trail and Pinto Ben, promotes what appears to be their genuine bond. Hart may have innvovated the notion of co-star mount - think Tom Mix’s Just Tony or Roy Rogers’ My Pal Trigger. No one seems to know the name of Broncho Billy Anderson’s horse. Hopalong Cassidy on the other hand never seemed to mention Topper by name though, when California Carson goes to handle him, he’s warned “Take care of your own horse.” Lawyer Ginger Rogers bails up cowboy star Jack Carson's employers by pointing out they violate the no prominent co-star rule in his contract by the billing given his horse in Richard Wharf's 1951The Groom Wore Spurs.

We can also see the contempt for alcohol found in the later Hollywood  western. Coming off the desert ready to register his claim clear headed in The Silent Man, Hart confines himself to his long glasses of water in the bar anticipating Shane’s “Sodee Pop”. Post prohibition cowboys took their status as role models seriously. Rex Bell orders buttermilk in the 1933 Diamond Trail and decks the gangster who sasses him over it. In Wide Open Town, a Hoppalong Cassidy in which the hero is again motivated by his protection of a little girl, bad guy Victor Jory taunts Hoppy about his refusing “a real drink” but when Jory goes for his gun he’s blinded by the whiskey he’d poured that Hoppy throws in his face.

Long before Woody Allen, Hart was getting stick for pairing with women half his age. That was easier for the critics than familiarising themselves with his work. Wolf Lowry shows Hart’s awareness in a plot where he is set to marry Margery Wilson, who passes off the photo of her young love Carl Ullman as a cousin. When he finds the truth, Hart / Lowry, who considered settling the matter with hot lead, leaves the couple to celebrate the ceremony he planned for himself and settles into the hard life on the distant Alaskan frontier.

The actresses in the Hart movies had notably better careers than their male associates. Frank Borzage was an Ince regular and went on to become one of Hollywood’s leading directors and Bob Kortman did persist into the fifties - but they were exceptions. I have no clear idea of what all-purpose supporting actor Robert McKim looked like. He comes on in different character make up each film.

By Contrast Margery Wilson was heroine of the Hugenot episode of Intolerance and did substantial work continuing into the twenties and becoming a writer-producer-director herself. The Toll Gate’s Anna Q. Nilsson became a major star in her own right. Edith Markey was Tarzan Elmo Lincoln’s Jane. Louis Glaum was Ince’s resident vamp achieving popularity which rivaled Theda Bara in films like Fred Niblo’s 1920 Sex. French intellectuals like Louis Delluc, Jean Cocteau and Charles Dullin compared her playing against a virginal Bessie Love, soon to be Hollywood’s most lively representative of Flaming Youth, to something out of Greek Tragedy. In the world of William S. Hart there were two kinds of women. Dorcas Matthews’s fallen wife has a back story with a wedding dress she wore “When I was good”.

It is hard to get round the dissonance between Hart’s appearance and that of the westerner
hero characters established by the covers of Dime Novels or the paintings of his friend Charles Russell, something not uncommon in series cowboys. Jack Perrin, Bob Steele, Swinging Sammy Baugh - or Audie Murphy - don’t look the part. It was in character for both Hart and Murphy to make their war bonds promotion shorts - Murphy’s Medal of Honour and Hart’s All Star Production of Patriotic Episodes for the Second Liberty Loan where he hams it up with Fairbanks, Pickford and Theodore Roberts. That was in the Pordenone season along with the synch. introduction he did for the re-issue of Tumbleweeds.

Hart’s critics said that he himself was the out of place element in his realistic frontier depictions. However Hart seems to have figured that out too. Seeing a large slice of his output together we recognise the actor’s long face framed by a pair of revolvers, held as if they really did have the weight of six lead rounds in them coming up in film after film, an image repeated in posters and publicity photos. We know the actor, like Murphy, as a key element of his imposing western tableaux. When he struggled to vary the formula - contemporary workman in The Whistle or Aztec Indian in The Captive God  the magic wasn’t there.

It’s agreeable to find that after this large scale re-assessment, William S. Hart holds his place with D.W. Griffith, Louis Feuillade and Victor Sjöstrom as one of the first major talents to realise the nature and scope of the movies and that there's still an excitement to be had out of his work.

Barrie Patison 2022

The Missing Movie Star.

 Putting together my book "The Man Who Ate Films - the Life and Work of Michael Curtiz" I struggled to find a picture of Mary Kidd, the leading lady of the films Curtiz made in Europe between those with his then wives, the Hungarian Lucy Doraine and the German Lil Damita.  I was all but defeated, falling back on murky frames from Die Lawine. IMDB was also unable and Google her and you'll get a shot of Mary Pickford.

 

Well the world need wait no longer. There on a dealer's table at Pordenone I found a studio portrait of Fraulein Kidd

.

RIDING LONESOME.

The western, cherished film form of my long gone childhood is supposed to have faded away. Don’t believe it. Some cycles live on. All I had to do was turn on the TV this week and there it was again.

On the commercials, we had A Father's Choice a near twenty year old TV Movie made by Christopher Cain who was one of the comers of that day for pieces like The Young Guns and The Principal.

A Father'sChoice - Zima, Strauss, Trachtenberg

A Father’s Choice follows the form of a standard TV movie weepy but it gets a bit of extra edge from it’s contemporary cowboy movie setting.

After the deceptive video store opening with little girls Michelle Trachtenberg and Yvonne Zima having their VHS choices censored ("Sound of Music! Mum, don’t you like us any more?”), they see their mother and adoptive father shot down in their suburban drive way and have to face the fact that their nearest relative is estranged dad Peter Strauss who they haven’t seen in years. “He’s a cowboy” cut to him in a rowdy bar chatting the blonde in a Stetson.

Dropped at his ranch (no wasteful exposition) the daughters find there’s no ‘phone, not all that much sympathy (“Laundry does not go on my Ormond Brothers records”) and wardrobe comes from The Grand Saddlery and Western Wear.  Life involves doing the ranch chores and the help of so nice case worker Mary McDonnell, who claims to be keeping professional in her dealings with Gary Cooper-like Strauss. Of course he wins them round. Birthing his horse’s foal is a sure ploy.

The dead mother’s rich urban sister moves to get custody (“I can give them everything Charley. What can you give them?”) but the daddy thing wins out when, after a personal best time roping calves, Strauss offers to forsake his place on the Professional Rodeo Circuit, to go on French Braiding their hair. Who can resist the damp eyed tiny in court wearing his Indian Turquoise necklace gift to the late wife.

The leads appeal. Strauss, treated to lots of anguished close ups, looks the part. He’s doubled plausibly in the bull-dogging -  straightening up in a lookalike outfit after his stunt man has finished roping. The suspense from hovering cops trying to track the killer pushes the piece back in the direction of Cain’s best work but he does invoke the western environment with vista shots and working cowboy detail. A Father's Choice has lasted better than most of the work around it.

Surprisingly however the pick of the batch was Rachel Talalay’s 2012 Hannah's Law. The idea of a woman director (the last of the Freddy Krueger movies was hers) doing a western about a female gunslinger doesn’t generate immediate confidence in an era of ideology warped production. In line with current attitudes, not only is the lead a self sufficient woman but she has black sidekick stage coach driver Kimberly Elise (John Q) and a black mentor in a silver stubbled Danny Glover, as they spend the duller part of the film providing her back story.

Despite the uneasy start, lacking cowboy movie panoramas and fielding youthful bounty hunter Sara Canning doing an implausible bit of marksmanship, plugging the bandit fugitive in the hand when she has the drop on him, Hannah’s Law manages to pastiche some of our favorite western plots.

TV actress Canning, with minimal make up, brings ‘em back alive (think Tin Star) to young Dodge City Assistant Marshall Wyatt Earp / Greyston Holt who, like card sharp Ryan Kennedy’s Doc Holliday, comes on for her despite her mannish get up. Reluctant, she ponders “When this is over, who’ll I be?”

 Like Lee Van Cleef with Giuliano Gemma in the 1967 I giorni dell'ira / Day of Anger, Glover fills Canning in on how to deal with the squad of Long Riders coming to town. ”When it gets close and dirty use your hog leg” tapping his side iron.  All this exposition pays off with all Canning’s supporters having reason to desert her for the confrontation, in the best High Noon tradition. Kennedy’s “As a man who has lived a life of regret, I know that look” is the most resonant.

The camera pulls round the street corner to reveal the silhouette line of bad hat horsemen. Their leader cautions that Canning will be hidden away to fire from cover, only to find her standing  in the middle of the main street braced for a shoot-out that director Talalay stages in a way that many of her predecessors would have admired. 

Hannah's Law - Ryan Kennedy

Throw in some nice sunset outlines and a bit of My Darling Clementine and you have a presentable later day western. The budget may keep it out of the class of The Avenging Angel or The Bone Tomahawk but it’s still surprisingly good. They lay the pipe for a sequel. I’m up for that.

William Witney’s 1965 Arizona Raiders also bubbled up from the vault because Quentin Tarantino is plugging his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by hosting a series of movies that the Leonardo de Caprio cowboy actor lead might have appeared in - passable idea - with a selection of SONY Westerns on the new movie Channel 32. Makes a change from Rumanian musicals.

Arizona Raiders itself just about gets by. The pleasures are from recognition. We spot the recycled plaster mud brick walls, the old Columbia orchestrations, their library gunshots, “Shoulda killed him when I had the chance”, “That Yuma’s a hell hole”, along with footage from The Quick Gun a year before. Even the title comes from one of Buster Crabbe’s old B movies. Audie Murphy is again a disillusioned follower of Civil War Guerilla leader Buck Quantrill, like Murphy's character in Kansas Raiders or Randolph Scott (Fighting Man of the Plains & Stranger Wore a Gun), Alan Ladd (Red Mountain) and all the rest. “When we heard Quantrill was killing Carpet Baggers, we didn’t care what else he did.” 

Tarantino.

Tarantino points out that the film is a remake of Texas Rangers - not the King Vidor thirties epic that was served up again as Streets of Laredo in 1949 and rather better The Outriders in 1950 but a l951 Phil Karlson Columbia movie.

For some reason (at ninety seven minutes it doesn’t need this padding) Arizona Raiders opens with actor Booth Colman in costume giving us an extended history lesson from fake pages of The Ohio Gazette and then we get into the plot of former Army Captain Buster Crabbe called in to stamp out resurgent guerilla activity in Post Civil War Arizona which doesn’t have an outfit like the esteemed Texas Rangers to deal with the problem. His solution is to have ex Arizona Raiders Murphy and Ben Cooper busted out of the 1864 Jail Wagon where they are being transported with breaks to walk a circle with their hands manacled. Crabbe (“I respect a good soldier no matter what side he’s on”) isn’t sure whether the boys will just high tail it for the Mexican border but he has recruited Audie’s younger brother to the rangers to get some leverage.

The bad hats are a mean lot. We are introduced to one driving his sheath knife through the hand of the holder of winning cards in his saloon poker game. The outlaws are suspicious but they have a big bullion robbery coming up - an unimpressive string of pack horses with "U.S. Mint" cases on their backs.

Well nostalgia’s not what it used to be and even in 1965 the old hands were trying to edge themselves into the world of Sam Peckinpah. A heavy dies at the foot of the cross. High on peyote, Michael Dante rips the blouse off implausible squaw Gloria Talbot. Without their guns, vengeful Yaqui Indians fling poison cacti down on the suffering bad hats trapped in a cañon below. 

None of this has much conviction. Veteran director Witney (he of the splendid Zorro’s Fighting Legion) is most at ease staging the gun fights with stunt men in the foreground flinging their hands in the air as they get shot. He manages to place action in the out of doors with the odd property department cactus prominent but somehow Witney never catches the grandeur the masters trade in.

Maybe Audie Murphy couldn’t manage to do his lines with feeling but by then he sounds like Audie Murphy and that’s good enough. His later films  (Showdown and The Posse From Hell) could be quite accomplished but this one is just watchable. Tim Holt was a more imposing Arizona Ranger in the nice 1948 Lew Landers movie.

For a finale, Talbot elects to go off and be the first Yaqui nun and Audie rides into the distance with Buster. I mean strewth - fair crack of the whip!  Audie Murphy!

Still, not at all bad for one week free to air.

Star Power: Estelle Brody

Brody & George Gershwin.

I was looking through Kino’s Cavalcade of Comedy DVD, a collection of (largely awful) early sound shorts which Paramount made probably at Astoria Studios in New York utilising Broadway and radio talent and I got to A Broadway Romeo from 1931, a fifteen minute item with minimal direction by Morton Blumenstock who specialised in these.

The film is unremarkable beyond giving a glimpse of Jack Benny’s shift into movies. However playing opposite him is Estelle Brody. She had been a major star of English films, notably the lead in Maurice Elvey’s 1927 Hindle Wakes, probably the best silent made in Britain - we’ll never know because the British film establishment regards British film, particularly British silent drama as a chore to be ignored as long as possible.

Brody - Hindle Wakes

 New York born Brody was first cast by director Thomas Bentley (the 1931 Hobson’s Choice and 1937’s Silver Blaze) in his 1926 White Heat and selected by Elvey for his 1927 Mademoiselle from Armentiers with it’s surprisingly vivid scenes of trench warfare, where Brody accompanies romantic lead John Stuart into the lines, not unlike Eleanor Boardman in Henry King's She Goes to War two years later. This was a major hit on it’s own turf and Brody and Elvey continued their association with the follow- up Mademoiselle Parley Vouz along with The Glad Eye, The Flight Commander (all lost) and Hindle Wakes.

Not a really pretty girl, Brody was lively and winning, carrying the lead part of spunky
Lancashire mill girl Fanny Hawthorne impeccably in Hindle Wakes. When Victor Saville
made Kitty in 1929, British film recording was still lacking and he took the unit to
Brody’s native New York where she found herself faking a British accent recording for
the part. Till then she’d passed herself off as Canadian to avoid the ill will toward
Americans in British films.

A Broadway Romeo

Two years later she tried to launch herself in American movies with A Broadway Romeo where she makes little impression. She did a couple of bit parts in American movies before settling in to unmemorable small roles in British film and TV in the fifties. No one seems to have remembered her there. The neglect of Maurice Elvey, then reduced to dim B movies, had spread to Estelle Brody. That’s kind of a shame.

 

Barrie Pattison 2018

SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL 2019.

My 2019 Sydney Film Festival turned out to be an Agnes Varda season with some associated first releases. I could have worked it harder but I didn’t want to face diminishing returns.  I let go four hundred and fifty minutes of Béla Tarr’s Satantango, to which I felt I had an obligation, and more reluctantly lost Brillante Mendoza’s Alpha - the Right to Kill to a sheduling conflict. Cutting down on viewing and mainly going for familiar names has never been the way to play Sydney Film Festival.  There were the usual irritations - the inadequate documentation on the animation programs, finding a card-only box office that hadn’t been announced or waiting in a queue for the Bong Joon-Ho Q&A that was never going to be let into the full house. For a horrible moment it looked as if the audience which received Rachel Ward’s Palm Beach rapturously might vote it in as best picture but the engaging  Bong beat that one out with his new Gisaengchung / Parasite.

In that one ubiquitous Korean Kang-ho Song (Foul Killer, Joint Security Area, The Host, Subijaki Western Django, Taxi Driver - where did he find the time?) Boon’s regular leading man heads a family making a miserable living folding pizza boxes in the basement flat where they can see drunks peeing against their window in the garbage filled alley way that the decontamination suit fumigators treat with a cloud of spray invading their home.

Parasite.

Son Woo-sik Choi bolstered by photo shop diploma manufactured by his computersavy sister So-dam Park tutors the daughter of the prosperous architect planned house (studio constructed with constant arguments between the director and the designer) He soon has his sister teaching computer, his dad driving (planting panties in the car to remove the former chaufeur) and finally his mum replacing long serving housekeeper Jeong-eun Lee. The only giveaway is that they all smell the same. Finally the owners go on holiday and the infiltrators have what they want - the house and it’s contents - to themselves. But in from the rain comes the former housekeeper who proves to have a hidden agenda of her own.

All this curiously recalls the sixties plots of Theorema, Baby Love or Les Felines.

Handsome just off realistic production values with a confident cast. As in Snowpiercer, we get the division between rich and poor. Boon must be tired of questions about whether the wealthy and envious poor families represent the two Koreas.

Palm Beach itself gathers a squad of Australian celebrity players backed up with Richard E. Grant who is the only one to show the required disdain for the tourist trap lifestyle of the inhabitants of the Northern Beaches. T-Shirt Czar Bryan Brown’s 73rd birthday is an occasion to gather together the members of his old band (think The Blues Brothers or Casi leyendas). Couples Brown and Greta Scachi, Sam Neil and Jaqueline McKenzie and Grant and Heather Mitchell are accompanied by their second generation. When guest Aaron Jeffrey turns down champagne for the tinnie from his own Esky we know he’s going to be allright. 

Palm Beach

 

 

 

Skeletons rattle out of the cupboards alternating with travel brochure highlights - stretching out by the pool, lush dining, fireworks, water skiing. Jaqueline McKenzie lasting well is particularly badly served with her big scene coming late and her nice dance on the grass cut short.

They think this one is a warm and fuzzy tribute to the Oz lifestyle. It’s not. Put it up against the similar and much abused Grown Ups films or more probing pieces like the French 2010 Les Petites Mouchoirs and the local offering shrivels.

Normally Sydney Film Festival is grey hair and oldies being helped down the stairs. It was a bit startling to find myself surrounded by eager young people holding excited conversations. I thought they must have got the day for Nick Offerman wrong - but no. They were there to see Brazilian heart throb Wagner Moura star of the ferocious Tropa de Elite  movies.

Normally Sydney Film Festival is grey hair and oldies being helped down the stairs. It was a bit startling to find myself surrounded by eager young people holding excited conversations. I thought they must have got the day for Nick Offerman wrong - but no. They were there to see Brazilian heart throb Wagner Moura star of the ferocious Tropa de Elite  movies.

He didn’t talk about those. He was there to spruik his new film Marighella an account of Brazil’s Public Enemy Number One in the days of the sixties dictatorship, a subject which had clear overtones of life under the current Jair Bolsonaro government. Their concerns over freedom of the press resonate locally at a time when the news media here are full of coverage of police making off with Australian journalists’ records.

Marighella  kicks off with the subject’s followers robbing a train (lengthy fluid camera movements) and sticking up a bank. I couldn’t help wondering how a film full of violent action could be so unexciting but that was not what this one was about. It documents the desperation of Seu Jorge’s Marighella taking up an “eye for eye” struggle with the then current regime who were big on torture and assassination, to follow their agenda set by the USA, determined that the rest of South America wasn’t going to follow the Cuban model. This one is a Brazilian “Years of Lead” movie right down to the abduction of an American consul.

In a gesture towards balance, they show Marighella’s team shooting down a US police instructor in front of his six year old and spare some sympathy for the sadistic cop on their trail, showing him trash talking the C.I.A. (no one uses the name) officer for whom he has contempt, telling him that won’t stop the US from funding him because they know he is the most effective opposition to the Marxist underground. They even allow characters to contemplate the notion that Armed Struggle may not have been the best path.

However, there’s no doubt about who Moura thinks are the good guys. The film gets into issues like the Brazilian authorities failure in their efforts to prevent news of Marighella’s activities getting out, countered by the Americans who want to put his wanted posters everywhere. We see a cop pissing on one.

Marighella :Adriana Esteves & Seu Jorge

Despite the sketchy depiction of the movement, the actors do register. The scene of them shouting the Brazilian National Anthem cut into the end credits was taken during a warm-up exercise they did to energise their performances and retained by Moura to emphasize the seriousness of what they were doing.

He registers sympathetically in person calling himself “an actor who directed a film” rather than a career movie director. The Hub overflowed with his admirers cheering, whooping and whistling his observations and his triumph in getting his film a release in Brazil. Time was when that was what a Cinémathèque audience did - but that was another country.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Werk ohne Autor  / Never Look Away is a BIG picture at three hours plus, employing an army of Czech and German workers and dealing with big Themes - art and history, the Nazis, divided Germany and Holocaust guilt. It looked like make or break for Von Donersmark to re-establish his Lives of Others reputation after his limply received re-make of Jérôme Salle’s Anthony Zimmer.

Does he get away with it? The answer must be a qualified yes. Never Look Away is very good on art, quite good on politics and if, it was twenty minutes shorter and had a stronger ending, it would impress more as drama. We get a surprisingly charged moment towards the end when super despicable Sebastian Koch shows up in young Tom Schilling’s atelier. It’s has the impact of the monster crashing Victor Frankenstein’s wedding in the James Whale film.

Never Look Away : Koch and Schilling.

 

 

 That’s characteristic of the film’s very German way of hammering it’s points - Saskia Rosendahl’s last moments cross cut with deaths on the battlefield, the successive art
school mentors, the repeat of the bus horn sequence.

Let’s add a special note for the super sharp camerawork of Caleb Deschanel of all people.
 

The Souvenir is so British. It belongs to the tradition of Brief Encounter, The Terence Davies trilogy and Steve McQueen’s Shame. Tilda Swinton has got to be in this one but it’s a bit much to find it’s made by her school chum Joanna Hogg and stars her daughter Honor Swinton Byrne.

Briefly, in what we are told is that in the early eighties (I.R.A. bombs, sixteen millimetr film, manual typewriters but not the street scenes, cars and costumes to clue us in)e young Swinton Byrne is found among her film school chums discussing the under privileged as subject matter “I think we’re all as real as each other.”

Souvenir : Swinton Byrne

Into her life comes toff Tom Burke who claims to do top secret stuff for the Foreign Office and pays for snacks at his club by personal cheque. In easy stages they become a couple.

Burke goes through a nasty withdrawal as Byrne watches and, after a fling with a willing skin head and Burke’s spell in rehab, she takes him back into her home and her bed but those of us familiar with these know that’s not going to work out. Sure enough mum Tilda will advise “The Worst.”

The pace is solemn. The nearest they come to a sex scene is a montage of peeling stockings off legs with austere music. Most of the film is uninteresting wide shots set in a replica flat where we can see Hogg’s  photos of the real life setting of her story through the windows, spaced by jarring inserts.

I sat there hoping in vain for a significant revelation to justify my time, thinking I never encountered a British film school with well behaved students listening carefully to their instructor before tasking with the tidily stored gear. They are not game to show us Swinton-Byrne’s student film.

They say part two is on the way.

On the other hand I watched Ursula MacFarlane’s Untouchable, drawn like the people around me by prurient interest in Hollywood tycoon Harvey Weinstein’s outrages. As it rolled on I realised that what I was watching was not documentary but narrative. Movies generate these - Dalton Trumbo as a political prisoner rather than the world’s best paid writer who worked out how to manufacture film scripts on an unprecedented factory basis, Leni Reifenstahl as a proponent of fascist ideology not someone who took on the Berlin Olympics movie because it gave her unprecedented film making resources and access to stud athletes like Hollywood Tarzan to be Glenn Morris.

Untouchable is not all that much interested in finding out how “fat kid from the Bronx” Weinstein got to be the Hollywood billionaire deal maker in a few decades. It busies itself with his career as a serial sexual predator. There seems to be little doubt that Harvey Weinstein is a monster. Before all this broke I remember bad mouthing him at my Chinese movie event for his treatment of Stephen Chow and the destruction of the splendid Siu Lam juk kau/Shaolin Soccer. I thought at the time that could come back and bite me but I needn’t have worried. There is no sex in that narrative. Nobody cares.

The makers of Untouchable have enough to keep them going without any analysis of his creative work. A succession of women whom we know from their winning screen appearances show up to denounce him - Gwyneth Paltrow, Paz de la Huerta, Rosanna Arquette. Add the technically blind actress whose silhouette with guide dog is their knockout punch. Details of the fortune spent with the sinister security company trying to intimidate his opponents is overlaid with ominous music. That photo of Weinstein with Hilary Clinton must have raised a hoot of triumph in the production office. Scenes of the Me Too movement filling the streets of Manhattan represent a judgement of near Biblical proportions.

The only thing they left out is Weinstein being stripped of his Fellowship in the British Film Institute. Now that must have stung.

Untouchable : Weinstein

The film’s production values are strong. The making is accomplished, even innovative retaining the interview sections where the subjects pause or think.

My sympathy goes out to the producers of the inevitable TV movie to come. How can they top documentaries offering imperiled Paltrow, Rose Byrne, Arquette and the rest? Where will they get someone so perfect a clean cut hero as crusading Ronan Farrow and what chance has Kevin Spacey in a fat suit against Weinstein himself who already gave a better performance than all the real life movie stars he accompanied in Joe Eszterhas’ An Allen Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn?

Another non fiction piece was Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky's  Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, shot in 20 countries on six continents and an account of what they describe as the sixth great extinction in the planet's existence.

We are shown the unprecedented scale of human intervention in the natural order, 10,000 elephant tusks (it doesn’t look like that) on fire in Kenya, nickel-copper -cobalt- palladium mine’s underground corridors in Norilsk Siberia, among the ten most polluted places in the world, potash mines in Russia's Ural mountains, lithium evaporation ponds in Chile's Atacama desert, the Dandora giant landfill garbage dump in Kenya, constantly scoured by human scavengers and marabou storks, a ten storey bucket-wheel excavator in the open pit coal mine in Hambach in Germany, the twin-bore Gotthard base rail line in Switzerland, world's longest and deepest  tunnel, bulldozer harvested Carrara marble quarries in the North Tuscany Alps or a text book juxtaposition of  mossy endangered old-growth rain forests on Vancouver Island and the stripped by loggers slopes they leave. Throw in the factory doing Michelangelo's Davids - all recorded on a three hundred to one ratio shoot.

In all this imposing Koyaanisqatsi spectacle, the odd human face registers - the African wildlife officer disturbed that the tusks being burned behind her represent elephants that she actually followed in the wild, a sculptor who prefers woolly Mammoth Tusks to Elephant Ivory or the armed rangers who know that the animals they are protecting fear them because they are men, like the poachers they are there to combat.

It’s pretty impressive stuff though it’s not hard to imagine Alice Vikander’s austere commentary stripped out and replaced by one extolling the accomplishments of engineering.  The makers proudly point out that the piece was shot and edited without a script and it hasn’t benefited from that. As the Yes Man told John Barrymore in World Premiere “It has size but it lacks shape.” I couldn’t help thinking they were a bit hard on Global Warming! For the first time in living memory the State Theater was  habitable for the pit-of-winter Sydney Film Festival.

Ritesh Batra made the widely admired The Lunchbox and six years later here he is back again with Photograph a German/Indian movie processed at the Sam Spiegel Labs, a rather better film which has the faults and qualities of the first movie multiplied.

The plot has Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Sanya Malhotra, a couple of not quite young people who meet when he starts to hawk her one of his tourist instant photos in front of Mumbai’s Gate of India. She is called away and he is left with the picture. All the market traders know that his revered village Grandma, Farrukh Jaffar has stopped taking her pills because he won’t get married.  To get himself off the hook he sends her the picture as being his bride to be and finds himself in more trouble when the old woman packs up and comes to the city to meet the girl.

Photograph :Nawazuddin Siddiqui & Sanya Malhotra at the movies.

 

 Malhotra has problems of her own, though she tops her accounting class (her picture on their building’s poster). Her family arrange meetings with the used-to-be-fat son of a business associate. Conveniently (the film leaves out all the difficult stuff) the leads meet on a bus and she agrees to support his deception - so charming meetings with granny Jaffar.

The lead pair are as irritating as potential lovers in a Naruse film. Even with the laid back performances, we feel like giving them a good shaking until they get physical. He’s bankrolled the marriages of his two sisters and is into buying back the family house for granny who doesn’t need it. She won’t tell her parents that the path they put her is on nothing like what she wants. Her excursions into his world give her Delhi belly from street food and the disturbing sensation of having a rat run over her feet in a movie theater.

The film's digressions are more involving than the main narrative. A taxi driver from his old town is upset when Siddiqui tells him to stop reminiscing and keep his eye on the Mumbai traffic. She has the village woman maid tell her about the country side and he gets advice when he smokes a joint with the totally corporeal ghost of a suicide his friend witnessed.

We never see the formula entertainment movie Siddiqui takes Malhotra to but Photograph is actually full of borrowed movie plots - the purported photo is the spine of Pupi Avati’s splendid Bix (what happened to that?) and finding the pictures of the heroine in the admirer’s room runs for Past’s Abwege through de Palma’s Sisters.

Here we’re still closer to Merchant Ivory than Bollywood but that’s not an accurate location. It’s hard to knock a film that so clearly wants the viewer to like it.

In the wake of the winning Bend It Like Benham, Gurinder Chadha’s Blinded by the Light is stretching it a bit offering the personal redemption of Viveik Kalra a 1987 British Pakistani  teenager through the discovery of Bruce Springsteen.

Blinded by the Light : Williams, Phagura & Kalra

The kid is is having a rough Teenage with his car worker dad out of a job and the neighborhood skin heads spitting on him and daubing swastikas on the family home. However as happens in these, things take a turn for the better. His Sikh chum Aaron Phagura introduces him to old casettes of The Boss, the school chum girl protestor Nell Williams comes round (he tells her that if she’s just doing it to tick off her conservative family, that’s totally allright), his English teacher recognises his individual voice and gets him work experience with the local paper and (nice this) the menacing neighbor turns out to be a WW2 veteran who is heavily down on     anyone using the swastika he fought against.

Our hero’s old chum’s dad Rob Bryden in a dumb wig turns out to be in touch with the Springsteen thing from his own generation and it all ends uplifting if kind of obvious with the girl rescuing his dad from the fascist marchers. 

   

Krystyna Janda showed up front and centre in a new movie - made nearly forty years after her debut in Andrzej Wadja’s Czlowiek z marmuru/Man of Marble. She’s been about all that time - Mephisto, Elles and the rest - becoming a kind of scaled down Euro Meryl Streep. Here speaking three languages, she’s still able to head up a substantial Italian-Polish piece from countryman Jacek Borcuch whose career is largely in Polish TV and unknown to me. Their Dolce Fine Giornata is prime Festival fare. It’s what used to be called Radical chic - issues served up as entertainment or entertainment propping up issues, like the early films of Barbet Schroeder - very like the early films of Barbet Schroeder.

Janda plays a famed Polish poet living in the lush Italian countryside of which we get some nice scenics of mist rising on the hills or the historic bell tower. Rumpled husband Antonio Catania shuffles round the elegant villa in old slippers and daughter, rising star Kasia Smutniak (Perfetti sconosciuti, which I always seem to be referencing) manages to make her presence felt in an under-written part. She has brought the family to support mum in her acceptance of the Nobel Prize for literature, the only award of any value she observes. 

Dolce Fine Giornata : Janda & Smutniak.

 

 

 Janda teaches grandson Wiktor Benicki to swear in Polish and value Frank Sinatra. Her guests troop out of the family home at dawn with suitably Fellini-esque music. Add in “a ltlite crush” Krystyna has developed on spunky local Coptic restauranteur Lorenzo de Moor. All in all, Krystyna is living the fantasy life of her target audience or film festival subscribers.

About this time Muslim extremists zap Campo Fiore market in Rome killing tourists. If they’d made it the Bataclan attack we would have a different movie. Local feeling runs against refugees, so Krystyna elects to make the big gesture and turns down the award. She and her Arab squeeze go internet viral.

At this point the film establishes its story arc. Journalist Robin Renucci does an attack interview. Drunken police captain Vincent Riotta, who summoned eight officers with torches and a dog when Benicki went missing, now turns aggro. His own son has been beaten because of her campaign and he and the local mayor, who is up for re-election, have met hostility for nominating her. “Do you think you can say anything?”

Janda’s comfortable world is caving in on her. This is not something we are used to seeing in movies or any other place - Alain Cuny in Pascal Aubier’s 1971 Valparaiso, Valparaiso maybe. It’s agreeable to face something not laid out on familiar lines, something that requires second thought.

Also buried in the Festival deluge, note Sohrab and Rustum a new fourteen minute animation from Lee Whitmore, maker of Ned Wethered all those years back in 1984. Sohrab and Rustum is conspicuous, not the least as a contrast to all the festival toons with it. You could not fit this one into Adult Swim. Indeed there’s no indication that it’s maker has seen material with that aesthetic.

It is what Palm Beach so desperately wants to be and fails, an appealing rendition of the Australian experience, of a treasured childhood event recalled after a lifetime - and it feels like it.

In a beach front girls school, the uniformed class listens to a fifties battery radio but their attention is won over by a winning, glasses-wearing young woman English Teacher who reads them an 1853 imitation Biblical poem by the son of the founder of Rugby school, something that is completely removed from their experience and ours. 

The realistic outlines playing over coloured backgrounds are stylish and unfamiliar and achieve the mix of nostalgia and adolescent wonder the piece drives on. It left me wanting to see the other work Whitmore has produced since I lost touch with her career. Now that would actually have been worth having in the event's Australian Women Directors season.

Sohrab and Rustum

Barie Pattison 2022