Moving On: new releases

For the first time in what is now quite a long life, there’s nothing running in the movie theaters that I want to see. I was inclined to put this down to what you might call the suck it up Gran'pa syndrome, a movie goer’s Seventh Age. I do still have my teeth but I register current films as made by people younger than I am to attract people younger than I am.

However, I discover that Marty Scorsese has stirred a substantial controversy with a manifesto that puts a similar argument, decrying the fact that super hero movies have edged out the kind of films which some of us valued all our lives. His defenders claim that he’s not knocking the current movies or their fans but the fact that they are taking the space and attention that cinema proper used to fill.

Well, the westerns and musicals which once brightened my day have all but vanished. (Scorsese says the new films lack danger)  However the current shift is more a change of business model than esthetics and the idea that the streamed mini series are a fair swap doesn’t seem to be getting traction. Outside of Game of Thrones, these don’t appear to be part of the on-going conversation. What’s the last time you heard someone reference Lonesome Dove or Winds of War?

I was all set to write off current releases with Top Gun - Maverick as the best of a bad lot. I didn’t like the first one all that much but Joseph Kosinski’s team do manage a few stirring moments - un-manned flight supporter General Ed Harris not displaced by the down draft while the van next to him shakes and the impossible stunt flying through the bridge arches, while superannuated pilot Tom Cruise zaps the Uranium Enrichment plant of an anonymous foreign power. 

I’d enjoyed the Jurassic Park cycle much more but their new Jurassic World Dominion, directed by Colin Trevorrow, didn’t grab me. They jammed all the leads from the previous movies in and struggled to give them space (I must have blinked while Omar Sy got eaten) and the once dazzling effects work is now familiar. I notice the film departed the cinemas much faster than the Top Gun movie.

Ma Dong-seok, Gwi-hwa Choi Beomjoidosi 2/ The Round Up

After these my, hopes centered on Sang-yong Lee’s The Roundup, a follow up to Yoon-Seong Kang’s 2017 Korean thick ear piece Beomjoidosi / Outlaws and it again fronts bulky Don Lee / Ma Dong seok, who got attention since the first film from his appearance in Train to Busan. He’s a “Beast Cop” character who gets our attention by brute force. He opens his innings by pulling the lock straight out of a door rather than putting his shoulder to it.

The premise is interesting. Korean cops set off for Vietnam to collect a wanted man who has turned himself in at the embassy. Vietnamese cameramen shot the material located there and the look is different but it’s not long before this one settles into another dim punch-up movie, centering on nasties who target Korean visitors. Complications arrive when a kidnapped man’s father (Nam Mun-cheol) refuses to be extorted.

Don Lee’s character is imposing and there is a possible twist in the way he runs the show, though his superior from the first film, Inspector Captain Gwi-hwa Choi is along on the extradition. Unfortunately all this subsides into a succession of punch-ups with our bulky hero smashing stuntmen through whatever obstacles are on hand.

On its home turf, this one is the biggest hit since Covid appeared and a sequel is already in production.

Ben Lewin occupies a curious zone between TV & film in Britain. His new Falling for Figaro kicks off with a mouth singing opera in close up and chubby Danielle Macdonald in the audience rapt while her significant other Shazad Latif dozes on her shoulder. She decides to dump her lauded spot as a City Fund Manager, determined to see if she can make it as an opera singer. The only chance is training with veteran Joanna Lumley in a remote farming village, where the accommodation is Gary Lewis’ Stinking Pig Inn with the wooden porker tab key to the Bridal Suite (“all that’s available”) and we get cutaways to highland cattle doubling as audience. Rehearsals play over feeding the chooks and McDonald gets to do Mozart’s setting of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” impressively.

Climax at the Singers of Renown contest, where MacDonald goes on after the girl who has barfed but still sings a treat. Speedy finale about no shortcuts and a predictable three years later happy ending pleasantly delivered.

It’s very British to mix high culture with the quaint regionals of A Cuckoo in the Nest, Whiskey Galore and (better) I Know Where I’m Going but this one has something that they don’t, in the way it makes the characters’ communicate their obsession with singing opera. It’s easy to understand wanting to do what they want and easy to see why Palace offered this to their public. Feel good stuff with unexceptional ‘scope production and strong leads. Anticipate an after life on subsidised TV.

So far familiarity is breeding contempt and I’m happier prizing Jean Arthur movies out of You Tube.

However old habits die hard and I was finally rewarded with something that resonated, Craig Roberts’ BBC piece Phantom of the Open.

It is the dreaded Great British Ugly again, like Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool or Peaky Blinders and it labors the issue of class one more time but this one does manage to be involving through a lovable loser protagonist and strong performances particularly by Mark Rylance and Sally Hawkins. The ending with his son caddying for Rylance is irresistible.

We fear the worst with more dim, grainy colour coverage of  Bacon Furnace crane driver Maurice Flitcroft / Rylance (cf. Albert Prjéan in Metropolitan) and a small screen B&W montage of WW2 getting in the way of his dreams. He’s told by his, now suit-wearing deputy manager, son that he’s facing redundancy when the mill is Nationalised and leaks the information to his work mates - classic British working class drama set up, complete with shot of the cloth cap wearing, unsmiling shift piling through the dim, brick walled street.

However Mark is into follow your dream philosophy - quick clip of Billy Liar on the tele, where he sees a golf champion competing in the British Open and decides that that’s for him. He starts reading up on the game.

Despite his total lack of skill, he takes advantage of paper work at the snooty golf club, where members won’t let him make up a four and the secretary won’t let him join, and enters for the 1976 Open, getting to run up double figures in the sand trap, with his disco dancing twin sons along swapping the one yellow caddie vest between them. He clocks up the all time worst score, ignoring the secretary’s advice that he’s not their type. The TV coverage (they don’t actually have this for trials) makes him a media joke.

After practicing slugging golf balls into a dust bin, he comes back as a French player in a false mustache. (we’ve already seen him manage broken Spanish, meeting Seve Balesterous in the dressing room) Even the birdie he looks like scoring eludes him. Failure is repeated with the twins' Disco Dancing tour, when the craze evaporates. The manager son is told to disown his family “You can’t be both!” However Hawkins gives him a stiff talk. This is the point where the piece pulls away from all those other British accounts of proletarian hardship.

We get a daffy happy ending when Mark discovers he has inspired an American Maurice Flitcroft tournament and they want to fly him out for the tenth anniversary. In a perverse way he has provided Sally the travel, champagne, caviar and a diamond (From his mate down at the market) he promised. The son’s Chinese clients are delighted to meet the heir to the only man who plays golf worse than their boss.

Nice finale where a title lists the three subsequent Opens Flitcroft/Rylance entered in disguises. Lots of media montages and a balance between showing him as a pesky simpleton and someone who managed to have a better life than the worn down class around him,  inverts the miserablist expectation it sets up. 

This films actually does have something interesting to say. The thing that makes it stand out is that it documents the most winning aspect of British society, the way so many people reject the grim life allotted them and find outlets for their frustrations - that's where the Film Societies come in.

So what is the message? I’m a bit off put to find that I’m actually repeating what the old wise heads were saying when I began, counseling that the work of Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson was more worthy than all those thick ear American films with Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando. I never swallowed that one and I’d expect the new readers who are starting here to regard my advice with suspicion. It will take a long time to decide if the awareness actually has matured or whether it’s making a misjudged attempt at following the money.

Meanwhile I note with interest that a few front runners are still talking to my generation. Chuck (Two and a Half Men, Roseanne) Lorre’s The Kominsky Method has Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin fronting half hour episodes about a Hollywood acting teacher modeled on Lee Strasburg and an agent friend, full of ferocious bad taste gags delivered impeccably by it’s great cast. The dead wife wanted Barbara Streisand to sing at her funeral (Michael cautions “I don’t think Streisand does funerals”) and they recruit a drag queen imitator. After the daughter falls down drunk, Nancy Travis, Douglas’ date for the event, says it’s the best time she’s ever had.

 

Arkin & Douglas - The Kominsky Method.

 And ... after a long dry spell I have found a new release that did catch my attention. I've enthused before about Aamir Kahn, the lead from Lagaan, and his subsequent output. His new Laal Singh Chaddha has got another week in the George St. Center and presumably other locations. You may not get another stab at it, so make the effort to see it now. I'll do this one at length later.

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2022

Celluloid Warriors.

Capra, Huston, Wyler, Stevens Ford.

Five Came Back, Laurent Bouzereau’s   big budget three part Netlix - Amblin 2016 documentary on the  Hollywood directors who joined up for US Government WW2 film making - sounds like a great idea. Frank Capra, William Wyler, John Huston, George Stevens and John Ford between them had contributed the core of important American film at the peak of it’s success and influence. 

 

Even with a few dummy runs like the Russian Bolshevik Revolution anniversary features or their Turksib, The Tennessee Valley Authority Films and the Olympics movies, there had never been an attempt to pour state effort, on this scale and using talent of this quality, into non fiction film making . However I found myself having reservations about Five Came Back's treatment of the subject.

When John Huston lists out this peer group early on, he includes Anatole Litvak. As far back as the sixties I was looking round for a subject for a monograph, someone who was under-documented and had done exceptional work. I homed in on Litvak - think Mayerling, Tovarich, All This and Heaven Too, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Blues in the Night, The Snake Pit, Decision Before Dawn, Anastasia and Act of Love. Phew! Maybe he was so co-operative because he knew that he’d missed the attention that was being lavished on other  filmmakers.

More recently French critics questioned why, when he was on their door step for decades, no one went to see Litvak. My efforts didn’t count. I can’t help wondering if there is something going on there that I don’t know about or maybe “Six Came Back” just wouldn’t have matched the title they purloined from the old John Farrow movie.

There is an account of Litvak’s WW2 productions in my “I’ve Been in Some Big Towns: the Life and Work of Anatole Litvak.”

Here Litvak gets a passing mention for his work on Why We Fight - the Battle for Russia which they correctly cite as the best work in the cycle. I guess that puts him ahead of John Sturges, Dimitri Tiomkin, Suart Heisler, Irwin Shaw, David Miller, William Hornbeck, Garson Kanin and a list that we’ll probably never see filled out.

Documentation of  Hollywood participants in WW2 Military documentaries is unfortunately sparse. We have to pick up information round the edges, like discovering here that wartime newsreel stories went through the Capra unit where they would presumably have been edited under Hornbeck’s supervision. Curiously the Private Snafu 'toons, made for the forces in Warners’ Termite Terrace, get more detailed attribution.

I also had reservations on the idea of using present day film makers as commentators - Guillermo del Toro, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Greengrass and Laurence Kasdan. Celebrity movie makers are notoriously thin on their knowledge of film history. John Houseman had to be told who Max Ophuls was when they were paired on Letter from an Unknown Woman. Vinente Minelli didn’t know that his cameraman Harry Stradling had shot his favourite movie, La Kermesse Heroique, and Elia Kazan fumed at being stuck with a photographer who’d never done anything significant, unaware that Norbert Brodine had filmed Of Mice & Men, The Divorcee, the silent The Sea Hawk  - and the Australian Officer 666.

Walter & John Huston.

The celebrity commentators do get in some nice moments - Spielberg endorsing John Huston, saying he would have loved to have been the one to fight Errol Flynn over Olivia De Havilland. Coppola had already commented war cameramen in the sequence in his Apocalypse Now. Having Meryl Streep do unobtrusive narration adds to the star power.

Also the use of out-takes and having leader film as punctuation, is a style which gives Five Came Back episodes individuality. The film delights in stories of the subjects outwitting the studio heads, military brass and politicians, smuggling censorable footage in lunch boxes or including a mid shot of Roosevelt’s soldier son in a troubled production previewed at the White House.

  San Pietro

One subject which the production addresses is faking - studio and model shots added to Ford’s Pearl Harbor material. The tedious British Tunisian Victory or Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will were considered more imposing models than the features the Hollywood directors knew. Like Steven Speilberg, I’d always thought of Huston’s 1945 (The Battle of) San Pietro as the gold standard in authentic combat filming but we now learn that it was shot three days after the Italian town had been taken by the allies, filming staged hostilities and the camera swerving to pick up casualties occurring out of it’s field of vision with absolute plausibility. Huston never fessed up on that one. This raises the question of whether the discovery makes his achievement more or less substantial.

Five Came Back, being a 21st Century production, the question of race was always going to be prominent. This was particularly relevant to Wyler, being a Jew who might have been executed if he was shot down on one of his B-25 bomber flights over Germany and, when a Major, punched out a doorman for anti semitic abuse. He had the choice of being sanctioned or facing a court marshal for conduct unbecoming an officer. The European campaign eventually took him back to the Wyler family’s home village in Merleuse where he could still film the sign from his father’s bar, though his entire family had been transported.

Mrs. Miniver - Greer Garson & Dantine

Wyler backed off making The Negro Soldier, when the briefing was to create a film that was as as de-ethnicised as possible at a time when black servicemen were afraid of KKK assaults on their training camp. We can’t miss the prominence given black soldiers in Huston’s long suppressed Let There Be Light but Five Came Back repeats the charge of Japanese racial vilification, making their point with animation clips and a particularly vivid montage of Know Your Enemy - Japan’s all kind of Japanese repeating the Banzai salute. It’s often noted that, in contrast, Germans and Italians were not interned in WW2 America but Wyler dug in his heals on making Helmut Dantine’s shot down flyer in Mrs. Miniver a brain washed fascist, over Louis B. Mayer’s objections.

The makers resist the temptation to turn John Ford into the star. We learn that, like Frank Capra, his solution to the challenges of his military obligation was to go on a bender and they describe his sympathetic treatment of real-life P.T. Boat Commander Robert Montgomery and abuse for war time civilian John Wayne, while filming They Were Expendable in 1946. Like Wyler, Ford was injured making his films.

George Stevens appears to have been the most deeply marked of the directors they cover. This project benefits from his unit’s making shots of him wearing his steel helmet in war-ravaged Europe, and the family archive which retained the material.  Stevens later commented that he would not have made 1939’s Gunga Din, with its scenes of combat as a schoolboy adventure, a year later when the reality was becoming evident. His escapist comedies and musicals from the nineteen thirties seemed trivial after filming the Dachau Camp. Stevens’ coverage there was used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials. I’d never seen some of this before. It is profoundly disturbing. 

Post-war, Stevens abandoned a comedy project (On Our Merry Way?) in a search for significance. We get this effectively elaborated in his son’s remarkable 1984 documentary A Film Maker’s Journey, which sets a standard against which all films of this kind must be measured. 

Capra in particular was incensed to find that, while he had been involved in the war effort, he’d gone from America’s most revered film maker to “Frank Who?” They claim that the grimness in It’s a Wonderful Life is a result. This ignores the shift in tone already evident in his thirties films, particularly Meet John Doe. The filmmakers are shaky on film history, unwilling to call out the fatuity of Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver or Wuthering Heights while omitting his substantial 1932 Bill of Divorcement, Dead End  or The Heiress. 

Something which I didn’t know, having being told that acceptance for these war time documentaries American theatre showing was their triumph. They had flopped. The public was happier with Mrs. Miniver. It’s a Wonderful Life was also a failure, ruining Liberty Films. It only found its audience subsequently through public domain airings on TV.

Capra with silent 35 mm. camera.

The point at which Five Came Back moves out of the ordinary is the ending, where they connect their subjects’ actuality shooting with footage from their fiction films. The celebration montage for the end of the war is one of the most involving pieces of film that we have.

Maintaining the high note, they wind up with Capra’s so nice awards acceptance speech “Because only the valiant can create, only the daring should make films and only the morally courageous are worthy of speaking to their fellow man for two hours and in the dark.” That rates a cheer. I wonder who scripted it.

Also

Many of the WW2 US War Office films are on YouTube. I’m including information on some of the less well-known.

William Wyler dodged a bullet when he pulled out of 1944’s The Negro Soldier finally directed by then Capt. Stuart Heisler. It is one of the least satisfactory of these productions.  It is obviously filmed using Hollywood fiction film conventions and equipment.

The film frames actuality with self conscious dramatised material, as a black preacher, Oscar Micheaux actor Carlton Moss who also wrote the film, conducts a service for a self-conscious all black congregation giving them quotations from Hitler’s twenty year old manifesto about the inferiority of the negro race and having the mother in the congregation read the letter from her soldier son, represented on the star banner near the studio interior pulpit. 

Mix from Old Glory to the Swastika banner to contextualise the prize fight between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling (this is a bit mean) before running through American history - the almost obscured black rower with Washington crossing the Delaware in the famous painting, soldiers in the Spanish American War, Cuba, Panama, the 1st US Troops to receive the Croix de Guerre etc. They cite U.S. black achievers - Polar Explorer Matthew Henson, inventor George Washington Carver and contemporaries like Jesse Owens and Marian Anderson. This material will be recapped in CBS’s imposing 1968 Black History - Lost Stolen or Strayed. We get to the military scenes with blacks inducted, trained and fighting, a female unit drilling with its black officer & the Tuskegee airmen - climaxing in split screen shots of units marching.

The handling is disappointingly routine and it seems unlikely that the film had an influence. It may have re-assured black Americans.


More imposing is 1947’s U.S. Army Air Corps documentary Thunderbolt directed by Wyler & Capt John Sturges, then a studio film editor.  The cutting of the flying scenes is remarkable.

James Stewart introduces the two year old coverage of the P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bomber aircraft. It was used in missions based in Corsica to break the stalemate in the Italian campaign by zapping enemy supply routes in Italy two hundred miles behind the front at Monte Casino and Anzio. There's a nod to history and the terrain that “exhausted Hanibal’s elephants and Caesar’s legions.”  Front-line bombing had failed (“wrong use of air power”), so they hit communications. “They boast that Italian trains ran on time - not these trains.”

A marginal example of the work of two major filmmakers, maybe it is possible to see their hand in the unusually grim touches - examining flack & bullet holes, crews comment that the flight is a plane short when no one saw it shot down, Italian kids edited to appear to be looking at a decayed body (“they saw things not meant for children to see”), the burning wreck (“a P-47s burning and there’s a man in it”) or using remaining ammunition on farmers and buildings.

They spend considerable time in the on-ground activity that spaced the two-hour missions, with the Americans keeping pets and creating a resort with buildings and a dammed river beach, because there was no one to stop them, and the one piece of location synch. filming - the Colonel‘s country club drunken singalong. The attempt to personalise the fliers isn’t completely successful, though it does come with  the voice-over regret “These are your years... the time to get started.”

Blown up from 16mm. in Technicolor, it has an evocative score by Wyler regular collaborator Gail
Kubik - who only made corporal.

Litvak’s Operation Titanic is a little remarked additional product from the Why We Fight team, recognisable from Disney animation, the Tiomkin sound (Song of the Volga Boatmen, Johnnie Came Marching Home & Aulde Lange Syne) and its final Liberty Bell. It is one of their best efforts, even if it’s tempo does slack at the end.

The opening suggests the scale of the air war - 20,000 tons of equipment and four months of preparation, 800 B-17 Flying Fortresses over Berlin in one raid - and gives the misleading message “none of those planes returned to their bases.” It reveals Shuttle Bombing, as arranged in the Tehran pact of 1943, with American flying fortresses leaving Italy and Britain to bomb Germany and German controlled European targets and landing and refurbishing in Russia, rather than returning under fire with their load discharged, “the triangular super highway in the sky.” The claim is that there was no target inaccessible to them and the enemy had no idea where the attack would come from. This is particularly convincing in the simple probing arrows animation.

Operation Titanic

The characteristic two-second edits, close up typing or rubber stamps, go with striking images. The Brass, in apparently studio filming, is less convincing than the often excellent location material gathered by twenty-five library researchers - the locomotive shadow falling on the fields it passes, the “Kill Hitler” painted bomb, brought back in the loading sequence. Narration adds “We were still in enemy skies.” or “Over the snow covered mountains of Persia ... ruins, a silent reminder that enemy boots had marched two times here.”  

This one took Ukrainian Litvak back to Russia for the first time since his twenties departure. He flew on bombing raids and his input on the Russian material is a major asset. The film is particular interesting in the depiction of the contact of Americans (“a thousand tourists from 48 ‘states” briefed “be soldierly and neat at all times”) and the Russians, with women and even uniformed children among the support group. Sign language, cards, baseball, pin-ups, chewing gum in exchange for choral concerts. “The unshakeable unity of the Allies.”

The coverage of co-operation with Russians could prove a post-war embarrassment to those shown and the film was suppressed for decades.

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2022

B Movies

 

Instead of using Reveille With Beverly as a forties B film that locates itself, I should have waited for The Smiling Ghost. Even without the one reference to the draft this is instant 1941, right down to scenes shot in a cutaway car, a character in an iron lung or jokes about tying a bow tie.

The contract lead players, the brassy orchestrations and even the editing, with characteristic soft edge wipes, brand it Warners. Though it’s meant to be a crazy family comedy, it lapses into film noir - the train pulling into the deserted station at night, the door that opens to throw the shadow of a gunman, lightning striking in the fierce rain storm - mixed in with horror movie - opening the mausoleum vault, the family mansion with the secret passage and a distorted face peering from behind the painting. The actual smiling ghost scenes are really quite scary.

The plot (don’t look too closely - this is a studio first half) has Wayne Morris, besieged by creditors but selected from a newspaper advert. his sidekick Willy Best placed over the pay ‘phone. The rich Bentley family require someone on a do-anything basis and he’s chosen, even with feeble jokes about his hair cut. Turns out they’ll pay a thousand dollars to anyone who will announce being engaged to heir Alexis Smith, become ”The Kiss of Death Girl” now that three of her financés have been struck down. Wayne forges ahead. “You’ve heard of her?” “I’ve heard of a thousand dollars.” Sure enough a fiendish monster lurks.

Contract technicians deliver state of the art production values. Director Lewis Seiler was an old hand. He’d done some of the best Tom Mix films. He paces the piece nicely and chooses the angles well. They needed someone not over-endowed with sophistication to take on this one. I cracked the killer’s identity in his first minute.

David Bruce, Brenda Marshall.

The leads are perfect in parts tailored for them, a still robust Wayne Morris “attractive in a kind of boyish way”, spoiled heiress Alexis Smith and intrepid girl reporter Brenda Marshall wearing a massive hair piece. The studio contract talent takes up the slack, the ubiquitous Alan Hale, Lee Patrick, Bogart’s secretary in The Maltese Falcon here glamorised, and David Bruce who was with Marshall in Singapore Woman.

However check the reviews. As with companion pieces like Ben Stoloff's The Hidden Hand or Bill Beaudine's Face of Marble, the one who everyone remembers is black comedian Willy Best, though he’s submerged in the second panel of cast credits. Along with Mantan Moreland and Steppin Fetchit, he does the craven (shot of knees knocking or sprinting away from danger), comic darkie comedy that people like Bill Cosby, Melvin Van Peebles and Spike Lee piled abuse on. The then most prominent black male players in Hollywood delivered variations on this racial stereotype. 

Willy Best

Since the nineteen sixties people have found it appalling. Watching them now it’s possible to see that, despite the dreadful material given them, all these actors would dominate their films. They’d even get laughs. Willy Best (in The Ghost Breakers opposite Bob Hope, who thought his timing was the most polished of anyone he’d worked with) here even makes the one character trait they give him, his support of Morris, register sympathetically.

The Smiling Ghost is a nostalgia piece for a few elderly viewers, a curiosity and a rich hunting ground for thesis writers. I found it a kind of quick revision on all those now forgotten double feature program fillers I once waded through in the hope that they would repay the time.

Then, because it was there, I looked at the 1936 Crime Patrol and it made an instructive comparison with The Smiling Ghost, both program first half movies, one from Warners at full cry and the other from the penny pinching Harry Knight Productions.

Without the standing sets, in-house production departments and contract personnel, director Eugene Cummings (his only credit) has to make do with actual streets and warehouses with a small studio to house his billiards club, doctor surgery and boxers' dressing room decors. Designer Paul Palmentola would live in infamy for his work on the Katzman serials. Here we can see him busting a gut to match the undercranked stock footage stadium wide shots and simulating a Drive-In restaurant with one clip-on tray the waitress collects from the car door. Like a lot of the people trapped on these derisive budgets, he was not without skill. They needed it just to get by.

Leading man is Ray Walker - think a poor man’s Jimmy Dunne, who was a poor man’s Don Ameche. Walker attacks the part with energy and registers sympathetically. He would have a long career subsiding into often un-credited bit parts. Leading lady, one time Zeigfield Girl Geneva Mitchell was presentable and the support cast offered a surprise with silent comic Snubb Pollard playing his henchman part straight.

Max Wagner with Pollard.

The plot has boxer Walker running foul of small time crime boss Wilbur Mack, by refusing to throw a fight (“All my friends are betting on me”) and being recruited into the police by the prospect of working with an ex champion at their gym. No training montage in this picture, Walker just appears on a neighborhood beat in uniform. (compare the immediate introduction to combat in The Deer Hunter)

Intriguingly the use of anonymous players in unmodified period motor transport in real city fringe settings gives the piece a plausible tackiness and Cummings' straightforward handling manages reasonable pacing. There’s even the odd surprise, as when the store clerk follows the robber into the street and lets off a couple of rounds at him. However Cummings can’t defeat dialogue like “Don’t try to think, fat head! We got to lay low till this blows over.”

Coming at it with minimal expectations, I quite enjoyed this one. Without wanting to over-sell it eighty years after the event, Crime Patrol and the B movie conventions in which it is made, stand up better than a lot of more ambitious work. I can understand why more than a few veteran regular movie-goers prioritised these, recognising them as tailored for their own undemanding tastes.

The You Tube copies on these are OK - and The Hidden Hand is very nice.

Barrie Pattison 2022

SQUID GAME.

There's no denying the attention getting ability of Netflix' Ojing-eo gei / The Squid Game. Beyond that,  it raises the possibility that we are watching the future of screened entertainment - a (South) Korean series delivered by a streaming service in the original language with sub-titles (the bad guys speak English) in pin sharp 16.9 that blows away the presentations of multi million dollar movies. It appears to have burrowed into world wide awareness.

We have to consider what exactly is happening here and where it came from. The work  really extends the line that runs through Nineteenth Century pulp serials, Fantômas and Dr. Mabuse, Republic and Sam Katzman, Superargo and Diabolik, Santo and Psycho. The imagery is as imposing as theirs - pastel shade Escher mazes, armed, bee featured, scarlet suit heavies, a criminal mastermind in a cubist black face mask (great piece of design). We get a fantastic secret headquarters run by a fiend with a hidden identity. Somewhere along the line, this has got mashed in with the Asian ultra violence cycle - Takashi Miike's Koroshiya 1/Ichi the Killer, Park Chan-wook's Oldeuboi/Old Boy and Chinjeolhan geumjassi / Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and their rip-offs, with Most Dangerous Game / Hounds of Zarroff and the Battle Royales bringing up the rear.

 I will admit to being sucked in, though I only intended to dip into a couple of episodes. They managed to manufacture the most seat gripping cliffhanger that I've run into in all this body of work.

Intriguingly Squid Game comes largely free of Marxist content. The worker heavies are backed by obscenely wealthy V.I.P. gamblers. Deadbeat dad hero Lee Jung-jae is a victim of his own destructive gambling habit, exploited by proletarian Seoul crims who make him sign a deed to his organs in his own blood. His wife is about to take their child to the U.S. out of his reach, though the kid enjoys his fast food birthday party her mum wouldn't have allowed. Even when he makes a killing at the track, this is lifted by girl pick pocket Hoyeon.

In the pit of his desperation, our hero is joined by briefcase man Gong Yoo who he shifts down the subway bench to avoid, saying "I don't believe in Jesus." Turns out the stranger offers the two envelope game where a loss gets a slap and a win a bundle of bank notes. The stranger leaves the business card with the circle, triangle and 'phone number which introduces the Squid Game, an ultra sadistic variation of the childrens' playground activity that opens the series in black and white.

 It's not till the participants get onto the playing field dominated by the giant swiveling fairground doll and see losers gunned down, that they realise what they are into. Characters include aged Oh yeung-su, thug Heo Sung-tae and the lead's old school chum Yoo Seong-ju, who has lost speculating his company's millions. Shrewish Kim Joo-Ryung makes a particularly vivid impression and figures (doubled) in one of the piece's two sex scenes.

Lee Jung-jae & Kim Joo-Ryung

In a character-istically cynical development, players who exercise an escape clause determine that the outside world is more menacing than the game environment. As desperation increases, loyalties fray and standards dissolve. 

Design factor is impressive - the stark dormitory where the beds get stacked in a replica of the maze entrances and cartoon depictions of the games appear on the walls. Bodies are incinerated in pink gift ribbon decorated coffins. Interloper cop Park he-soo penetrates the control area with its luxury observer lounge adorned with human shaped cushions and occupied by glitter faced speculators.

The piece builds to the ferocious episode Four (out of nine) and the general consensus is that it falls away from there. We get the impression the writers painted themselves into a couple of corners - unable to work out plot elements - though the revelation that playing the game is the ultimate incentive isn't bad and, as always in mini series world, needing to keep their options open for a sequel.

Ojing-eo gei / Squid Game.

 

 

 

Showrunner Hwang Dong-hyeok has form after his admired features, the 2011 Do-ga-ni / Silenced (spot Kim Joo-Ryung) and 2014's Soo-sang-han geun-yeo / Miss Granny. His attack is marred by already familiar touches - Stanley Kubric is in there, with the evil patrician turning away from the life and death struggle like Lawrence Olivier in Spartacus, and it's a liberty to make use of "The Blue Danube" again, while the heavy waving from the departing subway carriage immediately calls up distracting memories of William Friedkin's The French Connection. Even so, series drama attention now focuses on Hwang, after an act that it won't be easy for him to follow.

I leave this one with an alarmed feeling that I have seen the future and it might be working. 

 

Barrie Pattison 2022

Guilty and De Mille.

Adrianne Ames - Guilty as Hell.

Whatever may be said about the Hollywood movie, it's market penetration and vigorous promotion creates a nostalgia that doesn't go away. Product, that commentators and educators originally dismissed, is often still around when culture they endorsed has faded. With a little effort you can still watch Paramount’s 1932 A feature crime piece Guilty as Hell or Guilty as Charged in more prudish markets.

After their success in the 1926 movie of the Maxwell Anderson - Laurence Stallings hit What Price Glory, Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen continued to be teamed for a decade and a half, as Sgt. Quirt and Captain Flag or their  characters re-birthed for copyright reasons.

The pull back from close-up of the name embossed on Henry Stephenson’s Doctor bag is the first of the film's flamboyant camera moves, roving the apartment with his shadow and rolling into the close-up of his face to be reflected in the lenses of wife Claire Dodd’s glasses as he throttles her.

Stephenson is using the neighbors as part of his alibi, setting the radio to come on (a seven second valve warm up was standard at this time) while he chats in the corridor. The sound of the broadcast (“crooning ... it’s supposed to be soothing”) makes a link to shady Ralph Ince’s Colombine Club where picture snatching journalist Lowe gives up a taxi to the always glamorous Adrienne Ames (Woman Wanted, Abdul the Damned). Richard Arlen (in an uncharacteristically subsidiary part) finds the body of his lover Dodd and tries to remove the traces of his visit.

Guilty as Hell - McLaglen, Kelso, Stephenson, Arlen, Noel Francis & Ince

 

 

 

Lowe and Police Capt. McLaglen are old associates, stealing women from one another, and the reporter injects himself into the crime scene, ashing his cigarette on the body, but mellows when he takes an interest in Ames, who is prime suspect Arlen’s sister. Passages like McLaglen's tricking Arlen's lying witnesses and the demonstration of the unreliability of recollected time might have played better on Broadway, however at this point, conventional detective movie plotting depletes attention - comic cop Fred Kelsey bumbling round with a screw driver to make off with the door knob for finger prints.

The prints montage is one of the bits of flamboyant handling that continue to be injected into standard cop film staging, along with revealing Ames at the head of the stairs in her stylish apartment or dialogue in big close ups with the cast looking into the lens and pointing fingers or documents intruding into the shots.

The film does spring to life abruptly with McLaglen’s pursuit of Ince, as the fugitive attempts escape down a snow covered fire escape and the policeman blazes away at the wrong man. 

Director, former Keystone cop Earl C. Kenton, was someone whose involvement with the horror cycle (Island of Dr. Moreau etc.) would make his output  more conspicuous. Here he’s got celebrity cameraman Karl Struss along to urge him into work more showy than what we were getting from his admired contemporaries, people like Josef Von Sternberg and Howard Hawks. Unfortunately, from this distance, Guilty as Hell just registers as an erratic attempt to add luster to a routine crime feature. It is outclassed by the remarkably similar Hecht- MacArthur Crime Without Passion made a couple of years later.

The Vintage Filmbuff.com disk on Guilty As Hell is passable.

The film was re-made by Ralph Murphy as 1937’s Night Club Scandal with Elizabeth Patterson in the same part in both.

 

Also coming my way was a copy of the believed lost 1926 Cecil B. De Mille Production Silence, from a play by Max Marcin and directed by New Zealander, the assured Rupert Julian (Phantom of the Opera) whose career didn't last into the sound era. The opening makes this look as if it will be another one of the agreeable De Mille efforts that followed his break with Paramount, polished production line efforts under his own banner in the last years of the Silents - Donald Crisp's Young April or Julian's own Walking Back.

We get the best yet rendition of the familiar scene where the condemned man hears the construction of his gallows - montaged hammer strokes, mixed to swinging pendulum, noose and superimposed bells.

Flash back gets us into H.B. Warner’s remarkable three ages performance, as he comes into the saloon run by bar keeper and landlady Virginia Pearson (lead in Theda Bara's debut The Stain). Wife pregnant Vera Reynolds is renting upstairs and H.B. isn't interested in Pearson’s come on.  She is hammy but it’s interesting to see a De Mille woman dishing it out, using a bottle to club the police informer drinker behind the bar. 

Silence - Warner, Pearson & Hatton.

While H.B. was away Vera was sustained by benevolent rich guy Rockliffe Fellowes. Events land our hero in the grey bar motel and Vera marries her protector. When Warner eventually shows up to check out the situation, his pre-teen daughter, little Violet Crane, cuts the hungry ex-con a slice of her birthday cake. We've moved from touching to maudlin. 

Years again pass and at the marriage of the daughter, again Reynolds now grown to be the dead ringer for her late (thus saving an outlay on split screen) mum.  H.B.’s low life side kick Raymond Hatton (once more excellent) tries to blackmail Fellowes and in the ensuing confusion Vera plugs him, with H.B. taking the rap.

So we get back to H.B with his lawyer Jack Mower on death row and another saintly chaplain accompanying him on a (suitably effectsy) last mile. A happy end destroys any dignity the piece may have left but the high pro De Mille technical finish persists - large elaborately dressed decors.

Performances vary considerably with the children awful, in contrast to aging-on-screen Warner giving a notable turn.

It's easy to joke about the DeMille melodramas but as I watched Silence, it started to seem familiar. I realised that it's shadow was visible in the 2015 Charlize Theron Dark Places, which I'd seen a few nights before. It's unlikely that its writers had seen a De Mille movie that had been lost for near a century but that underlying structure still managed to come down the years. 

Re-made in l931 by Marcin and Louis Gasnier with Clive Brook, Silence turned up on the free Cinémathèque Française Henri site in a beautiful tinted copy of the version released in France, which had shed a reel.

Barrie Pattison 2022

Nazis and Parallel Worlds.

I’ve wanted to see the l932 F.P.1 Doesn’t Answer  through the five decades since I caught a half reel  clip with Conrad Veidt at a back yard 35 millimeter show in North London, where they kept the inflammable nitrate film in uncomfortable proximity to an open fire. The production was obviously an early example of the esthetic of The Shape of Things to Come, a cosmopolitan, high art sensibility brought to movie science fiction - wow, yes! Well unexpectedly, the film has shown up, for a short time only we are told, on You Tube, as Secrets of F.P.1, that same English language edition. 

In the brief period between the nineteen twenties arrival of film sound and the mid thirties
development of dubbing and sub-titling, it became common practice to produce parallel versions of movies. In Hollywood, film makers like Claude Autant Lara, José López Rubio and Jacques Feyder no less, would troop onto sets vacated by American directors, after the English speaking cast had gone home, and make their own versions with casts doing dialogue in French, German or Spanish. In the era of DVD extras, a few of these re-surfaced giving substance to the legend that Feyder’s version of Anna Christie with Greta Garbo again or George Medford doing the 1931 Dracula were superior to the ones we’d always watched.

 In Europe, the same thing was happening, producing a flock of lookalike, sound-different movies for their separate markets. A few notable productions were scooped up in this process - Congress Dances or the first sound films of Fritz Lang. Hitchcock did Mary, a German Murder, with Alfred Abel in the Herbert Marshall role. These consumed the early career of the then immensely popular Jan Kiepura but their big star was Conrad Veidt - two out of three Congress Dances and the English version of  Kurt/Curtis Siodmark’s “F.P.1 Does Not Answer.” Siodmark, brother of Robert, was, like Veidt, a specialist in fantasy and terror.

F.P.1. -  Albers, Veidt and Boyer.

Some of these alternates were made-later re-workings, rather than simultaneous, using as much footage as they could where original support players players weren’t recognisable - Kiepura in My Song for You and the Korda remake of Alex Ganovski’s Taras Boulba - but the F.P.1s  were genuine siblings with a photo taken of Veidt, Hans Albers and Charles Boyer, the fly boy heroes of the three versions, standing side by side on the decor to prove it.

They each recorded a version of the film’s theme song, with Albers’ becoming a hit still performed today.

As if just finding F.P.1 was not enough, the copy Is dazzling, looking like it came off the original negative correctly shown through the early sound aperture and impeccably graded. The brief, under cranked and forced processed night time exterior of the shipping offices, with fire engines rushing to the scene, is the best clue to the otherwise polished film's age.

Secrets of F.P.1. - Esmond & Veidt.

Secrets of F.P.1 opens at a black tie gathering in Hamburg, with Veidt’s Major Ellissen, who 'phones his press photographer associate Donald Calthrop (“an odd looking gentleman”) to get coverage for the bogus fire alarm he will send from the Lennartz Ship Yard, using the confusion to break into the file room and shift, to the owner’s office, plans on Floating Platform Number One -  “an artificial island in the middle of the Atlantic - made of steel and glass.” This creates interest in the neglected scheme designed by his friend, Leslie Fenton’s Capt. Droste.  

Veidt’s call was overheard by the glamorously turned out Jill Esmond, who proves to be part  owner of the Lennartz company.  The romantic leads that played opposite Veidt in his sound films always looked like his daughters and Esmond, then married to Laurence Olivier and fresh from a successful movie debut in Hitchcock’s version of The Skin Game, manages elegant nicely. She actually was the daughter of Eva  Moore from Whale's  The Old Dark House.

Smitten, the Veidt character moves on her but his life style is a stumbling block. “A man can’t always live in hotels. There are other things than hunting elephants and beating records” (Ever wonder why most English cinema failed to connect with a popular audience?) The offer of a revolutionary new plane is too tempting and Conrad signs on to pilot a marathon flight and disappears in Australia, while like Things to Come a superimposed machinery and flight material montage covers the remarkably swift Lennartz Company construction that gets F.P.1 up to the point where sailors gather on it’s deck and do the song about “The Lighthouse Across the Bay”.

Jill and Leslie have have become an item, upsetting our world weary traveler hero when he re-appears hair appropriately greyed, to explain to her “I didn’t want to come home a failure”.  Un-named nasties, who presumably have connections in surface transport (“There are spies in industry as there are in war”), have planted a saboteur on the Platform. We can spot Calthrop and Francis L. Sullivan among the jolly tars who fish off that imposing pylon in the studio tank - one of the nice pieces of staging that makes us forgive the unconvincing, un-populated model shots which provide the distant views of the platform.

Filling the sea water ballast tanks gives the bad hats’ agent a chance to sink the platform and a shoot-out with Fenton ensues - one of the movies' least exciting action scenes. Back in the Hamburg office, Jill hears this break out before the two way radio goes silent and she wants to use her plane to investigate the fact that F.P. One doesn’t answer but (surprise!) the only pilot available is Conrad, while the crew of the sinking construction have been gassed into immobility, with ballast controls jammed open and it’s planes out of commission.

Heroic intervention includes the later familiar shot of the plane take off, dropping off the lip of the deck only to soar skywards again!

What was intended as a ripping adventure yarn, (think Korda’s Clouds Over Europe/ Q Planes or Robert Stevenson’s King Solomon’s Mines) here emerges ninety years later as an antique, more revealing of its day than the makers intended and not in a good way. Well, be careful what you wish for.

   Montage image.

The French companion piece F.P.1 ne réspond plus with Charles Boyer as Ellison appears only to survive now as an inaccessible 9.5 sound edit. However, also on You Tube with excellent sub-titles, we can find the German copy, F.P:1 antwortet nicht again directed by Karl Hartl. Versions of the multi language productions, provided foreign partners, often omitted production values offered home audiences. This one was more than a reel longer than the English language film. Montages using  prismatic and superimposed images at the opening and during the rescue flight, tracked with Walter Reisch's "Flieger, grüß mir die Sonne," have been omitted in the English copy where the  credits have been abbreviated, possibly to disguise the foreign origins. Contributing writer Reisch had a long career, becoming part of the thirties exodus to Hollywood where he settled at 20th Century Fox for many years.

 

As I watched the German version, I first noticed how closely the British  followed it, with Veidt and Esmond performing the same movements and bits of business Hans Albers and Sybylle Schmidz do - not unlike Feyder’s cast repeating Clarence Brown’s angles in his Anna Christie. However as it rolled on, I also realised how much more I was enjoying it. The tempo matched the content more effectively, even before we get to the finale where Ellison’s discovery of the immobilised crew is extended and made more a matter of shocked realisation and his change of heart is slowly unrolled, moving from a feeling of betrayal to resolution. 

F.P.1 antwortet nicht - Schmidtz & Albers.

Albers is far more at ease in the Ellison part, given complexity as a prankster whose levity he is outgrowing while we watch. Veidt is one of the most authoritative performers of all time. His dismissing the angry mob with a sweep of his arm is something Albers can’t match but all his tormented screen apparitions haunt Veidt's attempts at being dashing in this one, as they do in Walter Forde’s 1935 King of the Damned or Victor Sjöstrom's enjoyable 1937 Under the Red Robe. Albers, given one of his best outings, is more plausible and involving here. Sybille Schmitz is not a conventionally pretty girl. Her career had been given a great launch with Ernö Metzner's realist two reel Polizeibericht Überfall /Police Report! Assault and the famous Carl Dreyer Vampyr, making her a German cinema A Lister, and here she plays with more shading than the better groomed Jill Esmond. (the striking shot of Esmond in her opera cloak, framed by the two caped bobbies, is actually better in the English version) Peter Lorre, frequently Albers’ side kick in German films of the day, takes the photographer part, though surprisingly Donald Calthrop (the blackmailer in Blackmail) is notably more effective. It is with his chess game, omitted in the English version, that the character’s function in the films emerges. Only Paul Hartman (later in Kazan’s Man on a Tightrope) is eclipsed by Leslie Fenton, fresh from his appearance in The Public Enemy. Fenton would go on to direct the exceptional Tomorrow the World and Alan Ladd Whispering Smith, among his more routine product.

Secrets - Fenton & Ward.

Rather sadly, we spot Warwick Ward, imposing-lecherous villain in Variety and the Bigitte Helm Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna / The Wonderful Lie of Nina Petrovna, here almost invisible as Fenton’s first officer, like Lang regular George John, his King of the Nibelungens and the blind man in M, in this one glimpsed as the aggro sailor leading the mutiny. Friedrich Gnaß from Razzia in St. Pauli & M is Lennartz' watchman. 

 

The Composer Alan Gray would also score the early films of Powell and Pressberger and Gunter Rittau (Metropolis, Blue Angel) is among the camera credits. Director Karl Hartl, formerly editor on films by Michael Curtiz and Alexander Korda, promoted with the arrival of sound, would also handle the Albers vehicle Gold and the excellent 1935 Zigeunerbaron. He was one of the most talented film makers of the Third Reich.

This brings us to the elephant in the room. Albers, Hartl and several more would achieve their greatest successes in the Nazi years.  Assume that is why their work is so little commented, as English language critics had little access to it, though Secrets of F.P.1 had a Marble Arch first run in London. Even if writers were familiar with 3rd Reich product it would have been an act of some daring to express admiration for it. From this distance, it would seem that Hans Albers was foremost among what have been described as “Deserter” film makers, people who neither endorsed or opposed the German government. Albers’ enormous popularity among German speaking audiences would have made him a formidable opponent and he never played a Nazi in any of the films I've seen, though he did do a Merchant Marine in Helmut Käutner’s WW2  Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7 only to see the film banned by Dr. Goebbels.

A closer examination of Albers’ films shows him receiving unexpected vindication from a British Court in Unter heißem Himmel (1936) and as agent of the American Police, Sergeant Berry, der gangster schrek aus Chicago (1938). I like to think of those as indications where his sympathies lay, though they are just as likely to be part of the German attempt to enlist sympathy for a forthcoming war with the Bolsheviks.

 

The F.P.I films can be seen as clearly a highlight in the European proto-science fiction cycle that goes back at least to William Wauer’s 1915 Der Tunnel and  Emil Jannings in the 1920 Algol, through Metropolis and Maurice Elvey’s 1929  High Treason and the Tunnel sound movies to Korda’s Things to Come - short on monsters from outer space but full of the abuse of technology. Add F.P.1. to the then-contemporary product, packed with unruly mobs roused by (presumably Bolshevik) agitators - include Metropolis, Giftgas and Michael Powell’s Red Ensign of a couple of years later, which the FP1s frequently resemble.

It is frustrating that such a classy entertainment and key piece of film history are virtually never mentioned in literature devoted to the subject. Though he had been a leading man since the early twenties, F.P.1 is the first of the major Hans Albers adventure films which appear to be the mother lode in 3rd Reich Cinema - include Gustav Ucicky’s Flüchtlinge (1933), Herbert Selpin’s Sergeant Berry (1938),  Hartl’s Gold (1939) and Selpin’s Wasser für Canitoga (1939).

Even more significant is the fact that the F.P.1s were Erich Pommer’s last pre-WW2 German productions, ending a list that includes Caligari, Metropolis, Variety and The Congress Dances. The combined pull of Hollywood and push from the Nazis emptied Berlin of possibly the greatest concentration of film making talent then in the world. Pommer’s departure alone changed the nature of German film visibly, ending the stream of master pieces he had nurtured. Selpin had been a writer, Hartl an editor and Ucicky a cameraman. They achieved films of this standard following their association with masters. It is a perverse tribute to Pommer's talent and that of his peers that their second rank could take the big step forward and emerge from largely mediocre work being done around them.

It was worth waiting fifty years. With all its flaws, F. P.1 antwortet nicht stands among the most enjoyable work of its day from any source. The film shows some of the most talented people then working pushing themselves to their limits in a tradition of great imagination. Having the parallel version is extraordinarily revealing. These are examples of the kind of film that mandate the existence of the Cinémathèques - which we do not have.

 

Conrad Veidt - heroic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2022.

MORE SPANISH FF.

Mediterráneo - Castillo, Rovira & Fernandez.

The 2022 Spanish Film Festival did provide notable movies - Maxibel (covered on Film Alert) is likely to be the best thing I see this year and Competencia oficial / Official Opening is one great in-joke. I did miss the new Santiago Segura and more - cost and time. However defying past experience, the popular material has been outclassed by purposeful movies this year. The also-rans have been dispiriting. Are El lodo /Wetland, Mamá o papá /You Keep the Kids and the dire La piel en llamas /Skin in Flames really the best efforts from the Hispanic world for twelve months?

There was however one other find in the schedule.

Mediterráneo - the Law of the Sea kicks off panning along the sunny Spanish surf beach picking up a man on a surboard and the plastic caught in the wire fence (like Cette musique ne joue pour personne) to get to a now grizzled Eduard Fernández (Hormigas en la boca 2005) with binoculars. He’s a pro life guard, arguing with boss Sergi López on the cost of jet skis to expand the business. However a picture of the child drowned in the surf at Lesbos Island gets to him. “We’re turning the Mediterranean into a mass grave.”

The law of the sea declares that no one is to be left in the water, so Eduard decides he’s off to help and asks for volunteers to join him but the only taker is the irresistible Anna Castillo (lead in Iciar Bollaín’s The Olive Tree) who turns out to be his daughter and who Fernandez doesn’t rate ready to go in the water. Nevertheless, Eduard drives off with his regular side kick Dani Rovira,  in the battered red car that will become a motif.

When they get to Lesbos, they find the beach where drownings are a regular event un-patrolled and roads choked with refugees. Taking a couple of them in the car, has the derisive local police threaten to arrest Eduard for people trafficking. The only sympathy comes from the beach-side hotel owner, who was a Turkish refugee herself years back, and cuts them a cheap deal for accommodation. They find a slashed raft on the shore and orange jackets with empty plastic water bottles in the pockets being used used as flotation.

The newcomers start operating with a salvaged dinghy. The Greek locals, whose livelihoods and living conditions are suffering, are unsympathetic. After the red car is graffiti'd, the garage owner quotes them fifteen hundred Euros for a paint job and the same sum when Eduard wants to buy spray cans and do the job himself.

Lopez and the daughter arrive with Jet Skis that the customs impound and there’s dialogue about ruining their Spanish business through neglect. The E.U., where no one turns up for meetings, gets stick for the inactivity of their own border maintenance force.

A Russian refugee woman doctor waits alone by the lighthouse tower, having promised her daughter that she would be there, when they were separated. Using this unlicensed medico gets the team thrown in the two segregated cells of the small jail but the film’s picture of the Greeks is shifting and the local sergeant refuses the bribe Eduard offers for her release and turns them all loose.

Father and daughter Castillo reconnect. It transpires that Eduard does know about her Major in journalism.  She brings photographer Àlex Monner to dinner and he proposes a TV interview of which Fernandez is scornful, until they point out that it was a photo that brought him there. The actual recording is telling. “The push factor is the E.U. selling arms to Syria.”

The highlight rescues give the piece grip - drowning people pulled up by their hair “Circle them twice. Give the children to their mothers. They won’t let go.” When Fernandez reaches one packed Zodiac, a passenger slashes it. (if they are in the water, the fugitives become refugees) When the refugees on shore find a young smuggler, he has to be rescued from the ugly mob they form. Along with showing Fernandez’ aggro nature, this redeems the sentimental edge. He says that the arrivals are not his responsibility after they land or pours out the now-sympathetic cops’ liquor, when they offer him a drink, and gets beaten up for it.

Mediterraneo - Barrena, Rovira, Castillo, Fernandez, Lopez & Monner.

The climax is the ferry sinking, where all resources are rushed to the the ocean full of floating people and orange jackets and there’s the buzz of seeing the hostile garage man leading the fishermen throwing out their nets to join the rescue. The girl they take for a boy, who is the one to thank them, already provides a grabber moment before her revelation - damp eyed finale.

Writer-Director Marcel Barrena specialises in issues subjects and his TV Movie Cuatro estaciones is admired. Film craft and performances are more than adequate. The photos of the real life characters shown with the end credits intrigue. That their activities led to the formation of the Open Arms Movement, with an impressive rescue record,  is an affirmation.

Add this one to the current misstep-free refugee cycle that already includes Terraferma, Soy Nero, Welcome and  La Pirogue.

Since the success of his 1993 Belle Epoque Fernando Trueba has been one of Spain’s most conspicuous movie directors. His films like La Niña De Tus Ojos (1993) and El embrujo de Shanghai (2000) have fielded name stars in ambitious productions. His new El olvido que seremos / Forgotten We'll Be / Memories of My Father ticks a lot of boxes - elaborate period recreation, a real life subject, an acount of doctor become politician Dr. Héctor Abad Gómez, played by name star Javier Cámara, whose refusal to endorse the Colombian government’s aggressive military treatment of progressives had him branded as a Communist and dismissed from his university post. Despite declaring “soy medico, non politico” he runs for office when fellow liberals are being assassinated.

  El olvido que seremos - Urrego, Cámara,

The three decade story starts mono- chrome for writer-son Juan Pablo Urrego’s 1971 studies in Turin with a flashback in colour to show warm Medellin extended family life. Add a digression into simulated 8 mm. for home movies of  life threatening illness. The craft aspects and performance are irreproachable.  Whit Stillman is in there as a fellow doctor.

Cámara is a great support actor (Truman 2015 and The Young Pope 2016) but he unfortunately registers as amiable rather than authoritive in his leading role. The support become indistict around him. 

This one is a companion piece to Quo Vadis Aida, showing over familiar events that we must presume were devastating to those involved but to which the makers are unable to bring conviction.

Poliamor para principiantes /Polyamory for Dummies is one of those irritating sex comedies, with (practically) no sex and few jokes, that were prominent in the swinging sixties - What’s New Pussycat, Extraconiugale, Prudence and the Pill.

Fernando Colomo (El efecto mariposa / The Butterfly Effect 1995)  fields veteran comedian Karra Elejalde (Even the Rain) in what someone must have thought was a racy, cutting edge romp, after all it features Elejalde’s son 28 year old Quim Àvila still living at home and failing to establish his masked Red Ranger character as a You Tube sensation. He gets punched out by suited up Toad Man at a Comicon and rushed to hospital where Àvila is smitten with nurse María Pedraza - who is rather fetching.

She however proves to be in a Polyamorous relationship with another young woman and we start picking up the practices and terminology (unicorns, cowboys etc.) of their community, which Àvila fails to master. Back home however, mum Toni Acosta adopts the notion of three-some with some enthusiasm. Similar lame frolics follow, attempting to show the participants as naive and fun loving.

Àvila further antagonises all when he appears as his Red Ranger character on Susi Caramelo’s TV show, denouncing Polyamory.

The optical effects commenting the disasterous relationships are mildly amusing for a while. Whatever hopes the Madrid settings and smooth handling have raised rapidly evaporate.

Dani de la Orden’s  Mamá o papá / You Keep the Kids descended from the 2015 French
movie Papa ou maman (2015), its sequel, the 2017 Italian Feature film Mamma o papà?
and a 2018 French Mini Series. It has been back to the well too often.

In attempt at a bright coloured sitcom, Dad Paco León (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) and mum Miren Ibarguren are separating when they both get the offer of dream jobs, so they want the other partner to look after their children in their absence and, in what the makers hope is a whimsical inversion, they start playing the kids with bribes like a bicycle claimed as the other partner’s gift and menacing fictions.

The makers want this one to register as edgy, with references to nipple shields and an aggressively inclusive school teacher but, outside of a nice scene of the family gathering  on stage to join in a song to protect the youngest from embarrassment, it just emerges as mean.

In the early stages of director Iñaki Sánchez' 2nd feature El lodo / Wetland, hopes are set up for a tense crime piece on the model of La isla mínima / Marshland whose star Raúl Arévalo is the lead again. However elements like the ecology material and remote canal-rutted landscape navigated by the long tiller boats, give way to familiar melodrama - Paz Vega’s pill popping wife still haunted by the death of her son and swarthy, menacing locals who stand about cursing “Fijo da puta.”  We wait for them to mutter "We don't like strangers here!"

Fresh from saving a wetland in Brazil, bearded agronomist Arévalo arrives at the Spanish La Laguna Blanco which is menaced by water levels which are dropping each year. Local matriarch Susi Sanchez tells him her farmers are good people - always ominous. We know that nice dog, that we don't see enough of, is a goner and Arévalo's distrust of the shot guns he won’t let in the house will prove justified. When things turns nasty Juan Gea, the local Police Jefe, alerts them to the fate of Arévalo’s dead predecessor.

El lodo / Wetland - Vega & Arévalo

Shaven headed Park Ranger Joaquín Climent, who is disturbingly tolerant of poachers, carries off the acting honors, though spooky home help Susana Merino, from de Iglesia’s El Bar and As Luck Would Have It, registers firmly enough to liven up the ending. The accomplished Roberto Alamo is wasted and Vega, making her transition from glamorous to serious, just comes over as grating.

 Drone shots of the terrain with driving its marshes by Satnav or glimpses of flying V formations of the endangered herons circling at dusk help but they'd be more effective if they were less murky.

    

Barrie Pattison 2022