The Sun Never Sets.

 The Sun Never Sets.

Pre-WW2 English film tends to be a surprising black hole in our cinema knowledge. We hear about the protectionist Quota Films Act, which made it viable to sell shoddy productions by the foot to meet the required Theatre Time of home -grown product. However, getting to see these is another matter. They were never re-issued and rarely printed up in the small film gages, which were the home video of the day. The British Film Institute tended to consider early production beneath their dignity. Though I lived a bus ride away from the London NFT, it wasn't till the Paris Cinémathèque did an English season that I saw titles like Pastor Hall, the Victor McLaglen Tower of London and the Maurice Elvey-Leslie Howard The Gentle Sex.  When British TV arrived, it showed minimal interest, though it would find space for even more tacky fifties efforts. Without prompting, a new generation of critics never enquired. 

It was assumed that the bulk of this material, quota quickies and more substantial efforts alike, had vanished. However market forces, in the succeeding forms of domestic video and streaming came riding up the hill. Titles unseen for more than half a century became available. Rank's Gaumont British product surfaced here when the ABC bought their library, presumably eyeing the Dirk Bogarde vehicles, and more recently Canal Plus has made a deal with the English Network label to make available another substantial set of titles, including Ealing and ABPC efforts that had made their way into their hands.

Hopes of finding lost masterpieces have largely proved unjustified but these films do have another value as a record of a lost pre-war world of Empire Rule, top-hatted toffs showing cloth-capped menials their proper place, Ivor Novello and Jessie Matthews, Music Hall, the British Broadcasting Corporation and threepenny comics. It may be less involving than the one populated by white hat cowboys, Broadway chorines and lantern-jawed G-Men but it is useful to know that this is a picture that a previous generation accepted and often considered a more suitable role model. It has its own fascination.

These generally arrive as sharp well-graded multi-title box sets. I now feel an obligation towards those, to which, curiously, YouTube has now added the imagined forever-lost 1932 Illegal, made for Warner British at their Teddington operation and directed by William McGann with minimal ambition and surviving in a good and apparently complete copy. After their home market showing, it had been common practice to hack a couple of reels out of the edited negatives and ship them to the 'States to provide first halves - never to be seen again. 

   Elsom

In Illegal, the then Mrs. Maurice Elvey, Isobel Elsom stars as the wife of rotter D.A. Clarke-Smith (from the thirties Man Who Knew Too Much), who she has to rescue from cheated bookie Wally Patch, so we move into the plot of Michael Curtiz’ silent The Maddona of Ave. A, shortly later again recycled for Marcel Carné’s debut, Jenny. Isabel uses unexpected winnings on the ponies to open the Scarecrow Club, a sly grog dive with a roulette wheel concealed in a birthday cake. This funds the education of her two daughters at Margaret Damer’s boarding school for better-class young women, on the condition that the other parents must never know about Isabel’s shady profession. 

She of course has a heart of gold, returning his losses to the nineteen-year-old punter and baring him from the wheel. I thought he might show up again. The  peelers take a dim view and, profiting from the club’s lax membership policy, gain admission. Elsom’s loyal associate Ivor Barnard recognises them too late to stop a raid, after which Isabel is thrown in the slammer. Seeing her photo in the paper,  the daughters, now grown (shot of stocking-ed feet touching - dissolve to larger size) to be judgemental blonde Margot Grahame (later in the U.S for The Informer and a Three Musketeers’ Milady) and more sensitive Moira Lynd  leave their posh school and resolve to use their well to do connections to attract customers to a legitimate use of the venue, with the big draw card being Grahame, in grotesque Louis Brooks' glamour outfits, singing then standard “Can’t We Talk It Over?”  

Elsom & Barnard - Scarecrow Club

Dad Clarke-Smith shows up again and Grahame moves off into her own flat, where he gropes her, precipitating a car smash.  Nice sister Lind has a (colorless middle-aged) Nob boy friend who pairs with her despite the scandal and Elsom, getting a fortnight time-off for good behaviour, comes back to the club and uses the obviously planted benzine that Barnard is cleaning the drapes with to burn the place down - as if that made any sense.

The US-imported department heads give the piece a mechanical smoothness (dissolving from the roulette wheel spinning to locomotive valve gears pumping) lacking in many of the minor British films of the day, an interesting comparison with parallel Michael Powell efforts, but they never catch the setting in any involving way. Brief, evocative location inserts, like the newspaper seller's street poster, the first exterior of a neighborhood pub in fog or a London cab parked outside Wandsworth Women’s prison may be the work of  British second cameraman  Cyril J. Knowles. Vintage vehicle enthusiasts will have a good innings. 

This one has the off-putting, squalid quality which persists in later English film - Gainsborough costume melo, Blue Lamp, Room at the Top, Movie Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. Elsom was much livelier as a Spanish Courtesan in Elvey's silent The Wandering Jew. After their divorce, she would settle into doing haughty matrons in Hollywood, films like Ladies in Retirement.

In the Studio Canal collection, director Graeme Cutts' altogether more substantial Over She Goes, of 1937, is a determinedly British musical, which seems to have escaped from Shaftesbury Avenue. A plot about stealing an incriminating letter involves disguising star Stanley Lupino as a missing uncle, back from South America. Think “Charley’s Aunt” and there’s a bit of Mabel’s Room and the common veranda outside the women’s bedrooms from the Willy Forst Alotria.

Large, glossy family estate set and a Fox-Hunting opening after which heir John Wood, a juvenile not outclassed by Lupino & (the most effective) Laddie Cliff  - veterans who have honed their talent on the ‘Halls - all carry in their respective love interests Clare Luce, Sally Gray & Gina Malo, after falling off their horses to get the boys to propose (!) Complications when Wood’s one-time squeeze Judy Kelly threatens a breach of promise action, though she had been the one to throw him over when he was just part of the struggling vaudeville trio. Cliff, the brainy one’s solution is to have a disguised Lupino pass himself off as his lost-believed-dead uncle, whose appearance would mean Wood would lose the inherited family fortune. Kelly’s vengeful American fiancé, heavyweight champion Max Bear, towers over everyone and is perfectly adequate for his part in the complications - about the time he played lead in Wellman’s superior The Prizefighter & the Lady.

Developments involve Police Inspector Syd Walker, who is stuck with Oxford-educated Sergeant Richard Murdock, and aunt Berthe Belmore, trying to unravel the disappearance of the revived uncle. The mechanically perfected dance routines in the gleaming white interiors are interchanceable and it comes as a relief when a carload of Walker’s singing Bobies takes us out of doors into the estate gardens. The pace is maintained, the numbers exactly drilled. There are a few OK bits of well-rehearsed comic business and the women are plausibly glamorous, suggesting they could have carried more of the load. Lab work is less polished with the shaky lighthouse matte and heavy grain on the opticals.

Things are undermined by the impression that the Brits are trying to demonstrate that they can keep up with overseas frivolity.

Less ambitious is Music Hath Charms of 1936, also included in Studio Canal's "British Musicals of the 1930s Volume 1 Box set" with Thomas Bentley credited as supervising director. This one is a shapeless musical with a spray of subplots related to BBC Dance Orchestra leader Henry Hall’s birthday, where his broadcast is picked up in a variety of locations. After the band celebrates it by serenading under the window of his suburban home, he takes carloads of children on a countryside holiday where he is mistaken for an escaped loony.

   Music Hath Charms - Hall & kids.

The musical numbers are spaced by sub plots - a breach of promise action in mugging Judge Aubrey Mallalieu ’s court, restless natives advancing on the pair of British pith helmet types offering their native  boy “Plenty kicks backside” in the African wilds, ocean going busybody Edith Sharpe interfering with a philandering pair and causing a shipboard panic and the marriage-shy mountain climber couple united by a rope cutting accident before meeting rustic Herbert Lomas. These in turn interlock, as with gunfire in the jungle cut to target shooting on board.

Nobody shines and it’s impossible to attribute the contributions of later-notable talents, Ronald Neame and Arthur Woods included. Equally feeble drama & jokes are erratically inserted between the cheery, now forgotten numbers but there is one nice sequence where the musicians trickle back from the countryside fiasco to their BBC live broadcast, which Hall has begun on solo piano. The film’s implausible account of thirties radio gives it some interest - more than the occasional bursts of production value (an enormous kids motorcade rolling through London or police and guardsmen marching to the sound of Hall’s broadcast.

He’s confident enough to compete with Kay Kyser and Harry James in the then-current band leader movie star cycle.

Like the recent surge in unfamiliar Hollywood early sound film on YouTube, these productions are a significantly underdocumented source and I enjoy investigating them. Watch this space!

Music Hath Charms - Carol Goodner

 

 

Barrie  Pattison - 2026

France Five.

 I've just come across TV France 5,  which appears to be their Tubi equivalent - free, no customer email address required, sharp transfers of often unfamiliar items and the option of good English subtitles. There are enough feature films there to keep me going for a month.

I homed in on director Raymond Bernard's 1947 Adieu... Chèrie. Back home after the Hollywood stint, Danielle Darrieux shows the authority missing from her thirties films. It is a peak in her long and uneven output.

The misleading opening presents her in the kind of film that Hollywood served up for Paulette Goddard, at this stage. An overflowing bathtub has fellow tenants in her Montmartre block of flats hammering on her door. Count Louis Salou (unrecognisable from Les Enfants de Paradis)and concierge Palmyre Levasseur get the door open to find her still in her bed. Turns out that he is using her to honey trap rich visiting foreigners on night club tours where she gets a kick back from the proprietors, as well as the commission Salou pays her cf. The Devil’s Holiday, among others.

     Adieu Cherie -Darrieux, Salou & oil

A police raid on the Casino, which converts to a restaurant too slowly (Danielle’s mark turns out to be an undercover cop)brings her into contact with fellow arrestee Jacques Berthier, heir to a Provincial Olive Oil fortune and plagued by his family’s efforts to marry him rich. The pair concoct a fake marriage scheme which will save him from glasses-wearing Rolande Forest, the latest heiress the family has found - with Danielle to be paid off for both the wedding and her rapid subsequent divorce.

She and Salou do an inspection, which gets Danielle roped into the Olive Mill Tour, with Louis whipping up a meal from the souvenir bottle. Similar jokey routines with Forest, in a silly feather hat, confirm the impression that we are watching a (kind of dull) sitcom unworthy of its star, with a subtext about the contemptible rural bourgeoisie.

Robt.Seller, Dorziat, Larquey, Gernaine Stainval

Danielle meets the family dominated by Chatelaine Gabrielle Dorziat, in possibly her best role, and we get the deliberate shift of tone which makes the film notable. The scenes between the two women are impressive but, as her sibling and Berthier’s dad, Pierre Larquey still manages to draw attention. Another brother is supposed to be hunting lions in Africa, when the family disgrace is that he actually married beneath himself and runs a Toulon bar in ignominy. Offering Danielle the necklace passed down for generations precipitates decisions aimed at maintaining the status quo for the final scenes. It comes as a shock when the end title appears. Principal writer Jacques Companéez also did Compagnes de la nuit and La reine Margot. His skill in providing disturbing material seems to have been grossly under-estimated.

This is a film of its day, with plot developments that recall the best French films of the dismissed pre Nouvelle Vague era - the domineering matriarchs of Douce and Diable au corps. The provincial false respectability of Pasionelle, La vie de plaisir or Le courbeau. Craftsmanship is studio superior, though the barn dance in the sound stage, where a car can drive in, does provide a disruption to conviction. Poor Berthier, early in his long career, looks the part but is outclassed, particularly when subjected to the film’s few screen-filling, portrait-lit close-ups.

Charles Aznavour figures briefly in a nightclub act.

Adieu ... Chèrie is a peak in Darrieux' long and uneven output. Finding a film that is so substantial leaves us wondering about director Raymond Bernard’s other unknown work or, for that matter, the lengthy filmographies of many of the other participants. 

By contrast, you really have to make allowances for Abel  Gance, particularly in his thirties weepies. I was prepared to go along with Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre/Diary of a Poor Young Man for about the first hour. This is just one for the money, stuck in a Nineteenth-Century sensibility and offering Marie Bell and Pierre Fresnay, thirties French Boulevard attraction heart throbs. 

Even if his young man is visibly middle-aged and is still wearing black lipstick, they do make Fresnay up plausibly dashing for the Mexican flashback. However as a “sportif” hero, rescuing heiress Bell’s charmless dog from the weir currents, leaping from a tower window to avoid compromising her and still adoring when she keeps on humiliating him as a fortune hunter, Pierre is really too much.

The film opens with the auction of the possessions of the de Champcey family, with young Marquis Pierre watching his inheritance vanish into their debts. The new owner wants to move into the family manor immediately but they’ve let Pierre be shifted into the valet’s chamber. Devoted, aged housekeeper Madame Désir has to wheedle him into eating the tray meal she has prepared. There is only one answer. He has to find a job! A “No Work” signs montage includes the Renault factory but the family solicitor has a solution, getting Pierre the spot of steward on the Laroque  manor in picturesque Brittany, our hero's major quality being that, unlike the previous steward, he is honest. However he soon shows his worth, riding their killer horse and mastering owner Marcelle Praince’s accounts.

Roman... Carton & Fresnay

Family members have their own problems. Heavily made up, model ship building grandfather Delaître is particularly disturbed when Pierre shows. Poor relatives Pauline Carton and Marthe Mellot voice their unfulfilled dreams - a fortune to build a Spanish cathedral to house Mellot’s remains, for which Pierre designs a stained glass window featuring distrustful daughter Marie Bell’s likeness. Pierre has the hots for her, though slim Suzanne Laydeker, his sister’s pauper schoolmate,  seems a more suitable match. They all plot to discredit Pierre with Marie. She thinks being locked in the tower together by singing shepherd André Baugé is a plan to compromise her and our hero has to leap from an impossible height to fetch help.

Comic Saturin Fabre has a better innings, ridiculous in a Druid outfit for the estate musical play and cheerily avoiding a duel with our hero. I still don’t get that bit. 

Finally, gramps’ conscience gets the better of him and he reveals that, as the old Marquis de Champcey’s steward, he stole the estate and still has the will revealing that the property really belongs to Pierre - the circumstances outlined to make Marie approachable - him becoming rich while Marie becomes poor. Rather than humiliate the girl, Pierre burns the will, the fire causing further distrust among the family, but, conveniently, there is a second copy, and all ends happily, complete with a vision of Merlot’s Cathedral for the wedding.

Gance has his feet off the pedals, making no attempt to disguise the old pot boiler’s implausibilities. (there were already two silent versions, though a 1995 Ettore Scola film only uses the work's name).  Gance plays the sequence of the ride to the tower completely soundless, without any artistic justification. Plot developments are hard to follow and probably always were. Roger Hubert on camera and designer Robert Guys work hard, though the real locations are clearly not connected to the studio interiors as they purport to be. We’ve seen these master craftsmen and the cast do better.

The copy is, like Adieu... Chérie, early generation but, where the contrasty grading was correct for a forties production, using it here probably misrepresents the mid tones that were more common before WW2, when this film was shot and are still visible in surviving original prints of other thirties films.

The 1933 Gardez le sourire/ Keep Smiling is the French language version of the Austrian film Sonnenstrahl/Ray of Sunshine, filmed simultaneously at Vienna’s Sacher Atelier, with the same leads,  Annabella (Suzanne Charpentier) and Gustav Fröhlich ( Gustave Froehlich).

The surprising, black comedy of the opening and the similar depression era working class struggle background raise hopes that this will equal director Paul Fejos’ remarkable Lonesome. Froehlich (tallest of the grubby applicants on the street outside the office) fails to get the one job the labor exchange offers and goes home to find his indignant landlady has locked him out of his room for being nine weeks behind on the rent. He wanders the streets alone, reaching the bank of the Danube at night.  Writing his farewell note, Gustav prepares to hurl himself into the suitably oily dark waters. Fejos’ U.S. silent The Last Moment also deals with a drowning. However on the bridge above him, Annabella appears, equally desperate.  She jumps and he leaps in to rescue her. Compare It’s a Wonderful Life, among others.

Dragging her back onto the riverbank, he spots the sign that promises a reward for rescuing would-be suicides and pushes her back in (!), seeing the beat policeman who takes them to the station where the desk sergeant duly produces Gustav’s fifty-crown note and tells Annabella that she has committed a crime and should be thrown into the cells. This however is too much trouble and he turns the pair loose with the reward money to carry them over. Their first purchase is a comb to dress her disheveled hair.

At a nearby fun park, they get a spot selling balloons on commission and he is recruited to be a black face target in a side show but a mean stripe-shirt customer loads a rock into a ball cover and Gustave is injured,  his replacement blacking up before he has even been cared for.

At this point, the texture abruptly changes. The leads, now scrubbed up, are engulfed in a crowd going to a wedding and in the shadows of the cathedral they repeat the responses of the bridal couple, removing the censurable shadow on the relationship. Rene Siti, a working French director, who did a couple of Michel Simon films, is remembered for the French version of Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. He is credited here as artistic contributor and, without documentation, it is legitimate to guess that the grim quality of Fejos’ work intimidated the company into passing the direction into his hands to provide a more up-beat tone.

Gardez le sourire - Annabella & Frolich.

We learn of Froelich’s dream of buying a taxi and, finding a deliveryman’s bag, he puts on the Stadtbank Cap and completes the run, getting himself hired. With the salaried position,  he can move into a housing project and make the first payment on his dream Taxi. However, the shadow of the original hovers over the new shooting and Gustav, while protecting a little boy flattening coins on a trolley track, is hit by a  Nudorf tram and has to be rushed to hospital, leaving Annabella unable to meet the payment due and facing losing the cab and their hope of a safe and happy life.

 However Siti rises to the occasion and presents the up-beat ending where the residents of the flats crowd onto the railings and shower Annabella with coins and bank notes, which their children gather up to placate the debt collector. It’s not a good fit with the sombre opening but it’s a nice sequence in itself and leaves us with a still presentable production. It’s also an early view of the Viennese public housing which to this day is presented as a model of responsible accommodation.

Curiously, the German version used a range of actors for the supporting roles, while here Robert Ozanne keeps on coming back in a variety of character make-ups.

Ignored even in its original market, Gardez le souvenir is not the major film that combining the stars of Metrololis and Le Million under the director of Lonsesome promissed but, for anyone with an interest in film history, this provides intriguing viewing. It’s not without its qualities. 

TV 5 offers more vintage film - René Clement's 1945 La Battaille du rail, Jacqueline Audrey's 1950 Olivia, Georges Lacomble's 1941 Mosieur La Souris, Marcel Carné's splendid 1937 Drole de Drame, along with more recent material and a Briggite Bardot stream. It's like having La Cinémathèque Française in the front room.

*https://www.tv5mondeplus.com/en/films/comedie-dramatique/le-roman-d-un-jeune-homme pauvre/play.   https://www.tv5mondeplus.com/en/films/comedie-dramatique/gardez-le-sourire.

Hollywood & Europe

 Two films, which curiously and probably unintentionally, repeat one another, have landed.  Compare Netflix' Jay Kelly and the Norwegian Sentimental Value, and you find yourself starting off from the same point. We see a successful on-screen filmmaker, approaching the end of his career, trying to repair the damage prioritising his work has done to his relationship with his two daughters. However the difference between the films proves more revealing than their similarities.

Jay Kelley represents a new level of ambition for writer-director Noah Baumbach, after a body of work including his Marriage Story and Frances Ha. The opening shows George Clooney collapsed in a noirish urban gutter, with a Pepsi Neon in the background and a dog sniffing him. Turns out Clooney’s movie star Jay Kelly is asking for another take with the camera still running.

Jay Kelly at work

 The piece rapidly works up traction with a flashback to the familiar story of the actor who went to an audition with a friend and was given the part instead of him.  Today’s Kelly watches the incident with  Charlie Rowe as his younger self, veteran director Jim Broadbent and friend  Billy Crudup. The bitterness is an early surprise.

We find Kelly-Clooney’s teenage daughter Grace Edwards is going off with her friends on her gap-year trip, when Clooney expected her to spend the time with him. He tracks the daughter through her girlfriend’s mother’s credit card. (the girl tells her mum she’s worse than Hitler) This works out as twenty five year manager Adam Sandler abruptly having to revive the Italian tribute presentation that he had cancelled and scenes of the Kelly motorcade rolling through Paris with his entourage reduced to seats in a second-class rail carriage. While Sandler fears the worst, Clooney turns this into a personal appearance, winning applause from the cut-price passengers with his polished Jay Kelly movie star charm. Watching, the daughter is less impressed than her star-struck videographer boyfriend. 

As the trip continues to his Italian honours, which Clooney now has to share with younger star Patrick Wilson, the extraordinary support cast come into their own. It’s still easy to see who are the movie stars and who are the extras. Lenny Henry registers in his brief acting school teacher part and Greta Gerwig makes her isn’t-that-Greta-Gerwig character radiate female sympathy.  The ever extraordinary Alba Rowacher stands out in a nothing part, not inhibited by the fact that she shares most of her scenes as driver for the still imposing Stacy Keach as Kelly's dad.  Laura Dern doing makeup lady asserts, being the first person to desert the Jay Kelly bandwagon. One of the best details is Sandler touching up the white hairs in Clooney’s eye brows with a Sharpy in her place.  Only Isla Fischer is lost in the shuffle.

Giovanni Esposito, Rowacher, Keach & Clooney with cheesecake.

 A bag-snatcher episode generates a familiar plot twist, the star living out his screen action hero fantasies. This seems to particularly appeal to movie cowboys. Think Jack Carson in The Groom Wore Spurs or my old favorites Richard Dix in It Happened in Hollywood & Buck Jones in Thrill Hunter. It’s more comfortable than the repeating scenario we get here again about fans as menacing and comic grotesques. Include Woody Allen and Stardust Memories, Kad Merad in Mes Stars & Moi, The King of Comedy or The Fan (adulation seems to be particularly troubling to Robert de Niro).

However, there is a surprise new emphasis. In the wake of Diego Calva in Babylon, we get Sandler as another enabler central character. These also are not new to movies. Think the disenchanted Lionel Stander or Jack Carson (again) in the first two Star Is Born movies and, later, Jason Robards in George Axelrod's now forgotten 1968 Secret Life of An American Wife.  However it's hard to tell whether it's Sandler's performance or the writing that places his perfect foil agent/manager character  (“Our love is unconditional. It’s like parents or imaginary friends”) at the heart of the film as Sandler becomes as imposing as the top-billed star. 

 

Possibly the most resonant idea in what is a substantial film, is the way that Sandler's victim/minder is also manipulating Clooney/Kelly (“Friends don’t take sixteen percent”) maneouvering him into the new production that he doesn’t want to do, with the dialogue in the Italian town square, where people are dancing under the wall size awning of a  handsome, younger George, asserting that what they are celebrating is also Sandler’s life’s work, with him similarly missing family events and making sacrifices.  “I’m Jay Kelly too.” Adam Sandler has pulled off the feat that defeated Jerry Lewis, Red Skelton, Bob Hope or Fernandel. He has made the transition from career star comic to remarkable serious actor.  

Coming after a couple of hours of best A feature globe trotting, with all the great celebrity bit parts, Jay Kelly disappoints by failing to deliver the final revelation they try to generate. The piece gives the impression of an undisciplined edit. Touches are too calculated - the motif cheese cake or “I’m always alone” as the flunky brings Clooney tea (anticipating Sandler telling him to get his own bottled water on the train). The fusion of Clooney and Kelly in the tribute reel of the star’s own old movies, which the character dismisses, worries me too.

 Then there's Affeksjonsverdi/Sentimen-tal Value, offering its story of the celebrity European filmmaker, who has similarly neglected his child’s upbringing, which provides a revealing contrast between European and US production.

Norwegian director (how many of those can you name) Joachim Trier had a breakout success in his Verdens verste menneske/ The Worst Person in the World with star Renata Reinsve, which found a public by putting on the screen performers who registered more like people than scripted characters, so here they are back again, doubling down with a more ambitious production and adding a name star in Stellan Skarsgård. The first time we see him, he's the lead actor we recognise from his earlier films - turns out that's a distant view with his hair dyed, seen through distorting window glass, as he abandoned the family home. There's a surprise when we find him older and gentler.

A work of European High Seriousness, Sentimental Value references, Ibsen, Chekov - and Lasse Hallstrom. That means it faces a challenge as coming off as poor man’s Ingmar Bergman - particularly when it centers on a film director self portrait. It has textual complexity with theatre and film, parental responsibility, the grandmother’s suicide and the idea of the scarlet trimmed timber house, where three generations have lived, become a character.

 Sentimental Values - Reinsve & Lilleaas

In the present, Reinsve is fronting a prestige stage production of “The Doll’s House”. She’s so rattled that she has her co-star married lover slap her to psych her up before going on. Further stress is generated by dad Skarsgård’s reappearance in the home, which he technically still owns - an irregularity in the mother’s will.

Skarsgård re-enters his daughters' lives because he wants  Reinsve to star in his comeback production. She is less tolerant of celebrity deadbeat dad Stelan, who abandoned them, than her sister Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, the one who reads his script and urges Reinsve to participate in a work of such high seriousness. We get a glimpse of Lilleaas' character, as a child appearing in one of Stelan's earlier films.

Jay Kelly - Clooney & Riley  Keough

Curiously similar, Jay Kelly also attempts to shoehorn in the second daughter with a scene of Clooney talking to Riley Keough on his i'Phone as he moves through the forest, which changes on an edit to her imagined presence walking beside him. Both sister characters have become substitute mother to the sibling on whom our attention is focused. Digression comes in Skaarsgård having a boozy Venice Film Festival nighttime on the beach with Elle Fanning, doing a thinly disguised self-portrait as a Hollywood star who is drawn in by the prospect of working with a luminary of the foreign art cinema and who he steadily but unsuccessfully attempts to make-over in Reinsve’s image for his film. This could be more interesting than what they deliver.

 The big ask is validating Skaarsgård’s project, from which we've heard only the lines “Prayer is not talking to God. It is a cry of desperation” early on. How Ingmar Bergman can you get? The later extended reading does plausibly come close to endorsing Lilleaas’s belief that it has the artistic importance to override objections, as it has done with the character letting her own pre-schooler appear.

Von Trier with Skaarsgård

Points for complexity and craft skills but this one wavers when it approaches achieving substance. What are they trying to tell us and is it worth the effort? It's not the one, of these two movies, I'd willingly sit through again. However, I find it disturbing that the American film, as with other Hollywood productions -  add Dean Martin in Joseph Anthony's 1959 Career, Walter Matthau in Secret Life of an American Wife and particularly Woody Allen's Stardust Memories - all propose Hollywood success as tawdry. Films that provide a sunnier assessment, like The Bad & the Beautiful, James L. Brooks L'll Do Anything all the way back to Maurice Tourneur's 1917 A Girl's Folly are way less determined. The overall picture is of an industry uneasy about itself, one that presents The Big Knife's bitterness with more confidence than Sullivan's Travels' cheery affirmation.

The repeating pattern is striking. Even people who are involved  in productions accept the notion of European High Art outclassing New World commercial product. 

It's not just film critics who can be sucked in.

Jay Kelly - Clooney's eyebrows

Barrie Pattison 2026.

Networking

Network seems to have elbowed its way into the current lineup of theatre re-issues.

 Director Sidney Lumet and writer Paddy Chayevsky had been pillars of the so-called Golden Years of US TV and they knew what they were on about. Network makes an interesting comparison with The Big Knife, in which Clifford Odets does a similar hatchet job on Hollywood, where he’d only been a guest, I love The General Died at Dawn and None But the Lonely Heart and can even spare a kind word for The Story on Page One. Their films all make sour grapes an art form.

 Network opens with a four-way split TV screen, which Peter Finch shares with the actual US network news anchors of the day and picks up him and William Holden weaving drunk through the New York traffic at night, celebrating the fact Holden’s UBS TV news division is going to fire Finch in a doomed attempt to salvage their miserable ratings. Corporate suit Robert Duvall and lady from Programming Faye Dunaway are circling and we get to the film’s first big ask. Finch freaks on air and declares his intention to commit suicide during the following night’s broadcast and Holden in the control room lets the item run.

   Network - Holden, Duvall, Finch & Dunaway.

They go with this, showing Dunaway waving the jump in ratings-share and coverage in The New York Times, who Duvall dismisses for not buying advertising with them. Gerald Ford "prisoner in the White House", Vietnam and Pati Hearst are elbowed. It takes talent of this standard to make this proposition go and an audience follow it.

The scene that everyone remembers follows, with a wild-eyed Finch, now having visions, chased round the studio by boom man and camera, demanding his viewers go to their windows and shout “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” Dunaway on the ‘phone, relates that the affiliates are calling, saying people in their cities are doing it, and we cut to Holden’s home where his daughter Cindy Grover (she gets eaten in Jaws)has gone to their apartment window - to see if their neighbors are joining in. The panorama of project apartment dwellers screaming from windows is the film’s most striking moment. 

Network "I'm mad as hell ..."

There’s lots more. Despite the skill of the leads, glamorous Dunaway’s daddy issues driving her into bed (super discreet nudity)  with mature Holden doesn’t fly but the cut to the close-up of plausible wife Beatrice Straight is a masterful enough moment to get her the support actress Oscar for a three minute role. The back and forward between executive William Prince and old associate Holden, which preserves loyalty past the point where he fires him, is vintage. When it comes down to Capital Murder, it is a kidnapped heiress who objects and when sympathetic executive (Robert Aldrich associate) Wesley  Addy speaks out, it is to make sure that the Network avoids damage to its reputation.

There’s enough material here to carry a production longer than this film’s two hours and, when some of it fails to register, there’s always something coming after to retrieve attention. I’d have liked to see Dunaway’s revised schedule with a Mao Zedong series, live camera bank robberies and the news complete with horoscopes and gossip. We do get them auditioning alternative TV Messiahs.  

Network has dated remarkably little, possibly because there is minimal street footage, eliminating those two clues - female fashion and traffic. The studio does look not a little like Fail Safe’s War Room. Technique is polished and unobtrusive and the cast are consistently brilliant - movie stars and walk-ons. Conchatta Ferrell and Lance Hendrickson have acquired profiles since but they still fit naturally into the assembly. In a roll call where it’s a Herculean challenge to be conspicuous, playing Ned Beatty against type (“because you’re on television, Dummy”) works a treat and the now late Robert Duvall, with nothing but contemptibility to work with, and Peter Finch, who’s figured that the way to handle Paddy Cheyevsky’s contemporary realism is to go Shakespearean, do stand out.

Fifty years ago, Network was outstanding - possibly the most accomplished thing we had from Sidney Lumet, when he was on the way to being the world’s best working filmmaker. Back then it didn’t convince when it laid all the evils of the world at television’s door and still doesn’t. Now however, even if its strength remains as entertainment, it doesn’t do too badly as prophecy, when we’ve had Fox News and government placating oil-rich Saudis. I still recall Oz TV allocating the entire night’s News bulletin to Australia carrying off the America’s Cup - the evening it looked like the black box from the downed Korean jetliner had been found too. I notice Network's UBS doesn't seem to have a sports division.

Also Network’s  language was too much for Broadcast TV and the copy on US HBO replaced black Ecumenical Liberation Army activist Marlene Warfield’s ”You can blow it out your ass” line with “You can blow it out your - nose!” Let’s be grateful that version appears to have sunk without trace.

Barrie Pattison 2026.