Italian Film Festival 2025.

When I had access to the European multiplexes, I used to wonder why the films I saw there were better than the ones that arrived in festivals - with a small overlap and a few exceptions. The answer wasn't all that hard to work out. The films were in theatres on the basis of their earning power while festival choices were made by critics, who might be nice people, kind to small animals and always remembering their mothers' birthdays, but had to  focus on material that would impress their editors or showed they shared their readers' preferences and prejudices. Paying customers were a surer guide than arbiters of taste.

It all comes back at the current Italian Film Month which puts up a strong (so far) selection of current hits. It’s getting hard to pick the best entry but Gabriele (Mediteraneo) Salvatores’ Napoli-new york/ Naples to New York has got to be in there with a chance. 

They don’t waste any time, opening with an undetected WW2 bomb obliterating a Neapolitan terrace occupied by locals who had no other shelter. Young Dea Lanzaro staggers out of the dust unharmed but next morning in hospital she sees the aunt, her only caregiver, die of her injuries. The girl escapes attention to share a building site hideaway with orphan Antonio Guerra, who barely supports himself cheating at Mazetta card games and selling cigarettes to the Americans who are now abandoning the city. However a U.S. ship is in the harbor and Guerra makes off with a row boat ferrying sailors ashore, to transport black cook Omar Benson Miller - who is having a good year with this one and Sinners.

One of the successive set-piece scenes has the kids trapped on the departing naval vessel, spoiling purser again imposing Pierfrancesco Favino’s record in detecting clandestines. They find the ship’s three communities - the seamen, the white clothed first class passengers and the wretched Italians in steerage. Given a bunk below decks,  the kids face one menacing sailor who advances on them to be warned off with a fork held at his throat. He proves to want to offer them a chocolate bar. After a voyage where they make themselves useful, the stowaways awake to the wonder of Lady Liberty outside a porthole, looking like the Madonna of Pompeii rising from the mist. Hard drinking Captain Tomas Arana makes them Favino’s problem and he conspires with Miller to smuggle the pair ashore. When the packing case where they are confined opens, they are in New York. Lanzaro knows her sister has already gone there to marry and tries to find her using the photo that is her most valued possession. Anyone remember Stephen Low’s 1995 IMAX film Across the Sea of Time?

The impact of the city with its hoardings, markets, Little Italy’s Saint Gennaro festival and Times Square Movie House bright lights foyers, is as mesmerising to the audience as it is to the kids. Separation makes Lanzaro desperate but Favino and Miller come back into the narrative (somewhat uneasily) as Favino’s home life with the striking Anna Ammirati takes a central place. The missing sister arrives as a mug shot in a discarded newspaper. Soon it's Defense Lawyer Anton Alexander reading the 1912 Xenophobic newspaper rant to a courtroom where Miller, limited to the blacks’ upper gallery, begins a round of applause, prompting calls for clearing the court. Women's Lib arrives a few decades too early but it's only a movie, Ingrid. Naples to New York manages to mix damp-eyed family material with sinister melodrama and becomes curiously topical with its U.S.immigrant deportation subject. 

The film buts one highlight onto another and sets them in an extraordinary movie world. Tempting food  adds another sense dimension to events -  Ammirati's cooking, the seeded bread roll the black teenager gives the starving girl, the luxury chocolate cake the pair steal. There are remarkable pieces of effects work - the reflection of the duo that the camera inverts to show them standing in the street. A subject that starts with a building exploding, funnels down to a card game, without any sense of anticlimax.  

It’s curious to see the Naples dockland again so soon after finding Luigi Comencini’s 1948 Proibito rubare on YouTube and the film makes its own comparison running the clip of Paisa, where they tell us we can see Guerra on screen. Indeed Naples to New York’s trick is putting up its own version of scenes we recognise from other movies - Death In Venice, The Ship Sails On, Once Upon a Time in America and notably The Brutalist, where the Ellis Island footage there is totally outclassed. We get a mix of actual locations (cafe tables have appeared on those garment district loading docks) and striking art department simulations. Jimmy Durante or Tom Waites doing "West Side Story" are among the period tracks that back the action. While this one has moved away from its origins, an unfilmed script by Fellini and Tullio Penelli, there are constant Fellini echoes  -  Miller smuggling an unexplained live leopard, a vice quarter with picturesque whores.

Naples to New York - Lanzaro, Guerra, Favino & Salvatores

The excellence of this one prompts me on all those other Salvatores films I’ve never managed to see, even  importing DVDs and putting in work on ethnic sources. Well what do I expect in a country that hasn’t had a Cinémathèque for fifty years.

Also contending for top honors, we get Roberto Andò's L'abbaglio/The Blunder/The Illusion, another superior effort from his 2022 Stranezza team, where comics  Salvatore Ficarra and Valentino Picone also flanked Tonino Servillo, there Luigi Pirandello. The new film is another of their Sicilian subjects, acknowledging writer Leonardo Sciascia. This time, they start with the duo as Franco & Ciccio and end with them as Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains, while Servillo registers imperiously.

Opening has ex-Bourbon Colonel Tony recruiting for his 1860 campaign to take Palmero for Garibaldi’s Risorgimento forces. Among the volunteers (father & teenage son, etc.) are Sicilians Ficcara & Piccone. Tony figures that even a coward may come in useful.

Turns out card sharp Ficarra is using the expedition as transport to get him back to the fiancée he hasn’t seen for years and, when the (0K model ships) landing comes under fire, the two leads are the only ones to break ranks and make a run for it, sheltering in the same cave. The duo come to terms with their mutual contempt and, after collecting a blast of buckshot in one’s rump when they try to steal from a clothes line, they find shelter in a nunnery by representing themselves as a deaf mute and his carer. Lively young sister Giulia Andò takes an interest and her older, card-playing supervisor is soon losing the returns scooped off from the plate to the newcomers. The leafy maze gardens seem like paradise but their cover is soon blown and they are expelled in an overhead shot of swarming black & white robe nuns.

The Illusion - Ficarra & Picone with Tony Servillo  - wide angle distorted.

Recaptured by the Garibaldi forces, to Col. Tony’s disgust - not worth a couple of bullets, His armed barricade has repelled the Bourbon troops and the comics are put in charge of lugging the one field piece, to be mounted on the hill fortress. They consider dumping it and taking off but, seeing the grey coats on the opposite slope, they manage to make it fire, all but missing the advance but putting a scare into the enemy, who scamper back down the hill to escape. 

Tony scorns the welcome offered by the rural Communists and Mafia people and Tommaso Ragno’s Garibaldi comes up with a desperate plan where Tony will take a doomed column in a feint that will make Pascal Gregory’s command think the Garibaldi forces are still in the area, while he marches on Palermo, where Tony’s mother still lives. Servillo cuts a distinguished figure on the horse he rides there on a secret visit.

The Bourbons sack and burn one town, which they believe sheltered their enemies but the village, where now ex-sister Andò is once more a resident, still welcomes the grey coats, offering to care for their wounded in the homes. They now face a similar fate. Seen from the hillside loo window, the royalists seem as numerous as the ants that swarm there. Servillo’s tiny force prepares a doomed resistance but in a great twist climax it is the Sicilians who save the day - even if we were expecting a battle.

It’s visibly scaled-down spectacle runs to scrubbed historic buildings, the beachhead scattering troops on the sand or the overwhelming opposing column reduced to Servillo's  telescope-masked view. The modest production values still make a presentable show case for the great performances & script. Pouring Verdi over things rounds out the impact. A class act, this one.

A coda shows the now unified country, where Servillo's search for the pair takes him to the secret gambling house, to be welcomed with whores and a glass of absinthe. There, he sees elegantly presented Andò doing the My Darling Clemantine routine behind players' backs. Tony sits down at the table. This is the second exceptional movie in the event that ends with a crooked card game.

Determinedly Sicilian and again fronting busy Tony Servillo is IDDU/Sicilian Letters from Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza, who have been over this ground before with the 2017 Sicilian Ghost Story, which also dealt with a supergrass and the mafia - that one more successfully managing its suspense elements and high culture references. "Faith begins when reason ends."

Sicilian Letters - Servillo.

In this one, straggly haired  Profesore Tony ends a jail term, which has stripped away his authority as a teacher, an official, a Mafia capo and a husband. Fausto Russo Alesi's Secret Police swoop on him as their way to track the last of the island's Honorable Society notables to elude them, Elio Germani's hidden heir to the criminal enterprise. A window of opportunity opens for Tony to regain his standing by manipulating the situation to bring to life his derelict luxury hotel project.

Germani has been hidden by a now mature Barbara Bobulova (who it's nice to see still a glamorous presence). Even his access to daylight has been imperiled by her neighbor's home improvements. Servillo's influence as a father figure is bait in a trap. This is getting unclear and uninvolving. An odd alliance forms between sullen police woman Daniela Marra and Tony but the cops and robbers are both smarter than they are.  Messages are exchanged in plastic-wrapped letters tucked into fishmonger stock. Craft aspects and cast are fine but the film lacks the conviction of the team's earlier Sicilian melo. It takes a while to connect the shock opening, cutting the goat's throat to the intrigue. The final exposition bewails the corruption of Sicilian society but attention has wandered by then. 

 Fuori is very much a vehicle for Valeria Gollino, who has been a welcome contributor to popular film for decades. Respiro, Portrait of a Lady on Fire - and Big Top Peewee. They make her character fifty five in director Mario Martone's new Fuori and introduce her being strip-searched for her induction to Rebibbia prison. They want us to know this one's not trivia.  

Fuori - De Angelis, Golino, Elodie.

The film is an adaptation of the autobiographical Novel by  Goliarda Sapienza, who they assure us is one of the important writers of our time. Golino has made a TV series of  Sapienza's The Art of Joy. In broken time sequence, we follow the character's imprisonment for the theft of her sister's jewellery. No miscarriage of justice here - we see her stuff the loot into her pantyhose at a party. Our heroine's not going to take any shit and there she is punching it out with a younger inmate, while the other prisoners chant "Fuori!" The action flashes forward and backwards (one neat change in screen shape indicates a time shift insert) and gradually her relationship with (current hot star prospect) Matilda De Angelis moves into central position. There is one striking passage where Gollino initiates a threesome in Elodie's perfume shop's hidden shower, which is bound to be the thing for which the film is remembered. 

It is only in the final rail station meeting with De Angelis, that provides her with a suitcase of contraband jail letters, that the shape of the work really emerges - with end captions to provide the information that someone who isn't familiar with Sapienza's status needs to access. Performances are superior and the filming, in what looks like genuine locations, is often handsome but Fuori is demanding. Just following events is hard work.

Le assaggiatrici / The (Food)tasters has been here before. It gets this double dip as an Italy, Belgium, Switzerland co-production, arriving in its German-speaking edition.

Director Silvio Soldini was responsible for the engaging Bread and Tulips and Days and Clouds. In this one, it's November 1943, the start of the decline of WW2 Germany,  Twenty six year old, freshly married and city-raised Elisa Schlott (Das boot 2022) seeks refuge from hostilities with her in-laws at rural Gross-Partsch, East Prussia  - since become Poland. However there is a mysterious installation in the nearby woods. It turns out that the Wolfschanze, the Führer's secret refuge, has been constructed there. We never see Hitler, which is a bit like a pantomime without a demon king, but his movements are effectively signaled by his special train pulling in and leaving. 

  Tasters- Elisa Schlott

A seven women team is recruited from healthy, young, local Germans to act as Hitler's foodtasters. The ambiguous chef offers  the prospect of epicure vegetarian meals in a time of scarcity and dismisses poisoning as being another risk of the war. There is a burst of activity when one of the group vomits after eating her portion of a food item, with suspicions of complicity in an assassination plot. 

A variety of backgrounds and motivations are revealed among the Fräuleins. One is of course a concealed Jew. Tension is accelerated when strict officer Max Riemelt (Kate Shortland's Berlin Syndrome), brought from the front, is put in charge. Against character, he and Schlott make secret rendezvous in the family barn. This is not going to turn out well.

Celebrity Swiss cameraman Renato Berta's desaturated images add conviction and performances are superior but it's all too grim.

More shortly.

Illusion -  Ficarra & Picone 

Barrie Pattison - 2025

The Heir to William S. Hart.

In the Australia of my childhood, the Saturday afternoon movie crowd was short-changed - at least in the urban centers where the exchanges must have thought they were dealing with sophisticated tinies. The series cowboy movies that were a signal element of the American experience hardly ever surfaced. Sure, we got (and treasured) Hoppy and (less so) Roy Rogers or the Durango Kid but their precursors, Ken Maynard, Col. Tim McCoy, Buck Jones and the rest, were all but unknown. When they surfaced in the VHS era I realised that an essential element of my cinema experience was missing. About then, I also discovered that John Ford spent his declining years peering at these, because they matched his taste, as well as being made by his old chums. 

I was reminded of that sense of having missed out when  Buck Jones' 1933 Thrill Hunter surfaced on Youtube. The remarkably sharp & clear copy got my attention straight off, looking as if it had been struck directly off an impeccable Gail Films negative, Columbia fanfare playing under their re-issue title.

Thrill Hunter is not one of the best of Buck Jones efforts. His great stone face, which is perfect at being the hard man cowboy, can’t manage the jokey compulsive liar character that Wally Beery in This Man’s Navy or Richard Dreyfus in The Big Fix nail with ease - add all the Baron Munchausens or Willy Whopper. However this one has an edge on most of the series westerns in using a half way A feature crew. Busy director George Seitz (the great silent The Vanishing American or the Andy Hardys), cameraman Ted Tetzlaff (later to direct The Window and Riff Raff/The Amazing Mr. Hammer) and editor Gene Milford  (Lost Horizon, On the Waterfront) are punching below their weight. They pounce on opportunities, like the plane buzzing a car at the rail Station, and produce a sequence that would be fine in a major production.

For the rest, the nonentities do as they are told. Revier makes a plausible movie heroine. Buck, first seen in an argument with ever typecast cook Willy Fung, who never speaks a word of English in this one, rescues her from a runaway when her unit is scouting locations for a production. (“give a horse his head. he’ll slow down pretty soon”) He’s invited to dinner with the Motion Picture People and spins them tall tales. (“You mean you flew for the Chinese?”) Riding back, he sees the end of a shootout, that leaves two quarreling bank bandits dead, and he takes credit for downing the pair.  (this plot gets re-cycled in the great 1964 Chicken episode of Gunsmoke) Buck is feted by the State Bankers Association in a nice outdoor ceremony and donates the reward money to build a swimming pool for the grateful community.

On-screen director, Ed leSaint sees him as someone to appear opposite Revier in their new picture. This moves Buck into the expected dramas. Got up in Wardrobe’s fancy braided outfit, he is ridiculed by the cowboy extras and has a fight with them. He does drive on the racing circuit (though the crash footage is library ) and begs off early from his night with Revier at the Hollywood Ritz to try to work out how to fly an airplane on a carnival gimble. These appear to be the only stunts he actually does, outside that nice rapid mount on Silver in the opening.

Our hero’s inability to manage the plane exposes his deceit and he’s sent on his way by all, including Revier, who he’s unknowingly given the locket with the map of the hiding place for the bank loot. He finds himself with hobos in an imposing-looking train but the production doesn’t get any value out of that. The writing is pretty lazy, putting him in the same rail freight car as the rest of the robbers, who make off with a car they claim has been sent to pick up Revier. Buck appropriates a dodgy plane that the owner can’t get started and takes to the sky (the impressive flying footage) in pursuit, shooting it out and surviving an OK crash before the Happy End, where he swears to give up falsehood - in vain.

Not exactly cerebral and short of the celebrity support that often prop up these - think Ward Bond, Wallace McDonald, John Wayne or Walter Brennan - but for a one hour B western, plenty OK. Jones had considerable control on some of these and it's easy to see him as the heir to William S. Hart, striking a nice balance between pulp adventure and plausibility. Me, I wish I'd found him when I was still part of his target audience.

 

Thrill Hunter - Revier, Jones, Robert Ellis, Harry Semels.


Barrie Pattison 2025.

Rage & Reason - André Cayatte

The fifties are represented as a golden age for French film, the period of La nouvelle vague, when filmmakers in their twenties could get up a feature film with comparative ease and have it widely admired. A dominant proportion had been “Children of the Cinémathèque”, critics sitting next to their mates at Langlois’ screenings. They were going to get attention in the influential serious movie magazines of the day. With Francois Truffaut, who was leading the charge, married to a producer’s daughter, the path became even smoother. 

Truth was that veteran French stars, writers and directors were often flagging - Gabin & Daniele Darieux in La verité sur Bébé Dongé anyone? They were an easy knock off.

 Claude Autant-Lara, who was shaping up for distinguished veteran status (Le diable au corps, Le traversé de Paris) published a sharp letter about the contempt with which his generation was treated, leaving him stuck with a lumpen sex comedy like La jument verte. This was the situation which would be repeated with the Chinese Fifth Generation. People who had been waiting for their moment suddenly found it had passed.

Another casualty was anyone like myself, who had been relishing the work of Autant-Lara,  Henry George Clouzot, René Clement, André Cayatte and a few more, who now found they were missing in action. I revere Agnes Varda but really - how many times does anyone need to see Cléo 5 a 7?

Though the career articles and retrospectives, which sustain reputations, were nowhere to be found, there was still a tradesman’s entrance. Clouzot, Autant Lara, Duvivier and (sort of) René Clair were recruited to knock out vehicles for their industry’s great star - Brigitte Bardot. Also consider the case of popular writer Sébastien Japrisot, whose contribution added box office clout to Costa Gavras’ Compartiment tueurs, René Clement’s Passenger dans la pluie,  Jean Herman’s Adieu l’ami and Anatol  Litvak’s The Girl in the Car, With the Glasses & the Gun - kind of like a sharper James Hadley Chase.

Consider particularly André Cayatte, who was variously a lawyer, a journalist, a filmmaker and a polemicist, these sometimes mixed in ways where the seams vanished. He mastered his director's film craft starting in wartime French Boulevard features - a couple of Tino Rossi musicals, the Middle Version of Au bonheur des dames and (better) Les amants de Veronne from a Jacques Prévert script. His endangered youth movies Justice est fait and Avant le déluge were an indication of the more serious work of which the impressive anti-capital punishment Nous sommes tous des assassins remains his peak achievement. This would be followed by films as imposing as Le Passage du Rhin, Les Risques du métier, the Annie Girardot Il n'y a pas de fumée sans feu & Mourir d'aimer, along with Le Verdict with stellar leads Jean Gabin & Sophia Loren. They were spaced by often misjudged efforts, though Les chemins de Khatmandu (Jane Birkin on the hippy trail) was enjoyably preposterous, Barbara Streisand liked La miroir a deux faces enough to do it over in English, and the better, two-part Jean-Marc et Françoise ou la vie conjugale resurfaced as Divorce His / Divorce Hers. I rated myself a fan and sought out the director's work, though its subtitled distribution was gappy.

  André Cayatte.  

I’m plunged back into that world by finding a nice (even with the odd flash) disk of Cayatte’s 1965 hit La piège pour Cendrillon/A Trap for Cinderella, a polished, original, noirish suspense piece, with one of Japrisot’s perverse twisty plots classed up with sharp dialogue by then-admired Playwright Jean Anouilh (“L’alouette”, “Becket”). Coming directed by the creator of Nous sommes tous des assassins, hopes were high.

 In La Piège pour Cendrillon, the heir to a shoe-making fortune has been killed in a fire, survived by her lookalike companion and one-time playmate. Both are played by not-quite-stellar Dany Carrel. This is made more sinister by placing the remaining burn scarred girl in the care of the heir's vicious lesbian secretary, Madeleine Robinson. 

 

Piège Pour Cendrillion - Carrell

Flashbacks fill in preceding events. Dany the companion was living in poverty, doing the books in Robert Dalban’s parking garage, and involved with worker lover Jean Gaven. Dany, the heiress goes through the motions of rescuing her but is mainly intent on humiliating the girl - with a bit of wrestling in itsy-bitsy bikinis thrown in. Both find themselves involved with the other’s admirers.

The way it's made is impressive - Armand Thirard’s gleaming Black and white wide screen photography, mirrors, elevator cages, material where it's not clear whether they are in studio or location interiors - impeccable split screen - until you notice that they keep on putting cushions in the middle of the shot to get a clean matte line and the camera is always locked down when there are two of Dany on screen. She was always decorative. This is probably her most demanding role and she gives her all but I can't help feeling that wearing revealing outfits - or taking them off - was her special skill. Robinson and Gaven show up the others.  

As with the other Japrisot movies, it pivots on another enigma that I'm not all that curious about. We never see the fire and we sit there thinking we’ve outguessed the writers on the identity of its survivor. A key plot contributor shows up at the last minute to further complicate expectations.

Like Girl in the car With the Glasses & the Gun, there's a recent remake of this one  - with Tuppence Middleton. I wonder about that. There’s also a Russian TV series with the same name, which acknowledges no connection.

My curiosity revived, I went looking for the other missing Cayatte movies. YouTube, my number one source, produced a list but closer examination revealed these to be mainly trailers or TV discussion clips. The only complete films were Justice est fait, which I didn't much like when I had an old sixteen millimeter print and 1978's La Raison d’état in a quite good copy, with subtitles only on material set in Italy, which they had translated into French - just as well, as my Italian is even rougher than my French.

We are coming to the end of André Cayatte with this handsomely mounted A Feature. It immediately gets our sympathy with an Edmond Rostand quote - "If the money spent on armaments went to medicine, we would all live to 120 and have youth for 90 years."

La raison d’état is another of its maker’s message pieces, lining up with the anti-war content of his (better) Le Passage du Rhine. Government Minister Jean Yanne is first seen being waved through by the gendarmes outside the palace, where his discreet honours ceremony is being conducted - no more than a hundred guests. His triumph is a massive arms deal placing munitions with a (fictional) African country, despite legal prohibitions. However, François Périer, the scruffy editor of a French Pacifist journal, is on his case and has assembled an incriminating dossier, which includes photos of crated munitions with official French SNR stencils being unloaded at the African airport.

Périer has an ally in Italian physicist Monnica Vitti, who makes a duplicate of his research, anticipating the intervention of Yanne’s enforcers and, sure enough, after the briefing with Michel Bouquet in Yanne’s private pistol range and a scene driving in Paris traffic, where Yanne in his open roof limo, listens to his opponent's phone call, action shifts to the motorway. Cars box in Périer's old Renault and force it off the road and down a cliff - disturbingly plausible Remy Julienne stunt work with full-size vehicles. In the wrecked car, with Périer’s body, the drivers place a substitute for the damning file

This leaves the question of Vitti’s copy -and the heart of the film. Yanne has her taken into custody and conducts the session in person. The film’s best passages are those between the two stars alone. Yanne, notably a comic performer, manages his shift into imposing and Vitti is right in her element, rounding her anguished Twentieth Century woman. He lays out temptations which rapidly move to four hundred million dollars - an Island Villa, a New York Penthouse - against her confronting the opposition of La Gouvernement de France. He breaks out newspapers headlined with hostile stories of her as a foreign agent and outlines the hollowness of any success - “ We will be replaced by others ... You will be attacked by the Unions when munitions factories close.”  We are doing Christ in the Desert here.

When her two-day Guarde a Vue expires, Monica turns to young associate Jean-Claude Bouillon for protection but he is left beaten in the gutter by the grim-faced security detail that takes her away.

This segment does communicate the “grand peur” that it describes but eventually the film is minor. The red-tinted montages of warfare and the depiction of corruption at the highest level, as board rooms of suits, opposed only by bearded hippies with a movable type printing press, all lack conviction. A guest- shot by the admirable Jesse Hahn, as the obligatory C.I.A. agent, doesn’t help. The reappearance of Cendrillon's incriminating chloroform is more effective. Raisons d’État was pretty much Cayatte’s last major production. I hadn't heard of it, despite its ambitions and my interest.

The film does retain interest as a snapshot of serious European film in an era some of us remember intensely but seen now, the clunky surveillance technique and locating inserts (a silver helicopter catches the sun as it flies past the Twin Towers) date the film and erode its courage and relevance. We can’t help remembering that this all anticipates the  Railbow Warrior affair.  Today we live uneasily in a period where the  Macron government seems to be the one sane voice in World Affairs and André Cayatte is largely forgotten. I don't see too much comfort in that.

Are We All Murderers?

Barrie Pattison

Welcome to Disney World.

 At the moment, Walt Disney is, in a phrase that my fifth-form English teacher would have used to illustrate redundancy, "extremely ubiquitous". SBS is doing the 2024 How Disney Built America six-parter, itself one of the US History Channel's How... serieses. Meanwhile, what was Fox Studios, with the old R.A.C. Sydney Showground lettering still on the gates, now has a sign reading "Disney" and buses roll down the streets covered with the campaign celebrating the release of the studio's new Elio. 

It occurs to me that my relation with Disney is now longer than any I've had with people I've actually known. Even before I found the Disney films, I homed in on their comic books - clean lines and distinctive characters. My formative years were punctuated with excursions to Sydney movie palaces doing Disney cartoon features double billed with Tarzan movies. When decades later l caught a beautiful new subtitled print of Tarzan's New York Adventure in a Paris art cinema, I remember being brought down by the realisation that I'd finally worked through all Johnny Weissmuller's jungle exploits. There were no more. I didn't exhaust Disney anywhere nearly so easily. Eventually, I would find myself seeking out Captain Eo at Anaheim and again at Euro Disney - that incidentally a whole lot less welcoming than  Futurescope, their competitor in the innovative projection systems market I was documenting. 

There was always something to relish in Disney titles, even when they were playing in TV-era near empty theatre sessions - the product reinvigorarted by CinemaScope for Toot Whisle Plunk Boom and Sword in the Stone, Robin Hood ("an outlaw for an inlaw"), The Aristocats' jam sessions crashing through successive ceilings or automation manufacturing the stampede for The Lion King - even the great effects work in live action like Blackbeard's Ghost. I will admit to being relieved when they stopped warbling Alan Menken's Broadway melodies but Robin Williams' genie and Josh Gad's  Frozen ice man warming his feet by the fire were still to come. After in-house Buena Vista Distribution released films for grown-ups and The Disney Channel appeared, the company went on to gulp down competitors Lucas Film, Marvel and Pixar,  

    Jason Gaignard

How Disney Built America goes for re-enactments, with unfamiliar-face performers Jason Gaignard (Witnesses) & Derek Kealy (Six Days in August) as yin & yang Disney brothers, Kealy's Roy forever stuck uneasily with the enabler role, cautioning against the cost of  Gaignard/Walt's ambitions. The series goes back to their Kansas City childhood but stops short of Euro Disney, their twenty-first-century triumphs and the current disputed policy of reviving the classic animations as live-action features. Personally, I thoroughly enjoy the Tim Burton Dumbo.

How Disney Built America is not the TV's first attempt to document Disney - include a 1988 PBS American Experience Ep., Jean Pierre Ibouts' 2001 Walt: the Man Behind the Myth, Samuel Doux' 2006 Il etait une fois ... Walt Disney /Once Upon a Time Walt Disney, along with the company's forays into self-portrait TV production, peaking with the fifties Mickey Mouse Club and its beaming Uncle Walt. In fact, Walt Disney must be in there, with Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ, as the figure to feature in the most documentaries ever. Despite all these, I find that the more you know about him, the less clear our impression becomes.

The studio head who took a day off to take Haley Mills on the Disneyland rides, when she arrived to do Pollyanna, also, I'm told, hounded a bored staff animator out of the industry for drawing the genitals on Chip and Dale in one frame (a twenty-fifth of a second). Disney, the voice of Mickey Mouse, attacked Art Babbit, the creator of Goofy, as a communist when Babbit led a 'forties company strike for better conditions and recognition. The man who Dali saluted as America's greatest surrealist was also abused by the high art community for debasing popular taste worldwide.

The basic narrative is pretty clear. After a Kansas City childhood, where early morning paper runs left the young Disney brothers dozing in classes and getting poor academic results, Walt volunteered for WW1, becoming an underage army driver, decorating the side of his ambulance and doing cartoons for Service papers. Back home with early animators Presman-Rubin Commercial Art Studio, he worked on the Laugh-O Grams series, and here How Disney Built America throws us a curve when one of their scholar commentators (who they field rather than survivors or family) describes their development of a universally lovable cartoon animal. No, it's Oswald the Lucky Rabbit! 

We hear about Producer Charles Mintz using their contract to make off with the character, leaving Oswald to be jostled by Krazy Kat and Scrappy in the obscurity of Winkler-Mintz Toons. Disney's obsession with Copyright Protection, dating from this, is only hinted though it got as far as the Sony Bono amendment, where Mickey Mouse was protected from the provisions of public domain by US Congress 

The Disneys started again, taking only their Winkler animator associate, Ub Iwerks. It was Ub who created Mickey Mouse, tracing the outlines off pocket change. Getting credit on the Mickey newspaper strip wasn't enough recognition and the dissatisfied cartoonist set up with Pat Powers, who had taken over the once mighty Felix the Cat franchise, doing Iwerks shorts there - the Willy Woppers, Flip the Frogs and the rest. That didn't work out either and back at Disney after the Reluctant Dragon, Ub would head up their effects work, and notably those for The Birds. Add animations for the Times Square Jumbotron. Incidentally, that's not a made-up moniker, like Parkyakarcus or Ishkabible. He was Norwegian and we'll see the family name again in the eighties, lettered across the Simulated Park Ride Theatre chain his son set up. 

 The Disneys launch Mickey just as sound comes in ("I think we should go see the Jazz Singer again") and, in an early example of what all biographers applaud as his thinking big, Disney sold his car to bankroll a repeat pioneer sonorisation of Steamboat Mickey. One of the current series' best moments is the glimpse of the staff manning slide whistles and xylophones in time to a picture projected on a bed sheet. We see them develop Donald's Iago to counter Mickey's bland Othello. Bluey take a hint!

There is more ambition when Walt gambles on an exclusive contract to use improved Technicolor and develops the multiplane process, replacing bench animation in achieving depth. Pioneering Xeroxing of cells and computerisatiom would follow. The series is not all that hot on film history. They do come up with a better copy of Oswald's debut in Trolley Trouble but cut it short and show the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiere as a wide-screen presentation more than a decade before the process actually arrived..

 Photographed in Multiplane Technicolor!

Snow White was key, a giant financial gamble, making the first feature-length, full-colour cartoon film. Just when money was running short, Walt is shown discovering shoddy Mickey dolls offered on a street stall and taking up merchandising, making a bare few thousand in his first year at the point where Snow White was draining the company finaces, still going back into production for multiplane sequences. Equally opportunistic Kay Kamen (Paul Chiusolo in the series) throws his savings on the Disney office table and regales them with the prospect of tie-in sales (lunch boxes, cereal packets) becoming a major revenue stream. Going global, they would later even open a big Disney Store on the Champs-Élysées. Disney becomes the world's leading spin-off merchant and Snow White is represented as the then biggest earning film, (until Gone With the Wind showed up? Birth of a Nation?) the substantial budget more than recovered. 

The French Once Upon a Time Walt Disney is good on WW2 with Walt wandering lost in his studio, commandeered for the military. This was a period of poor incomes on the new cartoon features and an unsuccessful return to a mix of live action and animation, like the Alice films which had been used in the twenties to try to establish the Disney Los Angeles base. (Not discouraged, Disney finally cracked this with the success of Mary Poppins) There are a few dodgy choices in there. I'd nominate the heart-shaped iris closing round the cherub's naked bottom in Fantasia as the cinema's most kitschy moment.

However, rather than fade away, Walt seized the moment. Backed by an extraordinary film-making organisation and an already fabulous library of In-House Product, he made a deal with ABC, the number three in the new U.S. TV networks and generated the broadcaster's first big hit, The Mickey Mouse Club ("Who's the leader of the club that's best for you and me?") This slotted in nicely with the company's now largely forgotten documentary True Life Adventures and British frozen asset bankrolled live-action movies.  I have an agreeable memory of Richard Todd as Rob Roy. 

Once again, Walt ignored accepted wisdom, filmed his Fess Parker Davy Crocket movies on the scale of Theatrical Features and kicked off a bonanza in selling 'Coonskin caps. However, what would have satisfied most ambitions became a launch pad for an even more impressive gamble, bankrolling his family-friendly theme Park at Anaheim outside Los Angeles. 

Disney had studied Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens and figured that he could provide an alternative to the perceived-seedy U.S. Carnivals of the day - think of the ones shown in movies like the Victor Fleming Hula, the Tod Browning Freaks or three of State Fair and a couple of Nightmare Alley. Walt wanted his park to be like walking into one of the company's movies. We see Roy saying that they were betting the farm in an area where the company had no experience.  Turned out workmen were still adding final touches the night before an opening, which was to be a live TV spectacular.

Ah, but there's more. Finding the Anaheim location surrounded by businesses and hotels that offended his quality control standards, Walt bought up a Florida swamp and converted it to the world's largest leisure destination, the EPCOT Center, offering in-built facilities spread around a people mover that engaged with his lifelong fascination with railroads. Even his 1988 death did not decelerate the project, with Roy taking over to ensure it was a monument to his brother's tenacity and vision...

Forty years later, we get Elio. The story centres on an orphaned army brat voiced by Jonas Kibreab, making a nice break from all those Disney princesses getting reunions in the house product. Living on a military launch base, he is in the care of his soldier aunt (re-voiced by Zoe Saldaña in Studio second thoughts). Substitute parenting has got in the way of her ambition to be an astronaut. The space-mad boy lead is all attitude. Wearing his kitchen drainer hat, he lies on the desert sand, where he's scratched a message urging aliens to collect him. In the manner of these, his walkie-talkie message gets amplified by the base radio disks and sent into space, in the wake of their explorer satellite. Sure enough, there is a light in the sky. Winning moment of his delighted "Oh boy, my first probe!"

Like Buck Rogers and Starman, Elio finds himself the one who has to defend Earth from Alien Invasion, despite finally fessing up that he's just a kid, to the freaky ambassadors from other planets.  They make a nice example of Pixar's no talking animals approach, with some great voice actors from series TV - Shirley Henderson, Jameela Jamil not to mention intimidating Brad (Everybody Loves Raymond)  Garret's war lord.

 Really, Elio is a striking demonstration of how durable the Snow White format has proved. Even dying couldn't remove the Disney stamp. The endearing young protagonist again finds themself in a hostile adult environment but, aided by eccentrics and winning critters, wins through, after a spectacular animation set piece, and ends endorsing family values. Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella were to be expected but Enchanted was a nice update there. Elio includes yet another scary transformation. (evil stepmother to hag, boys to donkeys, the sorcerer's apprentice brooms)  but now we have taken on board Terminator. with the film's most striking concept, the Elio replica substitute, a great mix of appealing and scary. 

Well, Elio scored Pixar's worst-ever opening weekend. Confusion reigns. Commentators are saying the suits weren't happy with a project that won't become a franchise, while Toy Story is already up to number five. Others object that the film should be recognised as a break with all that dulling sequels repetition. Fingers are being pointed at a public unwilling to accept the originality that formula cartoon releases lack and at feeble promotion, bringing the film out opposite heavyweight competition in the same market. Enthusiastic focus groups had indicated they still wouldn't pay to see it in a theatre and management executed a retooling to remove original director Adrian (Coco) Molina's "queer coded" diversity content. Little Elio was originally an environmentalist with an interest in fashion, which can still be glimpsed in the character's peculiar outfit (that did puzzle me). Political correctness does linger, making the one blonde kid in base school the bully but that character's only there briefly. This is, after all, the studio that left "New lamps for old" out of Aladdin so that Princess Yasmin wouldn't look ditzy. However, support of weirdos round the world with their ham radios, is genuinely cheerworthy, a better call out for inclusivity. Put them alongside the geek prophets of  Close Encounters or Moonfall. 

I'm not the target audience for Elio but it brightened my day.  If I was twelve, I'd be telling all my mates how great it was. I wait for developments and wonder whether the fuss will get Molina's original cut off the shelf. Don't expect another Flow. We only need one of those. Paul Grimault, the Wang Brothers, UPA, Raoul Servais, and Zagreb have come and gone but the Disney aesthetic is still with us. Ponder that one.

Barie Pattison

Scandinavian Film Festival

 Scandinavian film is a kind of austere undertaking. Childbirth and frozen tundra are familiar ingredients. Their major figures are a purposeful lot - Victor Sjöström, Carl Dreyer, Alf Sjöberg, the frequently dreadful Ingmar Bergman or the Dogma guys. The few Scandinavians who went in for energetic popular material, aimed at bringing the audience back next week, didn't get far with subtitles - think Tancred Ibsen, Gustav Molander or Hans Peter Moland. Approachable films are more likely to come from the Americas. With the minimal information available, I tend to prioritise their festivals. 

I picked a couple of titles here, almost at random. 

 Vejen hjem / Way Home is a characteristically challenging proposition, whatever way you come at it. It's curious to see it when I'm fresh from American Pastoral - Elle Fanning recruited by the Weathermen. The Danish counterpart is the most ambitious film treatment of ISIS I’ve watched. Islamic extremists have taken over the spot in movies reserved for Nazis and child molesters and with this one director Charlotte Sieling (Margrete den første) has to convince viewers that what she is putting on screen is a plausible reality as well as field something that is involving dramatic entertainment.

The film starts with a minibus load of stragglers disgorged onto the desert slopes of the Syrian border, on their way to join “The Free Syrian Army.” Among this lot, spot the mature features of bearded Nikolaj Lie Kaas, an important Danish star, though the bulk of his work hasn’t reached us. He's in Adam’s Apples and the Department K Series, that ran to the Flaskepost fra P, a spin-off feature directed by Moland.

Way Home - Kass

Kass carries a concealed photo of a teenage boy and a cell phone he uses to call home to inform his separated wife about his progress in locating the fugitive son. The kid has joined ISIS. Kass manages to reassure other Danish would-be recruits about his contact with the Mosque back home and when he proves to be down with handling an automatic rifle, after his army tour in Afghanistan and Iraq, he’s welcome. Ambushed with one of the patrols of their unit, he’s the one to return fire and rescue blundering novice Aria Kashef, who he joined with. The kid is the first to vouch for Kass’ commitment to Jihad after that.

We get a scene where jets take out the car ahead of the group on the desert road. Our lot rush to help retrieve their wounded child from the burning vehicle, only to have his parents make off with their own transport, stranding them.

Kass' unit is overrun by an ISIS command, who consider their tolerant brand of Islam offensive. The prisoners are lined up bloodied, while through the window Kass spots son Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt (they appeared together in the series  Familier som vores). The kid’s chores include punching boys younger than him in the gut, as part of their training. Kass has to join the execution of his recent comrades in arms. The film’s most telling image is his son applauding enthusiastically. 

     Way Home - Kass

The commander, speaking British English, incorporates Kass into his force, joining them in worship (“No man prays alone, except on the battle field”) where our hero, now in the black scarf uniform, is just a fraction out of time with the rest, checking his neighbors on when to bow their heads or kneel.

 Sieling's background is in documentaries and she first saw the project as non-fiction. Some of her research turned up as the story of one recruit who refused to go into battle claiming his Nike trainers had been stolen, which here metamorphoses into Kass warning new recruit Kashef about wearing tennis shoes in combat. The film’s most telling passages are the secret meetings between father and son, where the boy has embraced the structure his family never provided, along with his new martyr status (“Death is more important than life”) These come contextualised by a call to the judgemental mother (voice of Trine Dyrholm) resigned to the loss of her son, which his father still refuses to accept

It is all heavy stuff and the mounting needs to be flawless. I couldn’t help picturing the set decorator painting those convincing raised fist stencils on the white walls of the Jordanian settings. It’s a tribute to the uniform excellence of the performances that the impact of on-screen events does register. This is a film that stays with the viewer.

Also on show was Frederik Louis Hvild's De lydløse/The Quiet Ones, an account of the 2008 Copenhagen cash warehouse break-in, which remains the biggest theft in Danish history. 

We start with sculpted torso boxer Gustav Dyekjær Giese (Retfærdighedens ryttere/Riders of Justice), who at thirty is training for his last crack at the championship. He is approached by fellow hard man, English-speaking Radar  Kateb from Un prophète, the film's most familiar face. With the responsibility of a young family and the upcoming title shot, Giese at first participates only in the proposed robbery's planning stages. However, a failed break-in by a rival gang and a visit to the site, that shows him security is feeble, convince him to take over. 

Meetings have been in the grubby gym and dim underground parkings, all filmed in that murky high grain style that we wished had gone out of fashion. A  cut to a domestic scene introduced by a close-up of hands washing up in the kitchen sink brings hope of a lightening of tone but no such luck. Kateb is soon drowning squeeze Ida Cæcilie Rasmussen in the basin. 

The crew set about stealing a fleet of garbage trucks to block pursuit on roads spread with nails and digging up Kalashnikovs ("war guns - dirt won't stop them"). The preparation is the best element of the film, with Giese psyching himself up the way we've seen him prepare for the ring.

The job itself is staged on a disappointingly small scale. The earth mover, which is supposed to smash the vault wall at first try, proves inadequate, while cop cars swarm to the scene, only to keep their distance waiting for the SWAT team. Trim security guard Amanda Collin, who we've seen uneasily asserting herself in this macho world, shows up, a chance for her big scene, but that's a letdown. When it's all over and they are dividing up a "remote shit house" full of cash (dollars, krona and euros only), Giese checks reports to see if she is all right.

After a bank job that's not as good as the one in Rififfi, we get the ending of the Stanley Baker-Peter Yates Robbery turned around a bit. This one gets by but it would have been nice to see the unfamiliar context deliver more.

 

Barrie Pattison - 2025.