On the Basis of Sex (2018)

What does it take to be a Harvard man? Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) is a struggling attorney and new mother top of her class at Harvard Law who faces adversity and numerous obstacles in her fight for equal rights when her supportive husband and fellow student Martin (Armie Hammer) gets testicular cancer and beats the odds with her assistance. When Ruth graduates from Columbia after being refused to transfer her credits from Harvard she can’t get a job with a law firm so becomes a law professor instead. She takes on a groundbreaking tax case on the basis of gender with her husband, now a practising tax attorney, through the ACLU and its head Mel Wulf (Justin Theroux). She knows it could change the direction of her career and the way the courts view gender discrimination. Advised by her tough personal idol Dorothy Kenyon (Kathy Bates) to take it easy and eventually to lead the case with her husband who is much more personable and less strident in the courtroom she bites the bullet and shares the limelight …She’s a bully and she needs everyone to know how smart she is. This account of the legendary US Supreme Court Justice RBG has a mountain to climb with a very unsemitic toothy Brit incarnating a public figure of epic renown. Skillful writing by Daniel Stiepleman (RBG’s nephew) and a good pace by director Mimi Leder (making a return to features after a decade in TV) nimbly step over these hurdles with a light touch, as though guided by Martin Ginsburg. A woman and a mother and a Jew to boot! Using the tricky family story and not letting it become sentimental by refusing to focus on grim 1950s cancer treatment, countering Ruth’s personal evolution through the early days of feminist enlightenment with how she mismanages teen daughter Sixties rebel Jane (Cailee Spaeny), means this is a restive piece of historical biography, not content to sit on cliches, prickly where it might be endearing, amusing where it might be cloying. The law is wrong. Her early difficulties at Harvard in the sexist person of Dean Griswold (Sam Waterston) contrast sharply with the utter egalitarianism of her home life with Martin. How RBG is forced to confront her own limitations while simultaneously embarking on a case involving a man to prove sex discrimination that will result in the repealing of virtually all laws humanises a heroic story. It’s not perfect and the final scene-sequence is not as well managed as you’d wish in consideration of the outcome. Nonetheless it’s very likeable and well performed, especially by Hammer. These days if you want to see RBG just turn your TV channel to The Good Fight where Elaine May as the ghost of RBG is contentedly guiding Diane through a maze of contemporary legal problems. The country isn’t ready. Change minds first then change the law

Candyman (2021)

Black folks don’t need to be summoning shit. In present day Chicago, a decade after the last of the Cabrini towers were torn down, artist Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and his girlfriend gallery curator Brianna (Teyoonah Parris) have moved into a loft in the now gentrified Cabrini Green and are teased about it by her brother Troy (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) and his white boyfriend Grady (Kyle Kaminsky). A chance encounter with an old-timer William Burke (Colman Domingo) exposes Anthony to the true story behind hook-handed Candyman, a legendary ghoul who had his beginnings in a police killing in 1975. Anxious to use these macabre details in his studio as fresh grist for paintings, he unknowingly opens a door to a complex past that unravels his own sanity and unleashes a terrifying wave of violence starting with Brianna’s employer gallery owner Clive Privley (Brian King) and his intern the night of the opening featuring Anthony’s mirror installation Say My Name … Candyman ain’t a He. Candyman’s the whole damn hive. If you’re out here looking for Candyman, you ask me, stay away! This ‘spiritual sequel’ to the thirty year old supernatural slasher adapted from Clive Barker’s story wraps itself around the warp and weft of the original’s urban legend-making with added racial issues, opening out the problem of gentrification and using a little tricksy logic to justify the killings. By switching from the white female sociologist-semiotician protagonist Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen, whose voice is used here in the recordings Anthony finds) to a black visual artist directly connected with the first film’s story, something he discovers as he enters the gory rabbit-hole passing from the pretentious art world through five decades of police brutality, economic inequality, politics and (in)difference, the array of meaning slides into a whole new dimension. It’s a lot to load on a slasher flick and there’s a deal of dead space and a surprising failure to light all the black skin tones right which causes its own issues particularly when Anthony’s body becomes a work of horror in itself, transforming into a living honeycomb before the ultimate change when his identity is revealed. The continuity is underlined by the eventual appearances of Tony Todd and Vanessa Estelle Williams, while Robert A.A. Lowe’s score pays homage to Philip Glass’ and there are visuals that connect to the first film but nothing to approach the sheer panache and irrefutable story sense of that modern classic. Directed by Nia DaCosta who co-wrote with Win Rosenfeld and producer Jordan Peele. This is where it all began, the story of Candyman

The Man in Grey (1943)

Friendship between us would do you no good. At an estate auction during WW2 Rokeby (Stewart Granger) and Lady Rohan (Phyllis Calvert) discuss their shared histories when some lots come up concerning their forebears … Lovely heiress Clarissa Marr (Phyllis Calvert) makes friends with impoverished Hesther Shaw (Margaret Lockwood) at boarding school where a gypsy fortune teller says Clarissa will make a good marriage but to beware of female friends. She runs when Hesther presents her hand. Desirous of an heir, the remote and cruel ‘man in grey’ Lord Rohan (James Mason) marries pretty young Clarissa to have her as his brood sow and take her money but she doesn’t love him. Soon after, ensconced in fashionable London and ignoring her young son at their country estate, Clarissa discovers Hesther, now impoverished in an acting troupe, and brings her home, unaware that Hesther has long nursed resentment of her good fortune. While the ambitious Hesther sets her sights on Rohan, she also secretly encourages Clarissa into a relationship with affable gypsy Peter Rokeby (Stewart Granger) a fellow actor who little houseboy Toby (Harry Scott in blackface) declares is ‘black-white’ – it transpires he’s effectively a refugee from his home in the West Indies which the locals have reclaimed. Peter realises that Hesther has set her sights on Rohan and encourages Clarissa to leave him but then she falls ill … I can’t understand why people like being married. The first of the Gainsborough melodramas and boasting all its most significant exponents including director Leslie Arliss and cinematographer Arthur Crabtree who directed some himself. It’s a pleasingly robust Regency romance with wonderfully contrasting characters and spirited performances. The film that established Mason as the perfect period villain he gets all the best lines: I never thought to find a woman with a spirit as ruthless as mine; and, it’s a thousand pities I didn’t meet you before I married, Mason declares to heartless scheming social-climber Lockwood, seeing in her a mirror image of himself, just without the wealth. Adapted from Lady Eleanor Smith’s novel by Doreen Montgomery with a screenplay by Margaret Kennedy, this is well written, wonderfully shot, and lovingly shrouded in fantastically detailed production design. Who dishonours us dies

Where Eagles Dare (1968)

Because it’s the greatest ever titles sequence. Because it’s the greatest war film ever made. Because Ron Goodwin’s score is peerless. Because it’s Clint and Rich! Because it’s a Bank Holiday and we deserve it.

The Roots of Heaven (1958)

A man’s never alone when he fights for a good cause! In Fort Lamy West Africa idealist Morel (Trevor Howard) wants to put a stop to the brutal elephant hunt in French Equatorial Africa and repeatedly petitions officials to no avail. Now he gets the signatures of alcoholic former British officer Forsythe (Errol Flynn) and night club hostess Minna (Juliette Greco) an employee of Habib (Gregoire Aslan). Morel decides to harass the game hunters and this attracts the attention of one – American TV personality Cy Sedgwick (Orson Welles) who’s going on safari, Danish scientist Peer Qvist (Friedrich Ledebur) and a German aristorcrat Baron (Olivier Hussenot). Photographer Abe Fields (Eddie Albert) is along for some pictures to be syndicated worldwide and there are other hangers-on and opponents: ivory hunter Orsini (Herbert Lom) and then some of the area’s natives led by Waitari (Edric Connor) who want to use the campaign in their quest for anti-colonial resistance … It’s only the company of men that drives me to drink.In his notoriously candid memoir My Wicked Wicked Ways, Errol Flynn says of this difficult production that he was more surprised than anyone to get top billing particularly since Howard does the heavy lifting but that’s how it ended up when William Holden withdrew. Huston and producer Darryl F. Zanuck weren’t happy with the screenplay Romain Gary developed from his own 1956 Prix Goncourt-winning novel (Les Racines du Ciel) and hired travel writer Patrick Leigh-Fermor to do a rewrite. It was a tough film to make, far more problematic than The African Queen but much more complex, ambitious and of course, upsetting, given the subject matter. It seems a little unfocussed and even though Morel is the engine he is never fully explained as a character. Everybody on the production bar Flynn got sick and complications arose with food because of the multinational and multi-religious crew who all had different dietary requirements. Water was sparing even when Zanuck brought it in from France but it rarely arrived on time and even the best producer couldn’t stop malarial mosquitoes descending. Flynn stuck to vodka and stayed well, unlike colleagues who got dysentery and other horrendous illnesses. He was better equipped than most for the rough conditions after his years in New Guinea as a young man which are both cinematic and educational in his lurid yet literary account. Ever self-deprecating, Flynn offers a sympathetic turn as the drunken former officer. He had read the novel but observes, as is generally the case the character was developed on the set. When the camera starts to grind, you hope you strike the right tuning note – you hope, because you don’t know if you will be right. Maybe – it sometimes happens – your performance picks up in the middle of the picture. There was no opportunity to rehearse. He did his own stunts, sang a bawdy Australian song and swam in a river where he found out later a French captain had been eaten by a crocodile a couple of weeks earlier. He went on a private safari with Huston but unlike the trophy-hunting director couldn’t bring himself to shoot any of the beautiful animals. He said that Huston leaped along like a big spider through the trees. He concludes of making this film, French Equatorial Africa is a destination anyone can leave off their itinerary when they take their next vacation. It’s a very contemporary story but when it was made it must have felt like a film about masculinity and toughness and politics. Now it feels prescient. The first half is concerned with the philosophy of environmentalism and introducing the conflict between the various parties; most of the action scenes take place in the second hour during which cinematographer Oswald Morris’s work comes to the fore in some astonishing pictorial sequences. Welles does one of his memorable cameos, Lom makes a good villain and Zanuck was chasing the legendary Parisian chanteuse Greco who had made a number of other film appearances including in Zanuck’s previous Technicolor Cinemascope super-production with Flynn, The Sun Also Rises. The beautiful score is by Malcolm Arnold. Noble and memorable filmmaking. This is a great story, the scoop of the century, and I got plenty of film left!

Happy 83rd Birthday Elliott Gould 29th August 2021!

Today the renowned actor Elliott Gould celebrates his birthday and aren’t we glad this astonishingly, extravagantly gifted performer is still doing his thing? Forever associated with the counterculture he probably produced his greatest work with director Robert Altman and his stoned and dethroned Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye is the apotheosis of their collaboration, even if California Split is generally cited as the best ever gambling movie. He was so of the moment even Ingmar Bergman came calling. He starred in his acting colleagues’ films when they turned to directing and writing – Alan Arkin, Rip Torn, Monica Vitti and Susannah York all sought him out. When things changed in Hollywood he went international and did any number of big movies like A Bridge Too Far and starred in foreign productions and then he came back in Bugsy for Warren Beatty and that was a new touchstone. Known to later generations for the Ocean’s film series with his larger than life character Reuben, he’s also become another kind of icon through the talismanic comedy series Friends but for my money his best work in recent times has been in the best TV series of the twenty-first century, Ray Donovan. You can quote me. Happy birthday, Mr Gould. Mondo Movies adores you!

Love Story (1944)

Aka A Lady Surrenders. I feel safer away from the edge. England, WW2. A possibly deadly heart condition motivates concert pianist Lissa Campbell Margaret Lockwood) to start living life to the fullest. She signs up for the RAF WASPs but is found to have a heart condition and takes a break in Cornwall where she alights on handsome fighter pilot Kit Firth (Stewart Granger) and begins an affair with him, all the while keeping the truth about her condition safely at bay. But Kit, who is a childhood friend to jealous Judy (Patricia Roc), harbours his own health secret: a mine explosion has caused him to gradually lose his sight, causing his departure from the RAF. Judy needs sponsorship to complete her project at an amphitheatre she’s restoring for open-air performances and Lissa introduces her to widowed Tom Tanner (Tom Walls) who is happy to complete the funding but also wants to open a mine and eventually tires of Kit’s excuses for not manning up and either fighting or working as an engineer to extract valuable molybdenum. Lissa, too, wonders why Kit is doing nothing for the war effort and breaks up with him, frustrated at his lack of commitment to her or anything else. Tom opens up a mine and is trapped by an explosion and Kit helps lead him and others to safety. Later Lissa finds Kit reading Braille and he admits he’s losing his sight. Lissa thinks Judy is holding him back from having a very risky operation that will prevent him going blind. Then she goes to entertain the troops abroad while Kit makes a half-hearted marriage proposal to Judy who knows he’s not in love with her at all … I watched him flirt, kiss, sleep his way through a dozen affairs. Quite the surprise this inasmuch as there is a certain frankness as well as a compelling reticence that works well in terms of pacing a story that somehow inveigles the Cornish landscape as a significant character – the seas of crashing waves, the clifftop amphitheatre, the cave, the mine, all play their part in this leisurely narrative. Three of the era’s top stars are well matched – Lockwood talented and pensive, Roc cunning and ruthless, Granger troubled and achingly sincere, with the playful plainness of Walls as a stringent counter to the eventual outpouring of emotions. Lissa and Kit’s meet cute is incredibly written – the saucy disquisitions are a tonic – and the screenplay adapted from J.W. Drawbell’s story by Doreen Montgomery and director Leslie Arliss is filled with nifty occasionally cutting dialogue, presumably by Rodney Ackland (credited with Additional Dialogue). The story goes one way, then another, then it gets back on track to the implications of the title and of course Lissa’s ‘composition’ The Cornish Rhapsody is very memorable and concludes proceedings during a performance. A solid wartime romantic drama of sacrifice and loss and rumour which was the 4th highest-grossing British film in its year. Filmed at Gaumont-British studios in Lime Grove and the stunning Minack Theatre, Porthcurno, Cornwall. How long has anyone in the world?

One, Two, Three (1961)

You want the papers in triplicate, or the blonde in triplicate? C.R. ‘Mac’ MacNamara (James Cagney is a high-ranking Coca-Cola executive who’s assigned to their office in West Berlin following a fiasco in the Middle East. Now he wants to head up company operations in Western Europe and work out of London. After working on an arrangement to introduce Coke into the Soviet Union, Mac gets a call from his boss, W.P. Hazeltine (Howard St John) at Coca-Cola’s Atlanta HQ. Scarlett Hazeltine (Pamela Tiffin the boss’s hot-blooded but slightly dim 17-year-old party-loving socialite daughter, is coming to West Berlin. Mac is assigned the unenviable task of taking care of this young whirlwind. An expected two-week stay develops into two months, and Mac discovers just why Scarlett is so enamoured of the place: she surprises him by announcing that she’s married to Otto Ludwig Piffl (Horst Buchholz) an East German Communist with ardent anti-capitalistic views. Mac learns the terrible truth: the couple are bound for Moscow for an apartment just a short walk from the bathroom. Since Hazeltine and his wife (Lois Bolton) are coming to Berlin to collect their daughter the very next day, this is obviously a disaster of monumental proportions, with dreadful consequences for Mac as he can see his career go up in smoke. Mac deals with it as any good capitalist would — by framing the young Communist firebrand and having him picked up by the East German police, using all his wiles, as well as his sexy secretary/mistress Fräulein Ingeborg (Liselotte Pulver) to get his way. After Otto is forced to listen endlessly to the song ‘Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’ during interrogation, he cracks and signs a confession that he is an American spy. Then Mac discovers that Scarlett is pregnant and getting Otto back proves even harder that it was to get him out of the way … You’ll like him. He looks just like Jack Kennedy, only he’s younger and he has more upstairs. This scabrous look at Cold War Berlin from the perspective of former denizen Billy Wilder is derived from the one-act play Egy, kettő, három by Ferenc Molnar as well as the screenplay for Ninotchka which Wilder co-wrote. Working once again with I.A.L. Diamond, this fast-moving satirical farce whose speed is signalled by the opening sequence’s Khachaturian’s ‘Sabre Dance’ (which is repeated throughout) plumbs the absurdity of an unrehabilitated Nazi workforce clearly still in thrall to despotic employers who are themselves in the grip of the forward movement of capitalism and in Cagney’s case, a deep desire to get out of Germany and go to London. It used to be the Great Hotel Goring, and before that, it was the Great Hotel Bismarck. This desire for geographical change manifested itself for real when the Berlin Wall went up during the shoot sealing the border between East and West Berlin and the production had to abandon the city for Munich. Berlin of course is the Cold War in microcosm: split between different masters and ideologies, and the Coca-Cola office offers an insight to this situation in miniaturist perfection with Cagney regarded as a variation on Der Fuhrer, a habit he cannot get his heel-clicking minions to scrap. Capitalism is like a dead herring in the moonlight. It shines, but it stinks. That his charge has married a man with a name that sounds like piffle is totally preposterous and perfectly in keeping with the frantic and ludicrous tone of proceedings. An earworm song used as a torture method to get Piffl to talk proves that certain habits of the occupying forces are hard to change. The legendary Cagney gives a barnstorming performance in a truly gifted and well-managed ensemble and it was his last appearance onscreen until 1981’s Ragtime. Wilder said to Cameron Crowe, we had to go with Cagney, because Cagney was the whole picture. He really had the rhythm, and that was very good. It was not funny. But just the speed was funny … The general idea was, let’s make the fastest picture in the world … And yeah, we did not wait, for once, for the big laughs. Cagney couldn’t stand Buchholz who had made it big in Hollywood with The Magnificent Seven; Tiffin was in just her second film after being discovered as a teenage model and put under contract at Paramount. Wilder and Diamond skip delightedly through the charred political landscape of consumerism and communism without a care. Totally hilarious.  She married a communist? That’s going to be the biggest thing to hit Atlanta since General Sherman threw that little barbecue. No, I don’t think it’s funny. They’re going to live in Moscow? Now, that’s funny!

The Switch (2010)

What we crave most in this world is connection. ABC makeup artist Kassie Larson (Jennifer Aniston) has decided she wants to be a mother and advertises for a sperm donor and her ex-boyfriend now best friend forever equities manager Wally Mars (Jason Bateman) is vaguely horrified. At the pregnancy party he meets the handsome ‘Viking’ married he-man and Columbia assistant professor Leonard (Patrick Wilson) who Kassie has selected and gets horrifically drunk, swopping his own sperm for the donated sample. He turns up to work the next day seriously hungover, with no recollection of the night before until colleague Leonard (Jeff Goldblum) informs him he was at his apartment at 3AM talking about Diane Sawyer and a viking. Kassie and Wally disagree about the way their lives are evolving and she tells Wally she’s pregnant and leaves the city to bring up the resulting child with her parents back in Minnesota. In the intervening years until she returns with the son Sebastian (Thomas Robinson) Wally has no luck on the dating scene and they are strictly friends. Kassie contacts Roland who is now divorced and they get together. But Wally gets on really well with Sebastian, a neurotic little child, and then begins to realise he resembles him more than action man Roland … Just because you’ve never taken a chance in your entire life doesn’t mean you have to rip apart mine. Adapted from the Jeffrey Eugenides story Baster by Allan Loeb, this is more Wally’s story than Kassie’s and that’s okay. In the five years spent apart these people find themselves – and eventually a way back to each other. Without mocking the biological clock or the curious modern rituals that make single women feel so hunted they’ll invite a stranger to wank into a cup in their bathroom and become an anonymous father to a child they’ll normally never know, this is almost Whartonesque in its description of society’s contemporary mores and the pressure to pair off and procreate even if you’re not entirely appropriate spouse or parent material. Wally’s job is in equities and therefore encompasses the kind of risk he is averse to in his private life. Yet under the influence of alcohol he does something he could never verbalise and indeed takes years to recall. Goldbum’s role as his colleague, nudging him toward the truth, is nicely understated. This never descends to the cynical – indeed Wally’s arc is to realise perfection is overrated and responding to bullying with decisive action is not always going to achieve the desired outcome. The montage of his hopeless dates is very well done. Forewarned is forearmed: You’ve got to hide the crazy, at least through the appetisers. In Kassie’s absence he has matured and his dress sense has massively improved. Kassie’s disappearance for all that time – gestation, birth, early years – is never totally explained except that Minnesota is better for bringing up kids and now ABC has a good job for her and boy does she lives in a nice building. We get over the strangeness that Wally still doesn’t even have a picture of the weird but compelling little boy in whose life he looms significantly: did Kassie realise her son was his? Those empty photo frames – filled with happy families he’s never going to know but whom he imagines are his relatives – are a very touching metaphor. This dialectic of presence/absence and Wally’s admission to Sebastian that his own father disappeared early clarifies the film’s journey from loneliness in childhood and how it travels with you throughout life and sometimes people become parents by accident and that’s okay because things can work out fine. Mature, calm, emotionally intelligent, the antithesis of a romcom, filled with endearing, unhurried performances, this is one of those films that fed into Aniston’s ‘desperate childless unmarriageable’ celebrity metanarrative in the post-Pitt years. But hey, we’re all #TeamAniston aren’t we? And #TeamBateman too. Directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck. Everything is all turned around now

A Man For All Seasons (1966)

England needs an heir. 1529-1535 during the reign of Tudor King Henry VIII. When the highly respected British statesman Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield) refuses to pressure the Pope Clement VII into annulling the marriage of King Henry VIII (Robert Shaw) and his Spanish-born wife, Catherine of Aragon, his brother’s widow so he can father a child with his mistress Anne Boleyn (Vanessa Redgrave) and avoid another dynastic conflict like the War of the Roses. Cardinal Wolsey (Orson Welles) cannot sway him. More is asked by Richard Rich (John Hurt) for a position at Court which is not forthcoming – More says he should become a teacher, then Thomas Cromwell (Leo McKern) promises Rich success in exchange for information about More. More’s daughter Margaret (Susannah York) is hoping to marry young lawyer William Roper (Corin Redgrave) but More won’t give his blessing because Roper is a Lutheran. Wolsey dies and More becomes Chancellor and his clashes with the monarch newly married to Anne Boleyn increase in intensity. A devout Catholic, More stands by his religious principles and moves to leave the royal court and refuses to sign the Oath of Supremacy acknowledging Henry as Supreme Head of the newly established Church of England. Nor can anyone persuade him to make an explicit and treacherous public statement which would allow them to execute him. Unfortunately, the King and his loyalists aren’t appeased by this, and along with his former supporter and friend Thomas Howard the 3rd Duke of Norfolk (Nigel Davenport) press forward with grave charges of treason, further testing More’s resolve … I have no window to look into another man’s conscience. I condemn no one. Adapted by Robert Bolt from his 1960 historical morality play which also starred Scofield on stage, director Fred Zinnemann’s career, mapping out men of conscience against history, continues its fascinating trajectory with this display of contrasts – between a man of intellect and a bully of priapic appetites against a backdrop of Court plotting and religious anarchy. The changes to the play include removing the Greek chorus-like commentary of The Common Man and spreading his lines among other characters: the Thames boatman (Thomas Heathcote), More’s weaselly steward (Colin Blakely), an innkeeper, the gaoler from the Tower, the jury foreman and the executioner. I know a man who wants to change his woman. The practically Jesuitical arguing, wordplay and the spectacle of Realpolitik being invented on the march happens along the Thames, a further character here, providing means of transport as well as oozing mud and leaching life – its significance finally symbolising More’s compromised position when he can’t get a boat home to Chelsea from Richmond and is forced to walk through the night. Henry’s first appearance, lit up by the sun’s glare, lens flare gleaming off his golden gowns, is unforgettable – Shaw as the rambunctious bully lording it over all who cower around him is a joy. This isn’t reformation – this is war against the Church. Orson Welles’ indelible appearance as Wolsey, a figure straight out of Francis Bacon’s paintings, run to fat, molten like wax in his red cloak bleeding into the background, is a concrete representation of the Church’s hopeless situation as this bulwark plunges forward. We must now drive these subtle foxes from their covert. Theatre specialist Scofield got the role after Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier turned it down but as More he had starred in the West End and Broadway runs and was always Zinnemann’s first choice. He gives a classic film performance as the steadfast and honourable protagonist, countered by his uneducated and fiercely loyal leonine wife Alice (Wendy Hiller) and intellectually gifted daughter: watch her speak Latin to Henry who backs off when confronted with a woman of superior gifts, humiliated by his own lack of accomplishments (but he can dance). McKern reprised his role as Thomas Cromwell from the Broadway run; he had played the Common Man in the West End production. The law is used as a stick to beat reason and honesty and justice and decency in a disgusting display of the widespread corruption and vaulting ambition besetting Tudor England with the roots of Protestantism revealed as purely poisonous weeds of avarice and terror. The final sequence, the trial, a complement to More’s induction as Chancellor, with Rich perjuring himself (for the seat of Attorney General in Wales), is heartbreaking and brilliant. Is that what you deny? Is that what you dispute? Is that what you are not sure of? This kind of fluid literate filmmaking feels like a thing of the past. There are those who would find Henrician comparisons in the repulsive indecent oversexed much-married bastard-breeding law-breaking vulgarian currently occupying 10 Downing Street. We couldn’t possibly comment. Photographed by Ted Moore and scored by Georges Delerue, with costuming by Joan Bridge and Elizabeth Haffenden, this is timelessly elegant cinema. Stunning. Finally it isn’t a matter of reason. Finally it’s a matter of love