The Last Rifleman (2023)

Who in their right mind would go back to that place? Northern Ireland, 2019. World War Two veteran Artie Crawford (Pierce Brosnan) is newly widowed and living in Lough Valley care home. On the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy against all advice to the contrary from his fellow inmate Tom Malcolmson (Ian McElhinney) he decides to secretly escape to France to pay tribute to the war dead. He embarks on an arduous but inspirational journey through Ireland and across to France to pay his final respects to his best friend Charlie Lennon (Joseph Loane) who never returned. They formed The Three Musketeers from East Belfast with Maggie (Ethlinn Rose), whom Artie married. He stows away in the back of a laundry van and makes his way to Dublin where he and fellow passenger Rory (Samuel Bottomley) listen to Ennio Morricone music and then hitch a lift in a lorry to the ferry port at Rosslare where he conceals himself in a caravan belonging to Juliette Bellamy (Clemence Poesy) and her family. Due to illness he is discovered by the crew: What am I going to get? Life? drawls the proud 92-and-three- quarter-year-old after they find his passport is 17 years out of date. When he reaches France he makes his way to where his best friend fell, befriending a former enemy, Friedrich Mueller (Juergen Prochnow) singing It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, and shares a drink with fellow American vet Lincoln Jefferson Adams (John Amos). All the time he is unaware that he is being followed by Irish Journal reporter Tony McCann (Desmond Eastwood) ever since he absconded while the story is being broadcast nightly on the news and daughter Gloria (Ali White) and her family are cheering him back home on while the nursing home staff are aghast at the publicity … It’s a shock to learn you’ve lost the war. It’s a greater shock to discover you’ve been on the wrong side. It is a truism that a good film story will attract Jungian-style a number of writers and producers at the same time: something to do with the global consciousness. Or coincidence. Or just bad timing. So it is that the march was somewhat stolen on this by the near-simultaneous release of Michael Caine’s last film, The Great Escaper, also adapted from the real life story of Bernard Jordan, the English WW2 vet who slipped out of his home in 2014 to the commemorations in Normandy. The twist here is that the protagonist is Northern Irish (so the journey is longer, for starters) and played by an actor required to convincingly age up by twenty-plus years, with Brosnan playing the flashbacks from 1994 as himself, as it were, and Maggie Cronin as his beloved wife, already suffering memory loss as a harbinger of a life lived out in supervised care. The screenplay by Kevin Fitzpatrick understands the basic rule of the road movie – it’s an emotional journey! – and plays that aspect to the hilt. The vehicles, in order: laundry van, train, taxi, bus, lorry, caravan, ferry and finally, an army helicopter. Artie has a way with words (and a Norn Irish accent to boot) and the complexities of the trip, introducing a variety of characters to the ensemble to teach Artie how to survive (those diabetic attacks punctuate the story), how to get through pesky port controls and what to do when you meet a German veteran paying his own respects, lift the seriocomic drama above the mere recounting of a travelogue. His determination and righteousness give his character a nice flintiness. Effectively a story of survivor’s guilt, this is told and played with great charm with smart use of music to illustrate the dramatic highlights. Shot around Belfast in August 2022 with thirty credited producers in a cross-border co-production between Screen Ireland, RTE and Northern Ireland Screen, it’s a wonder this was made at all! Directed by Terry Loane. You know Artie – a man of mystery

Capricorn One (1978)

A funny thing happened on the way to Mars. Three astronauts Charles Brubaker (James Brolin), Peter Willis (Sam Waterston) and John Walker (O.J. Simpson) are about to launch into space on the first mission to Mars. But when a mechanical failure surfaces that would kill the three men, NASA chief Dr James Kelloway (Hal Holbrook) removes them from the Capricorn One capsule otherwise their funding will be pulled by Washington. To prevent a public outcry, NASA secretly launches the capsule unmanned and requires the astronauts to film fake mission footage in a studio in the middle of the desert. They do so under fear of their families being killed on a plane bringing them back home. However, the plan is compromised when ambitious TV journalist Robert Caulfield (Elliott Gould) starts reading deeply into a message Brubaker has broadcast to his wife Kay (Brenda Vaccaro) after his friend at NASA Elliot Whitter (Robert Walden) suddenly disappears when he detected the TV signals ahead of the capsule transmissions. When Caulfield’s brakes are tampered with he visits Mrs Brubaker at home to watch some innocuous home movies which confirm his suspicions that the mission is faked then finds the FBI in his apartment framing him for drug possession … With that kind of technology you can convince people of almost anything. Conspiracy theories ahoy! Director Peter Hyams’ screenplay exploits the story that won’t go away about the televised Apollo moon landing and extrapolates a juicy suspenser with an amiable cast. Not in the same league as the major paranoid thrillers of the era, it’s still bright and breezy and pretty plausible given the deniability factors and the political mood. Of cult value for the (non-)performance of Simpson with Karen Black along to help the wonderfully ironic Gould (whose dialogue is superior to the rest of the cast’s) get his man. And then there’s a crop dusting scene that of course recalls North by Northwest – in reverse! With Kojak at the helm! Godalmighty this is a lot of fun but there’s one horrifying scene in the noonday sun that will make you weep. It’ll keep something alive that shouldn’t die

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

Aka WW84. Nothing good is born from lies. And greatness is not what you think. As a young girl, immortal Amazon demi-goddess and princess Diana (Lily Aspell) competes in an athletic competition on Themyscira Island against older Amazons. She falls from her horse, misses a stage, and is disqualified after trying to take a shortcut. Diana’s mother, Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) and her aunt Antiope (Robin Wright) who is general of the Amazon army lecture her on the importance of truth. In 1984 adult Diana (Gal Gadot) works as a senior anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC. She specialises in the culture of ancient Mediterranean civilisations and studies languages for fun. She continues to fight crime as Wonder Woman, albeit while trying to maintain some anonymity, rescuing people from a botched jewellery heist in a local mall. Diana meets new co-worker, gemologist Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) an insecure woman who idolises Diana and tries to befriend her. Aspiring businessman and charismatic TV huckster Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) visits the museum to try to acquire a mysterious Dreamstone which grants wishes to anyone who touches it. It is one of the artifacts found as part of the black market the jewellery store engages in and both of the women unwittingly use it for their own desires: Diana wants to be reunited with her dead WW1 pilot lover Steve Trevor (Chris Pine); while Barbara wants to be like Diana. She gets a makeover at a local boutique and Lord turns up at a Smithsonian gala and manipulates her in order to retrieve the stone. Once it’s in his possession he wishes to become its embodiment and gains its power to grant wishes, while also able to take whatever he desires from others: he’s been selling shares in oil without striking it yet and in a matter of days becomes a powerful and influential global figure leaving chaos and destruction in his wake. Barbara, Diana and Steve try to investigate the Dreamstone’s power further, and discover it was created by the God of Treachery and Mischief; the stone grants a user their wish but takes their most cherished possession in return, and the only way to reverse the condition is by renouncing their wish, or destroying the stone itself. Steve realises that his existence comes at the cost of Diana’s power. Both Diana and Barbara are unwilling to renounce their wishes, and try to figure out another solution. Maxwell, upon learning from the U.S. President (Stuart Milligan) of a satellite broadcast system that can transmit signals globally, decides to use it to communicate to the entire world, offering to grant their wishes. Barbara/Cheetah joins forces with Maxwell to prevent Diana from harming him. Steve convinces Diana to let him go and renounce her wish so that she can regain her strength and save the world. She returns home and dons the armour of the legendary Amazon warrior Asteria, then heads to the broadcast station and battles Barbara, who has made another wish with Maxwell to become an apex predator, transforming her into a cheetah-woman. After defeating Barbara, Diana confronts Maxwell and uses her Lasso of Truth to communicate with the world … Does everybody parachute now? What a great welcome this film deserves: a charming, heartfelt feminist superhero sequel with a message of peace, love and understanding – but not before the world comes close to annihilation. Adapted from William Moulton Marston’s DC Comics character with a screenplay by director Patty Jenkins & Geoff Johns & Dave Callaham, this starts out very well but tellingly goes straight from a prehistoric setpiece into an Eighties mall sequence and the first half hour is fantastic. Then … there’s character development when the klutzy Barbara arrives and her transformation to Cheetah takes its sweet time while odious businessman Lord is also introduced with his own backstory. The wheels don’t come off, exactly. The scenes are fractionally overlong and the two villain stories don’t mesh precisely with excursions into politics (the Middle East and a bit of an anti-Irish scene in London) which then escalates when Lord introduces himself to the US President (Reagan himself though he’s unnamed) at the height of the Star Wars policy (and we don’t mean sci fi movies). The winged one then learns the beauty of flight from her reincarnated boyfriend; while Barbara becomes more feline and vicious, an apex predator as she puts it. And Lord gets greedy while alienating his little son. So there are three somewhat diverging narrative threads. This is a structural flaw in an otherwise rather wonderful story. An exhilarating pair of back to back introductory setpieces followed by a Superman tribute that is exceedingly pleasant but doesn’t capitalise on all the characters’ considerable potential, this is a half hour too long (like all superhero outings) with scenes that need to be cut and political commentary that doesn’t sit quite right. Some of the jokes about the Eighties (in Pine’s scenes) get a little lost (directing or editing issues?) but the costuming is on the money and given that Diana lives in the Watergate Complex it’s a little surprising more wasn’t made of this or that it wasn’t set a decade earlier. Otherwise DC is nicely established in terms of geography and obviously it’s plundered for story. There are jokes that land rather well, like the Ponzi scheme; and when Steve gets into a modern aeroplane and Diana suddenly remembers that radar exists. In effect, this is a movie about the conflict in using your powers – there is a time and a place and it’s not always appropriate to get what you want because there are consequences and making a choice implies potentially terrible consequences and sometimes loss of life. It also engages with rape culture, sexism and the dangers of TV, taking down cheap salesmen and televangelists. Witty, moralistic and humane this has everything you want in a superhero movie and it looks beautiful courtesy of cinematographer Matthew Jensen and production designer Aline Bonetto. There’s a neat coda in the end credits. And how nice is it that the late great Dawn Steel’s daughter Rebecca Steel Roven is a producer alongside her father Charles Roven? You go Gal! You’ve always had everything while people like me have had nothing. Well now it’s my turn. Get used to it

Waiting for the Barbarians (2020)

One grows to be a part of the place. A fair-minded magistrate (Mark Rylance) at an isolated desert outpost of an unnamed empire reevaluates his loyalty to his nation when police Colonel Joll (Johnny Depp) uses cruel tactics to interrogate the locals about a possible uprising. The Magistrate is horrified by his interrogation methods and finds an elderly man bringing his nephew for medicine with his eye gouged out. A beautiful girl (Gana Bayarsaikhan) who has similiarly been tortured – her ankle has been broken, her eyes singed and her back burned – catches the Magistrate’s fancy and he nurses her back to health and is saddened by her desire to return home to her nomadic people. After his journey to the desert with her, where the nomads take his silver as payment for not killing him and his men, he returns to his post to find Joll has gone through his records and lovingly curated library and he is now a suspect in some kind of non-existent insurrection while Joll’s second in command Officer Mandel (Robert Pattinson) dreams up outrageous ways to torture the locals and then the Magistrate himself for consorting with them … This is the border. This is nowhere. There is no history here. Adapted by J.M. Coetzee from his novel, this is a scathing – not to say shocking – takedown of imperialism. Rylance is superlative in his best feature role to date – the aggravating vocal mannerisms and tics are a thing of the past (literally) as one senses a real, moving being; while Depp is scarifying as the Colonel in sunglasses, a steampunk monster whose horrifying actions in just one week will take years to fix, if at all. Pattinson is in a race to catch up and does it rather well, revelling in blood lust. The mechanisms of torture are so ingenious as to elicit a kind of horrified wonder. And the Magistrate is silenced into moral awakening by a beautiful blind woman yet he is blind to her real desire – for her home: white saviour complex undone. This narrative about colonialism, conscience and control is non-specific yet universal. Shot lovingly in sequences of astonishing beauty by legendary cinematographer Chris Menges, this is as close to art as cinema can get. And yet it’s a political film and a film about love – of people, romance, culture. And it’s about the horror of what humans do to one another. Happily, the colony strikes back. Directed by Ciro Guerra in his English-language debut. We have no enemy that I know of – unless we ourselves are the enemy

Carve Her Name With Pride (1958)

If I’d been a man I’d like to have been a professional soldier. Young English war-widow and mother to Tania, a toddler daughter, Violette Szabo (Virginia McKenna) is recruited to become a secret agent in occupied France during World War II following the death in North Africa of her French soldier husband Etienne Szabo (Alain Saury). Teamed with Captain Tony Fraser (Paul Scofield) whom she has encountered socially, she is sent on her first mission to Rouen and does so well she even has time to go shopping in Paris. The second mission to Limoges is much more dangerous and she gets caught when her dodgy ankle gives up but not before she kills a dozen Nazis, allowing French Resistance fighter Jacques (Maurice Ronet) to escape and warn the rest of the cell. Exposed to torture at Avenue Foch by the Gestapo and the degradation of Ravensbruck concentration camp in the company of fellow trainees Denise (Nicole Stephane) and Lilian (Anne Leon) Violette finds herself facing a continual struggle for survival… I think you have certain qualifications that might be of great use. This adaptation by Vernon Harris and director Lewis Gilbert of R. J. Minney’s biography is a British war classic: the true story of a brave young Englishwoman who was selected to serve her country by dint of her ability to speak French, her athleticism and recent widowhood. It’s lightly told in monochrome against the backdrop of grey wartime London, with funny montages illustrating the progression of the relationship with Etienne – Violette is always accompanied by best friend Winnie (Billie Whitelaw) tagging along on their dates; while the antics at training camp are amusingly done and the action scenes are solid. The ending and coda are all the more tragic for their understatement. A story of greatness, very well told and McKenna was rightly recognised for her achievement in the complex role. Lewis Gilbert’s brother-in-law Sydney Tafler plays Potter, the ‘Ministry of Pensions’ official who hired Szabo. Look quickly for Michael Caine as one of the thirsty prisoners on the train. Real-life heroine ‘Odette’ was one of the film’s technical advisers and the poem that’s the source of Violette’s code was written by real-life SOE coder Leo Marks who would later become a playwright and screenwriter, perhaps best known for the film that killed Michael Powell’s brilliant British career (at least in the eyes of the so-called critics), Peeping Tom. They are not going to catch me

A Hidden Life (2019)

I thought that we could build our nest high up, in the trees. Fly away, like birds – to the mountains.1939, Austria. Peasant farmer and devout Catholic Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) is married to Franziska aka Fani (Valerie Pachner), and they are important members of the tight-knit rural community where they live a simple life with the passing years marked by the birth of three daughters. Franz is called up for basic training in the German army and is away from his beloved wife and children for months. When France surrenders and it seems the war might end soon, he is sent back from training and he and his wife farm the land and raise their children. As the war proceeds, Jägerstätter and the other able-bodied men in the village are called up to fight. They must first swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler and the Third Reich but despite social pressure Jägerstätter refuses. He is taken to prison, first in Enns where Captain Herder (Matthias Schoenaerts) is his tormentor then in Berlin and waits months for his trial. During his time in prison, he and Fani write letters to each other and give each other strength. Fani and their daughters are victims of growing hostility in the village but Fani is eventually able to visit her husband in Berlin.After months of brutal incarceration, his case goes to trial under Judge Lueben (Bruno Ganz) … There’s a difference between the kind of suffering we can’t avoid and a suffering we choose. You wait twenty years for a Terrence Malick film and then a whole lot come along at once and in truth most of them aren’t much cop and are decidedly lacking in narrative rigour. That the worst starred Ben Affleck is probably just a coincidence. Even Malick has realised you can’t get away with just shooting pretty pictures and keep an audience awake no matter how transcendental the image-making – there is a chasm of difference between thoughtful and ponderous. He reportedly stated, Lately – I keep insisting, only very lately – have I been working without a script and I’ve lately repented the idea. The last picture we shot, and we’re now cutting, went back to a script that was very well ordered. So in a complete U-turn he has a story that’s actually a biography with a beginning, middle and end. Albeit the real ending is a coda provided by beatification (surely the logical conclusion of all Malick films). The performances by a range of familiar faces are nuanced and true. And of course it looks beautiful, courtesy of the luminous cinematography by Joerg Widmer who has been camera operator for Malick since The New World. It was shot in 2016 and was in post-production for more than two years. The beautiful score by James Newton Howard incorporates works by Bach, Dvorak, Gorecki and Handel and assumes the mantle of love to match the pictures. It is one of Malick’s finest films, probing matters of faith, conscience and hope and shows that even the awful Germanic people occasionally boasted a conscientious objector not in thrall to the evil ideology of Nazism. Inspired by Eliot’s Middlemarch. The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs

The Small Back Room (1949)

Aka Hour of Glory. Men and women are all the same when they dance.
Brilliant but tormented and alcoholic bomb expert Sammy Rice (David Farrar) works for the British government during World War II. Army captain Dick Stuart (Michael Gough) drafts him into a secret project concerning a new small land mine that German planes have been dropping over England’s beaches. But despite the ministrations of his faithful assistant and girlfriend, Susan (Kathleen Byron), Rice’s increasingly problematic alcoholism and a recent injury threaten his ability to work. When he is called, hungover, to a bomb that has cost his colleague his life it’s a life and death situation and he requires every bit of his focus to not end up the same way … You mustn’t keep a dog and bark yourself, you know. Powell and Pressburger’s post-war drama about the detailed, painstaking jobs done by ordinary – or perhaps extraordinary – men and women fighting them on the wartime beaches is a baleful psychological study of desperation. The beads of perspiration in those endless close ups of the brilliant Farrar and the sexual allegory of dance and music is wonderfully choreographed in a kind of asynchronous narrative that eventually finds its climax. The clock is quite literally ticking throughout in a story of almost unbearable tension. There are terrific supporting roles for Jack Hawkins, Cyril Cusack and an unbilled Robert Morley, playing a government minister. Adapted by Powell and Pressburger from Nigel Balchin’s novel, this is an underrated entry in the auteurist pair’s output and a true cult classic. Unmissable British cinema. It is not the prestige of a particular department that is important but men’s lives

Z (1969)

He is alive. Greece, the 1960s. Doctor Gregorios Lambrakis (Yves Montand) leader of the opposition is injured during an anti-military/nuclear demonstration in an incident that causes his death. The government and army are trying to suppress the truth – their involvement with a right-wing organisation in a covert assassination. But they don’t control the hospital where Lambrakis is brought and the autopsy reveals the cause of death. Then tenacious Examining Magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is determined to not to let them get away with it despite every witness getting beaten up en route to his office … Always blame the Americans. Even if you’re wrong. Adapted from Vassilis Vassilikos’ 1966 novel by Greek-born director Costa-Gavras and Jorge Semprun (with uncredited work by blacklisted Ben Barzman), this political thriller gained its frisson and urgency from its lightly fictionalised portrayal of recent events in Greece which this more or less accurately depicts. Nowadays its style is commonplace but its skill in evoking the dangers of the official version and the suppression of free speech is more important than ever. Inspired by real-life events, including the ‘disappearing’ of opposition Moroccan politician Mehdi Ben Barka in Paris in 1965, with a surgical reference to JFK, the beauty of the construction is in having Montand’s experiences including with wife Helene (Irene Papas) dominating the first half, while the second is about the steady work of investigation carried out by Trintignant, who winds up unmasking a conspiracy at the highest level. Beautifully shot by Raoul Coutard and scored by Mikis Theodorakis. Tough, taut, suspenseful filmmaking that is exciting and dreadful simultaneously, speaking truth to power about corruption, passionate engagement and the casual use of street thugs to commit murder for the state. There is even room for humour as Trintignant insists on treating the officers like anyone else when they are indicted and each one of them believes him to be a Communist when in fact his right wing credentials are impeccable. In real life the military junta came to power and banned the venerable Papas, who was a member of the Communist Party:  she wasn’t the only one of course but she survived to celebrate her 94th birthday on 3rd September last. Essential cinema. Why do the ideas we stand for incite such violence?

Crossfire (1947)

He’s just one guy. We don’t get them very often. But he grows out of all the rest.  When he is called in to investigate the brutal murder of Joseph Samuels (Sam Levene), who was found dead at his home, police investigator Captain Finlay (Robert Young) discovers there may be a murderer among a group of demobilized soldiers, who had been seen with Samuels and his female friend at a hotel bar that night. Meanwhile, Sergeant Peter Keeley (Robert Mitchum), concerned that his friend Mitchell (George Cooper) may be the prime suspect, decides to investigate the murder to clear his friend’s name. To both investigators, each suspected soldier relays his version of that night through flashback. The first to step up is Montgomery (Robert Ryan) who reveals himself to be anti-semitic; the others are Floyd Bowers (Steve Brodie), Mitchell and a potential witness, Ginny Tremaine (Gloria Grahame). While Finlay and Keeley slowly piece together the fragments of that night, there is one possible motive that may have driven the killer to beat an innocent to death, which prompts Finlay to set up a trap to expose the killer…. You can tell a lot about a man by how he don’t respect the service. Adapted from future writer/director Richard Brooks’ controversial novel The Brick Foxhole but of course anti-semitism wasn’t the book’s subject – that would be homophobia, unmentionable as a perversion in those heady days of the Hays Code, as was the issue of inchoate violence among demobbed GIs. John Paxton’s exemplary screenplay still tells a great story with flashbacks used to illuminate the mindset of the killer on the run, with Ryan brilliantly embodying the murderer and Mitchum’s outwardly dozy persona deployed to good effect:  Instead of the purple heart we get purple ink. Brodie makes a good impression as the fall guy. It wears its politics on its sleeve with plenty of on-the-nose dialogue particularly from Young:  Hating is always the same. Always senseless. Yet it falls right. He gets a great speech about how there’s always a minority targeted for hatred and regales a story about his own ancestor, an Irish Catholic murdered for emigrating from the Famine and establishing a home in the US. Effectively a pursuit film – a disguised western, if you will – everyone knows whodunnit and the chase just gives him time to talk himself into a hangman’s noose. Made at a turbulent time for the industry, this B movie astonished many by being nominated for an Academy Award. An outstanding example of the message movie, dealing with the thorny issue of what GIs yet to be discharged from WW2 service were up to with tensions running high in the changing post-war world, every woman potentially a femme fatale:  Grahame excels as the tough lady men want to have ruin them. We’re too used to fightin’ but we just don’t know what to fight. Produced by Adrian Scott (the son of Irish Catholics) and directed by Edward Dmytryk both of whom suffered differently in the wake of the HUAC hearings that this film ironically helped bring about – both were blacklisted among the Hollywood Ten, but in 1951 Dmytryk gave people up in order to work again. They had previously collaborated with Paxton on Murder My Sweet, Cornered and So Well Remembered.  After this landmark production, RKO fired them. Scott moved to Europe and wife Anne Shirley wrote him a ‘Dear John’ letter, marrying another screenwriter, Charles Lederer. Scott’s next wife, Joan, provided a front for him to get work pseudonymously, mainly in British TV. He died at the age of 61. Ryan would star for Dmytryk in the wonderful western The Professionals 19 years later. Dmytryk died at the age of 90 in 1999. I don’t like Jews and I don’t like nobody who likes Jews

 

Anna Karenina (1948)

Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. St Petersburg, 1870s. Anna Karenina (Vivien Leigh) is married to dull government official Alexei Karenin (Ralph Richardson) who is apparently more interested in his career than in satisfying the emotional needs of his wife. Called to Moscow by her brother Stepan Oblonsky (Hugh Dempster), a reprobate who has been serially unfaithful to his trusting wife Dolly (Mary Kerridge), who he wishes Anna to placate, Anna meets Countess Vronsky (Helen Haye) on the night train. They discuss their sons, with the Countess showing Anna a picture of her son Count Vronsky (Kieron Moore), a cavalry officer. When he shows up at the railway station to meet his mother it’s lust at first sight. Each of them eventually gives up everything for the other and their baby dies in childbirth while Anna is seriously ill but her husband forgives her the indiscretion that has scandalised them both when she appears to be close to death. Anna has to choose which man with whom to live and risk giving up her young son by her husband and going into exile abroad with Vronsky. Upon their return to Russia Anna is shunned …  You’ve no idea what women like. The tragic love story at the centre of Tolstoy’s 1877 novel is a consistent literary trap for filmmakers. Despite the opulent style this Alexander Korda vehicle for Vivien Leigh is occasionally stillborn. It should be perfect casting but Leigh is pretty vacant at times, imperious and persuasive at others, in comparison with the supposedly unsuitable Garbo’s positive radiance in the role a decade earlier, while Moore is wholly wrong as Vronsky. At first. And yet Leigh becomes fabulously fatalistic in that sobering Russian way while Moore gives up everything for her and they never quite understand or trust each other, their emotionality overwhelming them in different ways. Meanwhile her righteous husband maintains his pomposity by referring to his Christian principles and refuses her a divorce, to utterly awful effect. Women are the pivot. Adapted by Jean Anouilh & Guy Morgan and director Julien Duvivier, this long film is compromised by the tone which takes its time to exude the sheer joy of the illicit sexual attraction thereby somewhat pre-empting the nature of the tragedy to come. There are some terrific set pieces and wonderful deep focus cinematography by Henri Alekan with incredible costumes by Cecil Beaton. Overall it’s a rewarding watch that was an unexpected disaster. But was that such a surprise? Scarlett O’Hara dumping her family and frolicking with a soldier in the aftermath of World War 2 while post-war privations were at a height? Better than its reputation would suggest. The last scene is rightly shocking.  And the light by which she had been reading the book of life, blazed up suddenly, illuminating those pages that had been dark, then flickered, grew dim, and went out forever