Ferrari (2023)

We all know death is nearby. Summer 1957. Former racer now company manager Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) is on the verge of bankruptcy. He and his estranged wife Laura (Penelope Cruz) put everything they have into the Mille Miglia race, a last role of the dice for them both following the death of their son Dino (Benedetto Benedettini) the previous year. The Miglia is an open road, endurance-based race lasting one thousand miles. While Enzo has kept Laura from learning of his infidelities, his mistress, Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) pressures him to grant their illegitimate young son Piero (Giuseppe Festinese) the Ferrari name as his confirmation nears. Meanwhile, in the wake of the groundbreaking development of the team’s Formula One car, Ferrari’s manufacturing company is suffering from severe financial losses. Faced with no other choice, Ferrari must merge with a sister company to continue doing business. However, Laura owns half of Ferrari’s shares so in order to move forward on deals, Enzo has to persuade Laura to sign the entirety of the company over to him. A resentful Laura demands a check for $500,000, which will bankrupt the company if she cashes it. Laura confirms her suspicions that Enzo has been having an affair after finding where Lina and Piero live in the countryside outside Modena. Enzo agrees to write the cheque and trust her to wait. As the Mille Miglia commences in Brescia, Ferrari encourages his drivers to remain ahead of the competition. During a pit-stop in Rome, Enzo’s newest addition to the team, Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone) refuses to change tyres in order to stay in the lead; he suffers a blowout and loses control of the vehicle, which veers off the road, killing de Portago, his navigator and nine onlookers in the resulting crash … He is entitled to an heir. The films of that supreme visualist Michael Mann are usually about complex, tortured men of ambition and conscience who also lead rather complicated private lives. So the life of Enzo Ferrari seems to be a perfect aesthetic and narrative fit in this latest motorsports film which had many stops and starts in its development over the years. Adapted by the late Troy Kennedy Martin from the Brock Yates biography,  Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine, the focus is dual: on the extramarital affair with Lina that has produced an illegitimate son, a replacement for his beloved heir, and the participation in a more or less unregulated road race that could be the making of the firm. The speed, glamour and sheer style of the era is beautifully evoked without losing a sense of danger or the grit of the open roads, captured with terrific detail by cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt. Ferrari himself is not exactly an open book – closed off by damned business practices, bereavement, sorrow, frustration and his domestic attentions permanently elsewhere, he is not a likeable protagonist. You might say the glacial Driver is ideal, nominative determinism apart. What I loved in you I also found in him, Laura declares after lending him the money he thought would bankrupt the firm and castigating him for replacing their beautiful Dino with his mistress’ bastard son. She has only one condition because she knows the value of the Ferrari name. The wrong son died. It’s a great monologue and states the emotional stakes of the film in one scene. Is she different from the others? Mann is not rated enough for his female casting but it’s one of the most attractive facets of his productions – he never works to type. Here it’s no different. Cruz is superb as the beaten down wife who quietly holds her power despite her outward demeanour and the cuckolding by her cold husband. Woodley is equally an unconventional choice for her role. Sarah Gadon gets to land the legendary kiss that killed. We all know it’s our deadly passion. Our terrible joy. And of course there are the racers. It’s wonderful (at last) to see someone essaying the role of de Portago, one of the era’s luminaries, as well as Peter Collins (Jack O’Connell) who was such a star before his premature death the year after this race. Real life petrolhead and racing team owner Patrick Dempsey plays Piero Taruffi, one of the few men from that time who lived to a great age. Top Gear fans (the original iteration, natch) will recognise Ben Collins who plays Stirling Moss while Wolfgang von Trips is played by Wyatt Carnell. Those were the days when noble birth (and family money) was as much a condition of participation in big motor races as driving skill. Brake late. Steal their line. Make them make the mistake. At 104 minutes in is the accident that literally stopped the Mille Miglia in its tracks and it’s terrible. But this is all about legacy and achievement and what’s left in the ether: a lingering taste of petrol fumes powers this along even if it’s not without its flaws, like the man himself. When a thing works better usually it looks more beautiful to the eye. A good if not exactly iconic car movie but a decent explanation as to the place of Ferrari today. Go beat the hell out of them

Hypnotic (2023)

That park. That day. Texas. Austin Police Department detective Danny Rourke (Ben Affleck) regales his therapist with the story of the abduction of his seven-year-old daughter, Minnie (Ionie Olivia Nieves) which occurred three years ago and led to the dissolution of his marriage. Afterwards, he is picked up by his partner, Nicks (J.D. Pardo) who informs him they have received an anonymous tip that a safe deposit box will be robbed. While staking out the bank, they witness a mysterious man (William Fichtner) give instructions to civilians and fellow policemen who immediately follow his commands. Rourke suspects they are all in an elaborate heist and races to the targeted safe deposit box. Inside, he only finds a picture of Minnie with the message Find Lev Dellrayne written on it. The mysterious man escapes but Rourke is now convinced the heist has something to do with his daughter’s disappearance. A trace run by Nicks on the tip-off call leads Rourke to the address of fortune-teller Diana Cruz (Alice Braga). Cruz tells Rourke that the mysterious man from the bank is named ‘Lev Dellrayne’ and that he and Cruz are both the escaped ‘Hypnotics’: powerful hypnotists trained by a secretive government Division to control people’s minds. She also tells Rourke that he is mysteriously immune to her own mind control abilities. You cannot brute force a mind like yours. Dellrayne hypnotises Nicks into attacking Rourke and Cruz, forcing Cruz to kill him in self-defence. Now the two primary suspects in Nicks’ murder, Rourke and Cruz flee to Mexico. There, they learn from a former Division contact of Cruz’s Jeremiah (Jackie Earle Haley) that Dellrayne is searching for ‘Domino’ a weapon developed by the Division which was stolen and hidden by Dellrayne when he escaped. He erased his own mind. Dellrayne then wiped his own memory and left behind triggers that will prompt him to gradually recall Domino’s location and simultaneously increase his regained hypnotic power. Dellrayne uses his ability to control civilians to pursue Rourke and Cruz from the contact’s apartment and into the surrounding city. However, Rourke taps into his own (previously unknown and unacknowledged) hypnotic power to stop Dellrayne’s control of the civilians, allowing him and Cruz to escape. Rourke and Cruz next seek out River (Dayo Okeniyi), a reclusive Division hacker. He hacks into the Division database and learns that Rourke’s former wife, Vivian (Kelly Frye) was a member of the Division. Cruz and River figure Rourke must be another Hypnotic whose memory was wiped. Later that night, Rourke investigates River’s database on his own, learning that Minnie is actually the Domino: she is the daughter of two powerful hypnotics: Rourke and Vivian. And – Cruz is actually Vivian; Rourke’s memory of his wife’s face had been altered so that he believed ‘Cruz’ to be a stranger. Rourke then realises that all the events and locations seen up to this point have been hypnotic constructs created in a facility populated by Division agents that have simply acted out the roles of all the people he’s met up to this point. Vivian and Dellrayne’ explain that Minnie was born and raised within the Division but Rourke escaped with her to stop her from becoming their weapon. Rourke hid Minnie and then wiped his memory, so the Division has been repeatedly putting him through a constructed scenario to make him remember … Are you familiar with the concept of hypnotic constructs? Something of a flop on its US release, this Roberto Rodriguez film sits in the cinematic Venn universe where Philip K. Dick meets Christopher Nolan, albeit it is more logical and with a 50% running time of the latter’s usual output. Co-written by the director with Max Borenstein, there is a deal of not just mind- but actionbending, recalling the world of Inception, with an interesting twist in using Affleck (the world’s worst line reader, fact fans!) when he’s told by a guy raising his eyepatch to take a better look at him, There’s more to you than meets the eye. That applies not just within the story but within the Affleck star text and his granite persona is given a depth and range he’s not usually required to play. By the time the 13th construct is being enacted we’re up to speed along with him but he still has another card left in the deck. Like all disguised westerns this concludes with a shootout but it’s the who, why and how that make it pleasurable. It’s sharp and pleasingly complicated and at 94 minutes a painless exercise in freeform genre cinema. You brought this on yourself

The Running Man (1963)

You’re not in Croydon any more. Stella Black (Lee Remick) returns from the memorial service for Rex, her late husband, a pilot who died in a gliding accident. He (Laurence Harvey) is in fact alive and well and in hiding at a secluded seaside boarding house having defrauded his insurer Excelsior out of a huge sum of money for his premature death after they failed to pay out for an accident involving his airline business. Stella joins him in Malaga, Spain where he has changed his appearance and is living under the assumed name of Jim Jerome. Things start to go wrong when an insurance investigator Stephen Maddox (Alan Bates) appears to be following Stella as she drives her expensive car and enjoys the high life at a lovely hotel … He shouldn’t have married her. Adapted by John Mortimer from Shelley Smith’s novel The Ballad of the Running Man, this starts out as a sunny neo noir suspenser and turns into something quite different with a nice twist that dictates the outcome. Harvey and Remick are superb as the beautiful blonde married couple whose fate alters irrevocably and their relationship with it; while the issue of mistaken identity regarding Bates is wonderfully played out, subtly inverting the entire premise so that it rebounds with catastrophic consequences. Thanks to Robert Krasker’s cinematography (a very different experience to the kind of exploitation of locations in The Third Man) Spain looks stunning and the sinister nature of the story comes entirely from the construction and playing. Never was misunderstanding so well portrayed: everything here is lost in translation. Watch out for Fernando Rey as a policeman and Noel Purcell and Eddie Byrne have small roles in a production partly shot at Ardmore Studios in Ireland.  Directed by Carol Reed. They’ll have to put up the insurance premiums on anyone who wants to make love to you

Casino (1995)

There are three ways of doing things around here: the right way, the wrong way, and the way that I do it. You understand? Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein (Robert De Niro) is a Jewish handicapper asked by the Chicago Mob to oversee the day-to-day casino and hotel operations at the Tangiers Casino in Las Vegas in 1973. His childhood friend, mobster Nicky Santoro (Pesci), is a made man and makes life tricky for Ace. Ace falls for call girl and chip hustler Ginger McKenna (Stone) whom he eventually marries. They have a daughter Amy (Erika von Tagen) but Ginger gets into drugs and her behaviour becomes loud and difficult. Ace has problems getting a gaming licence despite keeping local politicos happy and the skimmed money is being skimmed by people he employs. All his relationship begin to break down and the FBI are closing in when Ginger runs away with her lover and pimp Lester Diamond (James Woods) taking Amy with them … When you love someone, you’ve gotta trust them. There’s no other way. You’ve got to give them the key to everything that’s yours. Otherwise, what’s the point? And for a while, I believed, that’s the kind of love I had.  At first glance it doesn’t seem elegiac yet this Scorsese collaboration with co-writer Nicholas Pileggi (from his Casino:  Love and Honor in Las Vegas) five years after Goodfellas operates as a long goodbye to a way of life essentially foreign, about strangers in a strange land. It’s adapted from the lives of Frank Rosenthal, Anthony Spilotro and Geri McGee. The mob were never at ease in the desert landscape and the story problem doesn’t end there because all the relationships here are uneven and mismatched:  Jewish and Italian, Ace and Nicky, Ace and Ginger, the Mob and Vegas. It starts audaciously: with a bomb. Yet the victim is one of the narrators. The competing voiceovers by Ace and Nicky are stark illustrations of the power plays beyond the gaming tables. The storytelling, spanning a decade to 1983 (and ‘many years before’) is a familiar one of bribery, corruption, murder, gambling, crooked politicians, prostitution, children, golf, drugs and great clothes, And the production design by Dante Ferretti lit up by Robert Richardson’s beautiful cinematography offers a stark contrast to the coarseness of these terrible people. It’s long and talky and horrifically violent and startling in terms of juxtapositions and acting. At the centre of the extraordinary soundtrack in this epic of marriages gone wrong is the score for Godard’s Contempt (Le mepris) by Georges Delerue, pointing our response in the correct direction. We are left to contemplate the magnificent, complete performance by Sharon Stone, one of the best in modern cinema, the cause and effect in this epic and tragic tale of the misbegotten. In the end it is a pitiless exploration of humanity. A lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are buried in those holes

Showdown (1963)

Aka The Iron Collar. You can’t do this to a man. Not to a man! Two drifters, cowpoke Chris Foster (Audie Murphy) and veterinarian Bert Pickett (Charles Drake) go into the border town of Adonde. Bert gets in a fight after getting drunk and punches out the local sheriff during a card game and he and Chris are put in iron collars, chained to an outlaw and famed killer, LaValle (Harold J. Stone) at a post in the town square. He is there with his gang members Foray (L.Q. Jones) and Caslon (Skip Homeier). They manage to escape but La Valle wants them to rob a bank and they try to buy their way to freedom with some stolen bonds … The man who said he could never be caught. He’s collared now. Written by Bronson Howitzer (aka Ric Hardman) and directed by western stalwart R.G. Springsteen, this is standard genre fodder, albeit with appropriately noir overtones for this monochrome affair. Murphy acquits himself well, Stone is a convincing villain, Kathleen Crowley makes for an admirably cynical kind of femme fatale with a sympathetic backstory and Lone Pine stands in for New Mexico with well mounted if small-scale action. When I call you come or I put you back on the leash!

Lucy Gallant (1955)

Don’t get people mixed up with flowers. That only works for the birds and the bees or didn’t anyone tell you? 1941. Stranded by a storm in Sage City Texas en route to Mexico, Lucy Gallant (Jane Wyman) is assisted by handsome rancher Casey Cole (Charlton Heston) who helps find her suitable lodging in a town celebrating recent oil strikes. Local women’s reaction starting with Irma Wilson (Mary Field) and her daughter Laura (Gloria Talbott) to her fashion persuades Lucy to sell the contents of her trousseau and she decides to stay and open a dress shop with the backing of the local bank manager Charles Madden (William Demarest). Lucy lives at Molly Basserman’s (Thelma Ritter) boarding house and runs her store out of Lady ‘Mac’ MacBeth’s (Claire Trevor) brothel, The Red Derrick. She resists newly rich Casey’s romantic approaches explaining that she’d been on the verge of marriage when her fiancé jilted her following her father’s indictment for fraud. Casey proposes to her but only if she gives up business. She returns to find her store has burned down. He underwrites a bank loan for her to rebuild bigger and better without her knowledge. When WW2 breaks out Casey enlists and after the war he returns and they quarrel. He becomes engaged to a fashion model in  Paris but the relationship breaks up and Casey returns to Texas just when Lucy believes she is about to have her greatest success … Some champagne please, I feel like breaking glasses. Adapted from a novella by prolific short story writer Margaret Cousins, the screenplay by John Lee Mahin and Winston Miller feels somewhat laboured and the leads have little to do. The salty presence of Trevor and Ritter as Lucy’s solid female backup is welcome relief from a fairly turgid romance and the sexism is rather unpleasant. The brightest spot is towards the end with a spectacular fashion show guest hosted by legendary Edith Head (who designed the costumes) in a rare appearance (minus her signature blue lenses); while real-life Texas Governor Allan Shivers appears as himself. It can’t hold a candle to Giant, which also tells the story of modern Texas up to the same period. Directed by Robert Parrish. I really shouldn’t let you do it but I will

 

Barnacle Bill (1957)

Aka All At Sea. From the dawn of time we have always mixed in nautical circles. Royal Navy Captain William Horatio Ambrose (Alec Guinness) has an unfortunate problem – seasickness. It’s particularly embarrassing given his family’s 400-year history in the profession. He spent WW2 teaching in training schools and wasn’t exactly a success. He decides to invest in an amusement pier in the seaside town of Sandcastle but encounters opposition from the local Councillors when he attempts to establish the Victorian structure as a centre for entertainment for the young instead of the old codgers so decides upon a radical course – to have it registered as a foreign sailing vessel (the Arabella, in honour of his former foe now ally, beach hut proprietress Mrs Barringon, played by Irene Browne). He advertises cruises, to which the public flock in droves. When the councillors decide to charge him berthing fees he cuts off their land connection and his enemies plot a course of sabotage … For the price of my modest savings at last a command of my own. T.E.B. Clarke’s script might have a little too much quirk for modern tastes but it’s a lot of fun, with a couple of sequences featuring Bill’s ancestors that tip the nod to Guinness’ eight roles in Kind Hearts and Coronets – because Guinness plays them all. There are lots of other familiar faces including Percy Herbert as his first officer; Eric Pohlmann as the Ambassador from Liberama, happy to give his pier a boat number; Richard Wattis as a civil servant; and Victor Maddern as a treacherous dredge boater. There is a great sense of sly rather than vicious satire, backed up with lots of fun visual jokes – an escape artist rolling about stuck in a sack; a bunch of uniforms waging war in pedalos!; Bill and Mrs Barrington getting drunk and sliding up and down the floors of Crazy Cottage in wonderfully canted shots – and several good scenes mocking petty conspiracies and the backhanders people have to pay to councils, profiting off their situation. Ultimately cut off from the rest of his ‘ship,’ Bill arrives in France, to the delight of the locals. One might call it his Dunkirk. John Addison has a lot of fun pastiching seafaring tunes and shanties. Watch out for Jackie Collins as a beat girl. A massively underrated late Ealing feature, ripe for rediscovery. Directed by Charles Frend, also responsible for The Cruel Sea. What larks! What goes down must come up!

East of Eden (1955)

The way he looks at you. Sorta like an animal. In 1917 Salinas Cal (James Dean) and Aaron (Richard Davalos) Trask are the sons of decent farmer Adam (Raymond Massey) who is chairman of the local wartime draft board. Both compete for his attention but Cal has discovered that the mother Kate (Jo Van Fleet) they were told was long dead is in fact the madam of a whorehouse in Monterey, 15 miles away. He borrows money from her to profit from a rise in the bean farming market intending to repay his father for his failed experiment in freezing food for long-haul shipping.  But his father prefers Aaron’s announcement of his engagement to Abra (Julie Harris) whom Cal starts to desire just as Aaron feels pressure to enlist and Cal decides to surprise him … I’ve been jealous all my life. Jealous, I couldn’t even stand it. Tonight, I even tried to buy your love, but now I don’t want it anymore… I can’t use it anymore. I don’t want any kind of love anymore. It doesn’t pay off. Was there ever a more important or sinuous entrance in the history of cinema than James Dean’s arrival here? The way he moves, coiled like a caged animal set to pounce, slinking along like a cat, then hunched and feral, infiltrating our consciousness and catalysing our puzzlement and desire? I first saw this aged 12 and that’s the perfect age to watch it for the first time, this story of bad parenting, bullying, abandonment, sibling rivalry, envy and first love, all choreographed to the backdrop of the outbreak of WW1 in a masterful adaptation (by Paul Osborn) of the last section of John Steinbeck’s great 1952 novel. Everything about it is right:  the shooting style laying out the gorgeous landscape of Salinas, alternately warm and sunny, chill and foggy; the wide screen that’s barely able to contain the raw emotionality; the marvellous, occasionally strident score by Leonard Rosenman with its soaring, sonorous swoops. And there’s the cast. Jo Van Fleet gives a great performance (in her screen debut) as the wild whoremongering mother  – just look at her strut when we first see her (this is a film of brilliant entrances), providing the angular example of difference to this half-grown boy of hers; Massey is upstanding, a self-righteous, arrogant man, given to sermonising, incapable of leading by empathy; Harris is generous to a fault, allowing Dean to be everything, all at once, boy, man, lover. He burns up the screen with playfulness, confusion and rage. His scenes with Davalos, the Abel to his Cain, bespeak a softness and eroticism rarely equalled and play into the latterday perceptions of his orientation – or perhaps director Elia Kazan just understood how he needed to be in the part, getting into your head by whatever means necessary. Kazan recalled the audience reaction to Dean at the first screening and said that kids were screaming and yelling and practically falling over the balcony to get closer to him, they went wild. That’s how he makes you feel, James Dean. You want to get closer to him. You want to be him. This is really where that sensation began:  of feelings being teased, opened up, acknowledged. Once seen, never forgotten. You’re a likeable kid

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

Play something else. Bored Boston millionaire Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) devises and executes a brilliant scheme to rob a bank on a sunny summer’s afternoon without having to do any of the work himself. He rolls up in his Rolls Royce and collects the takings from a trash can without ever meeting the four men he hired to pull it off. When the police get nowhere fast, American abroad Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway), an investigator hired by the bank’s insurance company, takes an interest in Crown and the two begin a complicated cat-and-mouse game with a romantic undertone although Vicki is also assisting police with their enquiries via Detective Eddy Malone (Paul Burke) who stops short of calling her a prostitute due to her exceedingly unorthodox working methods. Suspicious of Anderson’s agenda, Crown devises another robbery like his first, wondering if he can get away with the same crime twice while Vicki is conflicted by her feelings and Tommy considers giving himself up … I’m running a sex orgy for a couple of freaks on Government funds. Dune buggies. Gliders. Polo ponies. Aran sweaters. The sexiest chess game in cinema. Those lips! Those eyes! Those fingers! Has castling ever seemed so raunchy?! Super slick, witty, rather wistful and absurdly beautiful, this classic caper is the epitome of Sixties cool, self-consciously clever, teeming with split-screen imagery, bursting with erotic ideas and boasting a brilliant if enigmatic theme song Windmills of Your Mind composed by Michel Legrand with lyrics by Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman. The breeziest, flightiest concoction this side of a recipe for soufflé, it benefits from both protagonists’ identity crisis where everything comes easily to Tommy and life is a game, and yet, and yet … while Vicki is genuinely hurt when Detective Malone hands her a file on Tommy’s nightlife affairs with another woman. Written by Alan Trustman, also responsible for Bullitt. The production is designed by Robert Boyle, shot by Haskell Wexler and directed by Norman Jewison while the editing is led by future director Hal Ashby.  This is deliriously entertaining.  And did Persol shades ever look as amazing? It’s not the money, it’s me and the system

Mary Poppins Returns (2018)

As I live and breathe. Grown up father Michael Banks (Ben Whishaw) and his three children get some help from Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) when the bank closes in on their home where his sister Jane (Emily Mortimer) helps out following the death of Michael’s wife a year earlier … Cleaning is not a spectator sport. Perhaps it was inevitable that following the successful transposing of the classic film into musical theatre that Disney would go back to the toybox and raid one of their most significant creations, a live-animation hybrid that lingers long in the imagination and the heart. With songs by Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman and set in ‘The Great Slump’ which we presume is sometime in the Thirties, this is a combination of race against time and treasure hunt, as the shares certificate that will save the family home is in the place least likely to be found – or the most obvious, if you know anything about movies/kites. There is a highly unlikely romance between Jane and Jack the lamplighter (Lin-Manuel Miranda), Mary is rather astringent and inconsistent, the dour interior and visual designs lack the antique spark of the original and there are real longeurs in between the fantasy sequences. Breaking the contract with the audience, there is jeopardy in these, featuring a kidnapping that harkens back to The 101 Dalmatians or The Aristocats. You might recognise Willie the Operatic Whale in ‘The Royal Doulton Music Hall’ but there seems to be a real disconnect with the story and some diversionary tactics – Miranda has a speechifying song part in ‘A Book is Not the Cover’ that could be out of his own Hamilton; Meryl Streep shows up as Mary’s foreign cousin and has an upside down song (‘Turning Turtle’) which has little to do with anything. It’s odd that the true heart of the original only starts to be suggested in the finale, a coda to the action that visually resonates and pops practically perfectly off the screen – at last. Directed as well as he directs everything else by Rob Marshall, who adapted with David Magee and John DeLuca, at least this isn’t a remake and James Corden isn’t in it but Angela Lansbury and Dick Van Dyke are. Everything is possible, even the impossible