Veronika Voss (1982)

Aka Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss. Light and shadow; the two secrets of motion pictures. Munich 1955. Ageing Third Reich film star Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech) who is rumoured to have slept with Hitler’s Minister for Propaganda Josef Goebbels, becomes a drug addict at the mercy of corrupt Lesbian neurologist Marianne Katz (Annemarie Düringer), who keeps her supplied with morphine, draining her of her money. Veronika attends at the clinic where Katz cohabits with her lover and a black American GI (Günther Kaufmann) who is also a drug dealer. After meeting impressionable sports writer Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate) in a nightclub, Veronika begins to dream of a return to the silver screen. As the couple’s relationship escalates in intensity and Krohn sees the possibility of a story, Veronika begins seriously planning her return to the cinema – only to realise how debilitated she has become through her drug habit as things don’t go according to plan … Artists are different from ordinary people. They are wrapped up in themselves, or simply forgetful. The prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s penultimate film and one of his greatest, its predictive theme would have horrible resonance as he died just a few months after its release. Conceived as the third part of his economic trilogy including The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola, this reworking of or homage to Sunset Blvd., whose ideas it broadly limns, has many of his usual tropes and characters and even features his sometime lover Kaufmann who could also be seen in Maria Braun; while Krohn tells his fellow journalist girlfriend Henriette (Cornelia Froboess) of his experience and potential scoop but Veronika’s hoped-for return is not what he anticipates with a Billy Wilder-like figure despairing of her problem. Its message about life in 1950s Germany is told through the style of movies themselves without offering the kind of escapist narratives Veronika seems to have acted in during her heyday.  She’ll be your downfall. There’s nothing you can do about it. She’ll destroy you, because she’s a pitiful creature. Fassbinder was hugely influenced not just by Douglas Sirk but Carl Dreyer and this story is also inspired by the tragic life of gifted actress Sybille Schmitz, who performed in Vampyr.  She died in 1955 in a suicide apparently facilitated by a corrupt Lesbian doctor.  The unusually characterful Zech is tremendous in the role. She would later play the lead in Percy Adlon’s Alaska-set Salmonberries as well as having a long career in TV. She died in 2011. It’s an extraordinary looking film with all the possibilities of cinematography deployed by Xaver Schwarzenberger to achieve a classical Hollywood effect for a story that has no redemption, no gain, no safety, no love.  Fassbinder himself appears briefly at the beginning of the film, seated behind Zech in a cinema. This is where movie dreams become a country’s nightmare. Screenplay by Fassbinder with regular collaborators Peter Märtesheimer and Pea Fröhlich.  Let me tell you, it was a joy for me that someone should take care of me without knowing I’m Veronika Voss, and how famous I am. I felt like a human being again. A human being!

Personal Affair (1953)

You see sex in everything! 17-year old Barbara Vining (Glynis Johns) is infatuated with her Latin teacher Stephen Barlow (Leo Genn) who’s married to lonely and insecure American woman Kay (Gene Tierney). When Barbara disappears after a private tutoring session with Stephen and Kay notices the girl’s crush on her husband, rumours swirl and he has to defend himself from the suspicion that he may have  raped and murdered her … I don’t think we are really ourselves in school hours. Lesley Storm adapted her stage play A Day’s Mischief;  she had form in that regard, having written the original play The Great Day, also adapted for cinema. She was an established screenwriter, contributing additional scenes and dialogue for Graham Greene’s The Fallen Idol and Adam and Evelyne and writing several other screenplays, with another Greene adaptation, The Heart of the Matter, released the same year as this, 1953. This mines a rich seam of prurient gossip and innuendo in a small community and with a great supporting cast including Megs Jenkins and Walter Fitzgerald as Barbara’s parents, Pamela Brown as her aunt who had a permanent disappointment in love at a similar age that has poisoned her outlook on relationships, Thora Hird as the Barlows’ housekeeper and Michael Hordern as the headmaster, and a raft of young (if not yet familiar) faces like Shirley Eaton and Nanette Newman (in her first role) playing her school chums. William Alwyn’s exacting score underlines the melodramatic urgency of the story which paradoxically takes place mostly in conversation between the adults who admit their misunderstanding of human behaviour and the subtlety of instinct while three women at different stages of life enact their experience of love and potentially its loss.  Directed by Anthony Pelissier. I’m no good without you

 

Highly Dangerous (1950)

It may not interest you technically but for a large section of humanity it could be a matter of life and death. The British government asks entomologist Frances Gray (Margaret Lockwood) to go behind the Iron Curtain and examine insects that might be used as carriers to spread disease in germ warfare. Grudgingly accepting the job, Frances goes undercover as Frances Conway, a tour director looking for potential holiday destinations and meets tough American reporter Bill Casey (Dane Clark) in the process. Unfortunately, the chief of police Razinski (Marius Goring) quickly sees through Frances’ flimsy cover. Then her contact is murdered and his body left in her hotel room and Frances is taken into custody, prompting Casey to come to her aid… A few months ago some people were shot accidentally in the woods. It was terrible. A vehicle for Lockwood after a period doing theatre, Eric Ambler loosely adapted one of his novels (The Dark Frontier), changed the gender of the protagonist and it’s a spirited adventure. The Ruritanian setting hints at the comedy style, returning Lockwood to a kind of thriller along the lines of The Lady Vanishes – enhanced by the casting of Naunton Wayne as Frances’ recruiter, Hedgerley, Wilfrid Hyde White (after The Third Man) and Goring’s performance as a comedy police chief, enlivening the playfulness. Like The Third Man, Ambler’s script makes a meta issue of storytelling, there’s a torture scene in a TV studio-like location and there are references to soap opera and a character called Frank Conway, the star of a radio serial that Frances listens to for her little nephew and for whom she is re-named. Nicely done with a good mix of intrigue, suspense and fun led by Clark as the inadvertent hero of the situation. Directed by Roy (Ward) Baker. You just can’t do things like that in real life.

Down Three Dark Streets (1954)

I kept asking myself, all night long, who would want to such a thing? FBI agent John Ripley (Broderick Crawford) inherits three cases his murdered partner Zack Stewart (Kenneth Tobey) has been investigating, hoping one of them will turn up his killer. Glamourpuss Connie Anderson (Martha Hyer) can be connected to gas station killer Joe Walpo (Joe Bassett). Fashion buyer Kate Martell (Ruth Roman) is getting phonecalls extorting insurance money that she received following her husband’s death and her young daughter is being threatened.When boxer Matty Pavelich (Claude Akins) beats up blind Julie Angelino (Marisa Pavan) her husband Vince (Gene Reynolds) agrees to testify, so another case is tied up … I don’t like men staring at me before lunch. Adapted by The Gordons (Mildred and Gordon) from their novel Case File FBI, this serves as something of a Valentine to that agency although J. Edgar Hoover reputedly objected to the early draft scripts. It’s enlivened by the shift between documentary-style realism, great location shooting and a conventional thriller mode boasting some terrific female performances, particularly Hyer (once touted as the new Grace Kelly) giving it the full Marilyn Monroe as the sexpot link to a mysterious criminal. Roman is her customarily intense self with a problematic household, an aggressive romantic interest (Max Showalter) and a job as a fashion buyer to contend with; while Crawford’s gruff persona suits the no-nonsense lead role. There is some especially piquant dialogue and a gloriously funny moment when an inventor tries to sell him on a Geiger counter for spies (it has a light that comes on when a taxman is in the vicinity). The stories are well put together and it ends (happily, for the viewer at least) at the Hollywood sign in a Los Angeles that is still notably rural, with the freeway almost empty of the traffic to come. Directed by Arnold Laven. Sometimes you meet some nice people in this business

Zelig (1983)

All the themes of our culture were there. In this fictional documentary set during the 1920s and 1930s a non-descript American called Leonard Zelig (Woody Allen) achieves notoriety for his ability to look, act and sound like anyone he meets. He ingratiates himself with everyone from the lower echelons of society to F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Pope becoming famous as The Changing Man. Even Hollywood comes calling and makes a film about him. His chameleon-like skill catches the eye of Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow), a psychiatrist who thinks Zelig is in need of serious cognitive analysis as someone who goes to extremes to make himself fit into society. Their relationship moves in a direction that’s not often covered in medical textbooks as she hypnotises him … I’m certain it’s something he picked up from eating Mexican food. A formally and technically brilliant and absolutely hilarious spoof documentary that integrates real and manipulated newsreel footage with faked home movies, a film within a film, period photographs of the leads and interviews with contemporary personalities, real and imagined, from Susan Sontag and Saul Bellow to ‘Eudora Fletcher’ (Ellen Garrison) in the present day. Even Bruno Bettelheim shows up to declare the subject the ultimate conformist. The sequence on the anti-semitism Zelig experiences as a child (his parents sided with the anti-semites, narrator Patrick Horgan informs us mournfully) is laugh out loud funny. Of course it has a payoff – in Nazi Germany. The editing alone is breathtaking, there is not a false moment and the music is superlative, forming a backdrop and a commentary as well as instilling in the audience a realistic feel for the time in which this is set. There are moments where you will not believe your eyes as Allen transforms into everyone he meets – regardless of race, shape or colour. An original and funny mockumentary that’s actually about the world we live in, an extreme response to childhood bullying and what we do to make ourselves fit in and where that could lead. You just told the truth and it sold papers – it never happened before!

 

Georgy Girl (1966)

You know, the trouble with you is you could say that you’re a good girl. Awkward 22-year old Georgy (Lynn Redgrave) is the musically talented daughter of parents who live in at the home of their employer James Leamington (James Mason) whose wife Ellen (Rachel Kempson) is dying. He has always taken a paternal interest in Georgy but finds his feelings are evolving and asks her to be his mistress. Georgy’s flatmate musician Meredith (Charlotte Rampling) leads a hedonistic lifestyle and finds herself pregnant by boyfriend Jos (Alan Bates) who marries her despite feeling attracted to Georgy when he moves into their flat and the pair commence a surreptitious affair… She was a beautiful woman – beautiful! Tolerant. Civilised – and about as exciting as a half brick. Even if you’ve never read Margaret Forster’s wonderful novel you probably know the title song performed by The Seekers but really this is all about Lynn Redgrave, who gives a great performance as the far from glamorous woman who is catnip not just to Mason but to Bates but wants nothing more than to be a good mother. She’s totally delightful in a film that swings, with Mason marvellous in a role that practically demands some moustache-twirling, such is his lasciviousness in his native Yorkshire tongue. The scene where Bates strips off unaware that a care worker is visiting the flat and Redgrave is pretending to be a nanny is just priceless. Rampling shines as the feckless Meredith who doesn’t have a maternal bone in her beautiful body and the portrayal of disenchanted motherhood is groundbreaking in its lack of sentimentality. Even so, this is relentlessly upbeat and contrives a fantastically apposite happy ending to a brilliantly offbeat set of relationships. How much more fondly can a film look upon its characters? Adapted by Forster and Peter Nichols and directed by Silvio Narizzano. God’s always got a custard pie up his sleeve

It Should Happen To You (1954)

I’d give my right arm to see myself in the movies.  Small-town model and actress Gladys Glover (Judy Holliday) encounters documentary-maker Pete Sheppard (Jack Lemmon) in Central Park and after he shoots footage of her gives him her address. She dreams of seeing her name in lights after two years of not making it in New York City. She takes a gamble by investing in billboard advertising to get her name out there. Almost immediately her risk pays off, and she finds herself inundated with media requests and fans, including the affections of the wealthy Evan Adams III (Peter Lawford) of the Adams Soap company.  Meanwhile Pete has rented a room in her boarding house and observes Adams coming and going with Gladys, whom he is trying to persuade to exchange the valuable spot in Columbus Circle for six elsewhere and eventually she agrees. Gladys initially bathes in the publicity which earns her all kinds of advertising campaigns but Pete sees the downside of overnight success before she recognises that she’s famous for being famous … All she’s got is nerve as far as I can see. A wafer-thin premise is spun by screenwriter Garson Kanin into an accomplished romcom that gives Holliday ample space to do physical comedy while Lemmon makes a striking debut. The story has a sting in the tail and Holliday gets to say that the most important thing in life is privacy:  so while the portrayal of the world of TV is a thing of the past, the message is very current. A slick concoction directed by George Cukor with (among other names of the era) Constance Bennett and her amazing cheekbones appearing as themselves in a TV show. I don’t stand for anything

Bad For Each Other (1953)

I’ve got a chance at something better and I’m going to take it. After serving in the Korean War, Army colonel and doctor Tom Owen (Charlton Heston) returns home to Coalville, Pennsylvania, on leave where his mother (Mildred Dunnock) is mourning her other son Floyd’s death. Tom learns from wealthy mine owner Dan Reasonover (Ray Collins) that Floyd, a mine safety engineer killed in an explosion, had betrayed Dan’s trust by buying substandard equipment and taking kickbacks. Floyd was also in debt. Tom wants to pay Dan back, but Dan tells him to forget about the money. Dan’s daughter, the twice-divorced socialite Helen Curtis (Lizabeth Scott) meets Tom at a party and asks him for a date. She arranges for him to meet Dr. Homer Gleeson (Lester Matthews), who runs a fancy Pittsburgh clinic catering to wealthy women with imaginary health problems and he offers Tom a job. Tom hires nurse Joan Lasher (Dianne Foster, born Olga Helen Laruska!) an attractive and idealistic young woman who plans to become a doctor herself and is concerned at the way the practice is run. Dan warns him against marrying his daughter while her aunt (Marjorie Rambeau) cautions him once she finds out that Gleeson is a fraud having taken the credit for the lifesaving operation Tom performed. Tom discovers there’s an ethical price to pay for his compromises and finds himself envying Dr. Lester Scobee (Rhys Williams) who cares for the miners of Coalville and their families and then a disaster strikes underground … I sometimes remembered the hippocratic oath. A canny fusion of medical soap opera with film noir, with Scott terrific as the bad girl. Heston is fine as the conflicted doctor who initially chooses moving up in society until finally even he has to admit he’s being unethical. Smart writing about class from novelists Irving Wallace and Horace McCoy and smoothly managed by director Irving (Now, Voyager) Rapper. Gratitude is no substitute for what I want

Manhattan (1979)

 

Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. Oh, I love this. New York was his town, and it always would be. 42-year old TV comedy writer Isaac Davis (Woody Allen) is involved with high school student Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) and freaking out about his Lesbian ex-wife Jill’s (Meryl Streep) forthcoming memoir of their marriage breakup; while his best friend, University professor Yale Pollack (Michael Murphy) is cheating on his wonderful wife Emily (Anne Byrne) with cerebral egotist book editor Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton). Isaac quits his job in a fit of pique which he instantly regrets and has to downsize in order to finance a year when he will try to write a book. Yale breaks up with Mary so when Tracy says she wants to go to London to study acting Isaac and Mary get together … I’m dating a girl who does homework. Elaine’s, the Empire Diner, The Russian Tea Room, Central Park, the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, Bloomingdale’s, Dean and Deluca, the Lincoln Center, Rizzoli’s bookstore, Zabar’s, the now-demolished Cinema Studio, this is the one where Allen fully expresses his love of his native city and it’s more than a Valentine as the story inspired by George Gershwin’s music, starting with Rhapsody in Blue, transports us into the inner workings of the characters and their preposterous lifestyle problems. The script by Allen and Marshall Brickman gives Keaton absurdly self-aggrandising dialogue protesting the burden of her beauty, Allen jokes about his castrating Zionist mother and jibes about Lesbian fathers, and everyone bar 17-year old Tracy is fairly ridiculous but even she is a serious sexpot who wants to go to London to train as an actor (supposedly based on Allen’s relationship with Stacy Nelkin). A gorgeous, funny, satirical film about silly people whose therapists call them, weeping, and they carry on doing stupid things, risking their relationships and their careers on a romantic whim in a disposable culture. (That’s Mia Farrow’s sister Tisa talking about the wrong kind of orgasm, BTW.)  It’s all told with love and humour and shot in ridiculously beautiful widescreen monochrome by Gordon Willis because of course the real unadulterated love spoken of here is for New York City and it gives the writer his voice.  Of the two of us I wasn’t the amoral psychotic promiscuous one  MM #2,600

The Facts of Life (1960)

Am I really going to San Francisco to spend the weekend… with the husband of my best friend? When neighbours Kitty Weaver (Lucille Ball) and Larry Gilbert (Bob Hope) meet it’s irritation at first sight but there’s an undeniable attraction which they eventually act upon during the annual neighbourhood vacation in Acapulco when they’re forced to spend it together. Problem is, they’re both married, she to habitual gambler Jack (Don DeFore), he to perfect homemaker Mary (Ruth Hussey) and they both have two children. They vow to take off together after circumstances and regular encounters at social gatherings mean they keep running into each other but a messed up drunken assignation at a motel makes them rethink. Then things change after Larry finds out that Kitty has written a note to Jack to tell him she’s leaving him when the pair take go to San Francisco for the weekend during the winter vacation … This is my first affair, so please be kind. A breezy but cold-eyed comedy of suburban middle class adultery is not necessarily what you might expect with that cast, but that’s what legendary screenwriting partners Norman Panama and Melvin Frank created and it’s very well played by the leads who of course are both peerless comedy performers and this is the third of the four films they made together. It’s as though Johns Cheever and Updike decided to up sticks and go Hollywood and take all the baggage of midcentury masculinity with them. Panama and Frank are of course great comic screenwriters.  Their first screen credit was on Hope’s 1942 movie My Favorite Blonde and later work with him includes Road to Utopia, Monsieur Beaucaire and an uncredited rewrite of The Princess and the Pirate so they know his strengths (they are his, as it were) and they turn a messy uncomfortable familial disruption into an easily enjoyed romcom whose moral messiness is tidied into great dialogue and barely concealed social anxiety.  This is the essence of comedy and it’s their forte. There are some shockingly barbed exchanges and there are excruciating sequences when the couple discuss the legal and financial ramifications of two divorces and realise when they’re finally alone together that they’re probably mismatched; when they almost get found out by neighbours at San Francisco Airport the tension is horrific.  There’s a notable score by Johnny Mercer and Leigh Harline with the title song performed by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé and while Frank gets the sole directing credit, it appears Panama co-directed. There’s an unexpectedly conventional titles sequence designed by Saul Bass, putting us right in the mood for the tenor of that era’s comedy style and it all looks beautiful in monochrome thanks to cinematographer Charles Lang. Night-time Los Angeles looks glossy even in black and white.  It’s an interesting one to compare with another film about an extra-marital suburban affair filmed the same year, Strangers When We Meet. Played a beat slower with a fraction less of the leads’ comedy mugging and shot in colour, this could match its melodramatic tone. Are you sure you’re with the right woman?