Mapplethorpe (2018)

The shy pornographer. After he bails on the Pratt Institute, horrifying his conservative family, Robert Mapplethorpe (Matt Smith) leaves for New York City where he lives on the wild side and teams up with another wannabe artist, Patti Smith (Marianne Rendón).  They set up home together at the Chelsea Hotel where they discover their artistic abilities and dream together. However Mapplethorpe is gay and Smith disappears to enjoy a hetero marriage when she is supplanted by curator and collector Sam Wagstaff (John Benjamin Hickey) who takes Mapplethorpe as one of his lovers.  He becomes his benefactor and backer and shows him some nineteenth century photographs that open up Mapplethorpe to the possibilities of the medium, having two exhibitions simultaneously, one high-art, one erotic, showing both sides of his artistry. A symbiotic relationship is born, albeit Mapplethorpe continues to party and sleep around as his success grows. He falls for black model Milton Moore (McKinlay Belcher III) but when Milton finds his diaries he believes he’s being used fetishistically and abandons him. Mapplethorpe’s lifestyle verges on the reckless, between sex and drugs, but he is now famous and celebrated.  His younger brother Edward (Brandon Sklenar) whom he barely knows is training in the technical side of the medium and joins him as his assistant.  When Edward displays his own talent, Mapplethorpe doesn’t want the competition and tells him to stop using the family name. Wagstaff has AIDS but Mapplethorpe refuses to be tested. When he is dying, Patti visits. He gets Edward to take one more photograph of him… I’m an artist. I would have been a painter, but the camera was invented. Luckily for me. Unsurprisingly considering the subject matter and the fact that this was made in co-operation with the Mapplethorpe Foundation, this contains an array of graphic and pornographic images, all by Mapplethorpe himself.  That’s only disconcerting when Matt Smith is in the same scene as Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits. The value here is not intrinsic in the dramatic exposition but in the ideas it espouses and the path it traces as Mapplethorpe finds his medium – from drawing and making jewellery to figuring out that his narcissism offered a view on masculinity previously unexplored (or exposed in public). You’re the Jekyll and Hyde of photography. He’s not an easy character to portray or to like because his essence lies in provocation and attention-seeking and Smith’s performance is not terribly convincing in a role that is better written than it is acted. Nor does the script deal with the essential lesson that this is a man who knew he wouldn’t live long and was prepared to die for his art. Beauty and the Devil are sort of the same thing to me. The relationship with Patti Smith doesn’t quite ring true either.  The film is about how photography evolved as Mapplethorpe’s own high-contrast signature developed – as he repeatedly says, Look at the blacks. It’s the revolution in image-making to replace the affect and emotion of painting that holds the eye. The context in which the drama is produced is a major factor in the narrative and the celebrities of the day become his models but NYC has cleaned up a lot since the filthy Seventies and if the Chelsea Hotel looks grimy enough for anyone and the spectre of AIDS haunts every frame a cleaned-up look still expresses a dispiriting social scene. The chronological approach that dogs biographical film drama doesn’t add a lot here but the punctuation – setting up famous photographs and then showing the real thing – is a useful technique of juxtaposition that adds to the tension of creation:  these pictures still manage to shock, captivate and provoke. Mapplethorpe died thirty-one years ago this week. Directed by Ondi Timoner (on Kodak film) from a screenplay co-written with Mikko Alanne, based on a screenplay by Bruce Goodrich. They call it playing chicken with the avant garde

Address Unknown (1944)

The quicksand of despair – and just before we died a man pulled us out. When Martin Schultz (Paul Lukas), a German expatriate art dealer living in the US, visits his homeland, he begins to get attracted by the Nazi propaganda and breaks ties with his close Jewish friend, Max Eisenstein (Morris Carnovsky) whose daughter Griselle (K.T. Stevens) an aspiring actress is engaged to marry his son Heinrich (Peter Van Eyck) and she has accompanied Martin to Munich to pursue her career for a year. But Martin is swiftly recruited by Baron von Friesche (Carl Esmond) to work in the Culture Ministry with devastating repercussions … You can’t sit on two stools at once. At least not here in Germany. Kressmann Taylor’s 1938 novella sounded a gunshot over the ramparts about the dangers of Nazism and the screenplay by Herbert Dalmas does it justice – and then some. Director William Cameron Menzies deploys the style of German Expressionism (shot by Rudolf Maté) in the service of all that is decent and the escalating tension is brilliantly paced. The near-lynching of Griselle at the theatre is shocking and concludes in the tragic manner you know to expect. The atmosphere of intimidation and dread is expertly sustained while Lukas’ encroaching guilt over his role in the desperate developments in Germany grinds to a logical conclusion in the form of coded communication as the visuals veer from film noir shadows to straightforward horror mise en scène. A superb evocation of how two intertwined families suffer in the murderous Nazi terror. The old Juncker spirit and German arrogance are gone

The Reptile (1966)

Half woman – half snake! England in the early twentieth century. Harry Spalding (Ray Barrett) inherits his brother Charles’s cottage in Clagmoor Heath following the man’s mysterious death. He moves in with his new wife Valerie (Jennifer Daniel). They are not welcomed by any of the locals save for the publican Tom Bailey (Michael Ripper) who tells him Charles died of the Black Death. The local crazy Mad Peter (John Laurie) may be the only person who knows what’s going on:  a Malayan curse has turned the daughter Anna (Jacqueline Pearce) of Dr Franklyn (Noel Willman) into a snake woman… You’re like your brother – obstinate! With a screenplay by Anthony Hinds (as John Elder), this was filmed by director John Gilling back-to-back with The Plague of the Zombies for Hammer and it shares its elegance and controlled atmosphere (and some of its major cast and sets) but let’s face it, it’s fairly silly. The actors are splendid – particularly Pearce as Cobra Girl and Laurie as Mad Peter, with Ripper great as ever – and there’s a flavourful score by Don Banks, making this a most enjoyable excursion into mind control with some terrific set pieces. This was cut to avoid an ‘X’ rating and was then passed in full in 1994.  If you take my advice you won’t live there

 

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944)

Listen, Zipper-puss! Some day they’re just gonna find your hair ribbon and an axe someplace. Nothing else! The Mystery of Morgan’s Creek! Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) is a small-town girl with a soft spot for soldiers. She wakes up one morning after a wild farewell party for a group of them  departing for service to find that while drunk the night before, she married a soldier whose name she can’t remember, except that “it had a z in it. Like Ratzkywatzky … or was it Zitzkywitzky?” She thinks they both used fake names and she doesn’t know how to get in touch with him or even what he looks like. The matter is complicated when she learns that she became pregnant that night as well. Hapless Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken), a local who’s been classified 4-F [unfit for active military service] who has been in love with Trudy for years, steps in to help out, but her over-protective policeman father (William Demarest) gets involved and complicates matters. Before long, Norval is arrested on 19 different charges, and then he finds himself on the run as an escaped prisoner. All seems lost until Trudy gives birth to sextuplets. At that point Governor McGinty (Brian Donlevy) and The Boss (Akim Tamiroff) step in:  cue the happy ending! … The responsibility for recording a marriage has always been up to woman. If it wasn’t for her, marriage would have disappeared long since. No man is going to jeopardize his present or poison his future with a lot of little brats hollering around the house unless he’s forced to. It’s up to the woman to knock him down, hogtie him, and drag him in front of two witnesses immediately if not sooner. Anytime after that is too late. Reuniting most of the cast of Preston Sturges’ 1940 outing The Great McGinty (Diana Lynn, William Demarest, Porter Hall, Brian Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff) in the same roles, this was shot in 1942 but not released by Paramount for another two years:  sensitivities were high when the US joined in the war effort and the War Dept didn’t want people to think badly of departing soldiers; plus the studio was trying to keep the auteur’s output on a leash because he shot so many films. And then there were the censorship problems which left Sturges with just ten pages of script going into production because of fears that Trudy’s situation might be likened to the Virgin Birth of religious lore. Sturges defended the text because he said it was intended to “show what happens to young girls who disregard their parents’ advice and who confuse patriotism with promiscuity.” It’s a breathtaking farce, played with astonishing energy and commanded by Sturges like a steam train driving through contemporary mores and family values. This is one of the reasons I was disappointed not to see inside his writing room at Paramount on the studio tour! Wildly funny, brilliant and daring, it’s a bona fide classic.

The Killing of Sister George (1968)

I’m writing something very obscene about the British Broadcasting Corporation.  June (Beryl Reid) is an actress who portrays the popular Sister George, a district nurse in a popular BBC soap opera. The actress spends her time drinking and engaging in Lesbian sex with her much younger live-in lover, factory worker Alice also called Childie (Susannah York) due to her penchant for baby doll dresses and her devotion to her collection of dolls. A television executive, Mercy Croft (Coral Browne) decides she likes Alice and wants to write Sister George off the show after she’s molested two nuns in the back of a taxi, two Irish Catholic novitiates just off the boat. June watches as her behavior and insecurity and bullying drive Alice away and into the arms of Mercy.  George discovers the only job she is likely to be offered is that of a cow’s voice on a kids’ show … I can hardly put through to the Controller your allegation that you may have been bitten by two nuns. Robert Aldrich and screenwriter Lukas Heller broke new ground with this, made directly after The Dirty Dozen. Aldrich’s regular collaborator, Heller added a sex scene between Childie and Mrs Croft to Frank Marcus’ 1964 play which was responsible for the film’s X rating under the newly instituted censorship system in the US. There were also censorship problems in the UK (the BBFC website states that this has by far the largest file of any film submitted with the sex scene “by far the most explicit scene of lesbian physical love that has ever been submitted [for classification].” ). This was also the first film to show the inside of a Lesbian nightclub.   It fits into the rather cynical ‘hag’ template the pair pioneered with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?  and Hush … Hush Sweet Charlotte. Beryl Reid’s butch persona (well known from The Belles of St Trinian’s) adds a new twist to the format, with her tweedy randy predator meeting her match in Mrs Croft. Reid had played the role on stage and had its energy and complexity down to a T. This is a confrontational film about ageing, femininity, relationships and career and how they can all converge into a crisis at the whim of an executive’s pen. Fascinating on so many levels, with the central story’s blackly comic claustrophobia expressed through excellent design, this is great entertainment. What’s one looking for then, love and affection?

Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

You save that jiggle for your husband.  Semi-retired Michigan lawyer Paul Biegler (James Stewart) takes the case of Army Lt. Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara), who murdered local innkeeper Barney Quill after his wife Laura (Lee Remick) claimed that he raped and beat her.  However a police surgeon finds no evidence of rape.  Over the course of a big trial, Biegler is the smalltown lawyer (and recently deposed District Attorney) who must parry with the new DA Lodwick (Brooks West) and out-of-town prosecutor Claude Dancer (George C. Scott) to set his client free, but his case rests on the victim’s mysterious business partner Mary Pilant (Kathryn Grant), who’s hiding a dark secret.  Biegler has to prove Manion was suffering temporary insanity but will the jury buy it after Biegler discovers he’s a violent and jealous husband and he knows in his heart he’s got a very weak defence? … Producer/director Otto Preminger spent most of the 1950s baiting the censor with material for adults and this long engrossing account of a true crime is no different. Wendell Mayes adapted Robert Traver’s (aka John D. Voelker) novel based on his own experiences on a 1952 case in the state of Michigan.The matter of fact handling of the explicit physical details in the courtroom confirms that this is a film that has no cinematic tricks. It’s shot wide and flat in black and white with the only camouflage or disguise in the personalities presenting themselves. That applies to the legal team too:  Parnell Emmett McCarthy (Arthur O’Connell) has to swear off the booze for the duration to assist Biegler;  Laura must drop the tight pedal pushers, don skirts and hide her wonderful hair;  Biegler’s bonhomie hides a finagling mind that doesn’t express great surprise at anything anyone says or conceals.   There’s a strand of humour running through both dialogue and characterisation that raises the game: the lightness of Remick as the bruised flirtatious beauty, with her wonderful companion dog Muff (Snuffy) who gets to provide his own witness statement in court, alongside Stewart’s jolly and wryly witty performance, makes this more pleasurable than the subject matter suggests. In fact the whole film avoids melodramatic excess and has a devious sinuousness that leads from Stewart. His banter with Joseph N. Welch [chief counsel for the US Army when it was being investigated for UnAmerican Activities in the McCarthy Hearings] about fishing provides a lot of enjoyment; Eve Arden as the reliable and seen-it-all secretary Maida Rutledge offers her typical scepticism in a film constructed from the cynic’s playbook. There are no histrionics or crazy closing arguments, just practice, rationale  and evidence (of witness-coaching). Now, Mr  Dancer, get off the panties – you’ve done enough damage.  Duke Ellington provides the film’s notable score and he appears uncredited as pianist Pie Eye and enjoys an exchange with Stewart. The great titles are by Saul Bass. This is elegant filmmaking, wonderfully crafted, telling a difficult story in the procedural vernacular very stylishly.  How can a jury disregard what it’s already heard?

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017)

Are you normal?  What is normal?  Harvard psychologist and inventor Dr. William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans) has the good fortune of having two women in his life – his eventual wife and colleague Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) who is denied her PhD because of her gender and their mutual lover, student Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote) the niece of the birth control activist, Margaret Sanger, whose feminist mother Ethel, Sanger’s sister, abandoned her to the care of nuns. Marston creates the DISC theory of Dominance, Inducement, Submission and Compliance which he lectures on to besotted female students.  In addition to helping him perfect the lie detector test, they form a ménage à trois which leads to the academics being fired from their University jobs and moving to the burbs where the two women inspire him to create one of the greatest female superheroes of all time, beloved comic book character Wonder Woman as their unconventional lifestyle and penchant for S&M causes problems for the legitimate and illegitimate children they raise together…  This sly old dissertation on American values is told in a series of flashbacks as Marston is forced to defend his comic book’s content to Josette Frank (Connie Britton) inquisitor in chief at the Child Study Association of America in the post-war era as comic books were literally burned, Hitler style, in the streets. No fool she as she knows all the moves, BDSM or no.  It’s amusing to see the trio’s relationship revealed first with the lie detector machine and then in the den of iniquity lorded over by Charles Guyette, the G-string king (JJ Feild) while outwardly life in the burbs goes on as per usual. This is an origins story with a difference and if it plays rather fast and loose (or restrained, whichever you’d prefer) with the lasso of truth, then it’s fun and imaginative and very well performed – interpreted, written and directed by Angela Robinson. Produced by Amy Redford.

The Square (2017)

The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations.  Christian (Claes Bang) the curator of a Swedish museum hires a PR team to create hype for a challenging new exhibition with explosive results after he responds with a poorly thought-out social media post when his smartphone is stolen … Written and directed by Ruben Östlund, this part-satire, part-horror utilises its international cast well in what is an overlong and episodic narrative:  Elisabeth Moss plays Anne, the journalist who winds up having a complicated one-night stand with Christian; while Dominic West essays a PJ-clad parody of Julian Schnabel; and Terry Notary is Oleg, after Oleg Kulik, a performance artist who reputedly acted like a dog and attacked people at an exhibition in Stockholm (Notary does an ape impression here). Bang is terrific in quite a complex and contradictory role in which all his pretensions are challenged. There is a dinner party from hell which is a film in and of itself.  This is a largely successful tract using issues of class, race, sex and society in a witty treatise on what could be summed up in two words:  culture shock. Like most modern art, better seen and experienced than read about. Winner of the 2017 Palme d’Or at Cannes.

78/52 Hitchcock’s Shower Scene (2017)

The movie is about fragmentation. It IS fragmentation.  Seventy-eight camera setups and fifty-two cuts. Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary about the most famous scene of all time in movies is a crowdpleaser – its subject is familiar to everyone. Starting with a ‘remake’ of Janet Leigh’s rainy drive to the infamous Bates Motel it settles into a series of interviews with a diverse range of commentators – from Eli Wood to Eli Roth, Walter Murch to Peter Bogdanovich, Danny Elfman to Guillermo del Toro, Stephen Rebello to Marli Renfro, Leigh’s body double, who offers intriguing insights into the week-long filming process.  The archive footage includes other Hitchcock films as well as TV interviews and excerpts from The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.  The contemporary interviews place the film in the vanguard of the culture and as part of a lifelong battle Hitchcock had with the censors – it’s pointed out that his previous film, North By Northwest, concludes in a phallic train entering a tunnel;  Psycho commences with a post-coital look between Leigh and John Gavin. It is also part of a disorienting cinematic process about space invasion and lack of safety, a film that literally changed how we watched films, and not just because by showing a toilet flush for the first time on the Hollywood screen Hitchcock wanted to remind us how our lives can just randomly go down the drain. Providing deft visual analysis (with great insights into the use of the jump cut), production information and ideas about the score, this is intensely interesting for the buff, the geek, the movie freak and even the seven year old daughter of one of the interviewees who has never seen the film but likes to make the knife action while imitating Bernard Hermann’s shrieking violins. That’s how influential this is. It’s obvious that Janet Leigh has to survive!

Donnie Darko (2001)

This came out right after 9/11 which was its misfortune. It has a rather extraordinary plane crash and it wasn’t that that made me relate to it entirely but it was a factor – one of my most vivid and disturbing dreams concerned a crash in my neighbourhood but that was in the aftermath of the Avianca crash on Long Island in 1990 and I remember afterwards reading in a column that nobody should eat bluefish for rather obvious reasons…. I digress. This begins with one of two songs by two of my favourite bands because there are two versions of the edit. So you see Jake Gyllenhaal cycling through his suburban neighbourhood either to Echo and the Bunnymen’s Killing Moon or INXS’s Never Tear Us Apart:  both forever songs, in my book. He’s a teen who’s off his meds and talks to Frank, a man dressed as a  giant rabbit in the bathroom mirror. Problem is, the rabbit can control him and as he searches for the meaning of life and his big sister (Maggie Gyllenhaal) bugs him and his little sister pursues her dancing ambition and everyone quarrels about voting for Michael Dukakis (because it’s 1988), he starts tampering with the water main flooding his school, a plane crashes into their house and he resents the motivational speaker (Patrick Swayze) who enters the students’ lives while the inspiring Graham Greene story The Destructors is being censored by the PTA.  He burns down the man’s house and the police find a stash of kiddie porn and arrest him. Donnie’s interest in time travel leads him to the former science teacher (Patience Cleveland) aka Grandma Death but his friendship with her leads the school bullies to follow him and she is run down – by Frank. Donnie shoots him.  When he returns to his house a vortex is forming and a plane is overhead and things go into reverse … and Donnie is in bed, just as he was 28 days earlier, when the story starts … Extraordinary, complex, nostalgic, blackly funny and startlingly true to teenage behaviour and perception and life in the burbs, I know there are websites dedicated to explaining this but I don’t care about that. Just watch it. And wonder how Richard Kelly could possibly make anything this good again. Stunning.