Hide and Seek (1964)

Very clever the Russians, aren’t they. Cambridge University. Astrophysics professor David Garrett (Ian Carmichael) is working on tracking Russian rocket launches. He meets up with an old mentor and friend, Professor Frank Melnicker (George Pravda) who is playing multiple games of chess at a display of simultaneous play at a local temperance hall. Garrett is confused by the apparently secretive way that one player, Paul Richter (Kieron Morre) transfers the knight chess piece to Melnicker. When Melnicker notices two individuals enter the hall he is distracted and excuses himself for the lunch break. Garrett offers to drive Melnicker to his hotel. There are two men (James Houlihand and Leslie Crawford) waiting for Melnicker outside. When Garrett intimates that since they are in England that Melnicker could find safety, Melnicker cryptically tells Garrett that he should recall his seventh chess move. Garrett’s driver (Judy Parfitt) informs him that Major McPherson (Edward Chapman) wishes to meet with him. The Major tells Garrett that he must stop socialising with Melnicker since he is a known East German communist. Garrett arrives at the Ministry of Defence for a meeting, and while in the bathroom a box of chess pieces is dropped off to him that his driver believes he mistakenly left in the car. In fact, it was left by Melnicker. It contains the knight chess piece and a money belt containing a large amount of cash. Garrett takes the chess piece and money belt with him and leaves the building to return to the hall where the chess demonstration was happening. When he arrives at the hall he finds the display being torn down, with the demonstration cancelled due to Melnicker not returning after lunch. Garrett remembers the moves Melnicker had made and comes up with king’s square four. When he says this to a cabby, the man suggests they drive to King’s Square, an address in Chelsea, Garrett rings the doorbell and a young woman named Maggie (Janet Munro) calls to him from the second floor. She is apparently expecting him and throws down keys so he can let himself in. Others arrive, – there for a wedding reception. Garrett is starting to wonder if he’s in the right place, when he sees Maggie talking to Richter and finds a room upstairs with a chessboard that is missing the knight piece he has in his pocket. Garrett talks with Maggie and finds out she does know of Melnicker. Maggie then says she has to leave and Garrett leaves alone after copying down Maggie’s phone number. Outside Garrett realises two men are following him. A running chase happens, with Garrett escaping by hiding in a children’s sandbox in Royal Chelsea Gardens which is packed with nannies and their charges. He phones Maggie and says he must meet up with her so he can return the money to Melnicker. Maggie tells Garrett to meet her at the train station at Watford, where she convinces him to board the train with her. On the train, Garrett continues to ask Maggie where Melnicker is and where they are travelling to but they’re going through Grantham. Maggie seems to be avoiding committing to anything and Garrett resigns himself to continuing on the train for the time being. Sometime later Maggie goes out into the corridor to smoke a cigarette and notices two men she identifies as secret police that they must avoid. They are chased around in the train until Maggie pulls the emergency stop cord and she and Garrett jump off the train. After a series of mishaps they are picked up by a bargeman called Wilkins (Hugh Griffith) who’s travelling with a menagerie, escaping potential nuclear disaster to what he calls his Magical Island … I think the game would have turned out quite differently if you had realised the importance of my seventh move. A Cold War picaresque, you say? We have just the thing! This jaunty jape-filled English travelogue is replete with Noah’s Ark (on a barge), a pixie-like love interest who is just this short of manic dream girl, a scientist who can’t swim but manages to rig a bomb in a boat and sexier-than-thou Curt Jurgens posing political equivocations in a series of chess moves but manages to get himself checkmated. Carmichael is of course an unlikely romantic hero but in his early Sixties customary comic-satiric mode he’s quite the dashing Hannay-style wrong man protagonist in a film that owes probably as much to Hitchcock and Buchan as the source novel by Harold Greene, adapted for the screen by Robert Foshko and David Stone. When our (eventually) romantic couple goes walkabout and winds up being picked up by Wilkins on a barge which transpires is filled with pairs of animals and 136 bottles of Jamaican rum it’s a highly diverting interlude filled with references to Shakespeare as this former teacher bemoans the colleague who advised in case of nuclear armageddon, cover your head with a brown paper bag. Garrett is inclined to agree with his colleague. Rather amusingly, there’s a graphic of the H-bomb behind this prepper declaring Annihilation Imminent. After a spell hitchhiking and meeting their nemesis Richter which winds up in a literal cliffhanger and apparent death, things can only conclude by meeting the main man, Hubert Marek (Jurgens), at a fortress-like hostelry where mind games matter as much as chess before Garrett uses his own little grey cells after being confronted Poirot-like by every player in the story. Then he goes all Tintin (L’Ile Noire) and figures things out. It’s an ingenious plot that might have been a bit better handled but the constant trickery, chess moves, the toilet and sex references, the theatrical quotes and the sheer chutzpah of the twist are all to be cherished in a film that has a deceptive tone all its own. This is billed as (producer) Hal E. Chester’s Hide and Seek which is a bit of a cheek even in these days of possessory credits. Beautifully shot in black and white by Gilbert Taylor, this is directed by Cy Endfield and was made before Zulu but released months after that fabled film. This probably wasn’t his wheelhouse but he makes a pretty good fist of a tongue in cheek Cold War movie that is as far from Bond as we could imagine even if starts off with a stonking rocket launch. What is all this horseplay?

Mr Jones (2019)

The Soviets have built more in five years than our Government has in ten. In 1933, Gareth Jones (James Norton) is an ambitious young Welsh journalist who has gained renown for his interview with Adolf Hitler. Thanks to his connections to Britain’s former Prime Minister, David Lloyd George (Kenneth Cranham), he is able to get official permission to travel to the Soviet Union. Jones intends to try and interview Stalin and find out more about the Soviet Union’s economic expansion and its apparently successful five-year development plan. Jones is restricted to Moscow where he encounters Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard) a libertine who sticks to the Communist Party line.  He befriends and romances German journalist Ada Brooks (Vanessa Kirby) who reluctantly sees him follow the path of murdered journalist Kleb in pursuit of a story. He jumps his train and travels unofficially to Ukraine to discover evidence of the Holodomor (famine) including empty villages, starving people, cannibalism, and the enforced collection of grain exported out of the region while millions die. He escapes with his life because Duranty bargains for it on condition he report nothing but lies. On his return to the UK he struggles to get the true story taken seriously and is forced to return home to Wales in ignominy … They are killing us. Millions.  Framed by the writing of Animal Farm after a credulous commie-admiring Eric Blair aka George Orwell (Joseph Mawle) expresses disbelief that Stalin is anything but a good guy, this is an oddly diffident telling of a shocking true story that’s art-directed within an inch of its life. Introducing Orwell feels like a disservice to Jones. Norton has a difficult job because the screenplay by Andrea Chalupa is too mannerly and the film’s aesthetic betrays his intent. Director Agnieszka Holland is a fine filmmaker but the colour grading, the great lighting (there’s even a red night sky shot from below as Jones and Brooks walk through Moscow) and the excessive use of handheld shooting to express Jones’ inner turmoil somehow detracts from the original fake news story. It happens three times during food scenes including when he realises he’s eating some kids’ older brother. Shocking but somehow not surprising and amazingly relevant given the present state of totalitarian things, everywhere, in a world where Presidents express the wish to have journalists executed and some of them succeed. Some things never change. Chilling. I have no expectations. I just have questions

Wings of Desire (1987)

Aka  Der Himmel Über Berlin / The Heaven Over Berlin / The Sky Over Berlin. Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? When did time begin, and where does space end? Isn’t life under the sun just a dream? Isn’t what I see, hear, and smell just the mirage of a world before the world? Two angels, kindred spirits Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander), glide through the streets of Berlin, observing the bustling population, providing invisible rays of hope to the distressed but never interacting with them. They are only visible to children and other people who like them. When Damiel falls in love with wistful lonely trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin) whose circus has closed due to financial problems, he tires of his surveillance job and longs to experience life in the physical world. With words of wisdom from actor Peter Falk (playing himself) performing in a WW2 thriller whose cast and crew the angels are observing – he believes it might be possible for him to take human form and enter history ... We are now the times. Not only the whole town – the whole world is taking part in our decision. We two are now more than us two. We incarnate something. We’re representing the people now. And the whole place is full of those who are dreaming the same dream. We are deciding everyone’s game. I am ready. Now it’s your turn. You hold the game in your hand. This beautiful benign allegory of the divided city of Berlin is of course clear to anyone familiar with the practices of the Stasi, who deployed one half of the East German population to spy on the other half:  when the Wall came down and the files were opened families and friendships were torn asunder. However a few years before that occurred, director Wim Wenders plugs into the nightmare of watching and being watched and makes it into a surreal dream in this romantic fantasy. I can’t see you but I know you’re here. It’s verging on noir with its portrait of a place riven by war and totalitarian rule, its acknowledging of the Holocaust and the overview of the Wall snaking through a post-war world. You can’t get lost. You always end up at the Wall.  A poetic film that’s so much of its time yet its yearning humanity is palpable, its message one of eternal hope. Shot in stunning monochrome by Henri Alekan, brought out of retirement and for whom the circus is named. I’m taking the plunge. Written by Peter Handke, for all the fallen angels on the outside looking in. Co-written by Wenders with additions by Richard Reitinger, loosely inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems. An exquisite city symphony that insists on the disrupting of image making, bearing witness, choosing life. With Curt Bois as Homer and Crime and the City Solution and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds perform.  Must I give up now? If I do give up, then mankind will lose its storyteller. And if mankind once loses its storyteller, then it will lose its childhood

Havana (1990)

Now I want a shot. One shot. At a game I could never get in before. Christmas Eve 1958. On the eve of revolution, Navy veteran and professional high-stakes gambler Jack Weil (Robert Redford) arrives in Cuba seeking to win big in poker games. Along the way, he meets and falls in love with Bobby (Lena Olin), the wife of a Communist revolutionary Arturo Duràn (an uncredited Raul Julia) and gradually becomes convinced that the anti-Batista campaign is a cause worth fighting for… Nobody should be here. Redford’s seventh collaboration with director Sydney Pollack is their final work together and is a rather uneven experience once it veers away from its inherent genre identity of romantic melodrama. Perhaps the problem is inherent in the premise linked to previous Redford characters and his meta perception as an enigma:  the lack of commitment to a cause which reeks of Casablanca.  In truth it’s a problem with the screenplay which takes too many stances too quickly. This also suffers somewhat in comparison with treatment of broadly related subject matter in The Godfather Part II with Mark Rydell making an appearance here as Meyer Lansky and that film’s outrageous sex show is in another dimension from the tame act Redford brings American tourists Diane (Betsy Brantley) and Patty (Lise Cutter) to see, the foreplay to their inevitable threesome. In fact the role of ‘Rick Blaine’ is actually split between Redford and Alan Arkin who plays Joe Volpi, Lansky’s front guy. Then Arkin gets to essay a variation on Claude Rains in the penultimate scene with Redford adopting a more straightforward heroic stance, not that that was ever in any doubt because of how the story begins. It starts out with an ill-advised voiceover by Redford and gets right into action which involves his going out on a limb for no perceptible reason to help a total stranger escape the attentions of SIM (Batista’s secret police) onboard the Cuba-bound ship, forcing the meet-cute with Olin. Olin’s character is an out of work Swedish actress who was inspired by Garbo – shouldn’t it have been Bergman?! – while her former husband, a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter got her exiled to Mexico and then marriage to Duràn, son of a well-connected Cuban family (we’re non-torturable, he explains). There’s talk about American citizenship. A lot of talk about moving to Miami. There’s a great character – a ‘fake fairy food critic’ called Marion Chigwell (Daniel Davis) and he is – what else – a CIA spook. Somewhere here there’s a great movie but it’s badly organised and the sub-plot with the journalist friend Julio Ramos (Tony Plana) seems under-explained. There are great poker scenes with the military chief Menocal (Tomas Milian) who of course is not what he appears. After Olin’s character loses her naturalistic diffidence in the first two-thirds it shifts into a different and more convincing gear. Even if we never believe Redford is in real trouble. Despite this there is an uncannily evocative atmosphere throughout and some great lines. Pollack was an inveterate messer with scripts, perhaps that explains it. There are major compensations in Owen Roizman’s cinematography (of the Dominican Republic, where this was shot) and the dreamy production design by Terence Marsh is something of a miracle. Written by Judith Rascoe (from her original idea) and Pollack’s usual collaborator, David Rayfiel. A fascinating work for students of Hollywood stardom as Redford edged into his mid-fifties. History is overtaking us

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)

In our country, General, they say never blow a bridge until you come to it. During the Spanish Civil War, an American professor of Spanish and explosives expert, Robert Jordan (Gary Cooper) allied with the Republicans finds romance with freedom fighting peasant Maria (Ingrid Bergman) during a desperate mission to blow up a strategically important bridge in the mountains while the Axis powers attempt to establish a base in Europe … Each of us must do this thing alone. Bergman got another Oscar nomination for her performance and Cooper displays his stoic masculinity in Dudley Nichols’ romantic (and lengthy) adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel. The protean quality of both stars is much in evidence here – Bergman is luminous as the Loyalist and Cooper is a perfect hero, strong, reliable and deeply felt. I’ve always loved you but I never saw you before. They make an awesome couple.  They don’t shoot you for being a Republican in America. However the adaptation isn’t as focused on action as it ought to be, the dialogue is occasionally too on the nose (explaining that Germany and Italy are using Spain against Russia) and overall this is not especially well staged, confined as it is to studio settings (imagine if they’d done this somewhere as lush as Northern Spain). Katina Paxou got the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award and she’s tremendous as the tough plain-speaking older woman Pilar in this story of betrayals and compromise – and, inevitably, sacrifice. With Akim Tamiroff, Arturo de Cordova, Vladimir Sokoloff and Joseph Calleia in a characterful ensemble, this doesn’t lack for interesting exchanges or tension which escalates as the moment descends. The original running time was trimmed from 168 minutes to 130 and then restored to 165. It’s too long but as a relic of classic screen performances and despite the issues it’s still one of the better Hemingway adaptations and simply must be seen. Directed by Sam Wood. Each of us must do this thing alone

Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)

Our gorgeous lie did not even last the night. Hong Kong 1949. American journalist Mark Elliott (William Holden) is covering the Chinese civil war. Undergoing a trial separation from his wife, he meets beautiful Dr. Han Suyin (Jennifer Jones), a widowed Eurasian physician originally from mainland China. As the pair fall in love, they encounter disapproval from both her family, his friends and Hong Kong society about their interracial romance … I have my work and an uncomplicated life. I don’t want to feel anything again… ever. This outrageously beautiful melodrama lingers long in the memory for its Widescreen Deluxe images, shot by the great Leon Shamroy, including two weeks on location in its Hong Kong setting; and its cast. Adapted by John Patrick from Suyin’s 1952 autobiographical novel it’s a pulsatingly lush romance, played to the hilt and given gravitas with its issues of race against a background of the war in China leading to a takeover by the Communist Party. The subject matter meant there was trouble getting it off the ground in those censorious days. The production was no less troubled, with the stars eventually coming to loathe each other. None of that matters because the performances sing in a carefully dramatised story that boasts some of the most romantic scenes in either of their careers. All those love letters, kissing on hilltops, swimming … it’s a spectacular and vivid epic, sad and tender. And was there ever a more impressive hunk of sexy mid-century masculinity than Holden?! There is a strong supporting cast including Torin Thatcher, Murray Matheson and Isobel Elsom, rounding out a snapshot of colonial life in those post-WW2 days. Ornamenting the gorgeous score by Alfred Newman is the title song by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster, one of the great movie themes, and it’s sung by The Four Aces. It was an enormous hit, just like the film.  Patrick would write another Hong Kong-set romance starring Holden, The World of Suzie Wong. Directed by Henry King, who had a knack for making beautiful films, with second unit location work by Otto Lang, who is uncredited. Love is nature’s way of giving a reason to be living, The golden crown that makes a man a king

Jet Pilot (1957)

I’m a refugee, not a traitor. During the Cold War, a Russian jet enters air space over Alaska and is escorted to an American air base. The pilot turns out to be a woman – Anna Marladovna (Janet Leigh). She claims to be defecting and demands asylum but refuses to provide information on Soviet activities. USAF Colonel Jim Shannon (John Wayne) receives orders to befriend her in order to win her confidence and gather information. The pilots compete with each other but gradually fall in love. When it appears Anna may be deported, Jim marries her – only to discover that she may be a spy and his mission to seduce her may have played right into her hands … This might be some new form of Russian propaganda. Shot between 1949 and 1951 by a likely uninterested auteur Josef Von Sternberg, producer Howard Hughes was basically reworking Hell’s Angels and spent a staggering seven years messing about with the edit before unleashing it upon an unsuspecting world. Despite its terrible reputation it’s mostly played for laughs with a first indication when sound effects literally trumpet Leigh’s stripping off her commie uniform. Naturally a woman that beautiful can’t be trusted, so the inevitable honeytrap is set. This is meat and drink to writer Jules Furthman and it’s all done with tongue firmly in cheek with the bonus of some incredible aerobatic cinematography from Winton C. Hoch. My favourite line? The one that provides a running joke and hints at a more lauded Leigh film a decade later:  Do you stuff birds too? A total hoot.

Radio Days (1987)

Who is Pearl Harbour? Narrator Joe (Woody Allen) tells the story of two burglars in his childhood neighbourhood of Rockaway Beach, NY, who get caught when they answer the phone to participate in a live radio competition back in the medium’s golden age. The songs trigger childhood memories and we are taken back to his life as a child as Young Joe (Seth Green) immediately prior to and during World War 2 where his mother (Julie Kavner) served breakfast listening to Breakfast With Irene and Roger and his father Martin (Michael Tucker) keeps his occupation a secret from the family until Joe finds out he’s a taxi driver when he hails a cab.  Joe’s favourite show is The Masked Avenger so he has a healthy fantasy life but when he spots a Nazi submarine on the shoreline he fails to alert anyone because he thinks they won’t believe him. Unmarried Aunt Bea (Dianne Wiest) lives with them and is constantly going out with losers. Joe has heard stories about radio stars and we learn about Sally White (Mia Farrow) a hatcheck girl with acting dreams and a bad accent who sleeps with big names including Roger to get ahead but always gets left behind until she gets her big break when she witnesses a murder … He’s a ventriloquist on the radio! How can you tell he’s not moving his lips? As any fule kno, Rockaway Beach is one of the most inspiring spots in New York. Winning, winsome and witty, this series of vignettes is stitched together with what can only be described as love with nods to famous radio stories including Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds broadcast, here interrupting a fogbound assignation. One of the funniest tales involves a sportscaster prone to melodrama regaling his audience with the story of a blind one-legged baseball star. Farrow and Wiest get two of the best character arcs, the former’s Singin’ in the Rain-ish storyline turning her from squeaky-voiced trampy wannabe actress to Louella Parsons-type gossip columnist via a run-in with a sympathetic mob hitman Rocco (Danny Aiello) from the old ‘hood; while the latter is terminally disappointed in love including a necessarily brief romance with a white-suited Tom Wolfe lookalike bemoaning the loss of his fiancée who turns out to have been a man called Leonard. Music and songs churn and curdle the endless embarrassment and kind hearted acts as friends, family and neighbours get on with their daily lives when war breaks out. Memories of Annie Hall abound in the voyeuristic kids whose new teacher Miss Gordon (Sydney Blake) turns out to be the exhibitionist they’ve been watching surreptitiously when they were out spotting German aircraft. Brimful of nostalgia and told with fond humour, this concludes on a bittersweet note as these little lives filled with crazy incidents and relatable attitudes acknowledge that they exist vicariously through what is the soundtrack of their lives, driven by the music of all the era’s greats with everyone from Artie Shaw to Duke Ellington and Xavier Cugat featured in the world of this kaleidoscopic narrative, like a lovingly reproduced living postcard. A beautiful, intensely funny and deeply affectionate work of art. I wonder if future generations will ever even hear about us

Thirty Years Since the Berlin Wall Fell 9th November 2019

 

 

 

 

That symbol of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain the Berlin Wall came down in dramatic fashion thirty years ago today. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing since, and there are those who might argue that you knew where you were when it was still dividing West from East. It remains inspirational to generations of writers and artists and filmmakers, forever embedded in celluloid not just as a dramatic device but as a reminder of authoritarianism, war and oppression.

Red Dawn (1984)

My father turned me in. Oh God, they do things you can’t imagine. When Soviet soldiers invade Calumet, a small Colorado town, sending Nicaraguan and Cuban paratroopers into the local high school football field, brothers Jed (Patrick Swayze) and Matt Eckert (Charlie Sheen) escape with friends (C. Thomas Howell, Darren Dalton) to the forest where they call themselves Wolverines after their school mascot. With their father Tom (Harry Dean Stanton) a prisoner of the invading army, the children decide to fight against the Soviets. As the country comes under increasing attack and bitter winter closes in, the group teams up with Lt. Col. Andrew Tanner (Powers Boothe) to take back their town but how long can they hold out as they discover they are behind battle lines in occupied America? … West Coast. East Coast. Down here is Mexico. First wave of the attack came in disguised as commercial charter flights same way they did in Afghanistan in ’80. Only they were crack Airborne outfits. Now they took these passes in the Rockies. What a film to watch in the week that Vladimir Putin declared liberalism dead. From a story by Kevin Reynolds, auteur John Milius bootkicks the US into surreality positing a Soviet landgrab when we all know they’d nuke the country to high heaven before that would happen. So far, so ridick, as what was supposed to be a small arty antiwar outing becomes a teenage Rambo with Milius toying with the original material assisted by General Alexander Haig, on MGM’s board of directors at the time, dreaming up a what-if scenario evolving from Mexico’s left wing sympathy splitting the US in half as Hitler’s plan for invasion is reworked.  It starts with a history class in Genghis Khan’s warring tactics and within 5 minutes of explaining his stratagems the Russian helicopters are on the ground.  Soon Alexander Nevsky is playing for free at the local cinema and William Smith is in town marshalling the Russkies (in reality he’d been a Russian Intercept interrogator for the CIA). When the drive-in becomes a re-education centre, it’s a nod to the potential for camp classic status as an ‘ironic’ acknowledgement of its own silliness but also reminds us a lot of WW2. Given that this was the first film to receive a PG-13 rating for its violence, it occupies a certain stratum of cultdom and not merely for an alt history:  here are some of the era’s top teen icons (half of The Outsiders!) shooting the hell out of everything in sight. What joy there is in seeing Lea Thompson manning a sub-machine gun and Swayze romancing Jennifer Grey long before Dirty Dancing. With astounding cinematography by Ric Waite and Frederick Elmes and an operatic score from the great Basil Poledouris, this is a salutary lesson in survivalism and resistance. Milius would describe it as “a Close Encounters with Cold War Russians”. Children did this