Scarlet Thread (1951)

An East End spiv. A 1950s wide boy with cinema accent. Petty thief Freddie(Laurence Harvey) likes to talk jive in an American accent in London’s Soho where he hangs out trying to impress the ladies. He joins forces with suave gangster Marcon (Sydney Tafler) to commit a jewel heist in the University town of Cambridge with (Harry Fowler) driving their getaway car. But loses his never, fires his gun and the victim, an elderly man gets dragged away in the car. When the men are chased through the streets of Cambridge by students they take refuge in the garden of the Master’s house and are greeted by his daughter Josephine (Kathleen Byron) who takes them for graduates and invites them in. Marcon introduces himself as an old student – Aubrey Bellingham – and passes himself off to a visiting vicar but Josephine’s romantic interest Shaw (Arthur Hill) is suspicious and then her aunt (Renee Kelly ) arrives – the woman the men ran into as they escaped their pursuers. And womanising Freddie then takes a fancy to Josephine, then it transpires the man he shot was her father – and the radio news reports the man has died … This university is packed with young men who talk in inverted commas. Lewis Gilbert’s early noirish film provides a great opportunity to see a callow pulpy youthful Laurence Harvey, learning which side of his face was more photogenic and doing the old cheap romance thing with (bizarrely enough) charismatic Byron, she of Black Narcissus with the crazy lipsticked mouth – and the clue to his real British identity recalls that film. How bizarre it is to see these gangsters come a cropper in the rarefied setting of Cambridge University, chased by students in flapping gowns. There’s some genuinely interesting cinematography by Geoffrey Faithfull – over the shoulder tracking behind Tafler (Gilbert’s brother-in-law) and Harvey after the heist goes wrong; point of view shots in the getaway car piloted by Harry Fowler alongside a policeman on a motorbike making good use of the rear view mirror as he sweats at the wheel. The contrast between these surprising crims and the fish out of water setting is jarring but also pleasing, the early Soho scenes with Dora Bryan and the presentation of Harvey as spiv quite fascinating. Not great but it is has its moments, not least when Harvey’s mask (and fake American accent) slips and Tafler’s act as the ancient graduate is very convincing. Adapted by A.R. Rawlinson and Moie Charles from their play. You dance too well. It makes me think of all the women you’ve danced with

The Tenant (1976)

Aka Le locataire. If you cut off my head, what would I say… Me and my head, or me and my body? What right has my head to call itself me? Shy bureaucrat Trelkovsky (Roman Polanski) is a Polish-born French citizen who moves into an apartment whose previous female tenant an Egyptologist called Simone Choule threw herself out a window and is dying in hospital, never to return. As his neighbours view him suspiciously, he becomes obsessed with the idea of the beautiful young woman and believes that her friend Stella (Isabelle Adjani) is planning to kill him … These days, relationships with neighbors can be… quite complicated. You know, little things that get blown up out of all proportion? You know what I mean? We know how claustrophobic apartments can be from Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby. This apartment is in Paris and it is the centre of the neighbours’ gossip and pass-remarkery, those objects of fear for someone who doesn’t wish to be found out, Gérard Brach and Polanski’s adaptation of Roland Topor’s novel Le Locataire Chimérique, turning a suggestive thriller into a paranoid fantasy with a sort of macabre chalky undertaste. Trelkovsky’s introduction to the apartment and view of the lavatory opposite is brilliant and the meet-cute with Stella over the gaping Munchian maw of a moaning mummified Simone is unforgettable. It may not be as beautiful as his other apartment movies but Polanski’s intent is quite clear with the regular reminders of toilet functions and the running gag about cigarettes.The casting is superb: Melvyn Douglas is great as Monsieur Zy, Lila Kedrova as Madame Gaderian with her crippled daughter are spooky while Shelley Winters excels as the concierge. On the one hand, it’s a dance of death bristling with atmosphere and Polanski is its fulcrum, revealing Trevolsky’s gender slippage as surely as he sheds his masculine outerwear while simultaneously descending into the brutal, funny depths of psychological disintegration.  On the other, it’s a perfect film about how lonely it can be a foreigner in the big city and how easy it is to lose oneself while others are watching you. For total trivia fans, the continuity here is done by Sylvette Baudrot who did that job for that other master of apartment movies Alfred Hitchcock on To Catch a Thief.  It’s a wonderful, scary funny Kafkaesque nightmare portrait of Paris and the ending is awesome:  talk about an identity crisis. I am not Simone Choule! 

Born on the Fourth of July (1989)

I’m not home. I never will be. I first encountered a Nam vet on Central Park West. He chased me despite being on crutches that were well past their sell-by date. I guess maybe it was because I had more legs than he did. I was waiting tables in a township on Long Island called Massapequa at a ghastly restaurant where a deranged and thankfully distant relative worked. Massapequa is the hometown of the Baldwin brothers and Ron Kovic, the subject of this impassioned film by Oliver Stone, a man whose own combat experiences had informed his previous film, Platoon, that astonishingly immersive journey of a naif to manhood in a horrifying exposition of American soldiers’ experiences. Ron Kovic’s book is the basis of another coming of age tale, this time of a Catholic boy whose parents’ devotion to JFK unwittingly unleashes their sports-mad son’s inner patriot.  I hadn’t seen this since its release and my fresh impression of its first sequences was of overwrought melodrama, underlined by John Williams’ overheated score. But this is all of a piece with the film’s intentions:  starting with a heightened picture of America’s hearth and home;  the futility and horror of war; the brutality of veterans’ experiences in epically gruesome, filthy underfunded hospitals (Kovic’s God-loving mother never even paid him a visit); the utter loneliness of being a castrated, paralysed man with a beating heart and functioning brain who is ridiculed by the anti-war protesters; the recognition that the only people with whom he now has anything in common are the other vets who are even more fucked up than he is. And so it moves into its more austere final sections. Politicisation. Separation from a family who refuse to accept he could have killed women and children and for whom he is a mere embarassment in a block where the other soldiers at least died. Is there a better correlative image in Stone’s entire oeuvre than the crane shot over the Wilson family home, where Ron has confessed to killing new recruit, their nineteen year old son William, in the dunes of Nam as the sun flared during an ambush, then he is wheeled away by a helper amid the scraps and detritus dumped in their yard and the leafy branches fade into a fluttering stars and stripes – and we are plunged into more police brutality at the 1972 Republican convention where he has joined the protest movement? This is elegant filmmaking. It is not without its humour or self-awareness. Ron has finally had his cherry broken by a Mexican whore in a sequence of T&A that reunites Stone with Willem Defoe who welcomes him to this sick paradise and he thinks it’s love – but hides his gift for her when he realises sex with a cripple is just a job for her. These vets’ wheelchair-off is a salve for those of us who might have liked to see one between Cruise and Daniel Day-Lewis, who beat him to an Academy Award that year (DDL gurned more). I’ve never been back to Massapequa or that cruddy restaurant but Stephen Baldwin has a small role as a schoolfriend, Tom Berenger gets him to join up, Frank Whaley is the other surviving vet who helps Ron out of his doomladen hole and Kyra Sedgwick is the gorgeous girl he loved so much he ran through the rain to dance with her at the Prom and she turns him on to the anti-war crusade. Cruise is simply great, giving a complete performance from boy to man in a narrative which exemplifies the art of juxtaposition and emotional arcs. This is cinema, utterly moving and indignant and humane. Watch it and weep.

Cutter’s Way (1981)

If you were to put a gun to my head I would have to say that this is my favourite American film. Or my favourite Californian film. Or my favourite film of the Eighties. Or …  my favourite film, period. There is simply nothing wrong with it. And it was one of those curious coincidences that made me see it. I had borrowed the source book from the public library just 10 minutes before seeing the poster at the local fleapit without being remotely aware of the film’s existence. I went to the library each Friday immediately school was out to borrow three books. They took precedence over any homework when I was a kid. The novel was Cutter and Bone, by Newton Thornburg and I saw a poster (not this one) with Jeff Bridges and John Heard and looked closer:  it was indeed an adaptation of the book I was holding in my hand (the name was changed because publicists thought it sounded too surgical). I read the book over the course of two days and saw the film on the Sunday night. It filled my head for years. I loved John Heard, had done since BBC2 had screened Between the Lines on Valentine’s Day 1980. Bridges of course I adored since he accompanied Clint in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot when that finally turned up on TV.  Heard is Alex Cutter, the crippled one-eyed Nam vet who is convinced of his friend’s story that an oilman is responsible for a teenage girl’s death after seeing her body disposed of in a trash can in a Santa Barbara street on a rainy night as he’s returning from an assignation. Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) is a boat salesman and gigolo who seems to love Alex’s sad alcoholic wife Mo (Lisa Eichhorn) more than her husband does and all three live a rackety lower class life in this very upper class town. Cutter pursues the suspicion with the dead girl’s sister (Ann Dusenberry) and they go after magnate J. J. Cord with devastating results.  (And yes there are those who will see in this an element of Moby Dick, something Alex himself references early on.) The three leads are just astonishing with Eichhorn offering one of the best performances you will ever see. Their complementarity reminds me that the American movie business was still making great films in my lifetime.  Heard was director Ivan Passer’s choice after playing in Othello – the role was originally intended for Dustin Hoffman (whew).  Jeffrey Alan Fiskin’s adaptation alters the last section of the novel but it works, however angrily and unhappily. Jack Nitzsche’s music has the aching power of a lullaby and Jordan Cronenweth’s cinematography is as indelible as a piece of enamelled jewellery. I still feel privileged to have seen this on the big screen on its first release (they let me in though I was far from 18… well, it was a small town and I was the only regular customer.) Incredible. I love this film so much. It makes my heart beat.

Of Human Bondage (1934)

This is such a disconcerting film adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s most famous work:  Bette Davis’ performance as the peroxided, abusive Cockney waitress still startles and her chemistry with Leslie Howard is compelling. It’s shot so oddly – with all those pieces to camera – and the power of their driven love/hatred has twice the erotic power of anything more obvious so that it adds up to a rich and strange viewing experience.  Davis was widely expected to win the Academy Award but she wasn’t even formally nominated;  this, however, made her a star. Howard was a legendary swordsman and late in life Davis regretted that she was the only one of his leading ladies (allegedly) that didn’t succumb to his charms (which are admittedly elusive at this point in time). Lester Cohen adapted the novel and it was directed by John Cromwell (father of actor James) who would later be blacklisted.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)

Do you know what it feels like to take a woman for twenty bucks? How two con artists get out-conned. Fun and larks with Messrs Lawrence Jamieson (Michael Caine) and Freddy Benson (Steve Martin) on the French Riviera – quite a departure for those of us being pelted with sleet and snow in the dog days of Spring. This remake of Bedtime Story (1964) which was written by Stanley Shapiro and Paul Henning is way cheaper than a ticket to Nice! Caine is the super-debonair Brit training up rube Martin and they both fall for American Queen of Soap Janet Colgate (Glenne Headly) and challenge each other to win this mark (loser must leave the luxury resort) and then try to rid themselves of the slew of wealthy widows they’ve romanced all around town. There are some fantastic, bloodcurdlingly excruciating dinner scenes with Martin faking autism and Caine has a great time as a German psychiatrist. It’s a great show with the added frisson of seeing Emperor Palpatine (Ian MacDiarmid) as Caine’s butler.  Directed by Frank Oz.