Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece of voyeurism, imagination and obsession, desire and control, was released on this day 66 years ago. Only recently deposed from its position as the greatest film of all time in the ten-year Sight & Sound poll, it was a flop on its release. As David Thomson says, We have learned how to watch it, and we have discovered the mortified figure Hitchcock often masked with his comedian persona. Charles Barr describes its impact: This story of a man who develops a romantic obsession with the image of an enigmatic woman has commonly been seen, by his colleagues as well as by critics and biographers, as one that engaged Hitchcock in an especially profound way; and it has exerted a comparable fascination on many of its viewers.
Adapted by Alec Coppel & Samuel Taylor (with an initial uncredited draft from playwright Maxwell Anderson) from Boileau- Narcejac’s novel D’entre les morts (trans: The Living and the Dead) it can be summarised as a haunting.
Retired San Francisco police detective John ‘Scotty’ Ferguson (James Stewart) is hired by wealthy old friend Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to investigate his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) who is exhibiting strange behaviour.
He rescues her from the water at the Golden Gate Bridge near Fort Point.
He fails to save her when she plunges to her death from the bell tower at Mission San Juan Bautista.
He meets Judy (Kim Novak), a dead ringer for Madeleine.
He makes her over so she looks identical to Madeleine …
There were mixed reviews although critics in the US liked it rather more than their British counterparts. Eric Rohmer’s review for Cahiers du Cinema commented, Ideas and forms follow the same road, and it is because the form is pure, beautiful, rigorous, astonishingly rich, and free that we can say that Hitchcock’s films, with Vertigo at their head, are about ideas, in the noble, platonic sense of the word.
Very soon, this place will be full of murderesses, drug addicts, prostitutes, just like before. Cabaret singer Yolanda (Cristina Sanchez Pascual) brings heroin to her lover who drops dead of an overdose. To escape from the police who arrive looking for her at the club where she works, the singer looks for refuge in a local convent where the Mother Superior (Julieta Serrano), a fan of Yolanda, rapturously greets her. The mission of the order, called the Humiliated Redeemers (Redentoras humilladas), is to offer shelter and redemption to fallen women. The convent once was a bustling haven for prostitutes, drug addicts and murderers, but it is now in disrepair. The order is facing serious financial hardships as their prime financial supporter, the vain and greedy Marchioness aka La Marquesa (Mary Carrillo), has decided to discontinue the convent’s annuity under the pretence of economising. The convent had taken in their wayward daughter Virginia who became a nun and ran off to Africa where she was eaten by cannibals. Six religious members of the community live at the convent: the mother Superior, four other nuns and the chaplain. To reinforce their vows of humility, the Mother Superior has given the other nuns repulsive new names: Sister Manure (Marisa Paredes), Sister Damned (Carmen Maura), Sister Snake (Lina Canalejas) and Sister Sewer Rat (Chus Lampreave). With few opportunities for spiritual ministry, the nuns have begun to indulge in their own idiosyncratic pursuits in order to pass the time. The nurturing Sister Damned compulsively cleans the convent and coddles all the animals under her care, including an overgrown pet tiger that she treats like a son, playing the bongos for him. Ascetic Sister Manure is consumed by thoughts of penitence and corporal self-sacrifice and cooks between LSD hallucinations. She murdered somebody and because the mother superior lied under oath to save her from jail she is devoted to her. The over-curious Sister Sewer Rat gardens and secretly under the pen name ‘Concha Torres’ writes lurid novels about the wayward souls who visit the convent. She smuggles the novels out of the convent through her sister’s regular visits. The unassuming Sister Snake, with the help of the priest (Manuel Zarzo) tailors seasonal fashion collections for dressing the statues of the Virgin Mary. Her piety is a cover for her romantic love for the chain-smoking chaplain. The mother Superior is a heavy drug user and a Lesbian, whose charitable work is a means of meeting needy young women of whom she says, From admiring them so much I have become one of them. At the convent, Yolanda mingles with the nuns and the Mother Superior soon falls passionately in love with her. Together, they consume coke and heroin until Yolanda decides both should come off the drugs. Withdrawal from the drug for Yolanda is like a painful catharsis but for the Mother Superior it confirms her very sinful nature. Yolanda keeps the Mother Superior at arm’s length and strikes a friendship with Sister Rat. The Mother Superior has to face both Yolanda’s rejection and the threats of closure … One of the bases of our community is self-mortification and humiliation. That’s why we have such bizarre-sounding names. Overdosing, Lesbian nuns, hard drugs, erotic novels. Not the best known of Pedro Almodovar’s films or even among his own favourites, principally because as critic Jose Arroyo points out, it was made more or less on commission, the first commercially produced among his body of work made by a multimillionaire for his actress girlfriend – this film’s leading lady. Notwithstanding that, this boasts a familiar cast that includes Eva Siva and Cecilia Roth in the ensemble with Maura making one of her five appearances for the director. Aren’t you a nun?/No, I’m a whore. The main storytelling issue is the passivity of the protagonist, something that led the writer/director to give the nuns more to do which is where the real fun happens. Nothing to do with the later Whoopi Goldberg movie Sister Act although there’s a certain broad familiarity, perhaps if this had gone the whole hog and been turned into a musical Almodovar might have achieved something closer to his ambitions. The uneven structure resulting from the unbalanced construction isn’t entirely satisfying and it leads to a bittersweet conclusion that feels rather abrupt. Never mind, we’ll never get over seeing these singularly human nuns with their loves and lusts and extremely bad habits! Eating this is like taking communion. Jesus appeared to me while I was making it. He offered me his wounds to suck, like a swallow
We’ve all heard his tall tales about the living dead in Beverly Hills. 1978. Narcissistic fading actress Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep) performs in a Broadway musical. She invites long-time frenemy, mousy aspiring novelist Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn), backstage along with Helen’s fiancé, famed plastic surgeon Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis). Infatuated with Madeline, Ernest breaks off his engagement with Helen to marry Madeline. Seven years later, a lonely, obese, depressed and destitute Helen is committed to a psychiatric hospital where she obsesses over taking revenge against Madeline. Another seven years later, Madeline and Ernest live an opulent life in Beverly Hills but they are miserable: Madeline is depressed about her age and withering beauty and Ernest, now an alcoholic, has been reduced to working as a reconstructive mortician. After receiving an invitation to a party celebrating Helen’s new book, Forever Young, Madeline rushes for spa beauty treatments. When she mentions she will pay any price, the spa owner gives her the business card of Lisle Von Rhuman (Isabella Rossellini) a mysterious, wealthy socialite who specialises in rejuvenation, which Madeline dismisses. Madeline and Ernest attend Helen’s party and discover that Helen is now slim, glamorous and youthful despite being 50. Jealous of Helen’s appearance, Madeline observes as Helen tells Ernest that she blames Madeline for his career decline. Madeline later visits her young lover but discovers he is with a woman of his own age. Despondent, Madeline drives to Lisle’s mansion. The youthful Lisle claims to be 71 and offers Madeline a potion that promises eternal life and youth. Madeline hesitates but then buys and drinks the potion which reverses her age, restoring her beauty before her eyes. Lisle warns Madeline that she must disappear from the public eye after ten years, to avoid suspicion of her immortality and to treat her body well. Meanwhile, Helen seduces Ernest and convinces him to kill Madeline. When Madeline returns home, she belittles Ernest who snaps and pushes her down the stairs, breaking her neck. Believing her to be dead, Ernest phones Helen for advice but drops the phone in shock when he sees Madeline approach him with her head twisted backward. Ernest takes Madeline to the hospital where the doctor’s (Sydney Pollack, uncredited) analysis shows she is clinically dead. Ernest finds Madeline in a body bag and considers her reanimation to be a miracle. He uses his skills to repair her body at home. Helen arrives and, after overhearing her and Ernest discussing their murder plot, Madeline shoots Helen with a shotgun. The blast leaves a large hole in Helen’s torso but she remains alive – she also has taken Lisle’s potion. Helen and Madeline fight before apologising and reconciling. Depressed at the situation, Ernest prepares to leave, but Helen and Madeline convince him to first repair their bodies. Realising they will need regular maintenance, they scheme to have Ernest drink the potion to ensure his permanent availability. The pair knock out Ernest and bring him to Lisle, who offers him the potion in exchange for his surgical skills … You are in violation of every natural law that I know. You’re sitting there, you’re talking to me – but you’re dead! Eternal youth, cosmetology, the living dead, remarriage screwball, Gothic horror and mad science combine fruitfully in this satirical black comedy that takes swipes at everything within range – Hollywood, vanity, fame, narcissism, beauty, immortality and of course actresses, which leads to an interesting casting conundrum with two of the town’s most amazing fortysomethings as the leads. Hawn is a gorgeous and gifted comedienne but here she is the designated ugly duckling who blooms into a fabulous romantic novelist. Streep had actually played just such a character in She-Devil and essayed her BFF Carrie Fisher’s avatar in Postcards From the Edge a role which supposedly made this frosty technical performer more loveable, as the critics of the era might have it. Here she goes full Joan Crawford in a movie which asks the audience to see her as a legendary screen beauty but her singularity mitigates this proposal somewhat. (Un)naturally there has to be a quote from Bride of Frankenstein and Hawn is gifted It’s alive! It is of course Rossellini who astonishes in her semi-nude presentation, a luscious cross between Cleopatra and Louise Brooks. Now she really has a body to die for. This fact alone crystallises the point of the movie – the business’ attitude to its female cohort. That she’s escorted by Fabio places this in its time but luckily both Elvis and James Dean turn up at one of her gatherings which lands the premise about stars living forever. It’s nice to see Ian Ogilvy at hand as the master of ceremonies. With a combination of CGI (including skin texture) produced by Industrial Light and Magic, animatronics and blue screen, this is a triumph of special effects if not entirely of story despite Martin Donovan & David Koepp having a hand in the screenplay. The characters simply aren’t developed adequately and they feel like the object of a long joke that pitches actresses against each other and then forces them to finish out their days with their worst enemy – each other. The often hysterical lively fun occasionally feels like it has a hole in the middle, like Helen. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. You gave other people your youth and wasted your own
Am I in this? In a retro-futurist kind of 1950s, a television host (Bryan Cranston) introduces a documentary about the creation and production of Asteroid City, a play by the famed playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). The play’s events are depicted in widescreen and stylised colour, while the television special is seen in monochrome Academy ratio. In the play, a youth astronomy convention is held in the fictional desert town of Asteroid City in the American Southwest. War photojournalist Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) arrives early to the Junior Stargazer convention with his teenage son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) a would-be intellectual and his three younger daughters Andromeda (Ellie Faris), Pandora (Gracie Faris) and Cassiopeia (Willan Faris) . When their car breaks down, Augie phones his father-in-law, Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks) asking for his help. Stanley, who dislikes his son-in-law, persuades him to tell the children about their mother’s (Margot Robbie) recent death, which Augie had concealed. Augie and Woodrow meet famous and disillusioned actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and her daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards) who, like Woodrow, will be honoured at the convention. Augie and Midge and Woodrow and Dinah, gradually fall in love throughout the play. The other convention participants arrive: five-star General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright), astronomer Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton), three additional teenaged honorees Clifford (Aristou Meehan), Shelly (Sophia Lillis) and Ricky (Ethan Josh) and their parents J.J.(Liev Schreiber) Sandy (Hope Davis) and Roger (Stephen Park), a busload of elementary-school children chaperoned by young teacher June Douglas (Maya Hawke) and a cowboy band led by singer Montana (Rupert Friend). A local motel manager (Stephen Carell) provides everyone’s accommodations. Gibson welcomes the attendees at the Asteroid City crater where the teenagers are to receive awards for various inventions. A UFO suddenly appears above the crater; an alien (Jeff Goldblum) emerges and steals the remnant of the meteorite that created the crater. Augie photographs the alien. Gibson, with instructions from the president, places the town under military quarantine, and everyone is subjected to medical and psychiatric examinations. Meanwhile, a romance blossoms between Montana and June, who assure the students that the alien is likely peaceful. The Stargazer honourees use Dr. Hickenlooper’s equipment to attempt to contact the alien. Tricking the guard watching the pay phone, Ricky calls his school newspaper to relay the quarantine details and cover-up to the outside world … They’re strange, aren’t they, your children. Compared to normal people. What is this, exactly? A faux-documentary about a play about a 1950s junior stargazer convention in the Southwest. After that indigestible meta-in-joke construction is absorbed, what is this – exactly? The latest Wes Anderson production is more ironic with flatter backdrops than usual, presumably to (ironically) play on the flatness of the desert itself with the theatrical sets, the drama is only truly enlivened by two performances, those of Cranston (primarily in black and white) who breaks the fourth wall by intruding on a scene in colour, and Hanks, appropriately whose charisma warms up a setting that is paradoxically stifling in the desert heat – well, as the film within the play within the documentary. I don’t understand that emotion. I’ve played it, of course. It’s difficult to know where to look but as a dramatic rule, when in doubt, follow the emotion, which leads back to the three delightful little girls who learn their mother has died and are determined to give her a funeral in the dust which their estranged grandfather (Hanks) eventually commits to performing even if the kids call themselves witches. I still don’t understand the play. There is probably a bigger point being made about political theatre with a Kazan-like narcissist director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody) leading the TV production and a needy self-conscious Methody movie star (Johansson) who, accompanied by that giant bottle of Chanel No. 5, can only be a parody Marilyn but this is ultimately confused. It’s not entirely unlikeable, not with those triplets, but it’s not very funny either. A real curate’s egg of shallow smugness from a story by those arch space cadets Anderson and Roman Coppola. You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep
Deep-fried fags! Sixteen-year-old best friends Tara (Mia McKenna Bruce), Em (Enva Lewis) and Skye (Lara Peake) head to the party resort of Malia on the island of Crete rites-of-passage holiday to celebrate finishing their GCSE exams. While Em will be off to college in the Autumn, Tara and Skye are less certain of their futures. The girls all look forward to drinking, clubbing and hooking up in what should be the best summer of their lives. Tara, the only virgin in the trio, feels pressure to match the sexual experiences of her friends. Their neighbours in the next apartment are another trio – Badger (Shaun Thomas), his mate Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) and their bisexual female friend Paige (Laura Ambler). On a night out together Tara becomes separated from the girls at a club and finds herself pulled out of the building by Paddy and dragged to the beach where he rapes her. Back at the apartment the next morning Em and Skye worry about her but figure Tara is larging it as per usual. Tara shows up and Paddy forces himself on her in her bed and she recalls exactly what happened the night before … If you don’t get laid on this holiday then you never will. With that raunchy title and characters and presentation straight out of Girls Gone Wild and any number of Uncovered reality shows, it’s easy to dismiss this at first sight. However it’s a striking writing and directing debut from British cinematographer Molly Manning Walker and won over the critics at Cannes with the Un certain regard prize. The tensions between the girls, the assumptions and the reality, recalled in flashbacks by Tara, are cannily timed. As Badger figures out what must have happened and tries to comfort a silent Tara the issue of consent comes to the fore. It’s only at the airport that the truth ultimately emerges. The sense of excitement, of decadence, the overwhelming feeling of drink and drug-fuelled happiness and then the realisation of the total lack of control are cannily captured through a combination of humour, edgy performances and finally by McKenna Bruce’s shifting awareness and sad acceptance of what has occurred, making this an ultimately devastating experience. The side eye from her supposed friend Skye and the sympathy from Em are well established, ensuring that the complexity of teenage friendships is never far from the surface. Skye’s increasing jealousy of the attention directed at Tara makes their association horribly toxic while Badger’s knowledge of his friend’s wrongdoing doesn’t encroach on his conscience so that he might actually do something about it in Tara’s defence. Twentysomething Manning Walker based this story on what she describes as a formative teenage experience and then interviewed teenagers on their own concerns about consent after writing a 50 page script that won the Next Step prize at Cannes 2021 – that’s a festival that’s been good for this gifted cinematographer – and it was the disparity in the male and female responses to the story that made her realise how important this could be. The downside of hedonistic energy is everywhere to be seen in this bristling but nuanced tale of beach parties and excess, the desperate loneliness in the middle of a loved-up crowd who lack the wit or wisdom to hold back or the vocabulary to express even the simplest words of sympathy as their senses are overloaded to the max, blissful in their ignorance. I told you you would. Love you babe. Best holiday ever!
Everybody’s a stranger until you meet ’em. Beautiful young Carrie Meeber (Jennifer Jones) travels from her small hometown to live with her married sister Minnie (Jacqueline de Witt) in Chicago in the 1890s, On the train she meets well-off travelling salesman Charles Drouet (Eddie Albert). When she loses her job in a sweatshop, she reconnects with the charming and smitten Drouet because she needs a new job to pay $5 board to her Swedish brother-in-law Sven (Robert Foulk – uncredited) but she becomes Drouet’s mistress and is now a kept woman. When Drouet’s friend middle-aged restaurant manager George Hurstwood (Laurence Olivier) falls in love with her, complications ensue. He hasn’t told her he’s married albeit unhappily to a controlling social-climbing wife Julie (Miriam Hopkins) and to escape his marriage (and two children making their way in society) he has to commit grand larceny in his office. As he and Carrie make a life together in New York his circumstances worsen and she is none the wiser as to why he cannot work. Then she tells him she’s pregnant and their financial problems threaten to overwhelm them when he reads in the newspaper that his newly married son is arriving from his honeymoon and Carrie sees an opportunity to improve their situation leaving him to his own devices while she blags her way to an acting career … You’ve got to pay the fiddler in this world. Theodore Dreiser’s realist novel Sister Carrie is adapted by Ruth Goetz and Augustus Goetz for the screen and becomes a typically beautiful William Wyler production – grave, melancholy and immensely moving. Not least because Olivier gives a truly magnificent performance as a man undone by desire and love, brought low by a woman so much younger and more naive. When he declares, This much happiness I’m going to have, you know his sacrifice will bring him down. He is enormously sympathetic, his acting horns drawn right in, probably because with Wyler he was never going to be able to indulge the grand theatrics of old: they had already worked together on Wuthering Heights and the mannered actor in him had been brought to book then by a director who knew just how much he needed from him, and how much storytelling he could do with the camera. And here the camerawork by Victor Milner is supreme, framing every emotional beat with just the right amount of distance and shot size, emphasising different perspectives and roles, juxtaposing possibility with imminent disaster, not least in those wonderful train scenes. Jones’s lack of technique somehow works to the advantage of the story: as her professional acumen improves, so does her control of the narrative: when she sees her ill and bedraggled husband again, and asks, Did I do this? it is simply heartbreaking. Their mismatched yet overwhelming love for one another contrives to make this one of the great unsung melodramas. The casting of Hopkins, who had also worked with Wyler (These Three), and Albert, is perfect, their character notes bringing solidity to an otherwise unbearable tragedy. It’s a sad story but I’ll keep it strictly commercial
I’ve got news for you – I think you’ve just gone into the gambling business. Unfairly cashiered from the Union Army Mike McComb (Errol Flynn) heads to Nevada and after running some card games gets into the silver business following an encounter with Georgia Moore (Ann Sheridan) whose husband Stanley (Bruce Bennett) is a mining engineer convinced that the nearby hills are full of silver. McComb lets him go out to the territory despite knowing the Shoshone Indians are on the warpath and his lawyer Plato Beck (Thomas Mitchell) cannot persuade him of the wrong he is doing – McComb is smitten with Georgia. By the time guilt overwhelms him he is too late to save Moore and ends up marrying Georgia and getting rich off the proceeds from the mine. His bank is using vouchers from the miners but when Plato shows up drunk at a housewarming dinner and tells the truth about McComb’s faults, the townspeople end up taking their savings from the bank, rival owners open other mines and he loses everything … His name marks our schools and our banks – and one day, maybe, our finish. Raoul Walsh liked both Flynn and Sheridan and this has a fantastically sparky script by Harriet Frank adapted from a story by Stephen Longstreet. He was a friend of Flynn’s and knew that by 1947 the star’s looks and acting were deteriorating, mainly from drink, possibly drugs and definitely from the financial and marital hurt inflicted by some wives. He says that both Flynn and Sheridan were drinking heavily on set and that director Raoul Walsh told him, ” ‘Kid, write it fast. They’re not drinking.’ It soon became clear that they were even if we didn’t see how. [Later on set] I went over and tasted the ice water. It was pure 90-proof vodka.’ ” What a shame. Because there are some great lines and exchanges here and the performances by the leads are sluggish, muted and dead on arrival for most of the film. The humour and ribaldry are fine, it’s the delivery that’s the issue. The irony that it’s about a man whose ability to lead is ruined by some intrinsic flaw cannot have been lost on Flynn. The references to King David, Bathsheba and the serpent’s egg by Mitchell are very clear Biblical analogies that point this up as a morality tale. What might have been, alas, in a film that is rather stillborn from such a paradoxically lively cast and a gifted director. Don’t let’s have a lynching
You and Marie are nothing but a couple of sluts. Twenty years after their shotgun marriage, their child dead and their little dog lost for months, dowdy Lola Delaney (Shirley Booth) rents out a room in the house she shares with her recovering alcoholic husband, chiropractor Doc (Burt Lancaster). The pretty college student Marie Buckholder (Terry Moore) does life drawings in the living room of track star jock Turk Fisher (Richard Jaeckel) and Lola enjoys watching them fall in love. Their carry on aggravates Doc who infers that they are engaged in sexual shenanigans despite being told that Marie is engaged to someone else. He compares Lola to Marie and his obsession ultimately drives him back to the bottle despite his two year membership of Alcoholics Anonymous which had got him back on track … I can’t spend my time kissing all the girls. Booth was recreating her acclaimed stage role (and it won her an Academy Award in her screen debut at 54) and Lancaster gives a great, mature performance in a William Inge play that reads like a suburban take on A Streetcar Named Desire: just how big is this house and how long is this woman going to stay in the spare room? Adapted by Ketti Frings, Lola is slatternly and useless but enormously endearing, Doc is remote and difficult but somehow admirable. His paranoia is not far from the surface and peppy Marie gets under his skin. His concealed passion destroys his resolve but Lola treats Marie like a daughter, unaware of his conflict until she opens the cupboard to make cocktails. He has never forgiven her for the forced marriage that stopped him training as a proper doctor and then Lola lost the baby. When his pent-up violent anger finally erupts it’s shocking. It’s a persuasive picture of long-festering marital resentments, fixation on the brevity of youthful beauty and loss and a signature film of kitchen sink realism. Directed by Delbert Mann. Alcoholics are mostly disappointed men
It’s her social security number, asshole – she works for you! Alex Owens (Jennifer Beals) is an eighteen year old juggling two odd jobs in Pittsburgh – welding by day at a steel mill, dancing by night in a working men’s club. But she aspires to become a successful ballet dancer. Nick Hurley (Michael Nouri) is her boss and he becomes her lover and he supports and encourages her to fulfill her dream; so does her mentor Hanna Long (Lilia Skala) a retired ballerina who once danced in the Ziegfeld Follies. Her best friends are Jeanie (Sunny Johnson) a waitress and an aspiring ice skater and Jeanie’s boyfriend Richie (Kyle T. Heffner) who works as a short order cook but dreams of making it as a stand up comic and going to Hollywood. Alex is afraid to push herself when she sees that fellow competitors for Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance and Repertory have years of training and it takes her friends’ botched efforts and a nudge in the right direction to make her take that big step towards her future … Dreaming is wonderful but it won’t put you closer to what you want. This was a cultural phenomenon back in the day and it’s the music video dream brought to life via the extraordinary backlit cinematography (by Donald Peterman) favoured by auteur Adrian Lyne, a simple plot borrowed from the backstage musicals of Busby Berkeley and the most thumping soundtrack ever dreamed up for the screen. And it is a dream, this story of a beautiful teen who fears failure but keeps on truckin’ and despite the huge warehouse loft apartment, the amazing figure and the somewhat grave demeanour, she’s oddly relatable precisely because she lacks confidence and gets around on a racing bike. Beals is a wonderfully charismatic performer who looks good in or partly out of clothes. Her casual attitude to what she wears is disarming, particularly when she takes off her tux in front of Nouri’s ex Katie (Belinda Bauer) and we see underneath is a fake shirt and it’s backless and barely there. Somehow everything she does feels empowering and sexy. There was some controversy stirred up over the fact that the dancer who (clearly!) performs the electrifying routines for Beals, Marine Jahan, was mysteriously uncredited and she called out the producers herself but it didn’t stop this going gonzo at the box office. Super Bowl XXI made up for it when she was the featured dancer in the half-time performance. (Sharon Shapiro did the body flips but no word on any further acknowledgement). The soundtrack is by Giorgio Moroder with the songs led by Irene Cara’s What a Feeling, doing for this what her theme for Fame did for that other sassy youthful production with a dark side and legwarmers. This is what feminism looked like in 1983 and it’s hot stuff, if you ask me. The first collaboration between producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, this fabulous fairytale was written by Tom Hedley and Joe Eszterhas from Hedley’s story and directed by Lyne, a man who clearly loves women. Don’t you understand? When you give up your dream you die
There is no whole thing. You have to make it work. Divorced thirtysomething recruitment agent Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson) begins a romantic relationship with glamorous sculptor Bob Elkin (Murray Head), aware that he’s also intimately involved with lonely middle-aged Jewish doctor Daniel Hirsh (Peter Finch). Bob takes off from the weekend babysitting for Alex’s friends the Hodsons (Vivian Pickles and Frank Windsor) in order to spend time with Daniel. The younger man represents a break with the pasts of both Bob’s older lovers, and neither is willing to let go of the love and vitality he brings to their mundane lives although he’s planning to leave for New York … I know you’re not getting enough of me but you’re getting all there is. Film critic Penelope Gilliatt’s screenplay, suggested by material she plumbed in her novel One by One, is a deep delve into the compromises and deceptions people make in order to have a little happiness. The North London setting with its population of slightly boho middle class types conceals the fact that the story is told rather cleverly, through the shared answering service, tales that Daniel is told by his patients, the insights of the precocious children Alex is minding and her mother’s truisms about marriage. The autumnal scenes carving out a season of political unrest hint at the melancholy truth that these are people who live in fear of rejection, hesitant about commitment, afraid to make a permanent display of emotion in a film which wears its protagonists’ pathology on its shirt sleeve, a patina of loss. It’s amusing to see both Alex and Daniel cruise past Bob’s flat late at night, fearful there might be yet another person claiming his affection. Alongside the brilliant performances of the leads, with Finch a standout, there’s legendary silent actress Bessie Love as an answering service operator; Tony Britton in search of a job and winding up with a one night stand; and a very young Daniel Day-Lewis as a car vandal. How apposite for Jon Finch to be hustling his namesake, narrowly avoiding a late night arrest in Piccadilly Circus. Directed by John Schlesinger, whose best film this is, about a world he fully inhabits. He also contributed to the screenplay for this landmark in gay representation, along with David Sherwin and Ken Levison, who are thanked for their assistance in the credits. Some people believe something is better than nothing, but I’m beginning to believe that nothing can be better than something
mondomovies 