L’Immensita (2022)

You only wear makeup if you’re going out or you’ve been crying. Rome in the 1970s, Clara (Penelope Cruz) is a nonconformist Spanish expatriate trapped in a loveless marriage to Felice (Vincenzo Amato) an unfaithful and abusive businessman, with whom she has three children: twelve-year old Adriana aka Adri (Luana Giuliani), Gino (Patrizio Francioni) and Diana (Maria Chiara Goretti). Adriana experiences gender dysphoria. Adriana rejects girlhood and instead identifies as a boy, wearing boys’ clothes and adopting the masculine name Andrea. One day, Andrea befriends Sara (Penelope Nieto Conti), a Romani girl who knows him as a boy. Upon a shared sense of being outsiders, Andrea and Clara grow closer. During the summer holidays Clara and the children go to a villa with her sisters- and mother-in-law (Alvia Reale) and all the young cousins. Adri is the ringleader when they explore a well and gets everyone into trouble, confronting Clara and taunting her into hitting her. After fantasising that a church service becomes a variety performance like the black and white TV shows she watches with Clara, Adri witnesses her father’s very young mistress Maria (India Santella) arriving at their apartment and she hears the woman declare that she is pregnant with Felice’s illegitimate child. Clara finally falls apart … You and Dad made me wrong. Is it too late to say that Cruz has come into her own and is a towering acting force in world cinema? She’s a powerhouse here yet her performance is not overwhelming – she shares the screen with a very cool kid who frankly could easily be male or female – and this is written so carefully that we understand Clara’s understanding of an eccentric child who declares she is the offspring of an alien and wants to spend her life in the sky. It only becomes problematic when Adri befriends and deceives Sara in the guise of ‘Andrea’ and becomes embroiled in a tentative pre-pubescent romance. Thankfully a deus ex machina prevents it from becoming the devastating betrayal that is threatened. The underlying tensions in the marriage are not openly discussed, they’re introduced subtly because almost everything here is from the children’s perspective as they try to navigate a wonderful mother and a distant disciplinarian father who makes her sad. Clara dresses in bright colours and pops off the screen whereas Adri is forced to wear white like the other girls in the Catholic school where the boys were black surplices. When Clara is hassled by guys following them on the street Adri protest to Clara, You are too beautiful. I am ugly. Both are outsiders, they have that in common. There is a remarkable balancing act performed here – the troubles of both mother and daughter are never overstated, both are fragile yet when Clara can no longer even talk about the cuckolding and the prospect of her husband’s bastard offspring, Adri bangs at the door of the bathroom where Clara has locked herself in and shouts, We’re the kids! You’re the grown up! It is the admission that Clara can’t cope after putting on the show of shows for her children. When she wants to play with the kids it’s Adri who tells her she can’t. Then, of course, Felice takes charge and does to Clara what all husbands do when they’re found out. Immaculately staged and performed, this is a joy for anyone interested in Italian interiors circa 1972 with wonderful use of space and light, geometric patterns and amazing wallpaper in a developing suburb that if it were in an American movie would become a location for poltergeists. Everything is heightened by the marvellous costume design by Massimo Cantini Parrini and the performances of contemporary singers, including the title song and Adriano Celentano’s nonsense song Prisencolinensinainciusol. Above all, this is a beguiling family drama about people and a place in transition and sensibly offers no easy answers. Directed by Emanuele Crialese, who co-wrote the semi-autobiographical screenplay with Francesca Manieri and Vittorio Moroni. Inside everything another thing is always hiding

No Hard Feelings (2023)

I’ll date his brains out. Montauk, New York. 32-year-old Maddie Barker (Jennifer Lawrence) is an Uber driver and bartender at a seafood joint. As she owes property taxes on the childhood home she inherited from her late mother, her car is repossessed and she faces bankruptcy. Her ex Gary (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) turns up to tow her car for non-payment of unaffordable property taxes and she sees it parked as she rollerskates to work and gets arrested attempting to steal it. Her surfing lawyer Gabe Sawyer (Zahn McClarnon) bails her out at court and warns her to stay out of trouble. Desperate to keep the home, a piece of real estate so valuable old classmate Doug Khan (Hasan Mihaj) tries to get her to give him the sale. She reminds him of his scandalous sex history with a teacher. Her friends Sara (Natalie Morales) and Jim (Scott MacArthur) are pregnant and hard up and thinking of moving to Florida. Sara points out a weird posting on Craigslist and Maddie feels forced to consider it even though she’s not a prositute. Wealthy couple Alison (Laura Benanti) and Laird Becker (Matthew Broderick) ask her to date their 19-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) in exchange for a Buick Regal. Since Percy is shy and has had no experiences with girls, drinking, parties, or sex, his parents hope to boost his confidence before he attends Princeton otherwise he will be hopelessly out of his depth. Maddie attempts to seduce Percy at the animal shelter where he volunteers and she pretends to be interested in adopting a dog but when she offers him a ride home, he thinks that she is attempting to kidnap him and pepper sprays her. Despite this, they agree to go on a real date the following day. Maddie and Percy meet at a bar the next night where one of her exes spills the dirt on her and Maddie introduces Percy to alcohol. Then they go skinny dipping at the beach. While they are in the water, a group of drunken teenagers steal their clothes. Maddie fights them in the nude, frightening Percy, who refuses to have sex with her. When she tries to leave without him, he jumps on her car naked and they outrun the local police. She and Percy try to have sex back at her house but he develops an anxiety rash so Maddie takes care of him. Maddie and Percy continue to date, sharing more about themselves and forming a friendship. He arranges to meet his former nanny but it turns out to be a manny named Jody (Kyle Mooney) and he’s jealous of Maddie because he wants to have sex with Percy too. Maddie and Percy confide in each other that they never went to prom. Maddie never went because her father didn’t respond to her requests to get to know him and that morning a letter arrived marked Return to Sender. He was a guy from the city where he lived with his real family and paid off her mother and ignored Maddie altogether. So they imitate a prom night, going to a fancy dinner where Percy plays the piano – he learned Maneater especially for Maddie. Percy meets an acquaintance from school, Natalie (Amalia Yoo) who’s going to Princeton too and she invites him to a party that night. After he and Maddie disagree about their long-term plans, he goes to the party while Maddie searches for him. She finds him with Natalie in bed, though nothing happened between them, after he took a painkiller with alcohol. After he and Maddie are asked to leave the party Percy confesses his love for Maddie. The next day, Percy tells his parents he wants to stay in Montauk with Maddie instead of going to Princeton … Need a car? Date our son. A return to mainstream non-superhero films for Academy Award-winner and newly married wife and mother Lawrence sees her in this Eighties/ Oughties sex comedy with the bonus of full-frontal nudity – hers. As the older woman educating a diffident younger man she has fun in this breezy if frank romp, high on the star’s charms in a screenplay co-written by director Gene Stupnitsky & John Phillips and apparently derived from a real world ad found by the film’s producers. It’s a well-worn story of a sentimental education but told knowingly, referencing everything from The Graduate to The Affair. In a script riddled with ribaldry and lewdness there are lots of good throwaway lines here – such as when Maddie and Sara inform Jim about the different kinds of one night stand a girl can have and when Percy has to have a talk with his parents while he acts as ‘the parents.’ His persistent abstinence is the perfect comic foil to Maddie’s sex drive. However as clever and funny as it is, the mystery persists as to why an A-list actress and producer would do full frontal nudity as Lawrence does here – albeit in an action scene after an open water coitus interruptus that Percy says reminds him of the beginning of Jaws. In the end it all revolves around property – location, pricing, ownership and the hold it has on people. That this ends on a road trip diffuses the issues of identity, class and money that this story is really about. It’s as if Benjamin drove off with Mrs Robinson, which is what should have happened. Isn’t it? Watch out for Achilles-Andreas of Greece (ie almost royalty, not since 1973, natch) in the small role of ‘Teen,’ These people use us so why don’t we use them?

Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell (1968)

Three fathers?! San Forino, a village in Italy. Carla ‘Campbell’ (Gina Lollobrigida) is an Italian woman who as a 16-year old twenty years earlier during the American occupation of Italy in WW2 slept with three American GIs in the course of 10 days, Cpl. Phil Newman (Phil Silvers), Lt. Justin Young (Peter Lawford) and Sgt. Walter Braddock (Telly Savalas). By the time she discovers she is pregnant, all three have moved on, and she, uncertain of which is the father, convinces each of the three (who are unaware of the existence of the other two) to support ‘his’ daughter Gia (Janet Margolin) financially over the years. To protect her reputation, as well as the reputation of her child, Carla has raised the girl to believe her mother is the widow of a non-existent army captain named Eddie Campbell, a name she borrowed from a can of soup (otherwise he would have been Captain Coca-Cola, the only other term she knew in English at the time). She shares her bed nowadays with Vittorio (Philippe Leroy) who works in her vineyard and she lives in a very nice house with a housekeeper and Gia is coming home from college. Now the three ex-airmen are attending a unit-wide reunion of the 293rd Squadron of the 15th Air Force in the village where they were stationed. The men are accompanied by their wives, Shirley Newman (Shelley Winters), Lauren Young (Marian Moses) and Fritzie Braddock (Lee Grant). In the Newmans’ case they are accompanied by their three fairly obnoxious boys. Carla is forced into a series of comic situations as she tries to keep them – each one anxious to meet his daughter Gia (Janet Margolin) for the first time – from discovering her secret while at the same time trying to keep Gia from running off to Paris to be with a much older married lecturer who will take her to Brazil. When confronted, Mrs. Campbell admits she does not know which of the three men is Gia’s father … I’m only one woman but my heart aches for three. Now more obvious as a source for the bonkers story of ABBA musical Mamma Mia! and its subsequent film adaptations, this expensive and smoothly told romcom from the camera-pen of Melvin Frank boasts a ridiculously good ensemble, fabulous locations and an enviable number of good lines in a characterful story. We paid more war damages than Germany. There are three terrific performances from the wives too, in a shrewdly cast lineup with contrasting physical and acting styles on display. At the centre of it all is La Lollo, trying to balance an impossible situation that is playful and funny with some decent slapstick and mastery of tone. It’s beautifully shot around Lazio and Rocca Catonera as well as Cinecitta Studios by Gabor Pogany. Riz Ortolani’s score keeps everything bouncing along including that title song performed by Jimmy Roselli. Co-written by Dennis Norden and Sheldon Keller, this is bright and enjoyable from beginning to end, even if there’s a necessarily quasi-sentimental conclusion. In Snow White the other dwarfs knew about each other

The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (2020)

Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in. As Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) ages and has a place of respect in society having divested himself of his casinos, he finds that being the head of the Corleone crime family isn’t getting any easier. He wants out of the Mafia and buys his way into the Vatican Bank but NYC mob kingpin Altobello (Eli Wallach) isn’t eager to let one of the most powerful and wealthy families go legit. Making matters even worse is Michael’s nephew, Vincent (Andy Garcia) the illegitimate son of his late brother, hothead Sonny. Not only does Vincent want out from under smalltime mobster Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna) who’s now got the Corleones’ New York business, he wants a piece of the Corleone family’s criminal empire, as well as Michael’s teenage daughter, Mary (Sofia Coppola) who’s crushing on him. Ex-wife Kay (Diane Keaton) appeals to Michael to allow their son Anthony (Franc D’Ambrosio) quit law school to pursue a career as an opera singer.  A trip to Sicily looms as all the threads of the Corleone family start to be pieced together after a massacre in Atlantic City and scores need to be settled … Why did they fear me so much and love you so much? Francis Ford Coppola revisited the scene of arguably his greatest triumph, The Godfather Saga, with writer Mario Puzo and yet he viewed it as a separate entity to that two-headed masterpiece. That was thirty years ago. Now he’s felt the need to re-edit it and it holds together better than the original release. The beginning is altered and it’s all the better to direct the material towards the theme of faith. Pacino is doing it all for his children and it’s his legacy he cares about more than money or respect: the symbolism writ large in the concluding sequence, a performance of Cavalleria Rusticana in which the weakness of our own central Christ figure is punished with the greatest violence – the death of close family.  This story then mutates from a pastiche of its previous triumphs to a a pastiche of an opera. The shocking and intentional contrast with the Cuban sex show in Part II couldn’t be starker yet it’s there for the comparison as Michael does penance for the death of Fredo, his dumb older brother who betrayed the family. He is physically weak from diabetes and the accompanying stroke;  his efforts to go totally legitimate have angered his Mafia rivals from whose ties he cannot fully break and they want in on the deal with the Vatican where Archbishop Gilday (Donal Donnelly) is the contact with Lucchesi (Enzo Robutti) who has a strange way of getting to everyone in the manner of old school Sicilians.  The Christ analogy is also about family sacrifice as his brother Sonny’s bastard son Vincent is nipping at his heels while sleeping with his own besotted daughter; he finds he is still in love with a remarried Kay, whom he finally introduces to Sicily when Tony is set to make his opera debut;  he is in bed with God’s own gangsters and the one good man Lamberto (Raf Vallone) is revealed as the short-lived Pope John Paul I. The references to the cinema of Luchino Visconti (and The Leopard) are rendered ever clearer while Carmine Coppola’s musical phrasing even drops in a bit of a spaghetti western music. It’s a sweeping canvas which gradually reveals itself even if the setup is awkward:  we no longer open on the windows at the Lake Tahoe house with their inlaid spider webs, instead we’re straight into the Vatican deal. It takes us out of the world of Godfather II. But we still see that sister Connie (Talia Shire) is the wicked crone behind the throne in her widow’s weeds, her flightiness long behind her but her song at the family celebration echoes her mother’s song at the wedding in the earlier film. The same acting problems remain in this cut. Like Wallach, her performance is cut from the finest prosciutto as she encourages Vincent in his ruthless ride to the top of the crime world. Mantegna isn’t a lot better as Joey Zasa. The Atlantic City massacre at the Trump Casino isn’t particularly well done – we’re reminded of a cut price Scarface. Wrapped into real life events at the Vatican in the late 70s/early 80s which give Donnelly, Raf Vallone and Helmut Berger (another nod to Visconti) some fine supporting roles, with an almost wordless John Savage as Tom Hagen’s priest son Andrew, this has the ring of truth but not quite the touch of classicism even with that marvellous cast reunited, something of a miracle in itself:  it feels like the gang’s almost all here. I cheered when I saw Richard Bright back as Al Neri! So sue me! And good grief Enzo the Baker is back too! Duvall’s salary wouldn’t be met by Paramount sadly and he is replaced by George Hamilton as consigliere. Even Martin Scorsese’s mother shows up! That’s Little Italy for ya! Pacino is filled with regret in this unspooling tragedy. And there we have it: the coda to a form of Italian American storytelling, the parallels with the earlier films expressed in flashbacks, as if to say, This was a life. Scorsese’s work is acknowledged but the narrative is forced forward to the inevitable tragedy. Life as opera – filled with crazy melodrama, betrayals, love, violence and murderous death. Garcia’s role makes far more sense in this version – we meet him quicker, his relationship clearly cultivated by Connie to ensure a passing of the guard. Yet what this cut also reinforces is that Coppola’s filmmaking wasn’t as confident, there are too many close ups – where is that surefooted widescreen composition? There are some awkward transitions and frankly bad writing. It’s long but it’s a farewell to a kind of cinema. And the death of Sofia Coppola as Mary was the price she had to pay for being her father’s daughter, non e vero? Now she’s the film world’s godmother. Gangster wrap. Finance is the gun, politics is the trigger.

Nothing But the Night (1973)

I dislike being put in my place – for you or anyone else. Three wealthy trustees of the Van Traylen fund, which supports a school for orphans on the Scottish island of Bala, are murdered but their deaths are clearly staged as suicide or accident. Three other trustees are on a bus carrying children from the school when the driver suddenly catches on fire, but he is the only one to die. One of the girls Mary Valley (Gwyneth Strong) is taken to a London hospital where she has strange seizures and recounts stories which she couldn’t possibly have experienced. Psychiatrist Dr Haynes (Keith Barron) and tabloid journalist Joan Foster (Georgia Brown) interview the girl’s mother Anna Harb (Diana Dors), a prostitute who’s done ten years in Broadmoor for murdering three people. They hope to enlist the aid of the hospital’s senior member, Sir Mark Ashley (Peter Cushing). When Haynes is brutally murdered following a visit from Harb, Ashley enlists the aid of old friend and police inspector Colonel Charles Bingham (Christopher Lee). They take their investigation to Bala where precautions have been taken to protect the children and the remaining trustees by the local police headed by Cameron (Fulton Mackay). In the meantime, Anna Harb travels secretly to Bala, hoping to find Mary, although she is now suspected of the murders and an explosion on a boat that apparently kills several others of the trustees. Ashley and Bingham then uncover the sinister truth behind the murders … Blasted reporters – never let you get on with your work. An intriguing premise rather undone by a sloppy screenplay from Brian Hayles adapting John Blackburn’s novel. It’s wonderful to see Lee and Cushing uniting in a contemporary story that doesn’t involve vampirism and it’s certainly odd that by the end of that year Lee would be ensconced in another Scottish island folk horror shocker, The Wicker Man. He produced this under his own company banner Charlemagne Films which he formed with producer Anthony Nelson Keys – their only production as it didn’t make money. What a shame that Dors is reduced to so little dialogue and spending half the film grubbing about in the undergrowth – then getting the old pyro treatment. And yes, that is Michael Gambon playing Inspector Grant; Kathleen Byron (the mad nun from Black Narcissus) plays Dr Rose; while young Strong is making her screen debut and would go on to become a much loved TV performer in shows like Only Fools and Horses. The ending is literally a cliffhanger but it’s practically thrown away: you might find similarities with the recent Get Out. Directed by Peter Sasdy. You burned your own mother alive!

Motherless Brooklyn (2019)

I got shot with my own gun. Lionel Essrog (Edward Norton) is a lonely private detective who doesn’t let Tourette’s syndrome stand in the way of his job. Gifted with a few clues and an obsessive mind, Lionel sets out to solve the murder of Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) his mentor and only friend while they’re out on a job. Scouring the jazz clubs and slums of Brooklyn and Harlem, Essrog soon uncovers a web of secrets while contending with thugs, corruption and the most dangerous man in the city, Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin) famed for building parks but in reality lining the pockets of his fellow investors in building corporations. Meanwhile Lionel finds that the half-caste daughter Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatah-Raw) who campaigns against housing discrimination may be connected with him. And the man supplying him with information on Randolph (Willem Dafoe) is not quite who he claims to be … Everybody looks like everybody to me.  Star and director Edward Norton loved Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel and determined to adapt it when it was published but this bears virtually no connection with its source material, setting it forty years earlier and fusing a variation on the plot of Chinatown with Robert Caro’s 1974 biography of Robert Moses.  It takes its sweet time to bed in and Norton’s character’s tics are immensely irritating even offputting. Once it settles into being a private eye flick it’s a better fit with the tone and the tropes work well – surveillance, shady operators, mistaken identity, chases, beatings and – just like Jake Gittes – going to a public meeting and then looking up files in City Hall. The issue of race and miscegenation replaces the incest plot but it’s all about power. Baldwin is at his best declaiming and he has some good lines here:  Do you have the first inkling how power works? The plot really kicks in when Norton works out who Dafoe really is. Norton asserts his own peculiar charms as the disabled guy whose problem ironically makes people think he’s dumb and uses that to his advantage. Either that or a sugar shaker. Wonderfully shot by Dick Pope, this is a tad long but ultimately a rather intriguing throwback noir melodrama with straightforward political commentary about slum clearance, ghettoising and corruption. This is not a programme for slum removal. This is a programme for negro removal

What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2019)

People don’t tend to like a good critic. They tend to hate your guts. Film critic Pauline Kael had an unimaginable influence in the world of thumbs up, thumbs down reviewing and accumulated acolytes and rivals as she cultivated what she believed was an expressive art form. She was a failed playwright from California who moved to New York City, had an illegitimate daughter by experimental filmmaker James Broughton and returned to Berkeley where she started talking about movies on a radio show. What she failed at in her theatre writing she achieved in reviewing. Something just clicked, as one interviewee recalls. She loved Shoeshine, damned Limelight and got herself in print with a book called I Lost it at the Movies which made her a name. And that title underwrites everything about a woman who regarded every movie as a date. She worked at McCalls’ until she was asked to leave because she did not sit on the fence and was not in tune with the mainstream. She crucified some films, like Hiroshima, mon amour and Lawrence of Arabia. She deplored American cinema at the time. Bonnie and Clyde is the review that made her famous in the wake of Bosley Crowther’s famously damning criticism. Her review was rejected by The New Republic and when The New Yorker published it it was a sensation and she got a job there on a six-month on, six-month off contract.  Robert Towne, who consulted on the film, describes how it helped the film. She loved movies and famously wrote Trash, Art and the Movies where she delineates the difference between the good and the bad as she saw it. She experienced sexism, as she stated on a 1973 TV show:  It is very difficult for men to accept that women can argue reasonably. She had her favourites – Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Warren Beatty among them. Camille Paglia shudders and says she can’t understand why she went to the mat for Last Tango in Paris:  she bought her own ticket at the New York Film Festival and stole the march on her rivals, giving it a rave that weekend. Mean Streets she loved and Scorsese was one filmmaker who benefitted from her cheerleading. She crucified films she thought were phony – she described Shoah as having a lack of moral complexity and summed up Apocalypse Now as white man – he devil. She would not be intimidated. She hated horror movies – she lived in New York City and said she had a hard enough time living in such a scary place without having to contend with The Exorcist and its ilk. There’s an excerpt of a TV interview with author William Peter Blatty saying that Kael’s reviews are full of personal poison. She got herself a great big house in Massachusetts and would spend a week at a time in New York at screenings. She enhanced some careers,  damaged others. She had her camp followers and encouraged Paulettes like Paul Schrader who would take on a job on the LA Weekly and then jump on the bandwagon for a particular film at her request. She had a rivalry with auteurist critic Andrew Sarris whom she castigates in her essay Circles and Squares. His widow Molly Haskell says of Kael, No male critic had as much testosterone as Pauline. While this is quite good on context it never really nails the nitty gritty of what it is to be a journalist and to go out on a limb giving the only viciously – and presumptively – perceptive account of a film that other critics are afraid to give what she would call a con. Her famous book about Citizen Kane‘s authorship rehabilitated the reputation of forgotten screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and his role in creating that masterpiece.  But just as Beatty sought to keep her quiet by giving her a job in Hollywood it showed she had blind spots and was perhaps rather naive:  she had come to believe her own publicity much as she professed to scorn the studios’: She was a virgin who was very willing to be seduced. Those six months made her bid a hasty retreat to the rather safer confines of critcism. When she loved something, you knew it:  she came out in a big way for Casualties of War. After 24 years and suffering from Parkinson’s she retired from The New Yorker. Readings from letters and telegrams that celebrities wrote to her capture some of the devastation she wrought including one from Gregory Peck:  You may have cost me good roles in the most productive phase of my career. Her review of Blade Runner was so damaging that director Ridley Scott hasn’t read a review since. On the other hand, Steven Spielberg wrote, 1000 reviews later you are the only writer who really understood Jaws.  It is interesting  – and impossible to credit in the democratised, non-edited non-hierarchical space and era of social media and the internet in which nobody has any particular importance – that one critic could have held such sway over popular opinion in a world where limited opening dominated. For Pauline Kael everything was a conversation. There are a lot of interviews here but their content feels circumstantial rather than deep or meaningful. It’s something of an irony. Written and directed by Rob Garver.  The movies needed her

 

To Each His Own (1946)

Are you proud of your life? In World War 2 London, fire wardens Josephine ‘Jody’ Norris (Olivia de Havilland) and Lord Desham (Roland Culver) keep a lonely vigil. When Jody saves Desham’s life, they become better acquainted. With a bit of coaxing, the ageing spinster tells the story of her life, leading to a flashback of her life in upstate New York town where is the daughter of pharmacist Dan (Griff Barnett) and she is proposed to by both Alex Piersen (Philip Terry) and travelling salesman Mac Tilton (Bill Goodwin) but she turns them both down. A disappointed Alex marries Corinne (Mary Anderson). When handsome US Army Air Service fighter pilot Captain Bart Cosgrove (John Lund) flies in to promote a bond drive, he and Jody quickly fall in love, though they have only one night together. Months later she gives birth to his son in a New York hospital and her plans to adopt the baby by stealth go wrong when Corinne’s newborn dies and she and Alex take in the child, known as Griggsy.  Bart has died in the war and then Jody’s father dies and she has to sell up. She starts up a cosmetics business in NYC under cover of Mac’s former bootlegging enterprise and reveals to Corinne she’s been propping up Alex’ failing business and will continue to do so but she wants the baby – her son – however the boy misses his ‘mother’ … You sin – you pay for it all the rest of your life. A morality tale that doesn’t moralise – that’s quite a feat to pull off but master producer and screenwriter Charles Brackett (with Jacques Théry) does it. This miracle of straightforward storytelling never falls into the trap of over-sentimentality and is helped enormously by a performance of grace notes and toughness by de Havilland, who won an Academy Award for her role as the unwed mother who through the worst of ironies loses access to her own baby when a finely executed plan goes wrong. Her ascent through the business world is born of necessity and grim ambition to retrieve her son – and the scene when she has to admit there’s more to parenting than giving birth is one of the finest of the actress’ career. Just bringing a child into the world doesn’t make you a mother … it’s being there … it’s all the things I’ve missed. The subject of illegitmacy is handled without fuss and de Havilland is surrounded by fine performances, acting like a sorbet to her rich playing of a woman whose coldness is pierced by the thoughts of her lost son: Culver is excellent as the no-nonsense English aristo who engineers a reconciliation; Anderson is fine as the flip rival who gains the upper hand while knowing her husband still loves his childhood sweetheart; and Lund scores in his debut in the double role as the flyer chancing his arm at a one-night stand and then as his own clueless son twenty years later, wanting nothing more than a night with his fiancée. A refreshing take on that strand of stories known as the Independent Woman sub-genre. Directed by Mitchell Leisen.  I’m a problem mother

 

My Brother Jonathan (1948)

There’s something I should have told you a long time ago. GP Jonathan Dakers (Michael Denison) welcomes home his son Tony (Pete Murray) from WW2 and when Tony reveals he’s seen too much and is quitting medicine, Jonathan tells him the story of his real background … Early 1900s. Jonathan is the older son of shady businessman Eugene (James Robertson Justice) and brother of Harold (Ronald Howard) and falls in love at a young age with Edie (Beatrice Campbell) daughter of landed gentry but she only ever had eyes for Harold. Jonathan trains as a doctor. When the mysterious Eugene dies his real job is revealed – corset salesman. His wife (Mary Clare) is none the wiser and believes he had social significance. However he’s spent their inheritance and Jonathan undertakes to save the family home and put Harold through his final year at Cambridge, sacrificing his own potential career as a surgeon. He works in the West Midlands in the general practice of Dr John Hammond (Finlay Currie) whose daughter Rachel (Dulcie Gray) is the practice nurse and she falls in love with Jonathan but he still has eyes for Edie.  The practice clientele are working class and he has to deal with the consequences of the regular accidents at the local foundry leading him to write a critical report which is conveniently lost. He is constantly criticised and when he saves a local child from diphteria in the hospital he has to face down the owner’s son-in-law and his medical rival Dr Craig (Stephen Murray) on charges of misconduct. Edie returns from Paris and intends wedding Harold, to Jonathan’s chagrin, but WW1 is declared and Harold is killed in action, leaving Edie pregnant and in a serious dilemma because she knows her parents will disown her … It must be nice to know what you want out of life. Adapted from Francis Brett Young’s novel by Adrian Alington and Leslie Landau, this was hugely popular at the British box office and unites real-life husband and wife Denison and Gray in one of their best films. It has all the ingredients of a melodrama but is supremely well-managed, beautifully shot and gracefully performed. The social message isn’t hammered home, it carefully underlines all the choices that the idealistic protagonist makes and is skillfully drawn as this picture of changing society emerges in intertwining plots of medicine and relationships. Directed by Harold French. They only have one idea in this country and that’s disgusting

Tell it to the Bees (2018)

He said this town was too small for secrets. With her failing marriage to her estranged former soldier husband Robert (Emun Elliott) and a curious young son Charlie (Gregor Selkirk), Manchester-born Lydia Weekes (Holliday Grainger) does not fit into the small Scottish Borders town where she has ended up. She starts a friendship with the town’s new doctor Jean Markham (Ann Paquin) who has bonded with Charlie after he takes an interest in her bee colonies at the house she inherited from her late father, the town’s former doctor. However, in 1950s rural Scotland, the women’s relationship raises questions particularly because Jean is remembered from a terrible incident involving another girl in her schooldays which prompted her father to send her away.  When Lydia is evicted from her home and loses her job at the local lace factory where her boss is her sister-in-law Pam (Kate Dickie) she goes to live at Jean’s house with Charlie to work as her housekeeper. However they are drawn to each other and start a sexual relationship. Somehow the locals get wind of the arrangement and gossip spreads. Charlie witnesses them in bed together and runs to report to his father. Jean could lose her career if Lydia fights for custody of Charlie.  Meanwhile, Robert’s younger sister Annie (Lauren Lyle), who is friends with Lydia, is happily pregnant by her black boyfriend and the family want her dealt with before the pregnancy becomes public … How do I explain? Jessica Ashworth and Henrietta Ashworth adapted the 2009 novel by Fiona Shaw [not the actress]. What could occasionally be perceived as a contemporary story retro-fitted to critique the insular homophobic values of its Fifties setting, this mostly manages to overcome that fear by reducing the significance of the unlikeable child who is a prism for adult behaviour.  It broaches some tough situations (like a botched home abortion) with the refusing of sentiment and a modicum of unsettling violence. This steers it through the conventional posturing and clichéd setup which is nimbly handled by director Annabel Jankel.  The leads (particularly Grainger) are superb. The cinematography by Bartosz Nalazek is beautiful.  Those sort of people don’t change their minds