Dangerous Minds (1995)

Who are these kids – rejects from Hell? Divorced former US Marine LouAnne Johnson (Michelle Pfeiffer) wants to resume her teacher training and her ex-husband’s friend Hal Griffith (George Dzundza) lands her an interview at his inner city high school. To her surprise she is hired on the spot and soon finds out why. In this ‘academy’ class of black and Latino teens from impoverished backgrounds, involved in gangs and drugs she is met with a wall of sullen indifference. She dresses in leather and teaches them karate and then ditches traditional class and tries to teach them poetry using Bob Dylan’s work. She goes to the home of Raoul Sanchero (Renoly Santiago) to tell his family they should be proud of him. She tries to stop pregnant Callie (Bruklin Harris) from dropping out. She attempts to save the life of Emilio (Wade Dominquez) from a revenge shooting but the headmaster (Courtney B. Vance) and his rules about knocking on doors costs the boy his life… All you gotta do is get their attention – or quit.  Adapted from the autobiography My Posse Don’t Do Homework by retired US Marine LouAnne Johnson, this is an upbeat update of material familiar from The Blackboard Jungle and To Sir With Love but with a rap soundtrack and a boyz in the ‘hood feel. If Pfeiffer never has to unpack her military training and really engage physically at the level of tough love promised with that background (she’s got training in marketing and PR, too, natch), there are sufficient moments of danger in the smooth screenplay by Ronald Bass but nothing too worrisome in a narrative that manages to inflict as many stereotypes as it is presuming to unpick. Sentimental, good-natured and resolved rather well even if you think the songs on the soundtrack are the poetry that would really appeal to this particular audience who roll over far too easily at the prospect of a rollercoaster ride and a free meal. Directed by John N. Smith. So you start out all wrong and just keep going

Serpent of the Nile (1953)

A woman of beauty, intellect and charity – this is almost too much to believe! Following the assassination of Julius Caesar in Rome 44 BC, Mark Antony (Raymond Burr) spares the life of Lucilius (William Lundigan), a Roman officer who becomes a friend as he makes his way to Alexandria in Egypt. However, Lucilius has had history with Cleopatra although she chooses to take up with Mark Antony. Eventually Antony loses his grip in a society resentful of a queen living in luxury while they become increasingly impoverished. Lucilius joins Antony’s rival, Octavius (Michael Fox), who arrives to put an end to Antony’s failing expedition since he is clearly being used by Cleopatra to establish dominion in Rome… Are women ever conquered? Adapted from H. Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra by Robert E. Kent, this low-budgeter from producer Sam Katzman was shot on the leftover sets from Salome, the Rita Hayworth film. It was the year for fans of Julius Caesar and the ancients as the successful Brando-starrer proved and despite the rackety origins, this is fun, filled with ripe dialogue and fruity leers. Lundigan has a blast as Burr’s love rival with a secret, having admired Cleo in Caesar’s house for many a long year;  while Fleming is totally alluring as the queen bee. That glorious gilded woman performing a dance of seduction is the great Julie Newmar. With an atmospheric score by Mischa Bakaleinikoff and narration by Fred Sears, this is very entertaining. Directed by William Castle. If you had but loved yourself more and Cleopatra less

Captain Boycott (1947)

I simply can’t understand a man like that. In 1880s Ireland Charles Stewart Parnell (Robert Donat) makes a rousing speech against the villainous property thefts by the British in Ireland but urges passive resistance, shunning rather than killing landlords. In a Mayo village, British landowner Captain Charles Boycott (Cecil Parker) dispossesses the townspeople who are being charged extortionate rents as his tenants and uses police and army to evict them, leaving them without hope. But when a passionate farmer Hugh Davin (Stewart Granger) creates an organised and nonviolent rebellion against the oppressor and falls in love with a beautiful newcomer Ann Killain (Kathleen Ryan) he proves that the Irish people are willing to fight for their rights ... You can’t make British soldiers fight for what any fool can see is an unjust cause.  Wolfgang Wilhelm’s screenplay makes light work of the systematic property rout and starving of Irish citizens described in Philip Rooney’s source novel, weaving a skein of complicity, action and politics that rings true. Co-written by director Frank Launder, with additional dialogue by Paul Vincent Carroll and Patrick Campbell,  the location shooting (with Westmeath standing in for Mayo) adding immeasurably to this history lesson about the infamous land agent who entered the lexicon because of the campaign of ostracising that brought him recognition. The cast is a Who’s Who of the British and Irish acting contingent of the era including the genial Noel Purcell playing Daniel McGinty a teacher who is also a crafty agitator, Mervyn Johns as a sneaky property dealer, Alastair Sim as a Catholic priest, Father McKeogh, and Maurice Denham as Lieutenant Colonel Strickland who is inclined to attribute Boycott’s conduct to a kind of personal pig-headed eccentricity rather than Anglo rule. Granger has a good role and is up to the witty and lively construction of this typical Launder and Gilliat production. William Alwyn’s spirited score captures the mood of the rebellion very well. Can you count pain – suffering – hunger – wretchedness?

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

The Southerner (1945)

French master Jean Renoir’s American work may not be as lauded as his films in his native France, but this is a tremendously well told adaptation of a novel by George Sessions Perry, Hold Autumn in Your Hand,  not surprisingly when you see who wrote the screenplay:  Nunnally Johnson, Hugo Butler, William Faulkner and Renoir himself. Not too dusty. It’s the tale of the Tuckers, cotton pickers in Texas. Sam (Zachary Scott) and Nona (Betty Field), their kids Jot and Daisy, and his mother (Beulah Bondi) decide to start up their own farm with nothing but a mule and some seed. They need access to water so the neighbour Devers (J. Carrol Naish) reluctantly permits access to his own supply and after a freezing winter in which their son becomes seriously ill,  the feud escalates and involves Devers’ half-wit nephew. Devers finds Sam trying to find a huge catfish that he’s been after for years and they find a way to solve their differences. The general store owner (Percy Kilbride – Pa Kettle!) who’s refused the family credit now wants to marry Sam’s mother but a terrible storm and resultant flooding ruins their entire plot and they have to start over. This is a really great story, so well told, limpidly shot by Lucien Andriot in the San Joaquin Valley and beautifully characterised and performed by a splendid cast – it cannot be fairly described. It shouldn’t be overlooked in Renoir’s oeuvre because even if it’s not as iconic a cinematic text as The Grapes of Wrath it’s an economic and beautifully framed and shot slice of Americana and it was the director’s own favourite of his American films. Scott has never been better cast and Field is simply luminous. Bondi is … herself! Really affecting filmmaking.

Time Out of Mind (2015)

NYC is a frightening place, especially the first time you spend there, but I’ve rarely seen anything to equal Richard Gere urinating in the street. He exults in the disgust of a man castigating him for it, calling him an animal. Oren Moverman’s commitment to the real meant that cameras were hidden as George (Gere) went around, camouflaged in beanies and anoraks, apparently aimlessly, drifting, while the denizens do what they do to the homeless in a terrifying cacophonous din that has for the viewer the dramatic affect of tinnitus. We see George going from homeless shelter to subway, hungry, begging, experiencing the death-defying bureaucracy along the way that would drive a fine mind crazy with frustration:  he has no ID, no paperwork to get more paperwork that would get him a bed, food vouchers, comfort. Sometimes he follows a young woman (Jena Malone) who it transpires is his daughter, who disowns him. At eighty minutes into the running time he finally tells his newfound Bellevue Hospital friend (Ben Vereen) the cataclysmic series of unfortunate events that has led to him having a life on the streets. A chance reunion with trolley lady Sheila (Kyra Sedgwick) enlightens us as to how he is thrown out of an apartment at the story’s opening. Gere is very moving.  He is frequently on the edge, crying, upset and he is very touching in the role, inasmuch as the writing allows, but his character is somewhat enigmatic. There is a resolution, of a sort, in keeping with the demands of the medium. Even Ken Loach has to permit that and this is a film that is redolent of that approach. But this is far from an easy watch. Moverman and Jeffrey Caine wrote the screenplay, developed from Caine’s story. Maybe we can all have more understanding of street people as a result.