The Death of Alexei Navalny 4th June 1976 – 16th February 2024

תנוח על משכבך בשלום

The world is changing. Truth is vanishing. War is coming – Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

Geopolitics are coming to get us, like it or not. Putin has presumably murdered Alexei Navalny (allegedly), the lawyer and anti-corruption blogger who held him to account and whose sudden death has been announced. It’s shocking and upsetting but hardly surprising given the regime’s actions in the North of Africa, the Middle East, the United Kingdom (more fools there) and of course the brutal encroaching upon Ukraine which commenced two years ago today. The ‘globalising’ EU has been the useful idiot for the Russian regime in all of this, opening borders so that Russians could install themselves everywhere, helping turn every country into identikit kips – in Ireland the true numbers will never be known due to the doctored Census figures. The only people allowed through the ports here without ID are foreigners (Irish people get arrested stet particularly at Dublin Airport, manned, curiously, by the Department of Defence) and there are Eastern Europeans (ie Russians) established in their thousands in even the smallest towns. The Russians were wargaming off Donegal a month before the invasion of Ukraine, they’ve been trying to dig up the transatlantic cables off Kerry for half a dozen years or more and the new iteration of the KGB has an enormous operation at the Embassy in Dublin’s Rathgar. Talk about the enemy within. The Irish Navy is retiring three ships and buying another – not to defend the coastline, which is extensive, but to dump more Moslems into Europe on the Libya-Italy route. The RAF is the country’s only air protection. The island only recently got radar. It is essentially defenceless. Then there are the few Russian spies we’re informed about – for instance the woman lifted in Australia who’d worked for an Irish Member of Parliament and then in the Space Observatory in Cork which is of course connected with the EU’s programme. Two leftwing Irish MEPs have recently been named as targets by a known Russian operative posing as an Estonian MEP. In this game of zero sums, Ireland is the EU’s useful idiot with a half-Indian Prime Minister and his similarly inclined Minister for Integration begging foreigners to repopulate it, advertising the country in Urdu in the anticipation presumably of eventually inviting that non-violent immensely tolerant Jew-friendly population of Gaza to move in en masse (the same Minister refused to confirm or deny Wednesday night when interviewed) – there are mosques everywhere and hospitals are taken over by Moslems with the removal of any signs of Christianity a common consequence of their increasing ubiquity not to mention their brazen unconcealed contempt for Irish women. Try visiting A&E and finding yourself the only Irish person among a sea of foreigners who don’t speak English. Did we mention that 26 years ago before the Good Friday Agreement which triggered the invasion, occupying and colonising of Ireland, nothing worked? And now there are even fewer houses, hospitals and schools for Irish people, with fewer Irish here as the natives are outnumbered yet mysteriously more housing is needed – just not for the locals. Vulture funds have snapped up property and hotels collude with the housing and dumping of so-called asylum seekers which even the most robustly generous non-racists now realise is a total scam. Just 3% of agricultural land is ‘permitted’ to be used to grow food (the EU, dontcha know) and another c15% of the country’s fisheries (the nation’s only remaining asset and purportedly worth 2,000 times more than has ever been given it by the EU) were handed to the EU a month ago with not a word about it in the Irish media, who are working hand in glove with the Government to propagandise the new normal (admittedly they’ve had 26 years of practice and as we can see they are all bought and paid for, sadly). There have been mysterious revelations – that in 2006 the Irish Government ordered mortgage lenders to give 100% loans to non-resident Poles, that the pro-EU airline Ryanair’s flights (from somewhere Warsaw/Krakow-adjacent…) to Dublin were responsible for the 90% decrease in criminality in Poland (one-way tickets handed out to individuals exiting prison?) not to mention the Good Friday Agreement’s weird coda which this author learned was allegedly the result of a secret 1990 agreement to turn Ireland into the refugee tip of the EU (mission accomplished, clearly with the Government in receipt of 10,000 Euros a head, apparently). A huge Nigerian population despite there being no direct flights until recently. 300 arrivals daily alone from Afghanistan and South Africa (just 2 of the 200+ nationalities in the country) at the height of COVID lockdown in one week during January 2021, according to the Dublin Airport Authority. And, by the way, Irish schoolchildren are being instructed to disavow the word ‘Irish’ from their heritage and to identify as ‘European,’ whatever that means. The Islamising of Europe facilitated by Angela Merkel and her cohort of Nazis (who were inspired to do that endlessly generative performative murder-art project The Holocaust by Yasser Arafat’s cousin, fact fans) makes it all a lot easier for the ongoing destruction of a people held in ideological capture. It took only 15,000 Russians to have the Crimea declared occupied yet Irish people are outnumbered in every single village, town and city by a polyglot multi-racial grouping of probably in excess of 5 million if anecdotal evidence, overcrowding and obvious lies are unpicked (in one town of our acquaintance the ratio is conservatively estimated at 9:1). Dublin had turned into a combination of Southall and Bradford within weeks of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and became impossible to live in – overnight the tension on the streets was palpable. Now it’s a no-go area. The westernmost island off Europe has been flooded with foreigners with no historical, racial, ethnic, religious, cultural or linguistic connection with the natives – who just got rid of the supposed shackles of the English to allow the Germans to take over in 1973 and then opened the floodgates in 1998 to finally rid ourselves of our independence, our borders and our language (BTW, Thank you, England, for that wonderful gift) not to mention our dignity and identity. Is this news to anyone? Very likely. Ireland is now a parallel universe for sentient individuals. A butterfly’s wings are broken in a Russian penal colony and the world falls apart. How this has affected recent Irish rural cinema is investigated in my latest book. In the meantime, be afraid. Be very afraid. Lock your doors. Shalom.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Location-Nation-Irish-Rural-Cinema-ebook/dp/B0CNNYD5X3/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2WRZ639F7A68Y&keywords=elaine+lennon+location+nation&qid=1708099347&s=books&sprefix=elaine+%2Cstripbooks%2C1816&sr=1-1

We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close – and those we never meet. – Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One 

RIP Alexei Navalny

Eternally Yours (1939)

For my first illusion this evening I intend to create a woman. Socialite Anita Halstead (Loretta Young) is engaged to be married and goes with all her galpals to see a magic act performed by Tony (David Niven), known as The Great Arturo after her bridal shower for her forthcoming wedding to Don Burns (Broderick Crawford). Anita and Tony are immediately attracted to each other and get married. She becomes his assistant in the act. One night, Tony becomes drunk in the company of a woman reporter Gloria (Eve Arden) and boasts he will jump out of an aircraft at 15,000 feet with his hands handcuffed behind his back. When she prints his claim, he first tries to get out of it with a fake cast on his arm, but when he sees the thousands of fans, he goes through with it, freeing himself in mid-air and parachuting safely to the ground. He promises Anita that he will not attempt the dangerous stunt again but breaks his word and performs it repeatedly all over the world. Anita becomes weary of the constant travel and longs to settle down and start a family. Secretly, she sells her jewellery and has a house built in the Connecticut countryside. When it is completed, she shows Tony a picture of it but his uninterested reaction stops her from telling him it is theirs. When he signs up for a two-year, round-the-world tour rather than take the vacation he had promised, she finally gives up. She leaves him and gets a divorce in Reno. Anita’s grandfather, Gramps aka Bishop Peabody (C. Aubrey Smith) breaks the news to a distraught Tony who has taken a clipper back to the US from his South American tour. On an ocean cruise with her Aunt Abby (Billie Burke), Anita is surprised to run into Don. She gets the ship’s captain (Granville Bates) to marry them. However, she spends their honeymoon night with her grandfather. The next night, Don insists on introducing her to his boss, Harley Bingham (Raymond Walburn), at a nightclub. The entertainment is none other than the Great Arturo, with his old assistant Lola De Vere (Virginia Field). He persuades Bingham to let him perform at Bingham’s company retreat at a resort, much to Anita’s discomfort. Mrs. Bingham (ZaSu Pitts) has a dilemma, though. They have not booked enough rooms to provide separate bedrooms for the unmarried Tony and Lola. Tony suggests he and Don share one room, while Anita and Lola take the other. During his stay, Tony tries unsuccessfully to persuade Anita to take him back. If the cold didn’t get him the water will. Meanwhile, the hapless Don becomes sick so the doctor prescribes no physical activity of any sort for a month. Bishop Peabody is told by his lawyer that Anita’s divorce is not legal. Later, he informs his granddaughter that Tony will be doing his parachute stunt that day. She attends … No woman likes a fake and everything about you is fake. The pairing of playful Niven with the luminously beautiful Young was a good idea – they would wind up doing a handful of films together including The Perfect Marriage (1946) and The Bishop’s Wife (1947). This is the first collaboration, based on a screenplay by C. Graham Baker and Gene Towne that was so loosely based on Sacha Guitry’s 1917 play L’Illusioniste it became original. This was tinkered with by others who are uncredited – including Garnett but also Peter Godfrey (who would direct our favourite Christmas movie, Christmas in Connecticut), Mack Sennett, Ben Hect and Charles Lederer. Whew. It’s not quite a romcom – it starts out like one – until Crawford’s overbearing presence and poor directing and timing from Tay Garnett (with Assistant Director Charles Kerr) unpick the performances which then find themselves in something of a melodrama despite the ripe screwball-style scenario and dialogue. The uneven tone is matched scene for scene with an inappropriately overwrought score from Werner Janssen which merely abets the situation heightening the drama and echoing Tony’s dilemma, time after time hoping the parachute will open – it’s not just a metaphor but the audience shares his shredded nerves when he’s doing his Houdini-like stunts. The central dramatic joke – life with a magician is anything but magic/an illusionist causes a woman to disappear – twice! – is well worked out despite the strange atmosphere. And there are some zingers: to compensate There you stand dripping in chinchilla and wishing it was a bungalow apron. And were it Don Ameche or Ralph Bellamy instead of the hunk of dead lead that was Crawford (mostly), Young’s marvellous befuddlement when she tries to explain what has happened with Tony – an act – a performance! – has some of the sexy Pre-Code echoing that dogged the original writing but is wasted on her unresponsive opposite number and it lands with a thud. If she’s lost on Crawford just look at her fabulous fashion by Travis Banton. There is a sterling supporting cast but Burke and Pitts don’t have enough to do while Aubrey Smith at least gets to perform with his colleague from the Hollywood Raj, that elite gathering of ex-pat British actors who liked to spend Sundays playing cricket. F. Hugh Herbert plays down his sardonic butler role. It was a banner year for Niven cast as a lead here and also performing in Wuthering Heights and Bachelor Mother. Not a bad 1939. Produced by Walter Wanger, this was in development so long that he and Garnett made another film, Trade Winds and footage from that and the 1939 New York’s World Fair is included here. I swear, I’m the only woman in the world who could live with you

Hide and Seek (1964)

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

Anna Karenina (1948)

Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. St Petersburg, 1870s. Anna Karenina (Vivien Leigh) is married to dull government official Alexei Karenin (Ralph Richardson) who is apparently more interested in his career than in satisfying the emotional needs of his wife. Called to Moscow by her brother Stepan Oblonsky (Hugh Dempster), a reprobate who has been serially unfaithful to his trusting wife Dolly (Mary Kerridge), who he wishes Anna to placate, Anna meets Countess Vronsky (Helen Haye) on the night train. They discuss their sons, with the Countess showing Anna a picture of her son Count Vronsky (Kieron Moore), a cavalry officer. When he shows up at the railway station to meet his mother it’s lust at first sight. Each of them eventually gives up everything for the other and their baby dies in childbirth while Anna is seriously ill but her husband forgives her the indiscretion that has scandalised them both when she appears to be close to death. Anna has to choose which man with whom to live and risk giving up her young son by her husband and going into exile abroad with Vronsky. Upon their return to Russia Anna is shunned …  You’ve no idea what women like. The tragic love story at the centre of Tolstoy’s 1877 novel is a consistent literary trap for filmmakers. Despite the opulent style this Alexander Korda vehicle for Vivien Leigh is occasionally stillborn. It should be perfect casting but Leigh is pretty vacant at times, imperious and persuasive at others, in comparison with the supposedly unsuitable Garbo’s positive radiance in the role a decade earlier, while Moore is wholly wrong as Vronsky. At first. And yet Leigh becomes fabulously fatalistic in that sobering Russian way while Moore gives up everything for her and they never quite understand or trust each other, their emotionality overwhelming them in different ways. Meanwhile her righteous husband maintains his pomposity by referring to his Christian principles and refuses her a divorce, to utterly awful effect. Women are the pivot. Adapted by Jean Anouilh & Guy Morgan and director Julien Duvivier, this long film is compromised by the tone which takes its time to exude the sheer joy of the illicit sexual attraction thereby somewhat pre-empting the nature of the tragedy to come. There are some terrific set pieces and wonderful deep focus cinematography by Henri Alekan with incredible costumes by Cecil Beaton. Overall it’s a rewarding watch that was an unexpected disaster. But was that such a surprise? Scarlett O’Hara dumping her family and frolicking with a soldier in the aftermath of World War 2 while post-war privations were at a height? Better than its reputation would suggest. The last scene is rightly shocking.  And the light by which she had been reading the book of life, blazed up suddenly, illuminating those pages that had been dark, then flickered, grew dim, and went out forever

Tenet (2020)

We live in a twilight world. An unnamed CIA agent (John David Washington) gets kidnapped and tortured by gangsters following an opera siege in Ukraine and wakes up after he takes a fake suicide pill, is rebuilt and sent on a new mission – to find out who’s shipping inverted bullets from the future using Priya (Dimple Kapadia) as a front. He discovers through a forged Goya it’s Russian arms dealer Andrey Sator (Kenneth Branagh) whose art expert wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) is more or less his hostage, trying to keep in contact with their young son. Working with British agent Neil (Robert Pattinson) he organises an attack on the (tax- free) Freeport in Oslo Airport where art treasures are being held in an attempt to to root out the channels Sator is using and tries to avert the end of the world as Sator’s suicide mission takes hold … With a hi-vis jacket and a clipboard you can get in practically anywhere in the world. The ongoing paradox – one of many – in the latest offering from writer/director Christopher Nolan – is that in a world of special effects he does his filmmaking in camera and this has an admirably real feeling, with a lot of it shot in gloomy European cities that mostly look alike – grey, with brutalist tower blocks and dull skies. It’s the dystopic vision that J.G. Ballard satirised while predicting the future, a time when Alain Resnais was pioneering storytelling backwards and forwards through time yet the Sixties feeling is very now. The palindromic inventiveness lies in the story structure, the characterisation and the trust in the audience. Of course it helps  that this tale of a man with the power of apocalypse in his nasty Eastern European paws and the foreknowledge informing his every move is released to a Covid-19 world where people wear masks and dread the end of days, rather like here (when they’re not masked they’re bearded, which is pretty much the same thing). That it also takes the long tall Sally from TV’s espionage hit adaptation of John le Carre’s The Night Manager and puts her in a markedly similar role doesn’t go amiss. These realistic meta touches – with Branagh’s horrifying oligarch resident in London – grip the narrative to something close to recognisable quotidian newspaper headlines; while the parallel lines of future-past intersect in the ‘inverted’ nodes that splatter in all directions. It may be that after one hundred minutes when they decide to return to Oslo and they mean go back in time to Oslo that the plot becomes not just far fetched but out of reach to the ordinary pea brain, or someone who thinks in too linear a fashion, as soldier Ives (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) chides The Protagonist. As ever, we must remember that future and past selves best not meet each other or else – annihilation. There are boys’ own fantasies writ large – joyriding an aeroplane and causing a horrifying amount of damage, an exhilarating catamaran race, an astonishing quasi-hijacking which can’t possibly go well with all that time travel inversion stuff, great military hardware for the penultimate sequence and the unpeeling of The Protagonist aka The American who starts out from a very bad place indeed and is literally reconstituted to do his worst.  The entire narrative is based on one diadic exchange:  What just happened here?/ It didn’t happen yet! It’s a different experience than Inception which was all about a built world inhabited by a featureless character – a video game, in any language. Yet we can see all the references from the Airport movies, through Terry Gilliam and The Thomas Crown Affair in this timeblender. Branagh is such an evil bad guy you expect him to tell Washington he expects him to die while twirling his comedy moustache. And Pattinson might well be reprising his T.E. Lawrence in those early sweaty linen suits. How you appear is all, as Michael Caine’s Sir Michael Crosby informs Washington – less Brooks Brothers, more Savile Row tailoring. They are men on a mission but not Men in Black. This all concludes in the abject maternal being resolved in pleasing fashion, a not unfamiliar trope in Nolan’s body of work; the opportunity to rewrite your life is presented here in key moments. There is one huge technical problem with the film that damages the plot clarity and that is the woeful sound mix, leaving much dialogue lost in the guttural music of Ludwig Goransson while revelling in the sheer kinetic drive of the action. It’s not too late in this digital age to whip up some new codes to tidy it up, is it? Maybe just ratchet up the EQs a tad. In the interim, relish the historical possibilities of film editing in this awesome mosaic of affect and attractions and heed the advice given in soothing voice early on, Don’t try to understand it – feel it. Welcome back, Cinema.

The Russia House (1990)

You live in a free society; you have no choice. Publisher Bartholomew ‘Barley’ Scott Blair (Sean Connery) is caught in a conspiracy when he receives manuscripts from a Russian scientist, Dante (Klaus Maria Brandauer) claiming that the Russian nuclear programme is a sham. Ned (James Fox) from British intelligence and Russell (Roy Scheider) and Brady (John Mahoney) of the CIA have the book intercepted en route to Blair at his Lisbon home because they consider it to contain crucial information.  They recruit him to investigate its editor, Katya Orlova (Michelle Pfeiffer) a divorced mother of two. As Blair goes to Moscow and learns the origin of the manuscript and discovers Russian military secrets, he falls in love with Katya and fights to protect her family even as he realises that Katya may have another admirer. The two intelligence agencies have a shopping list of questions to check that Dante is for real but Ned begins to wonder where Barley’s loyalties really lie … How the fuck do you peddle an arms race when the only asshole you’ve got to race against is yourself? Adapted from John le Carre’s novel by Tom Stoppard, this elegant look at Russian-British relations at the tail end of the Glasnost Eighties may have been overtaken by real events but it’s nonetheless a wittily constructed espionage story with one of Connery’s best performances as the sax playing book publisher whose heart is stolen by Pfeiffer, an atypically stunning editor with Pfeiffer turning in a really nuanced performance as the semi-tragic Russian. Only the second major American film to be shot in the Soviet Union, it’s picturesque indeed, using so many beautiful settings in Leningrad and Moscow and enhanced by the fantastic cast among whom film director Ken Russell makes a splash as Walter, the Brit spy, in his inimitable fashion; while the tension between the British and American agencies supplies much of the suspense. A superior entertainment directed by Fred Schepisi. If there is to be a hope we must all betray our country, we have to save each other because all victims are equal and none is more equal than others. It’s everyone’s duty to start the avalanche

Action in the North Atlantic (1943)

Aka Heroes Without Uniforms. We’ve run into a wolfpack. Merchant Marine sailors First Mate Joe Rossi (Humphrey Bogart) and Captain Steve Jarvis (Raymond Massey) survive the sinking of SS Northern Star by German U-boat U-37 en route from Halifax. After 11 days drifting they are rescued. Steve spends time with his wife Sarah (Ruth Gordon), while Joe meets and marries singer Pearl O’Neill (Julie Bishop). At the union hall, merchant seamen, including the Northern Star survivors, spend their time waiting to be assigned to a new ship. Over a round of poker, Johnnie Pulaski (Dane Clark) jokes about getting a shore job and reveals his fear of dying at sea. The others shame him into signing along with them on another ship. Alfred “Boats” O’Hara (Alan Hale, Sr.) is tracked down by his wife, who has apparently not seen him since he was rescued. She angrily serves him with a divorce summons. O’Hara, knowing he is headed back to sea, gleefully tears it up, saying Them ‘Liberty Boats’ are sure well named! When they are charged with getting supply vessel Seawitch to Russian allies in Murmansk as part of a sea convoy and the group of ships comes under attack from U-37 again, Rossi and Jarvis are motivated by the opportunity to strike back at the Germans but now have to dodge Luftwaffe bullets too … For a sailor’s wife this war is just another storm.  Tremendously exciting action adventure paying tribute to the men of the US Merchant Marine. The evocation of a group under pressure with their particular avocations and tics is expertly done and the characterisation is a model for war movies. There are all kinds of devices and diversions, from an onboard kitten and his successor; to envy of a Naval officer Cadet Ezra Parker (Dick Hogan); and the usual carping about the quality of the nosh. With a screenplay by John Howard Lawson (from a story by Guy Gilpatric) and additional dialogue by A.I. Bezzerides and W. R. Burnett you can be sure there are some riproaring lines: A trip to perdition would be like a pleasure cruise compared with what we’re going into. Wonderfully shot by Ted McCord with marvellous effects, you would never guess that this was shot on the studio lot due to wartime restrictions. Directed by Lloyd Bacon with uncredited work by Byron Haskin and Raoul Walsh. I’ve got faith – in God, President Roosevelt and the Brooklyn Dodgers – in the order of their importance!

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

Thirty Years Since the Berlin Wall Fell 9th November 2019

 

 

 

 

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

The Kremlin Letter (1970)

You’re a fool.  What’s worse, you’re a romantic fool. When an unauthorised letter is sent to Moscow alleging the U.S. government’s willingness to help Russia attack Red China, US Navy Intelligence Officer Charles Rone (Patrick O’Neal) has his commission revoked so he can do an extra-governmental espionage mission.  He speaks eight languages fluently and has a flawless photographic memory. He and his team are sent to retrieve the letter, going undercover and successfully reaching out to Erika (Bibi Andersson), the wife of a former agent now married to the head of Russia’s secret police, Kosnov (Max von Sydow). Their plans are interrupted, however, when their Moscow hideout is raided by cunning politician Bresnavitch (Orson Welles) and Rone finds himself being played by a network of older spies seeking revenge … My father says bed is integral to this and one must be good at it. Adapted by director John Huston with his regular collaborator Gladys Hill (who began as dialogue director on Welles’ The Stranger) from Noel Behn’s 1966 novel, this complex canvas of betrayal, treason, murder and double cross is in a line with Huston’s film noir period with a soupçon of Beat the Devil‘s absurdism. Its convoluted plot is best appreciated in response to the hijinks of Bond with its determinedly low-key approach allowing the banal thuggery of the spy master to be revealed. The cast is astonishing – Richard Boone as Ward, the peroxide instigator capable of literally anything, sadism, torture and murder;  two Bergman alumni united in transcontinental jiggery pokery; George Sanders playing piano in drag at a gay nightclub and worse, with a penchant for knitting; Barbara Parkins as Niall MacGinnis’ safe-cracking daughter; Vonetta McGee as a Lesbian seductress;  Nigel Green as The Whore, another old spy keen on playing dress up; Lila Kedrova as a Russian brothel keeper;  and Welles’ Gate Theatre mentor Micheál MacLiammóir shows up – in fact he’s the first character we encounter. A crazy cast in a fascinating Cold War timepiece that requires keen attention. Even so, it’s a stretch to have dour O’Neal pose as a gigolo to win Andersson’s affections. Still, Ted Scaife’s cinematography is a thing of beauty. Never mind the story, feel the wit. Huston appears early as the Admiral who gives Rone his marching papers. If you believe in a cause no danger is frightening