The Castaway Cowboy (1974)

As the Lord is my witness I am a wrong man. Texas cowboy Lincoln Costain (James Garner) gets ‘shanghaied’ in San Francisco, then jumps ship and washes ashore on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, right into the arms of widow Henrietta MacAvoy (Vera Miles) and her son Booten (Eric Shea) who are struggling to make a living as farmers. A lot of wild cattle often trample their crops, so Costain gets the idea to start cattle ranching instead. The Hawaiian farm hands don’t readily take to the American cowboy culture. You’re making yourself the laughing stock of the island. Costain explains to Henrietta that they need more equipment, unaware that she has to take out a credit note with banker Calvin Bryson (Robert Culp) who has eyes on her land (and her too) while Costain tries to make the locals useful but they make zero progress. He has to deal with a hothead Marrujo (Gregory Sierra) who tries to kill him and who then casts a spell on the farm’s head of staff Kimo (Manu Tupou). Then Bryson decides something has to be done to stop Henrietta making a go of the ranch … You just can’t expect to change a whole culture overnight. Written by Don Tait from a story by Tait, Richard M. Bluel & Hugh Benson, this Disney western is designed to appeal to the kiddies with the customary outstanding performance by child actor Shea, one of their occasional star roster). It also takes advantage of Garner’s amiable trickster persona, established in the back to back Support comedy westerns and which would be plundered to great effect in the longrunning The Rockford Files TV series airing for the first time one month after this was released, securing Garner’s fame and making him a household name. It’s toned down here to suit the tone of the family-oriented drama. TV star (I Spy) Culp makes for a smoothly persuasive villain while Miles is a lovely, trusting mother, just hovering on the edge of worry and hope. They call it death by sorcery. Managing the locals is one thing, Booten desperately wants a father figure and is permanently annoyed that Costain refuses to learn his name and that running gag offsets plenty of slapstick as Costain attempts to train pineapple cowboys. It’s attractively made and according to his memoir Garner for one enjoyed the surroundings of Kauai, the fourth largest of the Hawaiian islands which also served as a location for South Pacific, the 1977 remake of King Kong and Jurassic Park. Essentially a B western transferred to a tropical setting, replete with genre conventions – a stampede, a fistfight – included to build the tension towards an ingenious method of getting the cattle of the island to California, this is playfully done with a great deal of charm. And – Garner sings! Directed by Disney specialist Vincent McEveety. I wouldn’t bet against that man

April in Paris (1952) Doris Day

Doris Day recorded the Duke and Harburg song for the titular musical comedy on 5th June 1952. The film was released 24th December of that year.

Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012)(TVM)

There’s war and there’s war. 1990s: Renowned war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman) is recalling her youthful relationship with novelist Ernest Hemingway (Clive Owen). 1936, Key West, Florida. She meets him by chance in a bar and back at his house run by his wife Pauline Pfeiffer (Molly Parker) the two’s undeniable attraction is noted. My husband always says kill enough animals and you won’t kill yourself. The two writers encounter each other a year later in Spain where both are covering the Civil War, staying in the same hotel on the same floor. Initially, Gellhorn resists romantic advances made by Hemingway but during a bombing raid the two find themselves trapped alone in the same room and are overcome by lust as dust from the conflagration covers their bodies. They become lovers and stay in Spain until 1939. Hemingway collaborates with Joris Ivens (Lars Ulrich) to make the film The Spanish Earth. In 1940 Hemingway divorces Pauline so that he and Gellhorn can be married. He credits her with having inspired him to write the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and dedicates it to her. Over time however Gellhorn becomes more prominent in her own right, leading to some career jealousies between them. Gellhorn leaves Hemingway to go to Finland to cover the Winter War by herself. When she returns to the Lookout Farm in Havana the maid has quit and she tells him the place looks like a Tijuana whorehouse. Hemingway tells her that he has divorced Pauline. The two marry and travel together to China to cover the bombings by Japan. In China, they interview Chiang Kai Shek (Larry Tse) and his wife (Joan Chen) who Gelhorn can’t best when she expresses her horror after visiting an opium den where she has spotted a little girl. Chiang Kai shek is fighting the Chinese Communists and Japanese invaders. Hemingway and Gellhorn secretly visit Zhou Enlai (Anthony Brandon Wong) the revolutionary content to play both ends against the middle until his time comes. Gellhorn covers D-Day in Normandy. She reports on the Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps and his so horrified she runs out of them … There’s nothing to writing. Sit at your typewriter and bleed. Bluster and confidence, the devastation of war, lust and fine writing, a universe of division and conflict and conscience, all are called upon as the affair and marriage of two of the twentieth century’s best writers bear witness to unfolding history. Beautifully shot by Rogier Stoffers using different camera effects and archive montages to insert the characters into both colorised and monochrome footage, there is an uneven tone to this biopic as well as shifts in performance particularly by Owen who doesn’t quite capture the self-aggrandising charisma of Hemingway but certainly asserts his sexist boorish aspect. There is a certain comedy to the introduction of the famous characters, who take time to establish themselves in the narrative and sometimes play minor roles, there to augment and embellish the self-mythologising author who is hard to pin down here (Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris does this with caustic aplomb). Surrounded by an entourage of sycophants and hangers on, only John Dos Passos (David Strathairn) appears to question Hemingway’s macho posturing. When Hemingway admits he’s taken her Collier’s contract, Martha repeats what the man he calls the second best American writer has said of Hemingway and he hits her across the face: we know the marriage must be over. But not quite. There’s still a final act of war and humiliation. They have persuasively created a sexual and co-habiting relationship that is sometimes hard to watch when they exchange harsh words – but then wind up laughing at the good of it all. Until they fight again and it becomes ever more vicious. They’ll still be reading me long after you’ve been eaten by worms. Hemingway’s demise following his marriage to Mary Welsh (Parker Posey), who’s written as a celeb-hunting nicompoop, which may not be quite fair, is dramatic and swift in storytelling time (those presumably causative head injuries in the later aeroplane crashes are not covered albeit the car crash here with Welsh probably contributed to it). It’s a rich tapestry and while not successful overall, with an occasional (if forgivable) lurch into domestic melodrama, there are moments of genuine humour, black comedy and horror. For instance when Kai Shek dumps his dentures into a teacup and his verbose spider spouse does the talking and makes an unwilling Gellhorn take a gift. That’s history. The only thing that really interests me is people. Their lives. Their daily lives. And there are instances in war zones when Gellhorn scoops up children as their parents bleed to death and Hemingway, the father of sons by his previous wives, scoffs yet paradoxically admires her humanity. When Gellhorn walks into Dachau but then says Auschwitz was unbelievably worse and just takes off running we sense her disbelief. Kidman is quite splendid for much of the film. This is an amazingly comprehensive and visually immersive portrait of a man and a woman who were at the heart of a decade of world-changing events whose impact we still live with today. However their characters are almost too big to contain (and the gargantuan 2021 Ken Burns and Lynn Novick docu-series Hemingway has far more biographical information), literally covering too much ground with the prism of a domestic battle perhaps too slight for such an enormous focus. Necessarily episodic, the protagonists’ differences are sketched out schematically so this goes just a little way toward explaining why both are legends and Gellhorn fought so hard for her individuation. As she says here, she’s more than just a footnote to Hemingway. Consider this film restitution. At 155 minutes, this was premiered at Cannes but broadcast as a mini-series by HBO. Written by Jerry Stahl & Barbara Turner and directed by Philip Kaufman. We were good in war. And where there was no war we made our own. The battlefield we couldn’t survive was domestic life

Argylle (2024)

You need to stay on target. Introverted spy novelist Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) has almost finished writing her fifth book about Aubrey Argylle (Henry Cavill), the title character of the Argylle spy series. On a train journey with her cat Alfie (Chip) to go and visit her mother Ruth (Catherine O’Hara) home in Chicago, Elly is saved from an ambush by an actual spy, Aidan Wylde (Sam Rockwell) who explains to her that a devious organisation, known as the Division, headed by Ritter (Bryan Cranston) has targeted her because her novels seemingly predict their future. Aidan travels with Elly to England, hoping that her next chapter will reveal how to stop the Division. In London, the duo searches for a Masterkey that would help expose the Division that Elly had also referenced in her novels. Suspecting Aidan wants to kill her too, Elly calls her mother for help and she immediately travels to rescue her daughter. There’s a knock at the door and it’s Elly’s father (Bryan Cranston). Then Aidan arrives and reveals that her parents are both operatives of the Division, forcing him and Elly to fend them off before fleeing. Who’s the only person who hasn’t tried to kill you in the past seventy-two hours? Escaping to France, Aidan and former CIA deputy director Alfie Solomon reveal that Argylle is not entirely fictional: Elly is in fact agent Rachel Kylle (‘Argylle’ having been derived from ‘R. Kylle’), who was captured and brainwashed by the Division five years ago and made to believe that Dr. Margaret Vogeler (Ruth) and Director Ritter (Barry) were her real parents. Elly put her suppressed memories into her novels in modified form … We’re on our own now. Cats. Writers. Spies. A recipe for success! Starwise it’s essentially Bryce versus Bryan – with a lot of Sam and Henry to spice things up. Even John Cena and pop star Dua Lipa show up in the great opening sequence and later Samuel L. Jackson and Ariana DeBose enter the fray. There’s an argument to be made for a director with such clear gifts as Matthew Vaughn that he should be making serious films – that is, narratives with more significant content and in reality it would appear he is painting himself into a corner of ridiculousness if not necessarily one of large scale likeable silliness. But we might mention that here he’s making a film about the inside of a woman’s mind (and even her eyelids) – kudos for that. Spies lie. It’s part of the game. As the perennially youthful Rockwell morphs into the amusingly Action Man-like Cavill we understand how a writer thinks, the rules of the espionage genre and enjoy Vaughn’s permanently witty point of view as Ellie figures out how to do adventure and spying in the real world (again). You’re just a character I made up. As usual in a Vaughn production, everything looks beautiful courtesy of DoP George Richmond and production designers Russell De Rozario and Daniel Taylor, the action is well managed and there are even some meta references (Argylle is definitely suited and booted by Kingsman). There’s an impressive score by Lorne Balfe with an astute use of the Beatles’ final song to lend poignancy. The midpoint reveal is great fun. Thereafter the conventions necessarily come into play. The greater the spy – the bigger the lie. There’s an easy bond (James?!) between our principals: You’re one hell of a spy, Ellie. Not a bad writer, either. And it’s a jolly sight indeed to have Howard spend most of the film carting her cat Alfie around in a posh backpack – and you know what they say about cats in dramatic structure (Save the Cat?!) – if there’s one in the first act, it has to go off in the third! It makes us think Vaughn is precisely the director to reinvigorate that moribund franchise albeit this is the first in a series of its own to perhaps be fused with Kingsman at a later date. Bonkers, nutty and fun, to be honest, this had us at Cat. Just tell us what happens in the next chapter

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

Rich and Strange (1931)

Aka East of Shanghai. The best place for us is the gas oven. London couple, Fred Hill (Henry Kendall) and his wife Emily aka Em (Joan Barry), live a mundane middle-class existence. But that changes upon receipt of a letter informing them an uncle will advance them as much money as they need to enjoy themselves now rather than after his passing. So Fred quits his job and they both travel across the  English Channel to France. I couldn’t wear this – people will think we’re not married! After sampling Paris’s hot spots, they book passage on an ocean liner bound from Marseilles to the Far East. Fred gets seasick, leaving Em alone on board. To soak up time, she becomes acquainted with Commander Gordon (Percy Marmont), a dapper, popular bachelor. Later, upon his recovery, Fred is taken with a German princess (Betty Amann). As the voyage progresses, Fred and Em each spend more and more time with their new paramours, to the virtual exclusion of each other. By the time they arrive in Singapore, Fred and Em’s marriage is in a shambles. Em prepares to leave with Gordon for his home in Kuala Lumpur. However, before boarding the train, Gordon reveals that Fred’s princess is in fact a sham – a con artist who’s using him until his money runs out. Em now realises she can’t allow Fred to fall into this trap so she abandons Gordon to warn her husband. But it is too late. Fred discovers his ‘princess’ has just left for Rangoon, with £1000 of his money. Fred and Emily have only enough left to book passage home to England on a tramp steamer. Later, the ship is abandoned after a collision in the fog … Love is a very difficult thing. It makes everything very dangerous. Adapted by director Alfred Hitchcock’s wife and collaborator Alma Reville with Val Valentine from the novel Rich and Strange by Dale Collins, who apparently wrote a series of ‘sea romances’, this belongs firmly in middle of the British phase of the legendary filmmaker’s career before he made his sound breakthrough proper. The story might owe more to the fact that the Hitchcocks travelled to Paris for ‘essential research’ and fetched up in a brothel something that has never really been probed. Roughly one quarter of this comedy of marriage has dialogue so it’s still in the transition from the silent era replete with heavily made up performers and overacting. However there are some masterful shots by cinematographers Jack E. Cox and Charles Martin, particularly at the beginning, aside from the water tank situation and the ship’s set which was constructed in studio. There’s a deal of stock footage dressing up certain sequences and along with the lurches from drama, to melodrama, to comedy and back again, this is an uneven viewing experience. The travelogue aspect which incorporates fascinating footage from the Folies Bergeres (Em thinks they’ve pulled the curtain up before the performers got their clothes on), includes Paris, Port Said, the Suez Canal, Columbo and Singapore and inspires some fruitily amusing sub-titles in the silent fashion. The score by Adolph Hallis does a lot of heavy lifting and he would work again with Hitchcock on Number Seventeen the following year. Stage star Kendall makes for an adequate hero: his seasick scenes would make any bored wife run to the arms of Marmont, a star from the earlier era who would also appear for Hitchcock in Young and Innocent and The Secret Agent. Barry is strikingly beautiful, a beestung blonde teeming with sweetness and light. She had dubbed Anny Ondra in the earlier Hitchcock film Blackmail. She would make influential train thriller Rome Express the following year and sadly retired from films after 1933’s Mrs Dane’s Defence. She is now Henrietta, Dowager Duchess of Bedford. Elsie Randolph as the ‘spinster,’ a cruise ship cliche, is a hoot, particularly in the Egyptian market scenes. A regular stage partner of Jack Buchanan, she has the distinction of having acted twice for Hitchcock, forty years apart, since he hired her to play Gladys in Frenzy, the film that marked his return to British cinema, released in 1972! Kendall as the frustrated City office worker finally out of the ‘burbs gets some good scenes with Amann, especially when he’s trying to seduce her and they’re both in fancy dress – it really is a giggle watching him try to get to the bottom of her veils. She never really understood me. I was a bit too much for her. The German-American actress is exceptionally well cast as the femme fatale. The conclusion of course owes a lot to the play that inspired the title – The Tempest. Students of Hitchcock will have a hard time detecting the signature here as he grapples with the form of sound directing but the difficulties illustrate the issues arising from a setbound production (despite some clever production design) and the gap between those limitation and the freer comedy thriller which would become his metier in just a short while with his breakthrough, The Man Who Knew Too Much. The material and the performers for a great screwball comedy were here but it’s just not in the writing. Fascinating not least because it is judged Hitchcock’s great failure and marked the end of his dealings with British International Pictures. There’s only ever been you

Our Girl Friday (1953)

Aka The Adventures of Sadie. She is entitled to benefits commensurate to her sex. After a collision at sea, a haughty, wealthy young woman, Miss Sadie Patch (Joan Collins) is stranded in a lifeboat with three men: Carroll (George Cole) a journalist, Professor Gibble (Robertson Hare) an expert in civilisation, and Pat Plunkett (Kenneth More) an Irish ship’s stoker. They wash up on a desert island, where they build huts and catch fish and amorous rivalries soon spring up, with Carroll and Gibble making fools of themselves in a bid to win Sophie’s affections while she secretly hankers after Pat, who has a bit of a problem with drink and a devil may care attitude that makes him hard to approach… Where do you go when you can’t stand the sight of yourself? This mild comedy isn’t especially well directed by Noel Langley (who also wrote the screenplay, adapting Norman Lindsay’s 1931 novel The Cautious Amorist) but it’s certainly something to see all these men fall for young Joan Collins who busies herself making a fetching bikini from Kenneth More’s shirt. More probably fares best as the Oirish joker stoker who just waits to be caught. There is great battle of the sexes banter between Collins and Cole but it’s not well staged. A pleasant breeze of exotic colour in British cinema with a nice opportunity to see expert farceur Hare and how amazing to see Hattie Jacques playing Joan’s mother! Filmed in Mallorca, Spain. We must throw off our shackles. We must go back to the simple life. We must return to Mother Nature!

One Way to Denmark (2020)

Aka Denmark. Medical reports indicate you are sick no longer. Unemployed down on his luck Welshman Herb (Rafe Spall) is broke and can’t see his son. Life in his small town is dank and miserable. He gets mugged for his rubbish phone, the neighbours are awful and he has nothing going on. After he sees a TV documentary about Danish open prisons he hits on a plan to stage a heist with a fake firearm and get himself arrested so that he’ll at least have somewhere warm to sleep and regular food. But after hitching a lift and getting smuggled in a container, when he gets there he is befriended first by a dog and then by a wonderful woman Mathilda (Simone Lykke) who brings him to her home for dinner, introduces him to her little daughter and sceptical mother and he rethinks the plan. Then he doesn’t have enough money to pay for a ticket back home … Your father was a pain in the arse tramp but you know what I think? You’ve beaten even him. The premise harks back to Ken Loach with the dole office problems, the family divisions and the general air of hopelessness – but the larkiness and the mates (including Joel Fry and Tim Woodward) enliven Spall’s performance which struggles to rise above the writing by Jeff Murphy. It feels stuck between wanting to break out as a man who potentially could stage a heist a la Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon and the tenets/constraints of social realism – when Mathilda protests Wales must be beautiful, you feel for Herb’s attempts to explain just how dreadful it really is. The juxtaposition of the ease and relative modern luxury of flat Denmark with rainy stony mountainous Wales is nicely established. There are some moments of gentle comedy and the best visual is when Herb is caught and photographed by the police – his mugshot reads ‘A. Herbert’ which raises a chuckle but generally this is as lacking in laughs and drama as the Danish scenery and the relationships don’t ring true. Directed by Adrian Shergold. Incarceration tourism – that’s a fucking new one

Red Joan (2019)

Socialists can have glamour. Joan Stanley (Judi Dench) is a widow living out a quiet retirement in the suburbs when, shockingly, the British Secret Service places her under arrest. The charge: providing classified scientific information – including details on the building of the atomic bomb – to the Soviet government for decades. As the interrogation gets underway, Joan relives the dramatic events that shaped her life and her beliefs. As a physics student at Cambridge in the Thirties, young Joan (Sophie Cookson) is befriended by beautiful Sonya (Tereza Srbova) and her cousin Leo Galich (Tom Hughes) who grew up together after Sonya was orphaned and their relationship is more like that of a brother and a sister than cousins. Joan falls in love with the intense intellectual Leo. He goes to Russia in 1939 and is stuck there when war breaks out. Joan takes a job as assistant to married scientist Prof. Max Davis (Stephen Campbell Moore) at the wartime Tube Alloys project planning an atomic bomb for Britain. Leo returns from the Soviet Union and asks her to pass information but she refuses. She starts sleeping with Max on a trip to Canada where an encounter with Leo (now based in Montreal) sees her refusing once again to be a spy. Back in England she watches horrified the newsreel footage of the bombing of Hiroshima and finds herself sympathetic to the Soviet cause. But she accuses Leo of using her and then finds him dead, an apparent suicide. She tries to make contact with Sonya again … We’re not on the same side any more. Adapted from Jennie Rooney’s titular novel (based on the life of Melita Norwood) by Lindsay Shapero, this spy drama is meticulously made and attractively played by a talented cast. (If Tom Hughes isn’t the next James Bond I’ll eat one of the extravagant hats on display here). However some crucial plot points and revelations are played down in a badly mismanaged script which effectively diffuses any suspense into two near-identical scenes of the police staging a search of the Alloys department to find evidence about the supply of information to the Soviets. The flashback structure doesn’t always come off, the passage of time isn’t demarcated well and the relationship between Dench and her barrister son Nick (Ben Miles) doesn’t hit the dramatic point required: in fact his father’s identity isn’t clear in a parallel plot with Sonya’s pregnancy in the 1930s. The real culprit recruiting people to the Russian side is far too obvious, the tension is flat and it’s paced poorly. Not what you expect from a director of the calibre of Trevor Nunn but the story is intriguing nonetheless and Cookson does well with the role. Beautifully shot by Zac Nicholson. Is anything you ever told me actually true?

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

I’m not in love with you any more. Ex-litigator Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) leaves his three gifted children in their adolescent years and winds up in prison for fraud then returns to them after they have grown, falsely claiming he has a terminal illness when he’s thrown out of the hotel whose bills he cannot meet. He insinuates himself back into the family home where his archaeologist wife Etheline (Anjelica Huston) is dating accountant Henry Sherman (Danny Glover). Maths whiz and business genius Chas (Ben Stiller) is a widower who survived the plane crash that killed his wife the previous year and moves his sons Ari (Grant Rosenmeyer) and Uzi (Jonah Meyerson) back to the family home convinced their apartment is too dangerous. Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a depressive playwright who hasn’t had a play produced in seven years. She is married to older neurologist Raleigh St Clair (Bill Murray) who doesn’t know any of her secrets. Formerly successful tennis player Richie (Luke Wilson) is on a neverending world cruise following a disaster on court. When he realises he’s in love with Margot, his adopted sister he contacts their neighbour Eli Cash (Owen Wilson) a lecturer and popular novelist who himself starts romancing Margot but dabbles in drugs. Royal’s arrival coincides with each family member enduring a crisis that seems insurmountable and living together again brings things to a head …  This illness, this closeness to death… it’s had a profound affect on me. I feel like a different person, I really do. Flat symmetrical compositions with intricate production design and little camera movement. Ironic soundtracks. Blunt wit. At first glance Wes Anderson’s films might feel too contrived:  highly stylised yet with an inimitable tone, destined forever for the shelf labelled Quirk. This is reminiscent of Salinger with its NYC setting, big brownstones, a dysfunctional family full of supposed eccentrics and is openly influenced by Le feu follet and The Magnificent Ambersons. At first glance it’s rambling and lacking construction. But at the centre of it is a performance of paternal dysfunction by Gene Hackman that’s genuinely great – but even that appears to deflect from the roles played by his children.  They are a prism by which this deceitful man’s life is viewed. Hence the title.  It was written for him against his wishes, says Anderson. There is an undertow of sadness reflected by the repetition of Vince Guaraldi’s theme from TV’s Charlie Brown series (and what an extraordinary soundtrack underpins this bittersweet comic drama, with everyone from The Clash to Elliott Smith busy expressing those sentiments the characters refuse). It’s a determinedly literary experience with Alec Baldwin’s voiceover ensuring that even if we miss the beautiful Chapter Titles (because this is based on a non-existent book…) we are always anchored in a sprawling narrative with its endearing cast of characters. In truth these are people who are unsuccessful adults, mired in grief, lost in unrequited love (inspiring two suicide attempts), depression and psychological problems, constantly beset by memories of childhood achievements they cannot reproduce in the real world.  Faking it. It is a work of profound sadness and understanding. Just look at the pictures. Written by Anderson and Owen Wilson. I wish you’d’ve done this for me when I was a kid