The actor Kiefer Sutherland announced the death of his legendary father Donald with a poignant message. It was a loving tribute from one actor to another and a son to his dad. Sutherland graduated with a double major in engineering and drama and went to train in acting at LAMDA in London where he was deemed too lanky and ungainly to make it. A decade later his iconoclastic looks, deep voice and penetrating pale blue eyes called out to a new generation with his anachronistic hippie-style dropout in The Dirty Dozen, Kelly’s Heroes and MASH, which made his name and placed him at the centre of the counterculture onscreen. He and Jane Fonda made an arresting film in Klute and briefly became a couple offscreen. I found his rangy, hangdog quality and droopy pale eyes especially appealing. He also had something of the old-world gentleman about him – Jane Fonda. Thereafter he went from leading man for auteurs from Nicolas Roeg (Don’t Look Now) to Bernardo Bertolucci (1900) and Fellini (Casanova), but nonetheless would create probably his greatest character as another grieving father (after Don’t Look Now) in Ordinary People when Robert Redford was making his directing debut. He was absurdly touching. He made himself popular with a youth audience again with The Kentucky Fried Movie and National Lampoon’s Animal House and appeared in more war movies, action fodder, comedies, sci-fi (the terrifying Invasion of the Body Snatchers), thrillers and period dramas, English-language and otherwise. He returned to Canada (where he spent his summers on his farm in Quebec) for several films including Blood Relations for French director Claude Chabrol. His peripatetic career and international lifestyle had the usual dips and curveballs but he was never far from mainstream attention and in the 1990s hit another high with JFK in a stunning five-minute scene. He played a pair of roles for writer/director Robert Towne, Without Limits and Ask the Dust, in part perhaps because of an uncanny resemblance to the filmmaker appearing to be an avatar for him in the characters he was playing. His latterday avuncular style made him a humorous Mr Bennett in the new adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and he became an icon for young people once again with his President Snow in The Hunger Games franchise. In television he made an impression in everything from Citizen X to Dirty Sexy Money, Trust and The Undoing. Lately he had a recurring role in Lawmen: Bass Reeves and at the time of his death he had completed his role in the film Heart Land. To quote Hadley Freeman, With his death we lose another grown-up in the room. Rest in peace, Donald Sutherland.
The Summer blockbuster was initiated with the release of Jaws in 1975. Adapted from the Peter Benchley novel which director Steven Spielberg saw when it was still in galley proofs, it limned Ibsen’s The Enemy of the People but viewers might also recall aspects of his father Nathaniel Benchley’s novel The Off-Islanders which became the film The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.
Benchley co-wrote the screenplay for Jaws with Carl Gottlieb. He plays a TV reporter in the 4th of July beach scene.
There were three versions of the fake Great White (Carcharodon carcharias) and they were all called Bruce after Spielberg’s lawyer.
Stuntwoman and actress Susan Backlinie who played Chrissie Watkins the shark’s first victim died 11th May 2024 at the age of 77.
Spielberg said of the principal cast: I did go for a big star initially because my first choice for Quint was Lee Marvin, but he wasn’t interested. What I heard was that he wanted to go fishing for real! He took his fishing very seriously and didn’t want to do it from a ‘movie’ boat. My second choice was Sterling Hayden, whom I thought would make an amazing Quint. He had an Ahab quality about him – he had done a film entitled Terror in a Texas Town in 1958, where he played an imposing whaler who walked around with a harpoon. I was a big fan of his, especially from the two films he had done with Stanley Kubrick, The Killing [1956] and Dr. Strangelove [1964]. I don’t remember why, but he wasn’t able to do the role.
There were other actors who wanted to play Quint, and then Dick Zanuck and David Brown suggested Robert Shaw – they had just worked with him in The Sting [1973], which they produced, and loved him. I’d just screened two films with Shaw to refresh my memory, including A Man for All Seasons [1966], in which he was spectacular. Based on that, and of course on From Russia with Love [1963] – with that great fight on a train where he played the nemesis to 007 – I said, “Wow . . . I wish I had thought of him! It’s a great idea!” He fortunately said yes.
Richard Dreyfuss was not my first choice either. I went to Jon Voight first, and he said no. I think we interviewed Timothy Bottoms as well as several other actors, including Jeff Bridges. I was a big fan of The Last Picture Show [1971] – I was going after everyone in the cast from that film, including Bottoms and Bridges. We got turned down or they weren’t available. These things happen all the time. Richard Dreyfuss got the part because I loved [George Lucas’s] American Graffiti [1973]. George was the one who told me, “Why don’t you cast Ricky Dreyfuss?” I sought a meeting with Richard, who said he was interested in seeing Jaws, but he wasn’t interested in being in it. I was persistent, and [Jaws co-screenwriter] Carl Gottlieb, who knew Richard well, kept saying to him, “Come on, it will be fun.” So, Richard accepted another meeting with me, and I talked him into it.
How I cast Roy Scheider is an interesting story. I was going to a whole series of actors, most of them unknown. There was an actor I liked from Serpico [1973] – it was not Al Pacino – as well as another one I had seen in an off-Broadway play. But the studio, Zanuck, and Brown were pressuring me to get a name for this part. I was having trouble finding someone I liked. Then, I remember going to a party one night, and Roy Scheider, whom I loved from The French Connection, came and sat down next to me and said, “You look awfully depressed.” I told him, “Oh no, I’m not depressed. I’m just having trouble casting my movie.” He asked what the film was – I explained it was based on a novel called Jaws and told him the entire plot. At the end of it, Roy said, “Wow, that’s a great story! What about me?” I looked at him and said, “Yeah, what about you? You’d make a great Chief Brody!”
And the famous speech?
The Indianapolis speech about the delivery of the atomic bomb is my favorite part in Jaws. It was conceived by [uncredited Jaws screenwriter] Howard Sackler – who only wrote a one-page monologue as Quint starts to talk about one of the reasons he hates sharks. It was a wonderful scene and I kept trying to get Howard Sackler to expand it, but he felt that shorter was better and never would extend it. One day, I was talking to John Milius, and I said, “Could you make this a speech?” And John said, “Sure, it’s a great idea. I’ll try.”
So, John sat down and wrote page after page, in long hand I believe, a very, very long speech for Quint. It was essentially too much but pared down I knew it was going to be great. When Robert Shaw, who was himself an accomplished writer, read it, he said, “It’s too hard for me to play. There’s too much John Huston in some of this monologue. Huston could say this, but I can’t do it as well as he would. Let me have a chance at rewriting it.” So, Shaw rewrote Milius, who had rewritten Sackler – the final speech in the movie is basically Shaw’s version of Milius’s version of Sackler’s version!
And the most famous line? We’re gonna need a bigger boat. This was improvised by Roy Scheider.
Spielberg said of the experience making his second theatrical-only film: Being on Jaws became a living nightmare, and not because I didn’t know what I was doing or because I was struggling to find the movie in my head. I knew the film I wanted to make. I just couldn’t get the movie I had in mind on film as quickly as I wanted. When we got out to the ocean, a lot of the crew got seasick, and once that passed, a kind of lethargy set in because we weren’t seemingly getting anything done. The end never seemed to be in sight, and yet I was the only person who could reassure the crew that there would be an end to this some day.
I never left the island because I knew that, if I did, I would never come back. Yet I never wanted to quit. Ever. I had terrible, despairing days where I could see nobody hiring me again, and I could imagine Jaws being my last studio movie. I thought I would probably go on to make independent films if I could get doctors and dentists to put up enough money to finance a little movie with four people playing cards in a room. Basically, I didn’t have much hope for any longevity for my career, but I wanted to finish Jaws because I had never stopped believing in the movie.
I thought that if we could pull the shark off – if we could get the audience to believe in this big, mechanical monstrosity, if it really worked, if it even floated – people would be frightened. But I had no idea, nor did anybody on the production, how difficult it was going to be to float that monstrosity and get it to work in the ocean. And none of us anticipated how long Jaws would take.
None of us understood the water.
It was made under the worst of conditions. People versus the eternal sea. The sea won the battle.
Spielberg describes the reaction at the first preview: We previewed the film at the Medallion Theatre in Dallas, Texas. It was the first time the public ever saw Jaws. I’d had only one experience prior to this with The Sugarland Express, where the preview audience just kept quiet the entire time. But with Jaws, it was very, very loud and people went crazy. This preview was the most extraordinary response I could ever have imagined.
At one point, I remember I was standing at the door, and after the death of the Kintner boy, a man got up and started walking out—I thought, Oh my God. Our first walkout. Then he began running and I went, Oh, no, he’s not walking out—he’s running out. I could tell he was headed for the bathrooms, but he didn’t make it and vomited all over the floor. And I just went, Oh my God, what have I done? What kind of a movie have I made? A man has just barfed because of my film. But the great news was, about five minutes later, he went right back to his seat.
The film’s success gave Spielberg carte blanche: The success of Jaws gave me final cut on every movie I’ve made since then. It gave me a chance to make Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I had written the story. I was writing the screenplay. No one wanted to touch it until Jaws became a phenomenon, and suddenly Columbia said, “Go make your movie.”
So, ultimately, Jaws was the gift that kept on giving.
All quotes from Laurent Bouzereau’s Spielberg: The First Ten Years (Insight Edition, 2023)
This is new. Ageing hitman Wilson (Ian McShane) is tiring of his life of violence. He heads to the island of Fuerteventura for a job. His target is absent from his remote modern villa but Wilson notices a young blonde woman arrive and go for a swim in the pool. She rides a motorbike. He decides to have a quiet holiday and books into a local hotel. At a bar he befriends bartender Gloria (Nora Arnezeder) and realises she is the woman who was swimming at the villa. He is unexpectedly drawn to American Star, the ghostly shipwreck she shows him on a beach. He forms unexpected connections including young Max (Oscar Coleman) a fellow resident at the hotel whose father’s snoring keeps him out of his room. As Wilson lets his guard down, he notices he’s being followed and is surprised to meet fellow hitman Ryan (Adam Nagaitis) who intrudes on a lunch with Gloria. When Wilson is invited by Gloria to meet her glamorous mother Anne (Fanny Ardant) he is berated by Ryan and it is then he realises the real identity of his target … Were you born in that suit? A laconic hitman on one last job. It’s an oldie but a goody as tropes go and we liked it when McShane appeared in Sexy Beast, but also when Clooney played The American and Stamp was The Limey, thematically and tonally similar territories. And did we mention The Hit, a 1984 cult classic also set against an arid Spanish backdrop with blazing sun? Yes, when it works, it works and the ingredients are blended nicely in the screenplay by Nacho Faerna. I like to meet people. That meeting with a disingenuous blonde who turns out to be his mark is something that just might move things around in Wilson’s world. The steady accretion of detail as well as surprising family revelations chip away at him as surely as the sun burns off the dried up landscape and internal textures accumulate. Wilson is a military man, a Falklands veteran whose experiences dictate his actions now. His unexpected connection with Ryan doesn’t spare his handler shadow when the inevitable cathartic violence occurs, Chekhov dictating our dramatic rules and professional hitmen having work to do. Uncle sends his love. There is a terrific emotional undertow and pressure in a thriller which pulses with the intelligent and charming performance by McShane at its centre: his face, his eyes, his voice anchor this journey. When Ardant meets him she immediately detects danger for her daughter and their dancing is strangely gripping in a narrative which always keeps the audience one step away from brash exposition. The songs are very well chosen and there’s an impeccable score from Remate. Directed and edited by Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego with gorgeous cinematography by Jose David-Montero. Almost as old as me
It was while she was attending the 1956 Cannes Film Festival that stunning British Rank starlet Belinda Lee was spotted by Italian producers. The following year when she was shooting The Goddess of Love in the leading role as Aphrodite, the married actress had an affair with the equally married aristocrat Prince Filippo Orsini, a papal prince and member of Roman high society. It was a relationship that struck horror into the heart of the Vatican. The couple’s alleged attempts at suicide made headlines in those dolce vita years. After being smuggled into South Africa to make romantic adventure Nor the Moon By Night, Lee continued to make films in Europe, with directors like Francesco Rosi and Damiano Damiani, co-starring with everyone from Charles Aznavour and Daniel Gelin to Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman and Marcello Mastroianni in everything from realistic dramas, comedies and historical melos to serious arthouse, romances and colourful peplums.
The novelist Joy Packer whose book had been the source of that South African-set Rank film, said of Lee: Her hips were a little too big and her legs not quite enough for true grace, but what one noted was the beauty of her green cat-titled eyes, her mane of red-gold hair and the young firm contours of her throat and bosom. She was quiet and composed, easy to talk to, with a sleepy well-educated voice … She had a way of tossing her hair constantly as if she could not forget it… She was unaware of Africa, unaware of her surroundings or her job except when she was actually performing. People said that she was unapproachable. Perhaps she was, because she was wrapped in the shining cocoon of an illicit love affair. Her heart and soul were in Rome with her forbidden lover. Lee was just 22 at the time.
An almost unparalleled beauty, she was a very talented performer whose career was never properly nurtured in her home country where she had trained at RADA. She despised the typecasting that characterised her early career despite earning leading roles by her fourth film, Murder by Proxy and being voted 10th Most Popular Film Star by British film exhibitors in 1957 (the rest were men). Outside Britain she was treated as a cross between Sophia Loren and Melina Mercouri while unintentionally cultivating that reputation for scandal and notoriety via the tabloids and the feverish paparazzi. She said, I changed the day I got to Rome. One day I was a quiet English girl – the next I was a woman. What a time I had and how the Italian men love us actresses.
She is remembered today in her Devon hometown of Budleigh Salterton where a blue plaque is being unveiled at her former home, Cliff House, 10 Cliff Terrace.
Dr Phil Wickham, curator of the University of Exeter’s Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, said of the occasion: It is tremendous news that a blue plaque will now celebrate the life of Belinda Lee in her hometown. She is a fascinating figure who deserves to be better known. She was a star in two film industries who challenged the ways in which women were constrained in the post-war years. We are proud that she came from Devon and this plaque will help her to be remembered.
The changed role of women in society has prompted a re-evaluation of her life and aspirations in today’s more tolerant age. Lee appeared in much more overtly sexual roles than British producers had ever contemplated for her. In the Britain of the 1950s she was limited by a stereotype of demure and unthreatening beauty that fitted expectations of femininity at the time, at least for middle-class young women. The British press disapproved of her Italian career and private life, condemning Lee for being open about her desires. If she had lived perhaps she would have better fitted into the changing ethos of the 1960s.
She died tragically young in a car crash on Highway 91 just outside San Bernardino, California, 12th March 1961 with then fiance, filmmaker Gualtiero Jacopetti, who survived and dedicated his mondo documentary Women of the World, to her memory. She was all kinds of fabulous.
Lee is buried in the Cimitero Acatollico in Rome and she bequeathed £20,000 in the form of scholarships to the city’s Centre for Experimental Cinematography.
I might as well cash in on the notoriety I have got. It won’t last. I just want to live. I just want to have a good time.
Now is not the time for me to charging off on an adventure. Hove, on the south English coast. It’s 2014. 89-year old Bernie Jordan (Michael Caine) and his wife Rene (Glenda Jackson) have been living in a retirement home since Rene’s health deteriorated. Bernie, who served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, hopes to attend the 70th anniversary of D-Day but finds out that there are no spaces left on any group tours to Normandy for the event. Hesitant to leave Rene behind due to her fragile health, he is finally persuaded by Rene herself to find his own way to Normandy to join the commemorations. Bernie leaves the nursing home early one morning, encountering carer Adele (Danielle Vitalis) at the bus stop so he takes a taxi to Dover and gets a ticket on a ferry to France. On the ferry he meets RAF veteran Arthur Howard-Johnson (John Standing) who is part of a group tour. When Arthur sees Bernie with just a carrier bag and discovers that Bernie is travelling on his own, he invites him to join them and even to share his hotel room in France which is a pre-paid twin. Bernie is reluctant at first but ultimately agrees. Back in the UK, the care home staff are all in a panic over the mysterious disappearance of Bernie, whose whereabouts Rene does not reveal until much later in the day, when she confesses the truth to Adele, that he has escaped to Normandy. She has been diagnosed with a terminal illness and has only a short time left and she has not told Bernie about it because it would only worry him. Arthur gets a ticket for Bernie at the commemorative ceremony which is directly behind the Queen and President Obama but Bernie gives his ticket, and Arthur’s, away to Heinrich (Wolf Kahler) a German soldier who also fought on D-Day and has come to revisit Sword Beach. Leaving the ceremony behind, Bernie and Arthur head to the Bayeux War Cemetery, where Arthur looks for his brother’s grave while Bernie visits the grave of Douglas Bennett (Elliott Norman) a comrade-in-arms who was killed at the Normandy landing on D-Day after Bernie reassured him that he would be alright … A ninety year-old coffin dodger honours the glorious dead. The story of Bernard Jordan’s trip to the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings caught the public imagination in 2014 and inspired this and The Last Rifleman, released within weeks of each other. I’d go anywhere with you. Anywhere at all. The roles are presented with irony. Jackson’s is arrestingly lively, an unexpected pleasure given her situation in the care home where she busies herself and expresses great empathy for her young carer. Caine’s in contrast is quieter, thoughtful, focussing on the immediacy of the past before him. What a waste. When the camera tracks out wide from him at Douglas’ grave to the huge cemetery it proves a reminder that this is more than a memory. The film’s midpoint, when he listens to ex-pilot Standing’s story about his raid on Caen that likely killed his own brother is truly shocking. Indeed Standing gives probably the showiest performance in the film – complex, guilt-ridden, filled with little moments of meaning culminating in that dreadful revelation. The camaraderie in evidence with the German veteran pinpoints the idea of wasted lives while the contretemps with young black British veteran Nathan (Donald Sage Mackay) heightens the sensibility of devastated youth that pervades the theme. Interspersed with the contemporary sequences are flashbacks to Bernard in combat and his relationship with Irene during the war and they are touchingly played by Will Fletcher and Laura Marcus. There is an elegiac quality to the writing from William Ivory, qualified by the fact that Jackson died prior to the film’s release and Caine announced that it would be his swansong too. What a privilege it is to see these British cinema icons revelling in their screen element, balancing and complementing each other, scene by scene, five decades after their marvellous pairing in The Romantic Englishwoman. Directed by Oliver Parker. He has done it before. Only then of course they were shooting at him
Aka Arrête avec tes mensonges ie Stop With Your Lies. I don’t like raking over the past. You either feel nostalgic or disappointed. Novelist Stéphane Belcourt (Guillaume de Tonquedec) agrees to be the guest of honour at a celebration for a famous brand of cognac, even though he does not drink alcohol. When he returns to his hometown of Cognac for the first time in 35 years, he meets Lucas (Victor Belmondo) the son of his first love, Thomas Andrieu (Julien de Saint-Jean) a handsome farm boy who disappeared after they had a relationship in their final year at the local lycee when Stéphane (Jeremy Gillet) was hoping to become a writer after university in Bordeaux. Lucas represents the brand in Los Angeles and is leading a group of Americans around the area on a tour. Stéphane and Lucas go on an occasionally painful journey of discovery about who Thomas really was and why he did what he did throughout his life while attending events, embarrassing the Americans and socialising with the bourgeois great and good. Lucas tells Stéphane his father was only happy when Stéphane would appear on television yet wouldn’t have his books in the house. Lucas concludes that Stéphane has been writing about Thomas for years. Then the revelation that Thomas committed suicide the previous years shakes the author out of his complacency and he realises Lucas is the person really behind his invitation … What was my father like? The source novel by Philippe Besson is a confessional memoir of sorts, so this is a generative text on several levels – a kind of roman a clef transposed into a different format where other forms of recognition take place, catharsis on the part of the leading men just the start. He only ever brightened up when you were on TV. Writerliness is one facet, gay life another, rites of passage in a small town yet another. Life here and with you are different things. They’re different worlds. It is however a photograph which gives rise to the greatest gear shift – presaged when Lucas takes Stéphane to the quarry which was his father’s favourite location to hide from the world. It’s not the author’s first time at that spot. You write to someone to make them present again. The emotions of youth, the impact of first love, the knowledge that nothing can be that sweet again, the disappointment of adult experience, all coalesce into radically antithetical futures for this boy from his past. Nothing can ever be as fun as having sex and dancing in that bedroom to the music of Téléphone. One of the most gratifying moments is Thomas seeing Stéphane wearing his band shirt in the school corridor. There is comedy and irony aplenty – from the vehicle swaps to the running joke that an author who avoids alcohol is here to celebrate an internationally acclaimed drink and his attempts at humour when he recounts to the group of American tourists a story of what happened to him in a West Hollywood bar when he did consume a glass filled to the brim with pastis is disarmingly shocking. And, in the pantheon of French performers there is another kind of recognition because those mobile features and sad-dog eyes can only belong to the grandson of Bebel, the latest generation of Belmondo to take on the acting mantle. He plays the deceitful trigger to the opening of old wounds with sentiment and aplomb. I already know I’ll never be this happy again. When Stéphane ends up freestyling his speech at the end the themes are summed up in his monologue. The book (translated from the French by Molly Ringwald) is a deeply gratifying literary experience. The film has different modes of address, fulfilling in another way. The screenplay is co-written by director Olivier Peyon, Vincent Poymiro, Arthur Cahn and Cécilia Rouaud. You’ll write about all this. You can’t help it
Thirty years ago David Thomson could write of Clint Eastwood, Has there ever been so unneurotic, so steadfast, or so steadily improving a moviemaker?As a director, he matches his own work as an actor: acutely aware of his limitations, he knows how to look good, how to serve and broadcast himself, while doing interesting, honest work in the mainstream. There is nothing coy, boastful or unstable, nothing out of balance or true. Who could have foretold that when those words were published in Thomson’s 1994 edition of his Biographical Dictionary of Film that this was around the midpoint of the auteur’s career? For today at the age of 94 Eastwood is preparing Juror No. 2, allegedly his final film as director. Thomson’s commentary concluded with the words, The test that awaits Eastwood is whether he can find himself in neurosis and failure. And what has he done in the last quarter century alone to credit the shrewd critic? Investigated masculinity itself in its many colours as his own age has advanced – from Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino and Sully to American Sniper and The Mule and Cry Macho, boxing dramas, suburban race melodrama, political critiques, sardonic musical road movies. And the rest. A gallery of male neurosis, failure and a portrait of America itself. We salute you, Mr Eastwood. Many happy returns and more of them! #730days2straightyearsofdailypoststomondomovies
In the week it’s been announced a fourth entry in this series Mad About the Boy is due for imminent production, it’s incredible to think that it has been going for close to a quarter of a century. The first adaptation in what became a franchise was released twenty-three years ago today.
Helen Fielding’s hit 1996 novel was a rewrite of Pride and Prejudice and became a cultural milestone. A film adaptation was inevitable.
If the search for the iconic and beloved 32-year old slacker singleton heroine wasn’t quite that for Scarlett O’Hara it seemed of almost national import so the casting of the very un-British Renee Zellweger caused a ripple of consternation but it turned out to be an inspired choice.
She allegedly gained twenty pounds to play Bridget who notes her weight daily in her diary and struggles into her clothes with the help of very big pants.
The meta-casting of Colin Firth, TV’s Darcy from the BBC’s global hit adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, as Bridget’s love object human rights lawyer Mark Darcy, hit the sweet spot. It also meant Firth could send himself up and move on from the typecasting that had followed that other iconic role.
That TV series’ screenwriter Andrew Davies co-wrote the screenplay with Fielding and her onetime boyfriend, romcom king Richard Curtis.
Hugh Grant delighted as the devilish Daniel Cleaver, the rival for Bridget’s affections.
Directed by Sharon ‘Shazza’ Maguire, Fielding’s BFF and immortalised in the film by Sally Phillips, one of the posse helping Bridget through her trials and tribulations, the film was a huge hit and a critical success.
Zellweger was nominated for an Academy Award for her charming performance. Long live Bridget Jones!
Didn’t you once tell me a shock might kill her? When three robbers including Nicholas Conway (Kieron Moore) rob and murder her jeweller father Talbot (Ian Fleming) who is en route to the apartment of a wealthy client Farnborough (Martin Benson), Talbot’s daughter Jean (Elizabeth Sellars) arrives on the scene and gets a good look at Nicholas who has given her father the deadly blow. The police chase the men through London and the thieves’ car crashes and bursts into flames. Nicholas manages to get away and makes his way to his doctor brother Michael (Edward Underdown) who patches him up. He agrees to give him an alibi and conceal the situation from their mother without knowing what’s happened. When the police led by Inspector Trubridge (John Horsley) and Inspector Perkins (Robert Raglan) fail to get enough evidence to charge Nicholas, whose day job is in an insurance office, Jean resolves to get it herself. She takes up lodging with Michael and the men’s elderly mother (Ethel O’Shea) over his surgery. Then Nicholas sees her without realising who she is and Jean allows a relationship to progress to the point that he gives her a key to his flat while he continues his criminal ways and several robberies are carried out by his gang across London. However Farnborough wants his jewellery from the Talbot theft … If ever I see that man again I shall recognise him. Written and directed by the prolific and reliable John Gilling, this British B has some cool credentials with a score by Stanley Black and editing by Sid Hayers who would go on to make some decidedly nifty horrors (Night of the Eagle is a Mondo favourite). Sellars gives one of her best performances in the lead, swarthy Moore is an agreeable villain, a chancer with occasionally odd diction as if he’s a refugee from somewhere vaguely Eastern European, while Underdown is an entirely unlikely romantic anti-hero. He comments of his louche little brother, Nicholas is a more natural product of this miracle age. When Jean makes out with Nicholas they have some nicely cutting moments particularly when he thinks he’s about to conquer her: I’ve got a hunch about you. I’d like to get a glimpse of what’s under that armour plating – an iceberg or a volcano. Ooh er missus! Happily the screenplay is filled with these kinds of exchanges while the tension ramps up and the dressing-gowned gentleman crook gathers the thugs to get his booty back. O’Shea has a good supporting role as the concerned Irish mother of the Cain and Abel sons. Expressive Scotswoman Sellars was such an interesting performer, initially training in law but then switching to RADA and the theatre with terrific roles at the RSC and getting some decent parts in B movies like this plus a lead opposite Dirk Bogarde in the previous year’s The Gentle Gunman. The year after this she had roles in two big Hollywood productions, The Barefoot Contessa and Desiree and she had a terrific role in The Shiralee (1957). Later she would be reunited with Moore in The Day They Robbed The Bank of England (1960) and with the director in The Mummy’s Shroud (1967). She died in France at the great age of 98 in 2019. Moore coincidentally also lived in France where he died in 2007. What a well educated pair they were – Moore’s medical studies at University College Dublin were disrupted by his film career. Shot by Monty Berman around St Paul’s and Chelsea and at Alliance Studios in Twickenham with some quite thrilling tracking shots during the car chase. Watch out for Sam Kydd as a ticket collector. A thief can always tell a thief
Find a lap. Purr when stroked. Pampered streetwise cat Beckett (Mo Gilligan) takes for granted the lucky hand he has been dealt when he is rescued and loved by Rose (Simone Ashley), a kind-hearted and passionate student researching bees at university. Beckett settles into a comfortable life in the country. literally becoming a fat cat, while Rose and her klutzy boyfriend Larry (Dylan Llewelly) continue her project. Rose has to deal with the mentor Professor Craven (Bill Nighy) who unbeknownst to her is a rival plotting to sabotage her work because of a childhood incident with a bee. When Beckett loses his ninth life and he is inadvertently locked out of the house he shares with Rose, fate steps in to set him on a transformative journey … You don’t know how one small insect can change the world. Deviating from your premise with a subplot that also involves non-human species is an unusual way to navigate narrative. First this is about a cat. Then it’s about bees. The plot lines in the screenplay by Ash Brannon, Ken Cinnamon, Karen Wengrod and Leland Cox intersect in the character of Rose and when Beckett gets lost, they diverge and he goes through the kind of kitty cat disasters that clock up to his requisite number of lives. He presents himself to Rose when he comes back in different forms with the different-coloured eyes that mark him out. Look at you, all charm with your big stupid face! Despite the excursion into thriller territory there’s a buoyancy to the drolly villainous performance of Nighy as the fake mentor/real rival who will be pretty familiar to anyone carrying out research in the world of academia. The message here is about complacency,, valuing friendship and what you’ve got, the pointlessness of holding grudges and seeking revenge (even if Nighy makes it sound very pleasurable). Beckett gets to have a real hero’s journey and Gilligan acquits himself well as a presumably Sarf Lahndon feline. The animation is pleasing, the characterisation is fun and it all comes together in the end in a kind of animal shelter afterlife with a real-life conclusion bound to tug at the heartstrings. Pop star Zayn Malik makes his movie debut voicing Cameron and Kirk. Directed by Christopher Jenkins. When you live and love with all your heart one life is all you need
mondomovies 