Identity (2003)

What have you done? A judicial hearing is discussing a convict named Malcolm Rivers who awaits execution for a vicious mass murder that took place at an apartment building. The execution is due to take place in a couple of days. Journals belonging to Malcolm are discovered misfiled in the case evidence; they were not introduced during the trial. Malcolm’s psychiatrist, Dr. Malick (Alfred Molina) and his defence attorney (Carmen Argenziano) argue that the journals prove Malcolm’s insanity. Meanwhile, an accident happens on a road in rural Nevada during a torrential rainstorm. Alice York (Leila Kenzle) is hit by former LAPD cop now limo driver Ed Dakota (John Cusack) who is working for impatient 80s TV actress Caroline Suzanne (Rebecca De Mornay). They bring Alice, her husband George (John C. McGinley) and Alice’s nine year-old son Timmy (Bret Loehr) to a remote motel run by manager Larry Washington (John Hawkes). The phone lines are down, the roads are flooded and there’s no hope of getting medical attention for Alice who is badly injured. The group is joined by correctional Officer Samuel Rhodes (Ray Liotta), who is transporting convicted murderer Robert Maine (Jake Busey); prostitute Paris Nevada (Amanda Peet) who is driving from Las Vegas home to Florida to start her own citrus grove; newlyweds Lou Isiana (William Lee Scott) and his wife Ginny (Clea DuVall). With the group of ten strangers in separate rooms, Suzanne is killed outside by an unknown assailant. Ed finds Suzanne’s head in a dryer in the laundry room along with the number 10 motel key. Maine is suspected to be the killer as he has escaped. Ginny locks herself in the bathroom to escape Lou during a fight but the assailant strikes again, murdering Lou out of Ginny’s sight. At the hearing, Malcolm’s diaries indicate that he suffers from dissociative identity disorder, harbouring eleven separate personalities. His defence attorney argues that he is unaware of his crimes, which is in violation of existing Supreme Court rulings on capital punishment. Dr. Malick introduces the concept of integrating the personalities of someone with DID as Malcolm is being brought in. While taking photos of Lou’s crime scene, Ed finds the number 9 key in Lou’s hands. He begins to suspect that the killer is counting down and targeting them in order. Maine fails to escape the motel area and he is subdued by Rhodes and Ed. Larry is told to guard Maine but suspicion falls on him when Maine is found dead. Rhodes and Ed find the number 8 key next to his body and they harass Larry, who takes Paris hostage … Is it a countdown? ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ How many great stories have proceeded from that situation? This grisly and highly psychological unofficial adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None by Michael Cooney is an atmospheric murder mystery which once concluded has us returning to the beginning to check out the gnarly plot which concludes with a twist on a twist. A happily familiar cast lines out in a motel that has resonances with the one called Bates. To this day he remains completely unaware of the crimes he committed. Propulsively written and commencing with a judicial hearing prior to an execution of someone who isn’t introduced until the final quarter, this has a cleansing if dangerous downpour framing the action at the motel where people start arriving following a terrible car accident. Where is my face? Mixing snappy characters with vividly impressive terminal dispatches and relentless rain, having people turn on each other and unravelling at high speed different characters, each a form of disguise, making the sex worker the ironic moral compass while Ed, the ostensible protagonist, tries to solve the puzzle, all contribute to a pleasingly corkscrew narrative. I saw you in an orange grove. * Spoiler alert* As the identifies confront each other while the murderer’s personality deconstructs and their numbers are inevitably reduced in the fantasy murder spree, the plot structure is revealed. It’s a cunning tale, wrapped up in the enigma of a fractured personality. Directed with verve by James Mangold who manages to visually imbue a highly internal dream of a script with dash and shocking externalised violence. Who am I speaking to right now?

Vertigo Was Released 9th May 1958

Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece of voyeurism, imagination and obsession, desire and control, was released on this day 66 years ago. Only recently deposed from its position as the greatest film of all time in the ten-year Sight & Sound poll, it was a flop on its release. As David Thomson says, We have learned how to watch it, and we have discovered the mortified figure Hitchcock often masked with his comedian persona. Charles Barr describes its impact: This story of a man who develops a romantic obsession with the image of an enigmatic woman has commonly been seen, by his colleagues as well as by critics and biographers, as one that engaged Hitchcock in an especially profound way; and it has exerted a comparable fascination on many of its viewers.

Adapted by Alec Coppel & Samuel Taylor (with an initial uncredited draft from playwright Maxwell Anderson) from Boileau- Narcejac’s novel D’entre les morts (trans: The Living and the Dead) it can be summarised as a haunting.

Retired San Francisco police detective John ‘Scotty’ Ferguson (James Stewart) is hired by wealthy old friend Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to investigate his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) who is exhibiting strange behaviour.

He rescues her from the water at the Golden Gate Bridge near Fort Point.

He fails to save her when she plunges to her death from the bell tower at Mission San Juan Bautista.

He meets Judy (Kim Novak), a dead ringer for Madeleine.

He makes her over so she looks identical to Madeleine …

There were mixed reviews although critics in the US liked it rather more than their British counterparts. Eric Rohmer’s review for Cahiers du Cinema commented, Ideas and forms follow the same road, and it is because the form is pure, beautiful, rigorous, astonishingly rich, and free that we can say that Hitchcock’s films, with Vertigo at their head, are about ideas, in the noble, platonic sense of the word.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

To start inventing you need something real first. Grenoble, France. In an isolated mountain chalet novelist Sandra Voyter (Sandra Huller) decides to reschedule her interview with a female literature student Zoe Solidor (Camille Rutherford) because her husband, university lecturer and aspiring author Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) plays music loudly on a loop in their attic, disrupting the interview, making recording impossible. After the student drives away from the chalet, Samuel and Sandra’s visually impaired son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) takes a walk outside with his guide dog Snoop (Messi). When they return home, Daniel finds Samuel dead in the snow from an apparent fall. Sandra insists that the fall must have been accidental. Her old friend and lawyer Vincent Renzi (Swann Arlaud) suggests the possibility of suicide while Sandra recalls her husband’s attempt to overdose on aspirin six months earlier after going off antidepressants. After an investigation, Daniel’s conflicting accounts of what happened shortly before his father’s death, combined with the revelation that Samuel sustained a head wound before his body hit the ground and an audio recording of a fight by Samuel and Sandra the previous day, Sandra is indicted on charges of homicide. A year later, during the trial, Sandra’s defence team claims Samuel fell from the attic window and hit his head on a shed below; the prosecution suggests that Sandra hit him with a blunt object, pushing him from the second-floor balcony. During a courtroom argument with Samuel’s psychiatrist Jammal (Wajdi Mouawad) Sandra admits she resented Samuel due to his partial responsibility for the accident that led to Daniel’s impaired vision: he should have collected him from school but called a babysitter instead so he could stay home and writer. In the recorded fight, Samuel accuses Sandra of plagiarism, infidelity and exerting control over his life before their argument turns physically violent. The prosecution claims that all the violence came from Sandra but she points out that they’d been having conversations and disagreements that he’d recorded for six months as a substitute for writing and his transcriptions when presented by him were not accepted by a publisher in lieu of a novel … I don’t believe in the the notion of reciprocity in a couple. Written by the married couple Justine Triet & Arthur Harari (who appears as a literary critic) during the COVID lockdown, director Triet’s film sustains its mysterious premise right until the conclusion which may prove disappointing – perhaps a European take on the customary bittersweet Hollywood ending. it’s a Choose Your Own iteration of the murder procedural with flashes of Hitchcockian wit throughout. There is a re-enactment and a single flashback but the eccentric courtroom presentation is very different to the Anglo-Saxon convention with witnesses for the prosecution and defence talking over each other, a low threshold for evidence and an equally bizarre concept of the burden of proof (opinion-led, apparently). Sandra’s bisexuality and her affairs are brought up as a reason for her husband’s violent arguments with her, his use of anti-depressants rooted perhaps at her contempt for him when their young son was blinded because he should have been picking up from school, her relentless output still not sufficient to pay the bills while he is at home, renovating, homeschooling Daniel, having no time to write outside of his teaching job. At the heart of the story is a blame game between husband and wife – an accident that caused Daniel’s sight loss and a burning envy of a wife’s success whose latest plot is largely ‘borrowed’ from a passage in a novel Samuel abandoned, a writer wannabe now reduced to transcribing daily home life as a form of autofiction. As the USB recording from Samuel’s keyring is re-enacted he accuses Sandra of stealing his time and ‘imposing’ her worldview upon him despite his having forced the family to relocate to his hometown where she speaks English and the use of language becomes an issue in this French-German union where nuance, suggestion and meaning are potentially lost in translation – English is the no-man’s land resort of communication. Sometimes a couple is a kind of a chaos. The discursiveness masks the fact that it is their blind son and his dog who are the sole witnesses to the accident, spicing up the issue of court appearances and compounding the ambiguous nature of the crime and the lack of compelling evidence. Triet and Harari wrote this with Huller in mind (following an earlier collaboration) and she is a very modern heroine, word-smart, intellectually able, psychologically penetrating and completely at ease with herself to the point of lying easily. She is superb as this take no prisoners character, taking nonsense from nobody and while profoundly concerned with her son’s well-being she also boasts a terrifically charismatic nonchalance. Nevertheless, she is obviously unnerved by the courtroom experience in a language not her own. A sidebar to the exposition is the frank admission by Vincent that he has long thought highly of her. This is of course about writers and what happens when one half of a couple is more accomplished and successful than the other and how envy can eat like a cancer through a relationship. Samuel is destroyed by what he has done to his son, Sandra has dealt with it through adultery while also cheerfully churning out novels and doing translations on the side. She is pragmatic above all. Does Samuel commit suicide and are the recordings made in order to frame Sandra for his alleged murder? Maybe. Did he fall or was he pushed? Is the flashback from the visually impaired son true? Does Daniel lie? Why did he make a mistake in his first account? Rage does not exclude will! Guilt, jealousy, blame, language, meaning, all suffuse this tension-filled narrative which asks questions about how writers make their work and how much it plunders their private lives. How and why the story turns unexpectedly marks out the forensic narrative style. Rightly lauded, the exceptional screenplay was awarded at the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs and the Academy Awards among others and the film won Cannes’ Palme d’Or with the Palm Dog going to Messi! The first 9 minutes of the film are dominated by that appalling music which frankly would drive anyone to murder, if you want to know the truth. We won’t even name it such is its earworm potential for homicidal triggering. Gripping. A novel is not life! An author is not her characters! #700daysstraightofmondomovies! MM#4547

The Secret of Seagull Island (1980)

Has anyone ever told you you have the most beautiful eyes? Barbara Carey (Prunella Ransome) flies to Italy to visit her blind sister Mary Ann (Sherry Buchanan) but arrives in Rome to discover she has apparently disappeared, last seen three weeks earlier, putting a concert at the music academy where she trains in jeopardy. Barbara approaches the British Consul for help in this uncharacteristic and worrying situation and Martin Foster(Nicky Henson) assists her. People don’t just disappear. He’s reluctant at first but then thinks a rather louche Italian Enzo Lombardi (Gabriele Tinti) might know of Mary Ann’s whereabouts but Lombardi denies all knowledge and Barbara doesn’t believe him, getting into a scrap on his boat which might turn into something much worse when Martin turns up and rescues her. Local police believe they might have found Mary Ann’s body with eyes gouged out and then when it’s not her, link Mary Ann with another blind woman who is in hospital after a marine accident, found adrift in a dinghy – that’s not her either. It’s suggested that a reclusive rich man called David Malcolm (Jeremy Brett) the owner of a private island between Corsica and Sardinia might hold the answer to the mysterious murder of a series of blind women. When Barbara visits the blind woman in hospital a weird high pitched recording of birds is played in her room and the woman throws herself out of the window while Barbara is hit on the head. She now is apparently blind and introduces herself to Malcolm who has a thing for blind women. Then she visits his island where his disfigured son makes her acquaintance despite the fact that along with Malcolm’s first wife he’s supposedly dead. Malcolm’s wife Carol (Pamela Salem) isn’t too happy at the new arrival on her patch … I don’t know what it is about you but ever since we met I’ve been behaving like James Bond. Once upon a time, the Summer of 1981 to be precise, ITV showed a compelling British-Italian drama miniseries at teatime on Saturday called Seagull Island. And we wanted to see it again. It has cropped up all these years later thanks to the Talking Pictures channel, but in an entirely different form, a feature film, meaning that a couple of hours of drama (actually somewhere in the region of 200 minutes) have been lost to editing antiquity. Barbara is constantly in jeopardy and physically attacked and her situation pivots on Malcolm’s storytelling and behaviour with Brett turning into an expansive and thrillingly evil bad guy and Henson rolling up now and again to save the day. The plot is a lot less clear in this version than in the original series but the generic ancestry is happily in the suspenseful giallo tradition where American actress Buchanan originally made her name with What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (1974). It’s satisfyingly glamorous, delighting in the setting and the trophies of wealth – speedboats, lovely production design and costuming. There are some very good underwater scenes but there’s also a deal of gore and violence. We know it’s more than forty years since this was made but it’s still rather sad that the four leads (Ransome, Brett, Henson, Tinti) are long departed this earthly realm. Directed by Nestore Ungaro who co-wrote the screenplay with Jeremy Burnham and Augusto Caminito. The score is by Tony Hatch. The island isn’t large enough to make one feel lonely

Tread Softly (1952)

The door must remain locked. The seals must remain unbroken. When Madeleine Peters (Frances Day) the star of a new musical revue written by Keith Gilbert (John Bentley) walks out of the show in a plot hatched by her lover Philip Defoe (Olaf Olsen) he thinks the company will have to agree to being forced into keeping her as part of their contract despite her unsuitability. He doesn’t reckon on their finding another location – the Regency, a derelict theatre which has allegedly been haunted since their ‘Hamlet’ leading man died on the premises 40 years earlier. The eccentric widow Isobel Mayne (Nora Nicholson) of the dead actor is only persuaded to hire it out when her son Alexander (Michael Ward) agrees and the company accedes to her request that her late husband’s dressing room remain locked with nobody permitted to enter. With chorus girl Tangye Ward (Patricia Dainton) replacing Madeleine, rehearsals commence at the new home but then a body is found – it’s Alexander Mayne. Tangye is scared off and Gilbert comforts her but when Madeleine is found dead there too the police are called in and Inspector Hinton (Ronald Leigh-Hunt) discovers a link with missing emeralds from a jewel theft carried out years earlier with a suspect recently released from prison. As the secret is close to being exposed everyone’s life is in danger but the show must go on … Murder has been shut up there for forty years. Don’t let it out! The lovely actress Patricia Dainton might have expected a bigger career considering the showcase she has in her debut with five terrific song and dance routines in a very well plotted pacy backstage suspenser. Adapted by Gerald Verner from his novel The Show Must Go On with additional dialogue credits attributed to Donald Ginsberg & Vivian Cox, this was originally a radio serial before it was novelised. In a case of life imitating art, young usurper Dainton did indeed overtake Day in a sense, given that she was now definitely a film actress with a decade of good roles ahead of her, albeit in second features, while Day, a multi-talented star of previous decades, faded from view both as a film and theatre performer (she was a lead in Shaw’s final play Buoyant Billions, 1948) with this among her final screen roles. Her last would be for director Charles Crichton in 1957’s There’s Always a Thursday. Her costumes here were provided by Hardy Amies (who also dressed the Queen). Day’s storied private life with affairs throughout British society (male and female alike, from princes to heiresses) is the stuff of rumour and scandal. She was a panellist on the TV show What’s My Line? when feature offers dried up. This was Dainton’s first time to be paired with Bentley – in fact their next film together, and her second film, Paul Temple Returns, was released one month after this, in December 1952. Her ‘discovery’ on stage therefore coincides with her discovery in the film in a classic theatrical story (mimicking her own background as a dancer) and the romance and mystery produce several twists. John Laurie plays Angus McDonald, the theatrical agent with Olivia Winter his assistant played by Betty Baskcomb, the daughter of famed comic A.W. Baskcomb and who made her screen debut in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. Aside from the crazy camp dancing by Colin Croft, staged by Alfred Rodriguez, perhaps the oddest thing of all in this production is the similarity between the title song (in a few different iterations here) and the 1980s pop hit, Move Closer. Watch out for legendary choreographer Kenneth MacMillan as a dancer in the troupe. Filmed at London’s Granville Theatre, Waltham Green, long since demolished, as well as Marylebone Studios, this is directed by the very accomplished former documentarian David MacDonald, who earned his movie stripes assisting Cecil B. DeMille and who made some terrific melodramas in the 1940s (The Brothers, The Bad Lord Byron) but was relegated to Bs and could have made much better use of the fascinating locations here. And just think what Stanley Donen could have done with those musical numbers by Ivor Slaney! Brush away the dust – you’ll find an older star