another terrific film

I've been travelling and writing quite a bit recently, hence no blog since June. We've been to Berlin and Lübeck, fascinating places, the latter a rather pleasant surprise, especially as regards art and marzipan…(Incidentally our city Exeter was bombed in WW2 in retaliation for the devastation of Lübeck, Hitler's so-called Baedeker raids of 1942.) Then the new book Getting On (Poems 2000-12) was launched here in Exeter, with a further launch and reading scheduled at Bookmarks in London next week (Nov 6th).

At present our main library is undergoing major alterations and refurbishment, moving to a site next door: all these changes and (let's hope) improvements will take about 14 months apparently. Alongside the staff shake-ups and redundancies, all too many books and dvds are being sold off at bargain prices: in terms of film, this has meant we've watched a variety of interesting foreign classics, award winners and recent indie stuff (because that's what The Powers That Be are generally keen to get rid of!) None of them easily classifiable, let alone qualifying as mainstream movies.

Among some unexpected treasures not so far listed to be sold off, is Leap Year, a terrific Mexican film directed by an Australian director in his mid-thirties, Michael Rowe. Leap Year dates from 2010, when it won the Golden Camera award at Cannes for best debut film. It's quite gruelling and explicit – one-room, low-budget filming, while the acting of Monica del Carmen is courageous and extraordinary. Here's the supreme antidote to all the sick-making Hollywood shlock pumped out about dating and human relationships: in its pared-down (89 mins) style – a quasi-Bressonian eroticism? – and its extreme and unrelenting sincerity, Leap Year is strong stuff. Its frankness might well offend, provoking shock and defensive emotional reactions from many quarters – especially among the narrower sorts of feminists, the censorious prudes and lovers of sentimental cliché, and all those unthinking consumers of standard porn – none of whom would properly engage with the brutal and moving realities of the film's sexual politics. And it's not simply about gender attitudes, big city isolation and loneliness, but also very much concerned with class, race and economics in Mexico, where Michael Rowe has lived for many years. Rowe's stubborn persistence in getting his uncompromising script accepted and, after years of difficulties encountered, managing to direct it so effectively, bodes well for the future of someone who seems like a genuine auteur. Good luck to him, the award for his Año Bisiesto was no more than he deserved.

canine clerics and doggy Deans

The 2008 UK-NZ co-production, Dean Spanley – is still further cause for celebrating our excellent city library. This film is a delight, a true lettuce, a veritable 'little gem' – 96 mins only, crisp and perfectly delicious, excellent through and through.

Its pedigree, however, is as weird, wonderful and unexpected as can be. The extraordinary plot, unusually witty and engaging, is drawn from Lord Dunsany's novel My Talks With Dean Spanley. Dunsany (1878-1935), was an Anglo-Irish peer, friendly with Yeats, Gogarty and other literati of his time. He wrote in many fields, in verse and prose, and had plays performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. He's remembered these days, if at all, for various anthologised supernatural tales in collections here and there; these uncanny stories may seem rather understated by current tastes, and occasionally a bit whimsical, but they're generally literate and well worth seeking out.

I've not read the Dunsany novel on which the film is based, but the screenwriter is another original, the veteran Alan Sharp. Sharp, a Scottish novelist who moved to the USA in the Sixties, and now lives in New Zealand, worked with distinction in Hollywood on some terrific movies. I recall and recommend Night Moves and Ulzana's Raid – just two of his screenplays, thriller and western respectively, which managed to put various new twists on those declining genres. The quality of the dialogue and narrative is almost guaranteed, therefore, by this unlikely Celtic combination, ancient and modern. And the fine and perfectly judged direction is by a relatively new hand, Toa Fraser, a (thirtyish?) New Zealand guy.

As for the story, it's a very curious narrative, set in Edwardian times, about reincarnation and metempsychosis and father-son relationships and the ways of dogs and man, wine and cricket, life and death! There's no violence, but considerable verbal wit and impeccable visual style in this film: the exceptional, high-quality cast (five principal characters) play it out quite beautifully. Entrancing, hilarious and yet poignant performances by them all…We've never seen Peter O'Toole better, he's quite brilliant here, while Jeremy Northam, Bryan Brown, Judy Parfitt and Sam Neill are superb in support. Neill, especially, is both funny and affecting as the eponymous Spanley, an anguished churchman strangely dogged by caninity, who seems ready to sell his soul for some rare Tokay. What an ensemble! The players all seem effortlessly to inhabit that vanished Edwardian world: it's the art that conceals art, thoroughgoing professionalism plus the odd dash of sheer inspiration. This is a ravishing film to look at also, neatly paced and edited what's more, and unlike anything else I've seen in years. "A genuine and surprising pleasure", Time Out called it, and their critic was spot on: Woof woof! sniff this special treat out now!

Jean Rhys and her new blue plaque

In London post-WW2 there's never been quite the equivalent of a Parisian crepuscule, that brief 'blue hour' to which Jean Rhys often refers in her pre-war writings set in these cities. At any rate, it was around 4 o'clock on a dull grey but luckily dry March afternoon (06.03.2012) when the impressive English Heritage blue plaque for Jean was unveiled.

Witnesses to this memorable day numbered about two dozen, most notably Jean's granddaughter Ellen Moerman and various Dutch and French friends and colleagues; the excellent organisers from English Heritage, Dr Celina Fox and Libby Wardle; my partner Maggie Fisher, photographer for both my memoirs of Jean; Paul Sieveking, co-founding Editor of Fortean Times, and a mixed bag of cross-generational admirers, along with several biographers of the psychologising/speculative variety. Ironically but perhaps fittingly too, there were no publishers, no literary critics and no journalists to be seen. Jean had stated quite specifically that she never wanted biographies of herself – something Ellen also confirmed. (See too my recent haiku The Author/ities included with the short speech mentioned below.) However, Jean would doubtless have been delighted to be accepted, acknowledged and celebrated so enthusiastically and indeed definitively as a famous name in 20th century literature.

The distinguished historian and author Celina Fox, opening the proceedings, spoke about the work of English Heritage and their criteria for blue plaque consideration. It was at Flat 22, Dr Fox pointed out, that Jean and her second husband Leslie Tilden Smith lived, after their visit to Dominica. This was the only time Jean revisited the island of her childhood and it had proved a bitter experience, though it did bear strange and extraordinary fruit in Wide Sargasso Sea. If Jean's most famous book was written in Devon, however, it was fitting she should be commemorated in London where she spent much of her life, the city serving as background for much of her fiction. At Paultons House Jean Rhys wrote that superb and tragic book Good Morning, Midnight. But it was also in Chelsea, in 1914, that she first began setting down in notebooks bought in the Kings Road, memories of an emotionally devastating love affair – the sort of traumatic material she could later describe, concisely and objectively, like no other modern writer.

The traffic on the Kings Road scarcely required raised voices, let alone microphones, and after my own short speech, I introduced Ellen, who concluded her own comments on this relaxed and touching occasion by drawing the red curtains (which a cherrypicker had earlier placed high on the wall), and so the plaque was permanently on view to London and the world.

Photos of this ceremony – plus the cover of a special commemorative booklet of a quartet of her terrific short stories, edited by Ellen Moerman – may be viewed at http://www.alexislykiard.com. Click on Articles and Reviews, then on Jean Rhys Used To Live There Once for my short eulogy on the occasion, and for further information about the proceedings.

Check out the Czechs and Greeks

Two more excellent dvds from Europe, via our beleaguered but still splendid city Library. First, though it hardly needs recommendation, especially after its initial, huge international success, an absolute milestone of Czech cinema – Milos Forman's superb picture from 1965, A Blonde In Love. Don't be put off by the iffy UK title: this modest, 81-minute B&W masterpiece is an unforgettable movie, so humane, quirkily funny and bitter-sweet about the thwarted dreams and expectations of young lovers. It proved a favourite with Lindsay Anderson, Ken Loach, Tom Milne and many other estimable cineastes and critics. As for director Forman, he progressed of course to Hollywood and a glittering career as an 'American' filmmaker, scooping in the process various Oscars for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. His colleague on ABIL, Ivan Passer, didn't do so badly either (see my earlier comments on Passer's terrific thriller Cutter's Way).

All in all, ABIL, a small-scale, perfectly realised and observant piece proved highly revealing and slyly satirical about Czech life under a repressive regime. (This was several years before the shortlived Prague Spring gave the ordinary unprivileged citizens a welcome glimmer of hope and temporary relief from their everyday struggle to exist.) If the film had not been such a prizewinner and runaway success both critically and commercially worldwide, Forman and his team might have found themselves in trouble with the homeland authorities.

But joyous subversion apart, there's just so much to enjoy: the eponymous teenage blonde Hana Brejchova (Forman's ex-sister-in-law) whose debut this was, gives a quite delightful performance, although performance is perhaps the wrong word for such a natural, poignant and attractive on-screen presence. Most of the amazingly well chosen cast were non-professionals, while the best-known actor, the male lead Vladimir Pucholt (another perfectly judged character) eventually moved to the UK, assisted by Lindsay Anderson and others. Pucholt, who had not been allowed to study medicine, his first love – apparently because of his suspect bourgeois background, or some such strange authoritarian pretext – moved again to Canada and became a paediatrician in Toronto. What a star, eh?! This sort of unusual honesty, a decent, anti-heroic, gently humane and good-humoured view of life suffuses the film: it's a touching, uplifting and at times hilarious work.

Not in this league, but very original and strangely affecting too, as well as humorous and unexpected, is Attenberg (dir. Athina Rachel Tsingari, 2010). As in ABIL, there's a stunning young actress, Ariane Labed, who won an award for her performance at the Venice Festival of 2010. Yorgos Lanthimos, director of an even odder, also recent Greek film called Dogtooth, plays one of the main roles, but it's all impeccably acted and directed. (In colour, almost inevitably these days – though as with the late great Angelopoulos, there's often mud, rain, factories, cheap hotels, dereliction and ugly concrete buildings – so sundrenched beaches etc don't actually get much of a look-in.)

Never mind, though: this weird, downbeat little tale of a virginal young woman trying to come to terms both with her father's terminal illness and her own inexperience confronting sex and mortality – let alone her own reclusiveness and problem with living in the 'real' world – has considerable fascination. It's eccentric and intriguing, but never boring… Labed's obsession with David Attenborough/'Attenberg' and his tv. studies of different species makes a strange and rather funny counterpoint to the glum confusion and manic girly behaviour depicted. Viewers may also learn, and perhaps be as outraged as we were, that the Greek Orthodox church does not allow cremation! Director Tsingari herself is very intelligent, and her comments (see the interview in the Extras) on this sort of social hypocrisy, and about her individual approach to directing the picture – referencing screwball comedy, buddy movies, rites of adulthood and much else, suggest she's a talent to watch. But… given the current Greek crisis… who will step forward to finance her next film? Fingers crossed.

Russia and 'Russitania'

I've just seen for the first time two old films, both set in 'old' Russia, both beautifully made B&W features, both very much of their times (the Forties and Fifties). Each looks back however to depict a particular vision of Russia during an earlier historical period: they cover the pre-Revolutionary era and WW2, embracing both melodrama and drama, kitsch and tragedy – courtesy of Moscow and Hollywood. Two inevitably different views of course – poles apart, fantastical or neoRealist – of Russia and what one might label 'Russitania'.

I'd highly recommend Summer Storm (d. Douglas Sirk, 1944), taken from Chekhov's only novel The Shooting Party, itself a little known yet fascinating piece of early crime fiction. Sirk was a wonderful director, another of those talented European emigrés to Hollywood, and he assembled an odd but splendid trio of leads: George Sanders, Edward Everett Horton, Linda Darnell – and even Sig Ruman as the latter's drunken dad! The lovely and planturous Linda D. plays a splendid femme fatale, not at all a fairhaired Chekovian belle paysanne, but superb and statuesque nonetheless. In his film review of July 1944, the great James Agee wrote of "Linda Darnell, flashing her eyes and teeth and flexing her glands at both men", adding wistfully, "since, in general appearance she is a kind of person I can imagine going on all fours for, especially if I were a provincial judge, I thought her not entirely ill cast." Sanders is Sanders, witty, worldweary and irreplaceable. He was actually closer to Chekhov than the other thesps (born, after all, in St Petersburg); indeed, David Thomson has remarked on the unique Sanders style of "ostentatious and articulate disdain", brilliantly comparing him to "an amused, intelligent and playful Nabokov narrator". Many incidental pleasures too, in this studio-bound but highly entertaining Russitanian flick – another fine dvd reissue.

As for Mikhail Kalatovov's 1958 Cannes prizewinner, The Cranes Are Flying, it's moving and gruelling, a big international breakthrough for post-war Soviet cinema, and a truly gripping anti-militarist piece. What's more, there's another, very different and equally gorgeous female lead, the beautiful and redoubtable Tatiana Samoilova, the great-niece of Stanislavski, no less! Film historian and distinguished documentarist Basil Wright has noted (1974) that here "we at last find a heroine of character, indeed of a certain elegance, very much unlike the puddingy future hausfrauen of the cliche-ridden Stalinist cinema." Apart from what Wright calls its "technical exuberance" the film is a salutary reminder of the sacrifices made by ordinary Russians during WW2 (their losses – around forty million dead – were on a scale scarcely imaginable to us today). Samoilova is deeply affecting while everyone, given the tragic nature of the story, seems to 'exist' on the screen, rather than 'act': this was very much a picture of the real world, rather than a skilfully contrived studio fantasy. But both these films, so expertly made, in their quite different ways provide unforgettable images and performances which, once seen, will surely linger in the minds of anyone who loves what Lenin called 'The Tenth Muse'.

two terrific noirs

Both dated 1950, both B&W as noirs should be, brilliantly photographed by Burnett Guffey and Hal Rosson respectively. Both are adapted from good, workmanlike pulp novels, by Dorothy B. Hughes and W.R.Burnett. (Who they? younger fans may ask, but even the minor genre names are easier to follow up now than they once were.) Anyway, both have superb casts of clearly defined, believable if not sympathetic, and of course flawed characters.

Nicholas Ray's In A Lonely Place (via Hughes) contains perhaps Bogart's and Gloria Grahame's finest performances, which in both their cases is saying something. John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle also has a topflight cast, though not of such starry names – Sterling Hayden, Jean Hagen [see my Feb 12 blog], Sam Jaffe, James Whitmore, Louis Calhern. (But there's an unforgettable cameo by the young Marilyn Monroe!) While IALP, a psychological thriller, has very little explicit violence, TAJ has quite a lot: both, though, are equally affecting/involving. You care rather more about these people than the stock characters and cliche'd types in most genre movies. But then Ray was a near-great director. Andrew Sarris, one of the best ever US film critics, in his outstanding and provocative book The American Cinema (1968), lists Ray in the section 'The Far Side Of Paradise', concluding that "His films are the indisputable records of a very personal anguish that found artistic expression for little more than a decade". Ray's characters are imbued with "all the psychic ills of the Fifties", says Sarris shrewdly as ever; indeed, Bogart's sardonic paranoia and Grahame's bruised and spiky beauty, are a perfect match (in acting terms) and make a perfect mismatch in terms of the twisting, cunningly paced narrative.

Where Ray's vision was often appealingly raw, imaginative (or dare one say, re Hollywood, poetic?) and always highly emotional, Huston tended to be overblown and overrated [he's "Less than meets the eye", in another very apt Sarris category], too often cynical and calculating. In his latter years Huston turned increasingly to adapting, or in my view, ruining, some great and inspired works of literature by Melville, Crane, Lowry, Tennessee Williams, McCullers, and Joyce – works whose obsessive poetry totally eluded him. TAJ is probably Huston's last truly excellent movie. In terms of getting everything absolutely right, that is… But it was good to see these two terrific noirs once again: they've worn well since I first saw them, in the Sixties – the Ray one of the best and sourest dissections of Hollywood, the Huston one of the best heist movies. They've recently been reissued/restored in dvd form and no movie collection should be without them.

auntie Beeb cops out again

The latest example/victim of the compromises that the cop-out mentality involves was a play last Saturday night in the regular weekend drama series – The Wire, on Radio 3. The Radio Editor of the BBC's official Radio Times magazine selected this play, Zurich, as her Choice of the Day, ending her mini-essay with the words "it's an ultimately uplifting story". This, along with the play's title, was the giveaway that must have tipped off many listeners to the cop-out ending. Why then bother to listen, albeit incredulously, to a threequarter hour play trundling towards a foregone conclusion?

We stuck with the play, however, because the "issue", (ghastly overworked word) which it tried none too well to dramatise, was, and remains, an important one, and not just for older generations. Two fortyish Irish guys – Paul wheelchair bound, paraplegic for 16 years after a car crash, accompanied by his longtime best friend Aidan – travel to Zurich for an AC/DC concert. Paul has told neither mother nor friend that he's decided to end his life at a Swiss clinic. (Did we hear 'Gravitas' substituted for 'Dignitas'?) In the course of the play Paul tells Aidan and us quite insistently that his life is limited, painful, humiliating, lonely and depressing; he feels as a severely disabled person that he has not had and cannot have, any meaningful relationships, and has absolutely nothing to look forward to except more long years of even worse suffering.

But Aidan ducks out of doing the brave, moral and decent thing – to comfort and help his friend get to the clinic and offer support on that final journey; instead, he angrily lectures him and promptly takes a taxi to the airport. Then, in a completely unlikely last-minute volte-face, Aidan dashes back to the clinic and arrives in the nick of time before the irreligious cynic can quaff the hemlock. Aidan bursts in without demur and persuades Paul, in a couple of preachy minutes flat, not to persevere with his long-considered and courageous decision to put an end to what's been a meaningless continuance rather than a meaningful existence. And so back they go to Ireland, no problem. "Just like that", as Tommy Cooper would have said.

Well, how nice and neat and safe and heartwarming! We can all switch off and feel better. But what of proper, serious debate – what price good sense, humanity and reason? 'Dignity in (not) Dying' it certainly wasn't – more like 'Humiliation in Going-on-living, or Larkin's "Man hands on misery to man". (Incidentally, Zurich came across as predictably patronising and sanctimonious towards disabled people. But noticing the preponderance of Irish names involved – author, production credits etc – one rather suspects some religious pressure somewhere behind the scenes and the unconvincingly pat and moralistic 'argument'.)

On another note, if you ever listen to Feedback on BBC R4 you'll rapidly conclude it's a waste of time contacting Auntie with even the slightest whiff of criticism. Listeners invariably get fobbed off with some statement that exudes defensive smugness, rather than any logical explanation, apology or (gawd forbid!) admission that a programme, producer or presenter might possibly have got something wrong, might perhaps have been partial, biassed or mistaken. Political correctness, waffle and avoidance of what the managers perceive as potentially controversial, will always win out.

It leads to a feeble style of broadcasting – driven by a seemingly general dread of causing offence to somebody somewhere, to anybody anywhere! – and it has its inevitable consequences of fudging and cant. These are exemplified by numerous trailers and warnings about the strong language and possibly distressing issues raised in the programmes to follow. When there's a really important issue – life and death – to deal with, we deserve more honesty or at least something better than what we're currently being fed.

death of a master

Upon the sad demise, a week or so ago, of one of the world's last indisputably great film directors, I'd meant to post some sort of comment, however sadly inadequate. But I did read some decent Obits, and meanwhile have been entranced, watching again (or in some cases seeing for the first time), various masterpieces (The Travelling Players; Landscape In The Mist, etc) by the man who was Greece's finest filmmaker, Theo Angelopoulos. At least he'd have had the brief satisfaction of seeing his films collected as dvds in three boxed sets, the last of which is generally available this month.

What a way to go, however! Angelopoulos was aged 75, directing his new film in Piraeus, when run down by a motorcyclist who turns out to have been an off-duty policeman. Road accidents of one kind and another, so often seeming absurd and arbitrary as well as particularly shocking, have curtailed any number of formidable creative talents (Nathanael West, Camus, Pollock, Clifford Brown, W.G. Sebald etc): you're left thinking 'I wish there'd been more time, more work, more opportunity to relish what might have come next'.

Still, the legacy of Angelopoulos, those long, slow, remarkable and remarkably complex films, may now be properly assessed. He was a true original, and anyone interested in the art of cinema will be fascinated by his work. You don't have to know about Greek myths, history or politics, but the more you do know or care to find out about Greece's past and troubled present, the better. If you want lots of violence, fast editing, loud music and all the other obvious and banal aspects of the current mainstream, you won't like Angelopoulos's unique style or his exquisite and original use of landscape, and the emotion and poetry will pass you by. Time and patience are required in order to appreciate to the full the imaginative and innovative cinema of Angelopoulos: one is drawn into these lives and images gradually, frame by frame… And like all true artists he creates an atmosphere, a special world that fascinates and almost hypnotizes: it's a genuine and extraordinary experience that, as they say 'grows on you', and one which you can grow with. 'Caviare to the general' maybe, but a taste very well worth acquiring.

all Allen ain't

What a marvel is The Shop Around The Corner (d. Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)! Found a copy of this classic (Korean, what's more) in yet another recently opened local charity shop, for just a quid. The young James Stewart is the perfect foil for Margaret Sullavan (1911-60), that unique and highly original performer, who made a successful if relatively brief career on both stage and screen. Sullavan is now largely forgotten, except by older film fans: she projected a gutsy yet vulnerable, breezy but endearing charm. Her private life however, like that of many another Hollywood star away from the unreal celluloid world, seems to have been genuinely troubled – three marriages, ill-health, increasing deafness and death by her own hand… Her admirer Louise Brooks, another complex character and terrific actress, praised "that wonderful voice of hers – strange, fey, mysterious – like a voice singing in the snow."

Sullavan and Stewart are quite wonderful together, and the supporting cast, especially Frank Morgan as the shop owner, are also superb. This sublimely bitter-sweet – not quite screwball, if splendidly quickfire – comedy now seems perhaps closer to Renoir than Hawks or Preston Sturges, but with delightful hints of all three. Lubitsch directed with what was at the time labelled his 'touch' – a style full of feeling, European wit and elegance and just a dash of cynicism.

My favourite Lubitsch film, if anything even more enjoyable, remains the hilarious To Be Or Not To Be (1942), starring the lovely and equally ill-fated Carole Lombard. This, for whatever devious reasons of copyright or studio archival manoeuvres, seems currently unavailable. But maybe I'll be lucky enough to truffle out a Korean copy of this one too, and in some other inviting shop around the corner?

Allen's angst

The decline of Woody Allen in recent years has been pitiful. I watched in disbelief (luckily having copped a freebie copy) Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) – a dismal waste of time, money and talent. Does this man inhabit the real world or, come to that, his well-heeled American tourist's idea of Europe? This dreary little travel brochure and vehicle for product-placement lacks wit, irony or any hint of humour or realism. Arty types and intellectuals, according to him, are all beautiful people who live in beautiful villas, drive flashy sportscars and fly private planes. And they all have unlimited time and money with which to indulge themselves. We're invited to admire them and empathize with their trivial love-lives. Their life-styles seem to have been inspired by Hello – or in this case perhaps, Ola! – while the clumsy cinematography and deadpan voice-over (not by Allen, and anyhow utterly banal) do nothing but expose some wooden performances. (Only the talented Rebecca Hall emerges from this cinemuddle without damaging her rising reputation.) Mysteriously, this trite tripe was an 'Official Cannes Selection'. But talking of damaging one's reputation, maybe Allen should simply pack it in now, while the going's not so good.

knife edge of hysteria

Further to my previous comments about great B&W photography in Bela Tarr's MFL, the excellent work of Ernest Laszlo (another Hungarian, this time a long-term Hollywood emigré) in The Big Knife, 1955, is to be cherished. Robert Aldrich's terrific drama, which I saw in student days and had not seen since, seems better now than it ever did. Aldrich, once affectionately termed by French critics 'le gros Bob', was one of the very best Hollywood directors, specialising in gritty if not brutal movies about survival against the odds. Working mainly within the system, Aldrich produced some genre classics - war, westerns, noirs etc - including some of my absolute favourites in those fields: Attack, Apache, The Last Sunset, Ulzana's Raid, The Grissom Gang, Emperor Of The North, and the quite superb Kiss Me Deadly. You'd expect no less from a man who'd worked with Welles, while the physicality, the brilliantly expressive, almost expressionist, camera angles, the almost if not quite OTT performances, all seem perfectly right in these films' contexts.

As for The Big Knife itself, it features a matchless cast: the inimitable Jack Palance in one of his finest and most gripping dramatic roles; well supported by Ida Lupino, Shelley Winters, Everett Sloane, Wendell Corey, and Jean Hagen (she of "Aah jest caint stann um" fame in Singing In The Rain). And of course, there's Rod Steiger with a strange haircut and a deaf-aid, ranting and raving away as a studio mogul who's an unholy mix of Messrs Mayer and Cohn… Yet his "hammy outrageousness" (Time Out) somehow works when set against Palance's obdurate intensity.

Here's fear and loathing in LA, via the flawed but often brilliant Clifford Odets! His "wordy and stagebound script" was nonetheless considered (also by Time Out) "intellligent and literate", and it seems in hindsight a rather accurate depiction of Fifties America, cold war paranoia and all.

Early last year we saw a stage production of Odets's first success, Waiting For Lefty, and this Thirties piece seemed both curiously timely and dated. The powerful verbal gifts (along with the accompanying torrential verbosity) retained much of their force, while most of the occasional sentimental blemishes could be overlooked: Odets's socialism, like his heart, was in the right, or rather the left, place. Alas, by the end of the McCarthy era, Odets had sold out and become an extremely well-rewarded Hollywood hack, albeit one of the best around: see also Sweet Smell Of Success, an equally fine, equally hysterical film scripted by him a couple of years after TBK.

Unfortunately, just like Aldrich himself, whose later output declined and became slickly commercial (remember The Dirty Dozen and what happened to the later careers of Mesdames Davis and Crawford?) Odets went for the easy money flowing down the mainstream. But he remained, according to Jean Renoir, a decent, warm and very generous friend. In My Life And My Films (1974) Renoir writes movingly of their friendship and Odets's last days. He praises Odets's only foray into directing - the very odd None But The Lonely Heart, which starred an absurdly OTT Cary Grant plus dreadful cockney (not even Bristolian!) accent. This praise was, one feels, down to Renoir's own comradeship and innate generosity, rather than a true reflection of an interesting failure: surely NBTLH is not, as anyone who's seen this muddled piece will agree, any sort of "masterpiece"? Still those were times of exaggeration, days of hysteria and suspicion, when friendship accorded to outsiders, foreigners and exiles in Hollywood was in short supply. Renoir simply notes that Odets was "like everyone representative of his period… a victim of the anti-communist obsession". The paranoia and blame of that time are in impressive and riveting evidence in The Big Knife.

cutting edge of pseudery

What fairly recent movie garnered the following puffs on its dvd case? ("Mesmeric… This is film noir as metaphysical poetry… Extraordinary black and white camerawork" - Time Out. "extraordinary" - The Observer. "compelling" - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian. "majestic and mysterious"- Scotland on Sunday. "mesmerising… Swinton is just one highlight" - Jonathan Romney, Independent on Sunday.) And was a Cannes festival selection, at that? Answer: The Man From London, directed by Bela Tarr, 2007.

I recalled struggling with his earlier four hour effort, the dismal Satantango, whose opening sequence, a dark wet farmyard somewhere in Hungary, lasts for about half an hour – during which time we see some murky outbuildings, cattle crossing the mud in the wind and rain and nothing much else of any excitement or edification. We found ourselves eventually forced to fastforward in disbelief, and realised that nothing much else did happen during this interminable and lugubriously boring saga: nothing like our own dear and multiply-plotted Archers!

Anyhow, in all fairness, I checked out of our library this more recent film, because the time listed was only "90 mins approx". Also, The MFL was based on an author I admire, Simenon: this promised to be an unexpected marvel of psychological accuracy and gripping too. And the excellent and risktaking Swinton is always worth watching… Ah what a disappointment! The opening shot, up down and across, back and forth, along a ship's hull at night, was indeed leisurely. Thereafter the trades description act should have been invoked: a total of two hours ten minutes is not quite "90 mins approx", while all those carefully-selected, grandiose M-words and laudatory adjectives from various supposedly intelligent critics, from "mesmeric" onward, should have tipped us the wink. We dutifully stayed the course, again with considerable exasperation: was it really possible for any filmmaker to be so impossibly, wilfully slow, to show such complete and utter disdain for both narrative and audience?

Absurd multilingual dubbing and absolutely ludicrous 'storyline' didn't make for a riveting experience. Why should the extremely aged retiree Scotland Yard inspector, the eponymous TMFL, who speaks with the voice of Edward Fox, cross the Channel to investigate a missing sixty thousand quid – from a theatre box office of all unlikely places? He ignores a corpse in the harbour (Bastia apparently, rather than Belgium) and finally allows a murderer – the killer of the first killer, if you follow me – to go free with a large wodge of money and a pat on the back. (Tarr very much?) I don't think I have spoilt the film by hinting at the sheer absurdity of it all. Yes, it's indeed beautifully lit and photographed, but so what? Every face and object, longshot or closeup, is lingered on interminably, for no discernible purpose. A frustrated stills photographer Tarr may be or might have been, but an auteur he ain't. A pretty pretentious interview with The Man From Hungary is included as an 'extra'. This confirmed my misgivings and resolve never to watch another such piece of stodgily intellectualised boloney ever again. Life is too short, and good art is still shorter, but the Bela experience is far too long: beware and avoid!

those Quays!

The Quay twins, never to be confused with the awful Krays, conceived and directed in 1995 the unique and extraordinary Institute Benjamenta, or This dream people call human life. It was great to catch up with this rare gem a few days ago (thanks once again to Exeter's fine film library!) in its new dual format edition. This includes an informative booklet and lots of fascinating extras – several other shorts by the Brothers Q, and interviews with them and the exceptional actors Mark Rylance and Alice Krige, who star in this wonderful film. Of course the fact that it's B&W and drawn from the weird works of the German-Swiss author Robert Walser (1878-1956), whose latter years, from 1929, were spent in a mental hospital, may discourage your average browser in search of digital tricks and zappy sledgehammer editing, but the loss will be theirs.

The distinguished British poet and translator Christopher Middleton refers to Walser's "charmed ironic clownishness", and certainly the Quays seem to capture this. "An exquisitely realised anti-fairytale, a fragile world shimmering with luminous energy and hypnotic beauty" says blurb, and for once that's spot on. I should think anyone who likes Beckett, Kafka and Keaton would love this film about a very peculiar training school for servants, but it's a truly independent and original piece of cinema. Gottfried John, a Fassbinder stalwart, also plays an important part, and the film is mysterious, comical, oneiric, surreal and gorgeous to watch. Those who have savoured the strangely distinctive, sometimes nightmarish animation and the singularly odd puppetry and dreamscapes of the Quays' earlier films – their adaptations of Bruno Schulz for example – and their affinity with Central European filmmakers like Svjankmaier and Borowczyk, will need no further recommendation.