Brian Hannan

Bradford Widescreen Weekend 2024

We are so conditioned to watching old movies on tiny screens it comes as something of a primal shock to see them in all their original glory. Most festivals lean towards the arthouse end of the cinema business so it’s all the more delightful to find an event that without apology concentrates on the mainstream. Widescreen Weekend takes place at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, England, and mostly in its Pictureville Cinema, the only venue in the country equipped to show Cinerama pictures in the original three-strip version which requires three projectors.

And while most other film festivals attract general movie lovers, this one appears to appeal in large part to those who have had something to do with the movie-making business or its technical side. Speakers might include, for example, Cinerama restoration specialist Dave Strohmaier or Kevin Brownlow, editor turned director, and among the audience you might find people like Keith Stevens from Australia, a former operations executive with Village Roadshow there, but who started out as a projectionist and regaled me with tales of projecting The Sound of Music (1965) in its original roadshow run.

There’s a limited number of movies that were made, mostly in the 1960s, either in Cinerama or 70mm, so the event has expanded to take in the earlier Cinemascope and the other versions of widescreen technology on which Hollywood depended as the marketing hook to bring back audiences from the all-encompassing maw of television in the 1950s. Later films whose directors understood the cinematic impact of 70mm are also added to the mix.

You are transported back to a time when screens were just enormous – this one is 51ft wide – and were curtained, and those curtains would not open (to the sides) until in typical roadshow fashion, a lengthy musical Overture, highlighting aspects of the movie’s music, had run its course. There is something quite sumptuous about sitting in a movie theatre staring at huge red curtains and waiting for the house lights to dim and the music to begin.

Roughly half-way through the movie itself, the curtains would close for an intermission, and before the picture restarted there would be more music, what was termed the Entr’Acte. Some DVDS of roadshows contain both Overture and Entr’Acte but there is a lightyear of difference between hearing them in your lounge and being exposed to them in a picture house built to bring out their best sound.

This is a homage not just to old movies but the old way of seeing a movie.

In previous years the programs have included Ice Station Zebra (1968), West Side Story (1961), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Ryan’s Daughter (1970), Khartoum (1965), a pair from William Wyler that could not have been more diverse – Ben-Hur (1959) and Funny Girl (1968) – This Is Cinerama (1952), and Carol Reed’s The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965). Throw in a healthy helping of 1950s Cinemascope and Vistavision features and more contemporary pictures which embraced 70mm and you have the makings of an always satisfying weekend.

So one of the highlights is to see old favorites. This year we are being treated to the three-strip version of How the West Was Won (1962), your feet tapping immediately at the sound of the driving Alfred Newman score, David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965), which was blown up from 35mm to 70mm for roadshow, one of the original Cinerama travelogs Seven Wonders of the World (1956) and Stanley Donen musical Funny Face (1957) in Vistavision. For many the highlight will be a showing of the forgotten La Fayette (1962) in 70mm, at the time the most expensive French movie ever made.

There’s a Hitchcock strand including the 70mm version of Vertigo (1958), Cleopatra (1962) in 70mm, John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) and Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1961).

The event takes place in two cinemas so there’s up to six movies a day. This year’s edition begins today and ends on Monday. I’ll be there. If you’re going and are a subscriber to my blog feel free to say hello.

The Rain People (1969) ****

You could argue that grandiose ambition sucked the life out of Francis Ford Coppola. That if he had continued along the more intimate trajectory suggested here there might have been a more consistent output, perhaps on an even higher plane. Even if grounded in American life, this has a distinct European sensibility and while you won’t find a single memorable image you will definitely find characters of substantial depth drowning in agonizing circumstance.

That’s not to say you won’t find outstanding sequences. I defy you to find a more cruel and character-defining scene than the one where our heroine Natalie (Shirley Knight), running away from the chains of domesticity, takes dominance to a new extreme by demanding that muscular ex-college footballer Jimmy (James Caan) crawl round on the floor beneath her feet.

There’s no excuse for such behavior except that she wants some kind of revenge on her husband, whom she accuses of trapping her into said domesticity by the old-fashioned route of making her pregnant. This is before she discovers that Jimmy is simple-minded as the result of brain damage following an American football injury, and that it’s easier now for him to obey people rather than as before argue and stand his ground.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously said there were no second acts in American acts. What he failed to mention was that some people barely got to the end of the first act. Jimmy is an outcast, nobody willing to take responsibilty for him, everyone dodging such commitment. Because American scoiety has no place for losers, they fall through the cracks and stay there.

As a result of his injury Jimmy was given a thousand bucks and “told to leave.” So, he went. He’s got a destination in mind, salvation of some kind, I guess, heading towards a drive-in where he has been promised a job by the father, previously a huge fan, of his ex-girlfriend Ellen (Laura Crews).

Natalie is on a road trip to find herself, firstly at the very least just to escape, secondly requiring the seclusion to decide if she wants to keep the baby, but also to have fun, pick up other men for sex. That’s how she happens upon Jimmy. But there’s no sex, not with the shame she feels after humiliating him and realizing just how dumb he now is.

But the alpha horse-riding girlfriend doesn’t want him, she’s humiliated that anyone would associate her with this shambling hulk, and the promised job flies out the window. Natalie dumps him at a reptile zoo where the duplicitous owner appropriates his thousand bucks, leaving Natalie so delighted to be rid of him she races off and is pulled over for speeding by lovelorn cop Gordon (Robert Duvall). Circumstance forces a return to the zoo where Jimmy has caused chaos by freeing all the livestock.

But she’s taken enough by Gordon and desperate for the sense of freedom that illicit sex brings that she ends up in his trailer. Only his rebellious young daughter doesn’t take kindly to him bringing home his conquests and while he’s trying to bed Natalie, initially very complicit despite the awkward presence of the awkward child, causes a ruckus outside. Natalie would still be up for it except she takes umbrage that Gordon’s unable in his lovemaking to forget his dead wife, killed along with his son in a house fire.

The scene turns ugly and she’s rescued by Jimmy who proceeds to put his football playbook moves on Gordon, picking him up and throwing him to the ground and ramming him in the stomach, none of your standard fisticuffs here. But given Gordon’s a cop, there’s a gun on the loose and the daughter picks it up and shoots Jimmy stone dead.

That last scene comes out of nowhere and stops the audience as dead as it does Jimmy and in a bitter ironic twist wraps up a scenario where the lost never find what they’re looking for. You might find similar in, despite their power, later characters such as Michael in The Godfather (1972) and Col Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979).

Compare the Caan and Duvall of The Godfather and you’ll think they’ve swapped their personalities from here, Caan adopting the firmness and overt masculinity of Gordon and Duvall the soft-spoken tones of Jimmy.

I mispoke when I said there were no memorable images. There are, but their meaning comes later. We see Jimmy sweeping up leaves in playful fashion and only later discover that’s all he’s fit for. We see Natalie as trapped in a phone booth as in her marriage trying to talk her way out of returning to her husband, whose tone changes from angry to whining and desperate, and all we get of him is his voice. There are a few of those lingering shots of rainwater and drab early morning scenery that you would get in an arthouse picture but this quickly grows out of them and into the meat of the situation.

James Caan is particularly superb, completely altering is screen persona. Shirley Knight (The Group, 1966) delivers on previous promise and Robert Duvall demonstrates his range. Original screneplay also by Coppola.

Lost in the acclaim for Coppola’s more grandioise efforts but well worth digging out.

The Substance (2024) **** – Seen at the Cinema

Like Tar (2022) suffers from stylistic overkill and outstays its welcome by a good 30 minutes, but otherwise a perfect antidote to Barbie (2023). While not entirely original, owing much to the likes of The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Stepford Wives and the doppelganger and split personality nrrative nonetheless a refreshing take on the ageing beauty syndrome. Shower fetish might be a homage to Brian DePalma and except that the movie is directed by Frenchwoman Coralie Fergeat (Revenge, 2017) we might be lambasting its rampant nudity for misogynistic reasons.

On the plus side, everything else about it feels new. The whole story plays out like a demonic fable, the participants only caught out because, in their greed, they refuse to play by the rules. But like all the best horror films this occupies its own world. Whoever offers this free drug and the chance to relive your life through the best possible you is a monosyllabic voice at the end of a telephone. Not only is there gruesome rebirth but a stitching-up process. The black market drug at the center of the tale can only be accessed in a deadbeat part of Los Angeles by crawling under a door, but then, suddenly we’re in a pristine room and the various constituent parts of the substance are laid out on the Ikea model with easy-to-follow instructions.

After surviving a horrific automobile accident, onetime movie star Elizabeth (Demi Moore), reduced to breakfast television exercise guru, is passed a mysterious note by an incredibly good-looking young man that takes her down this particular rabbit hole. Like Eve’s forbidden fruit or Cinderella’s toxic midnight, there’s a catch to reliving her beautiful youth. She must switch back “without exception” to her original persona every seven days.

Of course, that’s too much to ask, and as the double named Sue (Margaret Qualley) steals minutes then hours and days the effect is seen on Elizabeth, a monstrous aged finger appearing in her otherwise acceptable hands first sign that these rules cannot be broken. Warning that there are two sides to this singular personality goes ignored. Instead of acting in concert each prt of the split personality conspires againt each other until entitlement spills over into abhorrent violence.

Apart from the initial rebirth squence, and the toothless section, the best scenes are more toned down, in one Elizabeth is faced with an alternative future, the other when she re-does her make-up four times for a date, unable to decide on which face she wishes to present.

Demi Moore (Disclosure, 1994) is being touted as a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination, but that’s mostly on account of her willingness to appear without makeup and for long sections without clothing. I’m not convinced that there’s enough heartfelt acting beyond the bitterness that was often her trademark. Margaret Qualley (Poor Things, 2023) isn’t given much personality to deal with except for exuding shining beauty and horror when it starts to go wrong.

All the males are muppets, it has to be said, wheeler-dealer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) the worst kind of obnoxious male. But this doesn’t feel much like a feminist rant but a more considered examination of refusal to accept oncoming age. Everyone has the kind of vacuous personality that’s endemic in presenting the best face (and body) to the viewing (television, big screen) public.

The movie plays at such a high pitch that most of the time you can ignore the deficiencies, but the 140-minute running time is at odds with hooking a contemporary horror audience and the gore at odds with hooking the substantial arthouse crowd required to generate the returns needed to pay back acquisition rights. None of the characters has any depth, little backstory, virtually nothing in the way of the usual confrontation with others in their lives, but then Elizabeth already lives a life of isolation, clearly lamenting her longlost fame and the attention it brings.

This won at Cannes for the script and not the direction and that feels about right. Great idea in ultimately the wrong hands, too much of the repetition that was so annoying in Tar and the determination to make every single shot different, a movie beaten into style every inch of its running time.

Coralie Fergeat has a triumph of some kind on her hands, but one that might struggle, due to excessive length, to find an audience. Not sure, either, why tis is being sold as comedy-horror, a peculiar sub-genre in the first place to make work, but I don’t remember laughing once.

However, like Saltburn (2023) this has a good chance of attracting the young crowd via word-of-mouth, the kind who are just waiting to find their own cult material.

Both facinating and repellant.

Claudelle Inglish (1961) ****

Simple small-town morality tale, brilliantly told, with a quiet nod to The Blue Angel and Citizen Kane. Shy dirt poor farmer’s daughter Claudelle Inglish (Diane McBain) after falling for the handsome Linn Varner (Chad Everett) expects to be married when he returns from his Army stint. But he rejects her. Initially, devastated, keeping all his letters and the dancing doll she had won with him at a fair, she decides that lying in bed all day and staring at the ceiling is not going to work. So she smartens up her frumpish look with lipstick and turns her simple wedding dress into a more attractive outfit.

She discovers that the boys are so desperate to come calling on this new-look creature that they will bring presents to every date, ranging from the biggest box of candy in the shop to a pair of red shoes. Encouraging her determined manhunt, dissatisfied mother Jessie (Constance Ford), who has endured twenty years of broken promises throughout marriage to hardworking Clyde (Arthur Kennedy), beseeches her to go after a rich man. Luckily, there is one within the vicinity, the widowed S.T. Crawford (Claude Akins) who happens to be their landlord. Crawford tries to bribe Clyde with free rent and other benefits to put in a good word, but to no avail, the father believing that true love cannot be bought and, furthermore, will alleviate abject poverty.

Claudelle bluntly rejects Crawford as “too old and too fat” but takes his present anyway and, under pressure, agrees to go for a ride with him without allowing him to stop the car. Dennis Peasley (Will Hutchins), eldest son of a store owner, believes he is the front runner, deluging her with gifts, naively believing she is his sweetheart until he realizes he is in competition with a horde of other local boys, including his younger brother, and outsider Rip (Robert Colbert). Jessie, seeing the prospect of a rich husband slip away, embarks on an affair with Crawford. Soon, Claudelle has the entire male population in the palm of her hand, piling up presents galore. However, tragedy, in the way these things go, is just round the corner.

What struck me first was the subtlety. Nothing here to bother the censor, beyond the immorality on show, and despite Hitchcock breaking all sorts of sexual taboos with Psycho the year before. This isn’t an all-hot-and-bothered essay like the previously reviewed A Cold Wind in August or a picture that pivots on twists-and-turns like A Fever in the Blood, both out the same year. It took me a while to work out Claudelle was actually having sex with all these guys.

The initial shy girl blossoming under the first blush of love is done very well, a gentle romance ensuing, Claudelle still withdrawn in company, agreeing to an engagement even though Linn cannot afford a ring, waiting anxiously for his letters, adoring the dancing doll, paying off a few cents at a time material for a wedding dress. It’s only after she receives a Dear John (Dear Jane?) letter that it becomes clear, though not crystal clear, that sex has been involved because that word is never spoken and that action never glimpsed. Only gradually do we realize that present-givers are being rewarded, and as her self-confidence grows she is soon able to pick her own presents. One look is generally all it takes to have men falling all over themselves to give her what she wants, which is, essentially, a life where promises are not broken. But the closest she gets to showing how much she is changed from her original innocent incarnation is still by implication, telling a young buck she is “pretty all over.”

I was also very taken with the black-and-white cinematography by Ralph Woolsey. The compositions are all very clear, but in the shadows Claudelle’s eyes become glittering pinpoints. The costumes by Howard Shoup won an unexpected Oscar nomination, his third in three years. Veteran director Gordon Douglas (Them!, 1954) does an excellent job of keeping the story simple and fluent, resisting all temptations to pander to the lowest common denominator while extracting surprisingly good performances from the cast, many drawn from Warner Brothers’ new talent roster.

Diane McBain (Parrish, 1961) handles very well the transition from innocence to depravity (a woman playing the field in those days would be tagged fallen rather than independent) and holds onto her anguish in an understated manner. In some senses Arthur Kennedy (Elmer Gantry,1960) was a coup for such a low-budget production, but this could well have been a part he was born to play, since in his movie career he knew only too well the pain of promise, nominated five times for Best Supporting Actor (some kind of record, surely) without that nudging him further up the billing ladder. His performance is heartbreaking, working his socks off without ever keeping head above water, repairs getting in the way of promises made to wife and daughter, kept going through adoration for his wife.

Constance Ford (Home from the Hill, 1960) is heartbreaking in a different way, scorning her loving husband and dressing like her daughter in a bid to hook Crawford. Television regular Claude Akins is the surprise turn. In a role that looked like a cliché from the off – i.e. older powerful man determined by whatever means to win the object of his desires – he plays it like he was auditioning for The Blue Angel, hanging on every word, being twisted round her little finger, demeaning himself as he is made to wait, sitting downcast outside the Inglish house like an rejected schoolboy. Of the younger cast, Will Hutchins was Sugarfoot (1957-1961), Chad Everett was making his movie debut, and Robert Overton had appeared in A Fever in the Blood (1961). Leonard Freeman (Hang ‘Em High, 1968) wrote the screenplay based on the Erskine Caldwell bestseller.

And where does Citizen Kane come into all this? The dancing doll Claudelle won at a fair when dating Linn is something of a motif, never discarded, as if a symbol of her innocence, and in close-up in the last shot of the film.

Grand Prix (1966) *****

If ever there was a case to be made for six-track stereophonic sound or, for that matter, split screen Grand Prix would form the first line of defense. That it was made in Cinerama 70mm was merely a bonus. Most roadshow movies start with an overture, a ten-minute or so musical introduction that would thematically at least give the audience some indication of the picture they were about to watch. Thrumming and roaring engines formed the montage opening to Grand Prix, a noise that almost shook a cinema to its foundations.

Cinerama had been built on its ability to create almost primeval effects. There was always a downward rush, a runaway train, a roller coaster, something to set an audience on the edge of its seat in pure exhilaration. But the visual had nothing on the aural and what set Grand Prix apart was danger, that constant thrum of engines rising to impossible crescendos. Split screen allowed the director to tell several stories at once as competitors chased each other round perilous circuits at a time when death was a racing driver’s constant companion and in fact of the thirty-two professional participants including Graham Hill, Jim Clark, Juan Fangio and Jack Brabham five were dead within two years of the movie’s completion. Nobody needed to remind an audience how hazardous the sport was, they could read about the continuous carnage in the newspapers, but what was less easy to convey, although such events were well attended, was the pure thrill of being at a race meeting. Grand Prix set out to rectify that problem.

At nearly three hours long it had room to tell several stories and in that respect it was more of an ensemble picture than something like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) which took even more time to tell just one story. Many of these stories came to an abrupt end as the character died in an accident.

Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, both racing aficionados, were front runners for the leading role but it went instead to James Garner, also a racer who did all his own driving (though not necessarily at the speeds indicated). And to properly represent the competition it required an international flavor so other drivers were played by Yves Montand (The Wages of Fear, 1953) in a part first offered to Jean-Paul Belmondo and Antonio Sabato (in his second film) with Adolfo Celi (Thunderball, 1965) as the Ferrari boss and Toshiro Mifune (Seven Samurai, 1954) as a Japanese team owner. Swedish star Harriet Andersson (Through a Glass Darkly, 1961) was cast as the female lead but dropped in favour of Eva Marie Saint (Exodus, 1960) in a role turned down by Monica Vitti (Modesty Blaise, 1966).

Garner and Saint had previously worked together in thriller 36 Hours (1964) and it said a lot for his marquee credentials that he was still best known for The Great Escape (1963). Although he had reached top billing status, films like The Art of Love (1965) and Mister Buddwing (1966) did not deliver commercially. Saint’s career had been as peripatetic after Exodus (1960) as before, star of All Fall Down (1962) but third-billed in The Sandpiper (1965) and second-billed in The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966), the latter two both big hits.

Frankenheimer had directed Saint in All Fall Down and enjoyed a distinguished career with The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964) although the high regard in which he was generally held was somewhat tarnished by The Train (1965) and thriller Seconds (1966), the latter a spectacular flop. Grand Prix was not only the biggest film of his career, though The Train had given him a grounding in action, but also his first in color. The movie was filmed on existing legendary circuits with Formula 3 racing cars adapted to look like Formula 1 and a thousand other incidental details including an appearance by a Shelby Mustang (with Carroll Shelby as technical adviser) that made it an accurate depiction of the sport. Eighteen cameras were used to film the races.

The narrative arc follows the Grand Prix season and while the actual competition dominates the movie it is against the background of the emotional turmoil the sport wreaks on the drivers and the wives and girlfriends who have to live with the knowledge that their partners might not come home at the end of the day. Garner is considered too reckless for the top spot in a racing team and in a bid for redemption signs for a new company. Former world champion Montand is coming to the end of his career. English actor Brian Bedford makes his mainstream movie debut as a driver recovering after a horrific crash caused by Garner. The emotional subplots comprise Garner having an affair with Bedford’s wife (Jessica Walter); Montand embarking on an affair with Saint who plays a magazine writer, with French actress Francoise Hardy (better known as a chanteuse) involved with Sabato. In addition, there are some telling sequences in which the drivers unload about their fears.

Frankenheimer does a terrific job in marshalling all the effects and the minute details, and the fact that there is no big star in the mix makes the battles between the characters more realistic.

The Notorious Landlady (1962) **

Botched job. Not an all-out stinker. Something that should easily have worked – and didn’t. Thanks to the principals involved. Biggest finger of blame points at Jack Lemmon (How To Murder Your Wife, 1965), who jitters and jabbers, arms waving, eyeballs swivelling, classic example of over-mugging the pudding.

But Kim Novak (Strangers When We Meet, 1960) is as bad for the opposite reason. She’s completely insipid. Sure, she’s meant to be playing someone frightened out of her wits but she could as easily be worrying about how to lay the table for all the energy we get.

Director Richard Quine (Strangers When We Meet) hardly gets off scot-free for allowing this to happen as well as quite bizarre shifts in tone from a fog-wreathed London straight out of Sherlock Holmes, to a denouement with Novak naked in the bath – Lemmon averts his eyes but the camera and hence the audience doesn’t – and a climax straight out of the Keystone Cops. I know Quine had a fling with Novak but it looks like he’s trying to share her physical charms with all and sundry, scarcely a scene goes by where’s she’s not in her underwear, night-time apparel, soaking wet one way or another or wearing revealing outfits. The “Notorious Cleavage” might have been a better title.

As I say, this should have worked. The story is straightforward enough, a mystery, red herrings aplenty, mysterious lurking figures, enough twists to give it edge.

Diplomat William Gridley (Jack Lemmon), newly arrived from the States, comes to view an apartment to rent in Mayfair only to find landlady Mrs Hardwicke (Kim Novak) most unwelcoming. Unfortunately for her, it’s love at first sight for him, so she can do no wrong. Which is unfortunate for him, for she is suspected of murdering her husband. That doesn’t sit well with Gridley’s boss Ambruster (Fred Astaire) who feels staff should be completely above board and not risk the good name of the U.S. by consorting with film noir style damsels.

Ambruster is already in cahoots with Inspector Oliphant (Lionel Jeffries) and it’s not long before Gridley is enrolled to act in an undercover capacity, sneaking into her bedroom, finding a gun in a drawer and overhearing suspicious phone calls all the while continuing to romance her. Meanwhile, he’s woken up in the middle of the night with her playing an organ. He’s such a clumsy clot he manages to set fire to a garage, which attracts front page headlines and puts his career in jeopardy.

Anyway, various red herrings later and Ambruster somewhat mollified after falling for Hardwicke’s charms himself, we discover that her husband isn’t missing after all, but when he turns up, she shoots him dead and so ends up in court charged with his murder. His death, while convenient, is treated as accidental.

But the fun’s only just beginning. What could have been a shade close to film noir or the kind of romantic thriller Hitchcock turned out in his sleep, now takes a quite bizarre turn. It transpires that her husband, a thief, has hidden stolen jewels in a candelabra which, because she’s short of cash, she has sold to a pawnshop. This emerges in the aforementioned bathtub contretemps. But Hardwicke is being blackmailed by the witness whose evidence cleared her. Said witness has made off with the jewels and now plans to kill off the real witness. So they all end up at a retirement village in, where else, Penzance. Gridley has to save the real witness from being run off the edge of a cliff in a wheelchair while Hardwicke and the fake witness would have had a real old catfight if either of them could have managed to land a punch, instead of hitting the ground or falling backwards into bushes, so the entire climax suddenly takes a distinct comedic turn.

There’s not even a decent performance from Fred Astaire (The Midas Run, 1969) or Lionel Jeffries (First Men in the Moon, 1964) to lift proceedings. In fact, the best performance comes from villain Miles Hardwicke (Maxwell Reed) who rejoices in lines like, “ I like you better when you’re frightened.”

Written by Larry Gelbart (The Wrong Box, 1966) and Blake Edwards (The Great Race, 1965), which would make you think comedy, and that this was a spoof in the wrong directorial hands, except that Edwards was responsible for Experiment in Terror / Grip of Fear (1962) so knew how to extract thrills.

Coulda been, shoulda been – wasn’t.

Esther and the King (1960) ***

Taking a Biblical tale as a starting point veteran director Raoul Walsh (White Heat, 1949) stirs up heady brew of intrigue, rebellion, politics and romance. Returning home victorious, King Ahasuerus (Richard Egan) discovers his wife Queen Vashti (Danielle Rocca) has committed adultery and that his minister Klydrathes (Renato Baldini) has been squeezing the people blind with punitive taxes, hanging them for non-compliance.

Casting his wife aside, the king seeks a new bride. Since he has conquered all the known world except Greece, marriage to make a political alliance is not an option, so, given women are treated as mere chattels and the king is all-powerful, all the likely virgins are rounded up including Hebrew Esther (Joan Collins) on her wedding day.

Her husband-to-be Simon (Rik Battaglia) kicks off, attacks Klydrathes and becomes a wanted man. The queen’s lover and the king’s chief minister Prince Haman (Sergio Fantoni) attempts to fix the bridal selection, inserting his hardly-virginal choice Keresh (Rosalba Neri) into the proceedings while attempting to murder clear favorite Esther. When that fails, Haman plots to usurp the crown. With the Hebrews facing possible annihilation, Esther is put in the position of giving in to the kind in order to save her people. As her serenity soothes the savage beast, her initial hate turns to growing attraction.

Meanwhile, Simon is on a rescue mission and Prince Haman cooks up a devilish plot that will see the Hebrews blamed for passing on military secrets to the king’s enemies. Naturally, all hell eventually breaks loose.

More a drama than a typical big-budget DeMille offering, with battles taking place off-screen action is limited to a few chases and skirmishes. There is a fair amount of sin on show what with a tribe of concubines at the king’s disposal, a whipping, a striptease by Vashti in a last gasp attempt to win back the king, some very seductive dancing routines by female slaves who, at times, look as if they were coached by Busby Berkeley. Substantial amounts appear to have been spent on costumes and production design, so historical atmosphere is well captured. Once you realise there’s not going to be any kind of big battle or major action center piece common to the Biblical genre, it’s easy to sit back and enjoy the political machinations, the initial torment of Esther, introduced as a rebellious soul, and the king, more at home with soldiers, shaking off his despondency at marital betrayal as he responds to Esther’s coaxing.

Richard Egan (300 Spartans, 1964) is a thoughtful king, showing very little temper, possibly because he doesn’t need to with everyone, beyond the conspirators, cowering in his presence. Regal and stately suits him fine rather than the more common explosions were accustomed to seeing from people in that line of work. The top-billed Joan Collins (Seven Thieves, 1960) has a difficult role. Normally, you would expect expressions of passion or depths of anguish, but the rebellion she displays at the start soon disappears when she enters the palace and is helpless to change the situation except by, initially against her will, accepting the king’s desires. In that sense, her portrayal is understandable but the understated performance gets in the way of a woman who is supposed to be devastated by the loss of her husband and then trapped by the needs of her people into making the marriage.

Sergio Fantoni (Von Ryan’s Express, 1965) excels as the spurned lover and Rik Battaglia (The Conqueror of the Orient, 1960) as the schemer. Rosalba Neri (Top Sensation, 1969) and Danielle Rocca (Behold a Pale Horse, 1964) both make striking appearances. Look out also for Gabriele Tinti (Seven Golden Men, 1965).

It was the end of the line for Irish actor Dennis O’Dea (The Fallen Idol), making his final film, and also, at least temporarily, for Joan Collins. She was coming to the end of her seven-year Twentieth Century fox contract but fell out with the studio after being rejected for Cleopatra, and on the evidence here you can see why. She been top-billed in The Sea Wife (1957) above Richard Burton and The Wayward Bus (1957) above Jayne Mansfield, but gradually fell down the pecking order. After leaving Fox, she only made five more films during the decade. Director Raoul Walsh made only another two.

Lee (2024) *** – Seen at the Cinema

Would have worked better as a documentary. Bit puzzled too by the deceit of the structural device, flashing back from her war years to being interviewed by an apparent journalist in old age at her country cottage. Seems an interesting conceit that he turns out to be her son Antony (Josh O’Connor) and she’s able to turn the tables and ask what she was like as a mother (not good, apparently, Antony grew up feeling he was an imposition). But also a standard biopic trope as he uses her famed photos to stimulate memories. But then, presumably in the interests of honesty (or who knows what) the credits blow these sequences to pieces by pointing out that her son didn’t have a scoobie about her war activities until after the death a forage in the attic turned up boxes of her photos. What the heck, artistic license and all that.

My other quibble, since I’m in that sort of mood, is that the ageing process seems to have passed our star Kate Winslet by. Sure, she’s dabbed on a bit of oldie make-up for her later years but the crow’s nest of lines around her eyes are noticeably prominent for a woman just turned thirty in the immediate pre-war year.

Still, on with the show, in which her pre-war fame as a surrealist is also ignored, as is her liaison with Man Ray, or that before she took up with another surrealist Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgard) she had been married to – and not divorced from – an Egyptian businessmen. The thrust of the movie is her war years as Vogue correspondent. There’s a bit of falling back on characters skitting around in the background (Cecil Beaton, for example) and keeping us up-to-scratch on timescale, invasion imminent etc.

Misogyny is fairly rampant, the British squeamish about sending women unnecessarily to the front line, the Yanks less so. Though Lee Miller is treated, for dramatic purposes, as the only female war correspondent, breaking through the usual class ceiling, in fact the Yanks had squads of them including Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh, third and fourth wives of Ernest Hemingway, respectively, Kathleen Harriman, Dixie Tighe and Helen Kirkpatrick, and Tania Long, none of whom would be unknown to Miller since she posed for a photo with the gang in 1943.

There was nothing subtle about Lee Miller, she said it like it was, a hard-drinking what used to be known as a free spirit, an euphemism for embracing a love-‘em-and-leave-‘em mentality. But there’s some subtlety here, a scene of her peeling potatoes revealing more about male expectation than any verbal punch-up with any officious male, being covered with supposedly invisible paint by Roland more effective in catching sexual attraction than the rest of her let-it-all-hang-out persona.

The only problem is that the concentration camp scenario has been dealt with by any number of far superior films and her staggering back with shock at the sight of the piled-up corpses not compensation enough. I don’t know enough about war photographers to compare what she captures through the lens with the dozens of others doing the same job. By the time her photos of the Holocaust were printed in American Vogue, Richard Dimbleby and Edward Murrow had delivered radio devastating reports and anonymous military photographers supplied tons of evidence against the Nazis.

I’m not sure it actually helps her case that she took a bath, naked, in Hitler’s bath.

Kate Winslet (Ammonite, 2020) almost single-handedly keeps the movie on course, but it lacks impact as a war picture, and the idea that nobody other than Lee was taking note of the suffering of the British during the Blitz seems a bit of a stretch. Pick of the support is most definitely Andrea Riseborough as the doughty British Vogue editor, every bit as tough if not as outspoken as Miller. Josh O’Connor (Challengers, 2024) spends all his time looking soulful for no reason I can divine. Marion Cottillard (La Vie en Rose, 2007) is wasted.

Ellen Kuras directed from a script by Liz Hannah (All the Bright Places, 2020), Marion Hume (movie debut) and John Collee (Monkey Man, 2024).

Movie not as hard-nosed as Winslet.

The Critic (2024) ** – Seen at the Cinema

Can we get over all this “national treasure” (a favorite of Britain) baloney, please? If we’re going to drag our esteemed acting knights of the realm out of their armchairs (you notice I didn’t say retirement because actors almost never officially retire, Kathy Bates and Gene Hackman to the contrary) could we please give them something more than an opportunity to overact and turn themselves into ripe old hams at the age of (in this case) eighty-five. Sir Ian McKellen (Gandalf and Magneto to you and me) deserves better.

Because there’s nothing at all in this beyond Falstaffian monster Jimmy (Ian McKellen), the eponymous theater critic, relishing his power and taking revenge when’s on the verge of losing it. Frankly, if this was called The Tie-Pin Killer, the serial murderer in the book on which this is based, and Jimmy, as in that book, was relegated to a bit part, albeit a juicy one, it might have been a lot more interesting.

While it touches upon 1930s London Fascists and the plight of the homosexual (a criminal offence to participate) these are kind of tossed into the scenario as if to placate an audience who might complain this is very thin gruel indeed. Presumably, we are somehow meant sympathize with this cruel, odious, character because from time to time he finds himself confronted by blackshirts, who take a dislike to his black companion Tom (Alfred Enoch), who acts as his secretary and presumably not anything else because Jimmy prefers “rough trade.”

In revenge for being fired, he sets up actress Nina (Gemma Atterton) to seduce his employer David Brooke (Mark Strong). Blackmail’s the tool of reinstatement. Apart from general actor insecurity, it’s not entirely clear why Nina should be so determined to keep in Jimmy’s good books. There’s some unbelievable stuff about becoming attracted to acting through reading his articles, which seems quite bizarre since his nasty reviews would put people off going, as he proudly explains is one his aims.

So Nina prostitutes herself for a good review. Yep, must happen all the time. And despite her supposed success – these are, after all, West End plays she is starring in – she lives in a bedsit where hot water is rationed. But she is, romantically, in a bind. She’s just dumped her married lover Stephen (Ben Barnes) whose wife Cora (Romola Garai) just happens to be the daughter of Brooke.

And although Brooke’s wife is “bonkers” (though that’s very much on the periphery) he’s that old-fashioned upper class English gent who only feels shame at adultery when he’s caught out and then of course does the right thing which is to blow his brains out. Which leaves Nina racked with guilt which drives her, as it would, back into the arms of Stephen only for him (another adulterer with principles) to reject her on the grounds that she slept with his father-in-law. When Nina begins to talk about confessing to her role in conspiracy, what’s an upstanding chap to do but drown her in the bathtub?

*In the original book Jimmy was a minor character.*

Crikey, and we complain about the plotting in the multiverse. This is just bonkersverse. Presumably, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Patrick Marber (Notes on a Scandal, 2007) happened upon Anthony J. Quinn thriller Curtain Call in which Jimmy exists on the periphery of the actual narrative though as a larger-than-life character and decided to forget the whole tie-pin killer thing and rearrange the tale so it revolved around McKellen in the hope nobody would notice, in the midst of McKellen roistering and boistering to his heart’s content, the lack of any sensible tale.

You could certainly have more easily hooked it on Nina, who falls into the Patrick Hamilton category of easily-led character on the edge with impulse inclined to cut her adrift.

If you want ham, McKellen’s your man, none of the subtlety which has impelled other performances. Gemma Atterton (The King’s Man, 2021) has a few moments tormented by conscience but the part is woefully underwritten. This is the reined-in Mark Strong (Tar, 2022) rather the one with the veins standing out on his neck. Lesley Manville (Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, 2022), potentially another future national treasure, has a brief role as does Romola Garai (Atonement, 2007).

Maybe wanting to burnish his artistic credentials, director Anand Tucker (Leap Year, 2010) is predisposed to the extreme close-up and for viewing a scene in extreme long shot through a corridor, window or door.

Jimmy would give have slated this.

House of Cards (1968) ***

American boxer Reno Davis (George Peppard) stumbles on an international conspiracy when hired by rich widow Anne de Villemont (Inger Stevens) in Paris to look after her eight-year-old son Paul (Barnaby Shaw). All roads eventually lead to Rome and a showdown with arch-conspirator Leschenahut (Orson Welles) in this thriller which throws in a couple of measures of Gaslight (1944) and, more obviously, North by Northwest (1959), to the extent of Anne being an icy blonde of the Eva Marie Saint persuasion and the couple, on the run, sharing a compartment on a train.

The boy’s previous tutor has been murdered. After months in a sanatorium, Anne, paranoid about her son being kidnapped, is in virtual house arrest in the family mansion, watched over by arrogant psychiatrist Dr Morillon (Keith Michell) who has diagnosed her as unstable, neurotic and a danger to the boy.

After an assassin on a bridge on the Seine takes potshots at Reno and Paul, Reno is framed for murder but escaping from the police returns to the mansion to find it empty, the furniture covered in dust sheets. I half-expected Reno to be told that the job was all in his imagination and that Anne did not exist, but instead finds out that mother and son have been taken to a castle in Dijon, in reality a fortress with a platoon of armed guards. Only Paul has been already been transported to Italy. So it’s attempted rescue, imprisonment, escape, fistfights, chase, clever moves and countermoves, twists and double twists as Reno and the still icy Anne head for Rome.

In among the mayhem are a few humorous moments, a play on the Trevi fountain scene from La Dolce Vita, a monk mistaken for a killer, a bored girl only too happy to be taken hostage, an over-familiar American who gives away valuable secrets because he mistakenly believes Reno is a co-conspirator, Dr Morillon making the error of treating Reno as a servant. And characters involved in assisting escape extract a high price, one seeking financial reward, another that her husband be killed in the process. There is also a flirtatious but spiky maid Jeanne-Marie (Perette Pradier) and a couple of excellent reversals.

Reno is somewhat innovative in the weaponry department, the hook of a fishing rod, for example, while the son is rather handy with a pistol. But given the opposition are armed with machine guns, knives and swords that seems only fair.

George Peppard seems to have found his niche in this one, dropping the innate arrogance of The Blue Max (1965) and Operation Crossbow (1965), no chip on the shoulder, a good bit more attractive as a screen presence, a nice line with the ladies, more than able to take care of himself, a sprinkling of wit, completely at ease. Inger Stevens comes off well though her psychological problems and concerns for her son get in the way of any burgeoning romance with Peppard. But she has quite a range of emotions to get through, from wondering if she is mad, to dealing with the controlling family, and letting go of her son enough to allow the boy to bond with Reno, and despite her vast wealth down-to-earth enough to see a toothbrush as an essential when on the run.

Orson Welles (Is Paris Burning?, 1966), as ever, looms large over everything, with dialog so good you always have the impression he improvised on the spot. Keith Michell, a couple of years away from international fame in BBC mini-series The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), does a very good turn as the psychiatrist.

John Guillermin, who directed Peppard in The Blue Max, has a lot to do to keep the various balls in the air, especially keeping track of a multiplicity of characters. The screenwriting team of Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch (Hud, 1963) pulled this one together from the novel by Stanley Ellin. Francis Lai’s memorable score is worth a mention, with distinctive themes for various parts of the story.

Eva Renzi (Funeral in Berlin, 1966) was originally down for the part of Anne and Italian actress Rosemary Dexter (Romeo and Juliet, 1964) has a small part.

Doesn’t quite come off .