documentary – The Magnificent 60s

aka Mr Chow (2023) ****

Pop quiz: name the only brother and sister who appeared in the same James Bond film. Hint: You Only Live Twice (1967). You might be more familiar with Tsai Chin (The Face of Fu Manchu, 1965, and three sequels) than Michael Chow. Though he had a bigger role in Joanna (1969) and The Touchables (1969) he was never more than a bit player, and often uncredited (55 Days at Peking, 1963). He also appeared in The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966) and there’s a fair chance you might remember him from Modesty Blaise (1966).

But HBO isn’t noted for devoting a documentary to a bit part player, not even one who can recite the opening of any film you care to mention. This film begins with such a recitation – encompassing the likes of North by Northwest (1959). If ever there was a more arresting opening to a documentary, this is it.

If you’re a fashionista or restaurant fan or gulled by celebrity photos, you’ll more likely know him by the name of Mr Chow, under which he established a chain of spectacularly successful eateries in London, New York and Los Angeles. He wasn’t even a chef, an understandable subject for a docu, what with all the creative endeavor that involves. But there’s no doubt he was creative, if only in reinventing himself. Born Zhou Yinghun, he chose the name “Mr Chow” because it meant people addressing him such manner rather than treating him with a racist epithet.

He might well have deserved a documentary for other reasons. He was the son of one of most famous Chinese opera stars, who reinvented the genre, and he escaped the cull of the intelligentsia instigated by Chairman Mao. His father was imprisoned for years and his mother was “beaten to death.”

The young Chow was living in England at his point, having been sent at a young age to a boarding school there, where racism of course was endemic. He attended art school but when his paintings didn’t sell he made a living from bit parts in movies – he was the child mown down by a car in Violent Saturday (1960), for example.

A Chinaman wanting to set up a business in London in the 1960s had two options: a laundry or a restaurant. But Chow didn’t want to imitate the ubiquitous Chinese restaurant. His artistic side came to the fore via interior design. His venture, in the staid world of the restaurants of the era, was a culture shock. Everything about it was different – no chopsticks and Italian waiters and no dressing for dinner (wear what you like), an anomaly in a high-end operation at the time. But since he attracted more than his fair share of celebrities presumably what they wore was highly acceptable.

An abundance of charm and connections gained through the movie business provided the funding. But it soon became the “in” place, and every evening was a performance.

By the time HBO came to make a documentary about him – and perhaps this fitted in more with that streamer’s agenda – he had become a proper artist. So much of the film, and indeed a good chunk of the opening section, is devoted to his modernistic artworks which often involved blowtorches, sheets of plastic and a rubber hammer. He exhibits under the name “M” so if you are familiar with the art world that might strike a better chord.

In the fashion of the current docu style, the makers seduce you with interesting material then hit you with a couple of blows you didn’t see coming. The “Shanghai trouble” is one such, which saw both parents killed. But there was also AIDS. His third wife Tina, a famous model, divorced at the time, died of that disease, contracted through a lover, not Chow, and she was one of the first non-homosexual people to be linked with the illness, and one of the first celebrities.

Abandoned, as he saw it, by his mother (in sending him to boarding school) family meant everything and you get the sense that the restaurants were as important as the various wives in creating a loving world. But he is also quite matter-of-fact about the personal calamities – you move on is his doctrine. The racism he endured cut deeper. Even as a famed restaurateur standing outside one of his own restaurants he found it hard to get a taxi to stop.

A handful of celebrities – hardly an all-star cast – pay tribute from Oscar-winning producer Brian Glazer (A Beautiful Mind, 2001) to LL Cool J and author Fran Lebowitz. But the pictures tell a story – Jack Nicholson, Mick Jagger etc are caught on camera having fun. I have to say the one time I went to the LA branch – as the guest of the publisher of Variety magazine – there was not a celebrity in sight (but it was lunch not dinner), though we were seated at Table No 1.

Cunningly directed by Nick Hooker (Agnelli, 2017).

As fascinating a docu as you will come across.

https://www.hbo.com/movies/aka-mr-chow

Windjammer (1958) **** – Seen in Cinerama at the Bradford Widescreen Weekend

It took this Norwegian interloper to show Cinerama the dramatic potential of its innovative widescreen process. A “windjammer” is a sailing ship and in this case training vessel Christian Radich embarking on a 239-day 17,000-mile round trip.

Although following primarily a documentary format, very close to the travelog style of Cinerama, the process that projected film on three synchronized 35mm projectors onto a curved 146-degree screen. It was much wider than the later Cinemascope and, like Imax, very much viewed as “event cinema,” the movies shown in roadshow to audiences astounded by the size of the images.

By the time Windjammer appeared, Cinerama had released six movies – This Is Cinerama (1952), Cinerama Holiday (1955), Seven Wonders of the World (1956), Search for Paradise (1957) and South Sea Adventure (1958). But the process was then mothballed as the producers worked out how to develop dramatic storylines. And, in some respects, you could argue, Windjammer showed them the way. Cinemiracle was almost identical to Cinerama except for being projected on a 120-degree curved screen. Louis De Rochemont and his son Louis De Rochemont III, producer and director respectively of Windjammer, had worked on Cinerama Holiday.

Windjammer showed the potential for more dramatic use of the wide screen beyond the obvious mountains and valleys and speedy point-of-view sequences for which Cinerama was famous. While the bulk of the film concentrates on just the one vessel, except for an occasional encounter with another sailing ship, when the Christian Radich is welcomed by a healthy contingent of the U.S. navy and bounded on either side by aircraft carrier, submarine and destroyers and with helicopter and airplane above, the compositional opportunities afforded are genuinely thrilling.

Couple that with a director who has the audacity to stick a camera on top of a submarine and capture what occurs when it submerges and surfaces – that sequence acclaimed by no less a widescreen authority than David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia, 1962) as the greatest single image he had ever seen – and you can see its potential.

The film is mostly narrated by one of the 70-odd young Norwegian volunteers, but is peppered by scenes with dialogue. And although none of these sections is as dramatic as the shots of the ship at sea or being battered by a storm or the incomparable submarine sequence, they do offer an element of human involvement missing from Cinerama, whose viewpoint was largely objective.

The arrival of a sailing ship in any port along the north and central American coast in 1956 was cue for celebration. Whether the public relations opportunity helped things along is unclear, but tourist boards over the world united to put on a spectacle. Our boys were serenaded by a King, various dignitaries, a marching band, calypso band, were invited to garden parties and introduced to limbo dancers. They also took part in a Fire Brigade simulation exercise involving jumping out of a three-story window, climbed out undersea of the hatch of submarine and swam along the seabed – without the benefit of wetsuit or anything else to keep out the cold – to recover a dummy missile. I’m not sure who was responsible for laying on a concert by cellist Pablo Casals or a separate concert on the deck of the ship with Arthur Fiedler conducting the Boston Pops Orchestra.

There was even the traditional downhill POV sequence. In Madeira this consisted of following a traditional passenger-carrying wicker basket toboggan as it tore down steep cobbles and in the U.S. chasing fire engines as they raced through city streets to a genuine fire. The two best scenes were absent dialogue. When nothing is explained and you watch a couple of teenagers climb out of the hatch of a sunken submarine, your heart is in your mouth. And, presumably chucked in to promote local tourism, there is nonetheless a quite astonishing sequence of a Norwegian farming family bringing in the harvest.

Norwegian harvest doesn’t involve piling the hay into stacks or ricks but arranging it in fences along the ground. Then it’s pitchforked into oxen-driven wagons before being transported down the fjords by zipwire and from there it makes its journey by rowing bost past spectacular waterfalls.

And just in case you think this is a glorified travelog there was a grim reminder of the dangers of sailing. Another sailing training ship, the Palmir, which reconnoitred briefly with the Christian Radich, later capsized in a storm with the loss of the entire crew except six sailors.

Windjammer was later absorbed into Cinerama and the version I saw was a restoration using the Smilebox curved screen system.

Stunning viewing.

London in the Raw (1964) ***

The headmaster of top English public school Harrow and the owners of upmarket emporium Grieves probably didn’t realize what they were letting themselves in for when they agreed to participate in this British version of Mondo Cane (1962), the movie that turned documentary into box office gold by the simple device of concentrating on the sleaze.

In truth it’s a bit of bait-and-switch, although anyone seeking titillation in those more repressed times when nudity was forbidden by the censor would be rewarded by the sight of three women topless, an anomaly explained by such nudity appearing in a non-sexual situation and my guess that the movie’s producers pointed to the stage loophole which permitted it as long as the women did not move. (That reasoning was explained, should you be interested, in Mrs Henderson Presents, 2005.)

The nudity occurs in the context of life classes, one organized by a bunch of beatniks as a means of funding their lifestyle, which includes eating baked beans cold and snacking on cat food, rebels that they are; when business is poor, they resort to taking snaps of the girls for Soho magazines. The other is the post-dinner entertainment in an upmarket restaurant where the customers sketch drawings of the undressed immobile models.

There’s an expose of clip joints, where elderly men are duped out of money by unfulfilled promise, paying extortionate amounts for non-alcoholic beverages, and a behind-the-scenes look at a strip club (nudity concealed behind nipple pasties) and a sex worker, the narrator making the point that while it’s not illegal for that woman to ply her trade indoors, a beggar playing a penny whistle in the street could be arrested. The strip club has the dingiest of entrances.

But in the main it’s a rather snippy examination of contemporary mores as staid London, at this stage not quite Swinging London, undergoes dramatic change. A health club enters the frame and there’s a gory piece on male hair transplants, a bloodier experience than audiences might expect, and a trawl round various unusual, but harmless, place of entertainment: an Irish pub with a horde of singers, an amateur Jewish theater, disco dancing at the renowned Whiskey-A-Go-Go, German students congregating for a slice of home at the Rheingold Club, the casino at Churchills, and cabaret.

“Bold! Brazen! Bizarre!” boasts the trailer and while that might be typical hype, audiences in those tamer times may well have been shocked especially when the camera focuses on two elements rarely discussed at that point in polite society: homelessness and drug addiction. Even so, it does find, as with the rest of the movie, unusual aspects of both. For example, the homeless lace their methylated spirits with milk. A director with an eye for dynamic composition could not have hit upon a better idea than contrasting the white contents of one bottle with the blue contents of another, the mixture being consumed in tea cups.

And I, for one, did not know that drug addicts were treated far more sympathetically in Britain than in the United States. That may well have been because the numbers were low, only 600 registered addicts compared to 47,000 across the Atlantic, though the degradation was no less pitiful, female abusers taking to the streets to pay for their addiction.

As a slice-of-life it’s less exploitational than the posters – or title – suggest and so falls into the historic category of The London Nobody Knows (1967), although less compelling, and it’s perhaps more interesting for the personalities involved, several of whom became significant figures, one way or the other, in the movie business.

Making the biggest later impact was Michael Klinger who went on to produce Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac (1966), drama Baby Love (1969), gangster classic Get Carter (1971), Gold (1974) and Shout at the Devil (1976). Co-producer Tony Tenser went on to found Tigon, the horror outfit that challenged Hammer. Stanley Long turbocharged the British sexploitation industry with numbers such as Groupie (1970), The Wife Swappers (1970) and Eskimo Nell (1975).

But it didn’t open many doors for director Arnold L. Miller who managed only a handful of features such as Frustrated Wives/Sex Farm (1974) which was banned by the British censor. Uncredited co-director Norman Cohen later made The London Nobody Knows.

Interesting for the most part and buy it if you want to play your part in upholding the British Film Institute which has rescued this from the vaults in the hope of making a quick buck.

Never Give In (2021) ***

The best documentaries, rather than bombarding you with facts or indulging in endless repetition, allow you to draw your own conclusions. Sometimes you might take the opposite view to that expressed by the filmmakers. Or perhaps the producers were being deliberately ironic in entitling this Never Give In when one of the most notable features of the early part of the career of legendary British football manager Alex Ferguson is that he did the opposite.

Possibly, his own experience permitted to understand better the temptations lying in wait for the young players in his charge. For as a young player himself Ferguson went by his own admission “off the rails” and committed an act, somewhat glossed over in humorous fashion, that under his own regime would have been more heavily punished.

He was not, except for a couple of years, a great player. Signing up part-time for St Johnstone involved a four-hour-plus round trip to Perth three times a week, getting home at 1am and rising at 6am for his full-time job as an apprentice toolmaker in Glasgow. Over four years he notched up relatively few appearances, turning out for barely one-quarter of the team’s games, and so disillusioned that he started enjoying the nightlife in his hometown, even breaking the unwritten code of drinking the night before a game.

Because he couldn’t be bothered going all the way to Perth for a game for the reserve team he got a pal to pretend to be his mother and call the manager to say he was ill. The ruse was rumbled and, ordinarily that would have been the end of a less-than-promising career. But, through injury, the team was short a striker, Ferguson’s position, and the game was against Glasgow Rangers, whose ground was close to the footballer’s home.

The gods were on his side. He scored a hat-trick, won a transfer to another team where he did far better and eventually was signed for a record fee by Rangers. He fell out with them because he failed to carry out the job of man-marking an opposition player who scored a vital goal in a Celtic-Rangers derby. He doesn’t blame himself for this fundamental error but assumes that the club had decided to freeze him out for sectarian reasons, forgetting for the moment this was the same club that defied sectarian opinion in forking out a record fee for him in the first place. Big-time career over he eventually found his way into management and when the gods shined on him again made the most of it.

Ferguson, effectively the narrator, looking back on his career after his near-fatal brain haemorrhage, doesn’t always draw the same conclusions as the audience, which is always the main ingredient of the better documentary.

Ironically again, for a man who built, courtesy of Harvard, a post-managerial career as a wonder communicator, that aspect of his personality was occasionally lacking. His father refused to speak to him for the two years when he was throwing his career away by falling victim to temptation, a presumably the intemperate youngster was not going to be the one to heal the breach.

Lack of communication was the consequence of another incident at Manchester United when he dropped out-of-form goalkeeper Jim Leighton, who had previously saved the manager’s bacon countless times with his displays between the posts, for an F.A. Cup Final replay. Leighton never spoke to him again. Ferguson’s response: he did the right thing.

What comes across most effectively, though not quite in the manner Ferguson suggests, is his ability to bring a team together. Famously, he created a siege mentality at Old Trafford, “us against them.” What underscores that of course is “us vs ego,” the team rather than the individual, no player, as he so often stated, more important than the team, and on the few occasions that did occur quick to dispense with the player’s services.

One of his methods of bonding individuals from disparate backgrounds was to call on shared memory, not the water-cooler kind of shared experience, but to get his players to recall their working-class backgrounds, their fathers and grandfathers who had done decades of hard graft, in jobs, such as Ferguson’s own father, in shipbuilding, or mining, or mindless factory work, and of mothers who made sacrifices to ensure a child’s future and of both parents who invested so much time and money either shuttling their offspring to endless football matches or watching every single game they ever played before any manager came calling.

In a post-operative state, Ferguson hit on the single most important aspect of memory, not so much remembering who you are, but recalling in detail who are the people around you, and where they fit into your life, and you to theirs, and of your shared experiences, that unique bond, where the individual is less important than the family.

Ferguson, in the light of his achievements, probably deserves a 10-part documentary. But this will certainly do for a start, not the first documentary made about him, but the one that touches most on the subjective rather than the objective view. Given our later image of him as a dour individual it’s refreshing to catch glimpses of his younger self galloping across a pitch in sheer delight. While he doesn’t quite own up to his failings, they are revealed nonetheless.

I must confess that, having been given access to Amazon and being a proud Scot, this was my first port of call rather than, say, Lord of the Rings or the many contemporary films now streaming. Thereafter, one sneak peek at The Rings of Power was enough, the portentous dialogue about how ships float put me off entirely.

The London Nobody Knows (1967) ****

Poverty is hardly an attractive movie subject. But in the light of Where the Crawdads Sing being accused of Hollywoodizing poverty, this is far grittier reminder of the grim reality.

Unexpectedly, documentaries hit a rich box office seam in the 1960s. But these were not the earnest features of the Man of Aran (1934) variety that elated the arthouse crowd or even Disney’s humor-leavened True-Life animal tales. No, documentaries in this decade mainlined the exploitative vein. West End Jungle (1961), Mondo Cane (1962) and London in the Raw (1964) had a very high cost-to-profit ratio.

The London Nobody Knows does not appeal to the prurient. It is a gritty riposte to the Swinging Sixties tourist-bedazzled London of Carnaby St fashion, pop music, red buses, Buckingham Palace and Big Ben. But to lure in an audience the camera intially focuses on the kind of travelogue that purports to show the different side to a well-known locale, before it delves into the terrible poverty which sections of the population could not escape.

Fronted by an actor – unusual then but standard now – in James Mason (Age of Consent, 1969) it begins with a diatribe against the way modern soulless architecture has destroyed significant parts of traditional London, ignoring for the most part that it swept away slums. The actor, bedecked in tweed jacket, polished brown shoes, flat cap and rolled-up umbrella, is in sharp contrast to the often decayed parts of the capital he strolls round.

Initially, what he turns up is almost quiz-question material. A victim of Dr Crippen who had a connection to the abandoned Bedford music hall theatre, home to giants like Marie Lloyd and where artist Walter Sickert was an avid attendee, the backyard in Spitalfield where Jack the Ripper disposed of one of his victims. We visit Clink St, site of a famed prison, which gave its name to “the clink,” and the Roundhouse Theater, originally a turntable for railway engines. Near the Savoy a man goes through the act of lighting a street gas lamp.

There’s a now-defunct egg-breaking plant, a business that carried out that chore on an enormous scale for chefs, and various bustling markets a-brim with the range of fresh food – eels squirming in their tanks, piles of fruit and vegetables – we only see these days in European or Asian markets. And there’s a look in passing at the type of fashions on parade when people don’t have a personal dresser, strange mixtures of outfits that were all the rage.

And then we come to the grim heart of forgotten London, a land of forgotten people, the homeless or near enough. Homelessness was not the issue it is now. The BBC play Cathy Come Home (1966) made a star out of Carol White, triggering a debate on the issue, highlighted by the formation the same year of homeless charity Shelter. But Cathy Come Home hardly touched the surface and after all it was fronted by a glamorous star.

There’s nothing glamorous about the awful, defeated often toothless faces here. Loss never looked so raw. Some don’t even find a park bench to spend the night but sprawl on the grass or fall asleep standing up leaning against a wall. Nothing so temporary as even a cardboard box available.

Others eke out a living as buskers – again, not the acceptable occupation it is now – a man dressed in a pirate outfit doing a demented tap dance. Some are not quite homeless, living in a shared dormitory on bunk beds in a Salvation Army hostel for six shillings and sixpence a night (a third of one pound sterling) or if they are flush a private room for 63 shillings a week.

Mention when seeking employment that your abode is the Salvation Army Hostel and you’ll never be offered a job. It’s a stigma. The sole perk here – what with spitting and drinking and gambling outlawed – is breakfast, but comprising porridge or fried egg, tea and two slices of toast, a meager repast by Full English standards.

The alcoholics drink something blue – methylated spirits probably – but the last vestiges of hope disappeared long ago except for one forlorn aged tramp who aims “to see if I could better myself…in a better way.”

The camera lingers on lived-in faces as though this was not a motion picture but the work of a photographer recording for posterity lives long worn away.

Oddly enough, there’s none of the self-pity that would predominate today. And there’s no blaming either. Circumstances are not investigated, though it’s obvious most took a wrong possibly alcoholic turn in their lives, were once gainfully employed but through unemployment were at the mercy of a system that didn’t yet exist to sustain them through this kind of tribulation.

Irish director Norman Cox had previously worked uncredited on London in the Raw, but the success of his mainstream breakthrough, the movie adaptation of television comedy series Till Death Us Do Part (1968), probably gave him carte blanche to undertake this though nothing else in his later portfolio – Confessions of a Pop Performer (1975), Stand Up Virgin Soldiers (1977) – approached this depth. Geoffrey Fletcher wrote the screenplay based on his own book published in 1965.

Girls Can’t Surf (2020) **** – Seen at the Cinema

Not to take anything away from this fascinating documentary about the battle for gender parity in the surfing world, but it occurred to me how few movies exist that features female athletes, compared to the plethora focusing on males. The occasional Million Dollar Baby (2004) and I, Tonya (2017) are in stark contrast to the plethora of Rocky (and now Creed)movies, or all the American football and baseball pictures while Kevin Costner alone has managed a dozen varied sports movies and even the recent King Richard (2021), ostensibly about the Williams sisters, actually centered on the father.

And the reason I ask is that the lives of any of the champion surfers showcased here would have made a worthy biopic, their stories mostly about overcoming adversity, battling male prejudice and finally, though only in the last few years, winning equal pay with men. Just as King Richard was as much about brand management, so is Girls Can’t Surf, although it was only by accident that big business understood the commercial impact women surfers had on sales of board clothing.

And the other reason I ask is that compared even to the long ago likes of Big Wednesday (1978) and Endless Summer (1965) the actual surfing footage here is meagre and it got me to thinking how much better it would have been with a proper budget for filming the surfing action.

Anyway, back to the movie I actually saw rather than the one I can only imagine, this covers the growth of female surfing from being regarded as a mere appendage to the male version to the billion-dollar industry it has become, tracing the largely sexist obstacles thrown in the way of women. The biggest issue initially wasn’t prize money, but that the men hogged the best waves and the best beaches, women often allocated times where the waves would be dismal, and therefore could not show off their skills.

This isn’t a sport like tennis or soccer where muscle power gives men the edge. Here, everyone is battling the same ocean. It’s not as if women get to surf with smaller, easier waves – that’s the last thing they want. The ocean doesn’t take it any easier on the women. But the women, barely tolerated, found themselves not just squeezed out of a decent share of the prize money but, being ignored in terms of publicity and deemed unworthy of articles in the surfing magazines, lost out in the battle to raise the sponsorship required just to make a living.

Whenever recession hit the sport, the answer was always to reduce female prize money, cancel female events or attempt to drive them out of the sport altogether. There’s an entire roll-call of generation after generation of top surfers not just battling each other to become world champion (there’s a program of global events as in Formula One racing) but battling personal circumstances – Pauline Menczer was crippled by arthritis, Pam Burridge suffered from anorexia – and each other as well as endemic sexism and inappropriate male advances.

The men were the glamour pusses, and they preferred it if the women stayed in their cars and read Mills & Boon novels and watched them surf, or if they wanted to parade about it should be in bikinis for the beauty contests that appeared a constituent part of any event.

The story is told in large part by the participants, names that were unfamiliar to me, like Jodie Cooper, Frieda Zamba, Lisa Anderson, Wendy Botha, Layne Beachley and Stephanie Gilmore. But the terms they use are the same as competitive athletes the world over, the determination to win, sometimes win at all costs, and even with a world championship trophy to your name unable to attract sponsorship.

The film could easily be interpreted as all about the battle for parity. At the start female prize money was barely a tenth of the million-dollar prize fund allocated the men. But even when manufacturers recognised that females were selling product, female earnings were usually half that of men. Eventually, the women took action, effectively going on strike when offered the poorer time slots in competitions, and at some point, it’s not exactly clear when, forcing the organisers to create a more even playing field, taking competitions to places where there was no shortage of giant waves for both sexes. The men, encountering exactly the same waves as their female counterparts, were forced to admit that in some instances the women were actually better. A social media outcry spelled the end of unequal pay, although noticeably there was no back payment for the years of inequality.

So, a terrific film directed by Christopher Nelius (Storm Surfers: New Zealand, 2010) – and co-written with Julie-Anne Du Ruvo – with no shortage of potential candidates for an awesome biopic, the supposed glamor of the surfing world exposed as tawdry for the most part, a bunch of larger-than-life personalities, a dose of humor, and women riding waves you would be scared to cross in a boat never mind with just a board for company.

In some programming quirk I caught this at the cinema but apparently it’s available on DVD and it must be streaming somewhere. The small screen will no doubt diminish the action but won’t take away form the basic story.

Ennio (2021) ***** – Seen at the Cinema

I became an instant fan of Ennio Morricone after watching dance troupe Pan’s People performing on BBC TV’s weekly Top of the Pops to Hugo Montenegro’s version of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly when it topped the singles charts in Britain in 1968. Sure, there had been successful theme songs in the charts before like Shirley Bassey’s rendering of Goldfinger, but never a pure instrumental and not a wailing guitar. This is quite simply an extraordinary documentary, and although it comes with an indulgence of anecdotes, what is considerably more compelling is the concentration, in accessible fashion, on the artist’s compositional skills. I could have watched four hours of this, never mind that clocking in at 156 minutes it’s already on the lengthy side for a documentary.

Morricone should never have been a film composer or a composer of any kind. He was too poor. His father was a trumpet-player and Morricone only took up music, designated instrument the trumpet, because his father believed a good trumpet player would always make a living and provide for his family. He was not a good trumpet player. At least, not at the start. Given that once orchestras and dance bands went out of favor, trumpet playing would have been a precarious existence, it was lucky his father’s insisted he also study harmony and composition. He won a place at a conservatoire, where the pupils, all except him, were the sons and daughters of the wealthy elite. And a conservatoire in those days was academically inclined, intending to produce classical composers and players, not people who would work as arrangers and composers of pop songs or commit the unpardonable sin of writing for the movies.

Morricone, always prolific, started working as an arranger of pop tunes for the RCA label in Italy and then for RAI, the Italian state television. But he was also an innovator and many of his songs began with a distinctive sound rather than the music being merely a backdrop to the song. He founded an experimental music group, making music out of anything but a musical instrument. You can see the benefits of that inquiring mind from the first 20 minutes of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), for me his compositional masterpiece and my favorite western.

When he started working for Sergio Leone, he realized they had once been classmates. Leone came to him because Morricone had already written music for Italian westerns. Of course, the collaboration became legendary. As you will be aware, Leone liked the music recorded before filming began and played it during filming. While an interesting approach, I always thought it odd, until I witnessed, here, Robert De Niro making an entrance in one scene of Once Upon a Time in America (1984).

While his themes were often complex, he had a genius for catching the ear of the listener. Many scenes showed Morricone with voice and fingers tapping out a theme you will instantly recognize because all his best work was instantly recognizable. Although an extremely shy person, he was not above walking out – or threatening to do so – if a film was not going according to plan, if a director insisted on making a change or incorporating other material. Nor, for such a genius, was he full of self-confidence. Eventually, he relied on his wife as a listening board to decide if his work was any good. For what he called the “triumphant” scene from The Untouchables (1987), where cops brandishing shotguns prompted by Sean Connery burst in on bootleggers, he supplied nine ideas for director Brian De Palma, who proceeded to use the one Morricone considered the weakest. Other times, he was the one suddenly requiring an extra piece of work, calling upon Joan Baez to supply lyrics at the last minute to his theme for Sacco and Vanzetti (1971) that became the memorable “Here’s To You.”

One of the most enjoyable elements of the movie is seeing concert renditions of his themes, “Here’s To You” with a massive choral ensemble making the hairs on the back of your head stand on end. You could probably make a case for Morricone reinventing the chorus, paving the way for such practitioners as Hans Zimmer. Until then, there was many a heavenly chorus, but Morricone found better use for a chorus. And you could also argue that he influenced the likes of Ridley Scott (Gladiator, 1999) in using female opera singers to introduce a completely new sound to movies.

One of Morricone’s stated aims was to use music to bring something else out of a scene, not to merely provide a relevant sound. So for the death of Sean Connery in The Untouchables or the baby carriage scene his music goes completely against what you are watching but nonetheless adds a deeper understanding. We also see how he folds different themes into the one piece of music.

There are a number of very moving sequences, when Morricone, for example recalls his father – he would not use a trumpet in his compositions until his father died – or when he explains his hurt at being made to feel an outcast by his classical peers, and there is one extraordinary moment when one of those who has disdained him writes a letter asking forgiveness for having so under-rated his work. And certainly there is clear petulance at being passed over for the Oscar for The Mission (1986), a piece of work that director Roland Joffe said made the movie a completely different experience. Morricone complained that half the music that won Herbie Hancock the Oscar for Round Midnight (1986) was actually old, rather than new, music.

My favorite anecdote is how Gillo Pontecorvo, hearing heard a piece of music Morricone had composed for The Year of the Cannibals (1970) promptly stole it for his own Queimade/Burn (1969) before settling, after an argumemt, for a similar piece. Actors, composers and directors in the anecdote queue include Quentin Tarantino (The Hateful Eight, 2015) , Clint Eastwood, Terence Malick (Days of Heaven, 1978), Dario Argento (Four Flies on Grey Velvet, 1971), John Williams, Hans Zimmer, Oliver Stone (U Turn, 1997) Marco Bellochio (Fists in the Pocket, 1965) and Bernardo Bertolucci (1900, 1976).

Morricone’s film music changed over the decades. Following the westerns were giallos, marked by dissonance rather than melody, then Hollywood came calling. I hadn’t quite realized what an audience Morricone commanded – over 70 million albums sold. He had hit singles In Italy – A Fistful of Dollars ranked fourth in the charts, For a Few Dollars one place below, “Here’s To You” also fourth. In Britain, “Chi Mai” reached the second spot; in France “Man with Harmonica” from Once Upon a Time in the West went to number one, as did “Chi Mai” while “Here’s To You” was at number two. And, of course, his music has been adopted by a host of rock bands, most notably Bruce Springsteen and Metallica.

Director Giuseppe Tornatore, who has a special place in the Morricone catalog thanks to Cinema Paradiso (1988), has produced a magnificent tribute to the genius. In my half century of regular cinema going, there are four composers I rank above all the rest, John Barry, John Williams, Hans Zimmer and Ennio Morricone, but of them all, the latter is the number one for not just his enormous output – 500 scores including 29 in one year – and his wide range of melodies, but because they are so many memorable pieces. Once Upon a Time in the West is never off my CD player and especially gets worn out in the car. For sheer enjoyment this is an undeniable five-star treat.

I am sure this will end being streamed somewhere but I urge you to try and catch it at the cinema, the effect will be lost on the small screen of the massed choruses or Morricone conducting in vast amphitheaters.

When Comedy Was King (1960) ***

The 1960s was as much devoted to old movies as to new – the production shortage sent studios and producers back to the vaults to find anything that could fill a slot on a cinema program – and one of the most surprising beneficiaries of this was the silent movie.

It’s impossible to understand the 1960s without realizing what underpinned both the revival of slapstick comedy in such movies as It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and The Great Race (1965) and, just as crucially, brought to the attention of a new public other non-comedic stars from Hollywood’s “golden age,” the revival of whose movies in turn prompted a reissue boom and a decade or so further on provided the stimulus for the restoration of forgotten masterpieces.

The innovator in the silent comedy field was Robert Youngson, a two-time Oscar-winner (in the one-reel documentary category), who had set the ball rolling with The Golden Age of Comedy (1957).

When Comedy Was King sports a greater repertoire of stars and in essence presents a tribute – though not necessarily a greatest hits – to some of the best of the silent comedians The line-up includes Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle, Laurel and Hardy, Mabel Normand and the Keystone Cops.

*It was renamed “The Parade of Joy” for European markets.*

None of the shorts featured are necessarily an individual artist’s greatest work – Chaplin’s contribution, for example, is drawn from a trio of 1914 pictures, The Masqurader, Kid Auto in Venice and His Trysting Place, none of which would be seen to represent the actor at his height. But they do give an idea of what silent comedy was all about.

Buster Keaton’s contribution is selected from the 18-minute Cops (1922) with well-timed gags, slapstick and car chases. Mutual self-destruction is a hallmark of Laurel and Hardy and Big Business (1929) sees the pair get into an argument with a customer, ending up demolishing everything in sight. This is probably the pick of the compilation since the pair’s comedy relies on their relationship with each other and with anyone who gets in their way.

Appreciation of the particular talents of Fatty Arbuckle scarcely survived the scandal that ended his career while memory of Mabel Normand would also have been hazy so Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916) is a good example of their comedy styles. They play a couple whose bed ends up floating on the sea.

Youngson was not above cashing in on a star’s future fame even when the example used of the person’s work could hardly be considered their best. In the case of Gloria Swanson (Sunset Boulevard, 1950) she was unrecognizable especially as she was only 12-years-old and being billed at the time as Gloria Dawn. Her inclusion is taken from the short Jimmie the Fox (1911) later renamed Bobby’s Sweetheart. Certainly, she is displaying none of the dramatic ability which made her the highest paid actress of the 1920s.

For all the varying quality of the actual footage, it does work as a showcase for the various stars, even though they would achieve greater success in later films. As importantly, it opened up for the 1960s generation the world of silent comedy and seemed to make that decade’s audience laugh as much as it had done previously.

Youngson would go on to make another five of these compilations throughout the decade. Without his initial forays into old school comedy, big-budget 70mm roadshows like It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World would never have seen the light of day, nor would more modest efforts like the British-made The Plank (1967), written, directed and starring Eric Sykes.

The Three Kings (2020) ****

Not to be confused with David O. Russell’s similarly-titled Persian Gulf War picture starring George Clooney from 1999, from which this picture could not be further removed given that it is the study of three Scottish football managerial geniuses who in their way created the basis for the business empires of Manchester United, Liverpool and Glasgow’s Celtic F.C.

The death of Diego Maradona and the subsequent grief that swept Argentina is the most recent example of the power of football. The Three Kings demonstrates that this is anything but a new phenomenon. And it also very much a story of the 1960s when these three kings of football ascended their thrones.

Jock Stein (of Celtic), Matt Busby (of Manchester Utd) and Bill Shankly (of Liverpool) were born within 30 miles of each other in grim Scottish mining communities. Busby and Shankly played at international level for their country but Stein, after a career in the lower echelons of football, was surprisingly hired by Celtic in the early 1950s where his leadership skills led him to be made captain of a team he subsequently led to the Scottish championship. As managers, they reached fabulous heights, Stein and Busby leading their teams to European Cup glory, Shankly’s Liverpool dominating English football for several seasons.

As much as it is about their individual triumphs and tragedies – Busby lost most of his team and nearly his own life in the Munich Air Disaster, Stein nearly died in a car crash – it is also most pertinently about the importance of football to a community. Shankly saw his team as in service to the city. But it was also about their combined global reach.

This is a personal film for me. I grew up in and around Glasgow just as Stein’s team was reaching its peak. My father used to take me and my brother all over Scotland in his car to support the team. (My knowledge of geography owes much to the teams Celtic played in Scotland and Europe.) We were at Motherwell in 1966 when in the dying minutes Celtic won the game to clinch their first title in a dozen years. We were at Celtic Park the following year when in the dying minutes our team won the quarter-final against the Yugoslavian champions Vojvodina Novi Sad and of course we sat glued to the television on May 25, 1967, when Celtic became the first British team to win the European Cup (the fore-runner of the Champions League).

The film is based on the book by Leo Moynihan.

In winning the European Cup, the first time anyone outside outside the Latin heartlands of Spain and Italy and Portugal did so, Celtic – with a team drawn from 30 miles around Glasgow rather than global galacticos – joined Europe’s elite, in the company of such names as Real Madrid, Benfica, AC Milan and Inter Milan. Celtic’s verve and audacity appealed to neutrals around the world. Manchester Utd’s fabled trio of Best, Law and Charlton, plus the legacy of the Busby Babes killed at Munich, gave that team a global platform. In Shankly Liverpool had a master of the soundbite who talked like James Cagney and did the spadework for the Liverpool teams that would dominate Europe in the 1970s and 1980s.

Whether they realised it or not, the trio put their teams on a pedestal few have reached and the film estimated that a quarter of the globe’s entire population currently supports one of the three. It is also a testament to the burden carried by the managers. By the age of 62 both Busby and Shankly had retired while Jock Stein Stein died from a heart attack in the dying seconds of a vital World Cup qualifying game while managing Scotland.

The film also captures the unique circumstances of each of the working-class cities where football was the lifeblood. All three had other major football teams and it would not be unusual for a quarter of the city’s populations to attend football matches on a Saturday afternoon. Cities that had been destroyed by the Second World War and suffered from a contraction of the workforce in the recessions of the 1960s turned to football as a lifeline. Men who otherwise contained their emotions would let them loose in raucous fashion when following their favoured teams.

Directed with at times great subtlety by Jonny Owen, also responsible for the film about Brian Clough’s Eurropean Cup-winning Nottingham Forest I Believe in Miracles (2015), and incorporating rare archive footage, the documentary looks back to a time when football passion could transcend adversity.

Here’s the link to the DVD: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=the+three+kings+documentary&i=dvd&crid=3MUGTRX0UJTWB&sprefix=the+three+kings%2Cdvd%2C154&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-a-p_3_15

It’s Not All Rock’n’Roll (2020) ****

I’ve never heard of the rock band Swearing At Motorists but like everyone else I’ve got misconceived notions about the rock’n’roll lifestyle of excess and how if you live long enough and are lucky enough you might find redemption at the end of the highway. So Jim Burns’ touching documentary It’s Not All Rock’n’Roll redresses that balance. Band frontman Dave Doughman has been a recording artist since 1995, making eight albums and about to set off on a tour where, if he’s unlucky, his audience might comprise six people, or an irate customer might insist on playing pool during the performance.

He even does his own washing-up, takes his boy to school and has a day-job as a forklift truck driver. He doesn’t do it for the money or the fame – just as well since none has come his way – but because he wants to be a working rock musician. Since the band consists of Dave and a drummer, it’s up to him to put on a show, and, by golly, he’s the best one-man show in town, leaping up and down, playing the guitar on his back, burning off energy like gas is a dime a gallon, and keeping the tempo way above eleven.

We catch up with him in Hamburg where he’s living. He’s single and trying to become the dad his dad wasn’t, developing a relationship with his young son, his life revolving around taking his son to and collecting him from school, fitting in songwriting and recording in between. Trying to make money when you are not particularly famous is the hard part if you want to remain a working musician, so he’s the one also selling records and memorabilia at concerts. Publicity is scant. He’s delighted when he is the February selection for a local calendar and there’s a hilarious sequence where, echoing the famous Coppertone advert, he is photographed on the beach with a dog pulling down his pants.

But it’s one version we get of him in Germany and another when he goes on tour back to homeland America and we find out that he was on the excess express for 27 years and has only recently cut out drink and drugs and sought out treatment for depression in order to become the responsible father his father was not. I wondered what kind of tour this would be since he is relatively unknown, although John Peel has played his records and he was part of the Dayton, Ohio, music scene at one point. The answer is he plays bars and if he is invited to a festival he has the opening slot – at 10.30am. But none of that matters to Dave. He treats every gig as if he is playing Madison Square Garden or headlining Glastonbury. It’s like the Field of Dreams of rock. Waiting for people to come, even if not many always do. But he gives the kind of performance nobody who does come will ever forget, as some concert-goers testify, and as we can see for ourselves.

The forklift truck driver shows us the way.

This being a documentary and me never having heard of this guy I had no idea where the story was going to go. I certainly didn’t think I would be totally engrossed, not so much by the later revelations, but by the guy’s honesty. In a business where artifice is often everything he is under no illusions. Even if the music doesn’t grab you by the balls, Dave Doughman has an unusual charisma. The camera loves him. And he’s not even mugging to the camera, this isn’t an act like so many other documentaries on rock stars. This is the real thing. And even when he’s electric on stage you’re still left thinking of his dichotomy – how is he going to bring up his son if he has to be thousands of miles away touring? This is an insider’s look at the genuine life of a rock musician – and not to be missed. That rare thing – a rock documentary with soul.

You can catch this on demand at Vimeo. Check out the trailer below.