Drama – Page 16 – The Magnificent 60s

Privilege (1967) ****

Considerably more prescient than perceived at the time. Predicts the influence of pop stars – immeasurably magnified now through social media – and instant cancellation as a consequence of inappropriate action or remark, plus the way marketing tie-ins can boost product. Itemizes more succinctly the corporate pressure brought to bear on entertainers as well as the constant public exposure that denies performers any privacy. The radio in a watch was way ahead of its time and you could also argue that it predates A Clockwork Orange (1971) in identifying the attraction of violence and it touches on self-harm.

It’s both daft but realistic, overblown but intimate, mixing gibberish and brilliance so well it’s hard to know which side to come down on. All the obvious targets – Church, Government, big business, the dumb young – are here.

The story is set in a Big Brother style “near future” when control of the masses is the aspiration of Government. Steven Shorter (Paul Jones) is the messianic pop star trapped by fame. His stage act is quite stunning. Imprisoned in a cage, handcuffed, brutally beaten by warders, he sings of freedom to a young, mostly female, audience driven to tears by his ordeal, and occasionally on the point of rioting.

Paul Jones’s performance was criticized at the time because reviewers wanted performer more than puppet, but, at the distance of a half a century, it looks more like the actor has made the correct choice, entombed by the restrictions placed upon his life.There’s scarcely a rebellious pop/rock star alive who hasn’t been in the thrall of big business. Rebellion is the modern equivalent of “bread and circuses,” whatever keeps the young happy and limited to venting their own revolutionary tendencies in a contained situation, and in this case endorsed by the State. The history of music is littered with entertainers taken advantage of by big business and, just as likely, willingly signing a big deal they later regretted – Creedence Clearwater Revival, George Michael come to mind though Taylor Swift found a sweet way of taking financial revenge. And of decades of tours that appeared to benefit as much the sponsors as the entertainers.

While there’s a 1984 vibe here, that element of a single party in eternal control of Britain is as relevant now as then. Some would argue the world, through the dominance of social media, is more vacuous than before. Others, precisely because of social media, less vacuous. Entertainers might be willingly enrolled to sell a variety of products or promote political activity, any one of which could be interpreted as as harmless as being used to sell 600 million apples which will go to rot unless immediately consumed, which is the marketing task in hand here.

Critics at the time were less taken by the principals, the pop star Steven Shorter (Paul Jones) and potential love interest Vanessa (Jean Shrimpton), recruited to paint his portrait but, in effect, presented as a glorified groupie. They wanted the performer to be as charismatic offstage, in the manner of Mick Jagger or John Lennon, as on, as if stage antics could not be separated from reality. But I found the numbing down of Shorter more authentic. He had lost/sold his individuality, he went where his bosses dictated, and although not indicated you could as easily equate his offstage life to being stoned out of his mind, which would accord with the experience of lot more entertainers afterwards than at the time.

If he only comes alive through performance that, too, while taken to an extreme, would be in line with the experience of many performers whose personality only catches fire when performing. Many actors, for example, will insist that fulfillment comes from wearing a variety of stage or screen masks.

And Shorter’s inherent masochism, willingly accepting the blows delivering by his truncheoned guards on stage, his back covered in scars, resonates more strongly today when self-harm in an indicator of poor mental health. Yet, he can rebel, aware of the individual control he exerts, that he chooses to demonstrate almost contemptuously when at a grand dinner party he refuses wine and insists instead that everyone, even his supposed boss, partakes of hot chocolate.

The other notion touched upon, which resonates far more today than then, is the price fame exacts, most importantly loss of privacy. When Vanessa, not unexpectantly, falls for our hero, she declines to take their brief affair further, “we’d never be alone together, not really.” And it’s surely not unintentionally ironic that the theme of his main song is “set me free.”

Bob Dylan embracing the electric guitar, scandalizing his purist folk base, might have provided the impetus for the climactic scenes, when the messianic Steven turns his back on rebellion (“repents” in a brilliantly staged concert) and instead embraces traditional Christian values, providing an opportunity for surprisingly entertaining pop versions of Onward Christian Soldiers and Jerusalem.

I haven’t mentioned that this isn’t a straightforward candidate for the A Star Is Born sub-genre, reporting rise and fall in standard manner, but instead is presented as documentary, but of the kind that would be more easily appreciated today, seductive camera dominant rather than the intrusive presenter, with all subsidiary characters either justifying their behavior or being shown abusing their position.

Probably most relevant of all is that Shorter’s career comes to a close from inappropriate remark, triggering cancelation and loss of “privilege.”

I can see why director Peter Watkins chose someone who could sing for his main character – Paul Jones had been lead singer of Manfred Mann before going solo, in both guises releasing a string of hit singles – since that kind of veracity is virtually impossible to achieve from miming or imitation. Instead of delivering a poor performance, and elivening every moment with “charisma,” it appears to me that Paul Jones, in his movie debut, is instead correct to follow his intuition or inner truth that offstage an entertainer is a mere ghost of himself. I would hazard that model Jean Shrimpton wasn’t called upon to do much acting, but her own soft-spoken Engish rose personality with just a hint of steel suits her character well.

Watkins, too, resisted the temptation to litter the background with scene-stealing supporting actors, or those hoping for a career break, and of these only Jeremy Child (A Fish Called Wanda, 1988) might be instantly recognizable.

Watkins had made his name with what appeared at the time to be tougher-talking television docu dramas Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1966), the latter so graphically showing the effects of nuclear war it was promptly banned. While Privilege on initial release carried little of the power of the first two, in retrospect it has come into its own. The only screenplay by Norman Bogner, better known for television, from an idea by Johnny Speight (BBC’s Till Death Do Us Part, 1966-1975) which translated to the U.S. as All in the Family, 1971-1979).

Worth reviving.

The Lion (1962) ***

For such a harmless picture The Lion raises a couple of troubling issues. The first concerns the titular beast. Doubt if you’d get the authorities these days to greenlight a movie where a pre-pubescent girl was in such close proximity to a full-grown lion. Having as a safety measure two sharpshooters on the sidelines out of camera range, as director Jack Cardiff did here, might not cut it.

Secondly, we’ve got censor double standard. I remember my shocked parents forbidding me from seeing Zulu (1964), a massive hit in Britain, on account of the toplessness of the indigenous females. The censor didn’t slap an X-certificate on that sequence on the assumption that such nudity, in the context of tribal tradition, wouldn’t apparently incite the lewd male gaze. Had this been white breasts on show, in whatever tradition, the censor would not have been so lenient, signifying an inherent racism. Here, surprisingly, we’ve also got female toplessness, somewhat more discreet than Zulu, but coming as a surprise to your reviewer.

Perhaps the oddest feature of the picture is the contradictory message: Africa is wonderful but it’s not the place to bring up a young girl. Certainly not one who embraces the wildness with considerably more conviction than a passing wildlife tourist. As the imdb stub puts it: the young girl Tina (Pamela Franklin) must be brought “back to civilization.”

And there’s a distinctly old-fashioned tint to a storyline that demands the appearance of her father Robert (William Holden), long divorced from wife Christine (Capucine), as the firm male hand required to drag his estranged daughter back to said civilization. Christine’s current partner John (Trevor Howard), grizzled poacher-turned-gamekeeper, former big game hunter now eking out a living as a game warden, appears more sanguine about the girl’s lifestyle but less welcoming to the visitor. Tina has raised the wild lion King from a cub and as their bond is intense she is reluctant to give him up.

Disney would have taken a different approach, buffing up the cuter aspects. That the studio could show adult and child perspective in tandem is instanced by Pollyanna (1960) and in the later The Jungle Book (1967) solved the problem of a young boy becoming too involved with his wild playmates by having an intriguing young girl tempt him away. Or a touch of the Born Free (1966) playbook might have seen Tina simply mutate from childhood to an adult job in the animal preservation business

Instead, playing out in almost literal fashion, are two human male beasts battling it out (though not physically, unfortunately) over the mother with the needs of the child seemingly swept to one side as the love triangle takes hold.

The best scenes concern Robert and Tina, especially her early disinterest in his presence, and her later delight at leading him a wild dance through the jungle and seeing how his terror of her lion pal equates with her complete lack of fear. While John’s role is to keep a grip on poaching, he’s not so friendly to the animals, almost determined to torment them by running his jeep recklessly at or around them to elicit maddened response and alarm the visitor with their wildness rather than their apparent, at a distance, docility.

Perhaps the lack of a punch-up ensures this movie never catches fire. There’s quite a perplexing sub-plot that dictates the outcome. The son of the local tribal chief has his eye on Tina and during the aforementioned tradition it’s clear the young girl wants to participate in the frenzied dance courtship ritual.

But this kind of tradition is at the polar opposite of civilization as is the tradition that an old man, succumbing to fatal illness, should be left out in the wild to die. Christine intervenes to save him. Meanwhile, believing his father dead, the son sets out to achieve manhood by killing the lion and in the ensuing tangle John kills both young man and lion. The tribal response to the death of their new chief goes unrecorded but Bullit’s action drives Tina towards her parents. With the lion dead, it’s a lot easier to winkle the girl away from Africa and back to civilization.

Plenty of wildlife for your buck, but plot and characters are not a patch on Hatari! (1962) or The Last Safari (1967). William Holden, whose yen for making movies as far away from the U.S. tax authorities as possible was destroying his career, is good value as the estranged father and if you are looking for smouldering then Trevor Howard (The Long Duel, 1967) is your man. Capucine would tee up with Holden – the pair had an affair – again in The 7^th Dawn (1964) but she was more effective in the later picture than here.

Jack Cardiff (Girl on a Motorcycle, 1968) directs from a script by Irene and Louis Kamp (The Sandpiper, 1965) based on the bestseller by Joseph Kessel (L’Armee des Ombres/Army of Shadows, 1969).

Might have preferred the Disney version.

The Arrangement (1969) ***

It might have been better if director Elia Kazan had handed over the screenwriting chores for this adaptation of his bestseller about the midlife crisis of advertising man Eddie Anderson (Kirk Douglas). As director he over-angsts the pudding. Anderson’s attempts to juggle wife Florence (Deborah Kerr) and mistress Gwen (Faye Dunaway) coupled with growing disgust at selling a new brand of cigarettes, Zephyr (“The Clean One”), in a way that pointedly avoids their cancer potential, leads to a suicide attempt.

During convalescence he determines to quit the advertising world and go back to his first love, writing, but in fact he ends up sabotaging his career. Florence represents impossible seduction and conscience. Slinky, in dark glasses, hot-tempered rather than submissive or demure, she accuses him of self-deception in his job. The picture flits back and forth between his various choices – different job, return to wife, settle down with mistress, or what seems his ideal world, cossetted by both Gwen and Florence.

Gwen is an excellent study of the modern woman (of that fast-changing period, I hasten to add), who needs a man for sex but not necessarily love, and can use the opposite sex as ruthlessly as any man. What she actually requires in her real life is quite different to what she seeks in the fantasy love she enjoyed with Anderson, sex on the beach, the buzz of controlling a high-powered man. Florence could be seen as an old-fashioned portrait of the adoring wife except for capturing so well the bewilderment of betrayal.

Kazan conjures up some wonderful images: the tension before the suicide attempt as Anderson plays chicken between two trucks, Gwen emerging wet from the pool to eat dangling grapes or with her legs up on Anderson’s desk, Anderson’s mother lighting votive candles in her house before using the same match for her cigarette, Kerr’s futile attempts to win back her fallen husband, Anderson flying solo.

In parts well-observed and directorially savvy, quick cuts between the present and the past, however it sinks beneath its own self-indulgence. My guess is that author Kazan could not bear to kill off a single one of the characters he had created for his acclaimed novel and the upshot is a vastly over-populated picture, few of whom cast any real light on Anderson’s predicament. So we are not only introduced to mother, dying father, brother, sister-in-law and analyst but priest and a bucket of clients and guys from the office. And there are some plot oddities – Anderson gets time off apparently to write journalistic pieces – and what is clearly intended as hard-hitting satire of the advertising world does not come off.

Dunaway (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967) is the standout as Gwen, living life according to her own rules, and with an unexpected vision of domesticity but Deborah Kerr (Prudence and the Pill, 1968) does pain like nobody else and is extremely convincing. Strangely enough, I didn’t go much for Douglas (Seven Days in May, 1964). He could have been leading a cavalry charge for all the range of emotions he exhibited. Douglas is no Montgomery Clift (Wild River, 1960), James Dean (East of Eden, 1955) or Marlon Brando (On the Waterfront, 1954) who was Kazan’s first choice. Kazan had not made a picture in six years and it had been eight years since his last hit Splendor in the Grass (1961). Not quite out-of-touch in concept and delivery, nonetheless it was shunned by the Oscar fraternity.

An odd one distinguished by Deborah Kerr and Faye Dunaway.

Inherit the Wind (1961) ****

As timely as ever with America seemingly always on the brink of dictating what freedoms people can enjoy. At the time the target was the oppression engndered by McCarthysim, rather than the more basic tale of whether State law could forbid its citizens to talk about evolution. It was set almost a century ago, based on a real-life case, and even now fundamentalists reject Darwin’s theories. Setting aside the context, the principle contested is still the same – not just free speech but the right to be different. You could even argue that scientists and fundamentalists are all agreed these days, that out of nothing came the universe, whether created by a Deity or someone operating a contraption called the Big Bang.

Setting aside the various arguments for and against Darwin’s theory, what we have, nonetheless, is an acting highpoint, a fabulous courtroom battle, of the kind adored by audiences, full of objections sustained, attorneys being warned by the judge, inadmissible evidence, smart remarks and witty rejoinders. This all takes place in a sweltering courtroom, temperature so high that the judge agrees to depart from court procedure and permit the verbal duellists to shed their jackets.

Given further depth because the antagonists, Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) and Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March), were once the best of pals, political allies, on the same side in the latter’s failed bid for the Presidency, and willing to accept the other’s personal foibles. Probably the first legal drama to accept that outside the courtroom the participants could be friends.

Luckily, most of it isn’t long speeches, but sharp comebacks, plus the detours, twists and turns that come about from concentrating more on the court than on any surrounding action, though there is forbidden romance, pastor’s daughter Rachel (Donna Anderson) defying her father over her love for the accused, schoolteacher Bertram (Dick York) whose teaching is in conflict with the Bible.

The most outraged denizens of the town get into a right tizzy, marches, religious songs, protest, but that’s leavened by commercial interests, a bank manager worrying that the town being ridiculed by those cleverer folks back east will harm his business, hoteliers, sideshow operators licking their lips at the financial bounty of reporters and gawkers descending on the town.

This is as you’d like to see Spencer Tracy, not the silent judge of Judgement at Nuremberg (1961), personality reined in by the weight of his decisions and the need to do right by those accused of even the most heinous of crimes, but the exuberant character, confident, up for battle, able to fend off any criticism and come back to any witticism at his expense with stinging repartee.

Fredric March, too, has a ball with a loudmouth character, convinced of his infallibility (except of course in terms of the Presidential Race), apt to stuff his face at dinner, but still with an intellectual thrust capable of parrying anything Tracy can throw at him. Tucked somewhere in between is weaselly reporter E.K. Hornbeck (Gene Kelly) whose newspaper has hired Drummond to defend Bertram in the hope of filling the front pages for days with the Trial of the Century (taking the prize from Leopold and Loeb the year before – both cases in real-life handled by Clarence Darrow).

Harry Morgan (The Flim-Flam Man/One Born Every Minute, 1967) plays the snipppy judge trying to maintain order while Claude Akins (Claudelle Inglish, 1961) the hellfire preacher. With so many interesting characters on parade, there’s never a dull moment, especially with each actor trying to wring every ounce of drama and/or pathos from their part.

Director Stanley Kramer (Judgment at Nuremberg) looks as if early on he made up his mind to give the actors their sway. There’s no reining in, even in the early scenes, with the populace up in arms and carrying very professionally-made signs and banners (no handwritten scrawls here, no sirree). And once Tracy and March hit their stride, it’s all an audience can do to sit back and admire. Sentiments expressed will still strike a chord, but, mostly it’s a testament to two great actors at the top of their game.

If you only remember March from the likes of The Condemned of Altona (1962) or Seven Days in May (1964) you should know he was a huge marquee attaction in his day, double Oscar-winner (and three nominations besides), as at home in swashbucklers like The Buccaneer (1938) as drama and comedies, leading man who could more than hold his own against top female stars – Greta Garbo (Anna Karenina, 1935), Katharine Hepburn (Mary of Scotland, 1936), Merle Oberon (Dark Angel, 1935) and Janet Gaynor (A Star Is Born, 1937).

Written by Nedrick Young (The Train, 1964) and Harold Jacob Smith (The McMasters, 1970) from the play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee.

A terrific watch.

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960) ****

Surprisingly frank, for the times, exploration of a failing marriage that tackles sexuality, racism, bullying, teenage angst. In those days there was no such concept as midlife crisis, so the general attitude of grin-and-bear-it results in a melancholy that suffuses the picture. Adapted from the Broadway hit by William Inge (Splendor in the Grass, 1961), provides more insight into American family life than the more souped-up soap operas of the Peyton Place variety. Except for crisis escalating action, could well have been misery memoir.

Opens with a surprisingly tender scene that’s again pretty raw for the period. In the morning, salesman husband Rubin (Robert Preston) strokes the arms and face of waking wife Cora (Dorothy McGuire), clearly hoping to initiate sex, when she abruptly rebuffs him. Before he sets off on a week-long business trip he tries to toughen up bullied friendless overly-mothered son Sonny (Robert Eyer), afraid of the dark, and bolster the flagging confidence of inhibited teenage daughter Reenie (Shirley Knight), only succeeding in inadvertedly punching his son in the face and triggering a row with his wife.

But, without warning, he’s fired from his job and not equipped to compete in the employment arena with a flood of younger people with college degrees and greater stamina. Pride prevents him owning up to Cora, rejection sends him to the bottle and a lady friend, hairdresser Mavis Pruitt (Angela Lansbury) who scandalizes the town by (and this dates it) always leaving the top button of her blouse open. Cora plans escape, hoping to go and live, temporarily until she can find a job, with bossy sister Lottie (Eve Arden) in Oklahoma City.

Meanwhile, following an accidental meeting, the hesitant shy Reenie strikes up a rapport with the more outgoing confident Sammy (Lee Kinsolving). Lottie isn’t so keen to help out her beleaguered sister. When Rubin finally returns after a four-day absence it’s to a welter of home truths.

He still can’t bear to admit the loss of his job. The uneasy truce is shattered when Sammy is chucked out of a party he attends as Reenie’s escort at the country club for being a Jew. Subsequently, he attempts suicide and dies, leaving Reenie in shock. Cora determines to find out for herself the rumors concerning Rubin’s affair. But it turns out, although Mavis is deeply in love with Rubin, they’ve never slept together, providing Cora with a second chance to make her marriage work.

What distinguishes the movie is the revelatory dialog you’d expect from an award-winning playwright like Inge. Characters reveal their inner selves, not always with prompting, and not always in argument, and such lines often bring characters to life. Included in that are some of the subsidiary characters.

For example, Ralston (Ken Lynch) whom Rubin openly dislikes because he successfully got away with an insurance scam that turned him into a millionaire, hides away in the back room of a pharmacy, drinking away his guilt. “I know what I am. Who I am,” says Ralston, “the town scandal.” And you think this is maybe just a passing character, but this is the guy, guilt or no guilt, who enforces the country club ban on admitting Jews.

The controlling Lottie suspects her husband’s need for a long walk in the evening is to get away from the sound of her voice. Unusually, the sisters broach the subject of intimacy. Lottie confesses, “I never enjoyed it the way most women say they do.”

What’s keeping Cora and Rubin apart is their lack of intimacy, caused by their battles over money, the husband refusing to get into debt to satisfy his wife’s yearnings not necessarily for the finer things of life, but to avoid the endless scrimping and saving, getting maximum wear from a dress for the growing Reenie by turning it into a skirt.

Rudin laments, “Was a time you liked what I had…If you can’t remember sowing all those wild oats with me, I just plain give up.” Finally, they get to the crux of the matter (again bold language for the times). Rubin asks, plaintively, “How come you don’t enjoy sleeping with me any more?” Retorts Cora, “I can’t fight with you all day and then go to bed with you at night.”

If there is a flaw it’s some attitudes that will jibe with contemporary audiences. “If I had a real wife,” argues Rubin, “I wouldn’t have to go high-tailing it to Mavis Pruit.” And I winced at this particular line: “I wished someone loved me enough to hit me,” says a wistful Lottie hearing that, for the first time in his life, Rubin slapped his wife. Lottie clearly equates manliness and ardor with such violence.

But on the whole, the dialog is a cut above. I’m not sure how much came directly from the play itself and how much was added by screenwriters Harriet Frank Jr and Irving Ravetch (Hud, 1963). The opening certainly, such a situation might be mentioned in the play but a bedroom scene like that would never be staged.

More at home in the theater than on screen Robert Preston (he only appeared in five pictures the whole decade including The Music Man, 1962) exudes such energy as the salesman that you can see how denial of sex would destroy his self-confidence. Dorothy McGuire (Swiss Family Robinson, 1960) is excellent as the wife trying her best not to end up as a put-upon stereotype. Shirley Knight (Petulia, 1968) was Oscar-nominated, Angela Lansbury (The Manchurian Candidate, 1962) came across as too wise to be a loose woman, and Eve Arden (in her only movie of the decade) impresses as the bossy sister.

With such terrific material and an excellent cast, Oscar-winning director Delbert Mann (Buddwing/Mr Buddwing, 1966) doesn’t need to do much to guide this one home.

Well worth a look.

A Cold Wind in August (1961) ***

Touching low-budget B-movie shot in black-and-white of a young man receiving his sexual education from an older woman. Motherless Vito (Scott Maxwell), the son of an apartment block super, is seduced by the older Iris (Lola Albright), three-time divorcee, looking for a son to mother.

This is not the transactional sex of The Graduate, and seduction is too strong a description for the yearning Iris whose advances are sensual and romantic, stroking Vito’s head, trapping his hand with her foot, and there is nothing clandestine about their affair either, no false names on a hotel register. They dally in the park, eat hotdogs, and he buys her flowers.

But as he experiences love for the first time, he also experiences more difficult emotions like jealousy and finds it difficult not just to cope with what seems like another man in her life, the wholesaler Juley (Herschel Bernardi), but the fact that she treats him with such contempt. Spoiler alert – well, not really, because you know from the off this is not going to turn out well – the affair ends when he discovers she is a stripper. And while she is left bereft, he now appears more attractive to girls his own age.

In contrast to the powerful emotions stoked up when the pair are together, director Alexander Singer (Psyche ‘59) fills us in on the rest of Vito’s humdrum life, working for his father during the school holidays, goofing off with his pals, and generally failing to make headway with girls his own age. But Iris’s life is not humdrum. Although she has a rule not to work in her own area, she breaks that to accommodate her estranged husband, whom she seems to tolerate, while at the same time drinking herself into oblivion to avoid any moves from Juley. Nor is she ashamed of her profession. It is an act, a job like any other, and provides her with a nice apartment.

Small wonder she treats men with contempt. Perhaps what she falls in love with is untainted innocence. In some senses she is adrift, at other times in full command. And her love for Vito is convincing.

It is full of incidentals. He gulps down ice-cream, she teaches him to drink one sip at a time, without being patronizing the father (Joe De Santis) tries to educate him to honor his inner feelings.

Lola Albright (Peter Gunn television series) carries off a difficult role very well indeed. Without laughs to help him out as it did Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, Scott Maxwell is believable both as the youth growing into adulthood and the youth wanting to remain a youth with no adult responsibilities. The low-key performance of Joe De Santis is worth a mention.

While the picture no doubt attracted attention for the risqué material, which would have certainly given the Production Code pause for thoughts, it provided a more rounded picture than was normal at the time of a woman working in the sex industry, even if only in the stripping department. Iris did not fall into any of the cliches. She is presented as a woman first and foremost rather than a stripper.

Alexander Singer sticks to the knitting and doesn’t come unstuck. John Hayes (Shell Shock, 1964) wrote the screenplay based on the Burton Wohl bestseller.

Unusual variation on the theme.

The Sixth Sense (1999) **** – Seen at the Cinema

If “I see dead people” isn’t one of the greatest lines ever written, I don’t know what is. Apart from anything else it highlights the screenwriting element of director M. Night Shyamalan’s talent. Had the little boy, in whatever haunted manner, simply said, “I see ghosts,” it wouldn’t at all have had the same impact. And reinventing this genre took a lot more than knitting together a few scary moments.

The horror genre had morphed into scaring the pants off women, their screams the soundtrack of the decade, and, of course, it was often the last sound they made as slicing-and-dicing became the norm and body counts multiplied. Nobody dies here. And the dead aren’t zombies either. Little Cole (Haley Joel Osment) almost acts as a psychiatrist, putting ghosts back together, listening to their woes, letting them come to terms with death. I won’t spoil the ending for you in case you haven’t seen it because when it first came out every audience member was urged not to reveal the ending.

What Shyamalan has done is give the ghost story narrative purpose, two characters who need each other, guilt-ridden psychiatrist Malcolm (Bruce Willis), marriage in trouble, suspecting wife Anna (Olivia Williams) of having an affair, finds himself getting unspoken guidance from the kid he is meant to be giving advice to. Cole is bullied at school, treated as a freak, having to conceal his own torment from everyone, and teachers who should recognize signs of disturbance instead resort to punishment. Kids lock him in a cupboard and single mother Lynn (Toni Collette) is at her wit’s end.

The great screenwriters invent scenes nobody’s ever thought about before. Trying to elicit information from Cole, Malcolms plays a game. If he is correct in an assumption, the child takes one step forward. A few correct answers and he’ll be plonked down in a chair opposite the psychiatrist. But if the answers are wrong, Cole takes a step backward. It’s an incredibly clever conceit, exposition disguised as a game. By the end of it, Cole is back where he started, and the boy’s ostensible savior is revealed as a failure.

These are two tormented souls coming together and for the most part it plays almost with an arthouse sensibility to a kid growing up, making his way in the adult world, except as much as Cole is developing, so is Malcolm, his life foundering, walking around in permanent lament for a world that’s gone wrong, somehow slipped away from his grasp from a time he was physically adored and professionally acclaimed.

It’s the psychiatrist’s burden to occasionally fail. Sometimes the consequences are unendurable even if the client was beyond repair and Malcolm puts his current depression, forgetting his anniversary, for example, down to one terrible failure. Cole isn’t entirely defenceless. He can spot adult weakness, and feeling threatened, humiliates his teacher with with vicious aggression that exposes a childhood disability that appears on the face of it successfully overcome but, in reality, still lurking.

Gradually, Cole grows in confidence, matures, is given the leading part in the school play, accepted, and Malcolm can take pride in his accomplishment. Shyamalan is too clever a screenwriter to have the child identify point blank the adult’s problems. The revelation is a moment of stunning self-clarity.

But I promised not to say any more.

Instead, I’ll talk about Shyamalan’s directorial skill, in particular his use of the fade, a little-used technical device from back in the day. Most directors simply employ the cut. Everything is connected, let’s move on, keep this narrative going. The fade is like the end of a chapter, time to turn a page, a sigh, every section allowed time to breathe, before we move on.

We might also credit Shyamalan with bringing out two superb performances from the leads. He wipes that trademark smirk off Bruce Willis’s face, finds ways of making the screen’s biggest tough guy come off as weak. Haley Joel Osment was a tad older than the character he plays, but still no more than ten, I guess, at the time of filming. To carry off such long speeches with such authenticity would be beyond most child actors, who usually come to the fore in some inconsequential froth, rather than a serious drama, was jaw-dropping. Amazing he didn’t win the Oscar or be given a special one. Because it’s a very special performance and without such singular acting the movie wouldn’t have worked at all.

Shyamalan’s been around longer than Christopher Nolan but with none of the comparable accolade. Apart from an occasional foray into sci-fi, he’s stuck, like Hitchcock, to the thriller genre. He followed The Sixth Sense with, in my opinion, his masterpiece, Unbreakable (2000) and had another big hit with Signs (2002) but thereafter his box office wavered and though consistently churning out a movie every two years ended up at the lower-budget end of Hollywood. His new one Trap, due out later this month, is distributed by a major studio, Warner Bros, so if it succeeds, and it’s getting great buzz, he might be welcomed back into the fold.

I was able to see The Sixth Sense on the big screen again not because someone was attributing retrospective glory to Shyamalan but because a marketing whiz has come up with the great publicity wheeze of tying up a package of pictures from the same year by different studios and chucking them out under the anniversary aegis (25^th in case you can’t do the maths) so tapping into nostalgia. As with the current reissue formula, these pictures are restricted to one showing on one day and to my surprise when I saw this, I would reckon the theater was three-quarters full and as much with youngsters as older people.

So while you’ve already missed it on the big screen, I’m sure it’s available on DVD or streaming.

Don’t miss it.

The Condemned of Altona (1962) ****

Shades of last year’s Oscar-winning Zone of Interest but with more guilt, some characters dodging it, others driven mad by remembrance of what they did or didn’t do during the Holocaust of World War Two. But mostly, an object lesson in how to expland a play (written by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre). Despite top class performances from Sophia Loren (Arabesque, 1966), Maximilian Schell (Counterpoint, 1967), Fredric March (Seven Days in May, 1964) and even, astonishingly, from Robert Wagner (Banning, 1967) it’s director Vitttorio De Sica (A Place for Lovers, 1968), with stunning images and clever camerawork, who steals the show.

You won’t forget in a hurry the outstretched hand of a prisoner in a blizzard condemned to die, nor the skeletal jaw seen through an x-ray machine. The backward crab crawl will remind you of a later movie. De Sica moves the camera every whichway. Aerial and overhead shots are mixed in with the camera swivelling from character to character or suddenly pulling back from a scene and then suddenly he stops you his restraint. But that doesn’t prevent him getting to the heart of the narrative matter and adding in some frisson of accuser attracted to accused.

Set at the end of the 1950s, we begin on a Succession note, but without the contemporary angst and back-stapping. German shipping entrepreneur Albrecht (Fredrich March), a war profiteer turned post-war profiteer having taken advantage of demand in the Germany industrial boom, and now with only months to live, wants to pass on his business to son Werner (Robert Wagner). But Werner shies away, disgusted by his father’s unspoken collaboration with the Nazis during the war, ignoring the argument that the businessman was simply dealing with whatever party was in power. And this would be the narrative, father explaining actions, hoping for expiation, planning for the business to pass down the family line rather than be sold off.

Except that Werner’s left-winger actress wife Johanna (Sophia Loren) discovers there is another contender, the supposedly dead older son Franz (Maximilian Schell) who, instead of being sentenced to death for war crimes and fleeing to Argentina, where he purportedly died, as was the story given out, is actually hiding in the family mansion. He’s pretty much been driven mad, the walls of his substantial hidey-hole daubed with disconcerting images. Windows blocked-up and no knowledge of the outside, wearing his Nazi uniform he envisages a Germany languishing in decay, poverty and hunger. He lives on champagne, oysters and chocolate (so not quite the tough prison regime), and, as discreetly portrayed as was possible at the time, has an incestuous relationship with doting sister Leni (Francoise Prevost), the only human being with whom he is in contact. The inmate, knocking back handfuls of Benzedrine, occupies his time by recording messages to be delivered, he hopes, to Germans many centuries ahead.

Johanna wonders how this mentally-ill man came to be obsessed with guilt and we discover that when he was growing up his father rented out spare land around the mansion to the Nazis for a concentration camp where 30,000 people died. But Franz hid a Jew in the house, was reported to the S.S. by his father, and witnessed the man’s execution, then was punished by being forced to join the Army where he was known as a torturer. Finally, he emerges from isolation and sees a different Germany and confronts his father in a shock ending.

Both Loren and Schell had just won Oscars, for Two Women (1960) – incidentally directed by De Sica – and Judgement at Nuremberg (1961), respectively, so their confrontation, where his initial male dominance (the poster image reflects this scene) settles into a more equal power dynamic. Frederic March is good as the father convinced he has done no wrong and I had to check that this was the same Robert Wagner who had often been indifferent in pictures. De Sica draws great performances from all and layers the whole movie in a doom-laden atmosphere. Written by Abby Mann (Judgement at Nuremberg) and Cesare Zavattini (Woman Times Seven, 1967)

Remains surprisingly potent.

A Fever in the Blood (1961) ****

Blistering B-film from writer Roy Huggins (TV’s The Fugitive) that marries political chicanery to legal jiggery-pokery in a movie that races from one twist to another. In his role as producer Huggins calls upon actors he made stars from the television series he created – Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (77 Sunset Strip), Jack Kelly (Maverick) – and gives Angie Dickinson (Oceans 11) the female lead.

Huggins’ brilliant premise is to ignore the dilemma of the man, Walter Thornwall (Rhoses Reason), nephew of a former Governor, wrongly accused of the murder of his wife, and instead to concentrate on accuser District Attorney Dan Callahan (Jack Kelly) and Judge Lee Hoffman (Efrem Zimbalist Jr), both of whom, running for the vacant Governor post, stand to make massive political capital from the publicity surrounding a sensational trial.

Former buddies Callahan and Hoffman are now bitter rivals after the former had reneged on a promise to support the latter’s bid for the political post. Also throwing his hat into the ring is Senator Alex Simon (Don Ameche) whose wife Cathy (Angie Dickinson) once had romantic yearnings for Hoffman. The only one of the trio who has anything approaching a conscience is Hoffman and that is immediately tested when the Senator offers him a bribe to stand down from the race, which the Judge, after an appeal from Cathy, does not report to the authorities. There is another ploy open to Hoffman. Should he find reason to declare a mistrial that would sabotage Callahan’s bid since he would not be riding high in the media after convicting a celebrity killer.

The picture jumps from intense politics, the wheeling-dealing and wrapping up votes, to a trial in a packed courtroom very much in the Perry Mason vein with surprise witnesses, shocks, objections sustained or overruled, clever arguments, dueling attorneys, and last-minute evidence.

A witness has Thornwall running away from the scene of the crime and when his wife is painted as a nymphomaniac that provides ample motive. Further evidence pushes the defendant into a worse corner. But all the while over the trial hangs the stink of political machination.

There are another half-dozen brilliant twists, not least of which is Judge Hoffman letting conscience go hang and embarking on a couple of dodgy endeavors himself including what amounts to sheer blackmail. The District Attorney, one of the sharpest tools in the box, reacts to every setback with a cunning that would have been criminal had it not been legal. Also hanging there is potential adultery between Cathy and the widowed Hoffman.

The writer in Huggins is a past master at shifting the cards in the deck and this has so many twists and turns it feels like a whole series of The Fugitive crammed into one episode. There is as much self-awareness of the underbelly of politics as in Advise and Consent (1962), as much deceit and corruption, as much principle disguised as honor.

But the plot here is so tight, the characters dealing with twists and turns that the movie has no requirement for the depth of characterization that would have been brought to the picture by a Henry Fonda or Charles Laughton. Huggins proves you can have just as much fun without the big boys. None of the stars with the exception of Angie Dickinson made a dent on the Hollywood A-list but they are all perfectly acceptable, and once Huggins tightens the screws plot-wise the last thing on your mind is wishing for a better cast.

A cracker.

Billy Budd (1962) ***

Unfairly muscled out by lavish roadshow Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) but covering similar territory minus sailors going off-piste on a South Pacific island. Peter Ustinov outranked fellow triple hyphenates Billy Wilder (writer, producer, director) and John Wayne (actor, producer, director) in that he could add acting to his other skills (writer, producer, director) and in some respects he was actually better remembered as a noted raconteur on late night television shows. I was surprised to discover he was actually well versed in the directing malarkey by the time he came to helm Billy Budd, four previous excursions dating from the late 1940s and most recently Romanoff and Juliet (1961). He was better known at this point as an Oscar-winner for Spartacus (1960). He would win another for Topkapi (1964) and go on to direct another three pictures.

Billy Budd is a claustrophic affair that you’ll need a bit of a history lesson to understand. The British Navy had two methods of recruiting sailors. The first was the more honest, awaiting a supply of volunteers. The second, the most dodgy legal proces ever invented, involved grabbing any likely candidate and forcing – “pressing”- them into service. Normally, this caper took place on land and gangs of recruitment officers did the business, hence the term “press gang.”

However, I was unaware that in times of war – this is set during the Napoleonic War – the British Navy could board any passing merchant vessel and commandeer any of its crew. In this case, Captain (actually Post Captain if you’re being technical about it) Vere (Peter Ustinov) hijacks only one sailor, Billy Budd (Terence Stamp).

Quite why it’s only this singleton is never explained. There are a couple of other irregularities that run against making this a tight ship in terms of narrative construction. The first is, that in the first of two critical incidents, our otherwise charming and chatty Budd is suddenly struck dumb with a stammer, the first time such an affliction has put in an appearance. The second is that, in consequence, Budd strikes an officer, the bullying Master-at-Arms Claggart (Robert Ryan) who hits his head while falling and dies.

Now even I know, and I’m hardly a naval scholar, that striking an officer is punishable by death. The fact that Claggart has a Capt Bligh disposition, inclined to find any opportunity to bring out the lash, makes no difference to the outcome. So while it seems that court martial provides dramatic scope, here the outcome is never in doubt. This isn’t Queeg on The Caine Mutiny, which is a more complicated affair, where the captain’s sanity is questioned.

So where the narrative should have built up in intensity, it largely flounders and depends (successfully as it happens) on audience appreciation of Budd as an innocent abroad.

That said, like Mutiny on the Bounty, it reveals the remarkable lack of recourse to any higher authority on ship should the highest authority either carry out or endorse cruelty. The minute he’s on the ship Budd is exposed to the sadistic will of Claggart who has condemned a sailor to a pitiless flogging for reasons that cannot be explained. Budd soon learns that Claggart has accomplices who will sabotage a crew member’s gear so that he will be put on a report, accumulation of sufficient black marks resulting in automatic flogging without interference from the captain.

While Vere is hardly in the Capt Bligh category and most of the time comes across as relatively amiable, our introduction to him is firing a shot across the bows of a merchant ship that doesn’t want to stop in case its crew is press ganged. He is quite ready to invoke the rules to get what he wants and is enough of a disciplinarian that the crew kowtow to him. He might feel a touch of remorse that Budd is the sacrificial lamb to the Royal Navy’s rule of law, but he’s hardly going to go against procedure.

So mostly what we’ve got is the acting. Terence Stamp (The Collector, 1965), in his debut, was Oscar-nominated and you can see why and in some senses this is the career-defining role before acting affectations and mannerisms took over. Robert Ryan (The Wild Bunch, 1969) is very effective as the sinister Claggart. And there are a host of other British names to look out for – David McCallum (Sol Madrid/The Heroin Gang 1968), Ray McAnally (Fear Is the Key, 1972), Paul Rogers (Three into Two Won’t Go, 1969) and Niall McGinnis (The Viking Queen, 1967) among the foremost.

Ably directed by Ustinov who wrote the screenplay with Dewitt Bodeen (Cat People, 1942) based on the original Herman Melville novel and a stage adaptation by Louis O. Coxe and Robert H. Chapman.

Worth seeing for Stamp’s performance.