Drama – Page 21 – The Magnificent 60s

The Big Day (1960) ****

Marvellous little drama. Succession the old-fashioned way when promotion was determined by interview, the process not clogged up by internecine family warfare. Doesn’t, either, go for the easy target of the English class system, instead exploring the universality of office politics, the quite different attitudes taken by individuals to superiors and inferiors, the determination to find someone who is not your equal, and the ways of dodging responsibility or simply indulging in dodgy behaviour.

It’s lit up by four superb performances, Donald Pleasance (Soldier Blue, 1970) as the dull accountant, Colin Gordon (Subterfuge, 1968) – usually a comedy foil – as the Machiavellian boss, Harry H. Corbett (pre-Steptoe and Son) as a weaselling manager and Andree Melly (The Brides of Dracula, 1960) as a secretary skirting scandal. The narrative is simple. Prior to the interview we dip into the lives of the three candidates – Victor (Donald Pleasance), high-flying sales manager Selkirk (William Franklyn) and transport manager Harry (Harry H. Corbett) who happens to be the brother-in-law of George (Colin Gordon) the boss.

*Donald Pleasance and Andree Melly let fly when the jig is up.*

Each has a deficiency, Selkirk inclined to show too much initiative, Harry running his department by the seat of his pants, Victor with no initiative whatsoever, a plodder. Each is caught out in an error of judgement, Selkirk striking a deal with a dodgy customer, Harry operating a driver logbook scam, Victor having an affair with his secretary Nina (Andree Melly). And a most unlikely relationship that is, the young self-possessed girl madly in love with a middle-aged man riddled with self-doubt.

When she first appears, in frankly one of the most erotic scenes capable of passing the British censor at the time, I had assumed this was a financial arrangement. That Victor would be reaching into his pocket. It’s only later we discover she’s his secretary and nourishes no ambitions for him to climb the corporate ladder, just believing that at a suitable juncture he will jettison wife and children. Mostly, what they all have to lose is pride. Hen-pecked Harry terrified of reporting failure to his domineering wife, Selkirk already planning how to spend the expected salary increase, Victor desperate to justify his existence by having his name on the letterhead.

Everyone has ideas above their station; everyone gets put in their place. Even the backroom staff jockey for position, Selkirk’s secretary Madge (Marianne Stone) tearing into Nina for her loose morals, in return being hit by bitchy comments about her spinsterhood. Both make a point of wishing the other’s boss “good luck” on the day of the interview in case they win. Madge often refuses to carry out work she considers too menial and seems always on the point of resigning over a minor issue. There is envy over the size of one’s office.

*The two secretaries previously at war bond over male inhumanity. Madge (left) comments that two people should bear the consequences of an affair not one.*

The best elements of the script are how plans go awry, how conversations turn as new information enters the equation and especially how the boss uses any opportunity to destabilize his staff, pitting them against each other, turning triumph into disaster, deftly fending off any threat to his position. George employs a wonderful phrase, “I’ve called you in to tell you why you’ve NOT got the job,” softening the blow by a small salary increase.

And it’s indicative of failings in his personality that he hands the job to the person least likely to challenge his authority – Victor – and that the promotion comes with the rider that the accountant get rid of Nina. And, suddenly, Victor comes into his own, the mouse roaring like a lion, although triumph is temporary. The last scene one of the saddest committed to celluloid, Victor alone, huge pile of work to get through and no solace anywhere.

It’s short, too, would have been intended as a “quota quickie,” release guaranteed by the Eady system, and should really have been lost in the slush pile. Instead, without any of the brutality of Succession, dissects the office mind-set. Donald Pleasance is the standout, but Colin Gordon and Andree Melly run him close. Support from Susan Shaw (Carry On Nurse, 1960) and Roddy McMillan (The View from Daniel Pike series, 1971-1973).

Director Peter Graham Scott (Father Came Too!, 1964) keeps his foot on the narrative pedal, focus never wavering, brooking no diversions. Bill MacIlwraith (The Anniversary, 1968) delivers a tight script bristling with terrific lines. given it only cost £22,300 (about $70,000) it’s quite astonishing.

NOTE: In the absence of a poster, the main photo is by Allan Warren.

More (1969) ***

Hedonism gets a reality check but not before it’s done a pretty good job of marketing Ibiza as an idyllic setting and just the place to accommodate anyone wanting to get high on drugs. Despite being the directorial debut of French producer Barbet Schroeder (Reversal of Fortune, 1990), the movie’s better known for the soundtrack created by Pink Floyd.

Which is a shame because despite the focus on the beautiful people living in an exotic world, and plugging, it has to be said, the delights of marijuana as the drug du jour, and not wandering down any cinematic cul de sac like visually exploring in subjective fashion the effects of an LSD trip, it fairly captures the free love counter culture paradise of the time where you could chill out in the sun and you didn’t need to be a biker to do it.

Estelle (Mimsy Farmer) is the lissom siren who hooks the far from innocent Stefan (Klaus Grunberg) – an ex-student, he has indulged in a bit of burglary – and introduces him to pot, Ibiza and heroin in that order. He finds his own way to other indulgences like a menage a trois. There’s an older drug dealer (Heinz Engelmann) in the background and some pals, Charlie (Michael Chanderli) and Cathy (Louise Wink), fleetingly hover into vision, but mostly it’s a two-hander, and there’s none of the despair and nihilism of drug addiction nor the moralistic overtones of a Hollywood picture too frightened of even the more enlightened censor to dare suggest you can have your cake and eat it.

There’s not much story, just the pair falling in love and hanging out, and Stefan wanting to experience the “more” that has made Estelle so impervious to life’s downturns. When he discovers her secret is heroin he wants to turn on in similar fashion and loving lover that she is she obliges. He can’t handle it the way she can and he’s the one that goes over the edge and dies of an overdose. But the director doesn’t resort to any moralizing at the end, this is no wake up call for Estelle, and there’s no sense of guilt, he’s just another handsome ship passing in the night.

The film’s best at exhibiting the easy living, the relaxed lifestyle, of the drug community where ownership is forbidden and life is cheap. It’s filmed as a romance, glorious settings made more glorious by the cinematography of Nestor Almendros (Days of Heaven, 1978).

Mimsy Farmer (Spencer’s Mountain, 1963) is the standout, making the jump into adult roles with ease, presenting an amoral character whose main aim in life to find the deepest sensory experiences. Klaus Grunberg, on his debut, is really just swept along like some flotsam in her attractive wake. Even when Farmer is stoned and really out of it she captures the camera, and while her character is essentially unattractive, it takes some pretty good acting to keep the audience from coming to that conclusion.

The act of shooting up was innovative for the time – and censored in some countries – but it’s not presented as anything but an extension of freedom, liberation of self a la LSD, and even Stefan’s death, the grittiest scene, comes over as mere collateral damage.

That it works is mostly due to Farmer’s performance and Schroeder’s lack of prurience. While there’s abundant nudity, and Estelle makes out with a gal and then enjoys a threesome, there’s no sense of sexploitation, which creates quite a different atmosphere to the more sensational movies of the time. Best of all, in deliberately moving away from heightened drama and turgid instincts that might focus instead on such elements like jealousy or guilt, the director allows the audience to make up its collective mind.

And if you get bored, there’s always the soundtrack and scenery.

Interesting depiction of elusive nirvana.

The Hill (1965) ****

Set in a British Army prison camp in North Africa during World War Two ruled by sadistic Sgt Wilson (Harry Andrews) who believes himself above the regulations he forces others to follow, The Hill is a parable about the hypocrisy of totalitarian rule. And much of what is shown would be offensive to modern sensibilities.

Although the commandant and medical officer (Michael Redgrave) are his superior officers, Wilson runs the unit by force of personality. He believes his ruthless treatment of the prisoners turns them into proper soldiers. Into his fiefdom come five new prisoners including coward Joe Roberts (Sean Connery), spiv Monty Bartlett (Roy Kinnear), African American Jacko King (Ossie Davis) – a “different colored bastard” – another Scot Jock McGrath (Jack Watson) and weakest link George Stevens (Alfred Lynch).

Most films about prisons emphasize imprisonment, most scenes taking place in cells or other places of confinement. Sidney Lumet (The Pawnbroker, 1964) directs this film as though it is a paeon to freedom with incredible shots of the vista within which the men are contained. He uses some of the most bravura camerawork you will ever see outside of David Lean.

The film opens with a two-minute crane shot credit sequence that pulls back from a prisoner collapsing on the titular hill to reveal the entire encampment and follows with a one-minute reverse tracking shot of Wilson striding through his domain. And while the camera controls what we see, our ears are constantly assailed by the constant drumbeat of other marching prisoners.

Climbing the hill in full pack would break any man and those who collapse are roused by buckets of water. The first to crack is Stevens who is constantly tormented by homophobic jibes. Continuous racist abuse is heaped on Jacko King “you blacks don’t have brains – you got it downstairs, we got it upstairs” until driven to the point of madness he begins to behave like a gorilla which frightens the life out of his superiors.

Obeying orders, says Joe Roberts, is “like a dog picking up a bone.” RSM Wilson is out of control, the commandant spending his nights with a prostitute, the medical officer clearly sent here as punishment for some previous misdemeanor. Of the senior staff only Harris (Ian Bannen) comes away with any dignity, constantly trying to thwart the worst bullying.

When Stevens dies suddenly, the film changes tack and becomes a battle for survival among those who could be blamed for causing his death and those who dare to point the finger. Wilson has no problem stitching up his colleagues and blackmailing the medical officer while Roberts is beaten up for his effrontery in standing up to authority.

But the astonishing presence and self-confidence and, it has to be said, courage of Wilson lords it over everyone, and there is an extraordinary scene where he forces the entire battalion of prisoners to back down when they are on the brink of open rebellion.

Connery is superb in what is his first dramatic role in a bread-and-butter dramatic production rather than the glossier Marnie (1964) and Woman of Straw (1964) and while he has his moment of defiance he gives enough glimpses of vulnerability and fear to ensure we do not mistake him for his alter ego James Bond. Ian Bannen delivers a touching, assured, performance, far removed from the nasty sarcastic personalities he portrayed in his other desert pictures, Station Six Sahara (1963) and the Flight of the Phoenix (1965).

Ossie Davies (The Scalphunters, 1968), as defiant as Connery, is brilliant as the man who works out a way to beat the enemy by confusing them; the scene in the commandant’s office where he treats the officer as his inferior is a tour de force.

Although the Army is meant to run according to established regulation, where obedience to a superior is paramount, it is equally apparent that it can also become a jungle if those who are the fittest assume control. Sgt Wilson demands unquestioned discipline even as he is breaking all the rules in the book. But he retains his authority not just by bullying, but by intelligence, exploiting weakness, coolness under pressure and by welcoming confrontation, his personality as dangerous as any serial killer.

Harrowing, superb, true.

The Iron Claw (2023) *** – Seen at the Cinema

When I was growing up there was a beloved character in British comic The Valiant called The Steel Claw. After one accident he lost a hand and after another the replacement artificial hand, made of steel, if touched by electricity, rendered him invisible, apart from the claw which floated in the air like some avenging angel. He started out a villain but in the kind of character development that rarely occurs in this world turns into a crime-busting hero.

I mention this not because I made the mistake of assuming the characters here would be super-heroes (though spandex does play a role) but because character development is in serious lack. And, to be honest, I’m getting a bit fed up – stand up The Holdovers – of repressed male characters holding it all together for the sake of a director who wants to make a point about repressed males. At least in The Holdovers the main character broke out of his emotional prison once in a while. Here, all we have is emotional blackmail. And a director who in true artistic fashion shies away from any real dramatic incident so that it can be dealt with in very clever long shot or occur offscreen or in shock follow-up sequence (one of which did work very well, I admit).

“I used to be a brother,” laments Kevin (Zac Elfron) at the end of the picture in homage no doubt to Marlon Brando’s famous line in On the Waterfront, as he sheds a tear in retaliation at having to keep up a stiff upper lip for the rest of the movie. By this point, he’s the sole survivor of five siblings, but the way the boys are ruled by the iron father, not a sniffle is allowed when anyone else passes away.

This is another of those biopics that won’t mean a thing to anyone outside America. At one point (long before WWF) wrestling was huge in the U.K., ruling Saturday afternoon telly when everyone was waiting for the football/soccer results, but it was so obviously faked nobody took it seriously. So, one of the issues here is the fraudulent aspect of the “sport.” Sure, you got to be fit to fake it, unless you’re a world champion with a tub of lard for a gut.

There’s a scene where Kevin earnestly explains – he’s nothing but earnest throughout – to future wife Pam (Lily James) that there is some skill involved in wooing the crowd and by dint of performance (aka acting) if you win enough people over you get to be world champion. And even if you end up getting thumped by the current world champion, if you shout it loudly or eloquently enough the audience will be convinced you’re actually the winner.

So the meat, such as it is, isn’t the wrestling (although that does occupy too lengthy a time) but how the four sons (one is dead when the picture starts) are corralled by father Fritz (Holt McCallany), now a wrestling promoter, into following him into the sport. Some of the boys ain’t so keen – Kerry (Jeremy Allen Wright) is a junior world discus throwing champion (as was dad), Mike (Stanley Simons) shows musical promise (as did, bizarrely, dad) – but still buckle down to the training and discipline. Even if it’s all faked, the body still takes a hammering. Some need pills to get them through.

One by one they all die off, Mike and Kerry by suicide, David (Harris Dickinson) after ignoring initial signs of internal bleeding. Still, mostly they grin and bear it, until, being the only brother left standing, Kevin takes against his father and tries to strangle him. Meanwhile, in the background, Mom (Maura Tierney) is as stoical as the others, her only rebellion refusing to wear the same funeral dress twice.

It’s mostly turgid, though, all the sons showing signs of depression, yet there’s some kind “happy ending” because all Kevin’s kids and grandkids end up living together to make up, I guess, for the loss of the siblings. There’s also good old-fashioned family values and the sons appear to truly bond instead of knifing each other in the back and leaving home at the earliest opportunity. But Dad never appears to blame himself for his hard line and Mom is unwilling to intervene.

I feel sorry for Zac Elfron (17 Again, 2009), the movie equivalent of being in a boy band, who’s muscled up and set himself up for Oscar contention. But, just as Wicked Little Letters was plagued by over-acting this is riddled with the opposite and no amount of macho posturing can make up for not having a decent character for an audience to root for.

The shock scene, in case you’re wondering, concerns Kerry. Despondent, he climbs on his motorcycle. We see the road, we see the distant lights of oncoming vehicle, but the camera just pulls back and pulls back with exceeding artiness. You think he’s dead, but, no, there he is shuffling around on crutches – minus a foot.

Written and directed by Sean Durkin (The Nest, 2020).

Please, sir, can we go back to dramas that are full of drama.

Wicked Little Letters (2023) * – Seen at the Cinema

The trailer would have won an Oscar, deftly put together, loaded with laughs, but the reality is this is set fair to be the worst picture of the year if not the decade. If it wins any marks at all it’s for showing that the Brits can match the likes of Tarantino and Scorsese in the cuss-word department and challenge The Thick of It for creative swearing. But even the Society for Ham Over-Acting would have trouble letting this mob join and you would find better detection – invisible ink, anyone? – from Enid Blyton’s Famous Five.

As it happens, I have relatives in the English south coast seaside town of Littlehampton and perhaps the entire population was so scarred by the occurrences detailed here that they never saw fit to bring up the subject or perhaps had decided it was just so preposterous it wasn’t worth mentioning.

Anyway, you can guess from the get-go that its repressed spinster Edith (Olivia Colman) who’s the culprit, sending poison pen letters to herself to get a bit of local attention. And you would be hard put even if you were dumbest of dumb cops to try and pin the blame on her next door neighbor Rose (Jessie Buckley), a war widow (it’s set after World War one) with a young daughter. Roisterous and boisterous though she is, she’d clearly rather spend what little cash she has on getting drunk than stumping up for over a hundred stamps, envelopes and writing paper.

Of course, this is a male-dominated society ruled with an iron hand by misogynists, Edith’s father Edward (Timothy Spall) top of the class in that department but closely followed by the dumb and dumber cops. Coming to Edith’s rescue in quite bizarre fashion is “woman police officer” (as is apparently her full title) Gladys (Anjana Vasen) and her coterie of amateur detectives, all members of the local whist club.

The whole thing is just too stupid for words. Roger Moore’s acting is Oscar-worthy compared to this lot who roll their eyeballs at the drop of a hat. There are attempts to ram into an already thin storyline references to feminism and racism and there may even be a rapacious priest somewhere in the mix for good measure, but the effect is of lazy moviemaing pandering to the crowd. Oh, and by the way, there’s a reminder – in case you’ve forgotten – just how much people frowned upon kids playing the guitar a century ago as if it was the kind of musical instrument devised by the Devil.

The trailer whizzes along but this moves like treacle. I’m sure actors are entitled to make a poor movie now and then, but this feels more like a director who failed to rein anyone in and as a consequence Oscar winner Oliva Colman (The Favourite, 2018), Oscar nominee Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter, 2021) and multiple Bafta nominee Timothy Spall (The Last Bus, 2021) are allowed to make complete fools of themselves. The only one showing restraint is Emmy award-winner Eileen Atkins (Paddington 2, 2017).

Who to blame? Director Thea Sharrock (Me Before You, 2016) for not issuing red cards to the actors, screenwriter Jonny Sweet (Greed, 2019) for dreaming up this farrago in the first place or the trailer team for providing such a misleading impression of the end result? The audience, desperate for an old-fashioned comedy along the lines of Four Weddings and a Funeral or The Full Monty?

Shambolic cartoon. Boo hiss.

Riot on Sunset Strip (1967) ***

Catholic high school girls in trouble? Call Sam Katzman. Delinquents, crazed by music or booze or sex or drugs (maybe all four), on the rampage? Call Sam Katzman. Thugs, to quote from Johnny Cash, keen to “watch a man die?” Call Sam Katzman. The new generation threatening to swamp the old? Call Sam Katzman. Require a sensuous lass in tight clothes to perform an Ann-Margret-style number? Call Sam Katzman.

Legendary five-and-dime producer Sam Katzman, with over 200 pictures in his portfolio, had put his stamp on everything from the East Side Kids and jungle flicks to horror, westerns and sci-fi. Any new genre with rip-off potential, he’d be first in the queue. Forget knives and guns and fists, music was the most dangerous weapon, over-exciting the young.

*“Girls in Hot Leather” is the bait-and-switch Italian title*.

So no surprise then to find the man behind Rock Around the Clock (1955) and Calypso Heat Wave (1957) also responsible for Teenage Crime Wave (1955), New Orleans Uncensored (1955) and Hot Rods to Hell (1967). Or that he’s an exponent of the old bait-and-switch here – no riot here that I could spot.

And probably over-emphasis on earnestness for a potential exploitationer, from the occasional intrusions of a pseudo-documentary voice-over to the grown-ups debating the causes of the latest outbreak of teenage rebellion, long hair, marijuana, popping pills and energetic dancing. That said, it’s even-handed, adults blamed for the divorce plague that leaves youngsters alone and vulnerable, cops too prone to violence, greedy businessmen and characters with right-wing tendencies causing the problem or making matters worse. “They’re just kids,” spouts earnest top cop Lorrimer (Aldo Ray), “they could be your sons and daughters,” not realizing one of them is.

Away from the grown-up talk-fest, the kids sit either numb listening to loud rock bands in far from sleazy clubs or on the dance floor pounding away to the beat, in either case not having much to say to each other, and inevitably ending up out the back door smoking a quiet joint or gathering in some pretty fancy home for a tripping party

Andrea (Mimsy Farmer), a youngster from a broken home living with her drunken mother, falls in with a bunch of teenagers who hang out in these hard-wired locales. Initially, she resists joining in, and perfectly innocent when caught up in a scuffle. But when supposed cool dude Herbie (Schuyler Hayden) spikes her drink with some acid at a party she turns all Ann-Margret, and is allocated a near six-minute slot to shake her stoned booty, leading the aforesaid Herbie to take her upstairs and take advantage. Doesn’t end well for Herbie as she’s under-age.

Turns out, too, Andrea is not so much the long-lost as abandoned daughter of Lorrimer and when he goes into rescue mode she gives him both barrels. “You left me alone for four years, let’s keep it that way,” she snaps. Apprised of her situation, he sets about the youngsters with his fists.

That supposedly leads to the riot. But it’s no more than the mildest of protests as he has to endure a Walk of Shame a la Game of Thrones (though with clothes on) and, bizarrely, becomes the poster boy for both police brutality and for anti-police-brutality. Natch, there’s a tacked-on happy ending but not before the voice-over can intone in apocalyptic manner: “Half the world’s population is under 25. Where will they go? What will they do?”

I had come at this because I was intrigued to discover Mimsy Farmer as the junior minx in Spencer’s Mountain (1963) and as she was overshadowed by Ann-Margret in Bus Riley’s Back in Town (1965) wondered how her career had progressed. Presumably come to a standstill, otherwise she wouldn’t have ended up in a B-picture cul de sac. She puts in a good performance, however, miles away from the lively youngster of the Henry Fonda picture, withdrawn, anxious, not fitting in.

A good chunk of the picture is wasted, from today’s perspective, on no-name bands and not much happening, but the talk-fest aspects prove that little has changed in the way the grown-ups misunderstand the young and much the same arguments for reining in the supposedly out-of-control teenagers are still being trotted out today. But it does point a prescient finger at marriage break-up (the fault of the grown-ups doing much of the blaming) as a root cause of teenage misbehavior and contemporary audiences will only be too familiar with predatory males spiking drinks.

Aldo Ray (Welcome to Hard Times, 1967) would be the marquee name, but you try and compete with a lithe teenager who says more in her six minutes of pent-up emotion and the resultant dancing than all the time spent on earnest debate. Laurie Mock (Hot Rods to Hell, 1967) is the wildest of the females.

Director Arthur Dreifuss was a Katzman regular but was also responsible for the movie version of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow (1962). Screenwriter Orville H. Hampton had a surprising pedigree with Cage of Evil (1960) and Jack the Giant Killer (1962) and Oscar-nominated for One Potato, Two Potato (1964).

More absorbing than I expected and Mimsy Farmer’s trip a lot more interesting than Peter Fonda’s.

An American Dream / See You in Hell, Darling (1966) ****

The Stuart Whitman Appreciation Society kicks into high gear with this under-rated drama. A huge flop and critically savaged at the time, its bitterly sardonic existentialist center will appeal more to contemporary audiences.

Norman Mailer, author of the source novel, was a hugely controversial public figure. A magnet for alimony, writer of sledgehammer prose, his filmed bestsellers (The Naked and the Dead, 1958) hit the box office with a heavy thud, climaxing in the disastrous Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987). Politician, avant-garde film-maker (Maidstone, 1970) and leading exponent of the “new journalism” (The Armies of the Night, 1968), his works were exceptionally tricky to translate onto the screen.

This one picks its way through a flotilla of heavyweight themes – corruption, entitlement, the Mafia – by focusing on a trio of flawed characters dogged by ideals amd let down by reality. War hero crusading journalist and television’s version of a “shock jock”, Stephen Rojack (Stuart Whitman) is weary of beating his head against a legal brick wall in his bid to bring to justice Mafia lynchpin Ganucci (Joe de Santis). But he’s also extremely done in coping with adulterous alcoholic heiress wife Deborah (Eleanor Parker).

When he asks for a divorce she retaliates with violence and scathing verbal abuse. In the scuffle that follows she teeters off the ledge of their penthouse apartment. In his defence Stephen might well have claimed self-defence given she tried to crown him with a huge rock, or at the very least relief (although admittedly that has little legal standing), but instead opts for suicide. In revenge for Stephen’s ongoing slating of the police and because the deceased is daughter to exceptionally important entrepreneur Kelly (Lloyd Nolan), the eighth richest man in America, the cops try to pin on him a murder rap. The charge is really a moral one, and equally as ruinous to a fast-rising career, that while he may not have pushed her he didn’t act to save her.

As it happens, and apparently coincidentally, Ganucci happens to be passing the penthouse at the time the woman hits the deck. Equally, coincidentally, riding with him is his moll Cherry (Janet Leigh) a wannabe singer whose only gigs are in Mob-owned night clubs.

But Ganucci’s presence turns out not to be coincidental after all. He was on his way to straighten Stephen out, possibly intending to use blackmail since Cherry is a stain on Stephen’s supposedly unblemished past. The cops are ferocious in their grilling, and adopt an unusual amount of forensic evidence for the time. Stephen would probably have come apart quicker had it not been for rekindling romance with Cherry, which, unexpectedly, provides the hoods with a lure to reel him in.

The satire is mostly reined in – cops unable to catch the real murderous Mafia pick on the guy who’s picking on them, Stephen’s business partners latch on to his sudden publicity/ notoriety to negotiate a multi-million-dollar pay rise with, natch, a rider in the contract negating it should he be found guilty. The drama is characters racing headlong towards fleeting happiness, the tiny morsels of hope that might filter down from the unacheivable American dream.

The performances carry it. What was it in Stuart Whitman (Shock Treatment, 1964) that drew him towards characters given a hard time? Whatever it was, he rode it in spades and here he presents his most complex character to date, oozing suspicion, suffocated by guilt, believing that all will come right in the end if he has a good woman by his side, not realizing that Kelly knows only too well which side her bread is buttered on. Janet Leigh (Grand Slam, 1967) plays very much against type as the hard-eyed chanteuse but Eleanor Parker (Warning Shot, 1966) essays one of the best – and most vicious – drunks (and lost souls drowning in a sea of wealth) you will ever see.

Not to be outdone, director Robert Gist (Della, 1965), pulls off some neat scenes, opening with a shot of a naked Eleanor Parker clad only in dark sunglasses watching television, using camera movement to put claustophobic heat on Whitman during interrogation scenes (Christopher Nolan’s interrogator in Oppenheimer apes his trick of pushing his chair close to his victim), portraying the flimsy sexiness of Parker in flimsy negligee, all the time not letting Whitman escape from his internal demons.

Perhaps, more boldly, rather than, as would be the contemporary temptation, treating Deborah’s death as a mystery, the details only unfolding bit-by-bit and leading to a hairy climax, Gist shows her death and lets the audience make up its mind what part Stephen played in it. The downbeat ending, too, would sit more easily with the contemporary audience. Mann Rubin (The Warning Shot, 1967) knocked out the screenplay.

This finished off Whitman’s career – he didn’t make another movie for four years and then ended up in B-picture limbo, directors more interested in his square jaw than the inner confusion he was so deft at portraying.

Well worth a look.

Spencer’s Mountain (1963) ****

Lot feistier than the heart-warming genre might suggest with the usually restrained Henry Fonda (Advise and Consent, 1961) coming over like he’s had a gagging order lifted, letting rip not just with a plague of cuss words but damning to Hell every hypocrite under the sun. A perfect example of the haves and have-nots where to become elevated to the former you need to know your Latin.

Despite loathing religion, quarry miner Clay (Henry Fonda) has got quite the Biblical spirit, no intention of girding his loins when he can sire nine kids, a heck of a crew to support from meager wages. He enjoys the kind of pleasures – add alcohol and gambling to his lust – that his God-fearing neighbors find objectionable, though they put those aside when he’s neighbourly enough to carry out repairs on their property for no charge.

When wife Olivia wants him to break open the piggy bank to fund a graduation ring for their oldest, Clayboy – what was wrong with just calling your kid Junior, I wonder – (James MacArthur), her dream clashes with his. He’s already spent the money on the power saw he needs to cut down to size the logs with which he is building his dream house, a bigger building, and brand-new, so his offspring don’t need to sleep five or six to a room or on the floor.

Clayboy is astonished to discover he’s the top dog at school but winning the class medal opens doors poverty prevents him getting through. Even when the local pastor Clyde (Wally Goodman) finds a last-minute loophole, Clay’s excellent grades don’t meet qualification criteria for college, he’s lacking in Latin.

But if there’s one thing Clay has learned to overcome, it’s adversity and soon a scheme is hatched. But even that has a drawback. A scholarship won’t cover all the costs. While Olivia accepts the principle that God intended them to be poor, Clay rejects that notion, the kind that keeps the downtrodden in their place, denying them the opportunity for betterment that comes with education.

This ain’t no sermon but it’s not The Grapes of Wrath either. Poverty hasn’t kicked the living daylights out of everyone but nobody seems able to catch a break even when one is floating tantalisingly close. Ain’t a family saga either, covering too short a period of time, and little but a series of loosely-connected episodes that eventually come together.

Clay gets the preacher in the mire for filling him full of booze, telling him it’s a cure for mosquito bites, while the pair are fishing. Public revulsion at the drunk pastor loses the preacher his congregation. Clay sorts it out by berating the churchgoers as hypocrites and threatening to withdraw his free labor when it comes to repairs. Come the Latin crisis, turns out the preacher was an ace scholar in the subject and can do the teaching, on the condition that the anti-religious Clay attends church.

In the meantime, there’s another kind of education required of Clayboy. Claris (Mimsy Farmer), whose training extends to reproduction and pores over the unexpurgated dictionary, gleefully hovering over the dirty words, has to teach the young man that a young woman wants more than whispers in the ear and bunches of flowers. Unfortunately, Clayboy has another suitor Cora (Kathy Bennett) who doesn’t take kindly to him rejecting her advances and when the opportunity arises to sabotage his plans does so with pleasure.

This is a film about working people. Not labor as such, and not about labor unrest or agitation either. In the way of Witness (1985), there’s a great scene (minus the soaring music of course) of constructing a wooden building, there’s men drilling and hammering at the quarry, and a pivotal scene in chopping down a tree. People seeing the benefit of hard work are less convinced by the ephemeral attraction of education, especially when that seems either beyond their reach, out of their league or as likely to find as the end of a rainbow.

So without overly saying anything much about the class divide in the U.S. (which is unspoken anyway and assumed, what with equality and all, not to exist) this says a great deal.

Henry Fonda fills his boots. It’s a plum role and he goes for it. Certainly, it’s the opposite of all those buttoned-up parts he seemed to land. Maureen O’Hara (The Battle of the Villa Florita, 1965) has a smaller part and it’s a mercy after nine kids she managed to keep her figure. James MacArthur (Battle of the Bulge, 1965) has every scene stolen from him by the charming minx Mimsy Farmer (Bus Riley’s Back in Town, 1965). You might spot Donald Crisp (Pollyanna, 1960) in his final role.

If you equate director Delmer Daves with hard-hitting westerns like Broken Arrow (1950) and 3:10 to Yuma (1957), it’s worth remembering he had a strong romantic streak as exhibited in Rome Adventure/Lovers Must Learn (1962). But he deliberately avoids the comedy pratfall of the later Yours, Mine, Ours (1968), also starring Fonda. He wrote the screenplay based on the book by Earl Hamner Jr.

Because this reputedly led to The Waltons TV series, you could be mistaken for thinking it’s as schmaltzy. It’s anything but. Take away the lush background and the idyllic scenery and while it finally gets to a heart-warming climax it’s tougher going and with a sexuality way ahead of its time.

Great watch.

Seven Days in May (1964) ****

Democracy is a dangerous weapon in the hands of the people. Can they be trusted to make the correct decision? That’s in part the thematic thrust of this high-octane political thriller that pits two of the greatest actors of their generation in a battle to decide the fate of the world. This was the era of the nuke picture – Dr Strangelove (1962), Fail Safe (1964), The Bedford Incident (1965) – all primed by the real-life Cuban Missile Crisis and the growing threat of the Cold War.

Just as the President (Fredric March) is about to sign a nuclear treaty with the USSR, much to the fury of the majority of Americans judging by opinion polls, Colonel Jiggs Casey (Kirk Douglas) uncovers signs of a military coup headed by hawk General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster). The movie divides into the classic three acts. In the first, Casey investigates the existence of a secret army unit in El Paso comprising 3,600 men trained to overthrow the government and needs to persuade the President the country is in danger. The second act sees the president hunting for find proof of the imminent coup and identifying the conspirators. The third act witnesses showdowns between the President and Scott and Scott and Casey.

At the heart of the story is betrayal – Scott of his country’s constitution, Casey of his friend when he takes on the “thankless job of informer.” Casey proves rather too ruthless, willing to seduce and then betray Eleanor Holbrook (Ava Gardner), Scott’s one-time mistress. Both Holbrook and the President prove to have higher principles than Casey.

For both Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster who operate at a high threshold of intensity and could easily have turned in high-octane performances the tension is even better maintained by their apparently initial low-key confrontations. Douglas has a trick here of standing ramrod straight and then turning his head but not his body towards the camera.

As a pure thriller, it works a treat, investigation to prove there is a conspiracy followed by the deaths and disappearances of vital people and finally the need to resolve the crisis without creating public outcry. The only flaw in the movie’s structure is that Casey cannot carry out all the investigations and when presidential sidekicks Paul Girard (Martin Balsam) and Senator Clark (Edmond O’Brien) are dispatched, respectively, to Gibraltar and El Paso the movie loses some of its intensity. But the third act is a stunner as the President refuses to take the easy way out by blackmailing Scott over his previous relationship with Holbrook.

Of course, there is a ton of political infighting and philosophizing in equal measure and speeches about democracy (“ask for a mandate at the ballot box, don’t steal it”) and the constitution and the impact of nuclear weapons on humanity. But these verbal volleys are far from long-winded and pack a surefire punch. The coup has been set up with military precision and must be dismantled by political precision.

The film was awash with Oscar talent – Burt Lancaster, Best Actor for Elmer Gantry (1960) and, at that point, twice nominated; thrice-nominated Kirk Douglas; Fredric March, twice Best Actor for Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) plus three other nominations besides; Ava Gardner nominated for Best Actress (Mogambo, 1953); and Edmond O’Brien named Best Supporting Actor for The Barefoot Contessa (1954).

None disappoint. March is especially impressive as a weak president tumbling in the polls who has to reach deep to fight a heavyweight adversary. Lancaster and Douglas both bristle with authority. Although Lancaster’s delusional self-belief appears to give him the edge in the acting stakes, Douglas’s ruthless manipulation of a vulnerable Ava Gardner provides him with the better material. Edmond O’Brien as an old soak whose alcoholism marks him out as an easy target is also memorable and Ava Gardner in recognizing her frailties delivers a sympathetic performance.

Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone) does a terrific job of distilling a door-stopper of a book by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II. But the greatest kudos must go to director John Frankenheimer – acquainted with political opportunism through The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and with Burt Lancaster (The Birdman of Alcatraz, 1962) – for keeping tension to the forefront and resisting the temptation to slide into political ideology.

American Fiction (2024) *** – Seen at the Cinema

I thought we were in for a treat when our hero is told not to be rude to anyone important. Kick ass, here we go. Nope. Worthy but dull. One part cosmic joke, three parts soap opera, only relieved by the kind of subdued acting that’s become very much the contemporary Oscar-nominated trend (see The Holdovers, Oppenheimer). And with a narrative thrust that is, unfortunately, laughable. I grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, which for generations lived under the cloud of No Mean City, a portrayal of the city as gangster heaven, and we are nothing on what Hollywood did to the Native Americans so, spare me, anyone saying they have been unfairly treated by any part of the media.

Let’s get the soap out of the way first. Monk (Jeffrey Wright) is an out-of-fashion literary novelist eking out a living as a English professor whose students are on the verge of cancelling him. He hives off to the family home where he discovers – discovers! – his mother (Leslie Uggams) is suffering from Alzheimer’s, brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown) is gay and a coke addict and his sister Lisa (Tracey Ellis Ross) is so ill from heart disease she drops down dead in front of him.

When his latest novel is rejected he decides he will rip off current bestseller Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) and write a book in gangsta patois. Lo and behold it works and what began as him cocking a snook takes on a more serious dimension when he is offered a $750,000 advance. And guess what, suddenly his principles go hang, and not because he’s just a greedy skunk like everyone else but because he’s been handed a get-out-of-jail-free card in that how, otherwise, with a divorced coke addict brother more interested in his latest lover and a dead sister – both I hasten to add high up in the medical profession, sister a consultant, brother a plastic surgeon – is he going to pay for his mother’s care. So he goes along with the gig and the problems multiply as he lives the hypocrisy he claims to abhor.

The idea of someone duping the publishing industry is hardly new. Bestselling British literary author William Boyd sent in a novel under a pseudonym but written in his own style that had attracted a gazillion sales and that was rejected. Polish novelist Jerzy Kosinski sent in one of his own award-winning novels without a word changed and had that rejected. So the publishing industry, like Hollywood and like the media, is just too easy a target unless the weapon is a lot sharper than this.

And hopefully this is a short-lived trope (Argylle went down a similar route), but we see his characters come alive in front of him and play out terrible scenes from his joke fiction.

Yep, so someone is making a point, that Black Literature has lost its way and why can’t Black authors be heralded for writing about ancient Greece (obviously not in your typical blood-sex-and-thunder fashion) or other arcane subjects or even, as shown here, take as their subject matter well-off university-educated rather than poverty-stricken characters and explore their issues (the same as everyone else’s since you’re asking).

Outside of Monk who spends most of the time locked in his head with a bit of light relief with fan-turned-lover Coraline (Erika Alexander), the only person who doesn’t take this stuff seriously is the sister who died too soon, deflating our literary hero by telling him his books come in handy for steadying loose table legs. Debut offering by writer-director Cord Jefferson based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett.

Kept afloat, just, by Jeffrey Wright (No Time to Die, 2021) mainlining on repression but that’s about it.