I first met Sinéad O’Connor in the late 80’s, not so long after she had become a mother.
Living in London at the time and she had become friendly with friends of ours, resultantly they all visited together when we were having a kids party one sunny afternoon.
Already an admirer by then, like the rest of the world I had fallen for the brilliance of her debut records. Aside from the music I was also aware of some of the publicity she had generated.
The thing I now recall mostly on meeting her that day, was the beauty of her soft spoken accent and the effect when she broke into what I can only describe as her 1,000 watt smile. Much later, Charlie Burchill and I were fortunate enough to witness that same smile many times over within the walls of our dressing room, when Simple Minds toured with Sinéad.
Nervous before each show, then utterly relaxed in our company afterwards, the experience of that tour rewarded us with the opportunity to witness up close the magnitude of Sinéad’s exceptional talent, it was beyond colossal. And as we do with all artists and musicians Simple Minds share a stage with, from then on we have always considered Sinéad as ‘one of us.’
It is for that reason, on the news of Sinéad’s passing, that we feel our hearts ache today.
I had previously seen clips from this version of the story, but never saw the entire film until now. I have to say I like it a great deal less than the 1924 version with Douglas Fairbanks (Senior), but this first colour production was a huge technological achievement for its time, even though — what with the breakout of World War II, and no less than five directors, along with various other issues — this version is mostly successful at what it sets out to do, but is also a bit of a hot mess.
You have to respect the ground-breaking effects (including the first use of what is now called Chromakey), the brilliant sets, the beautiful location photography (a mix of London and California, the latter being used after the war broke out), the lovely set pieces, and the gorgeous three-strip Technicolour process. It won Academy Awards for cinematography, art direction, and special effects, and was nominated for its music (the latter by the great Miklós Rózsa after a false start by Oscar Straus).
Because of the various problems during production, original director Ludwig Berger and Berger’s choice of composer (Straus) were eventually replaced primarily by Michael Powell. Powell also had to leave the production before its completion due to the war, and American Tim Whelan directed nearly all of the latter half’s outdoor scenes in California with assistance from the Korda brothers. You can already see why the film, as entertaining and gorgeous as it turned out, doesn’t always hang together.
The story, which has also gone by the name Aladdin and variations thereof for many film versions, was first made into a film in 1905 and across the 20th century (and into the 21st, with Disney’s live action remake of its own 1992 animated Aladdin). The core story is often said to be drawn from the medieval collection of Middle Eastern tales known as One Thousand and One Nights, but this is somewhat inaccurate. The Aladdin tale specifically (along with the Ali Baba tales) was added to the collection from other sources by the 17th-century European translator of the tales, Antoine Galland.
Producer Alexander Korda was inspired to do this movie by the 1924 silent version, but changed the story pretty substantially — as just one example, making the thief and the King two separate characters. If you don’t know the 1924 version like I do, this is a mostly-successful telling that tries to combine some variations of the tale into a coherent whole, and mostly does it quite well.
It is certainly a fine family film with enough fantasy to hold its audience even now, though I’m very glad they changed direction from its intended “full blown musical” idea. Three songs are still in the film, but apart from Abu’s solo song, they don’t disrupt the story.
The film opens brilliantly, as a blind beggar in ancient Basra along with his faithful dog companion tells the first part of the film’s tale in flashback. He tells of a young and naive King Ahmad of “Bagdad” (John Justin), who wants to learn more about the people he rules, so he is persuaded to go undercover by his evil Grand Vizier, Jaffar ((the great Conrad Veidt, who completely steals every scene he’s in).
King Ahmad (John Justin) and Jaffar (Conrad Veidt), his Grand Vizier
Once Ahmad is out of the castle and pretending to be a humble beggar, Jaffar has him arrested, and thrown in prison — later telling the people that Ahmad died, so Jaffar can claim the throne. Ahmad meets a young thief while in his cell called Abu (played by then 15-year-old Sabu Dastagir, who just went by “Sabu” in his film career).
Abu, a carefree youth, disbelieves his cell mate is the king at first, but befriends Ahmad — and pickpocketed the key to the cell so they could escape. They flee to Basra, where Ahmad spots the princess (June Duprez) and immediately falls in love with her. However, Jaffar is also in Basra and trying to win the Princess through other means — flattering her father, the Sultan (Miles Malleson, also one of the writers of the film), with life-size toys — the Sultan’s obsession. Malleson is another highlight, a wonderfully child-like old man played to perfection.
Jaffar seals the deal by giving the Sultan a mechanical flying horse, but in the meantime the princess and Ahmad have met, and the attraction is now mutual and she escapes the palace. Enraged, Jaffar uses his magical powers to blind Ahmad, and turn Abu into a dog. The princess is recaptured, but falls into “a deep sleep” and cannot be awakened.
You can see here how the Chromakey stuff is VERY primitive and doesn’t always match well.
Ahmad, still blind, is eventually tricked into returning to the palace, where he awakens the princess, and is then dismissed, along with his dog Abu. We return to the dock where we first met them, as he concludes his story — but the adventure quickly continues as the Princess is tricked into boarding Jaffar’s ship.
Now a prisoner, Jaffar tells her that his curses on Ahmad and Abu can only be lifted by her embracing him, which she very reluctantly does out of love for Ahmad. The spells are lifted, and Ahmad spots her and sets after the ship along with the now-human-again Abu. Jaffar sees them a bit later, and raises a storm that shipwrecks their small dinghy, then returns to Basra and uses a mechanical dancing goddess toy to kill the Sultan before returning to Baghdad.
He does TRY to woo Princess Noname, but ultimately has to resort to threats and hypnosis, of course.
Meanwhile, by sheer lucky coincidence, Abu finds a bottle on the deserted beach and opens it, revealing a very temperamental and gigantic genie (Rex Ingram). Ingram handles the role as best he can, but he’s just not very convincing — and the effects regarding the size differences between him and Abu, though imaginative, aren’t generally carried off well enough to continue the suspension of disbelief.
The scaling effects work reasonable well, but Genie’s performance is uneven (and you should see his toenails! Ayieee!)
Still, the influence of this film on later filmmakers like Ray Harryhausen simply cannot be overstated — this is the blueprint he and others followed for decades to come when it came to imaginative tales of fantasy. In addition to Harryhausen, Terry Gilliam’s best films are also clearly influenced by this movie.
The genie helps Abu steal a magical jewel from a faraway temple (with a Keystone Kops-esque guard squad) that helps him find and reunite with Ahmad, all of which is really well done. Abu and Ahmad use the jewel to see Jaffar hypnotizing the Princess to forget her love for Ahmad, and our hero loses hope and angers Abu — until Abu accidentally uses his third and final wish to send Ahmad back to Baghdad.
Abu then breaks his giant jewel out of anger, which introduces a handy plot device to get him also back to Baghdad via a flying carpet (very well done compared to the flying horse effects), the appearance of which triggers the population into overthrowing Jaffar, who is then killed by Abu, restoring Ahmad to power and allowing him to marry the Princess, who never did get an actual name.
Abu is offered the position of Grand Vizier to King Ahmad, but shuns any form of responsibility, re-steals the flying carpet, and heads out to more adventure. Everyone laughs, and the film concludes happily. You can almost forget how bad Sabu’s song was (he was otherwise generally excellent).
The flying carpet sequences, both in Chromakey and physical effects, work much better.
In its day, the film was a wonder and did very well at the box office. It maintains a good reputation (now as a children’s movie) to this day.
This version of The Thief of Bagdad was the template for most future special-effects-heavy fantasy films for decades to come, largely due to Larry Butler’s invention of ChromaKey, which with some later polish became the successor to the “traveling matte” techniques used in prior films.
Viewed as an adult, the physical effects are mostly great — and while the Chromakey effects are often so obvious it takes you out of the film, the alterations to the tale and a few handy plot machinations do not. Watched bearing in mind its technological and historical importance, it is still enjoyable, and well worth the 108 minute runtime.
Conrad Veidt does more acting with his eyeballs alone than most actors do with their whole body.
Blah blah blah Tom Cruise blah blah stunts blah blah Mission Impossible blah blah blah. You want stunts? You want life-threatening risks? You want thrills? Buster Keaton had Tom Cruise beat, handily, nearly 100 years ago with The General. Not only that, but you’ll learn at least a dozen new ways to stop a train you probably never thought of before.
Some of what he accomplishes in this 79-minute film seriously could have killed or severely injured him, and in fact he was knocked unconscious on one occasion during the filming. Several of the spike-pulling moments in the film would have put his life in severe danger if he had mistimed his actions, and there’s a lot of cow-catcher stunt work performed with the train and boxcars moving at speeds that added a great deal of risk to the shots.
The plot is pretty typical Keaton: there’s a girl he wants, but there’s an obstacle or set of obstacles in the way, and by a combination of dumb luck and reckless foolhardiness he blunders his way into overcoming the obstacles and gets the girl. The film is based on a true story of a Civil War locomotive chase, though Keaton for reasons unclear switched the sides, believing the public would be more sympathetic to the Confederate side, thus making the Union soldiers the villains.
Perhaps this contributed to the film’s poor performance at the box office at the time, despite having an exceedingly high budget (much to the studio’s consternation). But, to be fair, every dollar of it is on screen).
In The General, Keaton is Johnnie Gray, the engineer of his beloved locomotive, and is wooing a girl from the Lee family of Marietta, Georgia (having spent a fair amount of time in Marietta, this has always been an added bonus in the film for me). When the Civil War breaks out, the father and brother of Annabelle Lee rush to enlist, as does Keaton.
When he tells the clerk he is a railroad engineer, he is deemed too valuable in that role and turned away, though he is not told why. He comes across the Lee men after being rejected, but turns down their offer to join the line, branding him a coward in their minds.
Despondent Johnnie rides the literal rail after being rejected by his girl and her family.
They tell Annabella of his cowardice, and she rejects him “until I see you in uniform.” A year later — a time lapse not made explicitly clear in the film — a gang of disguised Union operatives plan to hijack a Confederate train (guess which one) and use it to destroy bridges behind them as the travel north, cutting off the Confederate supply lines.
The ruse succeeds and strands Keaton, but he quickly finds both another locomotive and a group of Confederate soldiers to give chase — but as he pulls out, he fails to realise that the locomotive was not attached to the rail cars full of soldiers, so now it is just him chasing The General and its carful of Union saboteurs to get his train back.
And now, the plot wrinkle: Annabella was on the train being hijacked to go see her wounded-in-battle father, and unlike her fellow passengers, did not disembark the train during the dinner break, instead heading to the luggage car to retrieve something. She is thus captured by the Union hijackers, and held prisoner aboard The General.
After losing his second locomotive, he continues the chase anyway he can.
Once Johnnie discovers this some time later, he becomes determined not just to get his own locomotive back, but to rescue his girl and stop their dastardly plan. Before and up to that point, the film engages in a series of incredible stunts as the rogues engage in a series of gambits to slow or stop Keaton’s chase, believing Keaton’s train is full — once they discover it’s just the engine and him, the stunts get even more impressive, and occasionally some malarkey goes on in other locations besides the two trains.
Checking to see if the canon he was towing in his earlier attempt to catch The General was working.
Keaton’s physical stunt-work is just mind-blowing to watch, especially considering that films in those days didn’t have the luxuries of safety considerations (though they did have stunt people for some long shots, those are much fewer than you’d expect — it’s mostly all Keaton). He climbs all over that locomotive like a spider, all while the train is in motion. If you’ve seen any of his films, you know he is the undisputed master of the thrilling-comedy-stunt moment, and there’s nothing Tom Cruise or anyone else can do about it.
The rail-thin Johnnie follows the raiders to a dinner where they reveal their plan.
I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by saying it all resolves in the end, Johnnie goes from civilian engineer to decorated leiutenant thanks to a field promotion, changes his occupation to “soldier” and finally enlists properly. Of course, the Lee family witness the finale and are deeply impressed, none more so than Annabelle.
Johnnie and Annabelle after he frees her from captivity by pretending to be a Union soldier.
Although it didn’t do well at its initial box-office debut, the film has risen steadily in the minds of both critics and cinephiles, and is now widely regarded as a true classic — and still routinely places very highly in lists of the all-time greatest movies, and still boasts the single most-expensive stunt shot in silent-movie history, which forms the spectacular climax of the film. While I’m still confused as to why Keaton reversed the sides to make it a peculiarly pro-Confederate film, the stellar filmmaking and Keaton’s performance overcome that one lapse in judgement.
You will hardly believe your eyes as a full-on steam locomotive (in real life, the “Texas”) crosses a burning bridge and crashes into the river below; this is not a model shot, nor were any special effects used or needed — director Clyde Bruckman just left the wreckage there in the river bed until it was finally salvaged for scrap during WWII.
They really did build a bridge, set it on fire, then drive a train across it and plunge it into the river. For realz! No wonder it went over budget!
Apart from crowd scenes where a lot of running or marching is required, the film is mostly speed-corrected to show the actors in natural motion, and this really brings the sophisticated nature of late-silent era filmmaking to the fore. The recreated original score is also a treat, though alternative and more modern scores exist for the 4K Blu-ray release (the first silent movie released on Blu-ray, and a wise choice among many good options).
Apart from being in B&W, I believe you could show this to modern audiences and they would still find the pacing to be attention-holding, the story layered enough for today’s audiences, the humour still funny, and the stunt-work disbelieved to be as real as it actually was. It’s a mystery to me why the film isn’t a regular visitor to revival-house cinemas, or better known to this generation’s cinephiles.
I’m just glad nobody’s been dumb or reckless enough to try and remake it, because The General is truly a unique example of the best the reckless early days of American filmmaking has to offer that really holds up across its nearly 100-year history. Plus it’s a better movie than any of the Mission: Impossible series. There, I said it.
This documentary is another one of those you might see at an IMAX cinema somewhere near you, possibly in 3D (as I did). I’ve always liked travel/archeological documentaries about places I’m not familiar with or haven’t visited, and Angkor Wat in Cambodia is definitely one of those places. The structures that remain behind from this abandoned city, and the recreations of what it would have looked like in its very, very long day (from the 9th through the 15th centuries) were eye-popping.
Angkor was filled with amazing and very original stone buildings of a stunningly elaborate design, and even all these centuries later, where the foliage has reclaimed so much of the space, the merger of the two is haunting and beautiful. As great as the ruins and recreations of the buildings are to look at, it reflects a remarkable emphasis on careful engineering, which isn’t just reflected in the buildings — the entire city had a maze of waterways and carefully-managed rice paddies that enabled the population to thrive, thus funding the stone temples and palaces.
The big mystery of Angkor, which the film does drag out more than a little, is why it was eventually abandoned for the later (and still current) capitol of Phnom Penh (pronounced Pen-OM Pen). The short answer is a remarkable example of climate change, which serves as a reminder that although we hear a lot about mankind’s current influence on climate change, it is a thing that happens with or without our actions; the Ice Age was another example of mankind-free climate change.
The rest of the film concerns itself with a mix of showing off some of the restoration of Angkor Wat (the multi-temple center designed to resemble the mythical home of the Devas, Mt. Meru) that has occurred in the past few decades, once the ruins were rediscovered. The center complex, known as Angkor Wat, was constructed in the 12th century to serve Khmer King Suryavarman II, and serve as his tomb. Originally designed as a Hindu temple complex, it evolved in the 13th century into a Buddhist complex, which it remains to this day.
The film spends a bit of time on some of the techniques used to spot other ruins and structures lost in the overgrowth of the jungle away from the central complex, using helicopters and LIDAR to search do ground-mapping that can distinguish remnants of buildings through the jungle. Much more remains to be discovered, but the central complex has been mostly restored and is a popular tourist and religious destination, just 3.5 miles away from Siem Reap.
Although tourist promotion is not really the point of the movie as much as highlighting the ancient and surprisingly sophisticated culture of Cambodia, it certainly makes me want to see the place with my own eyes. Historical drawings of what it must have been like when populated are astonishing, and even today the complex water-management system of old has been restored, showing off the superb control of their environment the Khmer people once had until a decades-long drought, followed by a decades-long flood, forced them to move far to the south.
Although the design is a world away from the Mayan ruins of Mexico that I have visited, both sets of ruins serve as a powerful reminder that the peoples of the past thought deeply about the centers of their cities, usually along religious lines, and that this inspired great labours in the same way that the great cathedrals we can visit today, whether from centuries past or more recent, are likely to be rediscovered in another millenium or so. Those things we think of as “permanent” are often looked back on as fleeting, given enough distance by the march of time.
Whether you are a fan of Dickens, or you’ve not read any of his work beyond A Christmas Carol, this is a fantastic film adaptation to offer insight into Dickens’ other work, full of strong visual language to put you in the authors’ mindset and life experiences. Great Expectations covers poverty, the working class, and injustice, but contrasts this with power, privilege and good old British eccentricity; themes Dickens constantly came back to in his other works.
As an adaptation of the book, Lean and his fellow screenwriters condense and cut some plot strands in order to make for a followable two-hour film, and made the deliberate choice to make the film in B&W rather than colour to further establish the film as being part of a bygone age. As a single film, no other version since has surpassed it.
Without trying to rehash the entire plot, an orphan named Philip Pirrup, whom absolutely everyone calls “Pip” as a single first and last name, is living with his older sister and her husband Joe, a kindly blacksmith. A chance encounter with the desperate escaped convict Abel Magwich in the graveyard of Pip’s parents and an act of kindness on Pip’s part sets in motion plot lines that will only show up much later.
In the meantime, Pip falls into the orbit of an eccentric patron, Miss Havisham, who has a macabre backstory and a young adopted daughter Estella, who is seemingly impervious to love and rather cold (and occasionally brusque), though of course young Pip falls in love with her anyway. As an adult, Estella does take on a beau but is, as Pip observes, simply using him. She explains matter-of-factly (again) to Pip that she has no heart and does this to all men — except Pip. It is a beautifully understated moment of foreshadowing where Pip finally “gets” her and what Miss Havisham has done to her.
As Pip turns 20, he discovers he has a mysterious benefactor (whom he assumes is Miss Havisham) who wants Pip trained in London to become a proper gentleman of society. Leaving his family, his patron, Estella and all he has known, he travels and meets up with a boyhood colleague, Herbert Pocket, who becomes his roommate and friend. A year later, matters come to a head as the benefactor reveals himself, setting in motion the means to resolve the various plot lines (and finally some action scenes!).
Pip (right) recognises schoolboy acquaintance Herbert Pocket, played by Alec Guinness.
A David Lean film is always beautifully shot and extremely well-directed, and this one is no exception. The B&W cinematography, apart from the opening sequence, was shot by Guy Green, who also worked with Lean on his other Dickens’ film, the even more memorable 1948 Oliver Twist. Both Alec Guinness and Martita Hunt had played their respective roles (Herbert Pocket and Miss Havisham) in a stage adapterion of the tale Guinness wrote, which prompted Lean to make the film in the first place (though he did not use Guinness’ stage script).
Lean definitely had a talent for picking and working with child actors, as both the young Pip (Anthony Wager) and the boy Herbert (John Forrest) are great in their parts, and a young Jean Simmons beautifully played the young Estella, with Valerie Hobson seamlessly taking on the adult Estella. Also of note is the ageless Frances L. Sullivan, who flawlessly played the lawyer Mr Jaggers in perfect Victorian style, but to be fair he had experience in the part — he had played the same role in a 1934 film version of Great Expectations as well!
There are only two serious errors in this film in my opinion, one of which was unavoidable: you can’t film the entire story, it would have likely doubled the running length of the film. Lean does his best to choose the best plot strands to follow, and resolves them all satisfactorily, but in truth Dickens’ lengthy storyline — it was originally written as a serial for a magazine, and the novel was originally published in three volumes — doesn’t lend itself to anything less than a mini-series.
The other flaw (and this was a big one) was casting a 38-year-old John Mills as the adult (21 year-old) Pip. I have no quibble with Mills’ excellent and emotional performance, but the age jump between the boy Pip and the (mature!) man Pip is just not credible on-screen. In a rare foot wrong, Lean should have cast a younger actor — at times, Mills looks more like 26-year-old Alec Guiness’ father than his contemporary.
A trip back to the mannered and class-centric world of Dickens’ time is probably not for everyone, even as beautifully realised as it is here, but as a picture of a bygone age (and Dickens’ clever way of pointing out the injustices and flaws of it), Great Expectations puts you right into the author’s imagination. The resolution of the film is a bit fast and tidy, but not before a series of memorable scenes in which Pip first (accidentally) destroys Miss Havisham and then forcibly prevents Estella from becoming Havisham’s prisoner — a powerful statement on the importance of finding your own way in the world, regardless of your circumstances or background.
I love this movie to itty-bitty bits, I first saw it in the cinema when it came out, nearly (gulp) 30 years ago, and then again some years later — Heather thinks it must have been 2004, for the 10th anniversary, likely at The Enzian in Maitland, Florida. So it has been a while, but seeing again last night, once again in the cinema was just heavenly.
Rarely has there been a movie this utterly joyful about a subculture, and the fact that it was one of those rare LGBTQ+ films that breaks through to the mainstream makes it even more beautiful. Priscilla, which follows the exploits of three Australian big-city drag queens at different stages of their lives (one of them transgender, no less) who get a lucrative gig in a faraway town, is at its heart a buddy movie about celebrating your style and embracing your past — told with infectious glee and love.
That it features an early and very effective performance by Hugo Weaving, playing Anthony “Tick” Belrose (drag name: Mitzi Del Bra), and the magnificent Terrance Stamp as Bernadette Basenger (whose real first name is a plot point, so I won’t give it away here), well-matched by Guy Pearce as Adam Whitely (drag name: Felicia Jollygoodfellow), and all three are just perfect yet surprising casting. While Tick’s story is arguably the “main” one, both he and Bernadette are confronting (or escaping) their past in this trip, while Adam (being the youngest) opts in on the adventure to fulfill his dreams.
Our trio, out of drag (only as required, mind you).
For those unfamiliar with Australia, it’s the same size roughly as the entire US, except that all the main cities hug the coastlines, so the road trip to Alice Springs is mostly a trip through remote desert, as their destination is smack-dab in the middle of the country. Adam’s mother buys them a very used old bus, and of course they pack an absolutely ungodly amount of costumes, props, makeup, and wigs with them.
Much of the film is comedic, thanks to the outlandish public personas of the trio, and there are lots of laugh-out-loud moments that are not just caused by outrageous costuming. The comedy is beautifully balanced with much more serious moments, including major and minor homophobia, personal growth, Tick’s literal confrontation with his past, and the bus breaking down in the middle of nowhere. Happily, the outback also has some friendly folks and a boatload of quirky characters that look out for our boys (and girl) as they each complete their personal and literal journeys.
If you shriek with delight at these incredible costumes, you might just be in the community …
The humanity and relentless positivity of the main characters wins you over almost immediately, and really carries the film through its various plot points and messages. If you’re not familiar with LGBTQ+ culture, this is a great introduction even though it is ostensibly about drag performers (hint: it isn’t really — it’s about finding and celebrating your true self).
Celebrated British actor Terrance Stamp, who first made his mark in film in the 1962 classic Billy Budd, is the real revelation here. He manages to effortlessly combine dignity, wisdom, experience, patience, and humour into his nuanced and layered performance, which threatens to steal the show but never quite does until the end of the film. This film revived his status as a hell of a good actor, resulting in a wealth of new roles and renewed respect in the industry that continues to this day.
Award-winning serious actor Terrance Stamp, known for superb villain portrayals, on the right.
For a film made 30 years ago, the “wokeness” (lol) of it is pretty stunning. There is representation of good and bad heterosexual characters, open-minded adults and children, the native aboriginal population, the white colonial population, and even the desert wildlife. Years earlier, David Bowie had made a music video (“China Girl” from Let’s Dance), that similarly touches on the spirit of Australia, and I can’t help but think maybe it had a tiny influence on this movie.
You really get a feel for the dynamic of the country, since the film starts in Sydney and is also a road movie about the beauty of the desert as well. When Adam finally gets some depth (after playing “generic young queen” for most of the film) as he fulfills his dream, you feel a family has bonded and your heart would be made of stone if you didn’t celebrate their victories.
The stars do such a terrific job of capturing the theatricality and joy of drag.
On top of everything else, it’s flawlessly made and brilliantly paced. It is funny, witty, joyous and celebratory, and I will never for the life of me figure out how it did so well with the general population, becoming a hit movie in most major countries, despite it quintessential Ozzie-ness.
This film is a gift to us all. If you’ve never seen it, go see it (especially in a cinema or in high-def). If you have seen it, you’re probably overdue for a revisit. It’s a buddy movie, a road movie, a gay movie, and a universal movie all in one, and it’s simply delightful.
Warning: some “fucking Abba” finally finds its way into this film, despite a ban from Bernadette.
I had a vague memory of seeing a film version of The Three Musketeers from my youth, and went looking around to see if I could find it either in my library or on one of the streaming services. My memory was that the version I saw so long ago was in B&W, but I now think I just watched it on a B&W TV (yep, I’m old). I’m still not sure what version I was thinking of, but I came across one that ticked the boxes, so I watched it. This movie … was not the one I sort of half-remembered.
This 1939 version was a musical comedy version that, despite that terrible idea, actually sticks pretty close to the book for as far as it goes — which really surprised me. I have a lot of time for Don Ameche, the star of this version, and he is one of the best things in it, taking the role seriously while never wiping the smile from his face as he plays the headstrong but skilled D’Artagnon, who hopes to join the King’s Musketeers.
Yes, that’s Don Ameche. Handsome, isn’t he?
In this telling of the tale, D’Artagnon mostly misses the actual Three Musketeers, who appear only briefly. The trio gets passed-out drunk drinking toasts at an inn to the various King Louises, because there are so damn many of them, and the scullery cooks (played by the all-mugging, all-singing, all-pratfalling Ritz Brothers) try on the Muskateers’ outfits and then get mistaken by D’Artagnon for the real Musketeers, and of course from there mischief ensues from all parties.
The success of this film depends very, very, very, very heavily on your tolerance of The Ritz Brothers, who were a vaudeville act that transitioned pretty successfully to film on the strength of being a mix between The Three Stooges and three Chicos from The Marx Brothers. They’re not in any way witty, but they can mug and clown (and also comedically sing and dance) with the best of ‘em.
The Ritz Brothers as the faux Musketeers
Their schtick, in my opinion, hasn’t aged well — but I cannot argue with the fact that they enjoyed a successful career in various forms of show business (though the fact that they got forgotten pretty quickly afterwards may prove me right about them). The film also relies way too heavily on D’Artagnon somehow not seeing the Ritz Brothers’ utter incompetence as pretend Musketeers, which of course he doesn’t since they only end up in his view by accident throughout the film at points where they have been (accidentally-comedically) useful to him.
Ameche handles a sword well, sings in a pleasing tenor, and is handsome enough to pull off the romantic scenes. The Ritz “Musketeers” keep getting pulled in by D’Artagnon’s delusion that they are real Musketeers, but they do aid in his success in the complicated (yet truncated) plot of this brief 73-minute film.
Buckles were most certainly swashed!
If you don’t know the story, read the book, or watch one of the later, more dramatic film or TV versions. Suffice to say Cardinal Richelieu was a very bad man who manipulated royalty both in France and England, and was foiled (ha!) by the Musketeers. The plot works well in this film, it’s just the comedy and the musical bits that fall flat.
First of all, there are only four songs in this “musical,” none of them that good, and the two for Don Ameche sound pretty similar to these ears, though he turns his “on the road” song into a love song later on pretty well. The two Ritz Brothers songs (one of which extols the virtues of chicken soup) are meant to be comedic but seem quite laboured to me.
Near the end of the film, the brothers contribute their best bit: a pie-plate dance that’s actually well-done and quite clever, meant to cover any sound D’Artagnon makes while freeing Lady Constance from the dungeon below the aristocrats they are working against. I should mention that the chase scenes, while regrettably sped up as was the custom of the time, are really well-done and focus on the hardworking horses.
The whole film is well-shot but still somehow kind of cheap-looking (just like The Ritz Brothers, insert rimshot here). I did recognise Lionel Atwill as de Rochefort, but only realized the near-immortal John Carradine was in this (as Naveau) when the credits rolled. I’m giving this a star for the cinematography, a half-star for Don Ameche, and another half-star for the pie-plate dance, and still looking for whatever version I thought was great when I was like nine or so.
Some fantastic matte work in the film that shouldn’t go unmentioned
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ “Complete” version, 4K with restored scenes
52-week film challenge, film 18
Quite possibly the most visually compelling film ever made, even after nearly a century. Certainly the most beautiful silent movie ever made. I recently noticed that Criterion had a 4K copy of the 2010 “Complete” restoration, so I watched it to see what had been added since the 2001 version. It turns out that the answer is “about 24 minutes more story, and a new version of the original score,” but there’s more to it than that, of course.
Lest we get too far ahead of ourselves, and for those who’ve never watched the whole thing, Metropolis is an incredibly futuristic-looking silent movie that absolutely everyone on Earth should at some point see. The reason I say this is that it is truly one of the most incredible film productions ever made from a visual standpoint, and on top of that the storyline is (sadly) still very relevant today.
The effects may be primitive by comparison to today’s films, but Lang brought a style and credibility to them — complemented by the design and art direction of the non-FX scenes — that not only hasn’t dated it, but in fact plays a huge role in the film’s immortality. Parts of his vision are the sort of future we all hoped we’d grow up in, but the underside (literally and metaphorically) of this future projection are indeed the world most of us ended up in.
As the film opens, we gaze upon an incredibly modernism-influenced style cityscape dominated by an exceptionally tall, large, and distinctly Art Deco Tower of Babel, with trains and cars on elevated railways bustling along at various levels on and above the ground, with airplanes (well, biplanes — a rare example of a visual that didn’t age well) buzzing around. The top of the tower is where the Master of the City (a sort of architect/chief executive) Joh Frederson and his adult son, Freder, live and enjoy the hedonistic lifestyle of the city’s elites. Lang said the look was inspired by his first trip to New York City.
Although there is no direct reference in either Thea von Harbou’s original 1925 novel-as-film-treatment nor in Lang’s film as to the exact time period, a 60s reprint of the novel placed it firmly as set in the year 2026. Whichever editor came up with that pretty much nailed it, as we are currently living in world alarmingly similar to the one described in the source material.
(L-R) Joh Freder, Rotwang, the Man-Machine
Freder, as a member of the elite, spends his days in gardens and playing sport and other such idle leisure — hobnobbing with the business magnates and politically-powerful and blissfully ignorant of how it all works. Meanwhile, the working class who actually make the city what it is live and work underground in a very functionalist, expressionistic Worker’s City, and toil on keeping the machines that power the metropolis of the elites in scenes that “influenced” Charlie Chaplin for his 1936 film Modern Times.
One day, a a radical woman teacher dates to bring some of the workers’ children up to the gardens to see how their “brothers” live. Freder is struck by the woman, Maria, and follows her down into the Worker’s City, where Freder sees firsthand the impoverished working class and the soul-shattering labour required to provide the elites with their lifestyle.
Maria brings the workers’ children up to see what they will forever be shut out from …
… and Freder is “shook” by what he sees and determines to investigate what lies beneath the city.
Though it was meant to be a parable on the danger of power imbalances, regrettably the problems shown in Metropolis have reared their ugly heads once again in a number of countries that have recently seen class-based unrest and abuses of power by those in charge. Anywhere you find that the elites live a lifestyle completely removed from the majority (who are of course taken for granted as an endless cheap labour supply), you will find strong echoes of this film, which regrettably still feels relevant and relatable nearly 96 years after its release.
Freder catches up with Maria, who he discovers is a symbol of hope for the workers, and she predicts that a “mediator”-cum-saviour will someday appear to resolve the growing chasm between the workers and the elites. Having been traumatized by this disparity himself, Freder sees himself, as the son of the city’s Master, as someone who could fulfill that mediator role, and falls in love with Maria.
Trials and tribulations ensue, and in the secondary plot it is revealed that there is a “mad” scientist in the city, Rotwang, who seeks revenge on Joh Frederson because Rotwang’s love — a woman named Hel — left him to marry the rich/powerful Joh, giving Joh his son Freder before dying. Rotwang has built a mechanical “man” — an iconic and insanely Futurist (but unmistakably female) robot design that he has plans for.
Joh, upon learning of the robot, orders Rotwang to remodel the robot to look and act like Maria — the heroine of the workers — but to have it incite the workers into violence against him. Joh wants this so he can crack down and destroy this attempt at workers gaining negotiating power, but while pretending to follow the order, Rotwang schemes to use the Maria-bot to fulfill his own plans, which are to resurrect Hel and take his revenge upon Joh.
Rotwang kidnaps the real Maria to make a doppelganger. This scene undoubtedly inspired James Whale for 1931’s Frankenstein.
Skipping a lot of exposition, Rotwang’s plan works only too well — Maria-bot incites the workers into a rabid state and commands them to destroy the machines, which will in turn destroy the Metropolis and its elite class. This isn’t what Joh intended, and it has the side effect of destroying the Worker’s City through flooding. While the workers are revolting, the real Maria escapes and tries to save the workers’ children, left behind in the fever of revolt, before they all drown.
Freder finds Maria, and along with his close friend Josaphat manage (barely) to rescue the worker’s children, and eventually get word of this to the workers, who by now have thought they accidentally drowned their own children and were so wracked with grief that they capture the Maria-bot and burn her at the stake. Rotwang gets his comeuppance, Freder gets Maria, and Joh learns the error of his ways.
What’s great about this new version is that the extra footage — which sadly could not be fully restored and is quite distinct from the previously-upscaled footage — adds depth and nuance to the story. In particular, this “complete” version really fleshes out some of the seconddary plot and in particular the supporting characters, from Josaphat to the unnamed Thin Man to Georgy, a worker that Freder befriends and learns from, temporarily trading places with him so that Freder can experience the worker’s life, and Georgy gets to briefly be experience the elite life.
The wickedness of the Thin Man, Joh’s enforcer so he doesn’t have to get his hands dirty, is made much clearer in this version, as is the affectionate relationship of Josephat and Freder, though there is of course no hint of beyond a close friendship. It was nice to see that level of male bonding without sexual overtones for a change.
The film is now almost to the full running time Lang intended (two short scenes are still wholly missing, and captions are used to cover this), and while yes, its now even longer, it is still so fascinating that the 2.4 hour runtime just flies by. Barring some significant new discovery of a better print or those missing scenes, this is the most complete version we’re likely to ever get.
This movie is just goddam incredible.
One can only hope that that perhaps the current “AI” fad will enable further restoration on the damaged but intact extra 24 minutes, making the switch between those scenes and the rest of the film less jarring. I could easily see how, at a minimum, the backgrounds could be extended to give those scenes the same 16:9 ratio as the rest of the film, and that would definitely be worth doing.
As I mentioned earlier, this is one of the incredibly few films that really should be seen by pretty much everyone everywhere. It is more than just a visually-captivating classic with a timeless message about the evils of exploitation; it is a plea to the future not to remake the mistakes of the past, which sadly has been ignored time and time again.
It’s a concert movie, but it’s not a concert movie. There’s no audience, no applause, no between-song banter. It’s two hugely influential musicians who were once in a band together reuniting to pay tribute to the man who helped them launch their careers: Andy Warhol. It’s a requiem and remembrance, entirely in song.
Cale, whose music I have enjoyed enormously, had a complicated relationship with Warhol, while Reed’s feelings
after Warhol’s unexpected death seemed to turn to a softer, more sympathetic side. Reed and Cale themselves, as the songwriting half of the Velvet Underground, also had a complicated relationship, but decided to work together on a song-cycle about Warhol for an album project, which became Songs for Drella. Both men were apparently caught off-guard by Warhol’s sudden death in 1987, and met up at the funeral and spoke to each other for the first time in years. From the suggestion of a mutual friend, they decided to write songs about their memories and perspectives on Warhol.
Some of the songs are based on their own memories and perspectives on Warhol, some are based on direct quotes or recollections from Warhol (either witnessed or drawn from his diary), and some are third-person narratives. As someone who grew up during Warhol’s biggest period of influence and art-world exposure, each and every song provides some fascinating insight.
The film, directed by Edward Lachman, is stark: a simple stage, some visuals on the screen above them, their instruments and microphones. There’s no audience, and it’s mostly harsh cuts between songs.
Lou sits for the whole thing, while Cale stands. Cale stares at Lou nearly continuously when he isn’t himself singing — sometimes quite sinisterly, always very intently — while Lou mostly looks at Cale near the end of songs to signal when to stop. There were public performance prior to the filming, but only a handful.
Following the filmed performance, Cale and Reed worked on the material further, and eventually recorded the album, which came out the following year. Most of the material is by Reed, but Cale’s contributions are, with one exception, my favourites: wistful and delicate, featuring clever piano and synth (complemented nicely by Reed’s guitar), sung in Cale’s trademark artfully-detached style.
Likewise, Reed’s songs are seriously enhanced by Cale’s stalwart keyboard and viola sophistication. Which is not to say Reed’s songs are weaker; they are performed in his own spoken/sung New York street poet style, full of emotion and observation, and he varies up the guitar work and structure of the numbers very nicely.
“Work” is by far my favourite Reed song from the project, and tells the tale of how Warhol pushed Reed to work hard to become a musical success. While Warhol himself fostered a public perception of kind of floating through the “scenes” and “happenings” he fostered, he was in fact a remarkably productive filmmaker, painter, and talent Svengali. We would likely not know of Reed and Cale (and may others) without him.
It’s fascinating watching both men express their complex feelings about “Drella” (the nickname a contraction of Cinderella and Dracula, which should kind of say it all) through their songwriting and style. That said, I’ll admit that I still think the best song about Warhol is Bowie’s whimsical tribute on Hunky Dory, simply named after the man himself.
If you have any interest in Warhol, or how he affected and helped shape these two deeply important but very different musical artists, you should absolutely watch this filmed performance. These two guys were the leaders of one of the most influential bands in the history of rock, came back together to pay tribute to their mentor, after which they vowed never to work together again.
However, they did anyway. In a great metaphor for their own complicated relationship, they did a one-off live show with songs from the Drella album, and then encored with their old VU bandmates Moe Tucker and Sterling Holloway on the song “Heroin.” This lead to a brief VU reunion, after which Cale and Reed vowed never to work together again (again). So far, this time, they’ve stuck to that vow.
(2002, dir. Peter Jackson) 52-week film challenge, film 16
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
It’s difficult to believe that just over 20 years have passed since the release of this, the “middle bit” of Jackson’s epic LOTR trilogy of films. A local IMAX screen has been showing the trilogy recently, and I was intrigued by the “remastered for IMAX” tag they added, so I went along to visit this old friend of a movie.
(A brief side note on that particular screening: I should have stayed at home. It was not “remastered for IMAX,” it was just the Blu-ray theatrical version blown up (in proportion, thank heavens) to fit the wider IMAX screen. There were problems with resolution and frame-skipping in the action sequences as a result. Very disappointing.)
When these three films came out originally, I was pretty obsessed with them, since I was re-reading the tales for the first time since college — not to mention the impact the first film had had on fans and first-time viewers alike. It truly brought the story out of “cult” status, and captured the mainstream through a combination of clever screenwriting (to bring cinematic order to the sprawl of Tolkien’s world-building) and state-of-the-art effects work.
According to my first review (back in 2002 on this very blog), I watched The Two Towers at least 10 times while it was in cinemas, both as a student of filmmaking and a Tolkien fan. It was a wonderful feeling to see packed houses and appreciative audiences who would never in a million years have read the dense and nuanced source material.
It was great to see them enjoying a tale that, although laden with special effects, wasn’t a crap sci-fi misfire like Attack of the Clones or the forgettable fantasy Reign of Fire — the latter was about dragons, and nobody remembers it. No, The Two Towers was a “war” movie that focused on the foot soldiers, the power brokers, and the innocent victims who get swept along.
Ironically, the film is probably one of the best “epic battle” movies ever made, though I can think of a few others of that lofty ranking. Both as a book and as a movie, it benefits hugely from all the scene-setting and character-introducing work done in the first movie (The Fellowship of the Ring).
This means that there is little in the way of backstory — since if you were going to see this one, it means you saw the first one, and we get straight on into the action. We do start off with a brief (very brief) recap of the (film) climax of Fellowship, the fall of Gandalf the Grey (and a bit more of what happened in his battle with the Balrog).
Then there is a good-sized break in the action to update us on the progress of the other characters as we left them in the first film — Sam and Frodo trying to enter Mordor; Merry and Pippin held hostage by Orcs and Uruk Hai, and Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas in hot pursuit. Jackson wisely shifts around between the three disparate groupings, signaling the depth and vastness of the different paths the Fellowship is taking towards the same goal.
It is with Sam and Frodo that we quickly meet up with the real star of the second film; the stunningly-realised Gollum (Andy Serkis). Although the character is obviously a CGI-generated effect, he convinces us totally of his physical presence. This is entirely due to Gollum having a physical presence during the filming for the animators to work off of. Played (and voiced by) Serkis, Gollum is (pardon the pun) fleshed out and made convincingly whole as a result.
Not only do the other actors have someone real to interact with, but they hear the voice we hear (one of the more remarkable vocal performances in many a year) — this was the secret to making Gollum so credible, and it really holds up. I would have loved to have seen the faces of Elijah Wood and Sean Astin when they finally got to see how all but Serkis’ facial expressions and movements were replaced with the Gollum character.
Praise should not be spared to the animators as well; though they had a remarkable (and undersung) actor’s performance as a strong starting point, they beautifully embellished it, expanding on Serkis’ unseen physicality and captured facial expressions in an eerie yet beautiful way. Serkis and the animation team should have been awarded a shared Oscar, for Gollum was the most fluid of collaborations between computer animation and human performance that had yet been seen on screen.
What Elijah Wood and Sean Astin saw (right), versus what we saw (left).
The film jumps around between these three sets of main characters, as well as introducing us to new plotlines and the characters that go with them — the Rohirrim, King Theoden and his daughter Eomer, Grima Wormtongue, the Ents, and so on. We learn a lot more about the “manufacture” of the Uruk Hai and the raising of Saruman’s army (which is representative of several nation-states, not just Orcs and Uruk Hai), but of course this is all glossed over compared to the book, because we only have three hours!
We can feel the film’s elements coming together, slowly at first but quickening in pace alongside returning “minor” (in the film) characters like Elrond, Arwen, and Saruman, and the buildup to war is effectively communicated. The film’s climax is the first test of Sauron’s forces, the battle for Helm’s Deep and its aftermath, which makes sense from a film perspective but falls well short of where the actual second book in the trilogy ended.
Mind you, Tolkien never intended the story to end up as three books — that was a merciful publisher’s choice — so the divisions in the books are just as “artificial” as those in the films. Jackson is guilty of rearranging the storylines a bit, glossing over or underplaying some important foreshadowing, and I think it is fair to say that while Jackson and his fellow screenwriters had a genuine gift for boiling down the long and complicated sections of the books without dumbing them down, they are also guilty of lingering on their own invented/contrived segues a bit more than strictly necessary.
Once you accept that most of this was crucial in making a set of films that would perform well at the box office with mainstream audiences rather than just Tolkien wonks, the justification for Jackson’s alterations are much more understandable. Let’s not forget that this was a huge risk by the studio — shooting all three films simultaneously in New Zealand and relying on a relatively-obscure NZ effects house, with a total investment of over $280 million before they saw the first dollar back (but the films earned at least 10x the budgets, so the potential alienation of the Tolkienites paid off).
Almost to a fault, Jackson predictably compressed long sequences (such as the four-day hunt for the Uruk Hai by Aragon and company), lingered on visually beautiful but less-vital plot points (like Edoras and of course Helm’s Deep), and shorthanded drawn-out or not-strictly-vital scenes and characters. The Ents in particular got precious little, but very effective, screen time — and featured some well-done CGI-enhanced puppet work of the time, though it must be said some effects have aged less well than the film overall.
There are a few moments — rare, but notable — that are not as well done as one would have hoped. There are waaay too many shots of Saruman running about and fretting on his balcony as he sees the Ents destroying his Uruk Hai “factory” (but too late to stop the war), but for a wizard he just looks helpless and impotent — very unlike his presence to this point.
The battle for Helm’s Deep takes up the entire third hour of the film, and is wonderfully gritty and dark. How so many filthy, terrorised, unwashed people can be so damn good-looking is one of the main mysteries of the film — but another is how Jackson manages to squeeze in bits of humour even in the most tense of moments, as the soldiers of Edoras face off against an overwhelming army of nightmare creatures. The battle scenes are a bit drawn out, with lots of shaky-cam cutaways of chaos between the more choreographed set pieces, but it is effective and involving.
Jackson cleverly sets up the resolution of the battle much earlier, shortly after the “reborn” Gandalph reappears to (some of) our heroes after seemingly falling to his death — Balrogs apparently make hot but suitable cushions for a long fall — in such a way that when he fulfills the promise he made in Edoras an hour-and-a-half (screen time) ago, it is thrilling and wraps up a plot point that had seemingly been left hanging with the Riders of Rohan scene. I will mention again here that the Balrog scenes near the beginning of this film only touch — lightly, and inaccurately — on the actual reason Gandalph survived and defeated it.
If you’re one of the people who never saw the film because you never read the books, fear not: plot-wise, you will be able to follow this easily, and the lore/minutia you don’t know will roll off your back with ease (and this is the true genius of Jackson’s filmmaking on this project). The overall themes are the power of love and friendship, the underlying presence of evil as the root of all hatred and war, and of course emphasizing kick-ass action sequences over the generally more scholarly and pastoral tone of the source material.
As I said in my original, contemporaneous review, this is the kind of movie they weren’t often making: tales with enough magic to take a long time to tell; grand spectacle very well balanced with thoughtful interludes (the “peaceful” lands versus the terrorized war-torn lands is a particularly sharp allegory that I like to think Tolkien would have appreciated being preserved); characters both major and minor with real depth, even when we first meet them.
Theoden nearly stole the film — actor Bernard Hill was fabulous in the part and we would have liked to have seen more of his character.
Nitpickers gonna nitpick, and it should be noted that I haven’t seen so much as a single frame of Amazon’s pre-LOTR Tolkien series thus far, but in both my original opinion at the time and upon revisiting The Two Towers now, Jackson did a great job straddling commercial/studio concerns and creating the visual language of the world Tolkien created. That he really introduced the wonder of Tolkien’s epic to the larger world should not be under-appreciated.
Addendum: There was a successful animated film by Ralph Bakshi in 1978 entitled The Lord of the Rings that covered (very roughly) the first half of the LOTR story to roughly the same point where Jackson’s Fellowship and Two Towers gets to. I saw Bakshi’s film on its release, and it was the thing that finally got me to sit down and read the intimidatingly-long books at last.
Bakshi never got to do a sequel to finish what he started on his version, but it was very influential (even to Jackson) — and the rotoscoping techniques Bakshi used in selected moments was very memorable and innovative. Without it, we probably wouldn’t have gotten Jackson’s version, so a hat tip where it is due.
I’m undecided about whether I should finally finish watching the extended versions of Jackson’s films (I have them, on Blu-ray even, but the extended Fellowship sated my appetite at the time), or dig up a copy of Bakshi’s epic and give that a second viewing ahead of its … gulp … inevitable 50th anniversary re-release in a few years’ time. I hope they’ll put it back in cinemas, and I hope they have a senior discount on it by then!
I’ve been staying out of actual cinemas for a long time due to the pandemic, but with the end of the global emergency (and with the option to mask up if the auditorium gets too crowded), I opted to take in an IMAX movie, as I generally love them and my local IMAX theatre is a museum right by my residence. My choice was Ancient Caves, a film about (mostly) underwater caves and what they can tell us about the most recent Ice Ages … and how man-made climate change may affect the natural cycle of the Earth’s cooling and warming.
As is generally the case with IMAX, the cinematography is stunning, and for once a film shot in 3D utilised that to good effect without getting cheesy about it, a la SCTV’S Doctor Tongue. There’s no brandishing a stalagmite repeatedly straight to the camera here, and indeed I doubt the divers and geologists in the film were even told it was going to be in 3D — but boy does it add depth and presence to spaces such as caves.
And what caves they are! The film starts off with some above-ground and underground (but not underwater) caves and introduces us to Dr. Gina Moseley, who really really loves caves and lowering herself into them on ropes. She serves as the narrator of the journeys into the caves, while Bryan Cranston serves as the narrator of the film overall.
It is of course a documentary, and the real purpose of the film is to use the caves and their stalagmites to study the previous Ice Ages — which happens about every 100,000 years. We’re not due for another one for a good long while (probably), but what happens during an Ice Age is interesting, and the way to get that information involves diving waaaay down into underwater caves to get core samples.
The film dwells a bit on the diving sequences, but the payoff is fantastic — eye-popping vaults of mineral and crystal stalagtites and stalagmites (and in the some of the less-deep caves, skulls and pottery), undisturbed and indeed untouched until this film in some cases for tens of thousands and up to a million years. I felt grateful to be able to witness these astounding scenarios in 3D without having to endure the diving and genuine risks taken to access these locations.
In short, Ancient Caves is educational but very interesting, particularly to anyone with the slightest interest in geology, cave exploring (above or below water), and the information scientists can extract from mineral deposits and such. The film does take a little time to discuss the impact of climate change currently, as it may have an affect on our future environment, and there was a brief but very interesting bit about the impact of human activity on the carbon dioxide count compared to the pre-mankind earth.
The film isn’t, however, focused on this point — it’s more a pure celebration of discovery, and the 3D and the diversity of locations really adds to the impact of the film. It’s playing on the IMAX circuit, so if it comes to your town and you could use a nice little escape from your day-to-day life — or just keep a pre-teen interested for an hour or so — this one might be second only to a dinosaur movie for edu-tainment value, and will definitely add value to your next trip to any local caverns.
Anyone who’s paid any attention at all to the silent era of movies will have seen at least one of the most famous silent-movie stunts — Harold Lloyd, seemingly halfway up climbing the side of a building, hanging on for dear life as he grabs hold of a giant clock after putting a foot wrong. Suddenly, the clock face comes partially undone, leaving him hanging high over a busy street. This is of course from one of Lloyd’s full-length features, Safety Last!, and it is a gem — but only one of the amazing stunts in the film, which is also quite funny.
Lloyd is often thought of last when one tries to name the giants of silent-era comedy, behind Chaplin and Keaton, but for my money he’s actually the most versatile of the bunch. While Chaplin almost always played a tramp in his silents, and Keaton forever plays a stone-faced version of the unluckiest man alive, Lloyd is often the sunny embodiement of American Exceptionalism, resiliently cheerful and sure that everything is going to work out despite the craziest things happened to him, and indeed that blind faith carries him through.
In Safety Last!, Lloyd opens the film looking like he’s in potentially fatal trouble — in jail and perhaps saying his goodbyes to his loved ones, with a hangman’s noose in the foreground. The set changes slightly, and we see in fact that noose was on a mail peg designed to allow the train to deliver a bag of parcels without stopping, and Lloyd was just a small-town young man on his way to the big city to make his mark.
He was doing this to secure his relationship to his intended bride (played by real-life wife Mildred Davis), by ensuring he has a career that can support a household and eventual family. The earnestness just radiates off Lloyd’s can-do attitude and beaming, positive face, but in fact like any such fellow he has to start small — sharing a room with a friend, working hard, and not quite catching the American Dream somehow … this film was only a few years prior to the start of the Great Depression, but somehow foreshadowed that all was not well with the game of “work your way to success.”
In another tell-tale America-of-the-20s trait, he puffs up his level of success to impress his girl, which in turn means he ends up spending most of his meagre paycheque on gifts he sends to her … skipping meals, hiding from the landlady, and making other sacrifices. In one scene, he ponders the cost of another gift while also staring at an advert for a “businessman’s lunch” (which costs 50¢ … you should see this film just to marvel at the prices of things!), and as he pushes himself to sacrifice for his bride-to-be, his minds “disappears” each of the five plates that were included in that luncheon. You can feel Lloyd’s hunger pangs.
As you might expect, the girl gets the idea to come visit and surprise him, and on very short notice he has to come up with ways to convince her he is as successful as he has boasted, hiding his lowly “real life.” While to modern audiences this thin plot moves along fairly slowly, there are always impressive stunts and action sequences (just him getting to the office is a great section of pratfalls and dangerous gambles) to fill the time until the next plot point.
Lloyd pays off a colleague not to reveal that he’s not the manager and this isn’t his office.
Mostly, Lloyd’s character (who was known as the “glasses man” in his earlier work, but he finally identifies the character as being himself — Harold Lloyd — on a business card, suggesting some real-life incidents are incorporated into the tale) just combines his incredible physicality with on-screen great luck in avoiding being killed or decapitated as would happen to the rest of us if we tried these stunts. Yes, there were stuntmen used and some clever camera trickery for the finale, but Lloyd is visibly on-screen for a number of these feats and it adds richly to the action.
In a panic over being found out as not the success he portrayed to his girl, he overhears the owner of the store wishing for a big publicity stunt and, thinking of his friend “Limpy” (the incredible Bill Strother, both a supporting character and sometimes Lloyd’s double for steeplejack and stunt sequences) who loves climbing buildings, offers a sure-fire plan to draw a crowd: he’ll climb to the top of the very tall department store building!
In an earlier sequence that sets up the climax of the film, Lloyd recognises a policeman in town as being an old buddy from their youth, and goads Limpy into helping him play a knock-down gag on the copper. But he doesn’t see his friend go inside and be replaced with a different cop, so when the prank is successful the furious flatfoot swears revenge on Limpy (Lloyd having quickly escaped). This sets up the dilemma that sees Limpy unable to scale the building in Lloyd’s stead (he was going to just take Lloyd’s glasses, hat and coat to fool the bosses), and Lloyd having to be coached into doing the climbing himself as the cop continues to chase Limpy around the store.
The sub-plot that sets up the finale
Of course, Lloyd doesn’t think he can do it, but Limpy reassures him that he’ll ditch the mad cop and take his place if he just climbs up a couple of floors. Well, the cop doesn’t give up that easily, and Limpy swings by a window every floor to encourage Lloyd to climb just another floor or two … until finally Lloyd has barely survived climbing up the entire building, reaping the entire $1,000 reward* for himself into the bargain, thus securing his forthcoming marriage.
*Lloyd is shown to be netting $15 every two weeks — remember this is 1923 — so a grand is like three years of wages in a single day, and of course it is implied he’ll be promoted as well.
Before the big climb and during it, there are numerous funny moments and smaller-scale stunts to keep things moving along, but the film — as ingenious and humourous as it is — still feels like the kind of plot that would sustain a film only half its one hour 13 minute runtime, and just throws in a lot of sequences that feel like (clever) padding.
Lloyd’s Not-Of-London … his actual position at the store.
That said, it’s very worth seeing. The incredibly clever way they did the climatic climbing sequences really make it easy to believe he’s hanging by a thread incredibly high up, but it wasn’t quite like that (you’ll have to guess how they did it in the silent era without the modern safety constraints and optical techniques such things would have today, I’m not telling).
I will however say that there’s a short Criterion Channel documentary made much later that reveals the secrets of Safety Last called Safety Last: Location and Effects that will spill the beans if you can’t figure it out yourself.
Throw in some incredibly well-trained pigeons (yes, really), a truly hilarious one-line cameo by a little old lady, and Lloyd’s amazing physical comedy, and you end up splitting your time between chuckling and staring wide-eyed at how he’s going to get out of this new bit of trouble.
If you’ve only seen sequences or still images from the film, I’d encourage you to watch the whole thing. Of course it was a big hit with audiences in its day, but in some ways it still embodies some uniquely American ideas about work-life balance, exploitative capitalism, and risk-reward philosophies that stand up today. Despite these subtle but weighty themes, it’s a feel-good film that everyone in the family will enjoy. Still!
The Chasbah 