The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

The Eyes of Laura Mars is an important movie for several reasons. The obvious one is that it was scripted by John Carpenter. Carpenter was making a name for himself as a screenwriter at that time. His directing career would soon take off as well. In a very brief period he would write the screenplay for The Eyes of Laura Mars, would write and direct the TV-movie Someone’s Watching Me and then write and direct Halloween. But The Eyes of Laura Mars was his first real experience working for a major studio on a major production.

The script had apparently been floating around for a while and a lot of writers aside from Carpenter were involved at some stage. Which means it may not be fair to blame Carpenter for some of the deficiencies in the script.

Irvin Kershner was offered the directing job. He was an experienced director although not perhaps a terribly distinguished one. He has the distinction of having directed the worst Bond movie of the pre-Daniel Craig era, the trainwreck that was Never Say Never Again. Would The Eyes of Laura Mars have been better with Carpenter directing? Perhaps.

The Eyes of Laura Mars is also interesting because it has a slight giallo feel.

This movie is also important because although it was made in 1978 it has very slight hints of the 80s. It’s like a proto-80s movie. In some ways it’s very 70s. New York City as a garbage dump, a world of violence, sleaze and squalor. But Laura Mars is rich and famous. Her world is a world of glamour, style, high fashion and money.

And it’s a suspense thriller with hints of the supernatural (or at least the paranormal), something you see in a few European movies of the 60s and 70s but don’t expect in a Hollywood movie.

Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway) is a very famous very successful photographer. It appears that she works in both the worlds of fashion photography and art photography. She’s a celebrity. And she’s controversial. Her photographs depict both high fashion and savage violence.

While doing a fashion shoot she has a vision. It has happened once before. A vision of murder. On the first occasion the murder actually did take place. And now it’s happened again.

The idea of someone seeing visions of murders before they happen was far from original. It is however given a few twists here. The visions are linked to her photography. If a photographer is a voyeur then she’s a voyeur of murder, but a kind of psychic voyeur of murder.

She finds out from cop Lieutenant John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones) that many of her earlier photographs bear uncanny similarities to police crime scene photos, photos that no-one outside the police department has seen. She may have been having these visions of future murders for quite some time without being aware of it.

What really freaks her out is that her interest in violent subject matter is a comparatively recent thing and she can’t explain why she suddenly developed this interest. It was just something that she felt compelled to do.

Laura will have further visions and there will be further murders.

Laura herself is not a suspect but it’s obvious that the murders have some kind of connection to her.

I have mixed feelings about Faye Dunaway but that may not be her fault. Apart from Chinatown she had a knack for being in movies that I really disliked. I don’t think of her as a bad actress. She’s pretty good here.

The movie does have a few definite weaknesses. The paranormal element could have been really interesting but is not developed fully. The screenplay really does have that “subjected to numerous rewrites” feel, because in fact it really did go through countless rewrites. The various thematic elements in the story, potentially interesting in themselves, just don’t quite come together as a coherent whole.

There is a clue early on that makes the identity of the killer very very obvious.

Perhaps the best thing about this movie is that the Laura Mars photographs were done by the great Helmut Newton. They’re superb. The two most successful and striking scenes are the fashion shoot scenes.

This movie has a few problems but don’t be put off by that. It’s an exceptionally interesting film that just doesn’t feel like a 1978 Hollywood movie. The giallo influence is very obvious and the world of high fashion figures in many notable gialli. The voyeurism theme is handled extremely well. I liked the way Laura is a voyeur but not just in the obvious ways (which she’s intelligent enough to be aware of) but in ways of which he’s not consciously aware. She is is some ways a passive voyeur - the images control her rather than her being in control of the images. And that’s disturbing for a photographer. Photographers manipulate reality but Laura is herself being manipulated.

The Eyes of Laura Mars is well worth seeing. Highly recommended.

Aelita: Queen Of Mars (1924)

Aelita: Queen Of Mars, directed by Yakov Protazanov and released in 1924, was not quite the first science fiction feature film and was not quite the first feature film to deal with space travel - the 1918 Danish film Himmelskibet (A Trip To Mars) has that honour. Aelita: Queen Of Mars is however a very early and very remarkable example of the breed. It was also the first Soviet science fiction movie.

The music to accompany the film was composed by Dmitri Shostakovich.

It was based on Alexei Tolstoy’s 1923 novel Aelita. It should be added that Alexei Tolstoy was a very distant relative of Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace.

Strange signals are being picked up at a Moscow radio station. They seem to be coming from Mars. They cannot be deciphered but they do suggest that there is an advanced civilisation on Mars.

Engineer Los (Igor Ilyinsky) is is convinced his wife is having an affair, which leads to unfortunate results.

Los is obsessed by those signals from Mars and he is determined to build a spaceship and travel to the Red Planet.

The Martians are meanwhile very much aware of the existence of an advanced civilisation on Earth. They have built an advanced viewing device (much much more than a simple telescope). Aelita, the Queen of Mars, is obsessed by what she sees of Earth society.

It’s a clever idea and Tolstoy’s novel is excellent. Unfortunately the movie does not focus sufficiently on the science fiction story. An enormous amount of the early part of the movie is devoted to tedious social drama. There’s also an attempt at satire, with corrupt bureaucrats being pilloried, which is interesting. This would hardly have been allowed once Stalin had consolidated his position.

It’s interesting that Alexei Tolstoy initially opposed the Russian Revolution but later became an ardent supporter of the Soviet regime. The novel has its political moments but they’re handled in an interesting way with some touches of cynicism.

The movie dabbles a great deal in politics and towards the end becomes crude propaganda.

The movie also adds an irrelevant subplot regarding a bumbling amateur detective.

A lot of attention is devoted to Engineer Los’s marriage. This is an important aspect of the novel, explaining much about Los’s motivations, but it is dealt with in way too much detail in the movie.

This is a movie that needed to be severely pruned. The first half of the movie could easily have been cut by 30 minutes. We get brief snippets of the science fiction plot intercut will long meandering stretches dealing in intricate details with a whole lot of stuff we don’t need to know and don’t care about.

While this movie does have some very real flaws it offers a lot of compensations. The art direction by Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky is stunning. The sets are amazing. The influence of the Constructivist movement in the visual arts is very obvious - this is like a Constructivist painting come to life which is wild since Constructivism was an abstract art movement. Alexandra Exter’s costume designs are insane, but in a good way.

This is a visually magnificent movie which invents its own distinctive science fiction aesthetic, radically different from the aesthetic of Fritz Lang’s German silent science fiction films. There is no other movie that looks quite like Aelita: Queen Of Mars. In fact there is no other movie that looks even remotely like this one.

Yuliya Solntseva’s strange and exaggerated performance as Aelita works for me. It makes her seem genuinely alien. Aelita looks like an Earth woman but of course she comes from a radically different culture.

So there is much to admire here. The problem is that the narrative is a total mess and the ending is catastrophically bad. It has some of the most superb visuals you will ever see. But as a movie it’s simply awful. It’s difficult to know what to say in terms of a recommendation. The visuals are so good that anyone with an interest in cinema will want to see them. But it’s such a bad movie. It’s a terrible movie that looks fantastic.

The old Kino DVD offers a reasonable transfer. This is a movie that needs a new full restoration. Judging by the DVD the source materials are still in fairly good shape so a restoration should be possible.

I’ve reviewed Alexei Tolstoy’s novel Aelita elsewhere (and the novel is vastly superior to the movie).

Lola Montès (1955)

Lola Montès was the final film of German-born director Max Ophüls. Or at least it was the last film he completed himself.

An immensely expensive and ambitious Franco-German co-production it failed at the box office and was heavily re-cut despite the objections of the director. The first serious attempt to restore the movie to reflect Max Ophüls’ intentions was in 1968. A second more ambitious attempt was made in 2008. That’s the version released by Criterion on DVD and Blu-Ray and that’s the version reviewed here.

It is of course the story of Lola Montez, perhaps the most notorious woman of the 19th century. Actress, dancer, courtesan, mistress of kings and geniuses. Her real-life story was extraordinary but the story of the making of this movie was pretty extraordinary as well.

Ophüls was not the first choice of the producers. They apparently had Jacques Tourneur in mind. They had grandiose plans. The film would be an international co-production and would be shot simultaneously in French, German and English. They obviously needed a multi-lingual director. Ophüls qualified on that count and the fact that he had made movies in so many different countries made him an even more attractive choice.

Ophüls wasn’t interested but he become interested when he started reading up on Lola Montez. But the producers wanted the movie shot in colour. Ophüls had never worked in colour and was appalled by the prospect. They also wanted it shot in Cinemascope, which also appalled the director.

The producers then did one of those things that seem like good ideas at the time. They told the director not to stress about money. He could spend as much as he liked. Bad idea. Ophüls spent a breathtaking amount of money. The movie went way over schedule.

The movie was a disaster at the box office. It’s not hard to see why when you watch the movie as Ophüls originally made it. It’s wildly unconventional. The sort of movie that bewilders mainstream audiences, and attracts negative reviews from mainstream critics. This is an experimental avant-garde art film made on a blockbuster budget. It’s the kind of outrageous movie that would later be associated with Ken Russell or David Lynch. Ophüls throws the whole idea of a linear narrative out the window.

There are extended flashbacks but without any narrative coherence. It’s all very stream-of-consciousness. There are few concessions to realism. The circus sequences, which are the heart and soul of the movie, are pure fantasy concoctions having zero connection to any event in Montez’s life. It’s actually very Ken Russell.

The movie starts with Lola in a circus. She has become a kind of freak show, displayed as if she were a wild beast, a man-eating tigress. She provides entertainment for the crowd by answering questions about her scandalous life. These trigger the flashbacks but they’re not in any kind of chronological order. She also does a trapeze act!

We see snippets of Lola’s youth, of her first marriage, her affair with the composer Liszt and her celebrated and notorious affair with King Ludwig I of Bavaria.

The big issue for a lot of people is the performance of Martine Carol as Lola. Ophüls didn’t want her. I don’t blame him. She does her best and she’s really by no means bad but she just does not have the charisma and the glamour that was needed. She also does not have the erotic allure. Lola was a woman who made her living from her sexual allure. A king ruined himself and his kingdom for her. Martine Carol just does not succeed in convincing us that this is a woman for whom rich powerful men would sacrifice everything.

Peter Ustinov (an actor I’ve always disliked) is superb as the ringmaster. He’s not just the ringmaster of the circus. He has become the ringmaster of Lola’s life. He is no mere exploiter. He loves Lola. He is devoted to her. I have to admit that Ustinov nails this tricky part extremely well.

Anton Walbrook (a bit of a favourite with Ophüls) is excellent as King Ludwig.

If you’re expecting a conventional movie you’re likely to be baffled and alienated. But it is as I said earlier rather like the movies of crazed visionaries like Ken Russell and David Lynch (with perhaps a slight dash of Josef von Sternberg’s obsessive pursuit of style). You just have to go with it. If you do that then it’s an intoxicating experience filled with wild visual splendours. The shot compositions are dazzling. The colours are stunning. The sets are magnificent. Ophüls couldn’t find a circus big enough to encompass his vision so he built one.

Lola Montès is what you get when you give a crazed genius a blank cheque. It’s a strange flawed masterpiece. Very highly recommended.

After leaving Hollywood and settling in France Ophüls only made four movies but they were certainly memorable. I’ve also reviewed La Ronde (1950) which is in its own way equally unconventional in its rejection of conventional narrative.

The Good Die Young (1954)

The Good Die Young is a 1954 British crime thriller directed by Lewis Gilbert. The first thing you’re going to notice about this movie is the cast - Laurence Harvey, Margaret Leighton, Stanley Baker, Gloria Grahame, Richard Basehart and Joan Collins. That’s a staggering amount of star power, both British and American. And the supporting cast includes Robert Morley (always fun) and Lee Patterson (whose performances I always enjoy).

The movie starts with four men about to pull off an armed robbery. This is a heist movie. Then we get extended flashbacks that tell us how the four came to be attempting something so obviously destined for failure.

They are all trapped in a spiral of despair and desperation. And they’re all primed to make seriously bad decisions.

Joe (Richard Basehart) is an American who has come to London to take his English wife Mary (Joan Collins) back to the States with him. He hadn’t reckoned on the determination of Mary’s manipulative mother to keep Mary with her and to wreck her marriage. Now Joe has run out of money so even if he can persuade Mary to make the break there’s no money to get back to New York.

Eddie (John Ireland) is an American serviceman. He’s married to movie star Denise (Gloria Grahame). She’s more of an aspiring movie star, convinced that major stardom is just around the corner. And she’s having an affair with handsome young actor Tod Maslin (Lee Patterson). The ensuing dramas cause Eddie to desert. Now he’s in serious trouble.

Mike (Stanley Baker) is a boxer. After twelve years of getting the daylights beaten out of him in the ring he has saved enough to get out of the fight game. Then he’s hit by disaster. A serious hand injury leaves him unable to fight and unable to get a regular job. And then comes a second disaster when his worthless brother-in-law costs him all the money he’s saved. Now he just can’t see a way out.

These three men can all be seen as basically decent guys who don’t really understand how their lives got so messed up.

Rave (Laurence Harvey) is a different kettle of fish. He’s the idle useless son of Sir Francis Ravenscourt (Robert Morley) who is no longer willing to pay his son’s debts. Rave is charming, manipulative, lazy, scheming and a thoroughly worthless human being. The one thing Rave fears is the prospect of work. Now he’s come up with a surefire plan to get rich, but he’ll need help.

It’s a robbery but it’s fool-proof. Eddie, Mike and Joe are not happy about the guns but Rave assures them that there won’t be any need to use them.

In the case of all four men there’s a woman involved but only one of the women (Denise) could be described as a femme fatale. The women do however, in differing ways, provide the crucial motivations that lead the four men to be sitting in a car, holding guns, about to commit armed robbery.

Eddie, Mike and Joe are typical noir protagonists - basically decent guys who have succumbed to temptation born of desperation. Rave is a much more sinister figure. His problem is that he thinks he’s a whole lot smarter than he really is. He thinks he’s a criminal mastermind but he’s an arrogant bungling amateur.

All of the performances are very very good. Laurence Harvey is perhaps the standout - he really does ooze reptilian charm. Among the women Joan Collins is adorable and looks gorgeous. Gloria Grahame has a part that was tailor-made for her and she makes the most of it. She is such a bad girl.

If there’s a weakness to this movie it’s that the build-up takes a bit too long. I can understand why it was done that way - we need to get to know these people and know what makes them tick and we need to care about their fates. But a bit of tightening up would not have hurt.

When we get to the heist it’s handled extremely well indeed and it’s beautifully shot with some very noir cinematography by Jack Asher and some fine use of very noirish locations. The movie was shot widescreen in black-and-white.

The premise has plenty of film noir potential and that potential is realised. This is full-blown film noir and it packs a punch.

The BFI Blu-Ray provides an exquisite transfer.

The Good Die Young is a top-notch British film noir and it’s highly recommended.

Xanadu (1980)

Xanadu may be the most 80s movie ever made. This is maximum 80s overload. This is a Gene Kelly-Olivia Newton-John roller-skating fantasy musical romance with goddesses. Goddesses on roller skates.

Although everything is explained eventually it does help if you know that this is a remake of a 1947 Rita Hayworth musical, Down to Earth. This is one of Hayworth’s least admired movies but I actually love it.

In the 1947 movie one of the muses, Terpsichore, takes the form of a human woman and comes to Earth, and puts on a Broadway musical. Terpsichore is the muse of dance. The muses were of course demi-goddesses and their role was to inspire the arts and sciences. It’s a crazy idea for a movie but Xanadu takes that craziness and ups it by about twelve notches.

Sonny Malone (Michael Beck) paints enlarged versions of album covers as promotions for record stores. There’s a cute blonde girl on one of the album covers. She looks just like a girl he just saw. A girl who appeared and then disappeared. The guy who took the original photo doesn’t know who she is - she was just suddenly there in the shot and then vanished.

Of course the reason she keeps appearing and disappearing is that although she calls herself Kira she is indeed Terpsichore, and demi-goddesses can do stuff like that. She’s been sent to Earth on a vital mission - to inspire the ultimate 80s nightclub.

Sonny and Kira make the acquaintance of Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly). He’s a construction tycoon but in the 40s he was a band leader, and had his own nightclub. He got his start with Glenn Miller. He gave up music after a disappointment in love. She was a lovely girl. She looked just like Kira. The audience of course knows that it really was Kira, or rather it was Terpsichore on a previous visit to Earth.

Danny admits that for 35 years he has daydreamed about opening another nightclub. Sonny persuades him to follow his dream. He knows the right place. It’s a derelict art deco wrestling auditorium. Danny has the money and the construction know-how to turn it into the ultimate nightclub. It will be called Xanadu. The name is Kira’s idea. It is of course quite possible that she was the one who inspired Coleridge to write his famous 1797 poem.

Two years earlier Olivia Newton-John had starred in the smash hit Grease. These two movies are very different but they do have one thing in common - a sense of total temporal dislocation. Grease is about teenagers in the 50s, or maybe in the 70s. Or even at times the 40s. Nothing fits into a coherent time period, and that’s why Grease works. It exists in its own fantasy teenage universe. There’s quite a bit of that in Xanadu. It’s the 80s meets the 40s, but with a goddess from a couple of millennia ago thrown in. Nothing fits. That’s what’s so great about it.

I have no idea if the people making this movie were getting into the Bolivian marching powder but this was Hollywood in 1980 and people in Hollywood in 1980 were certainly doing a lot of coke. And Xanadu does have an 80s cocaine-fuelled vibe. When you watch Xanadu the first word that will pop into your head is cocaine.

The casting of Olivia Newton-John works. Her Australian accent helps - it makes her seem out of place in California and of course she is out of place in California. She also has that ability to be adorable and wholesome without being cloying.

Michael Beck makes a forgettable male lead.

Gene Kelly does not make a mere cameo appearance. He’s one of the stars. This is a leading role. He’s out of place here, but he’s supposed to be. He’s a guy who still lives in the 1940s. It works. He’s excellent.

And Gene Kelly and Olivia Newton-John get to do a romantic dance number together. Miss Newton-John also gets to sport a very nice 40s hairdo.

Visually Xanadu is brash, garish, vulgar and overblown. This is 80s style taken to extremes, but with added art deco elements. And Danny lives in a mansion that once belonged to a silent film star and the mansion belongs to the Edwardian era. This is bad taste elevated into an art form.

Every single thing about Xanadu is just so wrong, but it’s so wrong in ways that make it just so bizarrely fascinating. Don’t try to make sense of it. Just go with it. She’s a goddess, and goddesses enjoy roller-skating as much as other girls do.

The dance sequences seem to have been shot by people who had never shot dance sequences before. The one dance sequence that works is the romantic dance sequence with Gene Kelly and Olivia Newton-John and I suspect it works because Gene Kelly took control and made sure it worked.

Xanadu was of course a flop. Xanadu is not a trainwreck. It’s beyond that. This is the cinematic equivalent of an earthquake that levels an entire city. It’s so bizarre that you can’t help feeling a sense of wonder that someone gave this movie the green light.

They don’t make movies like Xanadu any more. It’s one of those movies you really won’t believe until you see it. And yet it is weirdly enjoyable. Yes, I actually did enjoy Xanadu and I’m going to highly  recommend it.

I’ve reviewed the original 1947 movie Down to Earth and if you love Xanadu it’s worth checking out (plus you can’t lose with Rita Hayworth as a goddess).

Kansas Raiders (1950)

Kansas Raiders is a 1950 Universal-International western starring Audie Murphy and a very interesting western it is too.

Murphy plays a very young Jesse James. Now you have to remember that this is a Hollywood movie so it has zero interest in historical accuracy. Don’t assume that it’s going to follow the real-life story of Jesse James in any way, shape or form. That’s a particularly important point to bear in mind with this movie since any assumptions you may make about James as either a hero or a villain will lead you astray.

It is 1863, the middle of the Civil War. The movie opens out west, with a group of young men heading for the headquarters of the famous (or infamous) guerrilla leader Quantrill (Brian Donlevy). They want to join up. Quantrill’s admirers see him as a brave and bold warrior for the Confederacy. His detractors regard him as the leader of a gang of thieves and murderers.

Jesse James as we see him in the early part of this movie is a very likeable very pleasant young man. The sort of young man we expect to see as the hero in a western. He rescues a young lady when her horses bolt and both she and her cart seem headed for disaster. He’s the kind of young guy who saves the lives of ladies in peril.

And then suddenly we get a glimpse of a darker side to him. It’s a scene that has been repeated in countless westerns and adventure films. The hero has to fight a duel, in this case a fight to the death with knives, with a man who has tried to bully and insult him. We know what will happen. The hero will win, the bad guy will be disarmed and lying helpless waiting for the killing blow, and of course the hero will let him live because heroes do not kill helpless unarmed men. But in this case Jesse unhesitatingly delivers the killing blow. It’s a shocking moment of ruthless violence that you just don’t see in Hollywood movies in 1950. This is clearly going to be an unusual western.

There is more brutal violence to come. There are several scenes in which unarmed men who have surrendered are ruthlessly gunned down.

Jesse is appointed an officer in Quantrill’s guerrilla army. Jesse’s admiration for Quantrill knows no bounds. Then disillusionment starts to set in. Quantrill’s guerrilla army really is nothing more than a band of cut-throats and murderers. This is indicative of the overall mood of cynicism in this movie. There’s a Union guerrilla army, known as the Red Legs, operating in the same territory. They are also cut-throats and murderers. In fact Jesse has first-hand experience of the Red Legs. They slaughtered most of his family a few weeks earlier. Jesse is obsessed by thoughts of revenge. He is twisted up inside by hate. But he is at the same time fundamentally decent. He is a very conflicted young man. There’s some nice moral ambiguity in this movie.

There’s a definite cynicism towards war in this movie. Those who lead men to war talk of glory and honour but in practice war is nothing more than butchery. This is a dark grim violent movie.

This movie sets itself a difficult problem from the outset but it’s the way it tackles that problem that makes it such a fascinating movie. The focus is on young Jesse James and his brother Frank and their three buddies who would later go on to be the core of the James Gang. Jesse is very much the protagonist. We have to be able to relate to him. These young man have to be presented in a reasonably sympathetic light but they would go on to violent criminal careers and the movie itself focuses on their activities as party of a notorious band of thieves and murderers. The solution adopted was to portray them as innocents misled into wrongdoing by the charismatic evil Quantrill. And in particular Jesse is portrayed as being totally under the spell of Quantrill - he has a romantic notion of Quantrill as a brave fighter for freedom.

Of course as the truth about Quantrill becomes increasingly obvious Jesse becomes more and more conflicted and tortured. Jesse just cannot accept that he has become complicit in evil. This makes it a complex demanding part for Audie Murphy. Is Jesse a tragic hero or a tragic villain? He’s a bit of both. Murphy does a fine job. We might be exasperated by Jesse but at the same time we admire his loyalty to Quantrill, even if it’s tragically misguided loyalty.

Quantrill is evil, but he is also deluded. He seems to really believe that he is going to be the saviour of the South. It’s possible that at one time he really was a hero but he has spiralled downwards into self-delusion and fantasy.

A romance angle has been added. The woman (Kate, played by Marguerite Chapman) Jesse rescued at the start of the film turns up again at Quantrill’s headquarters. The movie has to be rather coy about her status. She is clearly Quantrill’s woman but that cannot be made too obvious.

The ending is really interesting and very effective.

Kansas Raiders is an exceptionally interesting western and it’s highly recommended.

The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray transfer looks superb.

La Ronde (1950)

La Ronde (1950), directed by Max Ophüls, was based on the 1897 play Reigen by Arthur Schnitzler. The play provoked outrage and was banned at one stage.

The movie follows the structure of the play. It is a round dance, although the movie also employs a carousel as a metaphor. It begins with a sexual encounter between a soldier and prostitute. The prostitute them moves on to another encounter with another man. That man in turns moves on the the next partner in the dance. She will go from him to another liaison. And so the dance continues.

It is the dance of love, and also the dance of sex. All of the encounters involve both love and sex, in varying amounts.

Each encounter is just a brief vignette but enough to tell us just how much each partner’s heart is engaged. Even when love is involved, it is still a game.

The structure could have made for a rather stagey film. It is theatrical, but also (thanks to the genius of Ophüls and his production designer) very very cinematic. It is deliberately and ostentatiously artificial. Anton Walbrook acts as a kind of master of ceremonies, leading us from one chapter to the next but he also plays multiple characters in the various chapters. And even when playing a character he breaks the fourth wall.

The setting is Vienna in 1900 but not for one second are we expected to believe that this is the real Vienna. This is the Vienna of Strauss waltzes and light opera, the Vienna of romance. The Vienna of the imagination.

Our attention is continually being drawn to the fact that this is not real life. Ophüls makes no concessions at all to realism. We are being told a delightful story but even if not a word of it is true we’re still going to be charmed by it.

This is a visually sumptuous, gorgeous movie. It was shot in black-and-white and could only have been shot in black-and-white. There’s a certain combination of glamour, style and artificiality that would never quite work in colour.


The difference between this movie, made in France in 1950, and Hollywood movies of the same period is staggering. There is a lot of sex in La Ronde. We don’t see it but we’re not left in the slightest doubt that every one of these encounters culminates in sex. No American studio would have dared even to contemplate making this movie. And it’s not just the amount of sex - it’s the movie’s cheerful immorality.

All of the characters are to some degree guilty of hypocrisy or deception but not one could be described as a villain or villainess. The philandering husband, the unfaithful wife, the professional whore and the part-time whore - they’re all basically decent sympathetic people. In a Hollywood movie the whore at least would have to be punished at the end but no-one gets punished here.

It’s a game, but the players know it’s a game. Nobody gets seduced unless they want to get seduced.

It’s a frivolous game, but the reason that the game of love and sex is so important is that it’s frivolous. Pleasure serves no purpose. That’s why it’s so important. That’s why we can’t live without it.

Ophüls has a dazzling cast with which to work. Simone Signoret, Simone Simon and Danielle Darrieux all stand out. Anton Walbrook was a major star at the time and he turns on the charm, with a twinkle in his eye.

Watching La Ronde is like drinking vintage champagne. If you want to see it as offering a commentary on sexual hypocrisy you can but my advice is to just enjoy its intoxicating pleasures. Very highly recommended.

The Bluebell Films Blu-Ray looks lovely. It’s in French with English subtitles.

The film was remade in 1964 by Roger Vadim as La Ronde (or Circle of Love). Critics love to sneer at Vadim. I don’t care. I like his movies and his version is worth seeing as well. While Ophüls offers us fin-de-siecle decadence Vadim goes for a feel of 60s decadence. I like both.

Arthur Schnitzler was also the author of the fascinating 1926 short novel Traumnovelle, the source for Stanley Kubrick’s movie Eyes Wide Shut.

Daisy Miller (1974)

Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller came out in 1974 and pretty much wrecked his career. He had just had three major hits one after the other, What’s Up Doc?, The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon. He was seen as a bit of a bumptious upstart. He compounded his sins by casting his new girlfriend Cybill Shepherd in the lead role. And Daisy Miller was a very ambitious rather cerebral rather arty movie. Critics were only too happy to plunge their knives into him.

This movie also damaged Cybill Shepherd’s carer. Critics savaged her performance. One can’t help feeling that many critics were excessively hard on her merely because she was Bogdanovich’s girlfriend - it was a case of guilt by association (in much the same way as the trashing of Geena Davis’s career was collateral damage when critics went after Renny Harlin for Cutthroat Island).

In the case of Cybill Shepherd in Daisy Miller it was also a classic case of an actress giving exactly the performance her director wanted from her and then being savaged by critics for her trouble.

It’s easy to see why Daisy Miller bombed at the box office. It was out of step with public tastes in 1974. It’s also a movie that requires at least a very vague understanding of the social mores of the past. And it’s a movie that requires the audience to be fully engaged - it’s a subtle movie with some very subtle touches and those subtle touches are very important. And it is an art movie. It was just not a movie that was going to please a mass audience.

This is a story about misunderstandings and misjudgments and misinterpretations, all of which can add up and lead to very unfortunate consequences.

Daisy Miller (Cybill Shepherd) is a young girl from a nouveau riche American family doing the Grand Tour in Europe. In Switzerland she meets Frederick Winterbourne (Barry Brown). He’s American as well but he was educated in Europe. He understands the rules of respectable society. That doesn’t mean he’s respectable. We learn that he has just had an affair with a woman named Olga. But Frederick knows how to appear respectable and that’s what matters.

Daisy knows nothing of such social rules. She has not enjoyed the benefits of a good education. She simply ignores the rules. As a result she gives the impression of being vulgar and, even worse, she gives the impression that she might not be respectable. The crux of the story is whether Daisy really is innocent or not. Frederick fears that she may not be. In any case even though he is falling in love with her he is not going to take the risk of becoming entangled with a woman who is not respectable, or appears not to be respectable.

Daisy is obviously falling in love with Frederick but Frederick fails to understand this, as he fails to understand so many things.

This is a story of Americans in Europe, with American and European social mores being hopelessly incompatible, but it’s a bit more complicated that. It’s vital to bear in mind always that Daisy’s family are nouveau riche Americans. Blue-bloods, upper-class Americans, could adapt much more easily to European mores. But Daisy’s family have zero comprehension of the social mores of late 19th century Europe. They have no idea why they shock people.

Winterbourne’s family are Americans who have become totally acclimatised to European society. They are perfectly at ease in European society. They understand the social rules and they follow them. They have become so Europeanised that they no longer understand Americans like Daisy.

While some viewers might think the dialogue is anachronistic it was in fact mostly lifted directly from the 1879 Henry James novella. Some viewers might also think that some of Daisy’s behaviour is anachronistic but the movie follows the James story very very closely. Bogdanovich did not make this stuff up and Henry James did not make it up either. Henry James, as a 19th century American who lived in Europe, would have been very familiar with the social mores of the time among Europeans, among upper-class Americans and among nouveau riche Americans. Daisy Miller is not a fantasy creation. Such girls certainly existed.

It needs to be emphasised that both James and Bogdanovich are sympathetic to Daisy. She is certainly vulgar and uncultured but she’s honest and open. Winterbourne is a less sympathetic character. He is imprisoned by his prejudices which causes him to hopelessly misinterpret Daisy’s behaviour. He is also imprisoned by his fear of scandal. He loves Daisy but to marry her would be a huge social risk. But Winterbourne is not a villain. In his own way he is a tragic figure.

Cybill Shepherd understood exactly the performance the part required. She’s terrific. She's just right. Barry Brown is equally perfect as Winterbourne.

The visual approach of the movie is both subtle and ambitious. Bogdanovich pulls off some stunningly complex long takes with mirrors everywhere and he’s not being gimmicky. Seeing Daisy reflected in mirrors works - Winterbourne is never really able to see Daisy just as she is. He sees her reflected though his prejudices and his misinterpretations. But Bogdanovich is never showy for the sake of being showy.

Henry James has never been the easiest of writers to adapt to film. His fondness for irony and ambiguity are not easy to translate to the screen. Daisy Miller is not, as some critics have claimed, just a bold attempt that failed to come off. It does come off. It’s not a partial success. It’s a success. It’s a wonderful movie and it’s very highly recommended.

The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray looks great and Bogdanovich’s audio commentary is very worthwhile. There’s also an interview with Cybill Shepherd. Both Bogdanovich and Shepherd remained extremely proud of this movie, and rightly so.

Love (1927)

Love (later retitled Anna Karenina) is an important movie in Greta Garbo’s filmography. She got to make this movie despite Louis B. Mayer’s attempt to destroy her career. She foiled that attempt by going over Mayer’s head to the owners of MGM. Love established Garbo as a star with the clout to pick her own projects, at least to some extent.

This movie also saw her moving away from her early vamp roles. This is the Garbo who became a legend - playing heroines who sacrifice everything for love.

Up to a point it follows Tolstoy’s novel, in a very superficial way. It’s a very long novel turned into a rather short film. The movie turns a complex story into a straightforward story of star-crossed lovers.

The setting is St Petersburg. Anna Karenina (Garbo) is married to the rich powerful Senator Karenin. She meets a handsome young Guards officer, Vronsky (John Gilbert). They are both stranded in a storm. They have to stay overnight in an inn. Nothing happens between them, but everything happens between them. The romantic/sexual fuse has been lit. There’s nothing either of them can do about it.

The first scene between Garbo and Gilbert is very long and it’s crucial. It’s a complex scene with all sorts of romantic and sexual approaches and hesitations and rebuffs. It’s the beginning of the obsessive love that the movie is all about. It’s done without any title cards. Garbo and Gilbert don’t need any help from title cards. We get the message.

The affair becomes more tempestuous. The scandal grows.

Anna’s problem is that she has a son. She will have to choose between Vronsky and her son. It is an impossible choice. As she tells Vronsky, she loves them both infinitely. But she will have to choose.

And eventually Anna’s husband will force her hand.

The film was shot with two radically different endings. Tragically the Warner Archive DVD includes only one of the endings and it’s a contrived and totally unsatisfactory ending which makes nonsense of the whole movie. This was an alternative ending for the benefit of exhibitors too afraid to risk screening a movie with anything other than a conventional happy ending. It’s very very difficult to judge this movie without being able to see the original ending.

There are some nuances which a lot of viewers today might miss. Anna’s husband is not a mere monster. He is not entirely unreasonable. He lays his cards on the table for Anna. He will turn a blind eye to her affair with Vronsky as long as she is very discreet. He will not tolerate a public scandal, or being publicly humiliated. Which is reasonable enough. But he also warns her that there will be consequences if she is not discreet. The problem is that Anna and Vronsky are not discreet.

This is Garbo in magnificent form as a woman tortured by love. John Gilbert is excellent. It’s the extraordinary chemistry between Garbo and John Gilbert that makes the 1927 silent version worth seeing.

The tragedy is that the moment they meet Anna and Vronsky are no longer in control. They both know that their love will end in disaster. It’s not they they know this and go ahead anyway. They have no choice. This is a love that cannot be denied. They have poured the wine and they will have to drink it.

Garbo also starred in a later sound version (in 1935) and that version is superior to the silent version.

Without seeing that original ending I honestly cannot say how good this movie really is, but Love is worth seeing for Garbo and Gilbert.

Diva (1981)

Diva, released in 1981, was the first feature film directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix and it also launched the cinéma du look movement in French film. One of the major criticisms of this movement is that it emphasised style over substance. We’ll get back to that.

Jules (Frédéric Andréi) is a young postman obsessed by opera singer Cynthia Hawkins

(Wilhelmenia Fernandez). He has made an illegal recording of one of her concerts. Since she has never made a legal recording this bootleg tape is potentially worth a lot of money although Jules is only interested in it for his own pleasure. There are people who want that tape and they have seen hoodlums after Jules in order to get it.

There’s another tape recording, made by a prostitute, which contains evidence that could bring down a criminal empire based on the smuggling of drugs and women. Just before the prostitute is killed she slips the tape into one of the panniers of Jules’ moped.

There’s another set of hoodlums pursuing poor Jules. They want that incriminating tape.

So there are two plots running in tandem. There are two sound recordings. Two sets of bad guys. Jules will become entangled with two women. Everything in this movie comes in pairs.

The two plots become fairly convoluted. Jules can’t really trust anybody. People are not necessarily what they seem to be. Jules is in over his head.

Gorodish (Richard Bohringer) may be on his side. Gorodish is an enigmatic figure. He seems to be passive but as the movie progresses he becomes more active and more important. There’s also Gorodish’s cute young roller-skating Vietnamese girlfriend Alba although whether she is actually his girlfriend isn’t quite clear. Things are not always as they seem to be in this movie.

Jules is more than a little obsessed by Cynthia Hawkins. He bluffs his way into her hotel room. He steals one of her dresses and gets a prostitute to wear the dress while he has sex with her. Then he gives the dress back to Cynthia. Yes, Jules is an odd young man.

Jules steadily becomes more obsessed by Cynthia.

There’s another murder. There are several cleverly staged chases. Jules has lots of narrow escapes. There’s gunplay. Things get blow up. The two plot strands never quite come together but that adds to the paranoia. Jules doesn’t know which set of bad guys will come after him next.

Apart from the obsession with doubles there’s a running theme of artificiality opposed to reality. Some things are real. Some things appear real. Cynthia will not record her voice because she believes that only a live performance is authentic.

This is certainly a visually stunning movie. The loft in which Jules lives is wonderful - lots of wrecked cars plus paintings of car accidents about to happen (appropriate since Jules’ life is an accident waiting to happen). Other sets and locations are equally impressive and mostly with a touch of the surreal or the hyper-real. There’s not much in this movie that we can confidently say corresponds to normal everyday reality. It’s not a case of dreams being confused with reality but perhaps more a case of art opposed to reality.

Beineix loved comic books and the movie does at time have a slight comic book look.

The Blu-Ray release includes a partial commentary track by Jean-Jacques Beineix. It’s interesting in revealing his thinking and mostly it’s interesting because it reveals just how trite his thinking was. Advertising has become all-pervasive. There’s a conflict between art and commercialism. Industrial design (such as car design) can be art. Wow, that’s all just so deep and profound. It’s what you’d expect from a first year film student.

Which gets us back to the style over substance argument. Personally I think you’ll appreciate this movie more if you see it as an exercise in pure style. Forget the substance. Who needs substance when when you can come up with style as impressive as this?

Diva is a must-see movie purely for its stylistic flourishes. While it came out right at the beginning of the decade Diva does have a very 80s look, but in a good way. And it is a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray looks great and includes lots of extras for those who are into that sort of thing (I’m not).