Isadora Duncan, The Biggest Dancer in the World (1966)

Isadora (sometimes known under the title Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World) is a 1966 BBC TV-movie based on the life of the famous but tragic pioneer of modern dance, Isadora Duncan.

The TV-movie was directed by Ken Russell. You might be wondering if you’ll see traces of Russell’s later style in this early work. In fact you’ll see more than traces. This is a full-blown Ken Russell movie.

Russell co-wrote the script with Sewell Stokes, who knew Isadora in the latter part of her life.

While Isadora was funded by the BBC and was screened on the BBC in 1966 it was always intended for theatrical release as well, and it did indeed get a theatrical release. It was something of a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival. The success of Isadora made it certain that Russell would soon make the jump to directing feature films, which in fact he did in the following year.

The considerable amount of nudity certainly indicates that a theatrical release was the intention.

Isadora was made on a minuscule budget (we’re talking about the BBC here) but it was shot in 35mm and while it’s in black-and-white it feels like a feature film rather than a TV production. Russell was pulling out all the stops with the visual and it has all his trademarks.

Isadora Duncan was briefly a sensation in the world of dance. She was an apostle of dance as free expression. Her dislike of any kind of discipline carried over into her personal life.

Her star faded quickly and her wild lifestyle took its toll. She blundered from disaster to disaster.

She enjoyed a brief vogue in the 1960s, being seen as a kind of godmother to the counter-culture.

Russell resists the temptation to idealise or romanticise her. He doesn’t exactly demonise her but he makes no attempt to downplay her extraordinary self-destructiveness and egotism and spectacularly bad judgment. This was a woman set for fame, stardom and riches and it all fell apart and the disasters were all of her own doing. He also does not downplay her vulgarity or her stupidity.

Isadora did have a touch of genius, but a very limited genius. In the opening years of the 20th century her approach to dance seemed exciting and revolutionary - pure expression, unconstrained by rules or discipline. Just dance what you feel. Like all such artistic approaches it was something of a dead end. The vogue for Isadora waned, her wild lifestyle began to catch up with her, her extravagance left her dependent on wealthy lovers who eventually tired of her whims and her dramas.

After the First World War she went to Russia, feeling sure that the Bolsheviks would recognise her as a fellow revolutionary. They did not. She was soon penniless. Isadora’s politics did not go much beyond thinking that being a revolutionary was exciting and glamorous.

An affair with a drunken lecherous thieving Russian poet ruined her even further.

Tragically she ended up being remembered mostly for the bizarre circumstances of her death.

Russell tells her story as an absurdist tragi-comedy. Isadora remains oblivious to the inevitable consequences of her self-destructiveness and self-absorption.

Isadora’s rejection of rules and discipline made her, briefly, a star in the world of dance. It also doomed her to disaster in life. She was ruled by her passions and her emotions and they led her astray every time.

Vivian Pickles (a dancer herself) is superb in the title role.

Russell was not going to let a micro-budget limit his already soaring ambitions. By necessity he had to use some stock footage. He makes extraordinary use of footage from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia.

This does not look like a TV movie. It looks like a Ken Russell feature film.

Russell’s productions for the BBC in the 60s cannot be dismissed as mere tentative experimentations. He was already Ken Russell. He had already chosen his artistic path.

Russell was fascinated by genius but had no interest in worshipful approaches. He liked to get under the skin of the artistic geniuses about whom he made movies and he wasn’t afraid of what he might find under the surface. He also made two notable films about artistic failures - this one and Savage Messiah (1972). They’d make a fine double feature.

Isadora is a major Ken Russell film and a great one. Very highly recommended.

The Last Picture Show (1971)

The Last Picture Show was Peter Bogdanovich’s second feature film and it launched him, briefly, as a superstar director.

This is a coming-of-age movie set in a tiny rapidly declining Texas town named Anarene. It begins in 1951.

Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges) are about to graduate from high school, along with Sonny’s girl Charlene and Duane’s girl Jacy (Cybill Shepherd). Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson) owns the pool hall, the cafe and movie theatre. There’s nothing else in Anarene worth owning. He’s a kind of mentor to Sonny and Duane.

In Anarene once you graduate from high school life is over. Duane eventually gets a job on an oil rig. That’s the most any male in Anarene can aspire to - well-paid manual labour. The girls have no aspirations. They will drift into marriage with losers.

Except Jacy. She at least has some dim notion that getting the hell out of Anarene would be a good idea. She knows that all she has going for her is that she’s pretty and men want to get into her pants. She’s a wannabe femme fatale but she doesn’t have the imagination to set her sights high enough and she isn’t smart enough and devious enough. She’s aiming to land a guy from Wichita Falls. To Jacy Wichita Falls is the Big City of a girl’s dreams, but the rich folks from Wichita Falls are only marginally less hopeless than the folks of Anarene.

Sonny dumps Charlene because after a year of going steady she won’t even let him put his hand up her skirt. He drifts into a futile affair with the middle-aged (Ruth Popper), the wife of the high school’s football coach. Nothing works out for any of the characters and they all end up more miserable than they were at the start. That’s the movie.

I can see what Bogdanovich is trying to do - showing us the futile squalid lives of losers in a loser town. He certainly succeeds. At times I do however get the feeling that this is one of those movies in which urban intellectuals express their fear and loathing of rural America. I definitely get the feeling that Bogdanovich despises his characters. Perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps he was aiming for Tragedy. This could have been a good setup for a film noir but that’s not what Bogdanovich is shooting for. My suspicion is that he’s aiming for an art film.

Bogdanovich has made some aesthetic choices that are clearly very deliberate. It’s not just that the movie is shot in black-and-white. It’s shot in such a way as to drain the life out of everything. The landscape looks like a post nuclear apocalyptic wasteland. Robert Surtees was a great cinematographer so the lifeless feel was obviously not a mistake - it was deliberate.

The town looks like it’s waiting to die. The pool hall, cafe and movie theatre are the social and cultural hubs of the town. There’s nothing else. The pool hall looks completely derelict. The cafe and movie theatre look semi-derelict. The hero drives an ancient beat-up pickup truck.

The boys dress like losers.

The women are all dowdy. Not because they’re unattractive but because they have allowed themselves to look dowdy. They look defeated. Even Jacy, the closest thing the town has to a glamour babe, is totally lacking in glamour. This was Cybill Shepherd at the peak of her hotness. Jacy is a very pretty girl but she has no idea how to make the most of herself. She doesn’t know how to do her hair or makeup. She doesn’t know how to dress. And this is 1951, a time when women’s fashions were very glamorous.

It has a similar feel to those British kitchen sink dramas of the early 60s in which the working class protagonists learn that there is no hope and nothing to look forward to. There’s no point in thinking about sex - that will just lead to degradation and misery. No point thinking about love - the only person likely to fall in love with you is another loser. The best thing you can do is just throw yourself under a bus and get it over with. This movie takes the same approach to small town America. The luckiest character in the movie is the guy who gets squashed by a cattle truck. His suffering is at least over.

Not a single character in this movie gets even the smallest amount of joy from sex.

I strongly suspect that this movie was a box office hit because it quickly gained the reputation of being a dirty movie. Cybill Shepherd cavorting nude in a swimming pool! I also suspect that that’s why critics doted on it. They approved of its open treatment of sex. It made critics feel like they were watching a European at film (you know, those subtitled movies where the actresses take their clothes off). At the time American movies were very tentatively exploring the possibility of dealing with sex in a grown-up way.

And The Last Picture Show was definitely raunchy by 1971 standards - lots of nudity, frontal nudity, sex scenes, open discussion of sex. It’s interesting to compare it to Klute, a Hollywood movie released in the very same year that also deals with subject matter. Klute seems very tame by comparison. A brief blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of Jane Fonda’s nipples and that’s about it. So it’s easy to see why The Last Picture Show attracted interest from the public and from critics.

Timothy Bottoms gives the dullest performance in the history of cinema. The other cast members do their best. Cybill Shepherd is by far the best thing in the movie.

I find it difficult to stay interested in a movie that includes not a single characters I can care about. I can be captivated by a movie featuring only unsympathetic characters if they’re rotten in interesting ways.

I can see why critics adored this movie. It’s miserable, nihilistic and filled with loathing for small town America. Critics like that kind of thing. In 1971 it was just what they had been hoping for. This is Serious Filmmaking. I intensely disliked every minute of it.

Un Flic (1972)

Un Flic (A Cop) was Jean-Pierre Melville’s final film. It’s sometimes described as a neo-noir but I’d be more inclined to see it as an existentialist crime thriller.

The opening sequence is extraordinary. It’s a very long build-up to a bank robbery. It was shot in a seaside town out of the tourist season. The streets are entirely deserted. The weather is bleak. It’s raining and there’s a driving wind. And there are these incredibly long vistas of sterile modernist architecture. The mood of alienation and utter emptiness is overwhelming. The robbers’ car (a big American car) appears to be the only automobile in the entire town. In fact, apart from the people in the bank, you could well believe that the town is uninhabited. The robbers are like dead men in a dead town.

Intercut with the robbery are scenes of a senior police detective, Commissaire Edouard Coleman (Alain Delon), driving through the streets of Paris in a police car and being called to various crime scenes. But the first crimes we see him investigating have no connection at all with that bank robbery.

The key details of the plot and the relations between the characters are revealed very slowly and very gradually.

This is a very minimalist film. We don’t get any backstory on any of the characters, we don’t find out how they come to be connected, we get only the sketchiest outlines of the plans of the criminals. We discover nothing of the motivations of any of the criminals. By the end of the movie all we really know about Commissaire Coleman is that he’s a cop. We’re told only what we absolutely need to be told.

Simon (Richard Crenna) runs a night-club and he’s also the leader of the criminal gang. He and Commissaire Coleman are friends although we have no idea how that friendship came to be. Cathy (Catherine Deneuve) is Simon’s mistress. She’s also Coleman’s mistress. We have no idea how this romantic triangle developed and we have no idea of the extent of these emotional attachments.

The gang is planning a much more ambitious heist, on a train.

Coleman has a lead that suggests that something criminal is going to take place on the train but he doesn’t know that there’s any connection with the bank robbery and he doesn’t know that Simon is involved in any way.

Eventually the police get a break and Coleman starts to put some of the pieces together.

What’s interesting is that apart from the main characters we see very few people at all. It’s as if the central characters are just actors on an empty stage set.

Everything in this film seems to take place in slow motion. There are two major heists and while there’s plenty of suspense there’s no sense of action or excitement. The build-up is extraordinarily slow and there’s virtually no action pay-off. At every point where you’re expecting action it just doesn’t happen.

Again all of this would appear to be deliberate. This is a heist movie but if you’re expecting anything resembling an action thriller you’re going to be bitterly disappointed. This movie has the feel of a stately European art film rather than a thriller.

The most notable thing about this movie is the extreme level of emotional detachment. The triangle between Simon, Coleman and Cathy involves all sorts of betrayals. Simon’s criminal career could be seen as a betrayal of his friendship with his friend Coleman the cop. Coleman’s determination to push ahead with the case without being swayed by his friendship for Simon could be seen as a betrayal of that friendship. Cathy’s affair with Coleman could be seen as a betrayal of Simon. Cathy’s involvement in Simon’s criminal activities could be seen as a betrayal of Coleman who is after all her lover.

But there’s no indication that any of these things matter to any of these three people. They don’t seem to be driven to any significant degree by either love or friendship. They also don’t appear to be driven by lust. The Coleman-Cathy relationship is curiously un-erotic. In fact there’s not the slightest indication of any real erotic attraction between any characters in this movie. At no point in the movie is there any emotional or erotic connection between any of the characters. Simon and Coleman are supposed to be friends but they behave like casual acquaintances. Coleman and Cathy are supposed to be lovers but the one time we see them together there’s as much emotion as you’d get between a high-class hooker and a client.

As a result the characters are more or less puppets. We see them doing things but we have no idea why they’re doing those things. Perhaps they don’t know. Perhaps they really are empty inside. My impression is that this approach is very deliberate. It’s one of the reasons I see this as an existentialist movie. The lives of the characters seem to have no meaning or purpose. There’s also more than a hint of absurdism. All of the characters are absurd and pathetic.

The train heist is a very very long very intricate sequence but it’s irrelevant to the plot. These criminals have already made an unrecoverable error by bungling the bank job, after which it’s inevitable that the police will catch them. This whole sequence conveys a sense of utter futility, of people doing very complicated things that are in fact meaningless.

All of which strengthens my conviction that this is very much an existentialist movie. I kept being reminded of Camus’ The Stranger. These are three people who are all very much alone. I think the title, Un Flic (A Cop), is very significant. Coleman is a cop. That’s all he really is. That’s all he’s got. He does his job efficiently and without emotion. If people let him down he discards them and moves on. The meaning of his life is that he’s a cop.


Some critics have fallen for the temptation to see this as a movie about problematic masculinity. In my view that says more about modern film critics and the obsessions of the 21st century than about the actual movie and the obsessions of the 1960s and 70s.

The performances are completely flat. Catherine Deneuve projects a kind of Hitchcock ice blonde vibe. There’s a bit of Kim Novak in Vertigo in her performance.

I’ve already mentioned the stunningly brilliant opening sequence. The train heist is elaborate but totally artificial in its clumsy use of miniatures (I like miniatures work in general but in this case it really is clumsy).

That’s not to say that I hated this movie. It fascinated me in its radical rejection of every convention of the crime thriller genre, and its radical and uncompromising rejection of every convention of movie-making. It’s not a thriller. It’s a remorseless exercise in absurdism, existentialism, alienation and complete aloneness.

This is not a movie for thriller fans. It’s not a neo-noir. This is very much a movie for fans of highly and coldly intellectualised European art-house movies. If that’s your thing then Un Flic does it very well. So, recommended with some caveats.

Blue Panther (1965)

Claude Chabrol’s Blue Panther (the original title is Marie-Chantal contre Dr Kha) is a lighthearted 1965 eurospy romp, or at least that’s what you might assume.

It opens with a murder on a train heading for Switzerland. Then Bruno Kerrien (Roger Hanin), who claims to be an advertising man, meets Hubert de Ronsac (François Moro-Giafferi) and his pretty cousin Marie-Chantal (Marie Laforêt) in the dining car. Bruno gets jumpy when he realises he is being watched. He asks Marie-Chantal to do him a favour. He wants her to hold on to a piece of jewellery for him for a day or two. The jewel is a blue panther with ruby eyes.

Marie-Chantal senses some kind of intrigue here and that sounds like fun so she agrees.

Later on the ski slopes she encounters reporter who tells her he is in Switzerland in pursuit of a story about international espionage. She guesses that the blue panther is involved.

There are all sorts of shady characters at the hotel. And pretty soon there’s a murder. And Marie-Chantal makes a dying man a promise.

She now realises that she’s playing a dangerous game but she’s kind of excited. At least having people chasing you and tying to kill you isn’t boring.

The Blue Panther is of course the movie’s McGuffin. Marie-Chantal has no idea what its significance is and neither does the audience. But there’s a bewildering assortment of people who want that jewel. Some might be good guys but we figure that most are bad guys and there’s no way of knowing which are which. There are two Soviet agents, one of whom is a young boy. He’s the boss. There’s a guy who could be a CIA assassin. Another guy might be working for an African terrorist organisation. And there’s the mysterious Dr Kha, presumably a diabolical criminal mastermind.

Plus there’s Olga (Stéphane Audran). She could be working for Dr Kha or she could be a freelancer. And Paco (Francisco Rabal). We have no idea what his affiliation might be. He seems like a good guy but it would be dangerous to jump to conclusions.

Luckily Marie-Chantal is a judo expert. She also seems comfortable with handguns. As innocent bystanders caught up accidentally in espionage go she’s pretty competent. She’s a smart girl - she’s suspicious of everybody. She never panics. She’s breezily confident that she can outsmart all these spies. She behaves as if getting caught in the middle of a web of espionage is just one of those things that a sophisticated girl should be able to handle. And the spies find themselves having to dance to her tune.

Marie Laforêt really dominates the movie in an effortless fashion. It’s an odd detached performance but it’s intriguing.

This is a strange movie. It seems on the surface to belong to the eurospy genre but it doesn’t really. It’s more like Chabrol was embarrassed by having to make such a movie so he decided to approach it in an off-kilter mocking sort of way. It never develops the energy or the sense of fun that you expect in a eurospy movie. There is some violence but there are no action set-pieces. There’s no suspense. It’s the sort of movie you’d get if you asked an intellectual who despises spy movies to make a spy movie.

Chabrol was associated with the Nouvelle Vague and this movie has all the flaws that one associates with that movement. It’s more like an intellectual exercise than a movie. Chabrol was clearly trying to avoid doing anything sordid like making a popular commercial movie. And it’s self-consciously clever. If you enjoy clever-clever self-referential movies that deconstruct the genre and get all meta and play elaborate games with audience expectations then you’ll enjoy it. But this sort of thing has been done a lot more effectively. If you want to see this sort of thing done really well watch Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Trans-Europ-Express instead. It’s a much better and much more enjoyable movie than Blue Panther and it’s cleverer and wittier as well.

Blue Panther often gets compared to Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise, made a year later. You could say it’s Modesty Blaise without the crazy outrageous fun elements.

As a spy movie or a spy spoof Blue Panther just doesn’t spark.

And then it just ends. Which I’m sure is very clever and avant-garde but I’m old-fashioned enough to enjoy movies with actual endings.

Of course Chabrol was not trying to make a spy movie, and he was not trying to make a spy spoof. He wasn’t interested in telling anything even resembling a coherent story. He was trying to deconstruct the genre and turn it inside out and make a movie about movies so if you’re looking for a spy movie you’ve picked the wrong movie.

Whether you enjoy this movie or not depends on whether you’re prepared to accept it for what it is. If so you’ll probably enjoy the game that Chabrol is playing, assuming that you like those sorts of cinematic games. Blue Panther is recommended if you’re a fan of this sort of thing. If such cinematic games are not your thing then you’ll be extremely bored.

Kino Lorber’s DVD provides a very nice transfer and there’s an audio commentary with Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson.

Alphaville (1965) Blu-Ray review

When Jean-Luc Godard made Alphaville in 1965 he was coming to the end of the first phase of his career. This was before he became obsessed with politics.

Alphaville was certainly a surprise. No-one expected Godard to make a science fiction movie, but Godard in those days liked to surprise people.

The movie appears to be set around thirty years into the future. Secret agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) arrives in Alphaville. He has travelled over vast distances of space and time. By car. It’s that sort of movie. Godard wants to disorient us. And he succeeds.

Alphaville is a totalitarian dystopia run by a super-computer called Alpha 60. After freeing himself of the unwanted attentions of a level-three seductress (Lemmy can find his own women) he makes contact with another agent. He believes the key is Professor von Braun, also known as Professor Nosferatu. Lemmy meets the professor’s daughter, Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina). She’s a strange girl. But everyone in Alphaville is strange. Many words are banned, and many thought cannot be expressed. Those who express thoughts that others cannot understand are executed. It’s all for the common good.

There is talk of mutants, and superior beings.

Eventually Lemmy attracts the attention of Alpha 60. The computer is puzzled by Lemmy. He might be dangerous.

Lemmy doesn’t think much of Alphaville but he can’t just cut and run because he’s become fascinated by Natacha. He is trying to explain to her the concept of love, which confuses her a great deal.

It all leads up to an action finale, with gun battles and car chases.

Science fiction fans at the time would have found the science fictional ideas in this film to be pretty trite and hackneyed. Dystopias run by super-computers would have seemed like a very tired idea. But to the art film school, who had never demeaned themselves by watching or reading anything as crass as science fiction, the ideas would have been exciting.

Godard in his early career wasn’t too bothered by plotting anyway. The fact that the script is ponderous and pretentious doesn’t matter. It’s the way Godard handles the subject matter, the way he shoots the movie, that makes Alphaville a great movie. And a startling movie.

The idea of doing a science fiction movie in film noir style is a good one. And giving the movie a hardboiled tough guy hero straight out of pulp fiction was inspired.

Of course Godard loved Hollywood crime B-movies, and those were the movies that inspired the French Lemmy Caution movies in the 50s and early 60s. And I think it’s obvious that Godard wanted an art movie that was pulpy and hardboiled, or maybe he wanted to make a hardboiled pulpy movie that was arty.

The approach works and gives Alphaville a totally distinctive feel.

Godard had no money for lavish sets so he just used modernist buildings in Paris to represent the soulless mechanistic world of Alphaville. It works.

Eddie Constantine’s performance is quite unlike the performances he gave in the actual Lemmy Caution movies. There’s very little of the wise-cracking which was his signature in those movies. In Alphaville he’s serious, grim and determined. And he’s excellent.

Anna Karina gives a nicely enigmatic performance. Howard Vernon as Professor von Braun doesn’t get much to do but he makes the professor weird and sinister (and more sinister because he probably really does think he’s doing the right thing), which is what was required.

A dystopia is just what you always get when you try to create a utopia and the movie gets that across effectively.

I saw this movie years ago but that was on a very early Criterion DVD release and Criterion in those days had massive quality control problems. That DVD was truly terrible. The Australian Blu-Ray from Umbrella on the other hand is extremely good. The only extra is an interview with Anna Karina. She has some interesting things to say about cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s despair when he discovered how Godard wanted the movie shot. Godard of course turned out to be right.

I highly recommend checking out the earlier Lemmy Caution movies such as Poison Ivy (La Môme vert-de-gris, 1953) and Women Are Like That (1960). They have little to do with Alphaville but they will give you some insight into why Godard knew that he had to have Eddie Constantine in this movie.

Alphaville is a strange little movie that isn’t quite like any other movie. Highly recommended.

Belle de Jour (1967)

Luis Buñuel, born in Spain, was the most notable of all surrealist film directors. Belle de Jour, released in 1967, is his most famous (and most commercially successful) movie.

Right from the start Buñuel has us wondering what on earth is going on and where this is all going to lead. We see a young couple in a carriage. The wife says something to upset the husband so he has her tied to a tree and flogged and then tells the coachman that he can do what he likes to her.

Then suddenly we see the young couple in bed together. The opening sequence was apparently just one of her sexual fantasies. OK, some people do have crazy sexual fantasies, there’s nothing startling in that idea. Then the wife seems to be getting amorous, but then she refuses to sleep with her husband. This girl obviously has a few sexual issues.

The woman is Séverine (Cathereine Deneuve). Her husband is Pierre (Jean Sorel, a successful surgeon. He obviously realises that she has some issues and he’s very patient with her.

Séverine decides to get herself a part-time job, working in an up-market brothel. She will only work afternoons so she is given the professional name Belle de Jour (Beauty of the Day). She’s nervous at first, especially when she discovers that some of her clients have certain kinks.

Working at the brothel introduces her to a street thug named Marcel, and her relationship with him is complex. It all leads to a dramatic conclusion.

Or does it? How sure can we be that any of this is real? Buñuel throws in fantasy sequences and flashbacks with no indication at all that suddenly we’re seeing one of Séverine’s fantasies or a scene from her memories. Of course her memories may or may not be true - they may be fantasies as well. We’re really not sure how much of this movie is real. Buñuel puts us into a constant state of uncertainty. There are really only two scenes which can be absolutely sure are fantasies. There are other scenes which leave us in a state of total uncertainty. We’re dealing with both the conscious and the unconscious and the unconscious may not necessarily be less real than the conscious.

It’s possible that the entire movie is one of Séverine’s fantasies. It’s possible that most of it is real. It’s possible that it’s a mixture of reality and fantasy. We have no way of knowing where reality ends and Séverine’s dreams begin. The ending gives us an answer, or maybe it doesn’t. We still can’t be sure.

Catherine Deneuve has always been good at playing odd and/or disturbing women. It’s something she does with a lot of subtlety. She doesn’t resort to histrionics, she just manages to make us feel very unsettled.

While some viewers might be tempted to read political meanings into this film I don’t think it’s a political film at all. The movie’s takes on all issues are too complex for straightforward political interpretations. Buñuel had been very left-wing in his youth but seems to have become politically ambivalent and even disinterested as he got older. This is certainly not an anti-feminist film and there’s not a trace of misogyny here but at the same time you’d have trouble seeing it as a straightforward feminist film. I think it’s futile enough to view it as a political film in a 1967 context and even more futile to try to analyse it through the lens of 21st century political obsessions.

Buñuel has some fun at the expense of the bourgeoisie but the bourgeois characters are not shown as being evil. Séverine is very bourgeois but she’s basically a sympathetic heroine. Pierre is even more bourgeois and he’s a really nice guy. Husson seems sinister at first but actually he’s ambiguous. And the nastiest character in the movie is the working-class thug Marcel. Buñuel was interested in religion but his attitude towards Catholicism (he was raised by the Jesuits) seems ambivalent. It’s not an angry movie (as all political movies are). It’s playful and amused.

It’s also not a morality play. Séverine has some sexual kinks but I don’t think the movie is telling us that she needs to give them up. Maybe she just needs to accept her nature. Séverine feels shame and guilt about being a prostitute but the movie actually doesn’t suggest there’s anything wrong with prostitution. Madame Anaïs’s brothel is a very pleasant place to work. The two most psychologically healthy characters in the movie are the two whores Mathilde and Charlotte. They’re cheerful, likeable and generally rather sweet. Madame Anaïs hires girls who enjoy their work and we get the impression that Mathilde and Charlotte really do enjoy their profession.

We also get the impression that working in a brothel is actually good for Séverine. She seems to be more relaxed, more in touch with her emotions and she even starts to thaw sexually.

Pierre’s friend Husson has chosen a life of immorality. He feels shame and remorse, and that makes his immorality much more pleasurable. For Husson it’s a formula that works.

Buñuel’s view of sadomasochism is also surprisingly nuanced. Séverine’s second customer is a masochist. He enjoys being beaten and humiliated by Charlotte, but he also insists on being in absolute control of the sexual encounter with her. Buñuel understands, as most people don’t, that in this case the masochistic partner actually calls the shots. This seems to apply to Séverine as well. She enjoys the idea of being dominated and whipped but in a relationship she wants to keep total control. When she encounters the thuggish Marcel she is clearly very sexually excited by him but she resists all his efforts to take control.

Belle de Jour is subtle surrealism. We don’t really know where the realism stops and the surrealism begins, or whether there’s any reality at all in the movie.

Belle de Jour is the kind of movie that you watch once and you think you’ve figured out what’s going on, then you watch it again and you decide that you have to rethink your interpretation completely. A fascinating brilliant movie, very highly recommended.

I Start Counting (1969)

I Start Counting, directed by David Greene, is an unjustly overlooked 1969 British drama/thriller and we can be extremely thankful to the BFI for making so many of these intriguing 1960s British obscurities available to us.

Wynne (Jenny Agutter) is a fourteen-year-old Catholic schoolgirl. She lives with her mum, her two brothers and her granddad. Wynne is hopelessly in love with her older brother George (Bryan Marshall). George is 32 but he’s not really her brother, not biologically, because Wynne is adopted. It’s still a potentially awkward situation. Of course Wynne is hardly the first teenaged girl to develop an inappropriate crush on an older man. Most girls just grow out of things like this, and George doesn’t seem to be the least bit interested in taking advantage of the situation. In Wynne’s case though it’s a fairly serious crush.

There’s also a crime thriller plot here. There’s a serial killer operating in the neighbourhood, a serial killer who kills girls.

Wynne gets the idea that maybe George is the murderer. She doesn’t have any really strong reasons to suspect him and fourteen-year-olds do tend to have overactive imaginations.

What’s important to both the emotional and crime plot strands is that Wynne is at an awkward age. She’s beginning to have both sexual and emotional feelings for men and for this reason she is perhaps not thinking all that clearly. Nobody going through puberty, male or female, is going to be thinking clearly. And she has no experience of life.

The past is a constant disturbing presence in her life. When she was a very small girl George’s fiancée Clare was killed in an accident and Wynne was the one who discovered the body.

The old house in which they lived has been scheduled for demolition so the family has been re-housed. Wynne goes back constantly to the old house, trying to recapture the happiness they knew there (or that she imagined they knew).

Wynne and her best friend Corinne (Clare Sutcliffe) play games in which they pretend to summon Clare’s spirit. They’re really just innocent games, a way of dealing with a past trauma, but they add to the complications of Wynne’s emotions.

And of course Wynne is a Catholic so there’s some guilt for her to deal with. It has to be said though that the religious aspect is a very very minor part of the film.

Wynne convinces herself more and more of two things that may not coincide with reality - that George is a killer and that she is going to marry him. Wynne’s fixations on these ideas lead to trouble and to plot complications.

This movie is a murder mystery, a suspense film, a coming-of-age film, a movie about the difficulty of letting go of the past and a kind of fairy tale. For the most part these disparate elements are combined with surprising skill. It has to be admitted that as a whodunit it’s a washout - once the serial killer plot kicked in and the three suspects were introduced it took me thirty seconds to figure out the identity of the killer, and I was right. In fact it’s so obvious that I assume that the film-makers intended us to know the killer’s identity right from the start. What matters is that Wynne doesn’t know, and this lack of knowledge on her part determines all her subsequent actions.

As a suspense film it’s very effective. There are some nice scares, the suspense parts of the movie take place in suitably creepy locations and we really can’t be certain how it’s going to end.

One really interesting thing about this movie is that Wynne is not mad. She lives partly in the past (we get quite a few flashbacks) and partly in a world of fantasy (and we get some fantasy sequences), but not to an extent that would be unusual or pathological in a fourteen-year-old. It’s crucial to both the suspense and coming-of-age strands of the plot that Wynne is at an age when she has not yet left the world of childhood completely. She has not yet learnt that reality isn’t always the way you want it to be. She has not yet learnt to distinguish between her fantasies and the real world. She’s a perfectly normal girl and she’s going through a perfectly normal stage of growing up. It just happens that in her case this process is happening at a time when a serial killer is loose and her inability to see her fantasies as fantasies could have terrible consequences.

There’s a definite fairy tale vibe as well but it’s done very subtly. This is certainly not a comedy but it’s not unrelentingly grim. There’s plenty of humour.

The acting is excellent from all the key cast members but it’s Jenny Agutter’s movie. It’s an extraordinary performance by a sixteen-year-old actress in a very demanding rôle. She’s always entirely believable.

Another interesting thing about the film is that it’s not in any way a feminist film (there’s absolute zero politics in this movie) but it deals with the emotional life of a young woman in a remarkably sensitive and sympathetic manner. And although Corinne is a less important character she’s also treated sensitively. She has her flaws, but mostly they’re just the result of immaturity. She’s also trying to navigate her way towards adulthood. Both girls behave foolishly at times but we fully understand why they do the things that they do.

David Greene had a long and busy career as a television director. He made a lot of TV movies. His include some incredibly interesting movies such as the totally bonkers high camp 1972 Madame Sin with Bette Davis and the excellent and criminally underrated 1968 spy thriller/romance Sebastian as well as the thriller Gray Lady Down and the musical Godspell - the guy was nothing if not versatile. Writer Richard Harris had an extraordinarily distinguished career in television. You name a great British TV series and you can be confident he wrote scripts for it.

The BFI Blu-Ray is packed with extras, including an audio commentary by film historian Samm Deighan, several interviews, short films and a bonus feature film, the children’s film Danger on Dartmoor (written by Audrey Erskine Lindop who wrote the source novel for I Start Counting). The transfer is excellent. 

I Start Counting is a very ambitious and complex film and it’s absolutely enthralling. Very highly recommended.

L’immortelle (The Immortal One, 1963)

L’immortelle (The Immortal One) was Alain Robbe-Grillet’s first film as a director although he had already established a reputation in film circles as the screenwriter of the prodigiously clever and convoluted 1961 movie Last Year at Marienbad. And in its own way L’immortelle (like all of Robbe-Grillet’s films) is every bit as interesting.

Here's the link to my review of L’immortelle At Cult Movie Reviews.

Barry Lyndon (1975)

Barry Lyndon was released in 1975 and is in every way a typical Stanley Kubrick film. It’s visually breathtaking. It’s also entirely lacking in emotion, but deliberately so. Kubrick does not want us to care about any of the characters in the film. He wants us to regard them in the same dispassionate way that he views them. It’s a movie you may or may not enjoy but in its own way it’s an extraordinary movie.

It was based on a very minor novel (The Luck of Barry Lyndon) by Thackeray and again this is almost certainly a deliberate choice on Kubrick’s part. Had he chosen to adapt a better known Victorian novel there’s the danger that the audience might have been familiar with the book and might therefore already have formed an opinion about it. It suits Kubrick’s purposes to choose a novel that very few people have read.

Thackeray was the inventor of the so-called "novel without a hero” and this is indeed a movie without a hero. Thackeray’s much more famous novel Vanity Fair would have suited Kubrick’s purposes equally well except that it’s too widely known and the audience would have preconceptions about it.

Barry Lyndon is not even a real anti-hero. An anti-hero is someone about whom we have some feelings even if they’re mainly negative. Barry is simply a non-hero. We don’t care enough about him to dislike him and the whole movie is so detached that it’s difficult even to work up disapproval for Barry.

There’s only one character in the movie who could potentially function as a hero, and that’s the young Lord Bullingdon, but he’s almost as unsympathetic as Barry and definitely not the stuff heroes are made of.

The protagonist (played by Ryan O’Neal) starts life as Redmond Barry, an Irishman born into modest respectability but penniless due to the untimely death of his father in a duel. Another duel will be the crucial event that launches Barry on his career (and a third duel will have equally momentous consequences). Barry suffers misfortunes and joins the British army and participates in the Seven Years War (an extraordinary cynical and senseless war brought about by the breathtaking amorality of Frederick the Great and which therefore serves as the ideal background to the story). Barry deserts and ends up in the Prussian service (a byword for brutality). Barry has no intention of remaining a humble soldier. He waits patiently for his chance of escape (he is a man who does not make things happen but he is extremely adept at recognising opportunities when they fall into his lap).

Barry’s fortunes prosper when he teams up with the Chevalier du Balibari (Patrick Magee), a professional gambler and amateur libertine. It has taken a series of betrayals to get Barry into this favourable situation but betrayal comes very easily to him. By the halfway stage of the movie Barry’s lack of morals, his eye for the main chance and a certain amount of luck have propelled him to the top of the social heap. He marries a fabulously wealthy widow. He has everything he ever desired. He has done little to deserve it. In the second half it all starts to fall apart for him, partly through his own flaws and partly through bad luck.

Much nonsense has been written about the supposed miscasting of Ryan O’Neal in the title role. In fact O’Neal is perfectly cast in every way. Barry Lyndon is a man with considerable ambitions and with a talent for opportunism but he has no morality and no beliefs and no personality to speak of. He takes on the colouring of his surroundings. O’Neal’s performance has just the right quality of complete emotional detachment but then in the rare moments that Barry has to display genuine emotion O’Neal rises to the occasion. It’s a perfectly judged performance and it’s obviously exactly what Kubrick wanted.

Marisa Berenson can’t act but that doesn’t matter since her role is more a modelling assignment than an acting job - her task is to look right and she does. She’s part of the decor really.

Hardy Krüger of course can act and he does a fine job as the Prussian Captain Potzdorf who manages to get the better of Barry for a while but is eventually betrayed by him.

Patrick Magee was a Kubrick favourite and he gives another outrageous but wonderful performance as the deplorable Chevalier du Balibari.

It’s often been remarked that almost every scene in this movie looks like a painting. There’s considerable truth to this. It’s a movie that is more a series of striking visual images than a conventional movie. There is a straightforward narrative here but it’s of little importance. No-one could possibly care what Barry’s ultimate fate is going to be. The images don’t serve the story. The story serves the images. Kubrick gets away with it because the images are so incredibly gorgeous. If there’s ever been a more beautiful movie than Barry Lyndon then I’ve yet to see it.

Kubrick was insistent that he wanted to use only natural light. If a scene took place by candlelight then the lighting for that scene would be provided entirely by candlelight. Special lenses and very fast film made it possible to do this and there’s no question that the film not only looks superb, it looks superb in a very distinctive way. It has a look that is quite different from any previous historical epic. Cinematographer John Alcott, set designer Ken Adam and costume designers Ulla-Britt Söderlund and Milena Canonero all won richly deserved Oscars for this movie.

Barry Lyndon is a movie that is worth seeing for its intoxicating images alone. In fact they’re enough to make it a must-see movie. It’s interesting as an epic without a trace of heroism. Like most of Kubrick’s better movies it’s just not like other people’s movies.

It’s an amazing technical achievement but was it really a worthwhile exercise? Was it a movie that was actually worth making? The answer to that pretty much depends on how you feel about Kubrick. If you’re a Kubrick sceptic then Barry Lyndon will probably confirm all your doubts about him. If you’re a Kubrick fan you’ll be overjoyed because this movie is the concentrated essence of Kubrickian film-making. It’s not a movie with anything profound to say. The protagonist sacrifices anyone and anything to achieve his ambitions and then finds that maybe it wasn’t worthwhile after all. Not exactly dazzlingly original. What is profound and original is the way it’s done - the extreme lack of any trace of heroism, the uncompromising refusal to manipulate the audience’s emotional responses or moral judgments and the unique style. I think it’s enough to justify the movie.

And I’m going to highly recommend this one because even if you end up not liking it it’s still one of those movies you have to see at least once.

Corridor of Mirrors (1948)

Corridor of Mirrors is a fascinating 1948 British gothic melodrama with perhaps just the faintest hint of film noir (enough to get it included in the 14th Annual San Francisco Film Noir Festival in 2016 anyway).

Mifanwy Conway (Edana Romney) has a wonderful husband and two lovely children and she is certainly not lacking for money. She seems to be very happily married. So why is she setting off to London to see her lover? It’s a complicated story, told mostly in flashback. She does meet her lover, at Madame Tussaud's wax museum, but she doesn’t meet him in the way you might expect. He’s one of the exhibits.

Seven years earlier Mifanwy was a high-spirited girl and a fixture in the night club scene. She and her friends belong to the infamous set known as the Bright Young Things. They live for pleasure and for parties and most of all they enjoy thumbing their noses at their parents.

It’s probably inevitable that her path will eventually cross that of Paul Mangin (Eric Portman). Mangin is an artist, fabulously rich and notoriously eccentric. Mifanwy thinks this will be a harmless romantic diversion, another way to deal with boredom. Mangin however seems to be fascinated by her to the point of obsession.

Mangin claims to have been born 400 years too late. He should have been born 400 years earlier. He should have lived in the Italy of the Borgias. It’s not all that uncommon to feel that way but Paul Mangin takes the idea very seriously indeed. In fact he does live in the Italy of the Borgias - he has recreated the past in his palatial home.

Mifanwy is the woman he has been waiting for. He has been waiting for her all his life. Women expect men to say such things but Mifanwy begins to suspect that in this case it is literally true. Mifanwy still thinks she can keep things on the level of a casual love affair but it is clear that to Paul there is nothing remotely casual about it.

There are plenty of bizarre plot twists to come and I won’t spoil the movie by revealing any more. Suffice to say that this is a movie that likes to surprise us and it throws plenty of ideas at us.

Star Edana Romney co-wrote the ambitious screenplay, based on a novel by Christopher Massie. 

This was the first feature film directed by Terence Young. Young went on to considerable success in the 60s helming three Bond movies (including the best of them all, From Russia with Love). 

The style of Corridor of Mirrors is unapologetically arty. This might irritate some viewers but there was probably no other way to handle this material. The story flirts with gothic horror and also with fantasy and the danger with this is that it could have subsided into whimsy or jokiness - in this case the artiness certainly works far better than whimsy or comedy would have. It also gives Young and cinematographer André Thomas the opportunity to indulge themselves in all manner of arty effects. Although it’s a British film it was for some reason shot in a French studio. 

Edana Romney looks striking and exotic and this is essential. The film could not have worked otherwise. As for her acting, she never really manages to make Mifanwy sympathetic and at times her character’s motivations are rather obscure. Fortunately this doesn’t really matter - what does matter is that despite his obsessiveness we should feel some sympathy for Paul Mangin and Eric Portman has no difficulty in achieving this. He also performs the more difficult feat of making Mangin seem like a man who might be mad without ever making him absurd. Had he seemed ridiculous for even a moment the entire film would have collapsed. 

The DVD cover artwork proudly tells us that this was Christopher Lee’s film debut. And so it was. But don’t get too excited - he has no more than a bit part. 

Simply Media’s DVD offers a good transfer. Image quality is excellent; sound quality is acceptable.

Corridor of Mirrors is a bewildering mishmash of genres and influences. It’s easy to point to the movie’s flaws but they don’t really matter. This is a breathtakingly ambitious and wildly strange movie that takes risks and if the risks don’t always come off the wonder of it is that more often than not they do come off. Very highly recommended.

The Blue Light (1932)

The bergfilme or mountain film enjoyed enormous popularity in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. These were adventure movies in mountain settings, often with mystical overtones and imbued with a fascination for, and a reverence for, both mountain landscapes and the way of life of mountain dwellers. One of the most successful of these movies was The Blue Light (Das blaue Licht), which marked the directorial debut of Leni Riefenstahl, soon to become one of the most controversial film-makers of all time.

Riefenstahl wrote, produced and directed the movie and played the starring role. It’s a kind of fairy tale, not surprising in view of Riefenstahl’s fondness for fairy tales.

Junta (Riefenstahl) is an outcast in her mountain village, reviled as a witch. This is because she is the only person who can climb to the top of the nearby mountain, to a grotto near the summit. On certain nights a strange blue light can be seen emanating from the grotto. The blue light is what attracts Junta, but it also attracts the young men of the village, invariably leading them to their deaths.

The blue light is given off by crystals and the villagers have a fair idea that the grotto is a natural treasure house. Junta is attracted purely by the beauty of the blue light while the young men are attracted by a combination of greed and a sense of adventure.

Junta attracts the attention of a man named Vigo (Mathias Wieman). He is fascinated by her, by the beauty of the mountains, and by the blue light. Vigo will eventually discover the secret of the grotto, which he learns by following Junta. Vigo hopes that be reaching the grotto he can bring prosperity to the village and persuade the villagers to cease their persecution of Junta.

Junta lives in a hut high up on the mountain with a young shepherd boy. It is an idyllic life. Vigo’s arrival initially seems to promise Junta happiness, but the secret of the blue light is a dangerous one.

One thing that is immediately apparent is that this is a film by the same person who made Olympia, the official movie of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. This becomes obvious within the first few minutes. The Riefenstahl trademarks are unmistakable. 

Judged purely as a visual stylist Riefenstahl was one of the towering geniuses of the cinema. Her sense of composition is extraordinary, but what makes it extraordinary is the movement. There is always movement. There is hardly a shot in the film that doesn’t contain movement of some sort. In the very rare cases when there is no movement there is a sense that movement is about to happen. Riefenstahl doesn’t show us pictures of mountains. There is always something else in the frame, something moving. It might be a waterfall, it might be the clouds, it might be a young woman running, it might be the light itself that is moving. You cannot judge Riefenstahl’s artistry by looking at still images from her films. Without the movement they just don’t work. Or rather they do still work as striking images, but it is the movement adds the touch of genius.

The Blue Light is a movie filled with a pulsating sense of life and energy that is almost organic. 

Of course you cannot discuss a Leni Riefenstahl film without mentioning her two most infamous films, The Triumph of the Will (her documentary of the Nazi Nuremberg Rally of 1934) and Olympia (her documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games). Because of these movies Riefenstahl has never been able to be judged as a mere film-maker. Her assumed complicity in the rise of National Socialism will always be there in the background. Riefenstahl later claimed that she had no inkling of what the Nazis were planning. This is of course to a large extent true. No-one can be held accountable for the horrific events of the 1940s on the basis of a movie they made in 1934. 

It is obvious however that there was a great deal in National Socialism that struck a chord in Riefenstahl - the worship of Nature, the idea of a mystical union with the landscape, the vaguely pagan pantheism, the idea of traditional communities having an organic link with the land. All of these elements formed part of the ideology of National Socialism and all of these elements are present, or at the very least implicit, in The Blue Light. These elements are also of course by no means sinister in themselves. In fact they’re part of the fabric of a great deal of modern thought and are possibly even more popular today than they were in Nazi Germany. They do not prove that Riefenstahl was a convinced Nazi; in some ways they merely explain why she was drawn to certain currents in National Socialist ideology. Riefenstahl’s obsession with nature, so obvious in The Blue Light, later led her to join Greenpeace.

The fact that The Triumph of the Will and Olympia were such strikingly effective films, judged purely in visual terms, merely proves that Riefenstahl was an exceptionally brilliant film-maker. The horrors of the Second World War and of The Holocaust occurred as a result of Hitler’s decision to invade Poland, not as a result of Riefenstahl’s films.

Whatever the truth about Riefenstahl there is no doubt about her talent. Of course you need more than just visual brilliance to be a good film-maker. The plot is fairly thin but it has just enough substance to keep the viewer interested and the story’s fairy tale quality makes it rather fascinating. In the hands of any other film-maker it would not be enough to sustain a feature film but the visuals are so breath-taking that they more than compensate for the thinness of the plot.

Riefenstahl proves herself to be a capable actress as well, giving Junta a strange innocent mystical quality.

Riefenstahl made extensive use of filters and and also used infra-red film stock for some scenes and she achieves some magnificent effects.

Pathfinder Home Entertainment’s DVD release includes the original German version plus the shortened silent version made for the export market. Picture quality for the German version is poor while the silent version is in even worse shape. This is a movie that really deserves better treatment. Its visual splendours would seemingly make it an ideal subject for a full restoration.

The Blue Light is an odd little movie, from an odd little genre, but it’s worth seeing for its extraordinary cinematography and for its historical interest. Highly recommended.