Ladyhawke (1985)

Ladyhawke is a 1985 fantasy film and it really is a bit of an oddity. I think it’s a wonderful movie but I can see why it flopped at the box office. It’s totally out of step with other movies of that genre of that era. It’s also to some extent out of step with the mainstream filmmaking approaches of the 80s.

It was produced and directed by Richard Donner.

The setting is northern Italy. The time period is not specified precisely but references to the exploits of the hero’s grandfather during the Crusades might suggest the 13th or 14th centuries.

A young thief, Phillipe Gaston (Matthew Broderick), escapes from an escape-proof dungeon.

Local authority is vested in the Bishop of Aquila (played by John Wood) and the bishop wants Phillipe recaptured. He sees the young thief’s escape as a challenge to his prestige and authority. The bishop is something of a tyrant and seems to rule mostly by fear.

Phillipe encounters Etienne of Navarre (Rutger Hauer). Navarre is a rather brooding figure, obviously a man in the grip of some obsession, but in his own way he seems to be a decent man who can even be almost kindly at times. Navarre has a hawk, an impressive bird of which he is inordinately proud. There is clearly a bond between the man and the hawk.

But at nightfall Navarre disappears completely and a beautiful lady appears. She is Isabeau of Anjou (Michelle Pfeiffer). She has an animal companion as well, a wolf. There is clearly a bond between the woman and the wolf.

In fact Navarre and Isabeau are the victims of an awful curse. They were lovers, until they aroused the ire of the bishop who called on the powers of darkness to afflict with a cruel and ingenious curse. During the day Isabeau is transformed into the hawk. At night Navarre is transformed into the wolf. They can never be together in human form. They are in fact doomed to be forever together and forever apart.

A nice touch is that in their animal forms they have no knowledge of their human natures. All the wolf knows is that for some reason he must protect this woman. All the hawk knows is that somehow she belongs to this man. They can never communicate. They can only communicate very indirectly, through Phillipe.

Another very nice touch is that Phillipe is a likeable pleasant resourceful young man but he is a chronic liar. That turns out to be useful. Whenever Isabeau asks if Navarre has spoken of her Phillipe assures her that Navarre speaks constantly of the strength of his love for her. That isn’t true. Navarre is a man of few words who could never articulate his feelings in this way. Phillipe tells Isabeau lies, but they are true lies. They are the things that are in Navarre’s heart. When Navarre asks if Isabeau has spoken of him Phillipe tells him the same sorts of true lies. There are things Isabeau cannot bring herself to say but Phillipe has survived as long as he has by being extremely astute. He knows how Isabeau feels about Navarre.

When the hawk is wounded crazy old monk Imperius (Leo McKern) enters the picture. He knows something very very important, but he doesn’t know how to make Navarre and Isabeau believe it.

By the mid-80s the established formula for adventure or fantasy movies was non-stop action, spectacle, some humour and a dash of romance. When the sword-and-sorcery genre emerged the formula remained the same but with a slightly tongue-in-cheek edge.

Ladyhawke ignores this formula completely. The focus is entirely on the love story. There’s some action and some excitement but it’s handled in a low-key way and there are no spectacular action set-pieces. This is a movie that relies on mood rather than spectacle. It’s a beautiful movie but it’s beautiful in a subtle slightly dreamy way.

This is a movie that seems to be aiming for the tone of 19th century medievalism - the romantic harkening back to the days of chivalry of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and of Pre-Raphaelite painting. I think it does this very successfully.

The casting is perfect. Rutger Hauer was a guy who could wear medieval garb and make you think that he’d been dressing that way all his life. He plays Navarre as a brooding but very sympathetic figure. Nothing matters to him except for the woman he loves. It’s an obsession, but a noble obsession. Hauer does not give a conventional action hero performance. He’s much more subtle than that. We feel Navarre’s pain, but the pain is not on the surface. It’s deep within Navarre’s soul. He simply cannot live with Isabeau.

Michelle Pfeiffer is just right. The first time we see her we are struck by her fragile ethereal beauty. And we know that this is a high-born lady. There’s nothing arrogant about Isabeau, just the placid assurance of a woman who has known since childhood what it means to be a lady. Isabeau is definitely not a kickass action heroine or a feisty girl heroine. She has courage, but it is a woman’s courage.

When Phillipe meets her he knows that he is going to devote himself to the service of this lady without any hope of reward. To serve such a lady is an honour. What’s extraordinary is that Matthew Broderick and Michelle Pfeiffer make this devotion totally convincing. Somehow all three leads are able to make us believe that this world of fairy-tale romance and chivalry is real.

The Bishop of Aquila is not a conventional adventure movie larger-than-life villain. He is a man in the grip of an obession. It has lewd him to do great evil, but the obsession started as love.

Ladyhawke never really had a chance at the box office. It’s a very uncommercial movie. It goes its own way. It’s a beautiful fairy-tale romance and I adored it. Very highly recommended.

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.

Serpent of the Nile (1953)

Serpent of the Nile is a low-budget epic about Cleopatra, directed by William Castle and produced by Sam Katzman.

It opens with Brutus and Cassius, the assassins of Julius Caesar, defeated in battle by Mark Antony. Lucilius (William Lundigan) is a serious-minded political zealot who wants to restore democracy. He’s on the side of Brutus and Cassius but once they’re dead he rather reluctantly agrees to serve Mark Antony.

Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, is determined to achieve an alliance with the strongest man in Rome and Mark Antony seems to fit the bill. She can offer him the gold he needs to achieve supreme power. In return (she hopes) she will be permitted to rule the world with him. She intends that eventually her son by Julius Caesar will rule the world.

Egypt is full of conspiracies and there are assassins everywhere. This is very confusing for poor Lucilius. He sees everything in terms of good vs evil. He soon decides that Cleopatra is evil. He had apparently loved her once but now he loves only Rome.

Mark Antony enjoys himself with Cleopatra in Alexandria, much to Lucilius’s disapproval (Lucilius is a man who disapproves of anything other than a fanatical devotion to duty).

Lucilius finds Alexandria to be a dangerous place. Cleopatra still carries a torch for him but she has chosen Antony because he seems to offer Egypt a better chance of survival as independent nation. She doesn’t see that she has much choice.

While Antony tarries with Cleopatra Octavian is building up his armies.

Robert E. Kent’s screenplay doesn’t bother with subtleties. Cleopatra is a queen so she must be wicked. Lucilius is a democrat so he must be the hero. Kent has managed to take a fascinating story and turn it into the plot of a second-rate western.

The one thing that really matters more than anything else in a movie about Cleopatra is the actress who plays her. Rhonda Fleming is just not in the same league as Claudette Colbert or Elizabeth Taylor. She doesn’t have Colbert’s overwhelming sexual allure. But she’s not bad. She’s beautiful and glamorous and looks reasonably exotic.

Raymond Burr is great fun as Mark Antony. He plays him as the bad guy in a gangster movie. Given that Rome was pretty much a gangster society that’s not a bad choice. He at least manages to make Mark Antony seem charismatic and dangerous. He also makes Antony a man of flesh and blood. He’s a bit of a rogue but we like the guy.

The big problem is William Lundigan as Lucilius. He’s awful. For the plot of the movie to work we have to believe that Cleopatra would be seriously torn between Lucilius and Mark Antony but nobody is going to believe for one second that a woman like Cleopatra would look twice at a dumb, uninteresting, self-righteous prig and bore like Lucilius. He has all the animal magnetism of a piece of soggy cardboard.

Lucilius is the hero but I found him to be a loathsome human being, a man who puts politics before people and will willingly betray love and friendship for the sake of abstract principles. He’s dull, humourless and without a shred of warmth or compassion. And like so many political zealots he always finds a way to rationalise his betrayals.

There is zero chemistry between Lundigan and Fleming. There is chemistry between Fleming and Burr, but that just serves to emphasise the ludicrousness of the film’s attempt to make us see Lucilius as a romantic rival.

Look out for Julie Newmar as the girl in the gold bikini (a decade before Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger).

The low budget is definitely a problem. I have no objections to the use of matte paintings but in this movie they’re just not very good. It’s unfair to criticise the movie for this. When you have a limited budget you can’t make an epic that is going to rival spectacular big-budget productions. William Castle does a fairly good job considering those limitations.

This is not an easy movie to find. There’s a Spanish DVD which includes the original English language version but the transfer isn’t great and it seems to be weirdly cropped. This is a movie that really needs a restoration and a Blu-Ray release.

Serpent of the Nile doesn’t quite make it. Rhonda Fleming’s acting is fine but she’s just not sufficiently mysterious, exotic or dangerous. Given the way the script demonises Cleopatra she needed to play her as a full-blown femme fatale.

The reason to see this movie is Raymond Burr. He really is a delight. Aside from that it’s moderately decent entertainment.

Abdul the Damned (1935)

Abdul the Damned is a 1935 British historical drama/biopic directed by Karl Grune. It is the story of the latter days of the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the last Sultan to possess effective power over the Ottoman Empire. More specifically the movie takes place against the background of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.

As the movie opens the Sultan has caved in to pressure to restore the constitution and has appointed the Young Turk politician and reformer Hilmi Pasha (Charles Carson) as Grand Vizier.

Fritz Kortner plays Abdul Hamid II and also plays Kelar, an actor who serves as the Sultan’s double (there were numerous assassination attempts against the Sultan’s life so having a double was a sensible precaution).

Yet another assassination attempt fails, with Kelar being shot and wounded instead of Abdul Hamid.

The Sultan may have appeared to have given in to the demands of the Young Turks but he intends to destroy them, and his plans to do so are devious and subtle. His plans are to be carried out by his ruthless Chief of Police Kadar-Pasha (Nils Asther).

There’s also a romance sub-plot. A beautiful Viennese opera singer, Therese Alder (Adrienne Ames), has caught the Sultan’s eye but Therese is in love with a young Turkish officer, Captain Talak-Bey (John Stuart). When the Sultan decides that he wants a woman he expects to get her. There is some subtlety to the relationship between the Sultan and Therese - her feelings towards him are a mixture of horror, repulsion, sympathy and affection.

It’s Fritz Kortner’s performance (or rather performances) that provide the main attraction. He’s delightfully sinister but with a certain roguish charm. Abdul Hamid is cruel and ruthless but he is a fighter and we have to have a certain respect for his determination to survive. And, in his own way, he does believe that the empire needs him. Kortner makes him a fascinating and magnetic personality, with a surprising but genuine element of tragedy.

Nils Asther as the Chief of Police is just as impressive - smooth but utterly devoid of scruples. The whole cast is extremely good.

There were no less than six writers involved in this movie, including Emeric Pressburger and Curt Siodmak.

Karl Grune had an interesting career as a director from 1919 until 1936 after which time he turned to producing.

Abdul the Damned is visually very impressive. The sets and costumes are marvellous but Grune also adds some imaginative touches. There’s a very clever scene early on, with Fritz Kortner as both Abdul Hamid and Kelar being reflected in multiple mirrors. And there’s a wonderful tracking shot at the opera.

This is a very lavish production. There was some serious money spent on this movie, and spent well.

The trick with an historical movie is making the ending work without making a mockery of the actual historical facts. Abdul the Damned pulls off this trick very adroitly. I liked the ending very much.

It should be noted that this is not an adventure movie as such, although it does have some suspense. It’s more of a historical drama with international intrigue set against a backdrop of revolution.

Abdul the Damned is included as a bonus movie in VCI’s three-disc Special Edition DVD release of the bizarre but intriguing 1934 British musical Chu Chin Chow. Since Chu Chin Chow is well worth seeing and the Special Edition is well worth buying you might as well give Abdul the Damned a watch since effectively you’re getting it for nothing. The transfer of Abdul the Damned is reasonably decent. Abdul the Damned has also been released individually by Network in the UK.

Abdul the Damned is an excellent and very handsome historical drama with a great lead performance by Fritz Kortner. Highly recommended.

The Scarlet Empress (1934)

The Scarlet Empress is the fifth of the six Josef von Sternberg-Marlene Dietrich movies made at Paramount. These movies were so heavily influenced by the personal relationship between director and star that without Dietrich they would probably never have been made, or if they had been made they would have been entirely different films, so it’s reasonable to refer to them as the von Sternberg-Dietrich movies.

The Scarlet Empress was a box office failure and while it’s a truly great movie it’s not hard to see why it failed commercially. This is a very extreme movie. Von Sternberg himself described it as “a relentless excursion into style” and he wasn’t kidding. It’s difficult to think of any Hollywood movie of that era that is so obsessively concerned with style rather than substance. The style is the substance. That’s the secret of its greatness but it’s taken to an extreme that undoubtedly alienated contemporary audiences.



Sophie Friederike Auguste, Prinzessin von Anhalt-Zerbst (Marlene Dietrich) is betrothed to the heir presumptive to the Russian throne, the Grand Duke Peter. In 1744 the young German princess arrives at the court of the Empress Elizabeth of Russia. The dashing Count Alexei (John Lodge), who had been sent to Prussia to fetch Sophie, had led her to believe that her prospective husband was a paragon of handsome masculinity so Sophie had been very enthusiastic about her marriage. She is appalled to discover that Peter is actually a misshapen half-wit who plays with toy soldiers.

Sophie, now renamed Catherine at the empress’s insistence, goes ahead with the marriage (the marriage ceremony giving von Sternberg the opportunity to indulge his taste for aesthetic excess). The marriage is hardly a success. Peter has his toy soldiers and his mistress and he hates Catherine. Catherine has her lovers and she disposes Peter. The big problem is what will happen when Elizabeth dies. Will Peter get rid of Catherine before she gets rid of him?

You could be forgiven for thinking that the plot merely exists in order to prove von Sternberg with the opportunity to give us one outrageous visual set-piece after another, and to some extent you’d be right. But those visuals are unbelievable. The sets are grotesque. At the Russian court the chairs are like gigantic gargoyles swallowing people up. The doors in the palace look like they were designed for giants and require half a dozen people to open them. Everything is surreal and wildly exaggerated. It’s like a fairy tale that has turned into a drug-induced nightmare. It’s impossible to list all the strange and wonderful and disturbing visual moments. It’s just one visual tour-de-force after another.

Everything is suffused with eroticism, mostly perverse eroticism. The Production Code started to be enforced in 1934 but The Scarlet Empress either got in just in time to avoid trouble or perhaps the Production Code Authority just missed the bizarre sexual imagery and incredibly risqué dialogue. Maybe the sadomasochism and perversity simply baffled them. There’s also a kind of dream sequence when the young Sophie is having stories read to her which contain quite bit of nudity. There’s even a nudie cuckoo clock.

Dietrich of course looks stunning. Her performance is strange and mesmerising but it would have seriously alienated viewers at the time. They would have been bewildered by the countless layers of irony and the emotional detachment. Catherine is not a heroine but she’s not a villainess. She’s not a monster, nor is she a victim. She is all of these things, and none. She may be an innocent with the soul of a libertine or a libertine with the soul of an innocent. She may be incapable of love or she may love too deeply. There’s nothing for an audience to get a handle on. And audiences do not react well to that. It’s all quite deliberate. She’s giving von Sternberg the performance he wants and she knows what she’s doing but it’s not going to sell at the box office.

Sam Jaffe as Peter and Louise Dresser as Elizabeth give outlandish over-the-top performances. John Lodge plays Count Alexei as the type of arrogant bad boy we could well believe has broken scores of female hearts.

There’s nothing even remotely conventional about this movie. By 1934 Hollywood standards it’s unique and bizarre. By today’s standards it’s unique and bizarre. This is von Sternberg being totally uncompromising. It wrecked his career but with this film and the following one, The Devil is a Woman, he got to make two final extraordinary masterpieces and perhaps after that there would have been nowhere left for his career to go.

The Criterion Collection DVD release is very disappointing and should be avoided. It’s incredibly grainy and it’s rather flat. The liner notes are also pompous and worthless. I believe there’s a far superior more recent UK DVD release.

The Scarlet Empress is an intoxicating blend of irony and delirious aestheticism. You might love it or hate it but you have to see it. I loved it. Very highly recommended.