pottedstu Reviews

Words for Battle (1941)

Rousing propaganda piece

[7/10 · 9 September 2007]

Made early in World War Two, this film offers inspiration to the people of Britain through a series of texts, mainly about the nature of Britain, drawn from great writers of the past and present. Laurence Olivier reads the poetry and prose in his customary powerful voice, and the words are accompanied by images of Britain which are often striking and poetic.

The film uses the writings of such classic English writers as Milton, Blake, Browning, and Kipling. From Kipling they choose the powerful but dark The Beginnings, which speaks of the time "when the English began to hate" and manages to be quite terrifying.

Also we hear Olivier reading from Churchill's speeches and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, making the film in part an appeal to Britain's American cousins to acknowledge their common culture and enter the war.

As propaganda it is effective: it's hard not to be moved by Britain's greatest actor reading Blake's Jerusalem. But at the same time, it's very vague in its message, more a reminder of British history than a manifesto of why we fought, and paradoxically it's only Lincoln's words that set out something of what the war was really about, the battle for liberty.

But visually, as you would expect from Jennings, there is much that is beautiful and arresting. A historical curio, but one still with plenty of interest.

Spare Time (1939)

Social history and poetic visuals

[9/10 · 9 September 2007]

Spare Time is a great little film that shows a lot of little details about life in Britain in the late 1930s.

The film is narrated by the distinguished writer Laurie Lee (best known for Cider With Rosie) but he is only there to reflect on the meaning of spare time in general terms, and the film doesn't tell us what all the different activities taking place are, it simply shows them in elegant film clips.

The activities range from those still common today, to some traditional working-class pursuits that are now dying out, to the highly esoteric. People go cycling and watch sports, but there's also a lot of music making - from the colliery band to the millworkers' kazoo jazz band. There are also scenes of very serious-looking men drinking in a bar, and a pigeon fancier and a greyhound owner. Some sections flash by very quickly while others get a little more detail, particularly the kazooists parading with a woman dressed as Britannia.

Jennings focuses on three industries: a coal mine, steelworks, and a textile mill. Because only the third employs women, there's inevitably a focus on male leisure pursuits, but some of the activities of the women of the mill are shown, and there are details of children playing. But for those interested in women's social history, the film doesn't show a great deal of women's lives.

The documentary movement of the 1930s and the Mass Observation program both seemed to involve a new interest in documenting the lives of ordinary people, considering even the smallest detail of people's lives to be important. Sometimes you might get the impression that highly-educated middle-class people analysing working class lives might be patronising or even a tool of social control (and the Mass Observation movement did influence early market research and opinion polling in Britain) but Jennings is genuinely concerned with rendering the small, everyday facts of peoples lives and turning them into something truly poetic.

In contrast to Jennings' wartime surveys of the nation, such as Listen to Britain, there is no propagandist or overly patriotic aspect to the film. It is simply a collection of images of a nation at play, and fascinating and valuable because of that, as much as for its artistry.

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960)

A great filmmaker in search of a plot

[8/10 · 23 July 2007]

Compared to Ozu or Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse's films are much lighter in tone, with more humour, and less of the overwhelming sense of pain and tragedy. Sometimes this works really well, offering stories that are emotionally involving but not morbidly extreme, but in this film I think it results in a film that's shapeless and drifts past the viewer without really going anywhere in particular.

The performances are excellent; of course Hideko Takamine is wonderful in the leading role running a hostess bar, but Reiko Dan is great fun as a young, flirty, ambitious hostess, and Tatsuya Nakadai as the loyal young bar manager is like a hero of the French New Wave, quiet, cool, and intense. Keiko's customers at the bar are to an extent caricatures, but are nicely drawn.

The film offers a full and fair-minded account of the world of hostess bars, with Naruse's usual interest in financial matters and the minutiae of life. But despite the occasional sad event, the cumulative impression is not of a woman in a desperately tragic situation, but more a case of just one damn thing after another. It lurches from moments of high drama to silliness to tragedy to the mundane, failing to achieve a consistent attitude or tone.

There are perhaps too many characters, so that while some relationships are clear and powerful, others pass by with little emotional effect. Unlike in Iwashigumo (Summer Clouds) the main character of this film isn't heroic, isn't keeping up any tradition, and doesn't have any particular claim on our affections. Her defence about needing a fancy lifestyle and expensive apartment for her job, and her attitude to her family, don't seem likely to endear her to the viewer either.

Overall, it feels like a set of great talents wandering around in an inadequate storyline. It's not enough to present the facts; a great film needs to use them to show you something more general about life. And something more profound than, "Well, every job has its problems."

The Body Stealers (1969)

Nice aerial footage, dull on the ground

[4/10 · 27 March 2005]

A few minutes of well-shot footage of parachute jumps and aerobatic flying seem the real impetus for this British science fiction picture. When there are no bodies hurtling towards the ground or planes shooting past each other, what's left is a bad script with far too many scenes of men in suits talking in offices and not nearly enough science or action. Since it was made for a family audience, there isn't even much in the way of female flesh.

Patrick Allen and his improbably large chin take the lead. His character, a NATO troubleshooter, is big on the sub-James Bond womanising and tough posturing. Yet for all his smooth lines and fetching cardigans, he does curiously little to actually solve the mystery of disappearing military parachutists. Plot development consists of supporting characters waving a Geiger counter over a few things while Allen chases the girls.

George Sanders is normally a reliable figure (see the far superior Psychomania, for instance), but he is wasted here as a personality-deficient general. Hilary Dwyer has the requisite qualities for a female star, being very pretty and a great screamer. Lorna Wilde is quite fetching as a mysterious blonde, but the rest of the cast do little.

This is a competently-made film from people who understood the limitations of their budget, limitations which mean rare special effects and few action sequences. The real problem is an absence of ideas or any ambition beyond filling the screen for 90 minutes. Once all the aerial footage has been used up, what is left is a very unoriginal story with little imagination or characterisation and lots of dialogue of a "The minister isn't going to like this" type. Nonetheless, Reg Tilsley's jazz score deserves a mention, ratcheting the tension even when the most mundane action is unfolding on screen.

It's hard to recommend this film when there are so many better British exploitation films from the era; it lacks even any Austin Powers-ish campness and shows nothing of 1960s Britain. As an attempt at family-friendly science fiction from Tigon, a studio better known for its sexually-frank horror, it's a slight curio of film history. For entertainment, you're better off jumping out of a plane, or even watching an in-flight movie.

Dear God (1996)

Superficial Christmas TV fodder

[5/10 · 4 January 2005]

A film like this is only on at one time of the year. Although it's about letters to God rather than Santa Claus, its theme of dreams coming true and its vague sentimentality are just right for the holiday season. The film is about a bunch of misfits and loners discovering a social conscience when they work in a department of the postal service that handles letters addressed to God and other people who don't have regular mailing addresses.

This is certainly no ask-god version of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (filmed as Advice to the Lovelorn and Miss Lonelyhearts), where a character faced with innumerable demands from desperate members of the public is slowly driven mad. It seems there are few problems in this film that cannot be solved with a misappropriated saxophone (indeed, with all the gifts being doled out, the film's idea of God is little different to Father Christmas). Wider issues of poverty, illness, death and other injustices are ignored.

As an atheist, I was a little disappointed to see people talking about God inspiring the characters, as though nobody could do a good deed without being an agent of the Lord. It seems odd that a film with a potentially blasphemous premise (people impersonating God) could end up as such an affirmation of religion, but in the cinema people who impersonate priests and nuns tend to end up as heroes (We're No Angels, etc) while actual priests turn out to be villains. This film certainly panders to the audience's need for a feel-good spirituality that is simple and undemanding, without any of the complexities of organised religion.

To be fair, the crew and cast are competent and while it's not Garry Marshall's best film, it's not his most shamelessly manipulative either (Pretty Woman is far stupider). The characters are an appealingly motley bunch that could work well in a sitcom, some of the dialogue is funny, and Dear God is in many ways a decent piece of schmaltz. If you forget about it as soon as it's finished, it's probably fine.

Excalibur (1981)

Pointless and confused retelling of Arthurian myth

[1/10 · 4 January 2005]

Boorman has always been a director more interested in intellectual themes and the play of symbols than in plot, characterisation, action, drama, or the other perks of commercial cinema. Sometimes, as in Point Blank, this produces a film which is austere yet impressive and resonant; at other times, like Zardoz, the result is unintentionally hilarious and leaves the viewer clueless as to the director's intentions.

Excalibur falls in the middle. It's not powerful epic film-making, and it's not camp nonsense. It's just dull. Most of the action takes place in near-total darkness, so it is almost impossible to follow the plot even if you can work out which of the million variations of the Arthur myth he's trying to tell. Occasionally Helen Mirren's naked body looms out of the night, which may have been nifty when the film was made but now there are websites for that kind of thing.

The cast (mainly not-quite-famous stage actors) don't seem to understand how to put their characters across on film. The cinematography is occasionally pretty, but generally dysfunctional since it fails to serve the needs of plot and character. Even the story itself is poor, demonstrating that the legend of Arthur is less a coherent narrative and more a string of sometimes contradictory events conflating numerous historical figures and folk tales.

The film has no discernible intellectual, social or political message, and though it promises the chance to see a record of some good stage actors, the expected performances never materialise through the darkness and mud. The story of Arthur has been presented so many times it's almost impossible to do anything original other than be worse than whatever has come before (as the recent King Arthur demonstrated). Watch Disney's The Sword and the Stone instead.