JekyllBoote-1 Reviews

The Traveling Executioner (1970)

Perhaps executions seemed quaint in America's "liberal hour"

[2 January 2009]

This is an exceptionally difficult movie to see. As others have noted, it has not received a DVD release, and the VHS video is difficult to track down and probably prohibitively expensive if found.

I saw it just the once, on TV, about ten years ago, but it made a strong impression on me. Stacy Keach gives a very brilliant performance as that most paradoxical of beings: a likable, humane executioner. He is ably supported by Bud Cort who adds his undertaker character to the gallery of eccentric young men that were his early stock in trade.

I also recall the general atmosphere of levity, a failure to take the central theme of the movie - death - very seriously. This is possibly explained by the fact that in 1970 (or, more probably 1969, when the film is likely to have gone into production) the death penalty itself probably seemed to have become a permanent relic of the past, unlikely to be employed again as the United States joined most of the developed world in rejecting it de facto if not yet de jure. (This abolition was only confirmed in 1972, and was short lived, as it happened.) The movie - although much blacker in its comedy - has a similar feel to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (or its TV doppelgaenger, "Alias Smith and Jones"). In these, the Wild West had been somehow not merely domesticated, but suburbanised, and there was an overlay of late 60s/early 70s Southern Californian sensibilities on the period setting. "The Traveling Executioner" does something similar to the Deep South of the late 1910s.

The return of capital punishment in the U.S. in the late 1970s (and its mounting use in the 80s and 90s) is likely to distort the perceptions of those too young to remember the atmosphere of the time in which the movie was made, when its black humour appeared to be excused by the fact that the actual horrors of execution that it so lightheartedly depicted seemed unlikely to reappear.

The Amorous Milkman (1975)

Hooray for the Rank Charm School and Emotional Constipation!

[10/10 · 16 October 2008]

I loved Prof_Critic's review! The only trouble is, all the reasons he listed for disliking the film (the references to saucy postcards, British end-of-the-pier culture, Carry-on bawdiness, emotional constipation, the Rank Charm School, etc) are reasons, as I see it, to cherish it.

I'd rather sit through a million films like The Amorous Milkman than be lectured by earnest, humourless cultural Marxists (many of whom mistakenly believe themselves merely to be liberals so subliminal has their brainwashing been), who have a visceral hatred for the indigenous people and culture of England. For this reason alone I must award the film a full ten marks!

Shrek 2 (2004)

A morally and aesthetically abhorrent form of child abuse

[1/10 · 29 May 2008]

The whole Shrek franchise is thoroughly abhorrent, both morally and aesthetically.

It tries to have things two mutually inconsistent ways: to create a fairytale scenario while parodying and guying the whole fairytale genre (thus creating the kind of brats who are cynical before they have had the opportunity to be innocent). It is also coarse and ugly (with the post-Punk relish in such wilful ugliness).

The Disney studio produced sugar-coated travesties of the central-European tradition of story-telling, but these were at least often accompanied by musical scores of some attractiveness (and musical literacy); Shrek is happy to recycle substandard versions of middle-of-the-road rock and soul staples.

To subject your children to this trash is child abuse; to subject yourself to it....

Magpie (1968–1980)

Trendy by default - a show of and for its time

[13 August 2005]

Since the inauguration of commercial TV in Britain in 1955 there's always been a perception that the (state-funded although, ahem, theoretically independent) BBC is solid, serious and worthy, and that the commercial channels (particularly the first, historically speaking, to air, ITV) are frivolous, populist and ephemeral. (There is some factual basis for this last perception, since ITV has always been more reluctant to screen repeats than the BBC.)

In the kind of postmodern ideological meltdown (with the convergence of/confusion between the sociocultural left and the libertarian right) there's been an inevitable blurring of the boundaries between the BBC and ITV. (Indeed latterly there's been a kind of role-reversal, with the BBC (largely privatised by stealth) dumbed-down and politically supine, while ITV pursues higher quality programming, and shows slightly greater political independence of the Blair/Brown administrations.)

In the 1970s, however, the BBC still gave off a decided whiff of Reith-era austerity and earnestness (and at least the appearance of incorruptibility), and "Blue Peter" was locked into an eternal upper middle-class version of the 1950s. (Oddly enough, despite now having much younger and trendier presenters, something of this aura perversely persists even today.)

Simply by being unambiguously of its own time, "Magpie" managed to appear trendy, and simply by addressing the real interests and concerns of its young audience, irrespective of class, it distanced itself from its hidebound rival. Nothing emphasised this distance more than the respective theme tunes: while "Blue Peter" used a jaunty orchestral version of "The Sailor's Hornpipe" (subsequently updated but never replaced), "Magpie" featured a bespoke rock tune, performed by the Spencer Davis Group, whose chorus ("Magpie...") wavered semitonally in the psychedelic style of The Beatles' "A Day In The Life" ("I'd love to turn you oooooooon...").

I was definitely an ITV kid - I loved "Do Not Adjust Your Set", "Timeslip" and "Magpie", and syndicated American shows such as "Lost In Space" and "Land Of The Giants". (Apart from "Ivor The Engine" and programmes from the "Watch With Mother" stable, I cannot think of a single BBC children's show that I would have watched.) "Magpie" really hit its stride with the superb trio of Mick Robertson, Jenny Hanley and Douglas Rae (who out-trendied the inaugural trio of Tony Bastable, Susan Stranks and Pete Brady by an incalculably high factor). Having said that, the "Magpie" presenters were gradually-replaced individual modules, not entire teams who came and went en bloc.

The ITV policy of non-repeats means that there is nothing like the same access to old footage of "Magpie" than there is to...that OTHER programme. This distorts present-day awareness of the relative importance that the two shows had when they were concurrently airing. It is also indicative of the different programming priorities of ITV and the BBC, that "Magpie" was axed at the end of the decade it did so much to define, while "Blue Peter" carries on in its strangely dislocated bubble of timelessness.

The Browning Version (1951)

Harrowing, troubling and cleansing

[10/10 · 14 July 2005]

Until a week ago I had never seen this film.

I was lent a videocassette of it (taped from the TV) by a friend who urged me to watch it. "But you must watch it alone", they stipulated.

I am not sure whether my friend's act was one of great kindness or great cruelty. I do know that watching the film was extremely harrowing and upsetting.

It is difficult to convey quite what is so troubling and disturbing about this film without giving the plot away, but I was unprepared, among other things, for the frankness about sexual matters in such an old film (especially the frankness regarding female sexuality). Given that Rattigan was himself a homosexual (albeit, in a pre-Wolfenden age, a closeted one), it is possible (indeed, possibly too easy) to perceive a homosexual subtext in the film, should one choose to. But it is not necessary.

At first I was half expecting something sentimental in the "Goodbye, Mr Chips" vein (and this is, indeed, ironically referred to in "The Browning Version"), but this film is no facile tear-jerker. I did not read the other IMDb reviews before watching the film, and I was unprepared for the shock to my system that this amazing film has delivered.

I am not sure that I can unreservedly recommend the film, if only because it is so deeply unsettling and emotionally raw. A film set in an English public school of the early 1950s suggests a world of emotions reined-in and denied. But the terrible crises that occur in "The Browning Version" expose real emotions in a way that, even now, is rare.

This film urgently needs to be made available on DVD. For those who can withstand the intensity of its onslaught, it constitutes a salutary emotional cleansing.

This is a beautiful, and perennially relevant film.

Kidnapped (1971)

The Scottish and the "British"

[4 July 2005]

May I take this opportunity to correct a misunderstanding that has arisen in connection with "Kidnapped". In doing so I shall not attempt a review of the film itself, other than to note here that it is reasonably well-made and entertaining.

Whatever the rights and wrongs (ethically speaking) of the breakup of the old clan system in the Scottish Highlands, and the claims of the Jacobite Succession, it is just plain wrong (factually speaking) to refer to the English as the "British" by contrast with the Scots. The term British refers to anyone who was a subject of the British Crown, subsequent to the Act of Union of 1707; it can refer indifferently to Scots, Welsh, English and Northern Irish, and historically (prior to Home Rule) to the Irish generally.

There may be some sentimentality on the part of American viewers who, mindful of their own War of Independence, wish to identify with others struggling against "British" rule. But the terms British and English are not, and should not be considered, interchangeable.

(There is great ignorance about this distinction in Continental Europe as well; I have had many animated discussions with German-speakers, who have failed to distinguish between "England" and "Grossbritannien", and with Francophones, who think that the whole of "Grande-Bretagne" is also "Angleterre". This may be politically comforting, but is culturally and historically WRONG!)

The Jetsons (1962–1963)

Not reassuring

[12 May 2004]

There is a brilliant, bitingly satirical cartoon about a dysfunctional family that mercilessly puts American consumer culture under the microscope and finds it pusillanimous, vacuous and soul-destroying.

No, silly! - not the over-rated "The Simpsons", which is ultimately - beneath its thin veneer of satire - celebratory and reassuring (and, in my opinion, unwatchable for those reasons).

I'm talking about "The Jetsons". As with "The Flintstones", temporal dislocation is employed as a kind of Verfremdungseffekt, but in this instance we are thrown several centuries into a future which - like "The Flintstones"' palaeolithic age - looks disconcertingly like the suburban southern California of the early 1960s!

"The Jetsons" is harder-edged than "The Flintstones", and its subtle interrogation of American consumer capitalism more focused and sustained. Like most satire, and all of the protest movements of the post-war era, "The Jetsons" is better at stating the problems than offering any putative solutions. However, in the dumbed-down Clinton-Bush era of post-ideological (i.e. permanently ultra-right wing) politics, it's refreshing to have even the questions posed.

(PS. will the cosy, reassuring "The Simpsons", having featured war-hungry Tony Blair in a recent sugar-coated cameo, now give walk-ons to Lynndie England and her fellow Abu Ghraib torturers?)

Only Fools and Horses (1981–2003)

Leaves me cold

[6 May 2004]

David Jason, one of the great nearly-men of British comedy in the 60s and 70s, suddenly got very lucky indeed with "Only Fools and Horses". Just why this series should have captured the public's imagination and won such intense approbation is an enduring puzzle to me: the comedic premise is slender and its social setting is poorly and inaccurately observed. (Even in the 1980s Peckham was not Ealing-Comedy London, full of lovable white working-class scallywags, but a tough Afro-Caribbean ghetto.)

I have to confess that I find the show unwatchable, to the extent that, despite my best efforts, I have never succeeded in watching a single episode from beginning to end.

John Sullivan had previously written some excellent sitcoms, while OFAH's principals, Jason and Lyndhurst, were actors I liked and whose previous work I had enjoyed. Certainly the acting in the show is technically accomplished (even if shoddy scripts render the characters and situations unbelievable), unlike another intensely dire, yet insanely over-rated sitcom, "The Vicar of Dibley". (The cult of obesity-related feminism seems to have catapulted Dawn French - despite her complete lack of comic timing and basic acting technique - into an unassailable position as the favourite comic actress of the BBC, if not the licence-paying public. Nobody at the Beeb seems to have noticed - or cared - that she is talentless.)

As I say, I have enjoyed David Jason's work prior to OFAH. It seems to me, however, that the disproportionate public affection for this deeply flawed show has led to his being promoted beyond his talents (otherwise he would surely never have secured the roles of Pop Larkin or Frost on his own merits). His real talents lie in being a good, second-string supporting comic actor (like, for example, the late Peter Butterworth); he is funny and touching as Granville, in "Open All Hours", for example, appropriately in the lee of a giant comic talent (Ronnie Barker).

It is painful and puzzling to me when I find myself so at odds with the consensus of opinion. I don't WANT to appear arrogantly different from the herd. I have been no less troubled by my failure to see ANYTHING clever or funny about "The Simpsons", a show even more over-rated than OFAH. Still, I must honestly record sincere reactions: I hate OFAH and I hate "The Simpsons".

Mulholland Drive (2001)

A mesmerising melange of shaggy-dog stories

[10/10 · 8 January 2004]

Stupidly enough, I didn't get round to seeing this movie at the cinema when it was on general release. With some qualifications (e.g. "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me") I regard myself as a reasonably devoted David Lynch fan, albeit not an uncritical one. I bought the DVD of "Mulholland Drive" some months ago, and found all kinds of excuses not to make the mental and emotional effort to watch it. Until yesterday.

I thought about refraining from writing a review until I had seen the movie in its entirety several times, but it seems more honest to write a review based on my single viewing.

I can't pretend to complete innocence, however. I did read the first twenty or so of the 1200-odd IMDb reviews, in the hope of gaining some illumination.

It seems to me that there are two basic ways to miss the point with "Mulholland Drive":

1) Be so devoted a David Lynch fan that you kill the wonderful, haunting mystery of the film with explanation;

2) Be so bone-headedly anti-intellectual in general, and hostile to Lynch in particular, that you dismiss the film as "pretentious rubbish" or the like.

We can, I think, dismiss the latter group of reviewers; they'll never "get it". It's the first group who bother me.

I watched the film in complete innocence. I had no idea, for instance, that it was cobbled together from footage for a rejected TV pilot, and some new footage intended to turn it into a feature film. Knowing this would have completely altered my response. I'd've been looking for the "joins", and would have expected some incoherence and haste in the plot development.

Some reviewers regret that the TV series was not made. I have some sympathy with this, but perhaps it was better this way after all. The sainted "Twin Peaks", wonderful as it was overall, was more uneven than gilded memory might suggest; it had its longueurs, and suffered from having, by necessity, to be directed not merely by Lynch, but by others, leading to an inconsistency of style and viewpoint.

Even the tacked-on "the first half of the movie is all Diane Selwyn's dream" explanation doesn't take us VERY far, and robs the movie of much of its characteristically Lynchian suggestiveness. Lynch likes to set up situations that suggest rich possibilities of resolution, and then to withhold such resolution. You can feel cheated, as many doubtless do; you can attempt to defend Lynch by pretending that the plot has more coherence than is actually the case; or you can just accept that if you want what the pop-psych babblers call "closure" you'll either have to do some of the work yourself, learn to live with uncertainty, or stick to simpler cinematic fare.

So, it's all Diane Selwyn's dream? Maybe I've missed something, but this doesn't, so far as I can make out, explain the following:

1) There are three basic forces of evil in the movie:

i) The hermetically sealed Mr Roque (the Twin-Peaks midget!), who seems to give the Mafia-types and the latino manager of Cookies their orders;

ii) The Cowboy. Is the Cowboy (one of the weirdest and most sinister villains ever to appear in a Lynch movie) simply an enforcer for the Mr Big, or is he an emissary of:

iii) The Winkies Garbage Demon? This demon, who dwells among the junk behind the Sunset Blvd Winkies, literally scares a man to death. This same man has had a pair of prophetic dreams, and informs another man (a police officer?) that the Garbage Demon (as I shall call him) is responsible for all the evil that occurs in his dream. The Demon later also unleashes the airplane oldsters (clearly his satanic underlings) from the sinister blue box in pursuit of Diane Selwyn.

2) If "Betty" is really Diane Selwyn (or vice versa), how does she dream the earlier parts of the movie? She has already killed herself in response to the attack of the airplane oldsters.

3) How is Diane Selwyn privy to the experiences of Adam Kesher? Did she dream all of these? Why?

4) Why are hermetically-sealed Mr Roque (the Mr Big) and/or the deadpan, riddling Cowboy (under orders from the Garbage Demon?) so keen that Camilla Rhodes be cast in the female lead of Adam's bizarre nostalgia movie?

5) Who is the Blue-Haired Lady in Silencio? Why is blue so sinister in this movie (the blue box and its clunky key; the conventional blue key given to Diane by the hit-man)?

6) Why Silencio?

There are lots of other unanswered questions in my mind. Maybe other IMDb reviewers have the answers (or THINK they have!). As usual with Lynch, I think it's better just to accept that the whole thing is several interlocking shaggy-dog stories that aren't really going anywhere, but we can, if we like, hitch along for part of the ride. (I am reminded of the enigmatic Cowboy's reference to the "buggy" he is driving; it's the same with Lynch's narrative.)

If none of this appeals, you can always enjoy just looking at the pretty women! (Lynch never underestimates the sheer entertainment value of beautiful ladies and good music.)

I'll give it 10/10

That Was the Week That Was (1962–1963)

Savage satire

[23 October 2003]

Born too late (1960), for years I knew about TW3 by repute (from my two elder brothers). Some time in the late 70s, archive clips of this groundbreaking show started to be shown on TV, and I could see for myself - in spite of the technical advances of the intervening years - its amazing boldness and novelty.

It is hard to equate the present-day Sir David Frost, a jowly man in late middle age who currently conducts "soft", Sunday-morning interviews with politicians, with the gauche young man of the same name (if lacking the title) forty-odd years earlier, who gamely (if ineptly) participates in the revue-type sketches of TW3.

I myself was a young man in the 1980s; I was amazed not by the datedness of TW3 (although its B&W minimalism - which must have been so striking in the very early 1960s - seemed antediluvian twenty years later), but by the savagery of its satire. A sketch about Henry Brooke, the then-Home Secretary, was far fiercer than anything in "Spitting Image".

Far more important than Frost's gauche anchor was the magnificent Millicent Martin, a sexy jazz singer who declaimed (with only minimal rehearsal) complex, tongue-twisting ditties freshly-minted from the scriptwriters' slimline Remingtons.

Other regulars were the late, great comic actor, Roy Kinnear, a comparatively youthful Kenneth Cope (a good few years before "Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased)"), the irreplaceable Lance Percival (whom I was always too shy to approach when I saw him walking his basset-hound - only marginally more hangdog than he - near Parson's Green) and Timothy Birdsall, the handsome and charismatic cartoonist doomed to die of leukaemia at 26 halfway through the series.

There were lapses, of course. Sometimes it just wasn't funny. Other times it was hopelessly naive (the gushing JFK tribute, for example). The series was cancelled late in 1963, because, post-Profumo scandal, the General Election (which was not, in fact, held until October 1964) appeared to be in prospect.

They needn't have bothered. Harold Wilson's Labour Party won anyway!

Echoes of Louisa (1981– )

Short-lived, but long on attractive young ladies!

[22 October 2003]

"Echoes of Louisa" was a short-lived children's series that never quite took off. Its spooky story-line teamed a bang-up-to-date 1981 girl with a 19th-century revenant. As a healthy young man of 20 (at the time!), the main attractions of the show were Lucinda Bateson (soon to find greater fame in that classic early-80s show "Metal Mickey") and the divinely lovely Amanda Kirby (who probably found a very wealthy husband in short order - damn him!).

Mädchen Nr. 1 (2003 TV Movie)

Language barrier!

[7/10 · 30 September 2003]

I saw this movie while on holiday in Germany recently. It has most of the elements that make movies popular - attractive principals, an amusing circle of friends and acquaintances on the fringe of the main action, a first-class villain, and a romantic, will-they won't-they? plot with lots of twists, surprises and suspense along the way.

Thomas Schmidt is an intellectually serious chemistry student (with more than a passing resemblance to Richard Ashcroft) who coaches Denise, a radiantly beautiful girl with a flashily handsome, but faithless and insufferably arrogant boyfriend. The film concerns itself with Thomas's sustained, ever-thwarted attempts to lure the lady from her hateful swain. In this attempt he is abetted by his housemates: a witty, if diminutive sidekick, with some of the qualities of the young Dustin Hoffman, a well-meaning, blundering giant of unpredictable temperament, and a tomboyish, grungy platonic female friend.

There's just one thing that stops this film reaching the large audience that would enjoy it so much: IT'S IN German! It's a great shame that the barrier of language should impede the career of this fresh, amusing film. Even if I didn't understand German fairly well, I'd have no problem with watching the film with subtitles, but I know this is a sore point with some people. Maybe we Anglophones should do what the Germans do with OUR movies, and dub it!

(I should point out, for the benefit of those who may have misunderstood this post, that the version I saw was German-language, without subtitles.)

Mr. Toad's Wild Ride (1996)

An intermittently entertaining travesty

[6/10 · 9 September 2003]

The Monty Python team are the Pink Floyd of comedy; that is to say, they began brilliantly, shattering paradigms, but gradually subsided into lumbering, stodgy self-parody. (In the Floyd's case, compare and contrast the brilliantly fresh and visionary "See Emily Play" with the depressingly self-regarding millionaire's stadium plod-rock of "Comfortably Numb".)

The trouble is, many people follow rock bands and comedy teams as blindly as they follow political parties, once their basic loyalties have been established. So it is with the Floyd and the Pythons. Two or three Pythons only have to show up in a film or TV show for unthinking accolades to be heaped on it, regardless of whether, viewed objectively, it is any good or not. The Floyd/Pythons continue to bathe in the referred glory of their earlier, genuine achievements. (In any case, Jones and Idle are the only strong Python presences in the film; Palin (the smuggest of superannuated satirists) must have sleep-walked through his exiguous, undemanding role as The Sun, while it must have taken about thirty seconds for Cleese to complete his economy-size cameo.)

As an adaptation of the children's classic, Terry Jones's film is a travesty. Taken on its own terms, it is intermittently entertaining, although it loses focus and becomes excessively silly once Toad has escaped from gaol.

I think the film must be viewed in the context of the time it was made. John Major's faltering Conservative regime still just about held sway in Britain in 1995-6 (the time of the film's production), and the Labour Party had been out of power since 1979. The grasping, treacherous, materialistic weasels - who resemble the Blue Meanies from "Yellow Submarine" - are clearly a satire on the greedy entrepreneurs who had taken centre-stage in British public life after the accession of Margaret Thatcher. (We were still naive enough then to hope that Tony Blair's New Labour would rescue us from the weasels, so to speak. But New Labour were just the same old weasels in disguise.)

Steve Coogan and Nicol Williamson play their roles with more conviction than the film strictly deserves, while the Pythons simply trade on their fans' brand-loyalty. Pretty Julia Sawalha is fetching as the gaolkeeper's daughter

Gangs of New York (2002)

Mad, bad and deadly dull to watch

[1/10 · 6 March 2003]

At a loose end in Vienna earlier this week (2 March 2003), my friend and I went into the English Cinema on Mariahilferstrasse to watch "Gangs of New York". I fear deeply not merely for the aesthetic judgement of the cinema-going public, but for its mental and moral health in receiving this dire, overlong, gratuitously violent farrago with anything less than utter derision.

The "plot" (I use the term not merely loosely but with something that would verge, unenclosed with the requisite scare quotes, as intellectual fraudulence) has been described elsewhere on IMDb, so I shall not attempt, even if such an attempt were either possible or worthwhile, to corral the disjointed episodes of Scorsese's free fantasia into a semblance of order. Scorsese's name itself has become a kind of Open Sesame into the acceptance of people who ought otherwise to know better. I was never a fan; even "Taxi Driver" seemed to me a kind of early essay in the pornography of violence that has now become the stock-in-trade of most Hollywood directors. At least "Taxi Driver" was technically accomplished: well-filmed, well-acted, well-edited. Beyond the moderately impressive set designs and the pyrotechnics that appeal to four-year-olds of all ages, "Gangs of New York" is not even an averagely well-made movie. As for the acting, Di Caprio runs the full gamut of his repertoire from A to B, while Day Lewis is a Victorian melodrama villain who, were he not terrorising hapless street urchins with his cutlery collection and unconvincing New York accent, would be better occupied tying young ladies to railway tracks in the path of approaching steam locomotives. (Anyone casting a live-action movie of "Wacky Races" need look no further for Dick Dastardly!)

There is no editing, no discipline, no sense of internal form or tempo; there is "just one damn thing after another". These damn things are violence, violence, gratuitous sex and more violence. There is no serious attempt to build character, nor any sociopolitical analysis of the immiseration of the various tribes of the Five Points beyond the sentimental exoneration of anyone who is not white, Anglo-Saxon, male, heterosexual and Protestant, and the vilification and calumniation of anyone who is. Straight WASP male - Boo!

At the height of the draft riots I was reminded briefly of a far better movie: bloated WASP (boo!) David Hemmings's attempts to maintain a stiff upper-lip as his grand residence was besieged was a sillier re-run of the scene in "Carry On Up The Khyber", where the Raj feign indifference during "tiffin" to the invading natives.

A rotten movie that glorifies anarchy and senseless violence. Avoid, avoid, avoid! I only give it 1 out of 10 because IMDb do not give me the option to give it 0.

Quest for Love (1971)

Counterfactual history and unanswered questions

[10/10 · 28 January 2003]

To my considerable annoyance, every time this movie has been shown on TV I haven't had my VCR ready to record. I've probably seen it about three or four times, on the proverbial rainy afternoons when little-regarded films are broadcast. It's been described by other IMDb reviewers as a sci-fi love story, and it certainly is that. But it's also a rare foray for a mainstream movie into counterfactual history. (In this respect it resembles novels such as Kingsley Amis's "The Alteration", Keith Roberts' "Pavane" and Robert Harris's "Fatherland" more than it resembles other movies.) Colin Bell, a physicist, finds himself in a parallel version of our world after an experiment that goes wrong. The Second World War has not happened, and in all kinds of subtle and intriguing ways society is less advanced. The course of his own life has been drastically different as well: he is a playwright and novelist, not a physicist; he attended Oxford (arts and humanities-based) not Cambridge (science-based); his best friend (played by Denholm Elliot) has not lost his arm in WW2; most significantly, while single in OUR world, he discovers that he is, albeit unfaithfully, married in this one.

I'll concede that the conclusion of the movie IS rushed, but the rest of it is so superbly executed that I'm prepared to overlook this. Of course not all of the implications of this bizarre scenario are investigated; how could they be in a 90-minute movie? I'd agree with the other IMDb reviewer, who remarked that OUR world is limned far less vividly than its doppelganger. But this is surely as it should be; after all, we KNOW our world.

The unanswered question that has nagged me every time I have seen the movie is: Where is the other Colin Trafford? Surely the arrogant, womanising drunk isn't on the loose in our world, wreaking havoc in the the domain of research physics? (I think we're meant to assume that he's temporarily inhabiting his double's comatose body in hospital.) What is highly ingenious, and could pass unnoticed, such is the subtlety of its handling, is the way in which, although we never actually see him, we infer from people's reactions exactly what sort of person the other Colin Trafford was. (I'm reminded of the scene in the original "Nutty Professor" in which Buddy Love is introduced; we see him, at first, entirely in terms of other people's reactions.)

We still seem to be too near to the 60s and 70s (psychologically if not chronologically) for people to overlook the now-quaint fashions. Come on, though! Even the 70s are thirty years ago now. We're not surprised to see people in Edwardian times, or the 1930s, dressed in radically different clothes. Why should it strike as odd (and funny) that people more than a generation ago inhabited a universe more different from ours than the one that physicist Colin Trafford finds himself in? Every time I read someone dismiss a movie because the fashions are dated I want to scream! Such a lack of historical perspective means that there's a very real danger that anyone much under 40 or so will not be able to observe the subtle, but very real, contrast between the "real" world in "Quest For Love", and its slightly more old-fashioned twin, and will thus miss out on an important layer of the movie's meaning.

Lord Love a Duck (1966)

Seductive and magical

[10/10 · 20 January 2003]

When it came to voting, I wavered over this movie. At first I gave it 9/10 (fool!). Then I thought really hard, conjuring up scenes in my mind's eye and ear. I had to give it 10/10. (It's interesting that other reviewers have seen parallels with another mordant mid-60s comedy set in Southern California, "The Loved One".)

I first saw LLAD when I was 19 years old (nearly 24 years ago!), and fell in love with it immediately. To judge from some of the other reviews, it really does work a kind of magic on a suitably receptive viewer. (In this respect it resembles another cult movie, the original "Sweet November", which I didn't see until I was over 40, but still loved. Just imagine the impact that movie would have had on me when I was half that age!) Just as many people (my younger self included) felt an instant identification with Holden Caulfield in "The Catcher In The Rye", it is difficult not to feel a powerful identification with Mollymauk, in spite of (and partly because of) his strangeness.

There are many strokes of genius in this movie, several of them referred to by other IMDb reviewers. One of them was to cast a 38-year-old man, albeit a boyish one, in the role of Mollymauk. I sometimes idly speculate about what it would be like to be 17- or 18-years-old, but knowing what I know now at 42. (There was a case a few years back in my native England of a man of 32 who had posed as a teenage schoolboy in order to obtain fraudulent admission to a medical school - his thwarted ambition as an adult. Surprisingly, his deception went undetected for months!) Whether, armed with such knowledge, I could actually abide the company of ordinary youths for any amount of time is a moot point! Be that as it may, Tuesday Weld is so beautiful, that it isn't surprising that even a superior intellect like Mollymauk's is reduced to helpless adoration. (How strange and poignant to think that this young goddess metamorphosed in less than thirty years into Robert Duvall's shrewish, unlovely wife in "Falling Down"!)

Some of the hostile reviews reveal the ever-present danger of this extraordinary, unique movie being mistaken for one of the several kinds of genre movies it wickedly satirises.

Postman's Knock (1962)

Unique Comedy from a Golden Age

[10/10 · 14 January 2003]

The mark of the greatest films is that they create a world of their own. "Postman's Knock" is absolutely unlike any other film you've ever seen, and obeys its own rules of plot, character and comedy. The late Spike Milligan was a fitful genius who could, occasionally, lapse into becoming an undisciplined bore, but here he is absolutely at the top of his form.

He plays a country postman seconded, in error it transpires (a conceit not dissimilar to that in 1963's "Heaven's Above!"), to the big city. The conventional comedic take on this situation is to exploit the bumpkin's lack of sophistication in unfamiliar surroundings, but "Postman's Knock" completely inverts this; the bumpkin is shown to be vastly superior to the urban fools with whom he comes into enforced contact. Milligan even gets the girl!

The late 50s and early 60s were, in hindsight, a golden age for British comedy. It's amazing how, at the turn of the decade, a number of highly individual, indeed quietly experimental, comedies were made: e.g. "School For Scoundrels", "Bottoms Up!" and "Postman's Knock". (Later on in the 60s there were "A Jolly Bad Fellow", "You Must Be Joking!" and the amazing "Rotten To The Core".) These were not part of some franchise, however enjoyable (e.g. the St Trinians films, the Carry-Ons, etc), but apparently unrepeatable one-offs.

I'm surprised, and not a little disappointed, at the low rating this film has so far received from IMDb participants. It deserves to be cherished for its unique brilliance (I'd rather watch its opening credits than most complete films of the last thirty years), and I give it 10/10!

Having a Wild Weekend (1965)

"It was only a dream!"

[10/10 · 27 December 2002]

Recently I bought the DVD of "A Hard Day's Night", and spent a whole weekend watching and re-watching it. You might gather from this that I love the movie, as indeed I do, so what I'm going to say now may very well shock you: "Catch Us If You Can" is a better movie. Of course it wouldn't exist without the pioneering example of "A Hard Day's Night", which changed youth/pop movies for ever, but it really is a better movie.

I'm always inclined to see it as the final instalment of an early- to mid-60s trilogy of movies that began with Ken Russell's "French Dressing", and continued with Michael Winner's "The System". (I'm tempted to extend this to a tetralogy, with Richard Lester's "The Knack" as the last instalment. But, unlike the other movies, "The Knack" was a critical and commercial success - Palme D'Or at Cannes, and all that.) There's a continuity of mood, if not theme, between these movies, a strange mixture of exhilaration and wistfulness. The "phoney" 60s, a sort of hangover of the late 50s, lasted in Britain until about 1962 (although there were intimations of what was to come in Anthony Newley's "The Strange World of Gurney Slade"), but the Satire Boom, followed quickly by the Beatles, ushered in the real 1960s.

"Catch Us If You Can" takes a number of audacious risks from the very start: the Dave Clark Five are not a pop group playing themselves, but a team of stuntmen working on a series of TV commercials; their songs are performed off-screen as the soundtrack to the on-screen action; the movie insists strongly on the wintry season in which it was filmed: the frozen milk, the unbearably cold conditions of the meat warehouse, the orange growing safely inside the glass conservatory, the snowy countryside.

There is little of the lightness of mood of "A Hard Day's Night". "Catch Us If You Can", like its saturnine hero, Steve (Dave Clark), is strangely downbeat and melancholy. Not even the kittenish Dinah (Barbara Ferris) is capable of raising Steve's mood of dejection for very long. Absconding from the commercial they are filming, Steve and Dinah make an erratic Pilgrim's Progress across the West Country en route to an island, off the coast of Devon, that Dinah is contemplating buying. On the way they meet a group of proto-hippies (the term would not be in widespread use until the middle of 1966) squatting in abandoned buildings on Salisbury Plain, and a bickering middle-aged couple living in the opulent surroundings of Bath's Royal Crescent. In a sense, all of these people are in flight from the modern world.

The ultimate source of Steve's dejection is Leon Zissell, the svengali-like advertising executive, who is quite evidently besotted with Dinah. Zissell casts his shadow wherever the absconding couple might find themselves.

Guy and Nan, the bickering middle-aged couple, seem somewhat sinister at first, but they show themselves to be essentially good-hearted. Both are collectors, and we initially assume that Steve and Dinah are to be added to their collections. Actually, Nan collects old clothes, while Guy collects old phonograph recordings, photographs, etc., ("The pop art of yesteryear"). Anyone viewing "Catch Us If You Can" nearly forty years on will see how it has now been added to Guy's collection itself, a clever and telling touch. (Touching, too.)

The Austin Powers movies, funny and clever as they often are, have seriously distorted younger people's perceptions of the 1960s. Amidst all the "grooviness" there was always a quieter, more reflective aspect to the 60s (e.g. "Blow-Up"), and "Catch Us If You Can" captures this. Clear your mind of preconceptions: this movie is NOT a failed attempt at re-making "A Hard Day's Night", but a brilliantly successful attempt to make something quite different - a thoughtful, grown-up film that stands the test of time.

The Nutty Professor (1963)

Ol' Blue Eyes is blackened!

[10/10 · 27 December 2002]

Now that Ol' Blue Eyes has been safely translated to the Big Casino, the truth about "The Nutty Professor" can finally be told: Buddy Love IS Sinatra! Let's not pussyfoot around this fact. One or two of your earlier reviewers come close to admitting it (hernebay, and dodge196, who refers to Sinatra's "crooning and thuggery").

There's nothing remotely comparable in Eddie Murphy's re-make(s). A 1963 audience would have registered instant (if uncomfortable) brand recognition when presented with the all-singing, all-drinking, all-brawling Buddy Love. Maybe Sinatra saw the joke, although this doesn't really seem very likely. More likely he never saw the movie! Just as well for Jerry.

Night & Day (2001–2003)

Ambient Soap

[24 December 2002]

Strange how this oddly understated show divides opinion so violently. I watched the first 20 or so episodes when it was airing several times a week, without quite being drawn into the curiously un-insistent plotlines. The disappearance of the beautiful but unlikeable Jane Harper (Georgina Walker) ought to be an event of considerable drama, but such is the gentle, ambient quality of the show, that even this fails to move the viewer very much. Is this a failing? I'm inclined to give "Night & Day" the benefit of the doubt. When I first saw it I wasn't sure whether it was experimental or just incompetent. I don't think it really matters.

People who like quick development of plotlines are urged to stay away! "Night & Day" unfolds at a glacial pace. It was probably inevitable, in the light of this, that it would be reduced to one episode a week. This seems less an ignominious concession, and more a realisation on the part of the programme's makers of its natural tempo.

Some viewers will also be irked by the difficulty of establishing who the central character is. Initially Della, Jane's shy friend, seemed to occupy this role, but as the show has continued this would seem to be less the case.

On balance, I find the show likeable. Its lack of urgency, its ambient, dreamy quality, and its evocation of a quiet London (which still exists in pockets here and there) mark it out as unusual in a TV world where noise, incident and naturalism are the norm.

Call Me Genius (1961)

"The Art of Making Money"

[29 November 2002]

Tony Hancock was the biggest British comedian of the late 50s and early 60s. Viewing his two (not entirely representative) films and watching (and listening) to his "Half-Hour" comedy shows (running separately, if concurrently, on BBC television and radio), young people (those under 35 or so) will probably find this fact baffling unless they are extraordinarily well-informed about social conditions in immediately postwar Britain. There also seems to be a kind of gender barrier. Women of my acquaintance, even those that satisfy the fairly stringent criteria I detail in my previous sentence, seem to have found Hancock uniformly unfunny.

Hancock's humour, it must be said, was unconventional. It is entirely driven by the dialectic, if you will, between character and situation. Hancock loathed gags, and forbade his scriptwriters (usually the brilliant duo of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson) to indulge in them. It is also exceptionally restricted in time (late 50s), social class ("shabby-genteel" lower-middle) and place (the south-east of England). Yet Hancock, who bestrode Britain like a colossus in his heyday, nurtured the powerful delusion that he could succeed in America.

It would take an amazing act of empathy on the part of an American to penetrate Hancock's humour as displayed in his radio and TV shows. As a technician he was flawless, possessing a sense of comic timing unequalled by anybody in Britain except the probably equally unexportable Kenneth Williams (perhaps best known outside the UK because of his strong involvement in the "Carry-On" series of films). Needless to say, Hancock and Williams, the two greatest British comedians of all time, loathed and vilified each other.

"The Rebel" (pointedly re-christened "Call Me Genius" in the America Hancock was desperate to impress) was released to great disappointment in 1961. In hindsight it has gained in favour, its initial cool reception a matter of some puzzlement.

Hancock, in the film, is an office drudge who harbours artistic ambitions way beyond his hopelessly limited technical skills. However, he jettisons his boring day-job to share an artistic garret in Paris (only 200 or so miles from London) with a frustrated, but genuinely talented, young artist (Paul Massie). Hancock's infantile daubs are hailed as works of genius in the pretentious circles he inhabits. Galton and Simpson's screenplay wastes no opportunity to satirise the credulity of the modern-art world, and its unfailing capacity to court lucrative charlatans.

Can those outside the British Isles understand this film? I hope so. The office environment and lodgings Hancock occupies are stultifying, but the artistic world of Paris is shown to be as corrupt and foolish in its own way (NB. the identically uniformed "Existentialists", indistinguishable, in a sense, from their bowler-hatted counterparts with whom Hancock works in central London). Art does get a slightly better press in this film than commerce, since the possibility of genuine artistic talent (i.e. Paul's (Hancock's young flatmate and protégé)) is acknowledged. Nevertheless, the presence of trend-hungry buffoons within the artistic world (e.g. George Sanders' art dealer) indicates the interpenetration of the commercial and artistic worlds. Is art-dealing George Sanders any less a despicable entrepreneur than Hancock's erstwhile manager in his City of London counting-house, John le Mesurier?

Although we speak essentially the same language (I think the differences are often over-stated), cultural barriers remain between the UK and the US. However, Americans would do well to look closely at Tony Hancock, partly for his intrinsic value, and partly for the huge influence, conscious and unconscious, he has wielded over the British psyche (here I controversially include Ireland, which remains culturally close to the UK). His second feature-film ("The Punch And Judy Man"), while telling in its own way, is less valuable overall, both inside the UK (and its satellites) and beyond.