Sunday 29 September 2024

For what it's worth...




UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of September 20-22, 2024):

1 (1) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12A)
2 (2) Speak No Evil (15) ****
3 (new) The Substance (18) **
4 (3) Lee (15)
5 (re) Interstellar (12A) **
6 (5) Despicable Me 4 (U)
7 (new) 200% Wolf (U)
8 (6) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *
9 (7) The Critic (15)
10 (8) It Ends with Us (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:
1. Shaun of the Dead [above]
2. Mean Girls
3. Seven Samurai
5. Kal Ho Naa Ho


DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (4) Bad Boys: Ride or Die (15)
2 (1) Inside Out 2 (U) ****
3 (3) Despicable Me 4 (U)
4 (2) Twisters (12) ***
5 (5) The Bikeriders (15)
6 (new) Trap (15)
7 (7) The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (PG) ***
8 (14) Dune: Part Two (12) **
9 (12) The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (12) ****
10 (16) The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (12) ****


My top five: 
1. Inside Out 2

 
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Schindler's List (Sunday, BBC Two, 10pm)
2. Summer of Soul (Wednesday, Channel 4, 2.20am)
3. Kokomo City (Monday, Channel 4, 1.45am)
4. Men in Black (Sunday, Channel 4, 6.10pm)
5. Deerskin (Saturday, Channel 4, 2am)

Paradise lost: "The Fall"


Less a movie, more a mirage, a glimmer of something special amid the desert, at once breathtaking and exasperating. Once upon a time, there was a visionary young man called Tarsem Singh, who styled himself Tarsem, after Michelangelo and Rembrandt. Immersed in the exuberant visual culture of his native India, Tarsem first caught eyes as a maker of baroque pop promos: his "Losing My Religion", fashioned in collaboration with mandolin-strumming minstrels R.E.M., earned him both a Grammy and an MTV Music Video Award. The Hollywood system came calling, keen to feast on Tarsem's hypersaturated images, though his characteristically striking feature debut, 2000's The Cell, played like a very weird Jennifer Lopez video and crashed and burned at the box office. Striking out on his own, he envisioned something more ambitious yet: an 1910s-set anthology of lavishly illustrated bedtime stories that a crocked Tinseltown stuntman (Lee Pace) tells a bored young girl (Catinca Untaru) while recuperating in an L.A. hospital. 2006's The Fall was intended from the off as a grandiose and generous gesture: Tarsem's own Arabian Nights or Mahabharata. It was something like the movies with which Guillermo del Toro would emerge as one of the contemporary cinema's great fantasists, emerging around the same moment as Pan's Labyrinth; its layered storytelling anticipated what Ang Lee would later do - to Oscar-winning effect - with 2012's Life of Pi. The results would be carried shoulder-high into cinemas by David Fincher and Spike Jonze, two creatives who knew a gifted imagemaker when they saw one. Yet other forces were gathering against our hero. With its virtuosic interplay of light and dark, the film was deemed too grave for children (it opened with a 15 certificate in the UK, immediately halving its commercial chances); the Hollywood beancounters, meanwhile, felt it too expensive for a film that wasn't based on pre-existing material. No-one was ready for it, no-one knew how to sell it, and no-one had seen anything quite like it. Upon its first run, The Fall fell early and hard, and with it fell the technicolor dream of a certain kind of filmmaking.

Reissued this weekend in a restored director's cut, Singh's film invites speculation on the version of The Fall Hollywood would have made if they'd had their way. That version would likely have insisted on more familiar faces, fixed points to better reassure the viewer. Untaru is not the customary stageschool-polished automaton but an actual girl, a non-professional setting about her lines with unusual rhythms and a pronounced Slavic accent, one of several elements this circus-movie picked up as it trotted around the globe; though a semi-familiar face from theatre and TV at the time of filming, Pace, similarly, wasn't going to sell many tickets on the back of his name. Yet this pair prove central to this version's charm. His face proto-Pattinsonian in repose, Pace cuts a properly romantic figure in the bullfighter-bandit outfit he wears in the film's flashbacks, and he's a model of patience around his sometimes stuttering young co-star: had the film been the hit its makers hoped, the actor would almost certainly have been several rungs closer to the movie A-list than he presently is. More critically, the Hollywood version would also surely have demanded another pass or two at this script, to pull the story - and the story-within-the-story - into appreciably tighter shape. As The Fall meanders around the world, it assembles an unlikely squad of avengers, including Alexander the Great (Kim Uylenbroek), Charles Darwin (Leo Bill) and freed slave Otta Benga (Marcus Wesley); yet these characters appear to have been chosen less for the collective sense they make than for the opportunities they provide Eiko Ishioka (Bram Stoker's Dracula) to whip up spectacular costumes. The superhero movies that followed would be denigrated for offering too much exposition, not wanting to lose the viewer and the revenue stream they represented; The Fall would arguably have benefitted from a dash more explanation of who's in play and what's at stake, some narrative counterbalance to the film's visual magnificence.

But - boy - are those visuals magnificent. You may not mind being slightly or totally lost when finding yourself in the presence of such spectacular reference points; these images unfurl across a wide screen like banners. A tree explodes into flames (it's the Tarsem equivalent of the burning bush); shrouds take on the most primary of primary colours; a tribal gathering beats the supposedly groundbreaking Avatar to the punch by three years; there are extraordinary scenes in deserts and quarries and outside the Taj Mahal. All this beauty is liberating rather than oppressive; with each shot, Tarsem reminds his sometime Hollywood paymasters you do realise you can go anywhere with a camera, don't you? Any residual frustration stems from how the whole comes within touching distance of greatness, and what came next. The Fall is one of the most gorgeous failures of the century, and may still be closer than anything else around to the idea of cinema we retain in our heads. Yet two summers after Singh's film initially sank without trace, the colossal box-office success of Iron Man determined the new direction of Hollywood fantasy; from here on out, our family entertainments would be almost exclusively setbound and pixellated, cooked up in the safe, controllable environment of a Silicon Valley computer lab, and populated almost exclusively by familiar faces. Singh would try once again, adding 3D to his palette, with 2011's strikingly strange Immortals; but eventually even he would bend to industry norms, with takes on Snow White (2012's Mirror Mirror) and The Wizard of Oz (Prime Video's Emerald City, an early showcase for Hit Man's Adria Arjona as Dorothy Gale) where the audience knew to some degree what they were getting into. Grander designs and gestures would have to be parked for now; when Singh returned to India in 2023, somewhat chastened by experience, it was to make the largely naturalistic Dear Jassi. Impossible not to revisit The Fall and realise we lost something the minute this particular dream slipped away - but how stirring to have it back among us.

The Fall is now showing in selected cinemas, and available to stream via MUBI.

Thursday 26 September 2024

In memoriam: Kathryn Crosby (Telegraph 25/09/24)


Kathryn Crosby
, who has died aged 90, was an actress and singer who sparked considerable tabloid curiosity in 1957 upon marrying Bing Crosby, then thirty years her senior.

At the time, Crosby was emerging as a pertly petite presence in superior indie and studio ventures, billed by her stage name Kathryn Grant. She pulled focus from Kim Novak in casino heist movie 5 Against the House (1955); she was delightful dodging Ray Harryhausen effects as Princess Parisa in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), while her especially hostile witness proved central to Anatomy of a Murder (1959).

Yet this promising career was paused as the new Mrs. Bing settled into Crosby family life. The pair had met while the crooner was filming White Christmas (1954): “I was walking onto the Paramount lot [and] carrying some things to the drama department. And I heard a voice behind me, it said, ‘hi Tex, what’s your hurry?’ And I stopped dead. It was Bing Crosby.”

Though Grant fell rapidly – “I looked into his big blue eyes and about fifteen minutes later, I realized I was in love” – the initial courtship lasted several years. By this point, Bing was in his fifties, a survivor of a turbulent first marriage to nightclub singer Dixie Lee, and a noted, carefree womaniser besides: one of his flings, the actress Inger Stevens, only learned she’d been jilted upon watching a news report about the Grant-Crosby nuptials.

His new bride entertained few illusions: “[Bing] was a pretty cute kid when it came to convincing a girl that what she really wanted was to stay home and scrub floors. He didn’t know that he was a male chauvinist pig, but he was!” Diverse lifestyles posed a further challenge: “He was an insomniac. He slept for hours. And then he woke up and read all night until about six [am]… Well, I got up at six, so I upset him, which was too bad for him.”

The marriage endured nevertheless, with Crosby sporadically guesting on her husband’s TV specials; Bing returned the favour, appearing on San Francisco network KPIX-TV’s The Kathryn Crosby Show. They remained inseparable until Bing succumbed to a fatal heart attack after playing golf in October 1977: “He had had enough problems. But he went out on top of his game. He was wonderful and he was with friends and doing what he loved.”

Olive Kathryn Grandstaff was born in Houston, Texas on November 25, 1933, one of five children to county commissioner Delbert Grandstaff Sr. and his wife Olive (née Stokely), a music teacher. A child actor, she drew even more attention competing on the teen beauty-pageant circuit. After one judge suggested she try for movie roles, Grant and her mother flew to Hollywood: “Monday, we went to Paramount. On Wednesday, I tested with Bill Holden. And on Friday, I signed a seven-year contract.”

The newly renamed Kathryn Grant made an uncredited screen debut as a showgirl in the biopic So This is Love (1953); she was also spied, through Jimmy Stewart’s binoculars, around the songwriter’s piano in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). For some while, Grant combined acting with studying, earning a fine arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1955. 

As the unofficial keeper of the Bing flame, she oversaw the annual Crosby Golf Tournament in North Carolina; she also penned two memoirs, 1967’s Bing and Other Things and 1983’s My Life with Bing. In the press, she defended her husband against claims of physical abuse made by his oldest son Gary in his own 1983 memoir Going My Own Way: “From the time I met Bing, he never touched his boys. And Gary just told stories that were… They got a good audience.”

She resumed acting after Bing’s death, appearing in Broadway’s 1996 revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s State Fair. In 2000, she married Maurice William Sullivan, a teacher who’d homeschooled the Crosbys’ children; ten years later, Sullivan died in a car crash in which Crosby was badly injured. Her final big-screen role came earlier that year with Henry Jaglom’s showbiz drama Queen of the Lot (2010).

In Richard Grudens’ 2003 biography Bing Crosby: Crooner of the Century, Crosby revisited her first marriage with evident affection: “I’m glad I married an older man... When I married Bing […] his character was set. In other words, I knew what I was getting. With a younger man, you can’t tell how he will develop.”

She is survived by her three children with Bing.

Kathryn Crosby, born November 25, 1933, died September 20, 2024. 

On demand: "The White Balloon"


Hailing from the era when Iranian filmmakers were centring children in a bid to circumvent the censors, 1995's 
The White Balloon is a gem-like anecdote, chiselled out by Abbas Kiarostami (credited screenwriter), polished up by Jafar Panahi (Kiarostami's former assistant, making his feature directorial debut at a moment when he could still roam the streets without restriction). You could - and probably should - teach the economy of the first movement, which in a series of crisply congruent shots lays out both the route by which a seven-year-old girl (Aida Mohammedkhani) and her mother (Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy) return home from shopping, and the exact status of this family's constituent parts. Patriarch: gruff, demanding, offscreen, heard but never seen. Mother: generous but harassed and distracted. Daughter: relentless in her quest for a plumper goldfish to serve as the centrepiece of the traditional New Year's celebrations. On one level, the latter is intended as no more nor less than a representative Iranian girl, but Kiarostami and Panahi invite alternative readings of this moppet: as a consumer who's never happy with what she's got, to the extent she will drift into the waiting, greased-and-greasy palms of grifters and crooks; as an innocent who hasn't yet learned the rules of society, and so thinks nothing of transgressing them; and, perhaps most resonantly, as a fellow artist, who knows exactly what she wants but struggles to find the means to pay for it, and often finds others standing obstructively in her way. The setting is markedly different from the films that preceded it, the milieu now more comfortable, in as much as anything about contemporary Iranian society might be considered comfortable. Yet The White Balloon, though outwardly couched as a family film, proves just as self-reflexive as Close-Up, Where is My Friend's House? or the later The Wind Will Carry Us.

It gets there by means of a sly subterfuge. Though the girl is established as the obvious focal point and point of viewer identification, The White Balloon is really a running commentary on the character of everybody else we see on screen: the unscrupulous traders, the dismissive pet shop owner, the overworked tailor, the thoughtless scooter drivers, the good Samaritan prepared only to go so far. Once again, we bear witness to the great virtue of late 20th century Iranian cinema: simple interactions - and sparse dialogues, in this case between characters who spend a good stretch of the running time sitting on a grille at the side of the road - which click together like mosaic tiles or those opening shots into a gradually all-encompassing picture. As Kiarostami and Panahi saw it in 1995, neither this system not this society is functioning as it should; as a result, even a transaction as notionally simple as buying a goldfish turns into a protracted obstacle course, with no guarantee of the desired outcome at the end of it. The ending to this secular parable is deliberately left open, more mysterious than conventionally happy; that's why it stays with you so. (In its own way, it is a gift as great as any goldfish: something to take home and let swim around inside your head.) On the verge of tears throughout yet driven by a single-minded determination to see her mini-mission through, Mohammedkhani is a picture of constancy, resolve and resilience in what surely has to be one of the all-time great child performances, all the more impressive for seeming to understand and embody ideas altogether greater than her pipsqueak self. By my reckoning, she must now be in her mid-thirties; we can only wonder whether Iranian society is working out any better for her today.

The White Balloon is currently available to stream via YouTube.

On demand: "His Three Daughters"


His Three Daughters
 is one from the talkier end of the US indie spectrum. Writer-director Azazel Jacobs, son of Ken, relocates us to a poky two-bedroom property in a lower Manhattan housing co-op, where three sisters (to be more precise, two sisters and a stepsister) are coming to terms with the fact their father, sequestered offscreen in one of those bedrooms, is entering the final stages of terminal cancer. Eldest Carrie Coon is characterised immediately by her taut black polo neck and the way she barks her opening lines directly into the lens like an army drill sergeant; her action plan, over this mournful period, is to turn everything into a confrontation. Middle daughter Elizabeth Olsen is spacier and dreamier but also more amenable, a mom who attends Grateful Dead concerts just for the time out they provide. Youngest Natasha Lyonne, meanwhile, continues to get stoned, hang out with pals and bet ineffectually on sports, anything to avoid squabbling with her siblings and the fallout from the impromptu sick bay set up next door. They all talk, nevertheless. They talk because, as anyone who's been in such situations can attest, there's nothing much else to do save sit around and wait for the sad inevitable to happen; they talk because they haven't been in the same room for a while, and therefore have much to talk about. Jacobs sets the father's gradual deterioration against an altogether more consoling renewal of bonds among his offspring: three very different personalities are seen not to merge exactly, as they might in any Bergman film on this theme, but to occupy common ground for a while, geographically, conversationally, spiritually. Good for them.

How do we feel about this? Possibly relieved, for starters, that this kind of mid-budget, low-action, non-computerised kind of filmmaking still has a place in the modern movie economy, even if - again - it's fallen subject to the now-standard blink-and-you'll-miss-it theatrical engagement before being abandoned to the Netflix algorithms. A little restless from time to time, maybe? There is, after all, only one way His Three Daughters can plausibly end; we, too, find ourselves waiting for the old fella to pass. It isn't just the limited square-footage of Jacobs' film that reminds us we could be watching off-Broadway fringe theatre: minor players (a hospice nurse, a fuckbuddy, a security guard) enter and exit stage left and right, certain conversations go round and round, and every now and again scenes resolve into monologues. Netflix in its current awards-chasing configuration has demonstrated a historical inclination for the filmed play - I'm thinking back to 2020's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom - and Daughters is in that general territory, if not exactly that. That said, Jacobs uses this stage to rejig - and re-energise - the underlying tenets of the deathbed drama. As borne out by its subtly punning title, His Three Daughters is about ownership, but it's less about ownership of a property or company, as in everything from The Cherry Orchard to TV's recent Succession, than it is about ownership of a person: how invested each daughter has been in their father, and therefore - by a process of emotional trigonometry - how they relate to one another. The results scan as much more intimate, personal and broadly touching for that: you sense the film has had to shut itself away behind closed doors and be done as an indie piece because this also shuts out the bigger business that corrupts every other walk of life and every other movie you stumble across nowadays.

The closeknit approach permits Jacobs to pull off a terrific final-act coup de théâtre - something imagined, rather than strictly naturalistic or realistic; it is, among other things, what I imagine good theatre to be like - which overturns everything the first hour sets up in our minds about the father's identity and condition. (It's assisted by a textbook supporting performance from an actor who's been around for years and never quite got the flowers he deserves.) Yet even before this flourish, I was reassured to be back in such good company, among players capable of bending Jacobs' neat writing towards stressy, ragged or zoned-out life. Lyonne arguably needs this showcase the least: she's been getting along just fine of late in superior streaming television (Russian Doll, Poker Face), yet she gets to addend a note or two of vulnerability to her range. (You spot it most clearly in her off-russet hair: not the actress's usual shade, but that of an insecure shrugger who's had a bad dye job yet can't face going back to complain.) Good on Jacobs for thinking to rescue Olsen from the banalities of the MCU: she's all nervy warmth now, and it's funny that, when driven to swear, the worst that passes the character's lips is a circumspect "dammit", the curse of someone used to holding their tongue in the presence of children. Coon, conversely, does a ruthless sketch of a businesswoman who's been sleeping on a couch, up to her eyeballs in worry, then aces the tougher assignment of making us understand and empathise with this snippy hard-ass. Jacobs still wins everybody round by talking; he's apparently trying to reclaim the centre ground independent film abandoned in recent years as its creatives went in pursuit of ever more extreme and eyecatching sights and sensations. Yet Daughters' vaguely therapeutic air came as a tonic, after suffering such a violent reaction to The Substance: this, by contrast, is what it looks like when actresses are afforded dignity and respect before the camera. More of that as we head into the autumn-winter season, and we might find ourselves on the right track again.

His Three Daughters is now streaming on Netflix.

Wednesday 25 September 2024

Meat too: "The Substance"


Coralie Fargeat is the French writer-director whose tastes were apparently formed amid the turn-of-the-century New Extreme Cinema, and who's since come to translate that cinema's French variants for that English-speaking audience arthouse directors now have to court if they want to remain fully funded. Revenge, Fargeat's rape-revenge rerouting of 2017, was something like 2000's Baise-moi with a stronger visual sense and less (i.e. no) unsimulated fucking. The Substance - foremost succès de scandale of Cannes 2024, and by a long chalk the unlikeliest film ever to bear the Working Title logo - revisits the thematic territory and confrontational visual language of 2001's Trouble Every Day and 2002's In My Skin, being about a) women, b) their bodies and c) the messy tangles a) get in with b). That Fargeat is thinking more commercially than either Claire Denis or Marina de Van ever were can be deduced both from her decision to centre the film on Hollywood women, and how she forsakes those predecessors' knotty ambiguities in favour of often striking, front-and-centre images that even those traditionally averse to reading subtitles might readily understand. The strengths and limitations of the Fargeat approach are graspable from The Substance's opening five minutes: an inspired, fixed-camera evocation of the creation and subsequent besmirching of a celebratory star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and then an irksome scene-setter that involves Dennis Quaid (as a sleazy exec called Harvey, geddit) bellowing into the camera at close range while pissing all over the audience's shoes. 4DX proves an instant no-go, but even in standard 2D, this is a conspicuously ugly, wilfully grotesque film on the rigours of the high-end beauty regime.

To better connect The Substance with the multiplex crowd, Fargeat has not unsavvily cast Demi Moore in the lead role of Elizabeth Sparkle, the veteran star who submits to a disastrous deaging process in a bid to pep up her flagging career. Unlike the craggy-faced movie musclemen observed taking it all too easy amid the cosy retirement home of the Expendables series, Moore has been shown by history to relish a challenge: feigning carnal attraction to mid-period Michael Douglas and Robert Redford, working with Ridley Scott (while shaving off her own hair) on G.I. Jane, trying to maintain a leading-lady career in the wake of 1996's Striptease. The Substance, which trades openly in the physical difference between Demi Then (the dewy sylph of About Last Night and St. Elmo's Fire) and Demi Now (the harder-faced survivor of tabloid intrusion, motherhood and Tinseltown PT), undeniably presents as quite some workout for a comeback role. Moore spends the first half having to withstand the kind of unflattering lighting Bette Davis and Joan Crawford wouldn't have countenanced, so that her director might goose the viewer into wondering whether we, too, might take the desperate measures Elizabeth does: namely entering into a Dorian Gray-like lifeshare arrangement with a younger, perkier version of herself (Margaret Qualley), extracted from her own DNA. She spends the second half trapped under increasingly heavy latex, looking like Peter Boyle in the Everybody Loves Raymond reruns. 

That central transformation is at least underpinned by an internal visual logic. A restless, three-headed editing squad, including Fargeat herself, ensures these images flow, synch and pulse, however much they threaten to be obliterated by grue. Yet the film never alights on a comparable narrative logic, and if you're one of those people prone to leaning towards cinemagoing companions and whispering "that wouldn't happen", you should keep several blocks away from anywhere The Substance is screening. Sure, we're entering the realms of nightmarish fantasy: upon emerging from the Sparkle form, the Qualley doppelganger/substitute has to stitch up the neck-to-buttcrack slit left behind and then keep this shed skin fed and watered, which seems a terrible faff, and may well describe what it is to have to keep up appearances on any regular basis. Yet in the grounding human interaction Fargeat repeatedly falters: a lovestruck former classmate of Elizabeth's handing over a phone number he's dropped in a puddle (rather than, you know, writing it out again, as you would), or Sparkle herself jemmying open the back shutter of her clinic's visibly derelict premises so as to get her hands on the desired elixir of youth. Fargeat's aiming for the morgue-like rigour of a Kubrick or Cronenberg, but she fatally lacks their surgical precision; when she shows her hand, it's forever more slapdash than steady. (It strikes me as truly bizarre that the Cannes jury should have garnished her with Best Screenplay, of all prizes: snatches of the movie's dialogue sound at best inadequately translated.)

Every frame continues to exert a sticky visual compulsion. Fargeat and her design and effects team have conspired to exaggerate a world not dissimilar to ours, cranking both the colours and the neuroses way up past eleven. But an hour into The Substance, I realised it was much the same gawker tendency one gets upon glimpsing Katie Price's singular combination of lips, hips and tits in a newspaper or on TV: the compulsion is the trashier part of ourselves wondering just how big and just how bad things are going to get. (The answer, in this instance: very big and pretty bad.) The Substance likely won't be revived all that often - it's too gross to be even campily enjoyable, and conceals precisely zero hidden depths - but it may yet be projected onto the walls of some hipster bar, so the gathered patrons can ooh at the endless butt shots and eww at the sundered flesh, really the only permissible responses Fargeat's film allows us. It's far from uncommercial, resembling a series of billboards where the images are writ large enough that they couldn't be missed from space, let alone Hollywood Boulevard; it likely won't do Fargeat's career any harm whatsoever in today's film business. 

Still, from the POV of the cheap seats, it's depressing to witness the nuance, rhetoric and intelligent provocation of the French movies that inspired The Substance being drained away, leaving behind sensation without even a passing shadow of seriousness, a sorry sick joke. Fargeat heads hell-for-leather towards body horror, and then keeps mindlessly piling it on, like Demi's latex; a listless riot of broken teeth, snapped fingernails and suppurating orifices, the movie sets about doing with dysmorphia what Joker, another inexplicable recipient of a major festival prize, did with mental health, and thereby emerges as the grimmest conceivable cash-in of 2024. For all The Substance's wanton maximalism - and it feels wildly bloated and gassy at two hours twenty, lumbering on long after its last dubious ideas have left its body - any takeaways from this experience are minimal at best. A notion Fargeat may soon be snapping at Luca Guadagnino's heels for leftfield corporate branding gigs; a vague, hangover-like understanding of how hard it is to be a woman, and a woman in the entertainment industry in particular. But isn't it just as bad when all a female writer-director can think of to do with her actresses is regard them as pieces of meat?

The Substance is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Tuesday 24 September 2024

Crimes of passion: "Strange Darling"


All the right scenes, not necessarily in the right order. JT Mollner's festival breakout
Strange Darling follows July's slasher redux In a Violent Nature in offering another deconstruction and reconstruction of careworn genre-movie dynamics. Its titles announce both a film shot entirely on 35mm and a story in six chapters before Mollner serves early notice of scrambling intent by presenting us with Chapter Three: the misadventures of a bloodied peroxide blonde (Willa Fitzgerald), pursued through the wide-open spaces of middle America by a coke-snorting, shotgun-touting male (Kyle Gallner) introduced in the credits as The Demon. Inevitably, this opening gambit proves a feint and a lure - what we might expect from a conventional thriller - being as it is only the midpoint of a story that proves somewhat more complex (or, more precisely yet, twistier) than first suggested. That story is gradually revealed, in all its gory glory, as Mollner shoots off at tangents: a flying visit to a woodland property housing a disappointingly underused Ed Begley Jr. and Barbara Hershey as a couple with eccentric eating and leisure habits; a flashback to a motel hook-up where the leads prove capable of more than the grunting and yelping they're introduced doing, and Mollner reveals the events of Chapters Two through Six are but an extension of sexual power games; multiple renditions of the signature song "Love Hurts"; and a midfilm twist that may even be guessable from the bare-bones synopsis above.

Rest assured, everything slots together eventually, in ways that are clever more often than not. We are encouraged to guess which chapter will be coming up next, and fair begged to regard the whole as what we might call a re-Nolanification of noir. The leads, semi-familiar TV/PPV/VOD faces who've never been granted a platform such as this, commit to this chicanery, particularly in what is - chronologically at least - the characters' initial encounter, fraught as it proves with bad behaviour, heinous language and pressing issues of consent. Here, we acknowledge (maybe even admire) the high levels of risk involved, and that there are plentiful moments where, in the hands of a clumsier filmmaker, a performer might have been made to look foolish or stupid. Still, I kept wondering whether chicanery is all that Strange Darling is, maybe even the best that it is. If this narrative has any bearing whatsoever in male-female relations, it's that arrived at by a gifted yet unworldly screenwriting student, so bamboozled by the desires of the women around him - what turns them on, what gets them off - that he feels compelled to write about it. It's doubtless healthier that this befuddlement finds its way into script form, much as it's healthier that Tarantino pays his actresses to film their feet rather than harassing women at bus stops. But it still smells sour and resistible whenever it begins to seep off the screen and into the audience's lap. The real revelation with Strange Darling is that it is a fundamentally reactionary text; however Mollner shuffles it, all he's ultimately landed at is a novel way of filming - and punishing - a bloodied, semi-naked heroine. Plenty of achievement besides: it's knotty and tricky, adult to some degree, what film students delight in labelling as problematic, and actor-turned-cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi capably replicates the hazy, sundappled look of certain key 1970s horrors. Yet its sexual politics seem to date from the same era, which is why Strange Darling registers as one of those achievements that only leaves one suspicious of it, and its maker.

Strange Darling is now showing in selected cinemas.

Friday 20 September 2024

For what it's worth...




UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of September 13-15, 2024):

1 (1) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12A)
2 (new) Speak No Evil (15) ****
3 (new) Lee (15)
4 (re) Prima Facie - NT Live 2022 (15)
5 (6) Despicable Me 4 (U)
6 (4) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *
7 (new) The Critic (15)
8 (3) It Ends with Us (15)
9 (5) Alien: Romulus (15) ***
10 (new) ARM: Ajayante Randam Mosharam (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:
1. The Third Man 
3. Kal Ho Naa Ho


DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Inside Out 2 (U) ****
2 (2) Twisters (12) ***
3 (3) Despicable Me 4 (U)
4 (5) Bad Boys: Ride or Die (15)
5 (re) The Bikeriders (15)
6 (4) A Quiet Place: Day One (15) ***
7 (7) The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (PG) ***
8 (9) Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga (15) ****
9 (new) Knuckles (12)
10 (12) The Fall Guy (12) **


My top five: 
1. Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga

 
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. The Big Sleep [above] (Saturday, BBC2, 1.10pm)
2. The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Sunday, BBC2, 11.45pm)
3. School of Rock (Sunday, Channel 4, 1.55pm)
4. Northern Soul (Saturday, BBC2, 11.45pm)
5. A Star is Born (Tuesday, BBC1, 10.40pm)

On demand: "The Unknown"


MGM's 1927 silent
The Unknown sets out a series of deeply dysfunctional, often outright perverse relationships that almost certainly owe less to the Spanish legend the screenwriters claim to be adapting than certain showbiz whispers of the period. Even before Freaks, director Tod Browning was drawn to the travelling circus as a lusty, salty miniature of polite society. Here, he establishes that an amputee knife thrower trading as Alonzo the Armless (Lon Chaney) has vowed to protect glamorous assistant Nanon (Joan Crawford) from the brutes and strongmen who would manhandle her, only for a major revelation - a twist of the arm, we might say - to throw all of the above information into fresh doubt. It's a weird story to begin with, made weirder still nowadays by the fact the twentysomething Crawford doesn't yet look anything like the Crawford of Hollywood lore, while a surgeon who looks exactly like Claude Reins turns out to be an actor who isn't Claude Reins. (If the film teaches us anything, it's that bodies are treacherous; they can betray us, and anyone else looking on.) And yet: the film is non-creaky, defiantly alive, as alert to the horrors and wonders of the human anatomy as any subsequent David Cronenberg feature. Each intertitle-delivered twist is a further jolt of electricity to the Frankenstein's monster of a plot; you watch the whole get more convoluted as it goes along - or, rather, you note how its contortions mirror those of its own characters. It can't possibly be headed in that direction, you tell yourself. Oh yes it can, retorts Browning, with a cackle in his voice and a malevolent glint in his eye. Strap in, then, but this is a silent movie that still grips and moves a crowd today, possibly because the horrors of love circa 1927 aren't entirely far removed from those you and I have known in the present day. "It was just something in here that stung like the lash of a whip," says Alonzo, gesturing to his heart, playing down his emotions, setting up Browning's ultra-macabre finale. I mean... oof.

The Unknown is now streaming via YouTube, and available to rent via Prime Video.

Thursday 19 September 2024

On demand: "The World to Come"


Lost from view as the world went into Covid lockdown, the Christine Vachon-produced, Mona Fastvold-directed period piece 
The World to Come is to the American cinema what Portrait of a Lady on Fire was to its French equivalent: an absorbing, involving and finally deeply moving new angle on the whole business of love in crinoline and long johns, elevated by the kind of textured writing and playing you may have thought had been purged from today's cinema. It opens on January 1, 1856, with Katherine Waterston's heroine Abigail reading from her diary: "We begin the New Year with little pride and no hope." A black-clad farmer's wife in a frosty backwoods nowhere, Abigail has already seen a child die in her arms, and has resolved to dial down her expectations for anything beyond a hard, passionless existence; her diarising, which continues to float up on the soundtrack at sporadic intervals, is a ghost of the literary life a woman with her evident eye, brains and sensitivity might have enjoyed had she been born in another time and place. Alas, in this world, she's married to Casey Affleck. Still, we are not set down here to mope and suffer, rather to feel our way toward rapture. We get a hint of it with the arrival in town, just ahead of spring's first shoots, of Tallie (Vanessa Kirby): red-haired, roughly the same age as Abigail, modern in her outlook and dress, visibly very fond of her new companion and confidante. Alas Tallie, too, has a beardy-mumbly indie man waiting for her back at home (Christopher Abbott), and this is several decades before anyone really had the right vocabulary for queerness, open relationships and polyamory. For some while in The World to Come, the people appear every bit as penned in as their livestock.

We, however, can spend that time enjoying the textbook pleasures of the period drama: handsome, foursquare production design (albeit, in this instance, applied to the draughty shacks of second-generation settlers with barely two sous to rub together), mutedly pretty costumes, a feel for a scrap of land at different times of the year, first buffeted by snowstorms, and then - by the annual miracle of nature - renewed promise. Composer Daniel Blumberg's mournful slide guitar keeps threatening to segue (not inappropriately) into Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game". Jim Shepard and Ron Hanson's script, meanwhile, offers abundant lessons in the practicalities of living at this particular historical moment, including an improbable cure for fever. (An enema with molasses: these people had no word for Lemsip, either.) The whole construction - and the film rapidly puts down foundations and assumes that solidity - is elevated by a genuine rarity: an absolutely essential, distinctly Malickian voiceover that opens up the drama, letting on what Waterston's Abigail can only elegantly gesture at onscreen, whether doubts, fears or hidden but swelling passions. What's truly poignant about The World to Come is that the world it describes is so small and ordinary, so indifferent to the happiness of its inhabitants. (In this exploratory, ill-connected America, you can consider yourself lucky if you don't perish amid a harsh winter frost.) Yet within it, Fastvold and her collaborators spy a window of opportunity, a moment or two to be seized, and with those a chance to escape the past and emerge somewhere closer to our liberated present. There will be obstacles: Affleck and Abbott describe men who are not insensible but very much of their time, unhappy and longing in their own way, fearful for good reason, possessive and potentially murderous with it. Yet the movie finally chooses love, inviting its superb female leads to let down their guard as with their hair and create something all the more precious for being so precarious: a cabin of their own.

The World to Come is available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.

Tuesday 17 September 2024

Squirm and squirm again: "Speak No Evil"


Unusually, it makes complete sense that someone should have thought to remake 2022's Danish shocker
Speak No Evil. For all the breathless responses it inspired, that film barely made it off the festival circuit, a result of a) being two films in one, both difficult to market beyond the horror cognoscenti, and b) a final act that limited word-of-mouth to a blunt "well, that was an ordeal". (Intonation up and positive if you're a horror nut, down if you're anybody else.) It also makes sense that Blumhouse should have handed the assignment to British writer-director James Watkins, whose Eden Lake, a commendably nasty class-warfare thriller of 2008, moved through adjacent thematic territory. Where Christian Tafdrup's original honed in on cultural differences - and key differences - between the Danish and Dutch, this Anglicisation duly pits Brits (more specifically yet: the English) against Americans. Thus we find nice, mild, internationally minded Yanks Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis shuffling meekly up a West Country garden path (in an electric car, natch), pausing to gawp at the Cerne Abbas Giant's erection; they're headed there at the invite of crass Limeys James McAvoy and Aisling Franciosi, who have strong feelings about the French and foreign cheese, brew their own Calvados, somehow still have Chuck Norris films on their TV, and entertain designs besides on our nervous-Nelly heroes. Here, the remake alights on something genuinely new: this Speak No Evil is the first film in cinema history where the Americans are wallflowers and milquetoasts and the Brits are the bolshy, pushy, thoughtless arseholes. How far we've come in the wake of Brexit.

For two-thirds of his running time, Watkins respects the original's structure, and in doing so he recognises that Tafdrup's was a structure worth respecting, setting us as it did to squirming through a gradual cranking-up of transgressions (grounded in everyday interactions: childcare, dining, sleeping). Anyone who's already squirmed this way will find themselves spotting small, appreciable divergences. Foremost beneficiary of the script's regional variations, McAvoy's Paddy - almost certainly the defining screen Paddy; every Englishman called Paddy I've ever met has somehow been exactly like this - is more Johnny Mercer than full-on Faragista, but still a recognisable posh type, prone to quoting Philip Larkin and rocking out to Def Leppard. But this isn't just the McAvoy show. A fine thespian bridge quartet builds believably awkward relations, and both Americans, in particular, feast on the tensions within these characters, their marriage and this social situation: the most compelling square centimetre you'll see on screen all week is the zigzagging knot between McNairy's eyebrows. Crucially, these houseguests are sentient human beings with - when it comes down to it - actual, tough choices to make, as distinct from the original's wilting patsies; that shift in characterisation ensures Watkins' film feels less of a wind-up or sick joke at someone's expense than a well-rounded comedy of manners. 

If the first film was recognisably from the country that brought you those cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, the remake is very definitely from the country that gave the world The Office. (A little note of Brent enters McAvoy's performance as, over dinner, he asks his guests what the biggest sexual organ is.) Yet lest matters get too cosy or familiar, it's also - as Watkins plainly relishes - a film from the same part of that country as 1971's Straw Dogs, which brings us to the remake's biggest deviation from its source, its radical change of ending. Tafdrup's conclusion was one provocation among many; Watkins substitutes what felt to me like an entirely logical progression. (Such a logical progression, indeed, that it's the road I thought the original might have followed had its makers demonstrated any real interest in the children being shuffled around as props and plot points.) First time round, Speak No Evil was an ordeal that didn't bear thinking about, chiefly because it made very little sense beyond a certain point. The Blumhouse variation plays less like a conventional remake than a careful course correction or superior second draft, all the stronger for having given serious consideration to what did and didn't work in its source. The results are solid multiplex entertainment rather than high film art, but they also represent something rare and cheering in 2024: an instance of a studio movie not fumbling but fixing its story. Easier to hear the (ever-valid) point being made when it's not drowned out by off-camera sniggering; here, Watkins and co. swap in genuine narrative smarts.

Speak No Evil is now showing in cinemas nationwide.   

Saturday 14 September 2024

On TV: "Peterloo"


It's now clear that Mike Leigh's
Peterloo hasn't quite caught the public's imagination in the same way its predecessor, 2014's Mr. Turner, did. There would appear to be several reasons for this. Rather than a national-treasure performer playing a national-treasure artist painting vibrant London sunsets, Peterloo promises a lesser-known ensemble (toplined by Maxine Peake beneath a Vermeer bonnet) in a reconstruction of a little-known corner of British history - the 1819 massacre of peaceful protestors at a rally in Manchester - which resulted in a crushing defeat for the working classes. In its efforts to discuss the causes and ramifications of this under-discussed episode, the new film gets wordier and wordier with each scene; instead of Mr. Turner's pretty pictures, it commits to the dourness of pre-electrification Northern life in exactly the same way Leigh's tough Vera Drake committed to the dourness of the East End slums; and after two-and-a-half hours, it concludes with a downer ending that confirms the pessimist's view of history as, more often than not, a terrible slap in the face. I wondered whether any of the suits involved passed Leigh a note to inquire whether he couldn't in some way lighten matters up a touch, and then of course realised the famously ornery director wouldn't have paid them the blindest bit of notice anyway.

There may be something honourable in such intransigence, and there are still elements to admire here, notably in the film's evident scholarship, its management of scale and its historical veracity. From just a few minutes of onscreen activity, we can infer the performers had immersive training in how to best use the looms, angle grinders and printing presses by which the film evokes 19th century labour practices, and that Peake may very well have slept with the period potato peeler she's seen wielding at one point. Leigh has used Amazon money to purge from the frame anything that might scan as distractingly modern, and thereby recreate a dark age - one that, in the bright light of our touchscreen era, feels closer to feudalism than it does to the present - in which the fate of the British working classes was arguably sealed. (No nation-spanning French Revolution for us; instead, the protestors were driven into retreat, told to know their place, keep calm and carry on kowtowing. Or else.) There is, however, plenty of evidence to suggest that Leigh has become increasingly self-conscious in his efforts to (re)make history. The idiosyncratic choices of this director's previous period dramas (which include Drake, Turner and - best of all - 1999's Topsy Turvy) - arrived at spontaneously, either in workshop or on the day of filming - seem themselves to have been purged, and what's left behind betrays a familiar weakness of long-held passion projects: everything appears nailed in place, fussed over, vaguely lacquered. So much energy has been funnelled into Peterloo's recreation of life as it once was that actual life has been micromanaged out of it.

This is also, I think, a very specific take on history, which isn't always to the film's favour, as those early reviews questioning the simplicity of Peterloo's politics have flagged up. Leigh remains capable of dramatic subtleties and grace notes: I warmed to one workers' meeting, where an extremist young longhair can be heard screaming for the King's head, while centrist dad avant-l'heure Philip Jackson tries to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And the director's pre-existing commitment to the collective takes on a new edge in this context: Rory Kinnear's Henry Hunt, parachuted in from London in what other movies would doubtless position as the white-saviour role, is here defined as a snippy, metropolitan-elite snob who goes missing when the going gets tough, and doesn't even merit an epitaph in Leigh's eyes. (Peake, too, occupies no more than a supporting role; the varyingly unruly mob's the real star.) Yet Leigh's depiction of the ruling classes is forever more cartoonish than chilling, and these caricatures only add to the sense of an overly declamatory drama, wall-to-wall with wobbly-jowled, tophatted speechifying in which the same handful of sticking points are hammered to death. Long stretches of Peterloo would serve as unimpeachable civics lessons - they're like the twenty-minute collectivism scene that stopped Ken Loach's Land and Freedom dead in its tracks - but they're far less effective as drama or cinema than they are as a demonstration of oratorical technique.

What's missing from these scenes is any resonant debate - the debate Leigh set up very simply in a film like 2008's Happy-Go-Lucky by putting two individuals with radically different perspectives (there, Sally Hawkins' indelible Poppy and Eddie Marsan as her equally unforgettable driving instructor) in the same confined space. Peterloo is too grandiose for that, keeping its two tribes at arm's length for most of its duration, and busying itself with waffling that puts its conflict off - and off, and off again - until everything explodes at Peterloo in what the BBFC, somewhat deflatingly, describes as "moderate violence". The film's second half proves markedly stronger, with its poignant what-ifs, its glimpses of the victory that looked to have been within its huddled masses' grasp before the descent into pitched battle. You feel Leigh wants both the film and the massacre to serve as a rallying cry - an opportunity to learn from history, and improve on past results - yet on a scene-by-scene basis Peterloo treats that history as a done deal, rather than an ongoing struggle. Its box-office thud feels emblematic of a moment where the British Left, no less caught up in windy, angry, exhausting self-analysis, seems itself on the brink of defeat, while the working classes they once vowed to protect are being led towards the void by a new generation of oddbod toffs and poshos. "Liberty or death!," cry Leigh's rebels, shortly before setting off on what would, for some of them, be a fateful last march. To battle-scarred, experience-burnt 2018 ears, that might sound like another dangerously binary choice.

(December 2018)

Peterloo screens on Channel 4 at 11.55pm tomorrow, and will then be available to stream via the Channel 4 site.

Friday 13 September 2024

For what it's worth...




UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of September 6-8, 2024):

1 (new) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12A)
3 (3) It Ends with Us (15)
4 (2) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *
5 (4) Alien: Romulus (15) ***
6 (1) Despicable Me 4 (U)
7 (7) Blink Twice (15) **
8 (6) Inside Out 2 (U) ****
9 (re) Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (12A) **
10 (new) Firebrand (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:
1. The Third Man 
2. Batman Forever [above]
4. Kal Ho Naa Ho


DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Inside Out 2 (U) ****
2 (new) Twisters (12) ***
3 (2) Despicable Me 4 (U)
4 (3) A Quiet Place: Day One (15) ***
5 (new) Bad Boys: Ride or Die (15)
6 (7) Back to Black (15)
7 (17) The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (PG) ***
8 (14) The Garfield Movie (U)
9 (6) Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga (15) ****
10 (28) The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (12) ****


My top five: 
1. Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga

 
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. The Mask of Zorro (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.45am)
2. The Best Man (Sunday, BBC Two, 10pm)
3. Night at the Museum (Saturday, ITV1, 5.05pm)
4. The Outfit (Friday, BBC One, 10.40pm)
5. Peterloo (Sunday, Channel 4, 11.55pm)

Thursday 12 September 2024

In memoriam: Norman Spencer (Telegraph 11/09/24)


Norman Spencer
, who has died aged 110, was a writer, producer and production manager who played a crucial role in David Lean’s breakthrough films, including In Which We Serve (1942), Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948); towards the end of his life, he was reportedly the oldest man living in the Greater London area, and the second oldest man living in the United Kingdom overall.

Beginning as third assistant director on In Which We Serve and working his way up to unit manager on Blithe Spirit (1945) and associate producer on The Passionate Friends (1949), Spencer helped Lean define the notion of quality British cinema. Entertainments above all else, these collaborations were also emotionally expressive, and supported by the best craft the British industry could afford in the post-War years; like Spencer himself, they endured.

The pair parted ways creatively after rewriting The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) – where Spencer suggested The Colonel Bogey March be whistled rather than sung, the better to avoid censorship issues with the bawdy lyrics – meaning these early ventures typically lacked the scale of Lean’s later widescreen epics. Yet they were similarly rooted in considered storytelling, born of long brainstorming sessions over tea and coffee in Lean’s offices.

The results were hilariously comic in the case of Hobson’s Choice (1954), for which Spencer urged Lean to forsake his initial casting choice Roger Livesey in favour of Charles Laughton. (The script earned Spencer, Lean and Wynyard Browne a BAFTA nomination.) They were more poignant when addressing a seasoned Katharine Hepburn’s quest for love in Summertime (1955), its extensive Venice location work indicating the new, international direction Lean was travelling in. As the filmmaker put it, British soundstages were “a pitch-black mine… I prefer the sun.”

The pair fought several battles along the way. According to Spencer, Noël Coward doubted Lean’s capacity to adapt Blithe Spirit: “He said that David Lean had no sense of humour, he shouldn’t go anywhere near comedy, but he was wrong”. Lean only inherited The Passionate Friends after a cast revolt against original director Ronald Neame. The War Office repeatedly tried to halt production on Kwai, claiming a British officer would never behave as Alec Guinness’s Colonel Nicholson does.

Lean’s singular mix of perfectionism and distractibility, specifically his susceptibility to the opposite sex, posed its own challenges. Conceived as a vehicle for the director’s new wife Ann Todd, Madeleine (1950) proved a particular trial to shoot (“the marriage was going wrong”). As Spencer noted: “[David] was a huge womaniser: to my knowledge, he had almost 1,000 women. When we shot [Hobson's Choice] in the streets, people asked: ‘Who’s that good-looking actor?’ I had to say: ‘That’s not the leading man, it’s the director.” 

Spencer nevertheless persevered, returning to assist Lean on Lawrence of Arabia (1962), where he liaised with Morocco’s King Hassan II on locations, and sourced the many extras required for the film’s populous battle scenes. “We had to have a thousand camel saddles made, and we had to teach the camel riders in Morocco to ride in the way they ride in Jordan, which was a huge undertaking,” Spencer recalled. “But it had to be done, because the scenes had to match.”

Norman Leslie Spencer was born in Stockwell, London on August 13, 1914, two weeks after the outbreak of the First World War. He spent his childhood years in Essex, where the family relocated; after seeing his first film, aged nine, in Leigh-on-Sea, he pestered his parents for a toy projector.

Spencer left school aged fourteen and briefly worked as a commercial artist in central London, where he landed his first break. While painting a mural at a dance studio in Great Portland Street, the dancers told him various studios were hiring extras for crowd scenes, paying one guinea a day. Spencer duly volunteered his services at Pinewood, eventually appearing in barrack-room comedy Splinters in the Air (1937).

But it was over at rival Denham Studios where Spencer put down creative roots, appearing uncredited in the Marlene Dietrich/Robert Donat romance Knight Without Armor (1937) and as an athlete in A Yank at Oxford (1938). While apprenticing elsewhere – his first screen credit came as a clapper loader on the Madame Tussaud’s-set horror Midnight at the Wax Museum (1936) – he developed a profitable sideline as a stand-in, doubling for such stars as George Formby and Leslie Howard, and thereby earning an extra five pounds a week.

It was at Denham that Spencer first met Lean, then working as an editor: “We were both mad about film and started going to the pictures together with our wives. I remember one time David saying: ‘The sound is terribly low on this – let’s speak to the manager.’ The manager said loftily: ‘You don’t understand. The film comes to us and there's nothing we can do.’ David said: ‘Let me up to the projector room.’ Imagine David Lean being told he didn’t know about these things!”

Spencer was duly invited aboard when Lean formed Cineguild Productions with Coward and Neame in the wake of In Which We Serve’s success. Yet external circumstances meant he had to turn down a scheduled first assistant director gig on This Happy Breed (1944), Lean’s morale-boosting adaptation of Coward’s hit play: “Shooting was about five weeks away when I got my call-up papers. There was nothing anybody could do about it, and I was called up into the army.”

Following his Lean collaborations, Spencer himself branched out, overseeing the druggily existential road trip Vanishing Point (1971), a film as far from Lean as it was possible to get. Berated by critics – The New York Times’ Roger Greenspun called it “a movie about which I can think of almost nothing good to say” – Vanishing Point was embraced by young audiences who thrilled to its anti-authoritarian vibe. Spencer called it his most notable success as a producer: a scrappy idea – handed to him by the Cuban writer G. Cabrera Infante – converted into a major countercultural hit.

Later, Spencer operated as a middleman for journalist Donald Woods and director Richard Attenborough (who’d made his acting debut in In Which We Serve) on the project that became Cry Freedom (1987). This was a sweeping, awards-courting epic in the Lean vein, centred on the friendship between liberal South African Woods (Kline) and anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko (Denzel Washington); it was nominated for three Oscars and seven BAFTAs, winning Best Sound at the latter.

By that point, Spencer was an old hand, and British cinema had become far grander than the cottage industry he’d passed into fifty years before. Interviewed in 1999, he recalled the early days of working with Lean: “We started making films together and when we’d finished one, we’d always want to make another right away. We’d haunt bookshops, and he’d say, ‘Within nine feet of us is a wonderful idea for a film.’”

He married Barbara Sheppard in 1943, and is survived by the couple’s two children, including the actress Sally-Jane Spencer, who made her uncredited screen debut, aged four, in Lean’s The Sound Barrier (1952).

Norman Spencer, born August 13, 1914, died August 16, 2024.