Film

A 1940 film about the miners’ battles

This week, and for another few weeks, I will introduce films for the 40th anniversary of the 1984-5 miners’ strike. The first of those, The Stars Look Down (1940), was based on the 1935 novel by A J Cronin and directed by Carol Reed. It is set at the fictional Neptune Colliery in the North East and centres on Davey Fenwick (Michael Redgrave), son of a local miners’ leader, Bob Fenwick. Davey intends to go to college and hopes with education he can assist in the improvement of conditions in the mining industry. But Jenny Sunley (Margaret Lockwood) persuades him to abandon his studies. They are...

The greatest French film ever?

Made in 1937, Jean Renoir’s brilliant La Grande Illusion is set during World War One and features a group of French prisoners of war, their interactions, escape attempts and relations with their German “hosts”. Two French pilots, the aristocratic Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin). are shot down by von Rauffenstein (Eric von Stroheim), also an aristocrat. The collapse of their world and its shared values is one of the themes of the film. In a POW camp they are joined by the wealthy Jew Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) who shares his food with the other prisoners...

Rediscovering Dorothy Arzner

Dorothy Arzner is someone I had never heard of before, and maybe you haven’t either. Arzner was the only director of films in Hollywood under the studio system of the 1930s and 1940s and she made some pretty remarkable films in those years. Her work is currently being celebrated at the BFI in London and this week I got to see her last film, First comes courage . Here is how BFI described her: “Her films were multifaceted revisions of Hollywood norms, paying sharp attention to the intersection of women’s working and romantic lives. Her protagonists were snappy and headstrong, subverting...

Exposés of antisemitism

i>entleman’s Agreement (dir. Elia Kazan) and Crossfire (dir. Edward Dmytryk) both released in 1947, were two of the first American films to address antisemitism after World War 2. Kazan’s film stars Gregory Peck, a journalist who poses as Jewish so as to be better placed to write a report on antisemitism in New York. What he finds shocks him. Crossfire centres on an investigation into the murder of a Jewish man in a hotel room (in the original novel the victim was homosexual). The suspects are all serving US soldiers. As the police and army (Robert Mitchum plays the sergeant heading the...

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon

At the end of the credits of Napoleon , there is a brief dedication for Lulu, Ridley Scott’s dog. My guess is that the poor mutt died of shame after watching this pile of dross. It is difficult to think of anything positive to say about Napoleon . That is surprising, given Scott’s previous offerings include Blade Runner , Thelma and Louise , and Gladiator . The French Revolution is portrayed as only an orgy of ritualised sadistic murder. Napoleon’s victory at the battle of Toulon is said to have fixed his military reputation, although his much greater success in the Italian campaign (ignored...

Days of Heaven

Days of Heaven (1978) was Terence Malick’s second film as director. Bill (Richard Gere) is a steelworker in Chicago who kills his boss, unintentionally, in a fight. Along with his lover Abby (Brooke Adams) and his young sister Linda, he flees to Texas, where they become seasonal workers on a large farm. To avoid complications Bill and Abby pose as siblings. Bill overhears a conversation where, it is said, the farmer has only a year to live. He persuades Abby to pretend to fall in love with the farmer and marry him. She will then inherit the farm when he dies. A neat scheme, but the farmer...

Roy Battersby (1936-2024)

Probably best known for the TV drama Leeds United! (1974) which features a women’s textile workers’ strike (and was discussed in Solidarity 584 ), Roy Battersby had a highly productive and varied career as a writer and director of mainly TV dramas. He started off as part of that generation of left-inclined writers and directors (such as Ken Loach, Alan Bleasdale, Jim Allen, Dennis Potter, David Hare) who worked at the BBC on the Play for Today and then branched out into writing Cracker , Between the Lines , Morse , and many other dramas. As one of his last works he directed the film Red...

What the “Rustin” film leaves out

Colman Domingo has just been nominated to win an Oscar for best actor. I hope he wins — and not just because he did an excellent job playing American civil rights leader Bayard Rustin in the recent film made about his life. I hope he wins and uses his platform, when the eyes of America and much of the world will be on him, to speak about who Bayard Rustin was, and his legacy. Anyone making a film about the life of Rustin, or any other prominent individual, is forced to make choices. Not everything can go into a movie lasting at most a couple of hours. Choices are made. In the case of Rustin...

The Seven Samurai

One of the great films of all time, Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai put Japanese cinema “on the map”, though equally talented directors such as Kenji Mizoguchi were unjustly sidelined. The basic story is well-known: a destitute group of villagers, plagued by bandits who steal their harvest, turn in desperation to a group of Samurai warriors, one of whom, Kikuchiyo (popular Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune) lies about being part of this elite body. They are paid (in rice!) to protect the village, but the arrangement is not without its tensions. Contrary to the enduring popular image, the...

Kino Eye: Abel Gance's Napoleon

I haven’t yet seen the new Napoleon, but this much earlier (1927) film by French director Abel Gance is well worth taking the trouble to visit.

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