Film

Michael Collins, from 1916 to 1922

April 10 was 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement, and 24 May will be 100 years after the end of the Irish civil war. Neil Jordan’s 1996 film Michael Collins , with Liam Neeson as the Republican military leader Michael Collins, begins with the defeat of the 1916 uprising in Dublin. Collins vows that the next struggle will be different, a guerrilla war where the British superiority in numbers and arms will not prove decisive. After springing Eamon de Valera (Alan Rickman) from prison, he builds up an effective guerrilla force. He wipes out the British secret service agents in Dublin and the...

The man who hated the Oscars

I detest the Oscars, so all praise to actor George C. Scott who once remarked: "The whole thing is a goddamn meat parade. I don’t want any part of it". Alongside Patton , Scott’s best known film is Doctor Strangelove (director Stanley Kubrick, 1964), a black satire on the Cold War. Scott plays General Buck Turgidson, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A rogue B-52 bomber is heading for the Soviet Union to drop its nuclear bombs and cannot be recalled because its radio has been destroyed. The reason is complex but involves a deranged USAAF Commander who is obsessed by his hatred of the...

Kino Eye: Conrad Veidt, anti-fascist, 1893-1943

Although he was almost always cast as a Nazi villain (most famously as Major Strasser in the Hollywood classic Casablanca ), the German actor Conrad Veidt was an active and committed anti-fascist. On 3 April it will be 80 years since his untimely death, aged only 50. He sprang to fame with his role in the German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920), and became one of the most popular actors attached to the German UFA Studio. Under the new Nazi laws introduced in 1933 Veidt was expected to sign a racial declaration. He put his “race” down as Jewish — his wife was Jewish but...

Kino Eye: Paths of Glory

Following on from the mentions of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930 and 2022 versions) I would like to close this consideration of anti-war films depicting World War 1 by highlighting Stanley Kubrick’s film Paths of Glory (1957), featuring Kirk Douglas. An assault on the “Anthill” — a German stronghold — is mounted by the French army. Colonel Dax (Douglas) leads the suicidal attack but the first wave is completely wiped out. “B” Company, who would have been the second wave, refuse to leave their trenches and Dax stops the attack. The French High Command is furious, partly because one of...

Brings you to tears, makes your blood boil

Writer and director Sarah Polley’s new film, Women Talking , based on Miriam Toews’ book, is a devastating exploration of abuse and sexual violence, trauma and women’s oppression — and resistance. In an isolated religious community, a group of men have been drugging and raping the women and girls for years. Women have long been excluded from education, silenced, and kept disempowered, some domestically abused. Women Talking ’s opening declaration, “What follows is an act of female imagination”, alludes to the response of the village elders to the attacks. The attacks were dismissed as either...

Kino Eye: Remake of All Quiet On The Western Front

I have now seen the ‘“remake” of All Quiet on the Western Front by German director Edward Berger. Unsurprisingly, it differs considerably from Lewis Milestone’s 1930 classic. The bare outline — of both Erich Maria Remarque’s book and the 1930 film — is followed, but that’s about it. A key scene where the central character, German soldier, Paul Bäumer, returns home on leave is omitted, thus denuding the film of much of its personal impact. It’s another powerful anti-war statement with brutal combat scenes; but these men are human beings with emotions, feelings, families and loved ones, and this...

Lesbian life in the section 28 era

Georgia Oakley’s riveting and impressive debut, Blue Jean , is both moving and apposite. Jean, excellently performed by Rosy McEwen, struggles to navigate a double life. In her new job as a PE teacher in 1988 Newcastle, Jean is a newly-divorced and reserved individual, always making excuses to not socialise with her co-workers. She’s fretfully anxious to keep work life apart from her other life with her new girlfriend Viv, and other boisterous, more openly lesbian friends. But in 1988, set against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, a moral panic against homosexuality is being whipped up as the...

Kino Eye: My brilliant career

Long overdue in Kino Eye: a film from Australia. Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979) was adapted from Miles Franklin’s novel of the same name, written in 1901 when Franklin was only 16 years old, and published in Britain by Virago in 1980. It tells the story of Sybylla Melvyn (Judy Davis), who lives on an isolated farm and dreams of becoming a writer. Her parents are not exactly overjoyed at this prospect and pack her off to board with their maternal grandparents, who they hope will make her see sense. She becomes close to Harry Beecham (Sam Neill), and he proposes, but Sybylla...

Kino Eye: Ninotchka and Italy’s 1946 election

Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), starring Greta Garbo, was billed as a “romantic comedy”, but the comedy dished up is a rather thin gruel. Garbo plays Ninotchtka, a po-faced Soviet bureaucrat who is sent by her Commissar (Béla Lugossi, looking like Count Dracula in a uniform) to Paris on a mission to sort out three wayward colleagues, who have succumbed to the delights of the City of Light. As indeed does Ninotchka, eventually falling for the charms of the White émigré Count Léon d’Algoult. The film does make, as might be expected, some valid criticisms of the Soviet Union, but those tend to...

The racism of "The Birth of a Nation"

Eugene Debs (1855-1926) was the main public figure of the US Socialist Party in the era when it won over 900,000 votes in the presidential elections of 1912 and 1920. Later socialists, learning from the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution as well as rising black struggles, were critical of Debs's limitations, and of course the language he used was the language of his time; but Debs spoke out eloquently against racism. The Birth of a Nation (1915) has been called "the most influential film in history". The merits of the spectacular drama The Birth of a Nation excite bitter comment whenever it...

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