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Terror’s Advocate

Terror's Advocate

Format: Cinema

Release date: 16 May 2008

Venues: Curzon Soho, Renoir (London) and key cities

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Barbet Schroeder

Original title L’Avocat de la terreur

Cast: Jacques Vergès, Abderrahmane Benhamida, Hans-Joachim Klein, Magdalena Kopp

France 2007

135 minutes

Terror’s Advocate is a chilling study of one man’s role in the entangled web of twentieth-century terrorism. Told with the dramatic pacing of a political thriller, Barbet Schroeder’s intense and compelling documentary features an astonishing cast of characters, from resistance fighters to terrorists to war criminals, who have been witnesses and participants in decades of political upheaval, all linked by the same lawyer – Jacques Vergès. An undeniably charismatic and passionate advocate for anti-colonialist struggle and the right to a fair trial, he is a hero to some and a villain to others. This film truly exemplifies the cliché that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, a moral ambiguity that resonates throughout the documentary.

Vergès was born in Thailand in 1925 to a French diplomat from Réunion and a Vietnamese mother, and was educated in Paris, where he first met Pol Pot (indeed, the film opens with a disturbing scene of the eloquent, far-left lawyer blaming Cambodia’s genocide on virtually everything but the Khmer Rouge). Vergès began practising law in Algeria in the 1950s, at that time the forefront for nationalist struggles against the ‘imperialist oppressor’. Young and already remarkably egotistic, he took on as his first high-profile client Djamila Bouhired, a member of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), who would go on to become a role model for nationalists and Islamists worldwide – and Vergès’s future wife. Bouhired planted the bomb at the fashionable Milk Bar in 1956, which killed eleven people and wounded five others, an incident famously immortalised in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers.

The film goes on to spin out a complex web of connections and intrigue that ties together Algerian nationalists, German anarchists and pro-Palestinian, pro-Iranian terrorists. Vergès became the lawyer for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) after their attacks on the El Al aircraft in the 1960s; the PFLP would go on to form remarkable links with the infamous Carlos the Jackal (something of a terrorist for hire), as well as members of Germany’s Red Army Faction, creating a notorious terror network across Europe and the Middle East, much of whose activities were aided and financed by the notorious anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer François Genoud, one of the more repellent figures to feature in the film.

As his career progresses, Vergès’s principles become corrupted: his clients become more controversial, his connections with terrorists more appalling. He seems more concerned with self-aggrandizement, fame and money than principle. Vergès is perhaps best known in Europe for defending Klaus Barbie, the Nazi SS officer famously known as ‘The Butcher of Lyon’, whose trial was also funded by Genoud. In the interviews with Vergès, mostly filmed in a plush study while he smokes a no doubt expensive cigar, he describes the trial with relish. Exhilarated at the opportunity to take on the establishment in such a high-profile case, he deflected the charges against Barbie by dramatically accusing the French government of carrying out war crimes in Algeria in the 1950s. He lost, and Barbie was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987.

Though Schroeder is somewhat guilty of glamorizing terrorism (he treats the women active in the FLN, as well as Magdalena Kopp, who was once married to Carlos the Jackal, and was arrested in Paris in a car full of explosives in 1982, with kid gloves) there seems little doubt of his feelings for Vergès as the film builds towards its finale. Any kind of empathy with the lawyer and his clients is replaced by a sickening feeling that only intensifies in the final minutes of the film, as the credits roll over photographs of serial killers, Holocaust-deniers, African dictators and war criminals – all clients. Vergès remains a disturbing enigma to the very end in this riveting, must-see history lesson on terror.

Sarah Cronin

Watch the trailer:

The Cremator

The Cremator
The Cremator

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 11 December 2017

Distributor: Second Run

Director: Juraj Herz

Writer: Juraj Herz, Ladislav Fuks

Based on the novel by: Ladislav Fuks

Cast: Rudolf Hrušínský, Vlasta Chramostová, Ilja Prachar

Original title: Spalovač mrtvol

Czechoslovakia 1968

95 mins

A brand of Mitteleuropa murkiness and dark, jarring surrealism pervades what remains Juraj Herz’s most acclaimed work.

A family at the zoo. Close-ups of the parents’ eyes and mouths intercut with leopard fur, snake skin, crocodile hide, predators’ teeth. The two kids monkeying around in a cage. As they leave, it’s the occasion for a warped family portrait in a fisheye mirror above the gate. Then the animated credits. Faces split into four and dismembered body parts pile up around the names on the screen. From the start, The Cremator is about the inhuman, contaminating the human shape through parallels with the animal realm, or hacking it up into its meaningless, soulless constituents.

Director Juraj Herz had studied puppetry and theatre before coming to filmmaking and was a friend and collaborator of Jan Ŝvankmajer. Not surprising then that a similar brand of Mitteleuropa murkiness and dark, jarring surrealism pervades what remains Herz’s most acclaimed work. The interest in puppetry shows up in the film in the form of a waxwork dummies show that Karl Kopfrkingl, the cremator of the title, and his family, visit during an outing at a fair. The twist here is that the dummies are played by heavily made-up live actors mimicking the jerky, mechanical movements of automata. Again, here, the worlds of the animate and the inanimate are disturbingly blurred.

There is indeed something unwholesomely waxy in the texture of Kopfrkingl’s skin, something unnaturally neat in his greasy comb-over, something excessively glassy in his bulbous eyes. With unctuous, sinister bonhomie, Kopfrkingl guides us through his work at the crematorium – ‘The Temple of Death’ – all the while imparting his Buddhist-inspired belief that cremation is the sign of a humane society, as it helps ‘liberate’ the souls of the dead faster; his voice provides an oppressive near-constant explanation for everything we see, leaving little room for other characters to speak.

The only other voice that prevails is that of engineer Reinke, who urges Kopfrkingl to listen to his German blood and join the ‘Party’. This is 1939, the Nazis are gaining ground, and as Reinke insists, promising social promotion and the advantages of a private members’ club, Kopfrkingl soon comes to twist his earlier spiritual beliefs into the notion that Jews are poor souls that need to be liberated sooner rather than later through efficient mechanised cremation. Soon, he is visited by mystical apparitions and his exalted fanaticism threatens the safety of those around him.

Filmed in 1968, the film’s probing of the past found a chilling echo in current events. In August of that year, the shooting was interrupted by the Russian invasion. But although it was caught between the two ugly faces of twentieth-century European totalitarianism, The Cremator is about far more than its explicit historical reference and it cannot be reduced to a denunciation of the genocidal impulses of Nazi Germany specifically, or of totalitarian regimes in general. Neither can it simply be seen as a portrayal of a man’s increasingly deranged mental state. Much more disturbingly, Herz brings to the surface what lies under both the personal and historical madness, the predatory beastliness, the grotesque abomination, the pustulous corruption of human life, of which Kopfrkingl’s diseased mind and Nazi Germany or Communist Russia are simply the most visible manifestations.

In spite of such subject matter, The Cremator is no morbid downer and in addition to the astonishing visual inventiveness there is also a ferocious sense of humour in the details – Kopfrkingl and his children eagerly listening behind the bathroom door for the sound of their Christmas carp being killed with a mallet or the cat playing with the undone ribbon on his hanged mistress’s shoe. Disorientating, disquieting and darkly humorous, The Cremator remains one of the most richly resonant celluloid nightmares.

Virginie Sélavy

This review was first published in 2008 for Second Run’s original DVD release of the film.

The Party and the Guests

The Party and the Guests
The Party and the Guests

Screening in London on 11 November 2017 at Regent Street Cinema as part of the 21st Made in Prague Film Festival

Format: DVD

Part of The Czechoslovak New Wave Collection Vollume II DVD box-set

Release date: 7 December 2015

Distributor: Second Run

Director: Jan Němec

Writers: Ester Krumbachová, Jan Němec

Original title: O slavnosti a hostech

Cast: Ivan Vyskocil, Jan Klusák, Pavel Bosek, Karel Mares, Jana Pracharová

Czechoslovakia 1966

71 minutes

Jan Němec’s film is an engaging yarn about a small group of bourgeois people who set off for a picnic and soon find themselves in rather sadistic and perplexing company.

The Party and the Guests is an engaging yarn about a small group of bourgeois people or, perhaps, nomenklatura, who set off for a picnic and soon find themselves in rather sadistic and perplexing company; their party subsumed by an even larger and decidedly less sedate party. It was written by Ester Krumbachová and Jan Němec and directed by Jan Němec in 1966. Mr Němec was soon to fall foul of the Czechoslovakian Communist party, who promptly banned the film, and Němec’s life is entwined in a rather bittersweet history of art and censorship.

Visually, what it most resembles is a cinematic documentation of an al fresco theatrical event. There are essentially only three scenes and the mise en scène is pretty much constant forest. In terms of the camera choreography, The Party and the Guests is full of stillness; this, according to the short but thorough accompanying DVD booklet, is in contrast to Němec’s earlier films, which are renowned for their handheld, cinéma vérité jitteriness. This stillness is offset and reinforced by a subtle audio track that is spare but utterly seductive.

Silence and ‘natural’ sound are dominant. Throughout the first 30-plus minutes the most discernible sound other than speech and extra-vocal noises is the delicious friction of shoes against gravel as the guests tramp along country pathways. I imagine this is nothing other than a concrete by-product of shooting in country lanes strewn with shale but one is tempted to read it symbolically as a gnawing prelude to a grim and baffling denouement. As the movie continues it becomes apparent that the sound of rural Czechoslovakia – if indeed, it is Czechoslovakia – is obviously controlled. For instance, in one key scene the chief of what is implied to be the secret police sits at a desk in a clearing and interrogates the guests, guests who are in a state of Kafka-esque befuddlement as to what it is they are guilty of – trespassing? During his interrogation of the ‘guests’, the chief talks of nature and birds and their apparent freedom, and as he does so bird song and natural sounds are heard or rather conjured. As if the countryside is an illusion subject to the whims of a nebulous autocracy. It’s at that point that I realised that for me it is Němec’s graceful, restrained and symbolic use of sound and his subtle deployment of music that make this film so captivating. Without intending any disrespect to the camera operators or the cinematographer, I think this film would make a sparkling and captivating radio play or Hörspiel, albeit a very indirect one. It is dialogue-heavy, yet the dialogue is often inconsistent or fragmented. The soundtrack is layered with non sequiturs and inconsequential banter from which occasionally arise significant monologues and exchanges.

The Party and the Guests is usually interpreted in the West as an allegorical statement about the peculiarities of state dictatorships; the social orthodoxies imposed upon the mass and the implied threats that exist should one fail to conform. This complements quite nicely Western capitalist myths about post-Stalin Eastern bloc dictatorships. Yet when one thinks about it, it isn’t too long (say 30 seconds) before one recalls McCarthyism or thinks about extraordinary rendition and water boarding. Irrespective, I think a maverick figure like Jan Němec was probably railing against the conventions of cinema just as much as he was satirising the machinations of Antonín Novotný’s Czechoslovakia.

This review refers to the original DVD release of the film by Second Run in 2007. The special features on the new box-set edition include a filmed appreciation by Peter Hames. For a full list of extra contents, visit the Second Run website.

Philip Winter

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog

the-lodger
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog

Format: DVD

Release date: 25 February 2008

Part of the Alfred Hitchcock: The British Years box-set

Distributor: Network

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Scenario: Eliot Stannard

Based on: the novel by Marie Belloc-Lowndes

Cast: Ivor Novello, Malcolm Keen, Miss June

UK 1926

Made in 1926, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog was Alfred Hitchcock’s third completed feature and the one he considered to be his first real film. In spite of his inexperience, Hitchcock demonstrates a flair for building tension and creating an evocative atmosphere. This early silent establishes some of the idiosyncracies he later became famous for, notably his cameo appearances and his fixation on blonde actresses. It is also Hitchcock’s first take on the theme of the wrongly accused man, which would preoccupy him repeatedly throughout the rest of his career.

Based on the eponymous novel by Marie Belloc-Lowndes, the film is set in a foggy, gloomy London terrorised by The Avenger, a killer loosely modelled on Jack the Ripper. As yet another blonde woman is found murdered, a sinister gentleman takes up lodgings at the house of an elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Bunting. Soon, the lodger’s eccentric ways make him a suspect, and this is exacerbated by his obvious interest in Daisy, the Buntings’ young and pretty blonde daughter. Daisy is also courted by a police detective working on the case, and jealousy further spurs the latter’s suspicions when Daisy appears to reciprocate the lodger’s interest in her.

Like many of Hitchcock’s crime thrillers, this is really a sexual psychodrama. The hunt for the murderer is inseparable from the amorous triangle in which Daisy – a potential victim – is pursued by both the police detective and the suspect. In this way the film suggests that the connection between sex and violence is not simply restricted to the murder case but possibly underlies all male/female relationships. There is a scene in which the detective locks his handcuffs around Daisy’s wrists, telling her he’s hoping to do the same thing to the murderer soon. He means it in a playful manner but Daisy becomes upset and complains that he’s hurting her. Through this incident the film introduces intimations of violence in the courtship, revealing the disquieting side of the detective’s desire to possess Daisy. Although the story ends well – rather unconvincingly – a disturbing reminder of this undercurrent of violence is contained within the last images. As the happy couple stand by the window of their swish apartment, the words ‘To-Night – Golden Curls’ are seen flashing on a building behind them. These very same words appear on title cards at the beginning of the film, in connection with the murders. This small, barely noticeable detail introduces a sense of menace in the conventional happy ending, as if to suggest that men’s vicious impulses towards women lie dormant in any relationship, ready to be awoken at any time.

The Lodger is also worth watching for the sense of excitement that it exudes about the possibilities of the film medium. As the story requires that the killer’s identity should remain mysterious to the end, the tension relies on what is heard rather than on what is seen. This being a silent film, Hitchcock had to find clever ways of expressing sound through images. For some of the early scenes he went as far as constructing a glass floor in order to visually convey the noise of the lodger’s footsteps as he restlessly paces up and down his room. This may be slightly over-zealous, but it is that kind of enthusiasm and inventiveness that make the film so pleasurable to watch. The title cards are also worth mentioning: featuring designs by the Cubist-influenced artist E. McKnight Kauffer, they further enhance the dynamic, modern feel of The Lodger.

Virginie Sélavy

Naked Youth

Naked Youth
Naked Youth (aka Cruel Story of Youth)

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)DVD

Release date: 17 August 2015

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director Nagisa Ôshima

Writer Nagisa Ôshima

Original title: Seishun zankoku monogatari

Alternative title: Cruel Story of Youth

Cast: Yusuke Kawazu, Miyuki Kuwano

Japan 1960

96 mins

Hitching a lift from a random male, schoolgirl Makoto is molested. Student Kiyoshi turns up out of nowhere and saves her, extorting money from the sheepish gent in the process. The next day, our youthful pair meet up, are bored by a political demonstration, then turn up, inexplicably, in a speedboat in a desolate dockland of lashed-together log pontoons. When Makoto refuses Kiyoshi’s advances, he pushes her into the water and, despite the fact that she cannot swim, will not let her out again until she agrees to have sex with him. No good is going to come of this, is it? Inspired by the manner of their first meeting, they embark on a career of petty criminality, shaking down reliably predatory motorists. But, as periodic brushes with yakuza pimps hint, they are amateurs paddling in the shallows of a torrent that will carry them away.

As an essay in futility fuelled by amorphous desire and energy, Nagasi Ôshima’s ‘cruel story’ is up there with A bout de souffle (1960). This is how Naked Youth is usually read; as a contribution to the transnational sulk that envelops cinematic youth in the 1950s from The Wild One (1953) to Rebel Without a Cause (1955) to, God help us, Beat Girl (1960). Closer to home, it has also been linked with the taiyozoku (tribe of the sun) genre, originating in a 1953 story by Shintaro Ishihara – now Tokyo’s colourful governor. Makoto and Kiyoshi certainly fit the bill insofar as they are young and rudderless, but they are equally, and unusually, incompetent at being glamorous. They have neither the pathos that makes James Dean a social worker’s wet dream, nor the cool insolence of Brando or Belmondo. Actually they are quite plain and frumpily clothed.

And are they even rebels, with or without a cause? Presumably teen sex is, in itself, a rebellion. But the main criticism of parental authority comes from Makoto’s older sister Yuki who wants to know why her sibling is allowed to run wild. Indeed, the older generation are every bit as clueless and compromised as the younger and, one way or another, fund their misdemeanours. The endemic motor-rapists are easy pickings, and Kiyoshi’s older mistress puts up the money for Makoto’s abortion, which is itself carried out by Yuki’s disillusioned ex-idealist ex-lover. The supreme moment of bathos for the whole idea of stylish revolt comes in a brilliant scene where our Primark Bonnie and Clyde flee Kiyoshi’s mistress in a taxi, diving down a side street too narrow for her gas-guzzler, only to discover they have no money. At this point, the mistress rolls up and settles the fare for them. Only death, the great elevator as well as leveller, makes some concession to the glamour of the genre.

The film is, however, interested in rebellion after a fashion. Dr Akimoto and Yuki have some pained words about the loss of their political ideals. Makoto and Kiyoshi’s romance itself starts from this point. Their first date is preceded by newsreel footage of the Korean student revolution of 19 April 1960, and the date itself starts at a Zenkaguren rally against the AMPO treaty with the USA. These snippets play like the files of marching troops that frame the bedroom action in Ai no corrida (1976). Ôshima’s focus is on the intense, solipsistic folie à  deux, but history is there in Naked Youth as a cry from the street. So is Oshima wagging his finger, counselling political commitment as a remedy for silly star-crossed lovers? I am unsure as to what the precise historical practices of student movements in 1950s Japan may have been, but it is interesting to note that the Zenkaguren in Naked Youth protest by linking arms and running round in circles, holding brightly-coloured balloons.

Stephen Thomson

This review was first published in 2008 for the DVD release of Naked Youth by Yume Pictures.

Watch the original theatrical trailer:

The Killers

The Killers
The Killers

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 8 December 2014

Distributor: Arrow Films

Director: Robert Siodmak

Writers: Anthony Veiller, Richard Brooks, John Huston

Based on the short story by: Ernest Hemingway

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Edmond O’Brien

USA 1946

103 mins

‘That guy, what’s his name, the Swede, never had a chance, did he?’

The first twelve minutes of The Killers (1946) is a faithful (almost word for word) adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s much-anthologised short story. Two hit men enter a diner (shot to look like Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks – itself apparently inspired by Hemingway’s story), intimidating the owner, the cook and its one customer with a cruel vaudeville routine while they wait for their intended victim, ‘the Swede’. When he fails to show, the two thugs leave and Hemingway’s alter ego Nick Adams (the customer) runs to warn him. But the Swede refuses to flee, instead waiting passively – ‘There isn’t anything I can do about it’ – with typical Hemingway heroic fatalism. In the story he offers a simple explanation: ‘I got in wrong’; his resigned stoicism remains unexplained, his story untold. In the film (updated from 20s Chicago to New Jersey in the 40s) he claims, ‘I did something wrong… Once’. This ‘once’ (misread by Nick to mean it was something a while ago) leads to the second part of the film in which Reardon, an insurance investigator, gets witnesses to tell the story through seven flashbacks. However, in contrast with that other multiple flashback film, Citizen Kane, it is not a key to the character’s psychological make-up that he hopes to discover but the single mistake that sealed the Swede’s fate and led him along the series of events that ended with a visit from the hit men. Instead of a favourite childhood toy the clue is a green handkerchief embroidered with pictures of harps – the key to the mystery. As in Sunset Boulevard the opening murder gives the rest of the film a strong sense of fatalism – there can be only one ending for the Swede.

The Killers was directed by noir maestro Robert Siodmak back to back with The Spiral Staircase, which is often considered his masterpiece. Along with former colleagues Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann and Edgar G Ulmer (as well as his hero Fritz Lang) Siodmak was a refugee from Nazi Germany with a prolific career already behind him. However, unlike Lang, his reputation amongst auteurist critics was somewhat diminished by the fact that he seemed only able to make great films in one genre. It was when mixing European and American sensibilities that he was at his best. The influence of German Expressionism, especially strong in The Spiral Staircase, is also evident in The Killers where it meshes perfectly with American hard-boiled existentialism. Elwood (Woody) Bredell’s chiaroscuro cinematography is excellent and here almost rivals the great John Alton’s work on The Big Combo. It is a directing tour de force full of breathtaking shots, from the simple pan capturing the contrast between a panicking Nick and the stoic Swede at the start of the film to the virtuoso two-minute crane shot of the heist.

Siodmak was certainly aided by a first-rate cast and crew. Anthony Veiller gets the writing credit but was helped by Richard Brooks and John Huston. The final draft, Siodmak claims, was written solely by Huston (who had wanted to direct as well), but he remained uncredited as he was under contract at Warner Bros. The plot has one of the greatest twisty-turny double-crossings in film noir and the complex story is enlivened by the sparkling hard-bitten dialogue – ‘Don’t ask a dying man to lie his soul into hell’, Kitty is told – as well as a perfect ending that puts it all neatly into perspective.

The Killers is also notable for giving a first starring role to that former circus acrobat Burt Lancaster, who dominates the screen with a typically individual and naturalistic performance. Ava Gardner as Kitty Collins gives a near-iconic performance creating a noir femme fatale to rival Mary Astor and Barbara Stanwyck. At 24 she was already divorced from Mickey Rooney and set for superstardom but she was never better than here. Stealing the film from the (future) big stars is the excellent Edmond O’Brien (star of classic noirs DOA and The Hitchhiker) whose everyman appeal as the insurance investigator grounds the film and gives it its heart. While Reardon’s aim is ostensibly to recover the stolen money, the film leaves us in no doubt that what really drives him is a combination of sympathy for the Swede, a need to solve a mystery and also, crucially, to understand why a man would simply submit to his own murder.

Hemingway has gone on record to say that The Killers was his favourite of all the films based on his work and I wouldn’t disagree. There are many great film noirs and The Killers has all the necessary components to be a textbook example but beyond that it is simply an exceptional film.

This review was first published for the 2008 UK cinema re-release.

Paul Huckerby

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Sweeney Todd

Format: Cinema

Release date: 25 January 2008

Distributor: Warner Bros

Venues:Odeon Leicester Square and nationwide

Director: Tim Burton

Based on: the musical by Stephen Sondheim

Cast: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman

US/UK 2007

117 mins

There’s something both strange and familiar about Sweeney Todd. It is a tale that has been recounted on both the large and small screens several times over the last century and yet most people only know the broad strokes of the story – the serial killer who runs a barber’s shop that provides filling for the meat pies in the café below. This is mainly because, unlike the two other most famous Victorian serial killers – Jack the Ripper and Jeckyll/Hyde – Sweeney Todd isn’t based on a well-documented case or a famous novel but is a continuing game of Chinese whispers that began as a ‘penny dreadful’ around 1847. To this day there is a continuing debate regarding whether the folk tale is based on truth or not and each generation has added new details. Tim Burton’s new film version of the story, based on the Stephen Sondheim musical, includes Sweeney’s alter ego Benjamin Barker, who was only added to the mythos in the early 70s.

Familiarity also comes from the fact that this is almost the culmination of a life work’s for Burton – it is the third musical he has directed (following Corpse Bride and The Nightmare Before Christmas), the sixth film of his to feature Johnny Depp in the lead, the fifth with Helena Bonham Carter (the third that all three of them worked on together) and yet another love letter from the director to the Anglo-American school of gothic romance and horror. It combines the Grand Guignol of his earlier Sleepy Hollow with the razor-fingered melodrama of Edward Scissorhands to the extent that when Depp exclaims, ‘At last my hand is complete’, while holding a razor it feels like a prequel to Edward, albeit one with an 18 certificate.

For all its familiarity though, I imagine Tim Burton’s film will be the first full telling of the story that at least one generation has come across. A brilliant combination of vocals, victuals and Victorian horror, this is one of the finest musicals I’ve seen on screen in years.

Watching the badly weighted trailer and with the precedent of the ill-judged Mars Attacks in mind, I had worried in advance that the combination of murder, black comedy and musical might be a dreadful mismatch, but unlike Burton’s pointless remake of Planet of the Apes, Sweeney Todd is one revival perfectly matched to the director’s sensibilities. Though not as catchy as the first musical Burton plotted (Nightmare) and at times needing a little more tightening, Sweeney Todd could bring an entirely new audience to the musical genre with its combination of extreme horror and unexpectedly good vocal performances from all the leads. This is no glitzy melodrama designed to appeal to fans of Moulin Rouge or Evita but a potent horror film where the characters just happen to deliver their dialogue to music.

Johnny Depp is a brilliant character-actor (and now a bankable star on the back of Pirates of the Caribbean) and has always been at his best in Burton’s films. Here, he delivers a performance as memorable as Edward Scissorhands or Ed Wood, his mentor’s love of kitsch coming through via the white streak in Sweeney’s hair that seems borrowed from Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein. Bonham Carter is also on top form in another doomed romance that sees her mix a sickly pallor with a love of violence. In another strange echo, her final scene recalls her own role as the bride of Frankenstein in Kenneth Branagh’s risible Mary Shelley adaptation.

Depp and Bonham Carter already sang love duets from beyond the grave in the earlier Corpse Bride, but no one really noticed because the songs were delivered by their CGI avatars. Here, her unrequited love is surprisingly poignant even as she disposes of her man’s victims and makes cannibalism the latest diet on the streets of London. It’s a hard trick to make death beautiful, especially when it’s so bloody, but for every brutal throat-slashing in the movie there is an exquisite exsanguination – the severed jugular coating the throat in a scarlet damask or the outline of an angel appearing in rhesus negative on the floor. Elsewhere, the set design mixes the director’s continuing love of German Expressionism with the latest CGI, making the cobbled stones and soot-blackened bricks of nineteenth-century London spring as vividly to life as the consumptive pallor of its inhabitants.

As Burton brings another famous gothic tale of terror to the screen, the only real surprise (other than the amount of blood) is the lack of a horror icon in the cast – no contemporary of Vincent Price, Christopher Lee or Michael Gough here. However, the British character-actors Burton has assembled work wonders in their somewhat caricatured roles: Alan Rickman as the evil pantomime villain (following similar turns in Die Hard and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves) and Timothy Spall as his henchman. Unlike the rest of the world, I’m not a fan of Sacha Baron Cohen but here he is well cast as Sweeney’s absurd rival Pirelli, affecting an over-the-top Italian accent that segues into Cockney behind closed doors. Less successful are new comers Jamie Campbell Bower and Jayne Wisener as the young lovers Anthony and Johanna, both bland and twee in their parts – the former in particular, a younger, prettier Jonathan Rhys Meyers lookalike. The only other slight disappointment is the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo by Anthony (Stewart) Head, which I hoped would lead to at least one musical number…

American critics, pondering the success of this movie, wondered whether the marketing campaign was based on what they call a ‘bait and switch’ strategy, where you tempt someone with something but swap it for an item less palatable at the last minute, to whit: it was marketed as a (comedy) horror film but what audiences get is in fact a musical. However, while the first grisly murder may take a little while coming, subsequent deaths follow in rapid succession with increasingly lurid amounts of claret filling the screen. So for anyone who didn’t know this came with lyrics, music and a book, rest assured it is a horror film as well as a musical, and a very successful example of both.

Alex Fitch

Night and the City

Night_and_the_City
Night and the City

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 28 September 2015

Distributor: BFI

Director: Jules Dassin

Writers: Jo Eisinger, Austin Dempster

Based on the novel by: Gerald Kersh

Cast: Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Googie Withers

UK 1950

101 mins

As movie openings go, the first minute of this landmark British noir takes some beating. Surveying a night blacker than newspaper print, a disembodied voice introduces us to the scene we’ll spend the next 100 minutes touring: ‘the night is tonight, tomorrow night or any night. The city… is London’.

Based very loosely on Gerald Kersh’s excellent 1938 novel of the same name, Night and the City is the story of Harry Fabian, a small-time Soho club tout living in a derelict post-war capital populated entirely by a Dickensian array of beggars, forgers, con-men, bookies, gangsters and sharks. Fabian, played by Richard Widmark at his shifty, sweaty best, is keen to make something of himself, navigating the criminal underworld to achieve ‘a life of ease and plenty’ by becoming a wrestling promoter – the only hitch is that soon he’ll find the city turning in on him.

The story behind Night and the City is almost as compelling as the script itself. Directed by Jules Dassin following the success of The Naked City in 1948, it was his final film for Hollywood before the McCarthy trials exiled him forever. Foreknowledge of his precarious political position meant that Dassin and his largely American crew were forced to film on location on a tight schedule, often staying up all night to complete scenes – something which adds a pace and intensity entirely suited to Fabian’s descent into hell.

Far from the cosiness of some of the London-set British-produced movies of the period – Hue and Cry, say, or Passport to Pimlico – Dassin and his director of photography Max Green present the city as a savage prison – employing disorientating camera angles, claustrophobic compositions and documentary lighting that makes characters look like intaglios. A fine supporting cast – including Herbert Lom in the first of many roles as a heavy-lidded gangster, Googie Withers, and a remarkable turn from monolithic former professional wrestler Stanislaus Zbyszko – wander through the shadows in near-constant blackness, through a skeletal city: with large tracts of industrial wasteland and bombed-out buildings at its very centre, it’s hard to forget that Night and the City was filmed three years before the end of partial post-war rationing. London here is a chiaroscuro city made up of physical and emotional scars, where there is no chance of redemption or escape and morality is merely a hindrance to survival.

This lack of moral resolution was the reason why Night and the City received such a hostile critical reception on its original release. Forget all that, though: if you want to be grabbed by the collar and dragged through the gutters of Piccadilly, there’s really nothing like it.

This review was first published in 2007 for the BFI DVD release of the film.

Pat Long

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror

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Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror

Format: Blu-ray*

Release date: 23 November 2015

Distributor: BFI

Director: F.W. Murnau

Based on: Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Original title: Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens

Cast: Max Schreck, Alexander Granach, Greta Schröder

Germany 1922

89 minutes

Hailed as a masterpiece of early German cinema and still regarded as one of the best horror films ever made, the 1922 classic Nosferatu has stood the test of time, despite a shaky start. Unable to secure the film rights to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, FW Murnau changed key aspects of the text in order to make his film. This subsequently led to the Stoker estate successfully suing the production company (Prana-Film) for copyright infringement, leaving them bankrupt. In spite of a court order for all copies of the film to be destroyed, worldwide distribution ensured copies would remain intact. Nosferatu has since influenced and inspired generations of filmmakers, spawning loving remakes and homages in the process.

Nosferatu stands independently from Dracula, yet the narrative structure is both true to the original and surprisingly complex. After cheerful businessman Hutter takes a seemingly innocent trip to the Carpathian Mountains to secure a real estate deal with the elusive Count Orlok, he falls ill, without ever suspecting that the cause might be the bite marks on his neck. Meanwhile Orlok embarks on a voyage across the sea to take up residence in Hutter’s town. The ship’s rat-infested cargo unleashes a plague upon the town, and though Hutter is reunited with his young wife Ellen, she realises she must succumb to the vampire in order to overpower him.

To consider Nosferatu simply as a key example of the German Expressionist style prominent in the early 1920s somewhat obscures Murnau’s leanings towards formal qualities, and his use of techniques heavily influenced by nineteenth-century gothic romantic paintings. Nosferatu‘s outdoor locations give a sense of realism, but camera tricks distort perceptions of time and space. Idyllic landscapes can quickly become fearsome, evoking the uncanny and obliterating boundaries between the real and unreal. Yet it is, perhaps, the expressionist elements that help make Nosferatu the iconic film that it is. Most striking is the now infamous image of the huge distorted shadow of the vampire; when he ascends the stairs to Ellen’s room his deformed figure calls to mind all incarnations of (childhood) fears, the terrifying ghosts and monsters which exist in the imagination.

Brought to life by Max Schreck, Count Orlok possesses an other-worldly presence not seen in cinema before or since. His features are grotesquely exaggerated: ears, nose and teeth protrude from a skeletal face, and his hands are claw-like as they delve at his prey: the bizarre physicality of Schreck’s performance complements the expressionist aesthetic of the film. Associated with rats and pestilence, Orlok is a world away from the charming and seductive Dracula depicted by Christopher Lee in the Hammer films. However, an undercurrent of perverse sexuality and desire runs through the film, and the predatory nature of the vampire is literally examined under a microscope by the scientists, as if it can be understood rationally. But this is to no avail.

Nosferatu was the first of many Dracula films, and its unique aesthetic reflects the level of innovation in the German film industry at that time. This definitive two-disc set is exquisitely restored, with painstaking resurrection of the original music and intertitles. With special features including a 96-page book and a making-of documentary, there’s plenty to sink your teeth into.

This review refers to the 2007 Eureka Entertainment ‘Masters of Cinema’ DVD release.

Lindsay Tudor

* Special features of the newly remastered BFI Blu-ray release include a video essay by Christopher Frayling and the two short films Le Vampire by Jean Painlevé and The Mistletoe Bough by early film pioneer Percy Stow, which features a new score by Saint Etienne’s Pete Wiggs. The disc also includes a fully illustrated booklet featuring film credits, film notes by David Kalat and an essay on Albin Grau and Nosferatu’s occultist origins by Brian J Robb.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable

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Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable

Format: Dual Format (Blu-ray + DVD)

Part of Female Prisoner Scorpion: The Complete Collection limited edition box-set

Release date: 8 August 2016

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: Shunya Itô

Writer: Hirō Matsuda

Based on a manga by: Toru Shinohara

Cast: Meiko Kaji, Mikio Narita, Reisen Lee, Yayoi Watanabe

Original title: Joshû sasori: Kemono-beya

Japan 1973

87 minutes

Shunya Itô’s third film in the acclaimed Female Prisoner series is a heady mix of fierce attitude, visual potency, and unflinching violence.

Shunya Itô’s third film in the acclaimed Female Prisoner series is a heady mix of fierce attitude, visual potency, and unflinching violence. While the series was later sullied by an inferior director who made a number of second-rate sequels, Itô here creates a stylish slice of Japanese exploitation cinema that also helped cement the fiendishly cool Meiko Kaji’s status as an iconic screen siren.

Since escaping from prison, life on the run hasn’t been easy for Scorpion. After an outrageous opening sequence in which she hacks the arm off the steely-eyed Detective Kondo to avoid capture, Scorpion finds refuge with Yuki, a tragic and desperate prostitute who personally satiates her brain-damaged brother’s sexual appetites to keep him in order. Attempting to live a modest and inconspicuous life, Scorpion is soon in the clutches of a vicious prostitute gang led by Katsu, an ex-cellmate drunk on power and in the mood for revenge. Drugged and locked in a cage with menacing crows for company, she wakes to find herself next to the body of an abused young prostitute, and thereafter seeks to escape and exact vengeance. Scorpion is certainly a formidable predator, skilfully despatching her enemies in the blink of an eye and never looking back. But will the determined Detective Kondo catch up with her before she has executed her deadly rampage?

Beast Stable is forthright in confronting taboo themes such as abortion and incest, yet Ito handles them deftly, creating affecting scenes without being overly gratuitous. One such scene juxtaposes two abortions so that the composure of one highlights the viciousness of the other. And although the women in the film suffer at the hands of brutish men, the puppet master is Katsu, the evil queen-style villainess who wouldn’t look out of place in a Disney film. In spite of her abhorrent cruelty, once stripped of her accoutrements and without the help of her henchmen her superficiality and weakness are exposed. This is in stark contrast to the almost ethereal Scorpion, for whom action speaks louder than words. Indeed, Kaji barely utters two lines in the entire film and everything is communicated through the intensity of her eyes: they are her ultimate weapon, eventually sending Katsu round the bend.

There are moment when stunning cinematography lends the film a fairy-tale atmosphere, for instance, the fiery cascade of matches Yuki releases into the sewer; or the bird’s eye view of Scorpion and the dead prostitute lying face to face. This is further enhanced by Scorpion’s Houdini-esque feats. Even while on the run Scorpion is always imprisoned in some way, but each time she inexplicably escapes, and such narrative flaws only add to her mythology. A gentler side of Scorpion is also explored through an unlikely bond with Yuki. Solidarity is formed out of the adversity of the situation, but mutual trust gives rise to moments of unexpected tenderness, and as Yuki becomes instrumental in Scorpion’s fight for survival, Scorpion seems to give Yuki strength, even if her future looks bleak.

Despite sitting comfortably in the niche market of 70s exploitation, Beast Stable is also surprisingly restrained yet inventive, and still feels fresh today. What it lacks in explicit violence it makes up for in style. No wonder then that it has its part in influencing contemporary filmmakers (I won’t mention any names). Beast Stable has enough bite to stand independently, but fall under its spell and it won’t be long until you seek out its predecessors.

Lindsay Tudor

This review was first published in October 2007 in connection with the DVD release of Female Prisoner Scorpion. Beast Stable by Eureka Entertainment.