Moviedrome

This site is dedicated to BBC2’s Moviedrome. It’s an archive of every Alex Cox and Mark Cousins introduction

Tuesday, 24th November 2015

The Wonderful and Frightening World of Moviedrome

“Who’s going to believe a talking head? Get a job in a sideshow!”

Moviedrome was the most radical, influential and fondly remembered film series ever broadcast on mainstream TV. Well… probably. Each summer from 1988 to 1994 and then again from 1997 to 2000, the series would show a selection of “cult films” on BBC2 every Sunday night. The films they showed - weird, scary, startling, offbeat, obscure and often unappreciated - were exciting enough, but the filmed introductions that preceded each broadcast were often even more subversive than the pictures themselves.

On Sunday the 8th May 1988 Moviedrome broadcast its first episode. Filmed on a set of what looks like a disreputable L.A. motel room with a large neon sign of the series name flashing outside, the camera zooms back through one of the room’s windows with an Ejército Nacional de Liberación flag (the Marxist guerrilla National Liberation Army of Colombia) draped over the windowsill. The door to the empty room opens and film director Alex Cox enters, looking like a Robert Crumb drawing of a geeky punk. Wearing a leather jacket and a t-shirt of his most recent and most brilliant film, Walker, he begins to tell us a little about the premise of the series, and gives a brief introduction to the following film, The Wicker Man.

Alex Cox’s first Moviedrome introduction

“Let the sideshow begin…”

Though the televised film introduction was nothing new and Moviedrome was part of a long tradition that went back at least to The Vampira Show, Alex Cox and the whole style of the Moviedrome introduction was unlike anything that had come before (or since). Cox was instantly captivating. He was clearly educated and intelligent but he wasn’t a stuffy academic or a typical film critic/scholar. His style was quiet, unself-conscious, seemingly unconcerned by the camera. He spoke to the audience without condescension and in a direct and unaffected manner. Here was someone you could trust and respect and, as it turned out, learn a great deal from. After telling us that the primary focus of Moviedrome was to show “cult films” he went on to explain exacly what that was…

What is a cult film? A cult film is one that has a passionate following, but does not appeal to everyone: James Bond movies are not cult films, but chainsaw movies are. Just because a film has become a cult movie does not automatically guarantee quality. Some are very bad; others are very, very good. Some make an awful lot of money at the box office; others make no money at all. Some are considered quality films; others are exploitation movies. One thing cult movies do have in common is that they are all genre films – for example gangster films or westerns. They also have a tendency to slosh over from one genre into another, so that a science fiction film might also be a detective movie, or vice versa. They’re also generally cheaply made: most of the films in this season cost under $2 million. Some of them cost a great deal less. They share common themes as well, themes that are found in all drama: love, murder and greed. Murder and greed predominate in this season. All the movies chosen for Moviedrome – culled from the BBC library with the addition of a few personal selections – are acknowledged as cult films. Some are popular favourites, others are not, but every one has an element – a performance, musical score, opening sequence or whatever – that makes them greatly worth watching.

That final paragraph was not included in the broadcast but is added to the introduction in the first Moviedrome Guide, which was published as a companion to the first three seasons.

Everything is there in that first ever introduction: the subversiveness, the outsiderness, the humour, the ambition and creativity, and an obvious desire to communicate directly with the audience. This last point is interesting when looking at the first series introductions, because in some there will be particular books, pictures and objects placed about that motel room which have some kind of importance to Cox or are pertinent to what he has to say (and this would continue through all of Cox’s introductions over the years, as he would routinely digress from talking about the films in question and go off on fascinating and informative tangents about all kinds of topics). I’ve heard so many people saying that Moviedrome was their film education, but I think what they’re mainly referring to are Cox’s introductions. He covered so much ground.

There was also ambition in the way the set was used, because they didn’t just occupy the motel room. The lead-in to Diva, for example, was shot in the car that’s parked outside the window and you get the sense of a fully realised world in which these deliberations are taking place. There’s an interesting contrast between the vividly fictional surroundings of Cox’s introductions and the direct, unadorned honesty of his presenting style.

“I turn the tragic lantern on…”

“You know how everybody’s into weirdness right now?”

Before 1964 most of the films available to broadcast on UK TV were either old B movies, pre-war independent pictures or foreign-language films. Obviously, television was seen as competition and the distributors made sure they had the monopoly on all the classics and new studio product. This blockade ended when Samuel Goldwyn and the MCA (who owned Universal and controlled the pre-1949 backlog of Paramount) began selling films as packages to the BBC and ITV. From 1964 onwards a broader selection of films were broadcast, often as seasons which could run for over a year (the Midnight Movie or Saturday Thriller on BBC, for example).[1] I find this interesting because it seems to me that the kinds of films that would later gain a premium amongst film fans - ie. undervalued B movies and foreign-language pictures - were, for many years, the main staple available to the general viewer.

From 1965 to 2000 there existed a golden age of film programming on BBC2, when a vast range of films - classics, genre pictures, avant-garde, foreign-language, arthouse, independent, exploitation and cult films - were shown on a regular basis. From 1965 you had the World Cinema strand on every Monday night (moving to Thursday nights in 1966); the kind of foreign-language films that just aren’t shown anymore were broadcast every week (with subtitles). In the summer of ‘75 the first season of an eight-year run of the much-missed Horror Double Bills on Saturday nights was broadcast. In 1986 Derek Malcolm’s The Film Club began, with its amazing roster of director seasons, foreign films, classic cinema and arthouse pictures. This would lead directly on to Moviedrome in 1988. Moving into the ‘90s wih Moving Pictures, Dr Terror’s Vault of Horror, Robert McKee’s Filmworks, the Forbidden Weekend in 1995 and Forbidden Season in 1997, Mark Cousins’ Scene By Scene and the second iteration of Moviedrome.

“Deep in the night, plying very strange cargo…”

“Hardly ever missed, did I?”

Over the course of 11 seasons Moviedrome broadcast 204 separate films (207 in all, as three films - Johnny Guitar, Carrie and One-Eyed Jacks - were shown twice). Though there was the odd stinker here and there, it’s extraordinary how many truly great films were shown. The full list can be seen on the index page.

In the early years, I was too young to realise the cultural significance of the series, the introductions and the films themselves. What I do remember quite vivdly is the excitement that Moviedrome inspired, how much I anticipated Alex Cox’s introductions each week and the intense reactions I had to many of the films.

Some, like Django, had never been shown on TV before; and others, like Nothing Lasts Forever, would never be shown on terrestrial TV again (or pretty much anywhere else). That film was therefore an important broadcast in itself, but that wasn’t the only instance where Moviedrome was ahead of the pack or influential. That very first introduction preceding The Wicker Man has been credited with renewing interest in the film, leading to it now being respected as one of the greatest horror films of all-time. And a whole generation of film-makers who grew up watching Moviedrome (like Ben Wheatley, for example) have credited it with educating and inspiring them. Add to that the breadth of topics and political scope of Cox’s informative introductions and the whole package of Moviedrome, both films and introductions, was a goldmine that went way beyond its remit to show some cult movies.

“Match me, Sidney.”

Alongside the films that were shown is a short list of films that were intended to be broadcast but, for whatever reasons, never were. Below are links to scans of the introductions for three films that were never shown, but were still included in the first Moviedrome Guide.

• Bird (1988) • Chinatown (1974) • Inserts (1975)

In that very first introduction to The Wicker Man there’s a brief montage of posters for forthcoming films in the season. One of which - Burt Topper’s The Strangler - was never shown. The two most important unbroadcast films on Moviedrome are, I think, an intended double-bill of Francesco Rosi’s The Mattei Affair and Salvatore Giuliano. They apparently filmed an introduction in a swimming pool in Budapest but the BBC didn’t even purchase the films and their refusal to do so - based on a growing reluctance to show foreign-language films - resulted in Alex Cox leaving for good.[2] The people behind the recent release of Salvatore Guiliano by Arrow on DVD apparently approached both Alex Cox and producer Nick Jones to try and purchase the introductions for inclusion but neither had access to the footage and doubted that it still existed. Other films that were intended for that final Cox season but never shown were a double-bill of Slightly Scarlet and Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past; plus Alice’s Restaurant and Django Kill. The last of which was eventually broadcast as part of BBC2’s Forbidden Season in 1997 with a new Alex Cox introduction. I know of only two unbroadcast films during the Mark Cousins years: The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which has an entry in the Radio Times for the 23rd November, 1998. The other is Mildred Pierce which is included in the opening montage for the titles of the 1999 season, but… was never shown.

I see so many instances of people misremembering certain films as having been shown on Moviedrome. Alex Cox’s Repo Man seems to be the most common false memory. Even Cox himself in a couple of interviews I’ve seen spoke of films being included that turned out not to have been. Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley is one; Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: Wrath of God, another. You would expect at least one of Herzog’s films to have been included. The other main omission, I think, is David Lynch. Despite several people saying that they remembered seeing Blue Velvet on the strand, none of Lynch’s films were ever included.

Jonesing for film

Moviedrome was the invention of BBC Producer Nick Jones. According to the first Moviedrome Guide, Jones was born in Essex and educated at University College London. His first credit I can find online is producing The Book of the Film in 1978, a comedy drama set in a public library in York. He went on to produce Bilko on Parade for the BBC in 1984 and Hammer - The Studio That Dripped Blood in 1987.

Nick Jones meeting prospective Moviedrome presenters

Moviedrome’s main precursor was The Film Club. Both strands were shown on BBC2 and were essentially alike in that they both showed films with brief introductions; but unlike The Film Club which (for most of its run) had a whole raft of different artists and scholars leading us into the film each week, Moviedrome had just the one. This final quality is one of the things that made it so special, of course, because there was a coherence and single point-of-view that ran throughout. This is also why, I believe, the introductions of Alex Cox and, later, Mark Cousins left such an indelible impression and are still remembered, whereas The Film Club seems to have fallen off the radar somewhat in the intervening years.

Nick Jones didn’t just come up with the idea of Moviedrome. He coined the title, selected most of the films, co-wrote the Moviedrome Guides and was also responsible for offering the job of presenting it to Alex Cox. Cox himself said that this was due to his own Film Club introduction in 1988 for a double-bill of Point Blank and The Long Goodbye which Jones produced. There’s a piece by Richard Scott in The Times, from 14th May 1994; a preview of the seventh season, where the germination of Moviedrome is explained:

The idea with the original Moviedrome was to have each week’s programme introduced by a film-maker with a particular interest. But the results were varied, and in cases in which English was not the first language and Autocue-reading skills were less than adequate, the viewer was sometimes left more baffled than to begin with.

Which is a little confusing. It suggests that there were episodes of Moviedrome that pre-dated the Alex Cox introductions. I assume he’s referring to Film Club, but that had been running for several years by 1988 and continued for three more. In fact, Moviedrome would start its run just as the 1987/88 season of Film Club ended and the latter would return for its next season as Moviedrome was winding down, so for that first two years we had an almost unbroken run of films every week, each with a brief introduction.

Click to read

Nick Jones produced various other film-related programmes for the BBC throughout the 1990s, including Close-Up (another series of introductions, this time by various people talking about their favourite films), Robert McKee’s Filmworks, 1995’s Forbidden Weekend, Forbidden Season in 1997, and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, a documentary presented by Alex Cox. He moved to Channel 4 in the late-90s and was responsible for commissioning film programming for Film4, back in the early days when it wasn’t shit on a stick. His most recent credits are directing Mark Kermode’s introductions to selected films from the BFI’s new online player in late-2015.

The poet and the provocateur

After Alex Cox left Moviedrome in 1994, film programming on BBC2 was still relatively healthy. Dr Terror’s Vault of Horror ended the year with its third and penultimate season of horror films. Moving Pictures was still running and would continue for another two years. Throughout 1995 100 films were shown on BBC2 to celebrate cinema’s centenary and during that same year the famous Forbidden Weekend was broadcast, which included several introductions by Alex Cox.

In 1997 Moviedrome returned with a new host in film-maker Mark Cousins. Cousins had made several documentary films and was the very successful and respected programmer of the Edinburgh Film Festival. He also looked about 18 years old. The bastard! In many ways he was the perfect choice as Alex Cox’s successor. He came out of that tradition at the Edinburgh Film Festival that I think began in the ‘70s with his friend and mentor Lynda Myles. It was her revolutionary approach that first set it apart from other festivals at the time; elevating films and film-makers that were previously considered “merely” genre directors. I think the fact they had a retrospective of Sam Fuller films and invited him over was considered radical and big news at the time. The unconventional approach of Myles in those years and its influence reached into the ‘80s through to the present day, and I suspect one of the major revolutions in film culture in the UK that would lead to Moviedrome. By all accounts, Cousins was just as radical and unconventional. In 1997 it’s difficult to think of anyone better suited to continue and build on Cox’s (and Nick Jones’s) work on the series.

I think that’s his knee!

His appointment on Moviedrome came at the tail-end of that flourishing of interest in film programming at the BBC and on TV in general.[3] Around this time Cousins presented another series called Scene by Scene in which he interviewed various artists about their films while showing them chosen scenes. Each episode ran to an hour and included such greats as Lauren Bacall, Martin Scorsese and David Lynch. At this time, Cousins seemed to be on a one-man-mission to rejuvenate our film culture and instill a love of film in the hearts of the British public. Unfortunately, Scene By Scene ended in 2001, a year after Moviedrome broadcast its final episode. And that was the end of that.

My most indelible memories of Moviedrome are from the Mark Cousins era. By the time he took over I was in my mid-teens and, in great part thanks to Alex Cox’s Moviedrome, I had developed an interest in cinema itself (as opposed to merely enjoying watching films), so Cousins’ joyous exuberance and passion for film was deeply inspiring. I’ll never forget the night I saw the double-bills of Leon/Le Samourai or The Warriors/La Haine and the profound effect they had on me.

There seems to have been some antipathy towards Cousins amongst certain hardcore Moviedrome fans; mainly because he wasn’t Alex Cox. In many ways he was the complete opposite. His introductions were almost all positive and whereas Cox would use his time to go off on fascinating tangents about all kinds of stuff, Cousins’ were almost entirely about the film in question. He was more like a typical film critic in that sense, but the last word you would use to describe him is ’typical’. He is uniquely passionate. He appears to be physically moved by film, unable to keep still as he talks about them. He is also uniquely and unapologetically poetic in his attitude to cinema. It was, I think, this final quality that did not endear him to some, because it’s one often dismissed as pretentiousness. It’s a lazy criticism that can plague British art. Cousins’ enthusiasm is completely unbridled and in his unguardedness he leaves himself open to ridicule, which is of course a great strength.

Cousins with your actual Tilda Swinton

Point of interest: Cousins’ close friend and sometime collaborator, the truly great Tilda Swinton, is a direct descendent of Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, who took the first X-ray pictures in Britain and was the first man to envision a totally electronic television system, providing the theoretical basis for such two decades before the technology existed to implement it. Thus a parallel line exists between that of Swinton’s family and the development of the technology ‘pon which Moviedrome was broadcast.

If only more people had Cousins’ sensual and emotional attachment to film and his desire to provoke the same in his audience we would have a far richer film culture than the present chin-kneading cynical race to the middle ground. For me, he is an invigorating corrective to such mediocrity and he shares with Cox an obvious desire to inspire the audience and shake things up. To engage as much with the world as with cinema.

The art of the title sequence

One of the most striking and memorable elements of Moviedrome were the title sequences for each season, particularly the Alex Cox years. They were very creative and technically sophisticated, but almost always tongue-in-cheek. I can’t think of any other film series - or any series, really - that displayed as much ambition and creativity in their titles.

The first series combined the title and the introduction by having Alex Cox present from the set I mentioned at the start, zooming out from the blinking neon Moviedrome sign and doing the intro all in one shot, which in itself was a very bold approach. I’ve seen the Moviedrome introductions in general described as “eerie” and likened to David Lynch, but I think that person was really talking about this first season. There is something very stark and striking about the tone. The second season seemed to be set in the same world, with Cox perhaps leaving the motel in the car parked outside to watch that week’s film at the drive-in. But it was from the third season on that they began to get much more inventive and ambitious. An animated train hurtles through the American landscape, onboard which a shady looking Alex Cox enters, looking like a dubious character from a film noir - perhaps this is the same train on which The Narrow Margin takes place - Cox also plays a barman on the train carriage cleaning a glass. The train eventually stops and when it pulls away Cox is left standing outside an old art deco cinema with the Moviedrome sign on top and that week’s film on the marquee. The fourth season began inside a diner with people walking past in the street outside. In a mirror of the first season, the camera tracks back through the empty diner and cranes up in a single shot to reveal that the diner is in fact a small model. Alex Cox enters frame right with a clapper board with each film’s title and the same date every week - 22nd November, 1963 - the day JFK was assassinated (a theme he would return to in 1993’s special JFK Night introduction of The Parallax View). 1992 and 1994 saw perhaps the most fondly remembered sequences, parodies of King Kong and The Third Man respectively; while 1993’s main season had a formally dressed Cox playing the organ in an ornate old movie theatre as scenes from various films played on the screen, into which Cox himself had been playfully inserted.

The grid below contains images from the title sequences of each of the 11 seasons of Moviedrome, plus the 1993 special “JFK Night” introduction. Click on each image to go to a video of that sequence.

1988

1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

JFK Night

1994

1997

1998

1999

2000

When Mark Cousins took over the title sequences were less ambitious and creative, but I assume that was due to budgetary constraints. His first season’s credits were very simple, very sincere, very ‘90s. The following year saw him in a brisk, straightforward rendering of a spy film (echoes of Cox’s final sequence, perhaps), while his last two years were basically moody montages of shots from some of the films in their respective seasons. I think these last two were the most successful of Cousins’ run.

The end of the cult of ‘cult cinema’

“Soon all of us will have special names, names designed to cause the cathode ray tube to resonate.”

When Moviedrome began it was a genuinely outsider interest and the films were largely under-appreciated if not outright obscure and impossible to find. However, it was in its attitude diametrically opposed to the kind of elitism and snobbery that encroach on notions of both “good” and “bad” cinema. In the last 30 years cult films have gone from being a roughly aligned group of films each with small, passionate followings to a unified genre in itself. Cult Cinema is now a brand that film companies not only sell their often shitty product through, it’s also a ubiquitous aesthetic that modern film-makers ape and whose films are informed by (and even built entirely on the work of) directors whose films had become cult entities. The most obvious and egregious example of the latter being Tarantino, of course; but the influence of cult cinema and the pilfering of those films is endemic in modern film culture and has become part of the mainstream. The appreciation of cult films has become elitist rather than inclusive. Moviedrome was always about bringing the audience in and opening cinema out to that audience.

The last picture show

I go back again and again to the social aspect of what Moviedrome did. By curating a season of films on TV, showing films each week that most will not have heard of or seen; there’s a social aspect to the collective nature of a group of people sitting at home watching films which have been introduced to us with a plethora of information about the film, the context in which it was made and the political, social, historical and economic considerations of those films; not to mention the invaluable information (usually given by Alex Cox) about the film-making process itself: how the business mitigates the results and usually screws up the artists’ intentions, etc. It was as much about the world around us and the films were placed in their broader context. In other words, Moviedrome was a broad education and you don’t get that now with an internet where we’re all solitary viewers and can select which films we fancy at the push of a button and then watch those films in a bubble, as opposed to an audience which experiences the films together. This aspect of Moviedrome is what cinema - at its best - is for.

Cult film fans reminiscing about Moviedrome

Another thing to consider is the frequent Moviedrome double-bills. When you place two films together it’s like a metaphor. You don’t just get two films, you get the clash that comes from that coupling and all kinds of avenues of thought and association arise. That above all else is something we don’t get in the current internet-driven climate and certainly not on television anymore. As is the overriding drive of modern culture, we’re now left alone, completely cut off from everyone else - individual consumers, divorced from the greater social and artistic context of films, which are increasingly detached from life as-it-is and the world outside. We need Moviedrome more than ever…

[1] Feature Films on British Television in the 1970s - Dr. Sheldon Hall [2] Shutting Out Subtitles - Alex Cox (25th June, 2004) [3] Channel 4, British Film Culture and Me - Paul Kerr (12th Jan, 2011)

Never shown on Moviedrome

If Mother India was India's Gone with the Wind, Guru Dutt was its Vincente Minnelli. Like the neo-realist-inspired Ghatak, Dutt was born in 1923, educated in Calcutta and associated with the leftist intellectuals of the Indian People's Theatre Association. However, he was less radical than Ghatak, studying dance in the early 1940s and getting into filmmaking through choreography. He started directing in 1952, but his most significant film, Kaagaz Ke Phool/Paper Flowers (1959), was also the first Indian one filmed in widescreen. It is an intense experience because Dutt himself played the lead, an autobiographical role about a film director recalling the golden age of studio filmmaking. The character dies in his directing chair at the end of the film and Dutt killed himself less than five years after its failure at the box office. Like many of Minnelli's films, Paper Flowers, is an elegy for a lost artistic past, richly detailed and brilliantly composed. The director in the movie comes from a wealthy Anglicized family, which looks down on "the dirty world of films", and the same prejudice wrecks his marriage. He then meets a girl under a banyan tree on a rainy night, falls in love with her and wants to cast her in his current film, which happens to he Devdas (P.C. Barua's classic work about a drunken young man in love with his neighbour). The girl is unwilling to dress up and wear film make-up, calling such things a sham and saying that she looks like a monkey. Thus, Paper Flowers becomes a comment on India's cinematic past and its tendency to glamorize and decorate. Dutt's camera style is the most distinctive of this period. He tracks backward rapidly and repeatedly to reveal the size of a space, a rare technique even for the masters of tracking shots — Mizoguchi, Ophuls and Minnelli. He does this particularly in the film's most beautiful sequence, a musical number set in a sound studio. The girl comes into the vast space, a diagonal shard of light splits the screen and the song "Time has inflicted such sweet cruelty on us" begins. The director and the girl stand almost motionless, while the camera pulls back and circles them and the space. This exquisite number is reminiscent of Minnelli's ballet climax in An American in Paris.

- Excerpt from Mark Cousins' The Story of Film. (© Mark Cousins)

As I did after the Alex Cox years, I’m going to watch three films which were never shown on Moviedrome as a kind of tribute to Mark Cousins. This is the final film of the three...

Brief thoughts

One of Mark Cousins' Top 10 Greatest Films.

I don't have too much to add to what Cousins says; partly because I'm tired and I want to wrap this up tonight and also because, only really knowing the films of Satyajit Ray, I can't really talk about Indian cinema with any knowledge. I thought it was a gorgeous film, very tragic obviously and yet so beautiful in construction and style. What stuck out most for me was the songs sung by the great Asha Bhosle - my good friend Graeme turned me on to her a few years ago and one of the pieces he showed was this glorious clip from Teesri Manzil - also by RD Burman. Graeme added:

RD Burman is credited with being the first Indian music director who brought a western influence into Bollywood, and it was the soundtrack to Teesri Manzil that was his breakthrough recording, which is where this track hails from. The bit where Asha Bhosle sails in - it's at 3:26 in the video - is for me one of the greatest moments in recorded history. Asha often was the playback singer for vampy / femme fatale / bad girl actors, and that is the case for her here; the only difference is that at this stage she wasn't a legend as Teesri Manzil is from 1965-ish. This recording was the beginning of the legend.

It's a glorious clip and full of the sort of great qualities which are completely disregarded in our staid western culture now; apart from perhaps the cinema of Baz Luhrmann.

It's divided into several parts and isn't the best quality, but this is worth watching: In Search of Guru Dutt.

Never shown on Moviedrome

The last significant 1980s British director, Terence Davies, preconceived his films as meticulously as Greenaway, but with the opposite effect. After a trilogy of bleak shorts, he wrote and directed Distant Voices. Still Lives (UK, 1988) to enormous acclaim. Set in his home town of Liverpool in the 1950s, its subject is a working-class family intermittently terrorized by its brutal father. The film itself is a flashback but, as a work of autobiography, it is also a depiction of what Davies feels like when remembering his difficult childhood. Thus it stands out at a double distance from the past. Nearly every painful scene is perfected as it were by exquisite framing and lighting (by William Diver and Patrick Duval), and crane shots are choreographed with as much grace and even joy as any Hollywood or Bollywood musical number. Davies has often cited the crane shot near the end of Young at Heart (Gordon Douglas, USA, 1954) where the camera glides through the window of a family home after the husband of one of its daughters appears to have killed himself, as a perfect cinematic moment, a depiction of heaven or the kind of utopia written about by Richard Dyer. Such scenes became the central formal-emotional device of his own work. Like the early work of Martin Scorsese, Distant Voices. Still Lives surveys remembered experience through an aesthetic that brings about a kind of recovery for the filmmaker and audience. The ugliness of the human situation is transformed by the beauty of its presentation. As in the films of Pedro Almodovar, Davies' female characters represent moments of emotional release. Since the late 1950s, British cinema had been interested in the nuances of social class. None captured the working, urban, cinema-going class better than Davies' masterpiece.

- Excerpt from Mark Cousins' The Story of Film. (© Mark Cousins)

As I did after the Alex Cox years, I’m going to watch three films which were never shown on Moviedrome as a kind of tribute to Mark Cousins. This is the second of the three...

Brief thoughts

One of Mark Cousins' Top 10 Greatest Films.

The style of this is so unique. The structure which goes forwards and backwards, as Davies himself says, in the way that memory becomes cyclical. The tone of it is hard to describe. The endless singing, the misery, the sometimes exuberant camera work, the extremely precise framing and lighting. They used a process where all the colour is taken out and only reds are still vibrant amidst a sea of browns. Terence Davies interview - Film Comment, 1988:

I knew I wanted a certain type of color, so we did a test with Kay Laboratories. I wanted tones of red and brown, but not sepia, because you can't watch sepia, it's impossible. So we used a coral filter and took out all the primary colors from the decor and costumes, except the red in the lip­stick. Then we used a bleach bypass process that leaves the silver nitrate in the print and desaturates the color.

I've seen the stillness and structure of the film described as "anti-cinema", but Adrian Danks says (rightly, in my view) that Davies' film effectively evokes the cinema of Powell and Pressburger, Bill Douglas, Yasujiro Ozu and the MGM musical. Personally, I find it almost unbearably sad (and true) to watch, but I can't deny it's a masterpiece and a fascinating work stylistically and structurally. My own favourite of Davies' films are The Long Day Closes and The House of Mirth.

Incidentally, one of the most beautiful moments in this film (or any other) is the shot of a group of umbrellas in the rain as the camera tracks up to reveal two film posters outside the Futurist cinema on Lime Street, Liverpool. This is the same cinema where Alex Cox first saw The Wild Bunch, aged 13. You can see him revisiting the now gutted and derelict cinema in 2008 here.

Davies has a few films in the pipeline - already made - which is exciting. You can read about them and all his other films on his beautiful site: terencedavies.com/

Never shown on Moviedrome

I love The Apartment. I absolutely adore it, but now, after a score of times seeing it, watching it over Chinese food, slo-moing MacLaine at the end as she runs along West 67th Street, I'm beginning to admire it less. I express my qualms not to wipe the smile off your face as you begin to read about a film I presume you like, but to register my shock at the discovery of my misgivings of its greatness. The Apartment has given me more pleasure, more things to talk about, more phrases to use as I speak to people, than any other film (there's a sign on my door which says `MENSCHES ONLY, PLEASE'). Now, I wonder if I allowed it to get too close to me. It gets very close to people indeed. Hum the theme song of The Apartment and you feel the stupendous loneliness of being in New York. Played faster and with more brass and it becomes Fran's dream song as she runs at the end. Fran and Mr Sheldrake fell in love to the same tune; the pianist at the Chinese restaurant plays it when they arrive; Fran buys it for Sheldrake at Christmas. It is the song of their love as much as 'As Time Goes By' in Casablanca. The Apartment gets close to people because it is great at the loneliness of Lemmon. Wilder and LaShelle often surround their lead actor with acres of that 2.35:1 space. The French critic Jerome Jacob said of The Apartment: 'In the era of Boeing, everyone has forgotten Lindbergh, everybody lives in the prison of the human face.' This, for me, is not the type of loneliness which The Apartment portrays. It's more like the loneliness in David Lean's Summer Madness: open, humane, heart-bursting. Jacob's idea is too abstract, too Kafkaesque. Baxter's loneliness isn't due to being imprisoned in some way. It is expressed when he goes to the park bench and the leaves fall, when he pretends to have a hot date in the lobby, but walks past her, when he stands alone outside The Music Man, when he packs alone on New Year's Eve and the camera (in one of Wilder's few non-eyelevel shots in the film) goes high, when he eats a TV dinner alone. His Picassos and Rousseaus on the wall show he has an interior life. He is a mensch, but isn't getting the chance to show it. Watch The Apartment drunk and you don't fall asleep. Why is that? I think it's because it doesn't stop-start. It flows like a river, widening and deepening. No sub-plot peters out. And exactly because it flows, because it's a miracle of classical storytelling, it never becomes abstract. French critics have talked of its critique of conformism, its attack on consumer society. I can see what they're saying, but in doing so they're misjudging the feel of the film. Maybe if the dialogue didn't crackle, if MacLaine wasn't so beautiful, if the flow of feeling and hope and warmth wasn't so constant, I could see something abstract there. But I can't. And I don't think Wilder could. He, like so many emigrés, fell in love with those countries which didn't fall in love with theories. His whole cinema is about retreating from theory, from ideology, about the unfashionable observation that all human beings are the same, into humour, fate, `so-what'ness, like the last lines of his films. Volker Schlöndorff says that this is what makes Wilder great. Wilder himself said that The Apartment could have been set in Hong Kong or Paris, Berlin or Rome. His targets aren't specifically America or New York, but people and those tendencies in people to take the easiest route through life, to half-live and half-think. More and more, as time goes by, The Apartment seems to float free from the specifics of the dawn of the sixties, when it was released. Although some critics savaged it for seeming to herald a new contemporary immorality, it now seems to be from a 'time before' that new morality. Stand it in line with The Graduate, etc., and it sticks out a mile. Like other poets of the had been or never was — Orson Welles, John Ford, Pasolini — Wilder's humanism is timeless. The great, timeless, moving humanism of the picture, however, doesn't make it a masterpiece and the reason I think it doesn't is in your hands at this moment. The Apartment is too much screenplay, too much soundtrack, not enough image track. It isn't a very visual film. When you watch it on a cinema screen, it is disappointing, it is almost too big. The feelings don't match the image. There are of course some purely visual moments. Trauner's 19th floor office building set does everything Wilder wanted it to do, but it isn't Wilder's image, it's King Vidor's. The contrast between Baxter's apartment and Sheldrake's home is better, subtler, more relevant for the film. Page 101 of the screenplay calls Sheldrake's house 'split-level American', but there's far more in the imagery than this. The house is brightly lit, Wyleresque, WASPy, bourgeois, fifties, full of fake permanence and pretend content. Baxter's phone conversation with Sheldrake after Fran's suicide attempt allows Wilder to cut between the two homes. Unlike in Wyler, it's rare to come across stable families in Wilder and his portrait of the Sheldrakes — which includes them smiling on a Christmas card — is subtly visual. Another visual moment which isn't in the script occurs when Baxter goes to Sheldrake's office the day after Karl Matuschka has punched him in the face. Baxter is wearing dark glasses to hide his black eye. When he says the word 'yeah' (top of p. 149), Wilder shoots from the side so that we can see his eyes in shadow, behind his glasses. There's no explicit dramatic point being made here, but the shot has an unusual tone and is ambiguously intimate. Of course the story of The Apartment has a visual thing — Fran's cracked mirror — as a key element, and Wilder has said several times that he is proud that he was able to photograph Lemmon in the thing that makes him realize that Fran is having an affair with Sheldrake, thus bringing the love and careerism in his life into direct conflict, forcing him to choose. This is, indeed, narratively rich and satisfying, but it falls short of making meaning in purely visual terms. It is reducible to logic and words. It's writable in a screenplay. Most of Wilder's visual ideas are equally reducible in The Apartment, and that is why, I think, it doesn't feel like a masterpiece. It explains itself too completely. It doesn't feel like it loves cinema, except, of course, for Fran running. If you imagine it in visual terms, the film is full of verticality, about Baxter climbing up the career ladder, Fran going up and down in the lift. And yet there's no sense of height in it. Wilder uses one of the widest, most horizontal of screen ratios, Panavision. This could have made for interesting tensions, but it doesn't. My first ten or so viewings of The Apartment were on a TV screen and they've made me come to a conclusion I thought I'd never make about any film: I think it's better on TV. The film's verbal rather than visual nature, its intimacies, performances, warmth make it one of the best things you can do with your box in the corner of the room. The work of directors such as Wilder has, through repeated TV screenings of their best-known films in the last three decades, gained in critical reputation. Other, more visual, less intimate, more abstract American film-makers such as Nicholas Ray or Budd Boetticher, have been served less well by television. I think that a film masterpiece must have images which in some way defy description. It must believe in the primacy of photography, it must leave a shape in my head. The Apartment doesn't do this, but it does so many other stupendous things. It is the best non-masterpiece of American cinema.

- Excerpt from Mark Cousins' introduction to Billy Wilder/I.A.L Diamond's The Apartment screenplay. (© Mark Cousins, 1998)

As I did after the Alex Cox years, I’m going to watch three films which were never shown on Moviedrome as a kind of tribute to Mark Cousins. This is the first of the three...

Brief thoughts

I decided to choose three films from Cousins' Top 10 favourite films from the BFI 2012 poll. This, for me, was the most obvious choice as it's a personal favourite of mine, too. I spent days trying to find something by Cousins on the film until I remembered the introduction to the screenplay which I've had since the late-'90s. Doh! It's a brilliant intro and the screenplay is obviously not too shabby, so it's well worth seeking out to read in full. I was a little surprised by the criticism at first but the more I think about it the more I agree. Wilder made so many masterpieces. Two of which were shown on Moviedrome (Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole), but many more which could have been but sadly weren't: this, Double Indemnity, Lost Weekend, etc. One later Wilder film I'm particularly fond of but which gets a bad rap is The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes; a wonderful film and I think a very good candidate for Moviedrome. In the series introduction to the 1997/98 season, Cousins says that a Wilder film will be included but it never was. I wonder which one was intended and if an intro was filmed.

The greatest thing about The Apartment, beyond the script, is Jack Lemmon's performance. The physical precision and dexterity of his movement. It is extremely visual, of course. And the sheer unrestrained happiness in that run by Shirley MacLaine at the end. It's perfect. I may watch it again, actually...

Alfred Hitchcock letter to Wilder, praising The Apartment Conversations with Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond

Originally broadcast on the 10th July, 2000 at 00:20am.

Tonight, one of the great forgotten American movies of the 1970s. Jeff Bridges is The Last American Hero. The Last American Hero is based on a simple true story, about a guy, Junior Jackson, who was a mechanic in a small town and who dreamt of winning the Demolition Derby. The film closely follows the life of the real-life character, Junior Jackson, who was a mechanic and who did dream of a bigger life and who did end up winning the Demolition Derby. The story was then adapted by Tom Wolfe, who was a writer for the New Yorker, who went on to write Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff. And these short stories became the subject matter for the film. Many of the films that we remember from the '70s, like Taxi Driver and The Godfather and Chinatown, were kind of exciting attacks on the old American Dream and all those values and all those '50s things, and that was really important; but at the same time there were these films like Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and The Last Picture Show, which were more subtle explorations of the possibility of still dreaming in America and this film is just like that. A lot of the famous movies in the seventies were directed by the so-called Movie Brats and they were very self-conscious films, very designed, a very strong visual look, often using colours in a different way. This picture, by contrast, has got a documentary look. Shot with long lenses, in natural light, it feels like a work of TV but a very humanistic one and that stands it apart from those other films, I think. The film was written by William Roberts, whose famous previous credit was on The Magnificent Seven as a writer and it was directed by one of the top-notch TV directors, Lamont Johnson. It's clear that the director of this picture was a real actor's director. The casting, for a start, is very good and there's a real emphasis on the acting, its very naturalistic lighting etc so that it doesn't put the actors off. Also, loads of location work, a real sense of place here. Television directors, at their best, were very good at this, capturing the real world in some way. When you look at the rest of the career of this director you can see that it was mostly for television, it was mostly quite issue-based stuff, it wasn't about alienation, his work, and given that that was the fashionable theme in American cinema of the '70s maybe that's why he stuck to TV. I think this is a real actors picture and Jeff Bridges is brilliant I think in the lead role. He was born in LA, son of Lloyd Bridges. A very different style of acting, I think, to the East Coast boys: De Niro and Pacino and Hoffman, who were neurotic, who were city-based actors. He is much slower to anger, more influenced by people like Henry Fonda and Gary Cooper, I think. Somebody said he had "a wounded grace" and I think that's a very good way of putting it. Although he's quite young in this picture he'd done a few films before this. He came to the attention of the audiences in The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich's movie, and he got an Oscar nomination for it. He then did Fat City, John Huston's boxing film. A great picture. And he went on later on, of course, to do recently The Big Lebowski and The Fabulous Baker Boys. Bridges' brother in the picture is played by Gary Busey and it's noticeable how different his style of acting is, much more edgy; and his mother is played by Geraldine Fitzgerald, who knew Orson Welles and who got an Oscar nomination for Wuthering Heights. In the end, why I like this picture is because it's really devoted to its characters. It's a great film about those characters and about their cars and about their values. Unfashionable in the time, I think. It's like the film was directed by Jonathan Demme and you can hardly have higher praise than that.

- Mark Cousins' original introduction, transcribed from an audio recording. (thanks to Kaprisky for the audio)

Brief thoughts

The last ever Moviedrome film and a very good film to go out on, I think. I hadn't seen it before. I'm fascinated by what Mark Cousins talks about and that's the way cultural assumptions mean certain things are lauded while others are ignored. This is a very good film and it's beautifully acted and also shot very well (it isn't just point-and-shoot documentary filming, it does have a form to the way it's framed and lit), but - as Cousins says - it was very unfashionable and probably still is. We're still in the wake of the '70s in terms of what is generally accepted to be serious, worthwhile, artistic cinema (ie. self-consciously shot and self-consciously "dark" themes - just look at the current vogue for US TV) and it's such a narrow view of art. The humanism of this film is quite beautiful and very difficult to do, I think.

Cousins also touches on the difference between Jeff Bridges - for me, the greatest screen actor of the last 40 years - and the more fashionable and lauded actors of the same generation; and it's the same thing again. Bridges has never been fully appreciated because his style doesn't chime with the narrow criteria by which we now evaluate great acting. One of the most memorable episodes of Mark Cousins' great Scene by Scene series of interviews was with Bridges. Unfortunately it isn't online, few of those great interviews are, in fact; but it's in the book of the series what they published.

As I did after the Alex Cox films, I'm going to watch three films that were never shown on Moviedrome as a kind of tribute to Cousins and then wrap everything up. So, almost done...

Originally broadcast on the 2nd July, 2000 at 11:25pm.

Tonight, one of the best films about a serial killer, from one of the most maverick directors. Donald Cammell's White of the Eye. White of the Eye is a film about a very disturbed character called Paul White, former hunter and now a hi-fi engineer who may or may not be a serial killer. It was directed by Donald Cammell, one of the strangest figures in modern American and British cinema, I think. He was born in Edinburgh, he was one of the key figures in London in the sixties, friends with Mick Jagger etc. He co-directed Performance with Nicolas Roeg, and then went to America and worked with Marlon Brando through the '70s. In 1977 he made a film, Demon Seed, which we showed on a previous Moviedrome and 10 years later he made this film, White of the Eye. Throughout his life Donald Cammell was very interested in themes of suicide and therefore it wasn't a surprise that at the age of 62, in his house in LA, with his his wife China there, he shot himself in the head. He survived for between 10 and 30 minutes thereafter and apparently spoke lucidly and wasn't in pain. This is of course a very dramatic thing to happen at the end of someone's life, but in some way any other filmmaker it would have been a surprise, not him. Donald Cammell used to say of himself that there was the professional Donald Cammell, the filmmaker, and then what he called "the uncensored Don" and it's a bit like Jekyll and Hyde, and of course Jekyll and Hyde was partly to do with the city where he was born, in Edinburgh; and what I think is so good about this picture is that it seems very much to come from the Mr Hyde side of his personality, the dark, the disturbed, the depressive side, the "life is a pile of shit" side of him. And he's not afraid to give a very unvarnished view of men and of America and things like that. And I think that's what's unusual and that's what makes it a Moviedrome film. The book, White of the Eye, was brought to Cammell and at first, because it was about a serial killer, he wasn't interested in it, but then he realised that he could make a movie which addressed some of the themes that he was really interested in. One of the things about Performance, the film that he made with Nic Roeg, was the way that it tried to argue that all people are both masculine and feminine and men are damaged if they are too masculine, and therefore he made this film to be about such a character: a man who was scared of women, scared of his feminine side and goes out and shoots them because of it. You could say that there's a touch of Oliver Stone about Donald Cammell, who's very interested in Native American myths and the sense of foreboding that those myths could provide for his story. But at the same time, as well as being interested in things such as desert and the effect the desert has on somebody, he's also interested in schizophrenia and the relationship between masculinity and femininity in people. This combination of themes - some very sixties themes but others rather timeless - crush into this film and make it a very visually rich tapestry. The husband in the film is played by David Keith, a kind of Patrick Swayze lookalike, who was very surprised that the director allowed him to go as far as possible, while he wasn't allowed to change any of the dialogue at all, he was allowed to act very extremely and he, I think, liked that a lot. The wife is played by Cathy Moriarty, who was in Raging Bull also. Movies these days mostly suck up to their audience, I think, they try to be dead glossy and they try to make you have a very nice time, laugh and cry and all these things. This film is much tougher. It doesn't really want you to like it, in a way. But it takes you into the mind of a character, takes you into an incredible landscape. It's wholly cinematic, I think. It tells the story with the camera and that's the best recommendation you can give.

- Mark Cousins' original introduction, transcribed from an audio recording. (thanks to Kaprisky for the audio)

Brief thoughts

I love the way Mark Cousins says that films nowadays "try to make you have a very nice time," as though that's beneath contempt. Quite right! I don't think I'd ever seen this before, even though I've had it on VHS for over 10 years. I feel a bit ashamed as it took me a while to realise its quality. I was expecting it to be something else and wasn't really prepared for it. Also, it's completely unlike anything I've ever seen and I couldn't really get a handle on its style. The ending is completely bonkers and the film is genuinely disturbing, I think; and not in a way which is explicable. I definitely need to see it a second time to let it sink in. In some ways it may be the only really pure Cammell film in that Performance was co-directed by Nic Roeg, Demon Seed was recut by the studio and so was Wild Side (until a more faithful cut was produced in 1999, too late for Cammell to see it).

David Thomson, in a 1998 review of the film in The Independent, described it as "one of the great secret works in cinema". This quote was used in the press for Arrow video's release of the film in dual-format this year (2014) which includes a fairly good 70 minute documentary on Cammell from 1998, Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance. Unfortunately, they spend about 30 minutes on Performance and then basically skip through the other three films in the second half, but it's still worth watching.

Here is an interview with Cammell conducted in June 1988 (just after he'd finished White of the Eye).

Around 1985, after God knows how many unrealized projects (including one reuniting me with Jagger, believe it or not, which was to be called Ishtar, but don’t get me started on that…) I was prepping this film for EMI, which was shelved when the company got taken over by Cannon. So as a sort of compensation, I was offered this strange little novel by Margaret Tracy called Mrs. White, which my wife and I adapted into White of the Eye. Basically, her novel explored this woman’s feelings as she discovers that her husband is insane and yet she is completely dominated by him. Well, I rethought all that and decided it was more interesting to have her deeply in love, so that when she discovers he’s a serial killer, she has to make that decision to leave him or confront him and continue to love him. Even to the point where he degenerates into bestiality. It really seemed to be an extremely powerful and moving idea. In fact, in the final reel, I tried to create the sound and fury of madness and take you into a world of transcendent horror.

That's the only place I've read about the fact that it was going to get an X rating, but thanks to a letter from Marlon Brando, analysing certain sequences from the film, it got an R rating. Cammell then goes on to mention his next project with Brando, which Moriarty mentions in the 1998 documentary and she says it was a brilliant script and would have been incredible but sadly it never got made.

Senses of Cinema: Donald Cammell Killing in Style: The Aestheticization of Violence in Donald Cammell's White of the Eye

Originally broadcast on the 18th June, 2000 at 11:40pm.

Tonight on Moviedrome, one of the most moving sex scenes in cinema and one of the scariest endings. It can only be Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now. Don't Look Now has a really Gothic story. A daughter dies (is drowned), her parents' life is shattered because of that drowning, they go to Venice and are haunted by the memories of her death. The film was based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier. In the short story, the girl dies of meningitis and the story doesn't really start until after that death and the parents are in Venice, grieving. So there's a kind of retrospective feel about it. The short story is more a scare-fest. It's intended to spook you. The film is also intended to do that, but it's also about romantic love, about the possibility of love, about your fear of your loved one dying. It's a kind of richer experience, the film. It's directed by that old favourite of Moviedrome, Nic Roeg. This was his third film. Previously he had made Walkabout and Performance; and many people think it's his best. If you know any other Nic Roeg films, you'll spot that this is one of his immediately. It's because the time is fractured in the film. Nic Roeg famously was entranced by the way that editing could change time forward and backwards and so he does it here. His main character is psychic in some way, he can see the future, but it's like the film can see the future as well - it flashes forward to what's going to happen. This is very Nic Roegean. This film starts in a grand country house in a grand country estate. It's a quintessentially upper-middle class setting; and Roeg (who comes from a middle-class background himself) seems absolutely obsessed by the idea middle-class culture represses things, represses the truth about what it's like to be alive, the agony, the fear of death, all these things; and he seems to plant a bomb under those kind of themes and explode them and that's why his films are so exciting. The husband in the picture, John Baxter, is played by Donald Sutherland, a Canadian actor who was a political radical in the sixties and who was in M*A*S*H in 1968. The wife is brilliantly, erotically played by Julie Christie, who had worked three times before with Nic Roeg, on Fahrenheit 451, on Petulia and Far from the Madding Crowd. She always seemed to choose brilliant directors throughout the '60s and the '70s. We really believe that these two characters are married, we really believe that they're in love. And somehow we feel as if we see their relationship over time. I think that's partly because of the famous sex scene, where Roeg intercuts them making love with getting dressed afterwards; and it's absolutely emotional - it's partly the music and it's just partly the intensity of that sex scene. There were rumours going around that they did it for real and there were outtakes doing the rounds at the studios in Hollywood, the secret screening rooms, but Nic Roeg said that only 9 frames of that scene were cut from the final film. Don't Look Now was voted the 8th best British film of all time. And it's simply I think because it's so dazzlingly, brilliantly made. It was released at the same time as The Exorcist and you could argue that it's more layered and more brilliant and more unusual than The Exorcist. I think that this is a really brilliant Moviedrome picture because it's absolutely honest about fear. It's absolutely honest also about the way your life can be broken up by a tragic event. And it's dazzlingly inventive cinematically.

- Mark Cousins' original introduction, transcribed from the video below. (thanks to Bob Sonder for the video)

Brief thoughts

Cousins says "Julia" in the video but I'm pretty sure he means Petulia, the 1968 film (so that's what I wrote above). I think it's astonishing that he's coming up with these final season intros off the top of his head. How many people could do that? Not me.

I don't want to say much myself because I don't want to tarnish this with my usual mediocre witterings and I have a few bits and bobs from other, more interesting people below. The main thing I wanted to say about Roeg is that he's one of those few directors whose films actually change your perception after you've seen them. I only finished watching this an hour or so ago and it's still in my head, but also it's like my eyes are more open than they were before. Roeg makes you see the world differently, I think, which is a wonderful gift. The effect of this film is accumulative. After that devastating opening scene, the film slows down a little and I wasn't aware of any emotion building within myself, but there's a scene much later where Donald Sutherland rushes out into Venice, completely lost and there's a beautiful, emotive piano theme on the soundtrack and (without mentioning what happens before) it's like a kick in the stomach almost. I realised at that point that the emotional connections being made in the editing throughout the film had had an accumulative effect and it's like the floodgates suddenly open. It's an extraordinary film, it really is.

The only recent film I can think of that has anywhere near the same power and brilliance in its making is Ben Wheatley's A Field in England and here is a brilliant piece by him in the Grauniad from last year about the film:

I remember first seeing Don't Look Now as a student and really enjoying it. But it wasn't my favourite Nicolas Roeg film. Performance and The Man Who Fell to Earth were top of the pile. I've watched Performance dozens of times, each time seeing something new. I saw The Man Who Fell to Earth at the Everyman cinema when I was 20 and it was etched on my mind for ever more.

Here is another fascinating Grauniad piece by Peter Bradshaw, from 2011: Don't Look Now and Roeg's red coat:

Sex and fear are embedded deeply within the film's DNA in ways that even the movie's biggest fans perhaps might not quite grasp. For Daphne du Maurier, "Venetian" was her private word for lesbian, and she herself had a lifelong struggle to come to terms with her own homosexuality, never far from the surface. Furthermore, "going to Venice" was her private code for having a lesbian sexual adventure. Crucially, Du Maurier herself, long before this story was written, went to Venice to get over the death of someone dear to her – her lover Gertrude Lawrence – and it may have been on this visit (although she made a number of literal visits to Venice) that she herself mistook a dwarf for a child. Denial and fear and excitement are transformed, in this story, into a tale of supernatural longing and horror. The movie shimmers with Du Maurier's ghost, and the ghosts of other stories and other connections: she in fact wrote another story set in Venice, entitled Ganymede, about a gay man addicted to his rapture at boys, a story obviously influenced by Thomas Mann's Death In Venice, and Roeg's film has perhaps inhaled some of the unwholesome, narcotic atmosphere of Luchino Visconti's movie version, in which a child is obsessively tracked, in the shadow of death. In Don't Look Now, Roeg is careful to exclude, as much as possible, the colour red from his screen, so that Christine's red mac becomes even more starkly visible. In fact, there is one important moment where he permits another red garment to be visible: and that is the cardinal's red hat. It is the cardinal who oversees John's restoration work on the church, an apparently kindly, worldly, enigmatic man who senses some unnameable catastrophe is approaching but can do nothing but pray. The church, like the police, are ambiguous figures of authority, at best watchfully neutral in the calamity that John is facing. The colour red has its own history in Venice. In the 16th century, Jews were forced to wear red as a distinguishing mark, a law changed to yellow when it became clear that it made them too much like cardinals. John's agonised glimpses of Christine's red coat has another literary echo: in Proust's Remembrance Of Things Past, the narrator has a famous journey to Venice, and it is in Venice that he sees, in the distance, the distinctive cloak of an aristocratic fraternity, and with a stab of pain it instantly reminds him of the elegant gown worn by his lost love, Albertine – a red gown.

The stuff about red and Roeg's efforts to erase any instance of red in the image is fascinating and Roeg himself says, in the short documentary on my DVD of the film ("Looking Back") that they eradicated it in every scene so that whenever they used it it would jump out immediately. While I'm talking about the DVD, I have to say, my copy had the most appalling quality audio I think I've ever heard on a professional, official DVD of a studio film. It was utterly dreadful and it appears to be a common fault with all the DVDs of this film. It's extremely frustrating as, with all Roeg's films, the sound track is as important and as impressive as the image.

On the wiki page for the film a sentence about Borges from Pauline Kael's review of the film is quoted (beneath in bold) and it sounds like it was favourable, but I dug it out in a book of her reviews I have (Reeling) and it's - typically for her - almost comically misjudged in its negativity and even the line that's quoted, which seems very positive, is a criticism when read in its entirety:

In Borges, mystery and decadence come close together, and at the picture's consummation the perfect, beautiful couple are split by a hideous joke of nature--their own child become a dwarf monstrosity. Using du Maurier as a base, Roeg comes closer to getting Borges on the screen than those who have tried it directly, but there's a distasteful clamminess about the picture--not because Venice is dying (though this sure is a counter-commercial for Venice) but because Roeg's style is in love with disintegration.

It's quite funny, if you can track it down. She describes it as "trash" and ends her review thus: "...it's like an entertainment for bomb victims: nobody expects any real pleasure from it." Eh??? One book I desperately want to read but don't have yet is Mark Sanderson's BFI Classics book on the film. It's supposed to be awesome, if anyone's interested; and I'll add more here once I get it.

Finally, here's the video for The Fall's "Theme from Error-Orrori", inspired by this film.

Originally broadcast on the 18th June, 2000 at 10:00pm.

Next up, Nic Roeg's dazzling film that kick-started modern Australian cinema. Moviedrome goes Walkabout. You hear so many producers today talking about the perfect script. It has to be 90 pages, it has to have every detail in it; and when they say that I always quote this film. It had 14 pages and look at the film that resulted. The beginning of the story of Walkabout, I think, is one of the most shocking of the movies. A man takes his son and daughter out to the Australian Outback, as if to have a picnic, but he takes out a gun and tries to shoot them. The story came from a novel, Walkabout, published in the fifties, by James Vance Marshall; and the story there is quite different: it's an American boy and girl rather than an English boy and girl, and instead of being taken to the Outback by their father they are in a plane crash and that's where they land. I think this has a very big effect on the nature of the story. In the novel, it's an accident that starts the whole thing off, here it's something to do with the psychosis in the family: the man's going mad. We've had Nic Roeg films on Moviedrome many times and that's because I think he's one of the great directors and one of the great British directors. Not incredibly well-known abroad (if you go to France they say, "Nicolas Roeg? Who is that?"), but their shame, they should know who he is. He started off as a cinematographer and shot François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 and Far from the Madding Crowd. Quite an innovative cinematographer. Then he got into film-making and his first film he co-directed - it was Performance, with Mick Jagger - and then this film, and then classics such as Don't Look Now, which is also in this run of Moviedrome. Nic Roeg tells a story that, as a young apprentice in the film industry, he went into a cutting room and he noticed that you could play a piece of action forward but then reverse it and he began to think of cinema as a kind of magic box, which could reverse time, it could time travel. And you notice that in his best pictures there is a kind of time travel. We see not only what the person is doing, but also what they will be doing in the future and what they're remembering and what they're fearing; and that's the great thing about some of his films. We get it here sometimes. We get the whole profusion of what's in someone's head, not just the simple fact of what they're doing. I think one of the great things about this film is that it's immensely cinematic. Its script apparently was only 14 pages long. There isn't all that much dialogue and it relies on the cinematography to tell its story and also provide its mood. Roeg uses every type of lens you could imagine. Fish-eye lenses, telephoto lenses. Sometimes he freezes the images, sometimes he blows them up massively for massive grainy effect. It really feels as if it's incredibly alive, photographically. The daughter is played by 19 year old Jenny Agutter, fresh off The Railway Children. The son is played by Luc Roeg, Nic Roeg's real son, who went on to produce films himself. And the boy that they meet, the Aboriginal character, is played by David Gulpilil, who Roeg found on a real Aboriginal estate and this changed the guy's life, he did lots of television thereafter and did films like Crocodile Dundee. I first saw this film in the late-'70s and I knew nothing about cinema then, but I do remember the scene at the end of the picture where Jenny Agutter swims naked in the pool. A very strong erotic effect that it had, I think on a whole generation of boys at that time. What's interesting is that when the film was re-released they restored a full five minutes of those scenes and so Roeg had seen that as a really big part of the film, whereas for us it was just a glimpse of something exciting. Nic Roeg has made so many great films. For me, my personal favourites are Eureka, Bad Timing and Don't Look Now; but this one I also cherish in a particular way because it's early in his career and because it affected me so much when I was a lad.

- Mark Cousins' original introduction, transcribed from the video below. (thanks to Kaprisky for the video)

Brief thoughts

I have a very strong memory of this broadcast but not so much for the effect the film had on me, unfortunately, and more because I'd spent the day sunbathing in record-breaking heat and was sprawled out on the settee, suffering the effects of mild sun stroke and drifting in and out of consciousness. I wish I could say it added to the experience of the film, but sad to say I didn't take much of it in that night. I haven't got too much to add to Mark Cousins's introduction. It's an astonishing film. A film that, much like all of Roeg's great movies, tends to accrue meaning and layers the more you watch. I agree 100% with Cousins's comment about it being "alive" - I think that's the most accurate thing you can say about it and I think Roeg's films really are ALIVE in a way that few others are. I also agree it's incredibly cinematic but I would add that it is cinematic because it uses both image and sound to create its effects and tell the story. The sound track is incredibly well designed and as expansive as the use of image in the film. Right from the start the sound is like a patchwork: an ominous drone, the sound of a voice on a radio being tuned, Stockhausen's 'Hymnen', aboriginal music, then the sound of the city. Later John Barry's beautiful score adds another layer and so on. You can't really divorce the sound from the image or vice-versa. I think that's one of the most incredible things about Roeg. That he started off as one of the greatest cinematographers - I think there's a clarity and lucidity to his photography that's only really equaled in Kubrick's films - and yet when he became a director he utilises the soundtrack just as brilliantly.

Roeg released The World is Ever Changing last year - his book in which he claims to pass on the decades of wisdom and experience he's amassed. I was really looking forward to reading it but almost everyone I know who read it said it was dreadful, so I haven't got around to it yet. Apparently, he doesn't talk about Performance (or Donald Cammell) at all and spends more time on Puffball, his most recent film, from 2007 (and one I've seen described on more than one occasion as the worst film ever made). This makes me want to read the book and see the film even more as I think Roeg is always on a different page to everyone else and I wouldn't be surprised if people just aren't 'getting' it. Or maybe they are tripe and he's just lost his magic? Only one way to find out...

I have to say, I think this brief clip of him - a kind of trailer for the book - is incredibly moving and makes me think he really is still ahead of everyone else: The World is Ever Changing: Nicolas Roeg on Film-making.

Originally broadcast on the 11th June, 2000 at 11:40pm.

Tonight, one of the most unusual film noirs, from the director of Rebel without a Cause. Robert Ryan stars in On Dangerous Ground. On Dangerous Ground is about a violent cop, played by Robert Ryan, who's sent out of town to the countryside, to get away from his violence and gets involved in an investigation of the death of a young child. If you saw Johnny Guitar in a previous run of Moviedrome you'll know what to expect because it's directed by the same director as this one, Nicholas Ray. He was an alcoholic, a sometime drug addict, bisexual, he was in left wing theatre in the '30s, studied architecture, in the fifties he became one of the most fiercely independent, maverick, passionate filmmakers in American cinema. He married Gloria Grahame, the actress, and very strangely she then later married his son. In the sixties he taught, in the seventies he worked with Wim Wenders; he died in 1979 of cancer. When you see the name Nick Ray on a film you know it's going to be very visual, not literary, which is good. You know that it's going to be passionate, it's going to be full of close-ups, you know that it's going to be messy, disruptive, because his life was messy and often he was drunk when he was making his films. But most of all you know it's going to be intellectually and thematically daring and we could do with more of that. I think there are two themes that come up again and again in Nicholas Ray films. He made a film called In a Lonely Place and I think loneliness is everywhere in his pictures. His characters are often very troubled, find it very difficult to express emotion (apparently like he did in real life). And I think the second theme is alienation. You could say it's the same thing, in a way, but it's even when people are close to each other they still don't connect. In a film like Rebel Without a Cause, that he made, of course, alienation is the theme. And that combination of loneliness and alienation makes his films very stark and very bold. Robert Ryan, the lead in the picture, I think is now rated as one of the best tough actors in cinema of this period. Less well-known is Ida Lupino, who also directed The Hitch-Hiker in this series of Moviedrome. One of the very few women directors in Hollywood ever, at that time. You'll notice pretty quickly the music in this film. It was done by Bernard Herrmann, who did the music for Psycho and for Taxi Driver, well-known as one of the great composers in cinema. An awful lot of the music by Golden Age composers in Hollywood was very slavish, it was always a means to an end: an attempt to make the audience laugh or cry or have quite a simple knee-jerk reaction. I think with Bernard Herrmann's scores they sort of can be played on their own, there's a kind of internal wisdom about them, the way he uses themes (he famously uses a very unusual viola like instrument in this film to represent Ida Lupino's character); and this thematic weaving that he does means it's a richer kind of score, I think. Nick Ray films were seldom received well when they came out and this one certainly wasn't. Everybody, including the producer John Houseman (who also produced Citizen Kane), felt that the story was just too much of a change. It starts like a film noir , a gangster movie in the city, and it ends up like a fairy tale set in the countryside, set in a kind of winter wonderland. That's exactly what's exciting about the picture: its lack of continuity. You could say that this film is like two films, in a way, and that is what was criticised at the time. It starts a city film, hard-boiled, dark, cynical, touches of Taxi Driver in the way that there are prostitutes etc in it, but the second half of the film it's like it dissolves from a gangster picture into a kind of fairy tale set in a winter wonderland. Thematically and tonally it becames a very different picture. Very unusual and very daring.

- Mark Cousins' original introduction, transcribed from an audio recording. (thanks to Kaprisky for the audio)

Brief thoughts

One of the absolute best films shown on Moviedrome, I think. I had seen it before as I'd taped it off the tellybox yonks ago, but even though I'm a big fan of Nicholas Ray, I didn't have a strong memory of this one and wasn't expecting too much of it because even Ray himself was apparently disappointed with the result, but it's an extraordinary film. I read the chapter on it in Geoff Andrew's great book The Films of Nicholas Ray and it's fascinating and really makes you appreciate the film even more. He makes the point that the film seems to have been an influence on Psycho: both have a schematic structure of two halves, both of which are divided by a car journey (and the sequence in the Hitchcock film where Marion Crane is escaping from the city has a very similar atmosphere), there are similarities in the young boy who murders someone in the Ray film and Norman Bates... as well as a few others. Also, I wondered if Herrmann's score for this might not have provoked Hitchcock to want to work with him. It has some similarities to the score he did much later for North by Northwest, I think, in its sound and its percussive, forward momentum. This was released in 1952 and Herrmann first worked with Hitchcock on The Trouble with Harry in 1954. Its influence stretches even further and Andrew makes the case that it anticipates the rogue-cop films like Dirty Harry and so on.

The screenplay was written by Ray and A.I. Bezzerides, who also wrote Kiss Me Deadly. What's impressive about it is how they delineate Robert Ryan's character in the first half. We see how callous and brutal he is in the pursuit of criminals, how incorruptible he is, how violent he is, nihilistic, hyper-sensitive, self-pitying, sexually repressed. The groundwork is laid of a character whose problems seem so ingrained and so stark as to be unresolvable, which is beautifully shown in a scene where he's confronted by his partner after beating up another suspect. He tells Ryan that he needs to forget the job at the end of the day and have a family to go home to, and says that he must enjoy the violence, but Ryan launches into this nihilistic tirade about the scum they have to deal with. It's quite chilling and you really get the sense of someone who is beyond help. The way these early scenes are shot - the framing, the lighting, the moving camera - is extremely impressive and it is, as Andrew says, "quintessentially 'Ray': decor and environment affect and mirror the characters' states of mind"... style is entirely at the service of meaning. The film was, as Cousins says, criticised for its apparently unconnected two halves, but the structure "embodies the torn, almost schizophrenic predicament of its protagonist" (Andrew). The film is beautifully shot by George E. Diskant, who also photographed The Narrow Margin and Ray's They Live By Night, with a dark film noir feel to the first half and a kind of lyrical beauty in the second. One other point that Andrew makes is that the second half is an almost mirror image of the first (especially in terms of light/dark and black/white, but also emotionally and tonally), but that Ray doesn't succumb to "facile, conventional moral polarity of evil city/pure countryside"; that Ryan finds the environment of the second half far more complex than the city and just as violent. The acting is incredible. It's one of those films that just seems perfect, to me.

I have Bernard Eisenschitz's biography of Ray, too, and will add anything of interest to this page once I've read it...

Originally broadcast on the 11th June, 2000 at 10:00pm.

Brace yourselves for this week's Moviedrome. Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson in Don Siegel's The Killers. The story is based on an Ernest Hemingway short story. A very simple idea, but a classic one, I think. Two assassins turn up to kill some guy and the guy doesn't resist in any way. Why would somebody not resist their own death? The story was first adapted for the movies by Robert Siodmak, a great German director who was in Hollywood, and it starred Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner and it's just one of the classic film noirs. What's so great about it is it's like a nightmare, it's roughly the same idea but noises and images keep repeating as if in a dream. One absolute difference between the two films is the fact that the original was set mostly at night and this one's set in the blinding sunshine. Also, this one's in colour and it's a particular kind of colour, almost that fifties powder blue type colour, even though the film was made in 1964, it looks a bit like a Pop Art painting by somebody like Andy Warhol and I think that's why it's remembered because its imagery is very iconic. In a way you could say this was the first TV movie that made it to the big screen. It was made just before the Kennedy assassination and was released just after - the intention was to put it on telly but it was thought to be too violent after the Kennedy assassination and therefore it went on to the big screens instead. The film was directed by Don Siegel, who started off as quite an intellectual figure. He'd studied at Cambridge University, for example, went to America, got two Oscars for two short films that he made, then got involved in Warner Brothers studio and started doing montages for films, including films like Casablanca. Then he made films like Hell is for Heroes and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and then he made this picture. Don Siegel quickly got the reputation for being a real man's man director, a no nonsense type guy, who a lot of people hated. The style of his pictures were very, very pared down, very blunt and brutal; the action sequences are always great and there are several brilliant action sequences in this picture. He also is known for not spending much time with actors, giving them very little to go on, so the combination of these things gives a very tough style of film-making. The most memorable performance in this film is probably from Lee Marvin who speaks in his usual baritone way and he uses his dark glasses a lot and he is totally unaffected - or seems to be - by what's around him, and that gives it a very cool, modern approach, I think. The lead woman in the picture is Angie Dickinson and some critics rate her as one of the great actresses. Now, I think what she's really brilliant at is kind of exposing her heart, being an extremely emotional actress and there are scenes here where she's brilliant at that. Ronald Reagan plays one of the hoods in the film. It's his last performance in the movies and his first baddie. And it raises one of the big questions in cinema: why did anybody ever give him a part? And the guy who's murdered at the start of the picture is played by John Cassavetes, who was one of the great, innovative directors at the end of the fifties, but who I think gives a very bad performance in this picture. Despite the fact I've slagged this film off quite a lot, I still think it is worth watching. Several reasons: the first is that it's got this contrast between quite a conventional TV style (a hang-over from the '50s) and this very modern sensibility that Don Siegel brought to it, with the violence and the brutality etc. I think the second reason is because it all comes together in the last 15 minutes. The climax is brilliant and the acting really moulds well to each other, so watch it for that.

- Mark Cousins' original introduction, transcribed from an audio recording. (thanks to Kaprisky for the audio)

Brief thoughts

I was surprised by Cousins's negativity before I watched the film, as I was expecting it to be really great (I hadn't seen it before), but I sort of agree with what he says. I found it quite disappointing, really. It has that common flaw with TV movies whereby everything looks like it's just been taken out of the box; everything is spotless and in pristine condition and it's difficult to accept what you're watching in some way, but when it has so much going for it, as this does, that does give the film a kind of Pop Art sheen or something, so again I agree with Cousins's observations. According to the Projectionist's Note on the Arrow release of the film, it was shot for TV but apparently always intended to be "show-able" on the big screen (you can watch it in 1.33:1 or 1.66:1 on the DVD):

The Killers has a place in history for being the first purpose-made American TV movie, at a time when television sets universally came in the squarish aspect ratio of 1.33:1. However, The Killers was intended from the onset to be show-able in cinemas, at a time when widescreen was all but universal and many projectionists were no longer able to screen films in the TV-shaped 'Academy' ratio. On January 15th, 1964, when the film was still known as Johnny North, the daily edition of variety reported that 'in all probability' 'North' will be released in Europe as a theatrical film, and thus, turned out to be the case.

Ronald Reagan is absolutely hilarious in it. His only technique seems to be raising and lowering his eyebrow. There's a scene with him and Marvin squaring off and it cuts from Reagan with a completely immobile, blank face to Marvin acting his heart out and then back to Reagan unchanged; and I could have sworn the film had frozen when Reagan was onscreen. He's dead behind the eyes! Either he was a genius of Warholian proportions or the worst actor in the history of the Universe. I also agree that Cassavetes is pretty poor in this. Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson more than make up for all that, though. A mixed bag, I guess.

Originally broadcast on the 4th June, 2000 at 11:40pm.

Tonight, a rare chance to see the only film noir directed by a woman. Ida Lupino's cult classic, The Hitch-Hiker. It's one of those classic hard-boiled stories. Two men are going on a fishing trip, they give a lift to a hitchhiker and he's no ordinary kind of hitchhiker. Like many films of the period, this one was based on a true-life story. There was a real serial killer who was a hitchhiker but there's one writing credit on the film that's missing, a guy called Daniel Mainwaring, who went on to write Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He wrote a good bit of this picture, but the reason his name isn't on the credits is because he was a Lefty and the studio boss at this stage was Howard Hughes and he was a right wing guy so he hated Mainwaring and wouldn't let his name go on the picture. I think Ida Lupino who directed the picture's one of the most interesting women in the whole of cinema, actually. She was born in Brixton in 1918. Her Mum went for an audition for a Hollywood film and the Mum wasn't given the part but she - the teenage daughter - was. She went to America and soon became a star (as she called herself, "The poor man's Bette Davis"). It was obvious that Lupino was some kind of rebel because quite soon she started refusing projects that Hollywood offered her and even though she was on a big salary she decided to go independent, set up her own production company with her then husband, Collier Young, and they started producing films and she wrote them and also started directing. It was quite interesting how she got to direct. She was producing a film and the director had a heart attack after three days and she just took up the reins. There were almost no female directors in the Hollywood studio system and there were certainly none directing this kind of hard-boiled type of cinema that she ended up doing. The sort of films that she made - this film, and another one, The Bigamist and several others - often took quite gritty, realistic stories (and this is a story taken from real life) and gave them a kind of dark treatment that Hollywood liked at the time; extremely unusual. The film was shot by not a very well-known name, Nicholas Musuraca - but when you look at his credits - by this stage he had done 150 other pictures, including classics like Cat People (the original) - and it seems that what he did in this picture was use pools of light on people's faces and no more. Now that is very stylish but it's also the fact that it was an extremely cheaply made film and therefore you don't need sets or anything when you just put a pool of light on people's faces. You probably won't recognise many of the actors in this film because it's a b-movie. There's Edmund O'Brien, who's one of the fishermen, but apart from that there's nobody famous, but the guy who plays the hitchhiker himself was William Talman - and he plays it brilliantly I think, because even when he's asleep one eye stays open, it's a very snake-like performance. And he wasn't very well-known, either, except that he was the first actor to lend his name to the anti-smoking cause. He got cancer in later life and publicised the fact that it was because of smoking that he got it. Nowadays, so many films are so long (three hours or more). It seems to be forgotten that one of the great things about cinema can be its economy, the simple, spare way of storytelling and Ida Lupino's films, and this one in particular, has been compared to the work of Sam Fuller and other directors who were very, very good at economical storytelling. This one comes in at seventy-something minutes, which is extremely unusual and it means you just get the bare bones and that's really enjoyable. I think there are loads of reasons for watching this film tonight. The first is that it's very entertaining. The second is the fact that it's this uniquely historical film (the only time a woman directed a film noir). Thirdly, it's because they don't make them like that anymore.

- Mark Cousins' original introduction, transcribed from an audio recording. (thanks to Kaprisky for the audio)

Brief thoughts

That's so true about the economy of cinema being completely lost nowadays, isn't it? Even directors like Scorsese who obviously knows more about cinema and its history than anyone seems unable to bring a film in at less than three hours half the time now, which is extremely depressing, because you get the impression it's pure self-indulgence and these directors have completely lost touch with the basic idea of telling a story. Everything is 'epic', everything is wide-screen and self-consciously shot and everything is over-long. Mark Cousins's own The Story of Film is extremely good on early female pioneers in Hollywood, I thought. Something I didn't know much about prior to watching it, I have to say. The writer, Daniel Mainwaring, not only wrote this and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but also another classic film noir (and almost Moviedrome film) in Out of the Past - which Musuraca also shot - and another Moviedrome film, The Phenix City Story, which I didn't like, personally. Joseph Losey adapted Mainwaring's novel, The Voice of Stephen Wilder (as The Lawless), from Mainwaring's own script; and in the book Conversations with Losey he had this to say about the writer:

This is one of the things that makes me very close to Dan Mainwaring--his experience of Americana, the nostalgia of the good things about small towns. I remember the smell of burning leaves at night in the autumn too. And I remember the smell of Christmas, the sparkle in the air at football games, and the sound of distant trains. And Dan remembers them all. He's a much underrated writer and he's a really quite noble man. He damaged himself with drink and he was very badly hurt by the blacklist.

I thought the film was great. I'm pretty sure I've seen it before but maybe not for 15 years. I found myself getting a little annoyed at the two fishermen because there seems to be ample opportunity to overpower Talman but they seem too passive for most of the film. The ending feels like a massive anti-climax, too. Still, it's a classic set-up and the film is very lean and the scenario obviously gives the plot a momentum lacking in many others. Incidentally, this was the fourth Edmund O'Brien film on Moviedrome. I think the most covered actor is a tie between Warren Oates and Clint Eastwood at six films apiece.

Originally broadcast on the 4th June, 2000 at 10:00pm.

On Moviedrome tonight the director of Sex, Lies and Videotape remakes a classic film noir. Steven Soderbergh's The Underneath. It's one of those stories about somebody who's walking back into their life. The lead character's Peter Gallagher. He, in the past, ran up loads of debts, walked out on his wife and now he's returned to town because his mother's getting married. What happens is he gets back with his wife in some way - she's involved with a real hoodlum - he gets a job as a security guard, gets involved in a robbery and the two things start to mix up, his personal life and the robbery story. It's a remake of an old film noir directed by Robert Siodmak, starring Burt Lancaster. In the original film the story is somewhat similar but the time-frame isn't as jumbled as it is in this picture. I think one of the questions when you're remaking a film noir is how do you update its style, these original pictures were very stylish and I think that Soderbergh and his DoP Elliot Davis found a good solution to that, which is, instead of having loads of blacks in the picture, they've had whole fields of green colour and red and yellow. It sort of flattens it out, it distances you from the picture in some way. But it also makes it more seductive on another level, it makes sometimes scary things that are happening in the picture nonetheless attractive and it's that combination of attraction and repulsion which makes these films interesting, I think. I think it's kind of appropriate that Soderbergh made this remake and we could also argue that his film Kafka is a remake, because it seems to me that he's interested as much in movies as real life so when you're watching his films you think this is about other movies as much as it is about real people and the real world. The director of the film's Steven Soderbergh and the jury's kind of out on him. Some people think he's one of the great technical directors of the 1990s. He made his mark first of all in 1989 at the Sundance Film Festival, famously with Sex, Lies and Videotape, which kind of invented the independent movie sector in America in the '90s. Then his career was up and down. This film was made in 1995 and he considers it a bit of a failure and after that he went kind of back to basics with very low budget films like Gray's Anatomy and Schitzopolis. But recently he's been on a roll again. The George Clooney/Jennifer Lopez picture, Out of Sight, brought him back to critical attention and then he made The Limey with Terence Stamp, which many people think was a good film and I thought it was a really awful one. Now he's made a new film with Julia Roberts. I read a book recently that Soderbergh wrote and he said this interesting thing. He abandoned a project because it wasn't deconstructed enough and it was almost like what he likes to do is start with a film and then take it to pieces and then re-edit it together. In this film that we're about to watch we see Peter Gallagher in the past leaving his wife, we see him the present and also in the future; so it's like he takes a timeline and then breaks it up and jumbles it and reassembles it like a mosaic. Peter Gallagher's in nearly every scene of this film and he's in also nearly every Soderbergh picture. He's a real Soderbergh regular. He was in Sex, Lies and Videotape and when it became the indie hit of 1989, he became one of the faces of indie cinema in America throughout the whole of the '90s. I think Gallagher's very good. It used to be in painting that the devil was always painted as the most handsome one. He looks very like the way devil is painted in Renaissance paintings, for example. That handsome, cold, dark look; and I think that's what he's got in this picture. I think, whatever you say about The Underneath, it's a real Moviedrome film. It's about mood, it's about the kind of truth-telling side of films and that's very good and also the last 15 minutes have got a great cross and double-cross plot.

- Mark Cousins' original introduction, transcribed from an audio recording. (thanks to Kaprisky for the audio)

Brief thoughts

I really enjoyed this one but I found it difficult to really care about what was going on. Joe Don Baker is great in it and it has Shelley Duvall in a really small role. I thought, "Oh my God, is that Shelley Duvall?!" I didn't feel particularly involved in any of it, I have to say; more like a passive observer. I've felt like that with most of Soderbergh's films, I think. I find his style very impressive but not particularly involving. The only film of his that I felt really moved by was King of the Hill.

Of more interest, I think, is the writer of the original film, Criss Cross, Daniel Fuchs. He seems to be one of those great gifted, but now forgotten writers of the post-war period. He also wrote Panic in the Streets and the great Cagney/Doris Day picture Love Me Or Leave Me. Here is a very interesting, recently published interview from 1989 in the Paris Review, which was withheld by Fuchs due to concerns about copyright: The Golden West: An Interview with Daniel Fuchs.

Originally broadcast on the 21st May, 2000 at 9:55pm.

Tonight Jackie Chan has no fear, no stuntmen, no equals, as Moviedrome goes for a Rumble in the Bronx. The plot of Rumble in the Bronx would not challenge a five year old. It's a very simple story: Jackie Chan comes from Hong Kong to America to visit his uncle, who owns a supermarket in the Bronx, the uncle sells the supermarket to a nice young Chinese woman and she gets into a bit of trouble and Jackie saves her. The print that we've got here is the American version of the film. It was shot in Chinese and apparently people say that the Hong Kong version is much better, that the script is wittier. Now I have to say the script couldn't be less witty really than it is at the moment but there probably are subtleties that we're not getting in this version. The film's called Rumble in the Bronx and it's set in the Bronx. One of the many funny things is the gangs in the film are mostly white and we don't get many white gangs in the Bronx. However, it was shot in Vancouver and it's part of the charm of the film, I think, that they really haven't made much of an effort to show that it's not Vancouver. You can see mountains in the background and there are no mountains in the background of the Bronx. Rumble in the Bronx is kind of like Jackie Chan Does America; it's intended to show how charming he is to American mainstream audiences. Jackie Chan was born in Hong Kong in 1954 to a very poor family. He went to live in Australia for a while and then got into the Peking Opera and there he learned things like mime and performance skills and this gives the way he moves on camera a real kind of grace and elegance. He worked on Bruce Lee movies for a while; did the stunts in those pictures. And people started to think he would be the new Bruce Lee, but there was a real difference: Bruce Lee was a kind of aggressive, kind of very internal type actor, whereas ol' Jackie was more of a boy next door, he had a kind of grace, a kind of ordinariness about him, actually, he doesn't dress very well, he's got a bad haircut, he's very reluctant to get violent in his films, he only does so when people get violent with him. And so there's a kind of gentler approach to his pictures. One of the trademarks of Jackie Chan in this chop-socky kind of film-making, as it's called, is he does his own stunts. The fans know that and it adds to the enjoyment of the film when you're watching it. At the end of this film we see that the stunt directors were jointly the director of the whole film, Stanley Tong, and Jackie Chan; and we can see how, at the end of the film (in the rushes and the outtakes of the picture), they did the stunts: there's often a camera to the side of the stunt, so we can see the crew laughing or running in to help somebody when they've broken their leg, as had happened four times in this film. We can see the ambulances coming in and everything and it gives a kind of comic feel to the ending of the film but it also underlines how dangerous it is. You could say that films like this one, Rumble in the Bronx, and some of the John Woo pictures influenced the kind of amusement arcade fight games that you get all the time. The difference I think between those fight games and a film like this is that the games are quite nihilistic, they're about the joy of killing and beating up somebody; they are often motivated by revenge. One of the things you always notice about Jackie Chan, there's almost never revenge, he's slow to anger, he always responds to somebody else being nasty and there's this kind of social responsibility in his pictures. It's a very New Labour kind of thing. He makes an effort to give a little homily after he beats somebody up, saying, "Let's be decent, let's be responsible." Jack Straw would love this kind of film.

- Mark Cousins' original introduction, transcribed from an audio recording. (thanks to Kaprisky for the audio)

Brief thoughts

I haven't got too much to add to that. The thing I love about Jackie Chan films is that more often than not the violence is just a pretext to a scene that's more about impressive invention and a display of physical dexterity - or, to be more precise, the beauty of those scenes is often watching Jackie beat people up using props in a very beautiful, very funny and very inventive way. The comparison is often made between him and old silent comedians like Keaton or Harold Lloyd and I think that's very true - he uses props in much the same way; lots of visual gags. So the violence is never even really the focus of the film. His movies do use the same build-up of tension as those of Bruce Lee, ie. when will he lose his patience completely and start retaliating, but it's always undercut by the humour and the visual invention in Chan's films. This is wonderful. Very funny in parts, I think. The presence of the mountains is hilarious. I saw Police Story 2 again the other week and it's not really as good as that or most of his best earlier films - which is a common complaint - but it's Jackie Chan. What more do you need? The only thing that bugged me slightly about it is that everything is shot with extreme wide-angle lenses, so whenever they pan the distortion at the edge of the frame is a little distracting.

Originally broadcast on the 14th May, 2000 at 11:35pm.

Martin Scorsese called tonight's film "a forgotten classic." It stars Alain Delon and its themes are seduction and murder. René Clément directed it and it's called Plein Soleil. In Plein Soleil, Alain Delon plays a very ordinary American guy who goes to live in Rome and insinuates himself into the life of a very rich American playboy. The film was adapted from the novel, The Talented Mr Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith. Her books have been used several times for movies. Hitchcock used one of them for Strangers on a Train and Wim Wenders used one for American Friend. The adaptation was done by a young French writer called Paul Gégauff and what he did is he condensed the story. He tragically died several years later when his wife stabbed him. The director was René Clément who was one of the great professional studio directors in France after the war. He made a very good film called La Bataille du rail. One of the things that the director wanted to do in order to increase his reputation is hire one of the great new cinematographers and this he did. The cinematographer's called Henri Decaë, he'd previously shot Truffaut's 400 Blows, which was a really fresh film, shot in the open air, none of the old heavy studio feel, and this makes for one of the most sumptuous films of the period. Tom Ripley himself is played by Alain Delon, 25 years old at the time. It's one of two films he made in this year. He also made Rocco and His Brothers that influenced Scorsese a lot in his making of Raging Bull. Before being a movie star, Delon had been involved in crime and the underworld and the French public knew that and it gave his performance a kind of edge - he's playing a character who's very literate but also quite monstrous and those things play well within the performance. Plein Soleil has obviously been remade recently as The Talented Mr Ripley, starring Matt Damon and Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. The new film's longer, more languorous in some way, it's more about the desire that the Ripley character has for the Greenleaf character and also the psychology. In the original film the relationship between the two male characters is quite narcissistic, in a way: there's a great scene where Alain Delon approaches the mirror and kisses himself, as if he's kissing the other guy (they look quite alike). In the remake, it's different. It's not narcissism, it's more homosexual desire. The new film's very good at showing how Matt Damon really fancies Jude Law and that's in keeping with Highsmith's writing (she was lesbian herself and there are a number of homosexual themes in her books). In the original film, Ripley, played by Alain Delon, is quite mysterious. The film doesn't try really to explain what his psychology is and therefore at the end of the film - which I won't give away, of course - there's a real surprise. In the remake there is a much more serious attempt to try and understand how Ripley feels. We see him crying, we see him upset, we understand his desire more; and therefore it's more sympathetic toward him. Martin Scorsese said that this film is "a forgotten classic which richly deserves its rescue from oblivion." That is really true. It was made at a time when French cinema was changing. It sort of got forgotten, in a way, but it's got a kind of visual sumptuousness and a kind of thriller element which is still really startling and daring for its time.

- Mark Cousins' original introduction, transcribed from the video below. (thanks to Kaprisky for the video)

Brief thoughts

This is another Moviedrome night that I have very strong memories of. I remember enjoying the first film - Blood and Wine - in this night's double-bill, but this was the one that had a huge effect on me. I don't think I'd seen the Anthony Minghella adaptation at this point, but I went on to read all of Highsmith's novels and I still re-read the Ripley cycle every once in a while. I think she's my favourite writer. The differences between the two films is very interesting, I think. The sexuality is downplayed in Plein Soleil (though it's hinted at quite clearly: the mirror scene is obviously a reference to Narcissus, which is a gay icon of sorts - also used by Cocteau, of course - and there's a bit on the boat where Dickie says to Tom, "I love Marge"; the implication of which is quite clear), whereas in the later film it's overplayed and they put far more than is in the book, unfortunately (as they did with the recent abysmal adaptation of Brideshead Revisited). I like both films very much, but I prefer Plein Soleil's cooler, more restrained style and approach. Highsmith is a novelist whose books have been well adapted into films. Strangers on a Train, Plein Soleil, and The American Friend are all classics, I think; and of the others: Ripley's Game (another adaptation of the same book as the Wenders film, with John Malkovich as Ripley; a wonderful film) and The Two Faces of January are both extremely good modern thrillers. The only bad adaptation of one of her books is the 2005 Roger Spottiswoode film of Ripley Under Ground. You could probably learn a lot about adaptation by reading The Talented Mr Ripley and then watching Plein Soleil and the Damon film, and then reading Ripley's Game and watching The American Friend and the Malkovich film. Anyway, Plein Soleil - one of the very best films shown on Moviedrome, I think...

Originally broadcast on the 14th May, 2000 at 9:55pm.

We kick off the new season of Moviedrome with a picture from the classic '70s director, Bob Rafelson. It stars Jack Nicholson and Michael Caine and is called Blood and Wine. On the surface Blood and Wine is quite a simple story. It's about Michael Caine and Jack Nicholson stealing a necklace, but the story has many more ramifications than that and what the film-maker is particularly interested in is the more brooding feeling about how the robbery affects Jack Nicholson's relationship with his estranged wife. Bob Rafelson was born into an upper-middle-class Jewish family in New York in 1933. In 1966 he did a very astute thing: he formed a spoof Beatles group, The Monkees, the rest is history and he made millions as a result. When he came to make his own pictures - films like Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens in the early-'70s - the tone was very different; much more serious, much more insisting on asking questions about what it's like to be alive in America in the '70s. Somebody said of Bob Rafelson that he's coiled so tight he seems to vibrate with an electric charge and those who know him always report about his intensity and his seriousness as a director. And you can see that in his work right from the '70s right through to this film, which although is a bungled robbery story it's still got an intensity about it. Rafelson films were never very visually distinctive but in this case he hired the great '60s and '70s American designer Richard Sylbert, who did The Graduate and Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, and this seems to have unified the picture. It's all composed in warm colours and it gives a very mature feel to what is a very mature story. The film was shot by Tom Sigel who previously had done The Usual Suspects and who went on to do the recent George Clooney picture, Three Kings. Jack Nicholson, of course, is the lead in the picture and he provides a kind of maturity in the centre of it. Michael Caine plays a very sick, coughing, emphysemic side-kick and it's almost like he's what Jack Nicholson is inside, a kind of sick soul type person. The wife's played by Judy Davis who's great of course in many Woody Allen pictures and very good here as a very troubled woman, very dowdy with the wig etc. And then there's Jennifer Lopez and what's interesting about her is that the film doesn't quite know how to place her. She's playing an ordinary person but she's very beautiful and you can feel some of Rafelson's attraction to her so it feels to me as if she's not quite appropriately cast. Stephen Dorff in the film plays the stepson; somebody who also morally waivers. I think the jury's out on him. I personally think that he's a rubbish actor but lots of people think he's really good. The writer and director Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, said recently that in the '70s films were about existential themes, they were about why are people alive, whereas in the '90s films are about post-modern themes, they're jokey plays on previous things. What I think is satisfying about this picture is that it feels '70s, it feels as if it's questioning serious matters and although it may feel a little bit dated I still think it's a great picture because of its seriousness.

- Mark Cousins' original introduction, transcribed from an audio recording. (thanks to Kaprisky for the audio)

Brief thoughts

The first film in the eleventh and final season of Moviedrome; and quite a change in style for the introductions. Instead of the pre-written intro being delivered on location somewhere, Cousins's final season has him giving seemingly improvised thoughts about the film in a white studio. This is punctuated by superfluous title cards telling us what he's about to focus on. It's very 'modern' in that it's much faster and it doesn't allow the viewer much space to concentrate before cutting to keep our attention, which I loathe usually, but it's not so bad here because, as always, Mark Cousins is extremely engaging.

I haven't seen this since the Moviedrome broadcast and I'd forgotten most of it, so it was a bit of a surprise that I enjoyed it so much as I wasn't expecting to. Michael Caine is superb in it as a hideous individual and Jack Nicholson isn't much better. There's an awful scene just after a car crash where Nicholson climbs into the upside-down car and starts feeling up the dying woman to see where the stolen goods are hidden. It's one of the worst things I think I've ever seen in a film, but it's a mark of how brilliant Nicholson is that you never entirely lose your sympathy for him. As I was watching this and thoroughly enjoying it I thought how great it would have been to have had a few more of these American neo-noir films from the late-'80s/early-'90s on Moviedrome. Maybe a John Dahl film or one of Carl Franklin's '90s noir pictures. I love all those films.

Originally broadcast on the 11th July, 1999 at 11:45pm.

At the end of the 50s, by which time he had become an icon of rebellion, Marlon Brando founded a production company called Pennebaker. He wanted to make a Western and spent ages developing scripts. Then someone gave him Charles Neider’s novel The Authentic Death of Henry Jones about a bank robber called Rio deserted by his friend who has the Oedipal name of Dad Longworth. He immediately took to it and said at the time “our early heroes were not 100% brave all of the time. My role is a man who is tough and vain and childish”. Stanley Kubrick was to direct, and Karl Malden, who had been in A Streetcar Named Desire and On The Waterfront with Brando, was to play the friend Dad. When Kubrick saw the finished script which was part-written by his long time collaborator Calder Willingham and Sam Peckinpah, he bottled out saying that he did not understand what it was about. Brando tried Sidney Lumet and Elia Kazan. Both refused so he decided to direct it himself. The production was endless. Brando threw away the script, improvised many scenes, shot different angles with different dialogue, got drunk when his character was drunk, filmed for six months, spending $6 million rather than the budgeted $1.6 million. The first cut lasted six hours. Paramount had hated it, and in particular how everyone lied apart from Malden’s character. According to Brando in his laddish autobiography: “They cut the movie to pieces. By then I was bored with the whole project and walked away from it”. The fact that shots do not match when Brando and Malden meet for the first time in five years does suggest that this scene was re-shot. Revenge is the driving force of many of the best westerns of the 50s and since such as The Searchers, The Naked Spur and Once Upon A Time In The West, and so it is here. What really works I think is that Brando takes most of the action out of the genre. His revenge on his friends is long delayed. His performance is almost expressionless so the effect is a slow accumulation of rage. And all around this pressure cooker of a character is tumult. The great use of wind and dust storms and the almost constant presence of the sea, the Big Sur, which expresses the build up of unease, as it does in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. All of this is beautifully shot in blue and gold velvety tones with compositions like Georgia O’Keeffe paintings by veteran cameraman Charles Lang. Brando could hardly be accused of picking a self-aggrandising role. Rio is an out-and-out heel, adolescent as many method roles are, because the actors were taught that their angst comes from teenage problems. Brando’s lover in the film played by Pina Pellicer is worth a mention. Her intense close up performance is the only one she gave in English language cinema before she killed herself three years later. The scene where he lies to her about a necklace by saying that it was his mothers is very brave, and the whipping scene shows how much he knew about acting. He does little but watch the extras – they stare at the horror, and Brando gave a bonus to the ones who winced most.

- Mark Cousins' original introduction, transcribed by colin0380. (thanks to Colin and Kaprisky for the transcript)

Brief thoughts

This is one of only three films shown on both Alex Cox's and Mark Cousins's Moviedrome (the other two being Carrie and Johnny Guitar). Here is the first broadcast. I don't have much to add to what I already said about the film after this second viewing. I agree with what Mark Cousins says about the use of wind, dust storms and the sea, giving the film a primal undercurrent. It is beautifully shot by Charles Lang and the locations are incredibly well chosen. As I said after the first watch of the film, I could quite happily watch the full five/six hour original cut.

A fascinating page: Kubrick's Imaginary Western.

I've read elsewhere of Scorsese praising VistaVision and basically saying it was unequalled and that we would never be able to experience what it was like to see the original prints screened as they were intended. Here is old Marty explaining the restoration of another classic shot in VistaVision, Richard III.

Originally broadcast on the 21st June, 1999 at 00:10am.

Robert Altman, who directed the similarly star-studded Prêt-à-Porter, hero-worshipped the director of tonight's picture, John Huston. There are parallels between the two men: both saw themselves in the mould of Hemingway, both drank, were accused of misogyny, left their first wives for the hard life, both lived in Paris. After being a boxer, reporter and screenwriter, Huston debuted as a director with The Maltese Falcon. He joined the army in 1942 and made a pair of brave and intense documentaries which were banned for many years. He won two Oscars for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and lead Hollywood's resistance to the McCarthy witch-hunts, with his friends Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. After making The African Queen, he left American in protest at McCarthy and moved to Ireland. Altman's hero directed The List of Adrian Messenger in 1963. It came the year after Huston did The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. The story was set in London, but he moved part of it - the climax - to Ireland, so that he could build in a fox hunt sequence. Kirk Douglas, whose company, Joel, produced the film, and who plays the lead says that it was this move to Galway that broke the momentum of the film-making and weakened the picture. He also takes part of the blame himself because, he says, he didn't have the time to focus on it. But he's undervaluing it, I think. As with Altman, I've never been a big admirer of Huston. I think he's more interested in ideas than movies and his work isn't very visual, but he always knows a good yarn when he hears it, especially a fable with a touch of Kipling. This one's an old style English whodunnit but with a twist. It was producer Ed Lewis who came up with the twist. Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and Robert Mitchum all appear in disguise and only reveal themselves at the end. I can't think of another movie where this happens and some people found that it distracted from the mystery element. I think it's fun. It's fairly obvious which one is Mitchum but the others are a tougher guess. Elizabeth Taylor was to play a hairy old male sailor and Mitchum says that Sinatra didn't do his bit at all, he just turned up for the unmasking. Huston himself appears briefly near the end and the boy in the movie is his son, Tony, who would later write the film The Dead for his father and who looks like his sister Angelica Huston. Tony recalls the filming as one of the few times that his father was physically affectionate with him. Huston gave a key role to Clive Brook, whose last film this was and who worked with Dietrich in the '30s. And he brought Anthony Veiller, who'd written the Burt Lancaster picture, The Killers, out of retirement from the antiques trade to script it. It's mostly an old-fashioned and very entertaining film, I think; though Kirk Douglas's speech about the Evil is very John Huston and the director's touch of cruelty in the fox hunt - which echoes the horse scenes in The Misfits - gives it a very dark edge.

- Mark Cousins' original introduction, transcribed from the video below. (thanks to Kurt Aerden and Kaprisky for the video)

Brief thoughts

I agree it's very old-fashioned but in a way which, I think, reflects badly on modern cinema. There's something about certain old films, particularly in the work of Orson Welles, where you get a great sense that this is a bunch of actors getting dressed up and playing make-believe, as it were, in order to tell a story. That's always there in theatre of course and I think it should always be there in cinema too. In fact, I think the further cinema gets away from that the more pompous and empty it becomes. So it's unfortunate that this is largely seen as a product of the old days. This film has that and, as Cousins says, it's great fun and highly entertaining. It really surprised me how difficult it is to tell which actor is which under the make-up, as each has such a distinctive face that you would expect it to be almost impossible to hide, but they do. There's a great pub scene, full of smoke and voices and menace; and Burt Lancaster's disguise in particular is very amusing. I have huge admiration for Huston, I have to say. It annoys me to buggery that people still bang on about cinema being a visual medium, when the sound is equally important and it hasn't been a purely visual medium since the silent days. And even then I think the important element is not the image but the cut, so you could say it's not the visuals that are important but the idea/emotion provoked by the edit. It seems so simplistic to reduce it to imagery. I can see why much of film criticism focused on the visual, as you can't replicate sound in books, but even now with the web and its capacity to reproduce both sound and image, we still seem to be stuck in this fetish for imagery and it's unfortunate that less visually striking directors like Huston can be criticised for the fact, when he made far more great films - and across five decades - than most directors (I don't mean Cousins's criticism, just that usually leveled at less visually inventive directors as a whole).