Midnight Cowboy
26 September 1969
The word “masterpiece” is already ringing in our ears about John Schlesinger’s first American movie, Midnight Cowboy, which comes to the London Pavilion almost stale from the accolades that have pursued it relentlessly across the Atlantic. One recalls similar immediate reactions to the overblown and flashy Darling, and is suitably forewarned. Like Darling this story, of a penurious young blade who arrives in New York with the confidence of his single conviction – that he’s one helluva guy in bed – has all the trappings of a film made for its time, swingingly right for the second half of 1969.
Perhaps, however, it’s an easier time to make films, or at least more genuine in its passion for sophisticated verismo. Midnight Cowboy is a very very much better piece of work than Darling; not perhaps a masterpiece of the cinema but Schlesinger’s personal masterpiece all the same. It deserves at least half the adjectives pouring forth about it from those in the business who were scared silly about the making of it in the first place. It frequently cuts deep and accurately into the truth, as much in its minor as in its major details. Strange how a visitor to a house can interpret the tensions of its occupants more clearly than can its occupants themselves. This is really Schlesinger’s achievement. He has caught on film a slice of America as well, if not better, than one had any right to expect.
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Death in Venice
4 March 1971
Some people will be bored by Death in Venice. Those omnipresent office girls who invade press shows in far greater numbers than critics were certainly rustling long before the end of Visconti’s latest film. But then it is about an elderly gentleman with a platonic passion for a young boy and it is culled from a novella by Thomas Mann in which nothing much actually happens except within the mind’s eye. It is a very slow, precise, and beautiful film, proportioned by a master who is about to embark on a version of Proust’s life story and, whatever some think of it, it is important to say that it is 100% better than 99.99% of what’s on offer in London at the moment.
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Deliverance
28 September 1972
The great thing about John Boorman’s Deliverance is that it’s a cracking good story. One puts it in these terms first because that’s just what most new films meanderingly aren’t. The cinematic art of narrative drive, often the prime quality of those film-makers we tend to deride, has largely been lost by less instinctive successors it is possible to admire too much for what they are saying, rather than how.
This is not to say that Deliverance is purely a commercial undertaking, though there is no real harm in that. Actually, since it is an adaptation by James Dickey, novelist and poet, of his own sensitive and frightening book, it is also a finely structured allegory about America and Americans. But at least it works properly on a more basic level. It’s good to watch, and then to think about.
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Solaris
3 May 1973
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, grand in scale though a mere 165 minutes long, is another from which one has to exorcise the long shadow of Kubrick. The film, which was hailed at last year’s Cannes and London festivals as the Russian 2001, is in fact light years away from that epic. Adapted by Tarkovsky from a story by the Polish writer Stanislav Lem, its gadgetry is minimal and its intention to work more on the mind’s eye than the body’s. The pacing is slow and inexorable, its labyrinthine and hallucinatory mixture of time, memory, and experience impossible to view sitting back at a comfortable distance. You either get right in there with it or you don’t.
The central character is a space scientist living with his parents and son in a quiet, Turgenev-like country retreat near Moscow. Years ago his wife had committed suicide and now the authorities are pondering about sending him to the planet Solaris where odd happenings have been reported from the manned space station. Solaris, it seems, is an ocean of sentient matter which has the power to read human minds and to recreate for their discomfiture figures relating to their past. When he arrives at the station, he finds his predecessor dead, and his surviving colleagues wrestling distractedly with their individual ghosts.
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Jaws
22 December 1975
“Don’t mock it,” someone said to me of Jaws. “It’s what the movie business is all about.” And I haven’t the slightest intention of putting down what is in commercial terms the most successful film of all time. It is, in fact, a great relief to find that Steven Spielberg’s epic is such a cracking good piece of entertainment that you don’t have to make excuses for it.
But it would be a pity also if we didn’t admit straight away that there are better films around than Jaws, and I fancy that Spielberg, its able and lucky young director, will one day make one, if he hasn’t already in Duel, his neglected first feature. Even so, Jaws is a splendidly shrewd cinematic equation which not only gives you one or two very nasty turns when you least expect them but, possibly more important, knows when to make you think another’s coming without actually providing it.
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Star Wars
16 December 1977
“I have wrought my simple plan
If I give some hour of joy
To the boy who’s half a man
Or the man who’s half a boy.”
Thus saith Arthur Conan Doyle in his preface to The Lost World, and thus quoteth Bob Dingilian, executive director of national publicity, 20th Century Fox Film Corporation as a preface to his notes for Star Wars. And I must say, it about sums up the picture, except that it gives some two hours of joy, and will probably also be appreciated by girls who are half women and women who are half girls too. Bob, you’re a genius.
Quite whether George Lucas, of American Graffiti fame, is also a genius is another matter. Viewed dispassionately – and of course that’s desperately difficult at this point in time – Star Wars is not an improvement on Mr Lucas’ previous work, except in box office terms. It isn’t the best film of the year, it isn’t the best science fiction ever to be translated to the screen, it isn’t a number of other things either that sweating critics have tried to turn it into when faced with finding some plausible explanation for its huge and slightly sinister success considering a contracting market.
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Taxi Driver
19 August 1976
If Robert Altman’s Nashville was the most important American film of 1975, it is at least arguable that Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver will come to be judged the most significant of 1976. It is not just that this chimerical parable of the New York streets has taken the box office by storm, like some upmarket Death Wish (though that in itself means something in view of the apparent failure of Mean Streets). Nor is it that the film is some imperishable masterpiece to be approached on bended knee by critics. Its real power lies in the urgency with which it is made.
It is, like Nashville, a tour de force which doesn’t so much explain America as reflect part of it with unerring accuracy. You may not like what you see, but you can’t stop it hitting you between the eyes.
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Alien
6 September 1979
If you want cinematic kicks, Ridley Scott’s massively successful Alien will give you them in profusion. Physically, I mean. No film I have seen in the last year or so, excluding perhaps The Deer Hunter, emanates so strong a whiff of palpable, nerve-straining shock. It is, in fact, an audience reaction picture par excellence. Which explains, perhaps better than the colossal buildup, why everyone wants to see it. The public now seems to be sitting back in its seats and saying, “Amaze me.” Alien, above all others recently, can be relied upon to do just that.
Yet it does so, oddly enough, with a story that is basically just a mixture of The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Thing from Outer Space. A dozen other 50s-sounding titles spring to mind – well, 60s at any rate. The point is the added 70s proficiency. You won’t see anything very original anywhere in the film, other than in the actual making of it. There, no holds are barred. Scott, a recruit from advertising, where instant atmospherics has to be the order of the day, manipulates his audience in a far stronger fashion than he managed with The Duellists. His combination of space fiction and horror story is no great shakes as a work of art. Artifice, however, it has in profusion.
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Vagabonde
8 May 1986
From time to time a film comes along which breaks all the rules, and gets away with it. Agnès Varda’s Vagabonde is one such project – the story of a young girl wandering round a wintry south of France whose frozen death in a ditch you know about from the beginning. She is not a particularly admirable person, and certainly not a heroine, as we find out.
Such a film, composed almost entirely of flashbacks, which resolutely refuse to tell you things about the girl that you think you want to know, takes great risks for a good reason. Varda clearly believes that we are likely to ask the wrong questions about her and thus to find untruthful answers. Her Vagabonde has made a choice and sticks to it. She is not a victim.
She is played with superb maturity – if that can be the word for it – by the 18-year-old Sandrine Bonnaire, in her sixth film and the last for which her parents had to countersign the contract. She was last seen here in Maurice Pialat’s To Our Loves, as another kind of rebellious teenager, creating havoc in her family. This time we don’t even know if she has a family, and the only havoc she creates is possibly within herself.
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The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
12 October 1989
Peter Greenaway is not a director of wide popular appeal, and almost certainly never will be. In that way, he is no Michael Powell. But The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover bears legitimate comparisons with Powell’s Peeping Tom for the audacity of its conception and the imagination with which it is made.
Peeping Tom was reviled in its time, and I doubt if we’ve got that much wiser. But whoever gave Greenaway the money this time – and it wasn’t the British, since Channel 4 felt his film could never be transmitted on television in the present climate – has caused to be made one of the two or three outstanding British films of the decade.
The film can best, or at least most simply, be described as a beautifully decorated moral parable about greed that’s funny and horrifying in turn. It intends to be very contemporary in tone (do we not consume with ineffable style?) but links very aptly with the past through Jacobean plays like John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. It is thus both absolutely of its time, and part of an English tradition which paints the comedy of life in the darkest and most bloodshot colours.
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An Angel at My Table
27 September 1990
It is difficult to say precisely why Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table is such a good film. It did not, after all, set out to be a film for the cinema at all but a three-part television project based on the trilogy of autobiographical novels by the New Zealand writer Janet Frame. And Campion has done little or nothing to alter it for its different medium.
Added to that, it is not as audaciously conceived as the same director’s Sweetie. It is, in fact, a surprisingly straightforward, honest and unpretentious tribute from one woman artist to another, and it is there that its true relevance lies.
But that almost certainly would not be enough to ensure its success. What you cannot leave out of the equation is the hidden subtleties of its making. Behind the tribute lies not only an extraordinary life but a real sense of how to put it on film so that we are first involved and then moved.
Malcolm X
4 March 1993
“Young black men today need role models, and it’s a shame we have to dig up a dead man instead of finding someone who walks among us.” You’d think that remark would have come from someone opposing the film Malcolm X. In fact, it’s from the mouth of Spike Lee himself – a measure, perhaps, of the doubts he had in his own mind while making a difficult film.
Lee may now feel, despite the inevitable flak and the fact that Malcolm X hasn’t done as well as might have been hoped at the box office, that it has all been worthwhile. Like Gandhi, which in some ways it resembles, the film and its attendant publicity has introduced millions to a hitherto shadowy figure. That is its triumph. Its disadvantage is that, in doing so, it seems both too prolix at three hours and 20 minutes and yet not detailed enough to answer more than half the questions raised about its hero.
The film starts with footage of the Rodney King beating by the Los Angeles police and ends with Nelson Mandela speaking in Soweto. It means to connect. In between there’s the fictionalised material on the true subject of the film. It is an expensive, often extravagant progress, tracing the history of the man from his humble and crooked beginnings through to his conversion in gaol, his espousal of the Black Muslim cause, his rejection by Elijah Muhammad’s movement, and finally his assassination by person or persons unknown.
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Naked
4 November 1993
Few films seem more likely to become milestones in the British industry’s uncertain march into the 90s than Mike Leigh’s Naked. Whether you like it or not, it is one of the most complex and audacious attempts to mark our present card. It is certainly Leigh’s most striking piece of cinema to date.
Set in the London represented by Dalston and Soho, it tries to articulate what is wrong with the society that Mrs Thatcher claims does not exist. It does so through the life and times of an unemployed Mancunian drifter – the equivalent, perhaps, of an even more loquacious Jimmy Porter de nos jours.
It is not a pretty picture, even though Leigh’s only slightly absurdist humour makes the pill a little less hard to swallow. You laugh as you’re choking. But anodyne it isn’t, and domestic comedy is not its genre.
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