Rezensionen von the red duchess

'Loser' is Amy Heckerling's 'Candide', in which a naive optimist is sent out into the world, only to discover that it is unjust, exploitative and brutal. The best thing about 'Loser' is its casting and the expectations it creates: where 'American pie' was a sweet romantic comedy disguised as a scatalogical exposure of man's basest instincts, 'Loser' is a scatalogical exposure of man's basest instincts disguised as a sweet romantic comedy. The ironic references to Mena Suvari's most iconic role - 'American Beauty' - expose the paedophilia driving that work's sentimentality. This is a film of unimpeachable integrity, as ugly and unpleasant as the characters it satirises, 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' in Hell. So much integrity, in fact, it's virtually unwatchable.

There are some people who try to reclaim 'Nadja' - along with Abel Ferrera's 'The Addiction' the most stultifyingly pretentious film ever made, bludgeoning the audience with Wim Wenders-like globs of pseudo-philosophical gabble and supposedly 'arty' screes of visual incoherence - by suggesting it is comic. But laughing at what, exactly? Horror films? You have to know what horror films do before you can mock them, and director Almedeyra hasn't a clue. American indie films? Probably, but it replicates that mind-numbing mindset so faithfully, it forgets to be funny about it. Students, whose existential angst and elevated notions of 'beauty' find expression in My Bloody Valentine records? Definitely. Elena Lowenstein as Dracula's Daughter (and Breton's Nadja?) is so gorgeous in her designer Grim Reaper cape, she may even replace Death from 'The Seventh Seal' as my iconic nightmare of choice.

there should be a sub-genre in the Western called 'the Robert Mitchum Western'. Mitchum's brilliant, idiosyncratic, usually undervalued Westerns import his film noir persona to etch some compellingly dark character sketches, and bring an elegiac world-weariness more familiar from the films of Sam Peckinpah. 'Man with the gun' is one of his best. Directed by Orson Welles protege Richard Wilson, it is a stark, monochrome beauty, full of chilling silhouettes and terrifying outbursts of savage violence, as Mitchum comes to tame a town terrorised by a monopolist with a private army. Mitchum's regression from soft-spoken stranger to deranged murderer, with a host of dark emotions in between, is a marvel of expressive, physical acting.

There is a scene in 'Code Unknown' in which a young boy nearly falls off a high-rise, watched with impotent horror by his parents. It reminds us, as with 'Funny Games', that Michael Haneke is a major suspense director, as alive as Hitchcock or Polanski to the voyeurism, violation, manipulation and eroticism inherent in the thriller genre. However, Mr. Haneke rejects this talent as lacking high-mindedness, and instead produces State-0f-The-Nation/Continent lectures whose insipidity of content is only matched by breathtaking formal excellence. Resist the wagging finger, and enjoy the supreme confidence of a director with the most exciting facility with the punishing long take since Godard.

I guess you would need to have seen at least one episode of 'Star Trek' to even begin to get this - I haven't, and so was slightly bewildered as to what was going on, why many people already consider it a classic. I enjoyed it because some of it was funny - the silly accents of the Tertians; the moving bravado of the washed-up Nesmith; the performance of Sam Rockwell as Guy, his name signifying his function as a kind of everyman link between the different layers of reality the film portrays. The visual effects, supposed to be tacky, still rise to some spectacular moments: the desert ghost world where the crew seek berillium, intensely orange after all the uniform grey; the climactic scene where Nesmith and Gwen must run through a corridor of huge rapidly punching lever-things.

As the film moves towards its climax, it is difficult to gauge the tone. It clearly starts out satirising the imagination-defeating banality of nerd-conventions - the fans dressed as aliens unable to tell the difference between a tacky show and reality, or who have willed it into a reality, are mirrored by the aliens who mistake the show for historical documents, and despite their scientific brilliance (like their human counterparts) are dubiously figured as mentally retarded, with their stupid laughs and jerky movements.

If we have gotten reckless or intellectually threadbare enough to call 'Being John Malkovich' Borgesian, than the same epithet can more validly be applied to 'Galaxy Quest', where a whole series of times, realities and representations, initially separate, conflate, leading to the bizarre finale, as the space heroes return to another Convention, this time genuine adventurers - the difference between actors and roles; actors and their roles of 20 years ago; actors who must play, and indeed become their roles of 20 years ago; fans who create an actual reality from a non-existent fantasy; fans from the real world who become indispensible figures in the fantasy which is now a real world (phew!).

The end is quite mind-boggling, where it is impossible to untangle the boundaries of reality and fantasy. So what began as satire of a phenomenon synonymous with being a loser, and almost fascist (the military parade that first greets the actors in the Star port), becomes a celebration, not really of losers redeeming themselves, but of the place of fantasy in everyday life, and its power to transform it. I don't mean politically restructure society; just the old post-modern ideas of reproduction and illusion. After all, we live in a 'real world' where a non-existent, fantasy language, Klingon, can now be studied at universities, as a 'real world' mode of communication. The real world has no place for heroes and goodness, but we can still pretend these things exist.

This little known entry in a minor series might ring a few more bells when it is known that 'the Falcon takes over' is the first adaptation of Raymond Chandler's wonderful novel 'Farewell my Lovely'. And rather good it is too. Unlike its more famous successors - Edward Dmytryk's 1943 'Murder my sweet' and Dick Richards' 1975 remake, both the very definition of earnest film noir and neo-noir - this film has a vein of parody, irony and wit, that brings it closer to Robert Altman's iconoclastic 'The Long Goodbye', or, at the very least, Eddie Constantine's Lemmy Caution series of films in France.

Of course, this has largely to do with the fixed needs of an already established series, to which any source material was fitted - Chandler was clearly just another hack writer towards whom little respect need be paid. There is none of Chandler's profound disillusionment here, no attempt to trace a society or analyse its corruption. this is the noir equivalent of a Broadway musical comedy, with background strictly a setting, like a ship or a drawing room, in which familiar types do their routine.

There is no angst-ridden, isolated, defeated knight Philip Marlowe here; in his place is the Falcon, a heavy, louche, even leery amateur of dubious sexuality (like Lemmy he is clumsily eager for the ladies, and tends to bed them as soon as he meets them (or in such a way as Hollywood code could at the time suggest); but he lives a determinedly bachelor life in a large house with his 'bit of rough' sidekick Goldie, who likes to wear incongruously svelte dressing gowns in the morning (another kind of Hollywood code), his unseen fiancee fortuitously miles away).

It is important to stress that in the very early days of noir, there was an in-built awareness of the need for parody. Noir is a powerful vision, especially in a culture of such blinding, gaudy brightness as the US. But sometimes, in its macho fatalism and frightened misogyny, it can be an exhausting vision - too much straight noir can be bad for your mental health.

But this is not to say that 'Falcon' is just a big joke. Like that other great serial film that transcended its modest origins - 'Sherlock Holmes and the Pearl of Death' - it is closer to the horror film than the detective genre. Moose Molloy's lumbering, unthinking violence is similar to Karloff's Frankenstein. The scene where the Falcon, impersonating a drunk, first meets him, is filmed with mock-horror sensationalism, as is O'Hara's creeping up on Goldie's neck later. There is an attempted murder in a fog-wafting cemetary. The scene at Jules Amthor's exotic haven has the feel of those Egyptian horrors like 'the Mummy' Universal used to churn out in the 1930s, while the soundtrack has the mysterious anxiety of horror rather than the strident fear we expect from noir.

In a genre which centres on the detective, on knowledge, on the possibility of explaining and repairing breaks in the social and moral order, the intrusion of horror will be disturbing. It asserts the opposite - the limits of knowledge, darkness over the light of reason, the vulnerability of bodies, the point of breakdown. the Falcon in this mystery is singularly inept, and is only saved from death by a singularly unconvincing deus ex machina. He is utterly exposed, his reason and detective status irrelevant faced with the cold fact of Death in a lonely forest, a very horror milieu. In this way, the amiably silly 'Falcon' is actually closer to the spirit of Chandler than more 'serious', faithful versions (Despite the scriptwriters' brave efforts, though, the plot is typically intransigent!).

Of all the directors who have plundered the legacy of Jean-Pierre Melville for superficial treasure, Takeshi Kitano has always been the most intelligent, the most alert to his metaphysical drive. 'Brother', Kitano's mostly marvellous new feature, is imbued with all things Melville, from the opening silent wandering of Yamomoto, like Jef in 'Le Samourai', to the muted blue colour palette, faceless glass buildings and grey ritual beach of 'Un Flic'

Most pertinent, however, is Melville's under-rated 'Deux hommes dans Manhattan', which also starred the director. Like that film, 'Brother' is Kitano's first American film, his first cultural work in the country of origin of the urban genre he has made his own. And like Melville, instead of dealing with this country, Kitano seems to have become more obsessively Japanese, more interested in ritual, nation, Eastern philosophy. In other words, Kitano has taken foreign money to make an uncompromisingly personal film which, like 'Boiling Point' and 'Kids' Return', turns the gangster film into a rite of passage.

A throwback to the methods and assumptions of Robert Flaherty, 'Bread Day' is a documentary recording a day in the life of an isolated snow-crowned former Soviet settlement, now sparsely populated by testy old people and some mangy animals. The title refers to the day when a supply of bread is sent to the settlement - the old folk must push the carriage themselves for the final miles of the journey. There are very few scenes in the film, the rigid camera focusing relentlessly on the tableau in hand, be it a vicious row in the bakery, or the methodical munching of a goat. We are supposed to pretend the camera isn't there, but drunks and animals keep drawing attention to it. This contrived 'unmediated' style is supposed to give us a genuine taste of the life of a community abandoned by the powers that be - all I could think was, why doesn't the cameraman help the old people push the carriage?

choirs are the most basic expression of any community, a coming together of classes, gender and races, a transcending of life's everyday conflicts through the artificial medium of song. Well, that's the theory anyway. So, in this era of high-capitalism, where Margaret Thatcher could plausibly claim that there was no longer any such thing as society, where communities are increasingly fragmented and displaced, where new media and popular art-forms have threatened the more 'artisan' modes, whither the choir?

In this four-part Channel 4 series, Howard Goodall, immortal composer of the Blackadder theme tune, attempts to find out. He visits four far-flung corners of the world - gospel in the American South, Zulu escatia (my phonetic rendering of a word never spelt!), folk/national singing in the post-Soviet countries of Bulgaria and Estonia, and traditional choirboy singing in England.

In these programmes, Goodall traces the social and historical context of these choral forms and their enduring visibility in their respective countries - slavery in the South; Communism in Eastern Europe. Frequently choral singing was a means of expressing communal spirit in conditions of great oppression - the fall of Bolshevism in Estonia, for instance, was precipitated by hundreds of thousands of people singing national songs in the streets. in South Africa, the choir's function of expressing tribal self-confidence has given way to economic necessity, as poor blacks perform in marathon song contests for money and status.

Goodall is an amiable guide, with a predilection for rolling his 'r's. there is some amusing pomposity-pricking, as when he eyebrow-raises an 'enthusiastic' American academic obsessed with Bulgarian singing. Every programme seems to centre on food and the kitchen. Nevertheless, the narrator's presence is frequently intrusive, interrupting the music for facile asides, resurrecting unwelcome spectres of 'Graceland' in South Africa.

'J'entends plus la guitare' is dedicated to the memory of Nico, the Swedish model and actress who was director Garrel's muse, most famous as the blonde Marcello meets at the castle party in 'La Dolce Vita', and the singer with the haunted monotone on the Velvet Underground's extraordinary 'Banana' album. the heroine of the film is a blonde German who, like Nico, turns to drugs - her last appearance is marked by a pun on heroine/heroin (the Velvets' most famous song), and the Velvet-esque guitar of the title is no longer heard by the hero, or the director. The female is usually signalled in Garrel's films by music, as if music itself was somehow a feminine principle - the 'Je', therefore, is plausibly the director's, offering the film as a mea culpa, blaming himself for a death triggered by pure male egotism. Gerard is one of the least likeable characters in European cinema, an emotional vampire who needs to suck the emotional blood out of countless women, leaving them diminished, empty, to save himself from a similar fate.

Perhaps, again in tribute to Nico, Garrel's usual stylistic austerity is filtered through a Warhol-like sensibility. this is one of the most gruelling films I have ever squirmed through, in terms of style - long, punishing takes in shabby, bare environments of people either talking self-serving philosophical twaddle, or, worse, little at all, the peeling of the walls against which the characters are framed speaking more eloquently for the emotional and imaginative inertia; takes that are so long and unadorned that the characters (or actors) arent' allowed to hide, and the various mannerisms or tics or little theatrical heightenings are exposed for what they are, not as accretions to be stripped away to reveal some real 'truth', but as part of the truth that we can never strip them away, never truly give ourselves to another - and in terms of content.

the film begins as a stereotypical French film, with two couples frustrated in love: one is in love with another but won't give him a child; one refuses to tell his lover he loves her because she doesn't know what the word means. The men begin the first of their discussions about their relations to the women, one grounded in culture, the other in experience. One could argue this as the philosophical base of the film.

In any case, things go from bad to worse, people start leaving each other, losing their children, sleeping with prostitutes or older, abused women. What is unusual in this film is that 'seedy' subject matter usually treated luridly or with too much downbeat detail, is here represented in a flat, monotonous visual style, and through a disarming ellipsis that doesn't warn the viewer that five minutes or five years have passed. This is the closest cinema has gotten to the numbed, unsensational texture of life itself. To even ask entertainment of it is besides the point.

Francois Truffaut follows in the tradition of Jean-Pierre Melville by adapting a popular genre as a serious allegory for the darkest period in French history: the Nazi Occupation. Just as Melville used the gangster film to examine notions of legality, legitimacy, authority and criminality in a period when the Resistance were outlaws and the police rounding up Jews for the death camps, so Truffaut takes the beloved putting-on-a-show warhorse, and uses it as a metaphor for the conditions of life in Occupied France: the need to act, adapt and continually discard roles. When Depardieu's character leaves to fight for the Resistance, he puns about exchanging his make-up (maquillage) for the maquis.

What Truffaut is most interested in, as in all his films, is the effect this need for constant dissembling has on individual identity and relationships. This wonderful romantic comedy plays like a mature update of 'Casablanca', richly stylised, bravely open-ended, with Truffaut's moving camera wrenching spirit from the claustrophobic confines.

Quite simply one of the best ever Shakespearean adaptations, because it achieves the near-impossible balance of comedy and melancholy that makes 'Twelfth Night' the favourite Shakespeare play of the discerning. More than either, 'Twelth night' makes tangible a feeling of longing, the exquisitely fine puppetry, the richly detailed mise-en-scene, the haunting Elizabethan pastiche score, all frame characters alone and desiring unrequited. this courtly anguish is satisfyingly countered by the cruel, physical humour of Toby and Aguecheeks' world, but even here, Malvolio's mirroring humiliation returns us to sadness.

Most 'The Making of...' documentaries are barely concealed extensions of the publicity machine, a glorified advertisement that purports to demystify the industrial production of cinema, to bring the audiences closer to actors and directors who are presumed to be engaged as real people creating a fiction, rather than a fiction. When really, the carefully stage-managed featurette reveals just as much as the filmmakers want, tantalising the curious punter without ever enlightening, and developing an extra facet of a star persona, rather than normalising it.

As you might expect, a 'Making of' an Ingmar Bergman film is a little different. Recording the shoot of his swansong and crowning masterpiece, 'Fanny and Alexander', 'Dokument' is essential viewing for Bergmanophiles. Framed by explanatory, often flippant intertitles, the film follows, in detail, Bergman at work, painstakingly, methodically, often tediously shaping each scene, the precise movements of camera and actors, the details of the composition, the timing and delivery of dialogue. There is no frivolous chumminess here, no meet-the-backroom-boys boffinry.

Bergman disclaims at the start any pretensions for this documentary, suggesting that it can never capture the inner journey that is the act of creation: this is of course true, but 'Dokument' is more than the entertaining peek backstage Bergman affects to offer us. With 'Dokument', Bergman performs two very serious functions. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, he educates the viewer. It many seem dull to watch take after take of each scene, with little of the 'hilarious' bloopers TV programmes and Hollywood end credits delight in (although there's some wonderful business with an intransigent cat). There may not seem to be any real difference between takes, or any reason why we should be shown rehearsals for takes followed by takes.

What this repetition does, though, is accustom the viewer to nuance, to the aesthetic reason for the most functional set-up, or why a character is in this particular position, why this shot is in close up, while the next is an elaborate long take. it alerts us to the use of colour, light, framing; it makes us aware of the details of the decor. The documentary may not show the creative inner journey, but when we see the process from rehearsal to take to final act, we do glimpse something of Bergman's art, something that is clearly going on in his head while the shoot takes place, but remains, until then, unspoken. Trust me, if you watch this documentary just before the film itself, as I did, your mind becomes more receptive, and the work's rich magic becomes even more clearly apparent.

Secondly, and relatedly, 'Dokument' is in a sense a Bergman film. Despite its light, seemingly loose form and tone (Bergman, far from being the anguished dictator of legend, is amiable and constantly braying with childlike laughter), the creative journey I spoke of becomes in a sense a spiritual journey. Like 'Fanny and Alexander' itself, a recreation of Bergman's childhood, the documentary is framed around dinners - in between comes a revelation of the artist, in this case at the end, rather than beginning, of his career.

There is a truly painful sequence here, among the most emotionally powerful in Bergman's work, where Bergman rehearses a cameo with his long-time collaborator Gunnar Bjornstrand, doing a piece as the clown Feste in Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night'. If the intertitles didn't suggest that Bjornstrand approved the scenes being shown, you would think they were exploitative and humiliating. Bergman may be near the end of his career here, but he is still intellectually and physically formidable, handling the demands of a big-budget, three hours plus costume drama with a large cast and difficult narrative strands with ease and grace.

Bjornstrand, on the other hand, seems nearly senile, tired, forgetful, plainly not up to the job, shown in his scene's non-appearance in the movie. The sight of Bergman trying to keep his friend's spirits up, encourage and compliment a giant of acting like he's a baby, for around 20 minutes, is something you'll never see in 'The Making of Pearl Harbour'. It says so much about Bergman's art and his themes, and how even at his most artificial, he was clearly, obstinately true to life. It's uncanny.

Garson Kanin's best films are so bright, fast and funny, and have been plundered by so many pallid, feel-good imitators, that it's easy to overlook how courageously critical they can be, of prevailing social norms, for instance, what society takes to be normal - 'natural' - about crucial concepts like family, gender, marriage etc. In 'My Favorite wife', Kanin takes the idea that a particular social order is natural, and tears it apart, by putting civilisation on one side, nature on the other, and revealing that there's nothing remotely natural about civilisation, or our places in it; that these things are man-made, and so can be questioned, negotiated, even changed by man (or, as is more usual in Kanin's world, woman).

'Wife' opens with an elaborate sequence showing the structure of civilisation at work in its most intrinsic form - the legal system. The hero is a lawyer, and is trying to declare his missing first wife dead so he can marry another. There are a few things we notice here: the judge is hilarious, a cantankerous old buffer, testy, capricious, and not at all rigorous, or even knowledgeable in his application of laws which, after all, structure people's lives, and which, we learn, are constantly overturned by the Court of Appeals, so that something that should be inviolable is shown to be provisional. there is room for manoeuvre, but there is also room for corruption.

More important for Kanin's purposes are two incidental details. The wife has been missing for seven years, a fairy-tale or mythical number in a site of legal process, undermining its claims to ultimate, 'official' reality. The hero's name is Arden, which might remind us of Shakespeare's Forest ('As you like it'), and the spirit of play that will inform the film, with people assuming and discarding roles, putting on costumes, using props, putting on 'plays' or performances to deceive, enlighten or outmanoeuvre others.

On one level, this warns us against accepting appearances in a civilised world that depends on appearances (all the talk about respectability); on another, it shows that certain roles - like being a mother, or husband - aren't God-given, but roles which have to be constantly rehearsed and refined. Play can be subversive - the way Ellen Arden dresses up as a man, breaks up a marriage, or tries to conceal a possible adultery - but it is also seen as a necessary process of socialisation: the children learn to imitate their parents, as they theatrically make their lost mother 'perform' her confession. They learn that society is fluid, not fixed; they also learn to lie. (the hero winds up in an Attic (as in Greek comedy), but that might be taking the analogy to far!)

Hitchcock once said that he often used Cary Grant because he wanted to work against his established image. But the figure of masculine immaturity and insecurity so richly realised in Roger O Thornhill ('North by Northwest') is already fully-formed here in a 'hero' who jumps at any chance to avoid making difficult decisions. Kanin, like Hitchcock later, makes brilliant, ironic use of Grant's most famous previous roles: 'Topper', another story about a professional flustered by a 'ghost'; and, especially, 'Bringing up baby', not just in the comically ghastly leopardskin bathrobe his second wife buys him, but in the animal imagery used throughout (kids going to the zoo; Steve as Tarzan etc.), contrasting with his civilised world that is making him desperately unhappy, his identity and masculine certainty fragmenting. (knowledge that Grant used to live with Randolph Scott adds further comic potency to their scenes)

This conflict between Nick's civilisation and the 'natural' order is typically complicated - Nick clearly married Bianca for her sexual prowess; Ellen and Nick are compatible because of their intellectual superiority to everyone else (which gives a streak of cruelty to their games, and makes one feel genuinely sorry for BIanca).

'Wife' is a masterpiece of farce, of shared rooms, opening and shutting doors, frustrated sexuality, mixed identities - but what makes it a true classic are the flashes of whimsy - the Steve diving sequence that results in some the most bizarre, incongruous, and sidesplittingly funny visions ever seen on film.

One of the surprise Irish films of the last decade, 'Rat', was a surreal concept in a realistic urban setting about a man who one day turns into a rat. Here is an earlier look at rodent life, but one that belongs to a different cinematic tradition. It has many precursors, some literary (Kafka, Dickens, Orwell, Saki etc.), some cinematic (David Lynch (the Gothic recreation of Victorian England in 'The Elephant Man'; the monochrome nightmare of 'Eraserhead'); the short 'Franz Kafka's It's a wonderful life'; Gilliam's 'Brazil'; 'Mousehunt'; the animation of Svankmajer and Starewicz.

The film combines live action, animation and animatronics. Set in an unspecified Victorian locale, it tells the tale of a rat caged in J. Haddock's rodent emporium, where horrific 'scientific' experiments are carried out. When Haddock discovers our hero has mastered the alphabet, he decides to cut off his head to measure his prodigious brain. The rat makes an ingenious escape, but finds the outside world as uncongenial as the laboratory, where a mob nab him and force him into a gruesome rat-fighting contest (having seen 'Amores perros' in the same week, I've had just about enough of this sort of thing). A second escape leads him back to the laboratory, and his doomed rodent comrades. He realises change is not going to come from running away, but by confronting the monster in charge.

This potent short is wonderful for many reasons. Its mastery of the vast mise-en-scene, the creepy laboratory, the teeming streets, the violent pubs, the scientific inventions; its evocative monochrome photography, creating an appropriately Gothic aura; its flitting between genres, tones and styles, from different points of view, all bespeak an exciting new talent. This is one of the great films about the Victorian age, about various kinds of anxieties - the 'progress' of science, where reason and the animal were not so distinct as they might have been; the fear of the mob, and the growing economic and social power of the working class; the joy in new inventions ('Tale' is a dark flipside to the Wallace and Gromit films).

The neat parable-like narrative, has a pleasing Dickensian moral purpose. In an Irish context, the shadow of the Famine over a film set in an era where the Irish were caricatured as beasts to be repressed and exploited, give the film an added resonance, while contemporary issues, such as cloning and animal experiments, are referred to, but with an admirably light touch.

Most TV biographies of notable writers follow a predictable format: a linear history of the artist's life; a side glance at the historical background; a superficial analysis of the work and personality by experts, 'friends' and fellow authors. 'Eugene O'Neill: Journey into genius' shows moderate inventiveness in choosing to dramatise the famous dramatist's life, not in the Hollywood biopic sense, but as a series of discrete tableaux revealing various aspects of his life and work - a modest precursor to '32 short films about Glenn Gould'. Maybe this method is more common in the States than Britain; I certainly can't think of many examples from the latter.

The film deals with O'Neill's literary apprenticeship, from being thrown out of Princeton for generally deviant behaviour, to his winning his first Pulitzer Prize for 'Beyond the Horizon'. It is framed by O'Neill's vigil at the deathbed of his father, an Irish ham actor he contemptuously nicknames 'Monte Cristo' after his most famous barnstorming role; an actor so renowned in his day that O'Neill's Pulitzer was announced in the papers as an award for James O'Neill's son.

This Oedipal struggle shadows all the events of O'Neill's life, from his Princeton expulsion; his developing alchoholism in dead end clerical and newspaper jobs; his first, stumbling attempts at poetry; his secret marriage; his contracting TB and decision to become a playwright; his travelling the world as a sailor; his putting on his first play with a provincial acting troupe, creating a new, genuinely American theatre in the process; his growing celebrity, and involvement with the socialist intellectual circle of John Reed; his affairs and second marriage. Appropriately, he wins the Pulitzer in the year of his father's death, and the film comes full circle.

Director Skaggs adopts a number of styles to tell this story - straightforward historical recreation; symbolic tableaux; stills montage; monologues of reminiscence, etc. There is no attempt at realism here - the intention is to tell of O'Neill's development in the mood and style of O'Neill's plays, with lots of stilted talk, atmospheric portentousness, silence, darkness etc. Fans of O'Neill who can recognise the allusions will probably enjoy this most; there are no concessions to the beginner.

For someone who hooted her way in disbelief through the 'classic' Anna Christie, and who has always considered the author a parodic Tennessee Williams, I found this film a little trying, the risible conversations with a tubercolic colleen; the 'significant' meeting with a fisherman; the pretentious debates about Art and Politics in New York bars; the supposedly harrowing sequences of medical operations and injections.

Matthew Modine, refuses the sinister charisma Jack Nicholson brought to the role in 'Reds', and is quite appealing as the arrogant, reckless, young O'Neill, faring less well with the rather embarrassing contemplative Art bits.

Or, as the more appropriately hard-boiled English title has it, 'Dames Don't Care!' This is the third Lemmy Caution adventure, the real thing before Godard spliced him in a post-modern blender for 'Alphaville' in the 1960s. Lemmy is a hard-drinking, lascivious, violent FBI special agent who operates in France solving relatively mundane crimes. He has the build of John Wayne, and his films are full of extended, masochistic brawls, the fist-fighting equivalent of swashbuckling. What saves Lemmy from the neanderthal fascismo of Mickey Spillane is his charming gaucheness as an American in France.

The opening sequence is emblematic of the pleasures on offer in a Lemmy Caution film. After credits of an almost atonal jazz scree drowning more familiar Latin rhythms, a sports car blunders through an eerie, desert-like space up to a nightclub, the Casa Antica, emitting a loud, tottering drunk, who insults the usher, lunges into the club, demanding the best table, the best whiskey, the best chair. The nightclub is a gloriously kitsch affair, recreating ancient Greek ruins, with broken columns, and discreetly Nazi-like statues.

Our American alco spots a man he doesn't like, dancing with a beautiful lady. He coarsely heckles him, and goads him into fighting. So begins, in these archly theatrical surroundings, the first of many ritualistic pummellings. The lush, though powerful, eventually concedes defeat, and offers his rival a drink as peace offering. It turns out this enemy is actually a contact, and the inebriate is Lemmy Caution, stiffly sober although we've seen him drinking most of a whiskey bottle.

The contact in involved in a case involving the apparent suicide of a banker, and compromising letters to his wife, who was recently found with a large amount of counterfeit banknotes. Lemmy searches her house, and on returning surreptitiously to the closed night-club, finds the murdered contact stuffed in a fridge. Continuing his investigations with the help of the French police, Lemmy discovers the suicide's adultery, his ex-chauffeur's rise in power with designs on the wife, and decides all the clues point to the lubricious Henrietta. Not before bedding her, of course.

'Les Femmes s'en balancent' is a strange hybrid of a film. The murder-mystery plot is straight out of Agatha Christie, complete with red herrings, suspects and a final gathering where the great detective reveals the solution. The milieu of night-clubs, jazz, fraud, sexual intrigue, class tension and brutal violence is more familiar from hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir. The irrepressible Lemmy, easily foiling all resistance, and irresistable to women, is more of a comic book proto-James Bond figure than a sour private eye - Godard wanted to call his Lemmy Caution adventure 'Tarzan versus IBM', which sounds about right.

Aesthetically, the film's style is as flat and functional as a modest American B-movie (the low-budget extends to trips to Rome, but not very convincing sets): few stylistic flourishes; set-ups and situations propelling the narrative. The strikingly aggressive use of jazz, however, looks forward to 'Touch of Evil' (Welles was in Europe at the time); the exterior scenes have a mysterious, almost surreal feel; and the acting is so knowing (Lemmy and Henrietta frequently wink to the audience) as to make the potentially offensive cheerfully camp. Sociologists will probably see something in the FBI agent usurping power from the local police, but Lemmy is more brawns than brains.