cairnsdavid

The trouble with British cinema may not be that we have an addiction to realism, but that we have such a dull idea of what reality is. The opera-singing fish and chip shop proprietor criticized in another review here, is in fact a real guy, who really sings opera in his fish bar. Reality contains more than just misery, poverty and squalor. The miserable goes hand in hand with the beautiful and the absurd. It's always impressive when a film manages to do justice to all three aspects of existence, as Donkeys does.

An aging wastrel who fears he may be dying wants to make up with his estranged daughter. From this simple and powerful premise, the filmmakers weave a web of emotional and comic complications, aided by a fantastic cast who make sense of the dizzying shifts from tragedy to farce and back again, sometimes within a single scene or even a single spoken phrase. If you want to experience the messiness of life condensed into a compact and compelling narrative, with the release of both laughter and sorrow, Donkeys will move you.

I've never given anything a bad review before, and I do so this time only because I can't believe all the good reviews here are genuine. I think the director rounded up all his pals to try and generate some positive word. What's needed is some authentic moral outrage to restore the balance. I thought this film was largely unfunny (despite some excellent actors) and totally confused in its approach to the subject. The vampires were horrible, and so were the mortals, and I couldn't care less what happened to any of them. The film had nothing to say, even on the most basic level. We were supposed to root for or like Van Dienh and Wagner because they were pretty and cool, but they were just as loathsome as everybody else. I felt physically sorry for Steiger, staggering through this farrago with acute discomfort, and we're supposed to laugh at someone who's both a bereaved father and an ex-nazi? The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. The naked girls are cute, but I couldn't enjoy them with a clear conscience because of the mindless viciousness of the film they were surrounded by. It's not particularly violent or anything, just shallow and ugly. And if you think the bad editing is due to the censor, think again - the European version is sloppy and disjointed too, because the filming itself is flat and there obviously wasn't enough good footage to begin with. Tawdry, unimaginative and doesn't even pay basic attention to vampire rules. Makes INNOCENT BLOOD look like NOSFERATU.

As good a script as Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett ever wrote! Mitchell Leisen directs with some flair too. This film drove Wilder to become a director after Charles boyer had a sequence cut - from then on, Wilder was able to protect his screenplays from such treatment. But any trouble behind the scenes doesn't really harm the film itself, which is a joy. An even more abrasive protagonist than usual, Charles Boyer's gigolo nevertheless builds up colossal sympathy - it's an approach Wilder would replicate in THE LOST WEEKEND to Oscar-winning effect. But EVERYBODY in this film is marvelous, as is the inventive story, inspired by Wilder's own time in mexico awaiting a visa to allow him into the States.