Recensioni di JamesHitchcock

On Easter Sunday, 10 April 1955, outside the Magdala public house in Hampstead, London, David Blakely, a young racing driver, was shot dead by his lover Ruth Ellis. Ellis was tried and executed for this crime, making her the last woman to be hanged in Britain.

"Dance with a Stranger"- the title is taken from a popular song of the period- tells the story of the doomed relationship of Ruth and David, a story that can be summed up by the cliche that they could neither live with one another nor without one another. David was handsome and superficially charming, but there was also a dark side to his personality. He was feckless, irresponsible, immature and a heavy drinker. He also had a vicious temper, and would abuse Ruth physically in the course of their frequent quarrels. Neither Ruth nor David remained faithful to one another. He had other girlfriends, and even became engaged to one, Mary Dawson, at a time when he was still seeing Ruth. She had another wealthy lover named Desmond Cussen.

Their relationship was further complicated by questions of social class. David was from a well-to-do bourgeois background, and knew that his family would never accept the working-class Ruth as his wife. Moreover, their objections to her went well beyond her social class. She was a divorcee, at a time when this status still carried some social stigma, and the mother of two children, only one of whom had been fathered by her husband. She worked as a nightclub hostess, a profession which put her on the edge of respectability, and there were rumours that she had previously been a prostitute and nude model, professions which would have placed her well beyond that edge.

The film is not always historically accurate. Most of the changes concern the character of Cussen, who here becomes much older than he was in real life. Ian Holm was, at 54, twice Miranda Richardson's age, whereas the real Cussen was only three years older than Ruth Ellis. I suspect that Holm also played Cussen as being much nicer than he was in real life, Ruth's platonic admirer and a benevolent father-figure to her and her young son Andy. No mention is made of the allegations that Cussen supplied Ruth with the pistol she used to kill Blakely, showed her how to use it and then drove her to the fatal rendezvous. Cussen would still have been alive in 1985, and his character was presumably whitewashed for legal reasons.

We tend to look back on the late fifties as a period of optimism, the New Elizabethan Age when Britain, with a beautiful young Queen at the helm, was emerging from a decade and a half of war and post-war austerity into a new age of prosperity. Yet there was also a darker, seedier side to the decade, and that is reflected in this film. We see little of the glamorous world of David and Blakely his family, and a good deal of the downbeat world of Ruth Ellis, perhaps unsurprisingly given that the screenplay was by Shelagh Delaney, best-known as the author of that seminal kitchen sink text, "A Taste of Honey". Mike Newell's direction emphasises the drabness of Ruth's world; many scenes are set in dark, dingy interiors. When the camera does move outside it is normally night-time or a dank, misty daylight. The visual look of the film could be described as Neo-noir, although that term is normally used for fictitious stories, not ones base don real-life events.

The film gave a big boost to its two young stars, Miranda Richardson and Rupert Everett. Richardson, in particular, is excellent, portraying Ruth as a woman who could seem hard and brassy to the outside world, yet who underneath that veneer was really vulnerable, someone who had been hurt by life and who could see no way of avoiding being hurt again.

This is important, because Ruth's story has become a well-known one in Britain. Her case played a part in the campaign to abolish capital punishment. This was not just because of her sex; hardly anyone remembers the penultimate woman to be hanged in Britain. (She was Styllou Christofi, a Greek-Cypriot immigrant who had murdered her daughter-in-law). It was certainly not because anyone believed her to be innocent; there was no doubt that it was she who killed David. There was, however, a widespread belief that she was as much sinned against as sinning, a victim of abuse who, only a few years later, would probably have been acquitted of murder on the grounds of diminished responsibility (a defence, alas, not available in 1955). The death penalty had already been abolished by 1985, but the film's central message, that justice needs too be tempered with mercy, was still relevant then, and remains relevant today. 7/10.

In 1971 BBC Scotland adapted for television "Sunset Song", the first part of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's trilogy "A Scots Quair". ("Quair" is a dialect word for "book"). At the time "Sunset song" was probably intended as a one-off project, but in the early eighties the BBC eventually filmed the two other parts, "Cloud Howe" and "Grey Granite".

All three parts of the trilogy are set in the north-east of Scotland and have as their main character a young woman, Christine "Chris" Guthrie, the daughter of farmer from the (fictional) rural village of Kinraddie, in Gibbon's native Kincardineshire. "Sunset Song" was set during the 1910s and deals with Chris's relationship with her overbearing, autocratic father, John, and her marriage to another farmer named named Ewan Tavendale, who dies in the First World War. "Cloud Howe" set during the 1920s in the small industrial town of Segget, deals with Chris's second marriage to Robert Colquhoun, an idealistic young clergyman in the Church of Scotland.

With "Grey Granite" the action moves into the 1930s. Robert is also now dead, and Chris moves to the larger city of Duncairn with Ewan junior, her son from her first marriage, now growing into a young man. Duncairn is another fictitious place, partly based upon Dundee and partly upon Aberdeen ("the granite city"), and set about halfway between the two. Chris buys a share in a guesthouse, while young Ewan goes to work in a factory and becomes a left-wing political activist.

Gibbon himself was politically on the Left, and politics always play an important role in his works. To judge from "Grey Granite", however, he did not seem to have held either the Labour Party or the Communist Party in very high regard, and Ewan initially joins a small new party called the Workers' League. After being beaten up by the police, however, he becomes more radical and joins the Communists, even though Gibbon portrays them as having a "the end justifies the means" mentality, prepared to countenance any act, including violent or dishonest ones, which will advance their cause. Under their influence Ewan's character starts to deteriorate as he becomes fanatical and narrow-minded, leading to problems in his relationship with his mother, and even with his English girlfriend Ellen, who originally supported him politically.

My own feelings were that an excessive amount of time was taken up with politics, especially a strand of politics which enjoyed little support in Britain at the time. (During the 1930s the Communist Party of Great Britain never won more than 0.3% of the popular vote). "Sunset Song" and "Cloud Howe" had political themes, but these themes never overshadowed other aspects of the drama in the way that they do here. For example, Chris's third marriage to Ake Ogilvie (an old acquaintance from her Segget days) is dealt with very briefly. For the first time I also had trouble understanding some of the Scots accents, especially Eileen McCallum as Ma Cleghorn, Chris's partner in the boarding-house business.

I must admit that I enjoyed "Grey Granite" a lot less than "Sunset Song" (the best of the three parts) or "Cloud Howe" (which started slowly but finished strongly). Even the BBC seem to have felt that it was the least interesting part of the trilogy, as they only dedicated three hour-long episodes to it. ("Sunset Song" had six and "Cloud Howe" four). Moreover, it was originally screened in August, a month which British television companies have traditionally regarded as a good time to show programmes, especially dramas, that they don't expect to attract a large audience, as much of the population will be on holiday. Vivien Heilbron as Chris is as good as ever, but in other respects "Grey Granite" was something of a disappointment. 6/10.

The Wikipedia entry for "Heller In Pink Tights" points out that there is no character in the film named Heller, which is true but irrelevant, given that the word is not intended to be a surname. A "heller" in this sense- and I had to look this up- is a variant of "hellion", meaning a troublesome or mischievous person.

The "heller" in this film is Angela Rossini, an Italian-born actress touring the American West with the Healy Dramatic Company, named after its founder (and Angela's lover) Tom Healy. Although the company's productions seem popular with local people, they are in financial difficulties and are constantly being pursued by their creditors. The film explores the complications which arise when Angela meets a handsome young gunfighter and gambler named Clint Mabry, who "wins" her in a poker game. Mabry has fallen foul of his former employer, De Leon. (De Leon owes him $5000 for killing three men, but does not want to pay, so has sent more men to kill him).

This was the only Western to be directed by George Cukor, a director better known for musicals, romantic comedies and melodramas. (It was also the only Western in which Sophia Loren ever appeared). It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that it is not a typical Western, certainly not in terms of its visual style which, appropriately given the movie's theme, is highly theatrical. Edith Head designed unusually ornate costumes for Angela and her colleagues in the drama company, and the stage sets are also grand. Although Indians, gunfighters, gamblers and crooked businessmen like de Leon were all common characters in Westerns, travelling players were not, so the introduction of Healy's company allowed Cukor to explore new ground.

"Heller in Pink Tights" will never be ranked among the great classic Westerns, but it is enjoyable enough. The lovely Sophia, unusually wearing a blonde wig, makes an appealing heroine, and she receives good support from Anthony Quinn as Healy and Steve Forrest as Mabry. There is a lot of humour- for example one of Angela's co-stars is very shy about revealing her true age, and there is a running joke about how she makes her twenty year old daughter pose as a teenager. The film does not turn up very often on television, at least not here in Britain, but it makes for fun viewing if you can catch it. 7/10.

"Blunt" is one of a number of plays inspired by the notorious "Cambridge Five" who acted as spies for the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Others include Julian Mitchell's stage play "Another Country", later made into a film, Alan Bennett's "An Englishman Abroad" and "A Question of Attribution", and Dennis Potter's "Traitor". What shocked British society most about the spy ring was not so much the treachery of its members as the fact that most of them were from well-off Establishment families and educated at the country's most prestigious schools. (Working-class spies such as John Vassall, Melita Norwood and the members of the Portland spy ring never achieved the same notoriety. John Cairncross, the "fifth man" in the Cambridge spy ring, has never attracted quite the same attention as his colleagues, partly because he was not exposed until the Cold War was virtually over, but also because he, unlike them, came from a working-class background and was educated at a grammar school).

The title character, Anthony Blunt, was the "fourth man" in the ring. He confessed his treachery to MI5 in 1964 in exchange for immunity from prosecution, but was not publicly exposed as a spy until 1979. Despite his Communist sympathies, which he never disavowed, he remained an Establishment figure all his life. He was a prominent art historian and in 1945 was made Surveyor of the King's Pictures, which allowed him to become a friend and confidant of members of the Royal family. He was made a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, but was stripped of this honour after his role as a spy was exposed.

This play, broadcast as part of the BBC's "Screen Two" series, does not deal with the whole of Blunt's career. It concentrates on the events of 1951 and the part played by Blunt in the defection of two other members of the ring, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, to the Soviet Union. The original plan, in fact, was that only Maclean should defect; his Soviet handlers knew that he was under suspicion and feared that, as a notoriously indiscreet alcoholic, he would not be able to withstand interrogation. In the event, however, Burgess decided to follow him, worried that he too might come under investigation.

Besides Blunt, the major characters are Burgess and Goronwy Rees, an academic who had been a close associate of the "Five" during their Cambridge days. Maclean plays a lesser role and Kim Philby, the "third man", is referred to but never appears. As for Cairncross, he is never mentioned; his role in the spy ring did not become public knowledge until 1990, three years after the play was broadcast.

Blunt is played by Ian Richardson (who bore a certain physical resemblance to the real Blunt) and Burgess by Anthony Hopkins. The two are sharply contrasting characters. Hopkins portrays Burgess as flamboyant and outgoing, but as indiscreet and hard-drinking as Maclean, idealistically drawn to Communism but temperamentally totally unsuited to the life of a spy. Richardson's Blunt, by contrast, is the ideal spy- cold, discreet, reserved, and icily self-controlled.

Michael Williams's Rees finds himself caught in a difficult position. A Communist sympathiser in his youth, he has since moved politically to the right and has become known as an anti-Communist intellectual. He insists that he was never involved in espionage himself, but is well aware of the activities of his associates. He knows that he should denounce them to the authorities, but his continuing friendship with Blunt and Burgess makes him unwilling to take such a step.

All three leading actors play their roles well, yet overall I found that the film was too talky and static. I felt that the concentration on one episode was too limiting, and would have preferred it if writer Robin Chapman had dealt with other parts of Blunt's life, especially his youth at Cambridge and his eventual exposure as a spy in 1979. Richardson's potrayal of Blunt as an emotionless cold fish was, apparently, historically accurate- a school contemporary described him as having "too much ink in his veins" and belonging to "a world of rather prissy, cold-blooded, academic puritanism". (It is revealing that the artist he revered more than any other was the cold, reserved and intellectual Nicolas Poussin). Even so, this does not make for a very interesting film. It is easy to see how the emotional, impulsive Burgess could have committed himself to Communism out of youthful idealism. Blunt, however, remains an enigma, one that this film does little to solve. 6/10.

"Sunday Bloody Sunday" is the story of a love triangle involving two men and a woman. That might not seem like anything out of the ordinary, but what is different about this film is that the triangle is a bisexual one. (A "biangle", if you like). Bob Elkin, a young artist, is simultaneously in relationships with Daniel Hirsh, a gay, middle-aged Jewish doctor, and with Alex Greville, a divorced female recruitment consultant. Daniel and Alex, who know each other through a mutual friendship with a family called the Hodsons, are both aware of Bob's relationship with the other, and both accept the situation, if somewhat reluctantly. (The director John Schlesinger, himself both gay and Jewish, said that Daniel was in some respects a self-portrait).

And that's really all the plot there is. This is not the sort of film where anything very much happens. It is the sort of film where people sit around in comfortable, bohemian, middle-class suburban London drawing-rooms talking about their emotional problems rather than actually doing anything. The only moment of action comes when the Hodson's dog is killed in a road accident and their young daughter narrowly escapes injury.

When the film came out in 1971 it was not a great box-office success. It did well in areas inhabited by comfortable, bohemian, middle-class suburban Londoners and their American counterparts, who doubtless saw the characters as their soul-mates, but flopped everywhere else. The critics, however, loved it, and it was nominated for four Oscars, including "Best Director" for Schlesinger and "Best Actor" and "Best Actress" for its stars Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson. It did even better at the BAFTAs where it won in all three equivalent categories and also took "Best Film".

The film's bisexual theme was, of course, genuinely groundbreaking in the early seventies. Male homosexuality had only been legalised three years earlier in Britain, and was still illegal in most American states; only a few years earlier a film dealing with a theme like this would have been unthinkable in both the British and American cinemas. By praising the film, therefore, the critics got a chance to show their support both for a liberal social agenda, the right to engage in same-sex relationships, as well as a liberal artistic one, the right to depict such relationships in the cinema. I suspect that if the film had revolved around a conventional heterosexual love triangle, with both Daniel and Bob in a sexual relationship with Alex but not with each other, it would not have attracted nearly so much critical acclaim.

Well, that was then and this is now. In 2025 depictions of gay relationships are no longer automatically regarded as something daring or groundbreaking, and even those of us who take a liberal line on gay rights do not feel obliged to like a film merely because it depicts such a relationship. And "Sunday Bloody Sunday" is frankly rather dull, impeccably politically liberal though it may be. Finch and Jackson, both talented stars, play their parts well, but even they cannot rescue this talky, long-winded film from sinking into boredom. Those who acclaim this as Finch's greatest achievement have presumably never seen "Network" or, for that matter, his earlier collaboration with Schlesinger, "Far from the Madding Crowd". 4/10.

"Awakenings" is based upon the non-fiction book by Oliver Sacks; the main character Dr. Malcolm Sayer, a neurologist working in a New York hospital, is a fictional version of Sacks. The action takes place in the late 1960s. Among Sayer's patients are a number of catatonic victims of an epidemic of encephalitis in the 1920s. In contrast to many of his colleagues, who consider these patients to be virtually brain-dead, Sayer believes that they have a mental life of their own, although they are unable to communicate with the outside world. When an experimental drug becomes available, Sayer administers it to his patients, with remarkable effect as they begin to "awaken" from their catatonic state. The "awakened" patients, however, need to adjust to life in a world which is unfamiliar to them.

I first saw the film, on television, a few days ago, and was surprised that I had not seen it before, as it stars two actors I have long admired, Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, a particular favourite of mine. (Perhaps the reason was the year when it came out; 1990 was a difficult time in my life when cinema-going was not perhaps my first priority). Williams had acquired a reputation for playing brash, outgoing characters like the DJ Adrian Cronauer in "Good Morning, Vietnam!" or the inspirational teacher John Keating in "Dead Poets' Society". Williams was a comedian before becoming an actor, and there is something of the clown about both Cronauer and Keating, although they are perfectly capable of being serious when necessary. Here his Dr. Sayer is rather different, a quiet, diffident, although deeply humane and caring, man. There is nothing of the clown about him. Like Cronauer and Keating, however, he is willing to challenge the establishment and the received medical opinion which holds that nothing can be done to help his patients. This is one of many fine performances from Williams.

De Niro's performance is perhaps even better. He plays Leonard Lowe, one of Sayer's patients. For much of the first half of the film Leonard is in a catatonic state, unable to express himself except by gestures, grimaces and cries which are interpreted by those around him as mere reflex actions. After his "awakening", however, Leonard reveals himself as a sensitive and intelligent person, although he finds it difficult to adapt, as a middle-aged man, to a world he has not known since he was a boy and which has changed immeasurably in the meantime. De Niro was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. (Williams was nominated for a Golden Globe but not an Oscar). De Niro did not win; perhaps the Academy were becoming sensitive to suggestions that too many "Best Actor" and "Best Actress" awards were going to actors for portraying people with some sort of disability. (Marlee Matlin in "Children of a Lesser God", Dustin Hoffman in "Rain Man", Daniel Day Lewis in "My Left Foot"). In the end the Oscar went to Jeremy Irons for his cold, emotionless and one-dimensional portrayal of Claus von Bulow in "Reversal of Fortune", a decision I have always found incomprehensible. My vote for "Best Actor"in 1990 would have gone to Kevin Costner for "Dances with Wolves", but De Niro would also have been a worthy winner. Another excellent performance comes from Ruth Gordon as Leonard's elderly mother.

1990 may not have been a good year for me, but it was certainly a good one for the cinema- the year of "Dances with Wolves", "Edward Scissorhands", "Goodfellas" and "Memphis Belle". I am glad I have now seen "Awakenings"- another fine film from a fine year, and a sensitive, intelligent and emotionally moving human story. 8/10.

I don't know why I recorded this film when it was shown on television. Perhaps because the theme of a young man chasing after women in the swinging sixties reminded me of Michael Caine's "Alfie", one of my favourite films, which had come out a couple of years earlier.

But, of course, "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush" is nothing like "Alfie" beyond a vague similarity in theme. Alfie, a young man in his early thirties, was a practised seducer. The main character of this film, Jamie McGregor, is a seventeen year old virgin schoolboy who is desperate to lose his virginity as soon as possible. He attempts to seduce every girl he meets- pretty-but-dim Linda, posh girl Mary, even posher (but dim) Caroline, and one or two others, before finally managing to get a girl called Audrey into bed with him. At the end he is left wondering just why he bothered. And there audience are left wondering just why they bothered watching the film.

The main difference between this film and "Alfie", however, is not the age or the lack of sexual experience of the main character. The main difference is that "Alfie" is actually a deeply serious film, a devastating exposure of the dark side of the sexual revolution. It shows how greater sexual freedom was giving irresponsible philanderers like Alfie more opportunities to seduce women, and implicitly condemns him for taking advantage of their need to love when all he wants for himself is sex. The irony is that Alfie ends up ruining his own life as effectively as he has ruined theirs.

"Here we Go Round...", by contrast, is simply a silly sex comedy which, as The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote when it first appeared in 1968, uncritically embraces the worst aspects of the adolescent mentality. Unlike the women in Alfie's life, nobody in this film is looking for love. The dialogue is banal and, although this its supposed to be a comedy, mostly unfunny.

As played by Barry Evans, Jamie is not an easy character to like, but he is so bland and lifeless that it is not easy to dislike him either. Evans went on to star in "Mind Your Language", a highly popular television sitcom in the late seventies, but one that is almost totally forgotten today, largely because its humour, heavily reliant upon racist stereotypes, is so offensive to modern tastes that no TV station would dare to broadcast it. The rest of the cast are no better. One or two of the young actresses who play Jamie's girls went on to better things; Judy Geeson, for example, starred in that fine thriller "Fear in the Night", and I will always remember the lovely Sheila White as the hypnotically evil Messalina in the BBC's excellent adaptation of "I, Claudius". Here, however, they are just wasted. I was disappointed, although not exactly surprised, to see Denholm Elliott as Caroline's father. At his best Elliott could be an excellent actor, but he did not always have the knack of choosing the right film, and could end up in some real stinkers. Other examples that come to mind are "Percy" and its sequel "Percy's Progress", two other seriously unfunny sex "comedies".

The film was shot in Stevenage, one of several New Towns built in south-east England during the sixties to take the overspill population from London. In 1968 the modernist architecture we see probably looked very state-of-the-art and trendy. Today, however, it serves to remind us that sixties architecture was starting to look very drab and seedy by the eighties (in some cases by the seventies), and that by the nineties a lot of it was being torn down. Sixties Britain did, of course, produce some wonderful pop music, but the examples we hear in this film are all instantly forgettable, and the fashions we see more bargain basement than Carnaby Street. The seventies are sometimes described as The Decade that Taste Forgot, but on the evidence of "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush" we can conclude that there was also a tasteless side to the sixties. 3/10.

Although two episodes of "The Faceless Ones" survive, when an animated version of the serial was produced, the decision was taken to animate all six of the original episodes, ignoring the two existing ones. The general rule with "Doctor Who" is that when the majority of the episodes survive, as with "The Reign of Terror" or "The Tenth Planet", they will be used as the basis of the new programme, with the missing episodes recreated in black-and-white, in a style similar to the original programme. When the majority of the episodes are missing, as here or with "Galaxy 4", the animators are given a free hand to recreate all the episodes in colour, using whatever style they deem appropriate.

The Second Doctor and his companions Jamie, Ben and Polly arrive at Gatwick Airport in July 1966. Although the serial was made and broadcast in 1967, there is a reason why the action needed to take place during the previous year. They discover that an alien race known as the Chameleons have set up a bogus airline and tour company in order to kidnap young people. Although in their natural form the Chameleons are only vaguely humanoid, they have the ability to disguise themselves as individual human beings, an ability which they use to infiltrate the airport and pose as members of its staff. We learn that their own planet has suffered some catastrophe, which has wiped out most of the population, which is why they need to kidnap humans as replacements. It falls to the Doctor and his companions, assisted by the police, various members of the airport personnel and Samantha, a feisty young woman from Liverpool whose brother is one of the kidnap victims, to foil their scheme.

Samantha is played by Pauline Collins, later to become a big star on British television and in the cinema. This was the serial which saw the departure from the series of Michael Craze and Anneke Wills as Ben and Polly, and Collins was offered the chance of becoming a regular companion to the Doctor, but she turned it down, something I have always regretted. Samantha would have been a welcome addition to the crew of the TARDIS, especially as this serial hints at a developing romance between her and Jamie.

This was only the third "Doctor Who" serial to be set in contemporary Britain after "Planet of the Giants" and "The War Machines" and only the second to feature the theme of an alien invasion. (In later seasons, especially during the Jon Pertwee years, the Doctor seemed to be fending off another alien invasion every week). The first serial with such a theme was "The Daleks' Invasion of Earth", where the invasion is a straightforward war of military conquest. The Chameleons' invasion is more subtle, something along the lines of "Invasion of the Body-Snatchers".

This could have been an intriguing story, but there are two problems with the serial as we currently have it. The first is that it is overlong. The original script (which was set in a department store rather than an airport) only contained four episodes (which would have been ample time in which to tell the story), but for some reason the producer insisted on six. As a result the story is told in a very leisurely manner, with little real suspense until the last couple of episodes. The other problem is that the animation (like that in "Galaxy 4") is not very well done, particularly in its depiction of movement and of human feelings. The actors' voices might reveal the characters' emotions, but these are not always reflected in their faces. For these reasons I cannot award the serial more than 5/10, but (as always with missing or partly-missing serials) I reserve the right to revisit that mark should the missing episodes ever turn up.

Many of Stephen Spielberg's films, particularly in the first half of his career, can be categorised either as "popcorn" movies like "Jaws" and the "Indiana Jones" franchise, "B-movies on an A-movie budget" as they were once described, and serious "issue" movies like "Schindler's List" (about the Holocaust) and "Amistad" (about slavery). "Always", which is a romantic fantasy about the afterlife, does not really fall into either category. It is a remake of the 1943 film "A Guy Named Joe". Spielberg possibly changed the name because the original film, confusingly, does not include any character named Joe. (Nor does this one).

Pete Sandich is an aerial firefighter known for his daredevil personality and tendency to take risks while in the air. His girlfriend, Dorinda, herself a pilot, worried for his safety, begs him to take another, safer, job, and Pete accepts a position as a trainer at a pilots' training school. Before he can take up his new job, however, Pete is killed, flying one last mission, while performing a risky manoeuvre to save the life of a friend.

But that, of course, is not the end of the story. Pete returns to Earth as a ghost and meets a being named Hap, presumably an angel although this word is never actually used. Hap tells him that he has a new mission- to provide inspiration to his fellow pilots, especially a young newcomer named Ted Baker. Although they will be unable to see or hear him, they will interpret his words as their own thoughts. The film also charts the progress of a romance between Dorinda and Ted. The film is noteworthy for providing Audrey Hepburn with her final film role- a brief cameo- as Hap. (She gave most of her fee to her favourite charity, UNICEF).

Spielberg is not normally known for remakes of earlier movies; it is said that he made an exception in this case because "A Guy Named Joe" was a great favourite both of himself and of Richard Dreyfuss, whom he had met while they were working together on "Jaws" in 1974, and who plays Pete here. The original studio, MGM, however, was less keen, and the project was held up until 1989, before it was finally realised by another studio, Universal Pictures. One of the dangers of remakes, especially remakes which have spent a decade or more in "development hell", is that they can end up looking very dated, and this was one of the criticisms made of "Always", even though Spielberg changed the original World War II setting to a modern-day firefighting scenario.

I suspect, however, that the criticism that the film is "dated" would be something more likely to worry critics than audiences. In the eighties Spielberg was mostly associated with family entertainment and adventure- his more serious offerings, apart from "The Color Purple", were to come later- and there is certainly plenty of adventure here. Some of the firefighting sequences, especially the one in which Pete is killed, are particularly heart-stopping. There are, however, some more serious and emotional aspects; Pete has to learn to say goodbye to Dorinda and not to resent the affection which is growing between her and Ted. The film may have been an influence on "Ghost", which came out the following year and which also features a young man who meets a premature death and who has to try and look after his girlfriend from the afterlife. "Always" may not be Spielberg's masterpiece but it is an exciting and at times moving family adventure story. 7/10.

"The High and the Mighty" is an early example of a disaster movie, made two decades before the genre was to become a popular one in the seventies. A DC-4 airliner flying from Hawaii to San Francisco suffers engine failure while flying above the Pacific Ocean. Can the crew manage to get back to land safely, or will they be forced to ditch in the ocean? The film brought home some of the difference between commercial aviation as it was in the fifties and as it is today- the propellor driven planes of that era were much smaller, carried fewer passengers (only one air hostess is needed to look after them), and flew at a slower speed and at a lower height than modern jets. It was also permissible to smoke on board, and it was even possible to board an airliner carrying a gun!

The disaster movie as it developed in the seventies was a genre with its own ground rules, the main one of which was to establish human interest by introducing us to a mixed group of people before showing us how they are affected by the disaster in question. This often meant using a large ensemble cast of well-known actors. This is also the formula used to make "The High and the Mighty". We learn the back-stories of a number of the passengers, including an unhappily married heiress and her husband, a former beauty queen worried about losing her looks, although she is only 30, a former actress, a middle-aged businessman obsessed with taking revenge against a the chairman of the airline (a fellow passenger) whom he accuses of having an affair with his wife and a young boy who commuting between his divorced parents, one of whom lives in Hawaii, the other in California.

The ensemble cast dissuaded a number of well-known stars, such as Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford from taking part, believing that there were no roles big enough for them. As a result, there are fewer star names than one would normally expect in a film of this nature. The film's biggest name is John Wayne, who also acted as co-producer, and who plays the co-pilot Dan Roman. In later life Wayne was to star in several films (such as "The Green Berets" or "Brannigan") where he played roles that should really have gone to a younger actor. "The High and the Mighty" is a rare example of Wayne playing a role which should really have gone to an older actor. We learn that Dan is a veteran of both World Wars, and is therefore presumably in his late fifties or sixties; Wayne was only 47 in 1954 and was too young to have fought in the First World War. Dan has a backstory of his own- we learn that he was the pilot in an air crash that killed his wife and son and left him with a permanent limp.

Director William Wellman was originally unhappy about the human interest storylines, and would have preferred to concentrate more on the airliner and pilots, but eventually allowed himself to be persuaded. My view is that Wellman's initial feelings were correct. The scenes where the air crew desperately battle to bring the plane home safely, trying to calculate how much fuel remains and how long it will take them to reach safety, are well handled and exciting. The human interest stories, however, are too perfunctorily handled to arouse much interest- some of them could have been the subject of an entire film in themselves- but the sheer number of them mean that they slow the film down and make it overlong and in places tedious. Some judicious cutting would have shortened the film and could have made it a lot better. 6/10.

When I recently reviewed Otto Preminger's "Bunny Lake Is Missing", I described it as his version of Hitchcock's "Psycho". Preminger's next film after "Bunny Lake...", "Hurry Sundown" also seems to have been his attempt to make his own version of a classic, in this case "Gone with the Wind". He acquired the film rights to K. B. Gilden's novel before it was even published. Like Margaret Mitchell's magnum opus, "Hurry Sundown" was a lengthy blockbuster set in the Deep South, and Preminger intended to turn it into a four-and-a half-hour epic. When the novel came out, however, it was not the major best-seller that the publishers had been hoping for, and although Preminger went ahead with his film he ended up making it on a much smaller scale than, and around half the length of, the film that he had originally intended.

The story is set in rural Georgia in 1946. Henry Warren, a local landowner, is trying to put together a lucrative property deal. To complete the deal, however, he will need to acquire two adjoining farms. One farm is owned by Henry's poor-white cousin Rad McDowell, the other by poor black farmer Reeve Scott. Henry himself is originally from a working-class background- we learn that he once worked as a shrimp fisherman- but became wealthy by marrying an heiress from an aristocratic Southern family. Henry is prepared to offer Rad and Reeve what would have been, under normal circumstances, a reasonable price, but is much less than the land is worth to him. Neither Rad nor Reeve is willing to sell, and the main subject of the film is Henry's underhand attempts to force them off their land, resorting to physical force when he fails to acquire the land through legal chicanery.

Henry is the main character in the film, and Michael Caine was a strange casting choice. Most of the characters he has played throughout his long career have been English; I have only seen him playing an American in one other film, "The Cider House Rules". "Hurry Sundown" was the first film in which he played an American; he makes an attempt at a Deep South accent, but he occasionally slips and at these times Henry seems like a Cockney wide-boy, Alfie or Charlie Croker mysteriously relocated to America's Deep South. Another actor who seems miscast is Faye Dunaway, making her film debut as Rad's wife Lou. Dunaway would only have been 26 in 1967, so is too young to be playing the mother of five children, the eldest of whom is in his early teens. Even John Philip Law, only four years older than Dunaway, seems a bit too young for Rad.

The film was made when the Civil Rights movement was at its height, and racism is a major theme. Many of the white characters are quite openly racist; I doubt if I have ever seen a film where the "n-word" is used so much. (Bleeped out in the version I saw on British television). Henry starts off by trying to seem liberal, making much of the fact that he is willing to offer Reeve the same price for his land as he is offering Rad, but ignoring the fact that neither man considers his offer enough. He later come out as a quite open racist, allying himself with the local Klan in his attempts to force Reeve off the land.

Henry's wife Julie Ann (a good performance from Jane Fonda) can come across as another phoney liberal, waxing sentimental about her dear old black mammy (who was Reeve's mother), but nevertheless prepared to associate herself with her husband's dubious practices, speaking up for him in court. At the end of the film, however, she undergoes a genuine change of heart when she sees just how amoral Henry has become.

One plot point that never quite rang true was the curious relationship which grows up between Henry and Charles, Rad's eldest son. Charles idolises Henry, despite the way in which Henry has treated his parents, and shares his hatred of black people. Henry in his turn has a definite soft spot for the boy, despite his contempt for the rest of the McDowell family, something which is never explained. I kept waiting for some sudden revelation- is Henry perhaps Charles's real father?- but it never came.

When it came out in 1967 the film was not a lot more successful than the novel it was based on. The critics largely disliked it, finding it melodramatic and patronising in its treatment of black people despite its ostensible liberal intentions. Actually, it's not a bad film, despite a few flaws; it moves at a good pace and tells an interesting story about credible characters. It falls a long way short, however, of being the new "Gone with the Wind". 7/10.

At one time, Hollywood's output consisted almost exclusively of films by white people about white people, with black actors appearing, if at all, in minor roles, often as domestic servants. This began to change slowly after World War II, but in the forties and fifties, and to a large extent even in the sixties, major roles for black actors tended to be confined to films with an explicit race relations theme. ("Carmen Jones", with its all-black cast, is a rare exception). Although the films themselves, from "Intruder in the Dust" to "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", were made with the best of intentions, the general attitude seemed to be that the only part of black people's lives that mattered to cinema audiences was their interactions with, and how they were treated by, white people.

By the eighties, this attitude began to change, and we began to see an increase in the number of films about how black people interacted with other black people. "The Color Purple" is a case in point. It is set in a black community in the Deep South during the early twentieth century. Racism does play a part in the story, but a relatively minor one, and for most of the time the emphasis is on relationships within the black community itself, not on relationships between the races.

The story opens in rural Georgia around 1909. The main character is a young African-American girl named Celie Harris. While still in her early teens, Celie is raped by her own father, a widower, and bears him two children. (It is later revealed that the man was in fact Celie's stepfather, but at the time she believed him to be her biological father). Her father then forces her to marry another widower considerably older than herself, a man named Albert Johnson, although Celie always calls him "Mister". At first Celie is relieved to be away from her abusive father, but Mister turns out to be just as abusive and domineering.

I won't set out the plot in any detail, as it gets quite complex, but the film follows the fortunes over the next thirty or so years of not just Celie and Mister, but also several other characters. These include Celie's beloved sister Nettie (possibly the only person she ever loves), who later becomes a missionary in Africa, Harpo, Mister's son by his first marriage and his wife Sofia, and the oddly named Shug Avery. Shug is a showgirl and Mister's former mistress, who later becomes a close friend of Celie. (In Alice Walker's original novel, they became lesbian lovers, but this is not reflected in the film).

The two main roles of Celie and Sofia are played by Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey, neither of whom was known as an actress in 1985. Goldberg, better known as a comedienne, had only made one previous film, the obscure "Citizen: I'm Not Losing My Mind, I'm Giving It Away"; Winfrey was making her film debut. Goldberg, of course, has gone on to become a well-known film star; Winfrey has made a handful of movies, but remains better known as a TV host. This was perhaps a risky casting decision, but it paid off. Goldberg and Winfrey complement each other well. Goldberg's Celie, traumatised by her early experiences, is a passive, accepting character who needs to learn how to stand up for herself. Winfrey's Sofia is a much stronger, feistier character, who will take no nonsense from her husband Harpo and who can stand up for herself without needing any lessons in how to do so.

Eventually, however, her feistiness will prove her downfall, when she slaps a white man who has been rude to her, and receives a lengthy prison sentence for assault It is implied, if never actually stated, that she is being punished for being an "uppity" black, and that a white woman in the same position would have been treated much more leniently.

Steven Spielberg was initially reluctant to take on the task of directing, feeling that the job should have gone to a black director, but eventually allowed himself to be persuaded. Spielberg had previously been noted for making entertaining "popcorn" movies like "Jaws" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" ("B-movies on an A-movie budget" as they were once described). "The Color Purple" is perhaps the first of his serious "issue" movies which were to become an important part of his output in the following decade.

"The Color Purple" has its weaknesses; at times it seems overlong, and the action seems to sag in the middle, when the focus shifts away from Celie towards Sofia. Overall, however, this is a powerful and at times moving story and an early attempt to tell the story of black Americans from their own perspective rather than the perspective of liberal white America. 7/10.

Although there were exceptions, most plays in the BBC's "Play For Today" series dealt with some aspect of contemporary British life during the seventies and early eighties. One thing that was happening in Britain during this period was a reform of the education system and an increase in the number of comprehensive schools. Today we tend to associate the comprehensive system with the Labour Party, but many comprehensive schools were in fact brought in by the Conservative government of 1970-74, in which Margaret Thatcher served as Education Secretary.

So how do you write a play (or at least an interesting play) about the reorganisation of the education system? Well, with "Headmaster" John Challen proved that such a thing was indeed possible. The main character is Tom Fisher, headmaster of secondary modern school. As in many parts of the country during the early 1970s, change is in the air as far as secondary education is concerned. The local authority plan to combine Fisher's school with a nearby with a nearby grammar school to form a comprehensive. The new school will operate from the two old buildings, but it will count as one single school, not two, and will have only one headmaster.

Fisher is clearly a respected man in his profession, and his school has a good reputation in the local area. This does not, however, necessarily mean that he will be selected as headmaster of the new combined school, even though the head of the grammar school is retiring. There are other candidates for the post, including his most formidable rival Mr Russell, the son-in-law of the grammar school head.

Russell has two advantages over Fisher. He has a university degree, something which Fisher lacks. (Today a degree would be mandatory for anyone wanting to teach in the state system, but this was not always so). Perhaps more importantly, he is far more committed to the new "progressive" methods in education, which were very much in vogue in the seventies, than is Fisher, something of a small-c conservative. "Headmaster" is therefore essentially a boardroom drama, set in a school rather than a factory or office. Will a coveted promotion go to a capable insider with a proven track record, or to an outsider who promises to be the proverb new broom sweeping clean?

On paper, the subject matter of this play might not seem enthralling, but in fact Challen manages to turn it into a very watchable drama, with the help of a great performance from Frank Windsor as Fisher and some good ones from the supporting cast. It takes me back to my own schooldays in the seventies when I was myself being taught at a state-run grammar school. Fortunately our headmaster was as small-c conservative as Fisher, so we were spared the half-baked experiments being advocated by Russell in the play. This is one of the "Plays for Today" which is long overdue for another airing on the BBC. 7/10.

The BBC's "Plays for Today" had a reputation for courting controversy, but "Don't Be Silly" was particularly shocking even by the standards of the series. It was written by Rachel Billington, the daughter of Lord Longford, one of Britain's most outspoken public figures of the sixties and seventies, and a man with a penchant for backing unpopular causes. He was a noted foe of the permissive society, and often take the side of criminals, even one as notorious as Myra Hindley, campaigning for her release from prison. Billington would therefore have been no stranger to controversy.

Michael and Pamela Redman, he probably in his forties, she in her thirties, are a West London couple with two young children. At first sight it might bethought that they are living the middle-class suburban dream, but it soon becomes clear that middle-class suburban nightmare would be an apter description. This is a portrait of a marriage so disastrous that even the word "dysfunctional" seems inadequate. Michael is jealous, suspicious, hot-tempered, a heavy drinker, and quite unable to control his raging emotions. He frequently provokes quarrels with Pamela, and then reacts with physical violence. She suffers several injuries of increasing seriousness, leading to her eventually having to be hospitalised.

What caused controversy when the play was first shown in 1979 was not just the violent incidents, although those were bad enough. Some reviewers were shocked that Michael and Pamela are obviously from the affluent executive or professional classes, the sort of people who a few years later would become known as "yuppies". Middle England already knew, or at least suspected, that wife-beating went on among the urban underclass. What shocked people was the revelation that it could also exist among the suburban middle classes.

There is a remarkable performance from Christopher Godwin (an actor I had not come across before) as Michael. What makes his performance special is that Michael is not just a one-dimensional figure, a crude drunken thug and nothing else (although Godwin is very good at conveying those aspects of his character). He is also clearly intelligent, and can also be witty and charming. These aspects of his personality often come across in his interactions with outsiders, and even at times with Pamela herself. Perhaps more disturbingly, he is also politically progressive and even thinks of himself as a pacifist- at one point he mentions having been on an Aldermaston march. Billington clearly did not want to take the easy option of implying that a man who is violent in his private life must of necessity also be an advocate of violent political positions.

Susan Fleetwood is also good as Pamela. She is not a weak character, but finds herself making excuses for her husband's abuse. Some women would have walked out of the marriage and got on the phone to a good divorce lawyer as soon as their husband laid a finger on them, but Pamela is unwilling- perhaps even mentally unable- to take such a step, held back perhaps by memories of happier days or by concerns about what might happen to the children.

"Don't Be Silly" does not make for easy or comfortable viewing, and the levels of violence shown would be controversial even today, more than four decades on. In 1979 a play like this would have been strong stuff indeed. It was therefore brave of the BBC to show it, and of Billington to write it. I am surprised that her father, a leading supporter of Mary Whitehouse's "clean up TV" campaign against sex and violence in the media, did not try to have it banned. 7/10.

Eugene O'Neill's play "Desire Under the Elms" is based upon the ancient Greek myth of Phaedra, Hippolytus and Theseus, but set in New England during the 1840s. The central character is Ephraim Cabot, an elderly farmer who surprises everyone when he marries Anna, a beautiful Italian woman young enough to be his granddaughter.

Ephraim has been married twice before, and twice widowed, and has three sons from those marriages. Peter and Simeon, his sons by his first wife, have gone to California to seek their fortune in the Gold Rush, but his youngest son, Eben, has remained on the farm. In the original myth Phaedra fell in love with her stepson Hippolytus, but her love was not returned. O'Neill's story diverges from the myth in this respect; Anna and Eben fall in love and begin an adulterous affair. Anna has a child by Eben, but Ephraim (who remains blithely ignorant of the affair, even though it is widely known among his neighbours) accepts the child as his own. The film then explores the complications arising from this situation, and the tragedy to which it leads.

1958 was the year that saw the sudden, and unexpected, emergence of Burl Ives, previously better known as a country singer, as a film star. During that year he made three films in which he played an autocratic patriarch- Ephraim here, Rufus Hannassey in "The Big Country" and Big Daddy in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. His performance in "Desire under the Elms" was criticised at the time; Bosley Crowther called him "the mortal weakness in the film", by which he really meant that Ives's interpretation of the role was not the same as his own. Although Anna and Eben are guilty of an atrocious crime, it is Ephraim- selfish, avaricious, angry, lustful, domineering- who is in many ways the villain of this film. Yet Ives manages to invest him with an awful charisma, a sort of dark energy, which makes him the dominant figure in the film, one of its strengths rather than a mortal weakness. He might be guilty of the other six mortal sins, but sloth is quite alien to his nature. He cannot help admiring his passionate vitality even when we are deploring his many vices.

Sophia Loren was better than I had expected. Loren and O'Neill might not seem a natural match, but she was helped by the script's changes to the original play, in which her character (called Abbie rather than Anna) was a natural-born American rather than an Italian immigrant and in her thirties, rather older than Eben. Loren would have been 24 in 1958, and in the film Anna and Eben are around the same age. Anna married Ephraim not out of love- even without the huge age difference he would be quite unloveable- but out of the desperation of a young woman who found herself penniless and alone in a foreign country.

Anthony Perkins plays Eben as an essentially weak character. In his heart he hates his father, but does not find the courage to defy him openly as his brothers do. Like Perkins's best-known character, Norman Bates in "Psycho", Eben is a young man dominated by the memory of a dead mother. His mother, Ephraim's second wife, brought to the marriage a lot of the land which now forms part of the farm, and she always encouraged her son to regard this land as his birthright, not to be shared with his brothers, the sons of Ephraim's first wife. He again shows his weakness when Anna is able to manipulate him into their affair.

The film was not a great success in 1958, and is not particularly well-known today. I note that it has only received thirty reviews; "The Big Country" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" have both got over 200. Yet I feel that as a psychological drama of great power and intensity it can stand comparison with either of those films. 8/10.

John R. Hodges, a printer, is forced to retire at the age of 65, although he would like to carry on working. The company he works for, however, has recently been taken over by a big conglomerate, which enforces its retirement policy on all its subsidiaries. John, however, is not a man to take bad news lying down, and decides to do something about it. He poses as Harold P. Cleveland, the president of the conglomerate, and announces that he will make an inspection tour of the printing company. During his visit he lets it be known that he favours the retention of older employees.

John's deception succeeds brilliantly. Nobody at the firm actually knows what Cleveland looks like, and the only person who recognises him is Joe, the boyfriend of his granddaughter Alice. Joe, however, is unable to convince anyone that John is an impostor; everyone else believes that he really is Cleveland. Not only is McKinley persuaded to rethink the retirement policy, he invites the supposed "Cleveland" to address the local chamber of commerce. John's speech, about the importance of experience to theAmerican economy, is so brilliant that it makes the national press and even causes the stock market to rise. The film then explores the complications arising from this situation, especially when the real Harold P. Cleveland learns what has been happening. (He is not as angry as one might expect, probably because John's speech has boosted the value of his company's stock).

The film is unusual for a comedy of this period in that it features an older man as its central character; most comedies were centred either upon a young couple or upon the traditional nuclear family of mum, dad and kids. If grandma and grandpa featured at all it was only as supporting characters. Here grandpa gets to take centre stage, with his son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter playing the supporting roles.

It is also unusual in that it takes a critical look at American capitalism, although its criticism was subtle enough to avoid the attentions of the McCarthyites who in the early fifties were obsessed with trying to smell out Communists in Hollywood. Nevertheless, McKinley is portrayed as difficult to like, obsequious towards his superiors and overbearing towards his subordinates, and business in general as cold and impersonal, a world where workers are treated like anonymous cogs in a machine and where the men at the top are so remote that nobody can recognise them.

Monty Woolley is not an actor with whom I am particularly familiar; indeed, I have only seen one other film in which he acted, "Since You Went Away", where, in a supporting role, he was one of the few good things in an otherwise disappointing film. "As Young as You Feel" gave him one of his few opportunities to take a leading role, and he made the most of it. He gives a brilliant performance, making John such a sympathetic and loveable old gentleman that we instinctively take his side, without bothering ourselves about whether or not what he is doing might be considered dishonest.

This film is not particularly well-known today, except by Marilyn Monroe completists. (A pre-stardom Marilyn features in a minor role as McKinley's pretty young secretary). It is, however, an amusing comedy which I feel deserves to be better known. I am happy to have caught it on one of its rare outings on British television. 7/10.

The Second Doctor and his companions Ben, Polly and Jamie land at some date in the far future in a human colony on an alien planet. The colony seems to be run like a large holiday camp, a sort of intergalactic Butlins. The colonists seem happy and content, if rather regimented in their way of life, and the travellers are warmly welcomed by a senior official known as the Pilot. The Pilot, however, is not the ultimate ruler of the colony, as he is subordinate to a superior official known as the Controller. The Controller, however, is never seen except as an image on a gigantic screen, although his voice can be broadcast to the colonists.

There are, however, a number of mysteries about life in the colony. Why is the main economic activity mining for a poisonous gas which appears to have no known use? Is there any truth in the rumours about the mysterious creatures known as the Macra, who are said to prowl the planet's surface outside the colony? It gradually becomes clear that the colony is less an intergalactic Butlins than an Orwellian dictatorship with the mysterious Controller as Big Brother. The reason that everyone seems happy is that unhappiness and discontent are equated with treason and punished severely, as is disobeying, or even questioning, the edicts of the Controller. The Controller has decreed that the Macra do not exist, so all discussion of their existence is forbidden. Those who claim to have seen them are sentenced to hard labour in the mines; this fate befalls a dissident colonist named Medok.

Of course, the Macra do exist- they are a malevolent race of gigantic, crab-like creatures- and we discover that they have been subtly manipulating the colonists to serve their interests. It falls to the Doctor and his companions to foil them.

Like so many early Doctor Who serials, "The Macra Terror" fell victim to the BBC's short-sighted, penny-pinching policy of allowing tapes of old programmes to be erased so they could be reused. All four episodes are currently missing, and the serial can only be viewed in the form of a reconstruction made using animation and sound recordings. Although the original programme was broadcast in black and white, the animations are in colour.

The animation is not the best thing about this serial, although they are better than some other attempts to realise missing "Doctor Who" episodes, such as "Galaxy Four". The story itself, however, is a pretty good one, an intelligent parable about authoritarian governments, especially authoritarian governments with a hidden agenda, and some very satisfying contributions by Patrick Troughton's doctor and his three companions. 7/10, although I reserve the right to review that mark should the missing episodes ever resurface.

"The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith" was part of the Australian "New Wave" of the seventies and eighties, and like a number of other New Wave films ("Manganinnie", "Picnic at Hanging Rock", "Breaker Morant", "Gallipoli", "The Man from Snowy River") it deals with the country's history. It is based upon Thomas Keneally's novel of the same name, which based on actual events which occurred in 1900. Two young Aboriginal brothers, Jimmy and Joe Governor, and their accomplice Jack Underwood, carried out a number of robberies and murders, killing a total of nine white people. After a manhunt Underwood and Joe were killed by the police and Jimmy was captured and later hanged.

Jimmy Governor is here renamed Jimmie Blacksmith. He is of mixed race, clearly intelligent, and reasonably well educated, having been brought up by a clergyman and his wife. He even marries a white girl. (Unlike South Africa and the American South, Australia had no taboo against racial intermarriage- in some circumstances it was even encouraged). Because of the racism which was endemic in Australian society at this period, however, Jimmie discovers that white people are unwilling to treat him as an equal. He is cheated and exploited by his employers and treated as barely human. Furious at his mistreatment, Jimmie snaps. He, along with his brother Mort and their uncle Tabidgi, declares war on white society and goes on a rampage that leaves several people dead.

On its release in 1978, the film was acclaimed by the critics, but was a box office flop in Australia. Possibly audiences were dissuaded from seeing it by its reputation of graphic violence, or possibly Australians did not want to be reminded of their country's racist past. The film's financial failure led to its director, Fred Schepisi, leaving Australia to work in Hollywood.

In Britain the film's reputation was a strange one. Although the British Board of Film Censors had passed it for screening, uncut, in 1978, before 1984 the BBFC only had jurisdiction over films shown in cinemas, not over video releases. When the early eighties saw a widespread moral panic about violent videos, "The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith" was branded a "video nasty", by the Director of Public Prosecutions and placed on a banned list meaning that video copies could be seized by the police, even though it could quite legally be shown in cinemas. The film found itself in some strange company. Most of the other films on that blacklist were just exploitative schlock, the cinematic equivalent of junk food, but Schepisi's film was a serious piece of film-making, an attempt to examine the social and psychological causes of violent crime. Schepisi (who wrote the script and acted as producer as well as director) was not trying to excuse Blacksmith's crimes, still less to revel in them as the makers of many video nasties did, but he was trying to understand the social forces which could drive an intelligent and seemingly promising young man to murder and robbery. He is assisted by an excellent, and very powerful, performance from Tommy Lewis in the central role. Forty years on from the video nasty panic, we can perhaps appreciate Schepisi's intentions more clearly. 7/10.

"Lord Jim", based upon a novel by Joseph Conrad, is set in South-East Asia during the late Victorian era. The title character, Jim, is a young officer in the British Merchant Navy. (He is not an aristocrat; his title of "Lord" is one he acquires later). He is regarded as a promising young man, and rises to the rank of First Officer, but destroys his career when, in a moment of weakness, he, along with the rest of the crew, abandons his leaky, unseaworthy ship during a storm and jumps into a lifeboat. Jim is branded a coward and banned from working as a seaman.

The rest of the film can be described as Jim's attempt to regain his self-respect and to redeem himself, in his own eyes if not in the eyes of society. This part of the story is complex, but it involves Jim accepting the task of delivering a cargo of weapons to the distant town of Patusan where a group of rebels are fighting a local warlord known as the General. Exactly where Patusan is supposed to be is never made clear; the country involved appears to be an amalgam of Thailand, Indonesian and Cambodia. The main characters from the area are played, however, by Japanese actors, although Jim's love-interest is played by the Israeli actress Daliah Lavi. The Production Code was still in force in 1965, and there seemed to be a rule, in any film destined for the American market, that relationships between white men and Asian women were OK, provided the woman was played by a white actress.

Jim helps the rebels to defeat the General's forces, following which they hail him as a hero and reward him with the title of "Tuan", or "Lord". There are, however, to be more trials in store for Jim when some of the General's associates raid the town hoping to steal treasure.

The traditional epic film generally dealt with stories from the Bible or from Classical antiquity. In the 1960s, however, there was a trend towards adapting the epic style to tell stories derived from more recent history or literature. The director most associated with this trend was David Lean in films like "Lawrence of Arabia", "Doctor Zhivago", "Ryan's Daughter" and, belatedly, "A Passage to India". ("Lawrence of Arabia" also starred Peter O'Toole, who plays Jim here). Other films in this style include "Khartoum" and "Fifty-Five Days at Peking". .

It seemed to me that director Richard Brooks was trying to turn "Lord Jim" into an epic of this sort. I have never read Conrad's novel, so cannot say if it is a book suitable for the epic treatment, but from those of his works which I have read he does not strike me as a particularly "epic" author. (Something more intimate, like Carol Reed's version of "An Outcast of the Islands", seems more suited to his style). I can say, however, that this style does not work here. The first part of the film, dealing with Jim's early career, the fateful storm and the subsequent inquest at which Jim is disgraced, is not too bad and can hold the viewer's interest. Once the action moves to Patusan, however, the film starts to go downhill. The second part is overlong, sprawling, confusing and difficult to follow. Even the appearance of an actor as talented as James Mason can do little to rescue it. Mason received second billing behind O'Toole, but his is a relatively minor role, and he does not appear until near the end.

O'Toole himself has never been my favourite actor, striking me as all charisma and no substance, and this was not a performance I liked. On an intellectual level I could sympathise with Conrad's Jim, a gifted young man destroyed by a moment of madness. On an emotional level I could never empathise with O'Toole's Jim, who seemed little more than a hollow façade. I am not alone in my views of the film or of O'Toole's contribution; when it first came out in 1965 it was much hyped- in Britain it was given the honour of being selected for a Royal Film Performance- but it was a failure at the box office and was hated by the critics. Today it occasionally turns up on television, but is little known even among film buffs. One of those big films which has ended up with a small reputation. 4/10.