Tag: classic

Ghost

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Everyone has seen Ghost before they’ve seen Ghost. We all know the iconic scene where Demi Moore shapes pottery while Patrick Swayze sits behind her as The Everly Brothers “Unchained Melody” plays in the background. It’s been parodied everywhere, from Family Guy to Two and a Half Men to The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (David Zucker, 1991). There’s a good reason it has been parodied. It’s a good scene. Cheesy, but memorable; a portrait of love that has transcended the ages.

But these parodies give a false expectation of what Ghost is actually about, which is less concerned with the transcendent power of love than a mishmash of different genres that cannot master any of them. While a huge success upon its release, winning Best Screenplay at the Academy Awards and making a mind-bending $505.7 million worldwide, the rest of the film barely shapes up to that one iconic scene.

The film is split into two key parts: before and after Sam Wheat’s death. This first part is far more engaging, with the young yuppie couple seemingly having it all yet afraid that their love is transient. Sam watches a plane crash on the TV, and states that he shouldn’t fly to LA as these things always come in threes — a false flag intended to tease those well aware of the film’s premise.

The point is that death can take us any time, and that the love we have on earth is special. Their communication at this time is tentative; with Sam — played with typical stunted machoism by Swayze — unable to tell Molly how much he truly loves her. Unpolished and unvarnished, these feel like real people. When the classic scene comes, it’s his way of saying that he cares about her, their joint caresses of the pottery wheel a symbol of the life that they want to share together.

This all changes after Sam is killed by a criminal on the street. Ghost quick jumps us through unnecessary narrative hoops instead of giving us the time to feel the immense loss that Molly must be feeling. Sam is not only literally a ghost but metaphorically too. Likewise Molly is half-formed, still waiting to be shaped at the pottery wheel.

In fact, Ghost doesn’t really get into the nature of grief at all. Instead this shaggy dog story — part comedy, part conspiracy theory, part exploration of purgatory, part action thriller — launches into a convoluted plot-line involving murder and illicit bank transactions. Therefore, Sam is not forced to try and get Molly to notice him for his own sake (which might be more moving) but to stop further crimes from being committed.

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Whoopi Goldberg won an Oscar for her brilliant supporting role (only the second black woman to do so) as a spiritualist who can talk to Sam, but her character is kind of shortchanged too. As Roger Ebert pointed out in his initial review about the classic kiss scene where Sam kisses Molly through her body: “this should involve us seeing Goldberg kissing Moore, but of course the movie compromises and shows us Swayze holding her — too bad, because the logical version would actually have been more spiritual and moving.” While the former move would’ve been a better representation of the power of love to transcend anything, the second is just another classic example of Ghost changing the rules of the game for the sake of the screenplay.

This is a film completely unconcerned with logic. One moment he can’t touch anything, then he figures out that he actually can; initially she can’t hear him, then right at the end she can. These kind of manipulations take us out of the emotional journey of the characters, which ends with a typically Hollywood action climax which must’ve satisfied denizens of the Box Office back in 1990 but ruins the film’s potential as a genuinely moving work of art.

Jerry Zucker, known previously for his far wackier works as part of the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker team such as Police Squad (1982) and Airplane! (1979), felt like the wrong director for the work, which might’ve succeeded far better as pure comedy. Anthony Minghella‘s Truly Madly Deeply (1991), released just a year later and containing a very similar premise, is the far more moving and humorous work, able to track the multi-varied emotions associated with grief with actual nuance and depth. I recommend you watch that instead.

The 30th anniversary edition of Ghost is in cinemas on Friday, February 14th.

Kind Hearts and Coronets

Posted on by victorfraga

Elegantly plotted, directed and acted, and wholly a product of its time, Kind Hearts and Coronets remains as current as when it was originally released, in the first half of the 20th century. It savagely questions why some people have it all by virtue of their birth while others endlessly struggle to make ends meet.

One of the biggest lies that members of the nobility tells itself is that their titles are unquestionable. As eight seasons of Game of Thrones has taught us, nobody who is born a Duke or Prince really garnered that title as a result of fine character, but rather as a result of their ancestors abolishing their challengers. Kind Hearts and Coronets examines this concept with brilliant rigour, charting Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini’s (Dennis Price) dastardly rise to become the 10th Duke of Chalfont by eliminating the eight members of his family standing in his way.

With the “comic” serial killer movie back in the form of The House That Jack Built (Lars von Trier, 2018), The Golden Glove (Fatih Akin, 2019) and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (Joe Berlinger, 2019), Kind Hearts and Coronets remains unimpeachable for its refinement of style as well as the utter savagery constantly lurking behind the surface. Mr Mazzini, robbed of any entitlements due to his mother marrying an Italian opera singer, is a gentle murderer. Ever-soft spoken, his murders are meticulously planned and executed, Price only ever revealing his complete bloodlust through the flickering of his eyes.

In one of the most famous examples of one character playing several roles, the eight people standing between him and the Dukedom are all played by Alec Guinness. There is more than simple comedy in this stunt casting. Guinness skilfully sinks into each role, giving them all distinct characteristics while cleverly stressing how each person has done nearly nothing to deserve their honours and titles.

Mazzini’s victims are a private banker, the private banker’s philandering son (occupation unknown), an Anglican priest, an Admiral, an army general, an amateur photographer, the Duke himself, and in one case of cross-dressing, a suffragette. With the exception of the reverend, these are all people who engage in activities that, at the time, could only be bestowed upon people with vast amounts of wealth. Together they represent the diverse spectrum of a “noble” British life. Mazzini realises very early on, in a precisely edited montage, that no matter how hard he works in a retail store, his salary could never produce a tenth of what these people earn simply by inheritance alone.

It is a movie that revels in ironies, piling them on top of one another with remarkable ease. The dialogue is rich in contradictions: In one of the most famous lines in the film, we learn that Mazzini — approaching his sixth murder — prefers not to go shooting due to his principled stance against “bloodsports”. The second irony is his manner of imprisonment. Only after a quarrel with his sweetheart and mistress Sibella (Joan Greenwood) — who of course didn’t want to marry him when he was married, but becomes uncommonly interested in him when he gets closer to the Dukedom — is he finally (but wrongfully) accused of murder. This is tied together by the central irony, that Mazzini, despite despising those who have wronged his mother and refused her burial in the Chalfont estate, aspires to be a Duke himself, thus becoming the kind of person that he truly hates. After all, there is no suggestion that once he becomes a Duke that he will turn into a kindly philanthropist.

It is the prime example of the Ealing Comedy. Produced at the Ealing Studios west of London between 1947-57, they were an exceptionally creative period for British Comic Cinema. The films stay relevant in British culture for the way they question common assumptions upon which society has been built. Take Passport to Pimlico (Henry Cornelius, 1949) which imagines the borough of London suddenly becoming a breakaway state, thus challenging the basis of British law itself. Kind Hearts and Coronets is no exception. Supremely funny while maintaining a great calmness of tone, it exposes the rotten heart of entitlement with the utmost grace.

Nothing much has changed either. At first I was intrigued to learn from rewatching the film that peers were allowed to be tried in the House of Lords, a practice that was discontinued in the mid-twentieth century. It truly felt like something from a previous time. Then I remembered that the House of Lords, the upper chamber of British parliament, is still populated with unelected members from both the Church and gentry, and thought how much further we have to go before Britain can be considered a truly equal country.

The 70th anniversary edition of Kind Hearts and Coronets is out in cinemas across the UK from Friday, June 7th.

Destiny (Der Müde Tod)

Posted on by victorfraga

A setup. A restraint. A promise. That’s all we’ve got to know to embark on Fritz Lang’s Destiny, which is returning now to British cinemas. Premiered in last year’s Berlinale, this restored version updates the 1921 German production’s color and soundtrack. Its core, however, still shivers with the fears of the Weimar Republic. It also reflects some of modern angst, which we experience nowadays.

Despite that, Lang’s production is, first and foremost, an expressionistic fairy tale with a healthy dose of ambition. Starting off with the introductory titles “some place, some time”, we’re presented to two unnamed lovers. They give a ride to a mysterious man in black into town.

At the local joint, the three of them reunite and a little bit of supernatural activity comes into play. The lady goes to the toilet and returns to find that both of them are missing. The tragic reality suddenly surfaces: that tall dark stranger was the Grim Reaper and her lover’s now dead. Some suicidal thoughts later, the lady begs Death for his return and he appeases her with a bet. He shows her three lives in danger and, should she save one of them, he’ll grant her wish.

The prologue acts as a frame story for three fables set in, sequentially: an Arab country, Italy and China. They all involve doomed couples and, though simplistic, come in beautifully-rendered Expressionist flair. Their common denominator is even reinforced by the same actors (Lil Dagover, Walter Janssen and Bernhard Goetzke) appearing in all stories. That ends up being the film’s most compelling quality.

The turbulent post-WWI Germany was, not unlike today, ripe for the us vs. them narrative in politics. Considering that, it speaks volumes that Lang wanted his meditation on death to show how mortality unites mankind. By setting his picture in three very different countries and times, he brings our shared fear to the forefront. Love and death, the two big motifs in the film, play out the same for Germans, as well as Arabs, Italians and the Chinese. His beliefs (and Jewish heritage) caused him to flee the country as the Nazi rose to power.

It also shouldn’t be missed by the attentive viewer the critic the filmmaker makes of systems of power. In the fables, the tragedies that befalls our characters always come from a powerful source, usually corrupt to some degree. In the first story, we see the dangers of power becoming entwined with religious fundamentalism (sounds familiar?). In the second, we’re spectators to the good old jealous ruler. And in the third, a sheer demonstration of totalitarian force goes awry. In Lang’s legendarium, death comes to us, but we, as a society, do provoke it with a passion.

Despite the gloomy subject, the tone of Destiny is strangely upbeat, with a brave heroine (Dagover) echoing the wishes of the audience. The most obvious counterpoint to that is Death itself, portrayed with perfection by Goetzke. Grim Reaper is as tired as any worker stuck in London traffic at rush hour, and you can feel his misery. When confronted with the affection, his response is a void look on his face – the modern of expression of indifference we all recognise. It’s as if his heart was screaming: “Nothing matters at all!!!”.

On the other hand, Destiny mattered a lot, particularly to Lang’s career . It was his first international hit and granted him the necessary status to make Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) afterwards. It reportedly inspired Luis Bunuel to make films and once impressed Alfred Hitchcock. Ingmar Bergman also seems to have taken cues from the Death character in The Seventh Seal (1957). But, underneath its artistic importance, there lies a film that dares to tell us that, even in the most difficult times, we all bleed and are faced with mortality in very similar ways.

Der Müde Tod in being released in selected cinemas across the UK and Ireland on June 9th, and it’s also available on digital HD on the same date.

Click here for another film classic taking place during the Weimar Republic, and also dealing with the subject of death – which is also showing in cinemas.

We got diversity all wrong!!!

Posted on by victorfraga

Diversity is not as straight-forward as it seems. We liberals like to think that it is a mandatory requirement for a multicultural, modern and sophisticated society. Yet we often come up with arguments that only serve to perpetuate the most reactionary and short-sighted rhetoric. For example, during the Brexit debate, the discussion around immigrants was almost inevitably linked to their financial and social contribution, something along the lines: “EU citizens have been paying taxes for years, they don’t claim benefits, and so on”. This is a dangerous fallacy.

It’s as if our tolerance of foreigners was entirely contingent on money and, to a lesser extent, social functionality (“they are our nurses, our train drivers, etc”). We have thereby stripped tolerance of its fundamentally altruistic nature. It’s as if we suddenly decided that tolerance has nothing to do with kindness, hospitality or high-mindedness. I have learnt from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 classic Fear Eats the Soul (which is out in cinemas this weekend) that this is a very serious mistake with very pernicious ramifications. Tolerance founded upon economic/ vested interests will develop into an ulcer and kill.

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A very downtrodden Emmi is inconsolable by the fact that no one can accept her immigrant lover

In Fassbinder’s world there’s never a happy ending, redemption, a reestablished equilibrium or any sort of feel-good sentiments. In fact, most of his films don’t even have credits at the end. It’s as if Fassbinder suddenly threw an unexploded bomb on our lap and said: “stand up, go home and deal with it”. It’s time to question our most firmly established values, and to recognise our sheer hypocrisy and selfishness even in our most seemingly generous deeds. That’s why Fassbinder is my very favourite director, and I have watched all of his 43 films at least twice each. It’s some sort of spiritual cleansing conducted with the most radical and unorthodox instruments.

So now let’s go back to Fear Eats the Soul and why it’s still so relevant today. The movie tells the story of the unusual romance between the 30-something Moroccan guest worker Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) and a 60-year-old widowed German cleaning woman Emmi (Brigitte Mira). Everyone close to Emmi disapproves of the relationship: her friends, her neighbours, local shopkeepers and even her own children. Fassbinder thereby exposes deeply-rooted cynicism, xenophobia, racism and ageism, with his usual Brechtian streak.

Then suddenly these people change their attitude and begin to embrace Ali, but that’s not because they have changed their prejudices. Their acceptance of the immigrant is entirely related to self-interest, as they have realised that a pair of young and strong hands could be useful in many ways which they did not anticipate. Fassbinder denounces the sheer hypocrisy of social integration contingent on vested interests. The ordeal triggers such anxiety inside Ali that he develops an ulcer that could kill him.

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Emmi and Ali encounter their neighbours, who have suddenly turned very nice

The Brexit narrative has done something similar to immigrants (not just EU immigrants but instead all immigrants, as many pundits willfully fail to make the distinction). The debate around immigration has entirely dehumanised immigrants, and even those supporting immigration often use callous and calculating arguments (“tax-paying, etc”) in order to support their values. We have all become just like Emmi’s friends, neighbours, local shopkeepers and children: we only value the immigrant once our self-interests are met. This is not tolerance, this is not diversity. As Fassbinder put it, metaphorically and also rather didactically, this is an ulcer.

Fear Eats the Soul is out in various cinemas across the UK from Friday March 31st, 2017, when this piece was originally written. The classic is available on Mubi in February 2023,

The Proud Valley

Posted on by victorfraga

Never has a film title been as misleading as The Proud Valley. You’d think this a nationalistic film movie populated with jingoistic chants, subliminal messages of racial superiority, the perfect place for patriotism its ugly face. Well, quite the opposite. This is not a film about national pride, but instead an extremely audacious statement against xenophobia, racial prejudice, as well as denunciation of the outrageous working conditions in the Welsh mines. It was once described as “possibly the most Marxist British film ever”. And it was made in 1940, at the outbreak of the War.

The film takes place in impoverished Rhondda Valley of Wales, where miners work in extremely dangerous and insalubrious conditions. Tragic deaths are a routinely recurrence. A Black American immigrant called David Goliath (Paul Robeson) suddenly joins the closely-knit community, and – unsurprisingly – at first he struggles to integrate. He gradually begins to win the respect of the very musical society through his singing. Robeson is a renowned bass singer and political activist, who was blacklisted in very his very homeland during the era of McCarthyism due to his working-class activism and socialist inclinations.

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The world-famous Paul Robeson is the star of the film, as in the original poster

Goliath is the ultimate foreigner. He literally stands from out from the crowd: not only he’s black, but he’s much taller and bigger than everyone else. Plus he has a strident voice and an enormous heart. He eventually takes up a job in the mines, where he’s always happy to help a worker in need. His heroic altruism knows no bounds, with a film critic at the time describing the character as a “big black Polyanna“. He is indeed a caricature of good, which makes the film borderline didactic as to why we should accept foreigners. The tragic ending of the movie is both inevitable and predictable. Goliath will make the boldest sacrifice in the name of the Welsh people.

Despite the trite formulas and one-dimensional lead, The Proud Valley is a a very revelant achievement in many ways. Firstly, the music and the photography are outstanding. Robeson sings twice, and a performance for a funeral inside a medieval is majestic and impressive. Secondly, such working-class realism (you will see workers literally at the coalface) was virtually non-existent. The first working class doc ever Housing Problems (Edgar Anstey/ Arthur Elton, 1935; which was just 16 minutes long) was never widely seen, and Ken Loach was just three years old back then, and so somebody else had to speak up for working people! Thirdly, and The Proud Valley makes a diversity statement long before the very concept of term was concocted in the 1960s.

The Proud Valley has now been fully restored with deliciously crisp and sharp black and white images. It’s available of DVD, Blu-ray and EST. The film is part of the Vintage Classic Collection by Studiocanal – just click here for more information. Below is the film trailer (not restored):