Duck Soup (1933)

Nora's Nite

Michael Koller via Senses of Cinema:

Duck Soup is indisputably the Marx Brothers' greatest film. It is the last of the five films the Brothers made for Paramount Pictures during their most creative and anarchic period. The first two films, Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930) were adaptations of their hit stage comedies and suffer from a theatrical inertia, while the next three, Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), and Duck Soup, were based on original screenplays. Duck Soup was the only one of these films that fully integrated and balanced all of the Marx Brothers' comic elements.

For the five Paramount films there were four brothers, a fifth, Gummo, left the line-up before they moved into the cinema. These brothers were so different to each other they seemed unrelated. Groucho was the leader, the slick greaser whose chief weapon was his mastery of the English language, yet he was as phoney as his moustache. Chico, with his fake Italian accent, represented the poor European immigrant who had arrived in America in search of a better future. Chico's strength, or weakness if you like, was his catalogue of bad puns.

During his trial as a spy in Duck Soup he is asked, "Isn't it true you tried to sell Freedonia's secret coded plans?" He replies, unembarrassed, "Sure I sold a code and 2 pair of plans." Curly, blonde-haired Harpo was mute, yet his lack of speech was never a hindrance, frequently being placed in a position were speech was mandatory and always coping. For example, in Monkey Business he attempts to get through the American customs by carrying a gramophone and pretending to be Maurice Chevalier. At one point in Duck Soup he answers the phone for Groucho. I wonder if his character really was mute!

Finally there was the much-maligned Zeppo. The ersatz WASP of the team, almost the comic straight-man and yet he was always in on the joke. He is generally regarded as the least talented of the four and yet he was in their best movies. Is this purely a coincidence or did he contribute significantly to their artistic success? Zeppo left the team to become a theatrical agent just after their Paramount contract was terminated.

The Marx Brothers are justifiably seen as the cinematic auteurs of their films partly because, apart from Duck Soup, the direction of their films is competent at best and frequently rudimentary. Nevertheless, Duck Soup is the product of a fortunate collaboration with the masterful comedy director Leo McCarey who understood his performers' comic genius. Duck Soup is definitely one of McCarey's better films even if it is not his best.

Duck Soup's trite B-grade drama operates in parallel and contrast to the Marx Brothers' absurdist comedy. This is beautifully illustrated in Margaret Dumont's first scene with Groucho. Dumont is serious, with a pompous dignity, her reactions to Groucho's misplaced humour are various, including outrage and moral indignation, yet she never acknowledges Groucho's 'wink'. She describes Firefly as "a progressive, fearless fighter" but Groucho never displays any responsibility and to the contrary undermines the notion in his opening song. "If you think this country's bad off now, just wait until I get through with it," he sings. Dumont perfectly demonstrates why she is one of the great 'straight men' of all time. Her performance alone is a joy to watch. And this demonstrates one of McCarey's strengths as a director.

He builds his film around actors, yet there is also an intuitive understanding of the technical power of filmmaking. McCarey allows his comedians to milk their humour without remaining subservient to narrative logic or character consistency. Chicolino (Chico) and Pinky (Harpo) are two spies who, along with Firefly, display no real allegiance to either of the opposing factions. This helps to maintain the comic pace of the film and says much about nationalistic jingoism and patriotic hysteria.

French Connection II (1975)

Peter's Nite

Stephen B. Armstrong on French Connection II via CinemaRetro:

The original script for French Connection II was prepared by Robert Dillon, whose previous credits included, most notably, Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Once production commenced in the summer of 1974, however, Frankenheimer decided that he needed to have his script re-worked. For the job, he recruited the novelist Pete Hamill, who’d actually known Eddie Egan, the New York City police detective upon whom Hackman’s character Popeye Doyle was based. In 2006, Hamill recalled his involvement in the project:

[When Frankenheimer] called me from Marseilles, asking me to help, I said I would try to get there within two days. "Why not one?" he said, and laughed nervously. I never asked why he called me. Someone hand-delivered a script to my place in New York and I read it on the plane.

John, at that time, had a major problem. He had already shot nine days of the existing script. He had developed a reputation for going over budget, so had no flexibility. He couldn't re-shoot what was already in the can.

That gave me a problem too, since I had to write around the existing pieces, which, as always, had been shot out of order. It was like working on a jigsaw puzzle. The basic problem was that Hackman, a great movie actor, had nothing to act. And the reason for that was that Roy Scheider was not in the sequel, and Hackman had nobody to bounce his lines off. He would never talk to a French cop the way he talked to Scheider in the Billy Friedkin original.

….My first work was on the following day's pages, trying to make the character sound like Popeye Doyle….Within a day-and-a-half (with naps in between) I had written enough for them to keep shooting for six or seven days….Hackman was ecstatic. He had something to act!

Frankheimer interviewed by Gerald Pratley:

Another example of course are the races of Grand Prix seen in Ronin as high-speed chases through the streets of Paris. They are so brilliantly done and so exciting throughout that the director finds himself questioned by almost everyone asking "how did you do this?" Frankenheimer replies, "Well, I spent hours recently recording commentaries about this for the DVD disc giving viewers an almost complete account of how we worked out the car sequences. First we sent out the art director -- or production designer as they call them now -- with a group of experts to determine where we would stage all this. Everything was pre-planned. We sketched them, with Ted Boonthanakit, as story boards; we put cameras in crash boxes, on cars and in cars, took shots of actors in and out of cars, towed cut-up cars, we used right-hand versions of the cars from England for close-ups of the actors who appeared to be driving but the actual driver was out of the shot driving on the right-hand side of the cars. We drove at the speeds you see in the picture and there were no special effects. Every car coming and going, passing or swerving, was driven by an expert racing driver. We had 300 French drivers at the wheels of all other cars on the road and for help in all this I have to thank Jean Claude Lagniez. There were all manner of ways and techniques we used, cameras with different lenses, and every move for every car was worked out in advance. It was very exciting, it was terribly dangerous, lives were often in jeopardy and it took a great many weeks -- and then I did 28 days on second unit filming; all the roads were blocked off to traffic, we controlled everything we shot and the French police were extremely helpful. And it all came together in the editing process with Tony Gibbs, one of the best editors still working today."

The bars, cafes, houses, and other interiors have the look, and create the atmosphere, of classic French films from past eras. This, said Frankenheimer, was what he set out to achieve, adding with a laugh, "I think I now have 'my trilogy' (a reference to the works of other directors, among them Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Kobayashi, Donski) with The Train, French Connection II and Ronin, which have several traits in common: a graphic French realism and characterization, pervaded with tragedy and humour." (The director has made two other films in France: Grand Prix (in part) and the little-known but memorable, Impossible Object.)

And what did all of this cost? For Frankenheimer, never known to be an "over-budget" filmmaker and who has achieved remarkable results on low budgets, Ronin was his most expensive film at $US54m. "Well," he said with a touch of humour, "I didn't waste money. We live in inflationary times, it's expensive shooting in France and the money is all there up on the screen. The studio got its moneysworth, car chases do not come cheap, and De Niro doesn't work for scale!

"I'm not lightning fast, but I'm not slow either. I tend to shoot a lot of set-ups. I was an editor and director in live television, that's what I did, and I watched every shot on the screen -- in rehearsal and in performance. I knew what was needed in editing and I still do. I shoot a lot of coverage, and making Ronin was an experience I enjoyed immensely."

Escape from Alcatraz (1979)

Pamela's Nite

Point Blank (1967)

Stuart's Nite

The Great Santini (1979)

Nora's Nite

If.... (1968)

Peter's Nite
Nora's pasta salad, gluten-free brownies

Lindsay Anderson bio at Screenonline:

Born in Bangalore, India, on 17 April 1923, younger son of a Scottish army officer stationed there, Anderson was named for Australian poet, Adam Lindsay Gordon, much admired by his mother. Educated at Cheltenham College, he announced there his intention to 'rebel' and spent the rest of his life carrying out this aim. At Cheltenham, he began a life-long friendship with writer-to-be, Gavin Lambert, drawn together by their love of American films; sixty years later, Lambert would write an elegant account of Anderson's (and his own) life and work.

Following World War 2 service as a cryptographer with the Army's Intelligence Corps, he read Classics at Wadham College, Oxford. Here, very significantly, he co-founded (with Lambert) the short-lived but influential critical journal, Sequence, in which he set down his passionately held views on such filmmakers as his heroes John Ford and Humphrey Jennings, on Hollywood musicals - and, with almost uniform severity - on the British cinema of the day, which he saw as irredeemably middle-brow and middle-class. In Sequence he indulged the luxury of 'saying exactly what [he] liked', and maintained the habit, sometimes to his own cost, for the rest of his life. He was not a man who changed his mind, and the passions of those early years informed the rest of his life.

John Harris on Lindsay Anderson via The Guardian:

Exactly 40 years ago, the film director Lindsay Anderson was preparing for the release of If..., the surreal story of a revolt in a public school in which the masters and prefects stood as signifiers for Britain and its atrophying establishment. This was 1968,and the cabal of libertines who drive the film's plot crystallised the political excitement that had been evident that year in London, Paris, Prague and Berlin. Their leader - all lips, hair and animal magnetism - was a character called Mick Travis, played by the young Malcolm McDowell. With good reason, his image has since been used on scores of record sleeves and club flyers, and tacked to successive generations of undergraduate walls.

Improbably, If... had been shot at Cheltenham college, Anderson's alma mater, whose cooperation had been secured via the crafty use of a 40-page fake script. "I kept saying, 'Why are they letting us shoot here? I can't believe it,'" says McDowell. "And Lindsay said, 'For God's sake, Malcolm - shut up! They think it's very nice, like a Tom Brown's Schooldays kind of film.'"

Eventually, the penny dropped. "Before the film opened," says McDowell, "they had to show it to the headmaster. It was the only screening Lindsay was not present at, which tells you something - and a week later, a letter arrived from Cheltenham college which sat unopened on his mantelpiece for at least seven years. I kept saying, 'Let's open it!', and he'd say, 'No! Put it back.' He didn't want to read the words, 'You betrayed us.'"

As a portrait of the rebel who retained a sentimental attachment to much of what he attacked, the anecdote has Anderson off to a tee - as I have been discovering over the past six months, working on a Radio 4 documentary that involved tracking down some of the people who were closest to him, as well as going back to the so-called Mick Travis trilogy: the three films that made Anderson's name - and, by the end, came close to destroying it.

If..., which won the Palme D'Or at the 1969 Cannes film festival, was the most brilliantly realised. O Lucky Man!, released in 1973, was more flawed, but an ambitious journey into our national character. To finish, there was 1982's Britannia Hospital, an unsatisfactory but fascinatingly swingeing attack on the NHS, trade unions, the monarchy, academia, science, television - and thereby Britain itself. It was released during the patriotic frenzy of the Falklands war, and according to one of Anderson's close associates, its outraged reception left him "a broken man". He remains one of British film's truly underrated talents, responsible for films full of an imagination and brio that most cinema long ago mislaid, but never quite accorded the reputation he deserves.

Anderson's last years were not as productive as they should have been, though in 1985, there came one high-profile and hilariously unlikely offer of work, when he was invited to film Wham! on their visit to China.
The result was a documentary Anderson titled If You Were There, which David Sherwin showed me on a portable TV at his home near the Forest of Dean: a rich, poetic, panoramic portrait of China's strangeness to the eyes of outsiders that George Michael thought wasn't "modern" enough, and Anderson claimed was guilty of one cardinal sin: there wasn't enough Wham! in it. To his annoyance, it was taken off him, recut and released as Wham! in China. "I do think that between them the Whammies have destroyed, or suppressed, an enjoyable, informative, entertaining and at times even beautiful film," he wrote in his diary.

Anderson died in August 1994, after suffering a heart attack while staying with friends in the south of France. A memorial celebration was held at the Royal Court, where David Storey dispensed an opening introduction to the evening. "He was a man with a set of values seemingly in place since birth," Storey said. "They were values by which he observed, scrutinised and judged everything around him, [and he had] an appetite for a world nobler, more charitable and above all more gracious than the one in which he found himself." If that description jars against Anderson's legendarily acerbic side, you do not have to look far for a more salty kind of remembrance; Malcolm McDowell, for example, later recalled that Anderson had expressed the hope that his gravestone might feature the inscription: "Surrounded by fucking idiots."

Better Call Saul!

View Larger Map

Black Beauty (1971)

Pamela's Nite
Special guests: Tess and Fiona.

Mark Lester on starring in Black Beauty via Daily Mail:

We had two ponies playing the young Black Beauty, with the famous white blaze on their foreheads, and I loved spending time with them. Patrick Mower [now Rodney Blackstock in Emmerdale] played the cruel squire. He was a nice bloke and a good laugh but I couldn't work out why my mother, who had accompanied me to Ireland, was so excited to meet him. I didn't realise Patrick already had something of a reputation as a heart-throb.

Although in my memory that summer seems to stretch on for ever, as they do when you are a child, I was there for only about three weeks. After that the cast and crew left for Spain to shoot the rest of the film.

I can't recall what I was paid for Black Beauty but I do remember in 1967, when I was making Oliver!, proudly telling the Daily Mail's Lynda Lee-Potter that I was earning £200 a week and banking the lot with a view to buying an E-type Jag! I made my last feature film, The Prince And The Pauper, in 1976 when I was 18. I'd never really seen acting as a long-term career.

I became an osteopath and today I have a successful practice in Cheltenham. I haven't acted in three decades but there is a possibility I may return to the screen. I have been asked to play King Harold in a film called 1066.

Swimming Pool (2003)

Stuart's Nite.

François Ozon on his film, via fm.com:

Q: This is your first movie in English. What motivated you to take this step?

FO: Once I made the lead character an English author and cast Charlotte, I thought it only natural. Also, I thought it would be fun to try to direct actors in English. I do speak the language but have not completely mastered it. Since Charlotte speaks fluent French, I didn't think it would be too complicated. The language did become a game in that, first, I wrote the script in French. Then I had it translated. Going from French into English, the script evolved, because some of the nuances in French did not translate exactly into English. We had to find equivalents.

Q: That's another part of the creative process, which Swimming Pool addresses as a whole.

FO: Yes. People are constantly asking me, "How is it possible for you to make one film after the other? Where does your inspiration come from?" To answer that question, I had the idea of projecting myself onto the character of an English writer instead of talking about myself as a director. So then the exploration became, how does a writer find inspiration and create a story, and what links that story to reality?

For her work, Sarah Morton needs to be alone, to lock herself away in a comfortable house and follow a strict regimen with rules that she imposes on herself. Then, suddenly, reality comes knocking on her door. Her first reaction, of course, is to reject it and to withdraw into herself. But then she decides to let this reality enter into her project. Sooner or later, the artist is forced to make a pact with reality.

Q: Sarah is an English mystery writer. Why, and how, were you so specific?

FO: Because I think it is not the style that is most important, but rather the narrative - the intrigue and the accumulation of clues that ultimately lead to the murderer or the solution. Writing a screenplay is similar in that all of the elements are put into place so that they can be brought to life during filming. In filmmaking, I like throwing the spectator off guard, going someplace unexpected.

Ever since Agatha Christie, there is a tradition of English women writers who like to describe particularly troubling or horrible characters and situations. I met with François Rivičre, who has studied these writers and gave me some insight into their psychologies. A number of them drink too much, have repressed lesbian tendencies, and are fascinated by perversions.

Before we started the film, I sent the script to the author Ruth Rendell and proposed that she imagine the book that Sarah would write in Swimming Pool. She answered me right away with a very sharp letter; she thought I had the nerve to ask her to write a novelization of the script, and she let me know that she has never needed anyone's help with her writing. Charlotte was amused by this and told me this was exactly how Sarah Morton would have reacted.

Q: Did you work closely with Charlotte Rampling to create the character of Sarah Morton?

FO: While the character of Marie in Under the Sand fed off of Charlotte's personality, this time the character is completely invented. In real life, Charlotte is very far from Sarah Morton.

With Pascaline Chavanne, our costume designer, Charlotte and I looked at photos of Patricia Highsmith, Patricia Cornwell, P.D. James, and Ruth Rendell. They all have something masculine about them, and they all give the impression that life stopped in the 1970s. Charlotte agreed to cut her hair and to go in that direction. As Swimming Pool progresses, Sarah evolves in both her attitudes and her clothes. She blossoms, becoming more feminine and luminous.

Q: The author physically changes as she writes.

FO: Yes, I wanted to start off with the cliché of the old Englishwoman uncomfortable in her own skin - who was probably radiant in her youth. I also wanted this aging body to become an object of desire, maybe even more than Julie's.

Most importantly, I wanted Sarah and Julie's bodies to each take on the qualities of the other. Sarah undresses little by little, her clothes become more feminine, and a portion of life is reinstated. Julie, on the other hand, begins to lose her former artifice and move towards purity. She turns into a child again, whereas she begins the story as a very aggressive and sexual young woman. There is a mutual exchange between these two women.

I've created an unusual rhythm since we do not immediately step into the story proper. The establishing scenes are very important. First, in London, we discover Sarah in her daily little world - interacting with her publisher, her family situation as a spinster living with her father, her taste for alcohol…Then there is a second introduction to Sarah, which shows her setting up shop in Lubéron and settling into work.

This way, we step into Sarah's story - the way she works, the tangible methods of a writer who requires a specific environment what with her habits and her odd little ways. Swimming Pool adheres to the rhythm of the creative process: things fall into place bit by bit, and in the last half-hour everything speeds up. Then you're dealing with highly concentrated twists and emotions.

Q: The end of the film suggests that not everything Sarah's seen has been real.

FO: In the creative process, things are never simple: What is real and what is not? How do you differentiate fantasy from reality? This theme also echoes Under the Sand, where Charlottte's character kept mixing fantasy and reality. Although in Swimming Pool, everything related to fantasy is part of the act of creation, so it is more channeled and less likely to end up causing madness.

In terms of directing, I've treated everything that is imaginary in Swimming Pool in a realistic way so that you see it all - fantasy and reality alike - on the same plane. When you tell a story, or when you film it, your process of identification with your characters is such that you completely immerse yourself in their logic and their perceptions. It's as if you're experiencing the same emotions that they are.

Breaking Bad wins a Peabody!

The intent of the Peabody Awards is to recognize the most outstanding achievements in electronic media, including radio, television and cable. The Award is determined by one criterion – "Excellence." The Peabody Awards are presented only to "the best of the best."

First presented in 1941, the George Foster Peabody Awards recognize distinguished achievement and meritorious service by broadcasters, cable and Webcasters, producing organizations, and individuals. The awards program is administered by the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. Selection is made each spring by the Peabody Board, a 16-member panel of distinguished academics, television critics, industry practitioners and experts in culture and the arts.

Today the George Foster Peabody Awards are often cited as the most selective and prestigious in electronic media. Each year, from more than one thousand entries, the Peabody Board selects the most outstanding works by unanimous vote. Though there is no set number of awards, no more than 36 have ever been presented in a single year.

Breaking Bad (AMC)
AMC, Sony Pictures Television, High Bridge Productions, Gran Via Productions
Bleak, harrowing, sometimes improbably funny, the series chronicled the consequences of a mild-mannered, dying science teacher's decision to secure his family's future by cooking methamphetamine.

Time Magazine in 1941:
A new type of accolade, which radio piously hopes will rank with journalism's Pulitzer Prizes and cinema's Oscars, was awarded for the first time last week. The trophies were four bronze medallions, each the size of a hockey puck. Their name: the George Foster Peabody Award "for conspicuous service in radio broadcasting." Selected for the first honors were: CBS (among chains), Cincinnati's 50,000-watt WLW (among big stations), Cleveland's 5,000-watt WGAR (among middle-sized stations), Columbia, null 250-watt KFRU (among small fry).

The idea of the awards was conceived by Lambdin Kay, public-service director for station WSB in Atlanta, and strenuously pushed by University of Georgia's publicity-minded dean of journalism, John E. Drewry. The University of Georgia itself awarded them, dubbing them after its late patron, Philanthropist George Foster Peabody, great & good friend of Franklin Roosevelt, who helped to found the Warm Springs Foundation.

Odd Man Out (1947)

Nora's Nite
Chinese Food and home-baked brownies
First MovieNite streamed from Netflix

Paul Tatara via TCM:

Director Carol Reed is most often hailed as the creative force behind The Third Man (1949), a highly stylized meditation on friendship and post-War morality. Many critics, however, feel that Odd Man Out (1947), which was filmed two years prior to The Third Man, is Reed's real masterpiece. Though just as imaginatively photographed and edited as The Third Man, Odd Man Out is anchored by James Mason's breathtaking performance as a critically wounded I.R.A. agent who encounters both tenderness and betrayal while on the run from the authorities. Viewers who are only familiar with Mason's later work in such films as Lolita (1962) and Georgy Girl (1966) will be startled by his forcefulness in this role. This is a character, and a movie, that you won't soon forget.

Reed, who optioned F.L. Green's Odd Man Out in 1945, felt that there was a shortage of talented screenwriters in England, so he insisted that Green himself should adapt the book for the screen. Green was flattered by the suggestion, but had never written a script before, and was leery of flying solo with so much at stake. Acting against his own instincts, Reed then hired R.C. Sherriff to more or less keep the project on track while Green got his bearings. Reed also tinkered with the script himself, but that was to be expected, since he had a hand in virtually every aspect of his productions. This tendency to spread his talents around was one of the reasons Reed, who could have used the financial support of a major studio, long resisted working on the Hollywood assembly line.

Reed's European investors, not surprisingly, were concerned with making movies that would appeal to American as well as British audiences. Reed, however, felt that British filmmakers should stick to the sort of material that they knew best. Although the politics of Odd Man Out would be somewhat difficult for Americans to follow, Reed was convinced that viewers would respond to any narrative, so long as it was perceived to be honest. He noted that, in the past, Brits had failed at the American box office when they tried to pander. "The films were not genuine and did not ring true," he said, "and the American public realized it. Instead of making pictures for a country we don't understand, we must make pictures our way."

Apparently, belief in the British film industry had reached a low ebb by the late 1940s. Mason felt that there were only a handful of worthwhile directors in England at the time, and Reed was among them. Thus, he was thrilled when the filmmaker approached him to play the lead role in Odd Man Out. Reed was famous for giving his actors free reign while "discovering" their characters, and Mason obviously ran with the chance. He delivered one of the key performances of 1940s cinema, and it permanently solidified his standing as an actor of international prominence. Mason's co-star in the film, Dan O'Herlihy, noted years later that "...James was almost too intellectual for his own good, but he had much more depth than most. Although he wasn't very emotional he could indicate emotion on screen superbly: there was an austere vulnerability about him which could be immensely powerful." Certainly, viewers around the world latched onto the complex gravitas of Mason's portrayal.

It seems, however, that Reed was never completely satisfied with Odd Man Out. Years after its release, while watching the picture with screenwriter Ben Hecht, Reed decided that about 30 seconds of footage needed to be removed from the print. He offered a startled projectionist 100 pounds to take a pair of scissors to the offending seconds, but the man wisely refused. God only knows which 30 seconds were bothering Reed. The film seems close to perfection to everyone else.

John Hill via Film Reference:

Unlike much of the British cinema's wartime output, the film has little truck with social realism. Formally, the film is heavily indebted to both German Expressionism and French poetic realism—indeed, its ending is practically a copy of Julien Duvivier's Pepé le Moko (1936)—and has much in common with its similarly stylised postwar US counterpart, the film noir. This is evident in the film's approach to both plot and visual presentation. Like classical tragedy, the film's story is concerned with the irreversible consequences of an initial error. Johnny McQueen (James Mason) is shot following an illadvised, and armed, mill robbery and is left to wander the city at night. Despite the efforts of others to save him, his fate is already sealed and, in a moving climax, Johnny meets his death in the arms of the woman he loves, while his last remaining hope of escape, the ship, is seen to sail off without him.

This aura of doom is reinforced by the film's iconography (the recurring appearance of the Albert Clock, the deteriorating weather) as well as its distinctive visual style. As in film noir, both lighting and composition are used to striking effect. Lighting is predominantly low-key, creating strong chiaroscuro contrasts and vivid patterns of light and shadow. Compositions tend to be imbalanced and claustrophobic, with characters either cramped into enclosed interiors (as at Granny's) or rendered small by their surrounding environment (as in many of the night scenes). The use of a tilted camera (almost a Reed trademark), acute angles, and wide-angle lenses adds to these effects, especially in the chase sequences involving Dennis (Robert Beatty) as he races down long and imprisoning alley-ways or clambers his way through a maze of scaffolding. While such scenes as these, with their imaginative combination of real locations and expressive visual design, have retained an air of freshness, the film's resort to full-blooded expressionism in its subjective sequences has worn less well. Although much admired at the time, the attempts to visualize Johnny's hallucinations by superimposing faces onto beer bubbles or by putting paintings into flight now seem simply belaboured (and, no doubt, represent the type of device which led Andrew Sarris to include Reed, somewhat unkindly, in his category of "less than meets the eye").

Debate over the merit of Reed's technique, however, has also tended to discourage too close an inspection of the meanings which the film projects (although the documentarist Edgar Anstey did attack the film at the time of its release for apparently importing French existentialism). For while the film's opening title disclaims any specific connection to the conflicts in Northern Ireland and the film itself studiously avoids referring to either Belfast or the IRA by name, it is also quite clear from the film that it is dealing with a recognisable setting and situation. Indeed, critics have, at various times, praised the film for both its distinctive Irish flavour and the enduring relevance of one of its apparent messages (the futility of violence). What the film does, in this respect, is not so much dispense with local details as deprive them of their social and political dimension. For, by employing the conventions of expressionism, and introducing an element of religious allegory, the film's interpretation of events is inevitably metaphysical rather than social. It is not history and politics which can explain the characters' motivations and actions, only an inexorable fate or destiny. In doing so, it also reinforces a view of the Northern Ireland situation as fundamentally irrational. As Tom Nairn has noted (in The Break-up of Britain), it has become quite common to account for the "troubles" in terms of what he labels "the myth of atavism." It is only "a special historical curse, a luckless and predetermined fate," he observes, "which can account for the war." And it is this viewpoint which is effectively reinforced by Odd Man Out. For Johnny too is "cursed," by virtue of his adoption of violence, and becomes, in his turn, the victim of an apparently "luckless and predetermined fate."

See also MovieNite's take on The Fallen Idol.

Behind the scenes!

Additionally, Peter embarrasses himself in a podcast: Breaking Bad Insider Podcast Episode 203.

Don't Look Now (1973)

Peter's Nite

Roger Ebert on Don't Look Now:

Venice, that haunted city, has never been more melancholy than in "Don't Look Now." It is like a vast necropolis, its stones damp and crumbling, its canals alive with rats. The cinematography, by Anthony B. Richmond and an uncredited Roeg, drains it of people. There are a few shots, on busy streets or near the Grand Canal, when we see residents and tourists, but during the two sustained scenes where John and Laura are lost (first together, later separately) there is no one else about, and the streets, bridges, canals, dead ends and wrong turns fold in upon themselves. Walking in Venice, especially on a foggy winter light, is like walking in a dream.
The city is old and ominous. John struggles to raise a statue to its perch on a church wall, and then uncovers it to reveal a hideous gargoyle, sticking its tongue out at him. A church scaffold collapses beneath him. The hotel where the Baxters are staying is eager to close at the end of season; the lobby furniture is already shrouded. The canals yield drowned bodies. And John's concern mounts as his wife listens to the two strange sisters, and becomes convinced their daughter is sending them messages. "She's dead, Laura," John says. "Our daughter is dead. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead."

But it is John who has second sight. "He has the gift, even if he doesn't know it, even if he's resisting it," the sisters tell one another. And after Laura is called home to be with their son, who has had a minor accident at boarding school, John sees her and the sisters standing at the front of a motorboat passing him on the Grand Canal. How can she be here and there? Those who have been to Venice will recognize it as a funeral boat.

The plot of "Don't Look Now," if it were summarized in a realistic way, would be fairly standard horror stuff. The identification of the red-hooded figure is arbitrary and perhaps even unnecessary. It is the film's visual style, acting, and mood that evoke its uncanny power. Like the recent films of M. Night Shyamalan, it works through apprehension, not plot or action. The "explanation": is perfunctory but the dread is palpable.

Another Country (1984)

Pamela's nite.

Wikipedia on Guy Burgess:
Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess was born at 2 Albemarle Villas, Devonport, Plymouth, England the elder son of Commander Malcolm Kingsford de Moncy Burgess RN and his wife, Evelyn Mary, daughter of William Gillman. He attended Lockers Park Prep School and then a period at Eton College. Burgess spent two years at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, but poor eyesight ended his naval prospects and he returned to Eton. He won an open scholarship to read modern history at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1930, gained a first in part one of the history tripos (1932) and an aegrotat in part two (1933), and held a two-year postgraduate teaching fellowship. Whilst at Cambridge, where he was recruited into the Cambridge Apostles, a secret, elite debating society, whose members at the time included Anthony Blunt. Like Blunt, Burgess was a homosexual.

Notorious for his bad behaviour and overt alcoholism, Burgess initially worked for The Times and, briefly, the BBC, as the Producer of The Week in Westminster, covering Parliamentary activity - wherein he was able to further his acquaintance with important politicians. He spent some time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. At Cambridge, he had been a friend of Julian Bell, the English poet who was killed while driving an ambulance in that conflict. Burgess and the other members of the "Five" were divided with regard to the impact of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which compromised their hard left ideals.

Burgess was most useful to the Soviets in his position as secretary to the British Deputy Foreign Minister, Hector McNeil. As McNeil's secretary, Burgess was able to transmit top secret Foreign Office documents to the KGB on a regular basis, secreting them out at night to be photographed by his controller and returning them to McNeil's desk in the morning. When assigned to Washington, D.C., Hector McNeil cautioned him to avoid three things: "the race thing", contact with the radical element, and homosexual adventuring. "Oh," quipped Burgess, "you mean I shouldn't make a pass at Paul Robeson?"

Assigned to the British embassy in Washington, Burgess continued his life as an unpredictable heavy drinker and indiscreet homosexual. He lived with Kim Philby in a basement flat, perhaps so that Philby could keep an eye on him. Nonetheless, Burgess was irrepressible, once insulting the wife of a high-ranking CIA official at one of Philby's dinner parties.

Burgess accompanied Donald Maclean in an escape to Moscow after Maclean fell under suspicion for espionage, even though Burgess himself was not under suspicion. The escape was arranged by their controller, Yuri Modin. There is some debate as to why Burgess was asked to accompany Maclean, and whether he was misled about the prospect for him returning to England. Unlike Maclean, who became a respected Soviet citizen in exile and lived until 1983, Burgess did not take to life in the USSR very well. Homosexuality was far less acceptable in the Soviet Union, and this may have been a problem, even though he had a state-sanctioned lover. Also, unlike Maclean, he never bothered to learn Russian, and even continued to order his clothes from his Savile Row tailor.

Becoming ever more dependent on drink, he appears to have been killed by his alcoholism, aged 52.

New season almost here!

Black Rain (1989)

Nora's Nite

Tom Mes on Yusaku Matsuda:

To gauge the impact and enduring popularity of Yusaku Matsuda in Japan, one need only walk into a Tokyo bookstore. In the cinema section, at least half a shelf will be taken up by photo books, essays, tributes and biographies of the late actor. Toyshops stock action figures and dolls, both vintage and new, based on his best-loved characters. In the numerous second-hand video stores of the Jimbocho area, it's easy to pick out Matsuda's films among the thousands of brightly coloured boxes: his are the ones that are twice as expensive as everything else.

Yusaku Matsuda is a phenomenon. His early death in 1989 at the age of forty has given him the kind of idolised immortality that the rest of the world bestows upon the likes of James Dean, Steve McQueen and Bruce Lee. The comparison with these giants is valid in more ways than one. Matsuda had a bit of all three: looks, acting range, cool machismo and a flair for action.

Yet, Matsuda remains a virtual unknown outside his home country. His misfortune was to have shot to fame at a time when the rest of the world had virtually forgotten that Japan even had a film industry: Matsuda reached his peak in the 80s, the most maligned decade in the annals of Japanese film history as seen through western eyes. Whereas stars of previous eras - Mifune, Takakura, Sugawara, Kaji - deservedly enjoy adulation beyond their own borders, Matsuda - who should be mentioned in the same breath - remains hidden from Western eyes, his work relegated to the dusty basement of Japanese cinema where few white men ever venture.

His obscurity is a paradox however, since millions around the world have seen Matsuda's final screen performance as the slippery villain Sato in Ridley Scott's Nihon-noir cop thriller Black Rain. An atypical role in many ways, it is the proverbial exception to the rule. In the part of his career that has come to define him, Matsuda played brash, cool, rebellious heroes, his tall figure and chiselled features furthermore lending him a virility and sex appeal that none of his forebears could match. As indisputably charismatic as Toshiro Mifune, Ken Takakura, Koji Tsuruta and Bunta Sugawara were, there was very little about them that would make women swoon or that would make scriptwriters decide that they should get the girl before fade-out.

Shameless promotion

Great teaser trailers for season two:

No Way Out (1987)

Stuart's nite. Finally.

Roger Donaldson via Popcorn Reel:

Roger Donaldson, an easygoing persona who looked relaxed and well-rested at a local hotel suite here in town, typically fills his films with energy, passion, sexiness and charm -- take "No Way Out" (1987) for example -- which he said he saw on cable television on a recent late night. He confessed to taping it and then watching it early the following morning. "Once I started watching it, I couldn't stop watching it! I suddenly saw it for what it was . . . I see why it succeeded as it did. The movie has got a great sort of cynical quality to it. It's sexy and it's funny and it's a good thriller. You're not sure how it's gonna turn out. And I think I saw in "The Bank Job" a movie with a similar sort of appeal to me." While the stories in both films are completely different, the director said that in tone the two films probably shared quite a lot in common.

Marathon Man (1976)

Stuart's nite -- but... he doesn't show up. Peter rescues the evening by transforming this into his nite.Conrad Hall obit via The Independent

One of Hall's teachers at USC was the Yugoslavian montage expert Slavko Vorkapich. After Hall's short film Sea Theme won first prize for photography in a USC amateur contest, he formed a small production company, Canyon Films, with some fellow students, and, after adapting a short story My Brother Down There into a screenplay, they raised money to make a movie version. Hall said:

When it came time to decide who would do what, we all wanted to be the director. We couldn't do it by committee, of course. So we thought about what other jobs would need to be done to make the movie: producer, editor, cinematographer. We wrote them all down and put them in a hat. I happened to draw "cinematographer" . . . Eventually I learned what a great opportunity it is to be able to tell a story visually. I've found that I can be a storyteller, like my father, by using visuals and not be in competition with him.

Canyon Films proved short-lived, and Hall then worked in several capacities in the industry, including photography, editing and production, contributing to commercials, industrial films and features, including providing 16mm footage for Disney's acclaimed "True-Life Adventure" The Living Desert (1953).

He was given his first screen credit as one of three photographers on a low-budget black-and-white thriller, Edge of Fury (1958), but he continued to serve as camera assistant and camera operator with such noted cinematographers as Ted McCord, Ernest Haller, Floyd Crosby and Hal Mohr. For Robert Surtees, he was camera operator on the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando.

Also in 1962, he worked with Ted McCord on the television series Stoney Burke for the producer Leslie Stevens. Stevens admired Hall's work, and retained him to photograph episodes of the science- fiction series The Outer Limits (1963-65), after which Hall was the cinematographer on Stevens's feature film about the occult Incubus (1966). Starring William Shatner, it was notable for having its dialogue spoken entirely in Esperanto (a would-be universal language developed in 1887) and though considered stilted and pretentious at the time the film now has a cult following.

One of the first major films on which Hall received sole credit was Morituri (1965) starring Marlon Brando as an anti-Nazi German. Directed by Bernhard Wicki, a German director working for the first time in Hollywood, the black-and-white film was poorly received, with only the cast (Yul Brynner and Trevor Howard co-starred) and Hall's strikingly vivid camerawork winning praise. The film won Hall his first Oscar nomination.

Another black-and-white film lauded for Hall's photography was Richard Brooks's true crime story In Cold Blood (1967), based on Truman Capote's book about two psychopathic killers. "I started off my career in a sort of naturalistic style, as opposed to an operatic style," said Hall, "and I've refined that over the years to fit the stories."

Hall preferred to work in black-and-white, but by the mid-Sixties most of Hollywood's films were being made in colour, and Hall's work on Harper (1966), The Professionals (1966) and Cool Hand Luke displayed his mastery of the form. Disliking the artificial style of Hollywood lighting, he favoured a naturalistic or impressionist approach. His superb, dream-like rendering of the Old West in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid won him the Academy Award, and he also won the film's leading lady Katharine Ross, to whom he was married from 1969 to 1975.

Able to be selective in his assignments, he liked to work on projects about "moral and ethical dilemmas". "I look for stories about humanity," he said,about choices a person has to make. I don't like thrillers. They're not made about the human condition. They exist to torture you. I'd rather do something like Day of the Locust about the losers who don't make it in film, but make their lives worthwhile by pretending.

After shooting Marathon Man (1976) Hall spent a decade running a production company making commercials with his fellow photographer Haskell Wexler, though he shot Bette Midler's concert scenes for The Rose (1979). He returned to feature-film making with the thriller Black Widow (1987), and subsequent films included Love Affair (1994) and A Civil Action (1998).

Hall was to receive nine Oscar nominations during his 50-year career (and may well receive another for Road to Perdition). He won his second award for his surreal evocation of the world of a dysfunctional family in American Beauty. "This was Sam Mendes's first film," he said,

but it never felt like his first film. He's actually a kind of control freak. I mean that in a good way. It's one thing to be directing. It's another to be directing and to have a vision and communicate that. Sam has vision. I helped contribute to that vision and to that wonderful screenplay.

The dream-like shot of cascading rose petals featured in the film has already become an iconic image of Nineties cinema, but Hall confessed to some initial trepidation with the project. "I kept asking Sam, 'How are we going to light these people? They're all so unlikeable.' " He was also perturbed to discover how much was cut from the film in its final editing. Though he came around to the final version ("When he showed it to me on the big screen, it was a revelation") Hall hoped that some of the cut material would be put back for the film's DVD release.

In 1994 Hall, whose son, Conrad W. Hall, took up the same profession and shot The Panic Room (2002), received a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Cinematography. "Every film that he worked on was something beautiful to the eye, and very imaginative," said Zanuck. "Connie was not known for his speed, but neither was Rembrandt. He was known for incredible genius."