The Royal Ballet’s autumn season began on Monday, but this was the eagerly awaited Swan Lake. Natalia Osipova, ex-Bolshoi, now principal with American Ballet Theater and the Mikhailovsky in St Petersburg, was making her debut as a guest with the Royal Ballet, partnered by Carlos Acosta.
This week a holy relic has gone on show in the British Library. The continuous scroll of the original manuscript of On the Road is a kind of ur-artefact of the Beat Generation. Typed up by Jack Kerouac in three weeks in April 1951, and 120 feet long, it underpins a central myth of the Beats: that a tight-knit counter-cultural post-war generation of young American writers were powered by nothing but inspiration (plus of course pills, nicotine and booze). They wrote the way jazzers performed - free-wheelingly, in the moment, without regard for the piffling orthodoxy of structure.
Do we really needed to hear more from Joe Lampton, the anti-hero of John Braine’s Room at the Top? His battle for social advancement and sexual self-expression has long since stopped holding up a mirror to society, you'd think. In fact we nearly didn’t hear more from him in this new BBC adaptation. Anyone turning on BBC Four one night in April last year expecting to watch would have been disappointed. Owing to a late-blooming rights dispute, the BBC decided on the day of broadcast not to go ahead.
Five million dollars: in the 1940s that was enough profit to make this Technicolor melodrama 20th Century Fox’s biggest box-office hit of the decade. Reaching cinemas in January 1946 on the heels of World War Two, John M. Stahl’s film didn’t offer audiences the conventional home comforts.
Reviewing the Buxton Festival production of Handel’s Jephtha on theartsdesk a couple of months ago, Philip Radcliffe complained that the director, Frederic Wake-Walker, had done too little to justify the staging of this, the composer’s last oratorio: had made it, that is, too static and unstagey. I wonder what Radcliffe would say about Katie Mitchell’s production for Welsh National Opera, revived this weekend by Robin Tebbutt, and a classic case of a director’s reluctance to allow an essentially statuesque, slow-moving work its natural space and pace.
Begun in 1943 and released in 1945, Les Enfants du paradis, which unfolds in two acts – the first frantic, the second slow – in Paris’s theatre quarter in the 1820s and ’30s, is regarded as the crowning glory of director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert’s fertile partnership.
The wide eyed little girl is sitting bolt upright in her hospital bed, clutching her large soft toy, her head encased in a voluminous bandage. Eileen Dunne, aged three, was injured by shrapnel during the London bombing in 1940, and Cecil Beaton’s Ministry of Information photograph of the bewildered child travelled the world, graced the cover of Life magazine and silently pleaded the British cause. The title Life gave his photo essay was simply “Cecil Beaton’s camera records tragic look of his England bombed.”
Shadow of a Doubt was reputedly Hitchcock’s personal favourite among his films. Joseph Cotten was cast against type as the glamorous, homicidal uncle, fleeing from the police and pitching up unexpectedly in his sister’s household in a sleepy Californian town. Hitchcock’s decision to shoot Thornton Wilder's script largely on location gives the film a unique flavour.
Lucy Gannon is the doyenne of drama-lite. Anyone who has seen Bramwell or Soldier, Soldier or Peak Practice will know her scripts, no matter how much suffering the characters undergo, will leave the viewer feeling better. She is in the reassurance game. The world is full of bad things and bad men but, generally, goodness wins out. All’s well that ends well.
If not as ensnaring as Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, or Out of the Past, Otto Preminger’s urbane police procedural Laura is one of the best film noirs because it transcends the genre. It is an inverted women’s picture – about the hubris of a successful career girl cum Galatea – a savage critique of the decadence of Manhattan high society, and a commentary on the neurotic idealisation of beautiful women.