Ealing Studios veteran Basil Dearden may have directed it, but 1944’s They Came to a City is mostly a JB Priestley film, an engaging blend of the mundane and the metaphysical.
The touch is not always light here. Swathes of clunking, cliché-ridden English dialogue threaten to make the star-crossed lovers look ridiculous, and one of them (Elliott Gould) can be a wooden actor at times.
Opera on film's most magical offering, better by some way than Joseph Losey's cinematically tricksy Don Giovanni, at last makes it to Region 2 in this BFI dual-format release.
Japanese director Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge is something of a one-off. Even in the context of the prolific director’s career variety, it’s an unusually stylised and visually captivating story of high artifice – there’s rich melodrama in its kabuki emotional playing and theatrical setting – that is set against the lowlife criminal comedy of 19th century Tokugawa Tokyo, or Edo as it was then known. Rich and strange, indeed.
The subtitle of Franz Osten’s 1928 film, A Romance of India, says it all: this Indian silent film is a tremendous watch, a revelation of screen energy and visual delight. An epic love story-cum-weepie with lashings of action and intrigue thrown in, it was an Indian-British-German coproduction (a curious strand of cinema history in itself) that was entirely filmed in India, and glories in having some of the country’s architectural wonders for locations: the Taj Mahal, central to the story, features primus inter pares.
German director Osten – he worked in India for close on two decades, making some of the classic films of the 1920s and 1930s, but never learnt an Indian language – also brings huge scale to its desert exteriors and crowd scenes, with hordes of camels, and a crucial elephant moment. It provided precedent for the Hindi post-war film industry as a whole, but there’s genuine feeling in the more intimate moments, as well as moments of realism that look forward even to the likes of Satyajit Ray’s classic Apu trilogy .
It all looks more than handsome in this BFI National Archive 4K restoration (there’s a short extra about that process), and the film’s new score from Anoushka Shankar is a treat. It must have been wonderful on the big screen with live ensemble when premiered as the LFF 2017 Archive Gala, but the combination of image and musical accompaniment certainly impresses from disc. Shankar has spoken of combining elements from the film’s 17th century historical setting, its 1920s production era and the present day, with the tastes of the latter dominating. As well as her own sitar – there are transcendent moments that sound so vibrantly alive, and gloriously lyric accompaniment for love scenes – she orchestrates for Indian bamboo flute and percussion elements, amplified at key moments by violin, cello, clarinet and keyboards.
An early intertitle, “Love, Sorrow - and Fame Immortal”, gives a hint of the action. British scriptwriter WA Burton worked from a treatment of Niranjan Pal’s play about Mumtaz Mahal, consort of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, who commemorated her with Agra's monument to undying love (the Taj Mahal, pictured above). It’s a very free treatment of her life story, beginning with a childhood ambush that sees her brought up by a peasant family, her nobility unsuspected; they name her Selima and treat her as a sister to their son, Shiraz (the film’s producer Himansu Rai plays that role in adulthood, opposite the enchanting Enakshi Rama Rau). Kidnapped by slavers, she arrives in the Emperor’s harem, where the Shah woos her. But Shiraz will always love her: he follows her to the palace, where emotions run freely. His suffering is finally redeemed when, already blind, he enshrines her memory in the Taj Mahal: “not hands but the warmth of a heart built this which stands like a dream.”
The accompanying booklet essays throw fascinating light on the unusual circumstances behind the film, and the context of Indian film-making in the closing decades of the British Raj. Films were aimed simultaneously at the local and international markets (Shiraz was a hit in Europe, but not in the US). Documentary and propaganda was never far away, illustrated by two extras here: Temples of India is a 1938 10-minute travelogue, shot in colour by none other than Jack Cardiff. The 1944 12-minute Musical Instruments of India was a public information film to promote Indian arts and culture, interesting because it didn’t follow more standard wartime lines to emphasise instead the wider cultural achievements of the soon-to-be-independent nation.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Shiraz
Adapted by Raymond Briggs from his best-selling graphic novel, When the Wind Blows was released in 1986 and stands up so well that you’re inclined to forgive its flaws: namely David Bowie’s leaden theme song and an abundance of fairly flat black humour. Though, in hindsight, Jimmy T Murakami’s deadpan, quasi-realist look at nuclear Armageddon as it befalls an elderly working class British couple shouldn’t be amusing.
Bertrand Tavernier’s trip through French cinema is shot through with the love of someone who has grown up with cinema and knows how to communicate his passion in a way that is totally engaging. The three hours-plus that he delivers make you want to plunge back into the classics, as well as start discovering many underrated or forgotten directors, actors, DoP’s or film score composers.
What makes the documentary so good is his 100% personal approach – although he is touchingly modest and includes contributions from many of his professional colleagues. It is not a completist’s bible or an attempt at cinema-historical balance. Rather like David Thomson’s unreservedly subjective and opinionated Biographical Dictionary of Film, this is a treasure trove of enthusiasms, presented with a keen knowledge of what underpins the language of great cinema. Tavernier celebrates well-known directors such as Jacques Becker, Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, Jean-Pierre Melville and Claude Sautet, but he focuses as well on lesser-known directorial talents such as Edmond T Gréville who split his remarkable career between England and France, and many of whose masterpieces, such as Menaces or Brief Ecstasy aren’t available on DVD.
The recurrent figure in Tavernier’s pantheon is Jean Gabin, the French acting icon from the 1930s through to the early 1960s, much more subtle than Depardieu in his depiction of the ordinary Frenchman. As Tavernier demonstrates with many carefully chosen clips, enhanced by an always eye-opening and thought-provoking commentary, Gabin was as fine an actor as any, not just the personification of a nation’s better self.
There are delightful quirks, such as his celebration of the tough-guy actor Eddie Constantine, best-known to British audience for his ironic self-referential role in Godard’s Alphaville, but a regular fixture in a series of often very violent gangster films of the 1950s, which Tavernier greatly enjoyed. He rhapsodises as well about Maurice Jaubert, the film composer, not least the score he wrote for Jean Vigo’s classic L’Atalante. In describing the way in which Jaubert managed to add a dramatic dimension to key scenes of the films he worked on, rather than just fill gaps, Tavernier gives us a lesson in film technique, just as he does in describing the outstanding work of other craftsmen working in the medium.
The film is never didactic, although always surprisingly informative. Tavernier’s exploration of French cinema is made entertaining by a wealth of revealing anecdotes – not least, during the making of Le jour se lève, designer Alexandre Trauner’s insistence that Carné and his producers build an extra floor onto the house (pictured above) which plays such a crucial part in the drama. What stands out perhaps most of all is an extraordinary generosity of spirit – this is a man who can speak about others in his profession with great respect, rare in a milieu where ego rules a great deal of the time. That generosity is contagious: this is a film where the man’s love of the medium is fully shared with his audience. Highly recommended to anyone interested in le cinéma français.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for A Journey Through French Cinema
The opening shot sets the tone for what follows: a pair of duelling cockroaches attached to a string, tormented by a bored child. In 1953’s The Wages of Fear, we quickly sense that Henri-Georges Clouzot’s characters are similarly powerless. His multi-national misfits, marooned in an unnamed South American town, are effectively prisoners, scrabbling around for the money with which to escape a place which is “like a prison: easy to get in, impossible to get out”. The film’s exposition is overlong, but creates a sense of oppressive dread.
As with Hitchcock’s The Birds, the leisurely first act means that the ensuing shocks hit home that much harder, the set-up (taken from a novel by George Arnaud) being that a serious fire at an American-owned oil well can only be extinguished with the aid of two truckloads of volatile nitro-glycerin. The Americans realise that they’ve a ready supply of willing recruits to drive them, the depot manager stating bluntly that “these bums don’t have any union – they’ll work for peanuts.” Drive too quickly and the consignment will detonate, and the four bums chosen have just a 50/50 chance of success.
Yves Montand’s strutting Mario and Charles Varnel’s sly hard man Jo drive the first truck, followed by Peter van Eyck and Folco Lulli as Bimba and Luigi. What ensues is unbearably tense: who’d have imagined that a pair of slow-moving lorries could instil so much terror? Predictably, this isn’t an easy ride: bumpy roads, rock falls, and a pool filled with crude oil all play significant parts. The famous sequence where the trucks reverse onto a shaky wooden platform remains uniquely terrifying.
As the tension rises, the pressure tells on the protagonists. Mario’s apparent bravery tips over into brutal thuggery and the cocky Jo turns into a snivelling wretch, though one undeserving of the fate which later befalls him. Clouzot’s bleak vision still looks and sounds unerringly modern: Armand Thiraud’s gleaming monochrome cinematography and Georges Auric’s minimal score haven’t dated at all. And the film’s nihilistic close remains a shocker.
This BFI reissue gives us The Wages of Fear uncut in a new 4K restoration, and comes with generous bonus features. Adrian Martin’s commentary is insightful, and there’s a long audio-only interview in English with Yves Montand: recorded in 1989, the star discussing his distinguished career. The best extras include an account of Clouzot’s chequered career and a revealing interview recorded in 2005 with Clouzot’s hard-working assistant director, Michel Romanoff. We learn that the film was actually shot in the Camargue region of south-west France, and that the huge boulder which blocks the road at one point took the crew several weeks to actually push into position. There’s an excellent booklet too, including contemporary responses by director Karel Reisz and critic Penelope Houston.
Overleaf: watch the 1953 trailer for The Wages of Fear
The much-respected visual artist Isaac Julien made his name as one of the first great black British filmmakers, not least with Looking for Langston (1989) and Young Soul Rebels (1991).
Screen biographies are tricky things to pull off when the person portrayed has left behind an indelible screen presence. It was hard to love Michelle Williams dragging up for My Week with Marilyn; Grace of Monaco was far from Nicole Kidman’s finest hour.